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It's been all downhill since then

Pretty much.

It's a story about a world where people use technology to freely share skills -- including, when needed, the skill of achieving freedom.

Print: https://archive.org/details/Ga...
Audio performance: https://archive.org/details/pr...

It's a story about a world where people use technology to freely share skills -- including, when needed, the skill of achieving freedom.

Print: https://archive.org/details/Ga...
Audio performance: https://archive.org/details/pr...

Mozilla developers planned this last year, and when watchful users objected in the related issue, Mozilla staff closed it to comments. They then pushed the system-breaking change to the world, with no mention of it in the release notes. When users whose systems were broken said so in a bug report, Mozilla closed it to comments, too.

I understand the need to minimize clutter in bug reports, but by taking away the only existing channel for users to engage with decision-makers, Mozilla is effectively sticking their fingers in their ears and telling their community to suck it up. How ironic that this was done by Mozilla's engineering community manager. How telling that his public comment invited people to email him to discuss it directly (making himself look good on record), yet he has completely ignored email messages sent to him in the days since then.

I always thought that one of the open source community's greatest strengths was our dedication to helping one another. When I write free software, and encourage people to use and depend on it in their daily lives, I take care to avoid causing unnecessary problems for them in future updates, even if their needs are different from my own. If I do cause such a problem and a bunch of them take the time to identify and report it, I see that as a sign that I made a mistake, I take responsibility for my actions, and I return their favor by spending a bit of time reworking my design.

I do this work partly for personal satisfaction in creating quality software, and partly because I don't like jerking people around, but mostly because I know that my time donated to the community is repaid indirectly, through all the contributions those people make to other open source projects. One of them might be writing the documentation for my favorite version control system, another might be using unusual hardware that exposes an OS bug that I'll need fixed next year, and others might have donated money or suggested a good design idea to projects that make my life easier in some other way. I give a little in the short term, and in return, I receive a lot in the long term.

This ecosystem of diverse and indirect contributions works amazingly well. I don't believe we would have Firefox, Chrome, MacOS (remember its Mach & BSD roots?), Android, Linux, or hundreds of thousands of other wonderful things if not for people in different situations helping one another like this.

So, when developers of a project like Firefox shut out a cross-section of the community that made their jobs possible and from whom they will almost certainly continue to benefit over time, it seems greedy to me. When they deliberately break the systems of the people whom they encouraged to depend on their software, especially when it's something so integral to daily life as the web browser, it seems irresponsible to me. And when onlookers choose disrupt the ensuing discussions by slinging useless comments like "freeloader" or "works for me" at other community members despite receiving value every day from this same community, they seem like hypocritical trolls.

I think we can do better than this. The open source community thrives on diversity and collaboration. Firefox can be replaced, but if we become another monoculture of self-absorbed know-it-alls, we all will have lost an asset of immeasurable value.

tl;dr: Dear Mozilla, you're doing it wrong.

Actually, mosquitos are an insignificant food source in almost all cases. The common claims that bats, or purple martins, are uniquely dependent on them is BS - stomach content surveys routinely show that they make up less than 1% of their diet. Even species of fish (e.g., mosquitofish) that purportedly eat large numbers of mosquito larvae turn out to overwhelmingly eat other things.

In any case, there are only 40 species of mosquito that feed on humans, out of nearly 3,500 species. Of these, the worst, as you say, is probably Aedes aegypti, which is a recent invasive species everywhere other than East Africa. Wiping them out in the Americas and Southeast Asia can only be good and I don't think Africans would mind if we wiped them out there too.

http://web.archive.org/web/201...

Alan Sugar sold Amstrad to Sky TV several years back.

OTOH, Clive Sinclair *did* endorse the Spectrum Vega+, though I'm assuming doing that in exchange for a small chunk of the royalties is as far as his involvement went.

That is nonsense. The IT guy that wiped her server, after the investigation began, posted on this very site asking for advice on how to destroy the evidence.

He posted on Reddit, not here, and his inquiry didn't read to me like an attempt to destroy evidence. He was trying to figure out how to redact email addresses from a large corpus of archived messages. This is standard practice during electronic discovery and document production, and isn't a sign of anything nefarious.

