All that the "lastest studies" do is reduce public confidence in science. A long time ago, I tuned out all the "latest studies" on food as a bunch of fraudulant BS foisted upon the public by "scientists" looking to feather their nests with research grants or lawyers looking for an ambulance to chase. Check out the following link. "According to the latest study" campaign. I just follow two maximums that have been know for hundreds (if not thousands) of years and that did not require multi-million dollar research programs to figure out : 1) All things in moderation and 2) eat a balanced diet.
Compared to the righty and lefty stations out there, NPR is the model of balance and journalistic integrity
Actually, it is their presentation of themselves are a "model of balance" that reveals NPR's lack of integrity. Fox and Air America are open and honest about their slant. In a sense, you can trust the more openly partisan presenters, because you know where they are comming from and you can easily filter the blantant partisan BS. When you tune to Fox, you know upfront to be on your guard and not to swallow everything they say. NPR on the other hand, obstensibly pretends to be evenhanded (perhaps they have delueded themselves into actually thinking they are evenhanded), but their bias is just as great.
I love NPR. NPR is a fine source for in-depth news, and I listen to it every morning and every afternoon during my commute. But I listen with a critical ear.
Without doubt, NPR is left-wing in every aspect from story selection to its vocabulary. They are just subtle about it. Their very vocabulary of referring to liberals as "progressives" is revealing; "progressive" being the now self-chosen moniker of the left (since liberal is now a dirty word). The stories to which NPR chooses to give air time are the stories that that concern "progressives". Have you ever noticed that when they report about a "crisis" in health care, there is usually a Democratic sponsoned health bill pending? When they report about the "evironmental crisis" in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, it is usually when the enviromentalists are working to defeat drilling in ANWR. Whenever the anti-war rhetoric is heating up, they run some heart-wrenching story about the mom of some soldier who was killed or some innocents accidentally targeted by the US (but never an in-depth story about people deliberately target by insurgents - just a three-second blurb). All the while, they maintain the facade of being objective. They also provide numerous forums for traditionally left-wing interest groups or members of the Democratic Party coalition. For example: 'Latino USA' is an NPR show about issues that affect a traditionally Democratic voting group. Their religious show "Speaking of Faith" almost always has flattering portraits of exotic, non-traditional, or liberal Christian beliefs (i.e. likey Democrates) as "enlighted" and "inclusive", there by implicitedly casting traditional Christian beliefs (likely Republicans) as old-fashioned and boarderline bigoted. "Speaking of Faith" (and most of media) also referes to liberal protestant denominations as "mainstream protestants" but excludes the conservative Southern Baptist Convention from that description. (The Southern Baptist are the largest protestant denomination in the country and in fact have more members than all the other "mainstream" denominations combinded (perhaps not counting Methodists), but are somehow not mainstream.)
So yes, NPR is biased. They are just sly about it. Read (or listen) between the lines.
Well, image your SSN as a common primary key across several databases such as credit card records,bank records, national identity card, tax, criminal records, and library. Now immagine it imbedded in your right arm or just in your driver licence in you wallet and readable at 10 or 20 feet. Now imagine it read everytime you enter a store, check out a library book, buy a hamburger, sit at a computer terminal, or drive by a stoplight.
Stop letting the fact that religious people are leary trick you into dismissing the threat as a fantasy.
From what I read on MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11636942/ , the Origami project will be a paperbook sized tablet computer (i.e. a PDA on steroids) that will run regular Win-XP instead of the crippled CE or XP-embeded found on most PDAs. Basically the PDA will evolve from an embedded system with limited functionality into a more full-featured portable PC with full multi-media capability. This will could also be a threat to the iPod, since the Origami box would also be a portable player, but with other features included.
Ubuntu...It extended meaning is that "a human is a human being through other human beings". But even that is too simple. It also contains respect and concern for one's family, one's neighbors and is fundemantally inclusive, in strong contrast to the fundemantal exclusive of the western culture.
Oh... so it means "Mensch". And yes, you see, we do have this concept in traditional western culture. You confuse the coarsening of post-modern culture with western culture, but there are still some 'traditional' families that try to instill these traits of manners, respect, and concern for others in our childern despite outside influences. You know... things like teaching them to give up their seat on the bus or train to an elderly person, or saying "Sir" and "Ma'am" when speaking to an elder, or offering to help a neighbor mow his lawn when he is sick or injured? These are all part of the "Golden Rule" which is a core part of Christianity, which was a core of traditional western culture.
What is going on here is that the Clinton Administration did a blanket order to un-classify truckloads of documents without properly reviewing each one to see if it was appropriate to de-classify. It was a purely political and ideological decision about "open government", "right of the people to know", etc, etc, etc without any real review of the propriety of releasing each document. So the Bush Administration is reacting to reclassify them on the basis of being prudent (better safe than sorry, in their view). Unfortunately, the Bush Administration is not properly reviewing them either to see if they need to be reclassified. It all boils down to there not being enough government officials with enough time (and authority) on their hands to review each document and make an intelligent decision on whether it should be classified. This is not a case of being "evil", but a case erring on the side of caution, when you are too short-handed to do anything else.
