There are no roads *TO* the area. There are obviously streets in the towns. And Brazil has something called the Amazon River Basin, by which one can travel to lots of places via a really neat modern invention called a *BOAT*.
Conversely, I have found it quite satisfying to learn on the web that certain test results my physician has freaked out over do not necessarily mean anything more than a minor infection of a particular organ.
Also, and more importantly, I learned on the web that symptoms I (and several quackoid dentists) had associated with tooth problems were better treated by a neurologist, who diagnosed the problem as trigeminal neuralgia at just about the same time I was becoming decidely suicidal (try having a rotating toothache for three months and see how you feel). There is definitely an important place for instant access to health information on the web.
I just recently realised that online reviews of merchants are being pumped by stooges of the same merchants, so this doesn't really surprise me at all. It just shows how important online evaluations have become when the parties themselves start putting their thumbs on the scales, so to speak.
Don't you just hate being impacted? I was impacted for a year once and I tell you it really sucked. Thankfully, I was eventually de-impacted with another company. These guys also have frequent impacts, but at least they try to trans-impact those impacted to another department where they are at least temporarily de-impacted.
Has it never occurred to these morons that the purpose of language is to communicate, not to sound important?
Funny, I always thought windows were holes in the wall that let light and air in. Next, some moron is going to want to trademark "doors." Then we'll have somebody create Lindoors and he can get sued too. Lots of money for the poor attorneys-at-law so they can pay for their Mercedeses(?). Personally, I'm going to trademark the names of all home orifices so I'll be a leg up on the competition. Come to think of it, isn't there already a Home Orifice?
"I wonder, though, if it is not too much trouble to remove features from(Cripple) XP, why was it impossible to remove IE back during the antitrust trial? Isn't IE just another feature like the BSOD. (Which for the uninitiated does really still exist in Windows XP."
This is just one of those inconsistencies that pops up when a person or corporation starts telling fibs without worrying about being consistent.
As for XP not being that bad, this is kind of like saying that your migraine headaches have been replaced with normal headaches that aren't that bad and only last a couple of hours instead of half a day. XP won't even allow drag and drop from and to a writable CD without having a third party program running. What are they going to do now, cripple the ability to drag and drop between regular drives? Block the use of the media player? Make you edit the registry in machine language? I really can't imagine what they could cripple that isn't either part of their plan to take over the world or is actually necessary for the computer to run properly.
Maybe they'll just make it impossible to boot anything but Windows....
"You are buying an intentionally crippled card..."
I think what you're missing is that some products have enough functionality for a crippled version to remain a quite usable product. The problem with XP and the like is that the uncrippled version is so bad that intentionally crippling it makes it act as if it were, well, crippled even more than usual....
Assuming for the moment that you're not just trolling me... Do you mean would I like to live in an ideal world? Of course I would. But on the practical assumption that I won't get that anytime soon, I have to, at least, hold folks who would bust into someone's home to the standard that it must be done in accord with the basic principles of law and that the only folks with the authority to do so must be those elected by the voters of their respective locales.
That any government claiming to represent a free people would even consider allowing private thugs to enforce laws that they themselves don't feel like enforcing or can't enforce is Orwellian to say the least, and I'd strongly suspect that any challenge to these practises on the basis of the principles of English common law, to which I presume even Australians are still subject, would beat the crap out of the idiots who support them.
That having been said, your suggestion that this kind of behaviour is not horrible further reminds me of the folks who thought the nazi cuckoos in Germany weren't horrible or threatening. These folks, who thought that they got to enforce whatever they thought was right in disregard for what the government thought later seized power and proceeded to begin murdering those they disliked by the millions, not to mention causing the deaths of millions of soldiers and civilians in the greatest war this planet has seen. Do you seriously think that corporate boards have any more innate respect for human rights that the brownshirts in 1930s Germany?
As for secret torts, the framers of the constitution were perfectly happy to allow secret torts in the privacy of ones own home. George and Thomas and Benjamin weren't, after all, control freaks like George III and Crazy John.
