Something that worked for me
on
Patently Silly Blog
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My Congressman, Bob Goodlatte (R-VA, 6th), was one of the guys behind the DMCA. He got on my case for suggesting a few years ago that the DMCA might actually be harmful to individual rights and the economy. So when I contacted his office about the abuse of patent law, I sent several examples from the USPTO. I took the time to find a few stories online, pulled the patents out, looked them up on the USPTO website in a few minutes, printed them out and mailed them with a quick not on each saying what they did in plain English.
I actually got a semi-personalized response from Goodlatte saying thanks for sending him examples of how messed up the system is. In the end that package only got his attention for a few minutes, but imagine if thousands of geeks poured through the USPTO's website and sent 10,000-20,000 patents dangerous to the U.S. economy to Congress like that. It might be enough to give whoever is in opposition enough ammo to take charge and push reform through as a way to take a jab at the majority party.
At least do something about it, then you're basically blameless when it all goes to hell in a handbasket.
Time Warner owns AOL. The other members of the big five would be dumb as hell to support this by opening their catalogs up to it. If anything, it would be an incentive to help the iTMS defeat AOL because every song that the AOL Music Store sells for them would also go into helping a competitor, Time Warner.
Choice versus freedom
on
Upbeat on E-books
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Most proponents of copyright expansion love to talk about how increased copyright powers make it safer to create and profit, which will give incentive to make more, ergo more choice. It seems like a classical dilemma, in another manifestation it is freedom versus security.
Customers don't get any tangible benefits out of a system that allows copyright holders to intrusively restrict their use of intellectual property. That is why systems like the one employed by iTunes work whereas most do not: in the case of iTunes, it only seeks to protect the status quo of the relationship between buyer and seller.
To that end, as part of the intellectual property right agreement, customers should have a legal right to force eBook publishers to let them print the eBook. If someone pays a few dollars for the eBook and then wants to print it, that is their right regardless of what the law says. It's the customer's paper and their expense. In most cases, it would just be cheaper to buy the print book anyway.
I am all for requiring cable companies to let small companies buy into their system, but it should be at a fair market value. Seriously, the cable companies own the infrastructure and there are only two legitimate options: make them lease it out at cost with joint obligation to support the infrastructure or lease access at a fair market value with minimal obligation to support the infrastructure.
Is it really that hard for the government to put together a small agency under the Library of Congress that keeps a federal record of all code projects and receives updates from every department? All that would have to be done to keep it up to date would be for the Congress to require each department that does its own IT work to keep in contact with the agency in each appropriations bill for new software projects.
Does a standalone WP have a use now?
on
AbiWord 2.2 Unleashed
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The appeal of Office suites is that you can create a document of some kind in one, and import data from another component. With OpenOffice, KOffice and Microsoft Office you have a pretty robust toolset for creating documents with mixed data. Where is AbiWord going to go along these lines? Are we going to see "AbiExcel?"
I seem to remember that in the beginning, the group was going to put out an entire office suite, but then got bogged down just trying to create the word processing component. A small and dedicated userbase, aside does Abiword have a future without these other components?
their glory days are now more or less behind them. No computer in my house uses Intel processors. My family has running AthlonXPs, 1 running a Sempron and 1 Powerbook with a G4. The 32bit AMD hardware is very, very affordable and perfect for tossing together something that just works and needs to be run by someone who doesn't have a lot of disposable income.
No one I know of talks about Intel and 64bit processors except to make fun of the Itanic. The Athlon64 and Opteron processors on the other hand are the objects of lust for many of the geeks I know. When they think 64bit that they can own, they think either AMD or Apple, not Intel.
What the Pennsylvania state legislature should do is look for ways to provide incentives for private citizens to create private sector competition. With this plan you aren't getting "crappy monopoly versus cheap municipal wifi" perse. What you are getting is "crappy corporate monopoly versus probably very crappy, restricted state monopoly." You are basically getting two large entities which really don't have your interests at heart to fight it out, in the end it'll probably be the government that wins and you'll just end up with AmTrak-level QoS for your WiFi.
