I don't buy and CDs, and I don't download music. If you don't do business with them they won't stay in business.
About the bankruptcy law: "The short answer is fairness," declared Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
Fairness would also involve passing laws that drop the maximum interest rate lenders can charge from 23.9% to something under 10%. At a time when the prime interest rate is less than 3% and banks pay less than 1% interest, charging 19-24% interest IS EXTORTION. Besides taking advantage of people during difficult financial times these rates CREATE difficult financial times.
How? Health insurance rates are skyrocketing and so are the co-pays. Have a serious illness or accident and you could end up with a co-pay greater than your annual income. With double digit interest rates you will never be able to crawl out from under that load. The new bankruptcy bill will just force people to walk away from debts. The next thing the Republicans will legislate is Debtor Prisons, where they can farm out the the prisoners as day laborers.
mmm... If that last graph indicates anything it says we are heading toward another ICE AGE, not global warming.
But, unless you believe that man's activities on Earth influence the behavior of the Sun, then the following URL should prove interesting: http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun -on-earth/glob -warm.html It shows a direct correlation between solar activity and global temperatures.
"Global warming -- a gradual increase in planet-wide temperatures -- is becoming more well documented and seems to be accepted by many scientists and people now as fact. Generally, this warming is attributed to the increase of green-house gases in the Earth's upper atmosphere.
Some solar scientists are considering whether some part of global warming may be caused, by a periodic but small increase in the Sun's energy output. An increase of just 0.2% in the solar output could have the same affect as doubling the carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere.
What is the Problem? What is the evidence for global warming? Certainly, there are considerably more green-house gases (e.g. carbon dioxide) in our atmosphere than in previous times. And there appears to be some evidence that global temperatures are rising. But, how accurate and correct are our global warming statistics? And, do we really know what role, if any, the Sun might play in any global warming patterns?
These issues are currently being debated, and may significantly affect you for the rest of your life. Would you like to do some research to find out more about global warming?
We suggest here some research topics and places to begin looking for information. But these are all controversial issues, and there are no definitive answers (yet). As an informed, and voting, citizen of the next millenium, you will need to keep listening, looking, and being alert to new research and evidence.
The following are key questions in your research on global warming:
* What is global warming?
* What is the evidence that global warming exists? How reliable and accurate is this evidence?
* What are the projected effects of global warming? How many of these projections have, in fact, been realized?
* What is the evidence that global warming might be caused by greenhouse gases?
* What is the evidence that global climate change might also be affected by solar variation?
* What can or should be done about global warming, at least that portion caused by pollutants and emissions?
* What can or should be done if there is also global climate change being caused by solar variability? "
What's nice about 'hypothetical setups' is that you can make up your mind without paying attention to confusing facts. I can 'hypotheticall configure' my LG cell phone so that is superior to any OS. Accordingly, the code in my LG cell phone makes a much more secure server than Windows 2003.
If MS didn't update IE to remove flaws, people would switch to FireFox even faster.
Duh!
You haven't noticed the 25 Million download mark for FireFox? And you've also overlooked the more than two dozen security holes in IE that Microsoft refuses to fix for users of previous versions of Windows, and some for XP? Besides the fact that FF is faster, has better features and is more stable, why else would people switch from IE to FF?
Hardly. The Globe is warming, but the reasons are not those supported by left wing pundants, whose only solution to anything is Socialism... government control over everyone's lives.
The "scientific" study used 5 years ago to support the the Kyoto conference has been shown to be sham, with cooked and trimed data and faulty conclusions. Using computer models to predict weather 50 years in advance, a task Dr Loranze proved to be impossible for times extending beyond a week into the future, is not science, it's propaganda. This is especially true when one considers that constants in the models are chosen specifically to give the desired results. Even when you use 7 such models and and average them the results are no better. If it were, then Meteorologists could forcast storm locations for the coming summer and give residents advanced warnings. In fact, they can't even accurately predict if the rain front passing through the county next to yours will drop rain on your house.
Volcanoes, cows and the biosphere inject many times more CO2 into the atmosphere than human activity does, and water vapor is 7 TIMES the green house gas that CO2 is.
