> So it is effectively illegal for you to preserve this work for future generations.
Copyright law (and, in particular, fair use doctrine) contains enough legal grey area to allow for something like this to be preserved for future generations without calling down the full wrath of the copyright mafia. (It's distribution to the current generation that will get you in trouble.)
IANAL, but I have yet to hear even a rumor of any instance of someone getting into serious legal trouble for digitizing or format-shifting something like this and NOT distributing it. For example, you could make yourself an audio-CD copy, or some FLAC files on a Flash-based USB 2.0 Mass Storage Device, or whatever, and stick it in a safe deposit box (in case a house fire destroys the original discs or the equipment needed to play them breaks down).
There are other things you might be able to get away with as well. Providing a copy to the history department of your alma mater, for instance, might (IANAL,ATINLA) fall under academic fair use.
> If the copyright owner decides that they want the recordings > back, then you will probably have to turn it over to them.
I'm not sure about that part. If the copy was obtained legitimately, I think the holder of the copy can keep, or even resell, that one copy.
He obviously doesn't own the copyright, so making additional copies would require permission, and releasing the thing into the public domain is clearly not in his bailiwick. Public performance or broadcast would probably require permission, too. But I'm pretty sure he can listen to the recording privately as many times as he wants.
> Jamendo and Magnatune are great for finding popular music?
The word "popular" in that sentence was a euphemism. Think "popular" as in "hoi polloi". People who listen to real music are sometimes reluctant to tell other people outright that their favorite tunes are "the ill-conceived noise that feeds on and perpetuates the ignorance of the masses". Calling such drivel "popular music" means roughly the same thing, but it's less offensive.
> It *does* seem to have both Glenn Gould recordings of Goldberg,
I'm not a big Glenn Gould fan. Does it have Feltsman's performance of the same piece? What about BWV 1079 and 1080, does it have Feltsman on those? Hector Olivera? What about the Munchinger string ensemble adaptation of both pieces? For that matter, do they have a string ensemble adaptation of the Goldberg variations? What Susanne Lautenbacher recordings do they have of Bach pieces?
Meh. I'll just buy the CDs and rip them. The quality is better that way anyhow.
Are you kidding? Oracle makes _DEC_ look open. Apple's not even playing the same sport.
However, I'm not sure it necessarily follows that they'll close up Solaris. As far as Oracle is concerned, the OS is basically a complementary component. Nobody is going to pay, for any operating system, anything resembling the kind of money Oracle likes to charge. But you do need the OS in order to run the Oracle software stack, so it's complementary to (i.e., goes with) their main product line. Arguably, it is in Oracle's best interests to commoditize the OS, because that enhances the market for and/or helps sell the products on which Oracle makes their money.
The traditional thing to do, which would also work from a purely sales perspective, is to throw the OS in "for free" with any purchase, in much the same way that the car dealership gives you a free tank of gas (value: $20) when they sell you a new vehicle (value: $10000 or more; their commission on that: at least $500, often rather a lot more, plus the chance you may bring the car back to them for repairs later).
But leaving it open accomplishes more or less the same thing (the salesman can still list the OS and its features as benefits of the whole package) and has the added benefit of improving the OS and making it more attractive to a significant percentage of network administrators. The only downside is that another vendor potentially can also sell a competing product on the same platform (and thus their sales people can ALSO list the OS and its features), but that's purely theoretical in this case. Microsoft sure doesn't seem likely to sell SQL Server for Solaris any time soon, and no other competitor I can think of really seems dangerous to Oracle, at least for the present. They *bought* MySQL, and while Postgres is a pretty decent database product from a technical perspective, it doesn't have the kind of name recognition value or mindshare or corporate infrastructure behind it that would be needed to turn it into a viable competitor for Oracle in the "let us know you're interested and we'll fly a team of six salesmen out to visit you for a week" market segment where Oracle scores the bulk of their revenue.