Jeb Bush performed the same scrubs on his email archives, after first releasing them unredacted and causing an uproar because they were full of constituents' personal data.

Nor are ranks from California.

It used to be that in the US there were no such things as police sergeants, lieutenants, captains, etc. The quasi-military rank structure came into being IIRC in Los Angeles California(?).

http://www.ci.richmond.va.us/P...

1807: The Richmond Police Department officially was established as one of the first formally organized law enforcement agencies in the United States.
...
1861: Virginia seceded from the Union. The president of the newly formed Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, established Richmond as the capital of the CSA Officers began wearing badges and were considered members of the militia.
1863: With the city's population swollen to almost 100,000 by the Civil War, the Richmond Police Department was overwhelmed. As a result, the Department was reorganized with 13 day officers, one of whom was designated the Chief of Police. The night watch was given one captain, three lieutenants and 40 privates.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

As the oldest police department in the country, the Boston Police Department (BPD) has a rich history and a well-established presence in the Boston community. The initiation of a formal department began in 1838, when the General Court passed a bill allowing the city of Boston to appoint police officers. The department was structured after the model developed by Sir Robert Peele for the London Police force.
...
The first police force consisted of 260 officers and a chief. Each division had a captain and two lieutenants; sergeants were not appointed until 1857. In these early days, an officer on duty carried a six-foot pole, painted blue and white to protect himself, and a "police rattle" to call for assistance.

Ranks were there back in the day when police officers were armed with RATTLES.

Ranks are NOT militarization. Police all around the world have ranks. Fire brigades have ranks.

Militarization is when regular police starts employing military weapons, tactics and equipment on daily basis.
I.e. When police thinks that it actually needs those "5,638 bayonets ($307,769) and 36 swords and scabbards", or when campus police thinks it really needs those M16s there is something terribly wrong both with their internal philosophy AND their purchasing program.

Could it possibly be that the USA has been staging these huge military operations around the globe since... oh... the Desert Storm?
And could it be that such huge military operations overseas create an increase in surplus of military equipment - while at the same time draining the budget of money that could be spent on local law enforcement, among other things?
Could it also be that unloading all those hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment onto law enforcement agencies is hiding actual holes in the law enforcement budgets?
And is there a chance that, besides all that surplus military gear, police has also been getting

Nor are ranks from California.

It used to be that in the US there were no such things as police sergeants, lieutenants, captains, etc. The quasi-military rank structure came into being IIRC in Los Angeles California(?).

http://www.ci.richmond.va.us/P...

1807: The Richmond Police Department officially was established as one of the first formally organized law enforcement agencies in the United States.
...
1861: Virginia seceded from the Union. The president of the newly formed Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, established Richmond as the capital of the CSA Officers began wearing badges and were considered members of the militia.
1863: With the city's population swollen to almost 100,000 by the Civil War, the Richmond Police Department was overwhelmed. As a result, the Department was reorganized with 13 day officers, one of whom was designated the Chief of Police. The night watch was given one captain, three lieutenants and 40 privates.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

As the oldest police department in the country, the Boston Police Department (BPD) has a rich history and a well-established presence in the Boston community. The initiation of a formal department began in 1838, when the General Court passed a bill allowing the city of Boston to appoint police officers. The department was structured after the model developed by Sir Robert Peele for the London Police force.
...
The first police force consisted of 260 officers and a chief. Each division had a captain and two lieutenants; sergeants were not appointed until 1857. In these early days, an officer on duty carried a six-foot pole, painted blue and white to protect himself, and a "police rattle" to call for assistance.

Ranks were there back in the day when police officers were armed with RATTLES.

Ranks are NOT militarization. Police all around the world have ranks. Fire brigades have ranks.

Militarization is when regular police starts employing military weapons, tactics and equipment on daily basis.
I.e. When police thinks that it actually needs those "5,638 bayonets ($307,769) and 36 swords and scabbards", or when campus police thinks it really needs those M16s there is something terribly wrong both with their internal philosophy AND their purchasing program.

