It doesn't matter if computing performance doubles if the software that runs on it decays in performance at an even greater rate. Back in 1988 MSDOS used to boot in less than 10 seconds after the BIOS POST. Who cares if you'll have software with features greater than your brain, with capacity to even guess your thoughts, wishes and desires, if it will just do what you want without mouseclicks of speech commands, who cares for all these features if it takes 5 years to boot up on a computer a gazillion times faster than today's computers, and its processing speed is uttering 3 words per decade while consuming 900 gigawatt of electric power? Case in point: Windows Vista.
Lots of ocean places have dead zones due to overfishing due to human hunger. None of the indigenous aquatic life can tolerate an ecosystem turned upside down by overfishing. Unmoderated and largescale thirst an hunger can destroy many things around you. Back in the day horse manure used to be the fertilizer, and people lived well within natural cycles, true, without much showering. But there were far less people nature had to support, unlike these days, high on running out fossil fuel based nitrogen fertilizer pumped eroded soil fed ultrapopulation. Out of 100 TW photosynthesis on earth, people need like 1-2 TW in food, and considering conversion efficiencies, that's more like 15 TW of the 100 TW photosynthetic input. Potable water is just a side question, the bigger problem is food without Haber-Bosch ammonia, that needs lots of basic energy to make. What's gonna feed us? Coal? Nuclear? Solar? Wind? Or this wave power? Energy is the question, once you got it, you can turn it into electricity and make whatever you want out of it, fertilizer, desalinated water, carbon dioxide derived fats and sugars food.
What about principles? I once witnessed someone argue on the phone for 2 days straight at work over billing of his premature born child being sent to an "out of network doctor" that he could not talk the hospital out of in the first place, being promised there would be no charge because nobody else is capable of doing that function, and then later there was a "mere" $10 charge of course. It sets precedent. If you let 1% stolen on arguments that it's too costly to recover, then you'll have 100% stolen provided that it would cost 150% to recover - how do you like that argument? True, most of the time people just use common sense and say forget about it, but other times people like to take a stand. I'm guessing it's not the $100 that he was after, but the principle of not getting violated.
As long as there is no World Government such as UN was supposed to be before Bush said "piss on you all", and as long as the pushbuttons controlling any GPS are located within a specific country that during a military conflict can withdraw access from the opponent country, as long as largescale military conflicts are possible because the world is chopped into nations and countries, there will be duplicated implementations of GPS, for different countries because it's too much of a strategic blunder to trust or have to rely on your adversary's systems. Of course the first thing during a crisis is to knock out your opponents satellites, or broadcast jamming signals, and everybody has secret plans already for that, even those who don't already have a GPS in space, and airplanes and ships at sea would suffer greatly, and therefore civilians and basic commerce. But suppose the US and China gets in a fight, and neither touches EU's Galileo because of neutrality pacts, then suddenly having 3 systems with 2 knocked out and only one "neutral" left is not such a bad idea. Now if the EU was chopped into countries, then there could be separate GPS for France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Britain, Sweden, Poland, etc, just to show that "we can do it too, we won't be left behind", but since they "belong" to one bloc called EU with tensions mitigated, they will probably have a single GPS. Same with the US, if civil war broke it up into North, South, Texas, West, they would all need their own GPS, because there is tension, but for instance Canada does not need an own GPS because there is no tension betwen her and the US. The number of GPS in space pretty much mimics the global strategic tensions available.
What's wrong with people building their own crappy roads? How would you like if UFO's landed where you live, and built you a better road, and sent you the bill, and the only jobs you are allowed to do is work at mcdonals serving these green aliens coffee? Now if they taught you how to build a better road, that's different. I don't think these peasants you speak of have a problem being taught good methods or given a good educations, maybe an initial problem with the "you think i'm stupid, I can't build a good road without you, you have to come here and show me?", but anyone with such attitudes doesn't get far, and such attitudes pass fast, because people wanna learn, they wanna become more able and more capable. Also, bribery in government is a big issue there, but I'm sure there were no bribes that halted something they really wanted done, such as test a few nuclear explosives, or they won't halt something like sending a spaceship to the moon. Just because everyday roadbuilding and dealing with the masses is highly bureaucratic having to pass through local officials, it doesn't mean that a government can't run at least a few programs efficiently without holdups.
