Some great movies in your list and I would add "Dark star", however the GP stipulated previous sci-fi and those movies all came out much later than star trek.
Also: The communicators inspired Motorola's first "clamshell" / "flip" cellular phone. (Which they named "Star Tak". B-) )
The communicators-in-the-logo/badge, slap-to-call interface in later shows has also been replicated: VoIP-over-WiFi speakerphones in I.D. badges for (initially) hospital emergency room personnel. Slap the badge to establish an initial connection to a voice recognition system which processes the request and sets up the call - on the hospital phone net, including the badge-phones and outside lines. It has speed-dial phrases for the currently on-shift people for particular roles, a by-name directory for departments and personnel, and the user's personal directory.
... things like Star Trek... weren't engineered to begin with
Actually, they were. FAR more so than any previous scifi to come out of Hollywood. (And note the SciFi / SF distinction. Star Trek is much closer to SF than just about anything "studio" before Babylon 5.)
Gene R. and his cohorts put together an engineering manual for the authors (which eventually was published and made available to the general public) in order to maintain technical consistency across episodes and keep things plausible enough that techies - much of their target audience demographic - wouldn't be constantly having their "willing suspension of disbelief" broken by glaring errors.
and, let's face it, Star Trek is terrible science fiction.
Compared to what went before it moved very far in the right direction. It was just about the best SF to hit moving images up to then (with a very few exceptions, such as a few episodes of Twilight Zone.)
You darned whippersnappers just don't UNDERSTAND how bad it was, back when 110 BPS was a fast connection.
Re:as Knuth told me when I was at his house
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I wrote Knuth an email once. He never wrote me back.
As with the xkdc.org reference in the grandparent, this is something of an in joke. Don doesn't do email. B-)
Those weird quantum things cancel out by the time you get to our level.
Actually they don't. Otherwise your computer's chips wouldn't work, all metals would be silver-colored, and don't even get me STARTED on the chemistry that runs the cells of both animals and plants.
Imagine if you could lift an aircraft carrier sized ship in to space with nearly no energy, then accelerate to.999 light speed with no more thrust than a model rocket.
Why insist on breaking the energy conservation laws? I'd settle for being able to lift an object from the Earth's surface to low Earth orbit, using electrical power at 50% efficiency. B-)
Of course once there it would be nice to fly it around using electrical power at similar efficiency, with the reaction being against the rest of the mass of the universe.
I will take the option of seatbelts while sitting at the bridge of your spaceship, thank you very much.
Reverse engineering things like Star Trek to come up with plausible explanations is lots of fun.
My take on near misses with photon torpedoes making "bang" sounds and throwing people around the bridge (besides the needs of dramatic presentation).
- Photon torpedoes are established as matter-antimatter nuclear bombs.
- These can be expected to produce some extreme EMP as a side-effect of their detonation and the "gamma light" from it striking any nearby matter.
- The artificial gravity / inertial compensation for multi-G impulse engine thrust (and any oddball forces from warp drive and changes to it) has to be variable to handle such variable conditions.
- The EMP interferes with its control mechanism. Not enough to smear the crew like paint over a nearby bulkhead. But enough for a near-miss to throw them around in their seats and rattle the ship enough to create the "bang" sound in the air. (Perhaps also the "whoosh" of a passing spacecraft, due to an electromagnetic "wake" from its systems - though that was clearly established as use of artistic license after the soundless flybys in the first trial footage were unsatisfying.)
- The engineers made the artificial gravity system VERY reliable. (Note that it keeps working when most of the ship's mechanisms, including other life support, is on the fritz.) And they made it good enough to keep the crew largely intact through "impacts" that seriously degrade the other systems and structural integrity of the ship. But they weren't able to get it down to no noticeable effect.
- And the designers didn't add seatbelt-equivalents until the first movie (after Admiral Kirk, done with his five-year missino, had given them hell about it.) B-)
... if you can lower the inertial mass of your spaceship can't you accelerate at ridiculous rates?
See E. E. Smith's _Lensman_ series for an exploration of that.
My own take: All bets are off since the principles are currently unknown. But assuming that things like energy conservation and action/reaction remain valid, an "inertial damper" seems likely to function as a way to transfer thrust evenly from the engines to the matter of the ship, crew, cargo, etc. (Or deliberately unevenly to achieve a convenient artificial gravity without spinning the ship.)
