Unfortunately, people are rather uneducated about the issues of the day, much less long-term concerns. They're fed and biased by news blips instead of learning any of the details or viewpoints behind a story.
Unfortunately, crowd-sourced government would mean the majority's knee-jerk reactions becoming law, instead of having any kind of hope of rational thought behind the legal system.
The Canadian numbers don't look too bad, despite the bleating about the oilsands.
That, of course, is what I care about the most: whether we're doing our part as a nation. Not much we can do about the rest of the world, especially China and the US.
I blame offshoring of manufacturing services. Offshoring has proven a boon to industries that wish to export their toxic manufacturing processes and slave-labour "wages" to foreign countries. Can you think of any cases where the "cheap" manufacturing wasn't accompanied by lax employee and environmental safety regulations?
Of course it doesn't do much to protect online content -- the DMCA was to stop use of "circumvention measures" such as decoding and ripping DVDs and Blu-Ray disks. All it does is make it illegal to decrypt stuff.
We really need to kill this attitude of "Nobody Fails" before it completely destroys the value of getting an education.
I didn't study in high school; I learned how to do that in University, because high school wasn't challenging.
As a result, I did barely pass one class and had to drop out of another to avoid a failing grade. So I took an extra semester to make up those lost courses and complete my degree.
But I'd rather have to take an extra semester and end up with a degree that means something than be passed on because the school wants to maintain some arbitrary stats on how many students pass.
The key power C macros had over any Template-type construct I've seen is that you can actually paste the name of the macro arguments to form unique variable names within the macro. So a single macro could expand to three or four different functions, a handful of variables, etc.
Yes, people are prone to hanging themselves by abusing macros, but you can do some wicked code simplification that expands inline to maximize performance. I had macros in my library of useful stuff that turned all the declarations and accessors of a "attribute and methods" into a single macro invocation. It was hard to debug them initially, but I used them for years afterwards without problems.
It's interesting to see Java replacing C as the back-end of compilers, though many still prefer the "Assembly" approach of producing JVM byte-code instead.
I like it. It looks like they've taken the power of C/C++ macros, wrapped it up in a clean simple syntax, and applied it to Java.
When I first started programming in Java, I was at a loss without my macros. The concept of macros and code expansion are so powerful, but often overlooked because they can be hideously difficult to debug and enhance.
The past week or so, my WIndows XP boot partition started behaving strangely. I had problems with Firefox and other applications that had never had problems before, and which had not been upgraded, and noticed a significant impact on download speeds.
Avast didn't detect whatever it was, even with a boot-scan.
Rather than play around trying to get rid of an unidentified virus, I nuked the XP boot partition completely and switched over to Linux full-time for now.
On the bright side, it was over 8 years since the last time I got infected with an XP box, so I don't think it did too badly for it's time.
While there's a lot of useful old hardware that only has a CD drive, I'd bet most of them don't have enough power to run 12.x comfortably anyhow.
I'm already at the point with my machine that I had to settle for 10.04.1, because later versions all have a bug that causes my Logitech Trackball to get lost, leaving me with a dead mouse.
I was kind of looking forward to futzing with Unity for a day or two, but I did plan on shifting back to Gnome again after that anyhow. Unless Gnome really is as bad as some say, in which case there are other options.
But I digress...
DVDs have been my standard storage medium for over 6 years. I gave up on CDs because of cost, not because DVDs or their drives were less reliable. I burn a lot of backups weighing in at around half a gig each. It's just not sane to spend $0.60+ on CDs that hold one back-up when I can fit 8-9 on a $0.30 DVD-R.
It'd be awful handy to be able to install most of the software without a network link. A lot of regions and small businesses have pretty poor links, and while you're downloading the install components for one machine, everyone in their company is affected by you hogging the bandwidth.
It's unclear to me if that's kosher, as the closed variant must contain code that had been GPLed at one point.
My interpretation of copyright law and licensing is that you can distribute source code you wrote under any license you choose. Where it becomes in issue is when other people have contributed to the project, muddying the ownership of parts of the software.
It's the same as having different licensing terms for different customers -- even if the licenses conflict, the restrictions apply to that copy of the software and don't affect other copies that are distributed, even if the code is the same.
I like the fact that Google and Bing use different ranking approaches, and use both depending on what I'm looking for. Google tends to do a better job of finding technical articles, FAQs, and manuals, while Bing tends to do better at finding news.
