For starters, Universal Access fee and the ~15 other taxes on telephone services that are plowed back into ILECs. Recall that UA was originally about capital investment in sparse areas. That has more than been payed for and depreciated by now, and (I can't find a link for it now, unfortunately) but a report by the ILECs themselves showed that UA is pure profit now. And it has only been going up.
Of course. And the presumed reduction in incarceration expenses offset by new incarceration for people who break theirs, etc. (Tha't sort of what I meant by 'etc'.) Of course, one also wants to fact in the cost of our own possessions being used against our own desires - they might be bad desires, but it is a cost, and not *just* in infantilizing adults.
There are always perverse situations created by this sort of thing, even if they may be rare. It isn't hard to think of one here... me and my buddies have a few to many off hunting. Someone hurts themselves badly, and I can't drive them to the hospital, because my intent and responsibilitie for my own actions and to those around me have been thwarted by a machine. This sort of thing removes human agency from precisely the sort of hard to choose situations in which we should be encouraging it.
There is a simple measure of whether such things make sense. (Note that passing it isn't sufficient, only neccessary.) Assume that this invention would drive drunk driving rates to zero (it won't, but play along.) Is the value of the damage caused by drunk drivers currently greater than $600 * the number of cars manufactured or imported into the US? I have no idea, but I strongly doubt it. Add in the fact that it won't reduce DD rates to zero, there will be additional costs on inspections, fines for having broken drunk-o-meters, etc.
If policy is made without looking at such concerns, you've got bad policy.
I haven't seen a movie in a theater in three years. I also haven't bought a CD. Most of my music comes from people I know, and I don't like movies.
Let them tie things up. Fuck them. We'll make our own media. Unless, of course, you really are addicted to Star Wars 9: The Vengance of Revenge of the Clones of the Clones, or similar offerings.
I actually realised that you meant it as a joke. But I wanted to see if there was a serious and thought out opinion behind it.
Well, I tend to think so, but intelligent minds may differ.
I also wanted to know if the comment mainly was against Visual Studio (Anti MS), or code generation using XML and XSLT.
Both, actually, but I try to be fair, and even use The Tools Of The Enemy when needed. (I'm running windows right now, for particular testing reasons, etc. and soforth.) Lately some of Microsoft's tools are looking interesting - it is rough, now, but the whole managed code thing seems like a good idea. I'm not inherently anti MSOFT; I am simply so most of the time, for reasons I consider good.
Sorry for boring you to tears with a subject that interests me.
No problem - it interests me, too (I try to automate as much as my life and business as I can - leaves me with more time to roll in piles of cash and vacation in exotic locales. As if.). Like I said, we use the technique, but consider it a starting point - a way to save clients money (As I said - with things like Hibernate, middlegen is great). Weirdly enough, that's a market differentiation, and we get more clients because of it as time goes on.
I don't hate XML and related standards. I do think they tend to be orthagonal bandaids to at least many situations for which they're proposed. I also dislike the high overhead of parsing them, the lack of pointers, and the general lack of standardization. But those are quibbles we could use just about anywhere in the last 35 years...
I don't think generating code from XML is any worse that a lot of solutions. I just don't think it is any better. There might be a problem you're solving in Visual-whatever, that I'm not getting.
I was mostly being goofy. But, as a serious response, it strikes me as the same sort of thing as UML, but updated to use recent buzzwords. Don't get me wrong - we use XML/XSLT in nontrivial ways in apps we build - sometimes, even when not strictly required - because it comes along with a nice toolchain.
We even use code-generation at times, when dealing with things like Hibernate, and I'm tryng hard to be able to generate the variances, too. It provides a starting point.
We don't use Visual(.*), but then we're not in that market.
I guess my point is that code generation tends to be a crutch. I've heard too many people claim that they can't do something, because the tool won't do it for them. I'm pleased that those people exist, because they feed a stream of dissatisfied clients to me, but I can't endorse it.
Anyway, like I said, I was attempting humour. Perhaps I shouldn't.
Windows isnt a "distribution" and comparing it to a linux one is just ridiculous
Hm, that's interesting. Are you asserting they are in different markets? 'Cause, see, they aren't.
