How about living somewhere besides the USA where when you get old, you die? After all, that is what is supposed to happen, isn't it? What is this with spending millions of dollars to try to get a few more hours of life? I think I remember reading that around 80% of the money spent on health care in the US is during the last six months of life. This is vastly different from other countries, and it is why other countries have quite different health care systems.
In the US things would be quite a bit different. What is the murder rate per capita in Belgium? Well, not looking it up and guessing I would say it is at least 10 times more in the US. Is this because criminals find it impossible to buy illegal guns in Belgium? Probably not. No harder than it is in the US - legal guns for non-criminals may be easier to get, but that's not the point.
Anyway, from everything I have seen, the mindset in the US is quite a bit different than in Europe. I think in the US there might be a lot problems with:
Lots more people spending all of their time high. Not sure "addict" is the right label here, but certainly the millions on welfare that aren't interested in working would have something new to occupy their time.
Stepping stones for sure. If we saw pot go from "bad, real bad" to "good, real good" what would this say to the 12 year olds that are watching friends smoking now? Why would anyone stop them? And, this would certainly bring them into more contact with the dealers that used to be dealing pot.
In the US high prices, limited availability and legal problems are the only things keeping a lot of folks off the stuff.
I'm glad Belgium has more responsible people, but that doesn't help us over here.
QEMM from Quarterdeck. Multi-tasking for DOS applications. Windowing and virtual full screen displays. This existed before the 386, but with a 386 things got much better.
What you should find scary is that while works entering the public domain may help geekdom, those that aren't quite as wired as you are are not helped at all.
Except, some other large corporation is going to pick up the recently-expired copyright works and republish them under their own name. Their compliation will then be under their copyright and folks will have a devil of a time telling the two apart. This will make for some amusing court decisions.
In short, somebody is going to grab the rights to distribute something that enters the public domain if it has any value. Then it will just benefit that different big business (stockholder or individually owned, it matters not).
The point isn't that it is a decision between the current owner benefiting or the "public at large" . No, the decision is between the current owner and some carrion-feeding consolidator picking up the rights and publishing their new compilation.
There is no way a USAF pilot shot down a commercial airliner. There is no way it happened two years ago with zero knowledge of it leaking out.
Think about it. A pilot gets an order to shoot down a hijacked passenger plane. Assuming someone had knowledge an hour after the first tower impact that other planes were being used in a similar fashion, there is still no way a pilot is going to be hanging out there shooting a US civilian airliner down without lots and lots of confirmation. The kind of confirmation that comes on the 6:00 news. Let's see - if you don't know the full story about what is going on, there are some alternatives that are pretty clear:
Shoot hijacked plane down, everyone dies. Maybe some more people on the ground.
Follow plane, maybe hijackers crash it and kill everyone on board.
Hiackers land plane (somewhere>?) and a few passengers get killed.
Yes, pilots are trained to follow orders. But, we have let pilots get dragged into court over fairly minor stuff. Mistakes have been pushed down to the bomber pilot, down to the guy flying the plane. We have made military "mistakes" that have caused civilian deaths. No way is this not going to go through the head of someone behind an US civilian airliner. I cannot imagine a pilot launching a missle at an airliner without knowing the president and everyone down to him is going to stand behind him 100% when the story comes out. Since there is utterly no way you are going to convince the pilot of this, there is no way it is going to happen.
Now, the really, really bad part is should a civilian airliner be used in Iraq, Afganistan or elsewhere as a real weapon (even without passengers), because of previous screw-ups (Iranian passenger plane, Italian tramway cable, KAL007, etc.) it is not going to be shot down until it is confirmed 19 different ways. Just what the millitary needs - second guessing commands. Too bad we have made the pilots take the heat for mistakes in the past.
Screw that - arrested? Hah. In Chicago if a cop sees you with a handgun (or something that looks like a handgun, like maybe a cell phone) you are running the risk of being shot.
Brandishing a handgun (or worse, mutiple guns) immediately labels you as a drug dealer with a turf war in progress. There are enough people already running around with guns and intent to do others harm with them that we thank the police for providing such strong disincentives for displaying guns. Unfortunately, even the threat of immediate death does not deter some of these folks.
