The issue described by the parent of this post is profoundly important. It goes to the very issue of citizen rights. In a country where your rights are issued you by the State and you live on its permits, the logic of allowing this sort of information to be used against you without a serious condition such as an accident or personal injury is hard to understand. There you didn't have the rights anyway. In such a case there is no question of the use of this data.
In Nation(s) such as the USA where the Citizen has the rights and they are leased to the State by a Constitution, the authorities must have "Probable Cause" to bring a warrant. (Real or imminant danger of an offense) A person cannot be compelled to testify against themselves. In such a State this data is not just a matter of its existence, it is a matter of violation of citizen rights to compel it.
I know I will hear from some idiot who remarks about driving not being a "right" but a "privilege." This has always been a questionable ruling of law covering the requirement to carry a drivers license and for "implied consent" for Drug testing of drivers (DUI). If people accept that such an "implied consent exists, they may as well allow electronic devices that can control the car's speed and prevent violations all of the time. But this would defeat the purpose of the violations and citations because they are really issued for revenue reasons and not public safety reasons.
Also violations that are issued by vending machine as these would be have absolutely no consideration of circumstances or conditions.
It might be acceptable under "Probable Cause" to evaluate the data if an accident has occurred. There you have probable cause to look.
Non USA posters will probably not understand this because the logic of most if not all other nations is that the power is the right of the State (Nation syn State) and a person merely gets their rights from a State. Note the (s) after State(s) above. The USA is 50 Nations in a Constitutional Federal Republic. These are nations on their own right. Several of these States approximately equal the greatest of States of the rest of the world (Non-USA) in economic power. Most of these States (USA) have armed forces ranking on their own in the world as world powers and I am not talking about the US Army/Air Force/Navy etc. The Citizens of these States(USA) have their rights and they lease them by Constitution to the States etc.
To be more precise the problem can be restated in that the teams are trying to reengineer the biologic process of vision while what they should be doing is attempting to reverse engineer the process. The teams are coming into the problem backwards beginning with the concept of GPS navigation and then attempting to pick a route based upon a camera input data field without properly compensating the camera data for the differentials of the human eye. So they rely too much on GPS and not enough concentration is given to the camera data.
The first problem is that human eyes see about 14 powers of 10 from the darkest to the brightest in differential. The best of our cameras see about 5.5 powers of 10. There is if anyone wants to write me as paulnoel(at) (my server is) => knology.net. Sorry about the spam paranoia...! I will discuss it with them in more detail. The essential problem with shadows is solved by developing this range of differentials or even wider.
The other problem is one computer programmers have a real bitch of a time with. It is understanding that natural systems operate because of inaccuracy and not because of accuracy.
When we get these two things together and fix them the problem is essentially gone.
Having an Uncle who for some years was in charge of the cleanup at Hanford and noting that he lives in Kelso I would tend to discount the FUD a lot. (About 99.999999999% or more.) Having two other Uncles who were reactor operations officers for US Nuke Subs makes me have a bit of family based info on the topic. I just am not as worried as most people are because I know generally what the problem is and how big it is.
To be sure the mess at Hanford is a serious mess. It involves largely the chemicals used to refine the various elemements after reactor actions. The reason they liked plutonium for bombs is that it could be bred out of lesser stuff and was easily chemically isolated. This gave rise to a lot of radioactive chemical wastes which bluntly were pretty reactive stuff.
The problem was storage was at best using technology we had at the time rather than trying to deal perminanently. The problem is that many of these chemical wastes are liquid and they are stored in containers that are failing or have started to fail.
The containers in many cases were about equal to swimming pools or to 55 gallon drums. Another problem is some of these elements migrate quite easily through barriers. They form all sorts of funny deposits which if struck are prone to catch fire.
With all of this said, the whole problem is one more of time and effort than danger. The location is really pretty unlikely to see a lot of migration outside Hanford and if it does go into the Columbia River it will be diluted well below any level of concern. The river is not small. At nearly 100,000 CFS flow and shortly diluted to 200,000 CFS average flow, this stuff is gone... gone... gone.
To explain a bit more, the problem here is largely one of timing and events. Most of this waste developed right during and shortly after WW2. Shall I say that priorities and for that matter knowlege have changed in the intervening years.
Actually the biggest problem in the cleanup owes to the need not to actually create more contaminated waste than absolutely necessary while doing the clean up.
Even more deeply into the issue, programers do not get royalties generally it is the marketing companies who do. While there are no royalties for those who actually produced the software, the marketeers get a lot. Until the proposal (with results) is made to allow programmers proper royalties (Similar to ASCAP etc) I would argue that any copyrights of the companies are about as honestly stolen as any other goods fenced by sneek thieves and pirates.
The other problem is what Bill Gates told his "friends" a few years back when he announced that they were stealing his codes. Unfortunately he was stealing theirs and those who came before. If we carry this business of royalties very deep we will find that we pay a lot and can do no business.
The real reason they are releasing cash has to do with something more fundimental. There are Securities Laws which while seldom enforced are called "Blue Sky Laws." These laws make it a serious criminal offense to sell a stock never intending to pay your investors back appropriately. Microsoft has earned a wad of cash. This is so obviously a stock fraud if they don't pay it in dividends especially since they cannot argue that they are going to grow infinitely any more that they must distribute or they will be subject to the most obvious prosecution for selling the "Blue Sky."
The problem here is that in distributing they have to admit that they are no longer a "Growth Company" and they have to admit that they are worth about 25 cents on the dollar what the investors have in the company right now and maybe less as asset value. I could go on in details but I am sure some ingnorant fool who thinks that he should only own stocks so that other bigger suckers than himself will buy them will argue.
The owners of Microsoft are avoiding jail terms they think by doing this. Unfortunately they should have been paying dividends 10 years ago to avoid this prosecution. But had they done so I suppose we might still have a robust Software industry with lots of competition and new programs for they could never have dominated the market so had they distributed.
The parent is obviously a Microsoft troll. Linux is a common and growing reason to build your own box.
I work in a small company with 12 computers on a network. The network is Linux (Slackware) and all but 3 of the machines now are running Linux. To be fair at least 5 of the machines running linux are dual bool windows but nobody turns that on much any more.
The last time one of the machines (dual booted) was turned on for Windows it was the object of a lot of fix actions for trojan and virus activity. Nine of these machines were originally purchaced with Windows installed. The last 3 boxes we bought bare of OS.
