That's funny... my DSL connection was a breeze to set up, it's had perfect uptime in the almost 3 months I've had it, I wasn't pressured into buying anything else. In fact, I was surprised how simple it went and how reliable it's been. Maybe I'm the exception, but all these horror stories I've been reading about simply haven't come to pass. Yet. And I've seen no indication they will.
Here in Indiana, the Do Not Call List has been a major success. I'm tempted to say it's the single most effective piece of legislation I've seen come along in quite a while.
Are you kidding? It's the only effective piece of legislation to come out of Indianapolis in a long time!
That's no longer how it works. Where I'm at, you have to be law faculty or a law student to have access to Lexis and/or Westlaw. Non-law students are out of luck, as are members of the public at large. That said, they can come in and look at our extensive physical collection.
Another thing is that academic libraries get a sizeable discount, with the idea that graduates will become accustomed to using the product and paying full-price. It's not about deep pockets, it's about marketing to those who will have deep pockets later.
In Indiana, I've been quite happy with the DNC list the state has instituted. Telemarketing calls have dropped to practically nil.
One thing to watch out for is that in many cases, when a "telemarketer" calls when your name is on a DNC list, it's not a telemarketer at all: it's a scam operation. If they refuse to hang up and refuse to provide details, they almost certainly ARE a scam group! Just something to be wary of.
I'm a total amateur, but I personally find that software tools can ultimately only go so far in debugging. The two most important debugging tools I'm aware of can't be solved with software: a short break from the project to clear your train of thought, and another set of eyes which might better see what you've overlooked.
Given the economic climate, I'm hardly surprised. Companies need to turn a profit. I just wonder if this won't backfire: companies are losing money, but consumers don't have the extra money to spend. It's not like the iApps are must-have upgrades.
The only way I can see this working out is if Apple stops including the iApps on all their Macs or ships lesser-powered versions (like they do with Quicktime).
While I realize you and your family never agreed to the software, you did authorize the installation of the modem. At best, it's a very gray legal area. The ISP and software manufacturer can both claim the tech was acting as a duly authorized agent (which he was) and you can validly claim that this software was never mentioned as being necessary and that it was sprung on you without prior notice, which would undoubtedly have affected your decision to purchase.
Unfortunately, he left with a valid signature, which legally means you have accepted the service as is, software and all. You may be able to remove the software, but at this point, all you can do is complain about it. But once you sign the sheet saying the work is done, you've essentially stated that the contract (or that portion thereof) has been fulfilled to your satisfaction. I know it's a hassle, but if you have serious misgivings about it, the proper procedure is to decline signature and say you never authorized this software installation, and allow the tech to remove the modem. Then deal with the sales department. If you paid by credit card, remember that you can put a hold on that payment until it is resolved to your satisfaction.
I have a new idea for a business model:
Come up with a really generic idea, wait, say, ten years for another company to come up with the same idea and become successful and then sue them!
Part 2 of the business model is to sue people who sue companies under the above premeses for patent infringement. Oh wow! Looks like I got my first target!
Re:The Constitution doesn't need amending
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 1
"From the above, it has been inferred that any kind of prayer in public schools is unconstitutional,...
Which it is, when all students are forced to participate."
You're missing the point I was making. Public schools are not a function of the federal government, but of the state and local governments. The same holds true for most public libraries. Any more, Americans tend to seek First Amendment redress at the expense of the 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.
My real point is that we've gone well beyond "Congress shall make no law" and well into "No publicly-supported institution shall engage in any behavior that could possibly be construed as..."
I'm not saying I agree with you or disagree with you as to whether the interpretation should be correct, I'm saying we've become so accustomed to pleading First Amendment that the Tenth Amendment has become all but forgotten. And it's a real shame because this nation (the US) is so diverse that one person can get a bug up his butt about something trivial in an otherwise largely homogenous community (think rural Indiana) and get the courts to rule that something the community is overwhelmingly in favor of (say, putting the 10 Commandments in front of a state or local courthouse)is unconstitutional. By centralizing all this and making what shouldn't be a federal issue a federal issue, it takes away the entire argument of "if you don't like it, go somewhere else." Yes, we need to give the minority power so the majority won't run roughshod over them. However, I also believe that individual communities should have a certain amount of say in establishing "community standards."
