If you want to make a decent point, leave Solyndra out of it. There are lots of people who believe that the role of government is to spend money developing things that are not yet commercially viable, but should be. Create a market and then let private companies enter when they can.
Like spacecraft, from which we now benefit in advanced understandings of our galaxy and universe. Or cancer research, which many big pharma companies don't want to investigate because it is an umbrella of thousands of different diseases leading to the same outcome.
Or solar energy, which eliminates the need to find natural resources. It was not a donation, it was a loan guarantee. A lot like investing in an IPO, but one that could not get enough private investors. And the reason it fell apart is because Chinese companies, heavily subsidized by China, were able to undercut them on price. Should we just give up and say let's get our solar panels from China? I don't want that, China gets too much of our money already.
We can argue about whether it was a good idea all you want, but there are a lot of people who see nothing wrong in this sort of thing, and there are plenty of other bad examples of mismanaged money that both sides can agree on.
The people who do not have a scanner do not have "access" to those channels. They could get a scanner, but have no desire to. Mostly because the police log is published in the newspaper, and they take that at face value. And without one, they cannot listen in.
When you spend a week finding out that the documentation does not match the behavior of that API or library call, and finally figure out how you have to work around it, there is no "urge" it is simply frustration while you tell future people why your code does not match the examples. Even the leaked MS code was full of this, according to reports, when the Office team did something stupid and the OS team had to put in a fix for it. Of course there are patches for thousands of programs.
I used to have the reference, appcompat.txt, but I can't find a link right now.
This sounds like a confusion of goto versus setjmp/longjmp. IIRC the K&R book essentially says "use at your own risk" due to reasons in gp's explanation. The normal goto does not have this caveat.
GOTO is a useful tool, as long as it is only used when that is the most sensible and elegant way of solving a problem. Or in rare cases when a quick fix is needed with minimal side effects, and again when it definitely won't cause stack or unwinding problems.
What if new devices started using proprietary screwdriver bits?
Same thing that has happened every other time this kind of thing comes along. It is in place for a while, consumers complain about it but go along, eventually the industry standardizes and new devices have consistent tooling. It happens to every new technology, someone thinks they can get more money by developing things in-house (Sony).
There will be early adopters, a plateau of sales, people will complain about their freedoms, and either companies will change or they won't, depending on what it's worth to them. Again, if the market is there for unlocked devices, they will be an option. If the demand is negligible, there is no reason for an existing company to fill that niche, so it's up to you to start that company if you want it.
These are valid answers if enough people actually do it. It would take less than a month for an employer to drop drug testing requirements if they had nearly no one to fill the jobs.
If enough people move to another city, that will be a big enough tax drain that the city will take notice. Just the threat alone, when people start putting their houses on the market and moving from local banks to national ones, will send a big enough signal that maybe government will change its ways.
It never works out because people are not willing to stand up. When voting time comes in foreign countries, a one-legged man walks 20 miles to vote and considers himself "very lucky". Here, we would demand that the bus routes be extended or send an ambulance to pick the guy up. Yes we pay taxes, but we don't pay enough to cover every situation, enough teachers, police, transportation for everyone in the city limits to do anything.
You have to state what you want, and what will happen if you don't get it, then do it. When you run out of countries to move to, then burn the government to the ground and start over because it's the only choice the government left you.
Yes, moving is expensive and inconvenient, but so is using something that is locked down, or living under stupid laws. You choose your inconvenience, and most people choose the path of least resistance.
And if you don't have the support to do things in big enough numbers, then you are in the minority and resistance is futile. Keep trying though, we need people to man the opposition.
The problem is, if you allow people the option, someone will figure out how to get around it. There will be security holes and patches and more holes and patches. Even if it's something as silly as the PS2 hack which loaded an invalid font file from a memory card.
Microsoft is taking the route everyone has been pushing them down for years - secure operating system. Not the best way to do it, but effective. Maybe you can flash your way around it, maybe you can't. If people want the security, they will buy it. If they want flexibility, they won't.
