In general, I don't actually have to "have trust" in the companies I do business with. I have the protection of the legal system and contract law that says if they stiff me, I can sue them or bring them up on charges (depending on whether it's a broken contract or outright fraud).
That "content providers" have been getting away with writing one-sided so-called "terms of service" that say they don't have to actually let you use what you bought is a big fat scam. Vote with your wallet, vote with products returns (most states have "Implied warranty for fitness of use" laws that trump "we guarantee nothing" warranties and "no return" store policies) and stop letting this kind of crap go by. Use the laws that are meant to protect YOU from them; they certainly don't hesitate to use the laws to prey on you.
The majority of users probably have no idea what DRM is and are thus unaffected
That wasn't true 5 years ago for music, which is why vendors are dropping DRM'd formats--they don't sell as well as plain old MP3s. It's currently becoming a big deal for E-books, because the cutting-edge of E-publishing is Romance & Erotica-- and R&E readers frequently aren't the kind of people who want to chase down pirate versions or DRM-cracking software; they just want to read their E-books without hassle. They perceive DRM as an increasing hassle, and are voting with their wallets and comments on forums like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books about Amazon's Kindle DRM and any other scheme that doesn't let them read their already purchased E-books on the device of their choice, when they want to, where they want to. Once they've been bitten by the downsides of DRM, they don't bother with cracked or pirated editions; they just don't buy from publishers that load their E-books down with DRM.
This is not a small niche market. This is the single largest-selling genre in publishing. You do not want to piss that many readers off if you want to stay in business.
1) The Code of Hammurabi was not an organized law code in the sense that Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis (aka. the Codex Justinianus) was. It was more like a compiled set of legal precedents, some of which are complex and arcane. It is NOT a good example of a "simple" legal system. It was, however, a unified set of precedents that applied across the entire empire, as opposed to every city having their own probably differing precedents.
2) The society of Hammurabi was NOT vastly simpler. Read up on the laws and society of ancient Babylon sometime; it some ways, it was surprisingly modern... not unlike ancient Rome in that respect.
3) Bodies of law seem to grow like kudzu until some one with extra-legal powers comes along and whacks the thicket back down to something manageable, and says, "This will now be the law of the land". They become known in history as "lawgivers", then the simplified system grows kudzu for the next thousand years... (cf. Sulla, Justinian, Draco, Solon, Napoleon... or check out legal codes in general.)
4)...or someone tries to collate the body of law and precedents into a work that explains it in a reasonable fashion--something like taking the kudzu and arranging it on a trellis. (cf. Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England). (NB: Blackstone is the definitive source for pre-Revolutionary War Common Law in the United States).
Nope, I diss him because he strongly implies that he dates woman not because he gives a damn about them as people, but because he wants a warm body to screw. He also says, and I quote, "Romantic relationships are about leverage, control, and compromise."
To me, this says "I manipulate the women I date so I can sleep with them". Compromise is a necessary part of a good relationship; the other two items have no business being in a good relationship. Anyone, male or female, who thinks that they are is waving a big red flag that says "Do NOT get involved with this person!" It can only end unhappily.
So, for his sake, and the sake of any women who make the mistake of seeking a fulfilling relationship with him, I hope he gets his legal prostitution. If all you want is sex with a warm body, it's cruel to manipulate other people who are seeking intimacy and companionship with the expectation that they're getting it.
Yep, it's called "tree-farming". Pretty standard for pulpwood these days; it's managed like any other crop. Sure, it's on a longer cycle than wheat, and it's taller, but the basic concept is the same.
The days of clear-cutting for pulpwood in the U.S. are long over. The big paper (& lumber) companies (Weyhauser, Georgia-Pacific, etc) own huge tracts of fast-growing pulpwood trees (like Loblolly & Slash Pines) that they farm in the Deep South and elsewhere. There's still more land that is held by individuals that lease the "crop" of trees to the paper companies, like the parent poster's grandmother.
