If you read MasterCard's threat, you run into the absurdity that they trademarked their phrase not once, but twice. Then if you look closer, you see that they are different. One breaks the two clauses up with a comma; the other with a period.
So it's simple. If you want to do this sort of thing in such a way that even MasterCard's boneheaded lawyers will lose their means of questioning it, just separate those clauses with a semicolon, as in this sentence, which I donate to the public:
"There are some things money can't buy; for everything else there's MasterCard."
When we finally get robots that can understand Asimov's Laws of Robotics, and we learn how to program them in, they won't be the altruistic platitudes the writer handed down to us. They're going to look more like this:
1. Make me rich.
2. Don't fuck with me.
3. Fuck everyone else.
In 50 years it may be trivial to use NMR or STM or newsprint and a flat-sided crayon to get the bits off an 8" floppy.
Questions of the value of the information are moot. Questions of technology rot are FUD. There is a balance between how one person values reading the data, and what he can afford to use to do it. The number of cases where the desire is great and the technology is nonexistent will probably remain constant and infinitesimal.
It's a silly damn question. Just as silly as it was 30 years ago when mag-tape stock started decaying or 50 years ago when steel-tape recorders started breaking down or 7000 years ago when Imhotep's little brother Shmohotep spilled mofo-juice on the papyrus with the tuning instructions for the pyramids...
Notebooks, though, are damn difficult to buy without a pre-installed OS.
I can remember a few years ago buying a stack of notebooks (about 25) from a manufacturer that sent the notebook reformatted along with the CD for the OS I had requested (95 or 98).
Only just now I've gone up on the name. They're second-tier, maybe third, probably just a re-plate of a Taiwanese make... En-something... I'm reasonably sure I saw it a few weeks ago on new merchandise... Enpower! that's it.
There are a few flaws with your list, but they're moot because the answer is:
0. Nobody tested the reset button.
There's no reason not to test this feature. The button was there for one reason--safety in a critical situation--and there were no doubt several pages of requirements written for the system's behavior when it was pressed. If the article is wrong and they did test it, and if it exhibited deviations from the required behavior, the planes would have been grounded until the problem was fixed and retested. Someone either lied about the completeness of the testing, or signed off on the risk.
Systems I&T on the Osprey program just killed a whole bunch of people. The rest of the problems you list merely conflated this one long enough for it to become deadly.
--Blair
Re:This follows other noteworthy networks from Dis
on
Tokyo.Disney.Net
·
· Score: 1
And if any of the Disney IS staff from Orlando read this, I want to say that they did a great job handeling the poor software the company I worked for wrote. They were some of the best people I dealt with at that job.
Imagine you're a wonky tech-head and you find out Disney Imagineering is hiring. Do you submit your resume? Well, maybe not if you know what their corporate culture is like. But if you think it's anything like their public image, or if you like that sort of order, then hell yeah. And if you're good enough to compete with all the people you think have submitted their resumes (and you can bet that Disney HR is picky picky picky), then you're probably joining a cadre of top-flight hackers doing work that glazes their eyes with fervor and joy.
--Blair
"They never got back to me...nor did Skywalker Ranch...I wonder if Pixar's hiring..."
1. Who ever told you the Internet was secure? Whoever it was, is, as we say, a lamer.
2. I ran into the Airwave guys in front of Fry's Palo Alto store a couple of weeks ago, and snarfed some of their lit. Their idea is cute, but they have a major chicken-and-egg problem: they need to either sell access to users before locale proprietors will sign up en masse, or they need to sell locale installations before the users will sign up en masse. And 90% of their 100 or so hits so far are coffee shops. Who spends more than ten minutes in a coffee shop, and are enough of those droids interested in wireless connectivity that you'll make any money at $1.99/use or $9.99/mo? And now their tech is compromised, so you can't even trust you're not giving away your Next Great Mobile SKU Database Platformation Business Model plan to the Latte Mafia when you're WEPping it to your bankroid. Tsk, tsk.
