Now, with that said, digital modulation, being much closer to a square wave than an analog voice signal, is much richer in HARMONICS than said analog signal.
This is utter and total nonsense. The modulated RF signal is harmonic and spectrally in accordance by regulation. Digital modulation doesn't cause carrier harmonics (the two are unrelated) and the harmonics from the square wave digital (which cause sidebands or wider bandwidth depending on mode) are of course attenuated at base band before modulation is applied and/or filtered out.
After all, any energy wasted in "harmonics" is energy that is not available to carry information to the receiver. Digital modem designers (RF or otherwise) have known about this for approximately forever.
I've lost count of how many times I've heard interference from digital paging transmitters bleeding into ham radio repeaters. The harmonics from the digital modulation mix with the transmitter's carrier, and that of whatever other transmitters happen to be on the same hilltop, and close to the same frequency range. It sounds awful, and it looks even worse on a spectrum analyzer screen.
Again, this has nothing to do with the DIGITAL nature of the transmitters. Intermodulation is usually not a result of harmonics from the transmitter, but rather harmonics generated in your own receiver - totally independent of modulation mode. And yes, it does look ugly on a spectrum analyzer - whether it is digital or analog.
Years ago (almost 40!), I was a transmitter engineer at KANU-FM (110KW, Lawrence, KS - University of Kansas). One night we got a call from a station in Florida that was on the same frequency. They had shut down their transmitter for maintenance, and our signal immediately started coming in on their studio monitor.
I also used to monitor the local police, who in those days were operating on VHF Low Band (30-50 MHz). That same ducting caused some southern, very rural and very hick-like (this was the 60s) sheriff systems to come come in on the same frequencies. Things got really wierd - especially since neither side knew what was going on.
They tried this way back in the '80s with the VideoCipher II. The encryption keys were stored in a single MCU chip, in RAM (with a battery on the baord). If you pull the chip, the keys vanish - that was the idea.
I know of people who strapped a battery to the MCU, unsoldered the MCU from the board, took it to a semiconductor manufacturer's failure analysis lab (there are several here in town). There, they read out the bits with an electron microscope and had they keys and the algorithm. My acquaintances, btw, never did anything with this information. They were hackers, not crackers.
Later it turned out that one could rebond one pin in the package, and read out and send back in crypto data. This lead to a whole industry providing free "pay" TV.
Putting it in one chip just isn't enough.
Now, if they have a cryptographically good hash, even knowing the desired hash result isn't good enough to allow you to build boards that satisfy the hash. That limits the damage to those folks willing to modify (or, most importantly, pay greedy techs to modify) their boxes, which is exactly what happened with the VideoCipher II.
Last time I looked, less than half of all VideoCipher's sold were *ever* enabled with a paid-for code.
1. Every year, Reagan proposed a budget that would increase the deficit and the debt. With a Democrat Congress (you ignored that), he had no choice.
Defending our country does not include arming terrorists in Latin America, Central Asia, Southeast Asia,
I thought you weren't going to call names. Terrorists? How about freedom fighters. Don't you remember, in the first free elections in Nicaragua since the Sandinistas seized control, that the Sandinistas were thrown out and a contra was elected?
I presume you are referring to the anti-soviet fighters in Afghanistan. If you don't think that damaging a totalitarian regime that had sworn to bury us is defending our country, you must have a very narrow definition.
Southeast Asia? Which terrorists did the conservatives arm there? I am really curious.
nor does it include coups and destabilizing governments whose economic policies corporations don't like. Example please? I have no idea which conservatives you are talking about and which countires.
Passing weapons programs that the military doesn't even want, in order to pay off defence contractors, is not defending our country. The B-1, $500 hammers, etc., etc. That's just corporate welfare. I'm glad you brought up the $500 hammers, because it is an example of mainstream press propaganda. The Pentagon, like any big government bureaucracy, is hardly the model of efficiency. If you order a special run of hammers, made specifically to military only specifications, don't you think it might cost a bit? It may have been somebody's payoff, but it is just as likely a typical government screwup. I used to do defense contracting in a very small company, and have seen the sort of silliness that goes on - that has nothing to do with politicans paying anyone back.
Both Democrats and Republicans do this, but conservatives and libertarians won't admit they love big government - when it helps them.
As I said before, all office holders do this. And none of them admit to loving big government - even the left! Furthermore, it has nothing to do with a philosophical love of big government, but rather to the realities of politics in a democratic society. I am amused the you seem to view the Democrats to be honest about this (they are not) while somehow the conservatives are less so. As for the libertarians, there are hardly any in office at all.
If conservatives believe in bailing out airlines, for whatever reasons, they support corporate welfare, and they are against free markets. According to free market theory, the airlines should have gone bankrupt, if they couldn't handle a slowdown in business. There are plenty of new airlines that could have been started. I guess conservatives don't believe in free markets after all.
Free markets must function within a operating civil society. When the government fails in a critical function (preventing a catastrophic terrorist attack), it is not "loving big government" or not believing in free markets to take certain steps in the face of massive disaster. OTOH it should please you to know that most conservatives oppose the additional handouts that the airlines are now asking for.
4. The S&Ls started having economic trouble when they started speculative investments (due to deregulation)
Good grief, what an amazingly high density of BS!
Let me rephrase your facts with a little reality:
The S&Ls started having economic trouble in the 1970's because they could not pay competitive rates to their depositors, due to rampant inflation. Jimmy Carter deregulated them (and Reagan did a bit more later) because otherwise they would have collapse at that time. They did speculative investments because they were forced to.
I am going to try and explain the S&L in more detail in hopes you will read it and understand...
Imagine that you own an S&L. Thousands of people have money in your institution that you have loaned out to other people in the form of long term mortgages. This is what your organization is required to do by federal law.
Interest rates rise to much higher than those rates. Your depositors are taking their money out and buying other higher paying instruments. You have two choices:
1) After they have taken all your working capital, go bankrupt - leaving any of your larger depositors without their money, leaving the government to pay off the amount that it insured, firing all of your employees, and stiffing your creditors.
or
2) Invest in higher yielding instruments so that you can pay competitive rates to hold your depositors.
This is exactly the situation in the 1970's (and it had nothing to do with some misguided monetarist policy, but rather the natural market response to the guns and butter inflation started by Johnson and furthered by Nixon - who was NOT a conservative).
Moving on....
The best investments which paid high returns were commercial real estate. Lots of money was going into them as people tried to avoid the exorbitant tax rates (i.e. the government's extremely progressive tax policies seriously distorted the real estate market). You, as an S&L owner, discover you can get 14% on your money for a loan to a new development. It has some higher risk (risk/reward ratio, you know). But you have to do it. If you don't, your depositors go to somebody else who does - perhaps a truly crooked S&L operator. After all, the government insurance programs (created by the liberals of the FDR administration) make it a zero cost option. As a depositor, there is exactly ZERO more risk to invest in an S&L that pays a fraction of a percent higher, no matter how high the risks it takes.
If you follow this to its logical conclusion, you realize that this creates a situation where the S&L's continue to have the choice of making risky investments, or going bust! All created by government policies put in place by, guess what? Tah Dah! Liberals.
In 1986, Reagan, recognizing that lower taxes lead to economic grown, had to negotiate with a hostile house of representatives controlled by - you guessed it - liberals - in order to get his taxes down. The liberals insisted on ending what they called "tax loopholes." Part of that was making losses on these real estate investments not deductible, but leaving the gains taxable. The utterly predictable result (and I modified my own investing months before this was passed based on the probabilities of it passing) was the sudden devaluation of those properties.
Was this crooked S&L executives? No, it was people who were investing in one set of rules, who suddenly had the rules changed by government fiat!
and were defrauded by people like Neil Bush.
Ah... you had to put a Bush into this. Nice rhetorical trick that, btw, proves nothing at all. I thought you weren't going to do any namecalling, but here you have just called Bush a criminal. Tell me, if Bush was such a crook, why wasn't he prosecuted by the Clinton administration?
