The tax was originally levied on blank cassette/VCR tapes, but for the same reason.
THe rationalle was that people were makign copies of music and the artists were loosing money in sales, so the tax was instituted and collected for distribution to the artists.
I have no idea if it's ever been distributed, and if so, how.
Not the same incident - the comment from the staff member was made a month or so after Parrish's comments. And I don't remember the exact phrasing, but if I recall correctly, her apology was almost as insulting as the original statement.
sorry, but a memember of the PM's staff does NOT have the right to call the duly-elected leader of our largest trading partner a f..king moron in front of the collective national press.
What do you think would happen if it was reported that his press secretary called Iran's leader a "f..king towelhead"?
Scientology is not in any way, shape or form a relgeion - just look at the name
It is, at best, a cult for those who have an inherently inflated ego and sence of self-worth that makes them superiour to the rest of the "Great Unwashed".
If relegion is the opiate of the masses, Scientology is the drug for intellectual snobs
I am done rambling now, but the point being, your views on religion are extremely biased and bigoted, and you should actually do research before you post something as idiotic and full of errors as this post was.
Speaking of intellectual rigor.... I think I missed the class where we were taught that anecdotal evidance constitutes proof.
For every muderder who was baptised/circumcised/whatever in the name of God, I will give you a million examples of somebody helping somebody else.
You don't even want to *think* about accusing the relgious of hypocracy with the rant you just gave.
Churches are institutions of man. Governments are institutions of man. Both are flawed.
If you want to stick to the rational & scientific.... how about what BF Skinner did to his daughter? The Nazi scientists experimenting on the jews? STD experiments on blacks in the united states? Should I keep going?
You might want to make sure you do YOUR research before you you decide to dump on something.
No, I'm not relegious
No, I'm not spiritual
What I am, however, is somebody who has a brain and refuses to accept dogma from ANYBODY - relegious, *or* rationalist.
Anything people want or need can be used to control them. In that sence, relegion is no different from anything else, and therefore can't be used to claim it is invalid, evil, or wrong.
Presumably, you believe in the scientific method/rationality. Others prefer to believe in a higher being.
Neither can be proven to be correct. Both require faith. And neither is inherently better, worse, "gooder", or more evil than the other.
Don't confuse the tool with the idiot that weilds it.
You're obviously not very familiar with Canadian politics, and certainly not familiar with LIBERAL politics.
f..kups like that usually get people appointed to cabinet in this country, or rewarded with some freaking patronage job somewhere.
This is the party where a member of the PRIME MINISTERS STAFF called Geogge W a "fucking moron" (yes, that's a direct quote) and was promptly defended by the PM (A Liberal) who said that the member in question had a right to their own view.
This is not, in any way, shape or form, a free speech issue.
CIRA's rules clearly state - and have for as long as *I* can remember - that annon registrations are not acceptable. THat was, and IS, grounds to pull the DNS records.
If there is *any* story here, it should be how the hell did the site get registered in the first place, given that it didn't meet the most basic requirements.
As for Volpe? He has my congradulations...... this is the first rule he's since since he launched his leadership campaign that he had tried to have enforced. Hopefully, it's the start of a trend.
Even when the law allows you to voluntarily provide your data for handling to certain private economic entities (like marketing agencies), the data recepient must have an established corporate legal framework and EU-compliant privacy protection charta approved by the authorities. The laptop buyer certainly meets none of that.
Call me silly, but I'm guessing that that might have something to do with the fact that the laptop buyer isn't a corporation
My birthday is Sept 13, 1958. If you tell anybody I'm gonna have your ass arrested and will personally see that you get an over-friendly roomie named Bubba for the next 5-10.
The real programmers are out listening to the kodo drums, because it gives them a warm, fuzzy feeling as they harken back to the good old days of mecury delay-tube memory.........
No double standard at all. Symantec et. al. exist only because of Microsoft's design/implimentation errors - they should not exist at all - there should be no market for microsoft to push them OUT of.
