Ah, so now we understand when dave420 speaks of a "just" wage. It is after all only just that a street cleaner, who also has a family to raise, children to feed and educate, a house to purchase, *should* earn nearly as much as a software developer. They are both people, fellow humans.
However, here in the United States, the market determines what is "just," at least within the sandbox of the economy as our government regulates it. The way things work here is different. People are paid according to how hard they work, how smart they are, and perhaps most of all, how well they play the game/system.
Someone content to be a street cleaner gets street cleaner wages (which may be more than you think, most people don't want to pick up garbage; same for plumbers). Someone who spends their own money to go to college, works hard, stays educated and on top of the game (and knows how to play the game), earns more. Perhaps a LOT more. If that same person doesn't keep on top of the game, if that same person doesn't constantly keep working at justifying their worth, then they may earn less.
As an educated person, who went into a great deal of debt paying for that education, who is expected to pay for my own continuing education, who must work perhaps 60-80 hours a week at times without the luxury of overtime pay, who spends hours and hours at home keeping up with technology and business trends rather than spending that time with my family, I do not feel that it is "just" that an hourly manual laborer should earn more than a fraction of what I earn.
The United States is not Canada, or Europe, or whatever other nation you proudly call home (though if you are "European," proudly claiming a nation as a home is a dangerous thing, eh?). We are not the home of national (rationed) health care, national pensions (bankrupting the future), national doles for the unemployed, free college educations. We don't have the eternal high unemployment and anemic economic growth of a France or Germany. We don't think of "just" wages. We think of just opportunities. We think of justice being the ability of people to better themselves, not the mandated end-result of actually being bettered.
Here, if I as an individual, wallowing in my liberal angst at making so much more money than my fellow and allegedly equal human being, want to make sure that my local street cleaner earns a "just" wage, I can always whip out my check book and redistribute some of my income. Now there's justice.
Sorry, but the BS-o-meter has rung here. I run in circles with some millionaires. My family has its fair share, I have friends in that group, and I belong to a yacht club with lots of them. I know a lot of people whose last name you would recognize instantly.
I know people who either didn't go to college, or left early, to pursue their fortunes, as well as people who came up the ladder. Something each of them have in common is that they don't 'land jobs' using a resume. If you are a "proud millionaire" (real liquid money, not tied up in mortgaged real estate you are renting out), you don't get jobs by handing over a resume and interviewing, starting at the bottom rung as you (apparently) intimate in a later post. You get jobs via highly placed contacts, or in your case, allegedly a highly motivated self-starter who didn't get formally educated, you use your proudly acquired and hard-won million to run your own business(es). You create jobs, you do your own thing, you chafe at having "betters" directing you. The educated people, those who worked through hierarchy, they sometimes get jobs, or sometimes run busineses. However, pretty much every single highly successful person I know who didn't get formally educated runs their own business. They don't get jobs working for other people for a paycheck.
With one exception: when their business fails, when they lose everything taking the risks, they don't whine about it. They pick themselves up, they do take a bottom rung job if they have to, and they rebuild what they had. A guy I sail with was in that category, wound up living in his car, broke, and is now again in a mansion with a fat bank account, nice yacht and a successful business. Perhaps you are in that category, perhaps you had your million and lost it all. But something else about those people is that they are a bit too busy to be spouting BS on Slash-fing-dot.
Nations don't have wishes. People do. The people of Cuba who actively and loudly wish to have a government other than Fidel Castro generally wind up in prison or dead. Even the spineless European governments got a bit upset at Castro's oppressive actions recently.
As an American, I do not accept that a "nation" can legitimately choose a form of government which prevents the people of that nation from, on a regular basis, expressing their "wishes" regarding their form of government and its leaders. Any form of government other than a democratic government with regularily scheduled elections is illegitimate. A "nation" that "chooses" some other other form and then denies the right of future generations (or people who just change their mind) to choose a different government is illegitimate, and should be ostracized, isolated, cut off from trade, and generally mocked. No nation should be permitted to claim that its oppression of our fellow man is an "internal issue." Every single discussion with it should center on nothing more than its treatment of its people and its political oppression. I wish we treated far more nations on this planet the way we treat Cuba.
While our government has done and does many questionable/bad/evil things in our names, restricting commerce and political ties with Cuba is not one of those. When are you non-Americans going to realize that our money is OUR money, our aid is OUR aid, and we can choose how to spend it, with whom we will or will not trade and on what terms, whose hungry mouths we will feed, which nations we will help with AIDS medication, and whether *our* money will be spent by the U.N. or others in any way whatsoever that we dislike.
As for the current federal administration doing all sorts of allegedly bad things... in November, we get to choose whether or not we agree, and may very likely kick him out. When, exactly, do the people of Cuba get to do that vis-a-vis Castro?
What did I write that was indicative of not being 'grown up?' Did I identify you correctly?
Like I wrote earlier, I've been using Unix since before Windows existed. Today, I am writing this on a W2k machine. A Mac OSX Powerbook sits in the next room. I'm ssh'ed into one of our Linux boxes, behind which the Windows boxes are safely firewalled. These are just tools, you use the one appropriate for the task. Sure, Windows has long sucked (though W2k redeemed so many of those faults). But it remains the best tool for certain things. And Linux? It is a progeny of The Unix Way. That command which you proclaimed to be 'assinine' is The Unix Way. That is one of the hallmarks of its superiority in particular instances versus Windows and other environments. Linux and Unix in general is better because of those 'assinine' commands and its underlying architecture, not because it parrots Windows with pretty GUI environments. I haven't booted Linux into X for at least two years.
