IANAL, but if you think it might make
serious money I'd like to insert (between
steps 2 and 3) setup some entity to protect
yourself, such as an LLC. They can't come after
your personal assets if it's done correctly.
Of course, if you have no net worth and are
setting this up by maxing out a credit card then
maybe you're not so concerned. Let them sue away,
and find out that you are a shallow pocket with
nothing but a months supply of ramen noodles and
thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Add insult
to injury by defending yourself for nothing vs.
their $500/hour attorneys. They might figure out
a way to garnish your future earnings though; so
setup the LLC anyway.
This is a letter held in trust since 1905 at the firm
of Brown, Ellison and Parker. They told Einstein to do this,
and now we are delivering this letter to you. We have kept
it sealed since then, and were told to deliver it to this address
at this date. Please sign here.
Of course you can't make the entire
program crash proof, but you can pay
particular attention to the parts that
might lead to data being deleted, making
them the number-1 priority.
Yes, any bug could lead to deleted
or corrupted data; but most don't.
This just tells us that ads have become expected.
Times square is one place. A NASCAR game would be another.
A busy New York street or a NASCAR race would actually
look wrong without ads because we've grown accustomed
to seeing them plastered everywhere. In those cases,
gamers might actually find the dissonance between reality
and the game to be a distraction.
Now imagine a game called "Grand Canyon Whitewater Rafting Adventure",
where you try to paddle through the canyon while being shot at (and shooting
back at) some enemy. Ads on the canyon walls might be every
bit as distracting as a Times Square without ads. We expect ads
in one canyon, but not in the other.
I recall having read that RTGs were used
extensively in remote Siberian locations during
the Soviet era. Apparently, leaking from these
RTGs, and the possibility of theft to make a dirty
bomb was a concern, and may still be. The Soviet records may have been poor or lost
during the transition.
Don't get me wrong. I think these devices can
be made very safe; but how do you "revolution proof"
any kind of reactor?
/me smacks forehead. Yeah, that makes perfect
sense. Now that I think about it, the fact that odds
were formulated "positively" like this, (ie, 0.99 of
something as opposed to 0.01 of something) was just one
of many things that made statistics difficult for me.
It's like the sign problem, only different.
I was happy just to pass that class and get out
alive.
Well, I said IANA statistician. Can you show
your work? It does make sense that some banks
would be able to hire 100 employees under those
circumstances and not bump into a criminal; but the
exact equation isn't something with which I'm familiar.
The other 28% must be small banks, or in denial.
If just 1 percent of the population is criminal, you
have to anticipate 1 criminal for every 100 people you
hire. IANA statistician, but even if you have well under
100 employees, the odds are still pretty good. I think it
would be like the birthday problem, where the odds of somebody
in a relatively small class having the same birthday as you
are surprisingly high.
Of course, I'm not sure what percent of the general
population would commit bank fraud if they had the opportunity.
That doesn't matter of course. People who are likely to commit
bank fraud will, of course, seek out jobs at the bank. As the
famous bank robber said, "that's where the money is".
...we just require professional sites to follow these rules?
That would kill two birds with one stone--it would weed out potentially
false reviews, and it would help bring professional journalism into the
digital age. If you want to be a professional
site, you have to follow the rules to maintain your license. If you don't
want to be a professional site, then you can say whatever you want; but those
who are looking for a review and want some level of professionalism
might be less likely to listen to you.
Now, Slashdot itself might decide to register as a professional site even
though its users posting comments aren't professionals. That's fine. A professional
site can have user-generated content, as long as it's easily distinguishable from
professional content, and on Slashdot that's easy. The main story at the top would
have to follow professional guidelines. User comments like this one wouldn't.
There, FTC. Fixed that for you.
Now I'm going to have a cup of Pete's coffee. It really is very good.
One mother-of-all-connectors would be nice.
I'm not willing to pay through the nose for that.
Have the prices on those things come down? My impression
on them is that they're proprietary and expensive; but if
they're not, then sure I'd much rather have one fat
connector.
Ethernet is actually very easy to connect. The only
connector that's really a hassle is the monitor, but if
you cheat and don't turn the little screws then it's
not so bad. If I'm going to be at the desk for a long
time, I turn the screws. If I'm moving the laptop into
the next room so I can watch movies on the big screen,
I just put the monitor cable in loosely, and then I use
WiFi but only because I don't want to trip over a cable
when I get up for snacks. Most of the time
the laptop is on the desk, but sometimes it moves into
the living area and plays DVDs, YouTube, or Hulu. That kills off another
device, and cable TV!
I guess the convenience of not having to spend less
than a minute plugging in cables isn't worth multiple
devices and thousands of dollars to me. In these tough
economic times, I think more people will be willing to
spend a few seconds plugging in a cable; but I've always
been a bit cheap I suppose, and not interested in chasing
every new little gadget that comes along, and if there's a way
to duplicate functionality with a reasonable effort, I'll just
duplicate the functionality instead of paying for the convenient
version.