If microsoft started addressing the problem and making the changes that rendered 3rd party virus programmes unnecessary, I would not only applaud them, but I might even change my mind about being willing to even DEVELOP windows applications.
In 25 years as a programmer, I have never written a windows *anything* for a client, and never will. Because when the sucker crashes (and it will), will the client blame microsoft? No, they'll blame ME - and it will affect MY reputation.
When I write for Unix/Linux/QNX/VRTX/Anything the hell else, I can be pretty sure that if something goes boom, it IS my fault - and I should take the blame, and if it reflects badly on me, I deserve it.
I have no problems whatsoever accepting responsibility for my errors. But there is no f..king way in HELL that I am going to send a client a programme and have them call me once a week bitching about how it keeps crashing becase it's MY fault, when it's because the damned thing is running on an unreliable piece of shit.
There is a very major difference between a 10 year old washing machine needing repairs and parts replacements after good, solid service and use over a period of time, and having to have the Maytag Man show up on your doorstep once a week if you want to be able to do more than one load a month without having your clothes get caught in the gears.
Is it just me, or - with the exception of the fact that it mentioned neither belltower nor grassy knoll - did that whole article read like Yet Another Conspiracy Theory?
I'm sorry, I can't help you there - I'm not exactly a firearms expert. All I can tell you is that what I was watching seemed to be reasonable. But if you can find the episode somewhere and critique it, I'd be interested in knowing
because there's a lot you can infer from knowing that minister X called the party leader at 3am and later talked to Y while the leader called minister Z.
Absolutly..... and there is nothing in what you said that contradicts what *I* said, and only goes to reinforce my point.
If minister X regularly talks to the party leader at 3AM, you know nothing.
It is the *departure* from the norms that give you information.
Given that there is nothing an inside source can tell a reporter at 3AM that couldn't wait untill normal office hours, you're not going to be having that particular problem. And unless the reporter is exceedingly stupid, he'll also be talking to others in his sources area of expertise/knowledge to help him cover his track, so he doesn't stand out..... most of which would also be part of the reporter's natural pattern.
How many Washington reporters don't talk to somebody at State at least once a day, for example? Good luck trying to use THAT to figure out who the leak is. If reporter X talks to person Y, then the odds are reporter Z is *also* going to call the same guy - or somebody very similar, at least - for the same type of information. So you wind up getting exactly bumpkis.... unless, as I said, the call comes in at 3AM, when nobody would normally be calling anybody else.
If you were using a system that had decent support for monitoring and managing daemons, you could have gotten an email with a core dump or whatever mailed to you when the fault first occurred, had the daemon brought back up, and if it continued to fail had the daemon kept down
DAMN good idea - I really wish I had thought of that one myself.
ummmm..... but what would you say if I told you that the daemon I wrote was the mail submission deamon?
What would have happened in that case is that my nice, reliable, micro-kernel is now hosed because it's too busy dumping core trying to send me core dumps to do anything usefull.
And that, boys, and girls, IS the point. Restarting daemons is a band-aid, not a solution.
t's all well and good for you to be bitched out for writing bad code. Infact, that's a VERY good thing. However, don't assume that microkernel systems exists as a crutch to programmers. That's just plain wrong.
Yes, it is..... but that, too, is reality. There will *always* be some stupid git (like I was) who will think he's being smart by taking advantage of that.
There are many, many instances I can think of where you might want that little extra level of reassurance.... but also many, many times when you *don't*, because it WILL be a crutch.
It exists as a firewall between users and crappy code. I would also venture to say that its inherent modularity will allow developers to pay more attention to the actual working bits of their code, and spend less time developing kludges and hacks to get their drivers working in a monolithic system.
First, see above - I'm saying that it will BE a crutch that a lot of programmers will use.
Second, why do you think that you have to develop "kludges and hacks" to make your driver work with a monolithic kernel, and not with a microkernel? You can have a microkernel with a badly designed system interface, or a monolithic one with a GOOD system interface.
And 3rd...... this is the point that bothers me most.
The thing that matters most about the maintainability of any piece of software - kernel, application, anything - is how it's written and structured. That includes the kernel.
