There are well over 10,000 laws in the US. Last year alone over 31,000 laws were passed across the country. In 2009 over 40,000 new laws were passed.
which everyone is breaking 5 times a day without knowing, it shouldn't be that hard to name a few so us average Joes can learn to avoid breaking that law
Well, there are some books on it (both of these are on my to-read list):
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
And I had to make sure only to buy things at Trader Joes since my local grocery store carried but one loaf of bread with no HFCS in it and it was hilariously marked up as some organic bullshit.
Try whole wheat pita bread. It's fairly cheap and doesn't contain HFCS. The ingredient list is very basic.
Due to government subsidies and advanced food science, you cannot control your intake of HFCS.
There is one way to do a good job at avoiding corn products: avoid anything that comes in a bag, box, or can.
You are trying to make it seem as if Congress has no power to do anything other than that which is explicitly granted in the Constitution, which is comically untrue.
So what the hell does the 10th Amendment mean, then?:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The Virginia Resultion of 1798, written by James Madison (the main author of the Constitution and the author of the Bill of Rights, including the 10th amendment) says:
That this Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact, to which the states are parties; as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact; as no further valid that they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.
"Resolved, That the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes -- delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral part, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."
MADD has very little to do with drunk driving or parents at this stage. Even their original founder (who DID loose a child to a drunk driver) is disgusted with them at this point.
The modern version of MADD is more about making money (mmm.. corrupt fundraising) and trying to push neo-prohibition based of iffy 'science' Plus, if you want to read up on how MADD pushes crap science to try and push their neo-prohibiton agenda, read this:
The point is they can't trash Linux since they only have write access to/home/user. Neither can they install games except to/home/user. It's trivial to simply reset/home/user to a default state with every login. Like most changes on Linux, this does not require a reboot. It's also trival to do that on Windows. Just install Windows SteadyState (free). Use it to apply restrictions such as only allowing programs in %ProgramFiles% and %WinDir% to run, disable command line, registry editing, the run dialog, windows-key shortcuts, writing to the desktop, etc. You can "Lock" the profile, which moves the profile to "%User%.orig". When the user logs in it copies that directory to "%User%" and discards the copy when they log off. SteadyState also includes "Windows Disk Protection" which discards all changes to the hard disk every reboot.
Gnome's lockdown is extremely limited. Only a handful of settings are available and it's not difficult to bypass. KDE's Kiosk is a little better, but still doesn't come close to Windows unfortunately.
As much as I hate to say it, it's possible to lock down a Windows desktop far more than GNOME or KDE.
That is not how it works in Windows. Yes, you can enforce user levels in XP but some apps will not work, and it is pretty easy to bypass anyway. Maybe Vista is better, but I certainly don't expect to see Vista on a public terminal anytime soon. With tweaking you can get those badly written programs to work. It involves changing various permissions on the file system and registry. It's a PITA, but it can be done.
Can you post which software auditing packages you use and/or recommend? If your network isn't too large, Spiceworks works pretty well. It's free, but only runs on Windows. The interface is web-based and works fine in Firefox on Linux. It has ads, though.
I've been using it for a few months now to monitor about a dozen printers (toner levels, etc) and a few hundred desktops (settings, installed software, etc). It's definitely made things easier for me.
I hope you're not too serious, but I'll try to explain.
Ubuntu uses Debian's apt package management system. It's a great thing, fast as hell (especially when one's coming from Gentoo or source-y relatives), easy through Synaptic and so on. It does, however, have one major difference to Gentoo's way of handling new releases: Only security fixes are applied to packages after a release.
That's a great advantage to admin staff. Never touch a running system's config unless upgrading to a new release. It's also a (rather large) disadvantage to people favouring the bleeding edge. A seperate "backports" repository will contain some new releases but it's not as extensive or current as gentoo's. The actual updating process itself, though, is typically orders of magnitude faster because packages are distributed binary (source optional) instead of as source and compiled locally. For Ubuntu you can download debs from getdeb.net. Some of it is stuff that's not packaged, but most of it is newer versions of software Ubuntu has in it's repos. I use stuff from it every now and then and haven't had any issues.
it just isn't a full office suite without one, not to say that thunderbird isn't bad or anything. hopefully, they will have one when 3 comes out for everyday use. I still would like to see a publisher replacement (for printouts and what not). Spicebird looks promising. It's based on Thunderbird and Lightning, but overall it seems much nicer. Like Thunderbird it's licensed under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL. I tried it out a few days ago but not throughly. Linux.com did an article on it recently, which, btw, is how I found out about it.
