The chain of events that goes from carrying a water bottle to government-sanctioned torment in an offshore prison is little different than the blasphemy-to-death-sentence progression. A minor offense occurs, the perpetrator gets annoyed by the subjective and obtrusive enforcement, a small circus of scandal ensues, and because nobody in the enforcement agency wants to be the guy who let a lawbreaker go, especially one who doesn't seem repentant, the slightest infraction can result in the maximum possible sentence. Sanity isn't a factor.
The TSA is only the first step. Yes, I object to their tactics, but they're just one part of a larger problem. Carrying water through their checkpoint is just one way to be labeled a terrorist and get detained. Another good one is to have joined a politically-aligned group as a youth or young adult in a Middle Eastern country, little different to how one would join the Boy Scouts here. Still another route is to show a more-than-passing interest in chemistry without a university signing off on everything you do. There are many ways to get onto a watch list here, and after enough little red flags, a big one goes up that gets people "detained".
Yes, the route from offense to sentence is often a little more direct in the more tyrannical regimes, but that has little bearing on my point: Insanity is only insane to those with a different idea of sanity.
Problem with most laws over here, they are based on the fear and not some sense. In some airports over here carrying a water bottle carries a torture sentence.
Every government tries to enact laws that mold its citizens to fit one particular morality, regardless of whether it's led by religion, hivemind democracy, or dictatorship. For localized groups that face communal problems, this has usually been perfectly fine. The real problem comes from applying one group's morality (and therefore its laws) to another group. The Internet lets everyone see everyone else's actions immediately, so what's perfectly fine to an irreverent filmmaker with poor taste in comedy can quickly spread as outrage among people with a stricter sense of decency.
To the people who enact and support the religious laws "over there", they make perfect sense, just as the people who support anti-terrorist or gun control laws in America think those laws make sense.
Similarly, dynamite was only used for mining and construction, until those nasty warlords got hold of it and made those bombs (such that Nobel's reputation was tarnished in a span of only 20 years). If the Internet ever existed in a truly open and free sense, it was only in the earliest stages before silly things like "commercial application" were considered. That's one of the downsides to a system everyone can use - that "everyone" must include people who will do things you don't like.
56k modems in the US are/were limited by FCC regs to about 53k [lowendmac.com].
From this url [2fords.net]:
The chilling news came just days before U.S. Robotics shipped its x2 modems: the FCC won't let modems transfer data at a rate faster than 53 kbps. The legal snafu has to do with a long-standing FCC regulation known as Part 68, which was never intended to affect modems. The problem is that if you send too much power through the phone line, your conversation can get loud enough to creep into neighboring lines. This is called crosstalk, and Part 68 was meant to prevent it. But to reach 56 kbps, the new modems must send more power down the line.
Once upon a time, I was measured as having an IQ over 180. I told the person administering the test (might have been an actual psychologist, might not... it was done through school when that was in vogue) that the result was outright wrong, and happily pointed out how most of the test questions were either tricks of misdirection, or variations on questions I'd already heard. I guess liking puzzles makes one a genius.
He didn't want to hear some kid dispute his vaunted test, so I was pushed to follow advanced courses and held to a standard far beyond my liking. High school was miserable as a result. Now that I'm free from the burden of a single number, I'm also doing okay.
I still enjoy puzzles, and I do pick up on some subjects faster than other people. That makes me different, but certainly no better or worse.
Then as far as I'm concerned, you don't exist, so I want nothing to do with you. I don't want to put effort into writing a book for your enjoyment, because you don't think my effort's worth anything.
In fact everything I've released so far has been released creative-commons.
That is your choice, and in fact it's one I rather like. Yeah, I'm human. I like getting free stuff, too. Some of the stuff I've written that I don't particularly care about (one-off philosophical rants, or abandoned worlds, or even just an interesting character that doesn't fit anywhere else) I've just dropped to public domain. Maybe somebody will care about it someday.
It's the choice that matters. I choose what my writing effort is worth. Sometimes it's worth money, sometimes it's worth the catharsis of writing, and sometimes it's worth a quick strike on the delete key, but it's my choice, not the pirates'.
Or there might be a larger market of people who will pay you for your work. There will certainly be a larger market of people who will see your work.
