I think Microsoft may have been considering the scope of this problem for a long time. They stopped the hubristic practice of naming "guaranteed unique" identifiers as UUIDs (Universally Unique IDentifiers) and started referring to them as GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifiers.)
Why would they change horses in the middle of the race, with all the expense of changing documentation, supporting two naming systems, and all of the resultant confusion, unless there was a reason to not refer to them as "Universal"?
OK, maybe it's because they were trying to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" the RFC defining UUIDs. But I'd prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt, and say that they were "forward thinking", looking at the problems of networking in space.
BWA HA HA HA! Sorry, I couldn't keep a straight face for that last bit.
But it is about vigilantes because there are no effective laws here, no Internet Cops busting the evil bot herders. There are some TOS contracts that ISP's can kind-of hide behind when they occasionally yank the plug. But why did this responsibility fall to their upstream providers?
If this really was a giant botnet hub, why didn't "real" law enforcement take them down? Because there are no effective laws, and no effective law enforcement who thinks they have the proper jurisdiction. The Secret Service or FBI only show up when there are "popular" crimes when they know they can make arrests, such as child porn or credit card thieves. Nobody in law enforcement cares about spammers or DDoS extortionists or bot herders because they're run out of little Eastern European internet cafes, and the FBI can't find or reach them.
Vigilantes are pretty much all we have working for us right now. And that's the way it's always been on the internet.
When you have no law, nobody with legal authority, vigilantes and posses will form to deal with issues. Human history is filled with evidence of this. Usually, the citizens demand a code of law to emerge from the chaos after some gross miscarriage of justice is perpetrated by an overzealous vigilante. The internet hasn't had that yet.
The internet is still in the stage where vigilantes mostly take care of it, and likely will be for some time to come. Certain nations lay claim to certain aspects of internet behavior of their citizens (we almost all agree that child porn is bad, for example.) But the more restrictive you get, the fewer people are in agreement. We'll never get the whole globe to agree on standards for porn, political content, religious content, etc., so it will be almost impossible for a Global Internet Police Force to arise.
I think the undefined-but-pragmatic status we're in will last quite a while longer, and the vigilantism will increase. Maybe the future will hold an odd-bedfellows agreement along the lines of the UK/USA spying deal. U.S. vigilantes will not be extradited for committing a good-faith takedown of a Russian spammer. And Russian vigilantes will not be extradited for taking down an American spammer.
Actually, when it comes to generics, drugs are not very different than car doors. The chemicals are supposed to be the same, but the other components may be cheaper. And there may be qualitative functional differences in the packaging. "Time release" is sometimes achieved by coating particles with compounds that have measured rates of decomposition in stomach acid, and with some percentage of particles to be coated heavier than others. There is no guarantee that a generic has to mimic that behavior, or that a generic uses the same coatings, or that a generic will release the same percentage over time. Those coatings and methods are frequently the targets of their own patents.
For example, if a doctor prescribes one 1000mg pill of time release brand X per day, your pharmacist may tell you to take one 250mg tablet of generic X every six hours, or two 500mg tablets every 12 hours, based on the effects of the drug.
Now, does that matter when you're talking acetaminophen? No. Aspirin? Maybe you need to shop around if you have a sensitive stomach, but for the most part no. But antidepressants or blood pressure medications? Do you really know what those extra "brand name" attributes are, or how they would affect you? I'm not a pharmacist, so I certainly wouldn't.
Of course, to your point, scare tactic advertising was part of the lawsuit against Knoll Pharmaceuticals, makers of Synthroid. For seven years, they suppressed their own paid-for study that showed the generic levothyroxine was equally as effective as their name brand Synthroid. They advertised heavily that you should only trust the brand name drug, all the while knowing that generics were bioequivalent.
(despite the fact that generics are composed of essentially the same active ingredients)
Have you bought generic or third party hardware before? I'm thinking of a replacement car fender a body shop once tried to sell me. The steel was thinner than the original steel, and much more flexible. The rolled form of the fender didn't exactly line up with the rolled form of the original. The factory fender, on the other hand, was a perfect match to the original part. I'm sure the car would have *looked* like it was supposed to, but if you examine the fit and finish up close, it's evident that it's not a perfect match.
