Because it's really a publicity stunt from Microsoft trying to get the Xbox360 in the forefront of peoples minds in the lead up to Christmas.
The article reads like most of the marketing cover I see from Microsoft (and for that matter most other software companies).
I've worked with WMG people before, and they aren't the kind of organisation that takes a payoff like that. And they certainly aren't a typical MS shop, either. My guess is simply that the guy was more familiar with Xbox as a platform than he was with PS3... I doubt there's much more to it than that.
Tell me that DRM has been implement for the little guy again?
Small scale, basic DRM (e.g., requiring entry of a serial number after installation) does appear to work for the free trial crowd. OTOH, it's hard to see how you could implement that business model _without_ DRM of some kind.
You have to understand that this was brought into place after Ian Huntley, who was a socially awkward person about whom there were several such unproven allegations, raped and killed two kids while working at the school they attended. This is specifically designed as a measure that would have prevented him from doing this.
Windows NT 3.1 was multi-user and able to run multiple tasks as different users simultaneously and they haven't removed that feature since. That's all that all that's required to run with multiple simultaneous users at kernel level really.
Oh, sure, you can have multiple user logins. You can even allocate multiple independent display sets. The basic problem is that the kernel only supports a single input path; all keyboards and mice are automatically connected to the single current active display set. This seems to be a basic assumption of the kernel architecture, and you would need to run a modified kernel to fix it.
The significant difference between the Radeon multi-mon setup and what that guy did is that the Radeon presents all the displays as a single display to Windows.
I'm not sure why this is such a big deal. The driver for my GeForce FX5200 is quite capable of doing this.
The Constitution does not prevent recognition of religion or acknowledgment of the prevent belief structure. The two issues are completely non-sequitur; though it is frequently a source of confusion.
The entire intent, and that's what is important [...]
You are aware that the question of whether the intent of the consitution is what is important or not is a somewhat contentious issue in legal theory, and is far from the single-sided obvious choice you indicate here. See (e.g.) this paper for a summary of the issues.
[...] is the church is to have no government control or influence. Anti-religious nut jobs have forgotten to check the intent. Its a stretch by any measure to believe, "In God We Trust", influences government decisions in any way, shape, or form; or that its capable of having such influence
And you've just highlighted the very problem with the original intent method of interpreting the constitution: the approach of determining the intent of the original framers is highly subjective, and you can essentially argue over the intent forever. You've picked an interpretation whereby the framers were intending to protect the government from interference by religion. Many (even most) others pick an interpretation where the framers intended to protect religions from interference by the government, preventing the government from favouring one religion over another and thus establishing a state religion. It's very hard to tell what was originally intended, and it's likely that at least a little of both was in the minds of the framers when they wrote the first amendment. And maybe some other things, too.
And until someone can prove this is in fact, not only the case, but that its a common fact, continued argument by these nut jobs only confirm they are ignorant nut jobs attempting to force their anti-religious religion down everyone's throat.
That's actually pretty-much the opposite of the intent, which is to prevent everyone from having the Christian religion forced down their throat. There are plenty of people opposed to this, and not all are "anti-religious" as you put it. In fact, I've spoken to many Christians who agree that religious approaches like this have no place in government.
And frankly, I find their motives to be more offensive. After all, at least with the religious nuts attempting to force it down your throat, their motives are obvious. With the other guys, they're lying to your face which pissing on the Constitution with their ignorance, lack of comprehension, and inability to learn history.
Actually, I think you're the one who needs the history lesson. One of the main arguments for the interpretation of the constitution I suggested above is that many of the original framers (e.g. Madison) had been disturbed by the British laws preventing preaching other than by appointed Anglican priests. They saw any support of any particular church by the state as a bad thing. It is hard to dispute this (see, e.g. the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, an antecedent of the first amendment which was drafted by Jefferson, which says in part "to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical"), although that hasn't stopped some conservatives from trying.
If I am reading this Wikipedia page right, the U.S. Code is published every 6 years only. So, we are expected to apply H.R. 3200, i.e. the "diff", to what may be a stale version of the original code?
What kind of revision control system is that?
The official printed version is. While the current printed copy is the 2006 edition, the online edition is up-to-date as of August 16 this year. I believe the update frequency is approximately monthly.
The problem is that the existence of google books makes it harder for others working on similar systems (and there are others, this isn't just a pipedream) to become established. A Google Books court-approved class-action copyright settlement would make it harder for somebody else to reach a similar agreement (because the public interest argument will be harder to make). Essentially, this is a field where the first person to do it is likely to end up with a monopoly, and Google have done it badly, thus precluding other people from doing it properly.
