Look at the other types of protest going on. Do you thinks it's terribly plesant to wade through a hundred or so psychotic protesters who both attempt physical assault AND call you 'Murderer' every morning on the way into work? (Anti-abortion activists) I'd imagine the same thing happens to non-union employees when the union strikes, to every member of the American World Worker's party, etc. Bricks are just extremly annoying.
Personally, I'm afraid a huge letter campaign wouldn't have much effect at all. The USPTO throws away the letters; They're far more worried about the opinions of the judges and lawmakers that can regulate them and or cut their budget. Letters written to to the federal judges that decide patent cases wouldn't have any effect either; They've got jobs for life, the public can go screw themselves. Writing to Congress, especially to the more powerful, established members, fails because they're too terribly interested in SIG money and the latest public opinion polls. Both changing public opinion through the media outlets and 'paying' Congresspeople to like our proposals cost far more money than the/. collective can fund.
Or, mabye it isn't. The WTO protesters made headlines even before the Anarchists showed; Many of us paid attention and now know why the WTO is 'evil'. How many of us have seen the latest Greenpeace 'chain yourslf to a tree' effort in the news? Do you think Greenpeace would even be a blip on our radar without thirty-odd years of it? I doubt it.
What we need to do is something so out-of-the-ordinary that the popular media picks it up and disseminates it, pre-chewed and dumbified, to the Joe and Sally Apathy's of the US. When public opinion shifts, so does Congress.
Send 'em bricks, and lots of them.
Any one interested please send mail to either the address listed above! Any organization of effort is better none, be it bricks, letters, or code.
Having checked with the company shipping clerk, FedEx, Airborne, UPS and USPS should take a brick wrapped in plain brown paper or in a largish envelope. To send the largish 4 lb, 14 oz brick I rescued from its role as doorstop would cost me $5.81 with Airborne (overnight), $6.60 wih Fedex (2-day), or $6.50 with the USPS. I dare say a thousand bricks/day would grind the USPTO mail room to a halt. It would be even better if none of us included contact information until the last brick. Not only would it leave the USPTO worried, the press would grapple onto it faster because of the 'mystery' angle.
But how many people could we get to participate? Say we get 10,000. That's 14,000 letters per day on average, and at a half ounce each, is 3.5 tons of mail.
Perhaps we should Airborne Express them a brick along with a letter that reads 'Judging from your decisions lately, everyone at the USPTO must be as dumb as a brick. Here's some company!/Now you're twice as smart' Our cost would soar to around $25, but they'd have to tolerate almost forty tons of insulting real-world spam. It's sure to make the news as one of the most inventive protests of all time.
Wrong. The test is supposed to be one's learned peers, an expert in the field. The common individual is not a software engineer, and has no business judging software patents. Nor is he a chemist, an expert in bioengineering or a 'rocket scientist'.
Slashdot readers are (relitivly speaking) experts in software, networking, databases, hardware and e-business. Therefore, we are qualified to make the 'obvious' determination. It's not our fault the USPTO isn't.
I'm sorry, Slashdot Man, but I think I'm going to get a preemptive restraining order against you..
Anyway, there is another variant to the Slashdor Drinking Game. A few buddies and I thought it up to bother one particular party attendee that night. The conditions for drinking were pretty much the same, except that you got an extra for every story someone else in the room posted and one subtracted for each of your own posts. Each player takes a story, in decending order from newest. At the end of perusing the story, you either take the alcohol penalty or lose an article of clothing. (General rule: if it went on in pairs, it comes off in pairs).
It honestly amazes me that one of our own AC has taken the effort to create a forum for his odd, yet strikingly funny posts. I hope you continue the 'serial' in the new forum, lest you be (-1 Offtopic)'ed to death here.
Strangly enough, 'fat-time and lubie' isn't nearly the craziest thing I've seen grab a following of viewers.
Heck, I have a ATI RAGE Pro that consistantly gets beat by a single Voodoo2 when it comes to QII framerate. My old G200 even comes really close to outperforming it!. I'm skipping the MAXX in favor of a newer Matrox dualhead; Respectable 3d performance AND it frees a PCI slot!
The first time I heard of the port to S/390, my response was something to the effect of 'You'd better start sharing those drugs, pal..'. Granted, I heard about it a month before the official announcement from an IBM employee, but still. S/390 was huge leap; AS/400 shouldn't be too far off.
Re:New platform introduced with v2.2.14 (S/390)
on
Linux Kernel 2.2.14
·
· Score: 2
Up that number by five or so. (We've got at least that many/. readers here) I've got two of them thirty feet from me. I won't get to play with them as intimatly as I'd like to, (I'm the 'low-end' guy, and we're only holding them for resale) but they won't leave without a 'Runs Linux' sticker over the shrink wrap.
