Re:Most violent game... ever!
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Those of you who've read the bible with any sort of objectivity know what I'm talking about.
Your comments just barely scratch the surface. The Bible is not some fun piece of entertainment, it's a grimly serious piece of work about a lot of really bad things.
"Oh, I see. But, anyway, I mean, I've never really understood the idea that if there was a God, that if someone was bad, He would make that person suffer forever, torture them for eternity, give them no chance to repair what had been done wrong if it was at all possible, and to top it off, punish them in such a way that it doesn't give anyone else a chance to learn from the poor bastard's misery. It just seemed so... so... well if not cruel and heartless, at least terribly bad, some how. Maybe as bad as whatever the person did; it would seem so... pointless, ahh, that's the word I'm thinking of, it seems like such a pointless exercise in futility."
"Not bad. Most people can't see the whole logic of the entire argument. Especially when it's a religious argument. Most of those are 'hands off'."
"I think you're right."
"I'll tell you something, Akers. With most men who have a religious system of beliefs, and a woman that they loved very deeply, would do what Lot did and sacrifice her, first before his religion."
"What do you mean?"
"Lot was in the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah looking for a few honest men, and he has a couple of VIPs from Heaven with him, when the local no-longer-boys choir come by looking for some backdoor action, and want to try the VIPs out for size. So Lot brings out his two beautiful, frightened virgin daughters, and offers them to the crowd, telling them to do anything they want to them, violate them six-ways-from-Sunday, if they'll take the girls, go away and stop bothering him and his two VIPs. You can find it in Genesis 19:8."
-Supervisor 246 to Akers 780126 in Paul Robinson's Instrument of God
[U]sability is a relatively new matter for us. How we react [ ] is similar [ ] to phenomena we didn't understand. Lightning was explained by Thor's Hammer, the plague was a punishment from God, and so forth. In our case, we replace "God's will" with "Companies", "Reports" and "Experts." We don't understand usability, so we push responsibility for it onto someone else.
I am reminded of the quote from [U.S. Supreme Court] Justice Potter Stewart in the case of Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 at 197 (1964):
I have reached the conclusion [ ] limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it...
I think if we substitute "software usability" for "hard-core pornography" in Stewart's quote we have the average programmer's capacity on the subject. But I suspect that may be overestimating some of their capacity based on the poor levels of usability of a lot of software out there, even a lot of commercial offerings.
Ever since I got my own domain name (paul.washington.dc.us) for free over five years ago and thus was able to legitimately use "postmaster" as an e-mail address, I use that. Actually, my system sends everything to me as a catch all regardless of address. I use a Yahoo address (I was using Netscape before) as the actual termination point (since I can simply change my termination point in the control panel at my nameserver's facility) I can redirect my mail in ten minutes. Yahoo's spam filtering is very good, I'd say maybe 3% of the mail I get is incorrectly marked as spam, mostly because it either uses html or it has attachments of certain types, but otherwise most of the spam is simply dumped unopened into the trash after I save the very tiny number of good mails I do get. Also I have certain usernames I use specifically for e-mail harvesting and any mail to them is either responses to orders I don't care about or spam, and I can read it or discard it. Works for me, anyway
Porn and violence is tearing apart marriages and families. Anyone who can't see the moral decay and complete deterioration of society as a whole because of these two abhorations has their head up their ass.
Garbage. Where is your evidence to back up this claim? As far back as 1965 a European study determined there is no correlation between pornography and mistreatment of women. A U.S. Study in the 1970s by a federally created commission came up with the same conclusion. Porn is no more responsible for sexual misconduct than diseases causing roaches. And I can see where all the televised violence (in a place with no television) caused the Hutus to murder 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days in Rwanda (probably by paying overtime bonuses.)
Were the 1950s a more moral time, when in the south, any "uppity nigger" who demanded his civil rights such as being able to vote ended up getting lynched? Or in the 1960s where they just got firehosed and attacked by Bull Connor's police dogs? How about the 1940s when them gooks were properly put in concentration camps even if they were American citizens? Yeah, we're a lot less moral and more violent than when the Three Stooges routinely poked each other's eyes out.
