Corporations can't strip you of your constitutional rights.
Yes, they are a problem. However, our Constitution gives us the power to deal with it. Citizens are still allowed to speak out against corporate injustice. We have the fair right to a trial if we are wrongly terminated or discriminated against. We have the freedom to work and live where we want to, and the freedom to choose which products we buy.
We still have the right to arm ourselves - a freedom most other "free" countries have given up. By that measure, we are still the freeest country in the world. Dispute that if you will, but a Tinnamen Square incident would never happen here.
Corporations only have as much power as we, the free people of the U.S., choose to give them.
...it helps them sell faster. Any author knows full well that he or she is giving their customer more value for their money by signing their book. Its no secret that an authors signature adds a great deal to the value of the book once it is resold. At the booksigning itself, however, the consumer pays the same amount they would if it had not been signed. A used book, if signed, is worth significantly more than an unsigned copy of the same book, and authors and publishers know this.
Yes, used book sales cut into new book sales. However, people have been selling their books for hundreds of years, and thats not going to change. Instead of persuading booksellers to stop selling used books(which will never work), they should do more things like booksignings that add value to the new book.
OK, lets get serious here. The latest American mass murder should prove beyond a doubt that America needs to Ban All Guns, for the safety of her children.
If we can simply pass enough laws to make guns illegal, and also sue the gun manufacturers out of business, we can solve all of this insane gun-related violence.
Because, as we all know, we will be much safer if we all are unarmed. Criminals are too stupid to make their own weapons or find black markets to buy them.
You simply can't make society safer by allowing law abiding citizens to be vigilantes. Our police force is amply able to handle the few gun related crimes that might occur once all guns become illegal. If your house is being robbed or otherwise under attack, calling 911 and reasoning with your attacker is always better than defending yourself with a gun. The police will respond immediately and save you.
Once again, this madness would have not occured if guns were illegal. The Slashdot population should be smart enough to recognize that you solve problems by concentrating on the specific technology, not the human nature, behind the problem. We should teach this fact to the rest of the world.
>> Oh the day when we see a java related story on slashdot without some java bashing.
Hey, I'd rather not bash Java. It looks like a nicely structured language with clean syntax that leads to good coding style. Now, can you point me to a site that performs well that uses JSP? Because all the ones I've seen so far are just dog slow.
Just installed Active Python and Komodo. Active Python falls under the "ActiveState Community Licence". Basically you get the code, and you're allowed to fix bugs, but you can't "fork" the product. You get the source code, but the licence means ActiveState controls the development of the product.
Komodo had no licence, but the source code was on the site. To install Komodo, you have to agree that you are using a product that is owned by ActiveState - you don't have any ownership of what you just downloaded.
I'm pretty excited. I've been waiting for a Perl IDE for a long time and I plan on trying both this and the Visual Perl product they are releasing.
...one proves non-obviousness to the patent office by showing that the idea was needed but someone else didn't discover it.
I don't see how that proves non-obviousness. That just proves that they got there first.
One click shopping is something that can be implemented by a junior-level programmer in less than a week. To me that makes it obvious. There's a lot wrong with that patent.
What is really needed is a better test of obviousness. If the average programmer can look at your program and quickly reverse engineer it, its not obvious. One-click is obvious by this test. If its something really useful, such as an algorithm for compression or encryption, but could not easily be reverse engineered, thereby requiring publication of the algorithm in order to disseminate it - that is non-obvious and thus would qualify for a patent.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Re:And you can't turn it off...
on
Perl and .NET
·
· Score: 1
Oh shit, I just realized you were the author. Sorry! I bought your book and I had just got through reading the intro chapters, which is why I was mislead. I did get the distinct impression the book favored the ActiveState port of Perl.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Re:And you can't turn it off...
on
Perl and .NET
·
· Score: 1
my bad. The book is based on the ActiveState port, though, with the "standard" Win32 release mentioned only to clarify differences.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Re:And you can't turn it off...
on
Perl and .NET
·
· Score: 4
>> Now the "ActivePerl" books will start to appear
Hate to burst your bubble, but the O'Reilly book "Learning Perl on Win32" was written by the founder of ActiveState. Also, from the beginning there was always much more development done on the ActiveState port of Perl than the "pure Perl release" you mention. ActiveState was started with a grant from Microsoft, and since its inception it has worked the "pure Perl" people to merge the two products.
