... until a pothole develops under a pipe or until the surface is worn away and tires start tearing into the pipes and you start losing coolant in a thousand small leaks all over the system. If you want to screw around with solar heat-based energy generation, passive solar at the focal point of a parabolic collector is much less costly, is much less brittle, and is much easier to repair when it does break.
Themselves. The other companies out there will simply be around waiting to pick up the pieces. These companies' leaders will be haled as geniuses and great businessmen by the business press after being, essentially, in the right place at the right time.
Wait a minute... that sounds familiar. I seem to remember a little company... name started with an 'M', I believe... and a big international company of some sort... Oh, well - that was a long time ago. Long faded into history. Nobody could learn anything from that.
... on our side of the pond government always fucks up everything it touches.
If you truly believe this, then your Libertarianism is blinding you. There are many things the government does well and manages to do in a more efficient and equitable basis than the private sector could ever hope to provide. As with all large organizations, there are some things that government doesn't do so well. But with things where cause and negative effect are temporally or physically far apart it is necessary, if one is to achieve some semblance of justice.
What if he was unable to safely land the chopper? Then you would have had possible fatalities. This didn't happen this time, but negligently inflicting this type of risk on the pilot and on the general public seems like a serious crime to me.
Take this argument to it's logical conclusion and you make piloting a helicopter itself illegal (because a pilot having an equipment malfunction or medical problem or pilot error can cause the same *potential* loss of life). Common sense has to take over eventually.
You seem to be deciding the issue on a judgment of "pilot/cop == good" (and therefore should be protected) vs. "people fooling around with laser pointers == bad" (and therefore should have the book thrown at them). Another person could just as soon see the curiosity of the people as good and the police officer as a jack-booted thug flying around disturbing the neighborhood. This is the problem with basing laws on "potentials" rather than probable costs and actualities. Rational consideration goes out the window in lieu of feelings and moral judgments about the people involved.
A reasoned analysis would have led to a much lower potential fine and sentence for this crime. But it's so much easier to feel good about being tough on crime and being "morally superior". Yes, stupid people do stupid things. But unless *actual* damages occur, stupidity should not necessarily be penalized. People, in the course of learning things or just in living their lives, make mistakes. Unless you want to make sure that only the omniscient (or incurious) survive, you cannot criminalize ignorance. And that is what this law does.
Now, what kind of of organization isn't governmental, educational, commercial, or military? A non-profit.
It all depends on what you mean by "non-profit". How about just a simple personal domain? Although most of these are de facto non-profits, common usage reserves the term non-profit for organizations that explicitly fall under IRS code section 503. So there are potential entities that fall under.org that do not fall under the rubric of "non-profit" organizations.
The US/Allies imposed democracy on the Axis powers of Japan, Italy and Germany after WWII. While it can be argued that Italy and Germany had some democratic traditions (however the Weimar Republic was really broken), it was foreign to Japan.
Actually, it's debatable whether or not Japan actually got a "democratic" country. In the early years following the surrender, the Communists in Japan had a lot of popular support. This worried the American military and the corporate leaders. The Communist-oriented unions and the party itself were repressed by the government and the keiretsus were allowed to re-form and regain power with corporate leaders essentially retiring into public office. Halberstam's book "The Reckoning" about the rise of the Japanese auto industry has good insight into this time period (and is a rippingly good read in its own right). The "choice" available to Japan since then is basically as broad as with the military-industrial complex that ran the country before and during the war. Elections do not a democracy make.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster used many pirate ships over many years to bring them all across! Just because he touched their genes with his noodly appendage to make it appear that they were all genetically similar does not mean they all started that way.
It's so funny to come hear and read these comments where 200 people pat each other on the back and assure themselves, year after year, that this is the year of Linux on the desktop, and Microsoft is finally doomed. The other millions of people running Windows just keep using their software, oblivious to the little jihad that goes on in your minds.
You sound a lot like a guy I knew who worked for DEC in 1988. He was talking about how these PC things were just a flash in the pan and how his customers loved VMS. The bottom line was that he just couldn't envision a future that made him irrelevant. It was a remarkable failure of vision for such a smart man. But no matter how hard he looked he couldn't see that his company's leaders were leading him down a path that led away from the one their customers trod.
Microsoft has a similar problem. The day of the desktop OS and the monolithic application is drawing to a close. Trying to shoehorn a desktop experience unchanged onto a tiny portable device rather than designing a special-purpose environment geared towards the function of the device is something that Microsoft still struggles with. The sheer hideousness of Vista and its palpable lack of value is still something that the Microsoft fanboys seem unwilling to accept. The bottom line is that Microsoft has stopped listening to its customers. It is providing "solutions" to problems no one has and ignores or provides unsightly hacks for problems its customers do have. In this, it is a lot like the late eighties DEC (or the early eighties IBM).
