FDR packed the supreme court and installed himself for an unprecedented 3rd time.
Strange argument. FDR was duly elected to his 3rd and 4th terms by the people, just like every other president. That can hardly be called installing himself. And any reasonable supreme court would have allowed it. The 22nd amendment wasn't ratified until 1951, almost 6 years after FDR died.
Ada may be out of fashion (was it ever in fashion?), but it certainly isn't outdated if you consider Java not to be outdated. I believe Ada was never widely accepted because it was too far ahead of its time.
Having been recently assigned to a project that uses Java 1.5, I had to review the differences since 1.1, which was the last version I had programmed professionally in. I was delighted to find that almost all of the new "cutting edge" features in Java 1.5 are similar to "outdated" Ada features I have used and loved for over a decade.
C is an outdated language even though it is in wide use. Ada is not outdated in spite of its disuse. Don't confuse popularity with ability.
How does one sign up to donate the human brain cells? I only use 10% of mine at a time anyway. Would I be able to telepathically communicate with the mice? Why do the articles never answer the important questions?
It wasn't a strawman argument. He was trying to clarify the boundaries of a rather broad statement you made, by showing part of your claim to be false. A strawman argument requires that he take it one step further and state that your entire claim is false. I don't think he was even implying that free speech never trumps a contract.
Both of you were off the point anyway. I don't believe any reasonable person would find the clause in question to wrongly impinge on a student's freedom of speech, as it mainly covers harrassment. The problem is the school administrators' overly broad interpretation of the scope and definition of the clause, and the refusal to consider evidence which showed that. It's hard to prove harrassment if the alleged victim is not named and doesn't know they are being harrassed. If the student and the school end up disagreeing on the point, then the student didn't sign what he thought he signed and that should invalidate the contract, in my non-lawyer opinion.
I hope it turns out well for the student. I think I would transfer in that situation and sue for the extra costs and a semester's worth of lost wages due to the graduation delay. I'm just laughing about the professor who was so horrible that he immediately assumed the anonymous reference in the blog referred to him. It seems like there's at least one teacher in every school that is so anti-student that it makes you wonder why they chose teaching as a profession in the first place.
I admit to being way out of the loop on Windows, but it was my understanding that Windows didn't have or require kernel support for DRM technology in current wide use.
The mainstream Linux kernel has had a driver for infineon trusted platform modules since 2.6.12. I didn't even know any motherboards had shipped with those chips (have any?). User libraries and kernel patches were available well before 2.6.12. Linux has supported kernel-level encryption for ages, and is also on the forefront of technologies like mandatory access control. Not to mention how easy it would be to write a kernel module to implement one's own preferred flavor of DRM.
In short, Linux is an excellent operating system to implement DRM on. Low user interest and even lower vendor interest are the main problems, not the kernel.
That being said, I think that all DRM is inherently flawed without some serious hardware support, and that it will probably always be crackable on a general purpose computer with any operating system, simply due to the fact that the unencrypted data must be available on the machine at some point. I concur with your 3 day estimate.
It isn't being bitter that keeps me from objectively viewing new Microsoft products. It's the fact that I haven't used any in the last 5 years. It's hard to be bitter about something that doesn't affect me. Of course, I don't go around making claims about Microsoft products, either.
I think you supported the grandparent's point very well. "I didn't know it was moving" is as stupid an excuse for hurting someone with a car as "I didn't know it was loaded" is for hurting someone with a firearm. The first thing I always do when picking up a firearm and the last thing I do before storing it is to ensure it is not loaded. And I always treat it as if it is loaded even when I know for certain that it is not. That last rule is as basic as keeping to your side of the road in a car. I can't remember ever not knowing it. And putting quotes around "accidentally" implies that you don't believe the shootings are really accidents, meaning it is the fault of the shooter and not the gun.
Many lives of police officers and the military depend on safe and reliable operation of their firearms. Consequently, they are manufactured to high standards of safety. You can drop a modern handgun with a round chambered and the hammer cocked and it is still highly unlikely to discharge. There are approximately equal numbers of handguns and motor vehicles in the United States. Even with the intrinsically dangerous nature of firearms, there are still about 30 times more deaths from car accidents than firearm accidents. I doubt any of those accidents could be attributable to manufacturing defects.
