Special Edition model for bishops and politicians.
Here in New Mexico, that's part of the problem.
Clearly, this is an unwieldy technical solution to a social problem: drunk driving would be cured in a hurry if strict laws were accompanied by adequate funding for the courts, which are way overloaded (letting people off due to technicalities) and by an attitude shift.
Currently, there is an attitude that "taking away the vehicle of the family breadwinner" would constitute an undue hardship on some individual. Yes, it would. But having that individual kill off some other family's breadwinner constitutes what I would call "an undue hardship" on that other family.
A lot of these issues have come to a head over the past 10 years or so after a couple of spectacular fatal accidents involving drunk drivers. That, and a newspaper reporter uncovering that one guy was still behind the wheel after being arrested 27 times for DWI.
[BTW, a similar line of arguments are responsible for New Mexico's high rate of uninsured motorists on the highways. But that's another story.]
Speaking of politician stories, though, you'll like this one.
A few years back in New Mexico a member of the state legislature was arrested for DWI. (Not the first time that such an event took place.)
His defense attorney mounted an effort to get the charges dismissed based on the "human brewery defense". The argument was that food items ingested by the defendant during lunch had started to ferment in his stomach and to produce the alcohol that was certainly observed in the administered tests. [Fortunately, I don't think the defense's story was bought].
I have to ask: with so many thousands of glyphs in Chinese, what did they do to utilize telegraph lines when that was the only means for fast long distance communication?
I'm assuming they didn't create a different sequence for each one....
Those who are making laws now are so illogical that they would never have run-time bugs because they would never get anything to compile.
The need for courts after legislation is sufficient evidence that laws won't compile properly; they are inconsistent, vague and open to different interpretation on different platforms (people).
Of course, a lot of that problem are people that don't get
#include <goldenrule.h>
when they were growing up; instead they're running with primitive BIOS code that amounts to "increase self pleasure and decrease self pain anyway possible"
...Spain that did the same thing and didn't become sucessful
Incorrect.
Spain was quite successful in the 1500's, otherwise known as the Siglo de Oro, or century of gold built up from their, uh, ventures in the New World.
At the time they were considered a pre-eminent world power. The British were quite nervous about the might of the Spanish Armada when they attacked in 1588, but were fortunate in that the Spanish fleet had to contend with a series of bad weather at inopportune times.
Of course it's only a theory, and not one I'd bet the farm on.
Literally, we have bet all the farms on it already.
Coastal flooding is the least of my worries should there be an actual significant warming trend, man-made or otherwise.
It's that once arable land helping to feed 6 billion people will lose it's agricultural productivity. Oklahoma may become a dustbowl and we'll all need to move north to Manitoba to grow wheat. And that's taking the optimistic view that the area of temperate climate just "moves north" but stays about the same size. It could shrink (or expand), too.
Despite how little we know about global warming, we have no choice in the matter; we have bet the farm on the outcome.
I agree with the sentiments, but if you read the letter carefully, Microsoft's wording is "may" have engaged.....
In that case, it's really up to the ISP to decide what to do.
If they decide to investigate thoroughly or summarily close someone's account without investigation, it's their decision. Microsoft can argue that it's the ISP's fault the account was canceled. They only advised the ISP of the possibility that some wrongdoing might be taking place and what to do if it was taking place.
But I sympathize with the ISP; it's usually a couple of geeks operating mountains of modems on razor thin margins. Given a scary letter from Microsoft I can see why they may have acted prematurely and wrongly.
I think the take-home lesson would be not to immediately take action unless you're presented with incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing or a court order.
Rather, send a registered letter saying that you obey the law, take allegations seriously, and will do your utmost to investigate the allegations and to take proper action depending on the outcome of the investigation. And since IANAL, I'd pay my lawyer a couple hours of time to look it over to make sure it was proper and watertight.
