When I think "patent", images of patent drawings for drill bits are the first association that comes to mind for me... which is the product of a professor who had *scary* levels of experience in the oil industry, but which will serve as a good example in this case.
Patents for drill bits cover *implementation* ideas. Perhaps this patent isn't for a solid bit, but rather one that has three conical rotating parts on sleeve bearings. Perhaps that one isn't for a pure tungsten carbide surface, but rather one that uses tungsten carbide to hold diamond grains in place. Implementation details.
If anyone had tried to patent "getting oil out of the ground" instead, they would have been laughed to death. If you were a tool bit manufacturer, you licensed patented ideas because they were faster, cheaper, or more reliable, not because they were the only way to do the job.
So that's the first problem I have with software patents: they tend to patent the job, not just one way to do it. If your PVR idea uses a fast general purpose CPU instead of a specific MPEG encoder chip, if it uses MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2, or if it's not even a physical product but instead just a software package you run on your computer with tuner card... well, even if you don't resemble Tivo at all in implementation, you probably fall under their patents for just solving the same problem of "pausing live TV".
The second problem is that they're patenting the obvious. Given the question, "how would you make it possible to pause live TV", exactly what percentage of Slashdot readers do you think would be unable to figure it out? Implementing it would probably be beyond the reach of most of us... but if Tivo were patenting their implementation, I'd expect to see source code in the patent.
Tivo thought of a new market. That's a wonderful thing, but should they be allowed a 17-year monopoly in it because of it?
that means she gets less than five CENTS an hour to teach a child. [per child of course]
Even with overcrowded classrooms, that would work out to at most $2 an hour, which can't be accurate. Your earlier $1 per child per day figure would work out to (using the most unrealistic timesheets) no more than $6 an hour, again not accurate. I worry that people will pay too much attention to your clearly invalid numbers and ignore your (quite correct) points.
My father teaches high school in one of the most underfunded states in the union... with years of experience, he makes over $30K a year before taxes, or around $15 an hour. It's not babysitter wages, but it's still quite a small amount if you expect to be able to hire people more competent than babysitters. It's less than he made in either of his two previous careers (not even considering inflation), and it's half of what many of my friends make straight out of college. Every teacher working in America's public schools is doing so either because they gave up much more lucrative job opportunities out of some sense of altruism or because they really can't find a better job. I'm cynical enough to be surprised that the first group isn't extremely rare, but the second group is still adequately represented.
I agree that teachers are underpaid, but it's important to understand why: the reason isn't some abstract ideal of fairness.
Ideally, we'd be paying teachers enough to make it a financially competitive job, and using the influx of new applicants to actually fire the least competent current teachers regularly. Isn't that what you do when hiring for any other job, make sure you're paying enough to have a full applicant pool to choose from? The current methods for avoiding incompetent teachers generally involve making them jump through years of easy "how to teach" classes and certification hoops, and I suspect for every illiterate they weed out there's at least one scientist they scare off.
Exactly what kind of "fair" Slashdot settlement do you think we could all agree on? The last time I proposed a fate for Microsoft, fair wasn't exactly topping my evaluation criteria.
You're just trying to trick them into listening to all our bitching, aren't you? God knows they've all been too bored/disgusted with the comments pages to read them for years.
I'm afraid I don't know of any loops in Red Hat... but it would be possible to create them. Do you have any examples?
How do you make sure that at no point does bash, or libc disappear or stop working?
Because if I tried to uninstall bash or glibc (or install anything conflicting), RPM would notice that all sorts of dependencies get broken, and would refuse to continue without the --hose-my-system option.
Alas, such things are not in the forefront of the news as I guess most companies are scared to invest in something so powerful.
I would think that the prospect of storing 140GB on a single disc could threaten to drive technology company CEOs mad with the lust for power, perhaps even awakening a long-imprisoned ancient evil that threatens to consume us all.
Also, I've been playing the new Wolfenstein too much.
