I can think all day about how the electrical in my house works, and understand the theory behind it. But can I wire my house so that everything works, and I don't burn it down? Maybe, but it is in my interest to have an electrician look at it to make sure. Not necessarily an electrical engineer.
My father is an electrical engineer, and I am (among other things) a licensed electrician. The stories my mother has about him trying to do his own electrical work are hilarious ("how hard can it be? It's a simple AC circuit!")
Isn't part of the reason we have a space station to learn how to fix stuff when it breaks?
No, the purpose of the ISS is to justify the stupid space shuttle, and by extension, a directionless NASA seeking to maintain its budget. Once the Air Force gave up on using the shuttle to launch satellites and switched to disposable Deltas, they suddenly had no real purpose in life. The ISS has been a "placeholder" program to suck up budget until NASA could convince someone to pay them to do something interesting. Seriously, what have they really done with the ISS? Solicit high school students to suggest experiments so they have something to do?
Going by memory, but I recall reading something from an early music copyright case that was something along the lines of "if 15 percent of the notes match" it's infringing...
I can't seem to find any on google of it though...
So don't copy songs if you cannot afford the damages. Copying songs is not necessary to one's life.
That's a separate issue. Even if nobody ever violated this law, the damages allowable under the law are still utterly ridiculous. Bad law is bad law, and bad law needs to be changed.
I see the disbelief climate-change deniers as being similar to 19th century disbelief that it was impossible for species to go extinct. They all had scientific rationales as to why it simply couldn't happen
I think you mean pre-19th century, and the scientific rationales amounted essentially to "we can't know for sure they're all gone until the entire world is explored", coupled with a lingering belief that God would not allow any of his creatures to go extinct. Acceptance of the fact of extinction had little to do with the Dodo, but rather was an outgrowth of the rise of modern science in the late 18th century and the concomitant decline in religion as an authority on the nature of reality.
In other words, it's not even remotely the same thing. The extinction thing was part of a vast historical "sea change", and the climate change thing is just a bunch of bickering over the accuracy of collected data and computer models.
Quit it with the failed car analogies already. The car would've shown up as stolen when you tried to register it. You wouldn't have even gotten to the dealership before you had the government involved trying to nail down the title.
If public transportation were ubiquitous, hey, no problem. But it's not. Municipalities run it "as a business" rather than admitting it's a service, a public utility, and admitting that hey, we need to put in enough tax money to make it cover enough areas.
My boss drives 75 miles each way to and from work five days a week. When gas was topping $4.50 a gallon he looked into taking the commuter train in. Our shop is 2 miles from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, and he lives in Lancaster, only a few miles from a Metrolink station. Turns out, even at $4.60 a gallon, the fuel cost for his 40mpg Kia Rio cost FIFTY BUCKS LESS than what a Metrolink monthly pass cost.
Then there was my mom's boyfriend. He lives in Simi valley and works at the naval base at Pt Mugu. Seemed like a no-brainer to take the Metrolink to work. The Metrolink line goes from Pt. Mugu through Simi and into downtown LA and back every day.... but it only runs passengers into the city in the morning--- the trains that run back don't run back all the way!
"kewl", and other such members of the larger "'leet speak" family, predate the publicly available internet by at least a decade. "kewl" was in use on BBS's and dialup chat back when 1200bps was considered fast.
It is important to remember that your first experience of something is highly unlikely to be novel, even if you spontaneously generated it yourself. This is particularly true if you are under 30 years old.
By the time she made this decision to write a parser for English, there were plenty of people who could have told her it was a bad idea.
Trouble is, there were also approximately the same number of people who thought it'd be the best thing ever. The entire idea behind "english" based languages is that they'd supposedly be simple to teach to non-engineers. The aim with COBOL was not to make the life of highly technically literate software engineers easier, it was to enable ordinary business analysts and accountants to become software engineers.
As it turns out, this notion was entirely too optimistic. Business analysts and accountants aren't generally capable of writing their own applications because they don't have an adequate education and/or talent for understanding the basic logic of how computers follow instructions, not because the symbology was unfamiliar. People pick up symbology pretty easily--- it's the syntax that they have trouble grokking--- but this was not readily apparent in a time when the number of computer programmers in the US could conceivably all attend a convention and be seated in a single hall.
COBOL was just an early and misguided attempt to bring computation to the "regular people". It simply turned out to be cheaper and easier to teach programmers business processes than to teach business process folks programming.
Color depth is not the main point. Color depth is merely a yardstick by which to measure the age (and by extension the craptasticness) of the display. You ever tried to get any work done on a 20 year old 14-inch EGA monitor?
