I played a lot of Warcraft II back in the mid to late nineties. The mental image of a bunch of Troll Axethrowers surrounding an enemy's farm, the farm in flames, with a continuous stream of axes flying into it just sticks so well in this case...
No, the only three ways Bush could lose his job are to be impeached and convicted, for him to resign, or for him to be bodily unable to do the job, like if he had been more hurt when he fell of that Segway, among other injuries.
Normally I'd include "mentally unable", but for some reason that hasn't stopped this particular president.
External forces like treaties and trade don't usually directly affect the President to the level that would be needed to call for his impeachment. Bush would have to have a stance so heinous that most other nations would completely cease trading with us in order to really cause enough trouble motivate the people to call for his removal. The problem with this is that our economy has been very important to other countries internationally. This can be seen easily back to 1929 when our economy's tanking took Europe, and a large portion of the rest of the world, straight to the crapper. The Middle East, for example, can't afford to cut off oil sales to the U.S. any more than we can afford to immediately cut them off as a supplier, we consume so much that they would be in as much trouble as we would.
I'm getting tired of how the Government constantly makes short-term changes to deal with long-term problems, somewhat blocking the problem until it rears its' head again. We could set the example for what a country can do for the world, but we don't.
I guess that I'm still just a little peeved by the election results.
My license plate is "CORDOBA". When I'm driving around and people pull up beside me to say something it's always either, "What's a Cordoba?", or "Does it have Fine Corinthian Leather?". Always.
And no, it's cloth right now. I have plans to reupholster it with leather, but that's not exactly cheap.
Well, I'm not terribly surprised that a contract would be awarded to Microsoft, especially if they are the current provider, but nine years!? That's more than a bit extreme. Three would have made sense, as that's the average lifespan of a Microsoft OS before Microsoft starts reducing support when the new release comes out.
A lot can happen in nine years. Nine years ago we we had just been formally introduced to Windows 95. Most of our programs were sixteen bit and didn't support long filenames. The average hard disk drive size was something like 400MB. Most new computers had eight, maybe sixteen megabytes of memory. 14400 bps modems were the shit, and vampire-tap thicknet and token ring were the most common network types. Hell, arcnet and Banyan Vines were still viable.
The biggest thing is that Microsoft wasn't the absolutely overwhelming player that it is today. Many of the big box stores that carried computers had just as many Apple Performas and Quadras as all of the PCs of different brands combined on display. OS/2 could be found on a few machines set up as customer displays displays. Microsoft was not the overwhelming monopoly that it subsequently worked to become. With the headway that non-Microsoft platforms have been making (along with the convergent evolution of Apple's OS along with the other POSIX-alike OSes), nine years from now Microsoft might not be the juggernaut that they are today.
Already Microsoft is suffering from the rot that any middle-aged empire goes through, just look at the constant, gaping holes in IE, IIS, and Windows that leave users burned by automated attacks time and again. Eventually the right people will become pissed off and the rate of corporate adoption of non-MS software will increase further than it already has.
They could have pushed it to 3.5GHz if they'd used the radiator from my '78 Chrysler Cordoba. It probably weighs more than the entire car that they pulled their radiator out of...
The Centris didn't have a built-in display. I think that the 650 was a Pizza-Box case, like the 660AV that I have gathering dust.
The neat thing about the case is that it fits quite nicely in 2U of rackspace, assuming it's on a shelf. If you want to run an m68K port and keep your existing rack mount setup intact it's a good choice.
"How about Flagstaff, Sedona, Prescott, Jerome or Bisbee? Most of the state is within four hours of Phoenix."
I've been to every one of those communities. I think that I'd do better in a larger community than they offer. Admittedly Flagstaff isn't tiny, but the entire city is still smaller than the university that I attended for awhile. I'm thinking something on a Tucson scale, but up on the Mogollon plateau.
amoral doesn't mean illegal.
on
Good Bad Attitude
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"Kazaa is amoral. What people choose to do with it may or may not be moral."
