Yes friends, Microsoft in a stunning religious epiphany realizes its opposition to GPL code has been misguided, and to set thing in order will fund a GPL infringement suit against AOL for violating the GPL.
During the press conference, notes that none of their code is GPL based, and their recent conversion to supporting the GPL will have no effect on their codebase.
I don't think it is particularly like slamming either. It is more like when you get a mortgage (or credit card).
I have had two houses and two mortgages. The first was sold twice, the second has been sold once (so far). And, I've had several credit cards accounts sold to other banks. And I have had banks accounts sold to other banks too.
I was not given any choice as to whether I wanted my accounts sold, but I have to option to refinance (potentially expensive, guaranteed inconvenient) or change credit cards holders if I am unhappy enough with the situation.
I do get legal protection (contract law) that the buyer of my mortgage can't jack up the interest rates of the mortgage. The credit card issuer can change the terms, but must notify you in advance. Of course, if you are carrying a large balance and have poor credit history, you may have trouble switching to a new card issuer.
There is some significant difference with DSL switching vs mortgages, etc.
1 - Options are more difficult for consumer to understand, distinguish, and verify.
2 - Existing service contracts underspecify just what kind of service you are being guaranteed. Also the service quality is much more subjective, i.e. not a commodity.
3 - Consumer is more likely to have a strong brand preference.
Definitely agreed that Red Hat has more value then Mandrake (I should have noted this myself in the initial post), but is the value 1.4 billion USD more to AOL? AOL could staff another company of 500 employees (Red Hat) forever on the interest from 1.4 Billion dollars.
AOL has a infrastructure for resolving customer problems, etc. and in a consumer desktop, one would have to consider that the majority of support issue are going to be of the same variety that Microsoft gets supporting its desktop software -- a comparitively small portion of this is related to real problems, most technical people would describe is as RTFM type problems.
Neither Red Hat nor Mandrake has an infrastructure that is designed to handle the deluge of user support issues from first-time, non-technical users. Support from Red-Hat or Mandrake would probably be sufficient to support the 2nd or third tier that AOL would need to support their customer base.
BTW, in my original post, I did not say that Mandrake over Red Hat was a slam dunk, I simply said that it was worthy of due consideration. 1.4 billion dollars can buy a lot of upgrades to MandrakeSoft. I'm sure that if AOL is seriously contemplating Red Hat, they would also be considering the alternatives.
Believe me, once the AOL Linux (aka Mandrake) CDs go it, Mandrake just became a viable entity in the country in the minds of the general consumer.
Though I've used Red Hat, and SUSE, I've never bothered with Mandrake myself. But, what is it that makes it something other than a real distro?
Is it as valueable as Red Hat, no. Is it good enough for AOL, I say yes.
AOL announced today the FREE AOL Linux PC program.
If you sign up for AOL at the time of purchase, you get an instant rebate and the system is free at the time of purchase.
System includes 2GHz Intel P4, 256 MB RAM, 32 MB AGP Accelerated Video card, Speakers, CD-R, and 56K modem. You also get a free stuffed toy penguin.
These systems comes with everything the average consumer needs for home use. The easy to use AOL comes pre-installed with AOL Linux. It also includes word processing, spreadsheet, database, games, email, and everything you need to connect to the internet, and much more.
AOL Linux includes a double your money back guarantee if your are not satisfied.
Offer not valid in all areas. Some exclusions may apply. Lawyers are rabid weasels. Price is free after rebate, monitor not included - 3 year AOL service contract required. Price before rebate is $449.95 USD. Early termination of AOL service contract results in financial penalties and loss of Karma points. See store for details.
Mandrake (and others) would be considerably better than RedHat in one important category, purchase price.
According to this MandrakeSoft has a market capitalization of 15.8 million EUR
Whereas this shows that Redhat has a market cap of 1.43 Billion USD
Seems to me that that buying Mandrake for roughly one hundredth the cost of Red Hat is a fairly compelling argument for giving Mandrake due consideration over Red Hat.
AOL already has name recognition, and should not need to pay huge money for the name recognition in the consumer market, especially given that your typical AOL customer would likely be equally happy regardless of the choice here by AOL and would have little recognition of Red Hat or Mandrake.
BTW, In case any AOL accountants are not smart enough to figure this out by themselves, I would be glad to accept a modest $500K consulting fee for my insight.
I'm sorry, but sarcasm is apparently a lost art, perhaps its my fault for not being over the top enough.
Johnathan Swift's modest proposal was that we should eat children because food was hard to come by. Given the literary reference, I had no thought that I had to explain sarcasm.
I henceforth swear never to be sarcastic without identifying it as such when posting.
