Interesting? You didn't even read the article. Its directional microwave.
Do try to be more charitable.
Rural areas are generally clusters of people, with each cluster distant from others. There are lots and lots of small towns of 100 people or less. In Illinois they're centered around grain elevators, with typically a little grocery store, and maybe a bar, maybe a church. The people drive 10-20 miles to the nearest Wal-Mart to do their serious shopping. They aren't served by cable TV and the quality of the telephone physical plant is generally awful.
Directional microwave or other signals might be more effective than anything else in reaching these towns. The enterprising ISP just puts a dish at a convenient spot, say on top of the grain elevator, and arranges for cooperative wi-fi to reach the rest of town. In fact, the towns themselves might be relay points in a double-ring network.
The part that struck me the most was that the FBI/BATF played Tibetan monk chants through a sound truck day and night. Any God-fearing apocalyptic would assume that the U.S. Government had chosen sides against them for Armageddon, and it was time to die for the Almighty. Clinton/Reno either foolishly didn't get that, or they got it and callously used the tactic anyway.
In Jesus' words: "I preached in the synogogue every day -- why didn't you come for me then?" David Koresh already thought he was the Messiah, and they played right into his hands. What was so awful about this guy, that they suspended due process, the Bill of Rights, and common sense to get him?
It made me sympathetic to the Davidians at the time. I was appalled when they were burned up. I wasn't mad enough to declare war on the U.S. Government, but I wasn't surprised when someone did. A year later, on the anniversary of the Branch Davidian massacre, a right-wing extremist killed scores of people by blowing up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. He said it was because of Waco.
Do I blame Clinton/Reno for Oklahoma City? I don't know.
They bounced the signal off Darl McBride's head, and the resulting distortion caused a rip in the fabric of space-time. That's why some reports have 72 miles and others 83. There was some heavy magnetomoronic craniorectal inversion in the signal.
This is similar to wind-aided records in track and field, and so the methods will have to be retested after Darl returns to his home planet.
Intermittently, an assistant went into the heavily shielded target room to adjust the target, a procedure that requires a retina scan by a security device and the insertion of special keys to assure that no one unauthorized enters.
It would take more than a neuralizer to get me to go in there.
I wonder where on the assistant they insert the special keys?
I appreciate your distrust of copyrights, since they have the tinge of software patents, copy protected DRM crap, and the like. I've never been comfortable with the GPL, because I didn't understand it until recently.
On the other hand, see my journal entry. The law's intent is to increase knowledge by protecting authors on the one hand, while making sure that the public eventually has free access to the work. The GPL does both!
Like it or not, if it weren't for copyrights, no one would write anything worth reading.
"... the principal behind the U.S. copyright
term--that it protect the author and at least one generation of heirs--remains
unchanged by the bill....
"As the foregoing discussion indicates, the
primary purpose of a proprietary interest in copyrighted works that is
descendible from authors to their children and even grandchildren is to form a
strong creative incentive for the advancement of knowledge and culture in the
United States. The nature of copyright requires that these proprietary interests
be balanced with the interests of the public at large in accessing and building
upon those works. For this reason, intellectual property is the only form of
property whose ownership rights are limited to a period of years, after which
the entire bundle of rights is given as a legacy to the public at
large."
SCO's contention that copyright is primarily for
the economic benefit of the copyright owner is utterly without
merit. Copyright law exists to promote the advancement of knowledge. One of the tools it uses is allowing authors to be rewarded.
The classic example is "Noah Webster[,] who supported his entire family from the earnings on his speller and grammar during the twenty years he took to complete his dictionary."
(House Hearings on Copyright Term Extension Act of 1995, at 165.)
A better example would be "Linus Torvalds, who used the notoriety he received from Linux to allow him to do what he wanted to do: write code."
Because [if] all of the man hours spent building up Gnome were spent on KDE (or K-Office, Konquerer, etc), the code would be much tighter, with greater functionality.
We don't know that. Extra man hours do not necessarily translate to improvement. In fact, it is precisely because the KDE development cycle is shorter (with fewer man hours between releases) that it has developed enough even to be in the discussion. The Gnome philosopy is to get it right before release, while the KDE philosophy is to release it and see what's not right.
As far as code forking goes, saying it's a weakness is like saying it's a weakness for Ford to have six models of SUV because it weakens their development of the perfect SUV. Huh? You can only drive one at a time. The object isn't creating perfect code, or the perfect SUV, it's satisfying the customer. You can't satisfy everyone with a given model of SUV, and no desktop will please everyone.
On the other hand, you have 120 days to sue under state laws. Existing suits continue; it's the law as it is at the moment an action is performed that determines its legality.
