If they are the enemies of our values, then perhaps we should declare war on their thinking process. I suggest we call it "the Crusades". It's a catchy title for a war. If history has taught us anything it's that we shouldn't let heathens like this pollute our societies. If it isn't stamped out it is likely to spread like a cancer. We should think of it as a kind of "Holy War" to rid the world of this wrong thinking once and for all.
Wait... maybe I should reread that history textbook one more time. I've got this nagging feeling I'm missing something important.
What's even worse to me is calling it Software Engineering. While it would be nice to think that programming could be rigorous enough to qualify as an engineering discipline, I hardly think it is at this point. It scares the hell out of me that there might be someone with a P.Eng specializing in software that will oversee a software project and maintain that it is safe for the general public because he was there. Our practices are *not* anywhere near that level. While a mechanical engineer can oversee the development plans of a bridge and certify that it is safe, there is nothing in the study of software engineering that allows someone to accomplish the same task for software.
What we need is a separate discipline which is not called "science" and not called "engineering". I recommend that it be called the trade of programming. Programmers should learn programming the same way that carpenters learn their trade. That is where a young apprentice programmer should learn about things like version control (and how to use their editor, etc, etc...)
I once saw a "performace art" exhibit at the National Gallery in Ottawa Canada. They had an exhibit where an artist wrote up requirements for a piece of artwork on a series of index cards. He then handed the cards over to his students and asked them to create the art. There was a wonderful letter in the exhibition where the artist describes how the resultant piece of art was absolutely horrible and that his students must have been complete morons. Apparently when given a list of requirements the students turned off every rational thought in their heads and implemented only what was written down, giving no thought to whether it was a good idea or not. It was also interesting to see that the original artist accepted no responsibility for supplying requirements that, when implemented, resulted in horrible art.
This was done in the 1960s. I often think that programmers should be required to see that exhibit. I wish I could remember the name of the artist.
Is it just me or is anyone else disturbed by this trend to call people "bad guys". It kind of implies that there is no reason to try to understand their motives or what they are trying to accomplish. They are simply "bad" and must be thwarted. Clearly on the other side are the "good guys". These are defined to be the people attempting to thwart the "bad guys" and nothing more. Obviously the opposite of "bad" is "good" and if they are good, we need to question their motives even less. Heck, they're the "good guys" after all.
Unfortunately I live in the inaka. There *is* a nice cheese shop in one of the department stores in the nearest big city, but it costs me 2500 yen and the better part of a day to get there;-) And they never have cheddar for some reason. However, the lady that runs the shop knows me pretty well so next time I will ask her to get some in. Thanks for the idea!
Actually, this winter I'm planning to make cheese. I'm just not sure how easy it is to import the mold. Hopefully it is not impossible.
Nice summary:-) It's definitely the case in Japan that most people are lactose intolerant. However, this does not stop them from eating ice cream in large quantities. The thing is that the dairy culture here is just very young (like 50 years or so) and good cheese is often an acquired taste.
It's a bit ironic that I was vegan for almost 10 years before coming to Japan. But it is difficult to eat vegan here so I now eat whatever when I go out. At home I was eating vegan, but added yogurt for health reasons (decided to try the DASH diet to moderate my high blood pressure). Yogurt is another very popular dairy product in Japan, and there is quite a lot of good yogurt here (though it often comes with a packet of sugar that you can add, which is bizarre to me). Eating yogurt seems to be what triggered my craving for cheese again (by far the most difficult thing for me to give up as a vegan).
I look forward to the day when I can buy decent cheese and a decent baguette (don't get me started on bread here...)
No. Not even close. Japan has the world's worst cheese. I went to a fancy restaurant and noticed they had a cheese plate. This is such a rare occurrence in Japan that I thought I must be dreaming. So I asked the waitress, "What kinds of cheese are on the cheese plate?". She replied, "Processed and cream".
To be fair, in Hokkaido they make some excellent camembert style cheeses. Japanese people don't seem to eat it though, which is too bad. I crave cheddar cheese, though. I'll even take the tasteless American cheddar cheese. As long as it is actually cheese and not cheese flavoured oil...
I think you are judging things from your own perspective. I have 271 songs on my computer. For a few of the songs I didn't buy the album, I copied them privately when I lived in Canada. But the vast majority of them I have the physical CD in my house.
I don't think I am less than a casual listener of music. But thousands and thousands of songs is useless. I'm going to guess that given your attitude you did not pay for the majority of the songs you have in your collection. Even at iTunes prices, "thousands and thousands" of songs will cost "thousands and thousands" of dollars -- this is way too much for the most casual of listener. Probably its way too much for you, and I'm going to further guess that you don't consider yourself a "casual listener" of music.
The reality is that there are some good songs out there. But there aren't thousands and thousands of good songs that I want to listen to. If you had to pay what the seller is asking, how many songs would you actually have? You are right when you say that most mp3s are worthless. I'll only listen to them for the dubious pleasure of listening to a "complete" album. But if I had to pay for them, I would choose not to, no matter what the price.
But if you really believe that *all* your mp3s have no value, then I invite you to delete them. If they have no value, then you won't miss them. But if you follow this simple experiment, I think you will find that there are a couple of hundred songs that you would be more than happy to pay for. In fact, I think that you will agree that one or two dollars for each of these songs is a bargain. And if you bought those songs for a few hundred dollars, you wouldn't miss the other "thousands and thousands" of songs cramming up you disk drives at all.
In other words, I think you are justifying your choice not to pay for the music you like by lumping it together with the music that you don't like. You probably already buy some music that you like, but I bet you would buy more if you didn't rationalize the reason away. This comes from my own experience, so YMMV.
