I think I would want to draft up a very clear - and legally binding - agreement that I would want my superiors in management to sign on behalf of the company. It would spell out in specific details, the security policies, security review process, enforcement etc.
A contract cannot override legislation. If the legislation is badly designed, there is nothing that can be done about this except changing the legislation. As I understand it, Childs did have written procedures and did follow them. My reading of the situation is that the problem is that he was expected to apply common sense that when the organization of the layers of beaurocracy above him changed and he started receiving instructions via a superior in a different department that he should actually follow them, rather than ignore them as against written policy. It seems he understood that the person giving him the instructions was authorized to do so by somebody directly superior to him, but refused on the basis that the person wasn't on the specific list of people who had the authority. The written policy was out of date, based on an old structure, and he was expected to adapt rather than stick to it.
So they make me turn off my personal electronic devices for takeoff and landing, but they don't turn off theirs?
I don't imagine they're playing minesweeper while taking off or landing.
More seriously, there are some devices that are tested and known to be acceptable, and others that may or (more likely) may not cause interference but nobody knows. They don't want to have to check that your device is on the approved list, so they enforce a blanket ban. The crew are trusted to check for themselves whether or not their devices are acceptable.
"How long has that oil pressure reading been at 0?" is a lot more likely to happen if the pilot has spent the last half hour reading a novel instead of scanning the instruments while flying the plane.
Only in the highly unlikely event that the audible warning system has failed for some reason. Besides, the regulations suggested wouldn't prevent a pilot reading a novel: only electronic entertainment is forbidden.
Cap't Crunch: "I spy... with my little eye.... something that iiiiissss... square." Co-Cap't Palm Pilot: "Is it the APU Generator 1 Bus Tie Isolation Button?"
"Hah. No. Obviously, it's the APU Generator 1 Bus Tie *Automatic* Button."
So this doesn't apply to places like slashdot and facebook.
Or, indeed, to 95%+ of small ecommerce businesses. As a consultant, I've always recommended to my clients that they hand off processing credit cards (for example) to one of the services that'll do it securely without them ever seeing the card number, in order to avoid any responsibility for looking after the data.
In general the web software stack community appears to still be as idiotic as ever.. What the hell were PPL thinking with JSON?
They were thinking: how do I get data into a web page from a server that isn't the same server as the page originated on? As browser vendors hadn't actually considered this as a valid use case at the time JSON was invented, a workaround was needed, and JSON was the only practical one anybody suggested.
Why stick with 6? I'm using IE3. When was the last time you heard of an IE3 exploit being released? I'm considering a switch to Netscape Navigator 1.1, just in case.
If a site is capable of executing user submitted content it's hardly immune from attacks.
It isn't. RTFA. Internet Explorer looks at the returned data, and takes a guess that it is. The action IE takes in response to this causes it to become capable of executing the content (by introducing new bugs into javascript code that already existed on the page).
Audi/BMW will not support the modifications nor honor the warranty on your car
Actually, at least here in the UK, they are legally obliged to honour the warranty, unless they can provide reasonable evidence that your modifications caused the fault you want them to fix. My suspicion is that the situation is similar elsewhere.
Something tells me MVC may be overkill for the app in question.
Model: The current time. May be conveniently stored in a single 64-bit int. Controller: Er, well, there is none. The application only "views". View: Ah, yes. Basically the entire application.
I knew someone once who made a good living out of suing for wrongful dismissal. He'd do things that weren't technically valid reasons for firing him but really annoyed his managers. He managed to get fired about once every two or three years, and get basically a year's salary as bonus whenever it happened. If I know him half well, he'd go out and have a celebration the day he realised he was working for this jerk, because that money would be practically in the bag.
And no one except Microsoft can deliver content via Xbox Live.
Yes, this is true. However people other than MS can provide content on the Xbox, simply not via the Live system. You see the distinction?
The App Store is not a monopoly, unless the meaning of the word is distorted. Of course a company has "a monopoly" on selling products through its own store.
The point isn't that they have a monopoly on selling products through the store. The point is that the store has a monopoly on selling applications that work with iPhones. Nobody cares how the application is delivered, that's totally irrelevant. The point is being able to get it onto a specific piece of hardware, and that's what Apple has a monopoly on.
To return to your analogy about football boots, a more similar one would be if Nike made prosthetic feet, and then used every means they could to prevent other people selling shoes that fit those feet, by taking steps like periodically varying the design in subtle ways so that everyone else's stock suddenly becomes useless, or taking legal action against people for copying their shoe designs.