Both are pretty bad at finding official government legislation and paperwork.
If all the search engines were to return the same results, what would be the point of competition?
I believe social media network games should be held to those same standards. The device you use to play games should not affect the legal restrictions on those games.
Only 5 of the free games mentioned look like they're targeting children. If they're installing the other 5, I'd like to know where the parents are that should be monitoring their kid's gaming and viewing habits.
I see no difference between trying to get kids to buy in-game items than trying to get them to buy real-world toys. In both cases, the parents are the ones who should be holding the purse-strings and taking their children shopping.
I think it might be possible to restrict these games on the basis of children under a certain age not being able to enter into a legal contract for the purchases.
At very least, there should be some requirement for parents to authorize the in-game purchases and limit spending on them on a per-game basis.
The cancelled study I keep mentioning was supposed to be done over 10 years ago in Canada, and was cancelled by Harper's then-minority government. The government has long since deleted the information from the Canadian government web servers, but I was able to find a copy of the relevant information in a Yahoo cache. I've copied it to my personal webserver in case someone decides to clear the Yahoo cache.
With millions of people testifying to the medical benefits of cannabis, it's pretty clear it's not a Schedule I drug.
However, the government in the US points to a lack of "proper studies", as do the Canadian medical associations. Yet both the US and Canadian governments put up every possible roadblock to proper, verifiable research, imposing restrictions like 30-day trials and then claiming there are no studies into "long term effects."
On the recreational side, over 50% of the population in both Canada and the US support regulation and taxation, the same as beer or wine, allowing home production.
Our governments aren't interested in learning the truth or discussing the issue. They're on a mission from God to protect us from "demon weed", and nothing will stand in their way -- not science, not the will of the people, not the economic arguments, and certainly not an electronic petition.
Slashdot Mirror
The legislation hasn't been passed yet, but it's on the table.
But on the flip side, we're taking the hit for the oilsands extraction process -- that's a heavy CO2 contributor.
But I agree with the sentiment.
Unfortunately, people are rather uneducated about the issues of the day, much less long-term concerns. They're fed and biased by news blips instead of learning any of the details or viewpoints behind a story.
Unfortunately, crowd-sourced government would mean the majority's knee-jerk reactions becoming law, instead of having any kind of hope of rational thought behind the legal system.
The Canadian numbers don't look too bad, despite the bleating about the oilsands.
That, of course, is what I care about the most: whether we're doing our part as a nation. Not much we can do about the rest of the world, especially China and the US.
I blame offshoring of manufacturing services. Offshoring has proven a boon to industries that wish to export their toxic manufacturing processes and slave-labour "wages" to foreign countries. Can you think of any cases where the "cheap" manufacturing wasn't accompanied by lax employee and environmental safety regulations?
Of course it doesn't do much to protect online content -- the DMCA was to stop use of "circumvention measures" such as decoding and ripping DVDs and Blu-Ray disks. All it does is make it illegal to decrypt stuff.
We really need to kill this attitude of "Nobody Fails" before it completely destroys the value of getting an education.
I didn't study in high school; I learned how to do that in University, because high school wasn't challenging.
As a result, I did barely pass one class and had to drop out of another to avoid a failing grade. So I took an extra semester to make up those lost courses and complete my degree.
But I'd rather have to take an extra semester and end up with a degree that means something than be passed on because the school wants to maintain some arbitrary stats on how many students pass.
From Webster's Online Dictionary:
The key power C macros had over any Template-type construct I've seen is that you can actually paste the name of the macro arguments to form unique variable names within the macro. So a single macro could expand to three or four different functions, a handful of variables, etc.
Yes, people are prone to hanging themselves by abusing macros, but you can do some wicked code simplification that expands inline to maximize performance. I had macros in my library of useful stuff that turned all the declarations and accessors of a "attribute and methods" into a single macro invocation. It was hard to debug them initially, but I used them for years afterwards without problems.
It's interesting to see Java replacing C as the back-end of compilers, though many still prefer the "Assembly" approach of producing JVM byte-code instead.
I like it. It looks like they've taken the power of C/C++ macros, wrapped it up in a clean simple syntax, and applied it to Java.
When I first started programming in Java, I was at a loss without my macros. The concept of macros and code expansion are so powerful, but often overlooked because they can be hideously difficult to debug and enhance.
