That was my first thought as well... with the incredible success MS has in new product development along with strong, effective leadership of the UN, how could this go wrong?
My wife plays that song. I find the lyrics to be campy humor. Not bad, in the same way that an R-rated Weird Al song would not be "bad". For reference:
Hey, Macklemore! Can we go thrift shopping?
What, what, what, what... [x7]
Bada, badada, badada, bada... [x9]
[Hook:] I'm gonna pop some tags Only got twenty dollars in my pocket I - I - I'm hunting, looking for a come-up This is fucking awesome
[Verse 1:] Nah, Walk up to the club like, "What up, I got a big cock!" I'm so pumped about some shit from the thrift shop Ice on the fringe, it's so damn frosty That people like, "Damn! That's a cold ass honkey." Rollin' in, hella deep, headin' to the mezzanine, Dressed in all pink, 'cept my gator shoes, those are green Draped in a leopard mink, girls standin' next to me Probably shoulda washed this, smells like R. Kelly's sheets (Piiisssssss) But shit, it was ninety-nine cents! (Bag it) Coppin' it, washin' it, 'bout to go and get some compliments Passin' up on those moccasins someone else's been walkin' in But me and grungy fuckin it man I am stuntin' and flossin' and Savin' my money and I'm hella happy that's a bargain, bitch I'm a take your grandpa's style, I'm a take your grandpa's style, No for real - ask your grandpa - can I have his hand-me-downs? (Thank you) Velour jumpsuit and some house slippers Dookie brown leather jacket that I found diggin' They had a broken keyboard, I bought a broken keyboard I bought a skeet blanket, then I bought a kneeboard Hello, hello, my ace man, my Mello John Wayne ain't got nothing on my fringe game, hell no I could take some Pro Wings, make them cool, sell those The sneaker heads would be like "Aw, he got the Velcros"
[Hook x2]
[Verse 2:] What you know about rockin' a wolf on your noggin? What you knowin' about wearin' a fur fox skin? I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm searching right through that luggage One man's trash, that's another man's come-up Thank your granddad for donating that plaid button-up shirt 'Cause right now I'm up in her stunting I'm at the Goodwill, you can find me in the (Uptons) I'm not, I'm not sick of searchin' in that section (Uptons) Your grammy, your aunty, your momma, your mammy I'll take those flannel zebra jammies, second-hand, I rock that motherfucker The built-in onesie with the socks on that motherfucker I hit the party and they stop in that motherfucker They be like, "Oh, that Gucci - that's hella tight." I'm like, "Yo - that's fifty dollars for a T-shirt." Limited edition, let's do some simple addition Fifty dollars for a T-shirt - that's just some ignorant bitch (shit) I call that getting swindled and pimped (shit) I call that getting tricked by a business That shirt's hella dough And having the same one as six other people in this club is a hella don't Peep game, come take a look through my telescope Trying to get girls from a brand? Man you hella won't Man you hella won't
(Goodwill... poppin' tags... yeah!)
[Hook]
[Bridge: x2] I wear your granddad's clothes I look incredible I'm in this big ass coat From that thrift shop down the road
Yeah, I'm a couple of years behind you. The only local BBSs I had access to (had to stay in the unlimited local calling zone!) were PC related, with only a token amount of non-PC content. One of them was an Amiga BBS IIRC, and there were some Apple BBSs, but they were out of my calling zone. I lived in a fairly low-population area. My parents had bought me (well, us) an Apple IIe, since that was what the school had:)
I didn't discover BBSes until I was 14 years old when a kid showed one to me at school. By the time I got my own modem, I had a Windows PC (I think?) and when I tied up the house phone, it was with a girl:)
When I said "open", I meant as in unencumbered. But yeah, I remember peeking and poking to figure out what happened when you did different things. I didn't have a schematic for the machine, and there was no Google. Of course, I could have mail-ordered the schematic or possibly ordered one from the library for a few weeks at a time, if I'd known one even existed. My printer came with one, so I did amuse myself with that for a while. You could increment the steppers (or any of the 8 pins!) manually and do some pretty cool text tricks. My dad was not a programmer, but he did see I was interested so he got me magazines where you would type in pages of code and make a little fractal or something appear. God help you if you forgot to load the OS first so you could save your work! My uncle seemed like the coolest guy ever. He went off to college and brought me back a few packs of pirated games crammed onto bright orange disks. Memories...:)
As cool as all that was, it was no more open than the CherryPy, information wasn't as easy to find or as inexpensive, the machine had nowhere near the power, and the cost of the machine was much higher. To say we are going backwards is not really true... it is much easier to geek out on hardware today than it was in the 80s, and much cheaper.