Bringing us back to the original point. Microsoft wordpad is in no way whatsoever an equivalent to sed, and anybody who says that Just Doesn't Get It.
Oops, typo... should have been [0-9]. And, it looks like slashdot ate some of it, thought it was html.
sed -e 's/([0-9]+):.*: (.*)$/\1 \2/' <f1 >f2
Using GNU/Linux -- Windows-free zone!
But not in the mind apparently. Let me guess, you love how the Linux GUIs and GUI applications are becoming more and more usable as Windows replacements.
Oops, typo... should have been [0-9]. And, it looks like slashdot ate some of it, thought it was html. Should have wrapped it in pre.
sed -e 's/([0-9]+):.*: (.*)$/\1 \2/' f2
Using GNU/Linux -- Windows-free zone!
But not in the mind apparently. Let me guess, you love how the Linux GUIs are becoming more and more usable as Windows replacements.
Larry
Re:Unix Tools and Shells.. that's what windows lac
on
Linux Users Are Spoiled
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Um, wordpad? wordpad?
Tell you what, you take 150000 lines of text, where the pattern is:
23523: asdf[134] - foo bar : xyz
All the numbers and text change on every line. I want *only* the leading digits before the colon, and the trailing text after the final colon, space separated. Doing this with a regular expression and sed is incredibly trivial. Something along the line of (not tested, but basically correct):
sed -e 's/([0-0]+):.*: (.*)$/\1 \2/' f2
Voila. Takes about thirty seconds.
Try that in, um, wordpad, and get back to me in a month when you finish. And don't blather on about some other Windows tool. You said wordpad can replace sed. Have lots of fun.
I always get a big kick out of the awe shown by Windows lusers when they see me rapidly and easily do a complex text manipulation operation such as that in/bin/vi (really ed). "How did you do that?!" It is sad. Sure, maybe Windows can do it via some VBscript or XML blah blah tied to Office via some OLE or COM blah blah, but I can do it from vi with a colon, or sed with a |. It's a whole mindset, and Windows just doesn't have it.
Larry (who was using vi and sed before Windows even existed)
NAC's *former* client apparently obtained portable IP space from ARIN over *FIFTEEN* months ago, and is leaving NAC *voluntarily*. Yet, now they want to force NAC to give up some of NAC's assigned IP space, which NAC obtained from ARIN in order to provide services to NAC clients. 45 days may not be a lot of time for a 'truly large network' but how about over FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY days?
Their former client is an utter asshole. They simply don't want to be responsible and make the effort to renumber their network, and want to use the lack of clue possessed by the legal system to their advantage, to cover up their own incompetence, and to steal from NAC. Their goal is not a "temporary" restraining order but rather a permanent judgement re-allocating the IP space. They are trying to assert property rights in it.
NAC pays for that IP space. NAC has to handle complaints about it. NAC has to manage routing issues. NAC has only a limited amout of IP space with which to service their customers. And most importantly, NAC DOES NOT OWN that space. ARIN merely assigned it to them, under an agreement which forbids NAC to do what the court has ordered.
Were I NAC, I would simply do as the court orders because doing otherwise is dangerous. And I would bill the former client for every last second spent on this, as well as a fee for handling any and all potential administration of the netblock (spam and other complaints, administrative email/contacts, so on), and of course a proportional share of the yearly ARIN fees. While fighting this.
AT&T was given a government mandated monopoly. They were given access to public ways often for free. They were given all sorts of benefits with the aim to provide telephone service to every last house in the nation. I find it difficult to feel that it is 'their' network.
Today, the network built over the last century belongs to the dwindling number of Baby Bell (RBOC) descendants of AT&T. The public deserves to get something back in return for all the benefits accrued to the RBOCs over nearly a century. Mandating that that network be shared in order to promote the public interest is an insignificant price to pay.
Agreed, however, PUC mandated rates are sometimes too low, sometimes too high. Public commissions deciding tariff rates is a problem.
An infinitely better solution would have been structural separation years ago: force the Bells to separate into multiple companies. One which manages the physical network infrastructure and charges all competitors the EXACT SAME rate for access to that network, and other company(ies) that provide services to business and consumer customers.
The fact is that for a long, long time, competition was ILLEGAL. RBOCs had a protected monopoly. Forcing other companies to build parallel networks rather than forcing the sharing of the existing network built with public legal protection and often public funds along the limited public right-of-way in our alleys, along our railroads, and beneath our roads is just wrong. It is a viewpoint which is oblivious to the history of the regulated and subsidized telecommunitions history of this nation. The Bells were given those protections because it is terribly expensive to build those networks. Same for the monopolies given to cable companies. Yet now we expect new entrants to the market to incur those network costs, sans the decades of monopoly protection to recoup the investment?
The only saving grace is that wireless technologies will be able to provide competition without needing to string wires all across the nation again. Hopefully it will be true competition, among multiple nimble local/regional competitors, not national goliaths like Comcast or SBC, which will be only too happy to stamp out all other competition and maintain a duopoly.
And one last comment. SBC in Illinois claimed that the POTS line (UNE-P) lease rate of about $12/mo paid by CLECs was *FAR* below their cost, and they lost big money every month on that. Looking at my SBC bill, I pay $5.61 for my line charge, and $4.50 for my "federal access charge" which is actually money SBC gets but they get to call it that. Everything else on my bill is option and tax (though some of that goes to SBC too).