Could it possibly be that the USA has been staging these huge military operations around the globe since... oh... the Desert Storm?
And could it be that such huge military operations overseas create an increase in surplus of military equipment - while at the same time draining the budget of money that could be spent on local law enforcement, among other things?
Could it also be that unloading all those hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment onto law enforcement agencies is hiding actual holes in the law enforcement budgets?
And is there a chance that, besides all that surplus military gear, police has also been getting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for todayâ(TM)s densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life.[1] The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in animal ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own.[2] Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind todayâ(TM)s most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets.[3]"

And also:
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
"Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habitsâ"and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasureâ"thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation â" and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."

In the 1980s, involved in the organic agriculture movement in NJ, I visited Rutgers Food Science library expecting to find a lot of resources (and people) concerned about health and nutrition. In my naivete I was shocked to see so many resources (including journals) seemed to focus on essentially how to addict people to ever more compelling processed foods with synthetic taste. Of course, now that academic emphasis makes sense if you think about where the money is -- in addiction and maintenance instead of prevention and cure. And that is very sad.

The good new is, many people are trying to make a difference to resist that. It's a tough battle. Our society may not win it. But we can hope.

A related movie:
http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/h...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Fed Up is a 2014 American documentary film directed, written and produced by Stephanie Soechtig.[1] The film focuses on the causes of obesity in the US, presenting evidence showing that the large quantities of sugar in processed foods are an overlooked root of the problem, and points to the monied lobbying power of "Big Sugar" in blocking attempts to enact policies to address the issue."

Another pair of movies focusing on individual and community empowerment to make nutritional changes:
http://www.fatsickandnearlydea...
http://www.fatsickandnearlydea...

https://www.drfuhrman.com/shop...
"After I was diagnosed with diabetes, my brother recommended I read Dr. Fuhrman's book The End of Diabetes. I started to read it right away and applied what I learned from it to my own life. By the time I was able to see my doctor -- three weeks later -- I had already lost 15 pounds, my blood glucose levels had returned to normal and the doctor said he had planned on putting me on meds but, after reviewing my new numbers, he would hold off for three more months. By that appointment, I had lost a total of 35 pounds, going from 218 to 188 pounds on my 6'1" frame ... I feel great and I never had to go on diabetes medication. My physician is now lowering my blood pressure medication, too. Thank you!!!"

Also see reviews here:
https://www.amazon.com/End-Dia...

Key idea:
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap--as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation-- and more self-discipline -- than most people are ever willing to muster.
    Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits--and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure--thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."

I feel Dr. Fuhrman is slightly wrong about a few of things, but overall he is very right on the big picture and a good place to start. Good luck nomad63!

It is rather obvious that charging more than most people can/will pay will encompass people who are cheap/ don't care/ or would like to, but they cannot afford it. First two are fine - the third, not as much.

The wealthy are perfectly willing to pay into the road fund to use those lanes, and the poor are only too happy to let them. "Support [for toll lanes] is high across all income groups, with the lowest income group expressing stronger support than the highest income group (80% vs. 70%)." So what's wrong with giving everyone what they want?

It's obviously a sendup of the '80s version of The Computer Chronicles. Their set is a close match for layout (including the table shape), their segments are the same, and even the rainbow-coloured title card from the 80s they used.

And yes, the Computer Chronicles was excellent: it didn't run uninterrupted for 19 years without good reason. It was ultimately the Internet that killed it, not lack of quality.

For anyone who would like to see for themselves, most of the 19 year run of the show is available on The Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/co...

Watching early episodes involving the introduction of things like the CD-ROM or the 486 is really fun.

The thing I remember most about reading Pokey was a curious link on their page to a fictional band with a detailed history. I enjoyed the comic too and even made my own fan comics which I have somewhere. Good times.

http://web.archive.org/web/htt...

Page cannot be displayed due to robots.txt.

HAHAHA oh man, not archived? HAHAHAHAHAHA

I'm asking for citations where the predictions were way off.

These are a dime-a-dozen. The Internet is full of such lists assembled. But they don't necessarily disprove anything — it is normal for a scientific discipline to fail sometimes. This article even analyzes different ways of detecting and dealing with such failures.

Trouble is, successful ones are so hard to find...

With the pace of global warming increasing, some climate change experts predict that the Scottish ski industry will cease to exist within 20 years.