You can equivicate all you want on this one, but the facts are clear - 30 billion a year for 30 years.
Which 30 billion for which 30 years do you happen to be talking about. I can't equivocate about it yet - you haven't defined what you are talking about!
Not to mention that the "conservative" Fed Chairman at the time, Paul Volker, a monetarist (like Reagan) destroyed many businesses by jacking up interest rates - but still provided plenty of liquidity to the finance industry, at attractive rates. It seems that conservatives just love a fiat currency, a hallmark of big intrusive government.
Ah... in case you haven't noticed, liquidity and high interest rates don't go together! How the hell could Volker destroy businesses by jacking up interest rates while not jacking them up to the finance industry? After all, the Fed only affects interest rates (it doesn't control them) THOUGH the financial industry.
Oh, and conservatives prefer a solid currency, which is why many of us are monetarists (a term you clearly misunderstand based on the paragraph above).
Bush has increased the deficit, and borrowed more money, which means that Americans will have to pay more interest. That means more taxes. He's just shifted the burden onto future generations, after he's out of office. How convienient for him. That means non-income federal taxes, state taxes, and local taxes will have to be increased. Bush raised taxes on all of us.
I always find it amusing when critics of conservatives (who in your case are clearly of a liberal persuasion - this isn't calling names, it is simply applying a correct label) are those who in the past always favored budget deficits.
The deficit has increased. Do you suppose this might be because the economy has contracted - both as a result of the collapse of stock market bubble, the natural business cycle, and the fact that we are at war and have suffered huge losses? I can remember when the left argued that deficits were GOOD. Now conservatives are bad because the deficits have gone up. Go figure...
Oh, and Bush cannot increase the deficit. Only congress can do that. I seem to remember that the Senate was controlled by strongly partisan democrats when some of these spending bills were passed.
BTW... increasing the deficit doesn't necessarily mean more taxes or that the burden is shifted to future generations. Debt is an instrument to be used when needed, as any business 101 major can explain to you. And the best way to decrease the deficit is to get the economy rolling again, which is best done by letting private money work and by reducing the very real physical threats to our security.
The Christian right is the most loyal and solid faction of the Republican party, and call themselves conservative.
Your point? Yes, the Christian right is loyal (although not as loyal as you might think). And the Christian Right OPPOSED the selection of your favorite whipping boy, Bush, as the Republican nominee. And they are conservative, for the most part, but are definitely not libertarian. Other wings of the republican party are libertarian-conservative. Does the Christian right favor some censorship? Yep. Does that mean they favor larger government? Nope. Does it make all conservatives or republicans into censors? Nope.
So again, I ask... Your point?
Interesting how conservatives care so much about women having abortions, except the kind of abortions that happen when bombing people. I guess only some fetuses count?
That is a seriously nasty allegation, as it implies (without, as your said, calling names) that conservatives are hypocrites and favor killing people out of the meanness of their hearts.
One difference I see frequently is that the conservatives question the wisdom of leftist policies, while the left constantly accuses the conservatives of having evil intent! And you don't like name calling! But you just called conservatives cold hearted killers and hypocrites. You just didn't do it in one word!
So... to address your issue.
Conservatives, being more realistic than the modern left, recognize that sometimes there are truly evil people who represent truly real threats, and that war (which involves killing, including killing innocent people) is a necessary evil. Evil. And necessary.
Leftists like yourself (oops, I can't call you a name)...
Humans like yourself, on the other hand, seem to think that anyone who favors violence for any reason (other than killing unborn babies) does so for purely wrong motives.
I am really sick of this slander by the left. Did I ever question the motives of liberals? Did I ever say that they were evil in their intent? No! Because I recognize that people can have honest differences of opinion, and their opinions just happen to be wrong.
But the left no longer is willing to behave in the civilized manner that democracy requires. The left not only disagrees, but it demonizes. It accuses conservatives of the most vile motives and actions. It never, ever credits conservatives with good intentions.
Instead, conservatives are characterized as corrupt, oppressors, happy killers, war mongers, robbers, prudes, etc. In fact, you have made every single one of those accusations (without using those terms) in your last few posts.
Is it any wonder that I detest the left? That I consider the left in the US to no longer be merely an alternative view, but rather to be a force of malice and evil?
Now, go ahead and call me names, that seems to be standard procedure for conservative liberatarian types.
I sugges you educate yourself about the differences between the conservative and libertarian movements. You have not only slandered conservatives with your attacks on their motives, but you have slandered libertarians by lumping them into the same category.
And I suggest that you take your superior, "I don't call names but you guys do" attitude and...
well... okay... at least read Slander by Anne Coulter so that you can improve your slanderous (or in this forum, libelous) style and bring it in line with the rest of your ilk.
Under Reagan and Bush, and now Bush II, the size of government increased dramatically. Reagan tripled the public debt. Republicans don't like the government building hospitals, or schools. but they love big government when it comes to the defence industry, space, and corporate welfare.
Since all government spending originates in the house of representatives, which was controlled by democrats during the entire time of Reagan and Bush I, your argument seems to lack a bit of reality! It is true that conservatives don't like the idea of government controlled health care, and we object to the vast amounts of money that are overspent on public education (the US spends far more per pupil than Europe, and gets poorer results - of course, in almost all European countries they have more private alternatives).
But yes, Republicans, and conservatives do believe in the NECESSITY of defending our country, and are willing to actually take the flack for spending the money necessary to do it. Then leftists like yourself come along and blame us for it. Go figure.
Under Reagan, Bush headed the "Vice-President's Council on Competitveness", in which he handed out billions of taxpayer money to select Republican donors. That's corporate welfare.
Gee, and all this time I thought Bill Clinton was the master at handing out billions - which is a lot easier when you have a congress of your own party. He did, Reagan and Bush I didn't!
Bush II just gave handouts and subsidies to airlines, Which were dying from the effects of 9-11.
agriculture, steel,
This was wrong. But it is HARDLY a conservative trait. In fact, conservatives have strongly attacked both of these moves. Again, you are not exactly demonstrating that conservatives are in favor of big spending.
It *is* true that elected officials in general tend to spend too much money, however.
Not to mention borrowed billions from the financial industry for "tax cuts" - a total joke, considering he just increased everyone's taxes, just pushed paying for it forward a few years.
Would you care to explain how Bush II just *increased* everyone's taxes? The main problem with his tax cut was that it wasn't enough, and the DEMOCRATS insisted that it end in 2010. The other problem was that congress in general tacked all sorts of pork onto bills that were necessary in the wake of 9-11.
Reagan and Bush both gave billions of bailouts to the defrauded S&Ls (like Bush's brother). They've bailed the finance industry time and time again, to the tune of trillions of dollars, over the last 20 years.
What an unsophistacted and untrue accusation! The S&L's were technically bankrupt starting with the inflation of the '70s. In fact, the entire concept of the S&L's, created by liberals, was financially irresponsible. S&L's could only survive, under the liberals' rules, in times of deflation. When inflation hit, it was Jimmy Carter (a conservative?) who changed the rules to allow them to invest in higher yielding (and higher risk) financial instruments. Had he not, the S&L's would have collapsed then, at much less cost, and he should have let them! And of course, the final blow to the S&L's was a result of a liberal required measure added to the Reagan tax cut - a measure which required that Real Estate partnership losses suddenly could no longer be deducted. This led to an immediate (and predictable) loss in the value of almost all commercial real estate of 15-30%. Since the S&L's were heavily invested in commercial real estate (since it alone provided the returns they needed to stay alive with low interest rate 30 year loans out), they lost ALL of their equity. IOW the straw that broke the camel's back was the liberals' insistence on a punitive tax rule. It is a tribute to their political skills, however, that they managed to hang the blame for this on Bush I.
