The way I read the Content-Disposition RFC, it provides semantics for how to display included components of a message. Now, if you wanted I suppose you could do a Content-Disposition: inline of a chunk of HTML that referenced images and objects from a remote website, but that would a) just use the standard HTML semantics b) would be considered a security risk by most mail clients.
Have we already forgotten Apple's OpenDoc, and System 7's Publish and Subscribe features? OpenDoc (not to be confused with OpenDocument) made it possible to build a document from components, with no "main" or "owner" application. P&S was a method for implementing component-based "copy and paste" in the OS, so you could "copy" a part of a document from a P&S-enabled application and it would dynamically update whenever the source updated. You could have, say, an image included in a document that would be a bar chart of the current budget from a budget document somewhere else. As that budget document and its bar chart changed, your document's chart would change with it.
Why did OpenDoc and P&S die? Because from a programming standpoint, they are horribly complex to implement in an application or OS. Imagine the complexity of dealing with just a fragment of text: when it changes, how should that change be interpreted? If I take out sentences over time and replace them with others, should there be a point where the text is declared (by the publisher, or by the subscriber) to be a different text entirely? If so, how do you do that and under what conditions? If not, why not? As the size of the fragment changes with the content, how do you reliably determine the "start" and "end" of it any more? If the source text is reorganized, do we have to track every chunk of our fragment's text and where it ends up? Do they still get published in something resembling the original order and format, and if so, how do you decide how to do that? If not, what do you publish and in what form?
Also, at the time (early 90s) there was barely enough user understanding of the idea of linking one document to another, let alone actively including a part of a document dynamically. People just didn't know what the hell it was all supposed to be for in an essentially pre-Web world. Almost fifteen years later, "such a thing is obvious", but back then the vast majority of developers said "the hell with that -- it costs more to do than we'll ever get out of it".
Nowadays, doing everything over the Internet would probably reduce the complexity somewhat -- you wouldn't have to have so many different kinds of applications and document types able to talk to each other, so the conversation framework would be correspondingly less complicated. You could also (assuming you can make Internet P&S work in the first place) modify the P&S dynamic to account for copyright, licensing and other conditions on the Publish end, and alerting subscribers to sudden major changes on the client end (to warn users of published info that their commentary on or use of it may now be out of date as a result of a major change).
Much as with some other literary thinkers, I think there's a kernel of a good idea that might be implementable at the core of all this verbiage coming from Ted Nelson, it's just pulling it out of the torrent that's the hard part. And in fact it turns out that a good deal of what he says has actually been done already in some form, as others have pointed out here.
Existence in treaty does not prove existence
on
Controlling Hurricanes?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
ihatewinXP wrote:
Oddly enough in the official Anti-Ballistic-Missile-Treaty there is a clause that states that America is not allowed to use / deploy their weather changing weapons including HAARP against the old Soviet Union.
There is also a UN treaty circa 1976 that basically says the same thing but in more general terms, while again naming the US and Russia.
Now I hate to be 'that guy' but knowing that in all the: legalese, time, preperation, and double checking that went into the ABM treaty that the inclusion of a weather weapon cant be purely speculative or coincidental.
ASsuming this language actually exists, I don't see why not, actually. It's like the standard copyright notice you see on books, that lists various means of reproduction, then says "...or any other means of recording or storage..." It doesn't mean there's some super-secret means of data storage that "they" aren't telling us about. In this example, I'm sure the stereotypical paranoia on both sides about the other's military and intelligence operations led them to list everything that could even remotely conceivably ever be used or developed during the length of time the treaty was in force. On the off chance that we (or they) developed actual working weather control, neither side wanted the other to be able to say "Haha, SALT II doesn't say anything about weather, EAT OUR CATEGORY 6 HURRICANE MOSKVA, BITCHES!" (Insert suitable evil laugh here; white cat optional but recommended.)
I recently saw a conspiracy-theory site make much of language in some type of new law or regulation that forbade US military to do certain kinds of weapons tests in the vicinity of cities without notifying local authorities. Among the listed weapons was chemtrails. This was cited as Absolute Proof that chemtrails existed and were regularly used by the US military in civilian areas. Same thing applies -- it's just being safe, OK? (Or in that case, was more likely a misguided attempt at reassuring the tinfoil-hat brigade.)
I have to deal on a daily basis with a co-worker whose first thought whenever we have a high-priority issue is to do the first thing that comes to mind as remotely reasonable. For example, we recently had a workstation dedicated to a business app that had some minor problems. Since it was old, we decided to go ahead and refresh it early. I built the new hardware and got it ready for the app to be installed.
When I posted my latest status update that I was waiting for the app manager to coordinate the install, he followed up and said "don't wait on him, just go ahead and copy the app directory, set all these environment variables..." I pretty much just ignored this. Later that day during a phone conversation I mentioned copying and updating the previous profile wholesale if they were really in that big a hurry (there was no reason to be, but if they wanted to be I at least wanted it to go well). He went ballistic and came vanishingly close to ordering me to just do it his way -- he can't do that because even though he has seniority, he isn't someone I report to, and our mutual boss was on the call, but he clearly wanted to.
