No. The customers of companies pay taxes. Don't believe me? Then consider this: companies will price their goods such that they make a net profit, that is, a profit after everything else has been paid out: salaries, money for capital investments, depreciation, taxes, etc. So any taxes that a company pays are actually being paid by their customers in the form of higher product prices. Of course, whenever the customer is a company, the same principle applies. Apply it recursively until you get to an individual, at which point the recursion stops.
Adm. Kimmel: What happen ?
Gen. Short: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Comm. Officer: We get signal.
Adm. Kimmel: What!
Comm Officer: Main speaker turn on
Adm. Yamamoto: How are you gentlemen!!
Adm. Kimmel: It's you!!
Adm. Yamamoto: All your battleship are belong to us.
Adm. Yamamoto: You are on the way to destruction.
Adm. Kimmel: What you say!!
Adm. Yamamoto: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Adm. Yamamoto: ha ha ha ha....
Adm. Kimmel: Take off every 'carrier'!!
Adm. Kimmel: You know what you doing.
Adm. Kimmel: Move 'carrier'.
Adm. Kimmel: For great justice.
My apologies to those whose stomachs couldn't take it...
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
So, bottom line: if you put patented code into the GPLed program, you cannot redistribute it, which means you can't sell it to anyone.
Having said that, the case you to which you refer does not illustrate this in the way you believe. The popular meme for this case is as follows: Ditzy woman orders coffee, drives away and spills it on herself and is scalded. She sues and is an instant millionaire. This is completely false. Here are the facts:
[goes on to list a few specifics of the case]
I have one, and only one, question: had she bought McDonald's coffee anytime in recent history, after McDonald's started serving their coffee so hot? If so, then she doesn't have a leg to stand on. Period. If not, then she might have a valid complaint.
Even so. Face it: shit happens. Automobile accidents (misnomer though it may be) are common. When I drive, I do so knowing that there is a possibility that someone will do something stupid and hit me, perhaps destroying my car and perhaps injuring me or even killing me. That is a risk I take by exposing myself to the driving environment.
When you buy coffee, there is the possibility that it will be too hot to drink. It's a risk that anyone with a brain will be aware of. Ms. Liebeck took that risk and lost. Tough. Shit happens.
It's when someone is either knowingly negligent (by "knowingly", I mean that they have already considered and dismissed the resulting effects) or malicious that I believe they should pay -- criminally. That goes for corporations as well: they should be shut down, either temporarily (equivalent to being put in jail) or permanently (equivalent to being executed) if convicted of a criminal offense. There will be innocent people working for such companies. Tough. They'll have to find another job, just as the people who unknowingly worked for convicted criminals had to.
In almost all other cases, responsibility for the consequences should be shouldered by the injured. Dealing with such consequences is what we have insurance for, but the tort system has managed to significantly distort the basic idea behind insurance such that the true costs and risks of something are hidden, because they're recovered by insurance companies as much through the tort system as they are through premiums. As for the victim not being aware of the possible consequences, ignorance of the law is no defense against a conviction, so why should ignorance of the risks be a defense against having to suffer the consequences of ignoring such risks?
Bottom line: the reason there are so many lawsuits in the U.S. today is that people expect everyone else (but not themselves, of course) to be perfect and, as a result, anything made by others to be similarly perfect. Or, at least, perfectly safe. Thanks to the "dumbing down" of America, Americans no longer understand how the world around them works, so it never occurs to them that there is risk in the things they do.
One of the really big problems is that we Americans want our cars to be big and accelerate like bats out of hell.
There's good reason for that. Our cars need to accelerate like bats out of hell because people in America drive like idiots, and you need all the options you can get to get out of the way. And we need our cars to be big because even with good acceleration, you can't always get out of the way.
In order to understand why both sexes have the physical and behavioral turn-ons that they do, we need to take a look at the evolutionary biology of human mating.
And then says this:
Oversimplifying only a little, we can say that women form an instinctive answer to their primary question based on four traits: kindness, wealth, social status, and talent.
So he has the right premise, but comes up with only a partially
correct answer.
The correct answer? Women are looking for success indicators.
What could these be? Well, how do you think you would behave
if you were extremely successful, and what traits do you think it
takes to be so successful? I'll list what I believe counts:
Confidence. As you succeed, you gain confidence that you can
succeed, and you gain confidence in yourself. Therefore, women look
for this. A guy who is confident is a guy who, if he isn't already
successful, has a high probability of being successful.
Assertiveness. To succeed, you must insist on getting what you
want. You must assert yourself, must compel others to do your
bidding. Want to know why men always have to make the first move?
