They never quote the original text! I will grant you the translation is a little...choppy. But let's not blame Babelfish until we know it really did foul up. Maybe the reporters well spoken not were.
> And of course, actually getting it up into orbit might take a little more work.
I'd be careful about saying that. While nerds may be in a minority everywhere they are found, in aggregate they are still a numerous and clever breed prone to accepting challenges like that. DJGPP came about because Stallman said it wasn't possible to run gcc under DOS. The thought of hundreds of thousands of sputniks in low earth orbit is scarey.:)
...I hope she takes all her spies and spy gadgets with her. The Fox people will undoubtedly rue the day they hired her when they find a bug in the men's room. And I don't mean the kind with legs.
>> How about the homeless build their own damn house? Why do people >> with jobs, and houses, have to support every one that does not.
> Because a society without such safety nets will accumulate large > amounts [sic. That's "numbers" - "amount" implies something that > cannot be enumerated, like water] of disenfranchised people who > have nothing to lose but their chains, and the choices at that > point are brutal oppression to keep them down or a bloody revolution.
Or we could admit that most of these poor, deprived people are already enmeshed in these "safety" nets and considering bloody revolution as their only way out of them. Governments cannot create value. That is by their very nature, and why we have capitalism today - well, half capitalism, since the government's "budget" takes up more than the other half, making half our economy a soviet-style command economy, and we all know how well that worked for the Russians, don't we?
When government tries to "solve" problems it does so by stealing from one category of citizens in order to give the money to another category. But the amount given out is never as large as the amount taken, and is usually an order of magnitude difference.
Want proof? Go back to the Kennedy administration and add up all the money spent since then "helping" people. You will find we have spent nearly enough to make every human being under the poverty line a millionaire. But, of course, had we done that we would never have our present array of fine bureaucratic departments intended to "help" the poor.
Want more proof? Go find out exactly what benefits are available to a poor person in your state. Do it for real, and you will need a lawyer, but when you get that result find out how many poor people are getting this amount. You will find that zero - that's "0", zip, goose egg, nada, ziltch - get this amount, and that only about half of those eligible get anything at all. Now go back to your lawyer and go through his legal bill for you, and then ask yourself how a poor person can afford such a good lawyer.
You want to sleep safely in your bed? Stop making poor people with government's "help". Leave people alone in freedom and the vast majority will not only find a way to support themselves, but will generate new value in our economy. Proof of that, you say? How much did the US government GNP rise in constant dollars from 1776 through to the second Roosevelt administration? Answer, a lot more than it has ever since - and this despite the fact that the electronic revo- lution forced the whole country up economic river for nearly 20 years, before copyrights, patents, and government "help" managed to stall it and send all those nice jobs, and money, overseas. But then, we couldn't employ all those beancounters and managers. And lawyers. Lots and lots of lawyers. Remember, maggots only eat dead flesh.
You are just like every Liberal I've ever met. Heart's in the right place. Brain isn't.
Let's see...we're managed by idiots with MBAs, we are underpaid by idiots with MBAs, our jobs are outsourced by idiots with MBAs, our deadlines are set by idiots with MBAs. Gee, I dunno why no one wants to be an engineer any more.
RPN was the only reliable way to be sure both you and the calculator agreed on the order of the computation. For a long time you could not walk up to an algebraic notation calc and expect to be able to use it to produce known-good results. Many of them were only "semi-algebraic" where you would enter 2+2= to get 4 but 30 SIN to get sin(30) - which is RPN. It was a long time before you could do "SIN(30)". Calcs also differed in the number of pending operations they would support, and because of implied priorities these did not match up with the "levels of parens" number. Only with RPN could you know exactly how to structure a problem and feed it in, how to deal with intermediate results, and how to get a reliable result that could be replicated on the same or other RPN models. TI machines weren't even consistent within their own calc line, never mind anyone else's.
RPN also required fewer keystrokes, and the advantage mounted with increasing problem complexity. Also, stack machines were more amenable to programming because the state of the calc could be known exactly, whereas with a TI the state was encoded in the pending ops stack, the paren stack, and then the program area. Jumping into such a mess was an adventure, to say the least.
