Posts by steward 278 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2008
I had a computer once running MS-DOS 6.22. I upgraded to Windows 3.11, no problem, From there to 95, then 98 2nd version, then 2000, then XP.
No reinstalls. Used Norton Ghost when I needed a bigger hard drive. Worked fine all along.
Then I installed Windows 7, which not only can't port installs from XP, but can't be upgraded from 32-bit to 64-bit without another full install. (I don't know why, Microsoft figured out how to upgrade 16-bit to 32-bit perfectly fine.) It's already (10 months after install) getting undefined "inconsistencies" in its registry, telling me I need to reinstall the whole thing over and all apps.
First Microsoft needs to get an operating system past XP that actually works. Vista and 7 just don't cut it. If they want to sell upgraded OS's, then provide ways to fix inconsistencies (if they know there's an inconsistency then they should be able to provide a report on what's conflicting), and provide a direct upgrade path without reinstalling everything all over again.
Nothing in the UCMJ authorizes what is being done.
On the contrary,
"813. ART. 13 PUNISHMENT PROHIBITED BEFORE TRIAL
No person, while being held for trial, may be subjected to punishment or penalty other than arrest or confinement upon the charges pending against him, nor shall the arrest or confinement imposed upon him be any more rigorous than the circumstances required to insure his presence, but he may be subjected to minor punishment during that period for infractions of discipline."
For those unfamiliar with US legal terms, "insure his presence" means "can't break out of the jail."
Source: an official US military site, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ucmj.htm
Your side of the puddle needs something like United States Code Title 42, Section 1983:
"Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress, except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer’s judicial capacity, injunctive relief shall not be granted unless a declaratory decree was violated or declaratory relief was unavailable. For the purposes of this section, any Act of Congress applicable exclusively to the District of Columbia shall be considered to be a statute of the District of Columbia. "
When you're trying to come to terms privately, and take an extreme position, that's a position for negotiation (a legitimate tactic.)
When your corporation swears in legal documents that it's taking a loss greater than the entire product of the planet, that's perjury (a felony.)
See the difference?
the iPad was my first foray into the lockdown world of Apple.
If they keep this 30% charge - which would actually have to be passed along to the consumer, ME, by the companies providing content... this will be my last foray into Apple as well.
It's really going to be difficult for Apple to sell multi-GB devices fillable with content that's too expensive to buy. And fun to watch Apple send itself down the tubes by forgetting what they're in business to sell in the first place.
I was disciplined at a county college in the US for writing an application like that... in 1981. Seems the sysop was a Catholic and was offended.
(I must admit that the penance it gave out could be considered offensive, although I thought it was rather poetic at the time: "Four Our Father's, Three Hail Mary's, Two Glory Be's and a partridge in a pear tree.")
Not legal names.
I know several people who have adopted new personal names without resorting to the Courts to do so; they use their "legal" names only when absolutely necessary.
And having "personal" names which are far different from "legal" names has been a tradition in US activism for several decades. Don't know why it'd be any different anywhere else.
the problem was simply not telling the postal service that there was a live animal in there. Live animals have to be shipped Special Handling, and there are increased postage fees and notifications for that.
http://www.usps.com/send/waystosendmail/extraservices/specialhandlingservice.htm
computer was available, at the time, for the price, that could handle three simultaneous voices for electronic music, with only about 38K available to program with?
And, of course, programs were available to make things easier. You know, software, that stuff you buy for your computer now to make things easier.
Commodore died for the same reason that Studebaker died: they didn't see where their market really was, and their marketers dragged the brand down the drain. (This is also the reason Microsoft dominates software: Gates is a geek who's good at marketing and working with marketers.)
I went to the alpha page using MSIE (it's the only browser allowed at the computer I'm at) and got the following message in the title bar:
You need to use a real browser in order to use Diaspora!
Considering that a lot of people use MSIE by choice, and a lot don't understand other browsers no matter how many times it's explained to them, I see a fast doom for any web service that doesn't support the most-used browser available.
Germany is still quite fanatic about denazification - banning sales of various memorabilia, etc.
The pink triangle that is one of the primary symbols of the gay rights movement came from Nazi Germany, as well: homosexuals were required to wear them, just as Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David.
And now, the thoroughly de-nazified Germany is attacking homosexual... vultures.
You just can't make this kind of stuff up - any fiction editor would reject it without even a letter.
which could be used to trip the jogger, or hit him with, without exposing him to a potentially lethal electric shock simply for exposing his body.
Or they could have called in another car or two to trap the offender. Or officers on bicycles, motorcycles, or if they have them in that city, horses.
Or they could have just left him alone, and gotten to work on rapes, murders, burglaries, robberies... oh, I forgot, those jobs are more dangerous than electroshocking a nude man.
is what the thing will bring.
"Although people don't want to pay extra for privacy, individuals still value privacy"
It's a contradiction. If people want to social network, and want privacy, they'll be more than willing to pay the charge that makes up for the lost revenue to facebook for the additional privacy.
Otherwise, if they're on facebook, they don't value privacy more than what's freely available.