A DEB package references the other packages it requires, not the libraries or binaries contained in the package, thereby alleviating the problem of depending on different library versioning conventions.
This is exactly the wrong thing to do. How many different forks (what it takes to produce a "different library versioning convention" are there for the average Linux library? 1. How many different packagers (what it takes to produce different packages) are there? A half dozen, in RPM land.
Like I said, Debian doesn't avoid these problems because of technological superiority, they avoid it because they don't have different groups of competing packagers. That's great now, but it'll be ugly if they ever fork.
It also allows for pre- and post-dependencies, which help apt handle the often complex task of updating between major versions of Debian, by making sure that packages are updated in the proper order.
"Only update packages when all of their dependencies have been updated" is by definition a proper order. I don't think RPM currently does this (although I can't recall seeing a post-install script fail because of it; I probably don't update enough packages simultaneously except with full distro upgrades, which do maintain proper ordering), but that's a bug in the package tool, not a failing in the package format.
The RPM format at best only provides the name and major version of any dynamic libraries a package requires.
You would perhaps like it to provide the author's favorite ice cream flavor, too?
Since different distributions and upstream authors all seem to have their own ideas on how to use dynamic library versioning,
Isn't this the problem entirely, and not the RPM format? If every library version number were updated the way it was supposed to be (backwards compatible in minor version number increments, API changes in major version number increments), then RPM works perfectly. I've seen it. Install version 2.3 of a library, and you can upgrade safely to 2.4 without breaking anything. If some bleeding edge packages needs version 3.0, then you install 3.0 *alongside* 2.4, and everything still works. Once the rest of your programs have been updated to use 3.0, you erase 2.4 and everything still works.
The big problem is what happens when this convention isn't followed, or when (worse yet) some library gets built into a FOO-bar.rpm by one guy and into a foo-bar-baz.rpm by another, so dependant software authors randomly choose one or the other, and you can't install both on your system. This could be solved if every author versioned correctly and every packager named correctly...
Or it could be solved the way Debian does it: with a single, authoritative package reposity. I occasionally have trouble getting a SuSE-built RPM to run on my Red Hat system. Debian users don't have this trouble, but if it's because of some superiority of.deb you never bothered to explain what that was. I rather suspect it's because Debian doesn't have the equivalent of SuSE: if you install a.deb package, you can be 99% sure that the guy who made it was using Debian.
And don't get me started on ports. I play with alpha software and write C++, so I have a compiler and all sorts of header files installed... but you want to mandate that *everyone* have the same when they want to upgrade software? And enough RAM to compile it?
You could be right, of course.. there could be some vital missing feature of the.RPM file format... but it bugs me that nobody who marked you +5 seemed to notice that you never mentioned what this feature was!!!
Installing most distributions (I consider Debian an exception) is easy now.
Administering a Linux box is still not easy.
As an example, to get the pictures off my digital camera:
The Red Hat upgrade (somewhere around 7.0, I think) installed my USB drivers automatically.
Easy to install, check.
When I have new pictures, "mv camera/* pictures/new" (in my home directory) transfers them to my hard drive.
Easy to use, check.
Setting the "camera" directory up required editing two of my automount config files and making a symlink to the mount point.
Easy to administer? No.
Well, okay, this was easy to do, but way too difficult for someone uninterested in computers to learn to do. Similarly with most tasks that require you to touch the/etc directory: the simple stuff is GUIfied now, but the extent of that depends on your distribution, and doing anything complicated requires reading man pages and figuring out config file formats.
Ironically, this makes Linux a great choice for office environments where users aren't expected to administer their own systems in the first place, but other considerations (say a little prayer for OpenOffice and KOffice tonight) are the limiting factor there.
The problem is just the same in Windows: if you're using the internet without keeping up with security updates and security policies, you may be remotely compromised and your computer may be trashed or may be used to attack others. Wanna guess what percentage of Outlook and IE users are still vulnerable to the half dozen exploits found in Microsoft's HTML components this year?