Re:The Constitution doesn't need amending
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 1
Oops. My bad. Sheesh, that'll teach me to post on an empty stomach!!
The Constitution doesn't need amending
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
One thing I find interesting in all this discussion of rights and freedoms is really how much we assume is constitutionally guaranteed versus what the Constitution actually says. For instance, here is the First Amendment in its entirety:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or
the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
From the above, it has been inferred that any kind of prayer in public schools is unconstitutional, that putting the 10 Commandments on public property is unconstitutional, that pr0n is legal, that a woman has the right to privacy and, consequently, the right to terminate pregnancy, that public libraries may not filter web sites, and so on and so forth.
The point I'm making is that we have become accustomed to reading an awful lot into that one small amendment. As a student of political science, however, I find it both amusing and disturbing that the first five words of the amendment are the ones most frequently ignored: "Congress shall pass no law..."
Taken literally (and as the Founding Fathers intended!) this means that most of these freedoms we take for granted were never intended to be freedoms at the level they are, but rather issues left to the individual states!
I don't know exactly what that means for us today, but it is food for thought.
Years ago, it was Rock 'n' Roll. Then it was Dungeons and Dragons (anyone remember the Tom Hanks movie Mazes and Monsters?) Now it's computer games. The simple fact of the matter is that certain forms of entertainment tend to appeal to certain types of people, and that for some people, it goes from entertainment to escapism to all-out addiction. Does that make gaming inherently evil? No. Does it make game manufacturers responsible for creating an environment in which people can immerse themselves?
That seems to be the point here. I would argue that Sony is no more at fault than NASCAR is for unsafe teenage driving. The vast majority of people out there can distinguish between fantasy and reality. Those who cannot have serious mental problems and require serious care and support. Unfortunately, in the United States the infrastructure for dealing with mental health issues varies greatly from state to state, and a lot of places are not equipped to handle people with social and behavioral disorders. Sony is no more at fault for creating an online multiplayer universe than Ford is for building a car that can go fast. Unfortunately, Sony is an easy target here. The real solution, however, is not to go after symptom, but rather the actual disease. I feel confident in saying that if not Everquest, something else would have taken its place. The only real solution is proper identification and treatment of social disorders, an area still vastly underdeveloped and carrying too much of a stigma to be effective.
I wish I could recall the/. article off the top of my head, but there is such thing as virtually perfect code. In fact, there's a government rating for it, and the standard is the space shuttle's critical systems code. It doesn't get delivered to NASA until they are absolutely certain that it will not fail. Period. By comparison, most commercial products out there don't even make the government rating charts.
IIRC, there are two seperate teams at work. One team's job is to write the code and make sure it's bug-free. The other team's job is to find any and all bugs and report them to the first team to be repaired. Competition between the two teams is encouraged, so team 1 doesn't even deliver code to team 2 until they're convinced there are no bugs. Then, team 2 does everything they possibly can to find even the most minute quirk or bug or flaw. Once they find one, they report it at once, and team 1 has to fix it. The code doesn't get delivered to NASA until both teams certify that the code is 99.9% bug-free (they acknowledge that there probably is a bug in there somewhere, but that they were unable to find it.) This process takes years to go through, but it also proves that it is possible to write reliable code. Every time NASA sends up a shuttle, lives depend on it, and the programmers are acutely aware of this.
The real key here is that the program isn't done until it's done, and the team ignores things like arbitrary deadlines etc. Instead of having the attitude that "it's good enough to ship" they take the attitude that "it's not good enough until we are absolutely certain that it will not fail. Period."
Applied to the commercial and OSS world, that would mean that software wouldn't come out nearly as often: I'm guessing one major OS upgrade every 5-6 years, if that.
This is one of those questions where 200 different people have 200 different opinions on the matter. My take on the subject is this:
First, get the degree. That piece of paper can open a lot of doors for you.
Second, talk to your advisors and campus job-placement center. That's what they are there for.
