I forget quite which year it was, back when we had to walk uphill both ways through the snow to get to the computer keypunch lab...
So sometime in the mid-80s, my boss needed to get a mortgage, and he and his wife and 3.5-year-old kid went to the bank. The kid saw a keyboard, went over and typed "BASICA GAMES", and nothing happened! And he couldn't find the screen, either!
He'd never actually seen a typewriter before, but the concept of 3-year-olds being computer-literate was still fairly radical back then. He mostly liked to play the donkey-crossing-the-street game.
Back then, it was fairly rare for my coworkers to have IBM PCs at home - we'd use terminals to talk to Unix machines, and some people had C64s or whatever for their kids; a 10-year-old playing games wouldn't have been surprising.
As you say, if it's the author's own work, that's fine, but if there's contributor content, they may have extra constraints, and that also applies to using packages with GPL or other licenses as a platform or component of your code. That was certainly one of the goals of the GNU Public Virus approach - if you're using Free Software, you can't make the Free parts non-Free, and if you're doing things the way RMS would really like, all of your contributions would also be Free. If you want to be able to later convert your Free package to non-Free, you'd better plan for it upfront.
That is one of the legal uncertainties with GPL - how do you manage copyright in a multiple-author environment? If you let other people report bugs or request features, and you fix the bugs or code the features yourself, that's unlikely to give the contributors partial ownership of the code, but if you also accept bug fixes from them, or certainly if you accept new feature code, that probably does.
The GPL3 license appears to be more restrictive than GPL2, not that I've spent much time examining the endless arguments about it (:-) Are GPL2 and GPL3 written in ways that you can use GPL2 code in GPL3 projects without permission? One of my concerns is that especially for larger projects such as the Linux Kernel, there are enough contributors that you really *can't* go asking them all for permission, even if the change control has always been good enough to identify them. There'll be people you can't find, people who think GPL3 is much better than GPL2, people who think it's much worse, and people who don't really care but don't like RMS for whatever reasons.
It's been a long time since I've done significant coding work. Most of it was internal projects at a previous employer, or work for hire we did for customers, so while some of it was general tools that could be reused outside my projects if people wanted to keep track of it (like printer drivers and termcaps and bug fixes), much of it was too customized to be useful outside of our environment. On the other hand, the code I've done on public projects has mostly been stuff that I'm really not attached to - teaching examples, or code that if I put any license on it it was a Netnews-style "It's Not My Fault" license. Help yourself...
The Asterisk open-source PBX is available on asterisk-shaped demo disks that you can pop into your PC to install a Linux OS and Asterisk PBX server software. It's not a perfect ninja star, but pretty good.
Everybody's been talking about how webmail is portable, and desktopmail isn't. My experience is just the opposite - I work on a laptop, and I can access my desktop email from anywhere that I have my laptop, any time, but I can only use webmail if I've got an Internet connection right now.
Sure, I need to be on the Internet to download new mail, but I already get more email than I can read in a day, and it's usually less critical to have the last five minutes' worth of mail than to be able to read fairly recent mail and look up older email. It's theoretically possible to emulate that with webmail by saving each new message as a file, stashed in a directory somewhere, or by appending them to a big file in/bin/mail format or whatever. I haven't seen a webmail system that made that easy, and at some point that approaches becoming an email client, especially if you've written some emacs macros or whatever, but in theory it's doable.
The advantage of webmail is that if you're in some network environment you don't control, such as at an Internet cafe or behind a customer's firewall or on your work VPN that doesn't let you pass POP/IMAP through to your personal-email mail server, you can access it. That can be useful, and I do use webmail sometimes for that. In theory you can convince some desktop clients to use SSL or SSH tunneling to connect to your POP or IMAP server, though I haven't set up a proxy to do that for Eudora and I'm not sure if Outlook is capable of it if you're using Microsoft's email protocols, but again in theory you can do it.
In practice, I use both for my real email - my personal email goes to an ISP POP/IMAP account that has also a webmail server, so I'll use that to read mail from my work VPN if I need to access it at the same time as accessing work, but I mostly download the mail into Eudora. My work email uses Outlook/Exchange with the mailbox stored on the server, only accessible from inside the VPN, so I use that except for rare occasions when my computer's down or I've forgotten my power cord and am borrowing another machine to read new mail with Outlook Web Access. OWA works fairly well - it's a heavyweight web-based system, wants IE as opposed to older Mozillas, and is somewhat picky about logins, but it lets me access the calendar functions as well as email.
