"Bottom line... the Selective Service exists only as a tool to be used in a doomsday situation, just like all of the city fallout shelters that were built in the USA during the cold war to be prepared for a nuclear bomb that never came."
Don't you really mean to say "just like all of the Fallout Shelter signs that were printed and stuck on the side of public buildings such as schools durng the cold war to fool the masses into thinking our goverment was doing something to protect them."
OK, its from the NYT so I suppose I shouldn't expect too much accuracy or consistency, but here are just a few of the problems I see:
"Investigators were particularly alarmed by one call they overheard last June. The message: "The big guy is coming. He will be here soon.""
Um, right, because: a) al Qaeda operatives naturally speak in English so they can be more easily understood; and b) they naturally use silly English idioms when they speak.
"A half dozen senior officials in the United States and Europe agreed to talk in detail about the previously undisclosed investigation because, they said, it was completed."
and
"The Mont Blanc inquiry has wound down, although investigators are still monitoring the communications of a few people."
OK, which is it? Is the investigation over or are they still monitoring a "few people"? And if they are monitoring a few people, are they sure those people don't read the NYT?
"During the American bombing of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2001, American authorities reported hearing Osama bin Laden speaking to his associates on a satellite phone. Since then, Mr. bin Laden has communicated with handwritten messages delivered by trusted couriers, officials said."
Well, folks, if you know enough to know he is writting his instructions by hand and delivering them by hand, then you know where he is. Otherwise, all you can say is that you "belive" he is doing this, which is the equivalent of saying you don't "know" anything.
Personally, I think all the space aliens who visit the Earth must be invisible because I have never seen any of them. It would never occur to me to doubt that space aliens have visited the Earth.:-P
There are other over problems like the fact that the government (German or otherwise) was monitoring a guy's phone calls because he was a muslim convert, apparently. Now, they say he contacted "Khalid Shaikh Mohammed" "who is accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks" (does anyone remember when it was Ayman al Zawahiri the Egyptian doctor who had masterminded the attacks, or even Mohammed Atta?) but of course, they would only know who he called becaue they were monitoring his phone calls already. Yes, it is a wide net.
As someone else pointed out on here, this is not news, so the interesting question is why this story is being told at all right now. I don't for a minute believe it is because "a half dozen senior officials in the United States and Europe agreed to talk in detail about the previously undisclosed investigation."
"Agreed to talk in detail" indeed! That would imply that the request for the discussion came from the NYT, which would, of course, be impossible since the investigation was "previously undisclosed." Obviously, the impetus to talk about this came from the "senior officials." The question is: "why?" Is it to boost George Bush in the polls? Is it to bolster the cause for new eavesdropping legislation? Or is it something I am not yet guessing?
Folks, it is not becuase the government wants you to know their spying techniques. They don't even want you to use PGP!
"Just because MacOS X 'just works' for you, doesn't mean that it will 'just work' for me."
Sure it will, you just may not like the way it "just works" especially if you prefer twiddling with settings all the time.
"If I'm not using the cursor, I'd like it to disappear. Does MacOS X 'just work' for me in that way?"
Yes, in fact, it does just work this way. Have you actually used OSX? If you had, I'm sure that in less than 1 minute you could have deduced that this is an application-specific behavior. The cursor disappears in Safari or Word, for instance, but not in iTunes. Makes sense if you think about it. You primarily read in Safari where a cursor in the middle of the page could be annying. You primarily type and read in Word where a cursor would be jsut as annoying for the same reasons. In iTunes you primarily select things with the cursor where it is more important to have the cursor in a location so you don't have to "jiggle the mouse" to see where it is before moving it.
Would you really want the cursor to disappear in the Finder after 5 seconds of inactivity?
I don't understand this objection at all.
"Oh, and I like hotkeys. Will MacOS X allow me to easily set up the combination of ctrl-j + l to switch to my web browser, and if that web browser doesn't exist, launch it?"
Well, you could either use a macro utility, or pretty easily set up an AppleScript to do this, but this functionality is not otherwise built in for reasons that make sense as someone else pointed out.