This is sometimes known as "the Roumanian option" or "the Roumanian solution." This is always an option of last resort, but it remains available to a people who would be free.
"Why is the air so thick with Anonymous Cowards reeling at the charges of fascism?"
Because most fascists are anonymous cowards until they get enough of them together to feel secure. Then they have their little beerhall putsch and start terrorizing the weak and defenseless.
The scary thing is, this isn't "government" by anything. It's a private entity given the right to force their way into your home because you MIGHT have something that belongs to them. These folks weren't elected by anyone except maybe the stockholders in an unopposed election. If I were Australian, I'd be jumping up and down asking who the hell gave corporations the right to act as a pseudo government. As a citizen of the world, I may just start jumping up and down anyway at the thought that the feared takeover by corporations has already begun. Does anyone here honestly think that Billy Boy wouldn't jump at the chance to run Amerika from his corporate office?
I didn't say it was perfect, but it sure simplifies things. Actually, my ISP is the public library, and you can't get any less commercial than that...
I got this idea from an originally free service that let you create various addresses on their server that would then forward email in either direction. They later decided to charge $12 a month (!) for the service. At that point I figured I could do the same thing myself with my own domain for significantly less money and I got all the other advantages that go with a domain.
The best solution I have found so far is to have your own domain and generate specific email addresses for specific types of communications. You keep your actual ISP email address totally secret and don't give it to anybody except your domain registrar. You then generate an address for your best friends and aquaintances you can trust and keep it separate from everything else so you don't have to change it but once every few years if that. You have a specific Shopping and Registration address you kill and replace after it becomes spammy. And you have an address for things like newletters and email groups you can also change and reregister if they leak out to the spam boobs. There are all kinds of variations on this theme, but that's the basic gist of the matter: Secrecy and flexibility.
TRON, babes. It runs the Seawolf arms system and it's on all those little Toyotas coming out of Japan. And it's open source. And it is, in fact, the most widely used OS in the world.
Unless things have changed radically since I actually used Linux on my desktop, the problem has been and continues to be peripheral manufacturers who refuse to write drivers for their equipment, so that it becomes necessary for some open source programmer to do so. And this isn't necessarily about to change. These manufacturers see their drivers as proprietary property. This is why the predictions have so far failed to bear fruit.
"Measurements lead to the idea that there would be a quite stable element with a very high atom mass."
Which gives new meaning to the term "heavy metal." Gee, I know what we could do with it. We could make long-lasting paint with it!
"Mrs. Smith, we only have two options. We can either leave the unimbecilium in your child's system and allow him to grow up severely retarded, or we can convert it into its radioactive form and subject him to a 99.9% chance of developing brain cancer in the next month."
"Who is to say that...element 139...wont be stable...?"
Um, all these elements HAVE existed--at the "beginning" of the universe, whatever that means post-relativity--just after the big bang. The reason they do not exist now is that they are unstable. I'm no physicist, but I think the instability is a direct result of the size of the element. The bigger they get, the more radioactive. And keep in mind that that's what we're talking about here, radioactive decay. The LD50 for Plutonium is something like 2 molecules. What do you think it is for unimbecillium?
Triumph of the computer illiterate.
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SCO Offline
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· Score: 1
"But with so many computer clocks incorrectly set, the infected machines began firing off data requests at SCO.com hours earlier...."
This says something fundamental about the folks whose computers are being used for this attack. And it does not bode well for any user-based attempt to solve ANY computer problem. There are just too many folks out there whose VCRs continuously flash 12:00!
Not to be a spoil sport or anything, but this gets to look more and more like academic self gratification rather than anything with any conceivable use. You can't even build an ununpentium bomb. These elements are so unstable one has to wonder if there isn't a good reason why they don't exist. Just how much ununpentium do we need lying around? I'm all in favor of basic research, but there have to be more fruitful avenues to explore.
