I'm a professional programmer, have been for 4 years. I'm also a PhD student (Computer Science) and more recently (like 15 days ago) a father. I've found that everyone in the professional world seems stolid and inflexible until the baby actually arrives, and then they're happy for you and lenient and usually very nice. If they're not, there's one surefire cure, and that's to sic your post-partem wife who's just been through the pain of her life on them. Have her talk about how hard it was going through labor and pregnancy and how much of a help you've been through it all and how she looks forward to all of those NICE people at work being grateful to have any of your time at all.
Legally, of course, you have the right to 12 weeks of paternity leave (unpaid) with a guarantee of having your job back (unless the company goes under, of course) as signed into law by the Clinton Administration in 1996 -- the Family and Medical Leave Act. On top of that, managers are usually more than happy to let you telecommute (I'm lucky -- they have no choice about me, I live out of state) most of the time at first to give your wife and new baby some time and energy. Programming's the greatest telecommuting job ever, and if you're boss is against it on matter of principle, transfer or find a new job in programming.
These have been out on the net since before it was the 'net. ftp.digital.com's nroff recipe collection. Surprised no old fart's picked this up. A lot of these things are really good. I'm a cook myself.
Hemp's great. What's related to it closely? Don't stop there, man. We've need a list a mile long.
You know what's really great about the fermentation and distilling process? The byproducts are absolutely astounding fertilizers. Fibers, nitrates, permangenates, all kinds of fun trace nutrients that are distilled away, don't burn, but do go right back into the soil. And it's a net carbon gain of 0. The CO2 generated by this is no greater than the carbon fixed from the soil and atmosphere needed to make the plants in the first place.
Oh, and a few more things that turn into ethanol quite readily.
1. Potatoes (really good. soil-healthy crop) 2. Grapes 3. Wheat 4. Sugar Beets 5. Honey 6. Rye 7. Apples 8. Peaches 9. Oats 10. Several types of hardy grasses, including milkweed, dandelions, cattails.
The list goes on. What's more, there's a surplus of all these every year. Regularly, crops simply get dumped into the ocean to mitigate price drops caused by low supply/demand ratio. We already farm too well. What if farmers could sell their entire surplus, every year? The revival of agriculture as a way of life. Even the >gasp small-farm -- remember what I said about local farming being a better way to produce energy because you don't have to ship it?!
Just think about it folks. Why is oil so cheap (compared to its energy cost) to harvest right now? Because there's a century of infrastructure built around its harvest. There are researchers making things more efficient, oil wells galore, efficient refineries, and why? Because we put a whole bunch of money and time into the research of it.
The total cost of delivery of a single gallon of gasoline is still quite high. It has to be mined, shipped to refineries (which uses oil!) refined in several stages (also uses oil), then shipped in individual semi-trucks (also uses oil) to get to it's final destination, which is for the most part a huge network of individual mom-and-pop owned gas stations. In addition to this, tankers fall over, refineries produce the occasional bad batch, pipelines break and need repair (oh boy, how about those SUVs needed to get to the point the pipeline broke in alaska), there are oil spills in Alaska, oil tanker ships. All these indirectly use oil to harvest oil.
As opposed to the infrastructure surrounding ethanol -- a fledgeling (no, I don't mean ADM) industry with some government and corporate funding and only 30 years of poorly funded research backing it. In 100 years, where will we be with this? One really darned great thing about grain alcohol, is that nearly every place in the non-desert world is suitable for growing some kind of grain that can be changed. Sugar cane, barley, hops, corn, rice. All can be turned into alcohol organically, with yeast, and the varieties of each can be grown in nearly every clime in the world, as opposed to having to be mined and distributed on the hub-and-spoke system. Locally managed stills can make enough ethanol to power entire towns for the most part, with a surplus. Believe me, we know the volume homemade, illegal, inefficient, made-by-the-village-drunk 'stills can produce in Arkansas and Tennessee. How about efficient stills made by corporations with the money to put into the research of draining every last drop out of the infrastructure they create? No long, hazardous shipping across outdated hub-and-spoke shipping lines. Fine-grained (no pun intended) distributed, low cost production facilities are a much better way of creating electricity and vehicle fuel.