Yet, did SBC lobby the PUC to raise the tariffs for what they charge me? No. They're apparently at least content with my $10.11 a month. I'm sure they make most profit on the extra optional services, but I'm also sure they squeak out at least a little from my $10.11.
So what did SBC attempt to get the CLEC UNE-P lease rate set to? Nearly TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS per month. Well over twice what SBC charges me, the consumer. My total phone bill, for TWO lines, including local long distance, with caller id, name display, second ring tone, taxes and fees is less than $35 a month from SBC. With SBC's proposed rate hike, a competitor would have had to charge me nearly $50/mo, BEFORE extras, taxes, fees and so on to provide the same.
In the end, the rate hike was to $19/mo. Meaning that a competitor would have to charge a bare profitless minimum of $38/mo to pay SBC for what SBC gives me for $35/mo total.
The most important thing to remember about the *average* consumer and their computer is that when something doesn't work, when something crashes, when they get a blue screen, they don't blame Bill Gates or the RIAA or whoever sold them the crap. They wonder "what did I do wrong?" It is one of the greatest brain-washings of all time.
Precisely. People with viewpoints like that often refer to "The Government" and seem to believe that "Government" money is mana from heaven. Taxation is involuntary servitude. It is confiscating the fruit of the labor of your fellow man. It is something to be minimized, not maximized. It is a necessary evil, with the emphasis on EVIL. To tell a person that they must, on pain of *death* (which is the ultimate power of the state, to kill you for resisting it), fork over their money so that a poet can sit at home and write poetry, is just morally wrong. Paying the poet voluntarily, that's a good thing. More power to you. Enslaving a fellow human to provide for your needs is wrong. Keep that in mind when you speak of the "right" to healthcare, or food, or whatever. Does your supposed "right" *require* the labor or money of another human? Think about it.
People doing things from the goodness of their hearts is a beautiful thing. People doing things at the behest of the barrel of a gun, where the alternative is prison or death, is a pure evil.
Not to mention that the JSC is a federal facility, and this work is probably being paid for with federal funds. School textbooks are the province of the state governments. One is not the business of the other.
While Gore certainly was a big promoter of the technology, I do not think his lack of promotion would have had that great of an effect really.
Back when I started using the "network" one sent email via bang addresses, using BITnet, UUCP, even Fidonet, and other networks. We weren't allowed to use the ARPAnet (I actually got busted once for gatewaying e-mail through an ARPAnet connected research box... lots faster than BITnet). Through interconnects, you got to corporate networks and universities. This was all happening before the federal government encouraged ARPAnet/NSFnet privitization. The benefits of interconnected networks (largely email and netnews at the time) made further interconnection inevitable. Some large corporations were beginning to use TCP/IP internally.
You have to remember the times, the mid-to-late 80s... businesses were already exchanging data via a national, even global, batch network and their own interactive networks. People were already using BBSes to send e-mail and files nationwide, and those were doing edge-node data transfers to avoid long-distance calls: Fidonet, etc. The writing was on the wall.
The Internet (which, remember, doesn't exist) would have happened and was happening, Gore or no Gore. Gore was not instrumental in creating it, and for one man to claim so is hubris. Larger and pre-existing forces led to it. He was helpful though, certainly.
Remember also that when the NSFnet went to multiple private backbones, they didn't come from nowhere. Businesses were already doing it. They already were doing private backhauls, working on faster and better telecom links, for private networks.
The big problem with our nation's constitutional form is that we wrote our Federal Constitution over 200 years ago. The Founders, the authors, were both brilliant and men of their times. Being men of their times, they created a system of limited, enumerated powers. By the letter of the federal constitution, the federal government has only a finite grant of power: what is not granted, is forbidden. That grant of power was sufficient for the time. Times have changed.
Today, we have a federal constitution where the legal doctrines that permit the federal regulation of minute aspects of our economic and personal lives are based on assinine reasoning and interpretation of the text. e.g. Stream of Commerce: a farmer growing his own potatoes for subsistance, who did not engage in commerce, is subject to federal regulation under the aegis of regulation of inter-state trade, because by not buying those potatoes, he didn't buy potatoes that may have come from another state, and therefore impacted the market in potatoes being sold in inter-state commerce, and therefore his not engaging in commerce is still an action within the power of the federal government to regulate. In other words, NOTHING it outside of the federal power to regulate.
How does the federal government administer the highway system? Get uniform national speed limits? Interact with our educational system? It has no power whatsoever to do these things directly. You do not see United States of America construction trucks filling potholes. Teachers do not take their instructions from the federal Department of Education. The federal government simply uses its unlimited taxation power, and then sends that money to states, with strings on how it may be used. It starves the states of tax revenue by mandating that every citizen nationwide pay into a big pot, and then holds that pot of money over the heads of the states as a club. Set such and such speed limit (or environmental law, or labor standard, or...) lest we not give you back the money which your citizens paid.
This arcane system is how it works. Bizarre legal doctrines, money passed around with strings, a federal government under basically no functional restraint since 1937 (look up 'constitutional revolution of 1937' or 'a switch in time that saved nine').
The power to 'interpret' makes the constitution a largely meaningless piece of paper today. We are loath to formally amend the constitution, as that is a difficult thing to do, and could be a Pandora's box. So instead our courts twist and wring meanings out of the text that simply aren't there. We speak of a flexible document. Is it really that flexible? And if it is, does it really have meaning?
We are taught that we have a written constitution. But in fact, we have a common-law constitution. The text of the constitution itself is largely useless in determining constitutional law in the year 2004. It must be understood within the context of the last two hundred years of jurisprudence.
