When you can patch a *single bit* in the binary to make the game believe it is already connected to the server?
That way you could play without any network setup at all.
This is the part that I really don't get. All of the DRM schemes to date are provably insecure, yet industry continues to buy into them. Why? Don't they understand that all it takes is *one* enterprising hacker to find the CMP instruction where the game checks for the internet connection, and flip a bit to reverse the comparison? Or worse, patch around the connection-checking code entirely.
Once your code is on someone else's machine, you have no control over which parts of it run, and which parts don't. No control - none, nada, zip. Really, how hard is it to understand this?
Some part of me thinks if these senators understood how it worked, the Internet wouldn't exist.
This would outlaw Internet Explorer - you actually can use it to share files with other computers. And it is installed without the owner's consent - by Microsoft, as a part of the OS.
If a programmers productivity goes up 1500% because you switched editors/IDE's, maybe the company should consider hiring better programmers.
Only 15 times? Honestly, I'd say there's a good two orders of magnitude between the most productive development environment and the least. Yes, programmer productivity can vary by an order of magnitude, but I've personally seen a team of 7 engineers get more done with Linux than 40+ could do with Windows.
Look, according to Brooks' Mythical man month, the average programmer can write 1000 lines of code a year. I, however, work in a company where anyone who *can't* write 10k+ per year is at serious risk of getting fired. Here, the difference between editors really can make or break your career. And yes, there is a tremendous difference in the amount of work you can get done with an editor which supports mouse-driven copy/paste, and one that does not. Most people assume editor choice is a matter of preference. Most people don't keep track of their productivity metrics. I, however, do, and I've seen a dramatic difference in the amount of work I'm able to get done. It's not so much that I can't do my job in other editors, but rather, that other editors force an inefficient working paradigm on the user. Consider the difference between someone working in Emacs who has to open a different shell window and grep through header files, vs. an IDE that automatically cross-references the source tree and displays the definitions as the user browses the file. Both coders will get code written, but the second will get it done much faster than the first, all other things being equal.
Granted, a poor programmer won't be made great by a great IDE, but a good programmer with professional ethics is going to insist on having the tools needed to do the job in the most efficient manner. It's not whining to ask for the proper tools; rather, it's foolish to expect good results when one uses the wrong tool for the job. It's not 1970 anymore, and the days of programmers ruling the roost are long gone. Business now expects *everything* to be faster-cheaper-better, and you can't deliver that writing code with ed.
Problem is, you might just be drinking it. Tritium combines with oxygen to form water, so any leak has the possibility of making it into the water supply.
And, if the leak wasn't serious, why would they lie about it? How can you be sure it was just 2 microcuries when the company lied about the leak in the first place?
Ok, the methane fuel cell has been around for about 3 decades.
That's not the hard part. The materials are rather expensive. And, at $700,000+ per unit, it seems our beloved startup hasn't solved the material expense problem either.
It is articles like these which make me wary of investing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H throwing money into my 401k. The fact that a good number of investors can be bamboozled by the likes of these does not inspire confidence, to say the least.
Why? Because if some administrator does not have "... his poor judgment cost the district millions..." in his performance review, others will be inclined to do the same, and worse.
How, exactly, does one get one's privacy back - once it has been violated?
Imagine, for a moment, if naked images of you (or your daughter) showed up on the internet? Sure, you could sue the school, but she (or you) will have to deal with it for the rest of your life. Did you know there's a statutory limit on the amount of money for which a school district can be liable? It's something like $150k - far less than the worth of someone's dignity.
Imagine the emotional consequence faced by your daughter, if every time she got into an argument someone posted naked pictures of her as revenge. Imagine if the entire school called her dirty names because of it.
And what does she get in return? Enough to pay for college, at maximum. Nevermind the fact that she might never marry, or might have self-esteem issues for the rest of her life. By law, her body is only worth $150k, or about a year of MBA salary.
Sometimes, the consequences of an action are so severe that the punishment must act as a deterrent to others. There is real, permanent harm in invading someone's privacy, especially when the law limits the liability of the infringer. Sure, watching someone eat candy is relatively innocuous. However, it is only a matter of chance that the interlopers didn't watch students undressing, or in other embarrassing situations. And who knows - maybe they did and are hoping investigators don't find out.
We don't have laws against speeding because speeders always cause accidents. Rather, we realize that excessive speed contributes to accidents, and increases the damage when accidents occur. Likewise, if we treat this incident as a mere lapse of judgment, we open the door to further abuses. Worse, because of the legislative limit on damages, it is entirely possible that the harm can never be undone or restituted.
