The government should have never gotten into the buisness of data distribution over a large, connected computer environment. A lot of the services we enjoy today, including many now in private hands, started out as government initiatives. It seems as though they're suggesting the government should only handle the services no private company wants. It's a fine line to walk.
And I'm not sure why we feel like people who use more government supplied resources can't pay more than an equal share of the cost. Trucking companies use the roads to make money and trucks are hard on roads. I don't see it as a huge deal that trucking companies pay road use fees in the form of taxes. I'd even take it step farther and suggest that parents with kids in school might pay a little higher tax rate that people without kids or those opting for private school. Everybody contributes, but those who use the resources the most contribute a little more.
You may want after school and athletic programs for your kids but don't expect those of us without kids to keep accepting higher and higher tax burdens for supporting them.
The Patriot Act is rooted in fear. We had indications there were persons of interest in this country taking flying lessons before 9-11, we just didn't act on them. And don't blame the agents on the ground, they raised the warning. It was mid-management at the bureau who didn't take the reports seriously.
Before that it was almost 10 years between the first attempt on the WTC and the second.
So out of anger and fear we craft the badly misnamed US Patriot Act. An act that stomps on friend and foe alike, but hardest on our own people. We create yet another new massive federal bureaucracy to protect us. What do you suppose all those people at that massive new federal agency are going to do for the next 10 years to justify their existence? They're going to put their own people and friendly visitors through endless procedure and invasive, pointless snooping. All to try and find a handful of people patient enough to wait another decade or longer.
In some ways the terrorists have already won. How easily we're spooked into throwing over constitutional protections that used to be the envy of the world. Thousands died on the battlefield to protect those freedoms but what's that sacrifice to a generation that grew up under the coddled over-protection of those ridiculous Baby On Board signs?
I hope our friends to the north don't take it personally because it's not.
There is a plenty of Mac forums all crowded with users having problems!!
And there are Windows forums crowded with users having problems and the people I know with Windows networks at home have to dork with something all the time to keep them running right.
Sometimes the impression it leaves is that Linux isn't allowed to be as good as Windows. At least on a relative basis. The impression I get from a lot of people is they expect Linux to be flawless before they'll stoop to trying it. Well, screw that. There are some nice distros out there and, on the whole, I spend a lot less time managing my home Linux network than I ever did with Winblows. The problems are different but certainly not any worse. If you want to run Linux at home it's certainly within the technical reach of the average user now.
Stop whining about what Linux doesn't do and step boldly into last week.
Because of that Microsoft has been forcing it's employees to only drink Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey since 1984.
You know that's not true because had they actually be pounding a few at the office their software would probably be better and MSFT as a whole wouldn't be wound so tight.
- You could be accused of crime based almost solely on things you bought at the store. The dude put out the fire and called 911. Not exactly a bright arsonist, now is he? I blame the prosecutors as much as the cops. Who looks at a shopping receipt and a tracking dog and thinks they have a case against the person who put the fire out? And the dude was a fire fighter. You'd think someone with intimate knowledge of the business could come up with something that isn't going to leave as much evidence behind.
- Once information about you exists somewhere it can be used for things you might not be able to envision at the time you turned the information over. You bought kerosene for a space heater, fertilzer for your lawn, some batteries and a spare garage door opener because your wife's car is a purse on wheels and she lost it. Then one day Homeland Security is showing up at your door. Unfortunately that's not unreasonably paranoid these days.
Still think you have nothing to hide? What's really pathetic is that people who really know trade craft and are willing to actually do something bad with those materials also know how to make it difficult to track their purchases. If they have an organized network some of those materials may have been purchased months or years previously by middle buyers now long gone who had no idea why they were buying two tons of fertilizer a few bags at a time.
Could this be considered anti-competitive behavior by the MPAA? I own a small video production company and distribute some media files as promotion. Trading them on P2P software is quite legal.
Wouldn't the MPAA tagging them as potentially infringing material unfairly deny people access to my movies?
Is this mouse-person going to have the same experience as a human would, albeit in a mouse's body?
I'm not sure, but I already work with human beings that have the intelligence of mice, so I'm thinking the human-brained mice should be able to fit in somewhere.
Just think how handy they would be if you were pulling cable and it gets stuck in the conduit somewhere? Or when you drop a bolt in a hard to reach place.
And HP has to pay a patent infringment settlement? That is seriously f'ed up.
Our patent system is broken. Extortion by litigation has to stop. This is stifling innovation and crippling our economy. Absolutely, un-f'ing-believable.