I've also got a couple of free webmail accounts I use for other things - gmail gets some of the high-volume public mailing lists which I don't want to clutter my personal or work email with and don't have privacy concerns about, and fastmail.fm has a nice Unix-flavored webmail system that I use for email from vendors, etc., that needs a bit more permanance than bugmenot or dodgeit.com but also don't mind losing if I haven't checked it in a while.
Most real-world taxes aren't at all based on the amount of government services that those activities need in order to exist. Taxes are based on where there's available money flow to tax - it's the Willie Sutton principle that the reason to rob banks is that that's where the money is.
There are occasional exceptions - governments might use road tolls to fund road maintenance or use fees charged for entering parks to pay for the park rangers. But that's not where the bulk of the money goes or where it comes from. In the US, the vast bulk of government money comes from personal income tax, and the second-most is either property taxes or corporate taxes of various sorts, or borrowed from foreigners that your children or grandchildren will need to pay back, and it mainly goes to income redistribution programs, military (federal), schools (state or local), prisons (largely fueled by the drug war and related real crimes), bureaucratic parasites, and medical care for old people, in ways that are almost never proportional to the costs of the service nor the benefits to the individuals paying.
Rich people generally pay far more than their proportional share of the wealth - not because the benefits to them are disproportionately higher, but simply because the government can't get as much money as it wants to spend any other way. Even a proportional (aka "flat") tax isn't enough for current spending - they'd still have to be taking far more than 100% of the income of the really poor and taxing the lower-middle classes at a rate that would leave them starving on the streets and/or running a violent revolution, as opposed to the current situation where the poor mostly don't starve and the lower-class workers can vote Democrat if they can't be tricked into voting Republican.
The reason not to tax in-game revenue is simpler - it's a purely fictitious system, and any real-world value occurs because people are willing to make transactions between fictitious goods (the game currency, or magic swords, or whatever) and hard cash, and those transactions are *already* subject to taxation. In practice, much of the dollars-for-magic-swords business happens in the informal economy, and there's the jurisdictional question of which government gets the money - local governments in the US with sales tax revenue already complain that they're not allowed to tax interstate or international commerce (in spite of that being a major reason that the US developed a strong economy), but the bulk of the transactions seem to be Chinese exports to the US, with the income going to Chinese entrepreneurs and only taxable there (unless the US wants to embarass itself by placing a protectionist import tax on magic swords, of course:-)
As far as I can tell from the uninspired collection of businesses that have been there over the years, the building's probably fine (though for all I know it could have leaks or other problems.) It looks better when there isn't paper covering all the windows - it's basically a glass-fishbowl front retail section and a big warehousey back section, cheap uninspired commercial real estate that's not on a corner, doesn't get walking-by traffic because it's on the wrong side of the shopping center, and doesn't get as much drive-by shopping traffic as most of the other uninspired commercial real estate nearby.
There's a much better fruit stand (Milk Pail Market) around the corner. The fruit at this place was sometimes cheaper, not usually very good, and usually not organic, and there was almost never a reason to shop there as opposed to Safeway, unlike the good fruit stand. I only went there once or twice - the main attraction was that it had a different ethnic group running it (I forget if they were Arab or Persian), so sometimes they'd have a bit different collection of fruits and veggies that they liked, but mostly it just wasn't that hot.
Actually, the day workers are over on the other side of the shopping center, and they're mostly Mexicans who actually *will* work, unlike the sign-holders who don't want to work. The local cities sometimes harass them, and sometimes cooperate with local Catholic churches that have organized day-worker centers. I've occasionally hired them when I had furniture moving to do, and there used to be more construction and building-refurb business for them. There's a not-quite-dead-yet Sears on the same side as the dead fruit stand, which Home Depot wants to take over, in which case there'll be more demand for workers over there.
The coders who want to do temp work usually hang out on the net, or deal with different kinds of temp agencies. You make a bit more money, and get to work inside, but otherwise it used to look pretty similar, and you're also usually really fluent in languages that the people doing the hiring don't actually understand so you sometimes need help translating to them as well.
