The law does not restrict the number of graduates, but it restricts anyone from entering those fields without being a graduate. There is also this little thing called "certification", which is required for the school or graduating from that school won't mean a dang thing. Now if you're telling me that there is actually competition for qualified students and that all who apply to either med school or law school are accepted, then I'll accept that this is an open market. Otherwise, way I see it is that the whole guild process serves to artificially limit the number of people who may enter the trade.
In the legal field, a two year paralegal could probably handle a vast number of cases like simple will and testaments, no-children-no-property-contested-no-fault-divorce s, routine small business stuff, etc. Yet the prices of these services are artificially propped up because either you read how to do it from a book for $20 or you get a full-on lawyer to charge you his fee while his paralegal does all the paperwork.
Ditto in the medical profession. A serious boatload of the work is done by nurses already. There's really no reason for me to go to a "doctor" to get a yearly check-up (weight, blood pressure, routine testing, etc). Yet again, though, I get to pay a much higher price because the doctor does the billing while the nurses do the work.
It's like having to take yur beater Chevy into the Chevy race mechanic to get the oil change.
And you can pretend that there is no legal limit to the number of doctors or lawyers, but when you make certification by the guild a requirement, it is in the guild's best interest to make sure the supply is restricted somewhere along the way... and while some people will cry about how "overlawyered" the U.S. is, part of the reason we have so many lawyers is because it takes a lawyer to do even the most minor legal thing. But look at the salaries in both of these fields, top of the scale. They have average salaries that put programming to shame.
Do you really think small businesses who want a custom accounting application or a simple web site should have to hire someone with a Masters in Computer Science, when someone with a "MS Access for Dummies" or the "Idiots Guide to HTML" would be just as good?
Ah, so instead of using the herd approach to getting a backbone we should use the force of law to artificially restrict the number of programmers by requiring admittance to a guild prior to being able to work in a field? What ever happened to just having a spine of your own?
What about searching for a keyword in all of a documents in a given directory/folder? (grep keyword *).
Which will break as soon as you get too many documents in that directory and therefore makes a terrible example of the ease of use of the CLI.
Besides, any idiot with half a clue could code a "find" application that a) you can drag-select and drop all the files you want to search onto, which then pops up a window to ask about search terms, etc, or b) you open it up tell it the search terms and then use a GUI interface to select a set of files or directories.
Personally I prefer the CLI, but a little creativity can make a GUI work just fine for a lot of stuff.
That's a good summary. But the IRS amount is based on averages. His daily commute would be around 5000 miles per year, less than half the national average for mileage. So what he really needs to do is tally up the total miles he drives every year and the total he spends on his car every year and divide to get a cost per mile, which he then multiplies by 5000 to get the true annual expense of commuting. He also needs to factor in any parking fees he pays and if he gets free parking he ought to consider the cost of having one parking place set aside for his car as a deduction on his overall income (since the employer is essentially subsidizing driving).
I am sure once he finds the true cost of driving those 5000 miles every year he will see that the comparison is not so great. However, if he is not going to ditch the car entirely in favor of bicycling, walking, and mass transit use with the occasional car rental or taxi ride thrown in, then he still has the fixed expense to own a car and pay its insurance, etc.
The real question is: can he live without a car at all? If he could do so, in spite of protestations of inconvenience, then to count the cost of commuting as only the incremental cost of gasoline is deceiving because it masks the true cost of ownership. However, if he absolutely "must" have the car (to haul his invalid mother around, or to visit his girlfriend on the weekends in a faraway place, or whatever reason), then it is fair for him to consider more the incremental expense associated with commuting. Of course, he should consider 5000 miles is a significant factor in his repair bills and such, which are technically part of the incremental cost of driving.
Personally I think that most Americans believe they "need" a car because they have not truly tried anything else. And so it becomes a vicious cycle. Our cities are designed around cars, which makes mass transit less useful and cycling or walking less attractive. So we don't even try to consider lifestyle changes that would help us avoid the massive expense of car ownership, which reduces support for transit, which pushes marginal cases into car ownership, etc etc.
