Thanks for the heads up; I'll look into Xara Extreme and see what's up. I've used (and do use) Inkscape, and it IS cool, but it's not Illustrator, not by a mile. Now, if you can tell me that Ableton Live, or Cubase SX - or even Sonar - has been opensourced, I'll jump up and down in ecstacy!:D
I've been a Linux user since 1995, and have been various kinds of a linux zealot for years. I love KDE, and Gnome is OK. I have come to despise windows, but I have been using windows on a PC because of the audio utilities; and it's too much trouble to reboot into linux to do other stuff, then boot back into windows to fire up Tracktion or Ableton Live. And before anyone gets excited, yes, I have Agnula/Demudi installed, yes, it's cool, but it's NOT Tracktion or Ableton live.
And anyone that tells you that Linux is a great desktop OS in a thread about Mac OS X simply hasn't had enough experience with OSX. I'm a convert, and as soon as I can sell my m-audio Delta 1010LT and my 3Ghz HT P4, I'll buy a firewire audio interface and be done with it. I have tracktion and Ableton Live on Mac, and they both work approximately the same interface wise on the Mac. On Mac I can also use lightwave - and blender isn't close; I can use Adobe CS 2 - and the Gimp is cool, but not cool enough to compete with CS (Illustrator - no comparable vector package for linux). NVU is available for linux, and I use it there, but it's also available for Mac, and so is Macromedia Studio MX, Fireworks, etc. And all with a *nix underbelly that is only one click away, without any of the annoying split-personality disorder of cygwin - which I *LOVE* on my x86 work-supplied laptop, where it's my only reprieve from windows hell, but doesn't come close to the overall functionality of OSX. Unison (the newsreader) beats the living daylight out of ANY other newsreader - and I own licenses to NBPro and NewsLeecher; Keynote stands head and shoulders above any other presentation software package I've seen - and to bring a mac to a staff meeting for a presentation is a joy. While the other presenters are noodling with their video configurations and trying to get things to work, I plug in the projector, the mac recognizes it and brings it up, and keynote presents me with the control console on the powerbook's screen while the actual presentation appears on the projector. Add to that the fact that I have yet to have OS X crash on me, and you've got the stability of Linux with the operational latitude and software choice (nearly) of Windows.
Servers? Give me Linux. Desktop? OS X all the way.
I think it's probably less about Tiger *specifically* and more about the continued development of *nix 'for the masses'. As a *nix Systems Integrator, I have to say that working on OS X is the single best userspace experience I'm familiar with. I love Cygwin - it actually makes windows tolerable for people like me! - and KDE is the Bomb in free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer UIs - but OS X is The Word...:D
Mac OS continues to be the leader in ergonomics ( scores best in first-experience usability and adheres to 'interface design theory' better than competitors ) and now offers people like me hard core tech head access... click on "Terminal" and Viola! I'm in bash!!! ssh, awk, tr, ls - all of my good old friends are there. And can be integrated via AppleScript...
Perhaps it's post facto reasoning, but I would say that it's reasonable to require applescript to integrate *Nix and Aqua. For har-core *Nix guys, it's no big deal to create scripts. For Grandma, it's probably better if she'd insulated from 'rm -rf' *as far as possible*.
I've been a Linux fan since '95, although never a religious zealot; I listened to the Fanboys scream about Linux bringing unix to the masses, and I have to admit that there was a certain amount of smug satisfaction in my heart when Apple released OS X. Not because they beat Linux to the punch, but because it shut up a lot of those annoying brats on IRC.
I think gmail is the best overall webmail service available, but that cant' overcome the intertia of a yahoo account spawned in the earliest days of yahoo.com. I mean, that was what, 8 years, 10 years ago? Gmail can't possibly become cool enough to supercede the value of consistency over time. Now, if Yahoo would let me forward my mail to gmail... Hrm...
I would say that your CS class is atypical in the extreme. My company hires CS types to work in my department. I have been, on occasion, responsible for making them into useful employees. Very, very few have anything like the conceptual grasp of computer systems and associated arcana that the course you describe would require.
