It connected those who, typically, both took and gave in a moderately fair exchange, a sort of moral contract. Not just a platform where information flowed freely, but one which nurtured new, better, easier ways for two-way communication to proceed. Then things changed. It began to suck. Literally.
New, consumer-oriented clients were invented, and offered without the servers required to complete the contract. Fewer and fewer of the users provided information; it was not long until effectively one-way IP connections were being sold, so-called "Internet access" difficult to use for the original purpose - even forbidding serving data outwards! An artificial division between "consumers" and "providers" of was created, and promoted as the natural order of things. By no coincidence, the Internet started filling up with crap.
Yes, "crap". Data unwanted by anyone (of whatever taste). Crap overwhelming and hiding real information, expressions of knowledge and belief. Advertisements. Pay sites for data and services free elsewhere. Payola search engines where apparently informative websites, actually an advertisements for a book or expensive services, are placed far ahead of where the same can be read for free.
Gnutella, in the original concept, actually offered a way back to making the Internet free again. Not so this one-way client. It offers no future.
An RFC for the future? A user-level client/server/distributed search-review engine - with optional pure servers, yes, where it can speed and smooth things. Protocols which can connect those who have sought and found some of what they are looking for with other seekers of the similar and exchange what they've found, and metadata of how good and where else it is.
Without invading privacy beyond "Unknown persons, seeking what you're looking for. found this very useful. Judging by their having saved it/paged through the whole thing/browsed the links in it. They thought this other stuff was crap by discarding it with prejudice; and, collectively, explicitly reviewed it this way or that; people who consistently disagree with you in their choices thought the opposite."
But the protocols would have to assure that in payment. you give to the collective wisdom what you take. At least in the matter of the reviewing.
By my reading of this, 6 months in prison for anyone who, for example, creates a web-enabled chat server, or allows the posting of comments from web page viewers, et cetra (without subjecting posters to the ID requirements, probably impossible to do via http).
Almost certainly forbids mailing list and Usenet gateways, too.
The value and purpose of the patent system is to promote innovation - attempts to patent the prior art and the obvious, or create a monopoly for supplying spare parts by patenting a particular combination of prior art and the obvious, are nothing more than abuses of the patent system's weaknesses.
Looking at these "improvements":
>Full width of the data bus, 128 data bits + 16 ECC bits (as opposed to 32/36 or 64/72 bits). 32/36 and 64/72 just match the "full width" of other data busses. Is Sun Microsystems trying to patent the idea of speeding memory access by widening data buses?
>Symmetrical placing of power and ground, such that inserting it backwards won't burn it up. Decades-old idea for circuit board connectors, like protecting circuits with notches in the board to act as keys, or diodes in-line with the power connections. Not just prior art, standard practice.
>Reducing signal skew by putting control logic in the middle of the SIMM board. Again, decades-old standard practice.
>RAM chips in four clusters, two on one side of double-sided board, two on the other. Given double sided boards, just amounts to "place the memory chips with the clock in the middle", again.
>9 RAM chips per cluster, in 3x3 square. Divide the number of chips needed by the 4 clusters of a clock-centered double sided board. you get 9 per cluster. 9 chips equals 3 chips squared, literally. Whoopee.
The traditional solution being to eat large amounts of salty bar snacks (peanuts, pretzels, etc) along with the beer. The salt helps retain water, and to a lesser extent, your body creates H2O as a byproduct of metabolism.:-)
-- "It must be all that beer we spilled!" - The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
If you work in the USA, I suggest you inform your HR guy that you are a salaried worker and not an hourly one, and that therefore he can't dock your pay in that way. The alternative is that he is reclassing you as an hourly worker, and owed time-and-half overtime not just for this week (and Friday off notwithstanding) but back OT as well for rather a long period into the past.
Believe it or not, there are rules companies have to follow about paying people.
