Just wanted to say thanks; driverpacks.net has saved me so much time and hassle slipstreaming and integrating images for work. Between driverpack.net, RyanVM, WPI, nlite and msfn.org forums, I've saved countless hours. I would have spent all that time either collecting files, writing scripts, etc. or just going through a Dell 'clean' install (which, even at my fastest, takes about 3 hours to slim down and then install the company apps, and configure/add to domain). Your driver packs saved my bacon a few months ago when the Dell cd drive died and I had to use one off the shelf. I've also pulled raw infs from them on occasion when I've needed a driver that I didn't want to hunt down. Thank you!
Actually, I was hoping you could translate to 'software developer' for me; it's a two step refactoring from 'marketing translation' and three from 'real-world'.
OK, I've read that quote (from the summary) over a few times and I have not a single clue what Ballmer is trying to say. Would someone please translate that in to something resembling a sentence for me?
I know this message is days old, but I really wanted to sit down and write a reply and just now got to it!
I've actually learned LISP this semester in AI class. LISP is... interesting. I mean, I get it, but it's so weakly typed (the same problem I had with learning perl)that I have troubles visualizing code for it. The C/C++ programmer in me is screaming "use a callback!", the Java programmer in me knows that Java doesn't allow pointers, so extend an abstract class, and the newly found LISP/perl programmer in me is in a corner sucking his thumb, quickly rocking back and fourth.
I mean, LISP performance screams for raw text processing, but it's like BASIC, in that I can't form a great mental image of encapsulated code. Although you mention subclassing in LISP, this isn't in common LISP, is it? I've tried to wade through the documentation, but it's simply massive. It's also a stupid complaint that I have, with perl as well, but something about implicit returns rubs me the wrong way. Although, LISPs' unwinding of stacked calls is really cool! That's a feature of Java (printStackTrace()) that I've always loved being built in. I also didn't know that LISP has assert, that's pretty cool for a weakly typed language (not that I bother to use assert in C - I figure if it ever fails, you've already got bigger problems than my program crashing:))
I also really like that LISP has atoms that I can count on to be a single element, instead of an unknown variant. Perl does this as well, although, less explicitly. The criticisms that I spoke of before are mostly just because I haven't done much functional language programming since BASIC on my Commodore64/VIC20, and QBASIC in DOS-6.0. That's my own shortcoming, not the languages'. Does CL provide threading (I assume it's interpreter based, and not code based) or encapsulation?
Very good points! Although, I do have an internship with a local company that I got as a freshman. That's kind of the dichotomy of my life, at the moment. My major is software development, but at the small shop I'm at, I do mostly network and system admin stuff:) I figure being the worlds first developer to have good admin skills should pay off... unfortunately, I'm a rather lousy admin with a bunch of beautiful shell scripts!;)
What's with the Slackware slam, man? Slackware was my first distro and I love it for what it is - I've never understood why Slackware users are assumed to be snobs and elitists because we like a no frills, stable, platform to work with. The entire Slackware principle is KISS and yet some people think that we're trying to say "I'm better than you with my vi-fu!" Not really, I just find that working with a text file where I know that the options will match the documentation easier than trying to dig up a tool to interface a plain text file for me. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to configure Samba under KDE and sat there going "when the call it 'such and such option' are they referring to this setting or that one, and does that match what my webmin module is calling that option, and what is the syntax for this thing? Comma delimited, space delimited?
I mean, you get a GUI that gives you a blank text field and a somewhat ambiguous label for it (that is, providing that whichever GUI you're using supports the option you're looking for...), and you're telling me that is less confusing than a plain text file? If you want to tick off Joe User, give him 800 pages of documentation that will enumerate his options, with examples of how to write it out as a single line of text, and then give him a GUI that doesn't quite match up.
Doesn't it make you angry when (caution: car analogy ahead) when you pull your car's manual from the glove box so that you can change the time on your radio and they give you a freaking picture of how to change it with a different model or kind of radio? Take a look at the windows registry - now, that, my friend is elitist. You're not even expected to understand how it work (which is obvious since my roaming profile never carries my personal changes because the developers of every application fail to think I'd like my settings in my user hive, not my machine hive! You're supposed to have machine settings in the machine hive, and user settings in the user hive, let's get it right for once, devs!)