The solution is just the same as in Windows, too: run up2date, MandrakeUpdate, Windows Update, apt, or whatever such tool your vendor provides.
The question is - which one is causal, which ones are reactionary?
It's basic physics that CO2 absorbs reradiated heat, but it's also basic chemistry that the solubility of CO2 decreases in warmer water. So that could go either way.
But do you really mean to suggest that the temperature on Earth somehow affects solar output?! If Earth suddenly vanished out of it's orbit, *maybe* that would have some measurable effect on the Sun, but biosphere temperatures? Any causation there can only be in one direction.
I'm going to be traveling ~600 miles back home in a few weeks using $30 of jet fuel. My last trip of that length sucked up $20 of gasoline. If you can think of a way for me to pull off $10 with solar power, I'd like to hear it.
We've had fossil fuels for a "cheap" source of energy for the past 150 years, and it hasn't done the world's poor a good goddamn bit of good.
Actually, it's increased the standard of living exponentially everywhere the industrial revolution hit, even in the face of a world population that has increased 10-fold in that time. Pretty sweet deal, huh?
The "Kyoto Protocol" was watered down into a feel-good hack that wouldn't have done a thing to reduce CO2 emissions in the long run, for exactly the reasons you claim. What's more, it would have *increased* emissions in the medium term, as half of the industry in the unfairly restricted first world decided that this was the last draw and moved to third world countries where they could release CO2 without pesky limits (oh, and where they could be exempt from limitations on all sorts of toxic pollutants and regulations about smokestack scrubbers as well).
Even if none of these obvious consequences happened, Kyoto still would only have delayed rising CO2 emissions for a few years, barely noticeable on a graph. What, you think the exempt countries are going to stay poor and agrarian forever?
It can't hurt to cut down on CO2 emission, even if it's not the 100% cause of global warming.
Yes it can. It can remove cheap energy and transportation sources for billions of people, maintaining or increasing rates of poverty and starvation around the globe.
But if it turns out that it was the influence of man, there won't be an 'undo' button!
Yes, there will. The "undo" button will be to reduce CO2 emissions after we've proven that they are a problem, and watch them fall back to equilibrium. We haven't passed some invisible "point of no return"; the Earth isn't currently the hottest it's been this millenium, much less the hottest ever.
Perhaps an imbalance of power like that can exist on a local level. We're talking about surveillance data that whose source is verifiable on a national scale. And if the United States is capable of mob injustice on a national level, these little doohickies aren't going to make things any worse.
Debugging TeX source while the professor is moving on doesn't sound workable to me.
It doesn't have to be correct enough to pass the TeX parser - you don't even try parsing it until you're back in your room studying (you do study your notes, right?) later. It just has to be accurate enough that you can correctly fix any syntax errors yourself later. And people are generally more forgiving than parsers.
If your statements were at all logical, in vitro fertilization would have settled the issue years ago. However, most people who believe in "souls" don't think that sex is a prerequisite for creating one.
I did mechanical engineering with a math minor... and between that and the Linux hobby I got exposed to LaTeX pretty early. I've never owned a laptop (or a PDA with a keyboard), so I haven't tried to use it for notetaking, but I'll bet with a little practice that's what would work best. And if you decide that it doesn't work for notetaking, it's a good thing to learn anyway. It produces spiffy-looking reports, translates automatically to MathML, is the preferred submission format of most math/engineering journals, etc. You'd want a laptop with a full size keyboard, not some palmtop 2-finger typing thing, though.
It's also the first thing you notice when you're checking out a new distro, and it's the only thing at all that shallow reviewers pay any attention to.
I've been an assistant at a half dozen installfests: a couple where mostly Red Hat got installed, a couple with mostly Mandrake, and a couple with mostly Debian. Unless Debian's installer has improved by orders of magnitude in the last 9-10 months, it is by far the most newbie-unfriendly of the lot. Even people experienced with other distributions needed to be walked through a Debian installation process beforehand to try and prevent any unpleasant surprises.