Most of the CS degree holders I meet describe long hours of tedious study of useless (in the vast majority of computer related jobs) COBOL on ancient and limited systems. Some describe hours of Novell training (and not the cool new SUSE-based stuff, I mean bindery context and the like) or, even worse, a lot of M$ crap that's not relevent to enterprise level computing. People who look at me like I've grown another head when I tell them to shift something right two bits or similar low-level concept.
" There once was a time where if you were a researcher at a university and you discovered something like this you'd actually go form a company and make a billion dollar industry."
Which I always thought was bull$hit. You go (usually) to a publicly funded university, you garner public grants for research funded by the taxpayer, you do seminal research in an eminently marketable process or technology, then you leave and profit, personally, with no remuneration of those who made it possible.
Or even worse, you sign a contract with an employer, and/they/ profit immensely, while you, the originator, and the University, and the Taxpayer, all get (more or less) cut out of the bargain - thrown the table scraps, as it were, in the form of salary and taxes.
Actually, US patent law is much more complex; I just went through the patent process for an invention. While you may have signed a contract with your company to render any relevant IP up to them, the patent process itself requires individuals. Your company may (as in my case) pay for the patent search and the patent preparation and the patent lawyers, but the application is made in the name of the individual inventors, who then assign exclusive rights to their company. Of course, the contract is executed prior to filing - or even doing much research.
I was assured by the patent attourney (on retainer to, but not employed by, my employer) that were I to refuse to assign exclusive patent rights to my employer, no development of the patent would go forward, and because it was specifically relevant to my job and developed on-the-job, a court case preventing me from exploiting it commerically would be a slam dunk, if I chose to try and patent-develop-profit myself. I did recieve a one time bonus, however.
Actually, I'm aware of an installation where a single (fairly robust) sun box is running at 200GB db size and 32 million LDAP entries on SunOne (descendant of the Netscape code). It sucks, but it works. Let's be honest - even the NS directory server is a nightmare to set up beyond the most rudimentary schema. Easier than OpenLDAP, true, but *easy*?
You're certainly correct about the specific *legal* application of the word "linux"; of course, 'linux' is not an operating system, in this context, but a kernel, as you illustrated. However, I think that you're being somewhat disingenuous here; your semantic objection to my statement that "linux does it", while technically accurate, doesn't address the fact that one merely has to go to the "***LINUX*** documentation project" and read the "***Linux*** Crash HOWTO" about the "***Linux*** Kernel Crash Dump" package found at lkcd.sourceforge.net.
So while you're right in your objection that Linus owns the trademark "linux",I would also note that your assertion that it's completely unambiguous is patently false; even the Linux Mark Institute confuses "Linux" with the Operating System on their front page... to wit:
"Similarly, if you are writing a product review, an engineering report, or even printing literature that merely refers to LINUX as the ***operating system***, as long as you indicate at least once by using the circle ® symbol that it is a registered mark, it is not necessary to obtain or hold a trademark license from LMI to use the name of ***the OS***."
***Emphasis mine***. In the end, I suspect that you are engaging in a red herring to disguise the fact that you were unaware that there existed GPL utilities for Linux that allowed it to perform a crash dump. So, while I don't condone 'name calling', and attempt to resist the impulse to participate in it, I also don't condone disingenuous objections designed to 'win' the 'debate' rather than 'resolve the issue' (whether or not a linux user may have a kernel crash dump like the other ***operating systems*** - including Windows, without a $20 shareware nag-screen laden utility - already offer.) at hand.
I'm certain someone else must have already pointed this out to you. Many types of windows BSOD's say "beginning dump of physcial memory"; they're writing to the disk. Solaris does it, Linux does it, Mac OSX does it. Of course there are failures that cause hardware to become unavailable, but those are usually hardware errors. All of the OS's we're talking about are fairly sophisticated, and they generate the blue screen or panic screen because someone is doing something naughty that leaves the kernel in question as to the status of memory, the stack, or other necessary functional bloc, so the kernel STOPS the system. In short, the vast majority of failures leave the kernel *quite* capable of writing to a designated crash pad, and every OS I've mentioned offers that option.
Um... We *don't* hear about it 'every time IE has an exploit'; just from the fixes I download through windows update on my work laptop described as fixes for security vulnerabilities in IE, I'd have to say that there would be little room for much else besides IE vulnerability posts. As has already been pointed out, we only hear about IE vulnerabilities when they are extremely serious in impact. The rest of the time, it's pretty much 'so what'?
