That may be your experience, but it's not something that I've seen since the times of Office XP.
I develop lots of training materials that go through people on all sides of the planet in their revision/editing process. It's not very unusual for some to have Office 2008, others 2010 and some 2012. In all cases I do not remember formatting problems to occur. And that includes different regional settings and so forth.
And I'm not even sure what you meant with the printer drivers...
Office - and a lot of other GUI apps (not just Microsoft ones) - use the printer driver to do their typesetting, since it already knows about fonts and specifically the way that characters will be spaced when printed out. So why would a vendor spend a lot of effort duplicating those algorithms when it can borrow them? In the same way, printer drivers often borrow raster manipulation functions from the video driver, where they are already essential parts - and can on top of that, leverage the video card's hardware accelerators.
People don't see it as much now that soft fonts are the rule, but in the olden days before TrueType, an HP LaserJet printer might come with about half a dozen HP bitmap fonts built into its ROMs and the printer driver supplied by HP contained font metric information for those fonts. If you took an MS Word document to some other printer - even an HP printer with a different resolution - the font metric information would be different, and the on-screen (and print) page flows and line breaks were often severely disrupted.
Most of the "incompatibility" between the open and MS office suites comes from this characteristic. A lot of the re-arranging can thus be avoided by not attempting to use the word processor like it was a mechanical typewriter, forcing new lines and new pages via brute-force typed-in spaces and blank lines, using styling instead. Virtually all of the incompatibilities can be eliminated by using a soft font that's available to both Windows and non-Windows machines, if the problem is coming from transporting documents across operating systems.
Closing the bank accounts of gainfully employed citizens just because they're work in a perfectly legal field that the government doesn't like is justice?
How the hell are you people still not realizing you're living in a situation worse than Nazi Germany? (Screw Godwin's law. This is a perfectly legitimate comparison.)
Godwin's meta-law. Godwin's Law will be invoked to choke off discussion of situations that actually are approaching those of Nazi Germany.
I think Apple/Jobs is just the poster boy. This isn't a new investigation, but as far as I know, it's only now that things are happening that make the news. And, of course, when it comes to anti-social behavior, about the only one person more self-centered than Jobs runs a database company.
that the best programmers/software engineers are astoundingly more productive; something like 10 to 25 times faster then average ones. He obviously wanted to do what it took to retain them, since he was knew that his new product developments relied on impossibly fast deadlines.
I have an amazing, original idea for retaining talent. Ready for this?........ Pay them a competitive salary.
I have a better one. Kidnap them and chain them to benches, lash them as needed and feed them gruel.
It worked for galleys, so let's bring back the Good Old Days!
Corporations aren't people, they're machines owned and steered by people: vehicles. My car doesn't have citizenship and neither should my corporation.
If you control a corporation and it's a "person" and has the rights of a person and you also act as yourself as a person, that's inherently unfair, because those of us who don't control corporations are only one "person" but the CEO (or whoever) is two "persons".
In reality, of course, it's worse, since a corporation is generally actually comprised of a lot of persons, but the corporate voice and actions aren't equally controlled by the persons in the corporation, only the ones in control. Which is, for example, how a mining corporation can successfully beat back legislative attempts to promote safety for the miners.
Can it not be that the wealthy love their country enough to volunteer their own hard-earned wealth to improve it (as they see it)? The theory that every money-related act is necessarily self-interested (let alone corrupting) is naive.
Well, I'd like my money to be the same hard way as Sam Walton's heirs did it.
But regardless, the problem is that a lot of people would like to volunteer their hard-earned money. If they weren't spending it on groceries. And if they had equally large quantities of it to volunteer.
Some say that every act is ultimately self-interested, not just money-related ones. Naive? Cynical?
Then work on that problem: make people less gullible (if that's what you think all those proles really are).
Of all the many stupid ideas that have been suggested in this discussion, that has to be the stupidest. Until we can engineer a massive virus that alters the DNA of everyone on the planet (or at least in the USA) good luck changing human nature.