No. Terrorism has already won. I sat there on 9/11, watching the news and crying. Crying for the innocent people who were murdered, yes, but also crying for the end of freedom. The end of civil rights. I knew at that moment that "liberty" would never again be anything but a hollow mockery of itself. I knew the gov't - to "protect" us - would strip us of the entire Bill of Rights and more besides. And that is exactly what they did. What RICO began, what the "War on (Some) Drugs" carried through, we, ourselves, through our government, have completed. And don't lecture me about the Republicans did this or the Democrats did something else. Both sides of the aisle voted for these things. Both share the blame.
As Franklin observed, those who would trade their liberty for imagined security deserve neither. And now we have neither, nor are we ever going to. There are times when I look at my 10 year old son and I am consumed with guilt at what I have brought him into.
The first programmable hand-held calculator was Hewlett Packard's HP-65. The SR-52 came a year later. HP then brought out the HP-67, and TI followed a year later with the TI-59. HP then came out with the HP-41 handheld programmable with slots for adding interfaces including HP-IL allowing the calc to handle all kinds of control and data-collections chores in labs. TI followed suit with the TI-88 the following year. I mean the year after that. No, it was the next year. The year after? As a matter of fact, TI never did come out with competition for the HP-41.
But there is no doubt that the first programmable handheld was the HP-65. If they don't have that in their collection then they ain't got the first.
> Could this be an effective argument against the > proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply > ignore the facts and press ahead?
It has been shown by traffic engineers that American speed limits are set too low. The rule they use is the 85% rule - the average speed of 85% of the traffic is the best speed. By definition, in fact, as it there- fore guarantees that cops only have to deal with the 15% of the population who will not drive reasonably and prudently. This rule-of-thumb has been shown useful again and again. Yet the US persists in restricting speeds to 55 or 65 miles an hour. According to many traffic engineer studies, this results in 75%(+/- a small number, I don't recall) offenders, far more than police can handle. Have the speed limits been raised to recommended levels? They have not. 75% offender rates are great for bringing in the fines. And those tickets also mean insurance companies can raise your rates, even though they know perfectly well a moving violation has no effect on your probability of a claim. So, why the obstinacy? Could it be because every municipality in the country is trying to get photocops installed everywhere? Do they reduce accidents? No. But they are great for revenue - as long as you get rid of that "punishing the transgresser" nonsense and just assume the registered owner of the violating car is guilty. Guilty until proven innocent is so much more efficient. Especially when there is no amount of proof that will satisfy a traffic court judge that anyone is innocent.
And then we have red-light cameras. Again, traffic engineers have pointed out - many times - that extending the yellow light to 4 seconds and making it consistent for all traffic lights does, indeed, make red-light intersections safer. So do we do that? We do not. Rather, we put up a red light camera, and then we shorten the yellows to push up the take. And does this make intersections safer? No, in fact the accident rate doubles, and in some instances triples, almost all of them, predictably, rear-end collisions. And, I hardly dare to point out, this, again, requires eliminating "innocent until proven guilty" and making the registered owner responsible.
Oh, sure, the registered owner can finger the real culprit - who is most often their spouse, but hey, it's a tort law, so it's okay to stress and strain a marriage for the sake of that fine.
So they all ride the gravy train, and we all pay. We pay in money for fines and insurance rate increases, we pay in time, as if commute distances aren't already ridiculous. We pay in aggravation, which either damages relations with other people or which will corrode your arteries faster than any amount of Ben and Jerry's best. And, finally, we pay with our lives because all of this is very profitable for the gov't, but it causes accidents, lots of them, and people get badly hurt or killed in such accidents - entirely preventable accidents - every day. Think of that when you pass one of those crosses set up by the side of the road, and remember that money was more important to the gov't than the life of that person, someone's son, daughter, spouse, sibling, friend. The $$$ are more important.
So will we wind up in George Orwell's nightmare here? With the current mania for gov't spying on Americans I'd say it's all but guaranteed. But if there is a way to use the system to catch jaywalkers, parking violations, right-of-way rules, inattentive wandering between lanes while sipping one's latte, well, you can bet we'll see those cameras - everywhere.
Freedom. Liberty. Rights. None of these can stand up to paranoia or the almighty dollar.
All the Baum Oz books, as well as the first half-dozen Plumly Oz books, are public domain! That means the "rights" that Ted Turner sold to these bozos are also public domain. Anyone can write an Oz script and film it as a movie. The new movie - a "derived work" - would be subject to our effectively-eternal copyright laws. But the original books and any rights derived from them are public domain. But there is one loophole through which these...people...can pull this crap.