I just finished a 3 month stint as a contractor for an ISP I won't name, which actually was doing business mainly colocating servers and as a bandwidth provider selling T1 to ISPs serving individual users. It had been an independent ISP until having recently been bought by another unnamed company, whigh might be described as a "Verio wannabe", or more accurately an "IPO wannabe". While there I experienced:
- The Offbeat DoS Attack from Outside -
One of our customers, a rather famous provider of Open Source software yet, was having its bandwidth flooded by, of all things, ICMP Destination Unreachable messages. Someone evidently was making a hobby of sending packets (probably any type would have done it) with the victim's IP address spoofed as a source, to nonexistent hosts logically downstream of university routers - which naturally returned the ICMP responses. The strange thing about this attack was that it was so stupid. Since it didn't involve amplification like smurfing, someone was probably using as much or more of their own bandwidth to cause it as it was consuming of their target's. After it was analyzed it was filtered and filed under "pain in the butt".
- The Surreal Politics of an Attack from Inside -
One day, a trickle of reports to "abuse@unnamed.net" began and quickly became a flood, of invective if not of volume. Nastygrams instantly threatening legal action, originating from people who had installed software to detect port scanning (and who for some reason had the temperment of pit bulldogs), and who indeed had detected a scan - in one case even two! - against ports WinNT remote-control Trojan "viruses" listened on, from an IP belonging to an ISP we supplied with bandwidth (a largish customer from the local office's standpoint). Shortly I was in the middle of:
1. Our backbone provider who began getting threats of legal action unless they immediately cut us off, and who wanted to know what we were doing about it now
2. The owner of the ISP the attacks were coming from, who: ignored email and phone messages from us; later responded with something along the lines of "You think you've got problems, I don't want to hear about it - look at my abuse email!" along with a pile of reports from days past about his hacker customer - and that our TOS with him required him to have immediately forwarded to us when he got them; said he couldn't filter or scan for the origin of the attacks because of his off-brand el-cheapo router which didn't have the option; though he knew the exact, single IP address the attack was coming from, refused to cut it off or let us filter it because it was the wireless link he was supplying many of his customers from, apparently using NAT; and in any case disclaimed any technical ability to trace the customer involved.
3. The local office's manager, who had approximately zero authority to make decisions and stock options to worry about. He kicked the decision to enforce our TOS up to:
4. The people trying to create the multistate mega-ISP, who seemed to be totally clueless about the legacy contract with the downstream ISP, what could or should be done about the problem, and what their own TOS was.
The eventual outcome was, whole days after the screaming started, was that who was apparently the only security expert among the mass of mostly former telecom employees in "NeoVerio" determined that indeed it is illegal to try to take over other people's NT systems, and gave us permission to filter that one IP address. Just a few hours after the IP address's owner had found who the hacker was and cut off their account.
The Attack that Never Was
Just before I quit... the whole network seemed to go haywire. About every fifteen minutes, *nothing* could connect to anything else on a different router or switch interface for a couple of minutes. Period. This started, or appeared to start, just after we move our backbone connection to a new and sophisticated Cisco router while leaving most of our connections on the old one, now a secondary router. After several days, and after every network expert available had scratched their head and agreed we had somehow screwed up the BGP in such a subtle way it could not be debugged or fixed, the backbone provider (What the hell - Winstar) told us of the failing OC-3 router card between us and the Internet. What had actually happened was our stuff detecting the failure and frantically thrashing about looking for another route to The World.
Moral: Don't work for an ISP that hasn't figured out how to be an ISP yet.
No, but the laws do not state that the individual cannot make exact copies for archival purposes. Therefore, it is irrelevant whether the copies are exact or not. Fortunately, it is rather basic to US law that what is not forbidden is allowed (a fact that evidently distresses the MPAA).
Imagine if the opposite were true - since the same rules apply to making archival copies of computer software in case the original media is damaged, those archival copies would be useless if even slight losses of information occurred in the backup process, probably resulting in completely inoperable software.
Offtopic, yeah... but The Phantom Menace was greatly outclassed as a failure by the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, "A Very Wookie Christmas", in which the original Star Wars cast visited Chewbacca's family on his home planet.