The purpose of the modest proposal was point out the problem, and make an overstated, if not blatantly ridiculous proposal. In my case, some elements are reasonable, at least on the surface, and others may be truly reasonable). We are not going to start eating children, and we're not going to eliminate IP laws. But we needed to do something about the starving children, and we need to do something about IP laws.
--
I am serious about eliminating shrink wrap agreements, its not about consumer cluelessness, its about a balance of power for commercial interests vs. the consumer. Shrink wrap agreements are out of hand, the consumer needs a better recourse to recover damages from the manufacturer in the case of massive defects in the software. This does not mean that Microsoft or other intend to harm the consumer, but they might be more inclined to due diligence if they knew they could not disclaim every possible thing is the license agreement. IANAL, but I understand that there are legal precendents for limiting the power of the vendor in such cases.
I would like to see software patents disappear, and I would like to see software copyright (and other IP copyright for that matter) cutailed. 75 years is ridiculous.
Copyright law was intended to grant protection for the author for a time (to ensure some protection of new material) but guarantee its eventual free use (to benefit society as a whole)
The first chapter is titled Antimatter, discussed what antimatter is, how we storeit, produce it, how we could produce it econmonically, how to use it more space travel and more mundance applictions.
He also write science fiction, I remember enjoying Rocheworld and Camelot 30K
1 -- require Microsoft (and other software companies) to make abandonware revert to free-use by anyone. Don't require company to necessarily make old versions available for download at now cost, just eliminate copyright protection for versions that are no longer supported.
2 -- Change copyright protection for software to a maximum of 5 years. Abandonware would simply accelerate the push into public domain.
3 -- Eliminate shrink wrap agreements, these are onerous burdens on uneducated consumers. Specify a standard commercial conduct code for shrink-wrap software.
4 -- Eliminate patents for software. Copyright protection is nearly automatic, favors the small developer compared to patents, and would eliminate a large cost of software development.
5 -- Encourage other governments to follow a similar set of reasonable rules.
My personal comments on these rules follow.
Microsoft might actually have to innovate to provide enough value to make consumers but software within the shortened copyright period.
Maybe Borland would revert to like a book license agreements -- in fact, that sounds like a good criteria to be included under point 3 above
Linux -- no damage here, if its all about freedom for the developer and consumer, Linux would be unaffected directly, although stiffer competition from a revitalized commercial sector may inspire more insanely great software here too.
Actually, this license has the same requirement -- From section 2.3
"nor may you use the Product to create a product or operate a service that is generally competitive with the Product or any other Borland product offerings"
When it came up of screen, I copied the license into my paint program, made a few changes, and agreed to that.
So far, I have not heard any complaints from Borland that they did not like my changes. So, I forgot to tell them. Big deal, they did not tell me about their license before I bought the product.
In truth, I've not purchased JBuilder (although I like Delphi). Sounds pretty awful. I would think there would have a great deal of trouble enforcing this.
However, a real threat that is just as bad is being ratted out by a disgruntled employee (or ex-employee), and being subject to a BSA audit. BTW, the disgruntled employee needs no factual basis for this to occur.
Best possible proof of the fact that you are correct follows:
Ask an average person how much he pays in taxes at all level, very few would estimate more than 35%
In actual fact, the national average is over 35%, but you are hit by a large number of separate taxes, taken from each paycheck, sales taxes, sin-taxes, surchages & fees, property taxes, and death taxes (I may have missed some categories)
The M$ tax does not count (yet) as a real tax, you still have choice, at least if you are willing to work at it:)
Say you make $80K per year, and you paid no taxes, except for 35% on April 15. How much are you going to scream about writing that check for $28K on tax day? Yet, $28K would be a discount to what you currently pay.
Yeah, we all complain about our taxes (well, almost all, some people seem to want to pay more), but it would be 1776 again if we had to write a check for $28,000.00 It would be much more convenient, but people would feel the pain. Not even Bill I feel your pain Clinton would not be able to keep the proles in line.
This would be sticker shock to many consumers, and AOLTW would be much worse off by lumping all charges on one bill.
Personally I think $200+ is ridiculous for the services offered, and would never survive with real competition.
Forget claiming a machine is vital for scientific progress.
Today you say: I need XXX million dollars to fight terrorism. If you need scientific progress, this is just another aspect of anti-terrorism.
Aliens -- potential terrorists, especially if they wear a turban.
cracking rc5 keys -- thwarting the privacy of intercepted terrorist messages.
Linux -- Communist software is ok as long as not terrorist. If you worried about this being a red flag on you grant money, go ahead and get the bungled M$ O/S then overwrite it.
News for Nerds -- Moore's law continues for another day.
Ozone damage? Why should there be any ozone damage. The energy density in the laser downlink would not be powerful enough to notice. It cerainly would not be ionizing. At the wavelengths I would expect it to operate, the energy absorption by atmosphere within the ozone layer should be almost zero.
