I don't see how this is news to anyone. Patents are designed as an incentive to share trade secrets which otherwise could be lost. In exchange you get to stifle innovation. 20 years (we'll say around 17 effective years since the filing date is the start date). The unintended consequence at work is that today's technology advances at such an incredible rate. In the time it takes to get a patent filed, your competitor probably invented something that improves on your design. If it doesn't infringe they can use it, otherwise they have to cease production or figure out some other way to do things.
17-20 years for a patent is an incredibly long time. Eternal September happened 17 years ago. Think of everything that has been invented since the average person knew what an internet was, before everyone had a collection of free AOL installers used as coasters or frisbees. Cell phones didn't have data plans, and the first SMS was sent. Windows 3.1, Linux goes from 0.99 to 1.0.
An invention comes along, it barely gets out the door before something overtakes it. I can't tell you how many times I see more efficient solar panels, and before they make it to market a new discovery makes them more efficient again. Drugs are no longer trial and error, instead thanks to genetic sequencing and protein models, we throw CPU time at finding likely candidates and then test only those instead of everything in the rainforest. In fact, drugs often have advances such as continuous release or other slight shanges at the end of their patent lifetimes to extend the financial stream. If there were no patent protection there would be no incentive to delay reformulation. But someone could just copy and sell it, of course, using you as free research.
So yeah, the whole purpose of the patent system is to stifle innovation, but only temporarily. Technology moves so quickly that we now miss out on several generations due to patents. Software in particular moves very quickly even compared to other tech. That's probably the biggest reason software patents don't make sense, more so than any other argument I've read. 2 years is enough time to release a product and have a de facto standard in place, and drive the entire software sector your direction. If you filed your patent. A patent term is 10 times that.
In other words, it's only getting worse.
As a competitor, however, your only option is to come up with something that's better, easier, faster, and non-infringing so that people move to your solution. Geocities came and went, AOL and AIM, ICQ, MySpace, 2 generations of cell phone tech, 3 generations of gaming platforms, all within the lifetime of a patent. So it is possible to move large numbers of apparently locked in users, or rather get them to migrate themselves.
The only question to answer is, are there enough non-patented ways to do things that you can work around the limits? If not, the entire industry stops. The speed at which technology changes should pretty much dictate that patents are unnecessary. Why protect yourself for 20 years when the tech will probably be irrelevant in 5?
Finally, as I began, the intent of patents was to get people to release their design so that society could benefit. Is there any reason to do that when you can just disassemble a program and see how it works? Even things like protocols don't require disassembly - just packet capture and analysis, like Samba. There is nothing to "open" (patens) about software, and so no reason to "patent".
You'd have to cover your short way before the SEC even opened an official investigation, and way way way before it announced it was opening one. Also, the crowdsourcing reports would probably be about as available as various bloggers and whistleblowers today. Lots of people do pump-and-dump or schemes to temporarily drop prices, and they are usually prosecuted.
Mostly because they gamed the rich people, and rich people don't like that, so of course they are caught. The SEC doesn't want to anger its future leaders so it doesn't usually jump on fraud unless its an outsider gaming the system. You might disagree with part of this, but try a pump-and-dump or short hoax and see how fast you're in jail.
And instead of 1 report to ignore, you have a thousand to ignore. The SEC needs to fund itself solely through the fines they collect, that will get them working. And fining punitive amounts instead of symbolic ones.
Doesn't matter. Business code of conduct says if it might look bad in a headline, don't do it. HP is a fortune 10 company and in the middle of a pretty big turnaround. The last thing they need is (potential) clients questioning leadership.
I'm still thinking you're backwards. You claim it's a subsidy, but that word doesn't make sense here. People who want to have their homes insured pay into the system, hoping they won't have to make a claim. You don't buy insurance and hope your house burns down, or that someone steals your valuables along with the otherwise value-less information in your wallet or other places. The benefit you get is knowing that if something catastrophic happens you don't have to replace your house yourself. There's no subsidy here - no government grant and nothing required.
You want to take the meaning that your policy is more expensive because of what other people do.
So rather than pay for your own security, you prefer to let everyone else pay for it after your house has been robbed. How very philanthropic of you.
Everyone else is not paying for anything. They contributed to a system that they can likewise benefit from if needed. You aren't spending their money, you're spending the middleman's money. And the middleman asks you if you're protecting your house, if they are any decent sort of middleman, on behalf of everyone else who puts money in. The insurance company physically checked out my house before telling the lender they would insure it, and they accepted the risk. Everyone else has already paid to secure their place in the system, not bail you out.
The insurance company takes the total amount of all expected claims (plus their markup) and divides it by the number of subscribers in the policy.
To come up with what number? The premium I assume? That would only work if they re-evaluated everyone's policy cost every time they added a new policy holder. Your explanation is an inelegant and naive idea of how they might gauge the policy amount, but is hardly the way it works. In reality, they look at the average cost of houses and goods owned, subdivided into brackets into which you fall. Your home value in your neighborhood means you likely own a certain value of items which must be insured. And the value of the home itself of course. The number of break-ins for the bracket goes into the calculation, the number of total loss home destructions, all kinds of variables, and they come up with the total cost of policyholders in that bracket. Isn't this the same thing that you said? No, it's not. If an insurance company has huge reserves, it will underwrite the policy itself. Otherwise, it will take your policy as operating revenue and essentially insure your policy with another company's backing. That's why you see advertisements for insurance that says it is underwritten by or backed by or some other relationship with a large company.
To repeat myself: the insurance company does not take a big number and divide by the policyholders, or else you wouldn't have an insurance company backed by someone else. The insurance company estimates how much it will cost to pay a claim on your house, and statistically speaking since it's not likely they will have to, the cost is less than the value of the home and its contents.
In theory, you could simply pay the insurance company a one-time fee over a certain number of years, instead of a monthly premium. If your assumptions were correct. Divide the likelihood of replacement over a number of years, multiply by the average replacement cost, you have a number. But we might move, or change things about the house, and we don't have all of the money up front. So they charge way less than they might otherwise, because they have a large number of people paying in. Liquid in, liquid out, and invest the rest as free money to multiply earnings. True insurance companies (not the fronts that are underwritten by someone else) aren't in the business of insurance, they are in the business of holding money and watching it grow.
And, we're talking about homeowner's insurance in a security thread. Unless you keep collector's items like coins or stamps or comic books,
The source code itself probably won't run as-is on different hardware, but there are clues and hints and subtleties that can be copied. A more efficient algorithm for this, or a creative way of doing that. Something clever like Carmack's inverse square root which most sane people would shy away from until proven are great examples. An efficient, error-tolerant input achieved by creative hit testing might give your interface usability advantages.
Clever ordering might save users from the problem I have where my cheap Dynex TV takes forever to change channels, where a better TV would implement frequency locking and input independently, with a way to 'cancel' the signal acquisition. My TV seems to take the approach of channel down, update frequency, aquire signal, begin display, then return to looking for input. Maybe it's a simple check before signal locking for additinoal input, or maybe it's a limitatino of the hardware that something in process can't be cancelled. The source code modifications would be a clue to that.
You're right that the source code as-is wouldn't be helpful, but there are certain levels of competitive secrets that might be interesting to lift, and with the GPL it's legal. Lift and improve, good for customers but bad for trade secrets.
I want this system to work, but until our economy has something more stable than consumers buying stuff they don't need, it's doomed. you can't just put a system into place, you have to replace what's there. And no one who is serious about fair tax looks at what will change when it's implemented. Parts maybe, but no holistic view.