I really wish someone would port Linux to one of the older rev AS/400's.. I've had a few chances to snag one off of a scrap deal, but w/ no OS they're useless to me..
should i upgrade to the new kernel, is there anything in it that i will notice and love
Probably not. Most of this release is just driver tweaks.
how hard is it to upgrade a kernel. Is it just a matter of downloading and compiling it, or is it a lot more complex?
There is an excellent document, the Kernel-HOWTO, that explains it in depth. Truthfully, there really isn't much more to it than that. (make clean && make menuconfig && make dep && make bzImage && make install) The only tough part is making it throught the kernel configuration; picking the right drivers, the filesystems, what to build as modules, etc.
Start by trying all the features you can marked (FIXED) or (FIXED ?). They require the simplest effort but are the most useful to someone who may or may not have the hardware on hand. Make an ISO partition greater than 4Gb and use it. Attempt some of the stuff he says 'isn't SMP freindly' on a SMP. Take copious mental notes of the results, and a bug report (or an 'It Works!) sent his way would be nice.
Hmmm.. I can now send email, automatically, from any WebTV account.. Perhaps I will hack together a small bit of code to 'spam' the USPTO, before some dishonest SIG gets their hands on it and uses it to spam Congress with 'Fire Janet Reno! Drop the monopoly charge against Microsoft'.
NSI doesn't care what TLD you request these days.. Besides that, the site does not exist to sell a product; It exists as a 'geek forum' of sorts first, and as a handy vehicle for a couple of ad banners second.
At the end of the list of little green links on the upper left of the page, there is one called 'hof'. Follow it, and your questions will be answered! (And yes, Katz appears to be, well, a frequent post target).
The cellphone is a good example. Does the Government make you own a cellphone? Are they forcing the tracking capability of that cellphone on you? And what safeguards would be in place to ensure the Government didn't get their hands on the telemetry sent back by your in car transponder? In the case of the cellphone, a warrant (at least here in the US) is needed for them to even try radiotriangulation. Would the transponders just be handing telemetry from millions of possible 'suspects' off to the nearest constable, or would there be a reasonable 'check' in place?
While conceivably each car could be fitted with an intelligent box that reports car speed to the satellite, I find it unlikely. They are far more likely to use a 'dumb' box that merely reports car position, and relies on the downlink systems to deal with the computations. Add a unique interrogative ID to the unit, and the British government can track your automotive whereabouts 24/7/365. So they get a tool to monitor the populous and maintain an often incorrect 'speed limit'. They've got cameras on street corners, and this is next?
Offtopic, but.. In such a system, what would be the 'British' way of dealing with long-term interruption of upstream service? Shut the car down? Just ignore the fact it cannot be 'monitored'? Also, I find it difficult to believe that anyone could easily refit many of the older cars..
First: ROX is a desktop tool suite. It is neither a WM or a X replecement.
Second: Some of us grew up with, and are much more comfortable with, alternate UI like the one RiscOS sported. We have favorite keyboards, mice, el al; Why not a favorite UI? I favor NextStep myself, with E (thanks R+M!) and TWM coming close on it's heels. (plus a PS/2 IBM M13 w/ touchpoint and easyCAT1) This fortune intentionally blank.
Sorry, but the electric hairdryer was a godsend for men, too. I should smack you with the cluestick for not having the forsight to realize that men with long hair are inconvenienced by wet hair, and there are a great many men whose vanity exceeds that of the average woman.
I have to pity the write of this article, and his obvious passive-aggressive hand washing fetish. Who else would include the electric hand-dryer on a 'Top 10 gadgets of all time' list, omitting both the light bulb AND the electric espresso maker?
Bloom County is still very relevant. Look at the bits they did with the AT&T 'Deathstar', and replace AT&T with Microsoft. Read the whole 'Meadow Party' series; Pols are the same.
Besides, Bloom County had the first mainstream cartoon hacker!
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the other types of protest going on. Do you thinks it's terribly plesant to wade through a hundred or so psychotic protesters who both attempt physical assault AND call you 'Murderer' every morning on the way into work? (Anti-abortion activists) I'd imagine the same thing happens to non-union employees when the union strikes, to every member of the American World Worker's party, etc. Bricks are just extremly annoying.
/. collective can fund.