--Blair
"There's a joke here about ALL YOUR BW ARE BELONG TO US but I'm feeling too conservative to use it, today."
The "mbit" rating on physical layers is the raw cycle rate of the bit symbols in the stream. That is, 10BaseT, in the middle of a packet, is sending bits at 10 mbps. But you're not always in the middle of a packet. You're forming packets, detecting the carrier, backing off collisions, sending preamble bits, sending header bits, doing it in two directions at once, etc., etc...
A moderately loaded TCP/IP/10BaseT network with well-behaved and responsive nodes on it will usually appear to have 3 mbps of user-data throughput, or roughly 300 kilobytes-per-second download rates in ftp.
In order to advance technology, I will now make a rash generalization that will in the future be looked upon as shortsighted and embarassing:
Nobody will ever really need more than 300 KB/s anyway.
Seems like if you apply a few degrees of Kevin Bacon to it I bet you would find that the people doing the shooting are not all that unrelated with the people doing the slandering and intimidating.
So now it's okay for, say, November 17 to come into the US and incorporate a 501(c)(3) front that recruits members for November 17 as long as it says "kill them with kindness" in the title?
There's a lot of bad craziness in this ruling. They reach back to a left-wing supportive ruling with at least as much bad craziness in it in order to support this instance of courtly insanity. It's almost as though they're trying to tangle this obvious case of hate-speech/violence in order to get a legal excuse to re-review the previous one. When the Supreme Court gets this, they can either validate the concept of violence-enabling speech as free speech, or they can fix it across all the cases cited.
And while I would agree that speech calling for violence necessary to revolutionize the government is clearly protected--it's the reason for the 1st Amendment--I don't agree that speech calling for violence against individuals engaged in medical practice should be protected. The government is not a doctor, and political action should be sufficient to decide the fate of such doctors. If political action is not sufficient, then your quarrel is with the government, not the doctors, or you're just plain wrong. In fact, I'm leaning towards the attitude that calling for violence against any person by name rather than a governmental institution is just plain wrong, though that would take some careful defining in a world where we place or inherit people in governing positions as an institution of one.
What say then we put up a list of all the assassinated presidents, along with just the wounded ones, and then we list all the sitting presidents we want dead? Or just state the concept here, which is the same thing?
If any Secret Service agents want to handcuff me and discuss it, you of course know where to find me, but keep today's ruling in mind.
There are any number of canonical limitations on free speech.
There are a countably infinite number of arguments against limitations on free speech, and a smaller but no less infinite number of arguments for them.
Which is moot so long as the federal courts have decided to politicize their decisions rather than maintaining the nation we won in the Revolution.
This is not a terrorism for hate speech transaction.
Welcome to the Bush era. In the new, monopolies 'R' us, if you don't smoke your cigarette you won't get any dessert class-war environment, we should see a return in the near future of anti-bashing legislation. You know, the sort of law that got Oprah in trouble with the Texas Cattlemen's Assn.
Soon you won't be able to talk down the pollution and cancer associated with petroleum products, but if you're a professional defamer and you happen to convince an unstable fundamentalist Militia rat to put a few rounds into the local Ob/Gyn, well, hey, you're good.
You say that the advertisers demand fast banner loads; but of course the rest of the page has no such requirement. Then you imply that no webpage owner ever sat and thought "you know, I might be able to charge a little more if I can guarantee that the banner ad will be the only thing on the screen for a few seconds; if the click-through goes up a little because of the increased attention it gets; if I pin the viewer's eyeballs on the only shiny object in sight..."
N.B.: I always knew how it worked; that table loads are a pig, and ad-servers are usually the best connected sites on the web. But it's interesting that banner ads are frequently not in the same table as every other byte of foreground on the page. I think that tactical HTML design could be a marketable consulting specialty, now that we're done hiring HTML coders just because they can read a Dummies book.
Cell-satellite beams aren't designed to hand-off subscriber units that are climbing through 100 miles at 9500 mph.
