If the IRS fills out what it knows, I have a better idea of whether I'm going to be audited. Downloading IRS info, and checking it to make sure it's correct, and clicking OK means the IRS already has everything it needs, and no audit needs performed under most circumstances. At the same time, Intuit is not the preparer - I download and check it, meaning I an the preparer.
Which brings me to my problem - you shouldn't require software or assistance to ensure your taxes are paid. There shouldn't be any sort of tax preparer, unless you are doing something complicated. However, I have found a number of times where H & R Block found small refunds I can take advantage of that I would not have known about myself. That shows it is too onerous for a person to get back what they deserve. If I do not get every cent entitled to me by law, the government has stolen money from me by obfuscating my entitlements in an unreadable legal quagmire.
Also, when Intuit does your return, it doesn't guarantee to take the fall for anything claimed in error - it asks you to review, and sign it yourself. Intuit's software does not qualify as a "tax preparer" for legal reasons, as far as I know. The taxpayer is on the hook for any errors in the software, although you might be able to convince an auditor that you didn't make that mistake intentionally, and they might go easy on you just like they went easy on presidential nominees for the same thing. Right?
Obama made the promise, Congress is failing to uphold it. I don't see a problem here.
What I do see a problem with is that I contacted my Congressguy McConnell to let him know that my Crohn's disease leaves me deciding to live a relatively normal life with huge debt, or a debilitating painful existence, and his discussions will affect my own personal future far more than it will affect his personal career, and I would appreciate being able to follow it.
I got no response, from my rep, on the most important issue of the decade (to most Americans anyway - as bad as numbers seem, the financial meltdown, terrorism, and 9/11 combined don't impact a small percentage of those potentially affected by health care).
See, you're confused just like a lot of people are. Bidding is not a simple process. I too was confused at why EDS keeps winning contracts, especially when I worked there.
EDS is very experienced at bidding, since it started as and continues to operate almost entirely as an outsourcing company. It knows what companies want to hear, and has a large number of success stories it can trot out. Every publicly reported disaster can be explained as changing customer requirements, or customer didn't give us all of the information, or some other excuse. The number of disaster contracts is very small compared to the number of "satisfied customer" contracts, so numbers are important too.
This article is partly (and the summary almost entirely) about how the low bidder always gets the job. The actual article really just demonstrates that Missouri is terrible at managing its outsourcing contracts. Having a single company implement something, then allowing other companies to bid to take it over, is just plain ignorance - the new company has to learn the system from scratch, and the old company has to cooperate in knowledge transfer with the new company. Often times, this is not in the original contract nor the new contract, so you end up paying extra for services not specified (and therefore not paid for). In other words, simple incompetence which can be rectified by including future-proofing in the contract. At the least, the contract should state that all documentation will be kept up to date, in a state which allows easy turnover when your contract is terminated. At that point, anything that the new company needs becomes a demand to the old company, to either produce the docs, transfer knowledge some other way, or face breach of contract punitive clauses.
That's a lie, unless there is a requirement that the low bidder has to get the contract. There is usually a qualification in there that says the lowest *qualified* bidder gets the job. I can't submit a proposal to do it for $100 and automatically get the contract, I have to convince them it can actually be done for that price.
Back to EDS, the trick is to make a semi-convincing argument that you know the business, and have supported other clients doing the exact same thing, so you know no one can do it cheaper without cutting corners. We don't just have a proposal, we have experience doing this.
Another way: I ask for bids on building a birdhouse. You are a residential housing company. You say you have piles of people who build things every day and will get a good, quality birdhouse instead of a slapdash one someone's grandmother would put together. Contract sold, you make an overpriced, non-functional pile of wood which technically fits the requirements but is of no value. Next time I want a house, I'm probably going to go with your proposal because we have a prior relationship and you're suited to the job. Next time I want a birdhouse, I'm going somewhere else.
A few years ago, GM was renegotiating with EDS and wanted to have multiple suppliers so they weren't depending on a single company. It was difficult for them to walk away from EDS because EDS knows the business, so they only diversified about half of what they wanted. It's not because EDS was better or cheaper, it just took less retraining and establishing contacts and relationships. (BTW this was all reported in market news at the time, none of this is inside info.) 10 years before, no one thought about putting exit clauses in, so EDS offered to do a lot of transition work for free on the bits it didn't win, in order to stay favorable on the stuff it was hoping to retain.
In short, companies like Haliburton or EDS show up, name their price, and say "Yeah it's expensive, but it's what we do every day... the other guys will have to get up to speed and you'll have schedule overruns, making it ultimately more expensive than the proposal says."
Then there's the no-bid contract written into law by a legislator to help one of his constituents' busi
I'm a software developer. I have a list of things I need to fix, some things are higher priority. We set a date, and work as many patches as we can toward that date, into a single release or patch. Makes it easier to test when you bundle several things together, and can test 5 patches with a single test case instead of individually. That makes the cycle more efficient.
Now, a large company would have more patches, and more would be high priority. So they fix what they can, that makes sense. Open the bug list, sort by priority, own one (or get assigned one). To the developer, this is just one of several (hundred?) problems on the list. Management has to increase the priority based on input from triage.
The entire world might know a defect is a security vulnerability, but if it's not made clear to the triage guy, it will sit as "possible denial of service" medium or medium-well priority until the known vectors are taken care of.
Thinking about it this way makes Microsoft's blunders understandable. Not forgivable of course. My customer sends me a bug report and says "gwah, you're exposing my entire database to everyone fix it now or face a lawsuit!!!!eleventy". I say, let's take a look, we find out that yes you can see the entire data set - after you enter your credentials and only while on your company's network, and you just sent a mail to your competitor with your credentials in it. Change your password, WONTFIX. In other words, MS has to have good info in order to decide how to prioritize.
At the same time, they have to keep their customers and shareholders happy, so while the triage guy says "this is the worst bug ever in the history of everything and it needs to be fixed yesterday" the company itself says to the employee "sure, but follow all processes and have it reviewed and put it in the next patch cycle and we'll test all of them next week and prepare for a release next week."
Then to its customers and shareholders it says "A small, hard-to-exploit exploit has been found and even though ASLR and DEP and sandboxing are in place, someone might after a million failures be able to exploit this exploit so we've decided to be proactive and fix this exploit. We haven't heard of anyone exploiting this exploit, but we didn't really ask any of our friends in the malicious software industry - but that was just because we didn't want to tip our hand. Your security is, after all, very important to us. Exploit."
I hereby denounce you as a troll, snake oil salesman, practicing thespian, and a grossly inappropriate sense of grandeur. That makes it true then, eh?
Look, if you want to travel back in time we can have a conversation using the terms as they used to be used. These days there is a different name for different types of unauthorized acquisition. The reason it's important is because in many countries the punishment is quite different.
If you were on trial for manslaughter, having accidentally run over a person who jumped into your auto's path, your lawyer would object every time someone said murder. So the judge says "overruled, either way the defendant killed someone, and admitted to that much in the police report, and that's why we're here".
Go ahead, point out how this situation is different from the copyright/theft argument. While you're doing so, make sure you read your post and my reply again.
The geek is trying to be precise here, and the law clearly defines a difference between the two. Now, given how many times this has been talked about, please tell me honestly, did I just get bite a troll? You other posts suggest you tend to be serious... in fact your other replies tend to take fine distinctions very seriously. But someone will read your post here and think, mighty fine point, I'll use that one someday.
I don't push things I don't understand. That's how people get viruses when human interaction is required, or delete data accidentally.
Your suggestion is basically when you think there's something available, click things that look like they might work, when you have no idea what they will do.
Here's an example from Vista, just because it's fresh in my mind. I click a zip file and IE asks me what to do - save or open. I always want to save, so I click "Don't ask" checkbox and "Save". Next time, instead of saving it opens the zip. The only way to change that is to find something in the registry - you can't just go into folder options like in XP and all previous windows, and there is no "Confirm open after download" or whatever it is. I clicked something because I thought it was what I wanted to do, and it turned into an internet search and careful registry tweak to undo.
You're suggesting doing the same thing, only with a picture which could very well be misleading at best. Trusting that a random script hasn't altered the DOM to put that there so you'd download something nasty. Or a.dll injection creating a window which isn't enabled until you are fully authorized, then kicks off severely malicious code.
I know, I'm being a bit ridiculous. But clicking on things you don't understand is terrible advice no matter the circumstance.
As a general rule, people hiding their activities DO HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE
Whether they are watching banned movies in your living room, or watching Shrek with your children, I bet most people close their curtains when it gets dark. What are they hiding?
