I have real trouble understanding legal language; my brain just isn't wired that way. So I'll ask you. Is economic status 'protected?' Yahoo isn't demanding payment; it's not a case of 'if you can't afford it, too bad, get a job.' It's almost the equivalent of Yahoo saying 'Show us 10 1000 dollar bills....ok, go on in. No no, keep your money; this is a free service.' If they wanted money, then yeah, they'd be fully within their rights to require a credit card; that's fine. But they don't want money; doesn't shouldn't that mean that they can't require proof of liquidity?
Exactly; it isn't proof of age. Yet, places like Yahoo are trying to use it like it is. And checking into a hotel or renting a car is different; you're giving the card as a guarentee of payment should you wreck the merchandise, bugger off with it, etc etc. You WILL be charged. Yahoo is simply using it as a ticket to entry; they flat out state 'you require a credit card, but no money will be taken from it.' Let me restate: Unlike car rental, hotel, or even a Blockbusters, Yahoo is NOT using the credit card as a form of payment. They require NOT THAT YOU GIVE THEM MONEY, BUT THAT YOU HAVE A CREDIT CARD. If they attempt to take money from that card, that's fraud; they've stated that they require no payment. My wife is 20, but she has no credit cards; that means that in the eyes of Yahoo, she's not old enough to warrent an account. That's not right.
I'm incredibly curious about something. Having a credit card is proof of being 18 or older, but being 18 or older does not automatically result in getting a credit card. Moreover, many adults refuse to get credit cards, denouncing them as capitalistic tools designed to keep people in perpetual debt, nigh unto indentured servitude. Therefore, would requireing a credit card not count as discrimination? At that point, you're not keeping kids out, which is legal, you're keeping anybody who doesn't have a piece of plastic out, which seems to me to be an artifical exclusion, which, again, seems to me to be illegal. Comments?
Programmers have to program more carefully *because* the Mac OS has no real memory management to speak of. That's like saying 'Cars should be built with no safety features, so that drivers will HAVE to be more careful.
This would definately be the way to go. Almost sounds like a shink wrap, though, doesn't it? "By not responding to this, you implicitly agree to release me from any and all obligations and agreements, explicity or implied, and also to pay me ONE MEEEELION DOLLARS!".
...this article, and that was saying that with Mac OS X installed, you'd finally stop getting IRQ conflicts. WHAT? I haven't had an IRQ conflict in, nigh, five years. This isn't DOS. Mac OS will never replace something like Linux until somebody figures out how to offer ALL of the power of a CLI type interface in their GUI. Want to see a fun exercise? Use Finder or Win Explorer. Go into a directory, and erase everything over a certain size, with the string 'llama' somewhere in the title, that is more than three days old. And I'll say the same thing about OS X that I said about NT: My server DOES NOT NEED a GUI. My server DOES NOT NEED multimedia capability, be it Direct X or QuickTime. In other words, with OS X, can I strip out everything but the network stack, hard drive controllers, NIC driver, and maybe a character interface, and put Apache on it and call it a dedicated web server? Or does my web server ABSOLUTELY need to be able to do rotating vector effects on it's fonts? Also, Apple is throwing away what was traditionally it's greatest asset as a (web) server, which was the lack of services. That's why it's so hard to hack a Mac; there's nothing there to hack. Granted, you can DoS it by pulling down a menu and walking away, but any system is vulnerable if you leave somebody access to a console. There are some great ideas in Mac OS X, but it is NOT the Second Coming, and I know for a fact that there are Mac users (in the real world, I often see Mac graphic design artists who are put in charge of the web servers when the admins leave, because 'they know that web stuff') who are quite leery of OS X. Of course, the vast majority treat Jobs like some sort of Messiah (Come to me my child...*whump*...You see? FLESH is stronger than steel, Conan.)
Oh, I agree that the new characters, spells, etc etc are great, and I'm looking forward to playing the game, but I've seen patches, let alone expansion packs, that add just as much stuff to a game. Time will tell, though, and I still play Diablo, so I'm not complaining. Just observing.:-) Of course, that's assuming I'm not too busy playing Redemption....
