"This is a much stronger power, because as a democracy, the government tends to follow the will of the people"
No, it doesn't. The government tends to follow it's own will unless "the people" complain *really* loudly, then the government, like the Internet, considers it damage and routes around it.
Damn, that's expensive compared to DSL here in Idaho where you can get 20MB for under a hundred. That 1MB line in LA (that is not working) is 8 times what a 1MB line in Boise, Idaho costs (and it works).
Sure, because the telcos have been the epitome of advancing the technology, and implementing technology. Their extremely honest willingness to let you use your bandwidth as you see fit, to let you use VOIP w/o extra pain and cost, to bill you such a very low rate for basic text messages that pager companies were letting you send a decade or more ago prove that it isn't the telcos putting down the rules on their networks, but the dastardly cell phone makers refusing to implement such cool technology.
WHo says the company has to be beholden to shareholders? Not all companies are corporations.
You have confused corporations for "third party". Corporations are government creations, with legally defined "responsibilities" to "shareholders" - naturally done in the name of better oversight and protection. But not all third parties, nor even all business, are corporations.
And, to fixate that matter more precisely, Free Software isn't the solution either. The entire infrastructure could be open, the data formats, server OS, apps, every single piece - and you still haven't solved the "issue". If a company goes under or otherwise suddenly closes shop, your data may not be accessible. The Free Software they used may not be available either.
For some the obvious answer to "what if they stop/go away/shutdown?" is the same answer as to the question "what if your hard drive dies?": backups. If it is important back it up, if not, then don't. Or do anyway. If it is not important enough to YOU for YOU to take necessary and reasonable measures to ensure you can get to it on an as needed basis, even in failure scenarios of the first order, then you have no position to argue form should you lose it.
The underlying issue is not third parties, corporations, proprietary vs. open, or any of those. It fundamentally is data accessibility. Free Software is not "The Solution", it can be part of it just as much as it can be part of the problem.
Reduntantly Available Data. That is the point. You can have that, and use a cloud. Or you can use a cloud and not have it. You do not automatically get it because your source code and/or software is available.
Your first link is not a link to the law, but an interpretation of it. The second link talks about "The Olympic Hopefuls" dressing as part of their band, in tracksuits. The similarity of them (their name and outfit) to the Olympics is not only obvious but admitted.
"Don't know if it's a fraud or not, but there is an easy way to tell. If it comes incorporated into your new Honda, then it's for real. If they try to sell it to you as a DIY kit, it's a fraud. The car industry is competitive enough that it would kill for a 3% increase in MPG, let alone more than 10%"
Bullshit. This is argument by popular authority (yes a combination).
However as to your claim about "kill for a 3% increase, let alone 10% is demonstrably false. You want to cut fuel consumption by 3$ or increase it by 3%? Easy. Mass management, rolling resistance, etc will get you there almost for free. Thinner tires can change your fuel economy by more than 3% - even w/o going ridiculously skinny. Moving to lighter materials (w/o adding other things) lowers the mass of the vehicle and leads to gains in fuel economy. And the mechanisms behind it are well understood and not controversial in the least.
When the 80's hit the fuel economy gains were not due to smaller cars but lighter cars. Medium to large vehicles can be lighter, but it takes effort in the design phase to get there, as well as willingness to change (that happen to simplify and improve) your manufacturing chain and process.
Large auto manufacturers suffer the same problem of large organizations: a resistance to rapid change.
As far as you arrogant assertion that all DIY kits are frauds, well clearly you know nothing about cars, or computers, or tools, or well most things. In particular, the aftermarket automotive industry is largely DIY "kits "", and has a plethora, nay a cornucopia of proven valid "kits". Automakers have to make tradeoffs that we the consumer do not. For example, what if a particular "thing" did in fact improve your fuel economy but also increased your net pollution? A car maker is likely to NOT use that thing or process in order to keep their emissions down. However, you the consumer can buy it and do it. Tradeoffs abound such as power/weight, power/fuel consumption, economy/pollution, just to name a small few.
Oh, and shall I mention that your fuel economy will change by greater than 3% from dry to wet conditions? Car makers do not care about 3%. You are looking at two vehicles, A get 20MPG. B gets 3% more. What does B get? 20.6 MPG. What does the sticker say? 20. Your vehicles has to get over 30MPG before that 3% will be visible to the buying public who may or may not care. Even with one car at 30 and the next one at 31, that 1MPG will not be the deciding factor - it is too small to be taken seriously on an individual basis. Even 10% may not be that spectacular, but could be a consideration.
To the mods and metamods: there is nothing insightful about the parent post other than showing the poster's ignorance of the reality and that smug ignorance leads one to posit that anyone who knows anything would already have done it and that only the bug carmakers have any innovation in them. None of those assertions are true, and therefore lack any insight. Please mod parent appropriately.
Most of what you describe are or can be factors of the SDK/API/environment, not the language.
1) A bold claim that is not exactly true... unless you define your terms in a very specific way to make it true.
2) JAVA has this, true, but the idea is not limited to JAVA. It is up to the entity making the platform and development tools. Could Apple do this? Absolutely. Could RedHat do this on Linux? Absolutely. A nice little kernel mod and some userland code would do that if you want. You can then get down to the system call level, file access level, etc. This is a good feature set, but entirely doable in most languages. In a way this is merely the extension of user/group/etc permissions into a programming language - and these concepts and implementations predate JAVA by a long shot. BTW I would classify this a safety feature, not a "control" feature. After all signed code can still do bad things to your computer/platform/data.
Also, there is a down side to the code-signing as you describe it. As I said, signing the code means getting access to "things that can do harm". What is Joe Q. Public going to do? Well he is going to click "Approve" of course! So what did code signing get you here? Nothing, because that app still can (and might) do Bad Things. IMO code signing's best use is to prevent the app from being silently "altered". That is what I care about the most.
