However, if you read a headline which says "U.N. sanctions $NATION" it's assumed that $NATION was punished in some way.
That has less to do with the word "sanction" and more to do with the U.N., which never does anything good in the world, so whenever they appear in the news, we assume it's bad news.
Perhaps a more familiar term for these corporate conspiracies would be "cartel", or did I attend the only high school that taught what a cartel is and why they're evil ?
They think of it as a battle, because that's how society has dressed it up for centuries. "us vs them" is a very seductive packaging for any idea.
Now if only people could realize that we spend most of our lives talking about, worrying about and being slaves to money, well then maybe they'd find a way to write money out of the equation and we could go back to fucking like rabbits.
Many server-class machines have something called IPMI (IP Management Interface), sometimes called LOM (Lights-Out Management). It is essentially KVM over IP, but built into the motherboard, sometimes via a small add-on card.
If you're playing around with desktop equipment, you should know that most boards will refuse to boot if a video card isn't detected. If you're trying to do this the cheap way, pop in the simplest video card you can find, hook it up to a KVM and get on with your life.
I run a bunch of headless machines here, they're all fully-functional PCs. When something breaks, I just whip out a USB keyboard and a VGA extension cord, and deal with it. The rest of the time it's all SSH and/or serial.
Maybe I'm just too old for this text fad (late 20's), but I think all these texters are wasting their lives. Oh yeah! I said it!
Why ? Because they spend more time texting than anything else, and the constant interruptions every time the phone vibrates just seems like a great way to kick ADD into overdrive. It used to be, there was a time for chatting, and a time for doing whatever it is you like or have to do. Now with these kids and their cell phones, every time is chatting time, and the result is a bunch of extremely socially-dependent people who can't do anything by themselves.
Sure, we've had ICQ for over a decade, and it has positive and negative effects on productivity, depending on its usage, but I think there's a big difference between an IM while I'm sitting at the computer doing other computery things, versus a text message while I'm working or shopping or studying or god-knows-what teenagers do when they're not yapping about hippie crap.
I'll be perfectly frank: I use text messages for work, and only work. I get paged when a server goes down, and I'll rarely type out a text message when coordinating with other techs, but that's about it. If I have sometime to tell someone, I can call them, and if it's too stupid or small a thing to call them about (a common excuse for texts), well really it's just too stupid, period! Do they need this information now ? Yes, No ? Shut up, then!
Then you run into problems where people start texting during important meetings, at the movies, or any other place where outside communication is verboten. It is an unwelcome distraction and quite disrespectful, and by allowing and even encouraging today's kids to rely on texting, we are setting them up for failure, farther down the road.
I think what jars most people, including myself, is that the whole avatar/Second Life thing is tacky and redundant. If all you want is a chat room, get on IRC. The supposed physicality of an on-screen persona is contrived and far more cumbersome than conversation alone.
OK, I'll be the first to concede that I am more sensitive (or attentive) to lag issues, being an audio/video hack myself, but how can 4+ frames of lag be ignored or even tolerated in any action game ?
I already consider the 3-frame LCD lag inacceptable and utterly shameful.. I mean the data is there, put it up already! If the de-crapifying filters need that much lookahead to function, they need to be refactored to use look-behind, and if the copycat engineers can't fix it, at least give an option to disable it per-port so we can play our games.
Now on the development side, as a so-so game dev myself, I can't think of any valid excuse for Killzone's 12 frames of lag. What the hell are they doing in the loop ? Here's what a game loop is supposed to look like :
Notice the lack of "sleep(9000)" statements ? So that's what, 20 usec worth of code ? Take input, spawn bullet, play sound and draw the goddamned frame already! If that takes you 200 msec to process, then your game is really running at 5 fps with a shit ton of interpolated frames in-between, and you should probably go back to writing Joomla plugins.
Ten years ago, this shit would not have flown. We used to tweak the everloving crap out of our loops, and VSYNC was the norm, which made late frames painfully obvious. To deal with it, we used hard-timed loops and every single piece of code had to obey the almighty strobe. You had 16 or 33ms to render your frame, and if that wasn't enough well, you had to tweak your code. Today, now that even game consoles have gone multicore, there is no excuse. You could even have one thread acting as a clock watcher, monitoring the other tasks and telling them to hustle (e.g. degrade) if they're falling behind.