Debian is a wonderful distribution (even for new users, now) once you've got it running, but if you think any "entry level users" can sit down at a Debian installation and have the slightest hope of getting through it successfully, you're deluding yourself.
If the product was labeled accurately, it wasn't faulty. Why would you give them your money in the first place?
Of course, they've released a few of these pseudo-CDs without labeling them as such, in which case you're completely right. But it looks like we're at least going to be squeezed honestly in the future.
That picture reminds me of some email sparring a couple years ago:
"Well, I think of Patrick and Roy in many ways, but dripping in testosterone is not one of them. Patrick and Roy would be better described as radiating a pale glow, sort of like a monitor-tan."
How the hell is it that we, in the USA, are reduced to using techniques Heinlein was driven to using in the freaking Soviet Union under Leninist Communism, just to avoid being ripped off and cheated?
Simple. To quote the same article:
All travel in the USSR is controlled at every point by Intourist; you must buy from it all travel, all automobile and guide service, all hotel rooms, all meals -- or if you buy a meal not from Intourist you simply waste a meal already paid for.
First, some important background: Everybody may want to rip you off and cheat you, if they get the chance. This is true under Leninist Communism, American Capitalism, or Stone Age Tribalism. What is supposed to make capitalism relatively immune is the idea that, if you don't like the service that one company is giving you, you can take your business to a competitor; unlike a Communist country where competition was supposedly a sign of inefficiency (why design two different brands of something when people can all use the same one?) or weakness (what's wrong with the State hotels, that you think there should be others?). Choosing competition works: there are countless businesses (McDonalds, Microsoft, Northwest, for example) that have received hundreds of dollars of my money in the past, but that will never see another dime due to various fatal failures of product or service. I don't care if such a company continues to fail its customers, because I have chosen to stop being one of them.
So now, to answer your question, how are we reduced to psychological warfare to avoid being cheated? Because something is different in that "competition" equation, that makes people (including you, apparantly) decide that it is more worthwhile to kick and scream than to go to a competitor.
I suspect there are many such factors. Some suggestions:
People feel more "entitled" now than ever before. Tens of millions have illegally copied music, and decided they liked it. The majority of the country is expecting to be recipients of government wealth transfers when they retire. Government has finally become mostly successful at protecting individual rights, and so we want to make the list of our "rights" as big as possible. The "right" to buy someone else's music on your terms seems to be on the list of most people here. Otherwise, why complain? The CDs are apparantly going to be labeled, so you don't have to buy them.
There are no competitors here. In the narrow view, every piece of music is an individual work that cannot easily be substituted. I'm a U2 fan, which among other things means I give Island Records Corporation money. If I decide that Island Records Corp. is a bastion of evil, I can't exactly the the next U2 CD from another label, and the Backstreet Boys just isn't going to cut it as a substitute. Whoever holds your favorite bands' contracts has a degree of power over you that doesn't exist in a commodity industry.
There are no competitors here. In the broader view, the record companies have a nice oligopoly with significant control over the radio stations and the record stores, and the radio stations and record stores have significant control over what music gets public dollars (and so over what bands continue). A cartel of about a half dozen record companies makes the rules, and it's not easy for others to play.
It's sad, too, because it would be so easy to give artists another distribution channel. Imagine, say, "musichotornot.com", where you got to download a 60 second clip from a musician's track and vote on it, or just see the top voted songs alongside links to their websites? It would be nice to see some way that bands with real talent could become popular without signing their souls away first. mp3.com is a good start, but it's hard to say what they're doing wrong.
He was convinced the USA would collapse before 2000.
The only thing along those lines I recall was the prediction that, between his own health and the threat of nuclear war, he would not make it to see 2000 himself. He was right, unfortunately. He was right for the first reason, fortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
When I think "patent", images of patent drawings for drill bits are the first association that comes to mind for me... which is the product of a professor who had *scary* levels of experience in the oil industry, but which will serve as a good example in this case.
