I absolutely agree that copying copyrighted works without paying for them is theft: someone is being denied the income from their copyrighted works.
However, I do not agree with this: The people most harmed are the musicians. When you pirate music, you are stealing from the artist who slaved to create it for you.
From CD sales, the artists get just about nothing. From CD sales, almost all the proceeds go to the distributors and publishers. The artist must play concerts to get revenues. Whether this is ethical in its own right is a second and largely unrelated discussion.
The artist is harmed by this theft of copyrighted works, but in most cases the distributors and publishers are harmed more.
True GESTURES use no mouse button; they just watch the pattern of position over time.
In Black & White, and in other applications that use a mouse to detect gestures, those mouse actions that do not require the buttons to be GESTURES. Drag & Drop is not a GESTURE but a direct interaction with the objects involved. Tooltips use the simplest of GESTURES: hovering in place. No mouse button.
On PalmOS and other devices where the pen must actually touch the screen to have its position registered, I would still call them STROKES, not GESTURES. Most artists' pen tablets can register the position of the pen if the pen is merely close to the tablet, not even touching, and therefore can support GESTURES.
You don't need those heavy bricks to use X10. There are wired-in x10 outlets and wall switches. These units fit inside the regular electrical boxes that wall switches and outlets fit.
In my apartment, I replaced three outlets around the kitchen counter with X10 in-the-wall outlets. Each outlet has one controllable plug and one always-powered plug. From those, I got some of those 20" light rails, and adhered them to the underside of the kitchen cabinets. These come on at dusk, and go off at 2am, by a perl script I wrote. I can control them (and the rest of the lights in the house) any other time with remote controls I have placed here and there.
The wall light switches are also wirable; they have "decorator" versions now that look like the flat rocker switches (but they actually aren't rockers, they're spring-loaded momentaries). Tap to toggle, or hold to dim.
Some of the 1980s x10 stuff is big and clunky, but they're definitely getting smaller and slicker. They have their oddball stuff, though. A universal remote control with a built-in corkscrew bottle opener? Glad they gave that for free, I wouldn't buy it.
Timothy: After last week's (somewhat) surprising pubic announcement that Yahoo! would straightforwardly feature a section of pornographic movies in its online store,...
"A Freudian slip is when you say one thing, and mean your mother." --Anonymous
The abbreviation IANAL normally stands for the caveat, "I am not
a lawyer," which often serves as a disclaimer in online discussions
where lay people are exchanging legal advice or their opinions on matters
of law.
I contend, IANAL better means "Incompetent Advice Necessarily
A Liability."
Why do people ask legal advice on weblogs where a real lawyer is essential?
If you're concerned about a licensing issue or personal freedoms, especially
with large corporate or government interests at stake, why would you
even consider taking the opinions of anonymous amateur pundits on a
for-profit advocacy weblog?
Get some professional, personal, specific advice from someone who is
accountable for the answers they provide. As much as some people don't
like the lawyer culture, it is clear that a reputable lawyer wants to
stay that way, and will be very careful to consider your situation thoroughly.
I actually decided to avoid DVDs on the merits of the technology, and also have no DVDs to this day. Unfortunately, finding CAV laserdisc anime is getting harder...
Maybe you haven't read this letter to Dr. Laura Schlessinger. It's been all over, with some alterations, amplifications, and amendments, but for geek-name-dropping-value, I'll provide the link to the version on Richard Stallman's Personal Home Page. (This is also the top link Google gives me, looking for "dr laura leviticus", by the way, beating out Dr. Laura's own home page.)
An excerpt:
[Dr. Laura,] I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
www.m-w.com: According to one theory, it's because I could care less has an emphatically sarcastic ring to it when spoken. Since it's difficult to sound sarcastic in print, the older I couldn't care less continues to be used there. But that's pure conjecture.
AUE FAQ has some other opposite idioms and their etymology.
Or maybe there's some people who feel that if you're not an Adonis or Pamela Lee, you're butt ugly. The whole site is about being shallow.