...after reading a bunch of these posts. If the record companies are screwing the consumers (conspiritorial overpricing of CDs as one post puts it) it's called 'fair-market pricing' or 'charging what the market will bear' irregardless of the fact that there IS no competition to determine fair price. If the consumers are screwing the record companies by downloading copies for free, it's 'theft'. All a matter of perspective, I do suppose.
What happens when you reach a buck in the hardware or have to patch the system or replace a kernel because of a hack that came about? It is costly and hellish to work on 4-6,000 pcs
Not with Linux. For patching and what not, one can easily create a single script that will do it all. Or, even better, and assuming it's a closed network, make an NFS share. On each machine, put a cron job that takes anything in that directory (RPMs generally) and applies it. You're probably on identical hardware and software, so that sort of thing works. Hell, write a daemon that monitors a port, and then start broadcasting commands, and they'll all pick up on it. Lots of ways.
The *current* inventory of nukes? Probably not. Every nuke that was on the planet when we were at the height of MAD and the Cold War? Well, if you detonated them all at once, I don't know. But if you did it correctly, you'd have more than enough to turn the moon into a very nice meteor shower.
It took a Saturn V rocket to get men to the moon in 1969, I doubt that an ICBM in 1959 could even reach the moon much less have an accuracy of 2 miles
WTF? All it would have to do is get out of the atmosphere, really, and keep enough velocity to overcome the microgravity Earth would exert on it at that point. And forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't an ICBM pretty much boost into the outer limits of the atmosphere, tip over, and come right back down? All they'd need to do is tell it not to tip over, and it would launch and keep going. They just lead the moon, and shoot. A nuke is a lot smaller than four men, and certainly doesn't carry the wight of oxygen, water, food, equipment, blah blah blah. An ICBM could make it to any planet you can name; it would just take a really long time.
...put the docs on the CD in PDF or whatever, and offer the printed docs as a seperate bundle. The cost of the software itself is lowered by the amount that the docs cost seperately. Those who want them, can get them. Those who don't want them don't get them. Simple. I myself, however, demand printed documentation. I cannot easily, for example, mark up a CD. Or mark it up and pass it around the office. Or take it to the can. That having been said, Palm Pilot formatted docs would be nice; I guess now that PDF is being integrated into PalmOS it's done and done.
That's one of the reasons for anamorphic DVDs, which are encoded with more horizontal resolution than a standard television can display, even if it's still less than full blown HDTV. If you're going to sit and wait for the next generation at all times, you're going to be sitting there for a while.
In order to properly 'research' his topic, the lad would need to go and engineer it from the ground up. He's not allowed to ask people where he might find relevant information; he's not allowed to ask *for* relevant information; he's not allowed to ask for opinons. Doesn't that mean that if he goes to a library, and reads an article on Nanotech, that he's "leeching" and "not doing his own work" and "the author of the article should be admitted to the college, and not the guy using the article for information?" Pathetic. I, speaking as one who has taken job interviews, and gave job interviews, and I would think most colleges, would rather see that the guy can go out and find information that already exists, rather than re-invent the wheel. I'd then want to see him apply the knowledge so gained. *Then* and only then, would I be concerned with him inventing the wheel from scratch. After all, by this definition, OSS is wrong, as it's leeching off somebody elses work. OOP is wrong; don't reuse those objects! Create new ones! Otherwise you're leeching! End of rant.