Republicans want more government
FALSE
interference in your sex life, your reproduction, your porn and everything else.
Many of us think that in some areas, some of this stuff indeed has gotten so far out of hand as to be seriously damaging to society. But few conservatives, except for some on the Christian Right, believe the government should "interfere in your sex life" - unless you are having sex with underage kids! Grow up!
Oh, and we also aren't interested in interfering with your reproduction, but we do believe that your murdering of your children to avoid the consequences of your sex life is immoral and should be illegal. That one, you can hang on us.
Bush wants to give tax money to churches and religious organizations.
Yep. Of course, the money is only to go to charitable works, but I guess you would prefer that only uncaring bureaucrats be the only people empowered to help folks!
Yes, conservatives seem to love big government,
You have yet to prove this. You have shown a few places where conservatives want government to act (which doesn't require *big* government) and have indeed identified that we believe that the most important purpose of government is to protect its citizens, rather than to pamper them.
Republicans love to send the US military to "protect America's economic interests" - more corporate welfare, for the oil industry, the weapons industry, minerals, etc.
Yep... of course, Democrats have started far more wars and interventions than Republicans - in fact FDR alone started more than every Republican since then! And if you don't want our economic interests protected, then go live on an island and eat coconuts. Only a fool believes that a country should not protect its interests.
Of course, you really mean to imply that we are using the military solely to help those evil businessmen, but if you look at all our interventions since 1960, that just isn't true. For the best examples of using military for business interest, look at FDR's interventions in Central America - not modern republicans!
By growing the military, they are increasing government.
Duh. Yes, that is true as long as we aren't allowed to cut a lot of the wasteful spending in other areas. Reagan tried to do the latter unsuccessfully. Bush hasn't tried hard enough, as far as *conservatives* are concerned.
But to imply that Conservatives favor big government is to blindly ignore all of modern history, the meaning of the conservative movement, and the politics and writings of all modern conservatives.
Now, don't get me wrong, it's not like Clinton was much different. He loved corporate welfare too.
Nice admission. Clinton was the master at using the goverment for his own purposes, whatever they were.
And politicans in general use the government to hand out largess to whoever will keep them in office.
However, I have to say that I have rarely seen a more pure example of the leftist propaganda line than you put in your last post. It is almost a classic, except even educated leftists don't claim that conservatives are for bigger government.
It is really too bad they don't teach history today, and it is also too bad that you get your information from sources on the left.
Just the S&L example alone is enough to show how badly the mainstream (read: left) press has mislead america. The general opinion of it, as supplied by you, is so far from fact as to be amazing - coming from citizens of a country that is supposed to be educated.... err... but of course I forget that they are educated by the failed public education system... and propagandized by the real biased media: NBC/CBS/ABC/NYT/CNN/WP/LAT.
Yes, they advertise fair and balanced. The other networks just imply it all the time. And I think Fox is fair and balanced - their hosts admit to their opinions on the air all the time, and they do report alternatives (unless you mean the far left dreck that even the major networks don't touch). Furthermore, unlike the other networks, when Fox News gets spokesmen for the other side, they don't get people who are silly caricatures and poor spokesmen - they get the real spokesmen and let them make their case (except O'Reilly, who isn't conservative anyway).
Conservative is pro-big government? really? That's certainly a different definition than I have ever heard!
Conservative has never been pro-big government. It does tend to favor enforcement of different laws than the left does, and it does tend to favor more defense spending, but neither of those are even close to a match for the rest of big government.
I also have not heard them argue for pro-corporate welfare. Can you be specific? Or are you using the left's code word that equates any decrease in taxation with "welfare?"
And yes, they are for going after Iraq. That is not the same as pro-war, unless any advocate of any war is pro-war, and anti-war means no war, no how, no reason, no matter what provocation.
I must disagree with the previous poster. FOX is a conservative network. As a conservative, I watch it a lot (I use it as video wallpaper while working).
And there is nothing wrong with it being a conservative network. What people seem to miss when they critize FOX is that all networks have biases. Only FOX is willing to admit that it is different.
I would also argue that Fox is a more fair network - you really do get to see all sides of an issue. The way the liberal networks do their slant is two ways:
1 - they simply don't show stories that contradict their points of view. CNN and the TV major networks are masters of this.
2 - they use loaded language. You almost never hear the adjective "liberal" or "leftist" on most networks, but the words conservative, ultra-conservative and rightist are applied to anything that isn't left-wing.
The anchors on most networks are stuffed shirts who try to portray a gravitas and a lack of bias, as they blather along with their liberal and left wing agenda. Fox anchors, OTOH are pretty open with their views, and are a lot more relaxed and human.
And not all of Fox anchors are conservative. Bill O'Reilly is in his own league... he can demagogue from any side of an issue (I always switch to another channel or classical music when O'Reilly comes on).
As far as Murdoch goes, his main ideology is money. He founded Fox more out of a recognition that there was a large viewership that was tired of the uniform biased view coming out of *all* other TV outlsets, rather than out of some conservative do-goodism (or do-badism if you are a leftist). Friends of mine who have worked closely with him are pretty uniform in their view that his ideology is money.
I was having trouble posting, due to DNS propagation times due to the slashdot move, and had saved my post on the clipboard. I decided to try again, pasted it and hit submit. Oops... I had snatched some Java onto the clipboard by mistake.
Oh well, at least it wasn't my bank account number and PIN or something!
It just boils down to syntax and ease of typing is just nonsense...
how about:
declarative vs procedural
portability
extensibility
testability
formal provability
code compactness
interactive vs. compiled
static vs dynamic memory models
object orientation
???
It is a lot more than syntax.
Forth happens to be very unusual as a language. It is extremely extensible (it is trivial to redefine the meaning of "if" should you want to). It is based on a dictionary concept. It has a compiler and interpreter that together can be written in about 3 lines on an 80 column wide screen (if you don't do pretty-print formatting). It is highly portable because, like LISP, it starts with a very small set of primitives that need to be ported, and then builds itself out of them. Creating an application from it simply continues that extension process.
When you write an application in Forth, the high levels of your application look almost like english text optimized to express your algorithm. It doesn't even have to be recognizable as "Forth." Charles Moore (http://www.colorforth.com/), who invented Forth, is a brilliant and iconoclastic guy who made a real contribution by creating a number of original language concepts.
One thing that is very tricky in Forth is cross-compiling. Because there is no difference between compile time and execution time, cross-compiling is inherently undefined. In order to make it work, you have to play some pretty subtle and head-breaking tricks.
XMLDataNode xdnLoginRsp = new XMLDataNode("LoginRsp");
xdnLoginRsp.addAttribute("Result", strResult);
WebPacXMLUtils.addNotNullChild(xdnLoginRsp, "SessionID", strSessionID);
return new XMLDataDOM(xdnLoginRsp);
Need better home page - like most open source
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Phoenix 0.4 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The Phoenix project may be a wonderful thing, but from the home page I can't tell why, or whether I want to use it. At least it mentions what it is in deep geek.
Too many open source projects assume that those who read their home pages already know what the project is for, or know why they would want to use it.
I would ask open source project folks to at least put a short description of their project (with minimal cryptic references to geek acronyms) and also a list of reasons as to why one might want it.
Computing today is too wide a field for all of use to keep track of every acronym and every open source project, so a web page that says "this is a better BLURP, using FARGLE and the new XVC standard" is pretty useless.
After all, what good is it to put a lot of work into a project if you keep away a lot of users by inadequate "marketing." If you want your work to be used and appreciated by lots of people, tell us what it is and why we want to use it!.
But we aren't arguing about GPL vs proprietary. We are discussing GPL vs public domain (which itself doesn't prevent GPL).
You seem to call FUD my argument that some public domain software will not be used if the only allowable model is GPL.
FUD?
How about obvious fact! I would rather see you refute that argument than just calling it FUD. Because that is the heart of my entire point: restricting software to GPL will cause some not to be used, and that this is less freedom.