I guess the grandparent's point with the drunk driver analogy is that there is a big difference between an unsafe product and an unsafe user. Nearly every single one of the millions of gun owners go their entire lifetime without a single accident, fatal or non-fatal, by following basic safety rules. How many drivers can say the same thing? I appreciate that you have a basic disagreement with the benefit of firearms in general, but the manufacturers are not to blame.
You say that gun owners have no regard for the safety of others or their own increased liability. On the contrary, I would say that gun owners have more regard for this than the gun opponents who want to blame manufacturers or the government. Gun manufacturers go to great lengths to make sure my guns are safe and reliable, and to provide easy means to secure them from children. If someone gets hurt by one of my guns in my house, then it is completely my fault and I should be held fully responsible for the consequences of my negligence. I hold households that my daughter regularly visits to the same high standards that I hold myself. To expect the government or gun manufacturers to keep my daughter safe from gun accidents is irresponsible and ineffective.
I don't know. I still read slashdot, even though I usually feel like the only conservative here. Roblimo has an excellent point about the importance of the moderation system. It's the main reason why I continue to visit, while avoiding more conservative blogs that lack decent moderation. I have no problem with people who disagree with me as long as they do so in an intelligent manner. Additionally, mudslinging and out of context arguments bother me even if I agree with the intent of the message.
That's why I read at +3. All the "Bush sucks" comments disappear, but if someone has a legitimate and thought provoking point opposing one of Bush's specific policies, I still see it and welcome it. I also avoid reading comments when the article topic is particularly sensitive for me, and have learned that refuting someone's opinion is never worth the trouble, but correcting logical fallacies or factual inconsistencies with supporting evidence can put the debate on a more intelligent and interesting level.
Now, if only there was a moderation system for TV news segments and political ads. -1 mudslinging, +1 balanced, -1 biased, +1 educational, -1 avoids the issue, etc. That would be something worth paying for.
Actually, the main criticism about postwar Iraq is its absence, since fighting is still going on.
What worries me is that the current attitude toward Iraq is a lot more like post-WWI attitudes about Germany than post-WWII. Today, people are war weary and want to avoid as much further interference in the middle east as possible. This is the same attitude that led to the highly popular, but ultimately costly and ineffective, appeasement policies toward Hitler.
Saddam Hussein is not the Hitler of our generation, although he might have been. Our Hitler will be some terrorist or dictator in the near future that will build up weapons of mass destruction unhindered because we don't want another Iraq war.
Over thirty years of Supreme Court decisions disagree with you. Unconstitutional parts of the original act were challenged in court and removed a long time ago. Search for a party of "FEC" at findlaw.com and you'll find a myriad of reasons why campaign finance reform does not violate the constitution.
Do you honestly think that congress would voluntarily restrict their own re-election campaigns without a really good reason? Since I write my elected representatives several times a year, I for one am happy that they now have much less financial incentive to value the opinion of a wealthy person over mine. I actually convinced my congressman once to cosponsor a bill that was introduced by the other party, something I'm not sure a middle-class engineer would have enough influence to accomplish before campaign finance reforms. I consider that to be an increase in the power of my individual free speech, not an abridgement. I also appreciate that they can spend less time fundraising and more time working on the country's problems. But that's just me, I guess.
Mod parent down. Top secret FEC records indicate he only has enough riches and power to qualify for a -1 moderation. +2 is too many slashdot readers for his freedom of speech quota.
If you're going for high standards of reliability like DO-178B certification, then the guidelines are usually to statically allocate as much as possible, use malloc if unavoidable, but never free the memory. This goes contrary to everything they drill into you in college, but it makes the maximum memory usage easily measurable and predictable and also makes the execution time of malloc very consistent. And trust me, you find memory leaks fast.
