Section 501 takes care of that in one fell swoop: support a group the USG doesn't like, and you can be stripped of citizenship...
Section 501, "Expatriation of Terrorists": This provision, the drafters say, would establish that an American citizen could be expatriated "if, with the intent to relinquish his nationality, he becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United Stated has designated as a 'terrorist organization'." But whereas a citizen formerly had to state his intent to relinquish his citizenship, the new law affirms that his intent can be "inferred from conduct." Thus, engaging in the lawful activities of a group designated as a "terrorist organization" by the Attorney General could be presumptive grounds for expatriation.
Well, actually the article is about the solid fuel component of hybrid rocket motors.
A hybrid is a solid/liquid fuel combination - the liquid part is the oxidizer (usually O2,) while the solid part is usually a hydrocarbon (e.g. urethane, rubber, paper.)
As the article notes, hybrids have many benefits - they're stable under a wide range of conditions because the dirty stuff isn't mixed full of oxidizer, they often burn cleanly because the oxidizer can be pure O2 rather than am per, they can be throttled by varying the amount of oxidizer entering the chamber.
The traditional downside with hybrids was burn rate - you could get a long, weak burn, but not a fast, high-thrust burn. This makes hybrids unsuitable as booster rockets.
Seems these new motors have the high burn rate. Yipee!
Exactly - that was the experience I had with my old 300-in-1 chemistry set about 27 years ago.
I did 30 pages of book/guided stuff. E.g. filtering a sand and salt solution, then spending 2 hours getting the salt out of the solution... at the end, guess what? I had salt again!!! Gee, that was fun.
I switched to my own guided experiments soon after that: KnO3 is cool, magnesium burns pretty well, sulfur smells bad, but hydrogen sulphide is even better! My father (a chemist) banished my experiments to the garage.
Next month, I told my parents I needed a pound of sodium chlorate as a desiccant. My father managed to keep a straight face, but bought it for me anyway.
Many more self-directed experiments were performed, and I found myself learning in leaps and bounds: I learned about the surface area of reactants when I thoughtlessly substituted powdered charcoal for granulated sugar in a simple propulsion experiment. Haha, skin and hair grow back.
Chemistry is cool, but make sure your set has fun compounds... I mean, what the hell fun is copper sulphate, etc?
Also, keep a lab book: it makes for pretty fun reading later in life ("4oz nitrocellulose," what was I thinking?) and is helpful if you screw up and the doctor/bomb-disposal unit needs to figure out what was going on.
OK, then, should we trust people with.50 calibre machine guns? RPGs? Stinger missiles? F-22's? Tactical nukes? Unless you're going to argue that private citizens should be allowed to posess any weaponry they choose, you have to draw the line somewhere. The difference between US gun laws and the rest of the world's is merely that the line is drawn differently.
Yes. The 2nd amendment basically says private citizens can own whatever weapons they want. It's the only amendment that even bothers to give an reason as to why this is a good thing. If you look at the revisions/proposed text it's clear that this is a justification of the right, not a limitation.
Tactical nukes might not be valid: if the US signs a non-profileration agreement, etc, can it nullify citizens' rights to top-of-the-line weaponry? I'm inclined to think no (e.g. a DMCA type treaty should not remove our first amendment rights.)
And, taking your argument from the other end, if the government trusts its people so much, why aren't people allowed to smoke dope? With dope, the risk of a third party being harmed is surely much smaller than that with a rifle.
This, I think, was just an embarassing oversight. Like privacy, the authors never even conceived that the right to ingest wantever you wanted would become an issue that required liimts on the government's powers.
Because sand often travels *along* coastlines. If I build a sea-wall, I protect my bit of sand, and the beach down-stream erodes. This forces my downstream neighbor to sea-wall his beach, and so on. Pretty soon everyone has a sea-wall, a strange curved beach, crappy water circulation, and diminished tidal wildlife.
Sometimes you just got to accept that some shorelines erode, and banning all seawalls will reduce the overall erosion rate and protect the shoreline (in terms of clean sand, healthy ecosystem.) Yes, you must accept the shore will erode at a slow rate, but that is just nature at work... the only way to halt it is to build a seamless concrete fortification down the entire coast, which rather defeats the purpose.