You can argue all you want about the inherent superiority of GPL vs proprietary software. But that is beside the point.
And "embrace, extend and extinguish" sounds a lot like FUD to me!
YOU don't own the IP that the government develops, we all do. And a lot of us would prefer that the government allow people to do whatever they want with it.
Go ahead and license your own stuff as GPL. Maybe that will be good. But don't force ALL government developed software into that mode!
By assuring that all use of the software will be under a non-proprietary license, the government is likely to cause that software to never be used.
Most public domain software is not ready for prime time use. It is often not portable, not well documented, and usually has a poor human interface.
For it to be valuable in general, some form of investment is usually needed.
With the public domain approach, the decision on that kind of investment is left to the market.
The outcome can be no investment, proprietary investment and/or open source investment. None of these are precluded.
My experience with open source software is that is mostly good for technogeeks like myself. It is rarely well documented, and often very complex to get working. There is a market for such software.
But there is also a market for software that just drops in and works, has a support organization behind it, and responds to the market demands rather than the whims of its developers.
Your argument appears to be based on one of the following two assumptions:
1) it is just plain evil to let someone profit from taxpayer funding
or
2) a company that improves public domain software and sells it as proprietary somehow either makes the software less good, or makes it impossible for open source work to proceed on the software.
So which is it?...or do you have some other logic that shows how your argument produces more competition.
Okay... so you agree with me that GPL is less competitive.
But you promote it.
Illogical.
Re:Suit and Tie do not make the programmer.
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Suit Up Or Ship Out?
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· Score: 2
As I said, " systems level work." The code wasn't that bad... in fact, I would say that most of the defects in the code were due to our inexperience (we were young and hadn't built OLTP systems before, and in those days there were not PC's for people to learn on), rather than the schedule. The system was in production for 10 years, before it was replaced due to a hardware change (in those days, we had to code the core stuff in assembly for speed - the mainframe only ran about 1 MIP, and we had thousands of simultaneous users).
And yes, we had no life outside the work hours. In fact, our wives staged a demonstration at the office (mostly just for fun). And I wouldn't (couldn't) work those hours today. That was 30 years ago!
Oh, and since then I have built similar systems with work schedules ranging from 30 - 60 hours per week depending on which project it was. They weren't as much fun, though, but were probably healthier for me.
Do not underestimate the power of a good, motivated team. And also recognize that you can often do good code when you are fresh, and then do good debugging of that code as you get more tired. This helps maintain the quality of the code.
It is important to realize that libel is *not* illegal in the US. Libel is only a civil violation, and requires that the injured party sue in civil court to recover damages.
Freedom of speech, like all freedoms, can never be absolute except in a society of total anarchy. Personally I think that in some cases we have too much freedom of speech in the US - specifically where newspapers publish secret documents which damage national security. Of course, there is the argument that without that freedom, the government can declare most anything secret (like they can in the UK) and thus cover up for themselves.
You forget that the 14th amendment extends the bill of rights to all citizens, thus prohibiting states from violating the first amendment.
The 14th amendment was passed after the civil war to prevent the former Confederate states from continuing slavery and other racist practices, by extending the constitutional protections to include state law. It wasn't fully enforced until the courts started finding segregation to be unconstitutional in the middle 20th century.
Re:Suit and Tie do not make the programmer.
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Suit Up Or Ship Out?
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· Score: 2
I don't know what you guys were doing, but I have done lots of quality systems level work (like building custom OLTP monitors, device drivers, com protocols, etc) on very long hours. I think it depends very much on the environment and on attitudes. If you get on a team that is really moving, you can work 18 hours a day, enjoy it, and do it for months.
On one of my first big projects, we ended up working so much that our "days" extended to about 28 hours. We would work for 20 hours or so, sleep 6, waste an hour or two getting to and from work and eating, showering, etc. As a result, our hours rotated and we had to distinguish between "yesterday" and "virtual yesterday." It was a fun project. Oh, and the long hours were not the result of management incompetence, but rather vendor incompetence and dishonesty ( a certain former pioneering minicomputer maker failed to deliver on OS enhancements and an OLTP monitor, so we had to roll our own).
Of course, it helps to be young (which I was when I did all that stuff).
Re:Suit and Tie do not make the programmer.
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Suit Up Or Ship Out?
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· Score: 2
Ah... EDS
What a strange outfit that used to be. They would interview your wife to make sure she was appropriate wife material for an EDSer. The company was almost paramilitary, with a boot camp for new hires. Ross Perot actively recruited military veterans, so they fit very well. He did this both for business reasons and because he is genuinely a very patriotic (if bizarre and misguided) guy. I saw a flag in his personal office that was signed by all the POW's that returned from Vietnam.
I worked for EDS in the late '70s as a result of a wierd deal whereby we didn't have to join the corporate culture. I had a direct authorization from Ross Perot to wear a beard (possibly an EDS first).
I only went to the Dallas country club headquarters once, but I remember a guy staring at my beard so hard he tripped getting off an elevator. Of course, I was wearing a suit THERE.
In spite of all this weirdness, I found the people there to be very nice. They also worked very hard and were competent at what they did (which was fairly low tech).
They hit your site with a referrer address of whatever they want you to read. They count on your curiosity to go there when you are investigating your referrer logs.
I strongly agree that we need self driving cars. Not only would it save time for all of us, but potentially it could be much safer. It would also be better environmentally because traffic, under automated control, could flow better. Also autos would be driven for better mileage, and if the system were safe enough, I might be able to give up my big, heavy SUV.
But I don't think the manufacturers should be flamed on this. It takes a cooperative effort between highway designers, very high tech research, the legal system and the manufacturers.
In other words, in the absence of some MAJOR breakthrough in AI, this will probably require a private/government joint venture. Most likely, the breakthroughs will come from the evil military industrial complex (TM).
You seem to be arguing that one counter example proves the case.
But public domain allows many Red Hat's, and also other companies.
There are a number of specialized research tools that were released public domain and have since been picked up and made into proprietary products. If that had not been done, it is likely that most of those tools would now only work in some long obsolete computer running against non-portable libraries.
Let's look at your claims for GPL:
anyone can take it and improve it. Yep, same with public domain.
Guarantee's code freedom. Since when was code a human being? What is "code freedom?" Do you mean that it guarantees that nobody can take the code, invest huge amounts of effort in it, and then recoup their investment by selling it as proprietary? Yep - it PREFVENTS that. In other words, it reduces the ways in which that code can benefit users!
GPL means reduced options! Otherwise it wouldn't preclude some of them in the license!
GPL is good for some things, but to assert it is good for all is equivalent to asserting that capitalism in software never produces anything of value!
I do not assume that true competition *will* take place. I simply argue that true competition is enabled. GPL allows fewer forms of competition.
If a behemoth company is able to break compatibility, it means that customers are still choosing to buy it in spite of that. This is called freedom.
Freedom doesn't produce optimal results in the short term. But I have yet to see a workable alternative.
GPL works in some areas. To advocate that publicly produced software carry restrictive licensing (GPL for example) is wrong. Even the evil big M pays taxes, after all.
I was advocating government release as public domain. After that, any licensing can be done. NOBODY can take away your rights to use that initial release. And anybody can license derivatives with GPL if that tickles their toes.
But it is not your choice. It is the choice of the government, and they should make the choice that maximizes freedom and opportunity. THEY own the copyright, not you.
That choice is public domain.
As far a software that you hold the copyright to, you are free to do with it as you wish. I have no argument with you releasing it under GPL. That is your choice, and may be a noble thing for you to do, or it may be totally selfish - it depends on the circumstance.
I have proprietary software. I don't release it to anyone at all at the request of a customer of mine, who considers it a competitive advantage.
At the moment I am extending a GPL'd assembler. That work will benefit my customer also (which is why I am doing it), but it will also benefit the GPL world.