Simple: because doing so shows that the guy is assertive enough (and
confident enough) to try. This may mean insisting on getting what you
want at the expense of others, perhaps even at the expense of the
women you're interested in. So be it.
Aggressiveness. You can't just assert yourself at the beginning
and expect to succeed. You can't just mess around. You have to be
aggressive about going after what you want. You have to be willing to
put a great deal of energy into it. This often translates to other
areas, for instance defense of territory.
Women pick up on all of these things. The guys that are cocky,
arrogant, mean (aggressive), and (in many geeks' eyes) cruel
(assertive) seem to always end up with the women precisely
because women are looking for the above traits. Kindness
doesn't even enter into the equation until much later. But by that
time, the man has scored, and in evolutionary terms that is all
that matters.
Finding the right combination of these traits to display is the real
trick. Confidence is probably the best trait to work on because it
involves the fewest compromises. Most geeks are highly confident in
their computer skills. But what needs to show through is confidence
about everything. And that means that, as a male, you must
approach a woman you're interested in as if there's no question that
the outcome of the encounter will be in your favor. And you must do
so without hesitation or doubt.
The right to free speech, however, requires the speakers to be responsible for what they're saying. This means that defamatory, inflammatory, and otherwise irresponsible speech under the safety of anonymity has to be curtailed somehow.
Umm, no. Speech should never be curtailed, whether anonymous or not.
You were on the right track, but somehow got a little derailed. The responsibilities that go with the right to free speech are simple:
The decisions you make are your own. Therefore, if you make a decision based on what someone else says, the consequences are yours, not theirs. It is your responsibility to research the claims made by others and form your own opinion.
The right to free speech implies that you may hear things you don't like, or even are untrue. Tough shit. If you want the right, you have to be willing to deal with the consequences. If you don't want the consequences, then you must abrogate your own right... and not someone else's.
Now, if I don't want to hear what someone is saying, I can either go elsewhere, wear earplugs, or filter it out (i.e., ignore it). This goes for online speech as well as speech in meatspace, and is true whether the speech is anonymous or not.
The only difference between normal speech and anonymous speech is that anonymous speech protects the speaker from retribution by those who don't like what is being said. But whether speech is anonymous or not, the responsibilities of the listener are the same.
I find it very interesting that many of the rights we have depend strongly on an individual's sense of personal responsibility, something that seems to be disappearing fast.
DETROIT, Michigan (Reuters) - 2 members of a work crew were simultaneously fried to a crisp and frozen solid today after their backhoe hit the new superconducting power line that was recently installed by Detroit Edison.
The new superconducting line carries power for half the city of Detroit, and that half of the city immediately blacked out after the superconducting line was cut. Officials have given no estimate of when power will be restored, but say they are "working on it" and additionally commented that "this superconducting line is a bitch to work with".
The shift supervisor was on site at the time of the accident. When asked about the accident, he commented "I'm just glad I was here, because they'd have a really hard time identifying the bodies otherwise". When asked how the accident happened, he said "we hit all sorts of lines with our backhoe all the time, but most of them are phone and data lines, so it's rare that there is a safety issue". Officials at Detroit Edison confirmed this, saying "most of the lines we hit belong to UUnet. We're proud to be helping to give those bastards a bad reputation".
Family members of the deceased could not be reached for comment.
It is Inktomi and Google that will wind up in an embroiled legal battle, and neither company can claim prior art.
I don't believe the defendant in a patent lawsuit needs to have their own prior art to win, they merely need to prove that prior art exists. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. I suspect that in practice, however, prior art makes no difference at all these days...
Further, for those who can read code fluently, the code itself is a precise description of what is intended, more than any amount of English.
They are handing an argument on a platter here, in my view. Pages spent saying code is speech, there is no line between code and expression, etc. is subverted right here. At least in debater-ish terms; no idea what a lawyer would make of that.
The statement in question is saying that no amount of English can provide as precise a description of what is intended. And you're right in questioning this item. I suspect that what they meant is that no amount of English can describe what is intended as succinctly as the source code.
You can't use nuclear fission because no one has figured out what to do with the spent radioactive waste.
Wrong. There are plenty of things we can do with the spent radioactive waste, but the very same idiots I'm talking about, who prefer coal power to nuclear power, also oppose the things we can do with nuclear waste that any sensible person would have no problem with, like:
Recycling it.
Burying it really deep (thousands of feet deep) someplace really remote, like some little island in the middle of the pacific.
Mixing it with dirt and rock in the same proportions that the original fuel ore was found and putting the resulting mix back in one of the derelict uranium mines.
Grinding it into really fine dust and dumping it in really small quantities (small enough to not have an effect on the fish population) into the ocean over a really large area. This would take some time, but there isn't a lot of it to begin with so this should be quite feasible.