This genetic crap is one issue nobody wants spelled out to minute scientific details, because then where is the love? How would you like to know that you're 0.01 IQ points lower than your friend, with 99.9999999% accuracy? How about my cat's IQ? Who cares? How can you live as equals in a society that tells you you're less capable than the guy next to you, based on something you can't do anything about? In fact most intelligence is acquired, through training, geniuses are trained, not born - see Judith Polgar. Some ability/disability stuff is obvious - study shows a blind person is a less capable and competitive prospective employee, based on numerous tests, such as sorting cards of different colors, which they can't see, so what? I had a blind english professor in college who was far more capable than me when it came to teaching english or just general knowledge, and I couldn't have thought of anyone better to teach that class, because he was perfect. Even if he hadn't been, so what? Study shows an 85 year old woman cannot meet the daily quota on a production line that 15-50 year olds have no problem with, and she used to have no problem with 40 years ago. Who cares? Where's the love? You love 80 year olds out of respect, blind people out of humanity. Just cuz they are senile and more dumb than average or than they used to be, it just makes them more special and lovable. It's that kind of world I want to live in, and you should want to live in too, because you'll get old, you have the chance to become blind, handicapped, mentally disabled, etc, and then how would you like to be treated based on your "worth." It's bad enough that pornstars are usually less than 60 years old, or employers seek out those most capable, it's just how it is, there is enough discrimination as is, that happens naturally and subconsciously, now you want to make it more conscious and piece apart the details? I don't wanna know.
I think if SVG really flies, it would revolutionize the web, unfortunately SVG is too open and unpatented. What MS figured out with Suse and what Adobe might be after here, is that, at least in the US, ( unlike in the EU for now, but that's only a matter of time, money and effort), patents work well against open source, so if we can hijack the open source people to code for free to our patent, then we can still demand people using the code to pay up for our "technology", we just have other people doing the development work and implementing our patents. Best way to make money - patent something, tell people to do the work free based on that patent, then go sell your customers the patented technology bundled with the code you had others create for free. Best way to make money.
Adobe Acrobat 5 for me is still the fastest of all pdf readers in Linux, even if it has a relatively ugly motif interface look. As far as Windows goes, starting with Acrobat 6 things went very downhill in bloat, and my preferred version to use on Win2k is the last release official release for Win95, I think it's Acrobat 5.0.8. It's zippy, but it seldom complains of features not understood by this reader, upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, but it still displays things well anyway.
You should also be allowed to go to any voting site within driving distance when it's about voting for president and not local issues, so that your boss couldn't look up the district you live in and say 1 person in that district voted democrat, everyone else republican, and chances are you were not that person, you live in a very republican neighbourhood. Local elections should be voted for on separate occasions, and issues with global reach should make it possible to you to drive to Texas from Minnesota and cast your vote for president from there. I know that's not how it works, you have to stay withing Minnesota, but at least you should be allowed to drive anywhere within your district, and then when your boss looks up the voting booth database in your district, you could say you voted somewhere else. Strangers showing up at all kinds of districts would also make sure elections there aren't rigged.
If you can't find your id in the database, you caught the voting process redhanded. However the vulnerability is getting a lot of extra junk votes into the database by unscrupulous people, that tilts the balance, how do you catch that? There also needs to be a certified counter at the door counting how many people went through the door, with watchdog volunteers certifying it, then the final results at any voting site database better match the number of people walking through the front door, within very tight margins. After the election is over, the databases are made public, you and professors at all kinds of universities download the databases, and do their own counts, or, you can give a copy of the database to your neighbour who checks his own vote in it, without anyone knowing which ID he's gonna look at, and he can do his own counting with his computer. You basically need 3 things - your receipt, the full database, and the total count verifying that there are no extra votes inserted into the database. Of course no system like this stops open vote buying promises such as - if you vote on me, if I get elected I'll give you a taxcut, and send you a check, pretty much how Bush sent everyone a taxcut check when he first got elected, a check that voters liked a lot, but with shortsighted paybacks like that a leader can drive a country deeply into debt and could be bad leadership in the longrun. People are vulnerable to such selfishness, but if that's how the voters are, and that's what they want, bad leadership and bad decisions, then the idea democracy, that people know what they want and get it good and hard too, is working great!
If someone looks at the machine and matches the B you voted for with the candidate B was under your ballot ID, then tracks your ip address/timestamp, you lose privacy. But who cares - it's a lot of work, and lots of voters are willing to sacrifice privacy to ensure the system is working, and all it would need is like 1% of the voters doing the anonimity sacrificing spot checking, the rest could just simply not check. What your boss wouldn't be allowed to do by law is force you to go check your vote make sure it was done right. Then if you feel you have anything to fear, you don't check it. By the way, most likely your boss knows you enough and your thoughtprocesses that he can guess with 99% certainty who you voted for anyway. It's just how it is, man.
