Floppies last at least as long as cheap writable CDs, in my experience, as long as you store them in a nice metal box with a tight-fitting lid. Don't leave them in the sun, on top of a speaker magnet, or in the baby's diaper bag - treat 'em just like 1600 bpi 9-track streamers.
Commercial music CDs, though, those things seem to last forever. Or at least, I've never had one wear out unless it was physically damaged. I've got CDs from the 1980s and early 90s that play fine.
"Call me precious I don't mind 78s are hard to find You just can't get the shellac since the war" --"Don't Sit on My Jimmy Shands", Richard Thompson
...if your well is properly sized you can run it also off of the solar+battery system. a propane tank outside will supply cooking, heat for home and water.
All the mail I get is addressed to me. It has my name on it, my address on it. It has my name in the SMTP envelope, it has my name in the salutation, it has my name in the "To:" field.
The lusrs that sent it typed in the wrong address, but the person they wanted to send it to has the same name I do. Capisce?
The people who turn off autocomplete and type all their email addresses by hand do not make these mistakes, because they have significant amounts of practice typing them correctly.
The people who use email clients that remember and autocomplete addresses don't ever integrate the RFC822 parse logic into their brains or fingers, so they always type.com for.net and.org addresses, and they always type smith when they mean smythe, and then forever after their mis-populated contacts list misdirects their email.
Seriously, decades of experience here; I remember when SMTP was an exotic protocol. I get many error messages every day from the email servers, and many of those errors are from misaddressed messages, and the people responsible simply are NOT the ones typing in email addresses from memory. It's the contacts list people, always, nearly every single time.
It was addressed to me; I own the address that received it, it is mine. According to the laws you've quoted, anyway, which strictly forbid opening mail addressed to other people. Only I may legally open it; it is mine.
I get a dozen emails a month on my gmail account that are intended for a person with a name very similar to mine.
These emails are all addressed to me, although that's not who they should have been sent to. The person sending intentionally sent it to me - they typed my address and pressed 'send' - so under the laws you've quoted nobody else may open it, only me.
I try and try to get these people (who are mostly British real estate salesmen) to stop sending me these emails which sometimes contain confidential information relating to their clients. The tossers apologize and promise never to do it again (and occasionally do stop for a week or two, then start up again). It appears that many British land brokers are not just poor typists, but also idiots.
He wasn't mentally acute enough to do the work at hand and not professional enough to take significant notes. We found a position for him on maintenance and other less challenging work.
Then you're a good manager.
A good manager finds a way to motivate each worker to do his or her best in a position well suited to that worker's intellect, personality and abilities.
A bad manager blames workers for being incapable of doing work they should never have been assigned, and eventually creates a resentful, unmotivated work force where everyone is "looking out for number one" and nobody is trying to be part of a collective win.
I don't think most people can write web code faster in lisp than PHP, unless you restrict yourself to a very tiny problem space. PHP has its issues (like a pretty broken language development community, meaning no offense to Rasmus himself) but it does allow incredibly rapid web development. In his essay, Graham says two lisp experts were better off using lisp for web development than using C++ or perl, and gives very good reasons why. But personally I suspect the real difference between Graham and his competitors was well motivated talent, which is not something you can shoehorn into a Dilbertesque corporate culture. Yeah, sure, languages do matter, but not as much as raw programming ability does.
...nuclear is the ONLY technology that we have here and now that can replace coal and gas fired baseline power needs.
Oh, you're cheating. Don't shift the argument.
We need to replace power plants that release radiation and geologically sequestered carbon into the atmosphere with power plants that use fuel produced from biologically sustainable sources. There's not a damn thing wrong with gas fired power plants, the problem is how we are feeding them.
Granted, coal plants have to go, but it's not fair to lump in gas plants with coal plants. In fact, it would be more accurate to lump nuclear plants in with coal plants, although that's also a kind of rhetorical cheating.
