I think you're the first person I've come across who thinks that the Ryan pick was for an obscure politician picked out of nowhere, rather than someone who the media has been promoting for months, and who's plan to abolish Medicare led to the major fact check organizations losing all credibility last year when they pretended it never happened.
You're saying you actually missed the Politifact scandal? Or are you claiming everyone else did?
Pretty much nobody has taken the Fact Check groups seriously since they made the claim that saying Medicare is going away is lying if Medicare is being replaced by something completely unlike it.
You can repeat links to this bullshit as much as you want. The problem we have is that groups like Politifact want to be taken "seriously" and think the way to do this is to debunk the loudest claims on each side, rather than the dishonest ones. This is what 20 years of one side claiming "media bias" does to the media.
If you seriously think that replacing a single payer healthcare system with a system of subsidies to private insurers is not destroying the original program, you're an idiot, evil, or both. Ryan's original proposal abolished Medicare. No amount of tortured "Yeah, but the Democrats didn't mention that, uh, something else might exist that might or might not help future seniors, and that people who are already old will still be covered by Medicare" type sophistry from the fact checkers changes that.
Personally, I always thought the natural born requirement was silly. Why don't we just change the requirement to being a US citizen for 35 years and put it in line with the age restrictions. If someone wants to move here at 20 and run for office at 55 I say why the hell shouldn't they be allowed to? If you're willing to believe that someone is willing to plot for 35 years to throw down the US by the ridiculously unlikely plan of being elected president, why do you doubt that someone wouldn't be willing to brainwash their child into doing it instead?
Disclaimer: I'm a naturalized citizen although I have no desire to run for President (and Americans wouldn't go for my kind of "Some things the government does are good, some things the private sector does are good, let's just do what's sensible" type liberalism anyway), but I personally don't see the point even in a "Must be here 35 years" requirement.
At the end of the day, it should be up to the American people themselves to decide whether or not someone is qualified to be President. With all Presidential candidates having, essentially, to be vetted twice, with large numbers of involved parties who have a high degree of self interest in making sure each candidate's dirty laundry is known, I don't see how it's a problem. It's not as if the President of France is going to win an American election - or if she or he does, it's not as if it'll be as a result of a massive fraud.
All the more reason to allow people who are looking for that to find each other so everyone else can focus on what they are there to do.
Please read the rest of the paragraph. This isn't about people using cons as a dating service. They're not there to get laid. At the same time, everyone's human.
You and I know this, most people know this, but I suppose some hackers who have social anxiety or Aspergers don't know this and for them it could help.
On the contrary, it would have the opposite effect for the reasons I've outlined. You're talking about a flag that, realistically, applies to 99% of the single people at the event. That is, most of the single, unattached, people who attend the event are going to be somewhat happy if they meet the right person, or even if they just get laid. And that applies whether they're at a con, on a bus, at a friend's party, or even at work (though the latter has awkward potential consequences which means, for logical reasons, they may keep their guards up.)
So what is the flag supposed to symbolize? "I'm human"? That's not how it's going to be read. It's going to be read as "It's OK to do the kinds of things you've read are sexual harassment to me." And as for stereotypical Aspergers types (note the term "stereotypical" - leaving aside the number of geeks who'd never get that diagnosis in a million years, but use the term to apply to them because they read somewhere it means "Rude and obnoxious but really smart", this whole "Aspergers wouldn't know they're sexually harassing someone" thing is really, really, insulting to those who have the conditiion) - as for stereotypical "Aspergers" types, they'll see it as an excuse to ignore the rules of human behavior.
I think people need to be more open in general if they want to avoid communication problems. This is one of the main reasons I am against the idea of some posers which is to add undercover cops and go that route, as that would make it even harder for people to communicate openly.
I honestly think you'd be surprised how easy this behavior is to spot. The Readercon case, for example, involves a person who crossed at least two rather blatently obvious boundaries:
- The first was going right in, and treating the survivor as his sexual plaything right from the start. No early get-to-know-you conversation, no suggestive back and forth between the two that showed the survivor was interested in doing something. The two were strangers. Would you have done that to a stranger? I mean, forget the con which isn't even a sex party, you're at a singles bar, you see an attractive member of the compatible sex at the bar, you politely compliment them and offer a drink, but they politely turn you down. Would you physically grab the woman later, put your arm around her, and announce to her friends something that implies you're going off to have sex with her?
- The second was even when asked repeatedly to go away following her around the con. Stalking her.
If you realize how obvious it is, you have to realize how easy a job "Con cops" are going to have policing such an event without hurting a single innocent horny asperger's sufferer. We're not looking at a case where someone is going to shyly approach someone and say "I'm terribly sorry, and I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I just saw you from across the room, and wondered if I could get to kn... wait, you have a badge? Handcuffs? Gun? No!!"
Yes, some people are socially awkward. As long as they accept no for an answer, and as long as they concentrate on what the con is about, rather than trying to get laid, that shouldn't be an issue.
...well yeah, but ask yourself this: how many people would actually bother to wear such a handkerchief in such a context anyway?
The problem here is that most people, single people anyway, would absolutely love it if Mr or Ms Wonderful came up, swept them off their feet, and took them upstairs for a good fuck. And in many cases, some people go to social events and at the back of their mind, or sometimes at the forefront, they're also thinking "Wouldn't it be nice if Mr or Mrs Attractive came up to me, whispered sweet nothings, and then we went up to the bedroom and fucked."
For all I know, it's even possible that many of the people reporting harassment actually fell into one or both of those categories on the day they were harassed. And, you know, that's fine, because it's irrelevant, and that's why the Hanky code, outside of an actual S&M party (and I'll explain why in a moment) is really completely missing the point.