Yup. They just want to make money, they are not interested in being a functioning member of society that provides more value than it takes, overall, and it shows. Nothing wrong with trying to make money, problem is greed is disproportionately out of balance, when the only thing that matters is the dog eat dog competition to claw your customers' eyes out for an extra dime to enhance bottom line, otherwise "you go under." Boloni. You don't go under. There has to be a way to distribute music online, cheaply, very very cheaply. They could be a broker between artists and consumers, make a small fee, and make the musicians live well too, unfortunately that doesn't turn into billions of profit, and who cares about music and artists and happy customers, we only care about them as far as they as the $ signs attached to them are concerned. They don't need to be "that" involved personally, just provide the servers and the ways for artists to upload their music, and people to download it, and let the computers handle the work. But they don't want to make little money, because that's not enough - 1 million downloads for an album that's 99 cents is only 1 million bux, minus hardware and bandwidth fees, minus say $500K for the band of 5, that leaves some profit, but who's interested in making $100K overall profit on a huge hit? If the same album gets sold as a CD, and say only 300K are sold at $19.95, with $15 profit per cd, that's $4.5 million profit instead of $100K, still not enough, not a billion, but it's at least something! We'd rather get personally involved, manage the artists, sign them, promote them, brainwash people into what's good music - that's where the cost goes. If you just let people figure out for themselves what they like without promotions, just provide top 100 billboards, and artists make their music, upload it in a standard format, then that's that. You make the money like stock brokers make money on transactions without having to pimp individual stocks. I'm signed up for emusic and it's perfect in this sense, and I like it, even though they just dropped the monthly downloads from 40 to 30, and I'm thinking eventually they wanna kill the whole thing to force people to DRM. I used to listen to the mainstream hits, because I didn't know better, now I don't even listen to radio anymore because the music I find myself on emusic is just so much deeper and better than the specially pimped "stars" in mainstream media. I think the "big" music business might find it a good idea to stop being a pimp and instead become a stock broker and then they should be fine. Stock broker firms, the NASDAQ and NYSE don't care how individual stocks perform, that's up to the companies to take care of their own stock prices - same with the music business, let the artists care about how good their art is, all you need to do is provide a low cost exchange platform that doesn't need micromanagement.
I signed up for emusic as a customer, I don't know how easy it is to sign up as an artist - it should be as easy as providing a bank account routing number, or a paypal account, telling me how much I get paid for each download and how much emusic gets paid, and click file/upload. There should be a payment first to verify identity like paypal does, so in case of uploading someone else's music it's easy to track and judge judy small claims court can get involved. In fact anybody ever creates a music and wants to claim copyright and authorship should automatically upload to such a broker service to get a timestamp paying say 10-20 cents per upload per year for storage or whatever cost breaks even(don't try to profit here, you'll kill the whole thing, profit later, on a sale), and then whoever gets such an upload first, is the owner. So if you make a song, and you're stupid enough to show and tell your friends without uploading first to emusic, they might go ahead and say they did it, it's their creation. If the barrier to entry is cheap, emusic could be like a safedeposit box with timestamp for copyright claims arbitration issues too. Of cours
You have to figure out a way for people to stop hurting each other and stop stepping on each other's feelings, then nobody will use guns and weapons! Like that's ever gonna happen...
Given a workable renewable energy policy based on infinite area solar power satellites the Earth plus the neighbouring space could easily support about 100 trillion people. All you need is localized glass-bubble ecospheres seeded with life from Earth, and put these glass bubble rotating space stations in a daisychain following Earth's orbit, then make some more chains closer and farther to the Sun than Earth. There is lots of room out there, and lots of solar energy flying off into nowhere when the Earth is not in the right spot to absorb it. Lots of energy = lots of human flesh and biomass, no energy = no biomass. Even with solar panels out there and people all down here stacked into mile high highrises would be supportable. Question is do you want to live in such a world, and even if you let people multiply up to 100 trillion, which could happen in no time given exponential growth patterns, you still haven't avoided only postponed the problem of eventually having to stop multiplying so quickly and having the population level off.
I haven't been using MS for internet browsing for years, especially since they "competitively" exterminated Netscape, including the Bush regime dropping the antitrust case. Last thing I used on windows was Netscape 4. There is utter intolerance towards any competitor on the Windows platform. Unfortunately it's an MS world out there, including anywhere you work, so you're getting screwed (or you believe you're getting screwed, which is what we're talking about, your state of mind, not facts that are debatable from all kinds of points of view) simply because the workplace makes these decisions. Of course you always have the choice to starve if you truly believe in something, or decline money making opportunities inviting you to come over to the dark side, and sometimes you willingly get screwed, try to balance it, within limits, simply to feed, but that does not mean you stop bitching. It's like slaves getting whipped, they do the stuff they are told to, but don't ever ask them to be happy about it, or rebuke them for "putting up with it", because everytime they tried not putting up with it, they got lynched. You think it's different with contemporary power entitites? You always bear the oppression while you have to, but oh no, don't ever ask people to stop bitching.
