The Standard is the rag that used Richard Mellon Scaife's money to fund largely false inquiries and to pay off sources to produce such journalistic rot as Troopergate and to further the "Vince Foster murdered" theory. These people are about as low as you can get while still having opposable thumbs.
More people were murdered by their own communistic governments than by any wars or famines in the last century.
That would be true only if you disregarded all the various violent external U.S. actions in South America, Africa, and Asia as well as those of the totalitarian regimes the U.S. has set up throughout Latin and South America. Sure, the U.S. tends to avoid killing its own citizens, but our leaders seem to have no qualms about supporting mass murder in other countries.
Communist governments killed 100 million people. See the Black Book of Communism. Give me a break. It's amazing there are still people defending communism after the experience of the twentieth century.
Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice
ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Task Force on Software Engineering Ethics and Professional Practices
Short Version
PREAMBLE
The short version of the code summarizes aspirations at a high level of the abstraction; the clauses that are included in the full version give examples and details of how these aspirations change the way we act as software engineering professionals. Without the aspirations, the details can become legalistic and tedious; without the details, the aspirations can become high sounding but empty; together, the aspirations and the details form a cohesive code.
Software engineers shall commit themselves to making the analysis, specification, design, development, testing and maintenance of software a beneficial and respected profession. In accordance with their commitment to the health, safety and welfare of the public, software engineers shall adhere to the following Eight Principles:
1. PUBLIC - Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest.
2. CLIENT AND EMPLOYER - Software engineers shall act in a manner that is in the best interests of their client and employer consistent with the public interest.
3. PRODUCT - Software engineers shall ensure that their products and related modifications meet the highest professional standards possible.
4. JUDGMENT - Software engineers shall maintain integrity and independence in their professional judgment.
5. MANAGEMENT - Software engineering managers and leaders shall subscribe to and promote an ethical approach to the management of software development and maintenance.
6. PROFESSION - Software engineers shall advance the integrity and reputation of the profession consistent with the public interest.
7. COLLEAGUES - Software engineers shall be fair to and supportive of their colleagues.
8. SELF - Software engineers shall participate in lifelong learning regarding the practice of their profession and shall promote an ethical approach to the practice of the profession.
When an executive deliberately manipulates earnings statements to drive the price of a stock up so he can sell his stock at a higher price, he should be held fiscally and legally responsible.
They can be, its called peircing the corporate veil. If you don't follow certain guidelines in running a corporation, the law can and will come after individuals.
Piercing the corporate veil means going after the shareholders' assets. It is not necessary to pierce the veil to sue or indict an officer of a corporation. There is no shield from liability for an officer's actions.
Meanwhile, individuals in the corporation are shielded from personal responsibility for the corporation's actions.
No, there is no shield for personal responsibility. For instance, in the recent Enron case, "Arthur Anderson" the business was charged with breaking the law as well as the head of their Houston office. There is not now nor has there ever been any shield for criminal or civil liability for a corporation's employees or officers.
It is true that the shareholders' liability is limited to the amount they invest in the corporation, but this has nothing to do with the concept of corporate personhood.
There are many dangers that radiation causes, but the one that concerns most people is cancer. What is the mechanism for radiation causing cancer? An ionizing radiation particle strikes the DNA inside the nucleus of a cell, causing a mutation that causes the cell to go into a state of uncontrolled cell reproduction. It just takes one initial cell to mutate to make a tumor.
It's not just the intensity of the electromagnetic radiation. Cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation. Each photon has much less energy than the UV, X-ray, and gamma ray photons that can cause cancer.
Let me put this in perspective for you. Research with animal clones has shown them to be less hardy, prone to obsedity and other syndromes, and overall less healthy and shorter-lived.
This is true, but lawmakers seem intent on banning cloning permanently, even if the problems with it are solved. Many are even against therapeutic cloning, which doesn't involve creating a new person at all, just cell cultures.
How would _you_ like to be a clone? Imagine growing up knowing, or finding out later, that you're a replicant.