Given the choice between having a system that's limping along and editing a text file, or having my registry blow up and repair it in safe mode, I'll take a plain text file any day of the week, man. Before I change something, I put a little comment on the line above it with the date, my intentions, and my initials, and leave the original setting commented out; If the system worked yesterday and it didn't boot this morning, go find the change I made yesterday, uncomment the original setting, comment out the one I set, add your initials and send me an email to let me know.
Please don't get the tone of this wrong, I'm not angry, I just wish that being of the opinion that simple system break less and complex systems break more often, in very complex ways, wasn't looked upon as snobbery. I'm sure I could get a handful of people here to give completely rational reasons that they'd prefer a registry hive over text files. More power to them, if it works for them and they can fix it when it breaks, I'm satisfied. Doesn't mean I agree with them, but, so what?
All that being said, if you want a GUI in slackware, when you login type 'init 5' or 'startx' or 'kdeinit', from KDE I assume you can use the control panel to make the boot default to GUI mode. It's your distro, it's completely vanilla, set it up as you wish. No one is stopping you but yourself. If you don't like the BSD style inits, the template for sysV are in place and there's a script that will take care of any scripts put in there at runlevel changes. I'll be back in a few hours to apologize for being a jerk.
NIS? NIS+? Oh, yeah... I should bring up Sun's "Microsoft Bob" of the directory world; it's probably not helping.:) But I maintain that it is free and I can ransack their code base at this moment if I weren't such a sorry, lazy, excuse for a developer. I say let the admins have the NIS code base.
What about the Compiz, Beryl, Fusion fiasco? That was a fork, merge, (branch?)... I've got svn repos with less confusing trees, for craps sake! Granted, it only lasted, what a couple of months or so, and I'm glad that every was able to humble themselves and work it all out... but it still was a fiasco!
Actually, you're absolutely right. I need to look at this entire thing as a challenge instead of grunt work. I need to kick the tire and light the fires, man.
If they want me to recite stuff, I'll not only recite it for them, but follow it up with the logic behind the answer.
Thanks for a good kick in the butt;) Sometimes I need someone to come along and say "quit whining and just do it!" That or a challenge:-)
I'm a junior, but I've just about maxed out the 400 level classes, so you could let it fall on either side of the fence.
What are you considering the really hard concepts? I was kind of hoping to be doing something on the order of nondeterministic garbage collection or elementary JIT kind of stuff. I've still got compiler design to take (I'm taking the prerequisite course this semester - we do a simplistic compiler in ADA95 for a made up language) and SPARC assembly really did challenge me; I tried pretty hard and just got a B (we don't do the +/- thing, but I probably would have had a B- if we did). I almost want to take it again just to solidify my understanding of it.
The last 'revelations' I've had in the last few years were when OOP suddenly hit me while I was working on a project. I had been writing Java for a year or two before this, but it was really just like my old C++ code encapsulated. All the sudden polymorphism clicked, although I knew what is was before, I really didn't understand how to effectively use it until that moment. A few months after that, I ventured off when J2SE-6 (Java 1.5?) came out with a better java.util.concurrent and hacked around with that for about a month until it really became second nature to thread and synchronize with producers and consumers. Then there was the moment someone told me in *NIX everything is a file - it's like the heavens opened and a light shone down on me. Obviously there were pointers in C++ back in high school, too.
But after these things, everything seems to be a repeat that I can master easily with these concepts (concurrency, threading, encapsulation, inheritance, references/pointers, interfacing, and atomic data structures), but I haven't had any 'discoveries' that propel my understanding to the next level. It's like I'm stuck at a plateau, if that makes sense. I was kind of thinking that everything that I've learned so far would culminate at a point where they, applied together, would give me a new tool for my toolbox, if you will. Have you felt what I'm saying, like you can't find the next step up in your understanding because you aren't aware of what you aren't aware of?
There's nothing wrong with that; I wouldn't be a good employee for you, and you wouldn't be a good employer for me. We'd be wasting each others time since I'd move on relatively quickly and go back to the job hunting process and you'd have to go through the hiring and training process again. It would be beneficial to the both of us if you skipped over me early in the process.
I'm actually going through that right now; I've got a 2.25 QPA and my adviser is ticked because he wants me to do grad school. "You've got the brains, you're smarter than most of the people in our grad program, but you'll never get in with grades like this!" he lamented yesterday. I actually really value his opinion and guidance (he's really an incredible instructor and talented programmer, not to mention he has an awesome breadth and depth of CS knowledge), and I felt really bad like I'm letting him down.
