Ah, you missed on little thing... They will walk in with a listing of this exchange on/. and a certification that the question originated at his IP address. The judge will note that he admitted an awareness of the questionable legality of his actions in front of the entire Internet, was told of the dangers, and then went ahead with the project anyway.
Ass raped would be nice compared to what they will do to him. They well get what they asked for in damages *and* he will be ordered to pay all court and lawyer fees. Yes, he will pay their lawyers $500/hour for every minute they spent on the case including the time they spent driving to and from the court house. They will then have the full force of the locale police to collect as well as being lawyers. If he makes them spend any time collecting the money they may sue him for the time they lost trying to collect. Not to mention what the judge might do if you can't come up with court costs. Ass raped with a barbed wire dildo is more like it.
Please, step back from the keyboard and start looking for a lawyer.
What is it about geeks and the law? Why are so many of us completely uneducated about the basic structure of civilization?
BTW, if you can afford a PC you can afford to ask a lawyer a question like this. You do not have to pay a retainer to get professional legal advice. You can shop around for a good deal. Just like Shatner says on the priceline adds lawyers would rather give you a deal on a few hours of work than have unbilled hours left at the end of the day. There are even web sites set up to help you find someone. I clearly can not know what your situation is. But, I talk to people on a regular basis who tell me they can't afford a lawyer. Then I see them drinking in the local bar, buying the latest video games, drop $20 at a time on iTunes, talking on an iPhone.... They cost of one year using an iPhone is about what you would pay to keep a cheap lawyer on retainer. For what most geeks spend on video games, cell phones, and pizza you could keep a top of the line lawyer on retainer.
If you want to be in business, act like it. If you walk into a small business and find someone cleaning the toilet, you have most likely found the owner. If you have to use a pay-as-you-go cell phone to be able to afford a lawyer, do it. Next thing you are going to tell us is that you don't have an account either and haven't learned the rules about what is a deductible business expense and what isn't.
I've been threatened with suits over using my last name in a business context. Turned out to be bull, but it still cost me nearly $10,000 to find out that they couldn't win a suit like that. But, they can still sue. To begin your education look up the term SLAPP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation).
They main reason they won't sue you is because you don't have anything they can take. OTOH, if you have a house and maybe some savings and maybe a salary they can garnish then they may sue you anyway. OTOH, if you have no money they may sue just to bankrupt you. Yes. companies do that sort of thing. They can't get anything from you, so they bankrupt you just to make a point. In cases like that you have little legal recourse. Gunning "them" down in the street might sound like fun, but after you think about it for a while you will most likely talk yourself out of it.:-) Look up "court costs" and the ways the courts are allowed to collect them.
Seriously. If you can't afford a lawyer you can't afford what you are doing.
My advice, take it for what you paid for it, is stop right now. You have already admitted in public that you realize you are breaking the law. That is what your posting on/. did for you. So just stop. Find a different game, or design your own game. Don't take this any further and please do not mention the name or even the kind of game you are doing on/. or anywhere else on line. You have already removed any possibility of defending yourself from a suit. You've lost.
Ok, now take a deep breath...
If you want to keep going, or if you ever want to do something like this again, pay for a couple of hours of legal help. Ask the lawyer how you would go about doing something like what you are doing. *Do not ask him if it is legal.* Ask how to do it legally. Very different questions with very different answers. Then ask him what you can do to be able to continue your project.
Over the last 30 years IP law has become a hobby of mine. I have taken a couple of classes on the subject, read many books and many more articles. I've even gotten to the point where I read SCOTUS rulings for fun. I've even written contracts that passed lawyer review without even having a comma changed. But, notice that I paid a lawyer to review it. I would never even think about doing what you have done without talking to a lawyer first. Even if I felt confident enough in US law (where I live) I know that I know very little about the laws in the rest of the world. Even the US has more than 50 jurisdictions...
While I am not the original poster the question seems reasonable so I tried to find some stats. Not easy to do. So, I just looked up deaths per capita by country and found this site (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita). I do not know how good their data is at lest it is data. According to them the murder rate in the US is 0.042802 per 1,000 which puts us in 24th place for murder rate. The UK came in at 46 with a murder rate of 0.0140633 per 1,000. So, you are 3 times as likely to die by murder in the US than in the UK.
OTOH, the high murder rates are in:
1 Colombia: 0.617847 per 1,000 people
2 South Africa: 0.496008 per 1,000 people
3 Jamaica: 0.324196 per 1,000 people
4 Venezuela: 0.316138 per 1,000 people
5 Russia: 0.201534 per 1,000 people
6 Mexico: 0.130213 per 1,000 people
7 Estonia: 0.107277 per 1,000 people
8 Latvia: 0.10393 per 1,000 people
9 Lithuania: 0.102863 per 1,000 people 10 Belarus: 0.0983495 per 1,000 people
Which are all a hell of a lot worse than the US or the UK.
OTOH, I looked up assaults per capita and the top ten are:
1 South Africa: 12.0752 per 1,000 people
2 Montserrat: 10.2773 per 1,000 people
3 Mauritius: 8.76036 per 1,000 people
4 Seychelles: 8.62196 per 1,000 people
5 Zimbabwe: 7.6525 per 1,000 people
6 United States: 7.56923 per 1,000 people
7 New Zealand: 7.47881 per 1,000 people
8 United Kingdom: 7.45959 per 1,000 people
9 Canada: 7.11834 per 1,000 people 10 Australia: 7.02459 per 1,000 people
That set gave me quite a chuckle. Yes, the US comes in ahead of the UK. But, notice how many of countries have roots in the former British empire, or were invaded by them, or colonized by them? Seems the British spread violent behavior everywhere they went. Since most of my ancestors are from the Celtic lands in the British Ilses, I blame the English...:-) Of course I have some English ancestors too, but as my father said "We don't talk about them".
Stonewolf
P.S.
The bit about the English ancestors came up in a conversation in which he bragged about the possibility of having Natlive American ancestors and the probability of having African ancestors (most people with my last name in the US are black) but was ashamed to have English ancestors because we are Welsh. Or at least we were when we got here in the 1680s. What is that 15 generations? Families have their own weird form of memory.
What you see has nothing to do with working for a bunch of lazy unprofessional bums. It has nothing to do with the passing of time or the decline of the American work ethic. I've seen what you have seen and been shocked by it every time. The difference is that I'm now 57 and it doesn't surprise me anymore. I first saw this kind of problem in my first job pumping gas in 1972 and it hasn't changed since.
So what is going on? What is the cause? Well, some people are just lazy unprofessional bums. That has been true as long as there have been people. But, most people will do a good job, act professionally, and put in 8 to 12 solid hours of hard work in exchange for a few things. What motivates people the most is the freedom to do a good job without fear of being punished for doing it. That wasn't what you expected me to say was it? It is also nice to get reasonable pay.
In most of the places I've worked people were punished, in some way or another, for taking any kind of risk. They are punished for taking any kind of initiative. They are rewarded for doing what they are told to do. They are rewarded for fixing blame rather than fixing problems.