I've read about adopted children who find out later in life that they are twins. Mostly they seem intent on finding their twin. I haven't heard about it being traumatic.
And rightly so! Ever since the settling of the New World we have experienced racial/ethnic/religious oppression, corporate power-mongers using their money and influence to squash our rights and freedoms, magic bullet theories, the use of fear to convince us to sign our freedoms away (eg. 09/11 "terrorism", crime) among other things. All of them committed by those in power.
It all boils down to whether you trust them to responsibly use the power they have in cases like this.
Well, do you?
STUDY THE PAST
Study the past, indeed! From your post, you would think that all this began with "the settling of the New World"! ROTFL! Try reading any history about any part of the world at any time!
When we consider whether we allow the police to have guns, we don't ask whether we can always trust them to use their guns wisely. Of course we can't. Instead, we ask what are the advantages of the police having guns versus their not having guns and what procedures we can have in place that will minimise the abuses.
We don't ban police from interrogating suspects even though sometimes they abuse their power in those interrogations. We do prevent them from torturing suspects, and we also will exclude certain evidence if police disregard the rights of suspects. Some jurisdictions also videotape all (custodial) interrogations of serious crimes, an excellent practice, which should be required.
But, notice, we do not ban interrogations. Nor do we say, we trust police to do the right thing always. The very foundations of our government are based on accountability to the people and checks and balances, not on trusting authorities to always do the right thing. Try reading The Federalist Papers some time instead of watching Oliver Stone movies.
Of all technologies, this one of having computers analyzing video surveillance cameras in public places, seems amazing innocuous. I can hardly imagine anything less threatening to me.
Why on the internet? Even airplane black boxes don't appear to be hooked up for communication of any kind, otherwise people wouldn't be so concerned with finding them after a crash.
There is usually fewer than one fatal airliner crash in the country per year, and hardly any others require analysis of the black box data.
By contrast, there are tens of thousands of fatal car accidents per year, and hundreds of thousands of other accidents--the article said 6,000 per day.
These boxes are only designed to hold a few seconds worth of data and the data is only saved and extracted after a crash. They don't keep your whole driving history and don't transmit it. I'm just astounded at the level of paranoia on Slashdot. When you have this kind of hysterical reaction to imagined problems, it undermines your credibility for real threats to personal privacy.
Telcos can barely keep up with the volume of requests by Feds wanting to read your email.
No, they still need a judge to issue a warrant in order to read your e-mail. The article is about things that do not need a warrant, which includes who is sending you mail and who you are sending mail.
The telephone companies and the post office have been giving out this information for decades without a warrant.
With CDs, this isn't really a significant source of income for most musicians. They tend to make most of their money from touring. Movies tend to make most of their money from theatres and selling to video stores (who then rent).
Do you have a source for this? Everything I've read says that most tours lose money.
Perhaps Slashdot might considering having some kind--any kind--of editorial process. At the minimum, have the article proofread by one other person before it gets posted.
The problem is, the internet isn't supposed to *BE* drivel! The internet is (was?) a beautiful thing, and the commercialization is turning much of it into drivel. You can't say the same thing about TV, really. TV was not created in universities, fueled by academic thoughts and humor, and later "corrupted."
You know, there's more academic content than ever before. If you don't like commercial content, don't visit the commercial sites.
They want the PIM features of their EMail-Client to work independently from the rest of it? Um, how about using a different application for different tasks?
The E-mail client will have the most interaction with the Address book/PIM features, so it makes sense to have the E-mail client be the "host" application of the PIM. The way Windows software is written, with DLL-based components, there's not much distinction between having a separate application and just being a component of the E-mail client.
Just a few weeks ago, I spent hours cleaning out my wife's Outlook Contact List, so I have a few ideas.
(1) Keep track of when each address was added to the address book. It was hard to tell which of a person's many addresses was current.
(2) Let there be a way of marking an address as inactive. Yes, you can delete an address, but then later it may be added in again (automatically or manually).