The problem is not entertainment; it is a lack of a valid and consistent moral code. The religionists have a weak and inconsistent moral code which has so many holes in it that pointing out their hypocricies will get them angry. Unless and until people act to establish a validatable moral code - one not based on some alleged God who supposedly will punish people after they die - but on a logical and rational basis to show why bad behavior has consequences here and now, you will have problems. Most people are good; give them sound values that make sense and most of them will stay that way. But people want easy and quick fixes or they don't know what they are doing and choose religion, which doesn't necessarily work once you find the holes (inconsistencies and hypocricies) in it. Which every man-made religion has.
Those dirty rotten #*($#*%( only gave us 15 $#*(@ minutes warning before shutting the #*$% place down. I thought the place had been slashdotted or something, I wasn't able to get through. May they roast in hell for a thousand years with no Internet access!
In short, the regulation of speech at issue here is not limited to the ultra-violent or the patently offensive and is far broader than what would be necessary to keep filth like Grand Theft Auto III and Postal II out of the hands of children.
I kind of thought GTA III was more of a parody and funny as hell than anything serious. I never thought it was "filth." Neither did the neighbor kids we allowed to play it. Most of them were too young to understand what a hooker does, anyway. My sister told one of the 9-year-olds who comes by to visit that she is not to kill anybody when a certain 6-year-old was around because his mother doesn't like the idea.
Matrix decision making was where you don't know if you really made a decision or if you just thought you did. Oh well, it seemed like a better joke at the time...
Will these be installed in the left wrist or the forehead. Revelations
Actually, it's the right hand. Funny, but I had the same idea, and I'm an agnostic!
And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth... And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
Revelations 13:11,16-18
I really like the Left Behind series of Christian thrillers. They tell about the lying, murdering and conniving people involved after the rapture of Christians. And that's the good guys!
Thanks, this is exactly the kind of feedback that I need. So you're basically saying that the Notary Public system is flawed in that it won't be possible to either validate copies of certain documents, or even trust any validation that does occur?
For most commercial transactions (wills, power-of-attorney, leases, mortgages) a notary is adequate. A notary's purpose is to be a non-party witness to a transaction.
At a bare minimum, for instance, a NP can be a witness that a document was signed by a certain person, and you can make sure that the person identified themselves with photo ID. I think that is a bare minimum for what a NP can do... so, what if the document that is being signed has the person's name, address, dob etc on it, and you are simply confirming that the ID they present matches with the paper they are signing? Would that constitute something a NP is allowed to do?
A notary can certify that a document is a true copy. A notary can take an acknowledgement that a particular person who is signing a particular document is known personally to them or has provided satisfactory identification. A notary can take a sworn statement. In some states a notary can issue summonses and subpoenas. A notary can't state that the information on a document matches some other document except to the extent that they can certify a copy of it. (A notary is a witness to a transaction, they are not permitted to be a party to the transaction.) But again, if it's government issued they might not be allowed to certify it. And some states prohibit photocopying of licenses. (The USA PATRIOT ACT may override this, however.)
Also, I assume it's possible to check up on a NP via some kind of registration of the fact that they are a NP.
Either with the county they are registered out of or the state, it depends on the state.
But if it's as easy as you say to become a NP in some parts, then are you (or anybody else) aware of other people who can act in a trusted proxy capacity? How about other "respected" members of the community?
If the issue is serious enough, a bank signature guarantee is used. This means that the user appears at the bank to which they are a customer and the bank, which supposedly knows them, then guarantees the signature. That is one way.
... abuselog.org, a site for the development of a generalized protocol for logging internet annoyances and abuses to a set of central servers, which could then be DDOS'd all to hell and back by the perpetrators of said annoyances and abuses.
This needs to be moderated funny as hell. It unfortunately is quite true...