The really great thing is that all these grains don't/NEED/ a ton of upkeep to grow, we just do a ton of upkeep to keep it edible. No one gives a sweet damn if the corn they use to power their vehicle was infested with ergot or weevils or blight, or little green bugs. It's all hydrogen in the end.
This can be the key, folks. This can avert the disaster heading our way once oil becomes expensive to mine. We just have to put the money in now while we can.
Using the IBM Java VM, I've been able to achieve consistently cutting my runtimes in half over the Sun VM. Anyone currently using the Sun VM for production work should test the IBM one and consider the switch.
My application that I benchmarked is data and network and memory intensive, although not math intensive, so that's what I can speak for. We consistently use 2 GB of main memory and pump a total of 2.5 TB (yes, TB) of data (doing a whole buch of AI style work inside the app itself) through the application over it's life cycle, and we cut our total runtime from 6 days to 2.8 days by switching to the IBM VM.
That means the other 10% will break down like so...
5% obfuscating the namespace with ties to the.NET Framework
2% smart tags. These will make your WVG document "smart" -- that is, allow MS to rewrite part of your graphics that might offend them. I see penguins looking longingly out of windows in your future, Mr Graphic Designer!
1% "extensions" Like, it would be really cool if you got a new <wvg:clippy> tag that would pop up every time you opened an wvg document in I.E!
1.99% Buzzwords that make WVG sound like a revolutionary B2B 99.999% uptime.NET-aware DRM-enabled, secure techonology solution for "helping you reach your creative potential in today's competitive marketplace." These, of course, will all be patented and made freely available under an obscure license which will confuse early adopters into implementing them, hopefully putting them directly into the Linux kernel and opening up a brand new SCO-like can of legal worms! These will also make WVG documents playable ONLY in Windows Media Player
0.1% Security enhancements. Like ties to VBScript objects that can execute arbitrary code on your box.
Depression affects 70% of women at some time in their lives. It is perfectly treatable with non-addictive medicines and therapy. Depression has been thought to be a leading cause in divorce.
Please read this site depression.org and try to watch for these symptoms. If they fit, you two need to have a talk. You may be doing her the biggest favor of her life.
Guilt is a primary feeling in depression, so if you suspect she is, you HAVE to make sure to not make her feel guilty about being so when you bring up the subject. It's not her fault. It's not your fault. If depression is the case, let her know that you love her, are there to help her, that she is not crazy, that you do not think less of her and that there is help for her -- these are all things that she will be feeling.
If it's this bad to you, you two need to sit down. You may even want to consider a marriage counselor.
Some women, especially those brought up in conservative households have guilt issues with having sex for fun. If this is the case, she needs to seek counseling to deal with the guilt.
If this is not the case, there may be other things that are worrying her or stressing her out that are affecting her sex drive. Stress is the biggest turn-off period. Sit down with her and talk about your sex-life when you aren't feeling aggressive and/or horny and be sure to let her know that you're not being threatening -- you are not mad at her nor dissappointed in her (even if you are, try to let it go for this talk, because she needs the understanding when put in this position).
Sometimes it may be that the general things just don't work on her (like touching, caressing), and she's turned on by something else. Or it may be that she has worries and stressors that you don't know about but can help her with if she tells you about them.
That's the best advice I can give you over the slashdot commentary. Good luck with you and your wife, and I hope you pull through this.
And before you start sleeping around. Talk to her about that too. I'm not here to judge what limits people have on thier marriage. She may be fine with you doing it with certain constraints, and you should know and abide by those if they exist. Sex may be just another activity to her and she may not consider extramarital sex as a breach of trust, so talk to her about it, if you see this as the only solution.
It's offtopic, I know, but it's not for this thread, and you guys obviously need some help.
4 "Nos" that become "Yes" with a skillful lover. First of all, these are not magic tricks. They won't work if you don't care about your wife. They may not get you sex THAT NIGHT. But you will get it more often, and your wife will think more of you and not nag you as much about things you don't do because you're remembering to do the things that matter most to her.
