Hmm.. So they might show up with a build of IE 9? Would be appropriate (turn a 6 upside down).
I feel sorry for the IE team at Microsoft - they get a lot of flak for a situation they didn't cause. They didn't choose to discontinue browser development in 2003. Where it up to them IE 6 would have been superceded in 03, 04 at the latest, instead of 07. And if IE 7 had come sooner IE 6 wouldn't have become as entrenched as it is now.
Wow! I'm an engineer now because my software can kill somebody! That really makes me feel better.
( Program in question is in PHP so how could it kill someone you ask? Well it's used by doctors when they prescribe medications to patients. If looks up the other medications the patient is on and looks for dangerous interactions. So if this look up fails or is miscalculated and the user doesn't notice then the patient could be killed )
That's the mental picture I get every time I see this debate. Fact: There is an observed increase in global average temperature over the last 100 years. Now whether that's due to man's activites or something else can be debated - whether the trend continues can be debated. Personally I think that 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 googlewatt heatlamp in the sky (a.k.a. The Sun) has a lot more to do with climate change than anything we as a species will ever do. But to say there has not been any warming to date is as much (if not more) than a lie than stating that the projections of climatalogists are fact.
Auto reformatting won't catch some of the other stupidities of this guy like outright empty blocks of code, code blocks that do nothing, or one of my favorites, passing a value between 4 to 6 variables before finally throwing it away and doing nothing with the value.
And then there's his habit of converting variables to strings with the sprint_f function AND THEN trying to add them numerically.
Oh, and while I'm in there I'm slowing pulling the bloody mess of interspersed PHP and HTML into something resembling a View / Control separation - at least enough of a separation to make editing the in the future code less of a pain.
Failure to comment doesn't secure your code - it just insures your code will be thrown away when the next guy comes in. It also increases the likelihood that your pissed off prior employer doesn't give you any references.
I'm currently digging through a nightmare code base. Not only are there no comments, but there's NO INDENTING EITHER. At all. I don't see how the guy who wrote it got as far as he did but. I take that back - he did occasionally comment, but only to mark the end of loops and functions which would be obvious if he would have indented his blasted code.
The decision has been made to patch what urgently needs to be patched in his code, then can it and start over from scratch. And I and my boss have already explained in detail to two calling in programmers exactly why it would be foolish to hire the moron.
Proven reserves will increase until the end. Hubbert's peak is about production, not about reserves. We peaked in 2005, '06 being the first year global production fell. Now yes, it will take 10 years to confirm the trend, but the ride is at or near the top and any argument otherwise wishful thinking at best.
Further, the easy oil is gone already. These new finds are in locations where extraction will be difficult - offshore, polar, etc. We can get to it, but it will be much, much more expensive.
The problem isn't oil - it's the abuse of it. Like an adict we've allowed oil to change the entire structure of our nation and our society. When the oil is gone this structure will not be sustainable.
It won't be armageddon. People will simply move back into the cities. The suburbs will become ghettos just as the inner cities are now and then they will die out. By the end of the century New York, Chicago and the other large cities of the US will contract back into the boundaries they had in the year 1900 before the oil infection took hold. It will only occur when people have no other choice - but now that we are beyond Heubert's peak that day is fast approaching.
Another sign of this is that even as the housing market overall is in crisis real estate in the inner cities has actually increased in value. Part of this is the lessors of such properties are usually corporations or affluent individuals, the other part is that the price of oil's rise creates a condensation pressure on cities that is only beginning.
Imagine for a moment if we geeks hadn't come up with DNS but instead tried to use a small handful of machines to handle domain name resolution. The Internet would collapse rather quickly no?
Funny then that to date our power grid is based on a centralized model. Sadly, as much as 20-30% of all power generated is lost during transmission over the grid.
Now effective solar panels and batteries to go with them would allow us to move to a more decentralized model. Imagine whole neighborhoods creating most - though not all - of their power needs. If the panels can get to around 80% of the needs of the house then the current power plants we have can be the only ones we need for awhile.
