Perl is great, until you work with C for a while, come back, whip up a quit solution involving multidimensional arrays, find it doesn't work, and spend half the day trying to figure out the right syntax to get it to work with references and all.
Also, structures would be nice. It's easy to do using hashes, but it's a pain to type. I'd suggest the dot notation, but it would break concatenation. Are there any symbols left for this?
I know you can write anything in any language and all that, and I know compiled lisp is supposed to be as fast as C, but the problem is that functional programming doesn't match how we use computers.
How do you phrase the questions when designing a program? Most likely, you think along the lines of "when the user clicks the button, then we do this", which is a procedural way of thinking. You don't think, "this function takes, X, Y, and Z, and produces W". Well, maybe if I did more programming in functional language, the second would seem natural.
Think how you would set up an event listener in a functional language. You'd probably think, "oh, that's easy, because functions are first class data", but when you go to do it, you'd probably find that you ignore the return value of the function, and the part of your code that does the work looks like procedural programming in a bunch of parentheses. Now that I'm thinking about this, maybe this is why Emacs has such a different feel than other editors.
But functional languages are great for math. Probably a good idea for embedding in another program as a scripting language. Matlab uses a funtional programming language. Autocad uses a Lisp dialect.
My biggest problem with these systems is the whole idea of a site being appropriate for one age group but not for another. Like, I think that a page using foul language is appropriate for almost anyone, but if I had kids, I'd probably block all religious sites until they were in their teens. I'd also block almost all retail sites, until they were out of the "screaming their heads off about stupid cartoon characters" phase.
The only workable solution is a system like reputation managers, where everyone ranks pages as to what degree they agree with the statement "this page is suitable for my children"? Rank it one to five, and have your ranking sent to the central server. The central server uses your rankings to match you to others who agree with your rankings. Then sites you haven't ranked are based on what the people you match think they should be rated. Adding categories (rank wrt sex, language, politics, religion) would allow the system to function more accurately with less users.
Then you could set on your own computer what level to allow the kids to surf. Maybe it's set at 2 for when you're home and you bump it up to 4 for when you leave the kids with a babysitter for a weekend. It works even if some people are overprotective, so that a parent of a 7 year old in Berkeley, a parent of a 10 year old in Los Angeles and a parent of a 16 year old in Salt Lake City might actually be using each others rankings (unknown to each other) because they match.
It's fairly robust against people trying to supress or promote an agenda, because if your agendas don't match, then you aren't going to use their rankings.
Sure, "what your kids while they're on the internet" is a great idea for now, but I'm thinking that by the time I have kids old enough to type, people won't get what "while they're on the internet" means, because well, what, you lost the signal? In some weird anti-technology retreat? Every terminal you own suddenly broke down? And your phone too? Think of how much more wired we are now than ten years ago. Is this somehow going to slow down?
Forgive me, but I can't seem to find the section of the constitution regarding "granting exclusive use of english words to a single organization". I do remember some bit about inventors and creative works and stuff, but nothing about "give us money for whatever law you want".
Yep, just reread that section, and guess what: It's not there. The closest congress comes is regulation of interstate trade, which the current supreme court actually thinks means "interstate trade", as opposed to congress's "whatever the hell we want". Trademark is protection against fraud. This law granting exclusive use of this word to a single organization is not about protecting against fraud, and isn't about anything congress is empowered to do.
Yeah, I had to look it up too. I don't remember the syntax. But think of all the "I just bought Red Hat Linux for Brain Dead Monkeys at Borders" users. There's a lot of them. The curve is leveling off. Easier to use means keeping out less of the riff raff.
Even people who know what they are doing wrt using the gimp, installing RPMs, maybe even make configure - make - make install. Here's a better one -- what percentage of Linux users know what/etc/rc.d is? I'm guessing it's less than 75%, and shrinking daily.
Wasn't this exactly what RMS was ranting about wrt the license for Plan 9? He took issue with the fact that even internal modifications must be released.
Now, I think RMS is a communist egomaniac, and while I don't think requiring disclosure of internal changes is any less free than "our API is GPL infected", I do agree that it's a bad idea.
Want to make sure no one uses your software? Release it with a requirement that internal modifications must be rereleased.