Patents for drill bits cover *implementation* ideas. Perhaps this patent isn't for a solid bit, but rather one that has three conical rotating parts on sleeve bearings. Perhaps that one isn't for a pure tungsten carbide surface, but rather one that uses tungsten carbide to hold diamond grains in place. Implementation details.
If anyone had tried to patent "getting oil out of the ground" instead, they would have been laughed to death. If you were a tool bit manufacturer, you licensed patented ideas because they were faster, cheaper, or more reliable, not because they were the only way to do the job.
So that's the first problem I have with software patents: they tend to patent the job, not just one way to do it. If your PVR idea uses a fast general purpose CPU instead of a specific MPEG encoder chip, if it uses MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2, or if it's not even a physical product but instead just a software package you run on your computer with tuner card... well, even if you don't resemble Tivo at all in implementation, you probably fall under their patents for just solving the same problem of "pausing live TV".
The second problem is that they're patenting the obvious. Given the question, "how would you make it possible to pause live TV", exactly what percentage of Slashdot readers do you think would be unable to figure it out? Implementing it would probably be beyond the reach of most of us... but if Tivo were patenting their implementation, I'd expect to see source code in the patent.
Tivo thought of a new market. That's a wonderful thing, but should they be allowed a 17-year monopoly in it because of it?
that means she gets less than five CENTS an hour to teach a child. [per child of course]
Even with overcrowded classrooms, that would work out to at most $2 an hour, which can't be accurate. Your earlier $1 per child per day figure would work out to (using the most unrealistic timesheets) no more than $6 an hour, again not accurate. I worry that people will pay too much attention to your clearly invalid numbers and ignore your (quite correct) points.
My father teaches high school in one of the most underfunded states in the union... with years of experience, he makes over $30K a year before taxes, or around $15 an hour. It's not babysitter wages, but it's still quite a small amount if you expect to be able to hire people more competent than babysitters. It's less than he made in either of his two previous careers (not even considering inflation), and it's half of what many of my friends make straight out of college. Every teacher working in America's public schools is doing so either because they gave up much more lucrative job opportunities out of some sense of altruism or because they really can't find a better job. I'm cynical enough to be surprised that the first group isn't extremely rare, but the second group is still adequately represented.
I agree that teachers are underpaid, but it's important to understand why: the reason isn't some abstract ideal of fairness.
Ideally, we'd be paying teachers enough to make it a financially competitive job, and using the influx of new applicants to actually fire the least competent current teachers regularly. Isn't that what you do when hiring for any other job, make sure you're paying enough to have a full applicant pool to choose from? The current methods for avoiding incompetent teachers generally involve making them jump through years of easy "how to teach" classes and certification hoops, and I suspect for every illiterate they weed out there's at least one scientist they scare off.
Exactly what kind of "fair" Slashdot settlement do you think we could all agree on? The last time I proposed a fate for Microsoft, fair wasn't exactly topping my evaluation criteria.
L-O-S-E. One fucking O.
Are you sure? I suspect SnapperHead is trying to slip a veiled incontinence reference past the moderators.
You're just trying to trick them into listening to all our bitching, aren't you? God knows they've all been too bored/disgusted with the comments pages to read them for years.
What about dependency loops?
I'm afraid I don't know of any loops in Red Hat... but it would be possible to create them. Do you have any examples?
How do you make sure that at no point does bash, or libc disappear or stop working?
Because if I tried to uninstall bash or glibc (or install anything conflicting), RPM would notice that all sorts of dependencies get broken, and would refuse to continue without the --hose-my-system option.
Alas, such things are not in the forefront of the news as I guess most companies are scared to invest in something so powerful.
I would think that the prospect of storing 140GB on a single disc could threaten to drive technology company CEOs mad with the lust for power, perhaps even awakening a long-imprisoned ancient evil that threatens to consume us all.
Also, I've been playing the new Wolfenstein too much.
A DEB package references the other packages it requires, not the libraries or binaries contained in the package, thereby alleviating the problem of depending on different library versioning conventions.
