This actually caught me a bit off guard. I'm so used to seeing Compaq screw over consumers and businesses with their junky desktops it amazes me that they would do something this cool. I mean, sure they have the *nix test drive thing going on, but they only do that to try and get people to stop running to Dell for servers.
I mean, hell, this is the company that released a line of PC's last year so underpowered and overloaded with proprietary bloatware right out of the box that they tried to blame it on Windows (Sure Windows sucks, but you didn't see any other manufacturer blaming crap performance on 400+mhz machines with 64+ megs of ram on M$), and now they turn around and give people an easy way to have all kinds of fun with an mp3 player under the GPL..
Kinda makes me wonder why tho.. anyone know anything about quality/sales levels of those players?
I had no clue what half of that was even about. But ya know what? It still seems like this guy has his shit together.
Anyone willing to try and go after America's horribly corrupt system of government(if it can even be called so anymore) by campaign funding in this rapidly expanding and changing electronic mess gets my respect is the best way to put it, I guess.
If: -It had surround sound (5.1, DAMMIT) capabilites -Preamp outputs. I need to be able to rock the block. -I could see it work before I paid $600 for it. If it was only a mail order product, I would consider it if shipping was cheap and it had a satisfaction guarantee. -Has to be able to switch the faceplate readouts from green in the day to amber at night so it doesn't light up the car. -Make it VERY HARD TO STEAL.
Gee, you'd think the people that do these studies might do studies about how MURDERERS ARE FUCKING CRAZY PEOPLE!
All psychology is just pop psychology. Psychologists just say that people who go against the grain are mentally ill and need help. They have been doing it for decades, and will never stop. If you really want to have fun, find a christian psychologist, and ask him if he believes that God created everything, created Jesus, had his son Jesus killed to forgive the sin of the world, and then brought him back to life, and now watches the world and everyone in it all the time so he can send anyone who doesn't agree with him to hell.
He will of course, say yes.
Then tell him you are the second coming of Christ mentioned in the book of revelations and that the world is about to end. Ask him if he thinks you are mentally healthy.
Anyone who trusts a psychologist is an idiot. The only good psychologists do is sorting out the people with physical illnesses that cause mental problems (manic depression, schizophrenia) and send them to a good psychiatrist so he can medically evaluate the situation. Other than that, they are all a bunch of quacks.
Ummm....07 micron. That means in 5 more years Ultra Sparc IV can debut real late at.07 micron running low clock speeds!
Seriously tho, they need to figure out a better way to make cpu's soon. They can only keep messing around with silicon for so long before we hit a bottleneck. And that would be very, VERY, bad for my Quake framrates.
How is Caldera any more legit than Babylon X? They are both just a bunch of geeks trying to make money from their computing skills. Unwanted email is unwanted email, regardless of the source.
I don't see any company as less legitimate than any other, (with the exception of scam companies that are just there to bilk investors out of millions and go under) and the same goes for spam. People who work with porn work just as hard to make a buck as the people who work with Linux.
Printed manuals often depend on the quality. For years Microsoft stuff came with huge, annoy, crappy manuals. I don't even know if they include manuals with their stuff anymore that cover more than installation, because all I ever see are OEM/Mass Liscensed versions.
I think many commercial products tend to ship with cruddy manuals to get people to take classes taught by the vendor. Big surprise there.
Some graphics packages come with huge, well written, easy to reference manuals. Gotta love those.
Sun Stuff comes with most of the documentation on CD, which makes it easy to just search through it all. Even better, they provide http://docs.sun.com that allows anyone to search through tons of documentation and look for just about anything needed for a Sun product, which is damned handy when i don't have time to root thru a book or dig out the cd.
Man pages of course rock. We use Legato networker at work, and one of the other admins had a spiral bound collection of the man pages. I'm not sure if it came with the software or as the books from a class, but it has to be the best manual I've ever seen for referencing commands, because with the spiral binding I can just flop it open and lay it wherever.
In time tho, I would like to see paper manuals be replaced by documentation on CD, or on the web. It seems terribly lame that big companies throw out thousands of little installation guides and assorted manuals (Such as the big multi language Sun liscense/intall packs, or the little install guides that come with OEM/Corporate version of windows) that never even get read. Imagine if all of those had just been left alone as nice, air cleaning, heat absorbing, shade providing trees.
