I abhor W as much as anyone, but what you are talking about isn't just your standard impeachment: it's a coup d'état. Since the third person in line is a democrat, this would be removing a democratically elected government in favor of the political enemies of those elected. Is it legal? Sure it is. Is it something that a responsible member of a democratic society should ever even think to consider? No way. If this was ever to be done, it would be just as bad as anything Bush has done. In many ways, it would be far worse.
If you want to impeach Bush, then that's fine. He has certainly done things to deserve it. But if you impeach the next guy in line just because you don't like him and want your own party in power, that's crossing the line. The line between democracy and everything else.
This is something you could certainly argue. My point was that legally speaking, the kid is absolutely in the right and he has a unanimous supreme court to prove it. Of course, in any society that allows for civil suits of this nature, the people with the money can harass the people without them. The US more so than many other countries, I guess. However, isn't this a textbook case for something like the ACLU? Free speech, that is. I don't think he would have much trouble getting a lawyer pro-bono if this were ever to get to court, and even a cheap, bad lawyer would be able to win this pretty easily.
No, it is a qwerty one but it's Swedish so I have a few extra keys ("å","ä" and "ö") and everything else is slightly moved around. This often happens the first time I use a new OS if I didn't set the locale during start-up or sometimes with dumb computer that don't expect that they might be played by more people than occupy North America.
It did that to me at first to (I'm running Firefox under Ubuntu), but after reloading the page a couple of times, and making sure that the applet was the first thing I clicked, it worked fine
A bigger problem for me is that I use a non-US keyboard which means that it I couldn't do anything because I couldn't change the locale so when I typed ":" it entered ">". Meaning I couldn't do anything since I couldn't change the drive to c:) Anyone got a fix for this?
What, are you kidding me? Since you seem to communicate in all caps language, let me explain it to you that way:
OF COURSE PEOPLE WATCH TV-SHOWS ON THEIR COMPUTER SCREENS!
I am currently looking at a bittorrent file of the latest Lost episode (that aired last night) and more than 180,000 people have downloaded it. That's just ONE TORRENT in ONE DAY! Most people might not view TV that way, but a helluva lot of people does. This is not an insignificant piece of the market.
This also highlights one of the great advantages with open source: free redistribution. The big reasons why debian, ubuntu and other linuxes can do such seamless updates is because of the package managers; because you have one unified system of downloading and installing apps, you can update them without any hassle at all. This wouldn't be possible on windows since the overwhelming majority of apps are not open source, meaning that you can't have a unified repository where you can download them from. That would be copyright infringement. This makes it so that every single app that wants to stay current has to make their own versions of an automatic updater, often making it gruesomely annoying to start whatever you need because of some damn pop-up (Acrobat Reader, I'm looking at you!). In ubuntu,, when something needs updating, a little star shines at the top of my screen, I click on it and enter my password, and bobs-yer-uncle, it's done.
Package managers are such an ingenious solution to handling software, and it is something that could only have come from the open source world.
Since you can't enforce these standards legally, you have to have these sorts of organisations that at least try to get some sort of consensus. After they've agreed on a standard, that can then become part of the conversation between different companies. "Can you implement standard X" instead of "What exactly do you do?"
Even if these standards have no "teeth", it is still hugely useful that they exist. Not all become what is used, but many do. Remember, HTTP and TCP/IP are such standards. They have caught on, have they not?
This is exactly the point. Wikipedia is built on the idea that anyone can add information, as long as it is accurate. If you want to debate something, you should use real arguments instead of your own credentials. This is a big part of why it works, and it also a big turn-off for "real" academics. For this very reason, I would deem it unlikely to pass, there is simply to much opposition. Even the chairwoman of the Wikimedia Foundation has voiced considerable opposition to it (although, I should note, this is fundamentally a decision for the community to make, not the foundation).
But the documents wouldn't be "public" like a website is public. It would still be stored encrypted and behind lock and key. Just anyone couldn't access it, and even FAA employees could probably only see a very limited subset of it. I'm just saying since these documents are public (and no, you can just censor any public document, you can only censor classified documents, and you can even sue to make those documents public), it wouldn't be a big deal if the FAA used Google's services. The Google sysops wouldn't need credentials or background checks or anything.