The "Tarzan" bozos pull much the same stunt by (eternally, since there is no time limit) trademarking the name "Tarzan". To be able to market any movie with "Tarzan" in the title requires licensing it from the Burroughs heirs for big bucks, even if most of the Tarzan books are public domain. Turner undoubtedly sold the trademark he got with the 1939 Judy Garland "Wizard of Oz". This is the kind of quasi-legal bullshit that has become the defacto metho for yanking public domain material back under the control, if not the actual copyright, of these large corporations.
If Sony's betamax had won Sony would have made a mint. It would therefore have had a pile of cash when it turned to the dark side, buying even more content and inventing even more DRM for it. No, no. VHS was the best choice. It was technologically inferior - but it was a hell of a lot safer. Sony is less evil than Microsoft, but not by much.
> what projects have you worked on which you felt had admirable code, > both high-level architecture and in-the-trenches implementation? In > particular I am interested in large user applications using modern > C++ libraries and techniques like exception handling and RAII."
The intersection of those sets is null. There is such a thing as pretty code. None of it is written in C++.
> one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of > its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated > itself from the community and refused to share.
In all honesty I would have to say that that cell hasn't changed much between then and now.
Yes, I guess I am in a grumpy mood. WHAT'S IT TO YA?
Given the kind of deliberate lying hack jobs that Michael Moore jestingly calls "documentaries" I would have to say on the evidence that Google is firmly on the side of the angels on this one. Moore is a character assassin writ large, and anything anyone can do to help his victims is justified.
This is why I look askance at the whole patent system - and why I suspect that we would, as a society, be better off without them.
Truthfully, most of the coming technologies have been developed under hacker-style gift economies, then patents and copyrights commercialize them. Best example is movies. Once made they cost pennies to reproduce. Soon CGI will have progressed to digital actors, and digital sets. The day is not far off when one person could create a whole movie in their Copious Spare Time. If that person believes in FOSS, then the movie will cost nothing, it is "gifted" to the economy and in return consumers provide respect (or "whuffie" in Doctorow terms). Where do the costs come in? Licensing the source material, the music, the digital actors images, and so on and so forth. Eventually free music, source material, and digital actors will create a FOSS movie community, and MPAA will go crying to the government because nobody wants to pay them for their crap.
Each such development pushes us toward a global gift economy, which is vigorously fought by entrenched business interests that sense the time has come for their elimination or replacement. This resistance is the one fault in capitalism: it creates forces that perpetuate it, and prevents (or tries to) any successor economic system. But I look at what is happening with FOSS, and I add it to cars designed in college courses, self-reproducing 3-d printers and fabricators to produce those free plans, and then toss in vertical farming (which produces both food and energy (despite the need to power the lighting system) and I see the eventual conversion of the world to a new paradigm. You would live by downloading free plans from the web and would build them with your 3d fabrication system. You would eat food grown in a spare room, you would have your own water use cycle - really the only thing left to produce that cannot be done for free is raw materials.
Let's see, an elderly physicist says it may be possible, a younger writer of science fiction says it isn't. What was Clarke's First Law again? But then, the SF writer isn't an elderly scientist, is he?
No. I was asked for my fingerprints once - after I started the new job and already commited to it. I refused and was forced out. However, before that happened, I was identified as a suspect in an incident of counterfeit money. So I was off to the police station to be grilled over leaving a bogus $20 at an eatery I'd never heard of. The manager followed the guy to my place of work and reported to the police. The police then used the database of employee photos for picture ID's and dragged in everyone they thought matched the description.
So, I got pulled into America's frightening evil so-called "legal" so-called "system" using an (I thought) innocuous photo. When they came looking for my fingerprints all I could think of is the FBI computers constantly running matches for wanted people and figured that if I could wind up getting sweated by the cops using just a photo of me, I thought the chances of getting enough fingerprint point matches to wind up getting arrested for murder, rape, tax evasion, whatever they got with a death penalty attached. Yeah, maybe the system would work and kick me. But then again, I might be one of those elderly felons that were proved innocent and released after twenty five years on death row. I don't need that kind of malarky. Go find a place that's just a little bit more reasonable.
It's one of the reasons I gave up flying. I hated feeling all my civil rights evaporate as I entered an airport...
