I'd be surprised if there's a single reasonably sized company in the US which doesn't have some piece of software on some old machine, cell phone or clock radio for which they lack the original proof of purchase.
In court possibly, their strategy however is that they use the threat of legal action which would bankrupt small companies like the OP's to force you to agree to one of their audits.
they audit your business outside of court system and if you don't have the receipts well you'll just have to buy another copy to satisfy them.
Don't like it? well back to court and they can drag it out for hundreds of thousands of dollars so that you go bankrupt and they win by default.
If you agree to the audit then they also get the bonus of a chance to trawl through everything, even stuff a court wouldn't normally let them and use that as ammo later.
"The scientist who takes the time to do a full fledged, fully documented, maintainable, fail-soft package for analysis of data that is unique to their project and their apparatus is probably not doing very much science, and probably not doing their intended job."
that's very debatable.
total number of citations can be a big deal in academia and some of the most cited papers in existence are tool papers.
BLAST netted the author almost 35 *thousand* citations.
and that's a real measure of how many other scientists were able to do work more easily thanks to the tool.
"real science" is largely about the shoulders of giants. as such making easy to use and powerful scientific tools is just adding a nice access ramp and railings for your own shoulders.
although on 3: the problem is that for fear of the "I have no idea how that got on my laptop" defense they intentionally write the law such that not knowing you possess it isn't a defense.
So it makes it into a weapon. You may have seen the story a while back of the person who wanted his bosses job so he planted child porn on his bosses computer and reported him. I can only wonder how many such cases like that aren't uncovered given that that one was only uncovered due to the perpetrator being stunningly stupid.
some 4chan style troll could stick an image on a defaced page inside a hidden div tag inside a hidden element and everyone who visisted the page would automatically become a criminal.
oh they'd be forbidden as such to use the fact that you knew where the victim was buried to convict you, only evidence collected from the body could then be used against you.
Or if they required you to put a pin into a map to show them where the body was buried. It's not asking for you to testify against yourself, merely forcing you to show them where evidence against you can be found.
I'm not clear. was the software for actually taking pantyshots or was it just a random name for something which would otherwise bore everyone to tears with it's description?
Story I heard second hand where jeff is a friend of a family member:
There was once a small startup where the founders noticed that most of the software for handling a particular task was needlessly complex and stupidly hard to use.
So they created their own version which was apparently good and very easy to use. the few customers they did pull in were very happy with it but they couldn't seem to break into the big leagues.
They discovered that some such attempts to sell their software to big corps had been shot down by the local consultants.
They tried contacting the big consulting firms to try to find out what they considered to be wrong with their software so that they could fix whatever problem was putting off the consultants but got back useless boilerplate replies just stating that they didn't think it was suitable.
Then one night in the bar at an exhibition one of the founders (lets call him jeff) got chatting candidly to someone from one of the big consulting firms(lets call him carl).
So jeff asked carl if he'd seen their software and what he thought of it. carl said that it was quite excellent. jeff asked why then did carls firm recommend against their clients using it. Carls reply was that it was simply too easy to use and too easy to set up. If Carls company recommended a worse piece of software that was hellish to set up then they were guaranteed many many billable hours as the client would be almost guaranteed to need consulting services.
So jeff went home and his startup set to work adding a myriad of essentially useless options and made the software vastly harder to configure.
it was still the same software once it was running but now the manual was a tome rather than a pamphlet and the setup took an expert rather than an amateur.
Like magic sales went up as consultants were suddenly willing to recommend it to their clients.
just throw up a VPN that required authentication to access and make sure the critical servers are only accessible through the VPN.
your critical servers could be behind locked down links which only allow VPN traffic and everything else could be authenticated through crypto.
there would still be attacks and the sites would probably end up even more insecure once the admins decide that "sure the network is secure so we don't have to worry about security" and any botnet herder or virus writer would probably be able to harvest a million throwaway private keys for accessing the network making the whole situation even less secure than the current situation where admins at least don't think "someone else" is handling the security and they know the internet is a dangerous place where you can't trust anything coming from the client.
Anyone who's serious about solar would put their money into a firm that's building big serious solar thermal in a desert somewhere.
Tiny, inefficient solar pannels on your roof are nothing but a status symbol at the moment. that same money could do far far more good better spent and harvest far more energy but it isn't about the energy. it's about prooving that you can afford the installation on your roof.
No I mean by the laws of physics it takes more energy to pump heat from a colder environment into a hot one.
heat pumps work well then it's warm outside and are at their most efficient while no matter what fluid you use the colder it is outside the worse they work.
Are you serious? "some losses" is like saying the sea contains "some water"
storage is a massive problem. pretty much all methods of storing power for any length of time require that you throw 40% to 50% of it away at a minimum.
