Right, but putting up randomly changing codes with individual digits randomly stopping (as they did in War Games) is not quite the same. It's especially egregrious when you see the same code flash by four or five times because the effects dept was lazy.:-)
Breaking launch codes a single digit at a time was one thing they got glaringly wrong, but then, every code-breaking scene in a movie seems to. You gotta show progress somehow, and a progress meter going from 0 to 100% of keyspace searched is pretty boring. (And still wrong in subtle ways, since you'll on average find the key halfway through.)
Oh, and my brother did actually redbox a phone once with a handheld cassette recorder....
Yes, but how much spyware could you install on your Commodore 64? How many problems could you cause that weren't solved by a power-cycle and write-protected floppy masters?
Sure, GUIs lower the bar to making the computer useful, but I still argue that they've raised the bar for one to be considered clueful. A mischeivous kid could park keyloggers and all sorts of other fun stuff, with the hooks hidden away in registry keys. How many high school teachers are going to know how to handle that situation?
Now, how would I do the same on that Commodore 64? Cut open the write protect notch on some floppy, and compromise that diskette? Go burn an EPROM and swap out the ROM chips when the teacher isn't looking?
I believe it was one of the Data General Nova series that effectively had a Halt and Catch Fire instruction. It went something like this (memory may be faulty): Reading a 0 took 3 times as much energy as reading a 1 on those machines. The Jump-Indirect instruction was encoded as all zeros (or nearly all zeros). If you put JMP @0 at location 0 and branched to it, you'd repeatedly fetch zeros at location 0 at the fastest rate the machine could manage.
*poof*
(The reason the DG burned 3x the energy for 0 is that it apparently sensed 0s by writing 1s and looking to see if that changed the value by looking for a pulse on the sense line. Writes are destructive. If it turned out 0, it'd have to rewrite the 0 afterwards.)
I know... we should enter into a reciprocal remote spying agreement with another country we're close with. For example, we could spy on Brits for Tony Blair, and they could spy on Americans for us. Then, we just share the intelligence! Now America would not be spying on Americans any longer. That should work, right? After all, we already participate in extraordinary rendition!
Are you kidding me? What if the criminal caught by these methods found out how he was caught? All the evidence gathered by illegal means would be inadmissable in court.
I see. Prior to that, the last OS to ship w/ a BASIC was QBASIC under the old DOS utils package in Win95 (and maybe Win98?), as far as I recall.
I presume this applies to the downloadable.NET runtime, right? Do current copies of WinXP + SP2 include all the same stuff? (I a tad Windows-ignorant. My apologies.)
You see, it's those fancy color monitors that cause all the problems. The computer I typed my high school papers on couldn't even display blue!
Seriously! I used WordPerfect 4.2 running from a 5.25" floppy on a Tandy 1000, printing to a 9-pin dot matrix printer. My display was an Apple 9" green-screen monitor driven by the composite output on the Tandy 1000.
Sometimes I think modern computers are major overkill, and end up tripping over their own weight.
I think many teachers already have a hard time anticipating what the computer is going to do. The thought of letting the kids make it do something different must be terrifying for them. At least, that was my experience.
Every so often, you find a clueful teacher or two. Problem is, as computers get more complex, the bar for cluefulness keeps rising and all the clued get jobs in industry.
Sun is like BASF. (You know the slogan: They don't make a lot of the products you use. They make a lot of the products you use better.) I don't suppose you use any windfarms, hydroelectric dams, coal-fired or nuclear power plants either, eh? Or could it be that, like many Sun servers, they're part of the infrastructure you rely on?
For instance, the fact they think the name V//V (or Viiv, or whatever) is a good one (regardless of the merits—or lack thereof—of the platform) should hint at some sort of pervasive mental illness...
No, but the expected number of physical encounters with AIDS in the stated test is 2, with a standard deviation of 1.22. And if I did my math right, there's about a 10% chance you won't sleep with one of the hookers with AIDS.
This test is more closely equivalent to half the hookers having AIDS, and a 100% chance in each pair that one has AIDS. In that situation, your odds of not sleeping with someone having AIDS is more like 0.39%. Thus, the 3% number indicates smart people are doing better than random, but still... it's a heavily stacked test.
(BTW, noticed I did not say "contract AIDS", because really, you contract HIV with some probability, and HIV develops into AIDS with some other probability that can be further affected by medication, etc. But nobody would be pedanting enough to point that out to me, would they? Oh, wait. This is Slashdot.)
Yes! I never understood the fascination of smiley packs, and who needs cheesy downloaded screensavers when you have Xscreensaver? And, hello... BitTorrent anyone?
