It's not about creating an atmosphere of 'everything must be 100% safe'..that's exactly want a bad management would like to be able to tell people (and somebody does at times)
People with a good enough education (not necessarily engineers) do know that it is not possible to say that a _future_ event (or sequence of events) will happen exactly like it _was_ predicted with a 100% confidence. One must always consider hidden variables and illusions , but given that hidden variables aren't foreseeable by definition (they are not manifest) one must work at dispelling illusion of total control and overconfidence; expecially when there are human lifes at stake and in conditions (space) in which the most apparently ridicolous event (foam detachment) could cause hardly predictable consequences.
The illusion was that, given that (afaik) there were records of foam detachments in previous Shuttle missions and records of minor and inconsequential damages in heat shielding, the foam problem was de-facto ruled as not-a-problem or a minor one !
But because of the records we later discovered that foam problem wasn't an hidden variable, therefore the human error (of considering foam a minor issue) isn't excusable in this occasion.
In my experience engineers are the least likely people to overlook apparently inconsequential problems when they have hints or evidence of problems ; but if you keep the absurd requirement of 100% failsafe equipement, they're obviously going to never approve anything, expecially when they know blame will be shifted on them. Add the second stress factor of working under a budget, knowing that you'll not be listened to if the problem you spotted is going to cause a budget rescheduling.
On a tangent: at least at NASA they did some record keeping and part of the problem was discovered quickly. Imagine doing that in a Enron like company.
Maybe because there is a million McDonald-didnt-want-em-learn-C++-in-2-weeks programmers and only one hundred thousand programmers with more then x thousand hours programming experience ? You know they shouldn't write "will code for food" on their signs, but rather "will rejoin cooking workforce"
On a tangent: the market being driven by pointy haired bosses doesn't help, either.
So we have (1) Collective Work which includes anthologies and encyclopedias and (2) Compilations which are definied in a way that you could take ANYTHING into a compilation, as long as you can demostrate it constitutes an "original work of authorship". Who has the burden of proof of demostrating originality, and what does "original" and "work of authorship" mean exactly ?
About (5) Database we have this definition "collection of a large number of discrete items of information" with noticeable exceptions: an anthology or encyclopedia or collective work or a routing table or a domain name registrar database are NOT databases, with an exception within exception that IF a domain registrar database is 1. maintained accurate and up-to-date 2. and accessible in real time to public without restrictions (which means FOR FREE) THEN it IS a protected database.
(8) INFORMATION- The term `information' means facts, data, works of authorship, or any other intangible material capable of being generated or gathered. seems a little wide as well.
We got some potential problem on (C) DISCRETE SECTIONS- The fact that a database is a subset of a database shall not preclude such subset from treatment as a database under this Act which is VERY arguable because the law doesn't tell us exactly WHAT a subset of a collection is with respect to this law, yet it protects the subset "as if" it was a collection, neither does the law define what is a "discrete item of information".
So let's imagine a collection of statistics on businesses (for instance, quarterly sales) in which the information is presented as follows: COMPANYNAME,Quarter,year,valueofsales. Let's say Micro$oft,4th,2005,$0 ; this is a subset of a larger database and a further subset of subset is Micro$oft,$0. If transitive rule applies, if a subset of a set is protected, then a subset of a subset is protected as well as a database (!!) so that even this little subset can qualify as a protected subset of a database. I guess it is left to the better judgment of the judge to decide what is a subset and what is not , which can quickly become HELL or HEAVEN depending ultimately (I guess)on Supreme Court. Even the knowledge that the name Micro$oft is included in a particular database can qualify as a subset if, for instance, it is followed by some special sign or fictious name which is an element of a database as well, so two elements of a database may be considered as a subset of a database and be protected ; this is left to the JUDGE I guess.
The (a) LIABILITY says that a person is liable if he makes avaiable in commerce "a quantitatively substantial part of the information in a database " which is very vague. It doesn't talk about subsets of database, but about information and leaves to the judge to decide what is quantitatively substantial part of information.
Again let's take the sales database example again with the Micro$oft,4th,2005,$0 subset. With attention to quantity the judge may consider one line out of 10 billions lines absolutely insignificant ; but it becomes more significant if I restrict the size of database, for example, to all the companies beginning with the letters MICRO ; with attention to the information, the problem becomes even more complex as the mere presence of Micro$oft name in a database can be seen as information.
And to the end the
SEC. 4. PERMITTED ACTS.
(a) INDEPENDENTLY GENERATED OR GATHERED INFORMATION- This Act shall not restrict any person from independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce
Who has got the burden of proving that the information was copied and not gathered ? The plaintiff will accuse the defendant of copying the information (or a subset of database) _hopefully_ by not merely mentioning the presence of the information in his
Even if you had a 10 student class you hardly could detect plagiarism as the amount of published stuff on any stuff is increasing daily and finding its way on the net, expecially on private for profit sites which don't allow google or other search engine spiders to index their content.
The idea of collecting all of the papers in one central database so that checking and comparing becomes effortless will in the long term show its weakness: once you have, for example, 10 thousand papers on similar subjects the search engine will obviously deliver more false positives , as the words and concepts that are used on ONE subject are very likely to be the same ; for the obvious reason that you are not likely to use (for instace) the word "pistillus" in a paper on networks, neither the word "router" in a paper on flowers , but you're likely to find the same words and the same concepts on papers made on the same subject.
So as the database grows larger there will be need to develop an algorithm that will form some kind of "confidence of match" rating system that is likely to look for 1) sequence of sentences 2)presence of patterns. But even by employing this kind of device, as the database grows _larger_ by day the likelyhood of a false positive grows as well, because the subject of papers is going to be constantly the same or very close to a constant in the long term. For instace there will be thousand of papers on the role of a switch in a network, of the role of sexuality in exchange of genetic material; given that the amount and kind of information that is taught on a subject at a certain point in time is going to be limited by the current widespread/public/taught information on that subject, it seems very likely to me that at the end the differences between papers will approach zero.