Let me guess, you're the cop who pulled me over on super bowl sunday and wanted to search my car because I blew 0.00 on your breathalyzer. I was speeding, so the pullover was valid. I have anxiety problems, and being pulled over at night by a single cop is not the most comfortable experience. You thought I was acting suspiciously because of my general anxiety and wanted to search my car.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."
So, that's wrong. I'm not hiding anything, I'm enforcing my rights. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, right? So you expect people to know the law. But if they call you on it, all of a sudden it's suspicious. That's a double standard, and you as an authority figure are applying pressure to get me to do something I don't feel like doing, which is pretty much an abuse of power.
"Hi judge, I just pulled this guy over and he said I couldn't search his car, that makes me think something's up. Can I have a warrant?"
Sorry, that wouldn't work (that part didn't actually happen, because he knew it wouldn't work). The proper way to search is to ask my permission or get a warrant. Since I said no, now you have to get a warrant. If you can't convince a judge, you never had probable cause. Here's my legally owned prescription anxiety drugs in a properly labeled container, still think I'm acting suspiciously? You already gave me a field sobriety test which came back negative or I'd already be in the back seat of your car, so I'm not impaired by those drugs, and if I were under their influence I wouldn't seem so anxious, eh? Still think I'm acting suspiciously?
"Yes, you're hiding something. What's wrong, you have a joint in there you don't want me to find? An unregistered gun?"
OK, fine. You know what, search my car. No ticket, nothing turned up in the search, I got an apology and a warning. An apology, and no ticket, from a cop who pulled me over for going 75 in a 60 zone. Did I have something to hide? Yes, my personal belongings from someone who has no reason to see what I'm doing. I'm hiding from the government and its agencies anything it does not have, by the laws of the land, any right to see.
When you have probable cause you can come for me, until then go away.
They might be crazy, but I'd expect anyone who believes in UFOs and thinks Roswell was a coverup would use TOR to gather and share evidence that "the gvmt doesn't want you to see." Or people sharing "true stories from 9/11 workers showing it's an inside job" or "OKC bombing was an inside job and we just found a patsy to blame" and "John Wilkes Booth was hired by the CIA" and "Lee Harvey Oswald worked for Hoover". These people are mostly harmless and think they have something to hide - the opposite of your supposition. They are hiding despite having nothing to hide. Nothing substantial of course, but they think they do.
Even more important, which I should have listed first, is the idea of free speech. People can't make changes if the government hides things from them, so it makes sense to create software that lets people share ideas. Silly harmless ones like above, or profound movements where the people force change in their government by revealing information. Someone sharing old 1970s era pictures of naked children is doing no actual harm (unless you want to conflate and suppose and imagine and maybe project, the pictures already exist). Someone working to free the Chinese people from a protective government is doing a great service (*in my opinion at least). Subverting your own government is treason, but I can freely say that I believe other citizens should subvert their governments without fear. What if I send that sentiment to my fri
SAP is one of the worst offenders, but I have to say I've seen the largest collection of poorly thought out icons at work, where someone puts on a dog and pony show to convince our company to buy things, and our company bites without trying it out on a few users first.
I hate having to 'mouse-over' an icon to find out what it does, and even worse is when it doesn't have a tooltip. Corporate software seems to be where the worst designs live because anything else is quickly abandoned in favor of something intuitive.
Thus, corporations tend to increase their own training budgets by basing decisions on bullet-point comparisons instead of real-world usage. You put something obvious in front of people, they'll be able to figure it out. But when the "Overview" button is a mountain with random clouds behind it or something, and the "Give me the report based on what I selected" button is in an entirely different frame from the selection criteria, your software is crap. Yes SAP I'm calling you out, but there are others just like you, which is the only reason you're still in the business. That and company execs are too embarrassed to simply say "we paid too much, here's your out clause, delete all versions and we're moving to something else". That would leave you responsible for excess expenditures, while forcing your peons to work with crap software doesn't reveal cold, hard numbers in the form of productivity loss due to training and questions and people just not being able to figure it out and saying to hell with it.
Someone says they prefer stepping through their user-land code, and you reply by saying that kernel level debugging is hard? Most software is userland, most debugging is userland.
Truly, there is no substitute for watching each branch happen to understand exactly why the application behaves a certain way. Static analysis is even harder when multiple classes and inheritance are involved, polymorphism makes it a whole different thing. It's easier for me to learn source code by putting a breakpoint on whtever I'm looking at, and running to that, then stepping out to see how I got there.
I don't care what happens to the kernel during that time, most people don't.
Even better, a truly useful "quick start" program example for each library.
For example, I want to know how to use zlib. The library is there, there is a zip and unzip executable, and you can have the make process run a self-test to ensure it can round-trip data without loss. All I have to do is look at how zip and unzip run, and I can use it just like that. Every library needs something like this.
How about a basic OpenSSL project that showcases one or two aspects of OpenSSL in a very short, one-screen, one-file executable? I've never used it so I don't know what to suggest.
Last time I tried to use fftw library I couldn't figure out where to even start - is there an initialization you have to call (like some crc32 code requires pre-computing an array before using it, but it's not clear by the docs) or something else? I couldn't find a simple program that takes a wav file (or other non-encoded data points) and outputs FFT results. I'd even take plain-text output that I could parse some other way... I can't figure out how to get the sample data in and get something useful out. The "demo" apps I've seen are way too complicated and do too much on their own to understand how they really use fftw. I've been trying to figure it out for maybe 8 years now, off and on. I know music theory, the related physics and acoustics, and have lots of experience with calculus, so you'd think it would be a no-brainer. I even understand how to implement FFT. I could have written my own library if I hadn't been distracted by trying to get this library working.
This is terrible advice. Lots of times I've been looking for something to try, but had nothing specific in mind. Getting a suggestion means that someone might actually use what you produce. As opposed to working on something to find out you're halfway done when Debian includes some obscure app that does the same thing, and no one uses what you did and has no use for it.
This is the best place to ask, because as soon as someone puts an idea up, someone else will probably reply with "you mean like..." and link to something that already does that. Wait a few days and the redundant suggestions will get knocked down.
If I had time on my hands, I'd be reading through this thread looking for something to do myself. I don't have any burning needs, but I have skills and a large personal code base to draw from, so I could turn around something quickly, or at least get a good start on a prototype to attract others to help build the next killer app.
We hate them, they pushed for effectively infinite copyright protections because some Air Pirates drew pictures of Mickey Mouse doing things almost everyone has done at some point in their lives.
The actual report says 44% of people who were contacted by Outsell and chose to respond have no intention of clicking on a link and simply read the headlines. You're not going to get people to click by changing your behavior - these people have probably never seen your site and aren't making a decision based on your site or your advertising. They simply intend to skim headlines.
So calling this advertising is really disingenuous. Calling it a return on anything is as well. A lone news site has to build loyalty and/or recognition before someone in the 46% group willingly changes their behaviors, which will take advertising money and lots more.
The only trade-off we're talking about is news site providing data to Google. If people don't find your random news site somehow, you have zero chance of being used. So you're providing data, hoping to be stumbled upon, just like every other website ever. In other words, just another member of the internet and just another company trying to make money via the internet.
I'll go further and say there is no difference between these 46% of people who don't click the articles, and the roughly 50% of people who visit the site but block ads. You could split hairs and say google is serving the data for the news provider while ad blockers consume bandwidth without generating corresponding advertising revenue. So google is the white knight here. Sure I pulled that number out of my butt, but I don't believe there is a single source for the number of ad blocking people - everything I've found is self-selecting based on the content of the site, or near-random guessing based on partial statistics.
I was hoping to post your comment before you, so instead I'll add a twist. Research conclusions are often incorrect - they have raw data, then leap to a conclusion which is among several supported by the data. More reasearch is needed to differentiate among the possibilities, but it gets reported as fact because it's "research" and "science".
Alternate interpretations: Half of google news users didn't find what they were looking for so google news index sucks Half of google news users didn't find what they were looking for so people look for non-existent things Most news can be summarized in a headline and the rest is fluff (half of the users clicked at least one time on one out of the millions of results, that's a damning statistic) Most news is not interesting (half of the users clicked at least one time on one out of the millions of results) Most people are not interested in news which actually is judged to be inherently interesting Google news users are a self-selected subset of people who want quick access to information without adverts, slow loading, cookie tracking, flash crap, extra and unnecessary image data transfer
I could go on, but which one of these sounds more plausible? I believe it's the last one, the people likely to use google news are likely to want a minimal search interface and zero clutter. News providers cannot make money by providing people what people want, that's an interpretation based on the conclusion.
