There's nothing there about that.. read the Rules of Professional Conduct:
Rule 1.2. Scope of Representation and Allocation of Authority Between Client and Lawyer.
(a) Subject to paragraphs (c) and (d), a lawyer shall abide by a client’s decision concerning the objectives of representation and, as required by Rule 1.4, shall consult with the client as to the means by which they are to be pursued. A lawyer may take such action on behalf of the client as is impliedly authorized to carry out the representation. A lawyer shall abide by a client’s decision whether to settle a matter. In a criminal case, the lawyer shall abide by the client’s decision, after consultation with the lawyer, as to a plea to be entered, whether to waive jury trial and whether the client will testify.
(b) A lawyer’s representation of a client, including representation by appointment, does not constitute an endorsement of the client’s political, economic, social or moral views or activities.
Its all over the place in here. Remember that copyright trolling is not a criminal matter. It is a civil case. These lawyers are not failing to comply with the law.
Now, you _could_ make an argument that the directors of Righthaven are legally insane - and that would compel the lawyers to have them committed. Now, THAT would be interesting.
I think that this is a problematic view of the situation. The oath of service that lawyers take is to fight for their client regardless of their personal opinion. The strength of the system rests in the abstraction of the lawyer's morals from the case they are contesting.
It is easy to blame a lawyer who defends a murderer or a rapist. However, if no lawyer was prepared to do so, many people accused of those crimes would lose their cases purely due to no representation. Lets not return to an age of witch-hunts.
I strongly support the court system imposing the heaviest of penalties on organisations that abuse the legal system for personal gain. And I think that the courts should have the right to extend those penalties to the cowards that hide behind shell companies. Lets put the blame where it truly belongs.
Ahh-hahahahahaha.... Moore's law guys. And before people flame me for misinterpreting the law, common usage is 'double the speed every 18 months'. It might be a misinterpretation, but its the most common usage in the world today.
When was the last time someone significantly increased hardwired bandwidth?
I gotta stop drinking red wine, and then posting on/.
Great swathes of middle management tiers were slashed during the early 90s in a vain attempt to show shareholders that organisations were more 'lean'. This senior management mentality left many organisations with no one who knew their business systems from a management perspective, and no one glueing together the corporate culture.
The unappreciated middle manager was the guy (pardon the sexist reference, but before the 90s, they mostly were guys) who established business systems and then went about implementing and policing them. For some strange reason, senior managers believed that they could replace this critical part of the organisation with code-cutters.
For a limited time it worked. You can make burgers with a robotic arm. However, it eventually started to slide sideways when people realised that their career was not going to be furthered by a performance management spreadsheet, and when their workmates were being retrenched by e-mail, the workers went into open revolt. Through no fault of their own, the IT workers were blamed for this loss of corporate identity - and the IT retrenchments that followed Y2K were testament to the corporate beliefs.
Now, ten years has passed, and this article has surfaced about 20 times. Despite its title, its NOT about training IT boffins. Its about trying to rebuild the middle management layer. People like Lisa Vaas have realised that the only viable candidates for the role are the IT people. They are the only ones who understand the business systems, and are the only ones who interact with the business on a horizontal plane instead of a vertical one.
Sadly, senior management are still trying to woo the shareholders with their clever cost cutting measures. And they feel more than a little threatened by the IT folk who know all their dirty little secrets. I doubt that any training gleaned by this approach will be more useful than a PHP refresher. Worse still, that is all that Lisa is asking for - when really, the IT crowd are the only ones holding the corporate life preserver these days.
Anonymous is the ultimate form of democracy. It is the unwashed masses, taking a whim upon themselves, and challenging the remainder of society to vote with (or against) them. They are the power of the masses, and at the same time, they have the mentality of a mob.
Take a look at recent events. American SEALs assassinate OBL despite a 30YO executive order banning such actions. No trial, no jury. Just straight to the execution. The legality of it is worthy of being questioned - but the vast majority of Americans support the action - which grants the senate the impetus to democractically 'make it legal'.
This is the definition of democracy. If you get enough people together, who agree on something, it becomes law. It doesn't have to be moral or just.
