To the mods: I have Karma to throw away, so that's what I'm doing. This is a totally worthless rant and only marginally connected to the topic of this story.
That said, I am so sick of hearing about litigation. It seems the Great American Dream is no longer to succeed in life through hard work, innovation and entrepreneurial prowess but to be on the constant lookout for someone to sue for wholly unrealistic sums.
A few years ago I was at work and suddenly found myself in so much pain I actually went to my knees. It was as if someone was exploring my guts with a red-hot fist and anything but a gentle touch. That lasted a few minutes during which I was fairly certain I was going to die and pretty certain it would have to be an improvement.
I was a healthy guy in my early 20s and had had no previous symptoms. The doctor at my HMO didn't see me straight away. I was seen by a nurse practitioner. She did a lot of tests, all of which came back negative right away or would take a day or more to show results. The abdominal X-Ray was mostly inconclusive, but I didn't appear to be bleeding internally. The nurse mentioned an MRI in passing and I immediately had the urge to bolt from the office -- I'm somewhat claustrophobic and pretty sure I'd go batty in that little tube. She smiled, said that was a common reaction and she didn't think it would be immediately necessary. She called in a nurse, they chatted; a bit later the nurse came back and said the only OpenMRI lab in town was booked solid for days.
More tests. She went over my symptoms with me again, poked around on my stomach until I wanted to hurt her in various creative ways but in reality just laid there and tried not to cry while offering one emphatic "YES!" after another to, "Does this hurt?"
She decided after that that I had pancreatitis, which is excruciatingly painful but never lasts more than 48 hours or so. She gave me a prescription for antibiotics and pain meds and I called my mom to come get me. The next day was hell. 48 hours! I figured I'd make it, if only just. But then 48 hours passed. And I went back. More tests, more head-scratching. I learned nothing new and was sent home. 72 hours. I felt a bit better, I supposed, or maybe I was just getting used to it. By the fourth day I was fine. It was later in the week that I found out what I'd really had: a small perforation in my stomach. I could have died at any point along the way. Surgery is usually indicated and the condition is considered immediately life-threatening. I was one of the rare few who have the things heal up on their own.
Everyone said I should sue. Everyone said I should be seriously, litigiously pissed. Especially since the actual doctor didn't see me until AFTER the whole thing was basically over (on the third day, when I was showing improvement, at which she adopted a "Wait and see, but don't hesitate to get to the ER if it gets worse" attitude.).
Except that I did a little research and I had perfectly described the symptoms of pancreatitis, apparently for good reason. It seems that acid from my stomach was leaking onto my pancreas (which is why it hurt a LOT more to lay down than to stand or sit, I guess). It was a perfect mimic. I was even sore in all the right places. A friend of mine has an uncle who is a trial lawyer and he was ready to jump all over it. "But I begged off the MRI," I told him. "But she didn't stress it hard enough," he replied. "The burden was hers, you have no medical training, you only knew you didn't want to get shoved in a dark hole. She was more than willing to comply because MRI's aren't cheap." To this day I don't actually know if an MRI would have helped. I suppose it would have shown the perforation the X-Ray missed. I suppose, in the end, it would have also caused me to undergo a surgery that, luckily, in the end I didn't need anyway. But... that really was just luck.
It went back and forth. In the end, I didn't sue. I might even h
The courts just ruled in favor of Morpheus and Grokster, which are basically just search engines of another kind (compared to, say, Google).
Now, if it's true that all these guys did was provide a search facility, why doesn't that ruling apply?
If all they did was provide a means to search for information they do not control or distribute themselves doesn't that mean ALL search engines could be sued? I mean, dang, I can go to MSN right now and find any number of sites willing to give me cracks and CD keys for Microsoft products (among many, many others). Does this mean the BSA should go after the Microsoft Network for... violating Microsoft's copyright and IP rights? AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger both allow users to share files (even entire directories). How is this different?
I really don't get it. If it's as simple as that, why didn't any number of search providers and special interest groups (Google, MSN, Lycos, AOL, Yahoo!, EFF) step forward and say, "You know what, we don't think so. You will back off. You will do it now."
What am I missing? They had to do something other than just provide a neutral search facility, right?
Under the Morpheus/Grokster ruling they could claim they designed the engine just for legit uses (or just because they felt like doing it as an intellectual exercise) and cannot be responsible if individuals not under the creators' direct control use the tool for uses other than those for which it was intended.
This goes back to the hammer analogy, I suppose: If I go to ACE and buy a hammer to bludgeon someone to death with, can the victim's family sue ACE and/or the manufacturer? That would be insane since the primary use of a hammer is not the braining of people who piss me off. Justification could be made for anything from automobiles to peanuts (ie, secretly feeding them to someone who is deathly allergic to them).
If all they truly did was create a search engine, it seems to me the RIAA simply used its gigantic financial power (in the form of threats of endless, costly litigation) to extort money from a tiny foe because going after a much larger, more dangerous but identical (in principle) foe (such as Google, MSN or Lycos) wouldn't be so easy, and because certain foes (Morhpeus, Grokster) had already been declared off-limits.
That is, I believe, the very defintion of "bully."
I doubt you'll ever hear the RIAA disclose how its targets (almost wrote: victims) are chosen. That's all part of the plan, of course. They aren't going to issue a dossier on the type of person they are likely to go after because that would give free reign to everyone else. At this point the best the RIAA can do, in the face of millions and millions of traders, is try to make people afraid to "play the odds".
If you think about it, we do this every day on larger and smaller scales. Many people buy lottery tickets where the odds of winning are so high you're virtually guaranteed to be throwing away your money (thus the big advertising, here in Florida, that tries to drive home the message that lottery revenue = education dollars: Sure, you aren't going to win, but, heck, do it for the kids!).
