Chaucer is Middle English, not Old English, and is still barely understandable. The dividing line between Old and Middle English is when France conquered England in 1066. Go read Beowulf in the original language and see how much like English it is. Hint: Slashdot doesn't even support all the required letters.
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
[thorn]eodcyninga, [thorn]rym gefrunon,
hu ða æ[thorn]elingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing scea[thorn]ena [thorn]reatum, ...
Inciting people to commit a crime is, in itself, a crime, so refusing access outright is preferable. The problem is not whether they do this only for suspicious people, but rather that the definition of suspicious is fluid, whereas the list of people that they would outright not allow into the country is likely to be less so.
Actually, by digital content, I meant "non-gratis digital downloads and streaming", though I'll readily admit that DRM does make the problem worse.
With a physical product, even if the actual data is digital, there's something tangible. It can be traded and sold. It can be used as a Frisbee. More to the point, physical media inherently requires that the media be broadly compatible with a wide range of products by multiple companies, because the mere existence of the physical media necessitates that compatibility. Shelf space is just too expensive to have twelve competing copies of a single movie in different encodings for different devices.
That's why HD-DVD had to eventually either fail or cause Blu-Ray to fail; too many standards translates into unhappy consumers and insane distribution overhead. The industry really can't support a wide range of competing standards in physical media. Heck, the industry is throwing DVDs in with a sizable percentage of their Blu-Ray discs simply because it can barely support two standards adequately.
With digital downloads, all of those barriers that previously kept content providers honest no longer matter. Up until the point at which consumer backlash kicks in, there's nothing preventing having a hundred different competing devices, none of which can read content created for any of the others.
You have no right to enter a country of which you are not a citizen, and they can deny you entry for any reason, and require whatever they want of you as a condition of entry.
Actually, no, they can't. Well, they can require it, but if I acquiesced to those demands and got caught doing so, I could lose my job, get sued for millions of dollars, and then do several years in federal prison.
At the core of the problem is the fact that most people do not have a legal right to give anyone else access to their email account. As an employee of a major Fortune 500 company, I am prohibited from doing so not only by my employment contract, but ostensibly by SEC regulations as well, because granting such access could constitute facilitating insider trading.
And even if you're not working for anyone at all, allowing other people access to your account is a violation of the terms of service, which according to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
And God help you if you happen to be working on anything that requires D.O.D. clearance. Sharing that sort of info with a foreign government could get you life in prison or even summary execution for treason.
In other words, Israel basically just closed their borders to U.S. citizens, for all intents and purposes, legally speaking. I mean, sure, you can go, but if you do, know that you're taking a very real risk that they might decide to demand that you break U.S. law as a condition of entry, at which point you have two choices: give up all the money you spent on travel and lodging or go to prison when you get back to the States.
Thanks, but no thanks. There are plenty of countries that actually want American tourists.
Agreed. And I'd go one step further and say that it makes no sense to buy a set top box built by any content provider, period. General-purpose set top box makers are competing with each other, which means that it is in their best interest to provide quality service for all content providers. A content provider, in contrast, has every incentive to make their service work well, but every incentive to make other companies' services seem substandard, assuming they even provide the ability to access those services at all.
And on the flip side, it makes no sense to buy content from any provider that also builds hardware. It is in their best interest to provide severely degraded service for everyone else's hardware. Notice, for example, that Kindle's flowing KF8 support still hasn't landed on iOS a year and a half later. Notice that (according to Slashdot discussions a couple of days ago) Amazon's new TV show pilots are not playable on Android devices except for Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets. And so on. Because they sell tablets, they have no incentive to make it work on anyone else's tablets. If it doesn't work, they can say, "Hey, you should try our new tablet. It does everything your old one does, plus it works with our content." If it works on other devices, they can't make that claim. As long as other providers aren't playing the same game, and as long as it still works on all computers (which nearly all tablet users also own), Amazon wins by default.
