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User: Forbman

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Comments · 1,681

  1. Re:what the heck? on Secret Service Seeks Indymedia Logs · · Score: 1

    Actually, good ol' Ted Kennedy *did* run for the Presidency in 1980.

  2. Re:absolutely wrong on Secret Service Seeks Indymedia Logs · · Score: 1

    So the phone book for my town was probaby printed somewhere on the West Coast by Dex. BFD. Since I don't really know who does or doesn't work for them, and since I can just as easily pay for an unlisted phone number as any of their employees can, it just doesn't really matter much anyways, does it?

    Since my phone book also has phone numbers for persons and companies not in my town, again, what is the big deal?

    Police officers, as a rule, don't have published phone numbers.

  3. Re:Hunters are pro Endagered Species Act on Secret Service Seeks Indymedia Logs · · Score: 1

    But what do you do when there are too many deer near your semi-rural home, crashing through all the anti-deer netting to eat your 5-year old apple trees to the ground, because all of the bear, cougars and wolves have been shot or removed?

    Or then what do you do when a remaining bear or cougar is simply doing what it's supposed to do, follow those deer around, and they instead end up crashing into your garbage can or deciding that all the pets (or small children...mmmm baby back ribs!) are simply easier prey?

    Or when all those "saved" deer are pushed out of the mountains into the valleys, where you get to see them starving because they cannot get to any of the grass in the yards or golf courses, so of course the state Dept. of Wildlife/Natural Resources *has* to feed the poor suckers!

    Sure, it's hard to see the justification for people who like to take a 7mm Mag rifle and go out and quite literally blow up prairie dogs, jack rabbits, or other small rodents with them.
    that's just sick.

    But if I go out and kill a deer, drag the thing back to my truck, and process the thing and stick it in my freezer, how is this any more bad or evil then the pack of wolves or coyotes, bear or wolverine that essentially does the same thing, but definitely leaves a much bigger mess?

  4. Re:Hunters are pro Endagered Species Act on Secret Service Seeks Indymedia Logs · · Score: 1

    Um, bullet proof vests are designed to stop bullets, deer are not. So, many bullets are designed explicitly to go through armour (e.g. using special penetrators and low-friction jackets.) These don't change lethality on deer, but do change the ability to kill people.

    Funny, though, if you go to Wal-Mart, Target or even Bass Pro Shop, you won't find this kind of ammo. It's all regular jacketed lead bullets or hollow points.

    Yes, those special penetrators and low-friction jackets are available. What about that saboted .30-06 round that Remington makes?

    Now, do I really *need* that Barrett .50-cal sniper rifle in the gun rack in my truck?

    For all the goose and duck lovers, we probably would not have many of the protections of all migratory waterfowl if not for groups like Ducks Unlimited. They *cooperate* with people like farmers to do things like convincing them to delay turning under crop stubble or go no-till, etc., rather than mandating from on high.

  5. Re:Hunters are pro Endagered Species Act on Secret Service Seeks Indymedia Logs · · Score: 1

    Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

  6. Re:Poor taste joke : on "Scotty" Gets Walk of Fame Star · · Score: 1

    Score: -5, Not funny.

  7. Re:poor guy on "Scotty" Gets Walk of Fame Star · · Score: 5, Informative

    Alzheimer's is the corruption and death of neurons by unknown agents (the amyloid placques associated with it do not seem to be a direct causitive action, from the last SciAm article [yeah, real authoritive, I know...] about it).

    Parkinson's is caused by parts of the brain having impaired production of/response to dopamine in the inner brain.

    You don't have to be 75 years old to get Parkinson's [Davis Phinney, Michael J. Fox].

    Both suck to be a witness to (my experience was watching my grandmother wither away from Parkinson's). It is very hard to get to the point where you enjoy and appreciate the fewer and fewer lucid moments the person has. Eventually, they do just become a visage of what they once were.