Yeah, but prior to the advent of the internet April 1 required a bit of work. Now there's more April Fool's jokes than lame blogs! It's joke overload. Sometimes less is more, y'know. I mean, it's like everyone is trying to be The Onion all day on April 1. But why bother when The Onion is The Onion all the time? Good April Fool's jokes involve a high level of subtlety, planning, and a real good "gotcha" at the end. Most of what we're seeing on the net just don't qualify.
Even on my 2.6 Ghz machine with a Radeon 9000 graphics card, I *still* use outline dragging becuase those 2.6 Ghz would be better spent on something else.
And how often are they? Any time I see someone going on about "wasting clock cycles" I know I'm in for a religious argument. Wasting clock cycles? I've wasted more clock cycles typing this reply than you're ever going to waste redrawing a resized window.
All he seems to be doing in this essay is advocating that farmers use modern farming techniques (i.e. synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, mostly). So fine. That's not all that controversial is it? But how does that ensure that the food actually gets to people? How does that ensure efficient use of resources?
Where's the sensible criticism of the bizarre government involvement in the U.S. food supply? Why does he not take issue with price supports and all the other nonsense that makes a gallon of milk cost more here in the heart of dairyland than any two gallons of gas? Why does he not mention vegetarianism, which is far more energy efficient than processing vegetable matter through cows and chickens and pigs? Why does he not talk about the problems that foreign aid and the drug trade produce in many countries, where farmers find it more profitable to be on the dole or to grow drug crops than they do to grow food crops that could feed their coutnrymen?
If the answer were as simple as "use synthetic fertilizer and pesticides", don't you think we would have solved all of this by now?
What a load. The real problem here is allowing untrusted script elements to have control. The best way to counter this threat is not to attempt to shame Windows users, but to point out the fundamental security risk (giving execution control to untrusted elements), which could really affect any of us viewing email in a web browser.
That said, I would support a law that gvies me a specific right to sue people who send me viruses via email. Let's see how affordable the TCO of a stock Windows system is then.
I especially like this solution because I know my email "client" isn't susceptible to viruses. It consists of using a custom POP fetch script that I wrote, find/grep for finding emails I want to read, less for reading them, and mv for saving them to a "folder". I write my emails in either nano or emacs and save them as text files. Then I use another script to send the stuff in my "outbox" to my ISP's SMTP server. Okay... I take that back. I am still susceptible to hoax viruses. But these days I would find those refreshingly humorous.:)
Actually, Linux can't be severely damaged by a virus if you are smart and run as a user, and not as root. Why? Permissions.
That is stupid. You know it's stupid. So stop saying it. Why are you willing to lose 24 hours of work? Is your time worth nothing to you? Not to mention the time recovering from the problem?
Oh, and have you audited every single piece of your system to make sure there are no local exploits that might be used to elevate a user level process to root? Those are not uncommon and you can be sure that a smart virus writer will try to take advantage of them. Surely a black-hat out there knows of an exploit or two that the white-hats have not yet found.
It is better if we work to minimize every threat rather than minimize the risks posed by those threats.
There are certain people in the US for whom it is beneficial to lump those of us who are anti-Bush alongside the anti-Americans. You don't need to help them by doing it yourself, though.
Since I never did that I don't know why you would want to pretend that I did. To deny that there is a sizable portion of the world that harbors some amount of anti-American sentiment is just delusional. Maybe it's not the Al-Qaida, "burn the infidels" level of hatred, but rather finds itself expressed as "why would I want to use this American crud if I don't have to?"
I think what Mark's getting at with this point is that here's a fairly low-grade way to put a dent in American superiority and limit the risky exposures from using American-produced software in government functions. I would certainly have the same types of feelings if the situation were reversed. It is not good for a country to have their technology infrastructure at the mercy of a few firms from some other country. In fact, vendor lock-in is bad even if the two firms are in buildings on the same block. But it's especially worrisome if you have to worry about foreign governments spying on your own government and stuff like that.