Other comments are a result of this conclusion. Written news will go from being important info first with as much data in the headline, to an inverse quagmire of hinting and supposition like the local evening news already is: Something in your kitchen could injure your entire family. We'll tell you what it is, but first here's the weather report and some commercials and a human interest story about lost puppies. That about wraps it up. That thing that could kill you? Oh yeah, our handyman has the following tip for homeowners: Don't stick your head in the garbage disposal when it's turned on, you could suffer damage and even death, and if your 2 year old child tries to save you she could be accidentally grabbed by involuntary muscle contractions and sucked in with you while the dog tries to see what's so interesting and turns on the gas stove which we told you not to use last week and your house burns down and catches your neighborhood on fire. Good night, NBC news is next.
Pretty sure this has been debunked, because the $800 hammer has to be tested to withstand zero-pressure, frozen environments without breaking or becoming useless. Even if it requires no modifications, someone smart (meaning lots of $$$ per hour) has to test it completely to make sure it doesn't fail. You can't just send up a normal hammer and hope it works, and you can't send up 10 of everything because each ounce of payload adds to the fuel costs. You certainly can't afford to hope your environment doesn't become depressurized instead of doing actual testing, because one tiny hole renders your equipment unusable until a supply mission comes back up.
Plus, it has to probably work outside, and you don't just set stuff down outside - it has to be tethered. And you don't want it flinging around on a bit of string... I'd google it for you but I have more pressing issues. Don't look for rhetoric like "$800 hammer" - try searching for the opposite of what you believe like "why is military hardware overpriced" or "explanations for $800 hammer". you'll be surprised.
I also want you to tell me that my family doesn't deserve to eat.
If you can't produce a marketable product at a price people will pay, and you have no other source of income, you need to find a way to cut costs or find a new profession. No one is forcing you to make these things. If you stop making them, demand will back up and someone else will step in and make the product at a higher price, and your family gets to eat.
It's almost magical how that works. If you argue that you are staying in business because the price will go up if a new company has to start over from scratch, you're volunteering to be the martyr and you are deciding whether your family eats.
As a customer, I would decide whether to buy your product based on a cost/benefit ratio, and whether I could find another supplier cheaper. Not whether your family gets to eat - that's a terrible way to make buying decisions.
In support, I offer these two anecdotes. I might be remembering wrong because of all the morphine, but I'm pretty close.
1) I was offered some chemical that takes off the gummy black stuff left behind after they take tape off you. The kind of tape that holds an IV in, or a naso-gastric tube in place. My doctor intervened and said basically: don't do that, it will charge you $40. Wait till you get home and get acetone, nail polish remover for a dollar. That's all it is, they just added on costs for profit and liability.
2) To illustrate the point, my doctor told me about the chemotherapy drug that costs $10,000 per dose. It works in horses as well. Doctors would tell their patients that they could order some, or they could provide their own, hint hint. Patients would go to the veterinary supply store and get the same thing for a few hundred dollars, claiming a sick horse, and then take the bag to the infusion clinic. The cost was because they can, and for liability and insurance due to it being a newly patented drug.
Doesn't matter if your insurance pays, your copay amount is probably going to be higher with the "for humans" version than full price "alternative" sources.
Confusing patent and copyright laws, that's a different thing from dismissing the possibility that someone would copyright a patio, which is what I did. The ones I've seen aren't terribly impressive, but you are right they could be registered and do automatically qualify for protection. However...
Who would claim copyright on a standard 10x8 foot patio? A block of concrete arranged to form a level surface with a boundary (often removed so that the patio itself is the apparent boundary) with an adjoining object such as lawn, flowerbeds, a livable structure, or storage structure... keep in mind the arrangement of items on the patio is distinct from the act of *building a patio* which is what I believe I was replying to.
Under copyright, you wouldn't get royalty payments unless it were built in to the specific contract, and at that point it's no longer IP laws, it's a contract between two legally consenting parties. I could make a truly breathtaking work-of-art patio, and sell the blueprints and build of materials, and sue people for copyright infringement when they spread these around. That's intellectual property. Here we bring the idea of "design" into the picture, as in "design and build a patio" instead of just build. Maybe you inferred that part, it wasn't stated so I certainly didn't.
What isn't likely, and I believe this is what I was originally replied to, is that someone builds an average patio and expects copyright licensing every time someone uses the patio. That's absurd. Patenting is out of the question for the simple case of "build a patio". What if someone builds a similar patio? You'd really have to go out of your way to make something noticeably different from every patio everyone everywhere has in order to have any standing to bring a lawsuit based on copyright infringement. If it doesn't get thrown out immediately, you are more likely going to make your case and then find the judge says you are violating the copyright of someone who built a similar patio before you, case dismissed.
I might be able to search every house using google maps to find someone who built a patio from my design without a corresponding order record for that address, and then bring a lawsuit hoping that someone didn't order for a family member or friend. That would be a difficult case to prove, that they saw my plans or my patio and built their own copy, instead of them coming to the same conclusion I did when I "invented" it. I don't think there has been much in the way of patio copyright case law, but in similar cases involving books or music it is very difficult to win such a case unless you are using direct quotations or sampling. Every other case that wasn't blindingly obvious that I know of has been dismissed or settled for a paltry sum. The measurements would have to match (to scale of course) very precisely. Sure it is possible to copyright a patio design and go after people who spread the design around, though difficult to enforce. Would someone looking at your house through google maps be guilty of copying your design because they have an image of your copyrighted design on their computer? If they took a picture at a birthday party and happened to be your backyard neighbor, capturing your patio and uploading it to Flickr? Maybe, but not really enforceable.
In other words, something functional like a patio has to be really out of the ordinary before you'd have a valid and enforceable copyright. It would have to be truly extraordinary to qualify for a patent. Given the original comment, it is unlikely this is what the person meant. The followup was basically "I should be able to download movies for free because it doesn't cost anyone anything and distributors are evil", so I'm even more certain this is not what they meant.
Distributors are in the business of taking a cut of something they didn't create. It's a parasitic business model. But people still sign contracts with these people, why?
MPAA, or one of its members to be specific, has a lot of relationships in place, and can leverage that to promote that movie. The content creator sees the contract as a trade-off, gaining market share in exchange for the distributor's services.
RIAA members prey on artists hoping for a wider audience - the last "insider" info I saw basically had a gold record giving the record company ~$10 million in profits, and each band member makes off with $25k for the year. Lots of people see that as the RIAA ripping off the artists. Some people see that as getting paid slightly over minimum wage to do nothing but play and hang out with friends and groupies. It's definitely one-sided, but people keep signing up. Used to be, like in the 80s, you needed the recording equipment so your money is in exchange for the ability to create something. These days, it's more about getting promoted (and having an experienced AutoTune guy fix your crappy singing).
I'm not disagreeing with you, distributors are evil. Middlemen are evil, whether they are trying to make money in digital markets just because they (think they) can track usage, or buying a house just to repaint a few walls and make a huge profit.
If it serves the creator to sign rights over to a company in exchange for some benefit, creators should be able to do that. Even if they are making a stupid decision.
I think what you're most concerned with is the new digital economy, where you have to pay to download a ringtone even though you own the CD. Or worse, you buy a DVD and want the opening theme as your ringtone - bypassing the encryption means you broke the US DMCA or whatever your Berne Convention country calls it. You bought a license to watch the video and listen to the audio - it makes no sense to limit your listening to "while the DVD is playing" only. You can lend a physical book, but if you're using a Zune or Kindle you have limits on the number of times you can loan it. You install an operating system, decide it's crap and switch to linux, and sell it to someone who can't activate it. The new digital economy is based on nickel-and-diming customers to bankruptcy, giving them temporary access to a product instead of the permanent access we once enjoyed. And we should reject it.
I admit, I'm divided on the download issue. On one hand, I myself have piles of stuff that I have downloaded without paying for. On the other hand, most of that I never used/watched/listened to. What I did consume, I generally purchased to register my support or deleted because it's crap.
You see, part of the digital economy is making a two-minute trailer for a video game or movie, and making people pay full price with no refunds to see the whole thing. With a car or billiard table you get to see the thing in action and decide if it's worth it. RIAA members tried to limit singles as much as possible, so you're expected to buy an album based on 1 song, rarely two songs. A crap song can be on the top 40 for weeks on end because it's based on airplay, not whether people like it. And the RIAA like it that way. We will let you TiVo anything - except for the ones with the broadcast flag flipped because our business model includes you watching TV. Well, do you chain someone to the seat so they can't go potty or make food during commercials? Or tape their eyes open? No, you rely on the satisfaction of your customers (not the viewers, I mean your advertisers, the true customers). If their sales go up as a result of advertising they will be happy. If people all pee at the same time and don't see the commercial, the advertiser puts ads elsewhere, like in-game or on virtual billboards.
