Create an iTunes account, based on a one-time-use credit-card number
Purchase your iTune
Deauthorize the computer you bought it with
Offer for sale the iTune and the password to the acccount
Purchaser authorizes their computer on the account
No cost except overhead time and effort for account creation.
And, if there was a way for users to create multiple accounts and transfer iTunes among them, it would be practical to bundle up groups of iTunes after purchase, attach them to a transfer account, and sell them.
You're a big company with a bunch of internal applications running acceptably on Windows 98. When you buy new PCs, the first thing you do is scrape their hard disks clean and install your suite of applications. You even have a site license for Windows 98, so this is legal. Buying new PCs with Windows 98 installed is not an option - Microsoft doesn't sell it or support it any more.
Given the pricing of this box, you can:
spend $467 and throw the Linux CDs away
spend $519 and throw the Windows XP Home CDs away
spend $589 and throw the Windows XP Pro CDs away
Which do you do?
(Those of you out there really in IT support can now tell me what's wrong with the above. My last sysadmin work was around 1996...)
Starting with Reagan, NASA has increasingly been viewed as a way to orbit and service military payloads.
Starting with Lyndon Baines Johnson, NASA has been increasingly viewed as a source of federal pork dollars. Can you think of any other reason why manned spacecraft are launched in Florida, but manned mission control and operational support are all in Houston?
Things will get better when NASA is seen by Congress as something more than a cash cow for high-tech jobs.
... where on the dartboard we have to live. No one of us created the 95% Windows landscape - we can work to change it, but for now we have to live with it.
For whatever reason (bang-for-the-hack, familiarity, relative security), Windows is going to be in the bullseye of the target for the forseeable future. Linux and Macs are going to be well away from the center.
The vast majority of Joe Sixpack users don't really do anything Windows-specific - they could switch, and move out of the bullseye.
Hey, someone with more graphic taste than me should create a picture explaining this to the public...
The low-level "reflexes" of reactors - the systems that actually run things minute-to-minute - are certified out the wazoo, and have received scrutiny at a level similar to the software that flies the Shuttle or commercial airliners.
As such, those systems are typically many years out of date relative to current hardware and software - if they were upgraded, they'd have to be recertified, and certification is so expensive that keeping thirty-year-old hardware running is cheaper. There are reactors in the US that are still controlled by PDP-8s (4K of 12-bit core memory, folks).
As others in this thread have said, the system that got hosed at this reactor was a modern status display added well after the reactor was signed off on and running. If it crashes, the operators get harder-to-understand information from the simpler systems in the control room, but the basic safety systems are still in place.
Homer Simpson to the contrary, the people who run nukes aren't completely stupid.
... above the fold, top-right corner in the dead tree edition this morning, with a continuation on page 14 or so, and two articles on the facing page (one about the MVA getting hammered, one with detailed instructions on how to clean up your infected machine).
The headline was Internet Worm Targets Microsoft Windows. We'll know they really get it when the next headline is Yet Another Microsoft Worm Breaks Windows.
Actually, this is a 99% of all OSs annoyance, I'm afraid, but I notice it most on my RedHat/KDE desktop.
There is no reason my web browsing and window scrolling should get slower and slower with time, just because I've been continuously logged in and hacking for a few weeks. It's not as if something is wearing out and has to be refurbished by my logging out, restarting the X server, and logging back in, really.
Maybe, someday, the authors of large programs that tend to run for days at a time will start to take the attitude that any memory leak is a bug. Surely at least one of the major distro compilers could afford a copy of Purify, understand its output, and fix the leaks.
Flame about Lisp machines that never leaked memory, in the early 1980's, deleted - redundant.
Even if I only have a library of 5 books, I'd still rather have only one that covers the basics. That way, I don't have to dig through five different, sometimes conflicting, explanations of the same concepts.
Ah, but which basics? The term "object-oriented" means different things to different people. The differences you're seeing in these books are probably caused by this.
Go read this article by Jonathan Rees, and you'll see why Java OO != Smalltalk OO != CLOS OO (to name two models you've probably seen, and one you probably haven't).