A: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And if you've been there, you know what that's like. Cornfields on three sides and a pig farm on the fourth side.
Q: A pig farm?
A: Yeah, so you wake up most mornings hoping the wind is blowing in the right direction, because if it's not, you're going to have an issue.
Oh come on, Marc: it's really only like that in the summer, when the wind's out of the south! In the winter the wind comes howling off the prairie bringing the odiferous delights of burnt soybean oil from the Kraft plant.
He's also right about the brainpower around this place. Awesome.
This "grey area" exists because there is no clearly defined boundary defining the seperation between the kernel and the drivers.
The may be no boundary API, but that's an ivory tower perfection versus practical performance issue. There is a legal boundary, however. From a different part of the thread (under the context of what the GPL means by "using the program" versus using the source code):
So you can run the kernel and create non-GPL'd programs while running it
to your hearts content. You can use it to control a nuclear submarine, and
that's totally outside the scope of the license (but if you do, please
note that the license does not imply any kind of warranty or similar).
BUT YOU CAN NOT USE THE KERNEL HEADER FILES TO CREATE NON-GPL'D BINARIES.
Comprende?
Linus
The all caps emphasis was Linus, not me.
As long as you don't use the Linux source code, which includes the header files, you can publish your binary or source under any license you wish. If you use the Linux source code, you can only publish under the GPL (or keep everything to yourself).
Sun said that it will offer OpenOffice.org users free first-incidence support... (emphasis added)
This is a good thing, though. Not because the Sun support will really help all that many folks, but because of the appearance of legitimacy it lends to OOO.
And a big plus: it flips a solar middle finger at Microsoft. Jyahh!
(Note: I didn't read the entire article, so this post may not hold up to my usual standard of fairness. In particular, I might understand Ms. Farrell better in context of other parts of the article.)
MS. FARRELL There is an assumption by protectionists that these jobs are going somewhere else, and all this money has been pocketed by C.E.O.'s who take it home. A little more sophisticated version is: It's being pocketed by companies in the form of profits. One step further and you say those profits are either going to go as returns to the investors in those companies, or they're going to go into new investment by those companies. Those savings enable me, if I am an investor, to consume more and therefore contribute to job recreation, and if I am a company, to re-invest and create jobs. That's important because I agree that we are migrating jobs away, some of which will never return, nor should they.
By attaching the label "protectionist" to anyone who decries offshore outsourcing, Ms. Farrell seems willing to draw a thick line between sides of the debate. Why? Intellectual laziness, I suppose.
"Protectionism" means using taxing power to favor domestic industry over foreign competition. Her use of the word is analogous to the frequent abuse of the word "censorship": it's not censorship to disagree.
Why would a company outsource jobs in order to create other jobs? They don't have job creation as their motive, and it's disingenous to say they do. Neither do investors consume more than others. The hole in her argument is that money paid out to investors doesn't necessarily end up in consumption, and money the company saves doesn't necessarily end up being reinvested. It may end up as bonuses paid to the managers who decided to offsource (tm), or to make payoffs to analysts.
The real question is this: is it proper to allow loyalty to a particular country to interfere with business decisions? Internationalists would say no, that nations are an artifact of a less enlightened time. Nationalists argue that there must be independent governments in the world, or the world government will have nothing to check it, and so we should be loyal to ours.
What I'm about is quality. Offsourcing is a short-sighted tactic, and I find it difficult to believe that companies trust offshore developers more than domestic ones. I'm missing something. Oh well, they must know what they're doing.
(UPI) Sources for Bell Aerospace insist their demands for "one million dollars" have been met, but they will fire the "giant laser" anyway. The White House could not be reached before press time.
My grandfather taught me to watch the birds. They get nervous when the weather is about to change.
Smell the air, look at the sky, examine the clouds, and feel the wind, the temperature, and the humidity.
I can almost always tell whether it's going to rain or not. In central Illinois, that's quite a trick.
My daughter's take, and my solution
on
Cringley on E-voting
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Last night my daughter asked me whether we would have electronic voting. I said we would, but that there will be more controversy about it than we ever had about paper voting. She asked why.
I told her that computer people and academics have known for decades that the way to ensure the correctness of a process is not just to examine the input and output, but to let everyone see the inner workings of it.
That made sense to her. She's 15, headstrong, and as honest as a light switch.
She asked how we can believe the voting machine company won't cheat unless we know how the machine works.
I also said the worst thing they'll try to do is to send the results over the Internet.
