Unfortunately, there's no easy way to leave them a comment about one's opinion of their behavior on their website. I looked.
You can leave a comment about the business, and a rating of their trustworthiness and vendor reliability here. They should see it if they care about their website, and some of their site's visitors (depending on installed FF plugins) may see it. Whether that effects their business prospects is dubious, but it's something.
If a business publicly asserts that a test which has similar mechanics to their test (but is a completely different expression) is a derived work, I'd say they're a bit untrustworthy (though to be fair, matters of law aren't something they claim expertise with -- OTOH, trustworthy people usually try to STFU on topics they don't understand (but we all make mistakes sometimes)). If they issue DMCA takedown notices based on that misconception, I'd say they're dangerously untrustworthy and no one can safely interact with them in commercial matters, which also impacts their "vendor reliability."
What troubles me more than the copyright issue, is that TFA makes it sound like they sell a "licensed version" of the test. It doesn't say authorized copies (copyright terminology), but a licensed version, which implies there might be terms of use or a contract, wholly unlike how people normally buy most copyrighted works (though many proprietary software publishers now assert that too). That is a pretty threatening idea. I wonder if TFA got that right.
The 9th circuit isn't doing that; Congress did it in 2008. That was the very intent of the FISA amendment, and there really wasn't any ambiguity about it. Many people simply hated it at the time. (Though most didn't hate it enough to vote against the people who did it -- both McCain and Obama who supported it as senators, combined got an overwhelming majority of the votes for president. Doing what they did, didn't destroy their campaigns.) Don't blame the court for that. The AT&T suit really ought to be dead; the time to fight for justice was 3.5 years ago and we collectively decided it wasn't important.
We need to accept and take responsibility for that decision. It is hypocritical to vote against justice and still demand it.
When you hear "Open API" any programmer will think it just means a well-known or documented API; i.e. it's not a secret. Load the accumulator with the petscii character you want to output and JSR $FFD2 -- or make a certain REST call as documented at the service's site -- that's what people will think you're talking about, when you say "Open API."
That isn't what TFA is talking about.
He's talking about different services using the same APIs, being client-compatible. That is, if you make a competitor to AWS, use Amazon's API. If you make a Facebook competitor, use Facebook's API.
WTF this has to do with Open Source, I'm not sure. It implies this guy thinks a trend will develop/continue where people move code off of their machine to other people's machines, I guess. And when code is running on someone else's machine, you don't care whether that machine's owner is allowed to maintain it themselves, so proprietary/free is meaningless to you -- both end up being effectively proprietary to you.
Maybe he's saying that compatible APIs (which would be 100x better term than "open APIs") just make it easier to switch services, so if you're not getting the server maintenance you want somewhere, maybe you'll find it at a competitor, all without having to rewrite your client.
And that's fine, but it's not nearly as useful as have a server under your own control. Free Software will always be easier on everyone.
Ok, let's begin that list I was talking about. So.. reason #1 for supporting SOPA is: your candidate has only a snowballs' chance in hell of being elected (probably because you've decided to not vote for him).
Who is the greater idiot: the idiots or the idiots who vote for them?
Let's not for a moment pretend we have anyone other than ourselves to blame. Everyone says they hate SOPA, but talk about voting against the SOPA parties and suddenly you're a wacko and 90+% people start listing reasons they plan to support the people who enact it.
This is why I have to delve into fiction to find a decent religion. The Cthulhu Cult believes in their guy, so they get to make idols. Old wizard Whateley and Joseph Curwen know Yog-Sothoth is real, because the spells work. A Satanless Satanism -- that's just fucked up. Satanists, WTF are you guys thinking?! Get with it and don't tell me "they change what it is." It was you. You changed.
You realize Satanists don't actually worship or even believe in the existence of Satan, right?
No, I didn't know that, and I find that to be disappointing. A Satanless Satanism has no charm at all. If I were a Satanist, I would schism the religion immediately and declare the Satan-deniers to be infidels. You gotta have the horned 'n' hoofed guy, for the artwork alone! I used to think Satanism was a reaction to lame religions, but it sounds like they managed to out-lame their parents.
If I oppose some theory based on loose conjecture...
There aren't any theories based on loose conjecture. Ideas can be based on loose conjecture, but experimental confirmation is what turns those ideas into theories (or fails to do so).
