When I am developing software - I'm just trying to solve problems for my customer. In the quickest and easiest, and most-sane way I can imagine. Sometimes that's based on something I was taught. Sometimes, it's based on something I've seen someone else do, in the past (but - I'm not going to copy/paste verbatim, of course.). Sometimes, it's just what makes sense, and I do it. I don't imagine for one second that with millions of others who have gone before me, that I'm the first one to solve problem x in this way. Nor am I going to waste my customer's billed-time looking up prior art that I may be infringing on. I re-invent wheels on a daily basis! That's what I do.
If someone patents the wheel, and sues me. Well, then, I am fucked. I am fucked, and I starve. I solve problems. I am a problem solver. Not a lawyer, and not an inventor, and not an entrepreneur.
And for the kiddies who are too young to be aware: Do not let them LIE to you. The decline in quality - overall, has been happening since LONG before piracy was a problem. It's not the writers, or actors or any of that. It's Studios willing to fund risky projects. And when you look at the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS that have been heaped on top of so many steaming turds to come out of Hollywood. . . it's really hard to imagine what they are thinking when they classify a project as "risky" or "not risky (sure-thing)" -- it actually pisses me off to think of the 16,000 children who die EACH DAY of starvation, and knowing all the money that gets wasted producing absolute used-toilet-paper like "Sharktapus".
They'll blame piracy, and our unwillingness to watch increasingly repetitive and inane commercials for unhealthy, stupid, and worthless products or services. But the real fault lies in an industry that is driven by risk adverse spreadsheet jockeys, instead of creative talent.
That's a pretty correct assessment of the situation, because most economists were talking about a NICKEL-PER-TRACK pricing model, back in the Napster days, but nobody could credibly assert a micropayment system (because of vendor fees charged per-transaction for credit cards), and also, there wasn't a DRM that would work. (and by "work", I mean, be economically harder to crack than the product was worth).
Apple; by virtue of its market muscle, and having a hardware player (iPod), was able to get enough record companies on-board, so they could establish a library of critical mass - so they could command an OUTRAGEOUS 99-CENTS-PER-TRACK. With DRM. People accepted this, because the iPod was fucking awesome. (and personally, my take on this, Apple owes it all to the clickwheel - this is the reason why the iPod is useable where every other music player completely sucks - at least for me - I've tried about a half dozen other music players, samsung, zune, sanyo, etc. they're all unusable, and I keep going back to my 2nd gen iPod nano).
(. . . but I'll be damned if I accept 99-cents-per-track with DRM...)
(this was around 1994, 1995, I think) - it KILLED the hard drive. Totally bricked. We had two theories over what had killed the drive. Either microcode on a flash chip had been erased by an induced current - or, there was some documentation from Seagate that seemed to indicate that; even when formatted, there were instructions encoded on the platter that directed the head on where to go. External read-write commands would never "see" or interact with this encoding, but the electronics ON the drive interacted with this encoding. Without the encoding, the drive head could not even leave the parking position.
The first theory seemed more likely to me - but it's not what I expected to happen when I bulk-erased the drive.
Yeah. And I also find that, over the past few years, given my exposure on "other sites" - I have a huge urge to "me-too-post". Other sites handle this with a "Like" button, or "+1". Slashdot, you can't really do anything, except post a "me-too". Which is tedious, and I think contributes to a lot of meaningless crapflooding, as someone who begins to post an "I agree" opinion, realizes the triviality of it all, and then decides they need to churn out a few paragraphs of rationalization to justify what would otherwise just be a simple, validating "like". Capiche?
This is precisely why there are tens of thousands of Americans on the streets protesting at this very moment.
After the Silverado/S&L crisis of the 1980's, the IPO bubble and Enron scandal of the late 1990's/early-2000's, and then the housing market/derivatives bubble of the late 2000's, each time, we've patiently asked for market reforms, or even an equivalent "justice" so that there would be an obvious moral "penalty" for those charged with this responsibility (and those who enjoy the rewards).
Each time - these requests are denied, and business carries on as usual, and those who bear the costs, and are made to suffer, have had it. We've warned that this was going to happen again.
Lo and behold - it's fucking happening again. Exactly as predicted. And nobody is fucking listening.
The really REALLY sucky part about this - is how the media has responded to this. This is now being used as justification for climate-science denialists. I know: the two have NOTHING technically to do with eachother. But the "reasoning" (more like rationalization) is: if they can be wrong about relativity, then they can be wrong about the greenhouse effect. Fucking troglodytes.
