Safari still doesn't allow me to check my issues and change my settings in my NationState. Come on, Apple, how am I supposed to keep the people of my country happy when I have to tend to them using an inferior browser?
I say we get a class-action suit against the patent office. Any lawyers with me?
Lawyers on/.? I wish. They're too busy making the news we all talk about so much.
Nothing is going to change until we start suing the patent office to recoup costs on claims related to gross negligence on the part of the patent office.
An excellent idea. Unfortunately, this wouldn't work. The patent office being horribly underfunded, as you said, there would be no money to gain by suing it. This doesn't really mean that suing it would be unsuccessful--after all, by taking away what little money it has we would obvioulsy punish it and make it stop this stupid behavior, and we might be able to shut it down entirely. However, the fact that no money would be awarded to us means that no lawyer would want to take on the case.
Find a lawyer who'll work for free, and this'll become a viable idea. That should happen sometime around when hell freezes over.
I can just see the waves of patent lawers out in the street screaming about how they have to now pay ME the holder of the patent on patenting royaltee's everytime they file a patent.
If I had the patent on patenting, I wouldn't charge royalties to those who I allowed to patent things. I just would be very selective about the patents I allowed. After all, I wouldn't have to give a license to every random person (or multinational conglomerate) that thought they had a good use for "my" idea.
I don't know that there's proof, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case. It seems like companies regularly and routinely settle cases quickly and without much real thought, as long as it won't completely destroy their business plan to do so. Supposedly even Verizon complied with the RIAA for a while before wising up and contesting the bullshit subpoenas they were getting.
I was thinking recently about the various currencies I have with which to buy food.
Mostly, of course, I can spend real, American dollars to get food (or anything else). But the money my parents paid for my meal plan at my college comes to me in the form of 9 meal credits per week and 150 "Entree Plus points" per semester. The Entree Plus points work like money, except that I can only spend them at certain places that, for the most part, only sell food.
If you subtract $150 from the amount my parents paid for my meal plan, it leaves $13 or so per meal credit. So, when I go to the cafeteria and have a bowl of cereal, it costs my parents $13. Interestingly, when I go to the convenience store in a nearby dorm to cash in my meal credits for food, each credit buys me at most $4.55 worth of food.
Basically, my school has two proprietary currencies. The irony is that wherever I can use one of those currencies, I can also use real money if I so choose. Next year methinks I'll go without a meal plan. The future of money: increased ease of use through open standards.
Federal matching funds will deepen the deficit? Please. Bush's little pet wars will waste far more money than Nader can ever hope to get from the government.
As the war on terror continues and the war in Iraq gets underway, Bush will put the country even more hopelessly in debt than it already is. Clinton's hard work in balancing the budget, getting a surplus for the first time in who-knows-how-long, will be washed down the drain as Bush battles the man who tried to kill his daddy.
Some campaign funds for a third political party would be a drop in the bucket compared with this unconscionable waste.
Okay, clearly I'm ignorant in a lot of this area. What is BGP?
And while I know that Cisco is a database server (right?), what are Bay and Juniper?
This is honest-to-goodness curiosity and lack of information here. Just wanted to clarify since lots of times on/. ignorance (and complacence with ignorance) masquerades as such.
I wonder how long it'll take this sort of legislation to filter around to the other states and up to the Federal level. Hopefully these laws will pass quickly, be effective and set a precedent that will bring spam down to a tolerable level everywhere.
Japan is betting...that the next-generation of high-tech products and computer networks will rely on open-source software.
The next generation?
As far as networks: The Internet is the most important network that I can think of, and what does it run on? Apache is the main Web server; I run a mail server with Qpopper and sendmail, of which the former is open source and the latter is at least free (is it open source? I don't even know); for the FTP part of serving, you can choose from Pure-FTPd, Pro-FTPd, wu-ftpd, or whatever else. "High-tech computer networks" of this generation already run on OSS.
As for products: There's a little more room for improvement here, but my PowerMac G4 is pretty damned high-tech, and while the GUI is closed, the core OS, Darwin, is open-source. And unlike Linux nerds who will say they have such-and-such a high tech system that's running OSS, mine came like this--right out of the box--and is a product targeted at, and sold mainly to, non-nerd consumers.
It used to be that I used very little software I paid for because I pirated everything; now I use very little software I paid for because it's free anyway, and for a substantial part of that software the source is available if I want it. Open source isn't a bet pertaining to the next generation, it's here already.