The AC's point (modded insightful too) was that they "have the power to supress and censor" Fiore - when they can really do no such thing, unless by denying his app they also went to the SFgate webserver and set it on fire
Nothing SFgate does can get Fiore's app onto people's iPhones. The fact that he could easily put the app there for people to download is irrelevant, because without some legal way of getting it onto people's hardware it is totally useless. And therefore, by taking this action, there are a number of people who are prevented from seeing what it is that Fiore has to say in the way that they are likely to find most convenient, and therefore probably won't, or rather wouldn't have heard what he has to say because of this action. Yes, this is censorship. It might not be particularly effective censorship, but there have always been routes around the edge of any censorship and the fact that there are many such routes in this case isn't really all that relevant.
I hear that Amazon has a monopoly on selling products through Amazon.com.
I also hear that WalMart has a monopoly on selling products in WalMart stores.
Oh no! Whatever is to be done!
Yes, but neither of them have a monopoly on selling products of a specific type, wherever in the world or on the internet somebody might want to sell them. Nobody other than Apple can sell iPhone apps, at all, ever, because there's no (legal/reliable) way of installing them except via Apple's store.
Let's say you run a bookshop that only sells children's books - Is it censorship to say no when playboy asks you to stock their books?
How about if you run a bookshop that's the only bookshop on an island, and where nobody else is allowed to build another bookshop because you own the only port and won't let anybody else import any books?
Nope, it's just selection. Every band or author that got turned down isn't a victim of censorship. They simply didn't produce a product that the company in question wanted to take on.
If Philips (who hold patents on methods used to produce CDs) decided not to licence those patents to anybody except approved record labels, and refused to grant approval of record labels that published content they didn't approve of, would you still agree it wasn't censorship?
That would make the situation closer to the one Apple is currently in, as they are in the position of being the only publisher who are legally able to reach the specific market in question, due to a combination of licensing and technical issues that prevent anybody else being able to publish to iPhone owners.
They did not stop him from publishing, they told him that they wouldn't publish him. Big difference.
And at the same time took active measures to prevent any other publishers from being able to reach the audience he was trying to reach, which renders the difference largely irrelevant.
That does not address the argument that was presented to you: if this is a case of censorship, then every single case where someone refuses to publish someone else's work is also censorship.
No, it doesn't, because the other side of the coin is that Apple has an artificially-enforced monopoly on publication of content for the iPhone or iPad. It is that monopoly that opens them up to such accusations. In the case you describe, I can simply go to another publisher who would (hopefully) publish my content. In this case, Apple has taken active steps to ensure that there can be no other such publisher, thus they have set themselves up as the sole arbiter of what is acceptable content for the iPhone and what is not. It is because they have this power that they can be accused of censorship. See the parallels with, for instance, news publication in states that have a single state-approved newspaper and do not permit any other publishers to operate, a situation which nobody would deny is censorship.
Is it censorship to stop me from painting my slogan on the side of your car? Or your house?
It is if I've taken active steps to make it almost impossible to paint it anywhere else, yes.
Look, the problem here *isn't* that Apple have refused to carry the app in their store. That's up to them, and I wouldn't expect to have any rights to tell them what they can and can't choose or not choose to sell there. The problem is that they actively attempt to prevent me from using any other mechanism to get the app onto my phone. When jailbreaks become available, they release firmware upgrades that prevent installation of those jailbreaks. AFAIK, it is still impossible to install a jailbreak on an iPhone with the latest released firmware version (3.1.3). They have also contested in the courts whether jailbreaking is legally permissible; they consider it a violation of their copyright, and apparently reserve the right to sue users who install jailbreaks on their phones. These actions are *only* acceptable if they provide a free platform for installing applications that anyone can use. So I'll continue complaining about censorship until they drop either one set of restrictions or the other. Because it is censorship: they are actively attempting to prevent me viewing content on my phone simply because they don't approve of it.
Absolutely. I was, thankfully, introduced to dualit toasters by my university who installed them in halls of residence. In the 15 years that have passed since, I've never found another toaster to equal them. They make the only toaster I've ever found that doesn't assume it knows how to make toast better than you do.
The efficiency of this dimmer is nearly 100% (assuming PWM use) and you can have good linearity of the light output. You won't get that with a ballast resistor.