Actually - the military was interested more in troops not getting navigationally lost. GPS has fantastically outperformed its original expectations by many orders of magnitude. (though - they did have a clue that they were going to be able to work it down to sub-100m accuracy at first, then shortly, down to sub-1m.)
There are still accuracy issues dealing with matching old non-GPS survey data, seismic activity, and tidal flexing of the earth's crust (which is a very irregular and unpredictable process, depending on your location ). And all of these issues could easily account for the discrepancies observed. (I think that given the size of the data set, it's not considered likely, that's all).
It's not really GMO foods in particular that there is an opposition. It's the monoculture that has resulted. And that happened long before the genetic modification - that happened decades before with breeding, selection, and hybridization. And elimination of other crops.
As you characterize the "left" here, you're using an overly-broad brush. Mostly - the "scares" have come from celebrities, using just as much unscientific crap as comes out of the industry promotion. But at their root, there is a plea for ACTUAL unbiased scientific studies, showing the safety of GMO foods, vaccines, and inactive ingredients. (there HAVE been numerous issues with mercury compounds used in vaccines, there have been numerous flawed safety studies sponsored by pharmaceutical industry research - which should be independently verified, and procedures and results opened. . . there have been many, many cases where corporations have kept important data secret, called it "proprietary", when in fact, it was "embarrassing", not any danger to their competitive market position - or rather, where public health and safety should have superceded that concern. Public health and safety should ALWAYS be above competitive market position.
The fact that - in the absence of hard data - some flakes blow things out of proportion, and in a fit of leftwing anti-capitalist, anti-corporate hysteria, promote an anti-science stance - is well-taken. But it is NOT a typical ideological left-wing position. It is a side-effect of LACK OF INFORMATION, caused by secrecy, caused by the con-men and scam artists, who have a long history of having something to hide.
The problem with this is; people are going to raise a big, hearty middle-finger to either of these taxes. You can't stop people from burning stuff. They will raise arms. And the government is going to have to raise arms to collect.
Personally, I like the idea of charging people money, who discharge crap into MY environment, incurring a cost on ME. Fossil fuels make it too easy for people to get away with burning stuff, and imposing this external cost (CO2+other pollutants) on other people. (not just people).
MOST Americans can't even work out a very simple false-dilemma fallacy when it's shoved in their face. ("You're either with the terrorists, or against them!" "America, love it or leave it!")
It's not the VOLUME of our education. It's the quality.
The problem is the conflation of corporate-owned, government (FCC) regulated, mass-media with "Free Speech". That Constitutional interpretation has yielded a grossly disproportionate power to corporations. This allowed them to manipulate public opinion in this age of electronic mass media. We began to vote against our own self-interest, at first, out of reactionary fear of communism, and then, once public education began to suffer, out of ignorance. This started a downward spiral that has only picked-up momentum, and will not only be a very difficult trend to reverse, but will take sustained effort over a long period of time.
I do not think it will take a curtailment of free speech or democracy - but it will require different thinking on how we define our corporate-owned, government-regulated, mass-media.
. . . in the field of Political Science, it's called Technocracy. And technically, the current Democratic Party is IT, but in practice, they are looking to the pragmatic manipulation of public opinion. The belief is; they can not do the good work of scientifically-based public policy, if they do not get elected, and that means: 1) Pandering to wealthy donors (because money is a necessary evil) and 2) Pandering to populism (because votes are a necessary evil, Snooki's world).
Many Technocrats argue that these trade-offs have not been worth it, that they've led to too many compromises with the other side, and have created structural weaknesses that have undermined any possible policy gains that could have been made. Probably, this was due to inherent issues with the interpretation of our constitution (mass media, and it's conflation with "free speech" and the disproportionate power thus yielded to corporate entities).
I've taken many online classes, in the CompSci discipline before. I figure, if I just walk through this curriculum, there's a chance I can provide useful feedback to the professor, and Stanford, and what worked and what didn't.
Yes. This is a national security threat. By definition. You can't have it both ways. Sorry globalists. You can't bully and exploit third-world labor, and then trust them with your proprietary industrial secrets. They will steal them from you, and turn around and use them against you. Period.
