> His job and status makes him seem closest to > Tim Russert
The odd thing is that I was not nearly boggled enough by the idea of Tim Russert doing the "I've been abducted by aliens" thing. Rush seemed much more natural for it in my mind's eye (leading the rally and whatnot).
I think George Will would have exploded if he had been abducted. The brain would simply have short-circuited.
Russert as protagonist works for me too, though. I just didn't have him in mind when I picked up the book.
> Why are they little *green* men? Why not blue? > Where did that start?
Well, if you'd read the book, it'd explain it all for you. Sheesh.
I actually read this just about two weeks ago. I've read Thank You for Smoking and Wry Martinis (a collection of columns) and the White House Mess. He is a funny guy, and his skewering of Tom Clancy as reproduced in Wry Martinis is deadly funny stuff.
I've tried to figure out whether the protagonist is George Will or Rush Limbaugh or whether he's simply a mix of several pundits.
You can probably find the book in discount book stores by this point (I picked up my copy - a trade paperback) at a book liquidator for about 3 or 4 bucks.
1. Warchalking necessarily involves sniffing around for open wireless networks. You generally do not do this by accident. I mean, I don't sit in my car with my 802.11b card in while driving up the street and then going "whoops! I found an unsecured WAP" (I'm aware the last part of that is redundant). Frequently, these are sought out. It is generally therefore a necessary condition that a certain amount of "door rattling" is going on here. That in itself is illegal.
2. The quotes from Nokia were ambiguous. Clearly, the unauthorized use of somebody's network is illegal and is theft. The fact that no physical property is removed may mean that larceny has not been committed, but it is an action that is going to be punishable by some criminal statute where you live, dollars to donuts. In common parlance outside of strict legal definitions, this constitutes theft although the offense you will be charged with may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
3. People that go warchalking, rather than going out to use the networks, are doing something a little different. They have no way of knowing whether the intention was to leave a network open. This shouldn't give carte blanche for people to go in and rape their bandwidth, however.
I think you need to ask yourself if a place really intends for their network to be open. There are little clues about this that the average moron can pick up on. If the WAP is in a doctor's office or a business, the chances are that they are not intending to allow their networks to be used openly. Just as someone may leave a car unlocked with the keys in it does not mean that there is a standing invitation to drive the car around for a while without asking.
The general rule should maybe encourage proprietors to mark their locations if they to allow others to use their networks. If no markings are in place, then the assumption should be that no use is permitted.
4. I would like to see Nokia's actual statement. As it has filtered from Nokia => www.computing.co.uk => Slashdot, it is no longer clear whether the warchalking itself is what was slammed or whether there is some confusion about the use of the term "warchalking." Clearly, Nokia has classified the unauthorized _use_ of a warchalked WAP as "theft". This is hard to argue with. I do see a legitimate beef from the pro-warchalking crowd against the idea of Nokia opposing warchalking per se, so long as vandalism does not occur.
The fact is that there is no right to go and use things that belong to others without permission. This notion is juvenile and dangerous -- it is akin to the people who claim that the US income tax is illegal for a variety of reasons. It constitutes willful ignorance of the law.
>> My secretary doesn't need to have her 300 mhz >> machine upgraded ever, probably. > > Remember IBM? Some old company, used to make > computers. They thought the same thing about > the 386. Compaq ate their lunch.
I don't dispute that. On the other hand, at some point of development, a tool becomes sufficient to do a job and the marginal benefit of replacing the tool with a "better" tool just isn't there if the old tool still works, even if there are some new features.
In the case of word processing and light spreadsheet use, I think that the marginal benefits provided by faster processors, more memory, new software, and new office suites (OpenOffice excluded since it presents a dramitc price point improvement) are simply not there. Word processing on a 386 had a lot of room for improvement - a GUI, hard disks, networking, stability, having more windows open, better resolution, etc. The whole shebang was a work in process.
Now, with an 800x600 screen, a copy of Word 97, network connectivity, a faster and larger hard drive, and a 300 mhz pentium, my secretary is pretty well set up to process words. ASCII doesn't get any bigger, and the formatting she does is not terribly complex. Her maximum document size has probably never exceeded thirty pages in a single document. Where is the marginal benefit from buying her a new anything?
If there is a dramatic improvement in design interface that suddenly requires more horsepower that will result in her having improved productivity, the cost of an upgrade might be worthwhile. Until then, there's no point.
I admit that there is often a lag in time between making capabilities available and applications taking advantage of the new capabilities. I just don't see anything out there right now that would justify spending $850 on a new 1.8 ghz Compaq Evo 310 with MS Office SBE and XP Pro.
A paradigm shift in human/software interfaces might convince me, but as long as it is a lady typing words into a word processor, I am solidly convinced that today's machines have more than enough oomph to do the job. Re the initial thread, her monitor does, too.
There are some people for whom such a technological development may have use and for whom greater resolution will be a good thing. If applications and OS software could take advantage of it, it might even have practical benefits such as reduced eyestrain (as well as the improved screen real estate someone else mentioned, though that would require ever-smaller fonts, making use difficult).
On the other hand, the dramatic, paradigm-changing benefits of going from DOS-based WordPerfect to a windowed (somewhat stable) GUI environment with network access, etc., don't seem to be in place yet to take advantage of new technology. I'll wait.
> The resolution can go as high as 3840x2400. > That is insane. I think the question is no
On one hand, there's the (apochryphal?) saying floating around regarding memory: "640k is more than enough memory for anyone" or something to that effect.
On the other hand, I think you have a legitimate point. To some extent, I think the CPU battle is basically over for most people. For an office environment, who the hell needs more than 500 mhz? My secretary (does word processing, some light spreadsheet stuff) doesn't need to have her 300 mhz machine upgraded ever, probably.
> longer how high can the resolution go. But on > the otherhand, how high can I set the > resolution with having to be able to squint to > see the letters that I am typing.
