WE ARE NOT ENGAGED IN A WAR. There has been no declaration of war by Congress. Declare an official war and I might be a tad more accepting. Not a vague excuse to expand excutive powers.
I too would have preferred a formal declaration, but according to John Yoo:
Neither presidents nor Congress have ever acted under the belief that the Constitution requires a declaration of war before the U.S. can engage in military hostilities abroad. Although this nation has used force abroad more than 100 times, it has declared war only five times
I know Slashdot is filled with Privacy Uber Alles types, and I understand and sympathize. However, there's a lot of silliness being written about all this. IANAL, and none of us knows all the crucial details, but a few points should be made:
There is a war on, and wars always cost some civil liberties. However, there's no draft, no wage and price controls, no concentration camps. We should count our blessings that all we have to put up with is some wiretapping and data mining.
You can't fight a war with just the tools of criminal justice. (Well, you can, but you'll probably lose.)
It should be clear to everyone that war with international bands of terrorists who hide as civilians is a new kind of war. Of necessity, it is fought largely in the shadows, which means sneaking and spying. I'm not happy with it, but it seems undeniable.
Hate Bush or not, I believe he's doing this to defend the country. (And yes, if Clinton or Kerry or Gore were President and doing the same thing, I'd still say so.) I have seen no real evidence that he's doing it to spy on Democrats or look good in the polls or line his pockets. If he's ever shown to have done any of that, I'll join the chorus of condemnation. Until then, though, I'm a bit tired of all the hysteria of the supposedly descending night of totalitarianism in the U.S., which I've heard has been just around the corner since the late '60s.
I'm all for new features, but I wouldn't hold up CSS as a model. Sometimes it seems like it goes out of its way to make things difficult for anyone writing a web page. Example: CSS took the totally simple CENTER tag and "improved" it with kludgy auto-width margins that don't work in IE5/Win. (Yes, I know that's Microsoft's fault, but even if it was reliable it'd seem like a step backwards.) And if you want to center something vertically, it's back to tables.
Want to use CSS to create a standard two- or three-column layout plus footer that works cross-platform? Have fun! Something that nearly every web coder needs to do all the time ought to be easy. Instead, it's considered a difficult problem even by authors of CSS books.
But hey, we can now put overlines over type! Everybody's been eagerly awaiting that feature, right? How about a future HTML that addresses the needs of those who actually create web pages?
How does having a bisexual character constitute an "agenda" or "uncomfortable sexual baggage"?
It feels like an agenda if the inclusion is gratuitous: having little or nothing to do with the plot. It's one thing to put references to gay sex in Coupling or Sex in the City, but rather a different thing to put it into a science fiction show. And it's a matter of degree: having a character known to be gay is one thing, having them drool over other characters all the time is another.
Isn't that just sort of a fairly realistic inclusion of the fact that actual people are sometimes gay or bisexual? In much the same way that people are sometimes female, or tall, or left-handed, and thus characters in stories sometimes also have these traits?
Again, it's an issue of dramatic appropriateness. Writers should know that it doesn't help a story to reference behaviors that make much or most of their audience uncomfortable for no other reason than "inclusiveness." (Like it or not, being female or tall or left-handed or straight doesn't make anyone uncomfortable.)
Think of it this way: a much higher percentage of people don't wash their hands after using the toilet than practice gay sex, so why not reference that every episode? Or how about evangelical Christians? There are more of those around than gays, so why not a character who's always talking about Jesus? Because it would cause much of your audience to squirm, without adding anything to the story (unless that was the story, and who wants science fiction about hygiene or evangelicals?).
By the way, I'm not saying any of this out of homophobia: my best friend of 31 years was gay and died of AIDS.
The Lisa, like other computers of the day, had rectangular pixels. The Mac's introduction of square pixels allowed true WYSIWYG, and was crucial to desktop publishing and computer art. The Mac's still strong position in the graphic arts industry is a direct result.
It is confusing, but they mean that the user interacts with documents ("objects"), instead of directly with applications or the Filer:
Dan Smith, a major contributor to the desktop interface, had created the Lisa's first interface, the Filer. The Filer asked a user a series of questions about what task the user wanted to accomplish, and when enough questions were answered, the tasks were executed and the Filer shrank to the background.