The only exception - I guess, is that muslims probably will not use complex interest-derived financial instruments to enslave you, since usury is against islamic law. Straight-up slavery, is not though. So keep on bleeding your own economy until they come over here and take-over. They will be happy to enslave your sons and daughters.
I wouldn't mind having an extra car for commuting to work and getting groceries, (and keeping my current car, only for long trips).
But that would mean: An extra car-payment. An extra insurance-payment.
Actually, I own my car clear right now, so not an extra car-payment. But I'm not looking to BUY a new car.
But insurance companies need to cut us a deal on electrics so we can have the flexibility we need to drive an electric to our daily commute (when we only need the 50 mile range); and keep the gasser in the garage for the weekend when we DO need the 450 mile range.
I really do WISH WISH WISH that gasoline would go up to $6, $7, $8/gal. I want to laugh my ass off at the motherfuckers in their giant pickup trucks. More than that, I want them to stay home, so I can drive to work without the stop-n-go on the freeway.
Never mind that the KIA was built in South Korea - and that the factory would belong to Kim Jong Il, had the USA not paid billions in tax dollars and US soldiers' blood, defending South Korea from North Korea.
That KIA is VERY heavily subsidized by the US taxpayer.
They are pretty nice cars for the money. Someday, their workers will be able to demand to be treated on equal footing with Detroit's workers. (long after Detroit's workers have lost that clout). (FWIW: I have struggled with the crappiest car in the world for the past 5 years, a "german" car, made in mexico. . . german prices, mexican quality.)
Car manufacturers do not sell cars any longer. They sell loans. This is why, when our financial industry collapsed, and required a bailout, our auto manufacturers required a bailout. This is also why, when the laborers' union contracts were up for renewal, it wasn't their wages, per-se, that were the sticking-point. It was the "financing" of their retirement.
Yes, we can no longer buy a useful new car for $3000, or its equivalent. Now, they're more like $30,000. Plus insurance.
I just *know* that since my macos classic g3 macbook died, I'm not going to be able to hack-into the alien's computer system and disable their shields, and they're totally going to take over the planet and eat us all.
Slashdot Mirror
When I am developing software - I'm just trying to solve problems for my customer. In the quickest and easiest, and most-sane way I can imagine. Sometimes that's based on something I was taught. Sometimes, it's based on something I've seen someone else do, in the past (but - I'm not going to copy/paste verbatim, of course.). Sometimes, it's just what makes sense, and I do it. I don't imagine for one second that with millions of others who have gone before me, that I'm the first one to solve problem x in this way. Nor am I going to waste my customer's billed-time looking up prior art that I may be infringing on. I re-invent wheels on a daily basis! That's what I do.
If someone patents the wheel, and sues me. Well, then, I am fucked. I am fucked, and I starve.
I solve problems.
I am a problem solver. Not a lawyer, and not an inventor, and not an entrepreneur.
And for the kiddies who are too young to be aware:
Do not let them LIE to you. The decline in quality - overall, has been happening since LONG before piracy was a problem. It's not the writers, or actors or any of that. It's Studios willing to fund risky projects. And when you look at the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS that have been heaped on top of so many steaming turds to come out of Hollywood. . . it's really hard to imagine what they are thinking when they classify a project as "risky" or "not risky (sure-thing)" -- it actually pisses me off to think of the 16,000 children who die EACH DAY of starvation, and knowing all the money that gets wasted producing absolute used-toilet-paper like "Sharktapus".
They'll blame piracy, and our unwillingness to watch increasingly repetitive and inane commercials for unhealthy, stupid, and worthless products or services. But the real fault lies in an industry that is driven by risk adverse spreadsheet jockeys, instead of creative talent.
That's a pretty correct assessment of the situation, because most economists were talking about a NICKEL-PER-TRACK pricing model, back in the Napster days, but nobody could credibly assert a micropayment system (because of vendor fees charged per-transaction for credit cards), and also, there wasn't a DRM that would work. (and by "work", I mean, be economically harder to crack than the product was worth).
Apple; by virtue of its market muscle, and having a hardware player (iPod), was able to get enough record companies on-board, so they could establish a library of critical mass - so they could command an OUTRAGEOUS 99-CENTS-PER-TRACK. With DRM. People accepted this, because the iPod was fucking awesome. (and personally, my take on this, Apple owes it all to the clickwheel - this is the reason why the iPod is useable where every other music player completely sucks - at least for me - I've tried about a half dozen other music players, samsung, zune, sanyo, etc. they're all unusable, and I keep going back to my 2nd gen iPod nano).