In the USA, we have more than enough cropland and sunlight to completely power our baseline with renewably produced methane gas that is already a part of the existing atmospheric carbon cycle, providing no change in the climate. Just harvesting the methane from all of the USA's municipal sewer systems would be a good start!
I don't want to fund oil companies that don't care if my children starve, I don't want to fund middle eastern terrorism, I don't want to fund militarized, centralized nuclear power production, I don't want to fund morally bankrupt, worker-abusing coal mining consortia, I don't want to increase the risk of my grandchildren contracting lung cancer, I don't want to fund creaky obsolete 1940s fission technology or even more obsolete 1800s petroleum technology. I want shiny 21st century biotech - gasoline-producing algae and rocket motor trees!
So sell me biologically produced methane gas, which I can access with existing infrastructure in my existing gas furnace, gas generator, gas stove, gas oven, gas dryer, etc. etc. with no dependence on foreign sources and I will be happy to pay you a fat profit - and it'll cost both of us far less than the cost of building, protecting and decommissioning nuclear power plants.
Criticism accepted! This is the truth as I see it, and I certainly could be wrong.
Religious #4 is me, personally. That's my answer. So it's definitely a religious answer, and the fact that it doesn't contradict science is a feature, not a bug.
Most westerners don't realize that there are a number of explicitly atheist religions. Jainism, for example, is much older than Christianity and still exists today. The dominant western theisms have worked very hard to convince people that religion and theism are synonymous, but any serious study of the history of religion will show this simply isn't true. People from Asia and the Indian subcontinent generally know this, people from Europe and the Americas generally don't.
As for my church, well, I am a pantheist, personally, but my church is Unitarian Universalist. We have been happily accepting theist, atheist and agnostic members since the late 1960s. Every UU congregation has its own unique flavor, but there are many thousands of them all over the world, so it's usually not hard to find one that works for you. Some strongly emphasize the exploration of religion, philosophy and spirituality, some don't; nearly all are active in social justice issues such as fighting ignorance, slavery, racism and injustice.
Why do religious people want 100% certainty when dealing with science, but are happy with faith when it comes to religion?
Some people are happy to take nearly everything on faith (they believe whatever nonsense they are told by newspapers, holy books, or scientific journals) and other people prefer to practice the scientific method, which enshrines experimentation and skepticism (of all things, including both religion and science itself). I personally have noticed little or no correlation between "faith based" beliefs and religion, honestly. In my own church, I cannot think of a single person who your sentence describes accurately; in fact many of us are practicing scientists. Yet: I can find a dozen people in five minutes on any anti-religious forum who firmly believe all sorts of things they have never bothered to actually verify for themselves, because, they claim, "science has proven" some absurd thing. Some of these people will tell you glass is a liquid, for example!
For many people a white-coated scientist is interchangeable with a black-robed priest... they simply believe whatever their chosen oracle tells them is true, completely on faith.
They really are. Religion is based on irrational answers to rational problems.
Speaking in my capacity as an ordained minister, I'd like to know what the heck you are talking about?
My religion welcomes atheists and agnostics and actively fights the type of dogmatism you are embracing. So why are you speaking this way about me and my co-religionists? You are telling harmful lies.
See, the truth is that people are not interchangeable parts, and both science and religion are composed of the works and beliefs of many individual people. If you ascribe the attributes of some subset of religion and/or science to a vast mass of people you've never met and have not tried to understand, and refuse to acknowledge the truth of easily verified facts, you have abandoned rationality. Abandoning reason is not a characteristic of religion, although it has been (and is) a characteristic of SOME religions.
Here's how your hypothetical conversation happens where I live:
Questioner: Where do earthquakes come from?
Religion: That's a good question! But it's really more the domain of geology; we religious types are more interested in the effects of earthquakes on humans and other living beings, and how to help make the world a better place for every creature.
Questioner: No, really, I want a real answer. Quit dodging!
Religious #1: GOD!
Religious #2: Who can say? God willing, we may learn someday.