You are free to not buy the product if it does not suit your needs. If a market for non-certified an unlocked devices springs up, some company will fill in the gap. If the market is too small, you have the freedom to start one.
I am all for using things as you see fit, but I'm also all for a market that provides things that people want to buy. If you don't want it, dn't buy it, and be sure to ask the businesses if they will sell an unlocked version. Either they will get the hint and you win, or you will get the hint and you lose.
The fight has always been about informing sheeple about their options, and Stallman has been flogging the same horse for decades. Know what you are buying, what your options are, and why you might want something more open that's out there. I have a locked HTC device, but I knew going in that I had an unofficial option to unlock it, and now HTC is providing an official unlocker. I made the choice and supported the company. If you get your uninformed friends to see the value, by rooting your device and showing what they can't do, they might come to understand as well.
If they don't see your point, there's no reason for the manufacturer to care either.
Good job, idiot. You linked to a page with words on it. You should try the preview button some time, make sure your links actually work before posting.
Because then work would get done, and we don't want our bosses to know how long things really take to get done. They will expect that in the future as well.
You don't make contributions when you want something done, it looks like bribery. You make your contributions when they are running for office. Then they look up who gave them money on sites like Open Secrets, and pay attention to those donors.
You don't just send a check to the politician. Everyone who complains about money in politics seems to not get this, or have a completely wrong understanding of how it works. You supported them in the past, and they do not want to lose support, so they go with the big money. A politician is not for sale on particular issues, he is for sale to the highest bidder. Then the highest bidder tells him what to do on the issues.
If you want to take a step back and say maybe they are only partly corrupt, then the lobbyist who represents big money gets to spend time educating the Congress Critter, while the opposition gets a handshake and a nod and a form letter.
The game has rules, if you want to play you have to understand them. "Send money with your letter" is not helpful advice unless you just want a population too jaded to even bother voting or contacting their Representative Rodent or Senatorial Snake.
No, Apple just waited until the time was right. The music industry is slowly realizing that they have to update their business model, and Apple being a major distribution channel is helping them realize that quickly.
The labels must be kicking themselves for not realizing this sooner, but at the same time they can say they had a choice back then and don't now.
And who knows, Apple may have been trying to do this for a while, and finally succeeded, and we only know about the success.
Shouldn't think of them as competitors. My neighborhood exists in Google Maps because I added it to OSM using the JOSM tool, tracing Yahoo satellite images (which was allowed at the time, no idea if it still is).
Google apparently consults the OSM data. The rule with OSM is you have to do it yourself, or use an open data set. So pretty much anyone can use it. Google used several of the major commercial data providers for a while, not sure if they own everything in-house at this point.
IIRC the most important part of that was allocating a standard sized bit of memory was calculated at the nearest power of 2, or 1024 bytes. Then the allocator adds a header and rounds to the nearest power of 2. So a request for 1024 bytes including slop space actually gets 2048. That was one of the biggest fixes they made - don't pre-calculate overage in multiple places, just ask for what you need until you get to the actual allocator.
This was memory designed to expand into, basically their own C-style alloc() function, which requests a chunk from the OS and divides it up for the application to use, in order to speed up repeated allocations. Not sure why C/C++ wasn't good enough tho.
It would be great if you kept to one point on a rant. Generally, adding a theory does bother me, because in a lot of cases it seems very convoluted, and in many cases does not even follow from the data presented.
You also seemed to attack the premise of neurons firing, suggesting it lacked credibility. I think this makes sense, in the same way as someone who takes anti-psychotic medication, then skips it for a while. In this case, killing takes the place of the medication, sating whatever imbalances or processes would normally exist. It is not a completely absurd theory.
Does it follow from the research? Well, only if you add in the delay, and then you are fitting numbers to your theory. And I have found that typically these types of reports serve only one purpose. A pet theory proven with a single dataset. The report serves the purpose of getting more people to look at a problem and potentially see if they have any matching, or refuting, data.