I think of that every time I buy a generic product. You pay less for a generic product for many reasons: the lack of a patent license or advertising are only two attributes of the lower cost. The materials may be inferior. The measurements may not be as precise. How many of those "low quality" attributes carry over to generic medicines? Am I getting the correct dosage? Is this product cut with food-grade corn starch or with clay dug out from the field next to the factory? Did they copy the binding agents that keep it from irritating my stomach, or did they use their own binding agents that might not work for me, and do those new agents have any interactions with the medicine?
I'm not saying generics are bad or ineffective -- I usually buy them. But I always think of the quality differences on the products I can see, and wonder about those differences that I can't.
Why humanize it? The best data centers are dark. Open them up once in a while for a maintenance monkey to swap hard drives in exchange for bananas, and call it a day. Why do they care if the monkey gets to look at a fish tank in between hard drive changes?
I started writing it in CAPSLOCK but then I remembered the lameness filter. And I didn't screw up the grammar because it was supposed to be sent to Nigeria from Microsoft, not the other way around. But oh well.
When I was a kid I loved my 50-in-One Electronics Kit from Rat Shack. They still make some kits: Electronics Learning Lab although I don't know if a 13-year-old would care as much as a 10-year-old.
My name is Thomas Hansen and I am a regional manager for Microsoft West, a prominent software company that does business with the Government of Nigeria. In strictest confidence I am writing to you about the matter of a great magnitude of money.
Last year, my company was involved in negotiations with your government in the drawing up of a joint marketing agreement for business. During the last military regime of Nigeria, some government officials set up a fund and awarded themselves contracts for the purchase of software. The present civilian government has set up a contract review panel, and has identified ours as one that can be replaced with no cost to your government. Without further review, these contracts could amount to USD$40,000,000 (forty million U.S. dollars) or more.
I am authorized to offer you 1% of the value of these contracts, USD$400,000, in exchange for the erasure of the competing offer. Please note this transaction is 100% safe and legal. I will commence the transferring of the funds within 72 business hours upon receipt of your bank account number. Please fax your account and driver's license to 1-419-419-4190 to continue with this transaction.
I am looking forward to doing business with you and solicit your confidential reply to this transaction.
Rockets are far less reliable than boats. A disaster could spread the waste far and wide across the atmosphere.
The environmental damage caused by rocket launches is not insignificant. The exhaust is not benign.
While the amount of energy it takes to boost a rocket to a low earth orbit (LEO) is high, getting it to earth's escape velocity is much higher. The Saturn V had a LEO payload capacity of 260,000 pounds, but a lunar payload of only 100,000 pounds. The Saturn V rocket weighed 6.6 million pounds at launch, almost all of which was fuel and oxygen.
Each Saturn launch cost about $3 billion dollars in today's terms. That's not a cost effective garbage truck.
Perhaps this can somehow be used to demonstrate that nuclear waste can be safely disposed of in the ocean floor? There have been serious proposals for disposing of waste in holes drilled hundreds of feet beneath the seabed in especially deep water.
I know this is unpopular with the anti-nuclear crowd, but a "real demo" may provide useful data.
Assuming there may be some people motivated to become developers, "Design Patters" would fit the timeless bill better than most. So would books on analysis and design, like Booch's "Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications".
How come they don't track down the IP addresses of infected computers and inform the users their computer is compromised? It seems these researchers also are getting a kick out of the botnet at the cost of the victims.
I think that would have been a responsible end to the study, but there was no mention in their paper of a "cleanup" phase. They did, however, take great care to follow an ethical code and "strictly reduce harm". To them, that meant: do not send victims actual malware, do not send victims to actual spammer sites, and do not collect credit card information. The spammers' victims were never "worse off" for having participated in the campaign.
Of course, contacting these people saying "you were identified in a spam campaign" would likely lead to thousands of lawsuits. The victims might have claimed "why didn't you stop me?" It's a messed up legal situation already.
"...is designed to support body weight, reduce stress on the knees and help people get up steps and stay in crouching positions"
Why do the Japanese want us to stay in crouching positions?
Crouching. Y'know, like the tigers. And the dragons.
Actually, TFA says why: many Honda factory workers have to crouch for extended periods to perform assembly or inspections beneath automobile frames. This kind of gives them a built-in, portable chair.