Religious #3: You must TAKE THE LORD into your HEART so that you may KNOW THE TRUTH!
Religious #4: You should go to the library and look up "plate tectonics" since this is really not a religious question. Also, it's hard to say if objective reality actually exists, so you should take my own subjective interpretations with a grain of salt, and embark on your own journey of discovery. All that being said, earthquakes seem to be caused by the shifting of huge chunks of the earth in reaction to stresses related to the distribution of heat and interactions of cosmic events such as the movements of the planets through space, as well as lingering effects from the formation of the solar system itself. We will probably learn more about this in the future, and many of the explanations used in the past seem silly to modern people, so keep an open mind.
Scientist #1: The latest poorly supported theory is absolutely correct and all other interpretations are obsolete.
Scientist #2: The latest theory is balderdash and poppycock and everyone knows that the standard model is correct! You are a heretic and should be burned!
Scientist #3: What do I know, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a geologist. That last religion guy sounded like the right answer to me, but that's unpossible, since religion is the opposite of science.
Scientist #5: I have degrees in geology and physics and I study plate tectonics. Why don't you come to my lecture series? I'm having it at the local Unitarian Universalist Church, because they love science talks, and they have better coffee than the Buddhists.
Robert Heinlein first described the waterbed in Stranger in a Strange Land and therefore, patents were denied to other people because his description was already there in the public domain. Of course, he couldn't have later patented it either, for the very same reason.
Waterbeds were known to the ancient Romans and are mentioned by Plutarch. I seem to remember that the ancient versions were not actually watertight, though; generally they were leather, and your backside got wet. They were also in use and described by 1855 for therapeutic purposes (see wikipedia). It does appear that Heinlein's invention of the waterbed was independent, but he was definitely not the "first".
...it is less about making money on the STB (although if you keep it for many many years, they do) but limiting the alternatives so that the code that is downloaded to present the user friendly screen and features work...
I get your point, but I'm not sure "work" and "user friendly" are the best words to use. My own STB would be better described as "vendor friendly" or even "user hostile"... although it can be said to "work" as long as you have very low standards for a "working" user interface.
Question: What is wrong with Powershell [wikipedia.org] ?
Answer: It's not busybox.
I occasionally start to do something with Powershell, but then I always realize I can do it faster, easier, with less memory using busybox compiled as a standalone windows executable. So I just do that instead.
If you are manipulating windows internals, sure, use powershell. But I'm generally trying to get something done in the real world... using powershell would be like using a $100 torque wrench to hammer in a nail.
we have apparently abandoned the idea that government can assure a free and fair market through regulation.
Well, yes, because they have so clearly and repeatedly shown that they're up for sale to the highest bidder and completely incapable of doing what they're supposed to - acting as neutral and impartial adjudicator.
True, but if you have a broken faucet it doesn't make sense to cap the well and start drinking your own urine.
Instead of saying "Our government is corrupt, therefore all government is evil and must be dismantled" it would make more sense to say "Our government is corrupt, so let's convict and execute the individuals responsible for the corruption". Fix the faucet, don't destroy the well.
But then again, most modern Americans are incapable of walking to market, much less getting off the couch and storming their local political criminal's headquarters. So perhaps we have ended up with exactly the government most of us deserve - fat, amoral and incompetent.
browser makers to grow a pair and stop trusting root CAs who do not enforce strict rules for identifiability on all the lesser CAs under them. Yes, this will be painful as many legit sites will catch it in the neck for problems not really of their making, but anything else leaves CAs with an incentive to cheat; cutting violators off from the magic money machine is the only way of getting the crap out of the pool.
You're right, but disconnecting the problem networks was the obvious remedy for spammers and botnets, and we can see how well that worked out...
Asking any corporation to favor product or service quality is not going to fly if it puts them at a competitive disadvantage, and we have apparently abandoned the idea that government can assure a free and fair market through regulation.