The reliability of this connection is going to suck. Trying to time the launch so you get good cell coverage with minimal handoff will make the old solution the economical one.
--Blair
"Return to your homepages. There's nothing to see here."
Companies that foolishly believed in huge dollar-per-user, hype-driven business models are dying like fleas in a dip tank.
In the past two weeks, I lost not one but two ISPs. Both had been bought and sold multiple times, and in the end the companies that bet on them last were left with an investment they did not understand. One of them was then folded under another subsidiary ISP, and both were bankrupted by the parent company. If the investors don't get them, the SEC and IRS will.
The other just sold all the human beings to EarthLink, land of the Clams. We were given an opportunity to cancel our accounts before they send the customer list to Clamlink, but an incompetent ISP is an incompetent ISP, so I have no doubt that the scn suckers now know enough about my credit card to cause me a great deal of irritating correspondence.
I apologize. I trusted wrong info, followed a link into the middle of a discussion, and didn't read your original post.
As for your "personal problem" with Texas beers, Lone Star!? You should have been looking for Shiner Bock (which is a lager more than a bock, so don't be skeered by the name).
My rant still stands. The UNICARD is a symptom of an abusive culture of bible-thumping, prudish, mind-control advocates. And it serves as a plain example of the sort of shame-avoidance politics that could easily get this censorware bill passed.
--Blair
"I'm beautiful, and they all look like Porky Pig, so they think I'm ugly...oh the humanity..."
Sure, absolutely. My point is simply that buying the box sans OS does not exempt one from buying the filter.
You sure about that? It looked like your point was that you can't sell a computer without an OS. Which you can. Then you can sell the OS. And installation. Which you can sell as being done after the sale of the computer but before delivery of that computer. Obviating the law.
And your respondent's point was that the law seems to say that you don't have to buy the censorware at all, even if the OS is bundled with the computer, you just have to be reminded that you can buy it (or get it free) if you want it.
In any case, this is no reason not to move to Tejas. There's too much code to be written in the wireless corridor just north of Dallas, and there's Johnson Space Center just south of Houston, and there's all that silicon being sculpted in Austin. The real reason never to move to Tejas is the fuckin' insanity of the UNICARD* and the apathy of free people to the religious zealotry that made it necessary.
--Blair
* - For those who don't know: Texas and several other bible-belt states are a patchwork of blue laws, some regarding alcohol, ranging from laissez-les-bon-temps-roulez to dry-as-a-preacher's-nuts political subdivisions. One form is the "club" system, where to drink in a public house you must be a member of that business' club, or you open the publican to fines of several thousand dollars per incident. If you're like most people, of course, you eat and drink in dozens if not hundreds of different places each year. Imagine your wallet, carrying all those proof-of-membership chits in it so you don't have to hit the strongbox every time someone changes their mind on the Happy Hour destination. Enter the UNICARD. One card covering several states and most drinking joints in those states. Fabulous. Let's just institute a National Identity Card while to satisfy Elmer Gantry's suckers--oh, and bring back The Scarlet Letter and Stoning, while we're at it... Meanwhile, unless you can see the dividing line painted between towns, you never know which towns you'll need the Unicard in, so don't leave that sucker at home when trying new bars, or you'll have to suffer the embarassment of signing yet another false name to yet another 'cue-stained application form to get yet another dittoe'd temporary card. Better yet, let's regulate religion for a few years and see how these sanctimonious pricks like having their lifestyle treated like a government-granted privilege...
Slashdot Mirror
...some days you wish slashdot had a cancel button...
If you read MasterCard's threat, you run into the absurdity that they trademarked their phrase not once, but twice. Then if you look closer, you see that they are different. One breaks the two clauses up with a comma; the other with a period.
So it's simple. If you want to do this sort of thing in such a way that even MasterCard's boneheaded lawyers will lose their means of questioning it, just separate those clauses with a semicolon, as in this sentence, which I donate to the public:
"There are some things money can't buy; for everything else there's MasterCard."
