For five years (until I got a different job with a conflicting schedule last year) I supplemented my income as an underpaid network administrator with a paper route. It actually paid more per hour than my "real" job did. Yeah, it was a little embarrassing at first (especially when people asked if I was helping my son/daughter), but it was regular exercise, and it put an extra $65/week (before taxes) into my pocket.
As a 16 year old kid, I know how important it is to have a private place where I child can go to relax- and talk to their friends in private.
Have you tried... your friends' houses? Or inviting them over? Or meeting somewhere? That used to be a popular way for kids to talk back when the Earth's crust was still molten, in the 70s'. (You even got to see them that way.) Or if that's too retro for you, how about talking on the phone like kids did in the neolithic 80's (landline) and medieval 90's (cell)? Bottom line: you don't need a computer to relax and talk to friends away from your parents.
...the Environment Agency has announced plans to privatise the air, opening as much as 73 percent of it to market forces to determine how to distribute it throughout the UK, and what it should be used for.
"The spreadsheet is the software tool that turns everyone into a hacker"
Sure, it's a silly statement, but Lotus 1-2-3 was the playground in which I (and a lot of other people) did much of my early hacking. Kids of the Excel generation may not be familiar with all the hacks that surrounded 1-2-3, including copy-protection-defeating tricks, add-ins for using it as a word processor (4-Word) or a mathematical solution seeker or a DOS WYSIWYG publishing tool (Allways), data compression to fit big files on little disks with SQZ!, using its primitive macro capability (including the powerful/x commands) as a Turing-complete procedural programming language capable of self-modifying code. It was a tool that was both accessible to mundanes and provided a wealth of phun for the rest of us.
OK, now that we've got all of the entirely-accurate "you don't need root" lectures out of the way, I'd like to share how I did get root on some boxes at the college I work at.
I started here 5 months ago. One of the things that got me the job was being able to tell my boss that "I know Linux", I've been running my own and a previous employer's web and mail servers for five years, etc. But that's not in my job description; it's someone else's job. In today's downwardly-mobile economy, I'm a mere "Technician" here.
I didn't push it. When a problem with DNS cropped up, I used my knowledge of how DNS works to help troubleshoot it, passing useful information to my boss and to the guy responsible for fixing it. A couple months later when we started having problems with DHCP, I stayed late helping to troubleshoot. When it happened again the next week and I was the only other person around, my boss logged me in under an account with root privilege (she has it because she's the boss, not because she's qualified to use it) so I could restart dhcpd. The next time, she actually gave me root, and I figured out what the problem was... but let the official admin get it working. After that, I kept my privilege to maintain the DHCP system to make sure it stayed operational.
That sounds like the end of the story, but it continues: I determined that the real problem with DHCP was that we didn't have enough addresses to accommodate student laptop plug-ins. I suggested a solution, and the boss let me do it: set up an old P2 box running Coyote Linux as a router, putting 30+ machines on their own subnet, thereby alleviating the problem (at zero expense). And on that box I don't just have root... I am root.
Stanley Kubrick waited the technology out or AI (But passed away too soon), maybe Gene should have done the same thing?
It's possible that if Gene had waited, the movie-making technology to "do it right" wouldn't have come along until after he died as well. TOS was one of the things (along with 2001) that legitimised "serious" sci-fi as a commercially viable genre. Sure it got cancelled, but its aftermarket popularity showed that there was money to be made from movies featuring visuals that have to be faked. Without TOS, there probably wouldn't have been a Star Wars or a Superman or ST:TMP (obviously) or ET etc... and without those money-making films driving the development of special effects, the technology wouldn't have gotten as far as it did in his lifetime. ST:TOS in 1991 might have ended up looking no better than, say, Space 1999.
Thanks for confirming that you really have no understanding of the topic, just half-baked ideosyncratic notions of maybe how it might work if the world worked the way you want it to.
"Without copyright" is nonsense; it exists. The law clearly states that copyright coverage is the default, and that something only goes into the public domain after something happens (e.g. time passing, or the creator declaring it).
Ownership can most certainly change hands. That principle is the bedrock of the entire mercantile system (and accepted in all but the smallest scale forms of communism).
Ideas are not covered in any way by copyright, so you're right that they aren't owned... but the statement has no point.
Pixar knew going in that Disney would have own the material and have the right to do sequels without them, and they must have known when they decided to split up that Disney would set up their own shop and exercise that right. This is hardly surprising.
