I kind of liked the idea of "viscously lashing out at an interesting post", myself. I visualized rippling phosphorescent jellyfish clinging to bridge pilings... damn, what is IN this coffee?
...since when is a company responsible for letting anyone outside of their organization when they are installing/upgrading/purchasing/etc new hardware?
Since they made a contract that commits them to providing goods or services, and their chosen install/upgrade/purchase causes them to knowingly, purposefully be in violation of contract. If I "upgrade" my fleet of trucks to electric vehicles, and that means I can no longer service my customers more than 200 miles away, those customers have a legitimate beef and they don't have to pay for the goods and service they will not receive. And if I do this secretly without notification, I am not immune to lawsuits for breach of contract or to punitive damages claims.
I suppose you'll want notification every time they roll out a new Cisco 3750 or some clown puts a Netgear switch in their cubicle?
If it means they can't deliver what they contracted to provide, then damn straight skippy. They only get to do secret stuff if it doesn't conflict with their contractual obligations!
Perhaps the "Impartial Rule of Law" is obsolete, though.
The internet wires, like the roads, should put be put by the government.
Well, those wires are certainly put up with public funding, although it's typically done with government-sponsored budgetary subterfuges. For example, the telcos have been applying "surcharges" to all phone bills for more than a decade to pay for rebuilding their infrastructure; they made a deal with the US fedguv that allowed them to do this. Note that what we are talking about here is almost the opposite of old-school American capitalism - forcing the customer to pay to build the service you will then charge them to use is definitely plutocracy at its finest, but certainly not free market capitalism. After thoroughly gorging at this trough, the telcos are now being exempted from following through with their deal and they've been released from the various non-competition and rate-limitation regulations that they agreed to in order to be allowed to fleece us. The situation is really not much different from being taxed and then having the tax revenue handed over to the telcos, but it's a lot harder to follow the money trail.
Loosely coupled systems are more survivable, though usually less efficient, than vertically integrated systems. A power plant that uses multi-fuel burners and switches between propane and methane based on market price and availability will make more profit than a single-fuel plant unless said plant is located directly on top of a natural gas well owned by the plant. If all the methane (or all the propane) gets consumed by something else (say, a nanomachine or an inflammable bacteria or a government war effort) the multi-fuel plant survives and the vertically integrated competition ceases to exist.
Humans don't photosynthesize because they are too busy running around avoiding saber-tooths and other humans to stand around in the sun. Eating things that photosynthesize and crapping out their seeds in rich piles of fertilizer is a better deal for everyone involved (including the saber-tooth).
A plant is sessile because that's been an optimally survivable form given the genetic patterns available to plants and their intersection with real-world conditions. By sitting still, they can harvest enough energy to indulge in titanic production of bulk and/or offspring. In shady swamps, of course, the venus fly-trap with its poor access to nutrients and sunlight evolves to snap up insects.
Sorry about the lack of structure in this post, but the first sentence tells you what happened to the Ents. They were too slow to keep us from eating them, and too fast to photosynthesize enough energy for reproduction. Venus flytraps can only exist in special ecological niches... you will note they are an endangered species.
My understanding is that no one has ever documented lead leaching out of a tin-lead solder into ground water. However, silver - which is commonly used in lead-free solders will leach out and is somewhere around 100x (at least) more toxic than the lead anyway. The concept of lead-free solder having anything to do with safety or environmentalism is downright silly... Where in the world did you get the idea that silver is more dangerous than lead? If you eat too much silver, you get argyria, which makes you turn grey and is pretty easy to spot before it really harms you. Lead poisoning by comparison is both vastly more common and far more subtle and difficult to detect.
I've eaten a fair amount of silver in my day, with no harm done. Hindus eat a lot of it too. And I've applied silver-based cream to burns (makes 'em heal faster). Westerners used to mark cattle by slipping a silver dime into a cut, that way you could check with your fingers to see if somebody had re-branded cattle they'd rustled from your spread.
Silver's a doddle. And there most certainly is plenty of documentation and research on lead leaching into ground water.