Oh, yes. There is also recent evidence (characteristic triple-tracks in plastic detectors) that the "cold fusion" style deuterium-tritium ion loading of palladium actually does produce fusion under some as yet undetermined set of additional conditions.
This might be a sign of a practical condensed-matter solid-state quantum-mechanical system for practical fusion power. (If so, a hypothetical practical device might be analogous to an integrated circuit or a complex semiconductor device like an SCR, triac, or insulated-gate-bipolar transistor, with the experimenters currently at the stage of probing for a hot spot on a galena crystal to make a diode for a crystal-set radio receiver while struggling to come up with a theoretical model explaining the details of the underlying mechanism in a way adequate to design a transistor.)
Nuclear fusion is pretty much a potential infinite source of clean electrical energy and we have 2 options to try to master plasma confinement long enough to harvest that energy. One is investigated with ITER and the other is the inertial confinement.
Third is inertial electrostatic confinement - Busard's polywell, Elmore-Tuck-Watson, Farnsworth-Hirsch,...
"Well-regulated" at the time meant "well-adjusted" or "in accurate operating condition",...
If we take that meaning, then it implies that members of the Tea Party, right-wing whackos, left-wing anarchists, etc, should not have the right to bear arms? A lot of gun owners aren't particularly well-adjusted or calibrated.
Nope.
Because, in District of Columbia v. Heller the Supreme Court confirmed that the "militia" clause was prefatory and the "right" clause was operative.
But even if it did matter, the militia clause 'refers to a well-trained citizen militia, which "comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense", as being necessary to the security of a free polity;' Are they physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense? They're probably a lot better armed, and capable with their arms, than the bulk of those on the other side of the political fence. And they certainly seem more interested in 'defending a free polity'.
Remember: The country was founded by nuts and other oddballs with guns. Jefferson, for instance, was obviously bipolar. Hamilton was rumored to be gay. There's lots of stuff to be said about Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, and others, too.
Most of the vagueness surrounds the part about well regulated militias.
No vagueness at all, especially after "District of Columbia v. Heller".
The majority ruled that the "militia" clause was prefatory (an introduction) and the "rights" clause operative.
Should only well regulated militias be allowed to bear arms?
Heller again: "the activities [the Amendment] protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia."
Who regulates the militias?
You misunderstand the term of art "well-regulated", which relates to correct operation (like a clock keeping good time). It has nothing to do with ruling them, everything to do with them being well-functioning fighters.
But it's also immaterial, as are the rest of your questions, because of the previous point.
For starters it doesn't mention how the militia should be regulated, what constitutes Arms or where they have the right to keep and bear them.
For that you do what "historiographers" do: Go back to the writings of the time and find out what the words meant to the authors and the other politicians who debated, suggested, and approved the wording. These people wrote a LOT of stuff which has survived in the historical record, much of it explaining what they meant or debating what it should say and why.
The editor of _The Federalist_ - the political party paper of one of the major factions, in which much of this stuff was published - was Noah Webster, who was also a language reformer who wrote the then-definitive textbooks for teaching American English and compiled and published the first dictionary of the American English language. Timeline:
- 1783 Speller published.
- 1784 Grammar published.
- 1785 Reader published.
- 1787 Constitution completed.
- 1789 Bill of Rights completed.
- 1806 Webster's first dictionary published.
It's pretty clear that
- "Militia" was "everybody with their privately-owned arms" (later defined in law as divided into the "organized militia" - males of appropriate age except for those exempt due to things like being in other government service, and the "unorganized militia" - everybody else able and willing to fight.
- "Arms" in private hands at the time included warships, cannon (both small and large, including crew-served weapons on shipboard and on carriages), the latest smooth bore, rifle, and pistol technology, rockets, bombs, bayonets, swords, daggers, and other edged weapons, etc. Figure on it including anything of potential military application. (They also understood and promoted progress and invention, and knew about attempts at automatic weapons and interchangeable parts for mass production. So figure it includes future developments, just as "press" includes automated high-speed presses and broadcast media, and "papers" includes electronic records.)