If mainstream reporting would prefix these by saying "... and one crazy scientist thinks..." maybe science wouldn't have the reputation of changing its mind so often. Or they could leave out the conclusion/theory part and just report on what was actually found. Either one would work. But the scientists won't stop doing it because that's the only way to get people talking.
Citation needed. The last estimate I read was something like a 5% success rate. I used that to make fun of Criminal Minds tv show, which has a near 100% success rate. That's the way profilers want to be seen, but it doesn't work out like that. So if you have numbers, preferably in percentages rather than total successes with no context, that would be a good start.
I'd like to see someone (other than me) test this by downloading a show while it is being shown on over-the-air TV, as a rerun. They were giving it away free at that time, the lawyer argues, and my client has an antenna with HD reception. How do you ensure the audience stays in their seats for the commercials? Keeps their eyes open? You don't? I move for immediate dismissal.
You're a nutter, and here's why. Keep in mind, I believed the same thing for a bit, let me show you a different way of thinking about it that makes far more sense.
First, the NIST and Popular Mechanics together have done a lot of coverage and explanation, there are links in the article and at the bottom for more reading. Take this information, buy the nearest structural engineer an expensive dinner, and let him/her explain, without interruption, why it is a valid conclusion.
The short version: jet fuel burns really hot, explosives powerful enough to bring the buildings down would have been heard, the fires alone were enough to cause progressive structural problems even without physical damage. Many myths are debunked here. In particular, This page explains the free-fall speed simply, to my satisfaction.
Now, that leaves use with the PNAC, identity theft, and Visa. I don't know about the Visa program, and nothing you've said makes me want to filter through any more nonsense. If you are a hijacker, it makes sense to go under an assumed identity if you've also been caught or monitored or basically would raise any red flags. The fact that you called it identity theft instead of claiming they were names picked from a hat to represent people who weren't actually on a plane is a little progress. Someone boarded the planes under those names. This is not evidence of anything.
PNAC is the most troubling, and by far the only factor in your post to be concerned about. The turf war between intelligence agencies allowed lots of things to happen which would not have been caught, and correcting that should have been the most action to come out of 9/11. At worst, you could claim this was intentional, and the attack was allowed to continue beyond the point that it was discovered, in order to support PNAC's goals. I am 100% certain that someone, somewhere, watched this unfold, and thought, there's our new Pearl Harbor. Whether they failed to act intentionally or not is entirely conjecture, and cannot be proven reliably either way.
So here's what you do. Suggest first that the reaction was assymetric, everyone will agree. Suggest second that this was a help to the goals of PNAC, and we have documents to support that. Third, suggest that it is not impossible that someone just didn't try hard enough to stop this, whether it was intnetional or incompetence. They don't have to buy the intentional PNAC part, just that someone didn't do everything they could (which is obvious from the infoturf wars).
At that point, you don't need a conspiracy theory to support the claim that the sum total of everything that happened was *in part* a logical extension of PNAC's goals of subjugating the citizens. Everything else is irrelevant. You can deal with the rest, how much was known and allowed vs. how much was just noise in a vast intelligence wasteland, however you want.
The power grab is complete, and didn't need a conspiracy to help. One rich pissed off Saudi who was trained, armed, and abandoned, gave them everything they needed *and more*.
Because people who as a whole believe in the evolution of something as complex as humans somehow don't get the concept of evolution of language. If we stop the natural evolution of language, we would as well spell things like Chaucer did.
Actually, English would still be German, with the rest of the language left in the various other parts it came from.
Or since that was derivative, let's go further back and have everyone speak Aramaic. After all, we don't have the original Indo-European to force everyone to speak, just a hypothetical prototype. No I changed my mind. If you can't express yourself using a drawing on a cave, it's not pure language and must be stopped.
Screw you people, I'm going to visit the slashdot cave, then to Boulder Caves in New Hampshire to see how politics is going. The rest of the afternoon will be on Mammoth Caves' Fark, drawing penises on everyone else's news stories.
No conflict. If you put people together in a dedicated space with little distraction, everyone's focus on the goal tends to make you retain the same focus. On the other hand, if you dole out tasks and tell everyone to go do things the best way they can, many programmers will go sit heads-down and crank out code.
