Yeah! Because Obama is against increasing the supply of oil and allowing oil companies to drill offshore! Oh wait, that was last month....
This whole "McCain is in the pocket of big oil" stuff is kind of silly. Other than tax issues can you name a single oil related issue where Obama and McCain oppose each other?
They both support things like carbon credits and funding for alternative energy stuff. (which the oil companies hate, try explaining how McCain can support carbon credits and be in the pocket of the oil companies at the same time) They both support things like offshore drilling. All the rest of it is just political posturing.
Democrats have just realized that people dont like oil companies and so claiming that every candidate they run against is in the pocket of oil companies is just one of those attacks they always make. Kind of like how republicans always claim democrats are elitist new england snobs. Its silly and if you look at the facts it usually doesnt have much basis in reality but these are the kinds of attacks that energize their base and work well in politics.
Its not really fair to drag something up from that long ago and use it to critize economists. They were speaking with the assumption that economic fundamentals wouldnt change a decade ago, which of course, they have. We had 9/11 which forced the fed to lower rates and they kept them there for too long which caused lots of inflation which caused commodity prices (including oil) to go through the roof. There were a lot of other factors that changed too.
Economists arent oracles, they cant forsee everything, but they can make rational judgements based on fundamental factors about where things are likely to go. They cant forsee a butterfly flapping its wings in china and somehow changing everything, but those guys are right more often than they are wrong.
Really, they arent unlike those ex-coaches/nfl players you see on sports shows predicting who is going to win the big game. They are usually right, but every now and then there is an upset and some monday morning quarterback at the watercooler is there to talk about how he saw it coming way before the experts did.
Really mods? Troll? The guy points out that driving while high is a *stupid* idea and he gets modded troll? Dont get me wrong, I am in favor of legalizing pot, but anyone who thinks that driving while high is a good idea is nuts. And the parent was absolutely right to point out that driving while high is a terrible, terrible idea.
Frankly, I suspect that the GP was the one who was trolling, anyone who suggests that driving while high is a good idea is either trolling or just plain dumb. (or maybe high, I guess that would fit)
I think you are being paranoid. MS didnt do that with any of their other hardware. (joysticks/keyboards/mouse/etc) Really, is there any practical way to keep someone from plugging a monitor into a linux box?
Economics is an extremely limited niche field? Have you heard of wall street? All those big investment banks and trading firms look first to economics grads when they go hiring. Wall Street grabs just as many economics grads as Silicon Valley does CS majors.
Even if you dont find it boring to begin with you really need to ask yourself the question "where will I be in five/ten/twenty years?". For the majority going into software engineering or IT the answer is "prettymuch the same thing I was doing two weeks after I graduated college". You might be better at it and you might be leading a team of people, but you will still be doing about the same thing.
You see this at big companies too, its much more common to promote a software engineer to a "software engineer level 2" or something similar than it is for them to move on to something else. The career path is usually designed to keep you doing the same thing for a long period of time. For many other types of jobs (such as consulting) the entry level position is seen as stepping stone to bigger and better things.
Now I know that there are a lot of exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking 90% of people who start out in a company as an entry level software engineer or IT guy dont move on to anything else. Thats why people get bored with it imho.
I never understood why this was so unpopular. We tax the beejebus out of cigarretes because it is an easy way for politicians to raise taxes without making everyone mad. Eating tons of junk food over the course of your life isnt much better than smoking a pack a day.
I'm not saying I support a tax on junk food, but I cant see how people can support taxing lower income folks who go through a pack a day but not this.
Um, no, they tried to fight the little guy who held the rights to it for years and eventually the court ended up ruling against them. "Not being evil" would have been if they had walked away as soon as they realized that another guy legitimately owned the name gmail. Google's failure to crush the little guy in this instance was not for lack of trying.
In the case of windows defender at least MS had an argument that the third party had no right to use the name "windows" as part of their trademark. Google didnt even have that.
