Another case of a clued-in judge with an appropriate judgment that is easily misunderstood.
The When-U folks should be strung up by their achilles tendons and roasted with blowtorches -- no question about it. But not for popping up ads! They should be consigned to hell for tricking people into installing the software.
What the court actually said is that the guy sending you the page has no say in how you choose to view it. You can read part, or all; re-read part, or block part if you'd like. You can use your own blocker, supply your own CSS, reformat for your Treo or even (hard as it is to imagine someone would want it) pop up different ads!
We should all be relieved that this right was upheld.
The physicist is showing his friend the programmer a thermos.
"You see, you can put a hot drink inside, and then take it with you. It doesn't matter how cold it gets outside; when you pour the drink out it's still hot!"
The programmer is quite impressed.
The physicist continues, "Or you can put a cold drink inside, and then take it with you. It doesn't matter how hot it gets outside; when you pour the drink out it's still cold!"
but there probably will be a few objects that will cost more to buy than copy...
This phenomenon is already here! Only the level of resolution is different. Basically most "luxury" products contain gratuitous details that are hard to copy. Usually this is the ephemeral "brand", or artificial scarcity. But most amusingly to me that's also why luxury goods usually emphasize that they are handmade or contain handmade components, illustrating that via variations or imperfections that a machine would not produce. That's right: imperfect products connote wealth!
Thorstein Veblen wrote about this phenomenon extensively over a century ago. I guess if household manufacturers become commonplace the wealthy will wear either only leather and hand-woven linen or else products made via special, expensive, DRM-controlled programs.
Clearly most of us should be submitting innocuous code to help camouflage the actual malign entries. That will make it harder for the judges to find badness. If you know that all the entries have some badness, then you'll look really hard. If you don't know which ones do, your checking gets worse.
This would make the test more like the real world too.
For years I couldn't understand what the fuss was about...I felt that all I was doing was just re-implementing ideas other people had had years ago and that I'd picked up from reading papers or old implementations. Eventually I figured out that sure, that was what I do, but most people don't read any literature, so struggle to re-invent the wheel (and therefore make the same mistakes). Myself I find new mistakes more interesting.
It's all about attitude. Do you keep learning, or just keep pushing forward. As another poster said: immerse yourself in the domain. It may not be completely true, but there is a lot of truism in the maxim "there's nothing new under the sun." If you understand that, coming up to speed will be easier than if you treat it as tabula rasa (oops, more of that old knowledge: a deal language). The best hackers I've worked with, whether institutionally trained or not, have all been alike in this regard. That's no accident.
Saving lives is not profitable. Viagra and headache medicines are.
Trials on patients with morbid conditions are very difficult. OK: The patient died. Was it related to the medication? They had an underlying condition (and that underlying condition can itself cause all sorts of problems).
If you go for medications that the patient can choose to use, well, the lawyers can still try to come after you for an imaginary problem, but they will have less raw material to dress up and twist around.
I'm forced to give it to a $8/hr customer service person over the phone to get my Cable, Internet, Telephone, Gas, Electricity services, rent a car, get a loan, get a bank account, apply for a job.
For most of those cases you can get away without doing this. When people ask for my SSN I just tell 'em "I'm a foreigner" and they just assume that that means "....and so I don't have one." And since they generally do want to do business with me, they find a way around the problem.
The really really nice thing about this is that the poor clerk taking my order doesn't need to get harshed about SSN politics, or even have to listen to a pointless rant. They just cast about and figure a way around the problem -- perfect! In fact they don't even see it as me causing a problem. It's just some faceless bureaucratic hassle that both of us are dealing with.
(As it turns out I am a foreigner, but telling people that is about as useful as telling 'em "I have brown hair" since most foreigners in the USA for more than a brief holiday end up needing an SSN anyway. But most people don't realise that).
Yea, I was not very clear. I agree with you: I always use Eurostar because it's faster (the planes have to be cheaper to compete). On other legs (e.g. Hannover->Stockholm or, as I said, things like Talinn->Venice) forget the rails.
Your argument is excellent. Pick some complementary data and it still works, which is a good cross-check:
Low density doesn't work for trains: The train used to be the primary transit link in Australia (2.6 people/km^2). Now air is. On the other hand other high-density countries (India: 318 people/km^2) still depend on rail links, although high-speed ones will be very hard to build.
Your distance metric is quite important too: go to any european rail site (bahn,de, sncf.fr, etc) and try to book a long-distance ticket (e.g. Stockholm-Venice, Paris-Prague etc). There are very few and the trip would take a long time. Flying is cheaper and faster overall. Paris/London is the perfect test: right on the cusp of train/flight tradeoff, and in fact you can chose them both; train is more expensive.
