The behavior in question isn't "bundling", it's "tying". And there is a notable and telling litigation history against M$ in the area of anti-competitive tying of non-OS products to its OS. (See this nifty summary of the Caldera v. Microsoft case of 1996-2000.)
(There are those that argue that the "non-OS product"--Windows 3.1--is actually an OS component. Those folks are, of course, wrong. At the time of MS-DOS 5.0 and Digital Research's DR-DOS 6, Windows was no more a mandatory OS component than a 3 1/2" floppy drive was.)
So, Microsoft has made grabs at non-OS-space with its OS products. Yeah, I know, they settled without admission of guilt. The fact they settled is the moral equivalent of an admission of guilt, legal weasels notwithstanding.
Windows 3.1 was tied, for no valid technical reason, to Microsoft's MS-DOS. This solely to weaken competitive OS products. Sound familiar?
In fact, what you're saying is that EVERY MS product (from Flight Simulator to Age of Mythology) is tied to Windows because most are Windows exclusive. That is not what the courts had in mind.
The reason most M$ applications seem to be "Windows exclusive" is because they can't be run natively on other platforms. That's a valid technical reason for OS-exclusivity. However, if someone (e.g., the WINE Project) successfully engineers an OS or a compatibility layer which is API-compatible with Windows, and therefore makes the technical reasons for OS-exclusivity go away... then... M$ has no say in the matter. If the MS products can be run on non-M$ OSs, then M$ has no legal standing to prohibit that. M$ cannot legally mandate Windows in order to run M$ applications. THAT is illegal tying. And THAT IS what the courts had in mind.
Whose, Earth's? They looked pretty solid to me. Clunky, overfunctional, unaesthetic, boxy, like 21st Century U.S. Army stuff. Ugly, but structurally sound for the stresses you can statically design for (acceleration/deceleration, course change, some collision and weapons-fire resistance).
Besides, I seem to recall that a lot of Earth Alliance stuff is produced in the same system we use in the 21st Century: lowest bidder. Ugly and functional is usually cheaper than pretty and functional.
Some of the stuff from the other races (Mimbari, for instance) seemed more fragile, but after your technology has mastered localized gravitation control you can reinforce your structure with selective gravity polarization (like Star Trek "Structural Integrity Field"). Make your naval architecture as swoopy and ephemeral as you like, so long as you have still have power while you're maneuvering. (Which, by definition, you do--Newtonian universe, right?)
By the bye, earlier upthread someone was bemoaning how the stereotypical TV SF space battle always seemed to be atmospheric ("thick 2-D", I believe). B5 seemed to model the 3D Newtonian universe quite well...Starfury fighters cutting thrust, whipping around 180 degrees on the yaw axis, and blazing away with lasers or missiles at whoever's chasing them, coasting along all the while.
I'm not sure the size of your scissors should make a difference on how individuals can be influenced.
I'm sure the size of the scissors poised over certain Naughty Bits(tm) would influence me greatly. Well, if they were poised over my Naughty Bits(sm).
Poised over the professional journalist's Naughty Bits(c), the shear size might influence the honesty of their review.
By the bye, my lovely wife makes a pretty good living minding the spelling of several professional journalists. I bet she wishes she had shears of size to poise over their Naughty Bits(r), so that they might learn to spell and punctuate.
I was gonna smartass this, but I can't think of any non-lame ways. ("Metric, or English, billions?" was the best I could do. Aren't you glad I didn't?)
/us is silly for buying the title "arithmetic" verbatim./editors are silly for doing it too, but what can you expect? And, of course, the Depressing Freep Ress is outstandingly silly for muffing the math, but whatever.
Nonetheless, billions or trillions... that's still a lot of money. My other comment about the legal credibility of such damage claims still stands pretty well.
Re:Refactoring does not depend on Eclipse: Emacs!
on
Eclipse 2.1 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Amen, Brother, preach it!
If I want "a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe," I'll play chess. And a monolithic tool that needs a 2,560-page manual and a 17-week qualification period is no fun. Give me robust but lithe and agile tools that I can string together with a minimum of grunting and get out of my way!.
Years (decades?) ago, I was one of the fringe-warriors in the various editor holy wars, but as I grew older and wiser I realized it had less to do with the tool and more to do with the craftsman. Now, I prefer to craft my code myself, not let an IDE do too much for me. (How much is too much? "I can't define it but I know it when I see it" [Quoting Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's comment on obscenity.] As soon as the tool spends less time helping me and more time being in my way, it's out of here.