Or even better, instead of having massive plants with a huge footprint make use of smaller pup nuclear reactors - about the size used in a naval ship. One of those could be placed where the power substations are now and pick up the slack that the solar panels can't fulfill. They wouldn't present any real contamination danger as once their fuel was spent after 30 years or so you truck out the entire unit and refurbish (i.e. refuel) it under controlled conditions in a remote area - while in service the internals of the thing aren't opened up.
These things also wouldn't have to make as much power as the current power stations because, by virtue of being closer to the customers they serve, they wouldn't lose as much power in the lines.
It's called the Constitution of the United States.
In section 10...
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.
And when we look back to section 9...
No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
Now I'm no constitutional scholar - but I interpret the above to mean the states can't tax each other's exports. This will be challenged and it will end up in the Supreme Court.
Sure you believe you have the right - do you have $100,000 lying around just to prove it? If you think the SEO litigation has lived to long then you should know there are copyright litigation cases that have been in and out of the courts for decades.
Not so simple. They are looking for a feature's availability (EV SSL). They can verfiy the feature's presence by testing its functionality - if it isn't present then deny service. You could work around it by spoofing the submission form and while you're at it the referrer - but that's not so simple as a user agent change.
What they are doing is like requiring Ajax to use their site or not at all. You can defeat it, but it takes time and probably isn't worth it. From their point of view you can defeat their block because you "Know how the Internet works." Joe Average Internet User does not - he's the idiot falling for the scams and calling in, complaining, wanting his money back after the fact. He's the one who'll be forced to upgrade.
There are a lot of people wanting to know the answer to that question. But my magic 8-ball says 'no' and no matter how hard I shake the thing the best I get is "Don't count on it."
They can't seize it in the sense of use it and deny you from printing your own books - but they and every other publisher has the right under the OGL to use the game mechanics created by any other publisher under the OGL. This has rarely been capitalized on but it has happened - Mongoose publishing put out a series of collection books on spells, feats and the like regardless of who originally published them.
That is true to the give and take nature of the OGL. You get the right to use materials designated as open under the license - such as Wizard's System Reference Document (which is an open clone of the D&D core rulebooks). You give up the right to close off your unique game mechanics from all other parties to the OGL.
This really isn't any different in principle from the Gnu Public License (No accident - the GPL inspired the OGL) - you get the right to use code from any program released under the license, but you give up the right to keep your derived code closed off from everyone else.
Yes, you can try to produce a compatible product with someone else's game or even as you put it 'rip it off' - but can you financially withstand a court battle drug out over the course of years if you do.
The main lesson that should be taken from the whole SEO circus is you don't need any merit or evidence whatsoever to sue someone in court. Large companies can knock small competitors out of business quite easily by bankrupting them with legal fees.
Moving back from the general to the specifics of this case which I am quite familiar with as I am the technical administrator of ENWorld, which is the largest D&D fan site and the place where many if not most of the third party publishers got their start. The open gaming license allows publishers to reference game mechanics that are part of the license without fear of getting sued. A lot of RPG's owe their existence to this license.
This new Game System License for 4e has additional strings attached meant to address areas where Wizards was unhappy with the outcome of the prior license. Their expectation of the OGL was that only D&D support material would come out of it - instead whole new spin off systems like True20, Mutants and Masterminds and most recently Pathfinder have arose which don't require the D&D core rules in any way. I haven't seen the new GSL yet but I presume that this will be one of the first issues that will be addressed by it.
A final thought on copyrights and game mechanics. While it is true you can't copyright "d20 + modifier" as an example, there aren't too many ways you can express it either. Copyrights on game systems are effective for much the same reason that patents on software are stifling - that is there's only so many ways to express a given thought in a game system and so too there are only so many ways to do something in software.
Actually, your atari 2600 mig work way worse on a newer set than an older one, because of video/audio lag. I find it hilarious to think that a newer tv able to take the Xbox 360 or PS3's input would have trouble with the humble 2600 - but it wouldn't surprise me either.
you can plug in that tv from 1990 and it'll still work people... talk about fud I bet my Atari 2600 would work with it if I'd ever bother to dig it out of the closet.
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Hmm.. So they might show up with a build of IE 9? Would be appropriate (turn a 6 upside down).