To prioritize anything else is to betray the game's purpose: to entertain via interactivity. If a game is going to sacrifice interactivity, I might as well go watch Mythbusters instead:P
If choosing Linux means I have to buy rare and expensive hardware, how can we call it free software ? "Free with a catch" is not actually free. I'm willing to spend the money if the end result is more reliable or better performing, but that's ignoring the people who stand to benefit from free software the most, those with tight budgets, also known as the majority of the goddamned world. For Linux-based systems to gain traction, we need to get those millions of not-so-wealthy folks on board, and for that, we need to support the cheap hardware they can afford.
WinModems were only named as such because Linux hackers couldn't be bothered to make them work. A more appropriate term would be "Software-driven modem", but then you can't make the oh-so-trendy us vs them pun, and that rivalry is, in my not-so-humble opinion, everything that's wrong with the Linux ecosystem. Too much infighting, too much whining, too much "I hate Alan Cox, therefore your distro sucks" bullshit. That's not what it was about, and frankly I think the key people in this scene are taking too much bad example from Linus' elitism.
We should be getting all that nice cheap hardware to work on Linux, because cheap hardware + free software is a winning combination; that much should be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain.
If common non-hacker priorities are "dumber" to you, well I do wonder where you find the time to post here because your mind must be bursting with revolutionary kernel enhancements for your Top100 cluster.
For everyone else, we don't give a flying fuck whose fault it is. We just care that it's broken, has been for a long time, and upon seeing countless changelogs that amount to little more than kernel hacker epeen comparisons, a lot of us have given up hope for a truly omnipotent Linux desktop.
My office PC is a Linux desktop, with Windows in a VM. It works well for me, as a sysadmin, since every single thing I do in my job is network-based. My desktop is quirky as hell, and a lot of things just don't work right, or lag like Michael Jackson's burial. Flash video is one such pain, multi-monitor support is another (inequal-sized monitors ? FAIL!). I put up with it because it kicks ass for 95% of what I have to do, but that last 5% is a nail-biter.
For similar reasons, I have a somewhat sleeker build on my laptop, mostly due to KDE4, that shiny bug-infested mess of a Vista clone. It's a pain to get basic things like power management to work reliably, and a few kernels ago my backlight controls decided to quit, along with Suspend-to-RAM and my battery status. All this despite my carefully configured kernels and hours of ACPI troubleshooting. What's the use of a fast kernel if it makes my machine virtually unusable ?
It's real cute that they improved responsiveness under load, but how often does a average Linux desktop run out of memory ? If it weren't for all my VMs, I could run comfortably with 512mb, or so free/top/gkrellm would suggest. I just don't know which user base they're trying to please with this release, it's definitely not me.
That's just the problem: they make up seemingly arbitrary restrictions on what you can and can't pay for via their service. Presumably, this is the fallout of being a gimmick and not a real bank, and thus not protected by banking laws and statutes.
If I withdrawn $100 from an ATM to buy a stolen monkey, the bank is not responsible. If I do the same thing via Paypal, they seem to believe that makes them an accessory to the crime... and it may well be, because they're already walking a fine legal line.
Does that mean there's a law to enable citizens to arrest, detain, jail, silence AND remove the government officials we don't like ?
Like uh, I dunno, the TSA ?
In the millions (billions?) of unwarranted searches performed under guise of national security, how many serious, dangerous, organized, threat-to-the-safety-of-the-nation terrorists have been caught and permanently neutralized ? In other words, what's the hit rate for this malware filter ?
If the answer is zero, you need to start thinking about a coup d'etat.
If the company guys me legal pad and a pen, and I write "[A] Great American Novel", it doesn't give the company any rights to my work.
Read your employment contract, most of them specify that anything created using company resources (time, equipment, materials) becomes company property.
Just Google around for a history of ridiculously abusive court cases, where a clever guy got sued by his employer over an independent invention that didn't involve any company resources. They abound, particularly in the tech sector where it is perhaps more common for a talented individual to create stuff in their spare time, or perhaps a company dealing in intellectual property is more prone to litigious greed... whatever the causes, it's not so much about "if" they will steal it, but "when". The answer to that is "as soon as it makes fiscal sense to do so".
To the OP, if your boss wishes to compensate you for going above and beyond, they should do so in the form of a no-strings-attached bonus or raise. Your boss might be a nice guy, but even the kindest souls will turn evil if backed into a corner, and you don't want to be at the mercy of some ratty old tech-ignorant judge, should things ever go sour and you find yourself having to defend your own property in court. The judge will see a payment from the company account for a laptop, and it doesn't matter what either party says, that payment will be treated as proof of ownership.