4. "Yeah, that's what we need, another kid" Guys. There's a real easy way to erase this one from the books. If you're done having kids, go make that trip to the Dr. You know what I mean. Snip snip. It doesn't hurt for long, and it doesn't destroy your sex drive. It just doesn't. You're still a man, get over it.
3. "I have a headache." If this is not a migraine (my wife gets these-- they're hell) draw a hot bath for her, preferably with bath salts, then rub her temples and scalp. Talk real nice. Be sweet. Then offer to massage her shoulders and back, arms, and feet.
2. "I just want to cuddle." Ok. Fine. Cuddle. If you can't get there from here, you're just as frigid as her. Massage, coo, talk, talk about her, then move to talking sexy (this does not mean "you don't know how much I want to fux0rz y0ur h07 b0d")
1. "Could you give me a backrub" Oh come on. This is practically an invitation. Especially because any good backrub will involve eventually getting her bra and shirt off. Get out the lotion and give her a backrub for god's sakes!! Then, after you've eased her muscles with deep muscle rubs, you can lighten your touch and massage her neck and shoulders lightly. Play with her hair. Make her feel like you love her. You do right? This is your wife, right?
There are so many good books on massage at Amazon, I can't even reccommend just one. Hell, there are so many that Jeff Bezos could probably patent one-click sex-therapy! Pick one that looks good. Buy it. Read it. Practice it. Often. She will love you.
Maybe it can take some pictures of that American Flag and the tire tracks while it's up there.
Don't know what good it'd do, since the conspiracy theorists would simply say something about the pictures being covertly doctored by the French government after the the probe landed in order that they might get back in bed with the U.S Government..
They'd get more Fox News airtime, but at least we'd have a few converts.
OK. Some worthy slashdotter tell me why this doesn't work for the RIAA (philisophical rants about why music should be free aside).
Sharing a music file is roughly equivalent to playing it on the radio. You share it for awhile, and people download and listen to it. Downloading a file and saving it to your harddrive is just like recording it to tape -- come to think of it, I remember a time when I recorded all files from my computer to tape...
You don't AFAIK have to have a special license to play a song over the radio, you just have to pay a small fee whenever you play it.
Since a file being shared is shared for a finite amount of time, and an unlimited number of listeners can download that file with their computer, just like they would listen to or record it off their car stereo (and the majority of encoding-of-your-choice files out there are roughly the same quality).
So why not a flat fee of say.01 cents per song per 3 minutes of sharing that song (assuming the song is three minutes long). Not an entirely unreasonable price to pay. Could even payed by subscription to KaZaa which might pay the record companies, evil as their sorry asses are, monthly for the average number of RIAA copyrighted files on their service, thus distributing the cost of file-availability to all users.
Anyone know why the RIAA hasn't thought of this? Anyone know anyone who's going to try the DJ argument in court?
OK. Some worthy slashdotter tell me why this doesn't work for the RIAA (philisophical rants about why music should be free aside).
Sharing a music file is roughly equivalent to playing it on the radio. You share it for awhile, and people download and listen to it. Downloading a file and saving it to your harddrive is just like recording it to tape -- come to think of it, I remember a time when I recorded all files from my computer to tape...
You don't AFAIK have to have a special license to play a song over the radio, you just have to pay a small fee whenever you play it.
Since a file being shared is shared for a finite amount of time, and an unlimited number of listeners can download that file with their computer, just like they would listen to or record it off their car stereo (and the majority of encoding-of-your-choice files out there are roughly the same quality).
So why not a flat fee of say.01 cents per song per 3 minutes of sharing that song (assuming the song is three minutes long). Not an entirely unreasonable price to pay. Could even payed by subscription to KaZaa which might pay the record companies, evil as their sorry asses are, monthly for the average number of RIAA copyrighted files on their service, thus distributing the cost of file-availability to all users.
Anyone know why the RIAA hasn't thought of this? Anyone know anyone who's going to try the DJ argument in court?
