Was at UIUC, now a Working Stiff. I'm sure there has been plenty of shuffling in the market... by the time I was there there were a bunch of small companies (most of which did better than mine, by my friends' experience) and Insight. But I bet Insight, with their big marketing budget, is going to push the small companies out. Actually, if bundling 'Net service with rent became illegal, it would probably be a boon for Insight, since they're the only company that all the students have heard of. Congrats on scoring a great deal, though, from whomever it was at the time.
When I was a Freshman in the dorms (200[23]) I think old-school Napster had already been shut down... but Kazaa pretty much crippled the University's Internet connection. So they blocked the ports, and everything worked reasonably well for all of first semester (well enough to survive X forwarding, though if you wanted to get hours of serious work done you either had to do as much as possible in straight SSH or hit the labs in-person). Then after upgrading the line and having a few weeks of awesome speed to start second semester they re-opened the Kazaa ports and the everything sucked again. P2P traffic truly will expand to the size of its container.
Audio rate for CDs is 44.1kHz. That's one sample every 22.7 microseconds. For a digital circuit these days that's an eternity. Plenty of time to read the data, apply error correction, and pipe it off to the DAC.
This is digital media we're talking about. There's no reason to measure digital media by converting it to analog and listening to it with our unreliable ears and easily-influenced minds. It can be measured perfectly by telling the CD player to tell us what the bits are, and compare it to the original.
I don't really feel like wasting a CD and lots of my time setting up an experiment over whether burned CDs wind up storing the same digital data as the CDs they're burned from. But I do know this: if CD players read slightly different data from burned copies of data CDs the result would be massive data corruption on every burned data CD. Data CDs are commonly read at 52 times the rate necessary to keep up with the 44.1kHz audio rate these days, and they don't have these problems, which would be easily and obviously apparent in digital data. Based on that logic, I can only conclude that you're either deluded or that I've just been trolled.
I sure got jerked around by the ISP that had an exclusive deal at my apartment in college. The first year the deal was with a company that couldn't keep the connection up reliably and had very little bandwidth. Then that company went out of business and they went with the local cable company that most people in town were reasonably happy with (Insight Broadband in Champaign). But since they had an exclusive deal on the building they put the screws to us: charged us $20/month per person (I had two roommates, so combined we paid twice as much as we would have normally) and, even worse, put us behind NAT. Yes, that's right, the whole fucking building behind one IP address. I wrote a letter to them (the gist of it being, "If you don't give me an IP address it's not Internet service, it's web'n'email service, which is not what I signed up for"). They didn't even respond.
I blame myself for the first year... I really should have read more closely and figured out whether the company was any good. The second year I really got blindsided, though... the landlord thought the price was $20/mo. for the three of us and didn't find out otherwise until after we'd signed the lease and made our first payment towards Internet service... the NAT thing I didn't know until I booted my computer and saw the dhclient spew scroll by. Ten-dot... hey!
I don't think the point is that profit is bad. The point is that the students can just figure out what they think is most useful to put in their program and write it, while the corporate programmers have to wait for a plan from the business side of things. Not, "What features can we put into this thing that would be cool/good?", which most programmers could figure out pretty quickly, but, "How much will this help our bottom line? How many resources is it worth assigning to this project? What features can we add that would help our profits? Would some features jeopardize our profits? Do we need to build any restrictions in? How does this fit in with our overall strategy?" These are valid questions to ask, and the fact that they're asked and discussed underscores why all the cool stuff people do for projects in college doesn't wind up being used by anyone. But the questions still take time, and sometimes result in a product that's not as useful to its users.
And then after that there's the issue of making it release-quality, which is more important for a company with a reputation than a bunch of students.
If a cheaper, more plentiful source of energy than OPEC oil is developed outside of OPEC nations, OPEC quickly loses its influence. Its actions to kill anything would be pretty irrelevant at that point.
I believe that it's a damn shame that so many engineer-hours are spent and so much money is spent on product features that actively restrict consumers. That when we buy things our money funds these limitations on us. And likewise what you said with profit buying lawyers, although I don't feel as strongly about that; it's not directly productive, but I don't feel it's as counter-productive because copyright infringement still is illegal, and for good reason (which is not to say that all copyright laws are good, but most file sharing would violate my idea of reasonable minimal copyright laws).
