That's just such a fantastic idea, I can't believe I've never heard it before.
This should be required for all government "sin" taxes. Make the up front cost higher, so that when people get the check at the end of the year they can really think about how much they'd be spending on wasteful activity.
Who would get the $1000 check at the end of the year and say, "Yes! Now I can go drive around for days."
I mean, this isn't an ideal solution for me, but it's a damn good compromise with those who just won't be happy without the government interference.
This always comes up, but if you're at all interested in programming languages, here's why you should learn Scheme.
A few years ago I was doing a project that involved parsing the intermediate code that GCC generated while compiling a C program. Doing a bit of research I found out that one of GCC's intermediate stages was a language called RTL (register transfer language). To my surprise, RTL looked something like this:
(set (reg:0) (mem:blah blah))
But wait, I thought -- that looks like Lisp. Come to find out RTL was based on lisp s-expressions.
It was then I realized what the Big Deal with Lisp was - it has no syntax at all, and programs written in this parenthetical form are trivially converted into a parse tree. In fact, if you've ever written a simple interpreter or compiler, odds are good you'd use a list-like structure to store the parsed code.
The reason Lisp and Scheme are so "powerful" is that you, as a programmer, have direct access to the program's parse tree at all times. (You can even alter the parse tree at compile time with macros, which is really modifying the compiler to suit your program.)
But really, the best way to learn why Scheme or Lisp are so great is to implement them. Writing a Scheme to assembly compiler will give you an incredibly deep understanding as to how compilers and programming languages in general work.
If you were to try to write a compiler for any other language, you'd probably spend most of your time on the lexer and parser. With Lisp or Scheme, the program, as written, is already almost fully parsed for you. Once you understand that, you'll realize why it's so cool.
But what price would you pay to feel better about yourself if you're a busy environmentalist who can't be bothered to change his lifestyle, but still wants to be continuously indignant about others driving cars without feeling like a hypocrite?
$8 a month seems quite reasonable to me.
But wait, there's more! You get to feel good about helping a minority, too! A minority that was specifically mistreated by the United States Government, no less!
All nativeenergy.com is missing is a "free" hemp tote bag with Bill Clinton's picture on it and they could charge an extra $10 for the orgasms people would have just from sending them money.
I use Subversion (locally) for my web sites, with hooks to automatically upload changed files on commit.
It saves a ton of time, and probably bandwidth since I can work on a local copy and only upload the changes. (Without having to keep track of which files I've changed.)
So if I were in your shoes, I'd make a local copy, start ripping stuff out little by little until the site doesn't work, rollback the changes until it does, and repeat. Having versioning really helps out if you make a mistake, which is inevitable.
Silly, it's because whoever has access to the video file to edit it will not also have access to the md5 hash taken at the time of the recording, and/or will not ever be able to generate ANOTHER md5 hash and/or claim the original hash was altered, and the new hash was the real one.
I think this story is a non-issue, since compliance with local laws is a good thing and it was decent of the New York Times to go to such lengths to respect them.
However, the more important issue here is that now that this technology exists and has been shown to work in situations like this, how long before something like this will be required to be used before you publish anything on the Internet?
I'll bet won't be long before some county government (or other small entity) in the sues a national/international publication for not censoring themselves according to local laws.
Now greenpeace has the ability to use the publicity they get to shake down companies for "contributions."
"Hey, Mr. CEO, it would be a real shame if your company was downgraded to not-so-green in our next report. You could go a long way to showing your support for the environment by tossing a few bucks our way."
Don't think for a second that won't happen.
Re:Makes sense to me
on
Bob Saget 2.0
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You're not alone. I think these shows survive by attracting a ridiculously small minority of people who think they're funny.
A *really* popular sitcom might get a few million people to watch it every night. Out of a population of 400 million, the actual ratio of people who enjoy that humor regularly is tiny.
My guess is that's it's much easier and cheaper to produce crap and get 30% of an already small audience simply by being slightly less crappy than the competition, than it would be to produce something great and attract more people who would usually do something else.
To get a really huge audience, you would need not only to win over the people who think TV sucks, but also the kind of people who watch "Everybody Loves Raymond" religiously. What kind of show would appeal to both sets of people? I certainly don't know.