Sorry for the Microsoft trolls out there but we are going to Linux and never coming back. I know of a lot of other offices where the same is going on. What is more, I don't see the "massive overhead" in sysops that Microsoft reports either. We had spent nearly $20,000 (one year) in Sysop overhead with Microsoft when we finally went to Linux and that has dropped to a noise level expense. Linux WORKS.
At home I have 2 computers and both came with Windows installed. Now they run Linux! I will not buy a machine with windows ever again.
Some years ago, my father and I secured the public printed documents on the manageement of the State of Alabama Board of Education and the various schools in the state. We recompiled the data by hand typing into a database and extracted much valuable management information. When presented to Mary Jane Caylor (State Board of Ed.) she was dumbfounded. She said with much excitement, "Where did you get this data!" It seemed that she had requested from the Bureaucrats this data in this form and they had told her it was impossible to give it to her.
Making a long story short this data was used with the obvious suggestions to improve schools and their management nation wide. Schools are now evaluated by the development of their students. Unfortunately we have not extended this evaluation into the direct compensation and tenure of teachers.
The point here is that data available on paper may as well be locked in a safe regrards solving problems. This P2P use and posting of all public documents on the Internet is the key to management of governmnt. It is like taking the hot sun and shining it on the snow burrying our freedom. It melts it away!
The question of how the water formed on the surface of Mars in the first place and how it left the planet are not shrouded in the funky current theories but in pretty well determined facts.
First the water did not leave mars entirely and secondly what did leave left because of a basic law of physics. The molecular spin net mass velocity of water is above the escape velocity of mars. This means several things. A Orbit may be prescribed about any ray extending from the center of mass of an object and if a mass spins about that ray faster than the excape velocity of the two mass system, the object leaves. This means water leaves without having to be pushed by the solar wind. It means that any liquid water on mars will leave and forget the terraforming because it will fail on this account. This velocity is below ecape velocity on earth.
A large part of the water on mars simply went into the structure of the planet. This is the process sucking up Earth's ocean at the moment. It probably accounts for most of the "losses." It is the process of Cement formation.
I know it isn't sexy but these are well determined processess and they do show evidence of having happened.
The big question of how the water got there in the first place is really cute. It could not have been transported in by meteor strike because of the loss to escape of water and heat of impact. It had to have been present there from the start. This means that Mars was somewhere else and move here and warmed up. This also fits with the escape of water matter because the process requires HEAT from the sun to do the work. You figure out how to make a body with the ice to warm up somewhere else. I don't know! I suspect a few things but I don't know.
This also causes a few cosmological problems with the whole theory of how the planets etc formed. Since your numbers determine the rate of dissipation of energy from the planet and deminish the rate of accreation of material from space we find a few curious facts.
All planets substantially smaller than Earth are "Evaporating" into space. It is quite impossible for a planet the mass of the earth to have developed from a smaller planet like mars. The process doesn't work! In order to form an "Earth" you essentially must start with an object about the current mass. This leaves us with a cosmological question as to how such a body would be formed in the first place. The small to large process just does not happen well.
This is best illustrated with the Comets evaporating on each pass and raises the question of how Asteroids developed. How does one get a sold iron meteor from a dust and gas cloud?
Probably the greatest irony of the whole Terrorism War is the claim that we in the USA have never faced this type of situation before. Actually it is profoundly a normal condition for the world and our formation as a nation arose out of dealing properly with and essentially disposing of terrorism.
Short history:
The USA in its Revolutiary war faced this. It was much of the cause for the war was the state sponsored terrorism by England. To wit: " He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." ~ US Declaration of Independence In Congress July 4 1776.
This repeated itself in the War of 1812 known in Europe variously as the 7 years war. In Alabama where I live it is known as the "Creek Indian War" and in Indiana it is famous for other reasons. The English supported a confederacy of 5 Indian Tribes to MURDER and TERRORIZE on the US Western Frontier. The Battle at Tippicanoe was the result of this. In Alabama the action progressed from Huntsville, to Horseshoe Bend. The battle was to stop the Creeks from raiding Tennesse and was supported by the Cherokee Indians. I could continue but this British supported State Sponsored Terrorism agains the USA and even against its Indian Populations went on eventually peaking in the Plains Indian wars. (Second to the US Civil War the most serious US Military actions) and finally decreasing under Hudsons Bay Company support and stopping in Norther California and Oregon in the period just before 1915.
Some other supporters of terrorism penetrated the USA at intervals with most events coming to a halt with the US Nuclear development at the end of World War II. We have had a short period without terrorism being significant since. It appears we are back into it.
There is a profound point here: The USA is no Flebe in the dealing with Terrorism. We developed our Art of Citizenship which puzzles most foreigners as a result of the continual terror attacks. It is in fact the Federal effort to destroy this art that left us volunerable to the problem at this time. The Patriot Act further diminishes the role of citizens and further endangers our people.
Yesterday the head "Patriot Act" man himself Mr. Ridge went out to warn us of the danger but left us with nothing to look for and nothing to do but cower in fear. That is not accidental. These men want us cowering in fear. It was Yesterday that they cowed our US House into without amendment continuing the US Patriot Act! They would celebrate another Al Qaeda attack as it would empower them even more at the hands of ignorant masses who think this is a new problem.
As an acid test of the facts here I provide the following question. Where is the phone number I can call to promptly and properly have Illegal or Undesirable Aliens DEPORTED? The facts show that this should have been the highest priority of the US Government on September 12, 2001. Until this exists where such persons may be promptly and properly dealt with we in the USA shall cower in fear. When it exists we may dissolve the Department of Homeland Security and live in peace and safety. There is no denying this fact! It is not opinion or rant. It is simply the proved fact of our history! We dealt with all the terrorism of the past by cooperation and support of the citizens natural right to self defense. To continue on this current course of denying such is to progress streight into the tyranny of Adolph Hitler and his Gestapo and SS.
Cutting Employee benefits is nearly irrelevant. You could fire every single employee of Microsoft below the upper management level and you would not save the $1 Billion desired to be saved. Firing Steve and Bill would more than save the money. This is the reality of modern management issues. All of the talk about the benefits of Outsourcing etc are lies. All they are is covers for the CEO CFO etc carting the stockholders money away.
Stockholders should take a hard look at any company doing outsourcing or these massive staffing changes. The workers may not be the only ones getting the boot. The owners (Stockholders) are getting the boot too!
I really appreciated the parent post telling the truth about these records.
The sad reality is that our crappy US based programs which have degraded and disgraced our world to the point that the FCC finally has to intervene. Even sadder is the foolish posts defending broadcasters here on/. against the need to deal with this. This stuff is far beyond indefensible.