I think another legitimate issue is whether a monitor should be replaced if it absolutely does not need to. One issue of technology is "can X be done?" An often overlooked issue is "Should we bother implementing X?"
I suspect that on newer machines fancier-pants monitors will be de rigeur as manufacturing techniques improve and prices ultimately make these consumer-priced models, but should you consider dumping an old monitor (and the many pounds of lead) into a landfill or send it to China for "recycling" when the marginal benefits of new technology are minimal?
By all means, lets keep doing research and development. Let's let the market consider what to do with the technology that companies develop. Let's not forget that technology should serve us and not the other way around. At least until the machines start to think, and then all bets are off.
I've enjoyed having my MP3 player for a few years now. It's this new device that plays compressed digital music files. Oh? You want an ogg vorbis music player? Well, it's only almost 2003 -- keep waiting.
Listen. I'm sympathetic. The next MP3 player (digital/compressed music player -- wait: GNU/digital/compressed music player) I purchase, I will look for o.v. compatibility. The device I have right now works just dandy, however.
Some people don't use ethernet. Some won't use mp3. Making ogg vorbis and mp3 play nicely won't yank the thousands of diamond rios out of people's hands or get them to upgrade. As a practical matter mp3 is the de facto winner of this round of music standards, technical or legal merits notwithstanding. I don't have to like it, it just is.
> Computers are great, but they are not very good > in social situations. No one wants to cram > around the computer in the back room for too > long.
And televisions are great in social situations? I can imagine nothing more annoying or just outright idiotic than passively staring at a flickering box spewing forth endless streams of drool-inducing shit for me to gobble up witlessly.
Sitting and reading/. is so much more rewarding than that.
guac-foo.
Re:Americans throw away freedom for capitalism
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
> Intellectual property and copyright law in the > digital era = censorship.
Only in your twisted world view. Intellectual property laws have allowed the United States to develop the most productive economy in the history of ever. Granted that I am uncomfortable with the notion that what was originally a much more limited right to "own" intellectual property has become, through special interest lobbying, a de facto permanent right. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water, however. Limited patent and copyright protections were very, very good for inventors and the public for about 150 years in the US.
> The computer is a communications tool which is > an extention and enhancement to our ability to > communicate and express ourselves, source code > is the method of expression, 1s and 0s are the > output of this expression.
Are you channeling Licklider?
> However current intellectual property law is > designed to reduce our abilities to express > ourselves via code or even to copy a file.
Hard to argue with your statement vis-a-vis the current trend in copyright, but that doesn't mean copyright is automatically and always a bad thing. You're viewing this in much too absolute a sense. Black and white views on this issue are too simplistic and, IMHO, likely wrong-headed ways of looking at the issue. Rarely is anything ever so cut and dried.
> Copyright and Intellectual property is out of > control right now and its slowly removing our > freedomm of speech and our right to expression.
Got me there.
> Why is it ok to censor people in the name of > capitalism, no one but rogue pirates dare step
You lost me here. I do not see patents/trademarks as being necessary hallmarks of a capitalist system. P&T are simply things that exist in the somewhat capitalist system that sort of has been implemented in the US. It is not a given that one must have the other to survive. I think you're mixing your prejudices here.
> forward and say what we all know is happening.
I really, really hate the royal "we". Who are the other individuals you are posting on behalf of?
> Freenet, GNU, etc etc, its all about freedom of > speech. Alot of people claim "well if you are
I thought it was about having copyright protection for a certain kind of software that dictated sharing of information. The GPL would have no effect in the absence of copyright law.
> going to have freedom to be open source you > should also have freedom not to be"
I agree. This does not mean that copyright should be scrapped for those who don't want to go the open source route. There are more ways to skin a cat than GNU/catskn.
> However when you arent open source and you > support the patent system you support > censorship.
I don't get your logic. Do you mean to say that if you support open source and you support the patent system (whatever that is), then you do not or do not necessarily support censorship, or are more data needed? You seem to be saying that something more than simply supporting the "patent system" is required to make me (for example) into a censorship supporter.
And...what's so bad about censorship? Did Moses come down from the mountain with a table indicating that the GNU/Ten Commandments forbid censorship? Why must all information "be free" except that it may be your personal preference? No natural law I know of dictates this (perhaps the heretofore unknown gnuth law of GNU/Thermodynamics).
> Its very funny how Americans can jump to > complain about China and the evils of
Well. I guess the Chinese are free to bitch about the US -- there's plenty to bitch about: the land-grab from most indian tribes, slavery, the Japanese internment, blah, blah, blah. The US isn't all roses. On the other hand, the Cultural Revolution is undeniably pretty much a "bad thing". How many people did Mao murder or starve during his regime? Some estimates I've seen of all the people killed in the name of nominally communist regimes, including China and the USSR, mostly, in the 20th century numbered about 100,000,000. That's pretty evil.
> Communism, claiming USA is all about freedom, > claiming the constitution, but its all bullshit.
No, it is not bullshit. The US saved France from Germany twice. The US was the single most important influence in protecting western Europe from Russia for forty years (and a fat lot of thanks it resulted in). The US was the single most responsible party for freeing the satellite countries from USSR influence in the late eighties and early nineties. The US has done the most of any country in the world to expand democracy. Hell, the US even helped the Chinese fight off the Japanese (who at the time were using biological weapons in addition to the "ordinary" atrocities of "comfort women" and mass murder of civilians).
Is the record lilly white? Is the US the Ivory Snow girl. No (unless Marilyn Chambers is the Ivory Snow girl you're thinking of). Were there problems along the way? Yes. The world isn't a movie or comic book. By and large, the United States has been the single most important proponent of individual freedom in the world for at least a century.
> USA is about Capitalism right now, not freedom.
