Everyone goes on so about the Mona Lisa, etc., that I have to throw in this commentary of Twain's from The Innocents Abroad (Source: enotes.com):
I have got enough of the old masters! Brown says he has "shook" them, and I think I will shake them, too. You wander through a mile of picture galleries and stare stupidly at ghastly old nightmares done in lampblack and lightning, and listen to the ecstatic encomiums of the guides, and try to get up some enthusiasm, but it won't come.
Yahoo must be in on it, too. I used Yahoo to search the susancollins.com site for the ad text and got nothing. I really wanted to see how the Susan Collins campaign is allegedly misusing the MoveOn trademark.
FWIW, as a somewhat liberal Democrat, Move On doesn't speak for me.
I think that if you examine U.S. law a bit, you'll find that it's very feudal in nature. You don't "own" the land your house is built on, you "hold title", and that title ultimately can be traced back to a government grant. And when you get a patent, it is the government that issues it. The government is obliged to protect your rights to these things, and if the government is overthrown, your rights disappear. I'm pretty sure the same thing applies to Canada.
Still, I think it's pretty wacko to for the government to be able to assert copyright over the image of a coin -- after all, the "government" is supposed to be the people. Oh -- maybe not in Canada. I think it's still part of the English monarchy, and I froget whether the monarch governs with the consent of the people, or whether she holds her position by divine fiat.
Somehow, this is no surprise to me. My first operational Linux box, a Redhat 5 system, was hacked several years ago while connected on an intermittent dial-up connection. The machine served as a router so my wife and I could share the Internet connection, and -- idiot that I am -- I had not bothered to enable the firewall, figuring no one would bother trying to hack into AT&T Worldnet dial-up clients. I would never have discovered it except that the attacker's scripts were expecting a newer version of Linux. The takeover attempt failed in the middle, and after I shut the machine down for the night, I couldn't login the next morning.
I think it's fair to take it as a given that no platform is completely invulnerable to being breached. And once the problem of getting in is resolved, which would you rather work with, Linux or Windows?
A local municipal government agency, using technology to solve a problem, as part of its charge to the public?
You must have read a different article than the one I read:
The private companies that will build and operate the Beltway lanes have proposed using technology that would scan drivers and passengers with bursts of infrared light that detect human skin.
The companies that proposed this project went after an opportunity: build additional capacity on a stretch of road that is frequently clogged and has insufficient room for expansion without condemnation of lots of extremely expensive real estate (valued at tens of dollars per square foot, not counting improvements). The way they sold this to the Commonwealth of Virginia is by promising to let carpools and buses use the lanes for free, while charging hefty fees to drivers who carry no passengers. The Commonwealth bought it, so in order to deliver on their promise, they have to come up with an automated way to catch carpool cheaters, or they will lose their shirts.
As you can see, the government is not involved in this one, but you can bet that if the technology succeeds, it will be applied in many other places, and possibly in some ways that we would prefer it not be applied.
Okay, I know it's a lame NRA joke, but I have to work with the available material. FWIW, Sony and the rest of the RIAA are missing a point: The fact that I have been able to buy LPs and CDs over the years and record them to cassette tapes for use in my car or Walkman fueled my purchases of these items. The fact that I can now rip them onto my MP3 player will fuel my future purchases. When I can't do that, I'll stop buying music.
I RTFA and the author fails to tell why it's illegal in most states. Just dangles the fact that it is in front of us.
I noticed that, too. And not only does he make that assertion without citation, he doesn't even give an email address. It's probably another one of those myths.
Whatever, I posted a question to the EPA's FAQ board. I'll post whatever answer I get, if I remember.
I sympathize with the guy -- I really hate the virtual pat-down when leaving a store -- but I remember there was case decided by the Supreme Court a couple or three years ago that said we have to identify ourselves to the police when asked. Exactly where the point is that it is necessary to provide a driver's license isn't entirely clear to me. But anyway, I see two bits of stupidity in this story:
The store manager was stupid for going attempting to impede the writer's departure. When I worked in retail, I was told to never try to stop a suspected shoplifter. It opens the store employee up to being shot or knifed, and it opens the store up to a lawsuit.
