The main problem affecting Humanity and the major stumbling block is the bourgeois.
The bourgeois are perfectly happy to sit on their arses, doing nothing but watch the money pour in their pockets.
Whatever will sit (or is deemed to sit) between the money and their pockets will mercilessly be fought by all means possible.
For example, watch the greedy record companies in the face of new technologies, such as the MP3.
Bourgeois are risk-adverse, and thus they will stenuously oppose any new progress unless it can be demonstated that such progress will only enhance the amount of money pouring in their pockets.
For the last 25 years, we have seen the bourgeois relentlessly lead a formidable onslaught against States, which is viewed as yet another barrier between money and their pockets, mostly because of various countries throughout the world, with their various "trade barriers", such as tarrifs and different cultures and customs.
Through clever propaganda, they are slowly subverting Democracy by letting more and more people believe that governments are bad and should be curtailed, to the eventual point where they will be able to have "one dollar, one vote vote".
The Space Race was brought forward by competition between two large powers; the annihilation of the other power has left the USA with a monopoly in power, and monopolies are never innovative.
We're seeing oil prices soar right now. With oil and other basic resources that we need for a modern society quickly dwindling: breathable air, drinkable water, etc. society as we know it will collapse long before most of these pie-in-the-sky ideals are reached.
When electronic typewriters started to appear, Smith-Corona-Marchant showed an innovative approach at making a keyboard. They used their mechanical keyboard assembly, so it felt just like a typewriter.
Each key bar stuck a metal rod, which had two piezoelectric microphones, one at each end. It then went to a circuit that calculated the time the sound impact they keybar made as it stuck the metal rod, thus enabling to determine, with the distance it was stuck, which key was pressed...
If Apple opened their OS to commodity PC's how long do you think it would take for MS to drop Office for the Mac? This would essentially kill the market, leaving Apple with a slow drift into bankruptcy.
It nearly happenned in the past. Right after the mac was launched, Apple was to announce a super-duper "object-oriented basic" that, apparentely, was very powerful AND easy to learn.
Microsoft threatened to pull JAZZ (the ancestor of EXCEL) off the market if Apple went ahead.
They are going to include the DeCSS code on every disk:
(FTFA:)
BD+ appears to be Blu-ray's version of a concept previously under consideration called SPDC, which enabled the method for encrypting a disc's contents to be included on the disc, rather than on the EPROMs of the disc player. One of the perceived failures of first-generation DVD was that its encryption mechanism of choice, called Content Scramble System (CSS), was spectacularly defeated, with the result being that the industry was forced to permanently and irreversibly support a now-worthless encryption scheme. With SPDC, new encryption algorithms could be adopted as old ones are cracked, enabling successive generations of high-def DVD to be stronger than earlier ones.
So, on each protected DVD, they gonna include the code to decrypt it, code that WILL HAVE to be executable by all sorts of DVD players. In order to do so, obviously, it will have to be written in a higher-level language or some sort of for portability.
This will make writing a ripper a cinch, since all one will have to do is to write an emulator for that code...
basically unless you are a canadian citizen, chances are your government/country/culture/etc has done something similar to what the terrorists are doing now.
You don't have far to go for that. Canada is notorious for having attempted to forcibly assimilate indians, and with it's repeated policies against the french-canadians in general.
Doing anything is a terrorist act, nowadays it seems. 4 days ago, while visiting Ottawa, for taking that picture of an old city bus, I had six cops on my back.
Why not? What do you lose? A couple minutes maybe? Oh no!
It's more than a few minutes. It's your liberty, your freedom.
Freedoms are lost when you don't use them. Right now, you are free to go about without police scrutiny.
Police have nothing but contempt for "civilians", that is, those not in their caste that's anointed with policeness. Police, when given sufficient power, simply boss civilians around.
When you consent to be searched while not being arrested and for no valid reason whatsoever, you are being bossed around by the police.
If you wanna live in a police state, go live in China, North-Korea or Cuba. Just don't make our countries become police states.