Here's the problem (aside from person issues which I won't go on about here, but life has thrown me some curve balls), I get stuck in this viscous cycle. I go in to a class and I'm really excited that I'll be learning something new. Then after a few weeks, I find that everything we're going to cover I've already played around with at home and mastered. Then I get bored, so I coast by getting C's without ever cracking a book. The C's aren't for lack of knowledge, but, rather for lack of cramming the specific fill-in-the-blank regurgitation that gets you an A. All of my peers can puke exactly what's on the test, but that's as far as their skill set goes. They can't apply it, even if they cared enough to understand it, and as soon as the final is over, they forget that they've ever learned it. Which is OK for them, because next semester they'll do the same work over again, but in a different language or with some twist.
The ever spiraling, dismal, ennui the situation generates is enough to bring a geek to his knees. Sure, I could cram, but I'd rather be hacking kernel code or playing with LDAP. The thing that ticks me off the most about this is that I could take any one of my peers (save only one or two, whom I look up to and try to learn everything I can from - I really respect those guys), and an hour ago held my ground fairly well on a discussion about the merits of 'goto' with a professor. Granted, that's probably because I'm reading Code Complete and kernel code on my own time. Really, all I'd like is to be left alone to learn. It's like I have to fight to get a chance to work on something interesting. Will I not be offered a job for a few low grades and a failed course here and there? Perhaps, but if my grades are all that interests an employer, they're not a company I'd like to work for. I'd like to find a place to work where I have peers - people whom I can learn, and get a friendly challenge from!
And it's not like I didn't give it a shot - I had a 3.75 my first semester (even after testing out of my first course), and I thought that I'd move up to greater challenges if I only put in the grunt work of writing linked lists, again. Then I found out that I would move on to writing linked lists in a different language... then I'd study linked lists in a datastructures course... and about that time I was starting to realize that no matter how many times I jumped through their hoops, they'd have some more grunt work for me to prove myself with next semester. I'm tired of jumping through hoops, especially ones I've already jumped through, or have proven that I can jump through.
All that being said, I've got an exam in a few hours and I promised myself that I'd try harder at this whole grades thing, so I've gotta' go study. Instead of playing with synchronized concurrency within polymorphic threaded in java, I'm going to stare at a book and try to remember which version of TCP/IP acknowledges packets with a 1, and which version acknowledges with incrementing numbers. Please forgive the bitter tone of this post, I'm just grappling with the logical dilemma of learning less to get better grades, or learning more to limit my future career options by not making it in to grad school. Then again, do I want to spend another year or two reciting version numbers without the slightest regard for whether or not I understand what they mean? I'm not bitter, but I had to vent all that before hitting the books, and your message was just the opportunity to get it off my chest.
Just wondering, why nickel? I mean, this strikes me as funny since ISA and PCI cards (and whatever existed before I was born) have been gold plated forever.
You'd think that if nickel cost less (I have no idea, and I'm sure purity matters to an extent) and performs better than gold, an engineer would have said, "Sure, we can pay more to gold plate these suckers... but, personally, I use nickel for my rig at home!" or something to that effect when his coworker drew up the specs eons ago.
Except in the version I saw the Titanic looked like a giant hot dog running aground in a sea of ketchup. Also, LSD was involved. I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but I drew the short straw...
We actually changed the station to The Food Channel and you were watching Emeril. Sorry, we were hoping for the outcome to be strangely confusing, not strangely enlightening as it were.
Also, that wasn't LSD; we sold you pieces of notebook paper that had accidentally been left underneath a leaking car battery.
Hmmm... how can we apply the notion of "beneficial friendly fire" to corporate America?
Perhaps if we got both HR and marketing in an enclosed area, like a warehouse, supplied them with weapons and then told them that next years budgeting allocations will be dependent upon the number of employees per department?
[...]If this seems upsetting, take a deep breath and go hug your girl, your kid, your dog, or your teddy bear.[...] Hrm... don't have a girl, kid, dog or teddy bear... Will a warm gun suffice?
Since you aren't an American, I presume you don't know, interstate and intrastate commerce and taxes were actually a very big factor in the American civil war just over a hundred years ago. Although it seems like more stupid greed and politics, this issue was settled at gruesome cost a century ago, and we shouldn't even touch this topic with a ten foot pole. Ever. IMHO.
To belabor the point... (sorry!)
This also relates to the state vs. federal rights which declares that federal law overrides state law, which is why you can be arrested for something that is legal in your state, but illegal at the federal level; many cultural and socio economical come to a head at this junction.
