Because they think of themselves as the "good guys", and the history they are taught (by school, Hollywood, the media, etc) portrays bad things being done by "bad guys". In reality, there is no good and bad, just a mixture of greys.
I completely agree that history as it is taught is a mostly worthless mess of "we are infinitely good" and "they are infinitely bad". However, to day that "there is no good and bad, just a mixture of greys" is ridiculous! There are many events throughtout history that are very clearly Bad and others that are clearly Good, regardless of your ethical background.
Let's look at a few extreme examples:
6 million Jews are murdered in German death camps during World War II
An estimated 20 million Russians are murdered in the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign
American slavery is an established institution for hundreds of years
Native Americans are nearly wiped out by small-pox infected blankets and through other genocidal actions
There is no shades of grey in those acts. They were and are evil acts.
Now the fact that American history books as taught in our schools will only go into detail on the first two (non-American "bad guys") and gives only token treatment to slavery and usually don't mention the Native American genocide is an entirely different problem...
They should do what my damn cell phone company does: Knock the hardware down to like $99, and make me pay a very affordable $9.95 a month.
I just bought a TiVo yesterday (my third). It was $50 (not $99) for the hardware (40hr). I pay $6.95 (not $9.95) a month for service.
Now it's not quite as good of a deal if you don't already have a TiVo since the one-TiVo rate is $12.95/mo. In my case, I paid for the service up-front since I hate mail-in rebates so this TiVo is usable for at least 23 months... which comes out to just under $9 a month for everything. Not a bad deal considering it's better than your "less expensive" proposal:-)
Why eBay? Why not require it for garage sales? Why not go after silent auctions that all sorts of places run (like many school districts and churches to raise funds). Usually there is a little good a law might do, or you can at least see some good intent behind it. This would do anything but prevent everyone in ND from selling things on eBay.
There are a lot of good reasons why this law is a bad idea... but this is not one of them. The examples you gave are private individuals (or groups of private individuals) engaging in commerce directly. Even the school or church auctions are typically run by volunteers or people working for the organization that stands to receive the money.
This proposed bill has nothing to do with situations like that, even if you extrapolate that to eBay. The proposed bill only goes after those people that are posting items to eBay on consignment for others. In other words, those businesses (and that's what it is even if the "business" is just one person working out of her basement) that profit from selling other people's items.
If we wanted to create an analogy to garage sales or church auctions, we would have to introduce some paid third party. Say my church wants to hold an auction to raise some funds and solicits donations from church members. Rather than run the auction ourselves, though, we hire the good folks at ChristianAuctions.com to handle all the details in exchange for 5% of the profits. In this analogy, the ChristianAuctions.com folks would be the ones taxed by the proposed bill and not the church or the people that donated the items.
To summarize: Bill = Bad, but not for the above reasons.
she worked 3/4 quarters of the year. Probably with good benefits, and retirement.
you work all year, probably with moderate benefits, and for only 10% more pay.
so, you work 25% more then her for 10% more pay...now who is making less?
hint: you.
Yes, but you missed a crucial detail: she had 15 years of experience and I was a fresh college grad. The fact that I was even in the same ballpark salary-wise shows how ridiculous the pay disparity was. A starting teacher (which is what I would have been) would make far far less. As I mentioned in my post, I made some 85% more (with full benefits and pension plan) as a starting software developer than I would have as a starting teacher.
As far as the working only 3/4 of the year... most of the teachers I knew made so little that they had to work during the summer to make some "extra" money just to get by. The few that were able to take the summer off either had a spouse that worked full-time or were close enough to retirement that everything was paid off and they had decent savings.
And that doesn't even get into the relatively new requirements for continued training that teachers have to go through. Add a few weeks of that each year and the actual free time a lot of teachers have amounts to just a few weeks.
I don't think the "likely" is an appropriately strong word to describe the chances that the person will receive a paycut going from a development job to a public teaching post. Perhaps calling it a "certain" paycut or "drastic" paycut is more realistic.
When I was in college, I got a secondary education ("high school") degree in addition to my computer science major. Throughout most of my schooling, I assumed that I would end up as a teacher rather than a software developer. In fact, it wasn't until I did my stint at student teaching ("practice" teaching in other countries, maybe?) and started getting some job offers did I come crashing down to reality.
In reality, the pay disparity is ludicrous. My mentoring teacher had been at the job for 15 years and was a wonderful and passionate educator. Yet my first job offer for a software developer position not only matched what she made but was some 10% higher. That's 15 years of dedicated improvement to her craft vs straight out of college. That offer was also roughly 85% more than I would have made as a starting teacher. Now, eight years later, I am making nearly (but not quite) 3x more than I would be had I remained in the teaching position. So calling it a "likely" paycut just isn't strong enough.
The shortage of math and science teachers isn't just due to the pay disparity, though. IMO, the other "big" knock against being a math or science teacher is that your students will fight you every step of the way unless you luck out with advanced classes (calculus, AP chem, etc). Facing a sea of disintrested or hostile faces in the "mandatory" classes can be soul-deadening.
But if you're close to retirement and have enough of a financial buffer to handle the massive paycut and enough passion for teaching to block out the soul-suckers, then this is a wonderful offer. Kudos to IBM for taking the lead on this!
As opposed to today, where they can go into any hardware store and buy a $1 blank and $3 service to dup your key onto another key?
Will that work with any new cars? The last three cars I've owned all had keys with chips in them. Lose the key and the dealer charges between $100 and $200 to replace it.
I'd imagine that the USB key would work somehow similar. Maybe it could encrypt the contents using some unique hardware ID associated with the key. If you lost it, you would have to go to the dealer to get a replacement... just like you (or me, at least) have to now.
Isn't the notion that you would "invest" in a computer for your kid for their school work an outmoded concept? Especially among the more tech-friendly crowd here at/.?
