Um, read entry 2.5 of the Ada FAQ. Ada was designed by a committee for the Department of Defense, based on an original design by Jean Ichbiah, with modifications made throughout the period from 1978 to 1983, then the later committees that modified and approved it to what became Ada95. It has DOD and Committeeness written all over it...makes me barf every time I have to look at it.
They didn't look over "compress" because gzip had more market share. Relatively speaking, it didn't, since compress was still included in EVERY non-free unix distribution around, whether BSD or SYSV based. The problem was that compress was such a small, insignificant part of a Unix distribution that they couldn't get a dime out of it. The support of GIF and TIFF files, on the other hand, is a MAJOR component of most image processing programs, particularly after the web and how the early browsers had settled on GIF a sa standard.
One must remember that the percentage of sales a patent is good for in royalities is directly related to how important the patented technology is to the application using the technology.
They are going to have to face up to the fact that they are a grown, mature company
Uh...M$ is many things, but they're aren't mature yet...they're still a company that's being run by teenage geeks who are enacting their competitive revenge against all the jocks whoever put them down in grade school and high school, or are still trying to shove their attitude to their parents that, "hey, i can do this my own damn way and don't have to follow your rules anymore."
M$ is going to act like immature little teenagers sticking their collective middle fingers to any form of authority for as long as those two are still in charge of the company.
Re:Editors/Debuggers only go so far...
on
Java IDEs?
·
· Score: 2
To summarize: you can't get dramatically more productive by changing how you do something you do. You get dramatically more productive by changing what you do. How your developers approach software development is far more important than the tools they use; how the tools they use suppport the approach they take is far more important than the tools themselves (and how many other people use those tools).
I'd be willing to pay a subscription fee, say 10 dollars a month, plus say 25 to 50 cents per song I download in order to reward artists for making music I like.
Except if you look at how the Music Industry distributes income from that sort of a mass-money collecting like that (e.g., the "broadcast licenses" collected by ASCAP from radio stations and bars/restaurants), you'll know that none of that will specifically go to the artist you downloaded, even though that information (artist x had y downloads, so artist x should get y * % of per-download fee) is readily available through computers.
The ASCAP and RIAA licenses for online mp3 and realplay stations (like those on live365.com) goes to the "general" fund. The fact that a station can say it had X listeners and played these Y tracks means nothing to them.
The money from "general fund" is distributed through an algorithm based on radio-ratings and airplay. Yes, that's right, you can be trading progressive rock exclusively, and britney spears (well, her copyright holders) is going to get all the money. An irish bar may play all traditional irish music, or stuff written by the performing artist...and britney spears is gonna get all the money.
And the worst part about that is that even if they didn't do this (which they will), and they actually looked at per-download numbers and multiplied that $0.50 / download * the number of downloads and determine that semi-obscure prog rock megaband Platypus should get $500 for the month of march...THEN the RIAA will take their "cut" and still consider the royality rate as if it was a cd sale -- the band will only get 10% or less of the take. For doing NOTHING, the RIAA will continue to take 90% of the income.
Artists make "profits" on concerts only where there is low overhead. Touring "North America" is NOT low overhead. Bands are incredibly lucky to break even. Remember that in some (most) record contracts, the "touring support" (if it exists at all) is (say the magic word) recoupable -- it comes out of the piddly 10% of the cd sales that the artists get (if they're lucky to get a rate that high). Artists can't tour without a strong initial $ 10K-60K to pay for things that HAVE to be paid up front, before a single ticket is sold. These include backing musicians (who work on salary, not percent of gross), roadies (ditto), hotels, transportation (taking a bus across America is NOT cheap), equipment rental (if you're a European band, you'll sometimes rent american rather than spend the money shipping all your stuff to the states)...and in all that the Manager gets a 20% cut of EVERYTHING incoming.
Most bands who only have audiences large enough to play small 300-800 seaters (not that those places have seats) lose money drastically.