Paper is a renewable resource; "Save a tree" makes about as much sense as "save a loaf of bread".
Given that the same lumber & paper companies own huge tracts of timber in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere, I suspect the lumber business is going the same route into managed farming, rather than cutting "wild" timber, especially as permission to clear-cut "wild" forests gets harder and harder to get.
I hope they legalize prostitution then, because with that attitude, you'd be a terrible boyfriend and a soon-to-be-divorced husband. Oh wait, you are...
Er... that would have been true ten years ago. Not these days. The rules changed.
Apparently she hadn't heard about the "creating a hostile work environment" test that is standard now. Gawd knows I have, seeing as work requires harassment training annually.
Several of them are defense contractors, so if you aren't in the defense industry, they're not going to be household names. Many of them produce foundational tech or infrastructure--you never heard if it because it's not a consumer brand name, but your house or car or computer would be so 19th century without it.
It's not a great claim for MA, though--many of those companies have satellite offices all over the country and just keep the corporate HQ in MA. The work is done elsewhere.
Dude, where can I find semi-current source for Cthangband? My daughter loves that game and it's gotten hard to find with the new "official" Angband site not carrying all the variants the way Thangorodrim did.
Every time I get attracted to an IDE, my next job doesn't have it available. Currently my IDE is gvim!! Last job, I think I was using xemacs. I'm happy if I have syntax coloring and mouse-driven text selection, so gvim or xemacs works.
Stuff like Eclipse is shiny and really nice, but if it takes 6 months - 1 year to get new software packages approved for use, IF you can make a case for them, and you've already got gvim on the computer.... you edit with gvim. Or vim. And build with make. I prefer using a Makefile anyway--I can see what steps are being used to generate my code, and control what's linked in easily. (unlike MS Visual Studio, which by default linked in the entire kitchen, complete with sink).
Oh, and will people please stop with the bubble sorts? That's one of the least efficient simple sorts around, but it's the algorithm everyone remembers when they have to pull a sort out of their ass on the fly. Why can't people remember insertion sort or selection sort instead? They're just as simple and more efficient!
Actually, for practical purposes, books frequently AREN'T still out there. Too many school budgets don't allow the school library to keep current with encyclopedias, science books, and other books in fields that are fast-changing. Heck, even public libraries have that problem: look in the computer books section and see if they have anything newer than "Windows 95 for Dummies"!
Wikipedia is far more up-to-date than whatever elderly edition of Encyclopedia (something) the school library has. It also provides a real-time lab in some of the dirty little secrets of science and information: the guys who write the science articles can be biased, and not necessarily right, and attitudes and information change. This was just as true in the heyday of "authoritative" sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica, but hidden from readers. (Read articles about things American in really old editions of Britannica if you want to see scholarly bias in print Encyclopedias!) With Wikipedia, teach 'em to check the 'Talk' and 'History' pages and teach them about edit wars, and they'll have a better understanding of why you use multiple sources and check them carefully.
Out-of-date information is sometimes worse than no information, because you learn as 'fact' things that aren't true, and the 'facts' we learn as children shape our view of reality. There are problems with having a view of reality based on bad science or fictional history.
This leads to a related rant: Adults should not stop learning just because they've left school and aren't being graded on it anymore. In the last decade, I've been shocked by how many things that I learned as an elementary or high school student either were erroneious or were ridiculously oversimplified. Brontosaurs didn't live in swamps to support their vast weight, genetic inheritance isn't the simple picture Mendelev laid out, Tutankhamun's tomb was not the last remaining royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings (KV-5, baby!!), birds are actually dinosaurs, there's some really weird shit living at the bottom of the sea (black smokers!), Mars has LOTS of water, Mayan writing has been deciphered, there's not just a 10th planet, there's a whole fuckwad of trans-Neptunian planets (sorry, "dwarf planets") plus an extra asteroid belt, there are known planets orbiting other stars (and hot Jupiters!), extremophiles, Jupiter's formerly-mysterious Red Spot is a really huge hurricane, etc, etc, etc....
