Or it could be a sophisticated ploy to create domestic demand for Chinese electronic goods. With the US economy sinking, they could have fears of an industrial surplus, a glut of cameras, tvs, and microchips, so they allowed themselves to be convinced that this program will help the economy as well as maintaining civil order. They don't actually care if it works, but of course if it does they will take credit for it. This kind of thing happens in the US all the time (the Bridge to Nowhere in Juneau), and everyone sees it for what it is. No conspiracy theory required.
I don't know enough about Chinese economic and political predictions, but it seems more probable to me than the last gasp of a totalitarian regime or a public statement of intent to continue surveillance of their own citizens.
Sure, because there's no incentive to stop playing, you either keep running through your card to search for a move, or you hit F2 and deal again. Solitaire, being less a game of skill than of luck, has the same addictive properties that slot machines do, and we know that Vegas makes a great deal more than Nintendo.
The crux of the problem is not that managers won't pay you more, but that a single firm that begins to offer engineers more money won't gain anything from it: it' called the prisoner's dilemma. Your boss can choose to pay you more, or not. If he pays you more, the economy will be stimulated somewhat, but if no other firms give their engineers raises, he will go out of business because they can afford to sell their products at a lower rate. If your boss gets together with every other boss in town and they all agree to give their engineers a 10% raise, there would be more economic stimulation and no need for anyone to go out of business (except for the temptation of one or more managers to betray the agreement).
However, if they do that, they are accused by anti-trust regulators of collusion and price-fixing. The most obvious solution is collective bargaining, but since you guys think you're above all that, you get shit pay instead.
So, (and I admit my internetworking ignorance here) is there any mechanism to allow a root nameserver to inform the next tier of servers that it's moving, or at least tell everyone to that cached domain names may not point to the right place?
BIOS on the PC is vastly different from, say, OpenFirmware or even EFI. Many things that are handled by the latter two are/were not handled by the former, which serves to blur the line a bit.
Forgive me for not reading your whole post, as it's long, but if you can print out another ballot after the first one, could print out enough and then either sneak them into the box or get a confederate to put them in somewhere that they will be added to the total count later?
The electronic voting machines in my district in Pennsylvania are very good. They look very much like the old mechanical ones, so it's not hard to re-learn, and there are lights that tell you when you've responded to all the polls on the ballot. You submit your vote with a large button in the bottom corner, but you cannot submit until every question has been responded to (there is always a "no response" or "no candidate" option, and space for write-ins.
I don't like touchscreens because they involve a hell of a lot of software layers to function, and they've been known to crash or freeze randomly and with unpredictable results.
Bill Joy, the actual inventor of the Internet and author of what is probably the oldest in-use code that's not on a mainframe, is clean-shaven.
I think it's worth pointing out that the most successful languages have been around since it was more acceptable for men to have beards, and that the author of at least one successful language (Ruby's Yukihiro Matsumoto) didn't grow a beard until after his language became successful. Also, several of the designers of Cobol were women, and I'm not sure whether that works for or against the hypothesis.
No, but you could (not necessary should, but COULD) require them to respond in some way to basic HTTP requests on TCP port 80 that would identify the domain and the function it is supposed to be performing.
For example, http://rtfm.mit.edu/ puts up a static-content page that tells you what the site is for, even though it's meant to be an ftp repository for usenet FAQs (I realize that rtfm.mit.edu is not actually a domain name, and also that there's really no reason not to have a web interface for something like that in 2008, but that's not really the point I'm making so lay off, all right?).
No, central registry should just put the rates up until it ceases to be profitable for companies to park crap that earn practically no money on squatted domains. They've started doing that with closing this loophole, now they need to do more of the same.
Or at any rate, that's how this shit is supposed to work.
It happened after they announced the release date and after it went into beta, though: that's the problem. One would expect that a company of MS's size could catch this stuff earlier in there development/release process, and the fact that the didn't is a cause for concern. Not really a cause for complaint, mind you, but this is slashdot after all.
Presumably (and this is presuming as a legal layman), making available for free, unconditional, and anonymous redistribution that is indefinite in scope constitutes implicit consent to said redistribution.
Most jurisdictions can fine the bar or seller just for having minors on the premises that aren't employed.