It is now 2017, but snow is still plentiful in Scotland. Indeed, the 2014 was the snowiest since 1945. Do you think, the 2004 prediction will come true by 2024?

“you can argue that may be our projection of [an ice-free Arctic by 2013] is already too conservative.”

Whether or not Arctic sea ice is at "record low" or not, the Arctic Ocean is decidedly not "ice-free" today.

Yet you've provided zero. Odd.

I made no claims requiring citations. I merely pointed out, that folks claiming "science is settled" typically disappear, when asked for successful prediction of their favorite science.

Nope. If you actually believe in science, I have to provide you with successful ones that survived peer review and replication

That may be too onerous a requirement in the case of Climate Science — the experiments take many years, so any replication is difficult.

Wrong is not the same as "fake". Fake news is stuff that's made up.

One way you can tell the difference is by whether a correction is made when the error is pointed out. The Time story about the MLK bust you list as fake news, for example, was followed by a correction and an apology. That's journalism. Nobody is perfect; journalism consists of acknowledging and correcting mistakes.
Check here:
http://time.com/4645541/donald...

To verify, here is the article, dated 20 January. Note that the incorrect information is removed, and the article has a correction also dated 20 January:
http://time.com/4642088/trump-...

The correction reads: Correction: An earlier version of the story said that a bust of Martin Luther King had been moved. It is still in the Oval Office.

To verify that the correction wasn't backdated, here's the archived version of the article as of 1AM on Jan 21. Notice the correction: http://web.archive.org/web/201...

That's the difference.

Long-haul freight really ought to be moved by rail where it causes less traffic congestion, emits less greenhouse gases, and doesn't tear up the roads. Also, it's easier to automate a vehicle that cannot steer. Unfortunately, the trucking industry is so heavily subsidized that there's no incentive to change.

wait, The Memory Hole *2* ??!!!1

It's at least the third one. Russ Kick's original Memory Hole blog was active in the mid-200Xs while James Tracy's Memory Hole blog was active 2012-2016.

If you want to know more about how governments memory-hole information, follow Gamergate on 8chan.

I'm trying to amass a list of programming books that are freely available on the Internet. The books can be about a particular programming language or about computers in general.

What are some freely available programming books on the Internet?

https://archive.org/search.php...
Download the PDFs here, and type the IBM PC listings into QB64. Most of them will work.
http://www.qb64.net/forum/inde...

A chainsaw don't know the difference between a log and a leg. But sometimes it's the right tool.

http://web.archive.org/web/200...

Reality:Many times more DANGEROUS and SCARY to be OUTED as a TRUMP SUPPORTED, than ANY MINORITY GROUPS right now. Here are just a few examples in the last few months alone.
1) White handicapped man beaten for MAYBE being a Trump supporter. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017...
1a) abcnews deleted the story. http://web.archive.org/web/201...
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Woman wants a Trump supporter to move from his seat because she doesn't like Trump
3)Trump supporter chocked and beaten for hat . http://abc7ny.com/politics/man...
4) Homeless woman beaten for Trump support. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
5) Black woman Trump supporter harassed in NYC https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Huffington Post is many times worse than Breitbart, Huffing Post had a headline "WTF FBI" , there hasn't been a time Breitbart has cussed out a federal agency or person.
http://web.archive.org/web/201...

https://www.google.com/search?... , notice all are from people saying WTF . Funny one is Obama used Win the Future.

I thought they were selectively removing reviews, but they just disabled reviews and made the (low) star rating disappear completely just for that monitor.

Except that they didn't. The article was retracted and The Next Web has issued a formal apology for their erroneous reporting.

The actual problem wasn't that Apple disabled the section in order to censor reviews; it was that they forgot to enable the section in the first place. Cached copies of the page show that the section was never enabled at all. It looks like someone at Apple simply forgot to press the button to enable ratings and reviews on the monitor. From there, a redditor used the opportunity to bend the truth quite a bit by claiming that Apple had disabled the section to hide bad reviews, despite the fact that they have a history of letting bad reviews stand, as you pointed out. The blogs love salacious news, so they posted it without doing proper vetting, and now they're all having to post retractions.

Yay for the Internet.