Who did it first is probably irrelevant, but the point is that rich-text corporate mail systems were long established at the time internet mail was still operating on the pre-Netscape plaintext mentality. I don't remember it that way. I remember precisely the opposite - I was using email by the early 1980s at the latest, and by the time business people started talking about non-textual email (as opposed to bit-shifted attachments) the major universities had already been doing it for years.
We used to have to wait for the UUCP links to light up when the phone rates went down for the night before we'd get any mail from the west coast. Finally getting full-time connectivity - because we worked on weapons systems - allowed us to finally get nearly-real-time mail like the universities already had.
Does anyone really ever try to make that argument? I think they'd lose their credibility pretty quick.
In Hitchen's infantile screed "God is not Great" he essentially says that atheist massacres aren't as bad as theist massacres because Stalin didn't claim to speak for God. Puerile and circular reasoning if you ask me (you didn't). I hated that book, in case you can't tell.
Dawkins makes the sharper point that more people have been slaughtered in the name of God(s) than have been butchered for avowedly atheist reasons, but that could well be just an artifact of the numbers. Most criminals believe in god, or at least profess to do so, because most people profess to believe in god. That makes me suspect that religion doesn't inherently cause or prevent evil.
I think mass movements such as religion (and militant anti-religious atheistic movements like Stalinism or Maoism) are easily perverted into atrocities simply because people get caught up in mob psychology and start thinking as they are told to think, rather than for themselves. Genocidal maniacs can use religion to help them commit their crimes when most people are religious. In a self-righteously atheist state such as Stalin was leading, atheism works mo bettah.
My wife's ancestors were burnt out of their homes in England by Catholic mobs. And her limey bastard ancestors had not a thing to do with letting Irish Catholics starve to death during the famine, while forcing them to grow other food, but only for export, right? Uh, no, you're thinking of my limey bastard ancestors, true descendants of Hrolf the Ganger every one. My wife's ancestors were busy intermarrying with the Irish and working for Scots-Irish solidarity at the time (a lost cause if there ever was one). That's why our family runs to red hair and freckles.
Tiocfaidh ar la! (Google it.) Don't need to, but I have no great sympathy for the IRA. If their time ever does come, I expect the Provos will bungle it in some spectacularly bloody fashion.
Bugger that math stuff.;) Got some good tips I can pass on? Of the C block that I don't entirely own but mostly end up accountable for I'm pretty happy when I compare it with the rest. I see people complaining about it but I really have not seen a person complain. There are a few automated messages that come through recommending we alter settings, from reliable sources even, but not one human has complained. I, for one, can't rely on someone else configuring their SMTP server properly and so I have, until now and maybe in the future, left the default message in place. (Emphasis mine.)
Email is text messaging...it wasn't originally meant to be marked up, it was to be read as simple plain text. That is of course untrue.
While you were typing out plaintext email on your student PINE terminal account, corporations were using mail systems that supported rich text and pictures and so on. I remember when MIME came out. I had been using Email in a corporate setting for quite a while... DuNet was the 2nd largest corporate network in the world when I worked for Uncle Dupie. VAXmail had base-64 attachments before MIME, but I believe that academia pioneered rich text email, quite the opposite of your claims.
Corporations still hate fat format mail. It drives their backup budget up, which cuts into profits. Tapes are not cheap, and offsite storage is not cheap either.
They use images for the entire email, because Outlook 2007, to name just one of many email clients, is completely incapable of rendering anything outside of extremely basic HTML. Using a bunch of images arranged in a table is the best way to assure your nicely designed email newsletter/adleter won't be mangled by the email client. Except that recipients regulated by SOX, GLBA, HIPPA, or FDA are not supposed to be allowing images in through the corporate mail hub. So, as compliance slowly makes its way into the infrastructure, carefully formatted sales drivel is reaching fewer and fewer targets intact. I think Email advertising will be increasingly more effective using tightly written pure text followed by a link to a good page... but since most people don't know the difference between "lose" and "loose" any more I guess asking for good copy writing is like asking for dehydrated water.
Although you are right that HTML is not necessarily a big overhead in email, in real life it almost invariably is.
I have run mail servers for over two decades now. I've looked at thousands of messages, and I have access to archives of literally millions of them.
