I was concerned about the fact that a high profile like kernel.org site was rooted, but knowing it didn't take a sophisticated and highly knowledgeable penetration team but just a group of bumbling script kiddies makes it all better.
I unpacked a zipped file in the wrong directory. Now I have hundred files spread through a directory that already contained many files and directories
very easy, using Total Commander, which Microsoft should have bought and included as the default file manager long ago (it's available at http://www.ghisler.com/ ). Open your folder in pane 1, open the zip file in pane 2, Shift+F2 (or click "Compare" in the Mark menu), Num * (or "Invert Selection" in Mark menu), press Del, confirm, done.
American culture is not Wall Street culture. There most definitely is a massive divide there
I'm afraid that's not really true, much as I'd like it to be. The proof is in the voting patterns: so many candidates get elected and reelected, even when they're known to be corrupt and worse, and even when they break all civilized boundaries in their campaigns. That tells me "Main Street culture" really doesn't much care about honesty, truth, justice or fair play. Sad, indeed.
Ok, I didn't get that from your message. If that's the case, I'm sorry for the harshness of my previous post.
This means that harsher rules are applied to children, just because schools are unwilling to deal with children being children; they'd rather have them as Play-Doh, obedient and unquestioning zombies.
Well, this sounds a bit too Pink Floydish (in the spirit of "We don't need no education") for my tastes. We can debate the importance of rules in the school, but using terms like "Play-Doh" and "zombies" is not really arguing.
A major problem is IMHO the lack of respect and support for teachers (in particular from parents). Fears of lawsuits for even speaking harshly to a student undermine the capability of teachers to deal with disruptive students. Teachers can't make judgement calls anymore, because they will be sued both for applying discipline and for not applying it. Their recourse is then rigid applications of rules, zero tolerance and pushing the problem somewhere else (to the police).
>But they surely aren't adults, and applying adult rules to them is just ridiculous.
That depends on who you ask
It doesn't matter who I ask; children aren't adults. Some people may choose to treat them as such, just like some people may believe they're Napoleon. That doesn't make them right.
But it isn't the only option. There's always self-learning or homeschooling (and whether they are effective or not would depend on the person).
Of course there are options, but my point was completely different: the option whether to go to school, be homeschooled or skip school altogether belongs to the parent, not the average child, because the child isn't mature and informed enough to understand the importance and consequences of the choice.
In context of this thread, you need to decide if children are humans or not. If they are, then they should have freedom of choice. If they aren't then they shouldn't be held responsible for any mischief that they do while being confined against their will at school.
That's pretty silly, isn't it? Nobody denies the children's humanity. But they surely aren't adults, and applying adult rules to them is just ridiculous. As the human animal matures, the domain where he/she can make good informed choices becomes larger and larger. It's a gradual process, and good parenting means recognizing this, helping the child improve his decisions, and adapting your strategies to your child's current level. That means giving them freedom of choice *where appropriate*. Treating it as an all or nothing proposition, as you do, is silly. I'd let my three years old pick an ice-cream flavor, but surely won't let him decide whether he should wash his teeth or no, or go play with the nice coyote he saw in the forest. Going to school is an important decision, with serious consequences, and therefore outside of the "choice domain" of most children, especially at school starting ages.
What is killing US manufacturing now is both slave-labor wages in other countries and the fact that the fab plants have moved there. This wouldn't have happened in the first place if the dickfaced politicians on the take from an elitist multibillionaire class hadn't been so gung-ho on "global free trade", aka Slavery Exported.
Calling that "slavery" is just agitprop. Lots of people in those countries are glad for the work, and the low wages they get are still better than the ones they may get otherwise.
This said, what's happening is only to be expected: capitalism is blind to concepts like nations and frontiers. When you open the barriers, via free trade agreements, favored nation status or other types of deregularization, you allow the market to work unconstrained, and the market doesn't care about you. It doesn't have any incentive to save your (the average American worker's) wages or quality of life. The market will push towards maximum efficiency, and that forces the equalization of wages and income over the area it encompasses. This may not be much of an issue for trade between countries where the average income is close enough (for example, Canada and the USA), but will be one when deregularizing trade between countries far different in average income, like the USA and China.
