If he wants to be taken seriously, though, he should consider spending some time proofreading his literature. Parts of that diatribe are so badly written that any meaning that was intended is almost totally obscured.
...if they died and were subsequently consumed by either a larger animal (dog, cat, etc.) or smaller insects, would the plague be transferable to the consumer?
Since bubonic plague is a bacterial condition (from Yersinia pestis) the simplest answer is: Yes.
The point is, though, that the bacterium has to enter the bloodstream by one means or another, and a pandemic is unlikely since the condition (at least in its original form) is treatable by common antibiotics.
A more insightful question here might be "what the hell are these guys doing playing around with nasty pathogens like this?".
I demand and expect an immediate and comprehensive investigation by the UN WMD inspection teams.
Perhaps they were there because they couldn't get the data HERE due to our privacy laws.
If the "here" to which you refer is America, I would probably take Austria's privacy laws over yours, if given the choice. Given how the US administration is taking the so-called "war on terror" hype as such an excellent excuse to cancel any right to privacy, I'm not sure the US is a place I'd want to be. Of course, it doesn't help that other governments (e.g. Australia, Britain) are gleefully following suit...
Heh... Thank the X11 developers for xinerama. I just dragged the window across so the navigation frame was on the left screen, and voila! Plenty of room.
Looks like the whole gamut of opinions on his response are well represented at the tail end of the article. I have no problem with his work (though he appears to have a generous opinion of his own worth), but it would have made a better impression if he had (a) made sure that he was responding to an offer from Microsoft, and (b) taken the time to come up with a more creative response than simply spraying invective like an adolescent hooligan.
As far as I can tell, the best general advice for Linux users is to get an Epson. I had a bear of a time trying to get my old Umax to work, and I eventually threw in the towel, got a cheapish Epson and never regretted it.
More advice: stay well away from parallel-port scanners.
Indeed. I have yet to encounter any function that I used to perform in MSOffice that I have been unable to perform in current versions of OpenOffice. Sure, some things you have to go about in a counter-intuitive way, but nobody needs to get me started on how many counter-intuitive things there are in MSOffice.
The truth is that Microsoft hasn't much to say for its product that can't be countered, so all they can do is bleat into the wind about their own "standards", such as they are, and hope that enough fools will be taken in before the dollars stop flowing. And unless they do something about their business model, sooner or later, stop they certainly will.
On the first machines I worked with (Burroughs B3700, which went out of production in 1976) the operating system (MCP) only allowed 6-character filenames, upper-case only please. After that, Honeywell's GCOS allowed (IIRC) 64-character filenames, and when I eventually got to play with PC-DOS, it was a bit of a shock to find myself stuck with the 8.3 convention.
Indeed. An "advertising application that offers advertisers information on searchers and their search activity, and the frequency at which keywords have been accessed." has little appeal for an informed Joe Consumer.
I use a combination of hosts file blacklisting, the excellent adblock/flashblock extensions to Firefox and link my cookies file to/dev/null, and that seems to work pretty well for me, in that I see very little advertising that I don't want to. When I use anybody else's computers, I tend to find the experience frustrating.
Until people wake up we'll keep living in this world run by greed and profit instead of one for the betterment of society
You've hit the nail on the head there. The patent office, with its practice of issuing patents for things that are in common use, has made itself into an irrelevance as far as innovation is concerned.
All they do at the moment is provide material for a lawyers' funfest, as if they didn't already have enough. A society driven by litigation (or the threat of it) is an ugly one.
artists were given fourteen years of protection. Today, despite near instantaneous communication, they are protected for a hundred years or better.
IANAL, but are you not confusing copyright with patents? IIRC the 14 year term refers to the viability of a patent, while copyright lasts for as long as you (or your executors) assert it.
People seem to forget that the pop culture that various industries churn out is not the only creative output in the world; it's just the most visible. And yes "it" will probably never get into the public domain.
... which indirectly comes around to this quote from TFA:
code writers (both legislators and technologists) have created an unprecedented array of weapons (both legal and technical) to wage war on the pirates and restore control to the owners of culture
... but what we all seem to be forgetting is that culture is something that by definition cannot be owned by any individual entity, it is a collective function of society as a whole.
> I suspect it would be very hard to thwarte a computer forensics expert
An encrypted filesystem would presumably make their job rather harder.
Though why bother? If these experts are trained by the "High Tech Crime Investigation Association", all you apparently have to do is use Firefox.