Email in general carries information in inverse relationship to the size of the mail in bytes - a person sending pure ASCII email almost invariably sends valuable information, and the more formatting the mail carries the less useful it is likely to be. Mail that belongs in a Dilbert cartoon is usually ten or more times "fatter" than it needs to be, due to HTML overhead and corporate double-speak.
Individual email messages do not necessarily follow this pattern... but, once your sample size is large enough, you see that HTML email is quite frequently a titanic waste of human and machine resources.
I find that sending grammatically correct non-HTML mail makes people think you are smart, and looking smart helps with the old paycheck at review time.
There really aren't that many consumer electronics items from the 1950s and 1960s in general use,... There were hundreds - possible thousands - of millions of radios and TVs made during that time, for example. These are 100% electronic items, unlikely to have failed due to mechanical problems (wear and tear), nor incompatible (in practice) with current standards and systems. Where are they now? The high voltage doughnuts (flyback transformers) start making a noise only bats and musicians can hear, then they start making a noise like frying bacon, then they start making periodic "popping" noises with the screen going to black at each "pop" and coming back from a white dot, then the windings arc to the chassis, the metal melts, and (if the fuse doesn't blow) the set catches on fire.
After that happens, it might cost you twice as much to fix as you'd spend on a newer, better set.
TVs from before 1960 are generally black & white, anyways. My family still had the only color set in our neighborhood in 1962, and I knew plenty of people still using B & W sets in the early 70s.
An atheist scout who lives an exemplary life will be rejected unless he lies about his beliefs. How is this a moral example for young people?
Why is it immoral for BSA to stand for religion AND morality? Why must they be forced to choose? Well, OK, if they want to try that it might work. So far they are not doing much to promote either one, as an organization.
On the other claw, many individual scout troops are fine organizations and promote strong moral values. It tends to depend on the local leadership, the national organization is brain-dead.
Athiest, now, are generally the most adamant about making other people belive like them than the reverse (Dawkins, Brown, etc).
Ah, yes, Charlemagne's campaigns, the Spanish Inquisition, the Reformation, all those thousands of Jews and Lutherans and Anabaptists tortured or burnt at the stake, the persecution of the Unitarians and Universalists, all that doesn't count - only the people Stalin killed count, because Stalin was an atheist!
My ancestors came to this country to escape religious persecution. My wife's ancestors were burnt out of their homes in England by Catholic mobs. But hey, God told them to do all that stuff so it's obviously OK.
Now, atheists, on the other hand - what's their excuse? Why, they've slaughtered nearly.00000000001 percent as many people as the servants of God have, those bastards!!!
Pity there's no alternatives to the BSA. Maybe some enterprising geeks could start one up, dedicated to environmentalism, conservation, science, and other mildly geeky stuff in addition to the BSA. Like the "Mr. Wizard Brigade" or something. There's Spiral Scouts, of course, but if you send your kid to Spiral Scouts you can expect the other children will call them gay and try to beat them up.
Sadly, I am not kidding.
On the up side, BSA (at the national level) only says you have to believe in some deity or deities. Any god will do. And they are woefully uninformed about non-christian religions, so Jains and Buddhists can get in even if they are actually atheists, the BSA won't ever figure it out.
I've already read all her books, thanks. Since I was already familiar with the events and personages she so thinly disguises I didn't find a lot of new information.
I wonder... if I showed up at the fan club and introduced myself as Stanford White, would anyone even bat an eye? Probably not.
You want ME to pay for YOUR broadband. No thanks dude.
But you are perfectly happy to gravy-train off the Internet I not only paid for, but actually built? Nice hypocrisy there, you should join the Ayn Rand fan club.
I looked through the big window into the computer room and said "Look, it's a DEC PDP-11 with the original purple racks! It must be an 11/34 or 11/24, probably runs RSX or TSX11!" and all the flyboys looked at me like I'd suddenly grown an extra head.
That was my first real computer, though - a unibus PDP-11 with switches on the front panel to enter your program in binary, and a flashing red light to indicate the processor completed a cycle.