If we're alone on a highway we know the cops patrol regularly we might be less inclined to speed because we are easy to single out. If there are a bunch of cars around us zipping along it's easier to believe we won't get caught if we fall in behind them. One of the cars up front will get busted, right? Just like a single cop isn't likely to pull over 15 cars at once, the RIAA can't possibly go after millions and millions of traders, they're just hoping that if they go after "enough" and if the people they go after are people we can identify with, we can more easily envision ourselves suffering the same fate in spite of the overwhelming odds against it.
If the RIAA begins to target consumers I bet they make every effort to achieve the appearance of acting randomly while at the same time going after as broad a set of demographics as possible -- a university student here, a bored middle-aged housewife there, the parents of some twelve-year-old with an mp3 addiction...
I was expecting a lot of CEO-speak and doubletalk (redundant?). You know, "productizing" and stuff. I wasn't expecting his answers to come across as candid and conversational. He didn't "boost" Lindows nearly as much as I figured he would. Maybe I'm just easily fooled...
One of the questions that really caught my attention was the one about apt-get.
Does apt-get break ClickNRun? I'd be willing to bet you'd end up with a seriously mangled system if you dist-upraded using apt, added some packages, then tried to use CNR. Does anyone know how this is handled?
This is lifted verbatim from The Unix Hater's Handbook. How lame is that?
There isn't a -1 Plagiarism but you mods should make this disappear.
All the AC had to do was attribute it, but I guess that was too much trouble and wouldn't have made it look like he's actually managed to generate an original thought.
Interesting that it should show up in this discussion...
And don't forget the Trill, what with Crusher doing Riker because he was carrying the symbiote but then balking when it was moved from Riker to a female host: "Maybe one day our ability to love will not be so limited."
Or Dax... the only hot lesbian action I've ever seen in Trek...
Tripp is Chief Engineer. That's why T'Pol always gets left in command when Archer is off flying through stars and stuff (and then usually placed in a situation where it would be "logical" but not very nice to betray Archer "for his own good".)
Morpheus and Grokster can't do a thing and would be Napster-style stupid to try.
That's part of the basis of their defense. The "network" is just a transient agglomeration of clients. The reason they are still alive is because there's not a central office through which all that spam was routed. By sending that message out to a couple hundred thousand people, RIAA took bandwidth piecemeal from members of the network but not from any one entity that could claim damages.
I'm sure the RIAA would love it if they'd try, though.
Here is the current development plan:
fix bugs add directories and namespaces add additional transports add support for internationalization (GNU gettext) port to OS X port to Win32
And here is a paper (PostScript) describing what GNUNet means by anonymity.
Anonymity is the lack of distinction of an individual from a (large) group. A central goal for GNUnet is to make all users (peers) form a group and to make communications in that group anonymous, that is, nobody (but the initiator) should be able to tell which of the peers in the group originated the message. It should be impossible for an adversary to distinguish between the originating peer and all other peers. In particular, even peers should not be able to recognize from which node the message originated.
Of course, in practice, it may be possible for a powerful adversary to do some analysis and potentially assign higher probabilities for being the originator of a message to a subset of the peers. GNUnet tries to make this as hard as possible (see our paper on anonymity). The degree of anonymity (how hard it would be to distinguish an individual from the group) in GNUnet depends on the resources (mostly bandwidth) that the individual has available to achieve anonymity.
In the case that an extremely powerful adversary was to break the anonymity of a peer, GNUnet provides deniability. Deniability means that the communication is secret in the sense that only the final recipient knows the key to decrypt the message. The sender and the intermediaries are unable to determine the actual contents. Since content migrates in the network, the originator of the content can often plausibly deny knowledge of the contents since the content could have migrated to the peer, making the originator indistinguishable from an intermediary. Since intermediaries have no means of decrypting the content and are (in all sane legal systems) thus not legally responsible for them (if you use the Internet to send an encrypted E-mail, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) will typically not be held responsible for the content that its servers transmit; in GNUnet, every peer plays the role of an ISP, providing Internet services to other peers).
Sounds good to me. According to the docs, the final version should be ready in time to ship with HURD 1.0!
Another instance of trading personal freedom and/or privacy for security?
Hard to say. I mean, I live in Florida, near the capital, but you don't have to drive far in any direction to be in the middle of the National Forest (read: nowhere). If I'm driving out in the middle of nowhere, get in a wreck and end up mangled I want someone to be able to pinpoint my location if I dial 911 from my cell phone.
What if I barely have time to hit the emergency button on the phone before I lose consciousness? What if I just can't talk for some reason? What if I don't really have a clue where I am or I'm just too addled to describe the location clearly? Around here, it's really easy to be on a 50-mile stretch of road that's just trees and more trees with lots of smaller roads branching off to who knows where.
It's more a case of when and how the location technology is used than whether there should be such technology. It has life-saving uses, but as with so many other things the potential for abuse is huge, especially by an administration that considers accountability, honesty and transparency nothing more than obstacles that must be overcome.
Maybe I'm too cynical... that would suck. The only thing that would suck worse is if I'm not being cynical enough...
The thing with religion... what scares me is that people like Bush and Ashcroft DO believe there will come a reckoning, but they always believe the reckoning will serve to vindicate them. "We face adversity now, but our faith leads us. In the end, God will show us to have been right." That's the feeling I get and it might be doing a disservice to both men. Bush just does not seem humble in his faith. He does not seem humble in anything. I've never gotten the sense that he stops to question, I can't picture him laying awake at night seeking guidance from within OR without and, indeed, when asked at the start of the war how he was sleeping he said he was sleeping quite nicely, thanks for asking.