Simply being open to the concept of a relationship, brief, sexual, or whatever, with the right person is not the same thing as being open to having sex with anyone. And no means no - once someone has indicated they're not interested, it doesn't matter if they're wearing a velour green hanky with blue paisley patterns on it or not, they're not interested in the person they rejected.
Which I've always thought is kinda obvious. But then you get discussions like this.
The Hanky code... the concept is not "Because I'm wearing a black hanky at this event, I hereby consent to you grabbing me out of the blue and beating the crap out me." It's a conversation starter, and it's one made at a venue that's relatively tightly controlled. S&M events are not generally open. They're usually comprised of a small community of people who know one another, or at least are no more than one step removed from someone who knows a guest personally, and can vouch for them. As you'd expect. You're talking potentially dangerous sex in that community, both physically and emotionally, and nobody wants anyone to "get hurt" in any real sense, however many bruises they may leave with. If you've met anyone who said, or read anything, that suggests Hankys mean "consent" rather than "Hey, you're into this too! Let's talk!", then you're probably listening to or hearing a fantasist. And one that wouldn't be welcome at any S&M event I've been to. (Which, oddly enough, have generally not featured hankies.)
Why is it this way? Because, well, the stakes are high, and so the standards are too within that community. Consent can never be assumed when it comes to someone you've barely interacted with. It doesn't matter whether that person's wearing a hanky. It doesn't matter whether that person's wearing a very short skirt. It doesn't even matter if the person stands in the middle of the room and yells "Hey, who wants a fuck?"
If he or she says no when you approach, it's "no". Back off and enjoy your evening with someone else.
India is not China, you have no idea what you are talking about.
India isn't France either. What the fuck does China have to do with anything?
India is having massive problems, it has no competition, it has no economic growth to speak of.
The Indian economy grew by 6.5% for the 2011-12 fiscal year. It's seen record growth throughout the mid-2000s - at a time when the US economy has had meager growth at its best.
Basically you're living in a fantasy world. You've decided India can't succeed, therefore you refuse to believe it is and even assert, constantly, it isn't, even when it is.
I'd advise you to read the above link, check the sources, and educate yourself, but you won't. You've already decided that your economic model of the world makes anything written on the page unpossible. That's very, very, sad. But if you step back a moment, and start checking whether your models work, and more importantly, try to determine why they fail when they fail and adjust those models accordingly, you might actually do yourself some good and not look like a swivel-eyed ideologue when you post this stuff.
India isn't kicking your ass, the laws in India actually prevent competition.
No, they're kicking our asses. Even now. Even in the middle of a fucking depression in the US with people willing to work for peanuts, and corporations making record profits, jobs are being outsourced to India.
That's a fact, and saying they don't because of a theoretical concept that is clearly untrue is a really dumb thing to say. It's an insult not just to people stating the obvious, but also to the numerous people who have lost jobs because of the trend, as well as the hardworking and entrepreneurial Indian people themselves who have made such a success of things.
I appreciate self-described "economists" have a habit of making sweeping statements of fact based on stuff they think should be true in theory, but that's not an excuse. Whether it's "I'm going to assert that jobs aren't being outsourced to India because I don't like the Indian economy" or "People of a certain race are lazy, but that's OK because it's caused by discrimination", if you don't take steps to verify that your assertion is true first, you're going to go down a very silly path. Good economists check the results match their theories, and adjust accordingly. Bad economists ignore reality, and ought to (but fuck me are Austrian and Chicago economists taken too seriously these days) lose credibility as a result.
Remember the "KHTML DEVELOPERS BLAST APPLE!!" thing that turned out to be "KHTML developers explain, after being asked over and over again to incorporate WebKit improvements into KHTML, why it's difficult to because WebKit is a significantly different system having been refactored by its developers"?
What you'll find is that the vast majority of phone companies support measures designed to bring in additional phone users that don't cost them money.
The concept here is "Network effect", and every phone company, no matter how small, benefits from being part of a large network where every potential customer knows that buying a phone gives them access to more than a rich minority.
Oh, and most of your argument consists of the slippery slope falacy - which is exactly what it is. Virtually every modern nation requires subsidized phone services be provided for the poor. None, to the best of my knowledge, have resulted in any companies becoming monopolies.
Oh and if it's impossible to start a business in India, why, exactly, are they kicking our asses? How is it that white collar jobs are being outsourced there? Is there a "Secretary of Call Centers and Software Development" position within the government running a giant, nationalized, call center/software development company? India seems to be doing pretty well for a country that spent 200+ years being fucked over by my ancestors.
The principle purpose of user tracking technology is for the oh-so-evil reason that advertisers want relevant ads to be pitched.
That's it. Nothing more. Like virtually everything out there, it can be used for evil, but for the most part is used innocuously.
Now, before you cry and wail and say "Squiggie's evil, he just said it's OK for someone to watch me on the web like a lecherous prevert" I want you to consider the following:
- Do not track is a voluntary program by the industry.
- Tracking is usually inherently non-evil and actually potentially useful (if you're a nerd living in his parent's basement at the age of 45, would you prefer ads for AWESOME GADGETS or for ADAM SANDLER MOVIES?)
- Making tracking opt-in rather than opt-out will ensure DNT fails. If the majority of people are presenting a flag that they never even said they wanted, is there any moral mandate to take any notice of the flag? If we had a "Do not photograph in public" only-visible-in-IR-light symbol, and clothing manufacturers started putting it on every T-shirt, with most wearers blissfully unaware such a symbol is there, would there be any moral mandate to avoid taking photos of people with such T-shirts?