There is better correlation between the current global warming and Solar activity. Historical data indicates this phenomenon is a cyclic event and we just happen to be on the crest of a hot cycle. Three hundred years ago there was a mini ice age and London had no summer. Were the left wing pundants around then they would have been screaming their heads off about "Nuclear Winter", just as they were doing 30 years ago. Notice, their solutions 30 years ago are the same they offer today.... a modern version of East Germany.
It's about time the FSF (or someone) stand up and take a stand on companies using trademark laws to get around the GPL.
Besides the TM fiasco there is another GPL dodge that is being employed by the Commerical distro makers. It's a nice scam. They TAKE ADVANTAGE of the monetary savings of GPL by basing 95%+ of their distro on GPL code, then they add a couple of 'poison pills' (3rd Party proprietary binaries) in order to claim a legal right to restrict your GPL rights to their essentially GPL distro.
The solution to this is easy, but it has become obvious they don't want to do it: merely move 3rd party proprietary software to a separate CD or ISO and enforce their proprietary licenses on those that which to install those apps. They could even keep that ISO on a secure website that requires loggin in, etc...
But, NO! They want to deny you the rights of installing your copy on as many boxes as you want, of making as many copies as you want, and giving away any of those copies to whom ever you choose. Those rights are the very same ones the GPL gave the distro maker, which allows them to create and distribute a linux distro in the first place. The distro makers do not have the right to restrict GPL rights to end users of their distro, In fact, the GPL says that if they attempt to do that they forfit their rights to GPL software. "Sorry, you can't exercise your GPL rights because it would violate the license restrictions of a 3rd Party proprietary app we've included with our distro." Let's be clear about this... They deliberately mix the software types SPECIFICALLY so they can foist a 'legal' restriction on your GPL rights. What does the FSF want to do about it?
to replace XP with SUSE Pro 9.2 on a computer that a couple used to do work at home. They needed to get work done and with the bugs, viruses, adware, popups, etc., they were getting overwhelmed just trying to keep their XP 'clean'.
My wife and I have LG VX3100A cell phones, We consider her number to be the "home" phone, regardless of where she is. She uses her phone about 1800 minutes per month and I use about 200 minutes per month. She recharges her phone every Sunday and Wednesday or Thursday, and I recharge my phone every Sunday whether I need to or not.
Getting rid of the land line was the best communication move we ever made. It got rid of the telemarketers, too.
What makes this patent particularly vile is that it was filed in 1989 but granted in 1998; this almost certainly constitutes a deliberate abuse of the patent system by Matsushita.
Exactly. And, I'll wager that if you research the patent you'll find that it was held in an 'open' state for a decade and mofidied regularly as advances in technology occured. Typical "submarine patent".
That's my experience, too. Just connecting my PC to the cable modem from RoadRunner is enough to allow me to send messages via SMTP... No authentication necessary. To download email I have to send a login name and password.
We are talking about admin tasks, aren't we? FC3 would be the bleeding edge equivilent of WhiteBox, for the daring admin. WhiteBox and be a server or a desktop. The admin would probably run GNOME and the desktop user would probably prefer KDE.
The only problem with your "companies have to recover costs of research" argument is that most research is funded by the NSF and NIH and those funds are payed for by John Q Taxpayer.
In many instances key knowledge breakthroughs are kept secret by the researcher after their discovery. The researcher then resigns their government job, takes the key knowledge with them, and creates a startup company to profit on that key knowledge, which they patent after having "discovered" it after their startup begins "researching". Combine that trick with the congressional law which gives rights for public research to private companies, and you hve the complete picture of the corporate research scam/welfare.
Most of the retail costs of high tech products comes from high profits which feed high salaries for the upper level management. Even stupid CEO who get fired after only 9 months on the job take $26M out the door with them. The Dick Lay's of the world just have to have 7 mansions, several jets, and dozens of condos around the planet, so they need those high salaries and retirement bonsus so they can afford to maintain those basic necessities.
the world BILLIONS of dollars. What would have been spent on Microsoft license fees is now used to feed, clothe and educate their children. So Linux HAS topped Gates miserly $750 million which is only 1.25% of his bank roll.