I disagree. The F-117 looked like nothing built on Earth previously; it looked like something that flew in from the set of "Star Wars". The B-2 is equally alien-looking. Now that we've had stealth aircraft around for a while, and people have gotten used to their look, it's easy to say "oh, it's obvious they're terrestrial aircraft".
It wasn't back then. I strongly suspect that the F-117 and the B-2 generated more than a few UFO reports back before they were officially acknowledged to exist. I also suspect that the YF-22 and YF-23's abilities to fly sideways (3D thrust vectoring, dynamic instability) provoked a few UFO reports during early tests when the planes were still Top Secret because of the "impossible maneuvers for an airplane" bit.
> Down with soulless corporations. Restore proprietorships which are led by a moral human being.
This makes me laugh! The best places I've worked were huge 'soulless' corporations that had (required-by-law or legal settlement) civilized employee policies, EEOC policies, ethical policies, harassment policies, etc.
The biggest douches I've seen as bosses over other people were the owners of small businesses--who are legally exempt from most requirements to treat their slaves employees as real live human beings.
They fixed most of the worst NPC pathing problems (though I haven't checked lately to see if the pet pathing bug in the Circle of Five dungeon was fixed--necromancers really hated that one!), and fixed banshees screaming through walls, finally. Line-of-Sight still gets blocked in some dungeons and fortifications by imaginary deceased turtles and small tufts of grass, but the quirks of LOS-checking are pretty well understood these days (yes, arrows and bolts will still hit you if you were in LOS when they were launched but got behind cover before they arrived).
OTOH, every patch day is full of hilarious new surprises, because Mythic continues to be unable to make code changes without introducing at least one "interesting" bug. Last good one was the RP bug that let RVR'ers get 1.5 million RP in an evening--first bug in live code I've seen that required a full day rollback.
My favorite DAOC glitch I remember from the old days of Old Frontiers, where the safe PvE zones were divided from the RvR/PvP zones by a pathing barrier, not a zone-change. There were spots where you could wiggle under the moutains at building corners and then run *under* the mountains unimpeded by pathing restrictions from the RvR zones to the PvE zones. One can imagine the results of this.
There were some well-known screenshots of an infamous level 50 Midgard dwarf runemaster's rampage through the Albion newbie PvE zones at one time....
Sadly, this went away when they introduced New Frontiers, where the RvR/PvP zones were put in a different zone from the PvE areas.
I'm a fan of strategy games rather than FPS (I'm too slow and nervous to handle mobs jumping out of the woodwork at me), and I still play Pharaoh/Cleopatra (even Caesar II on occasion). The graphics are SVGA at best, but for a bird's eye view of a city, who needs more? The gameplay continues to fascinate after a decade.
The Civilization series is much the same, though Civ IV certainly has lots of "teh shiny"--but they also added some interesting extra factors (religion, better diplomacy) and cleaned up some annoying AI behavior that Civ III had. Until Civ IV came along, I thought Civ II was the best, but Civ IV has NPC nations that actually respond well to diplomacy (read: trade goods, don't beat them up), as opposed to just putting off the date of their sneak attack if you're diplomatic (read: pay the Danegeld), which they did in Civ II.
I tend to stick with a game I like for decades--sometimes I still break out Angband and play it.
Er, no. Having read David McCullough's rather fascinating biography of John Adams, I am aware that he was pretty much a middle-class lawyer. Thomas Jefferson was a big land-owner--massively in debt all the time. George Washington was definitely a wealthy landowner, unlike many of his plantation-owning peers who were head-over-heels in debt like Jefferson--because Washington was quite smart about not living beyond his means and making sure his land actually earned money.
The American Revolution was a bunch of American upper-middle-class businessmen throwing off the monarchy and the laws enacted by Parliment to protect British mercantile interests at the expense of American mercantile interests. People who had worked hard to make a success of themselves in the Colonies rather justifiably didn't see why they should be impoverished by unfair laws designed to make rich manufacturers back in England still richer.