- "Well-regulated" at the time meant "well-adjusted" or "in accurate operating condition", not "under the rule of a government official". Like a voltage regulator, not a beaurocrat. A clock was "well-regulated" to keep accurate time. A double-barreled shotgun was "well regulated" if the shot patterns from both barrels hit the same spot. "Well-regulated" for a militia meant that they had training in how to shoot and how to work together. At the time this was typically done on a local level, with periodic practice and with officers elected by the militiamen themselves.
- Where: 1785 August 19. (Jefferson to Peter Carr). "As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a mederate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprize, and independence to the mind. Let your gun, therefore, be the constant companion of your walks."
Obviously Jefferson didn't completely agree with Webster's attempts to "regulate" American English spelling.
Correction, For some reason it took Microsoft decades to CARE...
Yep. (Sorry if I was being too subtle. B-) )
But I must admit: Somehow they've managed to continue raking in the billions despite their product being the swiss cheese of software security. From a business perspective, maybe they had no NEED to care. B-(
Why? So we don't have any more thalidomide babies.
And use of thalidomide to treat psoriasis, other autoimmune diseases, several cancers,...
Unfortunately, bureaucratic overcaution leads to not approving things that should be approved. Beta blockers, for instance. Delay there is estimated to have caused something like 300,000 excess deaths.
But a bureaucrat gets dinged for approving a drug that ends up with pictures of flipper babies but not for holding off on one that would have saved enough lives to populate Toledo Ohio.
And even then, the trials aren't perfect. Remember Vioxx? That's just one example.
During the 1800s there were tons of miracle cures and tonics. Mostly, they were just over priced booze, but some could do real harm.
Actually a lot of them contained opiates. They could do real good, real harm, and were addicting (though somewhat less than tobacco).
Then the FDA came along in 1906 and put an end to most of it.
Actually, then came a couple of medical catastrophies:
- A (legitimate) drug company, making one of the early (legitimate) antibiotics as a syrup, chose to use ethylene glycol as a solvent. This did a good job of suspending the drug and improved the flavor. And killed a lot of people.
- A cosmetics company used the brand new synthetic aniline dye in an eyeliner preparation. This permanently stained the corneas of a number of teenagers, blinding them. (Thus did the FDA also get authority over cosmetics.)
The FDA (even in its weakened state) makes me laugh at those who tell horror stories about government intervention in health care.
During the debates over its creation the consensus of Congress was that, if this new agency resulted in more than a six-month delay in the introduction of useful new drugs, it would be counter-productive. Of course the incentive structure led to an excess of caution, exercise of power, and imposition of red tape. By 1998 the average time from IND filing to new drug approval was up to 7.3 years. As of 2006 the cost was estimated to be between $500 million and $2 billion. Per drug. (Ever wonder why those "breakthrough" medical news items on Slashdot never seem to lead to deployment? Slashdot's only existed since 1997 and judging by your ID you haven't been here for 7.3 years yet.)
The bureaucratic delay included rejecting research done in other countries. This delayed the approval of Thalidomide long enough to head off the "flipper baby" disaster in the US (and for its name to become so anathema that its use for the treatment of cancers, psoriasis, and autoimmune disease is stunted to this day.) But that same rejection held off the approval of Beta Blockers for avoidance of secondary heart-attacks by over a decade, prompting the Wall Street Journal to start the headline of their story on it "100,000 dead...". (This was the conservative end of the estimate - actual cost in lives at the time was probably more like 300,000.)
The cost of approval means many promising drugs are never even researched because there's no chance that, even if approved, they could ever recover the cost. Thus "orphan drugs".
Drugs and treatments for aging - the general process rather than specific diseases that strike oldsters - will never even be considered, because the FDA considers "aging" to be a natural process rather than a disease and won't approve drugs to intervene. Even if congress forced them to change that right now, with the time-to-market resulting from their foot-dragging it's too late for the boomers and Xers.
But don't hold your breath waiting for it to be available for YOUR cohort. As early as the '80s a US official let slip (on CNN's Crossfire) that the only way to get a handle on the impending bankruptcy of Social Security was to "bring the death rate up to meet the birthrate". With the recent nationalization of much of medical care the government has an incentive to let oldsters die once they retire and consume benefits while no longer paying in. Though a "cure" or significant mitigation of aging would likely result in better health and longer working life of the general population, government officials can be expected to view it as just extending the length of feeble old age and "drains on the system". IMHO anti-aging treatments will not be developed and deployed in the US - until they are deployed elsewhere and US oldsters start kicking and screaming.
