Back then, Bill was on roughly the same scale; a hobbyist.
Specific complaint in Bill's letter:
The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Even in this early day Bill was not a hobbyist! . Bill has entirely focused not on a hobby but on a commercial venture. As I read this letter it seems perfectly clear: Bill was attempting to exploit (in the free market, capitalism sort of way) a hobby group for personal profit. He was not there as a hobbyist by any stretch of the imagination.
What, you don't want to mount quad gatling-style tag guns to your vehicle? Just think... when polly prissypants is cruising down the road drinking coffee, applying makeup, yaking on the cell phone and throwing cigarette butts out the window where they are blown back into your car you could tap a button and plaster 5,000 GPS tags/minute on the back of her hummer.
And for those guys in the 4x4's who think that weight + traction = immunity to the laws of inertia or the engineering limits of modern braking systems during ice storms, you could apply so many GPS tags that the weight of their vehicle increases 500 fold, thereby a) improving their tracking and b) forcing them to slow down.
There is a device already deployed (though not widely) that is placed in the road and has what is essentially a wire sticking straight up. When the car drives over this gizmo the wire delivers a hefty spark to the car disabling it. I couldn't find a link/photo in 10 seconds of google so I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader. But it is already out there and works on newer cars. (Older cars without electronic fuel injection, power windows and LCD TVs (and yes, I'm trying to be mildly funny here) aren't are vulnerable to a simple spark and are harder to stop).
People do not think about punishment when commiting most crimes.
Some do - those kids you laughed at back in high school who, when asked "we're gonna break into the school and trash the teachers' lounge - wanna come?" replied "no way... if we get caught I'm gonna be grounded/expelled."
Many (most?) Costco rebates are done over the web. If you flub up a number then it says "Sorry, you flubbed up a number - care to try again?" and has you repeatedly try until you get it right.
Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of the state of Nevada, 03-5554 begs to differ. The police may detain you at any time for any reason, regardless of what you are doing at the moment and may arrest you for refusing to provide identification. Riding in a car. Walking. Riding a bike. In United States v. Drayton Anthony Kennedy wrote "Even when law enforcement officers have no basis for suspecting a particular individual, they may pose questions, ask for identification and request consent to search luggage".
I thought that they had been painted by people who were around at the time who saw some people skating.
Ya think? Tell me... when was the last time the Thames froze over? If alive today what would Pieter Bruegel be portraying?
You still haven't really grasped the difference between climate and weather have you?
Gosh I love you gits. Where do you find your wit and whimsy? Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. In other words, climate is the stereotype. Seattle is wet and rainy. San Francisco and London are foggy. Las Vegas is hot and dry. Chicago is windy (though Chicago didn't get the nickname from anything to do with weather). Stereotypes are bad, no? Are you really going to attempt to induce panic around the world because the planet isn't living up to its stereotypes?
A few points that are always ignored by the global warming will kill us all crowd:
There are abnormal patterns in today's patterns (not a single one of which has never been recorded before, I might add) and this causes lots and lots of people to suddenly know and understand exactly what the cause is, and who to blame. India is getting abnormally cold temperatures - as CNN puts it, the current temperatures are the coldest in 70 years. If, as you claim, today's really cold temperatures are the blame of "global warming", then what caused the cold temperatures 70 years ago? Or are the climate boogeymen SO horrible that they are setting up kind of a resonant wave of evil that travels back in time and makes the land of the elephants go brrrr?
If greenhouse gas and ONLY greenhouse gas causes India to go brrrrr, what caused the cold snap 70 years ago? If something ELSE caused the cold back then, then how do you KNOW that the same mechanism (which has yet to be identified other than 'sometimes weather does stuff') isn't doing it again today?
The global warming crowd warns that Europe is going to get cold because (and ONLY because) of the greenhouse gasses, yet can't explain all of those old paintings of ice skaters.
Weather fluxuates. Always has. Always will. To claim that every -previous- shift in climate was completely natural but THIS one is caused by humans... well, I'm probably just wasting my breath.
North Korea and China both have the technology and both would be more than happy to sell a rocket to the bad guys. ICBMs require fairly sophisticated guidance systems - the ball bearing express just needs to reach the approximate vicinity of "way up there". Putting a lot of scrap in orbit destroy all of the GPS birds - without which the modern weapons are all but worthless - and will strike a blow against the infidels of MTV, Miss America, the Spice channel and Radio Disney.
