It seems like most people, especially geeks, want to take the easy route and try get a job. Being self-employed or running a business isn't all that hard and it is much more rewarding, especially for a computer geek now in internet age.
I don't think diving in head first and starting a geekly business is a great idea. If you can't find somebody else to hire you, you're not going to find any customers for your business either. I have three copies of that T-shirt, with different logos on them. Starting a business is easy. Turning even a modest profit may as well be impossible for all the luck I've ever had at it.
...It struck me that we are probably in the last generation where truck driving is going to be a human job.
I got into this discussion just the other day with some truck mechanic who was arguing that when the auto driving trucks come, at least he will still have a job.
I don't think I agree that fully automatic self-piloting trucks are very likely, and I'm not particularly worried about the machines taking my job.
I realize that the trend of the future is to try to wean all transportation off of petroleum fuels, but let's use the petroleum tanker as an example anyway, because it's the most complicated segment of trucking I know about. Where there are hundreds of different styles and configurations of trailers now, you've got to replace all of that with some new standard setup that can mate with the loading rack automatically, and you've got to standardize all the hardware at all the loading racks to mate with them. This would cost all the players in all segments of the game a fortune, and for what? Companies could save money by reducing accidents and liability, and they would reduce their labor costs. I'm not in any position to be an accurate judge of how much the liability angle might save a company, but I can say that the labor drivers get paid is a small fraction of the total operational cost per mile, so eliminating labor would only make a small dent in what it cost to move the load a given distance. I don't think the potential savings would be enough to offset the huge investment necessary.
Then on the unloading end, you've got a larger problem by orders of magnitude. You've got a staggering number of different businesses with a mind-boggling array of different configurations of this and that, and you've got to standardize every last bit of that so the truck can extend its robotic hoses and discharge the product. Hundreds of gas stations shut down permanently when the EPA passed some harder rules about their underground storage tanks, and all of that would be a drop in the bucket compared to how many stations would close their doors if something like this came rolling down the pipe. You're talking billions, if not trillions of dollars to dig all of that stuff up and reconfigure it to some standard plan at every gas station, factory, power plant, trucking company, heating oil distributor, etc. from West Possum Piss to East Raccoon Penis and back. They put these places down roads you'd never otherwise conceive of taking a truck, way out in the middle of nowhere on the other side of a ford, where you step out of the truck and hear strains of "Dueling Banjos" echoing off the hilltops in the distance, and hear a fat man squealing like a pig while some toothless guy tells him he has a purty mouth.
Sure, I can sit here and draw stuff on the back of my napkin all day imagining how the loading and unloading coupling stuff could work, and how it would all have to come together, but putting all that stuff into place would cost umpty scadillion bitcoins, and I just can't see it happening while business owns the US government. What's in it for business? Not enough to justify the investment, I don't think. Not to mention the impact this would have on fuel prices.
I think railroads are vastly more likely to go fully automatic in the next 20 years. Those things already steer themselves, and running them on auto pilot would be a pretty trivial problem.
I've been wrong before, and I don't have a crystal ball, but I think automatic trucks are going to be the norm shortly after we're all going to work in fully automated flying cars.
At least I hope so. At least that way I get to drive to the unemployment office in a flying car.
Yes -- but I wasn't expecting people to be able to work that out based on my appearance and choice of inner-urban transport.
Welcome to the land of strip malls and automobiles, where sidewalks are too expensive to build, and only the dirt poor and Mexicans should be seen using their feet for anything.
I came to Linux when Windows ME was a totally unstable POS, and XP was on the horizon, with some sort of "product activation" thing that was going to force you to make toll 1-900 number calls to Microsoft every time you changed your computer in some way, to get permission to keep using it. That was the rumor going around at the time, though it might well have been FUD. I tried Linux, and never found out if that rumor was true or not.
It was the second time I had attempted to get away from Windows, the first being with OS/2. The second attempt worked out much better, as that was just a hair over 10 years ago, and I skipped Windows XP, Vista and 7, and haven't bought any software in all that time either. It was nice getting off the upgrade treadmill, because I was the kind of guy who would keep using an obsolete version of something forever instead of paying money for an update. I was still using software from the early '90s at the turn of the century, because I'm cheap, but I'm not a pirate.