There hasn't been a new nuclear reactor built in the US in at least a decade. I believe Seabrook (NH) was the last one, and it went live in 1990.
Also, nukes are like airplanes or the Shuttle - their designs must be approved and certified out the wazoo, so they tend to never be upgraded unless there's absolutely no choice. Many US reactors are still controlled by PDP-8s - 1 MHz machines with a 4K address space of 12 bit words.
Hubble was designed to be serviced, on-orbit, by the Shuttle.
It's actually worse than that. Orbits at altitudes reachable by the Shuttle decay rapidly, because the atmosphere's a little too thick up there - satellites like the Hubble, with big solar arrays, are particularly vulnerable.
The most important thing that happens on Hubble servicing missions has nothing to do with fixing hardware. The Shuttle catches the Hubble, then fires its maneuvering engines and carries the Hubble up to a higher orbit.
I know this because my company did some computer modeling for NASA to help them predict how often these reboosts would be needed. The amount of atmospheric drag varies with sunspot activity - increased solar output makes the atmosphere "puff up" and makes orbits decay faster.
And guess what? The Space Station is in an orbit reachable by the Shuttle, and also has big solar panels, so it needs reboosting by the Shuttle too.
0. CEO 1. various VPs 2. middle management 3. task leader technical management 4. worker bees
Telecommuting puts the remote link in the hierarchy mostly at levels 3 and 4. Outsourcing puts it mostly at level 2. From a corporate command and control view, outsourcing looks better because there should be less communication needed - in theory it's all at the manager-to-manager level.
Of course, we all know that it can't work without detailed specs, which get written at levels 3 and 4, and the specs have to be negotiated and clarified, which means more interchange at 3 and 4.
Right now, when you sign up with iTunes, you get one authorization (cookie, token, whatever) which is used for both:
Permission to download stuff
Permission to play stuff once downloaded
Those two permissions should clearly be separable, as in the case of the guy who moved outside of the USA. Apple can't give him permission to download any more (the record labels won't let them), but there should be a way for them to give him permission to play stuff he already owns.
The non-separability of those permissions is a bug in iTunes. Let's see how long it takes Apple to fix it.
They already exist in R&D, and they do everything a driver can do, including backing up to a dock.
I had no idea they were that close to working. I'd heard about a DARPA automated driving experiment a few years ago, but this is cool.
Any bets someone will try this in Texas first? The state is big enough that there's significant traffic that doesn't have to cross state borders (and thus draw early federal attention).
How can anyone talk about robots taking over the economy without mentioning Hans Moravec? After all, he's only been doing work in robotic vision and navigaton for the past thirty years or so, and has been on record predicting human-equivalent intelligent machines by 2050 since the mid-1980's.
He's even got a start-up company that wants to manufacture control heads - basketball-sized sensor+computer units that could be used to run forklifts in warehouses.
My personal prediction is that within ten years, we'll see the first automated tractor-trailer truck. It'll have a Moravec-like brain that will run the truck for the 95% of the time the truck is rolling cross-country, and a satellite link for a driver to help direct it for the last 5%.
I have cable broadband in the Washington DC area (Comcast - $50/month), but I still keep my $13/month account with zzapp.org. Why?
Comcast isn't 100% reliable - they go down for a day or so about quarterly. ZZAPP is my backup for email connectivity (and it's useful for checking Comcast's status when it goes down). ZZAPP goes down about once a year, typically when their upstream ISP has a hardware failure.
ZZAPP is on the consumer side of all the major Internet issues, and they are not bashful about saying so in their monthly email newsletter.
They really do give back to the community, by giving out free dial-up accounts to low-income people who ask for them.
If all you want is cheap, somewhat-reliable connectivity, by all means go with the $5/month guys. If you want to support a reliable local business as well, look into a not-for-profit ISP.
I clearly shouldn't try to argue with someone who obviously has the facts at his fingertips, versus my non-budget-wonk memories. Nevertheless:
The National Debt in 1981 was $997.9 billion; in 1989 it was $2857.4 billion, not $4000 billion.