Where would you ever see 3500 degrees is the system (except where you specifically want it). So, if you are using 3500 degrees to break down water, so what?
You're convcerned about a measly 500 MW of added heat load? 500MW is a pretty typical coal-fired power plant. And to generate that 500 MW, you get an additional 300 MW of waste heat (this is assuming a quite modern, efficient coal fired plant BTW). Eventually, all 500 MW worth of electricity is converted to hear as well.
Now compare with space based laser, zapping us with 500 MW of beamed power, unless the conversion effieciency of beamed laser power to electricity you have no extra thermal load on the planet.
Of course, this does not give you the advantage of CO2, CO, O3, NOx, Hg, H2SO4 and many other interesting chemical discharges in the air, water, and land.
Ok, CO2 may actually be beneficial, but the others most certainly are not in terms of increasing concentrations in the environment.
BTW, the darling of most environmentalists is earth based solar (significant land and materials use issues, significant environment impacts), solar (don't ignore the bird kills), geothermal (actuall pretty friendly environmental, when you can get to it easily), tidal (who knows what damage you may be doing to the little fishies, big problems in energy density.
And of course fusion -- which just happens to have considerably more waste heat than a coal-fired plant. It still a steam-turbine design, but has additional heat loss in the form of gamma rays, etc. that will not be converted into electricity, and has potential harmful emissions (remember to gamma rays), radioactive materials, and will still cost lots of money.
I know just about everybody likes high-tech goodies, hot water, heating, air-conditioning, fresh food, health-care, etc.
Self-interest guarantees that most people will get their goodies, regardless of what the greens want. So the question is which methods work best (environmentally and econmically) not which is perfect.
Any space-based beamed power solution is among the lowest impact environmentally (mostly waste heat, which is not a significant problem compared to the other environmental costs)
To my knowledge, the only technology that has a potential to radically change the equations above, is ground-based solar cell based on nano-technology. You may be able to become non-invasive environmental, eliminate the materials cost issue, and have it be dirt cheap, though never too cheap to meter, assuming someone else is collecting the energy for you. BTW, although no waste heat this does not necessarily means no heat impact on environment -- if less heat is reflected back into space, then there is that many more BTU's captured from the sun.
Previous story was on the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence then we get the article on Bernie the spamming moron. These articles must be related.
You just can't make up stories like this -- you have to be a bonified idiot to come up with this stuff.
Does anybody have a truly good idiot stories site? One site that I've liked is here but I hope there is a really good one somewhere that needs to be slashdotted.
Re:Don't forget mars_nwe - the NetWare emu
on
Samba Turns 10
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· Score: 1
Actually, netware was a dos program. Have you ever heard of Netware 86 (4.61B was the most popular version of this IIRC).
You're server ran in non-dedicated mode, sharing your valuable 10 or 20 meg hard drive, but you could still run DOS apps on the same machine at the same time. Netware ran in 256K, so on a real beefy 512K machine, you had 256K left for MSDOS and your apps.
I remember installing many a Netware 86 network -- seems to me that g/net has the most popular technology at the time (for our customers) don't remember details -- Timeframe was mid 80's
Installing and configuring required significant technical knowledge. You actually linked your own drivers (the netware shell)
Original netware was for Motorola 68K systems, and Novell sold the hardware. Eventually, Netware gave up on selling 68K hardware, as they could not compete with commodity PC's.
IMO what made netware the best back then was small drivers. When dos was king, and a 256 XT was a hot machine, a driver than ran in 40K did file and printer sharing was way more important the the NetBios features from IBM/Microsoft that sucked down 80K of RAM.
Perhaps instead of thumping his Bible, he should have tried reading it before expressing his opinion. The book is silent on other planets and of course life on other planets, much less intelligent life on other planets.
Perhaps once could infer that there is no intelligent life on other planets based on theological complications with Jesus having to die for their sins too, but even that is speculation beyond what the book says.
The Bible has very little to say about scientific matters, despite what many theologians and Bible thumpers have decided up over the years. You would think people would have learned that making up stuff, claiming it was based on the Bible, and then getting trashed by the facts would have become unpopular since Galileo. BTW, the theoligians that disagreed with Galileo were following Aristotlean arguments not the Bible. Once again, the bible never says the earth was the center of the universe, etc. The Bible mentions the sun rising, etc. and people have inferred that the earth is at the center becuase of such language -- however, this is merely descriptive of the apparent sunrise, I can even read the sunrise & sunset times in the morning paper, and I am pretty sure that publisher know that earth orbits the sun, and the sun-rise is simply appearance, not a literal sun-rise.