What you are seeing is the result of modern business management at its best. The people you see wasting time know, they know down in their guts, that they will not be fired for wasting time and they will not be rewarded for doing a good job. They know that they could be laid off, but they also know that people will be laid off for political not for being incompetent. They will not be laid off because they stand around in the hall talking about nothing important. But, they will be laid off for not spending enough time talking to their boss about this weeks football games. In fact, the highest paid person, they guy with the most experience and/or the greatest skills, is more likely to be laid off than the new guy who still can't find the coffee filters. Why? Because laying off the expensive people has more impact on the quarterly report.
The mid level managers tolerate all this crappy behavior because the know the same things.
A while back, I went to work for a new company and as I walked around I noticed this guy with a green Mohawk who was reading Slashdot.com. In fact, that is how I found out about Slashdot.... It seemed he was our "IT Guy" or as he called himself "the system manager". Awesome system manager. Nothing ever broke and he did all his serious work at night after every one had left so it didn't impact our daily work. Shortly after that I overheard the President asking the CTO why this guy was on the pay roll. The president described him as looking weird, being disrespectful, and he never saw him actually do anything. Then he went on to say that nothing ever went wrong anyway so why did we need a system manager? BTW, the president and the CTO both have technical masters degrees from MIT. They should know better. The CTO couldn't or wouldn't defend Green haired Mohawk guy.
I had a chat with GHMG that in which I told him to 1) stop doing his work at night, you must be seen to be doing work. When your work starts to interfere with day to day operations offer to come in at night to do it. But, ask for more money for night work. 2) let little things break once in a while so they see you fix them. They need that to understand the value you the bring to the company. 3) Do not read Slashdot where management can see you reading Slashdot. 4) Walk around and talk to people, ask them what you could do to make them more productive. Then pass that list on to your manager and ask him to prioritize the list. You have to be seen adding value over the long run. You have to be seen taking an interest in the success of the company. 5) Create an online database for reporting problems and tracking their solutions. You need that to document all unscheduled tasks you perform. Make sure that all work requests go through your database. You must be able to document all the work you really do.
Ok, so what happened? He did what I suggested. A couple of month
I understand, it must be a lot like being an American while George Bush II was president.
Some of my ancestors were Irish. I know what they went through building this country (U.S.) and it makes me sick to see this sort of thing happen in Ireland. For the record I'm mostly Welsh and Manx but I'm also Irish, Scots Irish, and Scots, along with bits of several others ethnicities.
Arguing about words that have no referent is much like creating mathematical proofs that include a division by zero.
That is, it can be fun. It can be hilarious to use in arguments with people who do not understand the concept. Not as funny as listening to people demand proofs of negatives, but still laughable. All in all a stupid waste of time.
Stonewolf
P.S.
Now the fun starts. People will now jump in a tell me that theist and atheist do have referents. Then someone will demand a proof of the non-existence that the words do not have a referent. So, I win if more than 10 idiots argue tell my I am wrong.
If you understand the non-statement "What is the sound of one hand clapping" then you understand what I just said. And, no, it does not require any understanding of, or belief in, Buddhism to understand it.
This is an excellent suggestion, but not quite complete. Do not just complain. Ask for instructions on how to change the setting back to what it was. Under no conditions should you accept that it can not be done. You could change it yesterday, so you must be able to change it today, right? Be nice to the poor guy on the other end of the line. He is not at fault. But, when he says you can't change it kindly say that you believe he does not know how, and then demand to talk to a senior technical person so you can get your phone working again. Stay on the phone as long as possible and talk to as many people as possible.
Calling Verizon costs Verizon money, but it will not force them to change their actions. Calling the FCC forces the agency that regulates Verison to take notice of what Verizon has done. If the FCC doesn't get complaints they are not forced to "notice" the problem. Calling the Senate and the House of representatives makes sure that the people who make the laws that govern Verizon notice that the people who vote for them are not happy with the laws that govern Verizon. Believe it or not, no matter how large a bribe... OK "campaign contribution" your elected officials have been paid by Verizon (each and everyone of them has been bribed by Verizon) they will take action if they think it will affect their ability to stay in office. You see, no matter how much money Verizon can give them, Verizon can not vote for them. And the elected bastards know one thing, if they do not get elected they get no more goodies from Verizon and the rest of the megacorps.
And, Ya'know, if you are just feeling mean, call Microsoft support and ask how to turn off Bing on your phone. It is their product, they should know, right?
The idea is to make this policy change as costly for Verizon as possible. That means you make them pay to handle your calls and you make them pay even more by generating bad feelings toward them in the Senate and the House.
Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. If you want to call and leave a comment for at the White House for President Obomo, 202-456-1111 or, if you do not trust me as you should not, you can find the number here http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact. You can also send an email from there.
Stonewolf.
Why isn't this information listed at the top of the page on Slashdot?
I can almost see what you are saying if you pronounce SQL as sequel. But, you can't do that because sequel is, IIRC, a trademark:-) Or, is it possible you are pronouncing the "c" more like I pronounce "s"? I have encountered that among some English speakers in the past.
I'm very curious about your regional accent. I speak with a western US (mountain states) accent. What is your accent? I've worked with people from most English speaking countries and I know that pronunciations vary wildly from continent to continent, country to country, and region to region. I remember my shock the first time I heard an educated upper class Englishman pronounce the word "valet" and the first time I heard a Central Texan pronounce "guadalupe".
OTOH, if your posting was a joke, then you put it over on me and deserve a good laugh. If that is the case please let me in on it. There is no better laugh than laughing at yourself:-)
Time for a fork my friends. The time of MySQL has passed, the time for OurSQL has come.
I'm so clever... go to OurSQL.org, like I did, and guess what? Someone registered it back in '07 and is promising to give to the folks who fork MySQL. It wasn't me. Wish it were, I checked out the big three URLs just in case I was lucky enough be able to register it before I posted, found out I'm not so clever.
OurSQL.com is, of course, for sale. OurSQL.net has a page that says... "hello there, please work."
My favorite reasons is as an "attaboy". You do something really great at work and they send you someplace nice, give you an expense account, let you hang out with the kind of people you like... Sending you to a conference makes you feel good. Everyone who wanted to go, but didn't get sent, knows you have more "mojo" with the pointy haired bosses than they do. It is a whole lot cheaper than a raise or even a real bonus. And, who knows, you might actually learn something of use to the company.
By far the most common reason for being sent has been to gather competitive information about other companies. How many people from the list did you see? What were their ranks? What booths and what presentations did they go to? Did they present? (Mandatory attendance at *there* presentations.) If they had a booth, how big was it? How was it staffed (and yeah, cup size and number of the models can be important)? How expensive was the swag they were giving away? Did you see the following people.? Did you get the ranks of the people? If you happened to have a chance to eavesdrop what were they talking about? Did any of their folks try to talk to you? If so, what about? What off site/after hours activities did they throw. Do you know who went? Had to do that even for attaboy conferences. This kind of information can be used to judge interest and intent of competitors. Well worth the cost of sending technical experts.
(One time I used an attaboy to get me to the Game Developers Conference out in California. I found I was the one being tracked. I was the only person there from a large telecom. Free drinks are not free when you have put up with being grilled by venture capitalists. Not one of them believed me when I told them why I was there. BTW, GDC was a blast! And, I wound up collecting some good info on Microsoft.)