I think SCO beleives their claims (at least at the higher levels). I beleive that they THINK that they own this code
They'll have better luck convincing a judge or jury than this guy has of convincing the IRS that he is insane - proof of his insanity is that he believes that he alone is capable of interpreting IRS regulations. The insanity defense is being built here to protect himself against owed back taxes.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson
wants more time for conclusive scientific study as
the United States
recommendations to the World Health Organization, which has the temerity to come out with outlandish and controversal dietary recommendations such as eating less sugar and more fruits and vegetables.
Other sugar-producing nations in the Americas are falling into line with this policy view. (Although I can't understand that they're very happy with the US subsidies to its domestic sugar producers.)
For those old enough to remember, this "needs more scientific study of direct causal relationship" was trotted out by the tobacco industry for a long time to combat U.S. governmental efforts to label cigarette packs.
When it comes time to arguing legal cases and to leverage the desktop, sure.
IIRC, there'n nothing technically preventing MS from using Windows XP Embedded as a baseline for constructing a basic PC system. Then, uh, essential OS features, such as an HTML renderer and audio file decoders, could be added in a modular way (just as they are with Linux).
Such a solution would probably result in more robust and maintainable code since gratuitous complicated ties between the OS proper and the applications would not be needed to support the illusion needed for courtrooms and for marketing new "OS" features.
Here's a timely story for those of you filling out your federal tax return for Uncle Sam this spring.
According to my tax preparer, one of the ways they decide whether to audit a particular return is to correlate the adjusted gross income against ZIP code. Generally, areas segregate into rich and poor neighborhoods.
Persons in poor ZIP codes who have unusually high incomes would be singled out (Mr Coke Dealer that wants to avoid Al Capone's downfall - income tax evasion) on the one hand.
Then, people in wealthy ZIP codes with no visible means of support (again, illicit gains and unreported income).
It all goes to show that intelligent data mining can make much better use of the information already available. No need for John Ashcroft to review my frequent shopper card purchases.
"Dean has the opposite position of the average American on just about every political issue."
This is an odd assertion.
Not really.
IIRC, demographic profiling of New Hampshire voters found a pronounced skew in Dean's support; he was more heavily favored by those with more advanced college degrees (Kerry still winning among less educated, but Dean winning among the more educated).
The only vote that you thow away is one where you vote for someone because they could win.
Sadly, many people vote "for a winner" or because a candidate appears to have "momentum".
Exhibit A: Democratic primaries in the U.S.
OTOH, how much comfort do supporters of Nader's Green Party Presidential campaign in 2000 take in their principled stand not to elect Al "Lesser Evil" Gore, especially now that the country has experienced 3 years under Geroge W. Bush?
I used fvwm on Solaris/SPARC boxes back in the day when the CDE Openwindows combination was, by comparison, slow and memory intensive. The keyboard accelerator combinations for things like "verti-zoom" and lockscreen helped to increase my productivity.
Another window manager that I used for a year or two was ctwm. It was quite configurable, but not as memory lean as fvwm.
I live on a heterogeneous LAN. One thing that was nice was "xon remote_sgi_box xterm", etc. and building up a collection of terminal windows on all the different machines I needed for testing and production runs. Some unofficial icons made to look like the corresponding official logos made the desktop look "diverse", as well as highlighting the ability of X to exercise the network client/server aspects of a GUI.
That way if something doesn't work exactly like the higher-ups want it
So, like, what I'd like to know is exactly who in MyCorp is eating crow for the bad consequences of choosing MS?
Answer: nobody.
Nobody's held accountable because everybody doesn't think there is any choice: "PC's have to come with Windows, don't they?".
Give people an option, make them award of an alternative, and that there is a choice and maybe, just maybe, some of shit hitting the fan will get distributed to where it needs to be: the decision maker.
Because of the nature of Linux and FOSS, it's very hard to know exactly how much deployment any particular distribution is getting.
Sales figures are one thing, but users able to install the same CD on multiple machines mean that the number of installations could be higher.
Worldwise, subtracting new MS licenses from total new x86 hardware sales doesn't account for unauthorized installations of MS software on those other x86 machines. It's not all going to Linux and the *BSD releases. But MS probably has a better idea than anyone about the prevalence of piracy, so they may well have the most accurate figures about Linux installations, better than Gartner, IDG, and the other consulting firms.
