We can't "Boil ourselves out" it's one thing to claim we have the tech to change the global climate by releasing gasses that were locked away during a previously hot era, but the idea that we could KILL the earth is completely preposterous. At worst, we'll make it uncomfortable for ourselves, cause a mini extinction event and the world will move on with our without us. If without us, another intelligent race will come along eventually.
Those books were garbage and I'm ashamed to have read them. Someone told me they were hard scifi... but instead it was a furry anime style series of bad science. All of his books, in fact, are pretty much garbage.
Software freedom is so much less important than other forms of freedom (freedom from slavery, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc) in the real world that I can't take his writing seriously.
For our children, Software freedom will be the means to all of those other freedoms. This is not some scifi fantasy anymore. Computers will rule your life in the near future. They practically do now. To have software tools locked in corporate and government chains, will be the same as chaining you.
Yes, every phone company I've ever worked for has had a "Regulatory Affairs" department who's goals include: Political contributions, Lobbying, Getting government grants and more importantly doing everything short of bribing local officials into letting the phone company do whatever it is they want to do. It's how our government works and the only way any utility can get anything done. Utilities sue each other constantly over this stuff, it's nothing new.
A Faraday cage doesn't protect the things inside it from other things inside it.
/facepalm Building a kit plane doesn't give you any inside into how a modern commercial aircraft works. My father was an electrical engineer for the US airforce for 20 years, but I didn't quote that as a source and post anon because it's fucking stupid and irrelevant. You're dad told you so? Give me a break. Show us a real scientific test in which some piece of modern aircraft equipment failed because of interference with an iPad.
Your quote above reveals just how little you understand about how this works. The "Plane" can not be hurt by any electronic device. It's a giant piece of God damned aluminum. All that can be damaged are the instruments inside the cockpit. Those devices are inside the cockpit, which is itself a Faraday cage. Then you have each individual piece of equipment... having its own grounded case. Then you have each chip in that piece of equipment, again grounded and shielded. If they weren't, they'd interfere with themselves.
And of course, there is the most obvious piece of evidence there is: Everyone uses these devices on planes every day, all day long in spite of the rules... hundreds of thousands of flights, millions upon millions since the invention of the cellphone and not a single plane has gone down due to radio interference. Not one.
But there was no beginning. Either there was a big bang, in which time did not exist "prior to" that event, time was created by the event... or the event we consider to be the big bang was the end of the contraction cycle of the universe and it's return to expansion... in which case, again, there was no beginning.
Then we have your statement about intelligent design isn't believable. Well, the universe is rather uninterested in what you believe, so I doubt that's relevant in regard to the universes creation. Science and God are not mutually exclusive beliefs, although those that believe in one and not the other often use them to inappropriately discount the existence of the other.
You clearly are coding inside a box. Sure, there are certain types of programs where you can predict and handle all errors that arise from user input and the only "Exceptions" would be when ram or hard disk starts failing. Your basic note taking program or a calculator. But there are plenty of situations where input may very well not come from a controllable source. For example, a lot of my code involves API calls and such. And when my code is taking inputs from someone elses code, I can only do so much to prevent them from doing things that are absolutely insane. Or worse, when your code works off a database that 30 other people are writing code for. You never know what someones going to dump into a field. Or when the DB admin is going to change the field type. When you do not have absolute control over your data source, you can never be sure that the data you're getting will resemble anything like what you had planned on. I think this is more representative of what most programmers are dealing with every day.
If my tablet/phone/anything can bring down your fucking plane, you made the plane wrong, and why the fuck am I allowed to even have it on the aircraft in the firstplace?!? Oh, that's right, because it can't bring down a plane. At all. Not possible. The plane is flying over hundreds of thousands of cell towers during it's entire flight. During take off and landing it's within METERS of these towers broadcasting at several orders of magnitude more power than your damned phone.
The ban on these devices is simple. The airlines lobbied for it. Not because it keeps you safer, but because it makes you bored and more likely to buy their in-flight services like the ridiculous back of the seat computer bullshit. Learn to know when you're being manipulated.