Basically the MS case in this instance is less evil than the Google case. It is amusing to see all the fanboys try to find some reason why google was being morally superior in this instance though.
Age discrimination is also illegal. (and 28 is over the hill? wow) There are lots of people who go into the military and then get a real education later or in their spare time. Not everyone is well off enough to go straight from high school to a good college.
Incidentally I have a friend who got his bachelors at age 29 and now works for Microsoft, so people like that certainly do exist.
Any other illegal forms of discrimination you would like to advocate? The attitudes on this site are kind of disgusting.
Even if it wasnt, I am a little shocked at all the google fanboys claiming that discriminating against veterans is somehow a good way to run a company. A lot of these people started out in a lower income bracket, worked hard and risked their lives for their country, and got an education in what little spare time they had. And then they have to deal with some hiring managers from an upper middle class background who think that military guys arent capable of thinking intelligently because they followed orders while in the service. Its pretty lame. If Google's culture is actually promoting this then shame on them.
Sounds like a classic example of attacking the person rather than what he is saying. I dont know anything about this guy, but just because he was wrong about that doesnt mean he is wrong about this.
Personally, I can see how he has a point. Google and Yahoo control an overwhelming percentage of the market share when combined. Do you really want Google to have no major competitors other than MS? (if you can even count MS as a major competitor in that space, they are pretty small relative to Google) I know everyone likes google around here, but competition is a good thing. Yahoo is/was Google's biggest competitor.
If we had good competition we would see things like advertisers getting better deals and third party websites that host adwords getting a higher percentage. Currently Google's price markup between what they charge advertisers and what they give third party websites is huge.
Im not saying google is an evil company, just that advertisers and adwords customers would benefit greatly if Google had real competition. Yet they keep buying competitors (like doubleclick) or doing deals with companies like Yahoo to effectively remove them from competition.
Re:No, it is the age of the farmer and miner
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The Rise of Geekdom
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· Score: 1
Since when does wanting to be a geek with a career mean you have absolutely no social skills? If anything I would think the opposite, you need to be able to interact with people to be a manager of any kind.
What is it that is so bad about wanting to work hard and advance within a company? You make it sound like trying to do good work and get promoted is somehow immoral and dishonest.
And yes, "engineer" does generally equal "smart". There is a correlation there. Sure there may be some incompetent engineers out there, but any decent one is going to be more intelligent than the average guy on the street. And I really doubt that they are going to put the least competent ones in the entire company in charge of the whole thing.
I guess you are probably trolling and I shouldnt respond, but the stereotype you are throwing around about engineers having no social skills, never getting laid, etc. is even worse than the one I originally responded to where the guy was implying that the geeks sit on the bottom rung making peanuts their entire life.
Re:No, it is the age of the farmer and miner
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The Rise of Geekdom
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· Score: 2, Insightful
People are always surprised when they find out how much coal miners (or any other type of miner) make. You really have to compare all aspects of the job though. The income of a coal miner may be comparable to that of a bottom rung engineer at Cisco or Google after accounting for bonuses, stock, etc. but consider the lifestyle also. Being a coal miner sucks. Even people who choose to work as coal miners will tell you that being a coal miner sucks. When you work in a job such as a software engineer you get things like a comfortable work enviroment, flexible work hours, etc. Many software engineers actually enjoy their job.
(and I havent even touched on the fact that most good software engineering jobs offer career advancement beyond being a bottom rung guy with an extremely comfortable lifestyle, something that 99% of coal miners will never see)
This whole discussion seems like a classic example of "grass is greener on the other side". I know I wont be quitting my nerd job to go be a miner anytime soon, and I seriously doubt anyone else reading this will either.:)
Re:No, it is the age of the farmer and miner
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The Rise of Geekdom
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Wrong, this stereotype of "companies are led by dumb frat guys" is just a combination of nerds feeling down on themselves and dumb jocks trying to convince girls they will be successfull one day.
