This teaches a great life lesson and ethic. Let's see how well it carries over into the working world!
Not leaving the struggling behind is noble and all, but when the rope pulling up the strugglers is tied around the neck of the non-strugglers the nobility ends and the entire system is degraded.
If you blow off a test you damn well deserve a zero. If you don't turn in homework then you damn well deserve a zero.
If you just. can't. get. chemistry then the teacher should be willing and have latitude to help you.
Why should someone who works their ass off for a 55% be completely marginalized by someone who skipped class to get 50%?
Government intervention in the housing market has royally screwed things up. School administration intervention into teaching will royally screw things up. In both cases we lose as a whole.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
Managers are about the big picture, not the fine details. In fact.. a micro-managing manager can be a bad thing.
I wouldn't exactly call a hello world in HTML "fine" nor "detail".:)
Cringley's point is not one of "the manager should be one who can code" but one who understands the job of the people he/she manages. As he said, "You can't manage what you can't understand."
My former boss was previously a teacher and school principal. My current boss is the exact opposite (knows more about the Windows internals than I'll ever care to know).
I can say without doubt that the former is worse. Much worse. (Hence "former boss" not "current boss".) A boss or *project manager* who doesn't know what a "404 error" is in a web shop...ugh. QED.
or the inability to differentiate the DOM from JS the language
Wow, you get a gold star for arguing word semantics unnecessarily! (Double bonus for intentionally being flamebait.)
The context of the entire thread, the performance boost, and my comment is that of JavaScript in web apps. My comment was *clearly* about JavaScript in the context of web apps. Hell, my first bullet was that the language and browser are tied too closely together. I guess you read what you want to read.
That said: practically there is no difference between DOM & JS. JavaScript has no libraries or modules which means all functionality IS the language (no more differentiable than alert()). Again: if there was any mention of writing stand-alone apps or tools in JavaScript then you'd have more of a point but what Firefox, IE, etc. provide as "JavaScript" is, de facto, JavaScript.
I hate to see what you work on to call threading, logging, debugging, reflection, missing XML parsers, minimal date support, drag-and-drop, browser identification, etc. (and that's just where I stopped) just "missing bits"? If you want to write real apps then that stuff is not "bits" but necessities.
I've written my share of JS-heavy apps and the boost will be nice for that. However, my complaints with JS don't lie with performance.
Tied too much to the browser. JS works great for some (some love it) but syntactically I hate every last part of it. However: web == JS so I have no other option.
Typing. Yeah, it has types but they're practically worthless. A Number represents a float/double and an integer? Say what?
Type checking.
No reflection.
No dictionary. Sure, you can use an Object as a dictionary but the second someone prototypes it to add root functionality then you've introduced other items in your "dictionary". (I'm looking at you prototype.js)
Nothing resembling libraries. No dependencies, etc.
It's bastardized to accommodate the short comings of HTML (drop downs, combo boxes, etc.)
Obey's Postel's law too much. Error handling and exceptions is a sad state.
No threading. No locking. Nothing resembling concurrent programming. The more complicated your app the more arbitrary events and multithreading are important.
No classes. Prototyping & cloning is a neat paradigm for where it fits but so do class-based objects. This isn't just JS I have this problem with. Being able to do both and using the right one where necessary would be great.
When is the document loaded? And if you have two libraries vying for that event? (See library complaint)
Since it has no real library support I have to blame the browser for not providing more general functionality. XML parsing, date stuff is abysmal, and other "routine" stuff you do when making web sites.
Scoping. Scoping is mind-numbingly bad.
Namespaces (again, see library complaint) are implemented via object nesting, which isn't really namespaces
Logging and debugging. I haven't delved into the likes of Firebug to see how it works but when the language (again no libraries so I blame the language) itself only provides alert() then it's clear the creators weren't thinking about debugging at all. At least IE natively will let you debug JS!
Standard dialogs are alert() and confirm(). Anything and everything else you have to roll your own. I really, really don't want to write something for a Yes/No dialog instead of OK/Cancel confirm().
Drag-and-drop. If you've done it then you know it's no walk in the park.
Browser identification and JS version identification. Why should I have to jump through hoops, poke & prod things, and guess at what my JS run-time is? Everyone has their own means to detect it and it's absolutely ludicrous. I'm fine if there's no real "standard" but at least give me the variables to know what I'm writing against so I can adequately work with it. (Again tied too close to the browser.) Every language I use frequently has means for me to identify such things.
