"(The second amendment is pretty clear about the gun owners rights and their infringement -- I'm also not foolish enough to start tinkering with the Bill of Rights.)"
Yeah, if you're a member of a well-regulated militia, the feds can't pass a law preventing you from carrying guns. The only "well regulated militia"/s I've seen in the US in the last 60 years have been the National Guard and the Black Panthers. Congress should therefore be able to do whatever it wants to any of the rest of you who can't get your shit together to create and join a well-regulated militia, it just hasn't had the guts to do so.
Until, of course, the Supreme Court decided to rule in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) that being in a well-regulated militia was somehow the same thing as owning a gun for the putative purpose of defending yourself from "private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government" and hence "the activities [the Amendment] protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia." Thus apparent idiots like George Zimmerman, who would never have been able to possess a firearm in an urban area in any other first world country, get to 'defend' themselves against unarmed teenagers by killing them.
Your professor had a) achieved tenure; b) didn't do research; and c) cared about teaching. Which is fantastic, and I'm glad you got that person, and in many ways is how it should be.
Meanwhile, the professors you thought of as less-good than your 'best professor' may have been a) contract lecturers juggling teaching your class between multiple other teaching jobs; b) grad students juggling teaching your class between other jobs and their need to actually finish grad school; c) pre-tenure professors juggling teaching your class and cranking out the necessary papers to get tenure, since the alternative to achieving tenure is being fired in your 4th to 6th year of teaching; d) tenured, but since continuing to do the research your PhD trained you to do (no PhD ever trains you in pedagogy) is both more fiscally and intellectually rewarding for most people than teaching undergraduates, was focusing on research rather than teaching; and/or e) didn't give a shit about teaching because 1) very very very few institutions actually *reward* teaching (vs giving lip service to how important teaching is); or 2) people who care deeply about teaching become school teachers because it requires far less time as a student to achieve the same salary and job satisfaction and your less-than-stellar professor just doesn't care that much about pedagogy.
The single thing that would improve the experience of most college students as we all go through college is for pressure to be applied to institutions to reward people for teaching well, both in terms of immediate salary and in terms of career progress. Until that happens, your experience of 'good professors' is going to be limited to tenured individuals who give a shit, and that's a rare combination. When you find them, praise them to the institution whatever opportunity you get - it does actually help those people a little and is worth doing.
It's a popular product because there's few reasonable alternatives for anything other than the shortest trips. I live in Los Angeles; my family lives in Australia. It's a bloody long swim. If air travel to Australia involved a two hour exam and a strip search I'd still grit my teeth and do it every couple of years because the alternative would be to never see my family again.
More pragmatically for most Americans, like many many people I travel between California and various east coast cities on a regular basis for work. My choice is to spend several days driving or sitting on a train vs maybe 7 hours tops flying including all the security theater at the beginning of the flight. It's both more expensive and more time consuming to avoid the security theater, so I fly. (Doing a bit of rummaging on the web, Amtrak rail Los Angeles New York goes for $266 at best and takes 60 hours sitting in a standard seat (a sleeper costs $813). Driving goes for an estimated $280 in my recent model Ford and 50 hours of nonstop driving time (plus the cost of either accommodation or amphetamines..). Random airline goes for $155 per kayak.com and takes 5 hours.). So while I always opt out of the scanners (I do biomedical research - I'm willing to be a guinea pig for something that might improve the health of my fellow humans, but I'm not willing to be a guinea pig for the health impacts of a jammed scanner which provides no benefit whatsoever for my fellow humans), again, I'm basically willing to subject myself to whatever nonsense security game they're playing this week because it hasn't come close to crossing the time/price point of other forms of travel for anything where air travel was competitive in the first place.
No congresscritter or international equivalent wants to be Michael Dukakis and have her or his arse handed to them in the next election when a single Willie Horton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton) makes it onto a plane and does something Bad.
It's politically far safer to support any level of nonsense security theater and be able to say "I supported every effort to prevent this tragedy" after the inevitable next Bad Thing than stand up and actively support even the sanest reductions in security theater because the inevitable next Bad Thing will still happen and your political enemies will have no problem turning it into your fault.