Once I got started with Linux, I became active as a FOSS contributor not long after, and I've donated about 10 years of spare time to this and that, but mostly one project in particular. In the beginning, I was a rabid Linux zealot, and whenever anyone came to me with a computer problem, I switched them to Linux.
After 10 years of putting everyone back on Windows to get them out of my hair, I tried Windows 7 myself, because I got a cheap computer for my wife, and I thought I'd see if the OS that was already installed was usable. Basically all the software I rely on regularly is available for that platform, so I've got the same office suite, the same text editor, the same web browser, etc., over there. I'm really not interested in doing development work for free for a platform where people regularly part with cash to obtain software, but apart from that there really isn't all that much difference these days. I haven't seen any severe problems of the sort that prompted my exodus 10 years ago, and Windows basically seems a lot like KDE, only with fewer options, and only one desktop. It's not my favorite environment, but it's usable.
I've been wondering for some time now whether I would switch back or not. So far, I'm staying with Linux because it's comfortable and familiar, but I've also lost every bit of my religion. Linux on the desktop is dead. We're never going to change the world. These days, most people spend 99% of their time interacting with a web browser anyway, and are rarely affected by anything that happens to be going on under the hood. The biggest difference between Windows and Linux is that Linux doesn't make you sit through a big virus scan every time you turn around, and you'll never be tempted to buy a game.
Better service, more coverage (for the same price, which yes is effectively saving money), closer offices, etc?? There are plenty of reasons besides price for people to switch.
When I was unable to reach my brick and mortar insurance agent repeatedly, I turned to teh internets. The reusable dry adhesive tape people had the one and only website that functioned correctly from Firefox running on Linux, so they got my business.
I have no idea how much money I'm saving, and don't really give two shits.
Or we could just arrest everyone on a rotating basis, assume that they are guilty and give them the option of paying a fine or serving jail time on a chain gang.
I don't think the powers that be count incarcerated people among the unemployed either. This is a twofer for the government!
That's it in a nutshell. The technology was superior in many ways to the alternatives, but the alternatives I migrated to over the years all have one thing in common: they dramatically reduce the amount of garbage present in the signal.
The last time I fired up a newsreader, my old haunts were completely clogged up with binaries posted in the wrong place, spam, and trolls trolling trolls. There were almost no real posters left. It's a shame, because I've maintained several life-long friendships with people I met on Usenet back in the day, and I've never formed relationships like that with anyone since, on these various mailing lists and web forums and whatnot. Nothing close.
Too many think that science and engineering involves the kinds of stuff they see on the Science Channel.
There is that. I love watching stuff on the Science Channel, but I'd have a long, loooong way to go to become an engineer. The most recent way in which this point was driven home was while I was flipping through the math section in a pictorial translation dictionary. I can read Greek, Latin, and most Romance and Germanic languages, but I can't read that gibberish to save my life. Knowing that a glibbletharp expressed in Spanish is el glíbeltarpo doesn't do me the slightest bit of good.
It was then that I realized that I am utterly illiterate when it comes to math. All those formulae spread out everywhere make no more sense to me than Chinese characters, or Klingon. I'm exactly the kind of guy who would wash out of some kind of engineering or computer science program, and wind up changing majors.
I changed majors before I got in. Nobody would accept me as a CS candidate. So I'm a fairly accomplished in the geek arts to the extent you can become so without a shred of math background, but getting a worthless liberal arts degree really was about all I was good for, academically. That's why I earn my living with my back, like any common redneck, even though I had a great GPA at university.
I've spent almost all of my free time today doing development work on a native Linux application, and I have no clue what "SaaS" is without going to look it up.
I'd say that means the idea that this SaaS thing is killing native Linux app development is probably just a wee bit overstated. What on earth does it stand for anyway? Space alien anal Sex? Special anchovy asparagus Sauce? Sending apps across Saturn? No, wait, don't tell me, I'll guess eventually.
Of course it's just as fair to say my app isn't really all that relevant in the modern world, and it will die eventually. My team is a shadow of what it once was, and so am I, in terms of my devotion to development work. Frankly I spend entirely too much time goofing off here on/. to get any volunteering done, and that's largely because the audience has gone from a cheering mass to a few sporadic crickets chirping in the dark.
Linux on the desktop is dead. Long live Linux on the desktop.