I've been sent to more than one conference by mistake. I was once sent to a conference at Columbia in NYNY on zero notice. I was working in Austin, Texas at the time. The title of the conference and the list of attendees set of alarm bells with manager. The conference appeared to be on the economics of networks games, that is, MMOs and it had a truly amazing list of economist attending the conference. Turns out it was on who to use game theory to assign optimal prices for network usage. I found it facinating, but it did not apply to my subject matter area and it was of no interest the company. Things like that have happened more than once.:-)
When I've worked on standards I was always sent to the main conference relating to that standard. Have to show the flag. People will assume that if your rep isn't at the right conferences then your company isn't really committed to the standard. Customers might use that as a reason to switch vendors. And, oh my, but you can find that suddenly your emails are being ignored and no one is paying any attention to your issues. Not good, not good at all.
And, finally, I once got to go to a conference because it was being held in the building next door. It was just to cheap to pass up and it made me happy. (I met these two Brits who thought the signs banning concealed hand guns in the mall next door were a there to titillate the tourists. There words, not mine. They nearly ran back to the hotel when I informed them that they signs were for real and if they noticed, non-concealed hand guns *were still permitted*. Talk about failure to understand the local culture:-)
But, you know what? I have *never* been sent to a conference to learn a new skill. I have never heard of anyone being sent to a conference to learn a new skill. Learning is what classes are for. I have been paid to attend classes. I have been paid to teach classes on site at companies. Conferences are too short to actually acquire a new skill. OTOH, I have used conferences to identify areas that I wanted to study.
I was faced with the same problem several years ago. I found that Goodwill actually grinds printers into little chunks. They then separate the chunks into plastic and metal and sell them. They sell all they can get. Do not through it away, give it to Goodwill. OTOH, if you are into DIY then you can look at an old printer as a gold mine. There is at least one, maybe two very nice stepping motors, some nice gears, and a couple of stainless steel rods inside each printer.
I solved the printer problem by using Ebay to find a place here in town that refurbishes laser printers. Just searched for what I wanted and then said I want pick up only. Found several place within 15 miles. I bought a refurbished HP 4050N for $80, and a refurbished print cartridge for ~$100. The cartridge is rated for about 10,00 pages and looks like it will get there. Average cost, about 2 cents per printed page. I've not yet had to replace the print cartridge.
Before posting I went to EBay and checked for "color laser printer". You can buy a descent new color laser printer for less than $200. You can get a home quality one for under $100. It looks like you can even get an HP 4550n "gently used" for under $100. That's an industrial quality printer, built like a freaking battleship, for almost nothing.
Why would anyone buy anything other than a laser printer these days? Oh, yeah, photos.... I forgot. Isn't it cheaper to have those printed by an online service? I know that not everyone lives a mile from a Walgreens, but a lot of us do. It seems I can send a photo to them, and pick it up in a couple of hours. Why would I want to own a photo printer? That works even when I am on the road. Just find a local store and pick them up on my way out of town.
BTW, this kind of architecture makes it easy to add multiple execution units. With parallel execution and careful use of shared and private FUs and memories you can build a pretty damn powerful special purpose processor without a lot of hardware complexity.
All the execution units (aka co-processors in modern parlance) are still attached to a single bus, so theoretical max throughput is still one instruction per cycle. So this only makes sense if the CPs perform complex operations - like memory management, floating point, mul/div - or something of similar complexity. For the typical simple integer instruction that tends to dominate code it's no better than a microcoded processor - since now each normal instruction requires several cycles on the bus.
I see how you come to that conclusion. But, it is false. No reason why the inputs and outputs can't be on separate buses and no reason why you can't have separate machines communicating over yet another bus or set of buses to build a pipeline.
One version I found in my notes use a one instruction machine to implement the microcode for another machines. Like I said, my version was inspired by microcode so it *should* look like microcode.
Anyway, you are wrong, you're just assuming a limitation that isn't there.
A cousin of mine (Howdy Rusty!) described this concept to me in the '70s while I was taking classes toward my CS degree.
A little background: I went to the good old University of Utah which had a Boroughs 1700 with user writable microcode and so a lot of project centered around writing microcode and designing micro architectures. A friend was trying to code up a single instruction machine based on Curry Combinators. I thought he was nuts, but I liked the idea of a single instruction machine. So, I was talking to my cousin and he described an architecture that had one instruction that was a source and a destination address. Any address could be either memory or a register in a functional unit, an FU for short. No kidding, that is how he described it.
The only trouble was trying to figure out how to do a conditional branch.
A few years later while I was in gradual school I solved that problem and wrote paper about it. Being a gradual student I could not publish without permission from my adviser. Well, he got a good laugh out of the idea and told me not to show it to anyone. So, of course I sent it to everyone I knew. They all had a good laugh to. Said it was the funniest thing I had ever written. You see, I was into writing humorous stories at the time and people thought this was another one. Oh well, I have a print out of the thing around here somewhere.
What I really liked about the architecture is that if you started modifying it to make it more economical, doing things like making the addresses have different lengths and adding a bit to tell you if the long address is the source or the destination, the move architecture starts looking more and more like a classic instruction set architecture. I thought that was very cool. When you look at micro coded architectures and think about a pure move based processor it really does look like all traditional architectures are attempts to make the one instruction machine make more economical use of instruction bits.
So, how did I solve the conditional branch problem? Pretty much the way this fellow did. Every FU may, or may not, cause condition flags to be set. I added registers where you could read and write the condition bits and read and write the program counter. I also added a mask register that was anded with the condition register so you could enable and disable conditions. Then I just made the current instruction conditional on the values of the flags register anded with the mask register. If the result was non-zero the current instruction was skipped. Of course, the machine had to clear the condition register after each instruction was executed. (Hmm, it would make more sense to only make moves to the program counter conditional and it would make more sense to only clear the flags after a move to the instructions counter... Hey was a gradual student back then!:) That approach allowed you to select say the sign bit from one ALU, do an subtraction by moving values to two registers in the ALU, then jump if the sign bit is set. It also let you directly make any instruction conditional so you could implement something like the ABS() function without any jumps. Or, at least that was the idea.
I called my one instruction: The Conditional Move From Here To There And Clear Flags, or TCMFHTTACF insturction. The assembly for it was really dull, it just always had the same op code down the left hand edge of the screen... Ok, really, I just never listed anything but addresses when I wrote code for it.
Nice to see that someone actually built one of these. BTW, this kind of architecture makes it easy to add multiple execution units. With parallel execution and careful use of shared and private FUs and memories you can build a pretty damn powerful special purpose processor without a lot of hardware complexity.
This just to damn cool... someone finally built it!
If I were looking for prior art on this one I would look at SIMNET (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMNET) I would look at the systems leading up to it and the follow on systems. DARPA was way out in the lead pushing for distributed VR systems in the '80s and early '90s.
OTOH, I did skim the patent and it looks like they are talking about sending packets at fixed time intervals. The packets would contain all the little messages generated for the recipient during that time interval. That is a clever idea. Almost, if not exactly, like accumulating the motion of a mouse or a joystick for fixed time periods and reporting the accumulated change at fixed time interval. Something that device drivers have been doing for a very long time.