I'd have felt much better if he'd said he wasn't sleeping well at all. There's a fine line between showing humanity and showing weakness and he tends to err on the side of coming across as unfeeling to my eyes.
As for the gay/Santorum thing: NO ONE should be regulating that. Period. Not the feds, not the state, no one. Your wording of what the man said does nothing to change my mind. He is not gay. He has no business even talking about it in any official capacity. It's not his job. It is certainly not acceptable for two men to be arrested in the privacy of their own home for having consensual sex. The American Psychiatric Association officially removed homosexuality from the books almost 30 years ago. There is simply no rational scientific or moral basis for equating homosexuality with any of the things he said (whether he said them or not or how it was phrased).
In the end, the question comes down to this: If those cops in Texas had burst in on a man and woman having "perverse" sex, would they have grinned and apologized (and given the guy a high-five on the way out) or would they have arrested the two of them on the spot? Imagine the leers if it had been two women. But I bet no arrests would have been made. I can't PROVE that it would have gone down that way, but I'd bet next year's salary on it. And unequal application of the law is, by definition, discriminatory.
The cops weren't even in the right house! I don't understand how it was allowed to happen. I'm all for states' rights, but common sense must prevail. I honestly don't understand how such a law can be legally defended.
Finally, as to the chemical thing... we'll have to agree to disagree, though I'll grant that the truth is probably a lot murkier and closer to the middle than either of us will ever know for sure (especially with Ashcroft on guard).
Ditto on enjoying the debate. The ability to disagree with civility is rare. Being given incentive to actually think (rather than just react as expected or make wisecracks) on Slashdot is also pretty rare.
I agree. Hyper-realistic cartoons are still cartoons. I mean, we have all this pretty colored lighting and oooh-wow particle effects, but show me an engine that can deal intelligently with something as (apparently) simple as stacking objects on top of each other. And god save us from AI characters in a scripted sequence who keep right on talking to AI character standing next to him whose head you just blew off...
I don't really need 400fps, of course, but I would actually like games to WORK. The only reason I bought the 9700 Pro was because I caught one in NewEgg refurbs back in late January for $249 and had been looking at not much less than that for any of a number of inferior cards (GF4, 9500 series). So I figured what the heck.
I don't have the links right off hand (about the AGPGART issues) but the Linux forums at Rage3D and nForcersHQ have threads about it (including a response from an nVidia rep at one of them, can't recall which). I think there was a thread in the Gentoo forum a while back, too.
Ahh, fans. When all my fans are on high I sometimes wonder if my computer is going to boot up or taxi down the runway... I'd move to water but I'm just way too lazy and accident-prone. Besides, with the fans on high I can't hear the neighbors' brat crying at all hours. Damn thin walls...
'For many, the best analogy for the way DNA works is that it's like a computer program at the heart of every cell. Some of its programming tricks bear an uncanny resemblance to ones the human brain has dreamed up...DNA is [like] spaghetti code because nature has been tinkering with the system for billions of years like a bad programmer.'
That isn't very efficient. Microsoft did the same thing with the Windows codebase in only 20 years...
Seriously, though, I don't think this statement is as arrogant as some of the posters before me claim. Nature IS a bad programmer. Its arsenal consists of trial-and-error and brute force.
Given the scale nature works on (billions of years) it's not a bad way to go about things. A few million years testing out a given design seems slow and ponderous to us but from the point of view of evolution itself it's no big deal. Plenty of time to try again.
There's apparently been plenty of time for nature to develop a sense of humor.
I'd have jumped all over being in the original trilogy (especially since I was just a kid) but I don't think I'd want to be associated with the new batch.
All that overpowering CGI oooh-wow-look-at-what-George-can-do (with a giant renderfarm and a gajillion-million dollars) crap. Plus it would just plain suck to be in a scene with Jar-Jar and not have the satisfaction of throttling him until his head exploded... and that is the real reason fully CGI characters suck.
I don't think the whole "dual use" chemicals thing really holds up. I mean, if I know some guy is an evil son-of-a-bitch who gets his rocks off blowing people's guts out I could give him a high-powered rifle and some ammo "just for hunting". Could I really plead innocence when he blew a lot of people's guts out instead (or even in addition to)?
To answer your question, here's some stream-of-consciousness crap as it pops into my head. Don't expect much...
The Bush administration lacks transparency, even actively shuns it. Ashcroft has all but gutted the Freedom of Information act. Thanks to the Patriot Act we now have an embryonic (or is that too optimistic an assessment) Secret Police. Patriot II goes even further. Not only can you be surveilled and detained indefinitely without being told why and with little to no judicial oversight, your citizenship (and all attendent rights) can literally be taken away. A government with nothing to hide embraces disclosure, or at least has the decency to make a grand show of pretending to.
The government condemns Syria out one side of its mouth and asks them to vigorously "question" people for us out the other side.
We are told that protesters are at best unAmerican and at worst no better than terrorists. The Chinese say the same thing, oddly enough...
Senator Santorum says "... I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." The administration tacitly approves: "But the president believes that the senator is an inclusive man.... The president has confidence in Senator Santorum and thinks he's doing a good job as senator -- including in his leadership post." Fortunately racism is out of fashion...
The government condemns the Iraqis for wanting a strong religious element in their new government while every eighth word out of Bush's mouth is "God". He is welcome to his faith, don't get me wrong, but it has no place in matters of foreign policy and certainly no place in his decision to wage war. Every time I hear him mixing God into his war propaganda I get a little shiver of revulsion. I have great respect for those with faith, probably because I have none of my own and maybe that's a weakness or maybe it isn't. At any rate, Bush was quoted before he became president as saying that (paraphrased, of course) atheists aren't good Americans anyway... so what does my opinion matter?
