Maybe it's just me, but everytime I see metion of the Yopy, I think of the Amazing Yappy from the X-Files, and I wonder why in the world anyone would think that kind of association would be a good thing...
Similar thing here in Pittsburgh - 105.9 (WXDX) and 102.5 (WDVE) consistently play, sponsor, and help promote local (southwestern PA) bands. Really, it makes sense for them to do so - it costs them virtually nothing (OK, once every 2-4 hours some local band gets a 4-minute slot on the air), and gains them a whole hell of a lot of listener loyalty.
I'd be surprised if this isn't a consistent feature for "album rock" or "new wave" stations across the country, regardless of the station's ultimate owners. Sort of a corporate-enforced deviation from the standard... though that is a truly weird concept.
First point: censorship is when somebody else tells you what you may or may not experience... when you do it yourself, and can change your mind at any time, how can it be censorship?
Second point: the original poster suggested that instead of just having a simple flag accompanying a broadcast, that the broadcasters include enough information to do meaningful filtering... maybe you don't mind seeing the "violent" content in an action-adventure type of movie, but excessive gore or depictions of of domestic abuse disturb you.
Which brings us to the third point: with extra information and classification of the broadcast, you could tune it to avoid elements you, personally, find distasteful or disturbing. Instead, with the default implmentation of the V-chip, you have to rely on some central authority (a government agency or review board, I'd guess) to decide what content is "good" and what content is "bad".
I'll agree with you on the fact that the V-chip is an attempt at implicit censorship; if you want to use the V-chip at all, you have to buy into the idea that someone else is making your decisions for you. If the capabilities of the V-chip were expanded to allow custom filtering, though, it would be providing the tools that you would need to build a content firewall for your television. It probably wouldn't be a perfect firewall, but it would more accurately represent your desires and preferences than those of some beaureaucrat-for-life.
I'd rather see television shows come with some sort of classification tag, so I could build custom filters to screen out the truly offensive programming on television:
Reality TV
Infomercials
Colorized versions of classic films
Lame talk-show vehicles for one-time stars with dying careers
Anything related to the WWF or XFL
Friends
Any show based around sickeningly sweet little children
Jerry Lewis movies
Steven King movies
Odd-numbered Star Trek movies
Any news broadcast that mentions dot-com, dot-bomb, or e-anything.
Ultimate control would be hooking this up to a Tivo, and specifying that any blocked content would be replaced by something with greater entertainment value, like Plan 9 From Outer Space.
However there is a strong relationship - someone who understands CS will be a better programmer. Not to be snobbish, someone who doesn't understand any CS could _not_ be a programmer.
Agreed. Where you find dissention is in how much CS is needed to be a "good" programmer. Some assert that only a pure computer scientist who has spent years studying theory can write worthwhile code. Others argue that CS is overhyped, overblown, and overemphasized, and that you only need a basic understanding of CS to write good code.
The one end is like insisting that every engineer have a PhD in physics before they're allowed to do anything. The other insists that knowing f=ma is enough to get by, and you can pick up the rest as you go along. Somewhere in between the two extremes is a point where the minimum amount of education produces the maximum amount of effect. When we understand (or even have an inkling) of where that point is, then software development will have a chance to become a real engineering discipline.
Mathematics is a hard science, like physics, chemistry and computer science. ... Pure physics and chemistry not empirical at all.
You've got it backwards... "hard" sciences are those that deal with the physical universe; they really only have value if they accurately describe that universe. No matter how esoteric, bizzare or unusual the theories are, they are fundamentally useless if they do not achieve this goal. How well they do so is the yardstick by which scientists measure the success of those theories. In the end, they are empirical sciences - someone fires up a particle accelerator, or spend a a couple of years in a mine waiting for a neutrino to muck up a tank of water, looking for evidence that their theories are correct.
Mathematics (and computer science, which shares a lot with mathematics) are "pure" sciences. A mathematician or a computer scientist has more in common with a linguist than a physicist or chemist. They study completely artificial constructs. There is no "zero" in the universe; it's an artifical thing, a human concept. You can sit in that damn mine for a million years, and never detect a zero.
Because mathematics is just so plain damn useful in describing the universe, we tend to forget that it's just a very specialized and highly formalized langauge with an extremely strict set of rules. Think about it - it may be difficult, but you can describe any mathematical concept in English, French, Spanish, or any other human language. What makes one form of notation (math) a science, and the other (written langauge) an art?
