The data is potentially evidence in upcoming court cases.
Yes, well, whether this is okay or not depends entirely on the court case, doesn't it? I think more than a few/.'ers are concerned that it may indeed be used for court cases, but not necessarily just cases against Google....
The Constitution explicitly says that any rights not given to the government are retained by the people.
Just feel obliged to point out: The constitution says no such thing. You are conflating two separate entries in the constitution:
The ninth amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
And Tenth Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
And "police" are generally exercising powers "reserved to the States respectively" pretty much the only limit on the power of the states is that they can't abridge the constitution itself.
I know we all hate ACTA. And I agree 100%. But don't I seem to recall that the 'official' reason the US proposed ACTA in the first place was to use it against indian and chinese companies ripping of US PRODUCTS. Not software patents, not DMCA bullshit, but to prevent china and india from stealing from us with impunity?
Don't get me wrong, I hope india wins this. But if they do, it will be because we have so far subverted the treaty from its original purpose into this DMCA bullshit.
Congratz to canada for resisting this so far, and the support from us sorry sods and brethren to the south to do it again. Hopefully if you prove it can be resisted the US will learn hope once more...
So Penguin is doing this. That's interesting. Penguin, for those who don't know, is still in a dispute with Amazon (you can't buy any new penguin books for your kindle for the last several months, it is getting VERY annoying.)
I read this as just another shot in that war. Don't get me wrong . . . a reader-seller-neutral format would be cool (ePub might not be inappropriate) but Penguin seems an odd advocate given that they're whining because Amazon was willing to lose money on their books...
Baen seems to handle this just fine with non-DRMed formats of.html,.mobi etc. etc. If THEY were the ones advocating this, it might be worth getting behind.
So. One of the joys of my current job (and it actually is fun, even if only because I'm enough of an arrogant geek to enjoy showing off to the noobs) is that I train a lot of our new software engineers. So this is some of the basic stuff I try to teach them:
* Most real code is depressingly ugly. For the most part this is something to note, try to do better at, and not comment on. Commenting on it is typically at best futile -- no one is going to pay to refactor shitty code if it works, and at worst you might comment to the guy who wrote it, or his best friend . . . and even when I KNOW I've written ugly code, I don't need a kid pointing it out when he wasn't there at 3 AM the morning of the delivery. And if I'm bad enough as a coder that I don't know that, pointing it out won't make me better, and will make me dislike you. If it doesn't work, offer to work on it, and refactor it if it seems time efficient (if its really ugly it may be, but usually its not) but still don't diss someone else's work publicly, ever.
* Software engineering is fundamentally speaking a process oriented task. Software engineers typically aren't. If you are process-oriented, that's great, if you're not, deal. Never cut corners in the development and configuration management processes until you've been there at least a year and understand why they're all in place. And hopefully by then you won't be tempted to anyways.
* Different companies have different cultures. This said, in general a senior engineer would much rather help you get over something you're having trouble with, or answer a question, then have you sit in front of your computer and stare at code dumbly for several hours of the company's money. Everyone gets stumped by bugs, and in general trying to do everything yourself to show off is not helpful. Your time costs money, and lots of it -- this isn't school, and there's no virtue in hard work unless it helps in the short or long term to develop the product. Granted the senior engineer's time probably costs more, but if 15 minutes from him can save you several hours, its almost always a good deal (unless you spending the several hours will genuinely help you understand something you need to understand in the long-term, but not everything falls into that category) Be prepared to get told to shove off if they're busy, but ask the questions.
* Finally never, EVER, write code to a requirement you don't understand. Nothing is more frustrating (speaking as a tech lead) than an engineer coding something based on a requirement they didn't understand and doing it wrong, thus pushing out the delivery when they could've cleared everything up with a half hour discussion about the requirement.
Errrr. Elementary School, boy scouts, US History . . . I think in 9th grade we did a comparison of Athenian democracy to New England town government and contrasted it with the US Federal Republic....
One feels obliged to note that because massachussetts is one of the only states in the world that has ANY practicing actual democracies (the federal government is a republic) . . . the state usually doesn't interfere in this sort of thing. Welcome to town government by the people. Usually it works better than this, but, actually, often it doesn't.
This sort of attitude is, based on most feedback we have, BAD FOR US. Its not at all clear that one couldn't perform a rigorous study. Its much less clear that industry wants anyone to DO SO. Fundamentally speaking, if its really impossible to make a meaningful guess, then industry can continue to make up numbers.
I just don't believe that. EFF or someone should try to fund their own, serious, in-depth study of the issue. And if that means that phase 1 is a study on how to perform the study, so be it.