Well, I RTFA. The guy addresses this point directly:
In talking to a few colleagues about this fascinating business, I learned that most private equity shops shy away from dating sites for a number of reasons:
Dating sites are known for tremendously high churn rates (if your product works, your customers never have to come back; if it doesn't they see no reason to come back). This means dating sites have to keep a steady flow of new customers coming into the top of the funnel in order to survive, let alone grow revenue and profit.
High churn rates mean new customers have low, volatile expected lifetime values. This has a negative impact on the equity value of each customer, making it difficult to justify the valuation multiples seen by membership-driven websites in other verticals.
The need to keep more and more new customers coming in creates a necessity for massive marketing budgets that often involve aggressive affiliate marketing (i.e. paying third parties to bring you new customers). This further damages the perceived value of the user base to a potential investor or acquirer.
Like social networking, "online dating" is a natural monopoly (or, at best, a natural oligopoly). A dating site's quality is determined by the number and quality of matches it can provide a new user, which is directly tied to the size of its membership base. This makes it extremely difficult to enter the market.
However, just because something isn't a great investment prospect doesn't mean it's a bad business. Many, many people have become obscenely wealthy in this industry (both online and offline). The technology required to connect two people is trivial, meaning your only real expense is the cost of customer acquisition. If you are part of the natural oligopoly, your product quality will be high and people will seek you out. This cycle lowers your costs and sends your margins skyrocketing.
Furthermore, the online dating industry has made a lot of secondary players wealthy thanks to affiliate marketing. At times, online dating sites have paid as much as $100 per head for new paying customers, and routinely pay out at least a few dollars for new "free trial" users or other prospects. This means anyone with the power to herd single internet users can potentially tap into a strong monetization engine.
As an aside, knowledge of how to sleuth out domain registration and correlation is somewhat de rigeur for most of us in the Slashdot audience, and as such should reduce the newsworthiness of the story.
I still think it's newsworthy when someone uses nerd-like skills to reveal a secret. Sure, we've probably all done our share of reverse DNSing and whoising a few spammers and phishers, but most of us haven't uncovered a vast global conspiracy while doing so. I admire the guy for that bit of sleuthing.
RAID5 for CDs? Is there anything where I can burn 3 CDs with a 'set' of data. When I want to restore my data I just put in each disk sequentially and then it does some RAID5 magic and spits out my data?
Be a cool project, IMHO.
That's really clever, but it creates two dependencies. One on the physical media, and the other on having the software available in the future to decode them (and a platform that can run that software.) Shouldn't be too hard in the Linux world because they never seem to throw anything away, but I'm thinking back to funky backup software from the old DOS days that I'd never be able to recover today.
The GP was claiming the person who writes the code from scratch should do so because "that way you know exactly what it can do", and that implies "I don't need to document it because I know it." Yes, you can write a good reusable module and document it, but then you pay for that documentation in addition to paying for the code itself. And you pay for ongoing maintenance on that code and documentation. It's expensive. With an external library or framework, that's one less chunk of code I'm worried about.
And yes, I know the STL isn't in the language itself, and yes, most embedded systems have explicit proscriptions against dynamic memory allocation. I am not in such an industry and I do not have those restrictions, so I don't worry about it as much as others. But I want developers who know and embrace the STL because I don't want homegrown versions of simple, proven code anymore. The STL is a standard (that's what the "S" bit stands for:-) and should be used before any custom code is written. I am thoroughly tired of finding homegrown code because the developer didn't know better or had some misguided notion about the STL (possibly learned from an embedded background) that makes them think they need to write their own. I can point to two independent occurrences of this in our legacy code base today, and both have had bugs in their implementations that required maintenance efforts to go fix.
Your arguments make sense in the corner case of an embedded system with non-standard requirements. Fine, I understand that. "Not standard" is a perfectly valid argument (one I occasionally like to trot out to justify my own decisions.) But in the case of a standards-based system where those restrictions don't exist, people who claim "Not Invented Here" are wasting time and money in the business world, and making the lives of the maintainers a nightmare.
