This is just a typical example of the government making its usual uninformed decisions. When I become president, I'm going to fire the house and the senate and make it mandatory that the re-elected officials are all geeks.
HOLLYWEIRD, CA - A group of 52 independent songwriters and music publishers have filed suit against the ebola infected population of Africa. Raymond "Air Biscuit" Montle, a New York attorney representing the independent artists, said in an interview, "We've all seen the National Geographic coverage of native African tribes on TV. We know that ritual dancing and music is part of their heritage. At least some of those ritual songs contain words that could be translated into words for some of our copyrighted songs. The fact is that a person singing the song that also has ebloa could infect another person with ebola while uttering our copyrighted phrases. This person could then sing the same song and....oh, its all to hard to understand. Copyright infringement is wrong, not matter if the people doing it are sick and living in a third world country!"
I would tend to agree. On the other hand, I think the problem is not so much with recognized brand names, but when someone registers a domain with their last name that happens to be the name of a big corporation. There have been more than a few instances where the big company came in and stomped the guy because they had money and he didn't. He wasn't cybersquatting in this case....unless you consider posting your song lyrics and pictures of your kids cybersaquatting.
I think the main issue is not that there is an international organization deciding this stuff. I think it is more that they have no oversite (oversight?). What they say goes, and screw you if you don't like it. That is a sucky attitude to begin with, and in obviously non-cybersquatting rulings in favor of a trademark holder, it just seems like a big bully taking the candy away from a baby.
I remember well that fateful word, "creativity," uttered from an ex-developer. I have no problem with creativity if the person(s) implementing the software are skilled and experienced software engineers. The problem happens when you give software programmers carte blanche to be creative. Microsoft did that and they got Visual Basic.
We are still, a year later, fixing bugs, finding lame bugs like so:
error_result = NO_ERROR;
foo = foo;
error_result = 10;
if foo != foo then something that needs to be done but never is
end if;
report_error (error_result);
It really is hard to progress on other projects if every other week we have to drop everything and align his creativity with reality. So far we've been threatened with lawsuits and have lost sales because of this crap.
I'm sorry, but there is merit in trying to plan software projects. Focus creativity during design and specification, not during implementation. All you get from being creative in the implementation phase is a boat-load of code where 25% of it is orphaned by design changes.
Make what happen? Give people an irrational fear of the police?
Fear is not irrational when someone who doesn't know your good character and carries a gun wants to talk with you about breaking a few laws. Fear is not irrational when this same person who is also scared of you (because they don't know you) is willing to pull their gun and shoot you dead if you make a wrong move. All because you are suspected of committing a crime.
You realize that anyone can point a finger at someone and accuse them of a crime? True or not, if they say the wrong thing to the cop during the "off-the-record" interview or confuse the cop, they can be arrested. If you are arrested here (in the US), you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. However, the presumption just means that you most likely will only get out of custody if you have enough money to post bail. Even then, most moderately priced defense attorneys will advise you to plead guilty and hope to get off easy, even if you didn't do anything wrong!
So, some computer tags your face as closely matching that of a serial killer. A bunch of moronic cops show up and start asking you some questions. They find out you're a computer geek; a loner maybe. This starts them thinking...."weren't those Columbine dudes loners too? Holy shit, we got our man!" You get thrown in jail. $5k-$15k worth of lost salary and lawyers fees later, they find out its all a mistake. Fear that.
Cops carry guns because most people carrying a gun shouldn't be allowed to.
So we give guns to people that want a gun in order to satisfy their god complex? Please, spare me the "most cops are honest" rhetoric. I think most cops they do TV shows about are honest, but thats about where it stops.
And if he ran away when he saw them coming, then they shot him dead, would it not be a big deal? This is the paranoid protecting the paranoid here. I don't know about anyone else, but I belive that most cops I've encountered should probably not be allowed to carry a gun.
There was an incident here (Los Angeles) where a young black man driving a BMW was killed in a police pursuit. Why? He had no police record, nothing illegal in his car; reason to fear the police. However, his relatives said he was deathly and irrationally afraid of the police. (After seeing the Rodney King tape, I would be too if I was black.) They simply tried to pull him over for some reason, and he took off. Hit a sharp curve, lost control, lost his life.