You have informed them they are committing a crime. They have ordered you to do it, at least implicitly threatening your job if you fail to do it. They bought the package to be pirated, they own the computers it's pirated to. You are legally in the clear. Especially if you are willing to testify for the prosecution at your company's RICO trial.
Face it, copyright holders never ask "who's responsible" for pirating. All they care about is "who to sue". Your pockets are just nowhere near as deep as your employer's. So, let 'em suffer. God knows they asked for it. Quite literally.
I think I must've worked for you once upon a time.
Crafting tools is not wasting time. Frequently the fastest way to accomplish s six-week project is to take a month to write the tool...which will then complete the project in under a week. Management with your attitude will a) never see tools produced that increase the department's overall productivity and b) you won't have the best people working for you. No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here.
> I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift?
The sad fact of the matter is that Congress never studies anything but opinion polls and the wants and needs of those people who helped elect them. The reason is quite simple: the predominant life-form in Congress is "lawyers", none of whom has even the tiniest glimmer of intellect to devote to actual study of the issues. Existence proof? Virtually every bill passed by Congress leaves behind it a contrail of smaller bills amending, or even reversing, the first bill. If they studied issues, they would not need so many course corrections.
Frankly, lawyers should not be permitted to hold any elective office. It's a conflict of interest, pure and simple. Lawyers get elected to offices and they appear to operate as if their primary purpose is to create more need for, and opportunities for, more lawyers. Congress has never, ever, passed a bill that would in any way limit the continuing metastasis of lawyers except in one, count 'em, one, issue: as more and more people are yanked off Death Row due to the work of the Innocence Project, Congress, in it's infinite wisdom, has limited Death Row appeals more and more, leaving less room for the Innocence Project to continue to demonstrate how corrupted and failure prone is the system that so blythely sends people to be killed in the name of "Justice".
In point of fact, the one trade that ought to be predominant in Congress is software engineers. Realize that our so-called "legal," so-called "system" is really a large program of inferential rules. Who better to debug such a thing? =)
Slashdot Mirror
They never quote the original text! I will grant you the translation is a little...choppy. But let's not blame Babelfish until we know it really did foul up. Maybe the reporters well spoken not were.
> And of course, actually getting it up into orbit might take a little more work.
:)
I'd be careful about saying that. While nerds may be in a minority everywhere they are found, in aggregate they are still a numerous and clever breed prone to accepting challenges like that. DJGPP came about because Stallman said it wasn't possible to run gcc under DOS. The thought of hundreds of thousands of sputniks in low earth orbit is scarey.
...I hope she takes all her spies and spy gadgets with her. The Fox people will undoubtedly rue the day they hired her when they find a bug in the men's room. And I don't mean the kind with legs.
>> How about the homeless build their own damn house? Why do people
>> with jobs, and houses, have to support every one that does not.
> Because a society without such safety nets will accumulate large
> amounts [sic. That's "numbers" - "amount" implies something that
> cannot be enumerated, like water] of disenfranchised people who
> have nothing to lose but their chains, and the choices at that
> point are brutal oppression to keep them down or a bloody revolution.
Or we could admit that most of these poor, deprived people are already
enmeshed in these "safety" nets and considering bloody revolution as
their only way out of them. Governments cannot create value. That is
by their very nature, and why we have capitalism today - well, half
capitalism, since the government's "budget" takes up more than the other
half, making half our economy a soviet-style command economy, and we all
know how well that worked for the Russians, don't we?
When government tries to "solve" problems it does so by stealing from
one category of citizens in order to give the money to another category.
But the amount given out is never as large as the amount taken,
and is usually an order of magnitude difference.
Want proof? Go back to the Kennedy administration and add up all the
money spent since then "helping" people. You will find we have spent
nearly enough to make every human being under the poverty line a
millionaire. But, of course, had we done that we would never have
our present array of fine bureaucratic departments intended to "help"
the poor.
Want more proof? Go find out exactly what benefits are available to
a poor person in your state. Do it for real, and you will
need a lawyer, but when you get that result find out how many poor
people are getting this amount. You will find that zero - that's
"0", zip, goose egg, nada, ziltch - get this amount, and that only
about half of those eligible get anything at all. Now go
back to your lawyer and go through his legal bill for you, and then
ask yourself how a poor person can afford such a good lawyer.