The ones truly getting the shaft in all this are the TV broadcasters. It was always their band, so companies like Sennheiser made the gear for them to use in their own space. Nothing wrong with that. But everyone else went and bought that gear without the right to operate it, and now they feel entitled. And it's not currently made in other frequencies because Sennheiser built it only for their primary customers -- the already licensed users of the spectrum.
They've manufactured perfectly legal equipment for a licensed band, and a bunch of unlicensed users bought it and used it. That hardly makes it legal. So the non-legal users can start licensing some of the commercial UHF frequencies, just like everybody else who needs the exclusive use of RF for some business purpose. And it's going to cost them, and people are going to whine, and all because they suddenly have to pay their fair share. Don't worry if the gear's not there today, because if there's a dollar to be made selling it someone will start making it tomorrow.
Churches and cities can keep using their old, now-legal gear, and now it's official. But they're taking chances with shared spectrum just like anyone else. My city probably won't have the budget for replacement microphones and licensed spectrum, but that doesn't mean their current gear stops working: they just have to hope that some guy with a Fisher-Price baby monitor or a laptop won't start abusing it. But professional entertainers such as singers and NFL commentators will most likely step up and license a frequency because they can't afford to take the chance of some drunk interrupting a live performance with a baby monitor.
Why yes, my life has indeed been negatively impacted. I've been paying the FCC for licenses to use a tiny portion of the spectrum. And I've been supporting more than my fair share because these scofflaws have not been paying at all.
Without the revenue from the licenses, we would have no regulatory body, and without rules we simply would not have any working RF devices at all. A few giant broadcasters would be pumping megawatts into a handful of megastations, and we'd probably be getting nothing but crappy AM radio leaking interference into every electronic device in existence. Nobody would be responsible for ensuring their signals are of high quality and don't leak. Tiny signals would be drowned out. Cell phones would be impossible, as would any of the GPRS / 3G / EDGE type networking solutions. The fact that the FCC has provided this badly needed regulation says to me that they're an effective body (despite Pacifica and the censorship issues.)
And the licenses pay for it all. My license and my dollars have paid for my small portion of it. Their money has not. It's time for them to pick up the slack since they're reaping the benefit.
Harm? I'm not wishing harm on them nearly as much as I'm cheering the equality that's being forced upon them. If they want interference-free equipment, they'll now have to license it just like everyone else.
I have ALWAYS paid for my FCC licenses because the law says I'm supposed to. They didn't, and never have.
I might have had one ounce of sympathy if they didn't rise up as a group crying when someone else wanted to share their sandbox. But no, they've been using something for free that was not lawfully theirs to use in the first place, and now the FCC has said "it's a public sandbox and everyone else gets to play there too."
Slashdot Mirror
I think Microsoft may have been considering the scope of this problem for a long time. They stopped the hubristic practice of naming "guaranteed unique" identifiers as UUIDs (Universally Unique IDentifiers) and started referring to them as GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifiers.)
Why would they change horses in the middle of the race, with all the expense of changing documentation, supporting two naming systems, and all of the resultant confusion, unless there was a reason to not refer to them as "Universal"?
OK, maybe it's because they were trying to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" the RFC defining UUIDs. But I'd prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt, and say that they were "forward thinking", looking at the problems of networking in space.
BWA HA HA HA! Sorry, I couldn't keep a straight face for that last bit.
But it is about vigilantes because there are no effective laws here, no Internet Cops busting the evil bot herders. There are some TOS contracts that ISP's can kind-of hide behind when they occasionally yank the plug. But why did this responsibility fall to their upstream providers?
If this really was a giant botnet hub, why didn't "real" law enforcement take them down? Because there are no effective laws, and no effective law enforcement who thinks they have the proper jurisdiction. The Secret Service or FBI only show up when there are "popular" crimes when they know they can make arrests, such as child porn or credit card thieves. Nobody in law enforcement cares about spammers or DDoS extortionists or bot herders because they're run out of little Eastern European internet cafes, and the FBI can't find or reach them.
Vigilantes are pretty much all we have working for us right now. And that's the way it's always been on the internet.
When you have no law, nobody with legal authority, vigilantes and posses will form to deal with issues. Human history is filled with evidence of this. Usually, the citizens demand a code of law to emerge from the chaos after some gross miscarriage of justice is perpetrated by an overzealous vigilante. The internet hasn't had that yet.
