The same defenders of privacy who complain about as much as giving their name to the New York Times registration page, now feel free to drop all their data, search patterns, pictures, email and appointments in Google.
They know what you like, who are your friends, what your familiy looks like, where you look live, what your house looks like and what you do day in and day out. Let's face it, Google owns you. They make the KGB look like amateurs.
In Capitalist USA, the KGB is a private for-profit enterprise, the people willingly surrender their personal data and the data is passed on to whatever large corporation has the means to pay for it.
This is true. More sophisticated users are likely to dig deeper, issue queries with more terms and refine their searchers further. Unsophisticated users type very few terms, rarely go past the first page and tend to abandon the search session altogether if the response is not found. My statistics are a bit old, but I pressume this is still very much the case.
Just because you are an ignoramus it does not mean everyone else is too. My stats are backed up by the query logs of the search engine I was in charge of, and are matched by papers published in the WWW conference by others.
This has nothing to do with Google. There have been similar studies dating back to 1995. At best about 30% of users go to the next page, and of those 30% go to the page after that and so on. This means that the the fourth page is seen by less than 3% of users.
What I would expect is that with Google the number of people who go to the second page is even lower than before, perhaps 10-20%, which means less than 0.1-1% of users reach the fourth page.
Put it this way - show me the last time someone successfully used a British statute from the 17th century as valid case law in America.
Easy, and very relevant to our subject: every contract signed before the declaration of independence was still considered valid the day after. How was that contract interpreted? under the British statute even after independence and the writing of the constitution.
Hence the legal principle is there: in principle an old British statute can still have legal weight today.
Of course, in practice the answer is: very unlikely, as almost any valid law has been rewritten many times over by congress since independence.
This is a red herring. The portions of the English language that described the legal system at the time derive their meaning from English law. Judge, property right, crime, libel, etc.
The American legal system is spelled out sufficiently without invoking British law.
Today, after 230 years of case law, that is mostly the case, back then it was the complete opposite.
Or one could stop trying to read tea leaves and actually interpret what's written down, which was quite clearly Jefferson's intent, from his own writings on the matter.
And in the case of the first amendment, what is written down is that there are rights not explicitly written down which therefore will be subject to interpretation.
They also routinely look at Canadian and Australian cases, to understand how case law has been interpreted in similar jurisdictions. Of course this only applies when the underlying statutes are similar in nature. They are not construed as precedent setting, but just like the parent says, it can have a major impact on the judge's decision.
That is exactly what the constitution authors wanted. The consitution was written in English, using the English legal tradition and standard English meanings. When they wrote the word "judge" the meant a judge as understood in the british system. When they wrote the word trial, they meant a trial as understood in the british system.
In other words, every unstated assumption is to be resolved using the customs, practices and semantics of the day, which were, lo-and-behold the British customs. Particularly those rights that are not explicitly stated, but not to be construed as non-existent, as per the first amendment.
In Usenet/early-web days someone asked a big shot expert lawyer on this, and the comment was that an email with proper headings would be definitely be accepted as evidence towards the fact that a contract existed, just like a partially water-damaged paper contract would.
It would then be up to the court to decide if the evidence considered altogether (such as a sequence of emails leading up to the contract) constituted proof of contract. Certainly a single email out of the blue saying "I want a million widgets at 10c each delivered tomorrow." without any other context would not be considered proof, while a sequence of emails negotiating price punctuated with a last email stating "you have a deal, deliver a million widgets at 10c each tomorrow at our warehouse in 234 Main St. W, payment due upon delivery" would be most certainly constitute a contract. He did recommend however that this email had a "signature" at the end in the form of the typed name of the person making the purchase.
It is interesting to see that this judgement matches that. Perhaps someone with better searching skills than I can find the posting using google groups.
But it doesn't have to be that way. I too have a one-in-several-thousands IQ, but with proper coaching was able to overcome my ADD like problems. I still work on ten different projects at any given time, but I did learn to sit down long enough to learn something, take it to completion and stop using the ADD as an excuse.
People love Apple because it is cool, but in practice Apple has done little for its users.