To a company that sells software for a living, how can free software not be enemy #1?
For 15 years, free software was *NOT* Microsoft's enemy. Free software was utilities, shareware games, etc. These either encouraged the use of MS products, or made MS products easier to use. During those 15 years (say 1980 to 1995,) MS's enemies were exclusively rival OSes, rival compilers, rival PC networking solutions, rival wordprocessors, rival spreadsheets, and rival office productivity packages. Later, rival web browsing became important. Every one of these fights came down to keeping the standards-setting within Microsoft: as long as they owned the unpublished standards, they could crush a competitor trying to introduce a better product in any one area.
Linux only became possible due to the rise of the net: distribution became essentially free (FTP,) advertising became free (the WWW,) and user support became free (Usenet.) Linux gestated in a benign environment... by the time Microsoft noticed it ("free software - that's college kids making SpaceWar games"), it had grown to be a giant shark with fricking laser beams!
Well, the giant shark is loose now, and they see it as public enemy #1!
For example, the airplane was invented as a way to travel. As soon as the military saw this, they thought, we can drop bombs from this device.
No they didn't - it took the military the better part of 30 years to invent the concept of bombers.
They initially used planes as observation platforms (just like balloons and blimps, the other flying devices they had experience with.) Fighters came next, as the observation planes tried to do battle with one another. By the end of WWI, bombing from planes was still largely ineffective: artillery was much cheaper, could delivery much bigger payloads, and was well-integrated with infantry.
By 1935, the military had recognized the power of multiple engine bombers, and Europe had an early version of Mutually Assured Destruction (the belief that bombers could decimate each others' major cities and civilian populations.) WWII proved that this was a total misunderstanding of airpower: no country capitalulated due to bombing; civilian populations proved largely immune to bombing (air raid shelters, underground factories, dispersing people to the countryside.)
Have you ever throw a rock in a pond? The last place you want an asteroid to hit is in an ocean! Think big waves hitting the shores (which is where most people in the world live.) For a non-trivial, non-planet-killer, you want it to hit in the middle of a big landmass (e.g. middle of the USA, middle of Asia, middle of Australia, etc.) Almost zero population in all those places, still a lot of loss of life, but way less than slapping it down in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific!
The usually "defenses" by the GPL-violators appear to be:
1) A rogue summer-programmer copied the GPLed code into our product. [This probably doesn't fly - he was their agent.]
2) We re-implemented the code (fair enough, though most "reimplementations" are just rearranging and changing variable names, which probably will not stand up in court.)
3) We never read the GPL, so we couldn't have agreed to it. E.g. we found the routine on the web using a search engine, cut&paste, didn't read the rest of the file.)
4) We based our program on a stripped copy of the source we found somewhere - it contained no GPL.
5) The GPL is weaker than a click-through licence, we didn't even click to accept!
2 is completely a copyright issue. 3 & 4, if found credible by the court, may make the whole thing come down to copyright. 5 is interesting, but I don't know enough to judge.
He's confused about licenses versus copyright, e.g:
The GPL's language, then, tries to swallow every piece of software that incorporates a GPL program or portions of it. However, it probably cannot do so under the copyright law it purports to follow. The definition of a derivative work proves highly controversial in the software world, and may not stand up in court. [Page 15.]
This has nothing to do with the GPL!
If I create a derivative work from a copyrighted piece of GPL software, I can release it under my own terms without accepting the GPL. I then probably get sued by the COPYRIGHT holder, and the courts then decide if this was a derivative work, a new creation, a copyright infridgement, or whatever.
Alternatively, I can accept the license (the GPL,) in which case copyright law no longer applies: I have freely entered into a contract that gives me certain benefits and takes away certain others (e.g. my right to claim copyright trumps the license I just agreed to.) If I now start doing evil like violating the GPL, I get sued for violating a LICENSE, not copyright law.
The GPL does not "build on" copyright law - it's a license that I can agreed to or not. If I don't agree, copyright is the operative thing, if I do agree, the license if the operative thing!