Are you asserting that Microsoft's non-distribution doesn't bundle things in to the non-distribution when they want to compete with other software? 'Cause, see, they do.
Sure, 'Linux' means the kernel. There are not, however, very many people who bootstrap their boxes and build their own environments. The market here is for 'software I stick on a box and then the box is useful for something'. Microsoft clearly understands this exceptionally well, and I find it amusing that apologists for them claim not to.
There is no end to people who encourage you to eat bad food, drink too much and smoke. So?
I've coded large systems in Perl. The fact that one _can_ be sloppy is no impediment. I'm also slowly improving a largish app in Java I inherited. The code blows. Complete spagetti, with silly uses of beans that do nothing but delegate to deeper classes, such brilliant encapsulation as a rollback function that, if it doesn't have a DB handle, goes and gets a new one, and of course all of the idiotic restrictions of Tomcat. Great. What does a restrictive language win you again?
I can write crap code in any language. That Perl doesn't keep me from writing one liners and throwaway scripts just to get something done is a feature.
And don't get me started on the horror that is PHP...
No, we don't. We have no obligations to nature. Nature will go right on, evolving species on it's own, at some point something will come along and wipe out the human race and that will be nature too.
And the most likely agent to do so is ourselves, because we, as a species, both have the capacity to alter our environment and also fail to recognize the consequences of doing so.
Amazon.com - E-commerce pioneer seeking to
offer the world's largest selection of products online.
for details.
AvantGo - Mobile applications for handheld
devices.
DynDNS.org - One of the world's largest
providers of free and premium Dynamic DNS services.
Findory - Personalized news and blogs aggregator. Findory learns what kind of content you like by the pages you read.
Live365.com - The world's largest Internet radio website.
Salon.com - Online magazine covering news,
politics, technology, art, sex and health; winner of numerous web
awards.
Weta Digital - Weta Digital are well known as the special effects people behind the Lord of the Rings films. At his OSCON 2004 keynote, Milton Ngan of Weta Digital thanked some technologies, including Mason, which is used as part of their intranet.
A
AcuTrans.net - Home page for AcuTrans, a company providing an online content management system integrated with transcription services (built with Mason) for business, legal, medical, and self-insured companies.
Adventist.org - The official web site of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Alhazred - Progressive music project being produced with open source/free software
Alzabo.org - Home page for Alzabo data modelling tool.
American Lung Association of Washington - Assuring lung health for the people of Washington state through research, education, community service and advocacy.
Apartments - Apartments for rent by RentersInc.com. Free apartment search engine and apartment guide.
arabellan - Web presence of Ryan "Exide Arabellan" Zander, a graphical artist.
astrojax.com - amazing fun and action game - community website with lots of features.
Autismeinfocentrum.nl - Information- and documentationcentre about autism and related subjects in the Netherlands.
Beotechnic - Company specializing in knowhow transfer
Bikeworld.com - Online retailer, sporting a new 100% Mason-powered site that was developed entirely in-house.
bizjournals.com - Publisher of 41 weekly business newspapers across the US.
BlackSpider - Managed services provider
focused exclusively on the provision of e-mail security solutions.
Burma-Shave.org - All of the original Burma-Shave jingles, plus the Burma-Shave Daily mailing list.
C
cibera.de - cibera is an online library site which offers a central access point to interdisciplinary material concerning the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking area as well as the Caribbean.
Cars - iCarsInc.com Cars for sale. Buy and sell new and used cars online. Your next auto purchase starts right here. Find new, used, classics, sports cars, luxury cars, trucks, SUVï½s and even motorcycles for sale.
It was late. I'm not sure.
Either way, isn't there something called an anonymous remailer?
Sure. And how many people know they are there, let alone how to properly do the "::Request-Remailing-To:" trick? In any case, I was talking about the realities of the legal system, for the most part.
Whether there is a specific legal difference between eMule and a VCR in terms of contributory infringement liability under U.S. copyright law is up to the Supreme Court to decide in MAFIAA v. Grokster this June.
Right. I was saying the same thing, in, perhaps, a less obvious way.
In practice, it's not illegal if you don't get caught.