Re:Use a narrower brush!
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· Score: 1
"When you want to go off on criminal spammers, use a little more linguistic precision."
Speaking of linguistic precision, could it be that the guys who continually bombard me with ads for stuff that will enlarge my p3n1s have just confused SCO with a bunch of big dicks?
Geez! This is the everpresent danger of being sardonic in a posting. Does anyone here seriously think anyone ever wrote a book called The Life and Times of a Cheese Tort? Much as I appreciate the modding up, that should have been Funny not Insightful.
As for the total misconstrual of what I said, well, I was talking about the assumption that someone should have read a particular book because it was old and popular. The Three Musketeers are old an popular. Does that mean someone, unlike me, who hasn't read them is to be considered a dolt? Hardly.
As for whether The Rings are droll or not, you need to keep in mind that words may be used metaphorically and not just in their dictionary sense. This fact is lost on most folks who haven't read anything of a literary nature lately. "Droll" is actually a term that was used commonly in the 19th Century to describe the novels of the time, so that in this case it can be presumed to refer to the qualities of such 19th Century literary productions, whether they are specifically humorous or unusual, though I challenge anyone here to try to make a case that the Ring stories aren't peculiar. Talking trees, indeed!
I personally always run out and read the most popular books, no matter how droll and half-witted they are. Why just last week I read The Life and Times of a Cheese Tort: An Unauthorized Biography of Martha Stewart.
As for accuracy of movies vs. novels, Gorky Park was probably THE most accurately transported novel, and it sucked rather badly when compared with the novel. You just have to keep in mind that movies are a whole different medium and require different artistic values.
I suspect their cap is a floating one and has to do with how much of the available bandwidth is being sucked at any given time by everyone. If they announced a conservative figure that would always be valid and stuck with it, you'd probably get less than you are now, because they'd have to assume a worst case condition of the network.
Slashdot Mirror
There are no roads *TO* the area. There are obviously streets in the towns. And Brazil has something called the Amazon River Basin, by which one can travel to lots of places via a really neat modern invention called a *BOAT*.
Conversely, I have found it quite satisfying to learn on the web that certain test results my physician has freaked out over do not necessarily mean anything more than a minor infection of a particular organ.
Also, and more importantly, I learned on the web that symptoms I (and several quackoid dentists) had associated with tooth problems were better treated by a neurologist, who diagnosed the problem as trigeminal neuralgia at just about the same time I was becoming decidely suicidal (try having a rotating toothache for three months and see how you feel). There is definitely an important place for instant access to health information on the web.
I just recently realised that online reviews of merchants are being pumped by stooges of the same merchants, so this doesn't really surprise me at all. It just shows how important online evaluations have become when the parties themselves start putting their thumbs on the scales, so to speak.
Don't you just hate being impacted? I was impacted for a year once and I tell you it really sucked. Thankfully, I was eventually de-impacted with another company. These guys also have frequent impacts, but at least they try to trans-impact those impacted to another department where they are at least temporarily de-impacted.
Has it never occurred to these morons that the purpose of language is to communicate, not to sound important?
Funny, I always thought windows were holes in the wall that let light and air in. Next, some moron is going to want to trademark "doors." Then we'll have somebody create Lindoors and he can get sued too. Lots of money for the poor attorneys-at-law so they can pay for their Mercedeses(?). Personally, I'm going to trademark the names of all home orifices so I'll be a leg up on the competition. Come to think of it, isn't there already a Home Orifice?
"I wonder, though, if it is not too much trouble to remove features from(Cripple) XP, why was it impossible to remove IE back during the antitrust trial? Isn't IE just another feature like the BSOD. (Which for the uninitiated does really still exist in Windows XP."
This is just one of those inconsistencies that pops up when a person or corporation starts telling fibs without worrying about being consistent.
