If you order something online, you have a fixed period (usually 7 days) within which you are allowed to change your mind and cancel your order. This cancellation can take place by postal mail, telephone, or by email "to the last known address" of the merchant.
You have the right to refuse counsel; but your right to a fair trial takes priority. If the court decides that you won't get a fair trial if you represent yourself, they can insist that you have legal representation.
Usually this motion is put forward by the prosecuting attorneys, since the last thing any prosecutor wants is to win a case only to see it overturned because the defendant didn't get a fair trial.
My point was that the court can appoint a lawyer to defend him even if he doesn't want it; if a defendant proves himself incapable of defending himself (as this guy seems to be) then the court can refuse to allow him to represent himself.
If you need comments in order for your code to make sense, you need to rewrite your code.
My personal measure of coder productivity is as follows: 1. Take all the produced code. 2. Remove all the comments. 3. Present each function to a third party who is unfamiliar with the code, and ask them to explain how it works. If they can't, delete the function. 4. If you have anything left, remove all formatting except linebreaks, and count the *distinct* lines of code. (Bad coders tends to cut+paste, which would lead to overcounting.)
So why would the government of Germany want their citizens to talk without knowing what they arte talking about? In itself it doesn't make sense.
It does make sense: The German government is more concerned about the US government snooping on German citizens than it is about being able to do such snooping itself. It's a case of finding the lesser of two evils; they evidently decided that not being able to snoop on their citizens was less of a problem than having the US government snoop on their citizens.
IANAL, but I always thought any agreement could be enforced, whether it was in writing or not. I've certainly heard of verbal contracts; of course, without any written record you'll generally have trouble proving that any agreement was actually made.
While I'm sure people will bring up the risk of forged email, that isn't really any more of a legal issue than forged signatures on written contracts.
It seems to me that "scumware" is starting to take on proportions very similar to "wormware"; as the author notes, there seems to be little difference between the subseven trojan and the new.net software (or, I might note, whatever that horrible program was which made yellow links pop up everywhere).
Since anti-virus software doesn't seem to scan for these, perhaps someone should create a product which operates similar to antivirus software but instead scans for a dictionary of scumware?
There seems to be an unspoken assumption that democracy is always the best system of government. Any time an organization decides, as ICANN has, against an entirely elected government, protests are raised.
Democracy works if, and only if, the individuals voting have good knowledge of the issues on which they are voting. Richard Feynmann once suggested that referendums concerning the use of nuclear power should be restricted to people who could accurately explain what the equation y(t) = y(0) * exp(-t/l) meant; I would likewise suggest that the number of people competant to make decisions regarding the structure of the internet is quite limited.
In a "perfect democracy", dihydrogen monoxide would be a banned substance.
Did Microsoft even admit to the vulnerability which they surely (one hopes) knew existed in their own systems? No.
Did it occur to you *why* they haven't said anything?
Because this bug doesn't pose a security risk in Windows.
You're comparing apples and oranges... in Linux, this was a critical issue because linux's free() will quite happily trash your heap if you give it a chance. Under BSD and Windows, this is not a critical issue, because both BSD and Windows have marginally slower (but much safer) free() calls which will not trash your heap on a double free.
This bug (might) exist in the mentioned windows software, but it is a completely harmless bug, thus there is no reason to issue patches immediately.
Indeed; in this case we get a wonderful A/B comparison of the way OSOSes and CSOSes handle vulnerabilities.
And what does the comparison tell us? 1. A Open Source Operating System contained a bug which could be a security flaw. Patches were released within a few days. 2. A Closed Source Operating System contained the same bug, but due to design differences, the bug was not a security flaw. Since the bug wasn't an urgent problem, it got added to the bug-fixes-for-the-next-service-pack queue.
I think if you want any sort of exact comparison, you'd have to look at cases where the same bug caused the same level of harm.