Note that this works on smaller scale: New York (10,238 people/km^2) and Chicago (12,747) both support rich (underground) train networks (as do many European cities of course). LA, with only about 3K/km^2 can't (and that is not even as uniformly distributed as New York's, much less Chicago's) cannot. Oh, and Australia with no effective passenger train network? Sydney and Melbourne have good train networks too.
Sorry folks. I miss the trains too, but they don't work.
If you're writing software, worrying about goofy corner cases (VPNing over a neighbor's WLAN) is an excellent and valuable activity. But If you're writing legislation (or regulation in this case), it's generally a total waste of time.
Consider what VOIP 911 (sure to be renamed V911 or I911 or something equally lame) will look like in five years' time:
Standard home DHCP servers (i.e. those in boxes you buy from Fry's) will all issue a location attribute. They may be required to do so by law.
ISPs will be required by law to issue these identifiers as part of a DHCP response to all customers who connect via DSL or dialup (since they will have the standard PSTN ANI info already anyway)
Public WLAN operators will be required to provide this info.
VOIP software will be required to use it for 911
Since most people will get VOIP service from a commercial provider and will use supplier-provided, OS-bundled, or hardware VOIP encoding, this will "just work" (ha ha).
Oh, and in case this wasn't clear from the above:
To make sure this isn't an "unfunded mandate" your provider will be allowed to do "cost recovery" meaning the info will be sold to advertisers and abused.
What stops all this? A real, heretofore unknown high-level security model, that actually says "The email program can access stored email data, preferences, and can talk to the network on this port, to these hosts"...
Unknown? Perhaps to you. Multics had all this and more...back in 1965. In fact it's the direct ancestor of Unix (although they of course share no code).
The mail system (your excerpted example) did not use this privilege model until 1970 though, so you could sorta claim it was unknown until 35 years ago (and the IM support took another four years!).
A lot of web page "designers" I work with get upset when I suggest that readers ("users" they call them) might not want to see a long Flash splash page before getting to the real site. Likewise that users might not want to resize their window just to see things "just right." And of course ads might be blocked or even (gasp) all flash content.
I use custom CSS to control how web sites are displayed in my browser. Some sites don't look quite like the author might have intended (e.g. I make the text larger and substitute fonts). And yes I block flash and most ads. Why not? The page is sent to me; it's my choice how I chose to view it. I often don't even read every word of TFA before I go onto something else! I sometimes even skip around in a hardcopy book. Shocking!
These guys need to be whacked with the clue stick, and locked in a closet with those morons who object to so-called "deep linking."
I travel with a laptop, but never take it out of the house (or hotel room) where I'm staying (I do have a security cable for it). As long as I unload the pix from my camera every evening, and recharge it for that matter, I've hardly ever filled up a card. I mean really, I can put about 60 shots on my camera, and while I'm out and about I like to live, rather than be continuously clicking away.
So is there really a serious need for a product like this? Wouldn't the cost be better spent on a larger card for the camera?
...having stood in the correct corner of the house where my Verizon service gets two bars (unlike the no bars I get in the rest of the house).
Ever wonder why you can have a lousy connection with many bars showing? On most phones the bars reflect signal strength, not s/n ratio. Meaning your connection sucks regardless (and a call will "suck" more power too in that situation, both in the RF stage and (especially in a CDMA system) in the CPU).
BTW a CDMA system can theoretically withstand this situation better than a TDMA system like GSM can but I personally have never seen experimental verification of same, Qualcomm's aggressive marketing notwithstanding.
And I've been a Verizon customer for about 10 years, because of their position as "the provider that sucks the least" but I've recently started looking around to bail.
A Slidell family experiencing car trouble was surprised last Wednesday after finding thousands of dollars worth of cocaine wrapped around the vehicle's gas tank, authorities said.
Actually quite a number of older planes are in service in third-world countries (less soo for 747s for reasons stated in other posts). I've flown some rather terrifying trips on aging planes in africa (and standing-room-only DC-6 flights in India in the 1970s still give me goosebumps, even though at the time I was far too stupid to appreciate the danger).
EmbeddedJanitor said, "...Too often, the only way to plug in to the corporate ladder means selling out to a life of brown-nosing and playing the game..." and more disturbingly, "As a techie not interested in the corporate power chain, but rather in shipping good product and making a real profit, I find it hard to get a reasonable audience..."
to which
shirai insightfully responded, "Just as you don't expect the "corporate power chain" to understand the tech stuff, you probably don't understand all the management stuff your audience does..." and made some really useful suggestions along this line.