It all started when Apple came out with the deadend Lisa, followed by the incompatible Mac which left Apple ][ users out to hang, followed by many years of overpriced macs with small monochromatic monitors. Then from the early 90s til the introduction of OSX mac users were subjected to a remarkably flaky OS that made windows 95 look like a monolith of stability. Users were so totally fed-up that they engaged in extremely costly migrations to windows with Apple's market share falling from over 25% down to below 2%. When Mac clones were finally allowed there was such a a massive rush for the exits that Steve Jobs had to cancel the clone licensing program. Recently, under Jobs' aegis, Mac users were left with underpowered laptops even though it has been clear for well over a decade ago that the Intel line would, in practice, be superior thanks to their unlimited R&D budget. What has Apple track record been in responding to user requests such as two button mice? Love it or leave it!
During the first Gulf War, the pentagon released footage of a self-guided missile which had been trained on a truck driving down the highway. Luck had it that the truck drives into a huge crater left by an earlier bomb and disappears from the view finder of the missile.
The missile is no longer locked on target and unsure what to do, when suddenly the driver of the truck climbs out the hole and back into the field of view and starts running. The self-guided missile, in the absence of all other more valuable targets is programmed to strike humans so it zeroes in on the poor bastard and blows them again.
Wrong answer. If you can see her naked from the sidewalk she was in the public sphere and had no expectation of privacy. If it took climbing a tree and binoculars to see her, she had a reasonable expectation of privacy and it is illegal.
Actually, when I was working in a rather large ISP we were studying exactly this idea. How can we (the ISP) transfer money to content providers (such as on-line magazines and newspapers) so that they remain viable, which in turn creates demand for bandwidth from our customers.
This is the cable model, in which cable pays the TV channel for the content not the other way around. BellSouth is plain out to lunch on this one.
They probably aren't. They have increased risk of rollover and require substantially longer distances to break. I've seen video of a competent driver in a small sports car swerve around a pedestrian that runs into the road. The same test on a SUV leads to (a) the pedestrian being hit and (b) the SUV rolling over 270, then sliding on it side and hitting a telephone pole across the street.
SUVs are not safer than a smaller car. A smaller car with its better handling and breaking capabilities is a safer car in all but a very limited number of scenarios such as a frontal collision. The big three spun these exceptional scenarios so much that nowadays the average American has come to equate size with safety. Nothing further from the truth.
I informed my boss that I would be quitting as soon as we completed our current project, and that I would not leave any time earlier than that, as I would never leave my team stranded halfway a project. I also asked him not to tell my team so as not to demoralize them. In the end this was in the order of six weeks notice which was sufficient for him to plan a replacement strategy.
Once we had finished everything to satisfaction, I told my boss that I would be gone at the end of the week. He gave me two extra weeks of salary and told me that I would retain priviliged access to all accounts for another two months, in case my help was needed. He's a class guy and not long after that he was promoted.
A little known fact is that the US government is allowed to expropriate patents if this is in the national interest. If NTP plays its hand too strongly, the Pentagon will move in an take away their patent. NTP will still get proper compensantion, but this will be lower than the $450m they were offered by RIM. That is why the government filed the amicus brief: to put NTP on notice. They seemed to have missed the signal.
I agree, yet looking over my best code it is the complete opposite: my best code has a nearly a one-to-one line of code to comment ratio... The code is very succinct as most low level instructions have been abstracted into their own methods/subroutines.
As other have said the comments indicate the strategy rather than the tactics. The tactics are derived from good function and variable names. E.g. if the program iterates over each element of a list object and computes its absolute value should be totally readable from the code. What the comments say is: we compute the absolute value since at this time we only care about the total amount of buckets we need to allocate, later on we will distinguish between positive and negative entries...
Personally its frustrating to see a show describe what it does "science" when it completely lacks any scientific rigeur.
You are wrong about that. It does not "completely lack any scientific rigeur". They repeat their tests under various assumptions... in fact I would call what they do fairly good amateur science....
Slashdot Mirror
The same defenders of privacy who complain about as much as giving their name to the New York Times registration page, now feel free to drop all their data, search patterns, pictures, email and appointments in Google.
