As much as I love the 4th Amendment, I don't see where any person was deprived of security of their persons, houses, papers, and/or effects. Nor did any warrant issue (yes, I'm being cute with that one). What, again, does the 4th amendment have to do with this?
Or do you think you own data gathered by 3rd parties? Far as I can tell, it belongs to AT&T. Complain as a customer if you want (or refuse to give them your custom... with VOIP that's entirely possibly now). But if they want to give it to the government for any reason that's their choice. A foolish choice, perhaps, but theirs nonetheless.
Actually, what this means is that you should vote for a 3rd party candidate.
There's no way in hell that person will be elected, so you could say that those votes count *even less* than the ones for the major parties, but you'd be wrong. Actually the 3rd parties do a *lot* to shape the debate. If you look at the history of the platforms of the major parties, you will observe very quickly that they are strongly affected by significant showings of 3rd parties.
That's at least partly because the 3rd party voters are the most likely to switch their vote in a close election (and the non-close elections don't matter anyway).
So that malware now just needs to wait until the user has authorized root privs for some other purpose in order to do its mischief, I assume?
Linux and Macs don't suffer from viruses because it isn't worth it for device writers to target them, not for any inherent higher level of security. Ok, that's not entirely fair... Linux has the advantage of being so forked and fragmented that a virus has to be much cleverer in order to spread (i.e. not being a monoculture provides a certain degree of immunity much like partial population vaccination helps with real viruses)... but that isn't scalable until we get hard AI, at which point it will be pointless.
Give MS credit, at least, for trying to *actually* solve the primary security problem that people have complained about for almost forever, which is the need to run as an admin all the time. Pretending to solve it but leaving in holes that can be exploited would just get them laughed at again by people that actually understand security in *addition* to the current whining by people that don't really understand security.
Well, basically speaking, IP rights are a solution to the problem that information wants to be free. A clever hack, if you will, and not a true "right" in the natural rights sense.
The result of this immutable law of nature is that people won't expend much effort to produce it, because something that is free has no value and people rarely expend much effort on production of valueless things (I'm using the technical economics definition of "value" here).
The workaround to this problem is to (in theory temporarily) grant them the right to commercially exploit a work of information creation exclusively.
So as you see, it's not really a question of natural rights, like speech, liberty, etc. It's a question of a sensible societal tradeoff. In a sense, IP protection is a "public good" much like parks and libraries (heh, heh, he said "libraries"). Again, using the technical economics definition of "public good" here.
There doesn't appear to be such a problem with non-informational products of people's labor. Those are quite adequately dealt with by a free market.
The terrorists and their cronies perhaps don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but what about the *rest of us*?
Or are you saying that the government knows with unerring accuracy who all the terrorists are, and what their phone numbers are, but is *so* unbelievably incompetent that they can't use this information to track them down and kill them?
The whole call for 3rd parties that seems to sweep Slashdot (and any other political discussion) every time someone points out the corruption of the existing 2 party system is just another case of people not thinking enough about what they're saying.
The only potentially good way to have a multiparty system is a parlimentary system, and that has its own whole host of problems that are just as bad, if not worse, than those of a 2 party "winner takes all" system.
Let's suppose there were a viable 3rd party. What would it look like. Well, there are really only 2 relatively stable choices: it could appeal to a lunatic fringe, or it could attempt to appeal to the center.
If a supposed viable third party appeals to a lunatic fringe (of any stripe), there's the serious danger that a lunatic reviled by almost 2/3rds of the people could get elected president, or that that party could take control of congress. This is not a desireable outcome. If you don't think it could happen, study the Weimar Republic some more (c.f. Godwin's Law).
If the supposed viable 3rd party successfully appeals to the center, the other 2 parties will by necessity be forced to move further off-center to appeal to their core constituencies. Ultimately, then, you end up with 2 fringe parties and one centrist party, leading to *double* the chance that a fringe group reviled by almost 2/3rds of the country can take control of the government.
No, if you're going to have a non-parlimentary political system, 2 parties is evil, but it's less evil than 1 or 3+ parties.