This technology can and probably will make this happen more often.
He should be freed because what he did is no different than if a person that legally buys the protected document printed it and photocopied it 1000 times. If he is in jail for making a tool that allows people to obtain copyrighted material without paying for it, then every employee of ANY company that makes a photocopy machine should also be jailed.
He should also be freed because it appears he is nothing but an easy target to make an example of so some government punk can get a blue ribbon and a promotion. Nothing will be solved by locking this man up. Maybe the government and the RIAA should learn a simple lesson: there are many, many more people out there that are smarter than you. You cannot sue them and jail them all. Eventually, you'll lose the battle, like it or not. All you can do is keep evolving your protection methods so that it never becomes commonly easy to bypass your protection. Expensive, yes, but eternal vigilence is the price of profit and monopoly.
So everyone should submit anonymous tips to the DOJ that those criminals over at Xerox are making and selling copyright circumventing devices. There are a lot of people on slashdot, so the message would be heard. It might at least piss the DOJ off enough to make it public.
had a critical security flaw that would allow easy access to the sensitive nuclear database by hackers or unauthorized personnel
Yeah, I think you left the important part off....it was that the sa password is blank initially and nobody bothered to set it. I guess they booted it up and never bothered to log into the database as the administrator, right?
When I install Linux my root password is either blank or well-known. Isn't that the same thing? No, I guess not (sarcasm).
Actually, I'm an idiot. You're right about the error, although it would be interesting to see what the C++ standard says.
Someone posted in reply to the parent to this message that you just place the loops in separate compound statements (to change the scope) and it does work (so you don't have to go changing variables and such.)
Everything may have context, but the point is you need to be able to figure out exactly what context you are in before you can do anything successfully. Gnome is not hard to use for the experienced users since we aren't afraid to click icons with no text on them to see what they do.
As for those in the audience who want a similar GUI study done on MS windows to see who comes out on top, I think you already know Windows will beat the pants off Gnome. However, you might see similar results if instead of just a bunch of icons on a bar at the bottom of the screen, there was actually some TEXT on them giving a first-glance explanation of what the thing does.
I bet the windows GUI would have gotten the same comments if they took the "START" text off the start button. However, if they took the text off but placed the task bar at the top of the screen, people would have gotten it. They would have been used to the Apple OS method of doing things and it would have been intuitive. Put a tiny Gnome footprint on the left corner of a taskbar at the top of the screen and the non-techies they had participating in the study probably would have gotten it.
for instance, variables declared in for loop inits are suppose to be local to the loop, Microsoft apparently disagrees and their compiler reflects it.
Gee thats funny. I don't have that problem.
Did you do this:
for (int foo;... ;...) statement;
more code
for (int foo;... ;...) statement;
The scopes of the two instances of foo are the same in this case.
Can't recall there being a service pack for this problem since I've been doing this for years on both MS and GNU compilers. (At least I think most of my CS homework assignments worked....maybe I was in an alternate reality as I was running them for the professor.)
I second the disgust on the "Network Engineer" bit. I once watched a Novell CNE spend 6 hours on hold for tech support in order to be told how to set an IRQ on a multiport modem (since the default one probably conflicted with one of the other sub-standard cards on the machine.)
I also watched a Novell CNE spend 8 hours plugging in a Colorado Jumbo tape drive and installing the software for it. (For those of you that don't know, the Colorado Jumbo plugged into a floppy connector and had a very simple DOS based backup program. No other settings required.)
I also once had an MCSE ask me how to format a floppy. I have seen NT installs where they formatted the primary partition to 250 MB with a FAT file system, and then shard folders on that same partition. (Which means, since FAT has no security descriptors, there really wasn't a whole lot someone needed to do to be able to erase the shared information.)
I think I could get rich if I made bumper stickers that said, "I'm an Engineer!!!"
And you don't even want to hear what I have to say about the people that call themselves Audio and Video engineers these days....
I am graduating with a CS degree this June. I have to tell you that about 50% of the people graduating in my class don't deserve a degree. They got it by copying programs from past classes or riding the coat tails of others in "group" projects.