Not true. The law is the law. Emerging tech has more than once retroactively caught people. This probably doesn't hold for ephemeral "crimes" like shipping bits to one another, but I'm debating the point, not the specifics.
Making it harder to get caught will force the Copyright MAFIAA to compete in other ways.
True. as I spent some time discussing, from an economics standpoint. We seem to mostly be in violent agreement.
Then somebody has to host the.torrent of that zipfile
...and someone has to seed the initial download. And they are culpable, and tracable.
or put it on eMule
This means emule is culpable, by the **IA theories. I don't agree with those theories, but there is a lot of money behind them.
but it's likely much smaller and further removed from copyright liability.
I don't think you understand the game.
This is approaching one of those if-I-xor-the-movie,-and-share-the-OTP sort of thought experiments. Legally speaking, nothing has changed, aside from possibly increasing the cost of civil enforement. From a legal perspective, this changes nothing. Removing the need for a tracker means that a high-value target for copyright infringement suits (trackers) has been removed for at least some sharing situations. That doesn't change the underlying legal theory, nor does it change the goals of the antagonists or the desires of the protagonists. So, one must assume they will adapt. Found that last clause ('they') ambiguous? Surprise: look what is happening with, well, bittorrent. What do you think a movie studio will do?
I would predict well documented attacks on individuals sharing lots of crap off a password protected site soon, followed by a college student hosting lots of torrents. At least, that's how I'd play it, were I attacking with the goals, as I understand them, that the **IA has. But I'm not a legal strategist, and I'm sure there's a deeper game involving better PR and lots of lobby monkeys.
I hate to break it to you, but if the "fancy restaraunt" you've been eating at serves burgers, chances are you aren't eating at a fancy restaraunt.
I hate to break it to you, but I don't think you've had a good burger.
Come to NYC. Hell, when I lived in SF, there were come good burgers there, too, but not quite as. A good burger in one of the good-but-not-trendy places in Brooklyn is heaven. And those places also sell excellent steaks, foie gras, tartar, _wonderful_ rare tuna, and random trendy treats, too.
Of course, pick an upscale place, and you can spend 2 or three times as much on a burger that good, too.
Scalia is actually amazingly consistent. Some (including me) find him stupidly so at times, in light of the difficulties of his role.
The whole "activist" tag is just stupid. Any judge, faced with what they honestly consider to be drift from what the bulk of what law should be, is going to be "activist", because they are act upon their own legal theories. This applies to all political angles. (Think of the cases where judges have recused or resigned over what they thought was unjust law. That's an extreme version.)
Scalia is sometimes an "activist". So is the 9th CC. (And it is funny that the 9th handed him a massive lit grenade with Raich, and will be interesting to see what he does with it). But you can't fault him for consistency. I personally believe he is wrong a lot, but he is consistent. Most SCOTUS watchers (especially those who watch with an agenda, instead of professional interest or merely as a spectator sport) miss his nuance.
I personally think he and Kennedy are the most interesting members. (Again, not endorsing either of them; they're just, in my view, the most interesting.)
The BAFC, having learned that physics can have psychoactive effects, has announced a new initiative to counter the spread of so-call "light-speed", and the dangerous effects on our children and communities. "It has come to our attention that high relative velocities can distort the senses and impair driving," Arnold. B Toole, Executive Director of the Department of Health and Bodily Function Control (news, links) said. "Accordingly, we're partnering with the Department of Motor Vehicles and NASA to control this emerging danger."
Well, your fancy old kingdoms and phyla might be right for you, but in my family, I know they rest of them are of a different species, and sometimes I suspect a different order, as well, at least with some of them...
Some of them eat chinese "food" from strip malls, for dog's sake...
Another important thing to keep in mind is the power of changing what words mean.
For instance, "terrorism" was recently extended to include a meth lab in Virginia. Bad? sure. Terrorism? not hardly. Prosecutors will use anything available - they're forced to do so.
Re:nice perl is possible
on
Perl Medic
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Perl has always been a write only language that is only readable by the author.
Funny. I'm supporting an app initially written about 8 years ago entirely in perl. It is about 80K lines. Outputs PDF by writing postscript directly (don't ask, but there are reasons for this). I came in about 3 years ago on it. None of the original developers (nor the original company) are around. Somehow, we still maintain an improve it. Maybe it isn't such a write-only language.