Then it occurred to me. They should send the results
over the Internet
And by telephone
And by burning CD's and mailing them
And by printing the individual ballots on paper, hand-tallying the votes, and carrying the results to Washington with briefcases handcuffed to little old ladies.
Overkill with quadruple checks, all of which have to agree.
...there will always be people needed to FIX the robots when they break down. and OTHER robots capable of doing this job won't be around for a long time.
And when the robots can repair themselves, they'll still need us to supply the power... oh, sorry, that was just a movie, right?
Meanwhile, Mitsubishi is targeting the medical market. The company has developed a robot designed to perform many functions that a human nurse can perform.
Hmm, but I bet they don't look as nice in white stockings.
I wonder how long before they develop a blow-up version.
Slashdot Mirror
Do try to be more charitable.
Rural areas are generally clusters of people, with each cluster distant from others. There are lots and lots of small towns of 100 people or less. In Illinois they're centered around grain elevators, with typically a little grocery store, and maybe a bar, maybe a church. The people drive 10-20 miles to the nearest Wal-Mart to do their serious shopping. They aren't served by cable TV and the quality of the telephone physical plant is generally awful.
Directional microwave or other signals might be more effective than anything else in reaching these towns. The enterprising ISP just puts a dish at a convenient spot, say on top of the grain elevator, and arranges for cooperative wi-fi to reach the rest of town. In fact, the towns themselves might be relay points in a double-ring network.
The part that struck me the most was that the FBI/BATF played Tibetan monk chants through a sound truck day and night. Any God-fearing apocalyptic would assume that the U.S. Government had chosen sides against them for Armageddon, and it was time to die for the Almighty. Clinton/Reno either foolishly didn't get that, or they got it and callously used the tactic anyway.
In Jesus' words: "I preached in the synogogue every day -- why didn't you come for me then?" David Koresh already thought he was the Messiah, and they played right into his hands. What was so awful about this guy, that they suspended due process, the Bill of Rights, and common sense to get him?
It made me sympathetic to the Davidians at the time. I was appalled when they were burned up. I wasn't mad enough to declare war on the U.S. Government, but I wasn't surprised when someone did. A year later, on the anniversary of the Branch Davidian massacre, a right-wing extremist killed scores of people by blowing up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. He said it was because of Waco.
Do I blame Clinton/Reno for Oklahoma City? I don't know.
But I do remember Waco.
Actually I've been following these experiments.
They bounced the signal off Darl McBride's head, and the resulting distortion caused a rip in the fabric of space-time. That's why some reports have 72 miles and others 83. There was some heavy magnetomoronic craniorectal inversion in the signal.
This is similar to wind-aided records in track and field, and so the methods will have to be retested after Darl returns to his home planet.
It would take more than a neuralizer to get me to go in there.
I wonder where on the assistant they insert the special keys?
"Flogging spammers with their own intestines..."
:-).
Ok, I'll get to work on it.
Bug: Place your projectile weapon on the ground.
Edgar: You can have my gun ...[chsnick]... when you pry it from my cold, dead, fingers.
Bug: Your proposal is acceptable.
Edgar: Aaaaaagggghhh! [dies]
- Men In Black
I appreciate your distrust of copyrights, since they have the tinge of software patents, copy protected DRM crap, and the like. I've never been comfortable with the GPL, because I didn't understand it until recently.
On the other hand, see my journal entry. The law's intent is to increase knowledge by protecting authors on the one hand, while making sure that the public eventually has free access to the work. The GPL does both!
Like it or not, if it weren't for copyrights, no one would write anything worth reading.
SCO's contention that copyright is primarily for the economic benefit of the copyright owner is utterly without merit. Copyright law exists to promote the advancement of knowledge. One of the tools it uses is allowing authors to be rewarded.
The classic example is "Noah Webster[,] who supported his entire family from the earnings on his speller and grammar during the twenty years he took to complete his dictionary." (House Hearings on Copyright Term Extension Act of 1995, at 165.)A better example would be "Linus Torvalds, who used the notoriety he received from Linux to allow him to do what he wanted to do: write code."
(I'm a computer geek, not a lawyer)
See my RFC on Spam Eradification.
We don't know that. Extra man hours do not necessarily translate to improvement. In fact, it is precisely because the KDE development cycle is shorter (with fewer man hours between releases) that it has developed enough even to be in the discussion. The Gnome philosopy is to get it right before release, while the KDE philosophy is to release it and see what's not right.
As far as code forking goes, saying it's a weakness is like saying it's a weakness for Ford to have six models of SUV because it weakens their development of the perfect SUV. Huh? You can only drive one at a time. The object isn't creating perfect code, or the perfect SUV, it's satisfying the customer. You can't satisfy everyone with a given model of SUV, and no desktop will please everyone.
