Re:Finally something to address this....
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Are You Annoying?
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· Score: 1
Yes, I know there are a lot of "rightish" answers - it took me a long time to realize that, but that doesn't help when I'm the one stuck coding an answer to the problem.
You haven't done much programming in perl, have you?
In my HS English classes, including the AP ones, taught by the state English teacher of the year, we all learned that language is constantly evolving -- to assume that it is becoming more ambiguous is simply a leap of irrationality. My favorite example that we learned was that back when old Billy Shakespeare was writing, the word "going" was common slang for having an orgasm. If you are as uptight in real life as you are online, you might not be aware that modern slang has come around 180 degrees and now uses the term "coming" for the same exact thing. Is this confusing and ambiguous? No, it isn't.
Furthermore, by posting a grammar flame, you have invoked the law of grammar and spelling karma - flamers inevitably make their own related mistakes. In this case, it is simply IRONIC that you went to all that trouble to castigate people for misusing the term when in fact the term was used correctly as defined by the definition you prefer.
See, here's how it works -- Michael is so damn annoying that most people believe that he should start with himself before worrying about correcting others (you know that old cautionary phrase about people who live in glass houses, we're all pretty sure that Michael knows it too). But instead, contrary to most people's expectations, he just blithely asks everyone else if they are annoying. See -- events that are contrary to the expected behaviour, that is conventional irony.
But, I sincerely hope that no one mods you down (no irony intended) because your black & white view of grammar and your, "I'm so right, I don't even have to think critically about the points under discussion," attitudes are two examples of annoying IT behaviour that are described in the original article, so you do everyone here a service by giving us all examples of what not to do. Bet you didn't realize that when you made that post. Oh, the irony, it's killing me!
Playback of highly compressed video. I'm not talking about mpg2 compression, but the newer codecs that are just arriving on the scene. Perhaps "just arriving on the scene" won't meet your definition of "consumer-level" but soon those codecs will be commonplace and they will still be cpu intensive.
How about you provide the links this time around? I already did my part. In fact, before I even posted the second time I did exactly what you suggested - went to the mediam & large business section of dell's website and checked out the optiplex, dimension and precision lines, none of them listed "no operating system" as an option and even spot-checking the customize section for 4 different models "no OS" was never an option.
Well killer, maybe you need to check again because I've worked for two clients that did have ms-windows site licenses. They also have employee counts in the low 6 digits.
Furthermore, neither of them bought their PCs from Dell. But, just to humour your bullshit-eating ways, I dug up this little this article for you to read that says:
The Microsoft licensing terms, which were put in place on Aug. 1 [2002], specify that PC makers must ship PCs with an operating system.
... Many large companies pre-buy Windows through licensing programs and thus have to erase all the software that comes on factory-shipped PCs and reinstall their own. Buying a PC without an OS saves a step and prevents inadvertent dual purchasing.
The evidence is called a "ms windows site license."
In order to avoid paying for windows twice, corporations that already own a ms windows site license choose to buy their new PCs with linux pre-installed. They choose linux over no os at all because MS has this silly little contractual requirement with all vendors licensed to ship ms-windows, the requirement is all machines must ship with *an* OS. The requirement used to be to explciitly ship with ms-windows, but that requirement was axed as one of the few punishements that MS actually received for being found of abuse of monopoly power during the last couple of suits against them.
These corps would end up doing a ghost-install to bring the system into line with their standard corporate configuration anyway, so they gain absolutely nothing by having the machine come with ms-windows installed and a license to go with it.
Back in the days of napster, Orin's position was influenced by a top aide, Manus Cooney. Apparently Manus was pretty akamai about copyright, but he eventually left (perhaps lost an internal power-struggle, complete speculation on my part) and went to work as a lobbiest for Napster. I don't know where Manus Cooney is now (probably because I haven't bothered to google the guy) but in his absence, Hatch was quickly drawn to the darkside with a number of unethical enticements like the publication and subsequent mass-"purchases" of one of his own, quite pathetic, musical performances.
So the point in my original post remains -- How does Sveasoft know that you are redistributing?
