The issue is the breadth these laws have been expanded to in recent years.
But then we must look to why these laws have been expanded, and how we can reform them. One can say patents on the obvious should be denied, but how do we enforce that? It's clear that with enough lawyers, the blatantly obvious can become brilliant insights -- just ask ebay. It may be that the only workable reform is to sharply curtail patent expiry dates on conceptual things, or eliminate broad classes of patents altogether.
The idea of keeping the people who keep us safe from criminals understaffed and underequipped is widely seen by many intellectuals and social and political leaders as a great idea.
In the U.S., at least, we have over two million people in jail. I don't think we're particularly underfunded in that respect, it's just all going to private prison companies (run by politicians' buddies) from your tax money and mine.
One sleazy spammer tactic is to target a domain and autogenerate a zillion possible email addresses, in what's called a Rumpelstiltskin attack
It's especially awful if you own a domain and have all messages to it automatically forwarded to your home account. Presumably your mailbox will overflow before you get too many messages, but I'm betting it'd still be a bitch.
That doesn't make it the ideal language to use for those programs.
For technical reasons, no. But, for an open source project where you need contributors who know the language and can work with it, C/C++ evidently are the basis for the most successful projects. Otherwise the Common Lisp-based ones (or what have you) would be "the cream rising to the top."
I certainly spend enough time compiling C++ code that I can spend a fair bit of time on Slashdot. If I were running a software company developing a new project, I'd take a long look at alternative,m potentially more productive development environments, and then train my employees in what seems to be the best. Open source projects don't have that luxury.
Note that there are improvements being made for C++, and you can do your own. Visual C++ has edit-and-continue compiling. Apple has the Xcode distributed compilation environment. And you can also break your project into smaller, individually developed and tested modules, rather than one monster app.
Not to mention the fact that there's almost no upgrades you can do, besides maybe memory and the hard drive.
But for the majority of people out there, that's as much or more than they'll ever upgrade. Joe Sixpack isn't too enthusiastic about swapping out motherboards. And with typical machines nowadays, what do you need to upgrade? The CPU is fast enough for 98% of us, hard drives can be added via USB/Firewire, the laptops come with CD/DVD combo drives; other than the video card, there's not much really that most people care about upgrading. And the old machine can become a hand-me-down, anyway.
If you are on the edge of restricted space and you see a plane coming right at you you have to take evasive maneuvers. If this system prevented a pilot from taking appropriate evasive action that'd be a bad thing.
Presumably you would get a warning prior to hitting the edge of the space, for a region where you still have control (if not on auto-pilot) but where you should take action except in dire emergencies.
512 MB compact flash cards cost less than $150, that'll store a lot of images and even a decent amount of video.
Best to send them somewhere else thats better at storing things.
Having a (say) 802.11 wireless connection might be a reasonable feature for a camera. Press a button and it talks to your PC and uploads automatically, that would be handy. But cellphones will cost you a boatload for that much bandwidth.
The camera-phone connection makes sense for a quickie camera, not for a decent quality one. The higher the res, the higher-quality and larger lens you'll probably need to take a good picture. Though perhaps the cameras will get good enough to use a lens the since of a human's, which gets pretty good quality, I'd say.
forgive me if memory fails, but doesn't python require tabs or whitespacing in certain ways as part of its syntax requirements?
Yes, but as a C++ programmer, I've lost count of the number of times where I've made a coding mistake or had trouble fixing nesting because the indenting did not match the bracketing. If you're going to indent anyway, it's reasonable to have that as the sole determinant of nesting.
He said it's no longer viable for application level programming...
Well, let's check sourceforge.net. Most active projects include GAIM (C), eMule (C++), WinMerge (C++). Top downloads: at least BitTorrent is C/Python, but CDex is C++, ZSNES is assembly/C, Miranda IM is C/C++, Ethereal is C; it's only the web administration-focused tools that are PHP and Java.
Or you can get a domain name where any message to the domain gets sent to you, and give each comany an address of companyname@yourdomain.