Dark Star. I saw it as a 11-year old and it simultaneously twisted me into the weird cynical person I am and made me into a true SF fan. (No, wait, that's redundant.)
Who can forget the crew (even the dead but cryo-preserved skipper) arguing with the AI of a planet-buster thermonuclear bomb warning: gratuitous anti-MS jab (probably Microsoft Bomb (tm)). Trying to convince it not to blow up, when that's the sole and total purpose of existence. Just because it couldn't detach from the bomb rails.
They just don't write 'em like that, and more's the shame.
Are you sure that you didn't accidentally leave the driver disk in the floppy drive that was at the top of the boot order?
This sounds vaguely familiar. I went apeshit nuts for the better part of a morning trying to figure out why a SuSe 8.1 P3 450 in the lab was trying to execute NTLDR (and failing)... until I remembered the driver diskette for the framebuffer in the damn floppy drive. D'OH!
Microsoft OSs: productivity killers even if you don't run them.
But, of course, this doesn't solve the reported rewriting of the MBR, and unless the whole story is a monsterous anti-MS troll I would imagine the original poster would have mentioned the floppy diskette.
I'm puzzled. I guess it'll stay one of the eternal mysteries.
You haven't worked with government much have you? Imagine the difference in freedom between being IS for a small business vs. a large corporation. That's the same difference as between large corporation and government. Government employees don't install anything (in general there are exceptions).
I'm lead engineer for a U.S. Air Force developmental and contracting facility. (I think it qualifies as "government".) I get to install damn near whatever I want in the lab. Most of my demonstrations become production prototypes, and come deployment time the execution contractors often choose the same architecture we prototyped, right down to the same open-source suites (operating environments, toolsets, tons of GNU stuff...).
The employees are generally responsible for vendor management and designing the criteria for the RFP/RFQ (though often they are even more removed from that and do vendor management for the vendors that design the criteria...).
Yes, we have vendor minders in the contracting center, but even they are beginning to open up to OS (since, for instance, some of the distros have received some US DoD "blessing"). And yes, sometimes it's "Here's a bunch of money, please tell us what we need and then build it for us," but we geeks in the process have our say and it often weighs in highly with the suits. Hell, that's literally 50% of my job--engineering assessment of contractor proposals for requirements, architecture, analysis, design, testing, coding, deployment and integration--half technical analyst for the customer, half mad scientist. It's a living.
If any given governmental entity has geeks on-staff, and they listen to the geeks at all, open-source can viably be a part of their IT infrastructure. If the governmental entity doesn't have its own technical experts, or has them but doesn't listen to them, they (A) deserve to suck, and (B) can still benefit from "consider OS" laws if they are encouraged (by said laws) to contract with someone clueful.
Anyway I'm not sure what you are arguing here. You seem to have a pretty good handle, you can't imagine the kinds of regulations that might block open source.
I don't have to imagine, I've lived it, and we're slowly making progress within my little slice of government IT to work our way around and through and over the maze. A law like this helps, because it gives the embattled geek who wants to see the right thing done one more small pile of paper to stack up against the other piles of paper. After all, that's how these types of decisions are made, right? Whichever side can produce the greater weight of relevant laws, regulations, instructions, and supporting documentation wins.
Often states and state agencies have regulations and legislation which require all sorts of properties from various "bidders" on contracts.
What contract? Not applicable. Govt IT employee downloads, configures, and installs. The only way that doesn't happen is if IT employee's PHB decides that you have to buy software. Hence, my comments about the hearts (not applicable in the case PHBs), minds (also not applicable), and meeting agendas (right on point).
And the scenario can be played out other ways, too. Hire a local or in-state integration contractor. The contractor has to meet whatever pork-barrel acquisition rules, but now has the freedom to provide OS as well as (or instead of) commercial. A regular tax-revenue source (sales, property, income, whatever your state charges), within easy reach of the state revenue department, and keepin' those Texas Dollars in Texas, God Bless 'em!
Non-USians: none of this applies to you. Or maybe not.
Bottom line: open-source is probably not going to be disqualified by any state's acquision law, even the loopholey "gimme-my-kickback" kind.
No, I think that the battle lies in the hearts, minds, and committee-meeting agendas of acquisition and technical bureaucrats at all levels of government, Texas included. "Consider open source" needs teeth or else it will get the "We considered it a bad idea" treatment.
I thought Texas was a lethal-injection state. That's not expensive, right? A little barbituate, a little potassium chloride. Hell, if you were really cheap you wouldn't have to worry over-much about sanitizing the plumbing--who's gonna worry about subsequent infection if the needle's not sterile?
