Spitzer will likely run for NY governer next, but as far as I am concerned, he could run for the US Presidency. I know I would vote for him. And as president, it might not take too terribly long before the "current regime in power" would be sitting in the ICC docket at the Hague. (One can dream, right?)
Good golly no! Absolutely no need to patent anything like this. All that's needed is a NDA and licensing similar to MSFT's EULA. Tampering with the device to reverse engineer it will result in all safeguards/reaction controls to be disabled. Then self-immolation will kick in to preserve the IP. Pretty simple, really.
I note that your post has not yet been modded -1 OT, so I must presume that the editors must have found some semblance to reality, if even in some parallel universe.
Unless I am mistaken, the good old USA has not (yet) reverted to some feudal society -- right now it can more accurately classified as "Corporate National Socialism" (, although that term is somewhat redundant). We have at least 3 more years of "King George II" before the nazism morphs into the feudal society.
(BTW: With a wee bit of historical digging, it is not too difficult to dredge up where the Bush Dynasty's infatuation with National Socialism began -- grandfather Prescott Bush got into some real hot water over his political leanings.)
The Dubya regime has bent over backwards to facilitate employer hiring of illegal aliens. The net result is employers get really cheap labor, and the US taxpayers are subsidizing these employers. There isn't much money that these employers can kick into SS and Medicare for these illegal aliens, because they aren't really "here", and they aren't getting minimum wage. But a lot of states under financial pressure from the Feds "unfunded mandates" has brought their public health departments to the brink of bankruptcy.
I am all for immigration -- legal immigration, only. Depending upon which official is asked (and how politically correct) the number of illegal aliens in the USA is somewhere between 12 and 28 million. And while millions of illegal aliens slip across our borders, they are breaking our laws (sometimes with what they bring with them). In the mean time, persons seeking legal immigration into the USA are forced to wait years (and sometimes a decade or more) for their chance to emmigrate here.
Illegal aliens do not pass through a modern Ellis Island, and the rates of pneumonia, TB, and other diseases have skyrocketed in all the border states, as well as any jurisdiction where illegals congregate. The only way these illegal aliens can remain in the USA undetected is through identity theft and bogus identification. There is no way that Dubya or the DHS can assure the real American citizens that violent criminals, drug pushers, agents/sappers of foreign governments, or terrorists are not among those that slip across our borders.
The ever increasing clammor amongst politicians and employers for more cheaper labor reminds me of the rationale used to justify slavery in this country 150 years ago. IMHO, the Republican Party has long ago fallen from the grace they achieved in their opposition to slavery. The more politically correct term these days is "wage-slavery", and it is alive and well. How many people today don't have (and cannot afford) health insurance, let alone having both parents working only to just barely get by? Nearly all those things most necessary for survival and betterment in the USA do not get counted in the CPI (Consumer Price Index) -- things like health care, housing, heating, and higher education have been increasing at nearly double digit rates. When was the last time that the minimum wage went up, let alone at a rate that actually keeps up with the real rate of inflation?
NASA HAS contracted Condi Rice to build a quantum wire 1 meter in length. Four years is plenty of time for her to pull a carbon thread out of her ass. And like the old fable, maybe she CAN teach that horse to talk.
Just like Haliburton, Condi is looking for that "brass ring" called the no-bid, sole-source government contract. You cannot really expect her to get by on the $250K USD per year that being Secretary of State pays. She has ritzy dresses and matching shoes to buy.
Besides, don't you think that Dubya owes her something extra for that "performance" in front of the 9-11 Commission? This is yet another example of the "Peter Priciple" applied to the top echelon of political appointees, run amok, because she sure didn't do the country any service with her role as the "National Security Advisor".
So, analog broadcast television is scheduled to go "dark" just after the nationalmid-term elections. The protestations of the liberal news media will finally be silenced, a full five years after the still-unsolved anthrax letter attacks against them. And the neo-con "revolution" that started with a Republican Supreme Court appointing the US President in 2000 will have be virtually complete. Without free over-the-air analog TV news to keep people informed, the US Constitution and Bill of Rights can finally be put out of the current regime in power's misery.
It is not as if most (USA) television content has gotten better over the past five years. It looks like the RIAA and MPAA will be expecting a big boost in sales, as well as a large attendance upsurge in the nation's church/mosque/synagoge(s) to accommidate the entertainment-starved American public. All the world's religious fundamentalists will be able to take heart in the "progress" of the American public towards true enlightenment.
Issues like DRM broadcast flag crippled digital TV and digital radio will mean the end of the uncontrolled theft of media IP, even for time shifting. It is not as if the FCC "standards" are not still evolving to accomidate the **AA, rather than the public. That, and steep prices for all the new equipment have already made widespread DTV adoption by the end of 2006 likely.