Congress has willingly castrated itself (by pretty much gutting the War Powers Act, among other things, such as signing the Patriot Act into law literally without knowing what it was in any specific way). The sunset clause that would rescind the Patriot Act in 2005? An amendment is making the rounds that would do away with that and make the new powers permnanent, even though the administration actively refuses to disclose, even to high-ranking members of Congress, exactly how these new powers have been used and how effective they've been at achieving their stated goals.
Libraries are supposed to keep records of who checks out what books, make those records available to law enforcement officials on demand, and are forbidden under law to tell their patrons any disclosure has been made. What is the difference between forbidding the populace to read about certain topics and making them very very scared to read about certain topics?
I could think of plenty more, but I'm sure this is enough to piss off any number of people and get my karma slaughtered quite nicely. Plus I'm just plain old tired. If someone absolutely insists I provide links to substantiate this stuff, it'll have to wait.
Noooo... I am running Windows now. I'm not going to have a top of the line system with a top of the line video card and no 3D support.
AthlonXP 2100+ (1.73Ghz stock) @ 2250ishMhz / Radeon 9700 Pro at 350/660 (too lazy to scrape the crappy thermal pad off and cool it properly even though I really do NEED 400 fps in Q3), 512Mb of Corsair DDR333 RAM @ DDR424Mhz or so (good stuff, they should put it in a bottle and sell it)... and I'm too embarrassed to mention my glxgears fps. It's below 500 though. Way. Zero acceleration.
3DMark03 makes me feel all better since I can scrape by (but not by much) the 5000 barrier.
For now the high-end Radeons are the equivalent of $20 no-name crap when paired with an nForce2 and Linux. Mark @ nVidia says, "We are aware of this issue and hope to have a solution soon." Whenever that might be. Soon as in next month or soon as in "NeverWinter Nights Linux client" circa last year sometime?
See, AGPGART is not included in the nForce drivers but in the Detonators, which only makes sense (as far as I can see) if you happen to be nVidia.
Anyway, they better hurry... Windows is so light and fluffy. And it does EVERYthing for me. I hardly ever have to think anymore. I think I'm getting addicted, god help me... the other day I changed the screen saver on one of my monitors (the non-SETI one, of course) to 3DWindowsXP... and I kinda liked it. I'm so ashamed... there goes my karma... I deserve to be -1 Sell-Out'ed to oblivion...
If you read the parent I was replying to, you'll see that I only brought this up to counter the guy who was saying that ATI's Linux driver support is lacking... thus the "no one's perfect" at the end of my last post. I don't fault ATI OR nVidia for faulty or substandard Linux drivers. See, I had a laptop with a Trident CyberBladeXP in it so I KNOW what it's like when a company REALLY doesn't give a damn about Linux.
I was a teenager during the Gulf War and didn't know nearly as much as I thought (not much different now, I'm sure). At the time, I was all for it. Just had to look at Kuwait and look at Iraq. Kuwait didn't have a chance in hell of resisting and you know what they say, "For evil to triumph good must only do nothing," or words to that effect. Besides, the US literally created the monster (Saddam) beginning back in 1959 (CIA recruited him as an assassin and he failed miserably, too lazy to look for a link).
So, damn right, we should have to deal with it. He was in a literal sense our creation and his mess was our mess. Yet another reason to blame the US for the atrocities he committed. You don't make a monster and set it loose and then wash your hands of the whole thing. Not and stand next to the Stars and Stripes and talk about what a great American you are, anyway.
So we did something about him in 91. But far from enough. The current war is more complicated. We hear the talking heads spouting crap about weapons of mass destruction when in fact the weapons of mass destruction he USED on people were given to him by -- surprise -- us. The pressing question about Gulf War Syndrome isn't really whether he used WMDs against our troops but whether he used WMDs we gave him against our troops. But, prior to Kuwait everything was fine as long as he was doing our dirty work (destabilizing and terrorizing the evil Iran, giving Moscow the cold shoulder, and basically keeping the rest of his neighbors on pins and needles). If you pressed me I could find links for all this, but Google works for everyone.
It's hard to be for the war when you detest the blatant hypocrisy of the people and politics responsible. It's hard to not be for the war when it's the right thing to do for nearly 30 million people. I was whole-heartedly for liberating Iraq, but the way Bush went about it sucked. Or maybe it didn't. I don't know.
Bush could end world hunger and deliver peace on earth and I'd probably still despise him on principle and that's certainly a small-minded attitude. Fortunately, I'm not in a position of power to force that attitude on the world.
I just think he's a small-minded, not-very-bright piece of redneck trash dressed up in family money who's been handed everything he ever had, including a presidential election. I live in Florida (only a few miles from the capital building, actually) and also have no great love for Jeb with his heavy-handed "morals" and drug-addled offspring.
Bush is turning the country I love into a country I could easily learn to fear. I don't trust him and I never will. So I support removing Hussein from power (should have been done long ago, or better yet we should have never created him as an instrument of the Cold War to start with) but I don't trust the motives of the people responsible for doing it. Did they do a good thing? Yes. Are they going to turn it to their own purposes? Just ask Halliburton...
Sorry if this is less than crystal clear, but I've been up for ages and the screen is starting to blur...
Exactly, and by waiting over a decade to enact that solution, the leadership of the US and its allies committed mass murder and torture.
If you were starving your babies and I tried to give them some food only to have you sell it to buy drugs or stuff yourself with it... well, if I don't do everything in my power to stop that from ever happening again and the babies die, I'm complicit in those deaths, right?