"There's just two trivial examples I found off the top of my head. I could easily add more."
Find us two non-trivial examples.
"Don't think everyone who uses the Unix-like OSes are a bunch of twiddling geeks who are content to fiddle with the OS while Mac users end up getting real work done."
I don't either, but I do think that one of the selling points on every Linux distro site I have seen is configurability of the user interface which is fine If you are a twiddling geek, but not fine if you want uniformity of user experience across a company's computer installation. It is typically something that doesn't lead to productivity either. My user interface customization is limited to changing the desktop picture. Otherwise, I spend all my time actually using the computer.
"I'm not sure about the rest of the crowd, but the reason I use unix-like OSes is because its more efficient for me to get my work done."
Another good point. So, on the Mac, just run all your Unix apps in Quartz accellerated X11. I do this all the time, but I still dont' twiddle with the interface. What is the big deal?
"Just to get a bit more off topic here. People who believe that abortion *is* murder may be tunnel-visioned (as you put it). But keep in mind that anyone who tries to convince them otherwise is effectively trying to justify murder to them."
Which is just another way of saying it is a waste of bandwidth. Agreed.
As an aside, have you ever wondered why many of the people who are against abortion or the death penalty or whatever, have no problem with ritual cannibalism?
"Once a person has convinced themself of something, it generally takes a hell of a lot to change their mind."
Exactly why I am so damned agnostic about everything. Most of the time, I realize I don't have enough information to form an unwavering opinion, and every time I have thought I had enough information and I formed one, I was confronted with more information that made me waiver.
Having said that, I am still more than 99%, though less than 100%, certain that Windows sucks.
"It also depends on your audience. Saying "Abortion is murder" at a pro-choice meeting might well be flamebait, but saying it at a pro-life meeting certainly is not."
God, if slashdot is no different from the choice vs. life crowd, I'm outta here. Nothing to be gained from hanging around with a bunch of tunnel vision zealots.
Well, that is a good point. My PC's (meaning Intel or AMD boxes) sit in a closet. The only computers in my house that are "displayed" are the Macs, the NeXTs, and the SGI's.
However, the very design philosophy behind these machines goes beyond that physical to the architectural and software design and is what sets them apart from the PC's.
No amount of paint or drilling and cutting is ever going to make a PC anything other than a PC, though it can be helped along by installing BSD or Linux on it.:-)
I could screw a $2.00 handle from HomeDepo to my case and carry it to a LAN party and still have time to actually play the game. Or, even better, I could just take my laptop.
I'm not saying he made the case for me, just that he wasted he time. Had he made it for me, he would have wasted his time AND his money.
I personally think case modding is kind of idiotic. I suppose it gives bragging rights in some circles, but strikes me that anyone you would really want to impress wouldn't give a crap about your computer case.
I saw a mod on TechTV where they put the comptuer in a machine gun cartridge box. OK, what is the point of this? It doesn't make you cool, it just makes you the idiot who wasted countless hours with a Dremmel Powertool modifying a tin can to house his computer.
I'm not criticizing someone who wants to create a new space-saving circuit board design or something. That makes sense and takes some engineering skill.
This particular product seems more than a little silly with the designes that are just rails, not becasue I am concerned about electromagnetic radiation, but because I am concerned with dropping stuff on my motherboard. I thought that was the point of the case, otherwise, just lay the crap out on your desk and use it. It's a hell of a lot easier to switch hardware with it not in a case.
Legally, if they sell you a box and 3 years of a subscription service, and then fail to deliver, you are entitled to, at a minimum, a refund of the cost of the box and the fair market value of three years of the service, regardless of what you actually paid for the setup. This is the benefit of your bargain. Basic contracts law.
If the business is still alive, you might even be entitled to specific performance of the contract, if there was no reasonable alternative to their service. I assume TiVO is a reasonable alternative.
Well, I have to say, having just installed a FreeBSD (5.1) server in my house, I am blown away at the stability and easy configurability of this thing. I built the computer it is running on for $160.00 with (obviously) cheap parts and it is perfrominig like I had really spent some money on it.