Judges, in many cases (I can't say most having not done the research), seem to be interested in legitimately seeing justice done, but they are constrained by 1) the superior organization and presentation of high-priced lawyers, and 2) not pissing off the people that put them in office. In most cases bogus lawsuits end in a settlement, since even fighting the case to the end and winning is economically worse for the defendant.
The problem is, at heart, lawyers and the general inability of courts to punish people for filing dumb lawsuits, and it's exacerbated by the complement of the good, fair judges, who don't understand technical issues and usually rule questionably and write puzzling opinions.
One alternative (if they don't want to publish their specs) is to release only Linux drivers, but to release them under a 2-clause BSD license or in the public domain instead of the GPL or "other". Linus can release them with the kernel by adding the appropriate restrictions, including the additional warranty disclaimer, and the copyright statement in the file, but other projects can create new versions under licenses that are differently- or less-restrictive compared to the GPL without having to cleanroom them. Perhaps most importantly, non-open source projects could also use the code to create drivers, so everybody benefits, for almost no work on the part of the device manufacturer.
Of course, this is assuming that hardware manufacturers behave rationally, which is at contrary to their historical demeanor.
How much work does that actually involve? I don't read their online edition, but I imagine that they have all their articles in a database and put its contents into an HTML wrapper. That involves coding the wrapper once, and maybe a couple of conversions in the article text to make it HTML-friendly. You can do this when the article is converted into the database, or you can do it on the fly in your scripts, but the point is it shouldn't be that difficult to do.
No, that's not what they're trying to do. What they are trying to do is pass some laws that legitimate the state secrets doctrine. What we want them to do is declare it to be an invalid defense or excuse not to answer.
The point is that I don't trust a politician (or his aides) when it comes to protecting himself; I trust them more to judge fairly when the question of guilt falls on someone else. Further, it might only take one dissenting voice to get the truth out; the President can easily leverage force on one or two people, but the dozen or so members on a committee or 100+ in a full body won't be so easy to push around.
This does not mean that the President must report to Congress every single thing he plans to do, but only that if he or his advisors are asked to testify Congress on some issue, they tell the damn truth.
As for Clinton's handling of bin Laden, the "quiet communications" with other governments ended up doing as much damage to the operations as telling Congress possibly could have.
In answer to 1, handholding every step of the way is a big deal. I learned a bit about Windows server administration a while back, when it seemed like I'd want to be in IT (turns out I don't), and it's pretty easy. If you wanted to change anything, you'd click on Start, then either Control Panels or Programs> Admin Tools, pick the most obvious choice, and then do fairly obvious stuff.[1] Just about anything that couldn't be done that way could be done by right-clicking on the proper place.
Linux could do this, but what I've seen of Linux GUI conf tools is that they are rarely so organized. Someone comes up with a tool to manage or monitor feature XYZ, but it is first not integrated in with all the other tools, and secondly its name rarely describes what it does. Compare: "Network Monitor" to "Ethereal". Which would you expect to use to capture IP packets going through your machine?
To answer 2, I think the best choice is to come up with either a name-trademarked suite (like SuperConf) or a certification standard a la the Unix Specification or Linux Standards Base that distros would adhere to, and then recommend people choose a system that does that, e.g. "Any Linux or BSD distro which includes SuperConf by default will meet the IT department's needs," or "There are a variety of options that conform to the Linux Administration Guidelines [maybe have a version number like 1.1 to excite the PHBs]... RedHat provides enterprise support for a fee, Ubuntu is good for new users, Linspire looks and acts a lot like Windows..." This keeps the distro flamewars to a minimum, but still makes the necessary changes to make Free Software appealing.
[1]: Yes, there's plenty of stuff that's hard to find, but for a clueless computer babysitter like your average MCSE, it's everything you'd need.
Don't forget military vulnerability. If your entire power supply is based on things that are really far away in space, you'll have a hell of a time protecting them from sabotage or outright war. In fact, in case of war, you'll need to have some kind of back-up power source that you can use to power your country for at least a few years, until you either lose and get taken over (in which case it's now someone else's problem) or the war ends peacefully and you can shoot another transmitter into space.
