My mom had one that I used to play sometimes when I was a kid. One thing that you had to have was a good supply of the steel needles it used; they would wear out after just a few plays. As I watched the quarter-pound tonearm kick up little shavings out of the record grooves, I also wondered just how many more plays those old records could stand. (And I found out the hard way why it was such a big deal when they later introduced "unbreakable" records. Our 78s didn't seem to be all that much sturdier than eggshells.)
The one who does the trampling should be found guilty of murder, especially if they ran with no obvious signs of fire.
Right. Hundreds of people who were overcome with panic as a consequence of your action should rot in jail, while you, the one who triggered the event, should remain free to practice your hobby of instigating deadly stampedes on public property.
This new party wants to change the law to eliminate the concept of intellectual "property" altogether. No property --> no stealing, no matter how you choose to look at it.
Just as you have the right to look at someone on the street without their permission, this party wants to give you the right to create or distribute copies of anything that somebody publishes without their permission. It would all be perfectly legal and ethical in the unlikely case that they succeed in changing the laws.
The image that sounds more feasible today is the suicide backpack nuker blowing a crater in the middle of an urban area, a couple of missiles lobbied from North Korea into Tokyo, or twin nukes blowing up in Delhi and Islamabad.
The problem is that if any of those scenarios happen, it's not unlikely that events will spiral out of control afterwards, leading to the eventual launch of all those still-existing ICBMs.
Just look at all the crazy stuff that's happened in response to 9/11, then imagine multiplying that hysteria level by 1000X. That's the environment we'll be in after even a single nuke gets set off.
The big deal isn't the cookies. It's that this is an organization of supposed straight-laced agents whose job is to snoop on people to make sure that they're in line with the law, but they can't be bothered to keep themselves in compliance with the law.
This law may be silly, but they need to get congress to change it first, they can't just ignore it while they go about their business of monitoring other peoples' compliance with the laws.
What gets me is that drugs usually have two equally stupid names, the brand name and the generic name. Now you have twice as many unpronounceable words to try to remember: "Ask your doctor about Phrazxinex (Frobzinixol 200mg)." Who comes up with these names? Maybe it's just done with a computer program that strings together random syllables.
The amount of energy it takes to get a gasoline tanker worth of energy to a comet a few months before impact is very, very large.
So what? You originally claimed that it would take more energy than the USA uses in months to do the job, which makes it totally infeasible. I showed that the number is actually 8 orders of magnitude less.
At any rate, you wouldn't even have to bring the energy in the form of chemical fuel. For example, the Soviets launched dozens of small nuclear reactors into space on satellites, each one of which could deliver dozens of kilowatts of power for many months. Dust off the blueprints to one of those, grab ice from the comet to feed into a steam rocket, and you've got a package that would easily fit within our current launch capabilities.
For example, a cometary object 1km square would weigh a billion metric tons, and carry ~48 quadrillion Btus (or 1.41117626 * 10^13 kilowatt hours, a number so large it's silly), which would power the entire US for around six months if converted to electricity.
Umm, the idea isn't to stop the comet; it's to nudge it off course by a few thousand miles. To do that, all you have to do is change it's velocity by say 1 m/s a few months before impact. That would only take 5e11 joules or 140,000 KWh for your comet. That's an amount of energy comparable to what a single gasoline tanker truck can hold.
If typing rate is a constraint on your productivity, that's a serious problem with methodology.
Extra typing is mostly just an annoyance, but having to wade through thousands of lines of extraneous boilerplate code in order to find the essential logic is a serious problem.
Note that running an auto-indenter on java is harmless, and not so on python.
By definition, nobody would ever run an auto-indenter on python. An auto-indenter's job is to try to automatically recreate the redundant indent information that got out of sync with the brace information after programmers failed to do it manually. Python doesn't have this redundant info in the first place; it's an example of the DRY (don't repeat yourself) engineering principle that is frequently found in well-designed systems.