TSA worries about a bad guy sneaking a stick of dynamite and a bag of cobalt across the Mexican border. I fear a gifted al Quaeda terrorist trained at MIT or Cal Tech who decides to launch a payload of ball bearings into orbit from the middle of Afghanistan and scatter them far and wide.
Cost of MS hiring somebody to ensure that all windows programmers are aware of, and prevent the risk of toys like Sasser, Code Red and Melissa - $200,000/year for somebody actually willing to do the work.
It is true, however, that this estimate of "damages" is probably calculated using pages from the RIAA book of estimating damages: download one song, $21,000 (or whatever it is they are claiming these days).
If it is electronic it can be read at a distance. There is a non-zero (but as close to zero as you can get) chance that somebody would be able to go on a "war-eyeing" trip... checking out yer honey in bed? Some guy in a van outside might be able to pick it up.
Or first US city: China would be more than happy to provide North Korea with a Dong Feng 31 or two and Kim already has the payload. That is if Kim doesn't get his Taepodong-2s up and running. Seattle is well within range.
Let's say that nobody with an IQ > 500 buys a Brittney Spears CD. In this case yes, those people within the high end of the IQ scale are not consumers of Brittney Spears CDs. I'll go out on a limb and predict that if a study were ever completed one would find that a group of people who never buy CDs but only attend the symphony or opera in person are generally more intelligent than people who stand in line for Lip Synch Simpson CDs.
I don't hold my breath for anything good to come out of any of this. The average IQ is set at 100 - the subset of consumers, as a whole, probably skew the average far downwards.
The civilization that gave billions of dollarsto the likes of Brittney Spears, Saturday Night Live's lip-synch girl and Barbara Streisand doesn't give a rat's sphincter about personal rights, liberties or freedom.
a) Nobody should have to pay to download -ANY- spam on a metered access line or a dialup line.
b) Nobody should be required to hit the delete button dozens or hundreds or thousands of times a day just because the spammers don't want to switch to opt-in.
Spam -CAUSES DAMAGE AND EXPENSE-.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech"
NO LAW means NO LAW.
That's funny... I must have missed the part where your right to say anything you want includes a guarantee of an audience. Could you please point that out to me?
A white list is VOLUNTARY. An opt-in list law is COERCION.
A do-not-murder law is also coercion. If I don't ask for your marketing messages you have NO GUARANTEE OR RIGHT that I will receive them. And since you aren't guaranteed an audience, you have ZERO right to force costs of any kind on me. You want to send out the spam then YOU pay all costs. Including the cost of maintaining an opt-in list - that makes everybody who matters happy.
Sorry, but the free market requires that you maintain the items you own. Running a server requires paying for securing that server from attacks -- including e-mail spam attacks.
I own a house. I am required to maintain my house - including security. Yet there are still laws against people breaking into my house.
Feel free to send all the marketing materials you want to anybody who wants to receive them. If not enough people want to receive your emails then offer incentives to do so. Free market at work: but you don't want to have to put forth the effort, huh?
I want to run my business utilizing every right I was born with -- including speech.
This crock is the single most abused concept of the freedom of speech: your freedom of speech does NOT guarantee you an audience, and all unsolicited email marketing is an intrusion on my right to be free from such things.
There is NOTHING that guarantees you the right that your marketing messages will arrive in somebody's inbox. NOTHING. The Supreme Court even ruled on this once upon a time: see Rowan v Post Office.
If I don't want pornographic images in my home then you have -zero- right to send them. If I don't want ads for booze or tobacco, then you have -zero- right to send them.
If I visit your web page then I will be exposed to your banner ads or stupid flash things that zoom all over the screen. If I watch your TV station then I will be foreced to be exposed to the ads you run. But under NO circumstances should I EVER be required to suffer through things that you send through MY pop3 server, through MY ISP connection or through MY router. And since *I* have to provide time and effort to keep the anti-spam filters up and running it is entirely fair to demand that you simply be prevented from sending stuff to unwilling recipients in the first place.
If it ain't confirmed opt-in then it should be illegal - as should the sale of email address lists.
If I remember my Physics elective from uni, Galaxies are internally gravitationally bounded, that is the entire 'clump' of things is held rougly in equalibrium with gravity providing the contracting forces.
Our solar system is rougly in equilibrium... it isn't a galaxy. Lots of binary or trinary star systems are also in equilibrium - not galaxies either.