Both musical scores and performances can be copyrighted. So, for instance, although the works of Bach and Mozart are outside copyright, I can't sample the Boston Philharmonic's performances of said works. For a given song, you have the musical score, the lyrics, and the performance. Each of the three pieces can have separate copyrights associated with them. The musical score seems to be the most fragile though.
Although, the Beastie Boys recently pushed the boundaries apparently regarding three notes they sampled—perhaps the shortest sampling of a sequence of notes successfully defended under copyright law that still required deep litigation to settle. The narrow victory should give all artists pause.
Taxes are part of that expenditure. Payroll taxes do not affect those with large incomes nearly the way they affect those with smaller incomes. For one thing, payroll taxes only affect wages. They do not affect capital gains and dividends.
Income taxes are progressive, but sales and property taxes are not. Sales tax is assessed in proportion to consumption, not in proportion to income or wealth. Thus, sales taxes tend to be regressive, as those with less income spend a greater proportion of their income on basic necessities. Property taxes are a bit more complicated: They tend to hit folks in the middle. Poorer folks tend to rent, and pay property tax indirectly through rent. That tax is amortized over all the renters and so tends to hit each individual less. The folks in the middle buy houses and get hit with property tax directly. As your wealth grows, typically the value of your property grows sublinearly. I know if my income doubled, I would not buy a house that cost twice as much.
So, there's two impacts here:
Overall tax burden, measured as a proportion of income, is closer to flat than most people realize.
The amount of income available for investment (e.g. wealth accumulation) is vastly limited for people under some threshold.
That threshold isn't a fixed number, but rather flexible depending on the spending habits of individuals. I agree: Most people don't save enough, and push that threshold higher than it should be. But it's a very real fact that there is a threshold above which only truly reckless spending would cause you not to accumulate wealth. (And, well, that happens often enough if you look for washed up celebrities....)
Personally, I think many of the recent tax reforms are rather bogus... they tend to tilt the overall tax burden further toward the lower ranks, pushing the investment (and thus, wealth accumulation) threshold further up. Cecil Adams did a thoughtful analysis of Reagan's tax reforms. I'd love to see him do an update relative to Bush's reforms. Hint: Us middle class wage earners don't earn the bulk of our income from dividends. I bet you can guess who does, though.
I'm in favor of progressive taxation, not because "Oh, the rich guy can better afford it." Rather, the putative "rich guy" benefits more from the infrastructure, stability and social investment the government performs than the average individual. Roadways, public works, stable financial markets (overseen by the SEC), etc. Those don't directly impact the "little guy," except to cause the movers and shakers to decide where they do business, and how much business they choose to conduct. It's those with capital that reap the most direct benefits, and so they owe something back to the system that allows them to accumulate and control that wealth. It's only fair.
Historically, Gecko hasn't handled non-scrolling backgrounds very well. I guess its architecture didn't anticipate them. If you *really* want to slow down a page on a Gecko-based browser, pin the background and make the foreground elements translucent. Extra bonus points if you make the background an animated GIF. Even on my Opteron 246, scrolling such pages happens in seconds-long chunks.
(ObFreudianSlip: I originally typed "scrolling such pages" as "scrolling suck pages.")
Oh, definitely. I'd accept a 2x increase in daily commute time if I could use the bulk of the transit time productively, say, on my laptop or something. Especially if the train has WiFi. Every productive minute on the train subtracts a minute I need to be at the office (except when scheduled meetings force arrival or departure times).
Thing is, in the scenario I gave above, I wouldn't be able to use the time productively, since a large portion of it is used getting from one mode of transportation to the next (car-to-train, train-to-train, train-to-shuttle). I'd probably only be productive on the TRE, which is only about 1/3rd of the trip.
Google for distribution of wealth and you'll get tons of links, such as this one, which includes such nifty statistics for the US as:
The wealthiest 5% of households hold nearly 60% of all the wealth.
Wealth disparity has increased over the last 20 years.
The bottom 60% of households hold 4.2% of the wealth despite earning 26.8% of the income.
Careening back on topic... for what it's worth, I tend to telecommute in the morning and show up after lunch. I then drive home after the dinner rush--around 7PM. That usually works out pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, but putting up randomly changing codes with individual digits randomly stopping (as they did in War Games) is not quite the same. It's especially egregrious when you see the same code flash by four or five times because the effects dept was lazy. :-)
--JoeBreaking launch codes a single digit at a time was one thing they got glaringly wrong, but then, every code-breaking scene in a movie seems to. You gotta show progress somehow, and a progress meter going from 0 to 100% of keyspace searched is pretty boring. (And still wrong in subtle ways, since you'll on average find the key halfway through.)