Therefore, while citing others' work is typically part of the task in a PoliSci paper, it often violates the entire point of a programming task in a CS class, in which you are supposed to get the damn thing working properly.
I'd argue the exact opposite. Much of the strength of open source software lies in the ability for new developers to review existing code, and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of different implementations. It can serve both as an inspiration ("Look at how they did that... interesting. Can we improve it?") and as a caution ("Looks at how they did that... ugh! Can we avoid that?")
The only question in my mind would be: was the referenced material generally available (posted on a web site, published somewhere, etc.) or was it's availability restricted (someone asked Tom for the implementation he did last semester)?
If the former, then give them kudos for understanding that no development occurs in a vacuum, and make the intent of the project clearer in the future by telling students that they should not reference existing works; maybe by stating that such a comparison will be a follow-up project.
If the later, it's a dicier situation, because until the project is done and handed in, you don't know what action they decided to take (plagarism or citation.)
Well, and this is an inductive inference so take it with a grain of salt, it appears to me that in fact the Canadian company that bought the bankrupt Iridium is nothing more than a shell company that will provide the Iridium network's services to Western governments and militaries.
Take it with a large grain of salt:-) The US military, at least (and I would assume most of NATO as well) have had their own satelite comm system in place for decades. I really doubt they would see any advantage in using an unsecured commercial system. For other branches of the government, though, that don't have the need or the ability to maintain their own system of this sort, but might have occaisional need for it, contracting it out is pretty sensible. Which alone is enough to make you wonder, I guess.
In areas that lack the infrastructure needed to support mobile communications, a network like Iridium makes greate sense. Keep in mind that this is the state of affairs in the vast majority of the world; and natural disasters can easily disrupt communications even in a techologically wired area, effectively without notice.
I'm not surprised that the US government has signed on for a big contract. There are very few private citizens who have the absolute, essential need to have phone service under any circumstance. On the other hand, government agencies routinely send civilian employees into less-than-optimal environments - fighting forest fires, dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane, medical mercy missions - where being able to pick up a phone and just have it work, no matter what, suddenly makes managing things a whole lot simpler.
I was questioning whether such action could be legally considered as abandonment. Leaving money unprotected in a public place for any significant period of time certainly counts as such. The argument by IP advocates is that intellectual property can't be abandoned without an explicit action by the copyright holder; this is very different from the traditional concept of abandonment, where an owner's failure to act in certain ways causes the change in status of the property.
I'm wondering if IP in a digitial form, made available to the public without any attempt to safeguard that IP, can legally be construed as having been abandoned or placed in the public domain, because the owner of the property failed to take even the most minimal precautions needed to safeguard it from theft.
A library is only capable of lending out as many physical copies as they have on hand. If a library has 3 copies of the latest BritneySpiceChintzNBackstreet album, then only three patrons can have it checked out at any one time. If they want to allow for more multiple checkouts, they need to buy additional copies.
Still... what is interesting is the idea that once a work is in digital form, the effort of making an additional n+1 copies is effectively zero. I wonder if you could argue in a court of law that, knowing this, any company that knowingly and willfully puts out a digital version of a work is effectively relinquishing any idea of copyright on the work, because they have put it into a form that basically screams, "Copy me!".
It's like someone leaving a pile of money in the middle of the street, unguarded... and then screaming bloody murder when people start taking it, demanding that the cops track down and throw in jail everyone who touched their pile. In a situation like that, any sensible judge & jury would look at the loon, say "What did you expect?" and dismiss the case.
Aren't there ANY situations where having degrees of force between nothing and lethality could be handy?
Yes... but I think the point of the post is that if you take people who are trained to kill - and to do so as quickly and effeciently as possible - and then put them in a situation where everything they have been trained to do (kill) is the wrong response, then they will (eventually) behave incorrectly, because that's the way they've been trained to respond.
They'll have the wrong reflexes, the wrong reactions, the wrong thought processes; and because of that, will either end up misusing their "non-lethal" weapons in ways that get people maimed or killed, or get themselves killed. If you're going to give non-lethal weapons to people, they should be people who have been trained on how not to kill, on how to avoid violence, and how to de-escalate conflict... average, everyday police officers and their like, or specially-trained non-combat units in the military. Not Joe Marine.