Cops will always be nosy. Cops always want to stick their snouts in other people's business. Cops don't know about innocent people; for them, everyone is more or less guilty (for various values of "guilty" between 0 and 1).
Cops have to rout out crime, for them, there is no other endeavour worthy of any attention. Cops will always want the widest-ranging powers to do their "investigations", no matter the cost (in money or civil liberties).
Cops have no respect for "civilians", that is, those people who are not anointed with policeness. For cops, civilians are the matter from which criminals are made.
Cops pretend that they herd together to back each other up against criminal assaults; yet, cops rarely face criminals that shoot them. In fact, a locomotive engineer will kill more people through his career than a cop! No, really, cops think they are a caste above the rabble, and that for them to stop crime, they have to sift through the rabble's business.
Cops will use anything to ensnare "criminals". This is why there are laws that clearly say that you are under no obligation to talk to cops, because in their twisted ways, they will always find something to nail you down, real or imagined. And anything that looks like obstruction, like holding encrypted information, is a roadblock to their own endeavour, that is, stick their snouts in other people's business.
Cops have that paranoid attitude caused by their belief that everyone is more or less guilty. The friendliest cop will think nothing at stabbing you in the back, if he thinks you are remotely guilty of anything.
Cops have the power to kill or thoroughly wreck someone's existence. Yet, they yield this power with minimal education and training.
Here, cops have an acronym for non-cops: "FCs". As the "C" means "civilian", I'll leave what the "F" means as an exercise to the reader.
Cops despise non-cops. So, it is not surprising that in any instance, cops will look towards expanding their power of sticking their snouts in everybody's business.
You got that right... for years we had a VS1-MVS-XA-ESA-OS/390-z/OS environment
Then we brought in a DBMS with a 4GL and built-in TP monitor.
Eventually CMS went away - the programmers moved to TSO
Enter Unix, in the guise of SCT Banner.
Many of our programmers are "back to square 1", having to deal with C, shell scripts, perl, etc rather than JCL, PL/I and User Language. Cobol is somewhat familiar ground, although "make" is a wierd construct to them and shell script drivers are copied by rote (they're used to DMS/CMS or ISPF applications building compile JCL).
I was one of the architects involved in the creation of Dreamweaver, and it we designed it to be used by programmers, not just Web designers. Among other things, it was designed to be used just as BitTrollent is describing: as a code generator for GUI elements. Typically, you'll lay out a page, or some page element such as a form, graphically in the GUI view.
My, I am honoured!:)
I use Dreamweaver mostly for the site management functions (when you have had a website since 1993 and it evolves into a crufty 800MB mess, you need some serious tools to manage it), yet, nowadays, when I "do" a website, I do it in PHP. Dreamweaver works fine for this (although, perhaps the syntax highlighting could be improved), and it absolutely rocks when one deals with CSS and, of course, site management.
If you don't use a program like Dreamweaver to layout your pages, that's okay. But there is a good chance you are wasting a lot of time...
I like Dreamweaver because it lets you manage a crufty website easily. I've had a website since 1993 and over the years, it evolved into an unwieldy mess (it's about 800 megabytes right now).
However, whenever I work on it nowadays, I use PHP (you can't take the programmer out of the guy!) but Dreamweaver makes it easy to work with the CSS.
Slashdot Mirror
The opposite of "interlaced programming".
The bourgeois are perfectly happy to sit on their arses, doing nothing but watch the money pour in their pockets.
Whatever will sit (or is deemed to sit) between the money and their pockets will mercilessly be fought by all means possible.
For example, watch the greedy record companies in the face of new technologies, such as the MP3.
Bourgeois are risk-adverse, and thus they will stenuously oppose any new progress unless it can be demonstated that such progress will only enhance the amount of money pouring in their pockets.
For the last 25 years, we have seen the bourgeois relentlessly lead a formidable onslaught against States, which is viewed as yet another barrier between money and their pockets, mostly because of various countries throughout the world, with their various "trade barriers", such as tarrifs and different cultures and customs.