I must "render to Ceasar that which is Ceasar's" and such
But aren't all your worldly senses, the experiments which confirm evolution, the lack of observations to suggest its inaccuracy, Ceasar's? For example, by the late 1880s, would not a follower of "render to Ceasar that which is Caesar's" been allowed to doubt Newtonian mechanics, as failed to accurately predict what people were measuring with their worldly senses? Faith didn't really require rejection of Einstein's 1905 work, did it?
Technology which results in instruments which can measure things with greater accuracy, and insights which reveal ways to run experiments that were previously not thought viable, keep moving the line which distinguishes between what is "of this world," and what isn't.
There was a time, over a century and a half ago, when if someone had suggested evolution, it would have been merely a neat idea, and rejecting it would not have outed anyone as being anti-science. It was a question of faith and opinion. But then someone came up with a theory to check it against the world. The line between worldly and un-worldly knowledge moved, just like it did for Galileo.
To say evolution is on less solid ground than, say, relativity and quantum mechanics, is to reject observation, the modeling observation inspires, and the experiments which confirm or destroy the models. That's a rejection of science.
Being anti-science is ok. There's nothing necessarily stupid or dishonorable about saying "evolution hasn't happened," as long as you hold that what we see isn't real, or say that in real life things don't work consistently so it's foolish to try to model them, or adopt other mystic ways to reject the inferences that science draws.
But to reject science and also say you're not anti-science -- don't you see how everyone will think you're either being dishonest or clueless? (You say you don't mind that people think that, and presumably you think of yourself as not dishonest or clueless, but you do at least see why everyone would (mistakenly?) think that, right?) Why can't evolution deniers embrace their anti-science? What the hell is so important about science, that lip-service must be paid even if you're totally and absolutely convinced that science is wrong?
Does "give to Caesar what is Caesar's" require accepting science? If it does, then why don't mystics really do it? And if it doesn't, then why can't mystics just let science go? There's gotta be a better way than pretending ignorance of the evidence, or lying about it. Getting along just can't be this hard.
The only "hard" thing about them is that every single year when I pay them, it triggers VISA fraud alert (i.e. VISA calls me and wants me to confirm it was a legit charge) because they're not used to me buying a lot of stuff from Europe anymore.
And that's really a VISA problem rather than a Gandi problem, and actually if you think about it, it's not a "problem" at all -- confirming rare exceptions is good. I just wish VISA would realize that this yearly charge is like clockwork, every year at about the same time for about the same amount, so not really all that exceptional. But I can forgive that too. There's no real hassle here at all, and it'll take more than that for me to reconsider Gandi. It ain't broke so I ain't fixin' it.
All I can think of is that Obama lost a ridiculous bet with Boehner on some secret round of golf.
Boehner: "Ten thousand dollars? Chump change. No, I said let's make it interesting." Obama: "Ok, loser has to wear a dress and an SS armband at their next press conference." Boehner: "That's getting closer, but people pretty much expect that. The campaigns are on, so wacky attention-whoring is already in." Obama: "What did you have in mind?" Boehner: "If I win, you have to be all tax cut, free money, no consequences, wooo! and my party gets to be.." Obama: "-- Oh my god --" Boehner "..the voice of.." Obama: "-- I don't believe this --" Boehner: "..reason and responsibility."
[Several seconds of silence, then they both burst out laughing]
Boehner: "Scared?" Obama: "No, you're toast. Speaking of which, what happens when I win?" Boehner: "We drop the birther thing." Obama: "Oh please. No seriously, c'mon. I used to think that whole thing was stupid, but it makes people subconsciously think of me as a little more exotic and cool. Try again." Boehner: *shrugs* "Science." Obama: "Are you serious?! Holy shit. Really?" Boenher: "The question is, do you have the balls?" Obama: "What's your handicap?" Boehner: "Gingr--" Obama: "Quit fucking around, this is a serious bet." Boehner: "Minus 5." Obama: "Oh." Boehner: "Not so cocky now, are you, Mr Cool?"
Obama should be praised as a hero. So he lost at golf, BFD. He fought for science.
One of my flames against the anti-GMO crowd is how arbitrarily they draw the line between what is genetically engineered and what isn't. Any sort of goal-directed breeding, hybridization, etc. are forms of engineering, and they work on the genes, and they do it in a way where the resulting genotype has not, and would not, ever occur in nature. But somehow triticale doesn't terrify the the way a Roundup Ready product does.
What's interesting is that these older forms of genetic engineering are also patentable. We have had "proprietary food" since the 1930s. It used to be limited to asexually reproducing breeds and then later expanded. (I don't really pretend to understand the details of why that distiction mattered and why it got changed.)