Third, take advantage of other opportunities that present themselves and that sound interesting. What you study in college may very well have nothing to do with your career in the long run.
Do you have any hobbies or clubs you belong to that are not CS-related? Have you done or experienced anything that you think you'd enjoy delving into even more? If all else fails, there's always grad school, too.
A while back (meaning within the last 2 years) there was this company called 2am (which has gone under) which set up one of these gaming sites. Far and away their most popular game was called "Chain of Command." I don't want to bore anyone with details, but the idea was that you and a certain number of other individuals would fight a short (10-20 min) battle against another group of individuals. Each player got 4 soldiers, and the players were sorted by rank. As you got better, your rank would improve and you would move higher up the feeding chain.
But I digress. To do well at Chain of Command required a combination of teamwork, strategy and tactics. Teams that did well were generally teams that were aggressive, well-organized and used every advantage given them: cover, suppressive fire, stealth tactics, etc. What made that game cool was that in order to be effective you had to have a plan and stick to it. People who rushed in blindly ended up getting their tails shot off in short order. I had lots of fun with that game...
As a voter, you get the opportunity to speak your mind once every two years regarding federal matters. Sure, if you don't vote, you have the constitutional right to complain about it. However, if you do not vote, you have forfeited your most important voice. You see, we don't have time to be lobbiests and we don't have time to review every piece of legislation. That's why we take the time every 2 years to elect a member of the House of Representatives, every 4 years for a president and every 6 years for a Senator. By voting, you are saying that you either stand behind your representative or you are saying you really have issues with the job he's doing.
I don't condemn people who don't vote, but if you are eligible and don't take the time to let your voice be heard when it counts, I have no sympathy for you. If you care enough to gripe, you should care enough to vote. Please note that I fully understand there are times it's impossible to vote and I sympathize with that. It's when you simply don't care enough to vote and then turn around and whine that I have little tolerance for.
For what it's worth, I saw a report that it's not porn per se they're hiding pictures in. I don't remember the source, but from what I recall, they were actually using sports sites and pictures. But I could be wrong.
As an aside, I could see how they might use porn pictures to do their dirty work. They're not interested in the naughty picture, they're interested in the encrypted picture and getting a kick of double-revenge by letting us naughty Westerners see their (encrypted) top-secret plans and thinking we're just seeing a naked girl.
I'm not a demolitions or architecture expert, but as I understand it, the key to demolishing any building is to weaken it from within. A commercial airliner with any decent amount of fuel on board can provide a pretty huge explosion (aviation fuel is extremely flammable) and they hit several floors down. Given that the planes penetrated at high speed and that there were several floors above, it's understandable that the explosion took out the internal supports, destabilizing everything above the explosion as well as several floors below the explosion. After that, what remained of the supports simply couldn't sustain the weight of the remaining floors and the building collapsed. In some regards it's actually fortunate that it collapsed as slowly as it did so at least some people could get out.
As ABC News reminded us, we had the same reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing, immediately blaming militant Arabs. Turned out to be one of our own. On the other hand, who has the resources to pull off an attack like this one? Osama bin Laden is one of the few who does, but he's not the only one. I'm just at a loss to think of who else it might have been. But yes, before we blame people from the Middle East, we should examine all the facts.
IIRC, the original suit was brought by the DOJ and the attorneys general of 18 states. The DOJ has announced it will no longer seek a breakup, but that's no guarantee it will happen. For starters, the 18 attys general have a say in the matter. Next, the guilty verdict has already been handed down. IANAL, but I believe that only the penalty phase needs to be re-heard, along with any updates. It has happened before on several occasions that someone was sentenced to death even though the prosecutor didn't push it because the law of the land said it was a valid punishment for the crime.
I seriously doubt a breakup will happen, but this case is far from over. Microsoft has already been found guilty of at least some of the charges. The question is what the penalty should be. There may be 1000 opinions, but the one that counts is the one belonging to the judge.
There's a biography of her here [uscourts.gov], but it doesn't tell much about her politics. Anyone know what her attitude is likely to be?