I think that's enough. I'm sure you could easily argue back but this is my rant about why this boost is not the saving grace to JavaScript.
Basically my point is that performance does not bring JS up another tier. It just prolongs the pain of having a grossly inadequate language for rich application development. JS does have some nice things about it (first-class functions, closures, for(..in..), etc.) but in no way would I consider it "good" for application development.
Step back and realize the movement is pushing applications into the browser. Yes, the same apps that currently use threading; the same apps that have more than 4 input widgets (input, select, radio, checkbox); the same apps that run slow even when written in native code; the same apps that depends on libraries of code; etc. JavaScript, as is, is not The Answer and this performance boost is just a Bluepill in disguise.
...where is the SCOTUS case that ruled that US citizens upon returning to the US borders do not enjoy the protections of the constitution?
The constitution doesn't work that way. The constitution is a limitation upon the government, not the people, so being protected by the constitution is a misnomer at best and wrongful thinking at worst because it gives the appearance that the only reason you enjoy your speech & guns is because of the constitution.
I strongly suggest reading Hamilton's objection to the bill of rights in the Federalist Paper #84. It's like the man predicted the future, but I think he just understood tyranny (all the founding fathers did).
But just the flat-out "I took the initiative in creating the internet" does read like a claim that he, well, created the internet.
Anyone with half a notion of the history of the internet would know that the internet was not created by any one person. Cerf is often credited as the father of the internet and he himself said it was not one person's achievements. It was a slew of people that got the ball rolling.
Many of whom are considered computer science greats: Licklider, Baran, Roberts, Davies, Kahn, Cerf, etc. etc. (I know I'm missing a number of people from that list).
To anyone with a quarter of a notion of the history the internet would know that a politician could NEVER have invented the internet because it was so mind-blowingly radical of an idea. Hell, AT&T said it was IMPOSSIBLE. People had to coin the words of today's parlance: packet, protocol, header (originally: leader), etc.
The same people who think Gore invented the internet are the same ones who think Edison invented the light bulb and telephone. At least Gore didn't electrocute elephants on film, though I swear I saw him eat a kitten once while driving a Hummer.
Besides, there isn't enough precision in our fingers even if we wear claw-like stylus.
That was my thought on reading the headline. Didn't even RTFA to dismiss this as an idiot making a prediction without understanding the domain. Pure and simple: iPhone success hype for key technology of the iPhone.
Re:They should make a concerted effort to drop leg
on
Fresh Air For Windows?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Keeping 'legacy' support has always been a nice excuse for not significantly upgrading the OS (or spring cleaning).
Are we not in the time where everyone and their brother is using virtual machines? It would seem that MS should relegate legacy support to virtual machines instead. They have the source code so they could "easily" create a VM (or some very transparent layer that makes it look like its running natively) for each version they've ever sold.
Then they can do whatever they want and just keep the VM layers up-to-date.
Maybe. I keep wonderng where the loophole is, and how big it is.
Dude, that took like 3 minutes on govtrack.us (emphasis added to show how I interpret this text):
Nothing in subparagraph (A) or in paragraphs (1) and (2) of subsection (d) shall be construed to limit the ability of a health insurance issuer offering health insurance coverage in connection with a group health plan to increase the premium for an employer based on the manifestation of a disease or disorder of an individual who is enrolled in the plan.
I read that to mean and the previous paragraph: "Health insurance companies cannot discriminate enrollment in plans but the minute you get sick they can jack your premiums up."
So...you may be paying $X despite having markers for, say, Parkinson's just like everyone else, but the day you start getting symptoms then can charge you whatever they want.
I didn't read the whole thing (the bill itself is three titles of legalese "diffs") but that enough to me is a nice loophole that negates the purpose of the whole damn thing. It is not necessary to weed genetically predisposed people at enrollment when you can "tweak" their premiums when they actually get sick.
I still would like to hear Paul's reason for voting against this though.
Easy time limits to stop patent camping. For example if you apply for a patent and get you have 12 months to produce a "product" based on the IP otherwise it goes into public domain. Or another one, patents not licensed (to make a product) or used for 3 years automatically go into public domain.
The problem with "easy time limits" is that they are arbitrary, just like the current values. Why a calendar year, why not two? Why 3 years instead of 5? Why 5 instead of 10? Wait for another Sonny Bono to believe, and I quote his wife Senator Mary Bono:
Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution.