You want to sleep safely in your bed? Stop making poor people
with government's "help". Leave people alone in freedom and the
vast majority will not only find a way to support themselves, but will
generate new value in our economy. Proof of that, you say? How much
did the US government GNP rise in constant dollars from 1776 through
to the second Roosevelt administration? Answer, a lot more than it
has ever since - and this despite the fact that the electronic revo-
lution forced the whole country up economic river for nearly 20 years,
before copyrights, patents, and government "help" managed to stall it
and send all those nice jobs, and money, overseas. But then, we couldn't
employ all those beancounters and managers. And lawyers. Lots
and lots of lawyers. Remember, maggots only eat dead flesh.
You are just like every Liberal I've ever met. Heart's in the right
place. Brain isn't.
Let's see...we're managed by idiots with MBAs, we are underpaid by idiots with MBAs, our jobs are outsourced by idiots with MBAs, our deadlines are set by idiots with MBAs. Gee, I dunno why no one wants to be an engineer any more.
RPN was the only reliable way to be sure both you and the calculator agreed on the order of the computation. For a long time you could not walk up to an algebraic notation calc and expect to be able to use it to produce known-good results. Many of them were only "semi-algebraic" where you would enter 2+2= to get 4 but 30 SIN to get sin(30) - which is RPN. It was a long time before you could do "SIN(30)". Calcs also differed in the number of pending operations they would support, and because of implied priorities these did not match up with the "levels of parens" number. Only with RPN could you know exactly how to structure a problem and feed it in, how to deal with intermediate results, and how to get a reliable result that could be replicated on the same or other RPN models. TI machines weren't even consistent within their own calc line, never mind anyone else's.
RPN also required fewer keystrokes, and the advantage mounted with increasing problem complexity. Also, stack machines were more amenable to programming because the state of the calc could be known exactly, whereas with a TI the state was encoded in the pending ops stack, the paren stack, and then the program area. Jumping into such a mess was an adventure, to say the least.
No. Terrorism has already won. I sat there on 9/11, watching the news and crying. Crying for the innocent people who were murdered, yes, but also crying for the end of freedom. The end of civil rights. I knew at that moment that "liberty" would never again be anything but a hollow mockery of itself. I knew the gov't - to "protect" us - would strip us of the entire Bill of Rights and more besides. And that is exactly what they did. What RICO began, what the "War on (Some) Drugs" carried through, we, ourselves, through our government, have completed. And don't lecture me about the Republicans did this or the Democrats did something else. Both sides of the aisle voted for these things. Both share the blame.
As Franklin observed, those who would trade their liberty for imagined security deserve neither. And now we have neither, nor are we ever going to. There are times when I look at my 10 year old son and I am consumed with guilt at what I have brought him into.
The first programmable hand-held calculator was Hewlett Packard's HP-65. The SR-52 came a year later. HP then brought out the HP-67, and TI followed a year later with the TI-59. HP then came out with the HP-41 handheld programmable with slots for adding interfaces including HP-IL allowing the calc to handle all kinds of control and data-collections chores in labs. TI followed suit with the TI-88 the following year. I mean the year after that. No, it was the next year. The year after? As a matter of fact, TI never did come out with competition for the HP-41.
But there is no doubt that the first programmable handheld was the HP-65. If they don't have that in their collection then they ain't got the first.
> Could this be an effective argument against the
> proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply
> ignore the facts and press ahead?
It has been shown by traffic engineers that American
speed limits are set too low. The rule they use is
the 85% rule - the average speed of 85% of the traffic
is the best speed. By definition, in fact, as it there-
fore guarantees that cops only have to deal with the 15%
of the population who will not drive reasonably and
prudently. This rule-of-thumb has been shown useful
again and again. Yet the US persists in restricting
speeds to 55 or 65 miles an hour. According to many
traffic engineer studies, this results in 75%(+/- a
small number, I don't recall) offenders, far more than
police can handle. Have the speed limits been raised
to recommended levels? They have not. 75% offender
rates are great for bringing in the fines. And
those tickets also mean insurance companies can raise
your rates, even though they know perfectly well a moving
violation has no effect on your probability of a
claim. So, why the obstinacy? Could it be because every
municipality in the country is trying to get photocops
installed everywhere? Do they reduce accidents? No.
But they are great for revenue - as long as you get rid
of that "punishing the transgresser" nonsense and just
assume the registered owner of the violating car is guilty.
