But not everyone who runs a web site really "needs" their domain, that doesn't mean their not using it. I have a couple of domains registered myself, one of which I use almost solely for e-mail. For quite some time it was parked on a godaddy.com page. I didn't care, I still got to use it for e-mail. Now I put it to slightly better use, but I never would have gotten it if I'd had to pay $50 a year. Maybe an intial payment of $50 a year and a smaller renewal fee thereafter. My point is that the internet isn't just for commercial sites that can afford to pay a lot for expensive domains. And it's hard to find a decent web host that will give you a nice looking address without having a full domain.
It's also difficult to legislate who can buy a domain and who can't. If there's legislation against domain parking, whose to define domain parking? Take Microsoft's origami project. They bought the domain and presumably had it parked for a while before publicizing it.
And you talk about suing over copyright infringement. Suppose some hobbyist named Bill McDonald had bought McDonalds.com before McDonald's decided to get on the internet scene. Should they be able to sue Bill for copyright infringement? I should hope not.
I agree that there is a growing problem of people buying domains just to sell them at an obscene price later, but I haven't seen any solutions that don't screw someone over who doesn't deserve to be screwed.
New technology is always becoming available. It's always possible to improve the specs of a product by the time its released. Unfortunately if you always try to have everything top of the line, the product never gets released. If you want to ever actually release the product, you'll have to make some cuts. What companies need to do is know what features they want to have and complete it with the best available technology. Constantly adding features to a product that's never going to release (or is going to be so expensive it doesn't sell one it is released) is pointless.
A hundred years ago, people entertained themselves by reading books. Then radio came along, so they'd listen to radio shows instead. The radio programs in themselves weren't necessarily more fulfilling, but the provided a social aspect that didn't come along with books. People would all listen to the same thing at once, then the next day at work or school they could talk about the radio programs. T.V. replaced radio by offering the same social aspect but more than just audio. But TV shows are quickly becoming something you record and watch later, or download when you have time to watch. To a degree, this takes away from the social aspect. When someone watches a show as it airs, they're all hyped to go talk with a friend at work about it. But when they get to work, they find that their friend recorded it on their DVR and plans to watch it the following night. They lose interest by the time their friend is wanting to talk about it. It becomes like a book that some people rush out and read right away, but many will wait and read later, thus losing the social aspect.
I know there are some other reasons books are less popular than tv shows, but I have to wonder what effect the ability to download shows at your leisure will have on the social aspects of television. I'm not really opposed to the idea of DVRs or TV downloads, I just wonder what unintended consequences it may have.
Despite what it may look like, that site doesn't just accept anyone. My father, an engineer and expert in heat transfer sent in a petition card and received a follow up to confirm the legitimacy of his degree. I had a friend (a proponent of global warming) who tried to get her name on the list just to invalidate my use of the list in arguments, but failed because of the follow up.
Even if a few of the people signing that petition are dentists instead of climatologists, it shows that there are more than just a few dissenters.
That's great for politics. In science, people discuss issues, look at evidence, and the right point of view ultimately prevails. If an unpopular viewpoint is being supressed instead of addressed, the issue is political, not scientific.
Did you read more than 4 the words of the parent you quoted? They were talking about sattelite coordination, not making a laser that could shoot a beam half way around the world. They even mentioned that the atmosphere would provide problems for a laser.
Keeping warm is a lot easier than cooling off. To keep warm, all you have to do is generate and retain heat. To cool off, you have to move the heat away and keep it from being replaced and on a place like venus, where are you going to move it to?
Sounds to me like they're saying don't ship without any kind of operating system. If they ship with Linux, that's (somewhat) acceptable, so Microsoft could at least make the argument that they're not forcing people into Windows.
PC Vendors: Get Vista ready PC's nearly a year before Vista hits the markets!
Consumers: Okay!
(6 Months Later)
Microsoft: Sorry, but it's going to take more than we thought to run Vista. You'll have to buy new PCs.