You save tax information, you save receipts in case something you bought is defective, you save warranty papers, why not save your product keys?
That's right, Shawn, I do. And that's exactly why it bugs me. I already have enough shit like that to keep track of without adding software activation codes, dongles or backup copies of my activation files.
I don't use Linux because I can't afford Windows. I use it because I can install it where I need to without jumping through activation hoops, without keeping track of activation codes, and without worrying about being audited by BSA or MSFT trying to "help" me with automated software audits. Screw that.
The BBC Reports that Iranian government officials were quick to accuse the US administration of pressuring The Planet to terminate the contract.
The ends justify the means these days. We've lost any semblance of ideals. Privacy, the Constitution, freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable search...all shamelessly trampled when they become inconvenient in the war on terror.
Although at least this time we learned to keep our internment camps somewhere less visible.
From the website:
Q: Are you going to publish your source code?
A: Yes. Once the code is stable and we've had independent code audits, we'll publish the source code. We're releasing a security product, and we believe - along with legions of other security aware developers - that transparency is key to trust building. We are working as hard and fast as we can to make this happen. Our commitment is to publish the source before the end of 2005, hopefully sooner than later.
To me a bigger issue is Linux users have to have kernel 2.4 instead of 2.6. Guess I'll have to wait until they catch up.
At a certain point it's time to launch out on your own. There aren't many companies looking for in-house mentors. Besides, do you really want to work for someone else the rest of your life?
Initially I was going to leave tech behind but you really can't. Whatever career choice you make you'll see a million ways to make it better with automation. Being able to write your own tools gives you a huge advantage over your competitors who have to spend a lot of money to get software that doesn't work as well. And your technical background will also make you more competitive than your peers in almost any other field.
The plantiff gets another delay and that's counted as a victory? This is the plantiff we're talking about here, the one that's supposed to have a case when the start. And it's the plantiff asking for delay after delay. This is messed up.
If the Bushies want to do something about abusive litigation why don't they start with this case?
Let it go already. The Star Trek franchise is now something like 40 years old? Or close to it. Let go.
What follows is just my opinion but I liked Star Trek better before it got so preachy and, for lack of a better word, pussified. Every so often you just have to say screw the prime directive and stick a photon torpedo up some mofo's tailpipe.
If they had a court order that would, of course, be a different gig. But their chances of getting an ex-parte order to search my property in this county are darn near zero. And if the slightest breeze wafted my name around the courthouse my lawyer's office is right across the street. One of them would walk over and challenge first and call me later. And there's a better than even chance if they used the local sheriff one of them would call me on the way out to the house.
Now if it was a federal court order, don't know as many people there. But I can't imagine it would be that easy to get an ex-parte order from federal court. Even then they'd still have to go through the local sheriff and the minute they set foot in this county they're on my turf.
Just for grins I'd probably file a counter-claim for the damage their engineered quack grass did to my nice lawn. Plus whatever else Don could think of to sue them for.
Imagine if your next-door neighbor's EULA click obligated *you* to subscribe to Microsoft's trusted computing
Or imagine that your neighbor's grass growing under your fence is some kind of engineered supergrass that takes over your yard. Then one day someone from Monsanto calls demanding a license fee and requiring you to sign their contract.
Of course, they'd have to get some grass samples from my yard and that would almost be worth the license fee. The fence is pretty solid and the dogs would make getting clippings a death defying act.
Or why can't Michael Moore writeups highlight his twisting of the truth?
Show me one documented instance (pointing to a blog is not documentation) where Michael Moore has twisted the truth.
Like him or not his material is thoroughly researched and he's got the documentation to back it up. But I can see why people desperately want to think he doesn't tell the truth. I mean, if he's telling the truth, then you're living a lie and not any smarter than a common dupe.
So, yeah, it's perfectly understandable why you'd feel that way. Nobody likes admitting they're a chump. It's almost like admitting we don't have a good reason for being in Iraq.
You're being tongue-in-cheek but just in case anyone's seriously wondering, there's a decontamination protocol for landers designed to prevent just such an eventuality.
Of course, there's always the old law that nature always finds a way. But there's not much nature on this planet that can tolerate those temperatures.
A really interesting philosophical question is why not seed Venus with bacteria and orgnaisms able to tolerate the heat and pressure and try to terraform it? Why not? It's not like we'd be crowding out the Venusians.
And five million more people who will finally say, "I'm tired of all these spyware things." And try something else.
What's really funny is I warned a vendor last year that security issues related to IE were going to be an ongoing problem and they should look at moving away from the IE only application they were providing. They told me, less than politely, that IE was the number one browser in the world and I could basically STFU.