I am firmly convinced that economic and political freedom are inseparable. They are capable of existing in different degrees in the same place, but in the long run, the two move together. You cannot have political freedom without also having a freedom to work and produce what and how you want. Slaves can't be leaders.
> While we are more free than China, we are only > more free than China for now,
An astute observation. Freedom is a delicate flower.
> eventually Capitalism will remove all freedom > from us due to our own greed.
Nice assertion. Hasn't turned out to be right yet. Were I a betting man, I would not hesitate to take you up on that one. Capitalism _is_ freedom. It is an unavoidable result of personal economic and political freedom.
I believe that your"Bzzzzt! Wrong." comment is inaccurate. The item you cited from Yahoo showing institutional investors deals with the common stock traded under the symbol "CORL" rather than the non-voting, convertible, preferred shares (all 24 million of them) which I believe MSFT still owns. I have not been able to locate anything via Google yet to confirm your contention. I am also waiting on an email reply from CORL's investor relations.
If you have a cite that actually says that the convertible, non-voting, preferred shares were sold, please post it. Otherwise, you have made an ass of yourself.
I am not sure who is correct yet. I only know that your arrogant and brash "Bzzzzt!" b.s. doesn't say what you think it does. You only got modded up to +5 because a pile of editors were as ignorant as you regarding what the Yahoo site actually meant.
> How can you just misplace the blame on China's > government like that?
Since when can't a corrupt government be blamed for being corrupt?
> If anything, China's corrupt government means > that it is even more so _our_ responsibility to > keep the world clean and stop people from > harming themselves.
Holy White Man's Burden! I agree. Those poor Chinese need to be protected from themselves by us, smart, fancy-pants, "we know what's best for you" suburban honkies.
> I have an idea, you take a spear, and stick it > in the asscheek of a full grown bull elephant.
I suspect that prehistoric humans did not have a taste for bull fighting. I think that their idea of hunting is more along the lines of use overwhelming force and/or stealth.
If my protein consumption, and that of my family, depended upon my ability to hunt mega fauna, I would not be walking up to a mammoth and "stick[ing a spear] in the asscheek of an elephant [or mammoth]." I would get a group of people, lie in wait in sheltered areas (behind rocks, trees, on cliff ledges) in areas downwind from watering holes and wait for a laggard. Ideally, nobody would be anywhere near the mammoth.
Atlatls would be used to chuck "darts" (some can be as long as 6 feet and fly at speeds of about 50 feet per second) to hit the mammoth's exposed vital areas (bodies are not armor-plated tanks -- they have weak points between ribs, on the legs, the neck, etc.). I imagine that tactics would get very, very good after a period of hundreds or thousands of years of coexistence.
I would not need to walk up to the elephant to stick the spear in its asscheek -- I would be flinging it from a protected amubush area well out of reach of the mammoth's tusks, feet, and asscheeks. Probably some 15-25 meters away, depending on the terrain. Wounding and waiting would be just as effective as killing outright. The mammoth doesn't need to drop over dead instantly for me to eat.
> Do you have any idea what type of > bullet it requires, to do any significant > damage to one of these things?
Keep in mind that it is not necessarily how hard the weapon strikes, but where it strikes that matters when hunting. A 6' spear/dart traveling at 50'/second would do nicely for killing. It killed armor-plated Spaniards per Bernial Diaz' account of the conquest of Mexico.
I do not have any problem accepting that isolated or ambushed prey could easily fall to a small group of experienced hunters with little or no risk to the hunters.
I don't think that one mammoth or even a small group of them would present an especially difficult task for, say, seven to ten humans to kill with atlatls.
Atlatls aside, there are many, many proponents of the disease theory that know much more about this issue than I do. It is threatening to displace the "overkill" theory which matched nicely with the general contemporary ecological politics of the sixties and seventies.
An excellent website on the hyperdisease hypothesis can be found here. It is good reading and it makes me wonder whether, like the American Chestnut blight, a mammoth (or 80% mammoth or whatever is ultimately the result of this project), may still fall victim to the pathogen that killed it originally, if that is what happened. Just because the mammoth is gone doesn't mean that the pathogen is gone. Some chestnuts keep sprounting from their stumps, just to get killed back again by the blight.
Here is an interesting discussion of the very debate you two are going through.
My general recollection (and my source eludes me at this point) is that Woolly Mammoth parts are frequently found in conjunction with prehistoric settlements/campsites. Carcasses are frequently found with Clovis points embedded in the ribs. There is no question that there was severe hunting pressure on the mammoths. Did this wipe out the mammoth, or was it a combination of factors, including climate change (continuing today) resulting from the end of the ice age? My (amateur) guess is that it was a combination of those two factors.
As the National Geographic article mentions, the hunting pressure on the other types of mega fauna is not as obvious. I tend to think that the "overkill" supporters are generally right on the mammoth, but probably wrong on the other mega fauna extinctions in the New World.
Could early man kill woolly mammonths? The answer is unquestionably yes. (Check out Google for "Atalatl" some time). The fossil record clearly supports this. Did early man cause significant pressure on the mammoth population as a result of his hunting activities? The answer is clearly yes. Did early man alone cause the mammoth to extinction? This answer is less clear.
> Yeah, nothing like taking steps toward > reliable, equitable enforcement of existing > laws. Just think, you could suddenly start
I for one do not think that sending a red light ticket to the owner of a car regardless of who the driver is, is an "equitable" way of enforcing the red light laws. That is what happens in MD with the automatic red light tickets. The owner is responsible even if the face of the driver is clearly visible and clearly not the owner.
> receiving tickets for breaking speed limit laws > every time you break speed limit laws! Those > fucking bureaucrats!
Again, this system would not be able to track the driver, it would track the car (potentially). The person who gets fined is the owner of the car, not necessarily the driver. Again, I do not believe that this is "equitable." YMMV.
