Yes, I have read his testimonies, I'm not a lawyer but even I could have fried his butt (if I was there off course). He said among other things that all DHCP servers precisely know to which clients they give out IP's at any specific time and that the MAC-address, IP and time linked together in the DHCP log files is undeniable proof that cannot be forged.
I'm your average sysadmin and I know (as many of you do) that DHCP requests can be spoofed from the client side, even to the point of forging the MAC address so that the wrong link between IP and MAC gets logged, that a DHCP client can be given an IP by a rogue DHCP server and that not all DHCP servers have accurate to not speak of the non-existant logging on some machines.
Other things that I remember he said were that there were indeed a lot of files he didn't know the origin or content off and that he couldn't prove that specific files (MP3's) were legitimately ripped, were coming from P2P or otherwise copied. The way he did his forensics also were sub-standard. According to his testimony (or what it sounded like to me) he just plugged in the drive in an external enclosure and made some screenshots of the files on the hard drive. No making a copy of the disk and working of a copy. He even agreed to the lawyer that was frying him that he could've made those changes for all we know but he said that would be unethical.
Why is everybody so much against Wal-Mart? I don't understand it, the employees get average (usually above minimum-wage) pay AND (free) health insurance. Talk to your average waitress, chances are she doesn't get paid anything or way below minimum wage (Perkins Family Restaurants and Applebee's comes to mind) since she earns too much tips (according to suits) and they usually don't get health insurance, they can hardly get their employers insurance to pay up for work related injuries.
Wal-Mart is indeed big (became big, they didn't start out that way) and they take out some local competitors (because they can't (amount of items they carry) or don't want to (lower their profit margins to compete) because of the high prices local competitors have. I've heard complaints that they rise prices when the locals are eliminated but honestly, I hardly see them rising above the prices of any local retail business. Retail businesses have to compete in other areas where Wal-Mart can't compete and that is in personalized customer service and after-sales service. I've seen people do it though, it's not impossible. I've seen a local computer store flourish when Wal-Mart came because the other computer store didn't want to compete in prices (they thought that the market would keep carrying their high prices just because they were good at fixing stuff) and people needed help or upgrades with their Wal-Mart crap or some high-end stuff that Wal-Mart doesn't carry (they don't carry stuff that only some people will want, only retail stores can do that).
Some say they are evil because they don't allow to unionize, but I've seen big companies go under because of the unions and I think it's right for Wal-Mart not to allow the mentality of we-want-more-pay-but-less-work. I've seen a local cable business go under because the workers were doing 1-2 installations per day and then took the van home for the rest of the day and then returned it later. It was proven with GPS tracking systems that workers went to the bar, home or their mistresses yet they couldn't be fired because of the unions.
Currently I work at a place (large, medical and educational) where the cleaners are unionized. My department hasn't been cleaned properly in months and every other week somebody else comes in to do it. The guy that is there now, comes in the middle of the shift in my office without asking and starts eating his breakfast. They are on the clock, in my office, eating without asking and we can't fire them because they are unionized. All of our health insurances raised to keep up with the raising costs (it's a whole whopping $5/month now compared to free before), all of us had to eat it except for the unionized ones who started protesting. They made us (the honest, hardworking people) eat the cost of their (the lazy, unionized people) health insurance and guess what, soon enough it's going to raise again because they don't want to pay for it. One of my colleagues had to go to 'sensitivity training' because she raised her voice (not yelling, I was there) at a unionized laborer who didn't want to go on the roof to check out some filter that was stenching up the area (they kept claiming there was nothing wrong with it). After a long discussion up and down the ladders of higher management, they finally came, checked out the roof and found some stuff rotting in there. The unionized laborer however got to take off a day or two for emotional distress because he got insulted.
That's what unions will do for you. I'm sure they were good back in the day, when a lot of laborers needed good labor laws, but now they are just promoting mediocreness and killing competitiveness of the company that has them.
All IP should be assessed a resale value (per unit or per license) and a registration tax (federal, as you register with the copyright or patent office) has to be paid (say 8% of said value on a yearly basis). This resale value is then set as the price for any of the licensors.
If the price goes up when selling the IP to a competitor or somebody that wants to use it, the actual registration tax is re-calculated all the way back (like when you cheat on taxes) and you have to pay the price and if grossly misstated, a fine on top or even better, an invalidation of the IP.
