If it launched from a station in orbit, it will need to accelerate from 5mps to 7mps to break orbit. Does this slow acceleration imply that VASIMR power ships will have to circle the earth a few times to build up speed?
What? You didn't get a Dungeons and Dragons style game reference? Normally you'd have to be demoted to "geek in training" for that. But since you mentioned an obscure, and mostly dead, line of computers, you will just be lowered to "geek, second class". You are still allowed to use pocket protectors, but you may not use a slide rule or Debian based distribution.
I imagine that this happens nearly every election now because the number of absentee votes has increased. Back in the day there were very few mailins, just from expats and the military, so there wasn't enough of them to affect the outcome of the election.
If you work for a big enough company, get in touch with the legal department and see what they have to say. It is their job to decide which legal fights are to be fought, and which ones are to be avoided. My guess is that they'd put a stop to this if they knew about it.
If your company is too small to have staff lawyers, go over your boss's head.
- doug
PS: Get out from under that boss as his ethics and yours don't align. Whether that means an internal transfer or jumping ship is up to you.
Easily, the most common reason for branching is a stable-versus-development split.
I agree that's popular, but I don't think it's a good idea. Wouldn't it be better to have every check-in be stable?
No, you do not want to require every check-in to be stable. When I go home for the day, I want to check-in everything that I've been working on. I want to use the SCM system to ensure that I don't lose anything. If the code doesn't compile, that is no biggie. Doing a checkin (or a commit, or whatever your SCM system calls it) is not the same as publishing to the development community at large.
I agree that every published (pushed, delivered, whatever) change should be stable. That is a wonderful requirement, but not what you said.
Randal Schwartz, the Perl guru, gave a more detailed presentation on git, also at google. It has a lot more meat on its bones, and gives examples of using git.
Uploading, downloading, whatever. It is copying that is important. In your example, Jammy didn't copy anything; Mitch Bainwol did. Anything involving putting in on the network is merely shifting. I'll agree that Jammy didn't do a good job of securing the shifted files, but I don't think that he is required to. We don't have many laws requiring you to lock your door.
I hope MediaSentry gets it in the shorts on this one. If it is acting as a representative of the RIAA, it might not be an infringing copy. If they are not acting on RIAA's behalf, then they should be held liable.
Yes, MediaSentry is paid by RIAA, but because they are not licensed PIs, RIAA is having to back away from them a bit. I think the official relationship depends upon which court is hearing the case.
Aren't they underwritten by the US Gov't? I seem to remember that NASA or DOD was shoveling them money. Considering the number of failures, I just hope that it isn't a cost-plus scheme like so many federal projects. I'm not saying that no private money is going into this, just that the sting of failure is lessened by public largess.
'You say that you have enjoyed my stories for years. Why did you wait until you disliked one story before writing to me?'
Because, if I sent you a fan letter after every story I liked you would probably have me arrested for stalking.
RAH call the police for a stalker? Sorry, but I don't think that going to the authories was his style. He had an electric fence installed around his property to keep out the hippies who were fans of Stranger in a Strange Land.
I like the ACM, and I've been a member for nearly 20 years. But they don't have anything like the kinda clout that a union has. A professional society isn't the same thing as a union, and this is a good thing. The ACM can talk (mostly to itself) about issues without having to get into hardcore politics.
Years ago I worked at a company which had had problems with some telecom equipment in the field and no one could ever find any smoking gun. Random problems pointed to several different places on one particular board. One technician must have been working late, because apparently the CO filled with cockroaches once the sun went down. One of the theories was that bugs crawling across the board caused random short circuits. The customer was getting pissed, so management opted for a shotgun approach. Half a dozen shot-in-the-dark fixes were made, including adding an insulating coating. No one knows which one (or combination) of the fixes did the trick, but the random outages went away. That was engineering at its finest.
Several years ago I retired my PIII and I looked around. The United Way had an electronic donation group a near my job, where they refurbished and redeployed old stuff. They got my PC, scanner and printer (which I warned them about, but they wanted anyway). Like usual, I got to take something off of my taxes.
I don't know how much usefulness they got from it, but I tried.
Earlier this year the office park I was in sponsored some recyclers to show up and take old stuff. They got an old 17" monitor.
Personally I prefer to donate with the hope that someone, somewhere is going to be better off. But recycling is still way better than just trashing stuff. Even if you know that they're making a profit off of your stuff, at least it isn't going into a landfill.
The death sentence came from a Parisian court (dunno if it was royal or clerical), not the Vatican. Anyhow, you'd have to prosecute an officer of the court for performing his duties. If that is now OK, I'll enjoy watching the Salem Witch Trial suits work through the Massachusetts court system.
The Vatican may have been involved in slander/defamation of the Templar's name, but that surely has expired.