Awesome that private industry is funding it. I can't wait to see how it makes out!
In the end, this kind of research will be vital to the survival of the race. I mean, after all, "Deep Impact" (or "Lucifer's Hammer", or any number of other similar stories) is only a matter of 'when', not 'if'; and if you believe many scientists, we're overdue already. So everybody buy a tee shirt and wish 'em well!
So, for that piece of crap, you say "a *lot* of stuff he says is 'true'" (emphasis mine), and the best you offer is that people using appellations like "Micro$oft" burns your ass? Come on. Maybe it's the "penis envy" part? Or the part about "Setting up a server in Windows takes a couple of minutes"? Sorry, I see a bunch of wanking and sour-graping, combined with outright lies, and a few pointed pokes at the Linux Zealot community - which I don't credit with any 'hit points' because this is obviously from someone who would like to be a Windows Zealot, but isn't competent... or maybe it's a Linux Zealot making Windows Zealots look like idiots?
... people complain about the alleged 'incompatibilities' between OOo and Word, but I'd just like to make it absolutely clear that Microsoft Word's single biggest competitor is LAST YEAR's version of *word*, not OOo or WordPerfect. That's why LAST YEAR's version of Word (or other past versions) will exhibit some of the same kinds of formatting errors that OOo does when opening a word document. That's if it doesn't outright refuse to open it ("You need a newer version of Word, or ask your source to save it in an old format").
I think it depends on what you use to format your Resume, I think. I didn't experience any incompatibilities going from OOo to Word at all; occasionally I see problems the other way when tables and the like get too deeeeeeply nested.
On the other hand, I've since switched to using HTML for my resumes, and have yet to see any complaints. And I can edit it in VIM if necessary, *and* I can simply post it on my website if I need to. (although nvu is much nicer to make a resume in )
Hey, let's not get ahead of yourself. You can't just define "/.ers" as though we're all of one mind. For my money, I *hate* enabling technology, and am *drooling* over opressive technology. I love Windows, and abhor Linux, and get the heebie-jeebies when someone talks about that OpenBSD. I think we should adopt government-transparent encryption in every phase of our data processes; I think we should have video cameras in our bedrooms to make sure that we're having "Approved" sex. DRM gives me wood.
How much do RFID-based ID's cost? Wonder what happens if people start surreptitiously installing de-RFIDers in, say, McDonald's doorframes, or malls. hrmm....
No, wait, that's evil thinking! That's against God, and heterosexuality, and my kid is dying over there so you have the right to say the same goddamned thing I am!
I ran it for about an hour; turns out it's lumpy when one deals with multiple proxy servers (work vs. home) and it broke Rhapsody in a BIG way. I'm sure the good folks at Google will sort it out eventually.
OTOH, one must consider whether or not one trusts Google with one's information that way. I wanted to check it out, but probably, in the long run, wouldn't have used it. But it's worth noting that millions of people use ISP proxy servers without even knowing it (think transparent proxies) or without understanding it (think "proxy.isp.com"). I can't imagine that Google's Accelerator would expose one *more* than that.
disclaimer - I live about six miles from the KS border in Indep, Mo, the place that Christ is supposed to return to; Kansas has no monopoly on religious zealotry/disclaimer
That said, I want to make one observation about the Trial to Make Monkeys of Kansans. When one begins discussions of TCP/IP, or general networking, or branch chain prediction, or locality of reference in data theory, people wave their hands and admit that it's so far over their heads that they couldn't possibly have an opinion on the subject without years of study and some experience. They know intrinsically that such complex and specialized knowledge informs situations and implications that they cannot *approach* at their current level of understanding.
And yet these same people will make completely unfounded assertions and express concrete opinions about things that are every bit as complex ( ie, cosmology and biology ) and specialized, characterizing anyone who doesn't agree with them as bigots of one flavor or another.
The fact is this: The "Intelligent Design" agenda completely dismisses the Scientific Method informed by thousands of years of reasoning, and refined to a hard point by Karl Popper. Not that it's a dogma, but it's a very good yardstick to use as a bullshit detector.
In the end, the claims of ID could be 100% true, but they *would not be 'scientific'*; science and religion ask, and answer, entirely different questions. It's only when adherents of one or the other become sufficiently confused by scope and ontology that we start to have this kind of buffoonery in the Public Forum.
