Stupid argument? Why no honesty? Same answer to both questions: politics.
All I'm stating is why the tax cutters get political traction. Bringing logic and honesty to a debate about politics is like bringing a tuna casserole to a knife fight.
I was with you until you started blaming the tax-cutters for all our woes. I've seen many of the schools in the Silicon Valley area. Seen what they have that is new and well maintained (football fields, gyms, etc) and what is in deplorable conditions (science labs, teacher work preparation areas). And... I've seen the Santa Clara county department of education offices, and the large fountain they have in the spacious three story atrium and the nicely appointed giagantic meeting rooms. Sure, it takes money to run a school -- maybe the administrators should start spending it on education instead of fountains in atriums. When the science labs are well equiped and the county administrators are working out of the same size cubical that I had as a second-level engineering manager at a successful company just down the road, then we can talk about finding money to fill the real needs. Fountains in atriums for non-teaching administration offices are not a real need.
Yes, I resent that fountain, and that office building. I pay for it. When I walked into that building for the first time I was livid. That fountain is not doing anything at all toward getting my child educated. You want to know why the tax cutters are so strident? It is because they are so badly outnumbered by the tax squanderers. There needs to be a focus on results, and on what gets results, and then people will willingly pay their taxes.
Cygnus approached that in part by being the party selling support on a contract basis. They came in wearing suits, asking for signatures on expensive contracts, and promised to fix the bugs and implement special requirements. You said it yourself, what the execs want is supported software, they really don't give a rat's butt where the software comes from, they just want to know that in the future they can get someone's undivided attention when it needs fixing, and that the party that will fix it has the resources to implement the fix. Cygnus sold attention.
Now, on the darker side, they were known to hold certain trivial ("two-line") patches in their back pocket rather than push them to the open source repository so that they could charge each of their customers $50K to apply the patch to each customer's version of the software. I'm aware of one case where they charged two different divisions of the same company (who clearly didn't talk very much) for the same fix. Cynus was good at the contract game, writing them, selling them, and strategic fulfillment of them.
T-Mobile is not that bad here. In our family we've had two T-Mobile phones and one AT&T phone for a couple of years, after leaving Verizon. Verizon is bad news to deal with. AT&T doesn't care, they don't have to, but at least they have coverage where I need it and use GSM technology. T-Mobile is good to deal with, but the coverage is not so great. The problem with the USA, especially in the West, is that we have miles and miles of miles and miles. Building out and maintaing infrastructure is much harder here than in Germany or France simply because of the population density distribution. T-Mobile just has a hard time coming up with enough money to build enough infrastructure to grab enough customers to make enough money to build enough infrastructure.
There used to be a time where you could politically disagree with some but still be great friends, or at the very least amicable colleagues. Nowadays, the other political side is just filled with inhuman enemies that need to be degraded and driven into oblivion.
Indeed. I recall when Hubert Humphrey retuned to the Senate floor after months of cancer treatment. He was terminal, in the last weeks of his life, but he found the energy to return one last time. Barry Goldwater, a man he had run against during a presidential election, a man who was always on the opposite side of any debate, crossed the aisle and embraced Humphrey in a bear hug that lasted a least two minutes, Senate decorum be damned. On national television. These two men, decade after decade, made the case for their beliefs, debated vigorously, but never lost each other's respect. Where has that gone?
It is impressive. First off, most of the waveglider is on the surface. It has a passive submerged propusion unit on a cable. Secondly, it has a lot of sophisticated electronics and antennas in and on the surface unit. It survived a nasty test very, very well. Maybe the reason I am extremely impressed and you are not has to do with the fact that I actually build robots, and you don't have a clue about what it takes to build something that can live in an office for 6 months without breaking, much less on the ocean in a major storm. As we say in the local robot club when some newbie comes with a grand scheme of how to solve all of our challenges: "Talk is cheap. Show me your working robot."
Whenever the topic of whether or not the source code to voting machines should be inspected, I always point here: http://gaming.nv.gov/index.asp... and ask: 1) What do you think would happen to your slot machine if you told those guys you weren't going to show them your source code? and 2) Why not let these guys look at the voting machines, too. Seems like a transferable skill.