A relatively simple circuit using an oscillator IC with configurable duty cycle (e.g. a 555 in astable mode) will almost certainly be both more efficient and cheaper to build. Of course, it would be hard to program easter eggs into such a circuit (e.g. switch completely on and off 5 times within 5 seconds and the output continues flashing for a minute...).
Eclipse might be better than VS, but I've never been able to get it to run fast enough to be usable.
Strangely, I have the opposite issue. Eclipse runs just fine on my machine (Celeron D 2.66GHz, 1.5GB) but VS2005 + Resharper (because I can't live without automated refactoring) is a total hog. Intellisense often takes multiple seconds to open, startup times are annoyingly long and I often find my machine is lagging and open up the task manager and find devenv.exe is randomly using about 30% of my CPU time for no apparent reason.
How do I now use the IDE to search all the files.. in all of time? e.g. I remember that the code once had a certain string somewhere, but it seems to have been deleted. How do I find that? With git it's a single command.
I have no experience with git, but with an appropriate plugin VS exposes pretty much all the standard subversion commands for me. Unfortunately, subversion lacks that particular facility, so I can't be *sure* it would work, but I imagine any appropriate git plugin for visual studio will provide it.
If I switch between branches or revisions (which I do often - git is so wonderful) then IDEs tend to go haywire as hundreds of files suddenly change, and then change again and again..
This is why you should be using a version control system that integrates with your IDE rather than a command line one; I use AnkhSVN when working with visual studio, and it copes with such things without a huge issue. Sure, you'll need to drop to command line occasionally, but most day to day operations can then be handled by the IDE without running the risk of confusing it.
Well, almost every Unix developer uses Perl for glue code
Really? When I'm wearing my Unix dev hat, I usually use shell for such functions. I figure if it's good enough for the system's init scripts, it's good enough for me...
and almost every Microsoft developer will use VS2010
And in my Windows hat, I'm still using VS2005. Not sure if I'll upgrade or not; from what I hear I'll need a new workstation first.
and if you're programming a Mac, I don't see how you could be sufficiently non-erudite to use anything but Erlang.
While I don't program Macs, I have to express shock at the idea that a true Mac developer would consider anything other than Objective C.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I would want to draft up a very clear - and legally binding - agreement that I would want my superiors in management to sign on behalf of the company. It would spell out in specific details, the security policies, security review process, enforcement etc.
A contract cannot override legislation. If the legislation is badly designed, there is nothing that can be done about this except changing the legislation. As I understand it, Childs did have written procedures and did follow them. My reading of the situation is that the problem is that he was expected to apply common sense that when the organization of the layers of beaurocracy above him changed and he started receiving instructions via a superior in a different department that he should actually follow them, rather than ignore them as against written policy. It seems he understood that the person giving him the instructions was authorized to do so by somebody directly superior to him, but refused on the basis that the person wasn't on the specific list of people who had the authority. The written policy was out of date, based on an old structure, and he was expected to adapt rather than stick to it.
So they make me turn off my personal electronic devices for takeoff and landing, but they don't turn off theirs?
I don't imagine they're playing minesweeper while taking off or landing.
More seriously, there are some devices that are tested and known to be acceptable, and others that may or (more likely) may not cause interference but nobody knows. They don't want to have to check that your device is on the approved list, so they enforce a blanket ban. The crew are trusted to check for themselves whether or not their devices are acceptable.
"How long has that oil pressure reading been at 0?" is a lot more likely to happen if the pilot has spent the last half hour reading a novel instead of scanning the instruments while flying the plane.
Only in the highly unlikely event that the audible warning system has failed for some reason. Besides, the regulations suggested wouldn't prevent a pilot reading a novel: only electronic entertainment is forbidden.
Cap't Crunch: "I spy... with my little eye.... something that iiiiissss... square."
Co-Cap't Palm Pilot: "Is it the APU Generator 1 Bus Tie Isolation Button?"
"Hah. No. Obviously, it's the APU Generator 1 Bus Tie *Automatic* Button."
can someone explain to me why Parody is protected fair use and Satire isn't? Isn't that a pretty arbitrary line to draw?
Yes, it is. There's a good explanation of the historic reasons for it buried in this article.
So this doesn't apply to places like slashdot and facebook.
Or, indeed, to 95%+ of small ecommerce businesses. As a consultant, I've always recommended to my clients that they hand off processing credit cards (for example) to one of the services that'll do it securely without them ever seeing the card number, in order to avoid any responsibility for looking after the data.
In general the web software stack community appears to still be as idiotic as ever.. What the hell were PPL thinking with JSON?
