have interviews every 2-3 months to make sure information is updated.
ROFLMAO!
We can't get the INS to answer mailed letters or to answer the phone under any circumstances. The phone just rings nonstop or kicks us into "on-hold" hell. Letters, included those sent certified, are unanswered.
We'd LOVE having an interview with the INS so we can demand the return of several one-of-a-kind documents that they insisted upon having the originals of (with a bullshit legal promise that they would be returned).
I'd kind of like to get our marriage license back, along with a couple of birth certificates and other miscellaneous documents.
Am I correct in thinking CRC is big in mail order? If that's the case, instead of just boycotting them, take the time to fill out an order form, but don't include a check or credit card number, instead, include a note saying you will not complete the order until they release their unjust copyright stranglehold.
I still have my HP-41CV. I've had it since HP first released it. This little baby was THE calculator in its time. I went so far as to do assembly language programming on it (required special hardware). My 41 still sits on my desk for whenever I need to do some quick math.
Recently, I needed to buy a calculator for my daughter. The school specified a certain TI model. So I bought her a Hewlett-Packard calculator. I refuse to let the school dictate what companies I will do business with. Besides, TI calculators are junk.
If you can't take the time to fulfill your parental responsibilities regarding the net, you shouldn't let your child on the net.
Did you even read what I wrote? I do exactly that. I spend time with her to supervise her net activities. When she is a few years older, I will stop standing guard over her net usage. At the moment, however, she is only eleven years old. In a few years she will hit those rebellious teen years. I am not so naive to think I can be successful in sheltering her from the real world. Also, my daughter grew up in Europe where the t.v. shows are quite a bit looser in what they allow on public channels. She's not growing up inside a box. I'm sure she has a much more wordly view of things than her classmates.
Obviously, you didn't pay attention to what I said. I wish to stop sites who use names to attract kids but are porn sites. www.disney.com is a website for Disneyland. www.disny.com used to be a porn site. I have no problem with you being able to go to your favourite sex site.
As a libertarian, I believe censorship is wrong. As a parent, I believe censorship is sometimes necessary. I do not, however, advocate government sponsered censurship. I am my daughter's censure. When she surfs the web, I sit with her. When she does a google search, sometimes I will not let her click on one of the resultant links. On several occassions I've had her leave the room so I can check out a site first.
There is one case where I think the government should come down hard, fast, and without mercy. I want to hurt those scumbags who use urls that are common variations of sites kids might go to, but are really porn sites, e.g. whitehouse.com and disny.com.
Finally, I can justify shutting down spammers even though I am a libertarian. I pay for my internet access. The spammers do not. Your freedom stops at my front door. You can go to a park and spout your beliefs all you want. You can not demand entry into my home using the argument of "free speech". If you insist on forcing entry, I'll introduce you to another one of my rights. My right to own a gun.
For example, the USSR's economy increased 900% from a feudal economy in 1918 to a modern industrial state by 1928
The Soviet economy only lasted until the late 20th century because the Soviets stripped the wealth from all of the satellite states it controlled. As time went by, they needed to steal more and more wealth from these other countries to make up for their inefficiencies. Eventually it reached the point that they could not steal anymore. This was one of the major factors in the collapse of communism.
I won't even bother to discuss the murder of 20 million Soviet citizens to "advance" the Soviet Union.
Title 18 Sec. 241 of the United States Code.
Conspiracy against rights
If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same;
or
If two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured - They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.
Emphasis is mine. For everyone who keeps saying the Constitution does not apply. I say, the Constitution ALWAYS applies. If it didn't, then what good is it?
When you take a position in an elected, appointed, or law enforcement position with the government, you make a sworn oath to uphold and protect the Constitution.
The FBI agents and elected officials supporting them who are planning on implementing this overt violation of the IV Amendment of the Constitution either:
a. Didn't understand the oath they took. Which makes them very stupid, and are therefore unfit for their position.
or
b. Are knowingly violating their oath. Which makes the dishonest, and are therefore unfit for their position.
My wife is a professional translator (though not in German). She commented numerous times on what constitutes a good translation and about the art of translating in general.