I happen to be one of the many, many individuals who 'decried the forced consensus that there were WMDs in Iraq'; There was far too much trumped up 'evidence' for me to believe that it was an 'innocent mistake'; and anyone who can read "A Plan for a New American Century" and the tenets of the Project For a New American Century - along with their letter to Big Bill urging the invasion of Iraq, their assertions that we needed a 'new Perl Harbor', and still suggest that it was all an 'innocent mistake', is, IMO, afflicted with extreme Ostrichitis.
OTOH, I happen to think that Global Warming is probably the result of normal (over geological time) variances in global temperature, but this doesn't lead me to the conclusion you *seem* to have drawn, that curtailing our contributions of greenhouse gasses is futile and counterproductive. I think that it's a fairly high probability that the Earth's climate is a chaotic system, and as such, our contribution *might*, in fact, affect the future climate.
Either way, I see no sin in reducing the profligate amount of pollution we contribute to the environment, and think that a reduction can only have a positive effect on the future.
So, keep your sneering, misguided commie references to yourself.:D
I concur, as far as it goes; politics at the social level is almost trivially simple. It's easy, as you say, to collect friends one has no need of or desire for. The only caveat I would add is that frequently people begin to believe - regardless of their intellect - that honesty is more effective than politics. It's more a failure of idealism than one of intellect.:D
And I don't care whether your on the left, the right, the top, or the bottom, if you can't tell that man's an idiot, I've got some protected land in Alaska for you to set up drilling operations on. And a Nucular Power Plant that's safe from 'suiciders'.
Inventing the internet, do you think he might have spent a LITTLE more time dealing the the/. effect?
Remember, Al is they guy that lots of people didn't vote for because he was "too smart". *sigh* Instead, we deprived some poor villiage in Texas the use of their idiot for eight long years.
Interesting! Thanks for the heads up, I'll go look. I've always heard them harping on the 'high cost of CD distribution'; perhaps it was last year's propaganda...
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the heads up; I'll look into Xara Extreme and see what's up. I've used (and do use) Inkscape, and it IS cool, but it's not Illustrator, not by a mile. Now, if you can tell me that Ableton Live, or Cubase SX - or even Sonar - has been opensourced, I'll jump up and down in ecstacy! :D
I've been a Linux user since 1995, and have been various kinds of a linux zealot for years. I love KDE, and Gnome is OK. I have come to despise windows, but I have been using windows on a PC because of the audio utilities; and it's too much trouble to reboot into linux to do other stuff, then boot back into windows to fire up Tracktion or Ableton Live. And before anyone gets excited, yes, I have Agnula/Demudi installed, yes, it's cool, but it's NOT Tracktion or Ableton live.
And anyone that tells you that Linux is a great desktop OS in a thread about Mac OS X simply hasn't had enough experience with OSX. I'm a convert, and as soon as I can sell my m-audio Delta 1010LT and my 3Ghz HT P4, I'll buy a firewire audio interface and be done with it. I have tracktion and Ableton Live on Mac, and they both work approximately the same interface wise on the Mac. On Mac I can also use lightwave - and blender isn't close; I can use Adobe CS 2 - and the Gimp is cool, but not cool enough to compete with CS (Illustrator - no comparable vector package for linux). NVU is available for linux, and I use it there, but it's also available for Mac, and so is Macromedia Studio MX, Fireworks, etc. And all with a *nix underbelly that is only one click away, without any of the annoying split-personality disorder of cygwin - which I *LOVE* on my x86 work-supplied laptop, where it's my only reprieve from windows hell, but doesn't come close to the overall functionality of OSX. Unison (the newsreader) beats the living daylight out of ANY other newsreader - and I own licenses to NBPro and NewsLeecher; Keynote stands head and shoulders above any other presentation software package I've seen - and to bring a mac to a staff meeting for a presentation is a joy. While the other presenters are noodling with their video configurations and trying to get things to work, I plug in the projector, the mac recognizes it and brings it up, and keynote presents me with the control console on the powerbook's screen while the actual presentation appears on the projector. Add to that the fact that I have yet to have OS X crash on me, and you've got the stability of Linux with the operational latitude and software choice (nearly) of Windows.