If you just give a copy to your friend who then gives it away to everyone but won't reveal his source, how can Sveasoft know that you were the guy who "broke" your agreement (steganographic techniques aside)? Sveasoft can not legally compel you to reveal that you are redistributing because that would be an additional restriction beyond the terms of the GPL.
In fine slashdot tradition, I have not RTFA, but when you say:
"You then have a choice of licenses: you can choose to continue to follow the Seavsoft license, which will get you access to future revs of the code, or you can redistribute under the terms of the GPL which results in termination of the Seavsoft license and access to future revs."
it sounds like you are describing a violation of the GPL.
The violation that you describte is that the GPL does not allow the licensor to place additional restrictions in their license that are more restrictive than the terms of the GPL. What it sounds like you are saying is that if you redistribute the "pre-release" GPL source you will be restricted from access, through Sveasoft (very important) to future revs, of the GPL source. The problem with that approach is that disclosing to Sveasoft that you are redistributing is not a requirement of the GPL, so under the GPL Sveasoft can not require you tell them that you are redistributing and if you don't tell them, and you take steps to prevent them from finding out on their own, then they have no way to know to cut you off. I.E. the GPL prevents a licensor like Sveasoft from requiring self-incriminating testimony.
Now, if they really have the FSF's blessing, then I suspect that your description is incorrect, either that or things have changed since the FSF signed-off on their licensing plans.
1) No chance of accidentally blinding someone, yourself included.
Even 5mw "eye safe" lasers can damage the eye, they are just considered low power enough that the human blink reflex can protect the average eye before damage occurs. Some people blink slower than others, some eyes are more readily damaged than others. That's why even the 5mw pointers come with the labels warning you not to shine them into people's eyes.
2) No chance of damaging the camera permanently, which is probably more illegal than blinding it.
I'm not faimilar with the specifics, but I can see vandalism and destruction of public property as not adding much to the already theoretically unlimited "endangering national security." Either way you can end up in Guantanamo, but if you destroy the camera you will also be a vandal.
3) They don't replace it tomorrow, when you're not there to blind it again.
You can come by any time, smoke it and then leave the area.
If you just leave a laser trained on it from your windowsill or whatever, then they will still come out and replace the camera, but now they will be able to look back and find the source of the laser beam and before you know it, they are busting down your door justifying their big new DHS budget and sending your off ass and genitals off to guantanamo for a little abu grahib treatment.
Your.sig says: What part of "well regulated" is so hard to understand?
The context is actually: "well regulated Militia" or more completely:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
What your.sig imples and the bill of rights does not say is "a well regulated right to bear arms." In other words, yeah the Militia does indeed need to be regulated, but the right to bear Arms is not be regulated a.k.a. infringed.
Before some trigger happy dweeb with mod points decides that this is off-topic, think again, the 2nd amendment is just as much a part of the bill of rights as the other 9 amendments from which our court system has generally agreed together provide for a right of privacy. The 2nd amendment just spells out one way of keeping that privacy should things get out of hand.
Relatively high-power lasers are now readily available in pen-shaped pointer form. There are a lot of green 5 milliwatt lasers out of china floating around ebay and other webstores that can be easily modified up to around 30mw simply by rotating a polarzing filter.
These lasers work by emitting around 100-120mw of IR through a polarizing filter into a doped crystal that emits the 5-30mw or so of visible green. Although no laser guru, I believe this is called a "pumped" laser. Apparently it is also not terribly difficult to remove the IR shield and maybe the entire pumping assembly to get the full 100mw+ IR laser output. The problem with that is that IR is invisible to the naked eye so you can't tell where you are aiming it and you can easily end up blinding yourself with reflections that you don't even know about.
But, the good thing is that most cameras are sensitive to IR, so about $100 bucks and a sense of invulnerability should let just about anyone fry a camera like this in a short period of time. Just don't let your face be the last thing the camera records before its CCD burns out.
PS - if anyone has knowledge of exactly how much energy it takes to burn out a CCD, or anything along these lines, please post. Despite having a 10mw green laser, I haven't had a sacrificial camera to actually test this idea on in the last six months or so that I have been thinking about it.
Re:So, here's the question I find interesting.
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1984 Comes To Boston
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I can name a few of them off-hand -- because they made the national news. That should tell you that such recordings becoming public are so rare that they are considered a nationally newsworthy event.