The only way to beat that is to go as cheap as you can, such as Steve Howe's accoustic tours (93, 94, 2000), where the trip was just him, his manager (who also did sound mix), the guitars, his sequencer/tape relay, their luggage, and a station wagon, and that was the whole touring entourage (and very cheap out of the way hotels). Needless to say, that was a profitable tour...but that's the only way to do it...and even then, the calls back to his wife and family in England ate into that profity sizeably...
Editors/Debuggers only go so far...
on
Java IDEs?
·
· Score: 2
The two aspects of development that sped up my coding time (albeit, more than 50% of my time is research and design, still), are automated testing (using junit) and the concept of refactoring.
Automated testing allows developers to let the software decide what's broken and what isn't, so the developer isn't spending 75% of the coding time staring at 20meg log files looking for the line that is wrong, on every run. It also improves design because it requires the programmer to have already decided what the "right" answer for an algorithm should be, thus the algorithm is properly designed to completion.
Refactoring became very important -- its critical for developers to learn how to change and improve what's already working to create code and designs that are cleaner and easier to work with for extensions and new features. I've found refactoring can do wonders in solving problems that would otherwise have had to have been dealt with by Brooks' philosophy of "Throw the first version out". With refactoring, you can save much of the code / algorithms of the first version while still throwing away the faulty architecture that is making extensions difficult; you can learn to not be afraid of changing code that works.
I'd love to give the book to every graduating CS major looking into a programming job, since the first thing they're given is a "hey, fix up this code" job, usually.
I use emacs and JDE (discussed in other comments here) for my own work, including on Windows platforms, but if you go for a commercial IDE, there are plugin extensions for some IDEs (including Borland's JBuilder) that are made to embed JUnit and refactorings into the IDE; you'll see pointers to them on the web pages.
I did it in 8th grade as part of my science fair project.
Take two normal microscope slides, spray paint them black. One is slit directly in the center, parallel to the short ends. The other is slit with two slits, about 1.5cm apart, where each is an even distance from the center.
Mount them (and you can just use tape for this) in a SMALL shoebox (more the size of kids shoes. actually, a box that holds 500 business cards is about the right size too).
Cut a hole ( 1cm in diameter) in the center of one end of the shoebox and a rectangle (about 2x3 or smaller) out of the other one. put a sheet of newsprint or tracing paper, something really transpearant, to cover the 2x3 rectangle.
Lights dimmed low, hold the small hole up to a candle or a halogen bulb. The light source is important. Florescents and most incandescents won't work. You should see at least something of the effect against the newsprint.
From there, play with moving the two slides forward and back to get the best focus, but the effect should be there to some degree no matter what.
Actually, if memory serves, VH-1 was one of the first stations to do it...and I'm pretty sure they were doing it before 1991, but I'm not positive on that.
However, with Digital Cable in America, you don't really need them anymore 'cause the cable box itself will throw the logo on the screen as you change the channel, and you can call it up at any time on your remote, so eventually when the entire US is on digital cable or direct-tv satelite (who do the same thing), the need for them to identify the station during channel-surfing will be done.
Then they'll definitely have decided to keep 'em around to "mess up" programs so that your home-taping is getting inferior copies and you'll eventually want to buy a vid-tape or dvd release. X-Files, Robotech, and Simpsons season 1 are definitely showing that people are willing to buy whole seasons of things at a time, and would prefer that to getting the "one tape a month" approach that older syndicated shows were offering on TV promotions (e.g., MASH and the Honeymooners).
Actually, I'd like to see channels do the opposite of what they do now. When surfing, and I hit a program, I generally will decide based on the program content if i want to stick around. I'd rather be told what channel i've hit when i hit a commercial, in order to decide if i wanna stick around and wait 'til a program starts. This is the approach that HBO and Showtime do for their pay networks -- the programs are logo free, the promotions in between have the logo.