I have that; the only problem is the need for an e-mail black hole to forward stuff to that you don't want. I tried nobody@example.com but I just get bad address e-mails instead. Right now I've forwarded it to some company's black hole address, but is there a more general address for this?
As for my opinions on whether Saddam would have done anything, I would say he was already doing something, torturing, killing and oppressing many, many of 'his' people, and imho this was reason enough to go after him....and in the process, we killed a few thousand more of those self-same people. Hrmmm...
I'd just like to hear what your resolution would have been for Iraq?
There were 12 years between Gulf War 1 and Gulf War 2. It's pretty obvious by now that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, nor were they in league with al Queda. What exactly would be the consequence to the U.S. of having done nothing?
The only real advantage of cut'n paste is that you are already familiar with it from wordprocessing.
No, it is faster. I work a lot with both systems, and option-dragging a file on a Mac to a different directory is simply slower than cut, find target directory, and paste. I'm also fumble-fingered enough that I occasionally drop a dragged item at a different location than I intended, and cleaning that up is a hassle. Lastly, click-and-drag is harder on the clicking finger.
I understand the xbox, but will running linux on your pocket pc really be useful? is it even worth the effort, or is it just something cool.
I think it is useful, for the simple reason that the Linux community doesn't abandon hardware like the commercial companies do. If Dell dropped their Axim line because it wasn't making a profit, the PocketPC version would probably be less useful over time as fewer and fewer new things would be available for it. But with a Linux version, new stuff should typically support it with a recompile.
Now you may pay the price in polish (not Polish, polish), as generic apps or even generic Linux PDA apps may not be as polished as the commercial ones. So in the short run, the native platform may give a better user experience.
If it's like compare penis sizes at LAN parties great.
Hmm, you must go to different LAN parties than I do...
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
In fact, the richest 1% of taxpayers account for about 20% of all income, but they pay over 37% of all income taxes in this country.
And what if we include FICA, Medicare, gas, and all the other taxes? It's still money out of my pocket, there's no rational reason to exclude them from these sort of comparisons.
Your numbers are simply insufficient for the argument you're trying to make.
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
Ever heard of a progressive tax?
In the US? It's a myth.
The [tax] rate actually paid by the top 400 [incomer earners in the U.S.] in 2000 was about the same as that paid by a single person making $123,000 or a married couple, with two children, earning $226,000, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, a labor-backed group whose calculations are respected by a broad spectrum of tax experts.
Yesterday and today, the Slashdot front page has been fairly apologetic and sympathetic to Microsoft's cause.
Note that the kind words came from the story submitter, not the Slashdot editor. For Slashdot in general, it's ammo for the Linux cause, as a widely-used OS gets abandoned by its creator.
Re:Interesting technology
on
RFID Explained
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· Score: 2
Right now, you can buy a hammer, a pair of jeans, or a razor blade with anonymity. With RFID tags, that may be a thing of the past. Some manufacturers are planning to tag just the packaging, but others will also tag their products.
So pay cash, and there's no name associated with the purchase, and thus the RFIDs.
Here's my next question, where the hell is my http://donotemail.gov ???
You should try its equivalent, http://mygoodemailaddressforeveryonenotintheustosp am.gov
Telemarketers, even if the actual callers are out of the country, generally at least have a U.S. presence and thus can be affected by U.S. law. Spammers have no such problem.
Also recall that this money "wasted" on MSFT fuels jobs at microsoft which in turn feeds American families.
For half a billion, the army could hire a whole bunch of programmers to write the equivalent software for them. And then we'd all get the benefit, and those programmers would feed their families.
Anyway, wouldn't you rather the military use expensive "smart" bombs than cheap "dumb" ones?
Except that most expensive ones kept landing in Iran and Saudi Arabia until they stopped using them due to the protests. Why use them instead of the much cheaper JDAMs, which when they miss can't miss by that much? One might want to check how much Boeing contributed to various campaigns...
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is the breadth these laws have been expanded to in recent years.
