Until everyone in Washington is replaced in 3 election cycles (for the whole Senate) there will be no change. Try replacing them with someone who has actually done productive work, not lawyers.
This is another populist panacea and like term limits it is political nonsense.
All it does is shift power to the Washington lobbyist and permanent committee staff - those with expert knowledge in the subject matter and decades of institutional experience in drafting legislation and guiding it through the Congress.
When you are building a bridge you hire an engineer.
When you are governing a country you need the politician and you need the lawyer. Social engineers by profession.
The geek writes code that guides the actions of a machine.
The Congressman writes laws that shapes the lives of 300 million people - including that of the geek himself, of course.
Tell me why you want a pro on the one job and an amateur on the other. Why the geek is "productive" and the legislator is not.
I don't think people quite got what "YES WE CAN" really meant.
It means choosing between what is urgent and essential and what is disruptive and peripheral.
There is a banking crisis to be dealt with.
Big decisions to be made about financial relief for state governments, home foreclosures. Unemployment Insurance. Health Care. Education. Infrastructure. There is a federal budget to be passed.
There is Gitmo. Afghanistan.
North Korea. China. The Middle East.
The Bush administration is discredited and defunct. There is nothing to be gained by picking over the corpse.
But considering that on some platform, users may be dumb enough not to be able to install Flash, that some users may not want to install Flash for its close-sourceness this number could very well just above 98%.
To make it into the Top 50 for Windows at Download.com you need 50,000 downloads a week.
The Flash player gets 93,000 hits from CNET at week - 15,000,000 to date from this one source. Most Popular Downloads
The geek needs to let go the notion that overwealming majority of users have any trouble finding and installing the programs they want for Windows and the Mac - or give a damn about their "closed-sourcedness."
the age of consent is a rather amusing topic - the prudish pilgrams who founded america did in fact marry off 13 year old girls.
The decision was made by the parents - and I very much doubt they could have gone forward without the advice and consent of their church.
The Puritan was pragmatic about sex.
When you live on the edge of the known world your first concern is survival. You want the men sobered-up, settling down, raising families.
Underage marriages usually imply one or two things: a family alliance to build an estate or an appallingly high death rate, particularly in child birth.
I must have missed the memo where they lowered the standard from "beyond a reasonable doubt" to "reasonable suspicion"
"Reasonable doubt" in this context means only that a jury can find that an man of ordinary intelligence, judgment and experience, could have have mistaken the model for an adult.
The problem is that the jury won't be looking at a single photograph, but rather the hundreds or thousands of those you've collected which were entered into evidence.
The problem is that the jury won't be looking at the girl alone or the sexual content alone - but at how the videos and photos were presented on the web, the stage settings used, costumes, props, and so on.
Glad to see that WI is working to help stimulate the economy by pulling more money out of it!!
It is only a matter of time before all online sales are taxed.
It may happen state by state.
It may take the form of a federal value-added tax - most of which will be channeled back to the states.
But it will happen, and sooner rather than later, I suspect.
What is there to stop it? The states that need these revenues are Democratic. The Republicans have a secure hold only on the lower Mississippi Delta and the depopulated Northern plains.
Still, the money that goes into the development of a main-stream game is peanuts when compared to the price of the average Hollywood movie. Which sells for about 20 bucks.
GTA 4 was widely estimated to have a budget of $100 million.
Not surprising, really, since you are competing for talent and producing your product in much the same way.
the cost of software represents a substantial portion of their cost structure.
How substantial?
Most Americans work in low-margin business - doing things like agriculture, retail, etc... - providing the goods and services necessary for civilized life. It is these businesses for which the cost of software means the difference between laying off, and retaining employees.
I want to see your numbers here.
The custom accounting system for your farm or ranch costs $500 - and demands nothing more than a P3 with Win 98 and 16 MB RAM.
It is trivially easy to find free templates and tutorials for Excel and Quick Books
---and, of course, there are far more expense software and service bundles out there for the giant produce packing plant, the poultry king with 10 million birds.
The geek needs to be realistic about his place in a world where a thirty-year old Ford tractor, not kept up for show, sells for $10,000 - $20,000.
FOSS is no magic wand that significantly cuts costs or saves jobs here.