Back to topic
Let's face it, the ability to directly image anything outside the solar system is pretty amazing. It was not very long ago that Betelgeuse was imaged as the first star (as a disk, not a point source).
There are some very interesting large-baseline telescopes that have been proposed that would theoretically allow imaging details of planets in other solar systems, alas they budget for such projects may be some time in coming.
It's still a long way to the nearest star. With current tech, would be be very lucky to get a large ship moving at 1 percent light speed, so we will have to settle for pictures for some time to come. Where is Zephran Cochran when you need him?
I don't remember any policies of the current administration that restrict research using tadpole stem cells.
There is one important distinction between what you imply and the truth With respect to human stem cells research. There is not a restriction on embryonic stem cell research, just a policy not to fund using federal dollars. Since there is not a shortage of biotech research funds in this area, there is not much of an issue in reality.
Could not agree more in the large, however there a few big differences.
1) Most windows are of 9X variety, where there is no such thing as a root user, thus any exploit, thus any trojan code automatically can do anything it wants to the system. This is repeated on NT where you have to be admin to do lots of things, so many people grant admin to the desktop user (especially developers) -- This is compounded by the fact that NT servers often run as a privileged account. IIS does this so it can do a runas user -- also a prime example of stupid feature to integrate IIS with operating system.
2) Default installs on windows are notoriously over featured a.k.a. insecure
3) There is no chroot command. If you have to have a server running with special privilege, at least the chroot limits the target area for damage available to exploits
4) There are a lot more complexity on Windows. Windows is probably 100 times more complex than Unix in terms of shear numbers of API's, addons, etc. This almost guarantees there will be a signicantly larger number of security holes
5) Windows does not provide the tools that make it reasonably easy to secure it and keep it that way.
There is evidence against that I am familiar with against general relatively -- I read an interesting paper that used the common assertion that the precession of the orbit of Mercury was a slam dunk for general relatively, this paper argued with lots of mathmatics, that the orbit of Mercury was much better explained with Newtonian mechanics once you factored in that the sun was not spherical, but a lumpy oblate spheriod. It also happened that the irregularities in the orbits of other planets also can closer to observations on this basis as well. I found a link the refers to this here though it does not cover the theory
Re: Gravity, not much that I know of except for the possibility of gravity in more dimensions as you get small enough so that is no longer follows the inverse square law. This has been discussed several times on/. in recent articles on producing quantum black holes in particle accelerators. I have also seen some technical discussions of whether the gravitation constant changes over time (and the speed of light with it) or whether it is the same constant in all points of the universe.
Evolution. You must either be kidding, or be ignorant - or as I expect, you simply dismiss the validity of the counter arguments. There is a host of scientific evidence that is is opposition to Darwinism (and it comes from scientist and atheists). IMO Haldanes dilemma is one of the more powerful anti-Darwinist arguments and here is an anti-Darwinist site produced by an evolutionist that describes Haldanes dilemma as well as several other evidences against evolution. Yes, I am fully aware that creationists use some of the same arguments, but that does not invalidate the fact that there are scientific evidences against Darwinism. Read Haldanes dilemma, and tell how this is not a valid scientific argument against. BTW, I happen to follow the creationist, esp. given that Don Patton is a friend of mine. You'll have no trouble finding him if you dig into the creationist literature. IMO, some of it is good science (regardless of who developed it), and some of it is horrible junk science.
Plate tectonics, I know little about, but would be surprised if there was not contrary scientific evidence. Maybe someone else will point out the scientific weak links for us.
I point these out to refute the gerneral perception (not necessarily one you fall under) that science consists of a bunch a proven facts
Do such contrarian arguments mean we should discard the theory, not likely in the judgement of most scientists. But such contrarian arguments are often the beginning of discarding the theory (phlogiston) or refining it (Newton vs. Einstein)
Slashdot Mirror
Obvious answer, Microsoft.
Yes friends, Microsoft in a stunning religious epiphany realizes its opposition to GPL code has been misguided, and to set thing in order will fund a GPL infringement suit against AOL for violating the GPL.
During the press conference, notes that none of their code is GPL based, and their recent conversion to supporting the GPL will have no effect on their codebase.
I don't think it is particularly like slamming either. It is more like when you get a mortgage (or credit card).
I have had two houses and two mortgages. The first was sold twice, the second has been sold once (so far). And, I've had several credit cards accounts sold to other banks. And I have had banks accounts sold to other banks too.
I was not given any choice as to whether I wanted my accounts sold, but I have to option to refinance (potentially expensive, guaranteed inconvenient) or change credit cards holders if I am unhappy enough with the situation.
I do get legal protection (contract law) that the buyer of my mortgage can't jack up the interest rates of the mortgage. The credit card issuer can change the terms, but must notify you in advance. Of course, if you are carrying a large balance and have poor credit history, you may have trouble switching to a new card issuer.