Then there's folks like me that have bought several releases of SuSE, but only run the latest one.
And there are people recycling old Win98 boxes into single purpose servers on Linux.
Finally, a few distros might "phone home", but the user is permitted to modify this behavior, so that's not a complete measure either. It might be a good lower bound.
There's just no really accurate way to count installs.
incentive to "game" these systems by increasing your friend count.
This phenomena is not something new to online communities.
Politicians and salesmen have tried to "game" social networks for millenia.
And if you really want to study some interesting social networks, consider Multi Level Marketing (MLM) schemes which are often replete with zealous, almost religious fervor about Success and rely upon social networks for growth and an occassional well-placed meme, such as "Women Gifting Women".
Where it would be interesting is to look at the big databases of voters and voting behaviors that the major political parties (at least here in the U.S.) have on citizens. I'd bet the swing voters in the middle have more connections with a wider variety of people than those who are entrenched in their points of view and cloak themselves with like-minded people validating the shared values.
Re:I'll get to the point at the end of this post.
on
Canadian Privacy Act
·
· Score: 1
"Assault compilers" would be banned.
Damn well about time, too!
I've got fresh wounds from my latest run-in with
% gcc -Wpedantic...
Sun is in a great position to evaluate its costs and the benefits of operating Java the closed way and operating OpenOffice the open way.
They should evaluate the project growth in revenues from each business model and do what makes sense. And, yes, it may make sense to open up Java. But if they've sunk more money into Star/OpenOffice than they think they're likely to recoup as the number of customers increases (see recent deals with India, China, etc.) then maybe Java is worth holding onto.
...nasty reviews made by rivals should be revealable as well. The one author interviewed said that he did it to couteract rivals who he felt were trashing his book.
What to do, what to do...
Um, maybe rank the reviews according a measure of the author's previous posting history?
Anyone that spends their time trashing books mindlessly will ruin their chances of boosting their own book; astroturfers that write insightful comments will still be free to lose objectivity once in a while, but the overall average of lots of insightful comments will still give people a good idea of the consensus.
Even despite all of this crap, the costs for the customers (i.e., these who pay premiums for the healthcare) continue growing. Major cause: expensive drugs and more people requiring them permanently.
You've only touched upon a couple of the problems with the health care system in the United States.
Basically, the problem is that people are disconnected from paying prices and evaluating tradeoffs efficiently.
If everyone were required to pay something for medical care, even if it's only 2% of the cost, then more expensive treatments would be part of the equation of whether to get them done. It's not currently. Worse, expensive needless diagnostics are ordered in a CYA fashion because doctors know their malpractice insurance will go up unless they cover bases in case of lawsuit.
Finally, the doctors stick together (it's just like police officers), the trial lawyers stick together, and the health care buying groups stick together to milk the system for whatever they can. All of these groups lobby heavily to prevent the system from becoming more streamlined. Of course, they all want their own respective industries to self-regulate. And they can buy politicians to agree with that point of view.
Try a few things to see how totally fuck3d up the system is...
Find an freely-available, honest complete assessment and ranking of doctors in your area, including prices charged for basic procedures.
Find out if bad doctors merely moved to another state.
Ask your good doctor why he's leaving the practice (hint: dealing with insurance forms and low medicare/medicaid reimbursement rates.)
Try to get a prescription filled by a nurse.
Ask an ob/gyn how much malpractice insurance costs and how many juries understand what reasonable risks are.
Ask your investment broker how revenue on sales for pharmaceutical companies compares with other industries.
You say that also to victims of rape or other crimes?
From what little is known about the unauthorized leak from Mainsoft's computer, the prime suspect in the case has already gathered a high-powered legal team (currently engaged by Kobe Bryant).
In a pre-trial maneuver, the suspect has issued press releases alleging that Steve Ballmer was wearing a rather revealing red dress when the violation was said to have occurred.
Furthermore, he claimed that other witnesses were willing to come forward to testify to Mr Ballmer's unstable mental state, to his taste for unconventional gratification, and to his propensity for hanging out with an unsavory crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
Special Edition model for bishops and politicians.
