So why ask for Canadian money? Wouldn't you prefer to be paid in monopoly money or lira or something valuable like that?
Heh. Most Ex-Marines I've known haven't wanted World Domination, they've wanted a nap. Smart guys, really, naps are much healthier than World Domination.
World domination isn't, historically, really for canucks. Have you tried forestry, illegal plant cultivation, making sitcoms that somehow avoid sucking, or 'living on the system'?
Lion,
Bear,
Barracuda,
Orangutan,
Giraffe,
Rhinocerous,
Bobcat,
Mountain Lion,
Rattlesnake,
and any other unused names of the animal kingdom hertofore unpublicised. Document following, please do not step on my rights.
Thank you.
Summary: Kevin Smith admits he is predisposed to like a Star Wars movie, but still calls it great because it is not as cheesy as the first two. He says that if you complained about the first two being kiddie, you now have no excuses. He then goes into rather gory detail about all the little tie-ins and close-ups and endings that you thought could never be put together in one movie. He raves about the space and saber battles.
All in all, I think the review was okay, but don't trust Kevin Smith after Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. I saw that movie and wanted my money back. Haven't seen anything new of his since.
*comment nasty, possibly / probably wrong. Would retract. Apologies.
Some of it stands, most definitely the part about the best being driven away from large corporations. That's true of my entire generation; I'm afraid the world will be ruled by toadies and bullies by the time I'm 45 because most of the people with a brain were so disgusted by it all they couldn't deal with the bs.
I know where you work, Mr. Blue Badge, and you drive good people away with a stick. I worked with a bunch of Ex-Big-Processor-Corporation employees, and my ex-GF worked for you. I heard things like, "One day, I got an e-mail and went to the conference room. The first words out of the man at the front's mouth were, 'If you're here, you still have a job.' Everyone else had a cardboard box that security watched them fill before they left the building." Now, I know I'm not tip-top of the pile. I'm not even 2/3ds of the way up, I don't think, because I hate coding. But I would only take a job with an employer like that were I desperate. The thing keeping a lot of tech workers out of the market in the States right now is more Respect and Treatment than Pay or anything else. I know a lot of amazing programmers who are simply incompetent at working for large companies and the small company credos aren't in as much demand anymore, so they're essentially fux0red. Really what needs to happen for big companies like the one I assume you work for is a culture change to be more like those companies who everyone wants to work for......
Hard to affect. But ultimately, your compnay tends to be going down in certain areas at the moment because your culture sucks and you can't keep good people because the ones you did have looked at how they were treated and said, "Hrm. Let's go somewhere else."
Not that I'd not take a freaking blue badge right now, but that's just 'cause I'm desperate and coding in something that makes me stupider every day I sit there and stare at it.
Anyways, what you want is drones and the only reason I begrudge you your drones is because they would lower my market value.
World peace is only achievable through some form of population control - once everyone has a decent standard of living we either need to go to space or prepare for another population boom like there is in China / S. America. We don't have enough fresh water for another boom like this. We also don't have enough oil to run the food gathering process. Military power is going to become rather drastically important in the future if something is not done to curb our population problems.... I hate to say it, I hate to believe it, but it's becoming more and more true. Europe has managed to keep a moderately steady population, and more power to them, but they have enormous problems with a dozen things that are related to other people having bred more than them.
And since major religions and governments aren't as peacefully minded as you are, you're completely wrong about how peace is going to come along. Look at the Catholic Church and their new pope.
Another similarity : Lawyers. And getting information out of lawyers is like.... errr....... yeah. Not as hard as doctors. Another example is counselors. Easier than lawyers. Basically any personal-service consultant has a minor obligation of this kind.... probably even fiscal planners, to a point.
I can't imagine wanting to develop a huge application in Office. I've been modifying one that was built before I got here for the last three months, and it's been.......... frustrating. I've started spending too much time on Slashdot.....
Anyways. Office is a decent tool to a point, and after that it drops off sharply.
Professional: n.
Engaging in a given activity as a source of livelihood or as a career: a professional writer.
(dictionary.com)
Excel: n.
Something people use to run their business.
Development: n.
Determination of the best techniques for applying a new device or process to production of goods or services.
Since there will always be a new version of Office, there will always be development to do. And since so many people are stupid enough to pay for it, being a professional developing with it is always going to be possible.
My advice is to not build huge applications in Office unless you have absolutely up-to-date versions. There are certain points in Office 97 / 2000 where you get to a critical load area of your code and suddenly die. Function calls are in the help but don't quite work properly. Old products aren't supported. I'm buying this book because I need it, but building an app with older tools - something many office users are relegated to - is not that great an idea.
