To some bureaucratic organization that keeps 99 cents of every dollar to cover the administrative costs and lets the artists share the remaining one cent?
If I'm out of aspirin and get a headache at work, nobody has anything other than Tylenol which, for me at least, doesn't work worth a damn for a headache. Then I'm left with Tylenol-induced negative thoughts about having to work the rest of the afternoon with my head throbbing.
``How often do you see a photographer holding their dedicated-to-photography camera vertically?''
All the time if they're at, say, a sporting even and they know anything at all about composition. I've been doing sports photography since the '70s and have taken many tens of thousands of photos and the vast majority of my work is in the vertical format -- I specialize in track and field and other running events but I do hit the occasional high school foot/basket/baseball game. Yes... you can crop on the computer but, IMNSHO, it's a waste of pixels.
``Romans knew to let there be games, to keep the masses busy from free thinking.''
Yep. We have our reality TV, March Madness, the Super Bowl, the World Series (heck, professional sports in general), lotteries, celebrity worship, and so on and so on. There are already plenty of distractions to keep the American public from concentrating on, or even learning about, how their freedom has been taken away from them.
There are people/companies that are trying as hard as they can to turn it into something similar to broadcast media or, even worse, cable. It's something they understand. IMHO, it's similar to the way the Web changed once magazine designers started dictating what constituted good web page design -- squinty/headache-inducing text that can't be enlarged, horrible color schemes (including my newest least favorite: gray text on white background.). It wasn't ways pretty for the web user but it's something the designers understood.
The red flag for me about this article is that it's on Reason's web site. That alone is enough for me to back up a dump truck with a giant grain of salt.
``You can call it "to the bottom" if you think you somehow benefit from high taxes.''
I, personally, rather enjoy having things like running water, roads that can actually be driven on, bridges that don't fall down, food that's been inspected, and some other things that government provides. How are those things provided if we set up corporate-friendly tax regimes that wind up starving government? The private sector? Puhleez...
``Instead they write a job description which is impossible, or geared to bringing in a specific foreign worker.''
It'd be interesting to see the actual duties being performed by the H1-B worker who is hired to fill those jobs. I suspect that some of these hires aren't actually doing everything that was listed in the job description that disqualified American workers.
Hmm... the vast majority of the pro-powdered-alcohol comments in the article come from the inventor himself -- who stands to make a lot of money if this is legal everywhere. And the sole, somewhat-pro, comment by an M.D. was pretty lukewarm about the stuff. IMHO, it's a solution looking for a problem. Celebrations in the woods? Pretty lame argument in favor.
Yes but ketchup manufacturers (Big Ketchup?) paid the researchers to figure out the ketchup bottle problem. Not our long-term health. That problem is dumped by Big Ketchup into the FDA's lap who'll then turn around and ask Big Ketchup to study the problem for 90 days and, if nobody dies of cancer during that time, will deem the super slippery ketchup bottles safe. Unless the FDA decides that they can fast track the approval process because the American People need this product as soon as possible.
In a similar vein, Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows -- What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains" discusses something very similar from the standpoint of our using the Internet. It affects how we absorb and retain information and the changes in the brain are measurable. Essentially, the brain rewires itself to adapt to the technology that we use. That one's brain/thumb wiring is strengthened from messaging on smartphones is not a big surprise.
I can't type worth a damn on a smartphone with my thumbs. Anything texts I tried creating using my thumbs would be autocorrected to the point where the recipients would think I was having a stroke.
Your friend with the privileged account (I'm assuming this was running VMS, no?) might have been able to get away with using as much memory as he could. (Let's just hope he wasn't using an account with BYPASS privs enabled by default. I've encountered too many people who abused VMS boxes by setting their account up that way. They made terrible messes. Like code that can't run when accounts with less than "god" privileges are used. The problems they created were a pain -- and, sometimes, impossible -- to clean up.)
I had an intern discover that it was indeed faster to not do everything in memory. He was reading everything from a file into an array, applying some scale factor to all the elements, and then writing the entire array out to disk. It was taking forever. I had him try reading in one value at a time, apply the scale factor, and immediately write it out. Ran in a fraction of the time. Why? His account was on a system with a lot of other users. Memory quotas were enforced to avoid a single user taking over the entire system. When he read everything into memory, VMS was paging like crazy to fit his process into the smallish amount of RAM his quotas allowed and his program was spending a huge amount of time waiting for I/O to complete.
