I think he must have been thinking that Tsing Tao must sell more beer than Budweiser, because it's the best-selling Chinese beer, and there are 4 times as many Chinese people as Americans. Poor logic.
And it's also quite false. Tsingtao only has 12% of the Chinese beer market, while Anheuser-Busch has a 50% share of the US market. And Americans drink quite a bit more beer per capita than the Chinese -- the Chinese beer market just recently surpassed the US market. A-B sells over 100 million barrels of beer a year. Tsingtao sells over 3 million tons of beer a year, which comes to about 25 million barrels.
By the way, Anheuser-Busch owns 27% of Tsingtao. A-B made that move because the Chinese beer market is growing a lot faster than the US market. Also, China is ripe for consolidation, just like the US was in the 1950s.
I don't know. It actually looks legitimate. The cabs move every few minutes, and the cab company listed is legitimate, as is the info on getting your cab company listed. And Google announced Gmail on April 1.
It'd be nice if Google actually followed the HTML standard and put the <LINK rel="prefetch"> in the HEAD section, instead of in the BODY. Another problem is that most of the time spent downloading a typical page is the graphics, style sheets, scripts, etc. Just caching the page itself doesn't seem to do a whole lot in most cases.
Your "Quality is Job 36" was enough to excuse your mistake. Plus, when I read with highest scores first, it looks like the other guy was the redundant one, since you have a Karma bonus over him.
Re:Treating employees like human beings?
on
Inside Look at Pixar HQ
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
That's one of my biggest pet peeves in the workplace -- being referred to as a "resource". Just like other resources, such as raw materials and electricity. I find it about as disrespectful as can be. And then they have the audacity to say that "our people are our most important asset".
I think the parent poster has a lot of important points. But one thing I haven't seen mentioned in this entire thread is that each type of programming/thinking/communicating has its place. While visual layout of complex program logic is not a good way to program, a written procedural language is probably not the best way to create a GUI. We should be using descriptive languages (whether visual or text) for GUIs and such.
For example, a typical how-to book is mostly text, but it also includes diagrams of how to put things together, and pictures of the completed project. All of these are essential to the book. Another good example is teaching. Teachers employ multiple methods of teaching, as different people learn differently, and different topics lend themselves to different styles. Some people learn best by doing; others by watching; and others by reading.
I think the right thing to do regarding visual programming is to relegate it to where it works best. I suspect that this would be mostly related to things that are already visual -- i.e. graphical (GUI) layouts, etc. I think it's also useful to be able to visually represent program code "in the large" in a graphical manner, to see the inter-relations, but I don't think manipulating that type of graph is useful.
I remember the old NeXT Interface Builder. You would take components, and connect them together. You'd have to write code if you were doing anything complex, but you could set up the GUI, including callback functions, visually. I think it's still around in Mac OS X. Things like GLADE work similarly. I'd like to see these types of tools used more.
Actually, they DID set the CSS 2.1 standard. See Tantek Çelik's name there, under Editors at the top, right next to where it says microsoft.com? He also contributed a lot to the CSS 3 specs. Microsoft won't even comply with the standard that they helped build. That's probably the most asinine part of the whole story.
But the current rules say that the idea must be new, and not obvious to someone skilled in the art. This patent is clearly obvious, and has been done before (KWord at the least, perhaps even programs using DocBook). Anyone skilled enough to "invent" this would/should know that it is obvious, and that it had been done before.
So Microsoft is breaking the existing rules. Now can we be mad at them?
I'd have to say that it's debateable whether the Constitution allows states to make patent law or not. The 10th Amendment says:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The Constitution does not explicitly prohibit states from issueing patents and copyrights. But since Article I, Section 8 does give Congress the power to issue patents and copyrights, I think that means that the power is NOT afforded to the states or the people. But the 10th Amendment says that if the Constitution does not say anything about it, then Congress CANNOT make a law forbidding the states to do it. So I think Title 17 that you reference is either unconstitutional, unnecessary, or a clarification of the Constitution.
Agreed. But with software, there's already copyright protection. I can't think of too many other things that you can protect with both copyright and patent. I think software should only be covered by one or the other. The combination gives the owner too much power over its use.
The downside of this, of course, is that if you attempt to sell your invention or incorporate it in a product prior to the expiration of the secrecy period, somebody else could copy it and invalidate your patent.
That's easy enough to solve. Just make the length of the patent a multiple of the secrecy period. (I'd probably pick a factor of 4-10.) Thus, the applicant gets to decide how long to risk keeping it secret, and the more he's confident that it's original, the longer he can keep the patent. There would still be a reasonable time limit, of course. Note that the secrecy period wouldn't really effect the purpose of patents -- to make the process/technique known to the public -- since the public can't use the technique until the patent expires anyway.