And as far as AFV goes, the first show ever was hysterical, and it was all downhill from there. Now you're really lucky if it's as funny as a "Cathy" cartoon.
Thanks, I should have been more clear. Small circles. Your arm would fall off if you tried to use large circles anyway.
For those of you having conniptions from the "circular motion" statement, let me be clear that Brasso is a (mostly) liquid, and does not introduce any new scratches on the surface of the CD.
Use a cloth, apply Brasso in a circular motion, let dry. Wipe Brasso off with same cloth, using a decent amount of force. Brasso is a really good mildly abrasive polishing compound, and enough applications will erase any scratch.
Eh, even given the loss 50 IQ points, most people would still be way ahead of your average Home Depot cashier.
I had one pull out a calculator to figure out how many feet my 6 pieces of 8 foot long molding came out to, and she came up with 0.
Another time, I cut pieces of 16 foot molding about in half, and the cashier insisted that she had to measure each one. "No, it's really four 16 foot pieces, cut in half." I waited for ten minutes while she took each one to the meauring tape, coming back to the register with measurements like 7.95 feet, 8.10 feet, typed in each one, and then stared at me blankly when I handed her extra money so that I'd get a five insted of four ones back.
I swear, if these people aren't paying Home Depot for the priviledge of working there, Home Depot is getting ripped off.
Just last week I was wishing there were an online spreadsheet so I could organize some simple budgets from the thousand different computers I use. I love having my gmail account because it's a decent enough mail client that I can access from anywhere and doesn't require any maintenance on my part.
But the spreadsheet was just not ready for prime time. The limitations of a browser hacked to do what really should be done by a local app really showed. Even the most basic things didn't work as expected (copy/paste buttons instead of working shortcuts? No thanks.)
What would be ideal would be enough easily browsable online storage so that I could work on my spreadsheet locally and save it online. There's no way for Google to make money off such a thing, though, so I don't see it happening. (And yes, I know about the gmail-based filesystem that Linux has.)
I really wish we'd get away from the idea that all of these apps have to be implemented in a browser over HTTP. There's a reason nobody ever developed a GUI toolkit that works like that -- and it's because it's a horrible mess, and makes simple things hard and hard things impossible.
Unfortunately, with the way people are diving head-first into AJAX because it's the latest thing, I'm sure we'll be stuck with it forever.
Next stop -- an AJAX web browser. Mostly feature complete.
Re:Funny, I didn't know Mike McCurry Totally Sold
on
Net Neutrality or Not?
·
· Score: 1
>I didn't know he was such a sell out until that CNN piece.
You mean him being a White House press secretary didn't tip you off?
That can't be right. If they use a hash to encrypt saved passwords, there would be no way to recover them on a different client.
A hash is a one way trip, since for any hash there are going to be an infinite number of collisions, so an infinite number of starting points will lead you to the same hash.
If they're encrypting data at all, they're using some other algorithm.
In the U.S., at least, we believe that there are rights that are "automatic." The U.S. Constitution, which too few people read, defines these as inalienable rights that no governement or other entity can take away.
I'm just intending to clarify things, as your social contract statement seems to indicate that you believe that authority can grant or take away rights at whim, as long as it's written down somewhere, or otherwise generally agreed upon. I'm assuming this is a European idea.
The ramifications are that U.S. citizens have a basis for determining when a government has overstepped its bounds (whether they actually do is a different story), where the social contract idea seems to provide little justification for being critical of authority. I'm sure in either case it doesn't make much difference practically speaking, but we're coming from fundamentally opposed viewpoints. (i.e. humans have certain rights no matter what, vs. the only rights you have are what society agrees on.)
But, you're right, there's no inalienable right to receive RF signals and decode them, as far as I'm aware, in the U.S. Constitution or otherwise.
I don't have anything to say, but I just wanted to applaud you for being the first person in the history of Slashdot to spell "lose" correctly. Bravo, sir.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just such a fantastic idea, I can't believe I've never heard it before.
This should be required for all government "sin" taxes. Make the up front cost higher, so that when people get the check at the end of the year they can really think about how much they'd be spending on wasteful activity.
Who would get the $1000 check at the end of the year and say, "Yes! Now I can go drive around for days."
I mean, this isn't an ideal solution for me, but it's a damn good compromise with those who just won't be happy without the government interference.