Think of IP laws like the ACLU. Sometimes they seem to be on the wrong side of things, but it's because they have a single-minded promotion of one single focus. Sometimes the ACLU is o
This is a silly argument and deserves to be bitchslapped. Inventing a patio might qualify for intellectual property laws, but building one doesn't.
If I make an architectural plan for a house, that is something new and deserves protection for the advancement of the useful arts and sciences. The guy who puts in the windows, builds the patio, puts on the shingles, wires the place, are adding nothing that qualifies as art nor science. The architect gets copyright, the patio maker gets paid for labor.
The architect invents an energy efficient home which is self-cooling and self-heating in the same way large ant colonies self-regulate. He can get a patent on the idea, and copyright a specific plan (or set of plans) implementing the idea. The patio maker gets paid for labor only.
Please come up with an argument that involves a contribution to the useful arts and sciences. Here's one, I write a sophisticated audio processing algorithm which correctly identifies all pitches in music, translating an arbitrary audio file into sheet music. the software is protected by copyright, the algorithm is not patentable. But the idea behind the algorithm can be implemented in circuitry (a specific implementation and not subject to the general-use restrictions re: Bilski) and patented.
The guy who invents the algorithm probably owns the patents, unless he's an idiot. The guy who wrote the code gets copyright, but can't implement without permission or licensing from the patent owner. The guy who builds the circuits gets paid labor. The guy who built the patio should learn electrical engineering if he wants more money, or invent something new if he wants recurring payments.
I know, it's hard to believe that Miley Cyrus' children should benefit financially from the horrendous festering pile that is the corpus of her work, but don't worry she won't, because she didn't write most of it. Somewhere there's a composer who has a keen sense of what will play on the radio, and brought something new and marketable into the world. If you don't follow this argument, let's switch it over to a Disney cartoon. Their early works were truly masterpieces, and have been assimilated into the collective conscious of most of the developed world. I don't think they need life+90 years of protection, but they are far more interesting and useful and touching than a patio. They also took longer to make, with a significantly higher investment of either time, materials, brainpower, or permutations thereof. That investment is something we allow creators to recoup, in exchange for creating something that didn't exist.
Sure, most inventors are simply solving a particular problem of theirs and might have zero investment to recoup, but if they want people to know about their invention so it might also be useful to others, we have to give them something more than "Good luck, hope no one with existing production capabilities copies your idea and makes trillions before you can get a business going." I know I'm going back and forth with copyright and patents, if I make a picture that means a lot to people, they can't just scan it and print it out and have their own copy to sell to other people.
I sent a note to my "Congresscritter" Mitch McConnell in support of C-Span's complaint that resolving the differences between House and Senate bills should be televised. No response. Obama could ask them to open discussions, but Obama does not order Congress what to do.
When a presidential candidate promises things that only Congress can deliver, you have to discount that promise because they can't do anything about it. You really should discount the candidate because they lied about what they could do, but since everyone does that you'd have 0 votes for any candidate, more liars, and more 0-vote elections.
In contrast, FBI is an Executive Branch organization. So let's skip the healthcare trollbait and go directly to what's Obama going to do about FBI snoops!
I considered this from another angle in the shower this morning.
Google has to index page data, some of which is in script format. Remember when Google's cached pages showed un-obfuscated e-mail addresses instead of the obfuscated versions from the plain-text HTML? Well, Google had to build a tool to parse HTML in order to index the web, so there's the HTML parser. They had to add a script engine, so there's JavaScript. It has to be distributed, so possible to run in a separate process. CSS-based layout gives context to the page, and they have to detect link farming or other dirty SEO techniques, so parsing and applying CSS (looking for white-on-white text for example) makes sense, there's your rudimentary layout engine.
My conclusion was, Chrome is a byproduct of the optimization of the search engine indexing process. Turning it into a product was probably just a marketing idea to get Google's name always in press releases, and a logical outcome of the "ChromeOS" idea where the web is the platform. If you're going to deprecate hardware and OS by making the browser where everything happens, as they did with GMail, Google Docs, and piles of other offerings, you come to the conclusion of taking your web bot and turning it into a branding opportunity.
No competition with Firefox, yet. Firefox won't switch defaults from the most popular search provider. Also, Google won't be able to keep FireFox from implementing whatever Chrome-specific stuff you are imagining without heavy-handed tactics like wielding patents. ChromeOS is what Google wants, not browser market share. Use Chrome, get used to it, then why not switch to our OS since everything is available through the browser? Competition happens because the platform changes, not because Chrome wins.
Look what happened to Netscape - Microsoft changed the game by making users expect a free, built-in browser with an OS, and the platform changed from a free-for-all open web to IE-only with ActiveX controls seemingly overnight (even in technological time scales). It wasn't really browser competition, they wanted control of the desktop and killing a browser was a side effect. I have the same feeling here - Google's OS might kill Firefox accidentally in its desire to compete with handheld OS makers like phones, of which MS is a little part.
They do. For starters, the summary is terrible. I've been following ReactOS for 5 years or so, here's more info. It's not a real rewrite where you throw code away. It has been controversial, and not everyone in the project agrees it's the right way to proceed. If I can try to summarize the intent, it's like hoisting the house so you can repair the foundation, while keeping the upper levels intact. In reality it's like building a separate foundation so you can move the house onto either one, which makes mine just another in the long list of terrible analogies on Slashdot.
The article is about a partial rewrite held in a separate trunk. ARWINSS is a branch designed to make more use of WINE, so that the core OS functionality that is missing in trunk can work, and higher-level work can be done. In theory, bugs with GDI and/or User code will magically go away, so that the people working on usermode will be able to test and fine-tune their code in ARWINSS branch while the people working on the kernel fix the bugs or rewrite properly or whatever else in trunk. Alexsey has already found/fixed several existing bugs by playing with this branch, which were ported into trunk (based on SVN history at CIA.VC, watching for "merge from ARWINSS" commits in trunk).
It is not intended to be the direction of the project, and several developers are pretty much ignoring this branch except as a curiosity. Since ReactOS uses most of the WINE user-mode code, implementing a basic WineServer lets the WINE merges happen with a lot less hacking. Ultimately, this branch everyone's making a big deal out of will probably be deleted. That's not the project's opinion, that's my own, based on the project's stated goal of being a reference implementation of documented Windows functionality. Having a Wine server in there is one thing, X functionality propping it is the really cool part. Imagine native X-Windows sessions to your server box instead of using WTS/RDP? Maybe it will continue as an alternative branch just for the coolness factor.
To ramble further, any fixes that ReactOS does are sent upstream to WINE, ReactOS is helping. They are testing WINE's correctness in an actual Windows environment, sometimes copying ReactOS libraries (containing WINE code) onto a Windows box to test proper functionality. As an example, you can put na app and its libraries in the same folder and override DLL loading to use local libraries (the ones in the same directory) - except for a few reserved system libraries I think in newer Windows versions.
Further, WINE has a very large number of test cases which run in an automated framework. So ReactOS is double-testing both Wine's code and its test cases. If you hate Windows and love Wine, you should support ReactOS simply due to the additional testing effort and bugfixes submitted.
Any questions? I don't represent the project, but I do have a long-term outsider's view and I do compile and fiddle with the code. I have seen MS source code, so I don't contribute to the project other than the occasional comment.
(as much as I hate replying to oneself) Using Katie Holmes as an example:
Reference material is key in my method of aging. Keeping Katie's face in mind, I scoured the Web, looking for faces of old women who either resemble Katie and/or share the same facial expression. Here, Katie is smiling with her face positioned at a 3/4 angle so I tried to gather as many pictures of old women who are smiling in the same manner or close to that. I then opened up the picture of Katie in Photoshop and pasted the found images around her face on a separate layer, spread out to provide easy visual access.
Find older people who resemble the person, copy and paste. But they forgot this part, which might have helped:
Another kind of reference I like to use but is usually hard to find, is pictures of the subject's parents. I managed to find a couple of reference pictures of Katie's mother online and they really helped me to decide whether or not to give Katie a double chin. Since her mom has quite a bit of mass under her chin, I decided I would apply that to Katie too.
Hmm, actually based on the results they didn't use this tutorial at all. They assigned a task to someone without the skills or knowledge, and he bluffed his way through it.
I still haven't seen any posts about using age-enhancement software. This has been around for 15 years at least, I remember seeing the age-progression morph video with a disclaimer "this image was produced by digitally applying common aging patterns to the source picture" - later shortened to "what they may look like now using age-progression" and often "thanks to blah laboratories for providing age-enhancement techniques."
Wouldn't the FBI want to use such a thing, and maybe add some "died from lack of dialysis" marks here and there, instead of Photoshopping something together???