Sonny obviously didn't give a crap and was "hamstrung" by that damned pesky constitution. (I find it extremely disturbing that his wife, a sensor, had to be "informed" by staff that an indefinite copyright is unconstitutional. Perhaps elected officials must recite the constitution to get elected, but I digress.) Leave the terms up to elected officials and they'll pick their own arbitrary limits which *will* tend toward what the IP holders. No surprise that Disney supported Sonny Bono (hence the name the Mickey Mouse Protection Act).
The only non-arbitrary limit I can think of is zero: you get no protection for IP. Considering IP pays my bills and considering our global society is heading further into the information age...zero IP protection isn't something I can support.
I don't think the root problem is IP laws per se, but those who enact them. IMHO, discussing "how to fix IP" without discussing the system in which IP runs is pure folly (that is not a US-centric statement, but global). Like arguing what color carpet to install when the house is on fire. Sure, Vintage Wine looks much better than Tiffany Blue in the living room but it's wholly irrelevant.
That's simply not true. Look at The God Delusion, for example, and they compare against the list price of the paperback, not the hardcover.
Oh, holy crap dude. My point still stands that they compare to the list price and not their selling price. It's still deceptive.
Also, the page for the book you mentioned links to all the other version of the book which are available.
That goes to another complaint I've had about Amazon with time: their pages are choked full of crap that is basically the antithesis to the minimalist "Google design". I didn't even *see* that list you quoted.
Look at the paper version and its right there at the top that links to the other versions. Hardcover shows the same thing. Audio CD shows the same thing. The Kindle is the only of the seven editions that does not have this "Also Available In" box right at the top. The *only* edition. Ditto for The God Delusion.
Really, your rebuttal is nit picking the finer points of my post and doesn't refute my thesis: Amazon is trying to deceive users into buying Kindle.
Ahem! I suggest you read the section on DRM. The issue isn't black and white.
I propose that it is black & white. DRM exists to allow a producer to dictate what the consumer can and cannot do. Anyone who desires to dictate what a consumer can and cannot do, I contend, will not provide more freedom than the law allows and so will always remain on my black-list.
If I can't do more with an ebook than I can with a paper book then I don't want it. Ever.
If I can't buy an iTune and put it on a portable player of my choice then I don't want it. Ever.
If I can't buy a movie and watch it on my platform of choice then I don't want it. Ever.
It's very black & white for me, but I'm a liberty-toting libertarian: what do you expect?
The Kindle is $399. The books listed on the Kindle page are $9.99 each. Picking a random book: Sue Grafton's T is for Trespass. Kind price: $9.99. Hardcover price: $17.79.
(Something I find extremely interesting is Amazon compares the kindle price to the hard cover list price ($26.95) AND does not link to any other versions of the book, but the hard cover sure does. It seems they are intentionally wanting to give the false sense of "what a deal!" and making it harder to jump to a non-kindle version.)
$7.80 may look like a lot (Amazon will tell you $26.95-$9.99=$16.96...more than double the market price difference) but is having the ebook worth the difference? Grafton's previous book -- S for Silence -- is $7.99 for paperback ($4.24 if you buy 3rd party to Amazon) and $6.39 for Kindle (again, Kindle page doesn't list other editions). A whopping $1.60 difference. $1.60 to [legally] be permanently locked to that copy with your Kindle with no rights to sell that copy to any one, nor transfer to other devices, etc. (I don't think I need to list them).
Is $1.60 (or -$2.15 if 3rd party) or $7.80 worth it to switch to Kindle? Not to me, so I'll stick to being a tree-killer. I won't ever switch to ebooks that trap my money and ability to do as I please.
(I also don't own HD DVD (hah!) nor Blu-Ray and never will until I can play them under my OS of choice, but I digress.)
Honestly, if it comes down to DRM books and DRM movies where I can't read/play on the device of my choice then I'll happily give them up. But it won't be for long because the time will come when good creators of books and film will not be hamstrung by those who demand DRM. That is if the recent digital "experiments" by known musicians are of any indication.
Weight is the affect of gravity on a mass so it still weighs 60 tons but the water provides buoyancy so if you put it on a scale it won't read 60 tons. Granted the gravity will be different 1500 meters down but that wasn't the implication of "out of water".
You want to know the in-depth backstory of G-Man in Half Life? Wikipedia will tell you that as well. The latter may be called trivial by some, but I'm sure a lot of people have read it as well.