As others have pointed out, the levy is not meant to stop copying. In Canada it is not copyright infringement to make a copy of recorded music for private use. In exchange you pay a levy on blank material. In other words, it is legal to copy music for your own use. That is the point.
There are problems with the levy though. The first is that people and businesses have to pay the levy even if the media isn't used for storing music. Also the payments from the levy go to the copyright holders based on retail sales. If you don't sell retail, you get none of the money, even if many people are copying your songs. So the levy as implemented is unfair. Creating a fair levy would be very difficult.
Finally, I believe the levy is pretty much bad news for the recording industry and artists who are with the main record labels. In order to profit from the levy, the record companies need to own the copyrights -- otherwise the money would go to the artist. This gives the record companies a great deal of incentive to push artists to give up their copyrights. This does nothing to improve the situation that exists with the record companies and artists. And as people get more and more pissed off with the record companies, they will move more and more towards private copying. The levy is not enough to cover the loss in sales they will have (and are having).
But this last point is moot, since the recording industry pushed for the levy in the first place (when copying was more difficult). They are welcome to this karma coming back and biting them in the ass as far as I'm concerned.
This is the main point. Copyright infringement is not a crime. Repeat after me: "Copyright infringement is not a crime". It is a civil matter.
There should be no automatic court imposed penalty because it is not a crime. It is a civil matter. If the complainant wishes to sue for punitive damages then they can. Otherwise, the court should award based on damages. How those damages are calculated is dependent upon the suit.
The problem here is that the RIAA's team of lawyers successfully argued that their damages were in the $1.5 million range. I don't agree with them. Many people don't agree with them. But the court decided otherwise. It's too bad.
Should we have a cap on damages? Hell no! Why would we? If you burn down my house, but you are an otherwise nice person I should still be able to sue you to replace my house. Even if you did it by accident. Burning down my house by accident is not a crime. I'm not punishing you. I'm trying to replace my house.
Copyright infringement that is done by accident can also create damages. You *should* be able to sue for those damages. If I am an author and send a book to a publisher then I can reasonably expect to be paid. If in some incredible fluke of the universe the publisher distributed my book by accident but didn't receive any money for it, I *should* be able to sue them -- even though it was an accident. There shouldn't be one law for businesses and another for ordinary people; even if those ordinary people are very nice people.
It is reasonable to assume that someone seeding a file for a few hours does less damage than someone seeding at high speed for a year. IIRC though, the RIAA has argued that the distribution of one file is equivalent to the distribution of multiple copies -- because then others can further distribute the files. This is a ridiculous argument -- I can be held responsible for my own actions, but not for the actions of others. I think this is the basis for the huge award and it is just as wrong as having a cap on the award.
Arguing for a cap on penalties runs right into the arms of the RIAA. They *want* to make copyright infringement a crime so that they don't have to pursue damages themselves. They can sick the police on people instead. Creating a fine based system enables their logic.
Can we be consistent around here? The articles' copyrights were infringed. Nothing was stolen unless you are claiming that the company in question came around and took the printed articles. By calling it "stealing" you infer that the party that is infringing is committing a crime. They aren't (at least in the US and most of the rest of the world). Many organizations would like copyright infringement to be a crime. That way they don't have to do their own legwork and sue people. They can simply call the police. The state will pay for the enforcement of copyright.
Calling "copyright infringement" by its correct name does nothing to make it less wrong. Calling it "stealing" feeds into an agenda that I think most people don't want (i.e., copyright infringement being put under criminal law, enforced by the police and having jail times as punishment).
I've run XP projects with average teams with great success. And my best successes were with new code. In fact I wouldn't run XP on a maintenance project initially because you usually don't have good test coverage. It takes forever to build up an environment where XP's advantages are visible. If you are trying to do it with an untrained team it's a recipe for disaster.
Now, I don't really think XP is "agile" in the way most people view "agile". XP is a highly structured discipline which requires an understanding of the practices and a commitment to following them. Usually people think "We'll use common sense and keep the process lightweight" when they think "agile". They are often thinking that they have the freedom to pick and choose what they will do at any given time. They also rely heavily on individual contributions to make success. In that way it's pretty dissimilar from XP.
On the other hand, after having run several XP projects I am struck by the idea that the ability of XP projects to get good productivity comes from what isn't done more than what is. For instance allowing (demanding?) requirements to change midstream means that we don't build functionality that isn't needed at the end. Keeping the code base as simple as possible (especially reducing code duplication) means that we don't have to build the same thing over and over again. By enforcing continuous communication through pair programming, continuous integration, acceptance testing, etc we don't build things that we don't need by accident. I could go on forever.
I once estimated that my XP team could deliver functionality 6 times as fast as the other teams in the company. And we had a completely ordinary team of 6 programmers (including 2 coops). In fact we weren't programming 6 times as fast. In many cases we were writing code slower because we had to write tests and we were doing a lot of refactoring. But we were delivering functionality that the customer wanted much, much faster. It really helps when you don't have "emergencies" that cancel your project, or cause you to completely revamp a subsystem, or whatever. We were "agile" because we could deliver quickly and we could change what we were doing quickly. But we were bloody strict about how we did it.
I don't want to pair program with you either. See, we're all happy:-)
Some people can't pair program. Sometimes they are intimidated by having someone seeing what they are doing. Sometimes they don't understand how to do it effectively and are so caught up in their preconceived notions that it is impossible to teach them. Sometimes they are just nasty people that nobody wants to work with.