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Now, with that said, digital modulation, being much closer to a square wave than an analog voice signal, is much richer in HARMONICS than said analog signal.
This is utter and total nonsense. The modulated RF signal is harmonic and spectrally in accordance by regulation. Digital modulation doesn't cause carrier harmonics (the two are unrelated) and the harmonics from the square wave digital (which cause sidebands or wider bandwidth depending on mode) are of course attenuated at base band before modulation is applied and/or filtered out.
After all, any energy wasted in "harmonics" is energy that is not available to carry information to the receiver. Digital modem designers (RF or otherwise) have known about this for approximately forever.
I've lost count of how many times I've heard interference from digital paging transmitters bleeding into ham radio repeaters. The harmonics from the digital modulation mix with the transmitter's carrier, and that of whatever other transmitters happen to be on the same hilltop, and close to the same frequency range. It sounds awful, and it looks even worse on a spectrum analyzer screen.
Again, this has nothing to do with the DIGITAL nature of the transmitters. Intermodulation is usually not a result of harmonics from the transmitter, but rather harmonics generated in your own receiver - totally independent of modulation mode. And yes, it does look ugly on a spectrum analyzer - whether it is digital or analog.
Years ago (almost 40!), I was a transmitter engineer at KANU-FM (110KW, Lawrence, KS - University of Kansas). One night we got a call from a station in Florida that was on the same frequency. They had shut down their transmitter for maintenance, and our signal immediately started coming in on their studio monitor.
I also used to monitor the local police, who in those days were operating on VHF Low Band (30-50 MHz). That same ducting caused some southern, very rural and very hick-like (this was the 60s) sheriff systems to come come in on the same frequencies. Things got really wierd - especially since neither side knew what was going on.
Tropospheric ducting is kewl.
They tried this way back in the '80s with the VideoCipher II. The encryption keys were stored in a single MCU chip, in RAM (with a battery on the baord). If you pull the chip, the keys vanish - that was the idea.
I know of people who strapped a battery to the MCU, unsoldered the MCU from the board, took it to a semiconductor manufacturer's failure analysis lab (there are several here in town). There, they read out the bits with an electron microscope and had they keys and the algorithm. My acquaintances, btw, never did anything with this information. They were hackers, not crackers.
Later it turned out that one could rebond one pin in the package, and read out and send back in crypto data. This lead to a whole industry providing free "pay" TV.
Putting it in one chip just isn't enough.
Now, if they have a cryptographically good hash, even knowing the desired hash result isn't good enough to allow you to build boards that satisfy the hash. That limits the damage to those folks willing to modify (or, most importantly, pay greedy techs to modify) their boxes, which is exactly what happened with the VideoCipher II.
Last time I looked, less than half of all VideoCipher's sold were *ever* enabled with a paid-for code.
And this was in the '80s!
1. Every year, Reagan proposed a budget that would increase the deficit and the debt.
With a Democrat Congress (you ignored that), he had no choice.
Defending our country does not include arming terrorists in Latin America, Central Asia, Southeast Asia,
I thought you weren't going to call names. Terrorists? How about freedom fighters. Don't you remember, in the first free elections in Nicaragua since the Sandinistas seized control, that the Sandinistas were thrown out and a contra was elected?
I presume you are referring to the anti-soviet fighters in Afghanistan. If you don't think that damaging a totalitarian regime that had sworn to bury us is defending our country, you must have a very narrow definition.
Southeast Asia? Which terrorists did the conservatives arm there? I am really curious.
nor does it include coups and destabilizing governments whose economic policies corporations don't like.
Example please? I have no idea which conservatives you are talking about and which countires.
Passing weapons programs that the military doesn't even want, in order to pay off defence contractors, is not defending our country. The B-1, $500 hammers, etc., etc. That's just corporate welfare.
I'm glad you brought up the $500 hammers, because it is an example of mainstream press propaganda. The Pentagon, like any big government bureaucracy, is hardly the model of efficiency. If you order a special run of hammers, made specifically to military only specifications, don't you think it might cost a bit? It may have been somebody's payoff, but it is just as likely a typical government screwup. I used to do defense contracting in a very small company, and have seen the sort of silliness that goes on - that has nothing to do with politicans paying anyone back.
Both Democrats and Republicans do this, but conservatives and libertarians won't admit they love big government - when it helps them.
As I said before, all office holders do this. And none of them admit to loving big government - even the left! Furthermore, it has nothing to do with a philosophical love of big government, but rather to the realities of politics in a democratic society. I am amused the you seem to view the Democrats to be honest about this (they are not) while somehow the conservatives are less so. As for the libertarians, there are hardly any in office at all.
If conservatives believe in bailing out airlines, for whatever reasons, they support corporate welfare, and they are against free markets. According to free market theory, the airlines should have gone bankrupt, if they couldn't handle a slowdown in business. There are plenty of new airlines that could have been started. I guess conservatives don't believe in free markets after all.
Free markets must function within a operating civil society. When the government fails in a critical function (preventing a catastrophic terrorist attack), it is not "loving big government" or not believing in free markets to take certain steps in the face of massive disaster. OTOH it should please you to know that most conservatives oppose the additional handouts that the airlines are now asking for.
4. The S&Ls started having economic trouble when they started speculative investments (due to deregulation)
Good grief, what an amazingly high density of BS!
Let me rephrase your facts with a little reality:
The S&Ls started having economic trouble in the 1970's because they could not pay competitive rates to their depositors, due to rampant inflation. Jimmy Carter deregulated them (and Reagan did a bit more later) because otherwise they would have collapse at that time. They did speculative investments because they were forced to.
I am going to try and explain the S&L in more detail in hopes you will read it and understand...
Imagine that you own an S&L. Thousands of people have money in your institution that you have loaned out to other people in the form of long term mortgages. This is what your organization is required to do by federal law.
Interest rates rise to much higher than those rates. Your depositors are taking their money out and buying other higher paying instruments. You have two choices:
1) After they have taken all your working capital, go bankrupt - leaving any of your larger depositors without their money, leaving the government to pay off the amount that it insured, firing all of your employees, and stiffing your creditors.
or
2) Invest in higher yielding instruments so that you can pay competitive rates to hold your depositors.
This is exactly the situation in the 1970's (and it had nothing to do with some misguided monetarist policy, but rather the natural market response to the guns and butter inflation started by Johnson and furthered by Nixon - who was NOT a conservative).
Moving on....
The best investments which paid high returns were commercial real estate. Lots of money was going into them as people tried to avoid the exorbitant tax rates (i.e. the government's extremely progressive tax policies seriously distorted the real estate market). You, as an S&L owner, discover you can get 14% on your money for a loan to a new development. It has some higher risk (risk/reward ratio, you know). But you have to do it. If you don't, your depositors go to somebody else who does - perhaps a truly crooked S&L operator. After all, the government insurance programs (created by the liberals of the FDR administration) make it a zero cost option. As a depositor, there is exactly ZERO more risk to invest in an S&L that pays a fraction of a percent higher, no matter how high the risks it takes.
If you follow this to its logical conclusion, you realize that this creates a situation where the S&L's continue to have the choice of making risky investments, or going bust! All created by government policies put in place by, guess what? Tah Dah! Liberals.
In 1986, Reagan, recognizing that lower taxes lead to economic grown, had to negotiate with a hostile house of representatives controlled by - you guessed it - liberals - in order to get his taxes down. The liberals insisted on ending what they called "tax loopholes." Part of that was making losses on these real estate investments not deductible, but leaving the gains taxable. The utterly predictable result (and I modified my own investing months before this was passed based on the probabilities of it passing) was the sudden devaluation of those properties.
Was this crooked S&L executives? No, it was people who were investing in one set of rules, who suddenly had the rules changed by government fiat!
and were defrauded by people like Neil Bush.
