Re: Tough Moralism
Whataboutism? Really? C'mon.
26585 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"Which is to say, weather they intended to or not, they did in fact make the information public"
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
On the other hand, when there's an appalling spell of whether ...
Lard is a compact, high energy food source. It is especially tasty in US-style biscuits[0], which make for an easily cooked bread substitute. I've cooked this in an engine bay before, and also in a hastily constructed rock oven.
The Alcohol speaks for itself. If I were a young Russian kid forced to join in on this miserable and utterly useless agenda, I'd probably turn to booze, too.
[0] 2 cups AP flour, 1 Tbs baking powder, 1 tsp salt, 1/3 cup lard, 1 cup water (or milk). Can add about 1/2 tsp baking soda to change the pH for additional browning, but it's not necessary. Mix the dry ingredients, cut in the lard (rub the lard into the flour with your fingers), then quickly stir in the liquid (do not over mix, or they get tough). Drop by the heaping tablespoonful onto a baking sheet, pop into a 450F oven for 12-15 minutes, turning the sheet once. Makes about a dozen.
"About 20% of USA gas (the real vaporous stuff) comes from Russia"
Bullshit. Almost all of the US's natural gas imports come from Canada. About 98%, in fact. Almost all the rest comes from Trinidad and Tobago. Absolutely none of it comes from Russia.
With that said, the vast majority of natural gas consumed in the US is produced here, in the US.
"The problem with unplugging is that you can't get any work done."
Oh, horseshit. In fact, quite the opposite ... ALL you can get done on an unplugged network is work, because there is no way of accessing antisocial-media time-sinks.
Until some smart-ass manages to install Decwar or VTtrek, of course ...
It started long before the imigrant tech workers.
Post WWII, people from all over the world attended Berkeley and Stanford. They discovered that what became Silly Con Valley was a very nice place to live, and upon graduation, stayed here.
This lead to the plowing under of the orchards to create a new suburbia to house the large quantity of educated people. Many of these people had Engineering or Business degrees, some both.
In essence, an educated melting-pot made this place what it is.
Personally, I miss the cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, etc. ...
If a given kernel works for your hardware, and gets regular security updates, there is no real reason to install a newer kernel. I'm still using 4.4.x in a lot of places, including MeDearOldMum, GreatAunt and Wife's computers. It does what it needs to do, is rock-solid, supports all their hardware, and blissfully stays out of the way while they use their computers. Can't ask for much more than that in an OS.
That's why the intelligent farmer (remember him?) plants his trees on and over ground he owns. We're not talking an apple tree growing out of a hedge somewhere after some slob tossed a core into it, we're talking about an intentionally planted tree.
I feel a "cloud" simile coming ... don't touch that dial!
The point is that there is a need for programming the machine to produce the art prior to producing that art. The machine can not do it by itself, it requires an initiator. It matters not which human initiates the machine to produce the art, it was still initiated by a human. Without that human, the machine is inert.
I suppose you could invent a machine to program a machine to produce art, but at that point it's elephants all the way down.
"However, the idea that the public interest is served, or the constitution honoured, by granting copyright ownership to a piece of software... is an argument that I for one don't see."
Totally agree.
"That is correct under current law and jurisprudence/case law in the countries I'm familiar with."
Which, when you think about it, is all that really matters. And is why ElReg wrote the article ... it's an anomaly, and thus news.
"However, presumably his whole point is that the AI should now be considered as a legal entity."
Agreed. However, it would appear that his opinion is in the minority. For very, very small values of minority.
"That sentence in the article puzzles me"
Why? It's just another datapoint in the same genre of the rest of the article.
"the article is about copyright (which in the US you have to apply for,"
Incorrect. Here in the US, copyright is automatically granted to the author of an original work.
If this were to become common, I'd agree with you. As it is, however, I rather think that this is one case where security by obscurity might be a help.
With that said, of all the freedos machines I'm aware of[0], not a one of them is hooked up to any network other than sneaker-net.
[0] Probably in the high hundreds, possibly over a thousand.
I'm fairly certain that all the Walnut Creek Slackware CDs allowed installing direct from the CD ... assuming, of course, that your CD drive was compatible with the bootable kernel on the CD. Many were not back then.
Disclaimer: I didn't work there, I was just a beta tester for them ...
I still occasionally use Midnight Commander, a GPLv3 clone of the Norton offering, on my *nix systems. It's a useful tool, and a lot more powerful that it looks on first glance. Recommended.
N.B. Be VERY careful if you choose to run it as root ... it will do exactly what you tell it to do. Don't say I didn't warn you.
HP's OEM version of MS-DOS was customized to handle HP's non-standard Vectra hardware, begining with the first release of the Vectra line in 1989. Eventually HP saw sense (people wanted stuff like Flight SImulator and Lotus to run) and standardized their version of the hardware to run a generic DOS instead of their custom version. The proprietary HP hardware largely disappeared from the Vectra line by the time the 486 was ubiquitous.
If you have one of these ancient machines and want to play with it, but you've discovered DOS and early versions of Windows do not work properly, you'll need the correct software for the hardware. As is often the case for this old stuff, someone, in this case The HP Computer Museum, has archived the stuff. You can download most of the required software here.