This whole thread is offtopic, but I feel compelled to answer the troll.
4. If we are at war with Al Qaeda, then why doesn't the US treat them by Geneva conventions, and other standards for treating POWs? But the administration has denied that they are prisoners of war - they are "enemy combatants" - therefore, there must be no war, if they are not POWs.
It is quite clear that either you do not understand the Geneva Conventions, or you are merely spouting anti-American/anti-Bush rhetoric, or both, because the people at GITMO clearly do not qualify for POW status. Here is a link to the authoritative text of Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. I direct your attention to Article 3 and especially Article 4 which I quote for you.
Article 4
A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present
Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have
fallen into the power of the enemy:
1. Members of the armed forces of a Party to the
conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such
armed forces.
2. Members of other militias and members of other
volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to
a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if
this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps,
including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following
conditions:
(a) That of being commanded by a person
responsible for his subordinates;
(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign
recognizable at a distance;
(c) That of carrying arms openly;
(d) That of conducting their operations in
accordance with the laws and customs of war.
3. Members of regular armed forces who profess
allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining
Power.
4. Persons who accompany the armed forces without
actually being members thereof, such as civilian members of military aircraft
crews, war correspondents, supply contractors, members of labour units or of
services responsible for the welfare of the armed forces, provided that they
have received authorization from the armed forces which they accompany, who
shall provide them for that purpose with an identity card similar to the annexed
model.
5. Members of crews, including masters, pilots and
apprentices, of the merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft of the
Parties to the conflict, who do not benefit by more favourable treatment under
any other provisions of international law.
6. Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on
the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading
forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units,
provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.
The combatants held at GITMO do not meet these conditions and they are, in fact, war criminals themselves. They do not carry arms openly and they do not respect the laws and customs of war (i.e. they purposely and directly attack civilians and violate every single clause of Article 3 as a matter of deliberate policy). They are quite literally "illegal combatants", that is, they wage war without following the laws and customs of war. In fact, they are lucky because the "customs" of war prior to the Geneva and Hauge Conventions (which they are not protected by), would be to summarily execute anybody who was engaged in a purposeful violation of the laws and customs of wars (i.e. the old custom was to grant no quarter to war criminals on the field and, if they did happen to be captured, they would be tried at the drumhead, at best).
You also do not seem to grasp the concept that a state of War can exist without a neatly signed declaration. Nor do you grasp that war can also be waged by non-stat
[sarcasm] Hey, let's start a proprietary subscription based service where people can connect and see controlled content. We'll call it "Q-Link" or maybe "America-On-Line".[/sarcasm]
Well, since that has been done before, more likely I think were looking at interactive TV delivered through fiber-optic (as the article mentioned the "Google Cube"). Just think of tailored commercials for each individual user determined by a mixture of your subscription data (age, address, credit score), your past buying habits, and past viewing habits, and your surfing habits. Or think about commercials where your remote has a "buy now" button for instant targeted impulse buying (hey you were surfing for 'Perl Jam', now see several commercials about their CD Box set). The Data-Center-in-a-Box will be the local processing/routing node that determines which commercial the individual local viewers in its assigned sub-net get to see.
Think about a combination of cookies on steroids (actually they don't need a cookie, just your Google Cube MAC address) and a hugh highly indexed data-warehouse of individual past behavior that should make any privacy advocate cringe. I think Google's ability to collect, sort, index, retain, and retreive information about individuals will make the NSA look like third-rate amateurs. People get exercised about the NSA, but the Government is (mostly) constrained by law and periodic elections. Google (as a borderless international corporation) will not be restained by anything. My own personal alarmist, chicken-little-the-sky-is-falling prediction, Google enters into an information sharing agreement with VISA and DISCOVER, so they can track your off-line buying habits just as efficiently as your on-line habits.
Ok, I just don't understand, unless it is pure cheapness and greed. Why doesn't MS just pay the man $1 per shipped license. The marginal cost to press the cd and license the software is basically nill. It's not like they don't make a basically 100% profit on each license already. So surely they can cough up $1 out of the $370 that I paid them for my license. But Nooooo, they want to remove the functionality instead of licensing it. Come on MS, just fork over the cash (its basically chump change to you) and let the users keep the functionality.
If a business division is working with especially sensitive data, perhaps they should not be working on PC's at all. That might be a job for a thin-client/dumb terminal with no drives or ports (other than ethernet, video, and ps-2 keyboard/mouse).
Sun has been pushing thin clients for years and some of their major selling points have been security both from the data sensitive aspect and security from the user-can't-break-it aspect.