Show Description: http://www.teleport-city.com/movies/reviews/bizarr o/starwars.html
Transcript: http://www.lucasfan.com/swtv/swhs.txt
Video clips: http://pages.infinit.net/bonesnet/Holiday_videos.h tm
For the truly masochistic, ordering info: http://www.revok.com/
"Tolerates or fails to prevent bullying of, mob actions towards, and/or ostracism of individual students not conforming to the general societal mores of the mass of the student body..."
Amateur Radio is authorized to radiate in the bands assigned to it.
ADSL, cable, et cetra are not authorized to radiate at all in those bands, the AM ones, or any other frequency; if it does, it is violating FCC regs. Simple as that.
Micros~1 might want to get rid of it, but I suspect Parker Brothers (Now Hasbro, I think) will simply pretend it doesn't exist, after the way they got burned on the "Anti-Monopoly" fiasco - you can check that out at http://www.antimonopoly.com if you want the full story.
Hmm, need a new server - should I use Linus or Gates? Go with the super-duper Red Hat 6.1 - It's supposed to have everything!
Hmm, wait a minute - need rather better than the max 20Mb/sec that the two 7200 RPM IDE disks (new ones) give (of course! Any of the newer ones can pass data under their disks at near that speed). Hey, that's okay! I'll just use the Linux software RAID, that's supposed to be really really fast!
Hmm, waitaminnit. The mainboard used the HPT366 UDMA/66 controller. Well, that's been out quite a while, shouldn't be a prob...
Yup, just add "ide2=0,, ide3=0,," and it recognizes them. Install Red Hat 6.1, drat, it doesn't recognize the Future Domain 16C30 SCSI controller I was going to use to hold/usr like 6.0 did, heck, I'll just waste part of my fast disks for it... configure/etc/raidtab... mkraid... okay! hdparm -ft/dev/md0... 3.88 mb/s. Eww... gag...
Ah, DMA must not be enabled... hdparm -d1/dev/hde... damn, doesn't work... Need better HPT366 support. Just search the web... Ah, here 's the link to the patch at http://ntucsu.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~b6506063/hpt366. Superb... I'll be up in no time...
Ah, the patch is against 2.2.13. That's okay, I'll just recompile the kernel. Download 2.2.13... patch... make {mrproper, menuconfig, dep, bzImage}... edit/etc/lilo.conf, copy System.map, etc... reboot... damn, doesn't recognize the md RAID disk anymore! Ah, Red Hat must have installed the latest md patches to make it work... at least now I get 20.33mb/s with hdparm -ft/dev/hde... I'll just get the md patch for 2.0.13 from http://ftp.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/daemons/raid and... urk, last update was for 2.2.11. Uhh... S'ok, the linux-raid mail list archives say it works fine, just ignore the errors patching the PPC and Sparc archetecture parts. repatch... Now we're in business! It sees the MD disk! hdparm -ft/dev/md0...
drive hde lost interrupt drive hdg lost interrupt drive hdg lost interrupt drive hde lost interrupt . . . [until system hangs, ignoring Alt-SysReq]
Ah, the hell with it... Just install NT 4.0 server with striping and the manufacturer's official drivers...
Chinese paper is reputedly a real pain in the rear for printer manufacturers trying to sell products that must handle it. Given the problems with embedded objects, uneven thickness, and the fiber grain running side-to-side instead of lengthwise (accompanied by side-to-side paper curling), adopting modern paper-making methods might actually be necessary for the tech advances they are trying for there.
The white comes from the process of bleaching, oxidizing the colored compounds. In the past typically using "chlorine" bleach and producing such poisons as dioxins.
At least in the production of newer "Environmentally friendly" papers this has been replaced by other methods like exposing the pulp to ozone (O3).
I don't know what the relative needs are for the two fibers being compared, but I believe the brown comes from lignins in wood pulp, which shouldn't be present in high quantities in herbaceous plants.
Eric, over the last decade usage of the Internet has grown immensely, become overwhelmingly World Wide Web oriented, and been stratified from a way of exchanging information between sites both supplying and using data to a structure divided between "suppliers" such as portal sites and "users" often actually forbidden to operate server software on their connections, and expected to use little other than their web browsers to guess, point, click, wait, and repeat in a linear search for information.