I think it should be quite obvious to everyone, the greatest threat in any legal battle isn't so much the law, it's the extravagant costs incurred in court. The mere threat of dragging someone through that hell, forcing them to hire an attorney to defend against any alleged transgression, is usually enough to bully law-abiding citizens into doing whatever the big guy asks of them.
To launch that intimidating process, and then abort it prematurely, should be considered a threat and punished as such. Either you follow through to the end and accept whatever judgment is handed to you, or if you do chicken out early, it is considered forfeiture by default. I think that would cut down on frivolous court abuse, and as a bonus it would stop the RIAA dead in its tracks!
We're used to not paying for anything. Download some ISO, apt-get this and emerge that... I'm sure there are some people out there who use free software because they don't want to pirate Windows, but then again they didn't want to pay for it either.
Me, I use whatever's the best tool for the job. For network/web dev, that's Linux/KDE. For other stuff, it's Windows. How any of that relates to whether I download pirated games or not, well that's a leap of logic even I can't espouse.
Parking, much like traffic policing, has become a pointless profit generation scheme that addresses no real problem and "creates jobs", which in scientific language is called "inefficiency".
I say: free public parking for everyone. There is no scarcity, people aren't going to drive up from Mexico to steal your free parking spots. Nobody likes parking meters, except for the bean counters and the city execs shunting those funds to pad their frivolous budgets and buddy-buddy handouts. Meters do not reduce the problem of congestion, and they are a great inconvenience to everyone who ever has to go downtown to buy stuff or meet someone or go to a goddamned restaurant.
Paid parking is the textbook implementation of passive-aggressive behaviour. More hoops, more bullshit just so you can avoid getting a ticket from the city you're supposed to own, and the government drones who're supposed to represent your best interests. Just get rid of it all, and tell all those meter maids to get a real job.
We're all pretty much guessing here, so I will present my best educated guess. IANAPsychologist, I only took Psych classes to get chicks...
First of all, just because someone spends a lot of time doing one thing, that does not make them an addict. To be addicted to something, you have to feel drawn to it against your will, it must be an overwhelming urge. You know the old saying "I can quit any time I want, just not today"... that's addiction! If the very idea of stopping is a stressful thought, it's addiction. If you play WoW 16 hours a day because you enjoy it, and have nothing better to do, it's just a perfectly normal hobby. Have fun and please don't grief me!
If a person is truly addicted to something, drugs/sex/internet/anything, to a degree where it can be considered harmful, chances are the obsessive behaviour is a way to escape some stressful element in their life. Addiction is a symptom, a coping mechanism. You don't treat the symptom, you treat the cause.
A few years ago, one would have said I was addicted to WoW. I played it 16 hours a day, did almost nothing else. I wasn't addicted to a game, I was burnt out from a soulless job, broke and depressed out of my skull; the game was a way to shunt that negativity aside and keep from going batshit insane. It provided the cheap on-demand gratification I needed to stay out of the dumps, and by that definition it was successful. It floated me through a few rough months and gave me time to deal with my issues.
In light of that, I believe these so-called internet addiction camps can only cause more harm. To charge that amount of money, for what equates to six weeks of adult summer camp, is to prey on the weak. It does not address the underlying problem at all. An "internet addict" would be better served by a psychologist/therapist, and for that kind of money you could see your therapist twice weekly for a whole year, which is extreme overkill. You'll probably be cured after a dozen sessions or so, but "cure" isn't the right word, I prefer "empowered", because the change has to come from within. A therapist helps you map out the path, but you have to take that step toward self-respect and self-control.
The problem with Paypal is that, while they're not an FDIC-insured federally-legislated bank, they behave like one. If you're going to charge me service fees, currency exchange fees, transaction fees, balance fees, "you're a little too liberal for my inbred nationalist sensibilities" fees and "you're selling a big-ticket item so you must be rich" fees, well I expect there to be some very firm rules in place to ensure I get my mileage out of those fees. Dispute resolution ranks pretty high on that list, something Paypal does extremely poorly.