Also consider the not-so-hidden incentive for teachers to rely on a computer for evaluations.
Well what can I say, two nonsenses for the price of one ?
The first one, somebody wants to restore what is an arguably big piece of metal with (imho) very little engineering and sentimental value.
Wouldn't it be much better, from an historical point of view, to save the money to recover the Lander which is still on Moon ?
And given that the lander is going to be on the moon practically forever and intact, unless some meteorite hits it, wouldn't it be better to spend the money to give Hubble a second chance ?
The second one, suggesting that U$5M could instead feed some starving people for one year. What after this year is gone ? Wouldn't it be better to teach them how to feed themselves like somebody suggested ?
And by the way, do you really believe that money given to any charity will reach the poor entirely ? You're going to have a bad bad surprise sooner or later. Why don't you help the poors in your neighborhood, city, region, state to begin with ? They're reachable, you can check where the money goes if you _really_ care and are not just doing some moral washing of your "soul" by giving somebody some dollar.
Also remember that money isn't but an instrument of credit transfer and monetary profit isn't but the illusion of achievement and advancement. One can have one trillion dollar and still be hungry and poor if with that one trillion he can't buy food because "market" set one billion dollar price for a meal.
Last night I was watching a news brief by the mission memebers and one of them said that indeed judging from the few pictures we have so far received, the area is nothing like anything they saw before, but they spotted what they believe may be an interesting area.
This area may be composed of sediments or other unstable material and they're afraid it may not be stable enough to sustain the rover mass, therefore they'll cautiously approach it.
I'm no geologist but I guess the best area for a stratigraphic section would be inside a canyon, correct me if I'm wrong. But unless you land on top of it and give a look at it from above I think they'd have problems with solar arrays and daily sunlight exposure, not mentioning problems in pointing antennas and such. Guess current kind of rovers wouldn't do much good in a canyon situation.
Don't confuse countries and patriotism with success of space missions or other projects.
I'm not a citizen of U.S.A yet I'm very very glad that this project is going well and I'm also glad that half of ESA mission is going well (their satellite is working, only the lander part of that project apparently failed).
Why should I be "proud" of both missions even if both of them were not prepared in my country ?
Because they're not in competition ; both the missions have ONE goal: collecting information from Mars, developing new technologies and new know-how, investigating failures to learn from errors.
If there was "patriotic" or "economic" competition between NASA and ESA or other space agencies, they should be shooting rockets at each other instead of launching them in the space; guess what, people working at ESA or NASA don't even consider this as "competition" , they consider such a warmongering behavior as completely utterly insane !
And you needn't be a rocket scientist to understand why : there's no progress and no evolution in blasting each other into dust , there's no point in competing with others when you can cooperate with them for the purpose of obtaining something you want.
That's why almost all the "competition" you see on earth is not among people that can do and have resources , rather it's among people that don't have enough resources or think they need more and other people that think like them.
What they didn't understand is that it is better to cooperate for the purpose of becoming less dependant on rare resources then kill/starve/destroy each other for the purpose of monopolizing the rare resources.
Re:If OnStar can start your car and unlock your do
on
OnStar Considered Harmful
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Two Words: GPS Jammers. They already exist. As usual criminals will learn how to resist any technology because it is in their best interest to and they have resources, will and money to. The everyday citizen will just have to explain to his employer why he said he was sick while his car was going somewhere ; nobody will believe his wife took his car.
And if somebody is thinking about insurance premium cuts if you install the tracking device: as soon as it becomes standards, there will be no premium for installing it ; therefore the insurance companies will need to find some other way to do money if they have to keep the price low because of Onstar or other tracking stuff. Remember insurance companies as any other company are in the business for -profit- not for helping you.
Learn from what exactly ? It may have landed , it may have burned in the descent, parachute may not be working..etc.
Unless there was some kind of telemetry during the descent phase, we have 0 chances of knowing what happened (unless of course beagle is alive but not well and only MExpress can pick up its signal). That frustrates engineers/scientist/people that like raw data because they're not getting any raw data !
Remeber when you was a kid and you didn't know jack ? You probably now are an "adult" and think you know how to avoid being scammed ; you most definitely are a youngster with little experience if you considered that poor dude as "guilty of being stupid".
He's ignorant and old, everybody is born ignorant and it's no one fault , also when you'll become older you'll see your brain will not work as well as it does now. The guilty party is _always_ the scammer, not the scammed. Fraudsters and scammers are _parasites_ , not because they don't work (injuried people can't work, yet they're not parasites)but because they only leech your money.
Consider that: look again at your 401K, at the conditions of your bank account/credit card : do you think you know all the laws surrounding such everyday tools ? You don't. Do you think you understood all the implications of the contracts you signed ? You don't, unless you're an up-to-date lawyer.
Scams should be always exposed, and recorded, and the structure of scams and how they work should be taught at every occasion, maybe even in schools.
Do not invest in things you don't understand completely ; don't think you know everything.
why can't they realize that appearance counts in the business world?
They sometime do, but when at work their main concern is not the look of who's selling/presenting/pushing the product, their concern is the quality and price/performance ratio. The color of your tie has absolutely no relevance except as an aid for lack of self esteem or a distraction from the flaws of the product ; that is not to say you can't wear a tie or a nice suit, but at the end they're totally irrilevant cause many geeks try very hard not to judge people by look (but contemporary society pushes them into this kind of judging) or products by look (they'll do that regardless of external irrilevant influences).
You know you have a bucket of fools when the best they can do is to come here and say "I wonder what slashdot liberals will say".
Oh like you didn't know already, come on if you're so brilliant on understanding the ones you call "liberals" why do you seek for more "liberal views" ? I guess the only reason is because you enjoy bashing views that you think are different from yours ; you so much need a pair you don't have you feel like "oh ok I'll just call them liberal, liberals , gnaa !" That's kindergarten stuff, grow out of it.