Running the auto-indenter in java is harmless, but my point is that it erases any chance of you spotting errors based on indent/brace mismatching, which was your big reason for sticking with a language with the redundant block notation in the first place.
Changing the indenting of Python code is exactly equivalent to moving the braces in Java code. There is no compile-time check in Java that will figure out if you incorrectly moved a brace either. In both cases, if you don't want to change the meaning of the code, don't do that.
You're arguing that you want extra manually-crated redundancy in the text to help you spot (some) errors. (Redundancy which becomes useless if anybody happens to run an auto-indenter on the file, BTW.) That may be a small benefit, but it's not enough reason to dictate you entire choice of languages and saddling your project team's fingers with 3X more typing.
Java supports the optional curly-brace syntax for if/else statements just like C. I assert that this is a far more serious source of runtime errors caused by mediocre programmers than any Python indentation problems.
With Python indentation, what you see is what you get. You can stare at a C/Java conditional construct for quite some time before you figure it out if the indentation doesn't match the braces or somebody omitted braces where they shouldn't have.
An intelligent inventor would do a patent search up front to avoid the "hard work of independently re-inventing.
Nobody searches software patents for ideas, especially high-level fuzzy ideas like "wireless e-mail". Do you honestly think somebody is going to be sitting around saying: "Gee, I'd love to read e-mail with a mobile device. I can't imagine how to do that, though. Oh, I know, I'll search for a solution at the USPTO!.... Well I'll be damned, it turns out you can do it with wireless radio! I would never have thought of that. This just saved me years of research! I'll get in touch with these people to license their innovation right away!"
This concept known as "designing around" other patents is a key feature of the patent system.
If that's true, why don't we just arbitrarily outlaw random ideas? That would spur all sorts of new innovation. Maybe we should start by outlawing wheels, that way we might finally get to drive flying cars.
One must be entitled to enjoy her property, even if he does not do anything (perceived by others as useful) with it.
Patents aren't intended to be "property". They're intended to be an economic incentive to promote progress in arts and sciences. Any property-like features are a side-effect of the current implementation of patents. Such windfall benefits for the patent holder should not take priority over the utility of patents in benefiting the overall economy.
In particular, snatching up a bunch of cheap obscure patents, sitting around waiting for someone to do the hard work of independently re-inventing them, and then pouncing on them with a lawsuit is beneficial to no one besides the patent troll, and this practice should be totally prohibited.
Another problem with tubes is that to accommodate the bulk of a tube-based control computer, the robot would have to be big enough to be cast as the villain in a bad Godzilla sequel.
Conspiracy buffs believe certain patches in the Windows code might give U.S. authorities the power to access Chinese networks and disable them, possibly during a war over Taiwan.
Of course, if we try that then the Chinese will probably retaliate by triggering the self-destruct hooks that they've hidden in all of the motherboards they've been selling us...
OK, it's a duopoly, not a monopoly. The telcos and the cable companies both usually enjoy government-granted monopolies in their respective markets.
But where do you get the idea that the cable companies won't pull this exact same stunt? They would just love to implement technical tricks what will make it difficult to get a non-approved VOIP setup working over a cable internet connection, especially one that uses a 3rd-party server to call arbitrary phone numbers.
My cable company already offers their own phone service over the cable, with lucrateive per-minute charges. They can't see user-controlled VOIP as anything but unwanted competition.
Just to demonstrate why a lack of choice might be a good thing, which is better: vi or emacs?
vi.
Next question?
But seriously, for you, to edit under Linux I'd suggest just running "wine notepad". You'll be all set with your familiar app, and you won't have to worry about having to evaluate anything new.
Unless, there's major resolution in that small space (say 1280x1024), that's unworkable today.
So dig out the old program and OS versions; they haven't gone away. These same programs were good enough to run most of the businesses in the US on 80x25 character text displays or 640x480x16-color graphics displays not too long ago. They should still be able to handle this job.