In fact people who demonstrate high skill in both art and programming are so rare that even in these jobless times, they're almost guarenteed a job
Woohoo!
in the gaming industry if they want it.
Oh. Never mind. Not for me.
I disagree with the premise that programming and creating art are inherently distinct skills. Programming can be a highly creative task, at least if you're working at a level higher than mere coding to someone else's specs. And both disciplines require problem-solving skills (e.g. How do I optimise this sort for typical data sets without causing it to puke when it gets something random? How do I create a cheerful mood in this image using only "cool" colors?). There are definitely parts of the brain needed only by one or the other, but they use a lot of the same parts as well.
Spare us the ideological doublespeak. Under U.S. law and international treaty, anything that is not explicitly released to the public domain is legally controlled by its creator. That's the point being made. One could just as easily argue that when copyright expires, actual ownership changes hands from the creator to the public (as it should).
As someone getting closer to the supposed age-of-dislearning (29) I have done my very best to stay sharp and learn every day.
Sure, and as someone who has already gone way past that to the supposed age of encroaching senility (40 next March), I try to stay sharp as well. (e.g. I just picked up a second college degree.) In fact, I'm still sharp enough to recognise that learning new things takes me more effort than it did 25 years ago. (The good news is that I don't have to learn all the old things that 15-year-olds remain clueless about.) This isn't a double standard any more than acknowledging that I don't have as much hair as I did then, and I can't do all the same gymnastics in bed.:) I'm just good in different ways.
Personal skill at art is something that is teachable and can be learned.
Yes, but not by everyone. There really are people who simply Will Not Get It. Fortunately, they usually have other skills that are valuable in their own right, but they still aren't going to be great artists no matter how many times they work through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I once wanted to be a musician, but finally had to admit that it wasn't going to happen. Instead I'm a brilliant technical problem solver, an excellent writer, and a highly competent illustrator... whose best musical instrument by far is the CD player.
Higher learning curve? I'm 15, and got the hang of it fairly quickly.
It is the nature of being 15 that one gets the hang of things fairly quickly. For those of us with lots more miles on our brains, learning new things becomes more of a challenge.
I was a Comp Sci professional with an interest in web design, so I decided to go back to school and get a BFA in Digital Media. On one hand, I had fun, I learned a lot, and I can definitely produce better work than I used to. On the other hand, I'm still not the creative illustrative genius that I hoped to become.
So one tip would be: Recognise and accept your own limitations. Sure, programming is a lot more right-brained and creative than the public assumes, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have the instincts to produce great images, regardless of the tools you might have at hand.
Another tip would be to try what I did (but maybe on a smaller scale) and take some classes. See if a nearby art school (or college with an art department) has "continuing studies" classes in digital illustration, or try to get into one of their "real" classes.
In either case, it's not your software, but yourself that needs upgrading to improve your output.
Bush's supposed contempt for reading is vastly overstated. As even Farenheit 911 clearly demonstrated, the president considers reading with schoolchildren to be an even higher priority than responding to ongoing coordinated air attacks on American soil.
Trademark laws aren't there just to protect the owner of the trademark. They also serve to protect the consumer from being tricked by look-alike products. It may not be a big deal with cube puzzles, but I appreciate the fact that if I grab a case of familiar-looking beer off the shelf in a hurry, it'll taste like I expect it to taste when I get home and drink it. If you think court rulings about "confusion in the marketplace" are overreaching, then you've got a problem with the judicial implementation of it, not the law itself.
It'd be nice if big-city coastal employers would look even closer to "home" and consider outsourcing to smaller urban areas in the so-called flyover states. Former manufacturing centers in the Midwest (and presumably elsewhere) are full of hard-working, English-speaking, and (yes) highly-qualified potential employees with ready access to broadband connectivity, FedEx offices around the corner, etc. These cities have most of the other benefits of having employees in Silicon Valley or the Big Apple, but at a fraction of the cost of living.
You can definitely trademark the "look" of something. That's what Coca Cola's red-and-white cans and Nike's swooshes are all about.
The actual standard is whether there is potential for "confusion in the marketplace" as to whether your product is the original or not. It doesn't require outright fraud claiming that it is, just enough similarity that your hypothetical Typical Consumer might mistake it.
if you hate corporatespeak(tm), adding useless words and hard to understand, cool looking synonyms for words, why would you like to push a different form of the same kind of stupidness?