This is the exact logic that has allowed Betamax (and other analog devices capable of duplication) to exist. If the device has a legitimate use then the device is legitimate. If the maker or marketter of the device or service specifically argues an illegal purpose then the service should be shut down or the specific marketter or seller should be targetted, but that does not mean that the users should be targetted unless it can be demonstrated that they are breaking the law.
Companies that sold multifunction card readers and writers, as well as blank cards were marketting these with the claim that it allows one to watch Cable or Satellite TV for free. This marketting strategy is illegal, and businesses advocating the illegal activity are subject to prosecution. The devices, however, have legitimate uses beyond TV, as the subscription TV industry risked using an industry standard card rather than developing their own technology. Subsequently I feel that prosecution solely based on the purchase of such equipment from one of the aforementioned retailers is wrong. If they can prove that the customer is actually using the devices for illegal purposes then they have grounds, otherwise posession is not a crime. Since posession is not a crime, there is no justification for even a search warrant to examine the customer's equipment. If the customer then has turned around and started selling copied key cards and the TV subscription company can prove this though obtaining one then they can make a case.
If I and a bunch of associates had such equipment and were all served, I wouldn't hesitate to find a lawyer with experience for this and counter with racketeering and extortion claims as a group, and to attempt to convince the local attorney general to criminally pursue the matter.
Portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act related to devices capable of copying or playing copies need to be re-evaluated and repealed, for the logic that copying can be done legally of material not protected by copyright, therefore DMCA is restrictive.
"Why on earth are environmentalists opposed to an observatory? I mean astronomers not only like clear air, they even think light is pollution!"
Because unfortunately there are those who are completely uncompromising, and in this case the fact that the telescope complex takes up a fairly large amount of space and would alter as-of-yet unaltered land was probably what set them off. Personally I find this to be stupid to the largest extent, as it is as short sighted as groups who would completely annhilate ecosystems for any reason.
Short sightedness has led to massive wildfires that have burned more destructively than if the standard fire cycle were allowed to occur, and poor use of forested area in Arizona has led to the near eradication of any natural desert in the Salt River Valley, as desert and river valley space was seen as a comparative wasteland compared to the wooded areas of the state.
Personally I'd like it if there were another decent sized community within four hours drive of Phoenix that wasn't also in the desert, as it would be nice to try out a different city for living and working but still be close enough to friends and family to not fall completely out of my comfort zone.
"Not quite true. Remember Mac clones? Based on a standard reference design (CHRP? PREP? one of those) they could in theory run either NT4 or MacOS. I don't know if Apple hardware ever ran it, Apple could get away with having not-quite-conformant hardware that would still run MacOS."
This I can vouch for. I worked for a company for a short time that had a dual processor Motorola StarMax running NT4.0 as some kind of server that was semi-public, and they were using the PPC architecture because it severely reduced the utility of the box to anyone who would break into it.
I would imagine that the only Mac that could run it natively would be the PowerPC 4400, which was based on the same architecture as all of the cloned Macintoshes.
Re:What's wrong with normal pets?
on
Upgrade Your Dog
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Some dogs are functional though. "Seeing Eye" dogs, drug sniffing dogs, bomb detection dogs, dogs to seek out victims in structural collapses, dogs that find people in avalanche areas, and the like.
Personally, I'd like it if the technology could evolve to where the dog could actually indicate if it found drugs or if it found something that it wanted to eat or have sex with, instead of leaving that up to the dog's wrangler. Many a canine officer has claimed that someone had drugs in a backpack or whatnot at some point because the dog wouldn't leave a backpack alone, while there was probably just a candy bar in there or something.
For myself, if I had a dog at all I'd just want a fairly mild-tempered, easy going, no-frills, housebroken dog.