Yes, it is possible to calculate your memory needs using dynamic allocation and deallocation, but it is a lot harder to prove and a lot easier to make a mistake. If you really can reliably put an upper bound on the amount of memory your app uses, then there is usually no need for dynamic allocation in the first place. If you don't care about predicting your memory usage or malloc execution time, then why are you even asking the question? Just go with whatever is easier. However, consider that some extra effort now will pay off in the long run.
You have to let go of your assumptions from the non-embedded world. The natural instinct is to save as much memory as possible, since your memory is so limited. Your undergrad algorithms class taught you that dynamic allocation is the way to have the lowest possible memory usage at any given time. However, in an embedded application, unallocated memory is just as wasted as extra memory allocated in a static buffer, but in the latter you always know it is available as soon as you need it.
I take it you hated your high school lit class. We don't study the classics because they are old. We study them because they are good. I read about as many modern books as classics, but most of my favorites are in the classics. It sounds trite, but they have withstood the test of time, and for good reason. All the best modern writers started out as good readers, and are therefore heavily influenced by previous writers. For example, Charles Dickens is one of my favorite authors, and I can almost always tell if a modern writer reads a lot of Dickens (confirmed by looking up an interview with the author).
Very little literature depends on cultural knowledge to tell the story well. On the contrary, not being familiar with the environment is usually the big selling point. Science fiction and fantasy are the obvious examples, but even the most popular TV shows are all about cultures we are around but not a direct part of, like doctors, lawyers, detectives, and politicians. My wife immensely enjoys the cultural differences in Jane Austen novels even though she knows nothing about the history. The only thing she doesn't get is the humor. The stories themselves could be set in any time. In fact, it seems like a modern movie remake of "Pride and Prejudice" comes out about once a year.
Memorization of plots and quotes is not fun and is one of the reasons why I hated school even though I love learning. However, if it means that the next time I will be able to understand and enjoy the work more easily, I am all for it.
I don't think I've read any of those, but I'll make a point to look for them the next time I'm at the library. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a practically unknown short story that is even more plotless than you're describing, and is one of my all-time favorites. If you're a fan, you know that he rarely includes a detail that isn't significant. Consequently, the longer he takes to describe the setting, the better the story usually is.
Toward the end of a collection of his short stories that I own, he takes several pages just to set a story in a beautiful, serene scene. When I realized this, I became very excited and started from the beginning again so I could take in every word, pondering the possible significance of each tiny detail. The suspense grew with every page I turned as I anticipated what would mar this idyllic scene that he spent so much effort to establish. I wondered why this story was not widely known, as I was sure it was going to be the best in the collection.
Then came the last paragraph, which said all he wanted to do was describe a nice place. In perhaps Poe's biggest twist ending, instead of his best story ever, I was left with no story at all. I've read almost everything he ever wrote, but I think that obscure story messed with my mind the most, because I was the victim instead of a fictional character I only knew from a book. Unfortunately, it only works once.
My point is that a book doesn't need a plot to be enjoyable. Just like only a true fan could fully appreciate that little gem of a story that Poe created, I'm sure there are people for whom "The Areas of My Expertise" is ideally suited. Personally, it sounds perfect for the place of honor next to my "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader" (That's a compliment).
I think it's a natural right to share every kind of information (not only music, but everything) with my neighbour.
Fascinating coming from someone who doesn't even post his email address on slashdot. I'm also curious how you plan on making a living with an advanced biophysics degree without relying on intellectual property protection.
Billions of people for hundreds of years and thousands of court decisions agree that the right to distribute a musical work belongs only to its creator. A few million people in the last decade disagree or at least don't care. I don't think you have enough support to claim p2p music distribution as a fundamental right. And it certainly isn't codified in any law in this country.
Second, music is not expensive. A teenager only has to work less than 15 minutes at minimum wage to buy a song on iTunes, and only about 3 hours for a CD.
Lastly, your seed analogy might be close if everyone wanted to plant a new kind of grain every year and someone had to make a new "master copy." Pretty soon all the new seeds will only be able to be planted in one field with a tractor, fertilizer, and irrigation sold by the same company, and you won't be able to sell any of your harvest. And music recordings are nowhere near a necessity like food is.