Consider two vessels, one empty and one full of water. If you open a connection between them, water will flow from the full one to the empty one, and will do so until the levels equalize. Water represents average quality of life, the full vessel is the Western world, the empty vessel is the third world, the communication is the deregularization of trade (or "free trade"). At least at the beginning of the equalization process life will get worse for people in the Western world and better for the others. We are seeing this happen now. The real winners are the low wage workers in the other countries, and, of course, a very small but influential group of rich people who make money from both sides. The real loser is the average American worker, who however keeps voting against his own interests.
In the future, quality of life in all the globalized world will probably stabilize somewhere in the middle, and then, hopefully, will grow again and rise back to the current level and more. This might however take another generation or two. So, basically, if you're an average person in the first world, expect lower quality of life for you and your children; if you're in the third world, expect better.
I am supremely disapointed at Connie Willis, "To say nothing of the dog" was more of a feel-good fantasy novel
Eh, de gustibus and all that, but I loved "To say nothing of the dog", and I did get the (admittedly involved) explanation about the bishop's bird stump too. I'm really looking forward to the book where she explains the major incongruity hinted at in the final part of TSNOTD, and supposed to happen in 2600 something, centered on Coventry catedral:). OTOH, I always loved British literature, and enjoyed "Three men in a boat" immensely.
Something I really like about her writing is the way she manages to make the daily life of her characters so real, whether it's Victorian England, in for "To say nothing of the dog", WWII Britain in "Blackout/All Clear", or simply modern America in her series of Christmas stories in Asimov's.
BTW, I may be wrong, but I understand printing "Blackout/All Clear" as two separate novels was not her choice; the publisher decided the whole thing was too big for a single book.
If she feel indebted to the UK, she could compute how much the UK welfare state gave her, plus interests, and give the money directly to the government. Nothing prevent her from doing so
No doubt she could, is she was an egotistical penny-pinching miser. Heck, the tax on her first big cheque would probably cover more than she ever received in the first place. But, being a civilized human being, she realizes it's not a balancing game, and that getting as much from the system as you can is not the point. Having been on welfare, she surely knows some of the recipients will never repay the money they got, and that taxpayers (including herself) have to cover for them. And she's ok with that, because she thinks helping people is a good thing, better than turning your back to the poor because she doesn't owe them anything. She knows firsthand that people who receive welfare get another chance to fix their lives, and some of them do. And maybe one or two of them may go on and write the next global best-seller we'd all enjoy, or invent something that would help us all.
This is pretty common. The woman who wrote all those harry potter books did it on the dole. When she got her payout she ran for the US to prevent having to pay the UK tax rates that pay for things like the dole.
I don't get this post. You're completely wrong. J.K. Rowling did start the books while on the dole, but she did NOT "run for the US" to avoid taxes. On the contrary, she specifically refused to leave the UK (she currently resides in Edinburgh, Scotland), because she felt she owes a debt to the welfare state of Britain. Here are her actual words, from here:
A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major's Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.
It's pretty clear she's a better person than you are; and I don't understand why you'd post something as far from the truth as you did. Maybe there exists a pathological condition that afflicts conservatives and creates an irressistible compulsion to lie? Just like the other right-winger who suggested Stephen Hawking would have died had he depended on the British National Health Service? (see here or here.
Do you have any support for that statement? Or do you just believe it because you've heard some convincing sounding arguments from Dawkins or whoever and nodded along with them. I'm willing to bet that you haven't given the question any serious thought. This is what actual thinking looks like. Pretending theists all believe in an invisible sky man is just willful ignorance
First, I'm not the one who should support anything. You're the one coming up with extraordinary claims, about something that is or is not an invisible beard in the sky; you're the one that needs to prove his claims.
Second, yes, I have given the question a lot of serious thought, when I was in my twenties and later. I have read a lot of religious literature, including Augustine, Origenes, Aquinas and a brace of more modern ones. To put my opinions in a nutshell, they will only convince one who already believes (and the same is true of the article you linked to). Their thinking is invariably biased by their belief in the existence of (a) God. Therefore their arguments are themselves twisted and ultimately faulty. After much thought, I reached the conclusion that all religions are fake. I haven't seen anything to convince me of the contrary yet, but I'm open to (reasonable) discussion. Note that "reasonable discussion" means all preconceived ideas are on the table, and excludes quoting the Bible, threats of hellfire or attacks on Dawkins, Darwin or any other such thinkers.
I am pointing out that anyone who pretends to believe in a fake religion to mock real ones is a troll.