The reason that people accept the GPL is because they don't think it's fair that someone can close the source, and sell a product which is mostly someone else's work, and no one else can sell that product (even the original author). Another option would be prohibiting it from being sold, but it turns out that the GPL with companies selling it is a much better business model.
Think of the analogies to other information. You write an essay and give me a copy. Should I be able to translate it to german and sell it to a magazine under my own name? No, you probably want to prohibit that, and people think you are justified in prohibiting that. Okay, now you gave me your article, and I add some comments to my own version: "look up this reference", "I don't think this is correct", "reminds me of that nut with the funny name", etc. But I don't give it to anyone. Should I be required to / do you have the right to force me to disclose those comments.
Who is Jesse Burst? The article on ZDNet was written by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. But he isn't so high in the journalistic integrity department either. Check out his "quotes" from Tucows article.
tucows says:
This seems to happen with the bigger names in the Linux community like Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE. They seem to have an unspoken agreement that if nothing bad is said about their software, the reviewer will get something in return.
on ZDnet, this becomes
It's not just Mandrake, however. "Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE seem to have an unspoken agreement that if nothing bad is said about their software, the reviewer will get something in return," Simonds says.
It's a very subtle change, but it's the difference between "sometimes it looks like something fishy is going on" and "Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE conspire to fix reviews".
I can see this as an error if it had been an in-person interview. But to quote a webpage wrong? What, did he go to one website, write it down in shorthand, and only then fire up his word processor?
But then, wtf is up with calling this news? What's Vaughan-Nichols saying? "I have no sources, but I read this other article by someone who actually does research, so I'll summarize it for you"?
But what am I getting all fired up about. I always knew ZDNet was the national enquirer of the computer world.
I think as soon as someone does something like this, it naturally comes to mind, "hmm, why do I have all that other crap on my {web, sql, ftp, email} server anyway?"
Considering that the trend of the 90s was to centralize services so that each server performed only a single function (the webserver, the fileserver, the pdc, the mailserver...), do you think that people trying to minimize maintanence will be moving toward "appliance" computers, with only a single server app and a stripped down operating system?
We've seen it before -- routers used to be real computers. Now -- when's the last time you heard of a router crashing?
Do you see server rooms in five years looking like a component stereo system?
Damn, that must be the narrowest definition of "us" I've seen in a public forum. Is that "myself and the other 11 superelite uebermenschliche sys admins with 30 years experience scattered through the world in our mountaintop fortresses"?
I'm guessing it would take me a month or more to set up a high availability server. The second time I might be able to cut it down to a week. I don't think there are nearly as many gurus out there as you think. The last sys admin where I work now left because he got a better offer, but there are a lot of things in the system (cron jobs that fail every night; a web server named "mail", a mail server named "bkp") that make me he probably wouldn't be able to set up failover very easily.
Most Linux users, even experienced Linux users, don't know any more than how to keep it running, and how to set up what they've set up before. Being a Linux user doesn't mean one is an expert. Considering a graph of skill level for different OSs, Windows would have a nice broad distribution, centered around "knows how to do daily operations, but can't figure out new stuff on their own". Macs would be an even flatter distribution. Both more experts and more clueless newbies. Linux would be a much narrower distribution -- newbies *can't* use Linux, and to become an expert takes significantly longer than on Windows. But the average would be a little higher.
I'm thinking, what percentage of Linux users could do something as simple as have find delete all file in the home directory that hadn't been accessed in more than 90 days? How many would know where to look? How many would be able to understand the find syntax or know that they need to escape the semi colon? Why do you think pico ships with every Linux distro?
If you think about it, though, if you hire someone who could do this right, you'll probably be paying them about $50/hr as an employee, $75+ as a contractor. Figure a week to set it up, and that's $2000-$3000. And no support.
Of course, the disc will probably be on cheap bytes for $0.99 in a few weeks. Use that, and figure it out as you go.
Set up a mailing list. People forward spam there. Everything sent to the mailing list is stored for... maybe 8 hours. Then it is divided up so that only one copy is kept of each message. Then, it's sent out to volunteers who hunt down the spammer to whatever degree they feel like. Since each message is only processed once, rather than once per person, volunteers probably wouldn't be called upon more than once a week. Once a month, if it scaled well. Send a message to the postmaster "on behalf of hangthespammershigh.org" and everyone else involved, like whoever hosts the web page they tell you to visit.