I suspect that either the internet or else public libraries (or both) will become more popular also. Hope the libraries will have all stocked up on "My Pet Goat" by then...
Requirements for use of an "official SDK" effectively limits access through "non-approved" OSes or IDEs. Any requirement to sign an NDA for access to Nikon's programming information automagically eliminates F/OSS projects from participating. And any requirement for a programmer to be associated with a commercial software entity excludes the F/OSS "hobbyist" tinkerer.
Nikon may have reasonably good products, but as both a hobbyist photographer AND a hobbyist programmer, I will stay away from ANY Nikon products until their corporate attitude changes. It is not as if there are no competing brands of photo equipment in the marketplace that will meet BOTH of my hobbies. And Canon has some really nice products.
I have a fairly good memory, but not a lot of useful links. Social security numbers are/were supposed to be a privileged (or secret) number for a contract between a taxpayer and the government.
Just a couple of years ago, a group of Social Security Administration employees at the Federal Hill (Baltimore, MD) facility were arrested for selling lists of SSNs.
And in the past few years, employees of at least 3 DMV (Department of Motor Vehicle) offices (VA, DC, CO) were arrested for selling bona fide drivers licenses based upon fraudulent core identification.
The USA has between 12 million and 28 million (data varies according to the PC-ness of who is asked) illegal aliens residing here. Porous borders and seaports, insufficient funding, and the PC-ness of politicians unwilling to enforce existing laws has created a bureaucratic and security nightmare. Not only do officials not know how many illegal aliens are in the country, they are also clueless as to who they are or what they are up to.
While economic fraud is a portion of the impetus for identity theft, a far larger part of this problem can be directly attributed to the issue of illegal aliens and their efforts to obtain a "cover" identity. Identity theft must be addressed by a biometrically secure National ID card, stricter penalties for producing and using false documentation, and actually enforcing immigration laws. Underfunding enforcement has resulted in a lassefaire attitude among law enforcement officials al all levels of government, including a nonsensical "catch and release" policy by INS. ("You broke into the country illegally, but we are going to trust you to voluntarily show up for your heqaring in front of an immigration judge.")
The only things I can suggest is to contact your representatives in regard to the "Real ID Act" and immigration enforcement, remove all mention of your SSN from driver's license and checkbooks, shred all out-of-date personal financial information, stay in touch with your SS office regarding annual statements, and keep a close watch on your credit reports.
ECC memory is great at detecting and correcting single bit errors, but fails when it comes to correcting multiple bit errors. There was a technique one of my college instructors discussed called Huffman Encoding that could be used to correct a number of bit errors. While it is a robust technique, it would consume 75% of data storage for the correction bits.
BTW, does anyone out there have info on any modern hardware adaptations of Huffman Encoding?
After studying a number of video clips of Dubya making ad hoc quips/speeches (as opposed to the "canned" party line), I am inclined to agree with the submitter. The PDB's should have been redesigned to match the "My Pet Goat" format, including graphics.
Some people really just don't "get it". As a relatively early (1993) adopter of Wintel SMP, I can tell you that a multithreaded OS combined with some multithreaded apps can be significantly faster than single processor systems. (I used SMP to improve throughput in Photoshop, and rendering speed in 3D-Studio.)
Since 1993, I have been doing BYO with computers, and have found that, except for gaming, SMP (combined with SCSI disks) has proved to be a pleasant experience. Multitasking is limited mostly by the amount of memory in the system. SMP seems to provide for a "smoother" user experience (not having run benchmarks for quite some time).
CPU speed alone is no way to judge the value of a system -- something Intel has been far too quick to tout for many years. Throughput is what really counts. Differing CPU architectures (MIPS/SPARC/INTEL) and system design play a far larger role than the clockspeed. I have seen moderately large databases choke on a single CPU Intel box that would fly on a significantly slower clocked 64-bit SMP SPARC or MIPS computer.
IMHO, I am quite glad that Dell has decided to stay out of the AMD business, since the HP and SUN Opteron systems already work quite well. Dell is the "Wal-Mart" of computer hardware vendors, and I don't think they could do the Opteron (or dual core Opteron) justice, except lowball pricing.
Welcome to the People's Democratic Republic of the United States of North America. We aren't "of the people", nor "a democracy", nor even "a republic" any more. And. of course, the new name is also highly misleading for another reason -- the name implies a Communist country. Instead, we are now a country "by the corporation", "of the people", and "for the corporation" -- Corporate National Socialism (, but with a religious fundamentalist twist).
The Federal government now uses the taxpayers' money to fund propaganda to convince the people that everything the government is doing is in the people's interest, while promoting corporate interests instead. Using taxpayer money for data, research, and analysis of weather patterns should be available to those taxpayers. Dubya's regime has removed much of the open decision-making in government that is the basis for real democracy. Without accountability there can be no balance of power between the three branches of government.
