What about HTTPS? Couldn't an ISP do the same thing and capture personal information such as SSN's, credit card and bank account numbers and then share that information with anyone it wants to? I would imagine that once something like this is compromised at the ISP level, it would cause people to stop using legitimate services on the internet because they can't trust their ISP's.
..this is what you get in a society when everybody believes that they deserve everything and yet everybody is unwilling to do any hard work.
I disagree. I think what's happening is that society is becoming wise to common business practices. They realize that businesses have absolutely no loyalty to their employees. The employees at a company are merely a means to generate shareholder value. Make no mistake, they will cut your benefits, lay you off, not follow through on promises if it's in the interest of their bottom line.
State and Federal governments are really no different. For the most part, they placate the masses just enough to move their own agendas forward whether they're in your best interest of not.
This is raising a generation of people that see no reason not to cheat the system because they watch corporations and government do it all the time. They wonder why they should uphold a standard of honor that no one else is and have it be at their own expense.
I'm sure it was a piece of cake to write. Microsoft's proprietary API's and file formats are all easy to use and designed for maximum interoperability with third-party software.
I know the parent is meant to be funny but it always amazes how the general opinion is that the Intelligent Design camp is at odds with the Creationist camp. Who's to say that God isn't a metaphor for the forces at work that allow our universe to exist? In that sense, God would be responsible for evolution and all the other processes at work here.
Granted I'm Agnostic but the problem with the Creationists is that they take the stories of the Bible literally. There are several branches of Christianity that understand that parts of the Bible are meant to be interpretted metaphorically. In reality, you'll find that most religious texts have common metaphors that refer to the same basic concept.
So, why continue perpetuating the rhetoric which continues the "Us vs. Them" mentality? Instead, we should all work together, searching for that which we refer to as "God", "Mother Nature", "Father Time", "Flying Spaghetti Monster", etc. Whatever you want to call it, it's an entity unto itself and this discovery sheds a little more light on what it is and how it works.
I'll probably get modded down for this but here goes.
If data is not covered by free speech then consider the case where you think of something to say to someone, formulate it into the corresponding physical movements of my body to produce the sound waves in the recipient's direction that will then enter their ears and be translated into their brain.
How is this any different than pushing data into a computer, converting it into a form that can then be sent over a network substrate to another computer, then converted back into a format by a receiving computer?
If you look at it this way, the two things are fundamentally the same thing. I don't think there is a fundamental property of anything that states that it should be copyrightable. Instead, we seem to more or less arbitrarily decide what is copyrightable mostly based on everyone's different point of view. We also seem to decide where free speech doesn't apply in the same manner.
Now consider this, what if I printed out a hex dump of an mp3 and then called a friend of mine, enumerating each and every hexadecimal number to them so the could type it into their respective hex editor. They save it, load it up into their mp3 player and voila a working copy of a song. Is that covered by free speech or is it a violation of copyright? Perhaps I sing it to them and it becomes a work of art. Now what applies?
The point is the answer to the question of what does copyright apply to and what doesn't free speech apply to is not a very easy question to answer. It's largely a question of how you categorize things and that's what everyone has a difference of opinion about.
So, let me get this straight. You've given 4 weeks notice, expressed an interest in doing due dillegence to make the transition as smooth as possible and your current employer has decided to revoke all your access and make you a human paper weight?
If they are really intend to pay you to stay there for 4 weeks and do nothing, I would seriously use this to your advantage. You know all the technologies, programming languages, whatever that you never seem to have time to catch up on? Now is your chance to do it AND get paid for it!
I would bring books and a personal laptop in and start cranking away learning new things that would advance my career and hopefully get me to retirement faster.
Perhaps you are in a situation now where you'll be working less hours. Go home early. Spend more time with your family and friends. Spend more time working on your hobbies.
Time is precious, use it wisely. Before you know it, you'll wonder where it all went.
What if I don't have an internet connection? What if I'm playing on a laptop in a location without access to the internet? What if the authentication server gets overloaded like what happened when Bioshock was released and there were a bunch of legitimate customers that bought the game that couldn't play for several days? What happens if the authentication server goes down? What happens when I want to play this game 5-10 years from now?
It's been said before but this does nothing to curb piracy. The pirates will crack this. Meanwhile, the customer who purchased a legitimate copy of the game will have their ability to play it be hampered.