When I ran teams with pair programming I never forced people to do it. But our shop had a strict policy of no code ownership. You took the top story on the list no matter what area it was in. Our stories took on average 1-2 days (which is important when your iterations are 2 weeks long or less). It doesn't give you a lot of time to get up to speed especially when you refuse help from others. Habitual solo programmers were usually late and their code didn't fit with the others.
I know lack of communication and a desire to hide in your fortress of impenetrable code is cool in programming circles, but it does tend to lead to the degradation of the code base. Very occasionally there was a guy who just plain worked better on his own. Everybody is different. But in my experience, the ones who ran away to code by themselves every day were the guys that weren't worth having.
Even if Google is completely beneficial today, even if you are completely mundane today, what makes you think it will stay that way forever? Once the data is in the cloud, there's no taking it back. Are you sure there is nothing in your email that could harm you? Have you ever sent your cellphone number to someone? What if Google decides that revenues aren't high enough and it's time to sell telephone numbers to direct marketers? Have you ever had an argument with someone in your email and said something that you wish you hadn't? What if someone gets hold of those emails and tries to paint a picture of you as someone you aren't? Maybe you get divorced in the future and Google decides its alright to let lawyers see your email for some reason.
You say that you wouldn't trust Sony, but Google openly says what they want to do with your data. You do realize that a company is not a person right? A company is inherently not trustworthy because it doesn't have a character. A company is made up of many, many people, some trustworthy and some not. Today the head of Google may be trustworthy. What makes you think that in 10 years the same guys will be running the show? Or maybe they will get so big that some moron in a small part of the company will be able to get away with shit that the guys at the top don't realize. Or maybe they will decide that they want to change the focus of the company and sell off parts (including your data) to another company that isn't so trustworthy.
Don't get me wrong. I use "cloud services". I even have a gmail account. But I don't put my head in the sand and say, "I'm safe because it is Google". In fact, there are several emails I now wish had not gone through gmail... Forever is a long, long time and pretending that the status quo will last as long as the data is very naive.
I can sympathize with your plight. It's not a situation I would like to be in. I can also understand your attitude that there is no tool that can not be used given the circumstances. The worst that could possibly happen has already happened, so there is no way you could have made it worse.
But even given the above, I wonder if there still isn't another perspective that might be useful. Before I say anything, I will admit first that I have no right to say anything at all. I don't know the details of the issue. I am the last person who could judge such a situation. But since you have kindly volunteered your insight into such a difficult situation, I hope I can return the favor by giving you my ideas, whether they be right or wrong.
For a tool to be useful, it must be effective. You assume that had you read your daughter's suicide note that an intervention would have been more likely. But had you stopped her attempt, can you be sure that the outcome would have been better? It seems that happily your daughter survived. There is a big difference between a person who has survived a suicide attempt and a person who committed themselves to dieing and was stopped.
Even if it was luck that allowed her to survive, she may very well be in a better place now having followed through with her convictions than if she had been stopped. If you had spied on her and stopped her, it is entirely possible that such a betrayal would have soured any possibility of recovery. And knowing that she was being watched, she could have made a second attempt much more difficult to discover.
I don't have kids. But I have helped with a friend's family when he was away with the military. I also work as a high school teacher now. It seems to me that there is a time when children are open to receiving input from their parents and a time when they are closed. As they become teenagers, the time for input diminishes. I personally believe that no matter who the person is, the only effective tool when they are a teenager is trust. And while you might be able to control a horrible situation like you describe better without that trust, I suspect that your ability to influence the person will diminish. Without that influence the situation could very possibly be worse that what you have now.
Just my 2 cents. Of course there are no right and wrong answers in life. But I hope my thoughts proved useful to you even if you don't agree with them. I sincerely wish you good luck in the future!
This is an issue I have with this kind of consumer electronics that use open source software as the base. They have to be able to let me patch my own device. Maybe not everyone can do it, but personally I don't want to wait for my phone company to push an update to me (which might be never). It's the reason I won't buy an Android device unless I can get root and can flash my own roms. If I can't do that it might as well be closed, proprietary software.
There are more people now than in the past. Even if the percentage stays the same the numbers increase. If you live in a city, the chances are that population density has increased meaning that your percentage chance of meeting a pervert has increased. If because population density increases ease of transportation also increases (because you have better buses or whatever), then the range that a pervert can roam may also increase, increasing your chance of meeting one. Finally, the reporting of crimes involving child molestation etc seems to be increasing (although I have no evidence to support my feeling). If this is true it is possible that the reporting itself may have an effect on the actions of people. I live in Japan and whenever someone commits suicide in a bizarre manner inevitably there is a rash of copycat suicides. I think it is wrong to conclude that reporting of suicide induces suicide, but the manner of suicide is often affected. This may be the case in child molestation too. The reporting may not affect the chance of someone molesting someone, but I don't think it is unlikely that it might affect their decision of who to molest (i.e., a family member as opposed to a stranger).
To conclude, while the rate of child molestation in the population may not have increased, the absolute rate of child molestation may very well increase. And the type of molestation and choice of victim could easily be affected by the publicity given by other cases. So the impression that certain types of molestation are on the increase could be very real.
Of course this is speculation and I haven't actually looked at any data...
Actually, it's even easier than this. At the school I work for the teachers know what the students look like and what their names are. If one of the seats in the classroom is empty, usually it means a student is missing. If another student tries to impersonate someone you can tell by looking at them. So far this system is working pretty well. I'm pretty sure it's cheaper than a fingerprint scanner too.
Show me a new grad who is good at programming and I'll bet they didn't learn programming at university. A lot of new grads *think* they are good at programming. But apart from a handful here and there that cut their teeth on other projects, a new grad writing good code out of the gate is virtually unheard of. Hell, most people with 5 years working experience are crap.
