Book piracy was widespread in the 19th century. In particular, American publishers copied popular English works: the works of Charles Dickens, for example, were widely pirated in the United States.
Closer to our own time, Taiwan did not sign the international copyright convention until late in the 1970s. Up to then, Taiwanese publishers routinely ripped off popular books and sold their editions for a fraction of the what the legal editions cost.
The so-called "terrorist market" was an information market, which is modelled after a futures market, not the stock market. The Iowa Electronic Markets, which are run by the University of Iowa, have proved themselves useful both in pooling information about possible future events (e.g., who will elected president) and in attracting ideas about possible outcomes. Information markets clearly are a good idea - though it makes sense for something like this to be run by a university rather than the Pentagon.
If you're looking for a general introduction to a scientific subject, you might want to look up the old Time-Life "Science Library" volumes that were published in the 1960s. They're long out of print, but it's possible to find them in used-book stores or on web sites like alibris.com. I found that they present general concepts well, both through a clearly written text and through picturial essays at the end of each chapter.
I especially recommend the volume entitled Mathematics as a general introduction to that topic.
Oh, my - I know exactly where the inquirer is coming from. I have a full-time job, a family (five children), and I write Linux books I laughingly call my "spare time". I'm also a classic procrastinator: it's very difficult for me to get started. After years of struggling with this situation, I've found the following strategies are useful:
Less Is More: set aside less time to get the work done. I realize this sounds counterintuitive, but I've found that if I have budgeted only one hour to work, I sit right down and work straight through and get a lot done. If I budget four hours, inevitably I'll blow three of them web surfing or some other such nonsensen.
Organize Well: Break your work down into chunks each of which you can manage in a single session. This will require you to spend more time outlining and organizing than you may like, but in the long run that will actually save you time.
Budget Off Days: Purposely budget days off into your schedule. This will let you relax without feeling guilty; and you'll return to your work refreshed and ready to go.
Just Write One Sentence: If I'm feeling especially glum about the work, I'll make a deal with myself - just write one sentence. That small amount gets me going; and of course, when the sentence is written, I'm off and running.
This is a problem you'll be facing all your life; but good planning will help you to be highly productive. Good luck!
My wife and I have been married 25 years. For most of that time, we've not had a TV. Having gone 25 years without watching TV, I am forcibly struck when I see TV today: not by the programs themselves, but by the commercials. The skill with which they are made, and the forthrightness with which they present their messages of consumption, status, and sex, amaze me.
We in American and Europe have had decades to become inoculated to television, as the crude technology and sanitized programming of TV's early days developed into the high technology and low art seen today. I can imagine, however, that for someone living in an insular society like Bhutan's, flipping on a set and seeing what's broadcast now would be like getting hit on the head with a brick.
No doubt there are many factors in Bhutan's social change, but I'm sure that television is an important one.
As a number of people on this thread have pointed out, hydrogen is not a way to energy: it's a to store and distribute energy. The energy being stored could be generated by fission, or by wind or solar, geothermal, or any combination of the above.
The administration's point is that the sooner we stop burning fossil carbon as our principal power source, the better off we'll be. Setting aside the environmental concerns, which are not slight, there are serious geopolitical reasons for getting away from fossil carbon: such as the fact that the economy of the United States - and indeed of the world - is enthralled to the increasingly corrupt, increasingly fragile monarchy of Saudi Arabia. A political collapse of that government could deprive the world of a significant source of energy for an extended period of time, with catastrophic results.
While hydrogen is by no means ideal, it's the best alternative that we have now to the fossil-carbon economy, and it does allow us to develop cleaner, more efficient means of manufacturing energy over time. I hope the Left will not let its detestation of Bush blind itself to the fact that this proposal is interesting and creative, and holds promise to lead the world economy out of the energy dilemma that it now is in.
The answer is yes, in my experience hackers tend to be the sort of people who do things like brew beer or garden or make their own furniture or play their own music.
Why? Because hackers see themselves as artisans, not consumers.
Artisanship is, in my experience, a strong influence in the makeup of many hackers. The best ones remind me of my father, who was a master calligrapher: in their love of making beautiful things, and in the scrupulousness with which they treat their "mystery". I dare say that hacking is the last bastion of artisanship left in our consumption-oriented McSociety.