I think you're missing the real point of the Pastafarianism thing; that all religions are fake. Most people are used to treating them as "real", and most believers are afraid of examining their core beliefs; by pushing the absurdity of a colander in their faces, this guy and others are forcing them to look again at the basic issues, and maybe help a few of them realize the absurdity of the whole concept of a religion,or at least help them take it less seriously. That's a GOOD THING.
But where it comes to bread, beer, chocolate... it's a disaster
And for some reason, meats; I mean, prepared meats, like sausages, salami, ham, and so on. The selection and quality are incredibly poor compared to Europe (especially Central and Eastern Europe, though you can get some pretty good stuff in France and Italy too). It's not so bad for cheeses, but finding a good prosciutto or smoked sausage is very expensive and a real pain.
OMG! How on earth did the human race survive for millenia before patents? You're so right, without patents nobody would ever invent anything
This is really disingenuous. The issue of what we call now intelectual property is not new, and has existed long before patents and copyrights were introduced. Because there was no good mechanism for establishing and enforcing ownership of new inventions and discoveries, many creators refused to make them public, to the disadvantage of everybody else. Many skills and processes were passed only within a family, or a guild, or from master to apprentice, and their secret was jealously guarded. Look at the Venetian Republic, which ensured the monopoly of Murano glass for centuries, by forbidding glassmakers to leave the city; look at many scientists, like Galileo: in order to claim priority for his discoveries, he used to send encrypted descriptions to other scientists (see here for details), and only make the discoveries public later. It's possible he had even discovered Neptune, back in 1613 (see here for details) but he did not disclose it, fearing somebody else may claim it. As a result, the existence of Neptune remained unknown until 1846, that is more than two hundred years later.
Or check the thoughts of actual writers living in a period of weak or inexistent copyrights; look at Dickens here or Twain here.
Problems happen when information is just not verifiable, such as in closed source products, secret negotiations, undisclosed business interests, or whenever information is withheld or misrepresented.
You're mixing things up, either intentionally or because zealotry trumps reason in your thought processes. Not getting source code is not the same as being lied to, either by omission or by commission. You'll never have all the information about the making of a product available. You don't have the secret Coca Cola recipe, but that doesn't stop you from drinking coke. You don't know the composition of the various alloys your car is built of, but you do drive. You don't know the maintenance history of the plane you're going to use, but you do fly. You don't normally care about all those things, because they're not normally relevant to your needs. It's the same with the source code. What you care about is whether the product actually does what it's supposed to do, and meets both explicit and implicit expectations. The only reason to mention source code in this particular context is zealotry.
Let me give you an example: if a vendor tells you his database performs one thousand transactions a second in a given configuration, what are you going to do with the source, simulate the database using pen and paper and check the vendor's statement? Surely not. You'll build the configuration and count the transactions. If the database only performs a hundred transactions per second, you've been given false info. Or, if the database performs a thousand transactions for about a hour after which it crashes repeteadly, you've been given insufficient relevant info.
To preempt some weak counter arguments, yes, there are a few rare cases when the source code IS relevant to the issue. When getting actual source is an condition/expectation of the sale, the vendor will submit it, or they won't offer the product at all.
For home and office needs, we have been well beyond the upper limit for well over a decade
What I think happened is the attention of the computing world and of the enthusiasts has been focused on the whole Internet thing. This has led to a slow-down on the home/office application development side; as a result, most things we use computers for in homes and offices are the same we had ten years ago, so of course current computers are powerful enough to handle them. But I can think of lots of new home apps that will need more resources; and I'm quite sure there will be another computer revolution (maybe soon) that will trigger another speed race. Could be robotics, or fully immersive virtuals, or direct computer/neural interfacing, or, more likely, something completely different:)
than the trend towards arrays of radio telescopes?
Different strengths and weaknesses. With an array, you do interferometry, and can get very high angular resolution (the capability to distinguish between very close but separate sources). Look up aperture synthesis for more detail. If the source is bright enough, it's as if you had a virtual antenna with a diameter equal to the baseline (the distance between the individual antennas in the array). You can easily have individual antennas in the array positioned tens of kilometers apart, while a single antenna of the same diameter is clearly unpractical.
On the other hand, the sensitivity (capability to see very dim sources) is proportional to the actual surface of the antenna (a bigger antenna can collect more energy). That's where single aperture telescopes like the one in Arecibo, and the new FAST really outperform arrays.