Incidentally, a recent study (2005?) found that public school employees are 7 (seven) times more likely to sexually abuse children than clergy. The reason why these incidents don't often make the press is because the judgments are limited in many states to $150k, rather than the millions that the church had to pay out. It kind of makes me sick that school officials enjoy a legal kind of immunity for which the Church could only hope.
The overwhelming majority of digital cameras do not have a shutter. You do realize that clicking sound comes not from a shutter, but from a small speaker, right?
I'm honestly sorry I didn't patent this technique back in 2005 when I was working with digital image sensors, but suffice to say, it's been known about and used in industry for quite some time. Engineers have always known there was a tradeoff between the image resolution and frame rate, and this appears a rather obvious compromise. An image sensor chip has a limited bandwidth for reading out pixels, so naturally the framerate is a factor of the image pixel count.
Most image sensors can be reconfigured rather quickly, perhaps even between frames. This technique is hardly worth a patent, as it's obvious to anyone who's ever had to make a tradeoff between frame rate and light sensitivity, or frame rate and resolution. For video, there's the standard D1 resolution of 720 by 480. For stills, the whole resolution of the sensor is used. So obvious that it is hard to consider it novel enough to patent.
That the company which has *never* shipped an exploit-free version of Internet Explorer has something to say about security.
It's hard not to troll. Honestly, providing constructive criticism is difficult to someone so lacking in prudent judgment. But here goes, in the hopes that someone reading this at Microsoft will actually pay attention:
Security is not just a marketing buzzword or a *process*. It is an end result, which requires no weak links in the chain. The longer your chain, the more likely you'll have a weak link or two. This is the primary reason why Microsoft cannot produce secure code. Sure, they can educate their engineers, they can hold code reviews, but at the end of the day, Microsoft has too many links in the chain:
They outsource software development.
Their software projects are too large for a single person to understand. Hence, otherwise innocuous side effects of design can combine and interact to form security vulnerabilities.
Engineers are not held personally responsible for defects. Contrast this with open source, where poorly written code reflects poorly on the author *throughout the entire world*. A Microsoft engineer, OTOH, could write simply awful code without affecting his future career prospects.
Most OS projects are written by a few core developers who both know the code intimately and understand fully what is required of it. They know very well how to test it. Thus, a formal software engineering practice adds nothing of value.
At the end of the day, Microsoft has to make money. Thus, marketing features such as usability trump security. Deadlines trump security. The process trumps security. Intentions aside, the engineer writing code at Microsoft cannot delay a product release to ensure better security. A FOSS developer can.
Foss provides users with the ability to evaluate the security of their products. Proprietary software does not.
Producing secure code requires the coder to think like an attacker. It is a reflective mindset which explores possibilities, which thinks globally about a problem, which likes to spend time thinking, "What if?". It is not the mindset of someone working a process to meet a deadline. Secure code is written by people who have time to reflect on their work, to think about the possibilities for abuse, and who can take their time to produce a solution that works, instead of one that is "good enough" in the scheduled time.
I have cop relatives. On more than one occasion, I've heard said that police are trained not to draw their weapon unless they intend to use it.
And when you think about it, it makes little sense for an officer to draw a gun and make an armed criminal *more* nervous. That is, unless he intends to put a bullet in the criminal.
Think about the typical cop-criminal standoff in the movies. Both point their guns at the other, but no one fires. Why?
The cop can't arbitrarily shoot someone, so he can't fire until fired upon (*according to cop-movie semantics.)
The criminal doesn't want to get shot by the cop. But since the cop hasn't fired yet, the criminal (who is pre-disposed to shoot cops) can now take more time to aim and get a shot that will most likely be lethal instantaneously.
Having both drawn their weapons, the cop cannot de-escalate the situation without the criminal's consent; the cop is betting the criminal will somehow be more easily persuaded to relinquish his weapon with a gun pointed at him.
The criminal now holds all the cards. The cop - by not firing - has signaled to the criminal that he can take his time, aim well, and squeeze off the opening round.
The police officer will not even hear the criminal's weapon fire before being struck by the bullet.
In short, a cop gains no tactical or situational advantage by drawing his weapon but not firing. In real life, the movie standoff doesn't end with the criminal laying down his gun; it usually ends up much worse.
I don't know what stone tablets have to do with a Finite State Machine, but I'm no FSM heretic; my programs always transition cleanly from one state to the next, with no muddled undefined states in between.
And I'm pretty sure Moses cleanly transitioned to his final state as well.
When Dawkins asserts that evolution disproves God's existence, he's warmly welcomed by science. Nevermind the fact that he can't distinguish between science and philosophy, nor understand the limitations of the former.