Now the question is -- are they so rare because police abuse is so rare, or are they so rare because those kinds of videos have very high rates of infant mortality?
Any card that you pay off on a monthly basis should not have any interest fees at all. There are a few rare ultra bad deals for financially illiterate people that have no grace period, but anyone looking to live a cash life should be able to avoid those rip-offs in their sleep.
Donor was probably either napster or a member of the RIAA, if not them directly. They are trying to do the old drug pusher's tactic of "the first one's free."
What they don't get is that we've all already had the first one for free, and the second one and many more for free. They are too late.
When the user searches for a word in the current page show all the hits at once by showing a (user configurable) number of lines of context before and after each hit, then throw out all the "junk lines" until the next hit, repeat until the entire page is searched. That way the user gets to quickly eyeball every hit on the page, they can then click on the specific instance they care about and either return to the normal view of the page, but centered on that specific keyword match, or open a new tab with the document centered in it.
You set a poor precedent with your onomatopoeiac pronuciations and implications that people who disagree with you are no-talent, bitter losers. What's the matter? You can dish it out but you can't take it?
I was not talking about Open source projects involving infrastructure such as Apache or mysql
So what? Did I say anything about infrastructure? Oh you assumed that all those billions are just going into the kernel and back-end tools? I think you still haven't been paying close attention. Sun has been doing usability research with gnome. Mozilla is as focused on end-user stuff as they are on the API. Novell's Ximian is all about Evolution and their Desktop. Music composition and creation tools for linux are starting to seriously compete with expensive stuff from the likes of Steinberg. Meanwhile Free applications like vlc blow away powerdvd in terms of functionality and quality of output. Other than poorly thought out legal constructs, aka software patents, standing in the way, there is no reason to use powerdvd over the Free alternatives. Powerdvd is not the best tool for the job.
PS. I'm quite proud of the fact that I work for a private company that receives no hand outs from other companies.
WTF? What the hell does that mean? The best I can make out is you seem to think that companies like IBM and Novell are giving money away, no strings attached, to other companies working on Free software? If that's the case you have a seriously poor grasp of the way business works. And furthermore, 10 to 1 your "private company" takes "handouts" from the government in the form of tax breaks if not outright grants, few companies of any size in America do otherwise.
For crying out loud. Not every programmer out there has another job or in-house development to pay the bills with. How do you expect people to earn a living to put food on the table? Donations? ROFLMAO!
Waah! I'm not good enough of an engineer to get a piece of the billions of dollars that IBM, HP and other companies are putting into open-source development so I will pretend that only college kids and trust-fund babies work on open-source software.
Like so many before you, you make the mistake of equating commercial software with proprietary software. You have not been paying attention to the market for the last 10+ years. No soup for you.
PS - I walk the walk myself, taking home my share of that open-source development funding and have done so since before the days of Mosaic. So please, no silly accusations of never having worked a day in my life.
If I hadn't already posted to this thread, I'd have to mod you +1 hilarious. Beyond G.B.'s potential brick-shitting reaction to such a development, I think you have severely over-estimated Sealand's resources, even so much as to afford a cut-rate cruise missile.
Like they could even safely test it anywhere in the country, one "oops! premature detonation" and there would be no more country left.
The reason they teach "old, and hard to read" books is because they are part of our shared culture. Ender's Game, for all of its "fun" has had little impact on contemporary culture outside the narrow-band of science-fiction. Great Expectations, on the other hand, is well-known to orders of magnitude more people. References to it and similar "classics" are sprinkled through-out our culture.
So, the point is not merely to teach basic reading skills, it is also to give people a historical context in which to better understand our shared modern culture (for example, just look at how many movies are rewrites of such classics - "Cruel Intentions" is "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," "Clueless" is "Emma," "Apocalypse Now" is "Heart of Darkness," Shakespeare gets redone both overtly like Baz Lurhmann's "Romeo + Juliet" and undercover like, "10 Things I Hate About You" and "My Own Private Idaho" - the list is effectively endless, our culture just keeps repeating itself). In light of the goal to teach a common cultural base, most Science-Fiction can't even begin to come close to replacing "the classics."