It's not neccesarily as grim as PorcelainLabrador makes it sound...
The laws regarding non-competes vary from state to state. In some states, the courts are very unwilling to enforce a non-compete agreement that would effectively require someone to relocate in order to practice their trade, or which has provisions they consider overly broad (prohibiting a former bank manager from working in any capacity involving finances, for example.)
For the record, IANL; but I've consulted with a couple on non-competes I've signed while working in Pennsylvania. The above poster's comments are still entirely valid - get a lawyer to check the agreement before you sign, and don't sign any contract until you understand what it means to you and what the implications are.
...they just write code that works, but don't worry about "elegant," algorithimically well thought out code.
Hmm. There's can be a vast difference between "elegant" code and "code that works". I've seen beautifully written, well thought out code - written by incredibly knowledgeable folks with CS backgrounds - that did just plain damn stupid things when you considered the hardware or OS. Things that resulted in programs running about 10% as fast as required, or using about 10 times more memory then available... but boy, it was sweet code to review:-/
OTOH, working code - code that does the job to spec (speed/memory), runs on the target hardware - can be just plain damn ugly. Not unused-variables-scattered-all-over-the-place and no-error-checking ugly, but convoluted, non-obvious, "we did it this way to squeeze a 2% performance increase out of the system" or "we did it this way to avoid an obscure error condition" type of ugly.
There's a time and a place for both types of solution. Knowing when you have to do something ugly is as important as knowing when you need to put the thought in and come up with something elegant.
In practice, though, they're unique for consumer-channel NICs; the manufacturers want their cards to be "plug & play", which means that they assign each card a MAC address from a pre-allocated block that was granted to them by a central coordination authority. Anything else would result in hard-to-diagnose (for the layman) problems, complaints, a reputation for producing bad NICs, and eventual failure of the company as people avoided their "flaky" product.
on the other hand, if a former employer goes around making accusations to your current employer or prospective employer that causes you to lose a job or fail to get a job, then the former employer may be liable for damages. however, the threshold of prooof is high since you have to convince your current or prospective empolyer to testify and that your former employer behaved with malice.
Given that companies generally do not offer unsolicited opinions of ex-employees (and in many cases, are only willing to state "Yes, so-and-so worked for us during a certain time period"), I would think it should be fairly easy for a decent lawyer to prove that the company acted with malice.
I would think that this concept of 'always on' game characters would be very intersting - if you could program them to pursue some goal and compete against other peoples creations... it would be a fun game. In a MMORPG it may not be all that terrific if it became too common.
Hmm. You could require a certain amount of "off-line" time for characters before they can increase in level, advance their skills, increase their stats, etc. - call it "study/training" time. Certain game activities would require an expenditure of accumulated off-line time. For example, if you have a month of accumulated off-line time, you could spend (declare that you used) that time to work out and increase your endurance, or practice alchemy, or stellar navigation, or whatever.
You'd have to balance this out fairly well - what you're really doing is putting a time-limit on how quickly players can acquire skills. You'd probably want players to be able to ramp up relatively quickly (ie, requires hours or fractional hours of off-line time to learn new skills or achieve some moderate level of ability). After a while, though, you'd want to start to scale back, so that their time becomes more precious, and they need to decide which areas they want to concentrate on and improve.
This won't stop people from writing scripts to do things like camp on a spawn point and wait for items to appear. If you couple it with other game mechanics (ie, cost to train/study, time for training/practice, finding a trainer/teacher, etc.) it might help eliminate the abuses. Then again, it could lead to entirely new abuses...
"Haven't seen you around here lately, Magus." "I've been trying to rack up enough offline time to make a sceptre of the gods. Another month of not playing and I'll rule!"
The party games you mention are all clearly zero sum because only one winner is declared, the person/team with the most points wins.
Only if you keep score; most of the times I've played these types of games, we haven't bothered. Trivial pursuit is another example - I've played with friends, many times, without ever having finished the game. Just because the rules tell you how you can keep score, doesn't mean that you have to do so.
This sounds like accusing an automotive engineer of being stuck in the world of engines, tranmissions and axles. Just because the end-user doesn't see them, doesn't mean they do not perform useful functions, or that they can be removed or replaced with something better.