With me so far? Now, consider this: you decide that you've had enough. You are one of the 1% of IE users who knows what DNT is and actually want it sent, because you sincerely, honestly, don't want Google putting up ads that reflect your interests. You write to your legislator. "I actually have DNT turned on because I want it on!" you tell him, "And they ignore meeeeeeeeeeeeeee".
The result is likely to be legislation... that you don't want. The industry will point out that their tracking is useful. They will point out that it'll hurt capitalism(tm) if people avoid being tracked. They'll point out they don't share the data with anyone.
And the results will probably be: it'll be opt-in. It'll be strictly limited - the tracking flag can be ignored for political campaigns, by security agencies, and that corn farmers in Nebraska will get a $50 a bushell subsidy (riders suck.) You'll need to tell each organization that tracks you that they're not allowed to any more, by writing a letter to a posted address these organizations shall publish at the bottom of their website in a secure part of the site in a locked file called beware_of_the_leopard.html. They will have 28 days to comply, after which they will be legally obliged to not track you except where certain privacy conditions are met.
You know this. I know it. Angelina Jolie's dad knows it. That's the way it works.
DNT will be ignored if it's opt-out. And you'll never get a better deal than DNT if the industry has any say in it. And they will.
Page 19, of the original 86 DOS Manual pretty much confirms 86 DOS came with FAT, not the CP/M file system or a file system in any way inspired by CP/M (beyond FAT's use of 8.3 filenames.) There are other references in the same manual that make this clear, but page 19 has the smoking gun.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd love a source for this. What I've read has always suggested QDOS came with FAT from the very get-go.
And to be honest, I don't think your logic that it didn't holds up. Just because you had to build the boot disk with CP/M doesn't mean it was CP/M formatted, any more than the fact early GNU/Linux users had to set up a boot disk under DOS meant the resultant operating system was FAT based. CP/M (indirectly, by virtue of requiring a standardized BIOS) gave you raw access to the disks themselves, and building a boot disk for ANY operating system, CP/M or otherwise, required you write raw sectors.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd like more information before assuming you're correct. It does contradict what I've read elsewhere, and there's nothing about the "boot disk" thing that actually says it had to work that way.
1. Black-hat SEO. It would be trivially easy to get a site miscategorized, simply by changing the content after categorization (and it'd be simple to fool Yahoo's bots into thinking such changes are minimal.)
2. Legal issues. You want Yahoo to reject certain sites from being categorized. (Also: you want Yahoo not to reject certain sites from being categorized, but the MPAA may disagree with you...) However, if their service became as popular as it was in the mid-nineties, to the point it's the first stop for most searchers, you'd start to get a lot of regulatory interest. As it is, Google, which is fully automatic, gets regulator interest rather frequently. Can you imagine the problems associated with a manually updated index?
Now, in addition to all of that, you're putting in a ball park figure of $400m+ to set this up (I'm not sure, from that, what the maintenance costs are, because this index is going to get pretty useless if it isn't updated!)
Is this going to attract advertising worth that? And, moreover, from Yahoo's point of view, that's a hell of a lot of money compared to the cost of writing a crawler/indexer. The top home page in the country is Google, the core of which is a search engine that probably cost a few tens of millions to write over ten years (I'm not saying the whole of Google cost that, but GMail, Google News, etc, are additional services just as Yahoo Mail and Yahoo News are.)
Don't get me wrong, I'd like a good directory search and I really missed it when Yahoo stopped updating their's. But I still think the concept is impractical today. The web is too big for this to be cost effective. There are legal issues that were barely considered worth sniffing at in the mid-nineties.
If Yahoo have $400m in spare change lying around, I think they can spend it on something more useful. And they probably believe they can spend it on something more profitable.
Well, those are products, not strengths - at least, not from a turning-the-business-around way.
I do agree they're good as a long time Yahoo Mail user myself - although the intrusive ads in Yahoo Mail need to go away, as it's unusable on a smaller screen.
Yeah, that though would have been OK 15 years ago. Yahoo had its own strengths, it was an innovator, and did some awesome stuff like the first genuinely useful webmail, the my.yahoo.com thing, and - OK, probably not as useful if implemented today - but the original directory based search was awesome at the time.
But it doesn't really have any strengths right now. It's a husk of its former self, a company that' had no ideas how to run itself as it got larger, and thought "I know, let's just copy all the other faceless corporations" was a great way to fix everything. Its founders left because they neither understood how large corporations work, nor understood the problems that go with that way of working - the stifling, anti-creativity, anti-individualism that such corporations inflict upon their employee base.
And it's hard, really, to think of a technology company that's following that model that's actually doing OK at the moment. Maybe Amazon is there, I don't know, but Amazon has a Jobs-lite like character at the top, so it just about gets away with it.
Copying the way Google works? Well, Google is innovative, encourages its employees to be creative, and seems to be being rewarded for doing so. If you're a large Internet concern that's been going in the wrong direction for a while, looking over at Google seems to be a good approach.
Jerry Pournelle, former Byte columnist, original Internet Kook (seriously, Google for it) and writer of pulp-scifi made the claim I disputed that Kildall actually demonstrated a hidden secret key sequence that causes PC DOS to claim it's ripped off CP/M code. (Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS#cite_ref-1)
Like I said, I think it's crap, but it's simply not true that nobody has ever claimed that 86-DOS didn't steal code from CP/M. And much as I don't take Pournelle seriously, I can't ignore the fact many do.
I'm about 90% sure you're wrong on this. CP/M's file system doesn't really resemble FAT at a low level. FAT actually originated as the file system implemented by Microsoft's early stand-alone BASIC implementations.