I don't buy a lot of stuff, I pay my credit card off at the end of the month without effort. I don't get loans unless they are zero-interest, except for my house which I have 33% paid off in two years. Got a small governmnet zero-interest loan for that one too.
Since our economy is a consumer-driven one, where signs of increased consumer saving set off alarm bells, I'm already a drain on the government. Moving to a consumption-based tax is going to make me nearly a freeloader. It's going to encourage saving, since things will be more expensive. You say people have more money to spend, I say people spend it faster.
Normally, we want people to save, but that's not how the current economy works. Instead of saving, people spend more than they should, end up in debt, and a small portion declare bankruptcy and start at step 1. Companies eat these losses by charging everyone to participate (proportional to the risk they pose). If people saved instead of spent, and we eliminated the bankruptcy cycle almost completely, each incremental re-sale (payroll check to grocery store, to credit card, to credit card company payroll, to electronics store, electronics store payroll, etc) would fail to cascade. This isn't trickle-down economics, this is people spending and employees getting paid. People stop spending, employees get let go and stop spending, and the cycle continues. that's why it's all about the jobs, right now, today.
Unintended consequence of fair tax is going to be to push the economy into a depression. Unless we're already facing inflation, this proposal will demolish the spending habits of everyone but the absolute poorest, who live paycheck-to-paycheck. They will have no choice in spending. Prebates you say? Sure, but I'm including those when I say paycheck-to-paycheck. If you live at or above your means *with* the prebates, you're being taxed on 100% of your money, while people who save are taxed on a smaller percentage. So the number of people who, with prebates, are below the minimum standard of living, will be the determining number in whether this works or fails. I think if you look at that number, you'll realize this is a good idea in theory but unsustainable.
I had a similar problem, meant to select the dropdown below it and somehow set "interested in men" instead of leaving it blank. I didn't have the option to un-set it, the only option was "interested in women". It didn't actually change anything, I was still seeing gay dating ads for a few weeks until I mailed support. They "fixed the glitch" in some way. Bottom line, now I get dating ads that I'll never click on because they are so obviously bogus, instead of relevant ads for stuff that I might click on. I think I'll have to set myself to "married" and see what ads pop up.
Point is, this whole contextual/relevant ad thing is far from perfected, and I'd prefer to be able to un-set my "preferences" and let advertisers forget me if they decide I'm interested in things I never click on.
One day I'll see an advert and think "Who would ever buy that, I mean all you can do with is... waaaaaait a minute, I need one of those. I really need one, I should have had one 10 years ago but didn't know it existed. How did they know to show me that?" But that's still a long way off. And as long as they are wrong, I'll want to be as incognito as possible.
Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Army then told him he was not under arrest but was being detained
ICE is allowed to detain aliens without arresting them, since there's no point arresting someone if you're just going to deport them. The Army is allowed to detain enemy combatants.
The police are free to detain someone until they determine whether an arrest is necessary. An example would be if you are pulled over and the police suspect drunken driving. You can ask "Am I under arrest or am I free to go?" and you'll get either "I'm still trying to figure that out, how about doing a mandatory drunk test for me" or if you push it "If you want one or the other it's going to be an arrest and we're taking a blood sample." You're not in one of two mutually exclusive states (arrested or free).
Until a determination is made, and the timeframe does not exceed what is allowed for either party to make such a determination, I see no problem. The intent of the law is to be able to hold the bad guys long enough to figure out what they're up to, while releasing the good guys within a reasonable time.
I do see a problem with a US citizen returning from Holland (not known for its terrorism) and being subjected to a search which was obviously targeted. As soon as the person is found to be a citizen, ICE should be out of the picture, unless there is something suspicious that would trigger the Customs part instead of the Immigration part. In this case, I'm betting the Army told ICE the guy was suspicious.
You can have a problem with the laws if you want, but your post is close to fear-mongering. This is not an attempt to avoid getting around the limits of a law - ICE alone would have the authority to detain someone if something were suspect, either an alien or a customs problem. Why he was detained is the problem, not the semantics.
He was not under arrest, and he was not free to go, he was being detained to determine if there was a problem.
I see no evidence that you're a teacher, nor that you have any idea what is being taught in schools. Do you have any first-hand information? I have a teaching certificate, master's degree, and I left the field recently enough that I can tell you what gets taught currently.
Acceptance of other cultures is included, mostly because we are the melting pot and we will run into other cultures, even if we don't leave our hometown. even the most closed-off cities somehow seem to have a chinese restaurant with real chinese imports working there. Fostering their fragile egos is something many teachers minimize, because they realize that the sub-population with the highest level of self-worth and self-acceptance is prison inmates. Lots of schools minimize winning, but even in that culture there are contests on a lower scale and the concept of winner or loser is not lost on these kids. It's just in an uncontrolled context rather than something the school can control and try to recognize every participant. It's actually a harsher lesson than it would be if we held contests to teach kids about losing. So they still learn real life despite administrators trying to avoid it.
I was a substitute teacher for a year, and taught at any school that wanted me, whether the kids were well-behaved or not. Many subs would cross schools off their list and never would return. So I saw a wide range of classes. You can tell a lot about the teacher from the classes, and that's coming from someone who inherited my own classes from the previous teacher. It took two months to get the 8th grade kids to do things my way, after doing things for 2 years the previous teacher's way. One day with a sub is not going to change the personality of a class much.
What I learned was there is no way to generalize. Different classes with the same teacher develop distinct personalities, and groups of students with different teachers (ones following a track for example where they all go to the first class and all move on to the next class) develop different personalities even if the individuals are the same. A bad teacher can teach a lot to a good class, a different bad teacher can accomplish nothing. A good teacher can do wonders with a good class, and can be reduced to ineffectiveness with another.
I was fortunate enough to always get into the advanced classes, except for history. I hate history because I don't remember stuff I can look up. The few history teachers who relied on connections and reasoning fought an uphill battle because I resisted it. I even dropped from an A to a C in French when we moved to the History part, that's how bad it was. I ended up in the scrub world civ class, a senior in with sophomores, taught by the football coach. It was then that I realized how many stupid people were in our school - I had never been in a class with them before. They are not taught anything, they read and memorize, and test scores are dwarfed by "were you able to retain a piece of paper I gave you and nearly filled out for you a month ago" type assignments. I was shocked. Basic information that anyone might learn by paying attention in the previous 10 grades of school, these kids had no idea. I'd blurt something out and quickly became the "Einstein" of the class. Nothing groundbreaking, just simple facts. The expectation of poorly performing students is that they are not teachable.
So there is a stratification. The good teachers get the good students, and they are the top-tier graduates, the actual "students". The mediocre teachers get the overflow good students, mediocre students, and the overflow piss-poor students. Sometimes you get lucky and crappy students get a good teacher. But mostly you fall into advanced/normal/remedial track and stay there. Lots of people have a problem with this, but it's not good to be so much smarter than everyone else in your class that you get nicknamed "einstein" (by the football coach, no less) or are so bored you do your calculus homework instead of paying attention. It
That's only true if everyone thinks that way. If on the other hand everyone realizes that the two parties are polarizing on passionate issues but otherwise the same thing, it's the only way a third party will gain ground. The restrictions on 3rd party, with automatic allowance for the first two parties, almost guarantees that. The revolution will be started by a coordinated write-in vote.
I really think you're overstating the power companies have, and understating voter apathy. Companies write laws and offer them to their senator or rep, explaining why they are needed. There is nothing but ignorance and sloth to explain why individuals don't do the same. Company donations, before the limit was removed, were tracked by recording each individual contribution and what company they worked for. If Senator Jim got $300,000 from ACME, it was because 100 employees decided to contribute the maximum amount. The company wouldn't force people to donate money (sure it's possible, but normally that's not how things work). If employees pooled together their resources to advance the company they work for, how is that a bad thing?