And then there is the Bill of Rights, which causes great confusion in the minds of the average person. In fact, the average person likely thinks that the Bill of Rights *IS* the constitution. The federal constitution proper is a positive document: it positively grants powers. It is THE SOURCE of power (well, as a proxy for us, the sovereigns), and if the power is not granted, it doesn't exist. The Bill of Rights, however, is negative. It restricts, it does not grant. That has led to confusion in the popular mind, to where people (the electorate, Congress, the President, various courts...) now believe that if the government isn't literally restricted from doing something, then it must be able to do it.
Hence, the focus by courts to find hidden meaning inside (or within the 'penumbra' -- what asses) of particular amendments to restrict the power to government to meddle with our lives (which I suppose makes sense in the context of the 14th amendment and incorporation against states). In the case of the federal government, though
NSFnet was parallel to the ARPAnet, and built more as a general network using the same architecture. There were other networks as well in that time period, and they interoperated (BITnet, USENET, so on, hell, even Fido). The modern Internet is the NSFnet moved to private internetwork carriers, the "backbone." I believe that even had the NSFnet not transitioned to private backbone carriers and private interconnections, a parallel network would have naturally arisen on its own in the same timeframe, using TCP/IP. Corporations were already using e-mail and other internetwork features, gated to NSFnet and others for e-mail and netnews. I remember sending email using bang ! addresses from BITnet or NSFnet hosts, to major corporations, as well as to users on the BBS networks like Fido. Technical advances and demand would have forced the creation of a parallel public TCP/IP network (because that was what was in use by ARPA and NSFnet) which would become our modern Internet, regardless of the opening of NSFnet. Remember, many original backbone carriers who provided backhaul for NSFnet already existed. They didn't spring into existence because of the legislation. Legislation merely acknowledged a natural progression and burgeoning demand. IMHO.
When I was in CS at Purdue, all the intro programming/data structures courses were taught in Pascal. Most of us learned C as well, as part of other classes, in particular higher-level data structures and OS courses where real pointers are handy... though we did do a low-level machine emulator in *Pascal*, that was interesting. For C++, we learned it in a crash-course, during compiler design. The prof wanted us to use C++, and only like two people in the course had used it before. So we had a several week intense learning session, and then designed & implemented a C++(subset) -> SPARC asm compiler. The same for other compiled and scripting languages, learned them during a course that needed it.
The japanese makers had to move away from high reving 4 bangers that make useless hp (hp where you don't use it but is good for advertising) and go to larger displacement slower speed engines.
Uh, you mean useless HP when coupled to one of those nasty slushboxes. My 7500 RPM engine making most HP above 4500 RPM til redline makes me quite happy, but I drive stick so I can actually use it.
Yeah, I started using Bookpool when I was in college, around 92 I believe. Whenever it was, it was before it was a web site or had a domain or was even a company. "It" was just a mailing list, you'd say what book you wanted, and when enough wanted it, they'd go for a group deal from the publisher. It has always had the best prices. For technical books, there is simply no need to look anywhere else.
I will immediately and readily acknowledge that I know very, very little about "modern" Christianity. But I did double major in history in college, as well as it being an avocation. I studied and recall the interactions of the original Christians with the Roman Empire (ever heard of the Name?). So, I'll ask what do you know about Christianity, the 2000 years ago original REAL version?
The Empire was a heterogenous place. There were lots and lots and lots of gods and religions. One more, the Christian verison (a stoic Judeaism preaching eventual salvation for the downtrodden), would have easily been absorbed. Many, many other religions were. However, those original Christians were persecuted. Why? They were hated, by the people. Why? Because they were not tolerant. They actively worked to convert people. They actively tried to disrupt families, to disrupt the common observance of family deities (ancestor worship). They caused turmoil, violated law.
The Roman authorities originally considered Christians to be Jews (after all, they were). The Romans had a "special understanding" with the Jews. The province of Judea had an arrangement unlike nearly any other province. The Jews were protected by the Roman authorities and given a great deal of autonomy. Recall Paul, a Jew and a citizen, protected as he travelled. The Roman authorities actually protected early Christians from popular anger.
However, eventually, due to inquiries by provincial authorities asking how to deal with these people, the Romans decided that Christians were not Jews. They lost their protection. At popular DEMAND. Not because they were tolerant, peaceful, introspective religious people. They then were persecuted, not without some cause.
And what happened later? Christianity supplanted other religions in the Empire, by law. Wars were fought to spread it. Crusades. The Spanish in the New World. Uncounted numbers of people killed.
That is a tolerant religion? Sure, 2000 years later, modern "Christians" may have decided that now that they are dominant and have supplanted basically all other forms of religion in their western societies, they can be peaceful, quiet and tolerant. But I assure you, that is NOT the origin or history of Christianity.
Therefore, I ask again, are you a "for-real" Christian if you aren't on the street corner with that loud speaker? Do you truly believe in the Day of Judgement and the possibility of it happening tomorrow? Or are you some comfortable, 2000 long years later, tolerant pervision/derivitive of a Christian? Which is more "for-real?" The one practiced within mere years of the death of Christ, or today?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, so now we understand when dave420 speaks of a "just" wage. It is after all only just that a street cleaner, who also has a family to raise, children to feed and educate, a house to purchase, *should* earn nearly as much as a software developer. They are both people, fellow humans.
However, here in the United States, the market determines what is "just," at least within the sandbox of the economy as our government regulates it. The way things work here is different. People are paid according to how hard they work, how smart they are, and perhaps most of all, how well they play the game/system.