That's not true. The complaints about America are largely the result of American culture and history. It's not like suddenly in 2001 Bush took office and people just started having problems with America... do you really think it only took El-Qaida a few months to whip up their plans for 9/11?
Let's just be clear with this particular point that Mark is making that this isn't about Bush or that "open source" software itself is anti-American. The point is: people remember the Cold War and worry that American business works hand-in-hand with the CIA and other agencies (which is not to say that their own governments are any better in many cases-- but look at which foreign groups are most receptive to "open source": governments).
And as a person in the world, I would like to say "Thank you!"
The poster complaining about privacy is an absolute tool of the worst sort. It's your system, you set the terms of service. Unless you are knowingly violating your side of that agreement, what you did was not only legitimate, but quite respectable. You have every right to defend your system and the reputation of the service you provide. If the (ab)users don't like it, I'm sure the marketplace is full of potential alternatives.
Don't forget to read the opinion of the SCOTUS in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (which resulted from the airing of the actual Carlin routine). Just don't read the Court's decision on the air or the FCC will probably come after you (the controversial bits of the routine are in an appendix to the ruling).;)
Of course, with the current discussion to allow 14 and 16 year olds vote in California, I can see even more issues arising out of this. Not to mention, candidates being voted in merely on coolness factor rather than any real political platform or experience.
And that would be different how, exactly, from the current process?
Just remember: if voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
What I don't understand is why so much attention is on Java or C#. Is it only because with runtimes these are the languages out there that compile down to some form of byte-code? Don't we then perpetuate the problem of having to match binaries and runtimes just as we now have to match binaries and platforms (thinking x86 vs. PPC and the like).
I should think we'd all be better off if more and more end-user apps were being written in interpreted languages like Ruby, Python, or Perl, using the appropriate GUI bindings (my personal favorite is Ruby-GNOME2, especially just the GTK bits, since those are supported on Windows for an added portability bonus). Porting scripts from one GUI toolkit to another is often quite possible as well since the differences are often minimal (just don't get distracted by that ever-sought Holy Grail of the Meta-Toolkit). Not only that, there appears to be some promise for the idea of using libraries written in any C-based scripting languages from any of the other C-based scripting languages (just as they have excellent capabilities for using C libraries).
If you read the article I linked it is clear that most of this hinges on the definition of "lawyer", which varies greatly from place to place. Further if the ABA's estimate is a 10 point range on a 100 point scale that means that they really don't know and are just guessing. Unless you have sound evidence to back up your claim you are just guessing, too. In any case, the problem this country has is not too many lawyers.
Higher supply side numbers typically have a downward pressure on prices, even in a guild-protected profession like lawyering. The problem this country has is too many laws (even worse are the extralegal regulations that act with the full force of law). Why do we have too many laws? Because people keep voting for other people (often lawyers) who promise to fix whatever's wrong with the voter's life by (you guessed it) passing a law.
And if that's even really a problem, most Americans are way too distracted to care about it. And if that's possible, I'd say we have it pretty good-- or at least we seem to have what we want. And if that's because of all the lawyers, then so be it.
Just for the sake of argument, are you really including in that per capita figure "all other countries"? Do you have this per capita number on a country by country basis? And are you really prepared to compare the U.S. to all the places where the rule of law is nothing but a dream? At least here we have some hope of it-- I think I'd much rather be the target of an otherwise peaceful lawsuit than caught in the middle of some "civil" war between clans or the wrong side of some druglord's private army or whatever.
The more interesting numbers would be the ratios of lawyers to citizens in other fully modern democracies like England, France, Germany, Canada and Japan. I can't imagine the French (for example) have fewer laws and lawsuits than the U.S., not by any worthwhile amount anyway. For a better analysis of this Dan Quaylism, see this report, which contains numbers showing that the United States is far from winning the "overlawyered" race.