As for XP not being that bad, this is kind of like saying that your migraine headaches have been replaced with normal headaches that aren't that bad and only last a couple of hours instead of half a day. XP won't even allow drag and drop from and to a writable CD without having a third party program running. What are they going to do now, cripple the ability to drag and drop between regular drives? Block the use of the media player? Make you edit the registry in machine language? I really can't imagine what they could cripple that isn't either part of their plan to take over the world or is actually necessary for the computer to run properly.
Maybe they'll just make it impossible to boot anything but Windows....
"You are buying an intentionally crippled card..."
I think what you're missing is that some products have enough functionality for a crippled version to remain a quite usable product. The problem with XP and the like is that the uncrippled version is so bad that intentionally crippling it makes it act as if it were, well, crippled even more than usual....
"it's not new, horrible or threatening."
Assuming for the moment that you're not just trolling me... Do you mean would I like to live in an ideal world? Of course I would. But on the practical assumption that I won't get that anytime soon, I have to, at least, hold folks who would bust into someone's home to the standard that it must be done in accord with the basic principles of law and that the only folks with the authority to do so must be those elected by the voters of their respective locales.
That any government claiming to represent a free people would even consider allowing private thugs to enforce laws that they themselves don't feel like enforcing or can't enforce is Orwellian to say the least, and I'd strongly suspect that any challenge to these practises on the basis of the principles of English common law, to which I presume even Australians are still subject, would beat the crap out of the idiots who support them.
That having been said, your suggestion that this kind of behaviour is not horrible further reminds me of the folks who thought the nazi cuckoos in Germany weren't horrible or threatening. These folks, who thought that they got to enforce whatever they thought was right in disregard for what the government thought later seized power and proceeded to begin murdering those they disliked by the millions, not to mention causing the deaths of millions of soldiers and civilians in the greatest war this planet has seen. Do you seriously think that corporate boards have any more innate respect for human rights that the brownshirts in 1930s Germany?
As for secret torts, the framers of the constitution were perfectly happy to allow secret torts in the privacy of ones own home. George and Thomas and Benjamin weren't, after all, control freaks like George III and Crazy John.
"Live free or Kill somebody!"
This is sometimes known as "the Roumanian option" or "the Roumanian solution." This is always an option of last resort, but it remains available to a people who would be free.
If he really believes that, I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn to sell him dirt cheap.
"Why is the air so thick with Anonymous Cowards reeling at the charges of fascism?"
Because most fascists are anonymous cowards until they get enough of them together to feel secure. Then they have their little beerhall putsch and start terrorizing the weak and defenseless.
The scary thing is, this isn't "government" by anything. It's a private entity given the right to force their way into your home because you MIGHT have something that belongs to them. These folks weren't elected by anyone except maybe the stockholders in an unopposed election. If I were Australian, I'd be jumping up and down asking who the hell gave corporations the right to act as a pseudo government. As a citizen of the world, I may just start jumping up and down anyway at the thought that the feared takeover by corporations has already begun. Does anyone here honestly think that Billy Boy wouldn't jump at the chance to run Amerika from his corporate office?
I didn't say it was perfect, but it sure simplifies things. Actually, my ISP is the public library, and you can't get any less commercial than that... I got this idea from an originally free service that let you create various addresses on their server that would then forward email in either direction. They later decided to charge $12 a month (!) for the service. At that point I figured I could do the same thing myself with my own domain for significantly less money and I got all the other advantages that go with a domain.
The best solution I have found so far is to have your own domain and generate specific email addresses for specific types of communications. You keep your actual ISP email address totally secret and don't give it to anybody except your domain registrar. You then generate an address for your best friends and aquaintances you can trust and keep it separate from everything else so you don't have to change it but once every few years if that. You have a specific Shopping and Registration address you kill and replace after it becomes spammy. And you have an address for things like newletters and email groups you can also change and reregister if they leak out to the spam boobs. There are all kinds of variations on this theme, but that's the basic gist of the matter: Secrecy and flexibility.
"what's a good obscure OS?"
