At one point, the DoD required that software written for the military be written in Ada. So a decent number of schools could jack up the placement rates of their computer science or software engineering majors by teaching it and buddying up with the defense industry recruiters. I went to one of those colleges, and the majority of the early programming classes were all Ada.
At some point, though, the DoD decided to get with the times and dropped the Ada requirement. My first job out of college was mostly to take an existing Ada codebase and re-write it in C or C++, as appropiate.
No one is disputing the facts. What people are saying is that your interpretation of the facts is somewhere between self-entitled whining and utterly ridiculous trolling.
If you don't think the value you get from Apple's developer program is worth $99/year and 30% the solution is simple. Take your money elsewhere. Frankly though, in App development, distribution, and billing, the $99 is trivial and 30% is a damn good deal. If you're losing money on those numbers, the problem is with *you* and no one else.
Even more importantly, since Apple takes care of all the credit card stuff, and as an app developer you never have cardholder data in your possession; you don't have to worry about PCI DSS compliance.
I have enough headaches enforcing PCI at work. If I had to deal with it at home I wouldn't touch the App Store, or anyone else's mobile store, with a 10' pole.
> sales tax for all 50 states and the territories will > create an accounting nightmare
Oh, it's a whole lot worse than you realize. Cities, counties, multi-county "transportation districts", multi-city infrastructure districts, and like can all levy sales taxes too. Any and all of these, including the state, may chose to levy the tax only on certain goods, but not on others. They may have sales tax "holidays" certain times of the year; maybe for all goods maybe for just a few. For example, "back to school" sales tax holidays on various school supplies are fairly common each August. And all of these, and the hoops you'd have to go through to remit them, may change unpredictably at the whim of any of a thousand local governments.
And there's no simple and easy way to do a lookup. First off, do you use the customer's residential, billing, or shipping address to decide what tax to levy? And once you have an address, how do you do a lookup? You can't use the ZIP code or even the city field of the address. Those fields are determined by the post office for its own convenience in planning delivery routes and may not conform to municipal borders at all. (I've first-have experience with this. I once lived with one town and regularly got a card in the mail requesting and reminding me to use the neighboring larger town, in which my local post office was located, as the city field in my address.) Obviously, the state field is not granular enough.
What you'd need is an always up-to-date, nationwide, lookup of street addresses and the actual borders of every city, county, and miscellaneous tax district in all of the US; and what and when they tax and what's exempt and when. That sort of thing may be within the capabilities of a giant like Amazon. A startup? Not so much. This law would by a massive barrier to entry that would stop new internet businesses like a brick wall.
And all that's just the practical difficulty. There's also the basic fairness issue. If I run a business in one place, with no physical presence in the other, why SHOULD I have to pay even a single penny to that other government... from which I receive no services and to which I have no representation?
That's all well and good for little titles that people throw together in their spare time. But when somebody actually gave desktop Linux users a legitimate chance to purchase Linux versions of A-list titles by major studios (And threw a good portion of their revenue back into development of open-source tools and libraries that would have helped other companies do the same thing.); the Linux community responded resoundingly with rejection by refusing to buy in anything close to the numbers necessary to keep the business afloat. So nice as the Humble Bundle average is (And the HB have recently abandoned the indie, cross-platform philosophy anyway.), color me unimpressed by desktop Linux users' willingness to pay.
Mac users, OTOH (Since the overall topic *IS* iTunes.), do buy in the numbers necessary to keep outfits like Aspyr and Feral afloat and bring A-List titles to the platform (Even though they are often a bit later than the PC release and the hype has usually died down by the time of the port.)
... in *ANY* of these lawsuits. (Don't forget, there are a whole lot more companies throwing suits around in the mobile space than just Apple and Sansung.) If those previously-confidentail settlements can be dragged out into the public courts; there's no longer a way for the companies involved to come to a cease fire that allows both sides to save face.
Without that ability, watch all parties go for nothing but the full-out nuclear option in the future. There's no reason to do anything else.
The police in the bay area have become increasingly heavy-handed and more than a bit trigger-happy over the last few years. And the public has been responding by an increasing withdrawal of their trust and goodwill.