My daughter got her first computer before she was in Kindergarten and well before she could read. Why? Well, why not? I had some 8 or 9 computers hanging around so it wasn't any sacrifice to just put one of them in her room. Plus, it was interesting to see how a TRUE computer newbie reacted to Linux (SuSE 8.x)... but that's besides the point.
She just started 3rd grade yesterday and does so with an iBook as her primary computer. This has nothing at all to do with school. In fact, if she has something from school that can be done on a computer at all, then this will be the first year that that is the case. No, she has an iBook not because it's a good investment in her education but because it's the best choice of a computer for her overall (runs OS X, inexpensive if bought used, can hook up to her 20" monitor but can still take it on road trips).
My (rambling) point here is that with computers (and even laptops) so plentiful and so ubiquitous in our lives, the concept of getting one for your kid just for school is just odd.
Speaking of which, did anybody else notice the author description in that article?
"Bjarne Stroustrup is the College of Engineering Professor in Computer Science at Texas A&M University"
What!? Isn't that like saying the George Bush is a businessman from Texas? It's technically true, but completely misses the point on what matters.
This makes even less sense when you try to find the target audience. If the person reading the article already knows who Bjarne is (by which I mean every single C++ programmer), then I could see them omitting the entire "creator of C++" description because, well, they already know... but then why have a description at all?
If the person doesn't already know who this "Bjarne" is and they are reading the article, don't you think they'd want to know that he created the thing and therefore might have some relevant opinions on that matter?
Right, because Tivo doesn't already have that (caveat: requires a Series 2 Tivo that's been upgraded with the now-free HME software, which you should already have from standard updates unless you've specifically hacked your Tivo not to update). You can also watch recordings in multiple rooms (requires a second Tivo, of course), view photos and listen to music, transfer your recordings to your PCs (caveat: with DRM, but what did you expect?), and develop new applets.
I have three Tivo systems, including two Series2 sets and use all three nearly obsessively. I use the multi-room feature every other week or so (much more so during the winter). Transferring shows between sets is nearly trivial.
All that said, I wouldn't dream of suggesting that Tivo Central Online and Tivo2Go come close to approximating the power of TivoWeb or the like. Tivo Online, for instance, has two fatal flaws:
It doesn't show you your current recording schedule
Recording are scheduled the next time your Tivo updates
As far as I'm concerned, those two flaws make the entire feature useless. The only time I would want remote scheduling is when I'm away from the Tivo (meaning I need some way of knowing what is scheduled) and forgot to record something (meaning I want it to take effect right NOW).
The Tivo2Go feature is also fundamentally flawed... also for two reasons:
It is Windows only and costs $50 extra
The downloaded show is difficult to edit
All but one of my systems runs either OS X or Linux and that sole Windows system has no burner. Oops... Tivo2Go is unusable already. Then, when I download shows, I edit off the commercials (this was doubly important back when I encoded the result on VCDs since a full show with commercials wouldn't fit on one CD)... Tivo2Go fails again.
To sum up, I remain a huge Tivo fan and think they do most things absolutely right. But as long as they cripple remote scheduling and downloading, TivoWeb and the like (IMO) remain essential "power user" utilities.
I've been trying to make sense of Larry McVoy's actions here and the only sane conclusion I can come to is that he is one of the ultimate advocates of Open Source. He is willing to go as far as destroying his own company to make a point on the benefits of Open Source!
Right now, he is saying this to potential BitMover clients: "If you use BitKeeper, then I will control your development process. I am free to change how you work at just a whim." Can you imagine even ONE company that would accept terms like this? I can't.
Therefore, his actions now will have the result of destroying his company. That means that he is either incredibly stupid or has some other plan so clever that nobody (or almost nobody) sees it. I think it's the latter.
He's said many times that he is a big advocate of Open Source. Now, he is showing an object lesson on how horrible proprietary software can be. "Look at how much I can screw you over," he is telling us. "I wouldn't be able to do this if BitKeeper was Open Source."
Very clever! By sacrificing his company, he gets his point across much more strongly than mere words could ever do. Bravo McVoy!
Yes, I learned a long time ago that the best approach is to make my signature a completely uninteligable squiggle.
My signature is also not at all related to my name. It's always the same, but no part of it looks anything like letters. Looking back through the years, I can see a point where it was my name and then sorta-like my name.. but it's not anymore.
This has some nice benefits. The biggest is that you don't have to sign your full name on legal documents. I remember that the first mortgage I got was extremely hard on my hand since I had to keep writing my full name. This was back when it was semi-legible. Fast forward to refinancing my current house and my signature is scribbles from legibility point of view. When it came time to sign the papers, I refused to write out my full name. The loan officers conferred with their boss and then their boss's boss and then her boss before the word finally came down that as long as you couldn't see ANY part of my name in my signature, that I could use that instead of writing out my name in cursive. Saving a few minutes off of the loan signing time was nice but nothing compared to not having to pop a few Advil to dull the hand pain.
I don't know if you intended to use it as a strawman argument, but the following made me laugh aloud: "Would you complain if the police pulled you over for doing 70 mph through a school zone?"
I love it! It is, on the surface, apropos of nothing but is so audacious that it may well be apropos of everything. How can you argue with such a thing?
Them: I don't think paying a Use Tax is right, so I won't You: Not paying a Use Tax is like doing 70mph through a school zone Them:
I plan on using it regularly from now on in all my arguments. Thank you!
When I was in 6th or 7th grade (don't remember which), our school got its first set of computers. All 16 Apple IIe computers were lined up on one wall of the library until somebody could figure out what to use them for. The school had very few programs.. Oregon Trail and a typing one, mostly. Some kids had Apple's at home, though, and very quickly, BurgerTime and Mario Bros joined the list as unlabled disks that we all knew about.
Anyway, I was in "honor study hall" back then since I always finished my homework quickly and never needed to study. Bored smart kids are good at coming up with creative mischief in study hall so they shipped 10 of us to the library instead where we could do whatever we wanted.