Someone content to be a street cleaner gets street cleaner wages (which may be more than you think, most people don't want to pick up garbage; same for plumbers). Someone who spends their own money to go to college, works hard, stays educated and on top of the game (and knows how to play the game), earns more. Perhaps a LOT more. If that same person doesn't keep on top of the game, if that same person doesn't constantly keep working at justifying their worth, then they may earn less.
As an educated person, who went into a great deal of debt paying for that education, who is expected to pay for my own continuing education, who must work perhaps 60-80 hours a week at times without the luxury of overtime pay, who spends hours and hours at home keeping up with technology and business trends rather than spending that time with my family, I do not feel that it is "just" that an hourly manual laborer should earn more than a fraction of what I earn.
The United States is not Canada, or Europe, or whatever other nation you proudly call home (though if you are "European," proudly claiming a nation as a home is a dangerous thing, eh?). We are not the home of national (rationed) health care, national pensions (bankrupting the future), national doles for the unemployed, free college educations. We don't have the eternal high unemployment and anemic economic growth of a France or Germany. We don't think of "just" wages. We think of just opportunities. We think of justice being the ability of people to better themselves, not the mandated end-result of actually being bettered.
Here, if I as an individual, wallowing in my liberal angst at making so much more money than my fellow and allegedly equal human being, want to make sure that my local street cleaner earns a "just" wage, I can always whip out my check book and redistribute some of my income. Now there's justice.
Larry
Sorry, but the BS-o-meter has rung here. I run in circles with some millionaires. My family has its fair share, I have friends in that group, and I belong to a yacht club with lots of them. I know a lot of people whose last name you would recognize instantly.
I know people who either didn't go to college, or left early, to pursue their fortunes, as well as people who came up the ladder. Something each of them have in common is that they don't 'land jobs' using a resume. If you are a "proud millionaire" (real liquid money, not tied up in mortgaged real estate you are renting out), you don't get jobs by handing over a resume and interviewing, starting at the bottom rung as you (apparently) intimate in a later post. You get jobs via highly placed contacts, or in your case, allegedly a highly motivated self-starter who didn't get formally educated, you use your proudly acquired and hard-won million to run your own business(es). You create jobs, you do your own thing, you chafe at having "betters" directing you. The educated people, those who worked through hierarchy, they sometimes get jobs, or sometimes run busineses. However, pretty much every single highly successful person I know who didn't get formally educated runs their own business. They don't get jobs working for other people for a paycheck.
With one exception: when their business fails, when they lose everything taking the risks, they don't whine about it. They pick themselves up, they do take a bottom rung job if they have to, and they rebuild what they had. A guy I sail with was in that category, wound up living in his car, broke, and is now again in a mansion with a fat bank account, nice yacht and a successful business. Perhaps you are in that category, perhaps you had your million and lost it all. But something else about those people is that they are a bit too busy to be spouting BS on Slash-fing-dot.
Larry
It is pretty funny today... back in college we said "Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping." Tells you how much RAM was normal back then.
Larry
Nations don't have wishes. People do. The people of Cuba who actively and loudly wish to have a government other than Fidel Castro generally wind up in prison or dead. Even the spineless European governments got a bit upset at Castro's oppressive actions recently.
As an American, I do not accept that a "nation" can legitimately choose a form of government which prevents the people of that nation from, on a regular basis, expressing their "wishes" regarding their form of government and its leaders. Any form of government other than a democratic government with regularily scheduled elections is illegitimate. A "nation" that "chooses" some other other form and then denies the right of future generations (or people who just change their mind) to choose a different government is illegitimate, and should be ostracized, isolated, cut off from trade, and generally mocked. No nation should be permitted to claim that its oppression of our fellow man is an "internal issue." Every single discussion with it should center on nothing more than its treatment of its people and its political oppression. I wish we treated far more nations on this planet the way we treat Cuba.
While our government has done and does many questionable/bad/evil things in our names, restricting commerce and political ties with Cuba is not one of those. When are you non-Americans going to realize that our money is OUR money, our aid is OUR aid, and we can choose how to spend it, with whom we will or will not trade and on what terms, whose hungry mouths we will feed, which nations we will help with AIDS medication, and whether *our* money will be spent by the U.N. or others in any way whatsoever that we dislike.
As for the current federal administration doing all sorts of allegedly bad things... in November, we get to choose whether or not we agree, and may very likely kick him out. When, exactly, do the people of Cuba get to do that vis-a-vis Castro?
Larry
What did I write that was indicative of not being 'grown up?' Did I identify you correctly?
Like I wrote earlier, I've been using Unix since before Windows existed. Today, I am writing this on a W2k machine. A Mac OSX Powerbook sits in the next room. I'm ssh'ed into one of our Linux boxes, behind which the Windows boxes are safely firewalled. These are just tools, you use the one appropriate for the task. Sure, Windows has long sucked (though W2k redeemed so many of those faults). But it remains the best tool for certain things. And Linux? It is a progeny of The Unix Way. That command which you proclaimed to be 'assinine' is The Unix Way. That is one of the hallmarks of its superiority in particular instances versus Windows and other environments. Linux and Unix in general is better because of those 'assinine' commands and its underlying architecture, not because it parrots Windows with pretty GUI environments. I haven't booted Linux into X for at least two years.
Bringing us back to the original point. Microsoft wordpad is in no way whatsoever an equivalent to sed, and anybody who says that Just Doesn't Get It.
