To me, this looks the same as the RIAA requiring radio stations to pay royalties again for content that is webcast. It caused a good many stations to pull their audio streams and hurt consumers.
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I just don't understand how this is good, when the RIAA wanting us to pay twice for the same song on CD and MP3 is wrong. Please someone enlighten me.
Here is the big difference. In the case of the RIAA wanting you to pay twice for the same thing, they are trying to make you, the consumer, give up your rights to make private, fair-use copies of a work that you have paid for. In the case the Supreme Court ruled on, freelance writers want big publishers to pay for using their work to generate more revenues, or at least to pull in more eyeballs, to their sites. There is no fair-use issue in this case.
I'm sorry, but you'll have to explain to me how bundling IE to Windows is not illegal tying. What exactly improved about the operating system by making parts of the browser code inseparable from it. It always looked a lot to me like Microsoft's "integration" of IE with Windows was a lot like a GM welding their brand of car stereo into your chasis so it can't be easily removed, running the speaker wires through sealed conduits to speakers that are built into the fabric of your seats, and routing several of the car's major electrical systems through the stereo. The experience of driving a car is enhanced by having a stereo. Bundling it into the car makes the car a better product (have you ever tried to buy a car without one?). But making it so that it cannot be easily removed an replaced with a competing product is simply using your market advantage to crush competition in a market segment you want to control.
Of course to make the analogy fit more closely you'd have to accept that GM controlled 90% of the auto market and that they only produced four models of car. And you'd have to assume that GM perceived a threat that other stereo manufacturers were interested in expanding their stereo to make the stereo the entire user interface for the car, replacing the speedometer, the gas gauge, the odometer, and potentially even the air conditioning controls, the turn signal and, gasp, the steering wheel. Still I think it is a pretty good parallel.
Your argument just reinforces the point. If the government is tracking us, ask yourself, "For whom?" The answer is, of course, the corporate sponsors who have bought off the politicians - er... contributed to the politicians campaigns - so they could get this type of law passed. They do this so that when you try to exercize your fair use rights and make a personal copy of an audio recording that you have purchased, they can track you down for the lawbreaking fiend you are.
Yes, you are wrong. RSA exists because of fundamental research done by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman and is specifically a variation on an algorithm developed and published by Martin Hellman and Stephen Pohlig at Stanford University two years before RSA filed their patent application.
Re:There is use for a table in zero-gravity ?
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Uh? Nice grade school physics there. What you no doubt meant is inertia, not momentum per se. And you forgot to add is the correlary: a body in motion will continue to travel in the same direction with the same velocity, absent external forces.
Let's see why the correlary is so important. I challenge you to set a coffee cup down on a table without imparting any "bounce" to it. (In other words, try to set it down without making any sound - the clearest indicator that the thing would bounce in space.) Not easy, is it?
Now try it again, but this time also make sure that you don't impart any angular momentum to the cup. (Or, as a better illustration of what I'm talking about here, try to set the puck down on a air hockey table so that it doesn't move after you let go.)
So, Newton was right (down to a scale where relativistic forces take over), but it doesn't help make this table any more useful.
The patent is not for checksumming Web pages. It is for monitoring Web pages (using checksums to determine if they have changed since the last check, or not) and then e-mailing registered users a notification when the pages they are interested in have changed. Geez, doesn't anyone read the actual patents before posting on these things.
Speculating that "transparancy" will reduce crime is like positing that communism should reduce theft. It is incredibly nieve. Looking at communism from an "academic" or theoretical standpoint, it would be easy to say that since everyone shares in the product of each other's labor and resources are allocated according to need, there would be no need to steal, so theft would be non-existant. It didn't work out quite that way in the real world though did it?
Transparency would only work in theoretical ideal world where everyone's inforamation was available equally and powerful elites could not choose to share or not share at their desire. Not very likely in the real world.
Acticle 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution grants Congress the power "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Extending copyrights - and patents for that matter - ad absurdium does not "promote the progress of science and the useful arts". In fact, it has just the opposite effect. A limited time to exclusively profit from one's work provides an added incentive to perform and publish creative work. (Although there is already an incentive without this added benefit, because if you don't publish your work, what have you really accomplished and who will know?) Providing extremely long periods of exclusive rights simply promotes the lining of people's pockets beyond any reasonable simple incentive.
This does not promote the progress of science or the "useful arts", but disincentivizes progress. For example, let's say you come up with a great idea for an invention or book or whatever that is based on somebody else's work. You would probably want to publish what you have come up with, but you might decide not to do so when you figure out that you will have to pay a royalty or licensing fee to the person who published the idea your work is based upon.