The real issue we will not deal with in talking about "Adult" entertainment and etc is the human toll it is taking.
I have worked as RN in a State Prison in the USA. This prison had cable TV with all the channels due to the fine intervention of a Federal Judge who simply had no clue what he was doing. The men who ran the prison (Prisoners) called "Rock Men" were doing hard time for sex crimes. Don't pass this off lightly they were some pretty awful criminals. After some particularly nasty movie ran these men couldn't think or talk of anything else for about a week.
The sad reality is that a large part of our population never matures to a mental development level where they can handle seeing such things without it being too real to them and without it guiding their lives. Don't give me the crap about it not affecting most people, they are not the issue. The issue is that we are seeding this crap down among those who cannot handle this and it is precipitating crime and human injury. These are the people who agressively consume the access to such and frankly they are those who so agressively shout down those who speak up against it.
The danger here is much more profound that just such persons. American prosperity is a magnet to the children of the whole world. How they learn to be like us is from our movies and TV. Excuse it if you like but the cultural rot it is causing around the world is most of the reason for the world wide anger at the USA at the present time. Frankly if you had your kids being perverted and your society being poisoned by such you would get mad too. Just watch some of these shows and then imagine it being used as the model for how to live. Place it in your town! But you see it is creeping into your town too! American Kids are starting to act like the TV. The Gangster Rap culture has so poisoned Black Society in the USA for example that even Bill Cosby has spoken up about it. Kids are not just influenced to buy shoes and electronics from TV they learn to talk and act the way they see on the screen. This is what is at issue in the FCC effort.
Having young women think that they should be especially sexy and act out in public such may seem cute and even fun until you have to pay the cost of it. The pain in broken families, illegitimate and unsupported children makes this crime more destructive of society and of our prosperity generally than any other. Even Murder fades into insignificance against the cost of a child raised by a single family home where the support of that child fails because of such bad training. In the USA the amount of money the average illegitimate birth costs is staggering. It is over $300,000 by age 18 for that child. Life time damage is hard to calculate as this tends to echo into future generations. A fair estimate of the costs here is well over $1 Million a person. This cost is so high in the USA that it is threatening to collapse the econony of many locations such as inner city neighborhoods.
The effect world wide is even more dangerous as these people often have cultures ill prepared for modern times anyway. This is much of the cause of the "War on Terror" condition going on now. It has bread the situations around the world where terrorism breeds. Excuse this stuff off as minor stuff if you want. This is the most serious issue mankind has. It is quite literally one of mind pollution. A TV or Radio station has no more right to dump toxic radioactive waste in the environment than it has to dump corrosive ideas in this way into our world.
Just for entertainment, you have heard the joke about the man who had an ego so big that he lived in his own zipcode. Well due to a querk of the USPS and history, I do live in my own zipcode. (35749-9746) Just my house and nobody else's
All funny stuff asside we actually do need a system where my address whether Internet or Phone or otherwise is mine and portable. This must include Email addressing and allow me to make it portable without regards to ISP.
I would like to ammend your pretty efficient description of the facts with a few minor additions.
With the Department of Homeland Security spending hundreds of billions of US Taxpayer dollars into Foreign owned companies because they are Cheaper. (Even though Americans at two times the price due to taxes are cheaper than their foreign competition) We see the Republicrats (Not a spelling error) building the worlds most efficient mechanism for recording all of the terrorists activities up to your death and then providing a most efficient means for removing your dead body while blaming the taxpayers for not paying enough taxes.
Who after all is the worst terrorist? The one who destroyed 3000 people and about a $100 Billion from the US Economy or the guys who demanded $2,000 Billion from us for Homeland Security and will continue to demand another $500 to $1000 Billion every year from now on while celebrating each additional attack with more money demanded from the taxpayers while refusing to guard our borders and refusing to remove Illegal or Undesirable Aliens (The problem 9/11/2001) in a timely efficient manner.
Remember that if no attack comes in the next 10 years they will have spent a lot of money and will be put back to modest budgets as worthless unless they can find some way to preserve the terrorists as a threat. In the mean time too many careers somewhere on earth will hinge on the threat continuing.
Remember that it took Al Qaeda (Unopposed) from 1993 to 2001 to mount an attack on the US Mainland. Does anyone believe that we are stopping them now? If you do please tell me the Phone number that you can dial for immediate and proper dealing with Illegal and Undesirable Aliens.
For my Foreign friends, the US Citizens to this day do not even have a phone number they can call to have an alien who is causing problems dealt with promptly and the local police with some minor exceptions are forbidden by law to bring any proceeding against them. The US Border Patrol is currently being told to sit in their trucks and not even arrest border crossers who are illegal even when they see the event. The American Border Patrol (A private organization) set up drones and reported such crossings on the Internets While USA Purchaced Drones sat in their crates until the embarassment built up so much that they had to start such work this past week. You can rest assured that this will only operate so that the USA forces can ignore the American Border Patrol and continue not to do their job.
So long prompt response continues not to exist, you can take it as prima facia proof that there is no real threat in the eyes of US Leadership. You can take it all as a fraud. This measure is the first line of defense and the most modest of requests by decent citizens.
Back to the laws on gift cards and money I am thankful that Washington is starting to work on this. I just wonder how long that it will be before some federal law stops the effort to produce decent laws. (NAFTA or GATT and the WTO may be party too!)
To get a bit serious... there has been an intersection between the upward curve of job distruction by technology and the flattening of the upwards curve (now possibly down) of the generation of new jobs because of computers. Actually the effect has been more profound outside of the EU and USA than inside. It is starting to hit inside the EU And USA.
I could bore with statistics and I am sure no matter what nobody would be persuaded. We have finally reached the point at which large segments of society etc are simply being dumped as obsolete trash at a rate too high for them to adapte to the newer demands if they exist. Even the US Federal Reserve is starting to observe this and getting concerned. It isn't fun!
The rate of productivity rise is now globally at about 14% per year and rising. This is corresponding to an absolute dumping of masses around the world and is a substantial contributor to the issues behind the "War on Terror."
I don't forsee some magical uptick in jobs like the opimistic view holds nor do I see the apocolypse either. However we are faced with the reality that most of human needs and wants will be taken care of without human work. This produces a serious set of issues regards the distrobution of the results of this production and the value of persons in the world we are headed into. It is these last two issues that need the serious discussion and look at.
How do we maintain the value of persons in such a society and not foster antisocial and anti civilization behavior? How do we reward people? Surely it cannot be based on the fact of their grandfather's position. Property rights as important as they are, become a form of colonial hostile government in such a condition. How do we manage these.