Microsoft is so laden with fat there is no way they will be able to survive the economic downturn in its current state.
They don't have to, per se. Like the old joke goes ("I don't have to outrun the lion..."), all M$ has to do to survive the downturn is to outlast everybody else -- if they do that (and this "settlement" certainly gives them the power to do that by not taking ANY power away from them), then they'll last forever because there will be nowhere else to go...
But you are right, somebody who wants to leak a government document could potentially come from a unique IP, post once, leave, and never be heard from again.
Government documents are rarely something that someone would "leak" through Slashdot. In reality, it would be internal memos and information from a company, a "Trade Secret", that in most states loses its value entirely once its leaked.
But the "unique IP" isn't the best way to hide, as that IP would just be assigned to someone else later. In reality, the issue of tracing someone gets more difficult by IP Masquerading and IP redirecting firewalls. The rest of the world sees everything coming from my company as coming from a single IP, even though we have XX number of machines and users behind the wall. If enough of them read slashdot on a regular basis (and in a software development house, that's common), then it would be impossible to trace the post to an individual.
This way, VA can't come a month down the road asking about who posted comment #12345, the link is severed and there's no longer any information.
I don't see that as working. If the information WAS there but isn't, then the means by which the Gov could affect things are still there: the court or the feds could order Slashdot to stop the deletion in the future to try to catch the AC in a future post. No, in reality the best solution is to just not have that information saved at all, period.
A court order to implement a logging of ACs and traces that doesn't already exist is far easier to resist legally than a court order to enable a logging technology already built into the system and merely "disabled" or having short-duration logs.
You really can't do that and have it be truly anonymous. If the database under slashdot kept ANY information connecting an AC posting with the person who posted it, that info could be used against the AC. If Netscape & JWZ couldn't hold back the "really bad attitude" against a subpeona, then VA won't have (and wouldn't use) the resources to resist a legal subpeona demanding the evidence that connects an AC with his post that is being used against him or his employer or slashdot itself.
The only protection an AC, and Slashdot, has is to be able to honestly and truthfully say "That information does not exist and never did."
I would disagree. Yes, I can load Linux myself, but I don't want to. I'm a developer, not a sysadmin. I need a box where I can get the editor I want (emacs & joe), the compilers I need (java, and gnu C++ suffice), a browser for surfing for new libraries (mozilla, with netscape for pages that have broken old-standards javascript), and some media software (xcdroast/cdrdao, grip, xmms, and realplay).
And then I need to get to work.
I don't want to have to shop around for this or that hardware to constantly double-check that my hardware is supported by linux drivers (either OSS or vendor written). I don't have time.
I pay Dell or Penguin (my home box) to make enough hardware options so I can trust that they and Linux will get along, because I have more important things to do than go surfing the HOWTOs and mailing list archives only to find out that X hardware like some sound or graphics card that I got from "Best Buy" isn't supported and will never be supported, thus wasting the purchase utterly. I pay Dell for the service of getting a box with linux on it so I can get to my work (with a box that doesn't BSOD on me every 2 hours), not so I have a hobby box to keep fidgetting with hardware and latest&greatest kernels and patches and stuff, hoping some combination of drivers finally gets my such-n-such hardware to finally work so I don't have to keep dropping back into windows to use it.
Dell has not dropped Linux totally. Dell has dropped linux for their cheap, low-end systems, your standard home desktop (so, yes, GNU/Gnome|KDE/Linux isn't "ready" to be a home desktop system...but in my opinion it wasn't meant to be and shouldn't be force-fed into that environment).
Dell DOES still support and distribute RH7.1 on their workstation and server lines, and states they will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.
People don't just casually go "I wanna use linux" -- people pick Unix or Linux systems because they want to get something done and have decided that Microsoft products will cost too much and get in the way of actually getting things done. And if you have stuff you "have to get done", generally, you need a high-end workstation or server to do it.