I assume you mean 4 x 500mA, or 500mA per port. So do you really have 500mA peripherals plugged into *every* USB port? Or are you expecting the Pi to support the USB charging spec? 'Cuz there are better ways to charge your phone...
I only wish python didn't have semantic whitespace. That's it. Otherwise i like it just fine.
I'll disagree on that. We use white space to communicate our programs' block structure to other humans. Why should we use a different syntax to tell the compiler the same information? Computers should conform to the needs of humans. Full. Stop. Python eliminates that source of bugs and redundancy by having the compiler's view of the significance of what space match a human's view of significance of white space. Please join us in the 21st century. I'm old enough that I did undergrand homeworks with punch cards, and just missed being taught intro to programming using FORTRAN. One thing I've learned over the years is to recognize progress when I see it.
Actually, you make me reflect on how advanced their code really was. I'm not sure where the code was from. It would process X-Ray scatter data, and plot stereo images of crystal structures showing lots of little pen-plotted circles for atoms. The 3D view was quite remarkable, although you only got one angle. Changing view angle required another plot. Considering Ivan Sutherland's line clipping algorithm dates from the 60's, the crystalography code was quite advanced for the time -- there was a lot of hidden line removal going on to render the atoms correctly.
The plots were really slow... but the plotter was mesmerizing. I used to watch it through the window while waiting for my homework to come back after handing the card deck across the counter. Now, pardon me while I find my walker, damn kids on the lawn again.....
I remember back in the 1970's, the X-Ray crystalography researchers at my university would burn up lots of compute time (on an IBM 360/65, 1 MIPS, 4 mega-bytes of core) computing stereo images that were rendered by writing a mag tape that was then taken to a CalComp pen plotter. Two images, about 8 x 8 inches, were plotted, and then they would lay them on a table and use an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of cardboard from a used-up paper tablet to make a baffle between their eyes.
That's the first thing that popped into my mind. After having spent many hours over the past week helping my daughter do paperwork so that she could submit her extremely benign science fair project to the county science fair's institutional review board, I'm wondering how FB can get way with this? I guess that they can get away with it because no one will call them out on it, unless some victims file a lawsuit.
That's the modern world -- a 15 year old kid doing something demonstrably harmless has to do hours of paperwork to demonstrate a device to a dozen people, but a multi-national corporation can psychologically manipulate thousands of people with the intention to see if they can alter their mood with no oversight.
OK, so Freshmeat... er Freecode was a site with an up-to-the-minute listing of the latest source updates. It's value was in the freshness. And the site is going static.... *boggle*... what part of this am I not getting? A static version of Freecode is a waste of a good IPV4 address.
My daughter just did it. It is a Java-based introductory programming class. Supposed to be equivalent to a first semester programming class. You need to be able to read and code basic Java classes, understand Java scoping rules, and basic iteration and vectors. The AP test uses a case study called "Bug World" which involves instances of different classes of bugs, rocks, and I think flowers (I might be mis-remembering) and as part of the AP class you become familiar with the corpus of code to get experience reading a larger program. On the AP exam, you are asked to extend and modify Bug World.
Every kid I have talked to about the CS AP exam found it dead easy and the class not very stimulating. I have a hard time seeing how the avarage high school student would have so much trouble with it.
The Civil Rights Act of 1871 was signed by President Grant to deal with the Klan and others in the aftermath of the civil war. So, yeah, if the sheriff is at the front of the pack wearing a white sheet when somebody gets hanged for trying to vote, that might get the death penalty for the sheriff.
Soooo.... turn the liver into an alcohol powered fuel cell? So the only way your phone has enough charge to send a text is if you are drunk on your @ss? Do you really want to live in a world like that?
Section 1983 lawsuits for deprivation of civil rights under color of authority allows piercing the immunity of public officers and going after their personal assets. In this case, the mayor, and any of the police that participated. Their. Personal. Assets. Not the taxpayers. http://legal-dictionary.thefre...
The issue was not charging stations at either end, it was the dearth in between. You can go ahead and pretend that charging stations are as ubiquitous as gas stations, but they are not. In some places, like my neighborhood, they are more than sufficient. Out of town, not so much. Anyway, go ahead and believe what you want -- I gave you two data points. You gave me zero, and some arm waving. I am *not* anti electric car, we're shopping for a Leaf, and two neighbors have Leafs. This is a great town in which to own a Leaf. But I stand by my assertion -- road trips with an electric car require advanced planning with respect to recharging, where as a road trip in an ICE vehicle largely does not require advanced planning with respect to refueling.