There might very well be a larger market, but I don't get to choose it. I could also get a larger market seeing my work by hiring trucks to drive down city streets with loudspeakers playing a reading, but that might not actually be what I want. What the fuck gives you the right to decide what happens to my work?
If and only if you can get a publisher to buy it.
Or publish it myself, or hand it to friends and say "give this only to people who'll appreciate it". Again, I can decide where and how my work is distributed, and from that how much risk I must take. I can work with a publisher that will edit my work, likely improving my profit, or I can work with one that will leave my dialect alone, opting for the purity of the art. Piracy takes away that choice.
You realize those people aren't going to be your customers *ever*, right?
I do indeed. My usual response to such inquiries is something to the effect of "thanks for the interest, but I really don't want my work to be distributed like that. Here's a sample of what I'm working on, and if/when it's finished, it'll be available at this store". They aren't my customers, but I'll try to convert them anyway, and sometimes succeed. If not, then I've lost nothing more than if they didn't even ask.
You have no inherent right to have your business model supported by government intervention.
And you have no inherent right to make me write for you for free, with or without government help. I should be the one to choose how I work, and I choose to write stories for a bit of money.
Generally, yes. I've paid for the vast majority of works I've consumed. There are some exceptions where I pay through the magic of statistics (television, radio, and other such ad-supported media).
Of course, there are many ideas for which there is no clear source. The notion is just a part of societal knowledge. I like to think that those have been reimbursed by society as a whole, enough to be fair (though of course some are, and too many aren't). After all, that's the whole point of copyright in the first place: to encourage the production of art, for the purpose of fostering a richer society.
Interestingly enough, I have been exposed to all points regarding the subject, and my opinion is partly as I said before. The "piracy is absolutely not theft" argument is just as much bullshit as the "piracy is absolutely theft" argument.
Yes, theft and copyright infringement are different. One's a civil matter and the other's criminal. One results in the loss of a physical item, and the other results in someone gaining a copy. The implementation details are obviously different What remains the same though is the offense. If you steal $1 from my wallet, I'll have $1 less than I would without your interference. If you copy one of my books rather than buy it, I'll have (let's say) $1 less than I would without your interference. Of course, you may not have bought my book in the first place, and I may have dropped that $1 bill by accident. There's probabilities involved, I know, but that's not the point.
The point is that it's no longer my choice what happens to the book or the bill. I produce something, but I'm not allowed to decide what happens with it. I had a bill in my wallet, but I'm not allowed to choose how I spend it. That's where the analogy to theft comes from: pirates aren't stealing an object. They're forcing their way.
That's always the issue that gets forgotten when someone "debunks" the "stealing is theft" analogy. A big deal is made about how information wants to be free, and how the producers make record profits, and how piracy leads to so much more exposure, but they none of the pro-piracy advocates seem to care that this all happened by the pirates' sheer overwhelming force.
Yes, it's terribly wrong that the Pirate Party can't afford to fight. It's also terribly wrong that producers don't let their work go free once it's passed a certain age, or profitably, or some other nice metric. It's also terribly wrong to force someone else to live by your choices.
I did get a real job. It pays the bills, and occasionally, if I can find time, I still write.
My art doesn't depend on having a profit. My art depends on having the time, ambition, and inspiration to produce it after I come home from my real job.
You can keep calling it "stealing" if you wish, but that talking point has been debunked to death.
Really? Please do show me where it's been so mortally debunked. As a producer with copyright (an author of short scifi stories), I can take my words and ideas, and sell them to people who want to read/hear/otherwise-consume them. A pirate (self-declared or otherwise) can take my story, dump it on The Priate Bay, and suddenly there's a smaller market of people who will pay me for my work.
Without piracy, I have a clear route for making an income from my work. With piracy, I have to hope that my work becomes a loss leader for itself, reaching a wider paying audience through a non-paying medium. Sure, sometimes it will work. I've encountered a few folks who've seen some of my work freely and wanted more. On the other hand, I've also encountered folks who have outright asked me when my latest piece will be on TPB, rather than buying it.
That hurts. I am not a content-producing machine who lives on the happy thoughts of readers and the mental occupation of fans. I am a human, and I need to profit from my work. Piracy removes my income without my choice, forcing me to effectively rely on handouts from those who like my work enough to pay. My art has returned to patronage. Long live the king!
