He is NOT a public employee; he is an employee of a university which (more often than not depending on the state) is a separate legal entity.
He works for the University of Wisconsin, a public state-owned university. Granted such things can vary by state - but I work for a state university as a graduate research assistant and I know we were warned by legal a while ago that the same thing can happen to us, even as grad students.
The only gotcha I've run into is the default linux release is 32-bit and you have to dig to find the 64-bit download. If any cares, you download the 64-bit linux release here. [mozilla.org]
And unsurprisingly, naysayers proclaim that IE will survive, while firefox will die.
IE has been getting faster, I can't say the same thing about Firefox.
People keep saying this, but I just loaded the new Firefox and it feels to me like the interface is much more responsive and flash-intensive pages that used to take forever to load now show up extremely rapidly. I was sticking with FF3 because of the great plugins, but FF4 actually seems to be pretty decent out of the box.
I don't care how stupid the people at the network are - they know enough to put their well rated shows in good slots. It just turns out that a good portion of the collective slashdot "we" like different shows than the majority of people - and we are a small minority.
You forget that they used to be a niche-market channel that catered to "us", now they're going to be competing against other channels that have a lot more resources and are available at lower pricing tiers. I know I just downgraded my cable service recently because the only thing that used to justify my extra $30/mo was the Sci-Fi channel. I can't continue to justify that expensive when they cancel most of the programming that I want to watch.
Does not sound like the BSD or MIT license would be covered by this.
There's an "or" in the list of "things that make a license excluded, one of those items is:
(ii) licensed for the purpose of making derivative works
I don't know about you, but that sounds to me like all the OSS licenses, including BSD and MIT, are covered. If you want to put up software that is licensed in any way to allow for modification and redistribution then they're not going to let you.
Much less scary than "Apophis threatens to wipe out all life on planet!".
Rumor is that the guys who originally spotted it named it after the Stargate SG-1 character, who (presumably) sent an asteroid to destroy the earth in the episode "Fail Safe."
The "all debts public and private" line on US currency doesn't apply since the purchase of food from American Airlines is not a debt.
It is if they render goods or services before being paid - which they do. I've always seen them give people their items before taking the person's card.
For some reason, "not expanding" is the same thing as "a business slowly dying", a concept which always eluded me. I mean, come on...if you're posting a profit, who cares if you're growing by 5% or 10% or whatever; you're still making a profit.
I believe that the idea is that in theory a business that is doing a good job will continue to expand its customer base, if nothing else then by word of mouth. Personally, I don't really buy it since measuring customer base by revenue is subject to huge fluctuations in purchasing habits.
Essentially they are saying that if you don't agree with them and/or support their cause, they are going to blockade your business.
You mean like how private businesses can use trucks to blockade places they don't like? A friend told me about this story, and apparently the local paper has a paywall so this is the best I can do:
Spradlin Rock Case
Who's going to research new drugs if the work will be stolen and sold for just the cost of production? The companies that need to do the research and then go through years of trials for approval needs the charge higher to make back the money they invest and to have funds for future research....
The vast majority of this research is funded or subsidized by your tax dollars already. So, why exactly should these companies be making huge profits off of marginal investments in government work?
Linux (the ecosystem) doesnt have "one API", it has dozens. And all of them are updated so often and so unpredictably that by the time you finished your application, you cant install it on new systems without rewriting parts of it. Bad, really bad "API stability" is the main reason Linux failed so badly in the "industry".
While there are many different standards for different "sections" of the API, it is not like there are completely separate conflicting standards except in a couple of edge cases (the only example I can think of is VA-API vs. VDPAU vs. XvBA, which one could argue is the fault of proprietary manufacturers). Even when such a change is made, the vast majority of libraries continue to provide the old functions for backward-compatibility -- and for libraries that don't it is drop-dead simple for a manufacturer to provide the version of the library that they used and the linker will take care of the rest.
> Part of the reason Windows was successful was that it supported a lot of hardware, with only one API.
The other part was supporting this API for decades, and thus saving their customers the expenses of rewriting their applications over and over and over.