Sorry I posted that. Maybe someone will erase it, or mod it into never land.
and undergrads are cheaper still.
But you have to teach them to read first, so it's a wash.
Does it tiptoe about going
when it's not looking for a book?What about a pair of hornrimmed batgirl glasses with nice shiny chain, does it have that?
Can it read me a story, and make me think I'm there?
If not, it's not a proper librarian in my book.
Hmm, OTOH I'm thinking this whole robot thing may be going somewhere, after all.
It does, except as noted in the bill.
On the other hand, you have 120 days to sue under state laws. Existing suits continue; it's the law as it is at the moment an action is performed that determines its legality.
IANA L'yer.
Oh come on, Marc: it's really only like that in the summer, when the wind's out of the south! In the winter the wind comes howling off the prairie bringing the odiferous delights of burnt soybean oil from the Kraft plant.
He's also right about the brainpower around this place. Awesome.
Loren Heal, lheal at uiuc
The may be no boundary API, but that's an ivory tower perfection versus practical performance issue. There is a legal boundary, however. From a different part of the thread (under the context of what the GPL means by "using the program" versus using the source code):
The all caps emphasis was Linus, not me.
As long as you don't use the Linux source code, which includes the header files, you can publish your binary or source under any license you wish. If you use the Linux source code, you can only publish under the GPL (or keep everything to yourself).
This is a good thing, though. Not because the Sun support will really help all that many folks, but because of the appearance of legitimacy it lends to OOO.
And a big plus: it flips a solar middle finger at Microsoft. Jyahh!
(Note: I didn't read the entire article, so this post may not hold up to my usual standard of fairness. In particular, I might understand Ms. Farrell better in context of other parts of the article.)
By attaching the label "protectionist" to anyone who decries offshore outsourcing, Ms. Farrell seems willing to draw a thick line between sides of the debate. Why? Intellectual laziness, I suppose.
"Protectionism" means using taxing power to favor domestic industry over foreign competition. Her use of the word is analogous to the frequent abuse of the word "censorship": it's not censorship to disagree.
Why would a company outsource jobs in order to create other jobs? They don't have job creation as their motive, and it's disingenous to say they do. Neither do investors consume more than others. The hole in her argument is that money paid out to investors doesn't necessarily end up in consumption, and money the company saves doesn't necessarily end up being reinvested. It may end up as bonuses paid to the managers who decided to offsource (tm), or to make payoffs to analysts.
The real question is this: is it proper to allow loyalty to a particular country to interfere with business decisions? Internationalists would say no, that nations are an artifact of a less enlightened time. Nationalists argue that there must be independent governments in the world, or the world government will have nothing to check it, and so we should be loyal to ours.
What I'm about is quality. Offsourcing is a short-sighted tactic, and I find it difficult to believe that companies trust offshore developers more than domestic ones. I'm missing something. Oh well, they must know what they're doing.
spend time outside
My grandfather taught me to watch the birds. They get nervous when the weather is about to change.
Smell the air, look at the sky, examine the clouds, and feel the wind, the temperature, and the humidity.
I can almost always tell whether it's going to rain or not. In central Illinois, that's quite a trick.
Last night my daughter asked me whether we would have electronic voting. I said we would, but that there will be more controversy about it than we ever had about paper voting. She asked why.
I told her that computer people and academics have known for decades that the way to ensure the correctness of a process is not just to examine the input and output, but to let everyone see the inner workings of it.
That made sense to her. She's 15, headstrong, and as honest as a light switch. She asked how we can believe the voting machine company won't cheat unless we know how the machine works.
I also said the worst thing they'll try to do is to send the results over the Internet.
Then it occurred to me. They should send the results
-
over the Internet
-
And by telephone
-
And by burning CD's and mailing them
-
And by printing the individual ballots on paper, hand-tallying the votes, and carrying the results to Washington with briefcases handcuffed to little old ladies.
Overkill with quadruple checks, all of which have to agree.I: We will be having giant-sized moon rocket now.
P: You think you are becoming big shot with moon rocket now?
I: We are becoming superpower now.
P: You are not now.
I: We are too now.
P: We will be building bigger rocket now.
I: You are not now.
O: We are too now.
I: All of your bases are belonging to us now.
And when the robots can repair themselves, they'll still need us to supply the power ... oh, sorry, that was just a movie, right?
Hmm, but I bet they don't look as nice in white stockings.
I wonder how long before they develop a blow-up version.
Read The Fine Article, only it's Gr8Trade, not "-es".