You can, of course, Google for Brad Templeton and DNS, but you can also find his stuff here.
If we can come up with a way of wresting control of the root servers from ICANN in a way that won't break the existing scheme, then the transition is done...
OK. I'll admit it. I am an average programmer. Maybe a little bit better than average at thinking things through thoroughly, designing intelligently... it's that mathematician's aesthetic where you want things to be as clean and orthogonal as they possibly can. But I am slooow. At most jobs I've had there are definitely people quicker than I am, and a few that are slower.
So... should I bail? Dan's comments about average programmers struggling resonates with me... I've been out of work since May. It won't be long until I'm a balding guy in his mid 30's, so if the use-the-young-hard philosophy is prevalent, I'm double-whammied. Seems like the obvious thing to do is check out. But where to go?
My understanding is that the clone market was a losing game for everyone. Apple had their marketshare cannibalized, rather than expanded. UMAX, when they quit, said that they lost money on it. No gain for Apple, no gain for the cloner. Why bother?
Re:Doesn't anyone know Frank Miller?
on
Superhero Smackdown
·
· Score: 4, Funny
But then, Aquaman uses electric eels and ocean thermal vents to melt the polar ice caps and raise sea level, wiping out most of the earth's coasts. When the other superheroes come for him, he is surrounded by an army of Giant Squid, Whales, and sharks with Frickin' laser beams attached to their heads. And kryptonite weilding eels.
The US government is not willing to tell anyone what it knows about Iraq. It cannot reveal certain information for security purposes. It might reveal more than it can afford to reveal.
Riiiight. Can you think of any information they'd have about Iraq that they couldn't release to the American people? What exactly could be wrong with them saying "We have confirmed intelligence that says Iraq currently has fully operational ICBMs" or even suitcase nukes? There is no such information. They've never even made that claim. The most he's done is refer to some British and European reports speculating that given the right materials, Sadaam could produce a weapon in six months. He's never established ANY kind of connection between terrorists and Iraq whatsoever.
The funny thing is, even a German Marxist can make a better case for war against Iraq than the Bush Administration. Why is that? Could be a number of things. It could be the administration is inept when it comes to communications. Worse, it could be that they're deft at it, and they realize that the sort of waterd-down content-free soundbites they've been feeding the population actually work. But it also could be hidden motives on their part. Sometimes you have a hard time making a case when there's a case to be made, because the reasons for doing things have little to do with the easily made case.
Finally, I hope we both get modded offtopic (but maybe informative).
While the jab at dubya is something of a troll (though you should read this and this before you dismiss the sentiment outright), the part about collecting the tax is fairly insightful. Exactly how do you set up a system for tracking this sort of thing? Or do they just plan to dump the burden on merchants everywhere, and sock it to them if they don't comply?
The jurisdiction issues also make my head spin. I can't see any reason why, if I sell from California, Conneticut has any business regulating how I do business....
Seems that "Intellectual Property" is a vague concept some people seem to have a hard time grasping...
People like the patent office? They sure seem awfully confused about it lately.
Intellectual Property IS a vague concept... and is even farther from a normal factor between times and cultures than the idea of property itself. The idea of ideas being property is sortof odd. It's practically useful in some circumstances, but by no means a given: it's important to remember that property, like money, is a convenient fiction. But less convenient to implement and keep in many situations. Especially as the technology to manipulate and share ideas gets better.... since property implies control, it will come into conflict with enabling technologies.
In short, invoking the term "Intellectual Property" doesn't make anything an open and shut case.
The aesthetic qualities you hear in music are all in the functions you use to map a mathematical pattern to sound. One that corresponds to your aesthetics will sound good. One that doesn't won't.
I've been doing this sort of thing since high school, on and off. The conclusion that I came to about five years ago is that there might actually be a reason why most scales/tonal systems people have come up with have some basis in the harmonic series. Since then, it's been interesting trying to come up with algorithms that work with it.
Why am I not posting links? Because this is done in my spare time, and what I've come up with is still crummy. But I think the idea might be significant...
Um. No. Median is good enough for me and close enough to the average that I can call it average.
Median and average can differ significantly, depending on distribution within a population. As it turns out, in the data I have, the median figure appears to be $25,000-$27,500 per year. The average of the means in each income category comes out to be around $64,000 per year.
Keep in mind there are more in the 20K-30K range and lower then there are in the 90-100K range.
Sigh. I wish you'd said that the first time. I could have avoided my whole post. : )
Also, why get technical about it?