Doesn't Japan have a constitution that was written and imposed by the Americans? I guess Americans aren't "Europe", but they certainly were mostly European in the 1940s.
But most of the things you describe would be covered in civil court. Unless you engage in something like fraud, the authorities will not come arrest you for breaking your mortgage terms. If I stop insuring my house, the mortgage company can foreclose or sue me. They cannot have an officer throw me in prison. The phone companies have the Federal Government enforcing their interests... that's pretty different.
I'm just typing a reply totally devoid of information back to say I agree.
I also think we shouldn't tax corporations - at least not income tax. We could make up for the relatively small loss of revenue by taxing dividends and capital gains at the full rate. This would seriously reduce the amount of lobbying going on and seriously reduce the shenanigans going on in finance departments. It would eliminate the rationale behind off-shoring, and probably bring some amount of foreign desk jobs here as a tax haven. It would eliminate the howls of "double taxation" by people who get taxed on their dividends and capital gains.
He's actually more like Clinton than Bush when it comes to responding.
I can't actually disagree with that sentiment. The same thought went through my mind as I was typing my previous post. The biggest differences are consent and effectiveness. The cruise missiles cost millions of dollars and mostly hit where the targets were a half hour prior. They were also used against the wishes of the host government. That said, both cruise missiles and drones offer a tempting "easy" show of force, in terms of risk to forces.
What would have been brazen would have been to ignore all of that and NOT go after him.
Agreed, but I didn't expect that. I expected him to give Pakistan a heads up, if not seek their permission.
The only reason the US went into Libya was because Gaddafi wanted to create a new currency based on gold to be used in the oil trade.
Or - and I don't mean to dismiss the conspiracy sites here - it might be possible that the Europeans were about to drag us in to the conflict one way or another, creating a big fat mess unless we got involved immediately and in a big way. The UK sent an almost undefended "warship", for goodness sakes.
Obama carried out a black-ops strike in a supposedly "friendly" country without informing them at all. That was incredibly brazen. He regularly conducts drone attacks, though it appears always with approval of the countries involved. Nevertheless, it is a fairly aggressive posture. He wasted very little time at all going into Libya.
He might not talk like Bush, but he acts a lot like Bush. The main difference seems to be European acceptance. I don't see anything to make me doubt that he'd respond appropriately.
Software was "open" as in visible, but for the most part you were not free to change and redistribute. At the high end, the specs were "open" for paying customers, but protected by nondisclosure agreements. Even when not, the schematics were subject to copyright - you couldn't go out and produce your own. It was open for hacking, but not really "free". A $40 CherryPy has more power, memory, storage, and connectivity then the highest-end servers of the 80s, and it is almost completely unencumbered by IP restrictions.
And hardware aside... Google did not exist in the 80s. If you wanted to learn hardware, you needed a mentor or at least some source of books and magazines. As a resource for learning how to hack, the internet is just... amazing. If one of my kids has "the knack", then they will be in a much better spot than I was in the 80s.
That's exactly the same situation we were in when kids were playing games on Commodore 64s. For every geek peeking and poking the address space, there were hundreds of kids plugging in a cartridge and grabbing a joystick.
Most of that generation grew up playing blocky versions of arcade games on the C64 or Oregon Trail at school on an Apple. The smart kids could peek and poke to their hearts content, but now those kids have things like Arduinos and Mindstorms and robotics competitions. The barrier to entry for programming is a web browser and a text editor, available everywhere, and it is a lot more powerful than printing your name in a goto loop at Radio Shack.
I have a 48gx. It's a nice calculator, and indeed the software is well-written. But it will never run efficiently on anything else. It's machine code written for a dead architecture. It doesn't really matter how well-written it is, because it is a dead end. It did it's job well, and that's great, but today I'd rather have a less-efficient library written in some portable language. Sure, HP managed to get some more life out of the code - but they did it by emulating the old Saturn chip in ARM... in the end a much uglier hack than porting source code.