As for digging people up, since Galileo was vindicated, he has been dug up and is now in Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. I guess these retrials can go either way.
True, but the murder charges would be against individuals in France (not Spain) who are dead. Anyhow, that is criminal, and I was thinking this was a civil suit.
It isn't me that you've got to convince. It is CmdrTaco and his drone army that have to have the buy-in. Someone else was all about configurability (I think it was for the Dvorak layout), so the two of you should team up and extend the slashcode.
- doug
PS: As for using AZERTY, you have nothing but my sympathy. I was tormented by that layout when I lived in France, and I can say that it sucks. Any layout where you need to hit the shift key to get to the digits is just wrong.
w-a-s-d might be fine for some, but for us old school vi types, h-j-k-l is hardwired into our brains. Could that be added along-side the w-a-s-d stuff?
You're right that the transportation costs are low, but the mining costs are prohibitive. Those PHB skulls are so dense, so they chew up the drill bits like there's no tomorrow.
I believe that they are more effective as the power source for air turbines. Harnessing all that hot air that they produce to spin a turbine should generate countless megawatts. And it might justify some of the meetings that I've had to go to.
My beef is that in our high-tech field, they can be the ones most out of tune with the underling technology. The sales people have to understand enough to talk to management, many of whom are ex-technical. I remember the marketing types at a start up I was at get glossy eyed when they decided to target a product for the Army. Hah! Have you ever looked into MilSpec? We were a start-up, we barely met any standards. The marketeers got slapped around, and that idea was forgotten.
Yes, it is a broad brush comment, and I fully realize that there are some excellent marketing types. But they seem to be in the minority.
Although programming is the visible face of computers, most jobs using them have little/no programming requirements.
test - some testers automate tests, some just run 'em
project manager - keep track dates, but you have to understand the geeks
build/CM - some roles require perl/Makefile, others don't
support - there is a whole lot of user hand holding that needs to happen
documentation - good tech writers are as valuable as developers
technical sales - can you hide a product's warts long enough to sell it?
administrators - both the classic IT role, and as a system upgrade specialist
teaching - there seem to be more ads than ever for computer classes
Do you have people skills? Can you attend meetings all day without retching? If so, consider management. I don't care if my manger can code his way out of a paper bag as long as he can keep me out of meetings. He does have to know enough to kinda keep up in the technical discussions, but that is about it.
But my advice to you is to get out of the computer field. It doesn't appear to be where your interest lies. Find something else that you like doing and aim for the computer end of that industry. It may be too late for you to become a doctor, but hospitals have huge support staffs and working with already written medical software might be more rewarding for you. Or perhaps you can get teaching license and help run a high school program.
Be creative. There are lots of related fields where your skills might get you a job that you like. You might be surprised at what you can find and can talk your way into. Heaven knows that over the years I've seen countless EEs who end up with software jobs, and are often poorly suited for them.
- doug
PS: I intentionally left marketing off the list. If you need to stop and bounce an idea off of slashdot, you don't have what it takes for marketing. And you are a better person for it.
Some of it is handled by the land rising. The weight of the glaciers compressed the land, and land levels have been rising due to decompression for a while now (thousands of years).
I have no idea what the rate of decompression is, or how it compares to the change in sea level.
Thank you. I'm sick of people saying that the issue with global warming is that we're killing the planet. We're making it easier for some species, and harder for others. The main issue is that we're making it harder for ourselves.
Now...which politician will speak out in favor of wiping out aging?
Uh, all of 'em? Remember that you don't need to get them directly involved, you just need to get the AARP on board. They have the lobbyists who will do the rest.
Nope, not quite the same thing. I lived in France from 95-98, and I used the minitel for everything from directory assistance (ie - electronic phone book) to buying train tickets. Wait. That was about it. At 14.4 my dial up was faster, and only had phone usage rates. (No free local calls in France.) Mintel 1 (the only free one) was 1200 baud down and 75 baud up. One of the problems with the French (I saw this several times) is that they don't layer protocols worth a damn. Basically the signal processing folks designed the whole thing, instead of having a low level transport layer, and higher level services on top of it.
Content providers billed France Telecom for access, and that was added to the monthly phone bill. Note that content was text, not the pretty pictures available on the internet. Since only the first 3 minutes of looking up phone numbers was free, if you needed several numbers, you get a few, hang up, and reconnect. Oh, the joy.
I was much happier before in the US using the internet. The internet wasn't as big as it is now, but it was better than anything I ever saw with the minitel. I could get to usenet. I never used CompuServe, so I can't compare with those services. I haven't touched a BBS since the 80s, so I don't think that is a fair comparison.
- doug
BTW: I'm not trying to say that metered usages, throttling, and so forth are good stuff, just that minitel sucks more.