And people wonder why I won't buy books that I can't hold in my hand, movies that I can't stick on my shelf, etc. It's because of companies like Amazon that limit what you can do with content that you've paid for, not because there's a good technical or legal reason to do so, but rather for their own competitive advantage.
Not at all. What you're failing to take into account is that you'll rarely see a family making that much money unless they live in a major city, in a state with an income tax, high property taxes, and a high cost of living.
In a major city, a family of three making $200,000 is solidly middle class because the cost of everything is so much higher. Comparing the Bay Area to rural West Tennessee:
Gas prices cost nearly a buck a gallon more.
Eating out often costs twice as much (except fast food chains).
Housing costs about 10 times as much.
State income tax eats a little over 7%.
Thus, a person in the Silicon Valley making a hundred grand has as much buying power as a person in the rural South making about $30,000–$40,000, once you factor in all of the cost of living differences, the higher tax rates, etc. Heck, it's only equivalent to making about $56,000 even in the city of Memphis.
In other words, they're not kidding themselves. They really are average, middle class Joes, at least in the context of their area's cost of living. Now if they decide to retire in Bucksnort, that's another story, but assuming they want to retire where they lived their lives, you have to look at their income based on typical middle-class incomes in their area, because that's what will continue to set the price of housing, gasoline, food, etc. after they retire.
That's the difference between an anecdote and a statistic. More than 80% of people are married by age 40, statistically, versus (currently) only 21% of people under 30. Assuming you enter the job market at age 22, this means that the statistical probability of someone being married increases very rapidly beginning in the mid-20s or early 30s.
It doesn't take 40 years to clean up after a fertilizer plant explodes. BTW, what happens if they get another tsunami while they're cleaning up the mess?
If they get a Tsunami in central Texas while they're cleaning it up, I'm pretty sure the flooding will be the least of our worries; the dust cloud from the giant asteroid will be a more pressing concern....
Interestingly, there's a small percentage of people (around 15% or so) for whom talking on a cell phone has no measurable effect on their driving. These are people with the ability to interrupt the conversation flow, saying "just a minute" or simply ignoring the conversation altogether during a crisis.
When there's a serious traffic issue, I don't even have the ability to say "just a minute". My brain locks in on the road, and about a minute later, I say, "I'm sorry, I had to deal with traffic. What were you saying?" I just assumed everyone's brain worked that way. It's part of the basic fight-or-flight response programmed into pretty much all higher forms of animal life. When you sense danger, you freeze and you focus on the situation at hand.
Who are these 85%, and taxonomically speaking, which kingdom are they classified in?
In such circumstances, I would argue that you should individually bail out the investors who got screwed by buying the stock from them at something close to its original value, dissolving the bank, and selling off its assets to the highest bidder, with a cap on the number of stocks that the government will buy back from any single investor.
Wrong question. The correct question is, "How many years of experience do you have?" If the answer is more than 10, the probability of the person being married with kids begins to climb fairly rapidly. You can, therefore, ensure a more balanced workforce by not hiring people straight out of college, or at least by setting hard limits on the number of junior coders that you hire.
Unfortunately many tech firms do precisely the opposite, setting low limits on the number of senior engineers that they hire (because of the high cost per employee) and filling the rest of the department with new college hires. In the long run, this tends to result in a large volume of poorly written code that has to be thrown away every few years and rewritten from scratch because they didn't have a senior architect working on it.
It also results in accusations of age discrimination, because most companies won't hire senior engineers as junior engineers, and the number of senior engineer positions is limited, effectively forcing a sizable percentage of people out of the market entirely, decades before they're ready to retire. If, instead, the industry hired more senior people and fewer young people, the number of people going into the field would decrease to match the available jobs, and you'd have a much healthier job market for everyone.
Productivity in areas that require actual thought and concentration falls off after about 20 hours. Even 40 hours is a joke for anything but menial physical labor.
What this means is that the best ways to increase worker productivity are:
Ban meetings. Most days should have exactly zero meetings; if you have three meetings per day, you can't get work done because of all the interruptions.