Actually there are a lot of minor details that take effort to find out. For instance there was this 17 year old boy scout in Michigan who built a breeder reactor in his backyard, from smoke detectors, old glowing paint and taking batteries apart, and while he got all kinds of badges as a scout and was pretty smart, he still needed to trick some officials from smoke detector and battery companies and nuclear agencies into telling him how some things work exactly, saying he was doing a school report. I guess if he had the internet we have now back then it might have been different, and he would have never had to talk to anybody.
If that's all MS tries to show that no matter what you do people that bitch at you will always be bitching, that's a half hearted argument, because when it comes to push to shove, they will always be dicks and chose making a dollar by screwing you over instead of being a bit selfless to help you out. No balance. Getting screwed over and years of arrogance is what people are bitching at, and show them a 2 second good "intent" and expect them to drop all their guards. It takes time and track record to build trust, not marketing PR bs.
Most of the world doesn't care "yet." Do not think this will last forever, that the software patent clause that won't get resurrected year after year after year as long as there is money to pay the lawyers doing the dirty work trying to resurrect it, and there is money to campaign against politicians who are against it, sooner or later the whole world will have to care. Money talks, roll over, rover, sunny side up, nice and easy.
First I read that as: expect Microsoft to patch Novell customers. I'm like yeah, Windows Update now available for Suse Linux! Just let us take care of your systems, then we'll slowly upgrade it to whereever we want to take it. Oh you thought you were still running linux? Hah, we have already replaced everything unbeknownst to you, the kernel, the whole underlying system, including DRM players, etc. You've been clicking the "update now", "install latest security patch" button meaning you've digitally signed your agreement to all kinds of licenses and eula's we've attached to that button, which, as far as the current legislation stands, has the same agreeing power as a hand written signature. Oh you mean you didn't bother to read our 900 page eula pointing to 900 page disclaimers and subclauses, with each button click? Suck0rrrr....
I guess that's a good analogy mimicking the GPL, because my first question would be why can't I just use the BSD/WTFPL/Public Domain license with these cookies, and shove them wherever I want them to, or give all of them away. But obviously mom wants to put some restrictions on their use, limiting my freedom, in a sense limiting my freedom to do nasty things, to do harm or self destruct, because she cares about me and also about the cookies she made. She wants me to eat at least some of them, or give them away to friends who will hopefully eat them too, she puts some limits on what I can do with them, but she'd have a problem if I'd use them to have a "cookie fight" or "cake fight." The license is understood guaranteed by "if mom finds out I didn't", or in case of the GPL by the current copyright law. Technically you can do whatever you want with the cookies as long as mom doesn't find out, same with the GPL, as long as nobody finds out, but if you can get caught you will get caught, and the license is then asserted and you get punished very strong, even without having clicked a GPL or mommy's license accept button first. Still, the US Constitution and the Founding Fathers promoted this idea of nonpaternalistic government, but government by the people, for the people, instead of a benevolent overseeing paternalistic monarch who most of the time doesn't turn out to be so benevolent because of selfishness toward the self, same with parents but who usually turn out more on the benevolent side because of selflessness toward their kids, so where does the nonpaternalistic BSD license fall compared to the GPL? It's pretty much guaranteed that if the linux kernel were released under BSD you'd have more apple osx's that don't contribute much back to the original kernel, because selfishness dominates. as opposed to a lot less work going on but most all the work going back to the original that's freely available for the benefit of everyone instead of going under when some company decides to can it.
And once we really understand how all this works, some new nazi ideologist will come along and create a "bird flu" that will selectively wipe out the "enemy" based on their junk DNA that differentiates them, while the soldiers on the "good" side can freely walk among the epidemic because they are of course genetically immune, by design of the viral weapon. Then an even greater enlightened visionary will come along who will investigate whether it's possible to fuck up just any dna whatsoever with "clever code", whether it's animal, plant, single celled or virus, and of course such things always escape the lab and destruct all dna and all life on the Blue Planet we call Earth. The End. You know this stuff is interesting, but this it's worse than playing with fire, worse than playing with mutually assured destruction nuclear mindgames, because everyone and everything on this planet can get "burned" by playing with this fire, including bacteria that would happily survive and thrive in a nuclear holocaust. It wouldn't just turn back the clock of evolution - it would bust the clock to pieces. I think the slogan "fuck biotechnology" and banning all this research might not be such a bad idea, or at least "fuck biotechnology for now, let's prepare for it first before we play with this game", banning it until people can sustainably live in space, meaning in fully isolated glass bubbles, technology that can be brought back down to Earth too, and then at least you can have people and localized bioshperes living inside bubbles, which of course has its own problems, such as divergent evolution, but hey, once you know how to cure cancer, or fix the aging gene to live forever, or at least 2000 years instead of a mere 120 years that's genetically encoded, what small price is having to live in a bubble to pay?