The only people that would benefit from this would be their competitors.
CPU instruction set architectures are very dependent on the network effect: they need to have large numbers of people using them and developing for them, or the CPU's market share shrivels up and dies. (As has happened to MIPS and Alpha.)
The SPARC architecture won't survive in the non-embedded CPU market with just one major vendor selling systems. If Sun wants to continue down the SPARC path, they need competitors in that space.
Having said that, IMO it's already too late for SPARC. Sun should just move everything over to X86-64 like the rest of the world. The value-add in servers is in the CPU packaging and interconnects, not in the particulars of the CPU core. They can use off-the-shelf cores and not waste resources on processor design. There's no harm to Sun in open-sourcing the SPARC and letting others waste their time tinkering with it.
Let's not forget about all of the innovation that has occurred under this "flawed" system.
Let's not forget about all of the innovation that occurred without such a system. For example, consider the early history of software.
Where would we be today if fundamental ideas such as hashtables, quicksort, language compilers, user accounts, spreadsheets, etc. had been patented by their inventors? The industry would probably have been set back by decades as the patent holders sat back and used their monopoly privileges to build safe little moats around each of their protected market positions, shutting most newcomers out of the softare market.
Sun is offering a deal that seems torn from a cell-phone company playbook: offering a "free" Ultra 20 Opteron workstation if you sign up for a $29.95/mo, 3-year service contract."
Here are some of the cellphone-like terms from that contract:
- Service plan includes up to 1 Trillion CPU instructions per month, absolutely free.
- Extra CPU instructions are billed at $0.08/Billion peak, $0.03/Billion nights and weekends.
- Free instructions do not include floating-point operations. All floating point instructions are billed at $0.11/Billion.
- Monthly bill will also include a regulatory cost recovery service fee. You agree to pay this fee each month. This fee is not a tax, and it is not a required government payment. It is not possible for you to know the cost of this fee until you receive your bill. The amount of this fee is determined totally at the provider's discretion, it may change from month to month, and you agree that there is no limit how high the fee may be set. You agree that the provider is not required to justify the fee or base its amount on any reason whatsoever.
- If you cancel the contract before the 3-year term is up, you will be responsible for an early termination fee of $75,000 per system per month of contract remaining, up to a maximum of $3,200,000.
- The system remains the property of the provider. At the end of the contract term, you must return it in like-new condition, and you will be responsible for a $2895 restocking fee, plus, at our sole discretion, refurbishing fees for any wear, tear or damage to the system.
- This system is not compatible with household A/C electrical power. This system requires 3-phase, 153 Hz, 67 Volt RMS power. You are responsible for using a compatible power source. Failure to connect appropriate power will destroy the system, and will result in damage fees of at least $17,000. You may purchase optional compatible power from us. Our current rates are $34.50/kWH plus $179/month power connection fee.
- We may change any term of this contract at any time without notice. You agree that any and all changes are binding on you and you heirs.
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My mom had one that I used to play sometimes when I was a kid. One thing that you had to have was a good supply of the steel needles it used; they would wear out after just a few plays. As I watched the quarter-pound tonearm kick up little shavings out of the record grooves, I also wondered just how many more plays those old records could stand. (And I found out the hard way why it was such a big deal when they later introduced "unbreakable" records. Our 78s didn't seem to be all that much sturdier than eggshells.)
Right. Hundreds of people who were overcome with panic as a consequence of your action should rot in jail, while you, the one who triggered the event, should remain free to practice your hobby of instigating deadly stampedes on public property.
Just as you have the right to look at someone on the street without their permission, this party wants to give you the right to create or distribute copies of anything that somebody publishes without their permission. It would all be perfectly legal and ethical in the unlikely case that they succeed in changing the laws.
The problem is that if any of those scenarios happen, it's not unlikely that events will spiral out of control afterwards, leading to the eventual launch of all those still-existing ICBMs.