So, how do we apply "agile" software development practices to legislation? All I can think of is: develop a new system in the small (pick one or a few states to try it) and establish a time box, and evaluate whether the legislation accomplishes its goals, then decide whether to spread it to more states, scrap it and start over, or what. That seems like a great idea to me.
Here in the UK we frequently do this kind of thing with changes to social security benefits and similar ideas. The only problem is that it is very slow, as it can take several years to put the system in place, let it run long enough to get feedback, and then process that feedback into a new iteration. For anything truly important, you'd find people complaining that the change hadn't been applied in their area, and it would be extremely unpopular.
The "spaghetti" coding I'm talking about is very specifically sections within the bill that refer to other sections within the bill, both ahead and behind. So, for example, Section 223 ("Payment Rates for Items and Services") makes three references to Section 224. Section 225 ("Provider Participation") makes two references back to Section 223. And so on. Spend more than a few minutes with the bill, and you'll see what I mean.
This is absolutely standard practice in legislation, though, so I'm not sure what you see being the problem with it.
I do touch upon references to existing legislation in the 'spaghetti coding' paragraph, but that's because of potential namespace issues: while HR 3200 generally tries to fully qualify section numbers belonging to pre-existing laws and regulations, in some places it relies upon context instead, and you have to scroll back up to figure out if the section reference is internal or external.
A single act is rarely intended to be read directly. The changes it makes will be incorporated into amended statutes if it is enacted, and then you would read those statutes rather than the act itself. Once this has happened the context of the reference will become obvious.
Imagine a revision control system where all you could look at were diffs, and never a source code with the diffs applied to them. Would you use such a revision control system? Would you use such a revision control system to write a complex piece of software?
And yet, that is the how the legislative process works.
HR3200 considered by a software designer with no concept of how legislation works, aka: how to get my rant about HR3200 posted on Slashdot by superficially comparing it to software.
Okay, maybe that title is too long, but at least it's more accurate.
Agreed. Taking the authors points one by one, yes, I agree it's somewhat long. But it is a major piece of legislation designed to have profound effects. It needs to be long to ensure those effects are adequately managed.
"Much of HR 3200 makes piecemeal modifications to existing legislation, often with little explanation as to intent and consequences."
Well, yes. I question whether the author of this statement has ever read any legislation before, because almost all of it is like this. This is why amended statutes are a useful resource.
"HR 3200 also suffers in places from what a software engineer would call "spaghetti coding". In other words, a given section within HR 3200 [...] will reference several other sections elsewhere in HR 3200, both above and below."
Again, this is practically standard practice, and lawyers and judges are used to dealing with it. It isn't an issue.
"Furthermore, it often requires careful reading going back pages to see whether a reference to a given section is to a section within HR 3200 itself or a section in existing legislation (such as the Internal Revenue Service code)."
Here's the thing: HR3200 is not designed to be read by itself; if enacted, it will be used to make amendments to several other texts, thus producing amended copies of those. When reading the amended texts, it will usually be obvious which act is being referred to.
"HR 3200 also comes across as similar to a "kitchen sink" application, that is, a single piece of legislation that attempts to do far too much. I will finish Part I with the table of contents for HR 3200 to give you a sense of all that it is attempting to do. Note that these divisions, titles, and subtitles could have been broken up into individual legislation."
Not really. A piece of legislation is a compromise. It normally gets accepted because it contains some things that each of several camps wants to have included. Chances are that if you take any of those sections out and try to pass it individually, it won't go through because support for it won't be broad enough. Only taken together is there a chance of it passing into law.
Hubbard made several statements similar to it, mainly in private conversation, that have been attributed to him by various people. The most authoritative is probably the version that was attributed to him in an article for the LA Times, 27 August 1978, which read "Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion."
The constitution does not call for "separation of church and state" as it is so often misrepresented. It simply says that the Government cannot respect one religion over another. Freedom OF religion, not freedom FROM religion (And for the record, I'm not a believer in any religion)
Yet, by incorporating text concerning a single god in its currency (among other places), it places religions that have a single god above those that have either many or none.
It's going to be decommissioned in 5 years. Maybe they should be planning the lab for the next generation space station.
AIUI, there are plans afoot to extend the station's life. I've heard suggestions that it could be in orbit for around 10-15 more years. And as far as I know, there are no plans for a replacement station.