My laptop has enough power. If I wanted more, I could get a "desktop replacement" laptop;
but I'm fine with what I've got.
When I'm not going mobile, I plug in a keyboard. I can even drive the classic AT
keyboard you see in this picture, via adapters which aren't expensive at all.
I've also plugged in an auxilliary monitor.
My chair (not pictured) is not fancy, but it's comfortable enough for me.
As you can see, I've even got multimedia speakers plugged in. I watch vids
all the time like this. The only thing I can't do is expand my hardware; but I'm
not trying to build some neon game machine here. Once I got this laptop setup,
I never looked back.
IIRC, there was an overpriced solution back in the day called a "docking station";
but modern laptops have all the power, and all the connectors you need to duplicate
the desktop experience. I have a comfortable workstation that I can take on the road
with me. I can't imagine why anybody would want a traditional tower case that's not
mobile.
Oh, in case you're wondering, the case is open because I like the trackpad. I could
use a mouse separately and move the machine off the desktop if I really wanted to do that.
We should just build a central track
down I-5. Drive your car onto the train,
shut off the motor. Let the train go 200 mph there.
Drive off train.
Either that, or we should just build an autobahn
down the middle of I-5, separated from the trucks
and grannies. Require a special license, like you need
an M-1 for motorcycles, require an A-1 for the autobahn.
Minimum speed 120 mph in the right lane. Maximum 200 mph
in the left. Problem solved.
The Europeans will probably come up with a way to
equip cars with 3rd rail pickups and for them to form
into trains that are controlled by computer. We'll sink
all our money into 20th century tech. Feh. If we're going
to fork over that much dough, I want to see something really
new--the kind of thing we used to do; leading not following.
I don't get it either. Friggin PRO CASTRO demonstrators
marched right through the intersection of 18th and U Streets
when I lived in Washington DC, and nobody cared. The DC police
escorted them through the intersection, and along U St.
You've never heard about this protest, because the police
were cool about it. Nobody takes a pro-Castro protest seriously.
The G-20 protestors are being taken seriously, and it's backfiring
on the cops. If they treated these protestors with the same
civility that the pro-Castro demonstration was treated, you probably
wouldn't hear very much about it.
Ummm... that'd defeat the whole purpose, since charges of treason and the implementation
of capital punishment are fraught with all kinds of Contitutional perils. This is especially
so when they are carried out in haste, so no thank-you.
FWIW, my XXIX would be to abolish capital punishment. I'm not soft on crime though.
If you committ armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, rape or murder the ammendment
should also state you get life with no chance of parole, and it goes without saying that
there's a "we really mean it clause". This would be quite easy to implement since our
jails would be less crowded due to:
XXX: I can grow any plant I want as long as it's not GMO that wind pollinates
my neighbor's fields. I can put anything in my body and it ain't the Fed's biz.
And the duct-tape programmer is not afraid to say, "multiple inheritance sucks. Stop it. Just stop."
Thank-you Joel, for saying that. Some features
just need to be ripped out, and MI is one. I'm not
a huge fan of Java; but this is one thing they got right.
When so many successful apps are written in something
that doesn't have that feature, you need to ask yourself
why it exists. That alone is not reason enough to eliminate
it; but it's a start. When I learned about MI and tried
it, I could tell it was a train wreck and I never used it.
That was 10 years ago when I was obviously less experienced;
but it's cool to see that validated by someone like Spolsky.
What's wrong with "Parmesan-style", "Champagne-style", etc.
You could require that the "style" be in the same size and
font as the other part of the name on the packaging. You could
also require that the actual origin be near the name: Parmesan-style
cheese from Champagne.
...wouldn't it be awesome if we had an "open car platform"
that would let you put whatever the heck you wanted in there?
I understand that opening the whole platform might have safety
and/or legal issues; but I can dream.
Besides, people already put illegal chips in their cars to
override the emissions and get more HP.
Arguing that the whole car system should be closed only
hurts law abiding people who'd like to put their own noise in there,
or change the fonts on their computerized dash display.
That, and once you've opened the door to letting
people direct tons of metal at high velocity, any other mod
they make is relatively unimportant as far as safety
is concerned. Of course, that kind of
logic never works when it comes to legal stuff so... sigh...
we're pretty much left with the stock noise and/or voiding
our warranties, risking hefty fines, or a trip to Gitmo because
we violated the Digitial Millenium Car Act.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey let's put it in the LHC and see what hap(&(*%&* NO CARRIER.
IANAL, but if you think it might make serious money I'd like to insert (between steps 2 and 3) setup some entity to protect yourself, such as an LLC. They can't come after your personal assets if it's done correctly.