Ok, I'm an Ubuntu user who runs MS office 2000 (Yes, 2000, I've never seen a reason to upgrade) under wine and has both XP and Windows 7 running in VirtualBox. Both work perfectly in a virtual environment and I can run the apps I need and fiddle around without fear of messing up my system or losing data. Yes, there is nothing quite as funny as a BSOD in a window on your Ubuntu desktop:-) I find I kind of like Windows 7 except for one thing, I have a 64 bit system running an older AMD Athlon X3 3800 with 6 gigs of RAM. In VIrtualBox XP feels just fine, nice and responsive while Windows 7 is sluggish. That tells me that Windows 7 is not going to be acceptable on a lot of hardware that runs XP just fine. Also, since I have used Windows since version 3.0 I can claim some familiarity with the Windows UI. I can tell you that there are some things in the Windows 7 UI that drive me nuts. Why do they hide so much? I think they are trying to make it appear simple to new users but they aren't really doing that. They are just making it very hard to find the parts of the UI you need. They are definitely making it harder for long time users.
Imagine if the car makers tried to simplify the car UI by hiding the all the gauges and gear shift in the glove box, that would be a lot like the Windows 7 UI.
Not being new doesn't surprise me. I'd be surprised if it were new.
The incentive to implement it is the same as the incentive to implement the pay-to-send system. Some company somewhere gets to store the cents until they get paid out or canceled out of the system. That could be a whole lot of cents and the interest on the pot of cents they hold should be enough to make it interesting.
BTW, both system require a micropayment infrastructure. We'll eventually have such a system, but we do not have it now.
Another serious problem with either suggestion is that 0.01 USD is a lot of money to much of the population of the world. Any charge would lock millions of people out of email usage.
My real favorite solution to mass spam is to hunt down the spammers and either hang, draw and quarter them or burn them at the stake. The resulting videos would be posted on YouTube.
Seriously, I have a new plan to can spam. If you want me to see your email, you send me $0.01 cents along with the email. If you don't pay your email winds up in the great bit bucket in the sky.
We can set up a settlement system to keep track of how much we each owe versus how much we are owed. Most of us will wind up making a few cents per week from the emails from our banks and the few spammers that are willing to pay. A few of us (like one of my friends) who forwards everything to everybody will wind up paying a few cents, or even a few dollars, per month for the privilege of sending email. The charge is small enough that real businesses, those that spam my snail mail, will happily pay it. But, your average Nigerian prince with erectile dysfunction will not.
Hey we could even make it a bidding system. Let me set a price for accepting your email. If I want your email I set the price to $0. If I hate you I'll set the price much higher. Your email software would fetch the acceptance price and decide if I am worth sending a message to.
I teach (well, taught and hope to again...) at the junior college level. I can not count the number of times I have had a student come to me angry about having flunked my class. Often demanding a passing grade with the argument, "But, I never missed a class, I took every test, and I turned in every assignment". I have always replied that since they did all that and they got failing grades on the tests and assignments they should not be surprised to have failed, but the are. They are very surprised. In many cases they were unaware that they had failing grades, they never bothered to look at their grades. Or, as was often the case, they were unable to do the math needed to compute their average grade from their scores.
I once had a student argue with me over the answers she got on an Excel assignment (yeah, basic class with intro to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). She got the wrong answer. Her argument was that since, in her opinion her answer was correct, she should get full credit for the assignment. I explained the best I could that arithmetic is not subject to opinion. She took that complaint all the way to the president of the school and I had to explain to my boss that no, I would not change the grade until he changed arithmetic.
I don't work there anymore. They replaced my class with English Literature. They took out every bit of anything technical from the curriculum. It is a for profit school and too many students were dropping out when they realized they would actually have to be able to do simple arithmetic to get an associates degree.
What I have noticed, and I've noticed because it affects my ability to get jobs, is that over the last 10 years interest in getting any kind of technical education in the US has just about dried up. If you have an MFA you can get a teaching job. If you have an MSCS, good luck, there are Ph.Ds with CS degrees going hungry out there looking for the same jobs. As far as I can tell no US employer want to hire anyone graduating with technical degrees from the US. US citizens don't have H1B visas so they can't be treated as slaves. But, worse, US schools have watered down there programs so much that many US grads aren't worth hiring.
In the few real CS course I teach I often encounter people with BSCS degrees who have never heard the words "finite state machine" and do not know either definition of the word "heap". And, yet, they have degrees in computer science? WTF? Now, the thing that bothers me most about that is that I have met people from the same schools with the same degrees that got an excellent education. But, those institutions allow people to graduate who should not have been able to graduate. That makes it worse for all of us.
I see it now, early 2016, the order is given to de-orbit the ISS. A US CEV shows up to pick up the rest of the crew and to provide de-orbit thrust. The International crew passes the US crew, bound with duck tape, through the hatch into the CEV. They then slam and lock the door. The Japanese government sends a message to the US saying that further cooperation with the US on ISS operations will be "very difficult". The EU sends 27 diplomats to the US and the UN to explain at great length in 27 different languages that they are repossessing their contributions to the ISS. The Russian crew members send a brief message to the CEV saying, basically, "Kiss My Asski". Behind the scenes China is offering pennies on the dollar for the US modules and hint, so politely, that if the US doesn't sell the dollar will lose 80% of its value tomorrow when the Chinese start selling dollars at an 80% discount.
The CEV commander notices a rather large number of manned spacecraft, mostly Russian and Chinese, closing in. The CEV undocks, backs away slooowly and returns to KSC. The name of ISS is changed to the United Low Orbit Science and Technology International Testbed (U-LOST-IT) and they start doing real science on the thing.
The fact that you do not even know which of these topics are actually programming languages shows how absolutely worthless your original training was.
OTOH, I make a fair amount of money teaching programming languages to people who went to schools like your first school. They know C, or they know Java, and now their company is switching to C++ or C# or some other language and they come and take my classes so they can keep their jobs. They don't know enough to be able to teach themselves a new language. That was a skill their "school" didn't teach them.
BTW, none of the languages I teach existed when I was in school back in the 70s. But, I went to a school where the professors gave home work assignments in what ever language was appropriate. They would give us a hand out detailing how to do simple I/O write a function, create a counted and conditional loop and let us go off and do the work. Could be LISP one week, and FORTRAN the next, with a COBOL chaser... The second course every CS major took covered *concepts* of programming languages and taught a common way to look at them.
I have never taken a class on a specific language since I left college. (And only then to push up my GPA. All language specific classes were for non-CS majors.) Yet, I can read a book on a language and go teach a class about it to college educated "programmers" who do not know how to learn a new language.
One other thing, some companies change languages by trying to retrain their programmers and firing the ones who resist the change or who fail to learn the new language. Others just fire everyone who doesn't already know it and hire new people who do.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm really glad to see your sane and reasonable postings. Please keep it up.
If you are an example of horrible pedantic bitches, then the world needs millions more just like you.
Of course, I'm biased... I've been happily married (32 years) to a wonderful lady who also describes herself as a pedantic bitch.
Stonewolf
Ah, you missed on little thing... They will walk in with a listing of this exchange on /. and a certification that the question originated at his IP address. The judge will note that he admitted an awareness of the questionable legality of his actions in front of the entire Internet, was told of the dangers, and then went ahead with the project anyway.