And is charging really free in small-town Oregon? Here, many of the charge stations, including those in employer parking lots, are debit-card activiated.
Well, range is still a concern. I drove to a convention where two Tesla-owning friends also went. I lisented to their discussion about how to manage the range issue of driving to a place that is just beyond a single charge, how they had to plan their recharging stop, how it limited their choices for a lunch break. None of us gasoliine vehicle drivers had that discussion. So it is still not only a concern, they find range interesting dinner conversation. Range is getting better, surely, but stll is above the "have to think about it" threshold.
That requires a Section 1983 lawsuit, "Denial of civil rights under color of authority." Then you can pierce immunity and go after the personal assets of the goverment official. Getting a ruling like this one, where a federal court has stated quite clearly that people have a 1A right to film police is a key step. Now that it is clearly established that people have a 1A right to film, the *next* cop to get sued over this is wide open for a 1983.
Look people, this is NOT a 2A issue, this is a 1A issue. When does censorship stop? Why can't gun plans be published?
This may be a first amendment issue, or perhaps it is a second amendment issue, but that will be up to a court to decide. What you fail to understand is that like many Americans (I am American too, so I"m allowed to say that), you think that all rights are absolute
Nope. Didn't say that. Go re-read what I posted. Stop putting words into my mouth so that you can argue with them. Argue with what I *actually* said, not with some strawman that you made up from whole cloth.
What part of preventing the publishing of plans is not censorship? Look as hard as you like, I don't think you will find a part of preventing publishing that is not censorship.
When do national security interests trump anti-censorship? That question will keep thoughtful people debating for a long time. But somehow, I don't think 3D printed gun plans cross the line to national security.
Slashdot Mirror
Stupid argument? Why no honesty? Same answer to both questions: politics.
All I'm stating is why the tax cutters get political traction. Bringing logic and honesty to a debate about politics is like bringing a tuna casserole to a knife fight.
I was with you until you started blaming the tax-cutters for all our woes. I've seen many of the schools in the Silicon Valley area. Seen what they have that is new and well maintained (football fields, gyms, etc) and what is in deplorable conditions (science labs, teacher work preparation areas). And... I've seen the Santa Clara county department of education offices, and the large fountain they have in the spacious three story atrium and the nicely appointed giagantic meeting rooms. Sure, it takes money to run a school -- maybe the administrators should start spending it on education instead of fountains in atriums. When the science labs are well equiped and the county administrators are working out of the same size cubical that I had as a second-level engineering manager at a successful company just down the road, then we can talk about finding money to fill the real needs. Fountains in atriums for non-teaching administration offices are not a real need.
Yes, I resent that fountain, and that office building. I pay for it. When I walked into that building for the first time I was livid. That fountain is not doing anything at all toward getting my child educated. You want to know why the tax cutters are so strident? It is because they are so badly outnumbered by the tax squanderers. There needs to be a focus on results, and on what gets results, and then people will willingly pay their taxes.
Cygnus approached that in part by being the party selling support on a contract basis. They came in wearing suits, asking for signatures on expensive contracts, and promised to fix the bugs and implement special requirements. You said it yourself, what the execs want is supported software, they really don't give a rat's butt where the software comes from, they just want to know that in the future they can get someone's undivided attention when it needs fixing, and that the party that will fix it has the resources to implement the fix. Cygnus sold attention.
Now, on the darker side, they were known to hold certain trivial ("two-line") patches in their back pocket rather than push them to the open source repository so that they could charge each of their customers $50K to apply the patch to each customer's version of the software. I'm aware of one case where they charged two different divisions of the same company (who clearly didn't talk very much) for the same fix. Cynus was good at the contract game, writing them, selling them, and strategic fulfillment of them.
