But what about how EULAs can change, retroactively? As I understand it, Virginia has passed such a law, allowing this. So the EULAs in reality have no meaning, or rather are rendered meaningless because the law has no meaning.
Gag, I read this and it sounds like babble, but I can't find a better way to say it.
Virginia and some other states specifically allow the EULAs to float, which puts us in a specifically feudal situation. But Congress also periodically considers adding such a law, at the behest of the software companies (especially M$). Assuming that they eventually pass it, it is likely to become retroactively effective, ex-post-facto not withstanding.
I understand that this is technically not legal under contract law (unilateral modification) -- but our current law is so far from legal contract law, it isn't funny.
Nor do I really expect that our courts are going to have much sway any more. They've already abandoned their authority in too many ways, in this field: I don't think it's going to get better.
In the end, my own analysis is "if the government is going to encourage theft, and there are some around who want to steal, then theft is going to happen, and there's not a lot you can do about it."
Gotta remember: law isn't solid. Right and wrong, and natural law are solid. As a country goes bad, though, law gets spongiform.
I should point out that you shouldn't sit down and program this all into your computer at once. Rather, work out a physical system first, involving notebooks, photobadges + seal, and whatnot.
Then, as you settle down to something that works, program each part into your database piece by piece. That way, you won't ever have the problem of "good possible idea, no time to implement it".
Rather, you'll end up with "Excellent idea, it's working, it's making us money, but it's a little too labor-intensive -- here's $1000: automate the next part."
There are a lot of times when I want a job done, and would like to just bring it in, and having an idea of how good he is, hand it to a DTP guy, and let him do it. For that reason, sometimes I would go to Kinkos -- but they had only one guy usually, and he wasn't always all that good.
That said, I think there is something better that could be: set up, with a computer database, a market system for DTP people. There is a list: normal hours of contact; contact telephone; and then for each job, price per hour requested; self-rated competency; rating averages by previous customers on the questions: "value[1-10/ not applicable]", "quality of job [1-10/not applicable]", "speed of service [1-10/not applicable]", "teaching skill [1-10/not applicable]".
Finally, allow "virtual logging": if you come in, and are available to work, you can log in without a computer and without paying for the computer. As long as there is a computer free, you will be reported as "available", and ratings can easily be shown. That way, a customer can come in, look at the list of skilled workers, and walk right over to the person they want and say "I have this job I'd like you to work on, if you don't mind."
If there is nobody currently there that seems satisfactory, they can then query for the skill, and pick up a list of contact IDs.
Customers, meanwhile, can get rated on issues of "prompt payment" "haggles too much", or "unpaid contract creep".
By doing this, a person can query the job database, and find someone immediately available and competent, or someone to call. A skilled computer worker, in turn, can probably set up classes where he can teach 3-10 interested people at a time. This also allows for subcontracting: someone wants a job done fast and well; I take the contract, and then filter it down for preprocessing to people whom I know are good.
Do that well, and you'll find that there are a few real professionals who can actually make your computer lab their place of business; in turn, people will realize that when they want a computer job solved quickly and professionally, they know where to go: your lab.
You say that people got to value their own trades.
But that means that your internal corporate finances were based upon personal hype, not on any market process at all.
If I understand correctly, the Fastow-group traders would be a natural outgrowth of such a thing: you feed more resources to those who simply *say* that they were successful; but the fantasy world has a much higher success rate than the real world. So you automatically are going to funnel more resources to the frauds.
So it sounds to me like you are saying that Enron did not follow market principles.
That said, did the derivatives market predict the crash of Enron, before the news was out through other sources?
I understand what you are saying about it being better on average, but one needs to look at the worst cases -- Enron, Worldcom, Waste Management, and so on, and see if the derivatives market is generally predicting the failures successfully, or not predicting the failures, or is statistically the same as other methods. Once you know that, then you can look and see what the limitations of the derivatives market is, with regard to forecasting, and perhaps find better forecasts.
Okay, complete OT, mind if I ask a question: what happened with Enron, with regards to you? How did you come to be working at a company that turned out so corrupt? And what was your response as news started filtering down? Or did you get blindsided (and if so, how)?
[And on a related note, was Enron betting, not based on markets, but based on something like Stratfor forecasts? Was that a major part of the circumstances of their downfall?]
Also, how did Enron manage to mess up the market's predictive properties in their own case? What weaknesses does this imply to the market model, and how can this be fixed? Or did they? Did the market correctly predict things?
Nonetheless, I too think that it should be open-source code, and that any group should be able to register to audit the process from code download, to hardware certification, to compilation, onward [do it on your own penny, but get full visual access.]
If nothing else, it may well satisfy the conspiracy theorists, and put some confidence back into a system in which many (including me) have little confidence (due to vote fraud being standard fare since before I was born).