Personally, I'm afraid a huge letter campaign wouldn't have much effect at all. The USPTO throws away the letters; They're far more worried about the opinions of the judges and lawmakers that can regulate them and or cut their budget. Letters written to to the federal judges that decide patent cases wouldn't have any effect either; They've got jobs for life, the public can go screw themselves. Writing to Congress, especially to the more powerful, established members, fails because they're too terribly interested in SIG money and the latest public opinion polls. Both changing public opinion through the media outlets and 'paying' Congresspeople to like our proposals cost far more money than the
Or, mabye it isn't. The WTO protesters made headlines even before the Anarchists showed; Many of us paid attention and now know why the WTO is 'evil'. How many of us have seen the latest Greenpeace 'chain yourslf to a tree' effort in the news? Do you think Greenpeace would even be a blip on our radar without thirty-odd years of it? I doubt it.
What we need to do is something so out-of-the-ordinary that the popular media picks it up and disseminates it, pre-chewed and dumbified, to the Joe and Sally Apathy's of the US. When public opinion shifts, so does Congress.
Send 'em bricks, and lots of them.
Any one interested please send mail to either the address listed above! Any organization of effort is better none, be it bricks, letters, or code.
Having checked with the company shipping clerk, FedEx, Airborne, UPS and USPS should take a brick wrapped in plain brown paper or in a largish envelope. To send the largish 4 lb, 14 oz brick I rescued from its role as doorstop would cost me $5.81 with Airborne (overnight), $6.60 wih Fedex (2-day), or $6.50 with the USPS. I dare say a thousand bricks/day would grind the USPTO mail room to a halt. It would be even better if none of us included contact information until the last brick. Not only would it leave the USPTO worried, the press would grapple onto it faster because of the 'mystery' angle.
But how many people could we get to participate? Say we get 10,000. That's 14,000 letters per day on average, and at a half ounce each, is 3.5 tons of mail.
Perhaps we should Airborne Express them a brick along with a letter that reads 'Judging from your decisions lately, everyone at the USPTO must be as dumb as a brick. Here's some company!/Now you're twice as smart' Our cost would soar to around $25, but they'd have to tolerate almost forty tons of insulting real-world spam. It's sure to make the news as one of the most inventive protests of all time.
Wrong. The test is supposed to be one's learned peers, an expert in the field. The common individual is not a software engineer, and has no business judging software patents. Nor is he a chemist, an expert in bioengineering or a 'rocket scientist'.
Slashdot readers are (relitivly speaking) experts in software, networking, databases, hardware and e-business. Therefore, we are qualified to make the 'obvious' determination. It's not our fault the USPTO isn't.
Offtopic, but back on radar. +1 is good for something.
Just a note; The cases to the old Big Blue XT's wlll actually stop a 12 gauge of steel shot. (The .22 long rifle pierced nicely, as did the .38 .
I'm sorry, Slashdot Man, but I think I'm going to get a preemptive restraining order against you..
Anyway, there is another variant to the Slashdor Drinking Game. A few buddies and I thought it up to bother one particular party attendee that night. The conditions for drinking were pretty much the same, except that you got an extra for every story someone else in the room posted and one subtracted for each of your own posts. Each player takes a story, in decending order from newest. At the end of perusing the story, you either take the alcohol penalty or lose an article of clothing. (General rule: if it went on in pairs, it comes off in pairs).
That was the first thought I had too! Its kind of a 'Zippy the Pinhead' meets 'Slashdot Trolls' with a healthy dose of LSD.
/. postings 'archived'. They make slightly more sense in rapid-fire sequence.
Of course, my second was 'Why on God's green earth would anyone want to use the open-source actress meme'.
On a side note, it seems he has all of his
It honestly amazes me that one of our own AC has taken the effort to create a forum for his odd, yet strikingly funny posts. I hope you continue the 'serial' in the new forum, lest you be (-1 Offtopic)'ed to death here.
Strangly enough, 'fat-time and lubie' isn't nearly the craziest thing I've seen grab a following of viewers.
burgers and caffine is more like it
'Cigarettes and burgers, caffeine and alcohol' -Mega Deth, 502.
Remember, we geeks have vices too, might as well admit to them.
Lucky Strike and Stoli.. Mmmmm!
Heck, I have a ATI RAGE Pro that consistantly gets beat by a single Voodoo2 when it comes to QII framerate. My old G200 even comes really close to outperforming it!. I'm skipping the MAXX in favor of a newer Matrox dualhead; Respectable 3d performance AND it frees a PCI slot!
The first time I heard of the port to S/390, my response was something to the effect of 'You'd better start sharing those drugs, pal..'. Granted, I heard about it a month before the official announcement from an IBM employee, but still. S/390 was huge leap; AS/400 shouldn't be too far off.