Honestly I pity the world my kids would grow up in.
Seriously? You can walk into a store and buy a "phone" running Linux for under $200. It gets several hours of battery life, and has a better processor and more memory and storage than anything available on the desktop 15 years ago. The screen is on par with desktop standards of the same timeframe. If you handed me one in 1980, I would have believed you were a time traveler or an alien.
I can buy a $35 computer that far exceeds anything that a $3000 computer could do when I was a kid into computers in the 80s. The $35 computer is completely open, unlike anything from the 80s. Just like those computers, you can hook it up to your TV - but now your TV is a 55 inch 1080-line monster instead of a 20 inch 192-line lead and glass behemoth.
I have 5TB of redundant storage sitting in the basement - 15 years ago Microsoft was so proud of the ability to index a single TB that they launched Terraserver just to show off.
There will always be proprietary stuff out there, but I see no reason to pity my kids.
I'm advocating stripping powers away from corporations, rather than creating another hydra. "The Corporation" is the largest example of government interference in the free market ever. It's been incredibly disruptive.
I could see some use in this. I happen to like FreeBSD and ports - but if you were a Arch Linux expert, now you have a way to get really stable ZFS up quickly without learning a whole new environment.
I disagree that the right direction to go in is MORE regulation and MORE interference in the free market. I think that we need to strip away some of the protections afforded to corporations and re-think their role in our society. Having another corporation-like entity gain even more power seems like a step in the wrong direction. History has shown how strong the feedback cycle is between corporations and government, and similarly unions and government. Now they have free speech protection, not as individuals, but as entities in of themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL, you fixed it for Dr. Seuss! I'm not sure if that is bold and confident or heretic...
Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.
I like that I'm paraphrasing a historical figure to defend the teaching of a field's history.
That was my first thought as well... with the incredible success MS has in new product development along with strong, effective leadership of the UN, how could this go wrong?
My wife plays that song. I find the lyrics to be campy humor. Not bad, in the same way that an R-rated Weird Al song would not be "bad". For reference:
Hey, Macklemore! Can we go thrift shopping?
What, what, what, what... [x7]
Bada, badada, badada, bada... [x9]
[Hook:]
I'm gonna pop some tags
Only got twenty dollars in my pocket
I - I - I'm hunting, looking for a come-up
This is fucking awesome
[Verse 1:]
Nah, Walk up to the club like, "What up, I got a big cock!"
I'm so pumped about some shit from the thrift shop
Ice on the fringe, it's so damn frosty
That people like, "Damn! That's a cold ass honkey."
Rollin' in, hella deep, headin' to the mezzanine,
Dressed in all pink, 'cept my gator shoes, those are green
Draped in a leopard mink, girls standin' next to me
Probably shoulda washed this, smells like R. Kelly's sheets
(Piiisssssss)
But shit, it was ninety-nine cents! (Bag it)
Coppin' it, washin' it, 'bout to go and get some compliments
Passin' up on those moccasins someone else's been walkin' in
But me and grungy fuckin it man
I am stuntin' and flossin' and
Savin' my money and I'm hella happy that's a bargain, bitch
I'm a take your grandpa's style, I'm a take your grandpa's style,
No for real - ask your grandpa - can I have his hand-me-downs? (Thank you)
Velour jumpsuit and some house slippers
Dookie brown leather jacket that I found diggin'
They had a broken keyboard, I bought a broken keyboard
I bought a skeet blanket, then I bought a kneeboard
Hello, hello, my ace man, my Mello
John Wayne ain't got nothing on my fringe game, hell no
I could take some Pro Wings, make them cool, sell those
The sneaker heads would be like "Aw, he got the Velcros"
[Hook x2]
[Verse 2:]
What you know about rockin' a wolf on your noggin?
What you knowin' about wearin' a fur fox skin?
I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm searching right through that luggage
One man's trash, that's another man's come-up
Thank your granddad for donating that plaid button-up shirt
'Cause right now I'm up in her stunting
I'm at the Goodwill, you can find me in the (Uptons)
I'm not, I'm not sick of searchin' in that section (Uptons)
Your grammy, your aunty, your momma, your mammy
I'll take those flannel zebra jammies, second-hand, I rock that motherfucker
The built-in onesie with the socks on that motherfucker
I hit the party and they stop in that motherfucker
They be like, "Oh, that Gucci - that's hella tight."