There is some significant difference with DSL switching vs mortgages, etc.
1 - Options are more difficult for consumer to understand, distinguish, and verify.
2 - Existing service contracts underspecify just what kind of service you are being guaranteed. Also the service quality is much more subjective, i.e. not a commodity.
3 - Consumer is more likely to have a strong brand preference.
(Obviously 2 & 3 may be related)
Definitely agreed that Red Hat has more value then Mandrake (I should have noted this myself in the initial post), but is the value 1.4 billion USD more to AOL? AOL could staff another company of 500 employees (Red Hat) forever on the interest from 1.4 Billion dollars.
AOL has a infrastructure for resolving customer problems, etc. and in a consumer desktop, one would have to consider that the majority of support issue are going to be of the same variety that Microsoft gets supporting its desktop software -- a comparitively small portion of this is related to real problems, most technical people would describe is as RTFM type problems.
Neither Red Hat nor Mandrake has an infrastructure that is designed to handle the deluge of user support issues from first-time, non-technical users. Support from Red-Hat or Mandrake would probably be sufficient to support the 2nd or third tier that AOL would need to support their customer base.
BTW, in my original post, I did not say that Mandrake over Red Hat was a slam dunk, I simply said that it was worthy of due consideration. 1.4 billion dollars can buy a lot of upgrades to MandrakeSoft. I'm sure that if AOL is seriously contemplating Red Hat, they would also be considering the alternatives.
Believe me, once the AOL Linux (aka Mandrake) CDs go it, Mandrake just became a viable entity in the country in the minds of the general consumer.
Though I've used Red Hat, and SUSE, I've never bothered with Mandrake myself. But, what is it that makes it something other than a real distro?
Is it as valueable as Red Hat, no. Is it good enough for AOL, I say yes.
AOL Press Release. April 16, 2003
AOL announced today the FREE AOL Linux PC program.
If you sign up for AOL at the time of purchase, you get an instant rebate and the system is free at the time of purchase.
System includes 2GHz Intel P4, 256 MB RAM, 32 MB AGP Accelerated Video card, Speakers, CD-R, and 56K modem. You also get a free stuffed toy penguin.
These systems comes with everything the average consumer needs for home use. The easy to use AOL comes pre-installed with AOL Linux. It also includes word processing, spreadsheet, database, games, email, and everything you need to connect to the internet, and much more.
AOL Linux includes a double your money back guarantee if your are not satisfied.
Offer not valid in all areas. Some exclusions may apply. Lawyers are rabid weasels. Price is free after rebate, monitor not included - 3 year AOL service contract required. Price before rebate is $449.95 USD. Early termination of AOL service contract results in financial penalties and loss of Karma points. See store for details.
Mandrake (and others) would be considerably better than RedHat in one important category, purchase price.
According to this MandrakeSoft has a market capitalization of 15.8 million EUR
Whereas this shows that Redhat has a market cap of 1.43 Billion USD
Seems to me that that buying Mandrake for roughly one hundredth the cost of Red Hat is a fairly compelling argument for giving Mandrake due consideration over Red Hat.
AOL already has name recognition, and should not need to pay huge money for the name recognition in the consumer market, especially given that your typical AOL customer would likely be equally happy regardless of the choice here by AOL and would have little recognition of Red Hat or Mandrake.
BTW, In case any AOL accountants are not smart enough to figure this out by themselves, I would be glad to accept a modest $500K consulting fee for my insight.
You've got shell.
I'm sorry, but sarcasm is apparently a lost art, perhaps its my fault for not being over the top enough.
Johnathan Swift's modest proposal was that we should eat children because food was hard to come by. Given the literary reference, I had no thought that I had to explain sarcasm.
I henceforth swear never to be sarcastic without identifying it as such when posting.
The purpose of the modest proposal was point out the problem, and make an overstated, if not blatantly ridiculous proposal. In my case, some elements are reasonable, at least on the surface, and others may be truly reasonable). We are not going to start eating children, and we're not going to eliminate IP laws. But we needed to do something about the starving children, and we need to do something about IP laws.
--
I am serious about eliminating shrink wrap agreements, its not about consumer cluelessness, its about a balance of power for commercial interests vs. the consumer. Shrink wrap agreements are out of hand, the consumer needs a better recourse to recover damages from the manufacturer in the case of massive defects in the software. This does not mean that Microsoft or other intend to harm the consumer, but they might be more inclined to due diligence if they knew they could not disclaim every possible thing is the license agreement. IANAL, but I understand that there are legal precendents for limiting the power of the vendor in such cases.
I would like to see software patents disappear, and I would like to see software copyright (and other IP copyright for that matter) cutailed. 75 years is ridiculous.