Will all phones come pre-loaded with a spam scent? I already get enough text message spam as it is but now I'm going to get... SCENTED text message spam? The scent cartridges would have to be refilled constantly in order to be remotely useful. Uh, I think I'll pass on this one.:p
I can't think of a reason why anyone would want to use a stored procedure that builds dynamic SQL. For this type of thing, you should use a parameterized SQL query with a good provider like the Oracle Data Provider for.NET. If you always use the Parameter objects instead of concatenating them to the query text, you should be ok.
This seems to only really affect poorly written code. If developers were trained in best practices, we would have more secure software. Sadly, a lot of the books out there that teach you how to program use bad examples that indirectly promote writing insecure code.
The "government" may have "good" intentions, but the people in government will use the power they are given for other reasons. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
If privacy is taken away from the government I don't think it follows that employee privacy rights should also be taken away.
In the government scenario, the citizens pay taxes to (employ) the government so that it may represent their interests (funding police and fire departments, building and maintaining roads, funding education, etc.) However, the government is the party with more control.
In the job scenario, the employer pays the employee but the employer has more control. The roles are reversed compared to the government scenario.
I don't think this is a question of who pays who or who employs who. It is a simple matter of which party has more control. In the government scenario, the government has more control. In the job scenario, the employer has more control.
So, no, I don't think this would suggest that an employer should be entitled to know every bit of information about all of its employees. There is a difference between electing leaders and hiring followers.
Why should an artist need the type of publicity afforded by the RIAA anyway? That model is out-of-date. If, as the grandparent describes, all artists were to cut the umbilical cord with the RIAA and move over to indepdent distribution, this would create an entirely new market place.
Suddenly, an artist's popularity is no longer based on how much radio airtime or how good their marketing is. Instead, we would see this give rise to a system where the artist's popularity is actually determined by the music fans (what a concept:p). The artists with the highest ratings or the most downloads would become the most popular.
Once the new market place replaces the current one, I think you will find the playing ground will be more level for the known and unknown artists alike. There will no longer be a third party entity trying to shape the music market to generate the most revenue for themselves. I am glad to see bands like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead pushing this forward. It will be very interesting to watch it all unfold.
"We've [internally] tested several systems, and we're going to see if there's a way to identify pirated content on the network. That asks the question of what to do if we develop such as technology. The actual deployment raises a lot of questions, [such as the impact on] customer rights and government policy. We wouldn't proceed without answers to those questions." Hmm... maybe they could use something similar to this.
You are giving the RIAA too much credit. If they were that smart they would realize that copy protection and DRM is an exercise in futility and that their own existence is pointless.
It's the same reason a lot of people used to play MOO's and MUSH's. Perhaps it's just the fun of being able to create things and share them with a community. Personally, I never got into that sort of thing. I played MUDs a lot and as a result I'm an avid World of Warcraft player but I did know a lot of people who played MOO's and MUSH's.
The only significant thing that managed languages make easier with regard to multithreading other than a more intuitive API is garbage collection so that you don't have to worry about using reference counting when passing pointers between multiple threads.
All of the same challenges that exist in C/C++ such as deadly embrace and dining philosophers still exist in managed languages and require the developer to be trained in multi-threaded programming.
Some things can be more difficult to implement like semaphores. You also have to be careful about what asynchronous methods and events you invoke because those get queued up on the thread pool and it has a max count.
I would say managed languages are "easier" to use but to be used effectively you still have to understand the fundamental concepts of multithreaded programming and what's going on underneath the hood of your runtime environment.
...where the real money from the game is made. World of Warcraft the T-shirt, World of Warcraft the Coloring Book, World of Warcraft the Lunch box, World of Warcraft the Breakfast Cereal, World of Warcraft the Flame Thrower... the kids love this one!
No - I think the main point here is for very technical jobs, the employees are required to load up a large amount of information into their mind to solve large, complex problems. Anytime a person comes into their space to ask them about something unrelated this causes a context switch in the employee. They have to unload some or all of the information for the task they are currently working on to contemplate the topic that person who interrupted them wants to talk about. Once the interruptor has left, then the employee has to figure out "where they were at" which is essentially re-loading all the information needed to perform the task they were working into their mind.
Having a cubicle or an office at least establishes the notion of a boundary. In an open area, there are no boundaries and that typically makes other employees feel as though they can interrupt you for any reason at any time. The employee then becomes less productive due to the increased context switching.