Guilty until proven innocent is so much more efficient.
Especially when there is no amount of proof that will
satisfy a traffic court judge that anyone is innocent.
And then we have red-light cameras. Again, traffic
engineers have pointed out - many times - that
extending the yellow light to 4 seconds and making it
consistent for all traffic lights does, indeed,
make red-light intersections safer. So do we do that?
We do not. Rather, we put up a red light camera, and
then we shorten the yellows to push up the take.
And does this make intersections safer? No, in fact the
accident rate doubles, and in some instances triples,
almost all of them, predictably, rear-end collisions.
And, I hardly dare to point out, this, again, requires
eliminating "innocent until proven guilty" and making
the registered owner responsible.
Oh, sure, the registered owner can finger the real culprit
- who is most often their spouse, but hey, it's a tort law,
so it's okay to stress and strain a marriage for the sake
of that fine.
So they all ride the gravy train, and we all pay. We pay
in money for fines and insurance rate increases, we pay in
time, as if commute distances aren't already ridiculous.
We pay in aggravation, which either damages relations with
other people or which will corrode your arteries faster than
any amount of Ben and Jerry's best. And, finally, we pay
with our lives because all of this is very profitable
for the gov't, but it causes accidents, lots of them, and
people get badly hurt or killed in such accidents -
entirely preventable accidents - every day. Think of that
when you pass one of those crosses set up by the side of the
road, and remember that money was more important to the gov't
than the life of that person, someone's son, daughter, spouse,
sibling, friend. The $$$ are more important.
So will we wind up in George Orwell's nightmare here? With
the current mania for gov't spying on Americans I'd say it's
all but guaranteed. But if there is a way to use the system
to catch jaywalkers, parking violations, right-of-way rules,
inattentive wandering between lanes while sipping one's latte,
well, you can bet we'll see those cameras - everywhere.
Freedom. Liberty. Rights. None of these can stand up to
paranoia or the almighty dollar.
> Isn't anything sacred to these [Hollywood] people?"
Umm...in a word, no. Is this something you just noticed?
All the Baum Oz books, as well as the first half-dozen Plumly Oz books, are public domain!
That means the "rights" that Ted Turner sold to these bozos are also public domain. Anyone can
write an Oz script and film it as a movie. The new movie - a "derived work" - would be subject to our
effectively-eternal copyright laws. But the original books and any rights derived from them are public
domain. But there is one loophole through which these...people...can pull this crap.
The "Tarzan" bozos pull much the same stunt by (eternally, since there is no time limit) trademarking
the name "Tarzan". To be able to market any movie with "Tarzan" in the title requires licensing it
from the Burroughs heirs for big bucks, even if most of the Tarzan books are public domain. Turner
undoubtedly sold the trademark he got with the 1939 Judy Garland "Wizard of Oz". This is the kind of
quasi-legal bullshit that has become the defacto metho for yanking public domain material back under
the control, if not the actual copyright, of these large corporations.
This crap makes my blood boil...
If Sony's betamax had won Sony would have made a mint. It would therefore have had a pile of cash when it turned to the dark side, buying even more content and inventing even more DRM for it. No, no. VHS was the best choice. It was technologically inferior - but it was a hell of a lot safer. Sony is less evil than Microsoft, but not by much.
Forth love if honk then.
> what projects have you worked on which you felt had admirable code,
> both high-level architecture and in-the-trenches implementation? In
> particular I am interested in large user applications using modern
> C++ libraries and techniques like exception handling and RAII."
The intersection of those sets is null. There is such a thing as pretty
code. None of it is written in C++.
> one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of
> its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated
> itself from the community and refused to share.
In all honesty I would have to say that that cell hasn't changed much between then and now.
Yes, I guess I am in a grumpy mood. WHAT'S IT TO YA?
Given the kind of deliberate lying hack jobs that Michael Moore jestingly calls "documentaries" I would have to say on the evidence that Google is firmly on the side of the angels on this one. Moore is a character assassin writ large, and anything anyone can do to help his victims is justified.
...that he doesn't live in a free country.
Of course, neither do we - since 9/11 - so I guess I shouldn't throw stones.
This is why I look askance at the whole patent system - and why I suspect that we would, as a society, be better off without them.
