There's a natural limit - "unlimited long distance calling" means "audio communication (at a certain bandwidth) for as many hours as human beings can keep talking on one number", expecting that human beings sleep and aren't using their phones 24/7. And even if they are, the POTS SS7 bandwidth is 8K bytes/second, which is pocket change and won't come close to maxing out the bandwidth. Running a torrent server CAN max out the bandwidth 24/7.
I want Truth in Labeling. I don't expect impossible promises to come true; I want people to be called to account for making impossible promises in the first place. The stupid thing here is that the ISPs could have been the good guys if they had thought ahead: "Whatever the average usage is every month, the cap is 5 times the average! You only pay extra if you're way out of line!" and most people would think that was MORE than fair. Instead, by promising something impossible, they have of course failed.
I want Truth in Labeling. I don't expect impossible promises to come true; I want people to be called to account for making impossible promises in the first place.
In this recent animated film from Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, the hero is an aeronautical engineer, and there is a scene which includes a loving closeup of a log-log-decilog slide rule. It establishes beyond doubt that engineering is heroic, just like a Final Fantasy sword-as-long-as-wielder-is-tall.
(I went to engineering school when a 4-function calculator cost $200 and still required a wall plug; by the time I graduated, you could get one with four functions plus square root that worked on batteries.)
"Quozl", Alan Dean Foster: An alien race claiming to be totally non-violent . . . turns out they use complete simulation technology to be ULTRA-violent in privacy, and get it out of their systems. One of the arguments in favor of playing violent fantasy and/or video games. Problem is, in real life, some people will find it a substitute and some will find it an incentive.
OK, you're carrying something they don't like. You forgot your multitool, or pocketknife, or (I saw this once) titanium dive knife in your carry-on instead of your checked luggage. So why don't they have USPS flat rate boxes handy for a rounded-up price? Because you need to be shamed and punished. Keeping the tools off the plane is almost incidental.
The way they seem to treat those water bottles at the checkpoint, is proof positive that they didn't even consider them dangerous for a millisecond. Seriously, they just toss them in a bin
If the liquid is flammable, you can still safely toss it in a bin. If the liquid is an ingredient for a multi-ingredient explosive or chemical weapon, you can toss it in a bin. The stated purpose of the rule is to prevent those two categories . . . not to enforce buying things from the licensed airport vendors at inflated prices . . .
Superficially appealing, but I don't trust the average person - even someone with a permit - to have much skill, and to be prepared to act in a crowded setting with lots of collateral targets, and to hit what they're aiming at without making a hole in the fuselage that could be disastrous at 500 mph and high altitude.
Now, if you want to talk about qualification levels based on testing . . . . but then, I think all owners (and especially any concealed carriers) should have to demonstrate ability to hit a target.
Population also grows if you have better health care, and avoid much open warfare, so that more people live longer. And the average age of the population gets older, too. That's what the article says is prompting the change in allowing more young people.
I still have articles posted from the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, in 2007, about how many returned technical products worked fine, but customers hadn't been able to get them to work as expected and were convinced that they were faulty. So . . . . . not news.
Yes, they overreach in panicked overreaction to past incidents. But they are in a tough position as a "mere" city police force that winds up with national-security level responsibilities. *All* LEO and security people overreact because "If we mess up people die" and "Not on my watch!" ; NYC has the UN General Assembly with dozens of world leaders (and the normal UN with international officials all year long), other major high-publicity events that would be tempting targets, and every day a huge and dense population center with the busiest bridge in the world, the busiest bus terminal in the world, and other high-drama possible targets. At the same time as I believe strongly that NYPD and all LEO must be held to higher standards, and the presumption of guilt implied by blanket surveillance corrupts our social system, I also understand where the NYPD's paranoia comes from.
No, it's not about who wrote what, it's about "This is to satisfy requirement X", followed by "VP Blow wants the color changed", "VP Schmoe wanted it changed back" . . . .
That phrase has also been used for heyday IBM and Microsoft. But both sucked.
Heydey IBM didn't suck. You whippersnappers just don't appreciate what we had to do on mainframes to lay the groundwork for distributed computing. A lot of the ultra-modern pipelining in processors can be traced directly to Cray and Amdahl and other designers from the golden age, and if they could have had as much spare hardware and memory as a modern system-on-chip without blowing up both a bank and the power grid, who knows how much further we'd already be.