The internet is still in the stage where vigilantes mostly take care of it, and likely will be for some time to come. Certain nations lay claim to certain aspects of internet behavior of their citizens (we almost all agree that child porn is bad, for example.) But the more restrictive you get, the fewer people are in agreement. We'll never get the whole globe to agree on standards for porn, political content, religious content, etc., so it will be almost impossible for a Global Internet Police Force to arise.
I think the undefined-but-pragmatic status we're in will last quite a while longer, and the vigilantism will increase. Maybe the future will hold an odd-bedfellows agreement along the lines of the UK/USA spying deal. U.S. vigilantes will not be extradited for committing a good-faith takedown of a Russian spammer. And Russian vigilantes will not be extradited for taking down an American spammer.
it has to look good, make the client happy, and stand up.
Same could be said of a prostitute, although the standing is optional.
I've experiments to run,
there is research to be done
on the people who are still alive.
Actually, when it comes to generics, drugs are not very different than car doors. The chemicals are supposed to be the same, but the other components may be cheaper. And there may be qualitative functional differences in the packaging. "Time release" is sometimes achieved by coating particles with compounds that have measured rates of decomposition in stomach acid, and with some percentage of particles to be coated heavier than others. There is no guarantee that a generic has to mimic that behavior, or that a generic uses the same coatings, or that a generic will release the same percentage over time. Those coatings and methods are frequently the targets of their own patents.
For example, if a doctor prescribes one 1000mg pill of time release brand X per day, your pharmacist may tell you to take one 250mg tablet of generic X every six hours, or two 500mg tablets every 12 hours, based on the effects of the drug.
Now, does that matter when you're talking acetaminophen? No. Aspirin? Maybe you need to shop around if you have a sensitive stomach, but for the most part no. But antidepressants or blood pressure medications? Do you really know what those extra "brand name" attributes are, or how they would affect you? I'm not a pharmacist, so I certainly wouldn't.
Of course, to your point, scare tactic advertising was part of the lawsuit against Knoll Pharmaceuticals, makers of Synthroid. For seven years, they suppressed their own paid-for study that showed the generic levothyroxine was equally as effective as their name brand Synthroid. They advertised heavily that you should only trust the brand name drug, all the while knowing that generics were bioequivalent.
I was worried about being dismissed as one 'o' them tinfoil-hat people. Will paranoia become the new "sane"? :)
It already has, but we've all agreed to not tell you.
(despite the fact that generics are composed of essentially the same active ingredients)
Have you bought generic or third party hardware before? I'm thinking of a replacement car fender a body shop once tried to sell me. The steel was thinner than the original steel, and much more flexible. The rolled form of the fender didn't exactly line up with the rolled form of the original. The factory fender, on the other hand, was a perfect match to the original part. I'm sure the car would have *looked* like it was supposed to, but if you examine the fit and finish up close, it's evident that it's not a perfect match.
I think of that every time I buy a generic product. You pay less for a generic product for many reasons: the lack of a patent license or advertising are only two attributes of the lower cost. The materials may be inferior. The measurements may not be as precise. How many of those "low quality" attributes carry over to generic medicines? Am I getting the correct dosage? Is this product cut with food-grade corn starch or with clay dug out from the field next to the factory? Did they copy the binding agents that keep it from irritating my stomach, or did they use their own binding agents that might not work for me, and do those new agents have any interactions with the medicine?
I'm not saying generics are bad or ineffective -- I usually buy them. But I always think of the quality differences on the products I can see, and wonder about those differences that I can't.
Why humanize it? The best data centers are dark. Open them up once in a while for a maintenance monkey to swap hard drives in exchange for bananas, and call it a day. Why do they care if the monkey gets to look at a fish tank in between hard drive changes?
I started writing it in CAPSLOCK but then I remembered the lameness filter. And I didn't screw up the grammar because it was supposed to be sent to Nigeria from Microsoft, not the other way around. But oh well.
When I was a kid I loved my 50-in-One Electronics Kit from Rat Shack. They still make some kits: Electronics Learning Lab although I don't know if a 13-year-old would care as much as a 10-year-old.
Here's their kit category: http://www.radioshack.com/family/index.jsp?categoryId=2032398
I see they have one that also includes a Basic Stamp. Or maybe it would better complement an Arduino.
REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP
Hello Partner,
My name is Thomas Hansen and I am a regional manager for Microsoft West, a prominent software company that does business with the Government of Nigeria. In strictest confidence I am writing to you about the matter of a great magnitude of money.
Last year, my company was involved in negotiations with your government in the drawing up of a joint marketing agreement for business. During the last military regime of Nigeria, some government officials set up a fund and awarded themselves contracts for the purchase of software. The present civilian government has set up a contract review panel, and has identified ours as one that can be replaced with no cost to your government. Without further review, these contracts could amount to USD$40,000,000 (forty million U.S. dollars) or more.
I am authorized to offer you 1% of the value of these contracts, USD$400,000, in exchange for the erasure of the competing offer. Please note this transaction is 100% safe and legal. I will commence the transferring of the funds within 72 business hours upon receipt of your bank account number. Please fax your account and driver's license to 1-419-419-4190 to continue with this transaction.
I am looking forward to doing business with you and solicit your confidential reply to this transaction.
Faithfully yours,
Thomas Hansen
I've never understood why they consider a fuel rod "spent" after it drops from 100% to something like 95%. Why aren't they used longer?
Perhaps this can somehow be used to demonstrate that nuclear waste can be safely disposed of in the ocean floor? There have been serious proposals for disposing of waste in holes drilled hundreds of feet beneath the seabed in especially deep water.
I know this is unpopular with the anti-nuclear crowd, but a "real demo" may provide useful data.
Assuming there may be some people motivated to become developers, "Design Patters" would fit the timeless bill better than most. So would books on analysis and design, like Booch's "Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications".
How come they don't track down the IP addresses of infected computers and inform the users their computer is compromised? It seems these researchers also are getting a kick out of the botnet at the cost of the victims.
I think that would have been a responsible end to the study, but there was no mention in their paper of a "cleanup" phase. They did, however, take great care to follow an ethical code and "strictly reduce harm". To them, that meant: do not send victims actual malware, do not send victims to actual spammer sites, and do not collect credit card information. The spammers' victims were never "worse off" for having participated in the campaign.
Of course, contacting these people saying "you were identified in a spam campaign" would likely lead to thousands of lawsuits. The victims might have claimed "why didn't you stop me?" It's a messed up legal situation already.
"...is designed to support body weight, reduce stress on the knees and help people get up steps and stay in crouching positions" Why do the Japanese want us to stay in crouching positions?
Crouching. Y'know, like the tigers. And the dragons.
Actually, TFA says why: many Honda factory workers have to crouch for extended periods to perform assembly or inspections beneath automobile frames. This kind of gives them a built-in, portable chair.
In talking to a few colleagues about this fascinating business, I learned that most private equity shops shy away from dating sites for a number of reasons:
However, just because something isn't a great investment prospect doesn't mean it's a bad business. Many, many people have become obscenely wealthy in this industry (both online and offline). The technology required to connect two people is trivial, meaning your only real expense is the cost of customer acquisition. If you are part of the natural oligopoly, your product quality will be high and people will seek you out. This cycle lowers your costs and sends your margins skyrocketing.
Furthermore, the online dating industry has made a lot of secondary players wealthy thanks to affiliate marketing. At times, online dating sites have paid as much as $100 per head for new paying customers, and routinely pay out at least a few dollars for new "free trial" users or other prospects. This means anyone with the power to herd single internet users can potentially tap into a strong monetization engine.
As an aside, knowledge of how to sleuth out domain registration and correlation is somewhat de rigeur for most of us in the Slashdot audience, and as such should reduce the newsworthiness of the story.
I still think it's newsworthy when someone uses nerd-like skills to reveal a secret. Sure, we've probably all done our share of reverse DNSing and whoising a few spammers and phishers, but most of us haven't uncovered a vast global conspiracy while doing so. I admire the guy for that bit of sleuthing.
RAID5 for CDs? Is there anything where I can burn 3 CDs with a 'set' of data. When I want to restore my data I just put in each disk sequentially and then it does some RAID5 magic and spits out my data?
Be a cool project, IMHO.
