If they can do that, I could turn my gut into enough plate armor to stop a bullet.
--
Swords into plowshares---IT'S A TRICK!
on
Solar Sails
·
· Score: 1
So Russia's saying, "Um, we're gonna go into American waters and launch an ICBM from a nuclear submarine. But, um, it's not an ICBM, it's a spaceship. Yeah. And, um, it's not a MIRV, its a, uhhhh, it's a giant space sailboat! Yeah! That's the idea! And we're gonna have to launch a dozen of them, in case one of them doesn't work. Yeah. And, um, we're gonna launch 'em ahhhhh, all at once, to ummmmm save time! Yeah! And the idea came from ahhh, Lionel Richie! No, wait, it came from Carl Sagan! That's the ticket!"
With due respect, he didn't say "dead"; he said "dead in the water", as in "not going anywhere". And they aren't going anywhere. All they have been doing for the last ten or twelve years is bloating out existing products and buying, borrowing, and stealing innovations from other products. I see very little in the way of innovation. Guess we stifled it.
Well, stifling or no, we won't destroy Microsoft. We can't, really. They have a lot of momentum, enough to keep them floating for ten years or so. But remember--their biggest competitor is old versions of their own products.
"Wouldn't a non-wasteful, non-pork-barrelling, gubment be great?" has been the mantra of us have-nots ever since representative democracy was invented.
Personally, I don't have a billion dollars just lying around to spend on nothing but bribes and "campaign contributions." Microsoft does. And if Microsoft can say to every senator and every representative, "Here's an enormous campaign contribution. By the way, open source is a threat to the American Way. Also, please notice the check says "Microsoft" right there at the top and we've post-dated it about six months from now, plenty of time to pass a bill or two, wouldn't you say?"
Actually, they'll just give away the Super Secret 800 Number, the one that connects you straight to tier-three support. That's better than a check, because all you're doing is fostering good will, and you can't audit good will, or be required to report it to the GAO. Ghod bless soft money, eh?
Trademarks have to be protected, no matter how little you care, or else they will become invalid and anyone can use
them. If he doesn't go after OpenSSH, tomorrow it'll be Microsoft using the name.
So license "SSH" to OpenSSH already! Hell, license it for a dollar, under terms Microsoft or any other money-seeking interest will not accept, and be done with it! Trademarks are licensed all the time. GM had do pay Beretta Arms about a million dollars to call one of their cars the "Chevrolet Beretta."
that song "Ironic" by Alanis Morrisette doesn't have a single ironic quip in it.
I've been lying awake in bed trying to figure this out--is it ironic that Alanis Morissette's song "Ironic" doesn't contain a single ironic thing? Or is it ironic that thanks to this song, there are now millions of people walking around thinking it's ironic when it rains on your wedding day?
IANAL, and I'd really like to say that neither WIPO nor MS could touch your hypothetical sucks.com for selling the "microsoft" subdomain. But I have a suspicion that MS could argue "bad faith" against you, and win. Saying Microsoft Sucks is free speech (not to mention accurate, and on Slashdot pretty redundant). Registering such a domain would also be free speech. But, by attempting to sell a domain (or subdomain) which contains the name "Microsoft", you are trying to make money off the name of someone else's company. In other words, you have appropriated their trademark in an attempt to commercialize your own product. So that's bad faith.
What will be interesting is, given a company FOO, if Register.com receives money by selling the domain foosucks.com, are they acting in bad faith? Probably not, given they are an objective, flat-fee service, neither judging nor upcharging particular domain names based on the commercial desirability thereof. But if enough companies threaten and pressure them, and force them into legal expenditures, they just might cave and start filtering against *sucks" and so forth, just to stay unharassed.
Has anybody else been reading User Friendly's recent satire of Hollywood thought suppression? Good stuff, and I'm glad to see the Lessig interview for a serious look at the same subject.
Maybe you ought to stick to CNN, which is inherently mainstream.
Oh, I dunno. Paul Tatara seems to have pretty free reign with his movie reviews. He's been a source of many good leads, and has amused the hell out of me with his advice on what movies to avoid.