But then we must look to why these laws have been expanded, and how we can reform them. One can say patents on the obvious should be denied, but how do we enforce that? It's clear that with enough lawyers, the blatantly obvious can become brilliant insights -- just ask ebay. It may be that the only workable reform is to sharply curtail patent expiry dates on conceptual things, or eliminate broad classes of patents altogether.
The idea of keeping the people who keep us safe from criminals understaffed and underequipped is widely seen by many intellectuals and social and political leaders as a great idea.
In the U.S., at least, we have over two million people in jail. I don't think we're particularly underfunded in that respect, it's just all going to private prison companies (run by politicians' buddies) from your tax money and mine.
One sleazy spammer tactic is to target a domain and autogenerate a zillion possible email addresses, in what's called a Rumpelstiltskin attack
It's especially awful if you own a domain and have all messages to it automatically forwarded to your home account. Presumably your mailbox will overflow before you get too many messages, but I'm betting it'd still be a bitch.
That doesn't make it the ideal language to use for those programs.
For technical reasons, no. But, for an open source project where you need contributors who know the language and can work with it, C/C++ evidently are the basis for the most successful projects. Otherwise the Common Lisp-based ones (or what have you) would be "the cream rising to the top."
I certainly spend enough time compiling C++ code that I can spend a fair bit of time on Slashdot. If I were running a software company developing a new project, I'd take a long look at alternative,m potentially more productive development environments, and then train my employees in what seems to be the best. Open source projects don't have that luxury.
Note that there are improvements being made for C++, and you can do your own. Visual C++ has edit-and-continue compiling. Apple has the Xcode distributed compilation environment. And you can also break your project into smaller, individually developed and tested modules, rather than one monster app.
Not to mention the fact that there's almost no upgrades you can do, besides maybe memory and the hard drive.
But for the majority of people out there, that's as much or more than they'll ever upgrade. Joe Sixpack isn't too enthusiastic about swapping out motherboards. And with typical machines nowadays, what do you need to upgrade? The CPU is fast enough for 98% of us, hard drives can be added via USB/Firewire, the laptops come with CD/DVD combo drives; other than the video card, there's not much really that most people care about upgrading. And the old machine can become a hand-me-down, anyway.
Why not create a 'universal' language...
That's pretty much what Esperanto was designed to be: a universal second language.
If you are on the edge of restricted space and you see a plane coming right at you you have to take evasive maneuvers. If this system prevented a pilot from taking appropriate evasive action that'd be a bad thing.
Presumably you would get a warning prior to hitting the edge of the space, for a region where you still have control (if not on auto-pilot) but where you should take action except in dire emergencies.
A camera will generate huge files.
512 MB compact flash cards cost less than $150, that'll store a lot of images and even a decent amount of video.
Best to send them somewhere else thats better at storing things.
Having a (say) 802.11 wireless connection might be a reasonable feature for a camera. Press a button and it talks to your PC and uploads automatically, that would be handy. But cellphones will cost you a boatload for that much bandwidth.
The camera-phone connection makes sense for a quickie camera, not for a decent quality one. The higher the res, the higher-quality and larger lens you'll probably need to take a good picture. Though perhaps the cameras will get good enough to use a lens the since of a human's, which gets pretty good quality, I'd say.
forgive me if memory fails, but doesn't python require tabs or whitespacing in certain ways as part of its syntax requirements?
Yes, but as a C++ programmer, I've lost count of the number of times where I've made a coding mistake or had trouble fixing nesting because the indenting did not match the bracketing. If you're going to indent anyway, it's reasonable to have that as the sole determinant of nesting.
He said it's no longer viable for application level programming...
Well, let's check sourceforge.net. Most active projects include GAIM (C), eMule (C++), WinMerge (C++). Top downloads: at least BitTorrent is C/Python, but CDex is C++, ZSNES is assembly/C, Miranda IM is C/C++, Ethereal is C; it's only the web administration-focused tools that are PHP and Java.
Or you can get a domain name where any message to the domain gets sent to you, and give each comany an address of companyname@yourdomain.
I have that; the only problem is the need for an e-mail black hole to forward stuff to that you don't want. I tried nobody@example.com but I just get bad address e-mails instead. Right now I've forwarded it to some company's black hole address, but is there a more general address for this?