Or he's familiar with the way the teacher's union operates in California. They have effectively created the classic union employment situation where the only way to get fired is to do drugs at school or molest a child. I work for the largest school district in california. I am quite familiar with this.
My solution is a KVM switch and two boxes with different OSs.
I tried that for a while, but the nature of a KVM setup requires too much "mental page buffering". Since Vista blows XP out of the water when it comes to searching and sorting files, I do most of my embedded developing there. The compiler/loader apps for some of the controllers I develop for are XP only though. VMware solves the integration nicely, putting an XP machine at my disposal in a window on the Vista desktop. I also have an Ubuntu install on a VM, with access to the parent Vista install, so I can do real grep and such. I really ought to be running vista and XP under VMware installed on Linux, but that'd be too much work.
An instance of a VMware machine with XP installed on it. If you have even a year old dual core box it'll still be stupidly fast. If you don't have a computer that good, go buy a new computer, you cheapskate.
It took a professional typist about 10 minutes to bang out a professional letter.
Why is this an example of advancement? Technology hasn't changed that. What's changed is that the "typist" can now send it to a recipient halfway around the world instantly, or print 100 copies in minutes. The typist still has to bang out the letter on a keyboard, same as always.
A lifetime is generally unfair to a lot of authors - if the old dude wrote his greatest work only days, months, or two or three years before croaking, he and his estate make very little.
You don't seem to understand why we have copyright law. The purpose of copyright isn't to enrich the creator and his heirs, it's to encourage the creator to create more. If he dies, that's over. If the heirs want to get rich on creations, let them write their own shit. And don't bother with the "pass on the family business" thing, because if a plumber wants to pass his business on to his son, he better teach him plumbing.
The usual rule of thumb is that a film needs to make 2.5-3 times it's budget before it's profitable
I've heard that multiplier bandied about before, and frankly, it's a load of crap. The cost of making a movie has fuck-all to do with the cost of distributing and showing it. It costs the same amount to truck around 150 prints of a $25M movie as it does a $100M movie. The monkey in the projection booth gets paid the same hourly wage to rewind the reels after the $25M movie as he does the $100M movie. About the only thing that scales with production cost is the promotion budget, and that only scales marginally, and only a fool spends more on the advertising than on the production. The truth of the matter is that the investors who put up the front money are a bunch of greedy fucks who play 3 card monte with the money until it looks like they've mnade almost nothing... yet they still drive $100K Lexuses and live in Bel Air.
How about this then? A friend of mine worked for Disney and created a background mural for a ride at Disneyworld. The work was licensed to Disney solely for use as part of the ride. A couple years later, this same friend attended a Disney on Ice show, and what do you know, there was his background artwork. In the ice show. In violation of the license. He complained and Disney basically stonewalled him for a year, claiming variously "it's not your artwork", "it's allowed under the contract we signed", and other such bullshit. Eventually, they renegotiated a new contract for a lot more money. His agent said Disney pulls this crap all the fucking time, and most of the time artists don't find out until after the fact and don't have a live show to hold hostage, so they get stonewalled forever. They're a bunch of prick theives, stealing from everyone else, and whining about piracy at the same time. Fuck 'em.
In '95 Biden introduced a "Counterterrorism Bill" in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing that was essentially the same thing as the Patriot Act. He even said, when the DOJ introduced the Patriot Act, "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill".
It's simple to install. Adding applications is easy. Updating is easy. Seriously, what's not to like?
All my servers run linux, but I've been windows-on-the-laptop forever. When I bought my new laptop, I decided that I'd try Linux, and that I'd give it 6 full weeks before making any decision. I had to switch back to windows after 6 weeks. In the end, it wasn't any major drawbacks, but rather a sort of "death by 1000 cuts" laundry list of mildly infuriating things--- nVidia drivers that Ctrl-Alt-F1 to a black screen rather than letting you see a command prompt in character mode; mouse sensitivity/acceleration limits too low; double tap/double click detection erratic; terrible IM clients; support for user-defined hotkeys is crude and inflexible; flash objects in firefox intermittently fail to render in foreground; and any other little things that devs haven't gotten around to fixing, or think aren't broken. I could fix them myself, but I just don't have the kind of time necessary to climb the learning curve of a dozen different projects. The Linux GUI just isn't there yet. I love the command line, and hate to lose the convenience of the rational file system, but the little annoyances drove me nuts.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think all day about how the electrical in my house works, and understand the theory behind it. But can I wire my house so that everything works, and I don't burn it down? Maybe, but it is in my interest to have an electrician look at it to make sure. Not necessarily an electrical engineer.