Aside from that, if your explanation is correct, I really would like to see the code. Is this the six-sigma process, then? I'd like to know how bug-free code is written. I had enough trouble back in the days of DOS and C; nowadays, C++ and Windows just blow me away -- I find myself reverting, with relief, to Assembly to get things done. Or C, when I want fast coding: I still do have the old compilers. But I have to say that I've never been great, and I'm not as good as I used to be.
OT note:
Don't take the name of Christ in vain. If you don't believe in him, it's offensive to a lot of those who do: I never supported Rushdie (of "Sat. verses" infame) for the same reason, though I am not Islamic. If you do believe in Christ, it may be comparatively minor to a lot of other sins, but it does undermine your faith.
You have a wonderful idea, but as you point out, this would probably not be good for corrupt DemPublican-party politicians.
So, exactly how are you going to get the law changed, so that we get better politicians in control? Are you going to, for example, organize a grass-roots effort for an Amendment?
Good luck -- most Americans still watch TV for their news. The TV is controlled, in turn, by the Media 5, and so limited by the FCC, which is selected and given orders by Congress, which gets their publicity from the Media 5.
But suppose you do get enough publicity, and it does go up for vote. Understand that the 16th Amendment was fraudulently passed by Knox, quite likely at the behest of the Morgan and Rockefeller banks. (That, again with the help of the media.) That doesn't mean it is any less the law -- it is definitely the law. But I think it unlikely that your amendment will appear to pass, especially since the voting systems are regularly rigged (as you point out), and it would be unhealthy for the corrupt politicians who rig the votes.
Who's going to bell the cat?
My advice -- get on with it, get a job out of the country, and work for a full-time residency permit there.
I'd like to point out that vote fraud is a grand old tradition in America, and it *does* carry elections: if it didn't, it wouldn't be a tradition.
Chicago, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida...
That being the case, I would like to state as a matter of public record that I take no responsibility for the American government.
My vote does *not* matter, because my vote has zero chance of changing the results of a fraudulent system. Nor do the politicians pay attention to the votes, or the polls, or (often) even the letters written to them, as a gauge of whether their intended laws are good or bad: if they did, I would still vote.
Nor do the politicians represent me. They represent themselves, and claim that it is me they represent.
Nor is this simple cynicism. The voter fraud being standard is also a matter of public record.
That being said, because there is no ocean, would that there were no drops. People keep on dropping drops into a bottomless hole, and convincing themselves that there is an ocean. Much better, it would be, that they said "there is no ocean, forget the drops", and then got on with life.
Thanks for your reply [and nice name. Did you really work for them?]
I can see how this works. However, what you are describing allows supply not of the traded product (that is, the terrorist strike), but of the derivative, which is a function of many things, including terrorist strike, but also including media articles and such. As such, it is a derivatives market, and I question how well derivatives markets predict the future.
Yet I'm afraid that I think this one is likely to work, in predicting terrorism: when I look at it, it does not look like a true market.
To me, a true market has to have a supply and demand function. That is, if the price for an item is high, then people have to be able to step in, openly, and meet the demand with new supply, and cash in.
In this case, if the price for a terrorist attack was high, then someone has to be able to step in, provide the terrorist attack, and accept the money. That's just not going to happen, for obvious reasons: if it did, then it would make the market work successfully, but for an undesirable goal -- and would be shut down.
So this market has no true supply. That being the case, the most significant determinant of this market will not be true terrorism, but the trades of the biggest players. Those biggest players, in turn, may well be the media opinion columnists. They make their prediction, they explain their prediction in an article, people jump on the bandwagon, and the price rises. They then sell.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I don't think this one's going to work. In my opinion unfortunately, because having committed Slashdot heresy and read the article, it looks to me like the original arguments had merit.
When you said "Pop up video" information blurbs, I could help but think of good ol' Clippy (though on my Mac he looks like a walking Mac+).
I have to say that I find it rather useless, though I do like the real text question format, but others may well find it useful. Or, rather, they will find it comforting.
All we need for this to become a reality, is for computer programs to get *more* efficient for one three-year cycle, instead of slower, bulkier, buggier.
Until then, well, let me just say that I used Clippy for about two days. Then I turned it off. I could have done quite as well with a well-written manual.
Might I point out that every time there is an organ transplant, the hospitals and the doctors do make a large profit.
So if you allow death penalty donation, you're going to have an industry that profits from it. Even if it's a government agency that does all the organ transplants, government agencies profit in the form of increased power for their directors.
As I understand it, China already does this, and it is a huge problem. They apparently do execute prisoners for their organs.
Nor can you say "well, the medical profession won't be corrupt." In my grandfather's generation, the AMA successfully lobbied our Congress for a set of laws, which when combined with medical school practices, artificially holds down the number of doctors to keep doctor salaries high. That's corruption, resulting in needless deaths. Indeed, since most illnesses are not a big problem if caught early, that move by the AMA may be a large cause of increased need for organs.