Why do people complain when the government limits the choice of Internet providers, but the pirates removing my ability to choose my own business model is somehow a good thing?
Alright, Since sarcasm, satire, and hyperbole and irony all seem to be lost on you, I'll rephrase using the more common vernacular:
Whoosh.
I used the "dear leader" term to adopt satirically the voice of someone from the "wingnut echo chamber", which I then used to sarcastically disbelieve the OP's plea for sanity. I then hyperbolized the effect of our existing national security policies to illustrate ironically how useless they actually are, and how harmful such over-reactions can be, regardless of any political backing. Finally, the "three shells" comment was in humorous reference to Demolition Man, which depicts a perfectly safe society that is so risk-free it can't even function effectively in a time of minor crisis.
In truth, I think a moderate response is really what we should hope and work for, eventually aiming to relieve the conditions that make people want to commit such atrocities. However, all too often it seems our politicians (from all parties) see tragedy as a career-building opportunity, where they can exploit the public outrage to pass ever-stricter legislation that makes them look good while just wasting time, money, and lives.
There, I've explained the joke. It's somewhat ruined now, but at least the ACs can understand!
Really? It's almost as though that was a part of the desired effect. With just two mere words, the tone of my post goes from simple derision to complete mockery. Why should I stop short of that tantalizing line of satire, when I could take a running start, jump over the line, then strip naked and dance a jig on the other side?
Oh, I get it... you just don't want to see my naked jig. I understand.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying we should consider exceptional events to be exceptional, and not panic over shocking tragedies?
That's not what our Dear Leader says. He says "We can't accept events like this as routine" and promises that he'll try to work through the politics to stop things like this from ever happening again.
Let's not forget another major outlier like this, where a foreign adversary successfully executed an attack in an unexpected manner, using our own infrastructure against us! A brilliant maneuver by the enemy, and thanks to our kneejerk response, we've managed to avoid any recurrences for only a few trillion dollars in cost and a few thousand more American lives lost! With such a clear success rate for a panicked reaction, how can you possibly be advocating moderation?
Obviously, the politicians in charge know that the current public outrage will be the catalyst to move us forward into a safe future, where all risk is eliminated, violence is practically unknown, and environmentally-unfriendly customs have been replaced with three shells.
I personally don't see many felonies, but misdemeanors are commonplace. The most common I see are traffic violations (mostly speeding, failure to signal, and "rolling stops"), but other violations are often so trivial that people don't even realize they're breaking the law. Simple things like having a crack in a window or a garbage can turned over can be against local laws.
So, now walk me through this one, since I'm apparently quite slow... if I take something which is already being done "on a computer" and "using a network", which specific part of "hand-held computer" and "cellular network" causes this to be an "invention"?
The "making it work" part. After all, anybody can have an idea, but the whole point of a patent is to ensure reimbursement for the person who actually makes the invention work.
We already had desktop computers. We already had some inklings of hand held computers. We could already hook a camera up to a computer and send images over a network.
None of which explain the necessary arrangement that lets a camera fit into a phone form factor. Yes, we had ideas, but ideas are not inventions. Anyone can say "do X with Y", but it's not so easy to actually make it work.
several years before this patent was even applied for we had mechanisms to "allow a computer to transmit the output of a semi-conductor camera over a network"
And currently, we have mechanisms to transmit realistic 3D holograms to the other side of the galaxy. All we need is a Cat6 cable a few thousand lightyears long. Of course, this clearly obviates the novelty of any faster-than-light transmission we ever invent, since we can do it now (though sloppier and messier, and not really at all how it'll be done later).
...And the last I checked "in a smaller box" isn't really sufficient to differentiate yourself as a distinct patent.
Check again. Patentable inventions solve some problem (the "useful" requirement), and space constraints can certainly be a suitable problem.
I'm not going to go through each of the claims on the patent, but I'm not seeing anything in here that sounds like an invention
Likewise, I'm not going to open the book, but I'm not seeing anything in Moby Dick that makes it decent literature.
The claims are the single most important part of the patent. Everything else is just to make the claims clear enough that somebody else can duplicate the invention. Not reading them is tantamount to judging a book by its cover.
