>I can tell you weren't born in the early days of TV when it took several minutes for the tubes to warm up enough to show a picture on the screen.
Personal computers are already have many more years of production time than TV's did before they had "instant-on", not to mention color. We already had solid state TV receivers with stereo sound. TV developed much faster into a user-friendly form, than the PC did. Not only that, there are far more personal computers in, let's say, the first 30 years (which is how long it's been since I got *my* first home computer and I felt like I was late to the table), than the first 30 years of TV. And the home computer might even be a smaller percentage of the average person's net income than the TV was in the comparable period as well.
So lose this "just suck it up, the personal computer is in its infancy" crap. There is no good reason why we took the big step backwards. I remember a DOS machine that had DOS 3.3 in ROM. I miss that. I'd love to have a linux kernel like that. Have to do something about module initialization, which is really the problem in linux booting. I have no idea what WindowsXP is doing during its init. I have a slightly better idea what my Powerbook is doing, but it's really rare that I actually boot it.
>For example, if you have a Word document open, with unsaved changes, and the system sends it a shutdown, Word throws up a modal dialog box "er, dude, >I've been told to quit but you have unsaved changes... what should I do?"
If you aren't already, you should evolve to the next technological level where the amount of time to make this determination is greater than or equal to whatever would be required to sync memory to storage. If this means saving an uncommitted draft, then version it. Make it easy for the user to decide between his last 'unsaved' buffer or his last saved version. We should be talking milliseconds here. This should be accomplished even if the shutdown is the result of a power failure.
There. I've shown you one of the many areas where we are not actually on the plateau where there is nothing left to be invented.
>As an Air Force member I take the cost of items I request and approve very seriously.
That's well and good, but can it be significant in the face of two other phenomena?
1. Billions of dollars "just go missing" and the people responsible are allowed to remain in society.
2. There are people in industry who are perfectly willing to take large profits for their contribution to the military even though there is a WAR ON. I don't think they should operate at a subsistence level, but I do believe talking large *profits* during wartime is rather treacherous if not treasonous.
We hear about the hundreds of billions, going on trillions of dollars the "war costs", but that money does not go into the paychecks of the people fighting the war. It does not go into the municipal funds of the places where the raw materials are mined. It doesn't even give financial independence to the people actually doing the labor at the defense contractor companies. It seems to simply vanish.
If a war is truly necessary to the peace and freedom of the nation, then by God, it's important enough for the People to make sacrifices in order to bring that war to an end. If that means the CEO of one of the big Defense Contractors can't get a $40 million bonus during the war, so be it.
If you took the raw materials for the F/A-22 Raptor, and added a subsistence wage for everyone involved in its construction, do you reach the 1.5 *BILLION* that Lockheed Martin takes in return for it?
Taking that kind of windfall profit *during wartime* can not possibly be a realistic strategy for winning the war. I would go as far as to say it gives the war-machine-builders an incentive to prolong the war, or even, to lose it.
>Just this morning I set up a rule / filter in my mail client that says something like "If the sender is not in >my address book and there is a file that ends with.gif or.jpg attached, delete it."
I wish Firefox had exactly this, as a default rule that could be selected, per-mailbox.
I believe I've seen it all. I did a whole summer internship in loss prevention at a retail chain. I've personally witnessed all kinds of shoplifting techniques, but the all time WTF goes to the people who *pulled the front of the store off the building with a truck* and then loaded the truck with all the merchandise while alarms were going off, police were en-route, video cameras recording the whole thing, etc.
My least favorite times were the two times we had to go to stores that had been robbed at gunpoint, and one where the roof of the building had collapsed in a storm, ruining all the merchandise (the store closed, and the employees were out of work, in December.)
I decided based on that experience that I didn't want to work in security and/or loss prevention.
The anti-theft idea is well and good, but there is often a much worse problem of putting a return on the shelf and selling it for new. If the customer made a mess of the package, it's going to be hard to sell the item, and a lot of these packages are pretty damned hard to open nicely. I do have some experience in retail, and I know what I'm talking about here.
>2090: Windows 95 Binaries for long dead machines become public domain.
On what basis do you claim this? Copyright will not expire until 75 years after the death of the last individual with a claim to it. That will be long past 2090.
In other irrelevant comparisons, drag race VW's go through more transmissions in a hundred miles than a stock bugs will in a hundred thousand highway miles. Does that mean drag race trannies are inferior, or does it mean stock trannies are better? Or did we omit something important from our comparison?
>Where the fuck can you get a CS degree without DifEQ?
Almost everywhere.
CS usually requires calculus through single variable integration, and sometimes vector calc, expecially if you take Physics as your core science. But beyond that, you might get a course in linear algebra as a prereq for graphics. This is all compensated by all the discrete maths, automata, and algorithims, and theory of computing that you have to take, especially in the capstone courses.