Anonymous is simply the mob who agree. They are democracy manifest in all its failings. And characteristic of all democracies, the loudest voice has the appearance of steering the ship. Anyone who claims to speak for Anonymous clearly doesn't understand it. And anyone who speaks against it is in the same boat.
I have always used virus infections not as a measure of the resilience and robustness of an operating system (we all know that any coder that claims their code is bullet-proof is a moron).
Rather, I use the infection rates as a measure of the significance of the operating system.
If the hackers don't want to hack your OS, then your OS is insignificant to them.
Now, I'm not about to make a case that the hackers' opinions are relevant, but lets face it... they're in the business of market penetration. As soon as an OS gains any real significance in the marketplace, the hackers will turn their attention to it.
- The motorcyclist's creed : "You can be in the right, or you can be alive. Your choice."
Poor programming practices are a part of the problem, but we're also suffering from the architectural and design impositions enforced by M$ for years.
Regardless of whether you're programming in a Windows environment or not, Microsoft's insidious 'Abstraction to the point of distraction' policy has influenced development languages and environments.
Whilst abstraction creates more elegant and maintainable code, it is entirely overhead. It is there to help our feeble minds comprehend what's going on.
The steady push towards Java, C++ - even C# are all crafting a generation of programmers who can't cut multi-tier code. All they know to do is to push the buttons on the black-box - even if that black-box bottlenecks their entire application. Its easy to point the finger at them and say 'they're crappy programmers'. They are, but we made them that way.
Personally, I think that Java and VS2010 are really good examples of black-box programming being stuffed down the throat of the world's code-cutters. And it has created a culture where IT managers expect same day results. Not many programmers out there are prepared to give up their job to stand up to an IT Manager who wouldn't know a latency issue brewing until it bites them on the ass.
Yes. You're right of course. The problem is that the clean sweep is not an option. The power currently rests in the hands of folks who don't want things to change. So, whilst a clean sweep may well be the optimal solution, it is not about to happen. So, the more pragmatic solution is to attack the problem within the confines of the restrictive environment.
I suspect that the real problem here is that the Journals have yet to become truly enmeshed in the free market.
In time, they will be forced to compete for your hard earned dollars, and they will do so on the basis of two forms of merit.
Credibility
Price
Wikipedia (dare I mention it) has enormous public interest because it is free. It's credibility is highly questionable.
In time, the more credible journals will come down in price to a point that is acceptable to the market.
Academics are notorious for trying to excuse themselves from the free market (see other thread about commercial vs government funding), and the folks that publish these journals are no different.
If you're particularly offended by the prices on these paywalls, set up in competition. That's how it works.
How about we (the broader international community) fix up a few other minor measurement issues:
Lets get rid of Fahrenheit, but Centigrade/Celsius is also a flawed measure. Everything should be Kelvin
How's about we switch those positive and negative terminals round the right way?
Maybe a single standard for power points?
A4 might me be more international that Letter, but both are rubbish standards. How's about a paper size that is a decent multiple of the base centimetre
Oh, and of course, lets not forget that Base 10 is pretty archaic. Should everything be measured in hexadecimal?
I don't particularly like imperial measurements, but I'm not about to start throwing stones. My house is made of glass.
-- 'The nicest thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from' - Andrew Tanenbaum
Whilst I agree with your comment, the delivery is a bit flame-baitish (is that a word?).
Most of the western world is pushing the democracy wagon at the moment. It might not be a very good form of government, but its the best we've got right now.
Now, here's the rub. 90% of the world subscribes to some kind of religion. And a majority of those believe that their religion is entitled to governmental benefits of some kind or another.
Scientific or not, democracy demands that religion is recognised and favoured.
Combine that with a capitalist economic system that encourages exploitation and boundary-pushing, and we have... Scientology. Or Kopimism. Or Jedi-ism. Or whatever-ism.
You're right that it does not curry favour for the file-sharing concept. However, it does curry favour for the concept of abolishing religion-welfare. And that is something I can support.
Our lumbering education system is slowly moving away from 'knowledge based education' to 'skills based education'. However, it will take a long time before the old-fashioned diehards retire and make room for some new thinkers.
