Why shouldn't you be able to make calls from inside a retail establishment? Do they want to eliminate comparison shopping?
"Hello, Best Buy? What's your price on a Denon 217. $314? Thanks. Bye. OK, sales rep, would you like to match that price?"
Re:Meanwhile, C++ goes nowhere
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
·
· Score: 1
At least use "snprintf". (Or, in Microsoft's warped world, "_snprintf"). That prevents buffer overflows.
All the buffer overflow prone C library functions (sprintf, strcat,...) should be deprecated and moved to something like "unsafe_strings.h". That would make potential buffer overflow points stand out.
Meanwhile, try adding something like this to any major open source project:
And related to this, the "photograph of a trademarked building" issue has already been litigated., in "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum vs. Gentile". The photographer won on appeal. And he was selling a poster of the building, in competition with a poster sold by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The only registered trademarks with "Geisel" in them relate to Ted Geisel of "Dr. Seuss" fame. They both are drawings, not word marks, and they're not pictures of that library.
California also has state trademark registration, but that's narrow, only applies to "goods and services", and you have to register with the state. There's even a specific clause intended to prevent the use of trademarks to suppress publications, at Business and Professions Code 14320.
(3) Injunctive relief is not available to the owner of the right
infringed with respect to an issue of a newspaper, magazine, or other
similar periodical or electronic communication containing infringing
matter if restraining the dissemination of the infringing matter in
any particular issue of the periodical or in an electronic
communication would delay the delivery of the issue or transmission
of the electronic communication after the regular time for delivery
and the delay would be due to the method by which publication and
distribution of the periodical or transmission of the electronic
communication is customarily conducted in accordance with sound
business practice, and not to any method or device adopted for the
evasion of this section or to prevent or delay the issuance of an
injunction or restraining order with respect to the infringing
matter.
A major problem is that there's no major player pushing for higher reliability in the language. There's a high-reliability standards group for Java, but none for C++.
PayPal UK is regulated as a financial institution
on
Paypal Grinds To A Halt
·
· Score: 4, Informative
In Europe, PayPal is regulated as an Electronic Money Institution. This is just enough regulation to insure there are assets behind the issuer and you can get your money out.
In the US, New York State and Louisiana have imposed some regulatory requirements on PayPal.
Re:Meanwhile, C++ goes nowhere
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
OK, more details.
The classical problem with C was the failure to distinguish between a pointer and an array. (In the late 1970s, this was considered a feature. Now we know it's a bug.) This led to passing arrays around without size information, and to pointer arithmetic. C++ tries to paper over those issues with the STL, and it almost works. Almost.
"Smart pointers" don't work all that well in C++. The "auto_ptr" mess is instructive. After three published revisions, it still doesn't work well. And that's the simplest case. Reference-counted pointers have worse problems. Making an efficient, airtight smart pointer does not seem to be possible within C++. It needs some language support. Perl's strong and weak references (not Java's) are a good model here.
With optimization and language support, the overhead of reference counting can be brought
way down. But you can't do that at the template level.
(Incidentally, retrofitting garbage collection to C++ is probably a mistake. It's been tried. The interaction with destructor semantics is too ugly. Calling destructors at random times is not a good thing. And it leads to horrors like "re-animation" in Microsoft Managed C++).
The other huge area of trouble in C++ is threading. The language ignores the whole issue.
Locking is considered a library issue. The compiler gives you no help in determining whether a program is free of race conditions.
Because C++ is unsafe,
the usual advice is to be "very very careful". This has led to much talk of "patterns", rituals and taboos which supposedly keep bad things from happening. This helps a little, but it's more of a cult than a tool set.
So what we really have is C, with C++ cruft on top of that, then STL cruft on top of that, then "patterns" cruft on top of that. Not good.
And what is the committee doing? Adding more cruft, in the form of "generic programming". There's a way to abuse the template system into pretending to be a recursive term-rewriting engine which can be used to perform arbitrary computatations at compile time. This is being pursued as a foundation for a new generation of incomprehensible template libraries.
(If you've ever had to debug someone else's template, you know how hard it is. Imagine something far worse. If you want to go beyond imagining it, go over to Boost, download something, and try to fix it. Suffer.)
I've written a bit on
Strict C++. It's not impossible to fix this. It can almost be made backwards compatible. I don't claim to have all the answers. But at least I'm trying to improve safety and reliability. This is far more important than adding cool features.