This isn't something that Monsanto invented; they merely enforced their patents to a new degree of evil. Think of them as the [computer company name omitted but you damn well know who I'm talking about] of agriculture. It wasn't the tech that went bad, it was the lawyers. What used to be safe to society (and I mean this in a legal sense, not a biological sense) got spoiled by a bad apple (oops, sorry, I was trying to avoid that company's name to keep the flamebait mods down).
Nevertheless, it is spoiled, and 99% of us vote to keep the patent system pretty much the way it is. We're not going to roll back the fact that food can be proprietary, so that when you buy it, there may be unusual restrictions on what you're allowed to do with it.
That's why I support clear labeling. Not on GMO specifically, because I don't want to argue about what counts as GMO and what doesn't. That argument will always be stupid, like arguing about which religion is the correct one. The labeling should be government-mandated whenever the product has patents. (And honestly, I can't think of any reason to limit this to just food.)
Imagine your frustration, after you buy some quadrotriticale (thinking it's just good ol'-fashioned unproprietary wheat), ship it to Sherman's planet, plant it, and then you get a letter from Monsanto's lawyers saying you owe a billion dollars because the grain was supposed to be used to make flour, not as seed . Imagine buying an apple (damn, sorry, there's that name again) at a grocery store, and it's not until after you enter your hard cider into the state fair contest, that you find out it had terms of use which prohibited pressing -- you were only allowed to eat the apple solid.
That all borders on a sort of fraud and/or entrapment. Restrictions should be made clear prior to the sale, so that people don't unwittingly become liable for things they never could have known they weren't allowed to do. (*) This isn't a onerous requirement at all; my smizmar buys plants all the time, and some of them actually are explicitly labeled that they're patented and propagation is prohibited. So there's precedent that the supply chain can handle this kind of labeling.
If we're going to go nuts with all this crazy IP law, then there either need to be protections for innocent infringers, or their innocence should cause them to be defined as non-infringing. If you don't tell someone they're not allowed to use the seeds, then they're allowed to use the seeds. WTF would be so unfair about that?
(*) Same goes for software which the copyright holders insist is licensed rather than sold: it should be labeled and communicated prior to the sale, or else the EULA shouldn't be mandatory.
While I want campaign finance reform, it's been pointed out to me that it will likely be infeasible to give everyone who signs up money from the get go... We need some finance reform, I just don't know what that full picture looks like yet.
I think the long-term solution (alas I think my "solution" may already be proven wrong) to campaign finance is the same as the long-term solution to health care finance: pray for tech.;-) With tech, finance is irrelevant because things are cheap.
Lots of people concentrate on finance problems by asking "Who pays?" instead of asking "How much ultimately gets paid?" and that's a shame because it's the second question which is really important. The first question is merely a right/left debate point and even if you think one side is correct, it's not like anyone is ever swayed by the discussion.
I'd like campaigning to be cheap, to the point that a hundred million dollar campaign gets about the same number of votes as a two thousand dollar campaign. (Of course, I'd also like a pony.) When I get my pony -- oops I mean -- when campaigning is cheap enough, we'll also have stronger arguments that money isn't speech, so it'll get easier to hit the remaining corruption.
And that's why it seems ironic that we still worry about this in 2011, with teh interwebs and all that. Media is still expensive and even education (think about how awesomely crazy that is) is still expensive. WTF? How are they still buying our votes, when we don't watch TV commercials or read newspapers anymore?
If you go to Walmart.com, you expect it to be Walmart's site.
That's part of the joy of this. A political candidate can't openly admit that their own name is a trademark, representing a business being run for profit to the detriment of all other considerations. Thus, their names are fair game on the trademark grounds.
Once you get past the trademark barrier, you look at the remaining 70% of.com registrations (warning: that is a totally made-up statistic that I just pulled out of my ass), which just happen to be names or references to certain topics, rather than representing specific businesses. If newtgingrich.com's owner shows content related to Newt Gingrich, there won't be anything deceptive about usage of the domain name at all.
This isn't what's really important anyway. It's about who is best at SEO and gets the top Google result for "nute gingritch" searches.
