AA has been offering wireless on several SFO <-> JFK flights for quite a while. And as another poster pointed out, Virgin is also offering this on many flights.
I'm a little surprised that you weren't taught any functional languages, like Lisp, Scheme, or ML. It seems like a tragic hole in your college education. From a practical standpoint, it won't necessarily effect your ability to get hired at a bank, but it is surprising. Practically, unless you are working on low-level hardware or kernel code, I would focus on a high-level language like C++, Java, or C#. For C# you can download the free version of Visual Studio; for Java download Eclipse or NetBeans; for C++ learn to love emacs.
More importantly, join a mid-size to large open source project and contribute code. This will teach you important skills that you can only get by programming with other people: the need to use revision control, how to code to different coding standards, and the necessity of coding reviews.
A thorough understanding of revision control is a fundamental part of any professional programmer's skill set. If you have a chance, learn more than one revision control system.
You might want to spend some time learning about relational databases. You should have a good understanding of SQL and concepts like normalization and joins. On the open source side, you can learn about concepts using PostgreSQL or MySQL with InnoDB. On the closed source side, you can download Microsoft's SQL Server Express or Oracle. Both are free for personal development purposes.
Again, a good way to learn professional software development is to work in an public open source project. You'll work with people of different backgrounds and different skill levels. As an added bonus, it's an easy way to show your work (and code) to a prospective employer.
In New York City, if a cop tries to smash your camera or arrest you on a trivial charge for taking their picture, then the cop should get disciplined.
The New York Times had an entire article about cops and video:
Officers Become Accidental YouTube Stars
For what it's worth, the Picasa TOS you cite appear to be out of date; I assume you referring to the TOS here: http://picasa.google.com/web/tos.html. If you click the link "Privacy Notice" and then click back to the link "Terms of Service," you are brought to the standard Google TOS, not the older Picasa TOS. The only link I could find to the older Picasa TOS was (ironically) using Google search.
Note that the Google TOS do not limit its rights to material that is "intended to be available to the general public."
You are correct that most services have similar TOS, but they are each slightly different. And it's those slight differences that are fairly significant.
Actually, Yahoo could not easily put out a book of images from Flickr. Their TOS specify that the license is "solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted." Even if they wiggled around these terms, a photographer could terminate the license: "This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service."
I fully agree that you should read the license agreement, but I'm not sure what you mean by "standard" language. Could you please cite a central authority or reference regarding "standard" terms with respect to content syndication? It would be nice if there were a standard set of license terms for syndication.
The license to distribute the content is not the issue: Google needs a license in order to be able to display content to the public. The only issues have to do with the terms of license regarding duration and purpose.
First, the license is "perpetual" and "irrevocable." In other words, there is no legal remedy for a user to terminate the license. (Other Google services, like YouTube, modify the duration.)
Second, the license specifically grants Google the right to use content to "promote" services. This is almost a blank check to use content in any fashion. As the article points out, the TOS could allow Google to produce a book of Picasa images without compensating the photographers.
The article is spot on in this regard, and Google should modify their license terms.
careysb is spot on. This is the exact same issue many people had with Google Chrome. Google changed the license agreement for Google Chrome earlier today; one wonders if they will make the same fix for Picasa 3.0.
1. BETA..Beta..BETA (although their use of "Beta" is a bit stretched I know).
If you discuss license agreements with a lawyer, I don't think saying, "This is a beta license agreement" will carry much weight. If you agree to a contract, you are agreeing to the contract, warts and all. It's also worth noting that services like Gmail are still in "beta."
2. Complain, email, Complain!! - Google DOES listen generally (they may not write back, but people do pay attention)
I posted a question on Google groups a week or so ago and have now sent two email messages about the TOS. No response on the Google group; no response to the email messages. As you point out, they may be paying attention, but it's a bit hard to tell, no?
As other posters have pointed out, the Chrome privacy policy seems to make section 11 moot as it implies that Google will not collect information other than what is required to actually run the browser. So while they assert a royalty-free perpetual license to some content, Google states that they are not capturing the content.
Several other web-based services have a similar license agreement. Generally, the reason why Google's standard Terms of Service requires a royalty-free license is so they can syndicate and publish content you decide to distribute using Google's services. This doesn't necessarily seem applicable to using a web browser. However, even if the content in Section 11 should be included, there are a couple of extra phrases that Google has that other companies do not include. And they make a real difference with other services like Picasa Web Albums.
One extra phrase that Google includes in their Terms of Service is "promote." Other companies, like Yahoo and Apple, do not have this clause. To me, this implies that Google can use your content in advertisements for free. Another clause gives Google the right to share your content with business partners for the provision of syndicated services. Again, this could be for promotional reasons; you might end us having your content used in advertisements for Google's business partners, especially as the reasons for sharing the content are not well defined in the Terms of Service.