From a similar line of reasoning, I would think it a damn shame if art forms disappeared because they were too easy to steal. If we lost deep and complex forms of expression not because people didn't want them or value them, not because something that people liked better came along, but because they found ways not to pay for them.
Buggy whips fell out of favor because people found something they liked better. It would really suck if the survival of art depended upon it lacking any permanent interest, such that nobody would bother pirating it.
I realize that credit card users that pay their bills fully don't make the credit card folk any money, and I generally agree with the thrust of your argument, but I have never witnessed anger or aggression from my credit card company despite paying all my bills in full. If you always pay on time, what kind of interaction do they even have with you? Junk mail? Telemarketing calls?
The state gives me a license to drive, and I manage to flip my car over and kill myself. It's the state's fault for certifying me, not mine. Maybe if the blame "still ultimately falls there" anyone that's pissed off that I'm dead should sue the state.
Yeah, Microsoft has a driver certification program. But if you expect that a certification program will make all drivers crash-free you're expecting something completely unreasonable.
At any rate, if someone managed to reproduce this failure and find which module the crash was in then there could be a discussion of what really went wrong. A crash dump including a stack trace would be particularly informative. It's not really very difficult to generate such a crash dump if you have a 100%-reproducible crash. As driver bugs go, 100%-reproducible kernel panics are generally some of the easiest bugs to diagnose and fix.
A large K. I wonder what *that's* doing there! I have a globe drawn from the current relative position of the moon and shaded based on the current relative position of the sun. Nothing happens when you click it, though.
Lack of openness leaves you open to corruption. If there's any evidence that competitors could glean useful information from datacenter power bills then sure, let them be hidden. If surrounding states are considering similar laws and businesses are making clear that it's important to them, then consider it. Otherwise, if it's just about hiding information from the public, it's hogwash. Yes, states want to attract business. The public generally wants business to come to the state also. If the public won't accept the presence of a business given all the facts, and the solution is to hide the facts, then you are doing the public a disservice. You're taking away the tools they use to form their own opinions, and saying that Daddy Legislator Knows Best.
No, it's not theoretically perfect. If you want decent latency you need to have most of the UI figured out client-side, which is not what X is good at. Remote X isn't designed to utilize any client-side processing power, when we almost certainly have plenty of client-side CPU cycles to burn. What do programs use X for? To draw the UI in their windows. Sure, those windows can be anywhere. But what you're passing around is a bunch of UI data: where to draw lines and write text, what keys were pressed and where the mouse clicked. Ideally the UI drawing and kbd/mouse interaction is handled on the client machine for better latency, and application-specific data is handed between the client and the server. This is way beyond the scope of a windowing system that is already a beast.
Yes, X is very flexible. Don't cream your pants over it, it's not the solution to everything.
One of the things that Java, JS, CSS, HTML provide is that the processing of the immediate UI elements that really need to be responsive can be handled on client systems. When you click a button in a webapp to, say, sort your email, it might take a while for the sort to complete. But at least your browser gives you a response right away. With remote X you don't have any feedback that your click registered until the remote machine responds. Similarly, once your document is loaded in a web browser you can scroll through text quickly even if the network connection sucks. With X your scrolling behavior would only be as good as the network.
I don't think that the web as it is is a very good platform for app delivery. I think remote X has its own set of problems, though. What's needed is something higher-level than remote X, that allows latency-sensitive tasks to be performed on the client. I think Java was supposed to be that. The execution hasn't been there, though, for many webapps.
There are a lot of people throwing money into that black pit, many for good reasons. Just because they don't own houses now doesn't mean we shouldn't consider how they're impacted. There probably will be some positive effects for everyone, but increased cost of living is a concern for lots of people.
Two more things:
1. If you sell your house for profit you still have to live somewhere. You either buy another home at drastically inflated price (and in the process you'd lose money buying a house of equal value, because of all the money that flows out to lawyers, real-estate agents and the like), you throw money down the rent hole (more lossage) or you move somewhere else.