Anyhow, I too do not intend to donate my organs. I've considered the issue, and though I generally consider donating blood to be pro-life, I consider organ donation to usually be the opposite. I *would* donate blood if I could (I got a false positive for non-A,non-B hepatitis, when I donated on too little sleep once).
On the other hand, my wife used to donate blood, and I encouraged her not to do so any more. She has a mitral valve prolapse, and the Red Cross took her blood too often, knowing that it was dangerous, and caused some additional damage to her heart. But I guess they have their quotas. Point being, even the Red Cross is not above some forms of corruption.
I probably shouldn't have to point this out to geeks, but electrons make up approximately 0.1% of the ocean, by mass. They are also readily available in such common items as dirt, and renewable resources such as those that are grown for food.
There shouldn't be any concerns about consuming too much electricity.
Sometimes, changing the default font size *is* revolutionary.
When I was getting my Linux up and running, I installed Mozilla, and found that for all the menus, the default font size was 256. Let's see: 12 pt. = 1/6", so 256~2.5" high characters.
So I started going through, painstakingly looking up all the variables, and setting the "Main text bar menu default font size="... and so on. Finally got my browser up, and then discovered: the email menus!
Fun, fun fun!
Anyhow, I started looking for help on this (using Konquerer of course), and found lots of people posting "how do I make my default font sizes right, across the board?"
Nothing. No answers. Nada
Anyhow, I eventually stumbled across the answer: in your XFree86config file, you have to have your fonts in the right order: fonts/misc, then your 100dpi fonts, and finally your truetype fonts.
Other than that, it loads the postscript fonts as default.
Now, this might seem to be unrelated, but it isn't. It isn't always easy to set your default font sizes. Sometimes, it's extremely unobvious.
Although the NY Times wasn't actually at the side of the computer when a BSOD appeared, he was on a cell phone with someone who DID see a BSOD. It was simply a small error in reporting who was where, no big deal really.
But really, the person who actually wrote the article is far more competent than the NY Times reporter, and can tell the difference between an app crash and an OS crash, so you can still trust the NY Times as America's Leading Journal of Record (TM).
When my grandfather was a doctor in NY State, he helped an old indian, who told him how his grandfather had been a guide in the Revolutionary War, and the british had buried two cannons full of pay gold, and marked the spot with a spoon carved in a rock. Then they crossed the stream (they were running from American troops), were engaged, and were whipped. This was near Port Leyden, if I remember.
Essentially, nobody had dug up the cannons. Anyhow, as "payment" he told my grandfather the story. It was interesting. So they went out and poked around for the spoon on the rock (found it), and for the cannons (didn't find them).
But that same land was also owned by an ancestor of Winston Churchill, who was a fairly poor farmer. Anyhow, the ancestor one day picked up, sold his farm, moved to NYC, and began investing and trading like crazy, making a huge fortune, according to rumor. Then he moved to Britain, and married a British lady... the rest is history.
Very interesting history.
It makes me think that he maybe found the two cannons on his land, and then used the trading to launder the gold. But who knows. If Britain had any claim to the gold (America didn't, anyhow), it's more than repaid. And the farmer, well, he seems to me to match a certain biblical story about a person who found a treasure.
Competition is not piracy. However, given both Microsoft's history, and their direct actions, I am not convinced that this isn't just one part of a larger plan to make it legally impossible for companies to use Linux.
I think most slasdotters would agree with that position. A lot would not be so circumspect as that: they'd just assume that it necessarily true, given the evidence available.
Ultimately, this press release and license update is about legalities in light of FUD that is paid for in part by Microsoft licensing with no known code usage. But our current legal environment favors brigandage. Combine that with the fact that Microsoft regularly engages in brigandage, and I have to say this has nothing to do with capitalism or competition, unless you call various kinds of theft (burglary, bank robbery, piracy, etc...) competition.
If you're going to call theft competition, I'd have to say "no thanks; that won't improve the economy one bit."
(1) Like nature? Big sky? Try Dolly Sods in West Virginia.
(2) Like caves? Not really into spelunking? Find out some local walk-in natural caves in your area. I know in Virginia, there are lots. You need to get permission from whatever farmer owns the land, and you need a Nat. Geological Survey map [try the nearest university library], and you need a friend. That's it.
(3) Here's something really cool, one-in-a-world. If you like it, fine. If you don't, then skip it. But it's Tide Spring. There's a river that flows out of a spring, every *other* thirty minutes. Then for thirty minutes, it's dry. If you want to know where it is, ask Dr. Rudmin at the Physics department at James Madison University. By my memory, it's about 20 minutes to the west of Harrisonburg, VA.
(4) Go see a Shipbuilding company, or alternatively the space shuttle repair facility, or one of the coal strip mines. Any of those will have some really big equipment.