Google can fix this problem for Chrome. Other services, like YouTube and Blogger, have much more specific terms of service that ameliorate the problems of Section 11 of the Google TOS. However, the better solution for Google is to fix their TOS in the first place to only grab the rights required to run their products.
This must be your first Olympics. There is no other way to explain your naivete.
The organizing committees for the Olympic Games always charge an excessive amount of money for everything. As a contractor, I'm sure you have absolutely no idea what your room is costing, but I'm sure it is around ten thousand dollars for a mere three weeks. And the media housing is not a four star hotel.
Check out the rate card if you are really interested in cost inflation. A chair rental in the press center is usually between $300 and $600. And this is not for a nice adjustable chair--this is for a chair that would cost $30 to $50 retail.
Heck, everyone gets in the act: when I visited China last year, a first class direct business fare from New York City was under $1500. For the Olympics, that same flight was well over $6000.
You may also think the food at local restaurants is affordable, but I can assure you that the local merchants have probably doubled or tripled their prices.
There is nothing given away for free at the Olympics. Except for pins. And you usually have to trade for them.
Incidentally, here are a couple of other quick tips: China is not a democracy, don't drink the water ever (the locals don't), and make time to visit the Great Wall.
Check out the non-print version if you would like to see photos of the XO laptop. Of course, while you will also have advertisements, the content is nicely formatted for the screen.
I often wonder why Slashdot posts links to a version of the article formatted for printing rather than the main article.
The article states that the inclusion of chips would prevent the transfer of tickets. It's very common practice for tickets for major events to be resold; would each ticket need to be rekeyed in the event of a sale? Disallowing ticket resales would be unprecedented in Olympic history.
In addition, most sponsor organizations, the IOC, and participating countries are usually given largeblocks of tickets to do with as they please. The logistical requirements will be huge if BOCOG requires each of these tickets to have the information encoded as well.
A friend of mine who lives in Shanghai mentioned that ESPN and HBO went off the air this morning. The only western channels that are available are CNN and a German channel that is over 90% news.
A simple court order would open up any account they want. Why people go to these companies and ask "permission" is beyond me... Asking permission => Free
Haselton's thesis is interesting, but it fails to acknowledge that perfectly reasonable and intelligent people can disagree about their interpretation of a law or policy. This is why different judges will have different opinions of the same law. It doesn't necessarily mean that the law itself is broken. Haselton appears to have an idealized view of the universe where people are as simply unchanging finite state automata and English is a language that is never open to interpretation. Incidentally, while his rant against common law is cute, I much prefer a system where every single action I can or cannot take does not have to be codified into written law.
I would like to give this admin credit for not just walking into the place with a high-powered assault rifle and shooting at random. I wouldn't. I think a minimum qualification for participating in our society is knowing that "walking into a place with a high-powered assault rifle and shooting at random" is wrong. What's next? Giving people credit for not spitting on people who annoy them?
I have been angry at work. I took a more reasonable approach: I quit and found a different job.
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Transaction (Process ID 236) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.
/efytimes/lefthome.asp, line 284
Maybe they should consider using Linux....
Most people in NYC don't drive in Manhattan
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 1
The Manhattan 1984 comment is a bit of hyperbole. This system is closer to EZPass for lower Manhattan than other systems. If you were willing to accept EZPass, are you willing to accept this system?
One commenter noted that these are "public" roads, not toll roads. I'm not sure I understand how he draws the distinction. I pay taxes to help maintain both public and toll roads. As a New Yorker, I have no problems with private cars being charged to drive on roads. I've been taking the subway for over a decade and haven't driven for over 15 years. Yet I still have to pay for my "public" train system. Why should drivers be any different?
One of the major points of congestion pricing is to limit the number of cars in lower Manhattan. If you choose not to drive because of a loss of privacy, I think that would be considered a "win."
If you want to squawk about the use of computerized records being used to track people, check out the subway system. Far more people use the subway than use the roads, and through the use of the Metrocard my movements can be tracked throughout the city. That is a far larger invasion of privacy in New York City than any proposed congestion pricing models.
I definitely agree about the native format. Most imaging and prepress people I know work in the Photoshop format. Archival formats are still an issue. PDF is nice, but big and not compatible with every design application. The problem with formats is that you want to save all of the layers, channels, and paths. That gets tricky; I don't know if PNG can save all of that information. Realistically, I don't know of any prepress professional who works in the PNG format. What would be the point? TIFF and Photoshop both work fine.
In Photoshop, many filters do not work in 15- or 16- bits per pixel. For printed material, why would you want to do manipulation in sRGB rather than Adobe RGB? The problem with sRGB is that it is a subset of most CMYK spaces; the Adobe RGB and CMYK spaces are not subsets of one another.
