About 20 years ago when the local library got computerized, they were pretty clever about it. They had the card catalog digitized, and then placed stacks of bar-code stickers next to the check-out desks. The stickers were just unique numbers, not linked to any book record at all. At first all the books were stickerless. But every time someone checked out a book, bringing it to the library assistant for checkout, the worker found the book's record in the database (pretty quickly, I recall). Then she (or he) plunked down a sticker on the back cover and scanned in the book, linking barcode and book-record. Of course, the next time the book was checked out, they just had to run the light-pen over the barcode. Over a matter of months they had all the popular books had their barcode stickers. I suppose during slack times at the library they put bar codes on the rest of the collection. I thought this was a clever way to amortize the effort of the data entry. The patrons, of course, did much of the work: they pulled the books off the shelf, and by definition they pulled the most popular works first. In this way the library was easily able to get the highest-circulating material into the system right away.
The problem isn't that you insulted "Texas," a state I have no connection to; it's your crude generalization about a whole class of people. It's straw thinking like this that perpetuates the racism and xenophobia that is making the "fear-the-terrorist" political platform so powerful. It's because of those attitudes that my civil liberties are being dissolved -- that's what makes me angry. Try these sentences on for size (while wearing your irony goggles):
"So as dismayed as we are we are in a great minority, the whole state of Ohio would probably rejoice at the arrest of Sagoyan and would want him burned at the stake."
"So as dismayed as we are we are in a great minority, all the Whiteys would probably rejoice at the arrest of Sagoyan and would want him burned at the stake."
"So as dismayed as we Canadians are we are in a great minority, all Americans would probably rejoice at the arrest of Sagoyan and would want him burned at the stake."
This attitude is what feeds the problem. Free your mind.
people out there... [with] the sole purpose of killing Americans (and there are a lot of people out there like that)
Here is something you should know: no, there are not a lot of people like that. There are extremely few people like that. Such people are fantastically uncommon.
You're both right. Actually the party was supposed to celebrate "Public public key cryptography" but someone's word processor along the way saw the repeated word and took it out...:-)
Human rights? But what about civilization? Laws are above you and me they're for the greater good. Can I get a law. Cheers to that ol' chap Hammurabi. What greater gift to pass on to future generations than a bunch of laws?
Sorry mate but I think you might have had one too many, how about I help you nice and quietly step over to the scanning machine and we have a little snap of your Longers and Lingers?
You should read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (available here). According to him the D's and the R's were equally into electoral skulduggery; his hero/antihero worked for both parties.
Either we trust the people running our elections or we don't.
It's not quite that simple. As RWR once said, "Trust but verify."
Even if it were a power reserved to the states, Congress could easily tie compliance to receiving federal highway or other funding, which has been an effective strategy in the past for separation-of-powers concerns.
You say that like it's a good thing. Federal bullying of states and localities is not something we should be encouraging. I'd rather try to raise a ruckus in my county about sensible election equipment, i.e., take it on as MY problem as a citizen, than have the feds dictate how we run our elections. I don't trust them.
Something's wrong then; the assumption is that both the plaintiffs and society should benefit. Sure society benefits in these scenarios b/c Chevy is forced to build safer trucks, Microsoft repents of its ill dealings (umm..) and the RIAA is brought to heel (ummmm..). Anyway, that is good, but not enough if the plaintiffs themselves don't get a slice of justice too -- otherwise we're asking them to spend a huge amount of time and resources, and get virtually nothing in return. In short, there are 2 points here, and GGP raised one of them, and maybe assumed the other point implicitly. I don't think he missed the point.
In other words, I can break into your house and wander around...
When will people realize that public networks are totally unlike houses! It's a lot more like a 7-11 than a house. You are allowed to wander into the 7-11 any time of night or day, presumably to do business, but if you notice that there's a hole in the wall, or the security mirror is missing, well, it's not your fault.
Don't bother telling me why this network isn't really like a 7-11 either. (Actually it's a series of tubes...:-) All these analogies are weak. I'm just so tired of the house analogy I had to add a counterpoint.
Sorry, but I'm getting tired of this argument. Let's remember basic economics.
If you are IBM and you have, say, X lawyers as full-time staff and they cost you $Z a year, presumably they are not just sitting around playing checkers waiting for the next lawsuit; presumably you hired them full time because you have full time work for them to do -- work worth $Z to you. So you can't just divert these folks' energies to this SCO wankathon without giving up all the work they were going to do for you ordinarily. It's called 'opportunity cost' -- it essentially costs you $Z one way or another. So if you really do need that other work done, you'll have to hire other lawyers, probably for about $Z. Or you could leave your usual team on their usual tasks and hire other lawyers to sue SCO, and you'll probably spend about $Z on them if they are a lot like your first crew. One way or the other it is costing IBM. You know the saying, "There's no free lunch."