One thing that is absolutely certain is that the concepts of the "Work Ethic" and such as well as "Free Enterprise" are not particularly applicable to this brave new world we are building. We are facing a set of descisions that is profoundly difficult and are into what are essentially uncharted waters.
I don't want to hear the ignorant claims of some Libertarian or Conservative or Liberal who takes on their partizan line here. Lets start talking about how we should solve the problems and not arguing that they do not exist or that the old structures are still working. They are not!
I made an observation about the weather and its importance to daily life around the world one day when I tried to discuss the weather with the locals in the Philippines. (EH?) was the response. It never occurred to them that paying much attention to the weather was important.
They get weather there and some times quite severe, but I found that the reason was simple. They knew that certain days of the year it would be dry others wet and stormy. If the wind was blowing a certain direction at a certain time of the year, it told them what the weather was.
I suppose this is an over simplification but simply stated most of the world gets weather by the calender and by location. Weather in most of the world is pretty much boring. NORTH AMERICA and most specifically the Central Mississippi River Valley gets some pretty amazing weather. It is neither predictable by time of the year nor is it something that you can know by location. You cannot know it by wind direction and you cannot know it by other current conditions. It can bet amazingly dangerous or troublesome.
Rain in this region of the USA and southern Canada can be accompanied by most dangerous condtions. Rain in this area rains Fertilizer as well (Nitrate) which is natural in origin. As such weather is to those of us living in that area a pretty important thing. To the rest of the human race, they have a hard time understanding our preoccupation with it.
The logic of allowing US Government Weather Forcasting to be open to the public is an American Construct. It stems from our understanding that WE own our government. This is counter to the logic for most of the rest of the world. We are despite accusations to the contrary an Anti-Colonial force. The Colonial forces want to reoccupy our land and they are attempting to upset the logic so that they can force the middle men into weather just as they do in Europe and Asia. They are attempting to make everything even that which we have already bought and paid for into property we have to pay rent on. This is what the discussion is about.
The NWS for basic Info has a lot more to add to the forecast stuff than you might think. If you want to see my current conditions here they are. Clicking on the side links can give you a hint of the level of data that we expect for free.
I am sure that there will be worms and viri for Linux. There are always going to be some exploits. The issue is also one of design.
The Microsoft system is by design an "Anti Security System" because the logic that Microsoft uses is that they "Own" your machine. As such they make it under foreign control intrinsically. Linux on the other hand is designed with the concept that the machine is the user's machine and thus it is generally under control of the user unless he exports control.
This is a profoundly better security scheme for Linux. All of the arguments about bad users opening things up will be true but even with their efforts, the process will tend to be much safer than with Microsoft in charge. This is structurally so.
Don't get Stupid. Buy a compiler licence for each developer if you are not using the Open Source ones. In any case make sure that nobody has to wait for software he needs to run just because somebody else is using it. It would even be good to make sure that the tools are available at home. Programmers sometimes work out of their home for long hours so make it possible to do this as well.
This is a matter of respect of the employee. By making him/her share the compiler or such you are telling them that they are not worth even that modest investment. By allowing the home use of the tools you understand that he/she is sharpening the skills on other times etc.
It probably would be wise to schedule a time once a week for an hour or two where employees are honed up on new skills regards their job.
The compatiblity problems induced by applying security to the M$ OS is that by structure and by design the M$ OS(s) were progressively more and more "Insecurity Systems."
The essential thing here is to understand the most basic underlying logic of the M$ empire. They own your computer! In order to maintian their control they had to leave the system open to external takeover. Hackers have had a field day with this design decision.
If M$ is to stop having hackers romp their systems, they have to abandon the concept that they own the user's machine. If they abandon this, they abandon their revenue stream. The conclusion is obvious. You will never get security out of an M$ OS. They are in a box. If they lock out hackers they lock themseves out and their money out. If they don't lock out hackers, the SPAM, POPUPS and SPYWARE and other MALWARE will collapse the Internet and their fortune.
It will be curious to see if they can find their way out of the box that they have so deliberately constructed.
Just as a curious fact or two comes up, the reason US soldiers during WW-I were called "Dough Boys" was because the French General in charge thought they were uneducated worthless as soldiers and only good for messages and cooking. (Making Dough)
After his army was destroyed and Paris was threatened, the general had a thought, "Why not let the Americans die with us." Well he sent under US Command 5,000 into the forrest against 500,000 advancing Germans. He figured they would make a modest speed bump.
In two and one half hours the German Generals were writing in their logs that the only issue remaining was the terms of the surrender... not of the Americans but of Germany! Those poorly armed Americans were described by the Germans as "Shock Troops!" The Americans drove the Germans back 12 miles in the next week! This was hell on earth for the Germans. Slaughtering Frenchmen and Brits was a daily thing to them. Americans slaughtered the Germans!
Writers and performers can get paid salary but they also can get paid royalties based upon some pretty strongly defended copy protection rights under law. The FBI enforces these.
How many programmers do you know who get offered the chance to write for retained royalty pay? Do you think you are likely to get offered such rights which currently do not exist under law? [NOT NO...^*!! NO!] Please get with reality here. Computer programmers are more likely to have their work last longer than movie actors and screen writers who most often get royalties for use.
My objection to SCO and others is not that they should get paid for their work, rather that they stole the work they are demanding to get paid for!
Has anyone out there noted that he is not sponsoring legislation to make sure that computer programmers get copyrights and royalties for their work just like musical writers and performers do? I think that if he gave one rats rump about realy copyrights he would start with the people who are being ripped off of their rights the most.
How about lets really get real. The reason the cards stayed on the dock is that the school teachers/admin simply didn't know how to use computers in the first place. They were not going to use them, they were going to set them like trophies on their desks.
I have had a running fight with my daughter's teachers for 4 years now that they should send me emails if there are any problems. I have offered to add my address to their email address book and been forbidden. I have been told that writing me would take too much time but a parent teacher conference was ok.
This year I finally had one teacher who actually notified by email. The others NOT! Most teachers classrooms you find that the computer is neatly covered with a dust cover and maybe a potted plant is mounted on the top. (NOT USED EVER!) This spring our school system disposed of several thousand 3 year old computers which were "Out Dated" and replaced them with new ones. The new ones are used jsut as much as the old ones. (Get out your dust blower please!)
How about discussing this in the MEDIA or how the Gore Tax was passed without a Vote of Congress which is a violation of the US Constitution or...
