Well, it's one polluter at the head of one of the only rivers in the world (or mouth if shit really does flow upstream).
Which is really kind of apt, since windows users all have to use other people's devices to make their computing palatable and cleanse their data of its taint.
I'm not sure I want to continue this conversation though as I just ate.
I would say that makes sense, but that would be a complete lie.
Like pretty much everywhere (as a reasonable consequence of causality) the people who make the laws in the US, or specifically the constitution in this case, made them when they had no idea if the populace would allow them to continue making laws or whether they would rise up. When the constitution, and the bill of rights, were drafted, the people in power had absolutely no idea whether the country would still exist in ten years, much less two hundred. The laws back then WERE drafted with the idea that you had to get at least a majority of the country on your side or else they'd splinter into factions. And frankly, I doubt you, or I, could manage to create a nation on the frontier, without lines of control or communication, which was unified so well that with only one notable exception, there was never a splinter faction that tried to run off and do their own thing.
The kind of cruft that you're talking about is the consequence of people who know that the system that they're part of is good and that people will continue to want and need it. They're taking advantage of a good thing, the rule of law, and since they're the closest to it they can find their way through the cracks in ways civilians can't--to put it glibly, they're not above the law, they're inside it, exactly where it looks like they are.
Your "Nothing for it but to tear down one of the single greatest accomplishments in human history" attitude isn't unwarranted (ironic as that is based on the article), but it is illogical. The US of A will someday die. Everything living does. Whether that's because a meteor took it out or civil unrest made civil hands unclean, we won't know until it happens. However, the jerks in the government are no different than the jerks everywhere, and when they wipe their butt it smells no cleaner and no fouler than yours (even if they wipe their butt with money and so it has cocaine in it).
Human beings got where they were in history because they have free agency. You're trying to say that because that free agency is hindered in relatively small ways for a small subset of the population, that nobody has freedom or the ability to change things. Free agency is what CREATED the united states. It's what created every nation in the world, every building, every lasting stone monument. However, in all cases you had to convince a lot of other people to go along with your scheme, whether that involves submitting to a government or hauling stone blocks or selling land.
The reason the USA hasn't had a major revolution since the Civil War is because there hasn't been a good reason for there to be one. If there was one, a really good one, people would KNOW. They might still be cowards and the movement might not win, but it wouldn't be a flash in the pan. The populace looks like a herd of the ignorant from outside, but whatever else they are, every single person in that herd is a human being. They may behave statistically, but they are every single friggin' one of them making a decision based on everything they know and everything they believe.
If you want to see a revolution, then don't "keep your head down". Make a news network, and make it flashy. Show every single wrong that has been done in glorious detail and ignore every citizen who is saved by medicare and social security, every NASA technician who's living out their dream of being part of something greater, every police officer who stops brutal rape from happening in the streets. Maybe if you're all flash and glory you'll actually create that world-ending revolution you seem to be predicting.
Or you could do the same thing, but show them everything they need to make their own decisions, and maybe the world would actually get BETTER instead.
I think the liquid gas is aerosolized (becoming a gaseous liquid) and then burnt (a plasmic gas) and the exhaust (gasses and gaseous solids) are then expelled...?
IANA...well, anything relevant. (Maybe you can tell?)
As if. It could be the beginning of the end, if we're lucky. I can't imagine something with so much business interest behind it going down in one case (although IANAL). If it gets followed up by five, ten, twenty cases that drive the point home so that nobody can ignore it, sure, maybe.
If the current case changed anything, it would probably change the method to get a DMCA or the paperwork leading to one. The people who use DMCA most of the time have plenty of people ready to study changes in methodolgy and fill out paperwork. It would take several challenges to point out that it isn't something fixable.
Come now, we all know that "the truth" is left-leaning, and those darned media types are the only ones spreading it! If they disappeared, there would be no "truth" anymore, and the right could make SUCH a come-back!
(Not actually indicative of my political opinions, but I find it amusing nonetheless)
I can understand what you mean (and your code) and that's probably how I would have written it that way too, but I have to say that the goto code is more elegant.
Indented code is very useful when you are trying to look at logical levels, but at the same time, it makes it difficult to track the forward flow of code, especially when each step of indentation is very small. For example, in that code, you never have lines that stick out--you have the previous if(...) and then the next if(...) right below it, competing for attention, when in fact it may not even be called next if the statement equates to false. In the original code, the conditional and the code to be run are fairly distinct. You can see "This is what happens normally" and then, having that in hand, go back and track where each error goes, and then you say "Aha, they all come back to the same place, it's just that the closer you got to finishing, the more you have to undo."