A literal translation is almost never the correct translation. The most difficult things to translate are poetry and prose. In these, you must often completely change the sentence to get the true feeling, especially when slang is used. Slang almost never has similar phrase in the target lanquage, but the target language may have a slang expression that captures the true feeling intended by the original author.
Finally, she has nothing but contempt for machine translations.
My phone bill averages $60 to $80 a month, depending on how many calls to Europe we make each month.
My broadband internet access is $45/month with nearly defunct @Home. Running any sort of server through my broadband connection, like a mail server to make up for their incredibly unreliable email, is a violation their draconian AUP.
The alternate choice is DSL with PacBell/DSL. The service that allows me to run a server was about $70 a month, the minimum download speed guaranteed is 384k (it could be as high as 1.5M). The upload speed is a paltry 128k (same as @Home). I refuse to sign up for a service that has such a slow minimum guaranteed speed and they won't come to my house and measure it for me before I commit to at least a year of service.
The next higher package from PacBell had very nice upload and download speed, but was priced way out of my budget at about $170/month.
Oh, well. I can keep hoping something will come along that is affordable and unrestricted. Hell, it's not like they need to do anything other than provide a data pipe. I'll handle everthing else.
I'm not sure whether anyone, other than law-enforcement agents, is obligated to protect computer users,
I have some startling news for you. Law-enforcment officers are under NO obligation to protect you from anything at all. The Supreme Court ruled on this a long time ago. I wish I had the citation handy so I could post it. What the police do is come in after the fact, put a nice line around your body, and dust for prints.
After looking at your actions in Congress, we have come to the realization that your vote is sold to the highest bidder. We are a bit upset about this as we were never informed of the proper procedure to participate in the auction. Is it too late to make a bid for your vote? If not, inform us of the current high bid so that we may attempt to beat in. As Americans, we wish to participate in the true mechanics of government. I can think of no better way than for us to own a geniune senator just like the big corporations.
In that case, Congress has no business trying to pass a law that is known to be unConstitutional. In fact, the new version is (was since it looks like it got dropped) even more unConstititional (is that posssible?) because it would have allowed the detention of legal aliens, too.
Yeah, we should shut down our entire lives completely and ignore everything else in the world except for this one horrible event?
B.S. It's time to get on with your life. A great tragedy occurred, but at some point you have to pick yourself up and live again. I suggest you seek therapy. You might be suffering from post-tramatic syndrome.
My specialty is writing installation programs. That's really all I do professionally. Depending upon the platform, I use InstallShield Pro, bash scripts, perl, or whatever.
On my current project, a multitude of different plaforms must be supported. Besides half a dozen different Unixes, I must also deal with Windows NT/2k and Mac OS 9.
<rant>
All you Unix only people who say you write portable code don't know shit! Writing code that is portable across a few flavours of Unix/Linux is childs play. Let's see you write something that works on Linux, Mac, and Windows NT!
</rant>
Sorry, I had to get that out of my system.
After researching every conceivable system for cross platform installations, I've settled on Install Anywhere from ZeroG. Their JVM based installer covers all the platforms I deal with (and then some) and is extensible enough to be able to the specialized configuration necessary on each platform. I would have preferred to not need to write specialty code in Java (Perl being my choice), but I'll live with that. InstallShield Corp also has a JVM based installer, but it didn't seem to be as solid a product as the package from ZeroG. I hope I made the right choice.
There's too much buzz about the latest and greatest high end multiprocessor motherboard. Isn't one of the selling points of Linux is its ability to run on slower (and less expensive) equipement?
I want to set up a server at home. It will run Linux as the O/S. It will also run apache and sendmail and possibly samba (haven't decided on that last item). I expect it to be extremely low volume on both web hits and email.