Ah... you had to put a Bush into this. Nice rhetorical trick that, btw, proves nothing at all. I thought you weren't going to do any namecalling, but here you have just called Bush a criminal. Tell me, if Bush was such a crook, why wasn't he prosecuted by the Clinton administration?
You can equivicate all you want on this one, but the facts are clear - 30 billion a year for 30 years.
Which 30 billion for which 30 years do you happen to be talking about. I can't equivocate about it yet - you haven't defined what you are talking about!
Not to mention that the "conservative" Fed Chairman at the time, Paul Volker, a monetarist (like Reagan) destroyed many businesses by jacking up interest rates - but still provided plenty of liquidity to the finance industry, at attractive rates. It seems that conservatives just love a fiat currency, a hallmark of big intrusive government.
Ah... in case you haven't noticed, liquidity and high interest rates don't go together! How the hell could Volker destroy businesses by jacking up interest rates while not jacking them up to the finance industry? After all, the Fed only affects interest rates (it doesn't control them) THOUGH the financial industry.
Oh, and conservatives prefer a solid currency, which is why many of us are monetarists (a term you clearly misunderstand based on the paragraph above).
Bush has increased the deficit, and borrowed more money, which means that Americans will have to pay more interest. That means more taxes. He's just shifted the burden onto future generations, after he's out of office. How convienient for him. That means non-income federal taxes, state taxes, and local taxes will have to be increased. Bush raised taxes on all of us.
I always find it amusing when critics of conservatives (who in your case are clearly of a liberal persuasion - this isn't calling names, it is simply applying a correct label) are those who in the past always favored budget deficits.
The deficit has increased. Do you suppose this might be because the economy has contracted - both as a result of the collapse of stock market bubble, the natural business cycle, and the fact that we are at war and have suffered huge losses? I can remember when the left argued that deficits were GOOD. Now conservatives are bad because the deficits have gone up. Go figure...
Oh, and Bush cannot increase the deficit. Only congress can do that. I seem to remember that the Senate was controlled by strongly partisan democrats when some of these spending bills were passed.
BTW... increasing the deficit doesn't necessarily mean more taxes or that the burden is shifted to future generations. Debt is an instrument to be used when needed, as any business 101 major can explain to you. And the best way to decrease the deficit is to get the economy rolling again, which is best done by letting private money work and by reducing the very real physical threats to our security.
The Christian right is the most loyal and solid faction of the Republican party, and call themselves conservative.
Your point? Yes, the Christian right is loyal (although not as loyal as you might think). And the Christian Right OPPOSED the selection of your favorite whipping boy, Bush, as the Republican nominee. And they are conservative, for the most part, but are definitely not libertarian. Other wings of the republican party are libertarian-conservative. Does the Christian right favor some censorship? Yep. Does that mean they favor larger government? Nope. Does it make all conservatives or republicans into censors? Nope.
So again, I ask... Your point?
Interesting how conservatives care so much about women having abortions, except the kind of abortions that happen when bombing people. I guess only some fetuses count?
That is a seriously nasty allegation, as it implies (without, as your said, calling names) that conservatives are hypocrites and favor killing people out of the meanness of their hearts.
One difference I see frequently is that the conservatives question the wisdom of leftist policies, while the left constantly accuses the conservatives of having evil intent! And you don't like name calling! But you just called conservatives cold hearted killers and hypocrites. You just didn't do it in one word!
So... to address your issue.
Conservatives, being more realistic than the modern left, recognize that sometimes there are truly evil people who represent truly real threats, and that war (which involves killing, including killing innocent people) is a necessary evil. Evil. And necessary.
Leftists like yourself (oops, I can't call you a name)...
Humans like yourself, on the other hand, seem to think that anyone who favors violence for any reason (other than killing unborn babies) does so for purely wrong motives.
I am really sick of this slander by the left. Did I ever question the motives of liberals? Did I ever say that they were evil in their intent? No! Because I recognize that people can have honest differences of opinion, and their opinions just happen to be wrong.
But the left no longer is willing to behave in the civilized manner that democracy requires. The left not only disagrees, but it demonizes. It accuses conservatives of the most vile motives and actions. It never, ever credits conservatives with good intentions.
Instead, conservatives are characterized as corrupt, oppressors, happy killers, war mongers, robbers, prudes, etc. In fact, you have made every single one of those accusations (without using those terms) in your last few posts.
Is it any wonder that I detest the left? That I consider the left in the US to no longer be merely an alternative view, but rather to be a force of malice and evil?
Now, go ahead and call me names, that seems to be standard procedure for conservative liberatarian types.
I sugges you educate yourself about the differences between the conservative and libertarian movements. You have not only slandered conservatives with your attacks on their motives, but you have slandered libertarians by lumping them into the same category.
And I suggest that you take your superior, "I don't call names but you guys do" attitude and...
well... okay... at least read Slander by Anne Coulter so that you can improve your slanderous (or in this forum, libelous) style and bring it in line with the rest of your ilk.
Under Reagan and Bush, and now Bush II, the size of government increased dramatically. Reagan tripled the public debt. Republicans don't like the government building hospitals, or schools. but they love big government when it comes to the defence industry, space, and corporate welfare.
Since all government spending originates in the house of representatives, which was controlled by democrats during the entire time of Reagan and Bush I, your argument seems to lack a bit of reality! It is true that conservatives don't like the idea of government controlled health care, and we object to the vast amounts of money that are overspent on public education (the US spends far more per pupil than Europe, and gets poorer results - of course, in almost all European countries they have more private alternatives).
But yes, Republicans, and conservatives do believe in the NECESSITY of defending our country, and are willing to actually take the flack for spending the money necessary to do it. Then leftists like yourself come along and blame us for it. Go figure.
Under Reagan, Bush headed the "Vice-President's Council on Competitveness", in which he handed out billions of taxpayer money to select Republican donors. That's corporate welfare.
Gee, and all this time I thought Bill Clinton was the master at handing out billions - which is a lot easier when you have a congress of your own party. He did, Reagan and Bush I didn't!
Bush II just gave handouts and subsidies to airlines,
Which were dying from the effects of 9-11.
agriculture, steel,
This was wrong. But it is HARDLY a conservative trait. In fact, conservatives have strongly attacked both of these moves. Again, you are not exactly demonstrating that conservatives are in favor of big spending.
It *is* true that elected officials in general tend to spend too much money, however.
Not to mention borrowed billions from the financial industry for "tax cuts" - a total joke, considering he just increased everyone's taxes, just pushed paying for it forward a few years.
Would you care to explain how Bush II just *increased* everyone's taxes? The main problem with his tax cut was that it wasn't enough, and the DEMOCRATS insisted that it end in 2010. The other problem was that congress in general tacked all sorts of pork onto bills that were necessary in the wake of 9-11.
Reagan and Bush both gave billions of bailouts to the defrauded S&Ls (like Bush's brother). They've bailed the finance industry time and time again, to the tune of trillions of dollars, over the last 20 years.
What an unsophistacted and untrue accusation! The S&L's were technically bankrupt starting with the inflation of the '70s. In fact, the entire concept of the S&L's, created by liberals, was financially irresponsible. S&L's could only survive, under the liberals' rules, in times of deflation. When inflation hit, it was Jimmy Carter (a conservative?) who changed the rules to allow them to invest in higher yielding (and higher risk) financial instruments. Had he not, the S&L's would have collapsed then, at much less cost, and he should have let them! And of course, the final blow to the S&L's was a result of a liberal required measure added to the Reagan tax cut - a measure which required that Real Estate partnership losses suddenly could no longer be deducted. This led to an immediate (and predictable) loss in the value of almost all commercial real estate of 15-30%. Since the S&L's were heavily invested in commercial real estate (since it alone provided the returns they needed to stay alive with low interest rate 30 year loans out), they lost ALL of their equity. IOW the straw that broke the camel's back was the liberals' insistence on a punitive tax rule. It is a tribute to their political skills, however, that they managed to hang the blame for this on Bush I.