3) Exceptions being safe and non-fatal and possibly recoverable. This again depends on implementation. Not everyone uses exceptions. In Python exceptions are the norm, not the err exception. What you say about exceptions is also true for C. They can be safe, they can be possibly recoverable as well. Indeed most of the time they are recoverable - depending on how/why the programmer uses them.
4) Again, implementation of the environment, API, Library, SDK.
I'm not saying Obj-C HAS this things, just pointing out that what you assert to be a language feature is really an implementation feature and choice. There are kits that provide parts of these. Yes there need to be more and a mor ehtorough implementation of additional features.
"You could just as easily be just as shocked at a Presidential candidate accidentally releasing both a victory speech and a concession speech before knowing the outcome of an election. It's not really news, it's just humorous that it was posted (way) too prematurely."
Only if it included the exact vote totals.
Yes, the dialogue inclusion is the particularly bad part about this. And it coming from a place that is known to censor things it does not like, lie about what it does, and generally be evil. IN isolation it would be seen as funny. In this case it is part of a pattern. That is what sets it apart from the occasional news gaffe of releasing the wrong story ("DEWEY WINS!").
They said marking periods, not tests or quizzes. So what they are saying is that if a student gets 20% for the first entire quarter... then they have to work harder to squeak by in the second quarter. Exactly! We are not talking about kids taking two tests and that is it, or two assignments and that is it. We are talking about a kid AVERAGING 20% for an ENTIRE QUARTER. If you average the semester grade based on an average of averages, that is another fault in the existing mechanism or teacher policies. When I have taught, or was being taught, our semester grade was a weighted average of ALL graded assignments, quizzes, and tests.
Time for a statistician to give an exposition on how dumb averaging a collection of averages is vs. averaging the whole from the beginning. Come on slashdot, you can do it!
Where was the teacher in the prior couple months? If the teacher did NOT find a way to help the child for two entire months, something is wrong. If the kid is just not trying, then his or her arse deserves their pathetically low score. A side effect of this will be to hide the actual performance of the student not just from themselves, but from the teacher as well. Then they have a "plausible deniability" case that they just didn't know Johnny and Marie were doing so bad.
This is not about kids, it is about the teachers... and the administrators, the school board, and the teacher's "union".
No, it is not "to keep kids from giving up", it is to ensure that the soon-to-be-graded teachers don't get failing grades. They are concerned that those who believe bad teachers should find another line of work they are better suited at may come into power and thus by ensuring that none of their students can possibly mail mathematically, then neither can they.
This does nothing to encourage a student to work harder, indeed the opposite. I have a child who struggles, and I've seen what works. I've tutored kids who struggle, and I've seen what works. I've taught adults technical subjects. My wife and I homeschool our children[1] Many things work, but not lying to them about their performance. The proposed hypothetical is a red herring, and if it were the case then those teachers are precisely the kind of teachers that need to find a different line of work, whether that be building airplanes or flipping burgers (they can know their material inside and out but be bad teachers of it -we've seen that a lot in our industry). As many here have or will be saying, if you only have two tests then you have a problem regardless of the audience.
The right thing to do is to offer enough work/tests that a bomb or two doesn't destroy your shot.
Here is an example of how these kinds of things work:
A couple decades ago the State of Idaho decided to implement a "90% attendance rule" to be eligible for passing. On a 180 school day school year if you missed more than 9 days per semester, you could not pass w/o special exception. Here is how everyone else read it: "On a 180 school day school year you can miss up to 9 days per semester and still pass w/o special exception.". Is there any doubt as to what happened? Correct, they average missed days went to... drum roll please... 18/year! From less than 5.
Consider something else from the article: """ In a recent article in Harvard Educational Review, Freedom Area School District Superintendent Ron Sofo recounted an experimental program that he said helped to dramatically raise the math scores of struggling sixth-graders. Among other features, the program included "A, B, Not Yet" grading, in which students were required to redo work until it merited an A or B. """
Gee, getting rid of all grades except A or B raised average grades? No kidding?
Wonder what will happen to kids growing up with this system when taking the ACT/SAT. No, not really, it is easily predictable.
Tell you what, teach. I'm going to take a percentage of your salary home with me. I intend to use this system. So I'll be taking a *minimum* of 50% of your salary. Still sound good?
Oh and for those who complain about the text window size, use Safari and drag the bottom right corner to the right to fit the width you want.;)
1. We do so in part because my son was getting a 30% average in math and would get "Great Job!" written on top for starters. There was more to it than that, but that sums it up nicely.
And another "fascinating" comment by someone who did not RTFA and has no knowledge of the subject.
The/. title changed it to "ISO" instead of "Standards Bodies". That said the TFA did only reference ISO and ECMA, of which IBM is in fact a member.
And ECMA is a member of ISO. So is ANSI, of which you might think IBM is part of? And you'd actually be right.
You said yourself, ISO is comprised of various national standards bodies. Who do you think comprises these bodies? Fairies? ISO is comprised of groups that IBM is a member of. Therefore is it reasonable to state that IBM as a member of several of the bodies that comprise ISO is thus a member of ISO. As such, they can actually leave the ISO by leaving the standards bodies that comprise ISO.
Furthermore nearly every national standards body is in fact incorporated or whatever their country equivalent is. As such, your assertion that "there is no concept of corporate membership" is demonstrably false. ANSI is a not-for-profit U.S. corporation, and is a member of ISO.
"While we can be quick to claim hot topics as 'DRM' or 'Poor Economy' for the cause, it's more likely the simple fact that the difference between BluRay and DVD is negligible. "
You are wrong, and I say that with no qualifiers.