I'd likely be in jail now. Hell, I'd be in jail even if it was implemented here at work. I went into grade 9, oh, 10 years ago I suppose. Boy was I picked on; 13 in grade 9, intelligent as hell (and therefore socially inept). It was bad enough in public school when I was yanked out of classes once a week and sent to Gifted classes in the next town over. What the teachers never seemed to realize was that by saying "You're intelligent and deserve extra attention" they were also saying to every other student "You're stupid, and not as worthy as he is of extra attention" and we all know what happens next. Anyway, back to HS. One day I went to the book store, the only one in town that carried D&D stuff, and picked up the brand shiney new Thief's Handbook. Brought it to school, as I'd picked it up on lunch, sat down in German class, and started reading it. Teach walked in, saw the "Theif's Handbook" in big gold letters, and freaked, big time. Never occured to me to think that it might look wierd to others. Anywho, lets look at this for me here at work. Often does my colleuge and I discuss the finer points of various martial arts, while standing in an office or hallway. We routinely go on Nerf hunts. I have a Soldier of Fortune box under my desk, THE ULTIMATE SNIPER training manual (which I got when I got Tribes) and Killer on my shelf beside all my comp security books, Oracle books, etc etc. We're trying to create an OSS tactical space combat sim, so we're constantly discussing tactics, weapon effects, that sort of thing. Yeah, I'd be in jail by now under anonymous reporting, most likely. Hell, under these laws, a couple of kids practicing Shakespere would probably look like dangerous, mentally disturbed people. "Pay me my due, or I shall take a pound of flesh from thee" indeed. It disturbs me that, as others have pointed out, the system tries to breed into some students (football and other sports players) exactly the same traits it tries to breed out of others (people who can't be bribed with a letter jacket) while claiming it's for the good of society. I think this needs to be on a school board by school board basis, if not school by school, and should only be implemented on a two-thirds majority vote by each parent, student, and employee at said school.
If you look at it as exercising your imagination and creating original works, it's creative as hell. But some people compose really dry, boring music that sounds like a calculus theorum. That's not so creative.
And some code works, but is over-engineered, redundant, and not well implemented; hard to read, hard to upgrade, hard to extend or port. Other code is beautifully written; a clever algorithim, a cunningly designed UI, an extensible architecture, the sort of code that is a pleasure to read and use. I once, at a job interview (don't ask) drew a connection between coding and playing music; both involve takeing a framework, a language, and putting them in a certain order. With both, you can follow the rules and put together something that fits the definition, or you can craft something beautiful. Either way, so long as it makes you happy.:-)
Programming, in my opinion, isn't really a very creative activity. It's much more logical, structured, and rote.
By your definition, composing music isn't really creative; it's logical, structured and rote. Pick a clef, a key, and go with it. Major and minor thirds, fiths, etc etc. Different instruments play different roles. Of course, *playing* music is even more 'rote, structured and logical'; read the music, play. Programming is the most creative thing I know *at the upper level*; figuring out how to solve a given problem using the resources at hand. It's the *implementation* that tends to be 'rote, structured and logical.'
....because if I can go from pushing the 'CTRL' key down with picking up a submachine gun, striping it, cleaning it, reassembling it, loading and cocking it, aiming it, and firing it, while using the proper stance, BRAS technique, staying on target, target discrimination, etc etc whilst wearing a scratchy trench coat then DAMN, hold me back!
Oh, and since I've played Falcon 4.0, don't let me near an Air Force base; I can bugger off with a Falcon and bomb people to death!
Besides; anybody who's actually played Doom knows that if somebody was going to kill people, Doom Style, they'd do it with the CHAINSAW!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play Heretic II for the EXPRESS purpose of learning how to cast magic spells.
WAVE America is a private, for-profit school-safety program gearing up in North Carolina -- with the enthusiastic support of the governor -- and going nationwide. It offers incentives (caps, T-shirts, cash) to students who call a toll-free number and anonymously turn in classmates they believe to be depressed or dangerous. T-shirts?
I TURNED IN MY FRIEND BECAUSE HE'S DANGEROUS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT Caps? ANONYMOUS TIPSTER - DON'T PISS ME OFF!
People have to realize that in terms of conceptual evolution, there has been very little new thought up since the early seventies in CompSci. All we have been doing has been implementing the ideas of people like Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart. What is Linux but a clone of a 30 year old OS? What has Microsoft or Apple done new that wasn't done first and Xerox PARC and SRI?
So? Nuclear power reactors are steam engines with uranium or plutonium instead of coal. I believe the adage is 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'
So, the companies that are using Linux, and have iron-clad support contracts with third party support providers, like, say, Linux Care, are going to scoff at the notion when LinuxCare also say 'BTW, we've stamped version 1.2.1 of JFS to be solid, and we're willing to write that into our support contract'?
Linux is slowly coming to equal Solaris in terms of honest-to-Gods enterprise features. And I'm talking the simple stuff, like being able to fsck a mounted drive, or change shm_max type params without recompiling your kernel. When things like that are in place, you'll see a lot of shops moving over to Linux.