If you sue somebody for copyright/patent infringement then that value is the actual loss figure that the judge can use to calculate an objective and reasonable figure because if you register something for billions of dollars, expect to pay millions in registration, yearly.
For free and open-source stuff, you could register for free since 8% of 0 is still 0, just an online form will do with the requirement of a sample or the code of the program and it's license. Stuff that is not licensed with an office would be possible too, but then as the above examples, the value and the registration taxes are calculated when a court upholds your IP and assesses a value for it so that the actual income of patent trolls is greatly diminished (if you hold something for 5 years, giving away 40% of the damages awarded will greatly cut the paycheck of lawyers). The value a court assesses should be similar to values of similar IP that is registered, so no ballooned values anymore.
If you mean by 'graphical', binary colors (black and white or black and green or black and orange or if you were really rich, EGA card with 16 colors) 640k limit, no program groups, no multitasking, non-overlapping windows while competing products had 256 or more colors, overlapping windows and *gasp* hardware acceleration.
/me raises hand. That company had in a few years (with each change of CIO) solutions from SAP, PeopleSoft, some other package and Microsoft. The original IBM application was still working fine, running on some old mainframe from the early 90's (coax and green CRT terminals still all over the production area). Off course none of the new ones did their job and each had part of the business working so the year I came in, they had consultants (close to a 100, if you never heard of the mythical man-month, you should've been there) from all four companies trying to get it together.
Off course, when I got laid off, another company was trying to do a hostile takeover because everything was lagging behind. Customer service didn't have a clue what was going on since they used a different system than production and shipping was using something else too. It was hell working there, what was in the catalogs and what was actually shipping was almost a whole season different, you don't want that to happen in fashion.
Either way, air is a bad way to go. I think electric cars would be much more efficient at conserving energy.
Now you're converting something -> electricity -> compressed air -> movement instead of something -> electricity -> movement. Some natural law states that with each of these conversions, a loss of energy occurs. I think for compressed air it's somewhere about 50% of loss of energy while batteries easily go above 70% (even with the added weight, although the weight of a canister to hold that type of compressed air will probably be similar.
"We will run out of IP addresses by 2008." (ICANN 2001) The estimate was derived by assuming that the number of remaining addresses as of 2000 was about 1.7 billion and demand for new IP addresses will be 75 million in 2000, and moreover that demand for IP addresses will increase in a geometric progression after 2001. Based on these assumptions, the addresses would be depleting by 2008 if demand grows by a factor of 1.3 each year, and by 2006 if it grows by a factor of 1.5.
The debate will not get the facts, americans are not fired up for change. That is the same hippie bs that was going on right before Vietnam when JFK gave his "New Frontier" speech. And guess what, Barack will get a bullet in his brain or something similar just like JFK somewhere right before he does anything meaningful, of course it will be blamed on a single lunatic gunman (maybe we can blame some terrorists that live in a shady, oil-rich country).
The working class of Americans HOPE for a change, they won't GET it. There is too much in the works, too many people in power that benefit from these types of schemes. Americans will just like now, get fed what they want through the television, they will see some changes coming and then it will be shot right back to the year 2001 with a Democratic-Republican government hungry for more power.
And I think there we have the main problem with Microsoft's coding and intercompatibility issues.
This documentation that we're being made to write is how the data structures look, *on disk* - You could just give the design specs and from there on any decent programmer can derive what the end result will look like. If you say: bold text is going to be enclosed with >bold< tags and then we'll use a gzip routine on the document before saving to disk (as should be in the design spec) is the same as saying: to open a file, gunzip it and all text you see with >bold< tags is supposed to be bold. That is of course if you implemented according to design. If somebody outsourced the development to an Indian company (or a bad programmer) and they made shortcuts so that it 'looks' similar to what the design specs are but it doesn't work according to design specs then you have issues in your quality control. You have a documentation issue if your design specs don't get augmented for changes down the road. All-in-all it just comes down to good documentation and programming standards.
Since we already have implementations of these importers, and you don't rewrite code unless it's the absolutely last resort - And that's also a big mistake, everybody is just writing patches to the 20 year old code from programmers that nobody even knows if they're still alive for current security and feature upgrades. Of course it's faster to do (initial release), it's going to be slower to troubleshoot, execute and find security holes in it. Look at the Linux kernel. 2.4 and 2.6 were big rewrites from their predecessors and daily parts of still get rewritten if something better comes along. All-in-all they have a more stable base.