T-Mobile is not that bad here. In our family we've had two T-Mobile phones and one AT&T phone for a couple of years, after leaving Verizon. Verizon is bad news to deal with. AT&T doesn't care, they don't have to, but at least they have coverage where I need it and use GSM technology. T-Mobile is good to deal with, but the coverage is not so great. The problem with the USA, especially in the West, is that we have miles and miles of miles and miles. Building out and maintaing infrastructure is much harder here than in Germany or France simply because of the population density distribution. T-Mobile just has a hard time coming up with enough money to build enough infrastructure to grab enough customers to make enough money to build enough infrastructure.
There used to be a time where you could politically disagree with some but still be great friends, or at the very least amicable colleagues. Nowadays, the other political side is just filled with inhuman enemies that need to be degraded and driven into oblivion.
Indeed. I recall when Hubert Humphrey retuned to the Senate floor after months of cancer treatment. He was terminal, in the last weeks of his life, but he found the energy to return one last time. Barry Goldwater, a man he had run against during a presidential election, a man who was always on the opposite side of any debate, crossed the aisle and embraced Humphrey in a bear hug that lasted a least two minutes, Senate decorum be damned. On national television. These two men, decade after decade, made the case for their beliefs, debated vigorously, but never lost each other's respect. Where has that gone?
It is impressive. First off, most of the waveglider is on the surface. It has a passive submerged propusion unit on a cable. Secondly, it has a lot of sophisticated electronics and antennas in and on the surface unit. It survived a nasty test very, very well. Maybe the reason I am extremely impressed and you are not has to do with the fact that I actually build robots, and you don't have a clue about what it takes to build something that can live in an office for 6 months without breaking, much less on the ocean in a major storm. As we say in the local robot club when some newbie comes with a grand scheme of how to solve all of our challenges: "Talk is cheap. Show me your working robot."
Great link. Very well stated.
Whenever the topic of whether or not the source code to voting machines should be inspected, I always point here: http://gaming.nv.gov/index.asp... and ask: 1) What do you think would happen to your slot machine if you told those guys you weren't going to show them your source code? and 2) Why not let these guys look at the voting machines, too. Seems like a transferable skill.
I assume you mean 4 x 500mA, or 500mA per port. So do you really have 500mA peripherals plugged into *every* USB port? Or are you expecting the Pi to support the USB charging spec? 'Cuz there are better ways to charge your phone...
Not to mention _The And and the Aardvark_:
"I hate you, instant hole!" the Blue Aardvark
I only wish python didn't have semantic whitespace. That's it. Otherwise i like it just fine.
I'll disagree on that. We use white space to communicate our programs' block structure to other humans. Why should we use a different syntax to tell the compiler the same information? Computers should conform to the needs of humans. Full. Stop. Python eliminates that source of bugs and redundancy by having the compiler's view of the significance of what space match a human's view of significance of white space. Please join us in the 21st century. I'm old enough that I did undergrand homeworks with punch cards, and just missed being taught intro to programming using FORTRAN. One thing I've learned over the years is to recognize progress when I see it.
Actually, you make me reflect on how advanced their code really was. I'm not sure where the code was from. It would process X-Ray scatter data, and plot stereo images of crystal structures showing lots of little pen-plotted circles for atoms. The 3D view was quite remarkable, although you only got one angle. Changing view angle required another plot. Considering Ivan Sutherland's line clipping algorithm dates from the 60's, the crystalography code was quite advanced for the time -- there was a lot of hidden line removal going on to render the atoms correctly.
The plots were really slow... but the plotter was mesmerizing. I used to watch it through the window while waiting for my homework to come back after handing the card deck across the counter. Now, pardon me while I find my walker, damn kids on the lawn again.....
I remember back in the 1970's, the X-Ray crystalography researchers at my university would burn up lots of compute time (on an IBM 360/65, 1 MIPS, 4 mega-bytes of core) computing stereo images that were rendered by writing a mag tape that was then taken to a CalComp pen plotter. Two images, about 8 x 8 inches, were plotted, and then they would lay them on a table and use an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of cardboard from a used-up paper tablet to make a baffle between their eyes.
That's the first thing that popped into my mind. After having spent many hours over the past week helping my daughter do paperwork so that she could submit her extremely benign science fair project to the county science fair's institutional review board, I'm wondering how FB can get way with this? I guess that they can get away with it because no one will call them out on it, unless some victims file a lawsuit.