What we wanted to do was play Mario Bros and BurgerTime on the new computers. The librarian, though, wanted us to work for it. She happened to have a subscription to an Apple magazine.. type type that, back then, always had BASIC program listings in them. The C64 equivalent would be "Run" but I don't remember what the Apple one was called, anymore. Anyway, she had a rule that if we wanted to play a non-educational game, we first had to type in and correctly run a program from the magazine. Smart lady!
The first program we typed in was a "word muncher" type one where letters came down the screen and we had to type it before it got to the bottom. It was very simple (the letters weren't random, the speed was constant, the location was constant, etc). We all finished it and the other nine kids showed their work to the librarian and promptly started playing their games. I, on the other hand, was fascinated by what I had just done! By just typing a few simple things, I could make the computer do what I told it. I remember feeling almost euphoric when I realized how much power I had over it.
Very quickly, I started playing with the code. I would change a few words here and there and move things around... just to see what they did. After a few weeks, my word muncher game had levels of increasing difficulty, sometimes two or three letters at a time, and of course they were all random. The fact that I could do that hooked me forever.
Now what about the other kids in the study hall with me? Well, they saw what I was doing and they were impressed... and they even played my game when I was done (I learned later that it went into circulation as an "official" game in the Library for years to come)... yet whenever I tried to explain how it worked or convince them to make their own changes, they wouldn't. They didn't care at all. I couldn't fathom how they could see this magic taking place and now want to have a taste of it... but they didn't.
In years to follow, I took up BASIC, assembly, and then C on a C64 and tons of other languages on other systems but I never forgot that first intoxicating taste of raw power that I had over that simple little Apple IIe
The lesson I learned from my fellow students' reactions was almost as enlightening. They were just as smart as me (and in one case, although I would never have admitted it back then, smarter than me), yet they showed know interest at all in it. I would learn as the years went by that this reaction was actually the normal one and my reaction was the oddity.
That's why, in a few years, I will push my daughter to do some programming (probably in Python) but if she doesn't pick it up almost immediately, I'll drop it. Either you recognize the wonder or you don't.
I think that the message here is much more ominous than what the surface story tells. The young man simply stated his great dislike for the United States government that is in place. He also made a flip comment about himself being a pilot of one 9/11 planes that crashed into the towers. I only see a crime here if he actually did the task.
If that was the only reason he was arrested and indicted, then I agree that this is a scary precedent. But is it the reason? I don't think this story gives that kind of detail. This is all it says:
Mr. Walker, a 19-year-old student, is accused, among other things, of using his roommate's computer to communicate with - and offer aid to - a federally designated terrorist group in Somalia and with helping to run a jihadist Web site.
"I hate the U.S. government," is among the statements Mr. Walker is said to have posted online. "I wish I could have been flying one of the planes on Sept. 11."
It doesn't say that he is accused of making treasonous speech or inciting war or anything at all of the type. He is accused of offering aid and running a website for known terrorist groups. The quotes from Walker seem to be included only to make him look obviously guilty to the reader.
Still, this article doesn't say very much at all. It's entirely possible that those statements really are the crux of the case ("offering aid"). If that's the case, then I agree, this case if far more serious than anything to do with "wiretapping the Internet". This would be a dagger deep into the heart of our notion of free speech.
So with that in mind, I tend to think that this case is something else. Yes, I know we've lost a lot of our rights concerning free speech in the past few years, but I don't think we've gotten quite that far.
Killing babies, though... man. That's a moral issue, not a religious one. Even the most vocal proponent of "choice," which is just a euphamism for "death," [snip]
"[C]hoice" is not a euphemism for "death". That attitude is eactly what makes any Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice debate a waste of time. Both sides are talking about completely different things.
There are two distinct questions regarding this issue that determine your true stance:
Do you believe that a person has the right to choose to have (or not have) an abortion? The other way of asking this is "Do you believe that somebody else's moral beliefs should be able to force a woman to not have (or have) an abortion regardless of her beliefs?"
Do you believe that life begins at conception (thus making abortion a practice of "killing babies") or at some later point (birth, perhaps)?
The Pro-Choice and Pro-Life camps have each answers only one of the questions and each chose a different question. In fact, it's possible to have four different positions on the issue:
Position 1: "I believe that abortion is morally wrong but I don't believe I have the right to force this belief on others." (Pro-Life/Pro-Choice)
Position 2: "I believe that abortion is morally wrong and furthermore, I believe that I have the right to prevent others from doing it as well." (Pro-Life/Anti-Choice)
Position 3: "I believe that abortion is not morally wrong and also I believe that others have the right to choose on their own" (Anti-Life/Pro-Choice)
Position 4: "I believe that abortion is not morally wrong and furthermore, I think it should be mandated." (Anti-Life/Anti-Choice)
The fourth position is fairly off-the-wall which leaves us with three perfectly valid positions. Unfortunately, the Pro-Life movement is nearly entire made up of people taking position 2 and the vast majority of Pro-Choice people are position 3.
That leaves people in the Pro-Life/Pro-Choice camps out in the cold.
I, for instance, consider myself Pro-Life/Pro-Choice. I don't know when life begins for sure, but it's surely early enough to make abortion a very hard moral position to defend. On the other hand, I cannot allow myself to force my beliefs on somebody else. If another person comes to the moral decision that life begins at, say, birth, then it would be unbelievably arrogant of me to say that only my belief is the valid one.
So saying that "choice" = "death" is just continuing the trend of further confusing two distinct issues.
I can go along with a lot of what the Green party stands for. In fact, most 3rd parties get closer to representing my political views than the Democratic or Republican Parties. But going through the Green Party platform, I came across their concept of a maximum wage.
Yes, that's right, they are proposing a MAXIMUM wage in addition to a minimum one. Any money you make above and beyond 10 times the minimum wage is taken away from you (taxed at 100%).
Eh? Isn't this political suicide? That's such a monumentally horrible idea that it taints every other position they have!