This was much easier to install software for and configure than any of the Linux distros I have used in the past, including the vaunted RedHat.
Stable and fast. That's what I like, and this isn't even the current fork.:-)
I tried sending an email to the webmoderator but I couldn't find an email adddress. i thougth about sending one to they guy who made the logo since his email address was plainly displayed, but I thought it wouldnt' be productive.:-)
Here is my comment to something on her site.
I've been curious about this SCO suit and I want to compliment you on the great site. Lots of good resources there.
However, I just had to comment on the fallacious allegations in the letter from David Mohring. Now, I am a Mac and FreeBSD user. I don't do Microsoft, but there have to be better arguments in support of the GPL than denying it is what it is. That strategy never wins trials.
"' -- If the licensee includes any GPL code in another program, the entire program becomes subject to the terms of the GPL.'
"Actually, the above statement is Microsoft FUD, since it is actually the reverse which is more correct. If the licensee includes any NON-GPL'ed code in a GPL'ed program or library (*and* then distributes the resulting combined product outside of the licensee's organization) the NON-GPL code in question is deemed to be also licensed by the distributer under the GPL license.
I'm missing the subtle logical or legal distinction here. The first quotation, ascribed to Microsoft, can be restated thus:
If program A contains GPL code, then all of A is GPL.
The second quoted sentence, ascribed to someone who's source of income is supposedly derived from twiddling around with logical expressions, can be restated thus:
If program A contains not-GPL code, then all not-GPL code in program A is GPL.
No shit, Einstein! Since the GPL code is, by definition, GPL code, and since the logic is binary (GPL or not-GPL), there can only be at most two types of code in the program. The only question at issue is the nature of the not-GPL code.
Accordingly, there is no logical distinction to be made between saying that the not-GPL code becomes GPL and saying that ALL of the program is GPL.
Not to mention that, semantically and logically, the reverse of the Microsoft statement is not what the programmer said, but, rather, this:
Program A is not-GPL, therefore program A contains no not-GPL code (or "contains all GPL code" depending on how you want to express it since the two negatives cancel out).
I would agree with this last statement as written.
******
Here is what the GPL actually says, in pertinent part about licensing of otherwise non-GPL code:
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
***
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
***
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
The GPL isn't really a complex document. This section covers the nature of derivative works based on GPL licensed code and is explicit that "any work" that is distributed or published that includes "in whole or in part or is derived from" GPL licensed code must be "licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License." I don't know, but this sounds pretty much like what Microsoft was saying. As represented in the quotation on your website.
Now,
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you really mean to say "just like all of the Fallout Shelter signs that were printed and stuck on the side of public buildings such as schools durng the cold war to fool the masses into thinking our goverment was doing something to protect them."
Alcmaeon
"Investigators were particularly alarmed by one call they overheard last June. The message: "The big guy is coming. He will be here soon.""
Um, right, because: a) al Qaeda operatives naturally speak in English so they can be more easily understood; and b) they naturally use silly English idioms when they speak.
"A half dozen senior officials in the United States and Europe agreed to talk in detail about the previously undisclosed investigation because, they said, it was completed."
and
"The Mont Blanc inquiry has wound down, although investigators are still monitoring the communications of a few people."
OK, which is it? Is the investigation over or are they still monitoring a "few people"? And if they are monitoring a few people, are they sure those people don't read the NYT?
"During the American bombing of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2001, American authorities reported hearing Osama bin Laden speaking to his associates on a satellite phone. Since then, Mr. bin Laden has communicated with handwritten messages delivered by trusted couriers, officials said."
Well, folks, if you know enough to know he is writting his instructions by hand and delivering them by hand, then you know where he is. Otherwise, all you can say is that you "belive" he is doing this, which is the equivalent of saying you don't "know" anything.