My father is an electrical engineer, and I am (among other things) a licensed electrician. The stories my mother has about him trying to do his own electrical work are hilarious ("how hard can it be? It's a simple AC circuit!")
Isn't part of the reason we have a space station to learn how to fix stuff when it breaks?
No, the purpose of the ISS is to justify the stupid space shuttle, and by extension, a directionless NASA seeking to maintain its budget. Once the Air Force gave up on using the shuttle to launch satellites and switched to disposable Deltas, they suddenly had no real purpose in life. The ISS has been a "placeholder" program to suck up budget until NASA could convince someone to pay them to do something interesting. Seriously, what have they really done with the ISS? Solicit high school students to suggest experiments so they have something to do?
Going by memory, but I recall reading something from an early music copyright case that was something along the lines of "if 15 percent of the notes match" it's infringing...
I can't seem to find any on google of it though...
So don't copy songs if you cannot afford the damages. Copying songs is not necessary to one's life.
That's a separate issue. Even if nobody ever violated this law, the damages allowable under the law are still utterly ridiculous. Bad law is bad law, and bad law needs to be changed.
I see the disbelief climate-change deniers as being similar to 19th century disbelief that it was impossible for species to go extinct. They all had scientific rationales as to why it simply couldn't happen
I think you mean pre-19th century, and the scientific rationales amounted essentially to "we can't know for sure they're all gone until the entire world is explored", coupled with a lingering belief that God would not allow any of his creatures to go extinct. Acceptance of the fact of extinction had little to do with the Dodo, but rather was an outgrowth of the rise of modern science in the late 18th century and the concomitant decline in religion as an authority on the nature of reality.
In other words, it's not even remotely the same thing. The extinction thing was part of a vast historical "sea change", and the climate change thing is just a bunch of bickering over the accuracy of collected data and computer models.
Quit it with the failed car analogies already. The car would've shown up as stolen when you tried to register it. You wouldn't have even gotten to the dealership before you had the government involved trying to nail down the title.
The writers once again demonstrated that they're childish and stupid.
That's because it's JJ Abrams and his two dimwit pals Orci and Kurtzman, the same brain trust that has given us Fringe.
brilliant counter analysis!
i mod you up a milion time with all my sock puppets!
If public transportation were ubiquitous, hey, no problem. But it's not. Municipalities run it "as a business" rather than admitting it's a service, a public utility, and admitting that hey, we need to put in enough tax money to make it cover enough areas.
My boss drives 75 miles each way to and from work five days a week. When gas was topping $4.50 a gallon he looked into taking the commuter train in. Our shop is 2 miles from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, and he lives in Lancaster, only a few miles from a Metrolink station. Turns out, even at $4.60 a gallon, the fuel cost for his 40mpg Kia Rio cost FIFTY BUCKS LESS than what a Metrolink monthly pass cost.
Then there was my mom's boyfriend. He lives in Simi valley and works at the naval base at Pt Mugu. Seemed like a no-brainer to take the Metrolink to work. The Metrolink line goes from Pt. Mugu through Simi and into downtown LA and back every day.... but it only runs passengers into the city in the morning--- the trains that run back don't run back all the way!
"kewl", and other such members of the larger "'leet speak" family, predate the publicly available internet by at least a decade. "kewl" was in use on BBS's and dialup chat back when 1200bps was considered fast.
It is important to remember that your first experience of something is highly unlikely to be novel, even if you spontaneously generated it yourself. This is particularly true if you are under 30 years old.
By the time she made this decision to write a parser for English, there were plenty of people who could have told her it was a bad idea.
Trouble is, there were also approximately the same number of people who thought it'd be the best thing ever. The entire idea behind "english" based languages is that they'd supposedly be simple to teach to non-engineers. The aim with COBOL was not to make the life of highly technically literate software engineers easier, it was to enable ordinary business analysts and accountants to become software engineers.
As it turns out, this notion was entirely too optimistic. Business analysts and accountants aren't generally capable of writing their own applications because they don't have an adequate education and/or talent for understanding the basic logic of how computers follow instructions, not because the symbology was unfamiliar. People pick up symbology pretty easily--- it's the syntax that they have trouble grokking--- but this was not readily apparent in a time when the number of computer programmers in the US could conceivably all attend a convention and be seated in a single hall.
COBOL was just an early and misguided attempt to bring computation to the "regular people". It simply turned out to be cheaper and easier to teach programmers business processes than to teach business process folks programming.
Color depth is not the main point. Color depth is merely a yardstick by which to measure the age (and by extension the craptasticness) of the display. You ever tried to get any work done on a 20 year old 14-inch EGA monitor?