I read TFA, and I don't get at all what the controversy is about. Ummm... hello? TFA spends more time talking about the criticism of Walmart than it does about the company...
A Wikipedia (or any other encyclopedia) article is supposed to be about the subject of the article. If this one fails, it fails because of that. How about talking about the history of the company, its founding, its composition and financial results? Its main areas of product lines, it's suppliers and customers? Its executives and stock? Its stores and (the identity of, not commentary on) its policies? It's more than just a company, sure, but the article about the company should be about the company.
The criticism of Walmart is, indeed, a separate topic from the company itself. An article about the USA should discuss the country itself, it's land masses, people, language, culture, religions, political system (but not politics), etc., etc. If it talks about the controversies and opinions about the USA in the world at large at *all*, it should do so with a reference to a different article.
The automotive industry is just as rife with stupid patent problems as the software industry. It's just been around long enough that the majority of the stupid patents have expired.
Really, I worked at GM for a couple of summers (and my dad worked there for 36 years), and most engineers were just as annoyed with patents as people on Slashdot are.
And no, their competitive landscape being smaller doesn't help them much because dozens of small "inventors" (and I use the term lightly) patent random obvious stuff all the time and go after them too.
Just to take one random example: putting the map light on the bottom of the rear view mirror is a patented feature.
The IP indemnification has always been stated as making good awarded damages arising from patent infringement suits related to their customers use of Microsoft software.
Microsoft, or any other company that produces software, would be incredibly stupid to indemnify against any and all losses related to use of their product.
The only flaw in that idea is stated right in the idea itself: "a government run insurance plan". As a quote I saw recently said: "Government is an entity which, while it can't do big things well, can't do small things well either".
Admittedly, I'm not 100% certain that politics is a worse motivator for a health care provider than money... Only 99%.
Personally, I don't know of any holidays that follow the "first weekday after date X" format, at least in the US. President's day, for example, switched to the 3rd Monday in February a *long* time ago. Ok, Easter is an anomaly, but that's not Palm's fault:-).
But that aside, you most certainly *can* repeat an appointment on the 3rd Thursday of every November, though what it is that you're doing exactly one week before Thanksgiving every year is a mystery to me...
Wow... Someone thinks that a 90% probability of guilt is sufficient to convict someone... I hope I never move to his country. Generally speaking in wild generalities, the US system sets that threshold at about 99% (based not on any law, but on a cultural opinion framed by a quote from a famous patriot that he would rather let 100 guilty men go free than falsely convict an innocent one).
Also, appeals in the US (and I would hope probably most places) only consider matters of law, not of fact. Trying the facts becomes more and more suspicious as time elapses, as memories fade and trails of custody of evidence become more and more fractured and prone to error. So the presumption is that reasonable doubt can only increase with time, not decrease.
Anyway, the point of the double jeopardy rule in the US is a reaction to a visciously unjust (European) government tactic of the time of simply trying someone over and over again if they don't like the result of the first trial. Since our particular form of justice puts supremacy on the jury rather than on appointed judges, any trial after the jury aquits would be a trial of this form. It's not a perfect system, but it's one (agan, imperfect) check and balance on the power of government to unjustly harrass an innocent that the government doesn't like for some reason.
Not that we're really living up to those ideals these days... but I have a moderate amount of confidence in the long-term stability of the system even if it has the ability to royally screw up in the short term.
One of the inventions mentioned in the lazy man's summary is the discovery by the 9th century that the Earth was round and its approximate circumferance. If this is an example of the accuracy of this list, I'm not impressed.
Eratosthenes discovered this (include the circumference to about the same error) in the 3rd century BC using the same method.
(I'm not sure why it is that they don't have to deal with lean burning, I'm guessing that one reason is that fuel is injected during the combustion cycle, rather than being premixed prior to ignition.)
The answer is that diesels *do* have to deal with lean burning. They burn lean almost all the time. That's why they pump out huge amounts of NOx emissions (well, and particulates, but that's a much more complicated analysis).
If you have low sulpher fuel (due soon in the US), you can put a big mondo catalytic converter on a diesel and get the NOx's down to that of a gasoline engine. And (again, for complicated reasons) if you use a really high pressure fuel injector that can apply the fuel to the already compressed air, you can mostly get the particulates down to a bearable level.