A circuit court does have the right to say "we will not accept cases brought under such-n-such provisions of this act", but only after the president signs it. This is what initially happened to the CDA, particularly the no-abortion-speech provision; the court knew it was gonna be a problem and said that would be thrown out at the first instance.
But technically, a court can't address the constitutionallity of a law until after the law has actually been used to prosecute someone or a civil case has appeared before the court that was not eventually settled out of court.
(OT follows) The latter has been important in much of the patent issues -- there's usually a settlement in 99.9999% of patent court cases because stocks get hurt during long trials, so no court has really been in the position to actually address the issue of the legitimacy of a patent or of the current patent law.
I view the book instead as the first real book written in hyperlink-style
James Burke has already done that sort of thing, in The Pinball Effect and The Knowledge Web -- any time a subject in the book (histories of technology, effectively the companion books to TLC's Connections 2 and Connections 3 series respectively) has references in other parts of the book, he provides the page number and an id for that reference in the margin, so you can switch gears and see where the same invention or event had other effects described in the book instead of just following the text in order or having to check the index to cross-reference the subject.
I found that, yes, the sheer numbers of different cameras and vid-tapes and views was surprising...but at the same time, it helped us deal with it a little more.
With previous significant events where the event itself was caught on film (Pearl Harbor, the assassination and funeral of Kennedy, the attempt on Reagan, the destruction of the Challenger), there was only one version, one angle, one view of the event...and that view was burned into our eyes and into our minds forever -- we all share that same view because it was the only view the media could give us.
With tuesday's events, things are different. There are multiple views, multiple angles, different tapes were made public at different times. There is no one specific version of the crash and the fall that we each will share -- for the first time in a major, caught on film and shown on the media, tragedy, each american's view of it is as individual as if he was there to witness it himself.
Probably won't be the last, but I did feel it was an interesting distinction of the how the new century will differ from the old.
The "refundable" is the standard "you're paying by credit card" disclaimer. It means that you can recall the money if it really wasn't you using your credit card number to make the payment. They probably won't mail IRS-acceptable receipts until after that 30 days so you can't just print out the "sale confirmed" receipt to give to the IRS and then ask for the money back later...otherwise, its kinda ripe for tax-return abuse...
The State Department was evacuated Tuesday due to a possible explosion or fire amid a rash of explosions in New York and Washington.
A senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the incident appeared connected with two plane crashes at the World Trade Center, an explosion at the Pentagon and the evacuation of the White House.
"Something has happened at the State Department," the source said. "We don't know what yet. We hear it might have been a plane."
source : http://www.wtop.com/
earlier they reported on the explosion, claiming it was a car bomb, but later rescinded that. other news sources continue to insist the state department was not touched (that the building is intact, regardless of any incident) including eyewitness accounts.
Its more than just money. Trade Secrets (e.g., the code itself in M$'s case) represent shareholder value. The are the assets (even if on the books M$ doesn't actually value them as being worth anything) by which Wall Street judges them. Open-Source software isn't considered a valuable commodity when Wall Street looks at it. To Wall Street, what you give away isn't worth anything unless by giving it away you get rid of any alternatives; e.g., only give it away if you get a monopoly out of it, because then the monopoly is of value (though the software still isn't).
Anybody else notice the lack of Y2K compliance? I've seen the same thing happen at sites with an old implementation of wwwboard...look at the bottom of the issue and you'll see:
This page was last updated on Monday, September 3, 101.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, read entry 2.5 of the Ada FAQ. Ada was designed by a committee for the Department of Defense, based on an original design by Jean Ichbiah, with modifications made throughout the period from 1978 to 1983, then the later committees that modified and approved it to what became Ada95. It has DOD and Committeeness written all over it...makes me barf every time I have to look at it.
One must remember that the percentage of sales a patent is good for in royalities is directly related to how important the patented technology is to the application using the technology.
