Actually, it's got a perfectly decent text editor -- Viper.
As you mentioned, however, they're still waiting for the Emacs kernel to be finished; it's right on the list after HURD is done. (And no, Satan is not stocking up on electric blankets, so it'll be a while.)
Technically they have no authority to govern intrastate radio emissions.
The trouble with this argument is that the Supreme Court has shown no willingness to overturn Wickard v. Filburn; even the recent commerce clause coverage limiting rulings have specifically reaffirmed it.
Under current doctrine, it muct be neither interstate nor significantly commerce-affecting to avoid the Interstate Commerce Clause. I don't doubt the FCC can easily prove spectrum use affects commerce fairly directly.
Right, putting Papal quotes into the mouth of "Simplicus" and publishing the work in vernacular Italian (meaning "Simplicus" would be pronounced as a word meaning "stupid") didn't have anything to do with it.
There's a differnce being persecuted for nobly insisting on scientific truth, and being persecuted because you flamed the local absolute ruler in an era where freedom of speech was a concept yet to be invented.
Re:Cutting through the confusion
on
Wired on McBride
·
· Score: 1
(Knowing some filkers of note that I do, do you mind if I pass that on - with attribution, of course, mind you!;)
OPEC is still flaring off a whole lot of natural gas that it can't afford to ship in tankers at current prices, at least not until economic pressure forces the US to open some more gas terminal ports. They'd love a demand rise that would make it profitable to ship it -- and a quick kill-off of coal would do it, since nuclear takes too long to build and hydro's fully exploited in North America.
Re:Who ACTUALLY wrote that poem
on
Wired on McBride
·
· Score: 1
I'd thought I'd included a link with an (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling) note at the end before I started changing the poem.
Obviously I didn't.
In my defense, though, who wouldn't instantly recognize it? Marking an altered Kipling poem is as unnecessary as marking a Photoshopped version of Da Vinci's Last Supper. It's not like anybody's going to mistake it for an original work, or assume the original was done by someone else.
Cutting through the confusion
on
Wired on McBride
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
He expresses surprise that IBM didn't simply purchase SCO and donate the Unix code to the public domain; it would've been much cheaper than the current legal fracas.
It is always a temptation to a lawyer-armed corporation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say: -- "We filed a suit last night -- we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich corporation,
To puff and look important and to say:-- "Though we know we should defeat you, it would cost too much to beat you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptations in the path of corporations,
For fear they should succumb and go astray, So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to says:--
"We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost, For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
Corporations that play it are lost!"
Electrical power isn't even remotely a threat to the petroleum industry. Sure, it's all "energy", but even completely free electricity has so many drawbacks in vehicles that it wouldn't put a dent in petroleum use; batteries just don't have competitive energy density when put up against a tank of hydrocarbons.
You know what Bush would do if he really wanted to help the oil industry? Push the ratification of the Kyoto treaty.
Why? Because natural gas is a byproduct of petroleum extraction, coal is cheaper than natural gas for electricity production, and natural gas produces far less C02 per kilowatt-hour than coal does. The easiest, least expensive way to reduce U.S. CO2 production would be to shutter coal plants in favor of natural gas -- which would shift the profits from coal companies to oil companies.
You need a significant selective pressure for a mutation for it to become common. Even a genetically dominant trait -- say, six fingers in humans -- will remain indefinitely confined to a small subest of the population unless there is a significant selective pressure for it.
In a species whose primary -- and overwhelming -- adaptation for survival is its intelligence, it's quite possible that a mere 20% increase in musculature would have sufficient selective pressure in its favor to overcome genetic "inertia", even if there were no drawbacks. Often the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but merely to those fit enough that a new mutation isn't enough to displace them.
That's not like any of the selective breeding I've learned about. Selective breeding involves nothing more than choosing the traits you'd prefer to see in the offspring and then breeding a pair of individuals that posses those traits in the hope that they will be passed on to an improved generation.
And where do you think the variations of genes within a species -- the "natural" variety between individuals your selective breeding is taking advantage of -- comes from?
If there were no natural mutation, there would be nothing to select from. Mutation is a critical step in both evolution by natural selection and selective breeding. It's caused by natural radiation (solar, mostly, but also uranium and thorium in the crust) and natural mutagens (usually evolved by organisms as defensive poisons).