The author was stupid for picking a fight with the cop who responded to his call. If you want to show a cop that someone else is being unreasonable, you need to be completely reasonable with the cop. (See The Unicorn in the Garden for an example of how to finesse this.
Still, I hope he takes Circuit City to the cleaners.
The catch, of course, is that "fittest" depends on the environment that the organism lives in. And "less suitable genetic traits" are just the ones that happen to result in the individual's untimely death (i.e., before it reproduces). My myopia is obviously a less suitable genetic trait that could get me killed if I get into a situation where I need to see a danger at a distance. But none of my nearly-blind ancestors managed to get themselves killed before I came along, and I have managed to reproduce, and so this bad trait has been propagated to another generation. There seem to be certain diseases that are like that as well. Some inherited traits just happen to help a genetic line survive, and some of them just happen to not to have caused it to be extinguished.
I remember an article a few years ago that essentially said that the current generation of people is composed of a very small sample of the people who lived in the Middle Ages (to pick an epoch). Most of the family lines of that earlier epoch have been extinguished, for whatever reason. So in essence, we are whittling down to some few genetic lines that will have been lucky enough to make it that far. Whatever it is, it won't be perfect.
I think this is news because it is confirmation of an old idea that is still hotly debated.
Its not enough for them to lose the election. We should be seeing jail time for this sort of overreaching corruption.
Don't worry. We'll almost certainly see jail time if we get in this administration's way. Oh... You said "for this sort of overreaching corruption", not "from this sort of overreaching corruption".
It will be funny if they don't find anything on Tamm. Well, apart from the hassle the poor guy is going through.
It would be nice if people didn't post "print" links to articles. Lots of times this cuts out the advertising that the publisher has on the web page. Sure, most of us don't really care about the ads, but what helps the publisher make money to post the articles in the first place is the advertising revenue he gets from having thousands of eyeballs look at the ads. As publishers realize people are avoiding the ads, they are coming up with more complicated schemes like registration, etc. Who needs that?!!!
So, I'm curious, what's the difference between being schizophrenic (or otherwise having some recongized mental illness), and just "being a dick"?
The latter group haven't been diagnosed yet?
But seriously, it's not just about changes in personality. One guy I knew heard voices. From what I've read and heard (radio, not voices), when schizophrenics hear voices telling them to do something, it's more powerful than anything real. I guess you could say that their brain hardware has been hacked.
Sooo, I guess we can make jokes like the one I want to make, "Who needs schizophrenic mice?", but if they can help people like my friend, I think it's a good thing.
I don't think it matters what one's leanings are if they aren't qualified for the job.
I'm not sure if she's qualified or not. I haven't done an exhaustive search, but I don't see anywhere that she's been a big GOP donor, and that seems to me to be the most important qualification after ideology in the current administration.
No, I haven't had to go further than the supermarket to get my meat, but I clean the fish I catch, so that ought to count for something.
Your argument is akin to the argument I heard against hunting over 30 years ago, that hunting was inhumane because the deer (or whatever) might be wounded, or in any case might suffer fear during the chase, while the steer in the abbatoir would have no fear and feel no pain. Somehow, I think that steers know *exactly* what is going on, and I argue that people who oppose hunting on moral grounds should kill and dress all their own meat.
In the case of the whale, however, modern whaling methods seem to be so efficient that whales are in danger of extinction, even with civilized nations' having given up the practice. Since we can't seem to convince Japan and Norway to leave them alone, and U.S. aboriginal peoples are allowed to hunt them with 20th century weaponry, I think it's reasonable to argue that they ought to be restricted to methods that give whales a chance to survive.
This isn't to say that 19th century, non-explosive harpoons didn't endanger the whale population. Melville wrote that whales were harder to find in the mid-19th century than they had been in the "old days". But he also described many whales as having harpoons in them from previous attempts on their lives, which gives me reason to believe that some of them were able to reproduce and carry on the species.
If it comes to a question of individual whales' suffering but the species' continuing to exist, or extinction, I would prefer the former. But I really just wish we humans would leave them the hell alone.
If you want to bitch at the Eskimos for doing it, be my guest -- but you'll probably get bitched at in return about how "their traditions are as endangered as the whales" or some such thing.
Maybe they (and all other whalemen) ought to do it using traditional methods, too. I just finished reading Moby Dick, and it sounded a lot fairer for the whale in the days when men in rowboats pursued whales with non-explosive pointy sticks.