Larry
Oops, typo... should have been [0-9]. And, it looks like slashdot ate some of it, thought it was html.
sed -e 's/([0-9]+):.*: (.*)$/\1 \2/' <f1 >f2
Using GNU/Linux -- Windows-free zone!
But not in the mind apparently. Let me guess, you love how the Linux GUIs and GUI applications are becoming more and more usable as Windows replacements.
Larry
Oops, typo... should have been [0-9]. And, it looks like slashdot ate some of it, thought it was html. Should have wrapped it in pre.
sed -e 's/([0-9]+):.*: (.*)$/\1 \2/' f2
Using GNU/Linux -- Windows-free zone!
But not in the mind apparently. Let me guess, you love how the Linux GUIs are becoming more and more usable as Windows replacements.
Larry
Um, wordpad? wordpad?
/bin/vi (really ed). "How did you do that?!" It is sad. Sure, maybe Windows can do it via some VBscript or XML blah blah tied to Office via some OLE or COM blah blah, but I can do it from vi with a colon, or sed with a |. It's a whole mindset, and Windows just doesn't have it.
Tell you what, you take 150000 lines of text, where the pattern is:
23523: asdf[134] - foo bar : xyz
All the numbers and text change on every line. I want *only* the leading digits before the colon, and the trailing text after the final colon, space separated. Doing this with a regular expression and sed is incredibly trivial. Something along the line of (not tested, but basically correct):
sed -e 's/([0-0]+):.*: (.*)$/\1 \2/' f2
Voila. Takes about thirty seconds.
Try that in, um, wordpad, and get back to me in a month when you finish. And don't blather on about some other Windows tool. You said wordpad can replace sed. Have lots of fun.
I always get a big kick out of the awe shown by Windows lusers when they see me rapidly and easily do a complex text manipulation operation such as that in
Larry (who was using vi and sed before Windows even existed)
NAC's *former* client apparently obtained portable IP space from ARIN over *FIFTEEN* months ago, and is leaving NAC *voluntarily*. Yet, now they want to force NAC to give up some of NAC's assigned IP space, which NAC obtained from ARIN in order to provide services to NAC clients. 45 days may not be a lot of time for a 'truly large network' but how about over FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY days?
Their former client is an utter asshole. They simply don't want to be responsible and make the effort to renumber their network, and want to use the lack of clue possessed by the legal system to their advantage, to cover up their own incompetence, and to steal from NAC. Their goal is not a "temporary" restraining order but rather a permanent judgement re-allocating the IP space. They are trying to assert property rights in it.
NAC pays for that IP space. NAC has to handle complaints about it. NAC has to manage routing issues. NAC has only a limited amout of IP space with which to service their customers. And most importantly, NAC DOES NOT OWN that space. ARIN merely assigned it to them, under an agreement which forbids NAC to do what the court has ordered.
Were I NAC, I would simply do as the court orders because doing otherwise is dangerous. And I would bill the former client for every last second spent on this, as well as a fee for handling any and all potential administration of the netblock (spam and other complaints, administrative email/contacts, so on), and of course a proportional share of the yearly ARIN fees. While fighting this.
What asswipes.
Larry
AT&T was given a government mandated monopoly. They were given access to public ways often for free. They were given all sorts of benefits with the aim to provide telephone service to every last house in the nation. I find it difficult to feel that it is 'their' network.
Today, the network built over the last century belongs to the dwindling number of Baby Bell (RBOC) descendants of AT&T. The public deserves to get something back in return for all the benefits accrued to the RBOCs over nearly a century. Mandating that that network be shared in order to promote the public interest is an insignificant price to pay.
Agreed, however, PUC mandated rates are sometimes too low, sometimes too high. Public commissions deciding tariff rates is a problem.
An infinitely better solution would have been structural separation years ago: force the Bells to separate into multiple companies. One which manages the physical network infrastructure and charges all competitors the EXACT SAME rate for access to that network, and other company(ies) that provide services to business and consumer customers.
The fact is that for a long, long time, competition was ILLEGAL. RBOCs had a protected monopoly. Forcing other companies to build parallel networks rather than forcing the sharing of the existing network built with public legal protection and often public funds along the limited public right-of-way in our alleys, along our railroads, and beneath our roads is just wrong. It is a viewpoint which is oblivious to the history of the regulated and subsidized telecommunitions history of this nation. The Bells were given those protections because it is terribly expensive to build those networks. Same for the monopolies given to cable companies. Yet now we expect new entrants to the market to incur those network costs, sans the decades of monopoly protection to recoup the investment?
The only saving grace is that wireless technologies will be able to provide competition without needing to string wires all across the nation again. Hopefully it will be true competition, among multiple nimble local/regional competitors, not national goliaths like Comcast or SBC, which will be only too happy to stamp out all other competition and maintain a duopoly.
And one last comment. SBC in Illinois claimed that the POTS line (UNE-P) lease rate of about $12/mo paid by CLECs was *FAR* below their cost, and they lost big money every month on that. Looking at my SBC bill, I pay $5.61 for my line charge, and $4.50 for my "federal access charge" which is actually money SBC gets but they get to call it that. Everything else on my bill is option and tax (though some of that goes to SBC too).
Yet, did SBC lobby the PUC to raise the tariffs for what they charge me? No. They're apparently at least content with my $10.11 a month. I'm sure they make most profit on the extra optional services, but I'm also sure they squeak out at least a little from my $10.11.