There were probably similar WWII-temporary-shack buildings at Berkeley when I was there in ~1979, which didn't get nuked until a number of years later. I don't think that was about historic preservationism, though - the buildings were cheap, they needed the space, and they had lots of other construction projects going throughout the 80s and 90s, some on formerly-unbuilt ground and some where other buildings deserved to be demolished or rebuilt. And this being Northern California, as opposed to Boston, they didn't need to spend that much heating the things.
There's a much better fruit stand around the corner - Milk Pail Market, which has fruits, veggies, and a really wide variety of cheeses, and is one of those semi-outdoor designs that work well in California-like climates, plus there's a Trader Joe's and a Safeway in the same complex, and there used to be an Albertson's.
The folks who did the fruit business in Shockley's old place must not have done much market research - they didn't have the quality to compete with the fruit stand for people who like that kind of shopping, or the interesting selection of other products that attracts customers to Trader Joe's, or the conventional supermarket breadth of products that the two big commercial markets had, and there's a Mexican market (mostly a carniceria) on the opposite side of the complex next to the mainly Mexican residential area nearby so they'd also lose the walking-distance traffic (and Safeway and Milk Pail would absorb anybody walking from the prefab-condo-commuter residential area on the other side.)
I think the building also used to be a back-support-products store, but that moved to Palo Alto a few years ago.
If you're on a slow DSL, yes, it'll take a while to download SP2. Big deal - run it at night, and you've now *had* a couple of years, so realistically what you're talking about is installing an upgraded OS on your upgraded PC, so you could do the download on your old machine before you plug the new one in.
A large fraction of the problem can be taken care of by using a hardware firewall in front of your PC from the moment you first plug it in, which'll usually keep you safe long enough to get the current security upgrades. That's not fool-proof - there are bad guys hunting for flaws in popular firewall boxes - but it's a good start.
WIPO et al are very much against free expression
on
ICANN Wants Immunity
·
· Score: 1
The US is nominally all in favor of free expression as long as it doesn't involve sex or terrorism or other things that frighten the Republican forces of political correctness. But that's ICANN's real issues have never been about that - the only "IP" it ever cared about was "Intellectual Property", not "the Internet Protocol", and it mainly cares about protecting trademarks (a difficult problem when you're mapping trademarks that were formerly of local significance only into a global communications environment), and occasionally about protecting big copyright holders against piracy, and of course it always cares about finding ways to fund itself by charging for anything it possibly can.
Look at ICANN's insistence on requiring all registrars to collect True Names and True ICBM addresses for everybody who registers a domain name - they're not concerned about actual network administration working, which doesn't require that, but they want to make sure that you can deliver a trademark lawsuit or DMCA copyright shutdown notice on anybody who's got a domain name, regardless of the importance to human rights of being able to speak and publish anonymously. Do you want to have a domain name but not get your personal email and snail-mail spammed? ICANN doesn't think your privacy is as important as the RIAA and MPAA's business interests. I suspect that moving themselves to Switzerland will reduce this pressure, as well as getting away from the current Bush Administration who doesn't know quite what they want ICANN to do but whose knees keep jerking any time anything occurs to them.
This doesn't mean that losts of the quasi-anonymous domain registration isn't abusive - most of it is various forms of spammers, crackers, and other low-lifes. But even in a rigidly enforced mandatory-true-name environment, anybody who's involved in profit-making abuse can buy themselves a $100 shell corporation that legally exists in a file drawer in Delaware, and even if Alberto Gonzales hauls their corporate papers off to Gitmo to waterboard them, the worst that happens to the miscreants is that they need to send another $100 money order to set up another shell corporation. (The first half of that isn't just a hypothetical - I've traced spammers down to that particular black hole.)
You can also get USB-to-CF adapters, and assuming they're USB 2.0, they should do about as well as USB memory sticks for performance, while letting you use that old CF if that's useful to you, or new CF if you prefer to buy your memory that way.
And assuming that your OS will let you spin down the disks that aren't in use, keeping most of your running system on CF will keep things quite and low-powered except when you actually need disk.
You could argue whether the IBM PC gets first billing, or the Apple II, or the Commodore 64, I suppose; depends a lot on what you mean by "took off". But his discussion of busses also talks about USB like it was the first of its kind, a radical idea appearing out of nowhere.