IP resembles real or personal property a lot more than it resembles anything else.
And grass is green!
Titles 17 & 35 specifically intend to put real property restrictions on intellectual works. IP, by definition, makes a non-scarce thing scarce by treating it as property. So it is of absolutely no coincidence that exclusion, conveyance, subdivision, and limited control of IP are parallels of real property. Loose analogy in geek terms: if class B inherits from A then it's of no surprise B has the same properties of A.
The primary argument about IP is that specific legal force that non-scarce things are made scarce. In other words, the complaints against IP are for the reasons IP is being abused. Term extensions, trolling, trivial/prior-art, etc.
When you think about it IP is completely ironic. IP has exclusion but the point is to sell as many copies as you can. IP has conveyance and subdivision but the original owner has to voluntarily stop using it (the transference is intangible). IP has control but the more you control it the less you can sell it.
However, the absolute true irony to copyrights is that as time marches on communication of information gets cheaper and cheaper yet companies grip it tighter (DMCA) and get their stranglehold extended (Mickey Mouse Act)!
halfway decent spectral emission characteristics do in fact use a near ultra violet LED, and combination of red, blue and green phosphors to make white light.
You do understand the difference between a light-emitting diode fluorescing (which it can't) and the phosphorus coating the LED fluorescing, right?
The diode bumps an electron across the gap and a photon is emitted as the electron drops back down. When those photons strike the phosphorus, lose some energy, and emit a photon of lesser energy (i.e., lower frequency, longer wavelength) you get visible light. The former is electroluminescence, the latter is fluorescence.
Just because you slap some phosphorus on a LED, it doesn't mean the whole is still an "LED" but instead a "phosphorus coated LED". Don't confuse technical terms with a marketer bastardizing the term, especially when correcting someone who is clearly using the correct definition of LED.
As such, they are still discrete frequency lights and cannot creat and exact replica of incandescent (i.e. blackbody) radiation.
However, that is irrelevant due to the biology of our eyes. IOW, it doesn't matter if you see light of a violet frequency or, instead, a combination of red and blue (aka purple). Really, the LED needs to just mimic the spectral sensitivity (570nm, 540nm, & 430nm) of our cone cells. This means we don't need actual white light (frequencies ranging from red to violet) to have white light insofar as our eyes care.
And, no, LEDs are not fluorescent. Fluorescent bulbs stimulate mercury to emit UV light. The UV light hits the phosphorus which makes it fluoresce and produce visible light. LEDs work by jumping electrons across a band gap and a photon is emitted when it jumps back down. The high efficiency comes into play because it doesn't take much more energy than that of the band gap to make an electron jump.
Here's Senator Dodd's thoughts about telecom immunity
:The President... should be held accountable. I will do everything in my power to stop Congress from shielding this Presidents agenda of secrecy, deception, and blatant unlawfulness.
I've heard something similar out of Dodd before. Here's the catch: he is one of the few (umm, Congress) that can impeach the president. Has he done it? Not to my knowledge.
Basic political BS at its finest. It's like a cop standing by his car eating a donut, watching someone beat the piss out of another, and saying "boy, someone should do something about that."
Maybe he missed that whole impeachment thing at orientation...
What makes you think that the legislative branch writes laws?
Of all that I wrote and you nitpick over "write"? I sum up the job of thousands politicians (plus their staffs) for over 200 years in two words and you nitpick? I talk of constitutional law and grand theory of interpretation...and you nitpick on a two-word summarization?
It doesn't matter who writes the law when you talk of how to interpret the law. Does the python interpreter care who wrote the foo.py? Is there a special interpreting mode for Guido or you? HELL NO!
The overwhelmingly evident premise of my post was how to interpret law, or rather how it should be interpreted. It was not a dissertation on how a law is written because if your method of interpreting law is flawed then it doesn't matter who writes it. Period.
What good is the damn document if in 20 or 50 years it will mean something entirely different? What good is the amendment process if we can subvert it by just saying "...well, I think it means THIS now"?
Randy Barnett in "Restoring the Lost Constitution" (ISBN 0691123764) argues that the law should be interpreted as a reasonable person would at the time of enactment (original meaning). Not the intent of the writers, but the meaning. This goes for the constitution, all of the amendments, and all statutory law.
Think of it this way in terms of contracts: contracts are written down so it is understood what the parties agreed to. If the meaning of the contract can change over time based on who reads it then the whole point and premise of writing it down is lost. The only way to maintain a contract's validity is to interpret based on the meaning of when it was written down. Ditto for the constitution.
