While I mostly like DVD's, there is one thing about them that have always angered me. With VHS, you could pop in the tape, hit Fast Forward, and cruise by the 10 minutes of crap at the front of the tape (Copyright Warning, obsolete trailers, etc). I sure wish some DVD maker would produce a unit that would let me skip right to the main menu on a DVD, instead of forcing me to sit through that first 5-10 minutes of filler. I just want to watch the movie, already, and it seems to me that if it's *my* DVD player, it ought to obey *me*, not the disc producer.
Why would you have to seperate it? I suppose if you licensed those sound clips from a third-party, then, yeah, you might have to. I might be wrong, but I believe that NCSoft pretty much owns CoH/V outright? (I'm not entirely sure - the game was developed by Cryptic, so it might be that Cryptic kept some rights to the assets and code, and NCSoft entered into another license to use some resources from Cryptic in TR).
So, these are some of the considerations that have to go into Open Sourcing your products. If a product lost money, are you really going to spend $10k+ to have lawyers sort through all the details necessary to figure out what you own, what is owned by others, and if you can get the right to open source your stuff? The only time it's practical to open source something is either if your product is itself based on open-source products, or 100% owned outright by you, which often isn't the case. Most developers simply do not have the wherewithal to develop their game completely in-house - all low-level libraries, game engine code, sounds, animations, particle effects, models, textures, etc, from scratch. Some companies do ( I can think of Id, Valve, Epic, and I think Blizzard did so for WoW as well[?] ), but not all.
I know that NCSoft has a history of licensing tech from other companies (I believe one or two of their titles are based on one of the Unreal engines from Epic)
Not only could it potentially give a leg up to a potential competitor, but from the perspective of a company like NCSoft, if you release the whole thing for free, and it starts to get popular once it's free, even though you couldn't make it a commercial success, you setup a potential competitor for your own future products. It's hard (though not impossible) to compete with free products. There's already enough competition, without creating more for yourself.
Now, some might say that if it's free, that it doesn't really count as 'competition', because the people still have the money in their pockets that they are not spending on that product, so they might still pay for your future products with the money they aren't spending. That might, in some cases be true, but in other cases, people might decide that they spend enough time on, and enjoy the free product enough, that they decide not to look at other, 'premium' options.
Dunno if your bank supports anything like this, but Bank of America has a feature in their web banking system, called ShopSafe, which (if you have a CC account with them) lets you generate a one-time use CC number whenever you want, with a limit you set. For something like this, you could genenerate a number with a limit of like $1 (or whatever the minimum is). Then, you don't really have to worry about getting ripped off by companies.
I really don't get why so many ISPs fight the P2P idea. Instead of implementing bandwidth caps to preserve the limited amount of transit/peer traffic they can send/receive, they could use their internal network to provide a lot of internet content through smart, P2P caching; not just files, but also video streams, audio streams, etc.
The problem seems to be, mostly, the MPAA/RIAA/BSA (and their counterparts in other countries). But, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say. P2P technologies like Bittorrent have a huge potential for legal use, and are already used for distributing things like World of Warcraft patches (I wonder how ISP customers will react in AU once WoW can no longer patch for them), Linux ISOs, OpenOffice, and lots of other stuff which is legal to copy.
I wonder if Blizzard, and any other international companies using torrent for legitimate business in Australia, could sue AU under WTO rules for unfair trade practices, or somesuch, if this policy goes into effect? Actually, I don't think individual companies can sue, but they can petition their national governments to sue on their behalf. Still, point is, I wonder if a case can be made that blocking any kind of legitimate business traffic is a violation of WTO? After all, didn't one of the Carribean nations 'win' some kind of similar suit against the United States, for blocking that nation's online casino businesses?
I dunno the legal specifics of this, but it seems to me that the most reasonable rule of law would be that if at any point during your lifetime, the citizenship laws define you as a natural born citizen, that from that point forward you are always considered a natural born citizen. That is, citizenship status should never be able to be taken away from someone by legislation, once they have qualified (excepting, possibly, for crimes like treason), and if laws are liberalized after your birth, such that if you were born later you would be a natural citizen, then you should be considered a natural citizen under the newer law. Again, I don't know if that is the case or not.
"Subsequently, Obama carried an INDONESIAN passport when he visited Pakistan. .."
Citation please?
"Indonesia didn't recognize dual-citizenship at the time either."
Wait. What does Indonesian law have to do with U.S. citizenship? Can Indonesia pass a law stating that anyone born on U.S. soil becomes an Indonesian citizen, and loses their U.S. citizenship automatically because Indonesia doesn't recognize dual-citizenship? I'm sorry, but a foreign government can't strip people of their U.S. citizenship non-voluntarily. They can make a requirement that in order to qualify for Indonesian citizenship, you have to renounce your U.S. citizenship - but where is the evidence that Barack ever renounced his citizenship.
For that matter, how would Barack *ever* have been an Indonesian citizen? He was born in Hawaii to an American and Kenyan. The only way I can think of is if he actually applied for citizenship as an immigrant. Do you *have* to be a citizen of Indonesia to get an Indonesian passport, or can you get one as a legal resident?
"Finally, I seem to recall that he also certified that he was either Indonesian or Kenyan as 'citizenship' for the receipt of scholarships at Harvard."