I guess I could always look the other way and just stop sending food. Sure, the babies would die, but I wouldn't have to risk you giving me a bloody nose if I acted to stop you...
If my neighbors were starving their babies and I knew it and did nothing I'd be labelled an evil bastard. If they were starving the babies in part because I was taking a big chunk of the family's money to "punish" the parents for being bad parents even though I knew they'd take what little was left for themselves... well, what would I be then?
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To the mods: I have Karma to throw away, so that's what I'm doing. This is a totally worthless rant and only marginally connected to the topic of this story.
... that really was just luck.
That said, I am so sick of hearing about litigation. It seems the Great American Dream is no longer to succeed in life through hard work, innovation and entrepreneurial prowess but to be on the constant lookout for someone to sue for wholly unrealistic sums.
A few years ago I was at work and suddenly found myself in so much pain I actually went to my knees. It was as if someone was exploring my guts with a red-hot fist and anything but a gentle touch. That lasted a few minutes during which I was fairly certain I was going to die and pretty certain it would have to be an improvement.
I was a healthy guy in my early 20s and had had no previous symptoms. The doctor at my HMO didn't see me straight away. I was seen by a nurse practitioner. She did a lot of tests, all of which came back negative right away or would take a day or more to show results. The abdominal X-Ray was mostly inconclusive, but I didn't appear to be bleeding internally. The nurse mentioned an MRI in passing and I immediately had the urge to bolt from the office -- I'm somewhat claustrophobic and pretty sure I'd go batty in that little tube. She smiled, said that was a common reaction and she didn't think it would be immediately necessary. She called in a nurse, they chatted; a bit later the nurse came back and said the only OpenMRI lab in town was booked solid for days.
More tests. She went over my symptoms with me again, poked around on my stomach until I wanted to hurt her in various creative ways but in reality just laid there and tried not to cry while offering one emphatic "YES!" after another to, "Does this hurt?"
She decided after that that I had pancreatitis, which is excruciatingly painful but never lasts more than 48 hours or so. She gave me a prescription for antibiotics and pain meds and I called my mom to come get me. The next day was hell. 48 hours! I figured I'd make it, if only just. But then 48 hours passed. And I went back. More tests, more head-scratching. I learned nothing new and was sent home. 72 hours. I felt a bit better, I supposed, or maybe I was just getting used to it. By the fourth day I was fine. It was later in the week that I found out what I'd really had: a small perforation in my stomach. I could have died at any point along the way. Surgery is usually indicated and the condition is considered immediately life-threatening. I was one of the rare few who have the things heal up on their own.
Everyone said I should sue. Everyone said I should be seriously, litigiously pissed. Especially since the actual doctor didn't see me until AFTER the whole thing was basically over (on the third day, when I was showing improvement, at which she adopted a "Wait and see, but don't hesitate to get to the ER if it gets worse" attitude.).
Except that I did a little research and I had perfectly described the symptoms of pancreatitis, apparently for good reason. It seems that acid from my stomach was leaking onto my pancreas (which is why it hurt a LOT more to lay down than to stand or sit, I guess). It was a perfect mimic. I was even sore in all the right places. A friend of mine has an uncle who is a trial lawyer and he was ready to jump all over it. "But I begged off the MRI," I told him. "But she didn't stress it hard enough," he replied. "The burden was hers, you have no medical training, you only knew you didn't want to get shoved in a dark hole. She was more than willing to comply because MRI's aren't cheap." To this day I don't actually know if an MRI would have helped. I suppose it would have shown the perforation the X-Ray missed. I suppose, in the end, it would have also caused me to undergo a surgery that, luckily, in the end I didn't need anyway. But
It went back and forth. In the end, I didn't sue. I might even h
The courts just ruled in favor of Morpheus and Grokster, which are basically just search engines of another kind (compared to, say, Google).
... violating Microsoft's copyright and IP rights? AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger both allow users to share files (even entire directories). How is this different?
Now, if it's true that all these guys did was provide a search facility, why doesn't that ruling apply?
If all they did was provide a means to search for information they do not control or distribute themselves doesn't that mean ALL search engines could be sued? I mean, dang, I can go to MSN right now and find any number of sites willing to give me cracks and CD keys for Microsoft products (among many, many others). Does this mean the BSA should go after the Microsoft Network for
I really don't get it. If it's as simple as that, why didn't any number of search providers and special interest groups (Google, MSN, Lycos, AOL, Yahoo!, EFF) step forward and say, "You know what, we don't think so. You will back off. You will do it now."
What am I missing? They had to do something other than just provide a neutral search facility, right?
Under the Morpheus/Grokster ruling they could claim they designed the engine just for legit uses (or just because they felt like doing it as an intellectual exercise) and cannot be responsible if individuals not under the creators' direct control use the tool for uses other than those for which it was intended.
This goes back to the hammer analogy, I suppose: If I go to ACE and buy a hammer to bludgeon someone to death with, can the victim's family sue ACE and/or the manufacturer? That would be insane since the primary use of a hammer is not the braining of people who piss me off. Justification could be made for anything from automobiles to peanuts (ie, secretly feeding them to someone who is deathly allergic to them).
If all they truly did was create a search engine, it seems to me the RIAA simply used its gigantic financial power (in the form of threats of endless, costly litigation) to extort money from a tiny foe because going after a much larger, more dangerous but identical (in principle) foe (such as Google, MSN or Lycos) wouldn't be so easy, and because certain foes (Morhpeus, Grokster) had already been declared off-limits.
That is, I believe, the very defintion of "bully."