Yes, it definitely should apply to police. There was an incident in New York City some years back, where a man shot a former co-worker. Nine bystanders were shot or wounded after a police "gun battle" that killed the shooter; turned out all nine had been hit by police bullets or ricochets, with no evidence that the shooter had actually fired any more shots. The people who trained us in the 1970s would have been horrified at that many misses.
Yes, I see how it uses the word "right". Do YOU see how it uses the words "well regulated" and "Militia" BEFORE the word "right", as a clear reason and justification? I think people should have the right to bear arms as long as they pass a marksmanship test every year with EVERY gun that they own. If they can't use a gun properly, they shouldn't own it.
I tend to believe that the Republican party is more involved in undermining their Democratic opposition, rather than seeing Democrats trying to undermine each other at this point. Biden is already positioned as the white knight who will reluctantly accept the burden of representing the party once Hillary's baggage overwhelms her, and the Democrats don't need the negative karma of poisoning their own well to do that; they would want Hillary to be able to bow out and make a graceful handoff rather than scorch the earth behind her.
Merge early and often. In a 5-person group new to using ANY kind of VCS (plus me with experience), we had one user insisting that merging was impossible; when it turned out that his code base had not been updated for 3 months, while everyone else's gap was a week or less, other newbies were more annoyed than I was, because the absence of the stuff he had been working on had been slowing everyone down for weeks, and his insistence that it was now ready turned out to be totally wrong because it was connected to totally outdated contexts. This object lesson convinced the only other nay-sayer that maybe a VCS had actually been worthwhile.
Subversion is very easy to teach to beginners. I got a bunch of hardware people to join me in using it by starting with a very simple shared-file system just for myself and one other person, and over a year or so even the nay-sayers saw that it was trivial to use - and so used it.
If you think SVN doesn't work, you don't know what you're talking about - and you never used the systems that came earlier. Linus is a bright guy, but he did not invent software development, and his "not-invented-here" complex is sometimes counterproductive.
Yes, I think "structured" means decomposing the problem into pieces, and also looking for ways to mass-produce those pieces so you don't write the same code five or six times with tiny changes. It's like someone saying "I want something like an ARM processor, but I don't need some of the instructions and I have a great idea for a new one, so let's make our own processor out of NAND gates." In hardware, the very idea sounds moronic, but somehow people design their software that way.
We had a subroutine to convert numbers to printable form on the screen. And a different subroutine to convert numbers to the printer. And another to print to the comm port. Oh, yes, of course, everything optimized for purpose . . . because one generic routine to format a buffer, and then use the buffer for whatever purpose, would cost an extra subroutine call. This was before OO, but even Algol and PL/1 and Pascal had structures - so we had all sorts of structures that were just one or two items different from each other, and OF COURSE they had no common subsets - the differences were in different places in each one because it just "seemed like where that variable belonged" instead of saying "Hey, all of these have the same 10 things plus one or two other things, how about a nested structure?" So OF COURSE we needed completely different routines to perform essentially the same functions on the ever-so-slightly-different structures. That's not design, or functional decomposition, it's just writing code.
Yes. Like people, instead of like a project. So we wind up with a whole community of people, all pretty good, when all of those traits and advantages added to one project should have made a superman by now. (the biological / technological metaphor sort of collapses there. I'm thinking of making generations of people, all new and interesting but not better or more than before, vs. iterations of , say, Iron Man's suit, each a continual superset improvement.)
MS is using its own custom distro. Every different piece of hardware has its own custom distro. The work of the open source community towards a common project has been so fragmented (not to mention so co-opted) that it's not common. And on top of that, people treat each other like crap, so that good ideas become splinter schism religions instead of adding to one common greater good. There isn't one Linux; there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Linux-like or Linux-derived systems, with no real guarantee of complete interoperability. Maybe "Linux will never win" is an oversimplification, but I stand by it.