Meanwhile, C++ goes nowhere
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
C++ is in deep trouble. The C++ committee is focused on additional features for templates to the exclusion of almost everything else. Strostrup has said that there's nothing really wrong with C++, and the committee buys that. So none of the huge safety problems get fixed. And buffer overflows continue to plague computing.
This problem is the primary reason that C# exists. If the C++ committee had fixed their language, we wouldn't need C#.
It's a big issue for the open source community. The publicly standardized languages have major problems, and the newer languages are controlled by single large vendors.
This is getting really annoying. Especially since he doesn't actually know anything about the subject.
For a much better source of articles, see What's New, by Bob Park from the American Physical Society, who writes about what's happening in science. Park is a physicist, and knows what he's talking about.
The Sony and Honda robots are still using the zero moment point approach. This is a 35 year old way to define "stability". It's better than the old "center of mass must be over the base at all times"
approach, which leads to windup toys with big feet and very slow walking. But it's worse than Raibert's legged running work from the 1980s.
Because of this, legged robots are back to walking, rather than jogging or running. The field has regressed since Raibert and Hodgins.
It's prior restraint because it involves shutting off a publisher. The Government's only proper remedy is a civil or criminal action, not punitive seizure.
Also see the Privacy Protection Act, 42 USC 2000aa, which limits searches and seizures of "publishers", defined very broadly. Rackspace could have said no.
Good point. The base and tilt head are clearly from the this Martin MAC disco lighting unit. But it looks like they have some different projector mounted, with a rectangular front window.
Putting multiple low-power unsynchronized FM transmitters on the same frequency in a small area is going to yield mutual interference, not wide area coverage.
This would work better with Wi-Fi enabled boom boxes. Wi-Fi can handle multiple transmitters.
An Wi-Fi enable Walkman-like device has real possibilities.
This has to have gone through the Office of International Affairs in the Justice Department, which handles all MLAT matters.
So that's whom journalists should contact for information. The Director of that unit, Molly Warlow, is the responsible party.
This is clear prior restraint and a First Amendment violation. No treaty can override that.
Remember, the Patriot Act gag order provisions were ruled unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court last week. Further use of those provisions by the Government is questionable and may be illegal.
You know, the guy who's always plugging his ad-supported blog on Slashdot by turning press releases into Slashdot stories.
Enhanced product image gives it away
on
360-Degree 3D Imaging
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The product image shown in the article is very
dim. But if you bring it into Photoshop, do
gamma correction, scale it up by about 150%, and
filter the JPEG artifacts, it looks like this.
Now you can see what it is.
That looks a lot like the DL-1 digital light projector, which is a video projector on a 2-axis tilt mount. "Using the motion control feature, project your imagery anywhere in a 3D space". It's used for nightclubs and stage shows.
Well, there was Dwight Eisenhower. His first elective office was President of the US.
(Of course, he'd been Supreme Allied Commander.)
Bush I's first elective office was Vice President.
(He'd been CIA director.)
Jesse Jackson ran for president without holding any elective office. (He probably could have won an election for mayor of Washington D.C., and was suggested for that job by many. But as Mayor Barry used to say of Jackson, "Jesse don't want to run nothing but his mouth". He's now a talk show host on Clear Channel.)
If they really wanted to be annoying, they could generate images in Quicktime, which has a "slide show" format. It's hard, although not impossible, to do anything with those files.
This scam depends on the netherworld of "credit card merchant providers", who are also the money launderers who make spam possible.
If you're a legitimate business, and want to accept credit cards, you go to your bank and open a merchant account. They check your financial history, may demand a deposit (on which they pay interest), want to see you in person, may visit your premises, and make you sign a painful contract. Then they charge you about $100 per month, plus 1-3% of the transaction cost.
This is the way real companies do it.
If you're a less legitimate business, there are services for you, too. Charge-It-Now is a more or less legitimate one. "Now you can be approved to accept credit cards in as little as two hours and have a live merchant account in 24 hours. Applying online for our Internet processing software has never been easier. The entire application process is done online in less than 10 minutes and with our digital signature approval process; we do not need a physical signature. We deposit funds directly into your existing bank account.... We accept 98% of applicants". At this tier, the rates are higher and the merchant is more likely to be doing something dodgy. These outfits aren't regulated as banks. They're resellers of banking services. They need to be better regulated.
Further down in the muck, there is the "high risk merchant account" business. "Has PaySystems or other merchant providers shutdown your company, virtually stopping you from processing credit cards?... Good Credit / Bad Credit okay!...
We pride our business on the fact we can place just about any business type. Even if you've experienced problems in the past with other processors or have a low credit rating."