Why should I care about the average high school graduate? I can look at the dietary labels and tell you the important differences that pertain to my diet. As far as I'm concerned that's justification enough
But you would complain if the dietary labels would be instead written in some obscure domain-specific language (for example, off the top of my head, actual chemical composition of the incredients, or chemical reactions the ingredients may get involved in). The information would still be true, and complete (and maybe even more accurate than the current dietary labels), but in order to understand the actual effect on you you'd need specialized training or extended study time. Would you accept it's your fault for not having a MS in food chemistry?
The same applies everywhere. I don't want to have a PhD in economics to be able to understand my bank statement. I don't want a car only an expert mechanic can drive, or a washing machine only an expert electrician can plug in, and so on. I also don't have the arrogance to consider myself the standard everyone should use. I may be knowledgeable in computers, but I'm well aware there are many other things where my knowledge is equal or even less than the one of the "average high school graduate". And when I have to deal with those kinds of things I want the issues explained to me in clear, understandable language.
What computing features no longer available would you bring back if you designed a machine?
A real physical eject button for the CD/DVD drive. Not only on computers, but on BD and DVD players too. One that would work even if the firmware (or software) is frozen beyond hope.
And does Powershell allow me to overwrite changes to the registry?
Of course it does. There is a minor gotcha you should be aware of, and that's the permission on the key: existing keys that you get by using Get-Item will be opened in read-only mode, so you can't use SetValue() to change values; use Set-ItemProperty, as described in one of the links in my previous post.
you can't do search-and-replaces, pipe the registry through other utilities to make more advanced changes
I may have misunderstood what you mean, but you can do all of that, using Powershell. It's quite easy too. Powershell contains what's called a "registry provider" that allows you to enumerate though the registry items and pipe them through other utilities; see here how to use the registry provider. Look here, here or here for examples of piping registry items through other utilities
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I was concerned about the fact that a high profile like kernel.org site was rooted, but knowing it didn't take a sophisticated and highly knowledgeable penetration team but just a group of bumbling script kiddies makes it all better.
I unpacked a zipped file in the wrong directory. Now I have hundred files spread through a directory that already contained many files and directories
very easy, using Total Commander, which Microsoft should have bought and included as the default file manager long ago (it's available at http://www.ghisler.com/ ). Open your folder in pane 1, open the zip file in pane 2, Shift+F2 (or click "Compare" in the Mark menu), Num * (or "Invert Selection" in Mark menu), press Del, confirm, done.
American culture is not Wall Street culture. There most definitely is a massive divide there
I'm afraid that's not really true, much as I'd like it to be. The proof is in the voting patterns: so many candidates get elected and reelected, even when they're known to be corrupt and worse, and even when they break all civilized boundaries in their campaigns. That tells me "Main Street culture" really doesn't much care about honesty, truth, justice or fair play. Sad, indeed.
That's exactly what I was trying to point out.
Ok, I didn't get that from your message. If that's the case, I'm sorry for the harshness of my previous post.
This means that harsher rules are applied to children, just because schools are unwilling to deal with children being children; they'd rather have them as Play-Doh, obedient and unquestioning zombies.
Well, this sounds a bit too Pink Floydish (in the spirit of "We don't need no education") for my tastes. We can debate the importance of rules in the school, but using terms like "Play-Doh" and "zombies" is not really arguing.
A major problem is IMHO the lack of respect and support for teachers (in particular from parents). Fears of lawsuits for even speaking harshly to a student undermine the capability of teachers to deal with disruptive students. Teachers can't make judgement calls anymore, because they will be sued both for applying discipline and for not applying it. Their recourse is then rigid applications of rules, zero tolerance and pushing the problem somewhere else (to the police).
>But they surely aren't adults, and applying adult rules to them is just ridiculous.
That depends on who you ask
It doesn't matter who I ask; children aren't adults. Some people may choose to treat them as such, just like some people may believe they're Napoleon. That doesn't make them right.
But it isn't the only option. There's always self-learning or homeschooling (and whether they are effective or not would depend on the person).
Of course there are options, but my point was completely different: the option whether to go to school, be homeschooled or skip school altogether belongs to the parent, not the average child, because the child isn't mature and informed enough to understand the importance and consequences of the choice.