Plus, these ridiculously long copyrights and patents are anti-free market. It artificially inflates the price that a given idea or work would be worth if there were more than one source available. So, during the protected period of an invention's or creative work's life the price paid does not reflect it's true value or worth to society as a whole, or to those who would use it, but rather includes some value based solely on the exclusivity.
Extending copyrights (or patents) retroactively means that you are adding incentive to publish or share ideas to those who already decided that the previous incentive was sufficient - otherwise, why would they have published under the old laws. Since the Constitution only grants Congress the power to give copyright and patent protection "To promote the progress of science and the useful arts", retroactive extention of these protections is clearly unconstitutional.
Mickey Mouse is not protected specifically by copyright. He is a trademark of Disney. As such the protection for use of his specific image will not expire. I'm not sure how this would reconcile with someone using the trademark, Mickey Mouse, in a story whose copyright had expired. Once the copyright expires on "Steamboat Willie" will anyone be able to market copies of it, since it includes a Disney trademark as it's main character?
Okay, for the sake of cheaper desktop support you decide to allow PCAnywhere (or VNC, or ReachOut, or RemoteAdministrator, or CarbonCopy, or SSH, or...) through your firewall. Let's assume you're not totally stupid and so you only allow connections from the range of IP addresses assigned to your support company. Two questions then...
How secure is their network, and how do you know. Because if they have the excellent security practices of some of these companies that I have dealt with - like having Internet connections with no firewall at all - then your network just became as secure as their's. Nice. Or, let's say that they do this over dedicated lines rather than over the Internet. How many other companies do they serve and how do they protect your network from their others customers.
Second question: Who is sitting at that helpdesk PC at your service provider? Does your service provider have the same, or better, hiring practices as you do? How do you know that they aren't hiring Kevin Mitnick? (Don't get me wrong. Kevin has paid his debt to society and deserves the opportunity to find gainful employment, just like anybody else. Only, not at my company thank you.)
what Fortune 10 company has been driving the American economy in the last 10 years
Dude, what Fortune 10 company would that be: General Motors, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Ford, General Electric, IBM, Citigroup, AT&T, Philip Morris or Boeing. (See the list at Fortune 500.) Microsoft is number 84 of the list (216 on the Global 500).
Just because you worship Microsoft doesn't mean that Shrub Bush thinks it is driving the American economy. Dubya knows that energy is still king in the American economy. (Read a newspaper if you haven't seen what is sending us into a "recession".) Of course, Microsoft and Bill did give a lot of money to Dubya and the party, so a slap on the wrist may be called for, but it won't be because Microsoft is so vital to our economy.
I would be willing to wager that each of the organizations you mentioned use MS software to run their business.
Sorry again, but this is a common mistake. Very few organizations use Microsoft to "run their business". They use Microsoft for file servers where they store their mountains of Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. But, despite what the paper-pushers and PHB's of the world might want you to believe, Word and Excel documents, and most especially PowerPoint presentations do not run the business. And they could just as easily be ported over to Word Perfect, WordPro, StarOffice, 1-2-3, or any of thousands of other business document formats. (We did it before from WordStar to Word Perfect and then from Word Perfect to Microsoft Word.) And for e-mail and other group-ware, Lotus Notes is still more popular with corporate America - although I can't for the life of me figure out why companies think this brain-dead software with its piss-poor user interface is worth $450 per user.
Most serious software for "running the business" runs on high-speed servers from Sun, IBM, HP, DG and others. The critical business software is giant Oracle databases. And even there Oracle is not all that crucial since a database is a database. The data could just as easily be put onto a Sybase, Informix, DB/2 or other database system.
the fact that Microsoft is the most powerful, influential company in the United States
Sorry, but until it's not all about money anymore (yeah, right) either General Motors - in terms of revenues - or General Electric - in terms of market capitalization - is the most powerful, influential company in the United States. Microsoft is number 84 on the Fortune 500. In deference to our international friends, Microsoft is only number 216 on Fortune's Global 5000. Hell, Microsoft didn't even know what a lobbyist was until the anti-trust case was filed.
The fact that Microsoft's stock price has dropped from a high of $120 per share in December of 1999 to around $58 per share today is a pretty good indicator of a company on the ropes, if not dying. Regardless of how much you love Bill Gates that does not change the fact that Microsoft is only as powerful as it is because it used anti-competitive practices to ensure that we all had to use their products regardless of how much we thought they sucked. I would challenge you to point out the last time Microsoft was truly innovative and didn't just "adopt and extend" some existing technology.