For the non-Americans, Michael Dukakis was a governor of Massachusetts who stuck his neck out and supported a fairly common-sense program for giving prisoners coming up to the end of their sentence short periods of furlough as part of efforts to support reintegration into society. Willie Horton was a prisoner who absconded while on furlough and later raped someone. When Dukakis ran for President in 1988, Republicans ran attack ads against Dukakis featuring Horton and his crimes as a consequence of Dukakis' 'soft on crime' approach.
And in gnome hit F3 and the explorer-equivalent (nautilus) splits itself into two independently navigable panes so you can move shit from two folders as fast as you want - no need to have two copies of explorer open in the first place.
When a gentleman by the name of Ponzi started 'crowdsourcing' investment in his fine scheme.
I know bashing 'excessive government regulation' is common in the US, but when an entire field of endeavor is banned by regulation, it's usually worth looking at the historical reasons why that happened, and taking some care to ensure that (justifiable) revisions to that regulatory response don't allow the reemergence of the original problem.
To both parent posters: out of curiosity, working for casinos, how do you sleep at night?
Seriously, your work lives are dedicated to using your mathematical / computing / other skills to improving the efficiency of a process designed to extract money from relatively poor people's pockets and put it into the pockets of already rich people.
At the end of your lives, is that what you want to be remembered for? Really?
Ok, you have kids to feed. That's legitimate. It's a hard economy, maybe this was your only option when you took the job.
Can you, even just for yourself, write down your plan to move on to another job which doesn't involve using your skills to completely fuck people over? Or that doesn't involve looking at your end-users as 'idiots' who *deserve* to be exploited as a way of justifying what you do each day when you go in to work?
While there are plenty of uninhabited islands out there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_island), with few exceptions they're all recognized as being part of some nation's sovereign territory which means, by definition, they're not "in international waters". The two sort-of exceptions are Antarctica and the Svalbard archipelago. Svalbard has some quite delightfully weird legal history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Treaty) which makes going there and setting up 'commercial activity' rather less restricted than it might otherwise be, is still part of the Kingdom of Norway and subject to most of its laws. Antarctica is pretty much do whatever you want (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty) as long as it's not military. But while you might be able to set up a data center in either of those places, good luck with your internet connection.
Which brings me to my second point - "add a satellite uplink.." Who owns the satellites? Which country are they based in, and whose laws are *they* subject to? The number of comsat service providers is pretty small, and all of them have governments as major customers and in many cases part- or full-owners. Running your piratebay server on some rock off Antarctica is all well and good, but when your comsat service is cancelled because a national government took the carrier to court (or just threatened to), all you have is a disconnected server sitting on a cold rock.
This is the problem with all such 'remote island' schemes. The remote island still has to connect to the internet, and the more remote it is, the less connections you can afford to have, and the easier it is for someone to have you cut off. Better to have ten thousand redundant copies of whatever you're trying to make available floating around the internet than stick one copy on an easily disconnected island somewhere.
The bluff was called when the US jacked up terms for drug offences in the '80s. At the moment 1% of the population is incarcerated at any given time - the largest proportion of a population ever incarcerated in history by anyone.
The wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) bankrupted the city of Seattle in the early 1900s during a strike - after the cops started arresting people for breaching labor laws thousands of them turned themselves in for breaching the same laws. The resulting prison costs bankrupted the city. Gutsy move though - turning up at cop station to confess to a crime which would put you in jail for years, and having to depend on thousands of others to do the same for the strategy to actually work.
Hey, I remember Weasel Reader; I used it for years from when it was still called GutenPalm. Thanks for writing it - it made many a commute far more tolerable!