Actually reading claim 1, we see a patent for a handheld computer containing a camera, that uses a radio to transmit the pictures. In claim 2, this is specified to be the cellular phone network. Now what's interesting is that the first cell-phone cameras came to market in the summer of 1997. Surely this is prior art, yes? And the whole patent is invalid?
No. The patent was filed in February of 1997, placing it nicely in the territory for a genuine invention. There were some devices in as early as 1995 that might possibly be prior art, but I'm certainly not qualified enough to determine whether they fit the patent claims or not.
do you fix the bug and get sued by wordperfect for not documenting your calls (seriously) or not fix the bug and worry about everyone calling you an insecure (yet massively used) code house.
You document the calls in the first place, as a standard part of making a public API, rather than using inside knowledge to keep wordperfect's development slower and more expensive than your own. Then when you fix the bug later, you stay as true to that documentation as is possible, so there's no indication of ill will in any loss of compatibility.
you win some, you lose some in the software industry
Software development is a business, not a casino. There's enough risk in the market alone without betting on whether a judge will allow shady legal tactics.
It hasn't happened because it doesn't need to yet. I hate being one of those guys who says the terrorists have already won, but the terrorists have already won. An aspect of American daily life is interrupted by a constant reminder of how we pissed off somebody else. Once the privacy advocates fight enough, and enough time has passed to calm the politicians, the ridiculous security theater will relax... then there will be another incident to remind us that we will never be safe, and never really were.
The only way to return to normal convenient-yet-insecure life is to let attacks happen with no reaction, but that goes against human instinct.
Of course, to be going around doing this you'd need to smell of bomb residue and probably be seen on surveillance cameras doing it.
That doesn't matter. What matters is that you can deposit a chemical on a large number of others who have a high probability of going quickly to an airport security check. You never need to go near the sensors yourself.
One easy exploit is to rig a aerosol dispersal into a car's exhaust, then drive through a departures drop-off area a few times. Alternatively, contaminate the air around a rental car return. If the airport is one of those with significant public areas outside the secure area, a purse with an occasionally-puffing atomizer will be practically unnoticeable. Better yet, disguise the purse-riding atomizer as a wallet, and confess to coming to the airport in the middle of a pickpocketing spree. Bonus points if the pickpocketing is also staged for the benefit of cameras.
Taking another easy route, we could assume that contact's necessary to spread the scent to a person. That's also easy enough to accomplish. How many countertops, queue barrier posts, and restroom faucets are in an airport? With a small team of pre-contaminated guests with many complaints and small bladders, a barely-noticeable compound can be spread to hundreds of unsuspecting participants easily.
And with that, I'm probably now on yet another list...
Throwing the exception says "there's a situation that is so unexpected that I don't know how to handle it. Maybe you do." to the calling routine, under the assumption that the caller might know a little bit more about what's going on, and might have a way to work around the situation.
If left uncaught, Java exceptions will propagate all the way back past main() before being handled by the JRE. The JRE prints the whole stack down to where the exception was thrown. Often, that means a user viewing a console gets a nice big list of dozens (if not hundreds) of calls through the stack. This is a "full stack trace", and it's rather hideous.
An exception handler in production code should resolve the exceptional situation as best it can. Anything that can't be handled should be logged as appropriate for the application, with just enough information that a developer can reproduce the error, though not necessarily understand it fully from the log alone. For a database, it might be sufficient to log only the offending statement. For a parser, the file name might be enough. In a big enterprisey application to balance bank accounts, optimize bus routes, and mash potatoes, it would definitely be useful to know whether the "sensor read error" problem was in the weather station polling module or in the blast furnace controller.
Logging every trivial exception with a full stack trace and parameters quickly bloats log files beyond the point of being useful.
In my opinion, that depends really on how the rest of the code's written. If the "rerun the command" part is three lines out of fifty (as in the example), just copy/pasting may very well be fine. If the whole function needs to be rerun, recursion may be an option, and likely doesn't even need the infinite-loop check (because how likely is it that a newly-established database connection will time out before it can run a single command?).