So, while the data itself maybe free, the cost of providing it is far from zero.
Bogus argument. Do you lobby for the commercial weather companies?
Besides paying for the satellites, the radar stations, and the employees that maintain them, the taxpayer also pays for the NextRad Internet pages that are created by those same NOAA employees. Your clients are contributing NOTHING to the repackaging except adware, access fees, less coverage, and longer delays between satellite downloading of the data and its display on the webpage. Also, your client won't supply local coverage where the ad revenue base is not sufficient to meet their revenue projections, so folks living in less populated areas will have to be satisfied with weather coverage for the nearest big metropolis, regardless of how far away that metropolis is from their home.
The taxpayer doesn't need to pay again for data which they already own, and they don't need to pay what amounts to extorsion fees to the weather companies for the 'rights' to their own data.
"We feel that they spend a lot of their funding and attention on duplicating products and services that already exist in the private sector," Barry Lee Myers, executive vice president of AccuWeather, says of the weather service. "And they are not spending the kind of time and effort that is needed on catastrophic issues that involve lives and property, which I think is really their true function."
The internet weather companies, and their front organization, are continually propagating the lie that "these services already exist" in the private sector. The fact is that they are trying to steal the commons and then charge the community for access to it. They DO NOT launch their own weather satellites, NOR do they build and man their own NexRad radar sites. They get the weather data THE GOVERNMENT PROVIDES AT TAXPAYER'S EXPENSE and repackage it with talking heads and lots of ads, except that the product they deliver is often 15 or more minutes behind the actual weather, minutes that can mean the difference between life and death when a tornado is bearing down. NOAA NextRad sites are usually less than 7 minutes or less behind the actual weather. I can access the Omaha site and determine the approaching weather within 7 minutes of accuracy. The Weather channel makes available only 75 access points to cover the entire country. Lincoln is not one of them, so I am stuck with a North Central regional map. Not very handy if I wanted to determine last spring if the F4 tornado that hit Hallam 20 miles to the south west was going to roll over Lincoln or pass south of it. The desktop access app from the Weather Channel would cost me $60/year and is a box smaller in size than the NOAA nexrad animations, but it is surrounded by tons of ads which cycle constantly, eating bandwidth and slowing response time for the actual weather information update.
The reason why the weather companies are taking this political tack (Part Duce) is because they lost a recent PUBLIC battle to persuade NOAA sites to shut down public access. NOAA requested public input on the question and recieved over 1,400 responsible replies. The response was in favor of continuing free public access to NOAA weather sites by a ratio of better than 99 to 1. Now they are working behind CLOSED DOORS lobbying congress and , no doubt, buying with 'campaign donations' what their poor logic couldn't win in the court of public opinion.
And, no doubt, if we just leave it up there the Chinese and/or the EU will most certainly claim salvage rights and send up a repair crew.
The Chinese would claim it, if for no other reason than to make clear to the world what is becoming increasingly obvious: the USA lacks the desire (funds?) to maintain its status as a space faring nation and is being replaced by China as the space faring super power.
Learning Python or Ruby and using it will pay off in mere weeks vs. Java,
That is my experience, too.
I attempted to build an inhouse app using Java and JDev against PostgreSQL. Where I needed to add functionality always ended up in a method which included the phrase "Generated DO NOT EDIT". I spent six months learning Java (including a class, which emphasized text editors for making gui objects. Gui by the blind ???) and attempting to build the inhouse app. I gave up in frustration.
I decided to try Python and use Boa_Constructor against PostgreSQL. Ten weeks after I began I had learned both Python and Boa_Constructor, and had competed the app. It was 10X faster than the Java app against the same database, had all the features I had wanted to use, including reports, was easier to maintain, and MUCH easier to deploy.
I liked the fact that ALL the files in your Python/Boa project are ASCII files and Subversion does an excellent job of version control on them. Also, the apps looks and feels the same on Linux as it does on Windows, and I had to change less than a dozen lines to make it so.
Slashdot Mirror
to use to add or remove programs.
http://klik.berlios.de/
I don't buy and CDs, and I don't download music. If you don't do business with them they won't stay in business.