Are they betting on Bush's inability to maintain a budget?
Now that's a gimme if I ever heard of one...
C/C++ is no longer a viable development language
So what is, then? And language has enough people who know it to make for a viable development language for an open source project?
Not to mention, this means we should throw out Linux, Mozilla, Xfree, et al.
As for my opinions on whether Saddam would have done anything, I would say he was already doing something, torturing, killing and oppressing many, many of 'his' people, and imho this was reason enough to go after him. ...and in the process, we killed a few thousand more of those self-same people. Hrmmm...
I'd just like to hear what your resolution would have been for Iraq?
There were 12 years between Gulf War 1 and Gulf War 2. It's pretty obvious by now that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, nor were they in league with al Queda. What exactly would be the consequence to the U.S. of having done nothing?
The only real advantage of cut'n paste is that you are already familiar with it from wordprocessing.
No, it is faster. I work a lot with both systems, and option-dragging a file on a Mac to a different directory is simply slower than cut, find target directory, and paste. I'm also fumble-fingered enough that I occasionally drop a dragged item at a different location than I intended, and cleaning that up is a hassle. Lastly, click-and-drag is harder on the clicking finger.
I understand the xbox, but will running linux on your pocket pc really be useful? is it even worth the effort, or is it just something cool.
I think it is useful, for the simple reason that the Linux community doesn't abandon hardware like the commercial companies do. If Dell dropped their Axim line because it wasn't making a profit, the PocketPC version would probably be less useful over time as fewer and fewer new things would be available for it. But with a Linux version, new stuff should typically support it with a recompile.
Now you may pay the price in polish (not Polish, polish), as generic apps or even generic Linux PDA apps may not be as polished as the commercial ones. So in the short run, the native platform may give a better user experience.
If it's like compare penis sizes at LAN parties great.
Hmm, you must go to different LAN parties than I do...
In fact, the richest 1% of taxpayers account for about 20% of all income, but they pay over 37% of all income taxes in this country.
And what if we include FICA, Medicare, gas, and all the other taxes? It's still money out of my pocket, there's no rational reason to exclude them from these sort of comparisons.
Your numbers are simply insufficient for the argument you're trying to make.
Ever heard of a progressive tax?
In the US? It's a myth.
The [tax] rate actually paid by the top 400 [incomer earners in the U.S.] in 2000 was about the same as that paid by a single person making $123,000 or a married couple, with two children, earning $226,000, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, a labor-backed group whose calculations are respected by a broad spectrum of tax experts.
See this
Yesterday and today, the Slashdot front page has been fairly apologetic and sympathetic to Microsoft's cause.
Note that the kind words came from the story submitter, not the Slashdot editor. For Slashdot in general, it's ammo for the Linux cause, as a widely-used OS gets abandoned by its creator.
Right now, you can buy a hammer, a pair of jeans, or a razor blade with anonymity. With RFID tags, that may be a thing of the past. Some manufacturers are planning to tag just the packaging, but others will also tag their products.
So pay cash, and there's no name associated with the purchase, and thus the RFIDs.
Here's my next question, where the hell is my http://donotemail.gov ???
p am.gov
You should try its equivalent, http://mygoodemailaddressforeveryonenotintheustos
Telemarketers, even if the actual callers are out of the country, generally at least have a U.S. presence and thus can be affected by U.S. law. Spammers have no such problem.
Also recall that this money "wasted" on MSFT fuels jobs at microsoft which in turn feeds American families.
For half a billion, the army could hire a whole bunch of programmers to write the equivalent software for them. And then we'd all get the benefit, and those programmers would feed their families.
Anyway, wouldn't you rather the military use expensive "smart" bombs than cheap "dumb" ones?
1 6. html)
Except that most expensive ones kept landing in Iran and Saudi Arabia until they stopped using them due to the protests. Why use them instead of the much cheaper JDAMs, which when they miss can't miss by that much? One might want to check how much Boeing contributed to various campaigns...
(http://www.breakingnews.ie/2003/04/01/story938