If something happened like this on Apple OS X land, Apple would roll out an operating system update and disable Autorun. Perhaps, they could show a help document about installing applications with double clicking.
There were Apple viruses as of the original Macintosh, which had a similar feature for automatically loading drivers, software updates, and such.
They've been there, had that done to them, and moved on.
For some reason it took Microsoft decades to get the same message.
Jesus, don't you guys ever get tired of bashing windows?
Not as long as the ongoing barrage of malware built on Windows bugs continues and the PHBs of the world keep shoving Windows "solutions" down our throats at work while the bulk of computer-using humanity continues to use it at home.
Once it's no longer a blight on humanity we'll stop telling everybody what a blight on humanity it is. (Maybe we'll occasionally reminisce about what a blight on humanity it WAS, once that utopia arrives. B-) )
I wonder what bright soul at Microsoft thought it a good idea to extend autorun to all types of removable media.
Actually that originated with Apple, back with the Macintosh (or maybe even earlier).
Idea was to automatically load drivers for new devices from the device, system upgrades from the medium containing the software, etc. for that "plug it in and it just works" experience.
Of course it wasn't long after the Mac got into users' hands and development tools were available that some bright kid decided to put some prank software on a disk...
If you seriously think that NPR is liberal you need to expand your horizons a bit. NPR is barely left of center, let alone liberal.
That's just an appearance - caused by the far-left leaning of the bulk of US broadcast media and their deliberate attempt to make their position appear to be "center", allowing them to characterize anything "right" of them as "right-wing extremism".
Not that right-left matters much these days. Awareness of the libertarian-authoritarian axis has become sufficiently general that the current major political battle is between attempts to expand and shrink government power, rather than details of which behaviors are being suppressed and which can still be exercised without major government interference.
It may be _a_ basic input output system, but it is not the BIOS, which -- if I understand correctly -- was originally how all input/output was done through PCs.
BIOS was originally the small part of CP/M that had to be tweaked with the details of how to get to the devices on your particular hardware. It consisted mainly of things like character drivers for the keyboard, console text display (if present), and serial ports, and sector read/write drivers for the floppy disks.
As of the early xx86 IBM PCs the equivalent functionality (and more) had been added to the boot ROM, rather than having the boot ROM be JUST a basic boot-and-launch driver. Then with bigger/cheaper ROM in successive generations there was a race between bloat, "feature protection" (such as anti-overclocking) and "trojan horse features" (DRM, AMT,...) in the BIOS vs. OSes recovering control of the hardware interfaces to improve flexibility for functionality upgrades (at the cost of having to understand more about the particular machine's hardware).
These days even Wikipedia doesn't seem to cover the origins.
Am I the first to say that dumbing down low level config is a bad idea?
IMHO dumbing down the boot is a GOOD idea. There should be as little as possible between the raw hardware and the OS to tamper with the user's control of his system.
(Example of such tampering: Intel AMT - a built-in man-in-the-middle attack on the machine, sold to corporate IT departments as a FEATURE.)
But this stuff is not dumbing down (i.e. stripping down) the BIOS. It's adding MORE JUNK. Breaking the OLDER junk is incidental to doing a poor job adding the new crud (or deliberately suppressing the older functionality).
IANAL so take my postings with the requisite amount of salt.
Corporate law is primarily state level - except as it impacts stock transactions - so "where it is" will vary by state. A good state to start with is Delaware: As of a couple decades ago it was the state with the best terms for corporations and most new ones (that were really interested in doing business) incorporated there. (Some of the old ones reincorporated there as well.)
A good starting place to look for references is the "corporate officiers" section of the wikipeida article on Fiduciary duty.
Another is the plantif's pleadings in any of the boilerplate class-action stockholder suits that are filed, like clockwork, whenever a major corporation's stock takes a downturn - especially if certain law firms find anything that can be used as evidence of wrongdoing by corporate officials.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me there is a methodology issue. (Well more than one actually but this one is glaring.)
Where did they get the URLs?
The research could be measuring effectiveness of link-publication and advertising placement programs more than actual amount of content.
Some great movies in your list and I would add "Dark star", however the GP stipulated previous sci-fi and those movies all came out much later than star trek.