Apple's Macintoshes did the same thing with Appletalk a decade earlier, probably the most successful peripheral bus, though of course it was too slow for later applications.
USB 1.x could handle basic peripherals - at 12 Mbps it wasn't bad - but it was too slow for external disk drives other than the early generations of CDROMs, and the bus speed was far more of a limitation on usefulness than power, since anything needing more power than USB could use a wall wart. USB2 has made a real difference in the ability of USB to support larger disk drives.
IEEE-488 GPIB (aka HP-IB) did the one-bus-fits-all trick for the scientific instrumentation market in the 1980s, and HP at least used them for PC disk drives and similar applications for a while.
There were also some other busses trying to do that trick that got left in the dust - HP-IL, some Sony things, etc. - most of them trying to compete with Appletalk.
I've got a 2.5" external drive case that uses two USB wires. One goes to a standard USB plug on the case, and the other goes to a connector that's just a power socket. Standard USB supports a given amount of power per connector, so this is getting around the limitation by doubling that. (Obviously you need a powered USB hub or direct connection from a computer, not a non-powered hub, and calling the new version "Powered USB" seems like an unfortunate naming collision.)
There are two ways to spoof IP addresses - trick somebody into thinking the machine they want is at a bad guy's IP address instead of the real one, or trick somebody into thinking that the IP address they're trying to reach is on a bad guy's machine instead of the real one.
DNS primarily lets you look up the IP address corresponding to a domain name, and DNSSEC prevents this from being spoofed. Spoofing the routing protocols so that IP packets go to the bad guy's machine is obviously not DNS's problem.
What we need here is alternative keys to verify the signatures on TLDs like.com,.net,.uk,.de,.iq etc. You can do that without setting up an alternative root system. Of course, while the DHS is demanding the keys for the root from ICANN publicly, you *know* they'll be privately demanding the keys for.com from Verisign or whoever it is these days, and trusting.com not to be forged is really a much bigger issue than whether the US politicians may decide to forge keys in.cn some day just for fun.
The solution to trusting the root is for trusted institutions to maintain sets of alternate public keys that are used to sign the TLDs, and designing DNSSEC software so you can use your cached version of those keys if you don't trust the root.
There are two reasons for alternate roots, as opposed to alternate trust keys. A theoretical reason would be a political move by somebody, probably the CCTLD owners jointly with the ITU or maybe the UN, to take over the root so the US government would stop annoying them. That might be good. But the real reason was because people wanted to sell alternate TLDs, like.sex and.whateverIfeltlike, back when there were only the original TLDs and CCTLDs; I forget if the early ones dated back to Jon Postel's time or if they were mainly in the period of chaos after he died.
Windows starts up a bunch of different processes and applications at and after boot time, and it keeps hiding them in more different places every new OS version. So you'll have to hunt them all down. The easy one is your Startup folder (especially if your machine is set up by a Corporate IT Droid Department). See what apps you do and don't need, and make yourself a Don't Start folder to drag the ones you don't usually need into. Then go find the other various startup scripts, directories, etc. (i.e. RTFM, if you can find a manual) and see what stuff you do or don't need from there. I found that getting rid of the Office startup stuff helped a lot.
Also, if your PC comes from a major manufacturer like HP or Dell, see if it has a bunch of "helpful" manufacturer-installed software, and see what you can get rid of from that. I don't know if it's as bad as it used to be, but when my mother-in-law had a Compaq, there was a lot of stuff we had to trash to get the system to behave adequately; we eventually upgraded her to an XP-from-scratch installation which worked a lot better. (Of course, getting rid of all the spyware helped too:-)
Agreed - about:blank saves lots of time when opening pages, especially since my laptop is sometimes plugged into a work LAN or VPN where it needs a proxy and sometimes into the Internet where it doesn't, and this not only avoids waiting for complex pages to load, but avoids getting stuck by incorrect proxy settings.
The Personal Bookmarks Toolbar makes Slashdot one mouse click away.
Stephen Foster was a well-known American composer who was one of the pioneers of the business of selling your compositions as sheet music. He wasn't very successful; other sheet music publishers would sell his stuff without paying royalties, and copyright laws weren't very effective protection. Most of his work was in the 1850s, some from the late 40s. So there's some precedent.