Well, for one thing, the great and mighty Knuth uses very poor examples to try and make his point. The words "non-zero" and "soft-ware" are much less like "e-mail" than are lots of words that are still hyphenated. For example: T-bill, u-turn, t-shirt, I-beam, o-ring, a-frame, s-curve, t-square, v-neck, A-team, U-boat, H-bomb, D-Day (which can also still stand alone as "D Day"), X-Men, f-stop, g-string, j-bar, Q-Tip, R-value, T-ball,T-bone, X-Files, X-rated and x-ray.
About the only counter example I can think of is x-ray which I have seen spelled xray.
Okay, so the DoD gets "attacked" 22,000 times a year. I'm not suprised since BlackIce Defender tells me that my Win2K system is "attacked" between 12 and 20 times a day, or about 5,000 times a year. Of course it depends on what you call an attack.
Sorry, but you're wrong. Texas Election Code Title 8, Voting Systems, and Title 13, Recounts, provide for manual recounts specifically for voting methods where "a voter indicates a vote by punching a hole in the ballot". Or for "ballots counted by automatic tabulating equipment". No specific mention of "Scantron"-type - color in the circle - ballots is made in either Title.
As for the amazingly bloody wars described in the Torah and the rest of the Jewish Bible, they were quite the norm at the time. The Amalakites, for example, are singled out for destruction because rather than attacking the Hebrews head-on (where the men would be), they attacked the rear, where the women, children, and the feeble would be.
This is, of course, anti-Gentile horseshit. So the Amalakites were all killed because they played dirty too. How about the Midianites:
[Num. 31:1] They warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses, and they slay all the males. And they took all women as captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods. And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire.
Moses said, "Have you saved all the women alive? Now kill every male among the little one, and kill every woman that has known a man by lying with him, but all the young girls who have not known a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.
My point, of course, was not that the Isrealites were particular bastards for they way they waged war. More or less everyone during the period of the Isrealite conquest of Canaan waged war in this way. And since then people of almost every religious faith have waged war similarly (possibly excepting the Budhists).
My point was that despite the strong prohibition issued by God to Moses that "Thou shalt not kill" (or commit murder, or however the Old Testament Hebrew is supposed to be interpreted), that God subsequently went on and encouraged the people of Isreal to do just that - kill - so that they could come into possession of the "promised land" of Canaan.
Now you may say that it is not murder if God tells you to do it (although the "Son of Sam" victims families might disagree with you), but there does seem to be an inherent contradiction here. Is it simply "Thou shalt not kill" or is it really more like "Thou shalt not kill, unless I tell you otherwise, or if they attack you first, or if they don't follow our religion and encourage our people to follow their's (the Midianites and Moabites). Oh, and don't kill unintentionally either, although I don't feel nearly as strongly about that. And of course anyone who breaks our laws is subject to stoning or some equally painful death." My point is that despite Dubya's "born again" faith and rightous moral stances, it is very easy for him to carry out the death penalty and it doesn't really contradict anything in the Bible if you read it like a lawyer would.
Denton County? That's nothing. In Harris County...
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If what Denton County is doing bothers you, try the most populous county in Texas - Harris County - which encompasses Houston and its surrounding area. At the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector's web site (http://www.tax.co.arris.tx.us) you can search through voter registration records and tax records, either by a person's name or address. No birthday "password", just search for a name or address and there are the records.
Also, for two dollars, you can get the full vehicle title information (including owners name and address, purchase price, trade in value, and the names and addresses of any leinholders) from any Texas county tax office, or Department of Transportation office. If you know the vehicle's identification number (VIN) you can get the same information over the phone. (At least this is not online... yet.)
Of course, these are all public records, so I'm not sure what the big deal is. Even for non-public records, getting personal information on somebody is not difficult.
I don't know about the rest of the United States, but down here in Texas a simple 1-411 call to Southwestern Bell and they will tell you the name and address associated with any listed number you give them. For about thirty bucks a private investigator can get you unlisted numbers and cell phone owners names and addresses. (And there are some PI's who will do this by e-mail over the Internet without asking you for anything more than a credit card.)
Actually, thou shall not kill other members of the "chosen" people is the way it seems to have been intended, based on the rest of the Old Testament (or the Jewish Bible, if you prefer). God not only seems to have permitted the killing, and murder - what else could you really call the manditory death of men, women and children of Isreal's enemies, it would certainly be considered murder or genocide under current international conventions of war - but to actually have encouraged killing and murder, aided it, and in some cases done it Himself. But not against the chosen people.