I understand the difference between an emeritus professor, and a Wiki-expert, but outside my own field of expertise, why would I need to be anything more than a Wiki-expert?
Personally, I am excited about the prospect of having a plug in the back of my neck, and the opportunity to have large portions of my memory uploaded to the cloud. Leave me with my personal life experiences, and my core skills, and take the rest.
The 6502 processor was fast, clean and easy to program. My first assembly programs were on it. The assembly language was simpler and almost as fast as Z-80, and the apple BIOS permitted much more elegant control of the screen. It was so nice, it persisted into the Vic 20s, a much newer machine with a tidier construction and layout.
The 6502 was eventually surpassed by the 6809, which lead into the notorious 8088 and then x86 range.
None of them beat the 6502 for intuitive assembly code. It was almost as clean as the PDP-11.
This kind of reporting really frustrates me. 'Activity X CAN CAUSE consequence Y'.
Well, you could say just about anything there. What kind of crappy science is this? Is it just another headline grabber? Or were the balls of the psychologists legally removed by 'insert game vendor here'.
Methinks/. gets trolled by these kinds of articles far too often.
Open Source generally doesn't have a bankroll funding it. It has a community. Communities of like-minded individuals don't usually have the finances or the will to defend (or instigate) legal battles.
As they say, "You will never know who was really right. But you will know who had more money."
There was a highly controversial issue of Electronics Australia that covered how to make a Gun-type A-Bomb using household materials, and basically converting a house into a big low yield A-Bomb. The literature had been around for years before that, but this article was contentious because it also had a detailed section on how to enrich the Uranium. At the time, I was only about 7, so I didn't understand most of it, and can only vaguely remember the details. Something to do with home-made ruby lasers, centrifuges and the differences between U-232 and U-235. It was fascinating to me at the time. I wonder if I could find an old copy of it at the local library.
I believe that there is something fundamentally different between gaming and real life. You cannot respawn in real life. There are significant and measurable consequences for screwing up. Adapting a business model to a game is asking staff to adopt an 'all care, no responsibility' attitude.
Now, having a gaming lounge in the office, with high spec PCs networked and all preloaded with L4D2 ready to play... now that's a different story. However, I don't think that's what they mean by gamification.
Good comment. Unfortunately, in Australia, the 3G supplied by our main Telco runs at about 3K. So, its typically WiFi or hardwire. The speeds are workable, so it doesn't preclude the Inspiron. Just that these two relatively minor features would have made this laptop a sensational purchase instead of just a good one.
It sounds like this twits beef with.NET is that it dumbs down Windows programming.
He'd be right about that. Here's the real newsflash: 50% of all programmers are below average. If you need to think twice about that statement, you're one of them.
For the programmers who are not the elite, they can produce reasonably high quality Windows apps very fast and very cheap using.NET.
Now, you may be building a cooling control system for a nuclear reactor, and.NET would be a bad language to choose. However, I doubt that. The vast majority of app development is mainstream stuff to run on the mainstream platform. And that's going to be way more than 50%.
So, expensify can go off and hire the 'very expensive' coders who are 'very skilled', and pay them lots of money, and charge their customers lots of money for the privilege. And assuming that those are the contracts he wants, Expensify's CEO is doing the right thing to get them.
If those are not the contracts he's chasing, well then, he's probably just demonstrated that he's in the bottom 50%.
Dell Inspiron 15R. Its not hugely powerful. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles. It has two significant weaknesses: No Bluetooth on board, 100Mb NIC.
Otherwise, for AU$1100 (including a spare battery), what a chilly bargain. I could have two of these babies cheaper than most IBMs, Toshibas or HP/Compaqs - even Macs. You just know that they're going to be good for the warranty - if I need it, and lets face it, I know more about PCs that 98% of their tech support department, so its not like I'm going to call them when I have anything short of a hardware failure.
I plan to own the device for two years (good god, is that planned obsolescence in hardware I hear? Who'd a thought?). After that, it will go to one of the kids, and I'll buy another one in the same class.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing there about that.. read the Rules of Professional Conduct: Rule 1.2. Scope of Representation and Allocation of Authority Between Client and Lawyer.