> How the hell is some automated timer system > supposed to differentiate between you, a good, > God-fearin', tax-payin', hard-workin' Merr-kinn > in a nice new Ford Explorer and that damned > migrant worker in the shitbox VW Minibus?
I have no idea what brought on this non-sequitur. The only response it merits is that you make too many assumptions.
I refuse to apologize for demanding that statutes on the books as criminal (albeit summary) offenses be enforced as criminal offenses and not as regulatory violations. It is shockingly unfair to my sense of justice to change the rules so dramatically and to remove the protections enjoyed by the accused.
> I was pulled over on the PA Turnpike for this. > I was doing about 105 between two toll booths > not thinking anything of it (it wasn't heavily > patrolled back in the day). > > The cops used the time -> time between the two > booths to figure out that I was going in excess > of 100 mph and gave me a ticket for "reckless > driving/endangerment".
Another poster mentioned this. I've travelled the PA turnpike a million times at grossly excessive speeds and this has never happened to me. When was this? I wonder if it is something they did for a while and then stopped (for any number of reasons, like the PA statute on calculating speed via timing devices, for one).
The way to pay for this fancy new traffic monitoring is clearly to send tickets to everyone that goes from point A to point B in less time than it should take per the posted speed limit. Considering that we already have automatic red light and speeding traffic tickets (no police intervention required!), this seems like the next step for the "coddle you to death" bureaucrats to take.
Your questions have been mostly answered very well by others, but there are a couple of points I did not see addressed yet:
1. The board of directors is unlikely to end up in jail because...they didn't do anything, most likely. The CFO, the Treasurer, and the CEO are the ones most likely to be hung out to dry, although there will need to be a trial first to determine if a crime has been committed. I do not know if criminal acts were committed by those men, but I do know that I would not want to be standing in their shoes right now.
2. As others have mentioned, they did not "steal" $7 billion dollars. The execs of WCOM do not have a wallet full of 7 billion $1 bills stashed somewhere.
The overstated revenues and understated expenses that amounted to nearly $7 billion dollars combined actually did something much worse -- it inflated the EPS of WCOM. At the multiples WCOM was selling for a couple of years ago, this meant that WCOM's market cap was inflated by probably many more billions than just $7.
While this "benefitted" people on the upside (when there were no complaints), it has really, really hurt on the downside to find out that the earnings are bogus. In addition to the bubble deflating and thereby reducing the multiple on various (mostly) tech stocks, the underlying earnings were fake and the fall to the downside is even harder and farther for WCOM shareholders who bought late.
3. If the WCOM execs are convicted of fraud, their debts cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and they will be broke. They can play some games to protect themselves (the one guy who was building the huge house in Florida may have been doing so to take advantage of Florida's generous homestead exemption in anticipation of filing for bankruptcy) but they cannot escape the ultimate effect -- they will probably lose everything.
4. In some ways, I think Bernie Ebbers may even be worse off than you might think -- he was getting hit with margin calls because he was buying WCOM stock on margin as the price collapsed. That does not strike me as something one does when defrauding investors. It is distinctly possible that Ebbers simply was drinking his own Kool-Aid about WCOM bringing additional value to the enterprises it bought via "synergy" (a.k.a. the Philosopher's Stone of Wall Street).
5. Goodwill (the $50 billion write-down) is about as big an illusion as exists in the world of financial accounting. I always viewed it as a plug number to account for how much an acquiring business overpaid for a target. It is where the excess value of the consideration paid for a target is placed on the books when you can't increase other accounts, like physical assets or cash. Some businesses, if bought, would demand a premium for intangibles, like the "secret formula" for Coke or the Marlboro brand. Worldcom, however, bought nothing like a valuable brand. The $50 billion write down is simply an acknowledgement today that the deals that built Worldcom were based on inflated WCOM stock being used to buy inflated stock of companies like uunet and MCI.
6. WCOM stock has been delisted.
7. Worldcom will not go out of business. The creditors will end up owning the company, but the firm will continue to exist in some form. I would personally be disappointed to see them close shop, as they have a fantastic backbone and I like to see competition in the phone business. My real fear is that the ILECs will use Worldcom, Global Crossing et al as excuses to stop telco deregulation and fight competition.
The point of the potato clock comment was originally to mock the absurd tendency in the GNU/Linux community to try to run an OS on any platform regardless of the sense or purpose. It seems like a silly hobby to me, but then so does golf. It was hardly a commentary on any technological barriers or lack thereof to performing the install. Sheesh.
My original point is that I just think it is a dumb idea to put GNU/Linux on (newer) Apple hardware for the reasons I stated previously.
Different strokes for different folks, whatever. I just don't see the sense in it.
The geek factor I was talking about was in reference to the Apple server box running Gnu/linux now, btw. The release does in fact state that *other* Apple products are now being shipped w/ GNU/linux installed. The thing I hadn't seen before was the Apple server running Gnu/linux. I guess I should have been more specific on the potato clock factor.
Yeah, but nobody was putting it on the new Apple server box Apple has been pimping, or at least if so, it was not widely publicized. That was the point of the article referenced by the lead post in this topic, after all.
The geek factor I was referring to is not the value of the GNU/Linux install but simply the idea of putting GNU/Linux somewhere new, like on a potato-powered clock or something similar. The distro used for the install on Apple hardware was not a relevant point. This was pure and simple "potato clock" geek factor.
Slashdot Mirror
> His job and status makes him seem closest to
> Tim Russert
The odd thing is that I was not nearly boggled enough by the idea of Tim Russert doing the "I've been abducted by aliens" thing. Rush seemed much more natural for it in my mind's eye (leading the rally and whatnot).
I think George Will would have exploded if he had been abducted. The brain would simply have short-circuited.
Russert as protagonist works for me too, though. I just didn't have him in mind when I picked up the book.
guac-foo
> Why are they little *green* men? Why not blue?
> Where did that start?