Consumers (angrily): But you said...
PC Vendors (secretly happy): All we had to go with were the early Vista specs. But we'll give you a great deal on a new...
Remind anyone of early HD adopters? I'm sure PC's could be sold Vista ready today, but some of these sound like bare minimum specs to be running Vista. If Microsoft ups the system requirements, somebody's gonna get hosed (and it ain't the PC vendors).
Why just a one year period where.com domains can redirect? Why not just require that content be hosted on the.xxx domains. Then they could redirect forever without concerns of their customers not being able to find their site, but even if www.somepornsite.com redirects automatically to www.somepornsite.xxx, computers that block.xxx domains won't get there. It provides blockability without inconveniencing the site owners beyond having to move their content to a.xxx domain.
I also argue that they ought to use subdomains (ie xxx.somepornsite.com) rather than TLDs, because again it provides blockablity without creating struggle for the best new domains and forcing webmasters to spend time and money moving to new domains.
The rest of what you say, I pretty much agree with. Except it was the crazy liberals who voted for Kerry who told me not to support Badnarik.
Lots of the comments related to this post seem to be hoping that Microsoft will die a horrible death after they attempt to sue Linux vendors for IP violations. They say it would be the best thing for the advancement of technology. I would certainly like to see some better competition, rather than a competition stifling monopoly, but can you imagine what would happen if Microsoft Windows were no longer available? With the security holes it has, it would become worthless in a matter of months with nobody to keep releasing patches for it. Personally, I run a Windows box side by side with a Linux box and use Synergy to go back and forth. If Windows became worthless, I'd just switch my Windows box to Linux and keep on trucking. But I happen to be a computer nerd planning a switch to linux anyway, so a change like this wouldn't be very devistating.
Most computer users are far from computer nerds. If my mom couldn't use Windows anymore, I imagine she'd give up on computers all together before she'd try to learn Linux, or even OSX. Even my father who is very computer savvy for someone in his sixties would have trouble moving away from Windows. The same goes for probably 90% of the computer users I know.
Yes, it would be great if an operating system with a less domineering business strategy had risen to the top instead of Microsoft, but the truth is Microsoft has provided a platform that your average Joe can use. If Windows were yanked out of the system, much of the world would be technologically devistated, at least for a time. I certainly don't want to see these suits go through because of what they'd do to the Linux community, but I don't want to see Microsoft go bust either.
There are a lot of flaws with the idea of forcing porn sites onto an.XXX TLD. The most obvious is that it can only effect sites located within the US, but that aside, I've asked before, what happens when you have somepornsite.com and somepornsite.net owned by two different people? Is it just first come first served for the.XXX domain? And could somebody who doesn't own either of those buy the.XXX and hike up the price real high, since there will be a fight to get that domain?
And what about doorway sites? Could somepornsite.com stay open to redirect people to their new domain? If so, could it be an automatic redirect?
Forcing porn sites to buy another domain is, in my opinion unreasonable. I don't think the government ought to be trying to put such regulations on the industry to begin with, but if they are going to make such regulations, they ought to do it with the subdomain rather than the TLD. For example, at the top of this page you see politics.slashdot.org. The porn sites could keep their domains and not have to pay anything extra, the only restriction being that they have to use xxx.somepornsite.net instead of www.somepornsite.com. It wouldn't cost them anything, and it would give the politicians what their looking for by creating something that's easy to block.
As I say, I'm very much opposed to any of the above regulations, but I think my suggestion is a less obtrusive method.
I thought the same thing initially, but depending on how quickly the commercial space industry gets moving, it could be NASA vs. Scaled Composite. That's what I'm hoping for, anyway.
For a web application that's fairly simple. It just sends headers of whatever file type you're trying to save it as, generates the file on the server end, then uploads it to the user. Nothing particularly impressive on that end.