And that's only what I can come up with from the top of my head.
Yes, Nevada and California don't want it. NIMBYism at its finest. I live in California, but frankly I'd love to see the power companies here go bankrupt and leave the state without power. That'll teach those idiot pseudo-environmentalists and NIMBYists what happens when you refuse to build the things you depend on (power plants) in your own backyard...in other words, what happens when you don't take responsibility for your own needs (power).
As for the safety of nuclear power plants, remember that I'm talking about modern designs. You know, the ones where some law of physics would have to be violated for something really bad to happen? CANDU reactors are a good example, but I believe there are even better, safer designs out there these days.
We have thousands of reactor-years of experience with nuclear fission, and Chernobyl is the worst that has happened, and that was with a badly designed reactor with the safeties deliberately turned off! We've been putting nuclear reactors into military naval vessels on a more or less routine basis (think submarines) and have put them into relatively harsh environments for the last 40 years without any really significant problems, and you think that a land-based nuclear power generating facility based on a modern (read: uses the laws of physics to be safe) design will be UNSAFE?!? You're exactly the sort of person I've been talking about: you'd rather live with all the shit spewing from the coal plants than "risk" getting power from a clean, safe source whose only real problem is all the sensationalistic bullshit spouted by the media and pseudo-environmentalists. I hope you live in California so you can experience firsthand the consequences of your viewpoint.
This is what happens when you can't use nuclear fission to produce most of your power, thanks to the pseudo-environmentalists and NIMBYists and their shortsighted anti-everything stance.
So, those of you who are so deathly afraid of nuclear power, tell me: would you prefer to generate your power using "clean" natural gas which emits lots of CO2 and get an increase in the global temperature of 5 degC, or would you prefer to generate your power using "dangerous" nuclear power (not with the old RBMK technology that everyone loves to point to when they think of nuclear power, but with real modern nuclear designs like the Integral Fast Reactor) and deal with the "problem" of disposing of the comparatively little waste produced? Sorry, you don't get any other choices, because nothing else even comes close (coal and oil? Puhleeze. Solar? Yeah right...let me know when the production of a cell uses less power than the cell can generate over its lifetime. Hydro? How many ecosystems do you want to destroy in the process of building it? Wave? How many plants would you have to build to generate enough power, and what effect will it have on the coastline ecology?).
Bottom line: you're going to affect the world around you if you generate power. Conservation helps but it won't help nearly enough and, in any case, why do it when you can generate your power using something as clean as nuclear?
But, of course, nuclear power will never happen in this country thanks to the very people I'm talking about, so I guess we're all just going to have to deal with a hotter world (if the prediction referred to is correct).
Here's another compelling reason to put the font support in the X server instead of the application layer: if you put the font handling in the application layer, each system on which the clients will execute will have to have all the fonts those clients wish to use available on that system. Hence, the fonts available to the applications a user might run will vary depending on where he's running his applications from. This probably isn't a desirable situation.
Okay, if you're going to do font handling at the user level (and I agree that there are some compelling advantages of doing so), then you should do all the font handling at that level. In other words, you should be putting all this stuff in Xlib. So the API to fetch a new font and to draw it to the window remains exactly the same and Xlib itself worries about how to get the X server to render it, whether through the Render extension or through the traditional protocol call.
Because otherwise, (a) full font support in an application will require that application to be aware of every X-level font library (like Xft) in the system and know how to use it and (b) applications that need full font support will be less portable. That's more complicated than it's worth and gets you less overall benefit in return (the idea here is that as many fonts as possible should be antialiased/alpha-blended, and that includes Type 1 fonts, Truetype fonts, etc.).
By putting it in Xlib, you get the advantage of being able to back things out later (the API is what matters to the applications, ultimately) just as you can with Xft, but the added advantage of applications not having to do anything different than they already do. Upgrade the library and bang...all applications running on the same system that the library resides on can now make use of alpha-blended fonts transparently.
Support of application-level fonts will obviously require some kind of library support. I'd argue that it should be implemented in a separate library since we're talking about new functionality.
The X11 protocol gives applications bit-accurate control over drawing. The spec doesn't just say that you call XDrawText and something vaguely resembling the text will appear in the window roughly where you want it to, it defines the exact way in which the text bitmap gets combined with the window contents. Furthermore, the X11 server is not permitted to allocate extra colors (grey values) just because it feels like it; the application may require control over those values itself.