How do you know what the poster's intent was for using quotes, Kreskin
I was describing my use of quotes around nature, not that of the person you were responding to. If you re-read my post, you'll notice them.
Industrialism is a deviation from natural processes because it is clearly unsustainable
Nature is full of instabilities und unsustainable phenomena. Industrialism being doomed to a collapse no more makes it non-noatural than the unsustainable population explosions that happen to rabbits, resulting in mass die-offs.
Either the human organism, including the mind, is the natural product of nature's laws, or it is not. If it is, then its actions are as natural as those of ants or grass. If it is not the natural product of nature's laws, then it the product of a non-natural event -- gods or souls or some other supernatural phenomena. And thus the claim that anything is unnatural is inherently a religious claim.
What we traditionally call "genetic engineering" is different from breeding or natural selection because it adds genes that weren't there before while breeding just juggles them about.
False. Selective beeding and natural selection both involve the addition (through "natural" radiation, "natural" chemical mutagens, and "natural" retroviruses) of geners that weren't there before.
For example, there's a specific DNA sequence that, oddly enough, occurs in both certain breeds of cattle and the rattlesnakes that live in the region where that variety of cattle originated. It's probably the result of a retrovirus that was in the snake population, and was transferred to an ancestral cow by a snakebite. This natural inter-species gene transfer, of course, is identical to a standard method of interspecies genetic engineering -- except in deliberate genetic engineering we have some idea what the gene we're transferring does, and we know to keep an eye on the recipient of the genes. The natural version moves random genes, and we don't even know that it occured.
Let's explain how selective breeding works, shall we?
You take a plant. You randomly mutate it through radiation and chemicals. If the result has a property you like, you breed it into the food supply willy-nilly.
Now, you might be using "natural" radiation (but many "organic" foods were derived from strains deliberately mutated by human-created radiation) and "natural"ly-occuring mutagenic chemicals (but many "organic" foods were derived from strains deliberately mutated by human-created mutagenic chemicals), but the fact is the process is entirely random.
Now, compared to that process, you call delibrate induction of specifically chosen alterations, with multi-layered saftey testing on environmental and health grounds, the equivalent of randomly "twiddling the knobs" of life. A queer belief, no?
"Nature" is in quotes above not because of fear, but because it is a basically religious concept. On a strictly scientific basis, there's no distiction in the "natural"ness of a dandelion spreading its seed and humans operating a steel mill; both are the actions of "natural" organisms. The declaration of the works of the human brain as somehow non-natural requires a fundamentally religious distinction between body and soul.
That you are in grips of such a religious conviction is obvious from your assignment of "a reason" why fish don't breed with strawberries; those who do not accept your religious belief in a "nature" distinguishable from the non-natural simply accept that it's because of evolutionary divergence.
Your religious belief in "nature" also explains why you consider guided, directed, and deliberate genetic engineering "twiddling the knobs", while you trust the random product of mutations, when mere logic would result in opposite conclusions.
Windows for Workgroups 3.1 was released in October 1992, while Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was released in December 1993. Neither product was the same as Windows 3.1 (April 1992) or Windows 3.11 (December 1993, but a different product than WfW 3.11).
This one doesn't corrupt the CD standard. Its "copy protection" consists of a perfectly valid data track that runs a program to replace your (Windows) CD driver with a DRMed one.
$0.21 a kWh? So, you're living in the northeast US? Or outside North America?
City Residential Rate, 2003
New York 21.68 ¢/kWh San Francisco 16.63 ¢/kWh Boston 12.87 ¢/kWh Detroit 10.23 ¢/kWh Charlottetown 9.23 ¢/kWh Miami 9.18 ¢/kWh Houston 9.08 ¢/kWh Edmonton 9.05 ¢/kWh Chicago 8.79 ¢/kWh Halifax 7.89 ¢/kWh Regina 7.69 ¢/kWh Moncton 7.63 ¢/kWh Toronto 7.27 ¢/kWh Seattle 7.26 ¢/kWh St. John's 6.96 ¢/kWh Portland 6.76 ¢/kWh Nashville 6.70 ¢/kWh Ottawa 6.63 ¢/kWh Vancouver 5.20 ¢/kWh Montreal 4.89 ¢/kWh Winnipeg 4.84 ¢/kWh
(US dollars, includes taxes and such.)