Republicans want more government
FALSE
interference in your sex life, your reproduction, your porn and everything else.
Many of us think that in some areas, some of this stuff indeed has gotten so far out of hand as to be seriously damaging to society. But few conservatives, except for some on the Christian Right, believe the government should "interfere in your sex life" - unless you are having sex with underage kids! Grow up!
Oh, and we also aren't interested in interfering with your reproduction, but we do believe that your murdering of your children to avoid the consequences of your sex life is immoral and should be illegal. That one, you can hang on us.
Bush wants to give tax money to churches and religious organizations.
Yep. Of course, the money is only to go to charitable works, but I guess you would prefer that only uncaring bureaucrats be the only people empowered to help folks!
Yes, conservatives seem to love big government,
You have yet to prove this. You have shown a few places where conservatives want government to act (which doesn't require *big* government) and have indeed identified that we believe that the most important purpose of government is to protect its citizens, rather than to pamper them.
Republicans love to send the US military to "protect America's economic interests" - more corporate welfare, for the oil industry, the weapons industry, minerals, etc.
Yep... of course, Democrats have started far more wars and interventions than Republicans - in fact FDR alone started more than every Republican since then! And if you don't want our economic interests protected, then go live on an island and eat coconuts. Only a fool believes that a country should not protect its interests.
Of course, you really mean to imply that we are using the military solely to help those evil businessmen, but if you look at all our interventions since 1960, that just isn't true. For the best examples of using military for business interest, look at FDR's interventions in Central America - not modern republicans!
By growing the military, they are increasing government.
Duh. Yes, that is true as long as we aren't allowed to cut a lot of the wasteful spending in other areas. Reagan tried to do the latter unsuccessfully. Bush hasn't tried hard enough, as far as *conservatives* are concerned.
But to imply that Conservatives favor big government is to blindly ignore all of modern history, the meaning of the conservative movement, and the politics and writings of all modern conservatives.
Now, don't get me wrong, it's not like Clinton was much different. He loved corporate welfare too.
Nice admission. Clinton was the master at using the goverment for his own purposes, whatever they were.
And politicans in general use the government to hand out largess to whoever will keep them in office.
However, I have to say that I have rarely seen a more pure example of the leftist propaganda line than you put in your last post. It is almost a classic, except even educated leftists don't claim that conservatives are for bigger government.
It is really too bad they don't teach history today, and it is also too bad that you get your information from sources on the left.
Just the S&L example alone is enough to show how badly the mainstream (read: left) press has mislead america. The general opinion of it, as supplied by you, is so far from fact as to be amazing - coming from citizens of a country that is supposed to be educated.... err... but of course I forget that they are educated by the failed public education system... and propagandized by the real biased media: NBC/CBS/ABC/NYT/CNN/WP/LAT.
Yes, they advertise fair and balanced. The other networks just imply it all the time. And I think Fox is fair and balanced - their hosts admit to their opinions on the air all the time, and they do report alternatives (unless you mean the far left dreck that even the major networks don't touch). Furthermore, unlike the other networks, when Fox News gets spokesmen for the other side, they don't get people who are silly caricatures and poor spokesmen - they get the real spokesmen and let them make their case (except O'Reilly, who isn't conservative anyway).
Conservative is pro-big government? really? That's certainly a different definition than I have ever heard!
Conservative has never been pro-big government. It does tend to favor enforcement of different laws than the left does, and it does tend to favor more defense spending, but neither of those are even close to a match for the rest of big government.
I also have not heard them argue for pro-corporate welfare. Can you be specific? Or are you using the left's code word that equates any decrease in taxation with "welfare?"
And yes, they are for going after Iraq. That is not the same as pro-war, unless any advocate of any war is pro-war, and anti-war means no war, no how, no reason, no matter what provocation.
I must disagree with the previous poster. FOX is a conservative network. As a conservative, I watch it a lot (I use it as video wallpaper while working).
And there is nothing wrong with it being a conservative network. What people seem to miss when they critize FOX is that all networks have biases. Only FOX is willing to admit that it is different.
I would also argue that Fox is a more fair network - you really do get to see all sides of an issue. The way the liberal networks do their slant is two ways:
1 - they simply don't show stories that contradict their points of view. CNN and the TV major networks are masters of this.
2 - they use loaded language. You almost never hear the adjective "liberal" or "leftist" on most networks, but the words conservative, ultra-conservative and rightist are applied to anything that isn't left-wing.
The anchors on most networks are stuffed shirts who try to portray a gravitas and a lack of bias, as they blather along with their liberal and left wing agenda. Fox anchors, OTOH are pretty open with their views, and are a lot more relaxed and human.
And not all of Fox anchors are conservative. Bill O'Reilly is in his own league... he can demagogue from any side of an issue (I always switch to another channel or classical music when O'Reilly comes on).
As far as Murdoch goes, his main ideology is money. He founded Fox more out of a recognition that there was a large viewership that was tired of the uniform biased view coming out of *all* other TV outlsets, rather than out of some conservative do-goodism (or do-badism if you are a leftist). Friends of mine who have worked closely with him are pretty uniform in their view that his ideology is money.
Actually, it is java.
And it was a mistake to post it.
I was having trouble posting, due to DNS propagation times due to the slashdot move, and had saved my post on the clipboard. I decided to try again, pasted it and hit submit. Oops... I had snatched some Java onto the clipboard by mistake.
Oh well, at least it wasn't my bank account number and PIN or something!
This comes up from time to time.
But computer languages vary greatly.
It just boils down to syntax and ease of typing is just nonsense...
how about:
declarative vs procedural
portability
extensibility
testability
formal provability
code compactness
interactive vs. compiled
static vs dynamic memory models
object orientation
???
It is a lot more than syntax.
Forth happens to be very unusual as a language. It is extremely extensible (it is trivial to redefine the meaning of "if" should you want to). It is based on a dictionary concept. It has a compiler and interpreter that together can be written in about 3 lines on an 80 column wide screen (if you don't do pretty-print formatting). It is highly portable because, like LISP, it starts with a very small set of primitives that need to be ported, and then builds itself out of them. Creating an application from it simply continues that extension process.
When you write an application in Forth, the high levels of your application look almost like english text optimized to express your algorithm. It doesn't even have to be recognizable as "Forth." Charles Moore (http://www.colorforth.com/), who invented Forth, is a brilliant and iconoclastic guy who made a real contribution by creating a number of original language concepts.
One thing that is very tricky in Forth is cross-compiling. Because there is no difference between compile time and execution time, cross-compiling is inherently undefined. In order to make it work, you have to play some pretty subtle and head-breaking tricks.
XMLDataNode xdnLoginRsp = new XMLDataNode("LoginRsp");
xdnLoginRsp.addAttribute("Result", strResult);
WebPacXMLUtils.addNotNullChild(xdnLoginRsp, "SessionID", strSessionID);
return new XMLDataDOM(xdnLoginRsp);
The Phoenix project may be a wonderful thing, but from the home page I can't tell why, or whether I want to use it. At least it mentions what it is in deep geek.
Too many open source projects assume that those who read their home pages already know what the project is for, or know why they would want to use it.
I would ask open source project folks to at least put a short description of their project (with minimal cryptic references to geek acronyms) and also a list of reasons as to why one might want it.
Computing today is too wide a field for all of use to keep track of every acronym and every open source project, so a web page that says "this is a better BLURP, using FARGLE and the new XVC standard" is pretty useless.
After all, what good is it to put a lot of work into a project if you keep away a lot of users by inadequate "marketing." If you want your work to be used and appreciated by lots of people, tell us what it is and why we want to use it!.
But we aren't arguing about GPL vs proprietary. We are discussing GPL vs public domain (which itself doesn't prevent GPL).
You seem to call FUD my argument that some public domain software will not be used if the only allowable model is GPL.