As you say, I doubt there were many users who would have needed a more comprehensive manual to get up and running, but I notice that even when your project didn't need anything that huge in the way of a manual, writing the whole thing still seemed daunting enough that you (or any other contributor) never got around to tackling it. That barrier to entry (if I write and say I'm willing to help with documentation am I committing to doing something beyond what I have the time for?) is one of the other reasons I like wiki-based documentation from a contributor's point of view - it's easy to start off small, whether it's rewriting a few existing sentences to make something clearer, or documenting how to use one small feature, and then if you start feeling more ambitious (and especially if other people working on the project are making appreciative sounds about the contributions you're making), it's equally easy to start adding entire chapters or sections. I doubt I would have written back in the day to offer to write an entire manual for Weasel Reader, but I can completely imagine adding a section describing how a specific extra feature worked, or making some edits to the description of how to convert texts to make it a bit clearer for people with less computer savvy.
Thanks again for writing Weasel - I for one definitely appreciated it.
I've contributed documentation to a few projects, but only those who use a wiki approach to documentation. The one attempt I made to contribute documentation to a piece of software I used a lot but which didn't have a wiki ended the same way as yours - 'thanks but no thanks'. I don't think wikis make for the absolute best documentation (unless someone puts a lot of effort into organization, you end up with a lot of randomly arranged howtos), but they're extremely low threshold as far as getting end users to help you document your software, and give the programmers one central location to look at from time to time to correct and update the documentation based on what changes have been made to the code.
Umm.. "The Glock's frame, magazine body and several other components are made from a high-strength nylon-based polymer invented by Gaston Glock and called Polymer 2.[34].. The injection molded frame contains 4 hardened steel guide rails for the slide: two at the rear of the frame, and the remaining pair above and in front of the trigger guard... The frame houses the locking block, which is an investment casting that engages a 45 camming surface on the barrel's lower camming lug. It is retained in the frame by a steel axis pin that holds the trigger and slide catch... A spring-loaded sheet metal pressing serves as the slide catch, which is secured from unintentional manipulation by a raised guard molded into the frame."
The local Mr Plod can barely operate their own laptops. And certainly don't have the fiscal resources to go sending a HDD I opened and hit with a hammer a few times to the NSA to try and salvage data from - I'd pretty much have to fly a plane into a building to get that kind of attention. I agree with you though that running dban or something similar is more than enough. I think I'd personally just be so horrified to find CP on a device I owned that physical removal of the storage medium would feel cleansing in some way. After I'd done some forensics on the removed, offline drive to work out how the hell it had wound up there in the first place..
I thin if I ever found child porn on my computer I'd pull the hard drive and destroy it immediately. This guy not only got 4 months banned from being alone with his child (and if the porn was there because it *was* his, how the hell is this supposed to protect his daughter in 5 moths time?) but his name permanently associated with 'child porn' in the minds of everyone in his community.. And I suspect he was *lucky* to have gotten off so lightly. Child porn is the ultimate site of moral panic in the contemporary West, and one so severe it overrides notions of due process or innocent until proven guilty.
That didn't stop people electing Bush II. Twice. Although Bush did manage to walk the 'fundie enough to get the retards out but not too fundie to terrify the middle' line in a way that Santorum will never manage.
I'd far rather pay a predictable first world tax rate and not have my business constantly mired in software patent troll cases and other expensive 'IP' nonsense than pay low taxes and have a completely unpredictable and potentially business-destroying IP environment. But that's just me.
Does this mean I have some hope of replacing the utter garbage currently installed in my wife's Ford (Microsoft Sync, I'm looking at you). The car itself is pretty good, but the phone/music/voice control system is like some sort of retarded throwback to the '90s, and I'm actually genuinely worried it'll reduce the resale value of the car in a few years.
Additionally, most vaccines are 'leaky' - they don't protect all the time for everyone, even if given on schedule. The vaccine for Hepatitis B, for example, doesn't produce antibodies in about 10% of people. Problem is, you can't tell if a given vaccine with a known leak rate will work for you or not, but if not, you benefit from herd immunity.
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"(The second amendment is pretty clear about the gun owners rights and their infringement -- I'm also not foolish enough to start tinkering with the Bill of Rights.)"
