For completeness: https://thedailywtf.com/articl...

... they become the Content Overlook Board.

Not necessarily, the universe could be an inverted [curved] closed loop with the flat Earth on the inside of the outer membrane. On the down-side, we wouldn't be the center of the universe, but on the up-side, the universe would be all wrapped up in us.

Then cats would have already pushed everything off of the surface.

Humor aside, goto an area of land of level elevation (colloquially known as "flat") that has a tall tower and then drive a ways from it; once you get far enough away, besides become "smaller," in spite of the land being "flat," you see less and less of the base. I wonder why...

I was using Vue 2015 with a few plugins to save time for quick hobby related scenes. Now a subscription model is required for newer version and none of the older modules or assets (content) is available without upgraded. If I upgrade, I fear that if the company goes "belly up" that I will have a useless piece of software. I guess I will keep polishing my Blender and POV-Ray skills. I might just look into Terragen again since it still has a buy upfront option.

Or 25 seconds of Ieva's Polka and 4 frames from BLEACH (anime) repeated for 24 hours. Multiple possible claimers for very small amount each. Then there is DarkMateria's Picard Song which seems like a derivative transformed work to me.

Usually, when I am not developing for my place of employment, my usual tid-bits of Linux development is solely for myself, or for a selection of relatively CLI competent friends/acquaintances. I know approximately what their system setup is and thus a simple use of makeself is more than sufficient to allow a deployment. For the very, very few times that I have had to make a RPM or DEB package, it was not difficult, but required more work for the initial setup and at least for the Debian ones, would not meet snuff for being submitted as a maintained package if I ever had any reason to actually do so (usually something specifically for that person; for my own stuff, I don't even bother making installers exe or msi on the Windows side, even those WiX toolset makes it pretty easy, unless I am deploying to more than 2-3 computers). All-in-all, I suspect the general issue is "cannot be bothered." (I may be projecting).

For me personally, since I been using Linux since someone gave me a yellow coloured Slackware CD in the mid-90's, tracking dependencies only became a problem recently since I have been spoiled a bit by the improved state of package management. That said, the wifey gets seriously annoyed if installation involves more than running a double-click, shell script, apt-get, or yum. It is because that is not the expectation a person has on a "desktop" where "It just works" is a must.

Coding, once the mindset is developed, is easy for most people to become proficient. The job of a programmer is not limited to coding, however. I will preface that given the nature of the coding, it is possible to learn much of anything related to software as long as one has the tools. Indeed, much can be learned from a good mentor.

That said, the four year degree is not without its benefits. A good course load will serve on a silver platter things such as design skills, platform details, a few programming language, etc. In addition, many people would benefit from the extra course in formal writing or an elective in Accounting. These are not programming, but often working for companies, one would need to write a proposal (persuasive writing) or create expenditure reports (Accounting). These are things in which university/college does teach well.

Mainly the people that would benefit from 4 year college/university degree (beyond just having the "sheep skin") are people that are not naturally self-directed with their learning, or those people that wants knowledge and skill beyond just coding, particularly those that wish to eventually move out of the coding work into management, needs knowledge related to a specific industry, or wish to be less of a software engineer and more of a computer scientist.

I will note that neither being self-taught nor having a 4 year degree implies being a good coder. I know examples of both that could not code "Hello World" if their life depended upon it. I also know examples of both that exceed my own abilities. Usually, when the business owners I know think of a "good coder" they do not care about whether someone can implement a linked list, knows <insert language here>, can use version control, or actually documents their code. They want someone who will take their vague picture of what they need and turn it into a working product. For some, a 4 year degree will go a long way, and for others it is just a distraction. Mileage may vary; objects in mirror are closer than they appear (beware of T-Rex).

SCIgen referring to https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/arc... if anyone is interested

I have little doubt that Amazon had the necessary corpus to generate books including ones containing all the elements that people look for in a good book. That said, well designed and programmed robots can make reasonable food out of correct quantities of each ingredients in the correct order, but after a while it will all just begin to taste the same and be bland. In the case of the software generated stories, some of it might be accidentally good enough to make it into a literary publications if all of the vogue themes show up; however, until such time that we have "electric readers" that will read for us so that we won't have to do so, I doubt the bulk of it will make the upper ranks for the bulk of readers, at least for the first few generations of such.

Copyright and patents are still useful, but the timeframe is just purely rent-seeking. How about $10 dollars to register either for 2 years, double the previous for each 1 year extension. $10, $20, $40, $80, etc. The first few years will be cheap and a common citizen could get a foothold. Someone successful could even continue the monopoly for a few extra years. After a while, even a company such as Apple with unruly amounts of capital would give up and allow it to be public domain.

I agree for the trademarks, but would advice that it only applies to the context of use as a trademark. Trademarking a certain mouse would not prevent the character of that mouse from being used in a fictional work if not meant to represent the company.

I am not so concerned with the presence of copyright since it would be one of the few things keeping my modest work from simply being ripped off by someone with more marketing skills than I before I can even attempt to do something. I am, however, concerned with the blatant abuse. If someone is using one of my random utilities or hanging a print of one of my ugly renders on the wall 20 years from now, I would have had a chance to market it. 100 years of rent-seeking, it only encourages people to rest upon their laurels while speeding up inflation by creating undue artificial scarcity.

During a trip earlier this year to Toronto, I had visited Fort York. At least one sign referenced "Americans" plundering and burning the place. Since I doubt they would being doing it to themselves, it stands to reason they were referencing the US soldiers (history class, years ago, touched upon it as an US offensive towards the British which, while successful, wasn't quite as strategic as hoped, the museum at the site of the fort suggests the same but in less sugarcoated language, for fairly plain reasons).

Canadians and Mexicans are indeed citizens of the North American continent (or some of the citizens of the larger American continent, depending on whose map you read), but "United Statians" does not roll off the tongue as well in English, so I imagine that why it became a de facto convention. Since it is not de jure, maybe it will change, maybe it won't.

Honey-pots are not the newest idea out there; however, I might point out that actual dead-code in the binary is often removed by compilers when using higher numbers on the optimization parameter. -O1 might not remove it, but -O3 probably would (compiler dependent). I might also make note that if there is room for a buffer overflow in a library, the inside of the if statement might make an attractive jump target if is it visible to the context (probably involving setting EAX, ES, and EDI first and doing a direct far jump to the address with the current stack).

An interesting idea, but cost and risk versus benefit, I do not think it worth it.

People are using their phones increasingly more like a low-end laptop. I suspect the bargain cellphones will eventually catch up, but in the meantime, my $400 will not do the stuff that I would like to do. While I am more willing to forego doing the extra things, some people have more dollars and less restraint. We share see what the market will bear once the data is bare.

If I had mod points, I would 1-up this. I had no trouble understanding Sagan's videos when I was in grade school.

Especially since the GOTO statement is considered harmful.