I was on a federal jury once. I kept asking the judge for clarification about points of the law that the suspect was being tried under that I didn't understand (which you are fully entitled to do, btw--judge said so in his instructions). The judge made me jury foreman because I kept asking him questions.
I guess he figured I wasn't afraid to talk to the judge.
We used to get around this by having my daughter's music teacher tell me what the notes, timing and scale to use were, and I'd whip off original sheet music using Lilypond. Copyright: mine.
*Only* 200 years old? Read the Satires of Juvenal, where he's mocking the deviant behavior of young people those days, during the height of the Roman Empire.
You can go further back to some Greek whose name I forget who was complaining about long-haired, disrespectful youths back in 400 B.C. or so.
I think there's some ancient Egyptian texts surviving from the First Intermediate Period where the writer is lamenting how much things suck compared to "the old days" (The Old Kingdom).
No matter when you are, the old days were better, unless the old days were during the height of the Black Death.
I suspect the Royal Navy's records will tell you the date it was built and lost. Yes, civilized nations with long histories keep records going that far back.
It's far more complicated than that. Some of our ocean floor data is obtained through classified channels, and thus can't be published; even more of it is obtained via treaties and agreements that make the data "unclassified, restricted to DOD only", which means it still can't be published on Google.
There are actually three such lakes, and both the Rwandan lake and the lake in Cameroon haveerupted in the past, killing hundreds of people and thousands of livestock.
I remember when those eruptions happened, in the mid-1980s. It was world news, because it was such an utterly bizarre disaster right out of a bad scifi movie. I mean, who expects the deep lake you live near to barf suffocating gas one day and kill everyone downhill from it?
Slashdot Mirror
In general, I don't actually have to "have trust" in the companies I do business with. I have the protection of the legal system and contract law that says if they stiff me, I can sue them or bring them up on charges (depending on whether it's a broken contract or outright fraud).
That "content providers" have been getting away with writing one-sided so-called "terms of service" that say they don't have to actually let you use what you bought is a big fat scam. Vote with your wallet, vote with products returns (most states have "Implied warranty for fitness of use" laws that trump "we guarantee nothing" warranties and "no return" store policies) and stop letting this kind of crap go by. Use the laws that are meant to protect YOU from them; they certainly don't hesitate to use the laws to prey on you.
The majority of users probably have no idea what DRM is and are thus unaffected
That wasn't true 5 years ago for music, which is why vendors are dropping DRM'd formats--they don't sell as well as plain old MP3s. It's currently becoming a big deal for E-books, because the cutting-edge of E-publishing is Romance & Erotica-- and R&E readers frequently aren't the kind of people who want to chase down pirate versions or DRM-cracking software; they just want to read their E-books without hassle. They perceive DRM as an increasing hassle, and are voting with their wallets and comments on forums like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books about Amazon's Kindle DRM and any other scheme that doesn't let them read their already purchased E-books on the device of their choice, when they want to, where they want to. Once they've been bitten by the downsides of DRM, they don't bother with cracked or pirated editions; they just don't buy from publishers that load their E-books down with DRM.
This is not a small niche market. This is the single largest-selling genre in publishing. You do not want to piss that many readers off if you want to stay in business.
1) The Code of Hammurabi was not an organized law code in the sense that Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis (aka. the Codex Justinianus) was. It was more like a compiled set of legal precedents, some of which are complex and arcane. It is NOT a good example of a "simple" legal system. It was, however, a unified set of precedents that applied across the entire empire, as opposed to every city having their own probably differing precedents.
2) The society of Hammurabi was NOT vastly simpler. Read up on the laws and society of ancient Babylon sometime; it some ways, it was surprisingly modern... not unlike ancient Rome in that respect.