Saddam is in your league for sure as he didn't tolerate anything that was NOT on his script and tortured dissenters ; another thing Saddam did was a lot a lot of propaganda like " Iraq is the right country ! We alone have understood the clear way ! The heroic soldier that fired gases against the brutal iranians is an hero of our nation, for we all know iranians are evildoers".
Can you see intolerance growing ? "Now, go back to your New England based frat where your kind is tolerated. Makes it easier to identify most of y'all" and then what , go Saddam over them ? Hey Mr.Proud , compassion and law and rights don't work ONLY when they're good for you, they also works for others when it's NOT good for you, but all you know is that you want to "line em all on a wall". GROW A PAIR !
It doesn't require a PhD to understand how the voting system has always worked, yet you will need one or at least a very deep knowledge of the inner workings of a computer to understand how will voting work, if you'll support E-voting without human readable paper ballots as a proof of your vote.
How can this be good , considering the average education level of ANY population ? Would you rather understand if a vote is NO/YES by looking at a cross, or decode a binary code like 0 and 1 ? A cross on "YES" means "YES" and there is no argument over that. But is no cross on the computer, there's a 0 or a 1. What does 0 or 1 mean ? It depends : while YES is YES zero may mean YES or NO depending on what you think 0 or 1 means.
That only adds a layer of confusion that is not needed. You know who's having this same problem ? Electronic Librarians : they have electronics book nobody but a computer can read because all the words are composed by a combination of 0s and 1s. If the computers break down, you'll have to do translation by hand.
Try reading that. Explain me wtf it means. Too hard ? That means "I voted YES" in binary code. Try the trick yourself this place.
Now it takes a computer geek to understand that binary and even a geek would have an hard time translating it by hand. Also it takes -seconds- to any good computer user to transform that sequence into another binary sequence that says "I voted NO" and there would be -no trail- absolutely -no proof- that the change happened, because there is no paper trail.
Also, a good computer user can turn 100 Million votes from YES to NO in a matter of -seconds-. Try doing that on 100 million paper votes, it would take a long long while and it probably would require to corrupt a lot of people, not only one computer user.
As hackers have proved one bazillion times, absolutely secure computer system do NOT exists and will NEVER exist ; some people is spending a lot of money into tricking your computer to receive spam e-mail, regardless of all the security measures you can buy ; but at worst you'll receive some spam, no big deal.
Now imagine what some motivated people would do to turn the votes of an entire -country- from a YES to a NO in a matter of seconds. They would do anything and everything, the prize is enormous : that of ruling an entire country.
Pay attention, the fact that you have issues other then paper trail in your system doesn't even by chance mean paper trail is "not the issue"
Like in cars, one thing is to have backup tyre that can be tampered somehow, another thing is not to have any backup tyre at all ! The fact that it can be sabotaged doesn't make the backup tyre less then necessary.
Your pointing out system problems like the "manual enter" by poll worker is not without merit, it's an important problem, but try not to confuse different problems.
And the Dems benefiting from the situation you describe: do you really think Reps wouldn't take advantage somehow ? That's delusional.
Dude even girl boobies can be overinflated. That doesn't make them less attractive or less desiderable ipso facto. When exactly is a wage overinflated according to you ? When somebody asks more then the national wage average, the sector average , or some other average ? And on what data is the average computed ?
And are programmer "unrealistic" ? What is "realistic" exaclty ?
Not mentioning the "market" thing. Market isn't an abstract entity ! To say that market pays market do market something is attributing will to something that is made by people and of people in reality ; people have will , so they will decide which price is good for them, at what price is a good to be sold at what price is to be bought.
When the so called "market" is made , from the demand side, of an handful of companies you can pretty much track down market "price" to the will of an handful of humain beings called Management.
I think there is a common misconception of what programmers really do. If we compare the cost of resources (in a certain moment in time) of the resources used by programmers (mostly books,hardware,beverages,food) and the cost of resources used by other workers (for instance , a plumber) with the market prices of their products/services and quantity of good/service produced , I think we'll see that programmer are living goldmines.
Let's say that a plumber spends some money in materials to build a network of pipes needed to bring fresh water to an house. He sells his product to one person, with one house. You can't resell that very same work to other persons, because each and every house needs its plumbing works and materials.
Now the programmer spends his/her lifetime in front of a computer and does some investments in himself by buying hardware and books.Some company may pay these costs.Once the program reaches a mature stage it can be sold to MILLIONS of clients with ridicolously low replication costs.
The programmers usually don't get royalties on quantity of software sold : once the program is developed, it's company property and (in theory) the programmer could be fired. Thanks for your help, goto hell.
Now is it unreasonable for a programmer to ask for -comparatively- otrageous wages ? NO ! We have just seen that he's not likely to see his revenue increase EVEN IF the company for which he developed the software sold some million copies.
He may choose to have stock options instead of cash , but as many programmers have understood that's too much of a risk expecially when there isn't a system preventing management from doing wrong business decision or simple fraud.
Someone may say that the programmer doesn't know jack about selling products, financing, accounting , laws etc so he deserves to be paid little because he's not sustaining all the costs involved in running a company. But how the f*ck is a programmer supposed to do ALL of that and still do his job of daily coding and bugfixing ? It seems humanly impossible to me.
Yet, his product can be sold in enormous quantity and he's supposed to sustain all the risks of his job without a fair share on the QUANTITY of product sold. No wonder he's going to ask for comparatively huge wages.
The effects of "spinning" can be reduced or totally neutralized without a Phd in Counterspinning. Intuition, common sense logic and the question "who's gaining anything from this change" will help us a lot. Regardless of your political preferences I argue that you don't want any completely electronic voting process , if you believe in democracy or enjoy the rights coming with democracy.
Among the arguments used by makers of e-voting machines and systems we see 1) removing paper from voting process reduce costs 2) removing counters from voting process reduces costs 3) results can be collected in real-time, there are no useless delays 4) interactive multimedia voting is sometimes easier than making a cross on a piece of paper
Point 3 (fast results) is "pointless" given that there is -no void of power- between elections.