And no, you aren't a rich white guy. You're probably a white guy, and probably an asshole, but you aren't the target of the civil rights/minorities lobbies.
Ok, how does pointing out an instance of hypocracy regarding suppression of free expression make me an "asshole"? An ad-hominem attack does not refute the point. Suppresion of bad speech is still suppression of speech. What is good or bad speech is a matter of opinion among individuals (although I also agree that racist and sexist speech is bad). Your own speech could be good or bad depending on what somebody else thinks. Does that mean it should be arbitrarily supressed? Think about it.
Secondly, I'll assume your rant about "targeting" is a reference to racial politics and preferences. So lets talk about that, even if it is off-topic. You will probably note that its not the "rich white guys" kids that are getting refused admission to university or bussed across town to gang-ridden public schools (the rich send their kids to private schools or live in exclusive outer suburbs). It is working class people that are displaced by racial preferences in the university and who's kids are bussed accross town. The "rich white guys" at Harvard, Yale, and Ann Arbor are all too willing to agree to racial politics because it doesn't affect them (they get admitted anyway), it affects the working class kids who might be just above borderline, but who get displaced by somebody with even lower qualifications for no reason other than race.
The rich white guys, however, love to make you think you are a target, because you'll stand up for them, falsely thinking you're standing up for yourself.
Quite the opposite, the "rich white guys" get to sit back secure in their power while the poor fight it out amongst themselves. Did you ever hear of a saying that goes "Divide and Conquer"? Meanwhile, they can divert attention from themselves by saying "see all that we have done", while the basic power structure that keeps them rich and powerful remains intact.
Wow, way to ruin the internet. This sort of thing is exactly what people are trying to fight - basing everything on the "community standards of the recipient" is a recipie for disaster when you're talking about global network (especially an anonymous, pull based one). If your law were passed, you'd have just given carte blanche to shut down almost any site in the US to *anyone* who can afford a plane ticket and the services of a 16 year old.
There is legal precedent for a recipient standard which causes the most easily offended micro-minority's sensabilities to rule. Take for instance the "Hostile Environment" standard in sexual and racial harrassment cases. According to the law, no obscene or offensive intent is required. If the most easily offended receipient or observer in a work environment decides that something is offensive, then by law, it is. Of course, this has a chilling effect on speech. But then again, that is the point. The feminist and civil rights lobbies (who,despite their protests about being oppressed, are really increadibly powerful political lobbies) have decreed it to be so and have gotten the congress and courts to agree with them.
Of course, any suggestion to roll back the draconian restrictions on free expression are instantly labled "racist, sexist, reactionary, etc, etc, etc." Seems that a lot of people who have problems with the standard applied to porn have absolutely no problem applying the standard to other things.
I also had the problems of "loosing" POP messages when they are downloaded on different machines in my home network and of not having the sent items in a central location. I don't want to "leave them on the server" because my ISP will soon tell me my box is full and start bouncing inbound mail.
My solution was to set up fetchmail to download mail from the ISP-Pop server and deliver to procmail which delivers to an imap maildir in my home directory. Cron is set to check every 10 minutes for new messages. My imap server is courier-imap . The imap server reads whatever procmail dumps into the maildir. The configuration was a snap because I just took the default configurations(the box is inside my firewall and is not externally exposed - configuration may be more complex if you have to lock down the box for external access). Outbound I still send smtp directly from the mail client to the isp, but I have thunderbird configured to put a copy in the "sent" folder on the imap server.
I've had this configuration working a few weeks and so far it seems to work well. Now I can see my messages no matter which machine I happen to be on. Thunderbird seems to be easiest client to make this work with. I've had problems getting both Outlook/Outlook Express to put then sent items on the server, but have had not problems with Thunderbird.
here is the link that I used to help me with the setup (It's for Arch Linux, I use CentOS, but the configs are the same). Just remember to turn of the email notifications in your crontab or it will spam you inbox.
1 - Make patents like trademarks, they have to be actively used and defended. This means that a patent holder must actively be engaged in the manufacture or production of the patented item (or at least show demonstrable intent to do so - like arranging funding to build a factory). That would effectively end the "patent troll" business model of being in business to only licence patents. If the holder is "too small" to own the factory individually himself,then he can be a principle of the corporation or business that does.
2- If not ending software patents altogather, limit them to 5 years. Five years is practically forever in the software market. (perhaps they should do this with software copyrights too)
3- Because patents (and IP generally) are the work of the human mind, make patent ownership non-transferable and limited to the private individual who actually used his mind to invent it. No corporate ownership allowed.(Oh? You say that IBM funded the lab and not the indivdual inventor? IBM paid his salary? Well, then IBM can contract with the inventor to have a favorable or royalty-free license.) Corporations would be able to license, but never own. Provision can be made for joint ownersship in small limited partnerships when more than one person collaberated.
4 - Elminate method patents completely. If a method is secret, then it is already protected as a "trade secret".