Dr Who was relegated to number 8 while Stargate got number 6?! Something is very wrong with this list.
My evidence that this list is totally wacky: The Bionic Woman was a better science fiction show than Futurama? In what universe does this writer reside?
...when they decided to switch to Intel. When the switch was announced, my question was: "Hmmm, I wonder what Apple knows about Intel's plans that they can't or won't talk about?" This certainly looks like something that would fit with Apple's future plans regarding iPods and other mobile devices.
...the conservative decision (and the correct decision) would be to go with someone who is already in the phone business, see how the product does, see what its flaws are, then improve with its own Shiny Apple iPodPhone.
That sounds right, and Motorola must know that too, so I'd bet they insisted on some sort of non-compete clause. Thus, we should stop holding our breath for an iPod Phone, because it's at least a year away.
I didn't see this in the linked history, but once in an interview Bricklin (IIRC) said that in the early days they personally demonstrated VisiCalc at trade show booths. Sometimes accountants would actually cry, as they realized how many hours they'd spent adding up rows and columns of numbers, and how quickly they'd be able to do it now.
You know you've got a "killer app" when members of your target market burst into tears, realizing how much your software is going to change their lives!
As old as powered flight. The Wright Brothers patented a wing warping system that was used on the Wright Flier, which was of course, the first powered heavier than air craft to successfuly fly.
Very true, and Slashdot readers might be interested to know that wing warping was the subject of a huge patent battle between the Wrights and Glenn Curtiss. See here and here. The consensus is that the patent fight significantly inhibited US aircraft development at the time.
My whole plan was to switch away from Microsoft to Apple due to the (relatively) benign copy protection in OS X and other products.
I may have to rethink that strategy now.
Not to be argumentative, but how do you know Apple won't be using "(relatively) benign copy protection"? I remember all the griping around Slashdot regarding iTunes/iPod DRM, but in retrospect it's clear most of Apple's paying customers, and even most Slashdotters, find those restrictions rather reasonable. I don't see why Jobs would jeodardize this huge transition by suddenly going overboard with DRM.
Re:I'm not surprised HP is struggling-which site?
on
HP Fires Father of OOP
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· Score: 1
I was working offsite, but it was out of HP HQ in Palo Alto.
Mostly what it means is that HP obviously doesn't have any long term vision anymore, and are probably very much on the way out.
About seven years ago I was a sub-sub-contractor working on a project for HP. A minor style issue came up on the documents I was formatting style sheets for: should there be a hyphen here or not? When I asked my contact at HP, he said: "I'll have to ask the committee about that."
but I will not buy an x86 mac if it's going to participate in the upcoming DRM nightmare that awaits PC users
Maybe I'm naive, but I doubt that Jobs would take Apple into a DRM nightmare. (Unless "DRM nightmare" means "any DRM" to you.) Recall that Jobs negotiated hard with the record labels and got the OK for iTunes, whose DRM seems pretty reasonable and unobtrusive to everyone except zealots.
My guess: some iTunes-level DRM that most users will be able to live with.
since the internet is global you really need a global entity to be ultimately responsible for it.
Air travel, news, food, and Earth's economy are just as "global", and yet there are no global entities in charge of those areas. Not only does there not need to be, there are good reasons to not have global (i.e. centralized) control of such things. 20th century history is full of examples.
One big reason to fear UN control beyond taxes: how long before they try to crack down on "hate speech," which will mean criticism of certain governments and certain religions? I leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess which ones the UN would not want criticized.
And I won't shed any tears. If they're going to be a murderous dictatorship, they could at least kill some people who deserve it. (No, I'm not defending dictatorships, I just hate spammers.)
Here it is, straight from Lucas' first Hollywood boss and fellow USC graduate, Francis Ford Coppola: "George wanted to do Flash Gordon... he met with the people who owned it, and they didn't take him at all seriously. So he took the Flash Gordon trailers -- the diagonal titles that talk about the universe at that point [he means the opening story synopsis that seems to recede from the viewer as it scrolls up] -- and sort of combined it with a Stanley Kubrick '2001' world and created his own 'Flash Gordon.' " Lucas says the characters of "Star Wars" are not originals but "tributes."