How about using the MAC address of the card? At least it's something that can't be cheaply replaced
I have a Linksys wireless router with (4 wired ports) between the computers in my household and our DSL connection. All internet traffic goes through the router; all the computers on the internal network have non-routable 192.168.1.x IP addresses assigned to them by the router using DHCP. I can connect to the router's management interface just as if it were a website by using its default 192.168.1.1 address on this internal network, give the username amd password and I'm in.
There are 7 regular tabs and an orange "advanced" tab. On the 6th tab of the "Advanced" tab is a tab called "Mac Addr. Clone" that if I click on it, it provides a group of boxes where I could enter six two-digit hex numbers, click on the apply button, and the router will present whatever I put in there as its MAC address.
So to change the MAC address I present to the world would take me, oh, 10 seconds. Time cost is negligible, monetary cost is zero.
However [] one person controlling a million drones that send spam today... can control a million drones that submit IIALP reports [] their anti-spoof assumes individual malicious user endpoint hosts. If the malicious users on the Internet were limited to individual endpoint hosts, we wouldn't need solutions like IIALP!
So use a "real person" validation [] like when [] they require you to tell them what the distorted word in the.jpg is
I liked what the first person said and I like your idea of using capchas to prevent fake reports. Of course, there are problems with captchas being fed to people for interpretation (some porno gateways are feeding other people's capchas as blocks for their sites and using the response to feed back to the supplier). There are ways to solve that problem (captcha timeouts, use of random checkboxes instead of text input boxes, etc.)
Ok, here's another idea on the documentation front: Many people obviously have a problem with the concept of sending notarized copies of their ID docs through the mail. It's true, this does present many problems.
As a computer programmer for over 24 years and a Notary Public for over 24 months, I'd like to point out something else. In the Commonwealth of Virginia, notaries cannot authenticate copies of some government issued documents. I cannot authenticate a birth certificate, for example; the instructions from the Secretary of State make that particular example very clear. I also suspect I'm not allowed to certify copies of a drivers' license, I'm not sure on that point. (Since you can get certified copies of birth certificates from the registrar but you can't get them for DL that might be a different matter.)
Also, Virginia doesn't require seals on notarized documents; all they require is signature of the notary and commission expiration date. And basically anyone can buy a notary seal for $20 from a mail order company if they wanted to impersonate a notary. (Or get a friend of theirs to pay the fee to get a commission; in most states getting a notary commission is no more complicated than filling out a form and paying $10 to $40.)
The only way you can be certain the notary really is one is to verify their signature with either the county clerk where their commission indicates it was issued from (in county-based notary states, like California) or with the Secretary of State at the state capital (in state-based notary states, like Virginia). And that doesn't guarantee the notary was honest.
"We certainly will have open-source apps that compete with and that run on Windows. But when it comes to a guarantee or having someone who stands behind your software, [open source] is typically not something done in a capital approach." - Bill Gates
I'd like to ask the question: Will Microsoft guarantee its software in any way or provide indemnification to end users against claims of infringement?
End-User License Agreement for Microsoft Software
DCOM98 for Windows 98, version 1.3 [ ]
SOFTWARE PRODUCT LICENSE
The SOFTWARE PRODUCT is protected by copyright laws and international copyright treaties, as well as other intellectual property laws and treaties. The SOFTWARE PRODUCT is licensed, not sold. [ ]
7. NO WARRANTIES. Microsoft expressly disclaims any warranty for the SOFTWARE PRODUCT. THE SOFTWARE PRODUCT AND ANY RELATED DOCUMENTATION IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NONINFRINGEMENT. THE ENTIRE RISK ARISING OUT OF USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THE SOFTWARE PRODUCT REMAINS WITH YOU.
8. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY. In no event shall Microsoft or its suppliers be liable for any damages whatsoever (including, without limitation, damages for loss of business profits, business interruption, loss of business information, or any other pecuniary loss) arising out of the use of or inability to use the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, even if Microsoft has been advised of the possibility of such damages. Because some states and jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of liability for consequential or incidental damages, the above limitation may not apply to you.