They know what you like, who are your friends, what your familiy looks like, where you look live, what your house looks like and what you do day in and day out. Let's face it, Google owns you. They make the KGB look like amateurs.
In Capitalist USA, the KGB is a private for-profit enterprise, the people willingly surrender their personal data and the data is passed on to whatever large corporation has the means to pay for it.
Huh? I have the stats collected from a search engine, you have a link to wikipedia.
This is true. More sophisticated users are likely to dig deeper, issue queries with more terms and refine their searchers further. Unsophisticated users type very few terms, rarely go past the first page and tend to abandon the search session altogether if the response is not found. My statistics are a bit old, but I pressume this is still very much the case.
Just because you are an ignoramus it does not mean everyone else is too. My stats are backed up by the query logs of the search engine I was in charge of, and are matched by papers published in the WWW conference by others.
This has nothing to do with Google. There have been similar studies dating back to 1995. At best about 30% of users go to the next page, and of those 30% go to the page after that and so on. This means that the the fourth page is seen by less than 3% of users.
What I would expect is that with Google the number of people who go to the second page is even lower than before, perhaps 10-20%, which means less than 0.1-1% of users reach the fourth page.
This is an honest question: would a document that is a photocopy of a photocopy be considered triple hearsay?
Put it this way - show me the last time someone successfully used a British statute from the 17th century as valid case law in America.
Easy, and very relevant to our subject: every contract signed before the declaration of independence was still considered valid the day after. How was that contract interpreted? under the British statute even after independence and the writing of the constitution.
Hence the legal principle is there: in principle an old British statute can still have legal weight today.
Of course, in practice the answer is: very unlikely, as almost any valid law has been rewritten many times over by congress since independence.
English language != English law
This is a red herring. The portions of the English language that described the legal system at the time derive their meaning from English law. Judge, property right, crime, libel, etc.
The American legal system is spelled out sufficiently without invoking British law.
Today, after 230 years of case law, that is mostly the case, back then it was the complete opposite.
Or one could stop trying to read tea leaves and actually interpret what's written down, which was quite clearly Jefferson's intent, from his own writings on the matter.
And in the case of the first amendment, what is written down is that there are rights not explicitly written down which therefore will be subject to interpretation.
They also routinely look at Canadian and Australian cases, to understand how case law has been interpreted in similar jurisdictions. Of course this only applies when the underlying statutes are similar in nature. They are not construed as precedent setting, but just like the parent says, it can have a major impact on the judge's decision.
That is exactly what the constitution authors wanted. The consitution was written in English, using the English legal tradition and standard English meanings. When they wrote the word "judge" the meant a judge as understood in the british system. When they wrote the word trial, they meant a trial as understood in the british system.
In other words, every unstated assumption is to be resolved using the customs, practices and semantics of the day, which were, lo-and-behold the British customs. Particularly those rights that are not explicitly stated, but not to be construed as non-existent, as per the first amendment.
In Usenet/early-web days someone asked a big shot expert lawyer on this, and the comment was that an email with proper headings would be definitely be accepted as evidence towards the fact that a contract existed, just like a partially water-damaged paper contract would.
It would then be up to the court to decide if the evidence considered altogether (such as a sequence of emails leading up to the contract) constituted proof of contract. Certainly a single email out of the blue saying "I want a million widgets at 10c each delivered tomorrow." without any other context would not be considered proof, while a sequence of emails negotiating price punctuated with a last email stating "you have a deal, deliver a million widgets at 10c each tomorrow at our warehouse in 234 Main St. W, payment due upon delivery" would be most certainly constitute a contract. He did recommend however that this email had a "signature" at the end in the form of the typed name of the person making the purchase.
It is interesting to see that this judgement matches that. Perhaps someone with better searching skills than I can find the posting using google groups.
He's right. Pre-independence British law applies as common law in the USA if it has not been superseded by a more modern congress-approved law.
But it doesn't have to be that way. I too have a one-in-several-thousands IQ, but with proper coaching was able to overcome my ADD like problems. I still work on ten different projects at any given time, but I did learn to sit down long enough to learn something, take it to completion and stop using the ADD as an excuse.
People love Apple because it is cool, but in practice Apple has done little for its users.