Someone please correct me if I've got my history wrong... I'd rather be made a fool here than on a date with a history major:).
[...]
Thanks, I'll be here all week! ...I was afraid you were going to say that after a lame pun! Remember, kids, puns are the lowest possible form of comedy with the sole exception of 'lolcatz'. Rickrolls, now those are funny!
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Just wanted to say thanks; driverpacks.net has saved me so much time and hassle slipstreaming and integrating images for work. Between driverpack.net, RyanVM, WPI, nlite and msfn.org forums, I've saved countless hours. I would have spent all that time either collecting files, writing scripts, etc. or just going through a Dell 'clean' install (which, even at my fastest, takes about 3 hours to slim down and then install the company apps, and configure/add to domain). Your driver packs saved my bacon a few months ago when the Dell cd drive died and I had to use one off the shelf. I've also pulled raw infs from them on occasion when I've needed a driver that I didn't want to hunt down. Thank you!
Actually, I was hoping you could translate to 'software developer' for me; it's a two step refactoring from 'marketing translation' and three from 'real-world'.
OK, I've read that quote (from the summary) over a few times and I have not a single clue what Ballmer is trying to say. Would someone please translate that in to something resembling a sentence for me?
I know this message is days old, but I really wanted to sit down and write a reply and just now got to it!
:))
I've actually learned LISP this semester in AI class. LISP is... interesting. I mean, I get it, but it's so weakly typed (the same problem I had with learning perl)that I have troubles visualizing code for it. The C/C++ programmer in me is screaming "use a callback!", the Java programmer in me knows that Java doesn't allow pointers, so extend an abstract class, and the newly found LISP/perl programmer in me is in a corner sucking his thumb, quickly rocking back and fourth.
I mean, LISP performance screams for raw text processing, but it's like BASIC, in that I can't form a great mental image of encapsulated code. Although you mention subclassing in LISP, this isn't in common LISP, is it? I've tried to wade through the documentation, but it's simply massive. It's also a stupid complaint that I have, with perl as well, but something about implicit returns rubs me the wrong way. Although, LISPs' unwinding of stacked calls is really cool! That's a feature of Java (printStackTrace()) that I've always loved being built in. I also didn't know that LISP has assert, that's pretty cool for a weakly typed language (not that I bother to use assert in C - I figure if it ever fails, you've already got bigger problems than my program crashing
I also really like that LISP has atoms that I can count on to be a single element, instead of an unknown variant. Perl does this as well, although, less explicitly. The criticisms that I spoke of before are mostly just because I haven't done much functional language programming since BASIC on my Commodore64/VIC20, and QBASIC in DOS-6.0. That's my own shortcoming, not the languages'. Does CL provide threading (I assume it's interpreter based, and not code based) or encapsulation?
Sorry, I was half asleep when I wrote that, and looking at it again, I did take your statement completely out of context.
Very good points! Although, I do have an internship with a local company that I got as a freshman. That's kind of the dichotomy of my life, at the moment. My major is software development, but at the small shop I'm at, I do mostly network and system admin stuff :) I figure being the worlds first developer to have good admin skills should pay off... unfortunately, I'm a rather lousy admin with a bunch of beautiful shell scripts! ;)
I mean, you get a GUI that gives you a blank text field and a somewhat ambiguous label for it (that is, providing that whichever GUI you're using supports the option you're looking for...), and you're telling me that is less confusing than a plain text file? If you want to tick off Joe User, give him 800 pages of documentation that will enumerate his options, with examples of how to write it out as a single line of text, and then give him a GUI that doesn't quite match up.
Doesn't it make you angry when (caution: car analogy ahead) when you pull your car's manual from the glove box so that you can change the time on your radio and they give you a freaking picture of how to change it with a different model or kind of radio? Take a look at the windows registry - now, that, my friend is elitist. You're not even expected to understand how it work (which is obvious since my roaming profile never carries my personal changes because the developers of every application fail to think I'd like my settings in my user hive, not my machine hive! You're supposed to have machine settings in the machine hive, and user settings in the user hive, let's get it right for once, devs!)
Given the choice between having a system that's limping along and editing a text file, or having my registry blow up and repair it in safe mode, I'll take a plain text file any day of the week, man. Before I change something, I put a little comment on the line above it with the date, my intentions, and my initials, and leave the original setting commented out; If the system worked yesterday and it didn't boot this morning, go find the change I made yesterday, uncomment the original setting, comment out the one I set, add your initials and send me an email to let me know.