Assume a 200-watt CRT, a rate of about 10/kWh, eight hours full-power usage a day, and 250 days' usage a year (M-F, 50 of 52 weeks a year), your typical corporate user will save $30 a monitor in electricity a year by using LCDs.
Even if the 2004 numbers come in at double last year's, there will have been fewer than 41 million Macs sold, worldwide, 1994-2004, by the Apple 10-K SEC filings.
Combined 2001-2003 non-server PC sales are 423 million (Gatner Group numbers). Ten percent of 423 million is 42 million, or more than all the Power Macs that will have ever been sold by the end of this year.
So, if the number of PCs in service is less than 90% of the last 36 months' sales, and the number of Macs in service is somewhere around 100% of all PowerPC Macs ever sold, Macs might make up 10% of the installed base.
How many 4400s have you seen in service lately, and how much new software has been bought for them?
In 1989/90, I don't think Intel dropping the ball would have killed the x86. Too much installed base, and hope was on the horizon; the AMD 386DX-40 was largely held up by legal maneuvering, and the Cyrix 486DLC-33 was well into its development cycle. PC makers, who were still selling plenty of 286s in 1989, and who sold lots of 386s well into the '90s, could have held out the short delay.
Furthermore, the logical alternate wasn't RISC, but the Motorola 68000-series chips being mass-manufactured for Atari STs, Amigas, and Macs.
The traditional U.S. school subject "algebra" can be mastered in two years, yes. Similarly, the traditional U.S. school course of "chemistry" can be mastered in one year. But algebra, proper, refers to a huge set of related mathematical concepts that can no more be mastered in a mere two years than the entire scientific field of chemistry can be mastered in one.
There is accordingly absolutely no justification for your assumption that an Algebra III class covers the material that should have been mastered in an ordinary two-year algebra course, unless and until you've read this student's course material.
As a side note - who exactly is Sun's license with?
Sun had various deals with AT&T 1982-1987, had another in 1994 with USL just after it was bought by Novell, and then signed another license in 2003 directly with SCO.
Whatever the status of the old AT&T and USL/Novell deals, SCO definitively has a direct interest due to the 2003 deal.
Slashdot Mirror
"Emtabs"? What's wrong with "exabytes"? We call the quantity four million kilobytes four "gigabytes", after all, instead of four "emkibs".
And no, no "emxabs", either -- that's a yottabyte.
I call dibs on the term "emyobs", however. (Hey, it's got at least as good a chance as grouchibytes.)
Actually, it's got a perfectly decent text editor -- Viper.
As you mentioned, however, they're still waiting for the Emacs kernel to be finished; it's right on the list after HURD is done. (And no, Satan is not stocking up on electric blankets, so it'll be a while.)
Technically they have no authority to govern intrastate radio emissions.
The trouble with this argument is that the Supreme Court has shown no willingness to overturn Wickard v. Filburn; even the recent commerce clause coverage limiting rulings have specifically reaffirmed it.
Under current doctrine, it muct be neither interstate nor significantly commerce-affecting to avoid the Interstate Commerce Clause. I don't doubt the FCC can easily prove spectrum use affects commerce fairly directly.
(I am not a lawyer)
Right, putting Papal quotes into the mouth of "Simplicus" and publishing the work in vernacular Italian (meaning "Simplicus" would be pronounced as a word meaning "stupid") didn't have anything to do with it.
There's a differnce being persecuted for nobly insisting on scientific truth, and being persecuted because you flamed the local absolute ruler in an era where freedom of speech was a concept yet to be invented.
(Knowing some filkers of note that I do, do you mind if I pass that on - with attribution, of course, mind you! ;)
Go right ahead; I'm flattered.
OPEC is still flaring off a whole lot of natural gas that it can't afford to ship in tankers at current prices, at least not until economic pressure forces the US to open some more gas terminal ports. They'd love a demand rise that would make it profitable to ship it -- and a quick kill-off of coal would do it, since nuclear takes too long to build and hydro's fully exploited in North America.
I'd thought I'd included a link with an (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling) note at the end before I started changing the poem.
Obviously I didn't.
In my defense, though, who wouldn't instantly recognize it? Marking an altered Kipling poem is as unnecessary as marking a Photoshopped version of Da Vinci's Last Supper. It's not like anybody's going to mistake it for an original work, or assume the original was done by someone else.