CP/M's file system was extremely crude, being comprised largely of a single table containing the directory, with the rest of the disk containing the data. Each directory entry contained pointers to up to 16 blocks, if a file contained more than that it had to have multiple directory entries.
FAT has multiple tablers, and FAT's system is, ultimately, based upon chains of clusters, and the directories simply point at the starting cluster, with the information about the groups of clusters themselves stored in a separate table (the actual FAT.)
They're both hideous, but they're not remotely similar.
did NOT need to scan the whole disk to put a filesystem together
I never said anything remotely similar.
What I said, which I believe is true, is that CP/M had to read the whole directory to find out what parts of the disk were empty. Many of the optimizations that occurred between 1.3 and 2.x were to address this specific issue.
further still, you misunderstand what states' rights is and how it applies. it has nothing to do with giving the government power. in fact, it has a lot more to do with reducing government powers, by marginalizing their scope. it is a process, not an end.
Thanks for the pretty lecture, but you, apparently, have confused your idealistic views of what the terms should mean with how they're used in practice.
To spell it out for you. Statist is almost always used to mean "Any view that holds the government should do anything about anything." You can see this in the originator of this thread, a pseudo-libertarian rant that ascribes any conventionally proposed government action against AGW to be "statist". "I'm enlightened", sayeth the poster, "I can see there are non-statist things we can do too!" Well, great. Because the conventionally proposed government actions have to do with tradable CO2 production quotas and low wattage lightbulbs. Now you can make an argument, if you so wish, that this has to do with a subset of governments involving "elites", but leaving aside the misuse of the term to the point that it's meaningless in discourse in 2012, the fact is "statist" here simply refers to a proposal that the government use its power in any way whatsoever.
Which is how it's always used. Except perhaps in your own writings. Good for you, but epic fail on ignoring how everyone else is using it.
"States rights". That refers, objectively, to the proposal that States should be able to pass any damned law they wish, and fuck individuals, and especially fuck the Feds if the Feds try to restrict this in any way whatsoever. Now I can prove this quite easily, and I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this term isn't about "limiting" government through scope, but by "empowering one government at the expense of other people and governments".
How? Well, the defining issue as far as States Rights go is not the ability to regulate CO2 production, or sell low wattage lightbulbs - although, like the latter, it does cover degrees of whiteness.
No, the defining States Right issue is race, and the audacity of the Federal Government to trample upon the God-given right of every State to treat Black people like shit. Slavery? States rights! (Funnily enough, the right of a state to refuse to return slaves is never considered a "States Rights" issue by those who use the term.) Opting out of the Union because the other States aren't helping Slave States enforce slavery? "States Rights". Jim Crow? "States Rights". Preventing black people from getting edumicated? "States Rights". Clamping down on Civil rights marches? "States Rights". Preventing black people from voting? "States Rights".
Now, to be fair, the same people will occasionally use it elsewhere, but rarely in any way that suggests individuals be empowered first and foremost, and the Federal government limited with State governments given limited powers that respect individuals. No, it's pretty much a straightforward "Wah! Wah!! The Federal Government says my State has to stop purging its voter rolls of people with funny names. Its time for States Rights FTW!"
Again, that's how it's used. Except perhaps in your own writings. Good for you, but epic fail on ignoring how everyone else is using it.
A lot of the proposals have to do with changes in land use, and specifically abolishing the outlawing of mixed and high/medium density development zoning you get in the US at the moment. While many people, even with the choice to live close to the businesses that serve them, will still insist on living in the middle of nowhere, the fact is a lot of us would choose to live in such neighborhoods if they were available and - with supply being increased - were no longer horrendously expensive.
That's one major policy change that would make a difference. Not everyone wants to drive a friggin' car just get a gallon of milk, and very few people want to spend 2-3 times as much on groceries as they would in a country where land, and therefore the transportation of commodities, is planned more effectively.
The problem right now is that the far right has successfully painted the entire process of dealing with climate change as something that would reduce choice and force people to give things up. The reality is that there are plenty of policy changes the US government can make that would increase choices and result in a massive reduction in the amount of CO2 emitted.
The bit I love is the fact the same people who use the term "statist" tend to also be the people who use the term "State's Rights" and consider it a positive term, apparently not realizing the link between the two words.
And before I get flamed, yes, I'm aware people who approve of "States Rights" are simply choosing States against Federal or individual rights; in other words picking which government slips on the shackles over your ankles.
I know everyone wants to believe the story that a devious Bill Gates simply changed the copyright message on a copy of CP/M and re-released it, but there are numerous issues with the story:
- CP/M is tiny. Really, really, small. And has a well documented API. Anyone conversant in 808x assembler can put together a clone in a matter of days. This isn't an academic statement, I put together one myself for a A Level Computer Science course in the 1980s when I wrote a "CP/M emulator" for the Sinclair QL as my final project. (Appropriately the Sinclair QL's native operating system is also called QDOS. Go figure.)
- QDOS wasn't even a direct clone. The largest - or at least most complex - component of CP/M is the file system - almost everything else is an almost 1:1 call to a BIOS routine. And QDOS didn't have CP/M's file system - it used FAT, not the somewhat inefficient CP/M system which, IIRC, required scanning the entire directory to determine where the free sectors were. So even if someone had started off with a copy of CP/M and directly ported it, 90% of it or more would have had to be rewritten to produce QDOS.
The stories of Gary Kildall typing in some obscure set of keystrokes causing a copy of PC DOS to announce that it was actually CP/M - haha! - always struck me as improbable, and the fact they only appeared in dubious sources several years after this had supposedly happened makes me think the stories are outright fabrications. That doesn't mean there weren't potential copyright issues, and I suspect most of the stories of IBM somehow settling with DR over the similarities have some elements of truth - but this is because this was the early eighties, the era of Pacman lawsuits, to be followed a few years later by Apple's infamous look and feel suits against DR and Microsoft/HP.