DVD sales have been down for what, 3 years running (including year to date)? DVD sales are decreasing faster than BD sales are increasing. Video games surpassed the lucky-to-be-flat DVD sales. Home video overall is still down. These are all "simple facts".
BD costing significantly more than DVDs, which are losing ground overall, and you want to blame something that is for the most part, irrelevant? Lest we forget, during the same period after the release of DVD, people were saying the same thing wrt. DVD vs. VHS. The difference in content and visual/audio quality between VHS and DVD is quite large, though not all true at first. Yet we saw the same pattern of lackluster DVD vs. VHS sales. If that much of a clear difference in quality - even w/o spending more on TVs and receivers to "get the most out of it" - saw the same pattern, then how the hell is an alleged "minor" bump in quality going to be the main cause or even a significant one? BD is more expensive than DVD, just as DVD was more expensive than VHS. Players were not cheap, and the movies were significantly higher priced.
DVDs had very distinct advantages in that it was going to get pull out and stuck in your player, permanently ruined - an advantage anyone who had VHS could easily appreciate and understand. Yet it took several years for DVD to "take off".
It is certainly true that there was, and is a lot of hype around "the new format", and that it is exceedingly rare that the reality lives up to the hype. But if you look at what people in the know have been saying, you'll see that this year is in line with what reasonable people have been expecting, At current rates, the BD sales will top over 1.3 billion dollars this year. [sarcasm] Year, that's a loss for a more expensive purchase, sure. [/sarcasm] By the end of the year BD sales will approach 50 million discs this year. Do DVD sales outshine that? Hell yes. DVD is established and has been around for many years.
We also have the hype of "the end of the war" with the death of HD-DVD. People with no knowledge claimed it would be a huge win for BD, and eventually it will be. But anyone with sense and reason knew it wouldn't be right away. That said, on big "recent" titles, BD sales account for 1 little more than 1 in 20, and in some cases even one in ten sales of that movie. On essentially re-releases to BD, the sales share for BD has reached 2 out of 3. Overall almost one in ten movie disc purchases are BD. The format wars didn't end until this year. That means in less than one year after the "end of HD-DVD vs BD", BD has hit almost one in 10 (8%) of video disc sales. Note these are dollar amounts, for both DVD vs. VHS and BD vs. DVD.
Note that public availability of movies on DVD began in 1997 (1996 in Japan), and this was after the digital disc format wars ended. It took almost 5 years for DVD sales to surpass VHS sales. And that was considered "a meteoric rise" at the time. At the current growth rates, BD will outsell DVD in less time than it took DVD to overtake VHS. And VHS is still available, more than 10 years after the release of DVD video. After 2 years of public availability of DVD-Video, it was predicted by market analysts that it would be 5 more years before DVD overtook VHS. It took "only" 3 more years. Today the analysts are predicting 4 years for BD to outsell DVD. So the analysts are more optimistic this time around.
I should also note that DVD rentals lagged behind sales, only overtaking VHS rentals in late 2003 - six years into DVD-Video.
That depends, are you governor of one of the largest states in the Union? Do you potentially have state "secrets" the FBI has a reason to investigate? Or, most importantly, are you an officially recognized candidate for President of the United States? I'm guessing that since you used "CIA" instead of FBI and exaggerated to mobilize the whole..." that you are not, and wouldn't know the difference if they did.
You see, the SS has a mandate to "protect" "certain" candidates for POTUS and VPOTUS, and investigates identity theft. You think someone "cracking" into a VPOTUS candidate at the level of Republican or Democrat candidates might qualify under those categories? Damned straight they would.
Were you complaining the the Secret Service (perhaps you would have said CIA) has been guarding Obama since May 3rd? I suspect you were not. Why then, well before he had clinched the Democrat nomination? Threats apparently made against him, and apparently most important - he was drawing large crowds.
As I see it, if the FBI/SS/DHS *failed* to respond it would be a dereliction of duty, be it Obama, Biden, McCain, Palin, Paul, or even Kucinich.
Besides, why would anyone want to hack your email you can't even read articles correctly, or demonstrate basic understanding of the issue(s).
And finally, yes we "lower echelons" are quite simply of lower importance on such otherwise legally "minor" crimes/offenses. Deal with it by taken genuine action, rather than whining.
Asking if Yahoo accounts are subject to subpoena and relaying the answer to the governor suggests to me that the accounts were not simple private email accounts.
If that is what you want it to suggest, sure.
It could also suggest that they were trying to clarify if they were or not for other reasons. Change "personal email" to "personal phone" and how would that change things? People use their private email for a great many things, not all of which *should* be available to body, subpoena or not. Maybe she wanted to know if her personal email was subject to subpoena because she might be discussing, oh I don't know, personal matters there? Maybe she and her hubby could be discussing personal medical matters, family financial matters, or just what movies or products they did or did not like. Or perhaps her and here daughter might be discussing certain personal matters?
The question is valid for anyone going into that office, or any public office.
Should you r work be able to demand, and receive, your personal email records? I'm pretty sure most of/. would say "hell no". And for good reason.
An no, that someone *might* be doing something you don't like in personal email is not justification regardless of party. After all, they could do it over their personal phones and nothing would really change.
The main difference is that "it could be recorded" is true but has a qualifier: it would need a warrant of some sort. Email has a big advantage for the would-be Big Brother because you can go back and get copies prior to suspecting and investigating. That is something many should be considering, not just OK-ing it because they may or do disagree with the target in this case.
Yet more reasons you all would hate me as an elected official: my email will be encrypted and of course if I were doing anything possibly shady it would not even be in email. First rule of fight club and all.
"the fact that we weren't in the know in regard to her violation of law, her illegal act before the hacking, doesnt make her any more right about the matter. a crime is being committed, you just dont have proof. "
I've heard that line of argument before. Oh yeah, from fascists. Just change hacking to wiretapping or spying.