It'd be nice if they'd copy MS Office 2004 for OS X or Lotus Symphony rather than continue on with a bad copy of MS Office 2003. Notice the side bar? Floating on OS X (I prefer floating, btw), part of the window in Lotus Symphony. For me, at least, that is significantly more helpful than toolbars/menus or that irritating "ribbon".
It's also be awesome if Writer supported tabs and split editor like Eclipse. Those two features are one of the main reason I do everything I possibly can in Eclipse.
Ads really are the driver of this market, and therefore the crux of its problems in adapting to new technologies like P2P. Advertising is largely what pays for these networks and the shows they bankroll. Youtube and Tivo are ad killers, so it it does present a genuine problem to the revenue stream of the traditional broadcast media business model.
While there may be no one obvious solution, if you're a TV network there are definitely some things to NOT do.
1. DO NOT put MORE ads in your programs - you'll just drive more people to use alternative services like P2P.
2. SHORTEN the ads you do have, and charge companies more for them. This model works for VOD pretty well. But exercise caution here: 30 seconds at the beginning of a clip is about the maximum I'll put up with, and I'm no ADHD case.
3. LOWER the prices of DVDs for older content, and release new content onto DVD more quickly - make this supplementary revenue stream work better (it may turn into your primary revenue stream).
4. Stop whining and start adapting, or your lunch will continue to get eaten by Google and the Pirate Bay.
5. Stop listening to your geriatric network execs and start listening to your customers: give the people what they want, or you're toast.
6. Sell high quality, DRM-free downloads within a week of the episode airing.
If #6 happened, I would cancel my satellite subscription and just download the few shows I watch. I don't want to wait a year for a DVD release. I don't want a DRM-crippled iTunes or Amazon Unbox download. I just want to pay for it and watch it on any device I choose.
Agreed--I can't even transfer certain types of documents between two versions of Microsoft Word, if they are saved as.doc ("a table in this document has become corrupted"). On the other hand, my resume, created in OpenOffice and saved as a.rtf, appears horribly messed up when opened in Word. I'm not convinced there is a current interoperable solution. You could install Sun's ODF Plugin for MS Word.
In short, I am just really happy that a few bands are beginning to pave the way to a world without an RIAA.
It's happening all over - about 18 months ago a new music site called Sellaband opened its doors to unsigned Artists around the world. The object is to pre-sell copies of your next album at $10 (US) a piece. Once you hit $50000 you are put into a top studio with top producers and for each $10 Part a Believer purchases they get one copy of the 5000 Limited Edition versions of the album. Regular editions are also made available for the Artist to sell at gigs etc, and now Amazon.co.uk have signed up to sell them, and even pre-order 100 copies by buying 100 Parts once each Artist reaches $30000.
The Believers then get a share of the advertising revenues, and sales of the regular CD, plus anything they can make on selling any spare Limited Edition CDs, the Artist gets a third, Sellaband gets a third and the 5000 Believers share the last third. It's not going to make you a millionaire but its sort of fun!
So far there are over 6000 Artists registered, with 17 having made the $50000, last night Kaitee Page became the latest, and 7 of them now have their albums available from the Sellaband shop where you can purchase the CDs or download the tracks - the first three tracks are free and the others are all on 50c (US) each
Shaolin Temple of Boom (if you like NIN you should listen to their stuff) are also trying something new. They're asking for donations to help fund the album. I went ahead and donated to it because Projecktor is a good EP and would really like to see a full album.
The summary's a bit off - I haven't read this article, but something I read earlier today said that there are several releases. If I remember correctly: 1. The first part of the album (not the whole thing) is available as a free download. 2. The whole thing is available for download for $5. 3. A CD set is available (10-15ish?). The 2CD set is $10, but when you check out it shows the shipping price: $6.99. That's a bit high...