Unfortunately, if you plan to run the Oracle JVM, yes [processor architecture] does matter. Only a few {operating system, architecture} tuples are supported. For example, no {openbsd, sparc}.
Thank you! Yet another good reason to avoid Oracle.
Slashdot Mirror
Floppies last at least as long as cheap writable CDs, in my experience, as long as you store them in a nice metal box with a tight-fitting lid. Don't leave them in the sun, on top of a speaker magnet, or in the baby's diaper bag - treat 'em just like 1600 bpi 9-track streamers.
Commercial music CDs, though, those things seem to last forever. Or at least, I've never had one wear out unless it was physically damaged. I've got CDs from the 1980s and early 90s that play fine.
"Call me precious I don't mind
78s are hard to find
You just can't get the shellac since the war"
--"Don't Sit on My Jimmy Shands", Richard Thompson
Propane isn't "sustainable".
Wow, man, you're powertrolling.
Maybe there ought to be a slashdot "achievement" for that.
All the mail I get is addressed to me. It has my name on it, my address on it. It has my name in the SMTP envelope, it has my name in the salutation, it has my name in the "To:" field.
The lusrs that sent it typed in the wrong address, but the person they wanted to send it to has the same name I do. Capisce?
Human names are not reliably unique.
Yes it does. All the mis-sent email I get all has my name and my address on it. Otherwise it would not have been delivered to me.
I administrate several email domains.
The people who turn off autocomplete and type all their email addresses by hand do not make these mistakes, because they have significant amounts of practice typing them correctly.
The people who use email clients that remember and autocomplete addresses don't ever integrate the RFC822 parse logic into their brains or fingers, so they always type .com for .net and .org addresses, and they always type smith when they mean smythe, and then forever after their mis-populated contacts list misdirects their email.
Seriously, decades of experience here; I remember when SMTP was an exotic protocol. I get many error messages every day from the email servers, and many of those errors are from misaddressed messages, and the people responsible simply are NOT the ones typing in email addresses from memory. It's the contacts list people, always, nearly every single time.
It was addressed to me; I own the address that received it, it is mine. According to the laws you've quoted, anyway, which strictly forbid opening mail addressed to other people. Only I may legally open it; it is mine.
I get a dozen emails a month on my gmail account that are intended for a person with a name very similar to mine.
These emails are all addressed to me, although that's not who they should have been sent to. The person sending intentionally sent it to me - they typed my address and pressed 'send' - so under the laws you've quoted nobody else may open it, only me.
I try and try to get these people (who are mostly British real estate salesmen) to stop sending me these emails which sometimes contain confidential information relating to their clients. The tossers apologize and promise never to do it again (and occasionally do stop for a week or two, then start up again). It appears that many British land brokers are not just poor typists, but also idiots.
Then you're a good manager.
A good manager finds a way to motivate each worker to do his or her best in a position well suited to that worker's intellect, personality and abilities.
A bad manager blames workers for being incapable of doing work they should never have been assigned, and eventually creates a resentful, unmotivated work force where everyone is "looking out for number one" and nobody is trying to be part of a collective win.
Better hope so, to keep out the vermicious knids!
Is this the essay you remember?
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
I don't think most people can write web code faster in lisp than PHP, unless you restrict yourself to a very tiny problem space. PHP has its issues (like a pretty broken language development community, meaning no offense to Rasmus himself) but it does allow incredibly rapid web development. In his essay, Graham says two lisp experts were better off using lisp for web development than using C++ or perl, and gives very good reasons why. But personally I suspect the real difference between Graham and his competitors was well motivated talent, which is not something you can shoehorn into a Dilbertesque corporate culture. Yeah, sure, languages do matter, but not as much as raw programming ability does.
Starkle, starkle, little twink
what the heck I are you think!
or
Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you're at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea-tray in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle--
THE COMMENTER HAS BEEN CLUBBED UNCONSCIOUS FOR YOUR SAFETY.
Stay calm and carry on!