That is to say that ANY elected Official (President,Governet,whatever) remains in power until the new one is elected ; so there is no void of power and decision making process isn't interrupted.Also, if you waited for a few years for a new election you may as well wait a few days more or expose the election process to a very high risk of corruption , I'll explain in a moment.
Point 1 and 2 (removing paper,people) is true because (on the long run) the cost of using computer to collect votes is likely to decrease, while the cost of paper and people is likely to remain more or less constant or to rise. While this is not as far as I know strictly proved it surely is likely. We'll probably see voting machine makers pressing this argument more and more in the future.
But by removing paper , we let anybody with enough computer experience (black hat hackers, political zealots corrupted officials etc) do anything he likes with OUR vote. Because, as even kids know these days, you can have computer do whatever you want them to do if you just are good enough at programming them. And if a kid can outsmart you in programming your recorder, imagine what a skilled malevolent indivual could do with your vote.
If electronic voting machines are to replace the trusted paper-and-pen system, there will be NO PAPER TRAIL of what really happened. There will be NO RECOUNT because there will be NO PAPER VOTE, only lies, damn lies and statistics ! A list of voters or voting results is not the same thing as 100000 single pieces of papers with a cross or an hole on them ; try manipulating 100000 pieces of paper, try corrupting all the recounters and officials you need to manipulate enough votes.
Now try doing the same with a computer: it takes more or less a couple of seconds (remember Enron ? Deleting emails takes seconds, destroying paperworks takes a lot more time and may leave many traces).
Now, let's assume Point 4 is true (multimedia voting is easier). I've seen many elder people having a bad time operating ATMs or anything electronical (but also some young people). Making a cross doesn't even require you to have attended all K-12. You only need to know how to read and make a cross ! You don't even need to talk or compute ! Even blind people can vote with a braille enhanced piece of paper.
But let's say you want electronic voting because "it's cool". Ok, but NOT without a single piece of paper with an hole that represents your personal vote. That paper vote will be collected and will be used for recounts if any problem arises.
Do you really want to give up democracy for a computer?
I agree completely and let me tell you that from my personal, real experience I have seen that the best technical decision makers (when it comes to decide what soft/hardware a company should use)are not only seasoned technician , but seasoned users as well.
In other words, they have compared a lot of software by using it (and not by doing magazines management, technicians really MUST work) that they usually can't afford to buy -just- for the purpose of testing. Also, usually companies don't want to spend for R&D (whoa hardly news, alright) so the technicians have little choice: either get a pirate copy somehow or get crippled time limited demos if they're avaiable. Also technician are indirectly financing their job position by helping companies reduce R&D costs(and they don't get paid for that, not a dime)
The net result is that many companies in my opinion owe something to piracy when piracy is NOT used in real business environment to save costs. Business should pay in full for their software because it's used in a real-money profit making process.
So while the spotlight is always on the "evil pirates that harm profit" I'd rather point the spotlight continuosly on the Enron-creative-accounting companies that do REAL sizable harm to many many workers and families , or on the companies that are using money coming from socially inacceptable crimes like fraud,exploitement prostitution,exploitement of child labor, money laundering, drugs et al.
Let's be fair..many telemarking company are just trying to sell you products they paid $x at a price of $x+50 (usually) but this may vary. Nothing wrong with that. It's the way they do it that many of us consider inappropriate and annoying.
So if you can't win by a do-not-call list you can still get , even if -slowly- , rid of them by employing some simple tactics:
1) let the telemarketer talk forever, ask a lot of information, pretend you're interested in their product. It is perfectly legal. He/She may try to close the call by "so would you like to try/buy it ?". Pretend you need some more info, like color, size, weight..be creative. This way you're helping the person doing the job get paid (usually they're paid by per sale or per time) while you're adding more and more costs to telemarketing company.
2) if you do the above, NEVER close the call with a "i'll try or buy" ask them to call again in maybe one week.
3) if you're out, leave a note anybody answering the phone and have them ask the telemarketer to call again because you're out, but don't give them any other telephone number.
4) If you're pressured to buy for any kind of benefit (for sick children, aids, etc etc) I suggest you rather donate to somebody in need you know. Otherwise very little of your money if ANY will be received by somebody in real need.
At the end telemarketers costs will grow, they'll be forced to ask their advertiser for more money, but given that you didn't buy anything from them the advertisers will be very displeased and will drop them. They go out of business and stop annoying you for a long long time or maybe forever.
You literally OWN telemarketers, they live only thanks to YOU so YOU make the rules, they don't.
Yes it happened to me with email, namely with 200+ spam messages a day effectively clogging my inbox with good messages being bounched back to sender because of lack of space.
So unless you live under a rock and don't know about exponential growth you can imagine what could happen if telemarketers started calling en-masse because of the lack of restrictions and economies of scale.
Of course the fact that it didn't happen to you or it's not reported on daily news makes you feel confident you can make a "call to reality" to me which is just another rethorical trick, but you don't offer any reasonable argument.
In your precedent reply regarding the very same topic here you suggest people just to hang up the phone.
Now while this SEEMS to be a solution, what about telemarketers calling you incessantly ? Maybe company A has called today, but not B neither C and so on until they even call you from Nigeria. You spend all the day screening phone calls ? I think not. What if your answering machines starts deleting old messages (including good ones) to make room for new spam ? What if it doesn't roll over so there is no more room for good calls ?
OH but we can solve this, I'll hire you to screen all my calls, I'll pay $1 hour for this...wait a minute ! Now the marketing company is making me LOSE money !
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about creating an atmosphere of 'everything must be 100% safe' ..that's exactly want a bad management would like to be able to tell people (and somebody does at times)
People with a good enough education (not necessarily engineers) do know that it is not possible to say that a _future_ event (or sequence of events) will happen exactly like it _was_ predicted with a 100% confidence. One must always consider hidden variables and illusions , but given that hidden variables aren't foreseeable by definition (they are not manifest) one must work at dispelling illusion of total control and overconfidence; expecially when there are human lifes at stake and in conditions (space) in which the most apparently ridicolous event (foam detachment) could cause hardly predictable consequences.