It later turned out that there was authentication data that we needed and didn't know, but which was cached in the profile. His solution was "analyze the configuration data to find where the username and password are." Or, I said, I could just copy the profile over and then I don't need to spend hours looking for this data (that we aren't supposed to actually have -- it's a database login provided by the app management team, input directly by them into the app instance and saved in the profile, I presume in an encrypted form).
This same guy once pushed out a broken Windows group policy to our userbase to test it (that's when we found out it was broken). He's a pretty talented guy, and we apparently went to some length to keep him after his student eligibility expired, but at least once a week he recommends something totally braindead like that and I have to either ignore him or explain to him (and often others) why it's really not a good idea to do it his way.
But if it's a necessary resource (or "necessary enough"), eventually scracity will force the price up to where it becomes economically practical to recover it anyway. Admittedly letting that happen may be short-sighted, but let's face it, people are short-sighted.
What concerns me more is the widespread reports of private and municipal waste authorities just landfill-dumping the contents of recycling bins. I've heard of places that do this where recycling is mandatory.
I've done that too. I find a lot of weird-looking diagrams help the MEGO factor, which in turn helps with minimizing the length of the disruption before you can shoo them away and get some real work done. Bonus points for diagrams in more than one color of dry-erase.
I'm not saying we shouldn't recycle now. I'm saying that whether we recycle or not, those resources will still be exploitable later, in contrast to the parent to my post who seemed to think the choice is between recycling now and losing it forever.
Actually, yeah. When it comes to people who see the idea of any obligations to anything other than themselves as evil, I do consider myself better than them.
There is a difference between idiots who can't think further than next week, and people who exercise what is termed "enlightened self-interest" and thus are aware of long-term benefits to actions that seem painful in the short term. For an example of the idiots, look at people with negative-amortization mortgages, or Wall Street analysts who reward companies for treating their employees like replaceable factory machines (Wal-Mart) in ignorance of the real financial benefits that come from treating your employees well (such as, say, Costco, which is poised to eat Wal-Mart's lunch if the WMT execs don't watch out).
The trouble is, you can't have enlightened self-interest if you don't allow people to act on their own behalf. The key is allowing people to act to their own benefit without allowing them to act to the detriment of others.
I see a lot of self-described libertarians running around talking about how environmental regulation is anticapitalist and this and that. To them I say, who gave you the right to smoke up the air (and foul the water) that I breathe (and drink)? If you want to reduce the value of the air or water to everyone else in the world, you better compensate them for it before you do. And I don't mean "well, we make products that they can use..." I mean a choice that they make of their own free will. I mean giving them an option to say "No, I'd rather not breathe tainted air, thanks." If you want the right to be protected from others, you have to give others the right to be protected from you as well. Be glad that instead of having to answer individually to everyone in the dispersal radius of your industrial pollutants, you get away with just dealing with the government from time to time. A true libertarian regime would be much worse for you.
Enlightened self-interest can't exist if you attempt to protect others from themselves, only if you're protecting them from unconsenting harm by others and letting them dispose of themselves how they will.
Once the resource becomes too scarece then it's too late. It's exactly this kind of short sightedness that causes you to not see the point, both of recycling and of my argument.
Resources that we throw away don't just disappear. They're in the landfills and garbage dumps. One day somebody is going to develop a process to take old garbage, separate out valuable compounds, and reuse them. Probably that person will then find out it's not economically feasible for them to do it, due to someone else having started by buying the resource exploitation rights already from the various state and municipal solid-waste authorities, who will then buy the latecomer's R&D work and start the operation going.
It's shale oil all over again. Right now it's not practical to [extract shale oil|refine garbage]. But as the scarcity increases and the price climbs, it becomes more and more economical to develop processes to do these things that were formerly "too expensive".
It's not so important how many dollars it costs to produce ethanol capable of delivering one unit of energy. It's how many energy units it takes. Chemical processes only benefit so much from economy of scale. Currently ethanol takes more energy to produce than it can yield, and there's no reason to believe that's going to change much in the foreseeable future.
I've had two bosses (and a number of coworkers) who didn't understand the idea that letting the queue build up behind tasks getting completed is not a bad thing since it means the original task is getting completed that much quicker for the person who was there first/has a higher priority. When I worked pizza delivery, the very worst (and one of the shortest-lived of the seven I had in my less than a year there) was the guy who kept redirecting people willy-nilly. You got tired just from moving from task to task. Everybody hated him, including the customers, who could see him pulling people off the line in the middle of making their pizza. One person can prep one pizza in about one minute, but five people cannot make one pizza working twelve seconds each. It just doesn't work.
At Kinko's was the boss (and co-workers) who decided that since I knew how to do everything, anything they didn't know how or couldn't be bothered to do, they would dump on me. Eventually I started telling them things like "you're number 3 in the queue. It's gonna be awhile." They backed off after awhile when I made it clear that once you're in the queue, you stay in the queue until your turn comes, however long that is. I was valuable enough that they couldn't just fire me (though the next manager tried, and he got his ass handed to him by HR when I gave them a heads-up).