We could port to Windows, but who wants to work for free on a platform where people get paid lots of good money to work?
Speed limits are a voluntary highway tax, not a safety measure. This new technology will just make the government more efficient at collecting revenue.
If they really cared about safety, I'd say it's well within the grasp of 21st century technology to simply prevent vehicles from exceeding the speed limit for any given set of coordinates. Nobody wants that technology, because the government needs you to hang yourself with the rope they give you, so they can generate revenue, and people want to feel "free."
Anyone can clean, most people can do construction.
I don't think I'd go that far at all. Most people who try to do construction walk around with a hammer all day feeling so special that they're helping to build something, but they aren't accomplishing anything useful, and just need to get out of the way.
Just like most people who try to volunteer at software projects, actually.
I don't really have any particular opinion on the whole issue surrounding the viability or legitimacy of the patent itself, but I do find the underlying concept pretty revolting. Now Aunt Maple can give Little Jeffie a gift card that only lets him buy Christian music? I know way too many controlling older people who don't understand technology very well who would jump a mile high at a chance like that.
One of them is a preacher whose 22-year-old daughter is a single mother after a lifetime of being restricted to the Christian This and the Christian That. Serves him right.
I really hate it when people try to control other people in this fashion. When I had kids, I briefly explored the idea of setting up some kind of net nanny thing to "protect the children." I mean good grief man, when I was a kid, we had Playboy, and, gasp, Hustler, but today's kids have an impressive freak show at their disposal, with everything from autopsy videos to donkey porn to pictures of decapitations! The children need to be protected from that kind of horror!
Don't they?
No, as it turns out, my kids have zero desire to watch women eat feces or see a man with a pumpkin up his ass, and even though that stuff is out there, I have absolutely nothing to fear in terms of my children turning out to be perverted freaks who think stuff like that is normal. I'm pretty much glad I never got around to setting up the net nanny crap, and that I don't bother to spy on my children's electronic lives, even though it would be pretty easy for me to do.
People who use this gift card control technology suck. Piss on them, I say, whether the patent is valid or not. If you want to control the kind of gift someone buys, then buy a fucking gift and choose it yourself. So they can sell it for pennies on the dollar on eBay and use the money to buy whatever the hell they want, of course.
While bored one day, I looked at the local sex offender registry. Most of them were women, and some pretty damn hideous women at that. The chick with five chins and six moles bigger than Rhode Island who works at the dry cleaning place? Sex offender! The toothless gray haired hag who cleans up puke in the high school gymnasium? Sex offender!
There were also a couple of assholes I went to school with who went down for beating on their women. Great shock there.
So I'm a better person driving a gasoline tanker, because I came away from university with a 3.43 GPA? Oddly, my parents kind of regret pissing their money away on my useless degree for some reason, and they're eternally disappointed in me that I don't have a "real job."
Damn if I know quite what that would be though. It seems to me 99% of people who get a university education are setting themselves up for a career in retail anyway. Education is enlightening and stuff, but it doesn't put food on the table unless you're one of the lucky few.
Right after I learned a few basics of the C16 (C64 was for rich kids) I programmed a small game. Granted it wasn't much, dodge missles in a balloon but it was a game. And it was within a weekend. Instant gratification was a LOT easier back in the days.
It was easier to accomplish something satisfying in those days for sure. I had a TRS-80 Color Computer, and I wrote this cool fishing game where you controlled a little boat with your arrow keys to try to intercept and skewer fish, and every so often this giant fish would jump out of the water and eat your boat. It was so cool, and I wrote the whole thing in BASIC.
What was really shocking was how many years it took PCs to catch up. I got my first PC a few years after that, and I ported my program to some version of BASIC that was available on PCs of the day, GW BASIC, I think. The game was orders of magnitude slower, and not remotely playable, which actually killed my interest in programming for that platform for the longest time. They didn't have any decent way to produce sound in those days either. Before the soundcard revolution in about 1989 or so, you could do much more with a CoCo or a C64 than you could ever dream of on PC.
I got involved with PC sound very early on. I remember Creative when it was just some bunch of guys in Singapore, and you had to pay big long distance charges to talk to them on the phone. Who could have guessed what they would become, or that they would stop being terribly relevant not so long afterwards.
Ah, the good old days. Now get off my lawn, you damn kids!