Gilbert and Sullivan, who were late-1800s composers that made their money by having a theater company put on their operettas, had problems with other theater companies pirating their scores and putting on competing productions, depleting their potential audiences without paying them. In their case they weren't selling their compositions as a product, but might have been more successful financially if they had.
I suspect being hit by a piece of flying fiber is marginally better than being hit by a piece of flying metal, and it's probably easier to do a good multi-layer protection design without too much extra weight, but it sounds like that's the risky part of the process.
And I think I've seen Adam and Jamie using scuba tanks to do Bad Things to brick walls....
This "French surrendering" meme was annoying after the first couple of jokes. None of the jingoist US politicians (including Jay Leno....) who propagated it wanted to talk about the "French Resistance" or even the French Foreign Legion, and they certainly didn't want anybody referring to their enemies as "The Iraqi Resistance".
On the other hand, if you want to joke about French cars, go ahead.:-) My grandmother really loved her Peugeot, but most of my experience with the things is been Renaults (marginally better than Fiat) or Citroens (looks like an early VW hit by a trash can, but it's not that reliable.)
You're correct that usually people don't know how to read patents and freak out because they misunderstand the structure, but I don't think that's the case here; I think the guy really did get away with patenting the "blatantly obvious to the intro-college-course student" this time.
The usual patent structure looks like this
Abstract: a general description of what it's about.
Claim 1: Existence of roundness
Claim 2: The aforementioned roundness being attached to a device made of various materials
Claim 3: Vulcanization of Rubber as a technique for specific materials production
Claim 4: A specific configuration of vulcanized rubber applied in a configuration of roundness as illustrated in Figure 12, below,
Claim 5: PROFIT!!! (Sorry, had to say that here:-) - really only applies to Business Model patents.
Description: Some text in something resembling English about what's really been done here.
The standard way to misread this is to look at the abstract or first couple of claims and post to Slashdot that Oh, no, he's actually patented the wheel! when in fact the patent is really about some particular water-repelling tread design down in Claim 4.
On the other hand, the standard way to abuse such a patent, especially a business method patent, is to get the patent issued because the tread design in Claim 4 was actual valuable and novel work, and then threaten to sue anybody who violated Claims 2 and 5 by using a wheel in a profit-making transportation business. Sharks especially like this technique when the claims sound confusing and technical and it's not obvious to a typical court that the claims they're basing the suit on are the parts that *are* obvious to anyone skilled in the trade.
In this case, though, I don't think there's anything left out of most of the rants - the claims appear to describe storing a bunch of data, using a linked list to access the data in one order, and using a second linked list to access the data in a different order, and really not much else. Sure, it's patenting the data set with two linked lists instead of just a data set with one linked list, but that's still well covered in Computer Science 202, if not necessarily CS101.
If you don't care about specs, sounds like you're looking for a desktop - Not only because you get more horsepower and screen space per dollar, but because laptops seem to be more likely to have some part or other you care about that isn't compatible with your Linux distro that you can't easily replace by adding another card.
I want video eyeglasses with decent resolution (e.g. 1440 or 1600 stereo), with some kinds of transparency (either really transparent or a camera system that emulates it), voice and/or dataglove input, and a sufficiently lightweight CPU that carrying it around doesn't annoy my back. Unfortunately, the best glasses I've seen have still been ~640x480 or less, because they're designed for TV watchers or video game players, not people who need to actually read significant quantities of text.
Slashdot Mirror
So sometime in the mid-80s, my boss needed to get a mortgage, and he and his wife and 3.5-year-old kid went to the bank. The kid saw a keyboard, went over and typed "BASICA GAMES", and nothing happened! And he couldn't find the screen, either!
He'd never actually seen a typewriter before, but the concept of 3-year-olds being computer-literate was still fairly radical back then. He mostly liked to play the donkey-crossing-the-street game.
Back then, it was fairly rare for my coworkers to have IBM PCs at home - we'd use terminals to talk to Unix machines, and some people had C64s or whatever for their kids; a 10-year-old playing games wouldn't have been surprising.
That is one of the legal uncertainties with GPL - how do you manage copyright in a multiple-author environment? If you let other people report bugs or request features, and you fix the bugs or code the features yourself, that's unlikely to give the contributors partial ownership of the code, but if you also accept bug fixes from them, or certainly if you accept new feature code, that probably does.
