Maybe "ruin and chaos" is a bit exagerrated (maybe not), but you're missing the point...the US's population is not the factor that makes the impact. What would make the impact is the rate of consumption here, and many countries know this...it's the reason that the WTO recently had to rule against US steel tarrifs...they were hurting other countries.
To say "if you disappeared...there'd simply be a few less guys consuming everyone else's products." is quite possibly the largest world-economics-related understatement I've ever heard. Most Americans are workaholics and rampant conspicuous consumers, and as such get advertised to and marketed to by companies from every corner of the world. This, among other things, generates the huge trade defecits you refer to.
We (the US) *are* arrogant, the issue is whether (for a given issue) we are deservedly so.
It's not an issue that a clean-room implementation would fix. The patent in question isn't on the code, but rather on the file format. Remember all the shit that Compuserve put people through over the GIF file format? This would be similar. Microsoft is saying "Hey! We should be making money off that!". I don't know what this means for FreeDOS, PC-DOS, syslinux-based boot disks etc, but it can't be good...
He may be brainwashed, or he may be right...I'm reminded of a very recent story I heard on a recreation center where a group of seniors has been banned because they occasionally sang gospel songs (along with country and bluegrass). I believe that they said the banning was due to complaints about the spiritual nature of the songs (not the annoyingness of a bunch of seniors singning them at the rec center). This is a public place, all forms of speech are supposed to be allowed, but this group is being discriminated against (maybe) on religious grounds. Seems prime for ACLU support, on first amendment principles, but as far as I know, they are uninvolved in the case.
I wouldn't automatically assume that the ACLU would have supported the general.
The general was wrong, and as a general should have known better that to make inflammatory religious statements while still serving as an officer in the US Army and on camera. Also, the government has no religious opinion...which is the basic reason he shouldn't have said it. While an officer in the US armed forces, you are never "outside of work"...that doesn't happen until you resign your commission or retire.
You have to think about what you're saying here...you're saying that if everyone in the world currently using e-mail updates all of the software that they have (servers, clients, filters, firewalls, etc) that is used to transmit said e-mail, we stand a chance.
I agree with that, but don't agree that it's easily changed...there are a lot of mail servers out there, and a lot of mail clients out there, and ensuring that a change-over happens within a given time-frame is unreasonable.
What I imagine will eventually happen is that features to send certified or authenticated e-mail that currently exist will be placed into more widespread use and/or expanded on...much simpler to issue some patches for client apps to do that than to change the way e-mail works at a lower level.
I believe I understand now, although I don't have a real opinion on the matter...don't know enough of those affected, and haven't done enough research to have one yet.
I don't think it's reasonable to jail someone *at all* for bringing a recording device anywhere (well, maybe with the exception of some super-duper secret national-security-type places), regardless of whether they use the devices. Jailing people for selling or distributing copyrighted material without consent is probably stupid, too...fines make more sense. That is part of the difference, though, too.
Rape is a violent crime, and I'm one of those zealots that think it's an offense punishable by death (Spider Robinson convinced me that's a morally reasonable decision)...jailing a rapist only serves to remind the victim that somebody in jail completely violated them, and will likely be free to do so again someday.
I guess thinking in terms of "if somebody raped my daughter..." makes it clearest to me. It's not as final as murder, but it affects the victim for much longer, obviously. I agree that additional jail time is out of proportion to the crime of rape, but only because I have no respect whatsoever for rapists. Please note that I am not referring to the "legal" definition of rape, but the common-sense definition...screaming victim, etc.
Bounties on the heads of hackers responsible for viruses will just lead to frame-ups and the real perps will laugh and get away with it...I agree that bug-finder rewards make more sense than bounties.
Define "potential rapist". To me, that's anybody with a set of testes (and probably doesn't stop there). I'm not against free hookers or legalized prostitution (selling is legal, fucking is legal, etc), just not sure how such a thing helps those who want to commit rape not do so. If you're a rapist, you want to get sex in a way that overrides the consent of the person you are raping...hard to do that with a willing partner.
Apparently I'm suffering from difficulty in making sense of what you wrote, then... "My point is that instead of trying to punish more and more it might be a good idea to start using carrots instead of getting a bigger stick." makes me think "jail bad, something else, good", from whence I drew what I thought a logical conclusion... So, IMHO "Oops, there are" comments that (to me...damn I'm getting tired of parentheses) stating your opposition to the existing justice system.
The above threw me way off when reading into what you were trying to say about "A Clockwork Orange"...apologies for that.
So, rapists shouldn't go to jail? We should do what, then...give the rapists free hookers (carrot-horse analogy)?
What, pray-tell is a "transparent society"? If you're talking about one in which all the details of each person living within it are known to all of the others, then I'll thank you to please perform a sanity check. Preventing crime is one of the primary reasons that we have jails...the reason that crime levels are not receeding is that said jails only work to prevent the commission of crimes by people with the sense to avoid being jailed...take jails away for a decade, and see what happens to rape numbers.