What the hell, too much karma's just a burden anyways.
If you wanna learn Perl, I'd suggest getting the Perl Cookbook and browsing through it. I learn a lot of neat, useful tricks that way
Hell, I've implemented production software by pasting together multiple snippets from the Cookbook. I think I've invested maybe 200 lines of original Perl in all our production and support suite.
Buying the Perl Bookshelf was the best investment our organization ever made, and O'Reilly Press is God.
1. National Labs are a queer situation. Semi-demi-hemi-governmental installation. And, as aways, there's usually more land and encompasses than the security zone. (Not on an Air Force base, though. Almost always 100% of the base is a security zone.)
2. I really oughta learn Python. I can write straightforward stuff in Perl, but I don't suss the arcana. Just reading the Perl Apocalypse issue mentioned in the recent/. article and I realized I don't know squat about Perl. Maybe Python will give me another crack at language uber-mastery.
3. If you have a local retailer, you may still be in business, unless that retailer gets his stuff from his distibutor by air...
Sorry to offend you. My point is PEER PRESSURE==FEAR THE MOB. I think freedom begins with individual freedom.
Your example's tastelessness hid the point from me. I apologize for letting reflex inhibit rationality and interfere with communications.
Now, back on-topic. These folks are using their individual freedom (right to associate freely, right to speak freely) to help them live their own lives. They've chosen this not to make anyone else look bad, but to help them live up to their own expectations.
Peer pressure? This is a peer group its members freely choose to join. This is a peer pressure they freely choose to submit to.
Granted, there is a danger in accepting any form of peer pressure: down the extreme end of that road is cyanide Kool-Aid, self-castration, drug dealing, Shriners in fezzes riding mini-bikes, ethnic cleansing, fashion...And of course, there are counterbalancing risks of totally ignoring peer pressure: sociopathy, anarchic chaos, movie directors, narcissism, egomania, dictators of all stripes, fashion designers...
Also, it's the classic pattern: opt-in first, it soon turns into: "why aren't you joining the 'good' people?". Etc, etc.
And this matters to you, why? You've already demonstrated remarkable resistance to peer pressure (oh, wait, this is/., nevermind). Seriously, though, your slippery-slope dog won't hunt, Personal moral decisions do not automatically become moral repression. Sometimes it happens (abortion, abolition), sometimes it doesn't happen (prohibition, abortion). Does that mean that no one, or no small group, can make a personal moral judgement for himself/herself/themselves? What happened to freedom?
No, there's no threat here to anyone of reasonable intelligence and any hint of self-esteem. For those who don't, well, sheep will always be herded by someone.
Let's face it, moral calculus is much harder than integral calculus, because it's up to each of us to figure it out for ourselves. Your answer sheet means nothing to anyone else, and their answers don't make yours wrong.
Deployment of these aircraft within range of a strategic launch facility would practically be an act of war. Don't think for a minute that any country with a strategic launch field wouldn't expend stupid crazy amounts of effort to knock down an ABL that could reach into the air above that launch field. Stuff like mass suicide charges with dozens of fighters, special forces attacks on the ABL's support bases, etc.
As such, the ABL makes an incredibly poor strategic missile defense. It's mobile and powerful, but doesn't have the reach to stop launches from within the sovereign territory of a strategic hostile.
As to the "missile defense" agreement, the US seems to be edging out of this. Strategic defenses are still pie-in-the-sky, but things like the ABL make defending against third-world wannabes with "the bastard love child of SCUD" missiles practical.
Re:you may think it's funny now
on
Server In A Fly
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· Score: 1
But wait till this fly returns from the dead with the help of his cybernetic implants to seek revenge! Revenge Of The Cyborg Fly! Don't say I didn't warn you.
Stupid lame humor aside, the underlying articles are about the presense of an intense band of ionized particles in Europa's orbit, caused by and causing parts of Europa's water-ice surface boiling off because of particle bombardment. Then somehow the boffins or press types leap to the conclusion that Europan life is suddenly less likely. I don't see the connection, since Europan life could easily form deeper in the water. That would protect it from energetic particle bombardment.
I don't get how we go from "surface ionization" to "no life at all".
Customs Service logo? That's not a DOJ agency. That's Treasury. Now, if Customs' logo is there because of the importation angle, great, that makes some sense, but I'm in U.S. government service and I find it a hint strange that a subordinate service of one cabinet department would get co-billing with another cabinet department.