The GPL3 license appears to be more restrictive than GPL2, not that I've spent much time examining the endless arguments about it (:-) Are GPL2 and GPL3 written in ways that you can use GPL2 code in GPL3 projects without permission? One of my concerns is that especially for larger projects such as the Linux Kernel, there are enough contributors that you really *can't* go asking them all for permission, even if the change control has always been good enough to identify them. There'll be people you can't find, people who think GPL3 is much better than GPL2, people who think it's much worse, and people who don't really care but don't like RMS for whatever reasons.
It's been a long time since I've done significant coding work. Most of it was internal projects at a previous employer, or work for hire we did for customers, so while some of it was general tools that could be reused outside my projects if people wanted to keep track of it (like printer drivers and termcaps and bug fixes), much of it was too customized to be useful outside of our environment. On the other hand, the code I've done on public projects has mostly been stuff that I'm really not attached to - teaching examples, or code that if I put any license on it it was a Netnews-style "It's Not My Fault" license. Help yourself...
The Asterisk open-source PBX is available on asterisk-shaped demo disks that you can pop into your PC to install a Linux OS and Asterisk PBX server software. It's not a perfect ninja star, but pretty good.
Sure, I need to be on the Internet to download new mail, but I already get more email than I can read in a day, and it's usually less critical to have the last five minutes' worth of mail than to be able to read fairly recent mail and look up older email.
It's theoretically possible to emulate that with webmail by saving each new message as a file, stashed in a directory somewhere, or by appending them to a big file in
The advantage of webmail is that if you're in some network environment you don't control, such as at an Internet cafe or behind a customer's firewall or on your work VPN that doesn't let you pass POP/IMAP through to your personal-email mail server, you can access it. That can be useful, and I do use webmail sometimes for that. In theory you can convince some desktop clients to use SSL or SSH tunneling to connect to your POP or IMAP server, though I haven't set up a proxy to do that for Eudora and I'm not sure if Outlook is capable of it if you're using Microsoft's email protocols, but again in theory you can do it.
In practice, I use both for my real email - my personal email goes to an ISP POP/IMAP account that has also a webmail server, so I'll use that to read mail from my work VPN if I need to access it at the same time as accessing work, but I mostly download the mail into Eudora. My work email uses Outlook/Exchange with the mailbox stored on the server, only accessible from inside the VPN, so I use that except for rare occasions when my computer's down or I've forgotten my power cord and am borrowing another machine to read new mail with Outlook Web Access. OWA works fairly well - it's a heavyweight web-based system, wants IE as opposed to older Mozillas, and is somewhat picky about logins, but it lets me access the calendar functions as well as email.
I've also got a couple of free webmail accounts I use for other things - gmail gets some of the high-volume public mailing lists which I don't want to clutter my personal or work email with and don't have privacy concerns about, and fastmail.fm has a nice Unix-flavored webmail system that I use for email from vendors, etc., that needs a bit more permanance than bugmenot or dodgeit.com but also don't mind losing if I haven't checked it in a while.
There are occasional exceptions - governments might use road tolls to fund road maintenance or use fees charged for entering parks to pay for the park rangers. But that's not where the bulk of the money goes or where it comes from. In the US, the vast bulk of government money comes from personal income tax, and the second-most is either property taxes or corporate taxes of various sorts, or borrowed from foreigners that your children or grandchildren will need to pay back, and it mainly goes to income redistribution programs, military (federal), schools (state or local), prisons (largely fueled by the drug war and related real crimes), bureaucratic parasites, and medical care for old people, in ways that are almost never proportional to the costs of the service nor the benefits to the individuals paying.
Rich people generally pay far more than their proportional share of the wealth - not because the benefits to them are disproportionately higher, but simply because the government can't get as much money as it wants to spend any other way. Even a proportional (aka "flat") tax isn't enough for current spending - they'd still have to be taking far more than 100% of the income of the really poor and taxing the lower-middle classes at a rate that would leave them starving on the streets and/or running a violent revolution, as opposed to the current situation where the poor mostly don't starve and the lower-class workers can vote Democrat if they can't be tricked into voting Republican.
