During President Bush's re-election campaign, he stated that his government was obtaining warrants for wiretaps.
More recently, he as admited that they are not getting warrants but that they are only listening to people who have dealings with al-Queda (note: not just any terrorist group)
Given that he, arguably, has lied once about this issue, how certain are you that a year from now we won't the president saying that they only wiretapped people with dealings with al-Queda or who are involved in political groups that undermine the government's ability to fight the war on terror?
The Nixon administration infiltrated political groups that were against the Vietnam War. The result of that was the FISA law.
The president believes that he is not subject to the FISA law but did not advertise that fact until news reporters found out about it.
This powers we let the current president have are the powers that some future, and possibly liberal, president will have.
I don't think it is double-dipping. The radio station is a business. They paid their fees.
Because of the radio program I heard (probably NPR), I have known for a few years that if you own a restaurant and play the radio for your patrons, you have to deal with ASCAP and BMI or risk them taking legal action.
If you listen to the radio in your car, you are not making money off of it. But if you play songs as part of your business, they want a cut. The second dip is for the second business.
I think their legal "right" comes ultimately from the songwriter, not the band that was recorded. The ASCAP and BMI web site have language on them to try to persuade songwriters to sign up with them. A song writer has two other options:
1) let anyone who plays a recording of their song being played do so for free, or 2) go around the country seeing if they hear "their song" and ask for a license fee.
So the public performance right is one right in the US copyright law given to the songwriters to license or not.
I once heard a radio program describing how representatives of ASCAP and BMI would go to restaurants and write down the songs that were played on the PA system. If they did not have a license for public performance for those songs, they would be contacted by ASCAP or BMI.
You can contact those two organizations and pay for a license for public performance of songs who's music rights are owned by their member artists.
To quote their web site: "And with one license fee, ASCAP saves you the time, expense, and burden of contacting thousands of copyright owners."
According to the BMI web site:
"It does not matter how the song is performed. Be it a live band, radio, CD or tape, the music user must have the permission of the song's owner to perform it in their place of business."
An intersting note is that it is not the DJs problem, it is the club owner's problem. The onus is upon the owner of the venue to have a license with both of these organizations in case a recorded song in their catalog is played either by a DJ or a musician performing in their venue.
In the same radio program, they talked to business owners who responded by hiring musicians to play their own original music in lieu of paying ASCAP and BMI.
Along these lines, one problem I am aware of from my C++ days is this:
The caller allocates the memory for a new object. The class code initializes the data members. This is ok if everything is compiled together.
But if you use shared libraries, and you change the class to contain more or fewer data members, you must re-compile all the calling code. So much for data hiding.
You can work around this limitation by providing functions or factory class methods in your shared library to do all your constructing, but this is extra work.
It is not the case that you go from the highly bay area safe streets onto the highly dangerous BART system. If you follow the news, there are pleny of murders in Richmond, Oakland, San Leandro, and San Francisco.
I travel weekly to the Bay Area and I keep up on the news to get an idea of where not to hang around.
There was a BART employee stabbed recently. A while ago, in San Leandro, there was someone shooting people driving down the freeway.
In 2003, Richmond had 35 homicides. Berkeley had 5 homicides. Oakland usually has around 80 a year.
On this web site, Richmond is listed as the 12th most dangerous city. Oakland is 24th.
IIRC, gcc did not work on Minux. There was some funky C compiler you had to use. Pre Minux 3 was designed to work on an XT, so there were severe memory restrictions. There was a set of patches for 386 protected mode for Minux, but I could never get it to work on my 386 PC.
A TCP/IP stack was another thing that was lacking in Minix.
Good think Linux came along.
I still have the Prentice Hall box set. It was interesting reading through the printed source code.
So should each application package include all the files of the version of the runtime library it was tested with?
Should you have 200 versions of the runtime library, one for each application?
How about the same thing for GTK, GNOME, Qt and KDE libraries?
If every binary package was statically linked, we would not have all these package dependencies. You might run out of memory with 200 copies of these libraries all taking up space.
I think if you are particularly bright, going to a school that is undergraduate focused may be short sighted.
If you can read the book, go to lectures, and figure things out for yourself, then you want to be in a research focused school. If you need lots of help with office hours and such, go to an undergraduate focused school.