Uh...M$ is many things, but they're aren't mature yet...they're still a company that's being run by teenage geeks who are enacting their competitive revenge against all the jocks whoever put them down in grade school and high school, or are still trying to shove their attitude to their parents that, "hey, i can do this my own damn way and don't have to follow your rules anymore."
M$ is going to act like immature little teenagers sticking their collective middle fingers to any form of authority for as long as those two are still in charge of the company.
To summarize: you can't get dramatically more productive by changing how you do something you do. You get dramatically more productive by changing what you do. How your developers approach software development is far more important than the tools they use; how the tools they use suppport the approach they take is far more important than the tools themselves (and how many other people use those tools).
Except if you look at how the Music Industry distributes income from that sort of a mass-money collecting like that (e.g., the "broadcast licenses" collected by ASCAP from radio stations and bars/restaurants), you'll know that none of that will specifically go to the artist you downloaded, even though that information (artist x had y downloads, so artist x should get y * % of per-download fee) is readily available through computers.
The ASCAP and RIAA licenses for online mp3 and realplay stations (like those on live365.com) goes to the "general" fund. The fact that a station can say it had X listeners and played these Y tracks means nothing to them.
The money from "general fund" is distributed through an algorithm based on radio-ratings and airplay. Yes, that's right, you can be trading progressive rock exclusively, and britney spears (well, her copyright holders) is going to get all the money. An irish bar may play all traditional irish music, or stuff written by the performing artist...and britney spears is gonna get all the money.
And the worst part about that is that even if they didn't do this (which they will), and they actually looked at per-download numbers and multiplied that $0.50 / download * the number of downloads and determine that semi-obscure prog rock megaband Platypus should get $500 for the month of march...THEN the RIAA will take their "cut" and still consider the royality rate as if it was a cd sale -- the band will only get 10% or less of the take. For doing NOTHING, the RIAA will continue to take 90% of the income.
Most bands who only have audiences large enough to play small 300-800 seaters (not that those places have seats) lose money drastically.
The only way to beat that is to go as cheap as you can, such as Steve Howe's accoustic tours (93, 94, 2000), where the trip was just him, his manager (who also did sound mix), the guitars, his sequencer/tape relay, their luggage, and a station wagon, and that was the whole touring entourage (and very cheap out of the way hotels). Needless to say, that was a profitable tour...but that's the only way to do it...and even then, the calls back to his wife and family in England ate into that profity sizeably...
Automated testing allows developers to let the software decide what's broken and what isn't, so the developer isn't spending 75% of the coding time staring at 20meg log files looking for the line that is wrong, on every run. It also improves design because it requires the programmer to have already decided what the "right" answer for an algorithm should be, thus the algorithm is properly designed to completion.
Refactoring became very important -- its critical for developers to learn how to change and improve what's already working to create code and designs that are cleaner and easier to work with for extensions and new features. I've found refactoring can do wonders in solving problems that would otherwise have had to have been dealt with by Brooks' philosophy of "Throw the first version out". With refactoring, you can save much of the code / algorithms of the first version while still throwing away the faulty architecture that is making extensions difficult; you can learn to not be afraid of changing code that works.
I'd love to give the book to every graduating CS major looking into a programming job, since the first thing they're given is a "hey, fix up this code" job, usually.
I use emacs and JDE (discussed in other comments here) for my own work, including on Windows platforms, but if you go for a commercial IDE, there are plugin extensions for some IDEs (including Borland's JBuilder) that are made to embed JUnit and refactorings into the IDE; you'll see pointers to them on the web pages.
The implecations of light being a wave are nothing, as are the implecations of light being a particle...
Its the fact that it is the two at the same time that's troublesome...
I did it in 8th grade as part of my science fair project.
Take two normal microscope slides, spray paint them black. One is slit directly in the center, parallel to the short ends. The other is slit with two slits, about 1.5cm apart, where each is an even distance from the center.