I've lost track of the number of modules on cpan.org that are stuck at version y.xx and have not been updated in a long time and only work with versions of Perl *OLDER* than 5.3 because no one is able to correct the module to work with perl v5.3+
I assume you've also lost count of all the C, Fortran, PHP, Pascal and Java projects that don't work in modern environments, too.
Bottom line: If you can write good code in any language, you can write quality perl. Bad perl is easier to write than some languages, and I think that is a sign of utility. And don't get me started on some of the _bloody fucking awful_ Java I'm also supporting...
Slashdot Mirror
For starters, Universal Access fee and the ~15 other taxes on telephone services that are plowed back into ILECs. Recall that UA was originally about capital investment in sparse areas. That has more than been payed for and depreciated by now, and (I can't find a link for it now, unfortunately) but a report by the ILECs themselves showed that UA is pure profit now. And it has only been going up.
And your private business is just like verizon, which doesn't get any tax money, either.
Oh, wait.
There are always perverse situations created by this sort of thing, even if they may be rare. It isn't hard to think of one here... me and my buddies have a few to many off hunting. Someone hurts themselves badly, and I can't drive them to the hospital, because my intent and responsibilitie for my own actions and to those around me have been thwarted by a machine. This sort of thing removes human agency from precisely the sort of hard to choose situations in which we should be encouraging it.
If policy is made without looking at such concerns, you've got bad policy.
Let them tie things up. Fuck them. We'll make our own media. Unless, of course, you really are addicted to Star Wars 9: The Vengance of Revenge of the Clones of the Clones, or similar offerings.
Well, I tend to think so, but intelligent minds may differ.
I also wanted to know if the comment mainly was against Visual Studio (Anti MS), or code generation using XML and XSLT.
Both, actually, but I try to be fair, and even use The Tools Of The Enemy when needed. (I'm running windows right now, for particular testing reasons, etc. and soforth.) Lately some of Microsoft's tools are looking interesting - it is rough, now, but the whole managed code thing seems like a good idea. I'm not inherently anti MSOFT; I am simply so most of the time, for reasons I consider good.
Sorry for boring you to tears with a subject that interests me.
No problem - it interests me, too (I try to automate as much as my life and business as I can - leaves me with more time to roll in piles of cash and vacation in exotic locales. As if.). Like I said, we use the technique, but consider it a starting point - a way to save clients money (As I said - with things like Hibernate, middlegen is great). Weirdly enough, that's a market differentiation, and we get more clients because of it as time goes on.
I don't hate XML and related standards. I do think they tend to be orthagonal bandaids to at least many situations for which they're proposed. I also dislike the high overhead of parsing them, the lack of pointers, and the general lack of standardization. But those are quibbles we could use just about anywhere in the last 35 years...
I don't think generating code from XML is any worse that a lot of solutions. I just don't think it is any better. There might be a problem you're solving in Visual-whatever, that I'm not getting.
We even use code-generation at times, when dealing with things like Hibernate, and I'm tryng hard to be able to generate the variances, too. It provides a starting point.
We don't use Visual(.*), but then we're not in that market.
I guess my point is that code generation tends to be a crutch. I've heard too many people claim that they can't do something, because the tool won't do it for them. I'm pleased that those people exist, because they feed a stream of dissatisfied clients to me, but I can't endorse it.
Anyway, like I said, I was attempting humour. Perhaps I shouldn't.
Hm, that's interesting. Are you asserting they are in different markets? 'Cause, see, they aren't.
Are you asserting that Microsoft's non-distribution doesn't bundle things in to the non-distribution when they want to compete with other software? 'Cause, see, they do.
Sure, 'Linux' means the kernel. There are not, however, very many people who bootstrap their boxes and build their own environments. The market here is for 'software I stick on a box and then the box is useful for something'. Microsoft clearly understands this exceptionally well, and I find it amusing that apologists for them claim not to.
Gah. That sounds like "Build a house using sausage and slide rules with a Quantel PaintBox!"