In context of this thread, you need to decide if children are humans or not. If they are, then they should have freedom of choice. If they aren't then they shouldn't be held responsible for any mischief that they do while being confined against their will at school.
That's pretty silly, isn't it? Nobody denies the children's humanity. But they surely aren't adults, and applying adult rules to them is just ridiculous. As the human animal matures, the domain where he/she can make good informed choices becomes larger and larger. It's a gradual process, and good parenting means recognizing this, helping the child improve his decisions, and adapting your strategies to your child's current level. That means giving them freedom of choice *where appropriate*. Treating it as an all or nothing proposition, as you do, is silly. I'd let my three years old pick an ice-cream flavor, but surely won't let him decide whether he should wash his teeth or no, or go play with the nice coyote he saw in the forest. Going to school is an important decision, with serious consequences, and therefore outside of the "choice domain" of most children, especially at school starting ages.
What is killing US manufacturing now is both slave-labor wages in other countries and the fact that the fab plants have moved there. This wouldn't have happened in the first place if the dickfaced politicians on the take from an elitist multibillionaire class hadn't been so gung-ho on "global free trade", aka Slavery Exported.
Calling that "slavery" is just agitprop. Lots of people in those countries are glad for the work, and the low wages they get are still better than the ones they may get otherwise.
This said, what's happening is only to be expected: capitalism is blind to concepts like nations and frontiers. When you open the barriers, via free trade agreements, favored nation status or other types of deregularization, you allow the market to work unconstrained, and the market doesn't care about you. It doesn't have any incentive to save your (the average American worker's) wages or quality of life. The market will push towards maximum efficiency, and that forces the equalization of wages and income over the area it encompasses. This may not be much of an issue for trade between countries where the average income is close enough (for example, Canada and the USA), but will be one when deregularizing trade between countries far different in average income, like the USA and China.
Consider two vessels, one empty and one full of water. If you open a connection between them, water will flow from the full one to the empty one, and will do so until the levels equalize. Water represents average quality of life, the full vessel is the Western world, the empty vessel is the third world, the communication is the deregularization of trade (or "free trade"). At least at the beginning of the equalization process life will get worse for people in the Western world and better for the others. We are seeing this happen now. The real winners are the low wage workers in the other countries, and, of course, a very small but influential group of rich people who make money from both sides. The real loser is the average American worker, who however keeps voting against his own interests.
In the future, quality of life in all the globalized world will probably stabilize somewhere in the middle, and then, hopefully, will grow again and rise back to the current level and more. This might however take another generation or two. So, basically, if you're an average person in the first world, expect lower quality of life for you and your children; if you're in the third world, expect better.
I am supremely disapointed at Connie Willis, "To say nothing of the dog" was more of a feel-good fantasy novel
Eh, de gustibus and all that, but I loved "To say nothing of the dog", and I did get the (admittedly involved) explanation about the bishop's bird stump too. I'm really looking forward to the book where she explains the major incongruity hinted at in the final part of TSNOTD, and supposed to happen in 2600 something, centered on Coventry catedral :). OTOH, I always loved British literature, and enjoyed "Three men in a boat" immensely.
Something I really like about her writing is the way she manages to make the daily life of her characters so real, whether it's Victorian England, in for "To say nothing of the dog", WWII Britain in "Blackout/All Clear", or simply modern America in her series of Christmas stories in Asimov's.
BTW, I may be wrong, but I understand printing "Blackout/All Clear" as two separate novels was not her choice; the publisher decided the whole thing was too big for a single book.
If she feel indebted to the UK, she could compute how much the UK welfare state gave her, plus interests, and give the money directly to the government.
Nothing prevent her from doing so
No doubt she could, is she was an egotistical penny-pinching miser. Heck, the tax on her first big cheque would probably cover more than she ever received in the first place. But, being a civilized human being, she realizes it's not a balancing game, and that getting as much from the system as you can is not the point. Having been on welfare, she surely knows some of the recipients will never repay the money they got, and that taxpayers (including herself) have to cover for them. And she's ok with that, because she thinks helping people is a good thing, better than turning your back to the poor because she doesn't owe them anything. She knows firsthand that people who receive welfare get another chance to fix their lives, and some of them do. And maybe one or two of them may go on and write the next global best-seller we'd all enjoy, or invent something that would help us all.