There's a fucking app on FaceBook to do this!!!AgeMe For free!! Google search for "age progression" leads to several free sites where you could do it as well. FBI doesn't want the public to know? Contact the authors and ask them to do a special job under NDA.
Slashdot Mirror
If the IRS fills out what it knows, I have a better idea of whether I'm going to be audited. Downloading IRS info, and checking it to make sure it's correct, and clicking OK means the IRS already has everything it needs, and no audit needs performed under most circumstances. At the same time, Intuit is not the preparer - I download and check it, meaning I an the preparer.
Which brings me to my problem - you shouldn't require software or assistance to ensure your taxes are paid. There shouldn't be any sort of tax preparer, unless you are doing something complicated. However, I have found a number of times where H & R Block found small refunds I can take advantage of that I would not have known about myself. That shows it is too onerous for a person to get back what they deserve. If I do not get every cent entitled to me by law, the government has stolen money from me by obfuscating my entitlements in an unreadable legal quagmire.
Also, when Intuit does your return, it doesn't guarantee to take the fall for anything claimed in error - it asks you to review, and sign it yourself. Intuit's software does not qualify as a "tax preparer" for legal reasons, as far as I know. The taxpayer is on the hook for any errors in the software, although you might be able to convince an auditor that you didn't make that mistake intentionally, and they might go easy on you just like they went easy on presidential nominees for the same thing. Right?
Obama made the promise, Congress is failing to uphold it. I don't see a problem here.
What I do see a problem with is that I contacted my Congressguy McConnell to let him know that my Crohn's disease leaves me deciding to live a relatively normal life with huge debt, or a debilitating painful existence, and his discussions will affect my own personal future far more than it will affect his personal career, and I would appreciate being able to follow it.
I got no response, from my rep, on the most important issue of the decade (to most Americans anyway - as bad as numbers seem, the financial meltdown, terrorism, and 9/11 combined don't impact a small percentage of those potentially affected by health care).
See, you're confused just like a lot of people are. Bidding is not a simple process. I too was confused at why EDS keeps winning contracts, especially when I worked there.
EDS is very experienced at bidding, since it started as and continues to operate almost entirely as an outsourcing company. It knows what companies want to hear, and has a large number of success stories it can trot out. Every publicly reported disaster can be explained as changing customer requirements, or customer didn't give us all of the information, or some other excuse. The number of disaster contracts is very small compared to the number of "satisfied customer" contracts, so numbers are important too.
This article is partly (and the summary almost entirely) about how the low bidder always gets the job. The actual article really just demonstrates that Missouri is terrible at managing its outsourcing contracts. Having a single company implement something, then allowing other companies to bid to take it over, is just plain ignorance - the new company has to learn the system from scratch, and the old company has to cooperate in knowledge transfer with the new company. Often times, this is not in the original contract nor the new contract, so you end up paying extra for services not specified (and therefore not paid for). In other words, simple incompetence which can be rectified by including future-proofing in the contract. At the least, the contract should state that all documentation will be kept up to date, in a state which allows easy turnover when your contract is terminated. At that point, anything that the new company needs becomes a demand to the old company, to either produce the docs, transfer knowledge some other way, or face breach of contract punitive clauses.
That's a lie, unless there is a requirement that the low bidder has to get the contract. There is usually a qualification in there that says the lowest *qualified* bidder gets the job. I can't submit a proposal to do it for $100 and automatically get the contract, I have to convince them it can actually be done for that price.
Back to EDS, the trick is to make a semi-convincing argument that you know the business, and have supported other clients doing the exact same thing, so you know no one can do it cheaper without cutting corners. We don't just have a proposal, we have experience doing this.
Another way: I ask for bids on building a birdhouse. You are a residential housing company. You say you have piles of people who build things every day and will get a good, quality birdhouse instead of a slapdash one someone's grandmother would put together. Contract sold, you make an overpriced, non-functional pile of wood which technically fits the requirements but is of no value. Next time I want a house, I'm probably going to go with your proposal because we have a prior relationship and you're suited to the job. Next time I want a birdhouse, I'm going somewhere else.
A few years ago, GM was renegotiating with EDS and wanted to have multiple suppliers so they weren't depending on a single company. It was difficult for them to walk away from EDS because EDS knows the business, so they only diversified about half of what they wanted. It's not because EDS was better or cheaper, it just took less retraining and establishing contacts and relationships. (BTW this was all reported in market news at the time, none of this is inside info.) 10 years before, no one thought about putting exit clauses in, so EDS offered to do a lot of transition work for free on the bits it didn't win, in order to stay favorable on the stuff it was hoping to retain.
In short, companies like Haliburton or EDS show up, name their price, and say "Yeah it's expensive, but it's what we do every day... the other guys will have to get up to speed and you'll have schedule overruns, making it ultimately more expensive than the proposal says."
Then there's the no-bid contract written into law by a legislator to help one of his constituents' busi
I'm a software developer. I have a list of things I need to fix, some things are higher priority. We set a date, and work as many patches as we can toward that date, into a single release or patch. Makes it easier to test when you bundle several things together, and can test 5 patches with a single test case instead of individually. That makes the cycle more efficient.
Now, a large company would have more patches, and more would be high priority. So they fix what they can, that makes sense. Open the bug list, sort by priority, own one (or get assigned one). To the developer, this is just one of several (hundred?) problems on the list. Management has to increase the priority based on input from triage.
The entire world might know a defect is a security vulnerability, but if it's not made clear to the triage guy, it will sit as "possible denial of service" medium or medium-well priority until the known vectors are taken care of.
Thinking about it this way makes Microsoft's blunders understandable. Not forgivable of course. My customer sends me a bug report and says "gwah, you're exposing my entire database to everyone fix it now or face a lawsuit!!!!eleventy". I say, let's take a look, we find out that yes you can see the entire data set - after you enter your credentials and only while on your company's network, and you just sent a mail to your competitor with your credentials in it. Change your password, WONTFIX. In other words, MS has to have good info in order to decide how to prioritize.
At the same time, they have to keep their customers and shareholders happy, so while the triage guy says "this is the worst bug ever in the history of everything and it needs to be fixed yesterday" the company itself says to the employee "sure, but follow all processes and have it reviewed and put it in the next patch cycle and we'll test all of them next week and prepare for a release next week."
Then to its customers and shareholders it says "A small, hard-to-exploit exploit has been found and even though ASLR and DEP and sandboxing are in place, someone might after a million failures be able to exploit this exploit so we've decided to be proactive and fix this exploit. We haven't heard of anyone exploiting this exploit, but we didn't really ask any of our friends in the malicious software industry - but that was just because we didn't want to tip our hand. Your security is, after all, very important to us. Exploit."
In short: there are more than we'll ever know.
I hereby denounce you as a troll, snake oil salesman, practicing thespian, and a grossly inappropriate sense of grandeur. That makes it true then, eh?
Look, if you want to travel back in time we can have a conversation using the terms as they used to be used. These days there is a different name for different types of unauthorized acquisition. The reason it's important is because in many countries the punishment is quite different.
If you were on trial for manslaughter, having accidentally run over a person who jumped into your auto's path, your lawyer would object every time someone said murder. So the judge says "overruled, either way the defendant killed someone, and admitted to that much in the police report, and that's why we're here".
Go ahead, point out how this situation is different from the copyright/theft argument. While you're doing so, make sure you read your post and my reply again.
The geek is trying to be precise here, and the law clearly defines a difference between the two. Now, given how many times this has been talked about, please tell me honestly, did I just get bite a troll? You other posts suggest you tend to be serious... in fact your other replies tend to take fine distinctions very seriously. But someone will read your post here and think, mighty fine point, I'll use that one someday.
I don't push things I don't understand. That's how people get viruses when human interaction is required, or delete data accidentally.
Your suggestion is basically when you think there's something available, click things that look like they might work, when you have no idea what they will do.
Here's an example from Vista, just because it's fresh in my mind. I click a zip file and IE asks me what to do - save or open. I always want to save, so I click "Don't ask" checkbox and "Save". Next time, instead of saving it opens the zip. The only way to change that is to find something in the registry - you can't just go into folder options like in XP and all previous windows, and there is no "Confirm open after download" or whatever it is. I clicked something because I thought it was what I wanted to do, and it turned into an internet search and careful registry tweak to undo.
You're suggesting doing the same thing, only with a picture which could very well be misleading at best. Trusting that a random script hasn't altered the DOM to put that there so you'd download something nasty. Or a .dll injection creating a window which isn't enabled until you are fully authorized, then kicks off severely malicious code.