Here in New Mexico, that's part of the problem.
Clearly, this is an unwieldy technical solution to a social problem: drunk driving would be cured in a hurry if strict laws were accompanied by adequate funding for the courts, which are way overloaded (letting people off due to technicalities) and by an attitude shift.
Currently, there is an attitude that "taking away the vehicle of the family breadwinner" would constitute an undue hardship on some individual. Yes, it would. But having that individual kill off some other family's breadwinner constitutes what I would call "an undue hardship" on that other family.
A lot of these issues have come to a head over the past 10 years or so after a couple of spectacular fatal accidents involving drunk drivers. That, and a newspaper reporter uncovering that one guy was still behind the wheel after being arrested 27 times for DWI.
[BTW, a similar line of arguments are responsible for New Mexico's high rate of uninsured motorists on the highways. But that's another story.]
Speaking of politician stories, though, you'll like this one.
A few years back in New Mexico a member of the state legislature was arrested for DWI. (Not the first time that such an event took place.)
His defense attorney mounted an effort to get the charges dismissed based on the "human brewery defense". The argument was that food items ingested by the defendant during lunch had started to ferment in his stomach and to produce the alcohol that was certainly observed in the administered tests. [Fortunately, I don't think the defense's story was bought].
I have to ask: with so many thousands of glyphs in Chinese, what did they do to utilize telegraph lines when that was the only means for fast long distance communication?
I'm assuming they didn't create a different sequence for each one....
I seem to recall that there are theories about how a black hole devours a star, that accelerating ions spiraling inward do emit X-rays.
Also, something about polar jets of material getting expelled.
Any evidence of those theories applying, for those of you that know?
Those who are making laws now are so illogical that they would never have run-time bugs because they would never get anything to compile.
The need for courts after legislation is sufficient evidence that laws won't compile properly; they are inconsistent, vague and open to different interpretation on different platforms (people).
Of course, a lot of that problem are people that don't get
when they were growing up; instead they're running with primitive BIOS code that amounts to "increase self pleasure and decrease self pain anyway possible"Incorrect.
Spain was quite successful in the 1500's, otherwise known as the Siglo de Oro, or century of gold built up from their, uh, ventures in the New World.
At the time they were considered a pre-eminent world power. The British were quite nervous about the might of the Spanish Armada when they attacked in 1588, but were fortunate in that the Spanish fleet had to contend with a series of bad weather at inopportune times.
Of course it's only a theory, and not one I'd bet the farm on.
Literally, we have bet all the farms on it already.
Coastal flooding is the least of my worries should there be an actual significant warming trend, man-made or otherwise.
It's that once arable land helping to feed 6 billion people will lose it's agricultural productivity. Oklahoma may become a dustbowl and we'll all need to move north to Manitoba to grow wheat. And that's taking the optimistic view that the area of temperate climate just "moves north" but stays about the same size. It could shrink (or expand), too.
Despite how little we know about global warming, we have no choice in the matter; we have bet the farm on the outcome.
I agree with the sentiments, but if you read the letter carefully, Microsoft's wording is "may" have engaged.....
In that case, it's really up to the ISP to decide what to do.
If they decide to investigate thoroughly or summarily close someone's account without investigation, it's their decision. Microsoft can argue that it's the ISP's fault the account was canceled. They only advised the ISP of the possibility that some wrongdoing might be taking place and what to do if it was taking place.
But I sympathize with the ISP; it's usually a couple of geeks operating mountains of modems on razor thin margins. Given a scary letter from Microsoft I can see why they may have acted prematurely and wrongly.
I think the take-home lesson would be not to immediately take action unless you're presented with incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing or a court order.
Rather, send a registered letter saying that you obey the law, take allegations seriously, and will do your utmost to investigate the allegations and to take proper action depending on the outcome of the investigation. And since IANAL, I'd pay my lawyer a couple hours of time to look it over to make sure it was proper and watertight.