(. . . but I'll be damned if I accept 99-cents-per-track with DRM...)
I once used a bulk tape eraser on a hard drive.
(this was around 1994, 1995, I think) - it KILLED the hard drive. Totally bricked. We had two theories over what had killed the drive. Either microcode on a flash chip had been erased by an induced current - or, there was some documentation from Seagate that seemed to indicate that; even when formatted, there were instructions encoded on the platter that directed the head on where to go. External read-write commands would never "see" or interact with this encoding, but the electronics ON the drive interacted with this encoding. Without the encoding, the drive head could not even leave the parking position.
The first theory seemed more likely to me - but it's not what I expected to happen when I bulk-erased the drive.
+1 Really Insane
good troll.
Agreed. Except that we should start at 2000.
Yeah. And I also find that, over the past few years, given my exposure on "other sites" - I have a huge urge to "me-too-post". Other sites handle this with a "Like" button, or "+1". Slashdot, you can't really do anything, except post a "me-too". Which is tedious, and I think contributes to a lot of meaningless crapflooding, as someone who begins to post an "I agree" opinion, realizes the triviality of it all, and then decides they need to churn out a few paragraphs of rationalization to justify what would otherwise just be a simple, validating "like". Capiche?
Well, I think you're right.
This is precisely why there are tens of thousands of Americans on the streets protesting at this very moment.
After the Silverado/S&L crisis of the 1980's, the IPO bubble and Enron scandal of the late 1990's/early-2000's, and then the housing market/derivatives bubble of the late 2000's, each time, we've patiently asked for market reforms, or even an equivalent "justice" so that there would be an obvious moral "penalty" for those charged with this responsibility (and those who enjoy the rewards).
Each time - these requests are denied, and business carries on as usual, and those who bear the costs, and are made to suffer, have had it. We've warned that this was going to happen again.
Lo and behold - it's fucking happening again. Exactly as predicted. And nobody is fucking listening.
The really REALLY sucky part about this - is how the media has responded to this. This is now being used as justification for climate-science denialists. I know: the two have NOTHING technically to do with eachother. But the "reasoning" (more like rationalization) is: if they can be wrong about relativity, then they can be wrong about the greenhouse effect. Fucking troglodytes.
Actually - the military was interested more in troops not getting navigationally lost. GPS has fantastically outperformed its original expectations by many orders of magnitude. (though - they did have a clue that they were going to be able to work it down to sub-100m accuracy at first, then shortly, down to sub-1m.)
There are still accuracy issues dealing with matching old non-GPS survey data, seismic activity, and tidal flexing of the earth's crust (which is a very irregular and unpredictable process, depending on your location ). And all of these issues could easily account for the discrepancies observed. (I think that given the size of the data set, it's not considered likely, that's all).
tax it where it is pumped out of the ground. Per barrel of carbon.
It's not really GMO foods in particular that there is an opposition. It's the monoculture that has resulted. And that happened long before the genetic modification - that happened decades before with breeding, selection, and hybridization. And elimination of other crops.
As you characterize the "left" here, you're using an overly-broad brush. Mostly - the "scares" have come from celebrities, using just as much unscientific crap as comes out of the industry promotion. But at their root, there is a plea for ACTUAL unbiased scientific studies, showing the safety of GMO foods, vaccines, and inactive ingredients. (there HAVE been numerous issues with mercury compounds used in vaccines, there have been numerous flawed safety studies sponsored by pharmaceutical industry research - which should be independently verified, and procedures and results opened. . . there have been many, many cases where corporations have kept important data secret, called it "proprietary", when in fact, it was "embarrassing", not any danger to their competitive market position - or rather, where public health and safety should have superceded that concern. Public health and safety should ALWAYS be above competitive market position.
The fact that - in the absence of hard data - some flakes blow things out of proportion, and in a fit of leftwing anti-capitalist, anti-corporate hysteria, promote an anti-science stance - is well-taken. But it is NOT a typical ideological left-wing position. It is a side-effect of LACK OF INFORMATION, caused by secrecy, caused by the con-men and scam artists, who have a long history of having something to hide.
Oh. .. the republicans are in the wilderness, all right. They dragged the rest of us with them.
The problem with this is; people are going to raise a big, hearty middle-finger to either of these taxes. You can't stop people from burning stuff. They will raise arms. And the government is going to have to raise arms to collect.