If I may expand: do you really believe your management doesn't want to ship the hightest-quality, profitable product too? Don't forget that crucially, what management has to work with is uncertain information: what's going on in the marketplace, in the customer's mind, and in the company's development process.
Every product ships with bugs, whether it's Word, Firefox, or the Swanson's Pumpkin Kiev. They must not be showstoppers of course, but the product must ship or the customers can never benefit from it! Your management needs to give you clear information about what's needed, and you need to make sure (as shirai mentioned) that they have the info they need to make good and effective decisions.
And rarely does the CEO need to know the precise number of cycles consumed in a that loop; he or she needs to understand if the program will be unusably slow on the machines most of your customers will be using (and whether it's fixable or not).
Indeed, RMS ceded control, but remember that control of GCC essentially had to be yanked away and placed into a steering committee
No matter who you are, these transitions are never easy. Linus has set Linux up better than most projects, but still there is by design one central kernel (a very good design by the way, so far, for now, and for quite a while to come).
Slashdot Mirror
Gonzales....he'll go well with Chief Justice John Ashcroft.
Another case of a clued-in judge with an appropriate judgment that is easily misunderstood.
The When-U folks should be strung up by their achilles tendons and roasted with blowtorches -- no question about it. But not for popping up ads! They should be consigned to hell for tricking people into installing the software.
What the court actually said is that the guy sending you the page has no say in how you choose to view it. You can read part, or all; re-read part, or block part if you'd like. You can use your own blocker, supply your own CSS, reformat for your Treo or even (hard as it is to imagine someone would want it) pop up different ads!
We should all be relieved that this right was upheld.
The physicist is showing his friend the programmer a thermos.
"You see, you can put a hot drink inside, and then take it with you. It doesn't matter how cold it gets outside; when you pour the drink out it's still hot!"
The programmer is quite impressed.
The physicist continues, "Or you can put a cold drink inside, and then take it with you. It doesn't matter how hot it gets outside; when you pour the drink out it's still cold!"
Now the programmer is really dumbfounded.
He asks, "But how does it know?"
Thorstein Veblen wrote about this phenomenon extensively over a century ago. I guess if household manufacturers become commonplace the wealthy will wear either only leather and hand-woven linen or else products made via special, expensive, DRM-controlled programs.
You can set your standard timezone and then make appointments at the time "scheduled" which it gets right.
Clearly most of us should be submitting innocuous code to help camouflage the actual malign entries. That will make it harder for the judges to find badness. If you know that all the entries have some badness, then you'll look really hard. If you don't know which ones do, your checking gets worse.
This would make the test more like the real world too.
For years I couldn't understand what the fuss was about...I felt that all I was doing was just re-implementing ideas other people had had years ago and that I'd picked up from reading papers or old implementations. Eventually I figured out that sure, that was what I do, but most people don't read any literature, so struggle to re-invent the wheel (and therefore make the same mistakes). Myself I find new mistakes more interesting.
It's all about attitude. Do you keep learning, or just keep pushing forward. As another poster said: immerse yourself in the domain. It may not be completely true, but there is a lot of truism in the maxim "there's nothing new under the sun." If you understand that, coming up to speed will be easier than if you treat it as tabula rasa (oops, more of that old knowledge: a deal language). The best hackers I've worked with, whether institutionally trained or not, have all been alike in this regard. That's no accident.
If you go for medications that the patient can choose to use, well, the lawyers can still try to come after you for an imaginary problem, but they will have less raw material to dress up and twist around.
The really really nice thing about this is that the poor clerk taking my order doesn't need to get harshed about SSN politics, or even have to listen to a pointless rant. They just cast about and figure a way around the problem -- perfect! In fact they don't even see it as me causing a problem. It's just some faceless bureaucratic hassle that both of us are dealing with.
(As it turns out I am a foreigner, but telling people that is about as useful as telling 'em "I have brown hair" since most foreigners in the USA for more than a brief holiday end up needing an SSN anyway. But most people don't realise that).
Yea, I was not very clear. I agree with you: I always use Eurostar because it's faster (the planes have to be cheaper to compete). On other legs (e.g. Hannover->Stockholm or, as I said, things like Talinn->Venice) forget the rails.
Uh, oh. Data. The death of discussion on /.
Your argument is excellent. Pick some complementary data and it still works, which is a good cross-check:
Low density doesn't work for trains: The train used to be the primary transit link in Australia (2.6 people/km^2). Now air is. On the other hand other high-density countries (India: 318 people/km^2) still depend on rail links, although high-speed ones will be very hard to build.
