And yet, strangely, the fact remains that you were (hypothetically) breaking the law. When did it become acceptable to only follow the rules if you're in danger of getting caught? *groan* Personal responsibility is dead.
You can be written a ticket for driving the speed limit (say, 65mph) in the left lane when the speed of traffic is 85mph. Driving in traffic, like much of life, requires rational adaptation rather than slavish adherence to the letter of the law. Sometimes it's more important to be safe than to obey the law.
What are you talking about? Software doesn't wear out. There are programs running in the insurance industry that were written 30+ years ago. And funny you should mention, but there are odd little niche markets where people DO still use TurboPascal for MSDOS. I know of at least two software products written in Pascal, designed to run on MSDOS platforms, which are still being maintained and updated by the original creators-- in Pascal for MSDOS. One of them even complained to me about having trouble finding a modern computer that would work with his old TurboPascal.
Anyway, you're missing the entire point of the argument. The fact that people upgrade is, as stated in the article, because the industry requires constant innovation to sell new products. They don't need patents to stimulate innovation, as innovation is an integral part of the business model-- because the product doesn't wear out and require replacement. The reason most people don't still use TurboPascal for DOS is because better products came along. If neither the hardware nor the software ever got any better, you can bet your ass people would still be using their same old copy of TurboPascal for DOS rather than buying a new copy of TurboPascal for DOS becuase the old one would never fucking wear out.
We did? Who's "we"? The US stopped in 1996, but China is still cranking out tons of the stuff, and doesn't plan to have it phased out for TEN MORE YEARS. Furthermore, it's not the production of CFC's that release them into the atmosphere-- it's the venting of it from leaks in CFC-using equipment . It'll take at LEAST 10 years before we see a significant reduction in CFC venting due to equipment replacement.
Why can't we 'reseed' the ozone layer? We can make ozone in a lab, so why don't we get some high flying aircraft and strap some ozone filled bottles to the fuselage and start spraying? It'd be like dusting crops only a lot different.
Ozone (O3) is basically created when UV light hits O2 molecules. When there's less ozone to block the UV rays, it stands to reason that more ozone would be created because more UV radiation is getting down to the level where the atmospher contains more O2. Even those that believe the hole is caused by human activity don't describe it as a problem caused by lack of ozone production; rather, it's theorized that atmospheric chlorine is breaking the ozone down faster than the UV + O2 interaction can replace it. Suggesting we "spray ozone" completely fails to appreciate the scale at which this is happening. We're talking BILLIONS OF TONS of ozone. It's like suggesting that we fight a 100,000 acre wind-driven wildfire with bucket brigades and garden hoses.
How can this be possible. In recent years, if anything our environment has gotten worse. How could the ozone possible be healing itself?
Because ozone is created by the interaction of O2 and UV radiation. It's not some finite mass of rare elements. It's O3. The reason it's "coming back" is that human activity has a negligible effect upon it. The "hole" is a cyclical phenomenon more closely related to solar activity than anything else.
Oh, its the same thing in the US- Dasani is probably NYC tap water.
However ANY other tap water is vastly superior to Washington DC tap water, which will KILL YOU (between harmful levels of bacteria, to all the lead in the water). Even my tap water in Montgomery County, Maryland (right outside of DC) is so chlorinated that it smells like a swimming pool.
Even if they add a few impurities here or there, it sure beats DC's water!
If it has nothing else, NYC has absolutely GREAT water. It's bizarre. Probably because it's mostly groundwater from watersheds to the north, rather than, say, mostly well water like in texas, laden with yummy petroleum (it's in the ground-- you can't get away from it).
Sure it takes more energy to farm running a combine, but it only takes a couple of people to work an enormous field, feeding not only themselves but a good sized town as well. There's more to efficiency than just caloric input.
Absolutely! Nothing gets my goat more than some knob prattling about the number of calories worth of diesel fuel it takes to plow a field that yields X calories of food, and how it was "more efficient" 100 years ago-- as if the 30 man-hours spent cajoling an ox pulling a plow trade equally with the 3 hours spent driving an air-conditioned tractor over the same sized plot.
Specifically, the UCMJ prevents political activity while in uniform.
Maybe someone should have told that to the delegates to the RNC. Three % were active duty personnel.
They weren't on duty. The UCMJ prohibition is meant to bar folks from standing up in front of formations of [soldiers|sailors|airmen|marines] and exhorting them to support or oppose a particular political viewpoint. Serving as a delegate to a political party on your own time is perfectly acceptable.