And no, I'm not complaining because I make more than that (~$200,000/yr since their proposed minimum wage is $10/hr) because I don't come close... but I'd like to think that someday, somehow I might. But if I knew that it would all be taken away from me... yeesh!
If the "wasted vote" argument ever held any water, it doesn't any more. The two major parties have moved toward a weird, non-existent "center" for the last 50 years, to the point where it's difficult to tell them apart.
I parroted that stance almost word-for-word while explaining why I didn't vote in the last election. Gore and Bush, in my mind, were as different as John Jackson and Jack Johnson on Futurama (by which I mean, not at all). I figured that any candidate that could survive to the presidental level had to be so generic as to be indistinguishable from his opponent.
The past four years have proven me very wrong! Regardless of whether or not you think Bush's radical right policy shifts are good, it's hard to argue that had Gore taken power, that things wouldn't be very different.
So I am viewing this election in a different light. I don't like either choice, but at least now I realize that there is one.
>However, if you want a pre-built binary for your platform, then it'll cost you (roughly) $30.
You make a good point, but you picked the wrong example. QCad for Windows is not released under the GPL. To quote the README: "all QCad versions for Windows are proprietary software."
Yes, I know and I address that later
I could download his source, compile some binaries for at least Linux and OSX (QtWindows complicates matters so we'll leave that out) and sell them for $5
The complicating factor with QCad is the fact that Qt isn't GPL under Windows. Therefore, QCad is dual-licensed.
That is why I tried to constrict my example to just Linux and OSX binaries. XChat isn't dual licensed so that part of QCad's scheme just doesn't apply.
This sounds like one of those arguments between those who think that the "free" part of the GPL refers to cost ("free beer") and those who realize that it has nothing at all to do with cost and everything to do with freedom ("free speech"). This isn't at all going into a grey area or even into any of the remotely confusing parts of the GPL.
Simply put, the GPL does not prohibit charging for binaries. It doesn't even prohibit charging for source (and in fact, I believe RMS has said in the past that he favors charging for the source since it adds perceived value.. I could be very wrong on that, though). What the GPL prohibits is the recipient of the binary or source from redistributing for free later.
I first came across this style of distributing binaries with the QCad program. QCad is GPLed and is based off of Qt. You can freely download the source and build it yourself if you like. However, if you want a pre-built binary for your platform, then it'll cost you (roughly) $30. I think that's a great idea. What you are paying for, then, is the convenience of not having to build it yourself. Plus, in this case, it gives you a bit of a support contract which is not given for those that build it themselves.
Now say for the sake of argument that I thought that the QCad author was ripping people off (I don't). I could download his source, compile some binaries for at least Linux and OSX (QtWindows complicates matters so we'll leave that out) and sell them for $5. That would be totally legal and probably even ethical. It would also mean that I was being a jerk.. but the GPL says nothing about that.
So this entire XChat thing is all a bunch of hair pulling over nothing. They don't need any "okay" from ANY of the code contributors unless they change the license.. and they aren't in this case. If any of the (misguided) contributors insist that their code was meant to be used only in the "free beer" sense as well, then they have every right to create their own XChat windows binaries and distribute them on their own.
I love lists like this as they remind me of long forgotten books that I really enjoyed growing up. "How To Eat Fried Worms" was the funniest book in existence when I was 9. At one time, the most powerful book I had read was "Bridge to Terabithia". "Lord of the Flies" entranced me in Jr High. Those, and books like them, were all ones that really had an impact on me at a particular age but were ones that I have since forgotten.
This don't think it's odd that a list of banned books would have a lot of very good books one them. Good books tend to be more challenging to the reader and it's exactly those challenging parts that certain people object to. To those people, if it's not the same old pablum, then they don't want anything to do with it.
Still, there are some books on the list that are decidedly NOT great or even good books. "Sex", by Madonna. "The New Joy of Gay Sex". I'll have to admit that I can definitely see why somebody would try to get them banned from a public library. After all, you don't see Hustler magazine next to the New York Times at public libraries so why should you expect to find "Sex"? But on the flip side to that, they ARE books and as such, were I at a public library, I would fight any attempt to ban them.
And finally, it would be nice if this particular list had the following info: 1. Was the book actually banned? All it says is they were all "challenged" which means "somebody tried to ban it" to me. 2. WHY was the book challenged in the first place?
The monthly fee isn't as bad as it used to be for users with multiple TiVos. I bought the lifetime subscription for my Series 1 and then transferred it to my Series 2. That one has saved me a bit of money based on how long I've had it.
However, I just bought another Series 2 TiVo ($99!) and this time I'm going with the monthly fee. That's because with two active TiVos, the monthly fee is now down to only $6.95/mo. At this rate, it would take me almost 4 years to recoup the up-front cost of the lifetime subscription.
Now if there was no multiple-TiVo discount, I would still definitely do the lifetime...
I haven't had an iPod long enough to know: does the software for a new generation ever propogate back to the previous generation? I have a 3G iPod and am looking longingly at "Shuffle Songs" option at the top-level menu.
Basically, I listen to a lot of songs and audiobooks on my iPod. I find it necessary to "shuffle" my songs since the iPod won't honor any sort of iTunes playlist order.. but I don't want my audiobooks shuffled at all (skipping from chapter 5 to 19 and back to 13 isn't as fun as it sounds). Having a setting right on the top menu would be too handy.
So do these features ever propagate back or is my 3G software likely to never change again?
The issue with transfering these aged systems to modern hardware under emulation is that people actually took time to optimize the programs, given the limited capabilities of the machines. Thus, emulators usually are not complete enough in their emulation to run the incredibly customized software properly.
Ah, but what you are forgetting is that this particular simulator (SIMH) is Open Source. If it doesn't run your customizations fast enough, you can "simply" customize SIMH to act accordingly. Remember that with a simulator, you have access to everything! Giving priority to those tasks that you deem worthy is a very feasible course of action.