(a) Subject to paragraphs (c) and (d), a lawyer shall abide by a client’s decision concerning the objectives of representation and, as required by Rule 1.4, shall consult with the client as to the means by which they are to be pursued. A lawyer may take such action on behalf of the client as is impliedly authorized to carry out the representation. A lawyer shall abide by a client’s decision whether to settle a matter. In a criminal case, the lawyer shall abide by the client’s decision, after consultation with the lawyer, as to a plea to be entered, whether to waive jury trial and whether the client will testify.
(b) A lawyer’s representation of a client, including representation by appointment, does not constitute an endorsement of the client’s political, economic, social or moral views or activities.
Its all over the place in here. Remember that copyright trolling is not a criminal matter. It is a civil case. These lawyers are not failing to comply with the law.
Now, you _could_ make an argument that the directors of Righthaven are legally insane - and that would compel the lawyers to have them committed. Now, THAT would be interesting.
I think that this is a problematic view of the situation. The oath of service that lawyers take is to fight for their client regardless of their personal opinion. The strength of the system rests in the abstraction of the lawyer's morals from the case they are contesting.
It is easy to blame a lawyer who defends a murderer or a rapist. However, if no lawyer was prepared to do so, many people accused of those crimes would lose their cases purely due to no representation. Lets not return to an age of witch-hunts.
I strongly support the court system imposing the heaviest of penalties on organisations that abuse the legal system for personal gain. And I think that the courts should have the right to extend those penalties to the cowards that hide behind shell companies. Lets put the blame where it truly belongs.
Its a nice theory. Superluminal corkscrew gravity waves have been considered as a communication tool for some time now.
Problem is that they are also generated by black holes as their axis sweeps across us. They are not an indication of intelligent life.
Ahh-hahahahahaha.... Moore's law guys. And before people flame me for misinterpreting the law, common usage is 'double the speed every 18 months'. It might be a misinterpretation, but its the most common usage in the world today.
/.
When was the last time someone significantly increased hardwired bandwidth?
I gotta stop drinking red wine, and then posting on
Great swathes of middle management tiers were slashed during the early 90s in a vain attempt to show shareholders that organisations were more 'lean'. This senior management mentality left many organisations with no one who knew their business systems from a management perspective, and no one glueing together the corporate culture.
The unappreciated middle manager was the guy (pardon the sexist reference, but before the 90s, they mostly were guys) who established business systems and then went about implementing and policing them. For some strange reason, senior managers believed that they could replace this critical part of the organisation with code-cutters.
For a limited time it worked. You can make burgers with a robotic arm. However, it eventually started to slide sideways when people realised that their career was not going to be furthered by a performance management spreadsheet, and when their workmates were being retrenched by e-mail, the workers went into open revolt. Through no fault of their own, the IT workers were blamed for this loss of corporate identity - and the IT retrenchments that followed Y2K were testament to the corporate beliefs.
Now, ten years has passed, and this article has surfaced about 20 times. Despite its title, its NOT about training IT boffins. Its about trying to rebuild the middle management layer. People like Lisa Vaas have realised that the only viable candidates for the role are the IT people. They are the only ones who understand the business systems, and are the only ones who interact with the business on a horizontal plane instead of a vertical one.
Sadly, senior management are still trying to woo the shareholders with their clever cost cutting measures. And they feel more than a little threatened by the IT folk who know all their dirty little secrets. I doubt that any training gleaned by this approach will be more useful than a PHP refresher. Worse still, that is all that Lisa is asking for - when really, the IT crowd are the only ones holding the corporate life preserver these days.
I'll bet the US Navy SEALs had a very detailed counterstrike map of the area, and played it many times before the event.
I'd like to see their version...
Anonymous is the ultimate form of democracy. It is the unwashed masses, taking a whim upon themselves, and challenging the remainder of society to vote with (or against) them. They are the power of the masses, and at the same time, they have the mentality of a mob.
Take a look at recent events. American SEALs assassinate OBL despite a 30YO executive order banning such actions. No trial, no jury. Just straight to the execution. The legality of it is worthy of being questioned - but the vast majority of Americans support the action - which grants the senate the impetus to democractically 'make it legal'.
