Heh. Yeah, but those people have seen the time travelling toaster episode of the simpsons and know it as that, rather than the proper dinosaur hunting story it's supposed to be.
There's a fallacy in imagining a world where a particular person never completed a particular invention. In short, it skips the notion that someone else would have invented it instead.
Yeah, that's why I quit watching "Sliders". After they end up in a universe where all else is exactly the same as ours, except medecine has not been discovered/invented! I think more people need to read "Connections" by James Burke (or at least watch the TV show!) before they start imagining "a world without [X]". Nothing exists on its own. What I think is humorous is that these people are usually also capable of imagining the "Simpsons butterfly effect" as well. So how does that work? Killing a prehistoric butterfly changes EVERYTHING, yet removing Windows from the face of history only makes changes in the immediate vicinity of OS adoption? Pah!
Is it a sign of the incredible good design of TeX that the Adequacy people couldn't find very many real flaws to harp on? Or does Adequacy simply suck ass? I fear it to be the latter
Don't know about the former, but the latter is definitely true. Adequacy.org was self-described as site about "Controversial opinions, passionately held". In reality, it was a annoying loudmouth site full of smug contrarians obsessed with their own superiority. Hard to tell whether the site operators actually believed this, or were doing it as a put on; but in 2002, after only 14 months, they apparently grew tired of it, "froze" it into a static site, and have just left it there for future trolls to mine.
I know it's a wildly unpopular concept with a lot of the tech crowd, but that's the sort of thing that unions were created to prevent. You think EA would be raping it's employees if it's workers were unionized?
Not a fan of unions myself, but history suggests it'll get results.
Unfortunately, history also suggests that the results it'l get will be unemployment. It's ridiculously hard to get people to unionize over small crap like this. Historically, the most successful unionizations happened when there were serious health and safety issues. It's a lot easier to unionize (for example) mine workers and electricians when hundreds of your fellow workers are dying for lack of safety considerations. Unionization over lack of blog freedom is gonna be a really tough sell.
This kind of intellectual property [copyright] has many of the same advantages to society as physical property (an equally artificial concept if you consider it for a moment).
I have to disagree here. Physical property is a remarkably simple concept, and can only be considered atrificial if viewed out of the context of the real world. Property with regard to land is an extension of "territory", a concept even dogs understand. A primary requirement of property is that it be unique-- if you take it from me, I no longer have it. If I stand on it and keep others away, it remains mine. Intangibles like stories, songs, and ideas fail this test. They are neither diminished by sharing, nor defensible once released. Copyright, trademark, and patent law are legal constructs that alloow people to treat things that fundamentally are not property as if they were property.
That's what the cowboys said to the lawmen in the west.
"Whatcha mean we can't shoot people we dont like, force women into prostitution, beat up chinese rail workers within inches of their lives and kill indians at random no more?"
You're missing the point. Felonies are serious crimes, punishable by prison time, loss of voting right, and such. This kid stole the answers to a test. This is not a felony grade crime. I'm not saying he shouldn't be punished, I'm just saying it's asinine to elevate every crime to a felony in some irrational crusade to REALLY punish "evil doers", 'cause charging them with a misdemeanor "just ain't enough!" Christ, why don't we cut his head off and be done with it, eh?
No. Felonies also include identification theft, burglery, computer crimes, etc. Nice use of the hot-button strawman tactic though.
Please not my specific wording:
Felony crimes are supposed to be serious ones,
such as rape, murder, assault with intent to to great bodily harm, grand theft, and the like.
The additional crimes you list are also potentially serious crimes, and nothing I said disputes that. There is no strawman there, as I never misrepresented your position.
I find it interesting that the page of "computer crimes" to which you link describes both felonies and misdemeanors. I'd like you to find, on that page, which crime this child committed that calls for charging him with a felony. Sec 1: he didn't alter damage or destroy a computer, and it's only his first offense; Sec 2: no chance of death, injury, or disruption of government or utilities; Sec 3: Not an attempt to deceive or defraud. Conclusion: no felony
That said, if the state chooses to try him as a minor, that is their perogative, but the assumption that felonies only involve rape or murder and the like is false and the idea that computer crimes should never reach the level of felony is ridiculous
I never said felonies were ONLY rape, murder, etc. I only listed those to emphasize that felonies are serious crimes. Furthermore, I never said that computer crimes shouldn't be felonies either, only that this child's crimes do not warrant felony charges. And you accuse ME of strawman argument?
>>. What the fuck is wrong with people like you?
Perhaps you should ask yourself that question before you go off with misleading statements.