How long after useful privately owned computers were in homes did it take for the first ISPs to show up? A couple of years?
I'd put it at more like seven years. I definitely had a PC by 1986, and the first private ISP to make it onto the scene around here was about 1992. Before that, you had to be or know a university student, etc., to get on the internet, and the rest of us made do with BBSes.
IYou certainly don't need a doctorate in comp sci to be a network admin, but I've actually seen that listed in the last 6 months.
I don't have a relevant degree, and I finally gave up trying to break into the field when I ran across this little gem of a job posting:
WANTED: ENTRY LEVEL C++ PROGRAMMER. Must have advanced degree in molecular biology, particle physics, aerospace engineering or other advanced engineering degree. Some programming experience a bonus!
The one thing I have (programming experience) doesn't count for much under those terms. It's hopeless.
I don't know how kids today are doing it, or why they're paying all that money. Maybe it's where I live, but unless you have a MS or higher in one of about five very specialized and demanding fields, you're just pissing your money away. The whole "a degree in anything" phenomenon just doesn't work here. My parents have a MS and a BS in psychology between them, my wife has a BS in psychology, and I have a BA in foreign languages. We've got one fast food store manager, a hardware store clerk, a truck unloader and a truck driver between us. None of us have ever managed to find a damn thing to do with our sheep skins. At least ours were a couple orders of magnitude cheaper to acquire. I shudder to think how much more disillusioned I'd be if I were making payments on some huge mountain of debt. Education is enlightening and stuff, but it don't mean shit in the real world folks. Not for 90% of us anyway. Heh.
...other authors of copylefted books have other ways of making a buck.)
Hot chicks read my book, and then I make a fortune selling my "genetic material injection service" to them. It pays a lot more than paltry royalties, and it's good fun when they opt for the "direct injection" service, which I offer at half the price of the standard in vitro service.
In all seriousness, if I had it all to do over again, I'd probably choose a copyleft license for my book. You can't make a lot of money with books like this, and once they get tied up in all these contracts and licensing agreements, it's difficult to ensure that your work lives beyond the end of its brief window of commercial viability.
The Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and Italian languages use cognates of the word "American", in denoting "U.S. citizen".
Try telling that to my friends in Argentina, who insist adamantly they are "americanos" the same as I am. I really think the meanings of americano and American are so different in the two languages as to make them faux amis, even though they are cognates.
And we'd better hope it works, because it's the last chance we have of a Desktop Linux-compatible toolkit getting significant phone market share. I don't want to develop in Java, goddamnit.
I'd rather mod this up than comment, but since I don't have any mod points, I'll take this opportunity to express my passionate agreement with this statement.
Where we was goin to school at, we could of definately used some accent neutralization. I ain't never gon' ferget my English teacher who knowed how to talk real good, and teached us good to. Or my biology teacher who teached us all about Armageddon, which for which'uns of y'all is ignerint is pronounced ar-MEG-gadon.
I wouldn't bother going to the time and effort to bring a super cool new product (like, let's say, a hula hoop) to market if it was just going to get ripped off by a large corporation that has the resources to dump imitations at a loss until I go out of business.
But that's exactly what we do have. The patent system is pretty worthless to random independent inventors like me. I invent a super new hula hoop, but I can't do anything with the idea until I pay some lawyer to get my patent in motion. If I'm lucky, I eventually do get the patent after a couple of years of legal wrangling and a fortune in fees, and now I can start manufacturing my super new hula hoop. I can even roll the dice and start manufacturing it while the patent is still pending.
But I'm not a manufacturer, and setting up a manufacturing business is a lot more expensive than dreaming things up. So whether I have my patent in hand or not, I have to approach someone to get the thing made, and once the idea is out there, a patent is only as good as my budget for paying a team of layers to defend it.
That's how I did the math anyway, and that's why I don't hold a patent on any of my ideas. Instead, I buried them in the trash. If I can't profit, nobody is going to profit, and the world will just have to do without my super hula hoop.
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It seems like most people, especially geeks, want to take the easy route and try get a job. Being self-employed or running a business isn't all that hard and it is much more rewarding, especially for a computer geek now in internet age.
I don't think diving in head first and starting a geekly business is a great idea. If you can't find somebody else to hire you, you're not going to find any customers for your business either. I have three copies of that T-shirt, with different logos on them. Starting a business is easy. Turning even a modest profit may as well be impossible for all the luck I've ever had at it.