Personally, I think all the space aliens who visit the Earth must be invisible because I have never seen any of them. It would never occur to me to doubt that space aliens have visited the Earth. :-P
There are other over problems like the fact that the government (German or otherwise) was monitoring a guy's phone calls because he was a muslim convert, apparently. Now, they say he contacted "Khalid Shaikh Mohammed" "who is accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks" (does anyone remember when it was Ayman al Zawahiri the Egyptian doctor who had masterminded the attacks, or even Mohammed Atta?) but of course, they would only know who he called becaue they were monitoring his phone calls already. Yes, it is a wide net.
As someone else pointed out on here, this is not news, so the interesting question is why this story is being told at all right now. I don't for a minute believe it is because "a half dozen senior officials in the United States and Europe agreed to talk in detail about the previously undisclosed investigation."
"Agreed to talk in detail" indeed! That would imply that the request for the discussion came from the NYT, which would, of course, be impossible since the investigation was "previously undisclosed." Obviously, the impetus to talk about this came from the "senior officials." The question is: "why?" Is it to boost George Bush in the polls? Is it to bolster the cause for new eavesdropping legislation? Or is it something I am not yet guessing?
Folks, it is not becuase the government wants you to know their spying techniques. They don't even want you to use PGP!
Alcmaeon
Sure it will, you just may not like the way it "just works" especially if you prefer twiddling with settings all the time.
"If I'm not using the cursor, I'd like it to disappear. Does MacOS X 'just work' for me in that way?"
Yes, in fact, it does just work this way. Have you actually used OSX? If you had, I'm sure that in less than 1 minute you could have deduced that this is an application-specific behavior. The cursor disappears in Safari or Word, for instance, but not in iTunes. Makes sense if you think about it. You primarily read in Safari where a cursor in the middle of the page could be annying. You primarily type and read in Word where a cursor would be jsut as annoying for the same reasons. In iTunes you primarily select things with the cursor where it is more important to have the cursor in a location so you don't have to "jiggle the mouse" to see where it is before moving it.
Would you really want the cursor to disappear in the Finder after 5 seconds of inactivity?
I don't understand this objection at all.
"Oh, and I like hotkeys. Will MacOS X allow me to easily set up the combination of ctrl-j + l to switch to my web browser, and if that web browser doesn't exist, launch it?"
Well, you could either use a macro utility, or pretty easily set up an AppleScript to do this, but this functionality is not otherwise built in for reasons that make sense as someone else pointed out.
"There's just two trivial examples I found off the top of my head. I could easily add more."
Find us two non-trivial examples.
"Don't think everyone who uses the Unix-like OSes are a bunch of twiddling geeks who are content to fiddle with the OS while Mac users end up getting real work done."
I don't either, but I do think that one of the selling points on every Linux distro site I have seen is configurability of the user interface which is fine If you are a twiddling geek, but not fine if you want uniformity of user experience across a company's computer installation. It is typically something that doesn't lead to productivity either. My user interface customization is limited to changing the desktop picture. Otherwise, I spend all my time actually using the computer.
"I'm not sure about the rest of the crowd, but the reason I use unix-like OSes is because its more efficient for me to get my work done."
Another good point. So, on the Mac, just run all your Unix apps in Quartz accellerated X11. I do this all the time, but I still dont' twiddle with the interface. What is the big deal?
Alcmaeon
http://ranger.befunk.com/blog/archives/000291.h
Just my opinion, of course.
Which is just another way of saying it is a waste of bandwidth. Agreed.
As an aside, have you ever wondered why many of the people who are against abortion or the death penalty or whatever, have no problem with ritual cannibalism?
Exactly why I am so damned agnostic about everything. Most of the time, I realize I don't have enough information to form an unwavering opinion, and every time I have thought I had enough information and I formed one, I was confronted with more information that made me waiver.
Having said that, I am still more than 99%, though less than 100%, certain that Windows sucks.
God, if slashdot is no different from the choice vs. life crowd, I'm outta here. Nothing to be gained from hanging around with a bunch of tunnel vision zealots.
However, the very design philosophy behind these machines goes beyond that physical to the architectural and software design and is what sets them apart from the PC's.
No amount of paint or drilling and cutting is ever going to make a PC anything other than a PC, though it can be helped along by installing BSD or Linux on it. :-)
Alcmaeon
I'm not saying he made the case for me, just that he wasted he time. Had he made it for me, he would have wasted his time AND his money.