Most meetings should be either at the end of the day, the beginning of the day, or at lunch (with food). This minimizes the disruption that they cause.
Require all emails to contain a bullet-point executive summary. One person concentrates when writing it so everyone else doesn't have to concentrate while skimming it.
Standardize on a 30-hour workweek.
Standardize on an office environment so that workers can easily shut their doors and concentrate for periods of time.
Suggest specific break times that workers can choose so that they maximize their interaction with other people while minimizing how much they interrupt other workers in between.
Encourage workers to take non-work classes, form activity groups, etc. so that they don't burn out.
Encourage workers to work on things that they enjoy working on. Hire contractors to deal with the painful crap.
If you do these things, your productivity will soar.
A good programmer, but not a good developer. Non-mediocre developers are good enough at software architecture to contribute to the spec, not just follow it.
I actually took advantage of that design to work around a hardware bug once. The driver set up the device correctly, but then was unable to actually talk to the device. By pulling the USB plug halfway out and putting it back in, the OS reenumerated the bus, discovered the device (now correctly configured), and everything worked. (I later added a reenumeration call upon detecting this bad behavior, which fixed the problem completely, but it was useful as a quick workaround.)
Inrush is still probably limited to a few hundred mA. After negotiation, the device can power up additional components that draw more power. Devices won't be drawing that much power while you're plugging it in.
Is it bad that I read that in Bruce Willis's voice, complete with the trailing expletive?
Speaking of fun plots, they should have done one in which they unfreeze John McClane (voiced by Bruce Willis, of course). He falls for Leela, but keeps calling her Leeloo. Then he happens to be at a spaceport when they discover that an asteroid is heading towards earth, and the only way to stop it is to foil the terrorists who have taken the spaceport hostage so that he can steal a ship and mine the asteroid. Meanwhile, he is constantly being annoyed by Dr. Zoidberg who keeps talking in a high-pitched voice while wearing a light blond wig and a bizarre leopard-print suit.
Spoiler: it ends with the Earth blowing up when the asteroid hits it.
Easy. It's when two vertebrae are locked together in such a way that they are not independently movable because of overextension or overcontraction of spinal muscles.
Chiropractic care isn't bogus when used for what it was designed to do—correcting posture and forcing tight muscles to release so that they don't cause strain in further muscles, resulting in a chain reaction of back pain that leaves people in serious pain.
When used to treat back/neck pain, headaches resulting from tight neck muscles, pinched nerves, and other similar problems, with the exception of physical therapy (much more expensive), it is pretty much the only form of medical care that actually has a good history of success. The cracking of the back also releases endorphins, which make your back feel less sore, which further aids in healing by reducing the tendency to compensate for the sore muscles (which can injure other muscles).
In other words, the mechanism by which chiropractic care functions, at least for those purposes, is well understood and fully supported by medical science, unlike homeopathy, whose mechanism for working is believed to be limited to the placebo effect....:-)
Of course, when used to treat non-spine-related problems like heart disease and gingivitis, yes, chiropractic care is bogus, in much the same way that antibiotic care is bogus as a treatment for dandruff.
But it would be very, very expensive to do that. Even in the best case, the corporation would be able to bribe a few people. If what they want is sufficiently bad, though, there will be thousands pushing the other way.
We should reduce stupid and outdated regulations because they gum up the works. The problem is that the Libertarian party seems to just want fewer regulations, period, which is not the same thing. Deregulation of corporations is particularly tricky, because it quite frequently leads to serious abuse. It must be done slowly, carefully, methodically, and with an eye towards simplifying the regulations rather than removing useful protections. And most of the time, it shouldn't be done at all.
IMO, what we really need are fewer laws that apply to individuals when acting as individuals, and for codification of differences in rights between people acting as individuals and people using the resources of large groups (corporations, unions, etc.). The latter should be more regulated because their power is inherently disproportionate.