Johannes Mehserle, and the pittance of a slap on the wrist "punishment" for his murder of Oscar Grant*, for example, probably set relations between the police and the black community back by a good decade or so alone. Then, for an encore, they went about gunning down a mentally ill homeless man on a different BART platform, shooting an Iraq war veteran in the head with a tear gas canister during the occupy protests, and switching off telephone and internet service... something that you expect in North Korea or middle-eastern theocracies and dictatorships, not the United States... to suppress speech and communication during another protest (of the aforementioned killing of the mentally-ill homeless man). These sorts of things are not exactly going to engender trust or goodwill, especially amongst minorities or otherwise marginalized communities.
(* Yes, I know, Oscar Grant was kind of a scumbag. That's not relevant though. This is the United States. We're just not supposed to *DO* summary executions here... at all And being a scumbag doesn't change the fact that Grant was unarmed, unresisting, and lying prone and motionless when Mehserle decided to shoot him in the back.)
> That, and the well pump is 100' away and pushes > the water to the house, power is strung to it, and is > a bit of a draw.
One thing to consider...
When I lived in hurricane country, we were on a well too. But in addition to the electric pump, we also had an old-timey hand pump on it. Close the valve to the electric, open the one to the hand pump, and you've got all the water you need. Just pump it into a jug. 100' isn't very far to carry it.
I know you specifically mentioned flushing the toilets, so you're talking non-potable water there. But long-term storage of potable water has its own issues and lots of people forget to cycle their stockpile.
> It would be essentially a phone, only with no > ability to place callsâ"just data+GPS.
I first saw something like that in a Fry's in 2000-ish. That one relied on a 2-way paging service rather than a cellular service though.
What left me fairly horrified, though, was that this one could be *locked* to your kid's wrist, and the marketing blurbs suggested continuing to use the thing on your kids clear into their teens! Being not long out of college, my own teen years were relatively recent in my memory, and I was aghast at the notion.
An inherent part of competition and an inherent part of winning *IS* that your opponent loses. It's not just Microsoft and Apple, and it's not just in business. Video games, sports, card and casino games, the courtroom elections... the ideal outcomes all involve a clear winner and a clear loser.
In how many sports do the teams play to tie? Hay many sports don't have some sort of overtime to fix a tie at the end of regulation play?
Do you thing Google *does't* want to boot-stomp Bing into the dirt? Do you think they *don't* want gmail to crush hotmail?
Obama and Romney can't BOTH be elected president, come November.
Hell... even the very court case we're discussing is an example.... Samsung won, Apple lost.
Those DVD players may be lacking at Best Buy. But walk up to Chinatown and you'll find a dozen stores on Grant Street alone selling players in which you can play any region's disk while skipping all the tedious commercials and MPAA blather. Sure, they don't say "Sony" on the front. But they're half the price, work just as well, and are likely made by the same company, if not in the same factory even.
He's offended... positively beside himself even... at Apple's horrific audacity in charging the astronomical sum of $99 a year for a membership in the iPhone developer program. A regular crime against humanity, that.
To make matters worse, you also have to own a Macintosh on which to run xCode! That's unlike Android which, in his world, seems to allow you to do all the development directly on the device. That Vaio he bought to do the Android development on is just an unnecessary and extravagant luxury, of course.
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have lower Klout scores than Justin Bieber. Until this summer, so did President Obama. And as far as I could tell, Steve Jobs never had Klout at all. And this is a metric that I'm supposed to take seriously? I think not.
[2]: If you set a password (not a PIN) and use all numbers, when the iPhone asks for the code, it will pull up a numeric keypad, not the complete keyboard. Yes, it might lower security as an attacker knows the PIN is only numbers, but it is a lot easier to enter in the code that way.
If that concerns you, you can use Apple's free iPhone Configuration Utility to create and add a profile that requires a longer passcode. You keep the numeric keypad, but your code can be an arbitrary length. You also get an "OK" button to press to enter the code so the potential attacker won't even know how long your passcode really is without other clues.
You can also set up passcode aging and history and reduce the maximum number of failed attempts before an automatic wipe.
For that matter, you can use it and/or the Apple Configurator tool to do quite a lot of iDevice management and customization that the usual/. peanut gallery crowd would have you believe is impossible on iOS.