So yeah, it's true that Oracle isn't generally very open, but I'm not sure Solaris will ever been in the same category for them as their main product line in that regard. Solaris could remain open without significantly altering Oracle's core business strategy, IMO.
> If every state recognized your right to free speech for example
Who's going to convince them all to recognize it? The government of Iran, just for example, is just about as inclined to recognize a right to free speech as the US government is to adopt Sharia law.
The only thing we really need to get everyone to agree on is jurisdictional procedure, specifically, that governments must only prosecute things that are done in their own jurisdiction. If I violate the laws of Bongoswana while living in the US, it would be kind of nice if I didn't have to worry about getting arrested for it if I ever travel in Bongoswana later for some reason.
The trick is figuring out how that applies to the internet. Since the internet is new, that hasn't really been fully hammered out yet. It needs to be. Obviously, we can't expect everyone on the internet to always obey the laws of every country on the internet at all times. That would be insane, no matter where you're from. We need to work out in a clear and consistent way exactly how jurisdiction works on the internet, so that people can know which countries' laws they are expected to observe in any given situation. (My vote would be, the laws of the country where you're sitting, and the laws of the country where the server is sitting.)
> I thought [Republicans] were the party that's big on censoring.
Not that kind of censorship.
Republicans want to censor porn (which a few of them define to include basic nudity in any vaguely sexual context). Democrats want to censor hate speech (which some of them define to include such things as saying that homosexuality is wrong). Neither major party in the US wants to censor the kind of thing this bill is about.
> Hell, they buy their music on a medium where the Beatles have no place... > not that I am that big of a fan, but would you really buy music (as a real > lover) in a store that doesn't have this part music history?
Certainly. I can easily see myself shopping at a specialty music store that only carries renaissance and baroque music, for instance, or a shop that only carries music performed on strings (violin and cello and so on). Narrowing the overall focus of the store's selection would create room for a more thoroughgoing variety within those limits. Heck, I wouldn't mind spending a couple of hours browsing the shelves in a music store that only sells recordings of late-baroque music played on stringed instruments. I bet they'd have some really good stuff.
> When I was a kid, I remember learning in school.
Yeah, me too. But this article isn't about schools, or computers in schools. This article is about computers in homes.
Like any tool, it depends how you use it. If you use the computer as an educational tool, then it is one. If you use it as a babysitter, just plonk the kid down in front of it and say "use this thing and don't bother me", then very little education will ensue.
So set your laptop up with full-disk encryption and a dead man's switch.
> Or maybe I just really want to reign hell down on whom ever steals my laptop.
In that case, set up the dead man's switch to install Microsoft Windows. I'll leave picking which *version* of Windows the DMS should install as an exercise for the astute reader.
> If you had a telephone number, would you expect the telephone > company to voluntarily give up the account holder's info, as > in "Yeah, that's Bob's number. Here's where he lives."?
If you had a phone number you could call the public library and ask them to look it up in the criss-cross (aka city/county directory) and give you not just the address but also a name. (Okay, it's slightly more complicated than that: first you use the area code and exchange portions of the phone number to figure out which public library to call. This is not difficult, however.)
There are no such reference tools for IP addresses, however, perhaps because they are often technically dynamic (even if they don't in practice change very often), perhaps because they haven't been around as long, perhaps because privacy advocates have a strong tendency to get very excited about their cause whenever the word "internet" is involved, or perhaps because most people aren't tech-savvy enough to be capable of making use of such a service anyway.
In England they use the word "country" for sub-national entities, the way we use the word "state" in the US. Canada uses the word "province". It's the same thing. The difference is purely one of terminology.
They also, in England, use the word "England" for what we would call "England proper" (if we ever even had a reason to refer to it specifically as distinct from the rest of the nation, which would be fairly unusual). But that's just terminology.