The reason Paypal is such a bastard ? Lack of competition. Paypal is a bigger brand than all other general-public e-payment gateways combined. Bigger than moneybookers, bigger than e-gold... They get away with it, because they're #1. Because the alternative is to get your own merchant account, and that costs way too much money, involves way too much paperwork, and like any bank service, it gives them way too much power over your business. You gotta do this, you gotta do that, can't sell this, can't ring the same amount twice in a row to a single card, if you sell X we increase your fees, if you sell Y we increase your fees AND your mandatory reserve amount, if you sell X + Y you need to fill out this form and put up with your condescending account manager for a half-hour on the phone.
Paypal is a hell of a lot simpler than a merchant account, so they get away with murder, in exchange for the privilege of not having to deal with a real bank.
Harassment is harassment. There are laws regarding debt collection. Someone being harassed by a debt collector would be well-informed to learn about these laws and how they can be used to protect their constitutional rights.
Or, I mean, you could always just post the story to/.
I'm not talking about the CPU, I mean the entire PC. The CPU may well dial itself down to 10 watts, but the motherboard's subsystems don't seem to save much power when underused, at least not in desktop systems.
I've experimented quite a bit with underclocking, and always found the power savings rather unimpressive. The reason is simple: the CPU is only a small part of the total power consumption. Even if I could theoretically drop the CPU's usage down to a single watt, the board itself would still draw 20-30 watts. An active hard drive will pull another 10 watts, maybe half that when idling.
You can achieve better efficiency with mobile boards, such as the ones typically paired with Intel Atom chips (or the Pentium M of days gone by). Using those power-conscious boards, you can indeed hit 10 watts at idle for the whole system, but you do so by sacrifying performance and versatility.
Sure, except I paid for the damned gasoline, it's mine regardless of where it falls.
If an ISP fucks with the bits coming down your line, the service you paid for, well I think we have the right to fuck back, because we "own" those bits.
These people have successfully recreated the Linksys NSLU2. Yaayyy!
Any moron can buy a Gumstix and install Linux and TorrentFlux. All it takes is a shell script to send a WOL packet to the snoozing storage PC, dump the files on it and put it back to sleep. Or you could just treat the whole thing as a torrent appliance, hook up a USB-adapted hard drive and cut the redundant desktop PC completely out of the picture.
There's nothing newsworthy about "inventing" a seedbox that runs on miniaturized PC hardware, because there is no technological gap to bridge. You buy the thing, you install the things on the thing, and then you use the thing. Most techies can do that in their sleep.
There are hundreds of millions of computers on the internet, many of them 24/7. Do you think their sysadmins power them off to reduce the risk of infection ? No. Ideally, you should treat a PC as "tainted" from the moment you plug it into an untrusted network. In practice, having an unpatched Windows box on the internet for maybe 5 minutes is enough to get it breached, because out of those hundreds of millions of computers, a significant chunk of them are already infected, and scanning for new victims to bork.
Statistically, sometimes I wonder how we manage to get any real data out there, with all the hijinx going on.
In my bubble, the BSA is just as hated as the RIAA. The only difference is the latter has been in the news more recently and more frequently.
Anyone remember those old "meet the developers" infomercials the BSA used to produce ? They'd get a bunch of "up and comers" in the game industry to come rail on and on about how software piracy is killing their babies. Well now it's been a while, but last time I heard, BillG's kids were breathing just fine.
From my perspective, as an indie software developer, piracy ain't so bad. Sure, I don't get paid when someone copies my software, but I think of it as free advertising - it's no different than if I'd given out free promotional copies. People use it, might fall in love with it, and eventually show it to someone who will actually buy it. More importantly: what the fuck could I do about it anyway ? The way I see it, the BSA is just a bunch of thugs hired/created by Microsoft and a few other big greedy heavies. They go door-to-door, sidestepping the constitution, buying congressmen and terrorizing businesses into buying software they don't need.
If the BSA worked for everyone, every single copyright-holding software developer in North America, they'd be worthy of a little more respect. They'd also have to quit it with these scare and shame tactics, the only people profiting are the lawyers. Right now, the BSA are nothing but a bunch of dickless rent-a-cops shitting where they eat.
Slashdot Mirror
However, if you read a headline which says "U.N. sanctions $NATION" it's assumed that $NATION was punished in some way.
That has less to do with the word "sanction" and more to do with the U.N., which never does anything good in the world, so whenever they appear in the news, we assume it's bad news.
Perhaps a more familiar term for these corporate conspiracies would be "cartel", or did I attend the only high school that taught what a cartel is and why they're evil ?
