Wikipedia can be valuable even in mediocrity. I've used it as a "jumping off" point for knowledge about things that aren't covered in more traditional sources.
This is true of pretty much any encyclopedia - by their nature they tend to provide concise overviews of more complex points, and if you take those concise overviews you are likely to get a very misleading impression much of the time. At least with Wikipedia you are likely to have the references you need to further check the details - in paper based encyclopedias it is only the discipline-specific encyclopedias that include full referencing.
The whole "manufacturers one year warranty" thing exists to confuse consumers as to how much of a legal warranty they already get for free.
Not quite. The manufacturer's warranty is a period during which the manufacturer effectively agrees not to dispute merchantability. Also, depending on the circumstances, where you are, and what you have done, it is possible you may have accepted a contract that includes the warranty and then the warranty may exclude the implied warranty of merchantability. You might be taken to accept the terms if you mail in the warranty card (yes, you read right - never, ever mail in warranty registration cards - it is actually (a) a mechanism that tricks you into giving up your rights; and (b) a way of getting your details for marketing) or if you have availed yourself of the warranty for a problem not attributable to unmerchantability.
In the UK and Australia, the warranty of merchantability is not excludable in consumer contracts.
the equivalent magic phrase here in the UK is "fit for purpose"
No, that's a different thing. The UK has both unmerchantability and fitness for purpose, which also exist in pretty much any common law jurisdiction (most statutes merely restate the common law, although they may go beyond that by making the warranty non-excludable or altering its terms). The warranty of fitness for purpose is one which is implied where you make the purpose (which may be clearly implied, or expressly stated) of your purchase known at the time you purchase the goods, and reasonably rely on the vendor to know if the goods are suited to that purpose - in that case there is a warranty that the goods are suited to that purpose. The warranty of merchantability is a warranty that the goods are either fit for at least one of the purposes for which goods of that kind are normally bought (common law, UK) or are fit for all of the purposes for which goods of that kind are normally bought (Australia), but this takes into account other factors like purchase price (if you pay $30 for a digital camera you should expect it to be shoddy).
In this case the quality of the CCDs is such that the cameras are, having regard to their price, unfit for any purpose for which digital cameras are ordinarily bought, since they are not bought as disposable items and two years is way too short a lifetime for a solid-state component such as a CCD.
For all the Sony-bashing I've done, I have to salute Sony for stepping up to this one, no matter their motivation, though it looks mostly to be customer service and satisfaction.
Not so. These defects are such as to make the products unmerchantable, which gives the buyer (in this case the manufacturers) a bunch of rights that would cost Sony a lot more if they were exercised. Doing the repairs free will cost Sony a lot less than paying the value of replacement products or repairs by a third party, which is what they would be up for (plus costs) if they were sued.
There is nothing remotely attributable to honourable conduct here (and if you have dealt with Sony recently you would be aware of how thoroughly dishonourable that behemoth has become). It is self preservation, pure and simple, that has led them down this path.
CPU usage has dropped because garbage collection has significantly improved.
Be careful about looking at CPU usage in isolation - depending on the application, lower CPU usage may be bad rather than good. Where an application is performing CPU intensive tasks, low CPU usage usually means the application is stuck waiting for hardware for too long.
It is a common newbie programmer mistake to think "application's running slow, let's see how much we can speed it up by doing X" where X involves using more memory to reduce the instructions required to perform the task. But then you may well end up making more use of swap space (assuming a mass-deployed app you cannot assume everybody will just add more memory), slowing the app down.
On the other hand, sometimes the answer to speeding things up may be to use more memory up to the point just before you would expect swap space to start being used, even without looking at what instructions are being executed.
The tradeoff at this level is something that does need to be done by the programmer based on knowledge of what the application is doing and where the real bottlenecks are.
In TFA, the garbage collection strategies are very wasteful of memory. Java developers seem to like to say "memory is cheap", but it is not free, and a sufficiently hungry use will eventually run into a barrier in terms of price, available address space or hardware limitations. Where an application performs best by using a lot of memory all at once, it may well be that those approaches will result in lower performance rather than higher.
The upshot - you still have to choose your tools based on whether they are appropriate to the task at hand. And while I have not seen many C++ developers who will claim that C++ is the right tool for every job, it seems many Java developers like to claim Java is the right tool for every job.