I've had to re-write portions of Windows applications numerous times to get them to run properly on newer versions. If I'd been providing Linux apps I could have just dropped into the installer the version of the library I linked against, about the only libraries you can do that with on Windows are the MSVC++ runtimes.
Not sure what Fresh Start Software's motive was, but if it was to block development of a Stargate videogame, they achieved their goal.
If one of the quotes from TFA is to be believed then my hypothesis would be that they are offended by Stargate's treatment of religion:
Whiting then expressed optimism that Dark Comet would end up returning Cheyenne Mountain’s assets to him. He compared his situation in the “hostile takeover” to that of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in the first Iron Man movie, but said the motives for it were personal and even religious.
If you buy something in Rome, than in Dallas Texas, then in Istambul, your account is going to be flagged...
That's great when it works. I love how my local pizza hut shows up as being in a different state, it's always fun to have that trigger a "did you lose your card?" robocall.
I really, really hope that Obama *doesn't* win the presidential election next time around. Heck, if Obama is as smart as I hope he is, he won't even run. Because the Republican who gets in, in 2012 will face the same problems Obama did, and that guy isn't going to make a miracle happen either. And then you people, who blame everything on Obama will finally have to admit that the turkey you voted for aint any better.
You assume that some sort of rationality is involved in this equation, trust me that it isn't. I can assure you that they will still blame Obama.
Same as here in NY. School districts are bitching about the state withholding funds. In reality, they waste money on unnecessary crap like in TFA.
For a lot of places the "tech" funds are independent of their general budget. As you are likely aware you generally do not replace computers every year; however, if on the years you don't replace equipment you don't spend your tech money then you lose it for when you do need to buy new equipment.
To make the bitching even more egregious, most districts have plenty of money saved in "rainy day" type funds to cover budgets shortfalls.
Those funds are reserved for temporary budget shortfalls (such as an unexpected drop in enrollment for a year), they cannot handle a sustained loss of funding. Also, many places will ratchet your funding to your worst year - so even if budgetary conditions improve for the next year you won't get your budget back.
Maes Democratic opponent is John Hickenlooper who is currently the mayor of Denver.
Hickenlooper is also so well-liked that you'd be crazy to run against him, which is probably why we see Maes and Tancredo (another wacko) running against him.
The timing of the yellow light has nothing to do with whether or not you ran the red.
In some states it's illegal to be in the intersection when the light turns red. Fortunately in many states, mine included, if you've entered while the light is yellow then you're good to go - provided that you don't stop while you're still in the intersection.
It's like taking some gourmet dish, decomposing it down to raw protein, fat, carbs and minerals, blending them, and saying that the disgusting result is somehow representative of the original food. It is, in some way, but it's not the way that matters.
You do that and people won't eat it. The interesting thing here, at least from what I can tell, is that you do that to games and a lot of people will still eat that crap up - to the consternation of a lot of the rest of us.
I don't have luggage I can't handle alone, I don't drink the crap they serve, I don't eat the latex eagle they serve, so I fly cheaper.
Actually you don't, what really happens is that they price they charge for the tickets stays the same and the "fees" just become pure shareholder profit. If anything the prices for tickets has become more expensive even when correcting for the price of fuel and labor. So, we have more expensive flights with a lower quality of service - isn't baronism wonderful?
Any employer is well within their rights to view the communications of their employees while on the job and pertaining to job-related tasks. Since the public is their employer, the public has the right to know.
First, if you as a private business record that information then you will become liable for all of the actions of your employees. Second, I disagree that you have a right to that information. If there is wrongdoing involved then that's up to one of those involved and cognizant of the appropriate issues to blow the whistle. Usually when something goes wrong it is a mistake and you take action to correct it, it's when you choose not to correct the mistake that it becomes wrongdoing. These same issues crop up in research all the time - you make a mistake, ask someone for help finding it, and then you correct it. What I've heard, and find easy to believe, is that the GW skeptics are taking corrected issues out of context and claiming that the researchers created intentionally inaccurate results.
