e.g. The term "reasonable effort" is open to a million interpretations. Anything you do would likely disapoint somebody. Promise nothing and you always exceed what was promised.
Use the service to its best advantage, don't rely on SourceForge (or anything else) 100%, and if it doesn't work for you move on. After all, it IS free.
If we don't enforce patent rights, then we'll lose. Patents are a monopoly, for a limited period of time. This encourages R&D, because investors know they'll have some time to recover their investment & profit from their R&D. It also exposes the new technology created, so that others can learn from it even though they can't use it for free.
There's always the right of others to do the same thing in a different way. If the original patent isn't the best solution for a problem then somebody will come up with a new, better, cheaper alternative (an patent that, if they wish).
So the question is: "If there weren't a patent system in place, would anybody have invested time, effort & money into developing DVDs? Would the consumer even have them as a choice?"
The the other question: "Where do I get one of these cheap DVD players before they're all pulled from the shelf?"
Even worse -- the guys who exercised stock options, couldn't sell them 'cause they were either greedy or stuck in the quiet period, saw the stock drop before they could dump it, and now still owe taxes based on the inflated worth of the stock at the time they took posession.
No money, piles of debt to Uncle Sam, and they didn't even have the big boat in the drive!
Bring talented people to the US to stay!
on
The Laid-off Techie
·
· Score: 1
What this country should be doing is bring talented people to this country to stay!
If we truly need the manpower & the skills we should be welcoming these folks into our country as permanent residents & eventual citizens. Not only does this retain their talent for the long term BUT it eliminates employers from bringing H1B visa holders here as virtual indentured servants. A permanent resident is free to change jobs, will enter the job mnarket at a competitive wage and not depress the labor market for their skill set.
It's what has always worked for the US before. It's one of the founding principles of our country. Why did we abandon it for H1B?
... and in the same post somebody said they dropped their microdrive one a hard floor, it bounced several times, and it still runs fine.
Everybody has walkmans that withstand the pounding of joggers. The microdrive, since it has less mass than a CD, is pobably less affected & no doubt has ant-shock features designed in.
An undersea vehicle I was testing sank. It was recoverred after a wek on the bottom, in seawater. The NAVY crew working with me placed it into a sealed container filled with seawater, and shipped it back to the depot's lab for failure analysis & salvage.
Keeping it under water was less damaging than exposure to oxygen in the air. When we got it back, they rinsed everything with lots of flowing fresh water. We took everything apart, inspected it with a blacklight (sea-salt flouresces), baked it overnight in an environmental chamber (50C), reassembled things and almost every subassembly worked!
Cable assemblies took longer. There are lots of nooks & crannies for salt to hide in. They inspected them after a few weeks. Any salt tends to migrate out & beomes visible.
Yes -- the highest Federal tax bracket may be 38% BUT we incur costs elswhere. US income taxes don't fund the ranges of services & benefits that income taxes in other countries fund.
I pay extra for retirement: Social Security is additional cost, and provides only a fraction of what a person needs; contributions to an employer's retirement plan (if there is one); contributions to 401K plan; contributions to an IRA.
I pay extra for health coverage (a portion "paid" by my employer & a portion directly deducted from my pay): contributions to private health insurance, vision insurance, dental insurance.
Seperate deductions for funding Medicare/Medicaid that I hope I'll never need.
Short-term & long-term disability insurance in case anything should happen to me before I reach retirement age (a moving target, by the way).
What about days off: vacations & sick days, we're "given" a few weeks a year, just a fraction of what our European friends get.
You can't just compare deductions with the same name. We pay less in income taxes, but get less in return. Add up all the deductions, not only various taxes but moneys going to private concerns, and you'll be unpleasently surprised!
It's about the sam ein the US, we just "hide" our taxes.
I have deductions for federal income tax, state income tax, social security, medicare, a couple of state retirement programs, 401K 'cause social security won't provide a living wage, medical, dental & vision insurance... it just goes on & on.
More than half my pay goes to deductions, not all are taxes, but they pay for services that are funded by tax dollars elswhere. When Iook at total cost and services recieved I find that I'm envious of my German & Italian relatives!
I'm locked out of on-line pay records -- will add hard numbers later when I get home if anybody cares.