Therefore, Microsoft essentially funded the development of Perl for Windows systems, and also came up with the worlds first Perl IDE. ActiveState, essentially a subsidiary of Microsoft, is also releasing the Perl IDE as open-source software for Linux.
>> - but as the proud owner of three palmtops, five graphing calculators, four computers...
As the former owner of a palm and five graphing calculators(not to mention numerous watches, sunglasses, wallets, keys, walkmans) I wish I didn't lose everything that I carry around with me.
3 million emails a day, at an average of 5K each wouldn't be too hard to deal with. Yahoo processes all its email through a spam filter already - although it only gets about 60%, its program has never put a valid email in my spam folder. That's actually pretty impressive. If this program could catch 90+ of the spam without deleting valid email, it would be nothing short of amazing.
IMO - this is the way to stop spam - IP addresses and domain names of spammers are always elusive, but you can spot a spam email from a mile away.
3 of my friends took the same programming class and got together "war room" style when writing each of their programs. They got a giant white board and they would write each program in psuedocode before they wrote the first line of code. Once they were satisfied they had the logic down each of them worked out their own code separately from the pseudocode.
This saved them many hours of coding the rest of the class had to sweat through, yet in the end their programs looked different enough to qualify as individual programs(at UNM you are not allowed to work on programs in groups in most CS classes) because they implemented the psuedocode separately.
not a bad discussion for not reaching the front page of/.
Apparently, wireless transmission of energy falls under Tesla's 'crackpot' ideas - I probably would have refined my original question to 'what is the future of electricity' or something to that effect had I realized that from the start. I think we can agree that we have to replace burning coal with something more efficient and less polluting(right?) And I still think monopolistic control of the power supply is a Bad Thing. It would be great if our electrical system worked more like the internet.
Obviously I have more in common with Tesla's 'dreamer' side than with his 'electrical engineer' side.:)
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Re:Tesla self-educated?!?!?!
on
Longitude
·
· Score: 1
Good post, AC. Tesla did indeed have the finest education a prestigious European university could offer at the time.
However, I don't see how his education enabled him to be such a visionary. I've been reading some of his writings and some of it just gives me the chills. He came up with the entire system of alternating current - not by scientific method, not by trial and error, but by envisioning how it would all work. When he first physically built the first AC motor, he had the idea all worked out in his head. The guy was a prophet, and its a shame some of his other ideas never came into being. We could be using an electrical system that transmitted electricity through the upper atmosphere and using ~90% less energy than we do today.
There was a definite spiritual quality at play in Tesla's hugely significant inventions, and that is most definitely not taught in schools.
I submit that its actually easier to listen in on one's keystrokes and determine what you are typing from the vibrations your keys make than it is to break any modern form of encryption. Just another thing for the truly paranoid to think about.
For more on this, see The Code Book, by Simon Singh.
I don't think its Portland. Rather, its that every state near California would be better off without the influx of Californian refugees. In fact, I just visited Portland, and there were a lot of people there who encouraged me to move there.
Here in New Mexico, Californians have done a fine job of inflating real estate prices. When "foreigners" take all the good real estate and you can't buy a home in your home state because of them, well there's bound to be a backlash.
Bush and Gore both came to my state(New Mexico, 5 electoral votes) at least two times each during the campaign season. The reason was, our state is very evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.
If the electoral college were disbanded, it would be highly unlikely that a candidate would visit NM. However, the same would be true if our state heavily leaned one way or another. There was no reason for Bush or Gore to visit Utah, for example(same # of electoral votes) - that state was going to Bush, and no amount of campaigning would change that.