SCO's unix biz was terminally ill long before they started suing people (although that didn't help) The law suits were simply an act of desparation. SCO is dead because their product lacked all the high-end features found in most of the big 64-bit unix flavors like Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX. SCO was living in the the low-end 32-bit intel area of the Unix neighborhood and they just couldn't compete with Linux there and 64-bit Solaris/AIX RISC on the high end. BTW... I heard that SCO's biggest customer (McDonalds) was switching to WinXP for their point-of-sale equipment. Probably the last nail in the coffin.
Perhaps they could license some of Opera's technology (like rendoring or tab management) and itegrate them into IE (while not breaking IE's hooks into the OS).
Although some European countries have managed to reduce their emmissions, most have *not* met their targets and only the UK has exceeded its targeted cuts. In fact, "Eleven have reported increases since 1990, with huge rises seen in Spain (41.7 pct), Portugal (36.7 pct), Greece (25.8 pct), Ireland (25.6 pct), Finland (21.5 pct) and Austria (16.5 pct)" as reported at Forbes
So perhaps you should try talking to your European brothers living in glass houses in Spain and Ireland before you start casting rocks at the US. Making promises in a treaty is nice, but not keeping them yourself and then critizing those who never made the promise in the first place is hypocrisy of the worst sort.
Low Flush *wastes* water, Oil based don't work
on
To Flush Or Not To Flush
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
First, lots of cities in the US are changing their building codes to get rid of "low flush" after having them for years. Low flush toilets actually waste water because they frequently don't carry away all the waste on the first or second flush, so people end up flushing them repeatedly. After five flushes on a low flush, you've wasted like 3 times the water to accomplish what a regular toilet would have done in a single flush.
As far as "no flush" oil based systems, I've actually used one and I was disgusted by the smell. The state of South Carolina has (or had during the early-mid 90s) a "zero effluent" rest area on I-26. It used a mineral oil based system. They had big signs explaining how it worked and how it was so evironmentally beneficial etc etc etc. The problem is that it smelt like the monkey house at the zoo on a bad day. And I don't mean like a normal rest stop smells, but like a normal rest stop x12. I lived in the Carolinas back then and I frequently traveled that interstate, so I learned to "hold it" and skip that particual rest area and pay $.85 to buy a cup of coffee at McDonalds so I could use their regular bathroom. The smell is a dead give-away of bacterial growth. There is *NO WAY* an oil based no-flush system could ever be sanitary.
We also have White Noise Generators at my office. They simply sound like the air-conditioners running all the time. They do a good job of covering over most low-level noise like quite conversations.
The funny thing is that I was having my hearing checked a few months ago and I mentioned it to the doctor. He was completely suprised at the idea and had never heard of it, even though it has been around for years.
They are supplying the motherboard too, so how hard would it be to put a ROM on it that intercepts the query to the CPU and always gives the same (false) answer?
Ice cores contain an abundance of climate information --more so than any other natural recorder of climate such as tree rings or sediment layers. Although their record is short (in geologic terms), it can be highly detailed. An ice core from the right site can contain an uninterrupted, detailed climate record extending back hundreds of thousands of years[my emphasis].
Even the *oldest* ice core sample is estimated to be only 750K years old. That is still a blink of an eye in geologic time. It can only tell us about recent times. That is not enough to establish normality. How do we know that the last 750K is not abnormally cold or abnormally warm or abnormally volatile? We don't. Consequently, there is no reasonable baseline to establish "normal", unless we make the anthropocentric leap to conclude that our own short time on earth establishes normality.
What we do know, is that there have been repeated wild swings in global climate and CO2 levels (along with other atmospheric gases). Atmospheric CO2 levels were 10 times higher than today's levels at the end of the Triassic and the beginning of the Jurassic.
According to this site:
Similarly, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Early Carboniferous Period were approximately 1500 ppm (parts per million), but by the Middle Carboniferous had declined to about 350 ppm -- comparable to average CO2 concentrations today!
Earth's atmosphere today contains about 370 ppm CO2 (0.037%). Compared to former geologic times, our present atmosphere, like the Late Carboniferous atmosphere, is CO2- impoverished! In the last 600 million years of Earth's history only the Carboniferous Period and our present age, the Quaternary Period, have witnessed CO2 levels less than 400 ppm.[my emphasis]
So, if anything, the currently levels of CO2 are abnormally low. However, our anthropocentric bias causes us to see it a normal. Our anthropocentric hubris also assigns importance to our own actions.
BTW... Here are the current concentrations of greenhouse gases.
I don't dispute that we are in a warming trend. Objective evidence establishes that we are. But nature has an established history of going through these gyrations without our help. Are our actions adding fuel to the fire? Perhaps. But the evidence simply does not conclusively establish that man alone is the moving force behind warming trends generally or this one specifically.