Net (and let's be clear here, it's NET, not WEB neutrality) has to do with not banning speech based on content. This goes back to pre-web days on the USENET, where there were always arguments about the binaries newsgroups as well as many of the alt.* groups. Since there weren't many people savvy enough or who had enough time on their hands to uudecode the binaries, Hollywood wasn't particularly worried, although they'd lob a threat or two from time to time. A lot more people were worried about groups like alt.support.depression and alt.suicide.holiday, but most USENET carriers dismissed the complaints because of the principle of net neutrality.
Now, however, this term has been hijacked by people who believe that because they're watching a movie, they should get a priority routing without paying for the infrastructure to allow it. The lag time for the lower tier will likely be unnoticeable; the lag time for watching movies is critical. Since everyone knows already that net neutrality is good, that term has been seized - not for content neutrality - but for costs remaining the same no matter how many bits are consumed.
but the President could legitimately say that the Koran-burning increased the risks. Having troops there illegally (especially with the example of how the Afghans chewed through the Brits, just read some Kipling, and the Afghans bankrupting the USSR into nonexistence) threatens both the troops and the Republic.
Because they're involved in an illegal (the Congress has not issued a formal declaration of war, as required by the US Constitution) war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Bring them all home and they won't be in danger anymore.
And the US First Amendment can breathe a sigh of relief that it's no longer being attacked from a range of people from the loony left (Sec'y of State Hilary Clinton) to the loony right (former AK governor Sarah Palin.)
When suppliers cut people's views off from the net based on content, we lose net neutrality.
And there are a LOT of things in the Koran, as well as the Bible, which can easily be characterized as "hate speech". For example, the 84th verse of "The Family of Imran", one of the books in the Koran, directs Muslims to believe in what Moses taught; and the 621 commandments in the Mosaic law include such goodies as the summary execution of male homosexuals (Lev. 20:13), as well as a literal take-no-prisoners approach to warfare, killing men, women, and children (Deut. 7:1-2).
I fail to see how someone burning a pile of non-unique books, no matter how dear they are to some people, is more 'hateful' than hosting anything related to worship of the God of Abraham.
Then again, most of the people controlling the web at least nominally worship that deity.
the Bhopal gas tragedy occurred in India.
It took until 2006 for all court orders for settlement money to finally be carried out.
I don't think anyone's much worried about pursuing suits or countersuits for things like this through the courts there. Bhopal was simple: Union Carbide screwed up and poisoned lots of people. This took 22 years to settle completely, more years than the Web has been in existence.
"In hoc signo vinces", a victory guarantee to Constantine by Jebus' crowd, 312 C.E.
The hegira, the beginning of Mohammed's preaching and the founding of Islam: 622 C.E.
The followers of jebus started at least 310 years before muslims EXISTED.
you know about the reliability of Wikipedia: zero.
Brooklyn, like the rest of New York City, was 212 for many years. It was only after the introduction of +1 dialing that X11 codes were even used for area codes.
415 was introduced at the same time as 201, to make a coast-to-coast DDD call possible.
It's always good to consult a primary source, such as http://www.corp.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/51trans.html , instead of a useless source, like Wikipedia.
Verizon can't even reach all POTS subscribers with FIOS in the most densely populated US State.with FIOS. (That's NJ, folks, home of the first area code for DDD: 201.)
And to add insult to injury, they send ads about FIOS every two months to areas where it's not available.
The problem is that the inventors are bad at lawyering.
Once upon a time, long, long, ago (before 1/1/84, to be precise) there was an American behemoth called the "Bell System". Through its Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL) component, it carried on much basic and applied research. Pursuant to the Communications Act of 1934, which exempted the Bell System from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the Bell System had to -give away- all its inventions except to other telephony companies such as GTE. This was paid for by high long-distance rates.
BTL was chopped up into "AT&T Laboratories", "AT&T Bell Laboratories", and "Bell Communications Research" ("Bellcore".) Over the years, some units of these entities were acquired by SAIC - wherein lies the problem: engineers running these units and SAIC were lousy at enforcing patents. It wasn't in their historical corporate culture.
Solution: Lawyers buy the patents (probably for more money than SAIC could figure out how to get out of them) and make a profit. Long-distance calls are cheap now... but the basic research still has to be paid for. Didn't anyone ever hear of TANSTAAFL? The piper now needs paying.
Maybe SAIC will eventually figure out how to enforce patents on their own, as a new generation comes to work there.
There is, in civil law, a concept called the "doctrine of laches", which basically says that if someone knows that they have a right to something, and wait too long to enforce it, that they lose the right to enforce it.
"Too long" in the US often differs from state to state.
It looks more like something that should have been sent to the Onion, not to Vulture Central.
Or else John of St. Louis has a seriously warped mind and should seek professional aid immediately. The red X is commonly used to mark people who have been dropped or should be dropped from contention for a position, cf. http://www.spudart.org/blogs/randomthoughts_comments/A4441_0_3_0_C/
Maybe they could fix the bogus XP, Win7, and Vista Error 1625 - the equivalent of the BSOD for installing apps on a computer where you -are- the administrator, have all administrator privileges, but the highly-flawed Windows Installer program can't read the Windows Registry correctly.
It can't be TOO difficult, Adobe wrote its own installer which reads the registry correctly.
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