since, as it happens, Gore DID play quite a serious role in the creation of the internet.
The Internet existed before he ever looked at it. He just helped commercialized it.
Oh, and for the record, not too long *after* the election was over, a statement was jointly issued by various politicians, most notably Newt Gingrich, stating their gratitude to Gore's longtime leadership on this issue and to how huge a role he had played in creating our current high tech world.
What? The Evil Gingrich? Well, doesn't that PROVE that Al Gore did wrong by opening it to the spam merchants and porn sites (of kinks that I don't have, for all I:I is a member of {worthwhile users, not including teenagers under age of consent})?
Why the "Saves Lives?" subject? Everyone knows that DST kills children waiting for the school bus in the dark. That is why it isn't DST during winter and double DST during summer; eventually the trade-off becomes too severe.
> We no longer have to rely on the sun telling us what time we have to be to work.
Tell it to your circadian rhythms, bud.
Not so far off with dropping DST as the other suggestion seen here that everybody shift to GMT. That puts a large portion of the world on second shift, or else everyone will ignore it in practice, like they do metric in the USA, or newtons and KPH on Top Gear (at least as I see it on BBCA).
> In most states, it's completely legal to carry rifles and shotguns *openly*.
Not sawed-off shotguns, as they are deemed to have no military use, and thus fell below the 2nd Amendment protection. Likewise, although for other reasons, fully automatic rifles.
His point was that the cops thought it better not to arrest one or two of them on "minor" offenses, instead trying to tie them (ideally, them all) to more serious crimes, with long sentences. And RICO possibilities, as it has turned out.
No, the British East India Company may have had its property stolen, but no one BUT the officers of the ship(s) were available to be terrorized, and they weren't, even by their own reports.
> I think if the Queen said "Fuck you, I'm not doing it!"
Unfortunately for such an idea, she is not legally entitled to do that if presented with a death warrant for herself or members of her immediate family, let alone an act that might have been necessary due to a civil war, or something similar. Of course, there is no current civil war, but authorizing total monitoring is something that could have been done during the US Civil War.
The Monarch (as holder of the office, that is) is really the burning head of the Great And Terrible Oz, with the PM of whichever party being the "man behind the curtain" at which the Dorothies are not supposed to look.
> When they demand your keys simply, and legally, show them that it is random data.
Better, encrypt your random data with your strongest keys (which you will be "losing" anyways, from using them to encrypt anything), and send it in MBs. Eventually, British Telecom (which I understand is the only real provider, with every other "provider" just renting lines and bandwidth at wholesale rates) will collapse under the strain, if the mail buffers don't fill up, first.
Also, this will make it a useful feature to have multiple private keys, that can be changed automatically, and so also with your correspondents' public keys. If everyone is playing Fizbin (sp?) with their keys, the government will go crazy trying to manage everything.
This assumes, of course, that they are interested in the contents, rather than just doing traffic analysis.
Because an assembly of thousands of people worked so well for the Soviet Union, or (being all nerds, here) the Galactic Senate under Chancellor Velorum.
As others have noted, this gives about 10,000 members. And freshman congressmen think that they are ignored NOW!
Wasn't there one a year or two ago? The Aliens were in a ship run by the Predators, which crashed in Colorado?
> the next Blade Runner,
That would be the next movie based on something by Philip K. Dick (hopefully with actors, rather than tracings of them, this time).
> the next Firefly.
Go rent or buy a copy of Serenity. Better, buy 50-100 million copies, and pretty much guarantee that there will be another movie, even if River and Jayne have to make only cameos.
> but as a sci-fi fan there's a part of me that's discouraged to see us mining 1966 for ideas.
As opposed to mining the 19th century? The episode fighting the Planet Destroyer was Moby Dick, for instance. I have read theses claiming that all (written) Sci-Fi is 19th century literature, being the Literature Of Ideas, vs. the 20th century Literature Of Character And Consciousness.
Anyway, all literature mines ideas from the Neolithic, if not the Paleolithic. Aliens could have been about hunting a cave bear in their own cave network, for instance.
> I support [...] same-sex marriages (it's your bedroom; do whatever you want).