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The issue described by the parent of this post is profoundly important. It goes to the very issue of citizen rights. In a country where your rights are issued you by the State and you live on its permits, the logic of allowing this sort of information to be used against you without a serious condition such as an accident or personal injury is hard to understand. There you didn't have the rights anyway. In such a case there is no question of the use of this data.
In Nation(s) such as the USA where the Citizen has the rights and they are leased to the State by a Constitution, the authorities must have "Probable Cause" to bring a warrant. (Real or imminant danger of an offense) A person cannot be compelled to testify against themselves. In such a State this data is not just a matter of its existence, it is a matter of violation of citizen rights to compel it.
I know I will hear from some idiot who remarks about driving not being a "right" but a "privilege." This has always been a questionable ruling of law covering the requirement to carry a drivers license and for "implied consent" for Drug testing of drivers (DUI). If people accept that such an "implied consent exists, they may as well allow electronic devices that can control the car's speed and prevent violations all of the time. But this would defeat the purpose of the violations and citations because they are really issued for revenue reasons and not public safety reasons.
Also violations that are issued by vending machine as these would be have absolutely no consideration of circumstances or conditions.
It might be acceptable under "Probable Cause" to evaluate the data if an accident has occurred. There you have probable cause to look.
Non USA posters will probably not understand this because the logic of most if not all other nations is that the power is the right of the State (Nation syn State) and a person merely gets their rights from a State. Note the (s) after State(s) above. The USA is 50 Nations in a Constitutional Federal Republic. These are nations on their own right. Several of these States approximately equal the greatest of States of the rest of the world (Non-USA) in economic power. Most of these States (USA) have armed forces ranking on their own in the world as world powers and I am not talking about the US Army/Air Force/Navy etc. The Citizens of these States(USA) have their rights and they lease them by Constitution to the States etc.
To be more precise the problem can be restated in that the teams are trying to reengineer the biologic process of vision while what they should be doing is attempting to reverse engineer the process. The teams are coming into the problem backwards beginning with the concept of GPS navigation and then attempting to pick a route based upon a camera input data field without properly compensating the camera data for the differentials of the human eye. So they rely too much on GPS and not enough concentration is given to the camera data.
The first problem is that human eyes see about 14 powers of 10 from the darkest to the brightest in differential. The best of our cameras see about 5.5 powers of 10. There is if anyone wants to write me as paulnoel(at) (my server is) => knology.net. Sorry about the spam paranoia...! I will discuss it with them in more detail. The essential problem with shadows is solved by developing this range of differentials or even wider.
The other problem is one computer programmers have a real bitch of a time with. It is understanding that natural systems operate because of inaccuracy and not because of accuracy.
When we get these two things together and fix them the problem is essentially gone.
Having an Uncle who for some years was in charge of the cleanup at Hanford and noting that he lives in Kelso I would tend to discount the FUD a lot. (About 99.999999999% or more.) Having two other Uncles who were reactor operations officers for US Nuke Subs makes me have a bit of family based info on the topic. I just am not as worried as most people are because I know generally what the problem is and how big it is.
To be sure the mess at Hanford is a serious mess. It involves largely the chemicals used to refine the various elemements after reactor actions. The reason they liked plutonium for bombs is that it could be bred out of lesser stuff and was easily chemically isolated. This gave rise to a lot of radioactive chemical wastes which bluntly were pretty reactive stuff.
The problem was storage was at best using technology we had at the time rather than trying to deal perminanently. The problem is that many of these chemical wastes are liquid and they are stored in containers that are failing or have started to fail.
The containers in many cases were about equal to swimming pools or to 55 gallon drums. Another problem is some of these elements migrate quite easily through barriers. They form all sorts of funny deposits which if struck are prone to catch fire.
With all of this said, the whole problem is one more of time and effort than danger. The location is really pretty unlikely to see a lot of migration outside Hanford and if it does go into the Columbia River it will be diluted well below any level of concern. The river is not small. At nearly 100,000 CFS flow and shortly diluted to 200,000 CFS average flow, this stuff is gone... gone... gone.
To explain a bit more, the problem here is largely one of timing and events. Most of this waste developed right during and shortly after WW2. Shall I say that priorities and for that matter knowlege have changed in the intervening years.
Actually the biggest problem in the cleanup owes to the need not to actually create more contaminated waste than absolutely necessary while doing the clean up.
Even more deeply into the issue, programers do not get royalties generally it is the marketing companies who do. While there are no royalties for those who actually produced the software, the marketeers get a lot. Until the proposal (with results) is made to allow programmers proper royalties (Similar to ASCAP etc) I would argue that any copyrights of the companies are about as honestly stolen as any other goods fenced by sneek thieves and pirates.
The other problem is what Bill Gates told his "friends" a few years back when he announced that they were stealing his codes. Unfortunately he was stealing theirs and those who came before. If we carry this business of royalties very deep we will find that we pay a lot and can do no business.
The real reason they are releasing cash has to do with something more fundimental. There are Securities Laws which while seldom enforced are called "Blue Sky Laws." These laws make it a serious criminal offense to sell a stock never intending to pay your investors back appropriately. Microsoft has earned a wad of cash. This is so obviously a stock fraud if they don't pay it in dividends especially since they cannot argue that they are going to grow infinitely any more that they must distribute or they will be subject to the most obvious prosecution for selling the "Blue Sky."
The problem here is that in distributing they have to admit that they are no longer a "Growth Company" and they have to admit that they are worth about 25 cents on the dollar what the investors have in the company right now and maybe less as asset value. I could go on in details but I am sure some ingnorant fool who thinks that he should only own stocks so that other bigger suckers than himself will buy them will argue.
The owners of Microsoft are avoiding jail terms they think by doing this. Unfortunately they should have been paying dividends 10 years ago to avoid this prosecution. But had they done so I suppose we might still have a robust Software industry with lots of competition and new programs for they could never have dominated the market so had they distributed.
The issue here is not Antitrust it is FRAUD.
The parent is obviously a Microsoft troll. Linux is a common and growing reason to build your own box.
I work in a small company with 12 computers on a network. The network is Linux (Slackware) and all but 3 of the machines now are running Linux. To be fair at least 5 of the machines running linux are dual bool windows but nobody turns that on much any more.
The last time one of the machines (dual booted) was turned on for Windows it was the object of a lot of fix actions for trojan and virus activity. Nine of these machines were originally purchaced with Windows installed. The last 3 boxes we bought bare of OS.
Sorry for the Microsoft trolls out there but we are going to Linux and never coming back. I know of a lot of other offices where the same is going on. What is more, I don't see the "massive overhead" in sysops that Microsoft reports either. We had spent nearly $20,000 (one year) in Sysop overhead with Microsoft when we finally went to Linux and that has dropped to a noise level expense. Linux WORKS.