Truthfully, most of the coming technologies have been developed under hacker-style gift economies, then patents and copyrights commercialize them. Best example is movies. Once made they cost pennies to reproduce. Soon CGI will have progressed to digital actors, and digital sets. The day is not far off when one person could create a whole movie in their Copious Spare Time. If that person believes in FOSS, then the movie will cost nothing, it is "gifted" to the economy and in return consumers provide respect (or "whuffie" in Doctorow terms). Where do the costs come in? Licensing the source material, the music, the digital actors images, and so on and so forth. Eventually free music, source material, and digital actors will create a FOSS movie community, and MPAA will go crying to the government because nobody wants to pay them for their crap.
Each such development pushes us toward a global gift economy, which is vigorously fought by entrenched business interests that sense the time has come for their elimination or replacement. This resistance is the one fault in capitalism: it creates forces that perpetuate it, and prevents (or tries to) any successor economic system. But I look at what is happening with FOSS, and I add it to cars designed in college courses, self-reproducing 3-d printers and fabricators to produce those free plans, and then toss in vertical farming (which produces both food and energy (despite the need to power the lighting system) and I see the eventual conversion of the world to a new paradigm. You would live by downloading free plans from the web and would build them with your 3d fabrication system. You would eat food grown in a spare room, you would have your own water use cycle - really the only thing left to produce that cannot be done for free is raw materials.
Anyway, this day cannot come soon enough for me.
Let's see, an elderly physicist says it may be possible, a younger writer of science fiction says it isn't. What was Clarke's First Law again? But then, the SF writer isn't an elderly scientist, is he?
So, I got pulled into America's frightening evil so-called "legal" so-called "system" using an (I thought) innocuous photo. When they came looking for my fingerprints all I could think of is the FBI computers constantly running matches for wanted people and figured that if I could wind up getting sweated by the cops using just a photo of me, I thought the chances of getting enough fingerprint point matches to wind up getting arrested for murder, rape, tax evasion, whatever they got with a death penalty attached. Yeah, maybe the system would work and kick me. But then again, I might be one of those elderly felons that were proved innocent and released after twenty five years on death row. I don't need that kind of malarky. Go find a place that's just a little bit more reasonable.
It's one of the reasons I gave up flying. I hated feeling all my civil rights evaporate as I entered an airport...
Jesus! Does the Pope shit in the woods? Is a bear Catholic?
You have informed them they are committing a crime. They have ordered you to do it, at least implicitly threatening your job if you fail to do it. They bought the package to be pirated, they own the computers it's pirated to. You are legally in the clear. Especially if you are willing to testify for the prosecution at your company's RICO trial.
Face it, copyright holders never ask "who's responsible" for pirating. All they care about is "who to sue". Your pockets are just nowhere near as deep as your employer's. So, let 'em suffer. God knows they asked for it. Quite literally.
I don't know...it worked for negroes^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hblacks^H^H^H^H^H^Hafrican americans...
Crafting tools is not wasting time. Frequently the fastest way to accomplish s six-week project is to take a month to write the tool...which will then complete the project in under a week. Management with your attitude will a) never see tools produced that increase the department's overall productivity and b) you won't have the best people working for you. No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here.
> I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift?
The sad fact of the matter is that Congress never studies anything but opinion polls and the wants and needs of those people who helped elect them. The reason is quite simple: the predominant life-form in Congress is "lawyers",
none of whom has even the tiniest glimmer of intellect to devote to actual study of the issues. Existence proof? Virtually every bill passed by Congress leaves behind it a contrail of smaller bills amending, or even reversing, the first bill. If they studied issues, they would not need so many course corrections.
Frankly, lawyers should not be permitted to hold any elective office. It's a conflict of interest, pure and simple. Lawyers get elected to offices and they appear to operate as if their primary purpose is to create more need for, and opportunities for, more lawyers. Congress has never, ever, passed a bill that would in any way limit the continuing metastasis of lawyers except in one, count 'em, one, issue: as more and more people are yanked off Death Row due to the work of the Innocence Project, Congress, in it's infinite wisdom, has limited Death Row appeals more and more, leaving less room for the Innocence Project to continue to demonstrate how corrupted and failure prone is the system that so blythely sends people to be killed in the name of "Justice".
In point of fact, the one trade that ought to be predominant in Congress is software engineers. Realize that our so-called "legal," so-called "system" is really a large program of inferential rules. Who better to debug such a thing? =)