You're the one who thinks a first-time violation which harmed no one should be a felony. I redirect the question back to you.
I think youre wrong, the kid should be charged with a felony for this.
Jesus fucking christ. What the fuck is wrong with people like you? Do you even know the purpose of felony vs. misdemeanor? Felony crimes are supposed to be serious ones, such as rape, murder, assault with intent to to great bodily harm, grand theft, and the like. Installing a keylogger and swiping answers to a math quiz hardly rate time in state prison.
CB's are functionally different than cellphones. Due to the medium, there is a lot more listening than talking back and forth. As you are talking, you do not have to keep an ear (and brain power) out for the other end of the conversation. Talk or listen, but not both at the same time.
Also, truckers are generally professional drivers. Sure, some really suck. But far fewer than the average joes on the road.
Also of note is the fact that truckers have developed TONS of verbal "shorthand" phrases so they spend as little time as possible talking.
The GPL would become worthless as it relies on copyrights in ordeer to work. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License.
Your other points are spot-on, but this one misses the entire point of the GPL. The GPL is meant as a monkey wrench in the copyright system, as a sort of "anti-copyright". If copyright did not exist, there would be no need for the GPL.
A prime example of a military with excellent COMSEC was the Iraqi army, and they did it very simply as well. Instead of using radio, they ran wire and used field telephones for nearly EVERYTHING. When we were deployed for DESERT SHIELD we found the airwaves almost dead. The days of morse code and ciphers are pretty much gone.
Unless those telephones had a built-in encryption system, what stops the lines being tapped? The field telephones in WW1 were regularly tapped by opposing sides - surely that could still haved happened.
In WWI the two sides were usually less than a mile apart. During Desert Shield we were 120 miles away from the CLOSEST units. The ones we actually wanted to listen to were even farther back. This was all right in the beginning, before we even had a significant troop presence. We certainly didn't have the manpower available to send them into the desert to tap phones in the dark. Once we started blasting the bejesus out of them with Mk84's and Mavericks, though, they started to freak out and use radios a little.
FWIW, the entire Inca civilization rose, thrived and fell - without the wheel.
They didn't use the wheel, but they knew of the wheel. Small wheeled toys from the inca period have been found, showing that (despite what our inane 6th Grade "Social Studies" books implied) the incas weren't ignorant of the simple principle of the wheel.
, with the exceptions of those series that came out before fansubbing really existed.
Which would include RoboTech (dubbed),
I don't think Robotech counts as merely "dubbed". Harmony Gold took what was a rather random "giant fighting robots" series with no real cohesive story, and editted it into a trilogy of fairly solid story arcs, which required pretty much tossing out the original dialogue entirely. The original japanese Macross series never seemed to have any continuity other than the same characters reappearing to fight each other.
The real question for me is why the fansubbers (a new word for me, admittedly) rely on this nebulous notion of "tacit approval" to justify their actions, rather than actually asking permission. They must not want to know.
They would never get official permission. Official permission would limit the copyright holder's ability to stop "real piracy", as the distinction would be negligible.
And stop writing// -- that only applied to the Apple// line
Wasn't that specifically the "//c"? I seem to recall the previous ones using square brackets, i.e. "][e".
Re:Talk about backwards compatibility
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
·
· Score: 1
Win16 calls (and I also take that to mean DOS apps, but I could be wrong
You are wrong. "Win16 calls" refers to the API for Windows 3.1*, which was not actually an operating system, but rather a window environment running under DOS. Win16 calls will not be present in Longhorn, but DOS apps will still work. It's entirely possible, in fact, that one will be able to run Win 3.1 under Longhorn, and from there run software that uses Win16 calls.
I have a copy of ADVENTUR.EXE (a port of the good old Collosal Cave adventure) dated 1981 that still works-- that's a couple dozen years there. Really, DOS compatibility will probably never go away.
* The obvious clue there is that it's called Win16
My goodness, it must be a tough life, having to worry about all those people who failed to grasp the distinction between ethnicity and geography --
On the contrary it's a very rewarding life, lording it over my inferiors.
do you stay awake at night wondering whether there are some people who believe that Africa is "that place full of blacks"
No, but there's nothing I love more than sneering at people who automatically call blacks in africa "african-american", or people who think that dutch-descended boers in south africa whose families have lived there for 400 years "aren't really africans", while the descendents of slaves running Liberia are, despite being there under 200 years.
and Switzerland "that place full of pasty yodellers."
This is basic, basic stuff. This is the stuff they teach you *before* they start teaching you the interesting stuff.
It may have a 1990 date on it, but it's 1945-vintage stuff. I suspect it's just the latest reprint of a much older publication.
