Right now the CPSC is trying to go outside their juristiction to ban the sales of anything they consider a "chemical" to the public, since chemicals and other raw materials aren't safe consumer products. They are doing this under the guise of preventing the sale of illegal explosive fireworks to the public.

The ATF has the juristiction to regulate the manufacture and sales of such explosive devices, not the CPSC. The ATF is not trying to ban the sales of chemicals to the public.

Pretty soon it will be illegal to buy any raw materials for anything unless you can prove you are a business.

Anyway, sign up for the Fireworks alliance. They have nice prewritten letters you can send to your elected people.

Fireworks Alliance

DEATHBOT 9000 RUNS ON OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE! DEATHBOT 9000 IS ROUTIENELY MODERATED +5 INSIGHTFUL ON SLASHDOT! DEATHBOT 9000 MET WIL WHEATON ONCE! Deathbot 9000 has no concept of an indoor voice! Deathbot 9000 blathers incessantly about the GPL!

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The new G5s apparently don't use IEC power cables for some arbitrary reason (likely so they can sell replacements at $100 a piece).

Apple are such bastards.

Only $90

I'm speechless. It's a fucking pill fob. I got 3 of these for $2 in surplus not too long ago.

I'm working on a larger version of this, which I can hopefully run past some lawyerly type friends, but here's the short of it that I promised:

Right now, if I want to develop a product or software, I am faced with a tough choice:

1. Do a patent search, likely find some vague patents that might cover what I want to do, or
2. Do no patent search and just live dangerously.

If I do the patent search and decide to proceed, I may be liable later on for triple damages since I knew about the patents that I am accused of infringing.

If I don't do the search, I might clearly infringe on a patent I could have worked around with a different implementation.

What leads to this situation is that no one really knows what a patent covers until the court rules on it. Most defendants would consider that a little bit too late for them.

So here's the proposal, I call it "Double or Nothing":

1. If you are distributing a product, you incur no patent liability until you are notified of infringement.

2. If you immediately cease the alleged infringing action or accept the license terms, then you can not be sued.

3. You can continue the action that is the subject of the alleged infringement, without paying royalties, and be sued for damages from the notification date forward only.

4. In either case however, you may immediately sue the patent holder, challenging the patent claim. You may sue for any legal costs associated with the case, and lost revenue caused by ceasing the alleged infringing action.

5. Under this system, all actionable infringement is willful, so there's no need to let treble damages influence your choice to research patents.

Right now the patent holders have little to lose. It's easy for some small patent holding company to spam out infringement notices with impunity. This system would balance the risk, you'd better be damn sure of infringement before you start sending out notices of infringement, as you then become liable for lost revenue and court costs for every company that decided to cease the infringing action and challenge your patent.

This doesn't fix everything, but it would sure fix some of the abuses that are really hindering innovation.

I hate it when people say "RTFA".. especially if you did, even more if they are completely wrong. Pisses me off to no end.

Everyone should just say IITA (It's in the article). Means basically the same thing, less likely to piss people off, and you don't sound like a penis if they did read the fucking article and actually understood the implications better than you did.

First the Red Hat zealots came for me,
and I said nothing because I didn't want to run a commercialized distro
Then the Gentoo zealots came for me,
and I said nothing because I didn't want to compile everything
Then the OS X zealots came for me,
and I said nothing because I won't pay for overpriced hardware
Finally the Ubuntu zealots came for me,
and everyone was so sick of offtopic zealotry that no one spoke up at all.

Seriously though, I really don't have any opinion one way or another on Ubuntu itself. It sounds nice enough, even if it does break compatibility with Debian in an seemingly unnecessary way. Ubuntusers are driving me up a wall with their constant proselytizing though.

The Ubuntusers have mod smacked me for saying it's a distro for those too stupid to use Debian. It's kind of amusing they would go as far as modding back through my posting history to completely unrelated stories.

Looks like Ubuntu is the New Gentoo (tm).

We'll all have to go back and rewrite all those gentoo zealot jokes... :)

chertoff, chertoffed, chertoffing - To provide something in too small quantity and/or too late to matter.

Example Sentence:
I was going to get gas but I ran out on the way there. I guess I really chertoffed.

Odd as it may seem, laying audio cables on an artificial fiber carpet will immediately dull the sound of your stereo. And that's true for all cables, not just our Clearview wires. Unfortunately, the carpet is a huge mass of low quality insulation (dielectric). It absorbs and smears energy from the field around the wire. The effect is pretty grim, making music sound both dulled and harsh. A simple ear-tested solution is to raise the cables off the carpet by at least 8 inches. That's exactly what our maple Triad does.

--

Well, at least they are only ripping people off for $40, unlike the $500 knobs we all saw.

I predict when the pope dies they will come out with "new pope" but no one will like it, so then they will bring back "pope classic" and people will speculate if the whole thing was a marketing ploy or not.

BTW-Anyone figure out what "Fake ghostlike photons!" anagrams to yet?

Many people are used to hearing about murders in Colombia related to coke. But this time we aren't talking about the white stuff.

That's right, Coca-Cola has been accused of terrible abuses in Colombia, conspiring with the paramilitary forces to help them break unions at any cost.

Killer Coke
The Nation Coverage

As you all know, I'm not one to support unions, at least not US unions. As a Libertarian however, coersion of this sort goes against my grain.

Student arrested for fictional short stories that included a high school destroyed by zombies.

Sooo I thought I might try the interracial nudity Linux distro.

I go to their site, only to find there is no east coast US mirror, indeed, there's only one US mirror period. I try it. 20K/sec. On our new T3. So I try several other mirrors, and the most I get is 50K/sec. Shitty.

I notice there is a torrent file. I get the amd64 "warty" torrent file. I run bittorrent. 0 seeds. It's now 5 hours later. Still 0 seeds, still 0 progress.

Call me back when you have a "distribution system" for your so-called distro Ubuntu, until then, I'll stick with more available distros.

We are in the process of installing a T3 at work. The traditional CSU/DSU+Cisco junk route is about $10,000.

We currently have an excellent Sangoma WanPCI T1 card in our linux router, and I couldn't be happier with it. They don't seem to make T3 products though. So I'd rather just terminate the thing directly into a linux box, more flexible, and cheaper.

I've found the SBE wanPCI-T3 thing, but contacting their "official retailer" for non-OEM US sales, was, frankly, pointless. They didn't know what it was at first, and then they said they would have to get back to me. They didn't. CDW doesn't carry it, can't get it. Same story everywhere I look.

It looks like SBE bought Lanmedia which used to make several excellent cards of this type, all with drivers in the linux kernel main tree. SBE seems to be totally screwing it up too. I don't even know if the oldish LMC kernel drivers will support the newer SBE cards.

Anyway, I've also looked at the option to use an external Adtran T3SU CSU/DSU along with a Linux HSSI card to interface it with. Running into the same problem locating an HSSI card with good open source linux support.

I did find Emerging Technologies, and they have a linux supported HSSI card that looks great, except for this little line of bullshit:

"We wrote the drivers for the products we sell, and we fully support them. Our competitors use public code, so if you have problems you are on your own. And since they didn't write it they may not be able to fix whats wrong."

That seems to imply closed source kernel modules, something I really hate to deal with.

So anyway, I need help. I've been searching on and off for weeks on this, but information is sparse.