Because "*en" is fun.
I'm a pretty anal-retentive about language, fuming about gibberish such as "I should of..." and lazy kiddies who can't be bothered to use the Shift key despite its obvious benefits in readability. But I'm not bothered by folx playing around with alternate plural forms. It's a kind of intellectual creativity... OK, not that impressive and a bit juvenile, but so what?
Slashdot Mirror
For five years (until I got a different job with a conflicting schedule last year) I supplemented my income as an underpaid network administrator with a paper route. It actually paid more per hour than my "real" job did. Yeah, it was a little embarrassing at first (especially when people asked if I was helping my son/daughter), but it was regular exercise, and it put an extra $65/week (before taxes) into my pocket.
Have you tried... your friends' houses? Or inviting them over? Or meeting somewhere? That used to be a popular way for kids to talk back when the Earth's crust was still molten, in the 70s'. (You even got to see them that way.) Or if that's too retro for you, how about talking on the phone like kids did in the neolithic 80's (landline) and medieval 90's (cell)? Bottom line: you don't need a computer to relax and talk to friends away from your parents.
...the Environment Agency has announced plans to privatise the air, opening as much as 73 percent of it to market forces to determine how to distribute it throughout the UK, and what it should be used for.
Sure, it's a silly statement, but Lotus 1-2-3 was the playground in which I (and a lot of other people) did much of my early hacking. Kids of the Excel generation may not be familiar with all the hacks that surrounded 1-2-3, including copy-protection-defeating tricks, add-ins for using it as a word processor (4-Word) or a mathematical solution seeker or a DOS WYSIWYG publishing tool (Allways), data compression to fit big files on little disks with SQZ!, using its primitive macro capability (including the powerful /x commands) as a Turing-complete procedural programming language capable of self-modifying code. It was a tool that was both accessible to mundanes and provided a wealth of phun for the rest of us.
I started here 5 months ago. One of the things that got me the job was being able to tell my boss that "I know Linux", I've been running my own and a previous employer's web and mail servers for five years, etc. But that's not in my job description; it's someone else's job. In today's downwardly-mobile economy, I'm a mere "Technician" here.
I didn't push it. When a problem with DNS cropped up, I used my knowledge of how DNS works to help troubleshoot it, passing useful information to my boss and to the guy responsible for fixing it. A couple months later when we started having problems with DHCP, I stayed late helping to troubleshoot. When it happened again the next week and I was the only other person around, my boss logged me in under an account with root privilege (she has it because she's the boss, not because she's qualified to use it) so I could restart dhcpd. The next time, she actually gave me root, and I figured out what the problem was... but let the official admin get it working. After that, I kept my privilege to maintain the DHCP system to make sure it stayed operational.
That sounds like the end of the story, but it continues: I determined that the real problem with DHCP was that we didn't have enough addresses to accommodate student laptop plug-ins. I suggested a solution, and the boss let me do it: set up an old P2 box running Coyote Linux as a router, putting 30+ machines on their own subnet, thereby alleviating the problem (at zero expense). And on that box I don't just have root... I am root.
In order to make such a statement, you would have to be on crack.
It's possible that if Gene had waited, the movie-making technology to "do it right" wouldn't have come along until after he died as well. TOS was one of the things (along with 2001) that legitimised "serious" sci-fi as a commercially viable genre. Sure it got cancelled, but its aftermarket popularity showed that there was money to be made from movies featuring visuals that have to be faked. Without TOS, there probably wouldn't have been a Star Wars or a Superman or ST:TMP (obviously) or ET etc... and without those money-making films driving the development of special effects, the technology wouldn't have gotten as far as it did in his lifetime. ST:TOS in 1991 might have ended up looking no better than, say, Space 1999.
Yes, but are they programmed in multiple techniques?
"Without copyright" is nonsense; it exists. The law clearly states that copyright coverage is the default, and that something only goes into the public domain after something happens (e.g. time passing, or the creator declaring it).
Ownership can most certainly change hands. That principle is the bedrock of the entire mercantile system (and accepted in all but the smallest scale forms of communism).
Ideas are not covered in any way by copyright, so you're right that they aren't owned... but the statement has no point.
Pixar knew going in that Disney would have own the material and have the right to do sequels without them, and they must have known when they decided to split up that Disney would set up their own shop and exercise that right. This is hardly surprising.