I feel sorry for the IE team at Microsoft - they get a lot of flak for a situation they didn't cause. They didn't choose to discontinue browser development in 2003. Where it up to them IE 6 would have been superceded in 03, 04 at the latest, instead of 07. And if IE 7 had come sooner IE 6 wouldn't have become as entrenched as it is now.
As long as CTRL-ALT-DELETE still works we're golden.
Wow! I'm an engineer now because my software can kill somebody! That really makes me feel better. ( Program in question is in PHP so how could it kill someone you ask? Well it's used by doctors when they prescribe medications to patients. If looks up the other medications the patient is on and looks for dangerous interactions. So if this look up fails or is miscalculated and the user doesn't notice then the patient could be killed )
Nothing was said about spitting.
Now, I wonder who the first poster is going to be to demand Microsoft test their patches for compatibility with viruses and malware?
Cause that's how long it will take them to get through all the red tape.
That's the mental picture I get every time I see this debate. Fact: There is an observed increase in global average temperature over the last 100 years. Now whether that's due to man's activites or something else can be debated - whether the trend continues can be debated. Personally I think that 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 googlewatt heatlamp in the sky (a.k.a. The Sun) has a lot more to do with climate change than anything we as a species will ever do. But to say there has not been any warming to date is as much (if not more) than a lie than stating that the projections of climatalogists are fact.
Auto reformatting won't catch some of the other stupidities of this guy like outright empty blocks of code, code blocks that do nothing, or one of my favorites, passing a value between 4 to 6 variables before finally throwing it away and doing nothing with the value.
And then there's his habit of converting variables to strings with the sprint_f function AND THEN trying to add them numerically.
Oh, and while I'm in there I'm slowing pulling the bloody mess of interspersed PHP and HTML into something resembling a View / Control separation - at least enough of a separation to make editing the in the future code less of a pain.
Failure to comment doesn't secure your code - it just insures your code will be thrown away when the next guy comes in. It also increases the likelihood that your pissed off prior employer doesn't give you any references.
I'm currently digging through a nightmare code base. Not only are there no comments, but there's NO INDENTING EITHER. At all. I don't see how the guy who wrote it got as far as he did but. I take that back - he did occasionally comment, but only to mark the end of loops and functions which would be obvious if he would have indented his blasted code.
The decision has been made to patch what urgently needs to be patched in his code, then can it and start over from scratch. And I and my boss have already explained in detail to two calling in programmers exactly why it would be foolish to hire the moron.
Stupid question from a non-physicist -- What is the point in synthesizing elements with half lives measured in seconds if not microseconds?
Hopefully the lawyers involved will be disbarred. Probably they will not, but one can hope.
What cost? They're Microsoft employees - they don't have any souls.
When it's your own dog food it is free.
Proven reserves will increase until the end. Hubbert's peak is about production, not about reserves. We peaked in 2005, '06 being the first year global production fell. Now yes, it will take 10 years to confirm the trend, but the ride is at or near the top and any argument otherwise wishful thinking at best.
Further, the easy oil is gone already. These new finds are in locations where extraction will be difficult - offshore, polar, etc. We can get to it, but it will be much, much more expensive.
The problem isn't oil - it's the abuse of it. Like an adict we've allowed oil to change the entire structure of our nation and our society. When the oil is gone this structure will not be sustainable.
It won't be armageddon. People will simply move back into the cities. The suburbs will become ghettos just as the inner cities are now and then they will die out. By the end of the century New York, Chicago and the other large cities of the US will contract back into the boundaries they had in the year 1900 before the oil infection took hold. It will only occur when people have no other choice - but now that we are beyond Heubert's peak that day is fast approaching.
Another sign of this is that even as the housing market overall is in crisis real estate in the inner cities has actually increased in value. Part of this is the lessors of such properties are usually corporations or affluent individuals, the other part is that the price of oil's rise creates a condensation pressure on cities that is only beginning.
Imagine for a moment if we geeks hadn't come up with DNS but instead tried to use a small handful of machines to handle domain name resolution. The Internet would collapse rather quickly no?
Funny then that to date our power grid is based on a centralized model. Sadly, as much as 20-30% of all power generated is lost during transmission over the grid.