A year and a half back, I, living in Canada, got a job offer from an American company which doubled my salaray (and, being not Canada, halved my taxes;-) They said that all I needed was a TN1 visa; get it at the border, takes twenty minutes. The joys of free trade, neh? One catch: this visa REQUIRES a 4 year bachleorate or higher, or 10 years experiance. Now, I don't know about you, but I dropped out of my second year of college, in computer programmer/analyst, because there were too many job offers to pass up. So I had this mealy faced, huge forearmed guy tell me that because I had no university degree, that I didn't know how to do this job. It didn't matter to him that this company had gone outside of the fricking country to find a qualified applicant; his word was law. To argue with him was to risk permanant censure. So I languished for a month or two, and the company finally put me into a Candian company they'd very recently bought out, and I thought I'd just wait a year and get the L1 inter-company transfer visa. Amusing story part two: At this candian subsidiary, a co-worker was trying to get to California to do some Sales Engineering at a partner meeting, and got turned away at the border by the same INS official! He sat in the waiting area with Shaun Majumder, famed comic from Atlantic Canada. And any who doubt my skills, three weeks after I started (which means one week out of product training) I was on a plane to Korea to do a week long on-site, where we fixed each and every problem they had with Solaris, Oracle, web and application servers. Yay me.:-) Moral of story: I'm actually glad I didn't make it, but it was really really fucked up to require a university degree of somebody in a field that changes so fast that, quite honestly, static education doesn't matter. I was learning COBOL, for christ's sakes.
Slashdot Mirror
I have real trouble understanding legal language; my brain just isn't wired that way. So I'll ask you. Is economic status 'protected?' Yahoo isn't demanding payment; it's not a case of 'if you can't afford it, too bad, get a job.' It's almost the equivalent of Yahoo saying 'Show us 10 1000 dollar bills....ok, go on in. No no, keep your money; this is a free service.' If they wanted money, then yeah, they'd be fully within their rights to require a credit card; that's fine. But they don't want money; doesn't shouldn't that mean that they can't require proof of liquidity?
Exactly; it isn't proof of age. Yet, places like Yahoo are trying to use it like it is. And checking into a hotel or renting a car is different; you're giving the card as a guarentee of payment should you wreck the merchandise, bugger off with it, etc etc. You WILL be charged. Yahoo is simply using it as a ticket to entry; they flat out state 'you require a credit card, but no money will be taken from it.' Let me restate: Unlike car rental, hotel, or even a Blockbusters, Yahoo is NOT using the credit card as a form of payment. They require NOT THAT YOU GIVE THEM MONEY, BUT THAT YOU HAVE A CREDIT CARD. If they attempt to take money from that card, that's fraud; they've stated that they require no payment. My wife is 20, but she has no credit cards; that means that in the eyes of Yahoo, she's not old enough to warrent an account. That's not right.
I'm incredibly curious about something. Having a credit card is proof of being 18 or older, but being 18 or older does not automatically result in getting a credit card. Moreover, many adults refuse to get credit cards, denouncing them as capitalistic tools designed to keep people in perpetual debt, nigh unto indentured servitude. Therefore, would requireing a credit card not count as discrimination? At that point, you're not keeping kids out, which is legal, you're keeping anybody who doesn't have a piece of plastic out, which seems to me to be an artifical exclusion, which, again, seems to me to be illegal. Comments?
Programmers have to program more carefully *because* the Mac OS has no real memory management to speak of. That's like saying 'Cars should be built with no safety features, so that drivers will HAVE to be more careful.
This would definately be the way to go. Almost sounds like a shink wrap, though, doesn't it? "By not responding to this, you implicitly agree to release me from any and all obligations and agreements, explicity or implied, and also to pay me ONE MEEEELION DOLLARS!".
Actually, he means this.
...this article, and that was saying that with Mac OS X installed, you'd finally stop getting IRQ conflicts. WHAT? I haven't had an IRQ conflict in, nigh, five years. This isn't DOS.
Mac OS will never replace something like Linux until somebody figures out how to offer ALL of the power of a CLI type interface in their GUI. Want to see a fun exercise? Use Finder or Win Explorer. Go into a directory, and erase everything over a certain size, with the string 'llama' somewhere in the title, that is more than three days old.