MSDN, THE MICROSOFT DEVELOPER NETWORK SUBSCRIPTION [ ]
5. Microsoft Exchange Server (FOR BACKOFFICE SERVER VERSION 4.5 ONLY).[ ]
e. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES. The Limited Warranty referenced below is the only express warranty made to you and is provided in lieu of any other express warranties (if any) created by any documentation or packaging. Except for the Limited Warranty and to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Microsoft and its suppliers provide the Product and support services (if any) AS IS AND WITH ALL FAULTS, and hereby disclaim all other warranties and conditions, either express, implied, or statutory, including, but not limited to, any (if any) implied warranties, duties or conditions of merchantability, of fitness for a particular purpose, of accuracy or completeness of responses, of results, of workmanlike effort, of lack of viruses, and of lack of negligence, all with regard to the Product, and the provision of or failure to provide support services. ALSO, THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO DESCRIPTION OR NON-INFRINGEMENT WITH REGARD TO THE PRODUCT.
f. EXCLUSION OF INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, AND CERTAIN OTHER DAMAGES. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL MICROSOFT OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS OR CONFIDENTIAL OR OTHER INFORMATION, FOR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, FOR PERSONAL INJURY, FOR LOSS OF PRIVACY, FOR FAILURE TO MEET ANY DUTY INCLUDING OF GOOD FAITH OR OF REASONABLE CARE, FOR NEGLIGENCE, AND FOR ANY OTHER PECUNIARY OR OTHER LOSS WHATSOEVER) ARISING OUT OF OR IN ANY WAY RELATED TO THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE PRODUCT, THE PROVISION OF OR FAILURE TO PROVIDE SUPPORT SERVICES, OR OTHERWISE UNDER OR IN CONNECTION WITH ANY PROVISION OF THIS EULA, EVEN IN THE EVENT OF THE FAULT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF CONTRACT, OR BREACH OF WARRANTY OF
I like the idea C came up with of the ++ operator (and --, and to a lesser extent some of the equal codes such as *=,/= etc.), e.g. instead of A = A+1;
You have A++; or ++A;
depending on whether you want A to be increased before using it or after you use it.
I like the idea Pascal came up with to distinguish an assignment from a comparison. The equal symbol = is only used for comparison. To assign a value to a variable you must use the "becomes" symbol:=. This eliminates the possibility of nasty errors in C such as if B=C { being used where they should have used
if B==C {
N.B. Yes, I know there are checks in certain cases that require you to put certain of these type of expressions in () to allow them without getting compiler warnings, and I also know that there have been attempted system hacks where this type of exploit has been attempted to grant priveleges by doing a comparison using = instead of ==.
If assignment used a special sequence that can't be used in any other case (or did not allow assignment inside of a statement), check code that implemented root access hacks (A test for privelege against the user's privelege code which grants the user root privelege) would be impossible in the first place.
While I'm not standing up saying that unauthorized reproduction is necessarily right, the numbers given for losses are quite possibly blown way out of proportion to what reality would dictate. Here are some reasons why.
The numbers given for piracy losses presume that every single copy that was duplicated would have been a purchased copy made at the full list price. With the typical deep discounts that software packages sell for over list, this makes the piracy 'loss amount' numbers look much higher than they actually are as many who pirate software would either use something else or not use the program at all if they could not copy it. When a single copy of a program costs the equivalent of ten times what the computer is worth - if it wasn't, say, donated equipment - and about a month or two of your entire income, there is no way you can afford to pay full list price and you would not have. Yet the industry would claim that they have 'lost' the net retail purchase price to this party's failure to purchase their product.
These numbers imply there was an actual cash loss to the producing company, like software stolen from a store. These are non-sales, where the company doesn't sell a product to someone because they pirated the product. Since the company has no idea who is using that copy, the number is an estimate, a guess based on their imagination of how much they think the sale would have been, presumed on a full-list price retail sale.