So how much power do I need? I figure a 300 Mhz system will be more than enough power. 128Meg of memory should be enough, though it's cheap enough that I might as well go for 256Meg. SCSI is nice, but EISA is plenty fast for my needs, besides, big honking EISA drives are dirt cheap. I don't need onboard sound or fancy 3d graphics - it's going to be a headless server - sound and graphics won't be used at all. In fact, the fewer built in features the better, so i would prefer no built in ethernet cards. I can pick up a pair of ethernet cards for less than $25 any day (I probably have a couple lying around, anyway).
The only feature I can think of that could possible push the price up is I want it to be quiet. Does anyone make a system that is so quiet it can be kept in a bedroom where I (and my wife) sleep? Now do they make it cheap?
Essentially: Box with powersupply, motherboard with processor, 128Meg of ram, build in EISA controller, 10 Gig drive (more or less), floppy (for that first time boot and crash recovery), CDROM (nothing fancy, just used to install new software). Only enough video to run in console mode. No keyboard, monitor, or mouse - I can borrow those from another system for the initial setup. After that, I'll ssh into the system for configuration.
If legislators were responding to pressure from their constituents who were more concerned with the well-being of their children than with their freedom of speech, well, that's what legislators do.
The lawmakers should not, must not, give in to the demands for laws that are unconstitutional. If people want something done, then the lawmaker's job is to figure out how to do it within the legal framework of the Constitution. Their job is NOT to pass everything people demand. I'd like to see a Senator actually have the balls to say to his constituents (sp?), "I can't do that, it would be unconstitutional." You will never hear that, though, they would rather pass a bad law to look good now. When, in five years (or more), the Supreme Court tosses it out, he'll just say, "well, I tried." And the bastard will get relected on that basis.
Then allow an exception, by a unanimous vote of the Supreme Court, they can declare a particular point was constutionally vague enough to allow mistakes to be made.
The would be required to make that decision at the same time as the constitutionality ruling.
As for your point on two processes for dealing with unconstitutional laws, my point is that are lawmakers are continually passing laws that are obviously unconstitutional and the president signs that law. Can you say COPA? How about COPA II? I knew you could.
My proposal is a way of saying, knock it off! Yeah, it's a big honking 2x4, but sometimes a wack upside the head is what's necessary to get their attention.
I'm going to mail copy of the Consitution to Senator Feinstein (D-CA). It's obvious from her actions in the Senate that she has never set eyes on a copy in her life.
I propose a new Constitutional amendment. The Three-Constitutional Strikes And You're Out amendment. If an elected official votes for three laws that are later found unconstitutional (no statue of limitation, applied retroactively), they are kicked out of office and barred from all government work for life. These people are supposed to know what they are doing and have no fucking excuse for voting for unconstitutional laws.
Slashdot Mirror
ROFLMAO!
We can't get the INS to answer mailed letters or to answer the phone under any circumstances. The phone just rings nonstop or kicks us into "on-hold" hell. Letters, included those sent certified, are unanswered.
We'd LOVE having an interview with the INS so we can demand the return of several one-of-a-kind documents that they insisted upon having the originals of (with a bullshit legal promise that they would be returned).
I'd kind of like to get our marriage license back, along with a couple of birth certificates and other miscellaneous documents.
I did buy her an AOS calculator. Hewlette-Packard does make them. I tried to talk her into an RPN calculator but she refused.
Am I correct in thinking CRC is big in mail order? If that's the case, instead of just boycotting them, take the time to fill out an order form, but don't include a check or credit card number, instead, include a note saying you will not complete the order until they release their unjust copyright stranglehold.
I still have my HP-41CV. I've had it since HP first released it. This little baby was THE calculator in its time. I went so far as to do assembly language programming on it (required special hardware). My 41 still sits on my desk for whenever I need to do some quick math.
Recently, I needed to buy a calculator for my daughter. The school specified a certain TI model. So I bought her a Hewlett-Packard calculator. I refuse to let the school dictate what companies I will do business with. Besides, TI calculators are junk.
Did you even read what I wrote? I do exactly that. I spend time with her to supervise her net activities. When she is a few years older, I will stop standing guard over her net usage. At the moment, however, she is only eleven years old. In a few years she will hit those rebellious teen years. I am not so naive to think I can be successful in sheltering her from the real world. Also, my daughter grew up in Europe where the t.v. shows are quite a bit looser in what they allow on public channels. She's not growing up inside a box. I'm sure she has a much more wordly view of things than her classmates.