Right. In those situations, it doesn't really matter what you do. However, that's pretty much the worst case scenario, and even in that situation, stun grenades are still no worse than bullets; in situations where the person isn't holding a dead man's switch, they're likely to be better than bullets.
Waco, Texas. A big old compound, with a leader who was wanted for questioning. Lot's of stupid stuff happened there, with that leader locked inside with his followers. After days of negotiations, someone decided to flush them out with tear gas. Oooops - the canisters started a fire, everyone inside died.
Yeah, that can happen with stun grenades, too. The difference is that with either tear gas or stun grenades, there's a reasonable chance of being able to turn around and subdue the person using non-lethal means (possibly including tasers), whereas lobbing a crapton of ammo in their direction usually eliminates that option pretty quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Chaucer is Middle English, not Old English, and is still barely understandable. The dividing line between Old and Middle English is when France conquered England in 1066. Go read Beowulf in the original language and see how much like English it is. Hint: Slashdot doesn't even support all the required letters.
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
...
[thorn]eodcyninga, [thorn]rym gefrunon,
hu ða æ[thorn]elingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing scea[thorn]ena [thorn]reatum,
Inciting people to commit a crime is, in itself, a crime, so refusing access outright is preferable. The problem is not whether they do this only for suspicious people, but rather that the definition of suspicious is fluid, whereas the list of people that they would outright not allow into the country is likely to be less so.
Actually, by digital content, I meant "non-gratis digital downloads and streaming", though I'll readily admit that DRM does make the problem worse.
With a physical product, even if the actual data is digital, there's something tangible. It can be traded and sold. It can be used as a Frisbee. More to the point, physical media inherently requires that the media be broadly compatible with a wide range of products by multiple companies, because the mere existence of the physical media necessitates that compatibility. Shelf space is just too expensive to have twelve competing copies of a single movie in different encodings for different devices.
That's why HD-DVD had to eventually either fail or cause Blu-Ray to fail; too many standards translates into unhappy consumers and insane distribution overhead. The industry really can't support a wide range of competing standards in physical media. Heck, the industry is throwing DVDs in with a sizable percentage of their Blu-Ray discs simply because it can barely support two standards adequately.
With digital downloads, all of those barriers that previously kept content providers honest no longer matter. Up until the point at which consumer backlash kicks in, there's nothing preventing having a hundred different competing devices, none of which can read content created for any of the others.
And by that, I assume you mean Old English, i.e. German, give or take.
Actually, no, they can't. Well, they can require it, but if I acquiesced to those demands and got caught doing so, I could lose my job, get sued for millions of dollars, and then do several years in federal prison.
At the core of the problem is the fact that most people do not have a legal right to give anyone else access to their email account. As an employee of a major Fortune 500 company, I am prohibited from doing so not only by my employment contract, but ostensibly by SEC regulations as well, because granting such access could constitute facilitating insider trading.
And even if you're not working for anyone at all, allowing other people access to your account is a violation of the terms of service, which according to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
And God help you if you happen to be working on anything that requires D.O.D. clearance. Sharing that sort of info with a foreign government could get you life in prison or even summary execution for treason.
In other words, Israel basically just closed their borders to U.S. citizens, for all intents and purposes, legally speaking. I mean, sure, you can go, but if you do, know that you're taking a very real risk that they might decide to demand that you break U.S. law as a condition of entry, at which point you have two choices: give up all the money you spent on travel and lodging or go to prison when you get back to the States.
Thanks, but no thanks. There are plenty of countries that actually want American tourists.
Agreed. And I'd go one step further and say that it makes no sense to buy a set top box built by any content provider, period. General-purpose set top box makers are competing with each other, which means that it is in their best interest to provide quality service for all content providers. A content provider, in contrast, has every incentive to make their service work well, but every incentive to make other companies' services seem substandard, assuming they even provide the ability to access those services at all.