Or maybe because the Chinese would stop their lending programs, stop the cash flow and take their assets back, completely tanking our governments military fund. The people of the US don't necessarily have to be in trouble, a lot of produce can still be obtained without the Chinese, so we won't go hungry and a lot of the Chinese industry can be replaced with eastern-european or local industry. Sure the prices would go up (although the prices and wages would stabilize to support a self-sustaining economy) and the standards of living would go down a bit but we can survive without the Chinese, the government as it is run today can not.
They (RIAA) are being sued for what they do, so don't come with that. However, as an association backed by large music companies, they have more money and thus can stand (delay) longer in court before giving up even though what they are doing is illegal and unethical, it's the corrupt system that allows them to do that.
On another note, what the University did here might be illegal too. They are giving probably without a court order, a LIST of students' names to a third party. The RIAA is a PRIVATE organization, not a government or public benefactor and a judge can't order something that is against the law (that's what the RIAA is trying to force though). I know where I work (University) that would be against New York State, HIPAA and internal policy and if somebody in my group were to be sued, I would take it all the way to supreme court before I release anything.
Well, we could ratify the interplanetary kyoto agreements, then we can just export our carbon to Mars by paying them or any other 3rd world planet that will take it.
Well, if you have a Windows license/cd and an Intel Mac, it takes about 3 screens (5 clicks) to start your Windows install. Of course, then you're busy installing Windows for the rest of the afternoon, you'll wonder why you even started. I do not kid, I do not kid.
I manage Mac in a professional environment. Some new dimwit hated Mac (Microsoft fanboi) and required Windows so he could play with Visual Studio. I got the box in the late morning, by noon the Mac side was totally set up for all our NFS shares and LDAP directory, network accounts, Matlab and Office. Before lunch started the install of Windows XP, after lunch the Windows side was in an endless reboot loop. Apparently Windows XP doesn't like startup partitions to be secondary and larger than 32G? Tried again, took forever, finally finished up (although Windows set up the firewire network instead of the ethernet during installation) and then had to install Visual Studio 2008, 2005, 2003, 6 in that order to get all components (backwards compatibility anyone?) and Office 2003.
The kicker: now that I showed him how to switch between the environments he hardly uses the Windows side anymore.
Any type of way to fire unions is a good way to me. I have never been unionized and I don't want to be either. Unions are for people that don't want to work very much, get mediocre wages and get their @$$ outsourced asap. They don't care about the economics. If it weren't for the unions, we would still have decent jobs here in the West, maybe not payed as well overall but people would be forced to get the skills and get to working or lose their job. This would've in turn be a good thing for the economy since more people working (albeit somewhat lower wages) means more people spending money and less people profiteering of the welfare systems in many Westerner countries.
And you pay what for phone/tv/internet? Time-Warner Cable charges $150-$200 per month for 1 phone line, no options, 50-channel cable, no dvr riddled with ads and pay-per-view and 3 Mbps internet. As far as I can remember, I payed not even $70 in Belgium for a 5 MBps package (with caps) and tv/phone.
Unlike AT&T or some other American counterparts which apparently give the government access to listen and block with a smile.
I hope this ban gets lifted. The RIAA and their cronies have done too much damage to the economy already. Personally, I haven't bought any RIAA-affiliated music since 2002 and I have a lot of songs, go to Indiefeed or something similar for real 'free' music and then sponsor those artists.
As an answer to that, you can't vote with your wallet because there's nothing around that comes near the iPhone in form or function. You have Windows Mobile/Blackberries that come close until you actually use that crap, you have Sony Ericsson which comes close in functionality but certainly not ease-of-use. What all these complainers really want is an iPhone that is not locked into AT&T for whatever reason. So far, it's not here yet, it might come (hopefully sooner than later) but until then you're stuck with Windows, Symbian or something else proprietary. However, we'll hopefully have Google's phone soon and maybe the Neo1973 will finally get off the ground but until then we're stuck.
Disclaimer: I've had a Windows phone once a few years ago, that thing was slow and sucked battery and couldn't even get synchronize my IMAP account, it was somehow locked into Microsoft Office/Server products so I had to use Outlook (not Express) and a proprietary ActiveSync. I had it for a total of 2 weeks and then gave it away to somebody. I've also owned a Newton, HP and Palm products, the Newton and Palm actually did some good stuff but missed the cell phone functionality.