In my experience it almost never happens. No legal wrangling or threats either. Huh?
It is very simple. You are working at Company A and decide Company B would pay more and have better working conditions. Unless Company B is staffed by idiots and thieves, the first thing they ask for after your name is to see a copy of the non-compete agreement you signed with Company A. They know you signed one - everyone has to sign one. If you can't produce it, they can probably get a copy through some back-channel anyway. If it says you can't work for them specifically, that is probably not going to hold up. If it says you can't work on the same kind of stuff, they might find a non-conflicting place for you or drop you like a hot potato.
Yes, I have been on interviews where they have three different non-compete documents from the company I was coming from and asked which one I had signed. It doesn't take a staff a lawyers to figure this out. Hiring someone that is going to cause you legal trouble isn't worth it at all.
With Microsoft all I can assume is they really are staffed by idiots and thieves if they left themselves open to this kind of thing.
You no longer need to prove that your concept is implementable. Back in the 1800's it was a requirement to be able to supply a working model for a patent to be granted. Some people sent such models to the patent office. Clearly this became impractical.
I believe the rule was changed someting in the 1930s. No working models, no proof of the concept being implementable. With software and "concept" patents all you need is to write it up.
What would make the Muslim (and Aryan Nations folks) happy and remove the motivation for terrorism would be to:
Disband the state of Israel. Possibly execute all Jews, but more likely just ship them off to concentration camps somewhere in Poland. Anything short of this, such as disarming Israel by force and granting the Palestinians the "right of return" (effectively disbanding the state of Israel without saying so) would just lead to someone else killing the Israeli citizens.
Remove the current rulers from the existing Arab countries and replace them with an Islamic theocracy. A half-measure here would be to eliminate support for the current rulers and let them be overthrown. Might happen anyway at some point.
I don't see that any sort of "policy change" short of these two is going to help remove any motivations from terrorists. I don't think we are going to do either one of these things, so you can pretty much forget "policy changes".
Suppressing terrorists isn't something you can just turn the switch on to do. The profit has to be removed from it, which is where this is going. As long as they think they might win either conflict - Israel or establishment of Islamic theocracies - they are going to keep fighting any way they can. We can either give them what they want or convince them they can't have it. I do not think we want to live in a world where they get what they want.
Normally it is your homeowners/renters insurance that covers the contents of your car, not the auto insurance. Yes, you can get "extra insurance" as part of an auto policy that covers the contents in case of theft, but that usually isn't needed because of the homeowners/renters coverage.
The whole point of some blacklists is to prevent *commercial* email. So, what kind of email are companies going to send you? Therefore, it isn't relevent what they are trying to do or that they are blocked.
Your need to send email to AOL indicates an attempt to communicate with utterly clueless AOL users that can't get themselves a non-AOL email address. Serves them right to be cut off.
Of course, the larger spammers already have ways around both of these, so the flow of spam will not be deterred. The solution that many have taken is a whitelist where only the known-good are let in and everyone else is assumed to be bad. This also breaks email completely, but guess what? We're there already. Email is utterly broken because of blocking, blacklists that are maintained by zealots and whitelists.
The Amdahl V8 (large mainframe CPU) came in several different models and one primary difference was the clock speed. It might have been a different clock board, but I seem to recall it being primarily removing a wire-wrap wire.
I think Mr. Sterling's real "solution" is disclosed about 80% through the article:
(((How about the relatively simple solution of seven or eight billion of us starving to death? Or how about a few massive heat-wave-boosted lethal epidemics? That ought to put a swift kibosh on energy demand.)))
This is the only real solution according to much of the "Green" philosophy. I agree that it would solve most of the problems - having 1/8 of the population would put us back to where things were in the 1800s (or earlier) and effectively "solve" all of the pollution problems.
Unfortunately, I do not see many of the "Greens" volunteering to be in the first wave of losses to begin this process. If this is truely the way to a sustainable level of development, I see it coming about only as a couple of Green-inspired governments starting the process. Let's see, if Canada and Norway got together and declared war on Germany, France (nukes! bad!) and the US, could they win? Could they start a world war that would decrease the population by the necessary amount? I doubt it, but it would be a start in what could be considered "the right direction".