Meh. It's all basic research. Just read up on Cold Fusion for about half an hour and heard it compared to the state of transistor research fifty-sixty years ago. Who knew then and who cares now are the important questions.
Of course, there are probably a hundred failed technologies (read a Heinlein novel and you get yeast strips) for each successful one, but this is a good step.
This is an interesting article, but brings up one little thing for me about security - when you go this far out, you make yourself a target. The first thing I thought at the end of the article was, "man, I'd love to show this guy." And I didn't think along the same lines he did. I thought small focused high-speed cameras placed under the neighbors' eaves, I thought replacing his keyboard with a snooped replica... Again, social engineering and hitting someone where they are not looking seems to be the key to any cracking, not technical powerhousing. And pronouncing to the world that you use three firewalls is just asking for trouble.
I'm not a cracker, I'm not even much of a hacker, but I'm naturally sneaky bastich. (TM) And as real sneaky bastiches know, you don't ever stand in someone's face and tell them to you're going to beat the crap out of them, you wait until they turn around.
I try to be a nice guy despite my tendencies, but still... This kind of article reminds me of the French and their lines.
You'd think that NASA would figure out that virtually any nerd would give his left leg to work on a spaceship. This could probably lead to things like, "Free Software Testing" and "Free Software Programming" for them if they were paying attention.
If you could get into Mars Probe source code, and debug it, would you?
Well, no, it didn't protect them from the 'improvement' clause in patent law. If you improve upon a patent, you get to patent the new thing. That's why patent law attempts to be so broad. If you can think of something new, you're golden. The amusing thing about patents is that not all of them are open secrets anymore, there are some that are not published as widely on purpose... Or at least there were some at some point. They were certainly protected on that particular chip - noone could build one with x y or z property. However, if someone found x1, y1, and z1 that made it faster, they could build it. Thus patents USED to push innovation forward because everyone who wanted to sell IP had to patent their product..... No such luck now.
The other option to patents USED to be trade secrets - they still exist. But if you don't patent it you're not protected, and if you patent it it must become public, so there were companies that just held onto their knowledge and produced at a high rate because noone else could. An example of a trade secret that I can think of is nuclear weapons, although that's a rather biased example.
The amusing thing is that there is a huge list of inventions that are reliant upon both. Ex: the modern RAM module.
Noone would have put the funds into designing it if they hadn't had the ability to patent the thing. Once they developed it, they patented it. This is just fine with me. However, what's really neato is that all these other companies decided they would reverse engineer / one up them, and therefore a year or two later have faster chips. Works all good.
The real problem I have with patents / copyrights is more in the software and artistic industries. Once you have a creative community that is farmed like today's music and movies are, your creative community is, well, a victim rather than a beneficiary. Everyone feels as if they depend upon making it big, and therefore supports the idea that if you 'make it big' you should still 'own' all the 'content' you have produced for your entire life. This seems fair, but more and more artists don't own this content.
When it comes to software, people are trying to patent / copyright basic interface. There's often not much new in the interfaces / systems being patented except the involvement of lawyers. This is lame.
But there still needs to be room somewhere for people / companies to create and have a window of profit based upon this creation if it is useful enough that people will pay for it. Without that, we wouldn't have many of our modern items. Think Bell Labs ran on sheer good will? Just because a few knowledge-producers have been world-class jerks doesn't mean the system is COMPLETELY broken.
You're right. I should have done it in base 2 anyways. I didn't want to dig up numbers on revolutionary war census data, because I'm lazy, but I figured it was something like 2M - 25M tops in the colonies at the time, and figured now was something in the range of 200-250. 300M is actually higher than I would have thought. Not that I cared about that - it's more the ratio that makes my point.
Indeed they do, but they also do a Russian Imperial sometimes. Terminator's a little thinner. They'll often put the Russian on cask and it's quite decent. No longer as high quality as some of the other beers in town, due to their mass-production issues, but certainly a whole lot better than anything brewed nationally. If you're looking for a normal stout, a good one that you can probably get farther north is the Obsidian by Deschutes.... And every year they brew a Jubilale, although this year's was universally considered 'crap' by the people I drink with.
There are quite a few of 'em in Portland. I just drink 'em, I don't catch the label unless it sucks ass. Luckily enough, I can't think of any offhand by name.
This was also in the time when we lacked a standing army. At this point, any militia is so badly outgunned that it would be a joke. If the National Guard got pissed off enough about Iraq they could..... lobby for more funding to start buying helmets so they could attempt to throw over the government.
Slashdot Mirror
So why ask for Canadian money? Wouldn't you prefer to be paid in monopoly money or lira or something valuable like that?
Heh. Most Ex-Marines I've known haven't wanted World Domination, they've wanted a nap. Smart guys, really, naps are much healthier than World Domination.
