Another thing about PLATO in particular, is that while it was very cool and ahead of its time, there was very little important secret information stored in it.
Most of the users used it to do mundane homework assignments. It also had some games, and facilities that resembled today's newsgroups, chat and rudimentary informational websites.
At least in the site I used, keeping the aging Control Data Cyber mainframes that hosted PLATO creaking along was probably a much bigger worry than any security threats. There was no shortage of hardware-related downtime.
No, I'm not. He had lived in states where he would have been considered a citizen with full rights, but the federal government overrode the rights of those states to give him citizenship. The federal government said he was a slave.
(Not to mention the fact that these stupid technicalities you spout are an insult to basic human rights. States don't have rights. People do. A state does not have the right to enslave anybody.)
It probably just sits there and senses how much juice is left in the battery, and then lets the solar cell charge it.
And I assume that it is just as optimistic as every other battery sensor on this planet: A report of "50% charge remaining" really means "Shutdown in less than one minute."
You haven't fixed the OP's problem. All of your amendments are just as ambiguous as the current text of the Constitution, and so they too will be "living" as the courts repeatedly reinterpret them. To get a fully static Constitution, you will have to cram it full of thousands of pages of meticulous details.
We don't live in an 18th century agrarian society anymore. If you don't want it to be "living", and you want to interpret every word with strict literalism, then it will have to be revised and expanded to properly define a government's actual real world role modern life and technology. It would probably take at least couple of thousand pages to do the job properly.
(Note that it has never been taken literally since day one anyway. For example, for many decades slavery was allowed in spite of the fact that it was in direct violation of the Bill of Rights.)
Not really, the only reason the US wasted billions of dollars is because of bureaucracy (later years) and initial research (earlier years).
The Shuttle's fundamental design is so inherently flawed and unsafe that a massive bureaucracy, meticulous procedures and hand rebuilding are needed to keep the shuttle from being destroyed on each launch. The Chinese will have no magic cure for that fact.
In fact, if I were in charge I'd donate all the existing NASA Shuttle hardware to the Chinese so that they too can waste 30 years on a technological dead end. (This would also help to keep NASA from being tempted to recycle old shuttle parts into yet another launch system boondoggle.)
So if you enjoy needlessly clicking for the sake of needlessly clicking, then by all means continue to use click-to-focus.
I don't do much needless clicking, because I keep my hands on the keyboard and use Alt+Tab if I can. The mouse is relegated to secondary status, only used in the rare cases when it's worth taking my hands away from the more productive keyboard.
That means that most of the time I really don't want to worry about where the mouse cursor is, and I certainly don't want it on top of the window I'm working on, and I *really* don't want to worry about what happens if I accidentally bump it.
They were saying "use any window manager you want as long as it supports feature X or Y" - a far more reasonable request.
What if feature X or Y drives the user fricking insane?
The first time I used a Unix workstation 20 years ago, I was appalled by the focus-follows-mouse misfeature. It turns moving your mouse into navigating a minefield. Luckily, more sane desktop environments have been developed in the decades since.
I will never, ever enable focus-follows mouse. Nor will the vast majority of the population. I would switch to Microsoft Windows rather than suffer such abuse from a window manager. So the request is *not* reasonable.
This is a problem with the way that the standards are developed rather than an inherent problem with the patent system.
Not necessarily. Take Microsoft's VFAT patents, for example. Microsoft is currently shaking down camera manufacturers and other OEMs for royalties on this filesystem. This is depsite the fact that in the 21st century, that filesystem has zero technical merit, and the patents only cover techniques that were kludges to interface with a 16-bit OS from the 1980s that nobody has used in over a decade.
However, VFAT became a defacto standard (through no merit of its own). Everyone must be compatible with it to compete in the removable storage device market, and Microsoft reaps windfall profits. However, there was no "standards process" to abuse. The problem is that patents are allowed to exist even after the improvements they protect are no longer useful. That's one problem with patents themselves.
You seem to be self contradictory: On the one hand espousing libertarian babbling about how the Constitution limits the government; but on the other accepting intrusive government programs that redistribute rights from the people at large to certain favored supplicants at the whim of unaccountable bureaucrats, then calling these entitlements "property".
The compensation the government has to pay for the taking is the value of the patents over their entire term, which in this case is likely to be billions of dollars (for example: Thomson, which is just one member of the MPEG LA patent pool, receives a few hundred million dollars a year in licensing revenue).
I've got a better idea. Since the government made up this "patent value" out of thin air in the first place, how about let the government decide how much it's worth.
Since without a doubt it did *not* cost billions of dollars to come up with a couple of tweaked codec algorithms, the government shouldn't have to pay billions of dollars to buy them out. Just give the patent holders a reasonable return on their actual investments and call it a day.
That way we won't be stuck with another 20 years of redistributing wealth from the general public to a monopolistic corporate cartel.
Not really. Back in the day, if somebody patented a cotton gin, that didn't stop me from making another machine that cleans cotton which works on a different principle. The existence of the original machine in the market was irrelevant to new competitive entries.