In an enterprise environment (where VAXen are most often used), it's not feasible to just drop the architecture and switch to another. The amount of code running on the VAX is likely massive and no, it doesn't easily translate into code that works on Unix systems.
A good intermediate step in any migration is to use the SIMH simulator (http://simh.trailing-edge.com). SIMH can simulate quite a few systems (including a VAX) at the CPU level. As you may expect, this involves emulating every single CPU instruction... not a very efficient way to run code! However, its saving grace is that modern processors are very fast and old VAX systems are not. Depending on how old your VAX hardware is, you might find that an emulated VAX running on a newer P4/Xeon/Athlon/Opteron will be faster than the stock VAX!
This doesn't solve the migration problem but it does allow you to run your old code on modern easily-fixable and readily-available hardware. Beats having to get all of your parts off of eBay.
It doesn't matter if it takes you 4 minutes or 9 days to get into a given orbit, you are still going at the same speed once you actually get there either way. You have to be. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to get there. Anything that falls to the earth from a non-orbital position hits the earth at 11 km/sec (escape speed), minus the speed that it bleeds off in the atmosphere.
This is the part that I still don't get. Say I design a rocket ship that has an infinite supply of fuel. I set it so that it goes up at exactly 1m/s. I imagine that as I get higher up, I will need less force (not sure if that's the right physics term) to go my 1m/s so I dial-back the throttle a bit to make sure my speed stays constant.
Now according to everything I've heard, I will not be able to escape Earth's orbit going at this speed. Why? What is going to keep me from slowly but surely slipping away at my pokey 1m/s? Gravity? Wouldn't that decrease as I got farther up? Atmosphere? Same thing. What?
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I completely agree that history as it is taught is a mostly worthless mess of "we are infinitely good" and "they are infinitely bad". However, to day that "there is no good and bad, just a mixture of greys" is ridiculous! There are many events throughtout history that are very clearly Bad and others that are clearly Good, regardless of your ethical background.
Let's look at a few extreme examples:
There is no shades of grey in those acts. They were and are evil acts.
Now the fact that American history books as taught in our schools will only go into detail on the first two (non-American "bad guys") and gives only token treatment to slavery and usually don't mention the Native American genocide is an entirely different problem...
I just bought a TiVo yesterday (my third). It was $50 (not $99) for the hardware (40hr). I pay $6.95 (not $9.95) a month for service.
Now it's not quite as good of a deal if you don't already have a TiVo since the one-TiVo rate is $12.95/mo. In my case, I paid for the service up-front since I hate mail-in rebates so this TiVo is usable for at least 23 months... which comes out to just under $9 a month for everything. Not a bad deal considering it's better than your "less expensive" proposal :-)
There are a lot of good reasons why this law is a bad idea ... but this is not one of them. The examples you gave are private individuals (or groups of private individuals) engaging in commerce directly. Even the school or church auctions are typically run by volunteers or people working for the organization that stands to receive the money.
This proposed bill has nothing to do with situations like that, even if you extrapolate that to eBay. The proposed bill only goes after those people that are posting items to eBay on consignment for others. In other words, those businesses (and that's what it is even if the "business" is just one person working out of her basement) that profit from selling other people's items.
If we wanted to create an analogy to garage sales or church auctions, we would have to introduce some paid third party. Say my church wants to hold an auction to raise some funds and solicits donations from church members. Rather than run the auction ourselves, though, we hire the good folks at ChristianAuctions.com to handle all the details in exchange for 5% of the profits. In this analogy, the ChristianAuctions.com folks would be the ones taxed by the proposed bill and not the church or the people that donated the items.
To summarize: Bill = Bad, but not for the above reasons.
Yes, but you missed a crucial detail: she had 15 years of experience and I was a fresh college grad. The fact that I was even in the same ballpark salary-wise shows how ridiculous the pay disparity was. A starting teacher (which is what I would have been) would make far far less. As I mentioned in my post, I made some 85% more (with full benefits and pension plan) as a starting software developer than I would have as a starting teacher.
As far as the working only 3/4 of the year ... most of the teachers I knew made so little that they had to work during the summer to make some "extra" money just to get by. The few that were able to take the summer off either had a spouse that worked full-time or were close enough to retirement that everything was paid off and they had decent savings.
And that doesn't even get into the relatively new requirements for continued training that teachers have to go through. Add a few weeks of that each year and the actual free time a lot of teachers have amounts to just a few weeks.
I don't think the "likely" is an appropriately strong word to describe the chances that the person will receive a paycut going from a development job to a public teaching post. Perhaps calling it a "certain" paycut or "drastic" paycut is more realistic.
When I was in college, I got a secondary education ("high school") degree in addition to my computer science major. Throughout most of my schooling, I assumed that I would end up as a teacher rather than a software developer. In fact, it wasn't until I did my stint at student teaching ("practice" teaching in other countries, maybe?) and started getting some job offers did I come crashing down to reality.
In reality, the pay disparity is ludicrous. My mentoring teacher had been at the job for 15 years and was a wonderful and passionate educator. Yet my first job offer for a software developer position not only matched what she made but was some 10% higher. That's 15 years of dedicated improvement to her craft vs straight out of college. That offer was also roughly 85% more than I would have made as a starting teacher. Now, eight years later, I am making nearly (but not quite) 3x more than I would be had I remained in the teaching position. So calling it a "likely" paycut just isn't strong enough.
The shortage of math and science teachers isn't just due to the pay disparity, though. IMO, the other "big" knock against being a math or science teacher is that your students will fight you every step of the way unless you luck out with advanced classes (calculus, AP chem, etc). Facing a sea of disintrested or hostile faces in the "mandatory" classes can be soul-deadening.
But if you're close to retirement and have enough of a financial buffer to handle the massive paycut and enough passion for teaching to block out the soul-suckers, then this is a wonderful offer. Kudos to IBM for taking the lead on this!
Will that work with any new cars? The last three cars I've owned all had keys with chips in them. Lose the key and the dealer charges between $100 and $200 to replace it.