About the bankruptcy law:
"The short answer is fairness," declared Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
Fairness would also involve passing laws that drop the maximum interest rate lenders can charge from 23.9% to something under 10%. At a time when the prime interest rate is less than 3% and banks pay less than 1% interest, charging 19-24% interest IS EXTORTION. Besides taking advantage of people during difficult financial times these rates CREATE difficult financial times.
How? Health insurance rates are skyrocketing and so are the co-pays. Have a serious illness or accident and you could end up with a co-pay greater than your annual income. With double digit interest rates you will never be able to crawl out from under that load. The new bankruptcy bill will just force people to walk away from debts. The next thing the Republicans will legislate is Debtor Prisons, where they can farm out the the prisoners as day laborers.
They voted for it... now they have it, pressed down, heeped up and running over.
I didn't know they were a significant commercial market..... :P
if each activation takes 25 minutes, citing one poster's experience.
If they don't employ enough Indians the bottleneck will drive putative Windows users mad.
Come on over to Linux, folks, where you are treated like human beings, not corporate cash fodder.
mmm... If that last graph indicates anything it says we are heading toward another ICE AGE, not global warming.
n -on-earth/glob -warm.html
But, unless you believe that man's activities on Earth influence the behavior of the Sun, then the following URL should prove interesting:
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/su
It shows a direct correlation between solar activity and global temperatures.
"Global warming -- a gradual increase in planet-wide temperatures -- is becoming more well documented and seems to be accepted by many scientists and people now as fact. Generally, this warming is attributed to the increase of green-house gases in the Earth's upper atmosphere.
Some solar scientists are considering whether some part of global warming may be caused, by a periodic but small increase in the Sun's energy output. An increase of just 0.2% in the solar output could have the same affect as doubling the carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere.
What is the Problem?
What is the evidence for global warming? Certainly, there are considerably more green-house gases (e.g. carbon dioxide) in our atmosphere than in previous times. And there appears to be some evidence that global temperatures are rising. But, how accurate and correct are our global warming statistics? And, do we really know what role, if any, the Sun might play in any global warming patterns?
These issues are currently being debated, and may significantly affect you for the rest of your life. Would you like to do some research to find out more about global warming?
We suggest here some research topics and places to begin looking for information. But these are all controversial issues, and there are no definitive answers (yet). As an informed, and voting, citizen of the next millenium, you will need to keep listening, looking, and being alert to new research and evidence.
The following are key questions in your research on global warming:
* What is global warming?
* What is the evidence that global warming exists? How reliable and accurate is this evidence?
* What are the projected effects of global warming? How many of these projections have, in fact, been realized?
* What is the evidence that global warming might be caused by greenhouse gases?
* What is the evidence that global climate change might also be affected by solar variation?
* What can or should be done about global warming, at least that portion caused by pollutants and emissions?
* What can or should be done if there is also global climate change being caused by solar variability? "
so that proves it is.
What's nice about 'hypothetical setups' is that you can make up your mind without paying attention to confusing facts. I can 'hypotheticall configure' my LG cell phone so that is superior to any OS. Accordingly, the code in my LG cell phone makes a much more secure server than Windows 2003.
Duh!
You haven't noticed the 25 Million download mark for FireFox? And you've also overlooked the more than two dozen security holes in IE that Microsoft refuses to fix for users of previous versions of Windows, and some for XP? Besides the fact that FF is faster, has better features and is more stable, why else would people switch from IE to FF?
Hardly. The Globe is warming, but the reasons are not those supported by left wing pundants, whose only solution to anything is Socialism... government control over everyone's lives.
The "scientific" study used 5 years ago to support the the Kyoto conference has been shown to be sham, with cooked and trimed data and faulty conclusions. Using computer models to predict weather 50 years in advance, a task Dr Loranze proved to be impossible for times extending beyond a week into the future, is not science, it's propaganda. This is especially true when one considers that constants in the models are chosen specifically to give the desired results. Even when you use 7 such models and and average them the results are no better. If it were, then Meteorologists could forcast storm locations for the coming summer and give residents advanced warnings. In fact, they can't even accurately predict if the rain front passing through the county next to yours will drop rain on your house.