You can run your laptop for a few hours off a little battery but to run a city you'd need skyscrapers entirely filled with batteries which all need to be replaced every year or so and god help you if there's a fire in the building.
pumped storage takes a lot of land and huge capital investment and again you loose most of the power by converting it to potential and back to electrical.
flywheels can store a small amount of power and are great for handling little hicups in the power supply but you'd need huge numbers of them to run even a tiny town for a few hours.
Any other ideas?
we don't have any practical and realistic way of storing it. we have lots of inefficient or impractical ways of storing power.
Which would be great if heat pumps weren't at their least efficient when it was coldest outside which just by coincidence happens to be when people want to heat their homes.
A piece of advice I was once given by an old coder:
"If you ever do contract work for government make a special effort to cover your arse because you'll be blamed when something goes wrong no matter what.
Sometimes I think about the possibility that programming might one day be similarly restricted. That compiling without a computer science degree might be made a crime... and shudder.
Despite the fact that I have such a degree...
I could even think of justifications if I tried(prevent virus writing, ensure critical systems are written only by qualified individuals, ensure people who write systems which hold personal data are written by people who've had some education on computer security) but I don't think any of those areas would actually be improved and the industry as a whole would suffer.
I've worked on a student helpdesk and countless USB Sticks get handed in to the lost and found. Often they'll contain thesis or significant amounts of work and if the owner hasn't scrawled a phone number or student number on the outside sometimes we'll pop them in and try to figure out who own it so we can email them.
the computers they get plugged into are open access so if someone wanted to drop malware on the system they could just saunter in and plug the sticks in themselves. As such there's absolutely zero additional risk involved in plugging them in to try to find the owner.
Interestingly enough I attended a talk by a few well know authors who were talking about themes in old folk tails and fairy tails which they'd come across while researching old stories. One striking thing was that there tended to be a lot more sexual references. A lot of disney stories are older ones with the violence toned down and the sex stripped away entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be surprised if there's a single reasonably sized company in the US which doesn't have some piece of software on some old machine, cell phone or clock radio for which they lack the original proof of purchase.
In court possibly, their strategy however is that they use the threat of legal action which would bankrupt small companies like the OP's to force you to agree to one of their audits.
they audit your business outside of court system and if you don't have the receipts well you'll just have to buy another copy to satisfy them.
Don't like it? well back to court and they can drag it out for hundreds of thousands of dollars so that you go bankrupt and they win by default.
If you agree to the audit then they also get the bonus of a chance to trawl through everything, even stuff a court wouldn't normally let them and use that as ammo later.
"The scientist who takes the time to do a full fledged, fully documented, maintainable, fail-soft package for analysis of data that is unique to their project and their apparatus is probably not doing very much science, and probably not doing their intended job."
that's very debatable.
total number of citations can be a big deal in academia and some of the most cited papers in existence are tool papers.
BLAST netted the author almost 35 *thousand* citations.
and that's a real measure of how many other scientists were able to do work more easily thanks to the tool.
"real science" is largely about the shoulders of giants. as such making easy to use and powerful scientific tools is just adding a nice access ramp and railings for your own shoulders.
"The electrical conductivity in sodium is good enough that you can make electromagnetic pumps with no moving parts"
I'd never heard of liquid metal pumps before. I salute you good sir for introducing me to something fascinating.
any idea if they work on other liquids? does the liquid simply have to be conductive or what?
although on 3:
the problem is that for fear of the "I have no idea how that got on my laptop" defense they intentionally write the law such that not knowing you possess it isn't a defense.
So it makes it into a weapon. You may have seen the story a while back of the person who wanted his bosses job so he planted child porn on his bosses computer and reported him. I can only wonder how many such cases like that aren't uncovered given that that one was only uncovered due to the perpetrator being stunningly stupid.
some 4chan style troll could stick an image on a defaced page inside a hidden div tag inside a hidden element and everyone who visisted the page would automatically become a criminal.
oh they'd be forbidden as such to use the fact that you knew where the victim was buried to convict you, only evidence collected from the body could then be used against you.
Or if they required you to put a pin into a map to show them where the body was buried.
It's not asking for you to testify against yourself, merely forcing you to show them where evidence against you can be found.
I'm not clear. was the software for actually taking pantyshots or was it just a random name for something which would otherwise bore everyone to tears with it's description?
consultant?
Story I heard second hand where jeff is a friend of a family member:
There was once a small startup where the founders noticed that most of the software for handling a particular task was needlessly complex and stupidly hard to use.
So they created their own version which was apparently good and very easy to use. the few customers they did pull in were very happy with it but they couldn't seem to break into the big leagues.
They discovered that some such attempts to sell their software to big corps had been shot down by the local consultants.