Honestly, I don't know what CS is "for", but it certainly isn't programming. It seems to be some wildly misguided attempt to introduce programming (using toy problems) with no attempt at cultivating a deeper understanding of how to communicate using code. Then they throw in some random theory (depending on the fetish the profs currently have) and a handful of math that you may or may not ever use (and strangely often leaving out the most practical math subjects such as statistics). Half the people graduating don't even remember *any* theory when they graduate and do insane things like write save files with a context sensitive grammars.
And then when you think about it, CS stands for Computer SCIENCE and you start to wonder, where was the science in my degree... Or maybe you were in the math department and you graduated with an honors degree but never once took a math course above 2nd year level difficulty (and all the real math students laugh at you behind your back). Or maybe you got an engineering degree and started wondering why the mechanical engineers know all this stuff to pretty much guarantee that bridges won't fall down, but that computer engineers write software that crashes when someone looks at it funny.
And even given the complete failure to actually learn anything that could be called science in their computer science degree 95% of the graduating class hasn't written more than 10K lines of code in their entire life.
Who the hell know what CS is "for"? Personally I think it's for getting your foot in the door at a job interview because nobody bothers to check if you can actually program (like looking at a non trivial piece of your code) before they hire you.
As much as I want to agree with you, it's really pure speculation. Projects fail for a huge number of reasons of which computing platform is just one. It might be a PR disaster, but not for any legitimate reason. I daresay it is not impossible to build a decent trading system on Windows/.NET. I have implemented systems in.NET before and while it's not my platform of choice I don't really recall anything about it that should be a show stopper here.
But while we're speculating, it would be interesting to imagine a project failing precisely because of the hype about.NET. Most good programmers understand that a problem can only get as simple as it can get. After that no tool is going to help you make it simpler. But MS (and virtually all other proprietary tool vendors) promise that their tools can make projects magically simple. The only ones that get fooled into believing this are managers and bad programmers. These are the people who tend to flock to such projects.
So, it seems possible that a project could self-select itself for failure based on unrealistic expectations of the computer platform they are using. Well, when I say "it seems possible", what I mean is I've seen it happen time and time again;-) Whether it was the case here, I doubt I'll ever know. Bad programmers usually have no clue why their projects fail (or serendipidously succeed). That's why they are bad programmers.
Yes, especially Trixbox is very easy to set up if you have a dedicated machine for it (and you don't need much for an Asterisk box). For an installation cost, Asterisk is much cheaper to install than your average hard line PBX in my opinion. Well, I guess Nortel is out of business now, but those Nortel PBXs were a bitch to set up and maintain (add new lines, etc). My only real complaint about Asterisk (as long as I don't look at some parts of the code;-) ) has nothing to do with Asterisk itself. I find that I have problems getting consistently good quality sound through my ITSP. Sometimes the lowest cost route is really bad. Some ITSPs give you some control over the route so I need to play with that a bit, but it's a pain in the ass to deal with. If you have your own FXOs its less of a problem. Of course that increases the cost a bit (and buying good FXOs seems to be an art in and of itself).
As others have said, Asterisk becomes much more obvious if you have an ITSP (Internet Telephone Service Provider). Here's an example of what I have done with it. I moved to Japan 3 years ago, but I still wanted to keep in touch with my friends. Calling long distance to/from Japan is expensive, no matter what plan you have. So I bought a DID (Direct Inward Dial) for my old home town. This gives my friends a local number to call. It routes over the internet to my Asterisk box and rings a softphone on my computer in Japan. The DID costs me $5 a month. Of course, there is a huge time change between Canada (where I moved from) and Japan. Asterisk has voice mail. If my phone isn't running on my computer, Asterisk takes a message and emails me the contents. When I wake up in the morning, I can listen to the message from my email and call the person back. Outgoing calls cost me 2 cents a minutes to North America and there are unlimited plans with many ITSPs (I don't bother because I don't make many outgoing calls).
Even without an ITSP Asterisk is useful. Perhaps you are used to using Skype or Google Talk to make computer to computer voice calls. Asterisk lets you talk to your friends using SIP (and now I guess Google Talk), but still have all the PBX features. So for instance, if your friend wants to send you a voice mail via SIP they can. You can set up conference calls fairly easily as well. You can buy very inexpensive USB handsets that look like telephones and hook them up to your computer. If you set your softphone's audio device to the handset, it ends up working pretty much like a normal phone. Or you can buy a SIP handset (a bit more expensive) and simply plug it in anywhere you have a network connection. This allows you to set up as many extensions controlled by your Asterisk PBX as you want. It's handy if you have kids, especially since DIDs are really, really, cheap.
Finally, for some fun you can easily set up ring groups on Asterisk. Talking on a cell phone is generally expensive. Instead, you can set up a DID for your Asterisk box and everyone can call you there. If you have your softphone up, it will ring that first. If it isn't up (or you don't answer it) you can get it to call your cell phone with an outgoing call. You can even set up a voice mail menu that asks the calling person if they would rather leave a message or try your cell phone. And to be even fancier you can vary the response based on who's calling. If it's someone you don't know you can direct them to voice mail immediately, if it's someone you don't care about much you can just allow them to ring the softphone, if it's likely to be important than you can forward to your cell.
This should give you a few ideas. There are really an endless number of options. Especially since you have source code with Asterisk you can make it do whatever you want.
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are people that are enemies of western values.