You know, the one where a whole bunch of blind people each touch a different part of the elephant, and therefore have a different idea of what the elephant is?
Of course, that means that the RIAA clearly has its hand up the elephant's ass...
I am not a fan of current copyright law, but how is this not an unfair burden on small publishing houses and self-publishers? A $1 fee on evey copyrighted work would be trivial to Penguin, Disney, or Microsoft but not to competitors.
Do I want the GPL on my work to expire unless we pay this fee? The money's not the problem. It's the principle of it. Why should I have to pay to have my work be protected by the law simply because my work is published media?
Creativity and its rewards should be accessable to all people, not just those who can afford it. That was the original intent of the law as framed by the constitution and that's the way it should stand.
My Game Boy went through a lot when I was a kid. I got it when I was 14 or so and I'm 24 and still have it now.
I dropped it several times as a kid and ran over it in the driveway with a minivan twice while learning to drive. The screen didn't even crack! My brother dropped it in the bathtub when he was 7 or so, and threw it at me once or twice. Batteries have exploded in it, even.
I'm still amazed at how well those things hold up.
XML OS - Not really a PL or an OS, but if you install it on your manager's box, and tell him its XML, he won't know the difference, and you'll get promoted and published in a trade journal!
SCHEME OS - The user is given as documentation a BNF grammer and a tutorial on finite state machines written in math jargon and is told that in theory he/she has everything they need to use the computer, except that it hasn't been built yet.
EMACS - The user is told that the OS documents itself, that it does anything, and that all your tasks can be accomplished through it. Unfortunately, after poring over the miles of "documentation" that tells the user nothing about how to use it, the user takes his/her monitor, scoops out the contents and uses it as a cereal bowl.
OCAML OS - A great little OS that has lots of features and actually runs fast, but got banned by a bunch of parents' groups hwo decided it promotes smoking.
Haskell OS - EVERYTHING is a function. Want to open your calculator app? Just remember that it's not actually a calculator app, but a series of stateless functions that appear to your eyes like they are a caclulator app. Want to enter some numbers. You have to understand the concept of MONADS first! It's long, tedious, but at least it makes mathematical sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Written in 1996, with mailing list archines that far back. Surely someone has the code from back then and can point out the tabs...
Lynx was written in 1998, and this patent was filed in 1997. Is there a pre-1997 predecessor to lynx I don't know about?
Surreptitious
And
Moronic
Incindiary
Z -- it makes the title look cooler
Diatribe
Against
Torvalds
I'm a professional programmer, have been for 4 years. I'm also a PhD student (Computer Science) and more recently (like 15 days ago) a father. I've found that everyone in the professional world seems stolid and inflexible until the baby actually arrives, and then they're happy for you and lenient and usually very nice. If they're not, there's one surefire cure, and that's to sic your post-partem wife who's just been through the pain of her life on them. Have her talk about how hard it was going through labor and pregnancy and how much of a help you've been through it all and how she looks forward to all of those NICE people at work being grateful to have any of your time at all.
Legally, of course, you have the right to 12 weeks of paternity leave (unpaid) with a guarantee of having your job back (unless the company goes under, of course) as signed into law by the Clinton Administration in 1996 -- the Family and Medical Leave Act. On top of that, managers are usually more than happy to let you telecommute (I'm lucky -- they have no choice about me, I live out of state) most of the time at first to give your wife and new baby some time and energy. Programming's the greatest telecommuting job ever, and if you're boss is against it on matter of principle, transfer or find a new job in programming.
These have been out on the net since before it was the 'net. ftp.digital.com's nroff recipe collection. Surprised no old fart's picked this up. A lot of these things are really good. I'm a cook myself.
ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/recipes
This is what they meant when they said that "current screenshots do not reflect the reality of Duke Nukem Forever"!
Hemp's great. What's related to it closely? Don't stop there, man. We've need a list a mile long.