The fact that there are hundreds of thousands of programmers who actively despise Microsoft (many while they are forced to program for it) should say something to you. But your arrogance and sense of invincibility blinds you to the trouble Microsoft is in.
The good news for you is that, like IBM, Microsoft will not totally collapse - as an ex-boss of mine said, "It takes a lot of torpedoes and time to sink an aircraft carrier". But one thing is clear - no empire lasts forever, either in history or in business. They end up recreating themselves or collapsing. Microsoft has stopped recreating itself in any meaningful way. A learning company would have taken the DoJ prosecution as an opportunity to break itself apart, making several small organizations each of which could have expanded more rapidly into more diverse economic niches (and providing their non-management shareholders more profit). But Microsoft's management, riding their lumbering dinosaur of a company and being rich enough not to care about faster earnings growth, decided that herding a group of small, furry mammalian companies was much worse than keeping their current Apatosaurian ride. And they continue their ride to this day, being high enough on the back of the dinosaur that they don't notice that it has stopped moving; it might be still growing, because it's still able to reach nearby branches, but no one notices that it has found its way into a tar pit from which escape is either problematic or impossible.
As I said previously, Microsoft might not collapse entirely, but they will not emerge from the next ten or so years without taking a hard look at what's going wrong and making a firm commitment to reinventing themselves. It might not be Linux that is the root cause of this - it might be the failure of two major OS releases in a row (because I see few compelling features in W7); it might be a competitor coming up with a viable web-centric office suite; it might be an Apple multimedia convergence box that kicks Microsoft's ass in the media market; but one thing is clear: any company that has become as arrogant and customer deaf as Microsoft is heading for a fall - just like IBM and DEC before it.
This is one of the easiest bugs to create in JavaScript.
This is one of the easiest bugs to create in any dynamic language. The real problem is that people who've spent most of their time down in statically-typed code with manual memory allocation don't really understand GC. They don't understand that in getting rid of one class of problem (memory deallocation) they've just made another one (non-released references) more prevalent. Any one who wants to properly program a GC'ed environment should first spend a couple years with Lisp or Smalltalk. A monolithic, image-based environment is fairly easy to monitor for memory retention and image growth, and the use of event mechanisms in the UI makes sure you run into the issue fairly quickly.
You obviously don't know shit about the situation currently in Iraq.
And you and the other warriors didn't know shit when you cheerled the invasion. Every expert who knew anything about the region said that overthrowing a stable, albeit dictatorial, government in Iraq would result in a bloodbath, increased attacks against Turks from Kurdish extremists, and a southern Iraq dominated by Iranian-leaning Shia, destabilizing Saudi Arabia's northern border and, perhaps, drawing the Saudis and Iranians into a conflict that would be economically disastrous for the entire world because of potential impacts on oil delivery. Of course, the Bush administration, never letting the facts get in the way of a good neocon fantasy, decided to invade anyway, because as one of the "blogging chickenhawk" cheerleaders, Michael Ledeen said: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
Well we've seen how well that worked - Iraqi bloodbath? Check. Increased Kurdish extremist attacks against Turkey? Check. Southern Iraq dominated by Iranian-leaning Shia? Check. War begtween Iran and the Saudis? Not yet, thank God, but the war is still young.
So in closing, fuck you and your war cheerleading that led the ignorant in this country into a war which, if we were to follow your notions of "winning", would result in deaths of 10-20,000 more American soldiers and cost me and my children and grandchildren $12T over the next twenty years, fuck you for the 500,000-2M Iraqi civilians who will die as a result of you and your neocon leaders' glorious military adventure, and fuck you for the increased destabilization of the region that neocon fucks like you caused which will probably lead to worldwide economic collaspse and the resulting deaths of billions because they can't get the petrochemicals and fuel that they need to feed themselves. In general, just fuck you.
The nice thing about printing the vote is that you get the electronic tally right away, so the world can know a "tentative" result by that evening, while a full count could take all night, or or maybe even a few days to certify.
And, pray tell, why do we have this fetish for knowing the winner five minutes after the polls close? I find it more interesting when we don't know right away. The real reason for this? It's all media driven. The sooner that the networks and local stations can announce the winner, the sooner they can turn away from that small bit of public service programming that they provide (and which, rating-wise, is a snooze, because so many people are politically disengaged) and get right back on the profit trail. I'm so glad the media have been so successful in convincing so many of my fellow citizens that close races and late results are a disaster. We don't want the public to be distracted from important news like where Brittney Spears showed her cooch this week, after all.