In terms of actual code being copied however - no. It would, arguably, have taken more work to translate CP/M into 8086 assembler and then make all of the changes necessary to turn it into QDOS than it would to write QDOS from scratch. QDOS had a similar API, and a similar but not identical shell. Otherwise it wasn't remotely similar.
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I think you're the first person I've come across who thinks that the Ryan pick was for an obscure politician picked out of nowhere, rather than someone who the media has been promoting for months, and who's plan to abolish Medicare led to the major fact check organizations losing all credibility last year when they pretended it never happened.
You're saying you actually missed the Politifact scandal? Or are you claiming everyone else did?
Pretty much nobody has taken the Fact Check groups seriously since they made the claim that saying Medicare is going away is lying if Medicare is being replaced by something completely unlike it.
You can repeat links to this bullshit as much as you want. The problem we have is that groups like Politifact want to be taken "seriously" and think the way to do this is to debunk the loudest claims on each side, rather than the dishonest ones. This is what 20 years of one side claiming "media bias" does to the media.
If you seriously think that replacing a single payer healthcare system with a system of subsidies to private insurers is not destroying the original program, you're an idiot, evil, or both. Ryan's original proposal abolished Medicare. No amount of tortured "Yeah, but the Democrats didn't mention that, uh, something else might exist that might or might not help future seniors, and that people who are already old will still be covered by Medicare" type sophistry from the fact checkers changes that.
Disclaimer: I'm a naturalized citizen although I have no desire to run for President (and Americans wouldn't go for my kind of "Some things the government does are good, some things the private sector does are good, let's just do what's sensible" type liberalism anyway), but I personally don't see the point even in a "Must be here 35 years" requirement.
At the end of the day, it should be up to the American people themselves to decide whether or not someone is qualified to be President. With all Presidential candidates having, essentially, to be vetted twice, with large numbers of involved parties who have a high degree of self interest in making sure each candidate's dirty laundry is known, I don't see how it's a problem. It's not as if the President of France is going to win an American election - or if she or he does, it's not as if it'll be as a result of a massive fraud.
Does any of this make sense?
Please read the rest of the paragraph. This isn't about people using cons as a dating service. They're not there to get laid. At the same time, everyone's human.
On the contrary, it would have the opposite effect for the reasons I've outlined. You're talking about a flag that, realistically, applies to 99% of the single people at the event. That is, most of the single, unattached, people who attend the event are going to be somewhat happy if they meet the right person, or even if they just get laid. And that applies whether they're at a con, on a bus, at a friend's party, or even at work (though the latter has awkward potential consequences which means, for logical reasons, they may keep their guards up.)
So what is the flag supposed to symbolize? "I'm human"? That's not how it's going to be read. It's going to be read as "It's OK to do the kinds of things you've read are sexual harassment to me." And as for stereotypical Aspergers types (note the term "stereotypical" - leaving aside the number of geeks who'd never get that diagnosis in a million years, but use the term to apply to them because they read somewhere it means "Rude and obnoxious but really smart", this whole "Aspergers wouldn't know they're sexually harassing someone" thing is really, really, insulting to those who have the conditiion) - as for stereotypical "Aspergers" types, they'll see it as an excuse to ignore the rules of human behavior.
I honestly think you'd be surprised how easy this behavior is to spot. The Readercon case, for example, involves a person who crossed at least two rather blatently obvious boundaries:
- The first was going right in, and treating the survivor as his sexual plaything right from the start. No early get-to-know-you conversation, no suggestive back and forth between the two that showed the survivor was interested in doing something. The two were strangers. Would you have done that to a stranger? I mean, forget the con which isn't even a sex party, you're at a singles bar, you see an attractive member of the compatible sex at the bar, you politely compliment them and offer a drink, but they politely turn you down. Would you physically grab the woman later, put your arm around her, and announce to her friends something that implies you're going off to have sex with her?
- The second was even when asked repeatedly to go away following her around the con. Stalking her.
If you realize how obvious it is, you have to realize how easy a job "Con cops" are going to have policing such an event without hurting a single innocent horny asperger's sufferer. We're not looking at a case where someone is going to shyly approach someone and say "I'm terribly sorry, and I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I just saw you from across the room, and wondered if I could get to kn... wait, you have a badge? Handcuffs? Gun? No!!"
Yes, some people are socially awkward. As long as they accept no for an answer, and as long as they concentrate on what the con is about, rather than trying to get laid, that shouldn't be an issue.
The problem here is that most people, single people anyway, would absolutely love it if Mr or Ms Wonderful came up, swept them off their feet, and took them upstairs for a good fuck. And in many cases, some people go to social events and at the back of their mind, or sometimes at the forefront, they're also thinking "Wouldn't it be nice if Mr or Mrs Attractive came up to me, whispered sweet nothings, and then we went up to the bedroom and fucked."
For all I know, it's even possible that many of the people reporting harassment actually fell into one or both of those categories on the day they were harassed. And, you know, that's fine, because it's irrelevant, and that's why the Hanky code, outside of an actual S&M party (and I'll explain why in a moment) is really completely missing the point.
Simply being open to the concept of a relationship, brief, sexual, or whatever, with the right person is not the same thing as being open to having sex with anyone. And no means no - once someone has indicated they're not interested, it doesn't matter if they're wearing a velour green hanky with blue paisley patterns on it or not, they're not interested in the person they rejected.
Which I've always thought is kinda obvious. But then you get discussions like this.