I saw a mod on TechTV where they put the comptuer in a machine gun cartridge box. OK, what is the point of this? It doesn't make you cool, it just makes you the idiot who wasted countless hours with a Dremmel Powertool modifying a tin can to house his computer.
I'm not criticizing someone who wants to create a new space-saving circuit board design or something. That makes sense and takes some engineering skill.
This particular product seems more than a little silly with the designes that are just rails, not becasue I am concerned about electromagnetic radiation, but because I am concerned with dropping stuff on my motherboard. I thought that was the point of the case, otherwise, just lay the crap out on your desk and use it. It's a hell of a lot easier to switch hardware with it not in a case.
...it is a technology that even idiots can understand.
Legally, if they sell you a box and 3 years of a subscription service, and then fail to deliver, you are entitled to, at a minimum, a refund of the cost of the box and the fair market value of three years of the service, regardless of what you actually paid for the setup. This is the benefit of your bargain. Basic contracts law.
If the business is still alive, you might even be entitled to specific performance of the contract, if there was no reasonable alternative to their service. I assume TiVO is a reasonable alternative.
Well, I have to say, having just installed a FreeBSD (5.1) server in my house, I am blown away at the stability and easy configurability of this thing. I built the computer it is running on for $160.00 with (obviously) cheap parts and it is perfrominig like I had really spent some money on it. This was much easier to install software for and configure than any of the Linux distros I have used in the past, including the vaunted RedHat. Stable and fast. That's what I like, and this isn't even the current fork. :-)
I tried sending an email to the webmoderator but I couldn't find an email adddress. i thougth about sending one to they guy who made the logo since his email address was plainly displayed, but I thought it wouldnt' be productive. :-)
Here is my comment to something on her site.
I've been curious about this SCO suit and I want to compliment you on the great site. Lots of good resources there.
However, I just had to comment on the fallacious allegations in the letter from David Mohring. Now, I am a Mac and FreeBSD user. I don't do Microsoft, but there have to be better arguments in support of the GPL than denying it is what it is. That strategy never wins trials.
"' -- If the licensee includes any GPL code in another program, the entire program becomes subject to the terms of the GPL.'
"Actually, the above statement is Microsoft FUD, since it is actually the reverse which is more correct. If the licensee includes any NON-GPL'ed code in a GPL'ed program or library (*and* then distributes the resulting combined product outside of the licensee's organization) the NON-GPL code in question is deemed to be also licensed by the distributer under the GPL license.
I'm missing the subtle logical or legal distinction here. The first quotation, ascribed to Microsoft, can be restated thus:
If program A contains GPL code, then all of A is GPL.
The second quoted sentence, ascribed to someone who's source of income is supposedly derived from twiddling around with logical expressions, can be restated thus:
If program A contains not-GPL code, then all not-GPL code in program A is GPL.
No shit, Einstein! Since the GPL code is, by definition, GPL code, and since the logic is binary (GPL or not-GPL), there can only be at most two types of code in the program. The only question at issue is the nature of the not-GPL code.
Accordingly, there is no logical distinction to be made between saying that the not-GPL code becomes GPL and saying that ALL of the program is GPL.
Not to mention that, semantically and logically, the reverse of the Microsoft statement is not what the programmer said, but, rather, this:
Program A is not-GPL, therefore program A contains no not-GPL code (or "contains all GPL code" depending on how you want to express it since the two negatives cancel out).
I would agree with this last statement as written.
******
Here is what the GPL actually says, in pertinent part about licensing of otherwise non-GPL code:
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
***
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
***
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
The GPL isn't really a complex document. This section covers the nature of derivative works based on GPL licensed code and is explicit that "any work" that is distributed or published that includes "in whole or in part or is derived from" GPL licensed code must be "licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License." I don't know, but this sounds pretty much like what Microsoft was saying. As represented in the quotation on your website.
Now,
...all the coherent scenes that must have been cut, but had they been included, would have made the last two movies make sense.