Or maybe someone just wrote a Perl script to vote 1s or 2s or 7s, and to copy the pictures of anyone who is consistently rated a 7, 8, or 9. Maybe they ran overnight and skewed the results for that day.
This is a fad site, and the metrics are entirely subjective and non-scientific. Don't analyze the data. And if you're bemoaning a few 1s or 2s on your own photo, they've got you right where they want you: The whole site is about being shallow.
I haven't seen all these "Slashdot advocates boycotts" and "Slashdot wants you to stick it to RIAA" posts. Maybe you can provide some links that aren't followups to some nested thread. Maybe you can show evidence of a pattern of recommendations, evangelations, prostelizations, petitions, assignments, pleas or agreements that set up this official Slashdot Political Bloc of which you speak.
There is no cohesion in the Slashdot community.
All I see is a group of nerds who sit in their condos posting things to their own weblog that seem interesting to them. Some of them point out MPAA shenanigans, and some of them beat their chests about censorship. Many of the stories aren't even about these hot political topics; watch the stories on anime, journaling filesystems, quickies, book reviews, laugh-it's-funny stuff, advice-seeking about legal or business matters, and what distro of Linux someone likes.
There is no cohesion in the Slashdot community.
If you want to organize a boycott, do it. If you want to post non-registration-required New York Times links, if you want to shop at Amazon's competitors, if you want to destroy DVDs to show your moral indignation, do it. You may even find other people who agree with you on this issue or that issue.
There is no cohesion in the Slashdot community.
Don't expect Slashdot editors, or thousands of Slashdot readers to follow along like some Million Geek March. We're not organized, and speaking for myself only, I like it that way.
There is no cohesion in the Slashdot community.
Eschew groupthink. Think for yourself. Be an individual. Make your own decisions.
The solar foils added to ISS/Alpha recently were half an acre in size. This means that if aligned nicely, you can see ISS/Alpha with your unaided eyes. Oooh, the danger. I'm afraid.
If you can focus all of the solar light that hits an earth-acre space, into a much smaller space (say, a 3' square) on the ground, yes, it's gonna be hot and perhaps dangerously hot. But not weapons-grade dangerously hot.
While I'm not one of those enviro-nuts who worry about the 1 in 1e12 chance of a satellite's plutonium powercell exploding, I am somewhat leery of the science fiction premise that we'll get tons of new raw materials from the asteroid belt or moon.
The idea is simple: go to where the iron, nickle, cadmium, and other valuable minerals are, and ship them home. There's plenty of rocks up there.
The risks are high: you're guiding rocks of important sizes towards several billion sitting ducks. "Catching" the rock in Earth orbit is just a mite riskier than guiding a broken Mir into an uninhabited stretch of ocean.
Uh, read up on the differences between types of intellectual property: copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets. While the other three are aimed at establishing legal monopolies, trademark is not.
If you had a widget, and you didn't patent it, then other people could clone your widget. They just couldn't call it WonderWidget(tm) if that's your trademark. That's no monopoly.
I'm sure it has more to do with snubbing Intel, than snubbing Linux.
While Microsoft is watching the revenue losses in the server domain, they don't see Linux (in their mind, a veritable frankenstein of X11, enlightenment, GNOME, KDE, etc. etc.) as a threat to their simplified-for-consumers Windows XP desktop platform.
They also snubbed Intel on the X Box, though they "let" Intel buy their way back into that project late in the game. So now Intel has to pay for the privilege of building stuff that was designed by/for AMD, rather than setting their own specs.
I don't know the specifics of this latest snit that Microsoft has against Intel, but maybe (speculation) it's over a lack of help in getting Windows 2000 to run on IA64.
I use Win2K daily and have very solid uptimes. I think it's pretty solid, and I would expect XP to be another step in the right direction as far as stability goes. (Other aspects of XP trouble me, such as the kiosk-oriented gui and the copy control features.)