Besides, Dickens is not hard to read, at least not compared to titles like Canterbury Tales, Dante's Inferno or most of Shakespeare's plays.
PS - please no diatribes about concentrating on "western culture," as our country becomes more culturally diverse, certainly classics from non-european countries gain more and more relevance to modern American culture.
hanging one regime in the middle of the worst neighborhood and hoping like hell the domino theory kicks in was the best available option.
Regime-change + Hope. That about sums it up. Too bad they didn't think to actually come up with a plan beyond the regime-change part. It's not like these are real dominos and all they need is a simple little push...
Have you considered seeking employment with one of the companies that is trying to commercialize small-scale space-flight? It sounds like your skills as a generalist in a relatively similar field would be very useful to such companies seeing as how they are mostly all small start-ups, the dotcoms of space-flight before the market took off. Such companies need people who can wear many different hats as well as keep "the big picture" in their head so as to identify unexpected interactions and possible synergies across fields.
There is probably lots of competition since the X-Prize has made them relatively famous recently, but you do have a little more street cred than most.
PS - Don't waste your time responding the people freaking about your views on terrorism, some people just can't stand it that someone might question their own passionately held beliefs and feel that they must make you look at their own personal trees to make you ignore the forest.
A few years ago, Best Buy's customer non-service dicked me over for the last time. They made off with about $50 and 10+ hours of my time. Since then, I've vowed to be one of those "demon" customers. No, I don't have the patience to fill out rebates and return merchandise, hell I don't have patience to do rebates for any reason whatsoever.
But, I do make it a point to keep my eyes and ears out for pricing errors and the like which I can abuse the shit out of. I've got multiple accounts with bestbuy.com and anytime I find out about a severe price error, I make sure to rape them as hard as possible with it.
Since I've been at this, I've easily cost them 10x what they cost me - for example, the Claude Chabrol DVD box set which they sell for ~$70 - they originally mispriced at under $15, I ordered and received 4 of them. More recently, they meant to have a 30% off sale for certain dvds that are generally priced in the $20-$50 range. Instead they priced them all at under $9 for about 12 hours, including the $50 titles. I ordered about 12 of those. There are a few other similar cases of extreme pricing errors or single-use per "customer" coupons ($10 off any size order for example) that I've abused as best I could. The best thing about these pricing errors is that even if I can't return them for a full-price refund because the receipt reflects the price I paid, I can trade them or sell them on ebay and easily recover my "investment."
If Best Buy has pissed you off one time too many, join me in sticking it to them. We may be small as gnats compared to the behemoth that is bestbuy, but the more angry people who do their part, the more blood it loses and the more money we all will make.
PS, don't even get me started on their absolutely bullshit price-matching non-policy -- totally random, made-up-as-they go rules, even when the real "rules" are posted on a sign with 140pt type right above the smurf's head.
Ten to one, the software and probably even the assembly of these gps/phone coke cans was outsourced to a foreign country. What level of confidence is there that the cans have not been compromised in some deviously clever way?
Sure American designers/assemblers can be infiltrated too, but at least they have to do so amongst the eyes of hundreds of Americans who have a stake in their country remaining secure. In another country, it may be that only the upper-levels of management have any interest in not screwing up the relationship with Coke.
Hell, Coke is a multinational company too, whose to say that their interests are not sometimes at odds with the interests of America as a whole?
Maybe that sounds like tin-foil hat stuff to you, but from a security perspective, double-checking coke cans is low-hanging fruit, might as well grab it.
TV is dead and doesn't know it yet - the question will soon be -- how many p2p sources are there for programming?
A year ago, I cancelled my cabletv and cablemodem in favor of DSL and mini-dish satellite. But because of the incompetence of the satellite installers all I ended up with was DSL -- no satellite. But at about that same time I discovered some p2p networks that specialize in relatively high-quality (video and audio) redistributions of broadcast and cable tv shows. With access to that, I found that I don't need much TV, what I do "need" I can still get over the air -- usually in hi-def and easily recorded as a transport stream to my pc.