Personally I like the fact that in my small town in Virginia, I am able to go into many of the new stores and get either free wireless or very, very low cost wireless. As efficient as our state government is, I wouldn't trust the government for my internet access.
A better solution would be to encourage businesses to provide free wireless connectivity to their customers in exchange for lower or non-existant taxes. Not only do you get cheaper WiFi, but you also get a healthier local economy.
With a guy on FreeRepublic.com about Linux use in universities. He claimed that Linux is "forced on students" because of a rabidly anti-Microsoft passion and that the professors are desparately trying to make us think that Linux isn't a POS compared to Windows.
The real reason taht Linux is so well received and used in the university settings around the world is that it is conducive toward so many types of projects. Imagine trying to hack windows for this. Now Linux. No licensing, no fees, nothing.
We bubble in our candidate of choice, or we write in whoever we want to vote for. Therefore I can be proud knowing that I'm probably the only voter in Virginia that voted for Michael Badnarik for President and Cthulhu as a write in candidate for my congressional district...
For a long time I have been critical of Bush and his policies. For those that are looking for a systematic reason why a conservative or libertarian shouldn't support Bush, I have one here. I think that I have covered basically all of the bases for those on the right, including most of the major reasons that hold outs use to support him.
Google is a much bigger company, with a bigger pull for those that want to advertise. They also probably target their ads better than doubleclick. Oh and Google's motto is "do no evil" not "all your personal information are belong to us."
It's easy to see why Google would have a superior position in the market now. Better technology, bigger reach and a more honorable policy toward Internet users.
Unless you get a really good team together you will probably end up with one of two things. Either you'll end up with a game that no one wants to play, or that no one plays for any political value. The majority of the people I've met who are into politics that hardcore, are not the most entertaining people I've met. I can't say that I'd be too eager to play a game that they come up with.
If no image is coming to mind, just think of any political science class you might have had in college. Now imagine the kids who took politics VERY seriously, ate it up and had very little to no life outside it. Those are the kind of people that will be pushing for these games most likely.
So they dropped the BSD devils? I wonder what happened? Did somebody send a few planes full of Southern Baptists and Jehova's Witnesses over to Europe to have a little chat with the NetBSD team?
You'll get them charged with all manners of tampering with the election process, public disturbance, property destruction, destruction of government property and maybe even a terrorism charge under the USA PATRIOT Act's new definition of terrorism. Remember, anyone who commits property damage to influence the opinion of the civil body politic is now a terrorist.
Keep track of all of the times that you couldn't do something important, especially things legally necessary, because the powers that be didn't want to let you take the risk or rock the boat. Then when the police come in to investigate, if the higher ups decide to make you take the fall, take them with you by dropping all of your documentation about their ordering you to not do your job, onto the cops' lap.
There is nothing that police at all levels love more than taking down big rich guys.
A little bit of advise about political feeds
on
Cool RSS Feeds?
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· Score: 1
Avoid the average political blog because they will either be ra ra Bush or Kerry. They won't be entertaining or insightful, just full of annoying and shrill rhetoric in favor of one of the two major parties.
It should sicken everyone that both major parties are willing to go so far to win that we are now hearing about so many voter fraud problems arising before the election. Voter fraud should be one of the most severe crimes on the federal law books, it should be classified as a form of "attempting to overthrow the United States Government." No less than five years in prison IMO.
That said, America needs a much more comprehensive solution to voter fraud. It is one of the few things that I think warrants having a DNA tag for every citizen. There should be a national voter database that has the DNA of all citizens in it so that instead of having a national id you only have to go to the precinct and get a quick biometric test done to verify your ID.
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My Congressman, Bob Goodlatte (R-VA, 6th), was one of the guys behind the DMCA. He got on my case for suggesting a few years ago that the DMCA might actually be harmful to individual rights and the economy. So when I contacted his office about the abuse of patent law, I sent several examples from the USPTO. I took the time to find a few stories online, pulled the patents out, looked them up on the USPTO website in a few minutes, printed them out and mailed them with a quick not on each saying what they did in plain English.