Are these losses being reduced by the amount of money each reproduced copy would have cost to make? If the product sells for, say, $425.00 and the materials such as the CD, box, manual, shipping and handling cost $25, then the alleged 'loss' is $400, not $425 since they didn't spend the money to reproduce that package that was never sold. And, of course, this again presumes a full-list-price sale did not take place.
Nobody has any right to the use of someone else's works; those who produce such material are entitled to be compensated for what is being used. But let's not overblow how much the losses are in order to make things look ridiculously worse than they are, or pretend the numbers are anything but a wild guess, and totally made up.
Also, I'd like to point out that the term 'piracy' is being used to refer to the unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted materials, and is a misuse of the word. Piracy was originally the hijacking of someone else's seagoing vessel, not to the unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work. Stealing someone else's automobile at gunpoint is piracy, reproducing someone else's material represents a violation of law, but calling it 'piracy' makes it sound worse than it is, like someone busting into the software developer's offices and stealing packages.
My fellow administrators and I used to have company provided ISDN lines in our homes so that we could respond quickly to issues after hours. That was changed in the last few years to letting us expense our broadband service. Now our new CIO has elected to stop that benefit using the argument that we should be dedicated staff who desire to be responsive and should do what it takes to make that happen.
Well, since he's paying you over 6 figures a year to be dedicated, that makes sense. Oh wait, he's not paying you that much? Then he isn't paying 'dedicated' wages and should not expect you to supply the tools to do the job any more than a software company should expect the programmers to pay for their own compilers or computers. If you need that stuff to do your job it's a cost of doing business and the employer should provide it. If you don't need it, it's not your responsibility to provide and pay for it.
The rumor now is that we should also pay for blackberries, cell phones and pagers.
None of those things are necessary when you are doing your job on site because they can reach you where you are. If they expect to have the ability to reach you when you're not at work, they can pay for it. It's not your job to subsidize your employer, especially when they are not paying you the kind of 'professional' salaries that you would then be expected to have that sort of reachability. Beyond which, it's a tax-deductible expense to the company, it might not be for the employee.
We used to run whole research departments developing mathematical modelling, computational physics programmes on a single DEC VAX 11/750 with 8 MB of main memory and like 80 MB of hard disk space. It was so underutilised that astrophysics would rent out time on the darn thing to geophysics and chemistry.
At Long Beach (California) City College, we ran 15 terminals and 300 batch users over 1 card reader, on a Univac 90/60 mainframe with 100MB of disk space and 512K of memory, and I suspect the 2.5ghz HP Pavilion I just bought last month, remanufactured, for $350.00, has more power than that mainframe (that I believe cost over $100,000 in 1970s dollars) did.
We have gone in this direction because computers used to be vastly more expensive and had to be shared. As the price/performance of computing equipment went through the roof and costs continued to fall, it became more cost-effective to give really high levels of computing power to individuals. That most computers spend most of their time waiting indicates the tremendous capacity of what we have, and shows how ideas like this can improve the conditions of those who have not reached the standard of living to where single individuals can afford massive computing power.
Nobody needs a Mercedes Benz, but some people can afford them. When everyone can afford a Mercedes Benz-class automobile, then the quality of automobiles will rise to match. This is the situation of computers now.
Let's see, I just (2 weeks ago at Micro Center) purchased a remanufactured HP Pavilion PC 256MB memory, 40GB disk and Windows XP, which cost me $350.00 and it includes keyboard and mouse (I could have bought a similar machine with Lindows for $299 or so, but I write programs under Windows so I needed that). A used 17" monitor is around $45, but I already had one which I paid $100 for used, three years ago. Brand-new keyboards are $10, new mice are $4.95 I can see where the monitor at $45 is much more expensive than the (not very expensive) $350 computer. NOT.
"Pirate Radio" implies a high-powered transmitter (such as from ships off-shore or moving vehicles) trying to evade detection, being used to beam signals in an area at strength levels far, far in excess of the unlicensed threshhold.
This type of transmitter generates at or below the 100 mw permitted for completely unlicensed radio transmissions by FCC regulations. It is not "pirate" as this form of unlicensed radio transmitter is completely legal.