As of this quarter, PayPal began depositing customer balances into FDIC-insured bank accounts. The company had asked for an opinion from the FDIC on whether it could pass the insurance protection on to its customers. In its advisory letter, the FDIC said the insurance protections--up to $100,000 per customer per bank--would extend to PayPal customers, even when PayPal deposited the funds for them, PayPal said.
Why should intellectual property be treated any differently than physical property when it comes to tax laws? If businesses are taxed based on their revenue, they should be taxed separately in each jurisdiction based on the value of goods they produce in said jurisdiction.
I'm reminded of the Cola bottling cases, where syrup was manufactured in a low-tax locale and "sold" to bottling companies (wholely-owned subsidiaries). The syrup price was being set in order to ensure that the bottling companies never made a profit, in order that profit would only be reported in the locale where it was almost tax-free. It was ruled that the sale had to take place at market rates -- in other words, you can't hide money from the taxmen by transferring property from one jurisdiction to another. This is exactly the same issue.
(4) If TCP/IP were replaced tomorrow with a new open protocol for which only a GPL'ed implementation existed, people could still write and market a non-free implementation.
Exactly... people *could* write their own implementation. But would they?
The success of TCP/IP is due to the fact that people didn't have to write their own implementation -- they just dropped Tahoe in almost unchanged.
I could care less whether or not people have a non-free implementation of any protocol.
You should care more. We use these things called "shared networks". The infrastructure which gets built to support particular protocols depends upon the number of people using them. Without a free implementation of TCP/IP, not only would windows users be stuck without it, but you and I would also be.
3. Those who would like to use code, are entirely willing to give credit where credit is due, but haven't decided yet if they want to (or, legally, are allowed to) release their own code.
4. Anyone who wants to see open standards. It was only the existance of free-for-any-use code which lead to the global use of TCP/IP -- back when every company had their own proprietary network protocols, the only reason they added TCP/IP support in was because they could do so (almost) for free.
5. Anyone who wants commercial software companies to release their source code. Companies which operate by selling software are never going to GPL their code; they might, on the other hand, release it under a less restrictive license which would allow them to incorporate improvements back into their own codebase.
Network bandwidth is increasing much faster than computational power. As time tends towards infinity, trying to "save bandwidth" at the expense of more complicated processing is dumb.
when an Open Source, Linux, BSD, *nux company is on its way down, everyone is sad and want to support or purchase products to try to keep it going.
Aha! I've worked out what the crucial second step is. The complete business plan is:
1. Come up with a goofy idea which involves Open Source Software but has no obvious potential to make money. 2. Announce that you're "restructuring" and laying off 90% of your workforce. Watch your company get reported on slashdot. 3. Make money, as thousands of slashdot readers pull out their wallets to help an Open Source Software company stay afloat.
I'll agree that buffer overflows and format string errors are a problem... but core dumps?
If you don't want core dumps, disable them. Personally, I find core dumps to be rather useful things... if something goes wrong, you can track down what happened, unlike with interpreted languages where you'll be lucky to get an uninformative "Abnormal program termination" message back.
Ok... so if you want to use someone else's organs, you hop on a plane to India... if you want to have pig organs grown for you, you hop on a plane to the UK... if you want to have stem cells cloned and grown into organs for you, you hop on a plane to China...
Is it just me, or does it seem that medical treatment is moving in the direction of taking a very large number of plane flights?
Slashdot Mirror
If you order something online, you have a fixed period (usually 7 days) within which you are allowed to change your mind and cancel your order. This cancellation can take place by postal mail, telephone, or by email "to the last known address" of the merchant.
We need a "Real time open relay tester black list", so that people can block the queries sent by open relay testers.
I'm not being entirely facetious either; it seems that the volume of relay testing traffic has increased signficantly over the past year.
Mind telling me how you plan to evacuate Georgia in 48 hours?
Well, hopefully we'd have more than 48 hours of warning.
On the other hand, we could call it natural selection... survival of the-most-able-to-hijack-aircraft and all that.
if an asteroid is going to hit what are we going to do exactly?