The illusion was that, given that (afaik) there were records of foam detachments in previous Shuttle missions and records of minor and inconsequential damages in heat shielding, the foam problem was de-facto ruled as not-a-problem or a minor one !
But because of the records we later discovered that foam problem wasn't an hidden variable, therefore the human error (of considering foam a minor issue) isn't excusable in this occasion.
In my experience engineers are the least likely people to overlook apparently inconsequential problems when they have hints or evidence of problems ; but if you keep the absurd requirement of 100% failsafe equipement, they're obviously going to never approve anything, expecially when they know blame will be shifted on them. Add the second stress factor of working under a budget, knowing that you'll not be listened to if the problem you spotted is going to cause a budget rescheduling.
On a tangent: at least at NASA they did some record keeping and part of the problem was discovered quickly. Imagine doing that in a Enron like company.
Maybe because there is a million McDonald-didnt-want-em-learn-C++-in-2-weeks programmers and only one hundred thousand programmers with more then x thousand hours programming experience ? You know they shouldn't write "will code for food" on their signs, but rather "will rejoin cooking workforce"
On a tangent: the market being driven by pointy haired bosses doesn't help, either.
Let's disassemble the Bill, shall we ?
So we have (1) Collective Work which includes anthologies and encyclopedias and (2) Compilations which are definied in a way that you could take ANYTHING into a compilation, as long as you can demostrate it constitutes an "original work of authorship". Who has the burden of proof of demostrating originality, and what does "original" and "work of authorship" mean exactly ?
About (5) Database we have this definition "collection of a large number of discrete items of information" with noticeable exceptions: an anthology or encyclopedia or collective work or a routing table or a domain name registrar database are NOT databases, with an exception within exception that IF a domain registrar database is 1. maintained accurate and up-to-date 2. and accessible in real time to public without restrictions (which means FOR FREE) THEN it IS a protected database.
(8) INFORMATION- The term `information' means facts, data, works of authorship, or any other intangible material capable of being generated or gathered. seems a little wide as well.
We got some potential problem on (C) DISCRETE SECTIONS- The fact that a database is a subset of a database shall not preclude such subset from treatment as a database under this Act which is VERY arguable because the law doesn't tell us exactly WHAT a subset of a collection is with respect to this law, yet it protects the subset "as if" it was a collection, neither does the law define what is a "discrete item of information".
So let's imagine a collection of statistics on businesses (for instance, quarterly sales) in which the information is presented as follows: COMPANYNAME,Quarter,year,valueofsales. Let's say Micro$oft,4th,2005,$0 ; this is a subset of a larger database and a further subset of subset is Micro$oft,$0. If transitive rule applies, if a subset of a set is protected, then a subset of a subset is protected as well as a database (!!) so that even this little subset can qualify as a protected subset of a database. I guess it is left to the better judgment of the judge to decide what is a subset and what is not , which can quickly become HELL or HEAVEN depending ultimately (I guess)on Supreme Court. Even the knowledge that the name Micro$oft is included in a particular database can qualify as a subset if, for instance, it is followed by some special sign or fictious name which is an element of a database as well, so two elements of a database may be considered as a subset of a database and be protected ; this is left to the JUDGE I guess.
The (a) LIABILITY says that a person is liable if he makes avaiable in commerce "a quantitatively substantial part of the information in a database " which is very vague. It doesn't talk about subsets of database, but about information and leaves to the judge to decide what is quantitatively substantial part of information.
Again let's take the sales database example again with the Micro$oft,4th,2005,$0 subset. With attention to quantity the judge may consider one line out of 10 billions lines absolutely insignificant ; but it becomes more significant
if I restrict the size of database, for example, to all the companies beginning with the letters MICRO ; with attention to the information, the problem becomes even more complex as the mere presence of Micro$oft name in a database can be seen as information.
And to the end the
SEC. 4. PERMITTED ACTS.
(a) INDEPENDENTLY GENERATED OR GATHERED INFORMATION- This Act shall not restrict any person from independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce
Who has got the burden of proving that the information was copied and not gathered ? The plaintiff will accuse the defendant of copying the information (or a subset of database) _hopefully_ by not merely mentioning the presence
of the information in his
Even if you had a 10 student class you hardly could detect plagiarism as the amount of published stuff on any stuff is increasing daily and finding its way on the net, expecially on private for profit sites which don't allow google or other search engine spiders to index their content.
The idea of collecting all of the papers in one central database so that checking and comparing becomes effortless will in the long term show its weakness: once you have, for example, 10 thousand papers on similar subjects the search engine will obviously deliver more false positives , as the words and concepts that are used on ONE subject are very likely to be the same ; for the obvious reason that you are not likely to use (for instace) the word "pistillus" in a paper on networks, neither the word "router" in a paper on flowers , but you're likely to find the same words and the same concepts on papers made on the same subject.
So as the database grows larger there will be need to develop an algorithm that will form some kind of "confidence of match" rating system that is likely to look for 1) sequence of sentences 2)presence of patterns. But even by employing this kind of device, as the database grows _larger_ by day the likelyhood of a false positive grows as well, because the subject of papers is going to be constantly the same or very close to a constant in the long term. For instace there will be thousand of papers on the role of a switch in a network, of the role of sexuality in exchange of genetic material; given that the amount and kind of information that is taught on a subject at a certain point in time is going to be limited by the current widespread/public/taught information on that subject, it seems very likely to me that at the end the differences between papers will approach zero.
Also consider the not-so-hidden incentive for teachers to rely on a computer for evaluations.
Well what can I say, two nonsenses for the price of one ?
The first one, somebody wants to restore what is an arguably big piece of metal with (imho) very little engineering and sentimental value.
Wouldn't it be much better, from an historical point of view, to save the money to recover the Lander which is still on Moon ?
And given that the lander is going to be on the moon practically forever and intact, unless some meteorite hits it, wouldn't it be better to spend the money to give Hubble a second chance ?