FUD?
How about obvious fact! I would rather see you refute that argument than just calling it FUD. Because that is the heart of my entire point: restricting software to GPL will cause some not to be used, and that this is less freedom.
You can argue all you want about the inherent superiority of GPL vs proprietary software. But that is beside the point.
And "embrace, extend and extinguish" sounds a lot like FUD to me!
YOU don't own the IP that the government develops, we all do. And a lot of us would prefer that the government allow people to do whatever they want with it.
Go ahead and license your own stuff as GPL. Maybe that will be good. But don't force ALL government developed software into that mode!
By assuring that all use of the software will be under a non-proprietary license, the government is likely to cause that software to never be used.
...or do you have some other logic that shows how your argument produces more competition.
Most public domain software is not ready for prime time use. It is often not portable, not well documented, and usually has a poor human interface.
For it to be valuable in general, some form of investment is usually needed.
With the public domain approach, the decision on that kind of investment is left to the market.
The outcome can be no investment, proprietary investment and/or open source investment. None of these are precluded.
My experience with open source software is that is mostly good for technogeeks like myself. It is rarely well documented, and often very complex to get working. There is a market for such software.
But there is also a market for software that just drops in and works, has a support organization behind it, and responds to the market demands rather than the whims of its developers.
Your argument appears to be based on one of the following two assumptions:
1) it is just plain evil to let someone profit from taxpayer funding
or
2) a company that improves public domain software and sells it as proprietary somehow either makes the software less good, or makes it impossible for open source work to proceed on the software.
So which is it?
Okay... so you agree with me that GPL is less competitive.
But you promote it.
Illogical.
As I said, " systems level work." The code wasn't that bad... in fact, I would say that most of the defects in the code were due to our inexperience (we were young and hadn't built OLTP systems before, and in those days there were not PC's for people to learn on), rather than the schedule. The system was in production for 10 years, before it was replaced due to a hardware change (in those days, we had to code the core stuff in assembly for speed - the mainframe only ran about 1 MIP, and we had thousands of simultaneous users).
And yes, we had no life outside the work hours. In fact, our wives staged a demonstration at the office (mostly just for fun). And I wouldn't (couldn't) work those hours today. That was 30 years ago!
Oh, and since then I have built similar systems with work schedules ranging from 30 - 60 hours per week depending on which project it was. They weren't as much fun, though, but were probably healthier for me.
Do not underestimate the power of a good, motivated team. And also recognize that you can often do good code when you are fresh, and then do good debugging of that code as you get more tired. This helps maintain the quality of the code.
It is important to realize that libel is *not* illegal in the US. Libel is only a civil violation, and requires that the injured party sue in civil court to recover damages.
Freedom of speech, like all freedoms, can never be absolute except in a society of total anarchy. Personally I think that in some cases we have too much freedom of speech in the US - specifically where newspapers publish secret documents which damage national security. Of course, there is the argument that without that freedom, the government can declare most anything secret (like they can in the UK) and thus cover up for themselves.
You forget that the 14th amendment extends the bill of rights to all citizens, thus prohibiting states from violating the first amendment.
The 14th amendment was passed after the civil war to prevent the former Confederate states from continuing slavery and other racist practices, by extending the constitutional protections to include state law. It wasn't fully enforced until the courts started finding segregation to be unconstitutional in the middle 20th century.
I don't know what you guys were doing, but I have done lots of quality systems level work (like building custom OLTP monitors, device drivers, com protocols, etc) on very long hours. I think it depends very much on the environment and on attitudes. If you get on a team that is really moving, you can work 18 hours a day, enjoy it, and do it for months.
On one of my first big projects, we ended up working so much that our "days" extended to about 28 hours. We would work for 20 hours or so, sleep 6, waste an hour or two getting to and from work and eating, showering, etc. As a result, our hours rotated and we had to distinguish between "yesterday" and "virtual yesterday." It was a fun project. Oh, and the long hours were not the result of management incompetence, but rather vendor incompetence and dishonesty ( a certain former pioneering minicomputer maker failed to deliver on OS enhancements and an OLTP monitor, so we had to roll our own).
Of course, it helps to be young (which I was when I did all that stuff).
Ah... EDS
What a strange outfit that used to be. They would interview your wife to make sure she was appropriate wife material for an EDSer. The company was almost paramilitary, with a boot camp for new hires. Ross Perot actively recruited military veterans, so they fit very well. He did this both for business reasons and because he is genuinely a very patriotic (if bizarre and misguided) guy. I saw a flag in his personal office that was signed by all the POW's that returned from Vietnam.
I worked for EDS in the late '70s as a result of a wierd deal whereby we didn't have to join the corporate culture. I had a direct authorization from Ross Perot to wear a beard (possibly an EDS first).
I only went to the Dallas country club headquarters once, but I remember a guy staring at my beard so hard he tripped getting off an elevator. Of course, I was wearing a suit THERE.
In spite of all this weirdness, I found the people there to be very nice. They also worked very hard and were competent at what they did (which was fairly low tech).
From what I have seen on my logs...
They hit your site with a referrer address of whatever they want you to read. They count on your curiosity to go there when you are investigating your referrer logs.
I have been bitten by this once or twice.
I strongly agree that we need self driving cars. Not only would it save time for all of us, but potentially it could be much safer. It would also be better environmentally because traffic, under automated control, could flow better. Also autos would be driven for better mileage, and if the system were safe enough, I might be able to give up my big, heavy SUV.
But I don't think the manufacturers should be flamed on this. It takes a cooperative effort between highway designers, very high tech research, the legal system and the manufacturers.
In other words, in the absence of some MAJOR breakthrough in AI, this will probably require a private/government joint venture. Most likely, the breakthroughs will come from the evil military industrial complex (TM).
You seem to be arguing that one counter example proves the case.
But public domain allows many Red Hat's, and also other companies.
There are a number of specialized research tools that were released public domain and have since been picked up and made into proprietary products. If that had not been done, it is likely that most of those tools would now only work in some long obsolete computer running against non-portable libraries.
Let's look at your claims for GPL:
anyone can take it and improve it. Yep, same with public domain.
Guarantee's code freedom. Since when was code a human being? What is "code freedom?" Do you mean that it guarantees that nobody can take the code, invest huge amounts of effort in it, and then recoup their investment by selling it as proprietary? Yep - it PREFVENTS that. In other words, it reduces the ways in which that code can benefit users!
GPL means reduced options! Otherwise it wouldn't preclude some of them in the license!
GPL is good for some things, but to assert it is good for all is equivalent to asserting that capitalism in software never produces anything of value!
I do not assume that true competition *will* take place. I simply argue that true competition is enabled. GPL allows fewer forms of competition.
If a behemoth company is able to break compatibility, it means that customers are still choosing to buy it in spite of that. This is called freedom.
Freedom doesn't produce optimal results in the short term. But I have yet to see a workable alternative.
GPL works in some areas. To advocate that publicly produced software carry restrictive licensing (GPL for example) is wrong. Even the evil big M pays taxes, after all.
Gee... what makes you think I was advocating BSD?
I was advocating government release as public domain. After that, any licensing can be done. NOBODY can take away your rights to use that initial release. And anybody can license derivatives with GPL if that tickles their toes.
Yes, as an ISV you would indeed choose that.
But it is not your choice. It is the choice of the government, and they should make the choice that maximizes freedom and opportunity. THEY own the copyright, not you.
That choice is public domain.
As far a software that you hold the copyright to, you are free to do with it as you wish. I have no argument with you releasing it under GPL. That is your choice, and may be a noble thing for you to do, or it may be totally selfish - it depends on the circumstance.
I have proprietary software. I don't release it to anyone at all at the request of a customer of mine, who considers it a competitive advantage.
At the moment I am extending a GPL'd assembler. That work will benefit my customer also (which is why I am doing it), but it will also benefit the GPL world.
All of these models are valid.