TFA has been retracted and an apology has been put at the top of the page due to the erroneous reporting. Shockingly, the redditor got it wrong and the Internet-at-large didn't bother doing the slightest bit of verification before posting their clickbait headlines about a company being evil.

MacRumors has some additional reporting on what actually happened, but the gist of it is that no reviews at all were being posted for the 5K display until earlier today. In fact, the Ratings & Reviews section of the page was entirely disabled for that page until earlier today, presumably because someone forgot to activate the section after the product went on sale. Cached copies of the page confirm that that's been the case since the page went live last year, so the notion that Apple deleted bad reviews is demonstrably false, given that there never was a way to submit reviews--good or bad--in the first place.

Anyway, the inability to submit a review was already fixed by the time Slashdot posted this story, but, no doubt, people will be talking about the fictional bad reviews that Apple censored for months to come, simply because a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

https://archive.org/details/NI...

I would have thought there would be a rush on Walter Lippmann's "Public Opinion"

http://wwnorton.com/college/hi...

Thanks Archive .org and W.W. Norton.

Maybe there was, only it wasn't news since someone the media didn't like wasn't in power. Maybe presidents, and indeed political leaders have been doing much the same thing since time immemorial.

The Dubya Bush administration was under close watch from environmentalists. There used to be a bushgreenwatch.org site.
http://web.archive.org/web/200...

I believe it was the revelation of Frank Luntz's memo advising on changing the language used to address concerns about global warming ,er, climate change

Remember the 4GL initiative from Japan in the nineties? Still waiting for that killer language...

Yet Another AC here. Their 5GL languages KL0 and KL1 have been released as open source for several years. Those are basically versions of Prolog to do low level programming, such as writing operating systems for parallel computers.

The main problem of the Japanese 5th Generation project was that their dedicated parallel hardware could not compete with clusters of cheap off-the-shelf hardware.

Different AC here. A language can be considered Turing-complete even if the machines you can run it aren't universal machines.

I was going to say the same thing.

Your move, AC ;-)

We are legion.

Looks like the link to the original report (not in the Guardian article, but posted a couple times in the comments) might be Slashdotted. I found an archived copy at Internet Archive. It was posted last April and updated last May.

The real question is why have long copyright terms at all?

Enforcing artificial scarcity on ideas and treating them as "property", especially for long periods of time, should only be done if the end result is beneficial to society as a whole, rather than to a few powerful lobbies. And I have not seen anything that suggests that it is the case.

I am aware of one attempt to empirically establish the optimal copyright term, and the conclusion was around 15 years. You are welcome to read the papers and state any disagreement that you have with them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...

The real question is why have long copyright terms at all?

Enforcing artificial scarcity on ideas and treating them as "property", especially for long periods of time, should only be done if the end result is beneficial to society as a whole, rather than to a few powerful lobbies. And I have not seen anything that suggests that it is the case.

I am aware of one attempt to empirically establish the optimal copyright term, and the conclusion was around 15 years. You are welcome to read the papers and state any disagreement that you have with them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Can't load it, Is it being DDoSed again? Here's a link to an archived version

Now on to some bashing, we'll start with force updates that everyone complains the most about. Sorry, but this is a necessary evil,

Sorry, but you have no right to force people to update. It's their choice. More importantly normalizing constant updates provides extremely perverse incentives to software vendors. It signals they can get away with crappy QA using customers as beta testers and endless streams of security vulnerabilities at no cost to them.

leaving them vulnerable and they just don't give a flying f. The only way to address this needless insecurity is to force updates.

Most consumer desktop users are behind a stealth mode firewall where their external exposure is mediated by the security of their browsers and other network connected software. From publically available web statistics majority of Windows users don't even run a Microsoft web browser.

The overwhelming majority events that cause people to get hacked have nothing to do with operating system bugs. Social engineering and associated lapses in judgment account for upwards of 90% of compromises.

Insecure computers connected to the internet AFFECT ALL OF US, and since that includes way too many non-technical (aka muggles) people, who refuse to update when asked to, we have to force you, to protect ALL OF US from YOUR insecure system.