Well, at the top of my post I did mention, briefly, the possibility that the browser had been written by a 7-year-old (or Microsoft).
Using constants in that way is an elementary programming mistake. Assuming the authors of Opera used a variable representing the indentation when actually writing the list items' text to the screen, that variable should previously have been assigned a default value (possibly 30), but if the browser paid any attention at all to style sheets, the value from the sheet should have overridden the default value (indent = cssmargin;), rather than being added to it (indent += cssmargin;). The latter method would just be silly; the former would not cause problems that would require a -30 left margin from a CSS to fix it.
What happens when someone takes your time machine back in time to invent a time machine before you did, patents it, comes back and sues you for infringement?? Huh? What then?
Moral of the story: If you don't want to be sued, don't invent a time machine.
How would a margin of -30 cause a page that would otherwise render incorrectly to render correctly? The browser rendering it would have to be written by a 7-year-old (or Microsoft).
The options are:
a) They made a typo. This is impossible; 0 can't accidentally become -30. b) They were trying to fix the page for Opera. This is impossible. It would mean that the page rendered incorrectly in Opera, and they had to make the margin -30 in order to fix it. c) They were trying to break the page for Opera. This, by the process of elimination, has to be the case.
If you can think of another possibility, I would love to hear it so I can shoot it down.
Perhaps instead we should just have browsers that don't identify themselves as anything at all, forcing Web developers to make pages that actually display correctly in general.
Hmm, this smells suspiciously of fair use! The RIAA had better stomp on it quickly! I expect the author of the article will get into trouble with O'Reilly for getting them into legal trouble with the RIAA.
Just because you bought that music doesn't mean you have the right to listen to it! Err...listen to it in more than one location, I mean.
Speaking of central music servers, refer to my.sig for good things.
Why does it need to be Linux? Darwin is *nix, and most of these functions are available straight out of the box. This page is mostly about configuring existing tools.
I have a PowerMac G4, an early one, one of the first AGP ones. Once when we hadn't had broadband for very long and didn't yet have a router between the cable modem and the computer, a surge came through the cable line. It fried the cable modem and the computer's Ethernet port, but the computer still worked. It took a long time to figure out that it really wasn't working properly, though, and by that time our insurance company wouldn't cover the replacement.
Oh well. We got a cheapo Ethernet card and lived with an occasional crash. Not too long afterward we got a Linksys router, so now a surge would only fry a $150 router, not a $2000 computer (replacement cost).
Just FYI: To scientists, the word "theory" usually refers to an idea that is backed by considerable empirical data. Therefore, to some of us, it's a bit confusing when you refer to something as a theory and go on to say you called it that because it's not backed by evidence.
I see your point (actually, I agree, to an extent), but the word "hypothesis" or "conjecture" would have been better suited for that context.
Some people will be willing to shell out the cash; anyone else who finds it useful will wait until the price comes down a bit.
easily lost or stolen
For many people, this phrase translates to "portable"--not quite so negative a word as you'd like, but equally accurate. If you're worried about it getting stolen, zip your pocket.
why not connect to your pc with your wireless devices, easier to back up, maintain, expand, view files
PCs tend to remain on desktops, no? See previous point.
and did i say stupid?
Yes, in your subject line you admitted you were stupid. No need to repeat yourself.
ummm, you stupid...and ummm stupid...did i say you are stupid?
Ummm, saying stupid a bunch of times only makes it true for you...the rest of us are just as intelligent as we were before we read that.
How customizable the Linux install is...it's Linux. Doesn't that mean it's customizable as all hell?
Set it up to accept SSH connections, upload the source of another Linux distro, compile, install...how hard can it be? Relative to a normal Linux installation, that is (not a piece of cake, but certainly not brain surgery).
Or we could just wait for Apple to add AirPort support to the iPod. Presumably, if they were to do such a thing they would make it support Rendezvous (ZeroConf) as a matter of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Safari still doesn't allow me to check my issues and change my settings in my NationState. Come on, Apple, how am I supposed to keep the people of my country happy when I have to tend to them using an inferior browser?
I say we get a class-action suit against the patent office. Any lawyers with me?
/.? I wish. They're too busy making the news we all talk about so much.
Lawyers on
Nothing is going to change until we start suing the patent office to recoup costs on claims related to gross negligence on the part of the patent office.