Film scholars have long pointed out the sexual premonitions and suggestions in the vampire myth, the warnings about sex and sexual liberation. Vampires are mostly portrayed as
powerful men who steal past locked doors and barred windows to ravish helpless and beautiful women asleep in nightgowns in their beds. The Victorians were terrified of venereal
disease in much the same way we fear AIDS.
I think Katz was interpreting this passage from Roger Ebert's review of Nosferatu.
The Victorians feared venereal disease the way we fear AIDS, and vampirism may be a metaphor; the predator vampire lives without a mate, stalking his victims or seducing them with promises of bliss--like a rapist, or a pickup artist. The cure for vampirism is obviously not a stake through the heart, but nuclear families and bourgeois values.
The Victorians pretty much mastered the art of sexual repression, particularly in women. They even believed that syphilis was caused by sexual excess, not sexually transmitted infection. So yeah, Stoker probably sublimated the sex urge into a lust for blood. The analogy would have appealed to Victorians. So of course their Dracula is a hideous monster--the idea of a woman being attracted to this symbol of sexual urge was as unthinkable as a woman being attracted to a lobster. However, once a woman has been bitten (e.g. deflowered), she becomes full of blood lust (sexual urges), and can no longer see what the audience sees--that the source of her desires is a revolting, dangerous, socially unacceptable creature.
I've never seen such a terrible case of Dread Questionmark Disease in my life! And 101k of HTML source to render ~5k of text? It took almost twenty seconds for Netscape to render this pile, and that was on a P3/800 w/256mb of memory.
If this doesn't give you Fear Of A MicroSoft Planet, I don't know what will.
And screw the content; I'm so revolted by the presentation I couldn't bring myself to even try to read page two. More's the pity. I was really looking forward to seeing how far toy robotics had come.
It'll work against the white trash bullies, but there's this whole overclass of "approved" bullies. Jocks, for instance. And they'll get away with it, every time. When accused, they'll deny it, and the administration will believe them, then there'll be a big school assembly where they talk about how the system's being abused to settle jealousy-based vendettas, and the geeks in the back row will get careful looks from the podium that the rest of the student body can't help but pick up on, and the socially undesirable one will know he can't win, that the system isn't there for him, that it's all a lie and he'd better by-god get with the program, and the asshole that got away with the first punch will know he can get away with it next time, and the punch will get thrown twice as hard next time, and the next report will get ignored because if the first one was a sham the second one obviously is twice the sham, and the victim will get reported as a danger to himself, for failing to cowtow to the almighty sanctioned bully, and for walking around with a bruised cheek he refuses to explain, because there's no point in trying to explain, because the bully's in a protected class.
There is a double standard, and that standard is set by the social worthiness victim. Compare the prison terms of blacks convicted of murdering whites, to the terms of whites convicted of murdering blacks. Anybody who's ostracized is up against similar odds.
My family has a trailer on Lake Hartwell, swear to God. The floor's half rotted out, as my fatass uncle found out one drunk afternoon. But there's a phone line coming to it, sure enough.
OTOH, my own downtown Atlanta neighborhood of Grant Park is behind a pair of DACs, so no DSL for me and there are too many trees and highrises for me to get a Dish.
My mind is positively blown that to get the cutting edge in consumer bandwidth, TV and telephony, I have to move out to the GODDAMNED STICKS! What the hell is the world coming to when there's a DSL line coming to within walking distance of my fatass uncle's still?
So please, Mr. Georgia Tech graduate, wouldja put the friggin' bandwidth where the friggin' people live?
Well, performance (defined as quickness) is nice, but it is only one of three critical prongs, the other two being integrity and availability. If it's fast, but tends to crash halfway through a write operation, you don't have integrity. If it's stable but has to be taken down for an hour a day for maintenance, you don't have availability.
The glib statement is that among speed, integrity, availability and affordability, you can pick three. InterBase kind of spoils the equation, but when you compare MySQL, PostgreSQL, and, say, Oracle, you get the idea.