Contrast this with the closed source model, in which, in an effort to maximize vendor profit, always leaves out those unable or unwilling to pay.
Well, of course, they leave out those unwilling to pay.
So does Sun when it trims the full-time development team for StarOffice/OpenOffice to 24.
There is nothing that insulates the FOSS developer from economic realities.
The grants dry up. The corporate sponsor pulls out. The bank cuts you off. The mortgage payment is due next week.
FOSS is a development model. It is not a revenue model. In hard times you have to find a way to make ends meet.
You have to go where the money is.
It won't make a damn bit of difference if your software is still being released under the GPL.
For unwashed and uneducated who cannot bother to search Wikipedia
Available in alpha for the MacIntel, Apple TV and Linux.
The invitation-only alpha for Windows was only released last month.
Boxee is obscure. Boxee is in development. It can't play protected content. The software isn't even available to over ninety percent of the market.
In its current state it is not a threat to Hulu or anyone else.
Boxee does not currently support hardware video decoding, the entire load of the video decoding process is handled by the system's CPU which means that users need, by today's standards, a very powerful CPU to decode native 1080p videos encoded with a modern video codec like H.264.
chrome 500 series is basically a chrome 400 with a new display interface (hdmi/dp).
so all you are missing if you use the 400 series driver is DRM... who in their right mind would call that a problem..
anyone who can see that HDTV display and the single-cable HDMI solution for digital audio and video is the future of the PC in the home market.
At least with the old way, if it came in most of the way, I could still see and hear what was going on.
The "old way" began when you unfolded the Winegard antenna on a roof with a 45 degree pitch and a thirty foot drop and ended when you pounded in a ground stake with a sledgehammer until you were a candidate for cardiac arrest.
In labor and materials you had as big an investment in the antenna as you had in your 20" RCA - and one that paid dividends for many years after.
Digital has been broadcast at greatly reduced power.
If you want good reception now - and better reception later - you have to work for it - just as your grandad did for analog.
Seriously, we've got more important things to worry about in this country that weather people can watch their soaps on channel 4. Why are we wasting money on this.
Because it affects our most isolated and vulnerable populations. the elderly, the poor, and the disabled.
Look around you.
Find out where these people live.
How these people live.
Four hours spent on a rural bus run can be very educational.
The third-rate nursing homes.
The group homes and apartments built on barren agricultural lots five miles from the nearest traffic light.
The tenant houses and run-down trailer parks you never gave a thought to.
$90 a month as a personal allowance.
Out of which will come your co-pays for therapy and drugs and blood work.
You can argue the distinction between a "task" and an "activity."
But I don't think that takes you very far.
Unlike more traditional desktop environments, [Sugar] does not use a "desktop" metaphor and only focuses on one task at a time. The OLPC XO-1 has a 1 GB NAND flash drive and 256 MB of memory. Since there is no swap space and storage space on the laptop, only a limited number of activities can run concurrently. The project's stated goal is to "avoid bloated interfaces", and "limit the controls to those immediately relevant to the task at hand"Sugar (GUI}
Nothing would get the attention of the state of New York quite like every out-of-state online retailer refusing to sell to any NY resident or to ship items to a NY address.
To the left we see another geek blathering on about a boycott.
Slashdot's original hot-air balloon.
It assumes that the online retailer is prepared to surrender markets the size of New York and L.A.
It ain't gonna happen.
The end game would almost certainly a uniform federal sales tax with a rebate to state and local governments.
I suspect we will get there anyway - and sooner rather than later.
Slashdot Mirror
This is another populist panacea and like term limits it is political nonsense.
All it does is shift power to the Washington lobbyist and permanent committee staff - those with expert knowledge in the subject matter and decades of institutional experience in drafting legislation and guiding it through the Congress.
When you are building a bridge you hire an engineer.
When you are governing a country you need the politician and you need the lawyer. Social engineers by profession.
The geek writes code that guides the actions of a machine.
The Congressman writes laws that shapes the lives of 300 million people - including that of the geek himself, of course.
Tell me why you want a pro on the one job and an amateur on the other. Why the geek is "productive" and the legislator is not.
It means choosing between what is urgent and essential and what is disruptive and peripheral.