I've coded large systems in Perl. The fact that one _can_ be sloppy is no impediment. I'm also slowly improving a largish app in Java I inherited. The code blows. Complete spagetti, with silly uses of beans that do nothing but delegate to deeper classes, such brilliant encapsulation as a rollback function that, if it doesn't have a DB handle, goes and gets a new one, and of course all of the idiotic restrictions of Tomcat. Great. What does a restrictive language win you again?
I can write crap code in any language. That Perl doesn't keep me from writing one liners and throwaway scripts just to get something done is a feature.
And don't get me started on the horror that is PHP...
And the most likely agent to do so is ourselves, because we, as a species, both have the capacity to alter our environment and also fail to recognize the consequences of doing so.
Like, think you can, um, like, view source? Man, that's the coolest. You can, like, see what your browser is, like, rendering and stuff. heh heh.
The ransomware could phone home to a cracked server which provides the key. Or public key crypto could be used.
(This is from masonhq.)
You don't think I typed that from memory, did you?
Amazon.com - E-commerce pioneer seeking to offer the world's largest selection of products online. for details.
AvantGo - Mobile applications for handheld devices.
DynDNS.org - One of the world's largest providers of free and premium Dynamic DNS services.
Findory - Personalized news and blogs aggregator. Findory learns what kind of content you like by the pages you read.
Live365.com - The world's largest Internet radio website.
Salon.com - Online magazine covering news, politics, technology, art, sex and health; winner of numerous web awards.
Weta Digital - Weta Digital are well known as the special effects people behind the Lord of the Rings films. At his OSCON 2004 keynote, Milton Ngan of Weta Digital thanked some technologies, including Mason, which is used as part of their intranet.
A
AcuTrans.net - Home page for AcuTrans, a company providing an online content management system integrated with transcription services (built with Mason) for business, legal, medical, and self-insured companies.
Adventist.org - The official web site of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Alhazred - Progressive music project being produced with open source/free software
Alzabo.org - Home page for Alzabo data modelling tool.
American Lung Association of Washington - Assuring lung health for the people of Washington state through research, education, community service and advocacy.
Apartments - Apartments for rent by RentersInc.com. Free apartment search engine and apartment guide.
arabellan - Web presence of Ryan "Exide Arabellan" Zander, a graphical artist.
astrojax.com - amazing fun and action game - community website with lots of features.
Autismeinfocentrum.nl - Information- and documentationcentre about autism and related subjects in the Netherlands.
AutoSupplyUK.com - Used Japanese import auto store.
B BDO - Austrian tax consultancy
Beotechnic - Company specializing in knowhow transfer
Bikeworld.com - Online retailer, sporting a new 100% Mason-powered site that was developed entirely in-house.
bizjournals.com - Publisher of 41 weekly business newspapers across the US.
BlackSpider - Managed services provider focused exclusively on the provision of e-mail security solutions.
Burma-Shave.org - All of the original Burma-Shave jingles, plus the Burma-Shave Daily mailing list.
C
cibera.de - cibera is an online library site which offers a central access point to interdisciplinary material concerning the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking area as well as the Caribbean.
Cars - iCarsInc.com Cars for sale. Buy and sell new and used cars online. Your next auto purchase starts right here. Find new, used, classics, sports cars, luxury cars, trucks, SUVï½s and even motorcycles for sale.
Look at what happened with the Great Namespace Change. You can't track that kind of thing and keep your rep.
Wait-and-release is sometimes a good policy.
It was late. I'm not sure. Either way, isn't there something called an anonymous remailer?
Sure. And how many people know they are there, let alone how to properly do the "::Request-Remailing-To:" trick? In any case, I was talking about the realities of the legal system, for the most part.
Whether there is a specific legal difference between eMule and a VCR in terms of contributory infringement liability under U.S. copyright law is up to the Supreme Court to decide in MAFIAA v. Grokster this June.
Right. I was saying the same thing, in, perhaps, a less obvious way.
In practice, it's not illegal if you don't get caught.
Not true. The law is the law. Emerging tech has more than once retroactively caught people. This probably doesn't hold for ephemeral "crimes" like shipping bits to one another, but I'm debating the point, not the specifics.