(3) A richer data model for addresses and a user interface to match.
Right now, you can have only 3 e-mail addresses per contact. Not adequate. You need an unlimited number. Also, you should be able to share addresses (e-mail and otherwise) between people. John Smith and Jane Smith have different business phones and business e-mail addresses, but have the same home phone and address (and then again, have separate cell phone numbers.) I shouldn't have to update their home addresses separately. (Of course, it should keep a history of their past addresses, not just delete them.) There should be an easy way to tell the PIM that two contacts are really the same person and should be merged.
If I remember right a group of video pirates were busted here not too long ago for copying DVD's. What I heard about that case is that they were copying the entire DVD bit-for-bit whether it employed CSS or not. The copied DVD's were still encoded using CSS. So what possible use is it as a copy control scheme? None of course, but its very useful for controlling which people get to watch the DVD.
You need special CD-pressing machines to copy the CSS protection bits. If you have the same machines that the studios use to make CDs, yes you can copy CSS-protected discs, but not with normal computer DVD burners.
Region coding is a separate issue from CSS. Part of the reason for region coding is so that DVDs that are released for regions that are notorious for pirating will not get back to regions that have more respect for copyright.
The other reason for region coding is so that they can charge different prices in different regions. Although you may think that is a bad thing, not having it could mean that most people pay higher prices for DVDs, although rich countries like the U.S. would pay lower prices.
That's because, as soon as you publish the encrypted version of your file, your "one-time-pad" decryption key must be kept physically secure. And if you have to do that, you might as well have just kept the unencrypted version of your file physically secure in the first place.
No, it is conceivable, because you may be able distribute the keys in a way that is more secure, but less timely than the message. The obvious example is a ship out on the ocean. If you sent them out with a CD-ROM filled with highly random data, you could communicate with them over the radio and still be secure.
Instead of ICANN, I would suggest contacting your State Attorney General's office for deceptive trade practices, or the Postmaster General for mail fraud. ICANN can't prosecute these scumbags the way they should be.
Speaking of fans, can some hardware person explain to me why circuit boards aren't always mounted vertically? Wouldn't it be better for airlow? The way systems are put together now, either the mother board is horizontal or the slots are horizontal. Why?
Admittedly, the way expansion boards are made today, it would mean that connectors would go on the top or botttom of a system instead of the side (back), but would that be so bad? Also, I don't see why you couldn't put external connectors for an expansion board opposite the edge connector, so it would end up on the side of the system.
Is there a good reason or is this just one of those historical mistakes?
if governments would listen to scientists who are interested in preserving the human race, instead of businesses that are interested in enslaving it.
Yeah, that was the promise at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, that Science, with new improved Central Planning would rid of us of all this chaos and exploitation. Anybody remember how that turned out?
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
Why is the lack of security in SOAP not a SOAP security problem? Are you saying that security is outside SOAP's scope? That doesn't sound right to me. Surely security should be one of the prime concerns of any protocol.
No, it's been a major problem on the Internet that each protocol has had to develop its own security. Notice that editors such as vi and Emacs do not have their own security defined, they depend on the operating system to enforce security.
Similarly, the CGI specification also doesn't have anything about security. It does have provisions for passing along the authentication method and identity to the CGI program, but there's nothing in it about authorization or specifying how the authentication is to be done.
Notice that this has never been considered to be a problem. Using SOAP over HTTP has no more or less security problems than writing a CGI script. Yes, if you screw up, there are problems, same with CGI. Yes, you can modify databases. Same with CGI.
Actually, I'll just quote Linus: " In my opinion, shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software (no sources) with the worst of free software (no finishing touches). I simply do not believe in the shareware market at all."
That's fine. Much shareware is crap. If it is, don't use it. What this article is about is people who are using the shareware yet still don't pay for it. That's different.
One example of great shareware is WinZip. It's very easy to use, with more features than one would expect: I love that I can right-click on a file or directory and choose Zip and Email as one step.