Rather than adding laws to penalize other countries or off-shoring itself, how about eliminating the legalistic and red-tape nightmares that reduce profitability here? Removing hurdles on your own turf is more effective than raising them for other areas. At elast, if you want real gains and not perceived ones.
In your example, it would be a finance professor stepping into a teller role for the day. He happily accepts a deposit of $25,000 in cash, not realizing he needs to fill out the appropriate "suspicious activities" form required by the government.
And that is bad for me the person depositing 25k how? As long as I get what I asked for (the bank takes my money and makes it available to me on demand), why would it matter to me that the teller didn't fill out some form?
Do houses not built to code fall down/burn/etc? Sure. Do houses built to code do these things? Absolutely.
Does a compute install "built" to the accepted norm of security standards (hahahahahaha) get violated? Yes. Do ones that don't get violated? Yes.
The fallacy is that by doing things in an "accepted" way (usually known as "Best Practices") makes you safe. It doesn't. All it does is give an escape clause to people who are too lazy to do it the right way or know the details involved. Licensing is partially about providing lazy people with that escape clause - "Look the house was built according to code. Sure the code prevented us from doing things the safer away, and sure had we built this house using the safer way it would not have burned down, but since we built to code, we are immune to your recompense attempts". Incidentally this is the same problem that "Buckle up, its the law" campaigns perpetuate. The next major point of licensing is to create a virtual or straight up monopoly. Why?
The establishment in a field consists of those who seek to prevent more competition. The reasoning is inescapable - who better to decide the standards than those who know the business/field/technology? The creation and continual change of the so-called standards and codes presents an additional barrier to entry for new people, or people moving from elsewhere. That this barrier serves to limit competition is irrefutable - all barriers to entry do so by definition.
IF there were to be an "IT Union", it had better stay away from making standards and focus on reasonable treatment of the workers.
IMO better than a union would be for the tech industry workers to essentially create an "IT worker treatment" watch organization. Think credit bureau for how people are treated. Expose the horrible practices for what they are and let the companies change through PR pressure or suffer the results of being perceived as a company that treats their workers like crap. Perhaps this could even go beyond tech industry. Let there be "global" rankings on how we are treatred. Then when your local ISP gets rated below say, McDonalds, the local press can get a hold of it and shame the daylights out of them. It works.
Government, through its agent the Corporation, has been doing it to us for years. Now with the Internet and the lowering of the barriers to entry for getting your ideas and info out there, perhaps it is time we led the way to a kind of freedom by doing unto them as they have done unto us?
See, that is the problem: we don't. It seems to be the natural result of what appears to me to be a fundamental driving fore of humanity: make things better.
Parents refer to wanting "a better life" for their children, and generally work toward that goal. Non-parents tend to identify what they believe to be better things for society, and work toward those goals.
This process has in general served us well, but like most evolutionary changes will eventually become a detriment, if it has not done so already, to the human race. At this juncture in our societal and possibly human evolution we have attached priority to feelings. Why? Most real and physical problems are either solved or determined to be insolvable. With fewer big problems the mind turns to smaller problems, and perceived or invented problems. Offensive behaviour or talk, or even thought become problems of historical import that need to be solved.
A factor in this is that people are as general rule under less survival pressure. Take a brain wired to make things "better" and remove things to make better. It will invent new things that are bad. Slavery: bad. Once slavery is abolished there will the next step: continued violence against the former slaves and the slavers (aka both sides). When that for the most part abates ("problem solved for vast majority of cases"), those who thrive or depend on the continuing of the efforts (what today we call a "war") will then "see" new problems. Hence, offensive words, phrases, etc.. There will always be gullible people and wussies - people for whatever reason can't seem to stand on their own. So the cycle persists down further and further.
Combine this with another fundamental aspect of humanity: conflict. Looking around at this planet we see conflict. Predator and prey, for example. Vegetative growth and natural fires, for another. The dynamic of this planet is centered on conflict. it is thus no suprise that humans reflect that dynamic in our natures - it would be suprising if we did not. Time and again we see that abundance leads to stagnation when conflict is not present or is lessened.
So as we "solve" our physical priorities and move up the pyramid from food, water, shelter to emotional and intellectual "needs" (wants become needs when the needs are no longer a concern), I expect we will discover more and more "needs", more and more "problems and ills". I believe this has an effect on our literature and escapist entertainment. People in general gravitate toward stories that have conflict, hardship, and of course eventual human triumph. Being offended by the word "shit" in a name is but one small but common example of the lack of this release valve.
This is one of the many reasons mankind needs a "new frontier". Something that provides an outlet for those of us with the drive and wiring to seek that conflict. Not all conflict has to be interpersonal (war, arguments), it can be conflict of man vs. environment (man vs. the sea being a driver not that long ago). This brings in my mind the most logical choice to be space exploration and expansion. I think a solid case can be made for a biological imperative to do so. Animals search new places for food, and generally only when their food is scarce. Mankind appears to be unique on this planet in that he will search new and difficult areas out of sheer curiosity. Absent major conflicts and devastation on Earth, there is no driving source of inspirational conflict serving to unite the people behind a goal.
Day to day most of the world is falling into a corporate, governmental, or business slackery. We go to work, we do our jobs, we come home and we play or do more work, or sit around and vegetate. We are becoming tamed. Yes, we are taming ourselves. Therein lie the seeds of our downfall.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is a much stronger power, because as a democracy, the government tends to follow the will of the people"
No, it doesn't. The government tends to follow it's own will unless "the people" complain *really* loudly, then the government, like the Internet, considers it damage and routes around it.