I'm like, "Yo - that's fifty dollars for a T-shirt."
Limited edition, let's do some simple addition
Fifty dollars for a T-shirt - that's just some ignorant bitch (shit)
I call that getting swindled and pimped (shit)
I call that getting tricked by a business
That shirt's hella dough
And having the same one as six other people in this club is a hella don't
Peep game, come take a look through my telescope
Trying to get girls from a brand? Man you hella won't
Man you hella won't
(Goodwill... poppin' tags... yeah!)
[Hook]
[Bridge: x2]
I wear your granddad's clothes
I look incredible
I'm in this big ass coat
From that thrift shop down the road
[Hook]
Is that your grandma's coat?
Yeah, I'm a couple of years behind you. The only local BBSs I had access to (had to stay in the unlimited local calling zone!) were PC related, with only a token amount of non-PC content. One of them was an Amiga BBS IIRC, and there were some Apple BBSs, but they were out of my calling zone. I lived in a fairly low-population area. My parents had bought me (well, us) an Apple IIe, since that was what the school had :)
I didn't discover BBSes until I was 14 years old when a kid showed one to me at school. By the time I got my own modem, I had a Windows PC (I think?) and when I tied up the house phone, it was with a girl :)
When I said "open", I meant as in unencumbered. But yeah, I remember peeking and poking to figure out what happened when you did different things. I didn't have a schematic for the machine, and there was no Google. Of course, I could have mail-ordered the schematic or possibly ordered one from the library for a few weeks at a time, if I'd known one even existed. My printer came with one, so I did amuse myself with that for a while. You could increment the steppers (or any of the 8 pins!) manually and do some pretty cool text tricks. My dad was not a programmer, but he did see I was interested so he got me magazines where you would type in pages of code and make a little fractal or something appear. God help you if you forgot to load the OS first so you could save your work! My uncle seemed like the coolest guy ever. He went off to college and brought me back a few packs of pirated games crammed onto bright orange disks. Memories... :)
As cool as all that was, it was no more open than the CherryPy, information wasn't as easy to find or as inexpensive, the machine had nowhere near the power, and the cost of the machine was much higher. To say we are going backwards is not really true... it is much easier to geek out on hardware today than it was in the 80s, and much cheaper.
Doesn't Japan have a constitution that was written and imposed by the Americans? I guess Americans aren't "Europe", but they certainly were mostly European in the 1940s.
But most of the things you describe would be covered in civil court. Unless you engage in something like fraud, the authorities will not come arrest you for breaking your mortgage terms. If I stop insuring my house, the mortgage company can foreclose or sue me. They cannot have an officer throw me in prison. The phone companies have the Federal Government enforcing their interests... that's pretty different.
I'm just typing a reply totally devoid of information back to say I agree.
I also think we shouldn't tax corporations - at least not income tax. We could make up for the relatively small loss of revenue by taxing dividends and capital gains at the full rate. This would seriously reduce the amount of lobbying going on and seriously reduce the shenanigans going on in finance departments. It would eliminate the rationale behind off-shoring, and probably bring some amount of foreign desk jobs here as a tax haven. It would eliminate the howls of "double taxation" by people who get taxed on their dividends and capital gains.
He's actually more like Clinton than Bush when it comes to responding.
I can't actually disagree with that sentiment. The same thought went through my mind as I was typing my previous post. The biggest differences are consent and effectiveness. The cruise missiles cost millions of dollars and mostly hit where the targets were a half hour prior. They were also used against the wishes of the host government. That said, both cruise missiles and drones offer a tempting "easy" show of force, in terms of risk to forces.
What would have been brazen would have been to ignore all of that and NOT go after him.
Agreed, but I didn't expect that. I expected him to give Pakistan a heads up, if not seek their permission.
The only reason the US went into Libya was because Gaddafi wanted to create a new currency based on gold to be used in the oil trade.