It's much more effective for one person to track down the people involved and threaten to blow up their offices if they don't stop spamming than it is for 100 people to forward it to abuse@nonexistantdomain.cx.
All the farms in ventura county (southern california) seem to be divided by eucalyptus trees. Excellent wind breaks, and they grow fast.
Going 60 miles from Burbank to Fillmore on a hot day in southern california will definitely convince you of the effect of asphalt on weather. Fillmore is somewhere between suburbs and "near city rural". Burbank is surounded on all sides by 50 miles of asphalt (okay, it's only about 25 miles inland).
I worked in burbank one fall. It alternated between blast furnace and sauna. Makes what passes for hot in the bay area quite comfortable.
Why is everyone always bashing on drug smugglers? You're going to have crime as long as you define stuff people want to do as a crime. And if you're going to have crime, I'd much rather have organized crime than amateurs. I was actually considering setting up something similar to Jim Bell's assasination politics for local drug dealers. My theory is that the problem with drugs isn't the drugs themselves, it's the disorganized nature of the market. Make prices widely known, and people will be able to shop around. Profits fall out of the market, and bam! it's no longer worth shooting someone over drug territory. Maybe roughing them up a bit, but not killing them.
The guy down the street got shot through his window a few months back. Is someone going to do that if price competition can bring the margins down to under 50%?
I decided against it, though. Even if it isn't strictly illegal, I wouldn't want the hassle of being disliked by the police.
If I GPL my genes, then later, my children want to become cyborgs, would they be violating the license if they were to use implants that weren't GPL'd?
Would I be better off releasing my genes under the LGPL?
I started laughing when I saw that. Like it's some amazingly complicated problem or something, rather than just leaving a 5 second delay with a "click here to enter" link.
You misread what Network Solutions told you. It isn't an invalid TLD, it's a TLD that Network Solutions doesn't register.
For example, here's what a search for dwelle.de (German TV station) returned:
Incorrect domain name query: Please use a valid tld[.com,.net,.org,.edu] or no tld at all. Alphanumeric characters and hyphens [which are not the first and last characters]are valid for a domain name query.
.int is reserved for international organizations. I believe all UN and EU sites are registered under.int.
Oh, no, I can't get enough people to agree with my political crusade to have any effect.
Should I resort to violence and vandalism, or should I just force people to agree with my political agenda by convincing the government that "something must be done" (preferably, "for the children", "for the environment", or "for the poor").
Or maybe you should just go sit in your corner and pout, because freedom includes the freedom to open a restaurant, and the freedom to buy a right to use someone else's name for advertising, and the freedom to buy from people at a mutually agreeable price, and the freedom to hire people at a mutually agreeable wage, and the right to sell to people at a mutually agreeable price.
Or we could just have the government run everything, and those who were popular could have things their way, and everyone else would just be SOL. If you live in a democracy, the choice is (at least partially) yours.
Peter McWilliams died on June 14th. Many believe he would have been able to hang on a little longer if he had had access to medical marijuana, which he used to prevent the nausea his AIDS and cancer medicines caused.
He was awaiting sentencing for growing marijuana, which would have probably ended up at one of the medical marijuana clubs in California (it's illegal to sell it, but the state and the localities are happy to look the other way). The federal judge ordered weekly urine tests to make sure he wasn't using it, and a few days after a fire destroyed the computer that contained the only copy of his next book, he was found dead in his bathtub, having choked on his own vomit.
I'd appreciate it if anyone more familiar with the relevant law could comment. It seems to me that if you are asked to produce, for example, your stored email for the past year, "it's in a foreign country and you can't have it" isn't going to go over very well with the judge. Moreover, even refusing to acknowledge that it existed could get you in trouble, if you have the data later on.
If someone tried to run an anonymous remailer from Sealand, couldn't the operator still be subpoenaed? I don't think HavenCo's extranational status really matters, since everyone involved will be present in some country where you can get ahold of them.
If he linked to a story that read "capitalist pigs abuse workers", would it be okay for him to change the heading to "Microsoft Accused to Illegal Labor Practices"?
Windows is actually a really good analogy for humans. Unix or 80x86 would be as well. BeOS, the PowerPC, or Palm Pilot would be a really bad analogy. Crusoe would be a good analogy for cyborgs.