This is where your mid-grade spammer gets credit card processing. Most of those operators need to be kicked out of the credit card system.
Down at the bottom, there's "offshore high-risk credit card processing"."Merchant account service for bad credit, high risk, gambling, and adult related business." This is the land of 15% fees, long holdbacks, and processors who disappear suddenly.
Here we find companies operating from undisclosed locations, a criminal offense in many jurisdictions. These outfits help crooks and spammers launder their money, evade taxes, and hide from law enforcement. These operators are essentially part of organized crime.
The great thing about Google News is that you can easily see what Reuters, Al-Jazeera, Haaretz, and Xinhua have to say about the same event. If they're all saying roughly the same thing, that probably reflects reality. If there's serious divergence, there's probably major spin control going on somewhere.
Why? What's illegal about posting the names and addresses of delegates to political conventions? They're players in the political process, and are supposed to be accessable. If you voted in a Republican primary, you elected them. You're entitled to lobby them. Even though they're locked into the presidental candidate choices, they vote on the platform, and there's some room for negotiation there.
The list of Democratic National Convention delegates is on the Democratic National Convention website. (Look at the entries for each state.) The Republicans have been heavily criticized for keeping their delegate list a secret.
This is a pro-spyware bill, just like the CAN-SPAM act is a pro-spam bill. As with the CAN-SPAM act, it preempts state law, invalidating Utah's strong anti-spyware law. As with the CAN-SPAM act, it prohibits private lawsuits. Only the FTC can enforce this act, and they're a weak agency under the current administration.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hello, Best Buy? What's your price on a Denon 217. $314? Thanks. Bye. OK, sales rep, would you like to match that price?"
All the buffer overflow prone C library functions (sprintf, strcat, ...) should be deprecated and moved to something like "unsafe_strings.h". That would make potential buffer overflow points stand out.
Meanwhile, try adding something like this to any major open source project:
Compiles will fail until the code is fixed.And related to this, the "photograph of a trademarked building" issue has already been litigated., in "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum vs. Gentile". The photographer won on appeal. And he was selling a poster of the building, in competition with a poster sold by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
California also has state trademark registration, but that's narrow, only applies to "goods and services", and you have to register with the state. There's even a specific clause intended to prevent the use of trademarks to suppress publications, at Business and Professions Code 14320.
Also, California has a strong anti-SLAPP law.
A major problem is that there's no major player pushing for higher reliability in the language. There's a high-reliability standards group for Java, but none for C++.
In the US, New York State and Louisiana have imposed some regulatory requirements on PayPal.
If you lost money with Paypal between 1999 and 2003, there's a class action settlement.
The classical problem with C was the failure to distinguish between a pointer and an array. (In the late 1970s, this was considered a feature. Now we know it's a bug.) This led to passing arrays around without size information, and to pointer arithmetic. C++ tries to paper over those issues with the STL, and it almost works. Almost.
"Smart pointers" don't work all that well in C++. The "auto_ptr" mess is instructive. After three published revisions, it still doesn't work well. And that's the simplest case. Reference-counted pointers have worse problems. Making an efficient, airtight smart pointer does not seem to be possible within C++. It needs some language support. Perl's strong and weak references (not Java's) are a good model here. With optimization and language support, the overhead of reference counting can be brought way down. But you can't do that at the template level.
(Incidentally, retrofitting garbage collection to C++ is probably a mistake. It's been tried. The interaction with destructor semantics is too ugly. Calling destructors at random times is not a good thing. And it leads to horrors like "re-animation" in Microsoft Managed C++).
The other huge area of trouble in C++ is threading. The language ignores the whole issue. Locking is considered a library issue. The compiler gives you no help in determining whether a program is free of race conditions.
Because C++ is unsafe, the usual advice is to be "very very careful". This has led to much talk of "patterns", rituals and taboos which supposedly keep bad things from happening. This helps a little, but it's more of a cult than a tool set.
So what we really have is C, with C++ cruft on top of that, then STL cruft on top of that, then "patterns" cruft on top of that. Not good.
And what is the committee doing? Adding more cruft, in the form of "generic programming". There's a way to abuse the template system into pretending to be a recursive term-rewriting engine which can be used to perform arbitrary computatations at compile time. This is being pursued as a foundation for a new generation of incomprehensible template libraries. (If you've ever had to debug someone else's template, you know how hard it is. Imagine something far worse. If you want to go beyond imagining it, go over to Boost, download something, and try to fix it. Suffer.)