Not to be difficult, but galaxies have -lots- of smaller clumps of stuff in gravitational equilibrium and they are all subsets of, yet still part of, the original galaxy. What makes -this- subset of a clump so different? Size?
I've always wondered why people tend to think of a black hole as funnel-shaped: aren't they always spherical? If the singularity is at 0,0,0 and the hole looks like some cosmic tornado then this would imply that the event horizon (assuming a vortex that is straight up and down) would involve pi*d focused around 0,0,10 or something. A copy of Gigli located just below the singularity would be sucked in just as quickly as something just to the right or the left, meaning that the gravitational field extends more or less uniformly along all three axiseseses.
So from whence comes the funnel shape?
What makes this a galaxy rather than just some random swirl in the cosmos? (TFA doesn't really say)... does this galaxy have a black hole to call its own in the middle? What happens if a black hole eats another black hole?
Slashdot Mirror
Specific complaint in Bill's letter:
Even in this early day Bill was not a hobbyist! . Bill has entirely focused not on a hobby but on a commercial venture. As I read this letter it seems perfectly clear: Bill was attempting to exploit (in the free market, capitalism sort of way) a hobby group for personal profit. He was not there as a hobbyist by any stretch of the imagination.
And for those guys in the 4x4's who think that weight + traction = immunity to the laws of inertia or the engineering limits of modern braking systems during ice storms, you could apply so many GPS tags that the weight of their vehicle increases 500 fold, thereby a) improving their tracking and b) forcing them to slow down.
There is a device already deployed (though not widely) that is placed in the road and has what is essentially a wire sticking straight up. When the car drives over this gizmo the wire delivers a hefty spark to the car disabling it. I couldn't find a link/photo in 10 seconds of google so I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader. But it is already out there and works on newer cars. (Older cars without electronic fuel injection, power windows and LCD TVs (and yes, I'm trying to be mildly funny here) aren't are vulnerable to a simple spark and are harder to stop).
Some do - those kids you laughed at back in high school who, when asked "we're gonna break into the school and trash the teachers' lounge - wanna come?" replied "no way... if we get caught I'm gonna be grounded/expelled."
Many (most?) Costco rebates are done over the web. If you flub up a number then it says "Sorry, you flubbed up a number - care to try again?" and has you repeatedly try until you get it right.
Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of the state of Nevada, 03-5554 begs to differ. The police may detain you at any time for any reason, regardless of what you are doing at the moment and may arrest you for refusing to provide identification. Riding in a car. Walking. Riding a bike. In United States v. Drayton Anthony Kennedy wrote "Even when law enforcement officers have no basis for suspecting a particular individual, they may pose questions, ask for identification and request consent to search luggage".
Ya think? Tell me... when was the last time the Thames froze over? If alive today what would Pieter Bruegel be portraying?
Gosh I love you gits. Where do you find your wit and whimsy? Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. In other words, climate is the stereotype. Seattle is wet and rainy. San Francisco and London are foggy. Las Vegas is hot and dry. Chicago is windy (though Chicago didn't get the nickname from anything to do with weather). Stereotypes are bad, no? Are you really going to attempt to induce panic around the world because the planet isn't living up to its stereotypes?
A few points that are always ignored by the global warming will kill us all crowd:
There are abnormal patterns in today's patterns (not a single one of which has never been recorded before, I might add) and this causes lots and lots of people to suddenly know and understand exactly what the cause is, and who to blame. India is getting abnormally cold temperatures - as CNN puts it, the current temperatures are the coldest in 70 years. If, as you claim, today's really cold temperatures are the blame of "global warming", then what caused the cold temperatures 70 years ago? Or are the climate boogeymen SO horrible that they are setting up kind of a resonant wave of evil that travels back in time and makes the land of the elephants go brrrr?
If greenhouse gas and ONLY greenhouse gas causes India to go brrrrr, what caused the cold snap 70 years ago? If something ELSE caused the cold back then, then how do you KNOW that the same mechanism (which has yet to be identified other than 'sometimes weather does stuff') isn't doing it again today?
The global warming crowd warns that Europe is going to get cold because (and ONLY because) of the greenhouse gasses, yet can't explain all of those old paintings of ice skaters.
Weather fluxuates. Always has. Always will. To claim that every -previous- shift in climate was completely natural but THIS one is caused by humans... well, I'm probably just wasting my breath.