TRON, babes. It runs the Seawolf arms system and it's on all those little Toyotas coming out of Japan. And it's open source. And it is, in fact, the most widely used OS in the world.
Unless things have changed radically since I actually used Linux on my desktop, the problem has been and continues to be peripheral manufacturers who refuse to write drivers for their equipment, so that it becomes necessary for some open source programmer to do so. And this isn't necessarily about to change. These manufacturers see their drivers as proprietary property. This is why the predictions have so far failed to bear fruit.
Do you really think Microsoft is above hijacking their own browser and sending you to McGoogle.com when you try to go to Google?
"Measurements lead to the idea that there would be a quite stable element with a very high atom mass."
Which gives new meaning to the term "heavy metal." Gee, I know what we could do with it. We could make long-lasting paint with it!
"Mrs. Smith, we only have two options. We can either leave the unimbecilium in your child's system and allow him to grow up severely retarded, or we can convert it into its radioactive form and subject him to a 99.9% chance of developing brain cancer in the next month."
Ain't science wonderful?
"Who is to say that...element 139...wont be stable...?" Um, all these elements HAVE existed--at the "beginning" of the universe, whatever that means post-relativity--just after the big bang. The reason they do not exist now is that they are unstable. I'm no physicist, but I think the instability is a direct result of the size of the element. The bigger they get, the more radioactive. And keep in mind that that's what we're talking about here, radioactive decay. The LD50 for Plutonium is something like 2 molecules. What do you think it is for unimbecillium?
"But with so many computer clocks incorrectly set, the infected machines began firing off data requests at SCO.com hours earlier...." This says something fundamental about the folks whose computers are being used for this attack. And it does not bode well for any user-based attempt to solve ANY computer problem. There are just too many folks out there whose VCRs continuously flash 12:00!
New form of matter? Huh?
Not to be a spoil sport or anything, but this gets to look more and more like academic self gratification rather than anything with any conceivable use. You can't even build an ununpentium bomb. These elements are so unstable one has to wonder if there isn't a good reason why they don't exist. Just how much ununpentium do we need lying around? I'm all in favor of basic research, but there have to be more fruitful avenues to explore.
"When you want to go off on criminal spammers, use a little more linguistic precision." Speaking of linguistic precision, could it be that the guys who continually bombard me with ads for stuff that will enlarge my p3n1s have just confused SCO with a bunch of big dicks?
Geez! This is the everpresent danger of being sardonic in a posting. Does anyone here seriously think anyone ever wrote a book called The Life and Times of a Cheese Tort? Much as I appreciate the modding up, that should have been Funny not Insightful.
As for the total misconstrual of what I said, well, I was talking about the assumption that someone should have read a particular book because it was old and popular. The Three Musketeers are old an popular. Does that mean someone, unlike me, who hasn't read them is to be considered a dolt? Hardly.
As for whether The Rings are droll or not, you need to keep in mind that words may be used metaphorically and not just in their dictionary sense. This fact is lost on most folks who haven't read anything of a literary nature lately. "Droll" is actually a term that was used commonly in the 19th Century to describe the novels of the time, so that in this case it can be presumed to refer to the qualities of such 19th Century literary productions, whether they are specifically humorous or unusual, though I challenge anyone here to try to make a case that the Ring stories aren't peculiar. Talking trees, indeed!
I personally always run out and read the most popular books, no matter how droll and half-witted they are. Why just last week I read The Life and Times of a Cheese Tort: An Unauthorized Biography of Martha Stewart.
As for accuracy of movies vs. novels, Gorky Park was probably THE most accurately transported novel, and it sucked rather badly when compared with the novel. You just have to keep in mind that movies are a whole different medium and require different artistic values.
I suspect their cap is a floating one and has to do with how much of the available bandwidth is being sucked at any given time by everyone. If they announced a conservative figure that would always be valid and stuck with it, you'd probably get less than you are now, because they'd have to assume a worst case condition of the network.
Why don't they just call it clic.com?