Of course, if you have no net worth and are setting this up by maxing out a credit card then maybe you're not so concerned. Let them sue away, and find out that you are a shallow pocket with nothing but a months supply of ramen noodles and thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Add insult to injury by defending yourself for nothing vs. their $500/hour attorneys. They might figure out a way to garnish your future earnings though; so setup the LLC anyway.
carry your buckets of bits back home with you
In my experience, but buckets are no good. Everything I've ever heard of that goes into a bit bucket, doesn't come out.
How about environmentally-friendly reuseable bit bags?
This is a letter held in trust since 1905 at the firm of Brown, Ellison and Parker. They told Einstein to do this, and now we are delivering this letter to you. We have kept it sealed since then, and were told to deliver it to this address at this date. Please sign here.
Of course you can't make the entire program crash proof, but you can pay particular attention to the parts that might lead to data being deleted, making them the number-1 priority.
Yes, any bug could lead to deleted or corrupted data; but most don't.
If one thing has been burned into my brain as a programmer, it's this:
Crash all you want, but never, ever, ever harm, corrupt and by all that's holy, NEVER delete the user's data.
The data is sacred. The data is life.
it probably lacks sex scandal capabilities
They could interface this to it. (Warning, NSFW).
Magic 8-ball predicts dartboards overtaking analysts in 2016.
This just tells us that ads have become expected. Times square is one place. A NASCAR game would be another. A busy New York street or a NASCAR race would actually look wrong without ads because we've grown accustomed to seeing them plastered everywhere. In those cases, gamers might actually find the dissonance between reality and the game to be a distraction.
Now imagine a game called "Grand Canyon Whitewater Rafting Adventure", where you try to paddle through the canyon while being shot at (and shooting back at) some enemy. Ads on the canyon walls might be every bit as distracting as a Times Square without ads. We expect ads in one canyon, but not in the other.
I recall having read that RTGs were used extensively in remote Siberian locations during the Soviet era. Apparently, leaking from these RTGs, and the possibility of theft to make a dirty bomb was a concern, and may still be. The Soviet records may have been poor or lost during the transition.
Don't get me wrong. I think these devices can be made very safe; but how do you "revolution proof" any kind of reactor?
I always have to note it with just a bit of irony when somebody complains about government on the Internet. You know who created the Internet, right?
/me smacks forehead. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Now that I think about it, the fact that odds were formulated "positively" like this, (ie, 0.99 of something as opposed to 0.01 of something) was just one of many things that made statistics difficult for me. It's like the sign problem, only different.
I was happy just to pass that class and get out alive.
Well, I said IANA statistician. Can you show your work? It does make sense that some banks would be able to hire 100 employees under those circumstances and not bump into a criminal; but the exact equation isn't something with which I'm familiar.
The other 28% must be small banks, or in denial. If just 1 percent of the population is criminal, you have to anticipate 1 criminal for every 100 people you hire. IANA statistician, but even if you have well under 100 employees, the odds are still pretty good. I think it would be like the birthday problem, where the odds of somebody in a relatively small class having the same birthday as you are surprisingly high.
Of course, I'm not sure what percent of the general population would commit bank fraud if they had the opportunity. That doesn't matter of course. People who are likely to commit bank fraud will, of course, seek out jobs at the bank. As the famous bank robber said, "that's where the money is".
...we just require professional sites to follow these rules? That would kill two birds with one stone--it would weed out potentially false reviews, and it would help bring professional journalism into the digital age. If you want to be a professional site, you have to follow the rules to maintain your license. If you don't want to be a professional site, then you can say whatever you want; but those who are looking for a review and want some level of professionalism might be less likely to listen to you.
Now, Slashdot itself might decide to register as a professional site even though its users posting comments aren't professionals. That's fine. A professional site can have user-generated content, as long as it's easily distinguishable from professional content, and on Slashdot that's easy. The main story at the top would have to follow professional guidelines. User comments like this one wouldn't.
There, FTC. Fixed that for you.
Now I'm going to have a cup of Pete's coffee. It really is very good.
One mother-of-all-connectors would be nice. I'm not willing to pay through the nose for that. Have the prices on those things come down? My impression on them is that they're proprietary and expensive; but if they're not, then sure I'd much rather have one fat connector.
Ethernet is actually very easy to connect. The only connector that's really a hassle is the monitor, but if you cheat and don't turn the little screws then it's not so bad. If I'm going to be at the desk for a long time, I turn the screws. If I'm moving the laptop into the next room so I can watch movies on the big screen, I just put the monitor cable in loosely, and then I use WiFi but only because I don't want to trip over a cable when I get up for snacks. Most of the time the laptop is on the desk, but sometimes it moves into the living area and plays DVDs, YouTube, or Hulu. That kills off another device, and cable TV!