I know, I'm being a bit ridiculous. But clicking on things you don't understand is terrible advice no matter the circumstance.
Whether they are watching banned movies in your living room, or watching Shrek with your children, I bet most people close their curtains when it gets dark. What are they hiding?
Let me guess, you're the cop who pulled me over on super bowl sunday and wanted to search my car because I blew 0.00 on your breathalyzer. I was speeding, so the pullover was valid. I have anxiety problems, and being pulled over at night by a single cop is not the most comfortable experience. You thought I was acting suspiciously because of my general anxiety and wanted to search my car.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."
So, that's wrong. I'm not hiding anything, I'm enforcing my rights. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, right? So you expect people to know the law. But if they call you on it, all of a sudden it's suspicious. That's a double standard, and you as an authority figure are applying pressure to get me to do something I don't feel like doing, which is pretty much an abuse of power.
"Hi judge, I just pulled this guy over and he said I couldn't search his car, that makes me think something's up. Can I have a warrant?"
Sorry, that wouldn't work (that part didn't actually happen, because he knew it wouldn't work). The proper way to search is to ask my permission or get a warrant. Since I said no, now you have to get a warrant. If you can't convince a judge, you never had probable cause. Here's my legally owned prescription anxiety drugs in a properly labeled container, still think I'm acting suspiciously? You already gave me a field sobriety test which came back negative or I'd already be in the back seat of your car, so I'm not impaired by those drugs, and if I were under their influence I wouldn't seem so anxious, eh? Still think I'm acting suspiciously?
"Yes, you're hiding something. What's wrong, you have a joint in there you don't want me to find? An unregistered gun?"
OK, fine. You know what, search my car. No ticket, nothing turned up in the search, I got an apology and a warning. An apology, and no ticket, from a cop who pulled me over for going 75 in a 60 zone. Did I have something to hide? Yes, my personal belongings from someone who has no reason to see what I'm doing. I'm hiding from the government and its agencies anything it does not have, by the laws of the land, any right to see.
When you have probable cause you can come for me, until then go away.
They might be crazy, but I'd expect anyone who believes in UFOs and thinks Roswell was a coverup would use TOR to gather and share evidence that "the gvmt doesn't want you to see." Or people sharing "true stories from 9/11 workers showing it's an inside job" or "OKC bombing was an inside job and we just found a patsy to blame" and "John Wilkes Booth was hired by the CIA" and "Lee Harvey Oswald worked for Hoover". These people are mostly harmless and think they have something to hide - the opposite of your supposition. They are hiding despite having nothing to hide. Nothing substantial of course, but they think they do.
Even more important, which I should have listed first, is the idea of free speech. People can't make changes if the government hides things from them, so it makes sense to create software that lets people share ideas. Silly harmless ones like above, or profound movements where the people force change in their government by revealing information. Someone sharing old 1970s era pictures of naked children is doing no actual harm (unless you want to conflate and suppose and imagine and maybe project, the pictures already exist). Someone working to free the Chinese people from a protective government is doing a great service (*in my opinion at least). Subverting your own government is treason, but I can freely say that I believe other citizens should subvert their governments without fear. What if I send that sentiment to my fri
SAP is one of the worst offenders, but I have to say I've seen the largest collection of poorly thought out icons at work, where someone puts on a dog and pony show to convince our company to buy things, and our company bites without trying it out on a few users first.
I hate having to 'mouse-over' an icon to find out what it does, and even worse is when it doesn't have a tooltip. Corporate software seems to be where the worst designs live because anything else is quickly abandoned in favor of something intuitive.
Thus, corporations tend to increase their own training budgets by basing decisions on bullet-point comparisons instead of real-world usage. You put something obvious in front of people, they'll be able to figure it out. But when the "Overview" button is a mountain with random clouds behind it or something, and the "Give me the report based on what I selected" button is in an entirely different frame from the selection criteria, your software is crap. Yes SAP I'm calling you out, but there are others just like you, which is the only reason you're still in the business. That and company execs are too embarrassed to simply say "we paid too much, here's your out clause, delete all versions and we're moving to something else". That would leave you responsible for excess expenditures, while forcing your peons to work with crap software doesn't reveal cold, hard numbers in the form of productivity loss due to training and questions and people just not being able to figure it out and saying to hell with it.
Look at your training budget before you buy.
Someone says they prefer stepping through their user-land code, and you reply by saying that kernel level debugging is hard? Most software is userland, most debugging is userland.
Truly, there is no substitute for watching each branch happen to understand exactly why the application behaves a certain way. Static analysis is even harder when multiple classes and inheritance are involved, polymorphism makes it a whole different thing. It's easier for me to learn source code by putting a breakpoint on whtever I'm looking at, and running to that, then stepping out to see how I got there.
I don't care what happens to the kernel during that time, most people don't.
Even better, a truly useful "quick start" program example for each library.
For example, I want to know how to use zlib. The library is there, there is a zip and unzip executable, and you can have the make process run a self-test to ensure it can round-trip data without loss. All I have to do is look at how zip and unzip run, and I can use it just like that. Every library needs something like this.
How about a basic OpenSSL project that showcases one or two aspects of OpenSSL in a very short, one-screen, one-file executable? I've never used it so I don't know what to suggest.
Last time I tried to use fftw library I couldn't figure out where to even start - is there an initialization you have to call (like some crc32 code requires pre-computing an array before using it, but it's not clear by the docs) or something else? I couldn't find a simple program that takes a wav file (or other non-encoded data points) and outputs FFT results. I'd even take plain-text output that I could parse some other way... I can't figure out how to get the sample data in and get something useful out. The "demo" apps I've seen are way too complicated and do too much on their own to understand how they really use fftw. I've been trying to figure it out for maybe 8 years now, off and on. I know music theory, the related physics and acoustics, and have lots of experience with calculus, so you'd think it would be a no-brainer. I even understand how to implement FFT. I could have written my own library if I hadn't been distracted by trying to get this library working.
This is terrible advice. Lots of times I've been looking for something to try, but had nothing specific in mind. Getting a suggestion means that someone might actually use what you produce. As opposed to working on something to find out you're halfway done when Debian includes some obscure app that does the same thing, and no one uses what you did and has no use for it.
This is the best place to ask, because as soon as someone puts an idea up, someone else will probably reply with "you mean like..." and link to something that already does that. Wait a few days and the redundant suggestions will get knocked down.
If I had time on my hands, I'd be reading through this thread looking for something to do myself. I don't have any burning needs, but I have skills and a large personal code base to draw from, so I could turn around something quickly, or at least get a good start on a prototype to attract others to help build the next killer app.
We hate them, they pushed for effectively infinite copyright protections because some Air Pirates drew pictures of Mickey Mouse doing things almost everyone has done at some point in their lives.
The actual report says 44% of people who were contacted by Outsell and chose to respond have no intention of clicking on a link and simply read the headlines. You're not going to get people to click by changing your behavior - these people have probably never seen your site and aren't making a decision based on your site or your advertising. They simply intend to skim headlines.
So calling this advertising is really disingenuous. Calling it a return on anything is as well. A lone news site has to build loyalty and/or recognition before someone in the 46% group willingly changes their behaviors, which will take advertising money and lots more.
The only trade-off we're talking about is news site providing data to Google. If people don't find your random news site somehow, you have zero chance of being used. So you're providing data, hoping to be stumbled upon, just like every other website ever. In other words, just another member of the internet and just another company trying to make money via the internet.
I'll go further and say there is no difference between these 46% of people who don't click the articles, and the roughly 50% of people who visit the site but block ads. You could split hairs and say google is serving the data for the news provider while ad blockers consume bandwidth without generating corresponding advertising revenue. So google is the white knight here. Sure I pulled that number out of my butt, but I don't believe there is a single source for the number of ad blocking people - everything I've found is self-selecting based on the content of the site, or near-random guessing based on partial statistics.
I was hoping to post your comment before you, so instead I'll add a twist. Research conclusions are often incorrect - they have raw data, then leap to a conclusion which is among several supported by the data. More reasearch is needed to differentiate among the possibilities, but it gets reported as fact because it's "research" and "science".
Alternate interpretations:
Half of google news users didn't find what they were looking for so google news index sucks
Half of google news users didn't find what they were looking for so people look for non-existent things
Most news can be summarized in a headline and the rest is fluff (half of the users clicked at least one time on one out of the millions of results, that's a damning statistic)
Most news is not interesting (half of the users clicked at least one time on one out of the millions of results)
Most people are not interested in news which actually is judged to be inherently interesting
Google news users are a self-selected subset of people who want quick access to information without adverts, slow loading, cookie tracking, flash crap, extra and unnecessary image data transfer
I could go on, but which one of these sounds more plausible? I believe it's the last one, the people likely to use google news are likely to want a minimal search interface and zero clutter. News providers cannot make money by providing people what people want, that's an interpretation based on the conclusion.