Why did parent poster get modded down (flamebait/troll, not off-topic, I note) for suggesting they should ban styrofoam? Yes, the dihydrogen monoxide bit of this is fairly amusing, but criticizing the use of styrofoam is a troll? I don't think so. It's a perfectly fair question considering the objections raised (petroleum product, non-biodegradable, toxins released when burned, possible leaching into food)... are these concerns pure myth or scare-mongering on the same level as the H20 spoof? If so, can you prove it?
Coding is not selling copyrighted work. Coding is selling the service of coding. Most code is not universally useful. Neither are most "copyrighted" works. And in most of these cases, we find that copyright law is actually being used to deprive workers of "ownership" over "property" that they created. If I write a program for my employer, I cannot write that same program for someone because my employer would own the copyright on the so-called original and has the exclusive right to create derivative works. And before some libertarian gets all property rights on me...The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights.
Best part is: you've been modded up to +4, Insightful. Makes a person wonder if Slashdot isn't actually a Diebold beta of some sort.
Re:because perl is a pig that runs out of memory
on
Wicked Cool Shell Scripts
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
the stuff in/bin and/usr/bin are usually written in C and often quite robust.
You say this like Perl is not written in C and the interpreter crashes constantly.
Shell scripting is very useful for stringing together shell commands. Perl (and other scripting languages-- like my favorite, Ruby) are useful when your shell script starts to be too long to fit on a command line or starts to be more than one screen-full of text or when you want to add a nice GUI interface or when the task looks more like an application than a small utility.
But when's the last time Cali went for a Republican president? (I have no idea.)
Does the name Ronald Reagan ring a bell? Sheesh. Not only did he win in major landslides in terms of the electoral college (twice), but he was the governor of California for two terms before that (although not immediately prior). Additionally Bush 41 carried California in 1988.
It would hardly be suspicious if Bush wins CA in 2004. Especially not when you consider that bizarro recall election resulting in the Governator.
Slashdot Mirror
The law does not restrict the number of graduates, but it restricts anyone from entering those fields without being a graduate. There is also this little thing called "certification", which is required for the school or graduating from that school won't mean a dang thing. Now if you're telling me that there is actually competition for qualified students and that all who apply to either med school or law school are accepted, then I'll accept that this is an open market. Otherwise, way I see it is that the whole guild process serves to artificially limit the number of people who may enter the trade.
e s, routine small business stuff, etc. Yet the prices of these services are artificially propped up because either you read how to do it from a book for $20 or you get a full-on lawyer to charge you his fee while his paralegal does all the paperwork.
In the legal field, a two year paralegal could probably handle a vast number of cases like simple will and testaments, no-children-no-property-contested-no-fault-divorc
Ditto in the medical profession. A serious boatload of the work is done by nurses already. There's really no reason for me to go to a "doctor" to get a yearly check-up (weight, blood pressure, routine testing, etc). Yet again, though, I get to pay a much higher price because the doctor does the billing while the nurses do the work.
It's like having to take yur beater Chevy into the Chevy race mechanic to get the oil change.
And you can pretend that there is no legal limit to the number of doctors or lawyers, but when you make certification by the guild a requirement, it is in the guild's best interest to make sure the supply is restricted somewhere along the way... and while some people will cry about how "overlawyered" the U.S. is, part of the reason we have so many lawyers is because it takes a lawyer to do even the most minor legal thing. But look at the salaries in both of these fields, top of the scale. They have average salaries that put programming to shame.
Do you really think small businesses who want a custom accounting application or a simple web site should have to hire someone with a Masters in Computer Science, when someone with a "MS Access for Dummies" or the "Idiots Guide to HTML" would be just as good?
Ah, so instead of using the herd approach to getting a backbone we should use the force of law to artificially restrict the number of programmers by requiring admittance to a guild prior to being able to work in a field? What ever happened to just having a spine of your own?
What about searching for a keyword in all of a documents in a given directory/folder? (grep keyword *).