The legislative branch writes laws that are clearly unconstitutional. The executive branch ignores the constitution. The judicial case law has basically cut holes out of the constitution. The concept of a written constitution works if you have a branch of government that respects it and interprets it according to the original meaning. The fact that we have deviated so much from the constitution is proof enough to me that Jefferson was right when he said "because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." When the president can snoop on anyone's phone conversation in the name of "anti-terrorism" it violates your rights and is an action of a tyrant.
Nowhere in the constitution does it provide a "right" to privacy...
This thinking is why our constitution has basically been shit upon. The constitution is a restriction upon the government, not the people. You have every right you can possibly think of (wear a hat or not, go to bed @ 10pm or not, wear white after labor day or not, etc.) and you only "give up" certain rights for the protection of your liberty. For example, you give up the right to enforce law because if you could then you act as the judge, jury, and "executioner" and the defendant is no longer presumed innocent when your emotions take hold of your reasoning. So you have every right to privacy by virtue of being human except those parts you give up to protect the rest of your liberty or willingly give up (no different than any other right).
Your reasoning about privacy is precisely what I think is wrong with this country (but I don't blame you, I blame the politician of past and present) and why I'm a strong supporter of Ron Paul in either congress or presidency.
Slashdot Mirror
You must not be married.
This teaches a great life lesson and ethic. Let's see how well it carries over into the working world!
Not leaving the struggling behind is noble and all, but when the rope pulling up the strugglers is tied around the neck of the non-strugglers the nobility ends and the entire system is degraded.
If you blow off a test you damn well deserve a zero. If you don't turn in homework then you damn well deserve a zero.
If you just. can't. get. chemistry then the teacher should be willing and have latitude to help you.
Why should someone who works their ass off for a 55% be completely marginalized by someone who skipped class to get 50%?
Government intervention in the housing market has royally screwed things up. School administration intervention into teaching will royally screw things up. In both cases we lose as a whole.
I wouldn't exactly call a hello world in HTML "fine" nor "detail". :)
Cringley's point is not one of "the manager should be one who can code" but one who understands the job of the people he/she manages. As he said, "You can't manage what you can't understand."
My former boss was previously a teacher and school principal. My current boss is the exact opposite (knows more about the Windows internals than I'll ever care to know).
I can say without doubt that the former is worse. Much worse. (Hence "former boss" not "current boss".) A boss or *project manager* who doesn't know what a "404 error" is in a web shop...ugh. QED.
Wow, you get a gold star for arguing word semantics unnecessarily! (Double bonus for intentionally being flamebait.)
The context of the entire thread, the performance boost, and my comment is that of JavaScript in web apps. My comment was *clearly* about JavaScript in the context of web apps. Hell, my first bullet was that the language and browser are tied too closely together. I guess you read what you want to read.
That said: practically there is no difference between DOM & JS. JavaScript has no libraries or modules which means all functionality IS the language (no more differentiable than alert()). Again: if there was any mention of writing stand-alone apps or tools in JavaScript then you'd have more of a point but what Firefox, IE, etc. provide as "JavaScript" is, de facto, JavaScript.
I hate to see what you work on to call threading, logging, debugging, reflection, missing XML parsers, minimal date support, drag-and-drop, browser identification, etc. (and that's just where I stopped) just "missing bits"? If you want to write real apps then that stuff is not "bits" but necessities.
I've written my share of JS-heavy apps and the boost will be nice for that. However, my complaints with JS don't lie with performance.
I think that's enough. I'm sure you could easily argue back but this is my rant about why this boost is not the saving grace to JavaScript.
Basically my point is that performance does not bring JS up another tier. It just prolongs the pain of having a grossly inadequate language for rich application development. JS does have some nice things about it (first-class functions, closures, for(..in..), etc.) but in no way would I consider it "good" for application development.
Step back and realize the movement is pushing applications into the browser. Yes, the same apps that currently use threading; the same apps that have more than 4 input widgets (input, select, radio, checkbox); the same apps that run slow even when written in native code; the same apps that depends on libraries of code; etc. JavaScript, as is, is not The Answer and this performance boost is just a Bluepill in disguise.
From Dodgeball
Or something like that (going from memory).
The constitution doesn't work that way. The constitution is a limitation upon the government, not the people, so being protected by the constitution is a misnomer at best and wrongful thinking at worst because it gives the appearance that the only reason you enjoy your speech & guns is because of the constitution.