It may be personal preference but I have to say, when things line up, they're easier to understand; too many indentations per line of code is distracting.
Sure, it was clearly successful in everything it tried to do and is still lauded by many people as a great movie, but watching people suffer up close in a way that makes the target audience feel personally connected to it is a disservice to the tragedy and loss of life that occurred.
Fixed that for you. Or did you have an actual point in there somewhere? I may have missed it.
Maybe, but if your friend has a cybernetic implant from a trusted company, and you let them look over your shoulder while you do your taxes (pretending you still do your taxes on paper, I mean), it's still the company's fault that your identity info gets stolen by some scammer on the web. You let them see your private things, you both knew the implant wasn't 100% secure, but it's your friend, and you wanted their help.
I wrote an essay for college last year about ethics that used facebook as an example of borderline unethical behavior. Basically I said that people will have expectations coming in to a situation about what is reasonable and not reasonable to expect, and if you don't go out of your way to explain what is and isn't reasonable, you can expect that a lot of the users will continue using their expectations rather than reality, and if you are building your business knowing that they are going to have unrealistic expectations--or especially if it's based on that knowledge--but not addressing those beliefs, then that's clearly unethical.
I've also been toying with the idea of (if I ever ship software) converting EULA digital signatures into a basic rights quiz. If signing up for facebook took you through a set of questions that said,
1) Nothing I post here can be accessed by third parties [Y/N]
2) Nobody will ever see my drunk frat party pictures except the people I explicitly share them with [Y/N]
And the site pointed out in big red letters that your answers were wrong and didn't let you pass until you got them all right, then people would pay attention. Now, some minority will still not care and fewer still will just be completely oblivious no matter what you say, but something like that is a very reasonable amount of effort for the site maintainers to go through to correct users' misunderstandings.
Life is full of delicious ambiguity, and people assume that two polar opposites (male and female) have nothing in between. But life isn't like that. Life is a spectrum, and any place we draw the line is arbitrary -- not natural. Nature has its own laws, which are not the laws of men.
I agree entirely. However it brings up (in my mind, which admittedly doesn't function linearly), a simple and obvious question:
If men and women can't share (public) restrooms, why can straight and gay people?
I'm not gay-bashing, and it's admittedly not an important issue for most people. However, the need for segregated bathrooms isn't about sex (neglecting urinals) but it is about gender. People don't want to be looked at by anyone who might have ulterior motives. It's just been sort of yeah-well-sorta-assumed that that happened along sex boundaries. Of course, some places refuse to acknowledge those people even exist, but still...
Personally, I think if men and women dealt with each other's crap more often then maybe they'd be more realistic about the differences in the sexes (as in how little they matter). That's not to say I would want to, so much as it makes more sense to me.
Oh America, how I love thee, let me count the ways.
You produce thousands or millions of throwaway video displays, speakers, and batteries for no other purpose but so that a percentage of people who come across them will buy some unrelated product;
Food is plentiful enough that most need not worry, and many have grown fat and complacent;
And somehow you can't take that money, that labor, and that food and give it to people who need it the world over.
I've had exactly this idea for a couple years now, if not anywhere near a workable design. If it's done properly, it could be very interesting.
It being done properly would require: * Distributed power * Very high speed and high-reliability inter-module communication * Hotplugging * Standardized inter-module APIs and connectors * An OS capable of organizing the entire system seamlessly (I have my ideas) and securely (I don't)
I can't speak to the technical abilities of such a system but if it was running it could easily become one of those sci-fi systems from the movies that everyone insists can be done but which has yet to appear--taking "your" part of the computer with you and just plugging your desktop session in to whatever computer you come across. You could also have software running on modules that is separate from the CPU, so that, for instance, your hard drive will not only defrag on its own when not busy, but will also do virus and spyware scans. And if you have a module that just absolutely can't be allowed to be reverse-engineered, have it have its own secret processor and instruction set with capabilities that are accessable to the system via APIs without the internal processes being at all open to the system.
I'm sure they wouldn't be interested, but I'll have to find and send an email to these guys.
I have to agree. As someone who does some fiction writing on the side, mostly using low-level editors, I've always been more comfortable typing, then going back and correcting, sometimes after a few words, sometimes immediately, sometimes during proofreading. I have never once seen a fix-as-you-type spellchecker that wasn't more annoying than it was worth; typically, I'll see that I didn't write what I meant the second before the computer automatically changes it to some third spelling. Points-out-errors spellcheckers are better since they don't pretend to be smarter than you but simply ask if you're sure.