The Felligi-Sunter algorithm, which was published in 1969, lets a researcher compute the probability that two sets of demographic data describe the same individual. By weighting individual demographic items properly (for example, by giving more weight to a match on last name if the sex is male rather than female, and giving more weight to a match on an uncommon last name than to a common one), it's possible to join records from different databases - even databases whose records vary quite a bit - with an extremely high level of accuracy.
I know this, because my previous employer's business was doing just that. Most of the uses of this technology are benign - for example, finding multiple instances of the same individual in a given hospital's records, so that the hospital's medical records about that individual are not fragmented. However, it would not shock me to learn that the same technology is being used to join records from disparate databases in order to profile individuals for not-so-benign purposes, such as this article describes.
The good news is that the government is on the trailing edge of information technology. If the feds ever wanted to build the Big Brother Database, they could do it simply by joining the records held by the FBI with those held by the IRS; hopefully, the "bureaucratic waste and inefficiency" that politicians love to denounce will delay the building of the BBD for some time to come.
Atkins cuts out more than just carbs: it also cuts out caffeine and restricts alcohol. Like many people in our profession, I'm powerfully addicted to caffeine; but I've found that restricting it - by drinking water, say, instead of coffee or Coke - has helped me a lot, by helping to curtail my craving for junk food. After all, what's coffee without a sweet roll? Or Coke without chips?
My point is that a sane diet involves looking at everything you ingest, not just food.
For dealing with very old computers, I put together a survival kit that fits onto two floppies. Disk 1 is MS-DOS v. 4.07 - useful for booting DOS and old Windows PCs from the floppy drive, just to poke around and see what's going on. The second disk holds a C compiler, MS-Link, and associated tools - MicroEMACS, grep, wc, sort, etc. - all drawn from the old Mark Williams "Let's C" package (except for MS-Link, of course).
With these tools, I can usually get the machine up and running; MicroEMACS lets me edit autoexec.bat and associated scripts. Should I need to write and compile a simple program, the compiler is invaluable.
I've found these tools to be useful on machines up through Win-95. They don't help much with machines of more recent vintage.
Anecdotal evidence drawn from historical documents strongly suggests that the Middle Ages were warmer than our times. After all, Norse settlers grew wheat in Greenland - and just doing that today. Wine grapes were grown in England - ditto. And it's clear that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were much colder - as shown by all those Georgian-era paintings depicting the Thames frozen solid.
It's clear that the climate changes, and we don't really know why. There are lots of good reasons why we should develop replaceable energy sources and stop burning fossil carbon as our principal energy source - not the least of which is that the fossil carbon is going to run out some day. But global warming caused primarily by human interference? Unproved, perhaps unprovable.
If you look around the world, you'll see houses of all varieties and climates that have stood for centuries. For example, the Norwegian stave churches are made of wood and endure a brutal climate, yet have survived nearly a thousand years. Likewise, houses in and around York, in England have survived despite being build of wood and plaster. Here in Chicago, a place with a terrible climate, wooden structures have survived 150 years or more. Stone, of course, is more enduring than wood, and most of the long-lived buildings are made of stone rather than wood; yet some wooden buildings have survived while stone structures have fallen into ruin.
As long as good-quality materials are used and you pay attention to foundations and drainage, nearly any material will last a long time *as long as it is maintained*.
So, if you want your home to last a thousand years, build it well, of whatever material you prefer; but the most important factor is making sure that someone will maintain it after you're gone. Build it beautifully, so it will be treasured; and make it part of a large family or community - preferably religious, since religious communities have long memories. You might also want to arrange for some historical event to occur within your home (say, get yourself elected president); but that's a little tougher to arrange.
The SR-71 certainly is a design that's stood the test of time. But it's a relative newcomer compared with the granddaddy of all combat aircraft, the B-52. It first flew in the 1950s, and is still going strong.
I too had a rotary phone in my kitchen until quite recently. It was installed when we moved into the house in 1982, and we never had it removed: if it ain't broke, etc. The thing was a classic Western Electric model, built like a tank, indestructible.
A very good phone.
Then one day I checked my phone bill, and realized that with what I had paid over the years to lease the thing, I could have bought a dozen phones at Radio Shack. The classic, reliable rotary phone went back to Ameritech that same day!
Humanity needs to get off this planet, and a permanent mission on the Moon will be a good first step. If it does nothing more than mine fuel and put it into lunar orbit for use by other missions, it will have paid for itself.