Or - and I don't mean to dismiss the conspiracy sites here - it might be possible that the Europeans were about to drag us in to the conflict one way or another, creating a big fat mess unless we got involved immediately and in a big way. The UK sent an almost undefended "warship", for goodness sakes.
Obama carried out a black-ops strike in a supposedly "friendly" country without informing them at all. That was incredibly brazen. He regularly conducts drone attacks, though it appears always with approval of the countries involved. Nevertheless, it is a fairly aggressive posture. He wasted very little time at all going into Libya.
He might not talk like Bush, but he acts a lot like Bush. The main difference seems to be European acceptance. I don't see anything to make me doubt that he'd respond appropriately.
Software was "open" as in visible, but for the most part you were not free to change and redistribute. At the high end, the specs were "open" for paying customers, but protected by nondisclosure agreements. Even when not, the schematics were subject to copyright - you couldn't go out and produce your own. It was open for hacking, but not really "free". A $40 CherryPy has more power, memory, storage, and connectivity then the highest-end servers of the 80s, and it is almost completely unencumbered by IP restrictions.
And hardware aside... Google did not exist in the 80s. If you wanted to learn hardware, you needed a mentor or at least some source of books and magazines. As a resource for learning how to hack, the internet is just... amazing. If one of my kids has "the knack", then they will be in a much better spot than I was in the 80s.
That's exactly the same situation we were in when kids were playing games on Commodore 64s. For every geek peeking and poking the address space, there were hundreds of kids plugging in a cartridge and grabbing a joystick.
Most of that generation grew up playing blocky versions of arcade games on the C64 or Oregon Trail at school on an Apple. The smart kids could peek and poke to their hearts content, but now those kids have things like Arduinos and Mindstorms and robotics competitions. The barrier to entry for programming is a web browser and a text editor, available everywhere, and it is a lot more powerful than printing your name in a goto loop at Radio Shack.
I have a 48gx. It's a nice calculator, and indeed the software is well-written. But it will never run efficiently on anything else. It's machine code written for a dead architecture. It doesn't really matter how well-written it is, because it is a dead end. It did it's job well, and that's great, but today I'd rather have a less-efficient library written in some portable language. Sure, HP managed to get some more life out of the code - but they did it by emulating the old Saturn chip in ARM... in the end a much uglier hack than porting source code.
Honestly I pity the world my kids would grow up in.
Seriously? You can walk into a store and buy a "phone" running Linux for under $200. It gets several hours of battery life, and has a better processor and more memory and storage than anything available on the desktop 15 years ago. The screen is on par with desktop standards of the same timeframe. If you handed me one in 1980, I would have believed you were a time traveler or an alien.
I can buy a $35 computer that far exceeds anything that a $3000 computer could do when I was a kid into computers in the 80s. The $35 computer is completely open, unlike anything from the 80s. Just like those computers, you can hook it up to your TV - but now your TV is a 55 inch 1080-line monster instead of a 20 inch 192-line lead and glass behemoth.
I have 5TB of redundant storage sitting in the basement - 15 years ago Microsoft was so proud of the ability to index a single TB that they launched Terraserver just to show off.
There will always be proprietary stuff out there, but I see no reason to pity my kids.
I just don't see the general purpose computer going away any time soon.
But let's suppose it did... enterprise level hardware is still cheap by historical standards.
Fortunately, there is still full-blown unix available, and it keeps getting better and cheaper.
I'm advocating stripping powers away from corporations, rather than creating another hydra. "The Corporation" is the largest example of government interference in the free market ever. It's been incredibly disruptive.
I could see some use in this. I happen to like FreeBSD and ports - but if you were a Arch Linux expert, now you have a way to get really stable ZFS up quickly without learning a whole new environment.
May I ask what you mean? AFAIK it is much easier to bring a libel or defamation case in Europe.
My whole post was about unions.
I disagree that the right direction to go in is MORE regulation and MORE interference in the free market. I think that we need to strip away some of the protections afforded to corporations and re-think their role in our society. Having another corporation-like entity gain even more power seems like a step in the wrong direction. History has shown how strong the feedback cycle is between corporations and government, and similarly unions and government. Now they have free speech protection, not as individuals, but as entities in of themselves.
Hate speech is whatever the people in charge deem it to be.
You sound entirely too rational to be worried about a government official reading your Slashdot posts.