To everyone who is using 9/11 as some kind of emotional excuse I say, "Fuck you!"
Unless you were actually there or lost someone close please shut the fuck up about it scarring you mentally or some bullshit like that. I lost friends and co-workers and damn near fucking died.
Your 9/11 experience is not the baseline against which all other 9/11 experiences are measured. The severity of your trauma does not render trivial the experiences of those who suffered less than you. You are not the center of the universe.
I don't know--I thought the problem with most of the dotcoms was that they didn't have other departments/projects to feed the loss leader.
Yep. They started companies to (say) sell pies online, and in order to generate interest and find out what pies people liked, they'd give away free pies. When they finally start charging for pies because they needed to make money, they found out that the kind of pies people liked were the free ones, rather than the ones they had to pay (too much) money for. Hell of an expensive lesson, but we saw a LOT of people learn it!
Sounds to me like the big things people are looking for here are all iMac features.
The iMac is quiet, but it's a "turnkey" system without any serious expandability. I have three network cards, a Hauppage vid cap card, and three monitors. The iMac is not suitable for these things. The LCD iMac is further unsuitable for anyone who requires accurate color representation.
Can't we go to just ONE other planet without scattering our garbage about willy-nilly?!?!
Why should we? What possible reason is there to keep every damn thing in the universe in pristine, untouched condition? Besides, it's not like we're going to Mars and throwing a McDonald's bag out the window, scattering burger wrappers and half-eaten McNuggets all over the Martian surface. These are spacecraft components that, first chance we get, will probably be brought back to Earth and examined.
wind turbine farms are not a suitable 1:1 replacement for nuclear (or even gas or coal fired) power plants. They require wind and, unlike a nuclear reactor, the wind cannot be throttled up in response to higher demand. Wind power is a good idea, but it's really best as a supplemental power system.
Why can't they use some of their fancy GPS-guided ICBMs to deliver the nuclear waste into the heart of volcanos in remote sites for disposal?
A few million metric tons of lava will disperse the waste readily, intermixing it with the earth's magma. and like the parent poster said, the stuff is already radioactive.
Find me a volcano that sucks in molten rock and it might work. As I understand it, though, volcanos only spew out. Trying to shoot radioactive waste down a volcano to the earth's core is like trying to dispose of waste water by pouring it into a garden hose while the hose is turned on. Just doesn't work.
The Brits, however, don't seem to have a problem with thousand-year (or more) leases. Look at the real estate market in Chelsea and everyone is selling (or re-assigning, I guess) 999 year leases. Don't know what purpose that serves; maybe someone has to technically own the whole lot of 'em to claim some title of nobility (Earl of Chelsea?). But then I don't know what purpose a title of nobility serves, either.
As I understand it, the whole "999 year lease" kinda stuff is, as you indicated, a leftover from the ol' monarchy. Technically, the land is owned by the lord, but the terms of the leases are such that buying the lease is the same as owning it in all but name. They have no problem with it because it's just a convenient legal fiction that allows, for example, the Queen of England to own a large percentage of London, while at the same time the properties are almost entirely under the control of private entities.
The status of the machine can be monitored by another machine which can shout 'crap' if the first one does not reboot.
"Quo custodiet ipsos custodies" - who watches the watchman? Adding another machine to watch the first machine for what is already only a temporary kludge is adding too much unnecessary complexity. They just need to send the $10/hr intern down there to restart it every Wednsday morning until the bug is fixed.
Actually, it wouldn't be very hard to have the reboot process send out a useful message which, on its receipt at the appropriate time, would prevent the vocalization of "crap! crap! crap!" by another system. And, as such, a failure to reboot would draw the appropriate crap cries in a similar time-frame as a human rebooter could reasonably issue such fearful announcements.
But implementing such a system would probably require as much work as fixing the apparent micro-second rollover bug. The reboot is only a kludge until the bug is fixed.
Are you kidding? That's the top kind of boss. You just wait two weeks until something shits itself, then show up and offer to fix everything again and work as a fulltime IT consultant at twice the rate.
Nothing hardly ever shits itself enough to affect him. It just decays gently and makes the lives of the admin staff more difficult. At any rate, they eventually convinced his replacement (and then only after his computer finally had trouble) to hire a student part time to take care of IT needs (inadequate solution, but better than nothing).
If that doesn't work, you just discuss the situation with his boss.
Heh. It's in academia. His boss is the University of California Regents Office. They'd just as soon see his entire department die entirely, but can't kill it for various convoluted political reasons.