I wish it were that simple. ICANN has big money and politics behind them. They will:
1) dump several gigabytes of electronic information on him - good luck finding the needle in the haystack. 2) mark tons of stuff confidential.
He doesn't have the time to build a case based on the interesting stuff, he's off the board real soon now. He can't leak the interesting stuff he finds -- 10 days = 6 months with holidays, court delays, and various appeals.
So, at best he finds some minor graft (e.g. those lovely ICANN vacations and travel expenses,) and some serious evil (a few hundred million $ to cronies for non-competitive bids to "administer the net.") He can't copy the evidence, and loses his right as a board-member to pursue within a few months. Even if he finds evidence, ICANN will appeal it as confidential, run out the clock, and claim he has no standing to continue. He's screwed, we're screwed.
There are no clear King George + address on the web-page. This just looks like a prank database addition by someone at Dell on a slow day (probably a Kermit user, tho.)
Compare the act of defacing a web site with that of spray-painting a brick and mortar store front. Graffiti is basically the same, whether it's on a web site or in the real world. We don't need a new law that applies specifically to the former; instead, we should simply charge the kiddies with vandalism, just as we would if they did the latter.
Oh, like we already have copyright law, so we don't need a new one, like the DMCA?
When I take a break from Gran Turismo, I like to reboot into Linux:) 4+ usable GFlops, gotta love this box!
[goro@ps2]$ dmesg use boot information at 0x81fff000(old style) boot option string at 0x81fff100: root=/dev/hda1 crtmode=ntsc Loading R5900 MMU routines. CPU revision is: 00002e20 Primary instruction cache 16kb, linesize 64 bytes Primary data cache 8kb, linesize 64 bytes
Branch Prediction : on
Double Issue : on Linux version 2.2.1 (root@anps2rel1) (gcc version 2.95.2 19991024 (release)) #1 Wed Nov 14 18:28:00 JST 2001 no initrd found Console: colour dummy device 80x25 Calibrating delay loop... 392.40 BogoMIPS Estimated CPU clock: 294.240 MHz Memory: 30828k/32760k available (1192k kernel code, 672k data) Checking for 'wait' instruction... unavailable. POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX PlayStation 2 SIF BIOS: 0250 Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2 Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039 NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0 for Linux NET4.0. NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0 IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP Linux IP multicast router 0.06 plus PIM-SM Starting kswapd v 1.5 PlayStation 2 device support: GIF, VIF, GS, VU, IPU, SPR Graphics Synthesizer revision: 00005515 Console: switching to colour PlayStation 2 Graphics Synthesizer 80x28 pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured ...
The Slashdot Auto-Ticketer will find the best flight and mail a free round-trip ticket to the address you used when you registered for your Slashdot account. Perl rocks.
Just post a message with the title "Need ticket from to." The Slashdot Auto-Ticketer will find the best flight and mail a free round-trip ticket to the address you used when you registered for your Slashdot account. Perl rocks.
No, I think product liability laws are an excellent thing: users have a right to expect that products behave in a reasonable way (simple products should have very high liability, more complex/powerful products less so.) E.g. if I buy a cup of coffee, I have an expectation that the cup is capable of holding the hot drink without collapsing. If I buy a chainsaw, I expect documentation and acknowledge that there is risk in my using it. If I buy a professional band-saw, I figure I might lose an arm (I'm not a professional woodworker).
If I buy an operating system, I'm happy that it works, and that it won't cost me a limb if I misuse it or it goes wrong. If it lets me read my mail, and I can re-install when it fails, I am using the tool at a consumer level. If, on the other hand, I write a shell script to dispense insulin for my wife, and the computer crashes, I have no one to blame but myself.
The comsumer PC need not be perfect, just mostly harmless. At this level, product liability should be almost a non-issue: switch to Linux if you don't like the easy-of-use/reliability point that you are at.
$60B/year sounds reasonable: 100 Million users, with an average wage of $10/hour = 60 hours/person/year wasted, Or about one and a half hours per week for your average person.
This is less bad than traffic jams, and somewhat worse than income tax forms.
But, so what? Would America benefit for bug-free software? Would spending $300 billion so that ATMs didn't crash, Microsoft Expedia always worked, Verizon's DSL billing was perfect, really be a good use of resources (even if we could do those things?)