4. A deluxe, signed, and limited CD set is available ($75?). The signed one is $300.
Anyway, this NIN album is very good. If you're anxious for it and the NIN servers are still too slow, Amazon's MP3 service has it for $5. Amazon finally released a Linux version of the downloader, btw.
I always get a kick out of posts which start going into details of what they want company X to do, as if they're around and care what you say. Well, Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman do post to Slashdot...
While I agree with you that forking generally isn't good, at times it can possibly be a good thing. Take a look at XFree86/Xorg. Since the fork Xorg has had massive improvements, finally getting X to a modern state. Hopefully this fork will work on improving OOo, specifically in the GUI and speed areas (Novell, please at least copy Lotus Symphony's GUI or MS Office 2004 (OS X) but implement in native controls making use of system settings (it should follow my icon theme and font settings at least)). While I use OOo, it really doesn't seem as if Sun has much of a goal for it. The GUI isn't very intuitive, it still is horribly bloated, and overall it doesn't integrate with the system and looks hideous. Each new release doesn't seem to have any noticeable improvements over the previous. It just feels really stagnant. Hopefully this fork will have some direction and actually have a goal of competing with MS Office.
OK, so have a "test box". I myself have one. Guess what cable never get's plugged into it? That's right, the ethernet cable. If I'm doing something that requires the use of my in-house LAN, guess what gets unplugged....that's right, my connection to the outside world.
It's not that difficult really...I find that having an isolated not-connected (not even to my internal network) windows 98 box is FANTASTIC for my older games...fuck DosBox, I'll just build a 200 dollar killer Win98 box. You know, you could make things much easier on yourself if you gave VMWare a try. Install VMWare Server, set the networking to "host only", and do whatever you want with it. I just this for all of my testing. The snapshot feature makes it so much nicer than dealing with a real machine.
VirtualBox is also good (with a GPL version if you compile it from source, and it has a "seamless" mode), but for some reason even when the virtual machine is idle it's taking up ~25% of the cpu. VMWware doesn't...
I'd give it six months and this will be used to enforce install of WGA on every windows machine. We can only hope. If it happens six months from now, Ubuntu 8.04 will be nearing completion. 8.04, like 6.06, will be a LTS release. It'd be great to have Microsoft encourage people to look for alternatives around that time...
Hopefully this, more WGA outages/issues, shutting down projects that make windows bearable (AutoPatcher), etc, will be the push necessary to get people migrating from Microsoft and to cross platform software and open standards.
At the moment, if you're not doing gaming, the best video card on Linux is actually an Intel one. For now, my personal favorite card is the Radeon 9200. It's not the fastest, but it does have excellent fully open source 3d drivers. It handles Beryl with the eyecandy maxed out with no problem, and I can play GTA:3/GTA:VC (wine), Doom Legacy (native), and America's Army (native) with no problems.
I've used several Intel ones (82845G, on Dell Optiplex's and HPs) and can't stand them. Beryl hardly runs on it, and it can't even handle GLMatrix as a screen saver. Does anyone know if the "Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100" is decent? That's the main reason I'm holding off on getting a Dell laptop with Ubuntu. I need my Beryl/Compiz...
Damn I'd love to be able to buy a laptop with a Radeon 9200 and a Core 2 Duo...
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't tried 42.0 yet, but the last few releases have tracking already and can be turned on through about:config.
Just set privacy.trackingprotection.enabled and privacy.trackingprotection.pbmode.enabled to true.
If there are 10.000 laws in the US
There are well over 10,000 laws in the US. Last year alone over 31,000 laws were passed across the country. In 2009 over 40,000 new laws were passed.
which everyone is breaking 5 times a day without knowing, it shouldn't be that hard to name a few so us average Joes can learn to avoid breaking that law
Well, there are some books on it (both of these are on my to-read list):
Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target The Innocent
Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything
in the first place and/or organize a petition to get rid of them.
You think they really care about petitions? It is very difficult to repeal laws and scale back power.
TinyCA2 is rather easy to use.
From the FAQ:
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
And I had to make sure only to buy things at Trader Joes since my local grocery store carried but one loaf of bread with no HFCS in it and it was hilariously marked up as some organic bullshit.