Here are Exxon's top five executives, only two on the list didnt work at inherintly nerdy positions at exxon and thats because they joined company later in their careers after they had transitioned to management (ie they started out as nerds):
CEO has a degree in civil engineering, joined the company as a production engineer. Mark Elbers, senior vice president, has a degree in petroleum engineering and joined the company as an engineer. Michael Dolan, joined the company working in a research laboratory, also has many academia related positions in engineering. Stephen Simon, has a degree in civil engineering. Donald Humphries, has a degree in industrial engineering
I could go through and list every executive working at any of these "big oil" organizations, but you get the idea. We all love to hate on executives, but generally speaking board members want somebody very smart and hardworking to run their multibillion dollar company.
I guess there may be some areas where the guy at the top of the food chain is a sales guy who cant do algebra, but if the company has any "nerd" positions at all those are generally the people who will rise to the top.
Re:No, it is the age of the farmer and miner
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The Rise of Geekdom
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Eh, not really. You think the oil workers are getting paid the big bucks or the nerdy engineers who work for exxon? I knew several people who went to work for big oil from my school, they were all nerdy engineering types and they are all making a small fortune. It isnt the working class guys in bottom rung jobs that are making the big money at oil companies.
I can see the argument for these "Microsoft is dieing!" stories when you are talking about the technical merits of their software. I dont agree with it, but I can understand where people are coming from. It really seems like people will just grasp at anything that speaks negatively of anyone/anything in any way associated with MS regardless of how little sense it makes.
Claiming that the board is angry and looking to oust the CEO is just beyond ridiculous though. MS has always done an amazing job from a financial point of view. They post record profits and revenues every single year. Their profits for the past year (yes the Vista year) were double what they were 3 years ago. Even though the past year they grew more slowly than usual they still posted over 10% growth in earnings. Those kinds of numbers are much better than you will see from 90% of other companies out there.
If you were in charge of a group of people who had consistently outperformed most of their peers for decades would you fire them all?
Not likely, in order to unseat Outlook/exchange at this point you would have to give users a set of damn good reasons why its worth their time to switch. As much as everyone loves to hate MS, there isnt anything major another product is capable of that you cant get from Office. Even if MS does lag a year or two in adding a feature that its competitors have already shipped (think opera and firefox shipping tabbed browsing first) ultimately it wont matter much unless MS waits an extremely long time to ship that feature. They may not be first with everything but they know better than to let their rivals get too far ahead of them.
In any industry it isnt enough to be as good as the market leader, you have to be better in order to survive. Its their game to lose and they have been playing it long enough that they probably wont make a mistake big enough to give a competitor an opening.
Well, its good to see that US Citizens arent the only ones who blame their politicians for things they have no control over. Would you have the government regulating who private organizations invited to speak? I certainly wouldnt want that.
The guest list for that symposium looks to be weighted towards people who would NOT agree with the RIAA's stance. The guy in the first article linked is clearly pro-reform and he is going to be there. If you follow the links you will see that there are speakers from companies that have been sued by copyright holders in the past like Google.
If this guy was uninvited based on his views I would suspect its because the other side wanted more balance, not because they wanted the deck stacked. If balance is the goal here then it would seem fair to exclude him (although a bit rude I suspect) since his side appears to already be very well represented.
It isnt like the non-RIAA view isnt being heard here as the summary would suggest.
The counterfeit thing is nonsense. The chinese could just as easily modify a non-counterfeit router as a counterfeit one.
The counterfeit hardware isnt really counterfeit, instances like this are usually just the guy who runs the factory keeping it open an hour later than he is telling Cisco and producing a bunch of extra routers that he can sell on the cheap. The counterfeit item itself is typically exactly the same when we are talking about electronics. Its not like they are using completely different designs and slapping the Cisco brand name on it. (I am sure there are exceptions to this that someone will point out but I am speaking in general terms here, this rule applies for most counterfeit electronics)
Sure, we should be concerned because American companies are having their IP that they put a big investment into stolen, but its no less secure to buy a counterfeit router than a non-counterfeit.