Dubya, considering himself born-again, and therefor one of the chosen people, is fine with the killing of "infidels" (which one who kills would obviously be since killing is not permitted), which is well supported in the Old Testament. Only problem is that the New Testament teachings of Jesus don't support this nearly as well, since anyone can become one of the chosen people through faith in Jesus. And in at least one obvious case - Karla Fay Tucker, the pickaxe murderess - Bush supported the execution of someone who had confessed their sins, asked God for absolution, and accepted Jesus as her personal Saviour; thereby making her one of the chosen people too, in theory.
It is realtively easy to both support and tear down many ethical arguments based on ambiguous portions of the Bible.
I've actually heard of this being done (but it may well be an urban legend). However, it didn't exactly work out as planned. The feds were either tipped to the presence of the device or found it. They proceeded to remove the computer equipment from the room through a door-sized hole they knocked into a previously door-free wall.
I really don't see the point of Windows Encrypted File System, or other encyption systems that let you get to the encrypted information once you've logged in (i.e. no additional password, phrase, key, or whatever required). It is trivial for me to boot you Windows 2000 machine from a floppy and reset the local Administrator password (search for this utility yourself, I'm not going to give an URL for it). From there it is very simple to get in as any other user, including reading their Encrypted File System files.
If you really want to protect your files, use stand-alone encryption software (Rijndahl, maybe) and very long keys (combined with two or three factor authentication if you really want security).
Wired magazine had this report about the same air-powered car company back in May of 1999. They reported that Mexico was going to buy some 40,000 of these things to use as taxis in Mexico City. Anyone know if this sale actually happened?
Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..
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While what Mr. Knuth says is true in general for nonce words, it does not hold in all cases. The most frequent exception is nonce words that consist of an abbreviation hypenated onto a word. Remeber that the "e" in e-mail is an abbreviation for electronic, and not a full word by itself. Some very clear examples include A-bomb, H-bomb, X-ray, and the less radiation intensive A-frame (although in this last case the "A" is not an abbreviation, but simply the letter A itself, refering to the shape of the construction).
Would Knuth (or/.'ers) claim by extention that these should be abomb, hbomb (How would you pronounce that one?), xray and aframe. I say we should stick with the established standard, although I will concede that "e-mail" with a lower case "e" has become widely enough used that "E-mail" with an upper case "E" is probably unnecessary.
I love how everyone gets all worked up about what the candidates positions are on this type of issue. It's not like when whoever gets elected that there will suddenly be this stupid law passed exactly like the described it. There is this thing called a Congress that does have some say in the issue.
So what we are more likely to end up with, rather than either of the two stated possitions is something else entirely. Something like a law that mandates that all federally funded pre-school programs must install filtering software that blocks porn and any discussion of patent and copy right issues, and simultaniously sets up a federal grant to study whether the honking of Canada geese during their annual migration through the United States is contributing significantly to global warming, assuming that global warming is really happening.
Let's see. In the most recent debate, Bush claimed that the three men convicted in the dragging death of James Bird were all given the death penalty and were going to die for their crime. Actually, only two were given the death penalty. One was sentenced to life in prison.
So was Bush lying, stretching the truth, or as I suspect, he just didn't really know, because he's not all that aware of what is actually happening in his home state and relies on his "advisors" to tell him?
And just so it's clear that this is not the only incident of Bush stretching the truth... There are significant questions as to whether Gov. Bush actually fulfilled his service obligation in the Air National Guard. Nobody in the unit he was supposed to be attached to in Alabama can seem to remember him. Army paperwork shows no record of Bush ever reporting for duty in Alabama.
Then there is education reform in Texas, which Bush is claiming so much responsibility for. Education reform in Texas actually got started two Governers ago, when Mark White (Democrat) was Governer of Texas. It continued under Ann Richards (Democrat) and has, to be fair continued under Governer Bush. But for Bush to claim any real responsibility for education reform in Texas is at best a stretch.
Want me to go on? How about Bush's much touted "tax cut" in Texas, giving "some of the surplus back to the people". Well, I live in Texas and let me tell you how it really worked. It is true that the State property tax rate was cut. When that happened, all of the counties, cities, college districts, school boards, and other taxing districts that rely on state funding immediately had to raise their property tax rates to compensate for the decreased funding they would receive from the state. Net effect - my total property taxes (and those of everyone in my city that I have spoken to) have actually increased. Nice tax cut.
Then there is the "Compationate Conservative" thing. How compationate is it for the state of Texas to have the second highest percentage of uninsured people in the nation? Particularly when the majority of those without insurance are Latino children (who Bush otherwise acts so fond of). How compationate is it that Bush actively tried to limit the access that children in Texas had to the new federal CHIP program that provides affordable insurance to children of low income families?