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There's a natural limit - "unlimited long distance calling" means "audio communication (at a certain bandwidth) for as many hours as human beings can keep talking on one number", expecting that human beings sleep and aren't using their phones 24/7. And even if they are, the POTS SS7 bandwidth is 8K bytes/second, which is pocket change and won't come close to maxing out the bandwidth. Running a torrent server CAN max out the bandwidth 24/7.
I want Truth in Labeling. I don't expect impossible promises to come true; I want people to be called to account for making impossible promises in the first place. The stupid thing here is that the ISPs could have been the good guys if they had thought ahead: "Whatever the average usage is every month, the cap is 5 times the average! You only pay extra if you're way out of line!" and most people would think that was MORE than fair. Instead, by promising something impossible, they have of course failed.
I want Truth in Labeling. I don't expect impossible promises to come true; I want people to be called to account for making impossible promises in the first place.
In this recent animated film from Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, the hero is an aeronautical engineer, and there is a scene which includes a loving closeup of a log-log-decilog slide rule. It establishes beyond doubt that engineering is heroic, just like a Final Fantasy sword-as-long-as-wielder-is-tall. (I went to engineering school when a 4-function calculator cost $200 and still required a wall plug; by the time I graduated, you could get one with four functions plus square root that worked on batteries.)
"Quozl", Alan Dean Foster: An alien race claiming to be totally non-violent . . . turns out they use complete simulation technology to be ULTRA-violent in privacy, and get it out of their systems. One of the arguments in favor of playing violent fantasy and/or video games. Problem is, in real life, some people will find it a substitute and some will find it an incentive.
OK, you're carrying something they don't like. You forgot your multitool, or pocketknife, or (I saw this once) titanium dive knife in your carry-on instead of your checked luggage. So why don't they have USPS flat rate boxes handy for a rounded-up price? Because you need to be shamed and punished. Keeping the tools off the plane is almost incidental.
The way they seem to treat those water bottles at the checkpoint, is proof positive that they didn't even consider them dangerous for a millisecond. Seriously, they just toss them in a bin If the liquid is flammable, you can still safely toss it in a bin. If the liquid is an ingredient for a multi-ingredient explosive or chemical weapon, you can toss it in a bin. The stated purpose of the rule is to prevent those two categories . . . not to enforce buying things from the licensed airport vendors at inflated prices . . .
Superficially appealing, but I don't trust the average person - even someone with a permit - to have much skill, and to be prepared to act in a crowded setting with lots of collateral targets, and to hit what they're aiming at without making a hole in the fuselage that could be disastrous at 500 mph and high altitude. Now, if you want to talk about qualification levels based on testing . . . . but then, I think all owners (and especially any concealed carriers) should have to demonstrate ability to hit a target.
Too bad DS9 was a knockoff of Babylon 5.
Population also grows if you have better health care, and avoid much open warfare, so that more people live longer. And the average age of the population gets older, too. That's what the article says is prompting the change in allowing more young people.
I still have articles posted from the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, in 2007, about how many returned technical products worked fine, but customers hadn't been able to get them to work as expected and were convinced that they were faulty. So . . . . . not news.
Yes, they overreach in panicked overreaction to past incidents. But they are in a tough position as a "mere" city police force that winds up with national-security level responsibilities. *All* LEO and security people overreact because "If we mess up people die" and "Not on my watch!" ; NYC has the UN General Assembly with dozens of world leaders (and the normal UN with international officials all year long), other major high-publicity events that would be tempting targets, and every day a huge and dense population center with the busiest bridge in the world, the busiest bus terminal in the world, and other high-drama possible targets. At the same time as I believe strongly that NYPD and all LEO must be held to higher standards, and the presumption of guilt implied by blanket surveillance corrupts our social system, I also understand where the NYPD's paranoia comes from.
Or chainsaws.
No, it's not about who wrote what, it's about "This is to satisfy requirement X", followed by "VP Blow wants the color changed", "VP Schmoe wanted it changed back" . . . .
That phrase has also been used for heyday IBM and Microsoft. But both sucked.
Heydey IBM didn't suck. You whippersnappers just don't appreciate what we had to do on mainframes to lay the groundwork for distributed computing. A lot of the ultra-modern pipelining in processors can be traced directly to Cray and Amdahl and other designers from the golden age, and if they could have had as much spare hardware and memory as a modern system-on-chip without blowing up both a bank and the power grid, who knows how much further we'd already be.