While Global Warming may be a fact, its anthropogenic nature is still reasonably disputed for several reasons. First, there have been many climatic swings of warming and cooling since before man even existed. There is no compelling evidence to suggest that this current warming spell is not a natural occurrence.
Second, as far as CO2 levels are concerned, correlation != causation. For example, it is not out of reason to speculate that naturally warming temperatures might disrupt the ability of phytoplankton in the oceans to sequester carbon thereby causing increased oceanic and atmospheric CO2. Because the oceans are the world's largest single carbon sink and phytoplankton are probably the largest sequesterors of carbon in the world, that would cause a release of carbon that would dwarf human industrial activity. This would also provide a correlation between warming and CO2, but the causation would be reversed.
Another scenario is that the reported "solar dimming", could also disrupt the ability of phytoplankton in the oceans to sequester carbon. In this scenario, the extra release of CO2, may well be causing the warming, but the CO2 is largely released by diminished phytoplankton activity, with human releases being a drop in the bucket. The dimming itself may be caused by natural fluctuations of solar activity, natural atmospheric changes, or even to human activity creating particulate matter. (However, there is at least some evidence that human generated particulate matter in the atmosphere is actually decreasing since coal and wood are no longer burned in large quantities in modern industrial societies, outside of power plants.)
Recorded human history is merely a blink of an eye in geologic terms. Recorded *climatic* history has only started in the modern times (last 500 years). Our frame of reference is short. Our idea of "normal" climate is very limited. What we consider "normal" might actually be cold. We only consider our current climate to be "normal" because of our own hubris. Since we are also naturally anthropocentric, we look for human cause and human solutions everywhere, even where they do not belong.
embedded systems - there are still some around that are based on 386
history - it was a 386 based os in the first place
backwards compatability - it has been standard (well, sorta) to have a backwards compatability based on the basic i386 instruction set with everything else either an extension or optimization option.
I think this represents a true break with past where they are going for "modern" and fast versus the historical roots of the OS (now if only we could get rid of csh on bsd systems...). This could be good, since they get to drop a lot of extra baggage that was maybe holding performance back. But it seems like a drastic change of philosophy for FreeBSD.
Slashdot Mirror
All that the "lastest studies" do is reduce public confidence in science. A long time ago, I tuned out all the "latest studies" on food as a bunch of fraudulant BS foisted upon the public by "scientists" looking to feather their nests with research grants or lawyers looking for an ambulance to chase. Check out the following link. "According to the latest study" campaign. I just follow two maximums that have been know for hundreds (if not thousands) of years and that did not require multi-million dollar research programs to figure out : 1) All things in moderation and 2) eat a balanced diet.
I love NPR. NPR is a fine source for in-depth news, and I listen to it every morning and every afternoon during my commute. But I listen with a critical ear.
Without doubt, NPR is left-wing in every aspect from story selection to its vocabulary. They are just subtle about it. Their very vocabulary of referring to liberals as "progressives" is revealing; "progressive" being the now self-chosen moniker of the left (since liberal is now a dirty word). The stories to which NPR chooses to give air time are the stories that that concern "progressives". Have you ever noticed that when they report about a "crisis" in health care, there is usually a Democratic sponsoned health bill pending? When they report about the "evironmental crisis" in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, it is usually when the enviromentalists are working to defeat drilling in ANWR. Whenever the anti-war rhetoric is heating up, they run some heart-wrenching story about the mom of some soldier who was killed or some innocents accidentally targeted by the US (but never an in-depth story about people deliberately target by insurgents - just a three-second blurb). All the while, they maintain the facade of being objective. They also provide numerous forums for traditionally left-wing interest groups or members of the Democratic Party coalition. For example: 'Latino USA' is an NPR show about issues that affect a traditionally Democratic voting group. Their religious show "Speaking of Faith" almost always has flattering portraits of exotic, non-traditional, or liberal Christian beliefs (i.e. likey Democrates) as "enlighted" and "inclusive", there by implicitedly casting traditional Christian beliefs (likely Republicans) as old-fashioned and boarderline bigoted. "Speaking of Faith" (and most of media) also referes to liberal protestant denominations as "mainstream protestants" but excludes the conservative Southern Baptist Convention from that description. (The Southern Baptist are the largest protestant denomination in the country and in fact have more members than all the other "mainstream" denominations combinded (perhaps not counting Methodists), but are somehow not mainstream.)
So yes, NPR is biased. They are just sly about it. Read (or listen) between the lines.
Well, image your SSN as a common primary key across several databases such as credit card records ,bank records, national identity card, tax, criminal records, and library. Now immagine it imbedded in your right arm or just in your driver licence in you wallet and readable at 10 or 20 feet. Now imagine it read everytime you enter a store, check out a library book, buy a hamburger, sit at a computer terminal, or drive by a stoplight.
Stop letting the fact that religious people are leary trick you into dismissing the threat as a fantasy.