The second one, suggesting that U$5M could instead feed some starving people for one year. What after this year is gone ? Wouldn't it be better to teach them how to feed themselves like somebody suggested ?
And by the way, do you really believe that money given to any charity will reach the poor entirely ? You're going to have a bad bad surprise sooner or later. Why don't you help the poors in your neighborhood, city, region, state to begin with ? They're reachable, you can check where the money goes if you _really_ care and are not just doing some moral washing of your "soul" by giving somebody some dollar.
Also remember that money isn't but an instrument of credit transfer and monetary profit isn't but the illusion of achievement and advancement. One can have one trillion dollar and still be hungry and poor if with that one trillion he can't buy food because "market" set one billion dollar price for a meal.
Last night I was watching a news brief by the mission memebers and one of them said that indeed judging from the few pictures we have so far received, the area is nothing like anything they saw before, but they spotted what they believe may be an interesting area.
This area may be composed of sediments or other unstable material and they're afraid it may not be stable enough to sustain the rover mass, therefore they'll cautiously approach it.
I'm no geologist but I guess the best area for a stratigraphic section would be inside a canyon, correct me if I'm wrong. But unless you land on top of it and give a look at it from above I think they'd have problems with solar arrays and daily sunlight exposure, not mentioning problems in pointing antennas and such. Guess current kind of rovers wouldn't do much good in a canyon situation.
Don't confuse countries and patriotism with success of space missions or other projects.
I'm not a citizen of U.S.A yet I'm very very glad that this project is going well and I'm also glad that half of ESA mission is going well (their satellite is working, only the lander part of that project apparently failed).
Why should I be "proud" of both missions even if both of them were not prepared in my country ?
Because they're not in competition ; both the missions have ONE goal: collecting information from Mars, developing new technologies and new know-how, investigating failures to learn from errors.
If there was "patriotic" or "economic" competition between NASA and ESA or other space agencies, they should be shooting rockets at each other instead of launching them in the space; guess what, people working at ESA or NASA don't even consider this as "competition" , they consider such a warmongering behavior as completely utterly insane !
And you needn't be a rocket scientist to understand why : there's no progress and no evolution in blasting each other into dust , there's no point in competing with others when you can cooperate with them for the purpose of obtaining something you want.
That's why almost all the "competition" you see on earth is not among people that can do and have resources , rather it's among people that don't have enough resources or think they need more and other people that think like them.
What they didn't understand is that it is better to cooperate for the purpose of becoming less dependant on rare resources then kill/starve/destroy each other for the purpose of monopolizing the rare resources.
Two Words: GPS Jammers. They already exist. As usual criminals will learn how to resist any technology because it is in their best interest to and they have resources, will and money to. The everyday citizen will just have to explain to his employer why he said he was sick while his car was going somewhere ; nobody will believe his wife took his car.
And if somebody is thinking about insurance premium cuts if you install the tracking device: as soon as it becomes standards, there will be no premium for installing it ; therefore the insurance companies will need to find some other way to do money if they have to keep the price low because of Onstar or other tracking stuff. Remember insurance companies as any other company are in the business for -profit- not for helping you.
Learn from what exactly ? It may have landed , it may have burned in the descent, parachute may not be working ..etc.
Unless there was some kind of telemetry during the descent phase, we have 0 chances of knowing what happened (unless of course beagle is alive but not well and only MExpress can pick up its signal). That frustrates engineers/scientist/people that like raw data because they're not getting any raw data !
Remeber when you was a kid and you didn't know jack ? You probably now are an "adult" and think you know how to avoid being scammed ; you most definitely are a youngster with little experience if you considered that poor dude as "guilty of being stupid".
He's ignorant and old, everybody is born ignorant and it's no one fault , also when you'll become older you'll see your brain will not work as well as it does now. The guilty party is _always_ the scammer, not the scammed. Fraudsters and scammers are _parasites_ , not because they don't work (injuried people can't work, yet they're not parasites)but because they only leech your money.
Consider that: look again at your 401K, at the conditions of your bank account/credit card : do you think you know all the laws surrounding such everyday tools ? You don't. Do you think you understood all the implications of the contracts you signed ? You don't, unless you're an up-to-date lawyer.
Scams should be always exposed, and recorded, and the structure of scams and how they work should be taught at every occasion, maybe even in schools.
Do not invest in things you don't understand completely ; don't think you know everything.
why can't they realize that appearance counts in the business world?
They sometime do, but when at work their main concern is not the look of who's selling/presenting/pushing the product, their concern is the quality and price/performance ratio. The color of your tie has absolutely no relevance except as an aid for lack of self esteem or a distraction from the flaws of the product ; that is not to say you can't wear a tie or a nice suit, but at the end they're totally irrilevant cause many geeks try very hard not to judge people by look (but contemporary society pushes them into this kind of judging) or products by look (they'll do that regardless of external irrilevant influences).
"Excutive Review" : geeks don't like baloney.
You know you have a bucket of fools when the best they can do is to come here and say "I wonder what slashdot liberals will say" .
Oh like you didn't know already, come on if you're so brilliant on understanding the ones you call "liberals" why do you seek for more "liberal views" ? I guess the only reason is because you enjoy bashing views that you think are different from yours ; you so much need a pair you don't have you feel like "oh ok I'll just call them liberal, liberals , gnaa !" That's kindergarten stuff, grow out of it.
Saddam is in your league for sure as he didn't tolerate anything that was NOT on his script and tortured dissenters ; another thing Saddam did was a lot a lot of propaganda like " Iraq is the right country ! We alone have understood the clear way ! The heroic soldier that fired gases against the brutal iranians is an hero of our nation, for we all know iranians are evildoers".
Can you see intolerance growing ? "Now, go back to your New England based frat where your kind is tolerated. Makes it easier to identify most of y'all" and then what , go Saddam over them ? Hey Mr.Proud , compassion and law and rights don't work ONLY when they're good for you, they also works for others when it's NOT good for you, but all you know is that you want to "line em all on a wall". GROW A PAIR !