It all started when Apple came out with the deadend Lisa, followed by the incompatible Mac which left Apple ][ users out to hang, followed by many years of overpriced macs with small monochromatic monitors. Then from the early 90s til the introduction of OSX mac users were subjected to a remarkably flaky OS that made windows 95 look like a monolith of stability. Users were so totally fed-up that they engaged in extremely costly migrations to windows with Apple's market share falling from over 25% down to below 2%. When Mac clones were finally allowed there was such a a massive rush for the exits that Steve Jobs had to cancel the clone licensing program. Recently, under Jobs' aegis, Mac users were left with underpowered laptops even though it has been clear for well over a decade ago that the Intel line would, in practice, be superior thanks to their unlimited R&D budget. What has Apple track record been in responding to user requests such as two button mice? Love it or leave it!
NT is actually a pretty good architecture as far as OS design goes,
Actually original NT kernel is world class architecture as far as OS design goes.
During the first Gulf War, the pentagon released footage of a self-guided missile which had been trained on a truck driving down the highway. Luck had it that the truck drives into a huge crater left by an earlier bomb and disappears from the view finder of the missile.
The missile is no longer locked on target and unsure what to do, when suddenly the driver of the truck climbs out the hole and back into the field of view and starts running. The self-guided missile, in the absence of all other more valuable targets is programmed to strike humans so it zeroes in on the poor bastard and blows them again.
Wrong answer. If you can see her naked from the sidewalk she was in the public sphere and had no expectation of privacy. If it took climbing a tree and binoculars to see her, she had a reasonable expectation of privacy and it is illegal.
Actually, when I was working in a rather large ISP we were studying exactly this idea. How can we (the ISP) transfer money to content providers (such as on-line magazines and newspapers) so that they remain viable, which in turn creates demand for bandwidth from our customers.
This is the cable model, in which cable pays the TV channel for the content not the other way around. BellSouth is plain out to lunch on this one.
They probably aren't. They have increased risk of rollover and require substantially longer distances to break. I've seen video of a competent driver in a small sports car swerve around a pedestrian that runs into the road. The same test on a SUV leads to (a) the pedestrian being hit and (b) the SUV rolling over 270, then sliding on it side and hitting a telephone pole across the street.
SUVs are not safer than a smaller car. A smaller car with its better handling and breaking capabilities is a safer car in all but a very limited number of scenarios such as a frontal collision. The big three spun these exceptional scenarios so much that nowadays the average American has come to equate size with safety. Nothing further from the truth.
The company was croaking.
I informed my boss that I would be quitting as soon as we completed our current project, and that I would not leave any time earlier than that, as I would never leave my team stranded halfway a project. I also asked him not to tell my team so as not to demoralize them. In the end this was in the order of six weeks notice which was sufficient for him to plan a replacement strategy.
Once we had finished everything to satisfaction, I told my boss that I would be gone at the end of the week. He gave me two extra weeks of salary and told me that I would retain priviliged access to all accounts for another two months, in case my help was needed. He's a class guy and not long after that he was promoted.
Chalk one down for the good guys for once.
A little known fact is that the US government is allowed to expropriate patents if this is in the national interest. If NTP plays its hand too strongly, the Pentagon will move in an take away their patent. NTP will still get proper compensantion, but this will be lower than the $450m they were offered by RIM. That is why the government filed the amicus brief: to put NTP on notice. They seemed to have missed the signal.
Mark my words.
I agree, yet looking over my best code it is the complete opposite: my best code has a nearly a one-to-one line of code to comment ratio... The code is very succinct as most low level instructions have been abstracted into their own methods/subroutines.
As other have said the comments indicate the strategy rather than the tactics. The tactics are derived from good function and variable names. E.g. if the program iterates over each element of a list object and computes its absolute value should be totally readable from the code. What the comments say is: we compute the absolute value since at this time we only care about the total amount of buckets we need to allocate, later on we will distinguish between positive and negative entries...
Personally its frustrating to see a show describe what it does "science" when it completely lacks any scientific rigeur.
You are wrong about that. It does not "completely lack any scientific rigeur". They repeat their tests under various assumptions... in fact I would call what they do fairly good amateur science....