Up that number by five or so. (We've got at least that many /. readers here) I've got two of them thirty feet from me. I won't get to play with them as intimatly as I'd like to, (I'm the 'low-end' guy, and we're only holding them for resale) but they won't leave without a 'Runs Linux' sticker over the shrink wrap.
I really wish someone would port Linux to one of the older rev AS/400's.. I've had a few chances to snag one off of a scrap deal, but w/ no OS they're useless to me..
should i upgrade to the new kernel, is there anything in it that i will notice and love
Probably not. Most of this release is just driver tweaks.
how hard is it to upgrade a kernel. Is it just a matter of downloading and compiling it, or is it a lot more complex?
There is an excellent document, the Kernel-HOWTO, that explains it in depth. Truthfully, there really isn't much more to it than that. (make clean && make menuconfig && make dep && make bzImage && make install) The only tough part is making it throught the kernel configuration; picking the right drivers, the filesystems, what to build as modules, etc.
Start by trying all the features you can marked (FIXED) or (FIXED ?). They require the simplest effort but are the most useful to someone who may or may not have the hardware on hand. Make an ISO partition greater than 4Gb and use it. Attempt some of the stuff he says 'isn't SMP freindly' on a SMP. Take copious mental notes of the results, and a bug report (or an 'It Works!) sent his way would be nice.
Welcome to the Linux Quality Assurance Team!
Hmmm.. I can now send email, automatically, from any WebTV account.. Perhaps I will hack together a small bit of code to 'spam' the USPTO, before some dishonest SIG gets their hands on it and uses it to spam Congress with 'Fire Janet Reno! Drop the monopoly charge against Microsoft'.
Guess the Special Interest Group!
First: Have you ever considered a live episode of Geeks in Space? How about doing a live session at LWE?
Second: How bad was the hangover New Years day?
NSI doesn't care what TLD you request these days.. Besides that, the site does not exist to sell a product; It exists as a 'geek forum' of sorts first, and as a handy vehicle for a couple of ad banners second.
At the end of the list of little green links on the upper left of the page, there is one called 'hof'. Follow it, and your questions will be answered! (And yes, Katz appears to be, well, a frequent post target).
The cellphone is a good example. Does the Government make you own a cellphone? Are they forcing the tracking capability of that cellphone on you? And what safeguards would be in place to ensure the Government didn't get their hands on the telemetry sent back by your in car transponder? In the case of the cellphone, a warrant (at least here in the US) is needed for them to even try radiotriangulation. Would the transponders just be handing telemetry from millions of possible 'suspects' off to the nearest constable, or would there be a reasonable 'check' in place?
While conceivably each car could be fitted with an intelligent box that reports car speed to the satellite, I find it unlikely. They are far more likely to use a 'dumb' box that merely reports car position, and relies on the downlink systems to deal with the computations. Add a unique interrogative ID to the unit, and the British government can track your automotive whereabouts 24/7/365. So they get a tool to monitor the populous and maintain an often incorrect 'speed limit'. They've got cameras on street corners, and this is next?
Offtopic, but.. In such a system, what would be the 'British' way of dealing with long-term interruption of upstream service? Shut the car down? Just ignore the fact it cannot be 'monitored'? Also, I find it difficult to believe that anyone could easily refit many of the older cars..
First: ROX is a desktop tool suite. It is neither a WM or a X replecement.
Second: Some of us grew up with, and are much more comfortable with, alternate UI like the one RiscOS sported. We have favorite keyboards, mice, el al; Why not a favorite UI? I favor NextStep myself, with E (thanks R+M!) and TWM coming close on it's heels. (plus a PS/2 IBM M13 w/ touchpoint and easyCAT1)
This fortune intentionally blank.
Sorry, but the electric hairdryer was a godsend for men, too. I should smack you with the cluestick for not having the forsight to realize that men with long hair are inconvenienced by wet hair, and there are a great many men whose vanity exceeds that of the average woman.
Yes, I am the spitting image of a 1960's hippie.
I have to pity the write of this article, and his obvious passive-aggressive hand washing fetish. Who else would include the electric hand-dryer on a 'Top 10 gadgets of all time' list, omitting both the light bulb AND the electric espresso maker?
Owner of a caffeine fetish and proud of it.
Bloom County is still very relevant. Look at the bits they did with the AT&T 'Deathstar', and replace AT&T with Microsoft. Read the whole 'Meadow Party' series; Pols are the same.
Besides, Bloom County had the first mainstream cartoon hacker!
'Dan Rather is a turnip'