Wasn't this covered...
on
Upgrade Your Dog
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· Score: 3, Interesting
...in Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling? One of the dogs in that book even had a talk show, it's support electronics were so advanced.
you don't want to see a computer/technology patent war. everyone would be guilty of something. Heck, IBM would have almost everyone by the balls if they chose.
Since patents expire after seventeen years it's wise to just let them go. It's definitely safer.
One of the first things that I did when I was playing with Windows Chicago betas was to disable auto loading of CD related stuff. It's bloody annoying. Every computer that I had running Windows thereafter (through Windows ME, after that I stopped using Windows for Linux) had autorun disabled on the CD-ROM drives.
Oh no, I turned off an optional feature of the UI's shell! I'm going to Hell and going to be prosecuted for using a circumvention device!
Suncomm needs to go perform impossible acts of anatomy upon themselves, and the music industry needs to follow suit. If they don't like the ease which data can be copied in raw form from CDs they're welcome to design a new media and new drive that they only control.
Such a system is unstable though. Just because people don't vote like they should doesn't mean that they'll sit by and let it be taken away unless something damn good replaces it. If the government attempted to disenfranchise that large of a percentage of the population we'd end up having a revolution, and not a peaceful one at that. Since a lot has been built on the stability and prosperity this country has enjoyed since the end of the second world war, corporations are going to fight against rocking the boat and probably stop backing political candidates that would advocate such a system.
"To the public: You don't even know what caldera means, do you. Yes, you there reading/. The one who thinks it's just the old name for the SCO group. That's right, I mean you, the one who only knows what a gnu is because of the FSF logo."
Are you referring to that landform created through planetary vulcanological processes comprising a large portion of the plateau that Utah is made of, which the software development company based in that region named themselves after?
If I understand matters, until the Court considers your debt to society paid your civil rights are partially suspended. If you are on parole you have no reasonable expectation of privacy compared to any given person, and you are held to the highest standards of behavior and rules for what you are and are not allowed to do. In theory the Court should restore your civil rights once you are off parole, out of probation, or released from prison with all time considered served.
Sexual predator and sex offender registries complicate matters, as this is another condition upon the individual that lasts past any prison term, parole, or probationary period. I don't quite know how I feel about it, though I wonder if they would be better served to simply redefine the punishments for the crimes to include permanent probation or parole instead of the current registry terms, for right now it gives the impression of continuing to punish the convicted person after after we've otherwise indicated that their punishment is officially considered concluded. They are people, after all, so maybe in addition to the punitive part of their sentence they should be required to undergo psychological help or some kind rehabilitation to help deal with the problems, rather than leaving them to their own devices. It seems to be a broken system right now.
"If I [remember], in Florida and elsewhere, there were a lot of blacks that were turned away from voting and this did not look good to the rest of the world..."
If I rememeber correctly, it's suspected that someone whose job was to remove ineligible voters from the lists removed everyone with the same or similar name or alias to the person to be removed. Accounting for last names like Johnson, Smith, Thompson, and other particularly common ones that's a lot of people.
If something like that happens again with any kind of real quantity of the electorate I'll be in favor of extending voting rights to anyone who is a citizen who registers, with convicted felons serving their terms simply unable to physically get to the polls to cast their ballot as the disenfranchising part of their loss of rights. Yes, this would allow parolled and probationed ex-cons to vote, but if they're physically among the populace then we're not exactly doing much more than requiring them to pop in and say, "hello" from time to time. They may as well be included if it prevents this level of crap again.
Scary that the entry level version will probably be at least a third more powerful than this one, while the new high end model will likely blow this one out of the water. They can market the entry level one at $999 and the high end one at $1999, increasing their profits for those that feel that they must have the high end one, and making a lot on those who feel that they need one, even if it's the low end model.
Slashdot Mirror
I played a lot of Warcraft II back in the mid to late nineties. The mental image of a bunch of Troll Axethrowers surrounding an enemy's farm, the farm in flames, with a continuous stream of axes flying into it just sticks so well in this case...