In the middle, where you have to get along with your team and brainstorm and plan and meet, that's pretty much the definition of not writing code.
Conversations like "Hey did you see the game last night?" are minimal in the war room and individual scenarios, but common in the charisma/brainstorm scenario. Who the hell brainstorms for coding, anyway?
I think you're stretching this too much. If I take your car, you don't have it, that is stealing. If I take your exclusive right to copy a book you just wrote, you also don't have that right. It's not stealing, it is an infringement of rights.
When you have a society, you agree to give up certain things for the greater good. Known as a social contract, this establishes what you can and cannot do. You have not really made a case for removing this from the social contract.
If you have an idea and I copy it, no one has lost anything. When you try to implement it by writing a book, painting a picture, making a physical invention, or a movie, you have expended effort and time. If you create a beloved character like Winnie the Pooh, the question of control over the character might come up, whether I can make my own stories with the character (fan fiction). A separate question is whether I can take your book and copy it.
As for the part about controlling your computer, you went right off the deep end on that one. You could use a public library's computer instead, or an open wi-fi setup. Is that controlling your property? No, is it right to say that it is only control when your property is involved? No.
The only thing I agree with is that patenting things like human genomes and natural compounds is taking knowledge out of the public domain.
Dehumanization of the enemy explains a lot of the behavior. Normally it would have just happened and few people would know about it. They would know it happens, but not the details of every case. Technology changed that of course.
When one side fights with morals and the other doesn't, that's the problem. Urinating on someone who is dead and won't care is a big outrage, but only due to respect for the dead, even if it's your enemy. Beheading and dragging corpses through the street behind cars seems to be the way things work on the other side.
Technology allows us to share both sides with equality. Having a higher standard puts that side at a big disadvantage. If the US said it would drag corpses thrugh the street in victory and do all kinds of legal but humiliating things to you if you are caught or killed, the enemy would individually fear, not collectively. And individual fear is a lot harder to overcome. I don't want my body desecrated, I'm not joining your war unless I have to, and even then I'll do a half-hearted job.
Either play nice, or play dirty, but don't expect your enemy to do the same. And when you make a promise like 'no torture', either stick by it or throw it out the window. The worst propaganda you can have is a country that says one thing and does another (collectively). At least the jihadis are consistent. They have completely dehumanized the enemy, and do not seem concerned with the same things.
The only way to fight is civil disobedience. I do not recognize the copyright extension as constitutional, and I do not follow it. "Life of the author" should not be a factor in any temporary monopoly, only a specific number of years for everyone. Anything over 28 years is fair game to me. This covers the original 14+14 years from 1790 without having to verify a renewal, and the updated 28 years from the first extension in 1831.
I try to spread the word as often as possible. Only if we continue to assert our rights will we make any change. And of course, make it clear that we respect valid copyrights. Ghostbusters and Gremlins will be public domain next year, as well as episodes of A-Team and Cheers. If MAFIAA would allow hosting and sharing of anything 28 years old, I guarantee you people will stop copying newer content as much. It will still happen, but most people like to be legal if possible, and there is a lot of catching up to spend time on instead of newer stuff.
People who think the code is the documentation would not, in my experience, do something so idiotic. If you work in a domain where everyone is expected to know those terms, it works. If not, you find better variable and function names.
I always have clearly descriptive names, straight out of programming 101. That's mostly so I don't forget which one is which. The only 1-letter variables are counters, x, c, or i. And usually I use 'count', 'counter', 'index' or something else instead.
The end result is, the code actually is self-documenting and needs no explanation other than bug fixes or algorithm changes for specific reasons.
Just based on the presentation of your stats, which probably have been debunked, you're missing something important. Smokers cost half of what they pay in, but that's supposed to be just the costs related to smoking. The other half is supposed to cover the costs of every other illness and treatment that normal non-smokers would have to deal with. There's no way it would come close, ending with a net loss. Even with the additional smokers' tax.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to make a decent point, leave Solyndra out of it. There are lots of people who believe that the role of government is to spend money developing things that are not yet commercially viable, but should be. Create a market and then let private companies enter when they can.