You really think 20-30G is going to be enough? Belgium has bandwidth caps, (10G-30G depending on what you pay) and look at them complaining. They have nice bandwidth (5 Mbps) but can't use it to the full because before 2/3 of the month is over, everybody is surfing at 56k (restrictions if you exceed your limit) again.
We have it good here in the US as is. We have somewhat decent bandwidth for somewhat decent price without any caps. Let's keep it that way. The price sure isn't going down, so the more you give up, the more expensive it gets. Sure, the ISP's funneled $200 billion dollars of our taxes into their pockets, let's ask them first where that is before they can cap our bandwidths because they "don't make enough money".
I DO NOT want 20G bandwidth limits, I DO NOT want tiered bandwidth, I DO want cheap, affordable internet service where I can stream radio, surf, check e-mail and download stuff. My bandwidth usage is about 50G/month. Just so you know, if you have an XBox 360 (and probably a PS3 too), they suck up lots of bandwidth constantly. Yesterday I was at somebody's house trying to use their measly 1MBit line and had to unplug the XBox (and they weren't even playing on XBox Live) before I got a decent internet connection.
I don't know, maybe because you're a sysadmin that thinks spending $$$ is going to help a whole lot. What did you buy? Barracuda? Or another appliance that uses Linux, Postfix and Amavis with ClamAV and SpamAssassin. I just built a system like that for free on top of our current mail server (4y old machine) and the number of mails went down 80% after taking out (rejecting) IP's at the Postfix level using a DNSBL, and some custom rules we're about similar in size with the same purpose (educational). The whole process takes about a day and didn't even require the mail to be interrupted. So far (3 months) no complaints about missing e-mails, no complaints about passing SPAM.
As an avid fan (I've seen all the episodes up until the last season back-to-back once upon a time) they seem to use the tool necessary for the job. Yes, I've seen Windows desktops surfing AOL (with their research staff) but I've also seen PowerBooks.
Apparently Jamie got some time between the last season and now to test out that Ubuntu thingy and he really likes it. I'm a Linux/Mac-sysadmin, I don't necessarily like Ubuntu for myself (too dumbed down) but my parents currently run it on their desk- and laptop and they have stopped calling me every week about something that went wrong with their computer. I run Fedora Core here at work simply because it gets the job done (RPM's for specific scientific stuff), I am running all-Mac (2 PowerBook) at home now but I would use Gentoo (desktop). Slackware (other desktop) or Debian (router/server) if I had non-Mac computers.
Taxes DO pay for medical research. There are some examples ( http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cntry1=NA%3AUS&fund=0&fund=1 ). And there are of course the research that goes on in the military and other federal organizations. Although, looking back in history (Manhattan Project) you don't really want covert medical research sponsored by the government on unwilling/unwitting human and non-human subjects for the 'public good'.
Ebay doesn't have any legal recourse if you refuse this. Paypal is not a bank, they're a corporate (private) entity that handles money much like a 'bank' in SecondLife or WoW (I don't play any of these games so I don't know if there are banks in WoW). If you get suckered into providing your bank information for them so they can withdraw anything from your bank account, then that's on you. I just entrust them with their standard $300 limit and a credit card number which flags my expenses over $100.
My example: I sold something through e-bay and apparently was bid on by a scammer. I cancelled the bid but was charged a fee somehow for placing and completing an ad and then not selling it (that was back when E-bay was in it's first 6 months). I just refused to pay anything about it, they send me some nastygrams in my e-mail but they didn't have any legal recourse since 1) I didn't sign anything and 2) they didn't give any recourse for me (the victim) almost scammed by the highest bidder. They sent me some more nastygrams and eventually closed out my account. I didn't care, just opened another account.
This comment has been appearing on/. for the last umpteen years ever since the double click, one click order, mouse, voip, keyboard, cell phone, touchscreen, gui etc. patents started appearing. Nothing changed in all these years because the persons that have the money to file these patents also have the money to bribe^W contribute to legislators
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Yes, I have read his testimonies, I'm not a lawyer but even I could have fried his butt (if I was there off course). He said among other things that all DHCP servers precisely know to which clients they give out IP's at any specific time and that the MAC-address, IP and time linked together in the DHCP log files is undeniable proof that cannot be forged.