It has a very reasonable nagging start-up screen. It was very easy to register it.
Any of those issues are more important to me than SPAM. For your information, despite decades of debate over drilling in ANWAR, it still hasn't happened. (We won't even bring up that Alaskans, the constituents most affected by drilling in ANWAR, are more for it than lower-48 types.) How does that fit in with your theory that "What laws the congress considers and passes are controlled by campaign contributions"?
I agree that the public becoming active and writing our government representatives is a great idea and will hopefully have some effect. However it will be hard to overcome the effect of hundreds of thousands of dollars that our government representatives get from special interest groups such as the entertainment industry.
Yes, campaign contributions do have some influence. That does not mean you don't have influence. Believe it or not, big business does not get everything they want. We, unlike Canada, do not pay a copyright tax on blank CD-Rs. We do not pay a copyright tax on blank videocassettes, despite years of lobbying from Hollywood.
Britain had laws against copy-protection circumvention devices years before the DMCA (http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/Ukpga_198800 48_en_21.htm#mdiv296). This is true even though Hollywood cannot give hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to British politicians.
So, stop whining and let your representatives know how you feel. There was a story on Slashdot a few months ago about how few comments the Copyright Office received on a particular issue. The truth is few people care enough to write.
Our representatives will likely continue to represent those who give them the most money which they can then use to get reelected. Why they just don't try to get elected based on doing what their constituents want I do not know. I guess all we can do is write our reps and vote accordingly.
Even if there were no campaign contributions, politicians would often vote the opposite on an issue to the way majority of their constituents felt. Why? Because on many, many issues, those who feel strongly enough to write their Congressman, or to vote for someone because of that issue are in the minority. Very few people will vote against their Congressman because of his vote on some obscure amendment to hundreds of bills voted on. They probably don't know that it means milk will be an extra nickel a gallon. Even if they did, they probably have other issues more important to them.
So who is going to care? The dairy producers who get the extra nickel.
It's that way on many issues, maybe most. It's not just because of large campaign contributions, it's inherent in democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that was the American Spectator.
Hint: Compare "a few thousandths of a part per trillion" to "a few thousand parts per trillion".
Communist governments killed 100 million people. See the Black Book of Communism. Give me a break. It's amazing there are still people defending communism after the experience of the twentieth century.
Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice
ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Task Force on Software Engineering Ethics and Professional Practices
Short Version
PREAMBLE
The short version of the code summarizes aspirations at a high level of the abstraction; the clauses that are included in the full version give examples and details of how these aspirations change the way we act as software engineering professionals. Without the aspirations, the details can become legalistic and tedious; without the details, the aspirations can become high sounding but empty; together, the aspirations and the details form a cohesive code.
Software engineers shall commit themselves to making the analysis, specification, design, development, testing and maintenance of software a beneficial and respected profession. In accordance with their commitment to the health, safety and welfare of the public, software engineers shall adhere to the following Eight Principles:
1. PUBLIC - Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest.
2. CLIENT AND EMPLOYER - Software engineers shall act in a manner that is in the best interests of their client and employer consistent with the public interest.
3. PRODUCT - Software engineers shall ensure that their products and related modifications meet the highest professional standards possible.
4. JUDGMENT - Software engineers shall maintain integrity and independence in their professional judgment.
5. MANAGEMENT - Software engineering managers and leaders shall subscribe to and promote an ethical approach to the management of software development and maintenance.
6. PROFESSION - Software engineers shall advance the integrity and reputation of the profession consistent with the public interest.
7. COLLEAGUES - Software engineers shall be fair to and supportive of their colleagues.
8. SELF - Software engineers shall participate in lifelong learning regarding the practice of their profession and shall promote an ethical approach to the practice of the profession.
Piercing the corporate veil means going after the shareholders' assets. It is not necessary to pierce the veil to sue or indict an officer of a corporation. There is no shield from liability for an officer's actions.