True. But I think he's arguing that the current state of affairs in computing today is that an end user is exposed to far more details of the internals of their systems then they need to be. Imagine that your car needed different transmissions to deal with different operating conditions; and that the driver was expected to know which transmission was appropriate in a particular set of operating conditions, and swap them out as appropriate. That's more or less the current state of affairs with PCs and device drivers - when the state of the world changes (new video card, new network card, etc.) all too often, the end user needs to understand that they need to swap out the transmission for a new one.
It's not really a great analogy. Cars are not multi-purpose devices the same way that computers are, and automotive technologies have been refined and improved on by tens of thousands of people over the course of the last century. Still, you would think that the presence of a well-designed OS would be as transparent to a user as a transmission is to a driver. By that criteria, modern OS's are getting there, but still have a way to go before they have the same level of transparency to the casual user.
For the moment, companies are happy to except vanilla products like Apache and qmail, which do something simple, but do it efficiently.
Whoa, there - Apache is most assuredly not simple software. Companies prefer Apache, qmail, BIND, and the like on the server side because the cost/benfit ratio for server-side OSS is so blindingly obvious that even an accountant can't ignore it. $10K+ for an unlimited IIS license vs. free for Apache? $20K+ for an enterprise Exchange license compared to 0$ for sendmail?
Sure, if you want a commercial support service for Apache, you're going to have to pay for that. But... you do realize that the base license for most "enterprise" level software, including Microsoft's, does not include support, don't you? That's typically another %10 - %20% of the base cost, per year.
That doesn't even get into the "not supported here" syndrome you'll find from MS. "What? You installed a third party CGI program under IIS? Sorry, sir, we don't support that configuration. You have some in-house monitoring software on your Exchange server? Sorry again. Rebuild the machine from scratch, and then we'll talk."
I agree with your points about client-side software - MS and other commercial companies have capabilities there that give them a definite advantage over open source projects with the same general goals. As far as server-side goes, though, I think MS and others will just have to admit that open source typically offers the same or better capabilities for a heck of a lot less.
I was dead serious about that being the cause of your beliefs though, isn't that a given?
No, it's not a given - nor is it my belief that mandated internet filtering software in public libraries is "the right thing" to do. If we end up in such a deplorable situation, though - the assumption of my first post - I'd prefer to see control of the filtering software in the hands of the local librarians, rather than in the hands of some corporation.
If the software is controlled by a corporation that has to satisfy the needs of every community across the country, the likelyhood of the filtering software eviolving to the point where anything even mildly objectionable to anyone is unavailable is almost a dead certainty, as any other solution would cost too much to maintain. I focused on allow lists because I think that given the nature of the web and the tricks that various sites use to avoid filtering software (graphics as text, shifting IP addresses, etc.), it is literally impossible to write generic filtering software.
That's not a religious or moral view. I worked for a couple of search engine companies for two years, and filtering out intentionally mischaracterized web sites/pages has always been and probably will always be an extremely difficult problem. You can generally clean out most of the web spam by filtering, but some inevitably gets through, because the folks that are spamming your indexing operation are actively trying mislead you as to the content of their site.
That's one of the reasons that human-built indexes of the web like the ODP (dmoz, now, I think), Yahoo, and Lycos' web guides are successful; they've been filtered by humans, not machines, and even a casual user can see that. The link collections from these directories would probably make for an initial allow list that included a significant portion of the net.
Set aside the obvious manpower problem involved when every website viewed has to be verified and added by a libarian...
My apologies - forgot to include what is probably a key part of this scheme: you allow libaries (or anyone interested in using this type of system, for that matter) to publish and share this information. Instead of relying on your local librarian to build a list in isolation, you allow libaries to cooperate in identifying what they consider to be good and useful resources on the net.
...what of the ethics involved.
Sorry, I'm not debating the ethics; I was trying to address what I see as a poor technical solution.
In your scheme, nothing is allowed until someone with authority specifically allows it. Don't you see the problem with this?
No, not really. In my scheme, the authority that's in control is local - you can argue with your librarian; you can argue with the library board; you can campaign to have the libarary change it's policies, or stop patronizing the library, or otherwise try to get it to respond to you wishes. Compare that to the idea of a software company that has a 10-year contract to supply filtering software for the state. If I have to have one or the other - if filtering is going to be mandated by law - I'd rather keep whoever is responsible for the implementation close at hand, where they can be held accountable by the community that they serve.
"Just as an aside, I went to a Catholic high school:"
Ah.. yeah, I guess that explains it.