Also: The communicators inspired Motorola's first "clamshell" / "flip" cellular phone. (Which they named "Star Tak". B-) )
The communicators-in-the-logo/badge, slap-to-call interface in later shows has also been replicated: VoIP-over-WiFi speakerphones in I.D. badges for (initially) hospital emergency room personnel. Slap the badge to establish an initial connection to a voice recognition system which processes the request and sets up the call - on the hospital phone net, including the badge-phones and outside lines. It has speed-dial phrases for the currently on-shift people for particular roles, a by-name directory for departments and personnel, and the user's personal directory.
Still - what could possibly, after the realisation of last step, cause them to forget about seatbelts?
I take it you've never been in the military?
... things like Star Trek ... weren't engineered to begin with
Actually, they were. FAR more so than any previous scifi to come out of Hollywood. (And note the SciFi / SF distinction. Star Trek is much closer to SF than just about anything "studio" before Babylon 5.)
Gene R. and his cohorts put together an engineering manual for the authors (which eventually was published and made available to the general public) in order to maintain technical consistency across episodes and keep things plausible enough that techies - much of their target audience demographic - wouldn't be constantly having their "willing suspension of disbelief" broken by glaring errors.
and, let's face it, Star Trek is terrible science fiction.
Compared to what went before it moved very far in the right direction. It was just about the best SF to hit moving images up to then (with a very few exceptions, such as a few episodes of Twilight Zone.)
You darned whippersnappers just don't UNDERSTAND how bad it was, back when 110 BPS was a fast connection.
I wrote Knuth an email once. He never wrote me back.
As with the xkdc.org reference in the grandparent, this is something of an in joke. Don doesn't do email. B-)
Those weird quantum things cancel out by the time you get to our level.
Actually they don't. Otherwise your computer's chips wouldn't work, all metals would be silver-colored, and don't even get me STARTED on the chemistry that runs the cells of both animals and plants.
Imagine if you could lift an aircraft carrier sized ship in to space with nearly no energy, then accelerate to .999 light speed with no more thrust than a model rocket.
Why insist on breaking the energy conservation laws? I'd settle for being able to lift an object from the Earth's surface to low Earth orbit, using electrical power at 50% efficiency. B-)
Of course once there it would be nice to fly it around using electrical power at similar efficiency, with the reaction being against the rest of the mass of the universe.
I will take the option of seatbelts while sitting at the bridge of your spaceship, thank you very much.
Reverse engineering things like Star Trek to come up with plausible explanations is lots of fun.
My take on near misses with photon torpedoes making "bang" sounds and throwing people around the bridge (besides the needs of dramatic presentation).
- Photon torpedoes are established as matter-antimatter nuclear bombs.
- These can be expected to produce some extreme EMP as a side-effect of their detonation and the "gamma light" from it striking any nearby matter.
- The artificial gravity / inertial compensation for multi-G impulse engine thrust (and any oddball forces from warp drive and changes to it) has to be variable to handle such variable conditions.
- The EMP interferes with its control mechanism. Not enough to smear the crew like paint over a nearby bulkhead. But enough for a near-miss to throw them around in their seats and rattle the ship enough to create the "bang" sound in the air. (Perhaps also the "whoosh" of a passing spacecraft, due to an electromagnetic "wake" from its systems - though that was clearly established as use of artistic license after the soundless flybys in the first trial footage were unsatisfying.)
- The engineers made the artificial gravity system VERY reliable. (Note that it keeps working when most of the ship's mechanisms, including other life support, is on the fritz.) And they made it good enough to keep the crew largely intact through "impacts" that seriously degrade the other systems and structural integrity of the ship. But they weren't able to get it down to no noticeable effect.
- And the designers didn't add seatbelt-equivalents until the first movie (after Admiral Kirk, done with his five-year missino, had given them hell about it.) B-)
... if you can lower the inertial mass of your spaceship can't you accelerate at ridiculous rates?
See E. E. Smith's _Lensman_ series for an exploration of that.
My own take: All bets are off since the principles are currently unknown. But assuming that things like energy conservation and action/reaction remain valid, an "inertial damper" seems likely to function as a way to transfer thrust evenly from the engines to the matter of the ship, crew, cargo, etc. (Or deliberately unevenly to achieve a convenient artificial gravity without spinning the ship.)