I would like to iterate this again: any government agency (that isn't the NSA) produces enormous amounts of documents. Millions and millions, and there is only a teeny-tiny amount that someone would even consider to be anything other than completely open. In the post-9/11 Bush-world it seems like anything a government does is a huge national secret. The truth is that the US is still a very open society (a little less so than some European countries perhaps) when it comes to government documents. Virtually all of them are completely public. The thing is, the very select few that aren't public (a fraction of a percent), those are the interesting ones, while most the public ones will probably never be read by anyone because they are mindnumbingly boring.
There is a large need for places to store these documents, and services that can retrieve them from anywhere in the world in a smooth way. If Google can do this cheaply, I say go for it! The teeny-tiny select few that are sensitive can be handled in a different way. There are huge savings to be made here, tax-dollars that can be spent on rescuing puppies and curing lupus and stuff. <span class=Colbert>Are you against puppies? PUPPY-HATER!</span>
(sorry about that last thing, but you get my point;)
I'm certain that they already have serious security routines for dealing with sensitive data. But that would be a tiny minority of the total data. The rest of the stuff, the millions of boring documents that any government agency produces every year, that can be put on these servers (and properly backed-up, of course). It's not like it's classified or anything. If it is cheaper than what they use now and it fills all their needs, I say go for it! I mean, what does the google app suite cost, $50 per person opposed to $250 of MS Office, plus a couple of hundred bucks for the OS? That's some major savings. Also, you get a whole lot more with google than just the software you get from MS.
The FAA probably has serious security routines for the 1% already, I'm sure that they can figure something out. But for the vast majority of their data, reports, emails, archives and all the other stuff there is no reason not to use google apps. I mean, I'm sure they back it up. It's a cheap, easy and very good way to deal with that data. My point about FOIA is that all of this data is already public, so there is very little need to spend huge amounts of money designing their own super-secure system when google has one already done. Sure, they don't want hackers to get in (and I'm sure google protects against that), but there isn't like a strong need to hide the data from the four google administrators that might debug the system. They don't need clearance or anything.
If the administrator says that it serves their needs and that it is cheaper, I say go for it! More money for hospitals and stuff. Plus, it removes some of the monopoly MS has on software on government computers, which is always nice.
Somebody probably started to go through the archives of the movie studio, tracking it film by film till they finally found it in some warehouse in Hoboken.
They not only operate in the public eye by convention, they do so by law. Has nobody heard of the Freedom of Information Act? Virtually all data that the FAA would store on those servers would be public anyway, and promptly available on request from anyone in the general public.
Of course it's legal. Why wouldn't it be legal? The government can use contract private enterprises to do anything they need, whether it be data storage or building a house. Also, ever heard of the Freedom of Information Act? 99% of the stuff stored on those servers will be open to the public anyway (I suppose air-port security stuff and on-going investigations and the like would be the exceptions), so there is not like there is a pressing need to hide it.
I would also like to point out that it is not necessarily true that this will be stored on googles servers. It might very well be that the databases are maintained in-house and the google apps access those. Or it might very well be that google simply sells their apps to the FAA so nothing is run on google servers.
As for google/microsoft lock-in, the only thing that I guess would make google better is that it's cheaper and it is automatically backed-up to central servers, without any hassle. Also Microsoft == Evil and Google == Good. Where have you been the last half-decade?;)
That's simply not true. If they really needed, they could produce Battlestar Galactica or whatever on American soil, but if they refuse to air certain tv-shows or movies in Canada they are missing out on a huge market of fairly wealthy people.
You're missing the point big time. Yes, the US is a huge exporter of copyrighted materials, but Canada is a huge importer of copyrighted materials. The US could never afford to lose Canada as a customer, which means that they can't dictate shit about anything.
Money does indeed talk. This time it's speaking for the cool people.
No, wikipedia most certainly runs on Apache. See this diagram for a layout of wikipedia servers (it might not be completely current). The master databases are MySQL, the web-servers are Apache running mediawiki and all pages are cached by a huge bunch of squids. And, of course, they all run linux:)
I don't get this. I'm a long time Linux user and a frequent programmer that modifies my system in a whole bunch of ways. I switched to Ubuntu two or three months ago, and I think it's great. I previously used Fedora, which is also a great OS, but it is ridiculous to claim that ubuntu isn't as "hackable" or that it is not suitable for programming. I do both just as easily as I've done before. What is it specifically that you are not happy with?
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I'm talking about the legal principle which was pretty much set in stone by Hustler Magazine v. Falwell. Which was unanimous.