It is said that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. I fear that the imperial hubris of the current regime in power will not be willing to relinquish that power when state and national elections no longer favor those in power. I am reminded of a video blurb from Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9-11" movie in which Dubya is quoted as saying that "a dictatorship would be far easier (to rule)". I believe that it was no "accident" or "misunderstanding" when the FEC came out publically with the "trial balloon" of postponing the 2004 national elections, something that has never before been contemplated, even during the bloody Civil War. We have already seen the wholesale corruption of the bonds of trust between the government and the people in so many issues. The Bush administration's spin machine has thus far been working (overtime) to their advantage, but it will not always be thus.
While there is provision within the US Constitution for bounty hunters and privateers, the raising of private armies was not endorsed. The ramp-up of private security contractors for use in the war in Iraq (part of that coalition of the willing) has led to the creation of private armies. Just today, a helicopter filled with mercenaries from Blackwater Corp. was shot out of the skies of Iraq. No doubt that as the Iraqi conflict eventually winds down, these mercenaries will find useful employment protecting the likes of these neo-con politicians.
So, to coin MSFT's phrasiology "SCO Group believes that the SVR4 code they licensed from Novell/AT&T is even more "viral" than F/OSS licenses like GPL."
As MSFT's handmaiden in this battle with IBM over linux, SCO Group should have realized that their release of Caldera code under GPL would taint any suit against IBM. They should also have realized that the AT&T/BSD court battle of 20 years ago cannot be overturned just because they now have MSFT on their side.
The only marginally possible thing that could happen as an outcome to this SCO Group/IBM battle that could be harmful to linux is for the F/OSS GPL to be ruled invalid. This wouldn't help SCO Group much, but would take the wind out of the sails of all F/OSS efforts based upon anything but BSD. Which is exactly what MSFT would have wanted.
Not, apparently, in the democratic repubic of the USA. No legislator actually read the USA Patriot Act (I) before voting for it -- it came directly from the neo-con (oxymoron warning) think tanks (oxymoron warning) where it quietly evolved for nearly two decades. Not unlike many of the other Dubya rantings, like the Social Security "crisis". The neo-con (oxymoron warning) agenda doesn't make much economic sense, at least from Dubya's lips, since the context this "agenda" has been pulled from doesn't actually match the reality on the ground. Just like the Iraqi WMD the USA went to war over.
Sure, you New Zealanders are/were part of the British Empire, just like India, South Africa, etc. The Brits were really good at shipping cheap labor wherever they needed it to power their colonial economies. Which is a big part of the reason why there are so many Indians in SA and Malaysia -- the Indian diaspora was a British invention.
And now the shoe (sandal?) is on the other foot, now with many of the good jobs easily moving to where the labor is cheapest. I'm sure that that sweet irony is not lost on the Indian government. When my job has moved to India, however, I will not be following it there. Perhaps I will revert to that older profession, raising sheep and goats on my tea "plantation". (One thing, though. I will be encouraging my children to get into the construction trades, since those cannot be outsourced until remote control robots get way better.)
Yes, you want to move. But what makes you think that that illustrated book on the Kama Sutra will survive the move from your parent's basement? Or that moving to India will improve your chances one whit of actually getting layed?
Most of the more than one billion citizens of India still regard caste, family status, job, and size of dowery more important than your unique foreign-ness.
So your chances of "scoring" over there really aren't any better than here. Get a life! Are you willing to give up baseball for cricket, and football for soccer?
The cultural shock will do you in, if the bad water and the diseases don't. (Take it from someone who has already checked it out.)
Please be careful about what you say. After 9-11, Dubya spake thus "If you are not with "us", then you are for the terrorists." With the USA Patriot Act (I) and all that has followed, this has also come to mean (1) the political opposition (aka the "anthrax letters"), the **AA (""pirates" are terrorists"), etc.
What this country does not need is yet another law - what this country needs is a regime in power that respects the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, and uniformly enforces those laws already on the books. The current administration "talks the talk" about the "war on terror", but OBL is stil on the loose; talks about homeland security, but the borders and seaports are mostly unguarded; talks about the Social Security "crisis", but Medicare has been given a prescription "poison pill" and SS is more greatly threatened by Bush's "Realization" plan; beats the American people over the head with the drumbeat of threats of terror, but ships live anthrax and pandemic flu willy-nilly across the country; talks up a manned mission to Mars, but cuts NASA funding except for "militarized" robotics.
If Dubya were to go on live TV and report tomorrow's weather as sunny and warm, I would pack my umbrella.
But you are absolutely right. The way for a disgruntled public to express their displeasure with the current state of affairs IS to quit buying movies and music. Of course, the **AA will claim that their latest economic losses are due to even more piracy, and will generate even more draconian counter-measures. But hell's bells -- I say fsck them all!