Copyright law was intended to grant protection for the author for a time (to ensure some protection of new material) but guarantee its eventual free use (to benefit society as a whole)
Physicist Robert L Forward wrote a popular science style book, Indistinguishable From Magic
The first chapter is titled Antimatter, discussed what antimatter is, how we storeit, produce it, how we could produce it econmonically, how to use it more space travel and more mundance applictions.
He also write science fiction, I remember enjoying Rocheworld and Camelot 30K
1 -- require Microsoft (and other software companies) to make abandonware revert to free-use by anyone. Don't require company to necessarily make old versions available for download at now cost, just eliminate copyright protection for versions that are no longer supported.
2 -- Change copyright protection for software to a maximum of 5 years. Abandonware would simply accelerate the push into public domain.
3 -- Eliminate shrink wrap agreements, these are onerous burdens on uneducated consumers. Specify a standard commercial conduct code for shrink-wrap software.
4 -- Eliminate patents for software. Copyright protection is nearly automatic, favors the small developer compared to patents, and would eliminate a large cost of software development.
5 -- Encourage other governments to follow a similar set of reasonable rules.
My personal comments on these rules follow.
Microsoft might actually have to innovate to provide enough value to make consumers but software within the shortened copyright period.
Maybe Borland would revert to like a book license agreements -- in fact, that sounds like a good criteria to be included under point 3 above
Linux -- no damage here, if its all about freedom for the developer and consumer, Linux would be unaffected directly, although stiffer competition from a revitalized commercial sector may inspire more insanely great software here too.
Actually, this license has the same requirement -- From section 2.3
"nor may you use the Product to create a product or operate a service that is generally competitive with the Product or any other Borland product offerings"
I really doubt its a hoax. What I say below is true.
I called the number, someone answered.
I told him I was calling about the SmartVehicle, and he said "We are closed today". I said, "OK, I can call back Monday." He said "Thank you, goodbye"
According to this, the name listed for the phone number is:
Chen, Phon Keng
5330 Wickershire Dr NW
Hmm, broken English may not be that surprising.
I've got no problem with the license here.
When it came up of screen, I copied the license into my paint program, made a few changes, and agreed to that.
So far, I have not heard any complaints from Borland that they did not like my changes. So, I forgot to tell them. Big deal, they did not tell me about their license before I bought the product.
In truth, I've not purchased JBuilder (although I like Delphi). Sounds pretty awful. I would think there would have a great deal of trouble enforcing this.
However, a real threat that is just as bad is being ratted out by a disgruntled employee (or ex-employee), and being subject to a BSA audit. BTW, the disgruntled employee needs no factual basis for this to occur.
Best possible proof of the fact that you are correct follows:
:)
Ask an average person how much he pays in taxes at all level, very few would estimate more than 35%
In actual fact, the national average is over 35%, but you are hit by a large number of separate taxes, taken from each paycheck, sales taxes, sin-taxes, surchages & fees, property taxes, and death taxes (I may have missed some categories)
The M$ tax does not count (yet) as a real tax, you still have choice, at least if you are willing to work at it
Say you make $80K per year, and you paid no taxes, except for 35% on April 15. How much are you going to scream about writing that check for $28K on tax day? Yet, $28K would be a discount to what you currently pay.
Yeah, we all complain about our taxes (well, almost all, some people seem to want to pay more), but it would be 1776 again if we had to write a check for $28,000.00 It would be much more convenient, but people would feel the pain. Not even Bill I feel your pain Clinton would not be able to keep the proles in line.
This would be sticker shock to many consumers, and AOLTW would be much worse off by lumping all charges on one bill.
Personally I think $200+ is ridiculous for the services offered, and would never survive with real competition.
Forget claiming a machine is vital for scientific progress.
Today you say: I need XXX million dollars to fight terrorism. If you need scientific progress, this is just another aspect of anti-terrorism.
Aliens -- potential terrorists, especially if they wear a turban.
cracking rc5 keys -- thwarting the privacy of intercepted terrorist messages.
Linux -- Communist software is ok as long as not terrorist. If you worried about this being a red flag on you grant money, go ahead and get the bungled M$ O/S then overwrite it.
News for Nerds -- Moore's law continues for another day.
Ozone damage? Why should there be any ozone damage. The energy density in the laser downlink would not be powerful enough to notice. It cerainly would not be ionizing. At the wavelengths I would expect it to operate, the energy absorption by atmosphere within the ozone layer should be almost zero.
Where would you ever see 3500 degrees is the system (except where you specifically want it). So, if you are using 3500 degrees to break down water, so what?