You know what's really great about the fermentation and distilling process? The byproducts are absolutely astounding fertilizers. Fibers, nitrates, permangenates, all kinds of fun trace nutrients that are distilled away, don't burn, but do go right back into the soil. And it's a net carbon gain of 0. The CO2 generated by this is no greater than the carbon fixed from the soil and atmosphere needed to make the plants in the first place.
Oh, and a few more things that turn into ethanol quite readily.
1. Potatoes (really good. soil-healthy crop)
2. Grapes
3. Wheat
4. Sugar Beets
5. Honey
6. Rye
7. Apples
8. Peaches
9. Oats
10. Several types of hardy grasses, including milkweed, dandelions, cattails.
The list goes on. What's more, there's a surplus of all these every year. Regularly, crops simply get dumped into the ocean to mitigate price drops caused by low supply/demand ratio. We already farm too well. What if farmers could sell their entire surplus, every year? The revival of agriculture as a way of life. Even the >gasp small-farm -- remember what I said about local farming being a better way to produce energy because you don't have to ship it?!
Just think about it folks. Why is oil so cheap (compared to its energy cost) to harvest right now? Because there's a century of infrastructure built around its harvest. There are researchers making things more efficient, oil wells galore, efficient refineries, and why? Because we put a whole bunch of money and time into the research of it.
/NEED/ a ton of upkeep to grow, we just do a ton of upkeep to keep it edible. No one gives a sweet damn if the corn they use to power their vehicle was infested with ergot or weevils or blight, or little green bugs. It's all hydrogen in the end.
The total cost of delivery of a single gallon of gasoline is still quite high. It has to be mined, shipped to refineries (which uses oil!) refined in several stages (also uses oil), then shipped in individual semi-trucks (also uses oil) to get to it's final destination, which is for the most part a huge network of individual mom-and-pop owned gas stations. In addition to this, tankers fall over, refineries produce the occasional bad batch, pipelines break and need repair (oh boy, how about those SUVs needed to get to the point the pipeline broke in alaska), there are oil spills in Alaska, oil tanker ships. All these indirectly use oil to harvest oil.
As opposed to the infrastructure surrounding ethanol -- a fledgeling (no, I don't mean ADM) industry with some government and corporate funding and only 30 years of poorly funded research backing it. In 100 years, where will we be with this? One really darned great thing about grain alcohol, is that nearly every place in the non-desert world is suitable for growing some kind of grain that can be changed. Sugar cane, barley, hops, corn, rice. All can be turned into alcohol organically, with yeast, and the varieties of each can be grown in nearly every clime in the world, as opposed to having to be mined and distributed on the hub-and-spoke system. Locally managed stills can make enough ethanol to power entire towns for the most part, with a surplus. Believe me, we know the volume homemade, illegal, inefficient, made-by-the-village-drunk 'stills can produce in Arkansas and Tennessee. How about efficient stills made by corporations with the money to put into the research of draining every last drop out of the infrastructure they create? No long, hazardous shipping across outdated hub-and-spoke shipping lines. Fine-grained (no pun intended) distributed, low cost production facilities are a much better way of creating electricity and vehicle fuel.
The really great thing is that all these grains don't
This can be the key, folks. This can avert the disaster heading our way once oil becomes expensive to mine. We just have to put the money in now while we can.
Using the IBM Java VM, I've been able to achieve consistently cutting my runtimes in half over the Sun VM. Anyone currently using the Sun VM for production work should test the IBM one and consider the switch.
My application that I benchmarked is data and network and memory intensive, although not math intensive, so that's what I can speak for. We consistently use 2 GB of main memory and pump a total of 2.5 TB (yes, TB) of data (doing a whole buch of AI style work inside the app itself) through the application over it's life cycle, and we cut our total runtime from 6 days to 2.8 days by switching to the IBM VM.
Depression affects 70% of women at some time in their lives. It is perfectly treatable with non-addictive medicines and therapy. Depression has been thought to be a leading cause in divorce.
Please read this site depression.org and try to watch for these symptoms. If they fit, you two need to have a talk. You may be doing her the biggest favor of her life.