Yes, bureaucracies are like showbiz in how they manage their public appearance. They're just phenomenally more annoying in their performance.
"received over a regular telephone line onto paper." Seems like this would be a nice source of spare income if it could be done reliably, but do I have to use a modem?:P
I have a cable modem. Does that count? It's pretty regular; I've never seen it constipated at all.
More seriously, how tortured of a legal theory do you need to construct to cover broadband users? What is a "regular telephone line"? Does my cable modem count if my phone service is also provided by the cable co? If I'm using VOIP?
This news is mildly encouraging, but because it hinges on such a specific "technicality" (I love using that phrase in a legal context), I don't see how much it helps a lot of us.
Oh, yeah, IANAL, so consider my legal interpretation with great scepticism.
Slashdot Mirror
Or ripped from k5. Plus any other optional combinations of "old" and "dupe".
Sure, go ahead, mod me down, who needs karma anyways?
O - CowboyNeal is my el presidente for life!
Bring back the CowboyNeal option...the voter's best alternative to just voting "None of the above"!
The behavior in question isn't "bundling", it's "tying". And there is a notable and telling litigation history against M$ in the area of anti-competitive tying of non-OS products to its OS. (See this nifty summary of the Caldera v. Microsoft case of 1996-2000.)
(There are those that argue that the "non-OS product"--Windows 3.1--is actually an OS component. Those folks are, of course, wrong. At the time of MS-DOS 5.0 and Digital Research's DR-DOS 6, Windows was no more a mandatory OS component than a 3 1/2" floppy drive was.)
So, Microsoft has made grabs at non-OS-space with its OS products. Yeah, I know, they settled without admission of guilt. The fact they settled is the moral equivalent of an admission of guilt, legal weasels notwithstanding.
Windows 3.1 was tied, for no valid technical reason, to Microsoft's MS-DOS. This solely to weaken competitive OS products. Sound familiar?
In fact, what you're saying is that EVERY MS product (from Flight Simulator to Age of Mythology) is tied to Windows because most are Windows exclusive. That is not what the courts had in mind.
The reason most M$ applications seem to be "Windows exclusive" is because they can't be run natively on other platforms. That's a valid technical reason for OS-exclusivity. However, if someone (e.g., the WINE Project) successfully engineers an OS or a compatibility layer which is API-compatible with Windows, and therefore makes the technical reasons for OS-exclusivity go away... then... M$ has no say in the matter. If the MS products can be run on non-M$ OSs, then M$ has no legal standing to prohibit that. M$ cannot legally mandate Windows in order to run M$ applications. THAT is illegal tying. And THAT IS what the courts had in mind.
Whose, Earth's? They looked pretty solid to me. Clunky, overfunctional, unaesthetic, boxy, like 21st Century U.S. Army stuff. Ugly, but structurally sound for the stresses you can statically design for (acceleration/deceleration, course change, some collision and weapons-fire resistance).
Besides, I seem to recall that a lot of Earth Alliance stuff is produced in the same system we use in the 21st Century: lowest bidder. Ugly and functional is usually cheaper than pretty and functional.
Some of the stuff from the other races (Mimbari, for instance) seemed more fragile, but after your technology has mastered localized gravitation control you can reinforce your structure with selective gravity polarization (like Star Trek "Structural Integrity Field"). Make your naval architecture as swoopy and ephemeral as you like, so long as you have still have power while you're maneuvering. (Which, by definition, you do--Newtonian universe, right?)
By the bye, earlier upthread someone was bemoaning how the stereotypical TV SF space battle always seemed to be atmospheric ("thick 2-D", I believe). B5 seemed to model the 3D Newtonian universe quite well...Starfury fighters cutting thrust, whipping around 180 degrees on the yaw axis, and blazing away with lasers or missiles at whoever's chasing them, coasting along all the while.
I'm sure the size of the scissors poised over certain Naughty Bits(tm) would influence me greatly. Well, if they were poised over my Naughty Bits(sm).
Poised over the professional journalist's Naughty Bits(c), the shear size might influence the honesty of their review.
By the bye, my lovely wife makes a pretty good living minding the spelling of several professional journalists. I bet she wishes she had shears of size to poise over their Naughty Bits(r), so that they might learn to spell and punctuate.
Nonetheless, billions or trillions... that's still a lot of money. My other comment about the legal credibility of such damage claims still stands pretty well.
If I want "a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe," I'll play chess. And a monolithic tool that needs a 2,560-page manual and a 17-week qualification period is no fun. Give me robust but lithe and agile tools that I can string together with a minimum of grunting and get out of my way!.