Game manuals are the lamest. I don't know why the hell games still come with these. It isn't bad enough that game companies waste tons of paper on huge boxes and cardboard inserts, but they pack in manuals that nobody reads. Why the hell would I sit down and read a huge game manual when I could just play through a well designed tutorial? Console game companies realized this a long time ago and now place instructions wherever convienient in the game. PC game companies still insist of dumping in some little book that most people only glance through. They need to just put the manual on the CD in HTML and forget the paper.
Anyway, that's my.02 on manuals. Back to working out my summer budget.
If there had been multiple big OS's in the past it would have been bad. Now we have hardware companies working to produce OpenML to replace DirectX just so we have cross platform standards so that as Linux, BE, etc. continue to pick up speed we don't go back to the days when Amiga/DOS/Mac/OS/2 were all like different worlds.
I remember way back when pkzip 2.04g came out. That was like the big defining version of DOS based zip compression.
All the cool bbss were requiring zip back then, although some people tried to argue that arj and ace were better.
In the long run Winzip seems to have made zip the predominate form of compression in the Windows world, although the folks that really know what they are doing switched to rar compression long ago.
I still remember zipping up Doom II to back it up onto floppies 3 months before it was released when some janitor at id leaked it. Man, zip was SO great in those days.
Maybe someone should write a comment into the Linux kernel in memoriam or something.
AMD opened new fabs in both Texas (USA) and Dresden (Germany) last year. They are getting bigger and better everyday.
This is forcing Intel to get their stuff out sooner and cheaper than they every have before, which gives AMD an incentive to work even better.
And look at what it had given us all. The push for better and faster has brought us closer to a 64 bit consumer systems much sooner than many people expected. And with the competition quality is also becoming a thing to focus on. No longer will Sun, Alpha, IBM, and HP dominate the high end server markets. AMD and Intel have 64 bit chips on the horizon that will bring the cost of reliable, scalable servers down much lower than they have been with the previously named server makers able to overcharge like crazy because of demand.
And now AMD is having trouble keeping up with demand, just as their mighty rival Intel has been.
Using this as a guage of technological progress, what a WONDERFUL world we live in.
Imagine if there had been competition like this in the OS market over the last few years. God only knows where Microsoft could have gone against a strong competitor. And now with AMD and Intel pushing Linux as the next big OS, we can finally see every geeks dream of great processors, great operating systems, and most of all-
Hasbro sues people because they make clones that are 99% the same game as old Atari titles they own. Stealing something and pasting a new name on it is still stealing. People just assume that since they have been doing freeware ripoffs for decades that they have the right to make a commercial version as well.
A similar situation happened with Tetris. Alexy Pajihitnov (I think that's how the name is spelled) created Tetris while living in communist Russia. While he owned the rights to the whole thing, he never saw any of the money, as it was sucked off by the Soviet government. The international rights were bought and sold many times, almost totally out of his control. Now, years later Russia has opened up, he has moved to the US and is finally getting the rights back together. His company began sending out legal letters asking people to stop selling many of the hundreds of shareware Tetris knockoffs that are always being produced.
The shareware writers then started a campaign, and even a lawsuit, arguing that since they have been infringing on his copyright for years, they shouldn't ever have to stop.
I guess this sort of stuff is inevitable on the net, where people always want to get something for nothing, or as close to nothing as they can get. In a way this reminds me of the Napster case, people trying to support a service that was completly designed from the ground up with the intent of copyright infringment, and then going nuts because a corporation actually wants to make money, thus protecting the investments of its stockholders, which I'm sure more than a few of the complainers are via assorted funds in their 401k's...
Exactly what I was planning to post. We need to all write to congress and tell them to can that asswipe and hire someone that isn't so friggin arrogant that he can't see people reading hard to find books via computer.
12 gigs of mp3's.... YUM! Get one of these and slap it in the glove box (so it doesn't get all hot back in the trunk). Add in a small keyboard and one of those little 9" LCD TV's for a monitor (don't need a high res screen just for mp3's!) and a trackball... run BEOS so it boots up in 20 seconds and is ready by the time I get my seatbelt on! This is gonna rule!