But do you really believe that if I get a statistician, a computer scientist, and a bunch of their grad students in a room for several months, and give them money to try some methods, they won't be able to come up with something??
Mostly, I expect that we'll kind of compromise on the whole thing. I absolutely expect my employer to pay for the exams and the course provided I pass. The time? Not so much really. Yes, I expect my employer to allow me to study if there is "downtime" at work . . . but I don't expect him to prioritize me getting a certification over, say, keeping the network up and running. If its a new certification, of course, I may also expect preferential treatment for raises when annual evaluations come through. But really, the cert is good for me, and its good for the employer. We should BOTH be investing in it. That said, the one thing I absolutely expect, is that if I'm exempt and salaried, the employer will respect the fact that my coursework cuts down on the free extra hours he gets.
"our users place a lot of value in speed"
is not my opinion in the least, personally I like quality over speed.
Absolutely. But in many, many, searches, there are going to be a hundred sites with roughly the same quality. In that case, I want the fastest to win.
Also in searches that aren't narrow enough, high speed at the top will quickly tell me I have to refine my search parameters. Overall, I have to agree that optimizing for speed should optimize the whole search experience for all of us. As long as its just one of several signals, that is.
Except that drive-by-wire systems have absolutely no possibility of making the operation of the car safer (more efficient, sure, but that's it) and many many ways in which to make it less safe, so you're wrong about it making more sense to use drive-by-wire. I can't figure out what you're thinking with that statement.
That's flat-out not true. Traction Control and brakes and power synchronizing together (which is a lot of what drive-by-wire DOES) absolutely, in most cases, makes the average driver safer. Personally, I'm inclined to think that as drive-by-wire improves (until eventually, hopefully, the really dangerous part (i.e. the driver) will go away), we will in general progress to fewer accidents per car-mile but, unfortunately, far more catastrophic ones.
There's nothing funnier than an e-Ink fan posting "Waaaaah, people will never want to read from an LCD all day long" arguments from his 30" LCD, in front of which he will remain all day, reading.
For which precise reason, when I get done with the 'business' (and/or gaming) portion of my day, I want to STOP reading from one.
With faster algorithms, the machine can just get more jobs done in the same amount of time. But the jobs will just keep coming, so the energy use never changes.
Or are the new algorithms SO fast that all processing needs of humanity will be done in a week, thereby allowing us to turn off all supercomputers? Now that would save energy.
Hey now! Everyone knows that 5 IBM mainframes covers the entire world market for computers.
The same could be said for many organizations/groups, really. Anonymous has a central communications point where people propose such actions, and that pretty much makes it a group, just as much as some local political parties, really. (Or terrorist networks, or a variety of other things)
Its damages. Distributing the game before release can impact more than simply overall long-term sales (which I agree were probably not greatly affected), a lot can depend on the success of any product in its first week of sales etc. Frankly I have limited sympathy with anyone who pirates a game before it is officially released, and I would fully expect the damages to be significantly higher than if the game were pirated a week after release. Nintendo had gone to some effort, I'm sure, to ensure that various facilities got to do 'first look' stuff etc. etc. etc. which this totally screwed up.
Actually I feel obliged to point out that ONE reason it doesn't say "Brought to you by the Exxon Corporation" is because until the aforementioned Supreme Court decision, the Exxon corporation wasn't allowed to make political ads, just to contribute to PACs. Which isn't to say I agree, and actually its one reason why I think that the supreme court decision will have less immediately visible effect than people expect -- Corps have gotten so used to hiding behind deceptive PAC names they won't want to stop. Which isn't to say its a good decision.
Well they don't actually de-list the dead-tree. You can still find a Robert Jordan book. Amazon just isn't selling it direct. You're welcome to buy it used though . . .
Like I said, I don't think they can do this for long, but this is NOT like the music industry and iTunes. Amazon is one of the largest book retailers in the world even without e-books. Publishers should be somewhat wary with what they do. That said, the whole situation is very tricky. I'm not eager to see Apple's model enter the e-book industry more than it already has, but I also don't really approve of the idea of carrying over e-book wars into paper. Still given the choice I'll take Amazon over Apple every day, because Apple thinks of itself as a hardware manufacturer, and Amazon thinks of itself as a media store . . . which means its far more likely to end device lock-in, over time, IMHO. (I would say that device lock-in was totally evil, but in truth Amazon really kickstarted the e-book industry, which needed it, so I'm willing to classify it as a temporarily acceptable one)
I've got to say that MacMillan has never liked the concept of e-books to begin with, has been one of the fiercest supporters of strong DRM, and have ALWAYS wanted to price their e-books way too high. MacMillan is, for those who don't know, the owners of the TOR imprint (read: Wheel of Time) as the one most likely to be known by/. readers. That's right, the same people who will price an e-book like a hardcover after the paperback is out, and who regularly charged $15 for the PROLOGUES of the wheel of time books in electronic format. Plus they almost always delay the e-book publications, which annoys me. I have never liked MacMillan, and the only reason they get away with it (from me) is because while I don't like their company's policies on digital media, they actually do have pretty high quality editors and authors.