I'm old enough to remember the Apollo missions; how vividly I recall that day in July 1969, when the words "Tranquility Base here: the 'Eagle' has landed." came crackling over my transistor radio. Years later, when I took my own children to see "Apollo 13", I tried to explain to them what it was like back then, when we used to fly to the Moon. They asked me why we were going any more, and I didn't have a good answer. Still don't.
So, three cheers for the Chinese and the Euros, and God speed to them.
The article's point, IMHO, is that change for change's sake is not good. Sometimes change is clearly the right thing to do - for example, replacing job-control language with a modern operating system is (usually) the right thing to do, as is replacing assembly language with a high-level language for writing applications. The gains in reliability and maintainability make the effort worthwhile.
However, change just for the sake of change is often - usually? - leads to a degredation of reliability and maintainability, rather than the other way around. Companies that pursue a will'o'the'wisp often rush into a bog.
The point is, it's not too much to ask managers to perform some basic cost-benefit analyses before they sign onto the latest fad.
Before Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the Gestapo sent letters to top Soviet generals, each saying, basically, "Thanks for the secret data, bud - the money's been deposited in your Swiss account." Stalin being Stalin, all the letters were read, and a number of the most experienced Soviet general shot - thus making the Nazi invasion that much easier.
It wouldn't shock me if Langley were trying something of the same sort - bombarding the top Iraqi generals with suggestive messages, in the hope that Saddam will have them bumped off.
Is it possible to lead a happy, successful life after rejection by a prestigious university? Of course. I dare say most of the people reading this thread would regard themselves as reasonably successful and happy; yet only a few have ever attended a "prestigious" university. Only a snob would even ask the question.
If your goal is to acquire a decent education, there are many places you can do that: excellent state universities, small liberal-arts colleges, even community colleges. All you need is a good teacher and a willingness to work.
Attending a prestigious school is good for one thing: networking. By going to Ivy-Covered University, you'll meet people from "good" families whose uncles and cousins hold powerful positions in government and the corporate world - the people who give their kids names like "Strobe" and "Gray". It's your ticket into the American aristocracy.
If your goal is to ride the gravy train, then claw your way into a prestigious university. If your goal is get an education, then find the school that you can afford whose faculty has the best reputation for teaching, and go there. If your goal is to learn about life and the world, then go to work, or enlist in the military - you'll learn in a month than any prestigious university could show you in a lifetime.
I ordered my copy of "Beowulf and the Critics" some weeks ago through Amazon, and am about half-way through it. The book consists of two long essays by Tolkien on Beowulf and why critics to date (1935) had misinterpreted it. The bulk of the book consists of lengthy notes by its editor, Michael Drout, which explain all of Tolkien's references.
This is not a book for casual LOTR fans. However, anyone with an interest in a great writer's thoughts on great writing should have a look at it.
Tolkien distilled his thoughts on Beowulf into a magnificent essay, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". You can read the essay in an evening, but its thoughts on Beowulf and on literature will stay with you for a lifetime. The essay has been reprinted in "An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism", edited by Lewis Nicholson, which is available on Amazon.com
Finally, for more information on "Beowulf and the Critics" and on the Tolkien translations of Beowulf (he made two of them, one in prose and the other in alliterative verse), see:
I hoarded a few vacation days so I could take all of Christmas week off and spend it with the family.
We have a pretty large family - five kids. One daughter is married and visiting her in-laws in Puerto Rico; and our oldest son is stationed in Okinawa with the Marines; but the other three kids, my wife, and I have spent the week just doing fun stuff.
We live in Chicago, so there's a lot to do: the aquarium, the museum of natural history, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Art Institute; and of course, a viewing of "The Two Towers". It snowed on Christmas Eve, so I took the youngest kid sledding on what passes for a hill in this part of the world. And we've eaten lots of foods that taste great, and that I'll be dieting off months from now.
The previous posting by the man whose daughter was abducted just reminds me yet again how precious these days are, and how important it is to use them well.
You left out the transistor. And the telephone. And the liquid-fueled,staged rocket. The reaper.
Many technologies were invented elsewhere, but brought to fruition here. For example, mass production, which was brought to fruition by Eli Whitney and Henry Ford. You mention packet switching; the IP protocol, which gave us the ability to build a totally decentralized, global network, was a key piece of the Internet puzzle. And the von Neumann machine, invented for the Manhattan Project, was the fruition of many earlier designs.