This is exactly the wrong thing to do. How many different forks (what it takes to produce a "different library versioning convention" are there for the average Linux library? 1. How many different packagers (what it takes to produce different packages) are there? A half dozen, in RPM land.
Like I said, Debian doesn't avoid these problems because of technological superiority, they avoid it because they don't have different groups of competing packagers. That's great now, but it'll be ugly if they ever fork.
It also allows for pre- and post-dependencies, which help apt handle the often complex task of updating between major versions of Debian, by making sure that packages are updated in the proper order.
"Only update packages when all of their dependencies have been updated" is by definition a proper order. I don't think RPM currently does this (although I can't recall seeing a post-install script fail because of it; I probably don't update enough packages simultaneously except with full distro upgrades, which do maintain proper ordering), but that's a bug in the package tool, not a failing in the package format.
The RPM format at best only provides the name and major version of any dynamic libraries a package requires.
.deb you never bothered to explain what that was. I rather suspect it's because Debian doesn't have the equivalent of SuSE: if you install a .deb package, you can be 99% sure that the guy who made it was using Debian.
.RPM file format... but it bugs me that nobody who marked you +5 seemed to notice that you never mentioned what this feature was!!!
You would perhaps like it to provide the author's favorite ice cream flavor, too?
Since different distributions and upstream authors all seem to have their own ideas on how to use dynamic library versioning,
Isn't this the problem entirely, and not the RPM format? If every library version number were updated the way it was supposed to be (backwards compatible in minor version number increments, API changes in major version number increments), then RPM works perfectly. I've seen it. Install version 2.3 of a library, and you can upgrade safely to 2.4 without breaking anything. If some bleeding edge packages needs version 3.0, then you install 3.0 *alongside* 2.4, and everything still works. Once the rest of your programs have been updated to use 3.0, you erase 2.4 and everything still works.
The big problem is what happens when this convention isn't followed, or when (worse yet) some library gets built into a FOO-bar.rpm by one guy and into a foo-bar-baz.rpm by another, so dependant software authors randomly choose one or the other, and you can't install both on your system. This could be solved if every author versioned correctly and every packager named correctly...
Or it could be solved the way Debian does it: with a single, authoritative package reposity. I occasionally have trouble getting a SuSE-built RPM to run on my Red Hat system. Debian users don't have this trouble, but if it's because of some superiority of
And don't get me started on ports. I play with alpha software and write C++, so I have a compiler and all sorts of header files installed... but you want to mandate that *everyone* have the same when they want to upgrade software? And enough RAM to compile it?
You could be right, of course.. there could be some vital missing feature of the
Using Linux for most tasks is easy now.
/etc directory: the simple stuff is GUIfied now, but the extent of that depends on your distribution, and doing anything complicated requires reading man pages and figuring out config file formats.
Installing most distributions (I consider Debian an exception) is easy now.
Administering a Linux box is still not easy.
As an example, to get the pictures off my digital camera:
The Red Hat upgrade (somewhere around 7.0, I think) installed my USB drivers automatically.
Easy to install, check.
When I have new pictures, "mv camera/* pictures/new" (in my home directory) transfers them to my hard drive.
Easy to use, check.
Setting the "camera" directory up required editing two of my automount config files and making a symlink to the mount point.
Easy to administer? No.
Well, okay, this was easy to do, but way too difficult for someone uninterested in computers to learn to do. Similarly with most tasks that require you to touch the
Ironically, this makes Linux a great choice for office environments where users aren't expected to administer their own systems in the first place, but other considerations (say a little prayer for OpenOffice and KOffice tonight) are the limiting factor there.
The problem is just the same in Windows: if you're using the internet without keeping up with security updates and security policies, you may be remotely compromised and your computer may be trashed or may be used to attack others. Wanna guess what percentage of Outlook and IE users are still vulnerable to the half dozen exploits found in Microsoft's HTML components this year?