We expect stuff to fail. Let the free market decide what level of error we will tolerate (e.g. I can deal 1 crash per year on my home machines, my parents don't mind 1 crash per day! - we have different needs and price points.)
Yes, opposition doesn't prevent a firm from being a monopoly. Consider the railroads in the 1800s: they were opposed by many (mostly those that needed to ship goods,) but they were still monopolistic because users didn't have a real choice of transportation vendors. The railroads used similar tactics to those of Microsoft today (incompatible hardware/protocols, discriminatory pricing, and exclusive partnership agreements.) In addition to strong-arming their customer base, the railroads also hired private "security firms" to hassle their competitors and detractors, spent large sums of money to lobby congress.
A vigorous opposition doesn't mean you are not a monopoly, but it does mean that your days may be numbered.
I've been pegged at 50 for a while, but you're right: that would be a neat +1 trick.
I've been considering trying for +50 in a single weekend with a throw-away account - if I ever get bored, look out for the "oops, sorry about that link" trick:)
According to the current price on Ideosphere, the X-prize will be won around Feb 2005. See the XPRIZE claim for the full bidding history.
I personally think Feb 2005 is way optimistic, especially given the reusability requirement: the same craft must fly twice in a 14-day period. A private effort to get a single manned launch is tough enough -- 14 days to test, re-prep, and relaunch? Even NASA would have a tough time.
Damn, I wish I could find graduates that really understood linked lists. Of the many I have interviewed in the past several years:
90% could explain what a linked list was. 80% could write code to implement one. 70% could explain the cost to insert/delete/find. 60% could explain when one might use a list. 50% had considered a list with a cycle. 40% could reason about lists with cycles. 30% could reverse a linked list by pointer flipping. 20% could contrast linked lists to other related data structures (stacks, queues, heaps, dlls, etc.) 10% understood quicksorting lists, delete-pointed-to-element, and other complex cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Section 501 takes care of that in one fell swoop: support a group the USG doesn't like, and you can be stripped of citizenship...
Section 501, "Expatriation of Terrorists": This provision, the drafters say, would establish that an American citizen could be expatriated "if, with the intent to relinquish his nationality, he becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United Stated has designated as a 'terrorist organization'." But whereas a citizen formerly had to state his intent to relinquish his citizenship, the new law affirms that his intent can be "inferred from conduct." Thus, engaging in the lawful activities of a group designated as a "terrorist organization" by the Attorney General could be presumptive grounds for expatriation.
Well, actually the article is about the solid fuel component of hybrid rocket motors.
A hybrid is a solid/liquid fuel combination - the liquid part is the oxidizer (usually O2,) while the solid part is usually a hydrocarbon (e.g. urethane, rubber, paper.)
As the article notes, hybrids have many benefits - they're stable under a wide range of conditions because the dirty stuff isn't mixed full of oxidizer, they often burn cleanly because the oxidizer can be pure O2 rather than am per, they can be throttled by varying the amount of oxidizer entering the chamber.
The traditional downside with hybrids was burn rate - you could get a long, weak burn, but not a fast, high-thrust burn. This makes hybrids unsuitable as booster rockets.
Seems these new motors have the high burn rate. Yipee!
Exactly - that was the experience I had with my old 300-in-1 chemistry set about 27 years ago.
I did 30 pages of book/guided stuff. E.g. filtering a sand and salt solution, then spending 2 hours getting the salt out of the solution... at the end, guess what? I had salt again!!! Gee, that was fun.
I switched to my own guided experiments soon after that: KnO3 is cool, magnesium burns pretty well, sulfur smells bad, but hydrogen sulphide is even better! My father (a chemist) banished my experiments to the garage.
Next month, I told my parents I needed a pound of sodium chlorate as a desiccant. My father managed to keep a straight face, but bought it for me anyway.
Many more self-directed experiments were performed, and I found myself learning in leaps and bounds: I learned about the surface area of reactants when I thoughtlessly substituted powdered charcoal for granulated sugar in a simple propulsion experiment. Haha, skin and hair grow back.