Doesn't take an Einstein to figure that out.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
And the powers that be are glad you don't vote. The fewer people who vote, the more who are cynical about the process the more power they end up wielding. I personally refuse to let them make me that cynical.
You may not vote, but a lot of ignorant yahoos who'll believe any line of bull that goes along with their prejudices vote, and they vote at times and places where not one else can or will. Because they're not cynical. They know that whatever heap of moral garbage tells them what they want to hear will win their primaries and become the only alternative to the opposite party.
They're not smart enough to realize that once elected, their beloved candidate will talk one thing while screwing them (and the rest of us over), but they voted. And if you don't vote to counter-balance them. Or, if you share the same party, to moderate them, they're the ones who control what you'll get.
You can't just pick one example and claim it proves a point. If you look across a large sample size of elections, I HIGHLY suspect you will find that the candidate with the most money wins a disproportionate amount of the time.
I'd be glad if someone more ambitious than me would supply actual stats, but if memory serves, more than half the Koch-funded candidates in the last election lost. There wasn't much noise made about money down the drain, but some serious, even literal howling about some of the other failed election purchases.
PAC is short for Political Action Committee and it is a way of buying politicians. What is boils down to is a way for many people to combine their political contributions into one entity. (sarc) If the PAC supports your issues then that's ok. (/sarc)
If you have enough money to buy politicians in lots of half a dozen, is it a 6-PAC?
Yes Hillary Clinton is a liar.... But Benghazi? seriously? If ever there was an example of republicans trying to make a controversy out of essentially nothing, this is it.
I visited foxnews.com for the first time in quite a while. Benghazi was the #1 headline. Frankly, I'd forgotten about it. Things like a couple of hundred drowning Koreans, a hundred or so Malaysian airline passengers, an oil fire, floods, tornadoes wiping out people by the dozen, couple of dozen kidnapped girl students, Russia's hijunks in the Crimea and so forth, and the burning question of whether or not Hilary screwed up a year or so back and got a couple of people killed just didn't seem to be able to keep enough urgency for me.
No, it isn't speech. It's used to provide you with a podium, but a podium is not speech, and has never been seen as such since the beginning of the US.
It's amusing that the Supreme Court has said on numerous occasions that the government has the right to regulate the means, location or time of speech (see: Anti-abortion protest laws, regulating where a mob can protest a convention, or better yet, limiting where someone can protest a speech by PRESIDENT BUSH) and yet you teatards have an issue with the Supreme Court regulating the MONEY used to make the speech. It's stupid.
Money isn't speech. It's a bigger megaphone. And the prevailing attitude is that whoever shouts loudest wins.
I agree the Visa and MC programs are a pain. They come up so infrequently that I never remember what the password is. Plus with varying rules as to what constitutes an acceptable password, I can't even count on it using a password I'm familiar with.
If implemented like in Europe,though, you only have to remember the PIN. Which you use everywhere, so that's not an issue. There's a challenge-response part of the online purchase that generates a code to confirm you have possession of the card and know the PIN to validate the transaction. Yes, everyone has to have the little card reader available. I've only made a few online purchases with my European card, but they've all been that way so far.
I think what originally generated my hatred of Verified by Visa was that it had been assuming that I was idiot enough to do things involving money under IE and Microsoft Windows. So it didn't even work under Linux/Firefox.
And ultimately, how would you do chip and pin for online retail? You know, people that literally have to type their credit card number into a field?
Lots of online retailers now put credit card transactions through the Verified with Visa program, which takes you to e.g. your bank's online banking login page where you have to enter further credentials to complete the order. So, even if a thief has your credit card number and the extra security number on the back, he would not be able to use it without an extra password.
And when my order comes up to the Verified with Visa page, I cancel it. VwV is a pain.