...they can't use that argument if they are going to try to fight RIAA on antitrust.
The P2P services don't offer music, they offer files.
If they are not in the music business then RIAA is not trying to squash them as music competition. But if they are trying to establish a competing music business and RIAA is fighting dirty, they might have an antitrust claim -- but then they are not just a generic file-sharing service. IANAL
I've not looked at the codebase, but the hearsay is that NetBSD has cleaner, nicer code than the other BSDs, and because of that it is supposedly more portable than FreeBSD or OpenBSD. HTH.
People, people, we're ignoring the good side of this: that the remorseless Fungi from Yuggoth, now have to contend with the fact that their homeworld has been significantly downgraded in status.
Sadly those days are over, at least in the regions far from Moscow. I've taught tertiary computer science in Central Asia for several years, and I can tell that the school preparation nowadays for pupils is declining. For instance, many 3rd-course programming students in C.A. can't put together a working proof by induction even for a simple summation.
I don't know if American programming students can do any better. I will find out this semester, as I am teaching such a subject with students from the USA; I am curious.
The schools in the USSR might have been awesome, but that was awhile back now. In many places, if not everywhere, they have lost it. I think it is sort of like being a world class athlete. You sit on your ass for a few years watching television (like Fabrika Zvyozdy), and you rapidly sink down to the level of everyone else. Ne kruta my popali.
I just looked down at my WWFD bracelet (What Would Frink Do?), and chortled aloud at the idea. But to play devil's advocate, or Thomas Kuhn's advocate, science is much more a subjective, social construction that we like to admit. So maybe we, uh, could turn it into a mascot for misfits. We could call it the Planet with Mass Deficit Disorder. Or maybe, The Special Planet. Perhaps you'd prefer The Differently Orbiting Planet. Mm-hai!
Sorry to be the grammar nazi, but FYI, there is an important difference in the words "disinterested" and "uninterested." The summary has the proper word.
"Disinterested" means "unbiased," and connects up with phrases like "conflict of interest" or "vested interest," in which we are talking about some sort priorities, maybe economic or family. Whereas "uninterested" is about apathy, lack of attentiveness or low curiosity -- it's a feeling. Ideally, a good judge is disinterested in the cases he hears, but not uninterested.
Slashdot Mirror
About 20 years ago when the local library got computerized, they were pretty clever about it. They had the card catalog digitized, and then placed stacks of bar-code stickers next to the check-out desks. The stickers were just unique numbers, not linked to any book record at all. At first all the books were stickerless. But every time someone checked out a book, bringing it to the library assistant for checkout, the worker found the book's record in the database (pretty quickly, I recall). Then she (or he) plunked down a sticker on the back cover and scanned in the book, linking barcode and book-record. Of course, the next time the book was checked out, they just had to run the light-pen over the barcode. Over a matter of months they had all the popular books had their barcode stickers. I suppose during slack times at the library they put bar codes on the rest of the collection. I thought this was a clever way to amortize the effort of the data entry. The patrons, of course, did much of the work: they pulled the books off the shelf, and by definition they pulled the most popular works first. In this way the library was easily able to get the highest-circulating material into the system right away.
To be precise, what you've described is vorbis, not ogg. Ogg is the container, vorbis is the codec.
Nevertheless, well said.
That sig is brilliant: painfully funny. Sorry to go OT.
The problem isn't that you insulted "Texas," a state I have no connection to; it's your crude generalization about a whole class of people. It's straw thinking like this that perpetuates the racism and xenophobia that is making the "fear-the-terrorist" political platform so powerful. It's because of those attitudes that my civil liberties are being dissolved -- that's what makes me angry. Try these sentences on for size (while wearing your irony goggles):
"So as dismayed as we are we are in a great minority, the whole state of Ohio would probably rejoice at the arrest of Sagoyan and would want him burned at the stake."
"So as dismayed as we are we are in a great minority, all the Whiteys would probably rejoice at the arrest of Sagoyan and would want him burned at the stake."
"So as dismayed as we Canadians are we are in a great minority, all Americans would probably rejoice at the arrest of Sagoyan and would want him burned at the stake."
This attitude is what feeds the problem. Free your mind.
Unless you live in Texas and know every Texan, STFU.
Here is something you should know: no, there are not a lot of people like that. There are extremely few people like that. Such people are fantastically uncommon.
Pot, meet kettle.
Obligatory quote from Blue Velvet:
FRANK BOOTH: What kinda beer do you like?
JEFFREY BEAUMONT: Heineken.
FRANK BOOTH: Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!