There is a banking crisis to be dealt with.
Big decisions to be made about financial relief for state governments, home foreclosures. Unemployment Insurance. Health Care. Education. Infrastructure. There is a federal budget to be passed.
There is Gitmo. Afghanistan.
North Korea. China. The Middle East.
The Bush administration is discredited and defunct. There is nothing to be gained by picking over the corpse.
To make it into the Top 50 for Windows at Download.com you need 50,000 downloads a week.
The Flash player gets 93,000 hits from CNET at week - 15,000,000 to date from this one source. Most Popular Downloads
The geek needs to let go the notion that overwealming majority of users have any trouble finding and installing the programs they want for Windows and the Mac - or give a damn about their "closed-sourcedness."
The decision was made by the parents - and I very much doubt they could have gone forward without the advice and consent of their church.
The Puritan was pragmatic about sex.
When you live on the edge of the known world your first concern is survival. You want the men sobered-up, settling down, raising families.
Underage marriages usually imply one or two things: a family alliance to build an estate or an appallingly high death rate, particularly in child birth.
It surprised me that this post was originally modded as Flamebait.
Because the professional artist or photographer needs to have this nailed down before the session begins.
"Reasonable doubt" in this context means only that a jury can find that an man of ordinary intelligence, judgment and experience, could have have mistaken the model for an adult.
The problem is that the jury won't be looking at a single photograph, but rather the hundreds or thousands of those you've collected which were entered into evidence.
The problem is that the jury won't be looking at the girl alone or the sexual content alone - but at how the videos and photos were presented on the web, the stage settings used, costumes, props, and so on.
The role of government is shaped by the values of the community which created it.
I know of no government which will not insist on its right to protect minors against themselves and those who would exploit them.
That can not and will not limit a minor's freedom of action.
It is only a matter of time before all online sales are taxed.
It may happen state by state.
It may take the form of a federal value-added tax - most of which will be channeled back to the states.
But it will happen, and sooner rather than later, I suspect.
What is there to stop it? The states that need these revenues are Democratic. The Republicans have a secure hold only on the lower Mississippi Delta and the depopulated Northern plains.
Is the link as solid as you think it is - or are you in competition with everyone on-line at 9 PM Eastern Time?
GTA 4 was widely estimated to have a budget of $100 million.
Not surprising, really, since you are competing for talent and producing your product in much the same way.
That's quite naive, you know.
The icons of American pop culture have a disreputable origin.
There is always a hint of something illicit, exclusive, commercial, the scent of money about them.
Jazz emerges from the brothel and the Cotton Club in Harlem.
Where the audience was white and slumming but still dressed to the nines and the booze was pricey.
Not from the open-air bandstand on the village square.
The barriers to entry, the sense of danger, the envy you inspire, the money you spend, are all part of the experience that cements the bond.
How substantial?
Most Americans work in low-margin business - doing things like agriculture, retail, etc... - providing the goods and services necessary for civilized life. It is these businesses for which the cost of software means the difference between laying off, and retaining employees.
I want to see your numbers here.
The custom accounting system for your farm or ranch costs $500 - and demands nothing more than a P3 with Win 98 and 16 MB RAM.
Farm Software Products, Farm Works Software
It is trivially easy to find free templates and tutorials for Excel and Quick Books
---and, of course, there are far more expense software and service bundles out there for the giant produce packing plant, the poultry king with 10 million birds.
The geek needs to be realistic about his place in a world where a thirty-year old Ford tractor, not kept up for show, sells for $10,000 - $20,000.
FOSS is no magic wand that significantly cuts costs or saves jobs here.
Contrast this with the closed source model, in which, in an effort to maximize vendor profit, always leaves out those unable or unwilling to pay.
Well, of course, they leave out those unwilling to pay.
So does Sun when it trims the full-time development team for StarOffice/OpenOffice to 24.
There is nothing that insulates the FOSS developer from economic realities.
The grants dry up. The corporate sponsor pulls out. The bank cuts you off. The mortgage payment is due next week.
FOSS is a development model. It is not a revenue model. In hard times you have to find a way to make ends meet.
You have to go where the money is.
It won't make a damn bit of difference if your software is still being released under the GPL.