The security number by design not embossed on the card, nor, as far as I know, encoded in the stripe, because for physical card-reading applications the cashier has to confirm your identity by other means such as signature and driver's license.
Online transactions use the security ID, but if someone has latched onto that, then they're already running amok in someone's network or have physically stolen the card (in which case, cancel/replace ASAP!)
When waiting for a compile, we had to make proper flowcharts for operations manual, maintenance manual, and also the prammers manual, the latter having the source code. When there was a change to any program, all needed to be updated and approved before the change was put into place. Although a compile a day seemed leisurely, there was more time for code review and complaince. I think biggest issue is the lack of code review needed. Now, people are more interested in their train of thought to correct errors from compiler that they do not slow down and think about what they are coding. Code reason why there are so many bugs and security holes. People need to slow down and do all the other required steps to ensure quality code.
Agreed. Instant Gratification killed a lot of the quality-adding aspects of programming and what it didn't kill, the Ctrl-Alt-Delete method of problem solving did. At the time, resources were expensive and the cost of manpower was relatively cheap, so the programmers were allowed to be "inefficient". Now, the developers are the most expensive part of the system, we no longer work 40-hour 5-day weeks, and pre-compile code reviews, documentation and other "time-wasters" are not generally tolerated. After all, you have this smart IDE to write most of the code for you and besides, All You Have To Do Is...
i started on punchcards in college on a cdc mainframe
Me too. But that was the 1970s, not the 80s. Using punch cards in 1983 was idiotic.
It was about 1983 that we first began to get terminals and go to online text editing, although I'd worked on a TTY-based minicomputer in college. Before that, 3 compiles a day was a VERY good day. Even after, printouts were only dumped in the bins every couple of hours and since those 3270 terminals were expensive you had to sign up for one.
One of the largest shops in town had union keypunchers, so programmers there couldn't actually keyboard anything. I don't know how long it took for them to go interactive.
The difference between building a bridge and building software is that an engineering company will build a model of the bridge, the client will look at it (and possibly several other models), say "Yes, that's what they want. How long?" The engineering company will say "2 years" and the client will probably say "OK".
In software, you build a model showing the menus, dialogs and screens, present it to the client, who then says "That's right, but it needs just this one more thing." We can have it by next Thursday, right?
Because a model bridge is patently not the real thing, but model software is virtually identical to the only parts of the system that most people will ever see.
Really? do you honestly believe that everyone on this planet owes someone or some company money?
You really need to get out of your mom's basement from time to time.
Personally, I owe no one any money. sure I have Credit Cards but I clear the bill before the statement is issued, otherwise I owe no one anything. Before anyone asks, I own my own home and don't have a mortgage. I cleared that years ago. If I can't afford to pay for something in full, I simply don't buy it. It might do a few more people to follow that advice.
You also have a crap credit score, if that's true.
I'm generally not "in debt" by most people's standards - even pay cash on a new roof, but every few years I'll buy something financed or run a balance or something that keeps my score up.
Because life isn't predictable and some day having a good credit rating may make the difference between being able to maintain my lifestyle and property over a period of interrupted income or losing things I'd rather keep. Or at least paying lower interest while I'm recovering.
You can't print stamps using that service. You need to actually purchase stamps, or have an account from somewhere like Stamps.com or Pitney Bowes.
And stamps.com and Pitney Bowes are simply the Post Office outsourcing the collection of postage in a way that eliminates the inconvenience of having to drop by the post office.
Realistically, you can't just arbitrarily print out a stamp on your Epson printer any more than you can draw one on with crayons. The whole point of stamps or meter marks is to affirm that someone, somewhere has paid applicable postage fees. So Stamps.com provides software that certifies that the fee is (or will be) paid, and in exchange they generate and render an accepted postal meter mark that attest to the fact.
That government regulations guarantees that it's a crime for anyone to open my mail
No, it's a federal offense for unauthorized
people to open your mail. Or to remove it from USPS property. Which technically includes your front-door mailbox, or equivalent.