Mount them (and you can just use tape for this) in a SMALL shoebox (more the size of kids shoes. actually, a box that holds 500 business cards is about the right size too).
Cut a hole ( 1cm in diameter) in the center of one end of the shoebox and a rectangle (about 2x3 or smaller) out of the other one. put a sheet of newsprint or tracing paper, something really transpearant, to cover the 2x3 rectangle.
Lights dimmed low, hold the small hole up to a candle or a halogen bulb. The light source is important. Florescents and most incandescents won't work. You should see at least something of the effect against the newsprint.
From there, play with moving the two slides forward and back to get the best focus, but the effect should be there to some degree no matter what.
Actually, if memory serves, VH-1 was one of the first stations to do it...and I'm pretty sure they were doing it before 1991, but I'm not positive on that.
However, with Digital Cable in America, you don't really need them anymore 'cause the cable box itself will throw the logo on the screen as you change the channel, and you can call it up at any time on your remote, so eventually when the entire US is on digital cable or direct-tv satelite (who do the same thing), the need for them to identify the station during channel-surfing will be done.
Then they'll definitely have decided to keep 'em around to "mess up" programs so that your home-taping is getting inferior copies and you'll eventually want to buy a vid-tape or dvd release. X-Files, Robotech, and Simpsons season 1 are definitely showing that people are willing to buy whole seasons of things at a time, and would prefer that to getting the "one tape a month" approach that older syndicated shows were offering on TV promotions (e.g., MASH and the Honeymooners).
Actually, I'd like to see channels do the opposite of what they do now. When surfing, and I hit a program, I generally will decide based on the program content if i want to stick around. I'd rather be told what channel i've hit when i hit a commercial, in order to decide if i wanna stick around and wait 'til a program starts. This is the approach that HBO and Showtime do for their pay networks -- the programs are logo free, the promotions in between have the logo.
actually, i want the south park version...the south park edition of the Phantom Menace trailer is still one of the funniest 'net downloads i've got.
Though Troops has its moments, too...
They don't have to, per se. Like the old joke goes ("I don't have to outrun the lion..."), all M$ has to do to survive the downturn is to outlast everybody else -- if they do that (and this "settlement" certainly gives them the power to do that by not taking ANY power away from them), then they'll last forever because there will be nowhere else to go...
The Story of Magic from the Jargon File always amuses me...
Was this release assembed from the mozilla 0.9.4 source before or after the patch to fix linux plugins was installed?
Government documents are rarely something that someone would "leak" through Slashdot. In reality, it would be internal memos and information from a company, a "Trade Secret", that in most states loses its value entirely once its leaked.
But the "unique IP" isn't the best way to hide, as that IP would just be assigned to someone else later. In reality, the issue of tracing someone gets more difficult by IP Masquerading and IP redirecting firewalls. The rest of the world sees everything coming from my company as coming from a single IP, even though we have XX number of machines and users behind the wall. If enough of them read slashdot on a regular basis (and in a software development house, that's common), then it would be impossible to trace the post to an individual.
This way, VA can't come a month down the road asking about who posted comment #12345, the link is severed and there's no longer any information.
I don't see that as working. If the information WAS there but isn't, then the means by which the Gov could affect things are still there: the court or the feds could order Slashdot to stop the deletion in the future to try to catch the AC in a future post. No, in reality the best solution is to just not have that information saved at all, period.
A court order to implement a logging of ACs and traces that doesn't already exist is far easier to resist legally than a court order to enable a logging technology already built into the system and merely "disabled" or having short-duration logs.
The only protection an AC, and Slashdot, has is to be able to honestly and truthfully say "That information does not exist and never did."
And then I need to get to work.
I don't want to have to shop around for this or that hardware to constantly double-check that my hardware is supported by linux drivers (either OSS or vendor written). I don't have time.