I use Pricewatch to find the vendor but I don't deal with everyone I find through them.
Nice to know there are others building their own servers. I wouldn't trust hardware put together by anyone else. It's rare I ever have any problems with my boxen.
In some transactions, when you can expect the taxes and hidden charges to take your breath away, like a car rental, they have to disclose the tax rate. I'm not 100% sure but I think hotels are either doing it in their advertising or when you make the reservation. Certainly they show you at the desk before you initial the rate. Taxes also vary widely within a particular state. Some cities have local sales taxes they tack on top of state rates.
It may seem odd to outsiders, but it allows national companies to advertise the same price for an item across advertising mediums and state lines. Otherwise they'd have to make 50 different commercials, and modify them for some cities with different rates. It would be insane trying to keep track of it.
I'd say Nvu is today where Dreamweaver was maybe four years ago, sans the nasty Dreamweaver bug that would once in a while replace all your relative links with absolute local paths.
For what I do it would be insane to spend 400 bucks on a copy of Dreamweaver. You can manage a nice looking business site with Nvu, if you're working with largely static content. The style sheet editor could use some work, but give them time.
Linspire is backing Nvu development and they seem to be making excellent progress. But, you're right about it defaulting to HTML 4.0.
Still, it's wonderful to watch the pace of development.
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And I'm not sure why we feel like people who use more government supplied resources can't pay more than an equal share of the cost. Trucking companies use the roads to make money and trucks are hard on roads. I don't see it as a huge deal that trucking companies pay road use fees in the form of taxes. I'd even take it step farther and suggest that parents with kids in school might pay a little higher tax rate that people without kids or those opting for private school. Everybody contributes, but those who use the resources the most contribute a little more.
You may want after school and athletic programs for your kids but don't expect those of us without kids to keep accepting higher and higher tax burdens for supporting them.
Before that it was almost 10 years between the first attempt on the WTC and the second.
So out of anger and fear we craft the badly misnamed US Patriot Act. An act that stomps on friend and foe alike, but hardest on our own people. We create yet another new massive federal bureaucracy to protect us. What do you suppose all those people at that massive new federal agency are going to do for the next 10 years to justify their existence? They're going to put their own people and friendly visitors through endless procedure and invasive, pointless snooping. All to try and find a handful of people patient enough to wait another decade or longer.
In some ways the terrorists have already won. How easily we're spooked into throwing over constitutional protections that used to be the envy of the world. Thousands died on the battlefield to protect those freedoms but what's that sacrifice to a generation that grew up under the coddled over-protection of those ridiculous Baby On Board signs?
I hope our friends to the north don't take it personally because it's not.
And there are Windows forums crowded with users having problems and the people I know with Windows networks at home have to dork with something all the time to keep them running right.
Sometimes the impression it leaves is that Linux isn't allowed to be as good as Windows. At least on a relative basis. The impression I get from a lot of people is they expect Linux to be flawless before they'll stoop to trying it. Well, screw that. There are some nice distros out there and, on the whole, I spend a lot less time managing my home Linux network than I ever did with Winblows. The problems are different but certainly not any worse. If you want to run Linux at home it's certainly within the technical reach of the average user now.
Stop whining about what Linux doesn't do and step boldly into last week.
You know that's not true because had they actually be pounding a few at the office their software would probably be better and MSFT as a whole wouldn't be wound so tight.
- You could be accused of crime based almost solely on things you bought at the store. The dude put out the fire and called 911. Not exactly a bright arsonist, now is he? I blame the prosecutors as much as the cops. Who looks at a shopping receipt and a tracking dog and thinks they have a case against the person who put the fire out? And the dude was a fire fighter. You'd think someone with intimate knowledge of the business could come up with something that isn't going to leave as much evidence behind.
- Once information about you exists somewhere it can be used for things you might not be able to envision at the time you turned the information over. You bought kerosene for a space heater, fertilzer for your lawn, some batteries and a spare garage door opener because your wife's car is a purse on wheels and she lost it. Then one day Homeland Security is showing up at your door. Unfortunately that's not unreasonably paranoid these days.
Still think you have nothing to hide? What's really pathetic is that people who really know trade craft and are willing to actually do something bad with those materials also know how to make it difficult to track their purchases. If they have an organized network some of those materials may have been purchased months or years previously by middle buyers now long gone who had no idea why they were buying two tons of fertilizer a few bags at a time.
Wouldn't the MPAA tagging them as potentially infringing material unfairly deny people access to my movies?
