bbanyc

20 ms·

211.
by bbanyc 12y ago
Ford's real motivation was to keep money out of the hands of the Dodge brothers - he thought they were going to use the dividend money to start a rival automaker, and he was right. The court ruled against Ford because he was acting in
212.
On learning, growth, and trust (2014)(eyrie.org)
1 points by bbanyc 12y ago|0 comments
213.
by bbanyc 12y ago
Because it wasn't made in Murray Hill. grep is also a single command in sed, but since it was in Unix v6 it's okay. There's an extreme case of NIH syndrome that pervades the Plan 9 community.
214.
by bbanyc 12y ago
Including the tax in the advertised price doesn't prevent it from being separately listed on the receipt. It'll say something like "Total $120, Included Tax $20" instead of "Subtotal $100, Tax $20, Total $120"
215.
by bbanyc 12y ago
A "flat tax" means moving from the current 10%, 15%, ..., 39.6% rates to a single tax bracket. Tax brackets are one section out of thousands in the Internal Revenue Code and one line on the 1040. We could move to a flat tax and
216.
by bbanyc 12y ago
Many foreigners are puzzled about why we Americans complain so much about our taxes, when they aren't particularly high by global standards. A major reason is that our taxes are particularly intrusive and annoying by global standards.
217.
by bbanyc 13y ago
A simpler explanation: people who spend their 20s in the military or in prison can't attend college until later in life. These are two large populations that are predominantly male and from lower classes.
218.
by bbanyc 13y ago
News Corp has a structure like that (NWS/NWSA), as does its spinoff 21st Century Fox (FOX/FOXA).
219.
by bbanyc 13y ago
SVN was designed as an API that could support multiple backends (they've already moved from one based on BerkeleyDB to the current ad-hoc one). Git was designed as a backend for a version control system that was supposed to get a clean
220.
Apt 1.0 released(lists.debian.org)
2 points by bbanyc 13y ago|0 comments
221.
by bbanyc 13y ago
The primary sponsor of the Federal Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act was a homeopathic physician. He put an exemption in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_S._Copeland
222.
by bbanyc 13y ago
From the python man page: "Documentation for installed Python modules and packages can be viewed by running the pydoc program." pydoc is part of the standard Python installation (though it might be broken out into a separate pa
223.
by bbanyc 13y ago
Worth noting: sufficiently ancient browsers (e.g. Netscape 1.x and most versions of Mosaic) can't even connect to modern websites, as they predate HTTP/1.1 and the "Host:" header. See http://www.jwz.org&#x2F
224.
by bbanyc 13y ago
For non-cryptographic applications that don't require top-grade security, but do want a short reasonably-unique identifier for a file to detect duplicates, MD5's speed and ubiquity made it a natural choice. This is the first thin
225.
by bbanyc 13y ago
Wouldn't that just be Usenet? And how would it avoid the problems that eventually made Usenet worthless as a discussion medium?
226.
by bbanyc 13y ago
There's a distinct category of "plant patents" which are more limited in scope to the typical "utility" patents. The CAFC has ruled that the availability of plant patents does not exclude plants from utility patent
227.
by bbanyc 13y ago
In this particular case the Federal Circuit failed to reach a coherent conclusion. 10 judges were on the panel and they produced 7 opinions, of which only a single paragraph was approved by a majority of the court. It's an intra-circ
228.
by bbanyc 13y ago
That's noble and I respect that. Unfortunately it fails to address software patents at all, and that doesn't make the problem go away. Copyrights are essentially about copying. Patents aren't - you can write a clean-room p
229.
by bbanyc 13y ago
On the one hand being against MORE STUFF is a perfectly reasonable position. There's too much accumulated cruft in legal documents that has no real purpose besides make-work for lawyers. On the other hand it's absurd to dogmatica
230.
by bbanyc 13y ago
Postfix was a no-go for OpenBSD because of the license. The only existing mail server with an acceptable license was qmail, which had its own issues, to put it lightly.
231.
by bbanyc 13y ago
You would have to file for "operating authority" for an out-of-state corporation, which typically involves similar fees and paperwork to incorporating in-state. I think that's what the article is referring to.
232.
by bbanyc 13y ago
To be precise, SSLeay was discontinued when its authors were hired by RSA. They're now under non-competes and couldn't change the license if they wanted to.
233.
by bbanyc 13y ago
So which projects actually use GnuTLS as opposed to OpenSSL (Apache, lighttpd, nginx) or NSS (Firefox, Chrome)? I'm aware of Debian linking some packages against GnuTLS to avoid the supposed GPL incompatibility issue with OpenSSL, but
234.
by bbanyc 13y ago
For example, let's look at the heavily patented field of video codecs. Right now, anyone can read the H.264 specification, you just have to pay potentially exorbitant fees to the patent holders to implement it. Without patents, there
235.
by bbanyc 13y ago
Agreed, but SAIL was, if not strictly the same culture as the AI Lab, at least significantly connected to it.
236.
by bbanyc 13y ago
The MIT AI Lab itself never found its way to that new world. There’s a reason the Emacs text editor is the only software artifact of that culture that survives to us, and it had to be rewritten from the ground up on the way. It didn'
237.
by bbanyc 13y ago
They missed a chance to abbreviate "poste électronique" to "postel", which would also commemorate the creator of SMTP.
238.
by bbanyc 13y ago
BCBS isn't a company. It's an association of a few dozen regional companies, some of which have their own word marks - Empire BCBS in New York is a separate company from CareFirst BCBS in Maryland, and so on. In some areas, like
239.
by bbanyc 13y ago
A lot of this is driven by historical concerns of large institutional installations that don't really apply to most Linux users today. We're set up for the possibility that /usr is a read-only NFS share for use by multiple p
240.
by bbanyc 13y ago
I smiled and said, "No sweat, I'll train you. The first command you learn is HELP" and proceeded to type it in on the console terminal. So the data center manager, the shift supervisor and the eight day operators watched the

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