Thing is though... that tactic *wouldn't* work if Uber weren't so astoundingly superior to the alternative. We have the same problems as New York... a corrupt medallion system that leaves too few cabs on the roads to the point that it's sometimes faster to walk than to take a cab somewhere. Calling a cab to be dispatched to you is a sick joke unless you're going to SFO. And the cabbies scream bloody murder whenever City Hall tries to improve the system... even if it's something as simple as issuing more medallions.
It should be no wonder to anyone with half a brain that people who actually need to move about town applaud the company that's done an end-run around such a stupid, dysfunctional, and corrupt system; and created a "cab" system that actually works.
Yeah. And the funny thing is, back when they were ripping off RIM instead of Apple they actually had the chutzpah to call their Blackberry knock-off a "Blackjack". This whole affair is pretty much SOP for Samsung.
> It's completly in a pilots discretion if he want's to > have some prankster on board who doesn't care if > the whole flight gets delayed because of a funny > shirt.
Not a bad point. But the time for the pilot to make that decision was at the scheduled departure time, before he ever saw Arijit's anti-TSA shirt. It would be entirely reasonable and correct for him to decide to keep to his schedule, have the gate agent award that seat to a stand-by passenger, and if anyone is late, tough cookies.
But that's not what happened. He decided to wait and then had Arijit removed for nothing more than the content of the shirt. That's the problem. And obviously, the airline decided the pilot was in the wrong, as they compensated Arijit with a new flight. And as a customer-facing employee, it was the pilots responsibility to make the correct decision in the first place.
And yes, the TSA deserves just as much, perhaps more, blame as the pilot for causing Arijit to be delayed in the first place over such an obviously harmless and obviously POLITICAL (the most important kind of speech to protect) statement as: âoeBombs ZOMG,â âoeZOMG Terrorists Alert level bloodred â" run, run take off your shoes.â Accompanied by the picture you can see on the article, he was very obviously simply mocking the TSA goons, not threatening anybody.
Just because someplace else is worse, doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to the problems we have here. And the situation here has clearly been deteriorating.
Since you brought it up, let's take 1989 for an example:
In 1989, the US was a place people fled TO, in order to get AWAY from repressive governments; not the government doing the repressing.
In 1989, you could go on that trip to Thailand without being irradiated with backscatter x-rays, taking you shoes and belt off, or getting felt up by some thug at the airport; and your friends or family could accompany you to the departure gate to see you off.
In 1989, you could pop over to some of the closer countries such as Canada, Mexico, or The Bahamas, for a visit; and be re-admitted to the US with nothing more than your drivers' license.
In 1989, no one had heard of a "free speech zone". The entire *country* was a free speech zone.
In 1989, you could go to concerts, amusement parks, nightclubs, and ballparks without being groped by some thug, having to show the contents of your pockets, backpack, or purse to another, going through a metal detector, or being under constant 1984-ish CCTV surveillance.
Maybe we're still free enough, in comparison to countries like China, to be considered "the land of the free". But we've been becoming progressively less free for years.
For over thirty years, the US Navy has been operating nuclear reactors which can be run at a reduced power level with the pumps turned off entirely. It's called natural circulation. You know... hot water rises, cold water sinks, and all that. They came up with the technology for the Los Angeles and Ohio classes of submarine, because subs hide by being quiet, pumps make noise, and you can make the sub stealthier if you can run the reactor without pumps. So why not require ALL reactors to have this ability?
The Navy, by the way, has a perfect operational safety record with its submarine reactors... not a single reactor accident in about sixty years.
When the iPhone first came out, there was no SDK, no AppStore, no way to load 3rd-party code on it at all. Apple's response to people who wanted to add functionality? "You should write web apps in HTML 5."
People screamed bloody murder at the notion. They DEMANDED an SDK. Jailbreaking started not to get around AppStore restrictions, but because there was no way to code and load native apps of ANY kind. So Apple eventually gave in and released an SDK and created the AppStore.
And now you want to go back? Now having a native app is indolent?
Aside from some minor hiccups on O2's network In the UK, there's nowhere else in the world that you hear about carriers having issues with the iPhone that AT&T has here.