Personally, I think for highly technical jobs that do not lend themselves well to multitasking, an office or telecommuting is best. You can lock your door, put your phone on DnD if you're working on a deadline sensitive task that you can't afford to be interrupted from.
What I don't understand about the ID vs. evolution argument is why ID is always assumed to mean belief in God/support for organized religion and evolution/natural selection couldn't have been "intelligently designed." It's almost as if someone just wanted to create a topic to incite people to argue endlessly about it and stifle discussions that could actually lead to some enlightenment.
The concept of there being an origin/creator/architect entity/force/whatever is not unheard of in philosophy. The "uncaused cause" anyone? I think we tend to lose sight of what an insightful philosophical discussion this can be without even bringing organized religion into the picture. Just because organized religion tends to bang the ID drum to support their case doesn't mean the philosophical concept isn't worth discussing because of that.
Don't take this to mean that I am religious or an atheist because I am neither. I am agnostic. I support the idea that we live inside of a system that we do not fully understand let alone know what its origin is. In order for us to truly understand the nature of system we inhabit, we would need to be outside of it. Our science requires us to make observations inside of the system based on properties and characteristics of that system. It is this particular reason that discussions of the origins of the universe cannot be fully explored by science. We would need to be able to analyze meta properties and characteristics of the system which we do not have access to from within it.
Nope - it was definitely the late 60's and early 70's and that was before I was born. There are exceptions but most music since then was formula-based regurgitations of the same thing over and over again. For the music that was actually worth listening to since then, most of it didn't get any air time on the radio or if it did, it was very little.
You just hold it, it reads your mind and plays what you want flawlessly! Seriously though, I have been playing guitar for 18 years. I play jazz, progressive rock, blues, folk, just about everything but country. Tuning your instrument is just part of playing the instrument. Once you start to provide innovation to make learning how to become proficient at a particular trade trivial, it de-values the trade. Mastering an instrument is almost on the same order as a personal quest. It isn't about achieving the goal as much as it is about the journey to get there. Music is about discovery and personal fulfillment not about using technology to make things easier.
I always have to wonder about this line of thinking. This type of technology is probably created by the same type of people that create automated scripts to farm exp and gold in MMO's. If you're not even going to sit down to enjoy what you're doing, why invest any time and money into it at all?
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What about HTTPS? Couldn't an ISP do the same thing and capture personal information such as SSN's, credit card and bank account numbers and then share that information with anyone it wants to? I would imagine that once something like this is compromised at the ISP level, it would cause people to stop using legitimate services on the internet because they can't trust their ISP's.
..this is what you get in a society when everybody believes that they deserve everything and yet everybody is unwilling to do any hard work.I disagree. I think what's happening is that society is becoming wise to common business practices. They realize that businesses have absolutely no loyalty to their employees. The employees at a company are merely a means to generate shareholder value. Make no mistake, they will cut your benefits, lay you off, not follow through on promises if it's in the interest of their bottom line.
State and Federal governments are really no different. For the most part, they placate the masses just enough to move their own agendas forward whether they're in your best interest of not.
This is raising a generation of people that see no reason not to cheat the system because they watch corporations and government do it all the time. They wonder why they should uphold a standard of honor that no one else is and have it be at their own expense.
I'm sure it was a piece of cake to write. Microsoft's proprietary API's and file formats are all easy to use and designed for maximum interoperability with third-party software.
I don't buy your justification. Two things:
Your metabolic profile is definitely the exception not the rule.
You can find a much healthier high calorie alternative to a bacon double cheesebuger that's packed with trans fat and cholesterol.
I know the parent is meant to be funny but it always amazes how the general opinion is that the Intelligent Design camp is at odds with the Creationist camp. Who's to say that God isn't a metaphor for the forces at work that allow our universe to exist? In that sense, God would be responsible for evolution and all the other processes at work here.
Granted I'm Agnostic but the problem with the Creationists is that they take the stories of the Bible literally. There are several branches of Christianity that understand that parts of the Bible are meant to be interpretted metaphorically. In reality, you'll find that most religious texts have common metaphors that refer to the same basic concept.
So, why continue perpetuating the rhetoric which continues the "Us vs. Them" mentality? Instead, we should all work together, searching for that which we refer to as "God", "Mother Nature", "Father Time", "Flying Spaghetti Monster", etc. Whatever you want to call it, it's an entity unto itself and this discovery sheds a little more light on what it is and how it works.
I'll probably get modded down for this but here goes.