Oh, and my brother did actually redbox a phone once with a handheld cassette recorder....
--JoeYes, but how much spyware could you install on your Commodore 64? How many problems could you cause that weren't solved by a power-cycle and write-protected floppy masters?
Sure, GUIs lower the bar to making the computer useful, but I still argue that they've raised the bar for one to be considered clueful. A mischeivous kid could park keyloggers and all sorts of other fun stuff, with the hooks hidden away in registry keys. How many high school teachers are going to know how to handle that situation?
Now, how would I do the same on that Commodore 64? Cut open the write protect notch on some floppy, and compromise that diskette? Go burn an EPROM and swap out the ROM chips when the teacher isn't looking?
--JoeMight I suggest an experiment? Go out to your car, and switch the two wires going to the battery, and see how that works out. :-)
--JoeI believe it was one of the Data General Nova series that effectively had a Halt and Catch Fire instruction. It went something like this (memory may be faulty): Reading a 0 took 3 times as much energy as reading a 1 on those machines. The Jump-Indirect instruction was encoded as all zeros (or nearly all zeros). If you put JMP @0 at location 0 and branched to it, you'd repeatedly fetch zeros at location 0 at the fastest rate the machine could manage.
*poof*
(The reason the DG burned 3x the energy for 0 is that it apparently sensed 0s by writing 1s and looking to see if that changed the value by looking for a pulse on the sense line. Writes are destructive. If it turned out 0, it'd have to rewrite the 0 afterwards.)
--JoeI know... we should enter into a reciprocal remote spying agreement with another country we're close with. For example, we could spy on Brits for Tony Blair, and they could spy on Americans for us. Then, we just share the intelligence! Now America would not be spying on Americans any longer. That should work, right? After all, we already participate in extraordinary rendition!
--JoeAre you kidding me? What if the criminal caught by these methods found out how he was caught? All the evidence gathered by illegal means would be inadmissable in court.
I should say "Last Microsoft OS." Obviously, Linux and most UNIXes have shipped with at least a C compiler for quite some time, and still do.
I see. Prior to that, the last OS to ship w/ a BASIC was QBASIC under the old DOS utils package in Win95 (and maybe Win98?), as far as I recall.
I presume this applies to the downloadable .NET runtime, right? Do current copies of WinXP + SP2 include all the same stuff? (I a tad Windows-ignorant. My apologies.)
--JoeYou see, it's those fancy color monitors that cause all the problems. The computer I typed my high school papers on couldn't even display blue! Seriously! I used WordPerfect 4.2 running from a 5.25" floppy on a Tandy 1000, printing to a 9-pin dot matrix printer. My display was an Apple 9" green-screen monitor driven by the composite output on the Tandy 1000.
Sometimes I think modern computers are major overkill, and end up tripping over their own weight.
--JoeErm... And where is this, exactly? I'm certain the Visual Basic runtime's there, but under what menu in WinXP will I find the Visual Basic compiler?
I think many teachers already have a hard time anticipating what the computer is going to do. The thought of letting the kids make it do something different must be terrifying for them. At least, that was my experience.
Every so often, you find a clueful teacher or two. Problem is, as computers get more complex, the bar for cluefulness keeps rising and all the clued get jobs in industry.
--JoeSun is like BASF. (You know the slogan: They don't make a lot of the products you use. They make a lot of the products you use better.) I don't suppose you use any windfarms, hydroelectric dams, coal-fired or nuclear power plants either, eh? Or could it be that, like many Sun servers, they're part of the infrastructure you rely on?
It's turtles all the way down, ya know?
I think the FTC might have something to say about that.
--JoeFor instance, the fact they think the name V//V (or Viiv, or whatever) is a good one (regardless of the merits—or lack thereof—of the platform) should hint at some sort of pervasive mental illness...
--JoeNo, but the expected number of physical encounters with AIDS in the stated test is 2, with a standard deviation of 1.22. And if I did my math right, there's about a 10% chance you won't sleep with one of the hookers with AIDS.
This test is more closely equivalent to half the hookers having AIDS, and a 100% chance in each pair that one has AIDS. In that situation, your odds of not sleeping with someone having AIDS is more like 0.39%. Thus, the 3% number indicates smart people are doing better than random, but still... it's a heavily stacked test.
(BTW, noticed I did not say "contract AIDS", because really, you contract HIV with some probability, and HIV develops into AIDS with some other probability that can be further affected by medication, etc. But nobody would be pedanting enough to point that out to me, would they? Oh, wait. This is Slashdot.)
--JoeYes! I never understood the fascination of smiley packs, and who needs cheesy downloaded screensavers when you have Xscreensaver? And, hello... BitTorrent anyone?