See where I'm going?
Windows, Unix and the Pentium III are all similar in one way -- they're a collection of hacks. Layers upon layers of stuff that worked pretty well at the time, and stuff that was later built to do something that hadn't been done before, but was influenced by what had happened before. Xterm is there because once upon a time, we used (real) terminals. Tar has strange syntax because it started as a tape archiver. Modern 80x86 processors have like 4 different modes, because of backward compatibility. Windows has a broken file name system because it wants to maintain compatibility. Unix has a broken file name system because it's still oriented around what you can type at the command line.
I sort of excluded the Mac, because the user interface is consistent, but if you think about it, the reason the Mac has no protected memory is because task switching was originally done in user space (Multi-finder in System 6). And when system 7 came out, they needed to be able to run the System 6 apps. And when MacOS 8 came out, they needed to be compatible with the system 7 apps, and when OS 9 came out,....
But hey, they work. Variation and selection (natural, planned breeding, economics or genetic algorithms) is a very efficient method of finding solutiosn to problems.
The boards run linux. I can't figure out what type of parallel processing they use. On the one hand, they refer to mapping all of the memory on up to 8 boards into a single address space (like SMP), but on the other, the also make a product to use MPI (like Beowulfs) on MacOS.
If they are less than about $2500 for a quad G4 board, this may be even cheaper than the KLAT-2 cluster's $650 / GFLOPS discussed here a while back.
What is the New York Times being blamed for? Not being effective enough in their self-censorship? The New York Times is a newspaper; they publish the news. So they get some news, and they are going to publish it. But the CIA says, "wait! we didn't intend to give you that information." So the NYT graciously agrees to censor the information, but they screw it up. BFD. The New York Times is not in the business of censoring information. The New York Times is in the business of publishing information. You don't give documents to a newspaper without checking that you can safely release them first. It was the CIA that screwed up. The moment the information left the CIA's control, it should be assumed that "the enemy" (whoever they might be) has the information. If the New York Times knows how to keep secrets, why doesn't the military hand over all the records from Area 51, and ask them to only publish the parts that should be printed?
If Jim Young hadn't published the information without the redactions, the information would still be there. Determined parties would still have that information. The only difference is that people would have (incorrectly) believed that the information was secure.
The argument is identical to disclosure of security holes. Someone (Jim Young) finds a vulnerability. He notifies the vendor (NYT) so that they can take action. When it becomes apparent that the hole is being exploited (others are publishing the names), secrecy becomes irrelevant, and the only issue is making sure everyone is aware of the hole ASAP, so Young published the names.
Does anyone think that if Jim Young hadn't published the names, Iranian intelligence wouldn't be able to get them out of the file?
Does anyone think that if it hadn't been widely publicized, Iranian intelligence wouldn't have eventually found out about the problem?
Blaming the NYT or Jim Young is like blaming Cult of the Dead Cow for the lack of security in Microsoft products.
Seriously. I was talking to my roommate about why marijuana should be legalized. I don't do drugs, so it would have almost no effect on me. She used to do pot regularly, and now only occasionally.
And she didn't think marijuana should be legalized.
(regardless of your position on the issue, it's the "I'm an exception" mentality that I'm illustrating.)
...and I thought that we read 1984 in school as a warning, not as a primer...
What's troubling about hostility to religion? Freedom of religion means when I go to a state supported event, I won't be forced to endure any religious bullshit.
Where do you get the idea that prayers at a (school sponsered, and tax money paid for) graduation or football game is NOT "establishment of religion"? Oh, is it because it happens to be your religion that's getting bitch slapped for crossing the line?
Or are we playing the "the student was just making a speach, and the school couldn't have known what he would say". If the intent of the law is religious, it's illegal. The supreme court has been very consistent on this matter. It's not what is happening, it's whether was is happening because some BUREAUCRAT, ABUSING HIS POWER, was trying to ENTANGLE GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION. And the supreme court says, "no, you can't do that".
Now, I agree that certain people on the supreme court are totally out to lunch, like the recent (4 judge) dissent that the feds had the authority to prosecute rapist on the grounds that it interferes with interstate commerce. They are clearly in the pocket of "it's our job to make sure everything works, just so long as we can work around the constitution".