Here here. Low power is the new stupid (half kidding) thing to obsess over. My most-used home computer with a UI is an Atom. In 2010 when people were drooling over how great Sandy Bridge might be, and how much kickass-per-$ the X6 Phenoms offered, I was looking for an Athlon II 240e for my server to downgrade to (eventually finding, to my joy, a 610e for sale, so that I could finally pay $130(?) for the downgrade), just so I could say I had a 45W-TPD-but-still-reasonably-powerful-for-transcoding CPU. Not that doing such things makes any sense at all, from a "green" or money-savings perspective; it's all about low wattage being the new dicksize ruler.
[Pompous English accent] "At your next dinner party, impress the all the wives by being the man with the smallest power supply."
And that's the relatively non-nerdy approach. Serious dudes are getting all excited over stuff like Raspberry Pi, etc
13 years ago you were probably (though by no means certain) using a lower level language, so there was a vague feeling that from a software perspective, you had already done about all you could do, so tweaking the hardware was what remained.
And the scalar speed of the hardware was pretty much the one thing to change.
Nowdays you're always thinking about the software, and the hardware is presented to you as something with overflowing abundance that you're not taking full advantage of. You go to "I need threads there" or "where can I pipe/fork this?" or even less nerdy things like trying out a new compiler, before you worry about clock speed. It's not that clock speed doesn't matter sometimes, but it's just one of a great many things you have access to and some control over, so it's naturally going to be de-emphasized compared to the older days.
Then from the implementation angle of overclocking, it's less work/thinking/hacking. You simply change some very well-labeled BIOS settings, which weren't always there with your 1990s computers. And you can literally buy water cooling systems, mass produced and already fitting your processor's package, off the shelf. Your case already has (or if it doesn't, you go buy one) holes and fans in the right places. It's all completely mainstream now, where you flick the switch someone else made, rather than having to come up with your own way to get it to work.
I can only conclude that you're pro-Rand and trying to make her critics look like idiots by setting up ridiculous strawmen. There's nothing even slightly hypocritical about advocating the repeal of those programs and using them when you qualify.
If you were actually out to make Rand look bad, you could have easily done much better than that. Fuck, just mention that for all her talk of reason, she was a smoker. See? Actual hypocrisy instead of your bullshit not-really hypocrisy. But you wouldn't want to say that, because Rand is your hero.
Stuff does, but for these taxes I think this may be the first time in history. (I'm admittedly a few years behind the times on this one.) If the software naively treats taxes in a special way different from the myriad other withholdings and expenses, I can see this being a slight pain in the ass. Back when I was working on this stuff, the 1987 version of our program would not have been able to handle this, whereas the 1988 version could, because unifying the code simply made things easier. Call the former behavior stupid if you want, but when you inherit a maintenance legacy, all you care about is all the work you have to do, not whose fault it is. And payroll reeks of being a world of legacy, where no one is writing brand new applications, so I'd expect there to be plenty of crazy limitations out there.
(Income tax withholding changed mid-year a few times if I recall, but one of the things about income tax is that being spot-on with the withholding isn't really all that important. If someone has to manually change rates mid-year and misses it by a week or two, it really doesn't matter, because people "settle up" when they file their tax returns every year. Close is good enough. Not so with Social Security and Medicare. If you screw it up then you have to adjust for it in later checks.)
Not that legacies excuse anything; sometimes maintainers just have to suck it up and do the work.
But software issues aside, I think lowered Social Security and Medicare withholdings and accrued employer expenses is just plained whacked, unless we're giving up on Social Security. If that's the plan, then those assholes need to come out and say it. DEFUNDING Social Security while keeping the pretense that it'll real, is just plain dishonest.
It's valid to either cut revenue and services, or increase revenue and services, but anyone who cuts revenue and says the services will still be there, is just another lying Republicrat scumbag.
Obviously, but Manning's not-having-his-shit-together was way deeper than technical. His situation was one where you don't even want to be a suspect or "person of interest." Once you have determined investigators looking at you, it's like having a determined burglar specifically interested in your house. He was one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people with access to these supposedly-sensitive documents, safely lost in a totally unmanageable crowd, and he told someone "look at me! look at me!"
I don't know if it even makes sense to "blame" him for getting caught, because at some point he apparently decided it was ok to get caught.
Exactly. That's how to do it. Set it up once like that, and then you don't need to worry about swap anymore. I think Linux has had this easy-to-do since the 2.2 days and OpenBSD was (I think?) doing it before that. And that was back when processors were an order of magnitude slower than today's stuff.
The other problems jimicus mentions still stand, but the swap problem is so solved.