    It sucks when someone you know dies suddenly in a car crash, heart attack or any other sudden cause. It sucks when it takes someone 10-15 years to slowly die from Parkinson's/Alzheimers [and I imagine, any terminal disease].

  8. Re:SUVs on A Flying Leap for Cars? · · Score: 1

    But you do have to worry about ground congestion when you finally get to your destination. DOH!

  9. Re:SUVs on A Flying Leap for Cars? · · Score: 1

    Well, considering the size of a plane required to fly a 4000-6000lb load, I don't think this will be a problem anytime soon.

    What is the max. load (crew+passengers+cargo+gas) of a Cessna 172?

    Now, say, one of these with a giant Claymore bomb attached to their belly flying over the superbowl...

  10. Re:Horrid Requirements on Portable Storage? · · Score: 1

    Actually, they're pretty typical of most work projects: Ambiguous everything.

    Cheap, Small, Fast. Pick any two.

  11. Re:Argh, the hidden codes! on Time to Kill Microsoft Word? · · Score: 1

    Sorry, Wordperfect files are essentially tagged text files. Having supported Word and WordPerfect side-by-side for a couple of years, the problems people had with Word were lower than people had with WordPerfect, even with the WordPerfect fanboys.

    Nothing like unbalanced tags a few pages separated in a WP document. Reveal Codes doesn't help much there.

    Understanding the Word Document model (Document-Section-Paragraph-Character) generally helps out, although the user interface has completely obfuscated this organization.

    (the Document settings are "stored" in the last paragraph mark...)

    It really is a more logical view of a document, much like working with Cascading Style Sheets and HTML, instead of just working with HTML.

  12. Re:That's what notepad is for. on Time to Kill Microsoft Word? · · Score: 1

    That would be Notepad on Win95/98. Notepad on Win2K/XP does not have that 32K-character limit.

    But, really, Notepad just sucks. Other text editors, including UltraEdit and TextPad, just rock.

  13. Re:too bad... on Yahoo! Not Protected From French Anti-Nazi Laws · · Score: 1

    Really? In the 80's, Iraq was a Soviet proxy. Iraq got lots of cool stuff from South Africa, France, Germany etc. also.

    We did give Iraq satellite intelligence, however.

  14. Re:lets let arin or icann step up on Yahoo! Not Protected From French Anti-Nazi Laws · · Score: 1

    No, at least in France's case, it had a large part to do with appeasing their large Muslim population ("workers"), as well as protecting their $billions in oil contracts that they had with Iraq.

    All the moral chest beating by France is just such loud hypocritical noise at this point.

    At least Lance and *US* Postal won the TdF again this year.

  15. Re:Goodbye sovereignty on Yahoo! Not Protected From French Anti-Nazi Laws · · Score: 1

    This case has nothing to do with sovereignty.

    France courts are free to do what they want.

    Yahoo is free to firewall off its business activity from France.

    It would be a reach for Yahoo to try and escalate the case to the WTO, but probably not.

    If only it resulted in a bit of a boycot by US-based airlines on Airbus planes... yeah, right.

    Maybe we should put together all of our rubber bands to make a slingshot capable of lobbing French's Mustard paks across the Atlantic and do that. Or get Cristo to drop a few million over France and photograph the yellow mess from space.

  16. Re:Jursidiction on Yahoo! Not Protected From French Anti-Nazi Laws · · Score: 1

    ...'cept it could have some effect on the EU/EC, which is a much bigger area than France.

    I suppose Yahoo will ultimately have to make a France-only website, hosted in France. If only they could just use Bob Roll to help them write a filter to convert all instances of "Paris" to "Paree" in text, and correctly empasize things like "Palace de Versailles" as "Palace <i>de</i> Versailles".

  17. Re:Office.. don't hold your breath. on Josh Ledgard On MS's Future Open Source Efforts · · Score: 1

    Well, IBM has patents on eBXML...