1c1
< In COBN3T AM3RNKA
---
> In COBET AMEPUKA
wait, wait, that should be
> B COBETCKOM AMEPUKE
You're both right. Actually the party was supposed to celebrate "Public public key cryptography" but someone's word processor along the way saw the repeated word and took it out... :-)
Sorry mate but I think you might have had one too many, how about I help you nice and quietly step over to the scanning machine and we have a little snap of your Longers and Lingers?
You should read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (available here). According to him the D's and the R's were equally into electoral skulduggery; his hero/antihero worked for both parties.
It's not quite that simple. As RWR once said, "Trust but verify."
You say that like it's a good thing. Federal bullying of states and localities is not something we should be encouraging. I'd rather try to raise a ruckus in my county about sensible election equipment, i.e., take it on as MY problem as a citizen, than have the feds dictate how we run our elections. I don't trust them.
Something's wrong then; the assumption is that both the plaintiffs and society should benefit. Sure society benefits in these scenarios b/c Chevy is forced to build safer trucks, Microsoft repents of its ill dealings (umm..) and the RIAA is brought to heel (ummmm..). Anyway, that is good, but not enough if the plaintiffs themselves don't get a slice of justice too -- otherwise we're asking them to spend a huge amount of time and resources, and get virtually nothing in return. In short, there are 2 points here, and GGP raised one of them, and maybe assumed the other point implicitly. I don't think he missed the point.
When will people realize that public networks are totally unlike houses! It's a lot more like a 7-11 than a house. You are allowed to wander into the 7-11 any time of night or day, presumably to do business, but if you notice that there's a hole in the wall, or the security mirror is missing, well, it's not your fault.
Don't bother telling me why this network isn't really like a 7-11 either. (Actually it's a series of tubes... :-) All these analogies are weak. I'm just so tired of the house analogy I had to add a counterpoint.
Sorry, but I'm getting tired of this argument. Let's remember basic economics.
If you are IBM and you have, say, X lawyers as full-time staff and they cost you $Z a year, presumably they are not just sitting around playing checkers waiting for the next lawsuit; presumably you hired them full time because you have full time work for them to do -- work worth $Z to you. So you can't just divert these folks' energies to this SCO wankathon without giving up all the work they were going to do for you ordinarily. It's called 'opportunity cost' -- it essentially costs you $Z one way or another. So if you really do need that other work done, you'll have to hire other lawyers, probably for about $Z. Or you could leave your usual team on their usual tasks and hire other lawyers to sue SCO, and you'll probably spend about $Z on them if they are a lot like your first crew. One way or the other it is costing IBM. You know the saying, "There's no free lunch."
If they are not in the music business then RIAA is not trying to squash them as music competition. But if they are trying to establish a competing music business and RIAA is fighting dirty, they might have an antitrust claim -- but then they are not just a generic file-sharing service.
IANAL
I've not looked at the codebase, but the hearsay is that NetBSD has cleaner, nicer code than the other BSDs, and because of that it is supposedly more portable than FreeBSD or OpenBSD.
HTH.
That is a fantastic reply to, "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide." You should post that to Bruce Schneier's blog
"Like a crosstown hurricane on fire!"
(and yeesh, I paid money for that album.)
People, people, we're ignoring the good side of this: that the remorseless Fungi from Yuggoth, now have to contend with the fact that their homeworld has been significantly downgraded in status.
It's a public relations nightmare for them.
Sadly those days are over, at least in the regions far from Moscow. I've taught tertiary computer science in Central Asia for several years, and I can tell that the school preparation nowadays for pupils is declining. For instance, many 3rd-course programming students in C.A. can't put together a working proof by induction even for a simple summation.
I don't know if American programming students can do any better. I will find out this semester, as I am teaching such a subject with students from the USA; I am curious.
The schools in the USSR might have been awesome, but that was awhile back now. In many places, if not everywhere, they have lost it. I think it is sort of like being a world class athlete. You sit on your ass for a few years watching television (like Fabrika Zvyozdy), and you rapidly sink down to the level of everyone else. Ne kruta my popali.
I just looked down at my WWFD bracelet (What Would Frink Do?), and chortled aloud at the idea.
But to play devil's advocate, or Thomas Kuhn's advocate, science is much more a subjective, social construction that we like to admit. So maybe we, uh, could turn it into a mascot for misfits. We could call it the Planet with Mass Deficit Disorder. Or maybe, The Special Planet. Perhaps you'd prefer The Differently Orbiting Planet. Mm-hai!
"Disinterested" means "unbiased," and connects up with phrases like "conflict of interest" or "vested interest," in which we are talking about some sort priorities, maybe economic or family. Whereas "uninterested" is about apathy, lack of attentiveness or low curiosity -- it's a feeling. Ideally, a good judge is disinterested in the cases he hears, but not uninterested.
It's a pity the other responders didn't get the allusion. History surely does repeat itself.