When Behe answers by pointing out that evolution doesn't have answers for some of the most basic questions, he's treated like a moron and shunned.
Nope, no bias there. So, let's sum up:
If you're an atheist, feel free to mix science and philosophy to your heart's content. And, btw, we won't point out the fact that some of your statements are provably false.
If you're a creationist, you're not allowed to make any philosophical speculation about the implications of certain structures in biology. No, you aren't allowed to mix philosophy and science, because, well, you're obviously a moron.
You know, the interesting thing is that I don't like Behe's arguments, because they're statistical in nature. But even I have to admit the problem modern biology has with answering his objections is quite telling. Biologist have *no clue* why certain structures are favored and others not. Their excuse: "evolution did it - don't ask how we know, just believe it".
That, to me, sounds more like religion than science. At least a religion admits when they ask you to believe something on faith.
While peer review is better than unquestioned authority, it does have a remarkable blind side. The adage of mutual back-scratching and the fox guarding the hen house is all too appropriate.
The problem is that genuinely independent review of science is hard to come by. Consider for example how science treats dissenters such as Michael Behe. When a scientist points out valid problems in papers discussing evolution, he's villified as a creationist. And the interesting part is that his objections are entirely scientific, which incenses the Darwinists even more. Instead of pointing out that his critical analysis makes evolutionary biology a better, more rigorous discipline, his university publishes a disclaimer against him.
The IPCC scandal and Behe controversies have illustrated quite clearly that modern science is more about consensus than critical thought. While I agree that science *can* provide us with solutions to environmental problems of today and tomorrow, I'm wise enough to realize that it *often* fails to do so for reasons which have nothing to do with science.
People are starting to realize that calling something "science" doesn't make it true, nor does it make it science.
You know, the real crux of the issue is the politicization.
Now, I'm not saying global warming isn't real, nor that it isn't human caused. However, I did download the global temperature data and ran stats on it.
And the result?
The global average temperature is now close to what it was a hundred years ago.
From the last half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, it was relatively warm. Then, in a very short period of time (~ a decade), the temperature fell precipitiously until bottoming out in the first 10 years of the 20th century.
As the 20th century progressed, temperatures rose. In the last half of the 20th century, the rise is dramatic.
After the turn of the century, the temperatures started to drop. For the last few years, we have returned to a level very close to that of 100 years ago.
The variance is substantial. The year on year fluctuations are often several degrees.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I still have a bit of work to do - I'm using a very crude global mean average which does not take into account the varying areas served by the various temperature stations; I haven't weighted the data at all. I have, however, used the same "adjusted" data set the scientists used, and the while the trend is smaller, it is still there. I averaged the data over 11 years to eliminate variances caused by the 11 year solar cycle, and the trend is still there. However, that being said, for all the CO2 emitted in the latter half of the 20th century, we have not been able to prevent the Earth from returning to its 20th century low. Instead, it appears as if we're simply going through a natural cycle of temperatures. (Granted, having only 1.5 cycles of data to work with is hardly sufficient to call it a trend, it does appear that way at the moment.)
Now it's important to keep in mind that I'm looking at actual temperatures here. There's no interpolation of tree ring data or inferential analysis at all. I'm looking at the *actual data*, not someone's projections, not someone's hypothetical model, not some indirect indication of global temperature. Actual data.
Granted, global warming might be real. But the current numbers do not support the doom-and-gloom hoopla promoted by the pundits. Perhaps there's a good explanation as to why temperatures are dropping, but it doesn't seem forthcoming.
While I don't deny that people do come back at a lower pay grade, the reason they do is because after a few months of searching for work, they're willing to take whatever is offered.
If they stood their guns, OTOH, we would all be better off. Look at it this way: there are n people out of work right now. The market rate for salary is x.
The company is going to hire someone. So, regardless of how much, or how little, the candidate demands, there will be n-1 people out of work after the hire. The longer the company procrastinates, the more money they lose.
The potential candidate can offer to work for x - $(some value) in order to undercut the other n - 1 people looking for work.
Suppose that said candidate offers to work for x - $(some value). Here's what he has accomplished:
He is now employed at a salary below the value of the work he does. He's going to lose k * $(some value), where k is the length of his employment. In order to regain the loss, he's going to have to find another job at some later date, at a higher salary. But that's not likely, because:
In accepting work at a rate of x - $(some value), the going rate is now y, where y = x - $(some value). That is, the market rate is now lower than it used to be, so he's going to have a difficult time convincing another company to hire him at y + $(some value), rather than the going rate of x.