They can't, it's illegal under laws designed to keep comic book/trading card companies from reselling their items on the secondary markets for high prices.
Many of you are recommending that the knowledge seeker go to his local library to do research on nanotech.
Has it occured to you people that maybe he doesn't have a good library to go to? Libraries tend to be pretty poorly funded in the US, and and pretty likely to suffer a serious dearth of information on theoretical sciences like nanotechnology. There aren't many good books on it to begin with, and they would likely be considered to obscure by library purchasers who feel the push to keep the shelves well stocked with numerous copies of old Stephen King novels for people too cheap to go blow five bucks on a paperback as opposed to providing people with an environment for scientific research.
Also be sure to think about the quality of search tools in puplic libraries. It is most likely that subjects like nanotech would be best researched in scientific magizines and journals that are not likely well categorized in the kind of search databases public libraries use, which are often terribly generic and designed more for use by young children who only need to know which set of encylcopedias to look in.
For reasearch on nanotech, the web is quite likely the best reference out there, and shame on you for attacking someone for trying to take advantage of an incredible tool like/. to further his education.
I used to be a regular of an #efnet channel where all the regulars had become good friends. One of them was a great guy who had spent years struggling through life as a geek in an area where the macho redneck moron stereotype fit 99% of the town, including his family.
As far as geeks go, he wasn't even much of a geek. But he was intelligent, great with computers as well as electronics (ie: circuitry.). As his life spiraled downward he somehow managed to start a successful web business after dropping out of high school to escape the daily torment. He moved out of his parents house, and was doing very, very well, especially for a 17 year old dropout.
Then Columbine happened. This gave a great idea to some of the idiots he had attended school with: they accused him of threatening to come to the school and shoot them both.
He was immediatly arrested and jailed, and charged with assault. He was to be tried as an adult, and kept in prison until his father somehow raised $20,000 to bail him out.
During the time he was in jail, he became unable to keep up with orders coming in for the stuff he was selling over the web. He was very late on a few, and publicly apoligized for it on some web based message boards. He caught up on his orders, and things were looking bright until a few guys decided to scam him. They reported him for credit card fraud, saying that he had charged them and not shipped them some rather large orders that he had shipped in an attempt to get double what they had ordered. Because he was under suspicion for the previous incident, he was immediatley arrested, and all of his computers and business related equipment were confiscated.
At this point the police leaked the whole thing to the local paper, which reported it all front page, stated that he had been convicted (untrue) and embellished with accounts from his "schoolmates" that he had attempted to molest local boys.
He was soon released from jail after the FBI looked at the fraud case and had it all dismissed. When he got out, however, he had been evicted by his landlord and terminated from his side job as a result of the newspaper article. Unfortunatly, none of the local lawyers were willing to take action on his behalf.
So he got a job several counties away delivering pizzas, and moved back in with his family.
One night, on the way home from work, another driver ran a stopsign and slammed into him at a busy intersection. He didn't want to stop in the intersection, so he drove 100 feet down the road to the first open spot which happened to be his house and went back to the intersection to await the police.
When the police got there, they recognized him, and things changed from a simple accident to him being nailed with a hit-and-run charge and they again arrested him. He was released the next day, and then fired from his pizza job.
The last time I heard from him, his life was pretty much in ruins. He had no job, no car, no money, no computer, and couldn't leave the state to go start over somewhere else because he still had to wait for his trial to start and end so that his dad could repay the loaned bail money.
This is where things like WAVE lead. Idiocy that destroys live that have potential to be incredible.
What a Goddamned shame.
At least we have good people like Jon Katz and the/. guys to try and make a difference.
"Even if you can stop some insanity at the school board level, there are still plenty of people higher up the food chain who will promote their cause."
People higher up the food chain aren't promoting their causes, they promote the causes of the moronic schmucks who will vote for someone simply on the basis of religion. Politicians have realized more and more recently that the easiest way to get votes is to worry less about pleasing big corporations or small interest groups and just kiss up to people so stupid that they simply vote for the guy that supports Jesus.