Is it your belief that these trends will continue, or do you feel that there is still room for entirely new methods of gathering and presenting Internetted data to users to appear and compete in the marketplace, or for the users to return to supplying a greater share of the data retrieved by other users?
I find it most irritating when the warnings are not only idiotic, but downright fraud, intended to be ignored, and actually needing to be ignored if the product is to be used for the purpose intended. Examples:
My small stepladder with 3 steps, including the top platform as a step. On the second step it has a label: "Do not stand on or above this step".
The handheld Cellular phone with a warning not to hold it near your head in use to avoid exposure to RF radiation from the attached antenna. And without enough volume for it to be heard any other way.
The automatic coffee maker I bought my brother as a christmas gift. It had an attached clock designed to brew coffee at a selected time so coffee would be waiting when the owner woke up. When my brother opened it he found a stern warning not to leave it plugged in except when actually brewing the coffee.
Actually, I was not think only of Jamestown. The Plymouth ("Mayflower") colony didn't do so well, either, until they decided to divide their communal land (and later their "cattle").
In any case, "Gentlemen unaccustomed to working with their hands" or not, the attempt to substitute group responsibility (read: no responsibility) for the production of essential resources for individual responsibility was the real problem.
I read the post, while it had a score of 1, considered spplying one of my few points to it as "funny", decided to reply instead (giving up moderator access to the whole article/comment collection), and returned to it to find a score of 4. All in a matter of a couple minutes.
Probably none of the 3 who did moderate it up in that time knew they would be raising it above 2 either.
Slashdot Mirror
It connected those who, typically, both took and gave in a moderately fair exchange, a sort of moral contract. Not just a platform where information flowed freely, but one which nurtured new, better, easier ways for two-way communication to proceed. Then things changed. It began to suck. Literally.
New, consumer-oriented clients were invented, and offered without the servers required to complete the contract. Fewer and fewer of the users provided information; it was not long until effectively one-way IP connections were being sold, so-called "Internet access" difficult to use for the original purpose - even forbidding serving data outwards! An artificial division between "consumers" and "providers" of was created, and promoted as the natural order of things. By no coincidence, the Internet started filling up with crap.
Yes, "crap". Data unwanted by anyone (of whatever taste). Crap overwhelming and hiding real information, expressions of knowledge and belief. Advertisements. Pay sites for data and services free elsewhere. Payola search engines where apparently informative websites, actually an advertisements for a book or expensive services, are placed far ahead of where the same can be read for free.
Gnutella, in the original concept, actually offered a way back to making the Internet free again. Not so this one-way client. It offers no future.
An RFC for the future? A user-level client/server/distributed search-review engine - with optional pure servers, yes, where it can speed and smooth things. Protocols which can connect those who have sought and found some of what they are looking for with other seekers of the similar and exchange what they've found, and metadata of how good and where else it is.
Without invading privacy beyond "Unknown persons, seeking what you're looking for. found this very useful. Judging by their having saved it/paged through the whole thing/browsed the links in it. They thought this other stuff was crap by discarding it with prejudice; and, collectively, explicitly reviewed it this way or that; people who consistently disagree with you in their choices thought the opposite."
But the protocols would have to assure that in payment. you give to the collective wisdom what you take. At least in the matter of the reviewing.
And totally pointless.
> ... I think the military will be heavily involved if these suckers get built! hehehe
It'll be a surprise, like the machine-gun equipped dune buggies used in Desert Storm.
By my reading of this, 6 months in prison for anyone who, for example, creates a web-enabled chat server, or allows the posting of comments from web page viewers, et cetra (without subjecting posters to the ID requirements, probably impossible to do via http).
Almost certainly forbids mailing list and Usenet gateways, too.
The value and purpose of the patent system is to promote innovation - attempts to patent the prior art and the obvious, or create a monopoly for supplying spare parts by patenting a particular combination of prior art and the obvious, are nothing more than abuses of the patent system's weaknesses.