Just because it's monolithic, doesn't mean it's not well-structured. If you have a good, clean interface, with a well-defined way to interact with the rest of the kernel, then your code will be easy to maintain, and WILL TEND TO BE MORE RELIABLE.
Let's say for the sake of arguement (and I'm making no claims here - I haven't seen T's code) that T is the world's worst programmer, and Linus is the best. If T has designed a crappy interface that promotes side-effects, for example, the kernel is gonna suck. Linus' code, however, presents a brilliant interface, simple, robust, all the mechanisms you need, and built in check to make sure you don't hose yourself or anything else. Which would you want in your r/t system?
Now turn it around.... Linus is the world's worst programmer, and T is god-like. NOW which one would you want to use? And what does either side of that particular coin have to do with micro vs mono? Exactly 0.
This is how *I* view the microkernel vs monolithic kernel debate. I think the system response issues are mostly overblown and based on out-of-date models (Mach and Minux 1 are definitely out of date microkernels - l4 seems to have response times that are measurably slower, but mostly unnoticable to the end user). I think this is a valuable area of research and I look forward to minux 3 maturing and becoming more usable.
I think the response times are *somewhat* overblown, but not that much. Look at the anal lengths game players will go to to obtain that extra.5 fps. And when you're talking about somebody running multiple servers, those extra percentage points of performance can make the difference between being able to plan your hardware upgrades on a 5 year cycle or a 3 year cycle.... that means BIG bucks.
I think the point that bothers ME most about this whole debate is that there *are* other considerations to be taken into account when you're talking about the quality or useability of any piece of software, and T, in his arguements, seems to be focusing on essentially one, and ignoring all others. Even the example he uses - restarting services - is a BAD one, for the reasons presented above, and a major red flag for anybody who's ever had to deal with juniour programmers and try to get them to do things properly.
The microkernel deals (or tries to deal) with a SUBSET of the types of problems that can affect a kernel. This isn't a bad thing - ther
I'm sorry, but I don't remember the episode - but I'll tell you what I *do* remember.
THey had a slide/guide set up into a swimming pool - the angle was somewhere between 30 and 45 degrees, I think. They tried different distances from about 15 feet, and I think the closest they could get because of their rig was about 1.5 feet or so - certainly under 3.
They tried 9mm.38,.45 magnum, 22 file 303 (or 30-6 - don't remember), up to and including a.50 cal sniper rifle.
Bottom line - black powder musket ball went down at least 3 feet. None of the other rounds went anywhere, except as slow-moving fragments - they all shattered when they hit the water.
Aside from the fact that they had a fixed deflection angle, I didn't see anything wrong with their methodology.
Yes, I should have.... and my point is that Tanenbaum's approach is a broken band-aid attempt to ignore the problem in the hopes that it will go away, just as my use of inittab was.
Time and again, the side that the U.S. supported was far more violent. Not to mention -- we shouldn't be intervening to decide other peoples' affairs, inthe first place.
[deleted for brevity]
We should revisit this history. Where you stand is an indicator of your basic humanity.
Yes, we should - and your humanity, apparently, is as selective as hell.
Re-read the post you're replying to. Nowhere in there did I say the Republicans were virginal, nor did I say the Democrats were neutral. *Both* parties are out to lunch - as you yourself admitted.
Right-wing bad, left-wing good because the left-wing didn't kill or torture *quite* as many people - is that it? That's exactly the left-right wing pissing match crap that I was referring to in the first place.
Sorry, I ain't buying what you're selling.
BOTH sides were severly out to lunch in central america, left or right.... and anybody who says anything different is as revisionist as hell.
If you can sleep soundly at night because "your" side didn't kill quite as many as the other side, I see no reason whatsoever to think that what I said originally needs to be corrected.
Slashdot Mirror
The tax was originally levied on blank cassette/VCR tapes, but for the same reason.
THe rationalle was that people were makign copies of music and the artists were loosing money in sales, so the tax was instituted and collected for distribution to the artists.
I have no idea if it's ever been distributed, and if so, how.