I doubt you'll ever hear the RIAA disclose how its targets (almost wrote: victims) are chosen. That's all part of the plan, of course. They aren't going to issue a dossier on the type of person they are likely to go after because that would give free reign to everyone else. At this point the best the RIAA can do, in the face of millions and millions of traders, is try to make people afraid to "play the odds".
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If you think about it, we do this every day on larger and smaller scales. Many people buy lottery tickets where the odds of winning are so high you're virtually guaranteed to be throwing away your money (thus the big advertising, here in Florida, that tries to drive home the message that lottery revenue = education dollars: Sure, you aren't going to win, but, heck, do it for the kids!).
If we're alone on a highway we know the cops patrol regularly we might be less inclined to speed because we are easy to single out. If there are a bunch of cars around us zipping along it's easier to believe we won't get caught if we fall in behind them. One of the cars up front will get busted, right? Just like a single cop isn't likely to pull over 15 cars at once, the RIAA can't possibly go after millions and millions of traders, they're just hoping that if they go after "enough" and if the people they go after are people we can identify with, we can more easily envision ourselves suffering the same fate in spite of the overwhelming odds against it.
If the RIAA begins to target consumers I bet they make every effort to achieve the appearance of acting randomly while at the same time going after as broad a set of demographics as possible -- a university student here, a bored middle-aged housewife there, the parents of some twelve-year-old with an mp3 addiction
I was expecting a lot of CEO-speak and doubletalk (redundant?). You know, "productizing" and stuff. I wasn't expecting his answers to come across as candid and conversational. He didn't "boost" Lindows nearly as much as I figured he would. Maybe I'm just easily fooled ...
One of the questions that really caught my attention was the one about apt-get.
Does apt-get break ClickNRun? I'd be willing to bet you'd end up with a seriously mangled system if you dist-upraded using apt, added some packages, then tried to use CNR. Does anyone know how this is handled?
This is lifted verbatim from The Unix Hater's Handbook. How lame is that?
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There isn't a -1 Plagiarism but you mods should make this disappear.
All the AC had to do was attribute it, but I guess that was too much trouble and wouldn't have made it look like he's actually managed to generate an original thought.
Interesting that it should show up in this discussion
And don't forget the Trill, what with Crusher doing Riker because he was carrying the symbiote but then balking when it was moved from Riker to a female host: "Maybe one day our ability to love will not be so limited."
... the only hot lesbian action I've ever seen in Trek ...
Or Dax
First Officer? What did T'Pol have to do with it?
Tripp is Chief Engineer. That's why T'Pol always gets left in command when Archer is off flying through stars and stuff (and then usually placed in a situation where it would be "logical" but not very nice to betray Archer "for his own good".)
Better make that half a million to save some time for Springsteen ...
Morpheus and Grokster can't do a thing and would be Napster-style stupid to try.
That's part of the basis of their defense. The "network" is just a transient agglomeration of clients. The reason they are still alive is because there's not a central office through which all that spam was routed. By sending that message out to a couple hundred thousand people, RIAA took bandwidth piecemeal from members of the network but not from any one entity that could claim damages.
I'm sure the RIAA would love it if they'd try, though.
Go ahead, everyone else has done it.
And here is a paper (PostScript) describing what GNUNet means by anonymity.
From the official GNU page for GNUNet:
Sounds good to me. According to the docs, the final version should be ready in time to ship with HURD 1.0!
(That last bit was a bad joke. I hope.)
Making an "untraceable connection" might be a really bad idea ...
Yeah, a guy I knew used to grow and sell it to feed his wife and kid.
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... a terrorist he was not. The closest he ever got was getting drunk and shooting at road signs.
Hey, it was either that or get a job
But still
This is quite possibly the worst analogy I've ever seen.
... bravo.
I'm speechless
They are using the built-in messaging facilities of the P2P clients themselves.
... er, I mean "educational alerts" ...
I wonder how long it'll be before they start doing pop-up spam
Another instance of trading personal freedom and/or privacy for security?
... that would suck. The only thing that would suck worse is if I'm not being cynical enough ...
Hard to say. I mean, I live in Florida, near the capital, but you don't have to drive far in any direction to be in the middle of the National Forest (read: nowhere). If I'm driving out in the middle of nowhere, get in a wreck and end up mangled I want someone to be able to pinpoint my location if I dial 911 from my cell phone.
What if I barely have time to hit the emergency button on the phone before I lose consciousness? What if I just can't talk for some reason? What if I don't really have a clue where I am or I'm just too addled to describe the location clearly? Around here, it's really easy to be on a 50-mile stretch of road that's just trees and more trees with lots of smaller roads branching off to who knows where.
It's more a case of when and how the location technology is used than whether there should be such technology. It has life-saving uses, but as with so many other things the potential for abuse is huge, especially by an administration that considers accountability, honesty and transparency nothing more than obstacles that must be overcome.
Maybe I'm too cynical
So a man beating his wife to death == two men having sex.
Haha. I'll let the logic of that speak for itself.
The thing with religion ... what scares me is that people like Bush and Ashcroft DO believe there will come a reckoning, but they always believe the reckoning will serve to vindicate them. "We face adversity now, but our faith leads us. In the end, God will show us to have been right." That's the feeling I get and it might be doing a disservice to both men. Bush just does not seem humble in his faith. He does not seem humble in anything. I've never gotten the sense that he stops to question, I can't picture him laying awake at night seeking guidance from within OR without and, indeed, when asked at the start of the war how he was sleeping he said he was sleeping quite nicely, thanks for asking.
... we'll have to agree to disagree, though I'll grant that the truth is probably a lot murkier and closer to the middle than either of us will ever know for sure (especially with Ashcroft on guard).