In fact, it's just jaw dropping when you see how good and cheap service is overseas. A friend of mine moved back to the US from Singapore a couple years ago. He had an iPhone there, and never had a dropped call... not one, anywhere in the country. And what did he pay for data? On SingTel (Singapore's equivalent to AT&T) the first 12GB carried no extra charge over his voice plan. After 12GB it was metered until he had $30 of data charges, and after that, it was unlimited. That was on top of a $45 voice and text plan. And all that is, of course in $SGD, of which you get about 1.2 for every $USD.
What AT&T, Verizon, and their lot are allowed to get away with here is nothing less than highest robbery.
Forget fines. DMCA takedown demands are supposedly filed "under penalty of perjury". Last I heard, perjury is a prosecutable offense. Force all DMCA takedowns to be filed in the name of a specific responsible individual. And start tossing those individuals in prison for these fraudulent takedowns. *Then* I'll be impressed.
Probably a more expensive formula of pavement than is necessary in places where the temperature range between summer and winter is less extreme. (San Francisco, for instance, rarely gets above 80 in the summer or below 40 in the winter.)
In many cases the person writing the listing for Monster, Craigslist, or whatever, is not actually an engineer who knows exactly what skills that specific job will require. He's an HR type who kinda sorta knows a little bit about what a programmer does, can write a flowery description of how wonderful the company is, can write up a generic description of what entails a good employee, and knows all of the latest technical buzz words, but not necessarily what they mean.
In these cases, the hiring manager may ask HR for candidates who know C. But the HR guy sees that objective-C and C# are "trending" on Facebook, on LinkedIn, in the "twitterverse" and in the "social media blogosphere"; and he puts them on the listing instead of plain old C.
There are also jobs where it's just assumed that you know C. My first job out of college was like that. I was hired because I'd studied Ada in school and the job description didn't list C at all. But the actual job involved quite a lot of re-implementation of existing Ada code into C. And it was just assumed that, as a programmer and computer science graduate, I knew C by default.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
At one point, the DoD required that software written for the military be written in Ada. So a decent number of schools could jack up the placement rates of their computer science or software engineering majors by teaching it and buddying up with the defense industry recruiters. I went to one of those colleges, and the majority of the early programming classes were all Ada.
At some point, though, the DoD decided to get with the times and dropped the Ada requirement. My first job out of college was mostly to take an existing Ada codebase and re-write it in C or C++, as appropiate.
No one is disputing the facts. What people are saying is that your interpretation of the facts is somewhere between self-entitled whining and utterly ridiculous trolling.
If you don't think the value you get from Apple's developer program is worth $99/year and 30% the solution is simple. Take your money elsewhere. Frankly though, in App development, distribution, and billing, the $99 is trivial and 30% is a damn good deal. If you're losing money on those numbers, the problem is with *you* and no one else.
Even more importantly, since Apple takes care of all the credit card stuff, and as an app developer you never have cardholder data in your possession; you don't have to worry about PCI DSS compliance.
I have enough headaches enforcing PCI at work. If I had to deal with it at home I wouldn't touch the App Store, or anyone else's mobile store, with a 10' pole.
> sales tax for all 50 states and the territories will
> create an accounting nightmare
Oh, it's a whole lot worse than you realize. Cities, counties, multi-county "transportation districts", multi-city infrastructure districts, and like can all levy sales taxes too. Any and all of these, including the state, may chose to levy the tax only on certain goods, but not on others. They may have sales tax "holidays" certain times of the year; maybe for all goods maybe for just a few. For example, "back to school" sales tax holidays on various school supplies are fairly common each August. And all of these, and the hoops you'd have to go through to remit them, may change unpredictably at the whim of any of a thousand local governments.
And there's no simple and easy way to do a lookup. First off, do you use the customer's residential, billing, or shipping address to decide what tax to levy? And once you have an address, how do you do a lookup? You can't use the ZIP code or even the city field of the address. Those fields are determined by the post office for its own convenience in planning delivery routes and may not conform to municipal borders at all. (I've first-have experience with this. I once lived with one town and regularly got a card in the mail requesting and reminding me to use the neighboring larger town, in which my local post office was located, as the city field in my address.) Obviously, the state field is not granular enough.