My bad. The deficit went up by a factor of three instead of a factor of four.
So, the Reagan years increased the deficit by ~$1800 billion. if Congress had had its way, it would have been $2100 billion (ignoring cumulative effects). I still think it's unlikely that the cumulative effects would have eaten the whole $1800 billion. As you said, it depends on whether the differences in spending were mostly for new entitlements.
Anyway, the real problem of the Reagan years was the combination of big budgets and tax cuts. I vaguely remember seeing a lovely graph that showed spending and tax receipts as a function of GDP. The closest thing I could find to it online was here. Check out Figures D and E on that page - they both show something odd happening in 1982
... the budget deficit would have disappeared by the end of Reagan's term.
Here are the sums of both columns of your table:
Reagan: $7912.8 Congress: $8233.1
The Reagan years increased the deficit from ~$1000 billion to ~$4000 billion. The difference between those two figures is only $320.3 billion. The only way to make the remaining $3700 billion go away is to assume massive supply-side driven increases in taxes - voodoo economics, anyone?
Like everyone who gets to the top of the Federal government, Reagan was more interested in changing spending priorities than he was in actually reducing spending. Clinton is the exception that proves the rule here - he got spending under control because the Republican-controlled legislature wouldn't let him do anything else.
There are lots of patents concerning legal procedures.
Really? I've heard rumors that these patents exist, but haven't yet heard one attached to a patent number. If you know of any, please post them.
The closest I've come to confirmation of this was private email from an IP lawyer/hacker, who said he had heard at the 2002 New York State Bar Association annual meeting that "a Patent had been issued on a Method for Preparing Patents - in essence, the practice of law itself may be patentable!" And even he didn't have a hard reference to the patent.
... right after someone patents a legal procedure as a business method. As it is right now, lawyers have a vested interest in more stuff being patentable - more patents means more searches, more filing fees, and more lawsuits, hence more money for lawyers.
When lawyers have to have their documents scanned for patent violations before filing them, they'll begin to get a taste of what the rest of us have to put up with, and maybe they'll work to prune it back a bit.
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Create an iTunes account, based on a one-time-use credit-card number
Purchase your iTune
Deauthorize the computer you bought it with
Offer for sale the iTune and the password to the acccount
Purchaser authorizes their computer on the account
No cost except overhead time and effort for account creation.
And, if there was a way for users to create multiple accounts and transfer iTunes among them, it would be practical to bundle up groups of iTunes after purchase, attach them to a transfer account, and sell them.
Given the pricing of this box, you can:
spend $467 and throw the Linux CDs away
spend $519 and throw the Windows XP Home CDs away
spend $589 and throw the Windows XP Pro CDs away
Which do you do?
(Those of you out there really in IT support can now tell me what's wrong with the above. My last sysadmin work was around 1996...)
Starting with Lyndon Baines Johnson, NASA has been increasingly viewed as a source of federal pork dollars. Can you think of any other reason why manned spacecraft are launched in Florida, but manned mission control and operational support are all in Houston?
Things will get better when NASA is seen by Congress as something more than a cash cow for high-tech jobs.
... where on the dartboard we have to live. No one of us created the 95% Windows landscape - we can work to change it, but for now we have to live with it.
For whatever reason (bang-for-the-hack, familiarity, relative security), Windows is going to be in the bullseye of the target for the forseeable future. Linux and Macs are going to be well away from the center.
The vast majority of Joe Sixpack users don't really do anything Windows-specific - they could switch, and move out of the bullseye.
Hey, someone with more graphic taste than me should create a picture explaining this to the public...
Big red concentric circles - traditional target
At 10 'oclock - Mac OS X logo
At 2 'oclock - Tux
At 4 and 8 'oclock - Darts with a virus and a worm riding them
Dead center - the Windows logo
Across the bottom - Move out of the bullseye!
A simple, accurate description of the main reason you're safer Anywhere But Windows.