You might say that a reboot introduces a level of risk which, combined with the risk of a monitoring system failure is to high for such a system. In which case, implement a system which doesn't need rebooted. If the system is so important, it's important enough to be stable!
Well yeah, that's the real crux of the matter now isn't it. Since the manual reboot is only a temporary kludge intended to work around a bug that's (presumably) being fixed, the atypical activity of restarting should be attended by a human. I would assume that the uptime monitoring system was not designed to account for this reboot, but was designed to handle other incidents and as such would require no further attendance.
You design this sort of system _expecting_ that a reboot or two will be missed. Okay.. blame the tech if he didn't follow procedure.. but what if the reboot didn't happen because the tech's wife was in labor or if his kid got hit by a truck? You design systems thinking of the _worst_ case scenario.
You don't run a fucking air traffic control system with a "one truck" vulnerability.
Exactly. If you find a bug that requires a restart before a 49.7 day timer runs out, you are indeed an idiot if you decide a restart once a month is good enough. At the very least I'd have tech down there on the 1st and 15th of the month, so they'd have to miss three scheduled restarts to cause this problem. Better yet, have two guys there every damn Wednsday at noon. If they both miss seven Wednsdays in a row, well, you got bigger problems than bad software. Whoever decided once a month was adequate needs to have his head handed to him.
Hey, I submitted this two days ago. What makes it slashdot worthy now?
You probably failed to include the requisite Windows bashing, this time appearing in the form of unfounded speculation that it's a repeat of the Win95 bug.
Slashdot Mirror
You can be written a ticket for driving the speed limit (say, 65mph) in the left lane when the speed of traffic is 85mph. Driving in traffic, like much of life, requires rational adaptation rather than slavish adherence to the letter of the law. Sometimes it's more important to be safe than to obey the law.
What are you talking about? Software doesn't wear out. There are programs running in the insurance industry that were written 30+ years ago. And funny you should mention, but there are odd little niche markets where people DO still use TurboPascal for MSDOS. I know of at least two software products written in Pascal, designed to run on MSDOS platforms, which are still being maintained and updated by the original creators-- in Pascal for MSDOS. One of them even complained to me about having trouble finding a modern computer that would work with his old TurboPascal.
Anyway, you're missing the entire point of the argument. The fact that people upgrade is, as stated in the article, because the industry requires constant innovation to sell new products. They don't need patents to stimulate innovation, as innovation is an integral part of the business model-- because the product doesn't wear out and require replacement. The reason most people don't still use TurboPascal for DOS is because better products came along. If neither the hardware nor the software ever got any better, you can bet your ass people would still be using their same old copy of TurboPascal for DOS rather than buying a new copy of TurboPascal for DOS becuase the old one would never fucking wear out.
We did? Who's "we"? The US stopped in 1996, but China is still cranking out tons of the stuff, and doesn't plan to have it phased out for TEN MORE YEARS. Furthermore, it's not the production of CFC's that release them into the atmosphere-- it's the venting of it from leaks in CFC-using equipment . It'll take at LEAST 10 years before we see a significant reduction in CFC venting due to equipment replacement.
Ozone (O3) is basically created when UV light hits O2 molecules. When there's less ozone to block the UV rays, it stands to reason that more ozone would be created because more UV radiation is getting down to the level where the atmospher contains more O2. Even those that believe the hole is caused by human activity don't describe it as a problem caused by lack of ozone production; rather, it's theorized that atmospheric chlorine is breaking the ozone down faster than the UV + O2 interaction can replace it. Suggesting we "spray ozone" completely fails to appreciate the scale at which this is happening. We're talking BILLIONS OF TONS of ozone. It's like suggesting that we fight a 100,000 acre wind-driven wildfire with bucket brigades and garden hoses.
Because ozone is created by the interaction of O2 and UV radiation. It's not some finite mass of rare elements. It's O3. The reason it's "coming back" is that human activity has a negligible effect upon it. The "hole" is a cyclical phenomenon more closely related to solar activity than anything else.
If it has nothing else, NYC has absolutely GREAT water. It's bizarre. Probably because it's mostly groundwater from watersheds to the north, rather than, say, mostly well water like in texas, laden with yummy petroleum (it's in the ground-- you can't get away from it).
Absolutely! Nothing gets my goat more than some knob prattling about the number of calories worth of diesel fuel it takes to plow a field that yields X calories of food, and how it was "more efficient" 100 years ago-- as if the 30 man-hours spent cajoling an ox pulling a plow trade equally with the 3 hours spent driving an air-conditioned tractor over the same sized plot.