No, there is no shield for personal responsibility. For instance, in the recent Enron case, "Arthur Anderson" the business was charged with breaking the law as well as the head of their Houston office. There is not now nor has there ever been any shield for criminal or civil liability for a corporation's employees or officers.
It is true that the shareholders' liability is limited to the amount they invest in the corporation, but this has nothing to do with the concept of corporate personhood.
It's not just the intensity of the electromagnetic radiation. Cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation. Each photon has much less energy than the UV, X-ray, and gamma ray photons that can cause cancer.
This is true, but lawmakers seem intent on banning cloning permanently, even if the problems with it are solved. Many are even against therapeutic cloning, which doesn't involve creating a new person at all, just cell cultures.
I've read about adopted children who find out later in life that they are twins. Mostly they seem intent on finding their twin. I haven't heard about it being traumatic.
Study the past, indeed! From your post, you would think that all this began with "the settling of the New World"! ROTFL! Try reading any history about any part of the world at any time!
When we consider whether we allow the police to have guns, we don't ask whether we can always trust them to use their guns wisely. Of course we can't. Instead, we ask what are the advantages of the police having guns versus their not having guns and what procedures we can have in place that will minimise the abuses.
We don't ban police from interrogating suspects even though sometimes they abuse their power in those interrogations. We do prevent them from torturing suspects, and we also will exclude certain evidence if police disregard the rights of suspects. Some jurisdictions also videotape all (custodial) interrogations of serious crimes, an excellent practice, which should be required.
But, notice, we do not ban interrogations. Nor do we say, we trust police to do the right thing always. The very foundations of our government are based on accountability to the people and checks and balances, not on trusting authorities to always do the right thing. Try reading The Federalist Papers some time instead of watching Oliver Stone movies.
Of all technologies, this one of having computers analyzing video surveillance cameras in public places, seems amazing innocuous. I can hardly imagine anything less threatening to me.
I don't have a transcript of this interview, but he has done some interviews in the past.
There is usually fewer than one fatal airliner crash in the country per year, and hardly any others require analysis of the black box data.
By contrast, there are tens of thousands of fatal car accidents per year, and hundreds of thousands of other accidents--the article said 6,000 per day.
These boxes are only designed to hold a few seconds worth of data and the data is only saved and extracted after a crash. They don't keep your whole driving history and don't transmit it. I'm just astounded at the level of paranoia on Slashdot. When you have this kind of hysterical reaction to imagined problems, it undermines your credibility for real threats to personal privacy.
No, they still need a judge to issue a warrant in order to read your e-mail. The article is about things that do not need a warrant, which includes who is sending you mail and who you are sending mail.
The telephone companies and the post office have been giving out this information for decades without a warrant.
Do you have a source for this? Everything I've read says that most tours lose money.
Perhaps Slashdot might considering having some kind--any kind--of editorial process. At the minimum, have the article proofread by one other person before it gets posted.
You know, there's more academic content than ever before. If you don't like commercial content, don't visit the commercial sites.
The E-mail client will have the most interaction with the Address book/PIM features, so it makes sense to have the E-mail client be the "host" application of the PIM. The way Windows software is written, with DLL-based components, there's not much distinction between having a separate application and just being a component of the E-mail client.
Just a few weeks ago, I spent hours cleaning out my wife's Outlook Contact List, so I have a few ideas.
(1) Keep track of when each address was added to the address book. It was hard to tell which of a person's many addresses was current.
(2) Let there be a way of marking an address as inactive. Yes, you can delete an address, but then later it may be added in again (automatically or manually).
(3) A richer data model for addresses and a user interface to match.
Right now, you can have only 3 e-mail addresses per contact. Not adequate. You need an unlimited number. Also, you should be able to share addresses (e-mail and otherwise) between people. John Smith and Jane Smith have different business phones and business e-mail addresses, but have the same home phone and address (and then again, have separate cell phone numbers.) I shouldn't have to update their home addresses separately. (Of course, it should keep a history of their past addresses, not just delete them.) There should be an easy way to tell the PIM that two contacts are really the same person and should be merged.