Sure, but (a) most people use a truecolor visual with at least 16 bits of depth these days, so allocating extra colors isn't a problem, (b) just because alpha information is provided doesn't mean the X server has to use it...it can draw the fonts the same way they would be drawn had they been supplied as a straight bitmap, and (c) alpha font support can be turned on or off with an option to xset(1) or, if that's not possible, a switch to the X server itself if necessary.
The X11 protocol and Xlib are not at the level of abstraction of the Windows GDI, Postscript, or other, similar APIs; they are lower level. Anybody dealing with them needs to write a lot of code dealing with different device classes. In X11, you get a Windows GDI-like API, with all its conveniences and limitations, more at the level of the toolkits. Such toolkits can then provide you with antialiased rendering when available without code changes. GTK, Qt, fltk, and wxWindows all have hooks for putting this functionality in.
Yeah, but the problem is that the common API amongst all these things is Xlib and, underneath, the X protocol. Font handling is such a fundamental role of the X server that I believe newer methods of rendering fonts should also be handled by the X server.
Otherwise, you get the X server handling some fonts while the toolkits handle other fonts. That's insane! It's also wasteful.
The deal is this: users expect the fonts to look good. They don't give a shit what toolkit is in vogue at the time, nor should they. Good looking, toolkit-independent fonts can be had by implementing them at the X server level, so why isn't this being done? This may be a religious issue, but I strongly believe that if you're going to implement functionality that the X server already handles in some manner, then you should implement it in the X server. Otherwise you're just contributing to the mess we already have, namely the proliferation of toolkits that all provide roughly the same functionality but in slightly different and incompatible ways.
This is ridiculous. Why not instead: design a separate font server protocol that takes the same font specification as the older font server and outputs a font with alpha information and set up the X server to automagically detect that the font server is talking the newer protocol and treat the font data as including alpha information, then render it appropriately to the screen.
As for fonts in the font path, just have the X server detect that the file is of the new alpha-capable format and deal with the font appropriately.
I mean, the whole point behind having an abstraction like the X server that deals with fonts is that the applications don't have to know things like whether or not the fonts are antialiased...they Just Work.
So please, tell me why this won't work, and why it's not being implemented this way.
Remember, people: it would have to pass FAA certification before it could be produced, and maintenance on it would fall under the same rules that govern certified aircraft: only licensed mechanics are allowed to work on it, only FAA-approved modifications are allowed, an inspection is required every year, etc. The very things that make aviation so expensive will likely bury this thing even if it's otherwise a complete revolution in aviation.
I rely on somebody's programming every time I hop in a commercial airliner.
No, you don't. You rely on at least two very highly trained and experienced human pilots, who control the plane and make the go/no-go decisions.
The reasons for flight not becoming as commonplace as automobile driving are related to human decision-making and knowledge, not to technology. And let's face it: for flight to become that commonplace, the very same idiots that drive on the roads today would be flying in the air, making decisions as poorly up there as they do down here. How many morons have you seen drive really slowly in the left lane, or drive side-by-side and exactly the same speed as the guy in the lane next to them? These are the people we're talking about. They're the same people that "just want to get their work done" but don't want to learn how to get their work done. It's the type of person who doesn't want to make any decisions, they just want to get from point A to point B as easily and quickly as possible. Flight requires decision making that precludes such a person from sitting in the left seat, and all the electronics in the world aren't going to help.
Hell, there are enough trained pilots who try to be like that as it is: they're the people that ask the weather briefer whether or not they should go, rather than making that decision for themselves.
I see a pager as a warranty. If you're not willing to be on-call 24/7 to stand behind your work, I'm not sure I want you working for me or with me.
I see. So I take it, then, that you expect the company that manufactured your car to fix it under warranty on demand, 24x7? How about the new house you bought?
For anything that the average person purchases, 24x7 support will cost quite a bit extra if it's even available at all. And equipment that you buy for the operation of your company usually requires the purchase of an expensive support contract in order to get 24x7 instant support.
Given all that, why exactly is the stuff you built any different? Are you being paid a whole lot extra to support your stuff 24x7? I suspect not.
I agree that you should do the best you can to build things right. So should the companies that manufacture the things we buy. But just as it's unreasonable to expect the companies that manufacture the things we buy to support their products 24x7 with a (say) 20 minute response time for free, it's also unreasonable to expect a salaried employee to carry a pager to support his systems (software or otherwise) 24x7 without paying him over an above his normal salary.
And before you mention how much such people normally make, keep this in mind: you're not being paid for the 24x7 support. You're being paid to produce a custom application, one that can't be sold in volume. Companies that create low-volume software charge each customer hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars for their software, and often won't even provide 24x7 support for it without an additional service contract.
So why should you be any different, and why should the people that work for you be any different?