At my current job the main problem was people ambushing me as soon as I walk in the door with every little question they've come up with that morning. I've gotten them trained to where they know if I walk in and go straight from my mailbox to my office, I have something to work on already; if I come into the lobby area where they are after checking my box, they're free to drop whatever on my plate. The new trouble ticket system we just installed helps too, as they can enter a ticket as soon as they think of a question or encounter a problem, instead of feeling frustration until I get there. I'm working on getting them trained to realize that instead of coming down 3 floors to change someone's default e-mail client or whatever, I can do almost anything software-based that needs to be done right from my office (and probably do it better since I have all my reference materials and tools for various things right in front of me, to say nothing of direct access to the servers if something server-based needs to be done).
It's slow work, but we're making progress. Next up will be getting them to plug their own Ethernet cables back in when they've been pulled out from the wall (no, I'm not kidding).
I used to work at an online gaming company that got swallowed by EA in early 2000. My first job there was in the test bay, and one guy who worked there asserted the following about ESRB. Apparently, if your game was too advanced for the test stations they had (and according to him, their test stations were pretty crappy), they would call you up and ask you questions about the game content, then assign a rating based solely on that.
So basically ESRB was completely vulnerable to gaming their particular system. Things have apparently changed and become much more thorough now, but theoretically if you sabotaged your own game so it wouldn't run, you could get them to assign you almost any rating you wanted just by answering their questions the right way. (Obviously getting an M game assigned a rating of E would be pushing your luck, but you might get it down from an M to a T.
Some anonymous coward wrote: Microsoft did out-innovate Netscape. They mat not have been the first on the scene with a browser, but they were certainly the first to produce one that was a pleasure to use (by the standards at the time)...
Were you even around on the Intarweb when IE 3.0 was going head-to-head with NS 3.x?
Netscape was the browser for at least two years (mid-1995 to mid-1997ish). IE was slow, painful to use, and had horrible rendering. IE 3.0 couldn't even render fairly simple tables correctly, which meant web pages that used tables for layout (which was many, many of them) looked like absolute shit in IE but looked OK in almost any other browser. Netscape was so dominant that people occasionally referred to the Web as "the Netscape".
Netscape 4 vs. IE 4 was a different story entirely. Netscape lost their focus and fell victim to the "portal" mania that was happening in 1998. From out here in the real world it looked like they were putting all their resources into the portal silliness, and later, Internet services silliness like being an e-mail provider, and the browser became almost an afterthought. Check out what jwz says in his "farewell Mozilla" gruntle: 1998 was when Netscape finally quit even credibly trying. And what they had at that point was a pigsty of a collection of code that, to yield a clean, functional browser, would (and did) have to be almost completely rewritten.
Microsoft didn't "out-innovate" Netscape as much as Netscape quit innovating completely. Winning a race is easy when the competition isn't running any more.
A couple years ago at one company I worked at, we had a theme Cinco de Mayo party, complete with cheap straw sombreros with bands of various colors. After the party, one was left over with a hot-pink band. Later that afternoon somebody committed an egregious screwup and I said "You get the Sombrero of Shame". I got the pink-banded sombrero and hung it in his cube.
After that it became tradition that if you committed a really stupid blunder, you had to go claim the sombrero of shame. (It was considered more honorable to claim it oneself than to have it thrust upon you by acclamation at the weekly status meeting.)
I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the "openings" that list active DoD clearance with lifestyle polygraph are just this kind of BS listing. Security clearances are supposed to end the moment you leave the employment that requires them. In practice this is a bit fudgeable if your previous employer plays ball, but it still involves a lot of paperwork (apparently) on their part to "transfer" your clearance to a new employer, so why would they bother? If anything I'd think they'd make it as hard as they can, to discourage people from leaving now that they've put all the administrative work into getting you cleared.
My gut tells me that a lot of the "job openings" that require active DoD with poly are tailor-made for existing employees in the same organization who are being groomed for promotion. They already have the clearance and since they're not changing employers it's a lot less hassle to get it blessed by the Powers That Be.
The one I really hate is being lied to by recruiters. Monday morning they tell you about this wonderful opening they have that exactly matches your skill set; Tuesday afternoon you show up for the interview and it's "oh, that opening was filled last week. But let's sit down and talk just in case anything comes up later that you're qualified for." Nine times out of ten I'll bet they make the whole thing up in the first place just to get you in a chair and pick your brain to see where they can shoehorn you in to get a placement bonus.
The purpose of the 10th amendment is to reserve all powers to states not explicitly granted to the federal government. This is exactly why the federal government has no business striking down state anti-sodomy laws. Granted, such laws are asinine and stupid. However, it is up to state legislatures and state supreme courts to change them or strike them based on state constitutions or state-wide referendums.
The Supreme Court would arguably have the power to decide that a right is not reserved to the states either, but to the people only (the Tenth states that unenumerated rights are reserved to the states or to the people generally). In effect this is what was done when various antiregulatory Amendments from the First down were held through Supreme Court decisions to prohibit the states from committing certain acts as well.
The text of the Constitution is entirely silent on the subject of heterosexual sex and homosexual sex. This is not a judgment about homosexuality, it is just a fact. The only "right" to homosexual sex or any sex for that matter was created through interpretations that stretch the text of the Constitution far more than "public use" has been stretched today.
The fact that the Constitution is silent on either, means that the federal government is intended to be powerless to regulate or prohibit either. Compare the text of the Tenth Amendment, with the context that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights were considered unnecessary by many of the framers of the Constution because they considered them implicit in the main body to begin with.