What you'd need is an always up-to-date, nationwide, lookup of street addresses and the actual borders of every city, county, and miscellaneous tax district in all of the US; and what and when they tax and what's exempt and when. That sort of thing may be within the capabilities of a giant like Amazon. A startup? Not so much. This law would by a massive barrier to entry that would stop new internet businesses like a brick wall.
And all that's just the practical difficulty. There's also the basic fairness issue. If I run a business in one place, with no physical presence in the other, why SHOULD I have to pay even a single penny to that other government... from which I receive no services and to which I have no representation?
That's all well and good for little titles that people throw together in their spare time. But when somebody actually gave desktop Linux users a legitimate chance to purchase Linux versions of A-list titles by major studios (And threw a good portion of their revenue back into development of open-source tools and libraries that would have helped other companies do the same thing.); the Linux community responded resoundingly with rejection by refusing to buy in anything close to the numbers necessary to keep the business afloat. So nice as the Humble Bundle average is (And the HB have recently abandoned the indie, cross-platform philosophy anyway.), color me unimpressed by desktop Linux users' willingness to pay.
Mac users, OTOH (Since the overall topic *IS* iTunes.), do buy in the numbers necessary to keep outfits like Aspyr and Feral afloat and bring A-List titles to the platform (Even though they are often a bit later than the PC release and the hype has usually died down by the time of the port.)
... in *ANY* of these lawsuits. (Don't forget, there are a whole lot more companies throwing suits around in the mobile space than just Apple and Sansung.) If those previously-confidentail settlements can be dragged out into the public courts; there's no longer a way for the companies involved to come to a cease fire that allows both sides to save face.
Without that ability, watch all parties go for nothing but the full-out nuclear option in the future. There's no reason to do anything else.
> Bush is the 'worst ever', worse even than Andrew
> Johnson. sheesh!
Worst ever? No.
Worst in living memory? Probably not.
Worst in my own lifetime? Most definitely. And that probably applies to the majority of the /. readership.
The police in the bay area have become increasingly heavy-handed and more than a bit trigger-happy over the last few years. And the public has been responding by an increasing withdrawal of their trust and goodwill.
Johannes Mehserle, and the pittance of a slap on the wrist "punishment" for his murder of Oscar Grant*, for example, probably set relations between the police and the black community back by a good decade or so alone. Then, for an encore, they went about gunning down a mentally ill homeless man on a different BART platform, shooting an Iraq war veteran in the head with a tear gas canister during the occupy protests, and switching off telephone and internet service... something that you expect in North Korea or middle-eastern theocracies and dictatorships, not the United States... to suppress speech and communication during another protest (of the aforementioned killing of the mentally-ill homeless man). These sorts of things are not exactly going to engender trust or goodwill, especially amongst minorities or otherwise marginalized communities.
(* Yes, I know, Oscar Grant was kind of a scumbag. That's not relevant though. This is the United States. We're just not supposed to *DO* summary executions here... at all And being a scumbag doesn't change the fact that Grant was unarmed, unresisting, and lying prone and motionless when Mehserle decided to shoot him in the back.)
> That, and the well pump is 100' away and pushes
> the water to the house, power is strung to it, and is
> a bit of a draw.
One thing to consider...
When I lived in hurricane country, we were on a well too. But in addition to the electric pump, we also had an old-timey hand pump on it. Close the valve to the electric, open the one to the hand pump, and you've got all the water you need. Just pump it into a jug. 100' isn't very far to carry it.
I know you specifically mentioned flushing the toilets, so you're talking non-potable water there. But long-term storage of potable water has its own issues and lots of people forget to cycle their stockpile.
> It would be essentially a phone, only with no
> ability to place callsâ"just data+GPS.
I first saw something like that in a Fry's in 2000-ish. That one relied on a 2-way paging service rather than a cellular service though.
What left me fairly horrified, though, was that this one could be *locked* to your kid's wrist, and the marketing blurbs suggested continuing to use the thing on your kids clear into their teens! Being not long out of college, my own teen years were relatively recent in my memory, and I was aghast at the notion.
Eh?