I know we all love to hate on telecoms around here, but your analogy doesnt make sense. In each of those cases hollywood and GM are getting paid more for producing more. The expectation that consumers have for the internet is that they can essentially get all they want for a flat fee. At some point that becomes a money losing activity for the people providing the service. The telecoms wont be able to charge you 20 times as much when you start using 20 times as much bandwidth.
Here is a better analogy:
An all you can eat buffet place does great business for a period of about 20 years. All of a sudden some new technology allows people to eat 50 times what they used to be able to. People then go to the all you can eat buffet and start consuming WAY more food than they did before. At first it doesnt matter because a minority of people are actually using the technology and eating way too much food. However, the owners of the buffet place see the writing on the wall and realize that soon everyone will be eating 50 times as much at their little restraunt.
The fact of the matter is that all the money for infrastructure has to come from somewhere. Either:
a) all consumers pay more b) government subsidises the telcoms to build it c) the consumers that are using all the bandwidth pay more d) the telcom just loses tons of money and then goes out of business e) the telcom just throttles access and doesnt let heavy users do everything that they want to online.
Dont make the silly typical slashdot argument about how at&t isnt reinvesting any of the money that you give them every month and they are sending huge amounts of money to their shareholders, the amount that they return to their shareholders is less than 10% of what they take in. In order for the utility to maintain a modest but healthy profit margin the money has to come from somewhere. On slashdot people get mad no matter which direction the telcom tries to move in. If they try to charge consumers more they are evil, if they try to get money from the government they are evil, etc. Its ok to be against one of those things, but you cant be against them all.:)
glibc isnt the only implementation that does something like this. You can write a simple little function that will just keep a counter of the number of times alloc has been called and then call back to the regular alloc until the counter hits a certain value and then force it to fail by returning NULL. Just do some analysis on your code and then use enough different counter values that you can be reasonably sure you have covered all the paths. Or you could turn the hooks on/off depending on where you are in the code being tested.
A lot of people will wrap their alloc calls in a != NULL or something similar but never test it. If you are working on a large system it is a virtual certainty that someone somewhere has made an error in the code that is supposed to clean up after the return from a failed alloc call. Untested alloc clean up functionality causes a lot of errors. Having difficulty forcing it to fail is a terrible excuse for not testing your code.
I cant count the number of times I have seen a programmer do something like the following:
Just checking your return value is not enough. You have to make sure you clean up everything and test it. It is very rare that you can just throw a "return failure" statement in there and be ok. Usually things are significantly complex that you cant get away with just assuming that the error case works. For example many programs will keep enough memory seperate from the alloc that they can still perform an operation like saving the file and exiting cleanly. However it is very common to see this functionality fail to work correctly because the guy writing all the other code left the data structures in some bad state due to not testing alloc failures well enough.
I watched 21 and I am pretty sure that they didnt botch the Monty Hall problem. It seemed weird that it would be in a senior level math course at a top notch engineering school, but the way they described it was mathematically correct.
The government wastes a huge amount of money, you say 'we can get the same results while spending less money' sarcastically but it is actually true. Government jobs are generally regarded as something you can get and collect paychecks/receive benefits for the rest of your life no matter how lazy/incompetent you are. That should change, no business owner would tolerate it in a company and tax payers shouldnt tolerate it in government either.
Additionally there are many government programs that go WAY beyond providing basic services like police. We dont need to be spending more money on defense than the entire rest of the world combined and we dont need to be taking hard earned tax dollars to write checks to people who dont want to work for a living.
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Yeah! Because Obama is against increasing the supply of oil and allowing oil companies to drill offshore! Oh wait, that was last month....