Are we interested in this as a solution?
Re:I'd suggest really old maps
on
Open Maps?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You can forget about accuracy with digitizing from aerial photographs. NavTech tried this for a long time and there are just too many corrections that needed to be applied to get things right. The photographs they were working from were paid for to be done "right" and they still didn't have the needed accuracy.
They now collect all geometry with differential GPS in car - driving all the roads.
Trust me, you aren't going to get anything usable from aerial photographs that were not created with this application in mind.
Navigation Technologies uses TIGER data as a base and then expands on it by adding and verifying street attributes (names, addresses, etc.) as well as fixing up the geometry. This is an enourmous task and they have a large staff dedicated to collecting this information.
They spend over 50 million a year collecting, administratrating and publishing this information.
Their competition spends about the same. This is not something a couple of guys can collaborate on and come up with something meaningful.
Understand that the range of an RFID is perhaps at best a few feet. Many applications are limited to 12-18 inches. This isn't something that can be tracked from a satellite.
Also, you miss the major point of anything like this. Forget law enforcement getting their hands on it - they have much better techniques. Look at the tollway automatic payment boxes (which aren't anything like RFID but do identify a car by radio) - at first they said they did not save the data. Then some enterprising lawyer got the idea of subpoenaing the data and it turns out they do keep it. This is now something every divorce attorney looks for. What you need to look at with dangerous applications of this is not law enforcement but the ability of the information to be subpoenaed.
And shoot those police with a shoot-to-kill order.
Come on, are you a sheep? Are you going to rattle off a list of things like this and say you have no responsibility for changing things? If you honestly believe your list, you know the 2000 election was rigged and the 2004 election will have a similar result. So, politics are dead in the US. What are you going to do?
If you do nothing it will soon be too late. How about a repeal of the 22nd amendment so George W. Bush can be "President for Life"? Do you think this is too far fetched? Obviously not, from your list. So, if you wait until November to overthrow the government, it may be too late and we will have no choices left. At least now it would be possible to rebuild the electoral process.
Well, standing here 200 years after that you might think this was a good thing. Look into how things were back then and you will discover that there were 20-30 "artists" that got patronage and the rest, well, they starved. Or went back to schlepping boxes.
The patronage system ended becase it compensated far too few people. It was a catch-22 system where to get noticed you had to do things that gave you exposure. How did you get exposure? By having a patron that financed it. It is sort of like looking for a job where everyone says they only want someone with experience. Also, "patronage" was something doled out by nobles. The kind of censorship they could have was incredible. I believe Mozart himself got into trouble with that - writing an opera that was critical of something your patron held dear was just not done! But Mozart (from what I recall) did it and suffered because of it.
What the "record company" model did for artists was to provide a way to finance the patronage (promotion) without it being at the whim of a noble. The incredible success of one performer subsidized the ones that were not as successful. In some ways, it is similar to a patronage system, but without the nobility - just crass commercialism.
Re:CD's are really a bargain when you put it this
on
The Way the Music Died
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You misunderstand the point. It isn't that you are "promoting the label" but what you are supporting is the "culture of risk".
What this means is that it is the business of recording companies to engage in somewhat risky behavior - they bring in artists that may become a big hit and sponsor them. It doesn't always work out that way, but enough do that it covers the costs for everything they do.
This is essentially how a venture capital fund works as well - not everything may be a hit, but enough works out that it keeps everything going.
This does mean that there are a lot of expenses going through the system that need to be paid for. So, the one "hit" that they get pays for the other 9 that didn't quite make it but a lot of promotion was done for.
One big problem today is that such strategies aren't very well thought of. The executives are looking at this in a more risk-adverse way and this leads to not wanting to take chances. So, we have endless copies of things that have been a hit with the hope that this is less risky and more of a sure thing. This sort of thinking almost always leads to failure, and I think there are precedents for saying so.