Yeah, if you're a member of a well-regulated militia, the feds can't pass a law preventing you from carrying guns. The only "well regulated militia"/s I've seen in the US in the last 60 years have been the National Guard and the Black Panthers. Congress should therefore be able to do whatever it wants to any of the rest of you who can't get your shit together to create and join a well-regulated militia, it just hasn't had the guts to do so.
Until, of course, the Supreme Court decided to rule in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) that being in a well-regulated militia was somehow the same thing as owning a gun for the putative purpose of defending yourself from "private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government" and hence "the activities [the Amendment] protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia." Thus apparent idiots like George Zimmerman, who would never have been able to possess a firearm in an urban area in any other first world country, get to 'defend' themselves against unarmed teenagers by killing them.
Your professor had a) achieved tenure; b) didn't do research; and c) cared about teaching. Which is fantastic, and I'm glad you got that person, and in many ways is how it should be.
Meanwhile, the professors you thought of as less-good than your 'best professor' may have been a) contract lecturers juggling teaching your class between multiple other teaching jobs; b) grad students juggling teaching your class between other jobs and their need to actually finish grad school; c) pre-tenure professors juggling teaching your class and cranking out the necessary papers to get tenure, since the alternative to achieving tenure is being fired in your 4th to 6th year of teaching; d) tenured, but since continuing to do the research your PhD trained you to do (no PhD ever trains you in pedagogy) is both more fiscally and intellectually rewarding for most people than teaching undergraduates, was focusing on research rather than teaching; and/or e) didn't give a shit about teaching because 1) very very very few institutions actually *reward* teaching (vs giving lip service to how important teaching is); or 2) people who care deeply about teaching become school teachers because it requires far less time as a student to achieve the same salary and job satisfaction and your less-than-stellar professor just doesn't care that much about pedagogy.
The single thing that would improve the experience of most college students as we all go through college is for pressure to be applied to institutions to reward people for teaching well, both in terms of immediate salary and in terms of career progress. Until that happens, your experience of 'good professors' is going to be limited to tenured individuals who give a shit, and that's a rare combination. When you find them, praise them to the institution whatever opportunity you get - it does actually help those people a little and is worth doing.
It's a popular product because there's few reasonable alternatives for anything other than the shortest trips. I live in Los Angeles; my family lives in Australia. It's a bloody long swim. If air travel to Australia involved a two hour exam and a strip search I'd still grit my teeth and do it every couple of years because the alternative would be to never see my family again.
More pragmatically for most Americans, like many many people I travel between California and various east coast cities on a regular basis for work. My choice is to spend several days driving or sitting on a train vs maybe 7 hours tops flying including all the security theater at the beginning of the flight. It's both more expensive and more time consuming to avoid the security theater, so I fly. (Doing a bit of rummaging on the web, Amtrak rail Los Angeles New York goes for $266 at best and takes 60 hours sitting in a standard seat (a sleeper costs $813). Driving goes for an estimated $280 in my recent model Ford and 50 hours of nonstop driving time (plus the cost of either accommodation or amphetamines..). Random airline goes for $155 per kayak.com and takes 5 hours.). So while I always opt out of the scanners (I do biomedical research - I'm willing to be a guinea pig for something that might improve the health of my fellow humans, but I'm not willing to be a guinea pig for the health impacts of a jammed scanner which provides no benefit whatsoever for my fellow humans), again, I'm basically willing to subject myself to whatever nonsense security game they're playing this week because it hasn't come close to crossing the time/price point of other forms of travel for anything where air travel was competitive in the first place.
No congresscritter or international equivalent wants to be Michael Dukakis and have her or his arse handed to them in the next election when a single Willie Horton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton) makes it onto a plane and does something Bad.
It's politically far safer to support any level of nonsense security theater and be able to say "I supported every effort to prevent this tragedy" after the inevitable next Bad Thing than stand up and actively support even the sanest reductions in security theater because the inevitable next Bad Thing will still happen and your political enemies will have no problem turning it into your fault.