Woohoo!
in the gaming industry if they want it.
Oh. Never mind. Not for me.
I disagree with the premise that programming and creating art are inherently distinct skills. Programming can be a highly creative task, at least if you're working at a level higher than mere coding to someone else's specs. And both disciplines require problem-solving skills (e.g. How do I optimise this sort for typical data sets without causing it to puke when it gets something random? How do I create a cheerful mood in this image using only "cool" colors?). There are definitely parts of the brain needed only by one or the other, but they use a lot of the same parts as well.
Spare us the ideological doublespeak. Under U.S. law and international treaty, anything that is not explicitly released to the public domain is legally controlled by its creator. That's the point being made. One could just as easily argue that when copyright expires, actual ownership changes hands from the creator to the public (as it should).
Sure, and as someone who has already gone way past that to the supposed age of encroaching senility (40 next March), I try to stay sharp as well. (e.g. I just picked up a second college degree.) In fact, I'm still sharp enough to recognise that learning new things takes me more effort than it did 25 years ago. (The good news is that I don't have to learn all the old things that 15-year-olds remain clueless about.) This isn't a double standard any more than acknowledging that I don't have as much hair as I did then, and I can't do all the same gymnastics in bed. :) I'm just good in different ways.
Yes, but not by everyone. There really are people who simply Will Not Get It. Fortunately, they usually have other skills that are valuable in their own right, but they still aren't going to be great artists no matter how many times they work through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I once wanted to be a musician, but finally had to admit that it wasn't going to happen. Instead I'm a brilliant technical problem solver, an excellent writer, and a highly competent illustrator... whose best musical instrument by far is the CD player.
It is the nature of being 15 that one gets the hang of things fairly quickly. For those of us with lots more miles on our brains, learning new things becomes more of a challenge.
So one tip would be: Recognise and accept your own limitations. Sure, programming is a lot more right-brained and creative than the public assumes, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have the instincts to produce great images, regardless of the tools you might have at hand.
Another tip would be to try what I did (but maybe on a smaller scale) and take some classes. See if a nearby art school (or college with an art department) has "continuing studies" classes in digital illustration, or try to get into one of their "real" classes.
In either case, it's not your software, but yourself that needs upgrading to improve your output.
Or you could try getting some fiber in your diet, and then you could spend that time reading in a more comfortable chair.
Bush's supposed contempt for reading is vastly overstated. As even Farenheit 911 clearly demonstrated, the president considers reading with schoolchildren to be an even higher priority than responding to ongoing coordinated air attacks on American soil.
For info about the evolution of NextStep to OS X, the Mac OS X history article is also worth reading.
Trademark laws aren't there just to protect the owner of the trademark. They also serve to protect the consumer from being tricked by look-alike products. It may not be a big deal with cube puzzles, but I appreciate the fact that if I grab a case of familiar-looking beer off the shelf in a hurry, it'll taste like I expect it to taste when I get home and drink it. If you think court rulings about "confusion in the marketplace" are overreaching, then you've got a problem with the judicial implementation of it, not the law itself.
It'd be nice if big-city coastal employers would look even closer to "home" and consider outsourcing to smaller urban areas in the so-called flyover states. Former manufacturing centers in the Midwest (and presumably elsewhere) are full of hard-working, English-speaking, and (yes) highly-qualified potential employees with ready access to broadband connectivity, FedEx offices around the corner, etc. These cities have most of the other benefits of having employees in Silicon Valley or the Big Apple, but at a fraction of the cost of living.
You can definitely trademark the "look" of something. That's what Coca Cola's red-and-white cans and Nike's swooshes are all about.
The actual standard is whether there is potential for "confusion in the marketplace" as to whether your product is the original or not. It doesn't require outright fraud claiming that it is, just enough similarity that your hypothetical Typical Consumer might mistake it.
Not at all.
Hint: Learn to write coherently. Then you'll be able to whine about other's questionable writing choices without looking so hypocritical.
Because "*en" is fun.
I'm a pretty anal-retentive about language, fuming about gibberish such as "I should of..." and lazy kiddies who can't be bothered to use the Shift key despite its obvious benefits in readability. But I'm not bothered by folx playing around with alternate plural forms. It's a kind of intellectual creativity... OK, not that impressive and a bit juvenile, but so what?