According to the aforementioned bio, she got both her undergraduate and law degrees from Catholic University in Washington DC and also teaches at Georgetown. By all appearances she's about as much a Washington insider as a jurist can get. Now, I don't know much about her personally, but I don't think CUA's law school is particularly conservative (I was an undergrad there.) Long story made short, she'll be a competent judge, and probably lean toward the government side. I'm cautiously optimistic about her.
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That's funny... my DSL connection was a breeze to set up, it's had perfect uptime in the almost 3 months I've had it, I wasn't pressured into buying anything else. In fact, I was surprised how simple it went and how reliable it's been. Maybe I'm the exception, but all these horror stories I've been reading about simply haven't come to pass. Yet. And I've seen no indication they will.
Here in Indiana, the Do Not Call List has been a major success. I'm tempted to say it's the single most effective piece of legislation I've seen come along in quite a while.
Are you kidding? It's the only effective piece of legislation to come out of Indianapolis in a long time!
That's no longer how it works. Where I'm at, you have to be law faculty or a law student to have access to Lexis and/or Westlaw. Non-law students are out of luck, as are members of the public at large. That said, they can come in and look at our extensive physical collection.
Another thing is that academic libraries get a sizeable discount, with the idea that graduates will become accustomed to using the product and paying full-price. It's not about deep pockets, it's about marketing to those who will have deep pockets later.
In Indiana, I've been quite happy with the DNC list the state has instituted. Telemarketing calls have dropped to practically nil.
One thing to watch out for is that in many cases, when a "telemarketer" calls when your name is on a DNC list, it's not a telemarketer at all: it's a scam operation. If they refuse to hang up and refuse to provide details, they almost certainly ARE a scam group! Just something to be wary of.
I'm a total amateur, but I personally find that software tools can ultimately only go so far in debugging. The two most important debugging tools I'm aware of can't be solved with software: a short break from the project to clear your train of thought, and another set of eyes which might better see what you've overlooked.
You forgot the "First Post" announcement.
Given the economic climate, I'm hardly surprised. Companies need to turn a profit. I just wonder if this won't backfire: companies are losing money, but consumers don't have the extra money to spend. It's not like the iApps are must-have upgrades.
The only way I can see this working out is if Apple stops including the iApps on all their Macs or ships lesser-powered versions (like they do with Quicktime).
Stage 3: Profit!
While I realize you and your family never agreed to the software, you did authorize the installation of the modem. At best, it's a very gray legal area. The ISP and software manufacturer can both claim the tech was acting as a duly authorized agent (which he was) and you can validly claim that this software was never mentioned as being necessary and that it was sprung on you without prior notice, which would undoubtedly have affected your decision to purchase.
Unfortunately, he left with a valid signature, which legally means you have accepted the service as is, software and all. You may be able to remove the software, but at this point, all you can do is complain about it. But once you sign the sheet saying the work is done, you've essentially stated that the contract (or that portion thereof) has been fulfilled to your satisfaction. I know it's a hassle, but if you have serious misgivings about it, the proper procedure is to decline signature and say you never authorized this software installation, and allow the tech to remove the modem. Then deal with the sales department. If you paid by credit card, remember that you can put a hold on that payment until it is resolved to your satisfaction.
I have a new idea for a business model:
Come up with a really generic idea, wait, say, ten years for another company to come up with the same idea and become successful and then sue them!
Part 2 of the business model is to sue people who sue companies under the above premeses for patent infringement. Oh wow! Looks like I got my first target!
My real point is that we've gone well beyond "Congress shall make no law" and well into "No publicly-supported institution shall engage in any behavior that could possibly be construed as..."
I'm not saying I agree with you or disagree with you as to whether the interpretation should be correct, I'm saying we've become so accustomed to pleading First Amendment that the Tenth Amendment has become all but forgotten. And it's a real shame because this nation (the US) is so diverse that one person can get a bug up his butt about something trivial in an otherwise largely homogenous community (think rural Indiana) and get the courts to rule that something the community is overwhelmingly in favor of (say, putting the 10 Commandments in front of a state or local courthouse)is unconstitutional. By centralizing all this and making what shouldn't be a federal issue a federal issue, it takes away the entire argument of "if you don't like it, go somewhere else." Yes, we need to give the minority power so the majority won't run roughshod over them. However, I also believe that individual communities should have a certain amount of say in establishing "community standards."