The reason not to tax in-game revenue is simpler - it's a purely fictitious system, and any real-world value occurs because people are willing to make transactions between fictitious goods (the game currency, or magic swords, or whatever) and hard cash, and those transactions are *already* subject to taxation. In practice, much of the dollars-for-magic-swords business happens in the informal economy, and there's the jurisdictional question of which government gets the money - local governments in the US with sales tax revenue already complain that they're not allowed to tax interstate or international commerce (in spite of that being a major reason that the US developed a strong economy), but the bulk of the transactions seem to be Chinese exports to the US, with the income going to Chinese entrepreneurs and only taxable there (unless the US wants to embarass itself by placing a protectionist import tax on magic swords, of course
As far as I can tell from the uninspired collection of businesses that have been there over the years, the building's probably fine (though for all I know it could have leaks or other problems.) It looks better when there isn't paper covering all the windows - it's basically a glass-fishbowl front retail section and a big warehousey back section, cheap uninspired commercial real estate that's not on a corner, doesn't get walking-by traffic because it's on the wrong side of the shopping center, and doesn't get as much drive-by shopping traffic as most of the other uninspired commercial real estate nearby.
There's a much better fruit stand (Milk Pail Market) around the corner. The fruit at this place was sometimes cheaper, not usually very good, and usually not organic, and there was almost never a reason to shop there as opposed to Safeway, unlike the good fruit stand. I only went there once or twice - the main attraction was that it had a different ethnic group running it (I forget if they were Arab or Persian), so sometimes they'd have a bit different collection of fruits and veggies that they liked, but mostly it just wasn't that hot.
The coders who want to do temp work usually hang out on the net, or deal with different kinds of temp agencies. You make a bit more money, and get to work inside, but otherwise it used to look pretty similar, and you're also usually really fluent in languages that the people doing the hiring don't actually understand so you sometimes need help translating to them as well.
There were probably similar WWII-temporary-shack buildings at Berkeley when I was there in ~1979, which didn't get nuked until a number of years later. I don't think that was about historic preservationism, though - the buildings were cheap, they needed the space, and they had lots of other construction projects going throughout the 80s and 90s, some on formerly-unbuilt ground and some where other buildings deserved to be demolished or rebuilt. And this being Northern California, as opposed to Boston, they didn't need to spend that much heating the things.
The folks who did the fruit business in Shockley's old place must not have done much market research - they didn't have the quality to compete with the fruit stand for people who like that kind of shopping, or the interesting selection of other products that attracts customers to Trader Joe's, or the conventional supermarket breadth of products that the two big commercial markets had, and there's a Mexican market (mostly a carniceria) on the opposite side of the complex next to the mainly Mexican residential area nearby so they'd also lose the walking-distance traffic (and Safeway and Milk Pail would absorb anybody walking from the prefab-condo-commuter residential area on the other side.)
I think the building also used to be a back-support-products store, but that moved to Palo Alto a few years ago.
A large fraction of the problem can be taken care of by using a hardware firewall in front of your PC from the moment you first plug it in, which'll usually keep you safe long enough to get the current security upgrades. That's not fool-proof - there are bad guys hunting for flaws in popular firewall boxes - but it's a good start.
Look at ICANN's insistence on requiring all registrars to collect True Names and True ICBM addresses for everybody who registers a domain name - they're not concerned about actual network administration working, which doesn't require that, but they want to make sure that you can deliver a trademark lawsuit or DMCA copyright shutdown notice on anybody who's got a domain name, regardless of the importance to human rights of being able to speak and publish anonymously. Do you want to have a domain name but not get your personal email and snail-mail spammed? ICANN doesn't think your privacy is as important as the RIAA and MPAA's business interests. I suspect that moving themselves to Switzerland will reduce this pressure, as well as getting away from the current Bush Administration who doesn't know quite what they want ICANN to do but whose knees keep jerking any time anything occurs to them.
This doesn't mean that losts of the quasi-anonymous domain registration isn't abusive - most of it is various forms of spammers, crackers, and other low-lifes. But even in a rigidly enforced mandatory-true-name environment, anybody who's involved in profit-making abuse can buy themselves a $100 shell corporation that legally exists in a file drawer in Delaware, and even if Alberto Gonzales hauls their corporate papers off to Gitmo to waterboard them, the worst that happens to the miscreants is that they need to send another $100 money order to set up another shell corporation. (The first half of that isn't just a hypothetical - I've traced spammers down to that particular black hole.)