Servers? Give me Linux. Desktop? OS X all the way.
I would just point out that the GPU maths are usually limited precision, so they would lend little assistance for many high precision functions...
I think it's probably less about Tiger *specifically* and more about the continued development of *nix 'for the masses'. As a *nix Systems Integrator, I have to say that working on OS X is the single best userspace experience I'm familiar with. I love Cygwin - it actually makes windows tolerable for people like me! - and KDE is the Bomb in free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer UIs - but OS X is The Word... :D
Mac OS continues to be the leader in ergonomics ( scores best in first-experience usability and adheres to 'interface design theory' better than competitors ) and now offers people like me hard core tech head access... click on "Terminal" and Viola! I'm in bash!!! ssh, awk, tr, ls - all of my good old friends are there. And can be integrated via AppleScript...
Perhaps it's post facto reasoning, but I would say that it's reasonable to require applescript to integrate *Nix and Aqua. For har-core *Nix guys, it's no big deal to create scripts. For Grandma, it's probably better if she'd insulated from 'rm -rf' *as far as possible*.
I've been a Linux fan since '95, although never a religious zealot; I listened to the Fanboys scream about Linux bringing unix to the masses, and I have to admit that there was a certain amount of smug satisfaction in my heart when Apple released OS X. Not because they beat Linux to the punch, but because it shut up a lot of those annoying brats on IRC.
I think gmail is the best overall webmail service available, but that cant' overcome the intertia of a yahoo account spawned in the earliest days of yahoo.com. I mean, that was what, 8 years, 10 years ago? Gmail can't possibly become cool enough to supercede the value of consistency over time. Now, if Yahoo would let me forward my mail to gmail... Hrm...
I would say that your CS class is atypical in the extreme. My company hires CS types to work in my department. I have been, on occasion, responsible for making them into useful employees. Very, very few have anything like the conceptual grasp of computer systems and associated arcana that the course you describe would require.
Most of the CS degree holders I meet describe long hours of tedious study of useless (in the vast majority of computer related jobs) COBOL on ancient and limited systems. Some describe hours of Novell training (and not the cool new SUSE-based stuff, I mean bindery context and the like) or, even worse, a lot of M$ crap that's not relevent to enterprise level computing. People who look at me like I've grown another head when I tell them to shift something right two bits or similar low-level concept.
" There once was a time where if you were a researcher at a university and you discovered something like this you'd actually go form a company and make a billion dollar industry."
/they/ profit immensely, while you, the originator, and the University, and the Taxpayer, all get (more or less) cut out of the bargain - thrown the table scraps, as it were, in the form of salary and taxes.
Which I always thought was bull$hit. You go (usually) to a publicly funded university, you garner public grants for research funded by the taxpayer, you do seminal research in an eminently marketable process or technology, then you leave and profit, personally, with no remuneration of those who made it possible.
Or even worse, you sign a contract with an employer, and
Actually, US patent law is much more complex; I just went through the patent process for an invention. While you may have signed a contract with your company to render any relevant IP up to them, the patent process itself requires individuals. Your company may (as in my case) pay for the patent search and the patent preparation and the patent lawyers, but the application is made in the name of the individual inventors, who then assign exclusive rights to their company. Of course, the contract is executed prior to filing - or even doing much research.
I was assured by the patent attourney (on retainer to, but not employed by, my employer) that were I to refuse to assign exclusive patent rights to my employer, no development of the patent would go forward, and because it was specifically relevant to my job and developed on-the-job, a court case preventing me from exploiting it commerically would be a slam dunk, if I chose to try and patent-develop-profit myself. I did recieve a one time bonus, however.
Actually, I'm aware of an installation where a single (fairly robust) sun box is running at 200GB db size and 32 million LDAP entries on SunOne (descendant of the Netscape code). It sucks, but it works. Let's be honest - even the NS directory server is a nightmare to set up beyond the most rudimentary schema. Easier than OpenLDAP, true, but *easy*?
You're certainly correct about the specific *legal* application of the word "linux"; of course, 'linux' is not an operating system, in this context, but a kernel, as you illustrated. However, I think that you're being somewhat disingenuous here; your semantic objection to my statement that "linux does it", while technically accurate, doesn't address the fact that one merely has to go to the "***LINUX*** documentation project" and read the "***Linux*** Crash HOWTO" about the "***Linux*** Kernel Crash Dump" package found at lkcd.sourceforge.net.