No, marriage has nothing to do with who you screw. It is a public, not a private, function. In fact, it relates to the regulation of reproduction and responsibility for produced or adopted children.
As such, ideally, one should be able to file taxes as Married *only* if one has also had deductions for Dependents in that or previous years, or have a certificate from a doctor that the woman is currently pregnant. Good luck getting *that* through, though.
. BTW, I am a Republican, what I consider reasonably conservative, both economic and social, and my office and bedrooms are notoriously messy. Friends refer to my looking for old documents as "conducting an archeology expedition."
> even if all of the ipv4 namespace was exhausted,
Neither IPv4 nor IPv6 have any namespace. They are numberspaces.
Even if you know, other readers might not, so here goes the boring explanation:
192.7.6.x is a numberspace (of Class C width, and I know that it is not supposed to be routed, it was just a demo), vs. bandit.netdestroyers.evilmasterminds.ORG, which is a namespace (well, a point in one).
Namespaces are not yet much of a problem, except when someone else has your preferred name, like hp.com being owned by a printer company, rather than Henry Purcell, who wants it but hasn't enough money to make the company give it up, the evil domain squatters! Or hp-sucks.com being owned by HP (it may be, for all I know) rather than Hypobaric Products, Makers of Fine Vacuums (not cleaners, the really empty spaces) Since 1992. Or when someone wants to use an umlaut in the domain name, or any other character that is not in [A-Z0-9_\-], but cannot (at least from most browsers, DNSs, etc.).
> I think calling the left wingers Liberal is a phenomenon unique to the USA.
No, we call them "liberal" - note the lack of capitalization.
> In my country (Denmark), the liberals and conservatives are right-wing parties with adjacent seats
No, I expect that the Liberals and Conservatives (assuming translation into English) are the parties that you mention - note the presence of capitalization.
Names and reality are oft askew in politics. How much democracy was there in the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, or even of Germany? How much socialism in the National Socialist Party?
> Of course, politics is not one-dimensional.
Sci-Fi writer Jerry Pournelle got a PhD with a thesis dividing it into a Statist-Individualist axis and a Rationalist-Irrationalist axis at right angles. Fascists were Statist/Irrationalist whereas the Soviets were Statist/Rationalists, because Communism had a claim of rationality to Marx's theories whereas Fascists appealed to the Spirit of The People or some such nebulous source. Ayn Rand was an Individualist/Rationalist whereas Anarchists were Individualist/Irrationalists, because she had a set of theories to justify her stands while they just went on emotional appeals. Note that "Rationalist" theories do not have to be correct, rational, or even supportable, merely claim to be, and seem to be on a cursory glance (and if you accept their theses about the superiority of the "real" Proletariat [vs the Lumpen-Proletariat, or the Bourgeoisie, or whatever else], or that Ideas are real things, vs. merely having real consequences).
Obviously, you never heard any Grimm's Fairy Tales as a youth, nor read even a retelling of the Odyssey, nor of Greek Mythology, nor even Hurlbut's Story Of The Bible.
Admittedly, the print media (i.e., "graphic novels") can be a bit much, but the words are no worse than they usually are.
Heck, I grow up watching Westerns on TV and reading Michael Morecock, and it hasn't affected me any (he says, drinking a toast to his vanished youth, from a cup made from an enemy's skull:-) .
That last paragraph was a joke, of course. I didn't discover Morecock until college. The Aeneid, and Tale Of Da Derga's Hostel, on the other hand... Thanks, Harvard Classics.
Evidently, Katzer believed the meme that justice always goes to the highest bidder, and was proven wrong.
If he had been smart, he would have not sent the notice requiring payment to the guy whose copyrights he infringed. Then, he might have gotten away with forcing every other, unknowing, party to pay him on the basis of his granted patent, even though it was granted on the basis of a now-apparent fraud.
Cant we just grow up now and realise we have to be moderate in our consumption of the planets resources instead of trying to trick our way out ?