It's fairly well known that the biggest issue for Win9x/WinNT/Win2K's stability is crappy third-party device drivers. The fault lies in the OS architecture, to be sure, but the reality is that device drivers can crash your Windows since they run in a less restrictive processing environment.
Microsoft tests their own drivers a lot more than they can exercise ATI's drivers, so guess what happens when you install an ATI video card that's not on the HCL? Boom.
Do you think this'll be any better when someone installs some generic $25 USB2 hub? How about new devices that have been in development for a while, assuming USB2 support for XP would save them, who are now reading resumes for some code jockey to learn how to make a USB2 driver for their first assignment?
Even if Microsoft wants to snub Intel for whatever bedfellow business reason, it's in their best interest to make sure consumer-level cheapo devices can't rip down the platform. Boom.
If you don't rigorously enforce/protect your trademarks every time there's a possible infringement, the trademarks themselves can and will be wiped out.
This is very different from patent law, where a patent may be left idle. The patent holder can selectively choose to defend, license or ignore those who are possibly infringing. (It is for this reason that I am not against patents themselves, but against those patent bullies who find new revenue sources in the courtroom.)
"If you don't agree with the law, fix it." Explore the ways that trademark law can be fixed, and contact your local government official.
As for MFN, I thought that was on the block but barely missed-- I had heard discussions that some in Congress were quite relieved that we left it at annual review in face of this. Got a link? Always glad to be corrected.
Some history about George Herbert Walker Bush, which may shape thoughts about his son, America's current President.
Bush the First was Envoy to China, doing what he could to avoid UN recognition of an official Peoples Republic of China, counter to Kissinger's willingness to deal with then-600,000 people as one unified-under-Communism sovereign country.
Bush Number One was the Chairman of the Republican National Committee. He asked Nixon to resign that fateful August, to spare the party a shred of dignity.
Bush Sr. then moved to Direct the CIA, mopping up the Watergate damage with trinkets, junkets, and some good old-fashioned spy-bustin'.
This should give you a clue as to where Bush #2 may be getting his opinions: the family looks out for Republicans First, and thinks China's leadership must be cracked.
That said, this is the only thing Bush Jr. and this Congress has done so far that I'd agree with. In order of importance: (1) stress the importance of the crewmembers, (2) the Chinese' failure to follow international standards in return of citizens and sovereign vehicles, (3) the fallout this will have on Favored Nations trading status for China. The Congress could still wimp out and give MFN again, but I'm hoping they'll stop kowtowing to the Great Bear here.
The state is hyperreal -- it operates like software. It seems stable enough while the power is on and it hasn't run into any major bugs, but interrupt the power supply or corrupt it, and the state falls apart.
This is probably the worst analogy I've heard in a while. You don't have to mention 'software' or 'linux' to get geeks to understand something that's outside those realms. Don't try to make everything fit into those categories.
Software is a set of instructions, and the machine follows those instructions. Politics and sovereign diplomacy are comprised of thousands or millions of different people who each have their own agendas. If you pull the plug on a computer, it STOPS. If you corrupt a government, it STILL has thousands or millions of different people who each have their own agendas; the agendas are just that much more recklessly out of tune.
Give a poor man a million dollars, he will remain a poor man.
A scary number like 80%+ of all large-prize lottery winners go bankrupt within a few years. Most have no understanding of how to make that money work for them, or to turn it into a renewable resource through wise investment. They spend the $100k/year, even selling the future years' checks before they come in.
It took a while to find anything that actually said what this man was accused of doing. Finally, I dug into the newspaper articles refered on the "Friends of Randal Schwartz" site, getting this from the Dr. Dobb's link:
It was two years ago this month, however, that Schwartz was indicted on three felony charges - one count of altering computer systems without authorization, and two of accessing a computer with intent to commit theft. The victim was Intel's Hillsboro, Oregon supercomputing division where Schwartz had been working for several years as a consultant. [...] Intel is asking restitution, somewhere in the neighborhood of $70,000, even though an Intel attorney acknowledges that the company found no evidence that Schwartz planned to use the "stolen" information.