Personally, I feel that working in CMYK is a terrible idea. I would rather any file that is going to press start with an Adobe RGB or other wide gamut profile and get converted to CMYK prior to press or on the RIP. If it is going to the web, convert the file to sRGB as it is resized for the web page.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a few months to experience life in another location and with another culture with few restrictions. Seize the day.
In fact, the original post and the referenced article is very similar to a comment I made two months ago regarding American Airlines offering wifi. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1182095&cid=27401567
AA has been offering wireless on several SFO <-> JFK flights for quite a while. And as another poster pointed out, Virgin is also offering this on many flights.
I hit speedtest.net from both a recent American Airlines flight and a Virgin America flight (Bonus: Verizon Fios and TWC stats, too!).
The connections from the flights were good enough to watch Battlestar Galactica on hulu.com. (I am a big geek.)
In both cases, Internet service was provided by Gogo.
I'm a little surprised that you weren't taught any functional languages, like Lisp, Scheme, or ML. It seems like a tragic hole in your college education. From a practical standpoint, it won't necessarily effect your ability to get hired at a bank, but it is surprising. Practically, unless you are working on low-level hardware or kernel code, I would focus on a high-level language like C++, Java, or C#. For C# you can download the free version of Visual Studio; for Java download Eclipse or NetBeans; for C++ learn to love emacs.
More importantly, join a mid-size to large open source project and contribute code. This will teach you important skills that you can only get by programming with other people: the need to use revision control, how to code to different coding standards, and the necessity of coding reviews.
A thorough understanding of revision control is a fundamental part of any professional programmer's skill set. If you have a chance, learn more than one revision control system.
You might want to spend some time learning about relational databases. You should have a good understanding of SQL and concepts like normalization and joins. On the open source side, you can learn about concepts using PostgreSQL or MySQL with InnoDB. On the closed source side, you can download Microsoft's SQL Server Express or Oracle. Both are free for personal development purposes.
Again, a good way to learn professional software development is to work in an public open source project. You'll work with people of different backgrounds and different skill levels. As an added bonus, it's an easy way to show your work (and code) to a prospective employer.
In New York City, if a cop tries to smash your camera or arrest you on a trivial charge for taking their picture, then the cop should get disciplined. The New York Times had an entire article about cops and video: Officers Become Accidental YouTube Stars
Note that the Google TOS do not limit its rights to material that is "intended to be available to the general public."
You are correct that most services have similar TOS, but they are each slightly different. And it's those slight differences that are fairly significant.
I fully agree that you should read the license agreement, but I'm not sure what you mean by "standard" language. Could you please cite a central authority or reference regarding "standard" terms with respect to content syndication? It would be nice if there were a standard set of license terms for syndication.
First, the license is "perpetual" and "irrevocable." In other words, there is no legal remedy for a user to terminate the license. (Other Google services, like YouTube, modify the duration.)
Second, the license specifically grants Google the right to use content to "promote" services. This is almost a blank check to use content in any fashion. As the article points out, the TOS could allow Google to produce a book of Picasa images without compensating the photographers.
The article is spot on in this regard, and Google should modify their license terms.
Incidentally, this is not really new. This came up on earlier /. threads here and here. I compared various license terms for photo services on my blog one week before the release of Google Chrome and responded to the Google blog post a few days later.
careysb is spot on. This is the exact same issue many people had with Google Chrome. Google changed the license agreement for Google Chrome earlier today; one wonders if they will make the same fix for Picasa 3.0.
1. BETA..Beta..BETA (although their use of "Beta" is a bit stretched I know).
If you discuss license agreements with a lawyer, I don't think saying, "This is a beta license agreement" will carry much weight. If you agree to a contract, you are agreeing to the contract, warts and all. It's also worth noting that services like Gmail are still in "beta."
2. Complain, email, Complain!! - Google DOES listen generally (they may not write back, but people do pay attention)
I posted a question on Google groups a week or so ago and have now sent two email messages about the TOS. No response on the Google group; no response to the email messages. As you point out, they may be paying attention, but it's a bit hard to tell, no?
As other posters have pointed out, the Chrome privacy policy seems to make section 11 moot as it implies that Google will not collect information other than what is required to actually run the browser. So while they assert a royalty-free perpetual license to some content, Google states that they are not capturing the content.
Several other web-based services have a similar license agreement. Generally, the reason why Google's standard Terms of Service requires a royalty-free license is so they can syndicate and publish content you decide to distribute using Google's services. This doesn't necessarily seem applicable to using a web browser. However, even if the content in Section 11 should be included, there are a couple of extra phrases that Google has that other companies do not include. And they make a real difference with other services like Picasa Web Albums.