The Hanky code... the concept is not "Because I'm wearing a black hanky at this event, I hereby consent to you grabbing me out of the blue and beating the crap out me." It's a conversation starter, and it's one made at a venue that's relatively tightly controlled. S&M events are not generally open. They're usually comprised of a small community of people who know one another, or at least are no more than one step removed from someone who knows a guest personally, and can vouch for them. As you'd expect. You're talking potentially dangerous sex in that community, both physically and emotionally, and nobody wants anyone to "get hurt" in any real sense, however many bruises they may leave with. If you've met anyone who said, or read anything, that suggests Hankys mean "consent" rather than "Hey, you're into this too! Let's talk!", then you're probably listening to or hearing a fantasist. And one that wouldn't be welcome at any S&M event I've been to. (Which, oddly enough, have generally not featured hankies.)
Why is it this way? Because, well, the stakes are high, and so the standards are too within that community. Consent can never be assumed when it comes to someone you've barely interacted with. It doesn't matter whether that person's wearing a hanky. It doesn't matter whether that person's wearing a very short skirt. It doesn't even matter if the person stands in the middle of the room and yells "Hey, who wants a fuck?"
If he or she says no when you approach, it's "no". Back off and enjoy your evening with someone else.
My Kindle Fire fits in my pockets too. Maybe you just need better trousers ;-)
India isn't France either. What the fuck does China have to do with anything?
The Indian economy grew by 6.5% for the 2011-12 fiscal year. It's seen record growth throughout the mid-2000s - at a time when the US economy has had meager growth at its best.
Basically you're living in a fantasy world. You've decided India can't succeed, therefore you refuse to believe it is and even assert, constantly, it isn't, even when it is.
I'd advise you to read the above link, check the sources, and educate yourself, but you won't. You've already decided that your economic model of the world makes anything written on the page unpossible. That's very, very, sad. But if you step back a moment, and start checking whether your models work, and more importantly, try to determine why they fail when they fail and adjust those models accordingly, you might actually do yourself some good and not look like a swivel-eyed ideologue when you post this stuff.
No, they're kicking our asses. Even now. Even in the middle of a fucking depression in the US with people willing to work for peanuts, and corporations making record profits, jobs are being outsourced to India.
That's a fact, and saying they don't because of a theoretical concept that is clearly untrue is a really dumb thing to say. It's an insult not just to people stating the obvious, but also to the numerous people who have lost jobs because of the trend, as well as the hardworking and entrepreneurial Indian people themselves who have made such a success of things.
I appreciate self-described "economists" have a habit of making sweeping statements of fact based on stuff they think should be true in theory, but that's not an excuse. Whether it's "I'm going to assert that jobs aren't being outsourced to India because I don't like the Indian economy" or "People of a certain race are lazy, but that's OK because it's caused by discrimination", if you don't take steps to verify that your assertion is true first, you're going to go down a very silly path. Good economists check the results match their theories, and adjust accordingly. Bad economists ignore reality, and ought to (but fuck me are Austrian and Chicago economists taken too seriously these days) lose credibility as a result.
This is the way Slashdot works.
Remember the "KHTML DEVELOPERS BLAST APPLE!!" thing that turned out to be "KHTML developers explain, after being asked over and over again to incorporate WebKit improvements into KHTML, why it's difficult to because WebKit is a significantly different system having been refactored by its developers"?
What you'll find is that the vast majority of phone companies support measures designed to bring in additional phone users that don't cost them money.
The concept here is "Network effect", and every phone company, no matter how small, benefits from being part of a large network where every potential customer knows that buying a phone gives them access to more than a rich minority.
Oh, and most of your argument consists of the slippery slope falacy - which is exactly what it is. Virtually every modern nation requires subsidized phone services be provided for the poor. None, to the best of my knowledge, have resulted in any companies becoming monopolies.
Oh and if it's impossible to start a business in India, why, exactly, are they kicking our asses? How is it that white collar jobs are being outsourced there? Is there a "Secretary of Call Centers and Software Development" position within the government running a giant, nationalized, call center/software development company? India seems to be doing pretty well for a country that spent 200+ years being fucked over by my ancestors.
The principle purpose of user tracking technology is for the oh-so-evil reason that advertisers want relevant ads to be pitched.
That's it. Nothing more. Like virtually everything out there, it can be used for evil, but for the most part is used innocuously.
Now, before you cry and wail and say "Squiggie's evil, he just said it's OK for someone to watch me on the web like a lecherous prevert" I want you to consider the following:
- Do not track is a voluntary program by the industry.
- Tracking is usually inherently non-evil and actually potentially useful (if you're a nerd living in his parent's basement at the age of 45, would you prefer ads for AWESOME GADGETS or for ADAM SANDLER MOVIES?)
- Making tracking opt-in rather than opt-out will ensure DNT fails. If the majority of people are presenting a flag that they never even said they wanted, is there any moral mandate to take any notice of the flag? If we had a "Do not photograph in public" only-visible-in-IR-light symbol, and clothing manufacturers started putting it on every T-shirt, with most wearers blissfully unaware such a symbol is there, would there be any moral mandate to avoid taking photos of people with such T-shirts?
With me so far? Now, consider this: you decide that you've had enough. You are one of the 1% of IE users who knows what DNT is and actually want it sent, because you sincerely, honestly, don't want Google putting up ads that reflect your interests. You write to your legislator. "I actually have DNT turned on because I want it on!" you tell him, "And they ignore meeeeeeeeeeeeeee".
The result is likely to be legislation... that you don't want. The industry will point out that their tracking is useful. They will point out that it'll hurt capitalism(tm) if people avoid being tracked. They'll point out they don't share the data with anyone.