In his defense, Schwartz said that he was only trying to show Intel how inadequate its security system was. At the time, Schwartz was working under two Intel contracts: one to deploy DNS servers for the entire corporation, and another as a system administrator for some network-support machines. Since both contracts were running out, he'd hoped to generate a new contract to improve Intel's security. To that end, Schwartz ill-advisedly ran Crack, a commercially available password-breaking program that uses brute force to discover vulnerable passwords. His plan was simply to put together a proposal - based on real data - for improving Intel security. The sort of information he intended on presenting in the proposal included nearly 50 network passwords he'd discovered (including that of one ambitious vice president whose password was "pre$ident").
Before Schwartz could put his proposal together, however, an Intel employee noticed an unauthorized program was hogging computer time. Upon discovering Schwartz's Crack run, he notified security, and in the flip of a bit, Schwartz went from being an "independent consultant" to an "industrial spy." Even though management recommended that Schwartz simply be confronted because there was clearly no criminal intent at work (Schwartz ran Crack under his own login and didn't try to dissimulate his efforts), Intel's jackbooted security team (maybe needing to justify their jobs) opted to call in the sheriffs department.
Schwartz admits that he made a number of '"bone-headed" mistakes - not clarifying the rules about Internet access, not reporting the first cracked password, not immediately reporting the results of the run - for which he probably deserved termination. However, he also says that his actions "were motivated by my desire to give Intel the best possible value for the money they were paying me," adding that none of his acts were based on malicious intent. In summary, Schwartz said: "I am sorry that I caused Intel any grief or hardship, and that in hindsight, I should have been clearer about my intention and actions."
The upshot of all this is that Schwartz is in a financial bind. There's little chance he will ever work at Intel again, even though he has given the company five years of good measure. Nor is he likely to work at any company that agrees with Intel's beliefs about him. With dim employment prospects, Schwartz has so far spent about $135,000 on his defense. When it's all said and done, he will probably end up paying $160,000 before even considering appeals.
Read the README, there's some additions, probably because the developers and testers did not want to spend all day failing to draw heart and wood gestures. Recognizing gestures isn't that hard in code, but the bigger you make your gestures, the easier it is to get recognized (just like PalmOS graffiti).
Typing R is the same as the Repeat gesture. This is the number one time saver. Just as graffiti is fine for jotting a quick note, I don't want to be scrawling all day.
Typing M is the same as the Miracle spiral gesture. You still have to draw the specific gesture to choose it, but repeats with R simplify multiple casts.
Typing C zooms to your Creature. The camera will follow him until you adjust the view yourself.
Ctrl+Shift zooms in very close to your hand. Zoom way out and then use this repeatedly to bring distant cows or mushrooms to your altar. Since this is so fast, you can steal trees from your enemy's forests with practice.
Don't waste a bookmark on your temple: Space,Space goes to your temple, and Space,Space again returns to your previous view.
Ctrl+digit makes a bookmark. Digit zooms to bookmark. Get your angle of view just right to see most of the buildings in the middle of a town, plunk a bookmark in the current center of your screen. Then you can zip to that same vantage point very fast. Again, use this to take things from place to place super-fast, like scaffolds to a neighboring town.
Another time-saver: assemble the scaffolds in the workshop yard, not on the building site. Why fly back and forth several times?
Another sanity saver: your creature will continue to follow a command after unleashing. Bring him home with a quick Space,Space,L,click,L. If he wanders into some other gods' zone, the other god will leash your creature!
Slashdot Mirror
I absolutely agree that copying copyrighted works without paying for them is theft: someone is being denied the income from their copyrighted works.
However, I do not agree with this: The people most harmed are the musicians. When you pirate music, you are stealing from the artist who slaved to create it for you.