For the non-Americans, Michael Dukakis was a governor of Massachusetts who stuck his neck out and supported a fairly common-sense program for giving prisoners coming up to the end of their sentence short periods of furlough as part of efforts to support reintegration into society. Willie Horton was a prisoner who absconded while on furlough and later raped someone. When Dukakis ran for President in 1988, Republicans ran attack ads against Dukakis featuring Horton and his crimes as a consequence of Dukakis' 'soft on crime' approach.
And in gnome hit F3 and the explorer-equivalent (nautilus) splits itself into two independently navigable panes so you can move shit from two folders as fast as you want - no need to have two copies of explorer open in the first place.
It still exists, & is still maintained.. http://apps.corel.com/lp/wpo/
When a gentleman by the name of Ponzi started 'crowdsourcing' investment in his fine scheme.
I know bashing 'excessive government regulation' is common in the US, but when an entire field of endeavor is banned by regulation, it's usually worth looking at the historical reasons why that happened, and taking some care to ensure that (justifiable) revisions to that regulatory response don't allow the reemergence of the original problem.
To both parent posters: out of curiosity, working for casinos, how do you sleep at night?
Seriously, your work lives are dedicated to using your mathematical / computing / other skills to improving the efficiency of a process designed to extract money from relatively poor people's pockets and put it into the pockets of already rich people.
At the end of your lives, is that what you want to be remembered for? Really?
Ok, you have kids to feed. That's legitimate. It's a hard economy, maybe this was your only option when you took the job.
Can you, even just for yourself, write down your plan to move on to another job which doesn't involve using your skills to completely fuck people over? Or that doesn't involve looking at your end-users as 'idiots' who *deserve* to be exploited as a way of justifying what you do each day when you go in to work?
Maybe not, but the Prosecutor General of Finland might. You know, given Nokia is headquartered in Finland and all..
Now we're talking :)
While there are plenty of uninhabited islands out there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_island), with few exceptions they're all recognized as being part of some nation's sovereign territory which means, by definition, they're not "in international waters". The two sort-of exceptions are Antarctica and the Svalbard archipelago. Svalbard has some quite delightfully weird legal history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Treaty) which makes going there and setting up 'commercial activity' rather less restricted than it might otherwise be, is still part of the Kingdom of Norway and subject to most of its laws. Antarctica is pretty much do whatever you want (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty) as long as it's not military. But while you might be able to set up a data center in either of those places, good luck with your internet connection.
Which brings me to my second point - "add a satellite uplink.." Who owns the satellites? Which country are they based in, and whose laws are *they* subject to? The number of comsat service providers is pretty small, and all of them have governments as major customers and in many cases part- or full-owners. Running your piratebay server on some rock off Antarctica is all well and good, but when your comsat service is cancelled because a national government took the carrier to court (or just threatened to), all you have is a disconnected server sitting on a cold rock.
This is the problem with all such 'remote island' schemes. The remote island still has to connect to the internet, and the more remote it is, the less connections you can afford to have, and the easier it is for someone to have you cut off. Better to have ten thousand redundant copies of whatever you're trying to make available floating around the internet than stick one copy on an easily disconnected island somewhere.
The bluff was called when the US jacked up terms for drug offences in the '80s. At the moment 1% of the population is incarcerated at any given time - the largest proportion of a population ever incarcerated in history by anyone.
The wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) bankrupted the city of Seattle in the early 1900s during a strike - after the cops started arresting people for breaching labor laws thousands of them turned themselves in for breaching the same laws. The resulting prison costs bankrupted the city. Gutsy move though - turning up at cop station to confess to a crime which would put you in jail for years, and having to depend on thousands of others to do the same for the strategy to actually work.
Hey, I remember Weasel Reader; I used it for years from when it was still called GutenPalm. Thanks for writing it - it made many a commute far more tolerable!