I strongly suggest reading Hamilton's objection to the bill of rights in the Federalist Paper #84. It's like the man predicted the future, but I think he just understood tyranny (all the founding fathers did).
Anyone with half a notion of the history of the internet would know that the internet was not created by any one person. Cerf is often credited as the father of the internet and he himself said it was not one person's achievements. It was a slew of people that got the ball rolling.
Many of whom are considered computer science greats: Licklider, Baran, Roberts, Davies, Kahn, Cerf, etc. etc. (I know I'm missing a number of people from that list).
To anyone with a quarter of a notion of the history the internet would know that a politician could NEVER have invented the internet because it was so mind-blowingly radical of an idea. Hell, AT&T said it was IMPOSSIBLE. People had to coin the words of today's parlance: packet, protocol, header (originally: leader), etc.
The same people who think Gore invented the internet are the same ones who think Edison invented the light bulb and telephone. At least Gore didn't electrocute elephants on film, though I swear I saw him eat a kitten once while driving a Hummer.
That was my thought on reading the headline. Didn't even RTFA to dismiss this as an idiot making a prediction without understanding the domain. Pure and simple: iPhone success hype for key technology of the iPhone.
Are we not in the time where everyone and their brother is using virtual machines? It would seem that MS should relegate legacy support to virtual machines instead. They have the source code so they could "easily" create a VM (or some very transparent layer that makes it look like its running natively) for each version they've ever sold.
Then they can do whatever they want and just keep the VM layers up-to-date.
I surely can't be the first to think of this...
So...you may be paying $X despite having markers for, say, Parkinson's just like everyone else, but the day you start getting symptoms then can charge you whatever they want.
I didn't read the whole thing (the bill itself is three titles of legalese "diffs") but that enough to me is a nice loophole that negates the purpose of the whole damn thing. It is not necessary to weed genetically predisposed people at enrollment when you can "tweak" their premiums when they actually get sick.
I still would like to hear Paul's reason for voting against this though.
The only non-arbitrary limit I can think of is zero: you get no protection for IP. Considering IP pays my bills and considering our global society is heading further into the information age...zero IP protection isn't something I can support.
I don't think the root problem is IP laws per se, but those who enact them. IMHO, discussing "how to fix IP" without discussing the system in which IP runs is pure folly (that is not a US-centric statement, but global). Like arguing what color carpet to install when the house is on fire. Sure, Vintage Wine looks much better than Tiffany Blue in the living room but it's wholly irrelevant.
Look at the paper version and its right there at the top that links to the other versions. Hardcover shows the same thing. Audio CD shows the same thing. The Kindle is the only of the seven editions that does not have this "Also Available In" box right at the top. The *only* edition. Ditto for The God Delusion.
Really, your rebuttal is nit picking the finer points of my post and doesn't refute my thesis: Amazon is trying to deceive users into buying Kindle.
If I can't do more with an ebook than I can with a paper book then I don't want it. Ever.
If I can't buy an iTune and put it on a portable player of my choice then I don't want it. Ever.
If I can't buy a movie and watch it on my platform of choice then I don't want it. Ever.
It's very black & white for me, but I'm a liberty-toting libertarian: what do you expect?
The Kindle is $399. The books listed on the Kindle page are $9.99 each. Picking a random book: Sue Grafton's T is for Trespass. Kind price: $9.99. Hardcover price: $17.79.
...more than double the market price difference) but is having the ebook worth the difference? Grafton's previous book -- S for Silence -- is $7.99 for paperback ($4.24 if you buy 3rd party to Amazon) and $6.39 for Kindle (again, Kindle page doesn't list other editions). A whopping $1.60 difference. $1.60 to [legally] be permanently locked to that copy with your Kindle with no rights to sell that copy to any one, nor transfer to other devices, etc. (I don't think I need to list them).
(Something I find extremely interesting is Amazon compares the kindle price to the hard cover list price ($26.95) AND does not link to any other versions of the book, but the hard cover sure does. It seems they are intentionally wanting to give the false sense of "what a deal!" and making it harder to jump to a non-kindle version.)
$7.80 may look like a lot (Amazon will tell you $26.95-$9.99=$16.96
Is $1.60 (or -$2.15 if 3rd party) or $7.80 worth it to switch to Kindle? Not to me, so I'll stick to being a tree-killer. I won't ever switch to ebooks that trap my money and ability to do as I please.