But you're right: they would probably be bored shitless looking through my computer files, unless they just happened to be closet molecular biology junkies...:-D
Since when is a laptop computer not equivalent to a desktop machine?
If this were (hypothetically) to be contested, all I would (hypothetically) have to do is insist that my laptop machine is placed upon a desk, thereby making it inescapably a desktop machine by any sane linguistic definition.
...the OSDL will have to handle this situation perfectly to avoid exposing an exploitable weakness.
Or it might be over very quickly. Given MS's performance record at PR meetings, it might be just minutes before the MS test platform bluescreens or is trojaned or infested with spyware or malware.
End of review, everybody packs their bags and goes home.
it looks like he's just jealous that the Linux developers successfully did what the GNU developers are apparently not able to.
"Looks like" != is.
Sure, the hurd project might be to all intents and purposes moribund, but the point remains that Linux itself would not be usable without the GNU toolset.
Sorry to break my street cred, but the truth is that I'm just well and truly old enough to remember the old hardware.
Put it this way, the first modems I used occupied a 16/5.5/20 inch space and ran at a truly impressive 300 bps. And yes, they were hooked up to the clockwork phones that I mentioned. In those days, that was the bleeding-edge way of transmitting data to our Burroughs B3700 mainframe machines.
Indeed... but I'm sometimes a bit slow on the uptake, so by the time I got around to attempting to look at a few blogs I found it was too late. There's so much crap (splogs) in blogspace now, you have to be fairly determined to find any with real content.
Seems to me that "serious" bloggers would benefit from backing away a little and putting their material on to a more formal webpage instead. Then the sploggers can crapflood the main blogger sites to their hearts' content until they get taken down.
Heh... I have my mobile phone programmed with a ringtone recording of an old 1970s British Telecom model 700 phone (i.e. with the mechanical bell), but none of the kiddies at my university seem to understand the joke.
I'm not too sure about this. We've seen a lot of column space on slashdot.org devoted to PhotoShop shills and their flames about the Gimp, and I find them a bit tiresome.
If the openusability thing actually makes changes which are demonstrably an improvement then I have no problem with it.
However, if all that happens is that they turn the interface into a clone of PhotoShop's then the developers will be doing the Gimp (and us) a disservice. Personally, I find the "classic" Gimp UI perfectly approachable (and I actually use it on a daily basis).
Incidentally, IIRC I heard (probably on/.) that there is some sort of extension or whatever that is supposed to emulate PS's UI already in existence, but a quick google just now failed to find it...
Does HTTP, etc. offer anyway for a web page to check if sound is even on?
I leave the system set with sound unmuted, since I find it much quicker to adjust by physically reaching across the desk and tweaking the volume button om the speakers manually. No html or javascript in the world is going to detect that.
I mostly leave it set at zero, however, since I find unsolicited noises annoying and intrusive.
Heh... I sometimes run into this sort of issue, but I have to acknowledge it's my own fault for symlinking my cookies file to/dev/null. But I am still happy enough with my choice not to tell the world about my browsing habits.
Slashdot Mirror
Hydrogenous sounds like more fun, though. At least you could put a match to it when you're feeling bored... :-D
If he wants to be taken seriously, though, he should consider spending some time proofreading his literature. Parts of that diatribe are so badly written that any meaning that was intended is almost totally obscured.
Since bubonic plague is a bacterial condition (from Yersinia pestis) the simplest answer is: Yes.
The point is, though, that the bacterium has to enter the bloodstream by one means or another, and a pandemic is unlikely since the condition (at least in its original form) is treatable by common antibiotics.
A more insightful question here might be "what the hell are these guys doing playing around with nasty pathogens like this?".
I demand and expect an immediate and comprehensive investigation by the UN WMD inspection teams.
In my dreams (sigh) :-(
If the "here" to which you refer is America, I would probably take Austria's privacy laws over yours, if given the choice. Given how the US administration is taking the so-called "war on terror" hype as such an excellent excuse to cancel any right to privacy, I'm not sure the US is a place I'd want to be. Of course, it doesn't help that other governments (e.g. Australia, Britain) are gleefully following suit...
Heh... Thank the X11 developers for xinerama. I just dragged the window across so the navigation frame was on the left screen, and voila! Plenty of room.
Looks like the whole gamut of opinions on his response are well represented at the tail end of the article. I have no problem with his work (though he appears to have a generous opinion of his own worth), but it would have made a better impression if he had
(a) made sure that he was responding to an offer from Microsoft, and
(b) taken the time to come up with a more creative response than simply spraying invective like an adolescent hooligan.