Well if you believe Sun's marketing BS, I guess you're really no better off than if you blindly acccepted MS's.
How did so many/.ers forget? The intention of.NET is to be a runtime environment to run on all platforms, not just on Windows. What, did you all lose your critical thinking facilites just because of some marketing BS from Sun?
The ultimate goal of.NET is pretty close to the holy grail of programming IMO - be able to write a program in any language that will run on any platform that has the.NET runtime. Mix and match languages if its appropriate and still run on any platform.
My analysis? The linked story is FUD and Sun is scared. Ignore.NET if you want, but also be prepared to cut yourself off from a lot of business that will be focused on it.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Re:More useful books on software development
on
Death March
·
· Score: 1
Too bad you never got past that. One of the book's points was that it doesn't matter what notation system your company uses as long as it uses something thats consistent and understood by each programmer.
Its got practical advice that applies to any language. If you would have read further, you'd have seen examples in C/C++, Pascal, and Basic(this was written in 93). It was a distillation of lots of stuff you'd only find in research papers or passed around by developers via word of mouth, handwritten notes, etc. There were a few things I never saw anywhere else, like how to tighten up for loops and while loops, and when to use recursion(college textbooks almost universally teach bad examples of this subject).
Why do you think publishers intend to put kids through hell? Their interest lies in selling books, not promoting an agenda. You have representation for a wide variety of political viewpoints from any large publisher. There is no hidden agenda to punish geeks, at least as far as I can tell.
If they can convince a publisher their book will sell, the publisher will take it. A book coming from a site the size of Slashdot is not likely to have too many problems getting published. Take it from someone in the industry - a lot of books get published, including a lot of obscure ones(which this project wouldn't be). There are 500,000 titles in print, with about 60,000 being added every year. Do you really think a Slashdot book would have a hard time getting published?
There is already an established section for books just like this one - computer culture(depends on the bookstore, YMMV). This would fit right in. I really don't see a problem with this at all.
Its actually worse than you think. As of June 1999 there were 1,860,520 adults in prison, or one out of every 147 people ~.68%. We have the largest prison population in the world, both in terms of percentage of the population and sheer numbers. Here is my source.
I'd like to think that racism has gone away in this day in age, but considering that fully 11 percent of black males in their 20s and early 30s are incarcerated, its easy to see that it hasn't.
Not to mention that our prisons are so bad a popular movie like Office Space can refer to them as "pound me up the ass" prisons - and no one questions the joke.
The war on drugs has turned this country from a country I was proud to be a citizen of to the most opressive, human-rights-violating nation in the world.
Web servers can't read your registry, plain and simple. The only possible way is if you ran an ActiveX control or an executable(scripting languages can't do this) that accessed the registry, but if you did that, it would be your own fault. Its certainly not the default behavior for a browser to access and send registry values to web servers.
Yes, the registry contains lots of nifty information. Besides the stuff you mention, it can store your passwords. If you have Auto complete enabled it'll even store your credit card numbers.
There are several things your browser sends, and its available to any web server. Your browser brand and version, language, the URL you clicked through from, your IP address etc. A server can tell if you have Javascript enabled. Most of the stuff a web server can detect about you is defined in the HTTP standard. Yes, Microsoft was collecting this information. Then again, Slashdot collects the same information./. knows your IP, browser version, Javascript capability, how long you stay, how often you visit, etc. Read the code. But so what. Most commercial websites collect this information.
However the registry and the information a browser sends are two very different things. There is no way a web server can get to your registry. And there are no secret API's that only Microsoft knows about. It would be way too much of a security risk, and someone would have blown the whistle a long time ago.
Actually, you would have more luck reading their registry than the other way around. IIS 4.0 and up provided a component that provided access to the web servers registry through a web page. You are able to set things up to perform any system admin task through a web page, if you want. Pretty insecure, if you asked me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they are a problem. However, our Constitution gives us the power to deal with it. Citizens are still allowed to speak out against corporate injustice. We have the fair right to a trial if we are wrongly terminated or discriminated against. We have the freedom to work and live where we want to, and the freedom to choose which products we buy.