All this would mean is that electronic distribution would dry up. If all electronic copies are freely distributable - as long as no fee is charged - you have the situation where it is impossible for anyone to make money once it gets out in digital form.
People would set up web sites where you could download everything and use as a loss-leader to get you to come to their web site and buy other stuff they could charge for.
I don't know how you could control this either. For software it would mean the end of distribution, period. Once it was sold in digital form it could be redistributed freely. OK, that puts Microsoft effectively out of the game. And Adobe. And anybody else that does not believe in "everything should be free". Everyone would have to scramble to make things utterly undistributable except on a 12-pack of DVDs that would be impractical to distribute any other way.
If you leave a 9 year old alone to do whatever they want, you have pretty much abdicated responsibility for being a parent. So, if your child downloads and distributes something, the parents should take the heat. Just because someone is underage doesn't mean that there is no accountability anywhere.
Since "spamming" in and of itself isn't illegal, there couldn't possibly be a conviction there.
Identity theft, on the other hand is illegal, so he goes to jail.
I know of no law anywhere that makes spamming a criminal offence. Now maybe CAN-SPAM defined some thing that can lead to a fine based on how email addresses are collected, but collecting email addresses is a lot different than spamming.
I know of no respected study that links Aluminum with Alzheimers or any other neurological problems. I know of lots of web pages filled with scary stories about how cooking with Aluminum pans made their aunt, uncle, father, brother or whatever have problems.
No science plus lots of anecdotal evidence leads people to very, very wrong conclusions. And, in places where the "Greens" have more political clout you get laws passed that codify bad science into rules that people think are grounded in something. In nearly all cases this is made-up nonsense from purely anecdotal hearsay.
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How about living somewhere besides the USA where when you get old, you die? After all, that is what is supposed to happen, isn't it? What is this with spending millions of dollars to try to get a few more hours of life? I think I remember reading that around 80% of the money spent on health care in the US is during the last six months of life. This is vastly different from other countries, and it is why other countries have quite different health care systems.
Hah. This is not an MBA. This is the CEO of Roxio.
Anyway, from everything I have seen, the mindset in the US is quite a bit different than in Europe. I think in the US there might be a lot problems with:
- Lots more people spending all of their time high. Not sure "addict" is the right label here, but certainly the millions on welfare that aren't interested in working would have something new to occupy their time.
- Stepping stones for sure. If we saw pot go from "bad, real bad" to "good, real good" what would this say to the 12 year olds that are watching friends smoking now? Why would anyone stop them? And, this would certainly bring them into more contact with the dealers that used to be dealing pot.
In the US high prices, limited availability and legal problems are the only things keeping a lot of folks off the stuff.I'm glad Belgium has more responsible people, but that doesn't help us over here.
QEMM from Quarterdeck. Multi-tasking for DOS applications. Windowing and virtual full screen displays. This existed before the 386, but with a 386 things got much better.
Except, some other large corporation is going to pick up the recently-expired copyright works and republish them under their own name. Their compliation will then be under their copyright and folks will have a devil of a time telling the two apart. This will make for some amusing court decisions.
In short, somebody is going to grab the rights to distribute something that enters the public domain if it has any value. Then it will just benefit that different big business (stockholder or individually owned, it matters not).
The point isn't that it is a decision between the current owner benefiting or the "public at large" . No, the decision is between the current owner and some carrion-feeding consolidator picking up the rights and publishing their new compilation.
Think about it. A pilot gets an order to shoot down a hijacked passenger plane. Assuming someone had knowledge an hour after the first tower impact that other planes were being used in a similar fashion, there is still no way a pilot is going to be hanging out there shooting a US civilian airliner down without lots and lots of confirmation. The kind of confirmation that comes on the 6:00 news. Let's see - if you don't know the full story about what is going on, there are some alternatives that are pretty clear:
Yes, pilots are trained to follow orders. But, we have let pilots get dragged into court over fairly minor stuff. Mistakes have been pushed down to the bomber pilot, down to the guy flying the plane. We have made military "mistakes" that have caused civilian deaths. No way is this not going to go through the head of someone behind an US civilian airliner. I cannot imagine a pilot launching a missle at an airliner without knowing the president and everyone down to him is going to stand behind him 100% when the story comes out. Since there is utterly no way you are going to convince the pilot of this, there is no way it is going to happen.