And the results will probably be: it'll be opt-in. It'll be strictly limited - the tracking flag can be ignored for political campaigns, by security agencies, and that corn farmers in Nebraska will get a $50 a bushell subsidy (riders suck.) You'll need to tell each organization that tracks you that they're not allowed to any more, by writing a letter to a posted address these organizations shall publish at the bottom of their website in a secure part of the site in a locked file called beware_of_the_leopard.html. They will have 28 days to comply, after which they will be legally obliged to not track you except where certain privacy conditions are met.
You know this. I know it. Angelina Jolie's dad knows it. That's the way it works.
DNT will be ignored if it's opt-out. And you'll never get a better deal than DNT if the industry has any say in it. And they will.
Page 19, of the original 86 DOS Manual pretty much confirms 86 DOS came with FAT, not the CP/M file system or a file system in any way inspired by CP/M (beyond FAT's use of 8.3 filenames.) There are other references in the same manual that make this clear, but page 19 has the smoking gun.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd love a source for this. What I've read has always suggested QDOS came with FAT from the very get-go.
And to be honest, I don't think your logic that it didn't holds up. Just because you had to build the boot disk with CP/M doesn't mean it was CP/M formatted, any more than the fact early GNU/Linux users had to set up a boot disk under DOS meant the resultant operating system was FAT based. CP/M (indirectly, by virtue of requiring a standardized BIOS) gave you raw access to the disks themselves, and building a boot disk for ANY operating system, CP/M or otherwise, required you write raw sectors.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd like more information before assuming you're correct. It does contradict what I've read elsewhere, and there's nothing about the "boot disk" thing that actually says it had to work that way.
Think of the following issues:
1. Black-hat SEO. It would be trivially easy to get a site miscategorized, simply by changing the content after categorization (and it'd be simple to fool Yahoo's bots into thinking such changes are minimal.)
2. Legal issues. You want Yahoo to reject certain sites from being categorized. (Also: you want Yahoo not to reject certain sites from being categorized, but the MPAA may disagree with you...) However, if their service became as popular as it was in the mid-nineties, to the point it's the first stop for most searchers, you'd start to get a lot of regulatory interest. As it is, Google, which is fully automatic, gets regulator interest rather frequently. Can you imagine the problems associated with a manually updated index?
Now, in addition to all of that, you're putting in a ball park figure of $400m+ to set this up (I'm not sure, from that, what the maintenance costs are, because this index is going to get pretty useless if it isn't updated!)
Is this going to attract advertising worth that? And, moreover, from Yahoo's point of view, that's a hell of a lot of money compared to the cost of writing a crawler/indexer. The top home page in the country is Google, the core of which is a search engine that probably cost a few tens of millions to write over ten years (I'm not saying the whole of Google cost that, but GMail, Google News, etc, are additional services just as Yahoo Mail and Yahoo News are.)
Don't get me wrong, I'd like a good directory search and I really missed it when Yahoo stopped updating their's. But I still think the concept is impractical today. The web is too big for this to be cost effective. There are legal issues that were barely considered worth sniffing at in the mid-nineties.
If Yahoo have $400m in spare change lying around, I think they can spend it on something more useful. And they probably believe they can spend it on something more profitable.
Well, those are products, not strengths - at least, not from a turning-the-business-around way.
I do agree they're good as a long time Yahoo Mail user myself - although the intrusive ads in Yahoo Mail need to go away, as it's unusable on a smaller screen.
I'd love that too, but the web has grown so large it's difficult to see how such a directory could be maintained properly.
There are projects, like DMoz, out there that attempt to, but they really have their limitations.
Yeah, that though would have been OK 15 years ago. Yahoo had its own strengths, it was an innovator, and did some awesome stuff like the first genuinely useful webmail, the my.yahoo.com thing, and - OK, probably not as useful if implemented today - but the original directory based search was awesome at the time.
But it doesn't really have any strengths right now. It's a husk of its former self, a company that' had no ideas how to run itself as it got larger, and thought "I know, let's just copy all the other faceless corporations" was a great way to fix everything. Its founders left because they neither understood how large corporations work, nor understood the problems that go with that way of working - the stifling, anti-creativity, anti-individualism that such corporations inflict upon their employee base.
And it's hard, really, to think of a technology company that's following that model that's actually doing OK at the moment. Maybe Amazon is there, I don't know, but Amazon has a Jobs-lite like character at the top, so it just about gets away with it.
Copying the way Google works? Well, Google is innovative, encourages its employees to be creative, and seems to be being rewarded for doing so. If you're a large Internet concern that's been going in the wrong direction for a while, looking over at Google seems to be a good approach.
I just saw this image on his home page, for the love of... why did Byte consider him a technology columnist again?
Jerry Pournelle, former Byte columnist, original Internet Kook (seriously, Google for it) and writer of pulp-scifi made the claim I disputed that Kildall actually demonstrated a hidden secret key sequence that causes PC DOS to claim it's ripped off CP/M code. (Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS#cite_ref-1)
Like I said, I think it's crap, but it's simply not true that nobody has ever claimed that 86-DOS didn't steal code from CP/M. And much as I don't take Pournelle seriously, I can't ignore the fact many do.
I'm about 90% sure you're wrong on this. CP/M's file system doesn't really resemble FAT at a low level. FAT actually originated as the file system implemented by Microsoft's early stand-alone BASIC implementations.
CP/M's file system was extremely crude, being comprised largely of a single table containing the directory, with the rest of the disk containing the data. Each directory entry contained pointers to up to 16 blocks, if a file contained more than that it had to have multiple directory entries.
FAT has multiple tablers, and FAT's system is, ultimately, based upon chains of clusters, and the directories simply point at the starting cluster, with the information about the groups of clusters themselves stored in a separate table (the actual FAT.)
