> But in retrospect I can see that my touchiness in that moment probably cost me tens of thousands of dollars.
I don't know if it's a side effect of living in a western society, but I see people make this kind of mistake all the time in the corporate world -- i.e. assuming that behind it all there's some neutral arbiter who will square any conflicts that arise in the workplace. In reality, if you make your self look like an ass in front of the wrong person, at the wrong point in the fiscal year, it affects your bonus / promotion / etc., and you never get that back, plus it's used to factor into every reward you get until you leave that company. Definitely better to be diplomatic.
I think his point is you wouldn't get the same thing. If Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain today, a decade or two from now nobody would know who he was. You might get some cheap Pooh-themed lunchboxes from China early on, but without Disney pumping money into him, Winnie would fade into obscurity. (e.g. Винни-Пух, the people's Winnie)
That's actual college-and-braces money that shareholders are making on the copyright, that otherwise wouldn't exist. And don't say that money is being stolen from us, because first of all, we're all potentially "them", and second, we all get to watch Winnie's Big Adventure on Netflix.
I think the part about "scuppering" is just some nautical-sounding nonsense that the author of the article threw in. If you read the account I linked to above, it's saying they jettisoned the masts, then cut the rudder, then threw the cannons overboard, but despite these the ship eventually broke apart. Like you say, it sounds like they were trying to stabilize it to reduce the damage, but my impression is they were trying to make it lighter and less top-heavy rather than intentionally sink it.
A contemporary account states "Il y a eu de si violents coups de talon que la barre du gouvernail a fait sauter le tillac de sa chambre, malgré six barreaux en plusieurs endroits, et qui fit déterminer Mr. de Castellan a L’aller couper luy meme." which roughly translates to "There were such violent blows to the rudder, the tiller burst through the deck of its room, despite six bars holding it in place, and Mr. Castellan made the decision to cut it."
It's interesting to see that even with the proliferation of satellites these days, there are only about a dozen above the continental United States right now, with all the categories selected.
When you factor in the number of people who are going out biking/hiking/vacationing/etc. so they have something to show off to their friends, I think Facebook probably has a positive effect on our collective health. (Present company excepted of course -- we all just love to get outdoors.)
That's a misleading comparison. I think the argument is that if you have a gun you can protect yourself from another person with a gun. A better analogy would be how some jurisdictions make bullet proof vests and gas masks illegal because they can be used (by bad people) to thwart police.
I have this thing where I wake up at 5:00 AM and my internal monologue sounds like someone twisting the tuning knob back and forth on a radio. Anyone know a name for that?
.Net provides a couple of different ways to dynamically emit IL, but that's not quite the same as being able to emit your own native machine instructions, though. I think the challenge would be that you'd need to work out a calling convention between the jitted code and the emitted native code, at which point you might as well stick the native code in its own library function and compile or assemble it with a native tool.
Way back in the day (mid high-school), I wrote a Tetris game in Pascal and Z80 assembly for the TRS-80. At some point I realized that since what was displayed on the screen was just a representation of an area of memory, I could keep track of the "cup" and all of the pieces that had already fallen into it directly in video memory instead of variables. I also optimized the code for drawing the "cup" so all three sides of it would get rendered in one shot in a single loop. The first time I ran it, a bug caused half of the bottom not to get drawn, and the first Tetris piece dropped through the hole and sliced straight into whatever vital memory came after the video area, immediately crashing the computer.
Huh. I always assumed Stalin was being overly paranoid when he exiled all of those folks to Siberia for breaking farm equipment, etc. Still a terrible, awful way to address the problem, but it makes a bit more sense if that's exactly the sort of thing the subversives are being told to do.
O' the demon of rum is abroad in the land.
His victims are falling on every hand,
The wise and the sinful, the brave and the fair.
No station too high for his vengeance to spare.
O woman, the sorrow and pain is with you.
And so be the joy and the victory too ;
With this for your motto and succor divine :
The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine!
The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine!
It seems like if they don't have enough pressure in their lungs to expel the bite of ham sandwich, you wouldn't necessarily be able to suck it out with this device. On the other hand, I have a hard time blowing up those skinny balloons for balloon animals, but the pump thing they sell with them does it like a champ.
Well, hold on now. There isn't a 1:1 correlation between credit card debt and poor spending choices. Someone who'd never charge more on their card than they could pay off at the end of the month might do it, for example, if they just got a speeding ticket and didn't have any cash to pay for it. (I'd certainly take that route long before a pay-or-get-arrested plan from the court.)