In that case, you have to decide which kind of terrestrial power to choose: coal, oil, solar, gas, wind, nuclear--all of which have their drawbacks. So, to an extent, you're back at square one.
That's all well and good, but if geeks with girlfriends are required to sustain the pinball industry, it's basically doomed. The cost of the machine, the power, renting the space, etc, is to be amortized by the number and frequency of users, and if they are small in number the marginal cost per game will go up. Would pinball be such an attractive date option if it cost $5 a game? $10? Arcade games, too.
I think, if pinball or arcades are to survive, they must start to appeal to young adults. Think about the popularity of video game poker, trivia, golf, hunting, whatever in bars: if you can find a way to make pinball appeal to those people, it can have a comeback in a major way.
Of course, if I knew how to do that, I'd be sending a resume off to Gary Stern right now.
There are things that Obama may not want to be public knowledge while they're going on (Hey guys, here's the President's itinerary, here's where he'll be on the plane, he'll be in this car in the motorcade, etc), but there's nothing that should be witheld from Congress. Period, end of story. Saying you can't trust Congress to do the right thing with sensitive information is basically a repudiation of democracy.
I agree. If the House and Senate feel that what the Executive is doing is clearly wrong, they have a Constitutional remedy for that. Doing anything less is, in the first place, an unpleasant moral compromise on their part, and in the second, a means of rendering the process they seek to stop legitimate.
They should pass a law, a constitutional amendment, or get the Supreme Court to rule, to the effect that the most an officer or agent of the government can do in the name of state secrecy under congressional testimony is to require a closed session for the duration of the testimony (afterwards, it will be for the Senators and Representatives to decide what to reveal, either through a resolution or through the Congressional Record. Failure to testify, or lying to the committee or chamber that is investigating, should be a severe federal crime whose penalties include stiff prison sentences, fines, and perpetual, irrevocable ineligibility for government employment.
But they won't do this, because they are all a bunch of pansies who shrink from a fight, even over serious issues of governance. Somewhere, Abraham Lincoln is weeping.
Slashdot Mirror
Or it could be a sophisticated ploy to create domestic demand for Chinese electronic goods. With the US economy sinking, they could have fears of an industrial surplus, a glut of cameras, tvs, and microchips, so they allowed themselves to be convinced that this program will help the economy as well as maintaining civil order. They don't actually care if it works, but of course if it does they will take credit for it. This kind of thing happens in the US all the time (the Bridge to Nowhere in Juneau), and everyone sees it for what it is. No conspiracy theory required.
I don't know enough about Chinese economic and political predictions, but it seems more probable to me than the last gasp of a totalitarian regime or a public statement of intent to continue surveillance of their own citizens.
Sure, because there's no incentive to stop playing, you either keep running through your card to search for a move, or you hit F2 and deal again. Solitaire, being less a game of skill than of luck, has the same addictive properties that slot machines do, and we know that Vegas makes a great deal more than Nintendo.
The crux of the problem is not that managers won't pay you more, but that a single firm that begins to offer engineers more money won't gain anything from it: it' called the prisoner's dilemma. Your boss can choose to pay you more, or not. If he pays you more, the economy will be stimulated somewhat, but if no other firms give their engineers raises, he will go out of business because they can afford to sell their products at a lower rate. If your boss gets together with every other boss in town and they all agree to give their engineers a 10% raise, there would be more economic stimulation and no need for anyone to go out of business (except for the temptation of one or more managers to betray the agreement).
However, if they do that, they are accused by anti-trust regulators of collusion and price-fixing. The most obvious solution is collective bargaining, but since you guys think you're above all that, you get shit pay instead.
So, (and I admit my internetworking ignorance here) is there any mechanism to allow a root nameserver to inform the next tier of servers that it's moving, or at least tell everyone to that cached domain names may not point to the right place?
Saw it on HBO. TV never lies, right?
BIOS on the PC is vastly different from, say, OpenFirmware or even EFI. Many things that are handled by the latter two are/were not handled by the former, which serves to blur the line a bit.
It's even worse in france, anything that counts in an ordinateur!
Forgive me for not reading your whole post, as it's long, but if you can print out another ballot after the first one, could print out enough and then either sneak them into the box or get a confederate to put them in somewhere that they will be added to the total count later?