Ultimately, the twisting of the "takings clause" today is nothing compared the the tortured interprations of the Consitution that give rise to the fundamental "rights" to homosexual sodomy and abortion.
I don't know why I bother, but...
Substitute "heterosexual sex" in place of "homosexual sodomy" in that sentence. Your right to have sex IS EXACTLY EQUAL TO a gay person's. PERIOD.
Now go do something productive, like volunteering at a hospital that does AIDS research.
I own everything I create (including my wedding, which I pay for and participate it, and create). The photographer does not 'own' the broadcast of this product (because he has not paid for its rights). I am paying him to document it, but it's not his creation.
It's not his creation, but if you sign a contract that says so, he does in fact own the "broadcast rights".
In the absence of a contract, the photographer could take pictures of the wedding party as they came into public space outside the church, but could not then make commercial use of those images (without seeking permission to do so). On the other hand, neither can you stop him photographing you, nor stop him from making noncommercial use of the photos. (The rules change a bit for "public figures", who have less control over their images. See "paparazzi".)
However, once you sign a contract that explicitly gives the photographer exclusive rights to commercially create and sell reproductions of your image as captured by him, your own right to do so is gone forever, unless and until you get him to give you back those rights, unless your locality has an unprecedented law to the contrary. In the US, at least, you do not have a Constitutional right to be protected from your own bad judgement in signing away your commercial rights (there are certain rights that are not legally recognized as subject to contract law, such as the right to the franchise).
Copyright of a photograph initially vests in the photographer, and has done for years and years and years. Rights to an image of a person initially vest in the person. Before a photo can be commercially copied, both those rights have to align.
If you really want to keep hand, wrist and arm pain at bay:
1) Take all your keyboards and sort them into two piles: one for all the rubber-dome keyboards, one for the buckling-spring and Alps-keyswitch ones.
2) Take the second pile and put them back where you got them.
3) Take the first pile out in the yard, dump them in a steel drum, douse them with gasoline, and BURN THEM.*
4) Go buy more spring- or Alps-based keyboards to fill any shortfall you now have.
* Standard disclaimers about toxic fumes, flame hazards, etc. apply.
I'm pretty well convinced it's less important which layout you use than how high the quality of your keyboard itself is. After two weeks using my wife's built-in higher-quality rubber-dome QWERTY laptop keyboard while on honeymoon, it's been physically painful going back to typing on the crappy rubber-dome QWERTY desktop keyboards we have at work for the last two days.
Yes, better keyboards will cost you (minimum $25-30, more likely $50, and you can go as high as $100 easily -- I even saw one super-duper-everything keyboard priced at $700), but this is your comfort and health we're talking about, plus they're much more tolerant of spills and other abuse. Spend the money. Invest in a relatively cheap (compared to half a dozen good keyboards, anyway) KVM so you don't have to buy a pricey keyboard for each computer.
If you think about it, Dvorak keyboards ought to make you more prone to RSI, not less... you're still typing the same letters, but now your fingers are moving with less variation to do it, which is practically the standard recipe for RSI. Am I missing something there?
Hell no they don't. Not the ones I worked at, ca. early 2004, anyway. It's out in the Express customer area, on the design Macs, and that's the only place it exists in any Kinko's, unless the manager has done something grossly non-standard and possibly illegal. Your average Kinko's droid hasn't got the design cojones to be able to do anything coherent with Quark anyway.
The only people we had who brought in Quark files with any regularity were the "design" students at the local U, most of whom had no business touching it and should have stuck to Word and maybe the occasional foray into Illustrator. Seriously, the things these idiots would perpetrate in the name of "graphic design" made my eyes bleed and my stomach lurch.
Quark itself impressed me as a very powerful program, but with very damaging flaws, like its terrible color management (it would do horrible things to pastel shades a lot of the time), lack of PDF support, and the "quirkiness" involved in saving a 4.11 document from version 5 (we had 4.11/Mac at Kinko's and a lot of people who brought us stuff were using machines with 5).
Quark and its users got to be such a pain that we adopted a completely hands-off policy to it: you're welcome to bring your Quark file in and try to print it yourself, but we will not try to fix it, manipulate it, convert it, or anything else at all. We barely admitted we had it, unless we had to under direct questioning.
Advertisers create annoying, intrusive ads because they think they're profitable, despite all the evidence of the ad-revenue bust of 1999-2000 to the contrary. If those ads were profitable, their value would have gone up, not down.
I have clicked on two web ads in my entire life on the web (over 10 years).
One was some server company's ad back in the dim days before those Java and flash ads even existed (remember when animated-GIF ads were the most annoying thing ever?) I checked it out, moved on and don't even remember who the company was now.
The other was recently (a couple of months ago). It was a Google text ad for Coffee Fool, and I was impressed enough with their site that I've recommended them to friends as "something to think about trying" (although I myself have yet to buy any of their product -- soon though...) I even bookmarked it so I know I can get back to it easily when I go to buy some of their stuff.
There have been other ads (few, but more than say, a dozen) that motivated my curiosity enough to type the URL into my browser, but I typically refrain from actually clicking on ads to avoid being tracked that way and/or to deny credit to an annoying ad for bringing me to a site that I nevertheless want to visit.