If Sony *hadn't* tried to tie multiple things together (region coding + copy protection) and only used their chips for copy protection then they would have won.
Sorry, but that is not true. The tying was entirely irrelevant to the result in the case.
Actually, in Australia, region-coded DVDs have already gone. That's the precedent that was used in this argument.
There was no such "precedent" used in this argument. There was some discussion of policy considerations and of region coding being anti-competitive and beyond the rights comprised in the copyright, but no precedent was involved at all.
a device or product, or a component incorporated into a process, that is designed, in the ordinary course of its operation, to prevent or inhibit the infringement of copyright in a work...
The result in the High Court turned on the interpretation of one word - "inhibit". The device did not "prevent" copying because it acted after the copying took place. There was no attempt to deny that one of the purposes of the device was to make the unlawfully copied game unplayable. The question was whether that would "inhibit" infringement. Sony argued that it inhibited infringement because it made the copy useless, and because it prevented it from having commercial value, thereby "inhibiting" the sale of infringing copies (itself an infringement).
The Court ruled that the inhibition must put a barrier in front of the infringement, not merely make the infringement pointless. It seems to me that preventing profit from a sale will prevent there being any value to the seller and thus put a barrier in front of the infringement. The language of the court at the point where they reached this part of their conclusion is somewhat muddled, reflecting, IMO, the fact that this is a place where their certainty was not quite as strong as with other parts.
The computer geek part of me wants to high-5 everybody in sight. The law geek part of me is somewhat uncomfortable with the way this decision was reached.
Elsewhere in the decision, the court more narrowly constrained an earlier decision by a lower court that said computer games are also protected as cinematograph films (movies), and hinted that they might be willing to overturn that decision if it were brought to them. That is promising since the protection of computer games as films could prevent imitation of other games if the "plot" of the new game is too close.
Their legal argument was that the locked-down state of the PS2 is needed to prevent copyright infringement, and therefore the modchip should be thought of as a device to circumventa copy-protection system. Thankfully, the court didn't buy their argument.
I don't think it's that simple. The mechanism certainly appears to satisfy the definition of a TPM under the Act:
a device or product, or a component incorporated into a process, that is designed, in the ordinary course of its operation, to prevent or inhibit the infringement of copyright in a work...
Part of the design of the mechanism was to do this, but Sony had also made the same mechanism implement region coding. I have not yet read the reasons for this decision yet, but note that the Full Court of the Federal Court (three judges) had decided unanimously the other way.
Legitimacy is granted through the social contract.... If even one person refuses it, then the state no longer has legitimacy of control over that individual,
For espousing theories of jurisprudence where ranting and rhetoric are much more fun, I sentence you to one hour of reading/. at -1.
(Obviously the GP was a positivist, but curiously a positivist who doesn't know what the actual rules are).
That's preposterous. If we have the ability to deflect an asteroid in 2008, surely we have the ability to do so in 2159.
Not when you factor in the likely effect of certain White House policies - if WWIII doesn't get us, and global infrastructure survives climate change well enough to support continued space flight, then scientists are likely to be burned at the stake as heretics in the new dark ages.
Wouldn't it be best to launch from somewhere outside the United States - say from the equator?
For a launch into space (which this is not), that will not get you out of reach of the US law if US citizens are involved in the launch. One of the handful of international space exploration treaties requires governments to regulate launches outside their territory by their citizens when the other territory has not granted a launch certificate pursuant to the treaty under its own laws. No doubt the US government has implemented this, since they seem to like anything that gives them more control over their own citizens.
I can't count how many times each DAY that I hear and/or see someone in IT doing something they would scream at a "user" for doing.
You have not given us any examples, but this may well be perfectly rational behaviour. The rules for when it is an is not safe to do a particular thing can be quite complex, and it is not reasonable to expect an end user to be familiar with all of them - they have another job they need to worry about. For example, an IT department will often tell people never to open attachments, but the real rule is much more complex, and IT people are much more likely to know when it is and is not safe to open an attachment.
Some of the better programmers I know are above average in their language skills.