And on the flip side, it makes no sense to buy content from any provider that also builds hardware. It is in their best interest to provide severely degraded service for everyone else's hardware. Notice, for example, that Kindle's flowing KF8 support still hasn't landed on iOS a year and a half later. Notice that (according to Slashdot discussions a couple of days ago) Amazon's new TV show pilots are not playable on Android devices except for Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets. And so on. Because they sell tablets, they have no incentive to make it work on anyone else's tablets. If it doesn't work, they can say, "Hey, you should try our new tablet. It does everything your old one does, plus it works with our content." If it works on other devices, they can't make that claim. As long as other providers aren't playing the same game, and as long as it still works on all computers (which nearly all tablet users also own), Amazon wins by default.
And people wonder why I won't buy books that I can't hold in my hand, movies that I can't stick on my shelf, etc. It's because of companies like Amazon that limit what you can do with content that you've paid for, not because there's a good technical or legal reason to do so, but rather for their own competitive advantage.
Do. Not. Trust. Digital. Content.
Not at all. What you're failing to take into account is that you'll rarely see a family making that much money unless they live in a major city, in a state with an income tax, high property taxes, and a high cost of living.
In a major city, a family of three making $200,000 is solidly middle class because the cost of everything is so much higher. Comparing the Bay Area to rural West Tennessee:
Thus, a person in the Silicon Valley making a hundred grand has as much buying power as a person in the rural South making about $30,000–$40,000, once you factor in all of the cost of living differences, the higher tax rates, etc. Heck, it's only equivalent to making about $56,000 even in the city of Memphis.
In other words, they're not kidding themselves. They really are average, middle class Joes, at least in the context of their area's cost of living. Now if they decide to retire in Bucksnort, that's another story, but assuming they want to retire where they lived their lives, you have to look at their income based on typical middle-class incomes in their area, because that's what will continue to set the price of housing, gasoline, food, etc. after they retire.
That's the difference between an anecdote and a statistic. More than 80% of people are married by age 40, statistically, versus (currently) only 21% of people under 30. Assuming you enter the job market at age 22, this means that the statistical probability of someone being married increases very rapidly beginning in the mid-20s or early 30s.
If they get a Tsunami in central Texas while they're cleaning it up, I'm pretty sure the flooding will be the least of our worries; the dust cloud from the giant asteroid will be a more pressing concern....
Oh, you meant in Japan.
When there's a serious traffic issue, I don't even have the ability to say "just a minute". My brain locks in on the road, and about a minute later, I say, "I'm sorry, I had to deal with traffic. What were you saying?" I just assumed everyone's brain worked that way. It's part of the basic fight-or-flight response programmed into pretty much all higher forms of animal life. When you sense danger, you freeze and you focus on the situation at hand.
Who are these 85%, and taxonomically speaking, which kingdom are they classified in?
In such circumstances, I would argue that you should individually bail out the investors who got screwed by buying the stock from them at something close to its original value, dissolving the bank, and selling off its assets to the highest bidder, with a cap on the number of stocks that the government will buy back from any single investor.
Wrong question. The correct question is, "How many years of experience do you have?" If the answer is more than 10, the probability of the person being married with kids begins to climb fairly rapidly. You can, therefore, ensure a more balanced workforce by not hiring people straight out of college, or at least by setting hard limits on the number of junior coders that you hire.
Unfortunately many tech firms do precisely the opposite, setting low limits on the number of senior engineers that they hire (because of the high cost per employee) and filling the rest of the department with new college hires. In the long run, this tends to result in a large volume of poorly written code that has to be thrown away every few years and rewritten from scratch because they didn't have a senior architect working on it.
It also results in accusations of age discrimination, because most companies won't hire senior engineers as junior engineers, and the number of senior engineer positions is limited, effectively forcing a sizable percentage of people out of the market entirely, decades before they're ready to retire. If, instead, the industry hired more senior people and fewer young people, the number of people going into the field would decrease to match the available jobs, and you'd have a much healthier job market for everyone.
Productivity in areas that require actual thought and concentration falls off after about 20 hours. Even 40 hours is a joke for anything but menial physical labor.