3) Bodies of law seem to grow like kudzu until some one with extra-legal powers comes along and whacks the thicket back down to something manageable, and says, "This will now be the law of the land". They become known in history as "lawgivers", then the simplified system grows kudzu for the next thousand years... (cf. Sulla, Justinian, Draco, Solon, Napoleon... or check out legal codes in general.)
4) ...or someone tries to collate the body of law and precedents into a work that explains it in a reasonable fashion--something like taking the kudzu and arranging it on a trellis. (cf. Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England). (NB: Blackstone is the definitive source for pre-Revolutionary War Common Law in the United States).
Nope, I diss him because he strongly implies that he dates woman not because he gives a damn about them as people, but because he wants a warm body to screw. He also says, and I quote, "Romantic relationships are about leverage, control, and compromise."
To me, this says "I manipulate the women I date so I can sleep with them". Compromise is a necessary part of a good relationship; the other two items have no business being in a good relationship. Anyone, male or female, who thinks that they are is waving a big red flag that says "Do NOT get involved with this person!" It can only end unhappily.
So, for his sake, and the sake of any women who make the mistake of seeking a fulfilling relationship with him, I hope he gets his legal prostitution. If all you want is sex with a warm body, it's cruel to manipulate other people who are seeking intimacy and companionship with the expectation that they're getting it.
Yep, it's called "tree-farming". Pretty standard for pulpwood these days; it's managed like any other crop. Sure, it's on a longer cycle than wheat, and it's taller, but the basic concept is the same.
The days of clear-cutting for pulpwood in the U.S. are long over. The big paper (& lumber) companies (Weyhauser, Georgia-Pacific, etc) own huge tracts of fast-growing pulpwood trees (like Loblolly & Slash Pines) that they farm in the Deep South and elsewhere. There's still more land that is held by individuals that lease the "crop" of trees to the paper companies, like the parent poster's grandmother.
Paper is a renewable resource; "Save a tree" makes about as much sense as "save a loaf of bread".
Given that the same lumber & paper companies own huge tracts of timber in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere, I suspect the lumber business is going the same route into managed farming, rather than cutting "wild" timber, especially as permission to clear-cut "wild" forests gets harder and harder to get.
Congratulations, Mr. Thomas! You have re-invented the concept of the embedded operating system.
*hands Keir Thomas his "Innovative Transportation Concept: The WHEEL!" Award *
Too bad industry has been using embedded OSs for about 40 years now...
I hope they legalize prostitution then, because with that attitude, you'd be a terrible boyfriend and a soon-to-be-divorced husband. Oh wait, you are...
Er... that would have been true ten years ago. Not these days. The rules changed.
Apparently she hadn't heard about the "creating a hostile work environment" test that is standard now. Gawd knows I have, seeing as work requires harassment training annually.
Several of them are defense contractors, so if you aren't in the defense industry, they're not going to be household names. Many of them produce foundational tech or infrastructure--you never heard if it because it's not a consumer brand name, but your house or car or computer would be so 19th century without it.
It's not a great claim for MA, though--many of those companies have satellite offices all over the country and just keep the corporate HQ in MA. The work is done elsewhere.
Dude, where can I find semi-current source for Cthangband? My daughter loves that game and it's gotten hard to find with the new "official" Angband site not carrying all the variants the way Thangorodrim did.
Every time I get attracted to an IDE, my next job doesn't have it available. Currently my IDE is gvim!!
Last job, I think I was using xemacs. I'm happy if I have syntax coloring and mouse-driven text selection, so gvim or xemacs works.
Stuff like Eclipse is shiny and really nice, but if it takes 6 months - 1 year to get new software packages approved for use, IF you can make a case for them, and you've already got gvim on the computer.... you edit with gvim. Or vim. And build with make. I prefer using a Makefile anyway--I can see what steps are being used to generate my code, and control what's linked in easily. (unlike MS Visual Studio, which by default linked in the entire kitchen, complete with sink).
Oh, and will people please stop with the bubble sorts? That's one of the least efficient simple sorts around, but it's the algorithm everyone remembers when they have to pull a sort out of their ass on the fly. Why can't people remember insertion sort or selection sort instead? They're just as simple and more efficient!