Slashdot Mirror
You can leave a comment about the business, and a rating of their trustworthiness and vendor reliability here. They should see it if they care about their website, and some of their site's visitors (depending on installed FF plugins) may see it. Whether that effects their business prospects is dubious, but it's something.
If a business publicly asserts that a test which has similar mechanics to their test (but is a completely different expression) is a derived work, I'd say they're a bit untrustworthy (though to be fair, matters of law aren't something they claim expertise with -- OTOH, trustworthy people usually try to STFU on topics they don't understand (but we all make mistakes sometimes)). If they issue DMCA takedown notices based on that misconception, I'd say they're dangerously untrustworthy and no one can safely interact with them in commercial matters, which also impacts their "vendor reliability."
What troubles me more than the copyright issue, is that TFA makes it sound like they sell a "licensed version" of the test. It doesn't say authorized copies (copyright terminology), but a licensed version, which implies there might be terms of use or a contract, wholly unlike how people normally buy most copyrighted works (though many proprietary software publishers now assert that too). That is a pretty threatening idea. I wonder if TFA got that right.
The 9th circuit isn't doing that; Congress did it in 2008. That was the very intent of the FISA amendment, and there really wasn't any ambiguity about it. Many people simply hated it at the time. (Though most didn't hate it enough to vote against the people who did it -- both McCain and Obama who supported it as senators, combined got an overwhelming majority of the votes for president. Doing what they did, didn't destroy their campaigns.) Don't blame the court for that. The AT&T suit really ought to be dead; the time to fight for justice was 3.5 years ago and we collectively decided it wasn't important.
We need to accept and take responsibility for that decision. It is hypocritical to vote against justice and still demand it.
When you hear "Open API" any programmer will think it just means a well-known or documented API; i.e. it's not a secret. Load the accumulator with the petscii character you want to output and JSR $FFD2 -- or make a certain REST call as documented at the service's site -- that's what people will think you're talking about, when you say "Open API."
That isn't what TFA is talking about.
He's talking about different services using the same APIs, being client-compatible. That is, if you make a competitor to AWS, use Amazon's API. If you make a Facebook competitor, use Facebook's API.
WTF this has to do with Open Source, I'm not sure. It implies this guy thinks a trend will develop/continue where people move code off of their machine to other people's machines, I guess. And when code is running on someone else's machine, you don't care whether that machine's owner is allowed to maintain it themselves, so proprietary/free is meaningless to you -- both end up being effectively proprietary to you.
Maybe he's saying that compatible APIs (which would be 100x better term than "open APIs") just make it easier to switch services, so if you're not getting the server maintenance you want somewhere, maybe you'll find it at a competitor, all without having to rewrite your client.
And that's fine, but it's not nearly as useful as have a server under your own control. Free Software will always be easier on everyone.
Reason #2 for supporting SOPA: All parties are corrupt.
Thanks people, let's keep these intelligent pro-SOPA arguments coming. They are most compelling!
Ok, let's begin that list I was talking about. So.. reason #1 for supporting SOPA is: your candidate has only a snowballs' chance in hell of being elected (probably because you've decided to not vote for him).
Who is the greater idiot: the idiots or the idiots who vote for them?
Let's not for a moment pretend we have anyone other than ourselves to blame. Everyone says they hate SOPA, but talk about voting against the SOPA parties and suddenly you're a wacko and 90+% people start listing reasons they plan to support the people who enact it.
This is why I have to delve into fiction to find a decent religion. The Cthulhu Cult believes in their guy, so they get to make idols. Old wizard Whateley and Joseph Curwen know Yog-Sothoth is real, because the spells work. A Satanless Satanism -- that's just fucked up. Satanists, WTF are you guys thinking?! Get with it and don't tell me "they change what it is." It was you. You changed.
No, I didn't know that, and I find that to be disappointing. A Satanless Satanism has no charm at all. If I were a Satanist, I would schism the religion immediately and declare the Satan-deniers to be infidels. You gotta have the horned 'n' hoofed guy, for the artwork alone! I used to think Satanism was a reaction to lame religions, but it sounds like they managed to out-lame their parents.
There aren't any theories based on loose conjecture. Ideas can be based on loose conjecture, but experimental confirmation is what turns those ideas into theories (or fails to do so).
But aren't all your worldly senses, the experiments which confirm evolution, the lack of observations to suggest its inaccuracy, Ceasar's? For example, by the late 1880s, would not a follower of "render to Ceasar that which is Caesar's" been allowed to doubt Newtonian mechanics, as failed to accurately predict what people were measuring with their worldly senses? Faith didn't really require rejection of Einstein's 1905 work, did it?