You're not getting it. They are going to get shut down by the feds any day now. Here's an email I just got from them today:
Dropbox Links let you share files or folders (of any size) with anyone, even if they're not using Dropbox
Sharing files is a huge pain - you have to compress, attach, upload, and a bunch of other verbs that are a waste of your time. Forget that! We just invented the best way to get stuff from your computer to the rest of the world.
Happy Dropboxing! - The Dropbox Team
That's got "Future MegaUpload" written all over it.
When was the last time the Washington post, or any newspaper for that mater, reported something that wasn't part of the democrat or republican talking points for the day? They're dieing because they stopped reporting "news" sometime in the 1970s. Fuck them, they deserve the fate they've been dealt.
It already happens ALL the time. We have a vendor for a CRM that just shut down the ODBC connection that they were implicitly charging us for. We went in to renew the contract and they said "Oh yea, ODBC is deprecated. You wont be able to connect to it after January 1st" to which we said "So how are we supposed to do reporting on the data?" and they replied "We have a new reporting service. You tell us which reports you need written and we'll charge you by the hour." As far as my employer is concerned "The cloud" is dead. The majority of cloud services we've dealt with have turned into extortion rackets in recent years. Upper management didn't see it coming but they're definitely on to it now. You can only sign a contract for so long... and once it's up they have you by the short hairs.
So... file sharing companies like dropbox are getting litigated out of business and shut down by the feds left and right... and yes, I see pirated shit on dropbox accounts all the time... but Google is poised to be one of the most powerful companies and history... that just seems foolish. Of course, he might know something we don't...
Because people are generally used to IPv4 and can remember something like 192.168.0.1 or whatever, but when you get into IPv6 and use something like: 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329 That's a bit harder... but oh, they made it easy because you can eliminate leading and consecutive 0's with colons or some shit so you end up with: 2001:db8::ff00:42:8329 But that doesn't make it easier... it's just totally fucking confusing. (Example stolen from Wikipedia)
Now, don't get me wrong, we need IPv6 and everyone should convert... yada yada yada... but I can certainly understand why people aren't jumping at the chance. IP addressing was always a pain in the ass for those of us without a Cisco cert, and IPv6 made it more of a pain in the ass.
That's a software button. And can be included, or not, and put anywhere the developer desires. Meaning the user never knows where or how to find it. These buttons are hardware on iOS and Android. You can not get stuck in an application because you can always hit back or home. Not so in windows 8
Slashdot depresses me. So does CNN, Redit... It's like a trifecta of misery. I try to keep Pandora open to cheer me up but then it decides to play me a Metallica song and I'm right back to being miserable.
What the hell are you talking about? It's the MOON. There is no environment, and development there will have absolutely no impact on us what-so-ever. None. It costs something like a billion dollars to launch 3 man capsule to the moon. How quick do you think it would take all those guys to go broke doing that? Unless we find printer ink in space, there's no way in hell it will ever be profitable until we have a space elevator or discover some new form of propulsion.
We have no idea what he was told by Microsoft. One of the biggest problems with Windows8 and their store is all the things it doesn't do that iOS and Android do. It doesn't even have a back button for gods sake. I have to imagine the store and distribution system has the same lack of features and is probably what he's complaining about. Microsoft probably tried to attract vendors like him by promising all sorts of promotion and such that he's not seeing as Microsoft realizes they have another Vista on their hands and are trying to pull back on investment before they lose too much money.
How many of these asinine data center advertisements are we going to get? This is at least the 3rd "How such and such data center survived Sandy!" I don't care... it's not news. You told your employees to stand in knee deep water in the middle of tons of electronic equipment and bail water? You're a god damned fool and lucky no-one got killed.
Allow? We? Is this a socialist dictatorship or some shit? If WE aren't going to the moon, doing anything with it, exploring, mining or anything else with it, then how do WE have the right to stop an individual from doing all those things?
So the media industry talked congress and the justice department into not only violating our constitutional rights but the rights of people in other countries and you think they are going to let a little thing like "market forces" stop them? You can't even buy a TV with a video output anymore! They're illegal!
Slashdot Mirror
um... you can get grass fed beef just about everywhere. Stop buying your groceries at walmart.