Yeah, this is the basic crap taught to us after we were learned how to properly label our work CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, or TOP SECRET, but before basic radio theory. Nothin' to see here at all, really.
This document is also 15 years old. Let's think about computing power available 15 years ago. Yes, there were computers more than powerful enough to do handle brute force decryption, not to mention more sophisiticated means. In terms of portability, however, there was nothing. Computing power has become so inexpensive and widespread now that more advanced forms of cryptography have (natrually) replaced the older, hand driven cyphers of old. Let's also think about the types of encryption that were being used back then. The mathematics that it takes to drive many of these algorithms was simply not practical in 1990. This document is serves more as a historical artifact now rather than a practial guide to decrypting like the government.
I can attest that your assertion is exactly right. I was a Signal Intelligence Analyst in the US Army from '87 to '91, and most of what we saw was pretty crude. Remember, the Army doesn't generally intercept diplomatic comm's encrypted with sophisticated devices locked in embassy basements. It's probably more sophisticated now, but back then we mostly got stuff encoded by drafted soldiers and sent via morse code! I was trained in basic cryptanalysis, but most of what we saw was (Soviet) Red Army code table stuff. Morse transmissions would come in as a bunch of 3-digit numbers. The first two digits correspond to the X and Y axes of a 10x10 grid. Each square in the grid would contain 3 to 9 numbered code "snippets", and the 3rd digit of the 3-digit number refers to which. These snippets could be anything-- "weather report", "infantry", "battalion", "heading", a single number, a single letter, etc-- that might make up part of a message. Codes like this are tough to break when used properly, but of course they weren't. Some red army private would send "225 171", and the guy on the other end would say "huh? say again?" because he was holding his code table upsode down or something. They'd go back and forth five or six times before the first guy would just lose his shit and say "GIVE ME A BALLISTIC WEATHER REPORT, YOU STUPID TARD!" and then we'd know that "225 171" meant "REQUEST" and "BWX(ballistic weather report)".
But at about the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, all that started to change. The russkies were gone, and most of the "warsaw pact interoperability" tendency for all their client states disappeared with 'em. A prime example of a military with excellent COMSEC was the Iraqi army, and they did it very simply as well. Instead of using radio, they ran wire and used field telephones for nearly EVERYTHING. When we were deployed for DESERT SHIELD we found the airwaves almost dead. The days of morse code and ciphers are pretty much gone.
I agree. For example, Cemex seems to be the top brand in Latin America. Well, I'm from Argentina and neither I nor anyone I know have ever heard of it.
That's because you have wood in Argentina. In Mexico, wood is outrageously expensive. For years the most popular building materials have been brick and cement block. For the last couple decades, though, Cemex has been pushing cast concrete structures. They do more than just make cement. They also provide loans to contractors to buy the casting equipment, arrange discounts on building materials, and generally act as a one-stop contractor's consultant. Basically, if anything is being built in Mexico, you can bet that Cemex is involved.
Interesting side effect of the scarcity of wood in Mexico is that Mexico City, a city of 25 million or so, has only like three fire trucks, because nothing ever really burns there.
It is a common geographic error, like those who think that Asia only means the Pacific shore at the very eastern edge of the Asian continent.
Nothing like trying to convince someone that yes, Russia really is in asia. I once had to literally point at the kamchatka peninsula on a globe to convince someone this was true. They insisted they were europeans because "the people there are white". It always irks me when people fail to grasp the distinction between ethnicity and geography.
Are you omniscient? How are you to say that the four years 2001-2005 will not be the better years of the current decade?
Any definition my backside.
OK, smartass, any definition of "the better part of a decade" used in conjunction with the past tense, as in "has had [something] for the better part of a decade".
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. Yeah, but those people have seen the time travelling toaster episode of the simpsons and know it as that, rather than the proper dinosaur hunting story it's supposed to be.
Yeah, that's why I quit watching "Sliders". After they end up in a universe where all else is exactly the same as ours, except medecine has not been discovered/invented! I think more people need to read "Connections" by James Burke (or at least watch the TV show!) before they start imagining "a world without [X]". Nothing exists on its own. What I think is humorous is that these people are usually also capable of imagining the "Simpsons butterfly effect" as well. So how does that work? Killing a prehistoric butterfly changes EVERYTHING, yet removing Windows from the face of history only makes changes in the immediate vicinity of OS adoption? Pah!