They're both hideous, but they're not remotely similar.
I never said anything remotely similar.
What I said, which I believe is true, is that CP/M had to read the whole directory to find out what parts of the disk were empty. Many of the optimizations that occurred between 1.3 and 2.x were to address this specific issue.
Thanks for the pretty lecture, but you, apparently, have confused your idealistic views of what the terms should mean with how they're used in practice.
To spell it out for you. Statist is almost always used to mean "Any view that holds the government should do anything about anything." You can see this in the originator of this thread, a pseudo-libertarian rant that ascribes any conventionally proposed government action against AGW to be "statist". "I'm enlightened", sayeth the poster, "I can see there are non-statist things we can do too!" Well, great. Because the conventionally proposed government actions have to do with tradable CO2 production quotas and low wattage lightbulbs. Now you can make an argument, if you so wish, that this has to do with a subset of governments involving "elites", but leaving aside the misuse of the term to the point that it's meaningless in discourse in 2012, the fact is "statist" here simply refers to a proposal that the government use its power in any way whatsoever.
Which is how it's always used. Except perhaps in your own writings. Good for you, but epic fail on ignoring how everyone else is using it.
"States rights". That refers, objectively, to the proposal that States should be able to pass any damned law they wish, and fuck individuals, and especially fuck the Feds if the Feds try to restrict this in any way whatsoever. Now I can prove this quite easily, and I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this term isn't about "limiting" government through scope, but by "empowering one government at the expense of other people and governments".
How? Well, the defining issue as far as States Rights go is not the ability to regulate CO2 production, or sell low wattage lightbulbs - although, like the latter, it does cover degrees of whiteness.
No, the defining States Right issue is race, and the audacity of the Federal Government to trample upon the God-given right of every State to treat Black people like shit. Slavery? States rights! (Funnily enough, the right of a state to refuse to return slaves is never considered a "States Rights" issue by those who use the term.) Opting out of the Union because the other States aren't helping Slave States enforce slavery? "States Rights". Jim Crow? "States Rights". Preventing black people from getting edumicated? "States Rights". Clamping down on Civil rights marches? "States Rights". Preventing black people from voting? "States Rights".
Now, to be fair, the same people will occasionally use it elsewhere, but rarely in any way that suggests individuals be empowered first and foremost, and the Federal government limited with State governments given limited powers that respect individuals. No, it's pretty much a straightforward "Wah! Wah!! The Federal Government says my State has to stop purging its voter rolls of people with funny names. Its time for States Rights FTW!"
Again, that's how it's used. Except perhaps in your own writings. Good for you, but epic fail on ignoring how everyone else is using it.
A lot of the proposals have to do with changes in land use, and specifically abolishing the outlawing of mixed and high/medium density development zoning you get in the US at the moment. While many people, even with the choice to live close to the businesses that serve them, will still insist on living in the middle of nowhere, the fact is a lot of us would choose to live in such neighborhoods if they were available and - with supply being increased - were no longer horrendously expensive.
That's one major policy change that would make a difference. Not everyone wants to drive a friggin' car just get a gallon of milk, and very few people want to spend 2-3 times as much on groceries as they would in a country where land, and therefore the transportation of commodities, is planned more effectively.
The problem right now is that the far right has successfully painted the entire process of dealing with climate change as something that would reduce choice and force people to give things up. The reality is that there are plenty of policy changes the US government can make that would increase choices and result in a massive reduction in the amount of CO2 emitted.
The bit I love is the fact the same people who use the term "statist" tend to also be the people who use the term "State's Rights" and consider it a positive term, apparently not realizing the link between the two words.
And before I get flamed, yes, I'm aware people who approve of "States Rights" are simply choosing States against Federal or individual rights; in other words picking which government slips on the shackles over your ankles.
More likely CodeSuite is right.
I know everyone wants to believe the story that a devious Bill Gates simply changed the copyright message on a copy of CP/M and re-released it, but there are numerous issues with the story:
- CP/M is tiny. Really, really, small. And has a well documented API. Anyone conversant in 808x assembler can put together a clone in a matter of days. This isn't an academic statement, I put together one myself for a A Level Computer Science course in the 1980s when I wrote a "CP/M emulator" for the Sinclair QL as my final project. (Appropriately the Sinclair QL's native operating system is also called QDOS. Go figure.)
- QDOS wasn't even a direct clone. The largest - or at least most complex - component of CP/M is the file system - almost everything else is an almost 1:1 call to a BIOS routine. And QDOS didn't have CP/M's file system - it used FAT, not the somewhat inefficient CP/M system which, IIRC, required scanning the entire directory to determine where the free sectors were. So even if someone had started off with a copy of CP/M and directly ported it, 90% of it or more would have had to be rewritten to produce QDOS.
The stories of Gary Kildall typing in some obscure set of keystrokes causing a copy of PC DOS to announce that it was actually CP/M - haha! - always struck me as improbable, and the fact they only appeared in dubious sources several years after this had supposedly happened makes me think the stories are outright fabrications. That doesn't mean there weren't potential copyright issues, and I suspect most of the stories of IBM somehow settling with DR over the similarities have some elements of truth - but this is because this was the early eighties, the era of Pacman lawsuits, to be followed a few years later by Apple's infamous look and feel suits against DR and Microsoft/HP.
In terms of actual code being copied however - no. It would, arguably, have taken more work to translate CP/M into 8086 assembler and then make all of the changes necessary to turn it into QDOS than it would to write QDOS from scratch. QDOS had a similar API, and a similar but not identical shell. Otherwise it wasn't remotely similar.