Amazing! I wonder if the original author was embelishing to make a point or if he was just misinformed.
Now then as for your example of BLM lands. That example has some flaws too. When the Feds lease land to a rancher they actually require that he graze a certain number of cattle upon the land. The rancher cannot reduce the size of his herd, or he will be removed from the program and his leases auctioned to somebody else who'll "use the land".
This policy also means that you & I can't buy the lease and use the land for recreation or as a nature preserve.
BTW: My information is dated (>15 yrs). Are policies more enlightened now?
The commons in old English villages is public land that can be used by all for grazing. It's intent is to create a reserve to be used by townsfolk when their own pasture is lacking, say in times of drought. However, if one villager aquires too many sheep for his land to sustain, then uses the commons to sustain his herd, he will become wealthier than his neighbors since he is raising more sheep than his own land could support. In times of real need, as in a severe drought, all villagers will try to graze their flocks on the commons which has already been depleted by the greedy villager.
The commons will be destroyed by overgrazing, the majority of villagers will lose their flocks & livlihood, but the greedy villager will probably have the most sheep left, since they grazed from the commons longer and both his sheep & his land were in better shape at the start of the drought.
The system works only if the villagers collectivly can bring pressure upon the one abusive individual.
Here's a related link that may say it better than I can.
For my application, and I presume most users, data flow is asymetric. Higher power at the access point would reduce errors on the access point to client direction, increasing the effective bandwidth. This is the direction that I need more bandwidth.
It must be the places I spend my Lira then. I always seem to get many more coins than bills & see very few bills below LIT 10 000.
I'll miss the variety once the Euro is phased in. It helps make travel fun. Our neighbor's youngest had his first birthday recently. We got him a large ceramic piggy bank and seeded it with coins left over from our travels. He & his brothers will probably never see most of hose coins again, certainly not in actual usage.
Times were good, lots of high paid jobs, company decided to save money by making an Assistent Engineer position at lower pay. All non-4-year-degreed engineers became Assistent Engineers -- no cut in pay but no raises in sight either because they were "overpaid".
Times were bad, no jobs available, lots of people looking. When a pile of resumes came in personel culled all non-degreed applicants. Still too many willing to take the offerred pay? Remove the 2-year degreed applicants. Continue until only a few resumes are left & pass these on to engineering.
Get the degree -- there'll come a time when it'll be necessary, or at least give you more options.
If you really want to baby the tube during transport, most carriers can quote a price that insures transport on a truck with special suspension -- "air-ride" or "electronics equipment van". Cost is about double normal shipping. They usually deal only with commercial accounts, if you can find anybody willing to take your money they'll double the cost again, and you must crate it yourself.
Commercial consumer electronics doesn't usually get this sort of treatment, though. Other option is to carefully place the monitor in the truck/van. A guy I worked with once, whose family had a moving business, always suggested putting delicate items right over the wheels of the truck/trailer. This minimizes vertical movement & acceleration when a pothole or curb is hit.
Guns can be realigned. If you've had the set for awhile it'd probably be worthwhile to have somebody degauss the set & realign the convergence.
ITL 1 000 had silver wires in them? Real silver? That bill's worth less than US$0.50 && I believe Italy stopped printing notes below ITL 10 000. They went to coins for such small denominations.
Patterns are a method of communication. A common language which allows you to say in just a few words what problem you are solving and how you will solve it. Yes, you still need a good algorithm, but that is an implementation detail and not what patterns are all about. They won't make a bad programmer a good one. It will let several programmers work together more effectively, and possibly make it easier to know what the bad programmer intended when you're stuck with fixing his code.
My favorite example of a pattern, from the original "Design Patterns", is the porch. A porch is a transition between the inside spaces of a house & the outside. It should allow you to greet a person at the door, converse with him there, and decide whether or not you wish to allow him into the inner sanctum of your home. It should be at least 6 feet wide, to allow room for a few chairs, a table for a drink or book, and still allow somebody else to pass. It should be close to the street, but not so close that you are forced to be a part of the public street scene. It should have a low wall or divider so that you can be seated and hear what is happening on the street and be a part of it but still maintain your privacy to read a book or converse with friends. The wall should be low enough so that you can stand or move your chair by the wall, and from there see what is happenning, become a part of the public life on the street, greet a passer-by.