Not the same incident - the comment from the staff member was made a month or so after Parrish's comments. And I don't remember the exact phrasing, but if I recall correctly, her apology was almost as insulting as the original statement.
sorry, but a memember of the PM's staff does NOT have the right to call the duly-elected leader of our largest trading partner a f..king moron in front of the collective national press.
What do you think would happen if it was reported that his press secretary called Iran's leader a "f..king towelhead"?
Scientology is not in any way, shape or form a relgeion - just look at the name
It is, at best, a cult for those who have an inherently inflated ego and sence of self-worth that makes them superiour to the rest of the "Great Unwashed".
If relegion is the opiate of the masses, Scientology is the drug for intellectual snobs
I am done rambling now, but the point being, your views on religion are extremely biased and bigoted, and you should actually do research before you post something as idiotic and full of errors as this post was.
.... I think I missed the class where we were taught that anecdotal evidance constitutes proof.
.... how about what BF Skinner did to his daughter? The Nazi scientists experimenting on the jews? STD experiments on blacks in the united states? Should I keep going?
Speaking of intellectual rigor
For every muderder who was baptised/circumcised/whatever in the name of God, I will give you a million examples of somebody helping somebody else.
You don't even want to *think* about accusing the relgious of hypocracy with the rant you just gave.
Churches are institutions of man. Governments are institutions of man. Both are flawed.
If you want to stick to the rational & scientific
You might want to make sure you do YOUR research before you you decide to dump on something.
No, I'm not relegious
No, I'm not spiritual
What I am, however, is somebody who has a brain and refuses to accept dogma from ANYBODY - relegious, *or* rationalist.
Anything people want or need can be used to control them. In that sence, relegion is no different from anything else, and therefore can't be used to claim it is invalid, evil, or wrong.
Presumably, you believe in the scientific method/rationality. Others prefer to believe in a higher being.
Neither can be proven to be correct. Both require faith. And neither is inherently better, worse, "gooder", or more evil than the other.
Don't confuse the tool with the idiot that weilds it.
You're obviously not very familiar with Canadian politics, and certainly not familiar with LIBERAL politics.
f..kups like that usually get people appointed to cabinet in this country, or rewarded with some freaking patronage job somewhere.
This is the party where a member of the PRIME MINISTERS STAFF called Geogge W a "fucking moron" (yes, that's a direct quote) and was promptly defended by the PM (A Liberal) who said that the member in question had a right to their own view.
This is not, in any way, shape or form, a free speech issue.
...... this is the first rule he's since since he launched his leadership campaign that he had tried to have enforced. Hopefully, it's the start of a trend.
CIRA's rules clearly state - and have for as long as *I* can remember - that annon registrations are not acceptable. THat was, and IS, grounds to pull the DNS records.
If there is *any* story here, it should be how the hell did the site get registered in the first place, given that it didn't meet the most basic requirements.
As for Volpe? He has my congradulations
Even when the law allows you to voluntarily provide your data for handling to certain private economic entities (like marketing agencies), the data recepient must have an established corporate legal framework and EU-compliant privacy protection charta approved by the authorities. The laptop buyer certainly meets none of that.
Call me silly, but I'm guessing that that might have something to do with the fact that the laptop buyer isn't a corporation
My birthday is Sept 13, 1958. If you tell anybody I'm gonna have your ass arrested and will personally see that you get an over-friendly roomie named Bubba for the next 5-10.
bull*cough*shit
.........
The real programmers are out listening to the kodo drums, because it gives them a warm, fuzzy feeling as they harken back to the good old days of mecury delay-tube memory
No double standard at all. Symantec et. al. exist only because of Microsoft's design/implimentation errors - they should not exist at all - there should be no market for microsoft to push them OUT of.
If microsoft started addressing the problem and making the changes that rendered 3rd party virus programmes unnecessary, I would not only applaud them, but I might even change my mind about being willing to even DEVELOP windows applications.
In 25 years as a programmer, I have never written a windows *anything* for a client, and never will. Because when the sucker crashes (and it will), will the client blame microsoft? No, they'll blame ME - and it will affect MY reputation.