Technology which results in instruments which can measure things with greater accuracy, and insights which reveal ways to run experiments that were previously not thought viable, keep moving the line which distinguishes between what is "of this world," and what isn't.
There was a time, over a century and a half ago, when if someone had suggested evolution, it would have been merely a neat idea, and rejecting it would not have outed anyone as being anti-science. It was a question of faith and opinion. But then someone came up with a theory to check it against the world. The line between worldly and un-worldly knowledge moved, just like it did for Galileo.
To say evolution is on less solid ground than, say, relativity and quantum mechanics, is to reject observation, the modeling observation inspires, and the experiments which confirm or destroy the models. That's a rejection of science.
Being anti-science is ok. There's nothing necessarily stupid or dishonorable about saying "evolution hasn't happened," as long as you hold that what we see isn't real, or say that in real life things don't work consistently so it's foolish to try to model them, or adopt other mystic ways to reject the inferences that science draws.
But to reject science and also say you're not anti-science -- don't you see how everyone will think you're either being dishonest or clueless? (You say you don't mind that people think that, and presumably you think of yourself as not dishonest or clueless, but you do at least see why everyone would (mistakenly?) think that, right?) Why can't evolution deniers embrace their anti-science? What the hell is so important about science, that lip-service must be paid even if you're totally and absolutely convinced that science is wrong?
Does "give to Caesar what is Caesar's" require accepting science? If it does, then why don't mystics really do it? And if it doesn't, then why can't mystics just let science go? There's gotta be a better way than pretending ignorance of the evidence, or lying about it. Getting along just can't be this hard.
I still use Gandi and I live in USA.
The only "hard" thing about them is that every single year when I pay them, it triggers VISA fraud alert (i.e. VISA calls me and wants me to confirm it was a legit charge) because they're not used to me buying a lot of stuff from Europe anymore.
And that's really a VISA problem rather than a Gandi problem, and actually if you think about it, it's not a "problem" at all -- confirming rare exceptions is good. I just wish VISA would realize that this yearly charge is like clockwork, every year at about the same time for about the same amount, so not really all that exceptional. But I can forgive that too. There's no real hassle here at all, and it'll take more than that for me to reconsider Gandi. It ain't broke so I ain't fixin' it.
That's basically the same religion. Same pantheon, different temple. You're a Christian (or close enough).
So that's what that Marilyn Chambers movie was about.
What's the deal with the Galaxy S' shitty GPS? Is that a hardware problem or Samsung software problem? Does Cyanogenmod fix it?
All I can think of is that Obama lost a ridiculous bet with Boehner on some secret round of golf.
Boehner: "Ten thousand dollars? Chump change. No, I said let's make it interesting."
Obama: "Ok, loser has to wear a dress and an SS armband at their next press conference."
Boehner: "That's getting closer, but people pretty much expect that. The campaigns are on, so wacky attention-whoring is already in."
Obama: "What did you have in mind?"
Boehner: "If I win, you have to be all tax cut, free money, no consequences, wooo! and my party gets to be.."
Obama: "-- Oh my god --"
Boehner "..the voice of.."
Obama: "-- I don't believe this --"
Boehner: "..reason and responsibility."
[Several seconds of silence, then they both burst out laughing]
Boehner: "Scared?"
Obama: "No, you're toast. Speaking of which, what happens when I win?"
Boehner: "We drop the birther thing."
Obama: "Oh please. No seriously, c'mon. I used to think that whole thing was stupid, but it makes people subconsciously think of me as a little more exotic and cool. Try again."
Boehner: *shrugs* "Science."
Obama: "Are you serious?! Holy shit. Really?"
Boenher: "The question is, do you have the balls?"
Obama: "What's your handicap?"
Boehner: "Gingr--" Obama: "Quit fucking around, this is a serious bet."
Boehner: "Minus 5."
Obama: "Oh."
Boehner: "Not so cocky now, are you, Mr Cool?"
Obama should be praised as a hero. So he lost at golf, BFD. He fought for science.
One of my flames against the anti-GMO crowd is how arbitrarily they draw the line between what is genetically engineered and what isn't. Any sort of goal-directed breeding, hybridization, etc. are forms of engineering, and they work on the genes, and they do it in a way where the resulting genotype has not, and would not, ever occur in nature. But somehow triticale doesn't terrify the the way a Roundup Ready product does.