Like spacecraft, from which we now benefit in advanced understandings of our galaxy and universe. Or cancer research, which many big pharma companies don't want to investigate because it is an umbrella of thousands of different diseases leading to the same outcome.
Or solar energy, which eliminates the need to find natural resources. It was not a donation, it was a loan guarantee. A lot like investing in an IPO, but one that could not get enough private investors. And the reason it fell apart is because Chinese companies, heavily subsidized by China, were able to undercut them on price. Should we just give up and say let's get our solar panels from China? I don't want that, China gets too much of our money already.
We can argue about whether it was a good idea all you want, but there are a lot of people who see nothing wrong in this sort of thing, and there are plenty of other bad examples of mismanaged money that both sides can agree on.
The people who do not have a scanner do not have "access" to those channels. They could get a scanner, but have no desire to. Mostly because the police log is published in the newspaper, and they take that at face value. And without one, they cannot listen in.
When you spend a week finding out that the documentation does not match the behavior of that API or library call, and finally figure out how you have to work around it, there is no "urge" it is simply frustration while you tell future people why your code does not match the examples. Even the leaked MS code was full of this, according to reports, when the Office team did something stupid and the OS team had to put in a fix for it. Of course there are patches for thousands of programs.
I used to have the reference, appcompat.txt, but I can't find a link right now.
This sounds like a confusion of goto versus setjmp/longjmp. IIRC the K&R book essentially says "use at your own risk" due to reasons in gp's explanation. The normal goto does not have this caveat.
GOTO is a useful tool, as long as it is only used when that is the most sensible and elegant way of solving a problem. Or in rare cases when a quick fix is needed with minimal side effects, and again when it definitely won't cause stack or unwinding problems.
Same thing that has happened every other time this kind of thing comes along. It is in place for a while, consumers complain about it but go along, eventually the industry standardizes and new devices have consistent tooling. It happens to every new technology, someone thinks they can get more money by developing things in-house (Sony).
There will be early adopters, a plateau of sales, people will complain about their freedoms, and either companies will change or they won't, depending on what it's worth to them. Again, if the market is there for unlocked devices, they will be an option. If the demand is negligible, there is no reason for an existing company to fill that niche, so it's up to you to start that company if you want it.
These are valid answers if enough people actually do it. It would take less than a month for an employer to drop drug testing requirements if they had nearly no one to fill the jobs.
If enough people move to another city, that will be a big enough tax drain that the city will take notice. Just the threat alone, when people start putting their houses on the market and moving from local banks to national ones, will send a big enough signal that maybe government will change its ways.
It never works out because people are not willing to stand up. When voting time comes in foreign countries, a one-legged man walks 20 miles to vote and considers himself "very lucky". Here, we would demand that the bus routes be extended or send an ambulance to pick the guy up. Yes we pay taxes, but we don't pay enough to cover every situation, enough teachers, police, transportation for everyone in the city limits to do anything.
You have to state what you want, and what will happen if you don't get it, then do it. When you run out of countries to move to, then burn the government to the ground and start over because it's the only choice the government left you.
Yes, moving is expensive and inconvenient, but so is using something that is locked down, or living under stupid laws. You choose your inconvenience, and most people choose the path of least resistance.
And if you don't have the support to do things in big enough numbers, then you are in the minority and resistance is futile. Keep trying though, we need people to man the opposition.
The problem is, if you allow people the option, someone will figure out how to get around it. There will be security holes and patches and more holes and patches. Even if it's something as silly as the PS2 hack which loaded an invalid font file from a memory card.
Microsoft is taking the route everyone has been pushing them down for years - secure operating system. Not the best way to do it, but effective. Maybe you can flash your way around it, maybe you can't. If people want the security, they will buy it. If they want flexibility, they won't.