Now, I fully realize that the current televisions shows produce little to no revenue from this p2p distribution. But there is the potential for all manner of revenue models -- from the obvious like embedded commercials to the more sophisticated like my personal favorite theoretical revenue model, the street performer protocol. All that needs to happen is for the content producers (and by that I do not necessarily mean the MPAA and other like minded companies that are mostly old-world-bottleneck distribution systems, but rather the actual guys who make the shows, director, producer, heck even the writers, actors and crew) to start experimenting with these new forms of revenue generation, kind of like TMBG is doing in that other article today.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I know there are a lot of "rightish" answers - it took me a long time to realize that, but that doesn't help when I'm the one stuck coding an answer to the problem.
You haven't done much programming in perl, have you?
Wah, wah, wah.
In my HS English classes, including the AP ones, taught by the state English teacher of the year, we all learned that language is constantly evolving -- to assume that it is becoming more ambiguous is simply a leap of irrationality. My favorite example that we learned was that back when old Billy Shakespeare was writing, the word "going" was common slang for having an orgasm. If you are as uptight in real life as you are online, you might not be aware that modern slang has come around 180 degrees and now uses the term "coming" for the same exact thing. Is this confusing and ambiguous? No, it isn't.
Furthermore, by posting a grammar flame, you have invoked the law of grammar and spelling karma - flamers inevitably make their own related mistakes. In this case, it is simply IRONIC that you went to all that trouble to castigate people for misusing the term when in fact the term was used correctly as defined by the definition you prefer.
See, here's how it works -- Michael is so damn annoying that most people believe that he should start with himself before worrying about correcting others (you know that old cautionary phrase about people who live in glass houses, we're all pretty sure that Michael knows it too). But instead, contrary to most people's expectations, he just blithely asks everyone else if they are annoying. See -- events that are contrary to the expected behaviour, that is conventional irony.
But, I sincerely hope that no one mods you down (no irony intended) because your black & white view of grammar and your, "I'm so right, I don't even have to think critically about the points under discussion," attitudes are two examples of annoying IT behaviour that are described in the original article, so you do everyone here a service by giving us all examples of what not to do. Bet you didn't realize that when you made that post. Oh, the irony, it's killing me!
Playback of highly compressed video. I'm not talking about mpg2 compression, but the newer codecs that are just arriving on the scene. Perhaps "just arriving on the scene" won't meet your definition of "consumer-level" but soon those codecs will be commonplace and they will still be cpu intensive.
How about you provide the links this time around? I already did my part. In fact, before I even posted the second time I did exactly what you suggested - went to the mediam & large business section of dell's website and checked out the optiplex, dimension and precision lines, none of them listed "no operating system" as an option and even spot-checking the customize section for 4 different models "no OS" was never an option.
Furthermore, neither of them bought their PCs from Dell. But, just to humour your bullshit-eating ways, I dug up this little this article for you to read that says:
The evidence is called a "ms windows site license."
In order to avoid paying for windows twice, corporations that already own a ms windows site license choose to buy their new PCs with linux pre-installed. They choose linux over no os at all because MS has this silly little contractual requirement with all vendors licensed to ship ms-windows, the requirement is all machines must ship with *an* OS. The requirement used to be to explciitly ship with ms-windows, but that requirement was axed as one of the few punishements that MS actually received for being found of abuse of monopoly power during the last couple of suits against them.
These corps would end up doing a ghost-install to bring the system into line with their standard corporate configuration anyway, so they gain absolutely nothing by having the machine come with ms-windows installed and a license to go with it.
Back in the days of napster, Orin's position was influenced by a top aide, Manus Cooney. Apparently Manus was pretty akamai about copyright, but he eventually left (perhaps lost an internal power-struggle, complete speculation on my part) and went to work as a lobbiest for Napster. I don't know where Manus Cooney is now (probably because I haven't bothered to google the guy) but in his absence, Hatch was quickly drawn to the darkside with a number of unethical enticements like the publication and subsequent mass-"purchases" of one of his own, quite pathetic, musical performances.
So the point in my original post remains -- How does Sveasoft know that you are redistributing?
If you just give a copy to your friend who then gives it away to everyone but won't reveal his source, how can Sveasoft know that you were the guy who "broke" your agreement (steganographic techniques aside)? Sveasoft can not legally compel you to reveal that you are redistributing because that would be an additional restriction beyond the terms of the GPL.