More advice: stay well away from parallel-port scanners.
The truth is that Microsoft hasn't much to say for its product that can't be countered, so all they can do is bleat into the wind about their own "standards", such as they are, and hope that enough fools will be taken in before the dollars stop flowing. And unless they do something about their business model, sooner or later, stop they certainly will.
On the first machines I worked with (Burroughs B3700, which went out of production in 1976) the operating system (MCP) only allowed 6-character filenames, upper-case only please. After that, Honeywell's GCOS allowed (IIRC) 64-character filenames, and when I eventually got to play with PC-DOS, it was a bit of a shock to find myself stuck with the 8.3 convention.
I use a combination of hosts file blacklisting, the excellent adblock/flashblock extensions to Firefox and link my cookies file to /dev/null, and that seems to work pretty well for me, in that I see very little advertising that I don't want to. When I use anybody else's computers, I tend to find the experience frustrating.
You've hit the nail on the head there. The patent office, with its practice of issuing patents for things that are in common use, has made itself into an irrelevance as far as innovation is concerned.
All they do at the moment is provide material for a lawyers' funfest, as if they didn't already have enough. A society driven by litigation (or the threat of it) is an ugly one.
In that case, a text file on a USB stick would do the job just fine, wouldn't it? Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best...
Most of the style guides now agree that it is OK to verb nouns. After all, it is accepted practice even in Skakespeare's work.
IANAL, but are you not confusing copyright with patents? IIRC the 14 year term refers to the viability of a patent, while copyright lasts for as long as you (or your executors) assert it.
... which indirectly comes around to this quote from TFA:
code writers (both legislators and technologists) have created an unprecedented array of weapons (both legal and technical) to wage war on the pirates and restore control to the owners of culture
... but what we all seem to be forgetting is that culture is something that by definition cannot be owned by any individual entity, it is a collective function of society as a whole.
An encrypted filesystem would presumably make their job rather harder.
Though why bother? If these experts are trained by the "High Tech Crime Investigation Association", all you apparently have to do is use Firefox.
But you're right: they would probably be bored shitless looking through my computer files, unless they just happened to be closet molecular biology junkies... :-D
Since when is a laptop computer not equivalent to a desktop machine?
If this were (hypothetically) to be contested, all I would (hypothetically) have to do is insist that my laptop machine is placed upon a desk, thereby making it inescapably a desktop machine by any sane linguistic definition.
End of story.
Or it might be over very quickly. Given MS's performance record at PR meetings, it might be just minutes before the MS test platform bluescreens or is trojaned or infested with spyware or malware.
End of review, everybody packs their bags and goes home.
"Looks like" != is.
Sure, the hurd project might be to all intents and purposes moribund, but the point remains that Linux itself would not be usable without the GNU toolset.
Sorry to break my street cred, but the truth is that I'm just well and truly old enough to remember the old hardware.
Put it this way, the first modems I used occupied a 16/5.5/20 inch space and ran at a truly impressive 300 bps. And yes, they were hooked up to the clockwork phones that I mentioned. In those days, that was the bleeding-edge way of transmitting data to our Burroughs B3700 mainframe machines.
Seems to me that "serious" bloggers would benefit from backing away a little and putting their material on to a more formal webpage instead. Then the sploggers can crapflood the main blogger sites to their hearts' content until they get taken down.
And I thought it was so cool... :-(
If the openusability thing actually makes changes which are demonstrably an improvement then I have no problem with it.
However, if all that happens is that they turn the interface into a clone of PhotoShop's then the developers will be doing the Gimp (and us) a disservice. Personally, I find the "classic" Gimp UI perfectly approachable (and I actually use it on a daily basis).
Incidentally, IIRC I heard (probably on /.) that there is some sort of extension or whatever that is supposed to emulate PS's UI already in existence, but a quick google just now failed to find it...
I leave the system set with sound unmuted, since I find it much quicker to adjust by physically reaching across the desk and tweaking the volume button om the speakers manually. No html or javascript in the world is going to detect that.
I mostly leave it set at zero, however, since I find unsolicited noises annoying and intrusive.
Heh... I sometimes run into this sort of issue, but I have to acknowledge it's my own fault for symlinking my cookies file to /dev/null. But I am still happy enough with my choice not to tell the world about my browsing habits.