I'm guessing that I'd see the same thing happening on my Linux systems if user account ulimits weren't, by default, all set up as "unlimited".
``Even if we were in the right and could win,'' said the former official, ``it could take a lot of resources away from other enforcement.''
A side effect of following up and taking an offending company to court just might be that other companies might clean up their act lest they suffer the same fate. ``Sternly-worded'' letters haven't done squat to end anti-competitive practices. The fines, though, have helped to make some money for the government. Not like that does anything to the groups who've been screwed by the anti-competitive practices. All they get is a warm and fuzzy feeling that some justice has been done. At least until a future Justice Deptartment decides to look the other way again.
Has anyone gotten a hold of a complete list of the manfacturers/vendors whose products are affected by this? The way this has been worded there are more than the five mentioned in the summary text. Have products from any vendors been found to be "safe". (At least, so far?) And what versions of BIOS have been found to be vulnerable?
``Why doesn't twitter just provide a button that a user can push when they feel relentlessly accosted by internet trolls. It would delete the user's account.''
Instead of an account being deleted due to the tweet recipient pushing a button, I'd vote for having that button send a message to a dedicated team at Twitter who would decide whether a user account should be terminated. Allowing `end users' to cause accounts to be deleted could be -- and almost certainly would be -- badly abused.
``Is there any accountability for those who use the tool?''
Sure. About as much accountability as there is for the people who create applications that allow morons to send unmoderated messages that others wind up finding objectionable, insulting, harrassing, etc. (IANAL but, IMHO, it doesn't much matter that posts can be deleted. Once sent the damage to the target has been done.) At least Twitter posts are identified and can be traced to an individual. Unlike Yik Yak where one can be harrassed anonymously by its users and there's no recourse for those who've been targeted. Wait until its creators wind up on the receiving end of a class-action lawsuit for that and its investors pull out after wondering why they ever gave money to people who don't appear to have given any thought to how their nifty software might be (mis)used. Due diligence? They've heard of it. Maybe. But my money's on ``no''.
You mean it's ``just a UNIX machine with...'', no?
I like Macs but I would be concerned about they're being so ``closed''. Need more onboard disk space? You need to buy another Mac. (I'm talking about the ``Airs''; not sure about the bigger, more expensive models.) Or another disk to toss into an external disk dock. (I love those things.) At least with a ``Lintel'' laptop, upgrading the internal disk is a simple matter. I'd opt for the big internal drive to avoid having to lug around a lot of external gadgets but that's just me. (Of course, I'd want at least one extra disk as big as the internal for backups onto the external dock waiting back in the dorm.)
If you're worried about being able to haul the laptop into a repair shop, then buy a Windows-based system known to work well with Linux (get the one with the smallest hard disk they sell), immediately pull out the hard disk, install a new one, install the Linux distribution (Scientific sounds appropriate for a physics major), and go forth and be productive. If any hardware problems arise, pull out the Linux HD, re-install the Windows HD, and have the repair guys work on it using an OS they're likely more accustomed to using. And no support hassles about having replaced Windows.
``What this means is that those who oppose systemd are only about taking away choice, control and flexibility from other users, they do not want other users to be able to utilize certain features. So these people basically want to keep Linux difficult to use, unconfigurable and inflexible.''
Your arm must be really tired from painting with that broad brush. As for those who oppose systemd being Microsoft ``agents'', the feature usurpation being done by the systemd developers seems to show just the opposite.
But... WTF does any of this have to do with SCO and their ridiculous legal arguments rising from the dead? Again?
Just what would that even accomplish? I get the source code to the Linux kernel with every set of CDs/DVDs that I've downloaded or purchased over the years. Is SCO seriously going to argue that that source code has been magically cleansed of the code that IBM allegedly ordered purged from IBM's developers' computers? That would only make any sense if IBM offered a Linux distribution -- tweaked, I assume SCO is thinking by the code they are alleged to have stolen from SCO. (SCO thinking... ha ha ha... I crack myself up.) Wait... I've never heard of an IBM Linux.
I stopped thinking about SCO and their delusions years ago. Looks like their legal department -- and that's likely all that's left of the company now -- hasn't and is still sitting in their office dreaming up conspiracy theories. It's all they can do now. Hell, it's all they've ever had.