From what I read on MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11636942/ , the Origami project will be a paperbook sized tablet computer (i.e. a PDA on steroids) that will run regular Win-XP instead of the crippled CE or XP-embeded found on most PDAs. Basically the PDA will evolve from an embedded system with limited functionality into a more full-featured portable PC with full multi-media capability. This will could also be a threat to the iPod, since the Origami box would also be a portable player, but with other features included.
AC vs DC
Tesla vs Edison
Tah-MAY-toe vs Tah-MAH-toe
Linux vs Unix vs Windows
Just let me mention that Vi really is better than Emacs.
Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves....
What is going on here is that the Clinton Administration did a blanket order to un-classify truckloads of documents without properly reviewing each one to see if it was appropriate to de-classify. It was a purely political and ideological decision about "open government", "right of the people to know", etc, etc, etc without any real review of the propriety of releasing each document. So the Bush Administration is reacting to reclassify them on the basis of being prudent (better safe than sorry, in their view). Unfortunately, the Bush Administration is not properly reviewing them either to see if they need to be reclassified. It all boils down to there not being enough government officials with enough time (and authority) on their hands to review each document and make an intelligent decision on whether it should be classified. This is not a case of being "evil", but a case erring on the side of caution, when you are too short-handed to do anything else.
It is quite clear that either you do not understand the Geneva Conventions, or you are merely spouting anti-American/anti-Bush rhetoric, or both, because the people at GITMO clearly do not qualify for POW status. Here is a link to the authoritative text of Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War . I direct your attention to Article 3 and especially Article 4 which I quote for you.
The combatants held at GITMO do not meet these conditions and they are, in fact, war criminals themselves. They do not carry arms openly and they do not respect the laws and customs of war (i.e. they purposely and directly attack civilians and violate every single clause of Article 3 as a matter of deliberate policy). They are quite literally "illegal combatants", that is, they wage war without following the laws and customs of war. In fact, they are lucky because the "customs" of war prior to the Geneva and Hauge Conventions (which they are not protected by), would be to summarily execute anybody who was engaged in a purposeful violation of the laws and customs of wars (i.e. the old custom was to grant no quarter to war criminals on the field and, if they did happen to be captured, they would be tried at the drumhead, at best).
You also do not seem to grasp the concept that a state of War can exist without a neatly signed declaration. Nor do you grasp that war can also be waged by non-stat
An intranet? Bah...Tinker-toys!
[sarcasm] Hey, let's start a proprietary subscription based service where people can connect and see controlled content. We'll call it "Q-Link" or maybe "America-On-Line".[/sarcasm]
Well, since that has been done before, more likely I think were looking at interactive TV delivered through fiber-optic (as the article mentioned the "Google Cube"). Just think of tailored commercials for each individual user determined by a mixture of your subscription data (age, address, credit score), your past buying habits, and past viewing habits, and your surfing habits. Or think about commercials where your remote has a "buy now" button for instant targeted impulse buying (hey you were surfing for 'Perl Jam', now see several commercials about their CD Box set). The Data-Center-in-a-Box will be the local processing/routing node that determines which commercial the individual local viewers in its assigned sub-net get to see.
Think about a combination of cookies on steroids (actually they don't need a cookie, just your Google Cube MAC address) and a hugh highly indexed data-warehouse of individual past behavior that should make any privacy advocate cringe. I think Google's ability to collect, sort, index, retain, and retreive information about individuals will make the NSA look like third-rate amateurs. People get exercised about the NSA, but the Government is (mostly) constrained by law and periodic elections. Google (as a borderless international corporation) will not be restained by anything. My own personal alarmist, chicken-little-the-sky-is-falling prediction, Google enters into an information sharing agreement with VISA and DISCOVER, so they can track your off-line buying habits just as efficiently as your on-line habits.
Ok, I just don't understand, unless it is pure cheapness and greed. Why doesn't MS just pay the man $1 per shipped license. The marginal cost to press the cd and license the software is basically nill. It's not like they don't make a basically 100% profit on each license already. So surely they can cough up $1 out of the $370 that I paid them for my license. But Nooooo, they want to remove the functionality instead of licensing it. Come on MS, just fork over the cash (its basically chump change to you) and let the users keep the functionality.
If a business division is working with especially sensitive data, perhaps they should not be working on PC's at all. That might be a job for a thin-client/dumb terminal with no drives or ports (other than ethernet, video, and ps-2 keyboard/mouse).
Sun has been pushing thin clients for years and some of their major selling points have been security both from the data sensitive aspect and security from the user-can't-break-it aspect.
