Internet access is not, never has been, and should not be considered a basic public service.
The Internet is a medium of communication for individuals and groups, organizations, and companies, people and assemblies of all kinds. As a medium of communication, putting ownership and control of access to it in the hands of government is a very very bad idea that relies on a false idea that the government can be trusted because it is the government which gives us rights and therefore will protect them on any service it provides.
Top marks on all points, especially on the part about the government liking to limit, choke and control.
The government is essentially a poorly-run giant monopoly corporation, for those who think in those terms. Imagine something larger than GM with management worse than SCO with practices shadier than Microsoft, and you get the right idea for what the US (and any government, for that matter) is. Few of us have seats on the board, even those of us who are able to choose board members have a shite choice anyway, and through the magic of gerrymandering we pretty much end up with the same board every year.
One little nitpick.
The Internet was founded by public investment money -- primarily DARPA grants, but also public university funding and other government funding. The bulk of what you communicate with was bought and paid for with public money.
For that reason it has always been, is, and always will be a public service.
So far, the courts have allowed us to use it within the Constitutional guarantees required of all public services. We would not be so lucky if the courts deemed the service owned by firms.
I normally wouldn't respond with such personal information, but because I don't want anyone to end up misinformed by what you've posted here, I feel that's far more important than my privacy.
"For example, bipolar disorder is typically something that requires lifetime treatment."
Bipolar disorder also happens to be the one malaise that ends up helping me understand my behavior as opposed to an excuse to behave badly. I can even trace the behavior along my family lines, and see where it came from, and other relatives who have the same problem.
Nothing for me has been more effective than:
1. Getting enough rest, 2. Eating healthy, 3. Living an active lifestyle, and 4. Playing a little cello at least once a week.
In order to keep up with the above, I've also:
5. Stopped watching TV, 6. Given up on most video games (well, other than Fire Emblem, because it requires thought to really do well at it)
I most definitely do not need drugs.
The primary way to put your chemicals into balance is by living a healthy lifestyle, not drugs. If your body is healthy, your mind is too, because your brain is part of your body. Is that surprising? It's common sense.
If the diagnosis helped me make sense of my life, if it gave me tools with which I could build a better life, then yes, I was autistic.
If the diagnosis turned into an excuse for self-destructive behavior, turned into a rationale for why I should be excused from the rules of civility, if it became a license for uncivil behavior, then no, I wasn't autistic.
I think that this is quite possibly the greatest thing I've ever read on Slashdot.
I've often looked at the (sometimes deliberately?) vague descriptions of various popular mental disorders, including autism, and noted how many of those traits might apply to me. But with almost every one, I could see it being the latter case, not the former.
That's great advice and spoken (written?) well.
I'll share with you another piece of advice I was once given by my child psychiatrist* when I was having difficulty coping with grad school:
Drugs are for temporarily helping you regain your sanity until you can control your life just fine on your own. They're a boost to regain self-reliance, not a permanent crutch.
*Not because my parents suspected I was nuts, but because I'd had febrile convulsions and they wanted to make sure nothing broke.
I think the author of the article misunderstands just what happened with GCC 4.0.
The main improvement in GCC 4.0 is implementing Single Static Assignment.
SSA is not an optimization. It is a simplification. If you can assume SSA, then it opens the door to an entire class of optimizations that can help improve your performance without affecting your code's correctness.
That last bit -- optimizing code without affecting correctness -- was a big problem in the days before SSA.
In that regard, SSA is a similar technology to RISC -- it does not speed things up by itself, but it enables speedups for later on.
The lack of SSA is one thing that kept gcc out of the hands of compiler researchers. Now that it does that, academia can start hacking away with gcc, and the delay you expect is the time between implementing SSA and implementing all of the optimizations that really will improve code performance.
It's interesting the author states, "By itself this was a straightforward contractual dispute that could, and should, have been settled quickly and easily." If it was so straightforward and should have "been settled quickly and easily", then the judge should have seen that too. So, the fact that the case is still going on shows that it's definitely not a "straightforward" case. (However, as we all know with SCO, that it's never straightforward, or quick and easy.)
Actually, he's got a great point here. It should have been settled quickly and easily. And it's clear that that's what SCO expected.
What neither SCO nor the author have grasped yet is that IBM is betting the farm on Linux, and because of certain FUD spread about the legality of the GPL and the business model they're promoting, it is in IBM's best interest to spend the money and time required to get a ruling on the case. If they fail, they can cut their losses on Linux and proceed elsewhere; if they succeed, they gain a FUD-killing precedent.
What's more, you'll note that SCO cannot withdraw due to the countersuit filed by IBM. By being sued, IBM gained the opportunity to file countersuit, and they filed several, carefully crafted to ensure that the ruling they get is exactly the one they want to support their business model.