I'm your average sysadmin and I know (as many of you do) that DHCP requests can be spoofed from the client side, even to the point of forging the MAC address so that the wrong link between IP and MAC gets logged, that a DHCP client can be given an IP by a rogue DHCP server and that not all DHCP servers have accurate to not speak of the non-existant logging on some machines.
Other things that I remember he said were that there were indeed a lot of files he didn't know the origin or content off and that he couldn't prove that specific files (MP3's) were legitimately ripped, were coming from P2P or otherwise copied.
The way he did his forensics also were sub-standard. According to his testimony (or what it sounded like to me) he just plugged in the drive in an external enclosure and made some screenshots of the files on the hard drive. No making a copy of the disk and working of a copy. He even agreed to the lawyer that was frying him that he could've made those changes for all we know but he said that would be unethical.
Why is everybody so much against Wal-Mart? I don't understand it, the employees get average (usually above minimum-wage) pay AND (free) health insurance. Talk to your average waitress, chances are she doesn't get paid anything or way below minimum wage (Perkins Family Restaurants and Applebee's comes to mind) since she earns too much tips (according to suits) and they usually don't get health insurance, they can hardly get their employers insurance to pay up for work related injuries.
Wal-Mart is indeed big (became big, they didn't start out that way) and they take out some local competitors (because they can't (amount of items they carry) or don't want to (lower their profit margins to compete) because of the high prices local competitors have. I've heard complaints that they rise prices when the locals are eliminated but honestly, I hardly see them rising above the prices of any local retail business. Retail businesses have to compete in other areas where Wal-Mart can't compete and that is in personalized customer service and after-sales service. I've seen people do it though, it's not impossible. I've seen a local computer store flourish when Wal-Mart came because the other computer store didn't want to compete in prices (they thought that the market would keep carrying their high prices just because they were good at fixing stuff) and people needed help or upgrades with their Wal-Mart crap or some high-end stuff that Wal-Mart doesn't carry (they don't carry stuff that only some people will want, only retail stores can do that).
Some say they are evil because they don't allow to unionize, but I've seen big companies go under because of the unions and I think it's right for Wal-Mart not to allow the mentality of we-want-more-pay-but-less-work. I've seen a local cable business go under because the workers were doing 1-2 installations per day and then took the van home for the rest of the day and then returned it later. It was proven with GPS tracking systems that workers went to the bar, home or their mistresses yet they couldn't be fired because of the unions.
Currently I work at a place (large, medical and educational) where the cleaners are unionized. My department hasn't been cleaned properly in months and every other week somebody else comes in to do it. The guy that is there now, comes in the middle of the shift in my office without asking and starts eating his breakfast. They are on the clock, in my office, eating without asking and we can't fire them because they are unionized. All of our health insurances raised to keep up with the raising costs (it's a whole whopping $5/month now compared to free before), all of us had to eat it except for the unionized ones who started protesting. They made us (the honest, hardworking people) eat the cost of their (the lazy, unionized people) health insurance and guess what, soon enough it's going to raise again because they don't want to pay for it. One of my colleagues had to go to 'sensitivity training' because she raised her voice (not yelling, I was there) at a unionized laborer who didn't want to go on the roof to check out some filter that was stenching up the area (they kept claiming there was nothing wrong with it). After a long discussion up and down the ladders of higher management, they finally came, checked out the roof and found some stuff rotting in there. The unionized laborer however got to take off a day or two for emotional distress because he got insulted.
That's what unions will do for you. I'm sure they were good back in the day, when a lot of laborers needed good labor laws, but now they are just promoting mediocreness and killing competitiveness of the company that has them.
All IP should be assessed a resale value (per unit or per license) and a registration tax (federal, as you register with the copyright or patent office) has to be paid (say 8% of said value on a yearly basis). This resale value is then set as the price for any of the licensors.
If the price goes up when selling the IP to a competitor or somebody that wants to use it, the actual registration tax is re-calculated all the way back (like when you cheat on taxes) and you have to pay the price and if grossly misstated, a fine on top or even better, an invalidation of the IP.
If you sue somebody for copyright/patent infringement then that value is the actual loss figure that the judge can use to calculate an objective and reasonable figure because if you register something for billions of dollars, expect to pay millions in registration, yearly.