Years (decades?) ago, I was one of the fringe-warriors in the various editor holy wars, but as I grew older and wiser I realized it had less to do with the tool and more to do with the craftsman. Now, I prefer to craft my code myself, not let an IDE do too much for me. (How much is too much? "I can't define it but I know it when I see it" [Quoting Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's comment on obscenity.] As soon as the tool spends less time helping me and more time being in my way, it's out of here.
Who can forget the crew (even the dead but cryo-preserved skipper) arguing with the AI of a planet-buster thermonuclear bomb
warning: gratuitous anti-MS jab
(probably Microsoft Bomb (tm)). Trying to convince it not to blow up, when that's the sole and total purpose of existence. Just because it couldn't detach from the bomb rails.
They just don't write 'em like that, and more's the shame.
This sounds vaguely familiar. I went apeshit nuts for the better part of a morning trying to figure out why a SuSe 8.1 P3 450 in the lab was trying to execute NTLDR (and failing)... until I remembered the driver diskette for the framebuffer in the damn floppy drive. D'OH!
Microsoft OSs: productivity killers even if you don't run them.
But, of course, this doesn't solve the reported rewriting of the MBR, and unless the whole story is a monsterous anti-MS troll I would imagine the original poster would have mentioned the floppy diskette.
I'm puzzled. I guess it'll stay one of the eternal mysteries.
I'm lead engineer for a U.S. Air Force developmental and contracting facility. (I think it qualifies as "government".) I get to install damn near whatever I want in the lab. Most of my demonstrations become production prototypes, and come deployment time the execution contractors often choose the same architecture we prototyped, right down to the same open-source suites (operating environments, toolsets, tons of GNU stuff...).
The employees are generally responsible for vendor management and designing the criteria for the RFP/RFQ (though often they are even more removed from that and do vendor management for the vendors that design the criteria...).
Yes, we have vendor minders in the contracting center, but even they are beginning to open up to OS (since, for instance, some of the distros have received some US DoD "blessing"). And yes, sometimes it's "Here's a bunch of money, please tell us what we need and then build it for us," but we geeks in the process have our say and it often weighs in highly with the suits. Hell, that's literally 50% of my job--engineering assessment of contractor proposals for requirements, architecture, analysis, design, testing, coding, deployment and integration--half technical analyst for the customer, half mad scientist. It's a living.
If any given governmental entity has geeks on-staff, and they listen to the geeks at all, open-source can viably be a part of their IT infrastructure. If the governmental entity doesn't have its own technical experts, or has them but doesn't listen to them, they (A) deserve to suck, and (B) can still benefit from "consider OS" laws if they are encouraged (by said laws) to contract with someone clueful.
Anyway I'm not sure what you are arguing here. You seem to have a pretty good handle, you can't imagine the kinds of regulations that might block open source.
I don't have to imagine, I've lived it, and we're slowly making progress within my little slice of government IT to work our way around and through and over the maze. A law like this helps, because it gives the embattled geek who wants to see the right thing done one more small pile of paper to stack up against the other piles of paper. After all, that's how these types of decisions are made, right? Whichever side can produce the greater weight of relevant laws, regulations, instructions, and supporting documentation wins.
Often states and state agencies have regulations and legislation which require all sorts of properties from various "bidders" on contracts.
What contract? Not applicable. Govt IT employee downloads, configures, and installs. The only way that doesn't happen is if IT employee's PHB decides that you have to buy software. Hence, my comments about the hearts (not applicable in the case PHBs), minds (also not applicable), and meeting agendas (right on point).
And the scenario can be played out other ways, too. Hire a local or in-state integration contractor. The contractor has to meet whatever pork-barrel acquisition rules, but now has the freedom to provide OS as well as (or instead of) commercial. A regular tax-revenue source (sales, property, income, whatever your state charges), within easy reach of the state revenue department, and keepin' those Texas Dollars in Texas, God Bless 'em!
Besides, everyone will pay their state's sales tax before long!
Non-USians: none of this applies to you. Or maybe not.
Bottom line: open-source is probably not going to be disqualified by any state's acquision law, even the loopholey "gimme-my-kickback" kind.
No, I think that the battle lies in the hearts, minds, and committee-meeting agendas of acquisition and technical bureaucrats at all levels of government, Texas included. "Consider open source" needs teeth or else it will get the "We considered it a bad idea" treatment.
What the hell, too much karma's just a burden anyways.