The low-level "reflexes" of reactors - the systems that actually run things minute-to-minute - are certified out the wazoo, and have received scrutiny at a level similar to the software that flies the Shuttle or commercial airliners.
As such, those systems are typically many years out of date relative to current hardware and software - if they were upgraded, they'd have to be recertified, and certification is so expensive that keeping thirty-year-old hardware running is cheaper. There are reactors in the US that are still controlled by PDP-8s (4K of 12-bit core memory, folks).
As others in this thread have said, the system that got hosed at this reactor was a modern status display added well after the reactor was signed off on and running. If it crashes, the operators get harder-to-understand information from the simpler systems in the control room, but the basic safety systems are still in place.
Homer Simpson to the contrary, the people who run nukes aren't completely stupid.
If by "ported" you mean "a thin layer over .NET semantics", yeah, a lot of languages have that.
.NET, and efficiently so", then the numbers will drop off quite a bit.
.NET, and declined.
If by "ported" you mean "language X's objects are completely visible to
See this thread from comp.lang.lisp on why Franz Inc (the longest-surviving Common Lisp vendor) looked into porting their stuff to
... above the fold, top-right corner in the dead tree edition this morning, with a continuation on page 14 or so, and two articles on the facing page (one about the MVA getting hammered, one with detailed instructions on how to clean up your infected machine).
The headline was Internet Worm Targets Microsoft Windows. We'll know they really get it when the next headline is Yet Another Microsoft Worm Breaks Windows.
Then you print each ballot fresh, right before it gets handed to the voter. The printing program could handle shuffling the order of the choices.
Actually, this is a 99% of all OSs annoyance, I'm afraid, but I notice it most on my RedHat/KDE desktop.
There is no reason my web browsing and window scrolling should get slower and slower with time, just because I've been continuously logged in and hacking for a few weeks. It's not as if something is wearing out and has to be refurbished by my logging out, restarting the X server, and logging back in, really.
Maybe, someday, the authors of large programs that tend to run for days at a time will start to take the attitude that any memory leak is a bug. Surely at least one of the major distro compilers could afford a copy of Purify, understand its output, and fix the leaks.
Flame about Lisp machines that never leaked memory, in the early 1980's, deleted - redundant.
Ah, but which basics? The term "object-oriented" means different things to different people. The differences you're seeing in these books are probably caused by this.
Go read this article by Jonathan Rees, and you'll see why Java OO != Smalltalk OO != CLOS OO (to name two models you've probably seen, and one you probably haven't).
No, it means they support recognized, Internet-wide standards, like network standard byte order.
There hasn't been a new nuclear reactor built in the US in at least a decade. I believe Seabrook (NH) was the last one, and it went live in 1990.
Also, nukes are like airplanes or the Shuttle - their designs must be approved and certified out the wazoo, so they tend to never be upgraded unless there's absolutely no choice. Many US reactors are still controlled by PDP-8s - 1 MHz machines with a 4K address space of 12 bit words.
It's actually worse than that. Orbits at altitudes reachable by the Shuttle decay rapidly, because the atmosphere's a little too thick up there - satellites like the Hubble, with big solar arrays, are particularly vulnerable.
The most important thing that happens on Hubble servicing missions has nothing to do with fixing hardware. The Shuttle catches the Hubble, then fires its maneuvering engines and carries the Hubble up to a higher orbit.
I know this because my company did some computer modeling for NASA to help them predict how often these reboosts would be needed. The amount of atmospheric drag varies with sunspot activity - increased solar output makes the atmosphere "puff up" and makes orbits decay faster.
And guess what? The Space Station is in an orbit reachable by the Shuttle, and also has big solar panels, so it needs reboosting by the Shuttle too.
A typical company hierarchy looks like this:
0. CEO
1. various VPs
2. middle management
3. task leader technical management
4. worker bees
Telecommuting puts the remote link in the hierarchy mostly at levels 3 and 4. Outsourcing puts it mostly at level 2. From a corporate command and control view, outsourcing looks better because there should be less communication needed - in theory it's all at the manager-to-manager level.