For free and open-source stuff, you could register for free since 8% of 0 is still 0, just an online form will do with the requirement of a sample or the code of the program and it's license. Stuff that is not licensed with an office would be possible too, but then as the above examples, the value and the registration taxes are calculated when a court upholds your IP and assesses a value for it so that the actual income of patent trolls is greatly diminished (if you hold something for 5 years, giving away 40% of the damages awarded will greatly cut the paycheck of lawyers). The value a court assesses should be similar to values of similar IP that is registered, so no ballooned values anymore.
I don't know what rock you were under, but preload has been available for a while:
preload 0.2 release: 2005-09-01
And it was there before as it was packaged in Gentoo (back when it was still popular) and Suse 9.3
If you mean by 'graphical', binary colors (black and white or black and green or black and orange or if you were really rich, EGA card with 16 colors) 640k limit, no program groups, no multitasking, non-overlapping windows while competing products had 256 or more colors, overlapping windows and *gasp* hardware acceleration.
Here is a funny video of Steve Ballmer commercializing Windows (back when it was only $99): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk
/me raises hand. That company had in a few years (with each change of CIO) solutions from SAP, PeopleSoft, some other package and Microsoft. The original IBM application was still working fine, running on some old mainframe from the early 90's (coax and green CRT terminals still all over the production area). Off course none of the new ones did their job and each had part of the business working so the year I came in, they had consultants (close to a 100, if you never heard of the mythical man-month, you should've been there) from all four companies trying to get it together.
Off course, when I got laid off, another company was trying to do a hostile takeover because everything was lagging behind. Customer service didn't have a clue what was going on since they used a different system than production and shipping was using something else too. It was hell working there, what was in the catalogs and what was actually shipping was almost a whole season different, you don't want that to happen in fashion.
Either way, air is a bad way to go. I think electric cars would be much more efficient at conserving energy.
Now you're converting something -> electricity -> compressed air -> movement instead of something -> electricity -> movement. Some natural law states that with each of these conversions, a loss of energy occurs. I think for compressed air it's somewhere about 50% of loss of energy while batteries easily go above 70% (even with the added weight, although the weight of a canister to hold that type of compressed air will probably be similar.
http://www.glocom.org/tech_reviews/tech_bulle/20020227_bulle_s2/index.html
"We will run out of IP addresses by 2008." (ICANN 2001) The estimate was derived by assuming that the number of remaining addresses as of 2000 was about 1.7 billion and demand for new IP addresses will be 75 million in 2000, and moreover that demand for IP addresses will increase in a geometric progression after 2001. Based on these assumptions, the addresses would be depleting by 2008 if demand grows by a factor of 1.3 each year, and by 2006 if it grows by a factor of 1.5.
The debate will not get the facts, americans are not fired up for change. That is the same hippie bs that was going on right before Vietnam when JFK gave his "New Frontier" speech. And guess what, Barack will get a bullet in his brain or something similar just like JFK somewhere right before he does anything meaningful, of course it will be blamed on a single lunatic gunman (maybe we can blame some terrorists that live in a shady, oil-rich country).
The working class of Americans HOPE for a change, they won't GET it. There is too much in the works, too many people in power that benefit from these types of schemes. Americans will just like now, get fed what they want through the television, they will see some changes coming and then it will be shot right back to the year 2001 with a Democratic-Republican government hungry for more power.
And I think there we have the main problem with Microsoft's coding and intercompatibility issues.
This documentation that we're being made to write is how the data structures look, *on disk* - You could just give the design specs and from there on any decent programmer can derive what the end result will look like. If you say: bold text is going to be enclosed with >bold< tags and then we'll use a gzip routine on the document before saving to disk (as should be in the design spec) is the same as saying: to open a file, gunzip it and all text you see with >bold< tags is supposed to be bold. That is of course if you implemented according to design. If somebody outsourced the development to an Indian company (or a bad programmer) and they made shortcuts so that it 'looks' similar to what the design specs are but it doesn't work according to design specs then you have issues in your quality control. You have a documentation issue if your design specs don't get augmented for changes down the road. All-in-all it just comes down to good documentation and programming standards.