--Blair
"ALL YOUR DOLLAR ARE BELONG TO US"
When we finally get robots that can understand Asimov's Laws of Robotics, and we learn how to program them in, they won't be the altruistic platitudes the writer handed down to us. They're going to look more like this:
1. Make me rich.
2. Don't fuck with me.
3. Fuck everyone else.
--Blair
...then we can read anything.
In 50 years it may be trivial to use NMR or STM or newsprint and a flat-sided crayon to get the bits off an 8" floppy.
Questions of the value of the information are moot. Questions of technology rot are FUD. There is a balance between how one person values reading the data, and what he can afford to use to do it. The number of cases where the desire is great and the technology is nonexistent will probably remain constant and infinitesimal.
It's a silly damn question. Just as silly as it was 30 years ago when mag-tape stock started decaying or 50 years ago when steel-tape recorders started breaking down or 7000 years ago when Imhotep's little brother Shmohotep spilled mofo-juice on the papyrus with the tuning instructions for the pyramids...
--Blair
Notebooks, though, are damn difficult to buy without a pre-installed OS.
I can remember a few years ago buying a stack of notebooks (about 25) from a manufacturer that sent the notebook reformatted along with the CD for the OS I had requested (95 or 98).
Only just now I've gone up on the name. They're second-tier, maybe third, probably just a re-plate of a Taiwanese make... En-something... I'm reasonably sure I saw it a few weeks ago on new merchandise... Enpower! that's it.
http://www.enpower.com
--Blair
There are a few flaws with your list, but they're moot because the answer is:
0. Nobody tested the reset button.
There's no reason not to test this feature. The button was there for one reason--safety in a critical situation--and there were no doubt several pages of requirements written for the system's behavior when it was pressed. If the article is wrong and they did test it, and if it exhibited deviations from the required behavior, the planes would have been grounded until the problem was fixed and retested. Someone either lied about the completeness of the testing, or signed off on the risk.
Systems I&T on the Osprey program just killed a whole bunch of people. The rest of the problems you list merely conflated this one long enough for it to become deadly.
--Blair
And if any of the Disney IS staff from Orlando read this, I want to say that they did a great job handeling the poor software the company I worked for wrote. They were some of the best people I dealt with at that job.
Imagine you're a wonky tech-head and you find out Disney Imagineering is hiring. Do you submit your resume? Well, maybe not if you know what their corporate culture is like. But if you think it's anything like their public image, or if you like that sort of order, then hell yeah. And if you're good enough to compete with all the people you think have submitted their resumes (and you can bet that Disney HR is picky picky picky), then you're probably joining a cadre of top-flight hackers doing work that glazes their eyes with fervor and joy.
--Blair
"They never got back to me...nor did Skywalker Ranch...I wonder if Pixar's hiring..."
Just ask pSOS customers what the future of pSOS became when Wind River bought ISI... --Blair
1. Who ever told you the Internet was secure? Whoever it was, is, as we say, a lamer.
2. I ran into the Airwave guys in front of Fry's Palo Alto store a couple of weeks ago, and snarfed some of their lit. Their idea is cute, but they have a major chicken-and-egg problem: they need to either sell access to users before locale proprietors will sign up en masse, or they need to sell locale installations before the users will sign up en masse. And 90% of their 100 or so hits so far are coffee shops. Who spends more than ten minutes in a coffee shop, and are enough of those droids interested in wireless connectivity that you'll make any money at $1.99/use or $9.99/mo? And now their tech is compromised, so you can't even trust you're not giving away your Next Great Mobile SKU Database Platformation Business Model plan to the Latte Mafia when you're WEPping it to your bankroid. Tsk, tsk.
--Blair
"There's a joke here about ALL YOUR BW ARE BELONG TO US but I'm feeling too conservative to use it, today."
I meant to follow up to Twain when he posted this, but now's as good a time as any:
U mikst up "x" and "y", yer, budy. It xud be "x" for "sh" and "y" for "th". Du yat, n ye werld wil yank u.