Damn, that's expensive compared to DSL here in Idaho where you can get 20MB for under a hundred. That 1MB line in LA (that is not working) is 8 times what a 1MB line in Boise, Idaho costs (and it works).
You mean like this guy: http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2007/12/journeys-replac.html ?
If that isn't cutting out the middleman, then I don't know what is. He didn't have megabucks, whether from riding the corporate engine or otherwise.
Sure, because the telcos have been the epitome of advancing the technology, and implementing technology. Their extremely honest willingness to let you use your bandwidth as you see fit, to let you use VOIP w/o extra pain and cost, to bill you such a very low rate for basic text messages that pager companies were letting you send a decade or more ago prove that it isn't the telcos putting down the rules on their networks, but the dastardly cell phone makers refusing to implement such cool technology.
WHo says the company has to be beholden to shareholders? Not all companies are corporations.
You have confused corporations for "third party". Corporations are government creations, with legally defined "responsibilities" to "shareholders" - naturally done in the name of better oversight and protection. But not all third parties, nor even all business, are corporations.
And, to fixate that matter more precisely, Free Software isn't the solution either. The entire infrastructure could be open, the data formats, server OS, apps, every single piece - and you still haven't solved the "issue". If a company goes under or otherwise suddenly closes shop, your data may not be accessible. The Free Software they used may not be available either.
For some the obvious answer to "what if they stop/go away/shutdown?" is the same answer as to the question "what if your hard drive dies?": backups. If it is important back it up, if not, then don't. Or do anyway. If it is not important enough to YOU for YOU to take necessary and reasonable measures to ensure you can get to it on an as needed basis, even in failure scenarios of the first order, then you have no position to argue form should you lose it.
The underlying issue is not third parties, corporations, proprietary vs. open, or any of those. It fundamentally is data accessibility. Free Software is not "The Solution", it can be part of it just as much as it can be part of the problem.
Reduntantly Available Data. That is the point. You can have that, and use a cloud. Or you can use a cloud and not have it. You do not automatically get it because your source code and/or software is available.
This was not a law, and your reference, while mostly correct (and misunderstood) is inapplicable.
If you swamped their phones and got "all circuits are busy" would you be saying the same thing?
Only if you're one of the conspiracy nuts.
Oh you mean like this or them or here or them?
Your first link is not a link to the law, but an interpretation of it. The second link talks about "The Olympic Hopefuls" dressing as part of their band, in tracksuits. The similarity of them (their name and outfit) to the Olympics is not only obvious but admitted.
"Don't know if it's a fraud or not, but there is an easy way to tell. If it comes incorporated into your new Honda, then it's for real. If they try to sell it to you as a DIY kit, it's a fraud. The car industry is competitive enough that it would kill for a 3% increase in MPG, let alone more than 10%"
Bullshit. This is argument by popular authority (yes a combination).
However as to your claim about "kill for a 3% increase, let alone 10% is demonstrably false. You want to cut fuel consumption by 3$ or increase it by 3%? Easy. Mass management, rolling resistance, etc will get you there almost for free. Thinner tires can change your fuel economy by more than 3% - even w/o going ridiculously skinny. Moving to lighter materials (w/o adding other things) lowers the mass of the vehicle and leads to gains in fuel economy. And the mechanisms behind it are well understood and not controversial in the least.
When the 80's hit the fuel economy gains were not due to smaller cars but lighter cars. Medium to large vehicles can be lighter, but it takes effort in the design phase to get there, as well as willingness to change (that happen to simplify and improve) your manufacturing chain and process.
Large auto manufacturers suffer the same problem of large organizations: a resistance to rapid change.
As far as you arrogant assertion that all DIY kits are frauds, well clearly you know nothing about cars, or computers, or tools, or well most things. In particular, the aftermarket automotive industry is largely DIY "kits
"", and has a plethora, nay a cornucopia of proven valid "kits". Automakers have to make tradeoffs that we the consumer do not. For example, what if a particular "thing" did in fact improve your fuel economy but also increased your net pollution? A car maker is likely to NOT use that thing or process in order to keep their emissions down. However, you the consumer can buy it and do it. Tradeoffs abound such as power/weight, power/fuel consumption, economy/pollution, just to name a small few.
Oh, and shall I mention that your fuel economy will change by greater than 3% from dry to wet conditions? Car makers do not care about 3%. You are looking at two vehicles, A get 20MPG. B gets 3% more. What does B get? 20.6 MPG. What does the sticker say? 20. Your vehicles has to get over 30MPG before that 3% will be visible to the buying public who may or may not care. Even with one car at 30 and the next one at 31, that 1MPG will not be the deciding factor - it is too small to be taken seriously on an individual basis. Even 10% may not be that spectacular, but could be a consideration.
To the mods and metamods: there is nothing insightful about the parent post other than showing the poster's ignorance of the reality and that smug ignorance leads one to posit that anyone who knows anything would already have done it and that only the bug carmakers have any innovation in them. None of those assertions are true, and therefore lack any insight. Please mod parent appropriately.
Most of what you describe are or can be factors of the SDK/API/environment, not the language.
1) A bold claim that is not exactly true ... unless you define your terms in a very specific way to make it true.
2) JAVA has this, true, but the idea is not limited to JAVA. It is up to the entity making the platform and development tools. Could Apple do this? Absolutely. Could RedHat do this on Linux? Absolutely. A nice little kernel mod and some userland code would do that if you want. You can then get down to the system call level, file access level, etc. This is a good feature set, but entirely doable in most languages. In a way this is merely the extension of user/group/etc permissions into a programming language - and these concepts and implementations predate JAVA by a long shot. BTW I would classify this a safety feature, not a "control" feature. After all signed code can still do bad things to your computer/platform/data.