That's really clever, but it creates two dependencies. One on the physical media, and the other on having the software available in the future to decode them (and a platform that can run that software.) Shouldn't be too hard in the Linux world because they never seem to throw anything away, but I'm thinking back to funky backup software from the old DOS days that I'd never be able to recover today.
The GP was claiming the person who writes the code from scratch should do so because "that way you know exactly what it can do", and that implies "I don't need to document it because I know it." Yes, you can write a good reusable module and document it, but then you pay for that documentation in addition to paying for the code itself. And you pay for ongoing maintenance on that code and documentation. It's expensive. With an external library or framework, that's one less chunk of code I'm worried about.
And yes, I know the STL isn't in the language itself, and yes, most embedded systems have explicit proscriptions against dynamic memory allocation. I am not in such an industry and I do not have those restrictions, so I don't worry about it as much as others. But I want developers who know and embrace the STL because I don't want homegrown versions of simple, proven code anymore. The STL is a standard (that's what the "S" bit stands for :-) and should be used before any custom code is written. I am thoroughly tired of finding homegrown code because the developer didn't know better or had some misguided notion about the STL (possibly learned from an embedded background) that makes them think they need to write their own. I can point to two independent occurrences of this in our legacy code base today, and both have had bugs in their implementations that required maintenance efforts to go fix.
Your arguments make sense in the corner case of an embedded system with non-standard requirements. Fine, I understand that. "Not standard" is a perfectly valid argument (one I occasionally like to trot out to justify my own decisions.) But in the case of a standards-based system where those restrictions don't exist, people who claim "Not Invented Here" are wasting time and money in the business world, and making the lives of the maintainers a nightmare.
The ones truly getting the shaft in all this are the TV broadcasters. It was always their band, so companies like Sennheiser made the gear for them to use in their own space. Nothing wrong with that. But everyone else went and bought that gear without the right to operate it, and now they feel entitled. And it's not currently made in other frequencies because Sennheiser built it only for their primary customers -- the already licensed users of the spectrum.
They've manufactured perfectly legal equipment for a licensed band, and a bunch of unlicensed users bought it and used it. That hardly makes it legal. So the non-legal users can start licensing some of the commercial UHF frequencies, just like everybody else who needs the exclusive use of RF for some business purpose. And it's going to cost them, and people are going to whine, and all because they suddenly have to pay their fair share. Don't worry if the gear's not there today, because if there's a dollar to be made selling it someone will start making it tomorrow.
Churches and cities can keep using their old, now-legal gear, and now it's official. But they're taking chances with shared spectrum just like anyone else. My city probably won't have the budget for replacement microphones and licensed spectrum, but that doesn't mean their current gear stops working: they just have to hope that some guy with a Fisher-Price baby monitor or a laptop won't start abusing it. But professional entertainers such as singers and NFL commentators will most likely step up and license a frequency because they can't afford to take the chance of some drunk interrupting a live performance with a baby monitor.
Why yes, my life has indeed been negatively impacted. I've been paying the FCC for licenses to use a tiny portion of the spectrum. And I've been supporting more than my fair share because these scofflaws have not been paying at all.
Without the revenue from the licenses, we would have no regulatory body, and without rules we simply would not have any working RF devices at all. A few giant broadcasters would be pumping megawatts into a handful of megastations, and we'd probably be getting nothing but crappy AM radio leaking interference into every electronic device in existence. Nobody would be responsible for ensuring their signals are of high quality and don't leak. Tiny signals would be drowned out. Cell phones would be impossible, as would any of the GPRS / 3G / EDGE type networking solutions. The fact that the FCC has provided this badly needed regulation says to me that they're an effective body (despite Pacifica and the censorship issues.)
And the licenses pay for it all. My license and my dollars have paid for my small portion of it. Their money has not. It's time for them to pick up the slack since they're reaping the benefit.
Harm? I'm not wishing harm on them nearly as much as I'm cheering the equality that's being forced upon them. If they want interference-free equipment, they'll now have to license it just like everyone else.
I have ALWAYS paid for my FCC licenses because the law says I'm supposed to. They didn't, and never have.
I might have had one ounce of sympathy if they didn't rise up as a group crying when someone else wanted to share their sandbox. But no, they've been using something for free that was not lawfully theirs to use in the first place, and now the FCC has said "it's a public sandbox and everyone else gets to play there too."