Well, except global warming, obviously. That just gets accepted as is, since anyone who suggests otherwise is probably an oil company shill. It's called "climate change" now. That way if the current trend of lower temps continues and we go into another mini ice age (as some are predicting) they're still right! Look, I hate to interrupt your meta-scoffing... but...
I personally sat through a lecture nearly 20 years ago that was given at the Stroud Water Research Center by the guy who discovered "global warming". I remember he was introduced by Dr. Ruth Patrick of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. AT THAT TIME, he said the worst mistake he'd ever made in his career was allowing the name "global warming" to get attached to what he was studying. He said that the global average warming trend was an indicator that something was changing, and that it appeared to correlate with increased carbon in the atmosphere mostly likely caused by human pollution, and that talking about "global warming" was like (my words here, don't remember his metaphor) calling your baby's influenza "mercury rise" because the tyke had a fever. Get it?
I suggested he should have called it "terrestrial albedo modification" but I was in a room full of biologists so they all looked at me funny. Really it should just be called "air pollution".
Incidentally, he presented pretty conclusive evidence at that time - ice cores, the Mauna Loa data, etc. that carbon in the atmosphere is increasing proportionally to global mean temperature. He also suggested that the increased energy being absorbed from the sun might result in more energetic weather, and a bunch of other stuff that seems prophetic now, but he cautioned that these suggestions could not be supported by the data and that we should not assume that his reasoning would necessarily pan out.
BRILLIANT! Oh, yes, quite right, carry on. Sorry to interrupt.
turning off all ICMP, hence killing PMTU discovery, is like taking the number off your front door to stop your house getting burgled and then wondering why you aren't receiving as much snail mail as you used to. I bow before your awesomely bad, yet totally apt analogy.
The sad thing is that there was a time when we voted FOR things. Now? We're just voting against them. Proud to say that I've never done that. Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil! If you can't find something or someone to believe in, then write in somebody you know could do the job.
My mother has received an amazing number of write-in votes in the last 20 years. And ya know what? Even though she didn't get elected, I still feel good knowing that she could do ANY of those jobs I voted her for.
Some of my friends have been known to vote for her too...
If we altered the penalties for bringing such bad faith suits and counter-suits then most of the problems in the U.S. patent system would fix themselves. I have no trouble believing that. However, as I noted previously, our current government allows favored businesses to both write legislation and prevent fair enforcement of existing laws. This being the case, I don't think you are going to see any such revisions of law in my lifetime. Big businesses, and businesses like Blackwater and Halliburton that have direct connections to government, profit disproportionately from an unwieldy and expensive system of law.
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I kind of liked the idea of "viscously lashing out at an interesting post", myself. I visualized rippling phosphorescent jellyfish clinging to bridge pilings... damn, what is IN this coffee?
...since when is a company responsible for letting anyone outside of their organization when they are installing/upgrading/purchasing/etc new hardware?
Since they made a contract that commits them to providing goods or services, and their chosen install/upgrade/purchase causes them to knowingly, purposefully be in violation of contract. If I "upgrade" my fleet of trucks to electric vehicles, and that means I can no longer service my customers more than 200 miles away, those customers have a legitimate beef and they don't have to pay for the goods and service they will not receive. And if I do this secretly without notification, I am not immune to lawsuits for breach of contract or to punitive damages claims.
I suppose you'll want notification every time they roll out a new Cisco 3750 or some clown puts a Netgear switch in their cubicle?
If it means they can't deliver what they contracted to provide, then damn straight skippy. They only get to do secret stuff if it doesn't conflict with their contractual obligations!
Perhaps the "Impartial Rule of Law" is obsolete, though.
The internet wires, like the roads, should put be put by the government.
Well, those wires are certainly put up with public funding, although it's typically done with government-sponsored budgetary subterfuges. For example, the telcos have been applying "surcharges" to all phone bills for more than a decade to pay for rebuilding their infrastructure; they made a deal with the US fedguv that allowed them to do this. Note that what we are talking about here is almost the opposite of old-school American capitalism - forcing the customer to pay to build the service you will then charge them to use is definitely plutocracy at its finest, but certainly not free market capitalism. After thoroughly gorging at this trough, the telcos are now being exempted from following through with their deal and they've been released from the various non-competition and rate-limitation regulations that they agreed to in order to be allowed to fleece us. The situation is really not much different from being taxed and then having the tax revenue handed over to the telcos, but it's a lot harder to follow the money trail.