(5) Go fossil hunting. Contact the geology department at a local university, and find out what there is. We used to hunt trilobytes (read cockroach sculpture), and found a number of them.
(6) Tour CEBAF/TJNAF. Get someone who works there to show you around.
(7) Learn about the plant life you see, as you go. For example, wild parsnip can give you a bad sunburn, when you contact the leaves, and then are exposed to X-rays. But find out what you can eat, and can't, and then (1) find it (2) pick it (3) check it with someone who really does know (4) try it. Just not mushrooms. Although the False Morel contains rocket fuel, and is very geeky, it should be noted that it can cause a very painful drawn-out death via liver/kidney/renal failure.
(8) Spend a week or a month working on an old-order (Amish, mennonite, etc.) farm. Find out how food is really made. Then find out how we do such things as homogenize or pasteurize milk.
(9) Find an old hill-fort (the indians and earliest colonists both used to build 3-sided earthen forts) and use cheap architectural tools to map it out.
(10) Hunt for indian arrowheads and musketballs in an old battlefield.
There, that's ten. For a geek, I really think that the important part is that you come back with some interesting bit of information that you never would have found out before. For example, I just discovered in my town an old hill-fort, 75 feet by 100 feet, with a good kilometer of earthen wall in front of it. Nobody knew it was there: they assumed that the craters had been from WWII bombs. But it is there. (I should note that in this country, the size of W. Va, there are 450 others. It isn't unusual here.)
But I really think that finding out unusual stuff is extremely geeky.
"Capitalistic" involves the use of money to determine what should be funded.
This is using government fiat, that is, the lawsuit, to determine what should be funded.
As such, it isn't capitalistic competitiveness. This is called neoliberal capitalism, and the other word for it, using common language is brigandage, or [on the high seas] piracy.
I should note that there is a story that Alexander the Great caught a pirate, and before he had the pirate executed, he asked "why do you do this?". And the pirate replied "I do no more or less than you do, but only on a smaller scale." Which seemed to relate to this when I started typing it, but now...... well, I guess I'm saying that Bill Gates, who so vocally accused others of being thieves, seems to do it himself -- but he does it more effectively. And our government is sypathetic to neoliberal capitalism in general.
I have to say, whether this will cost Microsoft anything really depends on whether this change is retroactive.
Because when Word98 for Mac was new, they included customer support as part of the sales package, but when I was getting mass document corruption, they specifically denied anything was happening, and said that what I said was happening wasn't. Later, it turned out they knew all along that this corruption was happening, but didn't fix the problems till after Word2000, if at all.
If they had told me what was going on, I could have found a workaround. If they had accepted copies of the files for post-mortem examination, maybe we would have also found this out.
This cost us and our business over $17000 in direct costs for their intentional denial of contractually required support, and over $11000 in further lost contracts.
If this is retroactive, I will happily step up to the plate and request $38000. That, for one $100 piece of software+support that was negligently and inentionally not fulfilled.
You probably can guess: As far as I am concerned, until they do pay off on that, Microsoft is still a liability.
I dunno why, but somehow this topic reminds me of a coversation like the following...
See, there's a limit to how many bits you can store on a disk. I see. Because the area of the disk is limited I see. But you don't want a limit, you want more space. I want more space. But you can't have more space, because all of the bits are square they're square. and there's only so many square inches of surface. Only so much. Yes. Look at this disk. Radius 3.25" 3.25 It's a circle. It's round. Pie-R-square Pie-R-square So the area's limited. I see.
And the bits, they're almost square, because that's the way the manufacturers' engineers like them. They like squares? Yes. I see. Well, really they're not square, they're almost square. And how's that? Well, they're square sections of a round arc. Not square? But almost square. Almost square. I see.
So what do we do? I don't know. Well, we get a better packing fraction. Better packing fraction? Yes. That's the key. A better packing fraction. I see. And your data is round. Data is round Because the magnetic field is round. I see. And a square doesn't approximate a circle very well, does it? No. What does it better? A circle? Well, yes, but you can't do it with a circle, because circles bump each other. They bump each other? Yes, and they leave empty space between them. And we want a better packing fraction? Yes. So what do we take a cue from? I don't know. I know you don't know, but I'll tell you. We take a cue from the bee. The bee? The honeybee. He uses hexagons. Aaah. Hexagons. Yes, hexagons. They're all the future. The future? The future. The future. Yes, the future. Hexagons. Yes. That's where the money is. You're a nut.
Sorry about this, it was 1999 that I was looking for printers, and when I evaluated them then, I remember that the wax-deposit printers had a cpp something like 22 cents per page for a color photo: not cheap at all.
That said, after reading all the other comments, I have to say that probably the price has dropped significantly.