Oh, you're cheating. Don't shift the argument.
We need to replace power plants that release radiation and geologically sequestered carbon into the atmosphere with power plants that use fuel produced from biologically sustainable sources. There's not a damn thing wrong with gas fired power plants, the problem is how we are feeding them.
Granted, coal plants have to go, but it's not fair to lump in gas plants with coal plants. In fact, it would be more accurate to lump nuclear plants in with coal plants, although that's also a kind of rhetorical cheating.
In the USA, we have more than enough cropland and sunlight to completely power our baseline with renewably produced methane gas that is already a part of the existing atmospheric carbon cycle, providing no change in the climate. Just harvesting the methane from all of the USA's municipal sewer systems would be a good start!
I don't want to fund oil companies that don't care if my children starve, I don't want to fund middle eastern terrorism, I don't want to fund militarized, centralized nuclear power production, I don't want to fund morally bankrupt, worker-abusing coal mining consortia, I don't want to increase the risk of my grandchildren contracting lung cancer, I don't want to fund creaky obsolete 1940s fission technology or even more obsolete 1800s petroleum technology. I want shiny 21st century biotech - gasoline-producing algae and rocket motor trees!
So sell me biologically produced methane gas, which I can access with existing infrastructure in my existing gas furnace, gas generator, gas stove, gas oven, gas dryer, etc. etc. with no dependence on foreign sources and I will be happy to pay you a fat profit - and it'll cost both of us far less than the cost of building, protecting and decommissioning nuclear power plants.
Criticism accepted! This is the truth as I see it, and I certainly could be wrong.
Religious #4 is me, personally. That's my answer. So it's definitely a religious answer, and the fact that it doesn't contradict science is a feature, not a bug.
Most westerners don't realize that there are a number of explicitly atheist religions. Jainism, for example, is much older than Christianity and still exists today. The dominant western theisms have worked very hard to convince people that religion and theism are synonymous, but any serious study of the history of religion will show this simply isn't true. People from Asia and the Indian subcontinent generally know this, people from Europe and the Americas generally don't.
As for my church, well, I am a pantheist, personally, but my church is Unitarian Universalist. We have been happily accepting theist, atheist and agnostic members since the late 1960s. Every UU congregation has its own unique flavor, but there are many thousands of them all over the world, so it's usually not hard to find one that works for you. Some strongly emphasize the exploration of religion, philosophy and spirituality, some don't; nearly all are active in social justice issues such as fighting ignorance, slavery, racism and injustice.
Some people are happy to take nearly everything on faith (they believe whatever nonsense they are told by newspapers, holy books, or scientific journals) and other people prefer to practice the scientific method, which enshrines experimentation and skepticism (of all things, including both religion and science itself). I personally have noticed little or no correlation between "faith based" beliefs and religion, honestly. In my own church, I cannot think of a single person who your sentence describes accurately; in fact many of us are practicing scientists. Yet: I can find a dozen people in five minutes on any anti-religious forum who firmly believe all sorts of things they have never bothered to actually verify for themselves, because, they claim, "science has proven" some absurd thing. Some of these people will tell you glass is a liquid, for example!
For many people a white-coated scientist is interchangeable with a black-robed priest... they simply believe whatever their chosen oracle tells them is true, completely on faith.
Speaking in my capacity as an ordained minister, I'd like to know what the heck you are talking about?
My religion welcomes atheists and agnostics and actively fights the type of dogmatism you are embracing. So why are you speaking this way about me and my co-religionists? You are telling harmful lies.
See, the truth is that people are not interchangeable parts, and both science and religion are composed of the works and beliefs of many individual people. If you ascribe the attributes of some subset of religion and/or science to a vast mass of people you've never met and have not tried to understand, and refuse to acknowledge the truth of easily verified facts, you have abandoned rationality. Abandoning reason is not a characteristic of religion, although it has been (and is) a characteristic of SOME religions.