You aren't destroying artists, you are destroying the incentive to produce non-DRM recordings.
Nice idea, except DRM is the direct result of piracy. It's not like the RIAA invented DRM to interfere with fair use and upset their customers, who then had no choice but to resort to rampant piracy in protest.
Please don't pirate -- you're just making it worse for the rest of us.
You're forgetting that campaign finance regulations are self-imposed. Don't think of the regulations as the government restricting the people's freedom of speech, think of them as the result of the leading members of both parties compromising on a set of rules to make it easier to estimate and control their budget and prevent corruption within their own ranks. The original act was passed during the Nixon administration, so I think we've had enough time to determine if it is unconstitutional. I'm as conservative as they come, but I don't want any of my representatives to feel obligated to someone because of the size of their campaign contributions.
As for people who want to endorse or oppose a candidate in their blog without soliciting contributions, just make it clear that no candidate approved your statement. If you receive more than $1000 a year to make a site dedicated to one candidate or party, and spend more than $250 a year operating the site, then you want to make sure you're following the laws.
Unfortunately, since the brain can only hold about 7 objects on its "stack" (immediate conscious memory), it is highly vulnerable to buffer overflow. The good news is, no exploit has ever been seen in the wild, unless you believe that the Threshold TV show is a documentary.
I see where you are coming from now. That still does not mean that all voice votes have 80% assent on the bill, though. It just means that all voice votes have 80% assent on whether a voice vote is sufficient. Those are two very different things. Over 20% could object to the bill, but not necessarily want their objection on record. Even if members of congress have a strong opinion on a potentially controversial bill like the DMCA, it is often politically advantageous for both supporters and opposers to stay off the record. They can appear to support both the entertainment industry and individual rights at the same time. Although, it is really a moot point, because in practice 80% is probably almost always true.
I couldn't find a reference to your 80% rule anywhere, and certainly not in the constitution. Can you provide a specific reference?
It is my understanding that voice votes are basically the judgement of the speaker or majority leader as to which side was louder (see the the house rules). If any member questions the accuracy of the voice vote, or just wants to force everyone to go on the record for whatever reason, he or she may request a recorded vote.
However, you have a good point about the bills probably being unvetoable. I find it unlikely that a voice vote would pass with less than 67%. There are ways for a bill killed in committee to be forced for a full vote too, but I was just intending to simply illustrate that the normal process makes it very difficult to pass an unpopular bill. The DMCA may not be popular on slashdot, but it certainly was popular in congress. Hopefully this one won't be.
house.gov is your friend. The hearing isn't actually scheduled until Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Basically, a draft of the proposed legislation was released yesterday by a lobbyist. A congressman hasn't even touched it except for maybe a few subcommittee members reading it in preparation for the hearing. It hasn't been sponsored, co-sponsored, introduced, or even mentioned in any congressional record. There are still a dozen roadblocks before this even comes close to becoming a law. A congressman actually has to endorse it, the subcommittee chair can kill it, the subcommittee can kill it, the committee chair can kill it, the committee can kill it, the speaker of the house can kill it, and the full house can kill it. And then the whole process must be repeated in the senate. And then the president must sign it. Yes, this is a horrible piece of legislation, but in my opinion it has a slim chance of passing.
There are no representatives from my state (Arizona) on the committee, and they get so much correspondence that they essentially ignore anyone who is not their direct constituent, but if your congressman is on the list, then now is the time to let them know how you feel, especially if you are from Texas or California.
Critical of politicians, yes. Interesting, no. But that's not just limited to newspapers. Case in point: a couple of weeks ago presidents Bush and Abbas held a joint press conference at the White House to announce their roadmap for Palestine. Questions from the Palestian press were actually insightful and related to the topic at hand. Every single question from the American press was completely off topic (I know -- I watched the entire press conference). The story was buried 3 links deep on cnn.com, only had one paragraph related to Palestine, and the remainder of the article was about how President Bush "tried to keep the discussion away from the CIA leak and Harriet Miers" and repeated the same tired "news" they had been reporting for weeks. I lost count of the number of days I saw or heard the headline that it is possible that indictments will be announced as early as the next day.