Slashdot Mirror
If it launched from a station in orbit, it will need to accelerate from 5mps to 7mps to break orbit. Does this slow acceleration imply that VASIMR power ships will have to circle the earth a few times to build up speed?
What? You didn't get a Dungeons and Dragons style game reference? Normally you'd have to be demoted to "geek in training" for that. But since you mentioned an obscure, and mostly dead, line of computers, you will just be lowered to "geek, second class". You are still allowed to use pocket protectors, but you may not use a slide rule or Debian based distribution.
Most elections only consider absentee/mail-in votes when
$votes_for_winner — $votes_for_loser < $absentee_votes
I imagine that this happens nearly every election now because the number of absentee votes has increased. Back in the day there were very few mailins, just from expats and the military, so there wasn't enough of them to affect the outcome of the election.
sometimes paper and pencil should not be automated
As a long time RPGer, I couldn't agree with you more.
If you work for a big enough company, get in touch with the legal department and see what they have to say. It is their job to decide which legal fights are to be fought, and which ones are to be avoided. My guess is that they'd put a stop to this if they knew about it.
If your company is too small to have staff lawyers, go over your boss's head.
- doug
PS: Get out from under that boss as his ethics and yours don't align. Whether that means an internal transfer or jumping ship is up to you.
Easily, the most common reason for branching is a stable-versus-development split.
I agree that's popular, but I don't think it's a good idea. Wouldn't it be better to have every check-in be stable?
No, you do not want to require every check-in to be stable. When I go home for the day, I want to check-in everything that I've been working on. I want to use the SCM system to ensure that I don't lose anything. If the code doesn't compile, that is no biggie. Doing a checkin (or a commit, or whatever your SCM system calls it) is not the same as publishing to the development community at large.
I agree that every published (pushed, delivered, whatever) change should be stable. That is a wonderful requirement, but not what you said.
Randal Schwartz, the Perl guru, gave a more detailed presentation on git, also at google. It has a lot more meat on its bones, and gives examples of using git.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dhZ9BXQgc4
Uploading, downloading, whatever. It is copying that is important. In your example, Jammy didn't copy anything; Mitch Bainwol did. Anything involving putting in on the network is merely shifting. I'll agree that Jammy didn't do a good job of securing the shifted files, but I don't think that he is required to. We don't have many laws requiring you to lock your door.
I hope MediaSentry gets it in the shorts on this one. If it is acting as a representative of the RIAA, it might not be an infringing copy. If they are not acting on RIAA's behalf, then they should be held liable.
Yes, MediaSentry is paid by RIAA, but because they are not licensed PIs, RIAA is having to back away from them a bit. I think the official relationship depends upon which court is hearing the case.
Aren't they underwritten by the US Gov't? I seem to remember that NASA or DOD was shoveling them money. Considering the number of failures, I just hope that it isn't a cost-plus scheme like so many federal projects. I'm not saying that no private money is going into this, just that the sting of failure is lessened by public largess.
'You say that you have enjoyed my stories for years. Why did you wait until you disliked one story before writing to me?'
Because, if I sent you a fan letter after every story I liked you would probably have me arrested for stalking.
RAH call the police for a stalker? Sorry, but I don't think that going to the authories was his style. He had an electric fence installed around his property to keep out the hippies who were fans of Stranger in a Strange Land.
I like the ACM, and I've been a member for nearly 20 years. But they don't have anything like the kinda clout that a union has. A professional society isn't the same thing as a union, and this is a good thing. The ACM can talk (mostly to itself) about issues without having to get into hardcore politics.
Years ago I worked at a company which had had problems with some telecom equipment in the field and no one could ever find any smoking gun. Random problems pointed to several different places on one particular board. One technician must have been working late, because apparently the CO filled with cockroaches once the sun went down. One of the theories was that bugs crawling across the board caused random short circuits. The customer was getting pissed, so management opted for a shotgun approach. Half a dozen shot-in-the-dark fixes were made, including adding an insulating coating. No one knows which one (or combination) of the fixes did the trick, but the random outages went away. That was engineering at its finest.
Several years ago I retired my PIII and I looked around. The United Way had an electronic donation group a near my job, where they refurbished and redeployed old stuff. They got my PC, scanner and printer (which I warned them about, but they wanted anyway). Like usual, I got to take something off of my taxes.
I don't know how much usefulness they got from it, but I tried.
Earlier this year the office park I was in sponsored some recyclers to show up and take old stuff. They got an old 17" monitor.
Personally I prefer to donate with the hope that someone, somewhere is going to be better off. But recycling is still way better than just trashing stuff. Even if you know that they're making a profit off of your stuff, at least it isn't going into a landfill.