Citation, please? Again, I think he would be a Kenyan citizen, maybe, since his father is Kenyan (that would depend on the laws of Kenya at the time he applied for the scholarship). But, again, Kenya can't strip him of U.S. citizenship, all it can do is refuse to recognize his Kenyan citizenship until he renounces U.S. This sounds like, at worst case, it would be a case of scholarship fraud, if he didn't meet the criteria for Kenyan citizenship when he applied for the scholarship. Unless you can find proof that he actually did renounce his U.S. citizenship, he is still a U.S. citizen (unless he's not, because of the legal defintion of a citizen you mentioned at the beginning; my point is, filing for a scholarship as a Kenyan citizen doesn't make you a non-US citizen).
"At what point does the evidence begin to cause you to question the 'canon'?"
Uhh, when you provide some actual, real evidence, instead of allegations which, even if true, don't constitute proof that he's not a U.S. citizen? Even if he *did* travel to Pakistan on an Indonesian passport, that in and of itself doesn't make him not a citizen (it might make him a liar, or even a criminal in Indonesia, but still a U.S. citizen; it might even imply that he renounced U.S. citizenship, but it's not really proof that he renounced it). Even if he *did* apply for a scholarship as a Kenyan citizen, that in and of itself doesn't make him not a U.S. citizen.
Yeah, and you can tell Windows to permanently ignore WGA, I think (I believe I did that on my laptop, though I don't remember for sure). I know you can configure Automatic Updates to only notify you when new updates are available (instead of downloading and installing them automatically). Once you've configured it to notify you, you then have the option to do the 'custom' install instead of express install, which lets you pick which updates the Automatic Updates service installs. It also allows you to 'hide selected updates' so that they will not be installed. I think you can hide the WGA update.
Girl makes a complaint to the police and has the boy arrested for harassment
That is, the article author mentions that WA State law where a person merely has to claim to feel harassed to have a case, it sounds like. I hope a Judge/Jury would see that a guy posting a love-note on a MySpace page, once, in an attempt to win her affections doesn't cross the border into true harassment; pathetic and desperate, perhaps, but not harassment.
Windows update can be configured to run in the background without needing to launch IE. They call the feature "Automatic Updates" and it has existed for, what, 5 years?
I think what they mean is that this malware relies on a compromised website to then compromise end-user computers (after all, most browser flaws require you to visit a site before the flaw can be exploited), and I believe they mean that 6000 websites are known to be 'infected', in turn infecting a much larger number of end-users. I might be wrong though.
From my original post. . . ". ..it would make sense to use a modified version of Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch OS with slightly expanded capabilities. .."
There's no reason the modified version of the OS for the Netbook couldn't have a lot of those things added to it. The iPhone OS already has the capability to add applications. So, Apple could either port Open Office, or their own iWork productivity suite (perhaps a stripped down 'express' edition). Apple could port iChat for the netbook to add instant messaging and video chat capabilities. The point is that the iPhone core OS is more lightweight than the full Mac OS X, and can be used to run lightweight applications. You'll probably not be playing WoW or editting video with such a netbook, but you could probably do some image editing (a lightweight port of iPhoto).
As for your last comment about replacing the battery - what on Earth does that have to do with the iPhone OS?
My point, which you seemed to have missed, is that creating a successful netbook is about managing user expectations. Don't market it as a full Mac computer, and don't design it that way. Build upwards from the iPhone OS, adding things like cut-and-paste which won't measurably bloat the OS, instead of trying to remove things from the full Mac. Then create some lightweight versions of apps for document viewing/editting, basic photo editing, etc, and you have a product that a lot of people would probably like. You can even charge people extra for some of the apps (but keep the prices in perspective with the market you are targetting - think about charging $30 for the stripped down iWorks Suite, instead of $100-$200, for example).
BTW, for anyone curious, I'm not an Apple fan-boy. I use a Dell which dual boots Windows XP and Vista. I just don't think that the netbook market is an impossible business model. There are lots of people on Earth who probably can't ever afford a full Mac computer (even a discounted used unit), but who might be able to afford a $250 Apple netbook (particularly when it hits the used market and drops to $150 or $100) .
Make sure it is *compatible* with Mac, of course, so that files can be transferred back and forth easily (maybe via firewire, usb, or bluetooth), and users can chat/IM with Mac user (and Windows and Linux users for that matter).
The thing about a faithless elector - unless the election is so close that you can actually change it, there's no point to switching your ballot. If the guy you are voting against anyway is still going to be president, all you've done is slapped the President of the United States in the face and ticked off all of his partisans. Not a good place to be, I'm pretty sure. If you were able to change the outcome of your election, you better fear for your very life, because you will have made about 49 percent of the nation very, very angry. And according to the Supreme Court's recent ruling, we are a nation where the 2nd Amendment gives an individual right to bear arms.
One thing about this whole Obama citizenship debate that bothers me - how the *hell* do we even wind up in a situation where, *after* the election, someone is questioning eligibility? In order to run for President, you have to register your candidacy with the Federal Election Commission, or something, don' you? Why aren't candidates required to prove eligibility as a requirement to even *be in the election*?
We should not have a system where it's even remotely possible that someone could be elected when they aren't eligible.
That said, there really is no question that Obama is a natural citizen. After all, we know who his mother and grandmother are, and we know they are natural born citizens. By definition, if either of your parents are US citizens, you are a natural born citizen. Unless you don't think the woman he claims as his mother really is his mother.