Stop thinking in powers of two! There is nothing in the universe that requires a byte to be eight bits. A byte is a set of (consecutive) bits used to represent a character. Nowadays, it just happens to be eight bits on most architectures.
If you read some RFCs, for example you will see that IP datagrams consist not of bytes, but octets, and words are defined, not assumed, to be 32-bits.
Look at the Jargon file. You'll see byte's proper definition as "A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used to represent one character; on modern architectures
this is usually 8 bits, but may be 9 on 36-bit machines. Some older architectures used `byte' for quantities of 6 or 7 bits,"
Have you ever wondered why C uses octal? Or why Unix (and therefore chmod(1)) takes octal numbers for permissions? It's because C and Unix were initially developed on 36-bit DEC machines. A 36-bit word has four 9-bit bytes, each represented by three octal digits.
It is nothing new for a company and its lapdog companies to adopt exclusionary business practices like this. Shockwave does the same thing, and doesn't even let you click through to get information about Shockwave, unless you play ball or code a liar-proxy.
Big railroads used to do things like this all the time to destroy little railroads. Every few months or years they would patent a new hookup technology, change the hookups on their railcars to the new type, then charge spur-line railroads more than they paid for their railcars to buy the patented, "improved" hookups. Soon enough the little railroad was broke, to be snapped up by the big railroad at bargain prices.
I have to wonder if AOL/TW will make the decision that Netscape Navigator is unprofitable. As soon as they do, IE will be the only client. Once IE is the only client, MS can decide what the only servers are.
Haven't read the Salon article yet, but there are three things to be careful of in abandoned buidings: cops, homeless people, and criminals. You're trespassing, and if there are "no trespassing" signs posted, you can probably be arrested for criminal trespass. As for the homeless, most of them are harmless, but lots of them are mentally ill, and if you suddenly invade a schizophrenic paranoid's home, or stumble onto a meth lab or crack den, or even some boozing surlies, you could be in some very real physical danger.
--
Great after school fun
on
Infiltration
·
· Score: 2
I grew up within walking distance of an abandoned VA hospital in Augusta, Georgia. In middle school and early in high school, we would go up there and wander through the halls and rooms, looking at abandoned equipment and poking through old filing cabinets. The cool part was that behind the main building--a hotel that had been converted during WWII to support a nearby air base--there was a warren of interconnected buildings with low rooftops between them to run up and down.
There was a security guard who seldom left his post, but as long as you were quiet, you could have a great time. The guard kept ruffians out, and vandals, but us sneaky geeks could have a great time.
One spring we took turns setting up MUDlike puzzles for each other. You dropped clues on floors in various rooms leading to a secret prize somewhere. The prize was a Smurf doll I had appropriated from my younger sister. I'd go to school and the winner would show me the doll, then it was his turn to hide it.
When they demolished the hospital in the mid-1980s, I was left with some great memories. By that time the building had starting to get creepy--scattered beer cans and used condoms littered certain rooms, and the place lost its innocent mystery. But my sister and brother and I would ride horses around on the enormous front lawn on fragrant evenings, ducking the branches of tall magnolias.
But vadding is a hell of a lot of fun. Once you start looking at a building as a machine, you'll want to start poking around to see how it works. The basements and rooftops of the 42-story skyscraper near Underground Atlanta kept me and my colleagues amused on slow workdays in the mid-1990s.
Happiness is an unlocked maintenance door.
--
Will this work on leather?
on
Nano-pants
·
· Score: 2
Because if it does, I'm gonna put off buying that Aerostich a little longer. Leather is a wonderfully versatile material, but I have yet to see a waterproofing technology that didn't turn leather boots, gloves, jackets, and pants into an uncomfortable vapor barrier, making it as useless on a hot dry day as it is on a cold wet one.
Slashdot Mirror
--
If they can do that, I could turn my gut into enough plate armor to stop a bullet.