In American English, "England" (the most common term), "Britain" (somewhat common), and "The UK" (mostly used in formal contexts) are in practice treated as synonyms. Unless you're a geography buff talking about the island as a land form, "Great Britain" usually refers to the country as well. And yes, it's a country, i.e., a sovereign nation-state.
Our use of the words "England" and "Britain" to mean the country are consistent with similar usages with regard to other countries. In Holland they use the word "Holland" to refer to something less than the whole country, as well, but as far as Americans are concerned it means exactly the same thing as "The Netherlands". Compare also "Russia", which consistently meant the USSR until the break-up. (On the extremely rare occasion when we wanted to refer to the sub-national entity, we said "Russian SSR" or something like that. Of course, since the breakup Russia has been separated from some of its former constituent states.) Except in formal diplomatic contexts, "China" means the PROC and the area controlled (de facto) by the PROC; "Taiwan" means the ROC and their (de facto) territory, including the various minor islands.
It's a matter of convenience and shorthand. We don't have time to go around saying "The People's Republic of the Congo" all the time, so we just call it (the) "Congo". It's easier. We don't want to bother to say "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Minor Outlying Territories Under Her Royal Majesty Elizabeth II" or whatever the full complete official name of the country is, so we just say "England". It's easier. FWIW, we don't say "The United States of America" most of the time either. We generally just call it "America". It's easier.
> have the right to try and sentence people without so much as a trial?
Neither a trial nor a sentence is required to ban someone from a facility. In most cases (barring any specific law to the contrary), whoever runs the facility can do that pretty much unilaterally, based on their own established criteria.
My boss, for instance, has the authority to ban someone from the public library where I work. She can do it just because they refuse to follow our policies. No trial is required. We do have a procedure that we follow, which includes multiple warnings for most offenses, but that's a procedure the library itself established (written up by the staff under the director's leadership and approved by the board) in order to help us deal with difficult situations. The procedure could be whatever the library needs it to be. No legal trial is required.
And yes, if someone is uncooperative when we ask them to leave, we can call the police to, umm, "assist" them in finding their way off library property. I had to do that once myself, on a Saturday when the director was not present. (We didn't ban that patron permanently, just for the day. She was obviously emotionally disturbed at the time.)
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing?
on
Plagiarism Inc.
·
· Score: 1
> not plagiarism... as the > GP said, its Ghostwriting.
Yeah? You just try telling that to the Academic Dean.
> (yet in this all things to Chairman Mao world, Obama gets credit).
Nothing new about that. The President always gets credit or blame for things that happen during his administration, even if they aren't directly his doing. George Bush (the first one) got the blame for a recession that wasn't in any way his doing. Clinton got credit for the increased revenues that finally soaked up (most of) the Cold War deficit.
FDR gets credit for ending the Great Depression, though as far as I can tell there is no reason to believe his policies had any real impact on it at all.
Reagan gets credit for ending the cold war, and while his military spending policies probably *accelerated* the bankrupting of the USSR, it was inevitable (and, indeed, nearing its conclusion) before Reagan was even elected. Other US Presidents contributed to the effort as well, but as far as public opinion goes, it's as simple as this: Reagan was in office when Gorbachev started talking about Glasnost. Reagan said "tear down this wall", and a couple of years later it came down. So he gets credit for it. That's politics.
Heck, Lincoln gets credit for ending slavery, even though he explicitly stated, and explained at some length, that that was never one of his goals. He was against slavery in principle and wanted to regulate it and prevent the spread of it to additional states, in the hopes that it would die out eventually or be done away with later, but he did not set out to end it once and for all, and he certainly didn't fight the war for that purpose. All he really wanted to do was hold the country together. In fact, if he hadn't been killed, reconstruction would have been handled rather differently and slavery in the south MIGHT have been allowed to continue for several more decades (though that's by no means certain).
> Because there's only two potential outcomes for the other child: boy or girl
It's not quite a fair coin toss, though. The ratio of males to females is a big higher than 1:1 among children (and much lower among the elderly, though that's less relevant to the question). Of course, this is assuming that the speaker is human...