Wholeheartedly agree. A gradual increase in fossil fuel costs will fuel growth of cheap, alternative energy
No, it won't. The reason it won't is that gradual change is something that people don't really notice. Instead, they gradually adapt to it. For instance, the price of gasoline here in the Silicon Valley has risen from about $1.35 to about $2.00, but it took months to happen, and the end result is that people in this area just pay up and continue to drive their SUV's and luxury cars (I'm no saint myself, as I own a '92 Mustang GT, but I may be somewhat unusual in that I value performance greatly. Most people in the Silicon Valley drive like a granny, so it's obvious that performance isn't something they're interested in).
Drastic change, on the other hand, is something that people sit up and take notice of. The oil "crisis" of the 1970's is a perfect example. The prices rose drastically enough and quickly enough that people sat up and took notice, and the result is that the Japanese were able to successfully sell their (relatively) fuel-efficient cars.
If I gave you a glass of water that might be toxic, but without proof, would you drink it? Of course not. Get a grip on reality. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it is not happening.
So how do you know that the glass of water you'll drink next isn't toxic?
"Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it is not happening" is precisely the reasoning that people use to justify any beliefs they may have that they can't otherwise justify. It's used to justify anything from crackpot beliefs in little green men running around kidnapping people to the existence of God.
No, in the best traditions of science, if you want to make a claim you have to back it up with solid evidence. There would be a lot more consensus in the scientific community about global warming if the evidence were more solid. Until there's better evidence, there's insufficient reason to believe that humans are having a significant effect on the planet's temperature.
Note that this is not the same as saying that these people aren't convinced of the validity of the mechanisms behind warming: there's plenty of evidence for them (Venus, for instance).
Hence, I think the best course of action is to continue to look for ways to reduce our impact, but not to go overboard about it. It doesn't hurt us to do the research. But it means not adopting some new technology unless it has a very good chance of being economical as well as beneficial. Moderation is the key.
Slashdot Mirror
No. The customers of companies pay taxes. Don't believe me? Then consider this: companies will price their goods such that they make a net profit, that is, a profit after everything else has been paid out: salaries, money for capital investments, depreciation, taxes, etc. So any taxes that a company pays are actually being paid by their customers in the form of higher product prices. Of course, whenever the customer is a company, the same principle applies. Apply it recursively until you get to an individual, at which point the recursion stops.
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My apologies to those whose stomachs couldn't take it...
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So, bottom line: if you put patented code into the GPLed program, you cannot redistribute it, which means you can't sell it to anyone.
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You didn't spell it right.
It's LENticular, not LINticular.
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After all, where do you think all the BOFHs-in-training are? Just think of all the, um, interesting problems you're likely to have with one of these.
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[goes on to list a few specifics of the case]
I have one, and only one, question: had she bought McDonald's coffee anytime in recent history, after McDonald's started serving their coffee so hot? If so, then she doesn't have a leg to stand on. Period. If not, then she might have a valid complaint.
Even so. Face it: shit happens. Automobile accidents (misnomer though it may be) are common. When I drive, I do so knowing that there is a possibility that someone will do something stupid and hit me, perhaps destroying my car and perhaps injuring me or even killing me. That is a risk I take by exposing myself to the driving environment.
When you buy coffee, there is the possibility that it will be too hot to drink. It's a risk that anyone with a brain will be aware of. Ms. Liebeck took that risk and lost. Tough. Shit happens.
It's when someone is either knowingly negligent (by "knowingly", I mean that they have already considered and dismissed the resulting effects) or malicious that I believe they should pay -- criminally. That goes for corporations as well: they should be shut down, either temporarily (equivalent to being put in jail) or permanently (equivalent to being executed) if convicted of a criminal offense. There will be innocent people working for such companies. Tough. They'll have to find another job, just as the people who unknowingly worked for convicted criminals had to.
In almost all other cases, responsibility for the consequences should be shouldered by the injured. Dealing with such consequences is what we have insurance for, but the tort system has managed to significantly distort the basic idea behind insurance such that the true costs and risks of something are hidden, because they're recovered by insurance companies as much through the tort system as they are through premiums. As for the victim not being aware of the possible consequences, ignorance of the law is no defense against a conviction, so why should ignorance of the risks be a defense against having to suffer the consequences of ignoring such risks?
Bottom line: the reason there are so many lawsuits in the U.S. today is that people expect everyone else (but not themselves, of course) to be perfect and, as a result, anything made by others to be similarly perfect. Or, at least, perfectly safe. Thanks to the "dumbing down" of America, Americans no longer understand how the world around them works, so it never occurs to them that there is risk in the things they do.