You should be able to find everything you're missing.
And assuming that your OS will let you spin down the disks that aren't in use, keeping most of your running system on CF will keep things quite and low-powered except when you actually need disk.
I've got a 2.5" external drive case that uses two USB wires. One goes to a standard USB plug on the case, and the other goes to a connector that's just a power socket. Standard USB supports a given amount of power per connector, so this is getting around the limitation by doubling that. (Obviously you need a powered USB hub or direct connection from a computer, not a non-powered hub, and calling the new version "Powered USB" seems like an unfortunate naming collision.)
DNS primarily lets you look up the IP address corresponding to a domain name, and DNSSEC prevents this from being spoofed. Spoofing the routing protocols so that IP packets go to the bad guy's machine is obviously not DNS's problem.
The solution to trusting the root is for trusted institutions to maintain sets of alternate public keys that are used to sign the TLDs, and designing DNSSEC software so you can use your cached version of those keys if you don't trust the root.
There are two reasons for alternate roots, as opposed to alternate trust keys. A theoretical reason would be a political move by somebody, probably the CCTLD owners jointly with the ITU or maybe the UN, to take over the root so the US government would stop annoying them. That might be good. But the real reason was because people wanted to sell alternate TLDs, like .sex and .whateverIfeltlike, back when there were only the original TLDs and CCTLDs; I forget if the early ones dated back to Jon Postel's time or if they were mainly in the period of chaos after he died.
Also, if your PC comes from a major manufacturer like HP or Dell, see if it has a bunch of "helpful" manufacturer-installed software, and see what you can get rid of from that. I don't know if it's as bad as it used to be, but when my mother-in-law had a Compaq, there was a lot of stuff we had to trash to get the system to behave adequately; we eventually upgraded her to an XP-from-scratch installation which worked a lot better. (Of course, getting rid of all the spyware helped too
The Personal Bookmarks Toolbar makes Slashdot one mouse click away.
Gilbert and Sullivan, who were late-1800s composers that made their money by having a theater company put on their operettas, had problems with other theater companies pirating their scores and putting on competing productions, depleting their potential audiences without paying them. In their case they weren't selling their compositions as a product, but might have been more successful financially if they had.
And I think I've seen Adam and Jamie using scuba tanks to do Bad Things to brick walls....
On the other hand, if you want to joke about French cars, go ahead.
The usual patent structure looks like this
- Abstract: a general description of what it's about.
- Claim 1: Existence of roundness
- Claim 2: The aforementioned roundness being attached to a device made of various materials
- Claim 3: Vulcanization of Rubber as a technique for specific materials production
- Claim 4: A specific configuration of vulcanized rubber applied in a configuration of roundness as illustrated in Figure 12, below,
- Claim 5: PROFIT!!! (Sorry, had to say that here
:-) - really only applies to Business Model patents. - Description: Some text in something resembling English about what's really been done here.
The standard way to misread this is to look at the abstract or first couple of claims and post to Slashdot that Oh, no, he's actually patented the wheel! when in fact the patent is really about some particular water-repelling tread design down in Claim 4.On the other hand, the standard way to abuse such a patent, especially a business method patent, is to get the patent issued because the tread design in Claim 4 was actual valuable and novel work, and then threaten to sue anybody who violated Claims 2 and 5 by using a wheel in a profit-making transportation business. Sharks especially like this technique when the claims sound confusing and technical and it's not obvious to a typical court that the claims they're basing the suit on are the parts that *are* obvious to anyone skilled in the trade.
In this case, though, I don't think there's anything left out of most of the rants - the claims appear to describe storing a bunch of data, using a linked list to access the data in one order, and using a second linked list to access the data in a different order, and really not much else. Sure, it's patenting the data set with two linked lists instead of just a data set with one linked list, but that's still well covered in Computer Science 202, if not necessarily CS101.
I want video eyeglasses with decent resolution (e.g. 1440 or 1600 stereo), with some kinds of transparency (either really transparent or a camera system that emulates it), voice and/or dataglove input, and a sufficiently lightweight CPU that carrying it around doesn't annoy my back. Unfortunately, the best glasses I've seen have still been ~640x480 or less, because they're designed for TV watchers or video game players, not people who need to actually read significant quantities of text.