Both musical scores and performances can be copyrighted. So, for instance, although the works of Bach and Mozart are outside copyright, I can't sample the Boston Philharmonic's performances of said works. For a given song, you have the musical score, the lyrics, and the performance. Each of the three pieces can have separate copyrights associated with them. The musical score seems to be the most fragile though.
Although, the Beastie Boys recently pushed the boundaries apparently regarding three notes they sampled—perhaps the shortest sampling of a sequence of notes successfully defended under copyright law that still required deep litigation to settle. The narrow victory should give all artists pause.
--Joe
Taxes are part of that expenditure. Payroll taxes do not affect those with large incomes nearly the way they affect those with smaller incomes. For one thing, payroll taxes only affect wages. They do not affect capital gains and dividends.
Income taxes are progressive, but sales and property taxes are not. Sales tax is assessed in proportion to consumption, not in proportion to income or wealth. Thus, sales taxes tend to be regressive, as those with less income spend a greater proportion of their income on basic necessities. Property taxes are a bit more complicated: They tend to hit folks in the middle. Poorer folks tend to rent, and pay property tax indirectly through rent. That tax is amortized over all the renters and so tends to hit each individual less. The folks in the middle buy houses and get hit with property tax directly. As your wealth grows, typically the value of your property grows sublinearly. I know if my income doubled, I would not buy a house that cost twice as much.
So, there's two impacts here:
That threshold isn't a fixed number, but rather flexible depending on the spending habits of individuals. I agree: Most people don't save enough, and push that threshold higher than it should be. But it's a very real fact that there is a threshold above which only truly reckless spending would cause you not to accumulate wealth. (And, well, that happens often enough if you look for washed up celebrities....)
Personally, I think many of the recent tax reforms are rather bogus... they tend to tilt the overall tax burden further toward the lower ranks, pushing the investment (and thus, wealth accumulation) threshold further up. Cecil Adams did a thoughtful analysis of Reagan's tax reforms. I'd love to see him do an update relative to Bush's reforms. Hint: Us middle class wage earners don't earn the bulk of our income from dividends. I bet you can guess who does, though.
I'm in favor of progressive taxation, not because "Oh, the rich guy can better afford it." Rather, the putative "rich guy" benefits more from the infrastructure, stability and social investment the government performs than the average individual. Roadways, public works, stable financial markets (overseen by the SEC), etc. Those don't directly impact the "little guy," except to cause the movers and shakers to decide where they do business, and how much business they choose to conduct. It's those with capital that reap the most direct benefits, and so they owe something back to the system that allows them to accumulate and control that wealth. It's only fair.
What if we went to a pure "wealth tax"?
--JoeAMD integrated the memory controller onto the CPU. The downside of this is that whenever memory technology changes, the pinout must also change.
Historically, Gecko hasn't handled non-scrolling backgrounds very well. I guess its architecture didn't anticipate them. If you *really* want to slow down a page on a Gecko-based browser, pin the background and make the foreground elements translucent. Extra bonus points if you make the background an animated GIF. Even on my Opteron 246, scrolling such pages happens in seconds-long chunks.
(ObFreudianSlip: I originally typed "scrolling such pages" as "scrolling suck pages.")
--Joe
Oh, definitely. I'd accept a 2x increase in daily commute time if I could use the bulk of the transit time productively, say, on my laptop or something. Especially if the train has WiFi. Every productive minute on the train subtracts a minute I need to be at the office (except when scheduled meetings force arrival or departure times).
Thing is, in the scenario I gave above, I wouldn't be able to use the time productively, since a large portion of it is used getting from one mode of transportation to the next (car-to-train, train-to-train, train-to-shuttle). I'd probably only be productive on the TRE, which is only about 1/3rd of the trip.
--JoeI'd love to bike or take public trans, but...
- Drive 20-30 minutes to the nearest train station (at D/FW airport)
- Take the TRE to Dallas, a 40 minute ride
- Wait 10-15 mintues for the DART rail
- Sit on the DART for another 30 or so minutes
- Wait 5-10 minutes for the shuttle bus
- Ride the shuttle for another 10 minutes
So my 40-60 minute commute becomes more like 120+. And I'm still driving 20-30 minutes each way in heavy traffic. Uhm, no thanks.But that's Texas for you.
--JoeGoogle for distribution of wealth and you'll get tons of links, such as this one, which includes such nifty statistics for the US as:
Careening back on topic... for what it's worth, I tend to telecommute in the morning and show up after lunch. I then drive home after the dinner rush--around 7PM. That usually works out pretty well.
--Joe