Alexander spends several pages describing how a porch is to be used, what problems it solves, how it interacts with other patterns... when an architect sees a client he can spend hours or days determining what sort of house they need to satisfy their needs, but when he returns to his office to converse with his coworkers he need only say "they need a porch" and everybody can get to work on the implementation.
This doesn't solve the problem, it just transfers it to somebody else i.e. the credit card processor. Now you as a user of the processor still have an obligation to your customers to assertain that the processor has proper safeguards in place.
There's also something to be said for keeping this data distributed. One humonguos database is a tempting target, and cracking one protection scheme nets a large return. Many small databases each with a different implementation would require a much larger expenditure of effort for the same return and might raise an alarm if other(s) got cracked first.
In general, you're allowed to listen to anything that's coming over the airwaves but you are not allowed to divulge that information in any way. So it's not wiretapping, but if you actually use the data you've obtained for anything meaningful you've broken the law anyway. Or have you?
Re:WARNING: THIS IS ADVICE TO TERRORISTS
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: 1
Obvious solution (short form):
1. fill each bucket to more than half full
2. tilt each bucket until liquid just reaches the intersection of the base & the wall at the bottom of the bucket
3. each bucket is now exactly half full, so you have 1.5 gallons + 3.5 gallons = 5 gallons.
The problem statement doesn't require that the 5 gallons be in a single bucket.
Note that this makes some assumptions about the symmetry of the buckets.
Yes, because of peculiarities with the way cell phones work, and to force them to work on a network that was designed on the premise that phones are NOT mobile, cell phones are always assigned to a mobile switch. That is, a switch for mobile phones, the switch itself is quite stationary.
The exchange (the 3 digits after the area code & before the dash in the USA) is assigned to the switch so those numbers are only used for mobile phones.This may change in the future when networks get smarter & you have true number portability, but for now there are exchanges that should be off-limits to telemarketers.
I'm not sure how this data is diseminated to the telemarketers, though. Anybody out there know?
Re:Every citizen should be kept under surveillance
on
Remote Breathalyzer
·
· Score: 1
London is already blanketted with security cameras. Most are linked to private firms, hired by local buusiness or civic organizations. If they notice a problem they call the cops and supply the tapes as evidence.
If there were one person responsible for all agencies' server security what would happen when he screwed up? Everybody connected would be compromised since they'd all have the same flaw.
Sooner or later everybody makes a mistake. By having every department responsible for their own servers a security breach is of limited scope.
Space grade components are the same silicon die, off of the same production line, as any other grade IC.
The differences:
1. Package: Usually ceramic or welded metal cases that are hermetically sealed. The more common plastic components breath as they temperature cycle. When they "inhale" there's a posssibility that contaminants are drawn into the case.
2. Test: Almost all parameters are 100% tested whereas commercial quality components are minimally tested with thorough testing done on selected lots. Tests are also conducted over a wider temperature range, Often electrical performance is less than for commercial components (e.g. lower speed,less gain) but the parameters are guarenteed over a wider range of temperature
3. Burn-in: Parts are burned in, operated at elevated temperature & power, to weed out infant failures. This improves reliability at the cost of slightly decreased lifetime
4. Inspection: The manufacturing & test facilities are inspected & certified to assure consistentcy in the production of the components. You're assured that the parts were made & tested in exactly the same way that the parts characterized on the data sheet you used to design your circuit.
5. Documentation: The product's entire life cycle is documented. You know exactly who made it, when & where. If a problem does manage to slip through you can track it back to the root cause then forward to all individual parts affected.
6. Marking: The chips are distinctively marked. Not only the part number, for example, the tops of ICs are usualy painted silver.
Al of these are things you can work around. You can seal the box the parts are contained in instead of each individual component. You can buy large lots of commercial components to assure uniformity. You can build boards or larger subassemblies then test & burnin these assemblies trading of the cost of test vs. the cost of thrwing away failed assemblies.
This has all been done before for military & space qualified projects. My guess is that these guys have done a better job of managing the project & costs. Not a trivial task, since you be able to look into the future & understand how the entire development & production process works.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend got it, thinks it's great.
He says it copies the DVD & saves it to a CDROM in compressed format. Playback is on a PC. Resultent quality is "inferior but quite acceptable".