Finally, Business is how we do business in America. Corporate taxes aside, payroll moves money and slices off bits to the government at every paycheck, which goes to sales and sales tax, which goes to a company, which goes to a paycheck, and the cycle continues. We create wealth, which is why the supply of money keeps increasing. Sometimes we have to favor business instead of individuals, or business stops. There's no incentive to create a company if everything is in favor of the people. People create small business, they become large business.
I've had this argument numerous times with the entry-level people who work around me, who used to work with me. The company is not there for you, you are there for it. If the company does something you don't like, you leave it, especially if you're entry level. A company without employees can't function, which is why we have unions and strikes. At the same time, you chose to be employed by this company rather than start your own business (I didn't have a choice, I don't have that much money, whatever excuse - your local bank will give you a loan if you have a solid business plan, you just don't want to take the risk). You hate your company but work for it, and don't speak up in masses when it jeapordizes your job. You hate your governmnet but doesn't speak up when it jeapordizes your personal time.
Business and people must co-operate, and the interests of one will outweigh the interests of another in some cases. But companies sometimes need laws changed, in the interests of themselves, which is in the interests of their employees. Think of any law you hate, and see why there might be a business driver behind it, or legitimate need. There isn't always a legit interpretation, but there is more times than not.
If you want to be an anti-corporate individualist, you can either work for yourself, where you are the business, or start your own small business and work with others, who are also the business. Or go be self-sustaining somewhere and don't participate in tax-funded things like 911 or libraries or subsidized communications or companies.
This law already has workarounds in place, so I see no need for it. Doesn't mean every law is bad.
You're not supposed to detect the browser, you're supposed to detect the engine. Presence or absence of a feature is one way, but there are lots of other ways. One particular engine might have an existing but bad implementation, but it also has a CSS parsing bug. This is how IE gets worked around most of the time. The engine detects itself, but that's not scripting.
I can change the user-agent of a browser, including IE. But I would expect the website to render properly even so. Yes I'm a web programmer and yes I know how much of a pain this is. But relying on an arbitrary identifier that can be updated when different software is installed is terrible. I can use Firefox with IETab, so my user-agent is misleading but accurately represents the engine (IETab sends an IE user-agent). Or I can change my user-agent to get around poor JavaScript detection, so the user-agent is wrong. Remember when IE changed to "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;...)"? It threw people off because they were looking for Mozilla user-agent, and it detected, and the site broke.
Now, you can create a signature-based detection based on whether things exist. Not a single feature, but several together. Just like netcraft uses several data points to create a signature of a web server, even if it doesn't report useful headers like "X-Powered-by: ASP.NET".
Create an array of functions or objects, which fills it with the functions or null. Convert it into 1 for exists, 0 for doesn't exist. Join the array (or skip this step and just think about it as binary), and convert from a binary representation to numeric. That's your signature based on the presence or absence of a feature. You just need to know which features to check for. Now you know which engine is being used, and you can know what works as expected. if (browser_engine = 34510) {do stupid IE processing } else {do normal processing}. What if a new browser comes along that matches the signature but doesn't behave? Same thing that happens if you check user-agent strings and then throw everything you don't know about into the "else" block, unexpected or undefined behavior. It's very unlikely that someone would make a browser that has the same existing and missing function signature but still have a poor implementation of something you rely on. This requires no more discovery than normal user-agent based techniques, since you still have to know that the browser exists to fix it.
For added flair, you can set up a test case, and if it passes that's a 1 and it fails that's a 0, instead of whether it exists or not. This gets run once, on the client side, and stored in the cookie or querystring or hidden form, or runs every time on the client if you prefer.
Not saying I'd use this, but it does answer your question.
You're think of MESS, the sister project to MAME that shares code.
MAME painstakingly reverse engineers every system into a generic machine definition which emulates the hardware, followed by specific driver code for every arcade game independently. Sometimes the driver is a mere tweak, like Galaga on Namco hardware has more memory than Pac-Man but is otherwise the same machine. (I just made that up as an example).
Console emulation is a different thing entirely. I assume if you read the article, since the summary mentioned SNES specifically, you'll start to appreciate the difficulty. The hardware itself is one problem, which is fairly easily emulated. But every game comes with its own data banks and memory control. The 8-bit NES has something like 200 different known "mappers" which react differently, so you can't just build a perfect NES and throw games at it. Some games will share mappers since it's obviously easier to reuse technology. But if a game needs something different, like larger levels or more sprites or better sound or anything really, the "mapper" changes. It's very much like building a generic hardware emulator and having every game plug in its own driver. Some will work, others won't. The early NES emulators didn't plan for this, the later ones built this in from the ground up. Most NES emulators didn't even know they were supposed to be doing it this way.
SNES is similar, logic in the console as well as the cartridge. I don't think there will ever be a fully complete NES or SNES emulator because it's just way too much work, and it's no longer popular. Check out the state of N64 emulation - similar hurdles, only N64 is a lot more complicated. Most N64 emulators do the basics and rely on plug-in libraries to handle things. If a game doesn't work, you change the audio processor or video handling plugin and try again. Compatibility is in the toilet. Many people have abandoned the N64 generation and moved on to the CD-based games, specifically because there is less code in the game. Emulate the hardware and most games will work, exactly like MAME. For many systems, you emulate the hardware and nothing works but the most basic day 1 games because it's all still in the game.
Now you're thinking to yourself, if the hardware can be generic enough to handle the mapper, why can't the emulator be generic enough to run the game? You need to learn a bit about roms and dumping to answer that. Grab a torrent of NES games and see how many [b] for bad dumps there are. More bad than good dumps, because you have to know the mapper in order to even dump it. Then you have the ROM data only, not the mapper which is baked in silicon in the cartridge. Somewhere, somehow, you have to have the schematics of the cartridge defined in a way that the generic hardware can read, understand, and interact with the virtual cartridge. Emulators solve that by adding the mappers to the emulation.
The only solution to this is to be able to define a virtual logic chip that interacted with the data in a "black box" kind of way, one chip per game (or each game can specify the virtual logic chip used, which incidentally was the plan for an alternate NES game format, in a way - unf - but it doesn't have the logic defined, just a reference to it). NES, SNES, N64, SMS, Genesis, I'm not sure what all else has this problem.
It's not all just hacks and tweaks, it's the difficulty of implementing silicon logic as machine code. MESS is slow, and compatibility is poor, because most people who do emulation want it done with their design, not a generic box. But it does advance as open source emulators improve and ideas or code gets moved over. But you still have to decode every cartridge's internal function - you can't just take data and throw it at a black box.
I am curious: If this is wrong, why is copying music (which is under a much more restrictive license than Creative Commons) not? Is it a "because I didn't make money off of it" thing?
Who said copying music is not wrong? You were replying to "Anonymous Coward", who has piles of posts here, and has argued both sides of that issue, but made no mention in this post. Maybe you're attributing something that some people argue to everyone who posts here, or maybe you're confused by the "copyright infringement is a separate offense and punished differently so it's not actually theft" argument. Not really sure. But I'm going to reply anyway.