The reason I say this is that I went to a reasearch focused school and was really inspired by dealing with professors who were on the cutting edge of reasearch. Some of them were also good at explaining things and really excited about the subject. But you couldn't count on it. Some of the big researchers had big egos and were not helpful. I managed to figure a lot of things out myself and was never bored.
At my alma mater (UC San Diego), we used to call it a "self-taught" University. I was able to take classes from Scripps Institute faculty as well. But if you need the help of professors who are good at explaining things, you might be frustrated at such a school.
I should mention that my degree is in Physics, not Computer Science. The Computer Science program in the early 80s was impacted (over full) and had lots of "weed out" courses.
The system I am looking for would use microphones to record all the conversations regarding requirements, resolve them into structured documents, then generate unit tests for all the requirements.
It would have to use microphones because, in my experience, you don't get a written requirements spec. Or if you do, customers don't feel constrained by it.
It would also have to raise a red flag when the customer contradicts themselves in the same sentence or paragraph.
But all kidding aside, JUnit is cool. For intricate portions of my code I write tests that represent specific scenarios and run regression tests whenever I have finished implementing the new rule of the day.
The United States military has closed the training camps in Afghanistan. In they have also opened one big training camp in Iraq. So Jihadis can go to Iraq and learn how to fight against a large army in an urban context.
As to the Jihadis being killed in droves every day, I suppose that means we will eventually run out of them, right? Some of us are old enough to remember the US government when they kept saying how many viet cong they had killed. It eventually exceeded the population of North Vietnam. They used to call it "the credability gap." How many years will the insurgency be "in their last throes?"
If and when the US military or Iraqi army subdue the insurgency, the battle-hardend remainder of the Jihadis will move on to the next country.
I'm glad you are so confident that the President's Iraq policy will produce a safer world. There are a sizeable number of Americans that doubt that.
Before the war was started, there were those who would have liked to continued the weapons inspections and international pressure to contain Saddam Hussein. Of course, now we don't have that option. The American people only have two choices:
1) Keep supporting the administration and hope they will in fact get it under control someday. 2) Stop going down what more and more people believe is a failed policy.
Since we can't seem to keep the Jihadis from entering Iraq whenever they feel like it, I will assume they will leave whenever they feel like it and travel on to the next battleground. Meanwhile, we do not have enough troops left over to provide creditable military option to deal with growing nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran.
It is not that degrees aren't worth shit. It is that there are a lot of people working in software development that don't have degrees. I have worked with a lot of non-degreed developers that were very capable.
Many non-degreed people will tell you degrees are worthless. They may collect stories of the "educated idiots" they have met or worked with. It might be sour grapes. It might be that they had to quit school to support themselves or their family. Some non-degreed people are really touchy about the idea that a person with a degree might be in any way more valuable than a person without a degree.
The portions of the patriot act that include library searches and searches of your apartment without telling you for months expire this year.
If Bush wants them to be in effect longer than that, he needs to get the congress to pass something to that affect. So he can veto this all he wants. He can't force the congress to extend them either.
So going to private funding replaces the group of legislators you have to convince to spend the money with a group of investors you have to convince to spend the money.
I don't think that private concerns are inherently less political than public ones. You would still have to do silly things to attract enough investors. Just like today you have to put in enough pork to attract enough legislators.
The frustration comes from the gap between what you can imagine and what you can talk other people into.
The issue is not what government would do. The issue is conservative politicians, like our president, claiming to be for moral values but ignoring the poor.
Bush's promised promised tax incentives for private giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation "to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy," Kuo said.
The religious right is very selective about their Christianity. They like to ignore Mathew 25:40.
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done [it] unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done [it] unto me.
Slashdot Mirror
During President Bush's re-election campaign, he stated that
his government was obtaining warrants for wiretaps.
More recently, he as admited that they are not getting warrants
but that they are only listening to people who have dealings with
al-Queda (note: not just any terrorist group)
Given that he, arguably, has lied once about this issue, how certain
are you that a year from now we won't the president saying
that they only wiretapped people with dealings with al-Queda or
who are involved in political groups that undermine the
government's ability to fight the war on terror?
The Nixon administration infiltrated political groups that were against
the Vietnam War. The result of that was the FISA law.
The president believes that he is not subject to the FISA law but did
not advertise that fact until news reporters found out about it.
This powers we let the current president have are the powers that some
future, and possibly liberal, president will have.
I don't think it is double-dipping. The radio station is a business. They paid their fees.