Browsing porn on those expensive hotel internet lines!
World domination isn't, historically, really for canucks. Have you tried forestry, illegal plant cultivation, making sitcoms that somehow avoid sucking, or 'living on the system'?
Not vicious enough. I only copyright stuff with more TEETH than that.
*tosses wooden Canadian nickel*
Lion, Bear, Barracuda, Orangutan, Giraffe, Rhinocerous, Bobcat, Mountain Lion, Rattlesnake, and any other unused names of the animal kingdom hertofore unpublicised. Document following, please do not step on my rights. Thank you.
Summary: Kevin Smith admits he is predisposed to like a Star Wars movie, but still calls it great because it is not as cheesy as the first two. He says that if you complained about the first two being kiddie, you now have no excuses. He then goes into rather gory detail about all the little tie-ins and close-ups and endings that you thought could never be put together in one movie. He raves about the space and saber battles.
All in all, I think the review was okay, but don't trust Kevin Smith after Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. I saw that movie and wanted my money back. Haven't seen anything new of his since.
*comment nasty, possibly / probably wrong. Would retract. Apologies.
Some of it stands, most definitely the part about the best being driven away from large corporations. That's true of my entire generation; I'm afraid the world will be ruled by toadies and bullies by the time I'm 45 because most of the people with a brain were so disgusted by it all they couldn't deal with the bs.
I know where you work, Mr. Blue Badge, and you drive good people away with a stick. I worked with a bunch of Ex-Big-Processor-Corporation employees, and my ex-GF worked for you. I heard things like, "One day, I got an e-mail and went to the conference room. The first words out of the man at the front's mouth were, 'If you're here, you still have a job.' Everyone else had a cardboard box that security watched them fill before they left the building." Now, I know I'm not tip-top of the pile. I'm not even 2/3ds of the way up, I don't think, because I hate coding. But I would only take a job with an employer like that were I desperate. The thing keeping a lot of tech workers out of the market in the States right now is more Respect and Treatment than Pay or anything else. I know a lot of amazing programmers who are simply incompetent at working for large companies and the small company credos aren't in as much demand anymore, so they're essentially fux0red. Really what needs to happen for big companies like the one I assume you work for is a culture change to be more like those companies who everyone wants to work for......
Hard to affect. But ultimately, your compnay tends to be going down in certain areas at the moment because your culture sucks and you can't keep good people because the ones you did have looked at how they were treated and said, "Hrm. Let's go somewhere else."
Not that I'd not take a freaking blue badge right now, but that's just 'cause I'm desperate and coding in something that makes me stupider every day I sit there and stare at it.
Anyways, what you want is drones and the only reason I begrudge you your drones is because they would lower my market value.
I don't think you're cynical enough.
World peace is only achievable through some form of population control - once everyone has a decent standard of living we either need to go to space or prepare for another population boom like there is in China / S. America. We don't have enough fresh water for another boom like this. We also don't have enough oil to run the food gathering process. Military power is going to become rather drastically important in the future if something is not done to curb our population problems.... I hate to say it, I hate to believe it, but it's becoming more and more true. Europe has managed to keep a moderately steady population, and more power to them, but they have enormous problems with a dozen things that are related to other people having bred more than them.
And since major religions and governments aren't as peacefully minded as you are, you're completely wrong about how peace is going to come along. Look at the Catholic Church and their new pope.
Another similarity : Lawyers. And getting information out of lawyers is like.... errr....... yeah. Not as hard as doctors. Another example is counselors. Easier than lawyers. Basically any personal-service consultant has a minor obligation of this kind.... probably even fiscal planners, to a point.
Good point.
I can't imagine wanting to develop a huge application in Office. I've been modifying one that was built before I got here for the last three months, and it's been.......... frustrating. I've started spending too much time on Slashdot.....
Anyways. Office is a decent tool to a point, and after that it drops off sharply.
Heh. In this case, it's probably both at once. No argument there. But if they want it, they feel they need it, and they cut checks that cash........
That's my point. Not that it's a good idea - noone ever said anything of the kind.
Professional: n.
Engaging in a given activity as a source of livelihood or as a career: a professional writer.
(dictionary.com)
Excel: n.
Something people use to run their business.
Development: n.
Determination of the best techniques for applying a new device or process to production of goods or services.
Since there will always be a new version of Office, there will always be development to do. And since so many people are stupid enough to pay for it, being a professional developing with it is always going to be possible.
My advice is to not build huge applications in Office unless you have absolutely up-to-date versions. There are certain points in Office 97 / 2000 where you get to a critical load area of your code and suddenly die. Function calls are in the help but don't quite work properly. Old products aren't supported. I'm buying this book because I need it, but building an app with older tools - something many office users are relegated to - is not that great an idea.