Ok, I screwed up. I should have paid more attention to my spelling.
Obviously, you didn't pay attention to what I said. I wish to stop sites who use names to attract kids but are porn sites. www.disney.com is a website for Disneyland. www.disny.com used to be a porn site. I have no problem with you being able to go to your favourite sex site.
As a libertarian, I believe censorship is wrong. As a parent, I believe censorship is sometimes necessary. I do not, however, advocate government sponsered censurship. I am my daughter's censure. When she surfs the web, I sit with her. When she does a google search, sometimes I will not let her click on one of the resultant links. On several occassions I've had her leave the room so I can check out a site first.
There is one case where I think the government should come down hard, fast, and without mercy. I want to hurt those scumbags who use urls that are common variations of sites kids might go to, but are really porn sites, e.g. whitehouse.com and disny.com.
Finally, I can justify shutting down spammers even though I am a libertarian. I pay for my internet access. The spammers do not. Your freedom stops at my front door. You can go to a park and spout your beliefs all you want. You can not demand entry into my home using the argument of "free speech". If you insist on forcing entry, I'll introduce you to another one of my rights. My right to own a gun.
The Soviet economy only lasted until the late 20th century because the Soviets stripped the wealth from all of the satellite states it controlled. As time went by, they needed to steal more and more wealth from these other countries to make up for their inefficiencies. Eventually it reached the point that they could not steal anymore. This was one of the major factors in the collapse of communism.
I won't even bother to discuss the murder of 20 million Soviet citizens to "advance" the Soviet Union.
Emphasis is mine. For everyone who keeps saying the Constitution does not apply. I say, the Constitution ALWAYS applies. If it didn't, then what good is it?
When you take a position in an elected, appointed, or law enforcement position with the government, you make a sworn oath to uphold and protect the Constitution.
The FBI agents and elected officials supporting them who are planning on implementing this overt violation of the IV Amendment of the Constitution either:
a. Didn't understand the oath they took. Which makes them very stupid, and are therefore unfit for their position.
or
b. Are knowingly violating their oath. Which makes the dishonest, and are therefore unfit for their position.
I leave it to you to decide which one applies.
My wife is a professional translator (though not in German). She commented numerous times on what constitutes a good translation and about the art of translating in general.
A literal translation is almost never the correct translation. The most difficult things to translate are poetry and prose. In these, you must often completely change the sentence to get the true feeling, especially when slang is used. Slang almost never has similar phrase in the target lanquage, but the target language may have a slang expression that captures the true feeling intended by the original author.
Finally, she has nothing but contempt for machine translations.
My phone bill averages $60 to $80 a month, depending on how many calls to Europe we make each month.
My broadband internet access is $45/month with nearly defunct @Home. Running any sort of server through my broadband connection, like a mail server to make up for their incredibly unreliable email, is a violation their draconian AUP.
The alternate choice is DSL with PacBell/DSL. The service that allows me to run a server was about $70 a month, the minimum download speed guaranteed is 384k (it could be as high as 1.5M). The upload speed is a paltry 128k (same as @Home). I refuse to sign up for a service that has such a slow minimum guaranteed speed and they won't come to my house and measure it for me before I commit to at least a year of service.
The next higher package from PacBell had very nice upload and download speed, but was priced way out of my budget at about $170/month.
Oh, well. I can keep hoping something will come along that is affordable and unrestricted. Hell, it's not like they need to do anything other than provide a data pipe. I'll handle everthing else.
That makes as much sense as denouncing Amnesty International because they work in countries that torture people.
Let's send this letter to Hollings:
Dear (questionably) Honorable Hollings,
After looking at your actions in Congress, we have come to the realization that your vote is sold to the highest bidder. We are a bit upset about this as we were never informed of the proper procedure to participate in the auction. Is it too late to make a bid for your vote? If not, inform us of the current high bid so that we may attempt to beat in. As Americans, we wish to participate in the true mechanics of government. I can think of no better way than for us to own a geniune senator just like the big corporations.