This whole "McCain is in the pocket of big oil" stuff is kind of silly. Other than tax issues can you name a single oil related issue where Obama and McCain oppose each other?
They both support things like carbon credits and funding for alternative energy stuff. (which the oil companies hate, try explaining how McCain can support carbon credits and be in the pocket of the oil companies at the same time) They both support things like offshore drilling. All the rest of it is just political posturing.
Democrats have just realized that people dont like oil companies and so claiming that every candidate they run against is in the pocket of oil companies is just one of those attacks they always make. Kind of like how republicans always claim democrats are elitist new england snobs. Its silly and if you look at the facts it usually doesnt have much basis in reality but these are the kinds of attacks that energize their base and work well in politics.
Its not really fair to drag something up from that long ago and use it to critize economists. They were speaking with the assumption that economic fundamentals wouldnt change a decade ago, which of course, they have. We had 9/11 which forced the fed to lower rates and they kept them there for too long which caused lots of inflation which caused commodity prices (including oil) to go through the roof. There were a lot of other factors that changed too.
Economists arent oracles, they cant forsee everything, but they can make rational judgements based on fundamental factors about where things are likely to go. They cant forsee a butterfly flapping its wings in china and somehow changing everything, but those guys are right more often than they are wrong.
Really, they arent unlike those ex-coaches/nfl players you see on sports shows predicting who is going to win the big game. They are usually right, but every now and then there is an upset and some monday morning quarterback at the watercooler is there to talk about how he saw it coming way before the experts did.
Really mods? Troll? The guy points out that driving while high is a *stupid* idea and he gets modded troll? Dont get me wrong, I am in favor of legalizing pot, but anyone who thinks that driving while high is a good idea is nuts. And the parent was absolutely right to point out that driving while high is a terrible, terrible idea.
Frankly, I suspect that the GP was the one who was trolling, anyone who suggests that driving while high is a good idea is either trolling or just plain dumb. (or maybe high, I guess that would fit)
I mean really, all of this should be obvious.
I think you are being paranoid. MS didnt do that with any of their other hardware. (joysticks/keyboards/mouse/etc) Really, is there any practical way to keep someone from plugging a monitor into a linux box?
Economics is an extremely limited niche field? Have you heard of wall street? All those big investment banks and trading firms look first to economics grads when they go hiring. Wall Street grabs just as many economics grads as Silicon Valley does CS majors.
Even if you dont find it boring to begin with you really need to ask yourself the question "where will I be in five/ten/twenty years?". For the majority going into software engineering or IT the answer is "prettymuch the same thing I was doing two weeks after I graduated college". You might be better at it and you might be leading a team of people, but you will still be doing about the same thing.
You see this at big companies too, its much more common to promote a software engineer to a "software engineer level 2" or something similar than it is for them to move on to something else. The career path is usually designed to keep you doing the same thing for a long period of time. For many other types of jobs (such as consulting) the entry level position is seen as stepping stone to bigger and better things.
Now I know that there are a lot of exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking 90% of people who start out in a company as an entry level software engineer or IT guy dont move on to anything else. Thats why people get bored with it imho.
I never understood why this was so unpopular. We tax the beejebus out of cigarretes because it is an easy way for politicians to raise taxes without making everyone mad. Eating tons of junk food over the course of your life isnt much better than smoking a pack a day.
I'm not saying I support a tax on junk food, but I cant see how people can support taxing lower income folks who go through a pack a day but not this.
Um, no, they tried to fight the little guy who held the rights to it for years and eventually the court ended up ruling against them. "Not being evil" would have been if they had walked away as soon as they realized that another guy legitimately owned the name gmail. Google's failure to crush the little guy in this instance was not for lack of trying.
In the case of windows defender at least MS had an argument that the third party had no right to use the name "windows" as part of their trademark. Google didnt even have that.
Basically the MS case in this instance is less evil than the Google case. It is amusing to see all the fanboys try to find some reason why google was being morally superior in this instance though.