The bottom line is that there is no law or social contract that compels me to retrieve the ads that happen to be linked off a page, just as there is no law or social contract that forbids me from getting up or flipping channels or just sitting with my eyes closed and hands over my ears going "lalalalala!" when an annoying ad comes on TV. Advertisers have as much right to speak as they can buy time for, but they have no right to actually be heard by someone who doesn't want to, although they will try any number of more or less dirty-but-still-legal tricks to make it less annoying to put up with ads than block them out.
Somebody else made the point that "If the ad annoys me I'll make it a point not to buy the product", and I agree with that. Advertisers should consider it an advantage when I can block ads that annoy me, because the less I see their annoying ad, the less I'll bitch about their company. (I guess that's a negative to anyone who still subscribes to the idea that "even bad publicity is good advertising", but apart from rock stars and Paris Hilton, I think that idea is dead.)
I have all the sympathy in the world for sites that are trying to provide services supported by ads. Then again, if no one's clicking on your ads, maybe you should get different ads on your site -- the whole "[violent act] the [object, animal, or person] and win a free [trendy gadget]" ad style should have died about 2 days after the Punch the Monkey ads came out back in what, '99? And if you are getting adequate clickthrough revenue, don't gripe about the people who don't click -- they're a cost of doing business that you should have anticipated.
Think about the case of the "Happy Birthday" song played by Mozart centuries ago. You don't hear it in restaurants much anymore (oh, they have "Happy Birthday" songs but they are not THE "Happy Birthday" song). The reason? Some guy copyrighted it and the Copyright Office was stupid enough to give him the copyright. Even though the Copyright Office's own rules state that anything that pre-existed before the copyright laws went into effect could not be copyrighted!
Cecil Adams begs to disagree with you. (Well. Cecil doesn't beg. Rather the opposite, usually.)
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The way I read the Content-Disposition RFC, it provides semantics for how to display included components of a message. Now, if you wanted I suppose you could do a Content-Disposition: inline of a chunk of HTML that referenced images and objects from a remote website, but that would a) just use the standard HTML semantics b) would be considered a security risk by most mail clients.
Why did OpenDoc and P&S die? Because from a programming standpoint, they are horribly complex to implement in an application or OS. Imagine the complexity of dealing with just a fragment of text: when it changes, how should that change be interpreted? If I take out sentences over time and replace them with others, should there be a point where the text is declared (by the publisher, or by the subscriber) to be a different text entirely? If so, how do you do that and under what conditions? If not, why not? As the size of the fragment changes with the content, how do you reliably determine the "start" and "end" of it any more? If the source text is reorganized, do we have to track every chunk of our fragment's text and where it ends up? Do they still get published in something resembling the original order and format, and if so, how do you decide how to do that? If not, what do you publish and in what form?
Also, at the time (early 90s) there was barely enough user understanding of the idea of linking one document to another, let alone actively including a part of a document dynamically. People just didn't know what the hell it was all supposed to be for in an essentially pre-Web world. Almost fifteen years later, "such a thing is obvious", but back then the vast majority of developers said "the hell with that -- it costs more to do than we'll ever get out of it".
Nowadays, doing everything over the Internet would probably reduce the complexity somewhat -- you wouldn't have to have so many different kinds of applications and document types able to talk to each other, so the conversation framework would be correspondingly less complicated. You could also (assuming you can make Internet P&S work in the first place) modify the P&S dynamic to account for copyright, licensing and other conditions on the Publish end, and alerting subscribers to sudden major changes on the client end (to warn users of published info that their commentary on or use of it may now be out of date as a result of a major change).
Much as with some other literary thinkers, I think there's a kernel of a good idea that might be implementable at the core of all this verbiage coming from Ted Nelson, it's just pulling it out of the torrent that's the hard part. And in fact it turns out that a good deal of what he says has actually been done already in some form, as others have pointed out here.
Oddly enough in the official Anti-Ballistic-Missile-Treaty there is a clause that states that America is not allowed to use / deploy their weather changing weapons including HAARP against the old Soviet Union.
There is also a UN treaty circa 1976 that basically says the same thing but in more general terms, while again naming the US and Russia.
Now I hate to be 'that guy' but knowing that in all the: legalese, time, preperation, and double checking that went into the ABM treaty that the inclusion of a weather weapon cant be purely speculative or coincidental.
ASsuming this language actually exists, I don't see why not, actually. It's like the standard copyright notice you see on books, that lists various means of reproduction, then says "...or any other means of recording or storage..." It doesn't mean there's some super-secret means of data storage that "they" aren't telling us about. In this example, I'm sure the stereotypical paranoia on both sides about the other's military and intelligence operations led them to list everything that could even remotely conceivably ever be used or developed during the length of time the treaty was in force. On the off chance that we (or they) developed actual working weather control, neither side wanted the other to be able to say "Haha, SALT II doesn't say anything about weather, EAT OUR CATEGORY 6 HURRICANE MOSKVA, BITCHES!" (Insert suitable evil laugh here; white cat optional but recommended.)
I recently saw a conspiracy-theory site make much of language in some type of new law or regulation that forbade US military to do certain kinds of weapons tests in the vicinity of cities without notifying local authorities. Among the listed weapons was chemtrails. This was cited as Absolute Proof that chemtrails existed and were regularly used by the US military in civilian areas. Same thing applies -- it's just being safe, OK? (Or in that case, was more likely a misguided attempt at reassuring the tinfoil-hat brigade.)