You are free to not buy the product if it does not suit your needs. If a market for non-certified an unlocked devices springs up, some company will fill in the gap. If the market is too small, you have the freedom to start one.
I am all for using things as you see fit, but I'm also all for a market that provides things that people want to buy. If you don't want it, dn't buy it, and be sure to ask the businesses if they will sell an unlocked version. Either they will get the hint and you win, or you will get the hint and you lose.
The fight has always been about informing sheeple about their options, and Stallman has been flogging the same horse for decades. Know what you are buying, what your options are, and why you might want something more open that's out there. I have a locked HTC device, but I knew going in that I had an unofficial option to unlock it, and now HTC is providing an official unlocker. I made the choice and supported the company. If you get your uninformed friends to see the value, by rooting your device and showing what they can't do, they might come to understand as well.
If they don't see your point, there's no reason for the manufacturer to care either.
Good job, idiot. You linked to a page with words on it. You should try the preview button some time, make sure your links actually work before posting.
-Average Joe
Because then work would get done, and we don't want our bosses to know how long things really take to get done. They will expect that in the future as well.
You don't make contributions when you want something done, it looks like bribery. You make your contributions when they are running for office. Then they look up who gave them money on sites like Open Secrets, and pay attention to those donors.
You don't just send a check to the politician. Everyone who complains about money in politics seems to not get this, or have a completely wrong understanding of how it works. You supported them in the past, and they do not want to lose support, so they go with the big money. A politician is not for sale on particular issues, he is for sale to the highest bidder. Then the highest bidder tells him what to do on the issues.
If you want to take a step back and say maybe they are only partly corrupt, then the lobbyist who represents big money gets to spend time educating the Congress Critter, while the opposition gets a handshake and a nod and a form letter.
The game has rules, if you want to play you have to understand them. "Send money with your letter" is not helpful advice unless you just want a population too jaded to even bother voting or contacting their Representative Rodent or Senatorial Snake.
No, Apple just waited until the time was right. The music industry is slowly realizing that they have to update their business model, and Apple being a major distribution channel is helping them realize that quickly.
The labels must be kicking themselves for not realizing this sooner, but at the same time they can say they had a choice back then and don't now.
And who knows, Apple may have been trying to do this for a while, and finally succeeded, and we only know about the success.
Shouldn't think of them as competitors. My neighborhood exists in Google Maps because I added it to OSM using the JOSM tool, tracing Yahoo satellite images (which was allowed at the time, no idea if it still is).
Google apparently consults the OSM data. The rule with OSM is you have to do it yourself, or use an open data set. So pretty much anyone can use it. Google used several of the major commercial data providers for a while, not sure if they own everything in-house at this point.
IIRC the most important part of that was allocating a standard sized bit of memory was calculated at the nearest power of 2, or 1024 bytes. Then the allocator adds a header and rounds to the nearest power of 2. So a request for 1024 bytes including slop space actually gets 2048. That was one of the biggest fixes they made - don't pre-calculate overage in multiple places, just ask for what you need until you get to the actual allocator.
This was memory designed to expand into, basically their own C-style alloc() function, which requests a chunk from the OS and divides it up for the application to use, in order to speed up repeated allocations. Not sure why C/C++ wasn't good enough tho.
It would be great if you kept to one point on a rant. Generally, adding a theory does bother me, because in a lot of cases it seems very convoluted, and in many cases does not even follow from the data presented.
You also seemed to attack the premise of neurons firing, suggesting it lacked credibility. I think this makes sense, in the same way as someone who takes anti-psychotic medication, then skips it for a while. In this case, killing takes the place of the medication, sating whatever imbalances or processes would normally exist. It is not a completely absurd theory.
Does it follow from the research? Well, only if you add in the delay, and then you are fitting numbers to your theory. And I have found that typically these types of reports serve only one purpose. A pet theory proven with a single dataset. The report serves the purpose of getting more people to look at a problem and potentially see if they have any matching, or refuting, data.