Whether copying music is wrong or not is not an absolute, especially considering that not everyone lives in the same country and therefore may be subject to different laws. It truly depends on whether copying qualifies as copyright infringement, and you can decide how to refine your definition of wrong - morally, legally, ethically, humanistically, financially, or any number of ways. Civil disobedience can be considered the right thing to do in the interest of furthering society, so the legal status is not the only consideration to make. You will get any number of answers in return. To answer your question very stupidly, it's not wrong in any consequential way for me to copy music from my CD that I bought to my hard drive so I can listen while I code. Some RIAA people think it is wrong, but I think they are wrong. Copyright law is a very complex beast.
This specific case, on the other hand, is a clear violation of the terms of use of a licensed property, much like GPL code. It's unlikely you'll get an honest post here saying that GPL violations are somehow "not wrong", but you are more likely to see that sort of thing in a proprietary-oriented website. They gave the code away for free, right? Must be free? But that doesn't mean that GPL violations are OK, just that people in certain business think it's ok, at least until they are caught. Same with Creative Commons, which is like open-source for things that aren't code. If you follow the terms, you are fine. If you break the terms you break the license, and you have no rights except what is granted under Copyright Law, which is a complex beast.
If I use a RIAA song for my campaign trail, that's a clear violation of the terms of use of a licensed property. But it isn't copying, right? So it's ok? It doesn't fall under the "copying" part of Copyright Law, which includes "Exclusive rights in copyrighted works" and "Limitations on exclusive rights". Instead, the "public performance" part applies, which can overlap the copying parts in places. That exists independently of any EULA or shrinkwrap - it's right there in USC Title 17.
Minor addition to your comment, for some may get the wrong impression if it gets modded up the chain.
That is a bit of a generalization, and not necessarily accurate. The summary was
As it turns out, old-style blocking I/O with modern threading libraries like Linux NPTL and multi-core machines gives you idle-thread and non-contending thread management for an extremely low cost; less than it takes to switch-and-restore connection state constantly with a selector approach.
In that context, as a reply to the summary,
some old school techniques are faster
is obviously a generalization, especially with the word "some" in there. You chose to rephrase this as an absolute
I would say that heavily tested, tried and true techniques are faster.
Heavily tested techniques don't automatically mean it will be faster, as your comment implies. You may have meant it as a generalization, and not necessarily accurate, but you didn't use "some" as gp post did. Bubble sort is a heavily tested, tried-and-true technique. Lots of solid code is out there and many apps use it, not knowing any better or because it was the first sort they found in their search or book.
The original was generalizing that if you look at the progression of techniques, we go for ease of use rather than speed. C to C++ to Java to C#, this is typically because the libraries make things easier, not because they run faster. It happens to be quicker to use a standard library sort than implementing your own (unless you have bad MSVS 6 headers, in which case you'll bang your head against the desk trying to figure out why it doesn't work). You can certainly write a faster performing bunch of code, but it's easier to not reinvent the wheel, and faster for the development cycle. So we go for ease of implementation, rather than always choosing the fastest. That's why most websites these days are written in Java or.NET or even php, instead of something compiled like CGI.
It has no force of law, but it is very useful in a defense. Assuming your lawyer knows about the concurrent resolution, of course.
Whereas State and Federal wiretapping laws were not intended to be used for such charges;
The legislative branch writes laws, the judicial branch interprets them. This resolution leaves judges little room to re-interpret what the intent or meaning of a law is. It does leave room, of course, and could be a bit clearer. I see no reason to *oppose* this. The fact that Congress agrees that wiretapping was not intended to be used that way is now a fact, not an interpretation.
Yes, you're wrong. But only a little. pointing a gun at you is where you're wrong. If he had shot the cop in the face, this video would have proven that the gun was never pointed at the suspect. Go ahead and watch, it's on the ground or bushes the whole time.
Now, what that means depends on your state and locality laws. It might very well be argued that he had a reasonable expectation of being in imminent danger.
To a jury watching that video in a closed off room isolated from the danger it posed, the gun was clearly visible but aimed away from the person and did not necessarily represent imminent danger. If he had pointed a gun directly at you, that might have constituted imminent danger.
You can argue that you were stopped, someone blocked your path, you backed up (clearly visible) which led to panic, and the gun was the last straw you needed to defend yourself. But it took 5 seconds from realizing the car was blocking your path and backing up, to seeing the gun. Would you have time to pull out a gun from your riding gear and shoot someone? If so, you'd be admitting to riding a motorcycle at high speeds with an easily accessible handgun, which you were able to draw faster than a trained cop. That wouldn't make any sense to me, nor to a jury if the prosecutor had any sense. You're the bad guy, you're in jail.
You are only within your rights if you are in danger, as defined by your local laws. In this particular video, I don't see any way to justify it. The moment you reach for a gun the cop shoots you first.
Yes the cop didn't do what he should have done, but your interpretation of your rights is not going to hold up in a court of law.
Which laws? Sounds like you've read "The Photographer's Right" enough to have it memorized, but the video is not the issue. The audio going along with the video is the issue, and "the laws of the United States are quite clear" about wiretapping being illegal. What they aren't clear about is when wiretapping applies and when it does not.
That is, this case is about whether you can apply wiretapping laws to a conversation between a public servant and a suspect who has no implicit right to privacy (anything you say can and will be used against you, and is probably being taped by the cop's dashboard cam). I've seen "America's wildest police chases" enough times to know that many cops record audio as well as video, even if you are a private citizen in your own car, innocent until proven guilty.
I understand your point, but Photo and video laws don't apply to sound. Lots of cases have proven that having a video camera clearly visible and a sign saying it is on and recording, on private property, will get the wiretapping charge if it also records audio and an officer decides he doesn't like it.
Not saying it's right, it's clearly wrong, but "Video" implies both "video without sound" and "video with sound" and it's easy to get them confused. Pictures don't have sound so that part is clear. This is about the audio recorded along with the video, otherwise it would have been automatically dismissed. To be clear, even if a video has no sound, the police can still decide to charge a person with wiretapping because most people's video recorders do capture sound. The charge won't stick, but will cause an innocent person problems. This video had sound.
We have laws against aggressive driving because of the potential for accidents, and we have laws against being high at work for the same reason. If nothing else, public intoxication would cover it but depending on what you're working with there may be additional laws and/or rules. Mandatory drug testing is one of those rules which an employer may choose to implement, while another more obvious one might be "Don't come to work if you're on drugs".
What we don't have is a ban on driving just because you might drive aggressively, which is the same thing as drug testing just in case you might be "messed up" at work. We're talking about laws/rules against doing something instead of laws/rules against potentially doing something. Your claim of superior reflexes make you a candidate for aggressive driving, so we should revoke your license without even evaluating your claim, nor your driving, based on your logic.
But you say you accept these laws because they protect society against people who do not have superior reflexes, or can't handle their drugs.
with mandatory drug testing, people who are better at handling their drugs, like doing it recreationally when off duty, don't get away with it or pay a fine. They get fired. Laws against aggressive driving prevent accidents, especially when the person is not as skilled as you claim to be. Laws and rules should reality, not probability. Disregarding you, the average person driving aggressively will cause accidents, and the average person using drugs at work will cause problems. So let's focus on the actual problem, not some hypothetical possibility.
The only reason I've ever seen mandatory drug testing used is 1) initial hire, which may be a filter to get rid of people who can't clean up for long enough to pass a test or 2) turning layoffs into firings-for-cause when reduction in force is needed. The only other purpose mandatory testing serves is letting the company say they are anti-drug. If someone is having problems at work, an employer does not need to have a drug testing policy in place to request a drug test on-demand. The employee's performance alone should dictate whether it's needed. It's rare for an employee who has an on-the-job injury to *not* be tested in some way, for insurance purposes. Why would it be different for performance-related concerns? You're acting strangely at work, for the safety of those around you we'd like you to either quit or submit to a drug test at company expense or psychological examination in accordance with your benefits. Seems simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Look in a mirror and try to smile... I think you're having a stroke.