The Internet had better be engineered to fend for itself. Requiring permission or license or certification affects ALL OF US far worse than any unpatched desktops. Look at what the brilliant 1337us3rs who run the Internet are doing. Nobody is taking fixing DNS amplification seriously. SMTP email continues to be deemed an acceptable form of communication and every website on the Internet is using adhoc user authentication forms driven by plaintext over HTTP encrypted or not. The basis of trust on the Internet is a series of redundant CA's several of which are run by "unfriendly" governments and most of which perform completely automatic signing based on completely INSECURE protocols. If all windows vulnerabilities were completely fixed tomorrow and everyone updated their computers **NOTHING** would change. I think it is rich in the extreme to start dictating anything to users.

Next: Spying. Telemetry. Malware. So much accusations. Has anyone actually taken apart the packets being sent to M$ to see what the hell is being sent? I didn't think so, I haven't seen any reporting on precisely what is being sent.

My characterization of Windows 10 as malware is informed simply by reading Microsoft's own documentation on the subject.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

At the enhanced level of reporting (which you can turn off) it also supposedly sends info on what applications you're using, and how long they're running. Again

List of software on device and uptime of applications are also sent for the lowest level (BASIC).

But I have a pretty good educated guess. Usage statistics, performance markers, errors that occur, those are the basic things that're sent home. Probably shoved into a giant database along with every other computer that reports back.

I don't care why they use the data. I don't care what they do with it. It's none of their business. I don't want them to have mine. If you don't agree you are welcomed to your view. It's irrelevant to me.

I highly doubt anyone can successfully take telemetry data out of this database and tie it back to some individual. So who cares?

I was most comforted to learn the NSA telephone database is just numbers not names and addresses.

Do you really think you're so important that someone actually cares what you're doing with your PC? Again, probably all s

It's a pity that shutdownify.com has shut down. Otherwise they could have dispensed with their own manual solution and pushed out an API-generated, streamlined, eye-catching, click-bating, VCgasm-inducing shutdown notice instead!

The Internet Archive will became the backup of all the knowledge in the world. I think it is also important to donate to that project / library. https://archive.org/donate/

As we learned years ago from IBM's "Think" magazine, #5, 1990

You get value from patents in two ways," says Roger Smith, IBM Assistant General Counsel, intellectual property law. "Through fees, and through licensing negotiations that give IBM access to other patents.

The IBM patent portfolio gains us the freedom to do what we need to do through cross-licensing--it gives us access to the inventions of others that are the key to rapid innovation. Access is far more valuable to IBM than the fees it receives from its 9,000 active patents. There's no direct calculation of this value, but it's many times larger than the fee income, perhaps an order of magnitude larger.

The analysis presented in that text file is valuable to us to understand what this means:

The value IBM gets from cross-licensing measures the trouble that the patent system would cause IBM if IBM could not avoid it. IBM's estimate is that the trouble could easily be ten times the good one can expect from one's own patents--even for a company with 9,000 of them.

Obviously that was written back when IBM had fewer patents, but it's no less true today. Continuing from the analysis:

For IBM, this trouble is hypothetical--cross-licensing prevents it from happening. For ordinary companies which cannot do likewise, the burden is real. IBM's estimate suggests that for a typical software company, patents will do ten times as much harm as good. Only the elimination of patents from the software field can enable most software developers to continue with their work.

A quote by Stallman linked to from her page:

"A new noninvasive test for Down's syndrome will eliminate the small risk of the current test. This might lead more women to get tested, and abort fetuses that have Down's syndrome. Let's hope so! If you'd like to love and care for a pet that doesn't have normal human mental capacity, don't create a handicapped human being to be your pet. Get a dog or a parrot. It will appreciate your love, and it will never feel bad for being less capable than normal humans."

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

What in the hell is going through that mans head? I met him once at a presentation he was giving about GNU at Uni once. I was completely disgusted with him (unwashed, smelly, dirty clothes etc. but worse his repulsive personality completely matched his repulsive appearance). If the work place is as warm and caring as his quote above indicates (and his personality is still the same as it was in early 90's) then I'm on the side of believing it is an extremely toxic place to work.

Rhapsody was announced in January 1997 - so the new OS strategy that would lead to Mac OS X was in place at that time. It was no big secret.

I love to show kids today what Yahoo! used to look like - blows their minds.

They go "Wow, that looks OLD! BTW, what's Yahoo?"