If mainstream reporting would prefix these by saying "... and one crazy scientist thinks..." maybe science wouldn't have the reputation of changing its mind so often. Or they could leave out the conclusion/theory part and just report on what was actually found. Either one would work. But the scientists won't stop doing it because that's the only way to get people talking.
Citation needed. The last estimate I read was something like a 5% success rate. I used that to make fun of Criminal Minds tv show, which has a near 100% success rate. That's the way profilers want to be seen, but it doesn't work out like that. So if you have numbers, preferably in percentages rather than total successes with no context, that would be a good start.
I'd like to see someone (other than me) test this by downloading a show while it is being shown on over-the-air TV, as a rerun. They were giving it away free at that time, the lawyer argues, and my client has an antenna with HD reception. How do you ensure the audience stays in their seats for the commercials? Keeps their eyes open? You don't? I move for immediate dismissal.
You're a nutter, and here's why. Keep in mind, I believed the same thing for a bit, let me show you a different way of thinking about it that makes far more sense.
First, the NIST and Popular Mechanics together have done a lot of coverage and explanation, there are links in the article and at the bottom for more reading. Take this information, buy the nearest structural engineer an expensive dinner, and let him/her explain, without interruption, why it is a valid conclusion.
The short version: jet fuel burns really hot, explosives powerful enough to bring the buildings down would have been heard, the fires alone were enough to cause progressive structural problems even without physical damage. Many myths are debunked here. In particular, This page explains the free-fall speed simply, to my satisfaction.
Now, that leaves use with the PNAC, identity theft, and Visa. I don't know about the Visa program, and nothing you've said makes me want to filter through any more nonsense. If you are a hijacker, it makes sense to go under an assumed identity if you've also been caught or monitored or basically would raise any red flags. The fact that you called it identity theft instead of claiming they were names picked from a hat to represent people who weren't actually on a plane is a little progress. Someone boarded the planes under those names. This is not evidence of anything.
PNAC is the most troubling, and by far the only factor in your post to be concerned about. The turf war between intelligence agencies allowed lots of things to happen which would not have been caught, and correcting that should have been the most action to come out of 9/11. At worst, you could claim this was intentional, and the attack was allowed to continue beyond the point that it was discovered, in order to support PNAC's goals. I am 100% certain that someone, somewhere, watched this unfold, and thought, there's our new Pearl Harbor. Whether they failed to act intentionally or not is entirely conjecture, and cannot be proven reliably either way.
So here's what you do. Suggest first that the reaction was assymetric, everyone will agree. Suggest second that this was a help to the goals of PNAC, and we have documents to support that. Third, suggest that it is not impossible that someone just didn't try hard enough to stop this, whether it was intnetional or incompetence. They don't have to buy the intentional PNAC part, just that someone didn't do everything they could (which is obvious from the infoturf wars).
At that point, you don't need a conspiracy theory to support the claim that the sum total of everything that happened was *in part* a logical extension of PNAC's goals of subjugating the citizens. Everything else is irrelevant. You can deal with the rest, how much was known and allowed vs. how much was just noise in a vast intelligence wasteland, however you want.
The power grab is complete, and didn't need a conspiracy to help. One rich pissed off Saudi who was trained, armed, and abandoned, gave them everything they needed *and more*.
Because people who as a whole believe in the evolution of something as complex as humans somehow don't get the concept of evolution of language. If we stop the natural evolution of language, we would as well spell things like Chaucer did.
Actually, English would still be German, with the rest of the language left in the various other parts it came from.
Or since that was derivative, let's go further back and have everyone speak Aramaic. After all, we don't have the original Indo-European to force everyone to speak, just a hypothetical prototype. No I changed my mind. If you can't express yourself using a drawing on a cave, it's not pure language and must be stopped.
Screw you people, I'm going to visit the slashdot cave, then to Boulder Caves in New Hampshire to see how politics is going. The rest of the afternoon will be on Mammoth Caves' Fark, drawing penises on everyone else's news stories.
No conflict. If you put people together in a dedicated space with little distraction, everyone's focus on the goal tends to make you retain the same focus. On the other hand, if you dole out tasks and tell everyone to go do things the best way they can, many programmers will go sit heads-down and crank out code.