Oh, yes. There is also recent evidence (characteristic triple-tracks in plastic detectors) that the "cold fusion" style deuterium-tritium ion loading of palladium actually does produce fusion under some as yet undetermined set of additional conditions.
This might be a sign of a practical condensed-matter solid-state quantum-mechanical system for practical fusion power. (If so, a hypothetical practical device might be analogous to an integrated circuit or a complex semiconductor device like an SCR, triac, or insulated-gate-bipolar transistor, with the experimenters currently at the stage of probing for a hot spot on a galena crystal to make a diode for a crystal-set radio receiver while struggling to come up with a theoretical model explaining the details of the underlying mechanism in a way adequate to design a transistor.)
Nuclear fusion is pretty much a potential infinite source of clean electrical energy and we have 2 options to try to master plasma confinement long enough to harvest that energy. One is investigated with ITER and the other is the inertial confinement.
Third is inertial electrostatic confinement - Busard's polywell, Elmore-Tuck-Watson, Farnsworth-Hirsch, ...
Fourth is dense plasma focus - Lerner, Mather, ...
"Well-regulated" at the time meant "well-adjusted" or "in accurate operating condition", ...
If we take that meaning, then it implies that members of the Tea Party, right-wing whackos, left-wing anarchists, etc, should not have the right to bear arms? A lot of gun owners aren't particularly well-adjusted or calibrated.
Nope.
Because, in District of Columbia v. Heller the Supreme Court confirmed that the "militia" clause was prefatory and the "right" clause was operative.
But even if it did matter, the militia clause 'refers to a well-trained citizen militia, which "comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense", as being necessary to the security of a free polity;' Are they physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense? They're probably a lot better armed, and capable with their arms, than the bulk of those on the other side of the political fence. And they certainly seem more interested in 'defending a free polity'.
Remember: The country was founded by nuts and other oddballs with guns. Jefferson, for instance, was obviously bipolar. Hamilton was rumored to be gay. There's lots of stuff to be said about Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, and others, too.
Most of the vagueness surrounds the part about well regulated militias.
No vagueness at all, especially after "District of Columbia v. Heller".
The majority ruled that the "militia" clause was prefatory (an introduction) and the "rights" clause operative.
Should only well regulated militias be allowed to bear arms?
Heller again: "the activities [the Amendment] protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia."
Who regulates the militias?
You misunderstand the term of art "well-regulated", which relates to correct operation (like a clock keeping good time). It has nothing to do with ruling them, everything to do with them being well-functioning fighters.
But it's also immaterial, as are the rest of your questions, because of the previous point.
"What? Every American is entitled to a pair of preserved bear arms hanging on the wall. How could that possibly be misconstrued?"
Only if they don't hang those frilly little fringes on them.
For starters it doesn't mention how the militia should be regulated, what constitutes Arms or where they have the right to keep and bear them.
For that you do what "historiographers" do: Go back to the writings of the time and find out what the words meant to the authors and the other politicians who debated, suggested, and approved the wording. These people wrote a LOT of stuff which has survived in the historical record, much of it explaining what they meant or debating what it should say and why.
The editor of _The Federalist_ - the political party paper of one of the major factions, in which much of this stuff was published - was Noah Webster, who was also a language reformer who wrote the then-definitive textbooks for teaching American English and compiled and published the first dictionary of the American English language. Timeline:
- 1783 Speller published.
- 1784 Grammar published.
- 1785 Reader published.
- 1787 Constitution completed.
- 1789 Bill of Rights completed.
- 1806 Webster's first dictionary published.
It's pretty clear that
- "Militia" was "everybody with their privately-owned arms" (later defined in law as divided into the "organized militia" - males of appropriate age except for those exempt due to things like being in other government service, and the "unorganized militia" - everybody else able and willing to fight.
- "Arms" in private hands at the time included warships, cannon (both small and large, including crew-served weapons on shipboard and on carriages), the latest smooth bore, rifle, and pistol technology, rockets, bombs, bayonets, swords, daggers, and other edged weapons, etc. Figure on it including anything of potential military application. (They also understood and promoted progress and invention, and knew about attempts at automatic weapons and interchangeable parts for mass production. So figure it includes future developments, just as "press" includes automated high-speed presses and broadcast media, and "papers" includes electronic records.)