If they are the enemies of our values, then perhaps we should declare war on their thinking process. I suggest we call it "the Crusades". It's a catchy title for a war. If history has taught us anything it's that we shouldn't let heathens like this pollute our societies. If it isn't stamped out it is likely to spread like a cancer. We should think of it as a kind of "Holy War" to rid the world of this wrong thinking once and for all.
Wait... maybe I should reread that history textbook one more time. I've got this nagging feeling I'm missing something important.
Usually all it takes to con someone is to tell them you love them...
Using someone's fear of further harm to extort money is not all that different than the mob coming in and telling you pay up or else.
What about to win an election?
Throw these crooks in jail.
If only...
What's even worse to me is calling it Software Engineering. While it would be nice to think that programming could be rigorous enough to qualify as an engineering discipline, I hardly think it is at this point. It scares the hell out of me that there might be someone with a P.Eng specializing in software that will oversee a software project and maintain that it is safe for the general public because he was there. Our practices are *not* anywhere near that level. While a mechanical engineer can oversee the development plans of a bridge and certify that it is safe, there is nothing in the study of software engineering that allows someone to accomplish the same task for software.
What we need is a separate discipline which is not called "science" and not called "engineering". I recommend that it be called the trade of programming. Programmers should learn programming the same way that carpenters learn their trade. That is where a young apprentice programmer should learn about things like version control (and how to use their editor, etc, etc...)
I once saw a "performace art" exhibit at the National Gallery in Ottawa Canada. They had an exhibit where an artist wrote up requirements for a piece of artwork on a series of index cards. He then handed the cards over to his students and asked them to create the art. There was a wonderful letter in the exhibition where the artist describes how the resultant piece of art was absolutely horrible and that his students must have been complete morons. Apparently when given a list of requirements the students turned off every rational thought in their heads and implemented only what was written down, giving no thought to whether it was a good idea or not. It was also interesting to see that the original artist accepted no responsibility for supplying requirements that, when implemented, resulted in horrible art.
This was done in the 1960s. I often think that programmers should be required to see that exhibit. I wish I could remember the name of the artist.
Is it just me or is anyone else disturbed by this trend to call people "bad guys". It kind of implies that there is no reason to try to understand their motives or what they are trying to accomplish. They are simply "bad" and must be thwarted. Clearly on the other side are the "good guys". These are defined to be the people attempting to thwart the "bad guys" and nothing more. Obviously the opposite of "bad" is "good" and if they are good, we need to question their motives even less. Heck, they're the "good guys" after all.
Deeply scary in my book.
Unfortunately I live in the inaka. There *is* a nice cheese shop in one of the department stores in the nearest big city, but it costs me 2500 yen and the better part of a day to get there ;-) And they never have cheddar for some reason. However, the lady that runs the shop knows me pretty well so next time I will ask her to get some in. Thanks for the idea!
Actually, this winter I'm planning to make cheese. I'm just not sure how easy it is to import the mold. Hopefully it is not impossible.
Nice summary :-) It's definitely the case in Japan that most people are lactose intolerant. However, this does not stop them from eating ice cream in large quantities. The thing is that the dairy culture here is just very young (like 50 years or so) and good cheese is often an acquired taste.
It's a bit ironic that I was vegan for almost 10 years before coming to Japan. But it is difficult to eat vegan here so I now eat whatever when I go out. At home I was eating vegan, but added yogurt for health reasons (decided to try the DASH diet to moderate my high blood pressure). Yogurt is another very popular dairy product in Japan, and there is quite a lot of good yogurt here (though it often comes with a packet of sugar that you can add, which is bizarre to me). Eating yogurt seems to be what triggered my craving for cheese again (by far the most difficult thing for me to give up as a vegan).
I look forward to the day when I can buy decent cheese and a decent baguette (don't get me started on bread here...)
No. Not even close. Japan has the world's worst cheese. I went to a fancy restaurant and noticed they had a cheese plate. This is such a rare occurrence in Japan that I thought I must be dreaming. So I asked the waitress, "What kinds of cheese are on the cheese plate?". She replied, "Processed and cream".
To be fair, in Hokkaido they make some excellent camembert style cheeses. Japanese people don't seem to eat it though, which is too bad. I crave cheddar cheese, though. I'll even take the tasteless American cheddar cheese. As long as it is actually cheese and not cheese flavoured oil...
I think you are judging things from your own perspective. I have 271 songs on my computer. For a few of the songs I didn't buy the album, I copied them privately when I lived in Canada. But the vast majority of them I have the physical CD in my house.
I don't think I am less than a casual listener of music. But thousands and thousands of songs is useless. I'm going to guess that given your attitude you did not pay for the majority of the songs you have in your collection. Even at iTunes prices, "thousands and thousands" of songs will cost "thousands and thousands" of dollars -- this is way too much for the most casual of listener. Probably its way too much for you, and I'm going to further guess that you don't consider yourself a "casual listener" of music.
The reality is that there are some good songs out there. But there aren't thousands and thousands of good songs that I want to listen to. If you had to pay what the seller is asking, how many songs would you actually have? You are right when you say that most mp3s are worthless. I'll only listen to them for the dubious pleasure of listening to a "complete" album. But if I had to pay for them, I would choose not to, no matter what the price.
But if you really believe that *all* your mp3s have no value, then I invite you to delete them. If they have no value, then you won't miss them. But if you follow this simple experiment, I think you will find that there are a couple of hundred songs that you would be more than happy to pay for. In fact, I think that you will agree that one or two dollars for each of these songs is a bargain. And if you bought those songs for a few hundred dollars, you wouldn't miss the other "thousands and thousands" of songs cramming up you disk drives at all.