The difference between Pat Buchanan and Louis Farrakhan is that Buchanan's positions just seem to somehow end up as actual practice, while Farrakhan is ignored. We attack Buchanan because he is an actual danger. Farrakhan is just a nut in a bow tie.
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Perl is great, until you work with C for a while, come back, whip up a quit solution involving multidimensional arrays, find it doesn't work, and spend half the day trying to figure out the right syntax to get it to work with references and all.
Also, structures would be nice. It's easy to do using hashes, but it's a pain to type. I'd suggest the dot notation, but it would break concatenation. Are there any symbols left for this?
I know you can write anything in any language and all that, and I know compiled lisp is supposed to be as fast as C, but the problem is that functional programming doesn't match how we use computers.
How do you phrase the questions when designing a program? Most likely, you think along the lines of "when the user clicks the button, then we do this", which is a procedural way of thinking. You don't think, "this function takes, X, Y, and Z, and produces W". Well, maybe if I did more programming in functional language, the second would seem natural.
Think how you would set up an event listener in a functional language. You'd probably think, "oh, that's easy, because functions are first class data", but when you go to do it, you'd probably find that you ignore the return value of the function, and the part of your code that does the work looks like procedural programming in a bunch of parentheses. Now that I'm thinking about this, maybe this is why Emacs has such a different feel than other editors.
But functional languages are great for math. Probably a good idea for embedding in another program as a scripting language. Matlab uses a funtional programming language. Autocad uses a Lisp dialect.
My biggest problem with these systems is the whole idea of a site being appropriate for one age group but not for another. Like, I think that a page using foul language is appropriate for almost anyone, but if I had kids, I'd probably block all religious sites until they were in their teens. I'd also block almost all retail sites, until they were out of the "screaming their heads off about stupid cartoon characters" phase.
The only workable solution is a system like reputation managers, where everyone ranks pages as to what degree they agree with the statement "this page is suitable for my children"? Rank it one to five, and have your ranking sent to the central server. The central server uses your rankings to match you to others who agree with your rankings. Then sites you haven't ranked are based on what the people you match think they should be rated. Adding categories (rank wrt sex, language, politics, religion) would allow the system to function more accurately with less users.
Then you could set on your own computer what level to allow the kids to surf. Maybe it's set at 2 for when you're home and you bump it up to 4 for when you leave the kids with a babysitter for a weekend. It works even if some people are overprotective, so that a parent of a 7 year old in Berkeley, a parent of a 10 year old in Los Angeles and a parent of a 16 year old in Salt Lake City might actually be using each others rankings (unknown to each other) because they match.
It's fairly robust against people trying to supress or promote an agenda, because if your agendas don't match, then you aren't going to use their rankings.
Sure, "what your kids while they're on the internet" is a great idea for now, but I'm thinking that by the time I have kids old enough to type, people won't get what "while they're on the internet" means, because well, what, you lost the signal? In some weird anti-technology retreat? Every terminal you own suddenly broke down? And your phone too? Think of how much more wired we are now than ten years ago. Is this somehow going to slow down?
Forgive me, but I can't seem to find the section of the constitution regarding "granting exclusive use of english words to a single organization". I do remember some bit about inventors and creative works and stuff, but nothing about "give us money for whatever law you want".
Yep, just reread that section, and guess what: It's not there. The closest congress comes is regulation of interstate trade, which the current supreme court actually thinks means "interstate trade", as opposed to congress's "whatever the hell we want". Trademark is protection against fraud. This law granting exclusive use of this word to a single organization is not about protecting against fraud, and isn't about anything congress is empowered to do.
Yeah, I had to look it up too. I don't remember the syntax. But think of all the "I just bought Red Hat Linux for Brain Dead Monkeys at Borders" users. There's a lot of them. The curve is leveling off. Easier to use means keeping out less of the riff raff.
/etc/rc.d is? I'm guessing it's less than 75%, and shrinking daily.
Even people who know what they are doing wrt using the gimp, installing RPMs, maybe even make configure - make - make install. Here's a better one -- what percentage of Linux users know what
Wasn't this exactly what RMS was ranting about wrt the license for Plan 9? He took issue with the fact that even internal modifications must be released.
Now, I think RMS is a communist egomaniac, and while I don't think requiring disclosure of internal changes is any less free than "our API is GPL infected", I do agree that it's a bad idea.