You need special CD-pressing machines to copy the CSS protection bits. If you have the same machines that the studios use to make CDs, yes you can copy CSS-protected discs, but not with normal computer DVD burners.
Region coding is a separate issue from CSS. Part of the reason for region coding is so that DVDs that are released for regions that are notorious for pirating will not get back to regions that have more respect for copyright.
The other reason for region coding is so that they can charge different prices in different regions. Although you may think that is a bad thing, not having it could mean that most people pay higher prices for DVDs, although rich countries like the U.S. would pay lower prices.
No, it is conceivable, because you may be able distribute the keys in a way that is more secure, but less timely than the message. The obvious example is a ship out on the ocean. If you sent them out with a CD-ROM filled with highly random data, you could communicate with them over the radio and still be secure.
Excellent idea. If you personally have received one of these cards, report it to http://www.usps.com/postalinspectors/fraud/MailFr
If you have already paid this, you could complain at the FTC, too.
Admittedly, the way expansion boards are made today, it would mean that connectors would go on the top or botttom of a system instead of the side (back), but would that be so bad? Also, I don't see why you couldn't put external connectors for an expansion board opposite the edge connector, so it would end up on the side of the system.
Is there a good reason or is this just one of those historical mistakes?
Yeah, that was the promise at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, that Science, with new improved Central Planning would rid of us of all this chaos and exploitation. Anybody remember how that turned out?
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
No, it's been a major problem on the Internet that each protocol has had to develop its own security. Notice that editors such as vi and Emacs do not have their own security defined, they depend on the operating system to enforce security.
Similarly, the CGI specification also doesn't have anything about security. It does have provisions for passing along the authentication method and identity to the CGI program, but there's nothing in it about authorization or specifying how the authentication is to be done.
Notice that this has never been considered to be a problem. Using SOAP over HTTP has no more or less security problems than writing a CGI script. Yes, if you screw up, there are problems, same with CGI. Yes, you can modify databases. Same with CGI.
That's fine. Much shareware is crap. If it is, don't use it. What this article is about is people who are using the shareware yet still don't pay for it. That's different.
One example of great shareware is WinZip. It's very easy to use, with more features than one would expect: I love that I can right-click on a file or directory and choose Zip and Email as one step.
It has a very reasonable nagging start-up screen. It was very easy to register it.
Ummm... SPAM is the most important issue? Yeah, to Slashdot geeks. Talk about limited perspective.
Any of those issues are more important to me than SPAM. For your information, despite decades of debate over drilling in ANWAR, it still hasn't happened. (We won't even bring up that Alaskans, the constituents most affected by drilling in ANWAR, are more for it than lower-48 types.) How does that fit in with your theory that "What laws the congress considers and passes are controlled by campaign contributions"?
Yes, campaign contributions do have some influence. That does not mean you don't have influence. Believe it or not, big business does not get everything they want. We, unlike Canada, do not pay a copyright tax on blank CD-Rs. We do not pay a copyright tax on blank videocassettes, despite years of lobbying from Hollywood.
Britain had laws against copy-protection circumvention devices years before the DMCA (http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/Ukpga_198800 48_en_21.htm#mdiv296). This is true even though Hollywood cannot give hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to British politicians.
So, stop whining and let your representatives know how you feel. There was a story on Slashdot a few months ago about how few comments the Copyright Office received on a particular issue. The truth is few people care enough to write.
Even if there were no campaign contributions, politicians would often vote the opposite on an issue to the way majority of their constituents felt. Why? Because on many, many issues, those who feel strongly enough to write their Congressman, or to vote for someone because of that issue are in the minority. Very few people will vote against their Congressman because of his vote on some obscure amendment to hundreds of bills voted on. They probably don't know that it means milk will be an extra nickel a gallon. Even if they did, they probably have other issues more important to them.
So who is going to care? The dairy producers who get the extra nickel.
It's that way on many issues, maybe most. It's not just because of large campaign contributions, it's inherent in democracy.