It seems that many people in this thread are discussing the points of specific languages, and while yes Basic is good for teaching line by line execution, it's not great for teaching data structures. I've not dealt with visual basic in about four years, so I may be outdated, but my opinion at the time was that it simply created confusion. There was a screen for building the interface, and another screen for coding events related to the object. I didn't feel it gave an accurate portrayal of how the program worked, because so many thing were done automatically, the programmer doesn't see half of what goes into the program. As many users have pointed out, Java will confuse new programmers because of it's strict object oriented nature.
In my opinion, you should begin strictly conceptually. A man who was friends with my highschool programming teacher wrote a program called Alice, which is intended to teach programming on a strictly conceptual level. The user creates an environment in which they can create animations with 3d objects. It introduces concepts of object oriented programming, if statements, else statements, functions, for loops, while loops, recursive loops, data structures, and virtually every other necessary concept in programming, without ever having to look at raw code. Once someone has these concepts under their belt, they can generally move to any programming language, only needing to work on syntax, which varies from language to language anyway. I really feel that Alice is the best way to learn programming concepts without having the concepts be tied to a specific language.
Another plus about Alice, is that because it's intended as a teaching tool, it comes with a set of prepared lessons. If you missed the link in the middle of the last pargraph, here it is again. Hope it suits your needs.
That's good to know. I might add, the people who make PDF995 also have some commercially available software that I believe is supposed to be better than their free print driver.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also difficult to legislate who can buy a domain and who can't. If there's legislation against domain parking, whose to define domain parking? Take Microsoft's origami project. They bought the domain and presumably had it parked for a while before publicizing it.
And you talk about suing over copyright infringement. Suppose some hobbyist named Bill McDonald had bought McDonalds.com before McDonald's decided to get on the internet scene. Should they be able to sue Bill for copyright infringement? I should hope not.
I agree that there is a growing problem of people buying domains just to sell them at an obscene price later, but I haven't seen any solutions that don't screw someone over who doesn't deserve to be screwed.
New technology is always becoming available. It's always possible to improve the specs of a product by the time its released. Unfortunately if you always try to have everything top of the line, the product never gets released. If you want to ever actually release the product, you'll have to make some cuts. What companies need to do is know what features they want to have and complete it with the best available technology. Constantly adding features to a product that's never going to release (or is going to be so expensive it doesn't sell one it is released) is pointless.
I know there are some other reasons books are less popular than tv shows, but I have to wonder what effect the ability to download shows at your leisure will have on the social aspects of television. I'm not really opposed to the idea of DVRs or TV downloads, I just wonder what unintended consequences it may have.
Even if a few of the people signing that petition are dentists instead of climatologists, it shows that there are more than just a few dissenters.
Very few dissenters? Here's a list of more than 17,000 dissenters most of whom are qualified scientists and engineers.
That's great for politics. In science, people discuss issues, look at evidence, and the right point of view ultimately prevails. If an unpopular viewpoint is being supressed instead of addressed, the issue is political, not scientific.
Does nobody build their own PC in China?
Did you read more than 4 the words of the parent you quoted? They were talking about sattelite coordination, not making a laser that could shoot a beam half way around the world. They even mentioned that the atmosphere would provide problems for a laser.
Keeping warm is a lot easier than cooling off. To keep warm, all you have to do is generate and retain heat. To cool off, you have to move the heat away and keep it from being replaced and on a place like venus, where are you going to move it to?
Never mind. I missed the part about selling dual boot machines.
I must be missing something. Last I checked I have a computer that dual boots Windows/Linux. How exactly does Microsoft not allow dual-boot machines?
Sounds to me like they're saying don't ship without any kind of operating system. If they ship with Linux, that's (somewhat) acceptable, so Microsoft could at least make the argument that they're not forcing people into Windows.
Consumers: Okay!
(6 Months Later)
Microsoft: Sorry, but it's going to take more than we thought to run Vista. You'll have to buy new PCs.