So while you're right in your objection that Linus owns the trademark "linux",I would also note that your assertion that it's completely unambiguous is patently false; even the Linux Mark Institute confuses "Linux" with the Operating System on their front page... to wit:
"Similarly, if you are writing a product review, an engineering report, or even printing literature that merely refers to LINUX as the ***operating system***, as long as you indicate at least once by using the circle ® symbol that it is a registered mark, it is not necessary to obtain or hold a trademark license from LMI to use the name of ***the OS***."
***Emphasis mine***. In the end, I suspect that you are engaging in a red herring to disguise the fact that you were unaware that there existed GPL utilities for Linux that allowed it to perform a crash dump. So, while I don't condone 'name calling', and attempt to resist the impulse to participate in it, I also don't condone disingenuous objections designed to 'win' the 'debate' rather than 'resolve the issue' (whether or not a linux user may have a kernel crash dump like the other ***operating systems*** - including Windows, without a $20 shareware nag-screen laden utility - already offer.) at hand.
I'm certain someone else must have already pointed this out to you. Many types of windows BSOD's say "beginning dump of physcial memory"; they're writing to the disk. Solaris does it, Linux does it, Mac OSX does it. Of course there are failures that cause hardware to become unavailable, but those are usually hardware errors. All of the OS's we're talking about are fairly sophisticated, and they generate the blue screen or panic screen because someone is doing something naughty that leaves the kernel in question as to the status of memory, the stack, or other necessary functional bloc, so the kernel STOPS the system. In short, the vast majority of failures leave the kernel *quite* capable of writing to a designated crash pad, and every OS I've mentioned offers that option.
Um... We *don't* hear about it 'every time IE has an exploit'; just from the fixes I download through windows update on my work laptop described as fixes for security vulnerabilities in IE, I'd have to say that there would be little room for much else besides IE vulnerability posts. As has already been pointed out, we only hear about IE vulnerabilities when they are extremely serious in impact. The rest of the time, it's pretty much 'so what'?
Awesome that private industry is funding it. I can't wait to see how it makes out!
In the end, this kind of research will be vital to the survival of the race. I mean, after all, "Deep Impact" (or "Lucifer's Hammer", or any number of other similar stories) is only a matter of 'when', not 'if'; and if you believe many scientists, we're overdue already. So everybody buy a tee shirt and wish 'em well!
So, for that piece of crap, you say "a *lot* of stuff he says is 'true'" (emphasis mine), and the best you offer is that people using appellations like "Micro$oft" burns your ass? Come on. Maybe it's the "penis envy" part? Or the part about "Setting up a server in Windows takes a couple of minutes"? Sorry, I see a bunch of wanking and sour-graping, combined with outright lies, and a few pointed pokes at the Linux Zealot community - which I don't credit with any 'hit points' because this is obviously from someone who would like to be a Windows Zealot, but isn't competent... or maybe it's a Linux Zealot making Windows Zealots look like idiots?
... people complain about the alleged 'incompatibilities' between OOo and Word, but I'd just like to make it absolutely clear that Microsoft Word's single biggest competitor is LAST YEAR's version of *word*, not OOo or WordPerfect. That's why LAST YEAR's version of Word (or other past versions) will exhibit some of the same kinds of formatting errors that OOo does when opening a word document. That's if it doesn't outright refuse to open it ("You need a newer version of Word, or ask your source to save it in an old format").
I think it depends on what you use to format your Resume, I think. I didn't experience any incompatibilities going from OOo to Word at all; occasionally I see problems the other way when tables and the like get too deeeeeeply nested.
On the other hand, I've since switched to using HTML for my resumes, and have yet to see any complaints. And I can edit it in VIM if necessary, *and* I can simply post it on my website if I need to. (although nvu is much nicer to make a resume in )
Hey, let's not get ahead of yourself. You can't just define "/.ers" as though we're all of one mind. For my money, I *hate* enabling technology, and am *drooling* over opressive technology. I love Windows, and abhor Linux, and get the heebie-jeebies when someone talks about that OpenBSD. I think we should adopt government-transparent encryption in every phase of our data processes; I think we should have video cameras in our bedrooms to make sure that we're having "Approved" sex. DRM gives me wood. How much do RFID-based ID's cost? Wonder what happens if people start surreptitiously installing de-RFIDers in, say, McDonald's doorframes, or malls. hrmm.... No, wait, that's evil thinking! That's against God, and heterosexuality, and my kid is dying over there so you have the right to say the same goddamned thing I am!