Since we already have implementations of these importers, and you don't rewrite code unless it's the absolutely last resort - And that's also a big mistake, everybody is just writing patches to the 20 year old code from programmers that nobody even knows if they're still alive for current security and feature upgrades. Of course it's faster to do (initial release), it's going to be slower to troubleshoot, execute and find security holes in it. Look at the Linux kernel. 2.4 and 2.6 were big rewrites from their predecessors and daily parts of still get rewritten if something better comes along. All-in-all they have a more stable base.
Or maybe because the Chinese would stop their lending programs, stop the cash flow and take their assets back, completely tanking our governments military fund. The people of the US don't necessarily have to be in trouble, a lot of produce can still be obtained without the Chinese, so we won't go hungry and a lot of the Chinese industry can be replaced with eastern-european or local industry. Sure the prices would go up (although the prices and wages would stabilize to support a self-sustaining economy) and the standards of living would go down a bit but we can survive without the Chinese, the government as it is run today can not.
Kinda like a mix of Hillary and McCain? If Bush would've been a democrat, then he might be just that.
They (RIAA) are being sued for what they do, so don't come with that. However, as an association backed by large music companies, they have more money and thus can stand (delay) longer in court before giving up even though what they are doing is illegal and unethical, it's the corrupt system that allows them to do that.
On another note, what the University did here might be illegal too. They are giving probably without a court order, a LIST of students' names to a third party. The RIAA is a PRIVATE organization, not a government or public benefactor and a judge can't order something that is against the law (that's what the RIAA is trying to force though). I know where I work (University) that would be against New York State, HIPAA and internal policy and if somebody in my group were to be sued, I would take it all the way to supreme court before I release anything.
Well, we could ratify the interplanetary kyoto agreements, then we can just export our carbon to Mars by paying them or any other 3rd world planet that will take it.
Well, if you have a Windows license/cd and an Intel Mac, it takes about 3 screens (5 clicks) to start your Windows install. Of course, then you're busy installing Windows for the rest of the afternoon, you'll wonder why you even started. I do not kid, I do not kid.
I manage Mac in a professional environment. Some new dimwit hated Mac (Microsoft fanboi) and required Windows so he could play with Visual Studio. I got the box in the late morning, by noon the Mac side was totally set up for all our NFS shares and LDAP directory, network accounts, Matlab and Office. Before lunch started the install of Windows XP, after lunch the Windows side was in an endless reboot loop. Apparently Windows XP doesn't like startup partitions to be secondary and larger than 32G? Tried again, took forever, finally finished up (although Windows set up the firewire network instead of the ethernet during installation) and then had to install Visual Studio 2008, 2005, 2003, 6 in that order to get all components (backwards compatibility anyone?) and Office 2003.
The kicker: now that I showed him how to switch between the environments he hardly uses the Windows side anymore.
Any type of way to fire unions is a good way to me. I have never been unionized and I don't want to be either. Unions are for people that don't want to work very much, get mediocre wages and get their @$$ outsourced asap. They don't care about the economics. If it weren't for the unions, we would still have decent jobs here in the West, maybe not payed as well overall but people would be forced to get the skills and get to working or lose their job. This would've in turn be a good thing for the economy since more people working (albeit somewhat lower wages) means more people spending money and less people profiteering of the welfare systems in many Westerner countries.
And you pay what for phone/tv/internet? Time-Warner Cable charges $150-$200 per month for 1 phone line, no options, 50-channel cable, no dvr riddled with ads and pay-per-view and 3 Mbps internet. As far as I can remember, I payed not even $70 in Belgium for a 5 MBps package (with caps) and tv/phone.
Unlike AT&T or some other American counterparts which apparently give the government access to listen and block with a smile.
I hope this ban gets lifted. The RIAA and their cronies have done too much damage to the economy already. Personally, I haven't bought any RIAA-affiliated music since 2002 and I have a lot of songs, go to Indiefeed or something similar for real 'free' music and then sponsor those artists.
As an answer to that, you can't vote with your wallet because there's nothing around that comes near the iPhone in form or function. You have Windows Mobile/Blackberries that come close until you actually use that crap, you have Sony Ericsson which comes close in functionality but certainly not ease-of-use. What all these complainers really want is an iPhone that is not locked into AT&T for whatever reason. So far, it's not here yet, it might come (hopefully sooner than later) but until then you're stuck with Windows, Symbian or something else proprietary. However, we'll hopefully have Google's phone soon and maybe the Neo1973 will finally get off the ground but until then we're stuck.