Well, if you'd read the book, it'd explain it all for you. Sheesh.
I actually read this just about two weeks ago. I've read Thank You for Smoking and Wry Martinis (a collection of columns) and the White House Mess. He is a funny guy, and his skewering of Tom Clancy as reproduced in Wry Martinis is deadly funny stuff.
I've tried to figure out whether the protagonist is George Will or Rush Limbaugh or whether he's simply a mix of several pundits.
You can probably find the book in discount book stores by this point (I picked up my copy - a trade paperback) at a book liquidator for about 3 or 4 bucks.
guac-foo
Microsoft does not need to cripple 802.11b. It is already crippled. It ships that way. WEP? Bah!
Future wireless hardware based on other standards may be at risk based on the MS extend, embrace, envelope, eat, expell process, however.
guac-foo
1. Warchalking necessarily involves sniffing around for open wireless networks. You generally do not do this by accident. I mean, I don't sit in my car with my 802.11b card in while driving up the street and then going "whoops! I found an unsecured WAP" (I'm aware the last part of that is redundant). Frequently, these are sought out. It is generally therefore a necessary condition that a certain amount of "door rattling" is going on here. That in itself is illegal.
2. The quotes from Nokia were ambiguous. Clearly, the unauthorized use of somebody's network is illegal and is theft. The fact that no physical property is removed may mean that larceny has not been committed, but it is an action that is going to be punishable by some criminal statute where you live, dollars to donuts. In common parlance outside of strict legal definitions, this constitutes theft although the offense you will be charged with may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
3. People that go warchalking, rather than going out to use the networks, are doing something a little different. They have no way of knowing whether the intention was to leave a network open. This shouldn't give carte blanche for people to go in and rape their bandwidth, however.
I think you need to ask yourself if a place really intends for their network to be open. There are little clues about this that the average moron can pick up on. If the WAP is in a doctor's office or a business, the chances are that they are not intending to allow their networks to be used openly. Just as someone may leave a car unlocked with the keys in it does not mean that there is a standing invitation to drive the car around for a while without asking.
The general rule should maybe encourage proprietors to mark their locations if they to allow others to use their networks. If no markings are in place, then the assumption should be that no use is permitted.
4. I would like to see Nokia's actual statement. As it has filtered from Nokia => www.computing.co.uk => Slashdot, it is no longer clear whether the warchalking itself is what was slammed or whether there is some confusion about the use of the term "warchalking." Clearly, Nokia has classified the unauthorized _use_ of a warchalked WAP as "theft". This is hard to argue with. I do see a legitimate beef from the pro-warchalking crowd against the idea of Nokia opposing warchalking per se, so long as vandalism does not occur.
The fact is that there is no right to go and use things that belong to others without permission. This notion is juvenile and dangerous -- it is akin to the people who claim that the US income tax is illegal for a variety of reasons. It constitutes willful ignorance of the law.
guac-foo
>> My secretary doesn't need to have her 300 mhz
>> machine upgraded ever, probably.
>
> Remember IBM? Some old company, used to make
> computers. They thought the same thing about
> the 386. Compaq ate their lunch.
I don't dispute that. On the other hand, at some point of development, a tool becomes sufficient to do a job and the marginal benefit of replacing the tool with a "better" tool just isn't there if the old tool still works, even if there are some new features.
In the case of word processing and light spreadsheet use, I think that the marginal benefits provided by faster processors, more memory, new software, and new office suites (OpenOffice excluded since it presents a dramitc price point improvement) are simply not there. Word processing on a 386 had a lot of room for improvement - a GUI, hard disks, networking, stability, having more windows open, better resolution, etc. The whole shebang was a work in process.
Now, with an 800x600 screen, a copy of Word 97, network connectivity, a faster and larger hard drive, and a 300 mhz pentium, my secretary is pretty well set up to process words. ASCII doesn't get any bigger, and the formatting she does is not terribly complex. Her maximum document size has probably never exceeded thirty pages in a single document. Where is the marginal benefit from buying her a new anything?
If there is a dramatic improvement in design interface that suddenly requires more horsepower that will result in her having improved productivity, the cost of an upgrade might be worthwhile. Until then, there's no point.
I admit that there is often a lag in time between making capabilities available and applications taking advantage of the new capabilities. I just don't see anything out there right now that would justify spending $850 on a new 1.8 ghz Compaq Evo 310 with MS Office SBE and XP Pro.
A paradigm shift in human/software interfaces might convince me, but as long as it is a lady typing words into a word processor, I am solidly convinced that today's machines have more than enough oomph to do the job. Re the initial thread, her monitor does, too.
There are some people for whom such a technological development may have use and for whom greater resolution will be a good thing. If applications and OS software could take advantage of it, it might even have practical benefits such as reduced eyestrain (as well as the improved screen real estate someone else mentioned, though that would require ever-smaller fonts, making use difficult).
On the other hand, the dramatic, paradigm-changing benefits of going from DOS-based WordPerfect to a windowed (somewhat stable) GUI environment with network access, etc., don't seem to be in place yet to take advantage of new technology. I'll wait.
guac-foo
> The resolution can go as high as 3840x2400.
> That is insane. I think the question is no
On one hand, there's the (apochryphal?) saying floating around regarding memory: "640k is more than enough memory for anyone" or something to that effect.
On the other hand, I think you have a legitimate point. To some extent, I think the CPU battle is basically over for most people. For an office environment, who the hell needs more than 500 mhz? My secretary (does word processing, some light spreadsheet stuff) doesn't need to have her 300 mhz machine upgraded ever, probably.
> longer how high can the resolution go. But on
> the otherhand, how high can I set the
> resolution with having to be able to squint to
> see the letters that I am typing.
I think another legitimate issue is whether a monitor should be replaced if it absolutely does not need to. One issue of technology is "can X be done?" An often overlooked issue is "Should we bother implementing X?"