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It doesn't matter if computing performance doubles if the software that runs on it decays in performance at an even greater rate. Back in 1988 MSDOS used to boot in less than 10 seconds after the BIOS POST. Who cares if you'll have software with features greater than your brain, with capacity to even guess your thoughts, wishes and desires, if it will just do what you want without mouseclicks of speech commands, who cares for all these features if it takes 5 years to boot up on a computer a gazillion times faster than today's computers, and its processing speed is uttering 3 words per decade while consuming 900 gigawatt of electric power? Case in point: Windows Vista.
Lots of ocean places have dead zones due to overfishing due to human hunger. None of the indigenous aquatic life can tolerate an ecosystem turned upside down by overfishing. Unmoderated and largescale thirst an hunger can destroy many things around you. Back in the day horse manure used to be the fertilizer, and people lived well within natural cycles, true, without much showering. But there were far less people nature had to support, unlike these days, high on running out fossil fuel based nitrogen fertilizer pumped eroded soil fed ultrapopulation. Out of 100 TW photosynthesis on earth, people need like 1-2 TW in food, and considering conversion efficiencies, that's more like 15 TW of the 100 TW photosynthetic input. Potable water is just a side question, the bigger problem is food without Haber-Bosch ammonia, that needs lots of basic energy to make. What's gonna feed us? Coal? Nuclear? Solar? Wind? Or this wave power? Energy is the question, once you got it, you can turn it into electricity and make whatever you want out of it, fertilizer, desalinated water, carbon dioxide derived fats and sugars food.
You just have to buy insurance on it and all your risk management problems are solved!
What about principles? I once witnessed someone argue on the phone for 2 days straight at work over billing of his premature born child being sent to an "out of network doctor" that he could not talk the hospital out of in the first place, being promised there would be no charge because nobody else is capable of doing that function, and then later there was a "mere" $10 charge of course. It sets precedent. If you let 1% stolen on arguments that it's too costly to recover, then you'll have 100% stolen provided that it would cost 150% to recover - how do you like that argument? True, most of the time people just use common sense and say forget about it, but other times people like to take a stand. I'm guessing it's not the $100 that he was after, but the principle of not getting violated.
As long as there is no World Government such as UN was supposed to be before Bush said "piss on you all", and as long as the pushbuttons controlling any GPS are located within a specific country that during a military conflict can withdraw access from the opponent country, as long as largescale military conflicts are possible because the world is chopped into nations and countries, there will be duplicated implementations of GPS, for different countries because it's too much of a strategic blunder to trust or have to rely on your adversary's systems. Of course the first thing during a crisis is to knock out your opponents satellites, or broadcast jamming signals, and everybody has secret plans already for that, even those who don't already have a GPS in space, and airplanes and ships at sea would suffer greatly, and therefore civilians and basic commerce. But suppose the US and China gets in a fight, and neither touches EU's Galileo because of neutrality pacts, then suddenly having 3 systems with 2 knocked out and only one "neutral" left is not such a bad idea. Now if the EU was chopped into countries, then there could be separate GPS for France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Britain, Sweden, Poland, etc, just to show that "we can do it too, we won't be left behind", but since they "belong" to one bloc called EU with tensions mitigated, they will probably have a single GPS. Same with the US, if civil war broke it up into North, South, Texas, West, they would all need their own GPS, because there is tension, but for instance Canada does not need an own GPS because there is no tension betwen her and the US. The number of GPS in space pretty much mimics the global strategic tensions available.
What's wrong with people building their own crappy roads? How would you like if UFO's landed where you live, and built you a better road, and sent you the bill, and the only jobs you are allowed to do is work at mcdonals serving these green aliens coffee? Now if they taught you how to build a better road, that's different. I don't think these peasants you speak of have a problem being taught good methods or given a good educations, maybe an initial problem with the "you think i'm stupid, I can't build a good road without you, you have to come here and show me?", but anyone with such attitudes doesn't get far, and such attitudes pass fast, because people wanna learn, they wanna become more able and more capable. Also, bribery in government is a big issue there, but I'm sure there were no bribes that halted something they really wanted done, such as test a few nuclear explosives, or they won't halt something like sending a spaceship to the moon. Just because everyday roadbuilding and dealing with the masses is highly bureaucratic having to pass through local officials, it doesn't mean that a government can't run at least a few programs efficiently without holdups.
My space program is better than yours. It's called keepin up with the Jones.