Consumers (angrily): But you said...
PC Vendors (secretly happy): All we had to go with were the early Vista specs. But we'll give you a great deal on a new...
Remind anyone of early HD adopters? I'm sure PC's could be sold Vista ready today, but some of these sound like bare minimum specs to be running Vista. If Microsoft ups the system requirements, somebody's gonna get hosed (and it ain't the PC vendors).
You mean it's not already crashing?
I also argue that they ought to use subdomains (ie xxx.somepornsite.com) rather than TLDs, because again it provides blockablity without creating struggle for the best new domains and forcing webmasters to spend time and money moving to new domains.
The rest of what you say, I pretty much agree with. Except it was the crazy liberals who voted for Kerry who told me not to support Badnarik.
Most computer users are far from computer nerds. If my mom couldn't use Windows anymore, I imagine she'd give up on computers all together before she'd try to learn Linux, or even OSX. Even my father who is very computer savvy for someone in his sixties would have trouble moving away from Windows. The same goes for probably 90% of the computer users I know.
Yes, it would be great if an operating system with a less domineering business strategy had risen to the top instead of Microsoft, but the truth is Microsoft has provided a platform that your average Joe can use. If Windows were yanked out of the system, much of the world would be technologically devistated, at least for a time. I certainly don't want to see these suits go through because of what they'd do to the Linux community, but I don't want to see Microsoft go bust either.
And what about doorway sites? Could somepornsite.com stay open to redirect people to their new domain? If so, could it be an automatic redirect?
Forcing porn sites to buy another domain is, in my opinion unreasonable. I don't think the government ought to be trying to put such regulations on the industry to begin with, but if they are going to make such regulations, they ought to do it with the subdomain rather than the TLD. For example, at the top of this page you see politics.slashdot.org. The porn sites could keep their domains and not have to pay anything extra, the only restriction being that they have to use xxx.somepornsite.net instead of www.somepornsite.com. It wouldn't cost them anything, and it would give the politicians what their looking for by creating something that's easy to block.
As I say, I'm very much opposed to any of the above regulations, but I think my suggestion is a less obtrusive method.
I thought the same thing initially, but depending on how quickly the commercial space industry gets moving, it could be NASA vs. Scaled Composite. That's what I'm hoping for, anyway.
For a web application that's fairly simple. It just sends headers of whatever file type you're trying to save it as, generates the file on the server end, then uploads it to the user. Nothing particularly impressive on that end.
Initialisms use the first letters of words. Examples include WTF, OMG, and the things in the article.
Anagrams are words that are made by rearranging the letters of another word: Clint Eastwood -> Old West Action, Mother in-law -> Woman Hitler.
There were no acronyms or (intentional) anagrams in the article, just a bunch of initialisms.
So suppose somepornsite.com and somepornsite.org are owned by two different groups? Who gets dibs on somepornsite.xxx?
I tried that once. Unfortunately VMWare checks it's enviornment to make sure you're not creating a VM within a VM.
Unfortunately, stating that it was a bad idea decades after the fact does nothing for the poor beings trapped in these small cages.
In my opinion, you should begin strictly conceptually. A man who was friends with my highschool programming teacher wrote a program called Alice, which is intended to teach programming on a strictly conceptual level. The user creates an environment in which they can create animations with 3d objects. It introduces concepts of object oriented programming, if statements, else statements, functions, for loops, while loops, recursive loops, data structures, and virtually every other necessary concept in programming, without ever having to look at raw code. Once someone has these concepts under their belt, they can generally move to any programming language, only needing to work on syntax, which varies from language to language anyway. I really feel that Alice is the best way to learn programming concepts without having the concepts be tied to a specific language.
Another plus about Alice, is that because it's intended as a teaching tool, it comes with a set of prepared lessons. If you missed the link in the middle of the last pargraph, here it is again. Hope it suits your needs.
Thanks.