I suspect that on newer machines fancier-pants monitors will be de rigeur as manufacturing techniques improve and prices ultimately make these consumer-priced models, but should you consider dumping an old monitor (and the many pounds of lead) into a landfill or send it to China for "recycling" when the marginal benefits of new technology are minimal?
By all means, lets keep doing research and development. Let's let the market consider what to do with the technology that companies develop. Let's not forget that technology should serve us and not the other way around. At least until the machines start to think, and then all bets are off.
guac-foo
I've enjoyed having my MP3 player for a few years now. It's this new device that plays compressed digital music files. Oh? You want an ogg vorbis music player? Well, it's only almost 2003 -- keep waiting.
Listen. I'm sympathetic. The next MP3 player (digital/compressed music player -- wait: GNU/digital/compressed music player) I purchase, I will look for o.v. compatibility. The device I have right now works just dandy, however.
GF
Some people don't use ethernet. Some won't use mp3. Making ogg vorbis and mp3 play nicely won't yank the thousands of diamond rios out of people's hands or get them to upgrade. As a practical matter mp3 is the de facto winner of this round of music standards, technical or legal merits notwithstanding. I don't have to like it, it just is.
guac-foo
> Computers are great, but they are not very good
/. is so much more rewarding than that.
> in social situations. No one wants to cram
> around the computer in the back room for too
> long.
And televisions are great in social situations? I can imagine nothing more annoying or just outright idiotic than passively staring at a flickering box spewing forth endless streams of drool-inducing shit for me to gobble up witlessly.
Sitting and reading
guac-foo.
> Intellectual property and copyright law in the
> digital era = censorship.
Only in your twisted world view. Intellectual property laws have allowed the United States to develop the most productive economy in the history of ever. Granted that I am uncomfortable with the notion that what was originally a much more limited right to "own" intellectual property has become, through special interest lobbying, a de facto permanent right. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water, however. Limited patent and copyright protections were very, very good for inventors and the public for about 150 years in the US.
> The computer is a communications tool which is
> an extention and enhancement to our ability to
> communicate and express ourselves, source code
> is the method of expression, 1s and 0s are the
> output of this expression.
Are you channeling Licklider?
> However current intellectual property law is
> designed to reduce our abilities to express
> ourselves via code or even to copy a file.
Hard to argue with your statement vis-a-vis the current trend in copyright, but that doesn't mean copyright is automatically and always a bad thing. You're viewing this in much too absolute a sense. Black and white views on this issue are too simplistic and, IMHO, likely wrong-headed ways of looking at the issue. Rarely is anything ever so cut and dried.
> Copyright and Intellectual property is out of
> control right now and its slowly removing our
> freedomm of speech and our right to expression.
Got me there.
> Why is it ok to censor people in the name of
> capitalism, no one but rogue pirates dare step
You lost me here. I do not see patents/trademarks as being necessary hallmarks of a capitalist system. P&T are simply things that exist in the somewhat capitalist system that sort of has been implemented in the US. It is not a given that one must have the other to survive. I think you're mixing your prejudices here.
> forward and say what we all know is happening.
I really, really hate the royal "we". Who are the other individuals you are posting on behalf of?
> Freenet, GNU, etc etc, its all about freedom of
> speech. Alot of people claim "well if you are
I thought it was about having copyright protection for a certain kind of software that dictated sharing of information. The GPL would have no effect in the absence of copyright law.
> going to have freedom to be open source you
> should also have freedom not to be"
I agree. This does not mean that copyright should be scrapped for those who don't want to go the open source route. There are more ways to skin a cat than GNU/catskn.
> However when you arent open source and you
> support the patent system you support
> censorship.
I don't get your logic. Do you mean to say that if you support open source and you support the patent system (whatever that is), then you do not or do not necessarily support censorship, or are more data needed? You seem to be saying that something more than simply supporting the "patent system" is required to make me (for example) into a censorship supporter.
And...what's so bad about censorship? Did Moses come down from the mountain with a table indicating that the GNU/Ten Commandments forbid censorship? Why must all information "be free" except that it may be your personal preference? No natural law I know of dictates this (perhaps the heretofore unknown gnuth law of GNU/Thermodynamics).
> Its very funny how Americans can jump to
> complain about China and the evils of
Well. I guess the Chinese are free to bitch about the US -- there's plenty to bitch about: the land-grab from most indian tribes, slavery, the Japanese internment, blah, blah, blah. The US isn't all roses. On the other hand, the Cultural Revolution is undeniably pretty much a "bad thing". How many people did Mao murder or starve during his regime? Some estimates I've seen of all the people killed in the name of nominally communist regimes, including China and the USSR, mostly, in the 20th century numbered about 100,000,000. That's pretty evil.
> Communism, claiming USA is all about freedom,
> claiming the constitution, but its all bullshit.
No, it is not bullshit. The US saved France from Germany twice. The US was the single most important influence in protecting western Europe from Russia for forty years (and a fat lot of thanks it resulted in). The US was the single most responsible party for freeing the satellite countries from USSR influence in the late eighties and early nineties. The US has done the most of any country in the world to expand democracy. Hell, the US even helped the Chinese fight off the Japanese (who at the time were using biological weapons in addition to the "ordinary" atrocities of "comfort women" and mass murder of civilians).
Is the record lilly white? Is the US the Ivory Snow girl. No (unless Marilyn Chambers is the Ivory Snow girl you're thinking of). Were there problems along the way? Yes. The world isn't a movie or comic book. By and large, the United States has been the single most important proponent of individual freedom in the world for at least a century.
> USA is about Capitalism right now, not freedom.
I am firmly convinced that economic and political freedom are inseparable. They are capable of existing in different degrees in the same place, but in the long run, the two move together. You cannot have political freedom without also having a freedom to work and produce what and how you want. Slaves can't be leaders.