Your solution requires changing a significant percentage of the population's behavior
Don't be silly. His "solution" really contemplates the removal of a significant percentage of the population, just not him, and ideally no one that he likes, and lots of those that he doesn't (non-Green voters, non-Sierra Club contributers, all those people in Asia and Africa that would like to have a lifestyle equal to that of 1950s England, let alone USA, etc.).
Re:Oh, well, that explains everything...
on
C# In-Depth
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· Score: 2, Insightful
> Turbo Pascal and Delphi were popular because 20 or so years > ago universities taught Pascal to their computer science students.
False, or else MS-Pascal would have become equally popular. Turbo Pascal was popular because it only cost $44.95, thus falling into the "buy it for a lark, try it, and toss it if it isn't good" buying space. Turbo C and Delphi, in their first versions, were equally under-priced, compared with $250 or so for MS compilers, and over $500 for some of the really good C compilers.
The really good, independently produced, compilers died away as Borland's cheapness and MS's standardness (not real standards, THEIR standards, but they wrote the OS, so *surely* they had the best tools? NOT) gradually undercut their niches. The first Turbo versions were crippled from the POV of professional programmers, but were good enough for students, amateurs, etc., and Borland then introduced better compilers for higher prices, until the best version was about as expensive as MS C, but slightly better (following the old GM strategy of cannibalizing yourself, rather than letting competitors do it, by covering all the price points). GNU C also helped kill them, as it was also good enough to make the other compiler companies' offerings redundant.
> About the time Delphi came out, things moved on > and they began teaching C++ which pretty much > killed Delphi off.
Actually, the programming market had only moved from Pascal to C, but Delphi was very wed to Pascal and its idioms. It also ran into the wall, in that the REALLY complicated stuff that professionals did was beyond it, and Borland didn't have a follow-on product.
Talking about environmental responsibility and climate change, and giving rights to homosexuals, is not likely to go over well with that crowd.
Except that is the crowd that he had. If he didn't think that they were up to his high moral and ethical standards, he should have improved them, or gone somewhere else with a better class of voter. As should you (assuming that you are an American citizen - if not, you have no standing, and should buzz off and bitch about your own politicians). I hear that Canada will take in refugees from the USA, and many Canadians even speak English.
> None of this would be a problem if the Puritans > hadn't felt the need to leave Britain and go > found a new country in the New World.
Wrong. The Puritans settled New England, then *northern* Ohio, and so were hundreds of miles away from Kentucky. The people that you want to despise are the Scotch-Irish (so called because none were Irish, only a bit more than half were Scottish, and almost none of those were Scots, aka Highlanders, and they should probably be called Anglo-Celtic Borderers, except that is too long). The problem, then, is that France let England seize control of its usual ally, Scotland, after which the militarized border folk on either side of the no-longer significant border were unnecessary, and gradually forced out.
Yes, it is all the fault of *France*. No Puritans were involved (especially as most Puritan families in NE have decayed to the point of being Unitarian Universalists, not Fundamentalists, and thus would never care about gambling except for its effect on the poor, which they would deplore but never try to reduce).
> but I really don't understand why all the environmentalists are happy with this but not fission...
Because a 30 MW plant is small, even compared to Shippingport #1, let alone to the 1000MW plants which were the last ones built (in the USA, at least). When it gets large enough to be more than a pilot program, they will turn against it. Originally, the environmental movement was in favor of nuclear power, until it became apparent that some one might actually make a profit providing it in a few years, as opposed to sometime in the far future.
The other explanation for the Wilderness Society, et al, switching on nuclear power is that it reduced the cognitive dissonance from working with people that were normally their enemies. If this is true, they will still flip to hating whatever CO2 sequestration methods are eventally chosen.
Sorry, ADD moment: Had we not had Holmes' Final Case,
we would never have had Mayer's The Seven Percent Solution,
however you might think of that. (I enjoyed it.)
No, if Arthur Conan Doyle hadn't reintroduced Holmes after a few years, we would never have had the Seven Percent Solution.
Alternately, if Holmes hadn't cleaned up during his years off after faking his death, Dr. Watson's literary agent would have had nothing more to publish, and Nick Meyers would have had no reason to write up the story from whatever records he found.