Programmers who are also lawyers have even stronger language skills. Study of the law leads to an appreciation for the value of precision that you do not get from a discipline where you can test your own work (within reason) - in the law if you fail to be sufficiently precise, you will find out when the judge slaps you down.
Two nukes, well placed, could take out 18 million people. There are 295 million people in the US. That would be 16.39% of the US population.
Gotta love the American education system. 18 / 295 * 100 = 6.1, not 16.39 (which would of course be exceeding the two significant figures in "18" even if it were close to the right number).
To get to 16% you would have to take out 47million.
No, that's "evil-you-shun". It's obvious really. Evil-you-shun is the work of the devil and was actually devised by al-Quaeda to steer God-fearing Southern Baptist Americans away from their faith. Have you looked at pictures of Charles Darwin and Osama bin-Laden? The beard is a dead giveaway. Plus, have you ever seen them in the same place twice? Think about it.
And of course when faced with evil-you-shun, then as a God-fearing American (and let's face it, if you're not God-fearing you have no business being an American), you'd darned well better shun it.
A really cool guy named Archimedies figures this out a long time ago
Archimedes wasn't cool. He was a nerd. Sure, he didn't get wedgies because he didn't wear pants (and on the odd occasion ran through the streets without wearing anything at all), but he would have been beaten up by the jocks just like the rest of us.
The blurb and TFA both use the word "psychopath", which covers pretty much any mental disorder. The detail of the article refers to people who lack empathy and conscience. That is a particular type of psychopathy - it is talking about the sociopath.
Sociopaths lack empathy, but that doesn't necessarily mean they lack a conscience. Most sociopaths recognise a logical connection between their behaviour and outcomes that leads to a different kind of conscience based on logic. Because the conscience is based on logic and the non-sociopath conscience is based on emotion (empathy), the conscience of a sociopath may well be better tuned to recognise the suffering of others outside their immediate circle. Non-sociopaths are more likely to have a conscience that is more limited to the people they actually interact with.
Of course the sociopath who has not developed this logical conscience is much more interesting to most people because they tend to leave a trail of destruction in their wake. People in this category include pretty much every spammer on the planet, and socially irresponsible business executives like Darl McBride.
Very logical people and people in the top intelligence percentiles are more likely to be sociopaths than others, so the Slashdot audience is likely to have a much larger proportion of sociopaths than the general community.
Successful business frequently requires making decisions that adversely affect those around you. If you have too much empathy, these decisions can be difficult or impossible for you to make. Sociopaths are more likely to make those decisions since their conscience, if it exists at all, is bound by logic and will recognise the necessity of the decision. TFA suggests that the high proportion of sociopaths among business managers is something of a concern. Bullshit - it's the expected outcome.
Politics is another area where sociopaths tend to be dominant, for reasons fairly similar to the reasons business leaders are more likely to be sociopaths. Politicians need to make many decisions that are going to have an adverse impact on a lot of people. Too much empathy hinders this.
As an aside, Governments use the empathy factor to their advantage. In Australia, they have gone to great lengths to ensure that refugees are not only kept segregated from society (in detention centres), and they have taken many steps to avoid "humanising" images of detainees appearing in the media. A mass media image - either a photo or a TV clip - is likely to arouse empathy among the general populace. Some of the Australian Government's internal communications have quite literally stated in so many words that people involved in immigration should take all steps possible to prevent humanising images appearing in the mass media. It's just one more way our leaders try to manipulate us. It doesn't work so well on the informed sociopath, or on the non-sociopath who has personal knowledge of the plight of refugees, but for the vast bulk of the population, it works well especially where the government can convince people that the refugees are a threat to them or people they know (in this case the empathy triggers an endorsement of the Government position).
The question is, when do we decide to do something about it? Until the coal runs out or we get it into our heads that it is time to act, whatever we see at any given moment will be a small fraction of what we are already committed to.
Depends on what you mean by "we". If you mean intelligent, thinking people, the question is rhetorical. If you mean governments, which at least in the Anglo-American sphere seem to have none of the former class of people, then the answer is "when coal, oil and natural gas run out", since they really don't give a toss about anything that doesn't help them get re-elected in four years time.
While I agree that we have a real big problem, I no longer labour under the delusion that we can actually get our moron leaders to do something useful to fix it.
Plain old executable client side apps written in C can access network information as well as any AJAX app.