The violation that you describte is that the GPL does not allow the licensor to place additional restrictions in their license that are more restrictive than the terms of the GPL. What it sounds like you are saying is that if you redistribute the "pre-release" GPL source you will be restricted from access, through Sveasoft (very important) to future revs, of the GPL source. The problem with that approach is that disclosing to Sveasoft that you are redistributing is not a requirement of the GPL, so under the GPL Sveasoft can not require you tell them that you are redistributing and if you don't tell them, and you take steps to prevent them from finding out on their own, then they have no way to know to cut you off. I.E. the GPL prevents a licensor like Sveasoft from requiring self-incriminating testimony.
Now, if they really have the FSF's blessing, then I suspect that your description is incorrect, either that or things have changed since the FSF signed-off on their licensing plans.
1) No chance of accidentally blinding someone, yourself included.
Even 5mw "eye safe" lasers can damage the eye, they are just considered low power enough that the human blink reflex can protect the average eye before damage occurs. Some people blink slower than others, some eyes are more readily damaged than others. That's why even the 5mw pointers come with the labels warning you not to shine them into people's eyes.
2) No chance of damaging the camera permanently, which is probably more illegal than blinding it.
I'm not faimilar with the specifics, but I can see vandalism and destruction of public property as not adding much to the already theoretically unlimited "endangering national security." Either way you can end up in Guantanamo, but if you destroy the camera you will also be a vandal.
3) They don't replace it tomorrow, when you're not there to blind it again.
You can come by any time, smoke it and then leave the area.
If you just leave a laser trained on it from your windowsill or whatever, then they will still come out and replace the camera, but now they will be able to look back and find the source of the laser beam and before you know it, they are busting down your door justifying their big new DHS budget and sending your off ass and genitals off to guantanamo for a little abu grahib treatment.
Your .sig says: What part of "well regulated" is so hard to understand?
.sig imples and the bill of rights does not say is "a well regulated right to bear arms." In other words, yeah the Militia does indeed need to be regulated, but the right to bear Arms is not be regulated a.k.a. infringed.
The context is actually: "well regulated Militia" or more completely:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
What your
Before some trigger happy dweeb with mod points decides that this is off-topic, think again, the 2nd amendment is just as much a part of the bill of rights as the other 9 amendments from which our court system has generally agreed together provide for a right of privacy. The 2nd amendment just spells out one way of keeping that privacy should things get out of hand.
Relatively high-power lasers are now readily available in pen-shaped pointer form. There are a lot of green 5 milliwatt lasers out of china floating around ebay and other webstores that can be easily modified up to around 30mw simply by rotating a polarzing filter.
These lasers work by emitting around 100-120mw of IR through a polarizing filter into a doped crystal that emits the 5-30mw or so of visible green. Although no laser guru, I believe this is called a "pumped" laser. Apparently it is also not terribly difficult to remove the IR shield and maybe the entire pumping assembly to get the full 100mw+ IR laser output. The problem with that is that IR is invisible to the naked eye so you can't tell where you are aiming it and you can easily end up blinding yourself with reflections that you don't even know about.
But, the good thing is that most cameras are sensitive to IR, so about $100 bucks and a sense of invulnerability should let just about anyone fry a camera like this in a short period of time. Just don't let your face be the last thing the camera records before its CCD burns out.
PS - if anyone has knowledge of exactly how much energy it takes to burn out a CCD, or anything along these lines, please post. Despite having a 10mw green laser, I haven't had a sacrificial camera to actually test this idea on in the last six months or so that I have been thinking about it.
Yeah, I can name a few of them off-hand -- because they made the national news. That should tell you that such recordings becoming public are so rare that they are considered a nationally newsworthy event.
Now the question is -- are they so rare because police abuse is so rare, or are they so rare because those kinds of videos have very high rates of infant mortality?
Any card that you pay off on a monthly basis should not have any interest fees at all. There are a few rare ultra bad deals for financially illiterate people that have no grace period, but anyone looking to live a cash life should be able to avoid those rip-offs in their sleep.