From CD sales, the artists get just about nothing. From CD sales, almost all the proceeds go to the distributors and publishers. The artist must play concerts to get revenues. Whether this is ethical in its own right is a second and largely unrelated discussion.
The artist is harmed by this theft of copyrighted works, but in most cases the distributors and publishers are harmed more.
True GESTURES use no mouse button; they just watch the pattern of position over time.
In Black & White, and in other applications that use a mouse to detect gestures, those mouse actions that do not require the buttons to be GESTURES. Drag & Drop is not a GESTURE but a direct interaction with the objects involved. Tooltips use the simplest of GESTURES: hovering in place. No mouse button.
On PalmOS and other devices where the pen must actually touch the screen to have its position registered, I would still call them STROKES, not GESTURES. Most artists' pen tablets can register the position of the pen if the pen is merely close to the tablet, not even touching, and therefore can support GESTURES.
(And no, I'm not a shill for x10.)
You don't need those heavy bricks to use X10. There are wired-in x10 outlets and wall switches. These units fit inside the regular electrical boxes that wall switches and outlets fit.
In my apartment, I replaced three outlets around the kitchen counter with X10 in-the-wall outlets. Each outlet has one controllable plug and one always-powered plug. From those, I got some of those 20" light rails, and adhered them to the underside of the kitchen cabinets. These come on at dusk, and go off at 2am, by a perl script I wrote. I can control them (and the rest of the lights in the house) any other time with remote controls I have placed here and there.
The wall light switches are also wirable; they have "decorator" versions now that look like the flat rocker switches (but they actually aren't rockers, they're spring-loaded momentaries). Tap to toggle, or hold to dim.
I just started using the motion sensors to turn lights on in the closets and hallway. Keychain remote controls to flip some lights from the car.
Some of the 1980s x10 stuff is big and clunky, but they're definitely getting smaller and slicker. They have their oddball stuff, though. A universal remote control with a built-in corkscrew bottle opener? Glad they gave that for free, I wouldn't buy it.
Freudian slip? (Score:3)
by woggo (slashdot@woggo.org) on Mon 16 Apr 07:01PM EST (#1)
Doh. I can't believe a First Post was on topic and actually read the whole writeup beyond the 'fold' on the front page!
Timothy: After last week's (somewhat) surprising pubic announcement that Yahoo! would straightforwardly feature a section of pornographic movies in its online store, ...
"A Freudian slip is when you say one thing, and mean your mother." --Anonymous
Rarely will working on your own car land you in jail if you do it wrong.
Rarely will asking your friends for advice about personal problems put you in serious debt six years later when you're audited or arrested.
[stock rant on the subject]
The abbreviation IANAL normally stands for the caveat, "I am not a lawyer," which often serves as a disclaimer in online discussions where lay people are exchanging legal advice or their opinions on matters of law.
I contend, IANAL better means "Incompetent Advice Necessarily A Liability."
Why do people ask legal advice on weblogs where a real lawyer is essential? If you're concerned about a licensing issue or personal freedoms, especially with large corporate or government interests at stake, why would you even consider taking the opinions of anonymous amateur pundits on a for-profit advocacy weblog?
Get some professional, personal, specific advice from someone who is accountable for the answers they provide. As much as some people don't like the lawyer culture, it is clear that a reputable lawyer wants to stay that way, and will be very careful to consider your situation thoroughly.
[end of stock rant on the subject]
I actually decided to avoid DVDs on the merits of the technology, and also have no DVDs to this day. Unfortunately, finding CAV laserdisc anime is getting harder...
Oy, the Old Testament is Immutable arguments.
Maybe you haven't read this letter to Dr. Laura Schlessinger. It's been all over, with some alterations, amplifications, and amendments, but for geek-name-dropping-value, I'll provide the link to the version on Richard Stallman's Personal Home Page. (This is also the top link Google gives me, looking for "dr laura leviticus", by the way, beating out Dr. Laura's own home page.)
http://www.stallman.org/dr-laura.html
An excerpt: [Dr. Laura,] I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
A few words in defense of "I could care less."
www.m-w.com: According to one theory, it's because I could care less has an emphatically sarcastic ring to it when spoken. Since it's difficult to sound sarcastic in print, the older I couldn't care less continues to be used there. But that's pure conjecture.