I've had the problems you describe, and it's largely because I'm so familiar with Linux that I get frustrated when things I expect to work a certain way (because they work that way in Linux) don't (because they don't work that way in OS X).
Best example so far: Netinfo. I have no idea what this thing is or how it works, other than that it's rudely replaced all the things I'm familiar with for networking-type-stuff. ("No entry for netinfo in section 5 of the manual." Dammit, Apple, where's my man page?)
Everything that I'm looking for is there. The fact that I don't understand how it works (and too lazy to find out where the missing man pages are) does not make the operating system overrated. It means I need to expand my horizons and learn how to do things in OSes not named Linux, and get off my ass and do a simple Google search.
I mean, in the time it took me to write this post, I could probably have found via GIS one or all of the following: (a) the man page for netinfo, (b) a download location for ALL of the missing man pages, not just netinfo, (c) an Apple-produced PDF detailing how netinfo and other networking ideas work, (d) the entire Apple sysadmin guide library, (e) a book I could borrow from the city library RIGHT NOW with all I need to know about NetInfo.
Simply put, 99% of the "hackers" out there really don't know anything about hacking, and use/download tools provided by the 1% of hackers who actually know how to do things. They don't know how or why their hacking scripts/apps work; they just know the bare essentials: "Do XYZ to make this app work."
You and I both know that you don't need to know anything about the Internet to use it. Usually we see the other side of this -- the innocents who get exploited because they didn't do their due diligence on their machines. You don't usually see this happen on the other side because, well, Darwin usually takes care of those people, and then they learn and become better script kiddies*.
Given the set of people with internet access that don't understand how the internet works and the set of people who have malicious intent, the probability that the intersection of the two groups is nonzero is ridiculous given the size of both of those sets and the fact that there is no structural restriction preventing members of one group from being members of the other.
Now you also have the set of people familiar with the "127.0.0.1" joke, which is likely at least as wide as User Friendly's audience (huge), but is a subset of the people who do understand something about how the internet works. But despite being a subset, it's a big one.
So eventually, with these two sets as large as they are and given enough time, I would claim that even if this particular incident is a hoax, it is only logical that the probability of an incident like this actually occuring is very high, and only getting closer to 1 with each passing hour.
I'm doing a lot of hand-waving in my proof here, I admit, as I do not have actual numbers to back up my case. But you must admit that my reasoning is not entirely bogus -- it is not only feasible that this occurred, but it's only getting more feasible as time goes on.
*"better" in the loosest sense of the word. In truth, the only -good- script kiddie is a dead one.
The 787 is even more economical than the A380, and not just on a cost-per-passenger basis, but on the fuel per passenger mile basis. Not only that, but frankly (and subjectively) the 787 is gorgeous -- the A380 is an eyesore.
The scriptwriter interviewed himself (on the official site, I believe) and covered this detail if I recall correctly.
If my memory isn't completely gone*, the basic idea here was that a lot of the jokes on the radio and in the book were not meant to be seen. In other words, as soon as they put another head on Zaphod's shoulders, it just didn't look right, and couldn't be made to look right, and not bad in that campy-funny kind of way but just plain old-fashioned bad.
And if you think about it, "Love the third arm" is a joke that's a lot funnier when you hear it over the radio and have to try to imagine it in your head than it is if you actually see it on screen: "Why does that asshole have a plastic thing sticking out of his chest?" If you actually see it explicitly, it's just stupid. You might get a joke out of it if it's hidden (a la the "head inside a birdcage" thing) but apparently even that looked lame.
Maybe if a master were doing their makeup effects, they could get it right, and maybe not.
And apparently these things were all somewhat covered by Adams in his notes, although Adams appears to have second-guessed everything, so who knows if that means anything.
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty much what I was thinking as I went through this article.
I'm astonished how badly people are missing the target on this one.
Internet access is not, never has been, and should not be considered a basic public service.
The Internet is a medium of communication for individuals and groups, organizations, and companies, people and assemblies of all kinds. As a medium of communication, putting ownership and control of access to it in the hands of government is a very very bad idea that relies on a false idea that the government can be trusted because it is the government which gives us rights and therefore will protect them on any service it provides.
Top marks on all points, especially on the part about the government liking to limit, choke and control.
The government is essentially a poorly-run giant monopoly corporation, for those who think in those terms. Imagine something larger than GM with management worse than SCO with practices shadier than Microsoft, and you get the right idea for what the US (and any government, for that matter) is. Few of us have seats on the board, even those of us who are able to choose board members have a shite choice anyway, and through the magic of gerrymandering we pretty much end up with the same board every year.