At home I have 2 computers and both came with Windows installed. Now they run Linux! I will not buy a machine with windows ever again.
Some years ago, my father and I secured the public printed documents on the manageement of the State of Alabama Board of Education and the various schools in the state. We recompiled the data by hand typing into a database and extracted much valuable management information. When presented to Mary Jane Caylor (State Board of Ed.) she was dumbfounded. She said with much excitement, "Where did you get this data!" It seemed that she had requested from the Bureaucrats this data in this form and they had told her it was impossible to give it to her.
Making a long story short this data was used with the obvious suggestions to improve schools and their management nation wide. Schools are now evaluated by the development of their students. Unfortunately we have not extended this evaluation into the direct compensation and tenure of teachers.
The point here is that data available on paper may as well be locked in a safe regrards solving problems. This P2P use and posting of all public documents on the Internet is the key to management of governmnt. It is like taking the hot sun and shining it on the snow burrying our freedom. It melts it away!
The question of how the water formed on the surface of Mars in the first place and how it left the planet are not shrouded in the funky current theories but in pretty well determined facts.
First the water did not leave mars entirely and secondly what did leave left because of a basic law of physics. The molecular spin net mass velocity of water is above the escape velocity of mars. This means several things. A Orbit may be prescribed about any ray extending from the center of mass of an object and if a mass spins about that ray faster than the excape velocity of the two mass system, the object leaves. This means water leaves without having to be pushed by the solar wind. It means that any liquid water on mars will leave and forget the terraforming because it will fail on this account. This velocity is below ecape velocity on earth.
A large part of the water on mars simply went into the structure of the planet. This is the process sucking up Earth's ocean at the moment. It probably accounts for most of the "losses." It is the process of Cement formation.
I know it isn't sexy but these are well determined processess and they do show evidence of having happened.
The big question of how the water got there in the first place is really cute. It could not have been transported in by meteor strike because of the loss to escape of water and heat of impact. It had to have been present there from the start. This means that Mars was somewhere else and move here and warmed up. This also fits with the escape of water matter because the process requires HEAT from the sun to do the work. You figure out how to make a body with the ice to warm up somewhere else. I don't know! I suspect a few things but I don't know.
This also causes a few cosmological problems with the whole theory of how the planets etc formed. Since your numbers determine the rate of dissipation of energy from the planet and deminish the rate of accreation of material from space we find a few curious facts.
All planets substantially smaller than Earth are "Evaporating" into space. It is quite impossible for a planet the mass of the earth to have developed from a smaller planet like mars. The process doesn't work! In order to form an "Earth" you essentially must start with an object about the current mass. This leaves us with a cosmological question as to how such a body would be formed in the first place. The small to large process just does not happen well.
This is best illustrated with the Comets evaporating on each pass and raises the question of how Asteroids developed. How does one get a sold iron meteor from a dust and gas cloud?
Probably the greatest irony of the whole Terrorism War is the claim that we in the USA have never faced this type of situation before. Actually it is profoundly a normal condition for the world and our formation as a nation arose out of dealing properly with and essentially disposing of terrorism .
Short history:
The USA in its Revolutiary war faced this. It was much of the cause for the war was the state sponsored terrorism by England. To wit: " He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." ~ US Declaration of Independence In Congress July 4 1776.
This repeated itself in the War of 1812 known in Europe variously as the 7 years war. In Alabama where I live it is known as the "Creek Indian War" and in Indiana it is famous for other reasons. The English supported a confederacy of 5 Indian Tribes to MURDER and TERRORIZE on the US Western Frontier. The Battle at Tippicanoe was the result of this. In Alabama the action progressed from Huntsville, to Horseshoe Bend. The battle was to stop the Creeks from raiding Tennesse and was supported by the Cherokee Indians. I could continue but this British supported State Sponsored Terrorism agains the USA and even against its Indian Populations went on eventually peaking in the Plains Indian wars. (Second to the US Civil War the most serious US Military actions) and finally decreasing under Hudsons Bay Company support and stopping in Norther California and Oregon in the period just before 1915.
Some other supporters of terrorism penetrated the USA at intervals with most events coming to a halt with the US Nuclear development at the end of World War II. We have had a short period without terrorism being significant since. It appears we are back into it.
There is a profound point here: The USA is no Flebe in the dealing with Terrorism. We developed our Art of Citizenship which puzzles most foreigners as a result of the continual terror attacks. It is in fact the Federal effort to destroy this art that left us volunerable to the problem at this time. The Patriot Act further diminishes the role of citizens and further endangers our people.
Yesterday the head "Patriot Act" man himself Mr. Ridge went out to warn us of the danger but left us with nothing to look for and nothing to do but cower in fear. That is not accidental. These men want us cowering in fear. It was Yesterday that they cowed our US House into without amendment continuing the US Patriot Act! They would celebrate another Al Qaeda attack as it would empower them even more at the hands of ignorant masses who think this is a new problem.
As an acid test of the facts here I provide the following question. Where is the phone number I can call to promptly and properly have Illegal or Undesirable Aliens DEPORTED? The facts show that this should have been the highest priority of the US Government on September 12, 2001. Until this exists where such persons may be promptly and properly dealt with we in the USA shall cower in fear. When it exists we may dissolve the Department of Homeland Security and live in peace and safety. There is no denying this fact! It is not opinion or rant. It is simply the proved fact of our history! We dealt with all the terrorism of the past by cooperation and support of the citizens natural right to self defense. To continue on this current course of denying such is to progress streight into the tyranny of Adolph Hitler and his Gestapo and SS.
Cutting Employee benefits is nearly irrelevant. You could fire every single employee of Microsoft below the upper management level and you would not save the $1 Billion desired to be saved. Firing Steve and Bill would more than save the money. This is the reality of modern management issues. All of the talk about the benefits of Outsourcing etc are lies. All they are is covers for the CEO CFO etc carting the stockholders money away.
Stockholders should take a hard look at any company doing outsourcing or these massive staffing changes. The workers may not be the only ones getting the boot. The owners (Stockholders) are getting the boot too!
I really appreciated the parent post telling the truth about these records.
The sad reality is that our crappy US based programs which have degraded and disgraced our world to the point that the FCC finally has to intervene. Even sadder is the foolish posts defending broadcasters here on /. against the need to deal with this. This stuff is far beyond indefensible.
The real issue we will not deal with in talking about "Adult" entertainment and etc is the human toll it is taking.