We still have the right to arm ourselves - a freedom most other "free" countries have given up. By that measure, we are still the freeest country in the world. Dispute that if you will, but a Tinnamen Square incident would never happen here.
Corporations only have as much power as we, the free people of the U.S., choose to give them.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Yes, used book sales cut into new book sales. However, people have been selling their books for hundreds of years, and thats not going to change. Instead of persuading booksellers to stop selling used books(which will never work), they should do more things like booksignings that add value to the new book.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
If we can simply pass enough laws to make guns illegal, and also sue the gun manufacturers out of business, we can solve all of this insane gun-related violence.
Because, as we all know, we will be much safer if we all are unarmed. Criminals are too stupid to make their own weapons or find black markets to buy them.
You simply can't make society safer by allowing law abiding citizens to be vigilantes. Our police force is amply able to handle the few gun related crimes that might occur once all guns become illegal. If your house is being robbed or otherwise under attack, calling 911 and reasoning with your attacker is always better than defending yourself with a gun. The police will respond immediately and save you.
Once again, this madness would have not occured if guns were illegal. The Slashdot population should be smart enough to recognize that you solve problems by concentrating on the specific technology, not the human nature, behind the problem. We should teach this fact to the rest of the world.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Hey, I'd rather not bash Java. It looks like a nicely structured language with clean syntax that leads to good coding style. Now, can you point me to a site that performs well that uses JSP? Because all the ones I've seen so far are just dog slow.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Komodo had no licence, but the source code was on the site. To install Komodo, you have to agree that you are using a product that is owned by ActiveState - you don't have any ownership of what you just downloaded.
I'm pretty excited. I've been waiting for a Perl IDE for a long time and I plan on trying both this and the Visual Perl product they are releasing.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
I don't see how that proves non-obviousness. That just proves that they got there first.
One click shopping is something that can be implemented by a junior-level programmer in less than a week. To me that makes it obvious. There's a lot wrong with that patent.
What is really needed is a better test of obviousness. If the average programmer can look at your program and quickly reverse engineer it, its not obvious. One-click is obvious by this test. If its something really useful, such as an algorithm for compression or encryption, but could not easily be reverse engineered, thereby requiring publication of the algorithm in order to disseminate it - that is non-obvious and thus would qualify for a patent.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Hate to burst your bubble, but the O'Reilly book "Learning Perl on Win32" was written by the founder of ActiveState. Also, from the beginning there was always much more development done on the ActiveState port of Perl than the "pure Perl release" you mention. ActiveState was started with a grant from Microsoft, and since its inception it has worked the "pure Perl" people to merge the two products.
Therefore, Microsoft essentially funded the development of Perl for Windows systems, and also came up with the worlds first Perl IDE. ActiveState, essentially a subsidiary of Microsoft, is also releasing the Perl IDE as open-source software for Linux.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
As the former owner of a palm and five graphing calculators(not to mention numerous watches, sunglasses, wallets, keys, walkmans) I wish I didn't lose everything that I carry around with me.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
IMO - this is the way to stop spam - IP addresses and domain names of spammers are always elusive, but you can spot a spam email from a mile away.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
This saved them many hours of coding the rest of the class had to sweat through, yet in the end their programs looked different enough to qualify as individual programs(at UNM you are not allowed to work on programs in groups in most CS classes) because they implemented the psuedocode separately.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Apparently, wireless transmission of energy falls under Tesla's 'crackpot' ideas - I probably would have refined my original question to 'what is the future of electricity' or something to that effect had I realized that from the start. I think we can agree that we have to replace burning coal with something more efficient and less polluting(right?) And I still think monopolistic control of the power supply is a Bad Thing. It would be great if our electrical system worked more like the internet.