Slashdot Mirror
But what about how EULAs can change, retroactively? As I understand it, Virginia has passed such a law, allowing this. So the EULAs in reality have no meaning, or rather are rendered meaningless because the law has no meaning.
Gag, I read this and it sounds like babble, but I can't find a better way to say it.
Virginia and some other states specifically allow the EULAs to float, which puts us in a specifically feudal situation. But Congress also periodically considers adding such a law, at the behest of the software companies (especially M$). Assuming that they eventually pass it, it is likely to become retroactively effective, ex-post-facto not withstanding.
I understand that this is technically not legal under contract law (unilateral modification) -- but our current law is so far from legal contract law, it isn't funny.
Nor do I really expect that our courts are going to have much sway any more. They've already abandoned their authority in too many ways, in this field: I don't think it's going to get better.
In the end, my own analysis is "if the government is going to encourage theft, and there are some around who want to steal, then theft is going to happen, and there's not a lot you can do about it."
Gotta remember: law isn't solid. Right and wrong, and natural law are solid. As a country goes bad, though, law gets spongiform.
I should point out that you shouldn't sit down and program this all into your computer at once. Rather, work out a physical system first, involving notebooks, photobadges + seal, and whatnot.
Then, as you settle down to something that works, program each part into your database piece by piece. That way, you won't ever have the problem of "good possible idea, no time to implement it".
Rather, you'll end up with "Excellent idea, it's working, it's making us money, but it's a little too labor-intensive -- here's $1000: automate the next part."
There are a lot of times when I want a job done, and would like to just bring it in, and having an idea of how good he is, hand it to a DTP guy, and let him do it. For that reason, sometimes I would go to Kinkos -- but they had only one guy usually, and he wasn't always all that good.
That said, I think there is something better that could be: set up, with a computer database, a market system for DTP people. There is a list: normal hours of contact; contact telephone; and then for each job, price per hour requested; self-rated competency; rating averages by previous customers on the questions: "value[1-10/ not applicable]", "quality of job [1-10/not applicable]", "speed of service [1-10/not applicable]", "teaching skill [1-10/not applicable]".
Finally, allow "virtual logging": if you come in, and are available to work, you can log in without a computer and without paying for the computer. As long as there is a computer free, you will be reported as "available", and ratings can easily be shown. That way, a customer can come in, look at the list of skilled workers, and walk right over to the person they want and say "I have this job I'd like you to work on, if you don't mind."
If there is nobody currently there that seems satisfactory, they can then query for the skill, and pick up a list of contact IDs.
Customers, meanwhile, can get rated on issues of "prompt payment" "haggles too much", or "unpaid contract creep".
By doing this, a person can query the job database, and find someone immediately available and competent, or someone to call. A skilled computer worker, in turn, can probably set up classes where he can teach 3-10 interested people at a time. This also allows for subcontracting: someone wants a job done fast and well; I take the contract, and then filter it down for preprocessing to people whom I know are good.
Do that well, and you'll find that there are a few real professionals who can actually make your computer lab their place of business; in turn, people will realize that when they want a computer job solved quickly and professionally, they know where to go: your lab.
But that means that your internal corporate finances were based upon personal hype, not on any market process at all.
If I understand correctly, the Fastow-group traders would be a natural outgrowth of such a thing: you feed more resources to those who simply *say* that they were successful; but the fantasy world has a much higher success rate than the real world. So you automatically are going to funnel more resources to the frauds.
So it sounds to me like you are saying that Enron did not follow market principles.
That said, did the derivatives market predict the crash of Enron, before the news was out through other sources?
I understand what you are saying about it being better on average, but one needs to look at the worst cases -- Enron, Worldcom, Waste Management, and so on, and see if the derivatives market is generally predicting the failures successfully, or not predicting the failures, or is statistically the same as other methods. Once you know that, then you can look and see what the limitations of the derivatives market is, with regard to forecasting, and perhaps find better forecasts.
Okay, complete OT, mind if I ask a question: what happened with Enron, with regards to you? How did you come to be working at a company that turned out so corrupt? And what was your response as news started filtering down? Or did you get blindsided (and if so, how)?
[And on a related note, was Enron betting, not based on markets, but based on something like Stratfor forecasts? Was that a major part of the circumstances of their downfall?]
Also, how did Enron manage to mess up the market's predictive properties in their own case? What weaknesses does this imply to the market model, and how can this be fixed? Or did they? Did the market correctly predict things?
... then I honor them for the effort.
Nonetheless, I too think that it should be open-source code, and that any group should be able to register to audit the process from code download, to hardware certification, to compilation, onward [do it on your own penny, but get full visual access.]
If nothing else, it may well satisfy the conspiracy theorists, and put some confidence back into a system in which many (including me) have little confidence (due to vote fraud being standard fare since before I was born).