I haven't seen it. He didn't know what format was used -- his technical knowledge & proclivities lie elswhere.
Personally, I'll stick to DVDs.
Looks like a bunch of CYA stuff.
e.g. The term "reasonable effort" is open to a million interpretations. Anything you do would likely disapoint somebody. Promise nothing and you always exceed what was promised.
Use the service to its best advantage, don't rely on SourceForge (or anything else) 100%, and if it doesn't work for you move on. After all, it IS free.
If we don't enforce patent rights, then we'll lose. Patents are a monopoly, for a limited period of time. This encourages R&D, because investors know they'll have some time to recover their investment & profit from their R&D. It also exposes the new technology created, so that others can learn from it even though they can't use it for free.
There's always the right of others to do the same thing in a different way. If the original patent isn't the best solution for a problem then somebody will come up with a new, better, cheaper alternative (an patent that, if they wish).
So the question is: "If there weren't a patent system in place, would anybody have invested time, effort & money into developing DVDs? Would the consumer even have them as a choice?"
The the other question: "Where do I get one of these cheap DVD players before they're all pulled from the shelf?"
Even worse -- the guys who exercised stock options, couldn't sell them 'cause they were either greedy or stuck in the quiet period, saw the stock drop before they could dump it, and now still owe taxes based on the inflated worth of the stock at the time they took posession.
No money, piles of debt to Uncle Sam, and they didn't even have the big boat in the drive!
What this country should be doing is bring talented people to this country to stay!
If we truly need the manpower & the skills we should be welcoming these folks into our country as permanent residents & eventual citizens. Not only does this retain their talent for the long term BUT it eliminates employers from bringing H1B visa holders here as virtual indentured servants. A permanent resident is free to change jobs, will enter the job mnarket at a competitive wage and not depress the labor market for their skill set.
It's what has always worked for the US before. It's one of the founding principles of our country. Why did we abandon it for H1B?
... and in the same post somebody said they dropped their microdrive one a hard floor, it bounced several times, and it still runs fine.
Everybody has walkmans that withstand the pounding of joggers. The microdrive, since it has less mass than a CD, is pobably less affected & no doubt has ant-shock features designed in.
An undersea vehicle I was testing sank. It was recoverred after a wek on the bottom, in seawater. The NAVY crew working with me placed it into a sealed container filled with seawater, and shipped it back to the depot's lab for failure analysis & salvage.
Keeping it under water was less damaging than exposure to oxygen in the air. When we got it back, they rinsed everything with lots of flowing fresh water. We took everything apart, inspected it with a blacklight (sea-salt flouresces), baked it overnight in an environmental chamber (50C), reassembled things and almost every subassembly worked!
Cable assemblies took longer. There are lots of nooks & crannies for salt to hide in. They inspected them after a few weeks. Any salt tends to migrate out & beomes visible.
Yes -- the highest Federal tax bracket may be 38% BUT we incur costs elswhere. US income taxes don't fund the ranges of services & benefits that income taxes in other countries fund.
I pay extra for retirement: Social Security is additional cost, and provides only a fraction of what a person needs; contributions to an employer's retirement plan (if there is one); contributions to 401K plan; contributions to an IRA.
I pay extra for health coverage (a portion "paid" by my employer & a portion directly deducted from my pay): contributions to private health insurance, vision insurance, dental insurance.
Seperate deductions for funding Medicare/Medicaid that I hope I'll never need.
Short-term & long-term disability insurance in case anything should happen to me before I reach retirement age (a moving target, by the way).
What about days off: vacations & sick days, we're "given" a few weeks a year, just a fraction of what our European friends get.
You can't just compare deductions with the same name. We pay less in income taxes, but get less in return. Add up all the deductions, not only various taxes but moneys going to private concerns, and you'll be unpleasently surprised!
Income tax of 55%.
... it just goes on & on.
It's about the sam ein the US, we just "hide" our taxes.
I have deductions for federal income tax, state income tax, social security, medicare, a couple of state retirement programs, 401K 'cause social security won't provide a living wage, medical, dental & vision insurance
More than half my pay goes to deductions, not all are taxes, but they pay for services that are funded by tax dollars elswhere. When Iook at total cost and services recieved I find that I'm envious of my German & Italian relatives!