Volcanoes, cows and the biosphere inject many times more CO2 into the atmosphere than human activity does, and water vapor is 7 TIMES the green house gas that CO2 is.
There is better correlation between the current global warming and Solar activity. Historical data indicates this phenomenon is a cyclic event and we just happen to be on the crest of a hot cycle. Three hundred years ago there was a mini ice age and London had no summer. Were the left wing pundants around then they would have been screaming their heads off about "Nuclear Winter", just as they were doing 30 years ago. Notice, their solutions 30 years ago are the same they offer today.... a modern version of East Germany.
Besides the TM fiasco there is another GPL dodge that is being employed by the Commerical distro makers. It's a nice scam. They TAKE ADVANTAGE of the monetary savings of GPL by basing 95%+ of their distro on GPL code, then they add a couple of 'poison pills' (3rd Party proprietary binaries) in order to claim a legal right to restrict your GPL rights to their essentially GPL distro.
The solution to this is easy, but it has become obvious they don't want to do it: merely move 3rd party proprietary software to a separate CD or ISO and enforce their proprietary licenses on those that which to install those apps. They could even keep that ISO on a secure website that requires loggin in, etc...
But, NO! They want to deny you the rights of installing your copy on as many boxes as you want, of making as many copies as you want, and giving away any of those copies to whom ever you choose. Those rights are the very same ones the GPL gave the distro maker, which allows them to create and distribute a linux distro in the first place. The distro makers do not have the right to restrict GPL rights to end users of their distro, In fact, the GPL says that if they attempt to do that they forfit their rights to GPL software. "Sorry, you can't exercise your GPL rights because it would violate the license restrictions of a 3rd Party proprietary app we've included with our distro." Let's be clear about this... They deliberately mix the software types SPECIFICALLY so they can foist a 'legal' restriction on your GPL rights. What does the FSF want to do about it?
to replace XP with SUSE Pro 9.2 on a computer that a couple used to do work at home. They needed to get work done and with the bugs, viruses, adware, popups, etc., they were getting overwhelmed just trying to keep their XP 'clean'.
Last night all those troubles went away.
I wonder how long Symantec has been setting on this ugly beast, and how many have gotten "owned" because of it?
A month? Six months? A year?
Some of the holes in IE have been open for over a year.
My wife and I have LG VX3100A cell phones, We consider her number to be the "home" phone, regardless of where she is. She uses her phone about 1800 minutes per month and I use about 200 minutes per month. She recharges her phone every Sunday and Wednesday or Thursday, and I recharge my phone every Sunday whether I need to or not.
Getting rid of the land line was the best communication move we ever made. It got rid of the telemarketers, too.
Exactly. And, I'll wager that if you research the patent you'll find that it was held in an 'open' state for a decade and mofidied regularly as advances in technology occured. Typical "submarine patent".
Works for me!
That's my experience, too. Just connecting my PC to the cable modem from RoadRunner is enough to allow me to send messages via SMTP... No authentication necessary. To download email I have to send a login name and password.
Never underestimate their ability to neutralize any efforts made to clean up their infected PCs or to teach them how to do it themselves.
We are talking about admin tasks, aren't we? FC3 would be the bleeding edge equivilent of WhiteBox, for the daring admin. WhiteBox and be a server or a desktop. The admin would probably run GNOME and the desktop user would probably prefer KDE.
If the links ARE to free music downloads then the computation which shows a $15K loss by the music industry is NEW MATH indeed.
The only problem with your "companies have to recover costs of research" argument is that most research is funded by the NSF and NIH and those funds are payed for by John Q Taxpayer.
In many instances key knowledge breakthroughs are kept secret by the researcher after their discovery. The researcher then resigns their government job, takes the key knowledge with them, and creates a startup company to profit on that key knowledge, which they patent after having "discovered" it after their startup begins "researching". Combine that trick with the congressional law which gives rights for public research to private companies, and you hve the complete picture of the corporate research scam/welfare.