Which will break as soon as you get too many documents in that directory and therefore makes a terrible example of the ease of use of the CLI.
Besides, any idiot with half a clue could code a "find" application that a) you can drag-select and drop all the files you want to search onto, which then pops up a window to ask about search terms, etc, or b) you open it up tell it the search terms and then use a GUI interface to select a set of files or directories.
Personally I prefer the CLI, but a little creativity can make a GUI work just fine for a lot of stuff.
That's a good summary. But the IRS amount is based on averages. His daily commute would be around 5000 miles per year, less than half the national average for mileage. So what he really needs to do is tally up the total miles he drives every year and the total he spends on his car every year and divide to get a cost per mile, which he then multiplies by 5000 to get the true annual expense of commuting. He also needs to factor in any parking fees he pays and if he gets free parking he ought to consider the cost of having one parking place set aside for his car as a deduction on his overall income (since the employer is essentially subsidizing driving).
I am sure once he finds the true cost of driving those 5000 miles every year he will see that the comparison is not so great. However, if he is not going to ditch the car entirely in favor of bicycling, walking, and mass transit use with the occasional car rental or taxi ride thrown in, then he still has the fixed expense to own a car and pay its insurance, etc.
The real question is: can he live without a car at all? If he could do so, in spite of protestations of inconvenience, then to count the cost of commuting as only the incremental cost of gasoline is deceiving because it masks the true cost of ownership. However, if he absolutely "must" have the car (to haul his invalid mother around, or to visit his girlfriend on the weekends in a faraway place, or whatever reason), then it is fair for him to consider more the incremental expense associated with commuting. Of course, he should consider 5000 miles is a significant factor in his repair bills and such, which are technically part of the incremental cost of driving.
Personally I think that most Americans believe they "need" a car because they have not truly tried anything else. And so it becomes a vicious cycle. Our cities are designed around cars, which makes mass transit less useful and cycling or walking less attractive. So we don't even try to consider lifestyle changes that would help us avoid the massive expense of car ownership, which reduces support for transit, which pushes marginal cases into car ownership, etc etc.
Yeah, but prior to the advent of the internet April 1 required a bit of work. Now there's more April Fool's jokes than lame blogs! It's joke overload. Sometimes less is more, y'know. I mean, it's like everyone is trying to be The Onion all day on April 1. But why bother when The Onion is The Onion all the time? Good April Fool's jokes involve a high level of subtlety, planning, and a real good "gotcha" at the end. Most of what we're seeing on the net just don't qualify.
Even on my 2.6 Ghz machine with a Radeon 9000 graphics card, I *still* use outline dragging becuase those 2.6 Ghz would be better spent on something else.
And how often are they? Any time I see someone going on about "wasting clock cycles" I know I'm in for a religious argument. Wasting clock cycles? I've wasted more clock cycles typing this reply than you're ever going to waste redrawing a resized window.
Brilliant response. Thank you.
Did he ever really answer the question?
All he seems to be doing in this essay is advocating that farmers use modern farming techniques (i.e. synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, mostly). So fine. That's not all that controversial is it? But how does that ensure that the food actually gets to people? How does that ensure efficient use of resources?
Where's the sensible criticism of the bizarre government involvement in the U.S. food supply? Why does he not take issue with price supports and all the other nonsense that makes a gallon of milk cost more here in the heart of dairyland than any two gallons of gas? Why does he not mention vegetarianism, which is far more energy efficient than processing vegetable matter through cows and chickens and pigs? Why does he not talk about the problems that foreign aid and the drug trade produce in many countries, where farmers find it more profitable to be on the dole or to grow drug crops than they do to grow food crops that could feed their coutnrymen?
If the answer were as simple as "use synthetic fertilizer and pesticides", don't you think we would have solved all of this by now?
What a load. The real problem here is allowing untrusted script elements to have control. The best way to counter this threat is not to attempt to shame Windows users, but to point out the fundamental security risk (giving execution control to untrusted elements), which could really affect any of us viewing email in a web browser.