Secondly, I'll assume your rant about "targeting" is a reference to racial politics and preferences. So lets talk about that, even if it is off-topic. You will probably note that its not the "rich white guys" kids that are getting refused admission to university or bussed across town to gang-ridden public schools (the rich send their kids to private schools or live in exclusive outer suburbs). It is working class people that are displaced by racial preferences in the university and who's kids are bussed accross town. The "rich white guys" at Harvard, Yale, and Ann Arbor are all too willing to agree to racial politics because it doesn't affect them (they get admitted anyway), it affects the working class kids who might be just above borderline, but who get displaced by somebody with even lower qualifications for no reason other than race.
Quite the opposite, the "rich white guys" get to sit back secure in their power while the poor fight it out amongst themselves. Did you ever hear of a saying that goes "Divide and Conquer"? Meanwhile, they can divert attention from themselves by saying "see all that we have done", while the basic power structure that keeps them rich and powerful remains intact.
There is legal precedent for a recipient standard which causes the most easily offended micro-minority's sensabilities to rule. Take for instance the "Hostile Environment" standard in sexual and racial harrassment cases. According to the law, no obscene or offensive intent is required. If the most easily offended receipient or observer in a work environment decides that something is offensive, then by law, it is. Of course, this has a chilling effect on speech. But then again, that is the point. The feminist and civil rights lobbies (who
Of course, any suggestion to roll back the draconian restrictions on free expression are instantly labled "racist, sexist, reactionary, etc, etc, etc." Seems that a lot of people who have problems with the standard applied to porn have absolutely no problem applying the standard to other things.
Actually Jobs and SGI have a common link in Pixar (which, IIRC, was a big customer of SGI). Your right, they would have been a good match.
I also had the problems of "loosing" POP messages when they are downloaded on different machines in my home network and of not having the sent items in a central location. I don't want to "leave them on the server" because my ISP will soon tell me my box is full and start bouncing inbound mail.
My solution was to set up fetchmail to download mail from the ISP-Pop server and deliver to procmail which delivers to an imap maildir in my home directory. Cron is set to check every 10 minutes for new messages. My imap server is courier-imap . The imap server reads whatever procmail dumps into the maildir. The configuration was a snap because I just took the default configurations(the box is inside my firewall and is not externally exposed - configuration may be more complex if you have to lock down the box for external access). Outbound I still send smtp directly from the mail client to the isp, but I have thunderbird configured to put a copy in the "sent" folder on the imap server.
I've had this configuration working a few weeks and so far it seems to work well. Now I can see my messages no matter which machine I happen to be on. Thunderbird seems to be easiest client to make this work with. I've had problems getting both Outlook/Outlook Express to put then sent items on the server, but have had not problems with Thunderbird. here is the link that I used to help me with the setup (It's for Arch Linux, I use CentOS, but the configs are the same). Just remember to turn of the email notifications in your crontab or it will spam you inbox.
1 - Make patents like trademarks, they have to be actively used and defended. This means that a patent holder must actively be engaged in the manufacture or production of the patented item (or at least show demonstrable intent to do so - like arranging funding to build a factory). That would effectively end the "patent troll" business model of being in business to only licence patents. If the holder is "too small" to own the factory individually himself ,then he can be a principle of the corporation or business that does.
2- If not ending software patents altogather, limit them to 5 years. Five years is practically forever in the software market. (perhaps they should do this with software copyrights too)
3- Because patents (and IP generally) are the work of the human mind, make patent ownership non-transferable and limited to the private individual who actually used his mind to invent it. No corporate ownership allowed.(Oh? You say that IBM funded the lab and not the indivdual inventor? IBM paid his salary? Well, then IBM can contract with the inventor to have a favorable or royalty-free license.) Corporations would be able to license, but never own. Provision can be made for joint ownersship in small limited partnerships when more than one person collaberated.
4 - Elminate method patents completely. If a method is secret, then it is already protected as a "trade secret".
SCO's unix biz was terminally ill long before they started suing people (although that didn't help) The law suits were simply an act of desparation. SCO is dead because their product lacked all the high-end features found in most of the big 64-bit unix flavors like Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX. SCO was living in the the low-end 32-bit intel area of the Unix neighborhood and they just couldn't compete with Linux there and 64-bit Solaris/AIX RISC on the high end. BTW... I heard that SCO's biggest customer (McDonalds) was switching to WinXP for their point-of-sale equipment. Probably the last nail in the coffin.
Perhaps they could license some of Opera's technology (like rendoring or tab management) and itegrate them into IE (while not breaking IE's hooks into the OS).
Before you spew vitriol at Bush and America perhaps you would like to know that American greenhouse gas emissions had gone down by 0.8 percent under Bush"
Although some European countries have managed to reduce their emmissions, most have *not* met their targets and only the UK has exceeded its targeted cuts. In fact, "Eleven have reported increases since 1990, with huge rises seen in Spain (41.7 pct), Portugal (36.7 pct), Greece (25.8 pct), Ireland (25.6 pct), Finland (21.5 pct) and Austria (16.5 pct)" as reported at Forbes
So perhaps you should try talking to your European brothers living in glass houses in Spain and Ireland before you start casting rocks at the US. Making promises in a treaty is nice, but not keeping them yourself and then critizing those who never made the promise in the first place is hypocrisy of the worst sort.
