How about electrical engineers. Still too vague? How about electrical engineers involved in high speed analog and digital design? How about civil engineers? Too vague? Civil engineers who are involved in ensuring public safety through specifying how a foundation for a building should be designed given knowledge of the soil and bedrock beneath a proposed site.
You trolled for fields then trolled further for specific fields. There are a couple of years required before you can really begin your engineering education. After a couple more years you've got an engineering degree. In theory you could do this without a university just as in theory you could study everything required to be a doctor without going to medical school (which, sorry to burst your bubble of ignorance is a school or college within a university). The degree ensures that there's at least some possibility that the person meets a set of minimum credentials. I try to avoid self professed doctors like the plague, just as I would avoid hiring any self professed civil engineers for any multi billion dollar buildings I put up.
There is no job (except scientist/professor) which a
university can prepare you for. Can you give any other examples?
Engineers, doctors, computer scientists (v.s. code monkeys who only know how to write code, they don't know how to architect a system. They're closer to translators in that they translate somebody elses English language specification into Perl or Java or C etc), nurses, dieticians.
In principle it is really bad. I'm not against corporate research, but I am against the bullying that will go with it. Look at the Monsanto corporation. First put things in a bit of perspective.
Imagine you're in your back yard, its a beautiful day. Your parents taught you that fences build good neighbours so your yard is fenced in. You are on friendly terms with your neighbours though. It so happens that one of your neighbours has an apple tree. It's in their yard but when the wind blows just right apples blow into your yard. You don't mind at all (though you wouldn't mind if the wind blew in another direction during the fall) because these are good apples, your favourite variety in fact. Usually you pick them up and eat them. At some time you miss an apple though. The apple and the seeds in it do what a half billion years of evolutionary programming has taught it: It grows and it flourishes. Now you've got an apple tree in your backyard, you didn't plant it, you didn't steal the seeds but still its there. Your neighbour doesn't care and you don't mind either. These apples are good eating.
Now for a more dystopian take consider the Monsanto corporation and their genetically modified canola seeds. A farmer in Canada grows 'natural' canola, he doesn't believe the glossies put out by Monsanto. Neighbouring farms don't feel the same way though, so they purchase Monsanto's genetically modified seeds. These seeds have been modified at the genetic level to resist a fairly powerful form of herbicide which it so happens Monsanto sells. The herbicide in question goes by the trade name of Roundup, and the seeds are referred to as Roundup Ready.
Similar to your story of the apple the winds blow and some of these genetically modified seeds find their way onto the farmers land. Just like the apple they obey a half billion years of evolution and germinate. From the farmers perspective these seeds and the plants they produce are a contaminant. This farmer purposely chooses to sell unmodified canola. This contaminant represents the intellectual property of Monsanto however and from Monsanto's financially fueled perspective they see this as the theft of their property. They take the farmer to court over it. Despite the fact that the farmer never physically stole the seeds (they invaded his property on the winds) nor did he want them he loses the law suit. He's charged with the standard Monsanto fee per acre, punitive damages and to rub a little salt in the wound the only way he can determine how much of this contaminant is in his crop is to use Roundup - which will kill his crop but leave the genetically modified crop surviving.
This same company, Monsanto, also sells other variants of seeds (Cotton I believe) who's plants have been linked to an increased incidence of cancer.
I'm not against research, nor am I against genetically modified crops. We've been modifying the genes of crops and animals for millenia already through more standard needs. What I am against is runaway corporations that can buy whatever legislation or legal outcome they'd like.
Err... that should be Jeff Minter. I'd blame my typing skills but my brain was at fault.
P.S. the 2 minute wait thats hardcoded in to slashdot is assinine. It doesn't hinder the shit storm of the troll brigade and just annoys regular posters.
I'm not much of a gamer, which is probably why I see it this way, but those silly little Shockwave games are a lot more appealing to me than the latest first person shooter.
Shockwave gaming now reminds me of gaming on the Commodore 64. Sure, the technology was somewhat limited but it was made up for with excellent gameplay. People like Jeff Hinter would be at home writing Shockwave games I think.
There's a big difference between a kid killing a teacher and a kid killing himself. It's a shame that he did himself in, but guess what, it wasn't the schools fault. He got a slap on the wrist and committed suicide. That's not an example of somebody thats wired too soundly.