Just look at all the crazy stuff that's happened in response to 9/11, then imagine multiplying that hysteria level by 1000X. That's the environment we'll be in after even a single nuke gets set off.
This law may be silly, but they need to get congress to change it first, they can't just ignore it while they go about their business of monitoring other peoples' compliance with the laws.
Plain text files were never really safe if you had ANSI.SYS turned on.
Yes, and why do you take those steps? Because you live in fear of the consequences that would happen if you didn't take them.
What gets me is that drugs usually have two equally stupid names, the brand name and the generic name. Now you have twice as many unpronounceable words to try to remember: "Ask your doctor about Phrazxinex (Frobzinixol 200mg)." Who comes up with these names? Maybe it's just done with a computer program that strings together random syllables.
So what? You originally claimed that it would take more energy than the USA uses in months to do the job, which makes it totally infeasible. I showed that the number is actually 8 orders of magnitude less.
At any rate, you wouldn't even have to bring the energy in the form of chemical fuel. For example, the Soviets launched dozens of small nuclear reactors into space on satellites, each one of which could deliver dozens of kilowatts of power for many months. Dust off the blueprints to one of those, grab ice from the comet to feed into a steam rocket, and you've got a package that would easily fit within our current launch capabilities.
Umm, the idea isn't to stop the comet; it's to nudge it off course by a few thousand miles. To do that, all you have to do is change it's velocity by say 1 m/s a few months before impact. That would only take 5e11 joules or 140,000 KWh for your comet. That's an amount of energy comparable to what a single gasoline tanker truck can hold.
Extra typing is mostly just an annoyance, but having to wade through thousands of lines of extraneous boilerplate code in order to find the essential logic is a serious problem.
Note that running an auto-indenter on java is harmless, and not so on python.
By definition, nobody would ever run an auto-indenter on python. An auto-indenter's job is to try to automatically recreate the redundant indent information that got out of sync with the brace information after programmers failed to do it manually. Python doesn't have this redundant info in the first place; it's an example of the DRY (don't repeat yourself) engineering principle that is frequently found in well-designed systems.
Running the auto-indenter in java is harmless, but my point is that it erases any chance of you spotting errors based on indent/brace mismatching, which was your big reason for sticking with a language with the redundant block notation in the first place.
You're arguing that you want extra manually-crated redundancy in the text to help you spot (some) errors. (Redundancy which becomes useless if anybody happens to run an auto-indenter on the file, BTW.) That may be a small benefit, but it's not enough reason to dictate you entire choice of languages and saddling your project team's fingers with 3X more typing.
With Python indentation, what you see is what you get. You can stare at a C/Java conditional construct for quite some time before you figure it out if the indentation doesn't match the braces or somebody omitted braces where they shouldn't have.
"Assuming we totally ignore all developments that occurred the 5 decades of computer science prior to 1995, then..."
And where did you find these languages that don't need to compile or parse your code when you're developing with them?
Nobody searches software patents for ideas, especially high-level fuzzy ideas like "wireless e-mail". Do you honestly think somebody is going to be sitting around saying: "Gee, I'd love to read e-mail with a mobile device. I can't imagine how to do that, though. Oh, I know, I'll search for a solution at the USPTO! .... Well I'll be damned, it turns out you can do it with wireless radio! I would never have thought of that. This just saved me years of research! I'll get in touch with these people to license their innovation right away!"
This concept known as "designing around" other patents is a key feature of the patent system.
If that's true, why don't we just arbitrarily outlaw random ideas? That would spur all sorts of new innovation. Maybe we should start by outlawing wheels, that way we might finally get to drive flying cars.
Patents aren't intended to be "property". They're intended to be an economic incentive to promote progress in arts and sciences. Any property-like features are a side-effect of the current implementation of patents. Such windfall benefits for the patent holder should not take priority over the utility of patents in benefiting the overall economy.