YMMV.
The coin! Looks foreign to me.
That's a US quarter dollar coin. Wikipedia says they're 24.26 mm in diameter. FYI.
...It struck me that we are probably in the last generation where truck driving is going to be a human job.
I got into this discussion just the other day with some truck mechanic who was arguing that when the auto driving trucks come, at least he will still have a job.
I don't think I agree that fully automatic self-piloting trucks are very likely, and I'm not particularly worried about the machines taking my job.
I realize that the trend of the future is to try to wean all transportation off of petroleum fuels, but let's use the petroleum tanker as an example anyway, because it's the most complicated segment of trucking I know about. Where there are hundreds of different styles and configurations of trailers now, you've got to replace all of that with some new standard setup that can mate with the loading rack automatically, and you've got to standardize all the hardware at all the loading racks to mate with them. This would cost all the players in all segments of the game a fortune, and for what? Companies could save money by reducing accidents and liability, and they would reduce their labor costs. I'm not in any position to be an accurate judge of how much the liability angle might save a company, but I can say that the labor drivers get paid is a small fraction of the total operational cost per mile, so eliminating labor would only make a small dent in what it cost to move the load a given distance. I don't think the potential savings would be enough to offset the huge investment necessary.
Then on the unloading end, you've got a larger problem by orders of magnitude. You've got a staggering number of different businesses with a mind-boggling array of different configurations of this and that, and you've got to standardize every last bit of that so the truck can extend its robotic hoses and discharge the product. Hundreds of gas stations shut down permanently when the EPA passed some harder rules about their underground storage tanks, and all of that would be a drop in the bucket compared to how many stations would close their doors if something like this came rolling down the pipe. You're talking billions, if not trillions of dollars to dig all of that stuff up and reconfigure it to some standard plan at every gas station, factory, power plant, trucking company, heating oil distributor, etc. from West Possum Piss to East Raccoon Penis and back. They put these places down roads you'd never otherwise conceive of taking a truck, way out in the middle of nowhere on the other side of a ford, where you step out of the truck and hear strains of "Dueling Banjos" echoing off the hilltops in the distance, and hear a fat man squealing like a pig while some toothless guy tells him he has a purty mouth.
Sure, I can sit here and draw stuff on the back of my napkin all day imagining how the loading and unloading coupling stuff could work, and how it would all have to come together, but putting all that stuff into place would cost umpty scadillion bitcoins, and I just can't see it happening while business owns the US government. What's in it for business? Not enough to justify the investment, I don't think. Not to mention the impact this would have on fuel prices.
I think railroads are vastly more likely to go fully automatic in the next 20 years. Those things already steer themselves, and running them on auto pilot would be a pretty trivial problem.
I've been wrong before, and I don't have a crystal ball, but I think automatic trucks are going to be the norm shortly after we're all going to work in fully automated flying cars.
At least I hope so. At least that way I get to drive to the unemployment office in a flying car.
Yes -- but I wasn't expecting people to be able to work that out based on my appearance and choice of inner-urban transport.
Welcome to the land of strip malls and automobiles, where sidewalks are too expensive to build, and only the dirt poor and Mexicans should be seen using their feet for anything.
I came to Linux when Windows ME was a totally unstable POS, and XP was on the horizon, with some sort of "product activation" thing that was going to force you to make toll 1-900 number calls to Microsoft every time you changed your computer in some way, to get permission to keep using it. That was the rumor going around at the time, though it might well have been FUD. I tried Linux, and never found out if that rumor was true or not.
It was the second time I had attempted to get away from Windows, the first being with OS/2. The second attempt worked out much better, as that was just a hair over 10 years ago, and I skipped Windows XP, Vista and 7, and haven't bought any software in all that time either. It was nice getting off the upgrade treadmill, because I was the kind of guy who would keep using an obsolete version of something forever instead of paying money for an update. I was still using software from the early '90s at the turn of the century, because I'm cheap, but I'm not a pirate.
Once I got started with Linux, I became active as a FOSS contributor not long after, and I've donated about 10 years of spare time to this and that, but mostly one project in particular. In the beginning, I was a rabid Linux zealot, and whenever anyone came to me with a computer problem, I switched them to Linux.