> While we are more free than China, we are only
> more free than China for now,
An astute observation. Freedom is a delicate flower.
> eventually Capitalism will remove all freedom
> from us due to our own greed.
Nice assertion. Hasn't turned out to be right yet. Were I a betting man, I would not hesitate to take you up on that one. Capitalism _is_ freedom. It is an unavoidable result of personal economic and political freedom.
Guac foo
http://nullwebmail.sourceforge.net/
Very, very fast. No goofy features, just send, receive, compose.
More pimpified:
http://horde.org/imp/
Guac-foo
> An interesting streamlining of the GPL. However
Ummmm. That should really be GNU GPL. I mean, without the GNU development tools, where would the GPL be? Huh?
guac-foo
I believe that your"Bzzzzt! Wrong." comment is inaccurate. The item you cited from Yahoo showing institutional investors deals with the common stock traded under the symbol "CORL" rather than the non-voting, convertible, preferred shares (all 24 million of them) which I believe MSFT still owns. I have not been able to locate anything via Google yet to confirm your contention. I am also waiting on an email reply from CORL's investor relations.
If you have a cite that actually says that the convertible, non-voting, preferred shares were sold, please post it. Otherwise, you have made an ass of yourself.
I am not sure who is correct yet. I only know that your arrogant and brash "Bzzzzt!" b.s. doesn't say what you think it does. You only got modded up to +5 because a pile of editors were as ignorant as you regarding what the Yahoo site actually meant.
Put up or shut up.
guac-foo
> How can you just misplace the blame on China's
> government like that?
Since when can't a corrupt government be blamed for being corrupt?
> If anything, China's corrupt government means
> that it is even more so _our_ responsibility to
> keep the world clean and stop people from
> harming themselves.
Holy White Man's Burden! I agree. Those poor Chinese need to be protected from themselves by us, smart, fancy-pants, "we know what's best for you" suburban honkies.
This post needs a mod for "whiny". For christ's sake, I feel like I've had a near-Alda experience.
Guac-foo
> I have an idea, you take a spear, and stick it
> in the asscheek of a full grown bull elephant.
I suspect that prehistoric humans did not have a taste for bull fighting. I think that their idea of hunting is more along the lines of use overwhelming force and/or stealth.
If my protein consumption, and that of my family, depended upon my ability to hunt mega fauna, I would not be walking up to a mammoth and "stick[ing a spear] in the asscheek of an elephant [or mammoth]." I would get a group of people, lie in wait in sheltered areas (behind rocks, trees, on cliff ledges) in areas downwind from watering holes and wait for a laggard. Ideally, nobody would be anywhere near the mammoth.
Atlatls would be used to chuck "darts" (some can be as long as 6 feet and fly at speeds of about 50 feet per second) to hit the mammoth's exposed vital areas (bodies are not armor-plated tanks -- they have weak points between ribs, on the legs, the neck, etc.). I imagine that tactics would get very, very good after a period of hundreds or thousands of years of coexistence.
I would not need to walk up to the elephant to stick the spear in its asscheek -- I would be flinging it from a protected amubush area well out of reach of the mammoth's tusks, feet, and asscheeks. Probably some 15-25 meters away, depending on the terrain. Wounding and waiting would be just as effective as killing outright. The mammoth doesn't need to drop over dead instantly for me to eat.
> Do you have any idea what type of
> bullet it requires, to do any significant
> damage to one of these things?
Keep in mind that it is not necessarily how hard the weapon strikes, but where it strikes that matters when hunting. A 6' spear/dart traveling at 50'/second would do nicely for killing. It killed armor-plated Spaniards per Bernial Diaz' account of the conquest of Mexico.
I do not have any problem accepting that isolated or ambushed prey could easily fall to a small group of experienced hunters with little or no risk to the hunters.
I don't think that one mammoth or even a small group of them would present an especially difficult task for, say, seven to ten humans to kill with atlatls.
Atlatls aside, there are many, many proponents of the disease theory that know much more about this issue than I do. It is threatening to displace the "overkill" theory which matched nicely with the general contemporary ecological politics of the sixties and seventies.
An excellent website on the hyperdisease hypothesis can be found here. It is good reading and it makes me wonder whether, like the American Chestnut blight, a mammoth (or 80% mammoth or whatever is ultimately the result of this project), may still fall victim to the pathogen that killed it originally, if that is what happened. Just because the mammoth is gone doesn't mean that the pathogen is gone. Some chestnuts keep sprounting from their stumps, just to get killed back again by the blight.
guac-foo
Here is an interesting discussion of the very debate you two are going through.
My general recollection (and my source eludes me at this point) is that Woolly Mammoth parts are frequently found in conjunction with prehistoric settlements/campsites. Carcasses are frequently found with Clovis points embedded in the ribs. There is no question that there was severe hunting pressure on the mammoths. Did this wipe out the mammoth, or was it a combination of factors, including climate change (continuing today) resulting from the end of the ice age? My (amateur) guess is that it was a combination of those two factors.
As the National Geographic article mentions, the hunting pressure on the other types of mega fauna is not as obvious. I tend to think that the "overkill" supporters are generally right on the mammoth, but probably wrong on the other mega fauna extinctions in the New World.
There is also a disease theory on the extinction.
Could early man kill woolly mammonths? The answer is unquestionably yes. (Check out Google for "Atalatl" some time). The fossil record clearly supports this. Did early man cause significant pressure on the mammoth population as a result of his hunting activities? The answer is clearly yes. Did early man alone cause the mammoth to extinction? This answer is less clear.
> Yeah, nothing like taking steps toward
> reliable, equitable enforcement of existing
> laws. Just think, you could suddenly start
I for one do not think that sending a red light ticket to the owner of a car regardless of who the driver is, is an "equitable" way of enforcing the red light laws. That is what happens in MD with the automatic red light tickets. The owner is responsible even if the face of the driver is clearly visible and clearly not the owner.