Humiliation doesn't work on our politicians, they bathe in it every single goddamned day and THEY LOVE IT!
What we need is a JFK style assassination or two, a little scare to wake them out of their circle-talking stupor.
They think of it as a battle, because that's how society has dressed it up for centuries. "us vs them" is a very seductive packaging for any idea.
Now if only people could realize that we spend most of our lives talking about, worrying about and being slaves to money, well then maybe they'd find a way to write money out of the equation and we could go back to fucking like rabbits.
Many server-class machines have something called IPMI (IP Management Interface), sometimes called LOM (Lights-Out Management). It is essentially KVM over IP, but built into the motherboard, sometimes via a small add-on card.
If you're playing around with desktop equipment, you should know that most boards will refuse to boot if a video card isn't detected. If you're trying to do this the cheap way, pop in the simplest video card you can find, hook it up to a KVM and get on with your life.
I run a bunch of headless machines here, they're all fully-functional PCs. When something breaks, I just whip out a USB keyboard and a VGA extension cord, and deal with it. The rest of the time it's all SSH and/or serial.
Maybe I'm just too old for this text fad (late 20's), but I think all these texters are wasting their lives. Oh yeah! I said it!
Why ? Because they spend more time texting than anything else, and the constant interruptions every time the phone vibrates just seems like a great way to kick ADD into overdrive. It used to be, there was a time for chatting, and a time for doing whatever it is you like or have to do. Now with these kids and their cell phones, every time is chatting time, and the result is a bunch of extremely socially-dependent people who can't do anything by themselves.
Sure, we've had ICQ for over a decade, and it has positive and negative effects on productivity, depending on its usage, but I think there's a big difference between an IM while I'm sitting at the computer doing other computery things, versus a text message while I'm working or shopping or studying or god-knows-what teenagers do when they're not yapping about hippie crap.
I'll be perfectly frank: I use text messages for work, and only work. I get paged when a server goes down, and I'll rarely type out a text message when coordinating with other techs, but that's about it. If I have sometime to tell someone, I can call them, and if it's too stupid or small a thing to call them about (a common excuse for texts), well really it's just too stupid, period! Do they need this information now ? Yes, No ? Shut up, then!
Then you run into problems where people start texting during important meetings, at the movies, or any other place where outside communication is verboten. It is an unwelcome distraction and quite disrespectful, and by allowing and even encouraging today's kids to rely on texting, we are setting them up for failure, farther down the road.
I think what jars most people, including myself, is that the whole avatar/Second Life thing is tacky and redundant. If all you want is a chat room, get on IRC. The supposed physicality of an on-screen persona is contrived and far more cumbersome than conversation alone.
OK, I'll be the first to concede that I am more sensitive (or attentive) to lag issues, being an audio/video hack myself, but how can 4+ frames of lag be ignored or even tolerated in any action game ?
I already consider the 3-frame LCD lag inacceptable and utterly shameful.. I mean the data is there, put it up already! If the de-crapifying filters need that much lookahead to function, they need to be refactored to use look-behind, and if the copycat engineers can't fix it, at least give an option to disable it per-port so we can play our games.
Now on the development side, as a so-so game dev myself, I can't think of any valid excuse for Killzone's 12 frames of lag. What the hell are they doing in the loop ? Here's what a game loop is supposed to look like :
for (;;)
{
if(button_pushed(1) && ga_hasammo(ga_PEW_PEW))
{
ga_plWeapon::spawn_bullet();
}
render_scene();
}
Notice the lack of "sleep(9000)" statements ? So that's what, 20 usec worth of code ? Take input, spawn bullet, play sound and draw the goddamned frame already! If that takes you 200 msec to process, then your game is really running at 5 fps with a shit ton of interpolated frames in-between, and you should probably go back to writing Joomla plugins.
Ten years ago, this shit would not have flown. We used to tweak the everloving crap out of our loops, and VSYNC was the norm, which made late frames painfully obvious. To deal with it, we used hard-timed loops and every single piece of code had to obey the almighty strobe. You had 16 or 33ms to render your frame, and if that wasn't enough well, you had to tweak your code. Today, now that even game consoles have gone multicore, there is no excuse. You could even have one thread acting as a clock watcher, monitoring the other tasks and telling them to hustle (e.g. degrade) if they're falling behind.