Available in alpha for the MacIntel, Apple TV and Linux.
The invitation-only alpha for Windows was only released last month.
Boxee is obscure. Boxee is in development. It can't play protected content. The software isn't even available to over ninety percent of the market.
In its current state it is not a threat to Hulu or anyone else.
Boxee does not currently support hardware video decoding, the entire load of the video decoding process is handled by the system's CPU which means that users need, by today's standards, a very powerful CPU to decode native 1080p videos encoded with a modern video codec like H.264.
There must be life on Mars.
Because no one on this world is going to believe that little Molly installed the $2500 retail-boxed CS4 Newegg delivered to your door last week.
God help you if you try to get her testimony on record.
She will in absolute innocence sink your case in an instant with an inconvenient and embarrassing truth.
The kid was simply your tool -
and what that says about you isn't very pretty.
The geek concocts ridiculous - and self-destructive - schemes that fail the simplest tests of logic and experience.
so all you are missing if you use the 400 series driver is DRM... who in their right mind would call that a problem..
anyone who can see that HDTV display and the single-cable HDMI solution for digital audio and video is the future of the PC in the home market.
not everyone is a twenty-something DIY geek eager to cut into the sheetrock.
Why is it you can't let the Ethernet cable hang through the hall again?
because your wife said no way in hell.
They sue you - as head of household - the owner of record.
The guy whose credit card took the $1500 hit from Dell. The guy who signed for the system when it was delivered.
The judge and jury doesn't have to believe you or your kid every time it becomes convenient to pass the buck.
they've Deus Ex'd it - that is, butchered it for the benefit of Consoles.
and any PC gamer with a 40 to 70 inch HDTV?
I'd be quite content with HDMI and 1080p -
a quiet - cool running - affordable - video card for media play and PC gaming that powers down gracefully for less demanding tasks.
The "old way" began when you unfolded the Winegard antenna on a roof with a 45 degree pitch and a thirty foot drop and ended when you pounded in a ground stake with a sledgehammer until you were a candidate for cardiac arrest.
In labor and materials you had as big an investment in the antenna as you had in your 20" RCA - and one that paid dividends for many years after.
Digital has been broadcast at greatly reduced power.
If you want good reception now - and better reception later - you have to work for it - just as your grandad did for analog.
Because it affects our most isolated and vulnerable populations. the elderly, the poor, and the disabled.
Look around you.
Find out where these people live.
How these people live.
Four hours spent on a rural bus run can be very educational.
The third-rate nursing homes.
The group homes and apartments built on barren agricultural lots five miles from the nearest traffic light.
The tenant houses and run-down trailer parks you never gave a thought to.
$90 a month as a personal allowance.
Out of which will come your co-pays for therapy and drugs and blood work.
Capped at perhaps $300/yr.
Life-Line phone service at 10 cents a minute.
if it is not an inside job - how does the thief get his photograph of the "authorized user?"
when the sensor is a webcam - why not include motion or depth perception in the authentication process?
if the camera is sensitive to infrared why not confirm that the heat signature of a live body is present as well?
You can argue the distinction between a "task" and an "activity."
But I don't think that takes you very far.
Unlike more traditional desktop environments, [Sugar] does not use a "desktop" metaphor and only focuses on one task at a time. The OLPC XO-1 has a 1 GB NAND flash drive and 256 MB of memory. Since there is no swap space and storage space on the laptop, only a limited number of activities can run concurrently. The project's stated goal is to "avoid bloated interfaces", and "limit the controls to those immediately relevant to the task at hand" Sugar (GUI}
Experienced in what?
Random lock-ups and crashes on systems that don't have the resources to run multiple apps of any size or complexity?
The user is focused on mastery of applications - he wants to learn how to play a movie or write a letter. He is not a system mechanic.
To the left we see another geek blathering on about a boycott.
Slashdot's original hot-air balloon.
It assumes that the online retailer is prepared to surrender markets the size of New York and L.A.
It ain't gonna happen.
The end game would almost certainly a uniform federal sales tax with a rebate to state and local governments.
I suspect we will get there anyway - and sooner rather than later.
Opinions change after you have been laid off. Food. Housing. Medical care. The geek hasn't known hard times.