Yeah, this is why MS software=bloatware....and I can understand why. Before COM became the common way to access non-linked sub-programs, DLLs were of course the way to do it. As the poster of the question mentioned, it created hell. Even COM does not totally do away with this in some case (we had one guy that had a component registered but had deleted the DLL that the component lived in.....it played hell with just trying to run installshield!)
MS probably statically links everything for the same reason I do....you never know what MFC DLL (or other library) the user has. You also never know when they are going to install one of those $10.00 bargain pieces of software that like to go in a hose system DLLs by overwriting old versions without asking. So, accuse me of authoring bloatware!
Of course, the Linux software publishers could just distribute their binaries and ASK if it needs to be statically linked or using a shared library. This would probably eliminate questions about licensing, but what do I know.
I too noticed that the article made some assertions that were not cited or given factual backup. This reminds me of a supposed "interview" with Bjarne Stroustrup someone in an IRC channel was pointing people to. The story was that it was an interview that was swept under the carpet by the editors that this particular reporter worked for. It went on to have Stroustrup saying things like, "C++ was made to give software engineers job security." and "It was intentionally made difficult to make people who understand it more valuable."
This just struck me as someone someone probably whipped up to show their managers a reason why not to go OO. OO is great for a lot of things but it is definately no silver bullet. I find that mediocre programmers tend to be anti-OO because, well, it hurts to think about those long words like polymorphism and inheritance.
Slashdot Mirror
(I'm joking of course)
No one in Africa could be reached for comment.
I think the main issue is not that there is an international organization deciding this stuff. I think it is more that they have no oversite (oversight?). What they say goes, and screw you if you don't like it. That is a sucky attitude to begin with, and in obviously non-cybersquatting rulings in favor of a trademark holder, it just seems like a big bully taking the candy away from a baby.
We are still, a year later, fixing bugs, finding lame bugs like so:
error_result = NO_ERROR;
foo = foo;
error_result = 10;
if foo != foo then
something that needs to be done but never is
end if;
report_error (error_result);
It really is hard to progress on other projects if every other week we have to drop everything and align his creativity with reality. So far we've been threatened with lawsuits and have lost sales because of this crap.
I'm sorry, but there is merit in trying to plan software projects. Focus creativity during design and specification, not during implementation. All you get from being creative in the implementation phase is a boat-load of code where 25% of it is orphaned by design changes.
This sounds cool, but I have to agree with what congress did on this one. What a waste of time and money.
Fear is not irrational when someone who doesn't know your good character and carries a gun wants to talk with you about breaking a few laws. Fear is not irrational when this same person who is also scared of you (because they don't know you) is willing to pull their gun and shoot you dead if you make a wrong move. All because you are suspected of committing a crime.
You realize that anyone can point a finger at someone and accuse them of a crime? True or not, if they say the wrong thing to the cop during the "off-the-record" interview or confuse the cop, they can be arrested. If you are arrested here (in the US), you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. However, the presumption just means that you most likely will only get out of custody if you have enough money to post bail. Even then, most moderately priced defense attorneys will advise you to plead guilty and hope to get off easy, even if you didn't do anything wrong!
So, some computer tags your face as closely matching that of a serial killer. A bunch of moronic cops show up and start asking you some questions. They find out you're a computer geek; a loner maybe. This starts them thinking...."weren't those Columbine dudes loners too? Holy shit, we got our man!" You get thrown in jail. $5k-$15k worth of lost salary and lawyers fees later, they find out its all a mistake. Fear that.
So we give guns to people that want a gun in order to satisfy their god complex? Please, spare me the "most cops are honest" rhetoric. I think most cops they do TV shows about are honest, but thats about where it stops.
I can port Apache to the C64 in two seconds. All I have to do is type in "Blitz!"
There was an incident here (Los Angeles) where a young black man driving a BMW was killed in a police pursuit. Why? He had no police record, nothing illegal in his car; reason to fear the police. However, his relatives said he was deathly and irrationally afraid of the police. (After seeing the Rodney King tape, I would be too if I was black.) They simply tried to pull him over for some reason, and he took off. Hit a sharp curve, lost control, lost his life.