I don't see how this is news to anyone. Patents are designed as an incentive to share trade secrets which otherwise could be lost. In exchange you get to stifle innovation. 20 years (we'll say around 17 effective years since the filing date is the start date). The unintended consequence at work is that today's technology advances at such an incredible rate. In the time it takes to get a patent filed, your competitor probably invented something that improves on your design. If it doesn't infringe they can use it, otherwise they have to cease production or figure out some other way to do things.
17-20 years for a patent is an incredibly long time. Eternal September happened 17 years ago. Think of everything that has been invented since the average person knew what an internet was, before everyone had a collection of free AOL installers used as coasters or frisbees. Cell phones didn't have data plans, and the first SMS was sent. Windows 3.1, Linux goes from 0.99 to 1.0.
An invention comes along, it barely gets out the door before something overtakes it. I can't tell you how many times I see more efficient solar panels, and before they make it to market a new discovery makes them more efficient again. Drugs are no longer trial and error, instead thanks to genetic sequencing and protein models, we throw CPU time at finding likely candidates and then test only those instead of everything in the rainforest. In fact, drugs often have advances such as continuous release or other slight shanges at the end of their patent lifetimes to extend the financial stream. If there were no patent protection there would be no incentive to delay reformulation. But someone could just copy and sell it, of course, using you as free research.
So yeah, the whole purpose of the patent system is to stifle innovation, but only temporarily. Technology moves so quickly that we now miss out on several generations due to patents. Software in particular moves very quickly even compared to other tech. That's probably the biggest reason software patents don't make sense, more so than any other argument I've read. 2 years is enough time to release a product and have a de facto standard in place, and drive the entire software sector your direction. If you filed your patent. A patent term is 10 times that.
In other words, it's only getting worse.
As a competitor, however, your only option is to come up with something that's better, easier, faster, and non-infringing so that people move to your solution. Geocities came and went, AOL and AIM, ICQ, MySpace, 2 generations of cell phone tech, 3 generations of gaming platforms, all within the lifetime of a patent. So it is possible to move large numbers of apparently locked in users, or rather get them to migrate themselves.
The only question to answer is, are there enough non-patented ways to do things that you can work around the limits? If not, the entire industry stops. The speed at which technology changes should pretty much dictate that patents are unnecessary. Why protect yourself for 20 years when the tech will probably be irrelevant in 5?
Finally, as I began, the intent of patents was to get people to release their design so that society could benefit. Is there any reason to do that when you can just disassemble a program and see how it works? Even things like protocols don't require disassembly - just packet capture and analysis, like Samba. There is nothing to "open" (patens) about software, and so no reason to "patent".
I'm tired of listening to that crazy foo' Murdoch and all his jiber-jabber. I ain't got time for that.
Shut up, Murdock, you're already crazy.
You'd have to cover your short way before the SEC even opened an official investigation, and way way way before it announced it was opening one. Also, the crowdsourcing reports would probably be about as available as various bloggers and whistleblowers today. Lots of people do pump-and-dump or schemes to temporarily drop prices, and they are usually prosecuted.
Mostly because they gamed the rich people, and rich people don't like that, so of course they are caught. The SEC doesn't want to anger its future leaders so it doesn't usually jump on fraud unless its an outsider gaming the system. You might disagree with part of this, but try a pump-and-dump or short hoax and see how fast you're in jail.
And instead of 1 report to ignore, you have a thousand to ignore. The SEC needs to fund itself solely through the fines they collect, that will get them working. And fining punitive amounts instead of symbolic ones.
Sorry, my monkeyshpere is full. Trying to care... unsuccessful.
Looks like he got on "The Plane to Nowhere".
Doesn't matter. Business code of conduct says if it might look bad in a headline, don't do it. HP is a fortune 10 company and in the middle of a pretty big turnaround. The last thing they need is (potential) clients questioning leadership.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/sustainability/hp-ousts-ceo-hurd-fails-the-headline-test/1126
I'm still thinking you're backwards. You claim it's a subsidy, but that word doesn't make sense here. People who want to have their homes insured pay into the system, hoping they won't have to make a claim. You don't buy insurance and hope your house burns down, or that someone steals your valuables along with the otherwise value-less information in your wallet or other places. The benefit you get is knowing that if something catastrophic happens you don't have to replace your house yourself. There's no subsidy here - no government grant and nothing required.
You want to take the meaning that your policy is more expensive because of what other people do.
Everyone else is not paying for anything. They contributed to a system that they can likewise benefit from if needed. You aren't spending their money, you're spending the middleman's money. And the middleman asks you if you're protecting your house, if they are any decent sort of middleman, on behalf of everyone else who puts money in. The insurance company physically checked out my house before telling the lender they would insure it, and they accepted the risk. Everyone else has already paid to secure their place in the system, not bail you out.
To come up with what number? The premium I assume? That would only work if they re-evaluated everyone's policy cost every time they added a new policy holder. Your explanation is an inelegant and naive idea of how they might gauge the policy amount, but is hardly the way it works. In reality, they look at the average cost of houses and goods owned, subdivided into brackets into which you fall. Your home value in your neighborhood means you likely own a certain value of items which must be insured. And the value of the home itself of course. The number of break-ins for the bracket goes into the calculation, the number of total loss home destructions, all kinds of variables, and they come up with the total cost of policyholders in that bracket. Isn't this the same thing that you said? No, it's not. If an insurance company has huge reserves, it will underwrite the policy itself. Otherwise, it will take your policy as operating revenue and essentially insure your policy with another company's backing. That's why you see advertisements for insurance that says it is underwritten by or backed by or some other relationship with a large company.
To repeat myself: the insurance company does not take a big number and divide by the policyholders, or else you wouldn't have an insurance company backed by someone else. The insurance company estimates how much it will cost to pay a claim on your house, and statistically speaking since it's not likely they will have to, the cost is less than the value of the home and its contents.
In theory, you could simply pay the insurance company a one-time fee over a certain number of years, instead of a monthly premium. If your assumptions were correct. Divide the likelihood of replacement over a number of years, multiply by the average replacement cost, you have a number. But we might move, or change things about the house, and we don't have all of the money up front. So they charge way less than they might otherwise, because they have a large number of people paying in. Liquid in, liquid out, and invest the rest as free money to multiply earnings. True insurance companies (not the fronts that are underwritten by someone else) aren't in the business of insurance, they are in the business of holding money and watching it grow.
And, we're talking about homeowner's insurance in a security thread. Unless you keep collector's items like coins or stamps or comic books,
The source code itself probably won't run as-is on different hardware, but there are clues and hints and subtleties that can be copied. A more efficient algorithm for this, or a creative way of doing that. Something clever like Carmack's inverse square root which most sane people would shy away from until proven are great examples. An efficient, error-tolerant input achieved by creative hit testing might give your interface usability advantages.
Clever ordering might save users from the problem I have where my cheap Dynex TV takes forever to change channels, where a better TV would implement frequency locking and input independently, with a way to 'cancel' the signal acquisition. My TV seems to take the approach of channel down, update frequency, aquire signal, begin display, then return to looking for input. Maybe it's a simple check before signal locking for additinoal input, or maybe it's a limitatino of the hardware that something in process can't be cancelled. The source code modifications would be a clue to that.
You're right that the source code as-is wouldn't be helpful, but there are certain levels of competitive secrets that might be interesting to lift, and with the GPL it's legal. Lift and improve, good for customers but bad for trade secrets.