Although I'd be more in favor of a public review period where the public can submit prior art or try to show that it's obvious. I suppose you could do both -- have a (variable length) secrecy period, then a review period, then the published/valid period.
The underlying idea behind the Third Geneva Convention is to provide a minimum level of humanitarian rights/respect. It's not to elevate POWs as something special. I'm not sure Article 4 was supposed to be an exhaustive, exclusive list. It looks like it's mainly trying to distinguish between civilians and military. Either way, the US seems to be following the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law. (I suspect the US is violating Article 5 for those prisoners who claim that they fall under the Convention.)
Why is it important for the US to follow (the spirit of) the Conventions, even if the other parties do not? Several good reasons:
Simple respect for basic human rights
Only way to be able to claim the moral high ground
We've agreed to the spirit of the Conventions; why would we want to play in the "gray areas"?
It will come back to haunt us when other nations use the same arguments against us
That last one is my biggest concern. Look into the future, and picture the US getting into a conflict with someone like China. They use the Bush Doctrine to assert that the US is an iminent threat. (I.e. the USA has weapons of mass destruction [indisputable] and intends to use them.) They then go on to claim that US soldiers are "illegal combatants" and there are therefore no rules prohibiting any actions against them.
OK, perhaps both situations wouldn't be likely to happen in the same incident. But still, I guarantee that the precedents we are setting now will be used against us much more effectively than we are using them to protect ourselves.
I think I have to disagree with the term "direct measurment". To me, that sounds like they put the thing on a scale. And I'm pretty sure that there have been "direct measurement[s] within our Milky Way Galaxy" before. In fact, I weighed myself last night.
What exactly do they consider direct versus indirect? I'm thinking that there are differing degrees of indirect measurement. From putting it on a scale, to measuring orbits of nearby objects, to red-shifts of light passing nearby.
I find it kind of odd that people who are thinking about trying Open Source care whether the vendor is making money. If you could buy a car below dealer cost, would you ask questions, or just buy the car? As long as you can get support for the product, it doesn't matter whether the vendor is making money or not. I don't know if it's just out of curiosity that they ask the question, or if they're trying to make sure that they're not buying into a dead-end product. But we should really be asking why Microsoft and other proprietary vendors are making so much money. Especially when the cost of producing 1 additional copy of the software is virtually zero.
I created a nice list of ways people can contribute to the Open Source projects (and thus become a part of the OSS community) without having to program. The canonical address of the list is currently here.
Weird. I just came up with that same phrase (zero-button mouse) about an hour ago. I was asking my friend if her Mac had a one-button mouse, and she said she had replaced the one-button mouse with a 2-button mouse. I told her that I had also gotten my own mouse, but that my Mac Mini had come with no buttons on the mouse.
HDTV will work fine on your regular TV, as long as your PC can output to the TV. That is, the HDTV receiver hardware (I use pcHDTV on Linux, and eyeTV 500 on Mac) is decoupled from the output (I use an ATI video card with TV out on Linux, and the $20 S-Video adapter on my Mac Mini). For HDTV on my plain old TV, I get black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. I'll be getting an HDTV monitor (with DVI) soon, but even with my 3-year-old TV, the HDTV picture looks better than analog TV.
Since when is it required that the speaker has to know the origin of the phrase? People use tons of phrases and don't know what they originally meant. Lock, stock, and barrel. Articulate. Worth his salt. Ivory tower.
I think a lot of the Slashdot crowd knows about Bookpool. When I started my job 3.5 years ago, I treated myself to $600 worth of books from there. Well, $1000 worth of books, for $600. They've got a pretty good selection of computer books (although not quite as extensive as I'd like) and their prices are competitive with Amazon. (Sometimes they're a little higher, usually a little lower.) And they only charge what it costs them to ship, which is nice, especially for multi-book orders.
I'm glad to hear that they're also a good company of nice people.
For just webmail, you should check out Slashmail. They have a high level of security, and can host your email domain for just $14/year. It's run by some friends on mine, and they've done a good job of putting it together using Open Source packages. I use it just to offload the spam filtering work to them.
There's no reason the NAS box has to have all the files in one file system. Just create multiple partitions or logical volumes. You export directory trees across the network on NAS, not file systems.