Try whole wheat pita bread. It's fairly cheap and doesn't contain HFCS. The ingredient list is very basic.
Due to government subsidies and advanced food science, you cannot control your intake of HFCS.
There is one way to do a good job at avoiding corn products: avoid anything that comes in a bag, box, or can.
You are trying to make it seem as if Congress has no power to do anything other than that which is explicitly granted in the Constitution, which is comically untrue.
So what the hell does the 10th Amendment mean, then?:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The Virginia Resultion of 1798, written by James Madison (the main author of the Constitution and the author of the Bill of Rights, including the 10th amendment) says:
That this Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact, to which the states are parties; as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact; as no further valid that they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.
Plus, the Kentucky Resolution of 1798 written by Thomas Jefferson says this:
"Resolved, That the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes -- delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral part, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."
How is that post a troll? The more local something is the better chance you have at accountability.
The modern version of MADD is more about making money (mmm.. corrupt fundraising) and trying to push neo-prohibition based of iffy 'science' Plus, if you want to read up on how MADD pushes crap science to try and push their neo-prohibiton agenda, read this:
http://www.duicenter.com/lectures/exception01.html.
It's long, but well worth the read.
Dopewars.
Gnome's lockdown is extremely limited. Only a handful of settings are available and it's not difficult to bypass. KDE's Kiosk is a little better, but still doesn't come close to Windows unfortunately.
As much as I hate to say it, it's possible to lock down a Windows desktop far more than GNOME or KDE. That is not how it works in Windows. Yes, you can enforce user levels in XP but some apps will not work, and it is pretty easy to bypass anyway. Maybe Vista is better, but I certainly don't expect to see Vista on a public terminal anytime soon. With tweaking you can get those badly written programs to work. It involves changing various permissions on the file system and registry. It's a PITA, but it can be done.
I've been using it for a few months now to monitor about a dozen printers (toner levels, etc) and a few hundred desktops (settings, installed software, etc). It's definitely made things easier for me.
Ubuntu uses Debian's apt package management system. It's a great thing, fast as hell (especially when one's coming from Gentoo or source-y relatives), easy through Synaptic and so on. It does, however, have one major difference to Gentoo's way of handling new releases: Only security fixes are applied to packages after a release.
That's a great advantage to admin staff. Never touch a running system's config unless upgrading to a new release. It's also a (rather large) disadvantage to people favouring the bleeding edge. A seperate "backports" repository will contain some new releases but it's not as extensive or current as gentoo's. The actual updating process itself, though, is typically orders of magnitude faster because packages are distributed binary (source optional) instead of as source and compiled locally. For Ubuntu you can download debs from getdeb.net. Some of it is stuff that's not packaged, but most of it is newer versions of software Ubuntu has in it's repos. I use stuff from it every now and then and haven't had any issues.
Hopefully that GUI is not the final version.
It'd be nice if they'd copy MS Office 2004 for OS X or Lotus Symphony rather than continue on with a bad copy of MS Office 2003. Notice the side bar? Floating on OS X (I prefer floating, btw), part of the window in Lotus Symphony. For me, at least, that is significantly more helpful than toolbars/menus or that irritating "ribbon".
It's also be awesome if Writer supported tabs and split editor like Eclipse. Those two features are one of the main reason I do everything I possibly can in Eclipse.
While there may be no one obvious solution, if you're a TV network there are definitely some things to NOT do.
1. DO NOT put MORE ads in your programs - you'll just drive more people to use alternative services like P2P.
2. SHORTEN the ads you do have, and charge companies more for them. This model works for VOD pretty well. But exercise caution here: 30 seconds at the beginning of a clip is about the maximum I'll put up with, and I'm no ADHD case.
3. LOWER the prices of DVDs for older content, and release new content onto DVD more quickly - make this supplementary revenue stream work better (it may turn into your primary revenue stream).
4. Stop whining and start adapting, or your lunch will continue to get eaten by Google and the Pirate Bay.
5. Stop listening to your geriatric network execs and start listening to your customers: give the people what they want, or you're toast.