Clinton staffers removed the "W" key from many keyboards before they left.
Why don't you fools ever check the facts? I bet you think that the Al Gore inventing the internet thing is a real knee-slapper, too. Spreading political rumor and innuendo as if it is fact hurts this democracy because it keeps false memes in circulation and a factually informed electorate is the only defense against tyrrany. Of course, if you only care about your side winning, I guess that doesn't matter.
After all, since he was still in the Academy, he wasn't trained enough yet to be hitting on some green guy's woman. I guess they were trying to kill him before he grew up to be a cop or a lawyer or a... OK, I could say singer, but that would be ridiculous...
They're not always rational...It'll be interesting to see.
What ever gave you the idea that people in business are rational? Rationalizing, maybe, but rational? If it's not fear or greed, it's not capitalism. Same with business which these days is simply capitalism writ small.
The telcos didn't do this for their own selfish reasons and they should pay the price for doing so.
I hope you mean that they did do it for their own selfish interest. They got paid $1000 to initiate each tap and $750/month to maintain it. The phone companies raked in a buttload of money by not checking on (or ignoring) what the law is. They deserve everything a court can throw at them (even revocation of their corporate charter). They knew that they were breaking the law and they charged very well for it.
Back in the late 40's Henry J. Kaiser went to an automaker exec dinner and was the keynote speaker. He vowed to invest $1B into his new company. There was a nervous chuckle around the room, and one wag was heard to say to a table partner, "He buys one white chip and thinks he can win?"
The point is that automobile manufacturing is a highly capital intensive industry. It was then and it still is now. It is an industry where the margins and volumes are such that by shaving a nickel off the cost of a floor mat, you're perceived as a saint. VC's in SV are used to thinking about investments on the order of millions or tens of millions, not the tens of billions it's going to take to be a playa.
Normally I would just sit here and stew about it quietly but this disturbs me greatly...
Nobody is pointing a gun at your head and forcing you to read. There are filters. The FAQ says why they post certain articles (and hint... it says that the site is eclectic and not simply "News for Nerds"). Nor is there any evidence that Slashdot has lost readers (or influence in the technical community - if they ever had any) in the time since they brought their politics section on line.
So given all of this, why should I (because I, too, have karma to burn and *I* like the politics section) care that it disturbs you greatly? More to the point, why do you keep reading if it disturbs you so much? I'm sure there are many other technical sites that deal exclusively in technology issues. Hell, there may even be a conservative/libertarian techno site out there (since you dislike the non-neutral editorial staff) that might be better suited to your tastes. In fact, since this is the internet and all you need is a server and high-speed connection to do it, why don't you set up your own site? In fact, the folks at Slashdot are even kind enough to give you the software to do so!
Slashdot Mirror
... until a pothole develops under a pipe or until the surface is worn away and tires start tearing into the pipes and you start losing coolant in a thousand small leaks all over the system. If you want to screw around with solar heat-based energy generation, passive solar at the focal point of a parabolic collector is much less costly, is much less brittle, and is much easier to repair when it does break.
Themselves. The other companies out there will simply be around waiting to pick up the pieces. These companies' leaders will be haled as geniuses and great businessmen by the business press after being, essentially, in the right place at the right time.
Wait a minute... that sounds familiar. I seem to remember a little company... name started with an 'M', I believe... and a big international company of some sort... Oh, well - that was a long time ago. Long faded into history. Nobody could learn anything from that.
If you truly believe this, then your Libertarianism is blinding you. There are many things the government does well and manages to do in a more efficient and equitable basis than the private sector could ever hope to provide. As with all large organizations, there are some things that government doesn't do so well. But with things where cause and negative effect are temporally or physically far apart it is necessary, if one is to achieve some semblance of justice.
Take this argument to it's logical conclusion and you make piloting a helicopter itself illegal (because a pilot having an equipment malfunction or medical problem or pilot error can cause the same *potential* loss of life). Common sense has to take over eventually.
You seem to be deciding the issue on a judgment of "pilot/cop == good" (and therefore should be protected) vs. "people fooling around with laser pointers == bad" (and therefore should have the book thrown at them). Another person could just as soon see the curiosity of the people as good and the police officer as a jack-booted thug flying around disturbing the neighborhood. This is the problem with basing laws on "potentials" rather than probable costs and actualities. Rational consideration goes out the window in lieu of feelings and moral judgments about the people involved.