Want to make sure no one uses your software? Release it with a requirement that internal modifications must be rereleased.
The reason that people accept the GPL is because they don't think it's fair that someone can close the source, and sell a product which is mostly someone else's work, and no one else can sell that product (even the original author). Another option would be prohibiting it from being sold, but it turns out that the GPL with companies selling it is a much better business model.
Think of the analogies to other information. You write an essay and give me a copy. Should I be able to translate it to german and sell it to a magazine under my own name? No, you probably want to prohibit that, and people think you are justified in prohibiting that. Okay, now you gave me your article, and I add some comments to my own version: "look up this reference", "I don't think this is correct", "reminds me of that nut with the funny name", etc. But I don't give it to anyone. Should I be required to / do you have the right to force me to disclose those comments.
tucows says:
on ZDnet, this becomes
It's a very subtle change, but it's the difference between "sometimes it looks like something fishy is going on" and "Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE conspire to fix reviews".
I can see this as an error if it had been an in-person interview. But to quote a webpage wrong? What, did he go to one website, write it down in shorthand, and only then fire up his word processor?
But then, wtf is up with calling this news? What's Vaughan-Nichols saying? "I have no sources, but I read this other article by someone who actually does research, so I'll summarize it for you"?
But what am I getting all fired up about. I always knew ZDNet was the national enquirer of the computer world.
I think as soon as someone does something like this, it naturally comes to mind, "hmm, why do I have all that other crap on my {web, sql, ftp, email} server anyway?"
Considering that the trend of the 90s was to centralize services so that each server performed only a single function (the webserver, the fileserver, the pdc, the mailserver...), do you think that people trying to minimize maintanence will be moving toward "appliance" computers, with only a single server app and a stripped down operating system?
We've seen it before -- routers used to be real computers. Now -- when's the last time you heard of a router crashing?
Do you see server rooms in five years looking like a component stereo system?
Damn, that must be the narrowest definition of "us" I've seen in a public forum. Is that "myself and the other 11 superelite uebermenschliche sys admins with 30 years experience scattered through the world in our mountaintop fortresses"?
I'm guessing it would take me a month or more to set up a high availability server. The second time I might be able to cut it down to a week. I don't think there are nearly as many gurus out there as you think. The last sys admin where I work now left because he got a better offer, but there are a lot of things in the system (cron jobs that fail every night; a web server named "mail", a mail server named "bkp") that make me he probably wouldn't be able to set up failover very easily.
Most Linux users, even experienced Linux users, don't know any more than how to keep it running, and how to set up what they've set up before. Being a Linux user doesn't mean one is an expert. Considering a graph of skill level for different OSs, Windows would have a nice broad distribution, centered around "knows how to do daily operations, but can't figure out new stuff on their own". Macs would be an even flatter distribution. Both more experts and more clueless newbies. Linux would be a much narrower distribution -- newbies *can't* use Linux, and to become an expert takes significantly longer than on Windows. But the average would be a little higher.
I'm thinking, what percentage of Linux users could do something as simple as have find delete all file in the home directory that hadn't been accessed in more than 90 days? How many would know where to look? How many would be able to understand the find syntax or know that they need to escape the semi colon? Why do you think pico ships with every Linux distro?
If you think about it, though, if you hire someone who could do this right, you'll probably be paying them about $50/hr as an employee, $75+ as a contractor. Figure a week to set it up, and that's $2000-$3000. And no support.
Of course, the disc will probably be on cheap bytes for $0.99 in a few weeks. Use that, and figure it out as you go.
--Kevin
Tell me if anyone is doing this, but...
... maybe 8 hours. Then it is divided up so that only one copy is kept of each message. Then, it's sent out to volunteers who hunt down the spammer to whatever degree they feel like. Since each message is only processed once, rather than once per person, volunteers probably wouldn't be called upon more than once a week. Once a month, if it scaled well. Send a message to the postmaster "on behalf of hangthespammershigh.org" and everyone else involved, like whoever hosts the web page they tell you to visit.
Set up a mailing list. People forward spam there. Everything sent to the mailing list is stored for
It's much more effective for one person to track down the people involved and threaten to blow up their offices if they don't stop spamming than it is for 100 people to forward it to abuse@nonexistantdomain.cx.