I saw someone make a comment, and I don't remember who or where, but I think it's insightful. Netbooks should be thought of more as larger, more capable PDA's/Smartphones, than they should as smaller, less capable computers. Given that premise, it would make sense to use a modified version of Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch OS with slightly expanded capabilities, instead of trying to get a stripped down Mac OS X to work well on a netbook.
I think Apple might find they *could* build a winning Netbook if they took that approach. Maybe they already are. Apple likes to deny they are doing something right up until they announce at WWDC.
That's one solution. I began looking into seperate password managers a year or two ago. The two solutions I found looked the best, at the time, were KeePass, and Bruce Schneier's Password Safe.
Ultimately, though, I decided against either one. The problem with using something like that is that, now, I don't actually know the passwords for all of my accounts. If something goes wrong, or I just don't have access to the safe (like maybe I am away from home and forgot to bring my USB key along, or I'm using a computer which I don't want to stick the key into (because the key might get infected with some virus/trojan if I stick it into a public PC, or maybe their is malware on the PC which, once I've unlocked the password safe, grabs all the account/password info), I can't get into my accounts.
The real, true, ultimate problem isn't that people need a password safe. It's that people need fewer accounts/passwords. We need something like OpenId to become more widespread. Now, you probably wouldn't use OpenId (or some analog) for very sensitive accounts like bank/paypal/amazon.com/etc, but how many times have you been to a site where you wanted to post in a forum, or add a comment to a blog, but then you were confronted with being forced to register an account? On the one hand, that might cut down on spam/noise/trolls (or it might not; if you are a troll or spammer, you just register an account without worrying about every using it again, so you don't care what the password is or if you remember it), but it also cuts down, I'm sure, on worthwhile posts because people can't be bothered to try to remember yet another password (or they just end up using a very small number of passwords everywhere).
I wish more sites used OpenId. Seems like only a very small minority of sites I've visited offer that as an option.
"If so, could anyone blame MySQL/Sun for creating its own proprietary fork in order to afford further core development?"
Wait - what good would it do for MySQL/Sun to create it's own fork if, by the poster's own declaration, community supported forks are *already* better?
I think, maybe, part of the problem is companies (not just Sun/MySQL, but other companies I've seen this with too) not really treating open source projects *as* open source. They release the software under GPL, or whatever free license, but because they want to maintain 'copyright purity' (that is, the code they distribute is 100% owned by them, because that is the only thing that will allow them to potentially make the codebase proprietary for selling 'enhanced' versions; if they accepted other contributors' code under the GPL, they would then have to accept the code to be GPL forever, for all versions), so they won't/can't integrate other contributors' code into the main distribution (unless they can work out some seperate licensing agreement with the third-party developer).
Whenever you have a situation like that, as a company, you are giving other developers the benefit of Free Software while *denying* it from your own customers (well, sorta, until they stop being your customers and start using the other forks), and yourselves.
I don't know what the 'best' business model is for open source companies, but if you really want to leverage open source/free software, you have to give up on directly charging for 'enhanced' versions of the software, because the only way to play that game is to force this situation where you cannot benefit from the enhancements of the community. If you are successful, like MySQL, then eventually the community grows to the point where the community's developer resources are greater than your own as the company, and you find yourself in a situation where you can't really keep up with the community.
Wait, so a warehouse owner wouldn't buy insurance with coverage for an Act of God? Why not? I mean, many types of damage can be traced to someone who can be held liable, so you can sue *them* to recover damages, but you can't sue God/Fate/Nothing, so seems like you would *want* to carry insurance for those types of situations, explicitely. I imagine 'act of god' insurance should be pretty cheap, since damage because of such, is, I suspect, pretty rare?
Well, why provision the data center with more expensive bandwidth, if a p2p solution can solve the problem without spending much/any extra money? Don't ever buy more of a resource until you are efficiently using the resource. Only if you are using it efficiently (or at least, as efficiently as you really can), and it's *still* not enough, should you actually buy more.
Businesses are pretty adamanant about expense justification (and they should be). You have to justify any expenses, and even when they are justified, if the company doesn't have the money, they won't spend it (usually).
Seems like every few months you hear yet another story about something bad happening because people are replying to or otherwise using a 'noreply' email address. Here's a clue - if you ever send emails to anyone from a 'noreply' address (or some other similar account name), you better make damn sure your servers are configured to not do something bad or stupid when unobservant users actually do reply to it.
I will give them credit for this: *at least* it was noreply at their own domain. Too often, when you hear about this sort of thing, it's because a company did something like sending an email with a return address of 'noreply@donotreply.com' or something like that (where the domain is not their domain, and is a string which could potentially be registered by someone). I remember reading (ok, just found the story again) about a guy who had registered the domain 'donotreply.com' for yucks, and started getting all sorts of stuff like replies from Capital One bank customers, when Capital One sent some emails with the donotreply.com as the domain. (Sadly, the website www.donotreply.com where the guy used to blog about all the emails seems to be down now; wonder what happened to it - probably sunk by a lawsuit, or maybe the guy finally got bored of spending his free time reading thousands of emails).
"If they're more devious (and have the money), they'll just get themselves another cell phone."
Are the cars using an ignition system that *requires* one of these special keys to even start the vehicle? If not, and it just happens that the key the folks gave me disables the phone, but a *different* key won't disable the phone, the teen will just spend $5 to have another, old-fashioned key made.
Have one giant 'coffee factory' per city, with insulated pipeworks to distribute hot coffee to businesses and residences. Then all your coffee grounds are in one place, where you can collocate the coffee refinery.