Hmm. I was trying to show that the "Christians want to censor all other religions!" attitude is not neccesarily as true as many people seem to believe. I guess I should have left it out of my argument, since the mere mention of religion has apparently made you decide that you can discount my arguments as being fundamentally unsound.
I'd argue that it's because censorware companies generally produce software that tries to do too much. Their default policies seem to be "deny access to this list unconditionally; deny access to other sites/pages that match these rules; allow access to anything not denied."
For libraries and the like, what you really want is filtering software that instead blocks anything that is not explictly allowed. That way, you have to involve a human being in the decision process. Done correctly, you could reach the point where:
Teenager is researching "akternative religions" for a class at school [1]
Finds that http://www.wiccan.org is blocked
Goes to librarian and explains what they're doing
Librarian looks up site, sees that it's not an obvious porn site, and adds it to the temporary allow list
Teenager gets to finish his/her research
At the end of the day/week/month, the head librarian or board gets to review the temporary allow list and decide if they want to add them to the default list
Yeah, it's still filtering. The point would be to put the control in the hands of the library itself, rather than in the hands of the commercial vendors. Default library policy could be "If we have a book or a periodical that references this, then it's allowed. Otherwise, use your best judgement, or get the parent's approval."
[1] Just as an aside, I went to a Catholic high school, and this sort of thing was a common type of assignment in junior/senior level religion classes. Kind of a "know your enemy" sort of thing, I guess.
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Maybe it's just me, but everytime I see metion of the Yopy, I think of the Amazing Yappy from the X-Files, and I wonder why in the world anyone would think that kind of association would be a good thing...
Remember: "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux!"
Similar thing here in Pittsburgh - 105.9 (WXDX) and 102.5 (WDVE) consistently play, sponsor, and help promote local (southwestern PA) bands. Really, it makes sense for them to do so - it costs them virtually nothing (OK, once every 2-4 hours some local band gets a 4-minute slot on the air), and gains them a whole hell of a lot of listener loyalty.
I'd be surprised if this isn't a consistent feature for "album rock" or "new wave" stations across the country, regardless of the station's ultimate owners. Sort of a corporate-enforced deviation from the standard... though that is a truly weird concept.
First point: censorship is when somebody else tells you what you may or may not experience... when you do it yourself, and can change your mind at any time, how can it be censorship?
Second point: the original poster suggested that instead of just having a simple flag accompanying a broadcast, that the broadcasters include enough information to do meaningful filtering... maybe you don't mind seeing the "violent" content in an action-adventure type of movie, but excessive gore or depictions of of domestic abuse disturb you.
Which brings us to the third point: with extra information and classification of the broadcast, you could tune it to avoid elements you, personally, find distasteful or disturbing. Instead, with the default implmentation of the V-chip, you have to rely on some central authority (a government agency or review board, I'd guess) to decide what content is "good" and what content is "bad".
I'll agree with you on the fact that the V-chip is an attempt at implicit censorship; if you want to use the V-chip at all, you have to buy into the idea that someone else is making your decisions for you. If the capabilities of the V-chip were expanded to allow custom filtering, though, it would be providing the tools that you would need to build a content firewall for your television. It probably wouldn't be a perfect firewall, but it would more accurately represent your desires and preferences than those of some beaureaucrat-for-life.
I'd rather see television shows come with some sort of classification tag, so I could build custom filters to screen out the truly offensive programming on television:
Ultimate control would be hooking this up to a Tivo, and specifying that any blocked content would be replaced by something with greater entertainment value, like Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Agreed. Where you find dissention is in how much CS is needed to be a "good" programmer. Some assert that only a pure computer scientist who has spent years studying theory can write worthwhile code. Others argue that CS is overhyped, overblown, and overemphasized, and that you only need a basic understanding of CS to write good code.
The one end is like insisting that every engineer have a PhD in physics before they're allowed to do anything. The other insists that knowing f=ma is enough to get by, and you can pick up the rest as you go along. Somewhere in between the two extremes is a point where the minimum amount of education produces the maximum amount of effect. When we understand (or even have an inkling) of where that point is, then software development will have a chance to become a real engineering discipline.