This genetic crap is one issue nobody wants spelled out to minute scientific details, because then where is the love? How would you like to know that you're 0.01 IQ points lower than your friend, with 99.9999999% accuracy? How about my cat's IQ? Who cares? How can you live as equals in a society that tells you you're less capable than the guy next to you, based on something you can't do anything about? In fact most intelligence is acquired, through training, geniuses are trained, not born - see Judith Polgar. Some ability/disability stuff is obvious - study shows a blind person is a less capable and competitive prospective employee, based on numerous tests, such as sorting cards of different colors, which they can't see, so what? I had a blind english professor in college who was far more capable than me when it came to teaching english or just general knowledge, and I couldn't have thought of anyone better to teach that class, because he was perfect. Even if he hadn't been, so what? Study shows an 85 year old woman cannot meet the daily quota on a production line that 15-50 year olds have no problem with, and she used to have no problem with 40 years ago. Who cares? Where's the love? You love 80 year olds out of respect, blind people out of humanity. Just cuz they are senile and more dumb than average or than they used to be, it just makes them more special and lovable. It's that kind of world I want to live in, and you should want to live in too, because you'll get old, you have the chance to become blind, handicapped, mentally disabled, etc, and then how would you like to be treated based on your "worth." It's bad enough that pornstars are usually less than 60 years old, or employers seek out those most capable, it's just how it is, there is enough discrimination as is, that happens naturally and subconsciously, now you want to make it more conscious and piece apart the details? I don't wanna know.
I think if SVG really flies, it would revolutionize the web, unfortunately SVG is too open and unpatented. What MS figured out with Suse and what Adobe might be after here, is that, at least in the US, ( unlike in the EU for now, but that's only a matter of time, money and effort), patents work well against open source, so if we can hijack the open source people to code for free to our patent, then we can still demand people using the code to pay up for our "technology", we just have other people doing the development work and implementing our patents. Best way to make money - patent something, tell people to do the work free based on that patent, then go sell your customers the patented technology bundled with the code you had others create for free. Best way to make money.
Adobe Acrobat 5 for me is still the fastest of all pdf readers in Linux, even if it has a relatively ugly motif interface look. As far as Windows goes, starting with Acrobat 6 things went very downhill in bloat, and my preferred version to use on Win2k is the last release official release for Win95, I think it's Acrobat 5.0.8. It's zippy, but it seldom complains of features not understood by this reader, upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, but it still displays things well anyway.
You should also be allowed to go to any voting site within driving distance when it's about voting for president and not local issues, so that your boss couldn't look up the district you live in and say 1 person in that district voted democrat, everyone else republican, and chances are you were not that person, you live in a very republican neighbourhood. Local elections should be voted for on separate occasions, and issues with global reach should make it possible to you to drive to Texas from Minnesota and cast your vote for president from there. I know that's not how it works, you have to stay withing Minnesota, but at least you should be allowed to drive anywhere within your district, and then when your boss looks up the voting booth database in your district, you could say you voted somewhere else. Strangers showing up at all kinds of districts would also make sure elections there aren't rigged.
If you can't find your id in the database, you caught the voting process redhanded. However the vulnerability is getting a lot of extra junk votes into the database by unscrupulous people, that tilts the balance, how do you catch that? There also needs to be a certified counter at the door counting how many people went through the door, with watchdog volunteers certifying it, then the final results at any voting site database better match the number of people walking through the front door, within very tight margins. After the election is over, the databases are made public, you and professors at all kinds of universities download the databases, and do their own counts, or, you can give a copy of the database to your neighbour who checks his own vote in it, without anyone knowing which ID he's gonna look at, and he can do his own counting with his computer. You basically need 3 things - your receipt, the full database, and the total count verifying that there are no extra votes inserted into the database.
Of course no system like this stops open vote buying promises such as - if you vote on me, if I get elected I'll give you a taxcut, and send you a check, pretty much how Bush sent everyone a taxcut check when he first got elected, a check that voters liked a lot, but with shortsighted paybacks like that a leader can drive a country deeply into debt and could be bad leadership in the longrun. People are vulnerable to such selfishness, but if that's how the voters are, and that's what they want, bad leadership and bad decisions, then the idea democracy, that people know what they want and get it good and hard too, is working great!
If someone looks at the machine and matches the B you voted for with the candidate B was under your ballot ID, then tracks your ip address/timestamp, you lose privacy. But who cares - it's a lot of work, and lots of voters are willing to sacrifice privacy to ensure the system is working, and all it would need is like 1% of the voters doing the anonimity sacrificing spot checking, the rest could just simply not check. What your boss wouldn't be allowed to do by law is force you to go check your vote make sure it was done right. Then if you feel you have anything to fear, you don't check it. By the way, most likely your boss knows you enough and your thoughtprocesses that he can guess with 99% certainty who you voted for anyway. It's just how it is, man.