Please don't get the tone of this wrong, I'm not angry, I just wish that being of the opinion that simple system break less and complex systems break more often, in very complex ways, wasn't looked upon as snobbery. I'm sure I could get a handful of people here to give completely rational reasons that they'd prefer a registry hive over text files. More power to them, if it works for them and they can fix it when it breaks, I'm satisfied. Doesn't mean I agree with them, but, so what?
All that being said, if you want a GUI in slackware, when you login type 'init 5' or 'startx' or 'kdeinit', from KDE I assume you can use the control panel to make the boot default to GUI mode. It's your distro, it's completely vanilla, set it up as you wish. No one is stopping you but yourself. If you don't like the BSD style inits, the template for sysV are in place and there's a script that will take care of any scripts put in there at runlevel changes. I'll be back in a few hours to apologize for being a jerk.
NIS? NIS+? Oh, yeah... I should bring up Sun's "Microsoft Bob" of the directory world; it's probably not helping. :) But I maintain that it is free and I can ransack their code base at this moment if I weren't such a sorry, lazy, excuse for a developer. I say let the admins have the NIS code base.
Did I miss anyone in my tirade? *Ducks*
What about the Compiz, Beryl, Fusion fiasco? That was a fork, merge, (branch?)... I've got svn repos with less confusing trees, for craps sake! Granted, it only lasted, what a couple of months or so, and I'm glad that every was able to humble themselves and work it all out... but it still was a fiasco!
Thanks for the advice and book, man! scott.lovenberg@@@gmail.com
Actually, you're absolutely right. I need to look at this entire thing as a challenge instead of grunt work. I need to kick the tire and light the fires, man.
;) Sometimes I need someone to come along and say "quit whining and just do it!" That or a challenge :-)
If they want me to recite stuff, I'll not only recite it for them, but follow it up with the logic behind the answer.
Thanks for a good kick in the butt
I'm a junior, but I've just about maxed out the 400 level classes, so you could let it fall on either side of the fence.
What are you considering the really hard concepts? I was kind of hoping to be doing something on the order of nondeterministic garbage collection or elementary JIT kind of stuff. I've still got compiler design to take (I'm taking the prerequisite course this semester - we do a simplistic compiler in ADA95 for a made up language) and SPARC assembly really did challenge me; I tried pretty hard and just got a B (we don't do the +/- thing, but I probably would have had a B- if we did). I almost want to take it again just to solidify my understanding of it.
The last 'revelations' I've had in the last few years were when OOP suddenly hit me while I was working on a project. I had been writing Java for a year or two before this, but it was really just like my old C++ code encapsulated. All the sudden polymorphism clicked, although I knew what is was before, I really didn't understand how to effectively use it until that moment. A few months after that, I ventured off when J2SE-6 (Java 1.5?) came out with a better java.util.concurrent and hacked around with that for about a month until it really became second nature to thread and synchronize with producers and consumers. Then there was the moment someone told me in *NIX everything is a file - it's like the heavens opened and a light shone down on me. Obviously there were pointers in C++ back in high school, too.
But after these things, everything seems to be a repeat that I can master easily with these concepts (concurrency, threading, encapsulation, inheritance, references/pointers, interfacing, and atomic data structures), but I haven't had any 'discoveries' that propel my understanding to the next level. It's like I'm stuck at a plateau, if that makes sense. I was kind of thinking that everything that I've learned so far would culminate at a point where they, applied together, would give me a new tool for my toolbox, if you will. Have you felt what I'm saying, like you can't find the next step up in your understanding because you aren't aware of what you aren't aware of?
There's nothing wrong with that; I wouldn't be a good employee for you, and you wouldn't be a good employer for me. We'd be wasting each others time since I'd move on relatively quickly and go back to the job hunting process and you'd have to go through the hiring and training process again. It would be beneficial to the both of us if you skipped over me early in the process.
I think you'd enjoy my rant above...
my rant
I'm actually going through that right now; I've got a 2.25 QPA and my adviser is ticked because he wants me to do grad school. "You've got the brains, you're smarter than most of the people in our grad program, but you'll never get in with grades like this!" he lamented yesterday. I actually really value his opinion and guidance (he's really an incredible instructor and talented programmer, not to mention he has an awesome breadth and depth of CS knowledge), and I felt really bad like I'm letting him down.