Did I mention that I've gone back to Firefox 2.0.0.20? It's rock solid. Stable. Never gives me any trouble. Never loses data, or unexpectedly replaces the content of a tab -- unlike 3.x, which loses tabs on a regular basis.
If I needed one *more* bad thing to say about 3.x (as if mentioning the "awesomeness bar" weren't ammunition enough), now I can call it "the Farmville player's version". Haha. It's not a very substantive criticism, but it sure is amusing.
I had no problems on my desktop, which is several years old and wasn't high-end even when new. Let's see.../proc/cpuinfo says it's a Celeron running at 2.13GHz with 256K of cache.
No problem. This computer can't play Flash-based games (like Bejeweled, which my sister is really into for some reason) without setting off the heat alarm, but Firefox displayed the 1249x19444 image without batting an eye. It was zoomed to fit by default, but clicking once zoomed it to 100%, and I can scroll through the whole thing just as if it were a web page. An ugly web page with a lot of missing images, but that's not my computer's fault.
Oh, probably should mention that I'm running Firefox 2.0.0.20. I got tired of the dataloss bugs in the 3.x series and downgraded. Not sure this is at all relevant to the ability to show a large image, but it's sufficiently out of the mainstream that I thought I'd mention it.
Slashdot Mirror
> On a more serious note, Hip-Hop/Rap is an example, depending on
> whether or whether not you want to call it music (I kid... sort of).
Real music has counterpoint.
I suppose, in theory, it would be possible to create contrapuntal rap... I think I'd even pay money to hear that... once.
> The Pope hasn't had a crusade since 1272
Man, what a geezer! I knew he was old, but yeesh.
> So it is effectively illegal for you to preserve this work for future generations.
Copyright law (and, in particular, fair use doctrine) contains enough legal grey area to allow for something like this to be preserved for future generations without calling down the full wrath of the copyright mafia. (It's distribution to the current generation that will get you in trouble.)
IANAL, but I have yet to hear even a rumor of any instance of someone getting into serious legal trouble for digitizing or format-shifting something like this and NOT distributing it. For example, you could make yourself an audio-CD copy, or some FLAC files on a Flash-based USB 2.0 Mass Storage Device, or whatever, and stick it in a safe deposit box (in case a house fire destroys the original discs or the equipment needed to play them breaks down).
There are other things you might be able to get away with as well. Providing a copy to the history department of your alma mater, for instance, might (IANAL,ATINLA) fall under academic fair use.
> If the copyright owner decides that they want the recordings
> back, then you will probably have to turn it over to them.
I'm not sure about that part. If the copy was obtained legitimately, I think the holder of the copy can keep, or even resell, that one copy.
He obviously doesn't own the copyright, so making additional copies would require permission, and releasing the thing into the public domain is clearly not in his bailiwick. Public performance or broadcast would probably require permission, too. But I'm pretty sure he can listen to the recording privately as many times as he wants.
> This looks cool, but I have to wonder how practical it is.
Less practical than just building an el, I'll warrant.
> Jamendo and Magnatune are great for finding popular music?
The word "popular" in that sentence was a euphemism. Think "popular" as in "hoi polloi". People who listen to real music are sometimes reluctant to tell other people outright that their favorite tunes are "the ill-conceived noise that feeds on and perpetuates the ignorance of the masses". Calling such drivel "popular music" means roughly the same thing, but it's less offensive.
> It *does* seem to have both Glenn Gould recordings of Goldberg,
I'm not a big Glenn Gould fan. Does it have Feltsman's performance of the same piece? What about BWV 1079 and 1080, does it have Feltsman on those? Hector Olivera? What about the Munchinger string ensemble adaptation of both pieces? For that matter, do they have a string ensemble adaptation of the Goldberg variations? What Susanne Lautenbacher recordings do they have of Bach pieces?