They tried contacting the big consulting firms to try to find out what they considered to be wrong with their software so that they could fix whatever problem was putting off the consultants but got back useless boilerplate replies just stating that they didn't think it was suitable.
Then one night in the bar at an exhibition one of the founders (lets call him jeff) got chatting candidly to someone from one of the big consulting firms(lets call him carl).
So jeff asked carl if he'd seen their software and what he thought of it.
carl said that it was quite excellent.
jeff asked why then did carls firm recommend against their clients using it.
Carls reply was that it was simply too easy to use and too easy to set up.
If Carls company recommended a worse piece of software that was hellish to set up then they were guaranteed many many billable hours as the client would be almost guaranteed to need consulting services.
So jeff went home and his startup set to work adding a myriad of essentially useless options and made the software vastly harder to configure.
it was still the same software once it was running but now the manual was a tome rather than a pamphlet and the setup took an expert rather than an amateur.
Like magic sales went up as consultants were suddenly willing to recommend it to their clients.
just throw up a VPN that required authentication to access and make sure the critical servers are only accessible through the VPN.
your critical servers could be behind locked down links which only allow VPN traffic and everything else could be authenticated through crypto.
there would still be attacks and the sites would probably end up even more insecure once the admins decide that "sure the network is secure so we don't have to worry about security" and any botnet herder or virus writer would probably be able to harvest a million throwaway private keys for accessing the network making the whole situation even less secure than the current situation where admins at least don't think "someone else" is handling the security and they know the internet is a dangerous place where you can't trust anything coming from the client.
well put.
I was under the impression that they were intrinsically less efficient than they actually are in very cold weather.
Thank you for correcting my mistake.
Anyone who's serious about solar would put their money into a firm that's building big serious solar thermal in a desert somewhere.
Tiny, inefficient solar pannels on your roof are nothing but a status symbol at the moment. that same money could do far far more good better spent and harvest far more energy but it isn't about the energy. it's about prooving that you can afford the installation on your roof.
again we see: trying to argue with feelings when the figures don't actually support you.
for a bonus trying to imply that if you disagree with the bullshit then you're stupid.
No I mean by the laws of physics it takes more energy to pump heat from a colder environment into a hot one.
heat pumps work well then it's warm outside and are at their most efficient while no matter what fluid you use the colder it is outside the worse they work.
Feeling are much easier to argue with than figures.
Are you serious?
"some losses" is like saying the sea contains "some water"
storage is a massive problem.
pretty much all methods of storing power for any length of time require that you throw 40% to 50% of it away at a minimum.
You can run your laptop for a few hours off a little battery but to run a city you'd need skyscrapers entirely filled with batteries which all need to be replaced every year or so and god help you if there's a fire in the building.
pumped storage takes a lot of land and huge capital investment and again you loose most of the power by converting it to potential and back to electrical.
flywheels can store a small amount of power and are great for handling little hicups in the power supply but you'd need huge numbers of them to run even a tiny town for a few hours.
Any other ideas?
we don't have any practical and realistic way of storing it.
we have lots of inefficient or impractical ways of storing power.
Ok, now you're good for the hottest day of summer.
we now need even more energy to heat homes on the coldest day in winter when we get the least sun.
Which would be great if heat pumps weren't at their least efficient when it was coldest outside which just by coincidence happens to be when people want to heat their homes.
If you were to transmit that same 40GB by text it would cost you $52,400,000.
A piece of advice I was once given by an old coder:
"If you ever do contract work for government make a special effort to cover your arse because you'll be blamed when something goes wrong no matter what.
Especially if it's their fault. "
exactly my point.
I justifications: not real reasons.
Sometimes I think about the possibility that programming might one day be similarly restricted.
That compiling without a computer science degree might be made a crime... and shudder.
Despite the fact that I have such a degree...
I could even think of justifications if I tried(prevent virus writing, ensure critical systems are written only by qualified individuals, ensure people who write systems which hold personal data are written by people who've had some education on computer security) but I don't think any of those areas would actually be improved and the industry as a whole would suffer.
I've worked on a student helpdesk and countless USB Sticks get handed in to the lost and found.
Often they'll contain thesis or significant amounts of work and if the owner hasn't scrawled a phone number or student number on the outside sometimes we'll pop them in and try to figure out who own it so we can email them.
the computers they get plugged into are open access so if someone wanted to drop malware on the system they could just saunter in and plug the sticks in themselves.
As such there's absolutely zero additional risk involved in plugging them in to try to find the owner.
Interestingly enough I attended a talk by a few well know authors who were talking about themes in old folk tails and fairy tails which they'd come across while researching old stories.
One striking thing was that there tended to be a lot more sexual references.
A lot of disney stories are older ones with the violence toned down and the sex stripped away entirely.