--Kevin
All the farms in ventura county (southern california) seem to be divided by eucalyptus trees. Excellent wind breaks, and they grow fast.
Going 60 miles from Burbank to Fillmore on a hot day in southern california will definitely convince you of the effect of asphalt on weather. Fillmore is somewhere between suburbs and "near city rural". Burbank is surounded on all sides by 50 miles of asphalt (okay, it's only about 25 miles inland).
I worked in burbank one fall. It alternated between blast furnace and sauna. Makes what passes for hot in the bay area quite comfortable.
Why is everyone always bashing on drug smugglers? You're going to have crime as long as you define stuff people want to do as a crime. And if you're going to have crime, I'd much rather have organized crime than amateurs. I was actually considering setting up something similar to Jim Bell's assasination politics for local drug dealers. My theory is that the problem with drugs isn't the drugs themselves, it's the disorganized nature of the market. Make prices widely known, and people will be able to shop around. Profits fall out of the market, and bam! it's no longer worth shooting someone over drug territory. Maybe roughing them up a bit, but not killing them.
The guy down the street got shot through his window a few months back. Is someone going to do that if price competition can bring the margins down to under 50%?
I decided against it, though. Even if it isn't strictly illegal, I wouldn't want the hassle of being disliked by the police.
--Kevin
If I GPL my genes, then later, my children want to become cyborgs, would they be violating the license if they were to use implants that weren't GPL'd?
Would I be better off releasing my genes under the LGPL?
I started laughing when I saw that. Like it's some amazingly complicated problem or something, rather than just leaving a 5 second delay with a "click here to enter" link.
For example, here's what a search for dwelle.de (German TV station) returned:
.int is reserved for international organizations. I believe all UN and EU sites are registered under
--Kevin
Oh, no, I can't get enough people to agree with my political crusade to have any effect.
Should I resort to violence and vandalism, or should I just force people to agree with my political agenda by convincing the government that "something must be done" (preferably, "for the children", "for the environment", or "for the poor").
Or maybe you should just go sit in your corner and pout, because freedom includes the freedom to open a restaurant, and the freedom to buy a right to use someone else's name for advertising, and the freedom to buy from people at a mutually agreeable price, and the freedom to hire people at a mutually agreeable wage, and the right to sell to people at a mutually agreeable price.
Or we could just have the government run everything, and those who were popular could have things their way, and everyone else would just be SOL. If you live in a democracy, the choice is (at least partially) yours.
--Kevin
Peter McWilliams died on June 14th. Many believe he would have been able to hang on a little longer if he had had access to medical marijuana, which he used to prevent the nausea his AIDS and cancer medicines caused.
He was awaiting sentencing for growing marijuana, which would have probably ended up at one of the medical marijuana clubs in California (it's illegal to sell it, but the state and the localities are happy to look the other way). The federal judge ordered weekly urine tests to make sure he wasn't using it, and a few days after a fire destroyed the computer that contained the only copy of his next book, he was found dead in his bathtub, having choked on his own vomit.
See www.forahero.com for more info.
I'd appreciate it if anyone more familiar with the relevant law could comment. It seems to me that if you are asked to produce, for example, your stored email for the past year, "it's in a foreign country and you can't have it" isn't going to go over very well with the judge. Moreover, even refusing to acknowledge that it existed could get you in trouble, if you have the data later on.
If someone tried to run an anonymous remailer from Sealand, couldn't the operator still be subpoenaed? I don't think HavenCo's extranational status really matters, since everyone involved will be present in some country where you can get ahold of them.
--Kevin
If he linked to a story that read "capitalist pigs abuse workers", would it be okay for him to change the heading to "Microsoft Accused to Illegal Labor Practices"?
Windows is actually a really good analogy for humans. Unix or 80x86 would be as well. BeOS, the PowerPC, or Palm Pilot would be a really bad analogy. Crusoe would be a good analogy for cyborgs.
....
See where I'm going?
Windows, Unix and the Pentium III are all similar in one way -- they're a collection of hacks. Layers upon layers of stuff that worked pretty well at the time, and stuff that was later built to do something that hadn't been done before, but was influenced by what had happened before. Xterm is there because once upon a time, we used (real) terminals. Tar has strange syntax because it started as a tape archiver. Modern 80x86 processors have like 4 different modes, because of backward compatibility. Windows has a broken file name system because it wants to maintain compatibility. Unix has a broken file name system because it's still oriented around what you can type at the command line.
