Here's an excerpt from the rought draft of the declaration of indepencence which Mr. Jefferson wrote (about King George III)...
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
First off, if you're a man (living in the US) aged 17-45 you already happen to be a member of the militia.
I thought a lot of 'rights' in the US where infered from the constitutaional articles.
The constitution is merely a listing of what limited powers the government posesses. Rights are one of those self evident things that are endowed by the Creator. In addition to listing the only things that the government was allowed to do, the founders also added the ninth and tenth amendments, just to clarify what that meant.
Amendment IX:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
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Like the right to privacy being not a direct right granted in the constitution, but something following from the wording of an article, an interpretation of the 'will' (if you will:)) of the founding fathers.
People like to debate this right-to-privacy thing, but even if you ignore the ninth amendment, there is always the fourth...
Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
And of course it is impossible to know the "will" or "intent" of the founders. So we have to rely on what they actually agreed upon and wrote down.
Question for next time
on
Rob Pike Responds
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Does the kernel matter any more? I don't think it does. They're all the same at some level. I don't care nearly as much as I used to about the what the kernel does; it's so easy to emulate your way back to a familiar state.
I wonder what his thoughts are on something like the TUNES Project as an OS alternative.
So basically, we're talking about a computerized version of the TV show Survivor? That could be very interesting. I'm betting a good strategy for that game is to create a small alliance which as a unit plays tit-for-tat against the others.
If the US government started massive spending on the "Dig a Big Hole In the Ground" project, PCGDP would rise but nobody would say the US was being more productive.
I think they're finally nearing completion on that project.
It was in December 1947 that John Bardeen and Walter Brattain working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, USA in a research team headed by William Shockley, demonstrated the first transistor, a semiconductor device based on germanium. However, the German scientist Julius E. Lilienfeld from New York had patented the first field-effect transistor in 1926. It was a patent on a 'Method and apparatus for controlling electric currents'...
Since I lived there for six years, I find it odd for another reason. Portland is cloud covered for most of the year (especially when you need it most, in the winter). Probably not the most econimical location for an expensive solar panels installation.
I'll suggest here that proper tools are an important way to prevent bugs and make auditing (reasoning about) software easier. And C is probably not a proper tool for creating secure software. Oh sure, if you're a super human coder and stick to a rigorously defined coding standard and have a team of other super human coders auditing the code with a fine tooth comb, you can produce C programs with fewer bugs than normal. But why not let the machines do the work for us? Try a language like O'Caml, or Haskell, you might like it! Besides having fewer lines of code to audit, you'll pretty much eliminate buffer overflows, fence post errors, interger overflows, etc.
I'd love to be in charge of a popular project and embed something into the code that isn't a trojan or hack but a simple sentence or two. Something like "Congratulations - you've actually audited this code. Please email me@address for your $50 reward (To the first person only)".
Your money would probably be better spent on bug bounties like Knuth does.
It always seemed to me that a thrown ball, disregarding friction from the air, should describe an elliptic section corresponding to its orbit around the Earth's center of gravity, not the parabola that so often got mentioned.
The parabola arises from a simplifying assumtion that the gravity producing body is infinite in all directions (which would result in a uniform gravitational field everywhere). Stated another way, assume the highest point the projectile reaches is small compared to the radius of the earth. Kind of like the assumption that accelleration due to gravity for earth is 9.8m/s^2 (which is true as long as you are sufficiently close to the surface). Take a baseball (mass=m1) and the earth (mass=m2). The magnitude of the force on the baseball is...
F=G*m1*m2/r^2 where G=universal gravitational constant (6.67E-11 Nm) r=distance between center of masses of m1 and m2 (radius of earth is ~6400km)
The accelleration of m1 due to m2 is...
F=m*a m1*a=G*m1*m2/r^2 a=G*m2/r^2
So if you throw the baseball 10 meters straight up, the gravitational field at the top of the arc will be about 3 ten thousandths of a percent less [compare (6400000)^2 with (6400000+10)^2]. That's a small error, so usually we ignore it.
You might also be interested to know that a parabola is merely a degenerate ellipse with one of the foci at infinity. See also about conic sections.
In the modern theory of growth, monopoly plays a crucial role as both a cause and an effect of innovation. Innovative firms naturally gain monopoly power for some period of time, and it is argued without the prospect of monopoly power in the form of "intellectual property" would have insufficient incentive to innovate. In fact intellectual monopoly is costly, dangerous, and neither needed for, nor a necessary consequence of, innovation. In particular, intellectual property may hurt more than help innovation and growth, and as a practical matter, is more likely to hurt. To the extent that intellectual property is helpful, as the economy grows or as trade expands through agreements such as the WTO, the length of protection should be reduced.
On the one hand, having schools churn out mindless automatons for industry is a horrible waste of human potential. On the other hand, not all alternatives are appealing.
I've been wondering the same thing. It seems a little bit strange that we have to rely on a commercial entity to do web searching. Why couldn't we have a distributed peer-to-peer search engine thingy? Every time I wanted to do a search, I'd first have to help perform someone elses search. We'd also need to have some authentication like the PGP web of trust to be sure that Widgets-R-Us wasn't out there spoofing search results. Are there any technical/practical reasons why this couldn't be implemented in the future?
Here's a direct quote from Section 8 of my copy of the Constitution sitting on my desk...
The Congress shall have Power...
...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
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Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit. But just for the record, I think smoking is a vile nasty habbit.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26494 4
Anyone know if the Zalewski bugs (254944 et al ) are slated to be fixed before the 1.0 release?
So basically, we're talking about a computerized version of the TV show Survivor? That could be very interesting. I'm betting a good strategy for that game is to create a small alliance which as a unit plays tit-for-tat against the others.
Check out the operating system project written in haskell.
Why not link to the official plan9 site?
What operating system to you use the most for your personal and/or work-related needs?
Since I lived there for six years, I find it odd for another reason. Portland is cloud covered for most of the year (especially when you need it most, in the winter). Probably not the most econimical location for an expensive solar panels installation.
I'll suggest here that proper tools are an important way to prevent bugs and make auditing (reasoning about) software easier. And C is probably not a proper tool for creating secure software. Oh sure, if you're a super human coder and stick to a rigorously defined coding standard and have a team of other super human coders auditing the code with a fine tooth comb, you can produce C programs with fewer bugs than normal. But why not let the machines do the work for us? Try a language like O'Caml, or Haskell, you might like it! Besides having fewer lines of code to audit, you'll pretty much eliminate buffer overflows, fence post errors, interger overflows, etc.
Isn't there some kind of universal law involved here? If you're writing code as fast as you can type, your language is overly verbose.
On the one hand, having schools churn out mindless automatons for industry is a horrible waste of human potential. On the other hand, not all alternatives are appealing.
I've been wondering the same thing. It seems a little bit strange that we have to rely on a commercial entity to do web searching. Why couldn't we have a distributed peer-to-peer search engine thingy? Every time I wanted to do a search, I'd first have to help perform someone elses search. We'd also need to have some authentication like the PGP web of trust to be sure that Widgets-R-Us wasn't out there spoofing search results. Are there any technical/practical reasons why this couldn't be implemented in the future?
I'll completely agree if you make sure that I get a compiler error when I try to do x*M instead of M*x (i.e. matrix multiplication isn't commutative).