US Postal inspectors have always been at liberty to open and examine the contents of any mail they deemed worth inspecting. That was true long, long before organizations like the NSA got involved.
They don't run mail, they just pay USPS for advertising to you, just like OTA free TV and radio. Do advertisers own TV and radio stations?
Effectively. Unless someone provides private funding, a radio or TV station won't stay on the air long without advertising.
Public TV and NPR weren't "owned" by advertisers originally, but the post-Nixon years have removed almost all government funding, donors rarely suffice, and the net result is that these days even most public-service broadcasts have advertisers.
That's a good question. As a start, it would be nice to know the number that the USPS is being paid to deliver junk mail to my house. I'm sure I could beat it for my house alone, I'm sure it comes out to cents per month, but we wouldn't know that without knowing the actual amount.
In 2010 the USPS brought in $17,300 [npr.org] million dollars from standard mail, there were 117.5 [wikipedia.org] million households in 2010 which means the USPS was paid roughly $147 per household to deliver bulk mailings
So if the above is correnct and I haven't screwed up the math, that would be about 1225 cents per month?
FORTRAN isn't that complex. Originally, it only had 7 statements (or was it 10)? The only halfway complex thing about it was the expression compiler parts.
But BASIC had several advantages. It was intended for interactive use, at a time when most FORTRANs were batch-only. It originally only supported a very limited set of variable names like "A", "B", "C", and so forth, meaning that you didn't have to implement symbol table logic, and the associated storages on machines when 16K RAM space might be considered at lot - instead the variable name was the hash code to a value table. Refinements such as the rich set of built-in functions and extensive string services were also later additions.
The original BASIC was so minimalist that even the first effort from Gates &Co. exceeded it. But it introduced a lot of people to "instant gratification" programming, and thus its influence can be felt in many places to this day.
Slashdot Mirror
That may be your experience, but it's not something that I've seen since the times of Office XP.
I develop lots of training materials that go through people on all sides of the planet in their revision/editing process. It's not very unusual for some to have Office 2008, others 2010 and some 2012. In all cases I do not remember formatting problems to occur. And that includes different regional settings and so forth.
And I'm not even sure what you meant with the printer drivers...
Office - and a lot of other GUI apps (not just Microsoft ones) - use the printer driver to do their typesetting, since it already knows about fonts and specifically the way that characters will be spaced when printed out. So why would a vendor spend a lot of effort duplicating those algorithms when it can borrow them? In the same way, printer drivers often borrow raster manipulation functions from the video driver, where they are already essential parts - and can on top of that, leverage the video card's hardware accelerators.
People don't see it as much now that soft fonts are the rule, but in the olden days before TrueType, an HP LaserJet printer might come with about half a dozen HP bitmap fonts built into its ROMs and the printer driver supplied by HP contained font metric information for those fonts. If you took an MS Word document to some other printer - even an HP printer with a different resolution - the font metric information would be different, and the on-screen (and print) page flows and line breaks were often severely disrupted.
Most of the "incompatibility" between the open and MS office suites comes from this characteristic. A lot of the re-arranging can thus be avoided by not attempting to use the word processor like it was a mechanical typewriter, forcing new lines and new pages via brute-force typed-in spaces and blank lines, using styling instead. Virtually all of the incompatibilities can be eliminated by using a soft font that's available to both Windows and non-Windows machines, if the problem is coming from transporting documents across operating systems.
Closing the bank accounts of gainfully employed citizens just because they're work in a perfectly legal field that the government doesn't like is justice?
How the hell are you people still not realizing you're living in a situation worse than Nazi Germany? (Screw Godwin's law. This is a perfectly legitimate comparison.)
Godwin's meta-law. Godwin's Law will be invoked to choke off discussion of situations that actually are approaching those of Nazi Germany.