Age discrimination is also illegal. (and 28 is over the hill? wow) There are lots of people who go into the military and then get a real education later or in their spare time. Not everyone is well off enough to go straight from high school to a good college.
Incidentally I have a friend who got his bachelors at age 29 and now works for Microsoft, so people like that certainly do exist.
Any other illegal forms of discrimination you would like to advocate? The attitudes on this site are kind of disgusting.
It is illegal to discriminate against veterans:
http://www.dol.gov/elaws/vets/userra/userra.asp
Even if it wasnt, I am a little shocked at all the google fanboys claiming that discriminating against veterans is somehow a good way to run a company. A lot of these people started out in a lower income bracket, worked hard and risked their lives for their country, and got an education in what little spare time they had. And then they have to deal with some hiring managers from an upper middle class background who think that military guys arent capable of thinking intelligently because they followed orders while in the service. Its pretty lame. If Google's culture is actually promoting this then shame on them.
Sounds like a classic example of attacking the person rather than what he is saying. I dont know anything about this guy, but just because he was wrong about that doesnt mean he is wrong about this.
Personally, I can see how he has a point. Google and Yahoo control an overwhelming percentage of the market share when combined. Do you really want Google to have no major competitors other than MS? (if you can even count MS as a major competitor in that space, they are pretty small relative to Google) I know everyone likes google around here, but competition is a good thing. Yahoo is/was Google's biggest competitor.
If we had good competition we would see things like advertisers getting better deals and third party websites that host adwords getting a higher percentage. Currently Google's price markup between what they charge advertisers and what they give third party websites is huge.
Im not saying google is an evil company, just that advertisers and adwords customers would benefit greatly if Google had real competition. Yet they keep buying competitors (like doubleclick) or doing deals with companies like Yahoo to effectively remove them from competition.
Since when does wanting to be a geek with a career mean you have absolutely no social skills? If anything I would think the opposite, you need to be able to interact with people to be a manager of any kind.
What is it that is so bad about wanting to work hard and advance within a company? You make it sound like trying to do good work and get promoted is somehow immoral and dishonest.
And yes, "engineer" does generally equal "smart". There is a correlation there. Sure there may be some incompetent engineers out there, but any decent one is going to be more intelligent than the average guy on the street. And I really doubt that they are going to put the least competent ones in the entire company in charge of the whole thing.
I guess you are probably trolling and I shouldnt respond, but the stereotype you are throwing around about engineers having no social skills, never getting laid, etc. is even worse than the one I originally responded to where the guy was implying that the geeks sit on the bottom rung making peanuts their entire life.
People are always surprised when they find out how much coal miners (or any other type of miner) make. You really have to compare all aspects of the job though. The income of a coal miner may be comparable to that of a bottom rung engineer at Cisco or Google after accounting for bonuses, stock, etc. but consider the lifestyle also. Being a coal miner sucks. Even people who choose to work as coal miners will tell you that being a coal miner sucks. When you work in a job such as a software engineer you get things like a comfortable work enviroment, flexible work hours, etc. Many software engineers actually enjoy their job.
:)
(and I havent even touched on the fact that most good software engineering jobs offer career advancement beyond being a bottom rung guy with an extremely comfortable lifestyle, something that 99% of coal miners will never see)
This whole discussion seems like a classic example of "grass is greener on the other side". I know I wont be quitting my nerd job to go be a miner anytime soon, and I seriously doubt anyone else reading this will either.
Wrong, this stereotype of "companies are led by dumb frat guys" is just a combination of nerds feeling down on themselves and dumb jocks trying to convince girls they will be successfull one day.
Here are Exxon's top five executives, only two on the list didnt work at inherintly nerdy positions at exxon and thats because they joined company later in their careers after they had transitioned to management (ie they started out as nerds):
CEO has a degree in civil engineering, joined the company as a production engineer.