Actually, I'm thinking more about this. I don't believe this coffee ground biodiesel idea could ever possibly be efficient. The problem with this whole idea is collecting and transporting the coffee grounds to processing facilities. How much energy are you going to 'spend' transporting the used coffee grounds to be processed? I'm almost positive you'll spend more energy collecting the coffee than you get back.
I still like the idea of District Heat, though, unless there is something inefficient about it that I'm not currently aware of.
Tiny, and marginal, yes. This won't solve the energy crisis. But, hey, why turn down 340M gallons of Biodiesel if you can get it cheaply?
I think that, for the near-term future, we should throw everything at the problem we can, as long as the solutions are efficient (I don't know if this coffee-ground idea really is efficient, but I'm willing to consider anything), even if they are small, they still add some energy to the world supply.
There are a lot of potential 'small gains' that could be made in human energy efficiency, but that aren't considered because they are considered 'small'.
Take, for example, the idea of District Heating. Every modern electrical generating plant that either burns hydrocarbons, or uses nuclear fission, generates electricity using a 'heat engine'. I think the figure I've seen is that the best heat engines, are, basically, about 50 percent efficient. That is, if you generate 1GW of heat, you produce 500MW of electricity, and 'waste' 500MW of heat energy (that's a pretty much best-case scenario, I believe). District Heating is the idea that you can use that 'waste heat' to heat up cold water (from a lake, river, ground water, etc), then use pipe-works to distribute the hot water to nearby houses, apartment buildings, office buildings, shopping centers, factories, restaurants, pretty much any kind of building. That hot water can be used to heat the buildings when the weather is cold, and can be used with heat exchangers to heat up treated water for human use (drinking, cooking, showers, etc). That is, you wouldn't directly drink or cook the lake water used in the district heating, but your 'hot water heater' in the basement, instead of using electric or natural gas to heat your treated water, would instead use the hot water from the district heating system as a heat source to heat the treated water).
At an individual level (that is, you as a consumer), you might not save much money by using district heat instead of electric or natural gas, because of the fact that district heat does require expensive insulated pipeworks, and pumping stations. So, district heat is not widely deployed, because there isn't a driving market benefit (individual cost savings) to drive it. However, if we look at the big picture, as an economy, if we can move millions of homes to district heating, that is a *lot* of electricity and natural gas which is *not* being used to heat homes or water any longer. But, because individual consumers might not see significant short-term savings, no one is really willing to invest in district heating systems.
Also, to be fair, district heating is only efficient a certain distance from the power plant. After that, it's too hard to keep the water sufficiently hot, even with well insulated pipes, so district heating couldn't serve the majority of America. Still, it could serve millions of Americans who do live sufficiently close to power plants, and thereby save a lot of energy every day. But without some sort of government mandate, it would probably never happen.
I think, mostly, they try to bundle simply because they'd rather get $100/mo from you than $40/mo. Adding additional services over the same physical connection costs very little to them. I imagine that, in terms of the per-subscriber cost to the cable company, that cable television is the most 'expensive' service for them, as they actually have to pay out money, per-subscriber, to most of the cable channels. Internet and Phone, on the other hand, must be pretty lucrative for them in comparison. Sure, with Internet, there might be some fees they have to pay for transit with other networks (Sprint, Global X'ings, AT&T, L3, etc), and for phone, they presumably have to pay to terminate calls to the POTS network. But bulk phone termination fees in the US are what, like 1 or 2 cent/min?
I'm sure for phone co's, the economics are similar. Maintaining a copper or fiber line to your house, plus the local switching office premises and equipment, and the uplink to their backbone are fixed costs. Once you've paid them enough to cover the costs to maintain that, any additional services they can get you to pay for is basically pure profit. They can get you to pay $40/mo for DSL maybe, or they can bundle phone and DSL for $60/mo and get extra revenue from you with almost no additional cost to them.
I'm very seriously considering switching to a 'naked DSL' offering from the phone company for $40/mo (I'll be paying more for DSL, but less overall). Then, just using my cell phone as my 'main' phone (it really effectively is, anyhow, so no real sense paying for 2 phones).
My local telco, Cincinnati Bell, also has a Cellular division, and if you get your cell phone and DSL with them, then for $10/month you can add unlimited WiFi calling for your cell phone. That is, their network supports something called UMA, which if you have a compatible handset, can use a WiFi hotspot to make phone calls (basically, VoIP using cell phone codecs), with the added advantage of, if you leave the hotspot, it will seamlessly move the call to the cell network.
So, when I'm at home, in range of my hotspot, or anywhere I'm in range of a hotspot, I can make free calls. One cool thing about this is, if the call originated on WiFi, even when you switch to the cell network, they still don't change you for the minutes - billing is based on where the call originated. That's a dual-bladed sword, though, in that they will charge you minutes while using WiFi if the call originated on the cell network, so you have to remember to hang up and call back when you are in range of a hotspot, or else use up your minutes.
T-Mobile also has a similar offering. Right now I'm trying to decide between T-mo an Cinci Bell. Basically, it'll cost me the same, either way, but I'm kind of leaning towards T-Mo because of the unlimited Fave-5 calling feature they offer (which won't cost me any extra, with the plans I'm considering from each telco, and since the bulk of my calling is basically to five phone numbers).