My point is that, for some exceptions, simply trying again may be the proper solution. Proper implementation, however, is left as an exercise to the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
The chain of events that goes from carrying a water bottle to government-sanctioned torment in an offshore prison is little different than the blasphemy-to-death-sentence progression. A minor offense occurs, the perpetrator gets annoyed by the subjective and obtrusive enforcement, a small circus of scandal ensues, and because nobody in the enforcement agency wants to be the guy who let a lawbreaker go, especially one who doesn't seem repentant, the slightest infraction can result in the maximum possible sentence. Sanity isn't a factor.
The TSA is only the first step. Yes, I object to their tactics, but they're just one part of a larger problem. Carrying water through their checkpoint is just one way to be labeled a terrorist and get detained. Another good one is to have joined a politically-aligned group as a youth or young adult in a Middle Eastern country, little different to how one would join the Boy Scouts here. Still another route is to show a more-than-passing interest in chemistry without a university signing off on everything you do. There are many ways to get onto a watch list here, and after enough little red flags, a big one goes up that gets people "detained".
Yes, the route from offense to sentence is often a little more direct in the more tyrannical regimes, but that has little bearing on my point: Insanity is only insane to those with a different idea of sanity.
Problem with most laws over here, they are based on the fear and not some sense. In some airports over here carrying a water bottle carries a torture sentence.
Every government tries to enact laws that mold its citizens to fit one particular morality, regardless of whether it's led by religion, hivemind democracy, or dictatorship. For localized groups that face communal problems, this has usually been perfectly fine. The real problem comes from applying one group's morality (and therefore its laws) to another group. The Internet lets everyone see everyone else's actions immediately, so what's perfectly fine to an irreverent filmmaker with poor taste in comedy can quickly spread as outrage among people with a stricter sense of decency.
To the people who enact and support the religious laws "over there", they make perfect sense, just as the people who support anti-terrorist or gun control laws in America think those laws make sense.
Similarly, dynamite was only used for mining and construction, until those nasty warlords got hold of it and made those bombs (such that Nobel's reputation was tarnished in a span of only 20 years). If the Internet ever existed in a truly open and free sense, it was only in the earliest stages before silly things like "commercial application" were considered. That's one of the downsides to a system everyone can use - that "everyone" must include people who will do things you don't like.
56k modems in the US are/were limited by FCC regs to about 53k [lowendmac.com].
From this url [2fords.net]:
The chilling news came just days before U.S. Robotics shipped its x2 modems: the FCC won't let modems transfer data at a rate faster than 53 kbps. The legal snafu has to do with a long-standing FCC regulation known as Part 68, which was never intended to affect modems. The problem is that if you send too much power through the phone line, your conversation can get loud enough to creep into neighboring lines. This is called crosstalk, and Part 68 was meant to prevent it. But to reach 56 kbps, the new modems must send more power down the line.
I win, right?
Once upon a time, I was measured as having an IQ over 180. I told the person administering the test (might have been an actual psychologist, might not... it was done through school when that was in vogue) that the result was outright wrong, and happily pointed out how most of the test questions were either tricks of misdirection, or variations on questions I'd already heard. I guess liking puzzles makes one a genius.
He didn't want to hear some kid dispute his vaunted test, so I was pushed to follow advanced courses and held to a standard far beyond my liking. High school was miserable as a result. Now that I'm free from the burden of a single number, I'm also doing okay.
I still enjoy puzzles, and I do pick up on some subjects faster than other people. That makes me different, but certainly no better or worse.
Then as far as I'm concerned, you don't exist, so I want nothing to do with you. I don't want to put effort into writing a book for your enjoyment, because you don't think my effort's worth anything.
In fact everything I've released so far has been released creative-commons.
That is your choice, and in fact it's one I rather like. Yeah, I'm human. I like getting free stuff, too. Some of the stuff I've written that I don't particularly care about (one-off philosophical rants, or abandoned worlds, or even just an interesting character that doesn't fit anywhere else) I've just dropped to public domain. Maybe somebody will care about it someday.
It's the choice that matters. I choose what my writing effort is worth. Sometimes it's worth money, sometimes it's worth the catharsis of writing, and sometimes it's worth a quick strike on the delete key, but it's my choice, not the pirates'.
Or there might be a larger market of people who will pay you for your work. There will certainly be a larger market of people who will see your work.