Bush is a liar too (aren't all politicians). He's just not called on it much.
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To me, this looks the same as the RIAA requiring radio stations to pay royalties again for content that is webcast. It caused a good many stations to pull their audio streams and hurt consumers.
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I just don't understand how this is good, when the RIAA wanting us to pay twice for the same song on CD and MP3 is wrong. Please someone enlighten me.
Here is the big difference. In the case of the RIAA wanting you to pay twice for the same thing, they are trying to make you, the consumer, give up your rights to make private, fair-use copies of a work that you have paid for. In the case the Supreme Court ruled on, freelance writers want big publishers to pay for using their work to generate more revenues, or at least to pull in more eyeballs, to their sites. There is no fair-use issue in this case.
I'm sorry, but you'll have to explain to me how bundling IE to Windows is not illegal tying. What exactly improved about the operating system by making parts of the browser code inseparable from it. It always looked a lot to me like Microsoft's "integration" of IE with Windows was a lot like a GM welding their brand of car stereo into your chasis so it can't be easily removed, running the speaker wires through sealed conduits to speakers that are built into the fabric of your seats, and routing several of the car's major electrical systems through the stereo. The experience of driving a car is enhanced by having a stereo. Bundling it into the car makes the car a better product (have you ever tried to buy a car without one?). But making it so that it cannot be easily removed an replaced with a competing product is simply using your market advantage to crush competition in a market segment you want to control.
Of course to make the analogy fit more closely you'd have to accept that GM controlled 90% of the auto market and that they only produced four models of car. And you'd have to assume that GM perceived a threat that other stereo manufacturers were interested in expanding their stereo to make the stereo the entire user interface for the car, replacing the speedometer, the gas gauge, the odometer, and potentially even the air conditioning controls, the turn signal and, gasp, the steering wheel. Still I think it is a pretty good parallel.
Your argument just reinforces the point. If the government is tracking us, ask yourself, "For whom?" The answer is, of course, the corporate sponsors who have bought off the politicians - er... contributed to the politicians campaigns - so they could get this type of law passed. They do this so that when you try to exercize your fair use rights and make a personal copy of an audio recording that you have purchased, they can track you down for the lawbreaking fiend you are.
Yes, you are wrong. RSA exists because of fundamental research done by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman and is specifically a variation on an algorithm developed and published by Martin Hellman and Stephen Pohlig at Stanford University two years before RSA filed their patent application.
Uh? Nice grade school physics there. What you no doubt meant is inertia, not momentum per se. And you forgot to add is the correlary: a body in motion will continue to travel in the same direction with the same velocity, absent external forces.
Let's see why the correlary is so important. I challenge you to set a coffee cup down on a table without imparting any "bounce" to it. (In other words, try to set it down without making any sound - the clearest indicator that the thing would bounce in space.) Not easy, is it?
Now try it again, but this time also make sure that you don't impart any angular momentum to the cup. (Or, as a better illustration of what I'm talking about here, try to set the puck down on a air hockey table so that it doesn't move after you let go.)
So, Newton was right (down to a scale where relativistic forces take over), but it doesn't help make this table any more useful.
The patent is not for checksumming Web pages. It is for monitoring Web pages (using checksums to determine if they have changed since the last check, or not) and then e-mailing registered users a notification when the pages they are interested in have changed. Geez, doesn't anyone read the actual patents before posting on these things.
Speculating that "transparancy" will reduce crime is like positing that communism should reduce theft. It is incredibly nieve. Looking at communism from an "academic" or theoretical standpoint, it would be easy to say that since everyone shares in the product of each other's labor and resources are allocated according to need, there would be no need to steal, so theft would be non-existant. It didn't work out quite that way in the real world though did it?
Transparency would only work in theoretical ideal world where everyone's inforamation was available equally and powerful elites could not choose to share or not share at their desire. Not very likely in the real world.
Acticle 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution grants Congress the power "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Extending copyrights - and patents for that matter - ad absurdium does not "promote the progress of science and the useful arts". In fact, it has just the opposite effect. A limited time to exclusively profit from one's work provides an added incentive to perform and publish creative work. (Although there is already an incentive without this added benefit, because if you don't publish your work, what have you really accomplished and who will know?) Providing extremely long periods of exclusive rights simply promotes the lining of people's pockets beyond any reasonable simple incentive.
This does not promote the progress of science or the "useful arts", but disincentivizes progress. For example, let's say you come up with a great idea for an invention or book or whatever that is based on somebody else's work. You would probably want to publish what you have come up with, but you might decide not to do so when you figure out that you will have to pay a royalty or licensing fee to the person who published the idea your work is based upon.