6. Sell high quality, DRM-free downloads within a week of the episode airing.If #6 happened, I would cancel my satellite subscription and just download the few shows I watch. I don't want to wait a year for a DVD release. I don't want a DRM-crippled iTunes or Amazon Unbox download. I just want to pay for it and watch it on any device I choose.
It's happening all over - about 18 months ago a new music site called Sellaband opened its doors to unsigned Artists around the world. The object is to pre-sell copies of your next album at $10 (US) a piece. Once you hit $50000 you are put into a top studio with top producers and for each $10 Part a Believer purchases they get one copy of the 5000 Limited Edition versions of the album. Regular editions are also made available for the Artist to sell at gigs etc, and now Amazon.co.uk have signed up to sell them, and even pre-order 100 copies by buying 100 Parts once each Artist reaches $30000.
The Believers then get a share of the advertising revenues, and sales of the regular CD, plus anything they can make on selling any spare Limited Edition CDs, the Artist gets a third, Sellaband gets a third and the 5000 Believers share the last third. It's not going to make you a millionaire but its sort of fun!
So far there are over 6000 Artists registered, with 17 having made the $50000, last night Kaitee Page became the latest, and 7 of them now have their albums available from the Sellaband shop where you can purchase the CDs or download the tracks - the first three tracks are free and the others are all on 50c (US) each
Shaolin Temple of Boom (if you like NIN you should listen to their stuff) are also trying something new. They're asking for donations to help fund the album. I went ahead and donated to it because Projecktor is a good EP and would really like to see a full album.If I remember correctly:
1. The first part of the album (not the whole thing) is available as a free download.
2. The whole thing is available for download for $5.
3. A CD set is available (10-15ish?). The 2CD set is $10, but when you check out it shows the shipping price: $6.99. That's a bit high... 4. A deluxe, signed, and limited CD set is available ($75?). The signed one is $300.
http://ghosts.nin.com/main/order_options.
Radiohead didn't come up with this idea. Harvey Danger did it back in 2005 and they probably aren't the first. Here's the Slashdot article:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/02/2056210
Anyway, this NIN album is very good. If you're anxious for it and the NIN servers are still too slow, Amazon's MP3 service has it for $5. Amazon finally released a Linux version of the downloader, btw.
While I agree with you that forking generally isn't good, at times it can possibly be a good thing. Take a look at XFree86/Xorg. Since the fork Xorg has had massive improvements, finally getting X to a modern state. Hopefully this fork will work on improving OOo, specifically in the GUI and speed areas (Novell, please at least copy Lotus Symphony's GUI or MS Office 2004 (OS X) but implement in native controls making use of system settings (it should follow my icon theme and font settings at least)). While I use OOo, it really doesn't seem as if Sun has much of a goal for it. The GUI isn't very intuitive, it still is horribly bloated, and overall it doesn't integrate with the system and looks hideous. Each new release doesn't seem to have any noticeable improvements over the previous. It just feels really stagnant. Hopefully this fork will have some direction and actually have a goal of competing with MS Office.
They really need a goal like this.
It's not that difficult really...I find that having an isolated not-connected (not even to my internal network) windows 98 box is FANTASTIC for my older games...fuck DosBox, I'll just build a 200 dollar killer Win98 box. You know, you could make things much easier on yourself if you gave VMWare a try. Install VMWare Server, set the networking to "host only", and do whatever you want with it. I just this for all of my testing. The snapshot feature makes it so much nicer than dealing with a real machine.
VirtualBox is also good (with a GPL version if you compile it from source, and it has a "seamless" mode), but for some reason even when the virtual machine is idle it's taking up ~25% of the cpu. VMWware doesn't...
Hopefully this, more WGA outages/issues, shutting down projects that make windows bearable (AutoPatcher), etc, will be the push necessary to get people migrating from Microsoft and to cross platform software and open standards.
I've used several Intel ones (82845G, on Dell Optiplex's and HPs) and can't stand them. Beryl hardly runs on it, and it can't even handle GLMatrix as a screen saver. Does anyone know if the "Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100" is decent? That's the main reason I'm holding off on getting a Dell laptop with Ubuntu. I need my Beryl/Compiz...
Damn I'd love to be able to buy a laptop with a Radeon 9200 and a Core 2 Duo...