In other words, I think you are justifying your choice not to pay for the music you like by lumping it together with the music that you don't like. You probably already buy some music that you like, but I bet you would buy more if you didn't rationalize the reason away. This comes from my own experience, so YMMV.
As others have pointed out, the levy is not meant to stop copying. In Canada it is not copyright infringement to make a copy of recorded music for private use. In exchange you pay a levy on blank material. In other words, it is legal to copy music for your own use. That is the point.
There are problems with the levy though. The first is that people and businesses have to pay the levy even if the media isn't used for storing music. Also the payments from the levy go to the copyright holders based on retail sales. If you don't sell retail, you get none of the money, even if many people are copying your songs. So the levy as implemented is unfair. Creating a fair levy would be very difficult.
Finally, I believe the levy is pretty much bad news for the recording industry and artists who are with the main record labels. In order to profit from the levy, the record companies need to own the copyrights -- otherwise the money would go to the artist. This gives the record companies a great deal of incentive to push artists to give up their copyrights. This does nothing to improve the situation that exists with the record companies and artists. And as people get more and more pissed off with the record companies, they will move more and more towards private copying. The levy is not enough to cover the loss in sales they will have (and are having).
But this last point is moot, since the recording industry pushed for the levy in the first place (when copying was more difficult). They are welcome to this karma coming back and biting them in the ass as far as I'm concerned.
This is the main point. Copyright infringement is not a crime. Repeat after me: "Copyright infringement is not a crime". It is a civil matter.
There should be no automatic court imposed penalty because it is not a crime. It is a civil matter. If the complainant wishes to sue for punitive damages then they can. Otherwise, the court should award based on damages. How those damages are calculated is dependent upon the suit.
The problem here is that the RIAA's team of lawyers successfully argued that their damages were in the $1.5 million range. I don't agree with them. Many people don't agree with them. But the court decided otherwise. It's too bad.
Should we have a cap on damages? Hell no! Why would we? If you burn down my house, but you are an otherwise nice person I should still be able to sue you to replace my house. Even if you did it by accident. Burning down my house by accident is not a crime. I'm not punishing you. I'm trying to replace my house.
Copyright infringement that is done by accident can also create damages. You *should* be able to sue for those damages. If I am an author and send a book to a publisher then I can reasonably expect to be paid. If in some incredible fluke of the universe the publisher distributed my book by accident but didn't receive any money for it, I *should* be able to sue them -- even though it was an accident. There shouldn't be one law for businesses and another for ordinary people; even if those ordinary people are very nice people.
It is reasonable to assume that someone seeding a file for a few hours does less damage than someone seeding at high speed for a year. IIRC though, the RIAA has argued that the distribution of one file is equivalent to the distribution of multiple copies -- because then others can further distribute the files. This is a ridiculous argument -- I can be held responsible for my own actions, but not for the actions of others. I think this is the basis for the huge award and it is just as wrong as having a cap on the award.
Arguing for a cap on penalties runs right into the arms of the RIAA. They *want* to make copyright infringement a crime so that they don't have to pursue damages themselves. They can sick the police on people instead. Creating a fine based system enables their logic.
Can we be consistent around here? The articles' copyrights were infringed. Nothing was stolen unless you are claiming that the company in question came around and took the printed articles. By calling it "stealing" you infer that the party that is infringing is committing a crime. They aren't (at least in the US and most of the rest of the world). Many organizations would like copyright infringement to be a crime. That way they don't have to do their own legwork and sue people. They can simply call the police. The state will pay for the enforcement of copyright.
Calling "copyright infringement" by its correct name does nothing to make it less wrong. Calling it "stealing" feeds into an agenda that I think most people don't want (i.e., copyright infringement being put under criminal law, enforced by the police and having jail times as punishment).
I've run XP projects with average teams with great success. And my best successes were with new code. In fact I wouldn't run XP on a maintenance project initially because you usually don't have good test coverage. It takes forever to build up an environment where XP's advantages are visible. If you are trying to do it with an untrained team it's a recipe for disaster.
Now, I don't really think XP is "agile" in the way most people view "agile". XP is a highly structured discipline which requires an understanding of the practices and a commitment to following them. Usually people think "We'll use common sense and keep the process lightweight" when they think "agile". They are often thinking that they have the freedom to pick and choose what they will do at any given time. They also rely heavily on individual contributions to make success. In that way it's pretty dissimilar from XP.
On the other hand, after having run several XP projects I am struck by the idea that the ability of XP projects to get good productivity comes from what isn't done more than what is. For instance allowing (demanding?) requirements to change midstream means that we don't build functionality that isn't needed at the end. Keeping the code base as simple as possible (especially reducing code duplication) means that we don't have to build the same thing over and over again. By enforcing continuous communication through pair programming, continuous integration, acceptance testing, etc we don't build things that we don't need by accident. I could go on forever.
I once estimated that my XP team could deliver functionality 6 times as fast as the other teams in the company. And we had a completely ordinary team of 6 programmers (including 2 coops). In fact we weren't programming 6 times as fast. In many cases we were writing code slower because we had to write tests and we were doing a lot of refactoring. But we were delivering functionality that the customer wanted much, much faster. It really helps when you don't have "emergencies" that cancel your project, or cause you to completely revamp a subsystem, or whatever. We were "agile" because we could deliver quickly and we could change what we were doing quickly. But we were bloody strict about how we did it.
I don't want to pair program with you either. See, we're all happy :-)
Some people can't pair program. Sometimes they are intimidated by having someone seeing what they are doing. Sometimes they don't understand how to do it effectively and are so caught up in their preconceived notions that it is impossible to teach them. Sometimes they are just nasty people that nobody wants to work with.