When I write for Unix/Linux/QNX/VRTX/Anything the hell else, I can be pretty sure that if something goes boom, it IS my fault - and I should take the blame, and if it reflects badly on me, I deserve it.
I have no problems whatsoever accepting responsibility for my errors. But there is no f..king way in HELL that I am going to send a client a programme and have them call me once a week bitching about how it keeps crashing becase it's MY fault, when it's because the damned thing is running on an unreliable piece of shit.
There is a very major difference between a 10 year old washing machine needing repairs and parts replacements after good, solid service and use over a period of time, and having to have the Maytag Man show up on your doorstep once a week if you want to be able to do more than one load a month without having your clothes get caught in the gears.
but only till crud puppy enters a strategic alliance with microsoft.
Since everybody here is a geek, nobody has a (non-inflatable) girlfriend.
..... I'm guessing that there's no real need for ANYBODY to get into a "my dick is bigger than your dick" pissing match.
So
Is it just me, or - with the exception of the fact that it mentioned neither belltower nor grassy knoll - did that whole article read like Yet Another Conspiracy Theory?
I look at most perl, and get flashbacks to APL
:-)
Are you *sure* locking Larry up is such a bad idea?
I'm sorry, I can't help you there - I'm not exactly a firearms expert. All I can tell you is that what I was watching seemed to be reasonable. But if you can find the episode somewhere and critique it, I'd be interested in knowing
You're right - it's a backup plan. Too bad it's a bad one.
It was also a backup plan for me - and it was bad then, too.
because there's a lot you can infer from knowing that minister X called the party leader at 3am and later talked to Y while the leader called minister Z.
..... and there is nothing in what you said that contradicts what *I* said, and only goes to reinforce my point.
..... most of which would also be part of the reporter's natural pattern.
.... unless, as I said, the call comes in at 3AM, when nobody would normally be calling anybody else.
Absolutly
If minister X regularly talks to the party leader at 3AM, you know nothing.
It is the *departure* from the norms that give you information.
Given that there is nothing an inside source can tell a reporter at 3AM that couldn't wait untill normal office hours, you're not going to be having that particular problem. And unless the reporter is exceedingly stupid, he'll also be talking to others in his sources area of expertise/knowledge to help him cover his track, so he doesn't stand out
How many Washington reporters don't talk to somebody at State at least once a day, for example? Good luck trying to use THAT to figure out who the leak is. If reporter X talks to person Y, then the odds are reporter Z is *also* going to call the same guy - or somebody very similar, at least - for the same type of information. So you wind up getting exactly bumpkis
....... unless, of course, you happen to be on dialup?
If you were using a system that had decent support for monitoring and managing daemons, you could have gotten an email with a core dump or whatever mailed to you when the fault first occurred, had the daemon brought back up, and if it continued to fail had the daemon kept down
..... but what would you say if I told you that the daemon I wrote was the mail submission deamon?
DAMN good idea - I really wish I had thought of that one myself.
ummmm
What would have happened in that case is that my nice, reliable, micro-kernel is now hosed because it's too busy dumping core trying to send me core dumps to do anything usefull.
And that, boys, and girls, IS the point. Restarting daemons is a band-aid, not a solution.
t's all well and good for you to be bitched out for writing bad code. Infact, that's a VERY good thing. However, don't assume that microkernel systems exists as a crutch to programmers. That's just plain wrong.
..... but that, too, is reality. There will *always* be some stupid git (like I was) who will think he's being smart by taking advantage of that.
.... but also many, many times when you *don't*, because it WILL be a crutch.
...... this is the point that bothers me most.
.... Linus is the world's worst programmer, and T is god-like. NOW which one would you want to use? And what does either side of that particular coin have to do with micro vs mono? Exactly 0.
.5 fps. And when you're talking about somebody running multiple servers, those extra percentage points of performance can make the difference between being able to plan your hardware upgrades on a 5 year cycle or a 3 year cycle .... that means BIG bucks.