Wow. Just wow. Where do I start? How about the MIT paper - written in 2005, so before Al Gore and other's claim that GW is causing them. Never the less, we have a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere and we have fewer. You like NOAA's stuff - http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/climo/ . Look towards the bottom for a bar graph. If I were to take 2000-today by year and mix it up the years by that decade with say the 1950s randomized in the 1950s (so it's not obvious which one is which, however with correct data for that decade) and see if you can tell which one is which, I bet you'd lose that one. Unless you really studied the data carefully. I honestly don't understand how you can say there are more and they are worse. The NOAA graph just doesn't show that, at least not yet. Maybe next month it will after they "adjust" it so it's not a problem anymore like they're doing with the other stuff.

(previous stuff I showed you) You looked at the graphs, saw the data was different and that didn't concern you? The "adjustments" are always in favor of GW. If you're a TA or a Professor going over someone's scientific work, that is one of the things you look out for. Faked or wrong data. The fact NASA has been caught red handed changing this stuff REALLY should bother you.

Here are some references, but look below
https://wattsupwiththat.com/20...
You like the telegraph?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

Here's one for you and you can see it with your own (as the Eagles would say - lying) eyes - Hansen's page (He no longer works for nasa BTW)- http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea... . Not as I remembered it. That's because they keep changing it - http://web.archive.org/web/*/h... Check out the 2007/2/24 version to today. Wow, same page where he admits in 2007 that the 1930s was the hottest decade on record. Now 1930s looks a lot colder. I don't think anyone would say the 1930s was the hottest on record as Hansen had to admit to in the early 2000s looking at the new graph. He claimed 1990s were until he was shown to be wrong. He claimed it was a Y2K bug. I don't think anyone believed that one.

Greenland - what about Venice Italy? It wasn't just Greenland, it was global.

To me this captain obvious moment (shown by the documented change in web page above) really should concern you, and make you mad that you've been lied to all of this time. Could go on and show you page after page or as that other site did, he overlaid them for you. Not that you seem to care, or perhaps you don't understand the material. I'm reminded a lot that other people aren't like me. Things that are painfully obvious to me aren't obvious to others.

Now, about concensus? http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... Yea, not so much.

Well I've enjoyed going down memory lane a bit here if you're not persuaded by the very definitive evidence I've shown you, you probably never will be. I understand I'm asking a lot because a great deal of money has been spent to make you believe, change data, and so on. MMGW is all about making a bunch of money and control.

The comparison to tobacco is disingenuous BTW. I was a scientist back in those days, in the 1970s. I felt it was clear. Again, I could find where the tobacco industry had faked data and weren't being honest. It wasn't hard even without something like the Internet. This in a time when science wasn't so good, calling a lot of things cancer causing that weren't. Showing other people without something like the Internet was just about impossib

Can you give me some details about this Russian invasion you are talking about? Like for example the date it happened, how many divisions were involved and for how long the fighting between the Russian soldiers and the Ukrainian army went on? Is there any video of this invasion? I mean we now live in a time when everything is recorded by the cellphone of someone, so surely there should be thousands of recording of this invasion, right?

I'm asking all this because last time I checked, what happened was a referendum, not an "invasion".

Military intervention does not require ordered ranks of men in uniform and insignias, chanting that they are the Russian army. We have many reports and pictures of "little green men" or "polite people" as the Russian defense minister called them, in the Crimean conflict, men in new camouflage and weapons issued to soldiers of the Russian Federation. I believe it was Suomen Sotilas which first published a breakdown of the weapons those soldiers used. These were Russian soldiers and Russian military equipment with no insignias on them to cause confusion about their origin in Ukraine during the operation. Putin first said that they were local militia or "self-defense groups" who seized weapons from the Ukrainian army, but later admitted that they were Russian special operations forces. They set up checkpoints in Sevastopol and Simferopol and occupied the Crimean parliament. Shortly after, the parliament announced a referendum on secession, which was "secured," of course, by the occupation. The US DoD afterwards published satellite photos showing Russian forces shelling the Ukrainian military across the border after the referendum.

Andrey Illarionov, a former Putin adviser turned critic, stated two weeks before the annexation crisis that Putin had a plan to destabilize Ukraine to implement a military operation to impose political control over the Ukraine. YMMV over the words of a defector.