Yup. They just want to make money, they are not interested in being a functioning member of society that provides more value than it takes, overall, and it shows. Nothing wrong with trying to make money, problem is greed is disproportionately out of balance, when the only thing that matters is the dog eat dog competition to claw your customers' eyes out for an extra dime to enhance bottom line, otherwise "you go under." Boloni. You don't go under. There has to be a way to distribute music online, cheaply, very very cheaply. They could be a broker between artists and consumers, make a small fee, and make the musicians live well too, unfortunately that doesn't turn into billions of profit, and who cares about music and artists and happy customers, we only care about them as far as they as the $ signs attached to them are concerned. They don't need to be "that" involved personally, just provide the servers and the ways for artists to upload their music, and people to download it, and let the computers handle the work. But they don't want to make little money, because that's not enough - 1 million downloads for an album that's 99 cents is only 1 million bux, minus hardware and bandwidth fees, minus say $500K for the band of 5, that leaves some profit, but who's interested in making $100K overall profit on a huge hit? If the same album gets sold as a CD, and say only 300K are sold at $19.95, with $15 profit per cd, that's $4.5 million profit instead of $100K, still not enough, not a billion, but it's at least something! We'd rather get personally involved, manage the artists, sign them, promote them, brainwash people into what's good music - that's where the cost goes. If you just let people figure out for themselves what they like without promotions, just provide top 100 billboards, and artists make their music, upload it in a standard format, then that's that. You make the money like stock brokers make money on transactions without having to pimp individual stocks. I'm signed up for emusic and it's perfect in this sense, and I like it, even though they just dropped the monthly downloads from 40 to 30, and I'm thinking eventually they wanna kill the whole thing to force people to DRM. I used to listen to the mainstream hits, because I didn't know better, now I don't even listen to radio anymore because the music I find myself on emusic is just so much deeper and better than the specially pimped "stars" in mainstream media. I think the "big" music business might find it a good idea to stop being a pimp and instead become a stock broker and then they should be fine. Stock broker firms, the NASDAQ and NYSE don't care how individual stocks perform, that's up to the companies to take care of their own stock prices - same with the music business, let the artists care about how good their art is, all you need to do is provide a low cost exchange platform that doesn't need micromanagement.
I signed up for emusic as a customer, I don't know how easy it is to sign up as an artist - it should be as easy as providing a bank account routing number, or a paypal account, telling me how much I get paid for each download and how much emusic gets paid, and click file/upload. There should be a payment first to verify identity like paypal does, so in case of uploading someone else's music it's easy to track and judge judy small claims court can get involved. In fact anybody ever creates a music and wants to claim copyright and authorship should automatically upload to such a broker service to get a timestamp paying say 10-20 cents per upload per year for storage or whatever cost breaks even(don't try to profit here, you'll kill the whole thing, profit later, on a sale), and then whoever gets such an upload first, is the owner. So if you make a song, and you're stupid enough to show and tell your friends without uploading first to emusic, they might go ahead and say they did it, it's their creation. If the barrier to entry is cheap, emusic could be like a safedeposit box with timestamp for copyright claims arbitration issues too. Of cours
You have to figure out a way for people to stop hurting each other and stop stepping on each other's feelings, then nobody will use guns and weapons! Like that's ever gonna happen...
Given a workable renewable energy policy based on infinite area solar power satellites the Earth plus the neighbouring space could easily support about 100 trillion people. All you need is localized glass-bubble ecospheres seeded with life from Earth, and put these glass bubble rotating space stations in a daisychain following Earth's orbit, then make some more chains closer and farther to the Sun than Earth. There is lots of room out there, and lots of solar energy flying off into nowhere when the Earth is not in the right spot to absorb it. Lots of energy = lots of human flesh and biomass, no energy = no biomass. Even with solar panels out there and people all down here stacked into mile high highrises would be supportable. Question is do you want to live in such a world, and even if you let people multiply up to 100 trillion, which could happen in no time given exponential growth patterns, you still haven't avoided only postponed the problem of eventually having to stop multiplying so quickly and having the population level off.
Do you know the concept of "sarcasm." Sometimes that's what reports are doing.
I haven't been using MS for internet browsing for years, especially since they "competitively" exterminated Netscape, including the Bush regime dropping the antitrust case. Last thing I used on windows was Netscape 4. There is utter intolerance towards any competitor on the Windows platform. Unfortunately it's an MS world out there, including anywhere you work, so you're getting screwed (or you believe you're getting screwed, which is what we're talking about, your state of mind, not facts that are debatable from all kinds of points of view) simply because the workplace makes these decisions. Of course you always have the choice to starve if you truly believe in something, or decline money making opportunities inviting you to come over to the dark side, and sometimes you willingly get screwed, try to balance it, within limits, simply to feed, but that does not mean you stop bitching. It's like slaves getting whipped, they do the stuff they are told to, but don't ever ask them to be happy about it, or rebuke them for "putting up with it", because everytime they tried not putting up with it, they got lynched. You think it's different with contemporary power entitites? You always bear the oppression while you have to, but oh no, don't ever ask people to stop bitching.