You're convcerned about a measly 500 MW of added heat load? 500MW is a pretty typical coal-fired power plant. And to generate that 500 MW, you get an additional 300 MW of waste heat (this is assuming a quite modern, efficient coal fired plant BTW). Eventually, all 500 MW worth of electricity is converted to hear as well.
Now compare with space based laser, zapping us with 500 MW of beamed power, unless the conversion effieciency of beamed laser power to electricity you have no extra thermal load on the planet.
Of course, this does not give you the advantage of CO2, CO, O3, NOx, Hg, H2SO4 and many other interesting chemical discharges in the air, water, and land.
Ok, CO2 may actually be beneficial, but the others most certainly are not in terms of increasing concentrations in the environment.
BTW, the darling of most environmentalists is earth based solar (significant land and materials use issues, significant environment impacts), solar (don't ignore the bird kills), geothermal (actuall pretty friendly environmental, when you can get to it easily), tidal (who knows what damage you may be doing to the little fishies, big problems in energy density.
And of course fusion -- which just happens to have considerably more waste heat than a coal-fired plant. It still a steam-turbine design, but has additional heat loss in the form of gamma rays, etc. that will not be converted into electricity, and has potential harmful emissions (remember to gamma rays), radioactive materials, and will still cost lots of money.
I know just about everybody likes high-tech goodies, hot water, heating, air-conditioning, fresh food, health-care, etc.
Self-interest guarantees that most people will get their goodies, regardless of what the greens want. So the question is which methods work best (environmentally and econmically) not which is perfect.
Any space-based beamed power solution is among the lowest impact environmentally (mostly waste heat, which is not a significant problem compared to the other environmental costs)
To my knowledge, the only technology that has a potential to radically change the equations above, is ground-based solar cell based on nano-technology. You may be able to become non-invasive environmental, eliminate the materials cost issue, and have it be dirt cheap, though never too cheap to meter, assuming someone else is collecting the energy for you. BTW, although no waste heat this does not necessarily means no heat impact on environment -- if less heat is reflected back into space, then there is that many more BTU's captured from the sun.
You may have to hold out a little longer.
...
I just checked ebay for current 9-track drive listings.
There where 2, both were relatively recent (6250 bpi, scsi intereface, etc.)
The nicer looking one had a buy-it-now price of $400, the other had a single bid of $100.
There were no hits for PDP-8 however.
You should trade it in for a collection of Pez dispenser if you want a better collector item.
I want a VAX in my basement personally.
I was offered an IBM-360 at one for free -- then the salesman mentioned something about a service contract
This poll is already rigged^h^h^h^h^h^h biased already, only 17.5 percent don't intead to use Linux at either home or office.
We all know Linux usage is a most a few percentage points, so even if it quadruples this year, it still does not come close to 82.5% usage rates.
Perfect example of how useless such onlines polls are if you ask me.
Revelations 13:16-17
(Bible search programs/sites are handy)
The Anti-Christ is simply someone against Christ. The Bible says that there were already many Anti-Christs. (I John 2:18)
Borg is a much better analogy. Assimulation, Resistance is futile. High tech drones. What more could you ask in an analogy?
Ballot-box stuffing is a mindless drone activity, not a hateful evil.
I vote Borg.
Geez, I knew that. Probably shouldn't post at 3:30 in the AM
Not sure why I qualify as Pooky, but the correction is noted.
Previous story was on the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence then we get the article on Bernie the spamming moron. These articles must be related.
You just can't make up stories like this -- you have to be a bonified idiot to come up with this stuff.
Does anybody have a truly good idiot stories site? One site that I've liked is here but I hope there is a really good one somewhere that needs to be slashdotted.
Actually, netware was a dos program. Have you ever heard of Netware 86 (4.61B was the most popular version of this IIRC).
You're server ran in non-dedicated mode, sharing your valuable 10 or 20 meg hard drive, but you could still run DOS apps on the same machine at the same time. Netware ran in 256K, so on a real beefy 512K machine, you had 256K left for MSDOS and your apps.
I remember installing many a Netware 86 network -- seems to me that g/net has the most popular technology at the time (for our customers) don't remember details -- Timeframe was mid 80's
Installing and configuring required significant technical knowledge. You actually linked your own drivers (the netware shell)
Original netware was for Motorola 68K systems, and Novell sold the hardware. Eventually, Netware gave up on selling 68K hardware, as they could not compete with commodity PC's.
IMO what made netware the best back then was small drivers. When dos was king, and a 256 XT was a hot machine, a driver than ran in 40K did file and printer sharing was way more important the the NetBios features from IBM/Microsoft that sucked down 80K of RAM.
Perhaps instead of thumping his Bible, he should have tried reading it before expressing his opinion. The book is silent on other planets and of course life on other planets, much less intelligent life on other planets.