But if you are conversing with them about tasks relevant to your job while at work using computers and networks bought with public money discussing data collected at public expense regarding issues you're being paid to investigate, then your employer - the public - has every right to know what you're doing and saying.
As a scientist you are technically paid with a "grant" and are contracting for a result (research papers) and not technically buying anything that gets the scientist to those results. So, if you're going to go as far as claiming rights to anything your money pays for then every single thing a scientist owns is "tainted" with public money. People are already pushing for this kind of completely unacceptable interference. Now virtually all grants specify all sorts of conditions on what should be your money, depending on the type of research you're doing this can be a huge problem. For example, if you do a joint grant with a national lab then all the equipment you buy has to be returned to the government at the end of the grant (the year) even if you're getting another grant (a renewal).
In fact, that's part of the premise behind government and educational research being of higher quality than private research. The openness of the former allows for greater scrutiny and confirmation of results.
Yup, you are entitled to the very open results that are published in publicly funded research papers. Those results should include all the processes necessary to reproduce them, which is generally a requirement of the contract set forth in your grant. I don't do GW research, but I imagine that they have the same requirements. Do you really think it's acceptable for someone to spend a decade working on something and then have someone else scoop them and take all the credit because they have access to all the work along the way to getting done?
But it's been argued that there's a financial conflict of interest in pro-AGW research since it now represents a significant fraction of government research spending.
Research spending is heavily dependent on previous successful publications, which is why credit for your work is extremely important. This system is very self-reinforcing, but the general feeling is that it reinforces successful work.
They aren't politicians -- they aren't accountable to the public, though they often do perform public services.
If they are using MY tax dollars then they damn well ARE accountable to the public.
So all of their private conversations are suddenly public record because they get paid with tax dollars? I'm sorry, but you have no right to take away our privacy just because you are the source of our paychecks.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a little hard for some universities, in my state several of the state universities are written into the state constitution.
He works for the University of Wisconsin, a public state-owned university. Granted such things can vary by state - but I work for a state university as a graduate research assistant and I know we were warned by legal a while ago that the same thing can happen to us, even as grad students.
If you're running Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10 there's a PPA (for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions):
Firefox 4 PPA for Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 users
People keep saying this, but I just loaded the new Firefox and it feels to me like the interface is much more responsive and flash-intensive pages that used to take forever to load now show up extremely rapidly. I was sticking with FF3 because of the great plugins, but FF4 actually seems to be pretty decent out of the box.
You forget that they used to be a niche-market channel that catered to "us", now they're going to be competing against other channels that have a lot more resources and are available at lower pricing tiers. I know I just downgraded my cable service recently because the only thing that used to justify my extra $30/mo was the Sci-Fi channel. I can't continue to justify that expensive when they cancel most of the programming that I want to watch.
There's an "or" in the list of "things that make a license excluded, one of those items is:
I don't know about you, but that sounds to me like all the OSS licenses, including BSD and MIT, are covered. If you want to put up software that is licensed in any way to allow for modification and redistribution then they're not going to let you.
Rumor is that the guys who originally spotted it named it after the Stargate SG-1 character, who (presumably) sent an asteroid to destroy the earth in the episode "Fail Safe."
It is if they render goods or services before being paid - which they do. I've always seen them give people their items before taking the person's card.
I believe that the idea is that in theory a business that is doing a good job will continue to expand its customer base, if nothing else then by word of mouth. Personally, I don't really buy it since measuring customer base by revenue is subject to huge fluctuations in purchasing habits.
You mean like how private businesses can use trucks to blockade places they don't like? A friend told me about this story, and apparently the local paper has a paywall so this is the best I can do: Spradlin Rock Case
The vast majority of this research is funded or subsidized by your tax dollars already. So, why exactly should these companies be making huge profits off of marginal investments in government work?
While there are many different standards for different "sections" of the API, it is not like there are completely separate conflicting standards except in a couple of edge cases (the only example I can think of is VA-API vs. VDPAU vs. XvBA, which one could argue is the fault of proprietary manufacturers). Even when such a change is made, the vast majority of libraries continue to provide the old functions for backward-compatibility -- and for libraries that don't it is drop-dead simple for a manufacturer to provide the version of the library that they used and the linker will take care of the rest.