I have worked as RN in a State Prison in the USA. This prison had cable TV with all the channels due to the fine intervention of a Federal Judge who simply had no clue what he was doing. The men who ran the prison (Prisoners) called "Rock Men" were doing hard time for sex crimes. Don't pass this off lightly they were some pretty awful criminals. After some particularly nasty movie ran these men couldn't think or talk of anything else for about a week.
The sad reality is that a large part of our population never matures to a mental development level where they can handle seeing such things without it being too real to them and without it guiding their lives. Don't give me the crap about it not affecting most people, they are not the issue. The issue is that we are seeding this crap down among those who cannot handle this and it is precipitating crime and human injury. These are the people who agressively consume the access to such and frankly they are those who so agressively shout down those who speak up against it.
The danger here is much more profound that just such persons. American prosperity is a magnet to the children of the whole world. How they learn to be like us is from our movies and TV. Excuse it if you like but the cultural rot it is causing around the world is most of the reason for the world wide anger at the USA at the present time. Frankly if you had your kids being perverted and your society being poisoned by such you would get mad too. Just watch some of these shows and then imagine it being used as the model for how to live. Place it in your town! But you see it is creeping into your town too! American Kids are starting to act like the TV. The Gangster Rap culture has so poisoned Black Society in the USA for example that even Bill Cosby has spoken up about it. Kids are not just influenced to buy shoes and electronics from TV they learn to talk and act the way they see on the screen. This is what is at issue in the FCC effort.
Having young women think that they should be especially sexy and act out in public such may seem cute and even fun until you have to pay the cost of it. The pain in broken families, illegitimate and unsupported children makes this crime more destructive of society and of our prosperity generally than any other. Even Murder fades into insignificance against the cost of a child raised by a single family home where the support of that child fails because of such bad training. In the USA the amount of money the average illegitimate birth costs is staggering. It is over $300,000 by age 18 for that child. Life time damage is hard to calculate as this tends to echo into future generations. A fair estimate of the costs here is well over $1 Million a person. This cost is so high in the USA that it is threatening to collapse the econony of many locations such as inner city neighborhoods.
The effect world wide is even more dangerous as these people often have cultures ill prepared for modern times anyway. This is much of the cause of the "War on Terror" condition going on now. It has bread the situations around the world where terrorism breeds. Excuse this stuff off as minor stuff if you want. This is the most serious issue mankind has. It is quite literally one of mind pollution. A TV or Radio station has no more right to dump toxic radioactive waste in the environment than it has to dump corrosive ideas in this way into our world.
Just for entertainment, you have heard the joke about the man who had an ego so big that he lived in his own zipcode. Well due to a querk of the USPS and history, I do live in my own zipcode. (35749-9746) Just my house and nobody else's
All funny stuff asside we actually do need a system where my address whether Internet or Phone or otherwise is mine and portable. This must include Email addressing and allow me to make it portable without regards to ISP.
I would like to ammend your pretty efficient description of the facts with a few minor additions.
With the Department of Homeland Security spending hundreds of billions of US Taxpayer dollars into Foreign owned companies because they are Cheaper. (Even though Americans at two times the price due to taxes are cheaper than their foreign competition) We see the Republicrats (Not a spelling error) building the worlds most efficient mechanism for recording all of the terrorists activities up to your death and then providing a most efficient means for removing your dead body while blaming the taxpayers for not paying enough taxes.
Who after all is the worst terrorist? The one who destroyed 3000 people and about a $100 Billion from the US Economy or the guys who demanded $2,000 Billion from us for Homeland Security and will continue to demand another $500 to $1000 Billion every year from now on while celebrating each additional attack with more money demanded from the taxpayers while refusing to guard our borders and refusing to remove Illegal or Undesirable Aliens (The problem 9/11/2001) in a timely efficient manner.
Remember that if no attack comes in the next 10 years they will have spent a lot of money and will be put back to modest budgets as worthless unless they can find some way to preserve the terrorists as a threat. In the mean time too many careers somewhere on earth will hinge on the threat continuing.
Remember that it took Al Qaeda (Unopposed) from 1993 to 2001 to mount an attack on the US Mainland. Does anyone believe that we are stopping them now? If you do please tell me the Phone number that you can dial for immediate and proper dealing with Illegal and Undesirable Aliens.
For my Foreign friends, the US Citizens to this day do not even have a phone number they can call to have an alien who is causing problems dealt with promptly and the local police with some minor exceptions are forbidden by law to bring any proceeding against them. The US Border Patrol is currently being told to sit in their trucks and not even arrest border crossers who are illegal even when they see the event. The American Border Patrol (A private organization) set up drones and reported such crossings on the Internets While USA Purchaced Drones sat in their crates until the embarassment built up so much that they had to start such work this past week. You can rest assured that this will only operate so that the USA forces can ignore the American Border Patrol and continue not to do their job.
So long prompt response continues not to exist, you can take it as prima facia proof that there is no real threat in the eyes of US Leadership. You can take it all as a fraud. This measure is the first line of defense and the most modest of requests by decent citizens.
Back to the laws on gift cards and money I am thankful that Washington is starting to work on this. I just wonder how long that it will be before some federal law stops the effort to produce decent laws. (NAFTA or GATT and the WTO may be party too!)
To get a bit serious... there has been an intersection between the upward curve of job distruction by technology and the flattening of the upwards curve (now possibly down) of the generation of new jobs because of computers. Actually the effect has been more profound outside of the EU and USA than inside. It is starting to hit inside the EU And USA.
I could bore with statistics and I am sure no matter what nobody would be persuaded. We have finally reached the point at which large segments of society etc are simply being dumped as obsolete trash at a rate too high for them to adapte to the newer demands if they exist. Even the US Federal Reserve is starting to observe this and getting concerned. It isn't fun!
The rate of productivity rise is now globally at about 14% per year and rising. This is corresponding to an absolute dumping of masses around the world and is a substantial contributor to the issues behind the "War on Terror."
I don't forsee some magical uptick in jobs like the opimistic view holds nor do I see the apocolypse either. However we are faced with the reality that most of human needs and wants will be taken care of without human work. This produces a serious set of issues regards the distrobution of the results of this production and the value of persons in the world we are headed into. It is these last two issues that need the serious discussion and look at.
How do we maintain the value of persons in such a society and not foster antisocial and anti civilization behavior? How do we reward people? Surely it cannot be based on the fact of their grandfather's position. Property rights as important as they are, become a form of colonial hostile government in such a condition. How do we manage these.