Also, there is a down side to the code-signing as you describe it. As I said, signing the code means getting access to "things that can do harm". What is Joe Q. Public going to do? Well he is going to click "Approve" of course! So what did code signing get you here? Nothing, because that app still can (and might) do Bad Things. IMO code signing's best use is to prevent the app from being silently "altered". That is what I care about the most.
3) Exceptions being safe and non-fatal and possibly recoverable. This again depends on implementation. Not everyone uses exceptions. In Python exceptions are the norm, not the err exception. What you say about exceptions is also true for C. They can be safe, they can be possibly recoverable as well. Indeed most of the time they are recoverable - depending on how/why the programmer uses them.
4) Again, implementation of the environment, API, Library, SDK.
I'm not saying Obj-C HAS this things, just pointing out that what you assert to be a language feature is really an implementation feature and choice. There are kits that provide parts of these. Yes there need to be more and a mor ehtorough implementation of additional features.
"You could just as easily be just as shocked at a Presidential candidate accidentally releasing both a victory speech and a concession speech before knowing the outcome of an election. It's not really news, it's just humorous that it was posted (way) too prematurely."
Only if it included the exact vote totals.
Yes, the dialogue inclusion is the particularly bad part about this. And it coming from a place that is known to censor things it does not like, lie about what it does, and generally be evil. IN isolation it would be seen as funny. In this case it is part of a pattern. That is what sets it apart from the occasional news gaffe of releasing the wrong story ("DEWEY WINS!").
Patently absurd
They said marking periods, not tests or quizzes. So what they are saying is that if a student gets 20% for the first entire quarter ... then they have to work harder to squeak by in the second quarter. Exactly! We are not talking about kids taking two tests and that is it, or two assignments and that is it. We are talking about a kid AVERAGING 20% for an ENTIRE QUARTER. If you average the semester grade based on an average of averages, that is another fault in the existing mechanism or teacher policies. When I have taught, or was being taught, our semester grade was a weighted average of ALL graded assignments, quizzes, and tests.
Time for a statistician to give an exposition on how dumb averaging a collection of averages is vs. averaging the whole from the beginning. Come on slashdot, you can do it!
Where was the teacher in the prior couple months? If the teacher did NOT find a way to help the child for two entire months, something is wrong. If the kid is just not trying, then his or her arse deserves their pathetically low score. A side effect of this will be to hide the actual performance of the student not just from themselves, but from the teacher as well. Then they have a "plausible deniability" case that they just didn't know Johnny and Marie were doing so bad.
This is not about kids, it is about the teachers ... and the administrators, the school board, and the teacher's "union".
No, it is not "to keep kids from giving up", it is to ensure that the soon-to-be-graded teachers don't get failing grades. They are concerned that those who believe bad teachers should find another line of work they are better suited at may come into power and thus by ensuring that none of their students can possibly mail mathematically, then neither can they.
This does nothing to encourage a student to work harder, indeed the opposite. I have a child who struggles, and I've seen what works. I've tutored kids who struggle, and I've seen what works. I've taught adults technical subjects. My wife and I homeschool our children[1] Many things work, but not lying to them about their performance. The proposed hypothetical is a red herring, and if it were the case then those teachers are precisely the kind of teachers that need to find a different line of work, whether that be building airplanes or flipping burgers (they can know their material inside and out but be bad teachers of it -we've seen that a lot in our industry). As many here have or will be saying, if you only have two tests then you have a problem regardless of the audience.
The right thing to do is to offer enough work/tests that a bomb or two doesn't destroy your shot.
Here is an example of how these kinds of things work:
A couple decades ago the State of Idaho decided to implement a "90% attendance rule" to be eligible for passing. On a 180 school day school year if you missed more than 9 days per semester, you could not pass w/o special exception. Here is how everyone else read it: "On a 180 school day school year you can miss up to 9 days per semester and still pass w/o special exception.". Is there any doubt as to what happened? Correct, they average missed days went to ... drum roll please ... 18/year! From less than 5.
Consider something else from the article:
"""
In a recent article in Harvard Educational Review, Freedom Area School District Superintendent Ron Sofo recounted an experimental program that he said helped to dramatically raise the math scores of struggling sixth-graders. Among other features, the program included "A, B, Not Yet" grading, in which students were required to redo work until it merited an A or B.
"""
Gee, getting rid of all grades except A or B raised average grades? No kidding?
Wonder what will happen to kids growing up with this system when taking the ACT/SAT. No, not really, it is easily predictable.
Tell you what, teach. I'm going to take a percentage of your salary home with me. I intend to use this system. So I'll be taking a *minimum* of 50% of your salary. Still sound good?
Oh and for those who complain about the text window size, use Safari and drag the bottom right corner to the right to fit the width you want. ;)
1. We do so in part because my son was getting a 30% average in math and would get "Great Job!" written on top for starters. There was more to it than that, but that sums it up nicely.
And another "fascinating" comment by someone who did not RTFA and has no knowledge of the subject.
The /. title changed it to "ISO" instead of "Standards Bodies". That said the TFA did only reference ISO and ECMA, of which IBM is in fact a member.
And ECMA is a member of ISO. So is ANSI, of which you might think IBM is part of? And you'd actually be right.
You said yourself, ISO is comprised of various national standards bodies. Who do you think comprises these bodies? Fairies? ISO is comprised of groups that IBM is a member of. Therefore is it reasonable to state that IBM as a member of several of the bodies that comprise ISO is thus a member of ISO. As such, they can actually leave the ISO by leaving the standards bodies that comprise ISO.
Furthermore nearly every national standards body is in fact incorporated or whatever their country equivalent is. As such, your assertion that "there is no concept of corporate membership" is demonstrably false. ANSI is a not-for-profit U.S. corporation, and is a member of ISO.
QED.