All true, but there's another reason why the Nazi bomb couldn't have happened: the atomic bomb was a hugely expensive set of very difficult engineering problems.
Just one example: the gaseous diffusion refining of U-235 required the invention of a filter for highly corrosive and radioactive uranium hexafloride gas, a pump capable of pumping the gas, then the building of a huge facility containing thousands of these pumps and filters and miles of stainless steel pipe.
We spent years and billions of dollars on the Manhattan Project doing this sort of previously-thought-impossible engineering. (Even so, we only had three bombs by August '45.) The Germans just didn't have the resources for it. Plus, they were being bombed at the time, which makes large projects rather more difficult.
Here it is, straight from Lucas' first Hollywood boss and fellow USC graduate, Francis Ford Coppola: "George wanted to do Flash Gordon... he met with the people who owned it, and they didn't take him at all seriously. So he took the Flash Gordon trailers -- the diagonal titles that talk about the universe at that point [he means the opening story synopsis that seems to recede from the viewer as it scrolls up] -- and sort of combined it with a Stanley Kubrick '2001' world and created his own 'Flash Gordon.' " Lucas says the characters of "Star Wars" are not originals but "tributes."
I know Jobs is talking up HD video, but imagine this: Apple starts selling downloadable movies, but only in standard VHS/broadcast resolution. That saves mucho bandwidth, won't matter to many people watching on small screens (like the rumored "video iPod"), and placates the MPAA and Hollywood, which can reserve HD for DVDs, etc.
I bought something that had a rebate, but it didn't come with the product. I called and they weren't able to give it to me for some reason, but promised to credit my account for the amount for any future purchase. So some months later, I place an order with my supposed credit, and *surprise* they have no record of any such thing. Scam artists.
Regarding the lawsuit, it does seem silly and greedy. Is there anyone who thinks Tiger (the OS) is produced by TigerDirect? I doubt it. With no confusion, I don't think they have a case.
Slashdot Mirror
WE ARE NOT ENGAGED IN A WAR. There has been no declaration of war by Congress. Declare an official war and I might be a tad more accepting. Not a vague excuse to expand excutive powers.
I too would have preferred a formal declaration, but according to John Yoo:
Neither presidents nor Congress have ever acted under the belief that the Constitution requires a declaration of war before the U.S. can engage in military hostilities abroad. Although this nation has used force abroad more than 100 times, it has declared war only five times
Warrantless searches happen all the time, and have been repeatedly upheld as legal.
There are good reasons for not getting FISA warrants.
There are strong legal arguments that warrantless searches are legal against foreign powers or agents of foreign powers, even if those agents are American citizens. This power was also claimed by the Reagan and Clinton administrations, and Clinton used such warrantless searches at least once.
Even Cass Sunstein, Constitutional law bigwig and not a Republican, to put it mildly, thinks, with some reservations, that this looks legal and unexceptional.
A few more points:
I'm all for new features, but I wouldn't hold up CSS as a model. Sometimes it seems like it goes out of its way to make things difficult for anyone writing a web page. Example: CSS took the totally simple CENTER tag and "improved" it with kludgy auto-width margins that don't work in IE5/Win. (Yes, I know that's Microsoft's fault, but even if it was reliable it'd seem like a step backwards.) And if you want to center something vertically, it's back to tables.
Want to use CSS to create a standard two- or three-column layout plus footer that works cross-platform? Have fun! Something that nearly every web coder needs to do all the time ought to be easy. Instead, it's considered a difficult problem even by authors of CSS books.
But hey, we can now put overlines over type! Everybody's been eagerly awaiting that feature, right? How about a future HTML that addresses the needs of those who actually create web pages?
...it's been 20 years away for the last 50 years.
So, does anyone still have a working email address from 1971? If not, I wonder who has the world's oldest currently working email address?