--
So Russia's saying, "Um, we're gonna go into American waters and launch an ICBM from a nuclear submarine. But, um, it's not an ICBM, it's a spaceship. Yeah. And, um, it's not a MIRV, its a, uhhhh, it's a giant space sailboat! Yeah! That's the idea! And we're gonna have to launch a dozen of them, in case one of them doesn't work. Yeah. And, um, we're gonna launch 'em ahhhhh, all at once, to ummmmm save time! Yeah! And the idea came from ahhh, Lionel Richie! No, wait, it came from Carl Sagan! That's the ticket!"
--
Well, stifling or no, we won't destroy Microsoft. We can't, really. They have a lot of momentum, enough to keep them floating for ten years or so. But remember--their biggest competitor is old versions of their own products.
--
"Wouldn't a non-wasteful, non-pork-barrelling, gubment be great?" has been the mantra of us have-nots ever since representative democracy was invented.
Personally, I don't have a billion dollars just lying around to spend on nothing but bribes and "campaign contributions." Microsoft does. And if Microsoft can say to every senator and every representative, "Here's an enormous campaign contribution. By the way, open source is a threat to the American Way. Also, please notice the check says "Microsoft" right there at the top and we've post-dated it about six months from now, plenty of time to pass a bill or two, wouldn't you say?"
Actually, they'll just give away the Super Secret 800 Number, the one that connects you straight to tier-three support. That's better than a check, because all you're doing is fostering good will, and you can't audit good will, or be required to report it to the GAO. Ghod bless soft money, eh?
--
--
How ironic.
--
--
What will be interesting is, given a company FOO, if Register.com receives money by selling the domain foosucks.com, are they acting in bad faith? Probably not, given they are an objective, flat-fee service, neither judging nor upcharging particular domain names based on the commercial desirability thereof. But if enough companies threaten and pressure them, and force them into legal expenditures, they just might cave and start filtering against *sucks" and so forth, just to stay unharassed.
--
exception handling removed for clarity
*/
Bitmap getImage(double latitude,
double longitude, double resolution, double framesize
) {
ResultSet rs=statement("select * from images " +
where latitude=:latitude and longitude=:longitude");
if (parseAddress(rs.address).equals(specials.MY_ADDR
return getImageByURL("http://goatse.cx/images/goatsexguy
else
return scaleImage(rs.image);
}
--
Has anybody else been reading User Friendly's recent satire of Hollywood thought suppression? Good stuff, and I'm glad to see the Lessig interview for a serious look at the same subject.
--
--
The Victorians pretty much mastered the art of sexual repression, particularly in women. They even believed that syphilis was caused by sexual excess, not sexually transmitted infection. So yeah, Stoker probably sublimated the sex urge into a lust for blood. The analogy would have appealed to Victorians. So of course their Dracula is a hideous monster--the idea of a woman being attracted to this symbol of sexual urge was as unthinkable as a woman being attracted to a lobster. However, once a woman has been bitten (e.g. deflowered), she becomes full of blood lust (sexual urges), and can no longer see what the audience sees--that the source of her desires is a revolting, dangerous, socially unacceptable creature.
--
If this doesn't give you Fear Of A MicroSoft Planet, I don't know what will.
And screw the content; I'm so revolted by the presentation I couldn't bring myself to even try to read page two. More's the pity. I was really looking forward to seeing how far toy robotics had come.
--
There is a double standard, and that standard is set by the social worthiness victim. Compare the prison terms of blacks convicted of murdering whites, to the terms of whites convicted of murdering blacks. Anybody who's ostracized is up against similar odds.
It won't work. It just won't work.
--
Sega denies it.
--
OTOH, my own downtown Atlanta neighborhood of Grant Park is behind a pair of DACs, so no DSL for me and there are too many trees and highrises for me to get a Dish.
My mind is positively blown that to get the cutting edge in consumer bandwidth, TV and telephony, I have to move out to the GODDAMNED STICKS! What the hell is the world coming to when there's a DSL line coming to within walking distance of my fatass uncle's still?
So please, Mr. Georgia Tech graduate, wouldja put the friggin' bandwidth where the friggin' people live?