TSA worries about a bad guy sneaking a stick of dynamite and a bag of cobalt across the Mexican border. I fear a gifted al Quaeda terrorist trained at MIT or Cal Tech who decides to launch a payload of ball bearings into orbit from the middle of Afghanistan and scatter them far and wide.
It is true, however, that this estimate of "damages" is probably calculated using pages from the RIAA book of estimating damages: download one song, $21,000 (or whatever it is they are claiming these days).
Based on these comments I'd say the papers would be fairly well cemented together.
If it is electronic it can be read at a distance. There is a non-zero (but as close to zero as you can get) chance that somebody would be able to go on a "war-eyeing" trip... checking out yer honey in bed? Some guy in a van outside might be able to pick it up.
Let's say that nobody with an IQ > 500 buys a Brittney Spears CD. In this case yes, those people within the high end of the IQ scale are not consumers of Brittney Spears CDs. I'll go out on a limb and predict that if a study were ever completed one would find that a group of people who never buy CDs but only attend the symphony or opera in person are generally more intelligent than people who stand in line for Lip Synch Simpson CDs.
The civilization that gave billions of dollarsto the likes of Brittney Spears, Saturday Night Live's lip-synch girl and Barbara Streisand doesn't give a rat's sphincter about personal rights, liberties or freedom.
a) Nobody should have to pay to download -ANY- spam on a metered access line or a dialup line. b) Nobody should be required to hit the delete button dozens or hundreds or thousands of times a day just because the spammers don't want to switch to opt-in. Spam -CAUSES DAMAGE AND EXPENSE-.
That's funny... I must have missed the part where your right to say anything you want includes a guarantee of an audience. Could you please point that out to me?
A do-not-murder law is also coercion. If I don't ask for your marketing messages you have NO GUARANTEE OR RIGHT that I will receive them. And since you aren't guaranteed an audience, you have ZERO right to force costs of any kind on me. You want to send out the spam then YOU pay all costs. Including the cost of maintaining an opt-in list - that makes everybody who matters happy.
OPT IN LIST. How hard is it?
If you believe that spam is protected by free speech then you believe in pushing your views on people.
I own a house. I am required to maintain my house - including security. Yet there are still laws against people breaking into my house.
Feel free to send all the marketing materials you want to anybody who wants to receive them. If not enough people want to receive your emails then offer incentives to do so. Free market at work: but you don't want to have to put forth the effort, huh?
This crock is the single most abused concept of the freedom of speech: your freedom of speech does NOT guarantee you an audience, and all unsolicited email marketing is an intrusion on my right to be free from such things.
There is NOTHING that guarantees you the right that your marketing messages will arrive in somebody's inbox. NOTHING. The Supreme Court even ruled on this once upon a time: see Rowan v Post Office.
If I don't want pornographic images in my home then you have -zero- right to send them. If I don't want ads for booze or tobacco, then you have -zero- right to send them.
If I visit your web page then I will be exposed to your banner ads or stupid flash things that zoom all over the screen. If I watch your TV station then I will be foreced to be exposed to the ads you run. But under NO circumstances should I EVER be required to suffer through things that you send through MY pop3 server, through MY ISP connection or through MY router. And since *I* have to provide time and effort to keep the anti-spam filters up and running it is entirely fair to demand that you simply be prevented from sending stuff to unwilling recipients in the first place.
If it ain't confirmed opt-in then it should be illegal - as should the sale of email address lists.
Our solar system is rougly in equilibrium... it isn't a galaxy. Lots of binary or trinary star systems are also in equilibrium - not galaxies either.
Not to be difficult, but galaxies have -lots- of smaller clumps of stuff in gravitational equilibrium and they are all subsets of, yet still part of, the original galaxy. What makes -this- subset of a clump so different? Size?
I've always wondered why people tend to think of a black hole as funnel-shaped: aren't they always spherical? If the singularity is at 0,0,0 and the hole looks like some cosmic tornado then this would imply that the event horizon (assuming a vortex that is straight up and down) would involve pi*d focused around 0,0,10 or something. A copy of Gigli located just below the singularity would be sucked in just as quickly as something just to the right or the left, meaning that the gravitational field extends more or less uniformly along all three axiseseses. So from whence comes the funnel shape?
What makes this a galaxy rather than just some random swirl in the cosmos? (TFA doesn't really say)... does this galaxy have a black hole to call its own in the middle? What happens if a black hole eats another black hole?
S'ok... they'll just have David Manning review the movies.