2. You have to pay more in property taxes if you just sit on your more valuable land. In California they passed a law a while back limiting annual value assessment changes, and it's a popular law that's helped people stay in their homes, but since property value does get reassessed (which almost always means a drastic increase in its taxed value) when you buy, sell or improve property it discourages these activities. And people become experts in finding shady ways to dodge reassessment. I think it raises the barrier for new property owners even higher, since new owners have to shoulder more tax burden. Which keeps more people throwing money down the rent hole. Which isn't to say that there aren't better ways it could be handled... just that the increasing value of your home/land might not actually make you rich.
Huh. I actually think that holding a cube at partial rotation has very, very limited utility (if it has any at all). You'd almost always get more use out of the old 2D idiom of a big desk with multiple screens that can be smoothly scrolled between, because the stuff on your screen would actually be readable. I wouldn't be surprised if some window manager has used a similar control scheme... in fact, I would be very surprised if it couldn't be done with ease in FVWM. Although I'm not sure that it's a better way to move around a big desk than the ways we already have.
I don't think Amtrak trains are as crowded as airplanes are, and I bet their average ridership is older and generally more patient, slow-paced folk that wouldn't make as many cell phone calls. The second that business travelers get it in their minds that it's their right and entitlement to make cheap phone calls on airplanes they will, in numbers too large to stop, with attitudes too pushy to counter. I don't know how many people use phones on Amtrak, but I know that on planes the second cell phones are allowed on once the plane lands the plane gets noisy fast. You know, while you're still stuck in your seat waiting for everyone to lug their oversized carry-ons out of the compartments. I don't want a whole flight of that.
If they need to communicate and they have Internet access they can use email, since the keyboard noises aren't nearly as annoying as phone conversations.
I don't play WoW, but I am a long-distance runner. If some company offered me free gear in exchange for running in a bunch of races wearing that gear I'd do it, as long as the gear wasn't too garish. I'd wear a jersey with an Asics logo on it in exchange for free shoes. I'm not nearly a good enough runner to get a deal like that (although, really, in most races there are more people that can see the midpack runners than the leaders, so it might actually be more effective to put ads on me than some elite dude).
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that all the effects are scriptable, so that different effects or placement schemes can be applied to different classes of window
How is that interesting? FVWM, which you even mentioned using, has had that ability for years (I use it very infrequently because consistency is good). So Beryl is bringing that aspect of FVWM back to the mainstream? I guess that's nice, if people find use in it, but it's hardly interesting.
I don't know how you control the desktop cube in Beryl, but if you can't make a normal 2-d window manager use similar controls I'll eat my hat. The fact that Beryl has a nice control method really doesn't have anything to do with 3-d desktops.
In my high school something nearly as bad happened. During my junior year some of the honors English students were caught copying from SparkNotes on a paper. Not only did some of them copy the same excerpts from the website, but some of them had just copy-pasted from their browsers and had "hyperlinks" (words that shows up blue and underlined) and font changes in the papers they turned in.
I had the same teacher for my (lower) English class. The episode made her a little bit paranoid about cheating. I was regrettably slacking off a bit in the class, but I actually did a good job on one of the papers. The teacher called me in after class, suspicious that I'd cheated because the writing style seemed too mature to be mine.
Haha, yeah, when I got Gran Turismo I for Playstation way back then I read the insert that tried to teach you how to take corners properly. I was absolutely awful at the game and didn't play it much, but I remember some of that stuff when driving and cycling in real life, how to brake and accelerate to corner well. But where I use it most it when I'm out running (because I run on interesting trails more often than I drive or bike on interesting roads); when I run up on trails in the hills, when I'm going downhill and there are turns that I have to slow down for I think about how to take a good line and maximize my exit speed.
I heard that someone in Champaign, IL (USA) killed a cyclist riding in the shoulder of a road (a minor state highway) while simultaneously driving and trying to download ringtones. She didn't actually face any jail time because the prosecutors didn't think they could convict her for vehicular manslaughter. She had a bad driving record already and faced the maximum possible penalty for illegal lane usage, which I think was a large fine and community service.