Guilt is a primary feeling in depression, so if you suspect she is, you HAVE to make sure to not make her feel guilty about being so when you bring up the subject. It's not her fault. It's not your fault. If depression is the case, let her know that you love her, are there to help her, that she is not crazy, that you do not think less of her and that there is help for her -- these are all things that she will be feeling.
Once again, good luck
If it's this bad to you, you two need to sit down. You may even want to consider a marriage counselor.
Some women, especially those brought up in conservative households have guilt issues with having sex for fun. If this is the case, she needs to seek counseling to deal with the guilt.
If this is not the case, there may be other things that are worrying her or stressing her out that are affecting her sex drive. Stress is the biggest turn-off period. Sit down with her and talk about your sex-life when you aren't feeling aggressive and/or horny and be sure to let her know that you're not being threatening -- you are not mad at her nor dissappointed in her (even if you are, try to let it go for this talk, because she needs the understanding when put in this position).
Sometimes it may be that the general things just don't work on her (like touching, caressing), and she's turned on by something else. Or it may be that she has worries and stressors that you don't know about but can help her with if she tells you about them.
That's the best advice I can give you over the slashdot commentary. Good luck with you and your wife, and I hope you pull through this.
And before you start sleeping around. Talk to her about that too. I'm not here to judge what limits people have on thier marriage. She may be fine with you doing it with certain constraints, and you should know and abide by those if they exist. Sex may be just another activity to her and she may not consider extramarital sex as a breach of trust, so talk to her about it, if you see this as the only solution.
It's offtopic, I know, but it's not for this thread, and you guys obviously need some help.
4 "Nos" that become "Yes" with a skillful lover. First of all, these are not magic tricks. They won't work if you don't care about your wife. They may not get you sex THAT NIGHT. But you will get it more often, and your wife will think more of you and not nag you as much about things you don't do because you're remembering to do the things that matter most to her.
4. "Yeah, that's what we need, another kid" Guys. There's a real easy way to erase this one from the books. If you're done having kids, go make that trip to the Dr. You know what I mean. Snip snip. It doesn't hurt for long, and it doesn't destroy your sex drive. It just doesn't. You're still a man, get over it.
3. "I have a headache." If this is not a migraine (my wife gets these-- they're hell) draw a hot bath for her, preferably with bath salts, then rub her temples and scalp. Talk real nice. Be sweet. Then offer to massage her shoulders and back, arms, and feet.
2. "I just want to cuddle." Ok. Fine. Cuddle. If you can't get there from here, you're just as frigid as her. Massage, coo, talk, talk about her, then move to talking sexy (this does not mean "you don't know how much I want to fux0rz y0ur h07 b0d")
1. "Could you give me a backrub" Oh come on. This is practically an invitation. Especially because any good backrub will involve eventually getting her bra and shirt off. Get out the lotion and give her a backrub for god's sakes!! Then, after you've eased her muscles with deep muscle rubs, you can lighten your touch and massage her neck and shoulders lightly. Play with her hair. Make her feel like you love her. You do right? This is your wife, right?
There are so many good books on massage at Amazon, I can't even reccommend just one. Hell, there are so many that Jeff Bezos could probably patent one-click sex-therapy! Pick one that looks good. Buy it. Read it. Practice it. Often. She will love you.
CP/M?? I think you mean SAP. CP/M was an 8bit OS back in the early 80s.
Maybe it can take some pictures of that American Flag and the tire tracks while it's up there.
Don't know what good it'd do, since the conspiracy theorists would simply say something about the pictures being covertly doctored by the French government after the the probe landed in order that they might get back in bed with the U.S Government..
They'd get more Fox News airtime, but at least we'd have a few converts.