One little nitpick.
The Internet was founded by public investment money -- primarily DARPA grants, but also public university funding and other government funding. The bulk of what you communicate with was bought and paid for with public money.
For that reason it has always been, is, and always will be a public service.
So far, the courts have allowed us to use it within the Constitutional guarantees required of all public services. We would not be so lucky if the courts deemed the service owned by firms.
Yeah! You sai... wait, what?
No, actually, I do love my job.
The solution is very easy.
You call up the bank, and you tell them their website doesn't work.
If they ask you what browser you're using, say, "Browser? What's that? I'm just accessing the internet."
Keep them on line. You might not ever get it to work, but the idea is to register the complaint.
Repeat next week.
It's not censorship any more than striking out the extra "t" in committtee^H^H^Hee is censorship.
It's just cutting out the errors.
I normally wouldn't respond with such personal information, but because I don't want anyone to end up misinformed by what you've posted here, I feel that's far more important than my privacy.
"For example, bipolar disorder is typically something that requires lifetime treatment."
Bipolar disorder also happens to be the one malaise that ends up helping me understand my behavior as opposed to an excuse to behave badly. I can even trace the behavior along my family lines, and see where it came from, and other relatives who have the same problem.
Nothing for me has been more effective than:
1. Getting enough rest,
2. Eating healthy,
3. Living an active lifestyle, and
4. Playing a little cello at least once a week.
In order to keep up with the above, I've also:
5. Stopped watching TV,
6. Given up on most video games (well, other than Fire Emblem, because it requires thought to really do well at it)
I most definitely do not need drugs.
The primary way to put your chemicals into balance is by living a healthy lifestyle, not drugs. If your body is healthy, your mind is too, because your brain is part of your body. Is that surprising? It's common sense.
If the diagnosis helped me make sense of my life, if it gave me tools with which I could build a better life, then yes, I was autistic.
If the diagnosis turned into an excuse for self-destructive behavior, turned into a rationale for why I should be excused from the rules of civility, if it became a license for uncivil behavior, then no, I wasn't autistic.
I think that this is quite possibly the greatest thing I've ever read on Slashdot.
I've often looked at the (sometimes deliberately?) vague descriptions of various popular mental disorders, including autism, and noted how many of those traits might apply to me. But with almost every one, I could see it being the latter case, not the former.
That's great advice and spoken (written?) well.
I'll share with you another piece of advice I was once given by my child psychiatrist* when I was having difficulty coping with grad school:
Drugs are for temporarily helping you regain your sanity until you can control your life just fine on your own. They're a boost to regain self-reliance, not a permanent crutch.
*Not because my parents suspected I was nuts, but because I'd had febrile convulsions and they wanted to make sure nothing broke.
Oh man! The monkeys! THE MONKEYYYYYSSS!!1
;)
And then there are the Midwives...
Man, I'm going to have nightmares all night. Thank you very fucking much for reminding me of that game. Asshole.
1a. Everyone seems to ignore OODraw - which if you buy a manual and learn how to use it is VERY powerful.....
OODraw does not import SVGs.
I'll join you in complaining the day I see Word open Word files exactly the way I made them, on the same system, with the same version of Word.
Correct. I was being lazy. :)
Good point. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that gcc was made less unattractive to compiler researchers. :)
I think the author of the article misunderstands just what happened with GCC 4.0.
The main improvement in GCC 4.0 is implementing Single Static Assignment.
SSA is not an optimization. It is a simplification. If you can assume SSA, then it opens the door to an entire class of optimizations that can help improve your performance without affecting your code's correctness.
That last bit -- optimizing code without affecting correctness -- was a big problem in the days before SSA.
In that regard, SSA is a similar technology to RISC -- it does not speed things up by itself, but it enables speedups for later on.
The lack of SSA is one thing that kept gcc out of the hands of compiler researchers. Now that it does that, academia can start hacking away with gcc, and the delay you expect is the time between implementing SSA and implementing all of the optimizations that really will improve code performance.
...who wrote that SCO/IBM article 3 or 4 Slashdot front-page articles ago?
It's interesting the author states, "By itself this was a straightforward contractual dispute that could, and should, have been settled quickly and easily." If it was so straightforward and should have "been settled quickly and easily", then the judge should have seen that too. So, the fact that the case is still going on shows that it's definitely not a "straightforward" case. (However, as we all know with SCO, that it's never straightforward, or quick and easy.)
Actually, he's got a great point here. It should have been settled quickly and easily. And it's clear that that's what SCO expected.
What neither SCO nor the author have grasped yet is that IBM is betting the farm on Linux, and because of certain FUD spread about the legality of the GPL and the business model they're promoting, it is in IBM's best interest to spend the money and time required to get a ruling on the case. If they fail, they can cut their losses on Linux and proceed elsewhere; if they succeed, they gain a FUD-killing precedent.