I want this system to work, but until our economy has something more stable than consumers buying stuff they don't need, it's doomed. you can't just put a system into place, you have to replace what's there. And no one who is serious about fair tax looks at what will change when it's implemented. Parts maybe, but no holistic view.
I don't buy a lot of stuff, I pay my credit card off at the end of the month without effort. I don't get loans unless they are zero-interest, except for my house which I have 33% paid off in two years. Got a small governmnet zero-interest loan for that one too.
Since our economy is a consumer-driven one, where signs of increased consumer saving set off alarm bells, I'm already a drain on the government. Moving to a consumption-based tax is going to make me nearly a freeloader. It's going to encourage saving, since things will be more expensive. You say people have more money to spend, I say people spend it faster.
Normally, we want people to save, but that's not how the current economy works. Instead of saving, people spend more than they should, end up in debt, and a small portion declare bankruptcy and start at step 1. Companies eat these losses by charging everyone to participate (proportional to the risk they pose). If people saved instead of spent, and we eliminated the bankruptcy cycle almost completely, each incremental re-sale (payroll check to grocery store, to credit card, to credit card company payroll, to electronics store, electronics store payroll, etc) would fail to cascade. This isn't trickle-down economics, this is people spending and employees getting paid. People stop spending, employees get let go and stop spending, and the cycle continues. that's why it's all about the jobs, right now, today.
Unintended consequence of fair tax is going to be to push the economy into a depression. Unless we're already facing inflation, this proposal will demolish the spending habits of everyone but the absolute poorest, who live paycheck-to-paycheck. They will have no choice in spending. Prebates you say? Sure, but I'm including those when I say paycheck-to-paycheck. If you live at or above your means *with* the prebates, you're being taxed on 100% of your money, while people who save are taxed on a smaller percentage. So the number of people who, with prebates, are below the minimum standard of living, will be the determining number in whether this works or fails. I think if you look at that number, you'll realize this is a good idea in theory but unsustainable.
Prompt, whitelist, solved.
I suppose /. wants me to type more things in here, but 3 words covers it.
I had a similar problem, meant to select the dropdown below it and somehow set "interested in men" instead of leaving it blank. I didn't have the option to un-set it, the only option was "interested in women". It didn't actually change anything, I was still seeing gay dating ads for a few weeks until I mailed support. They "fixed the glitch" in some way. Bottom line, now I get dating ads that I'll never click on because they are so obviously bogus, instead of relevant ads for stuff that I might click on. I think I'll have to set myself to "married" and see what ads pop up.
Point is, this whole contextual/relevant ad thing is far from perfected, and I'd prefer to be able to un-set my "preferences" and let advertisers forget me if they decide I'm interested in things I never click on.
One day I'll see an advert and think "Who would ever buy that, I mean all you can do with is... waaaaaait a minute, I need one of those. I really need one, I should have had one 10 years ago but didn't know it existed. How did they know to show me that?" But that's still a long way off. And as long as they are wrong, I'll want to be as incognito as possible.
ICE is allowed to detain aliens without arresting them, since there's no point arresting someone if you're just going to deport them. The Army is allowed to detain enemy combatants.
The police are free to detain someone until they determine whether an arrest is necessary. An example would be if you are pulled over and the police suspect drunken driving. You can ask "Am I under arrest or am I free to go?" and you'll get either "I'm still trying to figure that out, how about doing a mandatory drunk test for me" or if you push it "If you want one or the other it's going to be an arrest and we're taking a blood sample." You're not in one of two mutually exclusive states (arrested or free).
Until a determination is made, and the timeframe does not exceed what is allowed for either party to make such a determination, I see no problem. The intent of the law is to be able to hold the bad guys long enough to figure out what they're up to, while releasing the good guys within a reasonable time.
I do see a problem with a US citizen returning from Holland (not known for its terrorism) and being subjected to a search which was obviously targeted. As soon as the person is found to be a citizen, ICE should be out of the picture, unless there is something suspicious that would trigger the Customs part instead of the Immigration part. In this case, I'm betting the Army told ICE the guy was suspicious.
You can have a problem with the laws if you want, but your post is close to fear-mongering. This is not an attempt to avoid getting around the limits of a law - ICE alone would have the authority to detain someone if something were suspect, either an alien or a customs problem. Why he was detained is the problem, not the semantics.
He was not under arrest, and he was not free to go, he was being detained to determine if there was a problem.
I see no evidence that you're a teacher, nor that you have any idea what is being taught in schools. Do you have any first-hand information? I have a teaching certificate, master's degree, and I left the field recently enough that I can tell you what gets taught currently.
Acceptance of other cultures is included, mostly because we are the melting pot and we will run into other cultures, even if we don't leave our hometown. even the most closed-off cities somehow seem to have a chinese restaurant with real chinese imports working there. Fostering their fragile egos is something many teachers minimize, because they realize that the sub-population with the highest level of self-worth and self-acceptance is prison inmates. Lots of schools minimize winning, but even in that culture there are contests on a lower scale and the concept of winner or loser is not lost on these kids. It's just in an uncontrolled context rather than something the school can control and try to recognize every participant. It's actually a harsher lesson than it would be if we held contests to teach kids about losing. So they still learn real life despite administrators trying to avoid it.
I was a substitute teacher for a year, and taught at any school that wanted me, whether the kids were well-behaved or not. Many subs would cross schools off their list and never would return. So I saw a wide range of classes. You can tell a lot about the teacher from the classes, and that's coming from someone who inherited my own classes from the previous teacher. It took two months to get the 8th grade kids to do things my way, after doing things for 2 years the previous teacher's way. One day with a sub is not going to change the personality of a class much.
What I learned was there is no way to generalize. Different classes with the same teacher develop distinct personalities, and groups of students with different teachers (ones following a track for example where they all go to the first class and all move on to the next class) develop different personalities even if the individuals are the same. A bad teacher can teach a lot to a good class, a different bad teacher can accomplish nothing. A good teacher can do wonders with a good class, and can be reduced to ineffectiveness with another.
I was fortunate enough to always get into the advanced classes, except for history. I hate history because I don't remember stuff I can look up. The few history teachers who relied on connections and reasoning fought an uphill battle because I resisted it. I even dropped from an A to a C in French when we moved to the History part, that's how bad it was. I ended up in the scrub world civ class, a senior in with sophomores, taught by the football coach. It was then that I realized how many stupid people were in our school - I had never been in a class with them before. They are not taught anything, they read and memorize, and test scores are dwarfed by "were you able to retain a piece of paper I gave you and nearly filled out for you a month ago" type assignments. I was shocked. Basic information that anyone might learn by paying attention in the previous 10 grades of school, these kids had no idea. I'd blurt something out and quickly became the "Einstein" of the class. Nothing groundbreaking, just simple facts. The expectation of poorly performing students is that they are not teachable.
So there is a stratification. The good teachers get the good students, and they are the top-tier graduates, the actual "students". The mediocre teachers get the overflow good students, mediocre students, and the overflow piss-poor students. Sometimes you get lucky and crappy students get a good teacher. But mostly you fall into advanced/normal/remedial track and stay there. Lots of people have a problem with this, but it's not good to be so much smarter than everyone else in your class that you get nicknamed "einstein" (by the football coach, no less) or are so bored you do your calculus homework instead of paying attention. It
That's only true if everyone thinks that way. If on the other hand everyone realizes that the two parties are polarizing on passionate issues but otherwise the same thing, it's the only way a third party will gain ground. The restrictions on 3rd party, with automatic allowance for the first two parties, almost guarantees that. The revolution will be started by a coordinated write-in vote.