Because it's easy to make mistakes if you don't. Actually, it's easy to make mistakes if you do, but "getting technical" allows for insights that may not be available on a gut level. The devil is often in the details.
t least I attempted to provide figures instead of saying things like "Well the congresscritters should try living on the 15 K a average citizen makes". The original poster didn't even do that!
Not only does it have that effect, but this might be the sort of thing that finally gets users to start READING their EULA's carefully, to see what they're getting into. If you knew that you had to hunt carefully for that "This gives us rights to use your address book as we see fit", maybe you'll look closely and discover Microsoftesque "This gives us rights to pull data about you off your computer at will" and "You agree not to say anything bad about us" clauses.
MT is pretty sweet, but.... as it gets more popular, it too will probably be hacked.
Your best hope to remain hack free is to design your own system from scratch. Preferably using some ungodly combination of Java, Fortran, XSLT, XML, and a custom database you wrote in C for the fun of it.
I see 50 pack for $14.00 on the site... less than $.30 per CD, which is about as good as you can do at Target or Wal-Mart.... and if the information about the lacuer finish and durable dyes is true, quite worth it.
Obviously information technology will not resolve any immediate and desperate lack in basic needs -- food, medicine, adequate shelter, clothing, etc. But then again, neither will literacy. What literacy (and perhaps IT) can sometimes do, is raise the social capital of a region to the point where it becomes better at providing for itself and (eventually) participating in a larger economy.
What happens when you give IT to a pre-industrial society? We don't know. It'd be interesting to find out.
If I ran a business, and I paid taxes, and I found out that my taxes were going to something that was directly in competition in my product, I'd oppose it too.
It isn't as if the government is actively funding any efforts whose sole purposes are to compete directly with anyone's products (including Microsoft). The government has not formed a software company to compete with anyone -- the government simply solves problems and provides services. The fact that they can sometimes use GPL'd software in doing this and then release the solution for anyone else -- including Microsfot-- to use is an incidental benefit.
Of course, it's a powerful one, and will have an effect on private entities that provide similar solutions and services. But frankly, if a focused private entity can't compete with an organization which incidentally produces a viable solution all in a days work, they shouldn't be in the market in the first place. That's what all that private enterprise efficiency is for, right?
Incidentally, this is how deregulation ought to work. Want a deregulated utility market? Seperate the service delivery network from the gov't utility provider (in order to make sure competitors have equal access to the delivery network). Then wait for the competitors to come. The day the competitors provide better/cheaper service is the day the gov't entity goes out of business.
The day MS can produce something better than NSA secure linux (hah) is the day that the GPL should cease to matter in gov't funded projects. Until then, restricting folks from using the GPL in such projects is as ridiculous as requiring it.
The fact that any product that the government contributes to could be useful -- competetive, even -- in the same space that a commercial product is shouldn't disqualify it from being used and developed.
If you view information as a freely/perfectly flowing commodity, then the ideals of the free market make more sense.
If you look at the reality -- that information has a cost to obtain, and that some parties will place a high value on stopping the flow/use of information, then you begin to see the problem.
It doesn't take much to see, but somehow this doesn't seem to find its way into basic public debates about privitization and free markets as solutions to problems...
Slashdot Mirror
You can, of course, Google for Brad Templeton and DNS, but you can also find his stuff here.
If we can come up with a way of wresting control of the root servers from ICANN in a way that won't break the existing scheme, then the transition is done...
I'm going to start learning German, French, or Dutch, and I'm going to move to a sensible socialist democracy. Or maybe Costa Rica...
OK, I guess there's Australia and Canada...
OK. I'll admit it. I am an average programmer. Maybe a little bit better than average at thinking things through thoroughly, designing intelligently... it's that mathematician's aesthetic where you want things to be as clean and orthogonal as they possibly can. But I am slooow. At most jobs I've had there are definitely people quicker than I am, and a few that are slower.
So... should I bail? Dan's comments about average programmers struggling resonates with me... I've been out of work since May. It won't be long until I'm a balding guy in his mid 30's, so if the use-the-young-hard philosophy is prevalent, I'm double-whammied. Seems like the obvious thing to do is check out. But where to go?
Here's my question: did Pay Pal give AbiWord the information about the transaction so they can track down the thieves who did this?
If not, why not? Maybe there's NOT a security problem... and the thieves work at PayPal?
OK, it's ridiculous... but so is the idea that Pay Pal wouldn't help AbiWord with such info...
My understanding is that the clone market was a losing game for everyone. Apple had their marketshare cannibalized, rather than expanded. UMAX, when they quit, said that they lost money on it. No gain for Apple, no gain for the cloner. Why bother?