Actually there are a lot of minor details that take effort to find out. For instance there was this 17 year old boy scout in Michigan who built a breeder reactor in his backyard, from smoke detectors, old glowing paint and taking batteries apart, and while he got all kinds of badges as a scout and was pretty smart, he still needed to trick some officials from smoke detector and battery companies and nuclear agencies into telling him how some things work exactly, saying he was doing a school report. I guess if he had the internet we have now back then it might have been different, and he would have never had to talk to anybody.
I think those people lived that long because of low stress not because they fed little or shivered in the cold.
If that's all MS tries to show that no matter what you do people that bitch at you will always be bitching, that's a half hearted argument, because when it comes to push to shove, they will always be dicks and chose making a dollar by screwing you over instead of being a bit selfless to help you out. No balance. Getting screwed over and years of arrogance is what people are bitching at, and show them a 2 second good "intent" and expect them to drop all their guards. It takes time and track record to build trust, not marketing PR bs.
Most of the world doesn't care "yet." Do not think this will last forever, that the software patent clause that won't get resurrected year after year after year as long as there is money to pay the lawyers doing the dirty work trying to resurrect it, and there is money to campaign against politicians who are against it, sooner or later the whole world will have to care. Money talks, roll over, rover, sunny side up, nice and easy.
First I read that as: expect Microsoft to patch Novell customers.
I'm like yeah, Windows Update now available for Suse Linux! Just let us take care of your systems, then we'll slowly upgrade it to whereever we want to take it. Oh you thought you were still running linux? Hah, we have already replaced everything unbeknownst to you, the kernel, the whole underlying system, including DRM players, etc. You've been clicking the "update now", "install latest security patch" button meaning you've digitally signed your agreement to all kinds of licenses and eula's we've attached to that button, which, as far as the current legislation stands, has the same agreeing power as a hand written signature. Oh you mean you didn't bother to read our 900 page eula pointing to 900 page disclaimers and subclauses, with each button click? Suck0rrrr....
I guess that's a good analogy mimicking the GPL, because my first question would be why can't I just use the BSD/WTFPL/Public Domain license with these cookies, and shove them wherever I want them to, or give all of them away. But obviously mom wants to put some restrictions on their use, limiting my freedom, in a sense limiting my freedom to do nasty things, to do harm or self destruct, because she cares about me and also about the cookies she made. She wants me to eat at least some of them, or give them away to friends who will hopefully eat them too, she puts some limits on what I can do with them, but she'd have a problem if I'd use them to have a "cookie fight" or "cake fight." The license is understood guaranteed by "if mom finds out I didn't", or in case of the GPL by the current copyright law. Technically you can do whatever you want with the cookies as long as mom doesn't find out, same with the GPL, as long as nobody finds out, but if you can get caught you will get caught, and the license is then asserted and you get punished very strong, even without having clicked a GPL or mommy's license accept button first. Still, the US Constitution and the Founding Fathers promoted this idea of nonpaternalistic government, but government by the people, for the people, instead of a benevolent overseeing paternalistic monarch who most of the time doesn't turn out to be so benevolent because of selfishness toward the self, same with parents but who usually turn out more on the benevolent side because of selflessness toward their kids, so where does the nonpaternalistic BSD license fall compared to the GPL? It's pretty much guaranteed that if the linux kernel were released under BSD you'd have more apple osx's that don't contribute much back to the original kernel, because selfishness dominates. as opposed to a lot less work going on but most all the work going back to the original that's freely available for the benefit of everyone instead of going under when some company decides to can it.
And once we really understand how all this works, some new nazi ideologist will come along and create a "bird flu" that will selectively wipe out the "enemy" based on their junk DNA that differentiates them, while the soldiers on the "good" side can freely walk among the epidemic because they are of course genetically immune, by design of the viral weapon. Then an even greater enlightened visionary will come along who will investigate whether it's possible to fuck up just any dna whatsoever with "clever code", whether it's animal, plant, single celled or virus, and of course such things always escape the lab and destruct all dna and all life on the Blue Planet we call Earth. The End. You know this stuff is interesting, but this it's worse than playing with fire, worse than playing with mutually assured destruction nuclear mindgames, because everyone and everything on this planet can get "burned" by playing with this fire, including bacteria that would happily survive and thrive in a nuclear holocaust. It wouldn't just turn back the clock of evolution - it would bust the clock to pieces. I think the slogan "fuck biotechnology" and banning all this research might not be such a bad idea, or at least "fuck biotechnology for now, let's prepare for it first before we play with this game", banning it until people can sustainably live in space, meaning in fully isolated glass bubbles, technology that can be brought back down to Earth too, and then at least you can have people and localized bioshperes living inside bubbles, which of course has its own problems, such as divergent evolution, but hey, once you know how to cure cancer, or fix the aging gene to live forever, or at least 2000 years instead of a mere 120 years that's genetically encoded, what small price is having to live in a bubble to pay?