We didn't have computers when I was 12. OK, the bank did, and so did NORAD, but that was about it. The only BBS I had access to were the ones that went in my air rifle.
In Star Trek they knew about the Christian calendar, and it used it in reference to the past, but I never heard them say "It's the year 2378" (or whatever), unless maybe they were talking to someone from the latter half of the 20th century.
The problem of Y2K wasn't that we didn't have enough extra digits reserved, but the fact that we were lopping off significant ones and storing the year incorrectly (e.g. as "99" when the actual value was 1900 off from that).
Padding years with a leading zero isn't forward-looking, it's naively self-centered, assuming that people will still be using our silly "Anno Domini" year-counting system eight millennia from now. (I mean... don't you people even watch Star Trek?)
Those aren't theft cases. They're intellectual property cases, which are a completely different branch of jurisprudence from criminal cases involving theft of physical property. There is no such thing as a private prosecutor for a case of that sort: no one but the government has legal "standing" for it.
Try dropping the fixation on commercial use. You dismiss academic use as if it doesn't matter or it doesn't count(!), when that's precisely the point: it was out and about in academia in the 1970s. The commercialization of unix (which frankly wasn't important to its role in history until later, as evidenced by your 1980s example) came as a result of that proliferation.
I mean that little-u unix was free-as-in-beer, and could be use non-commercially by anyone. And they did. AT&T had lost control of it, and it was free-as-in-freedom to develop into something they had no authority over whatsoever. It may not have been until 1992 that BSD-OS was certified free-as-in-speech and could be used in commercial products, but long before that, the unix architecture and a hell of a lot of functionally compatible free-as-in-speech code - of both BSD and GNU lineage - was out there in the wild and serving as the blueprint and foundation from which FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux OS, NextStep, and Mac OS X were built.
I never said that the 1950s AT&T monopoly should have been preserved. I was only noting the irony that it was a former monopoly which - thanks to the consent decree which held it in check - spawned the greatest counteragents to the 1990s Microsoft monopoly.
Some key implications of the Carterfone decision on Bell Labs were overlooked by this article. As it mentioned, the same consent degree that previously granted AT&T its network monopoly also prevented it from commercializing its other activities. It was largely because of this limitation that a certain operating system developed at AT&T's Bell Labs in those days was not exploited commercially, but was instead openly passed around academia like a joint at a pot party. Only some time after Carterfone, as AT&T started to shake off that consent decree and start commercializing the work of Bell Labs, did it start to exercise its copyrights to that OS, and by that time the Berkeley distro had already been hatched, and unix was out of the barn. In other words: *BSD, Linux, and OS X ironically owe their existence to the pre-Carterfone AT&T monopoly. They probably would not have come into being if that decision had been made earlier, because Unix would have been treated as something to be commercialized (or at least denied to the public) from the beginning.
I've long suspected that the treatment of the globe as if it were all "local" couldn't be sustained indefinitely. Shipping goods from one hemisphere to another might make financial sense in the short term, as long as there's a huge economic voltage between them. But eventually that differential would have to equalize, and the work of shipping goods (and the cost associated with that) would become prohibitive.
As fossil fuels deplete and become less practical, short of a breakthrough that again makes transcontinental transport affordable (both economically and environmentally), I envision human society returning to the kind of physical isolation we experienced before the 19th century... but this time with an internet that connects us electronically.
IF (and I mean BIG IF) a government is going to set standards for fitness, it would make more sense to do it for people under 40. Someone who is obese at 50 or 60 is rarely going to successfully get their weight down and substantially improve their health. Sorry, but the damage is already done. But a child, teen, or young adult who is obese probably still has a fighting chance to get the weight off and develop a healthy lifestyle, to prevent the health problems associated with being overweight.
This doesn't prove that there is water ice on Mars. It only proves that there was water ice on Mars: We just vaporized it!
This is much like the experiments conducted by ye olde Viking landers in the 1970s, which didn't test for the presence of life, but tested (inconclusively) for the presence of life-which-has-just-been-killed. I find myself uncertain whether anyone at NASA has ever heard of Heisenberg!
The United States has vast, largely-untapped energy reserves stored in the fat cells of its population. If we would start putting this to use for transportation (walking, bicycling, skateboarding, whatever) it would not only reduce our dependence on overseas petroleum, it would reduce the amount we spend on health care. No new technology required.
At 5'10" and 210lbs I'm no fitness freak. But by biking and walking whenever practical, and using the car only when I have to, I go through only about 100 gallons of gas in a year. The last time I got a fix from a fuel dealer was in April.
it's very important to note that global food shortages (and corresponding rises in prices) are not caused by increased demand.
I'll buy the argument that reduced production is part of the problem, but I find it really difficult to believe that the doubling of the world's population in the last 40 years has had no corresponding impact on the demand for food.
Just because you don't encounter any free-market Republicans in your circles, and don't see too many of them on the floor of Congress, doesn't mean they don't exist. That's a classic logical error.
Slashdot Mirror
Those who do not learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
A kid could choke to death on bubblewrap, you know.
We didn't have computers when I was 12. OK, the bank did, and so did NORAD, but that was about it. The only BBS I had access to were the ones that went in my air rifle.