Here's the problem (aside from person issues which I won't go on about here, but life has thrown me some curve balls), I get stuck in this viscous cycle. I go in to a class and I'm really excited that I'll be learning something new. Then after a few weeks, I find that everything we're going to cover I've already played around with at home and mastered. Then I get bored, so I coast by getting C's without ever cracking a book. The C's aren't for lack of knowledge, but, rather for lack of cramming the specific fill-in-the-blank regurgitation that gets you an A. All of my peers can puke exactly what's on the test, but that's as far as their skill set goes. They can't apply it, even if they cared enough to understand it, and as soon as the final is over, they forget that they've ever learned it. Which is OK for them, because next semester they'll do the same work over again, but in a different language or with some twist.
The ever spiraling, dismal, ennui the situation generates is enough to bring a geek to his knees. Sure, I could cram, but I'd rather be hacking kernel code or playing with LDAP. The thing that ticks me off the most about this is that I could take any one of my peers (save only one or two, whom I look up to and try to learn everything I can from - I really respect those guys), and an hour ago held my ground fairly well on a discussion about the merits of 'goto' with a professor. Granted, that's probably because I'm reading Code Complete and kernel code on my own time. Really, all I'd like is to be left alone to learn. It's like I have to fight to get a chance to work on something interesting. Will I not be offered a job for a few low grades and a failed course here and there? Perhaps, but if my grades are all that interests an employer, they're not a company I'd like to work for. I'd like to find a place to work where I have peers - people whom I can learn, and get a friendly challenge from!
And it's not like I didn't give it a shot - I had a 3.75 my first semester (even after testing out of my first course), and I thought that I'd move up to greater challenges if I only put in the grunt work of writing linked lists, again. Then I found out that I would move on to writing linked lists in a different language... then I'd study linked lists in a datastructures course... and about that time I was starting to realize that no matter how many times I jumped through their hoops, they'd have some more grunt work for me to prove myself with next semester. I'm tired of jumping through hoops, especially ones I've already jumped through, or have proven that I can jump through.
All that being said, I've got an exam in a few hours and I promised myself that I'd try harder at this whole grades thing, so I've gotta' go study. Instead of playing with synchronized concurrency within polymorphic threaded in java, I'm going to stare at a book and try to remember which version of TCP/IP acknowledges packets with a 1, and which version acknowledges with incrementing numbers. Please forgive the bitter tone of this post, I'm just grappling with the logical dilemma of learning less to get better grades, or learning more to limit my future career options by not making it in to grad school. Then again, do I want to spend another year or two reciting version numbers without the slightest regard for whether or not I understand what they mean? I'm not bitter, but I had to vent all that before hitting the books, and your message was just the opportunity to get it off my chest.
You'd think that if nickel cost less (I have no idea, and I'm sure purity matters to an extent) and performs better than gold, an engineer would have said, "Sure, we can pay more to gold plate these suckers... but, personally, I use nickel for my rig at home!" or something to that effect when his coworker drew up the specs eons ago.
Was I just RickRolled in Python?
We actually changed the station to The Food Channel and you were watching Emeril. Sorry, we were hoping for the outcome to be strangely confusing, not strangely enlightening as it were.
Also, that wasn't LSD; we sold you pieces of notebook paper that had accidentally been left underneath a leaking car battery.
Hmmm... how can we apply the notion of "beneficial friendly fire" to corporate America?
Perhaps if we got both HR and marketing in an enclosed area, like a warehouse, supplied them with weapons and then told them that next years budgeting allocations will be dependent upon the number of employees per department?What can I say? I'm a problem solver by nature...
Will a warm gun suffice?
Since you aren't an American, I presume you don't know, interstate and intrastate commerce and taxes were actually a very big factor in the American civil war just over a hundred years ago. Although it seems like more stupid greed and politics, this issue was settled at gruesome cost a century ago, and we shouldn't even touch this topic with a ten foot pole. Ever. IMHO.
:).
To belabor the point... (sorry!)
This also relates to the state vs. federal rights which declares that federal law overrides state law, which is why you can be arrested for something that is legal in your state, but illegal at the federal level; many cultural and socio economical come to a head at this junction.
Someone please correct me if I've got my history wrong... I'd rather be made a fool here than on a date with a history major
'bout twice half the number.
American or British football fields, man?! Be precise or we'll have another mibibyte(MiB) situation on our hands, for craps sake!
I see you've never answered the waffle iron before your first caffeinated beverage of the day.
Remember, kids, puns are the lowest possible form of comedy with the sole exception of 'lolcatz'. Rickrolls, now those are funny!