Chemistry is cool, but make sure your set has fun compounds... I mean, what the hell fun is copper sulphate, etc?
Also, keep a lab book: it makes for pretty fun reading later in life ("4oz nitrocellulose," what was I thinking?) and is helpful if you screw up and the doctor/bomb-disposal unit needs to figure out what was going on.
OK, then, should we trust people with
Yes. The 2nd amendment basically says private citizens can own whatever weapons they want. It's the only amendment that even bothers to give an reason as to why this is a good thing. If you look at the revisions/proposed text it's clear that this is a justification of the right, not a limitation.
Tactical nukes might not be valid: if the US signs a non-profileration agreement, etc, can it nullify citizens' rights to top-of-the-line weaponry? I'm inclined to think no (e.g. a DMCA type treaty should not remove our first amendment rights.)
And, taking your argument from the other end, if the government trusts its people so much, why aren't people allowed to smoke dope? With dope, the risk of a third party being harmed is surely much smaller than that with a rifle.
This, I think, was just an embarassing oversight. Like privacy, the authors never even conceived that the right to ingest wantever you wanted would become an issue that required liimts on the government's powers.
Because sand often travels *along* coastlines. If I build a sea-wall, I protect my bit of sand, and the beach down-stream erodes. This forces my downstream neighbor to sea-wall his beach, and so on. Pretty soon everyone has a sea-wall, a strange curved beach, crappy water circulation, and diminished tidal wildlife.
Sometimes you just got to accept that some shorelines erode, and banning all seawalls will reduce the overall erosion rate and protect the shoreline (in terms of clean sand, healthy ecosystem.) Yes, you must accept the shore will erode at a slow rate, but that is just nature at work... the only way to halt it is to build a seamless concrete fortification down the entire coast, which rather defeats the purpose.
To a company that sells software for a living, how can free software not be enemy #1?
For 15 years, free software was *NOT* Microsoft's enemy. Free software was utilities, shareware games, etc. These either encouraged the use of MS products, or made MS products easier to use. During those 15 years (say 1980 to 1995,) MS's enemies were exclusively rival OSes, rival compilers, rival PC networking solutions, rival wordprocessors, rival spreadsheets, and rival office productivity packages. Later, rival web browsing became important. Every one of these fights came down to keeping the standards-setting within Microsoft: as long as they owned the unpublished standards, they could crush a competitor trying to introduce a better product in any one area.
Linux only became possible due to the rise of the net: distribution became essentially free (FTP,) advertising became free (the WWW,) and user support became free (Usenet.) Linux gestated in a benign environment... by the time Microsoft noticed it ("free software - that's college kids making SpaceWar games"), it had grown to be a giant shark with fricking laser beams!
Well, the giant shark is loose now, and they see it as public enemy #1!
For example, the airplane was invented as a way to travel. As soon as the military saw this, they thought, we can drop bombs from this device.
No they didn't - it took the military the better part of 30 years to invent the concept of bombers.
They initially used planes as observation platforms (just like balloons and blimps, the other flying devices they had experience with.) Fighters came next, as the observation planes tried to do battle with one another. By the end of WWI, bombing from planes was still largely ineffective: artillery was much cheaper, could delivery much bigger payloads, and was well-integrated with infantry.
By 1935, the military had recognized the power of multiple engine bombers, and Europe had an early version of Mutually Assured Destruction (the belief that bombers could decimate each others' major cities and civilian populations.) WWII proved that this was a total misunderstanding of airpower: no country capitalulated due to bombing; civilian populations proved largely immune to bombing (air raid shelters, underground factories, dispersing people to the countryside.)
Unless, the idea is to push it toward the oceans.
Have you ever throw a rock in a pond? The last place you want an asteroid to hit is in an ocean! Think big waves hitting the shores (which is where most people in the world live.) For a non-trivial, non-planet-killer, you want it to hit in the middle of a big landmass (e.g. middle of the USA, middle of Asia, middle of Australia, etc.) Almost zero population in all those places, still a lot of loss of life, but way less than slapping it down in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific!