No, the only three ways Bush could lose his job are to be impeached and convicted, for him to resign, or for him to be bodily unable to do the job, like if he had been more hurt when he fell of that Segway, among other injuries.
Normally I'd include "mentally unable", but for some reason that hasn't stopped this particular president.
External forces like treaties and trade don't usually directly affect the President to the level that would be needed to call for his impeachment. Bush would have to have a stance so heinous that most other nations would completely cease trading with us in order to really cause enough trouble motivate the people to call for his removal. The problem with this is that our economy has been very important to other countries internationally. This can be seen easily back to 1929 when our economy's tanking took Europe, and a large portion of the rest of the world, straight to the crapper. The Middle East, for example, can't afford to cut off oil sales to the U.S. any more than we can afford to immediately cut them off as a supplier, we consume so much that they would be in as much trouble as we would.
I'm getting tired of how the Government constantly makes short-term changes to deal with long-term problems, somewhat blocking the problem until it rears its' head again. We could set the example for what a country can do for the world, but we don't.
I guess that I'm still just a little peeved by the election results.
My license plate is "CORDOBA". When I'm driving around and people pull up beside me to say something it's always either, "What's a Cordoba?", or "Does it have Fine Corinthian Leather?". Always.
And no, it's cloth right now. I have plans to reupholster it with leather, but that's not exactly cheap.
You know why the British don't build computers, right?
They haven't figured out how to make them leak oil yet...
Well, I'm not terribly surprised that a contract would be awarded to Microsoft, especially if they are the current provider, but nine years!? That's more than a bit extreme. Three would have made sense, as that's the average lifespan of a Microsoft OS before Microsoft starts reducing support when the new release comes out.
A lot can happen in nine years. Nine years ago we we had just been formally introduced to Windows 95. Most of our programs were sixteen bit and didn't support long filenames. The average hard disk drive size was something like 400MB. Most new computers had eight, maybe sixteen megabytes of memory. 14400 bps modems were the shit, and vampire-tap thicknet and token ring were the most common network types. Hell, arcnet and Banyan Vines were still viable.
The biggest thing is that Microsoft wasn't the absolutely overwhelming player that it is today. Many of the big box stores that carried computers had just as many Apple Performas and Quadras as all of the PCs of different brands combined on display. OS/2 could be found on a few machines set up as customer displays displays. Microsoft was not the overwhelming monopoly that it subsequently worked to become. With the headway that non-Microsoft platforms have been making (along with the convergent evolution of Apple's OS along with the other POSIX-alike OSes), nine years from now Microsoft might not be the juggernaut that they are today.
Already Microsoft is suffering from the rot that any middle-aged empire goes through, just look at the constant, gaping holes in IE, IIS, and Windows that leave users burned by automated attacks time and again. Eventually the right people will become pissed off and the rate of corporate adoption of non-MS software will increase further than it already has.
Nine years is just way too long.
They could have pushed it to 3.5GHz if they'd used the radiator from my '78 Chrysler Cordoba. It probably weighs more than the entire car that they pulled their radiator out of...
Thanks! I needed a laugh today...
So what you're saying is that after the initial induction, the gang members have a lot more fun?
I know that Bush's standings aren't that good with the rest of the world, but I didn't realise that he was that disliked...
The Centris didn't have a built-in display. I think that the 650 was a Pizza-Box case, like the 660AV that I have gathering dust. The neat thing about the case is that it fits quite nicely in 2U of rackspace, assuming it's on a shelf. If you want to run an m68K port and keep your existing rack mount setup intact it's a good choice.
sorry, I think that the Rooster came first. Else the egg would have been useless...
"How about Flagstaff, Sedona, Prescott, Jerome or Bisbee? Most of the state is within four hours of Phoenix."