Other comments are a result of this conclusion. Written news will go from being important info first with as much data in the headline, to an inverse quagmire of hinting and supposition like the local evening news already is: Something in your kitchen could injure your entire family. We'll tell you what it is, but first here's the weather report and some commercials and a human interest story about lost puppies. That about wraps it up. That thing that could kill you? Oh yeah, our handyman has the following tip for homeowners: Don't stick your head in the garbage disposal when it's turned on, you could suffer damage and even death, and if your 2 year old child tries to save you she could be accidentally grabbed by involuntary muscle contractions and sucked in with you while the dog tries to see what's so interesting and turns on the gas stove which we told you not to use last week and your house burns down and catches your neighborhood on fire. Good night, NBC news is next.
Pretty sure this has been debunked, because the $800 hammer has to be tested to withstand zero-pressure, frozen environments without breaking or becoming useless. Even if it requires no modifications, someone smart (meaning lots of $$$ per hour) has to test it completely to make sure it doesn't fail. You can't just send up a normal hammer and hope it works, and you can't send up 10 of everything because each ounce of payload adds to the fuel costs. You certainly can't afford to hope your environment doesn't become depressurized instead of doing actual testing, because one tiny hole renders your equipment unusable until a supply mission comes back up.
Plus, it has to probably work outside, and you don't just set stuff down outside - it has to be tethered. And you don't want it flinging around on a bit of string... I'd google it for you but I have more pressing issues. Don't look for rhetoric like "$800 hammer" - try searching for the opposite of what you believe like "why is military hardware overpriced" or "explanations for $800 hammer". you'll be surprised.
I was right with you until
If you can't produce a marketable product at a price people will pay, and you have no other source of income, you need to find a way to cut costs or find a new profession. No one is forcing you to make these things. If you stop making them, demand will back up and someone else will step in and make the product at a higher price, and your family gets to eat.
It's almost magical how that works. If you argue that you are staying in business because the price will go up if a new company has to start over from scratch, you're volunteering to be the martyr and you are deciding whether your family eats.
As a customer, I would decide whether to buy your product based on a cost/benefit ratio, and whether I could find another supplier cheaper. Not whether your family gets to eat - that's a terrible way to make buying decisions.
In support, I offer these two anecdotes. I might be remembering wrong because of all the morphine, but I'm pretty close.
1) I was offered some chemical that takes off the gummy black stuff left behind after they take tape off you. The kind of tape that holds an IV in, or a naso-gastric tube in place. My doctor intervened and said basically: don't do that, it will charge you $40. Wait till you get home and get acetone, nail polish remover for a dollar. That's all it is, they just added on costs for profit and liability.
2) To illustrate the point, my doctor told me about the chemotherapy drug that costs $10,000 per dose. It works in horses as well. Doctors would tell their patients that they could order some, or they could provide their own, hint hint. Patients would go to the veterinary supply store and get the same thing for a few hundred dollars, claiming a sick horse, and then take the bag to the infusion clinic. The cost was because they can, and for liability and insurance due to it being a newly patented drug.
Doesn't matter if your insurance pays, your copay amount is probably going to be higher with the "for humans" version than full price "alternative" sources.
Confusing patent and copyright laws, that's a different thing from dismissing the possibility that someone would copyright a patio, which is what I did. The ones I've seen aren't terribly impressive, but you are right they could be registered and do automatically qualify for protection. However...
Who would claim copyright on a standard 10x8 foot patio? A block of concrete arranged to form a level surface with a boundary (often removed so that the patio itself is the apparent boundary) with an adjoining object such as lawn, flowerbeds, a livable structure, or storage structure... keep in mind the arrangement of items on the patio is distinct from the act of *building a patio* which is what I believe I was replying to.
Under copyright, you wouldn't get royalty payments unless it were built in to the specific contract, and at that point it's no longer IP laws, it's a contract between two legally consenting parties. I could make a truly breathtaking work-of-art patio, and sell the blueprints and build of materials, and sue people for copyright infringement when they spread these around. That's intellectual property. Here we bring the idea of "design" into the picture, as in "design and build a patio" instead of just build. Maybe you inferred that part, it wasn't stated so I certainly didn't.
What isn't likely, and I believe this is what I was originally replied to, is that someone builds an average patio and expects copyright licensing every time someone uses the patio. That's absurd. Patenting is out of the question for the simple case of "build a patio". What if someone builds a similar patio? You'd really have to go out of your way to make something noticeably different from every patio everyone everywhere has in order to have any standing to bring a lawsuit based on copyright infringement. If it doesn't get thrown out immediately, you are more likely going to make your case and then find the judge says you are violating the copyright of someone who built a similar patio before you, case dismissed.
I might be able to search every house using google maps to find someone who built a patio from my design without a corresponding order record for that address, and then bring a lawsuit hoping that someone didn't order for a family member or friend. That would be a difficult case to prove, that they saw my plans or my patio and built their own copy, instead of them coming to the same conclusion I did when I "invented" it. I don't think there has been much in the way of patio copyright case law, but in similar cases involving books or music it is very difficult to win such a case unless you are using direct quotations or sampling. Every other case that wasn't blindingly obvious that I know of has been dismissed or settled for a paltry sum. The measurements would have to match (to scale of course) very precisely. Sure it is possible to copyright a patio design and go after people who spread the design around, though difficult to enforce. Would someone looking at your house through google maps be guilty of copying your design because they have an image of your copyrighted design on their computer? If they took a picture at a birthday party and happened to be your backyard neighbor, capturing your patio and uploading it to Flickr? Maybe, but not really enforceable.
In other words, something functional like a patio has to be really out of the ordinary before you'd have a valid and enforceable copyright. It would have to be truly extraordinary to qualify for a patent. Given the original comment, it is unlikely this is what the person meant. The followup was basically "I should be able to download movies for free because it doesn't cost anyone anything and distributors are evil", so I'm even more certain this is not what they meant.
Distributors are in the business of taking a cut of something they didn't create. It's a parasitic business model. But people still sign contracts with these people, why?
MPAA, or one of its members to be specific, has a lot of relationships in place, and can leverage that to promote that movie. The content creator sees the contract as a trade-off, gaining market share in exchange for the distributor's services.
RIAA members prey on artists hoping for a wider audience - the last "insider" info I saw basically had a gold record giving the record company ~$10 million in profits, and each band member makes off with $25k for the year. Lots of people see that as the RIAA ripping off the artists. Some people see that as getting paid slightly over minimum wage to do nothing but play and hang out with friends and groupies. It's definitely one-sided, but people keep signing up. Used to be, like in the 80s, you needed the recording equipment so your money is in exchange for the ability to create something. These days, it's more about getting promoted (and having an experienced AutoTune guy fix your crappy singing).
I'm not disagreeing with you, distributors are evil. Middlemen are evil, whether they are trying to make money in digital markets just because they (think they) can track usage, or buying a house just to repaint a few walls and make a huge profit.
If it serves the creator to sign rights over to a company in exchange for some benefit, creators should be able to do that. Even if they are making a stupid decision.
I think what you're most concerned with is the new digital economy, where you have to pay to download a ringtone even though you own the CD. Or worse, you buy a DVD and want the opening theme as your ringtone - bypassing the encryption means you broke the US DMCA or whatever your Berne Convention country calls it. You bought a license to watch the video and listen to the audio - it makes no sense to limit your listening to "while the DVD is playing" only. You can lend a physical book, but if you're using a Zune or Kindle you have limits on the number of times you can loan it. You install an operating system, decide it's crap and switch to linux, and sell it to someone who can't activate it. The new digital economy is based on nickel-and-diming customers to bankruptcy, giving them temporary access to a product instead of the permanent access we once enjoyed. And we should reject it.
I admit, I'm divided on the download issue. On one hand, I myself have piles of stuff that I have downloaded without paying for. On the other hand, most of that I never used/watched/listened to. What I did consume, I generally purchased to register my support or deleted because it's crap.
You see, part of the digital economy is making a two-minute trailer for a video game or movie, and making people pay full price with no refunds to see the whole thing. With a car or billiard table you get to see the thing in action and decide if it's worth it. RIAA members tried to limit singles as much as possible, so you're expected to buy an album based on 1 song, rarely two songs. A crap song can be on the top 40 for weeks on end because it's based on airplay, not whether people like it. And the RIAA like it that way. We will let you TiVo anything - except for the ones with the broadcast flag flipped because our business model includes you watching TV. Well, do you chain someone to the seat so they can't go potty or make food during commercials? Or tape their eyes open? No, you rely on the satisfaction of your customers (not the viewers, I mean your advertisers, the true customers). If their sales go up as a result of advertising they will be happy. If people all pee at the same time and don't see the commercial, the advertiser puts ads elsewhere, like in-game or on virtual billboards.