Most of the retail costs of high tech products comes from high profits which feed high salaries for the upper level management. Even stupid CEO who get fired after only 9 months on the job take $26M out the door with them. The Dick Lay's of the world just have to have 7 mansions, several jets, and dozens of condos around the planet, so they need those high salaries and retirement bonsus so they can afford to maintain those basic necessities.
the world BILLIONS of dollars. What would have been spent on Microsoft license fees is now used to feed, clothe and educate their children. So Linux HAS topped Gates miserly $750 million which is only 1.25% of his bank roll.
Bogus argument. Do you lobby for the commercial weather companies?
Besides paying for the satellites, the radar stations, and the employees that maintain them, the taxpayer also pays for the NextRad Internet pages that are created by those same NOAA employees. Your clients are contributing NOTHING to the repackaging except adware, access fees, less coverage, and longer delays between satellite downloading of the data and its display on the webpage. Also, your client won't supply local coverage where the ad revenue base is not sufficient to meet their revenue projections, so folks living in less populated areas will have to be satisfied with weather coverage for the nearest big metropolis, regardless of how far away that metropolis is from their home.
The taxpayer doesn't need to pay again for data which they already own, and they don't need to pay what amounts to extorsion fees to the weather companies for the 'rights' to their own data.
"We feel that they spend a lot of their funding and attention on duplicating products and services that already exist in the private sector," Barry Lee Myers, executive vice president of AccuWeather, says of the weather service. "And they are not spending the kind of time and effort that is needed on catastrophic issues that involve lives and property, which I think is really their true function."
The internet weather companies, and their front organization, are continually propagating the lie that "these services already exist" in the private sector. The fact is that they are trying to steal the commons and then charge the community for access to it. They DO NOT launch their own weather satellites, NOR do they build and man their own NexRad radar sites. They get the weather data THE GOVERNMENT PROVIDES AT TAXPAYER'S EXPENSE and repackage it with talking heads and lots of ads, except that the product they deliver is often 15 or more minutes behind the actual weather, minutes that can mean the difference between life and death when a tornado is bearing down. NOAA NextRad sites are usually less than 7 minutes or less behind the actual weather. I can access the Omaha site and determine the approaching weather within 7 minutes of accuracy. The Weather channel makes available only 75 access points to cover the entire country. Lincoln is not one of them, so I am stuck with a North Central regional map. Not very handy if I wanted to determine last spring if the F4 tornado that hit Hallam 20 miles to the south west was going to roll over Lincoln or pass south of it. The desktop access app from the Weather Channel would cost me $60/year and is a box smaller in size than the NOAA nexrad animations, but it is surrounded by tons of ads which cycle constantly, eating bandwidth and slowing response time for the actual weather information update.
The reason why the weather companies are taking this political tack (Part Duce) is because they lost a recent PUBLIC battle to persuade NOAA sites to shut down public access. NOAA requested public input on the question and recieved over 1,400 responsible replies. The response was in favor of continuing free public access to NOAA weather sites by a ratio of better than 99 to 1. Now they are working behind CLOSED DOORS lobbying congress and , no doubt, buying with 'campaign donations' what their poor logic couldn't win in the court of public opinion.
It's too good a technology to waste.
And, no doubt, if we just leave it up there the Chinese and/or the EU will most certainly claim salvage rights and send up a repair crew.
The Chinese would claim it, if for no other reason than to make clear to the world what is becoming increasingly obvious: the USA lacks the desire (funds?) to maintain its status as a space faring nation and is being replaced by China as the space faring super power.
That is my experience, too.
I attempted to build an inhouse app using Java and JDev against PostgreSQL. Where I needed to add functionality always ended up in a method which included the phrase "Generated DO NOT EDIT". I spent six months learning Java (including a class, which emphasized text editors for making gui objects. Gui by the blind ???) and attempting to build the inhouse app. I gave up in frustration.
I decided to try Python and use Boa_Constructor against PostgreSQL. Ten weeks after I began I had learned both Python and Boa_Constructor, and had competed the app. It was 10X faster than the Java app against the same database, had all the features I had wanted to use, including reports, was easier to maintain, and MUCH easier to deploy.
I liked the fact that ALL the files in your Python/Boa project are ASCII files and Subversion does an excellent job of version control on them. Also, the apps looks and feels the same on Linux as it does on Windows, and I had to change less than a dozen lines to make it so.