Seems strange that they'd hire someone from a law firm associated with Microsoft for the Justice Dept. and then put him in a position to comment on an MS case.
Not for this administration.
FWIW, the Dept. of Justice uses Microsoft Windows for all of their desktops. (Probably not news to anyone.) They're locked into it, though, because of a variety of special applications they need, particularly the document imaging, OCR, and document management software that they need to pursue the complex cases their lawyers work with. The applications are going to drive what they do, and until vendors can provide competitively-priced applications on other platforms that meet their needs, they have no choice.
It's a shame. Kodak used to have a picture frame network. You could take your memory card out of your digital camera, insert it into your frame, and send pictures right off the card to other picture frames. Each frame used a dial-up modem connection and polled the Kodak server in the wee hours of the night. It was perfect for sending Grandma pictures of the grandkids. But the business model behind this network was a bit screwed up, and rather than fix it, Kodak killed it five years ago. There may still be something similar out from Fuji called Ceiva. As a fan of Kodak (my grandfather, a professional photographer, wouldn't use anything else), I hate to see them ceding the business to everyone else.
I guess it depends on how one defines "suitable replacement". One of my requirements is that my PDA can be synced to Linux. I can do that now with my Palm i705, but when it goes, I may be up the creek.
Does anyone know of Linux projects that sync with Windows Mobile or whatever the heck it's called?
Slashdot Mirror
He goes on at length here, down around page 190.
FWIW, as a somewhat liberal Democrat, Move On doesn't speak for me.
Still, I think it's pretty wacko to for the government to be able to assert copyright over the image of a coin -- after all, the "government" is supposed to be the people. Oh -- maybe not in Canada. I think it's still part of the English monarchy, and I froget whether the monarch governs with the consent of the people, or whether she holds her position by divine fiat.
I think it's fair to take it as a given that no platform is completely invulnerable to being breached. And once the problem of getting in is resolved, which would you rather work with, Linux or Windows?
As you can see, the government is not involved in this one, but you can bet that if the technology succeeds, it will be applied in many other places, and possibly in some ways that we would prefer it not be applied.
Okay, I know it's a lame NRA joke, but I have to work with the available material. FWIW, Sony and the rest of the RIAA are missing a point: The fact that I have been able to buy LPs and CDs over the years and record them to cassette tapes for use in my car or Walkman fueled my purchases of these items. The fact that I can now rip them onto my MP3 player will fuel my future purchases. When I can't do that, I'll stop buying music.
But who is uid 0 around here?
After all, look what happened in the Chronicles of Narnia. You get one witch in from one world and let her into another, and all hell breaks loose.
The /. headline referred to 1-Click Lawyers®. Now if that isn't a scary and dangerous feature, I don't know what is.
I noticed that, too. And not only does he make that assertion without citation, he doesn't even give an email address. It's probably another one of those myths.
Whatever, I posted a question to the EPA's FAQ board. I'll post whatever answer I get, if I remember.
BRIAN: I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly!
GIRL: Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.
BRIAN: What?! Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah!
FOLLOWERS: He is! He is the Messiah!
Source: Life of Brian- The store manager was stupid for going attempting to impede the writer's departure. When I worked in retail, I was told to never try to stop a suspected shoplifter. It opens the store employee up to being shot or knifed, and it opens the store up to a lawsuit.
- The author was stupid for picking a fight with the cop who responded to his call. If you want to show a cop that someone else is being unreasonable, you need to be completely reasonable with the cop. (See The Unicorn in the Garden for an example of how to finesse this.
Still, I hope he takes Circuit City to the cleaners.The catch, of course, is that "fittest" depends on the environment that the organism lives in. And "less suitable genetic traits" are just the ones that happen to result in the individual's untimely death (i.e., before it reproduces). My myopia is obviously a less suitable genetic trait that could get me killed if I get into a situation where I need to see a danger at a distance. But none of my nearly-blind ancestors managed to get themselves killed before I came along, and I have managed to reproduce, and so this bad trait has been propagated to another generation. There seem to be certain diseases that are like that as well. Some inherited traits just happen to help a genetic line survive, and some of them just happen to not to have caused it to be extinguished.