Schools that do not differentiate between EE or ECE and CS, tend to be heavier on the math.
Before you spout off with profanity, why don't you check SIGCSE consortium data or browse a college catalog or two?
Your PGP example is flawed. In the PGP example, I at least *had* the key. I had responsibility to keep the key safe. That was my responsibility if I lost it; mine to lose.
But my argument against media DRM is that it has a tendency to put a cryptographic scheme to which I do *not* have the key, on my creative works. Further, such schemes are often not so much a measure to "protect" artists or even the corporations that distribute their work, but are more an effort to maintain artificially high barriers to entry into the world of audio and video production.
I object very strongly when I am asked to use a recording format that places a cryptographic lock on *my* music -- that is, music that I composed, arranged, and performed, to which *I* hold all copyrights and for which I alone decide if and how its reproduction shall be limited.
So when Sony or Steinberg or Digi decides to swing their fist, protecting their copyrights or the copyrights of the artists they represent, that's fine. But they occasionally hit my nose, by abridging *my* copyright, or at least, expecting me to happily enter into a relationship whereby they will abridge my copyright, and it's no deal, no way, ever.
Few people seem to understand my argument. But mass acceptance of DRM schemes is a *very* *bad* thing for the rights of individual artists -- particularly those who wish to reserve all rights to their work while also not placing artificial constraints on distribution. To the corporate production machine, those two ideas are completely incompatable. It's hard for lots of people to comprehend that a person might want to hold copyrights but also broadcast his music or video or writings as far and as wide as possible (regardless of compensation). Those two goals are not at all incompatable, and are in fact, the basis for the existence of copyright law in the first place. The right to distribute your material is the main thing. Distributing for compensation is just a special case.
But the fact that rights are abridged for individuals is lost in the noise of "piracy."
It might matter if you happen to be the candidate.
This morning I had a nice talk with the newly elected representative for for my district in the state legislature. You see, he happens to be a friend and neighbor. I think it's just peachy that a real person that I actually know is an elected official in government. Someone who answers emails from me. Someone who I have actually personally observed *sharing some of my views.* Someone who takes the time to speak to me directly. A human being, not some interchangeable politician.
Perhaps you are not at a point in life where you find yourself directly in the same social bracket as some of your elected representatives. In that case, it may be simpler to shrug off politics and make statements like the one you made.
>*rolls eyes* RTFA, idiot. You can't buy votes with this scheme.
On the other hand, you may be able to defraud people who try to persuade voters / buy votes. Don't dismiss this possibility out-of-hand as though it cannot possibly be a problem. I think it may be a serious problem.
>do any of you guys happen to know when the US election is?
In most states it is going on right now, and ends, depending on local rules and various time zones, on November 7th. As of this morning, 167,000 people in my district have voted already. That's nearly 100% return on the early ballot requests, and it has been consistently the case that early ballots tend to be cast for Democratic candidates and opposition to conservative propositions.
"I see them at Wal-Mart with expensive designer clothes and then they swipe their Food Stamp cards and complain that they can't buy the sugary cereal."
You actually hang out a Wal-Mart collecting this kind of data?
>Is there a law in your state, or is there a new federal law that sales have to go through FFLs?
'Sale' and 'transfer' are distinct transactions with separate rules.
There are Federal and state laws, and the state laws tend to be more restrictive.
Mainly, there is this one, becuase the Federal law controls interstate transfers. "An individual who does not possess a federal firearms license may not sell a firearm to a resident of another state without first transferring the firearm to a dealer in the purchaser's state."
But most of my collection is pre-1868 antiques anyway. Matchlock, flintlock, muzzleloaders, all are exempt, and not even regulated in my state.
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>I can tell you weren't born in the early days of TV when it took several minutes for the tubes to warm up enough to show a picture on the screen.
Personal computers are already have many more years of production time than TV's did before they had "instant-on", not to mention color. We already had solid state TV receivers with stereo sound. TV developed much faster into a user-friendly form, than the PC did. Not only that, there are far more personal computers in, let's say, the first 30 years (which is how long it's been since I got *my* first home computer and I felt like I was late to the table), than the first 30 years of TV. And the home computer might even be a smaller percentage of the average person's net income than the TV was in the comparable period as well.
So lose this "just suck it up, the personal computer is in its infancy" crap. There is no good reason why we took the big step backwards. I remember a DOS machine that had DOS 3.3 in ROM. I miss that. I'd love to have a linux kernel like that. Have to do something about module initialization, which is really the problem in linux booting. I have no idea what WindowsXP is doing during its init. I have a slightly better idea what my Powerbook is doing, but it's really rare that I actually boot it.
>For example, if you have a Word document open, with unsaved changes, and the system sends it a shutdown, Word throws up a modal dialog box "er, dude,
>I've been told to quit but you have unsaved changes... what should I do?"