I'd imagine that the USB key would work somehow similar. Maybe it could encrypt the contents using some unique hardware ID associated with the key. If you lost it, you would have to go to the dealer to get a replacement ... just like you (or me, at least) have to now.
Isn't the notion that you would "invest" in a computer for your kid for their school work an outmoded concept? Especially among the more tech-friendly crowd here at /.?
My daughter got her first computer before she was in Kindergarten and well before she could read. Why? Well, why not? I had some 8 or 9 computers hanging around so it wasn't any sacrifice to just put one of them in her room. Plus, it was interesting to see how a TRUE computer newbie reacted to Linux (SuSE 8.x)... but that's besides the point.
She just started 3rd grade yesterday and does so with an iBook as her primary computer. This has nothing at all to do with school. In fact, if she has something from school that can be done on a computer at all, then this will be the first year that that is the case. No, she has an iBook not because it's a good investment in her education but because it's the best choice of a computer for her overall (runs OS X, inexpensive if bought used, can hook up to her 20" monitor but can still take it on road trips).
My (rambling) point here is that with computers (and even laptops) so plentiful and so ubiquitous in our lives, the concept of getting one for your kid just for school is just odd.
Speaking of which, did anybody else notice the author description in that article?
"Bjarne Stroustrup is the College of Engineering Professor in Computer Science at Texas A&M University"
What!? Isn't that like saying the George Bush is a businessman from Texas? It's technically true, but completely misses the point on what matters.
This makes even less sense when you try to find the target audience. If the person reading the article already knows who Bjarne is (by which I mean every single C++ programmer), then I could see them omitting the entire "creator of C++" description because, well, they already know... but then why have a description at all?
If the person doesn't already know who this "Bjarne" is and they are reading the article, don't you think they'd want to know that he created the thing and therefore might have some relevant opinions on that matter?
Very odd...
I have three Tivo systems, including two Series2 sets and use all three nearly obsessively. I use the multi-room feature every other week or so (much more so during the winter). Transferring shows between sets is nearly trivial.
All that said, I wouldn't dream of suggesting that Tivo Central Online and Tivo2Go come close to approximating the power of TivoWeb or the like. Tivo Online, for instance, has two fatal flaws:
- It doesn't show you your current recording schedule
- Recording are scheduled the next time your Tivo updates
As far as I'm concerned, those two flaws make the entire feature useless. The only time I would want remote scheduling is when I'm away from the Tivo (meaning I need some way of knowing what is scheduled) and forgot to record something (meaning I want it to take effect right NOW).The Tivo2Go feature is also fundamentally flawed... also for two reasons:
- It is Windows only and costs $50 extra
- The downloaded show is difficult to edit
All but one of my systems runs either OS X or Linux and that sole Windows system has no burner. Oops... Tivo2Go is unusable already. Then, when I download shows, I edit off the commercials (this was doubly important back when I encoded the result on VCDs since a full show with commercials wouldn't fit on one CD)... Tivo2Go fails again.To sum up, I remain a huge Tivo fan and think they do most things absolutely right. But as long as they cripple remote scheduling and downloading, TivoWeb and the like (IMO) remain essential "power user" utilities.
I've been trying to make sense of Larry McVoy's actions here and the only sane conclusion I can come to is that he is one of the ultimate advocates of Open Source. He is willing to go as far as destroying his own company to make a point on the benefits of Open Source!
Right now, he is saying this to potential BitMover clients: "If you use BitKeeper, then I will control your development process. I am free to change how you work at just a whim." Can you imagine even ONE company that would accept terms like this? I can't.
Therefore, his actions now will have the result of destroying his company. That means that he is either incredibly stupid or has some other plan so clever that nobody (or almost nobody) sees it. I think it's the latter.
He's said many times that he is a big advocate of Open Source. Now, he is showing an object lesson on how horrible proprietary software can be. "Look at how much I can screw you over," he is telling us. "I wouldn't be able to do this if BitKeeper was Open Source."
Very clever! By sacrificing his company, he gets his point across much more strongly than mere words could ever do. Bravo McVoy!
My signature is also not at all related to my name. It's always the same, but no part of it looks anything like letters. Looking back through the years, I can see a point where it was my name and then sorta-like my name.. but it's not anymore.
This has some nice benefits. The biggest is that you don't have to sign your full name on legal documents. I remember that the first mortgage I got was extremely hard on my hand since I had to keep writing my full name. This was back when it was semi-legible. Fast forward to refinancing my current house and my signature is scribbles from legibility point of view. When it came time to sign the papers, I refused to write out my full name. The loan officers conferred with their boss and then their boss's boss and then her boss before the word finally came down that as long as you couldn't see ANY part of my name in my signature, that I could use that instead of writing out my name in cursive. Saving a few minutes off of the loan signing time was nice but nothing compared to not having to pop a few Advil to dull the hand pain.
I don't know if you intended to use it as a strawman argument, but the following made me laugh aloud: "Would you complain if the police pulled you over for doing 70 mph through a school zone?"
I love it! It is, on the surface, apropos of nothing but is so audacious that it may well be apropos of everything. How can you argue with such a thing?
Them: I don't think paying a Use Tax is right, so I won't
You: Not paying a Use Tax is like doing 70mph through a school zone
Them:
I plan on using it regularly from now on in all my arguments. Thank you!
When I was in 6th or 7th grade (don't remember which), our school got its first set of computers. All 16 Apple IIe computers were lined up on one wall of the library until somebody could figure out what to use them for. The school had very few programs.. Oregon Trail and a typing one, mostly. Some kids had Apple's at home, though, and very quickly, BurgerTime and Mario Bros joined the list as unlabled disks that we all knew about.
Anyway, I was in "honor study hall" back then since I always finished my homework quickly and never needed to study. Bored smart kids are good at coming up with creative mischief in study hall so they shipped 10 of us to the library instead where we could do whatever we wanted.