They were thinking: how do I get data into a web page from a server that isn't the same server as the page originated on? As browser vendors hadn't actually considered this as a valid use case at the time JSON was invented, a workaround was needed, and JSON was the only practical one anybody suggested.
stick to IE6. Long live Internet Explorer 6!
Why stick with 6? I'm using IE3. When was the last time you heard of an IE3 exploit being released? I'm considering a switch to Netscape Navigator 1.1, just in case.
If a site is capable of executing user submitted content it's hardly immune from attacks.
It isn't. RTFA. Internet Explorer looks at the returned data, and takes a guess that it is. The action IE takes in response to this causes it to become capable of executing the content (by introducing new bugs into javascript code that already existed on the page).
Audi/BMW will not support the modifications nor honor the warranty on your car
Actually, at least here in the UK, they are legally obliged to honour the warranty, unless they can provide reasonable evidence that your modifications caused the fault you want them to fix. My suspicion is that the situation is similar elsewhere.
Something tells me MVC may be overkill for the app in question.
Model: The current time. May be conveniently stored in a single 64-bit int.
Controller: Er, well, there is none. The application only "views".
View: Ah, yes. Basically the entire application.
Why would anyone want to work for such a jerk?
I knew someone once who made a good living out of suing for wrongful dismissal. He'd do things that weren't technically valid reasons for firing him but really annoyed his managers. He managed to get fired about once every two or three years, and get basically a year's salary as bonus whenever it happened. If I know him half well, he'd go out and have a celebration the day he realised he was working for this jerk, because that money would be practically in the bag.
And no one except Microsoft can deliver content via Xbox Live.
Yes, this is true. However people other than MS can provide content on the Xbox, simply not via the Live system. You see the distinction?
The App Store is not a monopoly, unless the meaning of the word is distorted. Of course a company has "a monopoly" on selling products through its own store.
The point isn't that they have a monopoly on selling products through the store. The point is that the store has a monopoly on selling applications that work with iPhones. Nobody cares how the application is delivered, that's totally irrelevant. The point is being able to get it onto a specific piece of hardware, and that's what Apple has a monopoly on.
To return to your analogy about football boots, a more similar one would be if Nike made prosthetic feet, and then used every means they could to prevent other people selling shoes that fit those feet, by taking steps like periodically varying the design in subtle ways so that everyone else's stock suddenly becomes useless, or taking legal action against people for copying their shoe designs.
The AC's point (modded insightful too) was that they "have the power to supress and censor" Fiore - when they can really do no such thing, unless by denying his app they also went to the SFgate webserver and set it on fire
Nothing SFgate does can get Fiore's app onto people's iPhones. The fact that he could easily put the app there for people to download is irrelevant, because without some legal way of getting it onto people's hardware it is totally useless. And therefore, by taking this action, there are a number of people who are prevented from seeing what it is that Fiore has to say in the way that they are likely to find most convenient, and therefore probably won't, or rather wouldn't have heard what he has to say because of this action. Yes, this is censorship. It might not be particularly effective censorship, but there have always been routes around the edge of any censorship and the fact that there are many such routes in this case isn't really all that relevant.
I hear that Amazon has a monopoly on selling products through Amazon.com.
I also hear that WalMart has a monopoly on selling products in WalMart stores.
Oh no! Whatever is to be done!
Yes, but neither of them have a monopoly on selling products of a specific type, wherever in the world or on the internet somebody might want to sell them. Nobody other than Apple can sell iPhone apps, at all, ever, because there's no (legal/reliable) way of installing them except via Apple's store.
Let's say you run a bookshop that only sells children's books - Is it censorship to say no when playboy asks you to stock their books?
How about if you run a bookshop that's the only bookshop on an island, and where nobody else is allowed to build another bookshop because you own the only port and won't let anybody else import any books?
Nope, it's just selection. Every band or author that got turned down isn't a victim of censorship. They simply didn't produce a product that the company in question wanted to take on.
If Philips (who hold patents on methods used to produce CDs) decided not to licence those patents to anybody except approved record labels, and refused to grant approval of record labels that published content they didn't approve of, would you still agree it wasn't censorship?
That would make the situation closer to the one Apple is currently in, as they are in the position of being the only publisher who are legally able to reach the specific market in question, due to a combination of licensing and technical issues that prevent anybody else being able to publish to iPhone owners.
They did not stop him from publishing, they told him that they wouldn't publish him. Big difference.