"While we can be quick to claim hot topics as 'DRM' or 'Poor Economy' for the cause, it's more likely the simple fact that the difference between BluRay and DVD is negligible. "
You are wrong, and I say that with no qualifiers.
DVD sales have been down for what, 3 years running (including year to date)? DVD sales are decreasing faster than BD sales are increasing. Video games surpassed the lucky-to-be-flat DVD sales. Home video overall is still down. These are all "simple facts".
BD costing significantly more than DVDs, which are losing ground overall, and you want to blame something that is for the most part, irrelevant? Lest we forget, during the same period after the release of DVD, people were saying the same thing wrt. DVD vs. VHS. The difference in content and visual/audio quality between VHS and DVD is quite large, though not all true at first. Yet we saw the same pattern of lackluster DVD vs. VHS sales. If that much of a clear difference in quality - even w/o spending more on TVs and receivers to "get the most out of it" - saw the same pattern, then how the hell is an alleged "minor" bump in quality going to be the main cause or even a significant one? BD is more expensive than DVD, just as DVD was more expensive than VHS. Players were not cheap, and the movies were significantly higher priced.
DVDs had very distinct advantages in that it was going to get pull out and stuck in your player, permanently ruined - an advantage anyone who had VHS could easily appreciate and understand. Yet it took several years for DVD to "take off".
It is certainly true that there was, and is a lot of hype around "the new format", and that it is exceedingly rare that the reality lives up to the hype. But if you look at what people in the know have been saying, you'll see that this year is in line with what reasonable people have been expecting, At current rates, the BD sales will top over 1.3 billion dollars this year. [sarcasm] Year, that's a loss for a more expensive purchase, sure. [/sarcasm] By the end of the year BD sales will approach 50 million discs this year. Do DVD sales outshine that? Hell yes. DVD is established and has been around for many years.
We also have the hype of "the end of the war" with the death of HD-DVD. People with no knowledge claimed it would be a huge win for BD, and eventually it will be. But anyone with sense and reason knew it wouldn't be right away. That said, on big "recent" titles, BD sales account for 1 little more than 1 in 20, and in some cases even one in ten sales of that movie. On essentially re-releases to BD, the sales share for BD has reached 2 out of 3. Overall almost one in ten movie disc purchases are BD. The format wars didn't end until this year. That means in less than one year after the "end of HD-DVD vs BD", BD has hit almost one in 10 (8%) of video disc sales. Note these are dollar amounts, for both DVD vs. VHS and BD vs. DVD.
Consider these:
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2002/01/07/daily34.html and http://www.ce.org/Press/CEA_Pubs/929.asp
Note that public availability of movies on DVD began in 1997 (1996 in Japan), and this was after the digital disc format wars ended. It took almost 5 years for DVD sales to surpass VHS sales. And that was considered "a meteoric rise" at the time. At the current growth rates, BD will outsell DVD in less time than it took DVD to overtake VHS. And VHS is still available, more than 10 years after the release of DVD video. After 2 years of public availability of DVD-Video, it was predicted by market analysts that it would be 5 more years before DVD overtook VHS. It took "only" 3 more years. Today the analysts are predicting 4 years for BD to outsell DVD. So the analysts are more optimistic this time around.
I should also note that DVD rentals lagged behind sales, only overtaking VHS rentals in late 2003 - six years into DVD-Video.
That depends, are you governor of one of the largest states in the Union? Do you potentially have state "secrets" the FBI has a reason to investigate? Or, most importantly, are you an officially recognized candidate for President of the United States? I'm guessing that since you used "CIA" instead of FBI and exaggerated to mobilize the whole..." that you are not, and wouldn't know the difference if they did.
You see, the SS has a mandate to "protect" "certain" candidates for POTUS and VPOTUS, and investigates identity theft. You think someone "cracking" into a VPOTUS candidate at the level of Republican or Democrat candidates might qualify under those categories? Damned straight they would.
Were you complaining the the Secret Service (perhaps you would have said CIA) has been guarding Obama since May 3rd? I suspect you were not. Why then, well before he had clinched the Democrat nomination? Threats apparently made against him, and apparently most important - he was drawing large crowds.
As I see it, if the FBI/SS/DHS *failed* to respond it would be a dereliction of duty, be it Obama, Biden, McCain, Palin, Paul, or even Kucinich.
Besides, why would anyone want to hack your email you can't even read articles correctly, or demonstrate basic understanding of the issue(s).
And finally, yes we "lower echelons" are quite simply of lower importance on such otherwise legally "minor" crimes/offenses. Deal with it by taken genuine action, rather than whining.
Or become an important politician.
If that is what you want it to suggest, sure.
It could also suggest that they were trying to clarify if they were or not for other reasons. Change "personal email" to "personal phone" and how would that change things? People use their private email for a great many things, not all of which *should* be available to body, subpoena or not. Maybe she wanted to know if her personal email was subject to subpoena because she might be discussing, oh I don't know, personal matters there? Maybe she and her hubby could be discussing personal medical matters, family financial matters, or just what movies or products they did or did not like. Or perhaps her and here daughter might be discussing certain personal matters?
The question is valid for anyone going into that office, or any public office.
Should you r work be able to demand, and receive, your personal email records? I'm pretty sure most of /. would say "hell no". And for good reason.
An no, that someone *might* be doing something you don't like in personal email is not justification regardless of party. After all, they could do it over their personal phones and nothing would really change.
The main difference is that "it could be recorded" is true but has a qualifier: it would need a warrant of some sort. Email has a big advantage for the would-be Big Brother because you can go back and get copies prior to suspecting and investigating. That is something many should be considering, not just OK-ing it because they may or do disagree with the target in this case.
Yet more reasons you all would hate me as an elected official: my email will be encrypted and of course if I were doing anything possibly shady it would not even be in email. First rule of fight club and all.