(I also don't own HD DVD (hah!) nor Blu-Ray and never will until I can play them under my OS of choice, but I digress.)
Honestly, if it comes down to DRM books and DRM movies where I can't read/play on the device of my choice then I'll happily give them up. But it won't be for long because the time will come when good creators of books and film will not be hamstrung by those who demand DRM. That is if the recent digital "experiments" by known musicians are of any indication.
I wouldn't call 2k hits per day "trivial". That makes G-Man more popular than Gilligan's Island by shear number of hits...
Titles 17 & 35 specifically intend to put real property restrictions on intellectual works. IP, by definition, makes a non-scarce thing scarce by treating it as property. So it is of absolutely no coincidence that exclusion, conveyance, subdivision, and limited control of IP are parallels of real property. Loose analogy in geek terms: if class B inherits from A then it's of no surprise B has the same properties of A.
The primary argument about IP is that specific legal force that non-scarce things are made scarce. In other words, the complaints against IP are for the reasons IP is being abused. Term extensions, trolling, trivial/prior-art, etc.
When you think about it IP is completely ironic. IP has exclusion but the point is to sell as many copies as you can. IP has conveyance and subdivision but the original owner has to voluntarily stop using it (the transference is intangible). IP has control but the more you control it the less you can sell it.
However, the absolute true irony to copyrights is that as time marches on communication of information gets cheaper and cheaper yet companies grip it tighter (DMCA) and get their stranglehold extended (Mickey Mouse Act)!
The diode bumps an electron across the gap and a photon is emitted as the electron drops back down. When those photons strike the phosphorus, lose some energy, and emit a photon of lesser energy (i.e., lower frequency, longer wavelength) you get visible light. The former is electroluminescence, the latter is fluorescence.
Just because you slap some phosphorus on a LED, it doesn't mean the whole is still an "LED" but instead a "phosphorus coated LED". Don't confuse technical terms with a marketer bastardizing the term, especially when correcting someone who is clearly using the correct definition of LED.
And, no, LEDs are not fluorescent. Fluorescent bulbs stimulate mercury to emit UV light. The UV light hits the phosphorus which makes it fluoresce and produce visible light. LEDs work by jumping electrons across a band gap and a photon is emitted when it jumps back down. The high efficiency comes into play because it doesn't take much more energy than that of the band gap to make an electron jump.
Basic political BS at its finest. It's like a cop standing by his car eating a donut, watching someone beat the piss out of another, and saying "boy, someone should do something about that."
Maybe he missed that whole impeachment thing at orientation...
It doesn't matter who writes the law when you talk of how to interpret the law. Does the python interpreter care who wrote the foo.py? Is there a special interpreting mode for Guido or you? HELL NO!
The overwhelmingly evident premise of my post was how to interpret law, or rather how it should be interpreted. It was not a dissertation on how a law is written because if your method of interpreting law is flawed then it doesn't matter who writes it. Period.
Think of it this way in terms of contracts: contracts are written down so it is understood what the parties agreed to. If the meaning of the contract can change over time based on who reads it then the whole point and premise of writing it down is lost. The only way to maintain a contract's validity is to interpret based on the meaning of when it was written down. Ditto for the constitution.
The legislative branch writes laws that are clearly unconstitutional. The executive branch ignores the constitution. The judicial case law has basically cut holes out of the constitution. The concept of a written constitution works if you have a branch of government that respects it and interprets it according to the original meaning. The fact that we have deviated so much from the constitution is proof enough to me that Jefferson was right when he said "because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." When the president can snoop on anyone's phone conversation in the name of "anti-terrorism" it violates your rights and is an action of a tyrant.This thinking is why our constitution has basically been shit upon. The constitution is a restriction upon the government, not the people. You have every right you can possibly think of (wear a hat or not, go to bed @ 10pm or not, wear white after labor day or not, etc.) and you only "give up" certain rights for the protection of your liberty. For example, you give up the right to enforce law because if you could then you act as the judge, jury, and "executioner" and the defendant is no longer presumed innocent when your emotions take hold of your reasoning. So you have every right to privacy by virtue of being human except those parts you give up to protect the rest of your liberty or willingly give up (no different than any other right).
Your reasoning about privacy is precisely what I think is wrong with this country (but I don't blame you, I blame the politician of past and present) and why I'm a strong supporter of Ron Paul in either congress or presidency.