And at the same time took active measures to prevent any other publishers from being able to reach the audience he was trying to reach, which renders the difference largely irrelevant.
That does not address the argument that was presented to you: if this is a case of censorship, then every single case where someone refuses to publish someone else's work is also censorship.
No, it doesn't, because the other side of the coin is that Apple has an artificially-enforced monopoly on publication of content for the iPhone or iPad. It is that monopoly that opens them up to such accusations. In the case you describe, I can simply go to another publisher who would (hopefully) publish my content. In this case, Apple has taken active steps to ensure that there can be no other such publisher, thus they have set themselves up as the sole arbiter of what is acceptable content for the iPhone and what is not. It is because they have this power that they can be accused of censorship. See the parallels with, for instance, news publication in states that have a single state-approved newspaper and do not permit any other publishers to operate, a situation which nobody would deny is censorship.
Is it censorship to stop me from painting my slogan on the side of your car? Or your house?
It is if I've taken active steps to make it almost impossible to paint it anywhere else, yes.
Look, the problem here *isn't* that Apple have refused to carry the app in their store. That's up to them, and I wouldn't expect to have any rights to tell them what they can and can't choose or not choose to sell there. The problem is that they actively attempt to prevent me from using any other mechanism to get the app onto my phone. When jailbreaks become available, they release firmware upgrades that prevent installation of those jailbreaks. AFAIK, it is still impossible to install a jailbreak on an iPhone with the latest released firmware version (3.1.3). They have also contested in the courts whether jailbreaking is legally permissible; they consider it a violation of their copyright, and apparently reserve the right to sue users who install jailbreaks on their phones. These actions are *only* acceptable if they provide a free platform for installing applications that anyone can use. So I'll continue complaining about censorship until they drop either one set of restrictions or the other. Because it is censorship: they are actively attempting to prevent me viewing content on my phone simply because they don't approve of it.
www.dualit.com
Absolutely. I was, thankfully, introduced to dualit toasters by my university who installed them in halls of residence. In the 15 years that have passed since, I've never found another toaster to equal them. They make the only toaster I've ever found that doesn't assume it knows how to make toast better than you do.
The efficiency of this dimmer is nearly 100% (assuming PWM use) and you can have good linearity of the light output. You won't get that with a ballast resistor.
A relatively simple circuit using an oscillator IC with configurable duty cycle (e.g. a 555 in astable mode) will almost certainly be both more efficient and cheaper to build. Of course, it would be hard to program easter eggs into such a circuit (e.g. switch completely on and off 5 times within 5 seconds and the output continues flashing for a minute...).
Eclipse might be better than VS, but I've never been able to get it to run fast enough to be usable.
Strangely, I have the opposite issue. Eclipse runs just fine on my machine (Celeron D 2.66GHz, 1.5GB) but VS2005 + Resharper (because I can't live without automated refactoring) is a total hog. Intellisense often takes multiple seconds to open, startup times are annoyingly long and I often find my machine is lagging and open up the task manager and find devenv.exe is randomly using about 30% of my CPU time for no apparent reason.
How do I now use the IDE to search all the files.. in all of time? e.g. I remember that the code once had a certain string somewhere, but it seems to have been deleted. How do I find that?
With git it's a single command.
I have no experience with git, but with an appropriate plugin VS exposes pretty much all the standard subversion commands for me. Unfortunately, subversion lacks that particular facility, so I can't be *sure* it would work, but I imagine any appropriate git plugin for visual studio will provide it.
If I switch between branches or revisions (which I do often - git is so wonderful) then IDEs tend to go haywire as hundreds of files suddenly change, and then change again and again..
This is why you should be using a version control system that integrates with your IDE rather than a command line one; I use AnkhSVN when working with visual studio, and it copes with such things without a huge issue. Sure, you'll need to drop to command line occasionally, but most day to day operations can then be handled by the IDE without running the risk of confusing it.
Well, almost every Unix developer uses Perl for glue code
Really? When I'm wearing my Unix dev hat, I usually use shell for such functions. I figure if it's good enough for the system's init scripts, it's good enough for me...
and almost every Microsoft developer will use VS2010
And in my Windows hat, I'm still using VS2005. Not sure if I'll upgrade or not; from what I hear I'll need a new workstation first.
and if you're programming a Mac, I don't see how you could be sufficiently non-erudite to use anything but Erlang.
While I don't program Macs, I have to express shock at the idea that a true Mac developer would consider anything other than Objective C.