There are now n-1 people looking for work. Because he's reduced the value of their labor, *they* have now suffered a loss of (n - 1) * $(some value). So in taking that job at a lower salary, he's not only taken a personal loss, but caused everyone else looking for work to take a loss as well.
I know it's a simplistic analysis, but the basic point still holds: those who take pay cuts undermine not only themselves, but everyone else as well.
Any company will exploit their workers given the opportunity. At least Rockstar employees love what they're doing.
I've come to the point where I no longer care about rocking the boat. Yes, it will get you a bad performance review. But now that the economy is in the tank, it is very important to draw that proverbial line in the sand. You might even get fired.
Now, you might ask why anyone would voluntarily do something that would get them fired. Here's why: It is better for both you and I in the long run. This is almost a classic prisoner's dilemna. Here's how it would play out in a world where every employee stood up for themself:
Employer X attempts to get employee A to work unpaid overtime for salary j.
Employee A refuses.
Meanwhile, employer Y pays employee B a salary, k.
X fires A. X must now find another employee.
X must hire someone. They now have to hire B, at salary k + $(bonus) + $(raise), in order to induce him to leave Y.
Y must now hire someone. They now hire A at j + $(bonus) + $(raise).
In other words, a small amount of unemployment shows that the economy is working well for workers. What most people don't know is that the average employee in a tech-oriented business brings in $10k of revenue *per week*. That is, the salary and (more importantly) bonus a new hire draws is almost insignificant in comparison to the loss of profit a company endures during their absence. A company which waits even two weeks to hire someone at a lower salary will in most cases never recoup the lost opportunity cost of waiting. Businesses hate uncertainty, especially the loss-producing kind.
Morality is a luxury that not everybody can afford.
Well, in this respect Haiti must be rather affluent. 96 percent of Haitians are Christian, which makes them more religious than the United States.
The poor can embrace morality, if for no other reason, as a matter of pragmatism. The rich are generally well insulated from the consequences of their actions and can do as they please.
If a society won't abide by a common morality under all conditions, why have morality at all? In such a case, it becomes what we in the Western world call politeness. The common morality in Haiti allows people to share, so that instead of one person hoarding and everyone else starving, you have everyone surviving, even if not as well fed as they would like.
But sometimes you have to feed your own family first before you worry about the rest of the world.
And why, exactly would a Haitian care about the fate of some foreigner with food in HIS country when his family is starving? Maybe he's just thinking of feeding his family first...
Now, I'll admit you have the form of a classic troll. But, unfortunately, there are people out there who really believe that justice is best served by blinding the whole world (i.e. an eye for an eye), rather than showing compassion and mercy to those less fortunate. And worse, they often fail to realize the actions of a few people do not characterize the whole. I'm not comfortable with the notion of denying food to children because their father had the temerity to steal on their behalf, nor would I punish the majority of the docile suffering for the transgressions of a few belligerents. But even as I write this, I'm struck with the irony that I'm writing it for a person who lacks the capacity even to understand the problem of suffering in the first place.
I've heard it from missionaries that because Americans are so far removed from personal suffering, they often cannot grasp the true gravity of the situation overseas, or the necessity of their help. So they instead change the channel and waste a few hours before bed watching reruns.
In that same time frame, about two orders of magnitude more people were killed in ordinary automobile accidents. Around 30,000 people die in collisions every *year*.
Think about it: why not just outlaw cars completely? You'd save ten times the number of lives as this thing would.
The great difficulty I have with this is that it is inherently anti-freedom. These arguments in favor of safety *never* make sense, because *everything* in life carries a risk. What this does is removes control, and hence, some responsibility, from criminals. Someone facing a reckless driving charge may be able to argue that they're only partially at fault because the police *could* have prevented an accident. And once this happens, the police *will* use them for even mundane traffic stops, leaving you and I with the repair bill.
But that isn't even the worst of it. There are times when stopping for the police really is a bad idea:
In suburban Chicago, a Black couple was shot at by drunken Cook County deputies on their way home from a police ball. They managed to escape injury (with a bullet in their roof, no less) by driving to a police station in neighboring Dupage county. But if the police had possessed the means of remotely disabling their vehicle, they'd be dead. And, oh, btw, a judge dismissed all charges against the officers.
Imagine for a moment that you need to get to the hospital quickly - a lacerated jugular, pregnant wife, etc... Clearly, if you wait for the ambulance to show up, you're going to at least double the amount of time it takes for you to get stabilizing treatment. The fastest, lowest risk option is just to get in the car and go.
But if the police can disable remotely your vehicle, it is very likely you won't make it in time.