I've had to re-write portions of Windows applications numerous times to get them to run properly on newer versions. If I'd been providing Linux apps I could have just dropped into the installer the version of the library I linked against, about the only libraries you can do that with on Windows are the MSVC++ runtimes.
If one of the quotes from TFA is to be believed then my hypothesis would be that they are offended by Stargate's treatment of religion:
That's great when it works. I love how my local pizza hut shows up as being in a different state, it's always fun to have that trigger a "did you lose your card?" robocall.
You assume that some sort of rationality is involved in this equation, trust me that it isn't. I can assure you that they will still blame Obama.
For a lot of places the "tech" funds are independent of their general budget. As you are likely aware you generally do not replace computers every year; however, if on the years you don't replace equipment you don't spend your tech money then you lose it for when you do need to buy new equipment.
Those funds are reserved for temporary budget shortfalls (such as an unexpected drop in enrollment for a year), they cannot handle a sustained loss of funding. Also, many places will ratchet your funding to your worst year - so even if budgetary conditions improve for the next year you won't get your budget back.
It's a beta release and we're all happy with the LTS release right now?
Hickenlooper is also so well-liked that you'd be crazy to run against him, which is probably why we see Maes and Tancredo (another wacko) running against him.
In some states it's illegal to be in the intersection when the light turns red. Fortunately in many states, mine included, if you've entered while the light is yellow then you're good to go - provided that you don't stop while you're still in the intersection.
You do that and people won't eat it. The interesting thing here, at least from what I can tell, is that you do that to games and a lot of people will still eat that crap up - to the consternation of a lot of the rest of us.
Actually you don't, what really happens is that they price they charge for the tickets stays the same and the "fees" just become pure shareholder profit. If anything the prices for tickets has become more expensive even when correcting for the price of fuel and labor. So, we have more expensive flights with a lower quality of service - isn't baronism wonderful?
First, if you as a private business record that information then you will become liable for all of the actions of your employees. Second, I disagree that you have a right to that information. If there is wrongdoing involved then that's up to one of those involved and cognizant of the appropriate issues to blow the whistle. Usually when something goes wrong it is a mistake and you take action to correct it, it's when you choose not to correct the mistake that it becomes wrongdoing. These same issues crop up in research all the time - you make a mistake, ask someone for help finding it, and then you correct it. What I've heard, and find easy to believe, is that the GW skeptics are taking corrected issues out of context and claiming that the researchers created intentionally inaccurate results.
As a scientist you are technically paid with a "grant" and are contracting for a result (research papers) and not technically buying anything that gets the scientist to those results. So, if you're going to go as far as claiming rights to anything your money pays for then every single thing a scientist owns is "tainted" with public money. People are already pushing for this kind of completely unacceptable interference. Now virtually all grants specify all sorts of conditions on what should be your money, depending on the type of research you're doing this can be a huge problem. For example, if you do a joint grant with a national lab then all the equipment you buy has to be returned to the government at the end of the grant (the year) even if you're getting another grant (a renewal).
Yup, you are entitled to the very open results that are published in publicly funded research papers. Those results should include all the processes necessary to reproduce them, which is generally a requirement of the contract set forth in your grant. I don't do GW research, but I imagine that they have the same requirements. Do you really think it's acceptable for someone to spend a decade working on something and then have someone else scoop them and take all the credit because they have access to all the work along the way to getting done?
Research spending is heavily dependent on previous successful publications, which is why credit for your work is extremely important. This system is very self-reinforcing, but the general feeling is that it reinforces successful work.
So all of their private conversations are suddenly public record because they get paid with tax dollars? I'm sorry, but you have no right to take away our privacy just because you are the source of our paychecks.
But corporations have a right to make profits!!! The public good is just a concept after all, so it can't have any rights.
Does it matter when the end result is always that they do both?