  18. Re:Office.. on Josh Ledgard On MS's Future Open Source Efforts · · Score: 1

    ...but to do it right, that is what you need to do:

    Build a COM Compound Document reader to tease the Word document stuff out correctly, first.

    Otherwise, you will be chasing too many tails trying to get the pieces right for all cases.

    The challenge will be sucking the Word doc stuff out of an Office Briefcase file (Compound document with multiple other documents in it).

  19. Re:Office.. on Josh Ledgard On MS's Future Open Source Efforts · · Score: 1

    Not necessarily... Microsoft did pay someone to port COM to Solaris way-back-when (NT4 days, I think). There used to be a version of IE for Solaris, after all (IE4, I think)...

  20. Re:Office.. on Josh Ledgard On MS's Future Open Source Efforts · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, write an RTF->XML converter. RTF (new version comes out with each version of Word) is the linga franca of Word. The important stuff in a Word file are the RTF parts. The rest of the info is either COM Compound Document stuff or metadata.

    RTF, unfortunately, isn't nearly as strict as even HTML when it comes to closing tags, matching things, etc. But it is doable.

    And, I think, (well-written) RTF->Word, but not all Word->RTF. The XML file format is just a translation of RTF -> XML+XSD.

    Besides, the XML-based Office document formats are not the default formats anyways for Office XP/2003...

    Open-sourcing the Office document formats would mean open-sourcing a good chunk of COM as well.

    For quite some time, the internal structure of Excel files was published by Microsoft. XBIFF5 is the last reference I saw of it (Excel 5). Then Excel 97 came out, and everything started to be wrapped in OLE Documents (now called COM compound document). So the XBIFF5 stuff was the same, it was just stuck inside the COM document container.

    Now, not sure. Excel 97-2000 have same internal structure...

  21. Re:the Windows "window manager" on Josh Ledgard On MS's Future Open Source Efforts · · Score: 1

    But...there's already LiteStep and another one as well...

    LiteStep is GPL'd...

    In fact, I'm using it right now (W2K Pro).

  22. Re:Do the same thing they always do: copy Apple on Josh Ledgard On MS's Future Open Source Efforts · · Score: 1

    A lot of people would be happy if they deprecated cmd.exe and instead offered up a fully functional bash / ksh / tcsh / zsh shell, complete with all the expected command line tools and system facilities (grep, cron, /etc config files, and so on).

    Well...they do. It's called "Windows Script Host" (wsh), "Windows Management Interfaces" (WMI), Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI), etc.

    The stuff you can do with just these three things is pretty funky cool, and scary powerful. Even more scary than with the Unix tools.

    Of course, while the machinations are similar, it's more like playing with several really cool swiss army knives or funky multi-tools, rather than a big box of lego blocks the way the Unix command-line environment is used.

    Throw in TQCRunAs, and now you really have some power at your fingertips.

    But because it's Microsoft, it's just not gonna be looked at by most people. And because most Microsoft system administrators just don't think or work like Unix/Linux administrators...

  23. Re:Interopability on Reiser4 Filesystem Released · · Score: 1

    Hmm... but you can get the Windows Driver Developer's Kit, because file systems are implemented at the driver level. Then, you would probably need to go back to old information about WinNT3.x, as well as 4.x.

    It is probably possible to do with the information that MS has published over time.

  24. Re:cd into files for attributes.. neat... on Reiser4 Filesystem Released · · Score: 1

    Well, I bet you can't wait for WinFS. Oracle, of course, has iFS kind of skulking around, too.

    Maybe making the filesystem database work more like a relational database is what you really meant.

  25. Re:government kills US private industry (again) on VOIP Progress To Be Hobbled By Wiretap Costs? · · Score: 1

    but actually, in most other countries, the tap-enabled VoIP will still be installed. Think: China.

    Even in Europe, MI5, InterPol, etc., will still have limited access to do wire taps, etc., on VoIP. It will, of course, be a couple of degrees removed from the way the FBI wants access, but it'll be there.