That is not quite true. While they can in principle get access to the data, the security of doing it that way is lower. Server based applications put logic and security entirely on the server. A client application with direct access to the database is easily replaced by another one that does nasty things to the database because security in the database layer is necessarily less granular than security in the application layer.
Forget everything else - server based applications kick serious butt when it comes to being able to code and enforce the security rules that genuinely reflect what people should be allowed to do with the data.
An application that does not need access to a database, on the other hand, can usually find some way of benefiting from running in the native environment. Direct access to the file system is the most obvious and common requirement, but there are plenty of others.
By threatening your life, the terrorists have already taken away your freedom. Security is necessary to have freedom. So reasonable politicians... are trying to strike a balance to gain back some of the freedom lost trhough loss of security, as the expense of some other freedoms.
In other news, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true of pretty much any encyclopedia - by their nature they tend to provide concise overviews of more complex points, and if you take those concise overviews you are likely to get a very misleading impression much of the time. At least with Wikipedia you are likely to have the references you need to further check the details - in paper based encyclopedias it is only the discipline-specific encyclopedias that include full referencing.
Not quite. The manufacturer's warranty is a period during which the manufacturer effectively agrees not to dispute merchantability. Also, depending on the circumstances, where you are, and what you have done, it is possible you may have accepted a contract that includes the warranty and then the warranty may exclude the implied warranty of merchantability. You might be taken to accept the terms if you mail in the warranty card (yes, you read right - never, ever mail in warranty registration cards - it is actually (a) a mechanism that tricks you into giving up your rights; and (b) a way of getting your details for marketing) or if you have availed yourself of the warranty for a problem not attributable to unmerchantability.
In the UK and Australia, the warranty of merchantability is not excludable in consumer contracts.
the equivalent magic phrase here in the UK is "fit for purpose"
No, that's a different thing. The UK has both unmerchantability and fitness for purpose, which also exist in pretty much any common law jurisdiction (most statutes merely restate the common law, although they may go beyond that by making the warranty non-excludable or altering its terms). The warranty of fitness for purpose is one which is implied where you make the purpose (which may be clearly implied, or expressly stated) of your purchase known at the time you purchase the goods, and reasonably rely on the vendor to know if the goods are suited to that purpose - in that case there is a warranty that the goods are suited to that purpose. The warranty of merchantability is a warranty that the goods are either fit for at least one of the purposes for which goods of that kind are normally bought (common law, UK) or are fit for all of the purposes for which goods of that kind are normally bought (Australia), but this takes into account other factors like purchase price (if you pay $30 for a digital camera you should expect it to be shoddy).
In this case the quality of the CCDs is such that the cameras are, having regard to their price, unfit for any purpose for which digital cameras are ordinarily bought, since they are not bought as disposable items and two years is way too short a lifetime for a solid-state component such as a CCD.
Not so. These defects are such as to make the products unmerchantable, which gives the buyer (in this case the manufacturers) a bunch of rights that would cost Sony a lot more if they were exercised. Doing the repairs free will cost Sony a lot less than paying the value of replacement products or repairs by a third party, which is what they would be up for (plus costs) if they were sued.
There is nothing remotely attributable to honourable conduct here (and if you have dealt with Sony recently you would be aware of how thoroughly dishonourable that behemoth has become). It is self preservation, pure and simple, that has led them down this path.
That does not constitute a precedent - only a court can set a legal precedent. The ACCC also does not "rule", not being a court.
Be careful about looking at CPU usage in isolation - depending on the application, lower CPU usage may be bad rather than good. Where an application is performing CPU intensive tasks, low CPU usage usually means the application is stuck waiting for hardware for too long.
It is a common newbie programmer mistake to think "application's running slow, let's see how much we can speed it up by doing X" where X involves using more memory to reduce the instructions required to perform the task. But then you may well end up making more use of swap space (assuming a mass-deployed app you cannot assume everybody will just add more memory), slowing the app down.
On the other hand, sometimes the answer to speeding things up may be to use more memory up to the point just before you would expect swap space to start being used, even without looking at what instructions are being executed.
The tradeoff at this level is something that does need to be done by the programmer based on knowledge of what the application is doing and where the real bottlenecks are.