I guess the problem I have most with it is people who actually believe the computer when it claims to be smarter than them. It puts them in a mindset where the ONLY thing they have to do is produce something vaguely meaningful so that someone else can do the hard work of making it sensible; especially if they're going to claim that they're awesome communicators (and they tend to believe that, even if they wouldn't be arrogant enough to claim it) and get angry if people disagree, it's dumbtarded to take credit for that work, especially when it's not very good. They're script kiddies of spelling.
It is noteworthy that a metric ass-load (or metric butt-ton as it's also called) is less than an American butt-ton by a factor of 20% because we have our heads up there so much, stretching it out.
As someone who's spent a lot of time thinking about morality and personal responsability: The god is evil. You're a child. I don't think I mean what you may expect me to mean by that, so I'll explain; it's not being whiny or selfish or simple, but it can be summed up rather simply.
There are two basic modes that people operate in: they respond to what happened, or they say, "What do I do now?" Children are expecting--and expected--to be in the first category. They never need concern themselves with the future because they have a single problem in front of them with no silly details attached to it. Bug? Squish. Girl? Cooties! Heathen? Smite!
When you actually are in that "What do I do now?" mode, you begin developing a different mindset, "If I... then...". You get that sort of thing in small scale even as a child, but when you become an adult, it becomes part of your dealing, as it SHOULD. "If I kill the baker for being a heathen, we'll all starve." "If I blow up that building, children will have no parents, people will hate our people, there will be retaliation, and the war will stretch on forever." "If we invade this country, people will die, the rest of the world will see us as warlike, and all of the people that I govern will have to live in fear of a terrorist attack."
Unfortunately it seems like a lot of people want to stay children forever... as far as I'm concerned, they shouldn't be allowed to.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's one polluter at the head of one of the only rivers in the world (or mouth if shit really does flow upstream).
Which is really kind of apt, since windows users all have to use other people's devices to make their computing palatable and cleanse their data of its taint.
I'm not sure I want to continue this conversation though as I just ate.
I would say that makes sense, but that would be a complete lie.
Like pretty much everywhere (as a reasonable consequence of causality) the people who make the laws in the US, or specifically the constitution in this case, made them when they had no idea if the populace would allow them to continue making laws or whether they would rise up. When the constitution, and the bill of rights, were drafted, the people in power had absolutely no idea whether the country would still exist in ten years, much less two hundred. The laws back then WERE drafted with the idea that you had to get at least a majority of the country on your side or else they'd splinter into factions. And frankly, I doubt you, or I, could manage to create a nation on the frontier, without lines of control or communication, which was unified so well that with only one notable exception, there was never a splinter faction that tried to run off and do their own thing.
The kind of cruft that you're talking about is the consequence of people who know that the system that they're part of is good and that people will continue to want and need it. They're taking advantage of a good thing, the rule of law, and since they're the closest to it they can find their way through the cracks in ways civilians can't--to put it glibly, they're not above the law, they're inside it, exactly where it looks like they are.
Your "Nothing for it but to tear down one of the single greatest accomplishments in human history" attitude isn't unwarranted (ironic as that is based on the article), but it is illogical. The US of A will someday die. Everything living does. Whether that's because a meteor took it out or civil unrest made civil hands unclean, we won't know until it happens. However, the jerks in the government are no different than the jerks everywhere, and when they wipe their butt it smells no cleaner and no fouler than yours (even if they wipe their butt with money and so it has cocaine in it).
Human beings got where they were in history because they have free agency. You're trying to say that because that free agency is hindered in relatively small ways for a small subset of the population, that nobody has freedom or the ability to change things. Free agency is what CREATED the united states. It's what created every nation in the world, every building, every lasting stone monument. However, in all cases you had to convince a lot of other people to go along with your scheme, whether that involves submitting to a government or hauling stone blocks or selling land.
The reason the USA hasn't had a major revolution since the Civil War is because there hasn't been a good reason for there to be one. If there was one, a really good one, people would KNOW. They might still be cowards and the movement might not win, but it wouldn't be a flash in the pan. The populace looks like a herd of the ignorant from outside, but whatever else they are, every single person in that herd is a human being. They may behave statistically, but they are every single friggin' one of them making a decision based on everything they know and everything they believe.
If you want to see a revolution, then don't "keep your head down". Make a news network, and make it flashy. Show every single wrong that has been done in glorious detail and ignore every citizen who is saved by medicare and social security, every NASA technician who's living out their dream of being part of something greater, every police officer who stops brutal rape from happening in the streets. Maybe if you're all flash and glory you'll actually create that world-ending revolution you seem to be predicting.