Mark Elbers, senior vice president, has a degree in petroleum engineering and joined the company as an engineer.
Michael Dolan, joined the company working in a research laboratory, also has many academia related positions in engineering.
Stephen Simon, has a degree in civil engineering.
Donald Humphries, has a degree in industrial engineering
I could go through and list every executive working at any of these "big oil" organizations, but you get the idea. We all love to hate on executives, but generally speaking board members want somebody very smart and hardworking to run their multibillion dollar company.
I guess there may be some areas where the guy at the top of the food chain is a sales guy who cant do algebra, but if the company has any "nerd" positions at all those are generally the people who will rise to the top.
Eh, not really. You think the oil workers are getting paid the big bucks or the nerdy engineers who work for exxon? I knew several people who went to work for big oil from my school, they were all nerdy engineering types and they are all making a small fortune. It isnt the working class guys in bottom rung jobs that are making the big money at oil companies.
I can see the argument for these "Microsoft is dieing!" stories when you are talking about the technical merits of their software. I dont agree with it, but I can understand where people are coming from. It really seems like people will just grasp at anything that speaks negatively of anyone/anything in any way associated with MS regardless of how little sense it makes.
Claiming that the board is angry and looking to oust the CEO is just beyond ridiculous though. MS has always done an amazing job from a financial point of view. They post record profits and revenues every single year. Their profits for the past year (yes the Vista year) were double what they were 3 years ago. Even though the past year they grew more slowly than usual they still posted over 10% growth in earnings. Those kinds of numbers are much better than you will see from 90% of other companies out there.
If you were in charge of a group of people who had consistently outperformed most of their peers for decades would you fire them all?
Not likely, in order to unseat Outlook/exchange at this point you would have to give users a set of damn good reasons why its worth their time to switch. As much as everyone loves to hate MS, there isnt anything major another product is capable of that you cant get from Office. Even if MS does lag a year or two in adding a feature that its competitors have already shipped (think opera and firefox shipping tabbed browsing first) ultimately it wont matter much unless MS waits an extremely long time to ship that feature. They may not be first with everything but they know better than to let their rivals get too far ahead of them.
In any industry it isnt enough to be as good as the market leader, you have to be better in order to survive. Its their game to lose and they have been playing it long enough that they probably wont make a mistake big enough to give a competitor an opening.
Well, its good to see that US Citizens arent the only ones who blame their politicians for things they have no control over. Would you have the government regulating who private organizations invited to speak? I certainly wouldnt want that.
The guest list for that symposium looks to be weighted towards people who would NOT agree with the RIAA's stance. The guy in the first article linked is clearly pro-reform and he is going to be there. If you follow the links you will see that there are speakers from companies that have been sued by copyright holders in the past like Google.
If this guy was uninvited based on his views I would suspect its because the other side wanted more balance, not because they wanted the deck stacked. If balance is the goal here then it would seem fair to exclude him (although a bit rude I suspect) since his side appears to already be very well represented.
It isnt like the non-RIAA view isnt being heard here as the summary would suggest.
The counterfeit thing is nonsense. The chinese could just as easily modify a non-counterfeit router as a counterfeit one.
The counterfeit hardware isnt really counterfeit, instances like this are usually just the guy who runs the factory keeping it open an hour later than he is telling Cisco and producing a bunch of extra routers that he can sell on the cheap. The counterfeit item itself is typically exactly the same when we are talking about electronics. Its not like they are using completely different designs and slapping the Cisco brand name on it. (I am sure there are exceptions to this that someone will point out but I am speaking in general terms here, this rule applies for most counterfeit electronics)
Sure, we should be concerned because American companies are having their IP that they put a big investment into stolen, but its no less secure to buy a counterfeit router than a non-counterfeit.