Plus, there's no reason _not_ to do this. The module is already built. It's designed to be used with the shuttle, so after the last shuttle flight it will be useless if it isn't left up there. So why not leave it up?
Certification process fair enough, but a stable ABI is not needed for that, any piece of hardware that has a recognized in kernel tree driver driver should simply be plugged in and see if it works, if it does without any real issues, certification can be done
Yes, but the problem is that a very large quantity of modern hardware does not have a driver in the kernel tree. Most video cards rely on a vendor-supplied non open-source driver to function correctly, and most low-cost wireless networking cards are on chipsets that aren't supported by stock kernels (e.g. rt2500 -- there are open source drivers available, but you have to download them, compile them and install them yourself; the lack of a stable ABI makes the process difficult and time consuming, putting it beyond the scope of an average user).
Linux does have the largest in-built hardware support of any modern os.
Unless it supports (nearly) everything, the problem the GP mentions is still relevant: you can't just go to the shop, pick up some hardware, and expect it to work. You need to know what chipset works, you need to find a manufacturer who uses that chipset, and you need to pray when you get to the shop that they haven't switched chipsets since the compatibility lists were last updated. This isn't a theoretical objection -- I've been an active Linux user for the last 15 years, and I've lost count of the number of times this kind of shit has happened to me. Over time the hardware in question changes; once upon a time it was ISDN TAs and video capture cards that were hard to shop for, now it's wireless networking cards. But it's still there. And until it has _entirely gone_, Linux is not ready for the average consumer.
To me, the number is meaningless in itself. The fact that government agencies have been using the number is the issue. Either they knew that the number was wrong or they didn't bother checking it. Both possibilities can point to incompetence or malice and reflect very badly on the people responsible.
Not only that, it's actually a violation of government policy, which is to only use/publish statistics that have been approved by the Office for National Statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's really a publicity stunt from Microsoft trying to get the Xbox360 in the forefront of peoples minds in the lead up to Christmas.
The article reads like most of the marketing cover I see from Microsoft (and for that matter most other software companies).
I've worked with WMG people before, and they aren't the kind of organisation that takes a payoff like that. And they certainly aren't a typical MS shop, either. My guess is simply that the guy was more familiar with Xbox as a platform than he was with PS3... I doubt there's much more to it than that.
Tell me that DRM has been implement for the little guy again?
Small scale, basic DRM (e.g., requiring entry of a serial number after installation) does appear to work for the free trial crowd. OTOH, it's hard to see how you could implement that business model _without_ DRM of some kind.
Not if their contract says otherwise
Contracts are not allowed to override basic legal rights.
You have to understand that this was brought into place after Ian Huntley, who was a socially awkward person about whom there were several such unproven allegations, raped and killed two kids while working at the school they attended. This is specifically designed as a measure that would have prevented him from doing this.
Can somebody explain what this "blocks" is? I mean, C being a block-structured language, I thought it already supported them...
Windows NT 3.1 was multi-user and able to run multiple tasks as different users simultaneously and they haven't removed that feature since. That's all that all that's required to run with multiple simultaneous users at kernel level really.
Oh, sure, you can have multiple user logins. You can even allocate multiple independent display sets. The basic problem is that the kernel only supports a single input path; all keyboards and mice are automatically connected to the single current active display set. This seems to be a basic assumption of the kernel architecture, and you would need to run a modified kernel to fix it.
That wouldn't do anything for a simultaneous multiple user environment.
You can't do simultaneous multiple users with a stock windows kernel anyway, so hacking the display to work would be trivial.
The significant difference between the Radeon multi-mon setup and what that guy did is that the Radeon presents all the displays as a single display to Windows.
I'm not sure why this is such a big deal. The driver for my GeForce FX5200 is quite capable of doing this.
What? You run Windows without a full Cygwin installation?
Jules@minerva ~ /dev
$ ls
fd stderr stdin stdout
How do I access raw devices using cygwin?
The Constitution does not prevent recognition of religion or acknowledgment of the prevent belief structure. The two issues are completely non-sequitur; though it is frequently a source of confusion.
The entire intent, and that's what is important [...]
You are aware that the question of whether the intent of the consitution is what is important or not is a somewhat contentious issue in legal theory, and is far from the single-sided obvious choice you indicate here. See (e.g.) this paper for a summary of the issues.