Actually, for practical purposes, books frequently AREN'T still out there. Too many school budgets don't allow the school library to keep current with encyclopedias, science books, and other books in fields that are fast-changing. Heck, even public libraries have that problem: look in the computer books section and see if they have anything newer than "Windows 95 for Dummies"!
Wikipedia is far more up-to-date than whatever elderly edition of Encyclopedia (something) the school library has. It also provides a real-time lab in some of the dirty little secrets of science and information: the guys who write the science articles can be biased, and not necessarily right, and attitudes and information change. This was just as true in the heyday of "authoritative" sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica, but hidden from readers. (Read articles about things American in really old editions of Britannica if you want to see scholarly bias in print Encyclopedias!) With Wikipedia, teach 'em to check the 'Talk' and 'History' pages and teach them about edit wars, and they'll have a better understanding of why you use multiple sources and check them carefully.
Out-of-date information is sometimes worse than no information, because you learn as 'fact' things that aren't true, and the 'facts' we learn as children shape our view of reality. There are problems with having a view of reality based on bad science or fictional history.
This leads to a related rant: Adults should not stop learning just because they've left school and aren't being graded on it anymore. In the last decade, I've been shocked by how many things that I learned as an elementary or high school student either were erroneious or were ridiculously oversimplified. Brontosaurs didn't live in swamps to support their vast weight, genetic inheritance isn't the simple picture Mendelev laid out, Tutankhamun's tomb was not the last remaining royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings (KV-5, baby!!), birds are actually dinosaurs, there's some really weird shit living at the bottom of the sea (black smokers!), Mars has LOTS of water, Mayan writing has been deciphered, there's not just a 10th planet, there's a whole fuckwad of trans-Neptunian planets (sorry, "dwarf planets") plus an extra asteroid belt, there are known planets orbiting other stars (and hot Jupiters!), extremophiles, Jupiter's formerly-mysterious Red Spot is a really huge hurricane, etc, etc, etc....
I disagree. The F-117 looked like nothing built on Earth previously; it looked like something that flew in from the set of "Star Wars". The B-2 is equally alien-looking. Now that we've had stealth aircraft around for a while, and people have gotten used to their look, it's easy to say "oh, it's obvious they're terrestrial aircraft".
It wasn't back then. I strongly suspect that the F-117 and the B-2 generated more than a few UFO reports back before they were officially acknowledged to exist. I also suspect that the YF-22 and YF-23's abilities to fly sideways (3D thrust vectoring, dynamic instability) provoked a few UFO reports during early tests when the planes were still Top Secret because of the "impossible maneuvers for an airplane" bit.
> Down with soulless corporations. Restore proprietorships which are led by a moral human being.
This makes me laugh! The best places I've worked were huge 'soulless' corporations that had (required-by-law or legal settlement) civilized employee policies, EEOC policies, ethical policies, harassment policies, etc.
The biggest douches I've seen as bosses over other people were the owners of small businesses--who are legally exempt from most requirements to treat their slaves employees as real live human beings.
re: DAOC:
They fixed most of the worst NPC pathing problems (though I haven't checked lately to see if the pet pathing bug in the Circle of Five dungeon was fixed--necromancers really hated that one!), and fixed banshees screaming through walls, finally. Line-of-Sight still gets blocked in some dungeons and fortifications by imaginary deceased turtles and small tufts of grass, but the quirks of LOS-checking are pretty well understood these days (yes, arrows and bolts will still hit you if you were in LOS when they were launched but got behind cover before they arrived).
OTOH, every patch day is full of hilarious new surprises, because Mythic continues to be unable to make code changes without introducing at least one "interesting" bug. Last good one was the RP bug that let RVR'ers get 1.5 million RP in an evening--first bug in live code I've seen that required a full day rollback.