Yes, it definitely should apply to police. There was an incident in New York City some years back, where a man shot a former co-worker. Nine bystanders were shot or wounded after a police "gun battle" that killed the shooter; turned out all nine had been hit by police bullets or ricochets, with no evidence that the shooter had actually fired any more shots. The people who trained us in the 1970s would have been horrified at that many misses.
Yes, I see how it uses the word "right". Do YOU see how it uses the words "well regulated" and "Militia" BEFORE the word "right", as a clear reason and justification? I think people should have the right to bear arms as long as they pass a marksmanship test every year with EVERY gun that they own. If they can't use a gun properly, they shouldn't own it.
I tend to believe that the Republican party is more involved in undermining their Democratic opposition, rather than seeing Democrats trying to undermine each other at this point. Biden is already positioned as the white knight who will reluctantly accept the burden of representing the party once Hillary's baggage overwhelms her, and the Democrats don't need the negative karma of poisoning their own well to do that; they would want Hillary to be able to bow out and make a graceful handoff rather than scorch the earth behind her.
So don't you waste your time on
you waste your time on
you waste your time on
you waste your time on
you waste your time on
Don't waste it, Don't wast your time on me . . . . . ((Extra points for anyone who recognizes this . . . . ))
Merge early and often. In a 5-person group new to using ANY kind of VCS (plus me with experience), we had one user insisting that merging was impossible; when it turned out that his code base had not been updated for 3 months, while everyone else's gap was a week or less, other newbies were more annoyed than I was, because the absence of the stuff he had been working on had been slowing everyone down for weeks, and his insistence that it was now ready turned out to be totally wrong because it was connected to totally outdated contexts. This object lesson convinced the only other nay-sayer that maybe a VCS had actually been worthwhile.
Subversion is very easy to teach to beginners. I got a bunch of hardware people to join me in using it by starting with a very simple shared-file system just for myself and one other person, and over a year or so even the nay-sayers saw that it was trivial to use - and so used it.
If you think SVN doesn't work, you don't know what you're talking about - and you never used the systems that came earlier. Linus is a bright guy, but he did not invent software development, and his "not-invented-here" complex is sometimes counterproductive.
Yes, I think "structured" means decomposing the problem into pieces, and also looking for ways to mass-produce those pieces so you don't write the same code five or six times with tiny changes. It's like someone saying "I want something like an ARM processor, but I don't need some of the instructions and I have a great idea for a new one, so let's make our own processor out of NAND gates." In hardware, the very idea sounds moronic, but somehow people design their software that way.
We had a subroutine to convert numbers to printable form on the screen. And a different subroutine to convert numbers to the printer. And another to print to the comm port. Oh, yes, of course, everything optimized for purpose . . . because one generic routine to format a buffer, and then use the buffer for whatever purpose, would cost an extra subroutine call. This was before OO, but even Algol and PL/1 and Pascal had structures - so we had all sorts of structures that were just one or two items different from each other, and OF COURSE they had no common subsets - the differences were in different places in each one because it just "seemed like where that variable belonged" instead of saying "Hey, all of these have the same 10 things plus one or two other things, how about a nested structure?" So OF COURSE we needed completely different routines to perform essentially the same functions on the ever-so-slightly-different structures. That's not design, or functional decomposition, it's just writing code.
Yes. Like people, instead of like a project. So we wind up with a whole community of people, all pretty good, when all of those traits and advantages added to one project should have made a superman by now. (the biological / technological metaphor sort of collapses there. I'm thinking of making generations of people, all new and interesting but not better or more than before, vs. iterations of , say, Iron Man's suit, each a continual superset improvement.)
MS is using its own custom distro. Every different piece of hardware has its own custom distro. The work of the open source community towards a common project has been so fragmented (not to mention so co-opted) that it's not common. And on top of that, people treat each other like crap, so that good ideas become splinter schism religions instead of adding to one common greater good. There isn't one Linux; there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Linux-like or Linux-derived systems, with no real guarantee of complete interoperability. Maybe "Linux will never win" is an oversimplification, but I stand by it.