Comment Re:So let me get this straight... (Score 1) 758
Dell, Microsoft, and a handful of others have been sued in the past (and lost their suits), for failure to provide this.
Dell, Microsoft, and a handful of others have been sued in the past (and lost their suits), for failure to provide this.
Naturally, pay a $25,000 "license termination fee".
Or a $250,000,000 "improper disposal fee"
U.S. gallons are not the same size as U.K. gallons, sadly. 1.2009 U.S. gallons to the imperial gallon.
And 1.2009 U.S. pints to the imperial pint, as any beer drinker should know
oh, college supports free-spirited individualism -- so long as it is the approved extreme left-wing collectivist form of free-spirited individualism performed with in the confines of a campus-approved group of individuals espousing only campus-approved beliefs.
If you aren't there to receive teaching, then you might as well not be there at all.
I mean, if the professor isn't going to do me any good, I might as well save the money and learn it on my own. Who needs formal "education" that includes no educating?
sadly, the more basic law that stealing power lines while they are still connected is highly correlated with premature death hasn't had much impact, apparently.
I am suddenly compelled to post one of these bad boys:
nah, it is so they don't have to have two different production lines just to make large monitors versus small TVs.
This way they can be the same.
How would you get past the issue that images are the size that they are.
Unless you are suggesting making everything into vector graphics, I'm thinking this is a pipe dream.
Changing just the title bar and menus and stuff breaks many fewer apps.
The one bad thing about this is that on Windows, the APIs for dealing with DPI settings are very messy.
It can be done, but it is much, much easier to do it wrong than it is to do it right.
Also, the DPI settings scale all kinds of stuff.
Many web pages render badly because things are scaled all over the place. If you are using a background image for a div and the div grows, depending on your css (and your browser), the image will stay the same size and be in the upper-left corner of its box (really bad), scale to fill the box (correct, but ugly), or partially repeat (probably the worst)
I had to read one of his books.
The answer is yes, you are still you, but ONLY IF all of the modifications were done "online" without taking down "the system". "You" are not your brain, "you" are the process of execution upon the hardware. If you can "hot-swap" the components one by one, but keep the entire process "in memory" and "executing" continuously, then you still have the same process running on a completely new set of hardware.
You, in fact, can not patent code.
You might be able to patent an algorithm, or the use of a computer to perform a specific function in a specific manner, but you certainly can not patent code itself.
The code is an embodiment of the invention. You patent the invention, not the embodiment.
Well, at least, as a cadaver, he would be unlikely to sign any new laws.
That would be a 100000% improvement over any other possible option likely to appear on any ballot in any race anywhere.
I'd vote for Reagan's corpse too.
In fact, the whole purpose of patents it to teach an individual of ordinary skill in the appropriate art how to produce the invention.
So:
Go read how they made what they made.
As an aside, I wonder if an argument could be made to invalidate their patents on the grounds that their fear of useful teaching of their own invention being made public is an indication that they themselves do not believe that the patents represent sufficient information to teach one of ordinary skill in the art.
Here would be my (still broken, but probably better) approach to this:
1) All bills must include the full text of any section that they amend -- however trivial the amendment. This is because many really bad bills hide their badness by reading like a diff of the entire code. You can't read them at all, so you don't know what they do.
2) The current length of the code in sections, sentences, lines, words, and characters is to be determined. For each of these metrics, the adoption of all new bills must either have a net-zero effect (except maybe sections, which can be allowed to be a net-zero, but never a net-increase). At no time should the number of sections, sentences, lines, words, or characters increase due to the passage of a bill. Every time a new bill that decreases one of these metrics passes, the new value becomes the ceiling. Over time, this will lead to shorter and shorter code.
Congress will eventually adapt and learn to write laws in tighter language with abbreviations and shorthand, but even then there will be a limit to what they can accomplish, since every new bill must remove at least one character from the length of the law.
3) Just to make things reasonable, take the length, in characters and words, of the longest novel that reached any position on the NY Times best-seller list in 2009, and declare that these lengths serve as a floor, and that new bills will never be required to reduce either metric below these thresholds. If you think that is too small, pick a nice multiplier (maybe 2 or 3?) and apply that to the length of said novel.
4) Now the easiest way to game the system is by cramming everything into one supermassive bill, crafting byzantine legislative proceedings that provide the equivalent of debate-and-binding-vote on making amendments to the supermassive bill, and then passing the then-open supermassive bill only once per session or when there is an emergency. So, to limit that, the sum of all words changed, added, removed, or moved by a bill must not exceed some reasonable number (say 30,000 -- about 100 pages in paperback-book format). If you like, have a similar restriction on character count.
5) Finally, to close one last obvious loophole, require that no character within a bill may be any character other than a capital letter, lowercase letter, digit, comma, period, colon, semicolon, parenthesis, or section-symbol (or, if you want, you could say, any standard printing character that is part of 7-bit ASCII -- though that provides more encoding space). Additionally requiring that all such characters be represented in the same font, color, and font size, and in fact that all instances of a character must look identical in all respects. (To decrease encoding space... you don't want a law that defines meanings for subtle differences in characters and then uses the rest of the codespace full of laws that are encoded in wonky character adjustments)
This system is still broken, because ultimately the problem is that we can't trust anybody to be the person with the authority to make the decisions, and every system is open to gamesmanship.
And, of course, this system is, ultimately, way too complicated and fairly silly. But if we could implement it, it would still be an improvement.
Though I just thought of a different system with a similar goal.
1) At the beginning of every session of Congress, the code shall be divided into 535 contiguous parts of equal size. These parts shall be distributed randomly to the members of Congress. Beginning with the first such part and continuing in sequence until all parts are completed, each member of Congress shall read aloud on the floor of their respective house, their section. Each other member of said house will be required to transcribe said reading without access to a visual copy of the medium, writing only with a ball-point pen upon plain lined college-ruled paper. The reader shall read with sufficient volume and clarity that each member is able to create an accurate transcript.
2) No new bill may be passed, nor any other action taken, until all members have completed the reading aloud of their portions, and no portion is to be considered completed until each other member of Congress has produced a proper transcript with no more than 50 words incorrect or out of sequence.
3) (just for fun) each year, on the 4th of July, all manuscripts produced by 1) and 2) shall be used to build a great bonfire. The fire may be used to grill burgers, steaks, and other appropriate bbq fare, but must otherwise be left alone to burn, until completely consumed. Congress may not reconvene until the bonfire is finished.
Don't panic.