[...] is the church is to have no government control or influence. Anti-religious nut jobs have forgotten to check the intent. Its a stretch by any measure to believe, "In God We Trust", influences government decisions in any way, shape, or form; or that its capable of having such influence
And you've just highlighted the very problem with the original intent method of interpreting the constitution: the approach of determining the intent of the original framers is highly subjective, and you can essentially argue over the intent forever. You've picked an interpretation whereby the framers were intending to protect the government from interference by religion. Many (even most) others pick an interpretation where the framers intended to protect religions from interference by the government, preventing the government from favouring one religion over another and thus establishing a state religion. It's very hard to tell what was originally intended, and it's likely that at least a little of both was in the minds of the framers when they wrote the first amendment. And maybe some other things, too.
And until someone can prove this is in fact, not only the case, but that its a common fact, continued argument by these nut jobs only confirm they are ignorant nut jobs attempting to force their anti-religious religion down everyone's throat.
That's actually pretty-much the opposite of the intent, which is to prevent everyone from having the Christian religion forced down their throat. There are plenty of people opposed to this, and not all are "anti-religious" as you put it. In fact, I've spoken to many Christians who agree that religious approaches like this have no place in government.
And frankly, I find their motives to be more offensive. After all, at least with the religious nuts attempting to force it down your throat, their motives are obvious. With the other guys, they're lying to your face which pissing on the Constitution with their ignorance, lack of comprehension, and inability to learn history.
Actually, I think you're the one who needs the history lesson. One of the main arguments for the interpretation of the constitution I suggested above is that many of the original framers (e.g. Madison) had been disturbed by the British laws preventing preaching other than by appointed Anglican priests. They saw any support of any particular church by the state as a bad thing. It is hard to dispute this (see, e.g. the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, an antecedent of the first amendment which was drafted by Jefferson, which says in part "to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical"), although that hasn't stopped some conservatives from trying.
There are no Brazilian Dollars. Our currency is the Real.
Whereas American currency is Imaginary?
" and for New Line to make other films based on Tolkien's work"
Oh dear God, NO!
Yes, coming soon: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil: the movie.
I had this idea yesterday. Bastards.
If I am reading this Wikipedia page right, the U.S. Code is published every 6 years only. So, we are expected to apply H.R. 3200, i.e. the "diff", to what may be a stale version of the original code?
What kind of revision control system is that?
The official printed version is. While the current printed copy is the 2006 edition, the online edition is up-to-date as of August 16 this year. I believe the update frequency is approximately monthly.
The problem is that the existence of google books makes it harder for others working on similar systems (and there are others, this isn't just a pipedream) to become established. A Google Books court-approved class-action copyright settlement would make it harder for somebody else to reach a similar agreement (because the public interest argument will be harder to make). Essentially, this is a field where the first person to do it is likely to end up with a monopoly, and Google have done it badly, thus precluding other people from doing it properly.
So, how do we apply "agile" software development practices to legislation? All I can think of is: develop a new system in the small (pick one or a few states to try it) and establish a time box, and evaluate whether the legislation accomplishes its goals, then decide whether to spread it to more states, scrap it and start over, or what. That seems like a great idea to me.
Here in the UK we frequently do this kind of thing with changes to social security benefits and similar ideas. The only problem is that it is very slow, as it can take several years to put the system in place, let it run long enough to get feedback, and then process that feedback into a new iteration. For anything truly important, you'd find people complaining that the change hadn't been applied in their area, and it would be extremely unpopular.
The "spaghetti" coding I'm talking about is very specifically sections within the bill that refer to other sections within the bill, both ahead and behind. So, for example, Section 223 ("Payment Rates for Items and Services") makes three references to Section 224. Section 225 ("Provider Participation") makes two references back to Section 223. And so on. Spend more than a few minutes with the bill, and you'll see what I mean.
This is absolutely standard practice in legislation, though, so I'm not sure what you see being the problem with it.
I do touch upon references to existing legislation in the 'spaghetti coding' paragraph, but that's because of potential namespace issues: while HR 3200 generally tries to fully qualify section numbers belonging to pre-existing laws and regulations, in some places it relies upon context instead, and you have to scroll back up to figure out if the section reference is internal or external.
A single act is rarely intended to be read directly. The changes it makes will be incorporated into amended statutes if it is enacted, and then you would read those statutes rather than the act itself. Once this has happened the context of the reference will become obvious.
Imagine a revision control system where all you could look at were diffs, and never a source code with the diffs applied to them. Would you use such a revision control system? Would you use such a revision control system to write a complex piece of software?
And yet, that is the how the legislative process works.
No, it isn't.