I actually got a semi-personalized response from Goodlatte saying thanks for sending him examples of how messed up the system is. In the end that package only got his attention for a few minutes, but imagine if thousands of geeks poured through the USPTO's website and sent 10,000-20,000 patents dangerous to the U.S. economy to Congress like that. It might be enough to give whoever is in opposition enough ammo to take charge and push reform through as a way to take a jab at the majority party.
At least do something about it, then you're basically blameless when it all goes to hell in a handbasket.
Time Warner owns AOL. The other members of the big five would be dumb as hell to support this by opening their catalogs up to it. If anything, it would be an incentive to help the iTMS defeat AOL because every song that the AOL Music Store sells for them would also go into helping a competitor, Time Warner.
Most proponents of copyright expansion love to talk about how increased copyright powers make it safer to create and profit, which will give incentive to make more, ergo more choice. It seems like a classical dilemma, in another manifestation it is freedom versus security.
Customers don't get any tangible benefits out of a system that allows copyright holders to intrusively restrict their use of intellectual property. That is why systems like the one employed by iTunes work whereas most do not: in the case of iTunes, it only seeks to protect the status quo of the relationship between buyer and seller.
To that end, as part of the intellectual property right agreement, customers should have a legal right to force eBook publishers to let them print the eBook. If someone pays a few dollars for the eBook and then wants to print it, that is their right regardless of what the law says. It's the customer's paper and their expense. In most cases, it would just be cheaper to buy the print book anyway.
I am all for requiring cable companies to let small companies buy into their system, but it should be at a fair market value. Seriously, the cable companies own the infrastructure and there are only two legitimate options: make them lease it out at cost with joint obligation to support the infrastructure or lease access at a fair market value with minimal obligation to support the infrastructure.
Is it really that hard for the government to put together a small agency under the Library of Congress that keeps a federal record of all code projects and receives updates from every department? All that would have to be done to keep it up to date would be for the Congress to require each department that does its own IT work to keep in contact with the agency in each appropriations bill for new software projects.
The appeal of Office suites is that you can create a document of some kind in one, and import data from another component. With OpenOffice, KOffice and Microsoft Office you have a pretty robust toolset for creating documents with mixed data. Where is AbiWord going to go along these lines? Are we going to see "AbiExcel?"
I seem to remember that in the beginning, the group was going to put out an entire office suite, but then got bogged down just trying to create the word processing component. A small and dedicated userbase, aside does Abiword have a future without these other components?
their glory days are now more or less behind them. No computer in my house uses Intel processors. My family has running AthlonXPs, 1 running a Sempron and 1 Powerbook with a G4. The 32bit AMD hardware is very, very affordable and perfect for tossing together something that just works and needs to be run by someone who doesn't have a lot of disposable income.
No one I know of talks about Intel and 64bit processors except to make fun of the Itanic. The Athlon64 and Opteron processors on the other hand are the objects of lust for many of the geeks I know. When they think 64bit that they can own, they think either AMD or Apple, not Intel.
What the Pennsylvania state legislature should do is look for ways to provide incentives for private citizens to create private sector competition. With this plan you aren't getting "crappy monopoly versus cheap municipal wifi" perse. What you are getting is "crappy corporate monopoly versus probably very crappy, restricted state monopoly." You are basically getting two large entities which really don't have your interests at heart to fight it out, in the end it'll probably be the government that wins and you'll just end up with AmTrak-level QoS for your WiFi.
Personally I like the fact that in my small town in Virginia, I am able to go into many of the new stores and get either free wireless or very, very low cost wireless. As efficient as our state government is, I wouldn't trust the government for my internet access.
A better solution would be to encourage businesses to provide free wireless connectivity to their customers in exchange for lower or non-existant taxes. Not only do you get cheaper WiFi, but you also get a healthier local economy.