And let's not forget Tang, Teflon, and Silly Putty!
Slashdot Mirror
Closer to our own time, Taiwan did not sign the international copyright convention until late in the 1970s. Up to then, Taiwanese publishers routinely ripped off popular books and sold their editions for a fraction of the what the legal editions cost.
My point is that book piracy is nothing new.
Regards ...
I especially recommend the volume entitled Mathematics as a general introduction to that topic.
This is a problem you'll be facing all your life; but good planning will help you to be highly productive. Good luck!
We in American and Europe have had decades to become inoculated to television, as the crude technology and sanitized programming of TV's early days developed into the high technology and low art seen today. I can imagine, however, that for someone living in an insular society like Bhutan's, flipping on a set and seeing what's broadcast now would be like getting hit on the head with a brick.
No doubt there are many factors in Bhutan's social change, but I'm sure that television is an important one.
The administration's point is that the sooner we stop burning fossil carbon as our principal power source, the better off we'll be. Setting aside the environmental concerns, which are not slight, there are serious geopolitical reasons for getting away from fossil carbon: such as the fact that the economy of the United States - and indeed of the world - is enthralled to the increasingly corrupt, increasingly fragile monarchy of Saudi Arabia. A political collapse of that government could deprive the world of a significant source of energy for an extended period of time, with catastrophic results.
While hydrogen is by no means ideal, it's the best alternative that we have now to the fossil-carbon economy, and it does allow us to develop cleaner, more efficient means of manufacturing energy over time. I hope the Left will not let its detestation of Bush blind itself to the fact that this proposal is interesting and creative, and holds promise to lead the world economy out of the energy dilemma that it now is in.
Why? Because hackers see themselves as artisans, not consumers.
Artisanship is, in my experience, a strong influence in the makeup of many hackers. The best ones remind me of my father, who was a master calligrapher: in their love of making beautiful things, and in the scrupulousness with which they treat their "mystery". I dare say that hacking is the last bastion of artisanship left in our consumption-oriented McSociety.
I know this, because my previous employer's business was doing just that. Most of the uses of this technology are benign - for example, finding multiple instances of the same individual in a given hospital's records, so that the hospital's medical records about that individual are not fragmented. However, it would not shock me to learn that the same technology is being used to join records from disparate databases in order to profile individuals for not-so-benign purposes, such as this article describes.
The good news is that the government is on the trailing edge of information technology. If the feds ever wanted to build the Big Brother Database, they could do it simply by joining the records held by the FBI with those held by the IRS; hopefully, the "bureaucratic waste and inefficiency" that politicians love to denounce will delay the building of the BBD for some time to come.
My point is that a sane diet involves looking at everything you ingest, not just food.
With these tools, I can usually get the machine up and running; MicroEMACS lets me edit autoexec.bat and associated scripts. Should I need to write and compile a simple program, the compiler is invaluable.
I've found these tools to be useful on machines up through Win-95. They don't help much with machines of more recent vintage.
It's clear that the climate changes, and we don't really know why. There are lots of good reasons why we should develop replaceable energy sources and stop burning fossil carbon as our principal energy source - not the least of which is that the fossil carbon is going to run out some day. But global warming caused primarily by human interference? Unproved, perhaps unprovable.
Well, it's only appropriate that Jupiter have such a harem of consorts. Any idea what they'll be named?
If you look around the world, you'll see houses of all varieties and climates that have stood for centuries. For example, the Norwegian stave churches are made of wood and endure a brutal climate, yet have survived nearly a thousand years. Likewise, houses in and around York, in England have survived despite being build of wood and plaster. Here in Chicago, a place with a terrible climate, wooden structures have survived 150 years or more. Stone, of course, is more enduring than wood, and most of the long-lived buildings are made of stone rather than wood; yet some wooden buildings have survived while stone structures have fallen into ruin.
As long as good-quality materials are used and you pay attention to foundations and drainage, nearly any material will last a long time *as long as it is maintained*.
So, if you want your home to last a thousand years, build it well, of whatever material you prefer; but the most important factor is making sure that someone will maintain it after you're gone. Build it beautifully, so it will be treasured; and make it part of a large family or community - preferably religious, since religious communities have long memories. You might also want to arrange for some historical event to occur within your home (say, get yourself elected president); but that's a little tougher to arrange.
The SR-71 certainly is a design that's stood the test of time. But it's a relative newcomer compared with the granddaddy of all combat aircraft, the B-52. It first flew in the 1950s, and is still going strong.