What we wanted to do was play Mario Bros and BurgerTime on the new computers. The librarian, though, wanted us to work for it. She happened to have a subscription to an Apple magazine.. type type that, back then, always had BASIC program listings in them. The C64 equivalent would be "Run" but I don't remember what the Apple one was called, anymore. Anyway, she had a rule that if we wanted to play a non-educational game, we first had to type in and correctly run a program from the magazine. Smart lady!
The first program we typed in was a "word muncher" type one where letters came down the screen and we had to type it before it got to the bottom. It was very simple (the letters weren't random, the speed was constant, the location was constant, etc). We all finished it and the other nine kids showed their work to the librarian and promptly started playing their games. I, on the other hand, was fascinated by what I had just done! By just typing a few simple things, I could make the computer do what I told it. I remember feeling almost euphoric when I realized how much power I had over it.
Very quickly, I started playing with the code. I would change a few words here and there and move things around... just to see what they did. After a few weeks, my word muncher game had levels of increasing difficulty, sometimes two or three letters at a time, and of course they were all random. The fact that I could do that hooked me forever.
Now what about the other kids in the study hall with me? Well, they saw what I was doing and they were impressed... and they even played my game when I was done (I learned later that it went into circulation as an "official" game in the Library for years to come)... yet whenever I tried to explain how it worked or convince them to make their own changes, they wouldn't. They didn't care at all. I couldn't fathom how they could see this magic taking place and now want to have a taste of it... but they didn't.
In years to follow, I took up BASIC, assembly, and then C on a C64 and tons of other languages on other systems but I never forgot that first intoxicating taste of raw power that I had over that simple little Apple IIe
The lesson I learned from my fellow students' reactions was almost as enlightening. They were just as smart as me (and in one case, although I would never have admitted it back then, smarter than me), yet they showed know interest at all in it. I would learn as the years went by that this reaction was actually the normal one and my reaction was the oddity.
That's why, in a few years, I will push my daughter to do some programming (probably in Python) but if she doesn't pick it up almost immediately, I'll drop it. Either you recognize the wonder or you don't.
Ahh.. that was a fun stroll down memory's lane.
If that was the only reason he was arrested and indicted, then I agree that this is a scary precedent. But is it the reason? I don't think this story gives that kind of detail. This is all it says:
It doesn't say that he is accused of making treasonous speech or inciting war or anything at all of the type. He is accused of offering aid and running a website for known terrorist groups. The quotes from Walker seem to be included only to make him look obviously guilty to the reader.
Still, this article doesn't say very much at all. It's entirely possible that those statements really are the crux of the case ("offering aid"). If that's the case, then I agree, this case if far more serious than anything to do with "wiretapping the Internet". This would be a dagger deep into the heart of our notion of free speech.
So with that in mind, I tend to think that this case is something else. Yes, I know we've lost a lot of our rights concerning free speech in the past few years, but I don't think we've gotten quite that far.
"[C]hoice" is not a euphemism for "death". That attitude is eactly what makes any Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice debate a waste of time. Both sides are talking about completely different things.
There are two distinct questions regarding this issue that determine your true stance:
The Pro-Choice and Pro-Life camps have each answers only one of the questions and each chose a different question. In fact, it's possible to have four different positions on the issue:
Position 1: "I believe that abortion is morally wrong but I don't believe I have the right to force this belief on others." (Pro-Life/Pro-Choice)
Position 2: "I believe that abortion is morally wrong and furthermore, I believe that I have the right to prevent others from doing it as well." (Pro-Life/Anti-Choice)
Position 3: "I believe that abortion is not morally wrong and also I believe that others have the right to choose on their own" (Anti-Life/Pro-Choice)
Position 4: "I believe that abortion is not morally wrong and furthermore, I think it should be mandated." (Anti-Life/Anti-Choice)
The fourth position is fairly off-the-wall which leaves us with three perfectly valid positions. Unfortunately, the Pro-Life movement is nearly entire made up of people taking position 2 and the vast majority of Pro-Choice people are position 3.
That leaves people in the Pro-Life/Pro-Choice camps out in the cold.
I, for instance, consider myself Pro-Life/Pro-Choice. I don't know when life begins for sure, but it's surely early enough to make abortion a very hard moral position to defend. On the other hand, I cannot allow myself to force my beliefs on somebody else. If another person comes to the moral decision that life begins at, say, birth, then it would be unbelievably arrogant of me to say that only my belief is the valid one.
So saying that "choice" = "death" is just continuing the trend of further confusing two distinct issues.
I can go along with a lot of what the Green party stands for. In fact, most 3rd parties get closer to representing my political views than the Democratic or Republican Parties. But going through the Green Party platform, I came across their concept of a maximum wage.
Yes, that's right, they are proposing a MAXIMUM wage in addition to a minimum one. Any money you make above and beyond 10 times the minimum wage is taken away from you (taxed at 100%).
Eh? Isn't this political suicide? That's such a monumentally horrible idea that it taints every other position they have!
And no, I'm not complaining because I make more than that (~$200,000/yr since their proposed minimum wage is $10/hr) because I don't come close... but I'd like to think that someday, somehow I might. But if I knew that it would all be taken away from me... yeesh!
If the "wasted vote" argument ever held any water, it doesn't any more. The two major parties have moved toward a weird, non-existent "center" for the last 50 years, to the point where it's difficult to tell them apart.
I parroted that stance almost word-for-word while explaining why I didn't vote in the last election. Gore and Bush, in my mind, were as different as John Jackson and Jack Johnson on Futurama (by which I mean, not at all). I figured that any candidate that could survive to the presidental level had to be so generic as to be indistinguishable from his opponent.
The past four years have proven me very wrong! Regardless of whether or not you think Bush's radical right policy shifts are good, it's hard to argue that had Gore taken power, that things wouldn't be very different.
So I am viewing this election in a different light. I don't like either choice, but at least now I realize that there is one.