Andrew and Linus have been doing a fantastic job on the linux kernel. CA apparently has their knickers in a knot because they expect someone else to build the enterprise kernel that they need/want. F/OSS is great in this regard, especially the kernel. Build it in, or leave it out -- how hard is that?
And major F/OSS projects like linux aren't artificially hampered by the commercial OS vendors that want to sell a "desktop" version and a "server" version, or worse yet charge per client licenses (WTF!) Linux is imminently tweekable, runs on everything from embedded ARM7 to supercomputer cluster IA64. Stable linux distributions like Slackware offer far more compatability from desktop to server than RedHat's offerings (okay, FC4 is a "committee" project, not unlike the proverbial horse that became a camel).
Perhaps CA just needs to hire some F/OSS consultants -- they could get on the cluetrain just by lurking on the forums like slashdot. So to CA, I say "Quit you're mewing!".
Lets see... unified interface (IE), thin client, network enabled, server-based apps and storage. Yessiree, Bob. It's WebTV.
This is bound to tie in very nicely with (1) broadband internet, (2) DRM like Palladium, (3) profit center for metered applications, (4) profit center for remote storage, (5) automated updates. The TCO calculations suddenly become quite easy to make, and the business/user just deals with a monthly bill, just like with their cellphone(s).
MSFT did, apparently, think highly enough of your data to make each incident of data loss (due to MSFT's OSes or applications) worth $5.00 USD.
It hasn't been as if MSFT would actually put the $40 Billion USD they have stashed away at risk . They have offered to stand behind their products by exactly $5.00 USD worth. Considering that they should know better than anyone else what the quality of their software is, I don't see how this posting is even considered "news".
No doubt the Texas "neo-cons" (an oximoron) do not want any truckers to access p0rn anong the dusty trail -- that might negatively impact the business prospects of the "highway hookers".
Everybody knows that these "highway hookers" are only a few steps removed from being "respectible" Texas Republicans -- needing only the price of admission into the local Rotarians. And those Texas "compassionate conservative" (another oximoron) Christians would hate to see a decrease in the tithes and offerings on Sunday morning.
Texas, and expecially West Texas, has a proud history of supporting their hookers and their whorehouses. So who couldn't have seen this development on the TX WiFi horizon?
Jeez! No offense, but you must be a really old fsckr! Since that had to have been before 2-way police radios. ("You can't outrun a Motorola.")
Top speeds back then must have been all of 70 MPH - not fast by today's standards, except that the roads were mostly cowpaths.
On a side note, I don't know if it is a matter of road congestion, diminishing social mores, or a general lack of traffic enforcement, but it seems that there are far more people these days that ignore traffic regulations and common sense in the way they drive. Except for an unexpected hardware failure, most traffic "accidents" these days are not accidents but driver stupidity and/or reckless disregard for safety.
1993 is the year that I switched over to SMP systems and never looked back (excepting an Apple notebook computer - never could quite justify that SMP Sparc notebook).
Intel's latest efforts would appear to be an improvement on their HT technology, until you factor in the power required, and heat generated. On those specs, AMD has a far superior dual core processor. But for high density blade servers or for notebook use, I anticipate that IMB/Sony's cell processor will be the way to go.
The new web browser, just like the old web browser, that eliminates all that glitzy eye candy (and p0rn) that chews up unnecessary bandwidth. I, for one, welcome our new lynx-enabled webmaster overlords!
The bankrupt and failed telcos of the dot-bomb era (WorldCom, PSINet, Global Crossing, etcetera) cranked out a huge amount of "dark fiber" that is now being used to help off-shore out-source USA's IP and high tech jobs to China & India & elsewhere.
If the same resources had been used to build out the USA's fiber infrastructure (like FTTP) instead of "other places", the USA would be "numero uno" in percentage of broadband usage, unstead of 11th-going-on-50th. The regional "Baby Bells" were not interested then, and now it's pretty much too late -- the pool of cheap USA and foreign capital to fund such ambitious projects has been drying up.
The most critical and most expensive part of widespread broadband access is "the last mile". The USA has a regime in power that caters to the short term interests of their corporate owners/sponsers, whose financial goals are contrary to the longer term improvements in communications infrastructure that broadband access represents. Instead, we find both state and federal governments helping their corporate bretheren to monopolistically stake out municipal wireless markets that the telcos have otherwise shown no particular interest in, if only to lock out any possible future competition.
Slashdot Mirror
1x(Mark Spitzer) = 100x(John Ashcroft)
Spitzer will likely run for NY governer next, but as far as I am concerned, he could run for the US Presidency. I know I would vote for him. And as president, it might not take too terribly long before the "current regime in power" would be sitting in the ICC docket at the Hague. (One can dream, right?)