After 10 years of putting everyone back on Windows to get them out of my hair, I tried Windows 7 myself, because I got a cheap computer for my wife, and I thought I'd see if the OS that was already installed was usable. Basically all the software I rely on regularly is available for that platform, so I've got the same office suite, the same text editor, the same web browser, etc., over there. I'm really not interested in doing development work for free for a platform where people regularly part with cash to obtain software, but apart from that there really isn't all that much difference these days. I haven't seen any severe problems of the sort that prompted my exodus 10 years ago, and Windows basically seems a lot like KDE, only with fewer options, and only one desktop. It's not my favorite environment, but it's usable.
I've been wondering for some time now whether I would switch back or not. So far, I'm staying with Linux because it's comfortable and familiar, but I've also lost every bit of my religion. Linux on the desktop is dead. We're never going to change the world. These days, most people spend 99% of their time interacting with a web browser anyway, and are rarely affected by anything that happens to be going on under the hood. The biggest difference between Windows and Linux is that Linux doesn't make you sit through a big virus scan every time you turn around, and you'll never be tempted to buy a game.
Better service, more coverage (for the same price, which yes is effectively saving money), closer offices, etc?? There are plenty of reasons besides price for people to switch.
When I was unable to reach my brick and mortar insurance agent repeatedly, I turned to teh internets. The reusable dry adhesive tape people had the one and only website that functioned correctly from Firefox running on Linux, so they got my business.
I have no idea how much money I'm saving, and don't really give two shits.
Or we could just arrest everyone on a rotating basis, assume that they are guilty and give them the option of paying a fine or serving jail time on a chain gang.
I don't think the powers that be count incarcerated people among the unemployed either. This is a twofer for the government!
The poor S/N ratio makes it pretty much unusable.
That's it in a nutshell. The technology was superior in many ways to the alternatives, but the alternatives I migrated to over the years all have one thing in common: they dramatically reduce the amount of garbage present in the signal.
The last time I fired up a newsreader, my old haunts were completely clogged up with binaries posted in the wrong place, spam, and trolls trolling trolls. There were almost no real posters left. It's a shame, because I've maintained several life-long friendships with people I met on Usenet back in the day, and I've never formed relationships like that with anyone since, on these various mailing lists and web forums and whatnot. Nothing close.
Too many think that science and engineering involves the kinds of stuff they see on the Science Channel.
There is that. I love watching stuff on the Science Channel, but I'd have a long, loooong way to go to become an engineer. The most recent way in which this point was driven home was while I was flipping through the math section in a pictorial translation dictionary. I can read Greek, Latin, and most Romance and Germanic languages, but I can't read that gibberish to save my life. Knowing that a glibbletharp expressed in Spanish is el glíbeltarpo doesn't do me the slightest bit of good.
It was then that I realized that I am utterly illiterate when it comes to math. All those formulae spread out everywhere make no more sense to me than Chinese characters, or Klingon. I'm exactly the kind of guy who would wash out of some kind of engineering or computer science program, and wind up changing majors.
I changed majors before I got in. Nobody would accept me as a CS candidate. So I'm a fairly accomplished in the geek arts to the extent you can become so without a shred of math background, but getting a worthless liberal arts degree really was about all I was good for, academically. That's why I earn my living with my back, like any common redneck, even though I had a great GPA at university.
The Science Channel is still cool.
I've spent almost all of my free time today doing development work on a native Linux application, and I have no clue what "SaaS" is without going to look it up.
I'd say that means the idea that this SaaS thing is killing native Linux app development is probably just a wee bit overstated. What on earth does it stand for anyway? Space alien anal Sex? Special anchovy asparagus Sauce? Sending apps across Saturn? No, wait, don't tell me, I'll guess eventually.
Of course it's just as fair to say my app isn't really all that relevant in the modern world, and it will die eventually. My team is a shadow of what it once was, and so am I, in terms of my devotion to development work. Frankly I spend entirely too much time goofing off here on /. to get any volunteering done, and that's largely because the audience has gone from a cheering mass to a few sporadic crickets chirping in the dark.
Linux on the desktop is dead. Long live Linux on the desktop.
We could port to Windows, but who wants to work for free on a platform where people get paid lots of good money to work?