Ass raped would be nice compared to what they will do to him. They well get what they asked for in damages *and* he will be ordered to pay all court and lawyer fees. Yes, he will pay their lawyers $500/hour for every minute they spent on the case including the time they spent driving to and from the court house. They will then have the full force of the locale police to collect as well as being lawyers. If he makes them spend any time collecting the money they may sue him for the time they lost trying to collect. Not to mention what the judge might do if you can't come up with court costs. Ass raped with a barbed wire dildo is more like it.
Please, step back from the keyboard and start looking for a lawyer.
What is it about geeks and the law? Why are so many of us completely uneducated about the basic structure of civilization?
BTW, if you can afford a PC you can afford to ask a lawyer a question like this. You do not have to pay a retainer to get professional legal advice. You can shop around for a good deal. Just like Shatner says on the priceline adds lawyers would rather give you a deal on a few hours of work than have unbilled hours left at the end of the day. There are even web sites set up to help you find someone. I clearly can not know what your situation is. But, I talk to people on a regular basis who tell me they can't afford a lawyer. Then I see them drinking in the local bar, buying the latest video games, drop $20 at a time on iTunes, talking on an iPhone.... They cost of one year using an iPhone is about what you would pay to keep a cheap lawyer on retainer. For what most geeks spend on video games, cell phones, and pizza you could keep a top of the line lawyer on retainer.
If you want to be in business, act like it. If you walk into a small business and find someone cleaning the toilet, you have most likely found the owner. If you have to use a pay-as-you-go cell phone to be able to afford a lawyer, do it. Next thing you are going to tell us is that you don't have an account either and haven't learned the rules about what is a deductible business expense and what isn't.
Stonewolf
You can be sued at any time for almost anything.
I've been threatened with suits over using my last name in a business context. Turned out to be bull, but it still cost me nearly $10,000 to find out that they couldn't win a suit like that. But, they can still sue. To begin your education look up the term SLAPP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation).
They main reason they won't sue you is because you don't have anything they can take. OTOH, if you have a house and maybe some savings and maybe a salary they can garnish then they may sue you anyway. OTOH, if you have no money they may sue just to bankrupt you. Yes. companies do that sort of thing. They can't get anything from you, so they bankrupt you just to make a point. In cases like that you have little legal recourse. Gunning "them" down in the street might sound like fun, but after you think about it for a while you will most likely talk yourself out of it. :-) Look up "court costs" and the ways the courts are allowed to collect them.
Seriously. If you can't afford a lawyer you can't afford what you are doing.
My advice, take it for what you paid for it, is stop right now. You have already admitted in public that you realize you are breaking the law. That is what your posting on /. did for you. So just stop. Find a different game, or design your own game. Don't take this any further and please do not mention the name or even the kind of game you are doing on /. or anywhere else on line. You have already removed any possibility of defending yourself from a suit. You've lost.
Ok, now take a deep breath...
If you want to keep going, or if you ever want to do something like this again, pay for a couple of hours of legal help. Ask the lawyer how you would go about doing something like what you are doing. *Do not ask him if it is legal.* Ask how to do it legally. Very different questions with very different answers. Then ask him what you can do to be able to continue your project.
Over the last 30 years IP law has become a hobby of mine. I have taken a couple of classes on the subject, read many books and many more articles. I've even gotten to the point where I read SCOTUS rulings for fun. I've even written contracts that passed lawyer review without even having a comma changed. But, notice that I paid a lawyer to review it. I would never even think about doing what you have done without talking to a lawyer first. Even if I felt confident enough in US law (where I live) I know that I know very little about the laws in the rest of the world. Even the US has more than 50 jurisdictions...
Stonewolf
While I am not the original poster the question seems reasonable so I tried to find some stats. Not easy to do. So, I just looked up deaths per capita by country and found this site (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita). I do not know how good their data is at lest it is data. According to them the murder rate in the US is 0.042802 per 1,000 which puts us in 24th place for murder rate. The UK came in at 46 with a murder rate of 0.0140633 per 1,000. So, you are 3 times as likely to die
by murder in the US than in the UK.
OTOH, the high murder rates are in:
1 Colombia: 0.617847 per 1,000 people
2 South Africa: 0.496008 per 1,000 people
3 Jamaica: 0.324196 per 1,000 people
4 Venezuela: 0.316138 per 1,000 people
5 Russia: 0.201534 per 1,000 people
6 Mexico: 0.130213 per 1,000 people
7 Estonia: 0.107277 per 1,000 people
8 Latvia: 0.10393 per 1,000 people
9 Lithuania: 0.102863 per 1,000 people
10 Belarus: 0.0983495 per 1,000 people
Which are all a hell of a lot worse than the US or the UK.
OTOH, I looked up assaults per capita and the top ten are:
1 South Africa: 12.0752 per 1,000 people
2 Montserrat: 10.2773 per 1,000 people
3 Mauritius: 8.76036 per 1,000 people
4 Seychelles: 8.62196 per 1,000 people
5 Zimbabwe: 7.6525 per 1,000 people
6 United States: 7.56923 per 1,000 people
7 New Zealand: 7.47881 per 1,000 people
8 United Kingdom: 7.45959 per 1,000 people
9 Canada: 7.11834 per 1,000 people
10 Australia: 7.02459 per 1,000 people
That set gave me quite a chuckle. Yes, the US comes in ahead of the UK. But, notice how many of countries have roots in the former British empire, or were invaded by them, or colonized by them? Seems the British spread violent behavior everywhere they went. Since most of my ancestors are from the Celtic lands in the British Ilses, I blame the English... :-) Of course I have some English ancestors too, but as my father said "We don't talk about them".
Stonewolf
P.S.
The bit about the English ancestors came up in a conversation in which he bragged about the possibility of having Natlive American ancestors and the probability of having African ancestors (most people with my last name in the US are black) but was ashamed to have English ancestors because we are Welsh. Or at least we were when we got here in the 1680s. What is that 15 generations? Families have their own weird form of memory.
Stonewolf
Take them both. No, I am not kidding. I took the equivalent of both and they have both been extremely valuable.
Stonewolf
What you see has nothing to do with working for a bunch of lazy unprofessional bums. It has nothing to do with the passing of time or the decline of the American work ethic. I've seen what you have seen and been shocked by it every time. The difference is that I'm now 57 and it doesn't surprise me anymore. I first saw this kind of problem in my first job pumping gas in 1972 and it hasn't changed since.
So what is going on? What is the cause? Well, some people are just lazy unprofessional bums. That has been true as long as there have been people. But, most people will do a good job, act professionally, and put in 8 to 12 solid hours of hard work in exchange for a few things. What motivates people the most is the freedom to do a good job without fear of being punished for doing it. That wasn't what you expected me to say was it? It is also nice to get reasonable pay.
In most of the places I've worked people were punished, in some way or another, for taking any kind of risk. They are punished for taking any kind of initiative. They are rewarded for doing what they are told to do. They are rewarded for fixing blame rather than fixing problems.
What you are seeing is the result of modern business management at its best. The people you see wasting time know, they know down in their guts, that they will not be fired for wasting time and they will not be rewarded for doing a good job. They know that they could be laid off, but they also know that people will be laid off for political not for being incompetent. They will not be laid off because they stand around in the hall talking about nothing important. But, they will be laid off for not spending enough time talking to their boss about this weeks football games. In fact, the highest paid person, they guy with the most experience and/or the greatest skills, is more likely to be laid off than the new guy who still can't find the coffee filters. Why? Because laying off the expensive people has more impact on the quarterly report.