Most "professional pundits" whose material is nothing more than fresh, mindless typing diahrea...
Rent a DVD from blockbuster
Play it with VideoLan client
Open up dvd smartripper
Rip the DVD
Run the ripped files through DVD2One
Burn to a DVD
With a guy on FreeRepublic.com about Linux use in universities. He claimed that Linux is "forced on students" because of a rabidly anti-Microsoft passion and that the professors are desparately trying to make us think that Linux isn't a POS compared to Windows.
The real reason taht Linux is so well received and used in the university settings around the world is that it is conducive toward so many types of projects. Imagine trying to hack windows for this. Now Linux. No licensing, no fees, nothing.
We bubble in our candidate of choice, or we write in whoever we want to vote for. Therefore I can be proud knowing that I'm probably the only voter in Virginia that voted for Michael Badnarik for President and Cthulhu as a write in candidate for my congressional district...
For a long time I have been critical of Bush and his policies. For those that are looking for a systematic reason why a conservative or libertarian shouldn't support Bush, I have one here. I think that I have covered basically all of the bases for those on the right, including most of the major reasons that hold outs use to support him.
Could someone explain to me why the majority of visitors to a Democrat-affiliated site think that Kerry is better than Bush?
Or is BSD alive today? I can't remember. Can someone tell me whether we're trying to kill BSD or praise BSD today.
Off to my 2 minute Microsoft hate...
Google is a much bigger company, with a bigger pull for those that want to advertise. They also probably target their ads better than doubleclick. Oh and Google's motto is "do no evil" not "all your personal information are belong to us."
It's easy to see why Google would have a superior position in the market now. Better technology, bigger reach and a more honorable policy toward Internet users.
After looking at his desk area I'm still trying to figure out how he gets air flow to his pc...
Something tells me that half of this would have been unnecessary with 10 minutes of cleanup...
Unless you get a really good team together you will probably end up with one of two things. Either you'll end up with a game that no one wants to play, or that no one plays for any political value. The majority of the people I've met who are into politics that hardcore, are not the most entertaining people I've met. I can't say that I'd be too eager to play a game that they come up with.
If no image is coming to mind, just think of any political science class you might have had in college. Now imagine the kids who took politics VERY seriously, ate it up and had very little to no life outside it. Those are the kind of people that will be pushing for these games most likely.
So they dropped the BSD devils? I wonder what happened? Did somebody send a few planes full of Southern Baptists and Jehova's Witnesses over to Europe to have a little chat with the NetBSD team?
You'll get them charged with all manners of tampering with the election process, public disturbance, property destruction, destruction of government property and maybe even a terrorism charge under the USA PATRIOT Act's new definition of terrorism. Remember, anyone who commits property damage to influence the opinion of the civil body politic is now a terrorist.
Keep track of all of the times that you couldn't do something important, especially things legally necessary, because the powers that be didn't want to let you take the risk or rock the boat. Then when the police come in to investigate, if the higher ups decide to make you take the fall, take them with you by dropping all of your documentation about their ordering you to not do your job, onto the cops' lap.
There is nothing that police at all levels love more than taking down big rich guys.
Avoid the average political blog because they will either be ra ra Bush or Kerry. They won't be entertaining or insightful, just full of annoying and shrill rhetoric in favor of one of the two major parties.
You could just wear cargo pants. Plenty of pockets for your gadgets and a good pair costs no more than $20.
year...
It should sicken everyone that both major parties are willing to go so far to win that we are now hearing about so many voter fraud problems arising before the election. Voter fraud should be one of the most severe crimes on the federal law books, it should be classified as a form of "attempting to overthrow the United States Government." No less than five years in prison IMO.
That said, America needs a much more comprehensive solution to voter fraud. It is one of the few things that I think warrants having a DNA tag for every citizen. There should be a national voter database that has the DNA of all citizens in it so that instead of having a national id you only have to go to the precinct and get a quick biometric test done to verify your ID.
Where I came from, won is past tense, but hey... don't let my illiterate hick colloquialisms get you down...