Loosely coupled systems are more survivable, though usually less efficient, than vertically integrated systems. A power plant that uses multi-fuel burners and switches between propane and methane based on market price and availability will make more profit than a single-fuel plant unless said plant is located directly on top of a natural gas well owned by the plant. If all the methane (or all the propane) gets consumed by something else (say, a nanomachine or an inflammable bacteria or a government war effort) the multi-fuel plant survives and the vertically integrated competition ceases to exist.
Humans don't photosynthesize because they are too busy running around avoiding saber-tooths and other humans to stand around in the sun. Eating things that photosynthesize and crapping out their seeds in rich piles of fertilizer is a better deal for everyone involved (including the saber-tooth).
A plant is sessile because that's been an optimally survivable form given the genetic patterns available to plants and their intersection with real-world conditions. By sitting still, they can harvest enough energy to indulge in titanic production of bulk and/or offspring. In shady swamps, of course, the venus fly-trap with its poor access to nutrients and sunlight evolves to snap up insects.
Sorry about the lack of structure in this post, but the first sentence tells you what happened to the Ents. They were too slow to keep us from eating them, and too fast to photosynthesize enough energy for reproduction. Venus flytraps can only exist in special ecological niches... you will note they are an endangered species.
I've eaten a fair amount of silver in my day, with no harm done. Hindus eat a lot of it too. And I've applied silver-based cream to burns (makes 'em heal faster). Westerners used to mark cattle by slipping a silver dime into a cut, that way you could check with your fingers to see if somebody had re-branded cattle they'd rustled from your spread.
Silver's a doddle. And there most certainly is plenty of documentation and research on lead leaching into ground water.
We used to have to wait for the UUCP links to light up when the phone rates went down for the night before we'd get any mail from the west coast. Finally getting full-time connectivity - because we worked on weapons systems - allowed us to finally get nearly-real-time mail like the universities already had.
Does anyone really ever try to make that argument? I think they'd lose their credibility pretty quick.
In Hitchen's infantile screed "God is not Great" he essentially says that atheist massacres aren't as bad as theist massacres because Stalin didn't claim to speak for God. Puerile and circular reasoning if you ask me (you didn't). I hated that book, in case you can't tell.
Dawkins makes the sharper point that more people have been slaughtered in the name of God(s) than have been butchered for avowedly atheist reasons, but that could well be just an artifact of the numbers. Most criminals believe in god, or at least profess to do so, because most people profess to believe in god. That makes me suspect that religion doesn't inherently cause or prevent evil.
I think mass movements such as religion (and militant anti-religious atheistic movements like Stalinism or Maoism) are easily perverted into atrocities simply because people get caught up in mob psychology and start thinking as they are told to think, rather than for themselves. Genocidal maniacs can use religion to help them commit their crimes when most people are religious. In a self-righteously atheist state such as Stalin was leading, atheism works mo bettah.
While you were typing out plaintext email on your student PINE terminal account, corporations were using mail systems that supported rich text and pictures and so on. I remember when MIME came out. I had been using Email in a corporate setting for quite a while... DuNet was the 2nd largest corporate network in the world when I worked for Uncle Dupie. VAXmail had base-64 attachments before MIME, but I believe that academia pioneered rich text email, quite the opposite of your claims.
Corporations still hate fat format mail. It drives their backup budget up, which cuts into profits. Tapes are not cheap, and offsite storage is not cheap either.
Marketing people love fat email, though.
Although you are right that HTML is not necessarily a big overhead in email, in real life it almost invariably is.
I have run mail servers for over two decades now. I've looked at thousands of messages, and I have access to archives of literally millions of them.
Email in general carries information in inverse relationship to the size of the mail in bytes - a person sending pure ASCII email almost invariably sends valuable information, and the more formatting the mail carries the less useful it is likely to be. Mail that belongs in a Dilbert cartoon is usually ten or more times "fatter" than it needs to be, due to HTML overhead and corporate double-speak.