But then, Aquaman uses electric eels and ocean thermal vents to melt the polar ice caps and raise sea level, wiping out most of the earth's coasts. When the other superheroes come for him, he is surrounded by an army of Giant Squid, Whales, and sharks with Frickin' laser beams attached to their heads. And kryptonite weilding eels.
The US government is not willing to tell anyone what it knows about Iraq. It cannot reveal certain information for security purposes. It might reveal more than it can afford to reveal.
Riiiight. Can you think of any information they'd have about Iraq that they couldn't release to the American people? What exactly could be wrong with them saying "We have confirmed intelligence that says Iraq currently has fully operational ICBMs" or even suitcase nukes? There is no such information. They've never even made that claim. The most he's done is refer to some British and European reports speculating that given the right materials, Sadaam could produce a weapon in six months. He's never established ANY kind of connection between terrorists and Iraq whatsoever.
The funny thing is, even a German Marxist can make a better case for war against Iraq than the Bush Administration. Why is that? Could be a number of things. It could be the administration is inept when it comes to communications. Worse, it could be that they're deft at it, and they realize that the sort of waterd-down content-free soundbites they've been feeding the population actually work. But it also could be hidden motives on their part. Sometimes you have a hard time making a case when there's a case to be made, because the reasons for doing things have little to do with the easily made case.
Finally, I hope we both get modded offtopic (but maybe informative).
Well, one could wait for the paid staff to get around to it, but there's always the option of taking things into one's own hands...
While the jab at dubya is something of a troll (though you should read this and this before you dismiss the sentiment outright), the part about collecting the tax is fairly insightful. Exactly how do you set up a system for tracking this sort of thing? Or do they just plan to dump the burden on merchants everywhere, and sock it to them if they don't comply?
The jurisdiction issues also make my head spin. I can't see any reason why, if I sell from California, Conneticut has any business regulating how I do business....
Seems that "Intellectual Property" is a vague concept some people seem to have a hard time grasping...
People like the patent office? They sure seem awfully confused about it lately.
Intellectual Property IS a vague concept... and is even farther from a normal factor between times and cultures than the idea of property itself. The idea of ideas being property is sortof odd. It's practically useful in some circumstances, but by no means a given: it's important to remember that property, like money, is a convenient fiction.
But less convenient to implement and keep in many situations. Especially as the technology to manipulate and share ideas gets better.... since property implies control, it will come into conflict with enabling technologies.
In short, invoking the term "Intellectual Property" doesn't make anything an open and shut case.
The aesthetic qualities you hear in music are all in the functions you use to map a mathematical pattern to sound. One that corresponds to your aesthetics will sound good. One that doesn't won't.
I've been doing this sort of thing since high school, on and off. The conclusion that I came to about five years ago is that there might actually be a reason why most scales/tonal systems people have come up with have some basis in the harmonic series. Since then, it's been interesting trying to come up with algorithms that work with it.
Why am I not posting links? Because this is done in my spare time, and what I've come up with is still crummy. But I think the idea might be significant...
Um. No. Median is good enough for me and close enough to the average that I can call it average.
Median and average can differ significantly, depending on distribution within a population. As it turns out, in the data I have, the median figure appears to be $25,000-$27,500 per year. The average of the means in each income category comes out to be around $64,000 per year.
Keep in mind there are more in the 20K-30K range and lower then there are in the 90-100K range.
Sigh. I wish you'd said that the first time. I could have avoided my whole post. : )
Also, why get technical about it?
Because it's easy to make mistakes if you don't. Actually, it's easy to make mistakes if you do, but "getting technical" allows for insights that may not be available on a gut level. The devil is often in the details.
t least I attempted to provide figures instead of saying things like "Well the congresscritters should try living on the 15 K a average citizen makes". The original poster didn't even do that!
True. It was appreciated. : )
Bah. Extrans means "HTML tags go in verbatim"? Who'd've thunk it. But I'll wipe the drool of my chin and use "Preview" next time....
I recently did some number crunching on ... the top 50% of earners earn about $3.3 billion. Bottom 50%: $0.7 billion. The top 50% of earners earn 84% of the income.
<UL>
<LI> Of the total sample population (106,910), 55,606 make under $27,500 annually. Roughly 50% of Americans don't exceed this number.
<LI> Similarly, 25% don't break $12,500. 10% don't break $2,500.