The usually "defenses" by the GPL-violators appear to be:
1) A rogue summer-programmer copied the GPLed code into our product. [This probably doesn't fly - he was their agent.]
2) We re-implemented the code (fair enough, though most "reimplementations" are just rearranging and changing variable names, which probably will not stand up in court.)
3) We never read the GPL, so we couldn't have agreed to it. E.g. we found the routine on the web using a search engine, cut&paste, didn't read the rest of the file.)
4) We based our program on a stripped copy of the source we found somewhere - it contained no GPL.
5) The GPL is weaker than a click-through licence, we didn't even click to accept!
2 is completely a copyright issue.
3 & 4, if found credible by the court, may make the whole thing come down to copyright.
5 is interesting, but I don't know enough to judge.
He's confused about licenses versus copyright, e.g:
The GPL's language, then, tries to swallow every piece of software that incorporates a GPL program or portions of it. However, it probably cannot do so under the copyright law it purports to follow. The definition of a derivative work proves highly controversial in the software world, and may not stand up in court. [Page 15.]
This has nothing to do with the GPL!
If I create a derivative work from a copyrighted piece of GPL software, I can release it under my own terms without accepting the GPL. I then probably get sued by the COPYRIGHT holder, and the courts then decide if this was a derivative work, a new creation, a copyright infridgement, or whatever.
Alternatively, I can accept the license (the GPL,) in which case copyright law no longer applies: I have freely entered into a contract that gives me certain benefits and takes away certain others (e.g. my right to claim copyright trumps the license I just agreed to.) If I now start doing evil like violating the GPL, I get sued for violating a LICENSE, not copyright law.
The GPL does not "build on" copyright law - it's a license that I can agreed to or not. If I don't agree, copyright is the operative thing, if I do agree, the license if the operative thing!
I wish it were that simple. ICANN has big money and politics behind them. They will:
1) dump several gigabytes of electronic information on him - good luck finding the needle in the haystack.
2) mark tons of stuff confidential.
He doesn't have the time to build a case based on the interesting stuff, he's off the board real soon now. He can't leak the interesting stuff he finds -- 10 days = 6 months with holidays, court delays, and various appeals.
So, at best he finds some minor graft (e.g. those lovely ICANN vacations and travel expenses,) and some serious evil (a few hundred million $ to cronies for non-competitive bids to "administer the net.") He can't copy the evidence, and loses his right as a board-member to pursue within a few months. Even if he finds evidence, ICANN will appeal it as confidential, run out the clock, and claim he has no standing to continue. He's screwed, we're screwed.
There are no clear King George + address on the web-page. This just looks like a prank database addition by someone at Dell on a slow day (probably a Kermit user, tho.)
Compare the act of defacing a web site with that of spray-painting a brick and mortar store front. Graffiti is basically the same, whether it's on a web site or in the real world. We don't need a new law that applies specifically to the former; instead, we should simply charge the kiddies with vandalism, just as we would if they did the latter.
Oh, like we already have copyright law, so we don't need a new one, like the DMCA?
When I take a break from Gran Turismo, I like to reboot into Linux:) 4+ usable GFlops, gotta love this box!
[goro@ps2]$ dmesg
use boot information at 0x81fff000(old style)
boot option string at 0x81fff100: root=/dev/hda1 crtmode=ntsc
Loading R5900 MMU routines.
CPU revision is: 00002e20
Primary instruction cache 16kb, linesize 64 bytes
Primary data cache 8kb, linesize 64 bytes
Branch Prediction : on
Double Issue : on
Linux version 2.2.1 (root@anps2rel1) (gcc version 2.95.2 19991024 (release)) #1 Wed Nov 14 18:28:00 JST 2001
no initrd found
Console: colour dummy device 80x25
Calibrating delay loop... 392.40 BogoMIPS
Estimated CPU clock: 294.240 MHz
Memory: 30828k/32760k available (1192k kernel code, 672k data)
Checking for 'wait' instruction... unavailable.
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
PlayStation 2 SIF BIOS: 0250
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0 for Linux NET4.0.