An excellent idea. Unfortunately, this wouldn't work. The patent office being horribly underfunded, as you said, there would be no money to gain by suing it. This doesn't really mean that suing it would be unsuccessful--after all, by taking away what little money it has we would obvioulsy punish it and make it stop this stupid behavior, and we might be able to shut it down entirely. However, the fact that no money would be awarded to us means that no lawyer would want to take on the case.
Find a lawyer who'll work for free, and this'll become a viable idea. That should happen sometime around when hell freezes over.
I can just see the waves of patent lawers out in the street screaming about how they have to now pay ME the holder of the patent on patenting royaltee's everytime they file a patent.
If I had the patent on patenting, I wouldn't charge royalties to those who I allowed to patent things. I just would be very selective about the patents I allowed. After all, I wouldn't have to give a license to every random person (or multinational conglomerate) that thought they had a good use for "my" idea.
I don't know that there's proof, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case. It seems like companies regularly and routinely settle cases quickly and without much real thought, as long as it won't completely destroy their business plan to do so. Supposedly even Verizon complied with the RIAA for a while before wising up and contesting the bullshit subpoenas they were getting.
I was thinking recently about the various currencies I have with which to buy food.
Mostly, of course, I can spend real, American dollars to get food (or anything else). But the money my parents paid for my meal plan at my college comes to me in the form of 9 meal credits per week and 150 "Entree Plus points" per semester. The Entree Plus points work like money, except that I can only spend them at certain places that, for the most part, only sell food.
If you subtract $150 from the amount my parents paid for my meal plan, it leaves $13 or so per meal credit. So, when I go to the cafeteria and have a bowl of cereal, it costs my parents $13. Interestingly, when I go to the convenience store in a nearby dorm to cash in my meal credits for food, each credit buys me at most $4.55 worth of food.
Basically, my school has two proprietary currencies. The irony is that wherever I can use one of those currencies, I can also use real money if I so choose. Next year methinks I'll go without a meal plan. The future of money: increased ease of use through open standards.
Federal matching funds will deepen the deficit? Please. Bush's little pet wars will waste far more money than Nader can ever hope to get from the government.
As the war on terror continues and the war in Iraq gets underway, Bush will put the country even more hopelessly in debt than it already is. Clinton's hard work in balancing the budget, getting a surplus for the first time in who-knows-how-long, will be washed down the drain as Bush battles the man who tried to kill his daddy.
Some campaign funds for a third political party would be a drop in the bucket compared with this unconscionable waste.
Okay, clearly I'm ignorant in a lot of this area. What is BGP?
/. ignorance (and complacence with ignorance) masquerades as such.
And while I know that Cisco is a database server (right?), what are Bay and Juniper?
This is honest-to-goodness curiosity and lack of information here. Just wanted to clarify since lots of times on
I wonder how long it'll take this sort of legislation to filter around to the other states and up to the Federal level. Hopefully these laws will pass quickly, be effective and set a precedent that will bring spam down to a tolerable level everywhere.
Meanwhile, back to hitting the delete key...
Japan is betting...that the next-generation of high-tech products and computer networks will rely on open-source software.
The next generation?
As far as networks: The Internet is the most important network that I can think of, and what does it run on? Apache is the main Web server; I run a mail server with Qpopper and sendmail, of which the former is open source and the latter is at least free (is it open source? I don't even know); for the FTP part of serving, you can choose from Pure-FTPd, Pro-FTPd, wu-ftpd, or whatever else. "High-tech computer networks" of this generation already run on OSS.
As for products: There's a little more room for improvement here, but my PowerMac G4 is pretty damned high-tech, and while the GUI is closed, the core OS, Darwin, is open-source. And unlike Linux nerds who will say they have such-and-such a high tech system that's running OSS, mine came like this--right out of the box--and is a product targeted at, and sold mainly to, non-nerd consumers.
It used to be that I used very little software I paid for because I pirated everything; now I use very little software I paid for because it's free anyway, and for a substantial part of that software the source is available if I want it. Open source isn't a bet pertaining to the next generation, it's here already.
Uh-oh...
/.!
Computers may not be able to pass those tests yet, but they can obviously post to
Predicted new moderation category: -1, Computer-generated. I might have to start making typos to convince the mods I'm human!
Well, at the top of my post I did mention, briefly, the possibility that the browser had been written by a 7-year-old (or Microsoft).