Oh, I know, don't punish kids for there mistakes. They might commit suicide. Don't fail kids because they can't keep up with the class. They might commit suicide. Award only A+ across the board, for kids might commit suicide otherwise.
he probably feels like an utter piece of shit right now, as he is directly responsible for the suicide. In fact, he basically killed him (metaphorically speaking).
Bullshit. He probably feels bad, but its not his fault. The kid did something stupid, he got caught, he was punished and then he comitted the ultimate act of stupidity.
Suppose he wasn't caught or wasn't punished. In a couple of years he'd ask some girl out and possibly be rejected. I suppose it'd be the girls fault that the kid killed himself then?
This isn't insightful, its mongoloid drivel. Most of what is a Macintosh is compatible with the rest of the world. Macintoshes use standard IDE drives (though I still wish SCSI was standard), standard RAM and USB for most human interface and expansion devices. It's also got IEEE1394, the standard connector for digital video gear.
Arguably the hardware is less powerful than a PC and arguably its more expensive. It also happens to be wonderfully put together. I'm using a PIII 733 with ATA100 drives and 1 gigabyte of PC133 CL2 memory right now. It dual boots Linux and Windows 2000. I've installed an IEEE1394 card to get DV capture for my Canon GL1 camcorder.
Given the specs this should have been a slam dunk. I hooked up my camcorder, started capturing frames and was astounded by the number of dropped frames. Contrast this to my experience with a lowly iMac in Sears. 900 bucks or so of computing power, a 500 MHz processor, 64 meg of PC66 memory and probably ATA33 disks. I clicked on iMovie, clicked on capture and it just did it. No dropped frames.
To get the POS to perform equally I had to resort to purchasing a second ATA100 drive.
Easy. To avoid lawsuits like this one. I don't know what the licensing fees for Gracenotes are, but the scenario is almost like economics. You've got the licensing costs, the price you sell your product for and the expected financial outcome for a law suit.
If the licensing costs are small relative to your profits on the product and if your expected financial outcome for a law suit is negative enough you choose to use Gracenotes. Roxio so far assumes that the expected financial outcome (probability of being sued multiplied by the financial outcome of the lawsuit) is close enough to zero to risk it. Other companies don't feel that way. Free (unencumbered) software authors can use different metrics since they aren't responsible to share holders or employees.
Probably around the same time the sun burns out unfortunately. Most people use Windows boxes and whatever they come with, or whatever is most popular. Most of these applications probably default to Gracenotes. Remember that for every linux user there are about 9 to 9.5 Windows users, probably more since many people dual boot or just have linux installed out of curiousity.
In a lot of peoples opinion Gracenote acted in poor faith. They took contributions from the public in the form of the actual data in their database and then closed many of those same users off from it. I know that data that I entered in their database is now locked off from me because I don't use a player or ripper thats been blessed (read as: I don't use a ripper or player that has payed cash to them) by Gracenote. When I entered the data I was under the impression that the database was free for all.
I don't even own a machine that can use Roxio's product, but I'm buying a copy just to support their use of freedb.org.
I'd just like to add, I'm not against his views. I just hate feeling like somebodies trying to manipulate me through false facts. It's a huge part of why I've given up on local papers for instance. I average information from a number of sources - hoping they're not all skewed the same way, though unfortunately on a lot of issues they are.
I don't know that he really does have a balanced view of the issues. He's rewritten a bit of history much the way Hollywood does to prove their point, sell their causes or sell movies. Read some of James Burke's essays to learn a bit about the history of writing and publication. Copying really wasn't unencumbered when it was done by hand, in fact this is where the church started aquiring a lot of power. Monks would transcribe books, of course quite possibly filtering out any objectionable content. The common man didn't copy books because they were kept illiterate. These books were sold to the wealthy, having a nice library was a status symbol.
Netscape's licensing is less of a threat though. We know and understand that it isn't free. What's dangerous is when you believe something is unencumbered but it really is. Maybe the license gives you the right to the source code but not the right to redistribute it. The license could be written so that at first glance it looks GPL or BSD compatible. Most people only really give things a first glance.
This little exchange reveals that the judge has only a poor grip on what digital storage is.
No, it doesn't reveal anything of the like, its a valid question. Digital storage isn't a panacea, its still subject to the axiom of 'garbage in, garbage out'. If digitally copying VHS tapes and potentially distributing them was the issue then it would still be digital, but wouldn't be a perfectly true copy. Look at a Tivo, it makes digital copies of television, but those copies can't be defined as a "Perfectly true copy".