This is pretty common. The woman who wrote all those harry potter books did it on the dole. When she got her payout she ran for the US to prevent having to pay the UK tax rates that pay for things like the dole.
I don't get this post. You're completely wrong. J.K. Rowling did start the books while on the dole, but she did NOT "run for the US" to avoid taxes. On the contrary, she specifically refused to leave the UK (she currently resides in Edinburgh, Scotland), because she felt she owes a debt to the welfare state of Britain. Here are her actual words, from here:
A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major's Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.
It's pretty clear she's a better person than you are; and I don't understand why you'd post something as far from the truth as you did. Maybe there exists a pathological condition that afflicts conservatives and creates an irressistible compulsion to lie? Just like the other right-winger who suggested Stephen Hawking would have died had he depended on the British National Health Service? (see here or here.
Would the brain know that it is in a artificial world? Now proof that it already has not happened.
Not such a new concept there: people were already thinking about it 2500 years ago
Do you have any support for that statement? Or do you just believe it because you've heard some convincing sounding arguments from Dawkins or whoever and nodded along with them. I'm willing to bet that you haven't given the question any serious thought. This is what actual thinking looks like. Pretending theists all believe in an invisible sky man is just willful ignorance
First, I'm not the one who should support anything. You're the one coming up with extraordinary claims, about something that is or is not an invisible beard in the sky; you're the one that needs to prove his claims.
Second, yes, I have given the question a lot of serious thought, when I was in my twenties and later. I have read a lot of religious literature, including Augustine, Origenes, Aquinas and a brace of more modern ones. To put my opinions in a nutshell, they will only convince one who already believes (and the same is true of the article you linked to). Their thinking is invariably biased by their belief in the existence of (a) God. Therefore their arguments are themselves twisted and ultimately faulty. After much thought, I reached the conclusion that all religions are fake. I haven't seen anything to convince me of the contrary yet, but I'm open to (reasonable) discussion. Note that "reasonable discussion" means all preconceived ideas are on the table, and excludes quoting the Bible, threats of hellfire or attacks on Dawkins, Darwin or any other such thinkers.
I am pointing out that anyone who pretends to believe in a fake religion to mock real ones is a troll.
I think you're missing the real point of the Pastafarianism thing; that all religions are fake. Most people are used to treating them as "real", and most believers are afraid of examining their core beliefs; by pushing the absurdity of a colander in their faces, this guy and others are forcing them to look again at the basic issues, and maybe help a few of them realize the absurdity of the whole concept of a religion,or at least help them take it less seriously. That's a GOOD THING.
You don't get upset about breast enlargements do you ;-)
I do when they're forced on little girls too young to decide for themselves whether they want one or not
But where it comes to bread, beer, chocolate... it's a disaster
And for some reason, meats; I mean, prepared meats, like sausages, salami, ham, and so on. The selection and quality are incredibly poor compared to Europe (especially Central and Eastern Europe, though you can get some pretty good stuff in France and Italy too). It's not so bad for cheeses, but finding a good prosciutto or smoked sausage is very expensive and a real pain.
OMG! How on earth did the human race survive for millenia before patents? You're so right, without patents nobody would ever invent anything
This is really disingenuous. The issue of what we call now intelectual property is not new, and has existed long before patents and copyrights were introduced. Because there was no good mechanism for establishing and enforcing ownership of new inventions and discoveries, many creators refused to make them public, to the disadvantage of everybody else. Many skills and processes were passed only within a family, or a guild, or from master to apprentice, and their secret was jealously guarded. Look at the Venetian Republic, which ensured the monopoly of Murano glass for centuries, by forbidding glassmakers to leave the city; look at many scientists, like Galileo: in order to claim priority for his discoveries, he used to send encrypted descriptions to other scientists (see here for details), and only make the discoveries public later. It's possible he had even discovered Neptune, back in 1613 (see here for details) but he did not disclose it, fearing somebody else may claim it. As a result, the existence of Neptune remained unknown until 1846, that is more than two hundred years later.
Or check the thoughts of actual writers living in a period of weak or inexistent copyrights; look at Dickens here or Twain here.
Problems happen when information is just not verifiable, such as in closed source products, secret negotiations, undisclosed business interests, or whenever information is withheld or misrepresented.