Good golly no! Absolutely no need to patent anything like this. All that's needed is a NDA and licensing similar to MSFT's EULA. Tampering with the device to reverse engineer it will result in all safeguards/reaction controls to be disabled. Then self-immolation will kick in to preserve the IP. Pretty simple, really.
I note that your post has not yet been modded -1 OT, so I must presume that the editors must have found some semblance to reality, if even in some parallel universe.
Unless I am mistaken, the good old USA has not (yet) reverted to some feudal society -- right now it can more accurately classified as "Corporate National Socialism" (, although that term is somewhat redundant). We have at least 3 more years of "King George II" before the nazism morphs into the feudal society.
(BTW: With a wee bit of historical digging, it is not too difficult to dredge up where the Bush Dynasty's infatuation with National Socialism began -- grandfather Prescott Bush got into some real hot water over his political leanings.)
What a load of huey!
The Dubya regime has bent over backwards to facilitate employer hiring of illegal aliens. The net result is employers get really cheap labor, and the US taxpayers are subsidizing these employers. There isn't much money that these employers can kick into SS and Medicare for these illegal aliens, because they aren't really "here", and they aren't getting minimum wage. But a lot of states under financial pressure from the Feds "unfunded mandates" has brought their public health departments to the brink of bankruptcy.
I am all for immigration -- legal immigration, only. Depending upon which official is asked (and how politically correct) the number of illegal aliens in the USA is somewhere between 12 and 28 million. And while millions of illegal aliens slip across our borders, they are breaking our laws (sometimes with what they bring with them). In the mean time, persons seeking legal immigration into the USA are forced to wait years (and sometimes a decade or more) for their chance to emmigrate here.
Illegal aliens do not pass through a modern Ellis Island, and the rates of pneumonia, TB, and other diseases have skyrocketed in all the border states, as well as any jurisdiction where illegals congregate. The only way these illegal aliens can remain in the USA undetected is through identity theft and bogus identification. There is no way that Dubya or the DHS can assure the real American citizens that violent criminals, drug pushers, agents/sappers of foreign governments, or terrorists are not among those that slip across our borders.
The ever increasing clammor amongst politicians and employers for more cheaper labor reminds me of the rationale used to justify slavery in this country 150 years ago. IMHO, the Republican Party has long ago fallen from the grace they achieved in their opposition to slavery. The more politically correct term these days is "wage-slavery", and it is alive and well. How many people today don't have (and cannot afford) health insurance, let alone having both parents working only to just barely get by? Nearly all those things most necessary for survival and betterment in the USA do not get counted in the CPI (Consumer Price Index) -- things like health care, housing, heating, and higher education have been increasing at nearly double digit rates. When was the last time that the minimum wage went up, let alone at a rate that actually keeps up with the real rate of inflation?
NASA HAS contracted Condi Rice to build a quantum wire 1 meter in length. Four years is plenty of time for her to pull a carbon thread out of her ass. And like the old fable, maybe she CAN teach that horse to talk.
Just like Haliburton, Condi is looking for that "brass ring" called the no-bid, sole-source government contract. You cannot really expect her to get by on the $250K USD per year that being Secretary of State pays. She has ritzy dresses and matching shoes to buy.
Besides, don't you think that Dubya owes her something extra for that "performance" in front of the 9-11 Commission? This is yet another example of the "Peter Priciple" applied to the top echelon of political appointees, run amok, because she sure didn't do the country any service with her role as the "National Security Advisor".
So, analog broadcast television is scheduled to go "dark" just after the nationalmid-term elections.
The protestations of the liberal news media will finally be silenced, a full five years after the still-unsolved anthrax letter attacks against them. And the neo-con "revolution" that started with a Republican Supreme Court appointing the US President in 2000 will have be virtually complete. Without free over-the-air analog TV news to keep people informed, the US Constitution and Bill of Rights can finally be put out of the current regime in power's misery.
It is not as if most (USA) television content has gotten better over the past five years. It looks like the RIAA and MPAA will be expecting a big boost in sales, as well as a large attendance upsurge in the nation's church/mosque/synagoge(s) to accommidate the entertainment-starved American public. All the world's religious fundamentalists will be able to take heart in the "progress" of the American public towards true enlightenment.
Issues like DRM broadcast flag crippled digital TV and digital radio will mean the end of the uncontrolled theft of media IP, even for time shifting. It is not as if the FCC "standards" are not still evolving to accomidate the **AA, rather than the public. That, and steep prices for all the new equipment have already made widespread DTV adoption by the end of 2006 likely.
I suspect that either the internet or else public libraries (or both) will become more popular also.
Hope the libraries will have all stocked up on "My Pet Goat" by then...
The qouted Nikon official is full of BullScat!
Requirements for use of an "official SDK" effectively
limits access through "non-approved" OSes or
IDEs. Any requirement to sign an NDA for access
to Nikon's programming information automagically
eliminates F/OSS projects from participating.