Because of the radio program I heard (probably NPR), I have known for a few years that if you own a restaurant
and play the radio for your patrons, you have to
deal with ASCAP and BMI or risk them taking legal action.
If you listen to the radio in your car, you are not making money off of it. But if you play songs as part of your business,
they want a cut.
The second dip is for the second business.
I think their legal "right" comes ultimately from the songwriter, not the band that was recorded. The ASCAP and BMI
web site have language on them to try to persuade songwriters to sign up with them. A song writer has two other
options:
1) let anyone who plays a recording of their song being played do so for free, or
2) go around the country seeing if they hear "their song" and ask for a license fee.
So the public performance right is one right in the US copyright law given to the songwriters to license or not.
I once heard a radio program describing how representatives of ASCAP and BMI would go to restaurants and write down the songs
that were played on the PA system. If they did not have a license for public performance for those songs, they would be contacted
by ASCAP or BMI.
You can contact those two organizations and pay for a license for public performance of songs who's music rights are owned by their member artists.
To quote their web site: "And with one license fee, ASCAP saves you the time, expense, and burden of contacting thousands of copyright owners."
According to the BMI web site:
"It does not matter how the song is performed. Be it a live band, radio, CD or tape, the music user must have the permission of the song's owner to perform it in their place of business."
An intersting note is that it is not the DJs problem, it is the club owner's problem. The onus is upon the owner of the venue to have a license
with both of these organizations in case a recorded song in their catalog is played either by a DJ or a musician performing in their venue.
In the same radio program, they talked to business owners who responded by hiring musicians to play their own original music in lieu of paying
ASCAP and BMI.
Along these lines, one problem I am aware of from my C++ days is this:
The caller allocates the memory for a new object. The class code initializes the data members. This is ok if everything is compiled together.
But if you use shared libraries, and you change the class to contain more or fewer data members, you must re-compile all the calling code.
So much for data hiding.
You can work around this limitation by providing functions or factory class methods in your shared library to do all your constructing, but this is extra work.
I once worked with a programmer who's last name was Foo.
She had lots of files with Foo somewhere in the name.
It is not the case that you go from the highly bay area safe streets onto the highly dangerous BART system. If you follow the news, there are pleny of murders in Richmond, Oakland, San Leandro, and San Francisco.
I travel weekly to the Bay Area and I keep up on the news to get an idea of where not to hang around.
There was a BART employee stabbed recently. A while ago, in San Leandro, there was someone shooting people driving down the freeway.
In 2003, Richmond had 35 homicides. Berkeley had 5 homicides. Oakland usually has around 80 a year.
On this web site,
Richmond is listed as the 12th most dangerous city. Oakland is 24th.
It's not so crazy, it's cynical.
Elected officials find it safer to raise taxes for folks that can't vote them out of office.
Those services are very popular with the voters back at home, but raising taxes is un-popular with voters.
Solution: tax us citizens abroad!
You could, in fact, distribute mods to Minux. You just couldn't distribute the entire source of Minux with your mods.
The license allowed patch file sharing, but each user had to have their own licensed copy of Minux source to run the patches against.
IIRC, gcc did not work on Minux. There was some funky C compiler you had to use. Pre Minux 3 was designed to work on an XT, so there
were severe memory restrictions. There was a set of patches for 386 protected mode for Minux, but I could never get it to work on my 386 PC.
A TCP/IP stack was another thing that was lacking in Minix.
Good think Linux came along.
I still have the Prentice Hall box set. It was interesting reading through the printed source code.
So should each application package include all the files of the version of the runtime library it was tested with?
Should you have 200 versions of the runtime library, one for each application?
How about the same thing for GTK, GNOME, Qt and KDE libraries?
If every binary package was statically linked, we would not have all these package dependencies.
You might run out of memory with 200 copies of these libraries all taking up space.
I liked that one.
This one is also appropos.
I think if you are particularly bright, going to a school that is undergraduate focused may be short sighted.
If you can read the book, go to lectures, and figure things out for yourself, then you want to be in a research focused school. If you need lots of help with office hours and such, go to an undergraduate focused school.
The reason I say this is that I went to a reasearch focused school and was really inspired by dealing with professors who were on the cutting edge of reasearch.
Some of them were also good at explaining things and really excited about the subject.
But you couldn't count on it. Some of the big researchers had big egos and were not
helpful.