In TFA, the garbage collection strategies are very wasteful of memory. Java developers seem to like to say "memory is cheap", but it is not free, and a sufficiently hungry use will eventually run into a barrier in terms of price, available address space or hardware limitations. Where an application performs best by using a lot of memory all at once, it may well be that those approaches will result in lower performance rather than higher.
The upshot - you still have to choose your tools based on whether they are appropriate to the task at hand. And while I have not seen many C++ developers who will claim that C++ is the right tool for every job, it seems many Java developers like to claim Java is the right tool for every job.
(Now watch the Java bigots mod me down)
Obviously
If Sony *hadn't* tried to tie multiple things together (region coding + copy protection) and only used their chips for copy protection then they would have won.
Sorry, but that is not true. The tying was entirely irrelevant to the result in the case.
There was no such "precedent" used in this argument. There was some discussion of policy considerations and of region coding being anti-competitive and beyond the rights comprised in the copyright, but no precedent was involved at all.
That bit is not nearly as important to the case as you seem to think it is, nor is it as clear-cut as the limited quote you have made would suggest.
The result in the High Court turned on the interpretation of one word - "inhibit". The device did not "prevent" copying because it acted after the copying took place. There was no attempt to deny that one of the purposes of the device was to make the unlawfully copied game unplayable. The question was whether that would "inhibit" infringement. Sony argued that it inhibited infringement because it made the copy useless, and because it prevented it from having commercial value, thereby "inhibiting" the sale of infringing copies (itself an infringement).
The Court ruled that the inhibition must put a barrier in front of the infringement, not merely make the infringement pointless. It seems to me that preventing profit from a sale will prevent there being any value to the seller and thus put a barrier in front of the infringement. The language of the court at the point where they reached this part of their conclusion is somewhat muddled, reflecting, IMO, the fact that this is a place where their certainty was not quite as strong as with other parts.
The computer geek part of me wants to high-5 everybody in sight. The law geek part of me is somewhat uncomfortable with the way this decision was reached.
Elsewhere in the decision, the court more narrowly constrained an earlier decision by a lower court that said computer games are also protected as cinematograph films (movies), and hinted that they might be willing to overturn that decision if it were brought to them. That is promising since the protection of computer games as films could prevent imitation of other games if the "plot" of the new game is too close.
I don't think it's that simple. The mechanism certainly appears to satisfy the definition of a TPM under the Act:
Part of the design of the mechanism was to do this, but Sony had also made the same mechanism implement region coding. I have not yet read the reasons for this decision yet, but note that the Full Court of the Federal Court (three judges) had decided unanimously the other way.
Damn you reds. If it can be done, it will be done.
For espousing theories of jurisprudence where ranting and rhetoric are much more fun, I sentence you to one hour of reading /. at -1.
(Obviously the GP was a positivist, but curiously a positivist who doesn't know what the actual rules are).
Not when you factor in the likely effect of certain White House policies - if WWIII doesn't get us, and global infrastructure survives climate change well enough to support continued space flight, then scientists are likely to be burned at the stake as heretics in the new dark ages.
Ah, finally! The United States has a plan to put a stop to spam!
For a launch into space (which this is not), that will not get you out of reach of the US law if US citizens are involved in the launch. One of the handful of international space exploration treaties requires governments to regulate launches outside their territory by their citizens when the other territory has not granted a launch certificate pursuant to the treaty under its own laws. No doubt the US government has implemented this, since they seem to like anything that gives them more control over their own citizens.
You have not given us any examples, but this may well be perfectly rational behaviour. The rules for when it is an is not safe to do a particular thing can be quite complex, and it is not reasonable to expect an end user to be familiar with all of them - they have another job they need to worry about. For example, an IT department will often tell people never to open attachments, but the real rule is much more complex, and IT people are much more likely to know when it is and is not safe to open an attachment.
Programmers who are also lawyers have even stronger language skills. Study of the law leads to an appreciation for the value of precision that you do not get from a discipline where you can test your own work (within reason) - in the law if you fail to be sufficiently precise, you will find out when the judge slaps you down.
Gotta love the American education system. 18 / 295 * 100 = 6.1, not 16.39 (which would of course be exceeding the two significant figures in "18" even if it were close to the right number).