We can't "Boil ourselves out" it's one thing to claim we have the tech to change the global climate by releasing gasses that were locked away during a previously hot era, but the idea that we could KILL the earth is completely preposterous. At worst, we'll make it uncomfortable for ourselves, cause a mini extinction event and the world will move on with our without us. If without us, another intelligent race will come along eventually.
Those books were garbage and I'm ashamed to have read them. Someone told me they were hard scifi... but instead it was a furry anime style series of bad science. All of his books, in fact, are pretty much garbage.
Software freedom is so much less important than other forms of freedom (freedom from slavery, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc) in the real world that I can't take his writing seriously.
For our children, Software freedom will be the means to all of those other freedoms. This is not some scifi fantasy anymore. Computers will rule your life in the near future. They practically do now. To have software tools locked in corporate and government chains, will be the same as chaining you.
Yes, every phone company I've ever worked for has had a "Regulatory Affairs" department who's goals include: Political contributions, Lobbying, Getting government grants and more importantly doing everything short of bribing local officials into letting the phone company do whatever it is they want to do. It's how our government works and the only way any utility can get anything done. Utilities sue each other constantly over this stuff, it's nothing new.
A Faraday cage doesn't protect the things inside it from other things inside it.
/facepalm
Building a kit plane doesn't give you any inside into how a modern commercial aircraft works. My father was an electrical engineer for the US airforce for 20 years, but I didn't quote that as a source and post anon because it's fucking stupid and irrelevant. You're dad told you so? Give me a break. Show us a real scientific test in which some piece of modern aircraft equipment failed because of interference with an iPad.
Your quote above reveals just how little you understand about how this works. The "Plane" can not be hurt by any electronic device. It's a giant piece of God damned aluminum. All that can be damaged are the instruments inside the cockpit. Those devices are inside the cockpit, which is itself a Faraday cage. Then you have each individual piece of equipment... having its own grounded case. Then you have each chip in that piece of equipment, again grounded and shielded. If they weren't, they'd interfere with themselves.
And of course, there is the most obvious piece of evidence there is: Everyone uses these devices on planes every day, all day long in spite of the rules... hundreds of thousands of flights, millions upon millions since the invention of the cellphone and not a single plane has gone down due to radio interference. Not one.
But there was no beginning. Either there was a big bang, in which time did not exist "prior to" that event, time was created by the event... or the event we consider to be the big bang was the end of the contraction cycle of the universe and it's return to expansion... in which case, again, there was no beginning.
Then we have your statement about intelligent design isn't believable. Well, the universe is rather uninterested in what you believe, so I doubt that's relevant in regard to the universes creation. Science and God are not mutually exclusive beliefs, although those that believe in one and not the other often use them to inappropriately discount the existence of the other.
The point of exception handling is to prevent unwinding the entire stack.
You clearly are coding inside a box. Sure, there are certain types of programs where you can predict and handle all errors that arise from user input and the only "Exceptions" would be when ram or hard disk starts failing. Your basic note taking program or a calculator. But there are plenty of situations where input may very well not come from a controllable source. For example, a lot of my code involves API calls and such. And when my code is taking inputs from someone elses code, I can only do so much to prevent them from doing things that are absolutely insane. Or worse, when your code works off a database that 30 other people are writing code for. You never know what someones going to dump into a field. Or when the DB admin is going to change the field type. When you do not have absolute control over your data source, you can never be sure that the data you're getting will resemble anything like what you had planned on. I think this is more representative of what most programmers are dealing with every day.
If my tablet/phone/anything can bring down your fucking plane, you made the plane wrong, and why the fuck am I allowed to even have it on the aircraft in the firstplace?!? Oh, that's right, because it can't bring down a plane. At all. Not possible. The plane is flying over hundreds of thousands of cell towers during it's entire flight. During take off and landing it's within METERS of these towers broadcasting at several orders of magnitude more power than your damned phone.
The ban on these devices is simple. The airlines lobbied for it. Not because it keeps you safer, but because it makes you bored and more likely to buy their in-flight services like the ridiculous back of the seat computer bullshit. Learn to know when you're being manipulated.
You're not getting it. They are going to get shut down by the feds any day now. Here's an email I just got from them today:
Dropbox Links let you share files or folders (of any size) with anyone, even if they're not using Dropbox
Sharing files is a huge pain - you have to compress, attach, upload, and a bunch of other verbs that are a waste of your time. Forget that! We just invented the best way to get stuff from your computer to the rest of the world.