In Star Trek they knew about the Christian calendar, and it used it in reference to the past, but I never heard them say "It's the year 2378" (or whatever), unless maybe they were talking to someone from the latter half of the 20th century.
The problem of Y2K wasn't that we didn't have enough extra digits reserved, but the fact that we were lopping off significant ones and storing the year incorrectly (e.g. as "99" when the actual value was 1900 off from that).
Padding years with a leading zero isn't forward-looking, it's naively self-centered, assuming that people will still be using our silly "Anno Domini" year-counting system eight millennia from now. (I mean... don't you people even watch Star Trek?)
"01999" and "02008"? Methinks someone is taking the cautionary example of Y2K a little too far.
A laptop that's three-quarters of an inch thick? That's crazy talk!
Oh, yeah, this is a great example of a RICO case. Not.
Sophistry aside, the point still stands: The advice to go hire a lawyer was ignorant, bad advice.
Those aren't theft cases. They're intellectual property cases, which are a completely different branch of jurisprudence from criminal cases involving theft of physical property. There is no such thing as a private prosecutor for a case of that sort: no one but the government has legal "standing" for it.
Um... the only lawyers who prosecute theft cases are the ones working for the government.
Try dropping the fixation on commercial use. You dismiss academic use as if it doesn't matter or it doesn't count(!), when that's precisely the point: it was out and about in academia in the 1970s. The commercialization of unix (which frankly wasn't important to its role in history until later, as evidenced by your 1980s example) came as a result of that proliferation.
I mean that little-u unix was free-as-in-beer, and could be use non-commercially by anyone. And they did. AT&T had lost control of it, and it was free-as-in-freedom to develop into something they had no authority over whatsoever. It may not have been until 1992 that BSD-OS was certified free-as-in-speech and could be used in commercial products, but long before that, the unix architecture and a hell of a lot of functionally compatible free-as-in-speech code - of both BSD and GNU lineage - was out there in the wild and serving as the blueprint and foundation from which FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux OS, NextStep, and Mac OS X were built.
I never said that the 1950s AT&T monopoly should have been preserved. I was only noting the irony that it was a former monopoly which - thanks to the consent decree which held it in check - spawned the greatest counteragents to the 1990s Microsoft monopoly.
Some key implications of the Carterfone decision on Bell Labs were overlooked by this article. As it mentioned, the same consent degree that previously granted AT&T its network monopoly also prevented it from commercializing its other activities. It was largely because of this limitation that a certain operating system developed at AT&T's Bell Labs in those days was not exploited commercially, but was instead openly passed around academia like a joint at a pot party. Only some time after Carterfone, as AT&T started to shake off that consent decree and start commercializing the work of Bell Labs, did it start to exercise its copyrights to that OS, and by that time the Berkeley distro had already been hatched, and unix was out of the barn. In other words: *BSD, Linux, and OS X ironically owe their existence to the pre-Carterfone AT&T monopoly. They probably would not have come into being if that decision had been made earlier, because Unix would have been treated as something to be commercialized (or at least denied to the public) from the beginning.
ICANN has .cheezburger?
I've long suspected that the treatment of the globe as if it were all "local" couldn't be sustained indefinitely. Shipping goods from one hemisphere to another might make financial sense in the short term, as long as there's a huge economic voltage between them. But eventually that differential would have to equalize, and the work of shipping goods (and the cost associated with that) would become prohibitive.
As fossil fuels deplete and become less practical, short of a breakthrough that again makes transcontinental transport affordable (both economically and environmentally), I envision human society returning to the kind of physical isolation we experienced before the 19th century... but this time with an internet that connects us electronically.
IF (and I mean BIG IF) a government is going to set standards for fitness, it would make more sense to do it for people under 40. Someone who is obese at 50 or 60 is rarely going to successfully get their weight down and substantially improve their health. Sorry, but the damage is already done. But a child, teen, or young adult who is obese probably still has a fighting chance to get the weight off and develop a healthy lifestyle, to prevent the health problems associated with being overweight.
This doesn't prove that there is water ice on Mars. It only proves that there was water ice on Mars: We just vaporized it!
This is much like the experiments conducted by ye olde Viking landers in the 1970s, which didn't test for the presence of life, but tested (inconclusively) for the presence of life-which-has-just-been-killed. I find myself uncertain whether anyone at NASA has ever heard of Heisenberg!
A remote terminal session doesn't get you access to the OS X GUI, which is where AppleScript is found.
Would this Race-To-The-Pole game also include simulated frostbite?
The United States has vast, largely-untapped energy reserves stored in the fat cells of its population. If we would start putting this to use for transportation (walking, bicycling, skateboarding, whatever) it would not only reduce our dependence on overseas petroleum, it would reduce the amount we spend on health care. No new technology required.
At 5'10" and 210lbs I'm no fitness freak. But by biking and walking whenever practical, and using the car only when I have to, I go through only about 100 gallons of gas in a year. The last time I got a fix from a fuel dealer was in April.
Hasn't this judge seen the pilot for the current Battlestar Galactica series? This is madness!
Hand delivered by a trustworthy courier.
It was behind the couch all this time.
With Jesus.
Just because you don't encounter any free-market Republicans in your circles, and don't see too many of them on the floor of Congress, doesn't mean they don't exist. That's a classic logical error.