Using constants in that way is an elementary programming mistake. Assuming the authors of Opera used a variable representing the indentation when actually writing the list items' text to the screen, that variable should previously have been assigned a default value (possibly 30), but if the browser paid any attention at all to style sheets, the value from the sheet should have overridden the default value (indent = cssmargin;), rather than being added to it (indent += cssmargin;). The latter method would just be silly; the former would not cause problems that would require a -30 left margin from a CSS to fix it.
Read the parent comment and you will understand. My reply was not directly to the article.
Sorry, but I don't think it would be too hard for someone to establish prior art on pretty much anything you might think of to patent in that area.
What happens when someone takes your time machine back in time to invent a time machine before you did, patents it, comes back and sues you for infringement?? Huh? What then?
Moral of the story: If you don't want to be sued, don't invent a time machine.
Now, what's the W3C compliant way to get my [sarcasm] [/sarcasm] tags to display properly?
Use angle brackets, making them display properly with this syntax, thus:
<sarcasm>
[insert sarcastic comment here]
</sarcasm>
Once parsed by a browser, that should display as:
<sarcasm>
[insert sarcastic comment here]
</sarcasm>
How would a margin of -30 cause a page that would otherwise render incorrectly to render correctly? The browser rendering it would have to be written by a 7-year-old (or Microsoft).
The options are:
a) They made a typo. This is impossible; 0 can't accidentally become -30.
b) They were trying to fix the page for Opera. This is impossible. It would mean that the page rendered incorrectly in Opera, and they had to make the margin -30 in order to fix it.
c) They were trying to break the page for Opera. This, by the process of elimination, has to be the case.
If you can think of another possibility, I would love to hear it so I can shoot it down.
Perhaps instead we should just have browsers that don't identify themselves as anything at all, forcing Web developers to make pages that actually display correctly in general.
wget --useragent=""
Hmm, this smells suspiciously of fair use! The RIAA had better stomp on it quickly! I expect the author of the article will get into trouble with O'Reilly for getting them into legal trouble with the RIAA.
.sig for good things.
Just because you bought that music doesn't mean you have the right to listen to it! Err...listen to it in more than one location, I mean.
Speaking of central music servers, refer to my
I hear file servers are good with curry...
Web servers, I expect, would be better with oregano. Somebody try it and tell me how it turns out.
Why does it need to be Linux? Darwin is *nix, and most of these functions are available straight out of the box. This page is mostly about configuring existing tools.
I have a PowerMac G4, an early one, one of the first AGP ones. Once when we hadn't had broadband for very long and didn't yet have a router between the cable modem and the computer, a surge came through the cable line. It fried the cable modem and the computer's Ethernet port, but the computer still worked. It took a long time to figure out that it really wasn't working properly, though, and by that time our insurance company wouldn't cover the replacement.
Oh well. We got a cheapo Ethernet card and lived with an occasional crash. Not too long afterward we got a Linksys router, so now a surge would only fry a $150 router, not a $2000 computer (replacement cost).
The Apple may have been baked, but the customer was obviously only half-baked...
Just FYI: To scientists, the word "theory" usually refers to an idea that is backed by considerable empirical data. Therefore, to some of us, it's a bit confusing when you refer to something as a theory and go on to say you called it that because it's not backed by evidence.
I see your point (actually, I agree, to an extent), but the word "hypothesis" or "conjecture" would have been better suited for that context.
One point at a time:
expensive
Some people will be willing to shell out the cash; anyone else who finds it useful will wait until the price comes down a bit.
easily lost or stolen
For many people, this phrase translates to "portable"--not quite so negative a word as you'd like, but equally accurate. If you're worried about it getting stolen, zip your pocket.
why not connect to your pc with your wireless devices, easier to back up, maintain, expand, view files
PCs tend to remain on desktops, no? See previous point.
and did i say stupid?
Yes, in your subject line you admitted you were stupid. No need to repeat yourself.
ummm, you stupid...and ummm stupid...did i say you are stupid?
Ummm, saying stupid a bunch of times only makes it true for you...the rest of us are just as intelligent as we were before we read that.
How customizable the Linux install is...it's Linux. Doesn't that mean it's customizable as all hell?
Set it up to accept SSH connections, upload the source of another Linux distro, compile, install...how hard can it be? Relative to a normal Linux installation, that is (not a piece of cake, but certainly not brain surgery).
Or we could just wait for Apple to add AirPort support to the iPod. Presumably, if they were to do such a thing they would make it support Rendezvous (ZeroConf) as a matter of course.