What's more, you'll note that SCO cannot withdraw due to the countersuit filed by IBM. By being sued, IBM gained the opportunity to file countersuit, and they filed several, carefully crafted to ensure that the ruling they get is exactly the one they want to support their business model.
Right, but as I explained in my previous post, I suck at BSD. So that doesn't help me. :)
I've had the problems you describe, and it's largely because I'm so familiar with Linux that I get frustrated when things I expect to work a certain way (because they work that way in Linux) don't (because they don't work that way in OS X).
Best example so far: Netinfo. I have no idea what this thing is or how it works, other than that it's rudely replaced all the things I'm familiar with for networking-type-stuff. ("No entry for netinfo in section 5 of the manual." Dammit, Apple, where's my man page?)
Everything that I'm looking for is there. The fact that I don't understand how it works (and too lazy to find out where the missing man pages are) does not make the operating system overrated. It means I need to expand my horizons and learn how to do things in OSes not named Linux, and get off my ass and do a simple Google search.
I mean, in the time it took me to write this post, I could probably have found via GIS one or all of the following: (a) the man page for netinfo, (b) a download location for ALL of the missing man pages, not just netinfo, (c) an Apple-produced PDF detailing how netinfo and other networking ideas work, (d) the entire Apple sysadmin guide library, (e) a book I could borrow from the city library RIGHT NOW with all I need to know about NetInfo.
So it's not OSX's fault that you and I suck.
So basically, this is like Doom 3 without the interactivity, and with Sith Lords instead of Demons?
... and somehow I suspect that analogy also extends into maintenance costs ...
The Concorde is the Fran Drescher of airplanes. Sure, she's beautiful to look at, but nobody wants to have to hear her.
Worked for me.
Simply put, 99% of the "hackers" out there really don't know anything about hacking, and use/download tools provided by the 1% of hackers who actually know how to do things. They don't know how or why their hacking scripts/apps work; they just know the bare essentials: "Do XYZ to make this app work."
You and I both know that you don't need to know anything about the Internet to use it. Usually we see the other side of this -- the innocents who get exploited because they didn't do their due diligence on their machines. You don't usually see this happen on the other side because, well, Darwin usually takes care of those people, and then they learn and become better script kiddies*.
Given the set of people with internet access that don't understand how the internet works and the set of people who have malicious intent, the probability that the intersection of the two groups is nonzero is ridiculous given the size of both of those sets and the fact that there is no structural restriction preventing members of one group from being members of the other.
Now you also have the set of people familiar with the "127.0.0.1" joke, which is likely at least as wide as User Friendly's audience (huge), but is a subset of the people who do understand something about how the internet works. But despite being a subset, it's a big one.
So eventually, with these two sets as large as they are and given enough time, I would claim that even if this particular incident is a hoax, it is only logical that the probability of an incident like this actually occuring is very high, and only getting closer to 1 with each passing hour.
I'm doing a lot of hand-waving in my proof here, I admit, as I do not have actual numbers to back up my case. But you must admit that my reasoning is not entirely bogus -- it is not only feasible that this occurred, but it's only getting more feasible as time goes on.
*"better" in the loosest sense of the word. In truth, the only -good- script kiddie is a dead one.
So far, the 787 seems to be proving Boeing right.
The 787 is even more economical than the A380, and not just on a cost-per-passenger basis, but on the fuel per passenger mile basis. Not only that, but frankly (and subjectively) the 787 is gorgeous -- the A380 is an eyesore.
I think by "space station" he meant "space station that didn't subsequently drop out of the sky like a brick"
The scriptwriter interviewed himself (on the official site, I believe) and covered this detail if I recall correctly.
If my memory isn't completely gone*, the basic idea here was that a lot of the jokes on the radio and in the book were not meant to be seen. In other words, as soon as they put another head on Zaphod's shoulders, it just didn't look right, and couldn't be made to look right, and not bad in that campy-funny kind of way but just plain old-fashioned bad.
And if you think about it, "Love the third arm" is a joke that's a lot funnier when you hear it over the radio and have to try to imagine it in your head than it is if you actually see it on screen: "Why does that asshole have a plastic thing sticking out of his chest?" If you actually see it explicitly, it's just stupid. You might get a joke out of it if it's hidden (a la the "head inside a birdcage" thing) but apparently even that looked lame.
Maybe if a master were doing their makeup effects, they could get it right, and maybe not.
And apparently these things were all somewhat covered by Adams in his notes, although Adams appears to have second-guessed everything, so who knows if that means anything.
*a dubious assertion at best