My favorite DAOC glitch I remember from the old days of Old Frontiers, where the safe PvE zones were divided from the RvR/PvP zones by a pathing barrier, not a zone-change. There were spots where you could wiggle under the moutains at building corners and then run *under* the mountains unimpeded by pathing restrictions from the RvR zones to the PvE zones. One can imagine the results of this.
There were some well-known screenshots of an infamous level 50 Midgard dwarf runemaster's rampage through the Albion newbie PvE zones at one time....
Sadly, this went away when they introduced New Frontiers, where the RvR/PvP zones were put in a different zone from the PvE areas.
I'm a fan of strategy games rather than FPS (I'm too slow and nervous to handle mobs jumping out of the woodwork at me), and I still play Pharaoh/Cleopatra (even Caesar II on occasion). The graphics are SVGA at best, but for a bird's eye view of a city, who needs more? The gameplay continues to fascinate after a decade.
The Civilization series is much the same, though Civ IV certainly has lots of "teh shiny"--but they also added some interesting extra factors (religion, better diplomacy) and cleaned up some annoying AI behavior that Civ III had. Until Civ IV came along, I thought Civ II was the best, but Civ IV has NPC nations that actually respond well to diplomacy (read: trade goods, don't beat them up), as opposed to just putting off the date of their sneak attack if you're diplomatic (read: pay the Danegeld), which they did in Civ II.
I tend to stick with a game I like for decades--sometimes I still break out Angband and play it.
Er, no. Having read David McCullough's rather fascinating biography of John Adams, I am aware that he was pretty much a middle-class lawyer. Thomas Jefferson was a big land-owner--massively in debt all the time. George Washington was definitely a wealthy landowner, unlike many of his plantation-owning peers who were head-over-heels in debt like Jefferson--because Washington was quite smart about not living beyond his means and making sure his land actually earned money.
The American Revolution was a bunch of American upper-middle-class businessmen throwing off the monarchy and the laws enacted by Parliment to protect British mercantile interests at the expense of American mercantile interests. People who had worked hard to make a success of themselves in the Colonies rather justifiably didn't see why they should be impoverished by unfair laws designed to make rich manufacturers back in England still richer.
I was on a federal jury once. I kept asking the judge for clarification about points of the law that the suspect was being tried under that I didn't understand (which you are fully entitled to do, btw--judge said so in his instructions). The judge made me jury foreman because I kept asking him questions.
I guess he figured I wasn't afraid to talk to the judge.
We used to get around this by having my daughter's music teacher tell me what the notes, timing and scale to use were, and I'd whip off original sheet music using Lilypond. Copyright: mine.
*Only* 200 years old? Read the Satires of Juvenal, where he's mocking the deviant behavior of young people those days, during the height of the Roman Empire.
You can go further back to some Greek whose name I forget who was complaining about long-haired, disrespectful youths back in 400 B.C. or so.
I think there's some ancient Egyptian texts surviving from the First Intermediate Period where the writer is lamenting how much things suck compared to "the old days" (The Old Kingdom).
No matter when you are, the old days were better, unless the old days were during the height of the Black Death.
Well, you could come back to DAOC. Some of us are still there, keeping the lights on.
I suspect the Royal Navy's records will tell you the date it was built and lost. Yes, civilized nations with long histories keep records going that far back.
It's far more complicated than that. Some of our ocean floor data is obtained through classified channels, and thus can't be published; even more of it is obtained via treaties and agreements that make the data "unclassified, restricted to DOD only", which means it still can't be published on Google.
I don't know what magical land you're living in but here in Australia a publication is libellous if it:
Probably the magical land of the United States of America, since that is a well-known standard of libel and slander law here.
There are actually three such lakes, and both the Rwandan lake and the lake in Cameroon have erupted in the past, killing hundreds of people and thousands of livestock.
I remember when those eruptions happened, in the mid-1980s. It was world news, because it was such an utterly bizarre disaster right out of a bad scifi movie. I mean, who expects the deep lake you live near to barf suffocating gas one day and kill everyone downhill from it?