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There's good reason for that. Our cars need to accelerate like bats out of hell because people in America drive like idiots, and you need all the options you can get to get out of the way. And we need our cars to be big because even with good acceleration, you can't always get out of the way.
:-)
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- Confidence. As you succeed, you gain confidence that you can
succeed, and you gain confidence in yourself. Therefore, women look
for this. A guy who is confident is a guy who, if he isn't already
successful, has a high probability of being successful.
- Assertiveness. To succeed, you must insist on getting what you
want. You must assert yourself, must compel others to do your
bidding. Want to know why men always have to make the first move?
Simple: because doing so shows that the guy is assertive enough (and
confident enough) to try. This may mean insisting on getting what you
want at the expense of others, perhaps even at the expense of the
women you're interested in. So be it.
- Aggressiveness. You can't just assert yourself at the beginning
and expect to succeed. You can't just mess around. You have to be
aggressive about going after what you want. You have to be willing to
put a great deal of energy into it. This often translates to other
areas, for instance defense of territory.
Women pick up on all of these things. The guys that are cocky, arrogant, mean (aggressive), and (in many geeks' eyes) cruel (assertive) seem to always end up with the women precisely because women are looking for the above traits. Kindness doesn't even enter into the equation until much later. But by that time, the man has scored, and in evolutionary terms that is all that matters.Finding the right combination of these traits to display is the real trick. Confidence is probably the best trait to work on because it involves the fewest compromises. Most geeks are highly confident in their computer skills. But what needs to show through is confidence about everything. And that means that, as a male, you must approach a woman you're interested in as if there's no question that the outcome of the encounter will be in your favor. And you must do so without hesitation or doubt.
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Umm, no. Speech should never be curtailed, whether anonymous or not.
You were on the right track, but somehow got a little derailed. The responsibilities that go with the right to free speech are simple:
Now, if I don't want to hear what someone is saying, I can either go elsewhere, wear earplugs, or filter it out (i.e., ignore it). This goes for online speech as well as speech in meatspace, and is true whether the speech is anonymous or not.
The only difference between normal speech and anonymous speech is that anonymous speech protects the speaker from retribution by those who don't like what is being said. But whether speech is anonymous or not, the responsibilities of the listener are the same.
I find it very interesting that many of the rights we have depend strongly on an individual's sense of personal responsibility, something that seems to be disappearing fast.
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DETROIT, Michigan (Reuters) - 2 members of a work crew were simultaneously fried to a crisp and frozen solid today after their backhoe hit the new superconducting power line that was recently installed by Detroit Edison.
The new superconducting line carries power for half the city of Detroit, and that half of the city immediately blacked out after the superconducting line was cut. Officials have given no estimate of when power will be restored, but say they are "working on it" and additionally commented that "this superconducting line is a bitch to work with".
The shift supervisor was on site at the time of the accident. When asked about the accident, he commented "I'm just glad I was here, because they'd have a really hard time identifying the bodies otherwise". When asked how the accident happened, he said "we hit all sorts of lines with our backhoe all the time, but most of them are phone and data lines, so it's rare that there is a safety issue". Officials at Detroit Edison confirmed this, saying "most of the lines we hit belong to UUnet. We're proud to be helping to give those bastards a bad reputation".
Family members of the deceased could not be reached for comment.
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I don't believe the defendant in a patent lawsuit needs to have their own prior art to win, they merely need to prove that prior art exists. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. I suspect that in practice, however, prior art makes no difference at all these days...
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The statement in question is saying that no amount of English can provide as precise a description of what is intended. And you're right in questioning this item. I suspect that what they meant is that no amount of English can describe what is intended as succinctly as the source code.
Oops.
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Wrong. There are plenty of things we can do with the spent radioactive waste, but the very same idiots I'm talking about, who prefer coal power to nuclear power, also oppose the things we can do with nuclear waste that any sensible person would have no problem with, like:
And that's only what I can come up with from the top of my head.
Yes, Nevada and California don't want it. NIMBYism at its finest. I live in California, but frankly I'd love to see the power companies here go bankrupt and leave the state without power. That'll teach those idiot pseudo-environmentalists and NIMBYists what happens when you refuse to build the things you depend on (power plants) in your own backyard...in other words, what happens when you don't take responsibility for your own needs (power).
As for the safety of nuclear power plants, remember that I'm talking about modern designs. You know, the ones where some law of physics would have to be violated for something really bad to happen? CANDU reactors are a good example, but I believe there are even better, safer designs out there these days.