Now, the really, really bad part is should a civilian airliner be used in Iraq, Afganistan or elsewhere as a real weapon (even without passengers), because of previous screw-ups (Iranian passenger plane, Italian tramway cable, KAL007, etc.) it is not going to be shot down until it is confirmed 19 different ways. Just what the millitary needs - second guessing commands. Too bad we have made the pilots take the heat for mistakes in the past.
Brandishing a handgun (or worse, mutiple guns) immediately labels you as a drug dealer with a turf war in progress. There are enough people already running around with guns and intent to do others harm with them that we thank the police for providing such strong disincentives for displaying guns. Unfortunately, even the threat of immediate death does not deter some of these folks.
It is very simple. You are working at Company A and decide Company B would pay more and have better working conditions. Unless Company B is staffed by idiots and thieves, the first thing they ask for after your name is to see a copy of the non-compete agreement you signed with Company A. They know you signed one - everyone has to sign one. If you can't produce it, they can probably get a copy through some back-channel anyway. If it says you can't work for them specifically, that is probably not going to hold up. If it says you can't work on the same kind of stuff, they might find a non-conflicting place for you or drop you like a hot potato.
Yes, I have been on interviews where they have three different non-compete documents from the company I was coming from and asked which one I had signed. It doesn't take a staff a lawyers to figure this out. Hiring someone that is going to cause you legal trouble isn't worth it at all.
With Microsoft all I can assume is they really are staffed by idiots and thieves if they left themselves open to this kind of thing.
Item 2 does not require feasability, just that you write it down in a specific and detailed manner.
Item 3 is not required and has not been required for quite some time - I believe around 70 years.
I believe the rule was changed someting in the 1930s. No working models, no proof of the concept being implementable. With software and "concept" patents all you need is to write it up.
- Disband the state of Israel. Possibly execute all Jews, but more likely just ship them off to concentration camps somewhere in Poland. Anything short of this, such as disarming Israel by force and granting the Palestinians the "right of return" (effectively disbanding the state of Israel without saying so) would just lead to someone else killing the Israeli citizens.
- Remove the current rulers from the existing Arab countries and replace them with an Islamic theocracy. A half-measure here would be to eliminate support for the current rulers and let them be overthrown. Might happen anyway at some point.
I don't see that any sort of "policy change" short of these two is going to help remove any motivations from terrorists. I don't think we are going to do either one of these things, so you can pretty much forget "policy changes".Suppressing terrorists isn't something you can just turn the switch on to do. The profit has to be removed from it, which is where this is going. As long as they think they might win either conflict - Israel or establishment of Islamic theocracies - they are going to keep fighting any way they can. We can either give them what they want or convince them they can't have it. I do not think we want to live in a world where they get what they want.
Normally it is your homeowners/renters insurance that covers the contents of your car, not the auto insurance. Yes, you can get "extra insurance" as part of an auto policy that covers the contents in case of theft, but that usually isn't needed because of the homeowners/renters coverage.
Your need to send email to AOL indicates an attempt to communicate with utterly clueless AOL users that can't get themselves a non-AOL email address. Serves them right to be cut off.
Of course, the larger spammers already have ways around both of these, so the flow of spam will not be deterred. The solution that many have taken is a whitelist where only the known-good are let in and everyone else is assumed to be bad. This also breaks email completely, but guess what? We're there already. Email is utterly broken because of blocking, blacklists that are maintained by zealots and whitelists.
The Amdahl V8 (large mainframe CPU) came in several different models and one primary difference was the clock speed. It might have been a different clock board, but I seem to recall it being primarily removing a wire-wrap wire.
Unfortunately, I do not see many of the "Greens" volunteering to be in the first wave of losses to begin this process. If this is truely the way to a sustainable level of development, I see it coming about only as a couple of Green-inspired governments starting the process. Let's see, if Canada and Norway got together and declared war on Germany, France (nukes! bad!) and the US, could they win? Could they start a world war that would decrease the population by the necessary amount? I doubt it, but it would be a start in what could be considered "the right direction".