This is the definition of democracy. If you get enough people together, who agree on something, it becomes law. It doesn't have to be moral or just.
Anonymous is simply the mob who agree. They are democracy manifest in all its failings. And characteristic of all democracies, the loudest voice has the appearance of steering the ship. Anyone who claims to speak for Anonymous clearly doesn't understand it. And anyone who speaks against it is in the same boat.
I have always used virus infections not as a measure of the resilience and robustness of an operating system (we all know that any coder that claims their code is bullet-proof is a moron).
Rather, I use the infection rates as a measure of the significance of the operating system.
If the hackers don't want to hack your OS, then your OS is insignificant to them.
Now, I'm not about to make a case that the hackers' opinions are relevant, but lets face it... they're in the business of market penetration. As soon as an OS gains any real significance in the marketplace, the hackers will turn their attention to it.
- The motorcyclist's creed : "You can be in the right, or you can be alive. Your choice."
You're only partly right.
Poor programming practices are a part of the problem, but we're also suffering from the architectural and design impositions enforced by M$ for years.
Regardless of whether you're programming in a Windows environment or not, Microsoft's insidious 'Abstraction to the point of distraction' policy has influenced development languages and environments.
Whilst abstraction creates more elegant and maintainable code, it is entirely overhead. It is there to help our feeble minds comprehend what's going on.
The steady push towards Java, C++ - even C# are all crafting a generation of programmers who can't cut multi-tier code. All they know to do is to push the buttons on the black-box - even if that black-box bottlenecks their entire application. Its easy to point the finger at them and say 'they're crappy programmers'. They are, but we made them that way.
Personally, I think that Java and VS2010 are really good examples of black-box programming being stuffed down the throat of the world's code-cutters. And it has created a culture where IT managers expect same day results. Not many programmers out there are prepared to give up their job to stand up to an IT Manager who wouldn't know a latency issue brewing until it bites them on the ass.
This is another clear example of how our politicians are out of touch with technology.
They only ever needed to do one simple thing... make the ratings system the same for all kinds of media - movies, games, books, etc.
Was that so hard? Apparently, the answer is yes.
Yes. You're right of course. The problem is that the clean sweep is not an option. The power currently rests in the hands of folks who don't want things to change. So, whilst a clean sweep may well be the optimal solution, it is not about to happen. So, the more pragmatic solution is to attack the problem within the confines of the restrictive environment.
In time, they will be forced to compete for your hard earned dollars, and they will do so on the basis of two forms of merit.
Wikipedia (dare I mention it) has enormous public interest because it is free. It's credibility is highly questionable.
In time, the more credible journals will come down in price to a point that is acceptable to the market.
Academics are notorious for trying to excuse themselves from the free market (see other thread about commercial vs government funding), and the folks that publish these journals are no different.
If you're particularly offended by the prices on these paywalls, set up in competition. That's how it works.
In Australia, the price is not an issue (AU$60 per month for about 6Gb). The speed is the problem. You're lucky to get more than 256kbps.
And this is sitting outside the main Telstra Exchange in the middle of Brisbane.
Our Telco's just plain lie about performance - which I guess makes them just like every other Telco in the world.
I don't particularly like imperial measurements, but I'm not about to start throwing stones. My house is made of glass.
-- 'The nicest thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from' - Andrew Tanenbaum
Whilst I agree with your comment, the delivery is a bit flame-baitish (is that a word?).
... Scientology. Or Kopimism. Or Jedi-ism. Or whatever-ism.
Most of the western world is pushing the democracy wagon at the moment. It might not be a very good form of government, but its the best we've got right now.
Now, here's the rub. 90% of the world subscribes to some kind of religion. And a majority of those believe that their religion is entitled to governmental benefits of some kind or another.
Scientific or not, democracy demands that religion is recognised and favoured.
Combine that with a capitalist economic system that encourages exploitation and boundary-pushing, and we have
You're right that it does not curry favour for the file-sharing concept. However, it does curry favour for the concept of abolishing religion-welfare. And that is something I can support.
Our lumbering education system is slowly moving away from 'knowledge based education' to 'skills based education'. However, it will take a long time before the old-fashioned diehards retire and make room for some new thinkers.