Come on, news is supposed to be new. Everything I cared to know about the Plame case I already knew way back in July. Mr. Libby's indictment was news on the day it happened. If Mr. Rove is indicted, then it will be news on the day it happens. Mrs. Meirs nomination was news the day it happened and the day she withdrew. The 23 days in between, all the media reported was that liberals still don't like her and conservatives still aren't exactly elated about her either.
The great thing about the internet isn't blogs and online versions of TV and newspapers, it is the unprecedented access we have to raw data. I regularly visit whitehouse.gov, house.gov, senate.gov, supremecourtus.gov, federal and state democrat and republican party sites, and the personal pages of my federal and state representatives, senators, governor, and current political candidates. I also read the minutes of my local town council and school board meetings. Sure, a lot of those sites are obviously heavily biased, but at least I'm getting the biased opinions directly from the source. My entertainment, sports, and weather news also comes from more direct sources, like mailing lists from local venues.
When I hear about a court decision or a piece of legislation from somewhere, I look up the actual raw text for myself and come to my own conclusions. Whenever possible, I will watch the entire unedited coverage of an event I am interested in or read the transcript instead of relying on the small sound bites the media chooses to present. I didn't have to rely on the press to tell me what was really important to Senator Kerry when he was running for President; I looked up his votes and his sponsored/cosponsored legislation for myself. I know which senators voted against Justice Roberts and why, and which senators are likely to vote against Mr. Alito. The day after Harriet Miers was nominated, I predicted that she wouldn't be appointed. (I should have posted that prediction. For the record, I'm predicting Alito to be confirmed by about 65-35.) It sounds like a lot of work, but it doesn't actually take any more time than I used to spend reading the newspaper, and I'm a lot better informed for the effort.
Have you asked on the mplayer mailing list about this? If I understand your requirements correctly, it seems like it would be a matter of creating an option that would place the controls for gmplayer on a different display than the video output. This capability is built into X -- no redesign needed. The cinelerra video editor does this with their compositor window, but it must be built into the application code in order for it to work. I don't have TV out, so I don't know for sure if cinelerra supports that the way you want (I believe it does), but they do provide an option for ieee1394 (firewire) display that behaves the way you are describing. There is no intrinsic reason why mplayer could not do the same, and for all I know, it already does. It sounds like you have some coding skills, perhaps you could use cinelerra as an example to fix your personal build of gmplayer and submit a patch. At any rate, filing a feature request with the gmplayer developers is bound to be more effective than filing it on slashdot.
I see your point though about the ease of configuring multimedia applications. Linux is a highly capable system for multimedia work. Almost anything you want to do with it is within easy reach of a skilled developer. That is what makes it so attractive for companies like ILM, Dreamworks, etc. However, most of it is not easy at all for the average user. There are some good attempts at dumbing down the multimedia interfaces to WMP's level, like kaffeine and totem, but I don't know if either of those does what you are describing.
It's unfortunate that multimedia-focused Linux distributions haven't received more support or publicity. One of those might suit your style better. Dynebolic is one of my favorite Live CDs.
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Strange argument. FDR was duly elected to his 3rd and 4th terms by the people, just like every other president. That can hardly be called installing himself. And any reasonable supreme court would have allowed it. The 22nd amendment wasn't ratified until 1951, almost 6 years after FDR died.
Having been recently assigned to a project that uses Java 1.5, I had to review the differences since 1.1, which was the last version I had programmed professionally in. I was delighted to find that almost all of the new "cutting edge" features in Java 1.5 are similar to "outdated" Ada features I have used and loved for over a decade.
C is an outdated language even though it is in wide use. Ada is not outdated in spite of its disuse. Don't confuse popularity with ability.
How does one sign up to donate the human brain cells? I only use 10% of mine at a time anyway. Would I be able to telepathically communicate with the mice? Why do the articles never answer the important questions?