Any polictical figure who actually claims to be a christian is a liar, because if he really believed and wasn't just presenting a facade, the morality of the christian faith would push him to work against the immorality and dishonesty that run rampant in politics. Such a politician would be quickly attack and shut out by every other politician around, who would scramble to protect their own corrupt little niche in the world of corrupt politics.
1: Set your modems to dial the WAVE America phone number endlessly while you are at work. They have to pay for every one of those long distance 1-800 calls. If even a few people did this, it could cost them a bundle. 2: Continue the email campaigns against them. Wading through email takes time, and time is money. 3: Those of you that attack the WAVE America firewall, don't stop. Dealing with that is time, time is money. 4: Call and ask the people answering the phones how they can work for such an amoral corporation over and over again. Over time enough of this on top of other prank calls can lead to stress and employees resigning from the company, leading to high turnover rates that are bad for profits. In short, do ANYTHING you can to hurt Pinkerton and WAVE in the pocketbook, right where it counts.
"As recently as last week, they managed to buy their way into the George W. Bush campaign. "
Actually, most of Silicon Valley, with M$ in the lead, bought Bush before he had even confirmed his canidacy. The Republican party has been trying to pull in tech companies like as of late, in hopes that the companies will finance campaign in exchange for things like UCITA, tax breaks, weak labor laws, increased trade relations with China (cheap labor, plenty of room for internet expansion, etc.) and more.
And Dubya will have to do nothing but cater to the people who paid for his election, because with his lack of experience and intelligence(on top of his serious Oedipus complex), he needs something to fall back on for the 2004 election.
I am really, really, considering moving to Europe.
Why is this flame bait? Because I didn't say "but it would be great if the released it under the GPL because everyone knows that the GPL is God's gift to geeks.?"
Or perhaps it was because I gave Intel a little bit of props instead of just saying something cool about AMD.
One way or another, all I did was ask a simple fscking question related to the topic.
I guess this will just be moderated right down to "0" as "Offtopic."
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This actually caught me a bit off guard. I'm so used to seeing Compaq screw over consumers and businesses with their junky desktops it amazes me that they would do something this cool. I mean, sure they have the *nix test drive thing going on, but they only do that to try and get people to stop running to Dell for servers.
I mean, hell, this is the company that released a line of PC's last year so underpowered and overloaded with proprietary bloatware right out of the box that they tried to blame it on Windows (Sure Windows sucks, but you didn't see any other manufacturer blaming crap performance on 400+mhz machines with 64+ megs of ram on M$), and now they turn around and give people an easy way to have all kinds of fun with an mp3 player under the GPL..
Kinda makes me wonder why tho.. anyone know anything about quality/sales levels of those players?
Or is a big corporation actually just being nice?
I had no clue what half of that was even about. But ya know what? It still seems like this guy has his shit together.
Anyone willing to try and go after America's horribly corrupt system of government(if it can even be called so anymore) by campaign funding in this rapidly expanding and changing electronic mess gets my respect is the best way to put it, I guess.
Time to see how many OS's I can fit on 40+gig drives....
If:
-It had surround sound (5.1, DAMMIT) capabilites
-Preamp outputs. I need to be able to rock the block.
-I could see it work before I paid $600 for it. If it was only a mail order product, I would consider it if shipping was cheap and it had a satisfaction guarantee.
-Has to be able to switch the faceplate readouts from green in the day to amber at night so it doesn't light up the car.
-Make it VERY HARD TO STEAL.
anyway...
Gee, you'd think the people that do these studies might do studies about how MURDERERS ARE FUCKING CRAZY PEOPLE!
All psychology is just pop psychology. Psychologists just say that people who go against the grain are mentally ill and need help. They have been doing it for decades, and will never stop. If you really want to have fun, find a christian psychologist, and ask him if he believes that God created everything, created Jesus, had his son Jesus killed to forgive the sin of the world, and then brought him back to life, and now watches the world and everyone in it all the time so he can send anyone who doesn't agree with him to hell.
He will of course, say yes.
Then tell him you are the second coming of Christ mentioned in the book of revelations and that the world is about to end. Ask him if he thinks you are mentally healthy.
Anyone who trusts a psychologist is an idiot. The only good psychologists do is sorting out the people with physical illnesses that cause mental problems (manic depression, schizophrenia) and send them to a good psychiatrist so he can medically evaluate the situation. Other than that, they are all a bunch of quacks.