I've been to every one of those communities. I think that I'd do better in a larger community than they offer. Admittedly Flagstaff isn't tiny, but the entire city is still smaller than the university that I attended for awhile. I'm thinking something on a Tucson scale, but up on the Mogollon plateau.
"Kazaa is amoral. What people choose to do with it may or may not be moral."
This is the exact logic that has allowed Betamax (and other analog devices capable of duplication) to exist. If the device has a legitimate use then the device is legitimate. If the maker or marketter of the device or service specifically argues an illegal purpose then the service should be shut down or the specific marketter or seller should be targetted, but that does not mean that the users should be targetted unless it can be demonstrated that they are breaking the law.
Companies that sold multifunction card readers and writers, as well as blank cards were marketting these with the claim that it allows one to watch Cable or Satellite TV for free. This marketting strategy is illegal, and businesses advocating the illegal activity are subject to prosecution. The devices, however, have legitimate uses beyond TV, as the subscription TV industry risked using an industry standard card rather than developing their own technology. Subsequently I feel that prosecution solely based on the purchase of such equipment from one of the aforementioned retailers is wrong. If they can prove that the customer is actually using the devices for illegal purposes then they have grounds, otherwise posession is not a crime. Since posession is not a crime, there is no justification for even a search warrant to examine the customer's equipment. If the customer then has turned around and started selling copied key cards and the TV subscription company can prove this though obtaining one then they can make a case.
If I and a bunch of associates had such equipment and were all served, I wouldn't hesitate to find a lawyer with experience for this and counter with racketeering and extortion claims as a group, and to attempt to convince the local attorney general to criminally pursue the matter.
Portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act related to devices capable of copying or playing copies need to be re-evaluated and repealed, for the logic that copying can be done legally of material not protected by copyright, therefore DMCA is restrictive.
"Why on earth are environmentalists opposed to an observatory? I mean astronomers not only like clear air, they even think light is pollution!"
Because unfortunately there are those who are completely uncompromising, and in this case the fact that the telescope complex takes up a fairly large amount of space and would alter as-of-yet unaltered land was probably what set them off. Personally I find this to be stupid to the largest extent, as it is as short sighted as groups who would completely annhilate ecosystems for any reason.
Short sightedness has led to massive wildfires that have burned more destructively than if the standard fire cycle were allowed to occur, and poor use of forested area in Arizona has led to the near eradication of any natural desert in the Salt River Valley, as desert and river valley space was seen as a comparative wasteland compared to the wooded areas of the state.
Personally I'd like it if there were another decent sized community within four hours drive of Phoenix that wasn't also in the desert, as it would be nice to try out a different city for living and working but still be close enough to friends and family to not fall completely out of my comfort zone.
"Not quite true. Remember Mac clones? Based on a standard reference design (CHRP? PREP? one of those) they could in theory run either NT4 or MacOS. I don't know if Apple hardware ever ran it, Apple could get away with having not-quite-conformant hardware that would still run MacOS."
This I can vouch for. I worked for a company for a short time that had a dual processor Motorola StarMax running NT4.0 as some kind of server that was semi-public, and they were using the PPC architecture because it severely reduced the utility of the box to anyone who would break into it.
I would imagine that the only Mac that could run it natively would be the PowerPC 4400, which was based on the same architecture as all of the cloned Macintoshes.
Some dogs are functional though. "Seeing Eye" dogs, drug sniffing dogs, bomb detection dogs, dogs to seek out victims in structural collapses, dogs that find people in avalanche areas, and the like. Personally, I'd like it if the technology could evolve to where the dog could actually indicate if it found drugs or if it found something that it wanted to eat or have sex with, instead of leaving that up to the dog's wrangler. Many a canine officer has claimed that someone had drugs in a backpack or whatnot at some point because the dog wouldn't leave a backpack alone, while there was probably just a candy bar in there or something. For myself, if I had a dog at all I'd just want a fairly mild-tempered, easy going, no-frills, housebroken dog.