This always comes up, but if you're at all interested in programming languages, here's why you should learn Scheme.
A few years ago I was doing a project that involved parsing the intermediate code that GCC generated while compiling a C program. Doing a bit of research I found out that one of GCC's intermediate stages was a language called RTL (register transfer language). To my surprise, RTL looked something like this:
(set (reg:0) (mem:blah blah))
But wait, I thought -- that looks like Lisp. Come to find out RTL was based on lisp s-expressions.
It was then I realized what the Big Deal with Lisp was - it has no syntax at all, and programs written in this parenthetical form are trivially converted into a parse tree. In fact, if you've ever written a simple interpreter or compiler, odds are good you'd use a list-like structure to store the parsed code.
The reason Lisp and Scheme are so "powerful" is that you, as a programmer, have direct access to the program's parse tree at all times. (You can even alter the parse tree at compile time with macros, which is really modifying the compiler to suit your program.)
But really, the best way to learn why Scheme or Lisp are so great is to implement them. Writing a Scheme to assembly compiler will give you an incredibly deep understanding as to how compilers and programming languages in general work.
If you were to try to write a compiler for any other language, you'd probably spend most of your time on the lexer and parser. With Lisp or Scheme, the program, as written, is already almost fully parsed for you. Once you understand that, you'll realize why it's so cool.
It'll all be Motorola 68000.
Anything but Intel, it's just way too easy to find recent and cheap hardware and software that's i386.
Plus the textbooks won't have classic lines like,
"Today's machines now come standard with up to 4 megabytes of Random Access Memory, and this continues to increase every year!"
That's awesome, but how did you type the lowercase letters?
But what price would you pay to feel better about yourself if you're a busy environmentalist who can't be bothered to change his lifestyle, but still wants to be continuously indignant about others driving cars without feeling like a hypocrite?
$8 a month seems quite reasonable to me.
But wait, there's more! You get to feel good about helping a minority, too! A minority that was specifically mistreated by the United States Government, no less!
All nativeenergy.com is missing is a "free" hemp tote bag with Bill Clinton's picture on it and they could charge an extra $10 for the orgasms people would have just from sending them money.
Really? How do you get in on THAT?
I'm going to drive around in city traffic for the next hour unless somebody pays me $50.
Oh boy, I'll bet I know what form these warning stickers will take:
This product contains software known to the state of California to cause CANCER
I use Subversion (locally) for my web sites, with hooks to automatically upload changed files on commit.
It saves a ton of time, and probably bandwidth since I can work on a local copy and only upload the changes. (Without having to keep track of which files I've changed.)
So if I were in your shoes, I'd make a local copy, start ripping stuff out little by little until the site doesn't work, rollback the changes until it does, and repeat. Having versioning really helps out if you make a mistake, which is inevitable.
Congratulations on making me the guy in the library that can't keep his laughter below the acceptable level.
Silly, it's because whoever has access to the video file to edit it will not also have access to the md5 hash taken at the time of the recording, and/or will not ever be able to generate ANOTHER md5 hash and/or claim the original hash was altered, and the new hash was the real one.
Oh, wait, now that doesn't make any sense at all.
I think this story is a non-issue, since compliance with local laws is a good thing and it was decent of the New York Times to go to such lengths to respect them.
However, the more important issue here is that now that this technology exists and has been shown to work in situations like this, how long before something like this will be required to be used before you publish anything on the Internet?
I'll bet won't be long before some county government (or other small entity) in the sues a national/international publication for not censoring themselves according to local laws.
Now greenpeace has the ability to use the publicity they get to shake down companies for "contributions."
"Hey, Mr. CEO, it would be a real shame if your company was downgraded to not-so-green in our next report. You could go a long way to showing your support for the environment by tossing a few bucks our way."
Don't think for a second that won't happen.
You're not alone. I think these shows survive by attracting a ridiculously small minority of people who think they're funny.
A *really* popular sitcom might get a few million people to watch it every night. Out of a population of 400 million, the actual ratio of people who enjoy that humor regularly is tiny.
My guess is that's it's much easier and cheaper to produce crap and get 30% of an already small audience simply by being slightly less crappy than the competition, than it would be to produce something great and attract more people who would usually do something else.