Speed limits are a voluntary highway tax, not a safety measure. This new technology will just make the government more efficient at collecting revenue.
If they really cared about safety, I'd say it's well within the grasp of 21st century technology to simply prevent vehicles from exceeding the speed limit for any given set of coordinates. Nobody wants that technology, because the government needs you to hang yourself with the rope they give you, so they can generate revenue, and people want to feel "free."
Anyone can clean, most people can do construction.
I don't think I'd go that far at all. Most people who try to do construction walk around with a hammer all day feeling so special that they're helping to build something, but they aren't accomplishing anything useful, and just need to get out of the way.
Just like most people who try to volunteer at software projects, actually.
I don't really have any particular opinion on the whole issue surrounding the viability or legitimacy of the patent itself, but I do find the underlying concept pretty revolting. Now Aunt Maple can give Little Jeffie a gift card that only lets him buy Christian music? I know way too many controlling older people who don't understand technology very well who would jump a mile high at a chance like that.
One of them is a preacher whose 22-year-old daughter is a single mother after a lifetime of being restricted to the Christian This and the Christian That. Serves him right.
I really hate it when people try to control other people in this fashion. When I had kids, I briefly explored the idea of setting up some kind of net nanny thing to "protect the children." I mean good grief man, when I was a kid, we had Playboy, and, gasp, Hustler, but today's kids have an impressive freak show at their disposal, with everything from autopsy videos to donkey porn to pictures of decapitations! The children need to be protected from that kind of horror!
Don't they?
No, as it turns out, my kids have zero desire to watch women eat feces or see a man with a pumpkin up his ass, and even though that stuff is out there, I have absolutely nothing to fear in terms of my children turning out to be perverted freaks who think stuff like that is normal. I'm pretty much glad I never got around to setting up the net nanny crap, and that I don't bother to spy on my children's electronic lives, even though it would be pretty easy for me to do.
People who use this gift card control technology suck. Piss on them, I say, whether the patent is valid or not. If you want to control the kind of gift someone buys, then buy a fucking gift and choose it yourself. So they can sell it for pennies on the dollar on eBay and use the money to buy whatever the hell they want, of course.
You know, women can commit sexual assault too...
While bored one day, I looked at the local sex offender registry. Most of them were women, and some pretty damn hideous women at that. The chick with five chins and six moles bigger than Rhode Island who works at the dry cleaning place? Sex offender! The toothless gray haired hag who cleans up puke in the high school gymnasium? Sex offender!
There were also a couple of assholes I went to school with who went down for beating on their women. Great shock there.
A university education makes a person better.
So I'm a better person driving a gasoline tanker, because I came away from university with a 3.43 GPA? Oddly, my parents kind of regret pissing their money away on my useless degree for some reason, and they're eternally disappointed in me that I don't have a "real job."
Damn if I know quite what that would be though. It seems to me 99% of people who get a university education are setting themselves up for a career in retail anyway. Education is enlightening and stuff, but it doesn't put food on the table unless you're one of the lucky few.
Right after I learned a few basics of the C16 (C64 was for rich kids) I programmed a small game. Granted it wasn't much, dodge missles in a balloon but it was a game. And it was within a weekend. Instant gratification was a LOT easier back in the days.
It was easier to accomplish something satisfying in those days for sure. I had a TRS-80 Color Computer, and I wrote this cool fishing game where you controlled a little boat with your arrow keys to try to intercept and skewer fish, and every so often this giant fish would jump out of the water and eat your boat. It was so cool, and I wrote the whole thing in BASIC.
What was really shocking was how many years it took PCs to catch up. I got my first PC a few years after that, and I ported my program to some version of BASIC that was available on PCs of the day, GW BASIC, I think. The game was orders of magnitude slower, and not remotely playable, which actually killed my interest in programming for that platform for the longest time. They didn't have any decent way to produce sound in those days either. Before the soundcard revolution in about 1989 or so, you could do much more with a CoCo or a C64 than you could ever dream of on PC.
I got involved with PC sound very early on. I remember Creative when it was just some bunch of guys in Singapore, and you had to pay big long distance charges to talk to them on the phone. Who could have guessed what they would become, or that they would stop being terribly relevant not so long afterwards.
Ah, the good old days. Now get off my lawn, you damn kids!
How long after useful privately owned computers were in homes did it take for the first ISPs to show up? A couple of years?