AUE FAQ has some other opposite idioms and their etymology.
Or maybe there's some people who feel that if you're not an Adonis or Pamela Lee, you're butt ugly. The whole site is about being shallow.
Or maybe someone just wrote a Perl script to vote 1s or 2s or 7s, and to copy the pictures of anyone who is consistently rated a 7, 8, or 9. Maybe they ran overnight and skewed the results for that day.
This is a fad site, and the metrics are entirely subjective and non-scientific. Don't analyze the data. And if you're bemoaning a few 1s or 2s on your own photo, they've got you right where they want you: The whole site is about being shallow.
I haven't seen all these "Slashdot advocates boycotts" and "Slashdot wants you to stick it to RIAA" posts. Maybe you can provide some links that aren't followups to some nested thread. Maybe you can show evidence of a pattern of recommendations, evangelations, prostelizations, petitions, assignments, pleas or agreements that set up this official Slashdot Political Bloc of which you speak.
There is no cohesion in the Slashdot community.
All I see is a group of nerds who sit in their condos posting things to their own weblog that seem interesting to them. Some of them point out MPAA shenanigans, and some of them beat their chests about censorship. Many of the stories aren't even about these hot political topics; watch the stories on anime, journaling filesystems, quickies, book reviews, laugh-it's-funny stuff, advice-seeking about legal or business matters, and what distro of Linux someone likes.
There is no cohesion in the Slashdot community.
If you want to organize a boycott, do it. If you want to post non-registration-required New York Times links, if you want to shop at Amazon's competitors, if you want to destroy DVDs to show your moral indignation, do it. You may even find other people who agree with you on this issue or that issue.
There is no cohesion in the Slashdot community.
Don't expect Slashdot editors, or thousands of Slashdot readers to follow along like some Million Geek March. We're not organized, and speaking for myself only, I like it that way.
There is no cohesion in the Slashdot community.
Eschew groupthink. Think for yourself. Be an individual. Make your own decisions.
The solar foils added to ISS/Alpha recently were half an acre in size. This means that if aligned nicely, you can see ISS/Alpha with your unaided eyes. Oooh, the danger. I'm afraid.
If you can focus all of the solar light that hits an earth-acre space, into a much smaller space (say, a 3' square) on the ground, yes, it's gonna be hot and perhaps dangerously hot. But not weapons-grade dangerously hot.
You've been reading too many scifi novellas.
While I'm not one of those enviro-nuts who worry about the 1 in 1e12 chance of a satellite's plutonium powercell exploding, I am somewhat leery of the science fiction premise that we'll get tons of new raw materials from the asteroid belt or moon.
The idea is simple: go to where the iron, nickle, cadmium, and other valuable minerals are, and ship them home. There's plenty of rocks up there.
The risks are high: you're guiding rocks of important sizes towards several billion sitting ducks. "Catching" the rock in Earth orbit is just a mite riskier than guiding a broken Mir into an uninhabited stretch of ocean.
Uh, read up on the differences between types of intellectual property: copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets. While the other three are aimed at establishing legal monopolies, trademark is not.
If you had a widget, and you didn't patent it, then other people could clone your widget. They just couldn't call it WonderWidget(tm) if that's your trademark. That's no monopoly.
I'm sure it has more to do with snubbing Intel, than snubbing Linux.
While Microsoft is watching the revenue losses in the server domain, they don't see Linux (in their mind, a veritable frankenstein of X11, enlightenment, GNOME, KDE, etc. etc.) as a threat to their simplified-for-consumers Windows XP desktop platform.
They also snubbed Intel on the X Box, though they "let" Intel buy their way back into that project late in the game. So now Intel has to pay for the privilege of building stuff that was designed by/for AMD, rather than setting their own specs.