It doesn't require a PhD to understand how the voting system has always worked, yet you will need one or at least a very deep knowledge of the inner workings of a computer to understand how will voting work, if you'll support E-voting without human readable paper ballots as a proof of your vote.
:
1 01 10010000100000010110010100010101010011
How can this be good , considering the average education level of ANY population ? Would you rather understand if a vote is NO/YES by looking at a cross, or decode a binary code like 0 and 1 ? A cross on "YES" means "YES" and there is no argument over that. But is no cross on the computer, there's a 0 or a 1. What does 0 or 1 mean ? It depends : while YES is YES zero may mean YES or NO depending on what you think 0 or 1 means.
That only adds a layer of confusion that is not needed. You know who's having this same problem ? Electronic Librarians : they have electronics book nobody but a computer can read because all the words are composed by a combination of 0s and 1s. If the computers break down, you'll have to do translation by hand.
Here's an example
01001001001000000111011001101111011101000110010
Try reading that. Explain me wtf it means. Too hard ? That means "I voted YES" in binary code. Try the trick yourself this place.
Now it takes a computer geek to understand that binary and even a geek would have an hard time translating it by hand. Also it takes -seconds- to any good computer user to transform that sequence into another binary sequence that says "I voted NO" and there would be -no trail- absolutely -no proof- that the change happened, because there is no paper trail.
Also, a good computer user can turn 100 Million votes from YES to NO in a matter of -seconds-. Try doing that on 100 million paper votes, it would take a long long while and it probably would require to corrupt a lot of people, not only one computer user.
As hackers have proved one bazillion times, absolutely secure computer system do NOT exists and will NEVER exist ; some people is spending a lot of money into tricking your computer to receive spam e-mail, regardless of all the security measures you can buy ; but at worst you'll receive some spam, no big deal.
Now imagine what some motivated people would do to turn the votes of an entire -country- from a YES to a NO in a matter of seconds. They would do anything and everything, the prize is enormous : that of ruling an entire country.
I fear the day our will we be reduced to 0 and 1.
Want to know how management is damaging your brain ? Here's the quick proof :
I call this "overbehaviour." Doing something --anything -- because it... just needs to be improved! Most improvements aren't.
Signs that you're a manager: inventing words like "overbehaviour" when "stupidity" word already exists and is well understood.
Sorry pal, I'll look for you in Office Space 2
Entirely possible, as well as it is possible that the same mistakes are going to be repeated (a very human characteristic)
Pay attention, the fact that you have issues other then paper trail in your system doesn't even by chance mean paper trail is "not the issue"
Like in cars, one thing is to have backup tyre that can be tampered somehow, another thing is not to have any backup tyre at all ! The fact that it can be sabotaged doesn't make the backup tyre less then necessary.
Your pointing out system problems like the "manual enter" by poll worker is not without merit, it's an important problem, but try not to confuse different problems.
And the Dems benefiting from the situation you describe: do you really think Reps wouldn't take advantage somehow ? That's delusional.
Dude even girl boobies can be overinflated. That doesn't make them less attractive or less desiderable ipso facto. When exactly is a wage overinflated according to you ? When somebody asks more then the national wage average, the sector average , or some other average ? And on what data is the average computed ?
And are programmer "unrealistic" ? What is "realistic" exaclty ?
Not mentioning the "market" thing. Market isn't an abstract entity ! To say that market pays market do market something is attributing will to something that is made by people and of people in reality ; people have will , so they will decide which price is good for them, at what price is a good to be sold at what price is to be bought.
When the so called "market" is made , from the demand side, of an handful of companies you can pretty much track down market "price" to the will of an handful of humain beings called Management.
I think there is a common misconception of what programmers really do. If we compare the cost of resources (in a certain moment in time) of the resources used by programmers (mostly books,hardware,beverages,food) and the cost of resources used by other workers (for instance , a plumber) with the market prices of their products/services and quantity of good/service produced , I think we'll see that programmer are living goldmines.
Let's say that a plumber spends some money in materials to build a network of pipes needed to bring fresh water to an house. He sells his product to one person, with one house. You can't resell that very same work to other persons, because each and every house needs its plumbing works and materials.
Now the programmer spends his/her lifetime in front of a computer and does some investments in himself by buying hardware and books.Some company may pay these costs.Once the program reaches a mature stage it can be sold to MILLIONS of clients with ridicolously low replication costs.
The programmers usually don't get royalties on quantity of software sold : once the program is developed, it's company property and (in theory) the programmer could be fired. Thanks for your help, goto hell.
Now is it unreasonable for a programmer to ask for -comparatively- otrageous wages ? NO ! We have just seen that he's not likely to see his revenue increase EVEN IF the company for which he developed the software sold some million copies.
He may choose to have stock options instead of cash , but as many programmers have understood that's too much of a risk expecially when there isn't a system preventing management from doing wrong business decision or simple fraud.
Someone may say that the programmer doesn't know jack about selling products, financing, accounting , laws etc so he deserves to be paid little because he's not sustaining all the costs involved in running a company. But how the f*ck is a programmer supposed to do ALL of that and still do his job of daily coding and bugfixing ?
It seems humanly impossible to me.
Yet, his product can be sold in enormous quantity and he's supposed to sustain all the risks of his job without a fair share on the QUANTITY of product sold. No wonder he's going to ask for comparatively huge wages.
Here for $0 I'll tell you what consumers want:
1) free stuff
2) that is incredibly useful
3) that lasts forever
God produces such things , but you may produce
1) stuff for an affordable to cheap price
2) that is really useful, not a market bluf
3) that lasts more if comparatively expensive.
Now find me that $0 banknote
The effects of "spinning" can be reduced or totally neutralized without a Phd in Counterspinning. Intuition, common sense
logic and the question "who's gaining anything from this change" will help us a lot. Regardless of your political preferences
I argue that you don't want any completely electronic voting process , if you believe in democracy or enjoy the rights coming
with democracy.