We have thousands of reactor-years of experience with nuclear fission, and Chernobyl is the worst that has happened, and that was with a badly designed reactor with the safeties deliberately turned off! We've been putting nuclear reactors into military naval vessels on a more or less routine basis (think submarines) and have put them into relatively harsh environments for the last 40 years without any really significant problems, and you think that a land-based nuclear power generating facility based on a modern (read: uses the laws of physics to be safe) design will be UNSAFE?!? You're exactly the sort of person I've been talking about: you'd rather live with all the shit spewing from the coal plants than "risk" getting power from a clean, safe source whose only real problem is all the sensationalistic bullshit spouted by the media and pseudo-environmentalists. I hope you live in California so you can experience firsthand the consequences of your viewpoint.
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This is what happens when you can't use nuclear fission to produce most of your power, thanks to the pseudo-environmentalists and NIMBYists and their shortsighted anti-everything stance.
So, those of you who are so deathly afraid of nuclear power, tell me: would you prefer to generate your power using "clean" natural gas which emits lots of CO2 and get an increase in the global temperature of 5 degC, or would you prefer to generate your power using "dangerous" nuclear power (not with the old RBMK technology that everyone loves to point to when they think of nuclear power, but with real modern nuclear designs like the Integral Fast Reactor) and deal with the "problem" of disposing of the comparatively little waste produced? Sorry, you don't get any other choices, because nothing else even comes close (coal and oil? Puhleeze. Solar? Yeah right...let me know when the production of a cell uses less power than the cell can generate over its lifetime. Hydro? How many ecosystems do you want to destroy in the process of building it? Wave? How many plants would you have to build to generate enough power, and what effect will it have on the coastline ecology?).
Bottom line: you're going to affect the world around you if you generate power. Conservation helps but it won't help nearly enough and, in any case, why do it when you can generate your power using something as clean as nuclear?
But, of course, nuclear power will never happen in this country thanks to the very people I'm talking about, so I guess we're all just going to have to deal with a hotter world (if the prediction referred to is correct).
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Here's another compelling reason to put the font support in the X server instead of the application layer: if you put the font handling in the application layer, each system on which the clients will execute will have to have all the fonts those clients wish to use available on that system. Hence, the fonts available to the applications a user might run will vary depending on where he's running his applications from. This probably isn't a desirable situation.
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Okay, if you're going to do font handling at the user level (and I agree that there are some compelling advantages of doing so), then you should do all the font handling at that level. In other words, you should be putting all this stuff in Xlib. So the API to fetch a new font and to draw it to the window remains exactly the same and Xlib itself worries about how to get the X server to render it, whether through the Render extension or through the traditional protocol call.
Because otherwise, (a) full font support in an application will require that application to be aware of every X-level font library (like Xft) in the system and know how to use it and (b) applications that need full font support will be less portable. That's more complicated than it's worth and gets you less overall benefit in return (the idea here is that as many fonts as possible should be antialiased/alpha-blended, and that includes Type 1 fonts, Truetype fonts, etc.).
By putting it in Xlib, you get the advantage of being able to back things out later (the API is what matters to the applications, ultimately) just as you can with Xft, but the added advantage of applications not having to do anything different than they already do. Upgrade the library and bang...all applications running on the same system that the library resides on can now make use of alpha-blended fonts transparently.
Support of application-level fonts will obviously require some kind of library support. I'd argue that it should be implemented in a separate library since we're talking about new functionality.
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Sure, but (a) most people use a truecolor visual with at least 16 bits of depth these days, so allocating extra colors isn't a problem, (b) just because alpha information is provided doesn't mean the X server has to use it...it can draw the fonts the same way they would be drawn had they been supplied as a straight bitmap, and (c) alpha font support can be turned on or off with an option to xset(1) or, if that's not possible, a switch to the X server itself if necessary.
Yeah, but the problem is that the common API amongst all these things is Xlib and, underneath, the X protocol. Font handling is such a fundamental role of the X server that I believe newer methods of rendering fonts should also be handled by the X server.
Otherwise, you get the X server handling some fonts while the toolkits handle other fonts. That's insane! It's also wasteful.
The deal is this: users expect the fonts to look good. They don't give a shit what toolkit is in vogue at the time, nor should they. Good looking, toolkit-independent fonts can be had by implementing them at the X server level, so why isn't this being done? This may be a religious issue, but I strongly believe that if you're going to implement functionality that the X server already handles in some manner, then you should implement it in the X server. Otherwise you're just contributing to the mess we already have, namely the proliferation of toolkits that all provide roughly the same functionality but in slightly different and incompatible ways.
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Or a separate library?
I'm about to talk out my ass, but...
This is ridiculous. Why not instead: design a separate font server protocol that takes the same font specification as the older font server and outputs a font with alpha information and set up the X server to automagically detect that the font server is talking the newer protocol and treat the font data as including alpha information, then render it appropriately to the screen.