Slashdot Mirror
While I mostly like DVD's, there is one thing about them that have always angered me. With VHS, you could pop in the tape, hit Fast Forward, and cruise by the 10 minutes of crap at the front of the tape (Copyright Warning, obsolete trailers, etc). I sure wish some DVD maker would produce a unit that would let me skip right to the main menu on a DVD, instead of forcing me to sit through that first 5-10 minutes of filler. I just want to watch the movie, already, and it seems to me that if it's *my* DVD player, it ought to obey *me*, not the disc producer.
I read (most of) the article, and as far as I can tell, this is about VHS tapes which have movies on them, not blanks for you to record on your own.
Why would you have to seperate it? I suppose if you licensed those sound clips from a third-party, then, yeah, you might have to. I might be wrong, but I believe that NCSoft pretty much owns CoH/V outright? (I'm not entirely sure - the game was developed by Cryptic, so it might be that Cryptic kept some rights to the assets and code, and NCSoft entered into another license to use some resources from Cryptic in TR).
So, these are some of the considerations that have to go into Open Sourcing your products. If a product lost money, are you really going to spend $10k+ to have lawyers sort through all the details necessary to figure out what you own, what is owned by others, and if you can get the right to open source your stuff? The only time it's practical to open source something is either if your product is itself based on open-source products, or 100% owned outright by you, which often isn't the case. Most developers simply do not have the wherewithal to develop their game completely in-house - all low-level libraries, game engine code, sounds, animations, particle effects, models, textures, etc, from scratch. Some companies do ( I can think of Id, Valve, Epic, and I think Blizzard did so for WoW as well[?] ), but not all.
I know that NCSoft has a history of licensing tech from other companies (I believe one or two of their titles are based on one of the Unreal engines from Epic)
Not only could it potentially give a leg up to a potential competitor, but from the perspective of a company like NCSoft, if you release the whole thing for free, and it starts to get popular once it's free, even though you couldn't make it a commercial success, you setup a potential competitor for your own future products. It's hard (though not impossible) to compete with free products. There's already enough competition, without creating more for yourself.
Now, some might say that if it's free, that it doesn't really count as 'competition', because the people still have the money in their pockets that they are not spending on that product, so they might still pay for your future products with the money they aren't spending. That might, in some cases be true, but in other cases, people might decide that they spend enough time on, and enjoy the free product enough, that they decide not to look at other, 'premium' options.
Dunno if your bank supports anything like this, but Bank of America has a feature in their web banking system, called ShopSafe, which (if you have a CC account with them) lets you generate a one-time use CC number whenever you want, with a limit you set. For something like this, you could genenerate a number with a limit of like $1 (or whatever the minimum is). Then, you don't really have to worry about getting ripped off by companies.
I really don't get why so many ISPs fight the P2P idea. Instead of implementing bandwidth caps to preserve the limited amount of transit/peer traffic they can send/receive, they could use their internal network to provide a lot of internet content through smart, P2P caching; not just files, but also video streams, audio streams, etc.
The problem seems to be, mostly, the MPAA/RIAA/BSA (and their counterparts in other countries). But, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say. P2P technologies like Bittorrent have a huge potential for legal use, and are already used for distributing things like World of Warcraft patches (I wonder how ISP customers will react in AU once WoW can no longer patch for them), Linux ISOs, OpenOffice, and lots of other stuff which is legal to copy.
I wonder if Blizzard, and any other international companies using torrent for legitimate business in Australia, could sue AU under WTO rules for unfair trade practices, or somesuch, if this policy goes into effect? Actually, I don't think individual companies can sue, but they can petition their national governments to sue on their behalf. Still, point is, I wonder if a case can be made that blocking any kind of legitimate business traffic is a violation of WTO? After all, didn't one of the Carribean nations 'win' some kind of similar suit against the United States, for blocking that nation's online casino businesses?
"It was the law at the time."
I dunno the legal specifics of this, but it seems to me that the most reasonable rule of law would be that if at any point during your lifetime, the citizenship laws define you as a natural born citizen, that from that point forward you are always considered a natural born citizen. That is, citizenship status should never be able to be taken away from someone by legislation, once they have qualified (excepting, possibly, for crimes like treason), and if laws are liberalized after your birth, such that if you were born later you would be a natural citizen, then you should be considered a natural citizen under the newer law. Again, I don't know if that is the case or not.
"Subsequently, Obama carried an INDONESIAN passport when he visited Pakistan. . ."
Citation please?
"Indonesia didn't recognize dual-citizenship at the time either."
Wait. What does Indonesian law have to do with U.S. citizenship? Can Indonesia pass a law stating that anyone born on U.S. soil becomes an Indonesian citizen, and loses their U.S. citizenship automatically because Indonesia doesn't recognize dual-citizenship? I'm sorry, but a foreign government can't strip people of their U.S. citizenship non-voluntarily. They can make a requirement that in order to qualify for Indonesian citizenship, you have to renounce your U.S. citizenship - but where is the evidence that Barack ever renounced his citizenship.
For that matter, how would Barack *ever* have been an Indonesian citizen? He was born in Hawaii to an American and Kenyan. The only way I can think of is if he actually applied for citizenship as an immigrant. Do you *have* to be a citizen of Indonesia to get an Indonesian passport, or can you get one as a legal resident?
"Finally, I seem to recall that he also certified that he was either Indonesian or Kenyan as 'citizenship' for the receipt of scholarships at Harvard."