Plus, these ridiculously long copyrights and patents are anti-free market. It artificially inflates the price that a given idea or work would be worth if there were more than one source available. So, during the protected period of an invention's or creative work's life the price paid does not reflect it's true value or worth to society as a whole, or to those who would use it, but rather includes some value based solely on the exclusivity.
Extending copyrights (or patents) retroactively means that you are adding incentive to publish or share ideas to those who already decided that the previous incentive was sufficient - otherwise, why would they have published under the old laws. Since the Constitution only grants Congress the power to give copyright and patent protection "To promote the progress of science and the useful arts", retroactive extention of these protections is clearly unconstitutional.
Mickey Mouse is not protected specifically by copyright. He is a trademark of Disney. As such the protection for use of his specific image will not expire. I'm not sure how this would reconcile with someone using the trademark, Mickey Mouse, in a story whose copyright had expired. Once the copyright expires on "Steamboat Willie" will anyone be able to market copies of it, since it includes a Disney trademark as it's main character?
Okay, for the sake of cheaper desktop support you decide to allow PCAnywhere (or VNC, or ReachOut, or RemoteAdministrator, or CarbonCopy, or SSH, or ...) through your firewall. Let's assume you're not totally stupid and so you only allow connections from the range of IP addresses assigned to your support company. Two questions then...
How secure is their network, and how do you know. Because if they have the excellent security practices of some of these companies that I have dealt with - like having Internet connections with no firewall at all - then your network just became as secure as their's. Nice. Or, let's say that they do this over dedicated lines rather than over the Internet. How many other companies do they serve and how do they protect your network from their others customers.
Second question: Who is sitting at that helpdesk PC at your service provider? Does your service provider have the same, or better, hiring practices as you do? How do you know that they aren't hiring Kevin Mitnick? (Don't get me wrong. Kevin has paid his debt to society and deserves the opportunity to find gainful employment, just like anybody else. Only, not at my company thank you.)
what Fortune 10 company has been driving the American economy in the last 10 years
Dude, what Fortune 10 company would that be: General Motors, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Ford, General Electric, IBM, Citigroup, AT&T, Philip Morris or Boeing. (See the list at Fortune 500.) Microsoft is number 84 of the list (216 on the Global 500).
Just because you worship Microsoft doesn't mean that Shrub Bush thinks it is driving the American economy. Dubya knows that energy is still king in the American economy. (Read a newspaper if you haven't seen what is sending us into a "recession".) Of course, Microsoft and Bill did give a lot of money to Dubya and the party, so a slap on the wrist may be called for, but it won't be because Microsoft is so vital to our economy.
I would be willing to wager that each of the organizations you mentioned use MS software to run their business.
Sorry again, but this is a common mistake. Very few organizations use Microsoft to "run their business". They use Microsoft for file servers where they store their mountains of Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. But, despite what the paper-pushers and PHB's of the world might want you to believe, Word and Excel documents, and most especially PowerPoint presentations do not run the business. And they could just as easily be ported over to Word Perfect, WordPro, StarOffice, 1-2-3, or any of thousands of other business document formats. (We did it before from WordStar to Word Perfect and then from Word Perfect to Microsoft Word.) And for e-mail and other group-ware, Lotus Notes is still more popular with corporate America - although I can't for the life of me figure out why companies think this brain-dead software with its piss-poor user interface is worth $450 per user.
Most serious software for "running the business" runs on high-speed servers from Sun, IBM, HP, DG and others. The critical business software is giant Oracle databases. And even there Oracle is not all that crucial since a database is a database. The data could just as easily be put onto a Sybase, Informix, DB/2 or other database system.
the fact that Microsoft is the most powerful, influential company in the United States
Sorry, but until it's not all about money anymore (yeah, right) either General Motors - in terms of revenues - or General Electric - in terms of market capitalization - is the most powerful, influential company in the United States. Microsoft is number 84 on the Fortune 500. In deference to our international friends, Microsoft is only number 216 on Fortune's Global 5000. Hell, Microsoft didn't even know what a lobbyist was until the anti-trust case was filed.
The fact that Microsoft's stock price has dropped from a high of $120 per share in December of 1999 to around $58 per share today is a pretty good indicator of a company on the ropes, if not dying. Regardless of how much you love Bill Gates that does not change the fact that Microsoft is only as powerful as it is because it used anti-competitive practices to ensure that we all had to use their products regardless of how much we thought they sucked. I would challenge you to point out the last time Microsoft was truly innovative and didn't just "adopt and extend" some existing technology.