I understand the difference between an emeritus professor, and a Wiki-expert, but outside my own field of expertise, why would I need to be anything more than a Wiki-expert?
Personally, I am excited about the prospect of having a plug in the back of my neck, and the opportunity to have large portions of my memory uploaded to the cloud. Leave me with my personal life experiences, and my core skills, and take the rest.
We are the borg. Prepare to be assimilated.
The 6502 processor was fast, clean and easy to program. My first assembly programs were on it. The assembly language was simpler and almost as fast as Z-80, and the apple BIOS permitted much more elegant control of the screen. It was so nice, it persisted into the Vic 20s, a much newer machine with a tidier construction and layout.
The 6502 was eventually surpassed by the 6809, which lead into the notorious 8088 and then x86 range.
None of them beat the 6502 for intuitive assembly code. It was almost as clean as the PDP-11.
This kind of reporting really frustrates me. 'Activity X CAN CAUSE consequence Y'.
/. gets trolled by these kinds of articles far too often.
Well, you could say just about anything there. What kind of crappy science is this? Is it just another headline grabber? Or were the balls of the psychologists legally removed by 'insert game vendor here'.
Methinks
Open Source generally doesn't have a bankroll funding it. It has a community. Communities of like-minded individuals don't usually have the finances or the will to defend (or instigate) legal battles.
As they say, "You will never know who was really right. But you will know who had more money."
There was a highly controversial issue of Electronics Australia that covered how to make a Gun-type A-Bomb using household materials, and basically converting a house into a big low yield A-Bomb. The literature had been around for years before that, but this article was contentious because it also had a detailed section on how to enrich the Uranium. At the time, I was only about 7, so I didn't understand most of it, and can only vaguely remember the details. Something to do with home-made ruby lasers, centrifuges and the differences between U-232 and U-235. It was fascinating to me at the time. I wonder if I could find an old copy of it at the local library.
I believe that there is something fundamentally different between gaming and real life. You cannot respawn in real life. There are significant and measurable consequences for screwing up. Adapting a business model to a game is asking staff to adopt an 'all care, no responsibility' attitude.
Now, having a gaming lounge in the office, with high spec PCs networked and all preloaded with L4D2 ready to play... now that's a different story. However, I don't think that's what they mean by gamification.
Good comment. Unfortunately, in Australia, the 3G supplied by our main Telco runs at about 3K. So, its typically WiFi or hardwire. The speeds are workable, so it doesn't preclude the Inspiron. Just that these two relatively minor features would have made this laptop a sensational purchase instead of just a good one.
It sounds like this twits beef with .NET is that it dumbs down Windows programming.
.NET.
.NET would be a bad language to choose. However, I doubt that. The vast majority of app development is mainstream stuff to run on the mainstream platform. And that's going to be way more than 50%.
He'd be right about that. Here's the real newsflash: 50% of all programmers are below average. If you need to think twice about that statement, you're one of them.
For the programmers who are not the elite, they can produce reasonably high quality Windows apps very fast and very cheap using
Now, you may be building a cooling control system for a nuclear reactor, and
So, expensify can go off and hire the 'very expensive' coders who are 'very skilled', and pay them lots of money, and charge their customers lots of money for the privilege. And assuming that those are the contracts he wants, Expensify's CEO is doing the right thing to get them.
If those are not the contracts he's chasing, well then, he's probably just demonstrated that he's in the bottom 50%.
Dell Inspiron 15R. Its not hugely powerful. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles. It has two significant weaknesses: No Bluetooth on board, 100Mb NIC.
Otherwise, for AU$1100 (including a spare battery), what a chilly bargain. I could have two of these babies cheaper than most IBMs, Toshibas or HP/Compaqs - even Macs. You just know that they're going to be good for the warranty - if I need it, and lets face it, I know more about PCs that 98% of their tech support department, so its not like I'm going to call them when I have anything short of a hardware failure.
I plan to own the device for two years (good god, is that planned obsolescence in hardware I hear? Who'd a thought?). After that, it will go to one of the kids, and I'll buy another one in the same class.
The effects of prolonged exposure to the Supercolliding Super-button are not part of this test.