When I posted my latest status update that I was waiting for the app manager to coordinate the install, he followed up and said "don't wait on him, just go ahead and copy the app directory, set all these environment variables..." I pretty much just ignored this. Later that day during a phone conversation I mentioned copying and updating the previous profile wholesale if they were really in that big a hurry (there was no reason to be, but if they wanted to be I at least wanted it to go well). He went ballistic and came vanishingly close to ordering me to just do it his way -- he can't do that because even though he has seniority, he isn't someone I report to, and our mutual boss was on the call, but he clearly wanted to.
It later turned out that there was authentication data that we needed and didn't know, but which was cached in the profile. His solution was "analyze the configuration data to find where the username and password are." Or, I said, I could just copy the profile over and then I don't need to spend hours looking for this data (that we aren't supposed to actually have -- it's a database login provided by the app management team, input directly by them into the app instance and saved in the profile, I presume in an encrypted form).
This same guy once pushed out a broken Windows group policy to our userbase to test it (that's when we found out it was broken). He's a pretty talented guy, and we apparently went to some length to keep him after his student eligibility expired, but at least once a week he recommends something totally braindead like that and I have to either ignore him or explain to him (and often others) why it's really not a good idea to do it his way.
What concerns me more is the widespread reports of private and municipal waste authorities just landfill-dumping the contents of recycling bins. I've heard of places that do this where recycling is mandatory.
I've done that too. I find a lot of weird-looking diagrams help the MEGO factor, which in turn helps with minimizing the length of the disruption before you can shoo them away and get some real work done. Bonus points for diagrams in more than one color of dry-erase.
I'm not saying we shouldn't recycle now. I'm saying that whether we recycle or not, those resources will still be exploitable later, in contrast to the parent to my post who seemed to think the choice is between recycling now and losing it forever.
There is a difference between idiots who can't think further than next week, and people who exercise what is termed "enlightened self-interest" and thus are aware of long-term benefits to actions that seem painful in the short term. For an example of the idiots, look at people with negative-amortization mortgages, or Wall Street analysts who reward companies for treating their employees like replaceable factory machines (Wal-Mart) in ignorance of the real financial benefits that come from treating your employees well (such as, say, Costco, which is poised to eat Wal-Mart's lunch if the WMT execs don't watch out).
The trouble is, you can't have enlightened self-interest if you don't allow people to act on their own behalf. The key is allowing people to act to their own benefit without allowing them to act to the detriment of others.
I see a lot of self-described libertarians running around talking about how environmental regulation is anticapitalist and this and that. To them I say, who gave you the right to smoke up the air (and foul the water) that I breathe (and drink)? If you want to reduce the value of the air or water to everyone else in the world, you better compensate them for it before you do. And I don't mean "well, we make products that they can use..." I mean a choice that they make of their own free will. I mean giving them an option to say "No, I'd rather not breathe tainted air, thanks." If you want the right to be protected from others, you have to give others the right to be protected from you as well. Be glad that instead of having to answer individually to everyone in the dispersal radius of your industrial pollutants, you get away with just dealing with the government from time to time. A true libertarian regime would be much worse for you.
Enlightened self-interest can't exist if you attempt to protect others from themselves, only if you're protecting them from unconsenting harm by others and letting them dispose of themselves how they will.
Resources that we throw away don't just disappear. They're in the landfills and garbage dumps. One day somebody is going to develop a process to take old garbage, separate out valuable compounds, and reuse them. Probably that person will then find out it's not economically feasible for them to do it, due to someone else having started by buying the resource exploitation rights already from the various state and municipal solid-waste authorities, who will then buy the latecomer's R&D work and start the operation going.
It's shale oil all over again. Right now it's not practical to [extract shale oil|refine garbage]. But as the scarcity increases and the price climbs, it becomes more and more economical to develop processes to do these things that were formerly "too expensive".
It's not so important how many dollars it costs to produce ethanol capable of delivering one unit of energy. It's how many energy units it takes. Chemical processes only benefit so much from economy of scale. Currently ethanol takes more energy to produce than it can yield, and there's no reason to believe that's going to change much in the foreseeable future.
At Kinko's was the boss (and co-workers) who decided that since I knew how to do everything, anything they didn't know how or couldn't be bothered to do, they would dump on me. Eventually I started telling them things like "you're number 3 in the queue. It's gonna be awhile." They backed off after awhile when I made it clear that once you're in the queue, you stay in the queue until your turn comes, however long that is. I was valuable enough that they couldn't just fire me (though the next manager tried, and he got his ass handed to him by HR when I gave them a heads-up).
At my current job the main problem was people ambushing me as soon as I walk in the door with every little question they've come up with that morning. I've gotten them trained to where they know if I walk in and go straight from my mailbox to my office, I have something to work on already; if I come into the lobby area where they are after checking my box, they're free to drop whatever on my plate. The new trouble ticket system we just installed helps too, as they can enter a ticket as soon as they think of a question or encounter a problem, instead of feeling frustration until I get there. I'm working on getting them trained to realize that instead of coming down 3 floors to change someone's default e-mail client or whatever, I can do almost anything software-based that needs to be done right from my office (and probably do it better since I have all my reference materials and tools for various things right in front of me, to say nothing of direct access to the servers if something server-based needs to be done).