I'm not sure, but I already work with human beings that have the intelligence of mice, so I'm thinking the human-brained mice should be able to fit in somewhere.
Just think how handy they would be if you were pulling cable and it gets stuck in the conduit somewhere? Or when you drop a bolt in a hard to reach place.
Our patent system is broken. Extortion by litigation has to stop. This is stifling innovation and crippling our economy. Absolutely, un-f'ing-believable.
That's right, Shawn, I do. And that's exactly why it bugs me. I already have enough shit like that to keep track of without adding software activation codes, dongles or backup copies of my activation files.
I don't use Linux because I can't afford Windows. I use it because I can install it where I need to without jumping through activation hoops, without keeping track of activation codes, and without worrying about being audited by BSA or MSFT trying to "help" me with automated software audits. Screw that.
Freedom is better than staying with MSFT.
The ends justify the means these days. We've lost any semblance of ideals. Privacy, the Constitution, freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable search...all shamelessly trampled when they become inconvenient in the war on terror.
Although at least this time we learned to keep our internment camps somewhere less visible.
...for alcohol. Hehe.
From the website: Q: Are you going to publish your source code? A: Yes. Once the code is stable and we've had independent code audits, we'll publish the source code. We're releasing a security product, and we believe - along with legions of other security aware developers - that transparency is key to trust building. We are working as hard and fast as we can to make this happen. Our commitment is to publish the source before the end of 2005, hopefully sooner than later.
To me a bigger issue is Linux users have to have kernel 2.4 instead of 2.6. Guess I'll have to wait until they catch up.
Initially I was going to leave tech behind but you really can't. Whatever career choice you make you'll see a million ways to make it better with automation. Being able to write your own tools gives you a huge advantage over your competitors who have to spend a lot of money to get software that doesn't work as well. And your technical background will also make you more competitive than your peers in almost any other field.
If the Bushies want to do something about abusive litigation why don't they start with this case?
What follows is just my opinion but I liked Star Trek better before it got so preachy and, for lack of a better word, pussified. Every so often you just have to say screw the prime directive and stick a photon torpedo up some mofo's tailpipe.
Now if it was a federal court order, don't know as many people there. But I can't imagine it would be that easy to get an ex-parte order from federal court. Even then they'd still have to go through the local sheriff and the minute they set foot in this county they're on my turf.
Just for grins I'd probably file a counter-claim for the damage their engineered quack grass did to my nice lawn. Plus whatever else Don could think of to sue them for.
Or imagine that your neighbor's grass growing under your fence is some kind of engineered supergrass that takes over your yard. Then one day someone from Monsanto calls demanding a license fee and requiring you to sign their contract.
Of course, they'd have to get some grass samples from my yard and that would almost be worth the license fee. The fence is pretty solid and the dogs would make getting clippings a death defying act.
Show me one documented instance (pointing to a blog is not documentation) where Michael Moore has twisted the truth.
Like him or not his material is thoroughly researched and he's got the documentation to back it up. But I can see why people desperately want to think he doesn't tell the truth. I mean, if he's telling the truth, then you're living a lie and not any smarter than a common dupe.
So, yeah, it's perfectly understandable why you'd feel that way. Nobody likes admitting they're a chump. It's almost like admitting we don't have a good reason for being in Iraq.
It's f'ing cold up here.
Of course, there's always the old law that nature always finds a way. But there's not much nature on this planet that can tolerate those temperatures.
A really interesting philosophical question is why not seed Venus with bacteria and orgnaisms able to tolerate the heat and pressure and try to terraform it? Why not? It's not like we'd be crowding out the Venusians.
But, yeah, bring on the cool pics!
What's really funny is I warned a vendor last year that security issues related to IE were going to be an ongoing problem and they should look at moving away from the IE only application they were providing. They told me, less than politely, that IE was the number one browser in the world and I could basically STFU.
Sure glad I saved those emails....
Nice to know there are others building their own servers. I wouldn't trust hardware put together by anyone else. It's rare I ever have any problems with my boxen.
It may seem odd to outsiders, but it allows national companies to advertise the same price for an item across advertising mediums and state lines. Otherwise they'd have to make 50 different commercials, and modify them for some cities with different rates. It would be insane trying to keep track of it.
For what I do it would be insane to spend 400 bucks on a copy of Dreamweaver. You can manage a nice looking business site with Nvu, if you're working with largely static content. The style sheet editor could use some work, but give them time.
Linspire is backing Nvu development and they seem to be making excellent progress. But, you're right about it defaulting to HTML 4.0.
Still, it's wonderful to watch the pace of development.