Citation, please? Again, I think he would be a Kenyan citizen, maybe, since his father is Kenyan (that would depend on the laws of Kenya at the time he applied for the scholarship). But, again, Kenya can't strip him of U.S. citizenship, all it can do is refuse to recognize his Kenyan citizenship until he renounces U.S. This sounds like, at worst case, it would be a case of scholarship fraud, if he didn't meet the criteria for Kenyan citizenship when he applied for the scholarship. Unless you can find proof that he actually did renounce his U.S. citizenship, he is still a U.S. citizen (unless he's not, because of the legal defintion of a citizen you mentioned at the beginning; my point is, filing for a scholarship as a Kenyan citizen doesn't make you a non-US citizen).
"At what point does the evidence begin to cause you to question the 'canon'?"
Uhh, when you provide some actual, real evidence, instead of allegations which, even if true, don't constitute proof that he's not a U.S. citizen? Even if he *did* travel to Pakistan on an Indonesian passport, that in and of itself doesn't make him not a citizen (it might make him a liar, or even a criminal in Indonesia, but still a U.S. citizen; it might even imply that he renounced U.S. citizenship, but it's not really proof that he renounced it). Even if he *did* apply for a scholarship as a Kenyan citizen, that in and of itself doesn't make him not a U.S. citizen.
Yeah, and you can tell Windows to permanently ignore WGA, I think (I believe I did that on my laptop, though I don't remember for sure). I know you can configure Automatic Updates to only notify you when new updates are available (instead of downloading and installing them automatically). Once you've configured it to notify you, you then have the option to do the 'custom' install instead of express install, which lets you pick which updates the Automatic Updates service installs. It also allows you to 'hide selected updates' so that they will not be installed. I think you can hide the WGA update.
That is, the article author mentions that WA State law where a person merely has to claim to feel harassed to have a case, it sounds like. I hope a Judge/Jury would see that a guy posting a love-note on a MySpace page, once, in an attempt to win her affections doesn't cross the border into true harassment; pathetic and desperate, perhaps, but not harassment.
Windows update can be configured to run in the background without needing to launch IE. They call the feature "Automatic Updates" and it has existed for, what, 5 years?
I think what they mean is that this malware relies on a compromised website to then compromise end-user computers (after all, most browser flaws require you to visit a site before the flaw can be exploited), and I believe they mean that 6000 websites are known to be 'infected', in turn infecting a much larger number of end-users. I might be wrong though.
From my original post. . . .it would make sense to use a modified version of Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch OS with slightly expanded capabilities. . ."
". .
There's no reason the modified version of the OS for the Netbook couldn't have a lot of those things added to it. The iPhone OS already has the capability to add applications. So, Apple could either port Open Office, or their own iWork productivity suite (perhaps a stripped down 'express' edition). Apple could port iChat for the netbook to add instant messaging and video chat capabilities. The point is that the iPhone core OS is more lightweight than the full Mac OS X, and can be used to run lightweight applications. You'll probably not be playing WoW or editting video with such a netbook, but you could probably do some image editing (a lightweight port of iPhoto).
As for your last comment about replacing the battery - what on Earth does that have to do with the iPhone OS?
My point, which you seemed to have missed, is that creating a successful netbook is about managing user expectations. Don't market it as a full Mac computer, and don't design it that way. Build upwards from the iPhone OS, adding things like cut-and-paste which won't measurably bloat the OS, instead of trying to remove things from the full Mac. Then create some lightweight versions of apps for document viewing/editting, basic photo editing, etc, and you have a product that a lot of people would probably like. You can even charge people extra for some of the apps (but keep the prices in perspective with the market you are targetting - think about charging $30 for the stripped down iWorks Suite, instead of $100-$200, for example).
BTW, for anyone curious, I'm not an Apple fan-boy. I use a Dell which dual boots Windows XP and Vista. I just don't think that the netbook market is an impossible business model. There are lots of people on Earth who probably can't ever afford a full Mac computer (even a discounted used unit), but who might be able to afford a $250 Apple netbook (particularly when it hits the used market and drops to $150 or $100) .
Make sure it is *compatible* with Mac, of course, so that files can be transferred back and forth easily (maybe via firewire, usb, or bluetooth), and users can chat/IM with Mac user (and Windows and Linux users for that matter).
The thing about a faithless elector - unless the election is so close that you can actually change it, there's no point to switching your ballot. If the guy you are voting against anyway is still going to be president, all you've done is slapped the President of the United States in the face and ticked off all of his partisans. Not a good place to be, I'm pretty sure. If you were able to change the outcome of your election, you better fear for your very life, because you will have made about 49 percent of the nation very, very angry. And according to the Supreme Court's recent ruling, we are a nation where the 2nd Amendment gives an individual right to bear arms.
One thing about this whole Obama citizenship debate that bothers me - how the *hell* do we even wind up in a situation where, *after* the election, someone is questioning eligibility? In order to run for President, you have to register your candidacy with the Federal Election Commission, or something, don' you? Why aren't candidates required to prove eligibility as a requirement to even *be in the election*?
We should not have a system where it's even remotely possible that someone could be elected when they aren't eligible.
That said, there really is no question that Obama is a natural citizen. After all, we know who his mother and grandmother are, and we know they are natural born citizens. By definition, if either of your parents are US citizens, you are a natural born citizen. Unless you don't think the woman he claims as his mother really is his mother.