Ummm... .07 micron. That means in 5 more years Ultra Sparc IV can debut real late at .07 micron running low clock speeds!
Seriously tho, they need to figure out a better way to make cpu's soon. They can only keep messing around with silicon for so long before we hit a bottleneck. And that would be very, VERY, bad for my Quake framrates.
on Linus, and spitting on the monopolistic pigs at Micro$haft and Intel.
May Transmeta and AMD conquer the world with fast, low priced chips and reign supreme!
How is Caldera any more legit than Babylon X? They are both just a bunch of geeks trying to make money from their computing skills. Unwanted email is unwanted email, regardless of the source.
I don't see any company as less legitimate than any other, (with the exception of scam companies that are just there to bilk investors out of millions and go under) and the same goes for spam. People who work with porn work just as hard to make a buck as the people who work with Linux.
Printed manuals often depend on the quality. For years Microsoft stuff came with huge, annoy, crappy manuals. I don't even know if they include manuals with their stuff anymore that cover more than installation, because all I ever see are OEM/Mass Liscensed versions.
.02 on manuals. Back to working out my summer budget.
I think many commercial products tend to ship with cruddy manuals to get people to take classes taught by the vendor. Big surprise there.
Some graphics packages come with huge, well written, easy to reference manuals. Gotta love those.
Sun Stuff comes with most of the documentation on CD, which makes it easy to just search through it all. Even better, they provide http://docs.sun.com that allows anyone to search through tons of documentation and look for just about anything needed for a Sun product, which is damned handy when i don't have time to root thru a book or dig out the cd.
Man pages of course rock. We use Legato networker at work, and one of the other admins had a spiral bound collection of the man pages. I'm not sure if it came with the software or as the books from a class, but it has to be the best manual I've ever seen for referencing commands, because with the spiral binding I can just flop it open and lay it wherever.
In time tho, I would like to see paper manuals be replaced by documentation on CD, or on the web. It seems terribly lame that big companies throw out thousands of little installation guides and assorted manuals (Such as the big multi language Sun liscense/intall packs, or the little install guides that come with OEM/Corporate version of windows) that never even get read. Imagine if all of those had just been left alone as nice, air cleaning, heat absorbing, shade providing trees.
Game manuals are the lamest. I don't know why the hell games still come with these. It isn't bad enough that game companies waste tons of paper on huge boxes and cardboard inserts, but they pack in manuals that nobody reads. Why the hell would I sit down and read a huge game manual when I could just play through a well designed tutorial? Console game companies realized this a long time ago and now place instructions wherever convienient in the game. PC game companies still insist of dumping in some little book that most people only glance through. They need to just put the manual on the CD in HTML and forget the paper.
Anyway, that's my
If there had been multiple big OS's in the past it would have been bad. Now we have hardware companies working to produce OpenML to replace DirectX just so we have cross platform standards so that as Linux, BE, etc. continue to pick up speed we don't go back to the days when Amiga/DOS/Mac/OS/2 were all like different worlds.
Really? I thought that one was new. Oh well, good to know.
Thanks for pointing that out.
I remember way back when pkzip 2.04g came out. That was like the big defining version of DOS based zip compression.
All the cool bbss were requiring zip back then, although some people tried to argue that arj and ace were better.
In the long run Winzip seems to have made zip the predominate form of compression in the Windows world, although the folks that really know what they are doing switched to rar compression long ago.
I still remember zipping up Doom II to back it up onto floppies 3 months before it was released when some janitor at id leaked it. Man, zip was SO great in those days.
Maybe someone should write a comment into the Linux kernel in memoriam or something.
Anyway....
AMD opened new fabs in both Texas (USA) and Dresden (Germany) last year. They are getting bigger and better everyday.
This is forcing Intel to get their stuff out sooner and cheaper than they every have before, which gives AMD an incentive to work even better.
And look at what it had given us all. The push for better and faster has brought us closer to a 64 bit consumer systems much sooner than many people expected. And with the competition quality is also becoming a thing to focus on. No longer will Sun, Alpha, IBM, and HP dominate the high end server markets. AMD and Intel have 64 bit chips on the horizon that will bring the cost of reliable, scalable servers down much lower than they have been with the previously named server makers able to overcharge like crazy because of demand.