Still, diesels suck when it comes to emissions on almost all fronts except O3.
While there's more to this, what strategies should a developer take to insure that the resulting program is as crash-free as possible?
I think your first and biggest problem is that your haven't defined what you mean by "as crash free as possible". What kind of uptime requirements do you have, what kind of data loss and retention requirements? What's the cost of a failure? What's the cost of preventing a failure? What are the security requirements? Does the system have to resist malicious external interference (and if so, that's a whole new can of worms^H^H^H^H^Hquestions)?
If you don't answer these kinds of questions first, no advise that anyone can give you be anything more than a guess.
That said, probably the biggest 2 suggestions I would have are: 1) Don't overengineer. Make your solution as simple as possible, but no simpler. 2) Code review every damn line of code written or changed on the project with at least 4 people in the room.
If it takes more than 10 minutes to break today's DRM 100 years from now: a) I will eat my Birkenstocks without salt, and b) someone just shoot me, because we've failed as a civilization.
So the whole "what about when copyright expires" spiel is a read herring (pun intended).
History seems to indicate that if your invention is that important, you don't get patent protection anyway (as a matter of practial application).
Neither of the guys that invented these got rich off their patents, because people ignored them and the establishment was too invested in the patented invention to object. The whole RIM vs. NTP thing is the same effect happening in small today (though one could more easily argue that those patents actually are invalid... not trying to say anything about that).
I think the key thing to note from that website is this: "These persons are subject to the law when their activities relate to the sale, purchase, or transfer of goods or services (including information) within the United States or between the U.S. and a foreign country."
Google is doing all of this entirely within China.
Corporations are nothing but collections of people. The individuals change, of course, but no people, no corporation (effectively speaking).
So why does it surprise anyone that corporations are treated as people? Any rights the people that are part of the corporation have are effectively rights the corporation has.
Take one trivial example: do corporations have freedom of speech? Let's assume the answer is no, and perform reductio ad absurdum: How would a corporation "speak" anyway? Well, it would have one of it's spokespersons (or webmasters, or advertising executives, or whatever) go out and say something on behalf of the corporation. That's an actual real, live, person we're talking about here. That person has the right to free speech. If they choose to exercise that right in exchange for renumeration from someone else, that doesn't strip them of their right to free speech. Hence, the corporation can "say" anything that any of its members can say. If corporations don't have freedom of speech, neither do the people that make them up.
Q.E.D.
The real tragedy (assuming there is one here) is that groups of people are inherently difficult to hold accountable for something, especially if they stand together. That's powerful and beneficial when it's a matter of civil disobedience, but it's a kind of power that single individuals don't have. It's not a right, though, just a power.
Microsoft may not be able to comply with this request without effectively releasing all their source code. I have thought for a long time that Windows is such an organic life form that no one really understands how it works, either inside or outside Microsoft.
It's my opinion tha they could do the *very best they possibly could* to release the specifications for their APIs, and while it would help, it still wouldn't give anyone much more ability to interoperate than they currently have, because the documentation will be wrong.
Microsoft has a huge incentive to get their developer's documentation correct, and yet MSDN is rife with errors and omissions.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't that be "NASA Announces *Announcement Of* Dark Matter Discovery"?
Or do you think you own data gathered by 3rd parties? Far as I can tell, it belongs to AT&T. Complain as a customer if you want (or refuse to give them your custom... with VOIP that's entirely possibly now). But if they want to give it to the government for any reason that's their choice. A foolish choice, perhaps, but theirs nonetheless.
Actually, what this means is that you should vote for a 3rd party candidate. There's no way in hell that person will be elected, so you could say that those votes count *even less* than the ones for the major parties, but you'd be wrong. Actually the 3rd parties do a *lot* to shape the debate. If you look at the history of the platforms of the major parties, you will observe very quickly that they are strongly affected by significant showings of 3rd parties. That's at least partly because the 3rd party voters are the most likely to switch their vote in a close election (and the non-close elections don't matter anyway).