You've got it backwards... "hard" sciences are those that deal with the physical universe; they really only have value if they accurately describe that universe. No matter how esoteric, bizzare or unusual the theories are, they are fundamentally useless if they do not achieve this goal. How well they do so is the yardstick by which scientists measure the success of those theories. In the end, they are empirical sciences - someone fires up a particle accelerator, or spend a a couple of years in a mine waiting for a neutrino to muck up a tank of water, looking for evidence that their theories are correct.
Mathematics (and computer science, which shares a lot with mathematics) are "pure" sciences. A mathematician or a computer scientist has more in common with a linguist than a physicist or chemist. They study completely artificial constructs. There is no "zero" in the universe; it's an artifical thing, a human concept. You can sit in that damn mine for a million years, and never detect a zero.
Because mathematics is just so plain damn useful in describing the universe, we tend to forget that it's just a very specialized and highly formalized langauge with an extremely strict set of rules. Think about it - it may be difficult, but you can describe any mathematical concept in English, French, Spanish, or any other human language. What makes one form of notation (math) a science, and the other (written langauge) an art?
Excelent description. I wonder how many folks here would really understand the reference, though.
I'd argue the exact opposite. Much of the strength of open source software lies in the ability for new developers to review existing code, and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of different implementations. It can serve both as an inspiration ("Look at how they did that... interesting. Can we improve it?") and as a caution ("Looks at how they did that... ugh! Can we avoid that?")
The only question in my mind would be: was the referenced material generally available (posted on a web site, published somewhere, etc.) or was it's availability restricted (someone asked Tom for the implementation he did last semester)?
If the former, then give them kudos for understanding that no development occurs in a vacuum, and make the intent of the project clearer in the future by telling students that they should not reference existing works; maybe by stating that such a comparison will be a follow-up project.
If the later, it's a dicier situation, because until the project is done and handed in, you don't know what action they decided to take (plagarism or citation.)
Take it with a large grain of salt :-) The US military, at least (and I would assume most of NATO as well) have had their own satelite comm system in place for decades. I really doubt they would see any advantage in using an unsecured commercial system. For other branches of the government, though, that don't have the need or the ability to maintain their own system of this sort, but might have occaisional need for it, contracting it out is pretty sensible. Which alone is enough to make you wonder, I guess.
In areas that lack the infrastructure needed to support mobile communications, a network like Iridium makes greate sense. Keep in mind that this is the state of affairs in the vast majority of the world; and natural disasters can easily disrupt communications even in a techologically wired area, effectively without notice.
I'm not surprised that the US government has signed on for a big contract. There are very few private citizens who have the absolute, essential need to have phone service under any circumstance. On the other hand, government agencies routinely send civilian employees into less-than-optimal environments - fighting forest fires, dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane, medical mercy missions - where being able to pick up a phone and just have it work, no matter what, suddenly makes managing things a whole lot simpler.
I was questioning whether such action could be legally considered as abandonment. Leaving money unprotected in a public place for any significant period of time certainly counts as such. The argument by IP advocates is that intellectual property can't be abandoned without an explicit action by the copyright holder; this is very different from the traditional concept of abandonment, where an owner's failure to act in certain ways causes the change in status of the property.
I'm wondering if IP in a digitial form, made available to the public without any attempt to safeguard that IP, can legally be construed as having been abandoned or placed in the public domain, because the owner of the property failed to take even the most minimal precautions needed to safeguard it from theft.A library is only capable of lending out as many physical copies as they have on hand. If a library has 3 copies of the latest BritneySpiceChintzNBackstreet album, then only three patrons can have it checked out at any one time. If they want to allow for more multiple checkouts, they need to buy additional copies.
Still... what is interesting is the idea that once a work is in digital form, the effort of making an additional n+1 copies is effectively zero. I wonder if you could argue in a court of law that, knowing this, any company that knowingly and willfully puts out a digital version of a work is effectively relinquishing any idea of copyright on the work, because they have put it into a form that basically screams, "Copy me!".
It's like someone leaving a pile of money in the middle of the street, unguarded... and then screaming bloody murder when people start taking it, demanding that the cops track down and throw in jail everyone who touched their pile. In a situation like that, any sensible judge & jury would look at the loon, say "What did you expect?" and dismiss the case.
Yes... but I think the point of the post is that if you take people who are trained to kill - and to do so as quickly and effeciently as possible - and then put them in a situation where everything they have been trained to do (kill) is the wrong response, then they will (eventually) behave incorrectly, because that's the way they've been trained to respond.