Meh. I'll just buy the CDs and rip them. The quality is better that way anyhow.
Are you kidding? Oracle makes _DEC_ look open. Apple's not even playing the same sport.
However, I'm not sure it necessarily follows that they'll close up Solaris. As far as Oracle is concerned, the OS is basically a complementary component. Nobody is going to pay, for any operating system, anything resembling the kind of money Oracle likes to charge. But you do need the OS in order to run the Oracle software stack, so it's complementary to (i.e., goes with) their main product line. Arguably, it is in Oracle's best interests to commoditize the OS, because that enhances the market for and/or helps sell the products on which Oracle makes their money.
The traditional thing to do, which would also work from a purely sales perspective, is to throw the OS in "for free" with any purchase, in much the same way that the car dealership gives you a free tank of gas (value: $20) when they sell you a new vehicle (value: $10000 or more; their commission on that: at least $500, often rather a lot more, plus the chance you may bring the car back to them for repairs later).
But leaving it open accomplishes more or less the same thing (the salesman can still list the OS and its features as benefits of the whole package) and has the added benefit of improving the OS and making it more attractive to a significant percentage of network administrators. The only downside is that another vendor potentially can also sell a competing product on the same platform (and thus their sales people can ALSO list the OS and its features), but that's purely theoretical in this case. Microsoft sure doesn't seem likely to sell SQL Server for Solaris any time soon, and no other competitor I can think of really seems dangerous to Oracle, at least for the present. They *bought* MySQL, and while Postgres is a pretty decent database product from a technical perspective, it doesn't have the kind of name recognition value or mindshare or corporate infrastructure behind it that would be needed to turn it into a viable competitor for Oracle in the "let us know you're interested and we'll fly a team of six salesmen out to visit you for a week" market segment where Oracle scores the bulk of their revenue.
So yeah, it's true that Oracle isn't generally very open, but I'm not sure Solaris will ever been in the same category for them as their main product line in that regard. Solaris could remain open without significantly altering Oracle's core business strategy, IMO.
> If every state recognized your right to free speech for example
Who's going to convince them all to recognize it? The government of Iran, just for example, is just about as inclined to recognize a right to free speech as the US government is to adopt Sharia law.
The only thing we really need to get everyone to agree on is jurisdictional procedure, specifically, that governments must only prosecute things that are done in their own jurisdiction. If I violate the laws of Bongoswana while living in the US, it would be kind of nice if I didn't have to worry about getting arrested for it if I ever travel in Bongoswana later for some reason.
The trick is figuring out how that applies to the internet. Since the internet is new, that hasn't really been fully hammered out yet. It needs to be. Obviously, we can't expect everyone on the internet to always obey the laws of every country on the internet at all times. That would be insane, no matter where you're from. We need to work out in a clear and consistent way exactly how jurisdiction works on the internet, so that people can know which countries' laws they are expected to observe in any given situation. (My vote would be, the laws of the country where you're sitting, and the laws of the country where the server is sitting.)
> I thought [Republicans] were the party that's big on censoring.
Not that kind of censorship.
Republicans want to censor porn (which a few of them define to include basic nudity in any vaguely sexual context). Democrats want to censor hate speech (which some of them define to include such things as saying that homosexuality is wrong). Neither major party in the US wants to censor the kind of thing this bill is about.
> Therefore, thieves dont prey on honest people; thieves prey on stupider thieves.
"Lie to a liar, for lies are his trade. Steal from a thief, for that is easy. Beware an honest man." -- Mathurin Kerbouchard
> Hell, they buy their music on a medium where the Beatles have no place...
> not that I am that big of a fan, but would you really buy music (as a real
> lover) in a store that doesn't have this part music history?
Certainly. I can easily see myself shopping at a specialty music store that only carries renaissance and baroque music, for instance, or a shop that only carries music performed on strings (violin and cello and so on). Narrowing the overall focus of the store's selection would create room for a more thoroughgoing variety within those limits. Heck, I wouldn't mind spending a couple of hours browsing the shelves in a music store that only sells recordings of late-baroque music played on stringed instruments. I bet they'd have some really good stuff.