I pay Dell or Penguin (my home box) to make enough hardware options so I can trust that they and Linux will get along, because I have more important things to do than go surfing the HOWTOs and mailing list archives only to find out that X hardware like some sound or graphics card that I got from "Best Buy" isn't supported and will never be supported, thus wasting the purchase utterly. I pay Dell for the service of getting a box with linux on it so I can get to my work (with a box that doesn't BSOD on me every 2 hours), not so I have a hobby box to keep fidgetting with hardware and latest&greatest kernels and patches and stuff, hoping some combination of drivers finally gets my such-n-such hardware to finally work so I don't have to keep dropping back into windows to use it.
Dell DOES still support and distribute RH7.1 on their workstation and server lines, and states they will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.
People don't just casually go "I wanna use linux" -- people pick Unix or Linux systems because they want to get something done and have decided that Microsoft products will cost too much and get in the way of actually getting things done. And if you have stuff you "have to get done", generally, you need a high-end workstation or server to do it.
But technically, a court can't address the constitutionallity of a law until after the law has actually been used to prosecute someone or a civil case has appeared before the court that was not eventually settled out of court.
(OT follows) The latter has been important in much of the patent issues -- there's usually a settlement in 99.9999% of patent court cases because stocks get hurt during long trials, so no court has really been in the position to actually address the issue of the legitimacy of a patent or of the current patent law.
James Burke has already done that sort of thing, in The Pinball Effect and The Knowledge Web -- any time a subject in the book (histories of technology, effectively the companion books to TLC's Connections 2 and Connections 3 series respectively) has references in other parts of the book, he provides the page number and an id for that reference in the margin, so you can switch gears and see where the same invention or event had other effects described in the book instead of just following the text in order or having to check the index to cross-reference the subject.
With previous significant events where the event itself was caught on film (Pearl Harbor, the assassination and funeral of Kennedy, the attempt on Reagan, the destruction of the Challenger), there was only one version, one angle, one view of the event...and that view was burned into our eyes and into our minds forever -- we all share that same view because it was the only view the media could give us.
With tuesday's events, things are different. There are multiple views, multiple angles, different tapes were made public at different times. There is no one specific version of the crash and the fall that we each will share -- for the first time in a major, caught on film and shown on the media, tragedy, each american's view of it is as individual as if he was there to witness it himself.
Probably won't be the last, but I did feel it was an interesting distinction of the how the new century will differ from the old.
The "refundable" is the standard "you're paying by credit card" disclaimer. It means that you can recall the money if it really wasn't you using your credit card number to make the payment. They probably won't mail IRS-acceptable receipts until after that 30 days so you can't just print out the "sale confirmed" receipt to give to the IRS and then ask for the money back later...otherwise, its kinda ripe for tax-return abuse...
State Department Is Evacuated
WASHINGTON
The State Department was evacuated Tuesday due to a possible explosion or fire amid a rash of explosions in New York and Washington.
A senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the incident appeared connected with two plane crashes at the World Trade Center, an explosion at the Pentagon and the evacuation of the White House.
"Something has happened at the State Department," the source said. "We don't know what yet. We hear it might have been a plane."
source : http://www.wtop.com/
earlier they reported on the explosion, claiming it was a car bomb, but later rescinded that. other news sources continue to insist the state department was not touched (that the building is intact, regardless of any incident) including eyewitness accounts.
Its more than just money. Trade Secrets (e.g., the code itself in M$'s case) represent shareholder value. The are the assets (even if on the books M$ doesn't actually value them as being worth anything) by which Wall Street judges them. Open-Source software isn't considered a valuable commodity when Wall Street looks at it. To Wall Street, what you give away isn't worth anything unless by giving it away you get rid of any alternatives; e.g., only give it away if you get a monopoly out of it, because then the monopoly is of value (though the software still isn't).
Anybody else notice the lack of Y2K compliance? I've seen the same thing happen at sites with an old implementation of wwwboard...look at the bottom of the issue and you'll see:
This page was last updated on Monday, September 3, 101.
heh heh heh