As for fonts in the font path, just have the X server detect that the file is of the new alpha-capable format and deal with the font appropriately.
I mean, the whole point behind having an abstraction like the X server that deals with fonts is that the applications don't have to know things like whether or not the fonts are antialiased...they Just Work.
So please, tell me why this won't work, and why it's not being implemented this way.
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Remember, people: it would have to pass FAA certification before it could be produced, and maintenance on it would fall under the same rules that govern certified aircraft: only licensed mechanics are allowed to work on it, only FAA-approved modifications are allowed, an inspection is required every year, etc. The very things that make aviation so expensive will likely bury this thing even if it's otherwise a complete revolution in aviation.
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No, you don't. You rely on at least two very highly trained and experienced human pilots, who control the plane and make the go/no-go decisions.
The reasons for flight not becoming as commonplace as automobile driving are related to human decision-making and knowledge, not to technology. And let's face it: for flight to become that commonplace, the very same idiots that drive on the roads today would be flying in the air, making decisions as poorly up there as they do down here. How many morons have you seen drive really slowly in the left lane, or drive side-by-side and exactly the same speed as the guy in the lane next to them? These are the people we're talking about. They're the same people that "just want to get their work done" but don't want to learn how to get their work done. It's the type of person who doesn't want to make any decisions, they just want to get from point A to point B as easily and quickly as possible. Flight requires decision making that precludes such a person from sitting in the left seat, and all the electronics in the world aren't going to help.
Hell, there are enough trained pilots who try to be like that as it is: they're the people that ask the weather briefer whether or not they should go, rather than making that decision for themselves.
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Mankind, er, I mean neanderthalkind, must have actually figured it out a long time ago. After all, how else did OOG THE CAVEMAN get here?
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I see. So I take it, then, that you expect the company that manufactured your car to fix it under warranty on demand, 24x7? How about the new house you bought?
For anything that the average person purchases, 24x7 support will cost quite a bit extra if it's even available at all. And equipment that you buy for the operation of your company usually requires the purchase of an expensive support contract in order to get 24x7 instant support.
Given all that, why exactly is the stuff you built any different? Are you being paid a whole lot extra to support your stuff 24x7? I suspect not.
I agree that you should do the best you can to build things right. So should the companies that manufacture the things we buy. But just as it's unreasonable to expect the companies that manufacture the things we buy to support their products 24x7 with a (say) 20 minute response time for free, it's also unreasonable to expect a salaried employee to carry a pager to support his systems (software or otherwise) 24x7 without paying him over an above his normal salary.
And before you mention how much such people normally make, keep this in mind: you're not being paid for the 24x7 support. You're being paid to produce a custom application, one that can't be sold in volume. Companies that create low-volume software charge each customer hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars for their software, and often won't even provide 24x7 support for it without an additional service contract.
So why should you be any different, and why should the people that work for you be any different?
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No, it won't. The reason it won't is that gradual change is something that people don't really notice. Instead, they gradually adapt to it. For instance, the price of gasoline here in the Silicon Valley has risen from about $1.35 to about $2.00, but it took months to happen, and the end result is that people in this area just pay up and continue to drive their SUV's and luxury cars (I'm no saint myself, as I own a '92 Mustang GT, but I may be somewhat unusual in that I value performance greatly. Most people in the Silicon Valley drive like a granny, so it's obvious that performance isn't something they're interested in).
Drastic change, on the other hand, is something that people sit up and take notice of. The oil "crisis" of the 1970's is a perfect example. The prices rose drastically enough and quickly enough that people sat up and took notice, and the result is that the Japanese were able to successfully sell their (relatively) fuel-efficient cars.
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So how do you know that the glass of water you'll drink next isn't toxic?
"Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it is not happening" is precisely the reasoning that people use to justify any beliefs they may have that they can't otherwise justify. It's used to justify anything from crackpot beliefs in little green men running around kidnapping people to the existence of God.
No, in the best traditions of science, if you want to make a claim you have to back it up with solid evidence. There would be a lot more consensus in the scientific community about global warming if the evidence were more solid. Until there's better evidence, there's insufficient reason to believe that humans are having a significant effect on the planet's temperature.
Note that this is not the same as saying that these people aren't convinced of the validity of the mechanisms behind warming: there's plenty of evidence for them (Venus, for instance).
Hence, I think the best course of action is to continue to look for ways to reduce our impact, but not to go overboard about it. It doesn't hurt us to do the research. But it means not adopting some new technology unless it has a very good chance of being economical as well as beneficial. Moderation is the key.
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So now M$ tech support will have a legitimate reason to tell the poor user to reboot if his system is slow!
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