And while they could probably care less at Amazon de-listing their kindle books, if they've delisted the dead tree books, that's a real threat. And they deserve it, probably. That said, this is a game of chicken. Amazon can't afford to de-list their dead-tree for very long, and MacMillan can't afford to have them de-listed for very long. Who will blink first?
Or it could just be a glitch, there's no official reasons posted and TFA even admits they're not sure of the link, here. Amazon has had some wierd glitches before.
In another note, I do a lot of e-book reading on both my Kindle and my Laptop and other devices, and if what I want to do is 'sit and read a book' for several hours, the kindle wins every time.
I said as a legal entity and framework of laws. The Republic of France is nearly a hundred years younger than the US (which dates from 1789 by this standard) The UK is about a hundred years older (the end of the glorious revolution) The base legal principles for many other 'western nations' were established in the 20th century. Of those you listed, only Iceland, Norway and Denmark are plausible possibilities for being older. (Iceland especially)
Why this standard? Because we are talking about legal principles, not culture or ethnicity or anything else (Where I freely admit that any of the nations you listed wins easily.)
Two points.
First. US law is overwhelmingly derived from british common law, esp. in regards to property, so the differences, when they occur are striking.
Second. Do some research. As a legal entity and framework of laws, as opposed to culturally, the UK and a few islands in the pacific too small to conquer are basically the only countries in the world older than the US. France, Germany, any other country you care to name is comparatively quite young.
RTFS. They suggest that if you do that you MIGHT have paid for as many as a hundred of them, so the app store lost $300. I actually admire this examination of piracy insofar as its the first one trying to figure out 'losses due to piracy' that puts a number in for 'percentage of people who would've bought the app otherwise'. That percentage may be low, it may be high (actually 10% sounds like a good number to plug in to what is essentially a pile of guesses) but at least they're trying.
Slashdot Mirror
The data is potentially evidence in upcoming court cases.
Yes, well, whether this is okay or not depends entirely on the court case, doesn't it? I think more than a few /.'ers are concerned that it may indeed be used for court cases, but not necessarily just cases against Google....
The Constitution explicitly says that any rights not given to the government are retained by the people.
Just feel obliged to point out: The constitution says no such thing. You are conflating two separate entries in the constitution:
The ninth amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
And Tenth Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
And "police" are generally exercising powers "reserved to the States respectively" pretty much the only limit on the power of the states is that they can't abridge the constitution itself.
Don't get me wrong, I hope india wins this. But if they do, it will be because we have so far subverted the treaty from its original purpose into this DMCA bullshit.
Congratz to canada for resisting this so far, and the support from us sorry sods and brethren to the south to do it again. Hopefully if you prove it can be resisted the US will learn hope once more...
There really is no mechanism here. Cell Phone radiation is the wrong wavelength to do much of anything.
I feel obliged to correct myself. Apparently Penguin's dispute with Amazon is now settled.
I read this as just another shot in that war. Don't get me wrong . . . a reader-seller-neutral format would be cool (ePub might not be inappropriate) but Penguin seems an odd advocate given that they're whining because Amazon was willing to lose money on their books...
Baen seems to handle this just fine with non-DRMed formats of .html, .mobi etc. etc. If THEY were the ones advocating this, it might be worth getting behind.
* Most real code is depressingly ugly. For the most part this is something to note, try to do better at, and not comment on. Commenting on it is typically at best futile -- no one is going to pay to refactor shitty code if it works, and at worst you might comment to the guy who wrote it, or his best friend . . . and even when I KNOW I've written ugly code, I don't need a kid pointing it out when he wasn't there at 3 AM the morning of the delivery. And if I'm bad enough as a coder that I don't know that, pointing it out won't make me better, and will make me dislike you. If it doesn't work, offer to work on it, and refactor it if it seems time efficient (if its really ugly it may be, but usually its not) but still don't diss someone else's work publicly, ever.