I'd have felt much better if he'd said he wasn't sleeping well at all. There's a fine line between showing humanity and showing weakness and he tends to err on the side of coming across as unfeeling to my eyes.
As for the gay/Santorum thing: NO ONE should be regulating that. Period. Not the feds, not the state, no one. Your wording of what the man said does nothing to change my mind. He is not gay. He has no business even talking about it in any official capacity. It's not his job. It is certainly not acceptable for two men to be arrested in the privacy of their own home for having consensual sex. The American Psychiatric Association officially removed homosexuality from the books almost 30 years ago. There is simply no rational scientific or moral basis for equating homosexuality with any of the things he said (whether he said them or not or how it was phrased).
In the end, the question comes down to this: If those cops in Texas had burst in on a man and woman having "perverse" sex, would they have grinned and apologized (and given the guy a high-five on the way out) or would they have arrested the two of them on the spot? Imagine the leers if it had been two women. But I bet no arrests would have been made. I can't PROVE that it would have gone down that way, but I'd bet next year's salary on it. And unequal application of the law is, by definition, discriminatory.
The cops weren't even in the right house! I don't understand how it was allowed to happen. I'm all for states' rights, but common sense must prevail. I honestly don't understand how such a law can be legally defended.
Finally, as to the chemical thing
Ditto on enjoying the debate. The ability to disagree with civility is rare. Being given incentive to actually think (rather than just react as expected or make wisecracks) on Slashdot is also pretty rare.
I agree. Hyper-realistic cartoons are still cartoons. I mean, we have all this pretty colored lighting and oooh-wow particle effects, but show me an engine that can deal intelligently with something as (apparently) simple as stacking objects on top of each other. And god save us from AI characters in a scripted sequence who keep right on talking to AI character standing next to him whose head you just blew off ...
... I'd move to water but I'm just way too lazy and accident-prone. Besides, with the fans on high I can't hear the neighbors' brat crying at all hours. Damn thin walls ...
I don't really need 400fps, of course, but I would actually like games to WORK. The only reason I bought the 9700 Pro was because I caught one in NewEgg refurbs back in late January for $249 and had been looking at not much less than that for any of a number of inferior cards (GF4, 9500 series). So I figured what the heck.
I don't have the links right off hand (about the AGPGART issues) but the Linux forums at Rage3D and nForcersHQ have threads about it (including a response from an nVidia rep at one of them, can't recall which). I think there was a thread in the Gentoo forum a while back, too.
Ahh, fans. When all my fans are on high I sometimes wonder if my computer is going to boot up or taxi down the runway
That isn't very efficient. Microsoft did the same thing with the Windows codebase in only 20 years
Seriously, though, I don't think this statement is as arrogant as some of the posters before me claim. Nature IS a bad programmer. Its arsenal consists of trial-and-error and brute force.
Given the scale nature works on (billions of years) it's not a bad way to go about things. A few million years testing out a given design seems slow and ponderous to us but from the point of view of evolution itself it's no big deal. Plenty of time to try again.
There's apparently been plenty of time for nature to develop a sense of humor.
I'd have jumped all over being in the original trilogy (especially since I was just a kid) but I don't think I'd want to be associated with the new batch.
... and that is the real reason fully CGI characters suck.
All that overpowering CGI oooh-wow-look-at-what-George-can-do (with a giant renderfarm and a gajillion-million dollars) crap. Plus it would just plain suck to be in a scene with Jar-Jar and not have the satisfaction of throttling him until his head exploded
I don't think the whole "dual use" chemicals thing really holds up. I mean, if I know some guy is an evil son-of-a-bitch who gets his rocks off blowing people's guts out I could give him a high-powered rifle and some ammo "just for hunting". Could I really plead innocence when he blew a lot of people's guts out instead (or even in addition to)?
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... The president has confidence in Senator Santorum and thinks he's doing a good job as senator -- including in his leadership post." Fortunately racism is out of fashion ...
... so what does my opinion matter?
To answer your question, here's some stream-of-consciousness crap as it pops into my head. Don't expect much
The Bush administration lacks transparency, even actively shuns it. Ashcroft has all but gutted the Freedom of Information act. Thanks to the Patriot Act we now have an embryonic (or is that too optimistic an assessment) Secret Police. Patriot II goes even further. Not only can you be surveilled and detained indefinitely without being told why and with little to no judicial oversight, your citizenship (and all attendent rights) can literally be taken away. A government with nothing to hide embraces disclosure, or at least has the decency to make a grand show of pretending to.
The government condemns Syria out one side of its mouth and asks them to vigorously "question" people for us out the other side.
We are told that protesters are at best unAmerican and at worst no better than terrorists. The Chinese say the same thing, oddly enough
Senator Santorum says "... I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." The administration tacitly approves: "But the president believes that the senator is an inclusive man.
The government condemns the Iraqis for wanting a strong religious element in their new government while every eighth word out of Bush's mouth is "God". He is welcome to his faith, don't get me wrong, but it has no place in matters of foreign policy and certainly no place in his decision to wage war. Every time I hear him mixing God into his war propaganda I get a little shiver of revulsion. I have great respect for those with faith, probably because I have none of my own and maybe that's a weakness or maybe it isn't. At any rate, Bush was quoted before he became president as saying that (paraphrased, of course) atheists aren't good Americans anyway
Congress has willingly castrated itself (by pretty much gutting the War Powers Act, among other things, such as signing the Patriot Act into law literally without knowing what it was in any specific way). The sunset clause that would rescind the Patriot Act in 2005? An amendment is making the rounds that would do away with that and make the new powers permnanent, even though the administration actively refuses to disclose, even to high-ranking members of Congress, exactly how these new powers have been used and how effective they've been at achieving their stated goals.