Note: this could all change in Office 2003.
Meh. It's all basic research. Just read up on Cold Fusion for about half an hour and heard it compared to the state of transistor research fifty-sixty years ago. Who knew then and who cares now are the important questions.
Of course, there are probably a hundred failed technologies (read a Heinlein novel and you get yeast strips) for each successful one, but this is a good step.
This is an interesting article, but brings up one little thing for me about security - when you go this far out, you make yourself a target. The first thing I thought at the end of the article was, "man, I'd love to show this guy." And I didn't think along the same lines he did. I thought small focused high-speed cameras placed under the neighbors' eaves, I thought replacing his keyboard with a snooped replica... Again, social engineering and hitting someone where they are not looking seems to be the key to any cracking, not technical powerhousing. And pronouncing to the world that you use three firewalls is just asking for trouble.
I'm not a cracker, I'm not even much of a hacker, but I'm naturally sneaky bastich. (TM) And as real sneaky bastiches know, you don't ever stand in someone's face and tell them to you're going to beat the crap out of them, you wait until they turn around.
I try to be a nice guy despite my tendencies, but still... This kind of article reminds me of the French and their lines.
You'd think that NASA would figure out that virtually any nerd would give his left leg to work on a spaceship. This could probably lead to things like, "Free Software Testing" and "Free Software Programming" for them if they were paying attention.
If you could get into Mars Probe source code, and debug it, would you?
Well, no, it didn't protect them from the 'improvement' clause in patent law. If you improve upon a patent, you get to patent the new thing. That's why patent law attempts to be so broad. If you can think of something new, you're golden. The amusing thing about patents is that not all of them are open secrets anymore, there are some that are not published as widely on purpose... Or at least there were some at some point. They were certainly protected on that particular chip - noone could build one with x y or z property. However, if someone found x1, y1, and z1 that made it faster, they could build it. Thus patents USED to push innovation forward because everyone who wanted to sell IP had to patent their product..... No such luck now.
The other option to patents USED to be trade secrets - they still exist. But if you don't patent it you're not protected, and if you patent it it must become public, so there were companies that just held onto their knowledge and produced at a high rate because noone else could. An example of a trade secret that I can think of is nuclear weapons, although that's a rather biased example.
The amusing thing is that there is a huge list of inventions that are reliant upon both. Ex: the modern RAM module.
Noone would have put the funds into designing it if they hadn't had the ability to patent the thing. Once they developed it, they patented it. This is just fine with me. However, what's really neato is that all these other companies decided they would reverse engineer / one up them, and therefore a year or two later have faster chips. Works all good.
The real problem I have with patents / copyrights is more in the software and artistic industries. Once you have a creative community that is farmed like today's music and movies are, your creative community is, well, a victim rather than a beneficiary. Everyone feels as if they depend upon making it big, and therefore supports the idea that if you 'make it big' you should still 'own' all the 'content' you have produced for your entire life. This seems fair, but more and more artists don't own this content.
When it comes to software, people are trying to patent / copyright basic interface. There's often not much new in the interfaces / systems being patented except the involvement of lawyers. This is lame.
But there still needs to be room somewhere for people / companies to create and have a window of profit based upon this creation if it is useful enough that people will pay for it. Without that, we wouldn't have many of our modern items. Think Bell Labs ran on sheer good will? Just because a few knowledge-producers have been world-class jerks doesn't mean the system is COMPLETELY broken.
And how well has he done with it again? A master's in management qualifies you for middle management.... He's gotten a little beyond that.
You're right. I should have done it in base 2 anyways. I didn't want to dig up numbers on revolutionary war census data, because I'm lazy, but I figured it was something like 2M - 25M tops in the colonies at the time, and figured now was something in the range of 200-250. 300M is actually higher than I would have thought. Not that I cared about that - it's more the ratio that makes my point.
Indeed they do, but they also do a Russian Imperial sometimes. Terminator's a little thinner. They'll often put the Russian on cask and it's quite decent. No longer as high quality as some of the other beers in town, due to their mass-production issues, but certainly a whole lot better than anything brewed nationally. If you're looking for a normal stout, a good one that you can probably get farther north is the Obsidian by Deschutes.... And every year they brew a Jubilale, although this year's was universally considered 'crap' by the people I drink with.
There are quite a few of 'em in Portland. I just drink 'em, I don't catch the label unless it sucks ass. Luckily enough, I can't think of any offhand by name.
This was also in the time when we lacked a standing army. At this point, any militia is so badly outgunned that it would be a joke. If the National Guard got pissed off enough about Iraq they could..... lobby for more funding to start buying helmets so they could attempt to throw over the government.