--Blair
Death Stars Don't Kill People, Screenwriters Kill People
--Blair
The "mbit" rating on physical layers is the raw cycle rate of the bit symbols in the stream. That is, 10BaseT, in the middle of a packet, is sending bits at 10 mbps. But you're not always in the middle of a packet. You're forming packets, detecting the carrier, backing off collisions, sending preamble bits, sending header bits, doing it in two directions at once, etc., etc...
A moderately loaded TCP/IP/10BaseT network with well-behaved and responsive nodes on it will usually appear to have 3 mbps of user-data throughput, or roughly 300 kilobytes-per-second download rates in ftp.
In order to advance technology, I will now make a rash generalization that will in the future be looked upon as shortsighted and embarassing:
Nobody will ever really need more than 300 KB/s anyway.
--Blair
Unrelated?
Seems like if you apply a few degrees of Kevin Bacon to it I bet you would find that the people doing the shooting are not all that unrelated with the people doing the slandering and intimidating.
So now it's okay for, say, November 17 to come into the US and incorporate a 501(c)(3) front that recruits members for November 17 as long as it says "kill them with kindness" in the title?
There's a lot of bad craziness in this ruling. They reach back to a left-wing supportive ruling with at least as much bad craziness in it in order to support this instance of courtly insanity. It's almost as though they're trying to tangle this obvious case of hate-speech/violence in order to get a legal excuse to re-review the previous one. When the Supreme Court gets this, they can either validate the concept of violence-enabling speech as free speech, or they can fix it across all the cases cited.
And while I would agree that speech calling for violence necessary to revolutionize the government is clearly protected--it's the reason for the 1st Amendment--I don't agree that speech calling for violence against individuals engaged in medical practice should be protected. The government is not a doctor, and political action should be sufficient to decide the fate of such doctors. If political action is not sufficient, then your quarrel is with the government, not the doctors, or you're just plain wrong. In fact, I'm leaning towards the attitude that calling for violence against any person by name rather than a governmental institution is just plain wrong, though that would take some careful defining in a world where we place or inherit people in governing positions as an institution of one.
--Blair
an American and a Canadian?
A: Ask them this question.
--Blair
What say then we put up a list of all the assassinated presidents, along with just the wounded ones, and then we list all the sitting presidents we want dead? Or just state the concept here, which is the same thing?
If any Secret Service agents want to handcuff me and discuss it, you of course know where to find me, but keep today's ruling in mind.
--Blair
There are any number of canonical limitations on free speech.
There are a countably infinite number of arguments against limitations on free speech, and a smaller but no less infinite number of arguments for them.
Which is moot so long as the federal courts have decided to politicize their decisions rather than maintaining the nation we won in the Revolution.
--Blair
This is not a terrorism for hate speech transaction.
Welcome to the Bush era. In the new, monopolies 'R' us, if you don't smoke your cigarette you won't get any dessert class-war environment, we should see a return in the near future of anti-bashing legislation. You know, the sort of law that got Oprah in trouble with the Texas Cattlemen's Assn.
Soon you won't be able to talk down the pollution and cancer associated with petroleum products, but if you're a professional defamer and you happen to convince an unstable fundamentalist Militia rat to put a few rounds into the local Ob/Gyn, well, hey, you're good.
--Blair
> none of it, I assure you.
None?
Assuredly?
You say that the advertisers demand fast banner loads; but of course the rest of the page has no such requirement. Then you imply that no webpage owner ever sat and thought "you know, I might be able to charge a little more if I can guarantee that the banner ad will be the only thing on the screen for a few seconds; if the click-through goes up a little because of the increased attention it gets; if I pin the viewer's eyeballs on the only shiny object in sight..."
N.B.: I always knew how it worked; that table loads are a pig, and ad-servers are usually the best connected sites on the web. But it's interesting that banner ads are frequently not in the same table as every other byte of foreground on the page. I think that tactical HTML design could be a marketable consulting specialty, now that we're done hiring HTML coders just because they can read a Dummies book.