I find the situation that a person is operating a piece of machinery with mass on the order of a ton or so at speeds that are inherantly dangerous to the human body on impact (try throwing a naked human against a wall at even just 40km/h) without paying attention patently absurd. Automotive engineers for decades have abstracted us from what we're really doing by continually making the process of driving easier and more intuitive, widening and flattening roads and adding safety features to cars. And could it be that in doing so they haven't really protected us at all? If people now don't understand the gravity of what they're doing on the road at some level, and feel a responsibility to take driving seriously then what is the point of all this engineering? It doesn't make anyone safer, it just lets them get places faster on the way to their death, lets them do two things at once on the way to their death.
I read both articles in their entirity. It just sounds to me like the author wrote the articles as a pair, flipping his arguments around from one article to the other, to make a point: that the differences between the two threading models are simply differences, and that it's easy to apply opposite value judgements to each of them just by changing the wording of your description of a difference (most obvious example is the paragraph on signal persistence; compare how he amplifies and dismisses the difficulty of the same coding practices in each article). Or perhaps he was trying to help strong partisans recognize the viewpoints of people they disagreed with and come up with new approaches to their programming problems, or maybe he was trying to encourage developers to improve each threading model by recognizing the strenghts of others.
To me that seems more likely than that he's a shill.
Oh man. During the leadup to the 2004 presidential election when Howard Dean was getting lots of press I noticed that he bore a striking resemblance to a Chicago-area lawyer that often had ads on TV named Peter Francis Geraci. So I put links to pictures of both in my AIM profile.
At this time I was signed up for a website that auto-stalked my AIM profile/away messages, so that people could see an archive of them. So that went into the archive.
One of my friends saw it and told me that she heard that Peter Francis Geraci beat his kids. I didn't take it seriously, but I quoted it in the profile. And it went up on the dude's website.
A few weeks later I got IMed by the guy running the website. He'd received an C&D from the office of Peter Francis Geraci and had to kick me off the service and delete my archive as a result. He was really nice about it, but there wasn't much he could do.
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Was at UIUC, now a Working Stiff. I'm sure there has been plenty of shuffling in the market... by the time I was there there were a bunch of small companies (most of which did better than mine, by my friends' experience) and Insight. But I bet Insight, with their big marketing budget, is going to push the small companies out. Actually, if bundling 'Net service with rent became illegal, it would probably be a boon for Insight, since they're the only company that all the students have heard of. Congrats on scoring a great deal, though, from whomever it was at the time.
When I was a Freshman in the dorms (200[23]) I think old-school Napster had already been shut down... but Kazaa pretty much crippled the University's Internet connection. So they blocked the ports, and everything worked reasonably well for all of first semester (well enough to survive X forwarding, though if you wanted to get hours of serious work done you either had to do as much as possible in straight SSH or hit the labs in-person). Then after upgrading the line and having a few weeks of awesome speed to start second semester they re-opened the Kazaa ports and the everything sucked again. P2P traffic truly will expand to the size of its container.
Audio rate for CDs is 44.1kHz. That's one sample every 22.7 microseconds. For a digital circuit these days that's an eternity. Plenty of time to read the data, apply error correction, and pipe it off to the DAC.
This is digital media we're talking about. There's no reason to measure digital media by converting it to analog and listening to it with our unreliable ears and easily-influenced minds. It can be measured perfectly by telling the CD player to tell us what the bits are, and compare it to the original.
I don't really feel like wasting a CD and lots of my time setting up an experiment over whether burned CDs wind up storing the same digital data as the CDs they're burned from. But I do know this: if CD players read slightly different data from burned copies of data CDs the result would be massive data corruption on every burned data CD. Data CDs are commonly read at 52 times the rate necessary to keep up with the 44.1kHz audio rate these days, and they don't have these problems, which would be easily and obviously apparent in digital data. Based on that logic, I can only conclude that you're either deluded or that I've just been trolled.