* Software engineering is fundamentally speaking a process oriented task. Software engineers typically aren't. If you are process-oriented, that's great, if you're not, deal. Never cut corners in the development and configuration management processes until you've been there at least a year and understand why they're all in place. And hopefully by then you won't be tempted to anyways.
* Different companies have different cultures. This said, in general a senior engineer would much rather help you get over something you're having trouble with, or answer a question, then have you sit in front of your computer and stare at code dumbly for several hours of the company's money. Everyone gets stumped by bugs, and in general trying to do everything yourself to show off is not helpful. Your time costs money, and lots of it -- this isn't school, and there's no virtue in hard work unless it helps in the short or long term to develop the product. Granted the senior engineer's time probably costs more, but if 15 minutes from him can save you several hours, its almost always a good deal (unless you spending the several hours will genuinely help you understand something you need to understand in the long-term, but not everything falls into that category) Be prepared to get told to shove off if they're busy, but ask the questions.
* Finally never, EVER, write code to a requirement you don't understand. Nothing is more frustrating (speaking as a tech lead) than an engineer coding something based on a requirement they didn't understand and doing it wrong, thus pushing out the delivery when they could've cleared everything up with a half hour discussion about the requirement.
Errrr. Elementary School, boy scouts, US History . . . I think in 9th grade we did a comparison of Athenian democracy to New England town government and contrasted it with the US Federal Republic....
Fucking duh, Massachusetts.
One feels obliged to note that because massachussetts is one of the only states in the world that has ANY practicing actual democracies (the federal government is a republic) . . . the state usually doesn't interfere in this sort of thing. Welcome to town government by the people. Usually it works better than this, but, actually, often it doesn't.
This sort of attitude is, based on most feedback we have, BAD FOR US. Its not at all clear that one couldn't perform a rigorous study. Its much less clear that industry wants anyone to DO SO. Fundamentally speaking, if its really impossible to make a meaningful guess, then industry can continue to make up numbers. I just don't believe that. EFF or someone should try to fund their own, serious, in-depth study of the issue. And if that means that phase 1 is a study on how to perform the study, so be it. But do you really believe that if I get a statistician, a computer scientist, and a bunch of their grad students in a room for several months, and give them money to try some methods, they won't be able to come up with something??
Mostly, I expect that we'll kind of compromise on the whole thing. I absolutely expect my employer to pay for the exams and the course provided I pass. The time? Not so much really. Yes, I expect my employer to allow me to study if there is "downtime" at work . . . but I don't expect him to prioritize me getting a certification over, say, keeping the network up and running. If its a new certification, of course, I may also expect preferential treatment for raises when annual evaluations come through. But really, the cert is good for me, and its good for the employer. We should BOTH be investing in it. That said, the one thing I absolutely expect, is that if I'm exempt and salaried, the employer will respect the fact that my coursework cuts down on the free extra hours he gets.
"our users place a lot of value in speed" is not my opinion in the least, personally I like quality over speed.
Absolutely. But in many, many, searches, there are going to be a hundred sites with roughly the same quality. In that case, I want the fastest to win. Also in searches that aren't narrow enough, high speed at the top will quickly tell me I have to refine my search parameters. Overall, I have to agree that optimizing for speed should optimize the whole search experience for all of us. As long as its just one of several signals, that is.
Except that drive-by-wire systems have absolutely no possibility of making the operation of the car safer (more efficient, sure, but that's it) and many many ways in which to make it less safe, so you're wrong about it making more sense to use drive-by-wire. I can't figure out what you're thinking with that statement.
That's flat-out not true. Traction Control and brakes and power synchronizing together (which is a lot of what drive-by-wire DOES) absolutely, in most cases, makes the average driver safer. Personally, I'm inclined to think that as drive-by-wire improves (until eventually, hopefully, the really dangerous part (i.e. the driver) will go away), we will in general progress to fewer accidents per car-mile but, unfortunately, far more catastrophic ones.
There's nothing funnier than an e-Ink fan posting "Waaaaah, people will never want to read from an LCD all day long" arguments from his 30" LCD, in front of which he will remain all day, reading.
For which precise reason, when I get done with the 'business' (and/or gaming) portion of my day, I want to STOP reading from one.
With faster algorithms, the machine can just get more jobs done in the same amount of time. But the jobs will just keep coming, so the energy use never changes.
Or are the new algorithms SO fast that all processing needs of humanity will be done in a week, thereby allowing us to turn off all supercomputers? Now that would save energy.
Hey now! Everyone knows that 5 IBM mainframes covers the entire world market for computers.