...in Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling? One of the dogs in that book even had a talk show, it's support electronics were so advanced.
you don't want to see a computer/technology patent war. everyone would be guilty of something. Heck, IBM would have almost everyone by the balls if they chose.
Since patents expire after seventeen years it's wise to just let them go. It's definitely safer.
One of the first things that I did when I was playing with Windows Chicago betas was to disable auto loading of CD related stuff. It's bloody annoying. Every computer that I had running Windows thereafter (through Windows ME, after that I stopped using Windows for Linux) had autorun disabled on the CD-ROM drives.
Oh no, I turned off an optional feature of the UI's shell! I'm going to Hell and going to be prosecuted for using a circumvention device!
Suncomm needs to go perform impossible acts of anatomy upon themselves, and the music industry needs to follow suit. If they don't like the ease which data can be copied in raw form from CDs they're welcome to design a new media and new drive that they only control.
Such a system is unstable though. Just because people don't vote like they should doesn't mean that they'll sit by and let it be taken away unless something damn good replaces it. If the government attempted to disenfranchise that large of a percentage of the population we'd end up having a revolution, and not a peaceful one at that. Since a lot has been built on the stability and prosperity this country has enjoyed since the end of the second world war, corporations are going to fight against rocking the boat and probably stop backing political candidates that would advocate such a system.
"To the public: You don't even know what caldera means, do you. Yes, you there reading /. The one who thinks it's just the old name for the SCO group. That's right, I mean you, the one who only knows what a gnu is because of the FSF logo."
Are you referring to that landform created through planetary vulcanological processes comprising a large portion of the plateau that Utah is made of, which the software development company based in that region named themselves after?
If I understand matters, until the Court considers your debt to society paid your civil rights are partially suspended. If you are on parole you have no reasonable expectation of privacy compared to any given person, and you are held to the highest standards of behavior and rules for what you are and are not allowed to do. In theory the Court should restore your civil rights once you are off parole, out of probation, or released from prison with all time considered served.
Sexual predator and sex offender registries complicate matters, as this is another condition upon the individual that lasts past any prison term, parole, or probationary period. I don't quite know how I feel about it, though I wonder if they would be better served to simply redefine the punishments for the crimes to include permanent probation or parole instead of the current registry terms, for right now it gives the impression of continuing to punish the convicted person after after we've otherwise indicated that their punishment is officially considered concluded. They are people, after all, so maybe in addition to the punitive part of their sentence they should be required to undergo psychological help or some kind rehabilitation to help deal with the problems, rather than leaving them to their own devices. It seems to be a broken system right now.
"If I [remember], in Florida and elsewhere, there were a lot of blacks that were turned away from voting and this did not look good to the rest of the world..."
If I rememeber correctly, it's suspected that someone whose job was to remove ineligible voters from the lists removed everyone with the same or similar name or alias to the person to be removed. Accounting for last names like Johnson, Smith, Thompson, and other particularly common ones that's a lot of people.
If something like that happens again with any kind of real quantity of the electorate I'll be in favor of extending voting rights to anyone who is a citizen who registers, with convicted felons serving their terms simply unable to physically get to the polls to cast their ballot as the disenfranchising part of their loss of rights. Yes, this would allow parolled and probationed ex-cons to vote, but if they're physically among the populace then we're not exactly doing much more than requiring them to pop in and say, "hello" from time to time. They may as well be included if it prevents this level of crap again.
Scary that the entry level version will probably be at least a third more powerful than this one, while the new high end model will likely blow this one out of the water. They can market the entry level one at $999 and the high end one at $1999, increasing their profits for those that feel that they must have the high end one, and making a lot on those who feel that they need one, even if it's the low end model.
"It's clear that the machine is a hostile environment for Linux - there are only 2 mouse buttons. Made for MSFT crap. Nothing to see here, move on."
Uh, chord-middle anyone?