What this means is that the best ways to increase worker productivity are:
If you do these things, your productivity will soar.
A good programmer, but not a good developer. Non-mediocre developers are good enough at software architecture to contribute to the spec, not just follow it.
I actually took advantage of that design to work around a hardware bug once. The driver set up the device correctly, but then was unable to actually talk to the device. By pulling the USB plug halfway out and putting it back in, the OS reenumerated the bus, discovered the device (now correctly configured), and everything worked. (I later added a reenumeration call upon detecting this bad behavior, which fixed the problem completely, but it was useful as a quick workaround.)
Inrush is still probably limited to a few hundred mA. After negotiation, the device can power up additional components that draw more power. Devices won't be drawing that much power while you're plugging it in.
The problem is, the average age of security cameras is more than 5 years.
Is it bad that I read that in Bruce Willis's voice, complete with the trailing expletive?
Speaking of fun plots, they should have done one in which they unfreeze John McClane (voiced by Bruce Willis, of course). He falls for Leela, but keeps calling her Leeloo. Then he happens to be at a spaceport when they discover that an asteroid is heading towards earth, and the only way to stop it is to foil the terrorists who have taken the spaceport hostage so that he can steal a ship and mine the asteroid. Meanwhile, he is constantly being annoyed by Dr. Zoidberg who keeps talking in a high-pitched voice while wearing a light blond wig and a bizarre leopard-print suit.
Spoiler: it ends with the Earth blowing up when the asteroid hits it.
Easy. It's when two vertebrae are locked together in such a way that they are not independently movable because of overextension or overcontraction of spinal muscles.
Chiropractic care isn't bogus when used for what it was designed to do—correcting posture and forcing tight muscles to release so that they don't cause strain in further muscles, resulting in a chain reaction of back pain that leaves people in serious pain.
When used to treat back/neck pain, headaches resulting from tight neck muscles, pinched nerves, and other similar problems, with the exception of physical therapy (much more expensive), it is pretty much the only form of medical care that actually has a good history of success. The cracking of the back also releases endorphins, which make your back feel less sore, which further aids in healing by reducing the tendency to compensate for the sore muscles (which can injure other muscles).
In other words, the mechanism by which chiropractic care functions, at least for those purposes, is well understood and fully supported by medical science, unlike homeopathy, whose mechanism for working is believed to be limited to the placebo effect.... :-)
Of course, when used to treat non-spine-related problems like heart disease and gingivitis, yes, chiropractic care is bogus, in much the same way that antibiotic care is bogus as a treatment for dandruff.
But it would be very, very expensive to do that. Even in the best case, the corporation would be able to bribe a few people. If what they want is sufficiently bad, though, there will be thousands pushing the other way.
I'd settle for a law that requires DRM creators to promise permanent support for the DRM scheme and to post appropriate bonds to pay for it.
We should reduce stupid and outdated regulations because they gum up the works. The problem is that the Libertarian party seems to just want fewer regulations, period, which is not the same thing. Deregulation of corporations is particularly tricky, because it quite frequently leads to serious abuse. It must be done slowly, carefully, methodically, and with an eye towards simplifying the regulations rather than removing useful protections. And most of the time, it shouldn't be done at all.
IMO, what we really need are fewer laws that apply to individuals when acting as individuals, and for codification of differences in rights between people acting as individuals and people using the resources of large groups (corporations, unions, etc.). The latter should be more regulated because their power is inherently disproportionate.
Right. In those situations, it doesn't really matter what you do. However, that's pretty much the worst case scenario, and even in that situation, stun grenades are still no worse than bullets; in situations where the person isn't holding a dead man's switch, they're likely to be better than bullets.
Yeah, that can happen with stun grenades, too. The difference is that with either tear gas or stun grenades, there's a reasonable chance of being able to turn around and subdue the person using non-lethal means (possibly including tasers), whereas lobbing a crapton of ammo in their direction usually eliminates that option pretty quickly.