Oops. My bad. Sheesh, that'll teach me to post on an empty stomach!!
From the above, it has been inferred that any kind of prayer in public schools is unconstitutional, that putting the 10 Commandments on public property is unconstitutional, that pr0n is legal, that a woman has the right to privacy and, consequently, the right to terminate pregnancy, that public libraries may not filter web sites, and so on and so forth.
The point I'm making is that we have become accustomed to reading an awful lot into that one small amendment. As a student of political science, however, I find it both amusing and disturbing that the first five words of the amendment are the ones most frequently ignored: "Congress shall pass no law..."
Taken literally (and as the Founding Fathers intended!) this means that most of these freedoms we take for granted were never intended to be freedoms at the level they are, but rather issues left to the individual states!
I don't know exactly what that means for us today, but it is food for thought.
Next they'll offer vacation benefits as well...and they have some featured time shares they could recommend...
Years ago, it was Rock 'n' Roll. Then it was Dungeons and Dragons (anyone remember the Tom Hanks movie Mazes and Monsters?) Now it's computer games. The simple fact of the matter is that certain forms of entertainment tend to appeal to certain types of people, and that for some people, it goes from entertainment to escapism to all-out addiction. Does that make gaming inherently evil? No. Does it make game manufacturers responsible for creating an environment in which people can immerse themselves?
That seems to be the point here. I would argue that Sony is no more at fault than NASCAR is for unsafe teenage driving. The vast majority of people out there can distinguish between fantasy and reality. Those who cannot have serious mental problems and require serious care and support. Unfortunately, in the United States the infrastructure for dealing with mental health issues varies greatly from state to state, and a lot of places are not equipped to handle people with social and behavioral disorders. Sony is no more at fault for creating an online multiplayer universe than Ford is for building a car that can go fast. Unfortunately, Sony is an easy target here. The real solution, however, is not to go after symptom, but rather the actual disease. I feel confident in saying that if not Everquest, something else would have taken its place. The only real solution is proper identification and treatment of social disorders, an area still vastly underdeveloped and carrying too much of a stigma to be effective.
I wish I could recall the /. article off the top of my head, but there is such thing as virtually perfect code. In fact, there's a government rating for it, and the standard is the space shuttle's critical systems code. It doesn't get delivered to NASA until they are absolutely certain that it will not fail. Period. By comparison, most commercial products out there don't even make the government rating charts.
IIRC, there are two seperate teams at work. One team's job is to write the code and make sure it's bug-free. The other team's job is to find any and all bugs and report them to the first team to be repaired. Competition between the two teams is encouraged, so team 1 doesn't even deliver code to team 2 until they're convinced there are no bugs. Then, team 2 does everything they possibly can to find even the most minute quirk or bug or flaw. Once they find one, they report it at once, and team 1 has to fix it. The code doesn't get delivered to NASA until both teams certify that the code is 99.9% bug-free (they acknowledge that there probably is a bug in there somewhere, but that they were unable to find it.) This process takes years to go through, but it also proves that it is possible to write reliable code. Every time NASA sends up a shuttle, lives depend on it, and the programmers are acutely aware of this.
The real key here is that the program isn't done until it's done, and the team ignores things like arbitrary deadlines etc. Instead of having the attitude that "it's good enough to ship" they take the attitude that "it's not good enough until we are absolutely certain that it will not fail. Period."
Applied to the commercial and OSS world, that would mean that software wouldn't come out nearly as often: I'm guessing one major OS upgrade every 5-6 years, if that.
This is one of those questions where 200 different people have 200 different opinions on the matter. My take on the subject is this:
First, get the degree. That piece of paper can open a lot of doors for you.
Second, talk to your advisors and campus job-placement center. That's what they are there for.
Third, take advantage of other opportunities that present themselves and that sound interesting. What you study in college may very well have nothing to do with your career in the long run.
Do you have any hobbies or clubs you belong to that are not CS-related? Have you done or experienced anything that you think you'd enjoy delving into even more? If all else fails, there's always grad school, too.