I'm locked out of on-line pay records -- will add hard numbers later when I get home if anybody cares.
Amazing! I wonder if the original author was embelishing to make a point or if he was just misinformed.
Now then as for your example of BLM lands. That example has some flaws too. When the Feds lease land to a rancher they actually require that he graze a certain number of cattle upon the land. The rancher cannot reduce the size of his herd, or he will be removed from the program and his leases auctioned to somebody else who'll "use the land".
This policy also means that you & I can't buy the lease and use the land for recreation or as a nature preserve.
BTW: My information is dated (>15 yrs). Are policies more enlightened now?
The commons in old English villages is public land that can be used by all for grazing. It's intent is to create a reserve to be used by townsfolk when their own pasture is lacking, say in times of drought. However, if one villager aquires too many sheep for his land to sustain, then uses the commons to sustain his herd, he will become wealthier than his neighbors since he is raising more sheep than his own land could support. In times of real need, as in a severe drought, all villagers will try to graze their flocks on the commons which has already been depleted by the greedy villager.
The commons will be destroyed by overgrazing, the majority of villagers will lose their flocks & livlihood, but the greedy villager will probably have the most sheep left, since they grazed from the commons longer and both his sheep & his land were in better shape at the start of the drought.
The system works only if the villagers collectivly can bring pressure upon the one abusive individual.
Here's a related link that may say it better than I can.
For my application, and I presume most users, data flow is asymetric. Higher power at the access point would reduce errors on the access point to client direction, increasing the effective bandwidth. This is the direction that I need more bandwidth.
It must be the places I spend my Lira then. I always seem to get many more coins than bills & see very few bills below LIT 10 000.
I'll miss the variety once the Euro is phased in. It helps make travel fun. Our neighbor's youngest had his first birthday recently. We got him a large ceramic piggy bank and seeded it with coins left over from our travels. He & his brothers will probably never see most of hose coins again, certainly not in actual usage.
Yes, you're right.
My library is packed away & in-transit with the rest of my office. New company, new office, same old job
During my career I've also seen:
Times were good, lots of high paid jobs, company decided to save money by making an Assistent Engineer position at lower pay. All non-4-year-degreed engineers became Assistent Engineers -- no cut in pay but no raises in sight either because they were "overpaid".
Times were bad, no jobs available, lots of people looking. When a pile of resumes came in personel culled all non-degreed applicants. Still too many willing to take the offerred pay? Remove the 2-year degreed applicants. Continue until only a few resumes are left & pass these on to engineering.
Get the degree -- there'll come a time when it'll be necessary, or at least give you more options.
If you really want to baby the tube during transport, most carriers can quote a price that insures transport on a truck with special suspension -- "air-ride" or "electronics equipment van". Cost is about double normal shipping. They usually deal only with commercial accounts, if you can find anybody willing to take your money they'll double the cost again, and you must crate it yourself.
Commercial consumer electronics doesn't usually get this sort of treatment, though. Other option is to carefully place the monitor in the truck/van. A guy I worked with once, whose family had a moving business, always suggested putting delicate items right over the wheels of the truck/trailer. This minimizes vertical movement & acceleration when a pothole or curb is hit.
Guns can be realigned. If you've had the set for awhile it'd probably be worthwhile to have somebody degauss the set & realign the convergence.
ITL 1 000 had silver wires in them? Real silver? That bill's worth less than US$0.50 && I believe Italy stopped printing notes below ITL 10 000. They went to coins for such small denominations.
Patterns are a method of communication. A common language which allows you to say in just a few words what problem you are solving and how you will solve it. Yes, you still need a good algorithm, but that is an implementation detail and not what patterns are all about. They won't make a bad programmer a good one. It will let several programmers work together more effectively, and possibly make it easier to know what the bad programmer intended when you're stuck with fixing his code.
... when an architect sees a client he can spend hours or days determining what sort of house they need to satisfy their needs, but when he returns to his office to converse with his coworkers he need only say "they need a porch" and everybody can get to work on the implementation.