Both of you were off the point anyway. I don't believe any reasonable person would find the clause in question to wrongly impinge on a student's freedom of speech, as it mainly covers harrassment. The problem is the school administrators' overly broad interpretation of the scope and definition of the clause, and the refusal to consider evidence which showed that. It's hard to prove harrassment if the alleged victim is not named and doesn't know they are being harrassed. If the student and the school end up disagreeing on the point, then the student didn't sign what he thought he signed and that should invalidate the contract, in my non-lawyer opinion.
I hope it turns out well for the student. I think I would transfer in that situation and sue for the extra costs and a semester's worth of lost wages due to the graduation delay. I'm just laughing about the professor who was so horrible that he immediately assumed the anonymous reference in the blog referred to him. It seems like there's at least one teacher in every school that is so anti-student that it makes you wonder why they chose teaching as a profession in the first place.
Visual Basic is the fastest way I know to make a program that looks good, but doesn't work.
The mainstream Linux kernel has had a driver for infineon trusted platform modules since 2.6.12. I didn't even know any motherboards had shipped with those chips (have any?). User libraries and kernel patches were available well before 2.6.12. Linux has supported kernel-level encryption for ages, and is also on the forefront of technologies like mandatory access control. Not to mention how easy it would be to write a kernel module to implement one's own preferred flavor of DRM.
In short, Linux is an excellent operating system to implement DRM on. Low user interest and even lower vendor interest are the main problems, not the kernel.
That being said, I think that all DRM is inherently flawed without some serious hardware support, and that it will probably always be crackable on a general purpose computer with any operating system, simply due to the fact that the unencrypted data must be available on the machine at some point. I concur with your 3 day estimate.
It isn't being bitter that keeps me from objectively viewing new Microsoft products. It's the fact that I haven't used any in the last 5 years. It's hard to be bitter about something that doesn't affect me. Of course, I don't go around making claims about Microsoft products, either.
Many lives of police officers and the military depend on safe and reliable operation of their firearms. Consequently, they are manufactured to high standards of safety. You can drop a modern handgun with a round chambered and the hammer cocked and it is still highly unlikely to discharge. There are approximately equal numbers of handguns and motor vehicles in the United States. Even with the intrinsically dangerous nature of firearms, there are still about 30 times more deaths from car accidents than firearm accidents. I doubt any of those accidents could be attributable to manufacturing defects.
I guess the grandparent's point with the drunk driver analogy is that there is a big difference between an unsafe product and an unsafe user. Nearly every single one of the millions of gun owners go their entire lifetime without a single accident, fatal or non-fatal, by following basic safety rules. How many drivers can say the same thing? I appreciate that you have a basic disagreement with the benefit of firearms in general, but the manufacturers are not to blame.
You say that gun owners have no regard for the safety of others or their own increased liability. On the contrary, I would say that gun owners have more regard for this than the gun opponents who want to blame manufacturers or the government. Gun manufacturers go to great lengths to make sure my guns are safe and reliable, and to provide easy means to secure them from children. If someone gets hurt by one of my guns in my house, then it is completely my fault and I should be held fully responsible for the consequences of my negligence. I hold households that my daughter regularly visits to the same high standards that I hold myself. To expect the government or gun manufacturers to keep my daughter safe from gun accidents is irresponsible and ineffective.
That's why I read at +3. All the "Bush sucks" comments disappear, but if someone has a legitimate and thought provoking point opposing one of Bush's specific policies, I still see it and welcome it. I also avoid reading comments when the article topic is particularly sensitive for me, and have learned that refuting someone's opinion is never worth the trouble, but correcting logical fallacies or factual inconsistencies with supporting evidence can put the debate on a more intelligent and interesting level.
Now, if only there was a moderation system for TV news segments and political ads. -1 mudslinging, +1 balanced, -1 biased, +1 educational, -1 avoids the issue, etc. That would be something worth paying for.
What worries me is that the current attitude toward Iraq is a lot more like post-WWI attitudes about Germany than post-WWII. Today, people are war weary and want to avoid as much further interference in the middle east as possible. This is the same attitude that led to the highly popular, but ultimately costly and ineffective, appeasement policies toward Hitler.
Saddam Hussein is not the Hitler of our generation, although he might have been. Our Hitler will be some terrorist or dictator in the near future that will build up weapons of mass destruction unhindered because we don't want another Iraq war.