Well, for one thing, the great and mighty Knuth uses very poor examples to try and make his point. The words "non-zero" and "soft-ware" are much less like "e-mail" than are lots of words that are still hyphenated. For example: T-bill, u-turn, t-shirt, I-beam, o-ring, a-frame, s-curve, t-square, v-neck, A-team, U-boat, H-bomb, D-Day (which can also still stand alone as "D Day"), X-Men, f-stop, g-string, j-bar, Q-Tip, R-value, T-ball,T-bone, X-Files, X-rated and x-ray.
About the only counter example I can think of is x-ray which I have seen spelled xray.
Okay, so the DoD gets "attacked" 22,000 times a year. I'm not suprised since BlackIce Defender tells me that my Win2K system is "attacked" between 12 and 20 times a day, or about 5,000 times a year. Of course it depends on what you call an attack.
Sorry, but you're wrong. Texas Election Code Title 8, Voting Systems, and Title 13, Recounts, provide for manual recounts specifically for voting methods where "a voter indicates a vote by punching a hole in the ballot". Or for "ballots counted by automatic tabulating equipment". No specific mention of "Scantron"-type - color in the circle - ballots is made in either Title.
As for the amazingly bloody wars described in the Torah and the rest of the Jewish Bible, they were quite the norm at the time. The Amalakites, for example, are singled out for destruction because rather than attacking the Hebrews head-on (where the men would be), they attacked the rear, where the women, children, and the feeble would be.
This is, of course, anti-Gentile horseshit. So the Amalakites were all killed because they played dirty too. How about the Midianites:
[Num. 31:1] They warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses, and they slay all the males. And they took all women as captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods. And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire.
Moses said, "Have you saved all the women alive? Now kill every male among the little one, and kill every woman that has known a man by lying with him, but all the young girls who have not known a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.
My point, of course, was not that the Isrealites were particular bastards for they way they waged war. More or less everyone during the period of the Isrealite conquest of Canaan waged war in this way. And since then people of almost every religious faith have waged war similarly (possibly excepting the Budhists).
My point was that despite the strong prohibition issued by God to Moses that "Thou shalt not kill" (or commit murder, or however the Old Testament Hebrew is supposed to be interpreted), that God subsequently went on and encouraged the people of Isreal to do just that - kill - so that they could come into possession of the "promised land" of Canaan.
Now you may say that it is not murder if God tells you to do it (although the "Son of Sam" victims families might disagree with you), but there does seem to be an inherent contradiction here. Is it simply "Thou shalt not kill" or is it really more like "Thou shalt not kill, unless I tell you otherwise, or if they attack you first, or if they don't follow our religion and encourage our people to follow their's (the Midianites and Moabites). Oh, and don't kill unintentionally either, although I don't feel nearly as strongly about that. And of course anyone who breaks our laws is subject to stoning or some equally painful death." My point is that despite Dubya's "born again" faith and rightous moral stances, it is very easy for him to carry out the death penalty and it doesn't really contradict anything in the Bible if you read it like a lawyer would.
If what Denton County is doing bothers you, try the most populous county in Texas - Harris County - which encompasses Houston and its surrounding area. At the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector's web site (http://www.tax.co.arris.tx.us) you can search through voter registration records and tax records, either by a person's name or address. No birthday "password", just search for a name or address and there are the records.
... yet.)
Also, for two dollars, you can get the full vehicle title information (including owners name and address, purchase price, trade in value, and the names and addresses of any leinholders) from any Texas county tax office, or Department of Transportation office. If you know the vehicle's identification number (VIN) you can get the same information over the phone. (At least this is not online
Of course, these are all public records, so I'm not sure what the big deal is. Even for non-public records, getting personal information on somebody is not difficult.
I don't know about the rest of the United States, but down here in Texas a simple 1-411 call to Southwestern Bell and they will tell you the name and address associated with any listed number you give them. For about thirty bucks a private investigator can get you unlisted numbers and cell phone owners names and addresses. (And there are some PI's who will do this by e-mail over the Internet without asking you for anything more than a credit card.)
Actually, thou shall not kill other members of the "chosen" people is the way it seems to have been intended, based on the rest of the Old Testament (or the Jewish Bible, if you prefer). God not only seems to have permitted the killing, and murder - what else could you really call the manditory death of men, women and children of Isreal's enemies, it would certainly be considered murder or genocide under current international conventions of war - but to actually have encouraged killing and murder, aided it, and in some cases done it Himself. But not against the chosen people.