I'd put it at more like seven years. I definitely had a PC by 1986, and the first private ISP to make it onto the scene around here was about 1992. Before that, you had to be or know a university student, etc., to get on the internet, and the rest of us made do with BBSes.
IYou certainly don't need a doctorate in comp sci to be a network admin, but I've actually seen that listed in the last 6 months.
I don't have a relevant degree, and I finally gave up trying to break into the field when I ran across this little gem of a job posting:
WANTED: ENTRY LEVEL C++ PROGRAMMER. Must have advanced degree in molecular biology, particle physics, aerospace engineering or other advanced engineering degree. Some programming experience a bonus!
The one thing I have (programming experience) doesn't count for much under those terms. It's hopeless.
I don't know how kids today are doing it, or why they're paying all that money. Maybe it's where I live, but unless you have a MS or higher in one of about five very specialized and demanding fields, you're just pissing your money away. The whole "a degree in anything" phenomenon just doesn't work here. My parents have a MS and a BS in psychology between them, my wife has a BS in psychology, and I have a BA in foreign languages. We've got one fast food store manager, a hardware store clerk, a truck unloader and a truck driver between us. None of us have ever managed to find a damn thing to do with our sheep skins. At least ours were a couple orders of magnitude cheaper to acquire. I shudder to think how much more disillusioned I'd be if I were making payments on some huge mountain of debt. Education is enlightening and stuff, but it don't mean shit in the real world folks. Not for 90% of us anyway. Heh.
...other authors of copylefted books have other ways of making a buck.)
Hot chicks read my book, and then I make a fortune selling my "genetic material injection service" to them. It pays a lot more than paltry royalties, and it's good fun when they opt for the "direct injection" service, which I offer at half the price of the standard in vitro service.
In all seriousness, if I had it all to do over again, I'd probably choose a copyleft license for my book. You can't make a lot of money with books like this, and once they get tied up in all these contracts and licensing agreements, it's difficult to ensure that your work lives beyond the end of its brief window of commercial viability.
The Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and Italian languages use cognates of the word "American", in denoting "U.S. citizen".
Try telling that to my friends in Argentina, who insist adamantly they are "americanos" the same as I am. I really think the meanings of americano and American are so different in the two languages as to make them faux amis, even though they are cognates.
And we'd better hope it works, because it's the last chance we have of a Desktop Linux-compatible toolkit getting significant phone market share. I don't want to develop in Java, goddamnit.
I'd rather mod this up than comment, but since I don't have any mod points, I'll take this opportunity to express my passionate agreement with this statement.
Where we was goin to school at, we could of definately used some accent neutralization. I ain't never gon' ferget my English teacher who knowed how to talk real good, and teached us good to. Or my biology teacher who teached us all about Armageddon, which for which'uns of y'all is ignerint is pronounced ar-MEG-gadon.
It shore was depressin where I growed up at.
Stallmantitis is ridiculous.
Mod +1 Insightful.
I've been a FOSS developer for 10 years, but I still think RMS is crazier than a shithouse rat.
Yeah you know they're going to have to add more codes anyways. They're not thinking ahead. Let me contribute some more:
Gang raped by naked women wearing Tux T-shirts is code WX894953T. That's some impressive list.
I wouldn't bother going to the time and effort to bring a super cool new product (like, let's say, a hula hoop) to market if it was just going to get ripped off by a large corporation that has the resources to dump imitations at a loss until I go out of business.
But that's exactly what we do have. The patent system is pretty worthless to random independent inventors like me. I invent a super new hula hoop, but I can't do anything with the idea until I pay some lawyer to get my patent in motion. If I'm lucky, I eventually do get the patent after a couple of years of legal wrangling and a fortune in fees, and now I can start manufacturing my super new hula hoop. I can even roll the dice and start manufacturing it while the patent is still pending.
But I'm not a manufacturer, and setting up a manufacturing business is a lot more expensive than dreaming things up. So whether I have my patent in hand or not, I have to approach someone to get the thing made, and once the idea is out there, a patent is only as good as my budget for paying a team of layers to defend it.
That's how I did the math anyway, and that's why I don't hold a patent on any of my ideas. Instead, I buried them in the trash. If I can't profit, nobody is going to profit, and the world will just have to do without my super hula hoop.