Today, a good deal of software is subject to the "network effect". That makes it just about impossible to operate in many software markets without being compatible with the most popular protocols, formats or standards. If those things happen to be patented, you have no alternative but to pay the licenses or give up, regardless of what new innovations you may bring to the game. Products that don't interoperate with the existing installed base are simply not viable in the market.
Today's patents can be much mor powerful than originally envisioned. They can wall off an entire marketplace, not just a single clever idea.
Well, I'm going to be recording the Superbowl on my Linux-hosted Mythtv box. Then I'll use the automatic commercial flagging feature to skip over the game so I can see the ads.
If your throttle got stuck you could hit the clutch pedal and cut the power to the transmission.
Yeah, but I bet that for every person saved by being able to use the clutch to cut power, dozens more have been killed because driving a manual safely requires the dedicated use of all four limbs.
why use that 10b to give all Americans health care?
Because the current US healthcare system is a form of feudalism, where the serfs (workers with at least one family member not in perfect health) find it hard or impossible to leave the protection of their lords (large companies). This lack of mobility and reduced freedom of choice drives down prevailing wages in the job market, and it makes it much harder for potential competitors to start new small companies.
Few have benefited from this situation more than Mr. Gates, so I doubt that he's going to make any big moves to change the status quo.
You also have to be really careful using instructions that update less than a full 32-bit register on modern X86s (such as these 16-bit instructions). You could get "partial register stalls" if you try to read the full-width EAX or EDX after such a sequence. That could toss a big wrench into the deep execution pipeline while the CPU hunts around amongst dozens of pending micro-ops for the appropriate contents of the upper half of the register.
Ironic, given how much commentators liked to compare him to JFK back in the campaign. Kennedy had foresight.
No, Kennedy had *hindsight*. He saw just how much letting the Soviets beating us in a major space goal made his predecessor look like a chump. He didn't want to repeat that public relations mistake.
Right now, no country is seriously planning to do anything genuinely new with manned spaceflight for the next couple of decades. There's no motivation for a president budget a lot of money to try to beat anybody.
Slashdot Mirror
Another thing about PLATO in particular, is that while it was very cool and ahead of its time, there was very little important secret information stored in it.
Most of the users used it to do mundane homework assignments. It also had some games, and facilities that resembled today's newsgroups, chat and rudimentary informational websites.
At least in the site I used, keeping the aging Control Data Cyber mainframes that hosted PLATO creaking along was probably a much bigger worry than any security threats. There was no shortage of hardware-related downtime.
Which division is going to end up owning those massive headsets with the gigantic batwing logos that they hand out to NFL head coaches?
No, I'm not. He had lived in states where he would have been considered a citizen with full rights, but the federal government overrode the rights of those states to give him citizenship. The federal government said he was a slave.
(Not to mention the fact that these stupid technicalities you spout are an insult to basic human rights. States don't have rights. People do. A state does not have the right to enslave anybody.)
It probably just sits there and senses how much juice is left in the battery, and then lets the solar cell charge it.
And I assume that it is just as optimistic as every other battery sensor on this planet: A report of "50% charge remaining" really means "Shutdown in less than one minute."
Tell that to Dred Scott.
You haven't fixed the OP's problem. All of your amendments are just as ambiguous as the current text of the Constitution, and so they too will be "living" as the courts repeatedly reinterpret them. To get a fully static Constitution, you will have to cram it full of thousands of pages of meticulous details.
If you think that even one of those phrases are 100% unambiguous, you are the one who needs to take remedial English classes.
We don't live in an 18th century agrarian society anymore. If you don't want it to be "living", and you want to interpret every word with strict literalism, then it will have to be revised and expanded to properly define a government's actual real world role modern life and technology. It would probably take at least couple of thousand pages to do the job properly.
(Note that it has never been taken literally since day one anyway. For example, for many decades slavery was allowed in spite of the fact that it was in direct violation of the Bill of Rights.)
I already did up here.
I worked for months on the project where I was saddled with that damned primitive X window manager. Proof? The mental scars that I still suffer.
And don't even get me started on having the desktop switch on cursor hitting the edge of screen.
Not really, the only reason the US wasted billions of dollars is because of bureaucracy (later years) and initial research (earlier years).
The Shuttle's fundamental design is so inherently flawed and unsafe that a massive bureaucracy, meticulous procedures and hand rebuilding are needed to keep the shuttle from being destroyed on each launch. The Chinese will have no magic cure for that fact.
In fact, if I were in charge I'd donate all the existing NASA Shuttle hardware to the Chinese so that they too can waste 30 years on a technological dead end. (This would also help to keep NASA from being tempted to recycle old shuttle parts into yet another launch system boondoggle.)
So if you enjoy needlessly clicking for the sake of needlessly clicking, then by all means continue to use click-to-focus.
I don't do much needless clicking, because I keep my hands on the keyboard and use Alt+Tab if I can. The mouse is relegated to secondary status, only used in the rare cases when it's worth taking my hands away from the more productive keyboard.