There might very well be a larger market, but I don't get to choose it. I could also get a larger market seeing my work by hiring trucks to drive down city streets with loudspeakers playing a reading, but that might not actually be what I want. What the fuck gives you the right to decide what happens to my work?
If and only if you can get a publisher to buy it.
Or publish it myself, or hand it to friends and say "give this only to people who'll appreciate it". Again, I can decide where and how my work is distributed, and from that how much risk I must take. I can work with a publisher that will edit my work, likely improving my profit, or I can work with one that will leave my dialect alone, opting for the purity of the art. Piracy takes away that choice.
You realize those people aren't going to be your customers *ever*, right?
I do indeed. My usual response to such inquiries is something to the effect of "thanks for the interest, but I really don't want my work to be distributed like that. Here's a sample of what I'm working on, and if/when it's finished, it'll be available at this store". They aren't my customers, but I'll try to convert them anyway, and sometimes succeed. If not, then I've lost nothing more than if they didn't even ask.
You have no inherent right to have your business model supported by government intervention.
And you have no inherent right to make me write for you for free, with or without government help. I should be the one to choose how I work, and I choose to write stories for a bit of money.
Generally, yes. I've paid for the vast majority of works I've consumed. There are some exceptions where I pay through the magic of statistics (television, radio, and other such ad-supported media).
Of course, there are many ideas for which there is no clear source. The notion is just a part of societal knowledge. I like to think that those have been reimbursed by society as a whole, enough to be fair (though of course some are, and too many aren't). After all, that's the whole point of copyright in the first place: to encourage the production of art, for the purpose of fostering a richer society.
Interestingly enough, I have been exposed to all points regarding the subject, and my opinion is partly as I said before. The "piracy is absolutely not theft" argument is just as much bullshit as the "piracy is absolutely theft" argument.
Yes, theft and copyright infringement are different. One's a civil matter and the other's criminal. One results in the loss of a physical item, and the other results in someone gaining a copy. The implementation details are obviously different What remains the same though is the offense. If you steal $1 from my wallet, I'll have $1 less than I would without your interference. If you copy one of my books rather than buy it, I'll have (let's say) $1 less than I would without your interference. Of course, you may not have bought my book in the first place, and I may have dropped that $1 bill by accident. There's probabilities involved, I know, but that's not the point.
The point is that it's no longer my choice what happens to the book or the bill. I produce something, but I'm not allowed to decide what happens with it. I had a bill in my wallet, but I'm not allowed to choose how I spend it. That's where the analogy to theft comes from: pirates aren't stealing an object. They're forcing their way.
That's always the issue that gets forgotten when someone "debunks" the "stealing is theft" analogy. A big deal is made about how information wants to be free, and how the producers make record profits, and how piracy leads to so much more exposure, but they none of the pro-piracy advocates seem to care that this all happened by the pirates' sheer overwhelming force.
Yes, it's terribly wrong that the Pirate Party can't afford to fight. It's also terribly wrong that producers don't let their work go free once it's passed a certain age, or profitably, or some other nice metric. It's also terribly wrong to force someone else to live by your choices.
I did get a real job. It pays the bills, and occasionally, if I can find time, I still write.
My art doesn't depend on having a profit. My art depends on having the time, ambition, and inspiration to produce it after I come home from my real job.
You can keep calling it "stealing" if you wish, but that talking point has been debunked to death.
Really? Please do show me where it's been so mortally debunked. As a producer with copyright (an author of short scifi stories), I can take my words and ideas, and sell them to people who want to read/hear/otherwise-consume them. A pirate (self-declared or otherwise) can take my story, dump it on The Priate Bay, and suddenly there's a smaller market of people who will pay me for my work.
Without piracy, I have a clear route for making an income from my work. With piracy, I have to hope that my work becomes a loss leader for itself, reaching a wider paying audience through a non-paying medium. Sure, sometimes it will work. I've encountered a few folks who've seen some of my work freely and wanted more. On the other hand, I've also encountered folks who have outright asked me when my latest piece will be on TPB, rather than buying it.
That hurts. I am not a content-producing machine who lives on the happy thoughts of readers and the mental occupation of fans. I am a human, and I need to profit from my work. Piracy removes my income without my choice, forcing me to effectively rely on handouts from those who like my work enough to pay. My art has returned to patronage. Long live the king!