--Blair
Have you ever noticed that the banner ad at the top of a page will load and then, 20 or 30 seconds later, the page content will load around it?
How much of that do you suppose is deliberate?
--Blair
Of course, all too soon, they will have a whole category for "slashdotted"...
--Blair
Cell-satellite beams aren't designed to hand-off subscriber units that are climbing through 100 miles at 9500 mph.
The reliability of this connection is going to suck. Trying to time the launch so you get good cell coverage with minimal handoff will make the old solution the economical one.
--Blair
"Return to your homepages. There's nothing to see here."
Companies that foolishly believed in huge dollar-per-user, hype-driven business models are dying like fleas in a dip tank.
In the past two weeks, I lost not one but two ISPs. Both had been bought and sold multiple times, and in the end the companies that bet on them last were left with an investment they did not understand. One of them was then folded under another subsidiary ISP, and both were bankrupted by the parent company. If the investors don't get them, the SEC and IRS will.
The other just sold all the human beings to EarthLink, land of the Clams. We were given an opportunity to cancel our accounts before they send the customer list to Clamlink, but an incompetent ISP is an incompetent ISP, so I have no doubt that the scn suckers now know enough about my credit card to cause me a great deal of irritating correspondence.
--Blair
I apologize. I trusted wrong info, followed a link into the middle of a discussion, and didn't read your original post.
As for your "personal problem" with Texas beers, Lone Star!? You should have been looking for Shiner Bock (which is a lager more than a bock, so don't be skeered by the name).
My rant still stands. The UNICARD is a symptom of an abusive culture of bible-thumping, prudish, mind-control advocates. And it serves as a plain example of the sort of shame-avoidance politics that could easily get this censorware bill passed.
--Blair
"I'm beautiful, and they all look like Porky Pig, so they think I'm ugly...oh the humanity..."
Sure, absolutely. My point is simply that buying the box sans OS does not exempt one from buying the filter.
You sure about that? It looked like your point was that you can't sell a computer without an OS. Which you can. Then you can sell the OS. And installation. Which you can sell as being done after the sale of the computer but before delivery of that computer. Obviating the law.
And your respondent's point was that the law seems to say that you don't have to buy the censorware at all, even if the OS is bundled with the computer, you just have to be reminded that you can buy it (or get it free) if you want it.
In any case, this is no reason not to move to Tejas. There's too much code to be written in the wireless corridor just north of Dallas, and there's Johnson Space Center just south of Houston, and there's all that silicon being sculpted in Austin. The real reason never to move to Tejas is the fuckin' insanity of the UNICARD* and the apathy of free people to the religious zealotry that made it necessary.
--Blair
* - For those who don't know: Texas and several other bible-belt states are a patchwork of blue laws, some regarding alcohol, ranging from laissez-les-bon-temps-roulez to dry-as-a-preacher's-nuts political subdivisions. One form is the "club" system, where to drink in a public house you must be a member of that business' club, or you open the publican to fines of several thousand dollars per incident. If you're like most people, of course, you eat and drink in dozens if not hundreds of different places each year. Imagine your wallet, carrying all those proof-of-membership chits in it so you don't have to hit the strongbox every time someone changes their mind on the Happy Hour destination. Enter the UNICARD. One card covering several states and most drinking joints in those states. Fabulous. Let's just institute a National Identity Card while to satisfy Elmer Gantry's suckers--oh, and bring back The Scarlet Letter and Stoning, while we're at it... Meanwhile, unless you can see the dividing line painted between towns, you never know which towns you'll need the Unicard in, so don't leave that sucker at home when trying new bars, or you'll have to suffer the embarassment of signing yet another false name to yet another 'cue-stained application form to get yet another dittoe'd temporary card. Better yet, let's regulate religion for a few years and see how these sanctimonious pricks like having their lifestyle treated like a government-granted privilege...
this time, however, someone is fighting back - the songwriters!
I just wanna see Lars Ulrich in court testifying that he wants his stuff on Napster...
--Blair