Perhaps once could infer that there is no intelligent life on other planets based on theological complications with Jesus having to die for their sins too, but even that is speculation beyond what the book says.
The Bible has very little to say about scientific matters, despite what many theologians and Bible thumpers have decided up over the years. You would think people would have learned that making up stuff, claiming it was based on the Bible, and then getting trashed by the facts would have become unpopular since Galileo. BTW, the theoligians that disagreed with Galileo were following Aristotlean arguments not the Bible. Once again, the bible never says the earth was the center of the universe, etc. The Bible mentions the sun rising, etc. and people have inferred that the earth is at the center becuase of such language -- however, this is merely descriptive of the apparent sunrise, I can even read the sunrise & sunset times in the morning paper, and I am pretty sure that publisher know that earth orbits the sun, and the sun-rise is simply appearance, not a literal sun-rise.
Back to topic
Let's face it, the ability to directly image anything outside the solar system is pretty amazing. It was not very long ago that Betelgeuse was imaged as the first star (as a disk, not a point source).
There are some very interesting large-baseline telescopes that have been proposed that would theoretically allow imaging details of planets in other solar systems, alas they budget for such projects may be some time in coming.
It's still a long way to the nearest star. With current tech, would be be very lucky to get a large ship moving at 1 percent light speed, so we will have to settle for pictures for some time to come. Where is Zephran Cochran when you need him?
I don't remember any policies of the current administration that restrict research using tadpole stem cells.
There is one important distinction between what you imply and the truth With respect to human stem cells research. There is not a restriction on embryonic stem cell research, just a policy not to fund using federal dollars. Since there is not a shortage of biotech research funds in this area, there is not much of an issue in reality.
Could not agree more in the large, however there a few big differences.
1) Most windows are of 9X variety, where there is no such thing as a root user, thus any exploit, thus any trojan code automatically can do anything it wants to the system. This is repeated on NT where you have to be admin to do lots of things, so many people grant admin to the desktop user (especially developers) -- This is compounded by the fact that NT servers often run as a privileged account. IIS does this so it can do a runas user -- also a prime example of stupid feature to integrate IIS with operating system.
2) Default installs on windows are notoriously over featured a.k.a. insecure
3) There is no chroot command. If you have to have a server running with special privilege, at least the chroot limits the target area for damage available to exploits
4) There are a lot more complexity on Windows. Windows is probably 100 times more complex than Unix in terms of shear numbers of API's, addons, etc. This almost guarantees there will be a signicantly larger number of security holes
5) Windows does not provide the tools that make it reasonably easy to secure it and keep it that way.
There is evidence against that I am familiar with against general relatively -- I read an interesting paper that used the common assertion that the precession of the orbit of Mercury was a slam dunk for general relatively, this paper argued with lots of mathmatics, that the orbit of Mercury was much better explained with Newtonian mechanics once you factored in that the sun was not spherical, but a lumpy oblate spheriod. It also happened that the irregularities in the orbits of other planets also can closer to observations on this basis as well. I found a link the refers to this here though it does not cover the theory
Re: Gravity, not much that I know of except for the possibility of gravity in more dimensions as you get small enough so that is no longer follows the inverse square law. This has been discussed several times on /. in recent articles on producing quantum black holes in particle accelerators. I have also seen some technical discussions of whether the gravitation constant changes over time (and the speed of light with it) or whether it is the same constant in all points of the universe.
Evolution. You must either be kidding, or be ignorant - or as I expect, you simply dismiss the validity of the counter arguments. There is a host of scientific evidence that is is opposition to Darwinism (and it comes from scientist and atheists). IMO Haldanes dilemma is one of the more powerful anti-Darwinist arguments and here is an anti-Darwinist site produced by an evolutionist that describes Haldanes dilemma as well as several other evidences against evolution. Yes, I am fully aware that creationists use some of the same arguments, but that does not invalidate the fact that there are scientific evidences against Darwinism. Read Haldanes dilemma, and tell how this is not a valid scientific argument against. BTW, I happen to follow the creationist, esp. given that Don Patton is a friend of mine. You'll have no trouble finding him if you dig into the creationist literature. IMO, some of it is good science (regardless of who developed it), and some of it is horrible junk science.
Plate tectonics, I know little about, but would be surprised if there was not contrary scientific evidence. Maybe someone else will point out the scientific weak links for us.
I point these out to refute the gerneral perception (not necessarily one you fall under) that science consists of a bunch a proven facts
Do such contrarian arguments mean we should discard the theory, not likely in the judgement of most scientists. But such contrarian arguments are often the beginning of discarding the theory (phlogiston) or refining it (Newton vs. Einstein)
So, should I assume CNN is reporting on anthrax and Tom Brokaw so you will switch to the bacterial-free CNN news?