If data is not covered by free speech then consider the case where you think of something to say to someone, formulate it into the corresponding physical movements of my body to produce the sound waves in the recipient's direction that will then enter their ears and be translated into their brain.
How is this any different than pushing data into a computer, converting it into a form that can then be sent over a network substrate to another computer, then converted back into a format by a receiving computer?
If you look at it this way, the two things are fundamentally the same thing. I don't think there is a fundamental property of anything that states that it should be copyrightable. Instead, we seem to more or less arbitrarily decide what is copyrightable mostly based on everyone's different point of view. We also seem to decide where free speech doesn't apply in the same manner.
Now consider this, what if I printed out a hex dump of an mp3 and then called a friend of mine, enumerating each and every hexadecimal number to them so the could type it into their respective hex editor. They save it, load it up into their mp3 player and voila a working copy of a song. Is that covered by free speech or is it a violation of copyright? Perhaps I sing it to them and it becomes a work of art. Now what applies?
The point is the answer to the question of what does copyright apply to and what doesn't free speech apply to is not a very easy question to answer. It's largely a question of how you categorize things and that's what everyone has a difference of opinion about.
So, let me get this straight. You've given 4 weeks notice, expressed an interest in doing due dillegence to make the transition as smooth as possible and your current employer has decided to revoke all your access and make you a human paper weight?
If they are really intend to pay you to stay there for 4 weeks and do nothing, I would seriously use this to your advantage. You know all the technologies, programming languages, whatever that you never seem to have time to catch up on? Now is your chance to do it AND get paid for it!
I would bring books and a personal laptop in and start cranking away learning new things that would advance my career and hopefully get me to retirement faster.
Perhaps you are in a situation now where you'll be working less hours. Go home early. Spend more time with your family and friends. Spend more time working on your hobbies.
Time is precious, use it wisely. Before you know it, you'll wonder where it all went.
A quick google search found this site. Helpful?
What if I don't have an internet connection? What if I'm playing on a laptop in a location without access to the internet? What if the authentication server gets overloaded like what happened when Bioshock was released and there were a bunch of legitimate customers that bought the game that couldn't play for several days? What happens if the authentication server goes down? What happens when I want to play this game 5-10 years from now?
It's been said before but this does nothing to curb piracy. The pirates will crack this. Meanwhile, the customer who purchased a legitimate copy of the game will have their ability to play it be hampered.
Will all phones come pre-loaded with a spam scent? I already get enough text message spam as it is but now I'm going to get... SCENTED text message spam? The scent cartridges would have to be refilled constantly in order to be remotely useful. Uh, I think I'll pass on this one. :p
I can't think of a reason why anyone would want to use a stored procedure that builds dynamic SQL. For this type of thing, you should use a parameterized SQL query with a good provider like the Oracle Data Provider for .NET. If you always use the Parameter objects instead of concatenating them to the query text, you should be ok.
This seems to only really affect poorly written code. If developers were trained in best practices, we would have more secure software. Sadly, a lot of the books out there that teach you how to program use bad examples that indirectly promote writing insecure code.
If privacy is taken away from the government I don't think it follows that employee privacy rights should also be taken away.
In the government scenario, the citizens pay taxes to (employ) the government so that it may represent their interests (funding police and fire departments, building and maintaining roads, funding education, etc.) However, the government is the party with more control.
In the job scenario, the employer pays the employee but the employer has more control. The roles are reversed compared to the government scenario.
I don't think this is a question of who pays who or who employs who. It is a simple matter of which party has more control. In the government scenario, the government has more control. In the job scenario, the employer has more control.
So, no, I don't think this would suggest that an employer should be entitled to know every bit of information about all of its employees. There is a difference between electing leaders and hiring followers.
Why should an artist need the type of publicity afforded by the RIAA anyway? That model is out-of-date. If, as the grandparent describes, all artists were to cut the umbilical cord with the RIAA and move over to indepdent distribution, this would create an entirely new market place.
Suddenly, an artist's popularity is no longer based on how much radio airtime or how good their marketing is. Instead, we would see this give rise to a system where the artist's popularity is actually determined by the music fans (what a concept :p). The artists with the highest ratings or the most downloads would become the most popular.
Once the new market place replaces the current one, I think you will find the playing ground will be more level for the known and unknown artists alike. There will no longer be a third party entity trying to shape the music market to generate the most revenue for themselves. I am glad to see bands like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead pushing this forward. It will be very interesting to watch it all unfold.