The mid level managers tolerate all this crappy behavior because the know the same things.
A while back, I went to work for a new company and as I walked around I noticed this guy with a green Mohawk who was reading Slashdot.com. In fact, that is how I found out about Slashdot.... It seemed he was our "IT Guy" or as he called himself "the system manager". Awesome system manager. Nothing ever broke and he did all his serious work at night after every one had left so it didn't impact our daily work. Shortly after that I overheard the President asking the CTO why this guy was on the pay roll. The president described him as looking weird, being disrespectful, and he never saw him actually do anything. Then he went on to say that nothing ever went wrong anyway so why did we need a system manager? BTW, the president and the CTO both have technical masters degrees from MIT. They should know better. The CTO couldn't or wouldn't defend Green haired Mohawk guy.
I had a chat with GHMG that in which I told him to 1) stop doing his work at night, you must be seen to be doing work. When your work starts to interfere with day to day operations offer to come in at night to do it. But, ask for more money for night work. 2) let little things break once in a while so they see you fix them. They need that to understand the value you the bring to the company. 3) Do not read Slashdot where management can see you reading Slashdot. 4) Walk around and talk to people, ask them what you could do to make them more productive. Then pass that list on to your manager and ask him to prioritize the list. You have to be seen adding value over the long run. You have to be seen taking an interest in the success of the company. 5) Create an online database for reporting problems and tracking their solutions. You need that to document all unscheduled tasks you perform. Make sure that all work requests go through your database. You must be able to document all the work you really do.
Ok, so what happened? He did what I suggested. A couple of month
I understand, it must be a lot like being an American while George Bush II was president.
Some of my ancestors were Irish. I know what they went through building this country (U.S.) and it makes me sick to see this sort of thing happen in Ireland. For the record I'm mostly Welsh and Manx but I'm also Irish, Scots Irish, and Scots, along with bits of several others ethnicities.
Stonewolf
LOL
hardly profound, but an honest emotional reaction.
I'm part Irish. I know what kind of people my ancestors were, and to see their heritage debased by the people they left behind is hard to take.
Stonwolf
The Irish have earned the derision of all free people everywhere in the world.
Stonewolf
Arguing about words that have no referent is much like creating mathematical proofs that include a division by zero.
That is, it can be fun. It can be hilarious to use in arguments with people who do not understand the concept. Not as funny as listening to people demand proofs of negatives, but still laughable. All in all a stupid waste of time.
Stonewolf
P.S.
Now the fun starts. People will now jump in a tell me that theist and atheist do have referents. Then someone will demand a proof of the non-existence that the words do not have a referent. So, I win if more than 10 idiots argue tell my I am wrong.
If you understand the non-statement "What is the sound of one hand clapping" then you understand what I just said. And, no, it does not require any understanding of, or belief in, Buddhism to understand it.
This is an excellent suggestion, but not quite complete. Do not just complain. Ask for instructions on how to change the setting back to what it was. Under no conditions should you accept that it can not be done. You could change it yesterday, so you must be able to change it today, right? Be nice to the poor guy on the other end of the line. He is not at fault. But, when he says you can't change it kindly say that you believe he does not know how, and then demand to talk to a senior technical person so you can get your phone working again. Stay on the phone as long as possible and talk to as many people as possible.
After you call Verizon and complain you *must* then call the FCC. You can find the number at http://esupport.fcc.gov/complaints.htm?sid=d1e640&id=d1e697 or just 1-888-225-5322 if you trust me :-) Then, you call the senators and your representative. You find your senator at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm and then your representative at http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/mcapdir.html
Calling Verizon costs Verizon money, but it will not force them to change their actions. Calling the FCC forces the agency that regulates Verison to take notice of what Verizon has done. If the FCC doesn't get complaints they are not forced to "notice" the problem. Calling the Senate and the House of representatives makes sure that the people who make the laws that govern Verizon notice that the people who vote for them are not happy with the laws that govern Verizon. Believe it or not, no matter how large a bribe ... OK "campaign contribution" your elected officials have been paid by Verizon (each and everyone of them has been bribed by Verizon) they will take action if they think it will affect their ability to stay in office. You see, no matter how much money Verizon can give them, Verizon can not vote for them. And the elected bastards know one thing, if they do not get elected they get no more goodies from Verizon and the rest of the megacorps.
And, Ya'know, if you are just feeling mean, call Microsoft support and ask how to turn off Bing on your phone. It is their product, they should know, right?
The idea is to make this policy change as costly for Verizon as possible. That means you make them pay to handle your calls and you make them pay even more by generating bad feelings toward them in the Senate and the House.
Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. If you want to call and leave a comment for at the White House for President Obomo, 202-456-1111 or, if you do not trust me as you should not, you can find the number here http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact. You can also send an email from there.
Stonewolf.
Why isn't this information listed at the top of the page on Slashdot?
Who do they think they are, god?
Stonewolf
To me they do not sound at all alike:
ow-er-ess-que-ell versus or-a-kl
I can almost see what you are saying if you pronounce SQL as sequel. But, you can't do that because sequel is, IIRC, a trademark :-) Or, is it possible you are pronouncing the "c" more like I pronounce "s"? I have encountered that among some English speakers in the past.
I'm very curious about your regional accent. I speak with a western US (mountain states) accent. What is your accent? I've worked with people from most English speaking countries and I know that pronunciations vary wildly from continent to continent, country to country, and region to region. I remember my shock the first time I heard an educated upper class Englishman pronounce the word "valet" and the first time I heard a Central Texan pronounce "guadalupe".
OTOH, if your posting was a joke, then you put it over on me and deserve a good laugh. If that is the case please let me in on it. There is no better laugh than laughing at yourself :-)
Stonewolf
Time for a fork my friends. The time of MySQL has passed, the time for OurSQL has come.
I'm so clever... go to OurSQL.org, like I did, and guess what? Someone registered it back in '07 and is promising to give to the folks who fork MySQL. It wasn't me. Wish it were, I checked out the big three URLs just in case I was lucky enough be able to register it before I posted, found out I'm not so clever.
OurSQL.com is, of course, for sale.
OurSQL.net has a page that says... "hello there, please work."
My favorite reasons is as an "attaboy". You do something really great at work and they send you someplace nice, give you an expense account, let you hang out with the kind of people you like... Sending you to a conference makes you feel good. Everyone who wanted to go, but didn't get sent, knows you have more "mojo" with the pointy haired bosses than they do. It is a whole lot cheaper than a raise or even a real bonus. And, who knows, you might actually learn something of use to the company.
By far the most common reason for being sent has been to gather competitive information about other companies. How many people from the list did you see? What were their ranks? What booths and what presentations did they go to? Did they present? (Mandatory attendance at *there* presentations.) If they had a booth, how big was it? How was it staffed (and yeah, cup size and number of the models can be important)? How expensive was the swag they were giving away? Did you see the following people.? Did you get the ranks of the people? If you happened to have a chance to eavesdrop what were they talking about? Did any of their folks try to talk to you? If so, what about? What off site/after hours activities did they throw. Do you know who went? Had to do that even for attaboy conferences. This kind of information can be used to judge interest and intent of competitors. Well worth the cost of sending technical experts.