Think of IP laws like the ACLU. Sometimes they seem to be on the wrong side of things, but it's because they have a single-minded promotion of one single focus. Sometimes the ACLU is o
This is a silly argument and deserves to be bitchslapped. Inventing a patio might qualify for intellectual property laws, but building one doesn't.
If I make an architectural plan for a house, that is something new and deserves protection for the advancement of the useful arts and sciences. The guy who puts in the windows, builds the patio, puts on the shingles, wires the place, are adding nothing that qualifies as art nor science. The architect gets copyright, the patio maker gets paid for labor.
The architect invents an energy efficient home which is self-cooling and self-heating in the same way large ant colonies self-regulate. He can get a patent on the idea, and copyright a specific plan (or set of plans) implementing the idea. The patio maker gets paid for labor only.
Please come up with an argument that involves a contribution to the useful arts and sciences. Here's one, I write a sophisticated audio processing algorithm which correctly identifies all pitches in music, translating an arbitrary audio file into sheet music. the software is protected by copyright, the algorithm is not patentable. But the idea behind the algorithm can be implemented in circuitry (a specific implementation and not subject to the general-use restrictions re: Bilski) and patented.
The guy who invents the algorithm probably owns the patents, unless he's an idiot. The guy who wrote the code gets copyright, but can't implement without permission or licensing from the patent owner. The guy who builds the circuits gets paid labor. The guy who built the patio should learn electrical engineering if he wants more money, or invent something new if he wants recurring payments.
I know, it's hard to believe that Miley Cyrus' children should benefit financially from the horrendous festering pile that is the corpus of her work, but don't worry she won't, because she didn't write most of it. Somewhere there's a composer who has a keen sense of what will play on the radio, and brought something new and marketable into the world. If you don't follow this argument, let's switch it over to a Disney cartoon. Their early works were truly masterpieces, and have been assimilated into the collective conscious of most of the developed world. I don't think they need life+90 years of protection, but they are far more interesting and useful and touching than a patio. They also took longer to make, with a significantly higher investment of either time, materials, brainpower, or permutations thereof. That investment is something we allow creators to recoup, in exchange for creating something that didn't exist.
Sure, most inventors are simply solving a particular problem of theirs and might have zero investment to recoup, but if they want people to know about their invention so it might also be useful to others, we have to give them something more than "Good luck, hope no one with existing production capabilities copies your idea and makes trillions before you can get a business going." I know I'm going back and forth with copyright and patents, if I make a picture that means a lot to people, they can't just scan it and print it out and have their own copy to sell to other people.
Building a patio is not a contribution at all.
I sent a note to my "Congresscritter" Mitch McConnell in support of C-Span's complaint that resolving the differences between House and Senate bills should be televised. No response. Obama could ask them to open discussions, but Obama does not order Congress what to do.
When a presidential candidate promises things that only Congress can deliver, you have to discount that promise because they can't do anything about it. You really should discount the candidate because they lied about what they could do, but since everyone does that you'd have 0 votes for any candidate, more liars, and more 0-vote elections.
In contrast, FBI is an Executive Branch organization. So let's skip the healthcare trollbait and go directly to what's Obama going to do about FBI snoops!
I considered this from another angle in the shower this morning.
Google has to index page data, some of which is in script format. Remember when Google's cached pages showed un-obfuscated e-mail addresses instead of the obfuscated versions from the plain-text HTML? Well, Google had to build a tool to parse HTML in order to index the web, so there's the HTML parser. They had to add a script engine, so there's JavaScript. It has to be distributed, so possible to run in a separate process. CSS-based layout gives context to the page, and they have to detect link farming or other dirty SEO techniques, so parsing and applying CSS (looking for white-on-white text for example) makes sense, there's your rudimentary layout engine.
My conclusion was, Chrome is a byproduct of the optimization of the search engine indexing process. Turning it into a product was probably just a marketing idea to get Google's name always in press releases, and a logical outcome of the "ChromeOS" idea where the web is the platform. If you're going to deprecate hardware and OS by making the browser where everything happens, as they did with GMail, Google Docs, and piles of other offerings, you come to the conclusion of taking your web bot and turning it into a branding opportunity.
No competition with Firefox, yet. Firefox won't switch defaults from the most popular search provider. Also, Google won't be able to keep FireFox from implementing whatever Chrome-specific stuff you are imagining without heavy-handed tactics like wielding patents. ChromeOS is what Google wants, not browser market share. Use Chrome, get used to it, then why not switch to our OS since everything is available through the browser? Competition happens because the platform changes, not because Chrome wins.
Look what happened to Netscape - Microsoft changed the game by making users expect a free, built-in browser with an OS, and the platform changed from a free-for-all open web to IE-only with ActiveX controls seemingly overnight (even in technological time scales). It wasn't really browser competition, they wanted control of the desktop and killing a browser was a side effect. I have the same feeling here - Google's OS might kill Firefox accidentally in its desire to compete with handheld OS makers like phones, of which MS is a little part.
They do. For starters, the summary is terrible. I've been following ReactOS for 5 years or so, here's more info. It's not a real rewrite where you throw code away. It has been controversial, and not everyone in the project agrees it's the right way to proceed. If I can try to summarize the intent, it's like hoisting the house so you can repair the foundation, while keeping the upper levels intact. In reality it's like building a separate foundation so you can move the house onto either one, which makes mine just another in the long list of terrible analogies on Slashdot.
The article is about a partial rewrite held in a separate trunk. ARWINSS is a branch designed to make more use of WINE, so that the core OS functionality that is missing in trunk can work, and higher-level work can be done. In theory, bugs with GDI and/or User code will magically go away, so that the people working on usermode will be able to test and fine-tune their code in ARWINSS branch while the people working on the kernel fix the bugs or rewrite properly or whatever else in trunk. Alexsey has already found/fixed several existing bugs by playing with this branch, which were ported into trunk (based on SVN history at CIA.VC, watching for "merge from ARWINSS" commits in trunk).
It is not intended to be the direction of the project, and several developers are pretty much ignoring this branch except as a curiosity. Since ReactOS uses most of the WINE user-mode code, implementing a basic WineServer lets the WINE merges happen with a lot less hacking. Ultimately, this branch everyone's making a big deal out of will probably be deleted. That's not the project's opinion, that's my own, based on the project's stated goal of being a reference implementation of documented Windows functionality. Having a Wine server in there is one thing, X functionality propping it is the really cool part. Imagine native X-Windows sessions to your server box instead of using WTS/RDP? Maybe it will continue as an alternative branch just for the coolness factor.
To ramble further, any fixes that ReactOS does are sent upstream to WINE, ReactOS is helping. They are testing WINE's correctness in an actual Windows environment, sometimes copying ReactOS libraries (containing WINE code) onto a Windows box to test proper functionality. As an example, you can put na app and its libraries in the same folder and override DLL loading to use local libraries (the ones in the same directory) - except for a few reserved system libraries I think in newer Windows versions.
Further, WINE has a very large number of test cases which run in an automated framework. So ReactOS is double-testing both Wine's code and its test cases. If you hate Windows and love Wine, you should support ReactOS simply due to the additional testing effort and bugfixes submitted.
Any questions? I don't represent the project, but I do have a long-term outsider's view and I do compile and fiddle with the code. I have seen MS source code, so I don't contribute to the project other than the occasional comment.
http://www.exguides.org/photoshop-tutorials/age-progression.html
(as much as I hate replying to oneself) Using Katie Holmes as an example:
Find older people who resemble the person, copy and paste. But they forgot this part, which might have helped:
Hmm, actually based on the results they didn't use this tutorial at all. They assigned a task to someone without the skills or knowledge, and he bluffed his way through it.
I still haven't seen any posts about using age-enhancement software. This has been around for 15 years at least, I remember seeing the age-progression morph video with a disclaimer "this image was produced by digitally applying common aging patterns to the source picture" - later shortened to "what they may look like now using age-progression" and often "thanks to blah laboratories for providing age-enhancement techniques."
Wouldn't the FBI want to use such a thing, and maybe add some "died from lack of dialysis" marks here and there, instead of Photoshopping something together???
There's a fucking app on FaceBook to do this!!! AgeMe For free!! Google search for "age progression" leads to several free sites where you could do it as well. FBI doesn't want the public to know? Contact the authors and ask them to do a special job under NDA.