In particular, snatching up a bunch of cheap obscure patents, sitting around waiting for someone to do the hard work of independently re-inventing them, and then pouncing on them with a lawsuit is beneficial to no one besides the patent troll, and this practice should be totally prohibited.
Another problem with tubes is that to accommodate the bulk of a tube-based control computer, the robot would have to be big enough to be cast as the villain in a bad Godzilla sequel.
Of course, if we try that then the Chinese will probably retaliate by triggering the self-destruct hooks that they've hidden in all of the motherboards they've been selling us...
But where do you get the idea that the cable companies won't pull this exact same stunt? They would just love to implement technical tricks what will make it difficult to get a non-approved VOIP setup working over a cable internet connection, especially one that uses a 3rd-party server to call arbitrary phone numbers.
My cable company already offers their own phone service over the cable, with lucrateive per-minute charges. They can't see user-controlled VOIP as anything but unwanted competition.
vi.
Next question?
But seriously, for you, to edit under Linux I'd suggest just running "wine notepad". You'll be all set with your familiar app, and you won't have to worry about having to evaluate anything new.
So dig out the old program and OS versions; they haven't gone away. These same programs were good enough to run most of the businesses in the US on 80x25 character text displays or 640x480x16-color graphics displays not too long ago. They should still be able to handle this job.
CPU instruction set architectures are very dependent on the network effect: they need to have large numbers of people using them and developing for them, or the CPU's market share shrivels up and dies. (As has happened to MIPS and Alpha.)
The SPARC architecture won't survive in the non-embedded CPU market with just one major vendor selling systems. If Sun wants to continue down the SPARC path, they need competitors in that space.
Having said that, IMO it's already too late for SPARC. Sun should just move everything over to X86-64 like the rest of the world. The value-add in servers is in the CPU packaging and interconnects, not in the particulars of the CPU core. They can use off-the-shelf cores and not waste resources on processor design. There's no harm to Sun in open-sourcing the SPARC and letting others waste their time tinkering with it.
Let's not forget about all of the innovation that occurred without such a system. For example, consider the early history of software.
Where would we be today if fundamental ideas such as hashtables, quicksort, language compilers, user accounts, spreadsheets, etc. had been patented by their inventors? The industry would probably have been set back by decades as the patent holders sat back and used their monopoly privileges to build safe little moats around each of their protected market positions, shutting most newcomers out of the softare market.
Here are some of the cellphone-like terms from that contract:
- Service plan includes up to 1 Trillion CPU instructions per month, absolutely free.
- Extra CPU instructions are billed at $0.08/Billion peak, $0.03/Billion nights and weekends.
- Free instructions do not include floating-point operations. All floating point instructions are billed at $0.11/Billion.
- Monthly bill will also include a regulatory cost recovery service fee. You agree to pay this fee each month. This fee is not a tax, and it is not a required government payment. It is not possible for you to know the cost of this fee until you receive your bill. The amount of this fee is determined totally at the provider's discretion, it may change from month to month, and you agree that there is no limit how high the fee may be set. You agree that the provider is not required to justify the fee or base its amount on any reason whatsoever.
- If you cancel the contract before the 3-year term is up, you will be responsible for an early termination fee of $75,000 per system per month of contract remaining, up to a maximum of $3,200,000.
- The system remains the property of the provider. At the end of the contract term, you must return it in like-new condition, and you will be responsible for a $2895 restocking fee, plus, at our sole discretion, refurbishing fees for any wear, tear or damage to the system.
- This system is not compatible with household A/C electrical power. This system requires 3-phase, 153 Hz, 67 Volt RMS power. You are responsible for using a compatible power source. Failure to connect appropriate power will destroy the system, and will result in damage fees of at least $17,000. You may purchase optional compatible power from us. Our current rates are $34.50/kWH plus $179/month power connection fee.
- We may change any term of this contract at any time without notice. You agree that any and all changes are binding on you and you heirs.