Aside from that, if your explanation is correct, I really would like to see the code. Is this the six-sigma process, then? I'd like to know how bug-free code is written. I had enough trouble back in the days of DOS and C; nowadays, C++ and Windows just blow me away -- I find myself reverting, with relief, to Assembly to get things done. Or C, when I want fast coding: I still do have the old compilers. But I have to say that I've never been great, and I'm not as good as I used to be.
OT note:
Don't take the name of Christ in vain. If you don't believe in him, it's offensive to a lot of those who do: I never supported Rushdie (of "Sat. verses" infame) for the same reason, though I am not Islamic. If you do believe in Christ, it may be comparatively minor to a lot of other sins, but it does undermine your faith.
So, exactly how are you going to get the law changed, so that we get better politicians in control? Are you going to, for example, organize a grass-roots effort for an Amendment?
Good luck -- most Americans still watch TV for their news. The TV is controlled, in turn, by the Media 5, and so limited by the FCC, which is selected and given orders by Congress, which gets their publicity from the Media 5.
But suppose you do get enough publicity, and it does go up for vote. Understand that the 16th Amendment was fraudulently passed by Knox, quite likely at the behest of the Morgan and Rockefeller banks. (That, again with the help of the media.) That doesn't mean it is any less the law -- it is definitely the law. But I think it unlikely that your amendment will appear to pass, especially since the voting systems are regularly rigged (as you point out), and it would be unhealthy for the corrupt politicians who rig the votes.
Who's going to bell the cat?
My advice -- get on with it, get a job out of the country, and work for a full-time residency permit there.
Chicago, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida...
That being the case, I would like to state as a matter of public record that I take no responsibility for the American government.
My vote does *not* matter, because my vote has zero chance of changing the results of a fraudulent system. Nor do the politicians pay attention to the votes, or the polls, or (often) even the letters written to them, as a gauge of whether their intended laws are good or bad: if they did, I would still vote.
Nor do the politicians represent me. They represent themselves, and claim that it is me they represent.
Nor is this simple cynicism. The voter fraud being standard is also a matter of public record.
That being said, because there is no ocean, would that there were no drops. People keep on dropping drops into a bottomless hole, and convincing themselves that there is an ocean. Much better, it would be, that they said "there is no ocean, forget the drops", and then got on with life.
Thanks for your reply [and nice name. Did you really work for them?]
I can see how this works. However, what you are describing allows supply not of the traded product (that is, the terrorist strike), but of the derivative, which is a function of many things, including terrorist strike, but also including media articles and such. As such, it is a derivatives market, and I question how well derivatives markets predict the future.
IANAE. I am not an economist.
Yet I'm afraid that I think this one is likely to work, in predicting terrorism: when I look at it, it does not look like a true market.
To me, a true market has to have a supply and demand function. That is, if the price for an item is high, then people have to be able to step in, openly, and meet the demand with new supply, and cash in.
In this case, if the price for a terrorist attack was high, then someone has to be able to step in, provide the terrorist attack, and accept the money. That's just not going to happen, for obvious reasons: if it did, then it would make the market work successfully, but for an undesirable goal -- and would be shut down.
So this market has no true supply. That being the case, the most significant determinant of this market will not be true terrorism, but the trades of the biggest players. Those biggest players, in turn, may well be the media opinion columnists. They make their prediction, they explain their prediction in an article, people jump on the bandwagon, and the price rises. They then sell.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I don't think this one's going to work. In my opinion unfortunately, because having committed Slashdot heresy and read the article, it looks to me like the original arguments had merit.
Just not this implementation.
When you said "Pop up video" information blurbs, I could help but think of good ol' Clippy (though on my Mac he looks like a walking Mac+).
I have to say that I find it rather useless, though I do like the real text question format, but others may well find it useful. Or, rather, they will find it comforting.
All we need for this to become a reality, is for computer programs to get *more* efficient for one three-year cycle, instead of slower, bulkier, buggier.
Until then, well, let me just say that I used Clippy for about two days. Then I turned it off.
I could have done quite as well with a well-written manual.
Might I point out that every time there is an organ transplant, the hospitals and the doctors do make a large profit.
So if you allow death penalty donation, you're going to have an industry that profits from it. Even if it's a government agency that does all the organ transplants, government agencies profit in the form of increased power for their directors.
As I understand it, China already does this, and it is a huge problem. They apparently do execute prisoners for their organs.
Nor can you say "well, the medical profession won't be corrupt." In my grandfather's generation, the AMA successfully lobbied our Congress for a set of laws, which when combined with medical school practices, artificially holds down the number of doctors to keep doctor salaries high. That's corruption, resulting in needless deaths. Indeed, since most illnesses are not a big problem if caught early, that move by the AMA may be a large cause of increased need for organs.
Anyhow, I too do not intend to donate my organs. I've considered the issue, and though I generally consider donating blood to be pro-life, I consider organ donation to usually be the opposite. I *would* donate blood if I could (I got a false positive for non-A,non-B hepatitis, when I donated on too little sleep once).
