> 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.)
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.