It's slow work, but we're making progress. Next up will be getting them to plug their own Ethernet cables back in when they've been pulled out from the wall (no, I'm not kidding).
So basically ESRB was completely vulnerable to gaming their particular system. Things have apparently changed and become much more thorough now, but theoretically if you sabotaged your own game so it wouldn't run, you could get them to assign you almost any rating you wanted just by answering their questions the right way. (Obviously getting an M game assigned a rating of E would be pushing your luck, but you might get it down from an M to a T.
Microsoft did out-innovate Netscape. They mat not have been the first on the scene with a browser, but they were certainly the first to produce one that was a pleasure to use (by the standards at the time)...
Were you even around on the Intarweb when IE 3.0 was going head-to-head with NS 3.x?
Netscape was the browser for at least two years (mid-1995 to mid-1997ish). IE was slow, painful to use, and had horrible rendering. IE 3.0 couldn't even render fairly simple tables correctly, which meant web pages that used tables for layout (which was many, many of them) looked like absolute shit in IE but looked OK in almost any other browser. Netscape was so dominant that people occasionally referred to the Web as "the Netscape".
Netscape 4 vs. IE 4 was a different story entirely. Netscape lost their focus and fell victim to the "portal" mania that was happening in 1998. From out here in the real world it looked like they were putting all their resources into the portal silliness, and later, Internet services silliness like being an e-mail provider, and the browser became almost an afterthought. Check out what jwz says in his "farewell Mozilla" gruntle: 1998 was when Netscape finally quit even credibly trying. And what they had at that point was a pigsty of a collection of code that, to yield a clean, functional browser, would (and did) have to be almost completely rewritten.
Microsoft didn't "out-innovate" Netscape as much as Netscape quit innovating completely. Winning a race is easy when the competition isn't running any more.
There's no conspiracy theory so wacky Rense won't give it a favorable writeup.
After that it became tradition that if you committed a really stupid blunder, you had to go claim the sombrero of shame. (It was considered more honorable to claim it oneself than to have it thrust upon you by acclamation at the weekly status meeting.)
My gut tells me that a lot of the "job openings" that require active DoD with poly are tailor-made for existing employees in the same organization who are being groomed for promotion. They already have the clearance and since they're not changing employers it's a lot less hassle to get it blessed by the Powers That Be.
The one I really hate is being lied to by recruiters. Monday morning they tell you about this wonderful opening they have that exactly matches your skill set; Tuesday afternoon you show up for the interview and it's "oh, that opening was filled last week. But let's sit down and talk just in case anything comes up later that you're qualified for." Nine times out of ten I'll bet they make the whole thing up in the first place just to get you in a chair and pick your brain to see where they can shoehorn you in to get a placement bonus.
The purpose of the 10th amendment is to reserve all powers to states not explicitly granted to the federal government. This is exactly why the federal government has no business striking down state anti-sodomy laws. Granted, such laws are asinine and stupid. However, it is up to state legislatures and state supreme courts to change them or strike them based on state constitutions or state-wide referendums.
The Supreme Court would arguably have the power to decide that a right is not reserved to the states either, but to the people only (the Tenth states that unenumerated rights are reserved to the states or to the people generally). In effect this is what was done when various antiregulatory Amendments from the First down were held through Supreme Court decisions to prohibit the states from committing certain acts as well.
The text of the Constitution is entirely silent on the subject of heterosexual sex and homosexual sex. This is not a judgment about homosexuality, it is just a fact. The only "right" to homosexual sex or any sex for that matter was created through interpretations that stretch the text of the Constitution far more than "public use" has been stretched today.
The fact that the Constitution is silent on either, means that the federal government is intended to be powerless to regulate or prohibit either. Compare the text of the Tenth Amendment, with the context that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights were considered unnecessary by many of the framers of the Constution because they considered them implicit in the main body to begin with.
Ultimately, the twisting of the "takings clause" today is nothing compared the the tortured interprations of the Consitution that give rise to the fundamental "rights" to homosexual sodomy and abortion.
I don't know why I bother, but...
Substitute "heterosexual sex" in place of "homosexual sodomy" in that sentence. Your right to have sex IS EXACTLY EQUAL TO a gay person's. PERIOD.
Now go do something productive, like volunteering at a hospital that does AIDS research.
I own everything I create (including my wedding, which I pay for and participate it, and create). The photographer does not 'own' the broadcast of this product (because he has not paid for its rights). I am paying him to document it, but it's not his creation.
It's not his creation, but if you sign a contract that says so, he does in fact own the "broadcast rights".
In the absence of a contract, the photographer could take pictures of the wedding party as they came into public space outside the church, but could not then make commercial use of those images (without seeking permission to do so). On the other hand, neither can you stop him photographing you, nor stop him from making noncommercial use of the photos. (The rules change a bit for "public figures", who have less control over their images. See "paparazzi".)
However, once you sign a contract that explicitly gives the photographer exclusive rights to commercially create and sell reproductions of your image as captured by him, your own right to do so is gone forever, unless and until you get him to give you back those rights , unless your locality has an unprecedented law to the contrary. In the US, at least, you do not have a Constitutional right to be protected from your own bad judgement in signing away your commercial rights (there are certain rights that are not legally recognized as subject to contract law, such as the right to the franchise).