That's the modern world -- a 15 year old kid doing something demonstrably harmless has to do hours of paperwork to demonstrate a device to a dozen people, but a multi-national corporation can psychologically manipulate thousands of people with the intention to see if they can alter their mood with no oversight.
OK, so Freshmeat... er Freecode was a site with an up-to-the-minute listing of the latest source updates. It's value was in the freshness. And the site is going static.... *boggle*... what part of this am I not getting? A static version of Freecode is a waste of a good IPV4 address.
My daughter just did it. It is a Java-based introductory programming class. Supposed to be equivalent to a first semester programming class. You need to be able to read and code basic Java classes, understand Java scoping rules, and basic iteration and vectors. The AP test uses a case study called "Bug World" which involves instances of different classes of bugs, rocks, and I think flowers (I might be mis-remembering) and as part of the AP class you become familiar with the corpus of code to get experience reading a larger program. On the AP exam, you are asked to extend and modify Bug World.
Every kid I have talked to about the CS AP exam found it dead easy and the class not very stimulating. I have a hard time seeing how the avarage high school student would have so much trouble with it.
The Civil Rights Act of 1871 was signed by President Grant to deal with the Klan and others in the aftermath of the civil war. So, yeah, if the sheriff is at the front of the pack wearing a white sheet when somebody gets hanged for trying to vote, that might get the death penalty for the sheriff.
Soooo.... turn the liver into an alcohol powered fuel cell? So the only way your phone has enough charge to send a text is if you are drunk on your @ss? Do you really want to live in a world like that?
Section 1983 lawsuits for deprivation of civil rights under color of authority allows piercing the immunity of public officers and going after their personal assets. In this case, the mayor, and any of the police that participated. Their. Personal. Assets. Not the taxpayers.
http://legal-dictionary.thefre...
The issue was not charging stations at either end, it was the dearth in between. You can go ahead and pretend that charging stations are as ubiquitous as gas stations, but they are not. In some places, like my neighborhood, they are more than sufficient. Out of town, not so much. Anyway, go ahead and believe what you want -- I gave you two data points. You gave me zero, and some arm waving. I am *not* anti electric car, we're shopping for a Leaf, and two neighbors have Leafs. This is a great town in which to own a Leaf. But I stand by my assertion -- road trips with an electric car require advanced planning with respect to recharging, where as a road trip in an ICE vehicle largely does not require advanced planning with respect to refueling.
And is charging really free in small-town Oregon? Here, many of the charge stations, including those in employer parking lots, are debit-card activiated.
Well, range is still a concern. I drove to a convention where two Tesla-owning friends also went. I lisented to their discussion about how to manage the range issue of driving to a place that is just beyond a single charge, how they had to plan their recharging stop, how it limited their choices for a lunch break. None of us gasoliine vehicle drivers had that discussion. So it is still not only a concern, they find range interesting dinner conversation. Range is getting better, surely, but stll is above the "have to think about it" threshold.
That requires a Section 1983 lawsuit, "Denial of civil rights under color of authority." Then you can pierce immunity and go after the personal assets of the goverment official. Getting a ruling like this one, where a federal court has stated quite clearly that people have a 1A right to film police is a key step. Now that it is clearly established that people have a 1A right to film, the *next* cop to get sued over this is wide open for a 1983.
So, according to the summary, it puts limits on commercial use of GPS tracking data. Where does it limit government use of GPS tracking data?
It's for the children
Look people, this is NOT a 2A issue, this is a 1A issue. When does censorship stop? Why can't gun plans be published?
This may be a first amendment issue, or perhaps it is a second amendment issue, but that will be up to a court to decide. What you fail to understand is that like many Americans (I am American too, so I"m allowed to say that), you think that all rights are absolute
Nope. Didn't say that. Go re-read what I posted. Stop putting words into my mouth so that you can argue with them. Argue with what I *actually* said, not with some strawman that you made up from whole cloth.
What part of preventing the publishing of plans is not censorship? Look as hard as you like, I don't think you will find a part of preventing publishing that is not censorship.
When do national security interests trump anti-censorship? That question will keep thoughtful people debating for a long time. But somehow, I don't think 3D printed gun plans cross the line to national security.