> receiving tickets for breaking speed limit laws
> every time you break speed limit laws! Those
> fucking bureaucrats!
Again, this system would not be able to track the driver, it would track the car (potentially). The person who gets fined is the owner of the car, not necessarily the driver. Again, I do not believe that this is "equitable." YMMV.
> How the hell is some automated timer system
> supposed to differentiate between you, a good,
> God-fearin', tax-payin', hard-workin' Merr-kinn
> in a nice new Ford Explorer and that damned
> migrant worker in the shitbox VW Minibus?
I have no idea what brought on this non-sequitur. The only response it merits is that you make too many assumptions.
I refuse to apologize for demanding that statutes on the books as criminal (albeit summary) offenses be enforced as criminal offenses and not as regulatory violations. It is shockingly unfair to my sense of justice to change the rules so dramatically and to remove the protections enjoyed by the accused.
> I was pulled over on the PA Turnpike for this.
> I was doing about 105 between two toll booths
> not thinking anything of it (it wasn't heavily
> patrolled back in the day).
>
> The cops used the time -> time between the two
> booths to figure out that I was going in excess
> of 100 mph and gave me a ticket for "reckless
> driving/endangerment".
Another poster mentioned this. I've travelled the PA turnpike a million times at grossly excessive speeds and this has never happened to me. When was this? I wonder if it is something they did for a while and then stopped (for any number of reasons, like the PA statute on calculating speed via timing devices, for one).
The way to pay for this fancy new traffic monitoring is clearly to send tickets to everyone that goes from point A to point B in less time than it should take per the posted speed limit. Considering that we already have automatic red light and speeding traffic tickets (no police intervention required!), this seems like the next step for the "coddle you to death" bureaucrats to take.
Your questions have been mostly answered very well by others, but there are a couple of points I did not see addressed yet:
1. The board of directors is unlikely to end up in jail because...they didn't do anything, most likely. The CFO, the Treasurer, and the CEO are the ones most likely to be hung out to dry, although there will need to be a trial first to determine if a crime has been committed. I do not know if criminal acts were committed by those men, but I do know that I would not want to be standing in their shoes right now.
2. As others have mentioned, they did not "steal" $7 billion dollars. The execs of WCOM do not have a wallet full of 7 billion $1 bills stashed somewhere.
The overstated revenues and understated expenses that amounted to nearly $7 billion dollars combined actually did something much worse -- it inflated the EPS of WCOM. At the multiples WCOM was selling for a couple of years ago, this meant that WCOM's market cap was inflated by probably many more billions than just $7.
While this "benefitted" people on the upside (when there were no complaints), it has really, really hurt on the downside to find out that the earnings are bogus. In addition to the bubble deflating and thereby reducing the multiple on various (mostly) tech stocks, the underlying earnings were fake and the fall to the downside is even harder and farther for WCOM shareholders who bought late.
3. If the WCOM execs are convicted of fraud, their debts cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and they will be broke. They can play some games to protect themselves (the one guy who was building the huge house in Florida may have been doing so to take advantage of Florida's generous homestead exemption in anticipation of filing for bankruptcy) but they cannot escape the ultimate effect -- they will probably lose everything.
4. In some ways, I think Bernie Ebbers may even be worse off than you might think -- he was getting hit with margin calls because he was buying WCOM stock on margin as the price collapsed. That does not strike me as something one does when defrauding investors. It is distinctly possible that Ebbers simply was drinking his own Kool-Aid about WCOM bringing additional value to the enterprises it bought via "synergy" (a.k.a. the Philosopher's Stone of Wall Street).
5. Goodwill (the $50 billion write-down) is about as big an illusion as exists in the world of financial accounting. I always viewed it as a plug number to account for how much an acquiring business overpaid for a target. It is where the excess value of the consideration paid for a target is placed on the books when you can't increase other accounts, like physical assets or cash. Some businesses, if bought, would demand a premium for intangibles, like the "secret formula" for Coke or the Marlboro brand. Worldcom, however, bought nothing like a valuable brand. The $50 billion write down is simply an acknowledgement today that the deals that built Worldcom were based on inflated WCOM stock being used to buy inflated stock of companies like uunet and MCI.
6. WCOM stock has been delisted.
7. Worldcom will not go out of business. The creditors will end up owning the company, but the firm will continue to exist in some form. I would personally be disappointed to see them close shop, as they have a fantastic backbone and I like to see competition in the phone business. My real fear is that the ILECs will use Worldcom, Global Crossing et al as excuses to stop telco deregulation and fight competition.
1. I never called the Xserve a potato clock.
2. I agree that it is basically a racked G4.
3. I agree that this was not a technical coup.
The point of the potato clock comment was originally to mock the absurd tendency in the GNU/Linux community to try to run an OS on any platform regardless of the sense or purpose. It seems like a silly hobby to me, but then so does golf. It was hardly a commentary on any technological barriers or lack thereof to performing the install. Sheesh.
My original point is that I just think it is a dumb idea to put GNU/Linux on (newer) Apple hardware for the reasons I stated previously.
Different strokes for different folks, whatever. I just don't see the sense in it.
The geek factor I was talking about was in reference to the Apple server box running Gnu/linux now, btw. The release does in fact state that *other* Apple products are now being shipped w/ GNU/linux installed. The thing I hadn't seen before was the Apple server running Gnu/linux. I guess I should have been more specific on the potato clock factor.
Yeah, but nobody was putting it on the new Apple server box Apple has been pimping, or at least if so, it was not widely publicized. That was the point of the article referenced by the lead post in this topic, after all.
The geek factor I was referring to is not the value of the GNU/Linux install but simply the idea of putting GNU/Linux somewhere new, like on a potato-powered clock or something similar. The distro used for the install on Apple hardware was not a relevant point. This was pure and simple "potato clock" geek factor.