As you say, I doubt there were many users who would have needed a more comprehensive manual to get up and running, but I notice that even when your project didn't need anything that huge in the way of a manual, writing the whole thing still seemed daunting enough that you (or any other contributor) never got around to tackling it. That barrier to entry (if I write and say I'm willing to help with documentation am I committing to doing something beyond what I have the time for?) is one of the other reasons I like wiki-based documentation from a contributor's point of view - it's easy to start off small, whether it's rewriting a few existing sentences to make something clearer, or documenting how to use one small feature, and then if you start feeling more ambitious (and especially if other people working on the project are making appreciative sounds about the contributions you're making), it's equally easy to start adding entire chapters or sections. I doubt I would have written back in the day to offer to write an entire manual for Weasel Reader, but I can completely imagine adding a section describing how a specific extra feature worked, or making some edits to the description of how to convert texts to make it a bit clearer for people with less computer savvy.
Thanks again for writing Weasel - I for one definitely appreciated it.
I've contributed documentation to a few projects, but only those who use a wiki approach to documentation. The one attempt I made to contribute documentation to a piece of software I used a lot but which didn't have a wiki ended the same way as yours - 'thanks but no thanks'. I don't think wikis make for the absolute best documentation (unless someone puts a lot of effort into organization, you end up with a lot of randomly arranged howtos), but they're extremely low threshold as far as getting end users to help you document your software, and give the programmers one central location to look at from time to time to correct and update the documentation based on what changes have been made to the code.
"The Glock 23 has no metal parts"
Umm.. "The Glock's frame, magazine body and several other components are made from a high-strength nylon-based polymer invented by Gaston Glock and called Polymer 2.[34] .. The injection molded frame contains 4 hardened steel guide rails for the slide: two at the rear of the frame, and the remaining pair above and in front of the trigger guard. .. The frame houses the locking block, which is an investment casting that engages a 45 camming surface on the barrel's lower camming lug. It is retained in the frame by a steel axis pin that holds the trigger and slide catch. .. A spring-loaded sheet metal pressing serves as the slide catch, which is secured from unintentional manipulation by a raised guard molded into the frame."
The local Mr Plod can barely operate their own laptops. And certainly don't have the fiscal resources to go sending a HDD I opened and hit with a hammer a few times to the NSA to try and salvage data from - I'd pretty much have to fly a plane into a building to get that kind of attention. I agree with you though that running dban or something similar is more than enough. I think I'd personally just be so horrified to find CP on a device I owned that physical removal of the storage medium would feel cleansing in some way. After I'd done some forensics on the removed, offline drive to work out how the hell it had wound up there in the first place..
I thin if I ever found child porn on my computer I'd pull the hard drive and destroy it immediately. This guy not only got 4 months banned from being alone with his child (and if the porn was there because it *was* his, how the hell is this supposed to protect his daughter in 5 moths time?) but his name permanently associated with 'child porn' in the minds of everyone in his community.. And I suspect he was *lucky* to have gotten off so lightly. Child porn is the ultimate site of moral panic in the contemporary West, and one so severe it overrides notions of due process or innocent until proven guilty.
Or traceroute on linux/macos - same program, different call.
ok, they elected him after four years of his sterling leadership..
"Plus, he's genuinely stupid."
That didn't stop people electing Bush II. Twice. Although Bush did manage to walk the 'fundie enough to get the retards out but not too fundie to terrify the middle' line in a way that Santorum will never manage.
I'd far rather pay a predictable first world tax rate and not have my business constantly mired in software patent troll cases and other expensive 'IP' nonsense than pay low taxes and have a completely unpredictable and potentially business-destroying IP environment. But that's just me.
Does this mean I have some hope of replacing the utter garbage currently installed in my wife's Ford (Microsoft Sync, I'm looking at you). The car itself is pretty good, but the phone/music/voice control system is like some sort of retarded throwback to the '90s, and I'm actually genuinely worried it'll reduce the resale value of the car in a few years.
Additionally, most vaccines are 'leaky' - they don't protect all the time for everyone, even if given on schedule. The vaccine for Hepatitis B, for example, doesn't produce antibodies in about 10% of people. Problem is, you can't tell if a given vaccine with a known leak rate will work for you or not, but if not, you benefit from herd immunity.
Amen, and thank you.