Dunno about \.ers but /.ers are likely to be pleased with it.
The you went to the wrong employer. I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars knowing the material but not paying a university for the paper.
"the fact that we weren't in the know in regard to her violation of law, her illegal act before the hacking, doesnt make her any more right about the matter. a crime is being committed, you just dont have proof.
"
I've heard that line of argument before. Oh yeah, from fascists. Just change hacking to wiretapping or spying.
That is easy: put it on land.
Bend the laws to make it unprofitable to offshore
Wrong direction, right intent.
Rather than adding laws to penalize other countries or off-shoring itself, how about eliminating the legalistic and red-tape nightmares that reduce profitability here? Removing hurdles on your own turf is more effective than raising them for other areas. At elast, if you want real gains and not perceived ones.
And that is bad for me the person depositing 25k how? As long as I get what I asked for (the bank takes my money and makes it available to me on demand), why would it matter to me that the teller didn't fill out some form?
Do houses not built to code fall down/burn/etc? Sure. Do houses built to code do these things? Absolutely.
Does a compute install "built" to the accepted norm of security standards (hahahahahaha) get violated? Yes. Do ones that don't get violated? Yes.
The fallacy is that by doing things in an "accepted" way (usually known as "Best Practices") makes you safe. It doesn't. All it does is give an escape clause to people who are too lazy to do it the right way or know the details involved. Licensing is partially about providing lazy people with that escape clause - "Look the house was built according to code. Sure the code prevented us from doing things the safer away, and sure had we built this house using the safer way it would not have burned down, but since we built to code, we are immune to your recompense attempts". Incidentally this is the same problem that "Buckle up, its the law" campaigns perpetuate. The next major point of licensing is to create a virtual or straight up monopoly. Why?
The establishment in a field consists of those who seek to prevent more competition. The reasoning is inescapable - who better to decide the standards than those who know the business/field/technology? The creation and continual change of the so-called standards and codes presents an additional barrier to entry for new people, or people moving from elsewhere. That this barrier serves to limit competition is irrefutable - all barriers to entry do so by definition.
IF there were to be an "IT Union", it had better stay away from making standards and focus on reasonable treatment of the workers.
IMO better than a union would be for the tech industry workers to essentially create an "IT worker treatment" watch organization. Think credit bureau for how people are treated. Expose the horrible practices for what they are and let the companies change through PR pressure or suffer the results of being perceived as a company that treats their workers like crap. Perhaps this could even go beyond tech industry. Let there be "global" rankings on how we are treatred. Then when your local ISP gets rated below say, McDonalds, the local press can get a hold of it and shame the daylights out of them. It works.
Government, through its agent the Corporation, has been doing it to us for years. Now with the Internet and the lowering of the barriers to entry for getting your ideas and info out there, perhaps it is time we led the way to a kind of freedom by doing unto them as they have done unto us?
I'd rather hear the Governator say "Stop poking me" - Warcraft style.
See, that is the problem: we don't. It seems to be the natural result of what appears to me to be a fundamental driving fore of humanity: make things better.
Parents refer to wanting "a better life" for their children, and generally work toward that goal. Non-parents tend to identify what they believe to be better things for society, and work toward those goals.
This process has in general served us well, but like most evolutionary changes will eventually become a detriment, if it has not done so already, to the human race. At this juncture in our societal and possibly human evolution we have attached priority to feelings. Why? Most real and physical problems are either solved or determined to be insolvable. With fewer big problems the mind turns to smaller problems, and perceived or invented problems. Offensive behaviour or talk, or even thought become problems of historical import that need to be solved.
A factor in this is that people are as general rule under less survival pressure. Take a brain wired to make things "better" and remove things to make better. It will invent new things that are bad. Slavery: bad. Once slavery is abolished there will the next step: continued violence against the former slaves and the slavers (aka both sides). When that for the most part abates ("problem solved for vast majority of cases"), those who thrive or depend on the continuing of the efforts (what today we call a "war") will then "see" new problems. Hence, offensive words, phrases, etc.. There will always be gullible people and wussies - people for whatever reason can't seem to stand on their own. So the cycle persists down further and further.
Combine this with another fundamental aspect of humanity: conflict. Looking around at this planet we see conflict. Predator and prey, for example. Vegetative growth and natural fires, for another. The dynamic of this planet is centered on conflict. it is thus no suprise that humans reflect that dynamic in our natures - it would be suprising if we did not. Time and again we see that abundance leads to stagnation when conflict is not present or is lessened.
So as we "solve" our physical priorities and move up the pyramid from food, water, shelter to emotional and intellectual "needs" (wants become needs when the needs are no longer a concern), I expect we will discover more and more "needs", more and more "problems and ills". I believe this has an effect on our literature and escapist entertainment. People in general gravitate toward stories that have conflict, hardship, and of course eventual human triumph. Being offended by the word "shit" in a name is but one small but common example of the lack of this release valve.
This is one of the many reasons mankind needs a "new frontier". Something that provides an outlet for those of us with the drive and wiring to seek that conflict. Not all conflict has to be interpersonal (war, arguments), it can be conflict of man vs. environment (man vs. the sea being a driver not that long ago). This brings in my mind the most logical choice to be space exploration and expansion. I think a solid case can be made for a biological imperative to do so. Animals search new places for food, and generally only when their food is scarce. Mankind appears to be unique on this planet in that he will search new and difficult areas out of sheer curiosity. Absent major conflicts and devastation on Earth, there is no driving source of inspirational conflict serving to unite the people behind a goal.
Day to day most of the world is falling into a corporate, governmental, or business slackery. We go to work, we do our jobs, we come home and we play or do more work, or sit around and vegetate. We are becoming tamed. Yes, we are taming ourselves. Therein lie the seeds of our downfall.