Donor was probably either napster or a member of the RIAA, if not them directly. They are trying to do the old drug pusher's tactic of "the first one's free."
What they don't get is that we've all already had the first one for free, and the second one and many more for free. They are too late.
When the user searches for a word in the current page show all the hits at once by showing a (user configurable) number of lines of context before and after each hit, then throw out all the "junk lines" until the next hit, repeat until the entire page is searched. That way the user gets to quickly eyeball every hit on the page, they can then click on the specific instance they care about and either return to the normal view of the page, but centered on that specific keyword match, or open a new tab with the document centered in it.
Please don't talk down to me.
You set a poor precedent with your onomatopoeiac pronuciations and implications that people who disagree with you are no-talent, bitter losers. What's the matter? You can dish it out but you can't take it?
I was not talking about Open source projects involving infrastructure such as Apache or mysql
So what? Did I say anything about infrastructure? Oh you assumed that all those billions are just going into the kernel and back-end tools? I think you still haven't been paying close attention. Sun has been doing usability research with gnome. Mozilla is as focused on end-user stuff as they are on the API. Novell's Ximian is all about Evolution and their Desktop. Music composition and creation tools for linux are starting to seriously compete with expensive stuff from the likes of Steinberg. Meanwhile Free applications like vlc blow away powerdvd in terms of functionality and quality of output. Other than poorly thought out legal constructs, aka software patents, standing in the way, there is no reason to use powerdvd over the Free alternatives. Powerdvd is not the best tool for the job.
PS. I'm quite proud of the fact that I work for a private company that receives no hand outs from other companies.
WTF? What the hell does that mean? The best I can make out is you seem to think that companies like IBM and Novell are giving money away, no strings attached, to other companies working on Free software? If that's the case you have a seriously poor grasp of the way business works. And furthermore, 10 to 1 your "private company" takes "handouts" from the government in the form of tax breaks if not outright grants, few companies of any size in America do otherwise.
For crying out loud. Not every programmer out there has another job or in-house development to pay the bills with. How do you expect people to earn a living to put food on the table? Donations? ROFLMAO!
Waah! I'm not good enough of an engineer to get a piece of the billions of dollars that IBM, HP and other companies are putting into open-source development so I will pretend that only college kids and trust-fund babies work on open-source software.
Like so many before you, you make the mistake of equating commercial software with proprietary software. You have not been paying attention to the market for the last 10+ years. No soup for you.
PS - I walk the walk myself, taking home my share of that open-source development funding and have done so since before the days of Mosaic. So please, no silly accusations of never having worked a day in my life.
If I hadn't already posted to this thread, I'd have to mod you +1 hilarious. Beyond G.B.'s potential brick-shitting reaction to such a development, I think you have severely over-estimated Sealand's resources, even so much as to afford a cut-rate cruise missile.
Like they could even safely test it anywhere in the country, one "oops! premature detonation" and there would be no more country left.
The reason they teach "old, and hard to read" books is because they are part of our shared culture. Ender's Game, for all of its "fun" has had little impact on contemporary culture outside the narrow-band of science-fiction. Great Expectations, on the other hand, is well-known to orders of magnitude more people. References to it and similar "classics" are sprinkled through-out our culture.
So, the point is not merely to teach basic reading skills, it is also to give people a historical context in which to better understand our shared modern culture (for example, just look at how many movies are rewrites of such classics - "Cruel Intentions" is "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," "Clueless" is "Emma," "Apocalypse Now" is "Heart of Darkness," Shakespeare gets redone both overtly like Baz Lurhmann's "Romeo + Juliet" and undercover like, "10 Things I Hate About You" and "My Own Private Idaho" - the list is effectively endless, our culture just keeps repeating itself). In light of the goal to teach a common cultural base, most Science-Fiction can't even begin to come close to replacing "the classics."
Besides, Dickens is not hard to read, at least not compared to titles like Canterbury Tales, Dante's Inferno or most of Shakespeare's plays.
PS - please no diatribes about concentrating on "western culture," as our country becomes more culturally diverse, certainly classics from non-european countries gain more and more relevance to modern American culture.
hanging one regime in the middle of the worst neighborhood and hoping like hell the domino theory kicks in was the best available option.