Yes, subsequent copies will not lose any information, but they'll be perfect copies of a lossy copy.
Yes, melatonin is natural, but please be careful with it. Lot's of people seem to be blindly jumping on the melatonin bandwagon. Be aware that it can be inappropriate, especially for younger people. Use of melatonin can actually depress your natural production.
As for sleep problems, as a couple of other people posted, light has a lot to do with it. If you work in your well lit office, go home, sit down in your well lit den and type away on the computer you may be setting yourself up for difficulty sleeping.
While its new for Microsoft its nothing new in general. A lot of the software I use has exorbidant yearly licensing fees. For instance some of the more brutal ones are close to a million per year for 5 concurrent licenses. Oh, and then there's yearly support charges.
Even our desktop applications are leased and this is the way the bean counters like it. I'm sure there's some legal tax dodge involved or some figment of Wall Streets imagination that makes this look better on the books.
There's no mention that this will be enforced on small companies, of course, this could change.
There shouldn't be any recognized religions in my opinion. The process of deciding who gets to be a religion and who doesn't is too open to corruption and coersion. Should the worship of Roman gods be a recognized religion, and as such be exempt from taxation? What about christianity? What's your criteria for deciding beyond "I'm a christian and so I know I'm right"?
Put into a different light, even among christian sects there is dissention on who should and should not be recognized as a religion. Fundamentalist christians think that Roman Catholics are devil worshippers, at least if Jack Chick is to be believed. What about the Church of Latter Day Saints? Some guy has a vision that said polygamy is OK and its later retracted. Presently it still qualifies as a religion (a very rich one no less).
The problem with moderation isn't so much that things are modded up or down inappropriately but things are inappropriately unmoderated. Excessive upwards or downwards moderation is penalized in metamoderation. Many informative posts by Anonymous Cowards are left at 0. Many insightful posts that don't follow the party line are left at 1 or 0. Neither of these are captured by metamoderation.
The bulk of the moderators use their moderation points to reinforce their views rather than reward good commentary. It's been that way for quite a while which is what allowed karma whores to operate. If you can figure out what to post to increase your chances of upwards moderation you'll get moderated up.
I browse at -1, I no longer moderate though. I got tired of being hammered in metamoderation for doing what the moderation FAQ asked for: Reward good commentary, not views you sympathize with. Since I don't post often moderation put me in danger of ending up with negative karma.
That's the morons at x10.com. Do your part, take them up on any offers where they lose money. Do it repeatedly. They have many promotional offers that are big loss leaders, such as a decent X-10 starter kit for a few bucks.
I can't stand pop up adds, I can't stand pop up adds with excessive colour cycling even more. I shouldn't have to disable things, such as JavaScript, to not be annoyed. I prefer to retaliate by hitting them in the pocket book.
You might as well ask if pages 50-75 of 'War and Peace' express anything. Sure, there are a few random ideas in
those few pages, but nothing concrete. Nothing you can base an ideologcial argument on, but if you read the whole
of 'War and Peace', it's an entirely different matter.
I had thought of this argument just after I pressed submit. Oddly enough thats even the book I thought of. I'm still not sure that I can see any block of code as expression, but I still don't think code should be allowed to be silenced.
I feel this way while I don't see any expression in "MSWord" as a sequence of programming instructios I do feel that code can be an expression. Not all speech is expressive either, but all speech should be protected to ensure that the subset with an expressive nature can't be silenced.
In particular I think the demo scene mixed with a political or moral agenda is a pretty powerful idea of code as an expression. If I had any of the salient skills I could write a work of assembler code that expressed my ideology. It'd be small, which aids dissemination. It'd be flashy, lots of visual and aural eye candy, which makes the information memorable.
I'm trying to grasp code as expression but failing, at least in the general case. For instance I can see how demo coders with a political or moral agenda could use their code to disseminate an idea. This could be extremely powerful, especially with todays population accustomed to flashy video clips and sound bytes. Think of a meme that spreads as rapidly as "All your base are belong to us" but that contains a seed of an idea, enabled by a skilled FLASH programmer.
A random snippet of code I've got more of a problem with however. How do lines 20000 through 20025 of say Microsoft Word 2000 express something?