Evacuate Atlanta?
You have the right to refuse counsel; but your right to a fair trial takes priority. If the court decides that you won't get a fair trial if you represent yourself, they can insist that you have legal representation.
Usually this motion is put forward by the prosecuting attorneys, since the last thing any prosecutor wants is to win a case only to see it overturned because the defendant didn't get a fair trial.
I *did* read the article.
My point was that the court can appoint a lawyer to defend him even if he doesn't want it; if a defendant proves himself incapable of defending himself (as this guy seems to be) then the court can refuse to allow him to represent himself.
has a fool for both client and lawyer.
Anyone want to guess how long it will take before the court appoints a lawyer to defend him?
If you need comments in order for your code to make sense, you need to rewrite your code.
My personal measure of coder productivity is as follows:
1. Take all the produced code.
2. Remove all the comments.
3. Present each function to a third party who is unfamiliar with the code, and ask them to explain how it works. If they can't, delete the function.
4. If you have anything left, remove all formatting except linebreaks, and count the *distinct* lines of code. (Bad coders tends to cut+paste, which would lead to overcounting.)
So why would the government of Germany want their citizens to talk without knowing what they arte talking about? In itself it doesn't make sense.
It does make sense: The German government is more concerned about the US government snooping on German citizens than it is about being able to do such snooping itself. It's a case of finding the lesser of two evils; they evidently decided that not being able to snoop on their citizens was less of a problem than having the US government snoop on their citizens.
IANAL, but I always thought any agreement could be enforced, whether it was in writing or not. I've certainly heard of verbal contracts; of course, without any written record you'll generally have trouble proving that any agreement was actually made.
While I'm sure people will bring up the risk of forged email, that isn't really any more of a legal issue than forged signatures on written contracts.
Oops. It's been a while since I took those courses...
The article is a bit garbled (exponential time != NP-complete!) so it's a bit hard to work out what problem they were looking at.
I'm guessing 2-SAT; can anyone confirm/deny this?
It seems to me that "scumware" is starting to take on proportions very similar to "wormware"; as the author notes, there seems to be little difference between the subseven trojan and the new.net software (or, I might note, whatever that horrible program was which made yellow links pop up everywhere).
Since anti-virus software doesn't seem to scan for these, perhaps someone should create a product which operates similar to antivirus software but instead scans for a dictionary of scumware?
There seems to be an unspoken assumption that democracy is always the best system of government. Any time an organization decides, as ICANN has, against an entirely elected government, protests are raised.
Democracy works if, and only if, the individuals voting have good knowledge of the issues on which they are voting. Richard Feynmann once suggested that referendums concerning the use of nuclear power should be restricted to people who could accurately explain what the equation y(t) = y(0) * exp(-t/l) meant; I would likewise suggest that the number of people competant to make decisions regarding the structure of the internet is quite limited.
In a "perfect democracy", dihydrogen monoxide would be a banned substance.
Did Microsoft even admit to the vulnerability which they surely (one hopes) knew existed in their own systems? No.
Did it occur to you *why* they haven't said anything?
Because this bug doesn't pose a security risk in Windows.
You're comparing apples and oranges... in Linux, this was a critical issue because linux's free() will quite happily trash your heap if you give it a chance. Under BSD and Windows, this is not a critical issue, because both BSD and Windows have marginally slower (but much safer) free() calls which will not trash your heap on a double free.
This bug (might) exist in the mentioned windows software, but it is a completely harmless bug, thus there is no reason to issue patches immediately.
Indeed; in this case we get a wonderful A/B comparison of the way OSOSes and CSOSes handle vulnerabilities.
And what does the comparison tell us?
1. A Open Source Operating System contained a bug which could be a security flaw. Patches were released within a few days.
2. A Closed Source Operating System contained the same bug, but due to design differences, the bug was not a security flaw. Since the bug wasn't an urgent problem, it got added to the bug-fixes-for-the-next-service-pack queue.