Slashdot Mirror
The Internet existed before he ever looked at it. He just helped commercialized it.
What? The Evil Gingrich? Well, doesn't that PROVE that Al Gore did wrong by opening it to the spam merchants and porn sites (of kinks that I don't have, for all I:I is a member of {worthwhile users, not including teenagers under age of consent})?
Why the "Saves Lives?" subject? Everyone knows that DST kills children waiting for the school bus in the dark. That is why it isn't DST during winter and double DST during summer; eventually the trade-off becomes too severe.
> I think Highlander 2 proved that this won't work. :P
Well, Highlander 2 proved that Highlander 2 wouldn't work.
> We no longer have to rely on the sun telling us what time we have to be to work.
Tell it to your circadian rhythms, bud.
Not so far off with dropping DST as the other suggestion seen here that everybody shift to GMT. That puts a large portion of the world on second shift, or else everyone will ignore it in practice, like they do metric in the USA, or newtons and KPH on Top Gear (at least as I see it on BBCA).
> In most states, it's completely legal to carry rifles and shotguns *openly*.
Not sawed-off shotguns, as they are deemed to have no military use, and thus fell below the 2nd Amendment protection. Likewise, although for other reasons, fully automatic rifles.
His point was that the cops thought it better not to arrest one or two of them on "minor" offenses, instead trying to tie them (ideally, them all) to more serious crimes, with long sentences. And RICO possibilities, as it has turned out.
No, the British East India Company may have had its property stolen, but no one BUT the officers of the ship(s) were available to be terrorized, and they weren't, even by their own reports.
> I think if the Queen said "Fuck you, I'm not doing it!"
Unfortunately for such an idea, she is not legally entitled to do that if presented with a death warrant for herself or members of her immediate family, let alone an act that might have been necessary due to a civil war, or something similar. Of course, there is no current civil war, but authorizing total monitoring is something that could have been done during the US Civil War.
The Monarch (as holder of the office, that is) is really the burning head of the Great And Terrible Oz, with the PM of whichever party being the "man behind the curtain" at which the Dorothies are not supposed to look.
> When they demand your keys simply, and legally, show them that it is random data.
Better, encrypt your random data with your strongest keys (which you will be "losing" anyways, from using them to encrypt anything), and send it in MBs. Eventually, British Telecom (which I understand is the only real provider, with every other "provider" just renting lines and bandwidth at wholesale rates) will collapse under the strain, if the mail buffers don't fill up, first.
Also, this will make it a useful feature to have multiple private keys, that can be changed automatically, and so also with your correspondents' public keys. If everyone is playing Fizbin (sp?) with their keys, the government will go crazy trying to manage everything.
This assumes, of course, that they are interested in the contents, rather than just doing traffic analysis.
Because an assembly of thousands of people worked so well for the Soviet Union, or (being all nerds, here) the Galactic Senate under Chancellor Velorum.
As others have noted, this gives about 10,000 members. And freshman congressmen think that they are ignored NOW!
The accretion disks glow. Actually, the black hole glows, but at a temperature far too low to care, thanks to Hawking Radiation.
> So it ended up going to Cho even though Abrams was
> a little unsure of casting a Korean as a Japanese officer.
Sort of like being unsure of casting an Irishman as a Scottish engineer.
> No one's making the next Alien,
Wasn't there one a year or two ago? The Aliens were in a ship run by the Predators, which crashed in Colorado?
> the next Blade Runner,
That would be the next movie based on something by Philip K. Dick (hopefully with actors, rather than tracings of them, this time).
> the next Firefly.
Go rent or buy a copy of Serenity. Better, buy 50-100 million copies, and pretty much guarantee that there will be another movie, even if River and Jayne have to make only cameos.
> but as a sci-fi fan there's a part of me that's discouraged to see us mining 1966 for ideas.
As opposed to mining the 19th century? The episode fighting the Planet Destroyer was Moby Dick, for instance. I have read theses claiming that all (written) Sci-Fi is 19th century literature, being the Literature Of Ideas, vs. the 20th century Literature Of Character And Consciousness.