And any requirement for a programmer to be associated
with a commercial software entity excludes the
F/OSS "hobbyist" tinkerer.
Nikon may have reasonably good products, but as
both a hobbyist photographer AND a hobbyist
programmer, I will stay away from ANY Nikon
products until their corporate attitude changes.
It is not as if there are no competing brands of
photo equipment in the marketplace that will meet
BOTH of my hobbies. And Canon has some really
nice products.
I have a fairly good memory, but not a lot of
useful links. Social security numbers are/were
supposed to be a privileged (or secret) number
for a contract between a taxpayer and the government.
Just a couple of years ago, a group of Social Security
Administration employees at the Federal Hill (Baltimore, MD)
facility were arrested for selling lists of SSNs.
And in the past few years, employees of at least
3 DMV (Department of Motor Vehicle) offices (VA,
DC, CO) were arrested for selling bona fide drivers
licenses based upon fraudulent core identification.
The USA has between 12 million and 28 million (data
varies according to the PC-ness of who is asked)
illegal aliens residing here. Porous borders and
seaports, insufficient funding, and the PC-ness
of politicians unwilling to enforce existing laws
has created a bureaucratic and security nightmare.
Not only do officials not know how many illegal
aliens are in the country, they are also clueless
as to who they are or what they are up to.
While economic fraud is a portion of the impetus
for identity theft, a far larger part of this problem
can be directly attributed to the issue of illegal
aliens and their efforts to obtain a "cover" identity.
Identity theft must be addressed by
a biometrically secure National ID card, stricter
penalties for producing and using false documentation,
and actually enforcing immigration
laws. Underfunding enforcement has resulted in a
lassefaire attitude among law enforcement officials
al all levels of government, including a nonsensical
"catch and release" policy by INS. ("You broke
into the country illegally, but we are going to
trust you to voluntarily show up for your heqaring
in front of an immigration judge.")
The only things I can suggest is to contact your
representatives in regard to the "Real ID Act" and
immigration enforcement, remove all mention of your
SSN from driver's license and checkbooks, shred all
out-of-date personal financial information, stay
in touch with your SS office regarding annual
statements, and keep a close watch on your credit
reports.
ECC memory is great at detecting and correcting single bit errors, but fails when it comes to correcting multiple bit errors. There was a technique one of my college instructors discussed called Huffman Encoding that could be used to correct a number of bit errors. While it is a robust technique, it would consume 75% of data storage for the correction bits.
BTW, does anyone out there have info on any modern hardware adaptations of Huffman Encoding?
After studying a number of video clips of Dubya making ad hoc quips/speeches (as opposed to the "canned" party line), I am inclined to agree with the submitter. The PDB's should have been redesigned to match the "My Pet Goat" format, including graphics.
Spot on target!
Some people really just don't "get it". As a relatively early (1993) adopter of Wintel SMP, I can tell you that a multithreaded OS combined with some multithreaded apps can be significantly faster than single processor systems. (I used SMP to improve throughput in Photoshop, and rendering speed in 3D-Studio.)
Since 1993, I have been doing BYO with computers, and have found that, except for gaming, SMP (combined with SCSI disks) has proved to be a pleasant experience. Multitasking is limited mostly by the amount of memory in the system. SMP seems to provide for a "smoother" user experience (not having run benchmarks for quite some time).
CPU speed alone is no way to judge the value of a system -- something Intel has been far too quick to tout for many years. Throughput is what really counts. Differing CPU architectures (MIPS/SPARC/INTEL) and system design play a far larger role than the clockspeed. I have seen moderately large databases choke on a single CPU Intel box that would fly on a significantly slower clocked 64-bit SMP SPARC or MIPS computer.
IMHO, I am quite glad that Dell has decided to stay out of the AMD business, since the HP and SUN Opteron systems already work quite well. Dell is the "Wal-Mart" of computer hardware vendors, and I don't think they could do the Opteron (or dual core Opteron) justice, except lowball pricing.
Welcome to the People's Democratic Republic of the United States of North America. We aren't "of the people", nor "a democracy", nor even "a republic" any more. And. of course, the new name is also highly misleading for another reason -- the name implies a Communist country. Instead, we are now a country "by the corporation", "of the people", and "for the corporation" -- Corporate National Socialism (, but with a religious fundamentalist twist).
The Federal government now uses the taxpayers' money to fund propaganda to convince the people that everything the government is doing is in the people's interest, while promoting corporate interests instead. Using taxpayer money for data, research, and analysis of weather patterns should be available to those taxpayers. Dubya's regime has removed much of the open decision-making in government that is the basis for real democracy. Without accountability there can be no balance of power between the three branches of government.