Or you could do the same thing, but show them everything they need to make their own decisions, and maybe the world would actually get BETTER instead.
I think the liquid gas is aerosolized (becoming a gaseous liquid) and then burnt (a plasmic gas) and the exhaust (gasses and gaseous solids) are then expelled...?
IANA...well, anything relevant. (Maybe you can tell?)
Err... yes. I believe that's what I just said...
Okay, whatever.
As if. It could be the beginning of the end, if we're lucky. I can't imagine something with so much business interest behind it going down in one case (although IANAL). If it gets followed up by five, ten, twenty cases that drive the point home so that nobody can ignore it, sure, maybe.
If the current case changed anything, it would probably change the method to get a DMCA or the paperwork leading to one. The people who use DMCA most of the time have plenty of people ready to study changes in methodolgy and fill out paperwork. It would take several challenges to point out that it isn't something fixable.
stp://not.a.url/blog/some/date/well-I-dont-think-it-will-happen-anytime-soon-but-you-never-know-anyway-its-not-really-that-long-unless-you-have-to-type-it-in-is-it-since-you-have-cut-and-paste-which-is-wonderful-and-oh-my-lord-I-sound-like-I-have-been-drinking-too-much-coffee-okay-I-will-stop.html
(stp: sarcasm transfer protocol)
Oh dear. I can't even begin to count the number of people I've never seen in rooms with me.
Maybe I should start breaking into people's houses. I'd hate to start becoming schizophrenic! (MPD actually but that's grammatically awkward)
Come now, we all know that "the truth" is left-leaning, and those darned media types are the only ones spreading it! If they disappeared, there would be no "truth" anymore, and the right could make SUCH a come-back!
(Not actually indicative of my political opinions, but I find it amusing nonetheless)
The proper abbreviation of "Association" is "Assn." not "Ass."; yet somehow, if you used it, your post would be less accurate than it is now...
I can understand what you mean (and your code) and that's probably how I would have written it that way too, but I have to say that the goto code is more elegant.
Indented code is very useful when you are trying to look at logical levels, but at the same time, it makes it difficult to track the forward flow of code, especially when each step of indentation is very small. For example, in that code, you never have lines that stick out--you have the previous if(...) and then the next if(...) right below it, competing for attention, when in fact it may not even be called next if the statement equates to false. In the original code, the conditional and the code to be run are fairly distinct. You can see "This is what happens normally" and then, having that in hand, go back and track where each error goes, and then you say "Aha, they all come back to the same place, it's just that the closer you got to finishing, the more you have to undo."
It may be personal preference but I have to say, when things line up, they're easier to understand; too many indentations per line of code is distracting.
It turns out half of what the goose laid were gold-plated lead eggs. Archimedes saved me tons in legal expenses!
Sure, it was clearly successful in everything it tried to do and is still lauded by many people as a great movie, but watching people suffer up close in a way that makes the target audience feel personally connected to it is a disservice to the tragedy and loss of life that occurred.
Fixed that for you. Or did you have an actual point in there somewhere? I may have missed it.
Maybe, but if your friend has a cybernetic implant from a trusted company, and you let them look over your shoulder while you do your taxes (pretending you still do your taxes on paper, I mean), it's still the company's fault that your identity info gets stolen by some scammer on the web. You let them see your private things, you both knew the implant wasn't 100% secure, but it's your friend, and you wanted their help.
I wrote an essay for college last year about ethics that used facebook as an example of borderline unethical behavior. Basically I said that people will have expectations coming in to a situation about what is reasonable and not reasonable to expect, and if you don't go out of your way to explain what is and isn't reasonable, you can expect that a lot of the users will continue using their expectations rather than reality, and if you are building your business knowing that they are going to have unrealistic expectations--or especially if it's based on that knowledge--but not addressing those beliefs, then that's clearly unethical.
I've also been toying with the idea of (if I ever ship software) converting EULA digital signatures into a basic rights quiz. If signing up for facebook took you through a set of questions that said,
1) Nothing I post here can be accessed by third parties [Y/N]
2) Nobody will ever see my drunk frat party pictures except the people I explicitly share them with [Y/N]
And the site pointed out in big red letters that your answers were wrong and didn't let you pass until you got them all right, then people would pay attention. Now, some minority will still not care and fewer still will just be completely oblivious no matter what you say, but something like that is a very reasonable amount of effort for the site maintainers to go through to correct users' misunderstandings.
Life is full of delicious ambiguity, and people assume that two polar opposites (male and female) have nothing in between. But life isn't like that. Life is a spectrum, and any place we draw the line is arbitrary -- not natural. Nature has its own laws, which are not the laws of men.