A reasoned analysis would have led to a much lower potential fine and sentence for this crime. But it's so much easier to feel good about being tough on crime and being "morally superior". Yes, stupid people do stupid things. But unless *actual* damages occur, stupidity should not necessarily be penalized. People, in the course of learning things or just in living their lives, make mistakes. Unless you want to make sure that only the omniscient (or incurious) survive, you cannot criminalize ignorance. And that is what this law does.
They could be bringing in many more billions of dollars per year if they would split their corporation into a group of smaller corporations.
Uh, no. It's like the computer language equivalent of what happened at the Tower of Babel. With line noise. And no hookers.
It all depends on what you mean by "non-profit". How about just a simple personal domain? Although most of these are de facto non-profits, common usage reserves the term non-profit for organizations that explicitly fall under IRS code section 503. So there are potential entities that fall under .org that do not fall under the rubric of "non-profit" organizations.
there is a product called a Zune. Squirt. Squirt.
Not really. The other 4/5 makes you disgusted at yourself for ever listening to a right-wingnut idiot like him. So you don't.
Definitely! Replace them with the parentheses that God intended.
Actually, it's debatable whether or not Japan actually got a "democratic" country. In the early years following the surrender, the Communists in Japan had a lot of popular support. This worried the American military and the corporate leaders. The Communist-oriented unions and the party itself were repressed by the government and the keiretsus were allowed to re-form and regain power with corporate leaders essentially retiring into public office. Halberstam's book "The Reckoning" about the rise of the Japanese auto industry has good insight into this time period (and is a rippingly good read in its own right). The "choice" available to Japan since then is basically as broad as with the military-industrial complex that ran the country before and during the war. Elections do not a democracy make.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster used many pirate ships over many years to bring them all across! Just because he touched their genes with his noodly appendage to make it appear that they were all genetically similar does not mean they all started that way.
You sound a lot like a guy I knew who worked for DEC in 1988. He was talking about how these PC things were just a flash in the pan and how his customers loved VMS. The bottom line was that he just couldn't envision a future that made him irrelevant. It was a remarkable failure of vision for such a smart man. But no matter how hard he looked he couldn't see that his company's leaders were leading him down a path that led away from the one their customers trod.
Microsoft has a similar problem. The day of the desktop OS and the monolithic application is drawing to a close. Trying to shoehorn a desktop experience unchanged onto a tiny portable device rather than designing a special-purpose environment geared towards the function of the device is something that Microsoft still struggles with. The sheer hideousness of Vista and its palpable lack of value is still something that the Microsoft fanboys seem unwilling to accept. The bottom line is that Microsoft has stopped listening to its customers. It is providing "solutions" to problems no one has and ignores or provides unsightly hacks for problems its customers do have. In this, it is a lot like the late eighties DEC (or the early eighties IBM).
The fact that there are hundreds of thousands of programmers who actively despise Microsoft (many while they are forced to program for it) should say something to you. But your arrogance and sense of invincibility blinds you to the trouble Microsoft is in.
The good news for you is that, like IBM, Microsoft will not totally collapse - as an ex-boss of mine said, "It takes a lot of torpedoes and time to sink an aircraft carrier". But one thing is clear - no empire lasts forever, either in history or in business. They end up recreating themselves or collapsing. Microsoft has stopped recreating itself in any meaningful way. A learning company would have taken the DoJ prosecution as an opportunity to break itself apart, making several small organizations each of which could have expanded more rapidly into more diverse economic niches (and providing their non-management shareholders more profit). But Microsoft's management, riding their lumbering dinosaur of a company and being rich enough not to care about faster earnings growth, decided that herding a group of small, furry mammalian companies was much worse than keeping their current Apatosaurian ride. And they continue their ride to this day, being high enough on the back of the dinosaur that they don't notice that it has stopped moving; it might be still growing, because it's still able to reach nearby branches, but no one notices that it has found its way into a tar pit from which escape is either problematic or impossible.
As I said previously, Microsoft might not collapse entirely, but they will not emerge from the next ten or so years without taking a hard look at what's going wrong and making a firm commitment to reinventing themselves. It might not be Linux that is the root cause of this - it might be the failure of two major OS releases in a row (because I see few compelling features in W7); it might be a competitor coming up with a viable web-centric office suite; it might be an Apple multimedia convergence box that kicks Microsoft's ass in the media market; but one thing is clear: any company that has become as arrogant and customer deaf as Microsoft is heading for a fall - just like IBM and DEC before it.
A: Uses about 2.5 times the machine resources and blows goats.
This is one of the easiest bugs to create in any dynamic language. The real problem is that people who've spent most of their time down in statically-typed code with manual memory allocation don't really understand GC. They don't understand that in getting rid of one class of problem (memory deallocation) they've just made another one (non-released references) more prevalent. Any one who wants to properly program a GC'ed environment should first spend a couple years with Lisp or Smalltalk. A monolithic, image-based environment is fairly easy to monitor for memory retention and image growth, and the use of event mechanisms in the UI makes sure you run into the issue fairly quickly.