We look forward to hearing your reply.
In that case, Congress has no business trying to pass a law that is known to be unConstitutional. In fact, the new version is (was since it looks like it got dropped) even more unConstititional (is that posssible?) because it would have allowed the detention of legal aliens, too.
Yeah, we should shut down our entire lives completely and ignore everything else in the world except for this one horrible event?
B.S. It's time to get on with your life. A great tragedy occurred, but at some point you have to pick yourself up and live again. I suggest you seek therapy. You might be suffering from post-tramatic syndrome.
On my current project, a multitude of different plaforms must be supported. Besides half a dozen different Unixes, I must also deal with Windows NT/2k and Mac OS 9.
<rant>
All you Unix only people who say you write portable code don't know shit! Writing code that is portable across a few flavours of Unix/Linux is childs play. Let's see you write something that works on Linux, Mac, and Windows NT!
</rant>
Sorry, I had to get that out of my system.
After researching every conceivable system for cross platform installations, I've settled on Install Anywhere from ZeroG. Their JVM based installer covers all the platforms I deal with (and then some) and is extensible enough to be able to the specialized configuration necessary on each platform. I would have preferred to not need to write specialty code in Java (Perl being my choice), but I'll live with that. InstallShield Corp also has a JVM based installer, but it didn't seem to be as solid a product as the package from ZeroG. I hope I made the right choice.
Thanks for the correction. You are correct. I was thinking IDE, but the newer specs that support the very large drive.
The 300Mhz number is something I pulled out of my ass. It's obvious from the first two responses, I've overstated my requirements by about 3 fold.
Can you even buy new 100Mhz systems anymore?
There's too much buzz about the latest and greatest high end multiprocessor motherboard. Isn't one of the selling points of Linux is its ability to run on slower (and less expensive) equipement?
I want to set up a server at home. It will run Linux as the O/S. It will also run apache and sendmail and possibly samba (haven't decided on that last item). I expect it to be extremely low volume on both web hits and email.
So how much power do I need? I figure a 300 Mhz system will be more than enough power. 128Meg of memory should be enough, though it's cheap enough that I might as well go for 256Meg. SCSI is nice, but EISA is plenty fast for my needs, besides, big honking EISA drives are dirt cheap. I don't need onboard sound or fancy 3d graphics - it's going to be a headless server - sound and graphics won't be used at all. In fact, the fewer built in features the better, so i would prefer no built in ethernet cards. I can pick up a pair of ethernet cards for less than $25 any day (I probably have a couple lying around, anyway).
The only feature I can think of that could possible push the price up is I want it to be quiet. Does anyone make a system that is so quiet it can be kept in a bedroom where I (and my wife) sleep? Now do they make it cheap?
Essentially: Box with powersupply, motherboard with processor, 128Meg of ram, build in EISA controller, 10 Gig drive (more or less), floppy (for that first time boot and crash recovery), CDROM (nothing fancy, just used to install new software). Only enough video to run in console mode. No keyboard, monitor, or mouse - I can borrow those from another system for the initial setup. After that, I'll ssh into the system for configuration.
Then allow an exception, by a unanimous vote of the Supreme Court, they can declare a particular point was constutionally vague enough to allow mistakes to be made.
The would be required to make that decision at the same time as the constitutionality ruling.
As for your point on two processes for dealing with unconstitutional laws, my point is that are lawmakers are continually passing laws that are obviously unconstitutional and the president signs that law. Can you say COPA? How about COPA II? I knew you could.
My proposal is a way of saying, knock it off! Yeah, it's a big honking 2x4, but sometimes a wack upside the head is what's necessary to get their attention.
I propose a new Constitutional amendment. The Three-Constitutional Strikes And You're Out amendment. If an elected official votes for three laws that are later found unconstitutional (no statue of limitation, applied retroactively), they are kicked out of office and barred from all government work for life. These people are supposed to know what they are doing and have no fucking excuse for voting for unconstitutional laws.