If you think "A Clockwork Orange" is an accurate representation of the criminal justice system in the US, maybe you should take a break from Kubrick for a few days and relax a bit...
You don't think Google would massage any search results to point to articles in their favor? Might not be interesting to you, but I'm curious to see what happens...
I'm just waiting for the lawsuit to hit so I can do a Google search for "SCO vs. Google"...I can imagine some creative things that might happen there...heheh
The US powercut was caused by the cascading failure of a daisy-chain of power stations around the great lakes.
True, but if the computer systems that monitor situations like that had been in place and working (there were two systems that were either broken or turned off that were supposed to have prevented it...looking for a link to an article as we speak), the other grid operators could have upped their output enough to prevent it. The outage that happened there didn't have to happen...it'd be like a water system where you increase the output of active water sources when one has a problem that knocks it out.
A "ground-test" is a test performed prior to putting the tested item in its normal operating environment (in this case, it's an appropriate description, since it stayed on the ground).
"NASA Ground-tested an Ion Engine" would have been a less headline-ish way of saying it.
That is exactly why they've decided to do this...Latitude and Optiplex computers are pretty much exclusively corporate purchases, and there is an expectation of a certain level of support that goes along with those kinds of purchases.
If I get "Indira Korsapati" on the phone, and she's reading from a script, I've wasted 20 valuable minutes getting her to send me to someone who can actually help me solve my problem. I can't do that with any regularity and have time to support end-users.
The fact that most corporate customers also pay significant amounts of money for support means that this type of service is unacceptable. Dell's not just trying to be nice, they're trying to keep lucrative corporate customers from defecting to other manufacturers who offer similar service, support, and price. This looks to be a case where good support has become important enough to cause a shift in favor of the consumer (even if those "consumers" are mostly corporations).
dammit. I'm extremely wrong (my fault for quoting something without checking it first). Damned if I can find the article I read it in again, though. I imagine they'd have had to have been comparing atomic weights (silly, since it'd be H2 vs. He, and not H vs. He). The correct statement should have read "Helium has 92% of the lifting power of Hydrogen", which has a bit less impact as a statement. Apologies for the bad info.
Have you ever seen the film of the didaster? It didn't explode. It caught fire, then one end sank as the gas leaked out, then the middle, then the other end. Had it exploded, the whole shebang would have fallen straight down. C'mon...think about it for a minute before saying something like that. Helium has 20% of the lifting power of hydrogen, but fear makes it taboo for use in commercial aviation. We can certainly engineer containers that would keep it from catching fire today...jet fuel is explosive too.
What other hydrogen airships? I've found mention of other disasters, but nothing (other than the Roma, which only mentioned explosion...not fire) concerning flaming deaths...
The highly flamabble cloth you're scoffing at was coated with (among other things) powdered aluminum. For those of you who didn't already know, that's the key combustible component in solid rocket fuel. There has been at least one pretty good special on Discovery about it, and they tested some of the fabric to see if they could reproduce the results. Here are some things I recall from that special:
The skin of the dirigible was coated with powdered aluminum (aluminum oxide?)
There were special vents at the top of the blimp to vent leaking hydrogen
Hydrogen burns in a hard-to-see blue flame
solid rocket fuel burns a bright reddish-orange
the hindenburg burned a bright reddish-orange
There was a lot more to the show than that, but I was sufficiently convinced that the dirigible's skin did them in, not the Hydrogen.
Slashdot Mirror
To say "if you disappeared...there'd simply be a few less guys consuming everyone else's products." is quite possibly the largest world-economics-related understatement I've ever heard. Most Americans are workaholics and rampant conspicuous consumers, and as such get advertised to and marketed to by companies from every corner of the world. This, among other things, generates the huge trade defecits you refer to.
We (the US) *are* arrogant, the issue is whether (for a given issue) we are deservedly so.
It's not an issue that a clean-room implementation would fix. The patent in question isn't on the code, but rather on the file format. Remember all the shit that Compuserve put people through over the GIF file format? This would be similar. Microsoft is saying "Hey! We should be making money off that!". I don't know what this means for FreeDOS, PC-DOS, syslinux-based boot disks etc, but it can't be good...
If you're allowed to...might have to download the "Windows secure BIOS update tool" and only be allowed to flash "trusted" BIOS images
I wouldn't automatically assume that the ACLU would have supported the general.
The general was wrong, and as a general should have known better that to make inflammatory religious statements while still serving as an officer in the US Army and on camera. Also, the government has no religious opinion...which is the basic reason he shouldn't have said it. While an officer in the US armed forces, you are never "outside of work"...that doesn't happen until you resign your commission or retire.
I agree with that, but don't agree that it's easily changed...there are a lot of mail servers out there, and a lot of mail clients out there, and ensuring that a change-over happens within a given time-frame is unreasonable.