"All of which means that because Anderson was too poor to pay his $170 fine, his overall debt ballooned to $580. His fine more than tripled, solely because he was too poor to pay it."
This seems pretty much like the status quo. If you default on your credit card bill, and ultimately choose minimal payments until it's paid off, rather than bankruptcy, you'll end up paying several times the value of the original loan.
That said, if you go to the Biloxi court house's web site, they offer people the ability to do a payment plan for tickets, but they explicitly say "Remember that release on a payment plan is a privilege afforded by the Court and a violation of the payment order will result in your immediate arrest." I think that's pretty terrible since in this post-6th-amendment society, "arrest" is frequently indistinguishable from "imprisonment". Debt, especially something so trivial, should be a civil matter.
A couple of years back, I was hiring some vendor developers for my team, and since I had some flexibility in the interviews that wouldn't be allowed for full-time employees, I tried an experiment: For one of the vendor candidates, I told him a day ahead of time that I'd be asking him to implement System.Collections.Hashtable in C#, with behavior equivalent to the one in .Net. The day of the interview came, and he whiteboarded it flawlessly, to a degree that I'd never seen any other candidate accomplish, and he was able to have a deep conversation about the implementation and all of its nuances. He then proceeded to bomb the rest of his interviews and didn't get the position. What this illustrates to me is that the typical programmer interview, where we come up with some weird problem and toss it to the candidate while they have no references to look at, no IDE to type into, and a 45 minute deadline looming over their head, is totally divorced from the actual work we actually really want them to do. If I need someone to implement a widget, I'd rather they took some time to research it and do it right, versus trying to crap out a solution in five minutes on a whiteboard.
Weird - something about the form factor makes me want to violently toss it off a loading dock. Anyone know how much that would translate to in Gs? (The article says it will survive 6 Gs of shock.)
Do Chrome for PC and Chrome for iOS come from the same code base, and if so, how do you automate testing for closed systems like iOS? (I ask because from my totally anecdotal perspective, Chrome for PC is a rock-solid dream of an application, but Chrome on my iPad crashes if it sees an animated GIF from across the room.)
No Hire. As a software developer, 110% of your passion should be for code, followed by a couple of harmless, minor interests like bicycling or craft beer.
40, started using Linux in '93 or '94. You're probably old enough to realize that even though you're kind of in the same casino, those "upper management idiots" are playing a vastly different game than you or your startup. What portion of your work, for example, is spent figuring out whether the EU is going to give you a seven-figure fine for not localizing something, or whether a vendor from a non-NATO country can troubleshoot a server with a given client's PII on it, or whether the update you're pushing this week has been tested to make sure none of the 27 major products that take dependency on it are going to break? If your only metric is how much chrome the end user sees...
When I got out of the Army in the 90's, I had to fly back to America, and since I didn't trust the government's shipping contractor I took all of the guts out of my PC, stuck them in a carry-on bag, and went through security with it. The guy at the counter looked inside the bag and asked what it was. I told him it was a computer and he let me through. Oh, such an age of innocence!
You say that, but now that this is out it's only a matter of time before the bad guys realize they can stop using their nukes for leveling cities and repurpose them for disrupting HBO.
I've had lucid dreams on and off for several years. I remember one particular dream where I was visiting a friend, and he showed me a project he was working on in his back room. It was a hand-cranked machine that looked like a mashup of an astronomical orrery and an automatic transmission with the case taken off. Before I woke up, I was able to examine it for some time, and as far as I can recall, I could see each piece, in motion and interacting with its adjacent parts, with perfect resolution.
Now, the problem is that there was never an image of that machine on my visual cortex, so it must have originated somewhere further up the stack in some kind of symbolic form, which got used to synthesize the image I thought I was looking at. IMHO, it's a little bit backwards for my brain to have to repaint memories on an imaginary canvas so the little man in my head can look at them and reparse them over and over. (But apparently it does, and it's damned good at it.)
I had an interesting experience a few days ago: I was walking to my office, through a small cluster of other buildings in the same complex, and I ended up walking perpendicular to someone who I immediately recognized, based on body shape, face, hairstyle, dress, and shoes, as myself. Of course my rational bits knew it was just some other guy who looked a lot like me, but it was a close enough match that my recognition bits would intermittently "lock on" and tell me I was watching myself from 20 feet away. And that was disturbing as hell.
Anyway, now I know I have a doppelgänger working two buildings over, so I need to figure out what team he's on so I can crash his next office unwinder.