I think Apple/Jobs is just the poster boy. This isn't a new investigation, but as far as I know, it's only now that things are happening that make the news. And, of course, when it comes to anti-social behavior, about the only one person more self-centered than Jobs runs a database company.
that the best programmers/software engineers are astoundingly more productive; something like 10 to 25 times faster then average ones. He obviously wanted to do what it took to retain them, since he was knew that his new product developments relied on impossibly fast deadlines.
I have an amazing, original idea for retaining talent. Ready for this? ........ Pay them a competitive salary.
I have a better one. Kidnap them and chain them to benches, lash them as needed and feed them gruel.
It worked for galleys, so let's bring back the Good Old Days!
Corporations aren't people, they're machines owned and steered by people: vehicles. My car doesn't have citizenship and neither should my corporation.
If you control a corporation and it's a "person" and has the rights of a person and you also act as yourself as a person, that's inherently unfair, because those of us who don't control corporations are only one "person" but the CEO (or whoever) is two "persons".
In reality, of course, it's worse, since a corporation is generally actually comprised of a lot of persons, but the corporate voice and actions aren't equally controlled by the persons in the corporation, only the ones in control. Which is, for example, how a mining corporation can successfully beat back legislative attempts to promote safety for the miners.
Can it not be that the wealthy love their country enough to volunteer their own hard-earned wealth to improve it (as they see it)? The theory that every money-related act is necessarily self-interested (let alone corrupting) is naive.
Well, I'd like my money to be the same hard way as Sam Walton's heirs did it.
But regardless, the problem is that a lot of people would like to volunteer their hard-earned money. If they weren't spending it on groceries. And if they had equally large quantities of it to volunteer.
Some say that every act is ultimately self-interested, not just money-related ones. Naive? Cynical?
Then work on that problem: make people less gullible (if that's what you think all those proles really are).
Of all the many stupid ideas that have been suggested in this discussion, that has to be the stupidest. Until we can engineer a massive virus that alters the DNA of everyone on the planet (or at least in the USA) good luck changing human nature.
Doesn't take an Einstein to figure that out.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
OK. Maybe it does.
And the powers that be are glad you don't vote. The fewer people who vote, the more who are cynical about the process the more power they end up wielding. I personally refuse to let them make me that cynical.
You may not vote, but a lot of ignorant yahoos who'll believe any line of bull that goes along with their prejudices vote, and they vote at times and places where not one else can or will. Because they're not cynical. They know that whatever heap of moral garbage tells them what they want to hear will win their primaries and become the only alternative to the opposite party.
They're not smart enough to realize that once elected, their beloved candidate will talk one thing while screwing them (and the rest of us over), but they voted. And if you don't vote to counter-balance them. Or, if you share the same party, to moderate them, they're the ones who control what you'll get.
You can't just pick one example and claim it proves a point. If you look across a large sample size of elections, I HIGHLY suspect you will find that the candidate with the most money wins a disproportionate amount of the time.
I'd be glad if someone more ambitious than me would supply actual stats, but if memory serves, more than half the Koch-funded candidates in the last election lost. There wasn't much noise made about money down the drain, but some serious, even literal howling about some of the other failed election purchases.
PAC is short for Political Action Committee and it is a way of buying politicians. What is boils down to is a way for many people to combine their political contributions into one entity. (sarc) If the PAC supports your issues then that's ok. (/sarc)
If you have enough money to buy politicians in lots of half a dozen, is it a 6-PAC?
Yes Hillary Clinton is a liar.... But Benghazi? seriously? If ever there was an example of republicans trying to make a controversy out of essentially nothing, this is it.
I visited foxnews.com for the first time in quite a while. Benghazi was the #1 headline. Frankly, I'd forgotten about it. Things like a couple of hundred drowning Koreans, a hundred or so Malaysian airline passengers, an oil fire, floods, tornadoes wiping out people by the dozen, couple of dozen kidnapped girl students, Russia's hijunks in the Crimea and so forth, and the burning question of whether or not Hilary screwed up a year or so back and got a couple of people killed just didn't seem to be able to keep enough urgency for me.