Now effective solar panels and batteries to go with them would allow us to move to a more decentralized model. Imagine whole neighborhoods creating most - though not all - of their power needs. If the panels can get to around 80% of the needs of the house then the current power plants we have can be the only ones we need for awhile.
Or even better, instead of having massive plants with a huge footprint make use of smaller pup nuclear reactors - about the size used in a naval ship. One of those could be placed where the power substations are now and pick up the slack that the solar panels can't fulfill. They wouldn't present any real contamination danger as once their fuel was spent after 30 years or so you truck out the entire unit and refurbish (i.e. refuel) it under controlled conditions in a remote area - while in service the internals of the thing aren't opened up.
These things also wouldn't have to make as much power as the current power stations because, by virtue of being closer to the customers they serve, they wouldn't lose as much power in the lines.
It's called the Constitution of the United States.
In section 10...
And when we look back to section 9...
Now I'm no constitutional scholar - but I interpret the above to mean the states can't tax each other's exports. This will be challenged and it will end up in the Supreme Court.
Sure you believe you have the right - do you have $100,000 lying around just to prove it? If you think the SEO litigation has lived to long then you should know there are copyright litigation cases that have been in and out of the courts for decades.
I give it thumbs up because the sooner IE 6 dies the sooner I can stop considering it and its screwed up CSS implementation when developing pages.
Not so simple. They are looking for a feature's availability (EV SSL). They can verfiy the feature's presence by testing its functionality - if it isn't present then deny service. You could work around it by spoofing the submission form and while you're at it the referrer - but that's not so simple as a user agent change.
What they are doing is like requiring Ajax to use their site or not at all. You can defeat it, but it takes time and probably isn't worth it. From their point of view you can defeat their block because you "Know how the Internet works." Joe Average Internet User does not - he's the idiot falling for the scams and calling in, complaining, wanting his money back after the fact. He's the one who'll be forced to upgrade.
There are a lot of people wanting to know the answer to that question. But my magic 8-ball says 'no' and no matter how hard I shake the thing the best I get is "Don't count on it."
They can't seize it in the sense of use it and deny you from printing your own books - but they and every other publisher has the right under the OGL to use the game mechanics created by any other publisher under the OGL. This has rarely been capitalized on but it has happened - Mongoose publishing put out a series of collection books on spells, feats and the like regardless of who originally published them.
That is true to the give and take nature of the OGL. You get the right to use materials designated as open under the license - such as Wizard's System Reference Document (which is an open clone of the D&D core rulebooks). You give up the right to close off your unique game mechanics from all other parties to the OGL.
This really isn't any different in principle from the Gnu Public License (No accident - the GPL inspired the OGL) - you get the right to use code from any program released under the license, but you give up the right to keep your derived code closed off from everyone else.
Yes, you can try to produce a compatible product with someone else's game or even as you put it 'rip it off' - but can you financially withstand a court battle drug out over the course of years if you do.
The main lesson that should be taken from the whole SEO circus is you don't need any merit or evidence whatsoever to sue someone in court. Large companies can knock small competitors out of business quite easily by bankrupting them with legal fees.
Moving back from the general to the specifics of this case which I am quite familiar with as I am the technical administrator of ENWorld, which is the largest D&D fan site and the place where many if not most of the third party publishers got their start. The open gaming license allows publishers to reference game mechanics that are part of the license without fear of getting sued. A lot of RPG's owe their existence to this license.
This new Game System License for 4e has additional strings attached meant to address areas where Wizards was unhappy with the outcome of the prior license. Their expectation of the OGL was that only D&D support material would come out of it - instead whole new spin off systems like True20, Mutants and Masterminds and most recently Pathfinder have arose which don't require the D&D core rules in any way. I haven't seen the new GSL yet but I presume that this will be one of the first issues that will be addressed by it.
A final thought on copyrights and game mechanics. While it is true you can't copyright "d20 + modifier" as an example, there aren't too many ways you can express it either. Copyrights on game systems are effective for much the same reason that patents on software are stifling - that is there's only so many ways to express a given thought in a game system and so too there are only so many ways to do something in software.