--
The glib statement is that among speed, integrity, availability and affordability, you can pick three. InterBase kind of spoils the equation, but when you compare MySQL, PostgreSQL, and, say, Oracle, you get the idea.
Disclaimer I had Chinese food for lunch.
--
The PDP-11 came later. The original platform was the PDP-7, which had an 18-bit word size.
--
I can see it now:
"You were exceeding the speed of light in a school zone, sir."
"But I was only going 40MPH!"
"Speed of light's 38 here, sir, and 38MPH isn't just a good idea, it's the law."
--
If you read some RFCs, for example you will see that IP datagrams consist not of bytes, but octets, and words are defined, not assumed, to be 32-bits.
Look at the Jargon file. You'll see byte's proper definition as "A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used to represent one character; on modern architectures this is usually 8 bits, but may be 9 on 36-bit machines. Some older architectures used `byte' for quantities of 6 or 7 bits,"
Have you ever wondered why C uses octal? Or why Unix (and therefore chmod(1)) takes octal numbers for permissions? It's because C and Unix were initially developed on 36-bit DEC machines. A 36-bit word has four 9-bit bytes, each represented by three octal digits.
Honestly.
--
It is nothing new for a company and its lapdog companies to adopt exclusionary business practices like this. Shockwave does the same thing, and doesn't even let you click through to get information about Shockwave, unless you play ball or code a liar-proxy.
Big railroads used to do things like this all the time to destroy little railroads. Every few months or years they would patent a new hookup technology, change the hookups on their railcars to the new type, then charge spur-line railroads more than they paid for their railcars to buy the patented, "improved" hookups. Soon enough the little railroad was broke, to be snapped up by the big railroad at bargain prices.
I have to wonder if AOL/TW will make the decision that Netscape Navigator is unprofitable. As soon as they do, IE will be the only client. Once IE is the only client, MS can decide what the only servers are.
--
Haven't read the Salon article yet, but there are three things to be careful of in abandoned buidings: cops, homeless people, and criminals. You're trespassing, and if there are "no trespassing" signs posted, you can probably be arrested for criminal trespass. As for the homeless, most of them are harmless, but lots of them are mentally ill, and if you suddenly invade a schizophrenic paranoid's home, or stumble onto a meth lab or crack den, or even some boozing surlies, you could be in some very real physical danger.
--
I grew up within walking distance of an abandoned VA hospital in Augusta, Georgia. In middle school and early in high school, we would go up there and wander through the halls and rooms, looking at abandoned equipment and poking through old filing cabinets. The cool part was that behind the main building--a hotel that had been converted during WWII to support a nearby air base--there was a warren of interconnected buildings with low rooftops between them to run up and down.
There was a security guard who seldom left his post, but as long as you were quiet, you could have a great time. The guard kept ruffians out, and vandals, but us sneaky geeks could have a great time.
One spring we took turns setting up MUDlike puzzles for each other. You dropped clues on floors in various rooms leading to a secret prize somewhere. The prize was a Smurf doll I had appropriated from my younger sister. I'd go to school and the winner would show me the doll, then it was his turn to hide it.
When they demolished the hospital in the mid-1980s, I was left with some great memories. By that time the building had starting to get creepy--scattered beer cans and used condoms littered certain rooms, and the place lost its innocent mystery. But my sister and brother and I would ride horses around on the enormous front lawn on fragrant evenings, ducking the branches of tall magnolias.
But vadding is a hell of a lot of fun. Once you start looking at a building as a machine, you'll want to start poking around to see how it works. The basements and rooftops of the 42-story skyscraper near Underground Atlanta kept me and my colleagues amused on slow workdays in the mid-1990s.
Happiness is an unlocked maintenance door.
--
Because if it does, I'm gonna put off buying that Aerostich a little longer. Leather is a wonderfully versatile material, but I have yet to see a waterproofing technology that didn't turn leather boots, gloves, jackets, and pants into an uncomfortable vapor barrier, making it as useless on a hot dry day as it is on a cold wet one.
--