It is said that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. I fear that the imperial hubris of the current regime in power will not be willing to relinquish that power when state and national elections no longer favor those in power. I am reminded of a video blurb from Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9-11" movie in which Dubya is quoted as saying that "a dictatorship would be far easier (to rule)". I believe that it was no "accident" or "misunderstanding" when the FEC came out publically with the "trial balloon" of postponing the 2004 national elections, something that has never before been contemplated, even during the bloody Civil War. We have already seen the wholesale corruption of the bonds of trust between the government and the people in so many issues. The Bush administration's spin machine has thus far been working (overtime) to their advantage, but it will not always be thus.
While there is provision within the US Constitution for bounty hunters and privateers, the raising of private armies was not endorsed. The ramp-up of private security contractors for use in the war in Iraq (part of that coalition of the willing) has led to the creation of private armies. Just today, a helicopter filled with mercenaries from Blackwater Corp. was shot out of the skies of Iraq. No doubt that as the Iraqi conflict eventually winds down, these mercenaries will find useful employment protecting the likes of these neo-con politicians.
So, to coin MSFT's phrasiology "SCO Group believes that the SVR4 code they licensed from Novell/AT&T is even more "viral" than F/OSS licenses like GPL."
As MSFT's handmaiden in this battle with IBM over linux, SCO Group should have realized that their release of Caldera code under GPL would taint any suit against IBM. They should also have realized that the AT&T/BSD court battle of 20 years ago cannot be overturned just because they now have MSFT on their side.
The only marginally possible thing that could happen as an outcome to this SCO Group/IBM battle that could be harmful to linux is for the F/OSS GPL to be ruled invalid. This wouldn't help SCO Group much, but would take the wind out of the sails of all F/OSS efforts based upon anything but BSD. Which is exactly what MSFT would have wanted.
Not, apparently, in the democratic repubic of the USA. No legislator actually read the USA Patriot Act (I) before voting for it -- it came directly from the neo-con (oxymoron warning) think tanks (oxymoron warning) where it quietly evolved for nearly two decades. Not unlike many of the other Dubya rantings, like the Social Security "crisis". The neo-con (oxymoron warning) agenda doesn't make much economic sense, at least from Dubya's lips, since the context this "agenda" has been pulled from doesn't actually match the reality on the ground. Just like the Iraqi WMD the USA went to war over.
Now do you get it?
A Kiwi! (Sorry!)
Sure, you New Zealanders are/were part of the British Empire, just like India, South Africa, etc. The Brits were really good at shipping cheap labor wherever they needed it to power their colonial economies. Which is a big part of the reason why there are so many Indians in SA and Malaysia -- the Indian diaspora was a British invention.
And now the shoe (sandal?) is on the other foot, now with many of the good jobs easily moving to where the labor is cheapest. I'm sure that that sweet irony is not lost on the Indian government. When my job has moved to India, however, I will not be following it there. Perhaps I will revert to that older profession, raising sheep and goats on my tea "plantation". (One thing, though. I will be encouraging my children to get into the construction trades, since those cannot be outsourced until remote control robots get way better.)
Ta, and cheers.
Yes, you want to move. But what makes you think
that that illustrated book on the Kama Sutra will
survive the move from your parent's basement?
Or that moving to India will improve your chances
one whit of actually getting layed?
Most of the more than one billion citizens of
India still regard caste, family status, job, and
size of dowery more important than your unique
foreign-ness.
So your chances of "scoring" over there really
aren't any better than here. Get a life!
Are you willing to give up baseball for cricket,
and football for soccer?
The cultural shock will do you in, if the bad
water and the diseases don't. (Take it from
someone who has already checked it out.)
Please be careful about what you say. After 9-11,
Dubya spake thus "If you are not with "us", then
you are for the terrorists." With the USA Patriot
Act (I) and all that has followed, this has also
come to mean (1) the political opposition (aka
the "anthrax letters"), the **AA (""pirates" are
terrorists"), etc.
What this country does not need is yet another law -
what this country needs is a regime in power that
respects the US Constitution and Bill of Rights,
and uniformly enforces those laws already on the
books. The current administration "talks the talk"
about the "war on terror", but OBL is stil on the loose;
talks about homeland security, but the borders and seaports
are mostly unguarded; talks about the Social Security "crisis",
but Medicare has been given a prescription "poison pill" and
SS is more greatly threatened by Bush's "Realization" plan;
beats the American people over the head with the drumbeat
of threats of terror, but ships live anthrax and pandemic flu
willy-nilly across the country; talks up a manned mission to Mars,
but cuts NASA funding except for "militarized" robotics.
If Dubya were to go on live TV and report tomorrow's
weather as sunny and warm, I would pack my umbrella.
But you are absolutely right. The way for a disgruntled
public to express their displeasure with the current
state of affairs IS to quit buying movies and
music. Of course, the **AA will claim that their
latest economic losses are due to even more piracy,
and will generate even more draconian counter-measures.