So what did SBC attempt to get the CLEC UNE-P lease rate set to? Nearly TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS per month. Well over twice what SBC charges me, the consumer. My total phone bill, for TWO lines, including local long distance, with caller id, name display, second ring tone, taxes and fees is less than $35 a month from SBC. With SBC's proposed rate hike, a competitor would have had to charge me nearly $50/mo, BEFORE extras, taxes, fees and so on to provide the same.
In the end, the rate hike was to $19/mo. Meaning that a competitor would have to charge a bare profitless minimum of $38/mo to pay SBC for what SBC gives me for $35/mo total.
Yes, I feel so sorry for poor, poor SBC.
Larry
The most important thing to remember about the *average* consumer and their computer is that when something doesn't work, when something crashes, when they get a blue screen, they don't blame Bill Gates or the RIAA or whoever sold them the crap. They wonder "what did I do wrong?" It is one of the greatest brain-washings of all time.
Larry
Precisely. People with viewpoints like that often refer to "The Government" and seem to believe that "Government" money is mana from heaven. Taxation is involuntary servitude. It is confiscating the fruit of the labor of your fellow man. It is something to be minimized, not maximized. It is a necessary evil, with the emphasis on EVIL. To tell a person that they must, on pain of *death* (which is the ultimate power of the state, to kill you for resisting it), fork over their money so that a poet can sit at home and write poetry, is just morally wrong. Paying the poet voluntarily, that's a good thing. More power to you. Enslaving a fellow human to provide for your needs is wrong. Keep that in mind when you speak of the "right" to healthcare, or food, or whatever. Does your supposed "right" *require* the labor or money of another human? Think about it.
People doing things from the goodness of their hearts is a beautiful thing. People doing things at the behest of the barrel of a gun, where the alternative is prison or death, is a pure evil.
Larry
Not to mention that the JSC is a federal facility, and this work is probably being paid for with federal funds. School textbooks are the province of the state governments. One is not the business of the other.
Larry
While Gore certainly was a big promoter of the technology, I do not think his lack of promotion would have had that great of an effect really.
Back when I started using the "network" one sent email via bang addresses, using BITnet, UUCP, even Fidonet, and other networks. We weren't allowed to use the ARPAnet (I actually got busted once for gatewaying e-mail through an ARPAnet connected research box... lots faster than BITnet). Through interconnects, you got to corporate networks and universities. This was all happening before the federal government encouraged ARPAnet/NSFnet privitization. The benefits of interconnected networks (largely email and netnews at the time) made further interconnection inevitable. Some large corporations were beginning to use TCP/IP internally.
You have to remember the times, the mid-to-late 80s... businesses were already exchanging data via a national, even global, batch network and their own interactive networks. People were already using BBSes to send e-mail and files nationwide, and those were doing edge-node data transfers to avoid long-distance calls: Fidonet, etc. The writing was on the wall.
The Internet (which, remember, doesn't exist) would have happened and was happening, Gore or no Gore. Gore was not instrumental in creating it, and for one man to claim so is hubris. Larger and pre-existing forces led to it. He was helpful though, certainly.
Remember also that when the NSFnet went to multiple private backbones, they didn't come from nowhere. Businesses were already doing it. They already were doing private backhauls, working on faster and better telecom links, for private networks.
Larry
Oh how I wish I had mod points to rate that funny.
Larry
That said, I use mozilla - I could care less about a piece hacked out of mozilla to try to emulate IE
How much less? Could you care, that is.
Larry
Assembler? Try binary (it's not that hard, we did it in school in the second or third year). And entered with switches on a front panel.
Larry
We, at least, store it on a RAID mirror, and do nightly tape backups. Two week rotation. Odds are, it's safe.
Larry
The big problem with our nation's constitutional form is that we wrote our Federal Constitution over 200 years ago. The Founders, the authors, were both brilliant and men of their times. Being men of their times, they created a system of limited, enumerated powers. By the letter of the federal constitution, the federal government has only a finite grant of power: what is not granted, is forbidden. That grant of power was sufficient for the time. Times have changed.
Today, we have a federal constitution where the legal doctrines that permit the federal regulation of minute aspects of our economic and personal lives are based on assinine reasoning and interpretation of the text. e.g. Stream of Commerce: a farmer growing his own potatoes for subsistance, who did not engage in commerce, is subject to federal regulation under the aegis of regulation of inter-state trade, because by not buying those potatoes, he didn't buy potatoes that may have come from another state, and therefore impacted the market in potatoes being sold in inter-state commerce, and therefore his not engaging in commerce is still an action within the power of the federal government to regulate. In other words, NOTHING it outside of the federal power to regulate.
How does the federal government administer the highway system? Get uniform national speed limits? Interact with our educational system? It has no power whatsoever to do these things directly. You do not see United States of America construction trucks filling potholes. Teachers do not take their instructions from the federal Department of Education. The federal government simply uses its unlimited taxation power, and then sends that money to states, with strings on how it may be used. It starves the states of tax revenue by mandating that every citizen nationwide pay into a big pot, and then holds that pot of money over the heads of the states as a club. Set such and such speed limit (or environmental law, or labor standard, or...) lest we not give you back the money which your citizens paid.
This arcane system is how it works. Bizarre legal doctrines, money passed around with strings, a federal government under basically no functional restraint since 1937 (look up 'constitutional revolution of 1937' or 'a switch in time that saved nine').
The power to 'interpret' makes the constitution a largely meaningless piece of paper today. We are loath to formally amend the constitution, as that is a difficult thing to do, and could be a Pandora's box. So instead our courts twist and wring meanings out of the text that simply aren't there. We speak of a flexible document. Is it really that flexible? And if it is, does it really have meaning?