Your distance metric is quite important too: go to any european rail site (bahn,de, sncf.fr, etc) and try to book a long-distance ticket (e.g. Stockholm-Venice, Paris-Prague etc). There are very few and the trip would take a long time. Flying is cheaper and faster overall. Paris/London is the perfect test: right on the cusp of train/flight tradeoff, and in fact you can chose them both; train is more expensive.
Note that this works on smaller scale: New York (10,238 people/km^2) and Chicago (12,747) both support rich (underground) train networks (as do many European cities of course). LA, with only about 3K/km^2 can't (and that is not even as uniformly distributed as New York's, much less Chicago's) cannot. Oh, and Australia with no effective passenger train network? Sydney and Melbourne have good train networks too.
Sorry folks. I miss the trains too, but they don't work.
Consider what VOIP 911 (sure to be renamed V911 or I911 or something equally lame) will look like in five years' time:
- Standard home DHCP servers (i.e. those in boxes you buy from Fry's) will all issue a location attribute. They may be required to do so by law.
- ISPs will be required by law to issue these identifiers as part of a DHCP response to all customers who connect via DSL or dialup (since they will have the standard PSTN ANI info already anyway)
- Public WLAN operators will be required to provide this info.
- VOIP software will be required to use it for 911
Since most people will get VOIP service from a commercial provider and will use supplier-provided, OS-bundled, or hardware VOIP encoding, this will "just work" (ha ha).Oh, and in case this wasn't clear from the above:
The mail system (your excerpted example) did not use this privilege model until 1970 though, so you could sorta claim it was unknown until 35 years ago (and the IM support took another four years!).
Otherwise your points are legit.
This is more than just an ad issue.
A lot of web page "designers" I work with get upset when I suggest that readers ("users" they call them) might not want to see a long Flash splash page before getting to the real site. Likewise that users might not want to resize their window just to see things "just right." And of course ads might be blocked or even (gasp) all flash content.
I use custom CSS to control how web sites are displayed in my browser. Some sites don't look quite like the author might have intended (e.g. I make the text larger and substitute fonts). And yes I block flash and most ads. Why not? The page is sent to me; it's my choice how I chose to view it. I often don't even read every word of TFA before I go onto something else! I sometimes even skip around in a hardcopy book. Shocking!
These guys need to be whacked with the clue stick, and locked in a closet with those morons who object to so-called "deep linking."
I travel with a laptop, but never take it out of the house (or hotel room) where I'm staying (I do have a security cable for it). As long as I unload the pix from my camera every evening, and recharge it for that matter, I've hardly ever filled up a card. I mean really, I can put about 60 shots on my camera, and while I'm out and about I like to live, rather than be continuously clicking away.
So is there really a serious need for a product like this? Wouldn't the cost be better spent on a larger card for the camera?
BTW a CDMA system can theoretically withstand this situation better than a TDMA system like GSM can but I personally have never seen experimental verification of same, Qualcomm's aggressive marketing notwithstanding.
And I've been a Verizon customer for about 10 years, because of their position as "the provider that sucks the least" but I've recently started looking around to bail.
Also that the huge demand for Y2K development drove basically bootstrapped the Indian outsourcing industry.
Actually quite a number of older planes are in service in third-world countries (less soo for 747s for reasons stated in other posts). I've flown some rather terrifying trips on aging planes in africa (and standing-room-only DC-6 flights in India in the 1970s still give me goosebumps, even though at the time I was far too stupid to appreciate the danger).
Dude, please pledge to my fund for not walking to the moon and back!
What, is that a trick question? You plug it in first dummy!
--
(Not a rocket scientist, but an electrical engineer).
Every product ships with bugs, whether it's Word, Firefox, or the Swanson's Pumpkin Kiev. They must not be showstoppers of course, but the product must ship or the customers can never benefit from it! Your management needs to give you clear information about what's needed, and you need to make sure (as shirai mentioned) that they have the info they need to make good and effective decisions.
And rarely does the CEO need to know the precise number of cycles consumed in a that loop; he or she needs to understand if the program will be unusably slow on the machines most of your customers will be using (and whether it's fixable or not).
Indeed, RMS ceded control, but remember that control of GCC essentially had to be yanked away and placed into a steering committee
No matter who you are, these transitions are never easy. Linus has set Linux up better than most projects, but still there is by design one central kernel (a very good design by the way, so far, for now, and for quite a while to come).
What if the terrorists get it? Or the Tourists? This could become a Weapon of Mass Suction! Better keep this out of the hands of furriners!