HR3200 considered by a software designer with no concept of how legislation works, aka: how to get my rant about HR3200 posted on Slashdot by superficially comparing it to software.
Okay, maybe that title is too long, but at least it's more accurate.
Agreed. Taking the authors points one by one, yes, I agree it's somewhat long. But it is a major piece of legislation designed to have profound effects. It needs to be long to ensure those effects are adequately managed.
"Much of HR 3200 makes piecemeal modifications to existing legislation, often with little explanation as to intent and consequences."
Well, yes. I question whether the author of this statement has ever read any legislation before, because almost all of it is like this. This is why amended statutes are a useful resource.
"HR 3200 also suffers in places from what a software engineer would call "spaghetti coding". In other words, a given section within HR 3200 [...] will reference several other sections elsewhere in HR 3200, both above and below."
Again, this is practically standard practice, and lawyers and judges are used to dealing with it. It isn't an issue.
"Furthermore, it often requires careful reading going back pages to see whether a reference to a given section is to a section within HR 3200 itself or a section in existing legislation (such as the Internal Revenue Service code)."
Here's the thing: HR3200 is not designed to be read by itself; if enacted, it will be used to make amendments to several other texts, thus producing amended copies of those. When reading the amended texts, it will usually be obvious which act is being referred to.
"HR 3200 also comes across as similar to a "kitchen sink" application, that is, a single piece of legislation that attempts to do far too much. I will finish Part I with the table of contents for HR 3200 to give you a sense of all that it is attempting to do. Note that these divisions, titles, and subtitles could have been broken up into individual legislation."
Not really. A piece of legislation is a compromise. It normally gets accepted because it contains some things that each of several camps wants to have included. Chances are that if you take any of those sections out and try to pass it individually, it won't go through because support for it won't be broad enough. Only taken together is there a chance of it passing into law.
Hubbard made several statements similar to it, mainly in private conversation, that have been attributed to him by various people. The most authoritative is probably the version that was attributed to him in an article for the LA Times, 27 August 1978, which read "Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion."
The constitution does not call for "separation of church and state" as it is so often misrepresented. It simply says that the Government cannot respect one religion over another. Freedom OF religion, not freedom FROM religion (And for the record, I'm not a believer in any religion)
Yet, by incorporating text concerning a single god in its currency (among other places), it places religions that have a single god above those that have either many or none.
It's going to be decommissioned in 5 years. Maybe they should be planning the lab for the next generation space station.
AIUI, there are plans afoot to extend the station's life. I've heard suggestions that it could be in orbit for around 10-15 more years. And as far as I know, there are no plans for a replacement station.
Plus, there's no reason _not_ to do this. The module is already built. It's designed to be used with the shuttle, so after the last shuttle flight it will be useless if it isn't left up there. So why not leave it up?
I am sorry that nobody else found it funny. I'll go away again now.
Don't worry. I thought it was frickin' hilarious.
Certification process fair enough, but a stable ABI is not needed for that, any piece of hardware that has a recognized in kernel tree driver driver should simply be plugged in and see if it works, if it does without any real issues, certification can be done
Yes, but the problem is that a very large quantity of modern hardware does not have a driver in the kernel tree. Most video cards rely on a vendor-supplied non open-source driver to function correctly, and most low-cost wireless networking cards are on chipsets that aren't supported by stock kernels (e.g. rt2500 -- there are open source drivers available, but you have to download them, compile them and install them yourself; the lack of a stable ABI makes the process difficult and time consuming, putting it beyond the scope of an average user).
Linux does have the largest in-built hardware support of any modern os.
Unless it supports (nearly) everything, the problem the GP mentions is still relevant: you can't just go to the shop, pick up some hardware, and expect it to work. You need to know what chipset works, you need to find a manufacturer who uses that chipset, and you need to pray when you get to the shop that they haven't switched chipsets since the compatibility lists were last updated. This isn't a theoretical objection -- I've been an active Linux user for the last 15 years, and I've lost count of the number of times this kind of shit has happened to me. Over time the hardware in question changes; once upon a time it was ISDN TAs and video capture cards that were hard to shop for, now it's wireless networking cards. But it's still there. And until it has _entirely gone_, Linux is not ready for the average consumer.
To me, the number is meaningless in itself. The fact that government agencies have been using the number is the issue. Either they knew that the number was wrong or they didn't bother checking it. Both possibilities can point to incompetence or malice and reflect very badly on the people responsible.
Not only that, it's actually a violation of government policy, which is to only use/publish statistics that have been approved by the Office for National Statistics.