Among the arguments used by makers of e-voting machines and systems we see
1) removing paper from voting process reduce costs
2) removing counters from voting process reduces costs
3) results can be collected in real-time, there are no useless delays
4) interactive multimedia voting is sometimes easier than making a cross on a piece of paper
Point 3 (fast results) is "pointless" given that there is -no void of power- between elections.
That is to say that ANY elected Official (President,Governet,whatever) remains in power until the new one is
elected ; so there is no void of power and decision making process isn't interrupted.Also, if you waited for
a few years for a new election you may as well wait a few days more or expose the election process to a very
high risk of corruption , I'll explain in a moment.
Point 1 and 2 (removing paper,people) is true because (on the long run) the cost of using computer to collect
votes is likely to decrease, while the cost of paper and people is likely to remain more or less constant or
to rise. While this is not as far as I know strictly proved it surely is likely. We'll probably see voting
machine makers pressing this argument more and more in the future.
But by removing paper , we let anybody with enough computer experience (black hat hackers, political zealots
corrupted officials etc) do anything he likes with OUR vote. Because, as even kids know these days, you
can have computer do whatever you want them to do if you just are good enough at programming them. And if
a kid can outsmart you in programming your recorder, imagine what a skilled malevolent indivual could do
with your vote.
If electronic voting machines are to replace the trusted paper-and-pen system, there will be NO PAPER TRAIL
of what really happened. There will be NO RECOUNT because there will be NO PAPER VOTE, only lies, damn lies
and statistics ! A list of voters or voting results is not the same thing as 100000 single pieces of papers
with a cross or an hole on them ; try manipulating 100000 pieces of paper, try corrupting all the recounters
and officials you need to manipulate enough votes.
Now try doing the same with a computer: it takes more or less a couple of seconds (remember Enron ? Deleting
emails takes seconds, destroying paperworks takes a lot more time and may leave many traces).
Now, let's assume Point 4 is true (multimedia voting is easier). I've seen many elder people having a bad time
operating ATMs or anything electronical (but also some young people). Making a cross doesn't even require you
to have attended all K-12. You only need to know how to read and make a cross ! You don't even need to talk
or compute ! Even blind people can vote with a braille enhanced piece of paper.
But let's say you want electronic voting because "it's cool". Ok, but NOT without a single piece of paper with
an hole that represents your personal vote. That paper vote will be collected and will be used for recounts if
any problem arises.
Do you really want to give up democracy for a computer?
I agree completely and let me tell you that from my personal, real experience I have seen that the best technical decision makers (when it comes to decide what soft/hardware a company should use)are not only seasoned technician , but seasoned users as well.
In other words, they have compared a lot of software by using it (and not by doing magazines management, technicians really MUST work) that they usually can't afford to buy -just- for the purpose of testing. Also, usually companies don't want to spend for R&D (whoa hardly news, alright) so the technicians have little choice: either get a pirate copy somehow or get crippled time limited demos if they're avaiable. Also technician are indirectly financing their job position by helping companies reduce R&D costs(and they don't get paid for that, not a dime)
The net result is that many companies in my opinion owe something to piracy when piracy is NOT used in real business environment to save costs. Business should pay in full for their software because it's used in a real-money profit making process.
So while the spotlight is always on the "evil pirates that harm profit" I'd rather point the spotlight continuosly on the Enron-creative-accounting companies that do REAL sizable harm to many many workers and families , or on the companies that are using money coming from socially inacceptable crimes like fraud,exploitement prostitution,exploitement of child labor, money laundering, drugs et al.
Let's be fair..many telemarking company are just trying to sell you products they paid $x at a price of $x+50 (usually) but this may vary. Nothing wrong with that. It's the way they do it that many of us consider inappropriate and annoying.
So if you can't win by a do-not-call list you can still get , even if -slowly- , rid of them by employing some simple tactics:
1) let the telemarketer talk forever, ask a lot of information, pretend you're interested in their product. It is perfectly legal. He/She may try to close the call by "so would you like to try/buy it ?". Pretend you need some more info, like color, size, weight..be creative. This way you're helping the person doing the job get paid (usually they're paid by per sale or per time) while you're adding more and more costs to telemarketing company.
2) if you do the above, NEVER close the call with a "i'll try or buy" ask them to call again in maybe one week.
3) if you're out, leave a note anybody answering the phone and have them ask the telemarketer to call again because you're out, but don't give them any other telephone number.
4) If you're pressured to buy for any kind of benefit (for sick children, aids, etc etc) I suggest you rather donate to somebody in need you know. Otherwise very little of your money if ANY will be received by somebody in real need.
At the end telemarketers costs will grow, they'll be forced to ask their advertiser for more money, but given that you didn't buy anything from them the advertisers will be very displeased and will drop them. They go out of business and stop annoying you for a long long time or maybe forever.
You literally OWN telemarketers, they live only thanks to YOU so YOU make the rules, they don't.
Yes it happened to me with email, namely with 200+ spam messages a day effectively clogging my inbox with good messages being bounched back to sender because of lack of space.
So unless you live under a rock and don't know about exponential growth you can imagine what could happen if telemarketers started calling en-masse because of the lack of restrictions and economies of scale.
Of course the fact that it didn't happen to you or it's not reported on daily news makes you feel confident you can make a "call to reality" to me which is just another rethorical trick, but you don't offer any reasonable argument.
In your precedent reply regarding the very same topic here you suggest people just to hang up the phone.
...wait a minute ! Now the marketing company is making me LOSE money !
Now while this SEEMS to be a solution, what about telemarketers calling you incessantly ? Maybe company A has called today, but not B neither C and so on until they even call you from Nigeria. You spend all the day screening phone calls ? I think not. What if your answering machines starts deleting old messages (including good ones) to make room for new spam ? What if it doesn't roll over so there is no more room for good calls ?
OH but we can solve this, I'll hire you to screen all my calls, I'll pay $1 hour for this
But weren't Americans like 300 Million ? The missing 250 Millions haven't joined yet ? I would.