I really think you're overstating the power companies have, and understating voter apathy. Companies write laws and offer them to their senator or rep, explaining why they are needed. There is nothing but ignorance and sloth to explain why individuals don't do the same. Company donations, before the limit was removed, were tracked by recording each individual contribution and what company they worked for. If Senator Jim got $300,000 from ACME, it was because 100 employees decided to contribute the maximum amount. The company wouldn't force people to donate money (sure it's possible, but normally that's not how things work). If employees pooled together their resources to advance the company they work for, how is that a bad thing?
Finally, Business is how we do business in America. Corporate taxes aside, payroll moves money and slices off bits to the government at every paycheck, which goes to sales and sales tax, which goes to a company, which goes to a paycheck, and the cycle continues. We create wealth, which is why the supply of money keeps increasing. Sometimes we have to favor business instead of individuals, or business stops. There's no incentive to create a company if everything is in favor of the people. People create small business, they become large business.
I've had this argument numerous times with the entry-level people who work around me, who used to work with me. The company is not there for you, you are there for it. If the company does something you don't like, you leave it, especially if you're entry level. A company without employees can't function, which is why we have unions and strikes. At the same time, you chose to be employed by this company rather than start your own business (I didn't have a choice, I don't have that much money, whatever excuse - your local bank will give you a loan if you have a solid business plan, you just don't want to take the risk). You hate your company but work for it, and don't speak up in masses when it jeapordizes your job. You hate your governmnet but doesn't speak up when it jeapordizes your personal time.
Business and people must co-operate, and the interests of one will outweigh the interests of another in some cases. But companies sometimes need laws changed, in the interests of themselves, which is in the interests of their employees. Think of any law you hate, and see why there might be a business driver behind it, or legitimate need. There isn't always a legit interpretation, but there is more times than not.
If you want to be an anti-corporate individualist, you can either work for yourself, where you are the business, or start your own small business and work with others, who are also the business. Or go be self-sustaining somewhere and don't participate in tax-funded things like 911 or libraries or subsidized communications or companies.
This law already has workarounds in place, so I see no need for it. Doesn't mean every law is bad.
You're not supposed to detect the browser, you're supposed to detect the engine. Presence or absence of a feature is one way, but there are lots of other ways. One particular engine might have an existing but bad implementation, but it also has a CSS parsing bug. This is how IE gets worked around most of the time. The engine detects itself, but that's not scripting.
I can change the user-agent of a browser, including IE. But I would expect the website to render properly even so. Yes I'm a web programmer and yes I know how much of a pain this is. But relying on an arbitrary identifier that can be updated when different software is installed is terrible. I can use Firefox with IETab, so my user-agent is misleading but accurately represents the engine (IETab sends an IE user-agent). Or I can change my user-agent to get around poor JavaScript detection, so the user-agent is wrong. Remember when IE changed to "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; ...)"? It threw people off because they were looking for Mozilla user-agent, and it detected, and the site broke.
Now, you can create a signature-based detection based on whether things exist. Not a single feature, but several together. Just like netcraft uses several data points to create a signature of a web server, even if it doesn't report useful headers like "X-Powered-by: ASP.NET".
Create an array of functions or objects, which fills it with the functions or null. Convert it into 1 for exists, 0 for doesn't exist. Join the array (or skip this step and just think about it as binary), and convert from a binary representation to numeric. That's your signature based on the presence or absence of a feature. You just need to know which features to check for. Now you know which engine is being used, and you can know what works as expected. if (browser_engine = 34510) {do stupid IE processing } else {do normal processing}. What if a new browser comes along that matches the signature but doesn't behave? Same thing that happens if you check user-agent strings and then throw everything you don't know about into the "else" block, unexpected or undefined behavior. It's very unlikely that someone would make a browser that has the same existing and missing function signature but still have a poor implementation of something you rely on. This requires no more discovery than normal user-agent based techniques, since you still have to know that the browser exists to fix it.
For added flair, you can set up a test case, and if it passes that's a 1 and it fails that's a 0, instead of whether it exists or not. This gets run once, on the client side, and stored in the cookie or querystring or hidden form, or runs every time on the client if you prefer.
Not saying I'd use this, but it does answer your question.
You're think of MESS, the sister project to MAME that shares code.
MAME painstakingly reverse engineers every system into a generic machine definition which emulates the hardware, followed by specific driver code for every arcade game independently. Sometimes the driver is a mere tweak, like Galaga on Namco hardware has more memory than Pac-Man but is otherwise the same machine. (I just made that up as an example).
Console emulation is a different thing entirely. I assume if you read the article, since the summary mentioned SNES specifically, you'll start to appreciate the difficulty. The hardware itself is one problem, which is fairly easily emulated. But every game comes with its own data banks and memory control. The 8-bit NES has something like 200 different known "mappers" which react differently, so you can't just build a perfect NES and throw games at it. Some games will share mappers since it's obviously easier to reuse technology. But if a game needs something different, like larger levels or more sprites or better sound or anything really, the "mapper" changes. It's very much like building a generic hardware emulator and having every game plug in its own driver. Some will work, others won't. The early NES emulators didn't plan for this, the later ones built this in from the ground up. Most NES emulators didn't even know they were supposed to be doing it this way.
SNES is similar, logic in the console as well as the cartridge. I don't think there will ever be a fully complete NES or SNES emulator because it's just way too much work, and it's no longer popular. Check out the state of N64 emulation - similar hurdles, only N64 is a lot more complicated. Most N64 emulators do the basics and rely on plug-in libraries to handle things. If a game doesn't work, you change the audio processor or video handling plugin and try again. Compatibility is in the toilet. Many people have abandoned the N64 generation and moved on to the CD-based games, specifically because there is less code in the game. Emulate the hardware and most games will work, exactly like MAME. For many systems, you emulate the hardware and nothing works but the most basic day 1 games because it's all still in the game.
Now you're thinking to yourself, if the hardware can be generic enough to handle the mapper, why can't the emulator be generic enough to run the game? You need to learn a bit about roms and dumping to answer that. Grab a torrent of NES games and see how many [b] for bad dumps there are. More bad than good dumps, because you have to know the mapper in order to even dump it. Then you have the ROM data only, not the mapper which is baked in silicon in the cartridge. Somewhere, somehow, you have to have the schematics of the cartridge defined in a way that the generic hardware can read, understand, and interact with the virtual cartridge. Emulators solve that by adding the mappers to the emulation.
The only solution to this is to be able to define a virtual logic chip that interacted with the data in a "black box" kind of way, one chip per game (or each game can specify the virtual logic chip used, which incidentally was the plan for an alternate NES game format, in a way - unf - but it doesn't have the logic defined, just a reference to it). NES, SNES, N64, SMS, Genesis, I'm not sure what all else has this problem.
It's not all just hacks and tweaks, it's the difficulty of implementing silicon logic as machine code. MESS is slow, and compatibility is poor, because most people who do emulation want it done with their design, not a generic box. But it does advance as open source emulators improve and ideas or code gets moved over. But you still have to decode every cartridge's internal function - you can't just take data and throw it at a black box.
Who said copying music is not wrong? You were replying to "Anonymous Coward", who has piles of posts here, and has argued both sides of that issue, but made no mention in this post. Maybe you're attributing something that some people argue to everyone who posts here, or maybe you're confused by the "copyright infringement is a separate offense and punished differently so it's not actually theft" argument. Not really sure. But I'm going to reply anyway.