I don't know the specifics of this latest snit that Microsoft has against Intel, but maybe (speculation) it's over a lack of help in getting Windows 2000 to run on IA64.
I use Win2K daily and have very solid uptimes. I think it's pretty solid, and I would expect XP to be another step in the right direction as far as stability goes. (Other aspects of XP trouble me, such as the kiosk-oriented gui and the copy control features.)
It's fairly well known that the biggest issue for Win9x/WinNT/Win2K's stability is crappy third-party device drivers. The fault lies in the OS architecture, to be sure, but the reality is that device drivers can crash your Windows since they run in a less restrictive processing environment.
Microsoft tests their own drivers a lot more than they can exercise ATI's drivers, so guess what happens when you install an ATI video card that's not on the HCL? Boom.
Do you think this'll be any better when someone installs some generic $25 USB2 hub? How about new devices that have been in development for a while, assuming USB2 support for XP would save them, who are now reading resumes for some code jockey to learn how to make a USB2 driver for their first assignment?
Even if Microsoft wants to snub Intel for whatever bedfellow business reason, it's in their best interest to make sure consumer-level cheapo devices can't rip down the platform. Boom.
If you don't rigorously enforce/protect your trademarks every time there's a possible infringement, the trademarks themselves can and will be wiped out.
This is very different from patent law, where a patent may be left idle. The patent holder can selectively choose to defend, license or ignore those who are possibly infringing. (It is for this reason that I am not against patents themselves, but against those patent bullies who find new revenue sources in the courtroom.)
"If you don't agree with the law, fix it." Explore the ways that trademark law can be fixed, and contact your local government official.
Thanks on the correction re: symbols.
As for MFN, I thought that was on the block but barely missed-- I had heard discussions that some in Congress were quite relieved that we left it at annual review in face of this. Got a link? Always glad to be corrected.
Some history about George Herbert Walker Bush, which may shape thoughts about his son, America's current President.
Bush the First was Envoy to China, doing what he could to avoid UN recognition of an official Peoples Republic of China, counter to Kissinger's willingness to deal with then-600,000 people as one unified-under-Communism sovereign country.
Bush Number One was the Chairman of the Republican National Committee. He asked Nixon to resign that fateful August, to spare the party a shred of dignity.
Bush Sr. then moved to Direct the CIA, mopping up the Watergate damage with trinkets, junkets, and some good old-fashioned spy-bustin'.
This should give you a clue as to where Bush #2 may be getting his opinions: the family looks out for Republicans First, and thinks China's leadership must be cracked.
That said, this is the only thing Bush Jr. and this Congress has done so far that I'd agree with. In order of importance: (1) stress the importance of the crewmembers, (2) the Chinese' failure to follow international standards in return of citizens and sovereign vehicles, (3) the fallout this will have on Favored Nations trading status for China. The Congress could still wimp out and give MFN again, but I'm hoping they'll stop kowtowing to the Great Bear here.
The state is hyperreal -- it operates like software. It seems stable enough while the power is on and it hasn't run into any major bugs, but interrupt the power supply or corrupt it, and the state falls apart.
This is probably the worst analogy I've heard in a while. You don't have to mention 'software' or 'linux' to get geeks to understand something that's outside those realms. Don't try to make everything fit into those categories.
Software is a set of instructions, and the machine follows those instructions. Politics and sovereign diplomacy are comprised of thousands or millions of different people who each have their own agendas. If you pull the plug on a computer, it STOPS. If you corrupt a government, it STILL has thousands or millions of different people who each have their own agendas; the agendas are just that much more recklessly out of tune.
Give a poor man a million dollars, he will remain a poor man.
A scary number like 80%+ of all large-prize lottery winners go bankrupt within a few years. Most have no understanding of how to make that money work for them, or to turn it into a renewable resource through wise investment. They spend the $100k/year, even selling the future years' checks before they come in.