Why do people complain when the government limits the choice of Internet providers, but the pirates removing my ability to choose my own business model is somehow a good thing?
Alright, Since sarcasm, satire, and hyperbole and irony all seem to be lost on you, I'll rephrase using the more common vernacular:
Whoosh.
I used the "dear leader" term to adopt satirically the voice of someone from the "wingnut echo chamber", which I then used to sarcastically disbelieve the OP's plea for sanity. I then hyperbolized the effect of our existing national security policies to illustrate ironically how useless they actually are, and how harmful such over-reactions can be, regardless of any political backing. Finally, the "three shells" comment was in humorous reference to Demolition Man, which depicts a perfectly safe society that is so risk-free it can't even function effectively in a time of minor crisis.
In truth, I think a moderate response is really what we should hope and work for, eventually aiming to relieve the conditions that make people want to commit such atrocities. However, all too often it seems our politicians (from all parties) see tragedy as a career-building opportunity, where they can exploit the public outrage to pass ever-stricter legislation that makes them look good while just wasting time, money, and lives.
There, I've explained the joke. It's somewhat ruined now, but at least the ACs can understand!
Really? It's almost as though that was a part of the desired effect. With just two mere words, the tone of my post goes from simple derision to complete mockery. Why should I stop short of that tantalizing line of satire, when I could take a running start, jump over the line, then strip naked and dance a jig on the other side?
Oh, I get it... you just don't want to see my naked jig. I understand.
Wait a minute...
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying we should consider exceptional events to be exceptional, and not panic over shocking tragedies?
That's not what our Dear Leader says. He says "We can't accept events like this as routine" and promises that he'll try to work through the politics to stop things like this from ever happening again.
Let's not forget another major outlier like this, where a foreign adversary successfully executed an attack in an unexpected manner, using our own infrastructure against us! A brilliant maneuver by the enemy, and thanks to our kneejerk response, we've managed to avoid any recurrences for only a few trillion dollars in cost and a few thousand more American lives lost! With such a clear success rate for a panicked reaction, how can you possibly be advocating moderation?
Obviously, the politicians in charge know that the current public outrage will be the catalyst to move us forward into a safe future, where all risk is eliminated, violence is practically unknown, and environmentally-unfriendly customs have been replaced with three shells.
I personally don't see many felonies, but misdemeanors are commonplace. The most common I see are traffic violations (mostly speeding, failure to signal, and "rolling stops"), but other violations are often so trivial that people don't even realize they're breaking the law. Simple things like having a crack in a window or a garbage can turned over can be against local laws.
So, now walk me through this one, since I'm apparently quite slow ... if I take something which is already being done "on a computer" and "using a network", which specific part of "hand-held computer" and "cellular network" causes this to be an "invention"?
The "making it work" part. After all, anybody can have an idea, but the whole point of a patent is to ensure reimbursement for the person who actually makes the invention work.
We already had desktop computers. We already had some inklings of hand held computers. We could already hook a camera up to a computer and send images over a network.
None of which explain the necessary arrangement that lets a camera fit into a phone form factor. Yes, we had ideas, but ideas are not inventions. Anyone can say "do X with Y", but it's not so easy to actually make it work.
several years before this patent was even applied for we had mechanisms to "allow a computer to transmit the output of a semi-conductor camera over a network"
And currently, we have mechanisms to transmit realistic 3D holograms to the other side of the galaxy. All we need is a Cat6 cable a few thousand lightyears long. Of course, this clearly obviates the novelty of any faster-than-light transmission we ever invent, since we can do it now (though sloppier and messier, and not really at all how it'll be done later).
...And the last I checked "in a smaller box" isn't really sufficient to differentiate yourself as a distinct patent.
Check again. Patentable inventions solve some problem (the "useful" requirement), and space constraints can certainly be a suitable problem.
I'm not going to go through each of the claims on the patent, but I'm not seeing anything in here that sounds like an invention
Likewise, I'm not going to open the book, but I'm not seeing anything in Moby Dick that makes it decent literature.
The claims are the single most important part of the patent. Everything else is just to make the claims clear enough that somebody else can duplicate the invention. Not reading them is tantamount to judging a book by its cover.