Here's how your hypothetical conversation happens where I live:
Questioner: Where do earthquakes come from?
Religion: That's a good question! But it's really more the domain of geology; we religious types are more interested in the effects of earthquakes on humans and other living beings, and how to help make the world a better place for every creature.
Science: buzzword buzzword buzzword buzzword buzzword!
Questioner: No, really, I want a real answer. Quit dodging!
Religious #1: GOD!
Religious #2: Who can say? God willing, we may learn someday.
Religious #3: You must TAKE THE LORD into your HEART so that you may KNOW THE TRUTH!
Religious #4: You should go to the library and look up "plate tectonics" since this is really not a religious question. Also, it's hard to say if objective reality actually exists, so you should take my own subjective interpretations with a grain of salt, and embark on your own journey of discovery. All that being said, earthquakes seem to be caused by the shifting of huge chunks of the earth in reaction to stresses related to the distribution of heat and interactions of cosmic events such as the movements of the planets through space, as well as lingering effects from the formation of the solar system itself. We will probably learn more about this in the future, and many of the explanations used in the past seem silly to modern people, so keep an open mind.
Scientist #1: The latest poorly supported theory is absolutely correct and all other interpretations are obsolete.
Scientist #2: The latest theory is balderdash and poppycock and everyone knows that the standard model is correct! You are a heretic and should be burned!
Scientist #3: What do I know, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a geologist. That last religion guy sounded like the right answer to me, but that's unpossible, since religion is the opposite of science.
Scientist #4: BUZZWORD BUZZWORD BUZZWORD mumble mumble mumble.
Scientist #5: I have degrees in geology and physics and I study plate tectonics. Why don't you come to my lecture series? I'm having it at the local Unitarian Universalist Church, because they love science talks, and they have better coffee than the Buddhists.
Waterbeds were known to the ancient Romans and are mentioned by Plutarch. I seem to remember that the ancient versions were not actually watertight, though; generally they were leather, and your backside got wet. They were also in use and described by 1855 for therapeutic purposes (see wikipedia). It does appear that Heinlein's invention of the waterbed was independent, but he was definitely not the "first".
I get your point, but I'm not sure "work" and "user friendly" are the best words to use. My own STB would be better described as "vendor friendly" or even "user hostile"... although it can be said to "work" as long as you have very low standards for a "working" user interface.
Answer: It's not busybox.
I occasionally start to do something with Powershell, but then I always realize I can do it faster, easier, with less memory using busybox compiled as a standalone windows executable. So I just do that instead.
If you are manipulating windows internals, sure, use powershell. But I'm generally trying to get something done in the real world... using powershell would be like using a $100 torque wrench to hammer in a nail.
True, but if you have a broken faucet it doesn't make sense to cap the well and start drinking your own urine.
Instead of saying "Our government is corrupt, therefore all government is evil and must be dismantled" it would make more sense to say "Our government is corrupt, so let's convict and execute the individuals responsible for the corruption". Fix the faucet, don't destroy the well.
But then again, most modern Americans are incapable of walking to market, much less getting off the couch and storming their local political criminal's headquarters. So perhaps we have ended up with exactly the government most of us deserve - fat, amoral and incompetent.
Here in reality, many people are successfully building out solar power systems using components built in the USA or Europe using green energy.
http://www.solarworld-usa.com/solar-for-home/why-go-solar.aspx
http://www.solarworksforamerica.org/
http://www.aetsolar.com/
But don't let me interfere with your anonymous anti-Chinese xenophobic pandering...
You're right, but disconnecting the problem networks was the obvious remedy for spammers and botnets, and we can see how well that worked out...
Asking any corporation to favor product or service quality is not going to fly if it puts them at a competitive disadvantage, and we have apparently abandoned the idea that government can assure a free and fair market through regulation.
And you said it damn well!
Citation needed.
...compared to the crushing headaches many people get from so-called "3D".
Thank you! Yet another good reason to avoid Oracle.