Whether copying music is wrong or not is not an absolute, especially considering that not everyone lives in the same country and therefore may be subject to different laws. It truly depends on whether copying qualifies as copyright infringement, and you can decide how to refine your definition of wrong - morally, legally, ethically, humanistically, financially, or any number of ways. Civil disobedience can be considered the right thing to do in the interest of furthering society, so the legal status is not the only consideration to make. You will get any number of answers in return. To answer your question very stupidly, it's not wrong in any consequential way for me to copy music from my CD that I bought to my hard drive so I can listen while I code. Some RIAA people think it is wrong, but I think they are wrong. Copyright law is a very complex beast.
This specific case, on the other hand, is a clear violation of the terms of use of a licensed property, much like GPL code. It's unlikely you'll get an honest post here saying that GPL violations are somehow "not wrong", but you are more likely to see that sort of thing in a proprietary-oriented website. They gave the code away for free, right? Must be free? But that doesn't mean that GPL violations are OK, just that people in certain business think it's ok, at least until they are caught. Same with Creative Commons, which is like open-source for things that aren't code. If you follow the terms, you are fine. If you break the terms you break the license, and you have no rights except what is granted under Copyright Law, which is a complex beast.
If I use a RIAA song for my campaign trail, that's a clear violation of the terms of use of a licensed property. But it isn't copying, right? So it's ok? It doesn't fall under the "copying" part of Copyright Law, which includes "Exclusive rights in copyrighted works" and "Limitations on exclusive rights". Instead, the "public performance" part applies, which can overlap the copying parts in places. That exists independently of any EULA or shrinkwrap - it's right there in USC Title 17.
Minor addition to your comment, for some may get the wrong impression if it gets modded up the chain.
That is a bit of a generalization, and not necessarily accurate. The summary was
In that context, as a reply to the summary,
is obviously a generalization, especially with the word "some" in there. You chose to rephrase this as an absolute
Heavily tested techniques don't automatically mean it will be faster, as your comment implies. You may have meant it as a generalization, and not necessarily accurate, but you didn't use "some" as gp post did. Bubble sort is a heavily tested, tried-and-true technique. Lots of solid code is out there and many apps use it, not knowing any better or because it was the first sort they found in their search or book.
The original was generalizing that if you look at the progression of techniques, we go for ease of use rather than speed. C to C++ to Java to C#, this is typically because the libraries make things easier, not because they run faster. It happens to be quicker to use a standard library sort than implementing your own (unless you have bad MSVS 6 headers, in which case you'll bang your head against the desk trying to figure out why it doesn't work). You can certainly write a faster performing bunch of code, but it's easier to not reinvent the wheel, and faster for the development cycle. So we go for ease of implementation, rather than always choosing the fastest. That's why most websites these days are written in Java or .NET or even php, instead of something compiled like CGI.
pedant mode off
It has no force of law, but it is very useful in a defense. Assuming your lawyer knows about the concurrent resolution, of course.
The legislative branch writes laws, the judicial branch interprets them. This resolution leaves judges little room to re-interpret what the intent or meaning of a law is. It does leave room, of course, and could be a bit clearer. I see no reason to *oppose* this. The fact that Congress agrees that wiretapping was not intended to be used that way is now a fact, not an interpretation.
Yes, you're wrong. But only a little. pointing a gun at you is where you're wrong. If he had shot the cop in the face, this video would have proven that the gun was never pointed at the suspect. Go ahead and watch, it's on the ground or bushes the whole time.
Now, what that means depends on your state and locality laws. It might very well be argued that he had a reasonable expectation of being in imminent danger.
To a jury watching that video in a closed off room isolated from the danger it posed, the gun was clearly visible but aimed away from the person and did not necessarily represent imminent danger. If he had pointed a gun directly at you, that might have constituted imminent danger.
You can argue that you were stopped, someone blocked your path, you backed up (clearly visible) which led to panic, and the gun was the last straw you needed to defend yourself. But it took 5 seconds from realizing the car was blocking your path and backing up, to seeing the gun. Would you have time to pull out a gun from your riding gear and shoot someone? If so, you'd be admitting to riding a motorcycle at high speeds with an easily accessible handgun, which you were able to draw faster than a trained cop. That wouldn't make any sense to me, nor to a jury if the prosecutor had any sense. You're the bad guy, you're in jail.
You are only within your rights if you are in danger, as defined by your local laws. In this particular video, I don't see any way to justify it. The moment you reach for a gun the cop shoots you first.
Yes the cop didn't do what he should have done, but your interpretation of your rights is not going to hold up in a court of law.
Which laws? Sounds like you've read "The Photographer's Right" enough to have it memorized, but the video is not the issue. The audio going along with the video is the issue, and "the laws of the United States are quite clear" about wiretapping being illegal. What they aren't clear about is when wiretapping applies and when it does not.
That is, this case is about whether you can apply wiretapping laws to a conversation between a public servant and a suspect who has no implicit right to privacy (anything you say can and will be used against you, and is probably being taped by the cop's dashboard cam). I've seen "America's wildest police chases" enough times to know that many cops record audio as well as video, even if you are a private citizen in your own car, innocent until proven guilty.
I understand your point, but Photo and video laws don't apply to sound. Lots of cases have proven that having a video camera clearly visible and a sign saying it is on and recording, on private property, will get the wiretapping charge if it also records audio and an officer decides he doesn't like it.
Not saying it's right, it's clearly wrong, but "Video" implies both "video without sound" and "video with sound" and it's easy to get them confused. Pictures don't have sound so that part is clear. This is about the audio recorded along with the video, otherwise it would have been automatically dismissed. To be clear, even if a video has no sound, the police can still decide to charge a person with wiretapping because most people's video recorders do capture sound. The charge won't stick, but will cause an innocent person problems. This video had sound.
We have laws against aggressive driving because of the potential for accidents, and we have laws against being high at work for the same reason. If nothing else, public intoxication would cover it but depending on what you're working with there may be additional laws and/or rules. Mandatory drug testing is one of those rules which an employer may choose to implement, while another more obvious one might be "Don't come to work if you're on drugs".
What we don't have is a ban on driving just because you might drive aggressively, which is the same thing as drug testing just in case you might be "messed up" at work. We're talking about laws/rules against doing something instead of laws/rules against potentially doing something. Your claim of superior reflexes make you a candidate for aggressive driving, so we should revoke your license without even evaluating your claim, nor your driving, based on your logic.
But you say you accept these laws because they protect society against people who do not have superior reflexes, or can't handle their drugs.
with mandatory drug testing, people who are better at handling their drugs, like doing it recreationally when off duty, don't get away with it or pay a fine. They get fired. Laws against aggressive driving prevent accidents, especially when the person is not as skilled as you claim to be. Laws and rules should reality, not probability. Disregarding you, the average person driving aggressively will cause accidents, and the average person using drugs at work will cause problems. So let's focus on the actual problem, not some hypothetical possibility.
The only reason I've ever seen mandatory drug testing used is 1) initial hire, which may be a filter to get rid of people who can't clean up for long enough to pass a test or 2) turning layoffs into firings-for-cause when reduction in force is needed. The only other purpose mandatory testing serves is letting the company say they are anti-drug. If someone is having problems at work, an employer does not need to have a drug testing policy in place to request a drug test on-demand. The employee's performance alone should dictate whether it's needed. It's rare for an employee who has an on-the-job injury to *not* be tested in some way, for insurance purposes. Why would it be different for performance-related concerns? You're acting strangely at work, for the safety of those around you we'd like you to either quit or submit to a drug test at company expense or psychological examination in accordance with your benefits. Seems simple.
I figured I'd try smaller sentences this time.