I do know of people who have, successfully outrun the police. The problem is, they always got caught. Before the officer turns on his lights, he's got the plate number, and if he wants to push it, he'll just call ahead to his buddies. There is very seldom a real, compelling law enforcement reason for the much publicized high-speed chase. Even in cases where the car in question must be stopped, it can be accomplished with little more than letting the driver run out of gas. The cops can switch out vehicles; the escapee cannot.
Both systems disable the vehicle against the driver's consent.
Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if a thief could - using OnStar - remotely disable your daughter's vehicle on a lonesome stretch of highway. He doesn't need an EMP gun with a giant capacitor bank when a tethered laptop will do.
I grew up buying Chevies. So did my family. GM cars had practically become a religious tradition in our family until a few years ago.
When On-Star appeared, my first thought was, "I'll only buy the lower end models without it". Then GM made it standard.
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to BUY a car that helps big brother track my whereabouts and allows him to remotely disable my vehicle. The fact that they would do something like this sends a very strong, very clear message the company is anti-American. They just don't get this "freedom" thing the Bible-belt takes so seriously. And as if to add insult to injury, they're cars are now more expensive - in some cases by as much as $20k - than their Japanese counterparts.
Who do they think they're kidding? Does it really surprise anyone that GM is going bankrupt?
It's a FREEDOM thing, GM - you wouldn't understand.
Normally, yes, but as I thought about Microsoft and big corporations, I accidentally used Manager Math(TM) for the calculations. This explains the other 2 months:
Tech: (to manager) Hey, I hear there's a three year old bug in MS software... Should I log a change request to apply the patch when it comes out next month? That way we could test it as soon as it comes out and put it into the next migration cycle.
Manager: No, just let me know when the patch comes out and we'll address it then.
Tech: Why not just log it now?
Manager: Because the quarterly numbers are coming out soon and the CIO has been bragging about how secure our systems are. Wait until after the board meeting to log the ticket so it doesn't make our numbers look bad.
( A month later, the patch comes out.) Tech: (to manager) Hey, the patch is out, I just logged the ticket to patch all our systems.
Manager: Back it out now! We've got a major system migration coming up and we can't put it in if there are any defects logged and we don't have time to test the patch.
Tech: Okay, but you'll have to approve the backout.
Manager: Done.
(A month passes. The CIO walks in on the manager and tech) CIO: (To manager) What's going on here - the CEO just asked me if we're on top of this ${patch} and I can't find any tickets for it in the system!
Manager (to Tech): I told you to log that two months ago!
Tech (flabbergasted): I suppose I could log it AGAIN! Maybe it got lost somewhere in the system...
CIO: Well, when can we get the systems patched?
Manager: We could roll out-- (interrupted by Tech)
Tech: -Next month, as the migration period for this month ended yesterday and we're already over our SLA downtime budget. Besides, it will take another week to bring up the test lab and certify the patch for release anyway-
Manager, loudly: Which is why I told you to log the ticket three months ago!
CIO: If you knew about it three months ago, why didn't you tell me before the board meeting!? Now I'm going to have to revise the annual shareholder report!
(Awkward silence follows, with the CIO's Icy Stare suddenly directed toward the manager) CIO: (softly) Three months... you couldn't have told him three months ago. The bug is only two months old. (The CIO storms out.)
A longer, awkward silence follows. The CIO is quite naturally annoyed. The manager is quite embarassed. The Tech slowly begins to realize he's not going to get his bonus anyway, and starts to think of ways to delay the patch even further... "Test lab is out of commission..." "QA hasn't approved the ticket yet..." "Just missed the migration window..."
Slashdot Mirror
When you can patch a *single bit* in the binary to make the game believe it is already connected to the server?
That way you could play without any network setup at all.
This is the part that I really don't get. All of the DRM schemes to date are provably insecure, yet industry continues to buy into them. Why? Don't they understand that all it takes is *one* enterprising hacker to find the CMP instruction where the game checks for the internet connection, and flip a bit to reverse the comparison? Or worse, patch around the connection-checking code entirely.
Once your code is on someone else's machine, you have no control over which parts of it run, and which parts don't. No control - none, nada, zip. Really, how hard is it to understand this?
Some part of me thinks if these senators understood how it worked, the Internet wouldn't exist.
This would outlaw Internet Explorer - you actually can use it to share files with other computers. And it is installed without the owner's consent - by Microsoft, as a part of the OS.
Maybe this isn't a bad law after all.
If a programmers productivity goes up 1500% because you switched editors/IDE's, maybe the company should consider hiring better programmers.