It took a while to find anything that actually said what this man was accused of doing. Finally, I dug into the newspaper articles refered on the "Friends of Randal Schwartz" site, getting this from the Dr. Dobb's link:
http://www.lightlink.com/spacenka/fors/press/ddj96 03.html
In his defense, Schwartz said that he was only trying to show Intel how inadequate its security system was. At the time, Schwartz was working under two Intel contracts: one to deploy DNS servers for the entire corporation, and another as a system administrator for some network-support machines. Since both contracts were running out, he'd hoped to generate a new contract to improve Intel's security. To that end, Schwartz ill-advisedly ran Crack, a commercially available password-breaking program that uses brute force to discover vulnerable passwords. His plan was simply to put together a proposal - based on real data - for improving Intel security. The sort of information he intended on presenting in the proposal included nearly 50 network passwords he'd discovered (including that of one ambitious vice president whose password was "pre$ident").
Before Schwartz could put his proposal together, however, an Intel employee noticed an unauthorized program was hogging computer time. Upon discovering Schwartz's Crack run, he notified security, and in the flip of a bit, Schwartz went from being an "independent consultant" to an "industrial spy." Even though management recommended that Schwartz simply be confronted because there was clearly no criminal intent at work (Schwartz ran Crack under his own login and didn't try to dissimulate his efforts), Intel's jackbooted security team (maybe needing to justify their jobs) opted to call in the sheriffs department.
Schwartz admits that he made a number of '"bone-headed" mistakes - not clarifying the rules about Internet access, not reporting the first cracked password, not immediately reporting the results of the run - for which he probably deserved termination. However, he also says that his actions "were motivated by my desire to give Intel the best possible value for the money they were paying me," adding that none of his acts were based on malicious intent. In summary, Schwartz said: "I am sorry that I caused Intel any grief or hardship, and that in hindsight, I should have been clearer about my intention and actions."
The upshot of all this is that Schwartz is in a financial bind. There's little chance he will ever work at Intel again, even though he has given the company five years of good measure. Nor is he likely to work at any company that agrees with Intel's beliefs about him. With dim employment prospects, Schwartz has so far spent about $135,000 on his defense. When it's all said and done, he will probably end up paying $160,000 before even considering appeals.
I'd like to see the entire GUI component of an OS support this.
Walk around with a PalmOS device for a few days. You'll be yearning for keyboard shortcuts (which B&W thankfully has provided).
I have ended a couple hours of B&W, and found that I've forgotten how to use a scrollbar. :)
Read the README, there's some additions, probably because the developers and testers did not want to spend all day failing to draw heart and wood gestures. Recognizing gestures isn't that hard in code, but the bigger you make your gestures, the easier it is to get recognized (just like PalmOS graffiti).
Typing R is the same as the Repeat gesture. This is the number one time saver. Just as graffiti is fine for jotting a quick note, I don't want to be scrawling all day.
Typing M is the same as the Miracle spiral gesture. You still have to draw the specific gesture to choose it, but repeats with R simplify multiple casts.
Typing C zooms to your Creature. The camera will follow him until you adjust the view yourself.
Ctrl+Shift zooms in very close to your hand. Zoom way out and then use this repeatedly to bring distant cows or mushrooms to your altar. Since this is so fast, you can steal trees from your enemy's forests with practice.
Don't waste a bookmark on your temple: Space,Space goes to your temple, and Space,Space again returns to your previous view.
Ctrl+digit makes a bookmark. Digit zooms to bookmark. Get your angle of view just right to see most of the buildings in the middle of a town, plunk a bookmark in the current center of your screen. Then you can zip to that same vantage point very fast. Again, use this to take things from place to place super-fast, like scaffolds to a neighboring town.
Another time-saver: assemble the scaffolds in the workshop yard, not on the building site. Why fly back and forth several times?
Another sanity saver: your creature will continue to follow a command after unleashing. Bring him home with a quick Space,Space,L,click,L. If he wanders into some other gods' zone, the other god will leash your creature!