Generally such contributions that are not directly for candidate election purposes are called "soft money". (Although that generally refers to contributions to the general political party funds, so I'm not sure if this technically would count as "soft money".) Contributions directly to candidates are limited to $2000 per donor, to limit bribery, or at least the appearance of quid pro quo. So effectively, we're limiting direct bribes to $2000 per person, which doesn't get you too far in Washington these days. So instead, the big donors hold dinners and such, or donate to 527s or the political party itself, which are "soft money" contributions with no limits.
So I was thinking about this yesterday. There's an argument that 1st Amendment free speech requires that spending on political speech not be limited. But is that what's going on here? If I give money to the Democratic Party, is that me expressing my opinion? Or is it me trying to buy influence? And if I'm free to spend my money any way I please, doesn't that mean bribery should be legal? So obviously, there must be limits to what we're allowed to spend our money on.
Language matters. The labels we put on things effect the ways we think about those things. So let's change the language here to call a spade a spade, just like RMS suggests we call DRM "digital restrictions management". So I propose that we call these "soft money" contributions "soft bribes". Because that's what they are.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's also quite false. Tsingtao only has 12% of the Chinese beer market, while Anheuser-Busch has a 50% share of the US market. And Americans drink quite a bit more beer per capita than the Chinese -- the Chinese beer market just recently surpassed the US market. A-B sells over 100 million barrels of beer a year. Tsingtao sells over 3 million tons of beer a year, which comes to about 25 million barrels.
By the way, Anheuser-Busch owns 27% of Tsingtao. A-B made that move because the Chinese beer market is growing a lot faster than the US market. Also, China is ripe for consolidation, just like the US was in the 1950s.
I don't know. It actually looks legitimate. The cabs move every few minutes, and the cab company listed is legitimate, as is the info on getting your cab company listed. And Google announced Gmail on April 1.
It'd be nice if Google actually followed the HTML standard and put the <LINK rel="prefetch"> in the HEAD section, instead of in the BODY. Another problem is that most of the time spent downloading a typical page is the graphics, style sheets, scripts, etc. Just caching the page itself doesn't seem to do a whole lot in most cases.
Your "Quality is Job 36" was enough to excuse your mistake. Plus, when I read with highest scores first, it looks like the other guy was the redundant one, since you have a Karma bonus over him.
That's one of my biggest pet peeves in the workplace -- being referred to as a "resource". Just like other resources, such as raw materials and electricity. I find it about as disrespectful as can be. And then they have the audacity to say that "our people are our most important asset".
I think the parent poster has a lot of important points. But one thing I haven't seen mentioned in this entire thread is that each type of programming/thinking/communicating has its place. While visual layout of complex program logic is not a good way to program, a written procedural language is probably not the best way to create a GUI. We should be using descriptive languages (whether visual or text) for GUIs and such.
For example, a typical how-to book is mostly text, but it also includes diagrams of how to put things together, and pictures of the completed project. All of these are essential to the book. Another good example is teaching. Teachers employ multiple methods of teaching, as different people learn differently, and different topics lend themselves to different styles. Some people learn best by doing; others by watching; and others by reading.
I think the right thing to do regarding visual programming is to relegate it to where it works best. I suspect that this would be mostly related to things that are already visual -- i.e. graphical (GUI) layouts, etc. I think it's also useful to be able to visually represent program code "in the large" in a graphical manner, to see the inter-relations, but I don't think manipulating that type of graph is useful.
I remember the old NeXT Interface Builder. You would take components, and connect them together. You'd have to write code if you were doing anything complex, but you could set up the GUI, including callback functions, visually. I think it's still around in Mac OS X. Things like GLADE work similarly. I'd like to see these types of tools used more.
Actually, they DID set the CSS 2.1 standard. See Tantek Çelik's name there, under Editors at the top, right next to where it says microsoft.com? He also contributed a lot to the CSS 3 specs. Microsoft won't even comply with the standard that they helped build. That's probably the most asinine part of the whole story.
But the current rules say that the idea must be new, and not obvious to someone skilled in the art. This patent is clearly obvious, and has been done before (KWord at the least, perhaps even programs using DocBook). Anyone skilled enough to "invent" this would/should know that it is obvious, and that it had been done before.
So Microsoft is breaking the existing rules. Now can we be mad at them?
Agreed. But with software, there's already copyright protection. I can't think of too many other things that you can protect with both copyright and patent. I think software should only be covered by one or the other. The combination gives the owner too much power over its use.
Although I'd be more in favor of a public review period where the public can submit prior art or try to show that it's obvious. I suppose you could do both -- have a (variable length) secrecy period, then a review period, then the published/valid period.
Why is it important for the US to follow (the spirit of) the Conventions, even if the other parties do not? Several good reasons:
- Simple respect for basic human rights
- Only way to be able to claim the moral high ground
- We've agreed to the spirit of the Conventions; why would we want to play in the "gray areas"?