To prioritize anything else is to betray the game's purpose: to entertain via interactivity. If a game is going to sacrifice interactivity, I might as well go watch Mythbusters instead :P
If choosing Linux means I have to buy rare and expensive hardware, how can we call it free software ? "Free with a catch" is not actually free. I'm willing to spend the money if the end result is more reliable or better performing, but that's ignoring the people who stand to benefit from free software the most, those with tight budgets, also known as the majority of the goddamned world. For Linux-based systems to gain traction, we need to get those millions of not-so-wealthy folks on board, and for that, we need to support the cheap hardware they can afford.
WinModems were only named as such because Linux hackers couldn't be bothered to make them work. A more appropriate term would be "Software-driven modem", but then you can't make the oh-so-trendy us vs them pun, and that rivalry is, in my not-so-humble opinion, everything that's wrong with the Linux ecosystem. Too much infighting, too much whining, too much "I hate Alan Cox, therefore your distro sucks" bullshit. That's not what it was about, and frankly I think the key people in this scene are taking too much bad example from Linus' elitism.
We should be getting all that nice cheap hardware to work on Linux, because cheap hardware + free software is a winning combination; that much should be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain.
If common non-hacker priorities are "dumber" to you, well I do wonder where you find the time to post here because your mind must be bursting with revolutionary kernel enhancements for your Top100 cluster.
For everyone else, we don't give a flying fuck whose fault it is. We just care that it's broken, has been for a long time, and upon seeing countless changelogs that amount to little more than kernel hacker epeen comparisons, a lot of us have given up hope for a truly omnipotent Linux desktop.
My office PC is a Linux desktop, with Windows in a VM. It works well for me, as a sysadmin, since every single thing I do in my job is network-based. My desktop is quirky as hell, and a lot of things just don't work right, or lag like Michael Jackson's burial. Flash video is one such pain, multi-monitor support is another (inequal-sized monitors ? FAIL!). I put up with it because it kicks ass for 95% of what I have to do, but that last 5% is a nail-biter.
For similar reasons, I have a somewhat sleeker build on my laptop, mostly due to KDE4, that shiny bug-infested mess of a Vista clone. It's a pain to get basic things like power management to work reliably, and a few kernels ago my backlight controls decided to quit, along with Suspend-to-RAM and my battery status. All this despite my carefully configured kernels and hours of ACPI troubleshooting. What's the use of a fast kernel if it makes my machine virtually unusable ?
It's real cute that they improved responsiveness under load, but how often does a average Linux desktop run out of memory ? If it weren't for all my VMs, I could run comfortably with 512mb, or so free/top/gkrellm would suggest. I just don't know which user base they're trying to please with this release, it's definitely not me.
Remember, people, these are the organizations you trust with your money.
Banks are terribly overrated, as if that weren't obvious by now.
That's just the problem: they make up seemingly arbitrary restrictions on what you can and can't pay for via their service. Presumably, this is the fallout of being a gimmick and not a real bank, and thus not protected by banking laws and statutes.
If I withdrawn $100 from an ATM to buy a stolen monkey, the bank is not responsible. If I do the same thing via Paypal, they seem to believe that makes them an accessory to the crime... and it may well be, because they're already walking a fine legal line.
Does that mean there's a law to enable citizens to arrest, detain, jail, silence AND remove the government officials we don't like ?
Like uh, I dunno, the TSA ?
In the millions (billions?) of unwarranted searches performed under guise of national security, how many serious, dangerous, organized, threat-to-the-safety-of-the-nation terrorists have been caught and permanently neutralized ? In other words, what's the hit rate for this malware filter ?
If the answer is zero, you need to start thinking about a coup d'etat.
If the company guys me legal pad and a pen, and I write "[A] Great American Novel", it doesn't give the company any rights to my work.
Read your employment contract, most of them specify that anything created using company resources (time, equipment, materials) becomes company property.
Just Google around for a history of ridiculously abusive court cases, where a clever guy got sued by his employer over an independent invention that didn't involve any company resources. They abound, particularly in the tech sector where it is perhaps more common for a talented individual to create stuff in their spare time, or perhaps a company dealing in intellectual property is more prone to litigious greed... whatever the causes, it's not so much about "if" they will steal it, but "when". The answer to that is "as soon as it makes fiscal sense to do so".
To the OP, if your boss wishes to compensate you for going above and beyond, they should do so in the form of a no-strings-attached bonus or raise. Your boss might be a nice guy, but even the kindest souls will turn evil if backed into a corner, and you don't want to be at the mercy of some ratty old tech-ignorant judge, should things ever go sour and you find yourself having to defend your own property in court. The judge will see a payment from the company account for a laptop, and it doesn't matter what either party says, that payment will be treated as proof of ownership.