I remember an article a few years ago that essentially said that the current generation of people is composed of a very small sample of the people who lived in the Middle Ages (to pick an epoch). Most of the family lines of that earlier epoch have been extinguished, for whatever reason. So in essence, we are whittling down to some few genetic lines that will have been lucky enough to make it that far. Whatever it is, it won't be perfect.
I think this is news because it is confirmation of an old idea that is still hotly debated.
Don't worry. We'll almost certainly see jail time if we get in this administration's way. Oh... You said "for this sort of overreaching corruption", not "from this sort of overreaching corruption".
It will be funny if they don't find anything on Tamm. Well, apart from the hassle the poor guy is going through.
It would be nice if people didn't post "print" links to articles. Lots of times this cuts out the advertising that the publisher has on the web page. Sure, most of us don't really care about the ads, but what helps the publisher make money to post the articles in the first place is the advertising revenue he gets from having thousands of eyeballs look at the ads. As publishers realize people are avoiding the ads, they are coming up with more complicated schemes like registration, etc. Who needs that?!!!
The latter group haven't been diagnosed yet?
But seriously, it's not just about changes in personality. One guy I knew heard voices. From what I've read and heard (radio, not voices), when schizophrenics hear voices telling them to do something, it's more powerful than anything real. I guess you could say that their brain hardware has been hacked.
Sooo, I guess we can make jokes like the one I want to make, "Who needs schizophrenic mice?", but if they can help people like my friend, I think it's a good thing.
I'm not sure if she's qualified or not. I haven't done an exhaustive search, but I don't see anywhere that she's been a big GOP donor, and that seems to me to be the most important qualification after ideology in the current administration.
Not until someone hangs it on a cross.
Your argument is akin to the argument I heard against hunting over 30 years ago, that hunting was inhumane because the deer (or whatever) might be wounded, or in any case might suffer fear during the chase, while the steer in the abbatoir would have no fear and feel no pain. Somehow, I think that steers know *exactly* what is going on, and I argue that people who oppose hunting on moral grounds should kill and dress all their own meat.
In the case of the whale, however, modern whaling methods seem to be so efficient that whales are in danger of extinction, even with civilized nations' having given up the practice. Since we can't seem to convince Japan and Norway to leave them alone, and U.S. aboriginal peoples are allowed to hunt them with 20th century weaponry, I think it's reasonable to argue that they ought to be restricted to methods that give whales a chance to survive.
This isn't to say that 19th century, non-explosive harpoons didn't endanger the whale population. Melville wrote that whales were harder to find in the mid-19th century than they had been in the "old days". But he also described many whales as having harpoons in them from previous attempts on their lives, which gives me reason to believe that some of them were able to reproduce and carry on the species.
If it comes to a question of individual whales' suffering but the species' continuing to exist, or extinction, I would prefer the former. But I really just wish we humans would leave them the hell alone.
Maybe they (and all other whalemen) ought to do it using traditional methods, too. I just finished reading Moby Dick, and it sounded a lot fairer for the whale in the days when men in rowboats pursued whales with non-explosive pointy sticks.
Not for this administration.
FWIW, the Dept. of Justice uses Microsoft Windows for all of their desktops. (Probably not news to anyone.) They're locked into it, though, because of a variety of special applications they need, particularly the document imaging, OCR, and document management software that they need to pursue the complex cases their lawyers work with. The applications are going to drive what they do, and until vendors can provide competitively-priced applications on other platforms that meet their needs, they have no choice.
FWIW, your cat's drinking from the toilet is probably one of the more sanitary things he does. You've watched him clean himself, right?
It's a shame. Kodak used to have a picture frame network. You could take your memory card out of your digital camera, insert it into your frame, and send pictures right off the card to other picture frames. Each frame used a dial-up modem connection and polled the Kodak server in the wee hours of the night. It was perfect for sending Grandma pictures of the grandkids. But the business model behind this network was a bit screwed up, and rather than fix it, Kodak killed it five years ago. There may still be something similar out from Fuji called Ceiva. As a fan of Kodak (my grandfather, a professional photographer, wouldn't use anything else), I hate to see them ceding the business to everyone else.
I guess that's one way to take the site down. List it on /.
Does anyone know of Linux projects that sync with Windows Mobile or whatever the heck it's called?