We are taught that we have a written constitution. But in fact, we have a common-law constitution. The text of the constitution itself is largely useless in determining constitutional law in the year 2004. It must be understood within the context of the last two hundred years of jurisprudence.
And then there is the Bill of Rights, which causes great confusion in the minds of the average person. In fact, the average person likely thinks that the Bill of Rights *IS* the constitution. The federal constitution proper is a positive document: it positively grants powers. It is THE SOURCE of power (well, as a proxy for us, the sovereigns), and if the power is not granted, it doesn't exist. The Bill of Rights, however, is negative. It restricts, it does not grant. That has led to confusion in the popular mind, to where people (the electorate, Congress, the President, various courts...) now believe that if the government isn't literally restricted from doing something, then it must be able to do it.
Hence, the focus by courts to find hidden meaning inside (or within the 'penumbra' -- what asses) of particular amendments to restrict the power to government to meddle with our lives (which I suppose makes sense in the context of the 14th amendment and incorporation against states). In the case of the federal government, though
NSFnet was parallel to the ARPAnet, and built more as a general network using the same architecture. There were other networks as well in that time period, and they interoperated (BITnet, USENET, so on, hell, even Fido). The modern Internet is the NSFnet moved to private internetwork carriers, the "backbone." I believe that even had the NSFnet not transitioned to private backbone carriers and private interconnections, a parallel network would have naturally arisen on its own in the same timeframe, using TCP/IP. Corporations were already using e-mail and other internetwork features, gated to NSFnet and others for e-mail and netnews. I remember sending email using bang ! addresses from BITnet or NSFnet hosts, to major corporations, as well as to users on the BBS networks like Fido. Technical advances and demand would have forced the creation of a parallel public TCP/IP network (because that was what was in use by ARPA and NSFnet) which would become our modern Internet, regardless of the opening of NSFnet. Remember, many original backbone carriers who provided backhaul for NSFnet already existed. They didn't spring into existence because of the legislation. Legislation merely acknowledged a natural progression and burgeoning demand. IMHO.
Larry
When I was in CS at Purdue, all the intro programming/data structures courses were taught in Pascal. Most of us learned C as well, as part of other classes, in particular higher-level data structures and OS courses where real pointers are handy... though we did do a low-level machine emulator in *Pascal*, that was interesting. For C++, we learned it in a crash-course, during compiler design. The prof wanted us to use C++, and only like two people in the course had used it before. So we had a several week intense learning session, and then designed & implemented a C++(subset) -> SPARC asm compiler. The same for other compiled and scripting languages, learned them during a course that needed it.
Larry
The japanese makers had to move away from high reving 4 bangers that make useless hp (hp where you don't use it but is good for advertising) and go to larger displacement slower speed engines.
Uh, you mean useless HP when coupled to one of those nasty slushboxes. My 7500 RPM engine making most HP above 4500 RPM til redline makes me quite happy, but I drive stick so I can actually use it.
Larry
Cool. When was that?
Larry
Yeah, I started using Bookpool when I was in college, around 92 I believe. Whenever it was, it was before it was a web site or had a domain or was even a company. "It" was just a mailing list, you'd say what book you wanted, and when enough wanted it, they'd go for a group deal from the publisher. It has always had the best prices. For technical books, there is simply no need to look anywhere else.
Larry
I will immediately and readily acknowledge that I know very, very little about "modern" Christianity. But I did double major in history in college, as well as it being an avocation. I studied and recall the interactions of the original Christians with the Roman Empire (ever heard of the Name?). So, I'll ask what do you know about Christianity, the 2000 years ago original REAL version?
The Empire was a heterogenous place. There were lots and lots and lots of gods and religions. One more, the Christian verison (a stoic Judeaism preaching eventual salvation for the downtrodden), would have easily been absorbed. Many, many other religions were. However, those original Christians were persecuted. Why? They were hated, by the people. Why? Because they were not tolerant. They actively worked to convert people. They actively tried to disrupt families, to disrupt the common observance of family deities (ancestor worship). They caused turmoil, violated law.
The Roman authorities originally considered Christians to be Jews (after all, they were). The Romans had a "special understanding" with the Jews. The province of Judea had an arrangement unlike nearly any other province. The Jews were protected by the Roman authorities and given a great deal of autonomy. Recall Paul, a Jew and a citizen, protected as he travelled. The Roman authorities actually protected early Christians from popular anger.
However, eventually, due to inquiries by provincial authorities asking how to deal with these people, the Romans decided that Christians were not Jews. They lost their protection. At popular DEMAND. Not because they were tolerant, peaceful, introspective religious people. They then were persecuted, not without some cause.
And what happened later? Christianity supplanted other religions in the Empire, by law. Wars were fought to spread it. Crusades. The Spanish in the New World. Uncounted numbers of people killed.
That is a tolerant religion? Sure, 2000 years later, modern "Christians" may have decided that now that they are dominant and have supplanted basically all other forms of religion in their western societies, they can be peaceful, quiet and tolerant. But I assure you, that is NOT the origin or history of Christianity.
Therefore, I ask again, are you a "for-real" Christian if you aren't on the street corner with that loud speaker? Do you truly believe in the Day of Judgement and the possibility of it happening tomorrow? Or are you some comfortable, 2000 long years later, tolerant pervision/derivitive of a Christian? Which is more "for-real?" The one practiced within mere years of the death of Christ, or today?
Larry