No, it isn't speech. It's used to provide you with a podium, but a podium is not speech, and has never been seen as such since the beginning of the US.
It's amusing that the Supreme Court has said on numerous occasions that the government has the right to regulate the means, location or time of speech (see: Anti-abortion protest laws, regulating where a mob can protest a convention, or better yet, limiting where someone can protest a speech by PRESIDENT BUSH) and yet you teatards have an issue with the Supreme Court regulating the MONEY used to make the speech. It's stupid.
Money isn't speech. It's a bigger megaphone. And the prevailing attitude is that whoever shouts loudest wins.
I agree the Visa and MC programs are a pain. They come up so infrequently that I never remember what the password is. Plus with varying rules as to what constitutes an acceptable password, I can't even count on it using a password I'm familiar with.
If implemented like in Europe,though, you only have to remember the PIN. Which you use everywhere, so that's not an issue. There's a challenge-response part of the online purchase that generates a code to confirm you have possession of the card and know the PIN to validate the transaction. Yes, everyone has to have the little card reader available. I've only made a few online purchases with my European card, but they've all been that way so far.
I think what originally generated my hatred of Verified by Visa was that it had been assuming that I was idiot enough to do things involving money under IE and Microsoft Windows. So it didn't even work under Linux/Firefox.
Lots of online retailers now put credit card transactions through the Verified with Visa program, which takes you to e.g. your bank's online banking login page where you have to enter further credentials to complete the order. So, even if a thief has your credit card number and the extra security number on the back, he would not be able to use it without an extra password.
And when my order comes up to the Verified with Visa page, I cancel it. VwV is a pain.
The security number by design not embossed on the card, nor, as far as I know, encoded in the stripe, because for physical card-reading applications the cashier has to confirm your identity by other means such as signature and driver's license.
Online transactions use the security ID, but if someone has latched onto that, then they're already running amok in someone's network or have physically stolen the card (in which case, cancel/replace ASAP!)
When waiting for a compile, we had to make proper flowcharts for operations manual, maintenance manual, and also the prammers manual, the latter having the source code. When there was a change to any program, all needed to be updated and approved before the change was put into place. Although a compile a day seemed leisurely, there was more time for code review and complaince. I think biggest issue is the lack of code review needed. Now, people are more interested in their train of thought to correct errors from compiler that they do not slow down and think about what they are coding. Code reason why there are so many bugs and security holes. People need to slow down and do all the other required steps to ensure quality code.
Agreed. Instant Gratification killed a lot of the quality-adding aspects of programming and what it didn't kill, the Ctrl-Alt-Delete method of problem solving did. At the time, resources were expensive and the cost of manpower was relatively cheap, so the programmers were allowed to be "inefficient". Now, the developers are the most expensive part of the system, we no longer work 40-hour 5-day weeks, and pre-compile code reviews, documentation and other "time-wasters" are not generally tolerated. After all, you have this smart IDE to write most of the code for you and besides, All You Have To Do Is...
Bookmarks? Those things made great XMAS wreaths!
i started on punchcards in college on a cdc mainframe
Me too. But that was the 1970s, not the 80s. Using punch cards in 1983 was idiotic.
It was about 1983 that we first began to get terminals and go to online text editing, although I'd worked on a TTY-based minicomputer in college. Before that, 3 compiles a day was a VERY good day. Even after, printouts were only dumped in the bins every couple of hours and since those 3270 terminals were expensive you had to sign up for one.
One of the largest shops in town had union keypunchers, so programmers there couldn't actually keyboard anything. I don't know how long it took for them to go interactive.
The difference between building a bridge and building software is that an engineering company will build a model of the bridge, the client will look at it (and possibly several other models), say "Yes, that's what they want. How long?" The engineering company will say "2 years" and the client will probably say "OK".