OK. Some worthy slashdotter tell me why this doesn't work for the RIAA (philisophical rants about why music should be free aside). Sharing a music file is roughly equivalent to playing it on the radio. You share it for awhile, and people download and listen to it. Downloading a file and saving it to your harddrive is just like recording it to tape -- come to think of it, I remember a time when I recorded all files from my computer to tape... You don't AFAIK have to have a special license to play a song over the radio, you just have to pay a small fee whenever you play it. Since a file being shared is shared for a finite amount of time, and an unlimited number of listeners can download that file with their computer, just like they would listen to or record it off their car stereo (and the majority of encoding-of-your-choice files out there are roughly the same quality). So why not a flat fee of say .01 cents per song per 3 minutes of sharing that song (assuming the song is three minutes long). Not an entirely unreasonable price to pay. Could even payed by subscription to KaZaa which might pay the record companies, evil as their sorry asses are, monthly for the average number of RIAA copyrighted files on their service, thus distributing the cost of file-availability to all users.
Anyone know why the RIAA hasn't thought of this? Anyone know anyone who's going to try the DJ argument in court?
OK. Some worthy slashdotter tell me why this doesn't work for the RIAA (philisophical rants about why music should be free aside).
.01 cents per song per 3 minutes of sharing that song (assuming the song is three minutes long). Not an entirely unreasonable price to pay. Could even payed by subscription to KaZaa which might pay the record companies, evil as their sorry asses are, monthly for the average number of RIAA copyrighted files on their service, thus distributing the cost of file-availability to all users.
Sharing a music file is roughly equivalent to playing it on the radio. You share it for awhile, and people download and listen to it. Downloading a file and saving it to your harddrive is just like recording it to tape -- come to think of it, I remember a time when I recorded all files from my computer to tape...
You don't AFAIK have to have a special license to play a song over the radio, you just have to pay a small fee whenever you play it.
Since a file being shared is shared for a finite amount of time, and an unlimited number of listeners can download that file with their computer, just like they would listen to or record it off their car stereo (and the majority of encoding-of-your-choice files out there are roughly the same quality).
So why not a flat fee of say
Anyone know why the RIAA hasn't thought of this? Anyone know anyone who's going to try the DJ argument in court?
Get your torrent here
just give me a sec to download them
You know, the one where a whole bunch of blind people each touch a different part of the elephant, and therefore have a different idea of what the elephant is?
Of course, that means that the RIAA clearly has its hand up the elephant's ass...
I am not a fan of current copyright law, but how is this not an unfair burden on small publishing houses and self-publishers? A $1 fee on evey copyrighted work would be trivial to Penguin, Disney, or Microsoft but not to competitors.
Do I want the GPL on my work to expire unless we pay this fee? The money's not the problem. It's the principle of it. Why should I have to pay to have my work be protected by the law simply because my work is published media?
Creativity and its rewards should be accessable to all people, not just those who can afford it. That was the original intent of the law as framed by the constitution and that's the way it should stand.
What are we going to do tonight, Brain?
The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to hook you up to the Borg!
My Game Boy went through a lot when I was a kid. I got it when I was 14 or so and I'm 24 and still have it now.
I dropped it several times as a kid and ran over it in the driveway with a minivan twice while learning to drive. The screen didn't even crack! My brother dropped it in the bathtub when he was 7 or so, and threw it at me once or twice. Batteries have exploded in it, even.
I'm still amazed at how well those things hold up.
XML OS - Not really a PL or an OS, but if you install it on your manager's box, and tell him its XML, he won't know the difference, and you'll get promoted and published in a trade journal! SCHEME OS - The user is given as documentation a BNF grammer and a tutorial on finite state machines written in math jargon and is told that in theory he/she has everything they need to use the computer, except that it hasn't been built yet. EMACS - The user is told that the OS documents itself, that it does anything, and that all your tasks can be accomplished through it. Unfortunately, after poring over the miles of "documentation" that tells the user nothing about how to use it, the user takes his/her monitor, scoops out the contents and uses it as a cereal bowl. OCAML OS - A great little OS that has lots of features and actually runs fast, but got banned by a bunch of parents' groups hwo decided it promotes smoking. Haskell OS - EVERYTHING is a function. Want to open your calculator app? Just remember that it's not actually a calculator app, but a series of stateless functions that appear to your eyes like they are a caclulator app. Want to enter some numbers. You have to understand the concept of MONADS first! It's long, tedious, but at least it makes mathematical sense.