Linux and Macs don't suffer from viruses because it isn't worth it for device writers to target them, not for any inherent higher level of security. Ok, that's not entirely fair... Linux has the advantage of being so forked and fragmented that a virus has to be much cleverer in order to spread (i.e. not being a monoculture provides a certain degree of immunity much like partial population vaccination helps with real viruses)... but that isn't scalable until we get hard AI, at which point it will be pointless.
Give MS credit, at least, for trying to *actually* solve the primary security problem that people have complained about for almost forever, which is the need to run as an admin all the time. Pretending to solve it but leaving in holes that can be exploited would just get them laughed at again by people that actually understand security in *addition* to the current whining by people that don't really understand security.
The result of this immutable law of nature is that people won't expend much effort to produce it, because something that is free has no value and people rarely expend much effort on production of valueless things (I'm using the technical economics definition of "value" here).
The workaround to this problem is to (in theory temporarily) grant them the right to commercially exploit a work of information creation exclusively.
So as you see, it's not really a question of natural rights, like speech, liberty, etc. It's a question of a sensible societal tradeoff. In a sense, IP protection is a "public good" much like parks and libraries (heh, heh, he said "libraries"). Again, using the technical economics definition of "public good" here.
There doesn't appear to be such a problem with non-informational products of people's labor. Those are quite adequately dealt with by a free market.
Seriously, this is one case where you really could just continuously make more loans with the returned principle and get your $300.
That's what you do with CDs, right? It's just more automatic...
The terrorists and their cronies perhaps don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but what about the *rest of us*?
Or are you saying that the government knows with unerring accuracy who all the terrorists are, and what their phone numbers are, but is *so* unbelievably incompetent that they can't use this information to track them down and kill them?
The only potentially good way to have a multiparty system is a parlimentary system, and that has its own whole host of problems that are just as bad, if not worse, than those of a 2 party "winner takes all" system.
Let's suppose there were a viable 3rd party. What would it look like. Well, there are really only 2 relatively stable choices: it could appeal to a lunatic fringe, or it could attempt to appeal to the center.
If a supposed viable third party appeals to a lunatic fringe (of any stripe), there's the serious danger that a lunatic reviled by almost 2/3rds of the people could get elected president, or that that party could take control of congress. This is not a desireable outcome. If you don't think it could happen, study the Weimar Republic some more (c.f. Godwin's Law).
If the supposed viable 3rd party successfully appeals to the center, the other 2 parties will by necessity be forced to move further off-center to appeal to their core constituencies. Ultimately, then, you end up with 2 fringe parties and one centrist party, leading to *double* the chance that a fringe group reviled by almost 2/3rds of the country can take control of the government.
No, if you're going to have a non-parlimentary political system, 2 parties is evil, but it's less evil than 1 or 3+ parties.
A Wikipedia (or any other encyclopedia) article is supposed to be about the subject of the article. If this one fails, it fails because of that. How about talking about the history of the company, its founding, its composition and financial results? Its main areas of product lines, it's suppliers and customers? Its executives and stock? Its stores and (the identity of, not commentary on) its policies? It's more than just a company, sure, but the article about the company should be about the company.
The criticism of Walmart is, indeed, a separate topic from the company itself. An article about the USA should discuss the country itself, it's land masses, people, language, culture, religions, political system (but not politics), etc., etc. If it talks about the controversies and opinions about the USA in the world at large at *all*, it should do so with a reference to a different article.
In theory there isn't a difference.
In practice there usually is.
Really, I worked at GM for a couple of summers (and my dad worked there for 36 years), and most engineers were just as annoyed with patents as people on Slashdot are.
And no, their competitive landscape being smaller doesn't help them much because dozens of small "inventors" (and I use the term lightly) patent random obvious stuff all the time and go after them too.
Just to take one random example: putting the map light on the bottom of the rear view mirror is a patented feature.
Microsoft, or any other company that produces software, would be incredibly stupid to indemnify against any and all losses related to use of their product.
Admittedly, I'm not 100% certain that politics is a worse motivator for a health care provider than money... Only 99%.