- doug
The death sentence came from a Parisian court (dunno if it was royal or clerical), not the Vatican. Anyhow, you'd have to prosecute an officer of the court for performing his duties. If that is now OK, I'll enjoy watching the Salem Witch Trial suits work through the Massachusetts court system.
The Vatican may have been involved in slander/defamation of the Templar's name, but that surely has expired.
As for digging people up, since Galileo was vindicated, he has been dug up and is now in Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. I guess these retrials can go either way.
True, but the murder charges would be against individuals in France (not Spain) who are dead. Anyhow, that is criminal, and I was thinking this was a civil suit.
While it is useful to help with muscle mass, we need to find a way to prevent bone loss too.
It isn't me that you've got to convince. It is CmdrTaco and his drone army that have to have the buy-in. Someone else was all about configurability (I think it was for the Dvorak layout), so the two of you should team up and extend the slashcode.
- doug
PS: As for using AZERTY, you have nothing but my sympathy. I was tormented by that layout when I lived in France, and I can say that it sucks. Any layout where you need to hit the shift key to get to the digits is just wrong.
w-a-s-d might be fine for some, but for us old school vi types, h-j-k-l is hardwired into our brains. Could that be added along-side the w-a-s-d stuff?
You're right that the transportation costs are low, but the mining costs are prohibitive. Those PHB skulls are so dense, so they chew up the drill bits like there's no tomorrow.
I believe that they are more effective as the power source for air turbines. Harnessing all that hot air that they produce to spin a turbine should generate countless megawatts. And it might justify some of the meetings that I've had to go to.
- doug
My beef is that in our high-tech field, they can be the ones most out of tune with the underling technology. The sales people have to understand enough to talk to management, many of whom are ex-technical. I remember the marketing types at a start up I was at get glossy eyed when they decided to target a product for the Army. Hah! Have you ever looked into MilSpec? We were a start-up, we barely met any standards. The marketeers got slapped around, and that idea was forgotten.
Yes, it is a broad brush comment, and I fully realize that there are some excellent marketing types. But they seem to be in the minority.
- doug
Although programming is the visible face of computers, most jobs using them have little/no programming requirements.
Do you have people skills? Can you attend meetings all day without retching? If so, consider management. I don't care if my manger can code his way out of a paper bag as long as he can keep me out of meetings. He does have to know enough to kinda keep up in the technical discussions, but that is about it.
But my advice to you is to get out of the computer field. It doesn't appear to be where your interest lies. Find something else that you like doing and aim for the computer end of that industry. It may be too late for you to become a doctor, but hospitals have huge support staffs and working with already written medical software might be more rewarding for you. Or perhaps you can get teaching license and help run a high school program.
Be creative. There are lots of related fields where your skills might get you a job that you like. You might be surprised at what you can find and can talk your way into. Heaven knows that over the years I've seen countless EEs who end up with software jobs, and are often poorly suited for them.
- doug
PS: I intentionally left marketing off the list. If you need to stop and bounce an idea off of slashdot, you don't have what it takes for marketing. And you are a better person for it.
Some of it is handled by the land rising. The weight of the glaciers compressed the land, and land levels have been rising due to decompression for a while now (thousands of years).
I have no idea what the rate of decompression is, or how it compares to the change in sea level.
- doug
Thank you. I'm sick of people saying that the issue with global warming is that we're killing the planet. We're making it easier for some species, and harder for others. The main issue is that we're making it harder for ourselves.
Now...which politician will speak out in favor of wiping out aging?
Uh, all of 'em? Remember that you don't need to get them directly involved, you just need to get the AARP on board. They have the lobbyists who will do the rest.
-- doug
Nope, not quite the same thing. I lived in France from 95-98, and I used the minitel for everything from directory assistance (ie - electronic phone book) to buying train tickets. Wait. That was about it. At 14.4 my dial up was faster, and only had phone usage rates. (No free local calls in France.) Mintel 1 (the only free one) was 1200 baud down and 75 baud up. One of the problems with the French (I saw this several times) is that they don't layer protocols worth a damn. Basically the signal processing folks designed the whole thing, instead of having a low level transport layer, and higher level services on top of it.
Content providers billed France Telecom for access, and that was added to the monthly phone bill. Note that content was text, not the pretty pictures available on the internet. Since only the first 3 minutes of looking up phone numbers was free, if you needed several numbers, you get a few, hang up, and reconnect. Oh, the joy.
I was much happier before in the US using the internet. The internet wasn't as big as it is now, but it was better than anything I ever saw with the minitel. I could get to usenet. I never used CompuServe, so I can't compare with those services. I haven't touched a BBS since the 80s, so I don't think that is a fair comparison.
- doug
BTW: I'm not trying to say that metered usages, throttling, and so forth are good stuff, just that minitel sucks more.