Of course, we all know that it can't work without detailed specs, which get written at levels 3 and 4, and the specs have to be negotiated and clarified, which means more interchange at 3 and 4.
Permission to download stuff
Permission to play stuff once downloaded
Those two permissions should clearly be separable, as in the case of the guy who moved outside of the USA. Apple can't give him permission to download any more (the record labels won't let them), but there should be a way for them to give him permission to play stuff he already owns.
The non-separability of those permissions is a bug in iTunes. Let's see how long it takes Apple to fix it.
I had no idea they were that close to working. I'd heard about a DARPA automated driving experiment a few years ago, but this is cool.
Any bets someone will try this in Texas first? The state is big enough that there's significant traffic that doesn't have to cross state borders (and thus draw early federal attention).
How can anyone talk about robots taking over the economy without mentioning Hans Moravec? After all, he's only been doing work in robotic vision and navigaton for the past thirty years or so, and has been on record predicting human-equivalent intelligent machines by 2050 since the mid-1980's.
He's even got a start-up company that wants to manufacture control heads - basketball-sized sensor+computer units that could be used to run forklifts in warehouses.
My personal prediction is that within ten years, we'll see the first automated tractor-trailer truck. It'll have a Moravec-like brain that will run the truck for the 95% of the time the truck is rolling cross-country, and a satellite link for a driver to help direct it for the last 5%.
Comcast isn't 100% reliable - they go down for a day or so about quarterly. ZZAPP is my backup for email connectivity (and it's useful for checking Comcast's status when it goes down). ZZAPP goes down about once a year, typically when their upstream ISP has a hardware failure.
ZZAPP is on the consumer side of all the major Internet issues, and they are not bashful about saying so in their monthly email newsletter.
They really do give back to the community, by giving out free dial-up accounts to low-income people who ask for them.
If all you want is cheap, somewhat-reliable connectivity, by all means go with the $5/month guys. If you want to support a reliable local business as well, look into a not-for-profit ISP.
... for ghod's sake get it right!
""Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud."
My bad. The deficit went up by a factor of three instead of a factor of four.
So, the Reagan years increased the deficit by ~$1800 billion. if Congress had had its way, it would have been $2100 billion (ignoring cumulative effects). I still think it's unlikely that the cumulative effects would have eaten the whole $1800 billion. As you said, it depends on whether the differences in spending were mostly for new entitlements.
Anyway, the real problem of the Reagan years was the combination of big budgets and tax cuts. I vaguely remember seeing a lovely graph that showed spending and tax receipts as a function of GDP. The closest thing I could find to it online was here. Check out Figures D and E on that page - they both show something odd happening in 1982
Here are the sums of both columns of your table:
Reagan: $7912.8 Congress: $8233.1
The Reagan years increased the deficit from ~$1000 billion to ~$4000 billion. The difference between those two figures is only $320.3 billion. The only way to make the remaining $3700 billion go away is to assume massive supply-side driven increases in taxes - voodoo economics, anyone?
Like everyone who gets to the top of the Federal government, Reagan was more interested in changing spending priorities than he was in actually reducing spending. Clinton is the exception that proves the rule here - he got spending under control because the Republican-controlled legislature wouldn't let him do anything else.
Wedged government is good government, folks...
Really? I've heard rumors that these patents exist, but haven't yet heard one attached to a patent number. If you know of any, please post them.
The closest I've come to confirmation of this was private email from an IP lawyer/hacker, who said he had heard at the 2002 New York State Bar Association annual meeting that "a Patent had been issued on a Method for Preparing Patents - in essence, the practice of law itself may be patentable!" And even he didn't have a hard reference to the patent.
... right after someone patents a legal procedure as a business method. As it is right now, lawyers have a vested interest in more stuff being patentable - more patents means more searches, more filing fees, and more lawsuits, hence more money for lawyers.
When lawyers have to have their documents scanned for patent violations before filing them, they'll begin to get a taste of what the rest of us have to put up with, and maybe they'll work to prune it back a bit.
... but posting this comment should remove the point I gave the bastard.