I sure got jerked around by the ISP that had an exclusive deal at my apartment in college. The first year the deal was with a company that couldn't keep the connection up reliably and had very little bandwidth. Then that company went out of business and they went with the local cable company that most people in town were reasonably happy with (Insight Broadband in Champaign). But since they had an exclusive deal on the building they put the screws to us: charged us $20/month per person (I had two roommates, so combined we paid twice as much as we would have normally) and, even worse, put us behind NAT. Yes, that's right, the whole fucking building behind one IP address. I wrote a letter to them (the gist of it being, "If you don't give me an IP address it's not Internet service, it's web'n'email service, which is not what I signed up for"). They didn't even respond.
I blame myself for the first year... I really should have read more closely and figured out whether the company was any good. The second year I really got blindsided, though... the landlord thought the price was $20/mo. for the three of us and didn't find out otherwise until after we'd signed the lease and made our first payment towards Internet service... the NAT thing I didn't know until I booted my computer and saw the dhclient spew scroll by. Ten-dot... hey!
I don't think the point is that profit is bad. The point is that the students can just figure out what they think is most useful to put in their program and write it, while the corporate programmers have to wait for a plan from the business side of things. Not, "What features can we put into this thing that would be cool/good?", which most programmers could figure out pretty quickly, but, "How much will this help our bottom line? How many resources is it worth assigning to this project? What features can we add that would help our profits? Would some features jeopardize our profits? Do we need to build any restrictions in? How does this fit in with our overall strategy?" These are valid questions to ask, and the fact that they're asked and discussed underscores why all the cool stuff people do for projects in college doesn't wind up being used by anyone. But the questions still take time, and sometimes result in a product that's not as useful to its users.
And then after that there's the issue of making it release-quality, which is more important for a company with a reputation than a bunch of students.
If a cheaper, more plentiful source of energy than OPEC oil is developed outside of OPEC nations, OPEC quickly loses its influence. Its actions to kill anything would be pretty irrelevant at that point.
I believe that it's a damn shame that so many engineer-hours are spent and so much money is spent on product features that actively restrict consumers. That when we buy things our money funds these limitations on us. And likewise what you said with profit buying lawyers, although I don't feel as strongly about that; it's not directly productive, but I don't feel it's as counter-productive because copyright infringement still is illegal, and for good reason (which is not to say that all copyright laws are good, but most file sharing would violate my idea of reasonable minimal copyright laws).
From a similar line of reasoning, I would think it a damn shame if art forms disappeared because they were too easy to steal. If we lost deep and complex forms of expression not because people didn't want them or value them, not because something that people liked better came along, but because they found ways not to pay for them.
Buggy whips fell out of favor because people found something they liked better. It would really suck if the survival of art depended upon it lacking any permanent interest, such that nobody would bother pirating it.
If winrar constantly triggers UAC events then winrar is somewhere between "broken" and "broken".
It's unfortunate that this looks like bad user experience on Microsoft's part when it's almost certainly winrar's fault.
I realize that credit card users that pay their bills fully don't make the credit card folk any money, and I generally agree with the thrust of your argument, but I have never witnessed anger or aggression from my credit card company despite paying all my bills in full. If you always pay on time, what kind of interaction do they even have with you? Junk mail? Telemarketing calls?
The state gives me a license to drive, and I manage to flip my car over and kill myself. It's the state's fault for certifying me, not mine. Maybe if the blame "still ultimately falls there" anyone that's pissed off that I'm dead should sue the state.
Yeah, Microsoft has a driver certification program. But if you expect that a certification program will make all drivers crash-free you're expecting something completely unreasonable.
At any rate, if someone managed to reproduce this failure and find which module the crash was in then there could be a discussion of what really went wrong. A crash dump including a stack trace would be particularly informative. It's not really very difficult to generate such a crash dump if you have a 100%-reproducible crash. As driver bugs go, 100%-reproducible kernel panics are generally some of the easiest bugs to diagnose and fix.
A large K. I wonder what *that's* doing there! I have a globe drawn from the current relative position of the moon and shaded based on the current relative position of the sun. Nothing happens when you click it, though.
Lack of openness leaves you open to corruption. If there's any evidence that competitors could glean useful information from datacenter power bills then sure, let them be hidden. If surrounding states are considering similar laws and businesses are making clear that it's important to them, then consider it. Otherwise, if it's just about hiding information from the public, it's hogwash. Yes, states want to attract business. The public generally wants business to come to the state also. If the public won't accept the presence of a business given all the facts, and the solution is to hide the facts, then you are doing the public a disservice. You're taking away the tools they use to form their own opinions, and saying that Daddy Legislator Knows Best.