In the middle, where you have to get along with your team and brainstorm and plan and meet, that's pretty much the definition of not writing code.
Conversations like "Hey did you see the game last night?" are minimal in the war room and individual scenarios, but common in the charisma/brainstorm scenario. Who the hell brainstorms for coding, anyway?
I think you're stretching this too much. If I take your car, you don't have it, that is stealing. If I take your exclusive right to copy a book you just wrote, you also don't have that right. It's not stealing, it is an infringement of rights.
When you have a society, you agree to give up certain things for the greater good. Known as a social contract, this establishes what you can and cannot do. You have not really made a case for removing this from the social contract.
If you have an idea and I copy it, no one has lost anything. When you try to implement it by writing a book, painting a picture, making a physical invention, or a movie, you have expended effort and time. If you create a beloved character like Winnie the Pooh, the question of control over the character might come up, whether I can make my own stories with the character (fan fiction). A separate question is whether I can take your book and copy it.
As for the part about controlling your computer, you went right off the deep end on that one. You could use a public library's computer instead, or an open wi-fi setup. Is that controlling your property? No, is it right to say that it is only control when your property is involved? No.
The only thing I agree with is that patenting things like human genomes and natural compounds is taking knowledge out of the public domain.
Dehumanization of the enemy explains a lot of the behavior. Normally it would have just happened and few people would know about it. They would know it happens, but not the details of every case. Technology changed that of course.
When one side fights with morals and the other doesn't, that's the problem. Urinating on someone who is dead and won't care is a big outrage, but only due to respect for the dead, even if it's your enemy. Beheading and dragging corpses through the street behind cars seems to be the way things work on the other side.
Technology allows us to share both sides with equality. Having a higher standard puts that side at a big disadvantage. If the US said it would drag corpses thrugh the street in victory and do all kinds of legal but humiliating things to you if you are caught or killed, the enemy would individually fear, not collectively. And individual fear is a lot harder to overcome. I don't want my body desecrated, I'm not joining your war unless I have to, and even then I'll do a half-hearted job.
Either play nice, or play dirty, but don't expect your enemy to do the same. And when you make a promise like 'no torture', either stick by it or throw it out the window. The worst propaganda you can have is a country that says one thing and does another (collectively). At least the jihadis are consistent. They have completely dehumanized the enemy, and do not seem concerned with the same things.
The only way to fight is civil disobedience. I do not recognize the copyright extension as constitutional, and I do not follow it. "Life of the author" should not be a factor in any temporary monopoly, only a specific number of years for everyone. Anything over 28 years is fair game to me. This covers the original 14+14 years from 1790 without having to verify a renewal, and the updated 28 years from the first extension in 1831.
I try to spread the word as often as possible. Only if we continue to assert our rights will we make any change. And of course, make it clear that we respect valid copyrights. Ghostbusters and Gremlins will be public domain next year, as well as episodes of A-Team and Cheers. If MAFIAA would allow hosting and sharing of anything 28 years old, I guarantee you people will stop copying newer content as much. It will still happen, but most people like to be legal if possible, and there is a lot of catching up to spend time on instead of newer stuff.
People who think the code is the documentation would not, in my experience, do something so idiotic. If you work in a domain where everyone is expected to know those terms, it works. If not, you find better variable and function names.
I always have clearly descriptive names, straight out of programming 101. That's mostly so I don't forget which one is which. The only 1-letter variables are counters, x, c, or i. And usually I use 'count', 'counter', 'index' or something else instead.
The end result is, the code actually is self-documenting and needs no explanation other than bug fixes or algorithm changes for specific reasons.
Just based on the presentation of your stats, which probably have been debunked, you're missing something important. Smokers cost half of what they pay in, but that's supposed to be just the costs related to smoking. The other half is supposed to cover the costs of every other illness and treatment that normal non-smokers would have to deal with. There's no way it would come close, ending with a net loss. Even with the additional smokers' tax.