What's interesting is that these older forms of genetic engineering are also patentable. We have had "proprietary food" since the 1930s. It used to be limited to asexually reproducing breeds and then later expanded. (I don't really pretend to understand the details of why that distiction mattered and why it got changed.)
This isn't something that Monsanto invented; they merely enforced their patents to a new degree of evil. Think of them as the [computer company name omitted but you damn well know who I'm talking about] of agriculture. It wasn't the tech that went bad, it was the lawyers. What used to be safe to society (and I mean this in a legal sense, not a biological sense) got spoiled by a bad apple (oops, sorry, I was trying to avoid that company's name to keep the flamebait mods down).
Nevertheless, it is spoiled, and 99% of us vote to keep the patent system pretty much the way it is. We're not going to roll back the fact that food can be proprietary, so that when you buy it, there may be unusual restrictions on what you're allowed to do with it.
That's why I support clear labeling. Not on GMO specifically, because I don't want to argue about what counts as GMO and what doesn't. That argument will always be stupid, like arguing about which religion is the correct one. The labeling should be government-mandated whenever the product has patents. (And honestly, I can't think of any reason to limit this to just food.)
Imagine your frustration, after you buy some quadrotriticale (thinking it's just good ol'-fashioned unproprietary wheat), ship it to Sherman's planet, plant it, and then you get a letter from Monsanto's lawyers saying you owe a billion dollars because the grain was supposed to be used to make flour, not as seed . Imagine buying an apple (damn, sorry, there's that name again) at a grocery store, and it's not until after you enter your hard cider into the state fair contest, that you find out it had terms of use which prohibited pressing -- you were only allowed to eat the apple solid.
That all borders on a sort of fraud and/or entrapment. Restrictions should be made clear prior to the sale, so that people don't unwittingly become liable for things they never could have known they weren't allowed to do. (*) This isn't a onerous requirement at all; my smizmar buys plants all the time, and some of them actually are explicitly labeled that they're patented and propagation is prohibited. So there's precedent that the supply chain can handle this kind of labeling.
If we're going to go nuts with all this crazy IP law, then there either need to be protections for innocent infringers, or their innocence should cause them to be defined as non-infringing. If you don't tell someone they're not allowed to use the seeds, then they're allowed to use the seeds. WTF would be so unfair about that?
(*) Same goes for software which the copyright holders insist is licensed rather than sold: it should be labeled and communicated prior to the sale, or else the EULA shouldn't be mandatory.
It's not "deceptive" to put up an anti-x page at x.com.
I think the long-term solution (alas I think my "solution" may already be proven wrong) to campaign finance is the same as the long-term solution to health care finance: pray for tech. ;-) With tech, finance is irrelevant because things are cheap.
Lots of people concentrate on finance problems by asking "Who pays?" instead of asking "How much ultimately gets paid?" and that's a shame because it's the second question which is really important. The first question is merely a right/left debate point and even if you think one side is correct, it's not like anyone is ever swayed by the discussion.
I'd like campaigning to be cheap, to the point that a hundred million dollar campaign gets about the same number of votes as a two thousand dollar campaign. (Of course, I'd also like a pony.) When I get my pony -- oops I mean -- when campaigning is cheap enough, we'll also have stronger arguments that money isn't speech, so it'll get easier to hit the remaining corruption.
And that's why it seems ironic that we still worry about this in 2011, with teh interwebs and all that. Media is still expensive and even education (think about how awesomely crazy that is) is still expensive. WTF? How are they still buying our votes, when we don't watch TV commercials or read newspapers anymore?
That's part of the joy of this. A political candidate can't openly admit that their own name is a trademark, representing a business being run for profit to the detriment of all other considerations. Thus, their names are fair game on the trademark grounds.
Once you get past the trademark barrier, you look at the remaining 70% of .com registrations (warning: that is a totally made-up statistic that I just pulled out of my ass), which just happen to be names or references to certain topics, rather than representing specific businesses. If newtgingrich.com's owner shows content related to Newt Gingrich, there won't be anything deceptive about usage of the domain name at all.
This isn't what's really important anyway. It's about who is best at SEO and gets the top Google result for "nute gingritch" searches.