Hell, I've implemented production software by pasting together multiple snippets from the Cookbook. I think I've invested maybe 200 lines of original Perl in all our production and support suite.
Buying the Perl Bookshelf was the best investment our organization ever made, and O'Reilly Press is God.
Sheesh, I need to preview better. "There's usually more land than encompasses the security zone.
2. I really oughta learn Python. I can write straightforward stuff in Perl, but I don't suss the arcana. Just reading the Perl Apocalypse issue mentioned in the recent /. article and I realized I don't know squat about Perl. Maybe Python will give me another crack at language uber-mastery.
3. If you have a local retailer, you may still be in business, unless that retailer gets his stuff from his distibutor by air...
Your example's tastelessness hid the point from me. I apologize for letting reflex inhibit rationality and interfere with communications.
Now, back on-topic. These folks are using their individual freedom (right to associate freely, right to speak freely) to help them live their own lives. They've chosen this not to make anyone else look bad, but to help them live up to their own expectations.
Peer pressure? This is a peer group its members freely choose to join. This is a peer pressure they freely choose to submit to.
Granted, there is a danger in accepting any form of peer pressure: down the extreme end of that road is cyanide Kool-Aid, self-castration, drug dealing, Shriners in fezzes riding mini-bikes, ethnic cleansing, fashion...And of course, there are counterbalancing risks of totally ignoring peer pressure: sociopathy, anarchic chaos, movie directors, narcissism, egomania, dictators of all stripes, fashion designers...
Also, it's the classic pattern: opt-in first, it soon turns into: "why aren't you joining the 'good' people?". Etc, etc.
And this matters to you, why? You've already demonstrated remarkable resistance to peer pressure (oh, wait, this is /., nevermind). Seriously, though, your slippery-slope dog won't hunt, Personal moral decisions do not automatically become moral repression. Sometimes it happens (abortion, abolition), sometimes it doesn't happen (prohibition, abortion). Does that mean that no one, or no small group, can make a personal moral judgement for himself/herself/themselves? What happened to freedom?
No, there's no threat here to anyone of reasonable intelligence and any hint of self-esteem. For those who don't, well, sheep will always be herded by someone.
Let's face it, moral calculus is much harder than integral calculus, because it's up to each of us to figure it out for ourselves. Your answer sheet means nothing to anyone else, and their answers don't make yours wrong.
And here I am without mod points. Oh, well, I can't give you "flamebait" and "troll" at the same time, though you clearly deserve it.
As such, the ABL makes an incredibly poor strategic missile defense. It's mobile and powerful, but doesn't have the reach to stop launches from within the sovereign territory of a strategic hostile.
As to the "missile defense" agreement, the US seems to be edging out of this. Strategic defenses are still pie-in-the-sky, but things like the ABL make defending against third-world wannabes with "the bastard love child of SCUD" missiles practical.
Sounds like a Joe Cartoon Supahfly story to me.
Looks like someone set up Europa the bomb.
Stupid lame humor aside, the underlying articles are about the presense of an intense band of ionized particles in Europa's orbit, caused by and causing parts of Europa's water-ice surface boiling off because of particle bombardment. Then somehow the boffins or press types leap to the conclusion that Europan life is suddenly less likely. I don't see the connection, since Europan life could easily form deeper in the water. That would protect it from energetic particle bombardment.
I don't get how we go from "surface ionization" to "no life at all".
Yeah, I'll get modded down. It's happened before, it'll happen again.
Nope, sorry, he already has a bad sciffy series. If it weren't for that, though, you would be right.
Customs Service logo? That's not a DOJ agency. That's Treasury. Now, if Customs' logo is there because of the importation angle, great, that makes some sense, but I'm in U.S. government service and I find it a hint strange that a subordinate service of one cabinet department would get co-billing with another cabinet department.
Yes, bureaucracies are like showbiz in how they manage their public appearance. They're just phenomenally more annoying in their performance.
Seems like this would be a nice source of spare income if it could be done reliably, but do I have to use a modem?
I have a cable modem. Does that count? It's pretty regular; I've never seen it constipated at all.
More seriously, how tortured of a legal theory do you need to construct to cover broadband users? What is a "regular telephone line"? Does my cable modem count if my phone service is also provided by the cable co? If I'm using VOIP?
This news is mildly encouraging, but because it hinges on such a specific "technicality" (I love using that phrase in a legal context), I don't see how much it helps a lot of us.
Oh, yeah, IANAL, so consider my legal interpretation with great scepticism.