An inherent part of competition and an inherent part of winning *IS* that your opponent loses. It's not just Microsoft and Apple, and it's not just in business. Video games, sports, card and casino games, the courtroom elections... the ideal outcomes all involve a clear winner and a clear loser.
In how many sports do the teams play to tie? Hay many sports don't have some sort of overtime to fix a tie at the end of regulation play?
Do you thing Google *does't* want to boot-stomp Bing into the dirt? Do you think they *don't* want gmail to crush hotmail?
Obama and Romney can't BOTH be elected president, come November.
Hell... even the very court case we're discussing is an example.... Samsung won, Apple lost.
Eh?
Those DVD players may be lacking at Best Buy. But walk up to Chinatown and you'll find a dozen stores on Grant Street alone selling players in which you can play any region's disk while skipping all the tedious commercials and MPAA blather. Sure, they don't say "Sony" on the front. But they're half the price, work just as well, and are likely made by the same company, if not in the same factory even.
Check out his blog.
He's offended... positively beside himself even... at Apple's horrific audacity in charging the astronomical sum of $99 a year for a membership in the iPhone developer program. A regular crime against humanity, that.
To make matters worse, you also have to own a Macintosh on which to run xCode! That's unlike Android which, in his world, seems to allow you to do all the development directly on the device. That Vaio he bought to do the Android development on is just an unnecessary and extravagant luxury, of course.
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have lower Klout scores than Justin Bieber. Until this summer, so did President Obama. And as far as I could tell, Steve Jobs never had Klout at all. And this is a metric that I'm supposed to take seriously? I think not.
If that concerns you, you can use Apple's free iPhone
Configuration Utility to create and add a profile that requires a longer passcode. You keep the numeric keypad, but your code can be an arbitrary length. You also get an "OK" button to press to enter the code so the potential attacker won't even know how long your passcode really is without other clues.
You can also set up passcode aging and history and reduce the maximum number of failed attempts before an automatic wipe.
For that matter, you can use it and/or the Apple Configurator tool to do quite a lot of iDevice management and customization that the usual /. peanut gallery crowd would have you believe is impossible on iOS.
It also worked here in San Francisco.
Thing is though... that tactic *wouldn't* work if Uber weren't so astoundingly superior to the alternative. We have the same problems as New York... a corrupt medallion system that leaves too few cabs on the roads to the point that it's sometimes faster to walk than to take a cab somewhere. Calling a cab to be dispatched to you is a sick joke unless you're going to SFO. And the cabbies scream bloody murder whenever City Hall tries to improve the system... even if it's something as simple as issuing more medallions.
It should be no wonder to anyone with half a brain that people who actually need to move about town applaud the company that's done an end-run around such a stupid, dysfunctional, and corrupt system; and created a "cab" system that actually works.
Yeah. And the funny thing is, back when they were ripping off RIM instead of Apple they actually had the chutzpah to call their Blackberry knock-off a "Blackjack". This whole affair is pretty much SOP for Samsung.
> It's completly in a pilots discretion if he want's to
> have some prankster on board who doesn't care if
> the whole flight gets delayed because of a funny
> shirt.
Not a bad point. But the time for the pilot to make that decision was at the scheduled departure time, before he ever saw Arijit's anti-TSA shirt. It would be entirely reasonable and correct for him to decide to keep to his schedule, have the gate agent award that seat to a stand-by passenger, and if anyone is late, tough cookies.
But that's not what happened. He decided to wait and then had Arijit removed for nothing more than the content of the shirt. That's the problem. And obviously, the airline decided the pilot was in the wrong, as they compensated Arijit with a new flight. And as a customer-facing employee, it was the pilots responsibility to make the correct decision in the first place.
And yes, the TSA deserves just as much, perhaps more, blame as the pilot for causing Arijit to be delayed in the first place over such an obviously harmless and obviously POLITICAL (the most important kind of speech to protect) statement as: âoeBombs ZOMG,â âoeZOMG Terrorists Alert level bloodred â" run, run take off your shoes.â Accompanied by the picture you can see on the article, he was very obviously simply mocking the TSA goons, not threatening anybody.
Just because someplace else is worse, doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to the problems we have here. And the situation here has clearly been deteriorating.