They'll have the wrong reflexes, the wrong reactions, the wrong thought processes; and because of that, will either end up misusing their "non-lethal" weapons in ways that get people maimed or killed, or get themselves killed. If you're going to give non-lethal weapons to people, they should be people who have been trained on how not to kill, on how to avoid violence, and how to de-escalate conflict... average, everyday police officers and their like, or specially-trained non-combat units in the military. Not Joe Marine.
It's not neccesarily as grim as PorcelainLabrador makes it sound...
The laws regarding non-competes vary from state to state. In some states, the courts are very unwilling to enforce a non-compete agreement that would effectively require someone to relocate in order to practice their trade, or which has provisions they consider overly broad (prohibiting a former bank manager from working in any capacity involving finances, for example.)
For the record, IANL; but I've consulted with a couple on non-competes I've signed while working in Pennsylvania. The above poster's comments are still entirely valid - get a lawyer to check the agreement before you sign, and don't sign any contract until you understand what it means to you and what the implications are.
Hmm. There's can be a vast difference between "elegant" code and "code that works". I've seen beautifully written, well thought out code - written by incredibly knowledgeable folks with CS backgrounds - that did just plain damn stupid things when you considered the hardware or OS. Things that resulted in programs running about 10% as fast as required, or using about 10 times more memory then available... but boy, it was sweet code to review :-/
OTOH, working code - code that does the job to spec (speed/memory), runs on the target hardware - can be just plain damn ugly. Not unused-variables-scattered-all-over-the-place and no-error-checking ugly, but convoluted, non-obvious, "we did it this way to squeeze a 2% performance increase out of the system" or "we did it this way to avoid an obscure error condition" type of ugly.
There's a time and a place for both types of solution. Knowing when you have to do something ugly is as important as knowing when you need to put the thought in and come up with something elegant.
In practice, though, they're unique for consumer-channel NICs; the manufacturers want their cards to be "plug & play", which means that they assign each card a MAC address from a pre-allocated block that was granted to them by a central coordination authority. Anything else would result in hard-to-diagnose (for the layman) problems, complaints, a reputation for producing bad NICs, and eventual failure of the company as people avoided their "flaky" product.
Given that companies generally do not offer unsolicited opinions of ex-employees (and in many cases, are only willing to state "Yes, so-and-so worked for us during a certain time period"), I would think it should be fairly easy for a decent lawyer to prove that the company acted with malice.
Hmm. You could require a certain amount of "off-line" time for characters before they can increase in level, advance their skills, increase their stats, etc. - call it "study/training" time. Certain game activities would require an expenditure of accumulated off-line time. For example, if you have a month of accumulated off-line time, you could spend (declare that you used) that time to work out and increase your endurance, or practice alchemy, or stellar navigation, or whatever.
You'd have to balance this out fairly well - what you're really doing is putting a time-limit on how quickly players can acquire skills. You'd probably want players to be able to ramp up relatively quickly (ie, requires hours or fractional hours of off-line time to learn new skills or achieve some moderate level of ability). After a while, though, you'd want to start to scale back, so that their time becomes more precious, and they need to decide which areas they want to concentrate on and improve.
This won't stop people from writing scripts to do things like camp on a spawn point and wait for items to appear. If you couple it with other game mechanics (ie, cost to train/study, time for training/practice, finding a trainer/teacher, etc.) it might help eliminate the abuses. Then again, it could lead to entirely new abuses...
"Haven't seen you around here lately, Magus."
"I've been trying to rack up enough offline time to make a sceptre of the gods. Another month of not playing and I'll rule!"
The complete Engineer's Hymn (well, one version) for those who might be interested...
True. But I think he's arguing that the current state of affairs in computing today is that an end user is exposed to far more details of the internals of their systems then they need to be. Imagine that your car needed different transmissions to deal with different operating conditions; and that the driver was expected to know which transmission was appropriate in a particular set of operating conditions, and swap them out as appropriate. That's more or less the current state of affairs with PCs and device drivers - when the state of the world changes (new video card, new network card, etc.) all too often, the end user needs to understand that they need to swap out the transmission for a new one.
It's not really a great analogy. Cars are not multi-purpose devices the same way that computers are, and automotive technologies have been refined and improved on by tens of thousands of people over the course of the last century. Still, you would think that the presence of a well-designed OS would be as transparent to a user as a transmission is to a driver. By that criteria, modern OS's are getting there, but still have a way to go before they have the same level of transparency to the casual user.