The electronic voting machines in my district in Pennsylvania are very good. They look very much like the old mechanical ones, so it's not hard to re-learn, and there are lights that tell you when you've responded to all the polls on the ballot. You submit your vote with a large button in the bottom corner, but you cannot submit until every question has been responded to (there is always a "no response" or "no candidate" option, and space for write-ins.
I don't like touchscreens because they involve a hell of a lot of software layers to function, and they've been known to crash or freeze randomly and with unpredictable results.
Bill Joy, the actual inventor of the Internet and author of what is probably the oldest in-use code that's not on a mainframe, is clean-shaven.
I think it's worth pointing out that the most successful languages have been around since it was more acceptable for men to have beards, and that the author of at least one successful language (Ruby's Yukihiro Matsumoto) didn't grow a beard until after his language became successful. Also, several of the designers of Cobol were women, and I'm not sure whether that works for or against the hypothesis.
I was going to reply to this, but then I too much nostalgia... core dumped
No, but you could (not necessary should, but COULD) require them to respond in some way to basic HTTP requests on TCP port 80 that would identify the domain and the function it is supposed to be performing.
For example, http://rtfm.mit.edu/ puts up a static-content page that tells you what the site is for, even though it's meant to be an ftp repository for usenet FAQs (I realize that rtfm.mit.edu is not actually a domain name, and also that there's really no reason not to have a web interface for something like that in 2008, but that's not really the point I'm making so lay off, all right?).
No, central registry should just put the rates up until it ceases to be profitable for companies to park crap that earn practically no money on squatted domains. They've started doing that with closing this loophole, now they need to do more of the same.
Or at any rate, that's how this shit is supposed to work.
Do gay porn, which pays for men even better than straight roles for females. Sometimes three times as much.
I wonder if this will get modded as funny or informative.
It happened after they announced the release date and after it went into beta, though: that's the problem. One would expect that a company of MS's size could catch this stuff earlier in there development/release process, and the fact that the didn't is a cause for concern. Not really a cause for complaint, mind you, but this is slashdot after all.
Presumably (and this is presuming as a legal layman), making available for free, unconditional, and anonymous redistribution that is indefinite in scope constitutes implicit consent to said redistribution.
Most jurisdictions can fine the bar or seller just for having minors on the premises that aren't employed.
Judges, in many cases (I can't say most having not done the research), seem to be interested in legitimately seeing justice done, but they are constrained by 1) the superior organization and presentation of high-priced lawyers, and 2) not pissing off the people that put them in office. In most cases bogus lawsuits end in a settlement, since even fighting the case to the end and winning is economically worse for the defendant.
The problem is, at heart, lawyers and the general inability of courts to punish people for filing dumb lawsuits, and it's exacerbated by the complement of the good, fair judges, who don't understand technical issues and usually rule questionably and write puzzling opinions.
One alternative (if they don't want to publish their specs) is to release only Linux drivers, but to release them under a 2-clause BSD license or in the public domain instead of the GPL or "other". Linus can release them with the kernel by adding the appropriate restrictions, including the additional warranty disclaimer, and the copyright statement in the file, but other projects can create new versions under licenses that are differently- or less-restrictive compared to the GPL without having to cleanroom them. Perhaps most importantly, non-open source projects could also use the code to create drivers, so everybody benefits, for almost no work on the part of the device manufacturer.
Of course, this is assuming that hardware manufacturers behave rationally, which is at contrary to their historical demeanor.
How much work does that actually involve? I don't read their online edition, but I imagine that they have all their articles in a database and put its contents into an HTML wrapper. That involves coding the wrapper once, and maybe a couple of conversions in the article text to make it HTML-friendly. You can do this when the article is converted into the database, or you can do it on the fly in your scripts, but the point is it shouldn't be that difficult to do.
No, that's not what they're trying to do. What they are trying to do is pass some laws that legitimate the state secrets doctrine. What we want them to do is declare it to be an invalid defense or excuse not to answer.
The point is that I don't trust a politician (or his aides) when it comes to protecting himself; I trust them more to judge fairly when the question of guilt falls on someone else. Further, it might only take one dissenting voice to get the truth out; the President can easily leverage force on one or two people, but the dozen or so members on a committee or 100+ in a full body won't be so easy to push around.