My favorite example of a pattern, from the original "Design Patterns", is the porch. A porch is a transition between the inside spaces of a house & the outside. It should allow you to greet a person at the door, converse with him there, and decide whether or not you wish to allow him into the inner sanctum of your home. It should be at least 6 feet wide, to allow room for a few chairs, a table for a drink or book, and still allow somebody else to pass. It should be close to the street, but not so close that you are forced to be a part of the public street scene. It should have a low wall or divider so that you can be seated and hear what is happening on the street and be a part of it but still maintain your privacy to read a book or converse with friends. The wall should be low enough so that you can stand or move your chair by the wall, and from there see what is happenning, become a part of the public life on the street, greet a passer-by.
Alexander spends several pages describing how a porch is to be used, what problems it solves, how it interacts with other patterns
This doesn't solve the problem, it just transfers it to somebody else i.e. the credit card processor. Now you as a user of the processor still have an obligation to your customers to assertain that the processor has proper safeguards in place.
There's also something to be said for keeping this data distributed. One humonguos database is a tempting target, and cracking one protection scheme nets a large return. Many small databases each with a different implementation would require a much larger expenditure of effort for the same return and might raise an alarm if other(s) got cracked first.
In general, you're allowed to listen to anything that's coming over the airwaves but you are not allowed to divulge that information in any way. So it's not wiretapping, but if you actually use the data you've obtained for anything meaningful you've broken the law anyway. Or have you?
Obvious solution (short form):
1. fill each bucket to more than half full
2. tilt each bucket until liquid just reaches the intersection of the base & the wall at the bottom of the bucket
3. each bucket is now exactly half full, so you have 1.5 gallons + 3.5 gallons = 5 gallons.
The problem statement doesn't require that the 5 gallons be in a single bucket.
Note that this makes some assumptions about the symmetry of the buckets.
Yes, because of peculiarities with the way cell phones work, and to force them to work on a network that was designed on the premise that phones are NOT mobile, cell phones are always assigned to a mobile switch. That is, a switch for mobile phones, the switch itself is quite stationary.
The exchange (the 3 digits after the area code & before the dash in the USA) is assigned to the switch so those numbers are only used for mobile phones.This may change in the future when networks get smarter & you have true number portability, but for now there are exchanges that should be off-limits to telemarketers.
I'm not sure how this data is diseminated to the telemarketers, though. Anybody out there know?
London is already blanketted with security cameras. Most are linked to private firms, hired by local buusiness or civic organizations. If they notice a problem they call the cops and supply the tapes as evidence.
If there were one person responsible for all agencies' server security what would happen when he screwed up? Everybody connected would be compromised since they'd all have the same flaw.
Sooner or later everybody makes a mistake. By having every department responsible for their own servers a security breach is of limited scope.
Space grade components are the same silicon die, off of the same production line, as any other grade IC.
The differences:
1. Package: Usually ceramic or welded metal cases that are hermetically sealed. The more common plastic components breath as they temperature cycle. When they "inhale" there's a posssibility that contaminants are drawn into the case.
2. Test: Almost all parameters are 100% tested whereas commercial quality components are minimally tested with thorough testing done on selected lots. Tests are also conducted over a wider temperature range, Often electrical performance is less than for commercial components (e.g. lower speed,less gain) but the parameters are guarenteed over a wider range of temperature
3. Burn-in: Parts are burned in, operated at elevated temperature & power, to weed out infant failures. This improves reliability at the cost of slightly decreased lifetime
4. Inspection: The manufacturing & test facilities are inspected & certified to assure consistentcy in the production of the components. You're assured that the parts were made & tested in exactly the same way that the parts characterized on the data sheet you used to design your circuit.
5. Documentation: The product's entire life cycle is documented. You know exactly who made it, when & where. If a problem does manage to slip through you can track it back to the root cause then forward to all individual parts affected.
6. Marking: The chips are distinctively marked. Not only the part number, for example, the tops of ICs are usualy painted silver.
Al of these are things you can work around. You can seal the box the parts are contained in instead of each individual component. You can buy large lots of commercial components to assure uniformity. You can build boards or larger subassemblies then test & burnin these assemblies trading of the cost of test vs. the cost of thrwing away failed assemblies.
This has all been done before for military & space qualified projects. My guess is that these guys have done a better job of managing the project & costs. Not a trivial task, since you be able to look into the future & understand how the entire development & production process works.