Only 15 times? Honestly, I'd say there's a good two orders of magnitude between the most productive development environment and the least. Yes, programmer productivity can vary by an order of magnitude, but I've personally seen a team of 7 engineers get more done with Linux than 40+ could do with Windows.
Look, according to Brooks' Mythical man month, the average programmer can write 1000 lines of code a year. I, however, work in a company where anyone who *can't* write 10k+ per year is at serious risk of getting fired. Here, the difference between editors really can make or break your career. And yes, there is a tremendous difference in the amount of work you can get done with an editor which supports mouse-driven copy/paste, and one that does not. Most people assume editor choice is a matter of preference. Most people don't keep track of their productivity metrics. I, however, do, and I've seen a dramatic difference in the amount of work I'm able to get done. It's not so much that I can't do my job in other editors, but rather, that other editors force an inefficient working paradigm on the user. Consider the difference between someone working in Emacs who has to open a different shell window and grep through header files, vs. an IDE that automatically cross-references the source tree and displays the definitions as the user browses the file. Both coders will get code written, but the second will get it done much faster than the first, all other things being equal.
Granted, a poor programmer won't be made great by a great IDE, but a good programmer with professional ethics is going to insist on having the tools needed to do the job in the most efficient manner. It's not whining to ask for the proper tools; rather, it's foolish to expect good results when one uses the wrong tool for the job. It's not 1970 anymore, and the days of programmers ruling the roost are long gone. Business now expects *everything* to be faster-cheaper-better, and you can't deliver that writing code with ed.
Problem is, you might just be drinking it. Tritium combines with oxygen to form water, so any leak has the possibility of making it into the water supply.
And, if the leak wasn't serious, why would they lie about it? How can you be sure it was just 2 microcuries when the company lied about the leak in the first place?
Ok, the methane fuel cell has been around for about 3 decades.
That's not the hard part. The materials are rather expensive. And, at $700,000+ per unit, it seems our beloved startup hasn't solved the material expense problem either.
It is articles like these which make me wary of investing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H throwing money into my 401k. The fact that a good number of investors can be bamboozled by the likes of these does not inspire confidence, to say the least.
Why? Because if some administrator does not have "... his poor judgment cost the district millions..." in his performance review, others will be inclined to do the same, and worse.
How, exactly, does one get one's privacy back - once it has been violated?
Imagine, for a moment, if naked images of you (or your daughter) showed up on the internet? Sure, you could sue the school, but she (or you) will have to deal with it for the rest of your life. Did you know there's a statutory limit on the amount of money for which a school district can be liable? It's something like $150k - far less than the worth of someone's dignity.
Imagine the emotional consequence faced by your daughter, if every time she got into an argument someone posted naked pictures of her as revenge. Imagine if the entire school called her dirty names because of it.
And what does she get in return? Enough to pay for college, at maximum. Nevermind the fact that she might never marry, or might have self-esteem issues for the rest of her life. By law, her body is only worth $150k, or about a year of MBA salary.
Sometimes, the consequences of an action are so severe that the punishment must act as a deterrent to others. There is real, permanent harm in invading someone's privacy, especially when the law limits the liability of the infringer. Sure, watching someone eat candy is relatively innocuous. However, it is only a matter of chance that the interlopers didn't watch students undressing, or in other embarrassing situations. And who knows - maybe they did and are hoping investigators don't find out.
We don't have laws against speeding because speeders always cause accidents. Rather, we realize that excessive speed contributes to accidents, and increases the damage when accidents occur. Likewise, if we treat this incident as a mere lapse of judgment, we open the door to further abuses. Worse, because of the legislative limit on damages, it is entirely possible that the harm can never be undone or restituted.
Incidentally, a recent study (2005?) found that public school employees are 7 (seven) times more likely to sexually abuse children than clergy. The reason why these incidents don't often make the press is because the judgments are limited in many states to $150k, rather than the millions that the church had to pay out. It kind of makes me sick that school officials enjoy a legal kind of immunity for which the Church could only hope.
The overwhelming majority of digital cameras do not have a shutter. You do realize that clicking sound comes not from a shutter, but from a small speaker, right?
I'm honestly sorry I didn't patent this technique back in 2005 when I was working with digital image sensors, but suffice to say, it's been known about and used in industry for quite some time. Engineers have always known there was a tradeoff between the image resolution and frame rate, and this appears a rather obvious compromise. An image sensor chip has a limited bandwidth for reading out pixels, so naturally the framerate is a factor of the image pixel count.