I think SCO beleives their claims (at least at the higher levels). I beleive that they THINK that they own this code
They'll have better luck convincing a judge or jury than this guy has of convincing the IRS that he is insane - proof of his insanity is that he believes that he alone is capable of interpreting IRS regulations. The insanity defense is being built here to protect himself against owed back taxes.
Why should software be any different from sugar?
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson wants more time for conclusive scientific study as the United States recommendations to the World Health Organization, which has the temerity to come out with outlandish and controversal dietary recommendations such as eating less sugar and more fruits and vegetables.
Other sugar-producing nations in the Americas are falling into line with this policy view. (Although I can't understand that they're very happy with the US subsidies to its domestic sugar producers.)
For those old enough to remember, this "needs more scientific study of direct causal relationship" was trotted out by the tobacco industry for a long time to combat U.S. governmental efforts to label cigarette packs.
Absolutely.
FOSS only commoditises what really ought to be commoditised.
Software companies can still make money by creating true value added onto that base of cheap hardware and cheap software.
We're talking about new software, or support, tuning, customization of software systems that users might not want to manage themselves.
This software IS the operating system now.
When it comes time to arguing legal cases and to leverage the desktop, sure.
IIRC, there'n nothing technically preventing MS from using Windows XP Embedded as a baseline for constructing a basic PC system. Then, uh, essential OS features, such as an HTML renderer and audio file decoders, could be added in a modular way (just as they are with Linux). Such a solution would probably result in more robust and maintainable code since gratuitous complicated ties between the OS proper and the applications would not be needed to support the illusion needed for courtrooms and for marketing new "OS" features.
Here's a timely story for those of you filling out your federal tax return for Uncle Sam this spring.
According to my tax preparer, one of the ways they decide whether to audit a particular return is to correlate the adjusted gross income against ZIP code. Generally, areas segregate into rich and poor neighborhoods.
Persons in poor ZIP codes who have unusually high incomes would be singled out (Mr Coke Dealer that wants to avoid Al Capone's downfall - income tax evasion) on the one hand.
Then, people in wealthy ZIP codes with no visible means of support (again, illicit gains and unreported income).
It all goes to show that intelligent data mining can make much better use of the information already available. No need for John Ashcroft to review my frequent shopper card purchases.
"Dean has the opposite position of the average American on just about every political issue."
This is an odd assertion.
Not really.
IIRC, demographic profiling of New Hampshire voters found a pronounced skew in Dean's support; he was more heavily favored by those with more advanced college degrees (Kerry still winning among less educated, but Dean winning among the more educated).
Not your average Americans at all. Go figure.
The only vote that you thow away is one where you vote for someone because they could win.
Sadly, many people vote "for a winner" or because a candidate appears to have "momentum".
Exhibit A: Democratic primaries in the U.S.
OTOH, how much comfort do supporters of Nader's Green Party Presidential campaign in 2000 take in their principled stand not to elect Al "Lesser Evil" Gore, especially now that the country has experienced 3 years under Geroge W. Bush?
I used fvwm on Solaris/SPARC boxes back in the day when the CDE Openwindows combination was, by comparison, slow and memory intensive. The keyboard accelerator combinations for things like "verti-zoom" and lockscreen helped to increase my productivity.
Another window manager that I used for a year or two was ctwm. It was quite configurable, but not as memory lean as fvwm.
I live on a heterogeneous LAN. One thing that was nice was "xon remote_sgi_box xterm", etc. and building up a collection of terminal windows on all the different machines I needed for testing and production runs. Some unofficial icons made to look like the corresponding official logos made the desktop look "diverse", as well as highlighting the ability of X to exercise the network client/server aspects of a GUI.
That way if something doesn't work exactly like the higher-ups want it
So, like, what I'd like to know is exactly who in MyCorp is eating crow for the bad consequences of choosing MS?
Answer: nobody.
Nobody's held accountable because everybody doesn't think there is any choice: "PC's have to come with Windows, don't they?".
Give people an option, make them award of an alternative, and that there is a choice and maybe, just maybe, some of shit hitting the fan will get distributed to where it needs to be: the decision maker.