One extra phrase that Google includes in their Terms of Service is "promote." Other companies, like Yahoo and Apple, do not have this clause. To me, this implies that Google can use your content in advertisements for free. Another clause gives Google the right to share your content with business partners for the provision of syndicated services. Again, this could be for promotional reasons; you might end us having your content used in advertisements for Google's business partners, especially as the reasons for sharing the content are not well defined in the Terms of Service.
I wrote a comparison of the Google Picasa Web Terms of Service against similar companies. No other company seems to grab the promotional rights to your material in the same manner that Google does.
Google can fix this problem for Chrome. Other services, like YouTube and Blogger, have much more specific terms of service that ameliorate the problems of Section 11 of the Google TOS. However, the better solution for Google is to fix their TOS in the first place to only grab the rights required to run their products.
What do they drink then? Gasoline?
Tea, juice, soda, and so on. Tap water in Beijing is not potable.
The organizing committees for the Olympic Games always charge an excessive amount of money for everything. As a contractor, I'm sure you have absolutely no idea what your room is costing, but I'm sure it is around ten thousand dollars for a mere three weeks. And the media housing is not a four star hotel.
Check out the rate card if you are really interested in cost inflation. A chair rental in the press center is usually between $300 and $600. And this is not for a nice adjustable chair--this is for a chair that would cost $30 to $50 retail.
Heck, everyone gets in the act: when I visited China last year, a first class direct business fare from New York City was under $1500. For the Olympics, that same flight was well over $6000.
You may also think the food at local restaurants is affordable, but I can assure you that the local merchants have probably doubled or tripled their prices.
There is nothing given away for free at the Olympics. Except for pins. And you usually have to trade for them.
Incidentally, here are a couple of other quick tips: China is not a democracy, don't drink the water ever (the locals don't), and make time to visit the Great Wall.
I often wonder why Slashdot posts links to a version of the article formatted for printing rather than the main article.
The article states that the inclusion of chips would prevent the transfer of tickets. It's very common practice for tickets for major events to be resold; would each ticket need to be rekeyed in the event of a sale? Disallowing ticket resales would be unprecedented in Olympic history. In addition, most sponsor organizations, the IOC, and participating countries are usually given largeblocks of tickets to do with as they please. The logistical requirements will be huge if BOCOG requires each of these tickets to have the information encoded as well.
A friend of mine who lives in Shanghai mentioned that ESPN and HBO went off the air this morning. The only western channels that are available are CNN and a German channel that is over 90% news.
Shouldn't the summary read, "inventing the web?"
A "simple" court order => Not free
Haselton's thesis is interesting, but it fails to acknowledge that perfectly reasonable and intelligent people can disagree about their interpretation of a law or policy. This is why different judges will have different opinions of the same law. It doesn't necessarily mean that the law itself is broken. Haselton appears to have an idealized view of the universe where people are as simply unchanging finite state automata and English is a language that is never open to interpretation. Incidentally, while his rant against common law is cute, I much prefer a system where every single action I can or cannot take does not have to be codified into written law.
I have been angry at work. I took a more reasonable approach: I quit and found a different job.
And Alan Turing rolls over in his grave....
It is funny to have four comments on a post marked as "Redundant"
Maybe they should consider using Linux....
One commenter noted that these are "public" roads, not toll roads. I'm not sure I understand how he draws the distinction. I pay taxes to help maintain both public and toll roads. As a New Yorker, I have no problems with private cars being charged to drive on roads. I've been taking the subway for over a decade and haven't driven for over 15 years. Yet I still have to pay for my "public" train system. Why should drivers be any different?
One of the major points of congestion pricing is to limit the number of cars in lower Manhattan. If you choose not to drive because of a loss of privacy, I think that would be considered a "win."
If you want to squawk about the use of computerized records being used to track people, check out the subway system. Far more people use the subway than use the roads, and through the use of the Metrocard my movements can be tracked throughout the city. That is a far larger invasion of privacy in New York City than any proposed congestion pricing models.
I definitely agree about the native format. Most imaging and prepress people I know work in the Photoshop format. Archival formats are still an issue. PDF is nice, but big and not compatible with every design application. The problem with formats is that you want to save all of the layers, channels, and paths. That gets tricky; I don't know if PNG can save all of that information. Realistically, I don't know of any prepress professional who works in the PNG format. What would be the point? TIFF and Photoshop both work fine. In Photoshop, many filters do not work in 15- or 16- bits per pixel. For printed material, why would you want to do manipulation in sRGB rather than Adobe RGB? The problem with sRGB is that it is a subset of most CMYK spaces; the Adobe RGB and CMYK spaces are not subsets of one another. Personally, I feel that working in CMYK is a terrible idea. I would rather any file that is going to press start with an Adobe RGB or other wide gamut profile and get converted to CMYK prior to press or on the RIP. If it is going to the web, convert the file to sRGB as it is resized for the web page.