I sort of excluded the Mac, because the user interface is consistent, but if you think about it, the reason the Mac has no protected memory is because task switching was originally done in user space (Multi-finder in System 6). And when system 7 came out, they needed to be able to run the System 6 apps. And when MacOS 8 came out, they needed to be compatible with the system 7 apps, and when OS 9 came out,
But hey, they work. Variation and selection (natural, planned breeding, economics or genetic algorithms) is a very efficient method of finding solutiosn to problems.
The boards run linux. I can't figure out what type of parallel processing they use. On the one hand, they refer to mapping all of the memory on up to 8 boards into a single address space (like SMP), but on the other, the also make a product to use MPI (like Beowulfs) on MacOS.
If they are less than about $2500 for a quad G4 board, this may be even cheaper than the KLAT-2 cluster's $650 / GFLOPS discussed here a while back.
What is the New York Times being blamed for? Not being effective enough in their self-censorship? The New York Times is a newspaper; they publish the news. So they get some news, and they are going to publish it. But the CIA says, "wait! we didn't intend to give you that information." So the NYT graciously agrees to censor the information, but they screw it up. BFD. The New York Times is not in the business of censoring information. The New York Times is in the business of publishing information. You don't give documents to a newspaper without checking that you can safely release them first. It was the CIA that screwed up. The moment the information left the CIA's control, it should be assumed that "the enemy" (whoever they might be) has the information. If the New York Times knows how to keep secrets, why doesn't the military hand over all the records from Area 51, and ask them to only publish the parts that should be printed?
If Jim Young hadn't published the information without the redactions, the information would still be there. Determined parties would still have that information. The only difference is that people would have (incorrectly) believed that the information was secure.
The argument is identical to disclosure of security holes. Someone (Jim Young) finds a vulnerability. He notifies the vendor (NYT) so that they can take action. When it becomes apparent that the hole is being exploited (others are publishing the names), secrecy becomes irrelevant, and the only issue is making sure everyone is aware of the hole ASAP, so Young published the names.
Does anyone think that if Jim Young hadn't published the names, Iranian intelligence wouldn't be able to get them out of the file?
Does anyone think that if it hadn't been widely publicized, Iranian intelligence wouldn't have eventually found out about the problem?
Blaming the NYT or Jim Young is like blaming Cult of the Dead Cow for the lack of security in Microsoft products.
Seriously. I was talking to my roommate about why marijuana should be legalized. I don't do drugs, so it would have almost no effect on me. She used to do pot regularly, and now only occasionally.
And she didn't think marijuana should be legalized.
(regardless of your position on the issue, it's the "I'm an exception" mentality that I'm illustrating.)
...and I thought that we read 1984 in school as a warning, not as a primer...
What's troubling about hostility to religion? Freedom of religion means when I go to a state supported event, I won't be forced to endure any religious bullshit.
Where do you get the idea that prayers at a (school sponsered, and tax money paid for) graduation or football game is NOT "establishment of religion"? Oh, is it because it happens to be your religion that's getting bitch slapped for crossing the line?
Or are we playing the "the student was just making a speach, and the school couldn't have known what he would say". If the intent of the law is religious, it's illegal. The supreme court has been very consistent on this matter. It's not what is happening, it's whether was is happening because some BUREAUCRAT, ABUSING HIS POWER, was trying to ENTANGLE GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION. And the supreme court says, "no, you can't do that".
Now, I agree that certain people on the supreme court are totally out to lunch, like the recent (4 judge) dissent that the feds had the authority to prosecute rapist on the grounds that it interferes with interstate commerce. They are clearly in the pocket of "it's our job to make sure everything works, just so long as we can work around the constitution".
The difference between Pat Buchanan and Louis Farrakhan is that Buchanan's positions just seem to somehow end up as actual practice, while Farrakhan is ignored. We attack Buchanan because he is an actual danger. Farrakhan is just a nut in a bow tie.
(let's see, is there anyone else I can offend...)
Is this not a complete flame? Is there something I'm missing?
On what planet is this insightful?