And now AMD is having trouble keeping up with demand, just as their mighty rival Intel has been.
Using this as a guage of technological progress, what a WONDERFUL world we live in.
Imagine if there had been competition like this in the OS market over the last few years. God only knows where Microsoft could have gone against a strong competitor. And now with AMD and Intel pushing Linux as the next big OS, we can finally see every geeks dream of great processors, great operating systems, and most of all-
GREAT CHOICES!
Hasbro sues people because they make clones that are 99% the same game as old Atari titles they own. Stealing something and pasting a new name on it is still stealing. People just assume that since they have been doing freeware ripoffs for decades that they have the right to make a commercial version as well.
A similar situation happened with Tetris. Alexy Pajihitnov (I think that's how the name is spelled) created Tetris while living in communist Russia. While he owned the rights to the whole thing, he never saw any of the money, as it was sucked off by the Soviet government. The international rights were bought and sold many times, almost totally out of his control. Now, years later Russia has opened up, he has moved to the US and is finally getting the rights back together. His company began sending out legal letters asking people to stop selling many of the hundreds of shareware Tetris knockoffs that are always being produced.
The shareware writers then started a campaign, and even a lawsuit, arguing that since they have been infringing on his copyright for years, they shouldn't ever have to stop.
I guess this sort of stuff is inevitable on the net, where people always want to get something for nothing, or as close to nothing as they can get. In a way this reminds me of the Napster case, people trying to support a service that was completly designed from the ground up with the intent of copyright infringment, and then going nuts because a corporation actually wants to make money, thus protecting the investments of its stockholders, which I'm sure more than a few of the complainers are via assorted funds in their 401k's...
Exactly what I was planning to post. We need to all write to congress and tell them to can that asswipe and hire someone that isn't so friggin arrogant that he can't see people reading hard to find books via computer.
12 gigs of mp3's.... YUM! Get one of these and slap it in the glove box (so it doesn't get all hot back in the trunk). Add in a small keyboard and one of those little 9" LCD TV's for a monitor (don't need a high res screen just for mp3's!) and a trackball... run BEOS so it boots up in 20 seconds and is ready by the time I get my seatbelt on! This is gonna rule!
They can't, it's illegal under laws designed to keep comic book/trading card companies from reselling their items on the secondary markets for high prices.
Many of you are recommending that the knowledge seeker go to his local library to do research on nanotech.
/. to further his education.
Has it occured to you people that maybe he doesn't have a good library to go to? Libraries tend to be pretty poorly funded in the US, and and pretty likely to suffer a serious dearth of information on theoretical sciences like nanotechnology. There aren't many good books on it to begin with, and they would likely be considered to obscure by library purchasers who feel the push to keep the shelves well stocked with numerous copies of old Stephen King novels for people too cheap to go blow five bucks on a paperback as opposed to providing people with an environment for scientific research.
Also be sure to think about the quality of search tools in puplic libraries. It is most likely that subjects like nanotech would be best researched in scientific magizines and journals that are not likely well categorized in the kind of search databases public libraries use, which are often terribly generic and designed more for use by young children who only need to know which set of encylcopedias to look in.
For reasearch on nanotech, the web is quite likely the best reference out there, and shame on you for attacking someone for trying to take advantage of an incredible tool like
I used to be a regular of an #efnet channel where all the regulars had become good friends. One of them was a great guy who had spent years struggling through life as a geek in an area where the macho redneck moron stereotype fit 99% of the town, including his family.
/. guys to try and make a difference.
As far as geeks go, he wasn't even much of a geek. But he was intelligent, great with computers as well as electronics (ie: circuitry.). As his life spiraled downward he somehow managed to start a successful web business after dropping out of high school to escape the daily torment. He moved out of his parents house, and was doing very, very well, especially for a 17 year old dropout.
Then Columbine happened. This gave a great idea to some of the idiots he had attended school with: they accused him of threatening to come to the school and shoot them both.
He was immediatly arrested and jailed, and charged with assault. He was to be tried as an adult, and kept in prison until his father somehow raised $20,000 to bail him out.