>However, if you want a pre-built binary for your platform, then it'll cost you (roughly) $30.
You make a good point, but you picked the wrong example. QCad for Windows is not released under the GPL. To quote the README: "all QCad versions for Windows are proprietary software."
Yes, I know and I address that later
I could download his source, compile some binaries for at least Linux and OSX (QtWindows complicates matters so we'll leave that out) and sell them for $5
The complicating factor with QCad is the fact that Qt isn't GPL under Windows. Therefore, QCad is dual-licensed.
That is why I tried to constrict my example to just Linux and OSX binaries. XChat isn't dual licensed so that part of QCad's scheme just doesn't apply.
This sounds like one of those arguments between those who think that the "free" part of the GPL refers to cost ("free beer") and those who realize that it has nothing at all to do with cost and everything to do with freedom ("free speech"). This isn't at all going into a grey area or even into any of the remotely confusing parts of the GPL.
Simply put, the GPL does not prohibit charging for binaries. It doesn't even prohibit charging for source (and in fact, I believe RMS has said in the past that he favors charging for the source since it adds perceived value.. I could be very wrong on that, though). What the GPL prohibits is the recipient of the binary or source from redistributing for free later.
I first came across this style of distributing binaries with the QCad program. QCad is GPLed and is based off of Qt. You can freely download the source and build it yourself if you like. However, if you want a pre-built binary for your platform, then it'll cost you (roughly) $30. I think that's a great idea. What you are paying for, then, is the convenience of not having to build it yourself. Plus, in this case, it gives you a bit of a support contract which is not given for those that build it themselves.
Now say for the sake of argument that I thought that the QCad author was ripping people off (I don't). I could download his source, compile some binaries for at least Linux and OSX (QtWindows complicates matters so we'll leave that out) and sell them for $5. That would be totally legal and probably even ethical. It would also mean that I was being a jerk.. but the GPL says nothing about that.
So this entire XChat thing is all a bunch of hair pulling over nothing. They don't need any "okay" from ANY of the code contributors unless they change the license.. and they aren't in this case. If any of the (misguided) contributors insist that their code was meant to be used only in the "free beer" sense as well, then they have every right to create their own XChat windows binaries and distribute them on their own.
I love lists like this as they remind me of long forgotten books that I really enjoyed growing up. "How To Eat Fried Worms" was the funniest book in existence when I was 9. At one time, the most powerful book I had read was "Bridge to Terabithia". "Lord of the Flies" entranced me in Jr High. Those, and books like them, were all ones that really had an impact on me at a particular age but were ones that I have since forgotten.
This don't think it's odd that a list of banned books would have a lot of very good books one them. Good books tend to be more challenging to the reader and it's exactly those challenging parts that certain people object to. To those people, if it's not the same old pablum, then they don't want anything to do with it.
Still, there are some books on the list that are decidedly NOT great or even good books. "Sex", by Madonna. "The New Joy of Gay Sex". I'll have to admit that I can definitely see why somebody would try to get them banned from a public library. After all, you don't see Hustler magazine next to the New York Times at public libraries so why should you expect to find "Sex"? But on the flip side to that, they ARE books and as such, were I at a public library, I would fight any attempt to ban them.
And finally, it would be nice if this particular list had the following info:
1. Was the book actually banned? All it says is they were all "challenged" which means "somebody tried to ban it" to me.
2. WHY was the book challenged in the first place?
The monthly fee isn't as bad as it used to be for users with multiple TiVos. I bought the lifetime subscription for my Series 1 and then transferred it to my Series 2. That one has saved me a bit of money based on how long I've had it.
However, I just bought another Series 2 TiVo ($99!) and this time I'm going with the monthly fee. That's because with two active TiVos, the monthly fee is now down to only $6.95/mo. At this rate, it would take me almost 4 years to recoup the up-front cost of the lifetime subscription.
Now if there was no multiple-TiVo discount, I would still definitely do the lifetime...
I haven't had an iPod long enough to know: does the software for a new generation ever propogate back to the previous generation? I have a 3G iPod and am looking longingly at "Shuffle Songs" option at the top-level menu.
Basically, I listen to a lot of songs and audiobooks on my iPod. I find it necessary to "shuffle" my songs since the iPod won't honor any sort of iTunes playlist order.. but I don't want my audiobooks shuffled at all (skipping from chapter 5 to 19 and back to 13 isn't as fun as it sounds). Having a setting right on the top menu would be too handy.
So do these features ever propagate back or is my 3G software likely to never change again?
Ah, but what you are forgetting is that this particular simulator (SIMH) is Open Source. If it doesn't run your customizations fast enough, you can "simply" customize SIMH to act accordingly. Remember that with a simulator, you have access to everything! Giving priority to those tasks that you deem worthy is a very feasible course of action.
A good intermediate step in any migration is to use the SIMH simulator (http://simh.trailing-edge.com). SIMH can simulate quite a few systems (including a VAX) at the CPU level. As you may expect, this involves emulating every single CPU instruction... not a very efficient way to run code! However, its saving grace is that modern processors are very fast and old VAX systems are not. Depending on how old your VAX hardware is, you might find that an emulated VAX running on a newer P4/Xeon/Athlon/Opteron will be faster than the stock VAX!
This doesn't solve the migration problem but it does allow you to run your old code on modern easily-fixable and readily-available hardware. Beats having to get all of your parts off of eBay.
This is the part that I still don't get. Say I design a rocket ship that has an infinite supply of fuel. I set it so that it goes up at exactly 1m/s. I imagine that as I get higher up, I will need less force (not sure if that's the right physics term) to go my 1m/s so I dial-back the throttle a bit to make sure my speed stays constant.
Now according to everything I've heard, I will not be able to escape Earth's orbit going at this speed. Why? What is going to keep me from slowly but surely slipping away at my pokey 1m/s? Gravity? Wouldn't that decrease as I got farther up? Atmosphere? Same thing. What?