That means that most of the time I really don't want to worry about where the mouse cursor is, and I certainly don't want it on top of the window I'm working on, and I *really* don't want to worry about what happens if I accidentally bump it.
They were saying "use any window manager you want as long as it supports feature X or Y" - a far more reasonable request.
What if feature X or Y drives the user fricking insane?
The first time I used a Unix workstation 20 years ago, I was appalled by the focus-follows-mouse misfeature. It turns moving your mouse into navigating a minefield. Luckily, more sane desktop environments have been developed in the decades since.
I will never, ever enable focus-follows mouse. Nor will the vast majority of the population. I would switch to Microsoft Windows rather than suffer such abuse from a window manager. So the request is *not* reasonable.
This is a problem with the way that the standards are developed rather than an inherent problem with the patent system.
Not necessarily. Take Microsoft's VFAT patents, for example. Microsoft is currently shaking down camera manufacturers and other OEMs for royalties on this filesystem. This is depsite the fact that in the 21st century, that filesystem has zero technical merit, and the patents only cover techniques that were kludges to interface with a 16-bit OS from the 1980s that nobody has used in over a decade.
However, VFAT became a defacto standard (through no merit of its own). Everyone must be compatible with it to compete in the removable storage device market, and Microsoft reaps windfall profits. However, there was no "standards process" to abuse. The problem is that patents are allowed to exist even after the improvements they protect are no longer useful. That's one problem with patents themselves.
You seem to be self contradictory: On the one hand espousing libertarian babbling about how the Constitution limits the government; but on the other accepting intrusive government programs that redistribute rights from the people at large to certain favored supplicants at the whim of unaccountable bureaucrats, then calling these entitlements "property".
The compensation the government has to pay for the taking is the value of the patents over their entire term, which in this case is likely to be billions of dollars (for example: Thomson, which is just one member of the MPEG LA patent pool, receives a few hundred million dollars a year in licensing revenue).
I've got a better idea. Since the government made up this "patent value" out of thin air in the first place, how about let the government decide how much it's worth.
Since without a doubt it did *not* cost billions of dollars to come up with a couple of tweaked codec algorithms, the government shouldn't have to pay billions of dollars to buy them out. Just give the patent holders a reasonable return on their actual investments and call it a day.
That way we won't be stuck with another 20 years of redistributing wealth from the general public to a monopolistic corporate cartel.
Yep, that's pretty much what patents are for.
Not really. Back in the day, if somebody patented a cotton gin, that didn't stop me from making another machine that cleans cotton which works on a different principle. The existence of the original machine in the market was irrelevant to new competitive entries.
Today, a good deal of software is subject to the "network effect". That makes it just about impossible to operate in many software markets without being compatible with the most popular protocols, formats or standards. If those things happen to be patented, you have no alternative but to pay the licenses or give up, regardless of what new innovations you may bring to the game. Products that don't interoperate with the existing installed base are simply not viable in the market.
Today's patents can be much mor powerful than originally envisioned. They can wall off an entire marketplace, not just a single clever idea.
This is news for nerds, remember?
Well, I'm going to be recording the Superbowl on my Linux-hosted Mythtv box. Then I'll use the automatic commercial flagging feature to skip over the game so I can see the ads.
If your throttle got stuck you could hit the clutch pedal and cut the power to the transmission.
Yeah, but I bet that for every person saved by being able to use the clutch to cut power, dozens more have been killed because driving a manual safely requires the dedicated use of all four limbs.
why use that 10b to give all Americans health care?
Because the current US healthcare system is a form of feudalism, where the serfs (workers with at least one family member not in perfect health) find it hard or impossible to leave the protection of their lords (large companies). This lack of mobility and reduced freedom of choice drives down prevailing wages in the job market, and it makes it much harder for potential competitors to start new small companies.
Few have benefited from this situation more than Mr. Gates, so I doubt that he's going to make any big moves to change the status quo.
You also have to be really careful using instructions that update less than a full 32-bit register on modern X86s (such as these 16-bit instructions). You could get "partial register stalls" if you try to read the full-width EAX or EDX after such a sequence. That could toss a big wrench into the deep execution pipeline while the CPU hunts around amongst dozens of pending micro-ops for the appropriate contents of the upper half of the register.
When China, India and Russia go to the Moon to stay
But they're not going to. Sometimes they talk about it, but talk is cheap.
If any of those countries establish an actual permanent moon base within the next 20 years, I'll buy you a beer.
Ironic, given how much commentators liked to compare him to JFK back in the campaign. Kennedy had foresight.
No, Kennedy had *hindsight*. He saw just how much letting the Soviets beating us in a major space goal made his predecessor look like a chump. He didn't want to repeat that public relations mistake.
Right now, no country is seriously planning to do anything genuinely new with manned spaceflight for the next couple of decades. There's no motivation for a president budget a lot of money to try to beat anybody.
We could achieve you goals much more safely and cheaply by pumping all of the air out of an abandoned mine and sealing in some volunteers.
0.90 to 1.02 isn't particularly impressive. 0.00 to 5.71 is.
It's not all that impressive if you've already enlisted every single PC OEM as your personal towel boy.