Through clever propaganda, they are slowly subverting Democracy by letting more and more people believe that governments are bad and should be curtailed, to the eventual point where they will be able to have "one dollar, one vote vote".
The Space Race was brought forward by competition between two large powers; the annihilation of the other power has left the USA with a monopoly in power, and monopolies are never innovative.
Each key bar stuck a metal rod, which had two piezoelectric microphones, one at each end. It then went to a circuit that calculated the time the sound impact they keybar made as it stuck the metal rod, thus enabling to determine, with the distance it was stuck, which key was pressed...
What department it might be? The IRS???
Pascal.
Microsoft threatened to pull JAZZ (the ancestor of EXCEL) off the market if Apple went ahead.
Apple canned the O-O Basic...
(FTFA:)
So, on each protected DVD, they gonna include the code to decrypt it, code that WILL HAVE to be executable by all sorts of DVD players. In order to do so, obviously, it will have to be written in a higher-level language or some sort of for portability.
This will make writing a ripper a cinch, since all one will have to do is to write an emulator for that code...
Just spam them... They'll be so overwhelmed that their channels will grind to a halt.
Well, for one thing, they should clean their own house, like DEMANDING a logon to read their stories online...
Doing anything is a terrorist act, nowadays it seems. 4 days ago, while visiting Ottawa, for taking that picture of an old city bus, I had six cops on my back.
Freedoms are lost when you don't use them. Right now, you are free to go about without police scrutiny.
Police have nothing but contempt for "civilians", that is, those not in their caste that's anointed with policeness. Police, when given sufficient power, simply boss civilians around.
When you consent to be searched while not being arrested and for no valid reason whatsoever, you are being bossed around by the police.
If you wanna live in a police state, go live in China, North-Korea or Cuba. Just don't make our countries become police states.
Cops will always be cops.
Cops will always be nosy. Cops always want to stick their snouts in other people's business. Cops don't know about innocent people; for them, everyone is more or less guilty (for various values of "guilty" between 0 and 1).
Cops have to rout out crime, for them, there is no other endeavour worthy of any attention. Cops will always want the widest-ranging powers to do their "investigations", no matter the cost (in money or civil liberties).
Cops have no respect for "civilians", that is, those people who are not anointed with policeness. For cops, civilians are the matter from which criminals are made.
Cops pretend that they herd together to back each other up against criminal assaults; yet, cops rarely face criminals that shoot them. In fact, a locomotive engineer will kill more people through his career than a cop! No, really, cops think they are a caste above the rabble, and that for them to stop crime, they have to sift through the rabble's business.
Cops will use anything to ensnare "criminals". This is why there are laws that clearly say that you are under no obligation to talk to cops, because in their twisted ways, they will always find something to nail you down, real or imagined. And anything that looks like obstruction, like holding encrypted information, is a roadblock to their own endeavour, that is, stick their snouts in other people's business.
Cops have that paranoid attitude caused by their belief that everyone is more or less guilty. The friendliest cop will think nothing at stabbing you in the back, if he thinks you are remotely guilty of anything.
Cops have the power to kill or thoroughly wreck someone's existence. Yet, they yield this power with minimal education and training.
Here, cops have an acronym for non-cops: "FCs". As the "C" means "civilian", I'll leave what the "F" means as an exercise to the reader.
Cops despise non-cops. So, it is not surprising that in any instance, cops will look towards expanding their power of sticking their snouts in everybody's business.
Careful! you'll be modded "off-topic"!!!
Gosh. This guy should be FIRED, not from the company, but from a cannon.
Where's CICS???
I use Dreamweaver mostly for the site management functions (when you have had a website since 1993 and it evolves into a crufty 800MB mess, you need some serious tools to manage it), yet, nowadays, when I "do" a website, I do it in PHP. Dreamweaver works fine for this (although, perhaps the syntax highlighting could be improved), and it absolutely rocks when one deals with CSS and, of course, site management.
However, whenever I work on it nowadays, I use PHP (you can't take the programmer out of the guy!) but Dreamweaver makes it easy to work with the CSS.