The solution is just the same as in Windows, too: run up2date, MandrakeUpdate, Windows Update, apt, or whatever such tool your vendor provides.
The question is - which one is causal, which ones are reactionary?
It's basic physics that CO2 absorbs reradiated heat, but it's also basic chemistry that the solubility of CO2 decreases in warmer water. So that could go either way.
But do you really mean to suggest that the temperature on Earth somehow affects solar output?! If Earth suddenly vanished out of it's orbit, *maybe* that would have some measurable effect on the Sun, but biosphere temperatures? Any causation there can only be in one direction.
Burning fossil fuels isn't cheap.
I'm going to be traveling ~600 miles back home in a few weeks using $30 of jet fuel. My last trip of that length sucked up $20 of gasoline. If you can think of a way for me to pull off $10 with solar power, I'd like to hear it.
We've had fossil fuels for a "cheap" source of energy for the past 150 years, and it hasn't done the world's poor a good goddamn bit of good.
Actually, it's increased the standard of living exponentially everywhere the industrial revolution hit, even in the face of a world population that has increased 10-fold in that time. Pretty sweet deal, huh?
The "Kyoto Protocol" was watered down into a feel-good hack that wouldn't have done a thing to reduce CO2 emissions in the long run, for exactly the reasons you claim. What's more, it would have *increased* emissions in the medium term, as half of the industry in the unfairly restricted first world decided that this was the last draw and moved to third world countries where they could release CO2 without pesky limits (oh, and where they could be exempt from limitations on all sorts of toxic pollutants and regulations about smokestack scrubbers as well).
Even if none of these obvious consequences happened, Kyoto still would only have delayed rising CO2 emissions for a few years, barely noticeable on a graph. What, you think the exempt countries are going to stay poor and agrarian forever?
It can't hurt to cut down on CO2 emission, even if it's not the 100% cause of global warming.
Yes it can. It can remove cheap energy and transportation sources for billions of people, maintaining or increasing rates of poverty and starvation around the globe.
But if it turns out that it was the influence of man, there won't be an 'undo' button!
Yes, there will. The "undo" button will be to reduce CO2 emissions after we've proven that they are a problem, and watch them fall back to equilibrium. We haven't passed some invisible "point of no return"; the Earth isn't currently the hottest it's been this millenium, much less the hottest ever.
I am sure that would be a shock to those folks living in China that were run over by tanks 12 years ago.
I could have sworn those were Chinese tanks, not American, and so not subject to "Congress shall make no law". You learn something new every day.
Perhaps an imbalance of power like that can exist on a local level. We're talking about surveillance data that whose source is verifiable on a national scale. And if the United States is capable of mob injustice on a national level, these little doohickies aren't going to make things any worse.
Debugging TeX source while the professor is moving on doesn't sound workable to me.
It doesn't have to be correct enough to pass the TeX parser - you don't even try parsing it until you're back in your room studying (you do study your notes, right?) later. It just has to be accurate enough that you can correctly fix any syntax errors yourself later. And people are generally more forgiving than parsers.
If your statements were at all logical, in vitro fertilization would have settled the issue years ago. However, most people who believe in "souls" don't think that sex is a prerequisite for creating one.
I did mechanical engineering with a math minor... and between that and the Linux hobby I got exposed to LaTeX pretty early. I've never owned a laptop (or a PDA with a keyboard), so I haven't tried to use it for notetaking, but I'll bet with a little practice that's what would work best. And if you decide that it doesn't work for notetaking, it's a good thing to learn anyway. It produces spiffy-looking reports, translates automatically to MathML, is the preferred submission format of most math/engineering journals, etc. You'd want a laptop with a full size keyboard, not some palmtop 2-finger typing thing, though.
It's also the first thing you notice when you're checking out a new distro, and it's the only thing at all that shallow reviewers pay any attention to.