But that aside, you most certainly *can* repeat an appointment on the 3rd Thursday of every November, though what it is that you're doing exactly one week before Thanksgiving every year is a mystery to me...
You're *way* more optimistic about the Vista release schedule than even Microsoft is...
Also, appeals in the US (and I would hope probably most places) only consider matters of law, not of fact. Trying the facts becomes more and more suspicious as time elapses, as memories fade and trails of custody of evidence become more and more fractured and prone to error. So the presumption is that reasonable doubt can only increase with time, not decrease.
Anyway, the point of the double jeopardy rule in the US is a reaction to a visciously unjust (European) government tactic of the time of simply trying someone over and over again if they don't like the result of the first trial. Since our particular form of justice puts supremacy on the jury rather than on appointed judges, any trial after the jury aquits would be a trial of this form. It's not a perfect system, but it's one (agan, imperfect) check and balance on the power of government to unjustly harrass an innocent that the government doesn't like for some reason.
Not that we're really living up to those ideals these days... but I have a moderate amount of confidence in the long-term stability of the system even if it has the ability to royally screw up in the short term.
Eratosthenes discovered this (include the circumference to about the same error) in the 3rd century BC using the same method.
The answer is that diesels *do* have to deal with lean burning. They burn lean almost all the time. That's why they pump out huge amounts of NOx emissions (well, and particulates, but that's a much more complicated analysis).
If you have low sulpher fuel (due soon in the US), you can put a big mondo catalytic converter on a diesel and get the NOx's down to that of a gasoline engine. And (again, for complicated reasons) if you use a really high pressure fuel injector that can apply the fuel to the already compressed air, you can mostly get the particulates down to a bearable level.
Still, diesels suck when it comes to emissions on almost all fronts except O3.
I think your first and biggest problem is that your haven't defined what you mean by "as crash free as possible". What kind of uptime requirements do you have, what kind of data loss and retention requirements? What's the cost of a failure? What's the cost of preventing a failure? What are the security requirements? Does the system have to resist malicious external interference (and if so, that's a whole new can of worms^H^H^H^H^Hquestions)?
If you don't answer these kinds of questions first, no advise that anyone can give you be anything more than a guess.
That said, probably the biggest 2 suggestions I would have are: 1) Don't overengineer. Make your solution as simple as possible, but no simpler. 2) Code review every damn line of code written or changed on the project with at least 4 people in the room.
So the whole "what about when copyright expires" spiel is a read herring (pun intended).
Neither of the guys that invented these got rich off their patents, because people ignored them and the establishment was too invested in the patented invention to object. The whole RIM vs. NTP thing is the same effect happening in small today (though one could more easily argue that those patents actually are invalid... not trying to say anything about that).
But I do not think it means what you think it means :-). Here's a translation:
Anyone that thinks Google is Evil is deluding themselves.
Google is doing all of this entirely within China.
So why does it surprise anyone that corporations are treated as people? Any rights the people that are part of the corporation have are effectively rights the corporation has.
Take one trivial example: do corporations have freedom of speech? Let's assume the answer is no, and perform reductio ad absurdum: How would a corporation "speak" anyway? Well, it would have one of it's spokespersons (or webmasters, or advertising executives, or whatever) go out and say something on behalf of the corporation. That's an actual real, live, person we're talking about here. That person has the right to free speech. If they choose to exercise that right in exchange for renumeration from someone else, that doesn't strip them of their right to free speech. Hence, the corporation can "say" anything that any of its members can say. If corporations don't have freedom of speech, neither do the people that make them up.
Q.E.D.
The real tragedy (assuming there is one here) is that groups of people are inherently difficult to hold accountable for something, especially if they stand together. That's powerful and beneficial when it's a matter of civil disobedience, but it's a kind of power that single individuals don't have. It's not a right, though, just a power.
It's my opinion tha they could do the *very best they possibly could* to release the specifications for their APIs, and while it would help, it still wouldn't give anyone much more ability to interoperate than they currently have, because the documentation will be wrong.
Microsoft has a huge incentive to get their developer's documentation correct, and yet MSDN is rife with errors and omissions.