But hell's bells -- I say fsck them all!
Andrew and Linus have been doing a fantastic job on the linux kernel. CA apparently has their knickers in a knot because they expect someone else to build the enterprise kernel that they need/want. F/OSS is great in this regard, especially the kernel. Build it in, or leave it out -- how hard is that?
And major F/OSS projects like linux aren't artificially hampered by the commercial OS vendors that want to sell a "desktop" version and a "server" version, or worse yet charge per client licenses (WTF!) Linux is imminently tweekable, runs on everything from embedded ARM7 to supercomputer cluster IA64. Stable linux distributions like Slackware offer far more compatability from desktop to server than RedHat's offerings (okay, FC4 is a "committee" project, not unlike the proverbial horse that became a camel).
Perhaps CA just needs to hire some F/OSS consultants -- they could get on the cluetrain just by lurking on the forums like slashdot. So to CA, I say "Quit you're mewing!".
Lets see... unified interface (IE), thin client,
network enabled, server-based apps and storage.
Yessiree, Bob. It's WebTV.
This is bound to tie in very nicely with (1) broadband internet, (2) DRM like Palladium, (3) profit center for metered applications, (4) profit center for remote storage, (5) automated updates. The TCO calculations suddenly become quite easy to make, and the business/user just deals with a monthly bill, just like with their cellphone(s).
What's not to like about this?
MSFT did, apparently, think highly enough of your data to make each incident of data loss (due to MSFT's OSes or applications) worth $5.00 USD.
It hasn't been as if MSFT would actually put the $40 Billion USD they have stashed away at risk . They have offered to stand behind their products by exactly $5.00 USD worth. Considering that they should know better than anyone else what the quality of their software is, I don't see how this posting is even considered "news".
All of MSFT's code is "beta", and they know it.
No doubt the Texas "neo-cons" (an oximoron) do not want any truckers to access p0rn anong the dusty trail -- that might negatively impact the business prospects of the "highway hookers".
Everybody knows that these "highway hookers" are only a few steps removed from being "respectible" Texas Republicans -- needing only the price of admission into the local Rotarians. And those Texas "compassionate conservative" (another oximoron) Christians would hate to see a decrease in the tithes and offerings on Sunday morning.
Texas, and expecially West Texas, has a proud history of supporting their hookers and their whorehouses. So who couldn't have seen this development on the TX WiFi horizon?
Jeez! No offense, but you must be a really old fsckr! Since that had to have been before 2-way police radios. ("You can't outrun a Motorola.")
Top speeds back then must have been all of 70 MPH - not fast by today's standards, except that the roads were mostly cowpaths.
On a side note, I don't know if it is a matter of road congestion, diminishing social mores, or a general lack of traffic enforcement, but it seems that there are far more people these days that ignore traffic regulations and common sense in the way they drive. Except for an unexpected hardware failure, most traffic "accidents" these days are not accidents but driver stupidity and/or reckless disregard for safety.
Exactly so!
1993 called, and they want their SMP mobos back!
1993 is the year that I switched over to SMP systems and never looked back (excepting an Apple notebook computer - never could quite justify that SMP Sparc notebook).
Intel's latest efforts would appear to be an improvement on their HT technology, until you factor in the power required, and heat generated. On those specs, AMD has a far superior dual core processor. But for high density blade servers or for notebook use, I anticipate that IMB/Sony's cell processor will be the way to go.
So I'll wait (but I can't wait...)
that also takes care of all the pop-up ads: lynx!
The new web browser, just like the old web browser, that eliminates all that glitzy eye candy (and p0rn) that chews up unnecessary bandwidth. I, for one, welcome our new lynx-enabled webmaster overlords!
Exactly so!
The bankrupt and failed telcos of the dot-bomb era (WorldCom, PSINet, Global Crossing, etcetera) cranked out a huge amount of "dark fiber" that is now being used to help off-shore out-source USA's IP and high tech jobs to China & India & elsewhere.
If the same resources had been used to build out the USA's fiber infrastructure (like FTTP) instead of "other places", the USA would be "numero uno" in percentage of broadband usage, unstead of 11th-going-on-50th. The regional "Baby Bells" were not interested then, and now it's pretty much too late -- the pool of cheap USA and foreign capital to fund such ambitious projects has been drying up.
The most critical and most expensive part of widespread broadband access is "the last mile". The USA has a regime in power that caters to the short term interests of their corporate owners/sponsers, whose financial goals are contrary to the longer term improvements in communications infrastructure that broadband access represents. Instead, we find both state and federal governments helping their corporate bretheren to monopolistically stake out municipal wireless markets that the telcos have otherwise shown no particular interest in, if only to lock out any possible future competition.