Individual email messages do not necessarily follow this pattern... but, once your sample size is large enough, you see that HTML email is quite frequently a titanic waste of human and machine resources.
I find that sending grammatically correct non-HTML mail makes people think you are smart, and looking smart helps with the old paycheck at review time.
After that happens, it might cost you twice as much to fix as you'd spend on a newer, better set.
TVs from before 1960 are generally black & white, anyways. My family still had the only color set in our neighborhood in 1962, and I knew plenty of people still using B & W sets in the early 70s.
Now, those telechron clocks, those last forever.
Why is it immoral for BSA to stand for religion AND morality? Why must they be forced to choose? Well, OK, if they want to try that it might work. So far they are not doing much to promote either one, as an organization.
On the other claw, many individual scout troops are fine organizations and promote strong moral values. It tends to depend on the local leadership, the national organization is brain-dead.
Athiest, now, are generally the most adamant about making other people belive like them than the reverse (Dawkins, Brown, etc).
Ah, yes, Charlemagne's campaigns, the Spanish Inquisition, the Reformation, all those thousands of Jews and Lutherans and Anabaptists tortured or burnt at the stake, the persecution of the Unitarians and Universalists, all that doesn't count - only the people Stalin killed count, because Stalin was an atheist!My ancestors came to this country to escape religious persecution. My wife's ancestors were burnt out of their homes in England by Catholic mobs. But hey, God told them to do all that stuff so it's obviously OK.
Now, atheists, on the other hand - what's their excuse? Why, they've slaughtered nearly
Sadly, I am not kidding.
On the up side, BSA (at the national level) only says you have to believe in some deity or deities. Any god will do. And they are woefully uninformed about non-christian religions, so Jains and Buddhists can get in even if they are actually atheists, the BSA won't ever figure it out.
I've already read all her books, thanks. Since I was already familiar with the events and personages she so thinly disguises I didn't find a lot of new information.
I wonder... if I showed up at the fan club and introduced myself as Stanford White, would anyone even bat an eye? Probably not.
AFAIK it's still there, still working.
I looked through the big window into the computer room and said "Look, it's a DEC PDP-11 with the original purple racks! It must be an 11/34 or 11/24, probably runs RSX or TSX11!" and all the flyboys looked at me like I'd suddenly grown an extra head.
That was my first real computer, though - a unibus PDP-11 with switches on the front panel to enter your program in binary, and a flashing red light to indicate the processor completed a cycle.
I personally sat through a lecture nearly 20 years ago that was given at the Stroud Water Research Center by the guy who discovered "global warming". I remember he was introduced by Dr. Ruth Patrick of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. AT THAT TIME, he said the worst mistake he'd ever made in his career was allowing the name "global warming" to get attached to what he was studying. He said that the global average warming trend was an indicator that something was changing, and that it appeared to correlate with increased carbon in the atmosphere mostly likely caused by human pollution, and that talking about "global warming" was like (my words here, don't remember his metaphor) calling your baby's influenza "mercury rise" because the tyke had a fever. Get it?
I suggested he should have called it "terrestrial albedo modification" but I was in a room full of biologists so they all looked at me funny. Really it should just be called "air pollution".
Incidentally, he presented pretty conclusive evidence at that time - ice cores, the Mauna Loa data, etc. that carbon in the atmosphere is increasing proportionally to global mean temperature. He also suggested that the increased energy being absorbed from the sun might result in more energetic weather, and a bunch of other stuff that seems prophetic now, but he cautioned that these suggestions could not be supported by the data and that we should not assume that his reasoning would necessarily pan out. BRILLIANT! Oh, yes, quite right, carry on. Sorry to interrupt.
Granted, he's a retired rocket scientist, but he's nigh on 80 years old.
He's been on the previous release of Ubuntu LTS for years now and he hasn't a clue how the machine works, which is exactly how he likes it.
All I had to do was hook up his FIOS and tell him to always accept the patches when the OS asked him for permission to install them.
My mother has received an amazing number of write-in votes in the last 20 years. And ya know what? Even though she didn't get elected, I still feel good knowing that she could do ANY of those jobs I voted her for.
Some of my friends have been known to vote for her too...