(One time I used an attaboy to get me to the Game Developers Conference out in California. I found I was the one being tracked. I was the only person there from a large telecom. Free drinks are not free when you have put up with being grilled by venture capitalists. Not one of them believed me when I told them why I was there. BTW, GDC was a blast! And, I wound up collecting some good info on Microsoft.)
I've been sent to more than one conference by mistake. I was once sent to a conference at Columbia in NYNY on zero notice. I was working in Austin, Texas at the time. The title of the conference and the list of attendees set of alarm bells with manager. The conference appeared to be on the economics of networks games, that is, MMOs and it had a truly amazing list of economist attending the conference. Turns out it was on who to use game theory to assign optimal prices for network usage. I found it facinating, but it did not apply to my subject matter area and it was of no interest the company. Things like that have happened more than once. :-)
When I've worked on standards I was always sent to the main conference relating to that standard. Have to show the flag. People will assume that if your rep isn't at the right conferences then your company isn't really committed to the standard. Customers might use that as a reason to switch vendors. And, oh my, but you can find that suddenly your emails are being ignored and no one is paying any attention to your issues. Not good, not good at all.
And, finally, I once got to go to a conference because it was being held in the building next door. It was just to cheap to pass up and it made me happy. (I met these two Brits who thought the signs banning concealed hand guns in the mall next door were a there to titillate the tourists. There words, not mine. They nearly ran back to the hotel when I informed them that they signs were for real and if they noticed, non-concealed hand guns *were still permitted*. Talk about failure to understand the local culture :-)
But, you know what? I have *never* been sent to a conference to learn a new skill. I have never heard of anyone being sent to a conference to learn a new skill. Learning is what classes are for. I have been paid to attend classes. I have been paid to teach classes on site at companies. Conferences are too short to actually acquire a new skill. OTOH, I have used conferences to identify areas that I wanted to study.
Stonewolf
I was faced with the same problem several years ago. I found that Goodwill actually grinds printers into little chunks. They then separate the chunks into plastic and metal and sell them. They sell all they can get. Do not through it away, give it to Goodwill. OTOH, if you are into DIY then you can look at an old printer as a gold mine. There is at least one, maybe two very nice stepping motors, some nice gears, and a couple of stainless steel rods inside each printer.
I solved the printer problem by using Ebay to find a place here in town that refurbishes laser printers. Just searched for what I wanted and then said I want pick up only. Found several place within 15 miles. I bought a refurbished HP 4050N for $80, and a refurbished print cartridge for ~$100. The cartridge is rated for about 10,00 pages and looks like it will get there. Average cost, about 2 cents per printed page. I've not yet had to replace the print cartridge.
Before posting I went to EBay and checked for "color laser printer". You can buy a descent new color laser printer for less than $200. You can get a home quality one for under $100. It looks like you can even get an HP 4550n "gently used" for under $100. That's an industrial quality printer, built like a freaking battleship, for almost nothing.
Why would anyone buy anything other than a laser printer these days? Oh, yeah, photos.... I forgot. Isn't it cheaper to have those printed by an online service? I know that not everyone lives a mile from a Walgreens, but a lot of us do. It seems I can send a photo to them, and pick it up in a couple of hours. Why would I want to own a photo printer? That works even when I am on the road. Just find a local store and pick them up on my way out of town.
Stonewolf
BTW, this kind of architecture makes it easy to add multiple execution units. With parallel execution and careful use of shared and private FUs and memories you can build a pretty damn powerful special purpose processor without a lot of hardware complexity.
All the execution units (aka co-processors in modern parlance) are still attached to a single bus, so theoretical max throughput is still one instruction per cycle. So this only makes sense if the CPs perform complex operations - like memory management, floating point, mul/div - or something of similar complexity. For the typical simple integer instruction that tends to dominate code it's no better than a microcoded processor - since now each normal instruction requires several cycles on the bus.
I see how you come to that conclusion. But, it is false. No reason why the inputs and outputs can't be on separate buses and no reason why you can't have separate machines communicating over yet another bus or set of buses to build a pipeline.
One version I found in my notes use a one instruction machine to implement the microcode for another machines. Like I said, my version was inspired by microcode so it *should* look like microcode.
Anyway, you are wrong, you're just assuming a limitation that isn't there.
Stonewolf.
A cousin of mine (Howdy Rusty!) described this concept to me in the '70s while I was taking classes toward my CS degree.
A little background: I went to the good old University of Utah which had a Boroughs 1700 with user writable microcode and so a lot of project centered around writing microcode and designing micro architectures. A friend was trying to code up a single instruction machine based on Curry Combinators. I thought he was nuts, but I liked the idea of a single instruction machine. So, I was talking to my cousin and he described an architecture that had one instruction that was a source and a destination address. Any address could be either memory or a register in a functional unit, an FU for short. No kidding, that is how he described it.
The only trouble was trying to figure out how to do a conditional branch.
A few years later while I was in gradual school I solved that problem and wrote paper about it. Being a gradual student I could not publish without permission from my adviser. Well, he got a good laugh out of the idea and told me not to show it to anyone. So, of course I sent it to everyone I knew. They all had a good laugh to. Said it was the funniest thing I had ever written. You see, I was into writing humorous stories at the time and people thought this was another one. Oh well, I have a print out of the thing around here somewhere.
What I really liked about the architecture is that if you started modifying it to make it more economical, doing things like making the addresses have different lengths and adding a bit to tell you if the long address is the source or the destination, the move architecture starts looking more and more like a classic instruction set architecture. I thought that was very cool. When you look at micro coded architectures and think about a pure move based processor it really does look like all traditional architectures are attempts to make the one instruction machine make more economical use of instruction bits.
So, how did I solve the conditional branch problem? Pretty much the way this fellow did. Every FU may, or may not, cause condition flags to be set. I added registers where you could read and write the condition bits and read and write the program counter. I also added a mask register that was anded with the condition register so you could enable and disable conditions. Then I just made the current instruction conditional on the values of the flags register anded with the mask register. If the result was non-zero the current instruction was skipped. Of course, the machine had to clear the condition register after each instruction was executed. (Hmm, it would make more sense to only make moves to the program counter conditional and it would make more sense to only clear the flags after a move to the instructions counter... Hey was a gradual student back then! :) That approach allowed you to select say the sign bit from one ALU, do an subtraction by moving values to two registers in the ALU, then jump if the sign bit is set. It also let you directly make any instruction conditional so you could implement something like the ABS() function without any jumps. Or, at least that was the idea.
I called my one instruction: The Conditional Move From Here To There And Clear Flags, or TCMFHTTACF insturction. The assembly for it was really dull, it just always had the same op code down the left hand edge of the screen... Ok, really, I just never listed anything but addresses when I wrote code for it.
Nice to see that someone actually built one of these. BTW, this kind of architecture makes it easy to add multiple execution units. With parallel execution and careful use of shared and private FUs and memories you can build a pretty damn powerful special purpose processor without a lot of hardware complexity.
This just to damn cool... someone finally built it!
Stonewolf
If I were looking for prior art on this one I would look at SIMNET (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMNET) I would look at the systems leading up to it and the follow on systems. DARPA was way out in the lead pushing for distributed VR systems in the '80s and early '90s.