Since you brought it up, let's take 1989 for an example:
In 1989, the US was a place people fled TO, in order to get AWAY from repressive governments; not the government doing the repressing.
In 1989, you could go on that trip to Thailand without being irradiated with backscatter x-rays, taking you shoes and belt off, or getting felt up by some thug at the airport; and your friends or family could accompany you to the departure gate to see you off.
In 1989, you could pop over to some of the closer countries such as Canada, Mexico, or The Bahamas, for a visit; and be re-admitted to the US with nothing more than your drivers' license.
In 1989, no one had heard of a "free speech zone". The entire *country* was a free speech zone.
In 1989, you could go to concerts, amusement parks, nightclubs, and ballparks without being groped by some thug, having to show the contents of your pockets, backpack, or purse to another, going through a metal detector, or being under constant 1984-ish CCTV surveillance.
Maybe we're still free enough, in comparison to countries like China, to be considered "the land of the free". But we've been becoming progressively less free for years.
Oh, it gets better than that.
For over thirty years, the US Navy has been operating nuclear reactors which can be run at a reduced power level with the pumps turned off entirely. It's called natural circulation. You know... hot water rises, cold water sinks, and all that. They came up with the technology for the Los Angeles and Ohio classes of submarine, because subs hide by being quiet, pumps make noise, and you can make the sub stealthier if you can run the reactor without pumps. So why not require ALL reactors to have this ability?
The Navy, by the way, has a perfect operational safety record with its submarine reactors... not a single reactor accident in about sixty years.
Oh what short memories people have.
When the iPhone first came out, there was no SDK, no AppStore, no way to load 3rd-party code on it at all. Apple's response to people who wanted to add functionality? "You should write web apps in HTML 5."
People screamed bloody murder at the notion. They DEMANDED an SDK. Jailbreaking started not to get around AppStore restrictions, but because there was no way to code and load native apps of ANY kind. So Apple eventually gave in and released an SDK and created the AppStore.
And now you want to go back? Now having a native app is indolent?
Too true.
Aside from some minor hiccups on O2's network In the UK, there's nowhere else in the world that you hear about carriers having issues with the iPhone that AT&T has here.
In fact, it's just jaw dropping when you see how good and cheap service is overseas. A friend of mine moved back to the US from Singapore a couple years ago. He had an iPhone there, and never had a dropped call... not one, anywhere in the country. And what did he pay for data? On SingTel (Singapore's equivalent to AT&T) the first 12GB carried no extra charge over his voice plan. After 12GB it was metered until he had $30 of data charges, and after that, it was unlimited. That was on top of a $45 voice and text plan. And all that is, of course in $SGD, of which you get about 1.2 for every $USD.
What AT&T, Verizon, and their lot are allowed to get away with here is nothing less than highest robbery.
Forget fines. DMCA takedown demands are supposedly filed "under penalty of perjury". Last I heard, perjury is a prosecutable offense. Force all DMCA takedowns to be filed in the name of a specific responsible individual. And start tossing those individuals in prison for these fraudulent takedowns. *Then* I'll be impressed.
Probably a more expensive formula of pavement than is necessary in places where the temperature range between summer and winter is less extreme. (San Francisco, for instance, rarely gets above 80 in the summer or below 40 in the winter.)
In many cases the person writing the listing for Monster, Craigslist, or whatever, is not actually an engineer who knows exactly what skills that specific job will require. He's an HR type who kinda sorta knows a little bit about what a programmer does, can write a flowery description of how wonderful the company is, can write up a generic description of what entails a good employee, and knows all of the latest technical buzz words, but not necessarily what they mean.
In these cases, the hiring manager may ask HR for candidates who know C. But the HR guy sees that objective-C and C# are "trending" on Facebook, on LinkedIn, in the "twitterverse" and in the "social media blogosphere"; and he puts them on the listing instead of plain old C.
There are also jobs where it's just assumed that you know C. My first job out of college was like that. I was hired because I'd studied Ada in school and the job description didn't list C at all. But the actual job involved quite a lot of re-implementation of existing Ada code into C. And it was just assumed that, as a programmer and computer science graduate, I knew C by default.