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To some bureaucratic organization that keeps 99 cents of every dollar to cover the administrative costs and lets the artists share the remaining one cent?
If I'm out of aspirin and get a headache at work, nobody has anything other than Tylenol which, for me at least, doesn't work worth a damn for a headache. Then I'm left with Tylenol-induced negative thoughts about having to work the rest of the afternoon with my head throbbing.
All the time if they're at, say, a sporting even and they know anything at all about composition. I've been doing sports photography since the '70s and have taken many tens of thousands of photos and the vast majority of my work is in the vertical format -- I specialize in track and field and other running events but I do hit the occasional high school foot/basket/baseball game. Yes... you can crop on the computer but, IMNSHO, it's a waste of pixels.
Yep. We have our reality TV, March Madness, the Super Bowl, the World Series (heck, professional sports in general), lotteries, celebrity worship, and so on and so on. There are already plenty of distractions to keep the American public from concentrating on, or even learning about, how their freedom has been taken away from them.
There are people/companies that are trying as hard as they can to turn it into something similar to broadcast media or, even worse, cable. It's something they understand. IMHO, it's similar to the way the Web changed once magazine designers started dictating what constituted good web page design -- squinty/headache-inducing text that can't be enlarged, horrible color schemes (including my newest least favorite: gray text on white background.). It wasn't ways pretty for the web user but it's something the designers understood.
The red flag for me about this article is that it's on Reason's web site. That alone is enough for me to back up a dump truck with a giant grain of salt.
I, personally, rather enjoy having things like running water, roads that can actually be driven on, bridges that don't fall down, food that's been inspected, and some other things that government provides. How are those things provided if we set up corporate-friendly tax regimes that wind up starving government? The private sector? Puhleez...
Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.
Damn. Wish I had mod points for your post.
It'd be interesting to see the actual duties being performed by the H1-B worker who is hired to fill those jobs. I suspect that some of these hires aren't actually doing everything that was listed in the job description that disqualified American workers.
... I say "bribes". You have to admit that much of what is, today, considered "support" or a "donation" is really a thinly-disguised bribe.
Hmm... the vast majority of the pro-powdered-alcohol comments in the article come from the inventor himself -- who stands to make a lot of money if this is legal everywhere. And the sole, somewhat-pro, comment by an M.D. was pretty lukewarm about the stuff. IMHO, it's a solution looking for a problem. Celebrations in the woods? Pretty lame argument in favor.
Everyone with access to the internet thinks they're a comedian. Now it looks like it's "Post Something Based On A Science Fiction Novel Day". Great...
Or, maybe, nourished. There can't be anything good about having this coating getting into your digestive tract.
Yes but ketchup manufacturers (Big Ketchup?) paid the researchers to figure out the ketchup bottle problem. Not our long-term health. That problem is dumped by Big Ketchup into the FDA's lap who'll then turn around and ask Big Ketchup to study the problem for 90 days and, if nobody dies of cancer during that time, will deem the super slippery ketchup bottles safe. Unless the FDA decides that they can fast track the approval process because the American People need this product as soon as possible.
Yep... You're developing muscle memory.
In a similar vein, Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows -- What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains" discusses something very similar from the standpoint of our using the Internet. It affects how we absorb and retain information and the changes in the brain are measurable. Essentially, the brain rewires itself to adapt to the technology that we use. That one's brain/thumb wiring is strengthened from messaging on smartphones is not a big surprise.
(Heh heh... "texts" was supposed to be in parentheses. And I'm not even posting via smartphone.)
I can't type worth a damn on a smartphone with my thumbs. Anything texts I tried creating using my thumbs would be autocorrected to the point where the recipients would think I was having a stroke.
Your friend with the privileged account (I'm assuming this was running VMS, no?) might have been able to get away with using as much memory as he could. (Let's just hope he wasn't using an account with BYPASS privs enabled by default. I've encountered too many people who abused VMS boxes by setting their account up that way. They made terrible messes. Like code that can't run when accounts with less than "god" privileges are used. The problems they created were a pain -- and, sometimes, impossible -- to clean up.)