How does having a bisexual character constitute an "agenda" or "uncomfortable sexual baggage"?
It feels like an agenda if the inclusion is gratuitous: having little or nothing to do with the plot. It's one thing to put references to gay sex in Coupling or Sex in the City, but rather a different thing to put it into a science fiction show. And it's a matter of degree: having a character known to be gay is one thing, having them drool over other characters all the time is another.
Isn't that just sort of a fairly realistic inclusion of the fact that actual people are sometimes gay or bisexual? In much the same way that people are sometimes female, or tall, or left-handed, and thus characters in stories sometimes also have these traits?
Again, it's an issue of dramatic appropriateness. Writers should know that it doesn't help a story to reference behaviors that make much or most of their audience uncomfortable for no other reason than "inclusiveness." (Like it or not, being female or tall or left-handed or straight doesn't make anyone uncomfortable.)
Think of it this way: a much higher percentage of people don't wash their hands after using the toilet than practice gay sex, so why not reference that every episode? Or how about evangelical Christians? There are more of those around than gays, so why not a character who's always talking about Jesus? Because it would cause much of your audience to squirm, without adding anything to the story (unless that was the story, and who wants science fiction about hygiene or evangelicals?).
By the way, I'm not saying any of this out of homophobia: my best friend of 31 years was gay and died of AIDS.
The Lisa, like other computers of the day, had rectangular pixels. The Mac's introduction of square pixels allowed true WYSIWYG, and was crucial to desktop publishing and computer art. The Mac's still strong position in the graphic arts industry is a direct result.
It is confusing, but they mean that the user interacts with documents ("objects"), instead of directly with applications or the Filer:
Dan Smith, a major contributor to the desktop interface, had created the Lisa's first interface, the Filer. The Filer asked a user a series of questions about what task the user wanted to accomplish, and when enough questions were answered, the tasks were executed and the Filer shrank to the background.
Dr Who was relegated to number 8 while Stargate got number 6?! Something is very wrong with this list.
My evidence that this list is totally wacky: The Bionic Woman was a better science fiction show than Futurama? In what universe does this writer reside?
...when they decided to switch to Intel. When the switch was announced, my question was: "Hmmm, I wonder what Apple knows about Intel's plans that they can't or won't talk about?" This certainly looks like something that would fit with Apple's future plans regarding iPods and other mobile devices.
...the conservative decision (and the correct decision) would be to go with someone who is already in the phone business, see how the product does, see what its flaws are, then improve with its own Shiny Apple iPodPhone.
That sounds right, and Motorola must know that too, so I'd bet they insisted on some sort of non-compete clause. Thus, we should stop holding our breath for an iPod Phone, because it's at least a year away.
I didn't see this in the linked history, but once in an interview Bricklin (IIRC) said that in the early days they personally demonstrated VisiCalc at trade show booths. Sometimes accountants would actually cry, as they realized how many hours they'd spent adding up rows and columns of numbers, and how quickly they'd be able to do it now.
You know you've got a "killer app" when members of your target market burst into tears, realizing how much your software is going to change their lives!
As old as powered flight. The Wright Brothers patented a wing warping system that was used on the Wright Flier, which was of course, the first powered heavier than air craft to successfuly fly.
Very true, and Slashdot readers might be interested to know that wing warping was the subject of a huge patent battle between the Wrights and Glenn Curtiss. See here and here. The consensus is that the patent fight significantly inhibited US aircraft development at the time.
My whole plan was to switch away from Microsoft to Apple due to the (relatively) benign copy protection in OS X and other products.
I may have to rethink that strategy now.
Not to be argumentative, but how do you know Apple won't be using "(relatively) benign copy protection"? I remember all the griping around Slashdot regarding iTunes/iPod DRM, but in retrospect it's clear most of Apple's paying customers, and even most Slashdotters, find those restrictions rather reasonable. I don't see why Jobs would jeodardize this huge transition by suddenly going overboard with DRM.
I was working offsite, but it was out of HP HQ in Palo Alto.
Mostly what it means is that HP obviously doesn't have any long term vision anymore, and are probably very much on the way out.