Not sure what that has to do with iTunes, though.
Now I understand how Star Fleet officers operate the transporter!
> When I was a kid, I remember learning in school.
Yeah, me too. But this article isn't about schools, or computers in schools. This article is about computers in homes.
Like any tool, it depends how you use it. If you use the computer as an educational tool, then it is one. If you use it as a babysitter, just plonk the kid down in front of it and say "use this thing and don't bother me", then very little education will ensue.
> Maybe I'm paranoid.
So set your laptop up with full-disk encryption and a dead man's switch.
> Or maybe I just really want to reign hell down on whom ever steals my laptop.
In that case, set up the dead man's switch to install Microsoft Windows. I'll leave picking which *version* of Windows the DMS should install as an exercise for the astute reader.
> If you had a telephone number, would you expect the telephone
> company to voluntarily give up the account holder's info, as
> in "Yeah, that's Bob's number. Here's where he lives."?
If you had a phone number you could call the public library and ask them to look it up in the criss-cross (aka city/county directory) and give you not just the address but also a name. (Okay, it's slightly more complicated than that: first you use the area code and exchange portions of the phone number to figure out which public library to call. This is not difficult, however.)
There are no such reference tools for IP addresses, however, perhaps because they are often technically dynamic (even if they don't in practice change very often), perhaps because they haven't been around as long, perhaps because privacy advocates have a strong tendency to get very excited about their cause whenever the word "internet" is involved, or perhaps because most people aren't tech-savvy enough to be capable of making use of such a service anyway.
In England they use the word "country" for sub-national entities, the way we use the word "state" in the US. Canada uses the word "province". It's the same thing. The difference is purely one of terminology.
They also, in England, use the word "England" for what we would call "England proper" (if we ever even had a reason to refer to it specifically as distinct from the rest of the nation, which would be fairly unusual). But that's just terminology.
In American English, "England" (the most common term), "Britain" (somewhat common), and "The UK" (mostly used in formal contexts) are in practice treated as synonyms. Unless you're a geography buff talking about the island as a land form, "Great Britain" usually refers to the country as well. And yes, it's a country, i.e., a sovereign nation-state.
Our use of the words "England" and "Britain" to mean the country are consistent with similar usages with regard to other countries. In Holland they use the word "Holland" to refer to something less than the whole country, as well, but as far as Americans are concerned it means exactly the same thing as "The Netherlands". Compare also "Russia", which consistently meant the USSR until the break-up. (On the extremely rare occasion when we wanted to refer to the sub-national entity, we said "Russian SSR" or something like that. Of course, since the breakup Russia has been separated from some of its former constituent states.) Except in formal diplomatic contexts, "China" means the PROC and the area controlled (de facto) by the PROC; "Taiwan" means the ROC and their (de facto) territory, including the various minor islands.
It's a matter of convenience and shorthand. We don't have time to go around saying "The People's Republic of the Congo" all the time, so we just call it (the) "Congo". It's easier. We don't want to bother to say "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Minor Outlying Territories Under Her Royal Majesty Elizabeth II" or whatever the full complete official name of the country is, so we just say "England". It's easier. FWIW, we don't say "The United States of America" most of the time either. We generally just call it "America". It's easier.
> That's why we have the world series of baseball with only 2 countries playing!
When the World Series was organized, baseball wasn't played anywhere else. (The Japanese didn't start playing baseball until after World War II.)
I was going to say people without parasites in their brains have better things to do than play soccer.
Maybe they should check for correlations with victories in other third-rate sports, like bullfighting and field hockey and lacrosse.
Hey, I bet people with sickle-cell anemia are more likely to be taken captive by armed rebel insurgents than people without the disorder.