I had an intern discover that it was indeed faster to not do everything in memory. He was reading everything from a file into an array, applying some scale factor to all the elements, and then writing the entire array out to disk. It was taking forever. I had him try reading in one value at a time, apply the scale factor, and immediately write it out. Ran in a fraction of the time. Why? His account was on a system with a lot of other users. Memory quotas were enforced to avoid a single user taking over the entire system. When he read everything into memory, VMS was paging like crazy to fit his process into the smallish amount of RAM his quotas allowed and his program was spending a huge amount of time waiting for I/O to complete.
I'm guessing that I'd see the same thing happening on my Linux systems if user account ulimits weren't, by default, all set up as "unlimited".
A side effect of following up and taking an offending company to court just might be that other companies might clean up their act lest they suffer the same fate. ``Sternly-worded'' letters haven't done squat to end anti-competitive practices. The fines, though, have helped to make some money for the government. Not like that does anything to the groups who've been screwed by the anti-competitive practices. All they get is a warm and fuzzy feeling that some justice has been done. At least until a future Justice Deptartment decides to look the other way again.
Has anyone gotten a hold of a complete list of the manfacturers/vendors whose products are affected by this? The way this has been worded there are more than the five mentioned in the summary text. Have products from any vendors been found to be "safe". (At least, so far?) And what versions of BIOS have been found to be vulnerable?
Instead of an account being deleted due to the tweet recipient pushing a button, I'd vote for having that button send a message to a dedicated team at Twitter who would decide whether a user account should be terminated. Allowing `end users' to cause accounts to be deleted could be -- and almost certainly would be -- badly abused.
Sure. About as much accountability as there is for the people who create applications that allow morons to send unmoderated messages that others wind up finding objectionable, insulting, harrassing, etc. (IANAL but, IMHO, it doesn't much matter that posts can be deleted. Once sent the damage to the target has been done.) At least Twitter posts are identified and can be traced to an individual. Unlike Yik Yak where one can be harrassed anonymously by its users and there's no recourse for those who've been targeted. Wait until its creators wind up on the receiving end of a class-action lawsuit for that and its investors pull out after wondering why they ever gave money to people who don't appear to have given any thought to how their nifty software might be (mis)used. Due diligence? They've heard of it. Maybe. But my money's on ``no''.
You mean it's ``just a UNIX machine with...'', no?
I like Macs but I would be concerned about they're being so ``closed''. Need more onboard disk space? You need to buy another Mac. (I'm talking about the ``Airs''; not sure about the bigger, more expensive models.) Or another disk to toss into an external disk dock. (I love those things.) At least with a ``Lintel'' laptop, upgrading the internal disk is a simple matter. I'd opt for the big internal drive to avoid having to lug around a lot of external gadgets but that's just me. (Of course, I'd want at least one extra disk as big as the internal for backups onto the external dock waiting back in the dorm.)
If you're worried about being able to haul the laptop into a repair shop, then buy a Windows-based system known to work well with Linux (get the one with the smallest hard disk they sell), immediately pull out the hard disk, install a new one, install the Linux distribution (Scientific sounds appropriate for a physics major), and go forth and be productive. If any hardware problems arise, pull out the Linux HD, re-install the Windows HD, and have the repair guys work on it using an OS they're likely more accustomed to using. And no support hassles about having replaced Windows.
Your arm must be really tired from painting with that broad brush. As for those who oppose systemd being Microsoft ``agents'', the feature usurpation being done by the systemd developers seems to show just the opposite.
But... WTF does any of this have to do with SCO and their ridiculous legal arguments rising from the dead? Again?
IBM ordered source code to be destroyed?
Just what would that even accomplish? I get the source code to the Linux kernel with every set of CDs/DVDs that I've downloaded or purchased over the years. Is SCO seriously going to argue that that source code has been magically cleansed of the code that IBM allegedly ordered purged from IBM's developers' computers? That would only make any sense if IBM offered a Linux distribution -- tweaked, I assume SCO is thinking by the code they are alleged to have stolen from SCO. (SCO thinking... ha ha ha... I crack myself up.) Wait... I've never heard of an IBM Linux.
I stopped thinking about SCO and their delusions years ago. Looks like their legal department -- and that's likely all that's left of the company now -- hasn't and is still sitting in their office dreaming up conspiracy theories. It's all they can do now. Hell, it's all they've ever had.