I agree entirely. However it brings up (in my mind, which admittedly doesn't function linearly), a simple and obvious question:
If men and women can't share (public) restrooms, why can straight and gay people?
I'm not gay-bashing, and it's admittedly not an important issue for most people. However, the need for segregated bathrooms isn't about sex (neglecting urinals) but it is about gender. People don't want to be looked at by anyone who might have ulterior motives. It's just been sort of yeah-well-sorta-assumed that that happened along sex boundaries. Of course, some places refuse to acknowledge those people even exist, but still...
Personally, I think if men and women dealt with each other's crap more often then maybe they'd be more realistic about the differences in the sexes (as in how little they matter). That's not to say I would want to, so much as it makes more sense to me.
Oh America, how I love thee, let me count the ways.
You produce thousands or millions of throwaway video displays, speakers, and batteries for no other purpose but so that a percentage of people who come across them will buy some unrelated product;
Food is plentiful enough that most need not worry, and many have grown fat and complacent;
And somehow you can't take that money, that labor, and that food and give it to people who need it the world over.
That depends. Which kind of hammer?
I've had exactly this idea for a couple years now, if not anywhere near a workable design. If it's done properly, it could be very interesting.
It being done properly would require:
* Distributed power
* Very high speed and high-reliability inter-module communication
* Hotplugging
* Standardized inter-module APIs and connectors
* An OS capable of organizing the entire system seamlessly (I have my ideas) and securely (I don't)
I can't speak to the technical abilities of such a system but if it was running it could easily become one of those sci-fi systems from the movies that everyone insists can be done but which has yet to appear--taking "your" part of the computer with you and just plugging your desktop session in to whatever computer you come across. You could also have software running on modules that is separate from the CPU, so that, for instance, your hard drive will not only defrag on its own when not busy, but will also do virus and spyware scans. And if you have a module that just absolutely can't be allowed to be reverse-engineered, have it have its own secret processor and instruction set with capabilities that are accessable to the system via APIs without the internal processes being at all open to the system.
I'm sure they wouldn't be interested, but I'll have to find and send an email to these guys.
If only there were something you could do...
I have to agree. As someone who does some fiction writing on the side, mostly using low-level editors, I've always been more comfortable typing, then going back and correcting, sometimes after a few words, sometimes immediately, sometimes during proofreading. I have never once seen a fix-as-you-type spellchecker that wasn't more annoying than it was worth; typically, I'll see that I didn't write what I meant the second before the computer automatically changes it to some third spelling. Points-out-errors spellcheckers are better since they don't pretend to be smarter than you but simply ask if you're sure.
I guess the problem I have most with it is people who actually believe the computer when it claims to be smarter than them. It puts them in a mindset where the ONLY thing they have to do is produce something vaguely meaningful so that someone else can do the hard work of making it sensible; especially if they're going to claim that they're awesome communicators (and they tend to believe that, even if they wouldn't be arrogant enough to claim it) and get angry if people disagree, it's dumbtarded to take credit for that work, especially when it's not very good. They're script kiddies of spelling.
Or something like that.
It would definitely be counter-productive to not take advantage of markets that will pay more
I know! They could go out of business!
It is noteworthy that a metric ass-load (or metric butt-ton as it's also called) is less than an American butt-ton by a factor of 20% because we have our heads up there so much, stretching it out.
Clearly they didn't want to count the lasers I will have created 500 years ago after I go back in time next week.
As someone who's spent a lot of time thinking about morality and personal responsability: The god is evil. You're a child. I don't think I mean what you may expect me to mean by that, so I'll explain; it's not being whiny or selfish or simple, but it can be summed up rather simply.
There are two basic modes that people operate in: they respond to what happened, or they say, "What do I do now?" Children are expecting--and expected--to be in the first category. They never need concern themselves with the future because they have a single problem in front of them with no silly details attached to it. Bug? Squish. Girl? Cooties! Heathen? Smite!
When you actually are in that "What do I do now?" mode, you begin developing a different mindset, "If I... then...". You get that sort of thing in small scale even as a child, but when you become an adult, it becomes part of your dealing, as it SHOULD. "If I kill the baker for being a heathen, we'll all starve." "If I blow up that building, children will have no parents, people will hate our people, there will be retaliation, and the war will stretch on forever." "If we invade this country, people will die, the rest of the world will see us as warlike, and all of the people that I govern will have to live in fear of a terrorist attack."
Unfortunately it seems like a lot of people want to stay children forever... as far as I'm concerned, they shouldn't be allowed to.