Libraries are supposed to keep records of who checks out what books, make those records available to law enforcement officials on demand, and are forbidden under law to tell their patrons any disclosure has been made. What is the difference between forbidding the populace to read about certain topics and making them very very scared to read about certain topics?
I could think of plenty more, but I'm sure this is enough to piss off any number of people and get my karma slaughtered quite nicely. Plus I'm just plain old tired. If someone absolutely insists I provide links to substantiate this stuff, it'll have to wait.
Noooo ... I am running Windows now. I'm not going to have a top of the line system with a top of the line video card and no 3D support.
... and I'm too embarrassed to mention my glxgears fps. It's below 500 though. Way. Zero acceleration.
... Windows is so light and fluffy. And it does EVERYthing for me. I hardly ever have to think anymore. I think I'm getting addicted, god help me ... the other day I changed the screen saver on one of my monitors (the non-SETI one, of course) to 3DWindowsXP ... and I kinda liked it. I'm so ashamed ... there goes my karma ... I deserve to be -1 Sell-Out'ed to oblivion ...
... thus the "no one's perfect" at the end of my last post. I don't fault ATI OR nVidia for faulty or substandard Linux drivers. See, I had a laptop with a Trident CyberBladeXP in it so I KNOW what it's like when a company REALLY doesn't give a damn about Linux.
AthlonXP 2100+ (1.73Ghz stock) @ 2250ishMhz / Radeon 9700 Pro at 350/660 (too lazy to scrape the crappy thermal pad off and cool it properly even though I really do NEED 400 fps in Q3), 512Mb of Corsair DDR333 RAM @ DDR424Mhz or so (good stuff, they should put it in a bottle and sell it)
3DMark03 makes me feel all better since I can scrape by (but not by much) the 5000 barrier.
For now the high-end Radeons are the equivalent of $20 no-name crap when paired with an nForce2 and Linux. Mark @ nVidia says, "We are aware of this issue and hope to have a solution soon." Whenever that might be. Soon as in next month or soon as in "NeverWinter Nights Linux client" circa last year sometime?
See, AGPGART is not included in the nForce drivers but in the Detonators, which only makes sense (as far as I can see) if you happen to be nVidia.
Anyway, they better hurry
If you read the parent I was replying to, you'll see that I only brought this up to counter the guy who was saying that ATI's Linux driver support is lacking
I was a teenager during the Gulf War and didn't know nearly as much as I thought (not much different now, I'm sure). At the time, I was all for it. Just had to look at Kuwait and look at Iraq. Kuwait didn't have a chance in hell of resisting and you know what they say, "For evil to triumph good must only do nothing," or words to that effect. Besides, the US literally created the monster (Saddam) beginning back in 1959 (CIA recruited him as an assassin and he failed miserably, too lazy to look for a link).
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So, damn right, we should have to deal with it. He was in a literal sense our creation and his mess was our mess. Yet another reason to blame the US for the atrocities he committed. You don't make a monster and set it loose and then wash your hands of the whole thing. Not and stand next to the Stars and Stripes and talk about what a great American you are, anyway.
So we did something about him in 91. But far from enough. The current war is more complicated. We hear the talking heads spouting crap about weapons of mass destruction when in fact the weapons of mass destruction he USED on people were given to him by -- surprise -- us. The pressing question about Gulf War Syndrome isn't really whether he used WMDs against our troops but whether he used WMDs we gave him against our troops. But, prior to Kuwait everything was fine as long as he was doing our dirty work (destabilizing and terrorizing the evil Iran, giving Moscow the cold shoulder, and basically keeping the rest of his neighbors on pins and needles). If you pressed me I could find links for all this, but Google works for everyone.
It's hard to be for the war when you detest the blatant hypocrisy of the people and politics responsible. It's hard to not be for the war when it's the right thing to do for nearly 30 million people. I was whole-heartedly for liberating Iraq, but the way Bush went about it sucked. Or maybe it didn't. I don't know.
Bush could end world hunger and deliver peace on earth and I'd probably still despise him on principle and that's certainly a small-minded attitude. Fortunately, I'm not in a position of power to force that attitude on the world.
I just think he's a small-minded, not-very-bright piece of redneck trash dressed up in family money who's been handed everything he ever had, including a presidential election. I live in Florida (only a few miles from the capital building, actually) and also have no great love for Jeb with his heavy-handed "morals" and drug-addled offspring.
Bush is turning the country I love into a country I could easily learn to fear. I don't trust him and I never will. So I support removing Hussein from power (should have been done long ago, or better yet we should have never created him as an instrument of the Cold War to start with) but I don't trust the motives of the people responsible for doing it. Did they do a good thing? Yes. Are they going to turn it to their own purposes? Just ask Halliburton
Sorry if this is less than crystal clear, but I've been up for ages and the screen is starting to blur
Exactly, and by waiting over a decade to enact that solution, the leadership of the US and its allies committed mass murder and torture.
... well, if I don't do everything in my power to stop that from ever happening again and the babies die, I'm complicit in those deaths, right?
...
... well, what would I be then?
If you were starving your babies and I tried to give them some food only to have you sell it to buy drugs or stuff yourself with it
I guess I could always look the other way and just stop sending food. Sure, the babies would die, but I wouldn't have to risk you giving me a bloody nose if I acted to stop you
If my neighbors were starving their babies and I knew it and did nothing I'd be labelled an evil bastard. If they were starving the babies in part because I was taking a big chunk of the family's money to "punish" the parents for being bad parents even though I knew they'd take what little was left for themselves