The telephone network divides the world into 9 regious. 1 is North America above Mexico, 2 is Africa, 3 and 4 are Europe, 5 is Mexico and South America, etc. When there were too many countries being issued country codes in the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) in certain regions than there were available codes, they just borrowed some from the underused regions (e.g. Africa.) This is why Greenland, whose country code should start with a 3 or 4, has the number 299.
Since the obvious solution is much cheaper than any other choice (cost essentially zero vs. billions of dollars), the automobile industry will obviously do the same thing the telephone industry did, borrow numbers from where they aren't being used.
The newspaper article gave the example of what they can (and almost certainly will) do to fix the shortage of numbers: borrow manufacturer codes from countries that do not now and probably won't ever have automobile manufacturers, like Botswana.
Slashdot Mirror
Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>
Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>
Were the 1950s a more moral time, when in the south, any "uppity nigger" who demanded his civil rights such as being able to vote ended up getting lynched? Or in the 1960s where they just got firehosed and attacked by Bull Connor's police dogs? How about the 1940s when them gooks were properly put in concentration camps even if they were American citizens? Yeah, we're a lot less moral and more violent than when the Three Stooges routinely poked each other's eyes out.
The problem is not entertainment; it is a lack of a valid and consistent moral code. The religionists have a weak and inconsistent moral code which has so many holes in it that pointing out their hypocricies will get them angry. Unless and until people act to establish a validatable moral code - one not based on some alleged God who supposedly will punish people after they die - but on a logical and rational basis to show why bad behavior has consequences here and now, you will have problems. Most people are good; give them sound values that make sense and most of them will stay that way. But people want easy and quick fixes or they don't know what they are doing and choose religion, which doesn't necessarily work once you find the holes (inconsistencies and hypocricies) in it. Which every man-made religion has.
Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>
Those dirty rotten #*($#*%( only gave us 15 $#*(@ minutes warning before shutting the #*$% place down. I thought the place had been slashdotted or something, I wasn't able to get through. May they roast in hell for a thousand years with no Internet access!
"Mr. Wizard, get me out of here..."
There are 7 regular tabs and an orange "advanced" tab. On the 6th tab of the "Advanced" tab is a tab called "Mac Addr. Clone" that if I click on it, it provides a group of boxes where I could enter six two-digit hex numbers, click on the apply button, and the router will present whatever I put in there as its MAC address.
So to change the MAC address I present to the world would take me, oh, 10 seconds. Time cost is negligible, monetary cost is zero.
Also, Virginia doesn't require seals on notarized documents; all they require is signature of the notary and commission expiration date. And basically anyone can buy a notary seal for $20 from a mail order company if they wanted to impersonate a notary. (Or get a friend of theirs to pay the fee to get a commission; in most states getting a notary commission is no more complicated than filling out a form and paying $10 to $40.)
The only way you can be certain the notary really is one is to verify their signature with either the county clerk where their commission indicates it was issued from (in county-based notary states, like California) or with the Secretary of State at the state capital (in state-based notary states, like Virginia). And that doesn't guarantee the notary was honest.
I'd like to ask the question: Will Microsoft guarantee its software in any way or provide indemnification to end users against claims of infringement?
I don't know if actually using 'postmaster' as my e-mail address cuts down on spam for me, because I get quite a bit of it anyway.
Also, I have an address of spamiam on this domain which I use for mailers where I don't care about the mail they might send.
Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>
- I like the idea C came up with of the ++ operator (and --, and to a lesser extent some of the equal codes such as *=,
/= etc.), e.g. instead of
- I like the idea Pascal came up with to distinguish an assignment from a comparison. The equal symbol = is only used for comparison. To assign a value to a variable you must use the "becomes" symbol
:=. This eliminates the possibility of nasty errors in C such as
Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>A = A+1; You have
A++; or ++A; depending on whether you want A to be increased before using it or after you use it.
if B=C { being used where they should have used if B==C { N.B. Yes, I know there are checks in certain cases that require you to put certain of these type of expressions in () to allow them without getting compiler warnings, and I also know that there have been attempted system hacks where this type of exploit has been attempted to grant priveleges by doing a comparison using = instead of ==.