And I'll say the same thing about OS X that I said about NT: My server DOES NOT NEED a GUI. My server DOES NOT NEED multimedia capability, be it Direct X or QuickTime. In other words, with OS X, can I strip out everything but the network stack, hard drive controllers, NIC driver, and maybe a character interface, and put Apache on it and call it a dedicated web server? Or does my web server ABSOLUTELY need to be able to do rotating vector effects on it's fonts?
Also, Apple is throwing away what was traditionally it's greatest asset as a (web) server, which was the lack of services. That's why it's so hard to hack a Mac; there's nothing there to hack. Granted, you can DoS it by pulling down a menu and walking away, but any system is vulnerable if you leave somebody access to a console.
There are some great ideas in Mac OS X, but it is NOT the Second Coming, and I know for a fact that there are Mac users (in the real world, I often see Mac graphic design artists who are put in charge of the web servers when the admins leave, because 'they know that web stuff') who are quite leery of OS X. Of course, the vast majority treat Jobs like some sort of Messiah (Come to me my child...*whump*...You see? FLESH is stronger than steel, Conan.)
Oh, I agree that the new characters, spells, etc etc are great, and I'm looking forward to playing the game, but I've seen patches, let alone expansion packs, that add just as much stuff to a game. Time will tell, though, and I still play Diablo, so I'm not complaining. Just observing. :-) Of course, that's assuming I'm not too busy playing Redemption....
when I see it on shelves. But I must say, it seems more like Diablo 1.5 than anything else.
...after reading a bunch of these posts. If the record companies are screwing the consumers (conspiritorial overpricing of CDs as one post puts it) it's called 'fair-market pricing' or 'charging what the market will bear' irregardless of the fact that there IS no competition to determine fair price. If the consumers are screwing the record companies by downloading copies for free, it's 'theft'. All a matter of perspective, I do suppose.
The *current* inventory of nukes? Probably not. Every nuke that was on the planet when we were at the height of MAD and the Cold War? Well, if you detonated them all at once, I don't know. But if you did it correctly, you'd have more than enough to turn the moon into a very nice meteor shower.
...put the docs on the CD in PDF or whatever, and offer the printed docs as a seperate bundle. The cost of the software itself is lowered by the amount that the docs cost seperately. Those who want them, can get them. Those who don't want them don't get them. Simple. I myself, however, demand printed documentation. I cannot easily, for example, mark up a CD. Or mark it up and pass it around the office. Or take it to the can. That having been said, Palm Pilot formatted docs would be nice; I guess now that PDF is being integrated into PalmOS it's done and done.
..versions, like Doc, TealDoc, iSilo, and what not. I'd be glad to do it for you guys, if supplied with the material in text or HTML format.
That's one of the reasons for anamorphic DVDs, which are encoded with more horizontal resolution than a standard television can display, even if it's still less than full blown HDTV. If you're going to sit and wait for the next generation at all times, you're going to be sitting there for a while.
In order to properly 'research' his topic, the lad would need to go and engineer it from the ground up. He's not allowed to ask people where he might find relevant information; he's not allowed to ask *for* relevant information; he's not allowed to ask for opinons. Doesn't that mean that if he goes to a library, and reads an article on Nanotech, that he's "leeching" and "not doing his own work" and "the author of the article should be admitted to the college, and not the guy using the article for information?" Pathetic. I, speaking as one who has taken job interviews, and gave job interviews, and I would think most colleges, would rather see that the guy can go out and find information that already exists, rather than re-invent the wheel. I'd then want to see him apply the knowledge so gained. *Then* and only then, would I be concerned with him inventing the wheel from scratch. After all, by this definition, OSS is wrong, as it's leeching off somebody elses work. OOP is wrong; don't reuse those objects! Create new ones! Otherwise you're leeching! End of rant.