Or he's familiar with the way the teacher's union operates in California. They have effectively created the classic union employment situation where the only way to get fired is to do drugs at school or molest a child. I work for the largest school district in california. I am quite familiar with this.
My solution is a KVM switch and two boxes with different OSs.
I tried that for a while, but the nature of a KVM setup requires too much "mental page buffering". Since Vista blows XP out of the water when it comes to searching and sorting files, I do most of my embedded developing there. The compiler/loader apps for some of the controllers I develop for are XP only though. VMware solves the integration nicely, putting an XP machine at my disposal in a window on the Vista desktop. I also have an Ubuntu install on a VM, with access to the parent Vista install, so I can do real grep and such. I really ought to be running vista and XP under VMware installed on Linux, but that'd be too much work.
Then what is for games?
An instance of a VMware machine with XP installed on it. If you have even a year old dual core box it'll still be stupidly fast. If you don't have a computer that good, go buy a new computer, you cheapskate.
It took a professional typist about 10 minutes to bang out a professional letter.
Why is this an example of advancement? Technology hasn't changed that. What's changed is that the "typist" can now send it to a recipient halfway around the world instantly, or print 100 copies in minutes. The typist still has to bang out the letter on a keyboard, same as always.
here's a nickel. buy yourself an actual joke so we can use these senses of humor.
A lifetime is generally unfair to a lot of authors - if the old dude wrote his greatest work only days, months, or two or three years before croaking, he and his estate make very little.
You don't seem to understand why we have copyright law. The purpose of copyright isn't to enrich the creator and his heirs, it's to encourage the creator to create more. If he dies, that's over. If the heirs want to get rich on creations, let them write their own shit. And don't bother with the "pass on the family business" thing, because if a plumber wants to pass his business on to his son, he better teach him plumbing.
what? people might mod down a snide strawman that contributes nothing to the discussion? Let me try!
"No, strangling a composer with a piano roll is not fair use"
wow this is fun!
The usual rule of thumb is that a film needs to make 2.5-3 times it's budget before it's profitable
I've heard that multiplier bandied about before, and frankly, it's a load of crap. The cost of making a movie has fuck-all to do with the cost of distributing and showing it. It costs the same amount to truck around 150 prints of a $25M movie as it does a $100M movie. The monkey in the projection booth gets paid the same hourly wage to rewind the reels after the $25M movie as he does the $100M movie. About the only thing that scales with production cost is the promotion budget, and that only scales marginally, and only a fool spends more on the advertising than on the production. The truth of the matter is that the investors who put up the front money are a bunch of greedy fucks who play 3 card monte with the money until it looks like they've mnade almost nothing... yet they still drive $100K Lexuses and live in Bel Air.
How about this then? A friend of mine worked for Disney and created a background mural for a ride at Disneyworld. The work was licensed to Disney solely for use as part of the ride. A couple years later, this same friend attended a Disney on Ice show, and what do you know, there was his background artwork. In the ice show. In violation of the license. He complained and Disney basically stonewalled him for a year, claiming variously "it's not your artwork", "it's allowed under the contract we signed", and other such bullshit. Eventually, they renegotiated a new contract for a lot more money. His agent said Disney pulls this crap all the fucking time, and most of the time artists don't find out until after the fact and don't have a live show to hold hostage, so they get stonewalled forever. They're a bunch of prick theives, stealing from everyone else, and whining about piracy at the same time. Fuck 'em.
In '95 Biden introduced a "Counterterrorism Bill" in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing that was essentially the same thing as the Patriot Act. He even said, when the DOJ introduced the Patriot Act, "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill".
It's simple to install. Adding applications is easy. Updating is easy. Seriously, what's not to like?
All my servers run linux, but I've been windows-on-the-laptop forever. When I bought my new laptop, I decided that I'd try Linux, and that I'd give it 6 full weeks before making any decision. I had to switch back to windows after 6 weeks. In the end, it wasn't any major drawbacks, but rather a sort of "death by 1000 cuts" laundry list of mildly infuriating things--- nVidia drivers that Ctrl-Alt-F1 to a black screen rather than letting you see a command prompt in character mode; mouse sensitivity/acceleration limits too low; double tap/double click detection erratic; terrible IM clients; support for user-defined hotkeys is crude and inflexible; flash objects in firefox intermittently fail to render in foreground; and any other little things that devs haven't gotten around to fixing, or think aren't broken. I could fix them myself, but I just don't have the kind of time necessary to climb the learning curve of a dozen different projects. The Linux GUI just isn't there yet. I love the command line, and hate to lose the convenience of the rational file system, but the little annoyances drove me nuts.
it's not "quite prone" to breaking though. most people go through life without appendicitis.