I don't see how you can provide protection for one while squelching the other though. Would every bit of code have to go through legal proceedings to determine if its expressive or functional? Should one of the most powerful rights, free speech, be thrown out with the bathwater because a corporation is worried about profits?
Slashdot Mirror
You trolled for fields then trolled further for specific fields. There are a couple of years required before you can really begin your engineering education. After a couple more years you've got an engineering degree. In theory you could do this without a university just as in theory you could study everything required to be a doctor without going to medical school (which, sorry to burst your bubble of ignorance is a school or college within a university). The degree ensures that there's at least some possibility that the person meets a set of minimum credentials. I try to avoid self professed doctors like the plague, just as I would avoid hiring any self professed civil engineers for any multi billion dollar buildings I put up.
Imagine you're in your back yard, its a beautiful day. Your parents taught you that fences build good neighbours so your yard is fenced in. You are on friendly terms with your neighbours though. It so happens that one of your neighbours has an apple tree. It's in their yard but when the wind blows just right apples blow into your yard. You don't mind at all (though you wouldn't mind if the wind blew in another direction during the fall) because these are good apples, your favourite variety in fact. Usually you pick them up and eat them. At some time you miss an apple though. The apple and the seeds in it do what a half billion years of evolutionary programming has taught it: It grows and it flourishes. Now you've got an apple tree in your backyard, you didn't plant it, you didn't steal the seeds but still its there. Your neighbour doesn't care and you don't mind either. These apples are good eating.
Now for a more dystopian take consider the Monsanto corporation and their genetically modified canola seeds. A farmer in Canada grows 'natural' canola, he doesn't believe the glossies put out by Monsanto. Neighbouring farms don't feel the same way though, so they purchase Monsanto's genetically modified seeds. These seeds have been modified at the genetic level to resist a fairly powerful form of herbicide which it so happens Monsanto sells. The herbicide in question goes by the trade name of Roundup, and the seeds are referred to as Roundup Ready.
Similar to your story of the apple the winds blow and some of these genetically modified seeds find their way onto the farmers land. Just like the apple they obey a half billion years of evolution and germinate. From the farmers perspective these seeds and the plants they produce are a contaminant. This farmer purposely chooses to sell unmodified canola. This contaminant represents the intellectual property of Monsanto however and from Monsanto's financially fueled perspective they see this as the theft of their property. They take the farmer to court over it. Despite the fact that the farmer never physically stole the seeds (they invaded his property on the winds) nor did he want them he loses the law suit. He's charged with the standard Monsanto fee per acre, punitive damages and to rub a little salt in the wound the only way he can determine how much of this contaminant is in his crop is to use Roundup - which will kill his crop but leave the genetically modified crop surviving.
This same company, Monsanto, also sells other variants of seeds (Cotton I believe) who's plants have been linked to an increased incidence of cancer.
I'm not against research, nor am I against genetically modified crops. We've been modifying the genes of crops and animals for millenia already through more standard needs. What I am against is runaway corporations that can buy whatever legislation or legal outcome they'd like.
P.S. the 2 minute wait thats hardcoded in to slashdot is assinine. It doesn't hinder the shit storm of the troll brigade and just annoys regular posters.
Shockwave gaming now reminds me of gaming on the Commodore 64. Sure, the technology was somewhat limited but it was made up for with excellent gameplay. People like Jeff Hinter would be at home writing Shockwave games I think.
Oh, I know, don't punish kids for there mistakes. They might commit suicide. Don't fail kids because they can't keep up with the class. They might commit suicide. Award only A+ across the board, for kids might commit suicide otherwise.
Suppose he wasn't caught or wasn't punished. In a couple of years he'd ask some girl out and possibly be rejected. I suppose it'd be the girls fault that the kid killed himself then?
Arguably the hardware is less powerful than a PC and arguably its more expensive. It also happens to be wonderfully put together. I'm using a PIII 733 with ATA100 drives and 1 gigabyte of PC133 CL2 memory right now. It dual boots Linux and Windows 2000. I've installed an IEEE1394 card to get DV capture for my Canon GL1 camcorder.
Given the specs this should have been a slam dunk. I hooked up my camcorder, started capturing frames and was astounded by the number of dropped frames. Contrast this to my experience with a lowly iMac in Sears. 900 bucks or so of computing power, a 500 MHz processor, 64 meg of PC66 memory and probably ATA33 disks. I clicked on iMovie, clicked on capture and it just did it. No dropped frames.