Do you honestly think that congress would voluntarily restrict their own re-election campaigns without a really good reason? Since I write my elected representatives several times a year, I for one am happy that they now have much less financial incentive to value the opinion of a wealthy person over mine. I actually convinced my congressman once to cosponsor a bill that was introduced by the other party, something I'm not sure a middle-class engineer would have enough influence to accomplish before campaign finance reforms. I consider that to be an increase in the power of my individual free speech, not an abridgement. I also appreciate that they can spend less time fundraising and more time working on the country's problems. But that's just me, I guess.
Mod parent down. Top secret FEC records indicate he only has enough riches and power to qualify for a -1 moderation. +2 is too many slashdot readers for his freedom of speech quota.
Yes, it is possible to calculate your memory needs using dynamic allocation and deallocation, but it is a lot harder to prove and a lot easier to make a mistake. If you really can reliably put an upper bound on the amount of memory your app uses, then there is usually no need for dynamic allocation in the first place. If you don't care about predicting your memory usage or malloc execution time, then why are you even asking the question? Just go with whatever is easier. However, consider that some extra effort now will pay off in the long run.
You have to let go of your assumptions from the non-embedded world. The natural instinct is to save as much memory as possible, since your memory is so limited. Your undergrad algorithms class taught you that dynamic allocation is the way to have the lowest possible memory usage at any given time. However, in an embedded application, unallocated memory is just as wasted as extra memory allocated in a static buffer, but in the latter you always know it is available as soon as you need it.
Very little literature depends on cultural knowledge to tell the story well. On the contrary, not being familiar with the environment is usually the big selling point. Science fiction and fantasy are the obvious examples, but even the most popular TV shows are all about cultures we are around but not a direct part of, like doctors, lawyers, detectives, and politicians. My wife immensely enjoys the cultural differences in Jane Austen novels even though she knows nothing about the history. The only thing she doesn't get is the humor. The stories themselves could be set in any time. In fact, it seems like a modern movie remake of "Pride and Prejudice" comes out about once a year.
Memorization of plots and quotes is not fun and is one of the reasons why I hated school even though I love learning. However, if it means that the next time I will be able to understand and enjoy the work more easily, I am all for it.
Toward the end of a collection of his short stories that I own, he takes several pages just to set a story in a beautiful, serene scene. When I realized this, I became very excited and started from the beginning again so I could take in every word, pondering the possible significance of each tiny detail. The suspense grew with every page I turned as I anticipated what would mar this idyllic scene that he spent so much effort to establish. I wondered why this story was not widely known, as I was sure it was going to be the best in the collection.
Then came the last paragraph, which said all he wanted to do was describe a nice place. In perhaps Poe's biggest twist ending, instead of his best story ever, I was left with no story at all. I've read almost everything he ever wrote, but I think that obscure story messed with my mind the most, because I was the victim instead of a fictional character I only knew from a book. Unfortunately, it only works once.
My point is that a book doesn't need a plot to be enjoyable. Just like only a true fan could fully appreciate that little gem of a story that Poe created, I'm sure there are people for whom "The Areas of My Expertise" is ideally suited. Personally, it sounds perfect for the place of honor next to my "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader" (That's a compliment).
Second, music is not expensive. A teenager only has to work less than 15 minutes at minimum wage to buy a song on iTunes, and only about 3 hours for a CD.
Lastly, your seed analogy might be close if everyone wanted to plant a new kind of grain every year and someone had to make a new "master copy." Pretty soon all the new seeds will only be able to be planted in one field with a tractor, fertilizer, and irrigation sold by the same company, and you won't be able to sell any of your harvest. And music recordings are nowhere near a necessity like food is.
You aren't destroying artists, you are destroying the incentive to produce non-DRM recordings.
Please don't pirate -- you're just making it worse for the rest of us.
As for people who want to endorse or oppose a candidate in their blog without soliciting contributions, just make it clear that no candidate approved your statement. If you receive more than $1000 a year to make a site dedicated to one candidate or party, and spend more than $250 a year operating the site, then you want to make sure you're following the laws.