If assignment used a special sequence that can't be used in any other case (or did not allow assignment inside of a statement), check code that implemented root access hacks (A test for privelege against the user's privelege code which grants the user root privelege) would be impossible in the first place.
Any errors that occur, all that will be able to be said is, "Blame it on the Bossa Nova." (Long groan follows.)
- The numbers given for piracy losses presume that every single copy that was duplicated would have been a purchased copy made at the full list price. With the typical deep discounts that software packages sell for over list, this makes the piracy 'loss amount' numbers look much higher than they actually are as many who pirate software would either use something else or not use the program at all if they could not copy it. When a single copy of a program costs the equivalent of ten times what the computer is worth - if it wasn't, say, donated equipment - and about a month or two of your entire income, there is no way you can afford to pay full list price and you would not have. Yet the industry would claim that they have 'lost' the net retail purchase price to this party's failure to purchase their product.
- These numbers imply there was an actual cash loss to the producing company, like software stolen from a store. These are non-sales, where the company doesn't sell a product to someone because they pirated the product. Since the company has no idea who is using that copy, the number is an estimate, a guess based on their imagination of how much they think the sale would have been, presumed on a full-list price retail sale.
- Are these losses being reduced by the amount of money each reproduced copy would have cost to make? If the product sells for, say, $425.00 and the materials such as the CD, box, manual, shipping and handling cost $25, then the alleged 'loss' is $400, not $425 since they didn't spend the money to reproduce that package that was never sold. And, of course, this again presumes a full-list-price sale did not take place.
Nobody has any right to the use of someone else's works; those who produce such material are entitled to be compensated for what is being used. But let's not overblow how much the losses are in order to make things look ridiculously worse than they are, or pretend the numbers are anything but a wild guess, and totally made up.Also, I'd like to point out that the term 'piracy' is being used to refer to the unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted materials, and is a misuse of the word. Piracy was originally the hijacking of someone else's seagoing vessel, not to the unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work. Stealing someone else's automobile at gunpoint is piracy, reproducing someone else's material represents a violation of law, but calling it 'piracy' makes it sound worse than it is, like someone busting into the software developer's offices and stealing packages.
We have gone in this direction because computers used to be vastly more expensive and had to be shared. As the price/performance of computing equipment went through the roof and costs continued to fall, it became more cost-effective to give really high levels of computing power to individuals. That most computers spend most of their time waiting indicates the tremendous capacity of what we have, and shows how ideas like this can improve the conditions of those who have not reached the standard of living to where single individuals can afford massive computing power.
Nobody needs a Mercedes Benz, but some people can afford them. When everyone can afford a Mercedes Benz-class automobile, then the quality of automobiles will rise to match. This is the situation of computers now.
Let's see, I just (2 weeks ago at Micro Center) purchased a remanufactured HP Pavilion PC 256MB memory, 40GB disk and Windows XP, which cost me $350.00 and it includes keyboard and mouse (I could have bought a similar machine with Lindows for $299 or so, but I write programs under Windows so I needed that). A used 17" monitor is around $45, but I already had one which I paid $100 for used, three years ago. Brand-new keyboards are $10, new mice are $4.95 I can see where the monitor at $45 is much more expensive than the (not very expensive) $350 computer. NOT.
This type of transmitter generates at or below the 100 mw permitted for completely unlicensed radio transmissions by FCC regulations. It is not "pirate" as this form of unlicensed radio transmitter is completely legal.
Since the obvious solution is much cheaper than any other choice (cost essentially zero vs. billions of dollars), the automobile industry will obviously do the same thing the telephone industry did, borrow numbers from where they aren't being used.
The newspaper article gave the example of what they can (and almost certainly will) do to fix the shortage of numbers: borrow manufacturer codes from countries that do not now and probably won't ever have automobile manufacturers, like Botswana.