Obviously I have more in common with Tesla's 'dreamer' side than with his 'electrical engineer' side. :)
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
However, I don't see how his education enabled him to be such a visionary. I've been reading some of his writings and some of it just gives me the chills. He came up with the entire system of alternating current - not by scientific method, not by trial and error, but by envisioning how it would all work. When he first physically built the first AC motor, he had the idea all worked out in his head. The guy was a prophet, and its a shame some of his other ideas never came into being. We could be using an electrical system that transmitted electricity through the upper atmosphere and using ~90% less energy than we do today.
There was a definite spiritual quality at play in Tesla's hugely significant inventions, and that is most definitely not taught in schools.
By the way, check out the PBS special on Tesla Dec. 12.
http://www.pbs.org/tesla
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
For more on this, see The Code Book, by Simon Singh.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Here in New Mexico, Californians have done a fine job of inflating real estate prices. When "foreigners" take all the good real estate and you can't buy a home in your home state because of them, well there's bound to be a backlash.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
If the electoral college were disbanded, it would be highly unlikely that a candidate would visit NM. However, the same would be true if our state heavily leaned one way or another. There was no reason for Bush or Gore to visit Utah, for example(same # of electoral votes) - that state was going to Bush, and no amount of campaigning would change that.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
How did so many /.ers forget? The intention of .NET is to be a runtime environment to run on all platforms, not just on Windows. What, did you all lose your critical thinking facilites just because of some marketing BS from Sun?
The ultimate goal of .NET is pretty close to the holy grail of programming IMO - be able to write a program in any language that will run on any platform that has the .NET runtime. Mix and match languages if its appropriate and still run on any platform.
My analysis? The linked story is FUD and Sun is scared. Ignore .NET if you want, but also be prepared to cut yourself off from a lot of business that will be focused on it.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Its got practical advice that applies to any language. If you would have read further, you'd have seen examples in C/C++, Pascal, and Basic(this was written in 93). It was a distillation of lots of stuff you'd only find in research papers or passed around by developers via word of mouth, handwritten notes, etc. There were a few things I never saw anywhere else, like how to tighten up for loops and while loops, and when to use recursion(college textbooks almost universally teach bad examples of this subject).
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
If they can convince a publisher their book will sell, the publisher will take it. A book coming from a site the size of Slashdot is not likely to have too many problems getting published. Take it from someone in the industry - a lot of books get published, including a lot of obscure ones(which this project wouldn't be). There are 500,000 titles in print, with about 60,000 being added every year. Do you really think a Slashdot book would have a hard time getting published?
There is already an established section for books just like this one - computer culture(depends on the bookstore, YMMV). This would fit right in. I really don't see a problem with this at all.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
I'd like to think that racism has gone away in this day in age, but considering that fully 11 percent of black males in their 20s and early 30s are incarcerated, its easy to see that it hasn't.
Not to mention that our prisons are so bad a popular movie like Office Space can refer to them as "pound me up the ass" prisons - and no one questions the joke.
The war on drugs has turned this country from a country I was proud to be a citizen of to the most opressive, human-rights-violating nation in the world.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
Yes, the registry contains lots of nifty information. Besides the stuff you mention, it can store your passwords. If you have Auto complete enabled it'll even store your credit card numbers.
There are several things your browser sends, and its available to any web server. Your browser brand and version, language, the URL you clicked through from, your IP address etc. A server can tell if you have Javascript enabled. Most of the stuff a web server can detect about you is defined in the HTTP standard. Yes, Microsoft was collecting this information. Then again, Slashdot collects the same information. /. knows your IP, browser version, Javascript capability, how long you stay, how often you visit, etc. Read the code. But so what. Most commercial websites collect this information.
However the registry and the information a browser sends are two very different things. There is no way a web server can get to your registry. And there are no secret API's that only Microsoft knows about. It would be way too much of a security risk, and someone would have blown the whistle a long time ago.
Actually, you would have more luck reading their registry than the other way around. IIS 4.0 and up provided a component that provided access to the web servers registry through a web page. You are able to set things up to perform any system admin task through a web page, if you want. Pretty insecure, if you asked me.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.