Copyright of a photograph initially vests in the photographer, and has done for years and years and years. Rights to an image of a person initially vest in the person. Before a photo can be commercially copied, both those rights have to align.
1) Take all your keyboards and sort them into two piles: one for all the rubber-dome keyboards, one for the buckling-spring and Alps-keyswitch ones.
2) Take the second pile and put them back where you got them.
3) Take the first pile out in the yard, dump them in a steel drum, douse them with gasoline, and BURN THEM.*
4) Go buy more spring- or Alps-based keyboards to fill any shortfall you now have.
* Standard disclaimers about toxic fumes, flame hazards, etc. apply.
I'm pretty well convinced it's less important which layout you use than how high the quality of your keyboard itself is. After two weeks using my wife's built-in higher-quality rubber-dome QWERTY laptop keyboard while on honeymoon, it's been physically painful going back to typing on the crappy rubber-dome QWERTY desktop keyboards we have at work for the last two days.
Yes, better keyboards will cost you (minimum $25-30, more likely $50, and you can go as high as $100 easily -- I even saw one super-duper-everything keyboard priced at $700), but this is your comfort and health we're talking about, plus they're much more tolerant of spills and other abuse. Spend the money. Invest in a relatively cheap (compared to half a dozen good keyboards, anyway) KVM so you don't have to buy a pricey keyboard for each computer.
If you think about it, Dvorak keyboards ought to make you more prone to RSI, not less... you're still typing the same letters, but now your fingers are moving with less variation to do it, which is practically the standard recipe for RSI. Am I missing something there?
The only people we had who brought in Quark files with any regularity were the "design" students at the local U, most of whom had no business touching it and should have stuck to Word and maybe the occasional foray into Illustrator. Seriously, the things these idiots would perpetrate in the name of "graphic design" made my eyes bleed and my stomach lurch.
Quark itself impressed me as a very powerful program, but with very damaging flaws, like its terrible color management (it would do horrible things to pastel shades a lot of the time), lack of PDF support, and the "quirkiness" involved in saving a 4.11 document from version 5 (we had 4.11/Mac at Kinko's and a lot of people who brought us stuff were using machines with 5).
Quark and its users got to be such a pain that we adopted a completely hands-off policy to it: you're welcome to bring your Quark file in and try to print it yourself, but we will not try to fix it, manipulate it, convert it, or anything else at all. We barely admitted we had it, unless we had to under direct questioning.
I assure you, comScore is not a front for the NSA. Or wasn't as of mid-2001, at least.
I have clicked on two web ads in my entire life on the web (over 10 years).
One was some server company's ad back in the dim days before those Java and flash ads even existed (remember when animated-GIF ads were the most annoying thing ever?) I checked it out, moved on and don't even remember who the company was now.
The other was recently (a couple of months ago). It was a Google text ad for Coffee Fool, and I was impressed enough with their site that I've recommended them to friends as "something to think about trying" (although I myself have yet to buy any of their product -- soon though...) I even bookmarked it so I know I can get back to it easily when I go to buy some of their stuff.
There have been other ads (few, but more than say, a dozen) that motivated my curiosity enough to type the URL into my browser, but I typically refrain from actually clicking on ads to avoid being tracked that way and/or to deny credit to an annoying ad for bringing me to a site that I nevertheless want to visit.
The bottom line is that there is no law or social contract that compels me to retrieve the ads that happen to be linked off a page, just as there is no law or social contract that forbids me from getting up or flipping channels or just sitting with my eyes closed and hands over my ears going "lalalalala!" when an annoying ad comes on TV. Advertisers have as much right to speak as they can buy time for, but they have no right to actually be heard by someone who doesn't want to, although they will try any number of more or less dirty-but-still-legal tricks to make it less annoying to put up with ads than block them out.
Somebody else made the point that "If the ad annoys me I'll make it a point not to buy the product", and I agree with that. Advertisers should consider it an advantage when I can block ads that annoy me, because the less I see their annoying ad, the less I'll bitch about their company. (I guess that's a negative to anyone who still subscribes to the idea that "even bad publicity is good advertising", but apart from rock stars and Paris Hilton, I think that idea is dead.)
I have all the sympathy in the world for sites that are trying to provide services supported by ads. Then again, if no one's clicking on your ads, maybe you should get different ads on your site -- the whole "[violent act] the [object, animal, or person] and win a free [trendy gadget]" ad style should have died about 2 days after the Punch the Monkey ads came out back in what, '99? And if you are getting adequate clickthrough revenue, don't gripe about the people who don't click -- they're a cost of doing business that you should have anticipated.
Think about the case of the "Happy Birthday" song played by Mozart centuries ago. You don't hear it in restaurants much anymore (oh, they have "Happy Birthday" songs but they are not THE "Happy Birthday" song). The reason? Some guy copyrighted it and the Copyright Office was stupid enough to give him the copyright. Even though the Copyright Office's own rules state that anything that pre-existed before the copyright laws went into effect could not be copyrighted!
Cecil Adams begs to disagree with you. (Well. Cecil doesn't beg. Rather the opposite, usually.)