> have the right to try and sentence people without so much as a trial?
Neither a trial nor a sentence is required to ban someone from a facility. In most cases (barring any specific law to the contrary), whoever runs the facility can do that pretty much unilaterally, based on their own established criteria.
My boss, for instance, has the authority to ban someone from the public library where I work. She can do it just because they refuse to follow our policies. No trial is required. We do have a procedure that we follow, which includes multiple warnings for most offenses, but that's a procedure the library itself established (written up by the staff under the director's leadership and approved by the board) in order to help us deal with difficult situations. The procedure could be whatever the library needs it to be. No legal trial is required.
And yes, if someone is uncooperative when we ask them to leave, we can call the police to, umm, "assist" them in finding their way off library property. I had to do that once myself, on a Saturday when the director was not present. (We didn't ban that patron permanently, just for the day. She was obviously emotionally disturbed at the time.)
> not plagiarism... as the
> GP said, its Ghostwriting.
Yeah? You just try telling that to the Academic Dean.
> (yet in this all things to Chairman Mao world, Obama gets credit).
Nothing new about that. The President always gets credit or blame for things that happen during his administration, even if they aren't directly his doing. George Bush (the first one) got the blame for a recession that wasn't in any way his doing. Clinton got credit for the increased revenues that finally soaked up (most of) the Cold War deficit.
FDR gets credit for ending the Great Depression, though as far as I can tell there is no reason to believe his policies had any real impact on it at all.
Reagan gets credit for ending the cold war, and while his military spending policies probably *accelerated* the bankrupting of the USSR, it was inevitable (and, indeed, nearing its conclusion) before Reagan was even elected. Other US Presidents contributed to the effort as well, but as far as public opinion goes, it's as simple as this: Reagan was in office when Gorbachev started talking about Glasnost. Reagan said "tear down this wall", and a couple of years later it came down. So he gets credit for it. That's politics.
Heck, Lincoln gets credit for ending slavery, even though he explicitly stated, and explained at some length, that that was never one of his goals. He was against slavery in principle and wanted to regulate it and prevent the spread of it to additional states, in the hopes that it would die out eventually or be done away with later, but he did not set out to end it once and for all, and he certainly didn't fight the war for that purpose. All he really wanted to do was hold the country together. In fact, if he hadn't been killed, reconstruction would have been handled rather differently and slavery in the south MIGHT have been allowed to continue for several more decades (though that's by no means certain).
> Because there's only two potential outcomes for the other child: boy or girl
It's not quite a fair coin toss, though. The ratio of males to females is a big higher than 1:1 among children (and much lower among the elderly, though that's less relevant to the question). Of course, this is assuming that the speaker is human...
Did I mention that I've gone back to Firefox 2.0.0.20? It's rock solid. Stable. Never gives me any trouble. Never loses data, or unexpectedly replaces the content of a tab -- unlike 3.x, which loses tabs on a regular basis.
If I needed one *more* bad thing to say about 3.x (as if mentioning the "awesomeness bar" weren't ammunition enough), now I can call it "the Farmville player's version". Haha. It's not a very substantive criticism, but it sure is amusing.
I had no problems on my desktop, which is several years old and wasn't high-end even when new. Let's see... /proc/cpuinfo says it's a Celeron running at 2.13GHz with 256K of cache.
No problem. This computer can't play Flash-based games (like Bejeweled, which my sister is really into for some reason) without setting off the heat alarm, but Firefox displayed the 1249x19444 image without batting an eye. It was zoomed to fit by default, but clicking once zoomed it to 100%, and I can scroll through the whole thing just as if it were a web page. An ugly web page with a lot of missing images, but that's not my computer's fault.
Oh, probably should mention that I'm running Firefox 2.0.0.20. I got tired of the dataloss bugs in the 3.x series and downgraded. Not sure this is at all relevant to the ability to show a large image, but it's sufficiently out of the mainstream that I thought I'd mention it.