Actually reading claim 1, we see a patent for a handheld computer containing a camera, that uses a radio to transmit the pictures. In claim 2, this is specified to be the cellular phone network. Now what's interesting is that the first cell-phone cameras came to market in the summer of 1997. Surely this is prior art, yes? And the whole patent is invalid?
No. The patent was filed in February of 1997, placing it nicely in the territory for a genuine invention. There were some devices in as early as 1995 that might possibly be prior art, but I'm certainly not qualified enough to determine whether they fit the patent claims or not.
do you fix the bug and get sued by wordperfect for not documenting your calls (seriously) or not fix the bug and worry about everyone calling you an insecure (yet massively used) code house.
You document the calls in the first place, as a standard part of making a public API, rather than using inside knowledge to keep wordperfect's development slower and more expensive than your own. Then when you fix the bug later, you stay as true to that documentation as is possible, so there's no indication of ill will in any loss of compatibility.
you win some, you lose some in the software industry
Software development is a business, not a casino. There's enough risk in the market alone without betting on whether a judge will allow shady legal tactics.
It hasn't happened because it doesn't need to yet. I hate being one of those guys who says the terrorists have already won, but the terrorists have already won. An aspect of American daily life is interrupted by a constant reminder of how we pissed off somebody else. Once the privacy advocates fight enough, and enough time has passed to calm the politicians, the ridiculous security theater will relax... then there will be another incident to remind us that we will never be safe, and never really were.
The only way to return to normal convenient-yet-insecure life is to let attacks happen with no reaction, but that goes against human instinct.
Of course, to be going around doing this you'd need to smell of bomb residue and probably be seen on surveillance cameras doing it.
That doesn't matter. What matters is that you can deposit a chemical on a large number of others who have a high probability of going quickly to an airport security check. You never need to go near the sensors yourself.
One easy exploit is to rig a aerosol dispersal into a car's exhaust, then drive through a departures drop-off area a few times. Alternatively, contaminate the air around a rental car return. If the airport is one of those with significant public areas outside the secure area, a purse with an occasionally-puffing atomizer will be practically unnoticeable. Better yet, disguise the purse-riding atomizer as a wallet, and confess to coming to the airport in the middle of a pickpocketing spree. Bonus points if the pickpocketing is also staged for the benefit of cameras.
Taking another easy route, we could assume that contact's necessary to spread the scent to a person. That's also easy enough to accomplish. How many countertops, queue barrier posts, and restroom faucets are in an airport? With a small team of pre-contaminated guests with many complaints and small bladders, a barely-noticeable compound can be spread to hundreds of unsuspecting participants easily.
And with that, I'm probably now on yet another list...
Sorry. A bit of that got lost in revision.
Throwing the exception says "there's a situation that is so unexpected that I don't know how to handle it. Maybe you do." to the calling routine, under the assumption that the caller might know a little bit more about what's going on, and might have a way to work around the situation.
If left uncaught, Java exceptions will propagate all the way back past main() before being handled by the JRE. The JRE prints the whole stack down to where the exception was thrown. Often, that means a user viewing a console gets a nice big list of dozens (if not hundreds) of calls through the stack. This is a "full stack trace", and it's rather hideous.
An exception handler in production code should resolve the exceptional situation as best it can. Anything that can't be handled should be logged as appropriate for the application, with just enough information that a developer can reproduce the error, though not necessarily understand it fully from the log alone. For a database, it might be sufficient to log only the offending statement. For a parser, the file name might be enough. In a big enterprisey application to balance bank accounts, optimize bus routes, and mash potatoes, it would definitely be useful to know whether the "sensor read error" problem was in the weather station polling module or in the blast furnace controller.
Logging every trivial exception with a full stack trace and parameters quickly bloats log files beyond the point of being useful.
Welcome to the Slashdot moderation system. "Insightful" usually just means "complains about things that I don't like".
In my opinion, that depends really on how the rest of the code's written. If the "rerun the command" part is three lines out of fifty (as in the example), just copy/pasting may very well be fine. If the whole function needs to be rerun, recursion may be an option, and likely doesn't even need the infinite-loop check (because how likely is it that a newly-established database connection will time out before it can run a single command?).
My point is that, for some exceptions, simply trying again may be the proper solution. Proper implementation, however, is left as an exercise to the reader.