I ran it for about an hour; turns out it's lumpy when one deals with multiple proxy servers (work vs. home) and it broke Rhapsody in a BIG way. I'm sure the good folks at Google will sort it out eventually.
OTOH, one must consider whether or not one trusts Google with one's information that way. I wanted to check it out, but probably, in the long run, wouldn't have used it. But it's worth noting that millions of people use ISP proxy servers without even knowing it (think transparent proxies) or without understanding it (think "proxy.isp.com"). I can't imagine that Google's Accelerator would expose one *more* than that.
disclaimer - I live about six miles from the KS border in Indep, Mo, the place that Christ is supposed to return to; Kansas has no monopoly on religious zealotry /disclaimer
That said, I want to make one observation about the Trial to Make Monkeys of Kansans. When one begins discussions of TCP/IP, or general networking, or branch chain prediction, or locality of reference in data theory, people wave their hands and admit that it's so far over their heads that they couldn't possibly have an opinion on the subject without years of study and some experience. They know intrinsically that such complex and specialized knowledge informs situations and implications that they cannot *approach* at their current level of understanding.
And yet these same people will make completely unfounded assertions and express concrete opinions about things that are every bit as complex ( ie, cosmology and biology ) and specialized, characterizing anyone who doesn't agree with them as bigots of one flavor or another.
The fact is this: The "Intelligent Design" agenda completely dismisses the Scientific Method informed by thousands of years of reasoning, and refined to a hard point by Karl Popper. Not that it's a dogma, but it's a very good yardstick to use as a bullshit detector.
In the end, the claims of ID could be 100% true, but they *would not be 'scientific'*; science and religion ask, and answer, entirely different questions. It's only when adherents of one or the other become sufficiently confused by scope and ontology that we start to have this kind of buffoonery in the Public Forum.
I happen to be one of the many, many individuals who 'decried the forced consensus that there were WMDs in Iraq'; There was far too much trumped up 'evidence' for me to believe that it was an 'innocent mistake'; and anyone who can read "A Plan for a New American Century" and the tenets of the Project For a New American Century - along with their letter to Big Bill urging the invasion of Iraq, their assertions that we needed a 'new Perl Harbor', and still suggest that it was all an 'innocent mistake', is, IMO, afflicted with extreme Ostrichitis.
:D
OTOH, I happen to think that Global Warming is probably the result of normal (over geological time) variances in global temperature, but this doesn't lead me to the conclusion you *seem* to have drawn, that curtailing our contributions of greenhouse gasses is futile and counterproductive. I think that it's a fairly high probability that the Earth's climate is a chaotic system, and as such, our contribution *might*, in fact, affect the future climate.
Either way, I see no sin in reducing the profligate amount of pollution we contribute to the environment, and think that a reduction can only have a positive effect on the future.
So, keep your sneering, misguided commie references to yourself.
I concur, as far as it goes; politics at the social level is almost trivially simple. It's easy, as you say, to collect friends one has no need of or desire for. The only caveat I would add is that frequently people begin to believe - regardless of their intellect - that honesty is more effective than politics. It's more a failure of idealism than one of intellect. :D
And I don't care whether your on the left, the right, the top, or the bottom, if you can't tell that man's an idiot, I've got some protected land in Alaska for you to set up drilling operations on. And a Nucular Power Plant that's safe from 'suiciders'.
I would agree in almost every contest but one of popularity.
Inventing the internet, do you think he might have spent a LITTLE more time dealing the the /. effect?
Remember, Al is they guy that lots of people didn't vote for because he was "too smart". *sigh* Instead, we deprived some poor villiage in Texas the use of their idiot for eight long years.
Interesting! Thanks for the heads up, I'll go look. I've always heard them harping on the 'high cost of CD distribution'; perhaps it was last year's propaganda...