Don't know about the former, but the latter is definitely true. Adequacy.org was self-described as site about "Controversial opinions, passionately held". In reality, it was a annoying loudmouth site full of smug contrarians obsessed with their own superiority. Hard to tell whether the site operators actually believed this, or were doing it as a put on; but in 2002, after only 14 months, they apparently grew tired of it, "froze" it into a static site, and have just left it there for future trolls to mine.
Unfortunately, history also suggests that the results it'l get will be unemployment. It's ridiculously hard to get people to unionize over small crap like this. Historically, the most successful unionizations happened when there were serious health and safety issues. It's a lot easier to unionize (for example) mine workers and electricians when hundreds of your fellow workers are dying for lack of safety considerations. Unionization over lack of blog freedom is gonna be a really tough sell.
I have to disagree here. Physical property is a remarkably simple concept, and can only be considered atrificial if viewed out of the context of the real world. Property with regard to land is an extension of "territory", a concept even dogs understand. A primary requirement of property is that it be unique-- if you take it from me, I no longer have it. If I stand on it and keep others away, it remains mine. Intangibles like stories, songs, and ideas fail this test. They are neither diminished by sharing, nor defensible once released. Copyright, trademark, and patent law are legal constructs that alloow people to treat things that fundamentally are not property as if they were property.
That's what the cowboys said to the lawmen in the west.
"Whatcha mean we can't shoot people we dont like, force women into prostitution, beat up chinese rail workers within inches of their lives and kill indians at random no more?"
You're missing the point. Felonies are serious crimes, punishable by prison time, loss of voting right, and such. This kid stole the answers to a test. This is not a felony grade crime. I'm not saying he shouldn't be punished, I'm just saying it's asinine to elevate every crime to a felony in some irrational crusade to REALLY punish "evil doers", 'cause charging them with a misdemeanor "just ain't enough!" Christ, why don't we cut his head off and be done with it, eh?
No. Felonies also include identification theft, burglery, computer crimes, etc. Nice use of the hot-button strawman tactic though.
Please not my specific wording:
The additional crimes you list are also potentially serious crimes, and nothing I said disputes that. There is no strawman there, as I never misrepresented your position.I find it interesting that the page of "computer crimes" to which you link describes both felonies and misdemeanors. I'd like you to find, on that page, which crime this child committed that calls for charging him with a felony. Sec 1: he didn't alter damage or destroy a computer, and it's only his first offense; Sec 2: no chance of death, injury, or disruption of government or utilities; Sec 3: Not an attempt to deceive or defraud. Conclusion: no felony
That said, if the state chooses to try him as a minor, that is their perogative, but the assumption that felonies only involve rape or murder and the like is false and the idea that computer crimes should never reach the level of felony is ridiculous
I never said felonies were ONLY rape, murder, etc. I only listed those to emphasize that felonies are serious crimes. Furthermore, I never said that computer crimes shouldn't be felonies either, only that this child's crimes do not warrant felony charges. And you accuse ME of strawman argument?
>>. What the fuck is wrong with people like you?
Perhaps you should ask yourself that question before you go off with misleading statements.
You're the one who thinks a first-time violation which harmed no one should be a felony. I redirect the question back to you.
Jesus fucking christ. What the fuck is wrong with people like you? Do you even know the purpose of felony vs. misdemeanor? Felony crimes are supposed to be serious ones, such as rape, murder, assault with intent to to great bodily harm, grand theft, and the like. Installing a keylogger and swiping answers to a math quiz hardly rate time in state prison.
Also of note is the fact that truckers have developed TONS of verbal "shorthand" phrases so they spend as little time as possible talking.
Clearly not. The only elderly drivers I've met who were a danger on the road were in their 80's and 90's. Must be some kid who think 50 is "old".
Your other points are spot-on, but this one misses the entire point of the GPL. The GPL is meant as a monkey wrench in the copyright system, as a sort of "anti-copyright". If copyright did not exist, there would be no need for the GPL.
Unless those telephones had a built-in encryption system, what stops the lines being tapped? The field telephones in WW1 were regularly tapped by opposing sides - surely that could still haved happened.
In WWI the two sides were usually less than a mile apart. During Desert Shield we were 120 miles away from the CLOSEST units. The ones we actually wanted to listen to were even farther back. This was all right in the beginning, before we even had a significant troop presence. We certainly didn't have the manpower available to send them into the desert to tap phones in the dark. Once we started blasting the bejesus out of them with Mk84's and Mavericks, though, they started to freak out and use radios a little.
They didn't use the wheel, but they knew of the wheel. Small wheeled toys from the inca period have been found, showing that (despite what our inane 6th Grade "Social Studies" books implied) the incas weren't ignorant of the simple principle of the wheel.