I know we all love to hate on telecoms around here, but your analogy doesnt make sense. In each of those cases hollywood and GM are getting paid more for producing more. The expectation that consumers have for the internet is that they can essentially get all they want for a flat fee. At some point that becomes a money losing activity for the people providing the service. The telecoms wont be able to charge you 20 times as much when you start using 20 times as much bandwidth.
:)
Here is a better analogy:
An all you can eat buffet place does great business for a period of about 20 years. All of a sudden some new technology allows people to eat 50 times what they used to be able to. People then go to the all you can eat buffet and start consuming WAY more food than they did before. At first it doesnt matter because a minority of people are actually using the technology and eating way too much food. However, the owners of the buffet place see the writing on the wall and realize that soon everyone will be eating 50 times as much at their little restraunt.
The fact of the matter is that all the money for infrastructure has to come from somewhere. Either:
a) all consumers pay more
b) government subsidises the telcoms to build it
c) the consumers that are using all the bandwidth pay more
d) the telcom just loses tons of money and then goes out of business
e) the telcom just throttles access and doesnt let heavy users do everything that they want to online.
Dont make the silly typical slashdot argument about how at&t isnt reinvesting any of the money that you give them every month and they are sending huge amounts of money to their shareholders, the amount that they return to their shareholders is less than 10% of what they take in. In order for the utility to maintain a modest but healthy profit margin the money has to come from somewhere. On slashdot people get mad no matter which direction the telcom tries to move in. If they try to charge consumers more they are evil, if they try to get money from the government they are evil, etc. Its ok to be against one of those things, but you cant be against them all.
ugh, should have pressed preview, let me correct that code snippet:
:)
for(i=0; ibig_number; i++){
if((array[i]=malloc(something))==NULL){
return failure;
}
}
Forgive my syntactical errors please, the slashdot text box wont report the errors for me the way a compiler will.
If you are looking for a way to get to fail for the purpose of testing your code check out the alloc hooks.
.... ....
http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/glibc/libc_34.html
glibc isnt the only implementation that does something like this. You can write a simple little function that will just keep a counter of the number of times alloc has been called and then call back to the regular alloc until the counter hits a certain value and then force it to fail by returning NULL. Just do some analysis on your code and then use enough different counter values that you can be reasonably sure you have covered all the paths. Or you could turn the hooks on/off depending on where you are in the code being tested.
A lot of people will wrap their alloc calls in a != NULL or something similar but never test it. If you are working on a large system it is a virtual certainty that someone somewhere has made an error in the code that is supposed to clean up after the return from a failed alloc call. Untested alloc clean up functionality causes a lot of errors. Having difficulty forcing it to fail is a terrible excuse for not testing your code.
I cant count the number of times I have seen a programmer do something like the following:
for(i=0; ibig_number; i++){
if((array[i]=malloc(something)==NULL){
return failure;
}
}
Just checking your return value is not enough. You have to make sure you clean up everything and test it. It is very rare that you can just throw a "return failure" statement in there and be ok. Usually things are significantly complex that you cant get away with just assuming that the error case works. For example many programs will keep enough memory seperate from the alloc that they can still perform an operation like saving the file and exiting cleanly. However it is very common to see this functionality fail to work correctly because the guy writing all the other code left the data structures in some bad state due to not testing alloc failures well enough.
I watched 21 and I am pretty sure that they didnt botch the Monty Hall problem. It seemed weird that it would be in a senior level math course at a top notch engineering school, but the way they described it was mathematically correct.
The government wastes a huge amount of money, you say 'we can get the same results while spending less money' sarcastically but it is actually true. Government jobs are generally regarded as something you can get and collect paychecks/receive benefits for the rest of your life no matter how lazy/incompetent you are. That should change, no business owner would tolerate it in a company and tax payers shouldnt tolerate it in government either.
Additionally there are many government programs that go WAY beyond providing basic services like police. We dont need to be spending more money on defense than the entire rest of the world combined and we dont need to be taking hard earned tax dollars to write checks to people who dont want to work for a living.