- It will come back to haunt us when other nations use the same arguments against us
That last one is my biggest concern. Look into the future, and picture the US getting into a conflict with someone like China. They use the Bush Doctrine to assert that the US is an iminent threat. (I.e. the USA has weapons of mass destruction [indisputable] and intends to use them.) They then go on to claim that US soldiers are "illegal combatants" and there are therefore no rules prohibiting any actions against them.OK, perhaps both situations wouldn't be likely to happen in the same incident. But still, I guarantee that the precedents we are setting now will be used against us much more effectively than we are using them to protect ourselves.
What exactly do they consider direct versus indirect? I'm thinking that there are differing degrees of indirect measurement. From putting it on a scale, to measuring orbits of nearby objects, to red-shifts of light passing nearby.
I find it kind of odd that people who are thinking about trying Open Source care whether the vendor is making money. If you could buy a car below dealer cost, would you ask questions, or just buy the car? As long as you can get support for the product, it doesn't matter whether the vendor is making money or not. I don't know if it's just out of curiosity that they ask the question, or if they're trying to make sure that they're not buying into a dead-end product. But we should really be asking why Microsoft and other proprietary vendors are making so much money. Especially when the cost of producing 1 additional copy of the software is virtually zero.
I created a nice list of ways people can contribute to the Open Source projects (and thus become a part of the OSS community) without having to program. The canonical address of the list is currently here.
Weird. I just came up with that same phrase (zero-button mouse) about an hour ago. I was asking my friend if her Mac had a one-button mouse, and she said she had replaced the one-button mouse with a 2-button mouse. I told her that I had also gotten my own mouse, but that my Mac Mini had come with no buttons on the mouse.
Damn, I think you're right.
I believe that's "You'll sour the deal". </SimpsonsPedantry>
HDTV will work fine on your regular TV, as long as your PC can output to the TV. That is, the HDTV receiver hardware (I use pcHDTV on Linux, and eyeTV 500 on Mac) is decoupled from the output (I use an ATI video card with TV out on Linux, and the $20 S-Video adapter on my Mac Mini). For HDTV on my plain old TV, I get black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. I'll be getting an HDTV monitor (with DVI) soon, but even with my 3-year-old TV, the HDTV picture looks better than analog TV.
Since when is it required that the speaker has to know the origin of the phrase? People use tons of phrases and don't know what they originally meant. Lock, stock, and barrel. Articulate. Worth his salt. Ivory tower.
I think a lot of the Slashdot crowd knows about Bookpool. When I started my job 3.5 years ago, I treated myself to $600 worth of books from there. Well, $1000 worth of books, for $600. They've got a pretty good selection of computer books (although not quite as extensive as I'd like) and their prices are competitive with Amazon. (Sometimes they're a little higher, usually a little lower.) And they only charge what it costs them to ship, which is nice, especially for multi-book orders.
I'm glad to hear that they're also a good company of nice people.
For just webmail, you should check out Slashmail. They have a high level of security, and can host your email domain for just $14/year. It's run by some friends on mine, and they've done a good job of putting it together using Open Source packages. I use it just to offload the spam filtering work to them.
There's no reason the NAS box has to have all the files in one file system. Just create multiple partitions or logical volumes. You export directory trees across the network on NAS, not file systems.
Generally such contributions that are not directly for candidate election purposes are called "soft money". (Although that generally refers to contributions to the general political party funds, so I'm not sure if this technically would count as "soft money".) Contributions directly to candidates are limited to $2000 per donor, to limit bribery, or at least the appearance of quid pro quo. So effectively, we're limiting direct bribes to $2000 per person, which doesn't get you too far in Washington these days. So instead, the big donors hold dinners and such, or donate to 527s or the political party itself, which are "soft money" contributions with no limits.
So I was thinking about this yesterday. There's an argument that 1st Amendment free speech requires that spending on political speech not be limited. But is that what's going on here? If I give money to the Democratic Party, is that me expressing my opinion? Or is it me trying to buy influence? And if I'm free to spend my money any way I please, doesn't that mean bribery should be legal? So obviously, there must be limits to what we're allowed to spend our money on.
Language matters. The labels we put on things effect the ways we think about those things. So let's change the language here to call a spade a spade, just like RMS suggests we call DRM "digital restrictions management". So I propose that we call these "soft money" contributions "soft bribes". Because that's what they are.
Actually, they have paid for advertising on Slashdot. It didn't take too long to burn through their allocation of X thousand views though.