Anyway, all literature mines ideas from the Neolithic, if not the Paleolithic. Aliens could have been about hunting a cave bear in their own cave network, for instance.
> I support [...] same-sex marriages (it's your bedroom; do whatever you want).
No, marriage has nothing to do with who you screw. It is a public, not a private, function. In fact, it relates to the regulation of reproduction and responsibility for produced or adopted children.
As such, ideally, one should be able to file taxes as Married *only* if one has also had deductions for Dependents in that or previous years, or have a certificate from a doctor that the woman is currently pregnant. Good luck getting *that* through, though.
.
BTW, I am a Republican, what I consider reasonably conservative, both economic and social, and my office and bedrooms are notoriously messy. Friends refer to my looking for old documents as "conducting an archeology expedition."
In short, I call BS on the article.
> even if all of the ipv4 namespace was exhausted,
Neither IPv4 nor IPv6 have any namespace. They are numberspaces.
Even if you know, other readers might not, so here goes the boring explanation:
192.7.6.x is a numberspace (of Class C width, and I know that it is not supposed to be routed, it was just a demo), vs. bandit.netdestroyers.evilmasterminds.ORG, which is a namespace (well, a point in one).
Namespaces are not yet much of a problem, except when someone else has your preferred name, like hp.com being owned by a printer company, rather than Henry Purcell, who wants it but hasn't enough money to make the company give it up, the evil domain squatters! Or hp-sucks.com being owned by HP (it may be, for all I know) rather than Hypobaric Products, Makers of Fine Vacuums (not cleaners, the really empty spaces) Since 1992. Or when someone wants to use an umlaut in the domain name, or any other character that is not in [A-Z0-9_\-], but cannot (at least from most browsers, DNSs, etc.).
> I think calling the left wingers Liberal is a phenomenon unique to the USA.
No, we call them "liberal" - note the lack of capitalization.
> In my country (Denmark), the liberals and conservatives are right-wing parties with adjacent seats
No, I expect that the Liberals and Conservatives (assuming translation into English) are the parties that you mention - note the presence of capitalization.
Names and reality are oft askew in politics. How much democracy was there in the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, or even of Germany? How much socialism in the National Socialist Party?
> Of course, politics is not one-dimensional.
Sci-Fi writer Jerry Pournelle got a PhD with a thesis dividing it into a Statist-Individualist axis and a Rationalist-Irrationalist axis at right angles. Fascists were Statist/Irrationalist whereas the Soviets were Statist/Rationalists, because Communism had a claim of rationality to Marx's theories whereas Fascists appealed to the Spirit of The People or some such nebulous source. Ayn Rand was an Individualist/Rationalist whereas Anarchists were Individualist/Irrationalists, because she had a set of theories to justify her stands while they just went on emotional appeals. Note that "Rationalist" theories do not have to be correct, rational, or even supportable, merely claim to be, and seem to be on a cursory glance (and if you accept their theses about the superiority of the "real" Proletariat [vs the Lumpen-Proletariat, or the Bourgeoisie, or whatever else], or that Ideas are real things, vs. merely having real consequences).
Damn you, sir, for being an Interesting, Insightful, and Informative, Anonymous Coward, and me for using his last Mod point yesterday.
Obviously, you never heard any Grimm's Fairy Tales as a youth, nor read even a retelling of the Odyssey, nor of Greek Mythology, nor even Hurlbut's Story Of The Bible.
Admittedly, the print media (i.e., "graphic novels") can be a bit much, but the words are no worse than they usually are.
Heck, I grow up watching Westerns on TV and reading Michael Morecock, and it hasn't affected me any (he says, drinking a toast to his vanished youth, from a cup made from an enemy's skull :-) .
That last paragraph was a joke, of course. I didn't discover Morecock until college. The Aeneid, and Tale Of Da Derga's Hostel, on the other hand... Thanks, Harvard Classics.
> I don't recall the Chinese government issuing letters of marque.
That would be privateering, not piracy. It is piracy only when no recognized government sanctions it.
Of course, when one does, it is an Act Of War (hence usually issued when one state is already at war with another).
> I'm surprised it got as far as court.