I've written a bit on Strict C++. It's not impossible to fix this. It can almost be made backwards compatible. I don't claim to have all the answers. But at least I'm trying to improve safety and reliability. This is far more important than adding cool features.
This problem is the primary reason that C# exists. If the C++ committee had fixed their language, we wouldn't need C#.
It's a big issue for the open source community. The publicly standardized languages have major problems, and the newer languages are controlled by single large vendors.
For a much better source of articles, see What's New, by Bob Park from the American Physical Society, who writes about what's happening in science. Park is a physicist, and knows what he's talking about.
Because of this, legged robots are back to walking, rather than jogging or running. The field has regressed since Raibert and Hodgins.
Also see the Privacy Protection Act, 42 USC 2000aa, which limits searches and seizures of "publishers", defined very broadly. Rackspace could have said no.
Oh, and here is the first Wi-Fi enabled boom box. Community Media Platforms is working this area.
The hardware is coming. The next step is to reprogram it to do more for local microcasters.
Still, it's all very vague.
This would work better with Wi-Fi enabled boom boxes. Wi-Fi can handle multiple transmitters. An Wi-Fi enable Walkman-like device has real possibilities.
This is clear prior restraint and a First Amendment violation. No treaty can override that. Remember, the Patriot Act gag order provisions were ruled unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court last week. Further use of those provisions by the Government is questionable and may be illegal.
You know, the guy who's always plugging his ad-supported blog on Slashdot by turning press releases into Slashdot stories.
That looks a lot like the DL-1 digital light projector, which is a video projector on a 2-axis tilt mount. "Using the motion control feature, project your imagery anywhere in a 3D space". It's used for nightclubs and stage shows.
It's a cute stage effect, but not a breakthrough.
Bush I's first elective office was Vice President. (He'd been CIA director.)
Jesse Jackson ran for president without holding any elective office. (He probably could have won an election for mayor of Washington D.C., and was suggested for that job by many. But as Mayor Barry used to say of Jackson, "Jesse don't want to run nothing but his mouth". He's now a talk show host on Clear Channel.)
There was a minor fad for Corbin Sparrow EVs here in Palo Alto about three years ago. I haven't seen one in a while.
If they really wanted to be annoying, they could generate images in Quicktime, which has a "slide show" format. It's hard, although not impossible, to do anything with those files.
If you're a legitimate business, and want to accept credit cards, you go to your bank and open a merchant account. They check your financial history, may demand a deposit (on which they pay interest), want to see you in person, may visit your premises, and make you sign a painful contract. Then they charge you about $100 per month, plus 1-3% of the transaction cost. This is the way real companies do it.
If you're a less legitimate business, there are services for you, too. Charge-It-Now is a more or less legitimate one. "Now you can be approved to accept credit cards in as little as two hours and have a live merchant account in 24 hours. Applying online for our Internet processing software has never been easier. The entire application process is done online in less than 10 minutes and with our digital signature approval process; we do not need a physical signature. We deposit funds directly into your existing bank account. ... We accept 98% of applicants". At this tier, the rates are higher and the merchant is more likely to be doing something dodgy. These outfits aren't regulated as banks. They're resellers of banking services. They need to be better regulated.
Further down in the muck, there is the "high risk merchant account" business. "Has PaySystems or other merchant providers shutdown your company, virtually stopping you from processing credit cards? ... Good Credit / Bad Credit okay! ...
We pride our business on the fact we can place just about any business type. Even if you've experienced problems in the past with other processors or have a low credit rating."
This is where your mid-grade spammer gets credit card processing. Most of those operators need to be kicked out of the credit card system.
Down at the bottom, there's "offshore high-risk credit card processing". "Merchant account service for bad credit, high risk, gambling, and adult related business." This is the land of 15% fees, long holdbacks, and processors who disappear suddenly. Here we find companies operating from undisclosed locations, a criminal offense in many jurisdictions. These outfits help crooks and spammers launder their money, evade taxes, and hide from law enforcement. These operators are essentially part of organized crime.
The great thing about Google News is that you can easily see what Reuters, Al-Jazeera, Haaretz, and Xinhua have to say about the same event. If they're all saying roughly the same thing, that probably reflects reality. If there's serious divergence, there's probably major spin control going on somewhere.
The list of Democratic National Convention delegates is on the Democratic National Convention website. (Look at the entries for each state.) The Republicans have been heavily criticized for keeping their delegate list a secret.
This is the bill Philip Corwin, Kazaa's lobbyist, wanted.