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP
Linux IP multicast router 0.06 plus PIM-SM
Starting kswapd v 1.5
PlayStation 2 device support: GIF, VIF, GS, VU, IPU, SPR
Graphics Synthesizer revision: 00005515
Console: switching to colour PlayStation 2 Graphics Synthesizer 80x28
pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured
...
Just post a message with the title:
"Need ticket from CityX to CityY."
The Slashdot Auto-Ticketer will find the best flight and mail a free round-trip ticket to the address you used when you registered for your Slashdot account. Perl rocks.
Just post a message with the title "Need ticket from to ." The Slashdot Auto-Ticketer will find the best flight and mail a free round-trip ticket to the address you used when you registered for your Slashdot account. Perl rocks.
No, I think product liability laws are an excellent thing: users have a right to expect that products behave in a reasonable way (simple products should have very high liability, more complex/powerful products less so.) E.g. if I buy a cup of coffee, I have an expectation that the cup is capable of holding the hot drink without collapsing. If I buy a chainsaw, I expect documentation and acknowledge that there is risk in my using it. If I buy a professional band-saw, I figure I might lose an arm (I'm not a professional woodworker).
If I buy an operating system, I'm happy that it works, and that it won't cost me a limb if I misuse it or it goes wrong. If it lets me read my mail, and I can re-install when it fails, I am using the tool at a consumer level. If, on the other hand, I write a shell script to dispense insulin for my wife, and the computer crashes, I have no one to blame but myself.
The comsumer PC need not be perfect, just mostly harmless. At this level, product liability should be almost a non-issue: switch to Linux if you don't like the easy-of-use/reliability point that you are at.
$60B/year sounds reasonable: 100 Million users, with an average wage of $10/hour = 60 hours/person/year wasted, Or about one and a half hours per week for your average person.
This is less bad than traffic jams, and somewhat worse than income tax forms.
But, so what? Would America benefit for bug-free software? Would spending $300 billion so that ATMs didn't crash, Microsoft Expedia always worked, Verizon's DSL billing was perfect, really be a good use of resources (even if we could do those things?)
We expect stuff to fail. Let the free market decide what level of error we will tolerate (e.g. I can deal 1 crash per year on my home machines, my parents don't mind 1 crash per day! - we have different needs and price points.)
Yes, opposition doesn't prevent a firm from being a monopoly. Consider the railroads in the 1800s: they were opposed by many (mostly those that needed to ship goods,) but they were still monopolistic because users didn't have a real choice of transportation vendors. The railroads used similar tactics to those of Microsoft today (incompatible hardware/protocols, discriminatory pricing, and exclusive partnership agreements.) In addition to strong-arming their customer base, the railroads also hired private "security firms" to hassle their competitors and detractors, spent large sums of money to lobby congress.
A vigorous opposition doesn't mean you are not a monopoly, but it does mean that your days may be numbered.
I've been pegged at 50 for a while, but you're right: that would be a neat +1 trick.
:)
I've been considering trying for +50 in a single weekend with a throw-away account - if I ever get bored, look out for the "oops, sorry about that link" trick
Sorry, blew that first link -- it's Ideosphere
According to the current price on Ideosphere, the X-prize will be won around Feb 2005. See the XPRIZE claim for the full bidding history.
I personally think Feb 2005 is way optimistic, especially given the reusability requirement: the same craft must fly twice in a 14-day period. A private effort to get a single manned launch is tough enough -- 14 days to test, re-prep, and relaunch? Even NASA would have a tough time.
Damn, I wish I could find graduates that really understood linked lists. Of the many I have interviewed in the past several years:
90% could explain what a linked list was.
80% could write code to implement one.
70% could explain the cost to insert/delete/find.
60% could explain when one might use a list.
50% had considered a list with a cycle.
40% could reason about lists with cycles.
30% could reverse a linked list by pointer flipping.
20% could contrast linked lists to other related data structures (stacks, queues, heaps, dlls, etc.)
10% understood quicksorting lists, delete-pointed-to-element, and other complex cases.
It's depressing.
Aarg, my brain! *I* *must* *resist* *the* *common* *sense.*
Hello, little bitch,
I want to paw your young skin.
It's safe, I'm muzzled!
-- Evil Dog Poetry Society ($642.37 on Google)