Regime-change + Hope. That about sums it up. Too bad they didn't think to actually come up with a plan beyond the regime-change part. It's not like these are real dominos and all they need is a simple little push...
Have you considered seeking employment with one of the companies that is trying to commercialize small-scale space-flight? It sounds like your skills as a generalist in a relatively similar field would be very useful to such companies seeing as how they are mostly all small start-ups, the dotcoms of space-flight before the market took off. Such companies need people who can wear many different hats as well as keep "the big picture" in their head so as to identify unexpected interactions and possible synergies across fields.
There is probably lots of competition since the X-Prize has made them relatively famous recently, but you do have a little more street cred than most.
PS - Don't waste your time responding the people freaking about your views on terrorism, some people just can't stand it that someone might question their own passionately held beliefs and feel that they must make you look at their own personal trees to make you ignore the forest.
A few years ago, Best Buy's customer non-service dicked me over for the last time. They made off with about $50 and 10+ hours of my time. Since then, I've vowed to be one of those "demon" customers. No, I don't have the patience to fill out rebates and return merchandise, hell I don't have patience to do rebates for any reason whatsoever.
But, I do make it a point to keep my eyes and ears out for pricing errors and the like which I can abuse the shit out of. I've got multiple accounts with bestbuy.com and anytime I find out about a severe price error, I make sure to rape them as hard as possible with it.
Since I've been at this, I've easily cost them 10x what they cost me - for example, the Claude Chabrol DVD box set which they sell for ~$70 - they originally mispriced at under $15, I ordered and received 4 of them. More recently, they meant to have a 30% off sale for certain dvds that are generally priced in the $20-$50 range. Instead they priced them all at under $9 for about 12 hours, including the $50 titles. I ordered about 12 of those. There are a few other similar cases of extreme pricing errors or single-use per "customer" coupons ($10 off any size order for example) that I've abused as best I could. The best thing about these pricing errors is that even if I can't return them for a full-price refund because the receipt reflects the price I paid, I can trade them or sell them on ebay and easily recover my "investment."
If Best Buy has pissed you off one time too many, join me in sticking it to them. We may be small as gnats compared to the behemoth that is bestbuy, but the more angry people who do their part, the more blood it loses and the more money we all will make.
PS, don't even get me started on their absolutely bullshit price-matching non-policy -- totally random, made-up-as-they go rules, even when the real "rules" are posted on a sign with 140pt type right above the smurf's head.
Ten to one, the software and probably even the assembly of these gps/phone coke cans was outsourced to a foreign country. What level of confidence is there that the cans have not been compromised in some deviously clever way?
Sure American designers/assemblers can be infiltrated too, but at least they have to do so amongst the eyes of hundreds of Americans who have a stake in their country remaining secure. In another country, it may be that only the upper-levels of management have any interest in not screwing up the relationship with Coke.
Hell, Coke is a multinational company too, whose to say that their interests are not sometimes at odds with the interests of America as a whole?
Maybe that sounds like tin-foil hat stuff to you, but from a security perspective, double-checking coke cans is low-hanging fruit, might as well grab it.
TV is dead and doesn't know it yet - the question will soon be -- how many p2p sources are there for programming?
A year ago, I cancelled my cabletv and cablemodem in favor of DSL and mini-dish satellite. But because of the incompetence of the satellite installers all I ended up with was DSL -- no satellite. But at about that same time I discovered some p2p networks that specialize in relatively high-quality (video and audio) redistributions of broadcast and cable tv shows. With access to that, I found that I don't need much TV, what I do "need" I can still get over the air -- usually in hi-def and easily recorded as a transport stream to my pc.
Now, I fully realize that the current televisions shows produce little to no revenue from this p2p distribution. But there is the potential for all manner of revenue models -- from the obvious like embedded commercials to the more sophisticated like my personal favorite theoretical revenue model, the street performer protocol. All that needs to happen is for the content producers (and by that I do not necessarily mean the MPAA and other like minded companies that are mostly old-world-bottleneck distribution systems, but rather the actual guys who make the shows, director, producer, heck even the writers, actors and crew) to start experimenting with these new forms of revenue generation, kind of like TMBG is doing in that other article today.