No, it's not theoretically perfect. If you want decent latency you need to have most of the UI figured out client-side, which is not what X is good at. Remote X isn't designed to utilize any client-side processing power, when we almost certainly have plenty of client-side CPU cycles to burn. What do programs use X for? To draw the UI in their windows. Sure, those windows can be anywhere. But what you're passing around is a bunch of UI data: where to draw lines and write text, what keys were pressed and where the mouse clicked. Ideally the UI drawing and kbd/mouse interaction is handled on the client machine for better latency, and application-specific data is handed between the client and the server. This is way beyond the scope of a windowing system that is already a beast.
Yes, X is very flexible. Don't cream your pants over it, it's not the solution to everything.
One of the things that Java, JS, CSS, HTML provide is that the processing of the immediate UI elements that really need to be responsive can be handled on client systems. When you click a button in a webapp to, say, sort your email, it might take a while for the sort to complete. But at least your browser gives you a response right away. With remote X you don't have any feedback that your click registered until the remote machine responds. Similarly, once your document is loaded in a web browser you can scroll through text quickly even if the network connection sucks. With X your scrolling behavior would only be as good as the network.
I don't think that the web as it is is a very good platform for app delivery. I think remote X has its own set of problems, though. What's needed is something higher-level than remote X, that allows latency-sensitive tasks to be performed on the client. I think Java was supposed to be that. The execution hasn't been there, though, for many webapps.
There are a lot of people throwing money into that black pit, many for good reasons. Just because they don't own houses now doesn't mean we shouldn't consider how they're impacted. There probably will be some positive effects for everyone, but increased cost of living is a concern for lots of people.
Two more things:
1. If you sell your house for profit you still have to live somewhere. You either buy another home at drastically inflated price (and in the process you'd lose money buying a house of equal value, because of all the money that flows out to lawyers, real-estate agents and the like), you throw money down the rent hole (more lossage) or you move somewhere else.
2. You have to pay more in property taxes if you just sit on your more valuable land. In California they passed a law a while back limiting annual value assessment changes, and it's a popular law that's helped people stay in their homes, but since property value does get reassessed (which almost always means a drastic increase in its taxed value) when you buy, sell or improve property it discourages these activities. And people become experts in finding shady ways to dodge reassessment. I think it raises the barrier for new property owners even higher, since new owners have to shoulder more tax burden. Which keeps more people throwing money down the rent hole. Which isn't to say that there aren't better ways it could be handled... just that the increasing value of your home/land might not actually make you rich.
Huh. I actually think that holding a cube at partial rotation has very, very limited utility (if it has any at all). You'd almost always get more use out of the old 2D idiom of a big desk with multiple screens that can be smoothly scrolled between, because the stuff on your screen would actually be readable. I wouldn't be surprised if some window manager has used a similar control scheme... in fact, I would be very surprised if it couldn't be done with ease in FVWM. Although I'm not sure that it's a better way to move around a big desk than the ways we already have.
I don't think Amtrak trains are as crowded as airplanes are, and I bet their average ridership is older and generally more patient, slow-paced folk that wouldn't make as many cell phone calls. The second that business travelers get it in their minds that it's their right and entitlement to make cheap phone calls on airplanes they will, in numbers too large to stop, with attitudes too pushy to counter. I don't know how many people use phones on Amtrak, but I know that on planes the second cell phones are allowed on once the plane lands the plane gets noisy fast. You know, while you're still stuck in your seat waiting for everyone to lug their oversized carry-ons out of the compartments. I don't want a whole flight of that.
If they need to communicate and they have Internet access they can use email, since the keyboard noises aren't nearly as annoying as phone conversations.
I don't play WoW, but I am a long-distance runner. If some company offered me free gear in exchange for running in a bunch of races wearing that gear I'd do it, as long as the gear wasn't too garish. I'd wear a jersey with an Asics logo on it in exchange for free shoes. I'm not nearly a good enough runner to get a deal like that (although, really, in most races there are more people that can see the midpack runners than the leaders, so it might actually be more effective to put ads on me than some elite dude).