Dubya, considering himself born-again, and therefor one of the chosen people, is fine with the killing of "infidels" (which one who kills would obviously be since killing is not permitted), which is well supported in the Old Testament. Only problem is that the New Testament teachings of Jesus don't support this nearly as well, since anyone can become one of the chosen people through faith in Jesus. And in at least one obvious case - Karla Fay Tucker, the pickaxe murderess - Bush supported the execution of someone who had confessed their sins, asked God for absolution, and accepted Jesus as her personal Saviour; thereby making her one of the chosen people too, in theory.
It is realtively easy to both support and tear down many ethical arguments based on ambiguous portions of the Bible.
I've actually heard of this being done (but it may well be an urban legend). However, it didn't exactly work out as planned. The feds were either tipped to the presence of the device or found it. They proceeded to remove the computer equipment from the room through a door-sized hole they knocked into a previously door-free wall.
I really don't see the point of Windows Encrypted File System, or other encyption systems that let you get to the encrypted information once you've logged in (i.e. no additional password, phrase, key, or whatever required). It is trivial for me to boot you Windows 2000 machine from a floppy and reset the local Administrator password (search for this utility yourself, I'm not going to give an URL for it). From there it is very simple to get in as any other user, including reading their Encrypted File System files.
If you really want to protect your files, use stand-alone encryption software (Rijndahl, maybe) and very long keys (combined with two or three factor authentication if you really want security).
Wired magazine had this report about the same air-powered car company back in May of 1999. They reported that Mexico was going to buy some 40,000 of these things to use as taxis in Mexico City. Anyone know if this sale actually happened?
While what Mr. Knuth says is true in general for nonce words, it does not hold in all cases. The most frequent exception is nonce words that consist of an abbreviation hypenated onto a word. Remeber that the "e" in e-mail is an abbreviation for electronic, and not a full word by itself. Some very clear examples include A-bomb, H-bomb, X-ray, and the less radiation intensive A-frame (although in this last case the "A" is not an abbreviation, but simply the letter A itself, refering to the shape of the construction).
/.'ers) claim by extention that these should be abomb, hbomb (How would you pronounce that one?), xray and aframe. I say we should stick with the established standard, although I will concede that "e-mail" with a lower case "e" has become widely enough used that "E-mail" with an upper case "E" is probably unnecessary.
Would Knuth (or
I love how everyone gets all worked up about what the candidates positions are on this type of issue. It's not like when whoever gets elected that there will suddenly be this stupid law passed exactly like the described it. There is this thing called a Congress that does have some say in the issue.
So what we are more likely to end up with, rather than either of the two stated possitions is something else entirely. Something like a law that mandates that all federally funded pre-school programs must install filtering software that blocks porn and any discussion of patent and copy right issues, and simultaniously sets up a federal grant to study whether the honking of Canada geese during their annual migration through the United States is contributing significantly to global warming, assuming that global warming is really happening.
Let's see. In the most recent debate, Bush claimed that the three men convicted in the dragging death of James Bird were all given the death penalty and were going to die for their crime. Actually, only two were given the death penalty. One was sentenced to life in prison.
... There are significant questions as to whether Gov. Bush actually fulfilled his service obligation in the Air National Guard. Nobody in the unit he was supposed to be attached to in Alabama can seem to remember him. Army paperwork shows no record of Bush ever reporting for duty in Alabama.
So was Bush lying, stretching the truth, or as I suspect, he just didn't really know, because he's not all that aware of what is actually happening in his home state and relies on his "advisors" to tell him?
And just so it's clear that this is not the only incident of Bush stretching the truth
Then there is education reform in Texas, which Bush is claiming so much responsibility for. Education reform in Texas actually got started two Governers ago, when Mark White (Democrat) was Governer of Texas. It continued under Ann Richards (Democrat) and has, to be fair continued under Governer Bush. But for Bush to claim any real responsibility for education reform in Texas is at best a stretch.
Want me to go on? How about Bush's much touted "tax cut" in Texas, giving "some of the surplus back to the people". Well, I live in Texas and let me tell you how it really worked. It is true that the State property tax rate was cut. When that happened, all of the counties, cities, college districts, school boards, and other taxing districts that rely on state funding immediately had to raise their property tax rates to compensate for the decreased funding they would receive from the state. Net effect - my total property taxes (and those of everyone in my city that I have spoken to) have actually increased. Nice tax cut.
Then there is the "Compationate Conservative" thing. How compationate is it for the state of Texas to have the second highest percentage of uninsured people in the nation? Particularly when the majority of those without insurance are Latino children (who Bush otherwise acts so fond of). How compationate is it that Bush actively tried to limit the access that children in Texas had to the new federal CHIP program that provides affordable insurance to children of low income families?
Bush is a liar too (aren't all politicians). He's just not called on it much.