This technology can and probably will make this happen more often.
Well, I first thought the title was too similar to "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes." I suppose we could suggest "Attack of the Killer Tacos."
He should also be freed because it appears he is nothing but an easy target to make an example of so some government punk can get a blue ribbon and a promotion. Nothing will be solved by locking this man up. Maybe the government and the RIAA should learn a simple lesson: there are many, many more people out there that are smarter than you. You cannot sue them and jail them all. Eventually, you'll lose the battle, like it or not. All you can do is keep evolving your protection methods so that it never becomes commonly easy to bypass your protection. Expensive, yes, but eternal vigilence is the price of profit and monopoly.
So everyone should submit anonymous tips to the DOJ that those criminals over at Xerox are making and selling copyright circumventing devices. There are a lot of people on slashdot, so the message would be heard. It might at least piss the DOJ off enough to make it public.
I remember the Atari 2600 3D tic-tac-toe would cheat by not letting you make a move that wasn't in its favor.
5. If the post includes any of the words Microsoft, Windows, or Mom, it is flamebait.
Yeah, I think you left the important part off....it was that the sa password is blank initially and nobody bothered to set it. I guess they booted it up and never bothered to log into the database as the administrator, right?
When I install Linux my root password is either blank or well-known. Isn't that the same thing? No, I guess not (sarcasm).
I like how this message got labeled flamebait. Its true.
Actually, I'm an idiot. You're right about the error, although it would be interesting to see what the C++ standard says.
Someone posted in reply to the parent to this message that you just place the loops in separate compound statements (to change the scope) and it does work (so you don't have to go changing variables and such.)
As for those in the audience who want a similar GUI study done on MS windows to see who comes out on top, I think you already know Windows will beat the pants off Gnome. However, you might see similar results if instead of just a bunch of icons on a bar at the bottom of the screen, there was actually some TEXT on them giving a first-glance explanation of what the thing does.
I bet the windows GUI would have gotten the same comments if they took the "START" text off the start button. However, if they took the text off but placed the task bar at the top of the screen, people would have gotten it. They would have been used to the Apple OS method of doing things and it would have been intuitive. Put a tiny Gnome footprint on the left corner of a taskbar at the top of the screen and the non-techies they had participating in the study probably would have gotten it.
Gee thats funny. I don't have that problem.
Did you do this: ... ; ...) statement;
... ; ...) statement;
for (int foo;
more code
for (int foo;
The scopes of the two instances of foo are the same in this case.
Can't recall there being a service pack for this problem since I've been doing this for years on both MS and GNU compilers. (At least I think most of my CS homework assignments worked....maybe I was in an alternate reality as I was running them for the professor.)
I also watched a Novell CNE spend 8 hours plugging in a Colorado Jumbo tape drive and installing the software for it. (For those of you that don't know, the Colorado Jumbo plugged into a floppy connector and had a very simple DOS based backup program. No other settings required.)
I also once had an MCSE ask me how to format a floppy. I have seen NT installs where they formatted the primary partition to 250 MB with a FAT file system, and then shard folders on that same partition. (Which means, since FAT has no security descriptors, there really wasn't a whole lot someone needed to do to be able to erase the shared information.)
I think I could get rich if I made bumper stickers that said, "I'm an Engineer!!!"
And you don't even want to hear what I have to say about the people that call themselves Audio and Video engineers these days....
Throw them a basketball and run.
I live under a bunch of power lines, so my magnetism is a-ok.
Do your own work, never have a problem.
MS probably statically links everything for the same reason I do....you never know what MFC DLL (or other library) the user has. You also never know when they are going to install one of those $10.00 bargain pieces of software that like to go in a hose system DLLs by overwriting old versions without asking. So, accuse me of authoring bloatware!
Of course, the Linux software publishers could just distribute their binaries and ASK if it needs to be statically linked or using a shared library. This would probably eliminate questions about licensing, but what do I know.
This just struck me as someone someone probably whipped up to show their managers a reason why not to go OO. OO is great for a lot of things but it is definately no silver bullet. I find that mediocre programmers tend to be anti-OO because, well, it hurts to think about those long words like polymorphism and inheritance.