In software, you build a model showing the menus, dialogs and screens, present it to the client, who then says "That's right, but it needs just this one more thing." We can have it by next Thursday, right?
Because a model bridge is patently not the real thing, but model software is virtually identical to the only parts of the system that most people will ever see.
Really? do you honestly believe that everyone on this planet owes someone or some company money?
You really need to get out of your mom's basement from time to time.
Personally, I owe no one any money. sure I have Credit Cards but I clear the bill before the statement is issued, otherwise I owe no one anything.
Before anyone asks, I own my own home and don't have a mortgage. I cleared that years ago. If I can't afford to pay for something in full, I simply don't buy it.
It might do a few more people to follow that advice.
You also have a crap credit score, if that's true.
I'm generally not "in debt" by most people's standards - even pay cash on a new roof, but every few years I'll buy something financed or run a balance or something that keeps my score up.
Because life isn't predictable and some day having a good credit rating may make the difference between being able to maintain my lifestyle and property over a period of interrupted income or losing things I'd rather keep. Or at least paying lower interest while I'm recovering.
Legality only counts if you're caught and actually prosecuted.
FTFY. I've personally seen numerous people get off scott-free for some pretty heinous shit, purely as a result of who they/their daddy happens to be.
Scott-free? Are you implying something about Florida's Governor?
You can't print stamps using that service. You need to actually purchase stamps, or have an account from somewhere like Stamps.com or Pitney Bowes.
And stamps.com and Pitney Bowes are simply the Post Office outsourcing the collection of postage in a way that eliminates the inconvenience of having to drop by the post office.
Realistically, you can't just arbitrarily print out a stamp on your Epson printer any more than you can draw one on with crayons. The whole point of stamps or meter marks is to affirm that someone, somewhere has paid applicable postage fees. So Stamps.com provides software that certifies that the fee is (or will be) paid, and in exchange they generate and render an accepted postal meter mark that attest to the fact.
That government regulations guarantees that it's a crime for anyone to open my mail
No, it's a federal offense for unauthorized
people to open your mail. Or to remove it from USPS property. Which technically includes your front-door mailbox, or equivalent.
US Postal inspectors have always been at liberty to open and examine the contents of any mail they deemed worth inspecting. That was true long, long before organizations like the NSA got involved.
They don't run mail, they just pay USPS for advertising to you, just like OTA free TV and radio. Do advertisers own TV and radio stations?
Effectively. Unless someone provides private funding, a radio or TV station won't stay on the air long without advertising.
Public TV and NPR weren't "owned" by advertisers originally, but the post-Nixon years have removed almost all government funding, donors rarely suffice, and the net result is that these days even most public-service broadcasts have advertisers.
That's a good question. As a start, it would be nice to know the number that the USPS is being paid to deliver junk mail to my house. I'm sure I could beat it for my house alone, I'm sure it comes out to cents per month, but we wouldn't know that without knowing the actual amount.
In 2010 the USPS brought in $17,300 [npr.org] million dollars from standard mail, there were 117.5 [wikipedia.org] million households in 2010 which means the USPS was paid roughly $147 per household to deliver bulk mailings
So if the above is correnct and I haven't screwed up the math, that would be about 1225 cents per month?
FORTRAN isn't that complex. Originally, it only had 7 statements (or was it 10)? The only halfway complex thing about it was the expression compiler parts.
But BASIC had several advantages. It was intended for interactive use, at a time when most FORTRANs were batch-only. It originally only supported a very limited set of variable names like "A", "B", "C", and so forth, meaning that you didn't have to implement symbol table logic, and the associated storages on machines when 16K RAM space might be considered at lot - instead the variable name was the hash code to a value table. Refinements such as the rich set of built-in functions and extensive string services were also later additions.
The original BASIC was so minimalist that even the first effort from Gates &Co. exceeded it. But it introduced a lot of people to "instant gratification" programming, and thus its influence can be felt in many places to this day.