One thing that is absolutely certain is that the concepts of the "Work Ethic" and such as well as "Free Enterprise" are not particularly applicable to this brave new world we are building. We are facing a set of descisions that is profoundly difficult and are into what are essentially uncharted waters.
I don't want to hear the ignorant claims of some Libertarian or Conservative or Liberal who takes on their partizan line here. Lets start talking about how we should solve the problems and not arguing that they do not exist or that the old structures are still working. They are not!
I made an observation about the weather and its importance to daily life around the world one day when I tried to discuss the weather with the locals in the Philippines. (EH?) was the response. It never occurred to them that paying much attention to the weather was important.
They get weather there and some times quite severe, but I found that the reason was simple. They knew that certain days of the year it would be dry others wet and stormy. If the wind was blowing a certain direction at a certain time of the year, it told them what the weather was.
I suppose this is an over simplification but simply stated most of the world gets weather by the calender and by location. Weather in most of the world is pretty much boring. NORTH AMERICA and most specifically the Central Mississippi River Valley gets some pretty amazing weather. It is neither predictable by time of the year nor is it something that you can know by location. You cannot know it by wind direction and you cannot know it by other current conditions. It can bet amazingly dangerous or troublesome.
Rain in this region of the USA and southern Canada can be accompanied by most dangerous condtions. Rain in this area rains Fertilizer as well (Nitrate) which is natural in origin. As such weather is to those of us living in that area a pretty important thing. To the rest of the human race, they have a hard time understanding our preoccupation with it.
The logic of allowing US Government Weather Forcasting to be open to the public is an American Construct. It stems from our understanding that WE own our government. This is counter to the logic for most of the rest of the world. We are despite accusations to the contrary an Anti-Colonial force. The Colonial forces want to reoccupy our land and they are attempting to upset the logic so that they can force the middle men into weather just as they do in Europe and Asia. They are attempting to make everything even that which we have already bought and paid for into property we have to pay rent on. This is what the discussion is about.
The NWS for basic Info has a lot more to add to the forecast stuff than you might think. If you want to see my current conditions here they are. Clicking on the side links can give you a hint of the level of data that we expect for free.
I am sure that there will be worms and viri for Linux. There are always going to be some exploits. The issue is also one of design.
The Microsoft system is by design an "Anti Security System" because the logic that Microsoft uses is that they "Own" your machine. As such they make it under foreign control intrinsically. Linux on the other hand is designed with the concept that the machine is the user's machine and thus it is generally under control of the user unless he exports control.
This is a profoundly better security scheme for Linux. All of the arguments about bad users opening things up will be true but even with their efforts, the process will tend to be much safer than with Microsoft in charge. This is structurally so.
Don't get Stupid. Buy a compiler licence for each developer if you are not using the Open Source ones. In any case make sure that nobody has to wait for software he needs to run just because somebody else is using it. It would even be good to make sure that the tools are available at home. Programmers sometimes work out of their home for long hours so make it possible to do this as well.
This is a matter of respect of the employee. By making him/her share the compiler or such you are telling them that they are not worth even that modest investment. By allowing the home use of the tools you understand that he/she is sharpening the skills on other times etc.
It probably would be wise to schedule a time once a week for an hour or two where employees are honed up on new skills regards their job.
The compatiblity problems induced by applying security to the M$ OS is that by structure and by design the M$ OS(s) were progressively more and more "Insecurity Systems."
The essential thing here is to understand the most basic underlying logic of the M$ empire. They own your computer! In order to maintian their control they had to leave the system open to external takeover. Hackers have had a field day with this design decision.
If M$ is to stop having hackers romp their systems, they have to abandon the concept that they own the user's machine. If they abandon this, they abandon their revenue stream. The conclusion is obvious. You will never get security out of an M$ OS. They are in a box. If they lock out hackers they lock themseves out and their money out. If they don't lock out hackers, the SPAM, POPUPS and SPYWARE and other MALWARE will collapse the Internet and their fortune.
It will be curious to see if they can find their way out of the box that they have so deliberately constructed.
Don't let the Californians or East Coast types go to Huntsville, Alabama. They might get their whole world view warped.
Yes mod's it is on topic
Just as a curious fact or two comes up, the reason US soldiers during WW-I were called "Dough Boys" was because the French General in charge thought they were uneducated worthless as soldiers and only good for messages and cooking. (Making Dough)
After his army was destroyed and Paris was threatened, the general had a thought, "Why not let the Americans die with us." Well he sent under US Command 5,000 into the forrest against 500,000 advancing Germans. He figured they would make a modest speed bump.
In two and one half hours the German Generals were writing in their logs that the only issue remaining was the terms of the surrender... not of the Americans but of Germany! Those poorly armed Americans were described by the Germans as "Shock Troops!" The Americans drove the Germans back 12 miles in the next week! This was hell on earth for the Germans. Slaughtering Frenchmen and Brits was a daily thing to them. Americans slaughtered the Germans!
Just reporting what happened nothing else.
Writers and performers can get paid salary but they also can get paid royalties based upon some pretty strongly defended copy protection rights under law. The FBI enforces these.
How many programmers do you know who get offered the chance to write for retained royalty pay? Do you think you are likely to get offered such rights which currently do not exist under law? [NOT NO...^*!! NO!] Please get with reality here. Computer programmers are more likely to have their work last longer than movie actors and screen writers who most often get royalties for use.
My objection to SCO and others is not that they should get paid for their work, rather that they stole the work they are demanding to get paid for!
You don't think SCO would pay their programmers royalties do you?
Answer same as the likelyhood of that.
Has anyone out there noted that he is not sponsoring legislation to make sure that computer programmers get copyrights and royalties for their work just like musical writers and performers do? I think that if he gave one rats rump about realy copyrights he would start with the people who are being ripped off of their rights the most.
How about lets really get real. The reason the cards stayed on the dock is that the school teachers/admin simply didn't know how to use computers in the first place. They were not going to use them, they were going to set them like trophies on their desks.
I have had a running fight with my daughter's teachers for 4 years now that they should send me emails if there are any problems. I have offered to add my address to their email address book and been forbidden. I have been told that writing me would take too much time but a parent teacher conference was ok.
This year I finally had one teacher who actually notified by email. The others NOT! Most teachers classrooms you find that the computer is neatly covered with a dust cover and maybe a potted plant is mounted on the top. (NOT USED EVER!) This spring our school system disposed of several thousand 3 year old computers which were "Out Dated" and replaced them with new ones. The new ones are used jsut as much as the old ones. (Get out your dust blower please!)
How about discussing this in the MEDIA or how the Gore Tax was passed without a Vote of Congress which is a violation of the US Constitution or ...