If you aren't already, you should evolve to the next technological level where the amount of time to make this determination is greater than or equal to whatever would be required to sync memory to storage. If this means saving an uncommitted draft, then version it. Make it easy for the user to decide between his last 'unsaved' buffer or his last saved version. We should be talking milliseconds here. This should be accomplished even if the shutdown is the result of a power failure.
There. I've shown you one of the many areas where we are not actually on the plateau where there is nothing left to be invented.
>He's not invented a false reality, he's developed a new, more complete, system of arithmetic.
Isn't that something every mathematician does several times on the way to a Ph.D.?
"Inventing more math" is the math equivalent of "Inventing more grammars" in the CS realm.
Doing so does not change the landscape for existing fields of math, any more than writing a language like Befunge changes other grammars.
>As an Air Force member I take the cost of items I request and approve very seriously.
That's well and good, but can it be significant in the face of two other phenomena?
1. Billions of dollars "just go missing" and the people responsible are allowed to remain in society.
2. There are people in industry who are perfectly willing to take large profits for their contribution to the military even though there is a WAR ON. I don't think they should operate at a subsistence level, but I do believe talking large *profits* during wartime is rather treacherous if not treasonous.
We hear about the hundreds of billions, going on trillions of dollars the "war costs", but that money does not go into the paychecks of the people fighting the war. It does not go into the municipal funds of the places where the raw materials are mined. It doesn't even give financial independence to the people actually doing the labor at the defense contractor companies. It seems to simply vanish.
If a war is truly necessary to the peace and freedom of the nation, then by God, it's important enough for the People to make sacrifices in order to bring that war to an end. If that means the CEO of one of the big Defense Contractors can't get a $40 million bonus during the war, so be it.
If you took the raw materials for the F/A-22 Raptor, and added a subsistence wage for everyone involved in its construction, do you reach the 1.5 *BILLION* that Lockheed Martin takes in return for it?
Taking that kind of windfall profit *during wartime* can not possibly be a realistic strategy for winning the war. I would go as far as to say it gives the war-machine-builders an incentive to prolong the war, or even, to lose it.
>Just this morning I set up a rule / filter in my mail client that says something like "If the sender is not in
>my address book and there is a file that ends with
I wish Firefox had exactly this, as a default rule that could be selected, per-mailbox.
>There's no good way to detect if a video or music clip is copyrighted,
There is one good way: The author of the content identifies it.
>and relying on MySpace to police this manually would shut down the whole place.
And your point? You think the folks at Universal would not be perfectly satisfied with that result?
>USPS has an enforced LETTER monopoly.
I wonder what that means for the FedEX LETTER I sent this morning?
If you're going to say that's not a LETTER it's a PACKAGE, you're going into "No True Scotsman" territory.
"This is a country where beggars routinely have limbs amputated by their 'pimps' to get more sympathy from tourists."
Cite? Documentation of a single such case would be a good start... which should be very easy to do since it happens "routinely."
I believe I've seen it all. I did a whole summer internship in loss prevention at a retail chain.
I've personally witnessed all kinds of shoplifting techniques, but the all time WTF goes to the people who *pulled the front of the store off the building with a truck* and then loaded the truck with all the merchandise
while alarms were going off, police were en-route, video cameras recording the whole thing, etc.
My least favorite times were the two times we had to go to stores that had been robbed at gunpoint, and one where the roof of the building had collapsed in a storm, ruining all the merchandise (the store closed, and the employees were out of work, in December.)
I decided based on that experience that I didn't want to work in security and/or loss prevention.
The anti-theft idea is well and good, but there is often a much worse problem of putting a return on the shelf and selling it for new. If the customer made a mess of the package, it's going to be hard to sell the item, and a lot of these packages are pretty damned hard to open nicely. I do have some experience in retail, and I know what I'm talking about here.
>2090: Windows 95 Binaries for long dead machines become public domain.
On what basis do you claim this? Copyright will not expire until 75 years after the death of the last individual with a claim to it. That will be long past 2090.
In other irrelevant comparisons, drag race VW's go through more transmissions in a hundred miles than a stock bugs will in a hundred thousand highway miles. Does that mean drag race trannies are inferior, or does it mean stock trannies are better? Or did we omit something important from our comparison?
>Where the fuck can you get a CS degree without DifEQ?
Almost everywhere.
CS usually requires calculus through single variable integration, and sometimes vector calc, expecially if you take Physics as your core science.
But beyond that, you might get a course in linear algebra as a prereq for graphics. This is all compensated by all the discrete maths, automata, and algorithims, and theory of computing that you have to take, especially in the capstone courses.
Schools that do not differentiate between EE or ECE and CS, tend to be heavier on the math.