Ah, that's right. I had a ][+ and later a //e. I must've been remembering the ][+.
Which would include RoboTech (dubbed),
I don't think Robotech counts as merely "dubbed". Harmony Gold took what was a rather random "giant fighting robots" series with no real cohesive story, and editted it into a trilogy of fairly solid story arcs, which required pretty much tossing out the original dialogue entirely. The original japanese Macross series never seemed to have any continuity other than the same characters reappearing to fight each other.
They would never get official permission. Official permission would limit the copyright holder's ability to stop "real piracy", as the distinction would be negligible.
Wasn't that specifically the "//c"? I seem to recall the previous ones using square brackets, i.e. "][e".
You are wrong. "Win16 calls" refers to the API for Windows 3.1*, which was not actually an operating system, but rather a window environment running under DOS. Win16 calls will not be present in Longhorn, but DOS apps will still work. It's entirely possible, in fact, that one will be able to run Win 3.1 under Longhorn, and from there run software that uses Win16 calls.
I have a copy of ADVENTUR.EXE (a port of the good old Collosal Cave adventure) dated 1981 that still works-- that's a couple dozen years there. Really, DOS compatibility will probably never go away.
* The obvious clue there is that it's called Win16
On the contrary it's a very rewarding life, lording it over my inferiors.
do you stay awake at night wondering whether there are some people who believe that Africa is "that place full of blacks"
No, but there's nothing I love more than sneering at people who automatically call blacks in africa "african-american", or people who think that dutch-descended boers in south africa whose families have lived there for 400 years "aren't really africans", while the descendents of slaves running Liberia are, despite being there under 200 years.
and Switzerland "that place full of pasty yodellers."
that's CHEESE EATING pasty yodelers.
Yeah, this is the basic crap taught to us after we were learned how to properly label our work CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, or TOP SECRET, but before basic radio theory. Nothin' to see here at all, really.
No, the people in the army expected to read this usually maxed out the ASVAB.
I can attest that your assertion is exactly right. I was a Signal Intelligence Analyst in the US Army from '87 to '91, and most of what we saw was pretty crude. Remember, the Army doesn't generally intercept diplomatic comm's encrypted with sophisticated devices locked in embassy basements. It's probably more sophisticated now, but back then we mostly got stuff encoded by drafted soldiers and sent via morse code! I was trained in basic cryptanalysis, but most of what we saw was (Soviet) Red Army code table stuff. Morse transmissions would come in as a bunch of 3-digit numbers. The first two digits correspond to the X and Y axes of a 10x10 grid. Each square in the grid would contain 3 to 9 numbered code "snippets", and the 3rd digit of the 3-digit number refers to which. These snippets could be anything-- "weather report", "infantry", "battalion", "heading", a single number, a single letter, etc-- that might make up part of a message. Codes like this are tough to break when used properly, but of course they weren't. Some red army private would send "225 171", and the guy on the other end would say "huh? say again?" because he was holding his code table upsode down or something. They'd go back and forth five or six times before the first guy would just lose his shit and say "GIVE ME A BALLISTIC WEATHER REPORT, YOU STUPID TARD!" and then we'd know that "225 171" meant "REQUEST" and "BWX(ballistic weather report)".
But at about the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, all that started to change. The russkies were gone, and most of the "warsaw pact interoperability" tendency for all their client states disappeared with 'em. A prime example of a military with excellent COMSEC was the Iraqi army, and they did it very simply as well. Instead of using radio, they ran wire and used field telephones for nearly EVERYTHING. When we were deployed for DESERT SHIELD we found the airwaves almost dead. The days of morse code and ciphers are pretty much gone.
That's because you have wood in Argentina. In Mexico, wood is outrageously expensive. For years the most popular building materials have been brick and cement block. For the last couple decades, though, Cemex has been pushing cast concrete structures. They do more than just make cement. They also provide loans to contractors to buy the casting equipment, arrange discounts on building materials, and generally act as a one-stop contractor's consultant. Basically, if anything is being built in Mexico, you can bet that Cemex is involved.
Interesting side effect of the scarcity of wood in Mexico is that Mexico City, a city of 25 million or so, has only like three fire trucks, because nothing ever really burns there.
Nothing like trying to convince someone that yes, Russia really is in asia. I once had to literally point at the kamchatka peninsula on a globe to convince someone this was true. They insisted they were europeans because "the people there are white". It always irks me when people fail to grasp the distinction between ethnicity and geography.
OK, smartass, any definition of "the better part of a decade" used in conjunction with the past tense, as in "has had [something] for the better part of a decade".