When I ran teams with pair programming I never forced people to do it. But our shop had a strict policy of no code ownership. You took the top story on the list no matter what area it was in. Our stories took on average 1-2 days (which is important when your iterations are 2 weeks long or less). It doesn't give you a lot of time to get up to speed especially when you refuse help from others. Habitual solo programmers were usually late and their code didn't fit with the others.
I know lack of communication and a desire to hide in your fortress of impenetrable code is cool in programming circles, but it does tend to lead to the degradation of the code base. Very occasionally there was a guy who just plain worked better on his own. Everybody is different. But in my experience, the ones who ran away to code by themselves every day were the guys that weren't worth having.
Maybe your shop is different. Maybe...
Even if Google is completely beneficial today, even if you are completely mundane today, what makes you think it will stay that way forever? Once the data is in the cloud, there's no taking it back. Are you sure there is nothing in your email that could harm you? Have you ever sent your cellphone number to someone? What if Google decides that revenues aren't high enough and it's time to sell telephone numbers to direct marketers? Have you ever had an argument with someone in your email and said something that you wish you hadn't? What if someone gets hold of those emails and tries to paint a picture of you as someone you aren't? Maybe you get divorced in the future and Google decides its alright to let lawyers see your email for some reason.
You say that you wouldn't trust Sony, but Google openly says what they want to do with your data. You do realize that a company is not a person right? A company is inherently not trustworthy because it doesn't have a character. A company is made up of many, many people, some trustworthy and some not. Today the head of Google may be trustworthy. What makes you think that in 10 years the same guys will be running the show? Or maybe they will get so big that some moron in a small part of the company will be able to get away with shit that the guys at the top don't realize. Or maybe they will decide that they want to change the focus of the company and sell off parts (including your data) to another company that isn't so trustworthy.
Don't get me wrong. I use "cloud services". I even have a gmail account. But I don't put my head in the sand and say, "I'm safe because it is Google". In fact, there are several emails I now wish had not gone through gmail... Forever is a long, long time and pretending that the status quo will last as long as the data is very naive.
I can sympathize with your plight. It's not a situation I would like to be in. I can also understand your attitude that there is no tool that can not be used given the circumstances. The worst that could possibly happen has already happened, so there is no way you could have made it worse.
But even given the above, I wonder if there still isn't another perspective that might be useful. Before I say anything, I will admit first that I have no right to say anything at all. I don't know the details of the issue. I am the last person who could judge such a situation. But since you have kindly volunteered your insight into such a difficult situation, I hope I can return the favor by giving you my ideas, whether they be right or wrong.
For a tool to be useful, it must be effective. You assume that had you read your daughter's suicide note that an intervention would have been more likely. But had you stopped her attempt, can you be sure that the outcome would have been better? It seems that happily your daughter survived. There is a big difference between a person who has survived a suicide attempt and a person who committed themselves to dieing and was stopped.
Even if it was luck that allowed her to survive, she may very well be in a better place now having followed through with her convictions than if she had been stopped. If you had spied on her and stopped her, it is entirely possible that such a betrayal would have soured any possibility of recovery. And knowing that she was being watched, she could have made a second attempt much more difficult to discover.
I don't have kids. But I have helped with a friend's family when he was away with the military. I also work as a high school teacher now. It seems to me that there is a time when children are open to receiving input from their parents and a time when they are closed. As they become teenagers, the time for input diminishes. I personally believe that no matter who the person is, the only effective tool when they are a teenager is trust. And while you might be able to control a horrible situation like you describe better without that trust, I suspect that your ability to influence the person will diminish. Without that influence the situation could very possibly be worse that what you have now.
Just my 2 cents. Of course there are no right and wrong answers in life. But I hope my thoughts proved useful to you even if you don't agree with them. I sincerely wish you good luck in the future!
This is an issue I have with this kind of consumer electronics that use open source software as the base. They have to be able to let me patch my own device. Maybe not everyone can do it, but personally I don't want to wait for my phone company to push an update to me (which might be never). It's the reason I won't buy an Android device unless I can get root and can flash my own roms. If I can't do that it might as well be closed, proprietary software.
Or flaws in the code that HTC wrote...
There are more people now than in the past. Even if the percentage stays the same the numbers increase. If you live in a city, the chances are that population density has increased meaning that your percentage chance of meeting a pervert has increased. If because population density increases ease of transportation also increases (because you have better buses or whatever), then the range that a pervert can roam may also increase, increasing your chance of meeting one. Finally, the reporting of crimes involving child molestation etc seems to be increasing (although I have no evidence to support my feeling). If this is true it is possible that the reporting itself may have an effect on the actions of people. I live in Japan and whenever someone commits suicide in a bizarre manner inevitably there is a rash of copycat suicides. I think it is wrong to conclude that reporting of suicide induces suicide, but the manner of suicide is often affected. This may be the case in child molestation too. The reporting may not affect the chance of someone molesting someone, but I don't think it is unlikely that it might affect their decision of who to molest (i.e., a family member as opposed to a stranger).
To conclude, while the rate of child molestation in the population may not have increased, the absolute rate of child molestation may very well increase. And the type of molestation and choice of victim could easily be affected by the publicity given by other cases. So the impression that certain types of molestation are on the increase could be very real.
Of course this is speculation and I haven't actually looked at any data...
Actually, it's even easier than this. At the school I work for the teachers know what the students look like and what their names are. If one of the seats in the classroom is empty, usually it means a student is missing. If another student tries to impersonate someone you can tell by looking at them. So far this system is working pretty well. I'm pretty sure it's cheaper than a fingerprint scanner too.