To get a really huge audience, you would need not only to win over the people who think TV sucks, but also the kind of people who watch "Everybody Loves Raymond" religiously. What kind of show would appeal to both sets of people? I certainly don't know.
And as far as AFV goes, the first show ever was hysterical, and it was all downhill from there. Now you're really lucky if it's as funny as a "Cathy" cartoon.
It's got PCI!? Wow!
You know, the Risc processor is going to change everything.
Thanks, I should have been more clear. Small circles. Your arm would fall off if you tried to use large circles anyway.
For those of you having conniptions from the "circular motion" statement, let me be clear that Brasso is a (mostly) liquid, and does not introduce any new scratches on the surface of the CD.
Find it in the hardware store or Target.
Use a cloth, apply Brasso in a circular motion, let dry. Wipe Brasso off with same cloth, using a decent amount of force. Brasso is a really good mildly abrasive polishing compound, and enough applications will erase any scratch.
Cleaned my whole CD collection this way.
Eh, even given the loss 50 IQ points, most people would still be way ahead of your average Home Depot cashier.
I had one pull out a calculator to figure out how many feet my 6 pieces of 8 foot long molding came out to, and she came up with 0.
Another time, I cut pieces of 16 foot molding about in half, and the cashier insisted that she had to measure each one. "No, it's really four 16 foot pieces, cut in half." I waited for ten minutes while she took each one to the meauring tape, coming back to the register with measurements like 7.95 feet, 8.10 feet, typed in each one, and then stared at me blankly when I handed her extra money so that I'd get a five insted of four ones back.
I swear, if these people aren't paying Home Depot for the priviledge of working there, Home Depot is getting ripped off.
No, he's missing the Frickin' :-)
>Nobody in their right mind is going to rely on a software project that is somebody's hobby.
Best. Irony. Ever.
Just last week I was wishing there were an online spreadsheet so I could organize some simple budgets from the thousand different computers I use. I love having my gmail account because it's a decent enough mail client that I can access from anywhere and doesn't require any maintenance on my part.
But the spreadsheet was just not ready for prime time. The limitations of a browser hacked to do what really should be done by a local app really showed. Even the most basic things didn't work as expected (copy/paste buttons instead of working shortcuts? No thanks.)
What would be ideal would be enough easily browsable online storage so that I could work on my spreadsheet locally and save it online. There's no way for Google to make money off such a thing, though, so I don't see it happening. (And yes, I know about the gmail-based filesystem that Linux has.)
I really wish we'd get away from the idea that all of these apps have to be implemented in a browser over HTTP. There's a reason nobody ever developed a GUI toolkit that works like that -- and it's because it's a horrible mess, and makes simple things hard and hard things impossible.
Unfortunately, with the way people are diving head-first into AJAX because it's the latest thing, I'm sure we'll be stuck with it forever.
Next stop -- an AJAX web browser. Mostly feature complete.
>I didn't know he was such a sell out until that CNN piece.
You mean him being a White House press secretary didn't tip you off?
That can't be right. If they use a hash to encrypt saved passwords, there would be no way to recover them on a different client.
A hash is a one way trip, since for any hash there are going to be an infinite number of collisions, so an infinite number of starting points will lead you to the same hash.
If they're encrypting data at all, they're using some other algorithm.
In the U.S., at least, we believe that there are rights that are "automatic." The U.S. Constitution, which too few people read, defines these as inalienable rights that no governement or other entity can take away.
I'm just intending to clarify things, as your social contract statement seems to indicate that you believe that authority can grant or take away rights at whim, as long as it's written down somewhere, or otherwise generally agreed upon. I'm assuming this is a European idea.
The ramifications are that U.S. citizens have a basis for determining when a government has overstepped its bounds (whether they actually do is a different story), where the social contract idea seems to provide little justification for being critical of authority. I'm sure in either case it doesn't make much difference practically speaking, but we're coming from fundamentally opposed viewpoints. (i.e. humans have certain rights no matter what, vs. the only rights you have are what society agrees on.)
But, you're right, there's no inalienable right to receive RF signals and decode them, as far as I'm aware, in the U.S. Constitution or otherwise.
I don't have anything to say, but I just wanted to applaud you for being the first person in the history of Slashdot to spell "lose" correctly. Bravo, sir.
Not bad, but you need to work Soy in there somewhere.