I saw someone make a comment, and I don't remember who or where, but I think it's insightful. Netbooks should be thought of more as larger, more capable PDA's/Smartphones, than they should as smaller, less capable computers. Given that premise, it would make sense to use a modified version of Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch OS with slightly expanded capabilities, instead of trying to get a stripped down Mac OS X to work well on a netbook.
I think Apple might find they *could* build a winning Netbook if they took that approach. Maybe they already are. Apple likes to deny they are doing something right up until they announce at WWDC.
That's one solution. I began looking into seperate password managers a year or two ago. The two solutions I found looked the best, at the time, were KeePass, and Bruce Schneier's Password Safe.
Ultimately, though, I decided against either one. The problem with using something like that is that, now, I don't actually know the passwords for all of my accounts. If something goes wrong, or I just don't have access to the safe (like maybe I am away from home and forgot to bring my USB key along, or I'm using a computer which I don't want to stick the key into (because the key might get infected with some virus/trojan if I stick it into a public PC, or maybe their is malware on the PC which, once I've unlocked the password safe, grabs all the account/password info), I can't get into my accounts.
The real, true, ultimate problem isn't that people need a password safe. It's that people need fewer accounts/passwords. We need something like OpenId to become more widespread. Now, you probably wouldn't use OpenId (or some analog) for very sensitive accounts like bank/paypal/amazon.com/etc, but how many times have you been to a site where you wanted to post in a forum, or add a comment to a blog, but then you were confronted with being forced to register an account? On the one hand, that might cut down on spam/noise/trolls (or it might not; if you are a troll or spammer, you just register an account without worrying about every using it again, so you don't care what the password is or if you remember it), but it also cuts down, I'm sure, on worthwhile posts because people can't be bothered to try to remember yet another password (or they just end up using a very small number of passwords everywhere).
I wish more sites used OpenId. Seems like only a very small minority of sites I've visited offer that as an option.
"If so, could anyone blame MySQL/Sun for creating its own proprietary fork in order to afford further core development?"
Wait - what good would it do for MySQL/Sun to create it's own fork if, by the poster's own declaration, community supported forks are *already* better?
I think, maybe, part of the problem is companies (not just Sun/MySQL, but other companies I've seen this with too) not really treating open source projects *as* open source. They release the software under GPL, or whatever free license, but because they want to maintain 'copyright purity' (that is, the code they distribute is 100% owned by them, because that is the only thing that will allow them to potentially make the codebase proprietary for selling 'enhanced' versions; if they accepted other contributors' code under the GPL, they would then have to accept the code to be GPL forever, for all versions), so they won't/can't integrate other contributors' code into the main distribution (unless they can work out some seperate licensing agreement with the third-party developer).
Whenever you have a situation like that, as a company, you are giving other developers the benefit of Free Software while *denying* it from your own customers (well, sorta, until they stop being your customers and start using the other forks), and yourselves.
I don't know what the 'best' business model is for open source companies, but if you really want to leverage open source/free software, you have to give up on directly charging for 'enhanced' versions of the software, because the only way to play that game is to force this situation where you cannot benefit from the enhancements of the community. If you are successful, like MySQL, then eventually the community grows to the point where the community's developer resources are greater than your own as the company, and you find yourself in a situation where you can't really keep up with the community.
Wait, so a warehouse owner wouldn't buy insurance with coverage for an Act of God? Why not? I mean, many types of damage can be traced to someone who can be held liable, so you can sue *them* to recover damages, but you can't sue God/Fate/Nothing, so seems like you would *want* to carry insurance for those types of situations, explicitely. I imagine 'act of god' insurance should be pretty cheap, since damage because of such, is, I suspect, pretty rare?
Well, why provision the data center with more expensive bandwidth, if a p2p solution can solve the problem without spending much/any extra money? Don't ever buy more of a resource until you are efficiently using the resource. Only if you are using it efficiently (or at least, as efficiently as you really can), and it's *still* not enough, should you actually buy more.
Businesses are pretty adamanant about expense justification (and they should be). You have to justify any expenses, and even when they are justified, if the company doesn't have the money, they won't spend it (usually).
Seems like every few months you hear yet another story about something bad happening because people are replying to or otherwise using a 'noreply' email address. Here's a clue - if you ever send emails to anyone from a 'noreply' address (or some other similar account name), you better make damn sure your servers are configured to not do something bad or stupid when unobservant users actually do reply to it.
I will give them credit for this: *at least* it was noreply at their own domain. Too often, when you hear about this sort of thing, it's because a company did something like sending an email with a return address of 'noreply@donotreply.com' or something like that (where the domain is not their domain, and is a string which could potentially be registered by someone). I remember reading (ok, just found the story again) about a guy who had registered the domain 'donotreply.com' for yucks, and started getting all sorts of stuff like replies from Capital One bank customers, when Capital One sent some emails with the donotreply.com as the domain. (Sadly, the website www.donotreply.com where the guy used to blog about all the emails seems to be down now; wonder what happened to it - probably sunk by a lawsuit, or maybe the guy finally got bored of spending his free time reading thousands of emails).
"If they're more devious (and have the money), they'll just get themselves another cell phone."
Are the cars using an ignition system that *requires* one of these special keys to even start the vehicle? If not, and it just happens that the key the folks gave me disables the phone, but a *different* key won't disable the phone, the teen will just spend $5 to have another, old-fashioned key made.