Whoa, there - Apache is most assuredly not simple software. Companies prefer Apache, qmail, BIND, and the like on the server side because the cost/benfit ratio for server-side OSS is so blindingly obvious that even an accountant can't ignore it. $10K+ for an unlimited IIS license vs. free for Apache? $20K+ for an enterprise Exchange license compared to 0$ for sendmail?
Sure, if you want a commercial support service for Apache, you're going to have to pay for that. But... you do realize that the base license for most "enterprise" level software, including Microsoft's, does not include support, don't you? That's typically another %10 - %20% of the base cost, per year.
That doesn't even get into the "not supported here" syndrome you'll find from MS. "What? You installed a third party CGI program under IIS? Sorry, sir, we don't support that configuration. You have some in-house monitoring software on your Exchange server? Sorry again. Rebuild the machine from scratch, and then we'll talk."
I agree with your points about client-side software - MS and other commercial companies have capabilities there that give them a definite advantage over open source projects with the same general goals. As far as server-side goes, though, I think MS and others will just have to admit that open source typically offers the same or better capabilities for a heck of a lot less.
No, it's not a given - nor is it my belief that mandated internet filtering software in public libraries is "the right thing" to do. If we end up in such a deplorable situation, though - the assumption of my first post - I'd prefer to see control of the filtering software in the hands of the local librarians, rather than in the hands of some corporation.
If the software is controlled by a corporation that has to satisfy the needs of every community across the country, the likelyhood of the filtering software eviolving to the point where anything even mildly objectionable to anyone is unavailable is almost a dead certainty, as any other solution would cost too much to maintain. I focused on allow lists because I think that given the nature of the web and the tricks that various sites use to avoid filtering software (graphics as text, shifting IP addresses, etc.), it is literally impossible to write generic filtering software.
That's not a religious or moral view. I worked for a couple of search engine companies for two years, and filtering out intentionally mischaracterized web sites/pages has always been and probably will always be an extremely difficult problem. You can generally clean out most of the web spam by filtering, but some inevitably gets through, because the folks that are spamming your indexing operation are actively trying mislead you as to the content of their site.
That's one of the reasons that human-built indexes of the web like the ODP (dmoz, now, I think), Yahoo, and Lycos' web guides are successful; they've been filtered by humans, not machines, and even a casual user can see that. The link collections from these directories would probably make for an initial allow list that included a significant portion of the net.
My apologies - forgot to include what is probably a key part of this scheme: you allow libaries (or anyone interested in using this type of system, for that matter) to publish and share this information. Instead of relying on your local librarian to build a list in isolation, you allow libaries to cooperate in identifying what they consider to be good and useful resources on the net.
Sorry, I'm not debating the ethics; I was trying to address what I see as a poor technical solution.
No, not really. In my scheme, the authority that's in control is local - you can argue with your librarian; you can argue with the library board; you can campaign to have the libarary change it's policies, or stop patronizing the library, or otherwise try to get it to respond to you wishes. Compare that to the idea of a software company that has a 10-year contract to supply filtering software for the state. If I have to have one or the other - if filtering is going to be mandated by law - I'd rather keep whoever is responsible for the implementation close at hand, where they can be held accountable by the community that they serve.
Hmm. I was trying to show that the "Christians want to censor all other religions!" attitude is not neccesarily as true as many people seem to believe. I guess I should have left it out of my argument, since the mere mention of religion has apparently made you decide that you can discount my arguments as being fundamentally unsound.
I'd argue that it's because censorware companies generally produce software that tries to do too much. Their default policies seem to be "deny access to this list unconditionally; deny access to other sites/pages that match these rules; allow access to anything not denied."
For libraries and the like, what you really want is filtering software that instead blocks anything that is not explictly allowed. That way, you have to involve a human being in the decision process. Done correctly, you could reach the point where:
Yeah, it's still filtering. The point would be to put the control in the hands of the library itself, rather than in the hands of the commercial vendors. Default library policy could be "If we have a book or a periodical that references this, then it's allowed. Otherwise, use your best judgement, or get the parent's approval."
[1] Just as an aside, I went to a Catholic high school, and this sort of thing was a common type of assignment in junior/senior level religion classes. Kind of a "know your enemy" sort of thing, I guess.