He expresses surprise that IBM didn't simply purchase SCO and donate the Unix code to the public domain; it would've been much cheaper than the current legal fracas.
It is always a temptation to a lawyer-armed corporation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
"We filed a suit last night -- we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich corporation,
To puff and look important and to say:--
"Though we know we should defeat you, it would cost too much to beat you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptations in the path of corporations,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to says:--
"We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
Corporations that play it are lost!"
Oh, please!
Electrical power isn't even remotely a threat to the petroleum industry. Sure, it's all "energy", but even completely free electricity has so many drawbacks in vehicles that it wouldn't put a dent in petroleum use; batteries just don't have competitive energy density when put up against a tank of hydrocarbons.
You know what Bush would do if he really wanted to help the oil industry? Push the ratification of the Kyoto treaty.
Why? Because natural gas is a byproduct of petroleum extraction, coal is cheaper than natural gas for electricity production, and natural gas produces far less C02 per kilowatt-hour than coal does. The easiest, least expensive way to reduce U.S. CO2 production would be to shutter coal plants in favor of natural gas -- which would shift the profits from coal companies to oil companies.
"Blues"? Bah. Everyone knows the number one beer in Canada is the King of Beers.
No, not necessarily.
You need a significant selective pressure for a mutation for it to become common. Even a genetically dominant trait -- say, six fingers in humans -- will remain indefinitely confined to a small subest of the population unless there is a significant selective pressure for it.
In a species whose primary -- and overwhelming -- adaptation for survival is its intelligence, it's quite possible that a mere 20% increase in musculature would have sufficient selective pressure in its favor to overcome genetic "inertia", even if there were no drawbacks. Often the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but merely to those fit enough that a new mutation isn't enough to displace them.
That's a position I have the utmost respect for.
I don't agree, but it's on grounds of unprovables (how vulnerable is nature?) and probably a differing tempermental tolerance for risk.
That's not like any of the selective breeding I've learned about. Selective breeding involves nothing more than choosing the traits you'd prefer to see in the offspring and then breeding a pair of individuals that posses those traits in the hope that they will be passed on to an improved generation.
And where do you think the variations of genes within a species -- the "natural" variety between individuals your selective breeding is taking advantage of -- comes from?
If there were no natural mutation, there would be nothing to select from. Mutation is a critical step in both evolution by natural selection and selective breeding. It's caused by natural radiation (solar, mostly, but also uranium and thorium in the crust) and natural mutagens (usually evolved by organisms as defensive poisons).
How do you know what the poster's intent was for using quotes, Kreskin
I was describing my use of quotes around nature, not that of the person you were responding to. If you re-read my post, you'll notice them.
Industrialism is a deviation from natural processes because it is clearly unsustainable
Nature is full of instabilities und unsustainable phenomena. Industrialism being doomed to a collapse no more makes it non-noatural than the unsustainable population explosions that happen to rabbits, resulting in mass die-offs.
Either the human organism, including the mind, is the natural product of nature's laws, or it is not. If it is, then its actions are as natural as those of ants or grass. If it is not the natural product of nature's laws, then it the product of a non-natural event -- gods or souls or some other supernatural phenomena. And thus the claim that anything is unnatural is inherently a religious claim.
What we traditionally call "genetic engineering" is different from breeding or natural selection because it adds genes that weren't there before while breeding just juggles them about.
False. Selective beeding and natural selection both involve the addition (through "natural" radiation, "natural" chemical mutagens, and "natural" retroviruses) of geners that weren't there before.
For example, there's a specific DNA sequence that, oddly enough, occurs in both certain breeds of cattle and the rattlesnakes that live in the region where that variety of cattle originated. It's probably the result of a retrovirus that was in the snake population, and was transferred to an ancestral cow by a snakebite. This natural inter-species gene transfer, of course, is identical to a standard method of interspecies genetic engineering -- except in deliberate genetic engineering we have some idea what the gene we're transferring does, and we know to keep an eye on the recipient of the genes. The natural version moves random genes, and we don't even know that it occured.
Let's explain how selective breeding works, shall we?
You take a plant. You randomly mutate it through radiation and chemicals. If the result has a property you like, you breed it into the food supply willy-nilly.