I'd likely be in jail now. Hell, I'd be in jail even if it was implemented here at work. I went into grade 9, oh, 10 years ago I suppose. Boy was I picked on; 13 in grade 9, intelligent as hell (and therefore socially inept). It was bad enough in public school when I was yanked out of classes once a week and sent to Gifted classes in the next town over. What the teachers never seemed to realize was that by saying "You're intelligent and deserve extra attention" they were also saying to every other student "You're stupid, and not as worthy as he is of extra attention" and we all know what happens next. Anyway, back to HS. One day I went to the book store, the only one in town that carried D&D stuff, and picked up the brand shiney new Thief's Handbook. Brought it to school, as I'd picked it up on lunch, sat down in German class, and started reading it. Teach walked in, saw the "Theif's Handbook" in big gold letters, and freaked, big time. Never occured to me to think that it might look wierd to others. Anywho, lets look at this for me here at work. Often does my colleuge and I discuss the finer points of various martial arts, while standing in an office or hallway. We routinely go on Nerf hunts. I have a Soldier of Fortune box under my desk, THE ULTIMATE SNIPER training manual (which I got when I got Tribes) and Killer on my shelf beside all my comp security books, Oracle books, etc etc. We're trying to create an OSS tactical space combat sim, so we're constantly discussing tactics, weapon effects, that sort of thing. Yeah, I'd be in jail by now under anonymous reporting, most likely. Hell, under these laws, a couple of kids practicing Shakespere would probably look like dangerous, mentally disturbed people. "Pay me my due, or I shall take a pound of flesh from thee" indeed. It disturbs me that, as others have pointed out, the system tries to breed into some students (football and other sports players) exactly the same traits it tries to breed out of others (people who can't be bribed with a letter jacket) while claiming it's for the good of society. I think this needs to be on a school board by school board basis, if not school by school, and should only be implemented on a two-thirds majority vote by each parent, student, and employee at said school.
....because if I can go from pushing the 'CTRL' key down with picking up a submachine gun, striping it, cleaning it, reassembling it, loading and cocking it, aiming it, and firing it, while using the proper stance, BRAS technique, staying on target, target discrimination, etc etc whilst wearing a scratchy trench coat then DAMN, hold me back!
Oh, and since I've played Falcon 4.0, don't let me near an Air Force base; I can bugger off with a Falcon and bomb people to death!
Besides; anybody who's actually played Doom knows that if somebody was going to kill people, Doom Style, they'd do it with the CHAINSAW!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play Heretic II for the EXPRESS purpose of learning how to cast magic spells.
So, the companies that are using Linux, and have iron-clad support contracts with third party support providers, like, say, Linux Care, are going to scoff at the notion when LinuxCare also say 'BTW, we've stamped version 1.2.1 of JFS to be solid, and we're willing to write that into our support contract'?
Linux is slowly coming to equal Solaris in terms of honest-to-Gods enterprise features. And I'm talking the simple stuff, like being able to fsck a mounted drive, or change shm_max type params without recompiling your kernel. When things like that are in place, you'll see a lot of shops moving over to Linux.
A year and a half back, I, living in Canada, got a job offer from an American company which doubled my salaray (and, being not Canada, halved my taxes ;-) They said that all I needed was a TN1 visa; get it at the border, takes twenty minutes. The joys of free trade, neh? One catch: this visa REQUIRES a 4 year bachleorate or higher, or 10 years experiance. Now, I don't know about you, but I dropped out of my second year of college, in computer programmer/analyst, because there were too many job offers to pass up. So I had this mealy faced, huge forearmed guy tell me that because I had no university degree, that I didn't know how to do this job. It didn't matter to him that this company had gone outside of the fricking country to find a qualified applicant; his word was law. To argue with him was to risk permanant censure. So I languished for a month or two, and the company finally put me into a Candian company they'd very recently bought out, and I thought I'd just wait a year and get the L1 inter-company transfer visa. Amusing story part two: At this candian subsidiary, a co-worker was trying to get to California to do some Sales Engineering at a partner meeting, and got turned away at the border by the same INS official! He sat in the waiting area with Shaun Majumder, famed comic from Atlantic Canada. And any who doubt my skills, three weeks after I started (which means one week out of product training) I was on a plane to Korea to do a week long on-site, where we fixed each and every problem they had with Solaris, Oracle, web and application servers. Yay me. :-) Moral of story: I'm actually glad I didn't make it, but it was really really fucked up to require a university degree of somebody in a field that changes so fast that, quite honestly, static education doesn't matter. I was learning COBOL, for christ's sakes.