Have one giant 'coffee factory' per city, with insulated pipeworks to distribute hot coffee to businesses and residences. Then all your coffee grounds are in one place, where you can collocate the coffee refinery.
. . .
No, I'm not serious.
Actually, I'm thinking more about this. I don't believe this coffee ground biodiesel idea could ever possibly be efficient. The problem with this whole idea is collecting and transporting the coffee grounds to processing facilities. How much energy are you going to 'spend' transporting the used coffee grounds to be processed? I'm almost positive you'll spend more energy collecting the coffee than you get back.
I still like the idea of District Heat, though, unless there is something inefficient about it that I'm not currently aware of.
Tiny, and marginal, yes. This won't solve the energy crisis. But, hey, why turn down 340M gallons of Biodiesel if you can get it cheaply?
I think that, for the near-term future, we should throw everything at the problem we can, as long as the solutions are efficient (I don't know if this coffee-ground idea really is efficient, but I'm willing to consider anything), even if they are small, they still add some energy to the world supply.
There are a lot of potential 'small gains' that could be made in human energy efficiency, but that aren't considered because they are considered 'small'.
Take, for example, the idea of District Heating. Every modern electrical generating plant that either burns hydrocarbons, or uses nuclear fission, generates electricity using a 'heat engine'. I think the figure I've seen is that the best heat engines, are, basically, about 50 percent efficient. That is, if you generate 1GW of heat, you produce 500MW of electricity, and 'waste' 500MW of heat energy (that's a pretty much best-case scenario, I believe). District Heating is the idea that you can use that 'waste heat' to heat up cold water (from a lake, river, ground water, etc), then use pipe-works to distribute the hot water to nearby houses, apartment buildings, office buildings, shopping centers, factories, restaurants, pretty much any kind of building. That hot water can be used to heat the buildings when the weather is cold, and can be used with heat exchangers to heat up treated water for human use (drinking, cooking, showers, etc). That is, you wouldn't directly drink or cook the lake water used in the district heating, but your 'hot water heater' in the basement, instead of using electric or natural gas to heat your treated water, would instead use the hot water from the district heating system as a heat source to heat the treated water).
At an individual level (that is, you as a consumer), you might not save much money by using district heat instead of electric or natural gas, because of the fact that district heat does require expensive insulated pipeworks, and pumping stations. So, district heat is not widely deployed, because there isn't a driving market benefit (individual cost savings) to drive it. However, if we look at the big picture, as an economy, if we can move millions of homes to district heating, that is a *lot* of electricity and natural gas which is *not* being used to heat homes or water any longer. But, because individual consumers might not see significant short-term savings, no one is really willing to invest in district heating systems.
Also, to be fair, district heating is only efficient a certain distance from the power plant. After that, it's too hard to keep the water sufficiently hot, even with well insulated pipes, so district heating couldn't serve the majority of America. Still, it could serve millions of Americans who do live sufficiently close to power plants, and thereby save a lot of energy every day. But without some sort of government mandate, it would probably never happen.
I think, mostly, they try to bundle simply because they'd rather get $100/mo from you than $40/mo. Adding additional services over the same physical connection costs very little to them. I imagine that, in terms of the per-subscriber cost to the cable company, that cable television is the most 'expensive' service for them, as they actually have to pay out money, per-subscriber, to most of the cable channels. Internet and Phone, on the other hand, must be pretty lucrative for them in comparison. Sure, with Internet, there might be some fees they have to pay for transit with other networks (Sprint, Global X'ings, AT&T, L3, etc), and for phone, they presumably have to pay to terminate calls to the POTS network. But bulk phone termination fees in the US are what, like 1 or 2 cent/min?
I'm sure for phone co's, the economics are similar. Maintaining a copper or fiber line to your house, plus the local switching office premises and equipment, and the uplink to their backbone are fixed costs. Once you've paid them enough to cover the costs to maintain that, any additional services they can get you to pay for is basically pure profit. They can get you to pay $40/mo for DSL maybe, or they can bundle phone and DSL for $60/mo and get extra revenue from you with almost no additional cost to them.
I'm very seriously considering switching to a 'naked DSL' offering from the phone company for $40/mo (I'll be paying more for DSL, but less overall). Then, just using my cell phone as my 'main' phone (it really effectively is, anyhow, so no real sense paying for 2 phones).
My local telco, Cincinnati Bell, also has a Cellular division, and if you get your cell phone and DSL with them, then for $10/month you can add unlimited WiFi calling for your cell phone. That is, their network supports something called UMA, which if you have a compatible handset, can use a WiFi hotspot to make phone calls (basically, VoIP using cell phone codecs), with the added advantage of, if you leave the hotspot, it will seamlessly move the call to the cell network.
So, when I'm at home, in range of my hotspot, or anywhere I'm in range of a hotspot, I can make free calls. One cool thing about this is, if the call originated on WiFi, even when you switch to the cell network, they still don't change you for the minutes - billing is based on where the call originated. That's a dual-bladed sword, though, in that they will charge you minutes while using WiFi if the call originated on the cell network, so you have to remember to hang up and call back when you are in range of a hotspot, or else use up your minutes.
T-Mobile also has a similar offering. Right now I'm trying to decide between T-mo an Cinci Bell. Basically, it'll cost me the same, either way, but I'm kind of leaning towards T-Mo because of the unlimited Fave-5 calling feature they offer (which won't cost me any extra, with the plans I'm considering from each telco, and since the bulk of my calling is basically to five phone numbers).