Happy Dropboxing!
- The Dropbox Team
That's got "Future MegaUpload" written all over it.
Decent Linux Graphics Support?
There's no such thing. Wait until Valve/Steam get going and maybe... just maybe... But right now? Fuck no.
When was the last time the Washington post, or any newspaper for that mater, reported something that wasn't part of the democrat or republican talking points for the day? They're dieing because they stopped reporting "news" sometime in the 1970s. Fuck them, they deserve the fate they've been dealt.
It already happens ALL the time. We have a vendor for a CRM that just shut down the ODBC connection that they were implicitly charging us for. We went in to renew the contract and they said "Oh yea, ODBC is deprecated. You wont be able to connect to it after January 1st" to which we said "So how are we supposed to do reporting on the data?" and they replied "We have a new reporting service. You tell us which reports you need written and we'll charge you by the hour." As far as my employer is concerned "The cloud" is dead. The majority of cloud services we've dealt with have turned into extortion rackets in recent years. Upper management didn't see it coming but they're definitely on to it now. You can only sign a contract for so long... and once it's up they have you by the short hairs.
So... file sharing companies like dropbox are getting litigated out of business and shut down by the feds left and right... and yes, I see pirated shit on dropbox accounts all the time... but Google is poised to be one of the most powerful companies and history... that just seems foolish. Of course, he might know something we don't...
Because people are generally used to IPv4 and can remember something like 192.168.0.1 or whatever, but when you get into IPv6 and use something like:
2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329
That's a bit harder... but oh, they made it easy because you can eliminate leading and consecutive 0's with colons or some shit so you end up with:
2001:db8::ff00:42:8329
But that doesn't make it easier... it's just totally fucking confusing. (Example stolen from Wikipedia)
Now, don't get me wrong, we need IPv6 and everyone should convert... yada yada yada... but I can certainly understand why people aren't jumping at the chance. IP addressing was always a pain in the ass for those of us without a Cisco cert, and IPv6 made it more of a pain in the ass.
That's a software button. And can be included, or not, and put anywhere the developer desires. Meaning the user never knows where or how to find it. These buttons are hardware on iOS and Android. You can not get stuck in an application because you can always hit back or home. Not so in windows 8
Slashdot depresses me. So does CNN, Redit... It's like a trifecta of misery. I try to keep Pandora open to cheer me up but then it decides to play me a Metallica song and I'm right back to being miserable.
What the hell are you talking about? It's the MOON. There is no environment, and development there will have absolutely no impact on us what-so-ever. None. It costs something like a billion dollars to launch 3 man capsule to the moon. How quick do you think it would take all those guys to go broke doing that? Unless we find printer ink in space, there's no way in hell it will ever be profitable until we have a space elevator or discover some new form of propulsion.
We have no idea what he was told by Microsoft. One of the biggest problems with Windows8 and their store is all the things it doesn't do that iOS and Android do. It doesn't even have a back button for gods sake. I have to imagine the store and distribution system has the same lack of features and is probably what he's complaining about. Microsoft probably tried to attract vendors like him by promising all sorts of promotion and such that he's not seeing as Microsoft realizes they have another Vista on their hands and are trying to pull back on investment before they lose too much money.
How many of these asinine data center advertisements are we going to get? This is at least the 3rd "How such and such data center survived Sandy!" I don't care... it's not news. You told your employees to stand in knee deep water in the middle of tons of electronic equipment and bail water? You're a god damned fool and lucky no-one got killed.
Allow? We? Is this a socialist dictatorship or some shit? If WE aren't going to the moon, doing anything with it, exploring, mining or anything else with it, then how do WE have the right to stop an individual from doing all those things?
Not true at all. You need a new provider.
So the media industry talked congress and the justice department into not only violating our constitutional rights but the rights of people in other countries and you think they are going to let a little thing like "market forces" stop them? You can't even buy a TV with a video output anymore! They're illegal!
Their first mistake was in thinking that the censorship was designed to stop terrorism. Terrorism is an excuse, like WMDs... the real goal is control.