They weren't on duty. The UCMJ prohibition is meant to bar folks from standing up in front of formations of [soldiers|sailors|airmen|marines] and exhorting them to support or oppose a particular political viewpoint. Serving as a delegate to a political party on your own time is perfectly acceptable.
Your 9/11 experience is not the baseline against which all other 9/11 experiences are measured. The severity of your trauma does not render trivial the experiences of those who suffered less than you. You are not the center of the universe.
There's a written story to go with it setting it up: "I found this camera in the woods..."
It has "fiction" written all over it.
Yep. They started companies to (say) sell pies online, and in order to generate interest and find out what pies people liked, they'd give away free pies. When they finally start charging for pies because they needed to make money, they found out that the kind of pies people liked were the free ones, rather than the ones they had to pay (too much) money for. Hell of an expensive lesson, but we saw a LOT of people learn it!
The iMac is quiet, but it's a "turnkey" system without any serious expandability. I have three network cards, a Hauppage vid cap card, and three monitors. The iMac is not suitable for these things. The LCD iMac is further unsuitable for anyone who requires accurate color representation.
Why should we? What possible reason is there to keep every damn thing in the universe in pristine, untouched condition? Besides, it's not like we're going to Mars and throwing a McDonald's bag out the window, scattering burger wrappers and half-eaten McNuggets all over the Martian surface. These are spacecraft components that, first chance we get, will probably be brought back to Earth and examined.
wind turbine farms are not a suitable 1:1 replacement for nuclear (or even gas or coal fired) power plants. They require wind and, unlike a nuclear reactor, the wind cannot be throttled up in response to higher demand. Wind power is a good idea, but it's really best as a supplemental power system.
Heh. Probably too subtle for most people there, 'cause that's the way they ALWAYS spell.
Find me a volcano that sucks in molten rock and it might work. As I understand it, though, volcanos only spew out. Trying to shoot radioactive waste down a volcano to the earth's core is like trying to dispose of waste water by pouring it into a garden hose while the hose is turned on. Just doesn't work.
As I understand it, the whole "999 year lease" kinda stuff is, as you indicated, a leftover from the ol' monarchy. Technically, the land is owned by the lord, but the terms of the leases are such that buying the lease is the same as owning it in all but name. They have no problem with it because it's just a convenient legal fiction that allows, for example, the Queen of England to own a large percentage of London, while at the same time the properties are almost entirely under the control of private entities.
"Quo custodiet ipsos custodies" - who watches the watchman? Adding another machine to watch the first machine for what is already only a temporary kludge is adding too much unnecessary complexity. They just need to send the $10/hr intern down there to restart it every Wednsday morning until the bug is fixed.
But implementing such a system would probably require as much work as fixing the apparent micro-second rollover bug. The reboot is only a kludge until the bug is fixed.
That's when you count your elbows and don't come up with an even number.
PS: if you only have one arm, remember to change your elbow parity from EVEN to ODD.
Nothing hardly ever shits itself enough to affect him. It just decays gently and makes the lives of the admin staff more difficult. At any rate, they eventually convinced his replacement (and then only after his computer finally had trouble) to hire a student part time to take care of IT needs (inadequate solution, but better than nothing).
If that doesn't work, you just discuss the situation with his boss.
Heh. It's in academia. His boss is the University of California Regents Office. They'd just as soon see his entire department die entirely, but can't kill it for various convoluted political reasons.
Well yeah, that's the real crux of the matter now isn't it. Since the manual reboot is only a temporary kludge intended to work around a bug that's (presumably) being fixed, the atypical activity of restarting should be attended by a human. I would assume that the uptime monitoring system was not designed to account for this reboot, but was designed to handle other incidents and as such would require no further attendance.
You don't run a fucking air traffic control system with a "one truck" vulnerability.
Exactly. If you find a bug that requires a restart before a 49.7 day timer runs out, you are indeed an idiot if you decide a restart once a month is good enough. At the very least I'd have tech down there on the 1st and 15th of the month, so they'd have to miss three scheduled restarts to cause this problem. Better yet, have two guys there every damn Wednsday at noon. If they both miss seven Wednsdays in a row, well, you got bigger problems than bad software. Whoever decided once a month was adequate needs to have his head handed to him.
Heh. Only in America can you blame Audi because you were too dumb to tell the gas from the brake.
You probably failed to include the requisite Windows bashing, this time appearing in the form of unfounded speculation that it's a repeat of the Win95 bug.