I've been an assistant at a half dozen installfests: a couple where mostly Red Hat got installed, a couple with mostly Mandrake, and a couple with mostly Debian. Unless Debian's installer has improved by orders of magnitude in the last 9-10 months, it is by far the most newbie-unfriendly of the lot. Even people experienced with other distributions needed to be walked through a Debian installation process beforehand to try and prevent any unpleasant surprises.
Debian is a wonderful distribution (even for new users, now) once you've got it running, but if you think any "entry level users" can sit down at a Debian installation and have the slightest hope of getting through it successfully, you're deluding yourself.
If the product was labeled accurately, it wasn't faulty. Why would you give them your money in the first place?
Of course, they've released a few of these pseudo-CDs without labeling them as such, in which case you're completely right. But it looks like we're at least going to be squeezed honestly in the future.
That picture reminds me of some email sparring a couple years ago:
"Well, I think of Patrick and Roy in many ways, but dripping in testosterone is not one of them. Patrick and Roy would be better described as radiating a pale glow, sort of like a monitor-tan."
How the hell is it that we, in the USA, are reduced to using techniques Heinlein was driven to using in the freaking Soviet Union under Leninist Communism, just to avoid being ripped off and cheated?
Simple. To quote the same article:
All travel in the USSR is controlled at every point by Intourist; you must buy from it all travel, all automobile and guide service, all hotel rooms, all meals -- or if you buy a meal not from Intourist you simply waste a meal already paid for.
First, some important background: Everybody may want to rip you off and cheat you, if they get the chance. This is true under Leninist Communism, American Capitalism, or Stone Age Tribalism. What is supposed to make capitalism relatively immune is the idea that, if you don't like the service that one company is giving you, you can take your business to a competitor; unlike a Communist country where competition was supposedly a sign of inefficiency (why design two different brands of something when people can all use the same one?) or weakness (what's wrong with the State hotels, that you think there should be others?). Choosing competition works: there are countless businesses (McDonalds, Microsoft, Northwest, for example) that have received hundreds of dollars of my money in the past, but that will never see another dime due to various fatal failures of product or service. I don't care if such a company continues to fail its customers, because I have chosen to stop being one of them.
So now, to answer your question, how are we reduced to psychological warfare to avoid being cheated? Because something is different in that "competition" equation, that makes people (including you, apparantly) decide that it is more worthwhile to kick and scream than to go to a competitor.
I suspect there are many such factors. Some suggestions:
People feel more "entitled" now than ever before. Tens of millions have illegally copied music, and decided they liked it. The majority of the country is expecting to be recipients of government wealth transfers when they retire. Government has finally become mostly successful at protecting individual rights, and so we want to make the list of our "rights" as big as possible. The "right" to buy someone else's music on your terms seems to be on the list of most people here. Otherwise, why complain? The CDs are apparantly going to be labeled, so you don't have to buy them.
There are no competitors here. In the narrow view, every piece of music is an individual work that cannot easily be substituted. I'm a U2 fan, which among other things means I give Island Records Corporation money. If I decide that Island Records Corp. is a bastion of evil, I can't exactly the the next U2 CD from another label, and the Backstreet Boys just isn't going to cut it as a substitute. Whoever holds your favorite bands' contracts has a degree of power over you that doesn't exist in a commodity industry.
There are no competitors here. In the broader view, the record companies have a nice oligopoly with significant control over the radio stations and the record stores, and the radio stations and record stores have significant control over what music gets public dollars (and so over what bands continue). A cartel of about a half dozen record companies makes the rules, and it's not easy for others to play.
It's sad, too, because it would be so easy to give artists another distribution channel. Imagine, say, "musichotornot.com", where you got to download a 60 second clip from a musician's track and vote on it, or just see the top voted songs alongside links to their websites? It would be nice to see some way that bands with real talent could become popular without signing their souls away first. mp3.com is a good start, but it's hard to say what they're doing wrong.
He was convinced the USA would collapse before 2000.
The only thing along those lines I recall was the prediction that, between his own health and the threat of nuclear war, he would not make it to see 2000 himself. He was right, unfortunately. He was right for the first reason, fortunately.