I abhor W as much as anyone, but what you are talking about isn't just your standard impeachment: it's a coup d'état. Since the third person in line is a democrat, this would be removing a democratically elected government in favor of the political enemies of those elected. Is it legal? Sure it is. Is it something that a responsible member of a democratic society should ever even think to consider? No way. If this was ever to be done, it would be just as bad as anything Bush has done. In many ways, it would be far worse.
If you want to impeach Bush, then that's fine. He has certainly done things to deserve it. But if you impeach the next guy in line just because you don't like him and want your own party in power, that's crossing the line. The line between democracy and everything else.
This is something you could certainly argue. My point was that legally speaking, the kid is absolutely in the right and he has a unanimous supreme court to prove it. Of course, in any society that allows for civil suits of this nature, the people with the money can harass the people without them. The US more so than many other countries, I guess. However, isn't this a textbook case for something like the ACLU? Free speech, that is. I don't think he would have much trouble getting a lawyer pro-bono if this were ever to get to court, and even a cheap, bad lawyer would be able to win this pretty easily.
It's a dig at... well... digg. Last year they had the pink ponies, this year they have this. Difference is that last year's was actually funny.
I would like to point you to Wikipedia, which has a great April Fools frontpage. The best part is that it is all true!
No, it is a qwerty one but it's Swedish so I have a few extra keys ("å","ä" and "ö") and everything else is slightly moved around. This often happens the first time I use a new OS if I didn't set the locale during start-up or sometimes with dumb computer that don't expect that they might be played by more people than occupy North America.
What the hell kinduva pronoun is "hit"?
It did that to me at first to (I'm running Firefox under Ubuntu), but after reloading the page a couple of times, and making sure that the applet was the first thing I clicked, it worked fine
A bigger problem for me is that I use a non-US keyboard which means that it I couldn't do anything because I couldn't change the locale so when I typed ":" it entered ">". Meaning I couldn't do anything since I couldn't change the drive to c :) Anyone got a fix for this?
If we start using driverless cars, the Blue Screen of Death will suddenly have a whole new meaning!
What, are you kidding me? Since you seem to communicate in all caps language, let me explain it to you that way:
OF COURSE PEOPLE WATCH TV-SHOWS ON THEIR COMPUTER SCREENS!
I am currently looking at a bittorrent file of the latest Lost episode (that aired last night) and more than 180,000 people have downloaded it. That's just ONE TORRENT in ONE DAY! Most people might not view TV that way, but a helluva lot of people does. This is not an insignificant piece of the market.
This also highlights one of the great advantages with open source: free redistribution. The big reasons why debian, ubuntu and other linuxes can do such seamless updates is because of the package managers; because you have one unified system of downloading and installing apps, you can update them without any hassle at all. This wouldn't be possible on windows since the overwhelming majority of apps are not open source, meaning that you can't have a unified repository where you can download them from. That would be copyright infringement. This makes it so that every single app that wants to stay current has to make their own versions of an automatic updater, often making it gruesomely annoying to start whatever you need because of some damn pop-up (Acrobat Reader, I'm looking at you!). In ubuntu,, when something needs updating, a little star shines at the top of my screen, I click on it and enter my password, and bobs-yer-uncle, it's done.
Package managers are such an ingenious solution to handling software, and it is something that could only have come from the open source world.
Well done, linux people! Well done!
Since you can't enforce these standards legally, you have to have these sorts of organisations that at least try to get some sort of consensus. After they've agreed on a standard, that can then become part of the conversation between different companies. "Can you implement standard X" instead of "What exactly do you do?"
Even if these standards have no "teeth", it is still hugely useful that they exist. Not all become what is used, but many do. Remember, HTTP and TCP/IP are such standards. They have caught on, have they not?
This is exactly the point. Wikipedia is built on the idea that anyone can add information, as long as it is accurate. If you want to debate something, you should use real arguments instead of your own credentials. This is a big part of why it works, and it also a big turn-off for "real" academics. For this very reason, I would deem it unlikely to pass, there is simply to much opposition. Even the chairwoman of the Wikimedia Foundation has voiced considerable opposition to it (although, I should note, this is fundamentally a decision for the community to make, not the foundation).
But the documents wouldn't be "public" like a website is public. It would still be stored encrypted and behind lock and key. Just anyone couldn't access it, and even FAA employees could probably only see a very limited subset of it. I'm just saying since these documents are public (and no, you can just censor any public document, you can only censor classified documents, and you can even sue to make those documents public), it wouldn't be a big deal if the FAA used Google's services. The Google sysops wouldn't need credentials or background checks or anything.