And you and the other warriors didn't know shit when you cheerled the invasion. Every expert who knew anything about the region said that overthrowing a stable, albeit dictatorial, government in Iraq would result in a bloodbath, increased attacks against Turks from Kurdish extremists, and a southern Iraq dominated by Iranian-leaning Shia, destabilizing Saudi Arabia's northern border and, perhaps, drawing the Saudis and Iranians into a conflict that would be economically disastrous for the entire world because of potential impacts on oil delivery. Of course, the Bush administration, never letting the facts get in the way of a good neocon fantasy, decided to invade anyway, because as one of the "blogging chickenhawk" cheerleaders, Michael Ledeen said: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
Well we've seen how well that worked - Iraqi bloodbath? Check. Increased Kurdish extremist attacks against Turkey? Check. Southern Iraq dominated by Iranian-leaning Shia? Check. War begtween Iran and the Saudis? Not yet, thank God, but the war is still young.
So in closing, fuck you and your war cheerleading that led the ignorant in this country into a war which, if we were to follow your notions of "winning", would result in deaths of 10-20,000 more American soldiers and cost me and my children and grandchildren $12T over the next twenty years, fuck you for the 500,000-2M Iraqi civilians who will die as a result of you and your neocon leaders' glorious military adventure, and fuck you for the increased destabilization of the region that neocon fucks like you caused which will probably lead to worldwide economic collaspse and the resulting deaths of billions because they can't get the petrochemicals and fuel that they need to feed themselves. In general, just fuck you.
To do that you need the infrastructure to distribute and dispense it. It's never been an issue of making enough H2, but of getting it into the cars.
And, pray tell, why do we have this fetish for knowing the winner five minutes after the polls close? I find it more interesting when we don't know right away. The real reason for this? It's all media driven. The sooner that the networks and local stations can announce the winner, the sooner they can turn away from that small bit of public service programming that they provide (and which, rating-wise, is a snooze, because so many people are politically disengaged) and get right back on the profit trail. I'm so glad the media have been so successful in convincing so many of my fellow citizens that close races and late results are a disaster. We don't want the public to be distracted from important news like where Brittney Spears showed her cooch this week, after all.
Why don't you fools ever check the facts? I bet you think that the Al Gore inventing the internet thing is a real knee-slapper, too. Spreading political rumor and innuendo as if it is fact hurts this democracy because it keeps false memes in circulation and a factually informed electorate is the only defense against tyrrany. Of course, if you only care about your side winning, I guess that doesn't matter.
After all, since he was still in the Academy, he wasn't trained enough yet to be hitting on some green guy's woman. I guess they were trying to kill him before he grew up to be a cop or a lawyer or a... OK, I could say singer, but that would be ridiculous...
What ever gave you the idea that people in business are rational? Rationalizing, maybe, but rational? If it's not fear or greed, it's not capitalism. Same with business which these days is simply capitalism writ small.
I hope you mean that they did do it for their own selfish interest. They got paid $1000 to initiate each tap and $750/month to maintain it. The phone companies raked in a buttload of money by not checking on (or ignoring) what the law is. They deserve everything a court can throw at them (even revocation of their corporate charter). They knew that they were breaking the law and they charged very well for it.
The point is that automobile manufacturing is a highly capital intensive industry. It was then and it still is now. It is an industry where the margins and volumes are such that by shaving a nickel off the cost of a floor mat, you're perceived as a saint. VC's in SV are used to thinking about investments on the order of millions or tens of millions, not the tens of billions it's going to take to be a playa.
Nobody is pointing a gun at your head and forcing you to read. There are filters. The FAQ says why they post certain articles (and hint... it says that the site is eclectic and not simply "News for Nerds"). Nor is there any evidence that Slashdot has lost readers (or influence in the technical community - if they ever had any) in the time since they brought their politics section on line.
So given all of this, why should I (because I, too, have karma to burn and *I* like the politics section) care that it disturbs you greatly? More to the point, why do you keep reading if it disturbs you so much? I'm sure there are many other technical sites that deal exclusively in technology issues. Hell, there may even be a conservative/libertarian techno site out there (since you dislike the non-neutral editorial staff) that might be better suited to your tastes. In fact, since this is the internet and all you need is a server and high-speed connection to do it, why don't you set up your own site? In fact, the folks at Slashdot are even kind enough to give you the software to do so!
In short, please stop whining.
All the popular distros have them! How about "Demonic Deadyet"?