Because of the nature of Linux and FOSS, it's very hard to know exactly how much deployment any particular distribution is getting.
Sales figures are one thing, but users able to install the same CD on multiple machines mean that the number of installations could be higher.
Worldwise, subtracting new MS licenses from total new x86 hardware sales doesn't account for unauthorized installations of MS software on those other x86 machines. It's not all going to Linux and the *BSD releases. But MS probably has a better idea than anyone about the prevalence of piracy, so they may well have the most accurate figures about Linux installations, better than Gartner, IDG, and the other consulting firms.
Then there's folks like me that have bought several releases of SuSE, but only run the latest one.
And there are people recycling old Win98 boxes into single purpose servers on Linux.
Finally, a few distros might "phone home", but the user is permitted to modify this behavior, so that's not a complete measure either. It might be a good lower bound.
There's just no really accurate way to count installs.
incentive to "game" these systems by increasing your friend count.
This phenomena is not something new to online communities.
Politicians and salesmen have tried to "game" social networks for millenia.
And if you really want to study some interesting social networks, consider Multi Level Marketing (MLM) schemes which are often replete with zealous, almost religious fervor about Success and rely upon social networks for growth and an occassional well-placed meme, such as "Women Gifting Women".
Where it would be interesting is to look at the big databases of voters and voting behaviors that the major political parties (at least here in the U.S.) have on citizens. I'd bet the swing voters in the middle have more connections with a wider variety of people than those who are entrenched in their points of view and cloak themselves with like-minded people validating the shared values.
"Assault compilers" would be banned.
Damn well about time, too!
I've got fresh wounds from my latest run-in with ...
% gcc -Wpedantic
Sun is in a great position to evaluate its costs and the benefits of operating Java the closed way and operating OpenOffice the open way.
They should evaluate the project growth in revenues from each business model and do what makes sense. And, yes, it may make sense to open up Java. But if they've sunk more money into Star/OpenOffice than they think they're likely to recoup as the number of customers increases (see recent deals with India, China, etc.) then maybe Java is worth holding onto.
Oxytocin.
That would be different from Oxycontin, then.
What to do, what to do...
Um, maybe rank the reviews according a measure of the author's previous posting history?
Anyone that spends their time trashing books mindlessly will ruin their chances of boosting their own book; astroturfers that write insightful comments will still be free to lose objectivity once in a while, but the overall average of lots of insightful comments will still give people a good idea of the consensus.
IIRC, CVD grown diamond is amorphous, poly-crystalline.
Now if they could grow 300mm diamond wafers without so many defects, I'd be impressed.
Even despite all of this crap, the costs for the customers (i.e., these who pay premiums for the healthcare) continue growing. Major cause: expensive drugs and more people requiring them permanently.
You've only touched upon a couple of the problems with the health care system in the United States.
Basically, the problem is that people are disconnected from paying prices and evaluating tradeoffs efficiently.
If everyone were required to pay something for medical care, even if it's only 2% of the cost, then more expensive treatments would be part of the equation of whether to get them done. It's not currently. Worse, expensive needless diagnostics are ordered in a CYA fashion because doctors know their malpractice insurance will go up unless they cover bases in case of lawsuit.
Finally, the doctors stick together (it's just like police officers), the trial lawyers stick together, and the health care buying groups stick together to milk the system for whatever they can. All of these groups lobby heavily to prevent the system from becoming more streamlined. Of course, they all want their own respective industries to self-regulate. And they can buy politicians to agree with that point of view.
Try a few things to see how totally fuck3d up the system is...
You say that also to victims of rape or other crimes?
From what little is known about the unauthorized leak from Mainsoft's computer, the prime suspect in the case has already gathered a high-powered legal team (currently engaged by Kobe Bryant).
In a pre-trial maneuver, the suspect has issued press releases alleging that Steve Ballmer was wearing a rather revealing red dress when the violation was said to have occurred.
Furthermore, he claimed that other witnesses were willing to come forward to testify to Mr Ballmer's unstable mental state, to his taste for unconventional gratification, and to his propensity for hanging out with an unsavory crowd.
This isn't over by a long shot.