On the other hand, my wife used to donate blood, and I encouraged her not to do so any more. She has a mitral valve prolapse, and the Red Cross took her blood too often, knowing that it was dangerous, and caused some additional damage to her heart. But I guess they have their quotas. Point being, even the Red Cross is not above some forms of corruption.
I probably shouldn't have to point this out to geeks, but electrons make up approximately 0.1% of the ocean, by mass. They are also readily available in such common items as dirt, and renewable resources such as those that are grown for food.
There shouldn't be any concerns about consuming too much electricity.
Sometimes, changing the default font size *is* revolutionary.
When I was getting my Linux up and running, I installed Mozilla, and found that for all the menus, the default font size was 256. Let's see: 12 pt. = 1/6", so 256~2.5" high characters.
So I started going through, painstakingly looking up all the variables, and setting the "Main text bar menu default font size="... and so on. Finally got my browser up, and then discovered: the email menus!
Fun, fun fun!
Anyhow, I started looking for help on this (using Konquerer of course), and found lots of people posting "how do I make my default font sizes right, across the board?"
Nothing. No answers. Nada
Anyhow, I eventually stumbled across the answer: in your XFree86config file, you have to have your fonts in the right order: fonts/misc, then your 100dpi fonts, and finally your truetype fonts.
Other than that, it loads the postscript fonts as default.
Now, this might seem to be unrelated, but it isn't. It isn't always easy to set your default font sizes. Sometimes, it's extremely unobvious.
Although the NY Times wasn't actually at the side of the computer when a BSOD appeared, he was on a cell phone with someone who DID see a BSOD. It was simply a small error in reporting who was where, no big deal really.
But really, the person who actually wrote the article is far more competent than the NY Times reporter, and can tell the difference between an app crash and an OS crash, so you can still trust the NY Times as America's Leading Journal of Record (TM).
When my grandfather was a doctor in NY State, he helped an old indian, who told him how his grandfather had been a guide in the Revolutionary War, and the british had buried two cannons full of pay gold, and marked the spot with a spoon carved in a rock. Then they crossed the stream (they were running from American troops), were engaged, and were whipped. This was near Port Leyden, if I remember.
Essentially, nobody had dug up the cannons. Anyhow, as "payment" he told my grandfather the story. It was interesting. So they went out and poked around for the spoon on the rock (found it), and for the cannons (didn't find them).
But that same land was also owned by an ancestor of Winston Churchill, who was a fairly poor farmer. Anyhow, the ancestor one day picked up, sold his farm, moved to NYC, and began investing and trading like crazy, making a huge fortune, according to rumor. Then he moved to Britain, and married a British lady... the rest is history.
Very interesting history.
It makes me think that he maybe found the two cannons on his land, and then used the trading to launder the gold. But who knows. If Britain had any claim to the gold (America didn't, anyhow), it's more than repaid. And the farmer, well, he seems to me to match a certain biblical story about a person who found a treasure.
Competition is not piracy. However, given both Microsoft's history, and their direct actions, I am not convinced that this isn't just one part of a larger plan to make it legally impossible for companies to use Linux.
I think most slasdotters would agree with that position. A lot would not be so circumspect as that: they'd just assume that it necessarily true, given the evidence available.
Ultimately, this press release and license update is about legalities in light of FUD that is paid for in part by Microsoft licensing with no known code usage. But our current legal environment favors brigandage. Combine that with the fact that Microsoft regularly engages in brigandage, and I have to say this has nothing to do with capitalism or competition, unless you call various kinds of theft (burglary, bank robbery, piracy, etc...) competition.
If you're going to call theft competition, I'd have to say "no thanks; that won't improve the economy one bit."
Respectfully,
McLinux
(1) Like nature? Big sky? Try Dolly Sods in West Virginia.
(2) Like caves? Not really into spelunking? Find out some local walk-in natural caves in your area. I know in Virginia, there are lots. You need to get permission from whatever farmer owns the land, and you need a Nat. Geological Survey map [try the nearest university library], and you need a friend.
That's it.
(3) Here's something really cool, one-in-a-world. If you like it, fine. If you don't, then skip it. But it's Tide Spring. There's a river that flows out of a spring, every *other* thirty minutes. Then for thirty minutes, it's dry. If you want to know where it is, ask Dr. Rudmin at the Physics department at James Madison University. By my memory, it's about 20 minutes to the west of Harrisonburg, VA.
(4) Go see a Shipbuilding company, or alternatively the space shuttle repair facility, or one of the coal strip mines. Any of those will have some really big equipment.
(5) Go fossil hunting. Contact the geology department at a local university, and find out what there is. We used to hunt trilobytes (read cockroach sculpture), and found a number of them.