You are giving the RIAA too much credit. If they were that smart they would realize that copy protection and DRM is an exercise in futility and that their own existence is pointless.
It's the same reason a lot of people used to play MOO's and MUSH's. Perhaps it's just the fun of being able to create things and share them with a community. Personally, I never got into that sort of thing. I played MUDs a lot and as a result I'm an avid World of Warcraft player but I did know a lot of people who played MOO's and MUSH's.
The only significant thing that managed languages make easier with regard to multithreading other than a more intuitive API is garbage collection so that you don't have to worry about using reference counting when passing pointers between multiple threads.
All of the same challenges that exist in C/C++ such as deadly embrace and dining philosophers still exist in managed languages and require the developer to be trained in multi-threaded programming.
Some things can be more difficult to implement like semaphores. You also have to be careful about what asynchronous methods and events you invoke because those get queued up on the thread pool and it has a max count.
I would say managed languages are "easier" to use but to be used effectively you still have to understand the fundamental concepts of multithreaded programming and what's going on underneath the hood of your runtime environment.
...where the real money from the game is made. World of Warcraft the T-shirt, World of Warcraft the Coloring Book, World of Warcraft the Lunch box, World of Warcraft the Breakfast Cereal, World of Warcraft the Flame Thrower... the kids love this one!
No - I think the main point here is for very technical jobs, the employees are required to load up a large amount of information into their mind to solve large, complex problems. Anytime a person comes into their space to ask them about something unrelated this causes a context switch in the employee. They have to unload some or all of the information for the task they are currently working on to contemplate the topic that person who interrupted them wants to talk about. Once the interruptor has left, then the employee has to figure out "where they were at" which is essentially re-loading all the information needed to perform the task they were working into their mind.
Having a cubicle or an office at least establishes the notion of a boundary. In an open area, there are no boundaries and that typically makes other employees feel as though they can interrupt you for any reason at any time. The employee then becomes less productive due to the increased context switching.
Personally, I think for highly technical jobs that do not lend themselves well to multitasking, an office or telecommuting is best. You can lock your door, put your phone on DnD if you're working on a deadline sensitive task that you can't afford to be interrupted from.
What I don't understand about the ID vs. evolution argument is why ID is always assumed to mean belief in God/support for organized religion and evolution/natural selection couldn't have been "intelligently designed." It's almost as if someone just wanted to create a topic to incite people to argue endlessly about it and stifle discussions that could actually lead to some enlightenment.
The concept of there being an origin/creator/architect entity/force/whatever is not unheard of in philosophy. The "uncaused cause" anyone? I think we tend to lose sight of what an insightful philosophical discussion this can be without even bringing organized religion into the picture. Just because organized religion tends to bang the ID drum to support their case doesn't mean the philosophical concept isn't worth discussing because of that.
Don't take this to mean that I am religious or an atheist because I am neither. I am agnostic. I support the idea that we live inside of a system that we do not fully understand let alone know what its origin is. In order for us to truly understand the nature of system we inhabit, we would need to be outside of it. Our science requires us to make observations inside of the system based on properties and characteristics of that system. It is this particular reason that discussions of the origins of the universe cannot be fully explored by science. We would need to be able to analyze meta properties and characteristics of the system which we do not have access to from within it.
Buying tin foil hats? Cash.
Nope - it was definitely the late 60's and early 70's and that was before I was born. There are exceptions but most music since then was formula-based regurgitations of the same thing over and over again. For the music that was actually worth listening to since then, most of it didn't get any air time on the radio or if it did, it was very little.
You know what they say. Just because you stop being paranoid doesn't mean they stop following you. :)
You just hold it, it reads your mind and plays what you want flawlessly! Seriously though, I have been playing guitar for 18 years. I play jazz, progressive rock, blues, folk, just about everything but country. Tuning your instrument is just part of playing the instrument. Once you start to provide innovation to make learning how to become proficient at a particular trade trivial, it de-values the trade. Mastering an instrument is almost on the same order as a personal quest. It isn't about achieving the goal as much as it is about the journey to get there. Music is about discovery and personal fulfillment not about using technology to make things easier.
I always have to wonder about this line of thinking. This type of technology is probably created by the same type of people that create automated scripts to farm exp and gold in MMO's. If you're not even going to sit down to enjoy what you're doing, why invest any time and money into it at all?