Looking at these "improvements":
>Full width of the data bus, 128 data bits + 16 ECC bits (as opposed to 32/36 or 64/72 bits).
32/36 and 64/72 just match the "full width" of other data busses. Is Sun Microsystems trying to patent the idea of speeding memory access by widening data buses?
>Symmetrical placing of power and ground, such that inserting it backwards won't burn it up.
Decades-old idea for circuit board connectors, like protecting circuits with notches in the board to act as keys, or diodes in-line with the power connections. Not just prior art, standard practice.
>Reducing signal skew by putting control logic in the middle of the SIMM board.
Again, decades-old standard practice.
>RAM chips in four clusters, two on one side of double-sided board, two on the other.
Given double sided boards, just amounts to "place the memory chips with the clock in the middle", again.
>9 RAM chips per cluster, in 3x3 square.
Divide the number of chips needed by the 4 clusters of a clock-centered double sided board. you get 9 per cluster. 9 chips equals 3 chips squared, literally. Whoopee.
I don't see anything particularly ingenious here.
Isn't that the traditional hangover cure?
A bit of the hair of the drunk that hit you?
-- "It must be all that beer we spilled!" - The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
Yep, beer dehydrates you.
:-)
The traditional solution being to eat large amounts of salty bar snacks (peanuts, pretzels, etc) along with the beer. The salt helps retain water, and to a lesser extent, your body creates H2O as a byproduct of metabolism.
-- "It must be all that beer we spilled!" - The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
"Stout" is technically the intersection of the sets "beer" and "porridge".
And IMO the epitome of both.
If you work in the USA, I suggest you inform your HR guy that you are a salaried worker and not an hourly one, and that therefore he can't dock your pay in that way. The alternative is that he is reclassing you as an hourly worker, and owed time-and-half overtime not just for this week (and Friday off notwithstanding) but back OT as well for rather a long period into the past.
Believe it or not, there are rules companies have to follow about paying people.
I just finished a 3 month stint as a contractor for an ISP I won't name, which actually was doing business mainly colocating servers and as a bandwidth provider selling T1 to ISPs serving individual users. It had been an independent ISP until having recently been bought by another unnamed company, whigh might be described as a "Verio wannabe", or more accurately an "IPO wannabe". While there I experienced:
- The Offbeat DoS Attack from Outside -
One of our customers, a rather famous provider of Open Source software yet, was having its bandwidth flooded by, of all things, ICMP Destination Unreachable messages. Someone evidently was making a hobby of sending packets (probably any type would have done it) with the victim's IP address spoofed as a source, to nonexistent hosts logically downstream of university routers - which naturally returned the ICMP responses. The strange thing about this attack was that it was so stupid. Since it didn't involve amplification like smurfing, someone was probably using as much or more of their own bandwidth to cause it as it was consuming of their target's. After it was analyzed it was filtered and filed under "pain in the butt".
- The Surreal Politics of an Attack from Inside -
One day, a trickle of reports to "abuse@unnamed.net" began and quickly became a flood, of invective if not of volume. Nastygrams instantly threatening legal action, originating from people who had installed software to detect port scanning (and who for some reason had the temperment of pit bulldogs), and who indeed had detected a scan - in one case even two! - against ports WinNT remote-control Trojan "viruses" listened on, from an IP belonging to an ISP we supplied with bandwidth (a largish customer from the local office's standpoint). Shortly I was in the middle of:
1. Our backbone provider who began getting threats of legal action unless they immediately cut us off, and who wanted to know what we were doing about it now
2. The owner of the ISP the attacks were coming from, who: ignored email and phone messages from us; later responded with something along the lines of "You think you've got problems, I don't want to hear about it - look at my abuse email!" along with a pile of reports from days past about his hacker customer - and that our TOS with him required him to have immediately forwarded to us when he got them; said he couldn't filter or scan for the origin of the attacks because of his off-brand el-cheapo router which didn't have the option; though he knew the exact, single IP address the attack was coming from, refused to cut it off or let us filter it because it was the wireless link he was supplying many of his customers from, apparently using NAT; and in any case disclaimed any technical ability to trace the customer involved.