:)
That said, I would support a law that gvies me a specific right to sue people who send me viruses via email. Let's see how affordable the TCO of a stock Windows system is then.
I especially like this solution because I know my email "client" isn't susceptible to viruses. It consists of using a custom POP fetch script that I wrote, find/grep for finding emails I want to read, less for reading them, and mv for saving them to a "folder". I write my emails in either nano or emacs and save them as text files. Then I use another script to send the stuff in my "outbox" to my ISP's SMTP server. Okay... I take that back. I am still susceptible to hoax viruses. But these days I would find those refreshingly humorous.
Actually, Linux can't be severely damaged by a virus if you are smart and run as a user, and not as root. Why? Permissions.
That is stupid. You know it's stupid. So stop saying it. Why are you willing to lose 24 hours of work? Is your time worth nothing to you? Not to mention the time recovering from the problem?
Oh, and have you audited every single piece of your system to make sure there are no local exploits that might be used to elevate a user level process to root? Those are not uncommon and you can be sure that a smart virus writer will try to take advantage of them. Surely a black-hat out there knows of an exploit or two that the white-hats have not yet found.
It is better if we work to minimize every threat rather than minimize the risks posed by those threats.
There are certain people in the US for whom it is beneficial to lump those of us who are anti-Bush alongside the anti-Americans. You don't need to help them by doing it yourself, though.
Since I never did that I don't know why you would want to pretend that I did. To deny that there is a sizable portion of the world that harbors some amount of anti-American sentiment is just delusional. Maybe it's not the Al-Qaida, "burn the infidels" level of hatred, but rather finds itself expressed as "why would I want to use this American crud if I don't have to?"
I think what Mark's getting at with this point is that here's a fairly low-grade way to put a dent in American superiority and limit the risky exposures from using American-produced software in government functions. I would certainly have the same types of feelings if the situation were reversed. It is not good for a country to have their technology infrastructure at the mercy of a few firms from some other country. In fact, vendor lock-in is bad even if the two firms are in buildings on the same block. But it's especially worrisome if you have to worry about foreign governments spying on your own government and stuff like that.
That's not true. The complaints about America are largely the result of American culture and history. It's not like suddenly in 2001 Bush took office and people just started having problems with America... do you really think it only took El-Qaida a few months to whip up their plans for 9/11?
Let's just be clear with this particular point that Mark is making that this isn't about Bush or that "open source" software itself is anti-American. The point is: people remember the Cold War and worry that American business works hand-in-hand with the CIA and other agencies (which is not to say that their own governments are any better in many cases-- but look at which foreign groups are most receptive to "open source": governments).
And as a person in the world, I would like to say "Thank you!"
The poster complaining about privacy is an absolute tool of the worst sort. It's your system, you set the terms of service. Unless you are knowingly violating your side of that agreement, what you did was not only legitimate, but quite respectable. You have every right to defend your system and the reputation of the service you provide. If the (ab)users don't like it, I'm sure the marketplace is full of potential alternatives.
Don't forget to read the opinion of the SCOTUS in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (which resulted from the airing of the actual Carlin routine). Just don't read the Court's decision on the air or the FCC will probably come after you (the controversial bits of the routine are in an appendix to the ruling). ;)
Of course, with the current discussion to allow 14 and 16 year olds vote in California, I can see even more issues arising out of this. Not to mention, candidates being voted in merely on coolness factor rather than any real political platform or experience.
And that would be different how, exactly, from the current process?
Just remember: if voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
What I don't understand is why so much attention is on Java or C#. Is it only because with runtimes these are the languages out there that compile down to some form of byte-code? Don't we then perpetuate the problem of having to match binaries and runtimes just as we now have to match binaries and platforms (thinking x86 vs. PPC and the like).