Most image sensors can be reconfigured rather quickly, perhaps even between frames. This technique is hardly worth a patent, as it's obvious to anyone who's ever had to make a tradeoff between frame rate and light sensitivity, or frame rate and resolution. For video, there's the standard D1 resolution of 720 by 480. For stills, the whole resolution of the sensor is used. So obvious that it is hard to consider it novel enough to patent.
That the company which has *never* shipped an exploit-free version of Internet Explorer has something to say about security.
It's hard not to troll. Honestly, providing constructive criticism is difficult to someone so lacking in prudent judgment. But here goes, in the hopes that someone reading this at Microsoft will actually pay attention:
And if he's a manager, he'll steal your lunch and blame it on the bad economy.
Now, that is the logical thing to do. But criminals don't act logically - if they did, they wouldn't be criminals in the first place.
I have cop relatives. On more than one occasion, I've heard said that police are trained not to draw their weapon unless they intend to use it.
And when you think about it, it makes little sense for an officer to draw a gun and make an armed criminal *more* nervous. That is, unless he intends to put a bullet in the criminal.
Think about the typical cop-criminal standoff in the movies. Both point their guns at the other, but no one fires. Why?
In short, a cop gains no tactical or situational advantage by drawing his weapon but not firing. In real life, the movie standoff doesn't end with the criminal laying down his gun; it usually ends up much worse.
As in stone tablets for all you FSM heretics...
I don't know what stone tablets have to do with a Finite State Machine, but I'm no FSM heretic; my programs always transition cleanly from one state to the next, with no muddled undefined states in between.
And I'm pretty sure Moses cleanly transitioned to his final state as well.
http://www.masstimes.org/
Nope, no bias there. So, let's sum up:
You know, the interesting thing is that I don't like Behe's arguments, because they're statistical in nature. But even I have to admit the problem modern biology has with answering his objections is quite telling. Biologist have *no clue* why certain structures are favored and others not. Their excuse: "evolution did it - don't ask how we know, just believe it".
That, to me, sounds more like religion than science. At least a religion admits when they ask you to believe something on faith.
While peer review is better than unquestioned authority, it does have a remarkable blind side. The adage of mutual back-scratching and the fox guarding the hen house is all too appropriate.
The problem is that genuinely independent review of science is hard to come by. Consider for example how science treats dissenters such as Michael Behe. When a scientist points out valid problems in papers discussing evolution, he's villified as a creationist. And the interesting part is that his objections are entirely scientific, which incenses the Darwinists even more. Instead of pointing out that his critical analysis makes evolutionary biology a better, more rigorous discipline, his university publishes a disclaimer against him.
The IPCC scandal and Behe controversies have illustrated quite clearly that modern science is more about consensus than critical thought. While I agree that science *can* provide us with solutions to environmental problems of today and tomorrow, I'm wise enough to realize that it *often* fails to do so for reasons which have nothing to do with science.
People are starting to realize that calling something "science" doesn't make it true, nor does it make it science.
You know, the real crux of the issue is the politicization.
Now, I'm not saying global warming isn't real, nor that it isn't human caused. However, I did download the global temperature data and ran stats on it.
And the result?
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I still have a bit of work to do - I'm using a very crude global mean average which does not take into account the varying areas served by the various temperature stations; I haven't weighted the data at all. I have, however, used the same "adjusted" data set the scientists used, and the while the trend is smaller, it is still there. I averaged the data over 11 years to eliminate variances caused by the 11 year solar cycle, and the trend is still there. However, that being said, for all the CO2 emitted in the latter half of the 20th century, we have not been able to prevent the Earth from returning to its 20th century low. Instead, it appears as if we're simply going through a natural cycle of temperatures. (Granted, having only 1.5 cycles of data to work with is hardly sufficient to call it a trend, it does appear that way at the moment.)
Now it's important to keep in mind that I'm looking at actual temperatures here. There's no interpolation of tree ring data or inferential analysis at all. I'm looking at the *actual data*, not someone's projections, not someone's hypothetical model, not some indirect indication of global temperature. Actual data.
Granted, global warming might be real. But the current numbers do not support the doom-and-gloom hoopla promoted by the pundits. Perhaps there's a good explanation as to why temperatures are dropping, but it doesn't seem forthcoming.
While I don't deny that people do come back at a lower pay grade, the reason they do is because after a few months of searching for work, they're willing to take whatever is offered.
If they stood their guns, OTOH, we would all be better off. Look at it this way: there are n people out of work right now. The market rate for salary is x.
I know it's a simplistic analysis, but the basic point still holds: those who take pay cuts undermine not only themselves, but everyone else as well.
Any company will exploit their workers given the opportunity. At least Rockstar employees love what they're doing.
