I, like a great many/. faithful, was an awkward, geeky child. I do not know if this was due to all the D & D and late night BBS sessions, but that certainly did not help. I can tell you that my friends who were attractive enough to draw hot girls at the 11-13 year range had a tendency to stop showing up at our Friday night pizzafests and Boy Scout weekends because they had what we can loosely term a life. Others clued in through time for various reasons - I was a decent guitar player and when people started to figure that out (~16 years old) I started to get invited to parties that actually had girls at them. Suddenly, I wasn't coding C64's and perfecting my Eddie Van Halen solos with my free time - I had discovered girls and what they were for. As awesome as this was, it wasn't contributing to my IQ near as much as my previous activities and it (they) took a lot of my time. So smart kids have less sex? This should read "Kids who can get sex automatically dumb down because it's pretty much all they think about".
There are definite rules to patent law, and patent lawyers know them. Having one in charge of this office makes sense. If this office gets politicized, you run a very real risk of getting an institution that picks and chooses who gets the gravy based on general political demographics (i.e., pharma gets gravy, software gets shaft).
This administration USUALLY staffs appointee positions with partisan know-nothings (know a littles sometimes, if a partisan one is available) with the intent of overtly politicizing all institutional decision making to either stifle annoying social welfare programs (HUD, FEMA) or gain advantage for their supporters (AG's office, this). They certainly aren't the first to do this, they've just taken what was a tendency towards political favoritism with the occasional called in "favor" staining a lot of administrations (most) and turned it into a core policy with the affected institutions' new overlords brazenly throwing SOP into the dumper to further the partisan agenda. Their intent seems to clearly lean towards "get in line or pay the price" and I applaud any institution which stands up to this. You go patent boys!!!
On a side note, I posit that the above rant supports my contention that the current Harry Potter movie is a scathing indictment of the Bush Administration.
You don't need their disk. I've hooked them up for about 6-10 people and the first thing I do is trash that. Just set up the basic DHCP way for single machines and if you're routered, DHCP your WAN side and it's all gravy - takes 2 minutes tops.
There are rules (some call them laws) about types of data that can be gathered and how. This administration wants to reinterpret the rules in a way advantageous to them to the point that you can say that they don't think these rules (laws) apply to them. This is of course not the only area in which this pattern has been evident from this administration.
And you're right - a dictatorship is when only one ruler believes that laws don't apply to them. When a whole administration believes this it is called fascism.
As a DB Developer who works for marketing organizations I have to say that you should be VERY afraid of what both parties already know about you via legal channels - done for targeting of campaign funds. Add in easy, near-unlimited access!
Say you have a hot-button district coming into an election year (and they already know it's a hot-button district ahead of everybody else because they have a monstrous data store that would be illegal for any other entity). Do you really think info for a nice police sting to that area, targeted to opposition voters/wrongdoers won't be executed to sway the balance?
Politicization of non-political offices is a cornerstone of this administration. Another very crucial governmental function becoming too busy serving Washington to serve the people (that being law enforcement, from the CIA down to beat cops) is just be a side effect of this insidious effort.
How about clarifying the ROL (Return On Legislation) for tax breaks and coming up with more misrepresetative numbers for bad policies and scare tactics? You want to throw better data at W(ashington) for those efforts? They want data more than they want crooks. This is the information age, people.
Privacy has a cost, but so does the lack of it and that cost is our freedom.
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I, like a great many /. faithful, was an awkward, geeky child. I do not know if this was due to all the D & D and late night BBS sessions, but that certainly did not help. I can tell you that my friends who were attractive enough to draw hot girls at the 11-13 year range had a tendency to stop showing up at our Friday night pizzafests and Boy Scout weekends because they had what we can loosely term a life. Others clued in through time for various reasons - I was a decent guitar player and when people started to figure that out (~16 years old) I started to get invited to parties that actually had girls at them. Suddenly, I wasn't coding C64's and perfecting my Eddie Van Halen solos with my free time - I had discovered girls and what they were for. As awesome as this was, it wasn't contributing to my IQ near as much as my previous activities and it (they) took a lot of my time. So smart kids have less sex? This should read "Kids who can get sex automatically dumb down because it's pretty much all they think about".
There are definite rules to patent law, and patent lawyers know them. Having one in charge of this office makes sense. If this office gets politicized, you run a very real risk of getting an institution that picks and chooses who gets the gravy based on general political demographics (i.e., pharma gets gravy, software gets shaft).
This administration USUALLY staffs appointee positions with partisan know-nothings (know a littles sometimes, if a partisan one is available) with the intent of overtly politicizing all institutional decision making to either stifle annoying social welfare programs (HUD, FEMA) or gain advantage for their supporters (AG's office, this). They certainly aren't the first to do this, they've just taken what was a tendency towards political favoritism with the occasional called in "favor" staining a lot of administrations (most) and turned it into a core policy with the affected institutions' new overlords brazenly throwing SOP into the dumper to further the partisan agenda. Their intent seems to clearly lean towards "get in line or pay the price" and I applaud any institution which stands up to this. You go patent boys!!!
On a side note, I posit that the above rant supports my contention that the current Harry Potter movie is a scathing indictment of the Bush Administration.
You don't need their disk. I've hooked them up for about 6-10 people and the first thing I do is trash that. Just set up the basic DHCP way for single machines and if you're routered, DHCP your WAN side and it's all gravy - takes 2 minutes tops.
The answer is 42.
There are rules (some call them laws) about types of data that can be gathered and how. This administration wants to reinterpret the rules in a way advantageous to them to the point that you can say that they don't think these rules (laws) apply to them. This is of course not the only area in which this pattern has been evident from this administration.
And you're right - a dictatorship is when only one ruler believes that laws don't apply to them. When a whole administration believes this it is called fascism.
As a DB Developer who works for marketing organizations I have to say that you should be VERY afraid of what both parties already know about you via legal channels - done for targeting of campaign funds. Add in easy, near-unlimited access! Say you have a hot-button district coming into an election year (and they already know it's a hot-button district ahead of everybody else because they have a monstrous data store that would be illegal for any other entity). Do you really think info for a nice police sting to that area, targeted to opposition voters/wrongdoers won't be executed to sway the balance? Politicization of non-political offices is a cornerstone of this administration. Another very crucial governmental function becoming too busy serving Washington to serve the people (that being law enforcement, from the CIA down to beat cops) is just be a side effect of this insidious effort. How about clarifying the ROL (Return On Legislation) for tax breaks and coming up with more misrepresetative numbers for bad policies and scare tactics? You want to throw better data at W(ashington) for those efforts? They want data more than they want crooks. This is the information age, people. Privacy has a cost, but so does the lack of it and that cost is our freedom.