OTOH, I did skim the patent and it looks like they are talking about sending packets at fixed time intervals. The packets would contain all the little messages generated for the recipient during that time interval. That is a clever idea. Almost, if not exactly, like accumulating the motion of a mouse or a joystick for fixed time periods and reporting the accumulated change at fixed time interval. Something that device drivers have been doing for a very long time.
Stonewolf
Ok, I'm an Ubuntu user who runs MS office 2000 (Yes, 2000, I've never seen a reason to upgrade) under wine and has both XP and Windows 7 running in VirtualBox. Both work perfectly in a virtual environment and I can run the apps I need and fiddle around without fear of messing up my system or losing data. Yes, there is nothing quite as funny as a BSOD in a window on your Ubuntu desktop :-) I find I kind of like Windows 7 except for one thing, I have a 64 bit system running an older AMD Athlon X3 3800 with 6 gigs of RAM. In VIrtualBox XP feels just fine, nice and responsive while Windows 7 is sluggish. That tells me that Windows 7 is not going to be acceptable on a lot of hardware that runs XP just fine. Also, since I have used Windows since version 3.0 I can claim some familiarity with the Windows UI. I can tell you that there are some things in the Windows 7 UI that drive me nuts. Why do they hide so much? I think they are trying to make it appear simple to new users but they aren't really doing that. They are just making it very hard to find the parts of the UI you need. They are definitely making it harder for long time users.
Imagine if the car makers tried to simplify the car UI by hiding the all the gauges and gear shift in the glove box, that would be a lot like the Windows 7 UI.
Stonewolf
Not being new doesn't surprise me. I'd be surprised if it were new.
The incentive to implement it is the same as the incentive to implement the pay-to-send system. Some company somewhere gets to store the cents until they get paid out or canceled out of the system. That could be a whole lot of cents and the interest on the pot of cents they hold should be enough to make it interesting.
BTW, both system require a micropayment infrastructure. We'll eventually have such a system, but we do not have it now.
Another serious problem with either suggestion is that 0.01 USD is a lot of money to much of the population of the world. Any charge would lock millions of people out of email usage.
My real favorite solution to mass spam is to hunt down the spammers and either hang, draw and quarter them or burn them at the stake. The resulting videos would be posted on YouTube.
Stonewolf
Seriously, I have a new plan to can spam. If you want me to see your email, you send me $0.01 cents along with the email. If you don't pay your email winds up in the great bit bucket in the sky.
We can set up a settlement system to keep track of how much we each owe versus how much we are owed. Most of us will wind up making a few cents per week from the emails from our banks and the few spammers that are willing to pay. A few of us (like one of my friends) who forwards everything to everybody will wind up paying a few cents, or even a few dollars, per month for the privilege of sending email. The charge is small enough that real businesses, those that spam my snail mail, will happily pay it. But, your average Nigerian prince with erectile dysfunction will not.
Hey we could even make it a bidding system. Let me set a price for accepting your email. If I want your email I set the price to $0. If I hate you I'll set the price much higher. Your email software would fetch the acceptance price and decide if I am worth sending a message to.
Stonewolf
So true, so true....
I teach (well, taught and hope to again...) at the junior college level. I can not count the number of times I have had a student come to me angry about having flunked my class. Often demanding a passing grade with the argument, "But, I never missed a class, I took every test, and I turned in every assignment". I have always replied that since they did all that and they got failing grades on the tests and assignments they should not be surprised to have failed, but the are. They are very surprised. In many cases they were unaware that they had failing grades, they never bothered to look at their grades. Or, as was often the case, they were unable to do the math needed to compute their average grade from their scores.
I once had a student argue with me over the answers she got on an Excel assignment (yeah, basic class with intro to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). She got the wrong answer. Her argument was that since, in her opinion her answer was correct, she should get full credit for the assignment. I explained the best I could that arithmetic is not subject to opinion. She took that complaint all the way to the president of the school and I had to explain to my boss that no, I would not change the grade until he changed arithmetic.
I don't work there anymore. They replaced my class with English Literature. They took out every bit of anything technical from the curriculum. It is a for profit school and too many students were dropping out when they realized they would actually have to be able to do simple arithmetic to get an associates degree.
What I have noticed, and I've noticed because it affects my ability to get jobs, is that over the last 10 years interest in getting any kind of technical education in the US has just about dried up. If you have an MFA you can get a teaching job. If you have an MSCS, good luck, there are Ph.Ds with CS degrees going hungry out there looking for the same jobs. As far as I can tell no US employer want to hire anyone graduating with technical degrees from the US. US citizens don't have H1B visas so they can't be treated as slaves. But, worse, US schools have watered down there programs so much that many US grads aren't worth hiring.
In the few real CS course I teach I often encounter people with BSCS degrees who have never heard the words "finite state machine" and do not know either definition of the word "heap". And, yet, they have degrees in computer science? WTF? Now, the thing that bothers me most about that is that I have met people from the same schools with the same degrees that got an excellent education. But, those institutions allow people to graduate who should not have been able to graduate. That makes it worse for all of us.
Stonewolf
I don't think so.
I see it now, early 2016, the order is given to de-orbit the ISS. A US CEV shows up to pick up the rest of the crew and to provide de-orbit thrust. The International crew passes the US crew, bound with duck tape, through the hatch into the CEV. They then slam and lock the door. The Japanese government sends a message to the US saying that further cooperation with the US on ISS operations will be "very difficult". The EU sends 27 diplomats to the US and the UN to explain at great length in 27 different languages that they are repossessing their contributions to the ISS. The Russian crew members send a brief message to the CEV saying, basically, "Kiss My Asski". Behind the scenes China is offering pennies on the dollar for the US modules and hint, so politely, that if the US doesn't sell the dollar will lose 80% of its value tomorrow when the Chinese start selling dollars at an 80% discount.
The CEV commander notices a rather large number of manned spacecraft, mostly Russian and Chinese, closing in. The CEV undocks, backs away slooowly and returns to KSC. The name of ISS is changed to the United Low Orbit Science and Technology International Testbed (U-LOST-IT) and they start doing real science on the thing.
Stonewolf.
Neither is Oracle.
The fact that you do not even know which of these topics are actually programming languages shows how absolutely worthless your original training was.
OTOH, I make a fair amount of money teaching programming languages to people who went to schools like your first school. They know C, or they know Java, and now their company is switching to C++ or C# or some other language and they come and take my classes so they can keep their jobs. They don't know enough to be able to teach themselves a new language. That was a skill their "school" didn't teach them.
BTW, none of the languages I teach existed when I was in school back in the 70s. But, I went to a school where the professors gave home work assignments in what ever language was appropriate. They would give us a hand out detailing how to do simple I/O write a function, create a counted and conditional loop and let us go off and do the work. Could be LISP one week, and FORTRAN the next, with a COBOL chaser... The second course every CS major took covered *concepts* of programming languages and taught a common way to look at them.
I have never taken a class on a specific language since I left college. (And only then to push up my GPA. All language specific classes were for non-CS majors.) Yet, I can read a book on a language and go teach a class about it to college educated "programmers" who do not know how to learn a new language.
One other thing, some companies change languages by trying to retrain their programmers and firing the ones who resist the change or who fail to learn the new language. Others just fire everyone who doesn't already know it and hire new people who do.
Stonewolf