I guess the convenience of not having to spend less than a minute plugging in cables isn't worth multiple devices and thousands of dollars to me. In these tough economic times, I think more people will be willing to spend a few seconds plugging in a cable; but I've always been a bit cheap I suppose, and not interested in chasing every new little gadget that comes along, and if there's a way to duplicate functionality with a reasonable effort, I'll just duplicate the functionality instead of paying for the convenient version.
All of these problems are easily solved
My laptop has enough power. If I wanted more, I could get a "desktop replacement" laptop; but I'm fine with what I've got.
When I'm not going mobile, I plug in a keyboard. I can even drive the classic AT keyboard you see in this picture, via adapters which aren't expensive at all.
I've also plugged in an auxilliary monitor.
My chair (not pictured) is not fancy, but it's comfortable enough for me.
As you can see, I've even got multimedia speakers plugged in. I watch vids all the time like this. The only thing I can't do is expand my hardware; but I'm not trying to build some neon game machine here. Once I got this laptop setup, I never looked back.
IIRC, there was an overpriced solution back in the day called a "docking station"; but modern laptops have all the power, and all the connectors you need to duplicate the desktop experience. I have a comfortable workstation that I can take on the road with me. I can't imagine why anybody would want a traditional tower case that's not mobile.
Oh, in case you're wondering, the case is open because I like the trackpad. I could use a mouse separately and move the machine off the desktop if I really wanted to do that.
We should just build a central track down I-5. Drive your car onto the train, shut off the motor. Let the train go 200 mph there. Drive off train.
Either that, or we should just build an autobahn down the middle of I-5, separated from the trucks and grannies. Require a special license, like you need an M-1 for motorcycles, require an A-1 for the autobahn. Minimum speed 120 mph in the right lane. Maximum 200 mph in the left. Problem solved.
The Europeans will probably come up with a way to equip cars with 3rd rail pickups and for them to form into trains that are controlled by computer. We'll sink all our money into 20th century tech. Feh. If we're going to fork over that much dough, I want to see something really new--the kind of thing we used to do; leading not following.
I don't get it either. Friggin PRO CASTRO demonstrators marched right through the intersection of 18th and U Streets when I lived in Washington DC, and nobody cared. The DC police escorted them through the intersection, and along U St.
You've never heard about this protest, because the police were cool about it. Nobody takes a pro-Castro protest seriously. The G-20 protestors are being taken seriously, and it's backfiring on the cops. If they treated these protestors with the same civility that the pro-Castro demonstration was treated, you probably wouldn't hear very much about it.
Ummm... that'd defeat the whole purpose, since charges of treason and the implementation of capital punishment are fraught with all kinds of Contitutional perils. This is especially so when they are carried out in haste, so no thank-you.
FWIW, my XXIX would be to abolish capital punishment. I'm not soft on crime though. If you committ armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, rape or murder the ammendment should also state you get life with no chance of parole, and it goes without saying that there's a "we really mean it clause". This would be quite easy to implement since our jails would be less crowded due to:
XXX: I can grow any plant I want as long as it's not GMO that wind pollinates my neighbor's fields. I can put anything in my body and it ain't the Fed's biz.
And the duct-tape programmer is not afraid to say, "multiple inheritance sucks. Stop it. Just stop."
Thank-you Joel, for saying that. Some features just need to be ripped out, and MI is one. I'm not a huge fan of Java; but this is one thing they got right. When so many successful apps are written in something that doesn't have that feature, you need to ask yourself why it exists. That alone is not reason enough to eliminate it; but it's a start. When I learned about MI and tried it, I could tell it was a train wreck and I never used it. That was 10 years ago when I was obviously less experienced; but it's cool to see that validated by someone like Spolsky.
I hereby propose to resolve this problem by an ammendment to the Constitution, to read as follows:
XXVIII. We really mean it.
I'd take some Vermont on my pancakes any day
Would you like the sandy loam or the loose clay?
What's wrong with "Parmesan-style", "Champagne-style", etc.
You could require that the "style" be in the same size and font as the other part of the name on the packaging. You could also require that the actual origin be near the name: Parmesan-style cheese from Champagne.
...wouldn't it be awesome if we had an "open car platform" that would let you put whatever the heck you wanted in there? I understand that opening the whole platform might have safety and/or legal issues; but I can dream.
Besides, people already put illegal chips in their cars to override the emissions and get more HP.
Arguing that the whole car system should be closed only hurts law abiding people who'd like to put their own noise in there, or change the fonts on their computerized dash display.
That, and once you've opened the door to letting people direct tons of metal at high velocity, any other mod they make is relatively unimportant as far as safety is concerned. Of course, that kind of logic never works when it comes to legal stuff so... sigh... we're pretty much left with the stock noise and/or voiding our warranties, risking hefty fines, or a trip to Gitmo because we violated the Digitial Millenium Car Act.