- "Well-regulated" at the time meant "well-adjusted" or "in accurate operating condition", not "under the rule of a government official". Like a voltage regulator, not a beaurocrat. A clock was "well-regulated" to keep accurate time. A double-barreled shotgun was "well regulated" if the shot patterns from both barrels hit the same spot. "Well-regulated" for a militia meant that they had training in how to shoot and how to work together. At the time this was typically done on a local level, with periodic practice and with officers elected by the militiamen themselves.
- Where: 1785 August 19. (Jefferson to Peter Carr). "As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a mederate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprize, and independence to the mind. Let your gun, therefore, be the constant companion of your walks."
Obviously Jefferson didn't completely agree with Webster's attempts to "regulate" American English spelling.
Correction, For some reason it took Microsoft decades to CARE...
Yep. (Sorry if I was being too subtle. B-) )
But I must admit: Somehow they've managed to continue raking in the billions despite their product being the swiss cheese of software security. From a business perspective, maybe they had no NEED to care. B-(
Why? So we don't have any more thalidomide babies.
And use of thalidomide to treat psoriasis, other autoimmune diseases, several cancers, ...
Unfortunately, bureaucratic overcaution leads to not approving things that should be approved. Beta blockers, for instance. Delay there is estimated to have caused something like 300,000 excess deaths.
But a bureaucrat gets dinged for approving a drug that ends up with pictures of flipper babies but not for holding off on one that would have saved enough lives to populate Toledo Ohio.
And even then, the trials aren't perfect. Remember Vioxx? That's just one example.
During the 1800s there were tons of miracle cures and tonics. Mostly, they were just over priced booze, but some could do real harm.
Actually a lot of them contained opiates. They could do real good, real harm, and were addicting (though somewhat less than tobacco).
Then the FDA came along in 1906 and put an end to most of it.
Actually, then came a couple of medical catastrophies:
- A (legitimate) drug company, making one of the early (legitimate) antibiotics as a syrup, chose to use ethylene glycol as a solvent. This did a good job of suspending the drug and improved the flavor. And killed a lot of people.
- A cosmetics company used the brand new synthetic aniline dye in an eyeliner preparation. This permanently stained the corneas of a number of teenagers, blinding them. (Thus did the FDA also get authority over cosmetics.)
The FDA (even in its weakened state) makes me laugh at those who tell horror stories about government intervention in health care.
During the debates over its creation the consensus of Congress was that, if this new agency resulted in more than a six-month delay in the introduction of useful new drugs, it would be counter-productive. Of course the incentive structure led to an excess of caution, exercise of power, and imposition of red tape. By 1998 the average time from IND filing to new drug approval was up to 7.3 years. As of 2006 the cost was estimated to be between $500 million and $2 billion. Per drug. (Ever wonder why those "breakthrough" medical news items on Slashdot never seem to lead to deployment? Slashdot's only existed since 1997 and judging by your ID you haven't been here for 7.3 years yet.)
The bureaucratic delay included rejecting research done in other countries. This delayed the approval of Thalidomide long enough to head off the "flipper baby" disaster in the US (and for its name to become so anathema that its use for the treatment of cancers, psoriasis, and autoimmune disease is stunted to this day.) But that same rejection held off the approval of Beta Blockers for avoidance of secondary heart-attacks by over a decade, prompting the Wall Street Journal to start the headline of their story on it "100,000 dead ...". (This was the conservative end of the estimate - actual cost in lives at the time was probably more like 300,000.)
The cost of approval means many promising drugs are never even researched because there's no chance that, even if approved, they could ever recover the cost. Thus "orphan drugs".
Drugs and treatments for aging - the general process rather than specific diseases that strike oldsters - will never even be considered, because the FDA considers "aging" to be a natural process rather than a disease and won't approve drugs to intervene. Even if congress forced them to change that right now, with the time-to-market resulting from their foot-dragging it's too late for the boomers and Xers.