This does not mean that the President must report to Congress every single thing he plans to do, but only that if he or his advisors are asked to testify Congress on some issue, they tell the damn truth.
As for Clinton's handling of bin Laden, the "quiet communications" with other governments ended up doing as much damage to the operations as telling Congress possibly could have.
In answer to 1, handholding every step of the way is a big deal. I learned a bit about Windows server administration a while back, when it seemed like I'd want to be in IT (turns out I don't), and it's pretty easy. If you wanted to change anything, you'd click on Start, then either Control Panels or Programs> Admin Tools, pick the most obvious choice, and then do fairly obvious stuff.[1] Just about anything that couldn't be done that way could be done by right-clicking on the proper place.
Linux could do this, but what I've seen of Linux GUI conf tools is that they are rarely so organized. Someone comes up with a tool to manage or monitor feature XYZ, but it is first not integrated in with all the other tools, and secondly its name rarely describes what it does. Compare: "Network Monitor" to "Ethereal". Which would you expect to use to capture IP packets going through your machine?
To answer 2, I think the best choice is to come up with either a name-trademarked suite (like SuperConf) or a certification standard a la the Unix Specification or Linux Standards Base that distros would adhere to, and then recommend people choose a system that does that, e.g. "Any Linux or BSD distro which includes SuperConf by default will meet the IT department's needs," or "There are a variety of options that conform to the Linux Administration Guidelines [maybe have a version number like 1.1 to excite the PHBs]... RedHat provides enterprise support for a fee, Ubuntu is good for new users, Linspire looks and acts a lot like Windows..." This keeps the distro flamewars to a minimum, but still makes the necessary changes to make Free Software appealing.
[1]: Yes, there's plenty of stuff that's hard to find, but for a clueless computer babysitter like your average MCSE, it's everything you'd need.
Don't forget military vulnerability. If your entire power supply is based on things that are really far away in space, you'll have a hell of a time protecting them from sabotage or outright war. In fact, in case of war, you'll need to have some kind of back-up power source that you can use to power your country for at least a few years, until you either lose and get taken over (in which case it's now someone else's problem) or the war ends peacefully and you can shoot another transmitter into space.
In that case, you have to decide which kind of terrestrial power to choose: coal, oil, solar, gas, wind, nuclear--all of which have their drawbacks. So, to an extent, you're back at square one.
That's all well and good, but if geeks with girlfriends are required to sustain the pinball industry, it's basically doomed. The cost of the machine, the power, renting the space, etc, is to be amortized by the number and frequency of users, and if they are small in number the marginal cost per game will go up. Would pinball be such an attractive date option if it cost $5 a game? $10? Arcade games, too.
I think, if pinball or arcades are to survive, they must start to appeal to young adults. Think about the popularity of video game poker, trivia, golf, hunting, whatever in bars: if you can find a way to make pinball appeal to those people, it can have a comeback in a major way.
Of course, if I knew how to do that, I'd be sending a resume off to Gary Stern right now.
There are things that Obama may not want to be public knowledge while they're going on (Hey guys, here's the President's itinerary, here's where he'll be on the plane, he'll be in this car in the motorcade, etc), but there's nothing that should be witheld from Congress. Period, end of story. Saying you can't trust Congress to do the right thing with sensitive information is basically a repudiation of democracy.
I agree. If the House and Senate feel that what the Executive is doing is clearly wrong, they have a Constitutional remedy for that. Doing anything less is, in the first place, an unpleasant moral compromise on their part, and in the second, a means of rendering the process they seek to stop legitimate.
They should pass a law, a constitutional amendment, or get the Supreme Court to rule, to the effect that the most an officer or agent of the government can do in the name of state secrecy under congressional testimony is to require a closed session for the duration of the testimony (afterwards, it will be for the Senators and Representatives to decide what to reveal, either through a resolution or through the Congressional Record. Failure to testify, or lying to the committee or chamber that is investigating, should be a severe federal crime whose penalties include stiff prison sentences, fines, and perpetual, irrevocable ineligibility for government employment.
But they won't do this, because they are all a bunch of pansies who shrink from a fight, even over serious issues of governance. Somewhere, Abraham Lincoln is weeping.