Here here. Low power is the new stupid (half kidding) thing to obsess over. My most-used home computer with a UI is an Atom. In 2010 when people were drooling over how great Sandy Bridge might be, and how much kickass-per-$ the X6 Phenoms offered, I was looking for an Athlon II 240e for my server to downgrade to (eventually finding, to my joy, a 610e for sale, so that I could finally pay $130(?) for the downgrade), just so I could say I had a 45W-TPD-but-still-reasonably-powerful-for-transcoding CPU. Not that doing such things makes any sense at all, from a "green" or money-savings perspective; it's all about low wattage being the new dicksize ruler.
[Pompous English accent] "At your next dinner party, impress the all the wives by being the man with the smallest power supply."
And that's the relatively non-nerdy approach. Serious dudes are getting all excited over stuff like Raspberry Pi, etc
13 years ago you were probably (though by no means certain) using a lower level language, so there was a vague feeling that from a software perspective, you had already done about all you could do, so tweaking the hardware was what remained.
And the scalar speed of the hardware was pretty much the one thing to change.
Nowdays you're always thinking about the software, and the hardware is presented to you as something with overflowing abundance that you're not taking full advantage of. You go to "I need threads there" or "where can I pipe/fork this?" or even less nerdy things like trying out a new compiler, before you worry about clock speed. It's not that clock speed doesn't matter sometimes, but it's just one of a great many things you have access to and some control over, so it's naturally going to be de-emphasized compared to the older days.
Then from the implementation angle of overclocking, it's less work/thinking/hacking. You simply change some very well-labeled BIOS settings, which weren't always there with your 1990s computers. And you can literally buy water cooling systems, mass produced and already fitting your processor's package, off the shelf. Your case already has (or if it doesn't, you go buy one) holes and fans in the right places. It's all completely mainstream now, where you flick the switch someone else made, rather than having to come up with your own way to get it to work.
It's not "hacking" anymore.
I can only conclude that you're pro-Rand and trying to make her critics look like idiots by setting up ridiculous strawmen. There's nothing even slightly hypocritical about advocating the repeal of those programs and using them when you qualify.
If you were actually out to make Rand look bad, you could have easily done much better than that. Fuck, just mention that for all her talk of reason, she was a smoker. See? Actual hypocrisy instead of your bullshit not-really hypocrisy. But you wouldn't want to say that, because Rand is your hero.
Google isn't free. You have to pay them to use their service. Their service being, of course, advertisement delivery.
Stuff does, but for these taxes I think this may be the first time in history. (I'm admittedly a few years behind the times on this one.) If the software naively treats taxes in a special way different from the myriad other withholdings and expenses, I can see this being a slight pain in the ass. Back when I was working on this stuff, the 1987 version of our program would not have been able to handle this, whereas the 1988 version could, because unifying the code simply made things easier. Call the former behavior stupid if you want, but when you inherit a maintenance legacy, all you care about is all the work you have to do, not whose fault it is. And payroll reeks of being a world of legacy, where no one is writing brand new applications, so I'd expect there to be plenty of crazy limitations out there.
(Income tax withholding changed mid-year a few times if I recall, but one of the things about income tax is that being spot-on with the withholding isn't really all that important. If someone has to manually change rates mid-year and misses it by a week or two, it really doesn't matter, because people "settle up" when they file their tax returns every year. Close is good enough. Not so with Social Security and Medicare. If you screw it up then you have to adjust for it in later checks.)
Not that legacies excuse anything; sometimes maintainers just have to suck it up and do the work.
But software issues aside, I think lowered Social Security and Medicare withholdings and accrued employer expenses is just plained whacked, unless we're giving up on Social Security. If that's the plan, then those assholes need to come out and say it. DEFUNDING Social Security while keeping the pretense that it'll real, is just plain dishonest.
It's valid to either cut revenue and services, or increase revenue and services, but anyone who cuts revenue and says the services will still be there, is just another lying Republicrat scumbag.
Obviously, but Manning's not-having-his-shit-together was way deeper than technical. His situation was one where you don't even want to be a suspect or "person of interest." Once you have determined investigators looking at you, it's like having a determined burglar specifically interested in your house. He was one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people with access to these supposedly-sensitive documents, safely lost in a totally unmanageable crowd, and he told someone "look at me! look at me!"
I don't know if it even makes sense to "blame" him for getting caught, because at some point he apparently decided it was ok to get caught.
Exactly. That's how to do it. Set it up once like that, and then you don't need to worry about swap anymore. I think Linux has had this easy-to-do since the 2.2 days and OpenBSD was (I think?) doing it before that. And that was back when processors were an order of magnitude slower than today's stuff.
The other problems jimicus mentions still stand, but the swap problem is so solved.