Unfortunately, since the brain can only hold about 7 objects on its "stack" (immediate conscious memory), it is highly vulnerable to buffer overflow. The good news is, no exploit has ever been seen in the wild, unless you believe that the Threshold TV show is a documentary.
I see where you are coming from now. That still does not mean that all voice votes have 80% assent on the bill, though. It just means that all voice votes have 80% assent on whether a voice vote is sufficient. Those are two very different things. Over 20% could object to the bill, but not necessarily want their objection on record. Even if members of congress have a strong opinion on a potentially controversial bill like the DMCA, it is often politically advantageous for both supporters and opposers to stay off the record. They can appear to support both the entertainment industry and individual rights at the same time. Although, it is really a moot point, because in practice 80% is probably almost always true.
It is my understanding that voice votes are basically the judgement of the speaker or majority leader as to which side was louder (see the the house rules). If any member questions the accuracy of the voice vote, or just wants to force everyone to go on the record for whatever reason, he or she may request a recorded vote.
However, you have a good point about the bills probably being unvetoable. I find it unlikely that a voice vote would pass with less than 67%. There are ways for a bill killed in committee to be forced for a full vote too, but I was just intending to simply illustrate that the normal process makes it very difficult to pass an unpopular bill. The DMCA may not be popular on slashdot, but it certainly was popular in congress. Hopefully this one won't be.
And lest you think all lobbyists are evil, Public Knowledge and the Home Recording Rights Coalition will also be testifying at the hearing.
There are no representatives from my state (Arizona) on the committee, and they get so much correspondence that they essentially ignore anyone who is not their direct constituent, but if your congressman is on the list, then now is the time to let them know how you feel, especially if you are from Texas or California.
Come on, news is supposed to be new. Everything I cared to know about the Plame case I already knew way back in July. Mr. Libby's indictment was news on the day it happened. If Mr. Rove is indicted, then it will be news on the day it happens. Mrs. Meirs nomination was news the day it happened and the day she withdrew. The 23 days in between, all the media reported was that liberals still don't like her and conservatives still aren't exactly elated about her either.
The great thing about the internet isn't blogs and online versions of TV and newspapers, it is the unprecedented access we have to raw data. I regularly visit whitehouse.gov, house.gov, senate.gov, supremecourtus.gov, federal and state democrat and republican party sites, and the personal pages of my federal and state representatives, senators, governor, and current political candidates. I also read the minutes of my local town council and school board meetings. Sure, a lot of those sites are obviously heavily biased, but at least I'm getting the biased opinions directly from the source. My entertainment, sports, and weather news also comes from more direct sources, like mailing lists from local venues.
When I hear about a court decision or a piece of legislation from somewhere, I look up the actual raw text for myself and come to my own conclusions. Whenever possible, I will watch the entire unedited coverage of an event I am interested in or read the transcript instead of relying on the small sound bites the media chooses to present. I didn't have to rely on the press to tell me what was really important to Senator Kerry when he was running for President; I looked up his votes and his sponsored/cosponsored legislation for myself. I know which senators voted against Justice Roberts and why, and which senators are likely to vote against Mr. Alito. The day after Harriet Miers was nominated, I predicted that she wouldn't be appointed. (I should have posted that prediction. For the record, I'm predicting Alito to be confirmed by about 65-35.) It sounds like a lot of work, but it doesn't actually take any more time than I used to spend reading the newspaper, and I'm a lot better informed for the effort.
I see your point though about the ease of configuring multimedia applications. Linux is a highly capable system for multimedia work. Almost anything you want to do with it is within easy reach of a skilled developer. That is what makes it so attractive for companies like ILM, Dreamworks, etc. However, most of it is not easy at all for the average user. There are some good attempts at dumbing down the multimedia interfaces to WMP's level, like kaffeine and totem, but I don't know if either of those does what you are describing.
It's unfortunate that multimedia-focused Linux distributions haven't received more support or publicity. One of those might suit your style better. Dynebolic is one of my favorite Live CDs.