To get the POS to perform equally I had to resort to purchasing a second ATA100 drive.
If the licensing costs are small relative to your profits on the product and if your expected financial outcome for a law suit is negative enough you choose to use Gracenotes. Roxio so far assumes that the expected financial outcome (probability of being sued multiplied by the financial outcome of the lawsuit) is close enough to zero to risk it. Other companies don't feel that way. Free (unencumbered) software authors can use different metrics since they aren't responsible to share holders or employees.
Probably around the same time the sun burns out unfortunately. Most people use Windows boxes and whatever they come with, or whatever is most popular. Most of these applications probably default to Gracenotes. Remember that for every linux user there are about 9 to 9.5 Windows users, probably more since many people dual boot or just have linux installed out of curiousity.
I don't even own a machine that can use Roxio's product, but I'm buying a copy just to support their use of freedb.org.
I'd just like to add, I'm not against his views. I just hate feeling like somebodies trying to manipulate me through false facts. It's a huge part of why I've given up on local papers for instance. I average information from a number of sources - hoping they're not all skewed the same way, though unfortunately on a lot of issues they are.
I don't know that he really does have a balanced view of the issues. He's rewritten a bit of history much the way Hollywood does to prove their point, sell their causes or sell movies. Read some of James Burke's essays to learn a bit about the history of writing and publication. Copying really wasn't unencumbered when it was done by hand, in fact this is where the church started aquiring a lot of power. Monks would transcribe books, of course quite possibly filtering out any objectionable content. The common man didn't copy books because they were kept illiterate. These books were sold to the wealthy, having a nice library was a status symbol.
Netscape's licensing is less of a threat though. We know and understand that it isn't free. What's dangerous is when you believe something is unencumbered but it really is. Maybe the license gives you the right to the source code but not the right to redistribute it. The license could be written so that at first glance it looks GPL or BSD compatible. Most people only really give things a first glance.
Yes, subsequent copies will not lose any information, but they'll be perfect copies of a lossy copy.
As for sleep problems, as a couple of other people posted, light has a lot to do with it. If you work in your well lit office, go home, sit down in your well lit den and type away on the computer you may be setting yourself up for difficulty sleeping.
No, spend 15 bucks and get a cheap 3 button USB, or spend more and get your favourite mouse.
Even our desktop applications are leased and this is the way the bean counters like it. I'm sure there's some legal tax dodge involved or some figment of Wall Streets imagination that makes this look better on the books.
There's no mention that this will be enforced on small companies, of course, this could change.
Put into a different light, even among christian sects there is dissention on who should and should not be recognized as a religion. Fundamentalist christians think that Roman Catholics are devil worshippers, at least if Jack Chick is to be believed. What about the Church of Latter Day Saints? Some guy has a vision that said polygamy is OK and its later retracted. Presently it still qualifies as a religion (a very rich one no less).
The bulk of the moderators use their moderation points to reinforce their views rather than reward good commentary. It's been that way for quite a while which is what allowed karma whores to operate. If you can figure out what to post to increase your chances of upwards moderation you'll get moderated up.
I browse at -1, I no longer moderate though. I got tired of being hammered in metamoderation for doing what the moderation FAQ asked for: Reward good commentary, not views you sympathize with. Since I don't post often moderation put me in danger of ending up with negative karma.
I can't stand pop up adds, I can't stand pop up adds with excessive colour cycling even more. I shouldn't have to disable things, such as JavaScript, to not be annoyed. I prefer to retaliate by hitting them in the pocket book.
I feel this way while I don't see any expression in "MSWord" as a sequence of programming instructios I do feel that code can be an expression. Not all speech is expressive either, but all speech should be protected to ensure that the subset with an expressive nature can't be silenced.
In particular I think the demo scene mixed with a political or moral agenda is a pretty powerful idea of code as an expression. If I had any of the salient skills I could write a work of assembler code that expressed my ideology. It'd be small, which aids dissemination. It'd be flashy, lots of visual and aural eye candy, which makes the information memorable.
A random snippet of code I've got more of a problem with however. How do lines 20000 through 20025 of say Microsoft Word 2000 express something?
I don't see how you can provide protection for one while squelching the other though. Would every bit of code have to go through legal proceedings to determine if its expressive or functional? Should one of the most powerful rights, free speech, be thrown out with the bathwater because a corporation is worried about profits?