About seven years ago I was a sub-sub-contractor working on a project for HP. A minor style issue came up on the documents I was formatting style sheets for: should there be a hyphen here or not? When I asked my contact at HP, he said: "I'll have to ask the committee about that."
I thought: This company is doomed!
but I will not buy an x86 mac if it's going to participate in the upcoming DRM nightmare that awaits PC users
Maybe I'm naive, but I doubt that Jobs would take Apple into a DRM nightmare. (Unless "DRM nightmare" means "any DRM" to you.) Recall that Jobs negotiated hard with the record labels and got the OK for iTunes, whose DRM seems pretty reasonable and unobtrusive to everyone except zealots.
My guess: some iTunes-level DRM that most users will be able to live with.
since the internet is global you really need a global entity to be ultimately responsible for it.
Air travel, news, food, and Earth's economy are just as "global", and yet there are no global entities in charge of those areas. Not only does there not need to be, there are good reasons to not have global (i.e. centralized) control of such things. 20th century history is full of examples.
One big reason to fear UN control beyond taxes: how long before they try to crack down on "hate speech," which will mean criticism of certain governments and certain religions? I leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess which ones the UN would not want criticized.
...when they shoot some in the back of the head and bill the family for the bullet.
And I won't shed any tears. If they're going to be a murderous dictatorship, they could at least kill some people who deserve it. (No, I'm not defending dictatorships, I just hate spammers.)
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mstarwar.html
... he met with the people who owned it, and they didn't take him at all seriously. So he took the Flash Gordon trailers -- the diagonal titles that talk about the universe at that point [he means the opening story synopsis that seems to recede from the viewer as it scrolls up] -- and sort of combined it with a Stanley Kubrick '2001' world and created his own 'Flash Gordon.' " Lucas says the characters of "Star Wars" are not originals but "tributes."
Here it is, straight from Lucas' first Hollywood boss and fellow USC graduate, Francis Ford Coppola: "George wanted to do Flash Gordon
All true, but there's another reason why the Nazi bomb couldn't have happened: the atomic bomb was a hugely expensive set of very difficult engineering problems.
Just one example: the gaseous diffusion refining of U-235 required the invention of a filter for highly corrosive and radioactive uranium hexafloride gas, a pump capable of pumping the gas, then the building of a huge facility containing thousands of these pumps and filters and miles of stainless steel pipe.
We spent years and billions of dollars on the Manhattan Project doing this sort of previously-thought-impossible engineering. (Even so, we only had three bombs by August '45.) The Germans just didn't have the resources for it. Plus, they were being bombed at the time, which makes large projects rather more difficult.
The similarities with New Gods is interesting, but Star Wars also grew out of Lucas' desire to remake Flash Gordon:
... he met with the people who owned it, and they didn't take him at all seriously. So he took the Flash Gordon trailers -- the diagonal titles that talk about the universe at that point [he means the opening story synopsis that seems to recede from the viewer as it scrolls up] -- and sort of combined it with a Stanley Kubrick '2001' world and created his own 'Flash Gordon.' " Lucas says the characters of "Star Wars" are not originals but "tributes."
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mstarwar.html
Here it is, straight from Lucas' first Hollywood boss and fellow USC graduate, Francis Ford Coppola: "George wanted to do Flash Gordon
I know Jobs is talking up HD video, but imagine this: Apple starts selling downloadable movies, but only in standard VHS/broadcast resolution. That saves mucho bandwidth, won't matter to many people watching on small screens (like the rumored "video iPod"), and placates the MPAA and Hollywood, which can reserve HD for DVDs, etc.
Because they don't seem to using it!
*Rimshot*
I bought something that had a rebate, but it didn't come with the product. I called and they weren't able to give it to me for some reason, but promised to credit my account for the amount for any future purchase. So some months later, I place an order with my supposed credit, and *surprise* they have no record of any such thing. Scam artists.
Regarding the lawsuit, it does seem silly and greedy. Is there anyone who thinks Tiger (the OS) is produced by TigerDirect? I doubt it. With no confusion, I don't think they have a case.