An email from Alan Kay on 23 July 2003 replying to a question from Stefan Ram about the term "object oriented programming": note that Kay's reply does not include inheritance or polymorphism as essential parts of OOP. (He does include encapsulation. I leave it to readers to decide if he's also including data abstraction.)
...
I wanted to get rid of data.
...
I didn't like the way Simula I or Simula 67 did inheritance (though I thought Nygaard and Dahl were just tremendous thinkers and designers). So I decided to leave out inheritance as a built-in feature until I understood it better.
...
(I'm not against types, but I don't know of any type systems that aren't a complete pain, so I still like dynamic typing.)
OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.

--Here is a more detailed history of Smalltalk by Alan Kay.

There is the problem that old books that can not be sold are being purged (or recycled). I think the best way for the moment is send a copy of each book the Internet Archive Book Drive. They take some time to scan the books, but at least there is a chance for knowledge to be preserved. https://blog.archive.org/2010/...

Since you refuse to look at the evidence for yourself, the eight major investigations that cleared CRU of any scientific misconduct include:

  - House of Commons Science and Technology Committee: "the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact"

  - Independent Climate Change Review: "we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt."

  - International Science Assessment Panel: "We found absolutely no evidence of impropriety whatsoever"

  - Pennsylvania State University first panel and second panel: "Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community"

  - United States Environmental Protection Agency: CRU critics came to "faulty scientific conclusions" and "resorted to hyperbole."

  - Department of Commerce: "We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures"

- National Science Foundation: "We found no basis to conclude that the emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence."

If only there were a way to determine what that web page looked like a couple of months ago, say, before the recent election. If only there were an Internet archive, dare I say a "wayback machine" ...

http://web.archive.org/web/20161030222446/http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/greatlakes/climatechange.html

It makes a difference because she's a prostitute.

She's also a liar. She did not graduate.

After obtaining a degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia ...

Even if GamerGate were originally about a lack of integrity in the gaming press (and yes, I do believe there were probably some shenanigans at Kotaku), the message was completely overshadowed by a very real phenomenon, which is the incredible amount of verbal abuse women tend to receive online. No, it's not exclusive to them, but they seem to get a disproportional amount of vitriol. And frankly, compared to that, even as a gamer, that seems a lot more important than the original story.

Jack Thompson was mentioned. Thompson received an incredible amount of online attacks and threats, to the extent that he prosecuted against death threats from one 16 year old.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

This was reported lightly in the gaming media at the time, and with a very neutral tone. Same as instances of game developers getting death threats from unhinged people who were set off by something. This didn't blow up in the media at the time.

If women in gaming get more threats and harassment for being women in gaming, completely divorced from how publicized they've become (which is absolutely going to amplify that effect) I haven't seen solid research to demonstrate it. What I have seen is when Brianna Wu received a string of threats on her twitter (which also including threatening to castrate and kill her husband, something I've rarely seen reported) many outlets reported it, some within minutes, and by the next day she was doing interviews with major organizations. To say that the quantity and tone of coverage overshadowed that given to Thompson is an understatement.

And I can't even say this is all due to Wu's circumstances and the topicality of the story vs Wu's connections. I find it a little odd that she's able to also get this level of media coverage in announcing a bid to primary a Democratic congressman before he's even formally entered his next term (for anyone wondering, Wu has not so subtly revealed she'll be running against Stephen Lynch). One of the major hooks is that this is game developer who is supposed to have a higher familiarity with tech, but when it came to her actual game's recent PC release I can't find a single outlet covering it, let alone reviewing it.

I was about to post how every prior company that did this died, but apparently not. There are a few still around! OMG! I am buying one, because there's loads of movies I want my kids to see, with a few slight alterations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CleanFlicks and ClearPlay
Here is a Slashdot article about ClearPlay and CleanFlicks. The zdnet article link is dead, so use the wayback machine.
Here is another Slashdot article about ClearPlay
Trilogy Studios Movie Mask looks like it never actually came out.

However, everyone who tries to stream DVD or live TV content gets shut down. Here's a few:
Slashdot on Kaleidescape
Slashdot on Aereo