Disclaimer: I've had a Windows phone once a few years ago, that thing was slow and sucked battery and couldn't even get synchronize my IMAP account, it was somehow locked into Microsoft Office/Server products so I had to use Outlook (not Express) and a proprietary ActiveSync. I had it for a total of 2 weeks and then gave it away to somebody. I've also owned a Newton, HP and Palm products, the Newton and Palm actually did some good stuff but missed the cell phone functionality.
You really think 20-30G is going to be enough? Belgium has bandwidth caps, (10G-30G depending on what you pay) and look at them complaining. They have nice bandwidth (5 Mbps) but can't use it to the full because before 2/3 of the month is over, everybody is surfing at 56k (restrictions if you exceed your limit) again.
We have it good here in the US as is. We have somewhat decent bandwidth for somewhat decent price without any caps. Let's keep it that way. The price sure isn't going down, so the more you give up, the more expensive it gets. Sure, the ISP's funneled $200 billion dollars of our taxes into their pockets, let's ask them first where that is before they can cap our bandwidths because they "don't make enough money".
I DO NOT want 20G bandwidth limits, I DO NOT want tiered bandwidth, I DO want cheap, affordable internet service where I can stream radio, surf, check e-mail and download stuff. My bandwidth usage is about 50G/month. Just so you know, if you have an XBox 360 (and probably a PS3 too), they suck up lots of bandwidth constantly. Yesterday I was at somebody's house trying to use their measly 1MBit line and had to unplug the XBox (and they weren't even playing on XBox Live) before I got a decent internet connection.
I don't know, maybe because you're a sysadmin that thinks spending $$$ is going to help a whole lot. What did you buy? Barracuda? Or another appliance that uses Linux, Postfix and Amavis with ClamAV and SpamAssassin. I just built a system like that for free on top of our current mail server (4y old machine) and the number of mails went down 80% after taking out (rejecting) IP's at the Postfix level using a DNSBL, and some custom rules we're about similar in size with the same purpose (educational). The whole process takes about a day and didn't even require the mail to be interrupted. So far (3 months) no complaints about missing e-mails, no complaints about passing SPAM.
As an avid fan (I've seen all the episodes up until the last season back-to-back once upon a time) they seem to use the tool necessary for the job. Yes, I've seen Windows desktops surfing AOL (with their research staff) but I've also seen PowerBooks.
Apparently Jamie got some time between the last season and now to test out that Ubuntu thingy and he really likes it. I'm a Linux/Mac-sysadmin, I don't necessarily like Ubuntu for myself (too dumbed down) but my parents currently run it on their desk- and laptop and they have stopped calling me every week about something that went wrong with their computer. I run Fedora Core here at work simply because it gets the job done (RPM's for specific scientific stuff), I am running all-Mac (2 PowerBook) at home now but I would use Gentoo (desktop). Slackware (other desktop) or Debian (router/server) if I had non-Mac computers.
Taxes DO pay for medical research. There are some examples ( http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cntry1=NA%3AUS&fund=0&fund=1 ). And there are of course the research that goes on in the military and other federal organizations. Although, looking back in history (Manhattan Project) you don't really want covert medical research sponsored by the government on unwilling/unwitting human and non-human subjects for the 'public good'.
Ebay doesn't have any legal recourse if you refuse this. Paypal is not a bank, they're a corporate (private) entity that handles money much like a 'bank' in SecondLife or WoW (I don't play any of these games so I don't know if there are banks in WoW). If you get suckered into providing your bank information for them so they can withdraw anything from your bank account, then that's on you. I just entrust them with their standard $300 limit and a credit card number which flags my expenses over $100.
My example: I sold something through e-bay and apparently was bid on by a scammer. I cancelled the bid but was charged a fee somehow for placing and completing an ad and then not selling it (that was back when E-bay was in it's first 6 months). I just refused to pay anything about it, they send me some nastygrams in my e-mail but they didn't have any legal recourse since 1) I didn't sign anything and 2) they didn't give any recourse for me (the victim) almost scammed by the highest bidder. They sent me some more nastygrams and eventually closed out my account. I didn't care, just opened another account.
This comment has been appearing on /. for the last umpteen years ever since the double click, one click order, mouse, voip, keyboard, cell phone, touchscreen, gui etc. patents started appearing. Nothing changed in all these years because the persons that have the money to file these patents also have the money to bribe^W contribute to legislators