I think it should be quite obvious to everyone, the greatest threat in any legal battle isn't so much the law, it's the extravagant costs incurred in court. The mere threat of dragging someone through that hell, forcing them to hire an attorney to defend against any alleged transgression, is usually enough to bully law-abiding citizens into doing whatever the big guy asks of them.
To launch that intimidating process, and then abort it prematurely, should be considered a threat and punished as such. Either you follow through to the end and accept whatever judgment is handed to you, or if you do chicken out early, it is considered forfeiture by default. I think that would cut down on frivolous court abuse, and as a bonus it would stop the RIAA dead in its tracks!
Are you serious ?
We're used to not paying for anything. Download some ISO, apt-get this and emerge that... I'm sure there are some people out there who use free software because they don't want to pirate Windows, but then again they didn't want to pay for it either.
Me, I use whatever's the best tool for the job. For network/web dev, that's Linux/KDE. For other stuff, it's Windows. How any of that relates to whether I download pirated games or not, well that's a leap of logic even I can't espouse.
Parking, much like traffic policing, has become a pointless profit generation scheme that addresses no real problem and "creates jobs", which in scientific language is called "inefficiency".
I say: free public parking for everyone. There is no scarcity, people aren't going to drive up from Mexico to steal your free parking spots. Nobody likes parking meters, except for the bean counters and the city execs shunting those funds to pad their frivolous budgets and buddy-buddy handouts. Meters do not reduce the problem of congestion, and they are a great inconvenience to everyone who ever has to go downtown to buy stuff or meet someone or go to a goddamned restaurant.
Paid parking is the textbook implementation of passive-aggressive behaviour. More hoops, more bullshit just so you can avoid getting a ticket from the city you're supposed to own, and the government drones who're supposed to represent your best interests. Just get rid of it all, and tell all those meter maids to get a real job.
Do you know anything at all about 12 step programs ?
Have you studied data on recidivism rates for 12 step program "graduates" ?
Do you think artificial guilt is an effective tool to address deeply-rooted psychological issues ?
Do you actually think people behave the same way at an AA meeting, as they would outside the confines of an authority-based, peer-pressure microcosm ?
We're all pretty much guessing here, so I will present my best educated guess. IANAPsychologist, I only took Psych classes to get chicks...
First of all, just because someone spends a lot of time doing one thing, that does not make them an addict. To be addicted to something, you have to feel drawn to it against your will, it must be an overwhelming urge. You know the old saying "I can quit any time I want, just not today"... that's addiction! If the very idea of stopping is a stressful thought, it's addiction. If you play WoW 16 hours a day because you enjoy it, and have nothing better to do, it's just a perfectly normal hobby. Have fun and please don't grief me!
If a person is truly addicted to something, drugs/sex/internet/anything, to a degree where it can be considered harmful, chances are the obsessive behaviour is a way to escape some stressful element in their life. Addiction is a symptom, a coping mechanism. You don't treat the symptom, you treat the cause.
A few years ago, one would have said I was addicted to WoW. I played it 16 hours a day, did almost nothing else. I wasn't addicted to a game, I was burnt out from a soulless job, broke and depressed out of my skull; the game was a way to shunt that negativity aside and keep from going batshit insane. It provided the cheap on-demand gratification I needed to stay out of the dumps, and by that definition it was successful. It floated me through a few rough months and gave me time to deal with my issues.
In light of that, I believe these so-called internet addiction camps can only cause more harm. To charge that amount of money, for what equates to six weeks of adult summer camp, is to prey on the weak. It does not address the underlying problem at all. An "internet addict" would be better served by a psychologist/therapist, and for that kind of money you could see your therapist twice weekly for a whole year, which is extreme overkill. You'll probably be cured after a dozen sessions or so, but "cure" isn't the right word, I prefer "empowered", because the change has to come from within. A therapist helps you map out the path, but you have to take that step toward self-respect and self-control.
Fucked if you do, fucked if you don't.
The problem with Paypal is that, while they're not an FDIC-insured federally-legislated bank, they behave like one. If you're going to charge me service fees, currency exchange fees, transaction fees, balance fees, "you're a little too liberal for my inbred nationalist sensibilities" fees and "you're selling a big-ticket item so you must be rich" fees, well I expect there to be some very firm rules in place to ensure I get my mileage out of those fees. Dispute resolution ranks pretty high on that list, something Paypal does extremely poorly.