Making it harder to get caught will force the Copyright MAFIAA to compete in other ways.
True. as I spent some time discussing, from an economics standpoint. We seem to mostly be in violent agreement.
or put it on eMule
This means emule is culpable, by the **IA theories. I don't agree with those theories, but there is a lot of money behind them.
but it's likely much smaller and further removed from copyright liability.
I don't think you understand the game.
This is approaching one of those if-I-xor-the-movie,-and-share-the-OTP sort of thought experiments. Legally speaking, nothing has changed, aside from possibly increasing the cost of civil enforement. From a legal perspective, this changes nothing. Removing the need for a tracker means that a high-value target for copyright infringement suits (trackers) has been removed for at least some sharing situations. That doesn't change the underlying legal theory, nor does it change the goals of the antagonists or the desires of the protagonists. So, one must assume they will adapt. Found that last clause ('they') ambiguous? Surprise: look what is happening with, well, bittorrent. What do you think a movie studio will do?
I would predict well documented attacks on individuals sharing lots of crap off a password protected site soon, followed by a college student hosting lots of torrents. At least, that's how I'd play it, were I attacking with the goals, as I understand them, that the **IA has. But I'm not a legal strategist, and I'm sure there's a deeper game involving better PR and lots of lobby monkeys.
Simply because the torrent websites no longer have to host the .torrent files, or run the tracker,
Someone still has to host the .torrents.
This does, however, reenforce your point.
I hate to break it to you, but I don't think you've had a good burger.
Come to NYC. Hell, when I lived in SF, there were come good burgers there, too, but not quite as. A good burger in one of the good-but-not-trendy places in Brooklyn is heaven. And those places also sell excellent steaks, foie gras, tartar, _wonderful_ rare tuna, and random trendy treats, too.
Of course, pick an upscale place, and you can spend 2 or three times as much on a burger that good, too.
You should really get out more.
The whole "activist" tag is just stupid. Any judge, faced with what they honestly consider to be drift from what the bulk of what law should be, is going to be "activist", because they are act upon their own legal theories. This applies to all political angles. (Think of the cases where judges have recused or resigned over what they thought was unjust law. That's an extreme version.)
Scalia is sometimes an "activist". So is the 9th CC. (And it is funny that the 9th handed him a massive lit grenade with Raich, and will be interesting to see what he does with it). But you can't fault him for consistency. I personally believe he is wrong a lot, but he is consistent. Most SCOTUS watchers (especially those who watch with an agenda, instead of professional interest or merely as a spectator sport) miss his nuance.
I personally think he and Kennedy are the most interesting members. (Again, not endorsing either of them; they're just, in my view, the most interesting.)
The BAFC, having learned that physics can have psychoactive effects, has announced a new initiative to counter the spread of so-call "light-speed", and the dangerous effects on our children and communities. "It has come to our attention that high relative velocities can distort the senses and impair driving," Arnold. B Toole, Executive Director of the Department of Health and Bodily Function Control (news, links) said. "Accordingly, we're partnering with the Department of Motor Vehicles and NASA to control this emerging danger."
Some of them eat chinese "food" from strip malls, for dog's sake...
For instance, "terrorism" was recently extended to include a meth lab in Virginia. Bad? sure. Terrorism? not hardly. Prosecutors will use anything available - they're forced to do so.
Funny. I'm supporting an app initially written about 8 years ago entirely in perl. It is about 80K lines. Outputs PDF by writing postscript directly (don't ask, but there are reasons for this). I came in about 3 years ago on it. None of the original developers (nor the original company) are around. Somehow, we still maintain an improve it. Maybe it isn't such a write-only language.
I've lost track of the number of modules on cpan.org that are stuck at version y.xx and have not been updated in a long time and only work with versions of Perl *OLDER* than 5.3 because no one is able to correct the module to work with perl v5.3+
I assume you've also lost count of all the C, Fortran, PHP, Pascal and Java projects that don't work in modern environments, too.
Bottom line: If you can write good code in any language, you can write quality perl. Bad perl is easier to write than some languages, and I think that is a sign of utility. And don't get me started on some of the _bloody fucking awful_ Java I'm also supporting...