Yes, it is
There are many, many instances I can think of where you might want that little extra level of reassurance
It exists as a firewall between users and crappy code. I would also venture to say that its inherent modularity will allow developers to pay more attention to the actual working bits of their code, and spend less time developing kludges and hacks to get their drivers working in a monolithic system.
First, see above - I'm saying that it will BE a crutch that a lot of programmers will use.
Second, why do you think that you have to develop "kludges and hacks" to make your driver work with a monolithic kernel, and not with a microkernel? You can have a microkernel with a badly designed system interface, or a monolithic one with a GOOD system interface.
And 3rd
The thing that matters most about the maintainability of any piece of software - kernel, application, anything - is how it's written and structured. That includes the kernel.
Just because it's monolithic, doesn't mean it's not well-structured. If you have a good, clean interface, with a well-defined way to interact with the rest of the kernel, then your code will be easy to maintain, and WILL TEND TO BE MORE RELIABLE. Let's say for the sake of arguement (and I'm making no claims here - I haven't seen T's code) that T is the world's worst programmer, and Linus is the best. If T has designed a crappy interface that promotes side-effects, for example, the kernel is gonna suck. Linus' code, however, presents a brilliant interface, simple, robust, all the mechanisms you need, and built in check to make sure you don't hose yourself or anything else. Which would you want in your r/t system?
Now turn it around
This is how *I* view the microkernel vs monolithic kernel debate. I think the system response issues are mostly overblown and based on out-of-date models (Mach and Minux 1 are definitely out of date microkernels - l4 seems to have response times that are measurably slower, but mostly unnoticable to the end user). I think this is a valuable area of research and I look forward to minux 3 maturing and becoming more usable.
I think the response times are *somewhat* overblown, but not that much. Look at the anal lengths game players will go to to obtain that extra
I think the point that bothers ME most about this whole debate is that there *are* other considerations to be taken into account when you're talking about the quality or useability of any piece of software, and T, in his arguements, seems to be focusing on essentially one, and ignoring all others. Even the example he uses - restarting services - is a BAD one, for the reasons presented above, and a major red flag for anybody who's ever had to deal with juniour programmers and try to get them to do things properly.
The microkernel deals (or tries to deal) with a SUBSET of the types of problems that can affect a kernel. This isn't a bad thing - ther
I'm sorry, but I don't remember the episode - but I'll tell you what I *do* remember. THey had a slide/guide set up into a swimming pool - the angle was somewhere between 30 and 45 degrees, I think. They tried different distances from about 15 feet, and I think the closest they could get because of their rig was about 1.5 feet or so - certainly under 3.
.38, .45 magnum, 22 file 303 (or 30-6 - don't remember), up to and including a .50 cal sniper rifle.
They tried 9mm
Bottom line - black powder musket ball went down at least 3 feet. None of the other rounds went anywhere, except as slow-moving fragments - they all shattered when they hit the water.
Aside from the fact that they had a fixed deflection angle, I didn't see anything wrong with their methodology.
Yes, I should have .... and my point is that Tanenbaum's approach is a broken band-aid attempt to ignore the problem in the hopes that it will go away, just as my use of inittab was.
Time and again, the side that the U.S. supported was far more violent. Not to mention -- we shouldn't be intervening to decide other peoples' affairs, inthe first place.
.... and anybody who says anything different is as revisionist as hell.
[deleted for brevity]
We should revisit this history. Where you stand is an indicator of your basic humanity.
Yes, we should - and your humanity, apparently, is as selective as hell.
Re-read the post you're replying to. Nowhere in there did I say the Republicans were virginal, nor did I say the Democrats were neutral. *Both* parties are out to lunch - as you yourself admitted.
Right-wing bad, left-wing good because the left-wing didn't kill or torture *quite* as many people - is that it? That's exactly the left-right wing pissing match crap that I was referring to in the first place.
Sorry, I ain't buying what you're selling. BOTH sides were severly out to lunch in central america, left or right
If you can sleep soundly at night because "your" side didn't kill quite as many as the other side, I see no reason whatsoever to think that what I said originally needs to be corrected.