Evidently, Katzer believed the meme that justice always goes to the highest bidder, and was proven wrong.
If he had been smart, he would have not sent the notice requiring payment to the guy whose copyrights he infringed. Then, he might have gotten away with forcing every other, unknowing, party to pay him on the basis of his granted patent, even though it was granted on the basis of a now-apparent fraud.
Don't be silly. His "solution" really contemplates the removal of a significant percentage of the population, just not him, and ideally no one that he likes, and lots of those that he doesn't (non-Green voters, non-Sierra Club contributers, all those people in Asia and Africa that would like to have a lifestyle equal to that of 1950s England, let alone USA, etc.).
> Turbo Pascal and Delphi were popular because 20 or so years
> ago universities taught Pascal to their computer science students.
False, or else MS-Pascal would have become equally popular. Turbo Pascal was popular because it only cost $44.95, thus falling into the "buy it for a lark, try it, and toss it if it isn't good" buying space. Turbo C and Delphi, in their first versions, were equally under-priced, compared with $250 or so for MS compilers, and over $500 for some of the really good C compilers.
The really good, independently produced, compilers died away as Borland's cheapness and MS's standardness (not real standards, THEIR standards, but they wrote the OS, so *surely* they had the best tools? NOT) gradually undercut their niches. The first Turbo versions were crippled from the POV of professional programmers, but were good enough for students, amateurs, etc., and Borland then introduced better compilers for higher prices, until the best version was about as expensive as MS C, but slightly better (following the old GM strategy of cannibalizing yourself, rather than letting competitors do it, by covering all the price points). GNU C also helped kill them, as it was also good enough to make the other compiler companies' offerings redundant.
> About the time Delphi came out, things moved on
> and they began teaching C++ which pretty much
> killed Delphi off.
Actually, the programming market had only moved from Pascal to C, but Delphi was very wed to Pascal and its idioms. It also ran into the wall, in that the REALLY complicated stuff that professionals did was beyond it, and Borland didn't have a follow-on product.
Except that is the crowd that he had. If he didn't think that they were up to his high moral and ethical standards, he should have improved them, or gone somewhere else with a better class of voter. As should you (assuming that you are an American citizen - if not, you have no standing, and should buzz off and bitch about your own politicians). I hear that Canada will take in refugees from the USA, and many Canadians even speak English.
> None of this would be a problem if the Puritans
> hadn't felt the need to leave Britain and go
> found a new country in the New World.
Wrong. The Puritans settled New England, then *northern* Ohio, and so were hundreds of miles away from Kentucky. The people that you want to despise are the Scotch-Irish (so called because none were Irish, only a bit more than half were Scottish, and almost none of those were Scots, aka Highlanders, and they should probably be called Anglo-Celtic Borderers, except that is too long). The problem, then, is that France let England seize control of its usual ally, Scotland, after which the militarized border folk on either side of the no-longer significant border were unnecessary, and gradually forced out.
Yes, it is all the fault of *France*. No Puritans were involved (especially as most Puritan families in NE have decayed to the point of being Unitarian Universalists, not Fundamentalists, and thus would never care about gambling except for its effect on the poor, which they would deplore but never try to reduce).
> but I really don't understand why all the environmentalists are happy with this but not fission...
Because a 30 MW plant is small, even compared to Shippingport #1, let alone to the 1000MW plants which were the last ones built (in the USA, at least). When it gets large enough to be more than a pilot program, they will turn against it. Originally, the environmental movement was in favor of nuclear power, until it became apparent that some one might actually make a profit providing it in a few years, as opposed to sometime in the far future.
The other explanation for the Wilderness Society, et al, switching on nuclear power is that it reduced the cognitive dissonance from working with people that were normally their enemies. If this is true, they will still flip to hating whatever CO2 sequestration methods are eventally chosen.
No, if Arthur Conan Doyle hadn't reintroduced Holmes after a few years, we would never have had the Seven Percent Solution.
Alternately, if Holmes hadn't cleaned up during his years off after faking his death, Dr. Watson's literary agent would have had nothing more to publish, and Nick Meyers would have had no reason to write up the story from whatever records he found.