I think if you want any sort of exact comparison, you'd have to look at cases where the same bug caused the same level of harm.
Does "not a bank" mean "not insured by FDIC"?
From the article:
As of this quarter, PayPal began depositing customer balances into FDIC-insured bank accounts. The company had asked for an opinion from the FDIC on whether it could pass the insurance protection on to its customers. In its advisory letter, the FDIC said the insurance protections--up to $100,000 per customer per bank--would extend to PayPal customers, even when PayPal deposited the funds for them, PayPal said.
Why should intellectual property be treated any differently than physical property when it comes to tax laws? If businesses are taxed based on their revenue, they should be taxed separately in each jurisdiction based on the value of goods they produce in said jurisdiction.
I'm reminded of the Cola bottling cases, where syrup was manufactured in a low-tax locale and "sold" to bottling companies (wholely-owned subsidiaries). The syrup price was being set in order to ensure that the bottling companies never made a profit, in order that profit would only be reported in the locale where it was almost tax-free. It was ruled that the sale had to take place at market rates -- in other words, you can't hide money from the taxmen by transferring property from one jurisdiction to another. This is exactly the same issue.
(4) If TCP/IP were replaced tomorrow with a new open protocol for which only a GPL'ed implementation existed, people could still write and market a non-free implementation.
Exactly... people *could* write their own implementation. But would they?
The success of TCP/IP is due to the fact that people didn't have to write their own implementation -- they just dropped Tahoe in almost unchanged.
I could care less whether or not people have a non-free implementation of any protocol.
You should care more. We use these things called "shared networks". The infrastructure which gets built to support particular protocols depends upon the number of people using them. Without a free implementation of TCP/IP, not only would windows users be stuck without it, but you and I would also be.
CDWert wrote:
>[snip several reasons why GPL is the right license for him]
I don't dispute that. From the sound of it, the GPL is exactly the license you should release your code under.
But what you asked, and what I answered, was the question "Who [sic] is the GPL bad for?"
The fact that the GPL isn't bad for you in no way refutes the fact that it is bad for the classes of people I listed above.
Who is the GPL bad for ?
I'd add at least the following to your list:
3. Those who would like to use code, are entirely willing to give credit where credit is due, but haven't decided yet if they want to (or, legally, are allowed to) release their own code.
4. Anyone who wants to see open standards. It was only the existance of free-for-any-use code which lead to the global use of TCP/IP -- back when every company had their own proprietary network protocols, the only reason they added TCP/IP support in was because they could do so (almost) for free.
5. Anyone who wants commercial software companies to release their source code. Companies which operate by selling software are never going to GPL their code; they might, on the other hand, release it under a less restrictive license which would allow them to incorporate improvements back into their own codebase.
Network bandwidth is increasing much faster than computational power. As time tends towards infinity, trying to "save bandwidth" at the expense of more complicated processing is dumb.
when an Open Source, Linux, BSD, *nux company is on its way down, everyone is sad and want to support or purchase products to try to keep it going.
Aha! I've worked out what the crucial second step is. The complete business plan is:
1. Come up with a goofy idea which involves Open Source Software but has no obvious potential to make money.
2. Announce that you're "restructuring" and laying off 90% of your workforce. Watch your company get reported on slashdot.
3. Make money, as thousands of slashdot readers pull out their wallets to help an Open Source Software company stay afloat.
I'll agree that buffer overflows and format string errors are a problem... but core dumps?
If you don't want core dumps, disable them. Personally, I find core dumps to be rather useful things... if something goes wrong, you can track down what happened, unlike with interpreted languages where you'll be lucky to get an uninformative "Abnormal program termination" message back.
Ok... so if you want to use someone else's organs, you hop on a plane to India... if you want to have pig organs grown for you, you hop on a plane to the UK... if you want to have stem cells cloned and grown into organs for you, you hop on a plane to China...
Is it just me, or does it seem that medical treatment is moving in the direction of taking a very large number of plane flights?