<LI> The 80%/20% line occurs at about $52,500 per year. Now, the total income earned by the bottom 80% of earners (everyone who earns less than $52,500 per year), is about $1.8 billion. The total income earned by the top 20% (those earning over $52,500 per year) is about $2.3 billion.
<LI> On the 50%/50% line
</UL>
From that data, the idea that the top 50% of americans are paying 96% of the taxes doesn't seem like such a problem. They're making 84% of the money. Slightly progressive taxation scheme, but then again, 20% of the population isn't making enough to actually afford taxes, and 10% just barely makes anything at all.
<p>It's sometimes comfortable to look at nice middle-classish-looking median figure (or even an average) and assume it means "most americans are doing just fine." That might even be a true conclusion IF we were dealing with a normal distribution of income. But the reality seems to be that income distribution is a pretty skewed thing -- lots of individuals in the lower brackets, progressively fewer and fewer individuals as you get into the higher brackets.
Not only does it have that effect, but this might be the sort of thing that finally gets users to start READING their EULA's carefully, to see what they're getting into. If you knew that you had to hunt carefully for that "This gives us rights to use your address book as we see fit", maybe you'll look closely and discover Microsoftesque "This gives us rights to pull data about you off your computer at will" and "You agree not to say anything bad about us" clauses.
MT is pretty sweet, but.... as it gets more popular, it too will probably be hacked.
Your best hope to remain hack free is to design your own system from scratch. Preferably using some ungodly combination of Java, Fortran, XSLT, XML, and a custom database you wrote in C for the fun of it.
And case it's not clear, you're trying to get the chalice back to the gold castle. Yep.
As does most of the crappy slashdot criticizing tripe that appears on this sorry excuse for a website....
I see 50 pack for $14.00 on the site... less than $.30 per CD, which is about as good as you can do at Target or Wal-Mart.... and if the information about the lacuer finish and durable dyes is true, quite worth it.
Obviously information technology will not resolve any immediate and desperate lack in basic needs -- food, medicine, adequate shelter, clothing, etc. But then again, neither will literacy. What literacy (and perhaps IT) can sometimes do, is raise the social capital of a region to the point where it becomes better at providing for itself and (eventually) participating in a larger economy.
What happens when you give IT to a pre-industrial society? We don't know. It'd be interesting to find out.
Maybe some of these people have nice cars or swimming pools. If so, I'd like to make those part of my economic model.
You can't drive or swim in them, but surely they'd have no objection to you placing a flyer in/on them. You and a couple of hundred friends...
If I ran a business, and I paid taxes, and I found out that my taxes were going to something that was directly in competition in my product, I'd oppose it too.
It isn't as if the government is actively funding any efforts whose sole purposes are to compete directly with anyone's products (including Microsoft). The government has not formed a software company to compete with anyone -- the government simply solves problems and provides services. The fact that they can sometimes use GPL'd software in doing this and then release the solution for anyone else -- including Microsfot-- to use is an incidental benefit.
Of course, it's a powerful one, and will have an effect on private entities that provide similar solutions and services. But frankly, if a focused private entity can't compete with an organization which incidentally produces a viable solution all in a days work, they shouldn't be in the market in the first place. That's what all that private enterprise efficiency is for, right?
Incidentally, this is how deregulation ought to work. Want a deregulated utility market? Seperate the service delivery network from the gov't utility provider (in order to make sure competitors have equal access to the delivery network). Then wait for the competitors to come. The day the competitors provide better/cheaper service is the day the gov't entity goes out of business.
The day MS can produce something better than NSA secure linux (hah) is the day that the GPL should cease to matter in gov't funded projects. Until then, restricting folks from using the GPL in such projects is as ridiculous as requiring it.
The fact that any product that the government contributes to could be useful -- competetive, even -- in the same space that a commercial product is shouldn't disqualify it from being used and developed.
Power of the free market, eh?
If you view information as a freely/perfectly flowing commodity, then the ideals of the free market make more sense.
If you look at the reality -- that information has a cost to obtain, and that some parties will place a high value on stopping the flow/use of information, then you begin to see the problem.
It doesn't take much to see, but somehow this doesn't seem to find its way into basic public debates about privitization and free markets as solutions to problems...
Wasn't Bounty Quest supposed to help fix this problem?
What happened?
Anyone know of any countercartels of small businesses organizing to put this stuff to rest?
Where are our lawmakers?
The Religious Right, incredible as it may seem, can be the killer ally of the digital freedom movement, just like Stalin was in WWII.
:)
And when we are done with you, my libertine geek allies, "we will bury you."