But don't hold your breath waiting for it to be available for YOUR cohort. As early as the '80s a US official let slip (on CNN's Crossfire) that the only way to get a handle on the impending bankruptcy of Social Security was to "bring the death rate up to meet the birthrate". With the recent nationalization of much of medical care the government has an incentive to let oldsters die once they retire and consume benefits while no longer paying in. Though a "cure" or significant mitigation of aging would likely result in better health and longer working life of the general population, government officials can be expected to view it as just extending the length of feeble old age and "drains on the system". IMHO anti-aging treatments will not be developed and deployed in the US - until they are deployed elsewhere and US oldsters start kicking and screaming.
Now feel free to laugh.
If something happened like this on Apple OS X land, Apple would roll out an operating system update and disable Autorun. Perhaps, they could show a help document about installing applications with double clicking.
There were Apple viruses as of the original Macintosh, which had a similar feature for automatically loading drivers, software updates, and such.
They've been there, had that done to them, and moved on.
For some reason it took Microsoft decades to get the same message.
Jesus, don't you guys ever get tired of bashing windows?
Not as long as the ongoing barrage of malware built on Windows bugs continues and the PHBs of the world keep shoving Windows "solutions" down our throats at work while the bulk of computer-using humanity continues to use it at home.
Once it's no longer a blight on humanity we'll stop telling everybody what a blight on humanity it is. (Maybe we'll occasionally reminisce about what a blight on humanity it WAS, once that utopia arrives. B-) )
I wonder what bright soul at Microsoft thought it a good idea to extend autorun to all types of removable media.
Actually that originated with Apple, back with the Macintosh (or maybe even earlier).
Idea was to automatically load drivers for new devices from the device, system upgrades from the medium containing the software, etc. for that "plug it in and it just works" experience.
Of course it wasn't long after the Mac got into users' hands and development tools were available that some bright kid decided to put some prank software on a disk...
If you seriously think that NPR is liberal you need to expand your horizons a bit. NPR is barely left of center, let alone liberal.
That's just an appearance - caused by the far-left leaning of the bulk of US broadcast media and their deliberate attempt to make their position appear to be "center", allowing them to characterize anything "right" of them as "right-wing extremism".
Not that right-left matters much these days. Awareness of the libertarian-authoritarian axis has become sufficiently general that the current major political battle is between attempts to expand and shrink government power, rather than details of which behaviors are being suppressed and which can still be exercised without major government interference.
It may be _a_ basic input output system, but it is not the BIOS, which -- if I understand correctly -- was originally how all input/output was done through PCs.
BIOS was originally the small part of CP/M that had to be tweaked with the details of how to get to the devices on your particular hardware. It consisted mainly of things like character drivers for the keyboard, console text display (if present), and serial ports, and sector read/write drivers for the floppy disks.
As of the early xx86 IBM PCs the equivalent functionality (and more) had been added to the boot ROM, rather than having the boot ROM be JUST a basic boot-and-launch driver. Then with bigger/cheaper ROM in successive generations there was a race between bloat, "feature protection" (such as anti-overclocking) and "trojan horse features" (DRM, AMT, ...) in the BIOS vs. OSes recovering control of the hardware interfaces to improve flexibility for functionality upgrades (at the cost of having to understand more about the particular machine's hardware).
These days even Wikipedia doesn't seem to cover the origins.
Am I the first to say that dumbing down low level config is a bad idea?
IMHO dumbing down the boot is a GOOD idea. There should be as little as possible between the raw hardware and the OS to tamper with the user's control of his system.
(Example of such tampering: Intel AMT - a built-in man-in-the-middle attack on the machine, sold to corporate IT departments as a FEATURE.)
But this stuff is not dumbing down (i.e. stripping down) the BIOS. It's adding MORE JUNK. Breaking the OLDER junk is incidental to doing a poor job adding the new crud (or deliberately suppressing the older functionality).
Where does it say that this has to be the case?
IANAL so take my postings with the requisite amount of salt.
Corporate law is primarily state level - except as it impacts stock transactions - so "where it is" will vary by state. A good state to start with is Delaware: As of a couple decades ago it was the state with the best terms for corporations and most new ones (that were really interested in doing business) incorporated there. (Some of the old ones reincorporated there as well.)
A good starting place to look for references is the "corporate officiers" section of the wikipeida article on Fiduciary duty.
Another is the plantif's pleadings in any of the boilerplate class-action stockholder suits that are filed, like clockwork, whenever a major corporation's stock takes a downturn - especially if certain law firms find anything that can be used as evidence of wrongdoing by corporate officials.