I managed to figure a lot of things out myself and was never bored.
At my alma mater (UC San Diego), we used to call it a "self-taught" University.
I was able to take classes from Scripps Institute faculty as well.
But if you need the help of professors who are good at explaining things, you might be frustrated at such a school.
I should mention that my degree is in Physics, not Computer Science. The Computer Science program in the early 80s was impacted (over full) and had lots of "weed out" courses.
YMMV.
I am running Fedora and I got Firefox 1.0.6 as an update. According to this, the update rpm was available on Sept 10.
I can pull them down automatically either with up2date or I can use yum. I don't think I will have to wait long to get 1.0.7 that way.
Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.
Someone once referred me to Cactus, which is an extension of JUnit.
It only helps you for web apps, though.
The system I am looking for would use microphones to record all the conversations regarding requirements, resolve them into structured documents, then generate unit tests for all the requirements.
It would have to use microphones because, in my experience, you don't get a written requirements spec. Or if you do, customers don't feel constrained by it.
It would also have to raise a red flag when the customer contradicts themselves in the same sentence or paragraph.
But all kidding aside, JUnit is cool.
For intricate portions of my code I write tests that represent specific scenarios and run regression tests whenever I have finished implementing the new rule of the day.
I have used this binary with success: ntp4172.zip
Just checking today, this source seems more up to date.
That was a good link. I also remember reading that there were riots in the streets because renters thought they were getting cheated.
They were still being changed "a month's rent."
The United States military has closed the training camps in Afghanistan. In they have also opened one big training camp in Iraq.
So Jihadis can go to Iraq and learn how to fight against a large army in an urban context.
As to the Jihadis being killed in droves every day, I suppose that means we will eventually run out of them, right?
Some of us are old enough to remember the US government when they kept saying how many viet cong they had killed.
It eventually exceeded the population of North Vietnam. They used to call it "the credability gap."
How many years will the insurgency be "in their last throes?"
If and when the US military or Iraqi army subdue the insurgency, the battle-hardend remainder of the Jihadis will move on to the next country.
I'm glad you are so confident that the President's Iraq policy will produce a safer world.
There are a sizeable number of Americans that doubt that.
Before the war was started, there were those who would have liked to continued the weapons inspections and international pressure to contain Saddam Hussein.
Of course, now we don't have that option. The American people only have two choices:
1) Keep supporting the administration and hope they will in fact get it under control someday.
2) Stop going down what more and more people believe is a failed policy.
Since we can't seem to keep the Jihadis from entering Iraq whenever they feel like it, I will assume they will leave whenever they feel like
it and travel on to the next battleground.
Meanwhile, we do not have enough troops left over to provide creditable military option to deal with growing nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran.
It is not that degrees aren't worth shit. It is that there are a lot of people working in software development that don't have degrees.
I have worked with a lot of non-degreed developers that were very capable.
Many non-degreed people will tell you degrees are worthless. They may collect stories of the "educated idiots" they have met or worked with.
It might be sour grapes. It might be that they had to quit school to support themselves or their family.
Some non-degreed people are really touchy about the idea that a person with a degree might be in any way more valuable than a person without a degree.
The portions of the patriot act that include library searches and searches of your apartment without telling you for months expire this year.
If Bush wants them to be in effect longer than that, he needs to get the congress to pass something to that affect.
So he can veto this all he wants. He can't force the congress to extend them either.
See
this.
Margaret Cho rocks!
I saw one of her movies and I laughed so hard I cried.
Maybe she cannot break out of the C-List because her stand-up comedy subjects include sex, sexual politics, homosexuals, transvestites, and tolerance.
So mass appeal just isn't in the cards for her.
So going to private funding replaces the group of legislators you have to convince to spend the money with a group of investors you have to convince to spend the money.
I don't think that private concerns are inherently less political than public ones. You would still have to do silly things to attract enough investors.
Just like today you have to put in enough pork to attract enough legislators.
The frustration comes from the gap between what you can imagine and what you can talk other people into.
The issue is not what government would do. The issue is conservative politicians, like our president, claiming to be for moral values but ignoring the poor.
See this.
A quote:
Bush's promised promised tax incentives for private giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation "to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy," Kuo said.
The religious right is very selective about their Christianity. They like to ignore Mathew 25:40.
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done [it] unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done [it] unto me.
Jesus wants a capital gains tax cut.