3. The local office's manager, who had approximately zero authority to make decisions and stock options to worry about. He kicked the decision to enforce our TOS up to:
4. The people trying to create the multistate mega-ISP, who seemed to be totally clueless about the legacy contract with the downstream ISP, what could or should be done about the problem, and what their own TOS was.
The eventual outcome was, whole days after the screaming started, was that who was apparently the only security expert among the mass of mostly former telecom employees in "NeoVerio" determined that indeed it is illegal to try to take over other people's NT systems, and gave us permission to filter that one IP address. Just a few hours after the IP address's owner had found who the hacker was and cut off their account.
The Attack that Never Was
Just before I quit... the whole network seemed to go haywire. About every fifteen minutes, *nothing* could connect to anything else on a different router or switch interface for a couple of minutes. Period. This started, or appeared to start, just after we move our backbone connection to a new and sophisticated Cisco router while leaving most of our connections on the old one, now a secondary router. After several days, and after every network expert available had scratched their head and agreed we had somehow screwed up the BGP in such a subtle way it could not be debugged or fixed, the backbone provider (What the hell - Winstar) told us of the failing OC-3 router card between us and the Internet. What had actually happened was our stuff detecting the failure and frantically thrashing about looking for another route to The World.
Moral: Don't work for an ISP that hasn't figured out how to be an ISP yet.
No, but the laws do not state that the individual cannot make exact copies for archival purposes. Therefore, it is irrelevant whether the copies are exact or not. Fortunately, it is rather basic to US law that what is not forbidden is allowed (a fact that evidently distresses the MPAA).
Imagine if the opposite were true - since the same rules apply to making archival copies of computer software in case the original media is damaged, those archival copies would be useless if even slight losses of information occurred in the backup process, probably resulting in completely inoperable software.
Offtopic, yeah... but The Phantom Menace was greatly outclassed as a failure by the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, "A Very Wookie Christmas", in which the original Star Wars cast visited Chewbacca's family on his home planet.
r o/starwars.html
h tm
Show Description: http://www.teleport-city.com/movies/reviews/bizar
Transcript: http://www.lucasfan.com/swtv/swhs.txt
Video clips: http://pages.infinit.net/bonesnet/Holiday_videos.
For the truly masochistic, ordering info: http://www.revok.com/
"Tolerates or fails to prevent bullying of, mob actions towards, and/or ostracism of individual students not conforming to the general societal mores of the mass of the student body..."
Amateur Radio is authorized to radiate in the bands assigned to it.
ADSL, cable, et cetra are not authorized to radiate at all in those bands, the AM ones, or any other frequency; if it does, it is violating FCC regs. Simple as that.
Micros~1 might want to get rid of it, but I suspect Parker Brothers (Now Hasbro, I think) will simply pretend it doesn't exist, after the way they got burned on the "Anti-Monopoly" fiasco - you can check that out at http://www.antimonopoly.com if you want the full story.
Hmm, need a new server - should I use Linus or Gates? Go with the super-duper Red Hat 6.1 - It's supposed to have everything!
/usr like 6.0 did, heck, I'll just waste part of my fast disks for it... configure /etc/raidtab... mkraid... okay! hdparm -ft /dev/md0... 3.88 mb/s. Eww... gag...
/dev/hde... damn, doesn't work... Need better HPT366 support. Just search the web... Ah, here 's the link to the patch at http://ntucsu.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~b6506063/hpt366. Superb... I'll be up in no time...
/etc/lilo.conf, copy System.map, etc... reboot... damn, doesn't recognize the md RAID disk anymore! Ah, Red Hat must have installed the latest md patches to make it work... at least now I get 20.33mb/s with hdparm -ft /dev/hde... I'll just get the md patch for 2.0.13 from http://ftp.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/daemons/raid and... urk, last update was for 2.2.11. Uhh... S'ok, the linux-raid mail list archives say it works fine, just ignore the errors patching the PPC and Sparc archetecture parts. repatch... Now we're in business! It sees the MD disk! hdparm -ft /dev/md0...