I should think we'd all be better off if more and more end-user apps were being written in interpreted languages like Ruby, Python, or Perl, using the appropriate GUI bindings (my personal favorite is Ruby-GNOME2, especially just the GTK bits, since those are supported on Windows for an added portability bonus). Porting scripts from one GUI toolkit to another is often quite possible as well since the differences are often minimal (just don't get distracted by that ever-sought Holy Grail of the Meta-Toolkit). Not only that, there appears to be some promise for the idea of using libraries written in any C-based scripting languages from any of the other C-based scripting languages (just as they have excellent capabilities for using C libraries).
If you read the article I linked it is clear that most of this hinges on the definition of "lawyer", which varies greatly from place to place. Further if the ABA's estimate is a 10 point range on a 100 point scale that means that they really don't know and are just guessing. Unless you have sound evidence to back up your claim you are just guessing, too. In any case, the problem this country has is not too many lawyers.
Higher supply side numbers typically have a downward pressure on prices, even in a guild-protected profession like lawyering. The problem this country has is too many laws (even worse are the extralegal regulations that act with the full force of law). Why do we have too many laws? Because people keep voting for other people (often lawyers) who promise to fix whatever's wrong with the voter's life by (you guessed it) passing a law.
And if that's even really a problem, most Americans are way too distracted to care about it. And if that's possible, I'd say we have it pretty good-- or at least we seem to have what we want. And if that's because of all the lawyers, then so be it.
Just for the sake of argument, are you really including in that per capita figure "all other countries"? Do you have this per capita number on a country by country basis? And are you really prepared to compare the U.S. to all the places where the rule of law is nothing but a dream? At least here we have some hope of it-- I think I'd much rather be the target of an otherwise peaceful lawsuit than caught in the middle of some "civil" war between clans or the wrong side of some druglord's private army or whatever.
The more interesting numbers would be the ratios of lawyers to citizens in other fully modern democracies like England, France, Germany, Canada and Japan. I can't imagine the French (for example) have fewer laws and lawsuits than the U.S., not by any worthwhile amount anyway. For a better analysis of this Dan Quaylism, see this report, which contains numbers showing that the United States is far from winning the "overlawyered" race.
Why did parent poster get modded down (flamebait/troll, not off-topic, I note) for suggesting they should ban styrofoam? Yes, the dihydrogen monoxide bit of this is fairly amusing, but criticizing the use of styrofoam is a troll? I don't think so. It's a perfectly fair question considering the objections raised (petroleum product, non-biodegradable, toxins released when burned, possible leaching into food)... are these concerns pure myth or scare-mongering on the same level as the H20 spoof? If so, can you prove it?
And here I thought I was the only one who was critical of Lessig for that exact reason. :)
Hmmm. Now with even more hyperlinkability: The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights.
Coding is not selling copyrighted work. Coding is selling the service of coding. Most code is not universally useful. Neither are most "copyrighted" works. And in most of these cases, we find that copyright law is actually being used to deprive workers of "ownership" over "property" that they created. If I write a program for my employer, I cannot write that same program for someone because my employer would own the copyright on the so-called original and has the exclusive right to create derivative works. And before some libertarian gets all property rights on me...The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights.
Best part is: you've been modded up to +4, Insightful. Makes a person wonder if Slashdot isn't actually a Diebold beta of some sort.
the stuff in /bin and /usr/bin are usually written in C and often quite robust.
You say this like Perl is not written in C and the interpreter crashes constantly.
Shell scripting is very useful for stringing together shell commands. Perl (and other scripting languages-- like my favorite, Ruby) are useful when your shell script starts to be too long to fit on a command line or starts to be more than one screen-full of text or when you want to add a nice GUI interface or when the task looks more like an application than a small utility.
Right tool for the job.
But when's the last time Cali went for a Republican president? (I have no idea.)
Does the name Ronald Reagan ring a bell? Sheesh. Not only did he win in major landslides in terms of the electoral college (twice), but he was the governor of California for two terms before that (although not immediately prior). Additionally Bush 41 carried California in 1988.
It would hardly be suspicious if Bush wins CA in 2004. Especially not when you consider that bizarro recall election resulting in the Governator.