First, lots of cities in the US are changing their building codes to get rid of "low flush" after having them for years. Low flush toilets actually waste water because they frequently don't carry away all the waste on the first or second flush, so people end up flushing them repeatedly. After five flushes on a low flush, you've wasted like 3 times the water to accomplish what a regular toilet would have done in a single flush.
As far as "no flush" oil based systems, I've actually used one and I was disgusted by the smell. The state of South Carolina has (or had during the early-mid 90s) a "zero effluent" rest area on I-26. It used a mineral oil based system. They had big signs explaining how it worked and how it was so evironmentally beneficial etc etc etc. The problem is that it smelt like the monkey house at the zoo on a bad day. And I don't mean like a normal rest stop smells, but like a normal rest stop x12. I lived in the Carolinas back then and I frequently traveled that interstate, so I learned to "hold it" and skip that particual rest area and pay $.85 to buy a cup of coffee at McDonalds so I could use their regular bathroom. The smell is a dead give-away of bacterial growth. There is *NO WAY* an oil based no-flush system could ever be sanitary.
We also have White Noise Generators at my office. They simply sound like the air-conditioners running all the time. They do a good job of covering over most low-level noise like quite conversations.
The funny thing is that I was having my hearing checked a few months ago and I mentioned it to the doctor. He was completely suprised at the idea and had never heard of it, even though it has been around for years.
They are supplying the motherboard too, so how hard would it be to put a ROM on it that intercepts the query to the CPU and always gives the same (false) answer?
"Thousands of years" is too short of a frame of reference when we are talking about hundreds of millions, if not billions of years
From the National Ice Core Laboratory:
Even the *oldest* ice core sample is estimated to be only 750K years old. That is still a blink of an eye in geologic time. It can only tell us about recent times. That is not enough to establish normality. How do we know that the last 750K is not abnormally cold or abnormally warm or abnormally volatile? We don't. Consequently, there is no reasonable baseline to establish "normal", unless we make the anthropocentric leap to conclude that our own short time on earth establishes normality.
What we do know, is that there have been repeated wild swings in global climate and CO2 levels (along with other atmospheric gases). Atmospheric CO2 levels were 10 times higher than today's levels at the end of the Triassic and the beginning of the Jurassic. According to this site:
So, if anything, the currently levels of CO2 are abnormally low. However, our anthropocentric bias causes us to see it a normal. Our anthropocentric hubris also assigns importance to our own actions.
BTW... Here are the current concentrations of greenhouse gases.
I don't dispute that we are in a warming trend. Objective evidence establishes that we are. But nature has an established history of going through these gyrations without our help. Are our actions adding fuel to the fire? Perhaps. But the evidence simply does not conclusively establish that man alone is the moving force behind warming trends generally or this one specifically.
While Global Warming may be a fact, its anthropogenic nature is still reasonably disputed for several reasons. First, there have been many climatic swings of warming and cooling since before man even existed. There is no compelling evidence to suggest that this current warming spell is not a natural occurrence.
Second, as far as CO2 levels are concerned, correlation != causation. For example, it is not out of reason to speculate that naturally warming temperatures might disrupt the ability of phytoplankton in the oceans to sequester carbon thereby causing increased oceanic and atmospheric CO2. Because the oceans are the world's largest single carbon sink and phytoplankton are probably the largest sequesterors of carbon in the world, that would cause a release of carbon that would dwarf human industrial activity. This would also provide a correlation between warming and CO2, but the causation would be reversed.
Another scenario is that the reported "solar dimming", could also disrupt the ability of phytoplankton in the oceans to sequester carbon. In this scenario, the extra release of CO2, may well be causing the warming, but the CO2 is largely released by diminished phytoplankton activity, with human releases being a drop in the bucket. The dimming itself may be caused by natural fluctuations of solar activity, natural atmospheric changes, or even to human activity creating particulate matter. (However, there is at least some evidence that human generated particulate matter in the atmosphere is actually decreasing since coal and wood are no longer burned in large quantities in modern industrial societies, outside of power plants.)
Recorded human history is merely a blink of an eye in geologic terms. Recorded *climatic* history has only started in the modern times (last 500 years). Our frame of reference is short. Our idea of "normal" climate is very limited. What we consider "normal" might actually be cold. We only consider our current climate to be "normal" because of our own hubris. Since we are also naturally anthropocentric, we look for human cause and human solutions everywhere, even where they do not belong.
I think this represents a true break with past where they are going for "modern" and fast versus the historical roots of the OS (now if only we could get rid of csh on bsd systems...). This could be good, since they get to drop a lot of extra baggage that was maybe holding performance back. But it seems like a drastic change of philosophy for FreeBSD.