The reason Paypal is such a bastard ? Lack of competition. Paypal is a bigger brand than all other general-public e-payment gateways combined. Bigger than moneybookers, bigger than e-gold... They get away with it, because they're #1. Because the alternative is to get your own merchant account, and that costs way too much money, involves way too much paperwork, and like any bank service, it gives them way too much power over your business. You gotta do this, you gotta do that, can't sell this, can't ring the same amount twice in a row to a single card, if you sell X we increase your fees, if you sell Y we increase your fees AND your mandatory reserve amount, if you sell X + Y you need to fill out this form and put up with your condescending account manager for a half-hour on the phone.
Paypal is a hell of a lot simpler than a merchant account, so they get away with murder, in exchange for the privilege of not having to deal with a real bank.
Sue ?
Harassment is harassment. There are laws regarding debt collection. Someone being harassed by a debt collector would be well-informed to learn about these laws and how they can be used to protect their constitutional rights.
Or, I mean, you could always just post the story to /.
I'm not talking about the CPU, I mean the entire PC. The CPU may well dial itself down to 10 watts, but the motherboard's subsystems don't seem to save much power when underused, at least not in desktop systems.
I've experimented quite a bit with underclocking, and always found the power savings rather unimpressive. The reason is simple: the CPU is only a small part of the total power consumption. Even if I could theoretically drop the CPU's usage down to a single watt, the board itself would still draw 20-30 watts. An active hard drive will pull another 10 watts, maybe half that when idling.
You can achieve better efficiency with mobile boards, such as the ones typically paired with Intel Atom chips (or the Pentium M of days gone by). Using those power-conscious boards, you can indeed hit 10 watts at idle for the whole system, but you do so by sacrifying performance and versatility.
Sure, except I paid for the damned gasoline, it's mine regardless of where it falls.
If an ISP fucks with the bits coming down your line, the service you paid for, well I think we have the right to fuck back, because we "own" those bits.
These people have successfully recreated the Linksys NSLU2. Yaayyy!
Any moron can buy a Gumstix and install Linux and TorrentFlux. All it takes is a shell script to send a WOL packet to the snoozing storage PC, dump the files on it and put it back to sleep. Or you could just treat the whole thing as a torrent appliance, hook up a USB-adapted hard drive and cut the redundant desktop PC completely out of the picture.
There's nothing newsworthy about "inventing" a seedbox that runs on miniaturized PC hardware, because there is no technological gap to bridge. You buy the thing, you install the things on the thing, and then you use the thing. Most techies can do that in their sleep.
There are hundreds of millions of computers on the internet, many of them 24/7. Do you think their sysadmins power them off to reduce the risk of infection ? No. Ideally, you should treat a PC as "tainted" from the moment you plug it into an untrusted network. In practice, having an unpatched Windows box on the internet for maybe 5 minutes is enough to get it breached, because out of those hundreds of millions of computers, a significant chunk of them are already infected, and scanning for new victims to bork.
Statistically, sometimes I wonder how we manage to get any real data out there, with all the hijinx going on.
In my bubble, the BSA is just as hated as the RIAA. The only difference is the latter has been in the news more recently and more frequently.
Anyone remember those old "meet the developers" infomercials the BSA used to produce ? They'd get a bunch of "up and comers" in the game industry to come rail on and on about how software piracy is killing their babies. Well now it's been a while, but last time I heard, BillG's kids were breathing just fine.
From my perspective, as an indie software developer, piracy ain't so bad. Sure, I don't get paid when someone copies my software, but I think of it as free advertising - it's no different than if I'd given out free promotional copies. People use it, might fall in love with it, and eventually show it to someone who will actually buy it. More importantly: what the fuck could I do about it anyway ? The way I see it, the BSA is just a bunch of thugs hired/created by Microsoft and a few other big greedy heavies. They go door-to-door, sidestepping the constitution, buying congressmen and terrorizing businesses into buying software they don't need.
If the BSA worked for everyone, every single copyright-holding software developer in North America, they'd be worthy of a little more respect. They'd also have to quit it with these scare and shame tactics, the only people profiting are the lawyers. Right now, the BSA are nothing but a bunch of dickless rent-a-cops shitting where they eat.