Now, you might be using "natural" radiation (but many "organic" foods were derived from strains deliberately mutated by human-created radiation) and "natural"ly-occuring mutagenic chemicals (but many "organic" foods were derived from strains deliberately mutated by human-created mutagenic chemicals), but the fact is the process is entirely random.
Now, compared to that process, you call delibrate induction of specifically chosen alterations, with multi-layered saftey testing on environmental and health grounds, the equivalent of randomly "twiddling the knobs" of life. A queer belief, no?
"Nature" is in quotes above not because of fear, but because it is a basically religious concept. On a strictly scientific basis, there's no distiction in the "natural"ness of a dandelion spreading its seed and humans operating a steel mill; both are the actions of "natural" organisms. The declaration of the works of the human brain as somehow non-natural requires a fundamentally religious distinction between body and soul.
That you are in grips of such a religious conviction is obvious from your assignment of "a reason" why fish don't breed with strawberries; those who do not accept your religious belief in a "nature" distinguishable from the non-natural simply accept that it's because of evolutionary divergence.
Your religious belief in "nature" also explains why you consider guided, directed, and deliberate genetic engineering "twiddling the knobs", while you trust the random product of mutations, when mere logic would result in opposite conclusions.
Windows for Workgroups 3.1 was released in October 1992, while Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was released in December 1993. Neither product was the same as Windows 3.1 (April 1992) or Windows 3.11 (December 1993, but a different product than WfW 3.11).
This one doesn't corrupt the CD standard. Its "copy protection" consists of a perfectly valid data track that runs a program to replace your (Windows) CD driver with a DRMed one.
Assume a 200-watt CRT, a rate of about 10/kWh, eight hours full-power usage a day, and 250 days' usage a year (M-F, 50 of 52 weeks a year), your typical corporate user will save $30 a monitor in electricity a year by using LCDs.
Even if the 2004 numbers come in at double last year's, there will have been fewer than 41 million Macs sold, worldwide, 1994-2004, by the Apple 10-K SEC filings.
Combined 2001-2003 non-server PC sales are 423 million (Gatner Group numbers). Ten percent of 423 million is 42 million, or more than all the Power Macs that will have ever been sold by the end of this year.
So, if the number of PCs in service is less than 90% of the last 36 months' sales, and the number of Macs in service is somewhere around 100% of all PowerPC Macs ever sold, Macs might make up 10% of the installed base.
How many 4400s have you seen in service lately, and how much new software has been bought for them?
In 1989/90, I don't think Intel dropping the ball would have killed the x86. Too much installed base, and hope was on the horizon; the AMD 386DX-40 was largely held up by legal maneuvering, and the Cyrix 486DLC-33 was well into its development cycle. PC makers, who were still selling plenty of 286s in 1989, and who sold lots of 386s well into the '90s, could have held out the short delay.
Furthermore, the logical alternate wasn't RISC, but the Motorola 68000-series chips being mass-manufactured for Atari STs, Amigas, and Macs.
The traditional U.S. school subject "algebra" can be mastered in two years, yes. Similarly, the traditional U.S. school course of "chemistry" can be mastered in one year. But algebra, proper, refers to a huge set of related mathematical concepts that can no more be mastered in a mere two years than the entire scientific field of chemistry can be mastered in one.
There is accordingly absolutely no justification for your assumption that an Algebra III class covers the material that should have been mastered in an ordinary two-year algebra course, unless and until you've read this student's course material.
Umm... so, it's all right to make money by selling something you don't even own the rights to sell?
As long as the person you're selling to knows you don't have it and you deliver the good when required, why should anyone care?
Unlike IBM, Sun has apparently bought Unix rights from no fewer than four companies:
1) AT&T, in the ancient days.
2) Novell, in 1994.
3) SCO-later-Tarantella, in 1999.
4) Caldera-later-SCO, in 2003.
So, even if the #1 and #2 deals still legally are licenses with Novell, #3 and #4 can still give Caldera-later-SCO leverage on Sun.
Hrmm. And apparently there was another Sun deal in 1999 with SCO/Tarantella (as opposed to SCO/Caldera).
As a side note - who exactly is Sun's license with?
Sun had various deals with AT&T 1982-1987, had another in 1994 with USL just after it was bought by Novell, and then signed another license in 2003 directly with SCO.
Whatever the status of the old AT&T and USL/Novell deals, SCO definitively has a direct interest due to the 2003 deal.