I would like to iterate this again: any government agency (that isn't the NSA) produces enormous amounts of documents. Millions and millions, and there is only a teeny-tiny amount that someone would even consider to be anything other than completely open. In the post-9/11 Bush-world it seems like anything a government does is a huge national secret. The truth is that the US is still a very open society (a little less so than some European countries perhaps) when it comes to government documents. Virtually all of them are completely public. The thing is, the very select few that aren't public (a fraction of a percent), those are the interesting ones, while most the public ones will probably never be read by anyone because they are mindnumbingly boring.
There is a large need for places to store these documents, and services that can retrieve them from anywhere in the world in a smooth way. If Google can do this cheaply, I say go for it! The teeny-tiny select few that are sensitive can be handled in a different way. There are huge savings to be made here, tax-dollars that can be spent on rescuing puppies and curing lupus and stuff. <span class=Colbert>Are you against puppies? PUPPY-HATER!</span>
(sorry about that last thing, but you get my point ;)
I'm certain that they already have serious security routines for dealing with sensitive data. But that would be a tiny minority of the total data. The rest of the stuff, the millions of boring documents that any government agency produces every year, that can be put on these servers (and properly backed-up, of course). It's not like it's classified or anything. If it is cheaper than what they use now and it fills all their needs, I say go for it! I mean, what does the google app suite cost, $50 per person opposed to $250 of MS Office, plus a couple of hundred bucks for the OS? That's some major savings. Also, you get a whole lot more with google than just the software you get from MS.
The FAA probably has serious security routines for the 1% already, I'm sure that they can figure something out. But for the vast majority of their data, reports, emails, archives and all the other stuff there is no reason not to use google apps. I mean, I'm sure they back it up. It's a cheap, easy and very good way to deal with that data. My point about FOIA is that all of this data is already public, so there is very little need to spend huge amounts of money designing their own super-secure system when google has one already done. Sure, they don't want hackers to get in (and I'm sure google protects against that), but there isn't like a strong need to hide the data from the four google administrators that might debug the system. They don't need clearance or anything.
If the administrator says that it serves their needs and that it is cheaper, I say go for it! More money for hospitals and stuff. Plus, it removes some of the monopoly MS has on software on government computers, which is always nice.
Somebody probably started to go through the archives of the movie studio, tracking it film by film till they finally found it in some warehouse in Hoboken.
They not only operate in the public eye by convention, they do so by law. Has nobody heard of the Freedom of Information Act? Virtually all data that the FAA would store on those servers would be public anyway, and promptly available on request from anyone in the general public.
Of course it's legal. Why wouldn't it be legal? The government can use contract private enterprises to do anything they need, whether it be data storage or building a house. Also, ever heard of the Freedom of Information Act? 99% of the stuff stored on those servers will be open to the public anyway (I suppose air-port security stuff and on-going investigations and the like would be the exceptions), so there is not like there is a pressing need to hide it.
I would also like to point out that it is not necessarily true that this will be stored on googles servers. It might very well be that the databases are maintained in-house and the google apps access those. Or it might very well be that google simply sells their apps to the FAA so nothing is run on google servers.
As for google/microsoft lock-in, the only thing that I guess would make google better is that it's cheaper and it is automatically backed-up to central servers, without any hassle. Also Microsoft == Evil and Google == Good. Where have you been the last half-decade? ;)
That's simply not true. If they really needed, they could produce Battlestar Galactica or whatever on American soil, but if they refuse to air certain tv-shows or movies in Canada they are missing out on a huge market of fairly wealthy people.
You're missing the point big time. Yes, the US is a huge exporter of copyrighted materials, but Canada is a huge importer of copyrighted materials. The US could never afford to lose Canada as a customer, which means that they can't dictate shit about anything.
Money does indeed talk. This time it's speaking for the cool people.
No, wikipedia most certainly runs on Apache. See this diagram for a layout of wikipedia servers (it might not be completely current). The master databases are MySQL, the web-servers are Apache running mediawiki and all pages are cached by a huge bunch of squids. And, of course, they all run linux :)
I don't get this. I'm a long time Linux user and a frequent programmer that modifies my system in a whole bunch of ways. I switched to Ubuntu two or three months ago, and I think it's great. I previously used Fedora, which is also a great OS, but it is ridiculous to claim that ubuntu isn't as "hackable" or that it is not suitable for programming. I do both just as easily as I've done before. What is it specifically that you are not happy with?
Ruff, ruff, ruff! *cough* *cough*