You're mixing things up, either intentionally or because zealotry trumps reason in your thought processes. Not getting source code is not the same as being lied to, either by omission or by commission. You'll never have all the information about the making of a product available. You don't have the secret Coca Cola recipe, but that doesn't stop you from drinking coke. You don't know the composition of the various alloys your car is built of, but you do drive. You don't know the maintenance history of the plane you're going to use, but you do fly. You don't normally care about all those things, because they're not normally relevant to your needs. It's the same with the source code. What you care about is whether the product actually does what it's supposed to do, and meets both explicit and implicit expectations. The only reason to mention source code in this particular context is zealotry.
Let me give you an example: if a vendor tells you his database performs one thousand transactions a second in a given configuration, what are you going to do with the source, simulate the database using pen and paper and check the vendor's statement? Surely not. You'll build the configuration and count the transactions. If the database only performs a hundred transactions per second, you've been given false info. Or, if the database performs a thousand transactions for about a hour after which it crashes repeteadly, you've been given insufficient relevant info.
To preempt some weak counter arguments, yes, there are a few rare cases when the source code IS relevant to the issue. When getting actual source is an condition/expectation of the sale, the vendor will submit it, or they won't offer the product at all.
For home and office needs, we have been well beyond the upper limit for well over a decade
What I think happened is the attention of the computing world and of the enthusiasts has been focused on the whole Internet thing. This has led to a slow-down on the home/office application development side; as a result, most things we use computers for in homes and offices are the same we had ten years ago, so of course current computers are powerful enough to handle them. But I can think of lots of new home apps that will need more resources; and I'm quite sure there will be another computer revolution (maybe soon) that will trigger another speed race. Could be robotics, or fully immersive virtuals, or direct computer/neural interfacing, or, more likely, something completely different :)
than the trend towards arrays of radio telescopes?
Different strengths and weaknesses. With an array, you do interferometry, and can get very high angular resolution (the capability to distinguish between very close but separate sources). Look up aperture synthesis for more detail. If the source is bright enough, it's as if you had a virtual antenna with a diameter equal to the baseline (the distance between the individual antennas in the array). You can easily have individual antennas in the array positioned tens of kilometers apart, while a single antenna of the same diameter is clearly unpractical.
On the other hand, the sensitivity (capability to see very dim sources) is proportional to the actual surface of the antenna (a bigger antenna can collect more energy). That's where single aperture telescopes like the one in Arecibo, and the new FAST really outperform arrays.
Why should I care about the average high school graduate? I can look at the dietary labels and tell you the important differences that pertain to my diet. As far as I'm concerned that's justification enough
But you would complain if the dietary labels would be instead written in some obscure domain-specific language (for example, off the top of my head, actual chemical composition of the incredients, or chemical reactions the ingredients may get involved in). The information would still be true, and complete (and maybe even more accurate than the current dietary labels), but in order to understand the actual effect on you you'd need specialized training or extended study time. Would you accept it's your fault for not having a MS in food chemistry?
The same applies everywhere. I don't want to have a PhD in economics to be able to understand my bank statement. I don't want a car only an expert mechanic can drive, or a washing machine only an expert electrician can plug in, and so on. I also don't have the arrogance to consider myself the standard everyone should use. I may be knowledgeable in computers, but I'm well aware there are many other things where my knowledge is equal or even less than the one of the "average high school graduate". And when I have to deal with those kinds of things I want the issues explained to me in clear, understandable language.
What computing features no longer available would you bring back if you designed a machine?
A real physical eject button for the CD/DVD drive. Not only on computers, but on BD and DVD players too. One that would work even if the firmware (or software) is frozen beyond hope.
Atheism is a religion the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby
Atheism is a religion the same way that bald is a hair color.
And does Powershell allow me to overwrite changes to the registry?
Of course it does. There is a minor gotcha you should be aware of, and that's the permission on the key: existing keys that you get by using Get-Item will be opened in read-only mode, so you can't use SetValue() to change values; use Set-ItemProperty, as described in one of the links in my previous post.
you can't do search-and-replaces, pipe the registry through other utilities to make more advanced changes
I may have misunderstood what you mean, but you can do all of that, using Powershell. It's quite easy too. Powershell contains what's called a "registry provider" that allows you to enumerate though the registry items and pipe them through other utilities; see here how to use the registry provider. Look here, here or here for examples of piping registry items through other utilities
Reminds me of that old science fiction joke:
Not a joke, sheesh. It's the short story Answer, by Fredric Brown. Find it here. Know your classics!