(6) Tour CEBAF/TJNAF. Get someone who works there to show you around.
(7) Learn about the plant life you see, as you go. For example, wild parsnip can give you a bad sunburn, when you contact the leaves, and then are exposed to X-rays. But find out what you can eat, and can't, and then (1) find it (2) pick it (3) check it with someone who really does know (4) try it. Just not mushrooms. Although the False Morel contains rocket fuel, and is very geeky, it should be noted that it can cause a very painful drawn-out death via liver/kidney/renal failure.
(8) Spend a week or a month working on an old-order (Amish, mennonite, etc.) farm. Find out how food is really made. Then find out how we do such things as homogenize or pasteurize milk.
(9) Find an old hill-fort (the indians and earliest colonists both used to build 3-sided earthen forts) and use cheap architectural tools to map it out.
(10) Hunt for indian arrowheads and musketballs in an old battlefield.
There, that's ten. For a geek, I really think that the important part is that you come back with some interesting bit of information that you never would have found out before. For example, I just discovered in my town an old hill-fort, 75 feet by 100 feet, with a good kilometer of earthen wall in front of it. Nobody knew it was there: they assumed that the craters had been from WWII bombs. But it is there. (I should note that in this country, the size of W. Va, there are 450 others. It isn't unusual here.)
But I really think that finding out unusual stuff is extremely geeky.
the All-American Geek tour begins and ends at a single, broadband-connected computer.
His own.
Oh, with a year's supply of microwave meals.
"Capitalistic" involves the use of money to determine what should be funded.
... well, I guess I'm saying that Bill Gates, who so vocally accused others of being thieves, seems to do it himself -- but he does it more effectively. And our government is sypathetic to neoliberal capitalism in general.
This is using government fiat, that is, the lawsuit, to determine what should be funded.
As such, it isn't capitalistic competitiveness. This is called neoliberal capitalism, and the other word for it, using common language is brigandage, or [on the high seas] piracy.
I should note that there is a story that Alexander the Great caught a pirate, and before he had the pirate executed, he asked "why do you do this?". And the pirate replied "I do no more or less than you do, but only on a smaller scale." Which seemed to relate to this when I started typing it, but now...
I have to say, whether this will cost Microsoft anything really depends on whether this change is retroactive.
Because when Word98 for Mac was new, they included customer support as part of the sales package, but when I was getting mass document corruption, they specifically denied anything was happening, and said that what I said was happening wasn't. Later, it turned out they knew all along that this corruption was happening, but didn't fix the problems till after Word2000, if at all.
If they had told me what was going on, I could have found a workaround. If they had accepted copies of the files for post-mortem examination, maybe we would have also found this out.
This cost us and our business over $17000 in direct costs for their intentional denial of contractually required support, and over $11000 in further lost contracts.
If this is retroactive, I will happily step up to the plate and request $38000. That, for one $100 piece of software+support that was negligently and inentionally not fulfilled.
You probably can guess: As far as I am concerned, until they do pay off on that, Microsoft is still a liability.
See, there's a limit to how many bits you can store on a disk. I see. Because the area of the disk is limited I see. But you don't want a limit, you want more space. I want more space. But you can't have more space, because all of the bits are square they're square. and there's only so many square inches of surface. Only so much. Yes. Look at this disk. Radius 3.25" 3.25 It's a circle. It's round. Pie-R-square Pie-R-square So the area's limited. I see.
And the bits, they're almost square, because that's the way the manufacturers' engineers like them. They like squares? Yes. I see. Well, really they're not square, they're almost square. And how's that? Well, they're square sections of a round arc. Not square? But almost square. Almost square. I see.
So what do we do? I don't know. Well, we get a better packing fraction. Better packing fraction? Yes. That's the key. A better packing fraction. I see. And your data is round. Data is round Because the magnetic field is round. I see. And a square doesn't approximate a circle very well, does it? No. What does it better? A circle? Well, yes, but you can't do it with a circle, because circles bump each other. They bump each other? Yes, and they leave empty space between them. And we want a better packing fraction? Yes. So what do we take a cue from? I don't know. I know you don't know, but I'll tell you. We take a cue from the bee. The bee? The honeybee. He uses hexagons. Aaah. Hexagons. Yes, hexagons. They're all the future. The future? The future. The future. Yes, the future. Hexagons. Yes. That's where the money is. You're a nut.
Who's Larry and Fuzzy Pink Niven?
And can it do anything special, like write novels on its own, or bark?
Sorry about this, it was 1999 that I was looking for printers, and when I evaluated them then, I remember that the wax-deposit printers had a cpp something like 22 cents per page for a color photo: not cheap at all. That said, after reading all the other comments, I have to say that probably the price has dropped significantly.
Actually, it would be kindof nice to see a wax-transfer printer that could take a box of crayolas as its refill. Get the 50-color box, and go to town.