Personally, I like the idea of charging people money, who discharge crap into MY environment, incurring a cost on ME. Fossil fuels make it too easy for people to get away with burning stuff, and imposing this external cost (CO2+other pollutants) on other people. (not just people).
MOST Americans can't even work out a very simple false-dilemma fallacy when it's shoved in their face. ("You're either with the terrorists, or against them!" "America, love it or leave it!")
It's not the VOLUME of our education. It's the quality.
The problem is the conflation of corporate-owned, government (FCC) regulated, mass-media with "Free Speech". That Constitutional interpretation has yielded a grossly disproportionate power to corporations. This allowed them to manipulate public opinion in this age of electronic mass media. We began to vote against our own self-interest, at first, out of reactionary fear of communism, and then, once public education began to suffer, out of ignorance. This started a downward spiral that has only picked-up momentum, and will not only be a very difficult trend to reverse, but will take sustained effort over a long period of time.
I do not think it will take a curtailment of free speech or democracy - but it will require different thinking on how we define our corporate-owned, government-regulated, mass-media.
. . . in the field of Political Science, it's called Technocracy. And technically, the current Democratic Party is IT, but in practice, they are looking to the pragmatic manipulation of public opinion. The belief is; they can not do the good work of scientifically-based public policy, if they do not get elected, and that means: 1) Pandering to wealthy donors (because money is a necessary evil) and 2) Pandering to populism (because votes are a necessary evil, Snooki's world).
Many Technocrats argue that these trade-offs have not been worth it, that they've led to too many compromises with the other side, and have created structural weaknesses that have undermined any possible policy gains that could have been made. Probably, this was due to inherent issues with the interpretation of our constitution (mass media, and it's conflation with "free speech" and the disproportionate power thus yielded to corporate entities).
The alternative is. . . what, exactly?
I've taken many online classes, in the CompSci discipline before. I figure, if I just walk through this curriculum, there's a chance I can provide useful feedback to the professor, and Stanford, and what worked and what didn't.
Yes. This is a national security threat. By definition. You can't have it both ways. Sorry globalists. You can't bully and exploit third-world labor, and then trust them with your proprietary industrial secrets. They will steal them from you, and turn around and use them against you. Period.
The only exception - I guess, is that muslims probably will not use complex interest-derived financial instruments to enslave you, since usury is against islamic law. Straight-up slavery, is not though. So keep on bleeding your own economy until they come over here and take-over. They will be happy to enslave your sons and daughters.
I wouldn't mind having an extra car for commuting to work and getting groceries, (and keeping my current car, only for long trips).
But that would mean:
An extra car-payment.
An extra insurance-payment.
Actually, I own my car clear right now, so not an extra car-payment. But I'm not looking to BUY a new car.
But insurance companies need to cut us a deal on electrics so we can have the flexibility we need to drive an electric to our daily commute (when we only need the 50 mile range); and keep the gasser in the garage for the weekend when we DO need the 450 mile range.
I really do WISH WISH WISH that gasoline would go up to $6, $7, $8/gal. I want to laugh my ass off at the motherfuckers in their giant pickup trucks. More than that, I want them to stay home, so I can drive to work without the stop-n-go on the freeway.
Never mind that the KIA was built in South Korea - and that the factory would belong to Kim Jong Il, had the USA not paid billions in tax dollars and US soldiers' blood, defending South Korea from North Korea.
That KIA is VERY heavily subsidized by the US taxpayer.
They are pretty nice cars for the money. Someday, their workers will be able to demand to be treated on equal footing with Detroit's workers. (long after Detroit's workers have lost that clout). (FWIW: I have struggled with the crappiest car in the world for the past 5 years, a "german" car, made in mexico. . . german prices, mexican quality.)
Car manufacturers do not sell cars any longer. They sell loans. This is why, when our financial industry collapsed, and required a bailout, our auto manufacturers required a bailout. This is also why, when the laborers' union contracts were up for renewal, it wasn't their wages, per-se, that were the sticking-point. It was the "financing" of their retirement.
Yes, we can no longer buy a useful new car for $3000, or its equivalent. Now, they're more like $30,000. Plus insurance.
I just *know* that since my macos classic g3 macbook died, I'm not going to be able to hack-into the alien's computer system and disable their shields, and they're totally going to take over the planet and eat us all.