Before you spout off with profanity, why don't you check SIGCSE consortium data or browse a college catalog or two?
Your PGP example is flawed. In the PGP example, I at least *had* the key. I had responsibility to keep the key safe. That was my responsibility if I lost it; mine to lose.
But my argument against media DRM is that it has a tendency to put a cryptographic scheme to which I do *not* have the key, on my creative works.
Further, such schemes are often not so much a measure to "protect" artists or even the corporations that distribute their work, but are more an effort to maintain artificially high barriers to entry into the world of audio and video production.
I object very strongly when I am asked to use a recording format that places a cryptographic lock on *my* music -- that is, music that I composed, arranged, and performed, to which *I* hold all copyrights and for which I alone decide if and how its reproduction shall be limited.
So when Sony or Steinberg or Digi decides to swing their fist, protecting their copyrights or the copyrights of the artists they represent, that's fine. But they occasionally hit my nose, by abridging *my* copyright, or at least, expecting me to happily enter into a relationship whereby they will abridge my copyright, and it's no deal, no way, ever.
Few people seem to understand my argument. But mass acceptance of DRM schemes is a *very* *bad* thing for the rights of individual artists -- particularly those who wish to reserve all rights to their work while also not placing artificial constraints on distribution. To the corporate production machine, those two ideas are completely incompatable. It's hard for lots of people to comprehend that a person might want to hold copyrights but also broadcast his music or video or writings as far and as wide as possible (regardless of compensation). Those two goals are not at all incompatable, and are in fact, the basis for the existence of copyright law in the first place. The right to distribute your material is the main thing. Distributing for compensation is just a special case.
But the fact that rights are abridged for individuals is lost in the noise of "piracy."
>if I can see my backyard from google maps.. that's (ahem) [B] VISIBLE FROM SPACE [/B]
I've seen Google Earth pictures where you can make out clusters of pigeons, individual people, vehicles
no bigger than motorcycles, etc.
>It doesn't matter who you vote for.
It might matter if you happen to be the candidate.
This morning I had a nice talk with the newly elected representative for for my district in the state legislature.
You see, he happens to be a friend and neighbor. I think it's just peachy that a real person that I actually know
is an elected official in government. Someone who answers emails from me. Someone who I have actually personally observed *sharing some of my views.* Someone who takes the time to speak to me directly. A human being, not some interchangeable politician.
Perhaps you are not at a point in life where you find yourself directly in the same social bracket as some of your elected representatives. In that case, it may be simpler to shrug off politics and make statements like the one you made.
>You're right, no one takes them hiking.
I hiked all over Oregon and Washington last summer with my Canon 20D, 2 "L" lenses, and a carbon fibre tripod.
I would love to do it again.
>My precinct has about 30 to 40 voters. In general, nearly all of them vote.
I lived in a very small town too. There were elections where I could recognize my vote as being the single vote against an issue or for a candidate.
>*rolls eyes* RTFA, idiot. You can't buy votes with this scheme.
On the other hand, you may be able to defraud people who try to persuade voters / buy votes.
Don't dismiss this possibility out-of-hand as though it cannot possibly be a problem. I think it may be a serious problem.
>do any of you guys happen to know when the US election is?
In most states it is going on right now, and ends, depending on local rules and various time zones, on November 7th.
As of this morning, 167,000 people in my district have voted already. That's nearly 100% return on the early ballot requests, and it has been consistently the case that early ballots tend to be cast for Democratic candidates and opposition to conservative propositions.
"I see them at Wal-Mart with expensive designer clothes and then they swipe their Food Stamp cards and complain that they can't buy the sugary cereal."
You actually hang out a Wal-Mart collecting this kind of data?
I feel more sorry for you than I do for them.
>KDE is a what?
Generally a very good example of a well-designed C++ project.
> the airline or cruise ship won't be allowed to carry you unless the government gives a thumbs up.
Big money lobbying interests that those air and cruise lines happen to be, will ensure that the "thumbs up"
is routinely given...
>Is there a law in your state, or is there a new federal law that sales have to go through FFLs?
'Sale' and 'transfer' are distinct transactions with separate rules.
There are Federal and state laws, and the state laws tend to be more restrictive.
Mainly, there is this one, becuase the Federal law controls interstate transfers.
"An individual who does not possess a federal firearms license may not sell a firearm to a resident of another state without first transferring the firearm to a dealer in the purchaser's state."
But most of my collection is pre-1868 antiques anyway. Matchlock, flintlock, muzzleloaders, all are exempt, and not even regulated in my state.
When you put 635 random people in a room, you're going to find some scandalous stuff, no matter what.
When those 635 are not *random* people at all, but rather, wealthy people seeking power and authority, you will *really* see some bizarre things.
You don't need a scenario as unique as Congress for this.