What I imagine will eventually happen is that features to send certified or authenticated e-mail that currently exist will be placed into more widespread use and/or expanded on...much simpler to issue some patches for client apps to do that than to change the way e-mail works at a lower level.
I don't think it's reasonable to jail someone *at all* for bringing a recording device anywhere (well, maybe with the exception of some super-duper secret national-security-type places), regardless of whether they use the devices. Jailing people for selling or distributing copyrighted material without consent is probably stupid, too...fines make more sense. That is part of the difference, though, too.
Rape is a violent crime, and I'm one of those zealots that think it's an offense punishable by death (Spider Robinson convinced me that's a morally reasonable decision)...jailing a rapist only serves to remind the victim that somebody in jail completely violated them, and will likely be free to do so again someday.
I guess thinking in terms of "if somebody raped my daughter..." makes it clearest to me. It's not as final as murder, but it affects the victim for much longer, obviously. I agree that additional jail time is out of proportion to the crime of rape, but only because I have no respect whatsoever for rapists. Please note that I am not referring to the "legal" definition of rape, but the common-sense definition...screaming victim, etc.
Bounties on the heads of hackers responsible for viruses will just lead to frame-ups and the real perps will laugh and get away with it...I agree that bug-finder rewards make more sense than bounties.
Define "potential rapist". To me, that's anybody with a set of testes (and probably doesn't stop there). I'm not against free hookers or legalized prostitution (selling is legal, fucking is legal, etc), just not sure how such a thing helps those who want to commit rape not do so. If you're a rapist, you want to get sex in a way that overrides the consent of the person you are raping...hard to do that with a willing partner.
The above threw me way off when reading into what you were trying to say about "A Clockwork Orange"...apologies for that.
What, pray-tell is a "transparent society"? If you're talking about one in which all the details of each person living within it are known to all of the others, then I'll thank you to please perform a sanity check. Preventing crime is one of the primary reasons that we have jails...the reason that crime levels are not receeding is that said jails only work to prevent the commission of crimes by people with the sense to avoid being jailed...take jails away for a decade, and see what happens to rape numbers.
If you think "A Clockwork Orange" is an accurate representation of the criminal justice system in the US, maybe you should take a break from Kubrick for a few days and relax a bit...
You don't think Google would massage any search results to point to articles in their favor? Might not be interesting to you, but I'm curious to see what happens...
I'm just waiting for the lawsuit to hit so I can do a Google search for "SCO vs. Google"...I can imagine some creative things that might happen there...heheh
Wish I had mod points to give to you, AC...
True, but if the computer systems that monitor situations like that had been in place and working (there were two systems that were either broken or turned off that were supposed to have prevented it...looking for a link to an article as we speak), the other grid operators could have upped their output enough to prevent it. The outage that happened there didn't have to happen...it'd be like a water system where you increase the output of active water sources when one has a problem that knocks it out.
I'ts also hard to hold your breath while soldering underwater...[insert rimshot here]
"NASA Ground-tested an Ion Engine" would have been a less headline-ish way of saying it.
If I get "Indira Korsapati" on the phone, and she's reading from a script, I've wasted 20 valuable minutes getting her to send me to someone who can actually help me solve my problem. I can't do that with any regularity and have time to support end-users.
The fact that most corporate customers also pay significant amounts of money for support means that this type of service is unacceptable. Dell's not just trying to be nice, they're trying to keep lucrative corporate customers from defecting to other manufacturers who offer similar service, support, and price. This looks to be a case where good support has become important enough to cause a shift in favor of the consumer (even if those "consumers" are mostly corporations).
It's worse than that...opt-OUT as the preferred method? Let me just state my opinion officially: "That blows goat".
Funny, my ass...mod parent up "Insightful"
I'm reeeeealy glad I'm already done with lunch...
I, for one, welcome SCO's new neck-shitting overlords...
dammit. I'm extremely wrong (my fault for quoting something without checking it first). Damned if I can find the article I read it in again, though. I imagine they'd have had to have been comparing atomic weights (silly, since it'd be H2 vs. He, and not H vs. He). The correct statement should have read "Helium has 92% of the lifting power of Hydrogen", which has a bit less impact as a statement. Apologies for the bad info.
Have you ever seen the film of the didaster? It didn't explode. It caught fire, then one end sank as the gas leaked out, then the middle, then the other end. Had it exploded, the whole shebang would have fallen straight down. C'mon...think about it for a minute before saying something like that. Helium has 20% of the lifting power of hydrogen, but fear makes it taboo for use in commercial aviation. We can certainly engineer containers that would keep it from catching fire today...jet fuel is explosive too.
What other hydrogen airships? I've found mention of other disasters, but nothing (other than the Roma, which only mentioned explosion...not fire) concerning flaming deaths...
There was a lot more to the show than that, but I was sufficiently convinced that the dirigible's skin did them in, not the Hydrogen.
Doom IV?