The same could be said for many organizations/groups, really. Anonymous has a central communications point where people propose such actions, and that pretty much makes it a group, just as much as some local political parties, really. (Or terrorist networks, or a variety of other things)
Its damages. Distributing the game before release can impact more than simply overall long-term sales (which I agree were probably not greatly affected), a lot can depend on the success of any product in its first week of sales etc. Frankly I have limited sympathy with anyone who pirates a game before it is officially released, and I would fully expect the damages to be significantly higher than if the game were pirated a week after release. Nintendo had gone to some effort, I'm sure, to ensure that various facilities got to do 'first look' stuff etc. etc. etc. which this totally screwed up.
Actually I feel obliged to point out that ONE reason it doesn't say "Brought to you by the Exxon Corporation" is because until the aforementioned Supreme Court decision, the Exxon corporation wasn't allowed to make political ads, just to contribute to PACs. Which isn't to say I agree, and actually its one reason why I think that the supreme court decision will have less immediately visible effect than people expect -- Corps have gotten so used to hiding behind deceptive PAC names they won't want to stop. Which isn't to say its a good decision.
Also note that webscription books are $6 AND UNENCUMBERED BY DRM. Yeah Baen Books (if only all publishers were that smart.)
Well they don't actually de-list the dead-tree. You can still find a Robert Jordan book. Amazon just isn't selling it direct. You're welcome to buy it used though . . .
Like I said, I don't think they can do this for long, but this is NOT like the music industry and iTunes. Amazon is one of the largest book retailers in the world even without e-books. Publishers should be somewhat wary with what they do. That said, the whole situation is very tricky. I'm not eager to see Apple's model enter the e-book industry more than it already has, but I also don't really approve of the idea of carrying over e-book wars into paper. Still given the choice I'll take Amazon over Apple every day, because Apple thinks of itself as a hardware manufacturer, and Amazon thinks of itself as a media store . . . which means its far more likely to end device lock-in, over time, IMHO. (I would say that device lock-in was totally evil, but in truth Amazon really kickstarted the e-book industry, which needed it, so I'm willing to classify it as a temporarily acceptable one)
I've got to say that MacMillan has never liked the concept of e-books to begin with, has been one of the fiercest supporters of strong DRM, and have ALWAYS wanted to price their e-books way too high. MacMillan is, for those who don't know, the owners of the TOR imprint (read: Wheel of Time) as the one most likely to be known by /. readers. That's right, the same people who will price an e-book like a hardcover after the paperback is out, and who regularly charged $15 for the PROLOGUES of the wheel of time books in electronic format. Plus they almost always delay the e-book publications, which annoys me. I have never liked MacMillan, and the only reason they get away with it (from me) is because while I don't like their company's policies on digital media, they actually do have pretty high quality editors and authors.
And while they could probably care less at Amazon de-listing their kindle books, if they've delisted the dead tree books, that's a real threat. And they deserve it, probably. That said, this is a game of chicken. Amazon can't afford to de-list their dead-tree for very long, and MacMillan can't afford to have them de-listed for very long. Who will blink first?
Or it could just be a glitch, there's no official reasons posted and TFA even admits they're not sure of the link, here. Amazon has had some wierd glitches before.
In another note, I do a lot of e-book reading on both my Kindle and my Laptop and other devices, and if what I want to do is 'sit and read a book' for several hours, the kindle wins every time.
I said as a legal entity and framework of laws. The Republic of France is nearly a hundred years younger than the US (which dates from 1789 by this standard) The UK is about a hundred years older (the end of the glorious revolution) The base legal principles for many other 'western nations' were established in the 20th century. Of those you listed, only Iceland, Norway and Denmark are plausible possibilities for being older. (Iceland especially) Why this standard? Because we are talking about legal principles, not culture or ethnicity or anything else (Where I freely admit that any of the nations you listed wins easily.)
Two points. First. US law is overwhelmingly derived from british common law, esp. in regards to property, so the differences, when they occur are striking. Second. Do some research. As a legal entity and framework of laws, as opposed to culturally, the UK and a few islands in the pacific too small to conquer are basically the only countries in the world older than the US. France, Germany, any other country you care to name is comparatively quite young.
RTFS. They suggest that if you do that you MIGHT have paid for as many as a hundred of them, so the app store lost $300. I actually admire this examination of piracy insofar as its the first one trying to figure out 'losses due to piracy' that puts a number in for 'percentage of people who would've bought the app otherwise'. That percentage may be low, it may be high (actually 10% sounds like a good number to plug in to what is essentially a pile of guesses) but at least they're trying.