Are we interested in this as a solution?
They now collect all geometry with differential GPS in car - driving all the roads.
Trust me, you aren't going to get anything usable from aerial photographs that were not created with this application in mind.
They spend over 50 million a year collecting, administratrating and publishing this information.
Their competition spends about the same. This is not something a couple of guys can collaborate on and come up with something meaningful.
Also, you miss the major point of anything like this. Forget law enforcement getting their hands on it - they have much better techniques. Look at the tollway automatic payment boxes (which aren't anything like RFID but do identify a car by radio) - at first they said they did not save the data. Then some enterprising lawyer got the idea of subpoenaing the data and it turns out they do keep it. This is now something every divorce attorney looks for. What you need to look at with dangerous applications of this is not law enforcement but the ability of the information to be subpoenaed.
Come on, are you a sheep? Are you going to rattle off a list of things like this and say you have no responsibility for changing things? If you honestly believe your list, you know the 2000 election was rigged and the 2004 election will have a similar result. So, politics are dead in the US. What are you going to do?
If you do nothing it will soon be too late. How about a repeal of the 22nd amendment so George W. Bush can be "President for Life"? Do you think this is too far fetched? Obviously not, from your list. So, if you wait until November to overthrow the government, it may be too late and we will have no choices left. At least now it would be possible to rebuild the electoral process.
The patronage system ended becase it compensated far too few people. It was a catch-22 system where to get noticed you had to do things that gave you exposure. How did you get exposure? By having a patron that financed it. It is sort of like looking for a job where everyone says they only want someone with experience. Also, "patronage" was something doled out by nobles. The kind of censorship they could have was incredible. I believe Mozart himself got into trouble with that - writing an opera that was critical of something your patron held dear was just not done! But Mozart (from what I recall) did it and suffered because of it.
What the "record company" model did for artists was to provide a way to finance the patronage (promotion) without it being at the whim of a noble. The incredible success of one performer subsidized the ones that were not as successful. In some ways, it is similar to a patronage system, but without the nobility - just crass commercialism.
What this means is that it is the business of recording companies to engage in somewhat risky behavior - they bring in artists that may become a big hit and sponsor them. It doesn't always work out that way, but enough do that it covers the costs for everything they do.
This is essentially how a venture capital fund works as well - not everything may be a hit, but enough works out that it keeps everything going.
This does mean that there are a lot of expenses going through the system that need to be paid for. So, the one "hit" that they get pays for the other 9 that didn't quite make it but a lot of promotion was done for.
One big problem today is that such strategies aren't very well thought of. The executives are looking at this in a more risk-adverse way and this leads to not wanting to take chances. So, we have endless copies of things that have been a hit with the hope that this is less risky and more of a sure thing. This sort of thinking almost always leads to failure, and I think there are precedents for saying so.
People would set up web sites where you could download everything and use as a loss-leader to get you to come to their web site and buy other stuff they could charge for.
I don't know how you could control this either. For software it would mean the end of distribution, period. Once it was sold in digital form it could be redistributed freely. OK, that puts Microsoft effectively out of the game. And Adobe. And anybody else that does not believe in "everything should be free". Everyone would have to scramble to make things utterly undistributable except on a 12-pack of DVDs that would be impractical to distribute any other way.
I don't think I would like this at all!
If you leave a 9 year old alone to do whatever they want, you have pretty much abdicated responsibility for being a parent. So, if your child downloads and distributes something, the parents should take the heat. Just because someone is underage doesn't mean that there is no accountability anywhere.
Identity theft, on the other hand is illegal, so he goes to jail.
I know of no law anywhere that makes spamming a criminal offence. Now maybe CAN-SPAM defined some thing that can lead to a fine based on how email addresses are collected, but collecting email addresses is a lot different than spamming.
No science plus lots of anecdotal evidence leads people to very, very wrong conclusions. And, in places where the "Greens" have more political clout you get laws passed that codify bad science into rules that people think are grounded in something. In nearly all cases this is made-up nonsense from purely anecdotal hearsay.