A while back (meaning within the last 2 years) there was this company called 2am (which has gone under) which set up one of these gaming sites. Far and away their most popular game was called "Chain of Command." I don't want to bore anyone with details, but the idea was that you and a certain number of other individuals would fight a short (10-20 min) battle against another group of individuals. Each player got 4 soldiers, and the players were sorted by rank. As you got better, your rank would improve and you would move higher up the feeding chain.
But I digress. To do well at Chain of Command required a combination of teamwork, strategy and tactics. Teams that did well were generally teams that were aggressive, well-organized and used every advantage given them: cover, suppressive fire, stealth tactics, etc. What made that game cool was that in order to be effective you had to have a plan and stick to it. People who rushed in blindly ended up getting their tails shot off in short order. I had lots of fun with that game...
As a voter, you get the opportunity to speak your mind once every two years regarding federal matters. Sure, if you don't vote, you have the constitutional right to complain about it. However, if you do not vote, you have forfeited your most important voice. You see, we don't have time to be lobbiests and we don't have time to review every piece of legislation. That's why we take the time every 2 years to elect a member of the House of Representatives, every 4 years for a president and every 6 years for a Senator. By voting, you are saying that you either stand behind your representative or you are saying you really have issues with the job he's doing.
I don't condemn people who don't vote, but if you are eligible and don't take the time to let your voice be heard when it counts, I have no sympathy for you. If you care enough to gripe, you should care enough to vote. Please note that I fully understand there are times it's impossible to vote and I sympathize with that. It's when you simply don't care enough to vote and then turn around and whine that I have little tolerance for.
For what it's worth, I saw a report that it's not porn per se they're hiding pictures in. I don't remember the source, but from what I recall, they were actually using sports sites and pictures. But I could be wrong.
As an aside, I could see how they might use porn pictures to do their dirty work. They're not interested in the naughty picture, they're interested in the encrypted picture and getting a kick of double-revenge by letting us naughty Westerners see their (encrypted) top-secret plans and thinking we're just seeing a naked girl.
I'm not a demolitions or architecture expert, but as I understand it, the key to demolishing any building is to weaken it from within. A commercial airliner with any decent amount of fuel on board can provide a pretty huge explosion (aviation fuel is extremely flammable) and they hit several floors down. Given that the planes penetrated at high speed and that there were several floors above, it's understandable that the explosion took out the internal supports, destabilizing everything above the explosion as well as several floors below the explosion. After that, what remained of the supports simply couldn't sustain the weight of the remaining floors and the building collapsed. In some regards it's actually fortunate that it collapsed as slowly as it did so at least some people could get out.
As ABC News reminded us, we had the same reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing, immediately blaming militant Arabs. Turned out to be one of our own. On the other hand, who has the resources to pull off an attack like this one? Osama bin Laden is one of the few who does, but he's not the only one. I'm just at a loss to think of who else it might have been. But yes, before we blame people from the Middle East, we should examine all the facts.
IIRC, the original suit was brought by the DOJ and the attorneys general of 18 states. The DOJ has announced it will no longer seek a breakup, but that's no guarantee it will happen. For starters, the 18 attys general have a say in the matter. Next, the guilty verdict has already been handed down. IANAL, but I believe that only the penalty phase needs to be re-heard, along with any updates. It has happened before on several occasions that someone was sentenced to death even though the prosecutor didn't push it because the law of the land said it was a valid punishment for the crime.
I seriously doubt a breakup will happen, but this case is far from over. Microsoft has already been found guilty of at least some of the charges. The question is what the penalty should be. There may be 1000 opinions, but the one that counts is the one belonging to the judge.
According to the aforementioned bio, she got both her undergraduate and law degrees from Catholic University in Washington DC and also teaches at Georgetown. By all appearances she's about as much a Washington insider as a jurist can get. Now, I don't know much about her personally, but I don't think CUA's law school is particularly conservative (I was an undergrad there.) Long story made short, she'll be a competent judge, and probably lean toward the government side. I'm cautiously optimistic about her.
I don't know, I've never found them that appealing...