During the time he was in jail, he became unable to keep up with orders coming in for the stuff he was selling over the web. He was very late on a few, and publicly apoligized for it on some web based message boards. He caught up on his orders, and things were looking bright until a few guys decided to scam him. They reported him for credit card fraud, saying that he had charged them and not shipped them some rather large orders that he had shipped in an attempt to get double what they had ordered. Because he was under suspicion for the previous incident, he was immediatley arrested, and all of his computers and business related equipment were confiscated.
At this point the police leaked the whole thing to the local paper, which reported it all front page, stated that he had been convicted (untrue) and embellished with accounts from his "schoolmates" that he had attempted to molest local boys.
He was soon released from jail after the FBI looked at the fraud case and had it all dismissed. When he got out, however, he had been evicted by his landlord and terminated from his side job as a result of the newspaper article. Unfortunatly, none of the local lawyers were willing to take action on his behalf.
So he got a job several counties away delivering pizzas, and moved back in with his family.
One night, on the way home from work, another driver ran a stopsign and slammed into him at a busy intersection. He didn't want to stop in the intersection, so he drove 100 feet down the road to the first open spot which happened to be his house and went back to the intersection to await the police.
When the police got there, they recognized him, and things changed from a simple accident to him being nailed with a hit-and-run charge and they again arrested him. He was released the next day, and then fired from his pizza job.
The last time I heard from him, his life was pretty much in ruins. He had no job, no car, no money, no computer, and couldn't leave the state to go start over somewhere else because he still had to wait for his trial to start and end so that his dad could repay the loaned bail money.
This is where things like WAVE lead. Idiocy that destroys live that have potential to be incredible.
What a Goddamned shame.
At least we have good people like Jon Katz and the
I agree. Props to Katz for sticking his neck out.
"Even if you can stop some insanity at the school board level, there are still plenty of people higher up the food chain who will promote their cause."
People higher up the food chain aren't promoting their causes, they promote the causes of the moronic schmucks who will vote for someone simply on the basis of religion. Politicians have realized more and more recently that the easiest way to get votes is to worry less about pleasing big corporations or small interest groups and just kiss up to people so stupid that they simply vote for the guy that supports Jesus.
Any polictical figure who actually claims to be a christian is a liar, because if he really believed and wasn't just presenting a facade, the morality of the christian faith would push him to work against the immorality and dishonesty that run rampant in politics. Such a politician would be quickly attack and shut out by every other politician around, who would scramble to protect their own corrupt little niche in the world of corrupt politics.
1: Set your modems to dial the WAVE America phone number endlessly while you are at work. They have to pay for every one of those long distance 1-800 calls. If even a few people did this, it could cost them a bundle. 2: Continue the email campaigns against them. Wading through email takes time, and time is money. 3: Those of you that attack the WAVE America firewall, don't stop. Dealing with that is time, time is money. 4: Call and ask the people answering the phones how they can work for such an amoral corporation over and over again. Over time enough of this on top of other prank calls can lead to stress and employees resigning from the company, leading to high turnover rates that are bad for profits. In short, do ANYTHING you can to hurt Pinkerton and WAVE in the pocketbook, right where it counts.
"As recently as last week, they managed to buy their way into the George W. Bush campaign. "
Actually, most of Silicon Valley, with M$ in the lead, bought Bush before he had even confirmed his canidacy. The Republican party has been trying to pull in tech companies like as of late, in hopes that the companies will finance campaign in exchange for things like UCITA, tax breaks, weak labor laws, increased trade relations with China (cheap labor, plenty of room for internet expansion, etc.) and more.
And Dubya will have to do nothing but cater to the people who paid for his election, because with his lack of experience and intelligence(on top of his serious Oedipus complex), he needs something to fall back on for the 2004 election.
I am really, really, considering moving to Europe.
Why is this flame bait? Because I didn't say "but it would be great if the released it under the GPL because everyone knows that the GPL is God's gift to geeks.?"
Or perhaps it was because I gave Intel a little bit of props instead of just saying something cool about AMD.
One way or another, all I did was ask a simple fscking question related to the topic.
I guess this will just be moderated right down to "0" as "Offtopic."
Not to mention being hella fast, too.