Then one day I checked my phone bill, and realized that with what I had paid over the years to lease the thing, I could have bought a dozen phones at Radio Shack. The classic, reliable rotary phone went back to Ameritech that same day!
Humanity needs to get off this planet, and a permanent mission on the Moon will be a good first step. If it does nothing more than mine fuel and put it into lunar orbit for use by other missions, it will have paid for itself.
I'm old enough to remember the Apollo missions; how vividly I recall that day in July 1969, when the words "Tranquility Base here: the 'Eagle' has landed." came crackling over my transistor radio. Years later, when I took my own children to see "Apollo 13", I tried to explain to them what it was like back then, when we used to fly to the Moon. They asked me why we were going any more, and I didn't have a good answer. Still don't.
So, three cheers for the Chinese and the Euros, and God speed to them.
The article's point, IMHO, is that change for change's sake is not good. Sometimes change is clearly the right thing to do - for example, replacing job-control language with a modern operating system is (usually) the right thing to do, as is replacing assembly language with a high-level language for writing applications. The gains in reliability and maintainability make the effort worthwhile. However, change just for the sake of change is often - usually? - leads to a degredation of reliability and maintainability, rather than the other way around. Companies that pursue a will'o'the'wisp often rush into a bog. The point is, it's not too much to ask managers to perform some basic cost-benefit analyses before they sign onto the latest fad.
Sure they will. If they ever see the light of day. (Can you spell "illegal monopoly"?)
I was 12 in 1964. My advice? "There's this eight-year-old kid in Seattle named Gates. Find him. Become his friend. He will be very, very good to you."
It wouldn't shock me if Langley were trying something of the same sort - bombarding the top Iraqi generals with suggestive messages, in the hope that Saddam will have them bumped off.
If your goal is to acquire a decent education, there are many places you can do that: excellent state universities, small liberal-arts colleges, even community colleges. All you need is a good teacher and a willingness to work.
Attending a prestigious school is good for one thing: networking. By going to Ivy-Covered University, you'll meet people from "good" families whose uncles and cousins hold powerful positions in government and the corporate world - the people who give their kids names like "Strobe" and "Gray". It's your ticket into the American aristocracy.
If your goal is to ride the gravy train, then claw your way into a prestigious university. If your goal is get an education, then find the school that you can afford whose faculty has the best reputation for teaching, and go there. If your goal is to learn about life and the world, then go to work, or enlist in the military - you'll learn in a month than any prestigious university could show you in a lifetime.
This is not a book for casual LOTR fans. However, anyone with an interest in a great writer's thoughts on great writing should have a look at it.
Tolkien distilled his thoughts on Beowulf into a magnificent essay, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". You can read the essay in an evening, but its thoughts on Beowulf and on literature will stay with you for a lifetime. The essay has been reprinted in "An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism", edited by Lewis Nicholson, which is available on Amazon.com
Finally, for more information on "Beowulf and the Critics" and on the Tolkien translations of Beowulf (he made two of them, one in prose and the other in alliterative verse), see:
http://www.michaeldrout.com
We have a pretty large family - five kids. One daughter is married and visiting her in-laws in Puerto Rico; and our oldest son is stationed in Okinawa with the Marines; but the other three kids, my wife, and I have spent the week just doing fun stuff.
We live in Chicago, so there's a lot to do: the aquarium, the museum of natural history, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Art Institute; and of course, a viewing of "The Two Towers". It snowed on Christmas Eve, so I took the youngest kid sledding on what passes for a hill in this part of the world. And we've eaten lots of foods that taste great, and that I'll be dieting off months from now.
The previous posting by the man whose daughter was abducted just reminds me yet again how precious these days are, and how important it is to use them well.
Ben Stein was a speechwriter for Nixon. The economic advisor was his father, Herbert Stein.
You left out the transistor. And the telephone. And the liquid-fueled,staged rocket. The reaper. Many technologies were invented elsewhere, but brought to fruition here. For example, mass production, which was brought to fruition by Eli Whitney and Henry Ford. You mention packet switching; the IP protocol, which gave us the ability to build a totally decentralized, global network, was a key piece of the Internet puzzle. And the von Neumann machine, invented for the Manhattan Project, was the fruition of many earlier designs. And let's not forget Tang, Teflon, and Silly Putty!