To get to 16% you would have to take out 47million.
No, that's "evil-you-shun". It's obvious really. Evil-you-shun is the work of the devil and was actually devised by al-Quaeda to steer God-fearing Southern Baptist Americans away from their faith. Have you looked at pictures of Charles Darwin and Osama bin-Laden? The beard is a dead giveaway. Plus, have you ever seen them in the same place twice? Think about it.
And of course when faced with evil-you-shun, then as a God-fearing American (and let's face it, if you're not God-fearing you have no business being an American), you'd darned well better shun it.
Archimedes wasn't cool. He was a nerd. Sure, he didn't get wedgies because he didn't wear pants (and on the odd occasion ran through the streets without wearing anything at all), but he would have been beaten up by the jocks just like the rest of us.
The blurb and TFA both use the word "psychopath", which covers pretty much any mental disorder. The detail of the article refers to people who lack empathy and conscience. That is a particular type of psychopathy - it is talking about the sociopath.
Sociopaths lack empathy, but that doesn't necessarily mean they lack a conscience. Most sociopaths recognise a logical connection between their behaviour and outcomes that leads to a different kind of conscience based on logic. Because the conscience is based on logic and the non-sociopath conscience is based on emotion (empathy), the conscience of a sociopath may well be better tuned to recognise the suffering of others outside their immediate circle. Non-sociopaths are more likely to have a conscience that is more limited to the people they actually interact with.
Of course the sociopath who has not developed this logical conscience is much more interesting to most people because they tend to leave a trail of destruction in their wake. People in this category include pretty much every spammer on the planet, and socially irresponsible business executives like Darl McBride.
Very logical people and people in the top intelligence percentiles are more likely to be sociopaths than others, so the Slashdot audience is likely to have a much larger proportion of sociopaths than the general community.
Successful business frequently requires making decisions that adversely affect those around you. If you have too much empathy, these decisions can be difficult or impossible for you to make. Sociopaths are more likely to make those decisions since their conscience, if it exists at all, is bound by logic and will recognise the necessity of the decision. TFA suggests that the high proportion of sociopaths among business managers is something of a concern. Bullshit - it's the expected outcome.
Politics is another area where sociopaths tend to be dominant, for reasons fairly similar to the reasons business leaders are more likely to be sociopaths. Politicians need to make many decisions that are going to have an adverse impact on a lot of people. Too much empathy hinders this.
As an aside, Governments use the empathy factor to their advantage. In Australia, they have gone to great lengths to ensure that refugees are not only kept segregated from society (in detention centres), and they have taken many steps to avoid "humanising" images of detainees appearing in the media. A mass media image - either a photo or a TV clip - is likely to arouse empathy among the general populace. Some of the Australian Government's internal communications have quite literally stated in so many words that people involved in immigration should take all steps possible to prevent humanising images appearing in the mass media. It's just one more way our leaders try to manipulate us. It doesn't work so well on the informed sociopath, or on the non-sociopath who has personal knowledge of the plight of refugees, but for the vast bulk of the population, it works well especially where the government can convince people that the refugees are a threat to them or people they know (in this case the empathy triggers an endorsement of the Government position).
Yes. For any definition of "we" that includes the entire population and their effect on the vote.
Depends on what you mean by "we". If you mean intelligent, thinking people, the question is rhetorical. If you mean governments, which at least in the Anglo-American sphere seem to have none of the former class of people, then the answer is "when coal, oil and natural gas run out", since they really don't give a toss about anything that doesn't help them get re-elected in four years time.
While I agree that we have a real big problem, I no longer labour under the delusion that we can actually get our moron leaders to do something useful to fix it.
That is not quite true. While they can in principle get access to the data, the security of doing it that way is lower. Server based applications put logic and security entirely on the server. A client application with direct access to the database is easily replaced by another one that does nasty things to the database because security in the database layer is necessarily less granular than security in the application layer.
Forget everything else - server based applications kick serious butt when it comes to being able to code and enforce the security rules that genuinely reflect what people should be allowed to do with the data.
An application that does not need access to a database, on the other hand, can usually find some way of benefiting from running in the native environment. Direct access to the file system is the most obvious and common requirement, but there are plenty of others.
In other news, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.