Took a moment to get it. Good one! :)
The past week or so, my WIndows XP boot partition started behaving strangely. I had problems with Firefox and other applications that had never had problems before, and which had not been upgraded, and noticed a significant impact on download speeds.
Avast didn't detect whatever it was, even with a boot-scan.
Rather than play around trying to get rid of an unidentified virus, I nuked the XP boot partition completely and switched over to Linux full-time for now.
On the bright side, it was over 8 years since the last time I got infected with an XP box, so I don't think it did too badly for it's time.
While there's a lot of useful old hardware that only has a CD drive, I'd bet most of them don't have enough power to run 12.x comfortably anyhow.
I'm already at the point with my machine that I had to settle for 10.04.1, because later versions all have a bug that causes my Logitech Trackball to get lost, leaving me with a dead mouse.
I was kind of looking forward to futzing with Unity for a day or two, but I did plan on shifting back to Gnome again after that anyhow. Unless Gnome really is as bad as some say, in which case there are other options.
But I digress...
DVDs have been my standard storage medium for over 6 years. I gave up on CDs because of cost, not because DVDs or their drives were less reliable. I burn a lot of backups weighing in at around half a gig each. It's just not sane to spend $0.60+ on CDs that hold one back-up when I can fit 8-9 on a $0.30 DVD-R.
It'd be awful handy to be able to install most of the software without a network link. A lot of regions and small businesses have pretty poor links, and while you're downloading the install components for one machine, everyone in their company is affected by you hogging the bandwidth.
My interpretation of copyright law and licensing is that you can distribute source code you wrote under any license you choose. Where it becomes in issue is when other people have contributed to the project, muddying the ownership of parts of the software.
It's the same as having different licensing terms for different customers -- even if the licenses conflict, the restrictions apply to that copy of the software and don't affect other copies that are distributed, even if the code is the same.
We've come a long way since we first gazed at the stars and wondered...
I like the fact that Google and Bing use different ranking approaches, and use both depending on what I'm looking for. Google tends to do a better job of finding technical articles, FAQs, and manuals, while Bing tends to do better at finding news.
Both are pretty bad at finding official government legislation and paperwork.
If all the search engines were to return the same results, what would be the point of competition?
New York better watch out for an infringement lawsuit, too. :p
Maybe there should be a seperate security option to allow Facebook users to decide whether they want their comments indexed or not.
Personally I don't have an issue with it. A lot of people post some pretty interesting viewpoints to Facebook, treating it almost like a blog.
I haven't seen any mention of whether the document attack vector affects OpenOffice and LibreOffice users as well.
I think that's jumping to conclusions. People would still have their own sins to condemn them.
After all, no one's perfect.
I believe social media network games should be held to those same standards. The device you use to play games should not affect the legal restrictions on those games.
Only 5 of the free games mentioned look like they're targeting children. If they're installing the other 5, I'd like to know where the parents are that should be monitoring their kid's gaming and viewing habits.
I see no difference between trying to get kids to buy in-game items than trying to get them to buy real-world toys. In both cases, the parents are the ones who should be holding the purse-strings and taking their children shopping.
I think it might be possible to restrict these games on the basis of children under a certain age not being able to enter into a legal contract for the purchases.
At very least, there should be some requirement for parents to authorize the in-game purchases and limit spending on them on a per-game basis.
The cancelled study I keep mentioning was supposed to be done over 10 years ago in Canada, and was cancelled by Harper's then-minority government. The government has long since deleted the information from the Canadian government web servers, but I was able to find a copy of the relevant information in a Yahoo cache. I've copied it to my personal webserver in case someone decides to clear the Yahoo cache.
Health Canada - CIHR Medical Marijuana Research Program
If you block the research, the doctors and medical associations can keep crying that there's no research. Catch-22.
With millions of people testifying to the medical benefits of cannabis, it's pretty clear it's not a Schedule I drug.
However, the government in the US points to a lack of "proper studies", as do the Canadian medical associations. Yet both the US and Canadian governments put up every possible roadblock to proper, verifiable research, imposing restrictions like 30-day trials and then claiming there are no studies into "long term effects."
On the recreational side, over 50% of the population in both Canada and the US support regulation and taxation, the same as beer or wine, allowing home production.
Our governments aren't interested in learning the truth or discussing the issue. They're on a mission from God to protect us from "demon weed", and nothing will stand in their way -- not science, not the will of the people, not the economic arguments, and certainly not an electronic petition.