I hope phone calls stay banned. Airline flights are bad enough without having to listen to one side of a hundred phone conversations.
How is that interesting? FVWM, which you even mentioned using, has had that ability for years (I use it very infrequently because consistency is good). So Beryl is bringing that aspect of FVWM back to the mainstream? I guess that's nice, if people find use in it, but it's hardly interesting.
I don't know how you control the desktop cube in Beryl, but if you can't make a normal 2-d window manager use similar controls I'll eat my hat. The fact that Beryl has a nice control method really doesn't have anything to do with 3-d desktops.
In my high school something nearly as bad happened. During my junior year some of the honors English students were caught copying from SparkNotes on a paper. Not only did some of them copy the same excerpts from the website, but some of them had just copy-pasted from their browsers and had "hyperlinks" (words that shows up blue and underlined) and font changes in the papers they turned in.
I had the same teacher for my (lower) English class. The episode made her a little bit paranoid about cheating. I was regrettably slacking off a bit in the class, but I actually did a good job on one of the papers. The teacher called me in after class, suspicious that I'd cheated because the writing style seemed too mature to be mine.
Haha, yeah, when I got Gran Turismo I for Playstation way back then I read the insert that tried to teach you how to take corners properly. I was absolutely awful at the game and didn't play it much, but I remember some of that stuff when driving and cycling in real life, how to brake and accelerate to corner well. But where I use it most it when I'm out running (because I run on interesting trails more often than I drive or bike on interesting roads); when I run up on trails in the hills, when I'm going downhill and there are turns that I have to slow down for I think about how to take a good line and maximize my exit speed.
I heard that someone in Champaign, IL (USA) killed a cyclist riding in the shoulder of a road (a minor state highway) while simultaneously driving and trying to download ringtones. She didn't actually face any jail time because the prosecutors didn't think they could convict her for vehicular manslaughter. She had a bad driving record already and faced the maximum possible penalty for illegal lane usage, which I think was a large fine and community service.
I find the situation that a person is operating a piece of machinery with mass on the order of a ton or so at speeds that are inherantly dangerous to the human body on impact (try throwing a naked human against a wall at even just 40km/h) without paying attention patently absurd. Automotive engineers for decades have abstracted us from what we're really doing by continually making the process of driving easier and more intuitive, widening and flattening roads and adding safety features to cars. And could it be that in doing so they haven't really protected us at all? If people now don't understand the gravity of what they're doing on the road at some level, and feel a responsibility to take driving seriously then what is the point of all this engineering? It doesn't make anyone safer, it just lets them get places faster on the way to their death, lets them do two things at once on the way to their death.
I read both articles in their entirity. It just sounds to me like the author wrote the articles as a pair, flipping his arguments around from one article to the other, to make a point: that the differences between the two threading models are simply differences, and that it's easy to apply opposite value judgements to each of them just by changing the wording of your description of a difference (most obvious example is the paragraph on signal persistence; compare how he amplifies and dismisses the difficulty of the same coding practices in each article). Or perhaps he was trying to help strong partisans recognize the viewpoints of people they disagreed with and come up with new approaches to their programming problems, or maybe he was trying to encourage developers to improve each threading model by recognizing the strenghts of others.
To me that seems more likely than that he's a shill.
Oh man. During the leadup to the 2004 presidential election when Howard Dean was getting lots of press I noticed that he bore a striking resemblance to a Chicago-area lawyer that often had ads on TV named Peter Francis Geraci. So I put links to pictures of both in my AIM profile.
At this time I was signed up for a website that auto-stalked my AIM profile/away messages, so that people could see an archive of them. So that went into the archive.
One of my friends saw it and told me that she heard that Peter Francis Geraci beat his kids. I didn't take it seriously, but I quoted it in the profile. And it went up on the dude's website.
A few weeks later I got IMed by the guy running the website. He'd received an C&D from the office of Peter Francis Geraci and had to kick me off the service and delete my archive as a result. He was really nice about it, but there wasn't much he could do.