Hmm, wait a minute - need rather better than the max 20Mb/sec that the two 7200 RPM IDE disks (new ones) give (of course! Any of the newer ones can pass data under their disks at near that speed). Hey, that's okay! I'll just use the Linux software RAID, that's supposed to be really really fast!
Hmm, waitaminnit. The mainboard used the HPT366 UDMA/66 controller. Well, that's been out quite a while, shouldn't be a prob...
Yup, just add "ide2=0,, ide3=0,," and it recognizes them. Install Red Hat 6.1, drat, it doesn't recognize the Future Domain 16C30 SCSI controller I was going to use to hold
Ah, DMA must not be enabled... hdparm -d1
Ah, the patch is against 2.2.13. That's okay, I'll just recompile the kernel. Download 2.2.13... patch... make {mrproper, menuconfig, dep, bzImage}... edit
drive hde lost interrupt
drive hdg lost interrupt
drive hdg lost interrupt
drive hde lost interrupt
.
.
.
[until system hangs, ignoring Alt-SysReq]
Ah, the hell with it... Just install NT 4.0
server with striping and the manufacturer's official drivers...
The problem with this is that most people are for-profit, with a few exceptions such as clergy.
What can one say about a Linux distribution whose home page is on Yahoo?
Does anything even need to be said?
Chinese paper is reputedly a real pain in the rear for printer manufacturers trying to sell products that must handle it. Given the problems with embedded objects, uneven thickness, and the fiber grain running side-to-side instead of lengthwise (accompanied by side-to-side paper curling), adopting modern paper-making methods might actually be necessary for the tech advances they are trying for there.
The white comes from the process of bleaching, oxidizing the colored compounds. In the past typically using "chlorine" bleach and producing such poisons as dioxins.
At least in the production of newer "Environmentally friendly" papers this has been replaced by other methods like exposing the pulp to ozone (O3).
I don't know what the relative needs are for the two fibers being compared, but I believe the brown comes from lignins in wood pulp, which shouldn't be present in high quantities in herbaceous plants.
Eric, over the last decade usage of the Internet has grown immensely, become overwhelmingly World Wide Web oriented, and been stratified from a way of exchanging information between sites both supplying and using data to a structure divided between "suppliers" such as portal sites and "users" often actually forbidden to operate server software on their connections, and expected to use little other than their web browsers to guess, point, click, wait, and repeat in a linear search for information.
Is it your belief that these trends will continue, or do you feel that there is still room for entirely new methods of gathering and presenting Internetted data to users to appear and compete in the marketplace, or for the users to return to supplying a greater share of the data retrieved by other users?
I find it most irritating when the warnings are not only idiotic, but downright fraud, intended to be ignored, and actually needing to be ignored if the product is to be used for the purpose intended. Examples:
My small stepladder with 3 steps, including the top platform as a step. On the second step it has a label: "Do not stand on or above this step".
The handheld Cellular phone with a warning not to hold it near your head in use to avoid exposure to RF radiation from the attached antenna. And without enough volume for it to be heard any other way.
The automatic coffee maker I bought my brother as a christmas gift. It had an attached clock designed to brew coffee at a selected time so coffee would be waiting when the owner woke up. When my brother opened it he found a stern warning not to leave it plugged in except when actually brewing the coffee.
So you're saying that if Nintendo included, say, a flavored toothpick in each pack they would be off the hook?
Actually, I was not think only of Jamestown. The Plymouth ("Mayflower") colony didn't do so well, either, until they decided to divide their communal land (and later their "cattle").
In any case, "Gentlemen unaccustomed to working with their hands" or not, the attempt to substitute group responsibility (read: no responsibility) for the production of essential resources for individual responsibility was the real problem.
I read the post, while it had a score of 1, considered spplying one of my few points to it as "funny", decided to reply instead (giving up moderator access to the whole article/comment collection), and returned to it to find a score of 4. All in a matter of a couple minutes.
Probably none of the 3 who did moderate it up in that time knew they would be raising it above 2 either.