I've come to the point where I no longer care about rocking the boat. Yes, it will get you a bad performance review. But now that the economy is in the tank, it is very important to draw that proverbial line in the sand. You might even get fired.
Now, you might ask why anyone would voluntarily do something that would get them fired. Here's why: It is better for both you and I in the long run. This is almost a classic prisoner's dilemna. Here's how it would play out in a world where every employee stood up for themself:
In other words, a small amount of unemployment shows that the economy is working well for workers. What most people don't know is that the average employee in a tech-oriented business brings in $10k of revenue *per week*. That is, the salary and (more importantly) bonus a new hire draws is almost insignificant in comparison to the loss of profit a company endures during their absence. A company which waits even two weeks to hire someone at a lower salary will in most cases never recoup the lost opportunity cost of waiting. Businesses hate uncertainty, especially the loss-producing kind.
Removing the battery from my cellphone is a trivial matter, which has the added benefit of keeping it from interrupting me during driving.
Morality is a luxury that not everybody can afford.
Well, in this respect Haiti must be rather affluent. 96 percent of Haitians are Christian, which makes them more religious than the United States.
The poor can embrace morality, if for no other reason, as a matter of pragmatism. The rich are generally well insulated from the consequences of their actions and can do as they please.
If a society won't abide by a common morality under all conditions, why have morality at all? In such a case, it becomes what we in the Western world call politeness. The common morality in Haiti allows people to share, so that instead of one person hoarding and everyone else starving, you have everyone surviving, even if not as well fed as they would like.
But sometimes you have to feed your own family first before you worry about the rest of the world.
And why, exactly would a Haitian care about the fate of some foreigner with food in HIS country when his family is starving? Maybe he's just thinking of feeding his family first...
Now, I'll admit you have the form of a classic troll. But, unfortunately, there are people out there who really believe that justice is best served by blinding the whole world (i.e. an eye for an eye), rather than showing compassion and mercy to those less fortunate. And worse, they often fail to realize the actions of a few people do not characterize the whole. I'm not comfortable with the notion of denying food to children because their father had the temerity to steal on their behalf, nor would I punish the majority of the docile suffering for the transgressions of a few belligerents. But even as I write this, I'm struck with the irony that I'm writing it for a person who lacks the capacity even to understand the problem of suffering in the first place.
I've heard it from missionaries that because Americans are so far removed from personal suffering, they often cannot grasp the true gravity of the situation overseas, or the necessity of their help. So they instead change the channel and waste a few hours before bed watching reruns.
In that same time frame, about two orders of magnitude more people were killed in ordinary automobile accidents. Around 30,000 people die in collisions every *year*.
Think about it: why not just outlaw cars completely? You'd save ten times the number of lives as this thing would.
The great difficulty I have with this is that it is inherently anti-freedom. These arguments in favor of safety *never* make sense, because *everything* in life carries a risk. What this does is removes control, and hence, some responsibility, from criminals. Someone facing a reckless driving charge may be able to argue that they're only partially at fault because the police *could* have prevented an accident. And once this happens, the police *will* use them for even mundane traffic stops, leaving you and I with the repair bill.
But that isn't even the worst of it. There are times when stopping for the police really is a bad idea:
Both systems disable the vehicle against the driver's consent.
Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if a thief could - using OnStar - remotely disable your daughter's vehicle on a lonesome stretch of highway. He doesn't need an EMP gun with a giant capacitor bank when a tethered laptop will do.
I grew up buying Chevies. So did my family. GM cars had practically become a religious tradition in our family until a few years ago.
When On-Star appeared, my first thought was, "I'll only buy the lower end models without it". Then GM made it standard.
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to BUY a car that helps big brother track my whereabouts and allows him to remotely disable my vehicle. The fact that they would do something like this sends a very strong, very clear message the company is anti-American. They just don't get this "freedom" thing the Bible-belt takes so seriously. And as if to add insult to injury, they're cars are now more expensive - in some cases by as much as $20k - than their Japanese counterparts.
Who do they think they're kidding? Does it really surprise anyone that GM is going bankrupt?
It's a FREEDOM thing, GM - you wouldn't understand.
Normally, yes, but as I thought about Microsoft and big corporations, I accidentally used Manager Math(TM) for the calculations. This explains the other 2 months:
A longer, awkward silence follows. The CIO is quite naturally annoyed. The manager is quite embarassed. The Tech slowly begins to realize he's not going to get his bonus anyway, and starts to think of ways to delay the patch even further... "Test lab is out of commission..." "QA hasn't approved the ticket yet..." "Just missed the migration window..."