Show me a new grad who is good at programming and I'll bet they didn't learn programming at university. A lot of new grads *think* they are good at programming. But apart from a handful here and there that cut their teeth on other projects, a new grad writing good code out of the gate is virtually unheard of. Hell, most people with 5 years working experience are crap.
Honestly, I don't know what CS is "for", but it certainly isn't programming. It seems to be some wildly misguided attempt to introduce programming (using toy problems) with no attempt at cultivating a deeper understanding of how to communicate using code. Then they throw in some random theory (depending on the fetish the profs currently have) and a handful of math that you may or may not ever use (and strangely often leaving out the most practical math subjects such as statistics). Half the people graduating don't even remember *any* theory when they graduate and do insane things like write save files with a context sensitive grammars.
And then when you think about it, CS stands for Computer SCIENCE and you start to wonder, where was the science in my degree... Or maybe you were in the math department and you graduated with an honors degree but never once took a math course above 2nd year level difficulty (and all the real math students laugh at you behind your back). Or maybe you got an engineering degree and started wondering why the mechanical engineers know all this stuff to pretty much guarantee that bridges won't fall down, but that computer engineers write software that crashes when someone looks at it funny.
And even given the complete failure to actually learn anything that could be called science in their computer science degree 95% of the graduating class hasn't written more than 10K lines of code in their entire life.
Who the hell know what CS is "for"? Personally I think it's for getting your foot in the door at a job interview because nobody bothers to check if you can actually program (like looking at a non trivial piece of your code) before they hire you.
As much as I want to agree with you, it's really pure speculation. Projects fail for a huge number of reasons of which computing platform is just one. It might be a PR disaster, but not for any legitimate reason. I daresay it is not impossible to build a decent trading system on Windows/.NET. I have implemented systems in .NET before and while it's not my platform of choice I don't really recall anything about it that should be a show stopper here.
But while we're speculating, it would be interesting to imagine a project failing precisely because of the hype about .NET. Most good programmers understand that a problem can only get as simple as it can get. After that no tool is going to help you make it simpler. But MS (and virtually all other proprietary tool vendors) promise that their tools can make projects magically simple. The only ones that get fooled into believing this are managers and bad programmers. These are the people who tend to flock to such projects.
So, it seems possible that a project could self-select itself for failure based on unrealistic expectations of the computer platform they are using. Well, when I say "it seems possible", what I mean is I've seen it happen time and time again ;-) Whether it was the case here, I doubt I'll ever know. Bad programmers usually have no clue why their projects fail (or serendipidously succeed). That's why they are bad programmers.
Yes, especially Trixbox is very easy to set up if you have a dedicated machine for it (and you don't need much for an Asterisk box). For an installation cost, Asterisk is much cheaper to install than your average hard line PBX in my opinion. Well, I guess Nortel is out of business now, but those Nortel PBXs were a bitch to set up and maintain (add new lines, etc). My only real complaint about Asterisk (as long as I don't look at some parts of the code ;-) ) has nothing to do with Asterisk itself. I find that I have problems getting consistently good quality sound through my ITSP. Sometimes the lowest cost route is really bad. Some ITSPs give you some control over the route so I need to play with that a bit, but it's a pain in the ass to deal with. If you have your own FXOs its less of a problem. Of course that increases the cost a bit (and buying good FXOs seems to be an art in and of itself).
As others have said, Asterisk becomes much more obvious if you have an ITSP (Internet Telephone Service Provider). Here's an example of what I have done with it. I moved to Japan 3 years ago, but I still wanted to keep in touch with my friends. Calling long distance to/from Japan is expensive, no matter what plan you have. So I bought a DID (Direct Inward Dial) for my old home town. This gives my friends a local number to call. It routes over the internet to my Asterisk box and rings a softphone on my computer in Japan. The DID costs me $5 a month. Of course, there is a huge time change between Canada (where I moved from) and Japan. Asterisk has voice mail. If my phone isn't running on my computer, Asterisk takes a message and emails me the contents. When I wake up in the morning, I can listen to the message from my email and call the person back. Outgoing calls cost me 2 cents a minutes to North America and there are unlimited plans with many ITSPs (I don't bother because I don't make many outgoing calls).
Even without an ITSP Asterisk is useful. Perhaps you are used to using Skype or Google Talk to make computer to computer voice calls. Asterisk lets you talk to your friends using SIP (and now I guess Google Talk), but still have all the PBX features. So for instance, if your friend wants to send you a voice mail via SIP they can. You can set up conference calls fairly easily as well. You can buy very inexpensive USB handsets that look like telephones and hook them up to your computer. If you set your softphone's audio device to the handset, it ends up working pretty much like a normal phone. Or you can buy a SIP handset (a bit more expensive) and simply plug it in anywhere you have a network connection. This allows you to set up as many extensions controlled by your Asterisk PBX as you want. It's handy if you have kids, especially since DIDs are really, really, cheap.
Finally, for some fun you can easily set up ring groups on Asterisk. Talking on a cell phone is generally expensive. Instead, you can set up a DID for your Asterisk box and everyone can call you there. If you have your softphone up, it will ring that first. If it isn't up (or you don't answer it) you can get it to call your cell phone with an outgoing call. You can even set up a voice mail menu that asks the calling person if they would rather leave a message or try your cell phone. And to be even fancier you can vary the response based on who's calling. If it's someone you don't know you can direct them to voice mail immediately, if it's someone you don't care about much you can just allow them to ring the softphone, if it's likely to be important than you can forward to your cell.
This should give you a few ideas. There are really an endless number of options. Especially since you have source code with Asterisk you can make it do whatever you want.