Re:Putting quotes around "trade secrets"
on
Apple vs Bloggers
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· Score: 1
If that was the case, I could use secret-level government information I obtain
through my job and reveal it and magically it wouldn't be protected anymore!
Yes and no - Although I would agree it no longer counts as "secret" (since your
"crime" would involve the change in distribution of the information), you know
that information as secret, and therein lies the basis on which to charge you with
revealing them.
If you thrown a dart at a shopping list say "Apple will release the iBanana this year",
even if true and completely unexpected, you haven't broken the law, because you didn't
know that what you said held true, nor did you know it should have remained
secret.
If you overheard the same thing in a crowded convention center, you might have known
(or at least suspected) its truth, but you still wouldn't know it as a secret.
Re:Putting quotes around "trade secrets"
on
Apple vs Bloggers
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· Score: 1
no, the guard should respond by putting a bullet in your fucking head.
Uh-huh.
If you can't do better than that, I can see why you posted as an AC.
Sad. But then, Bush won, eh?
Re:Putting quotes around "trade secrets"
on
Apple vs Bloggers
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· Score: 0
Putting quotes around "trade secrets" Doesn't make them not trade secrets.
Quotes or not, "trade secrets" count as just that - secrets.
As soon as the whole world knows about them, they lose that status.
And, for the real shocker - simply talking about them doesn't break the law!
Violating an NDA does. B&E or cracking to obtain them does. Admittedly most
ways of obtaining them probably break the law. But talking about them, writing
about them, blogging about them? Nope.
Companies have things like NDAs precisely to keep "trade secrets" a
"secret". If they counted as legally-protected IP, a company would hold a
patent on them instead.
Most of these anti-blogger and anti-indy-news lawsuits you hear about involve
Apple trying to force the author to reveal their sources, not something so
petty as a mere cash settlement. Ironically, though, thanks to the sheer
number of bloggers out there speculating on Apple's Next Big Thing (patent
pending), the "source" of these leaks ends up Apple's own legal team - You
can tell what they have in their pipeline by which random rumor-mills they
choose to go after.
When the guy standing guard at the end of a pier with a glaringly obvious
docked Trident sub answers questions like "so, do I see a Trident sub over
there?" with "No Comment", they don't respond so uselessly just to piss off
the blind - If he doesn't refuse to answer all questions, you can
extract useful information just from what questions he won't answer.
No you don't. If my name is Steven does that mean I get to reserve steven.com?
I didn't claim that gave me the "right" to reserve my name - Quite the opposite, a
point with which you apparently agree... No, I don't automatically get "steven.com".
Neither does "SteveCorp" or "Three Steves, Inc", or even "Steve Jobs".
Joe McDonald, age 19 lives with his parents wants mcdonalds.eu? Uh, no.
With an "s" at the end, I would tend to agree that if we accept the idea of "rights"
to a name, he wouldn't get "mcdonalds.eu". What about "mcdonald.eu"?
Joe Somebody wants imasuperl33td00d.eu? Fine, whatever.
And if Walmart, however unlikely this may seem, decides to change its
name to "imasuperl33td00d-mart"?
I don't think you get my point - Arguing that companies get first dibs
counts as not only arbitrary, but a sharply anti-human sentiment.
I proposed nothing more radical than putting we mere living breathing
evolved inhabitants of this planet back on par with FICTIONAL entities,
and it truly, truly saddens me that people would defend fiction over
their own species.
Okay - So who gets Apple.eu? Paul McCartney or Steve Jobs? Let
the courts figure that out. They're what they're for.
Okay, you still miss the point - BOTH companies chose a
name that already exists as a common English word for a fruit,
and not-coincidentally occurs near the beginning of the alphabet.
The fruit existed first. People with the surname existed second.
The companies came LAST. Why does the company (whichever wins in
court) get preference on the domain name? And if you answer "the
law says so", consider me dissapointed.
I would agree with you if - and only if - companies had to
pick names that do not exist as words in any "natural" language.
Xerox would satisfy that (though I personally would still say
they can enter the drawing for that domain name with everyone else);
Anything presumptuous enough to call itself "Apple" or "Jones" or
"McDonalds" can go pound sand.
Apple.eu, Microsoft.eu and Dell.eu would all fetch a couple million easy.
If those companies value those domain names that highly, I fail to see the
problem with them, if luck doesn't shine on them in the name drawing, having
to pay whatever they will and whatever the "winner" wants. We call it "capitalism",
not "extortion" (though I realize this involves the EU, so take that as you will).
As a private citizen, you're not even worth a memo compared to these
multibillion dollar companies.
So you do understand my point - Yet you still argue in their
favor? Why?
They would't piss on your grave to save your life, but you want to do them
a favor by making sure no one can confuse the corporate equivalent of "Bill
Jones" with "Bill Cones" or "Jill Jones"?
Hey, I don't think highly of our species either, but I won't betray the
whole race in favor of fiction that, under OPTIMAL conditions would see
us all work for nothing (aka "slavery") just to survive and buy (with what
money?) their products.
Where have you been for the past ten years?
Learning how much Corporate America (tm) cares about their
employees (Enron), consumers (RIAA), and the incidental victims
(Firestone, ne Bridgestone) of their actions. Under
which rock have YOU hidden that you still trust Bill
Gates to act in your best interest?
As an aside, which you may or may not consider relevant - I consider
domain squatters right up there with spammers and virus authors as the
scum of the Earth. But to call any system that favors fictional
entities over humans; that favors the "biggest" user of a name; that
favors the deepest pockets, "fair"? That doesn't solve the problem,
it just describes one symptom of the societal psychosis that
allows the problem to exist in the first place.
I say just give major companies first dibs if the address name
is the same as the LEGALLY REGISTERED company name in that/those
countries
Why the bias toward companies? I "legally" have my own name
in my home country. Incorporation in its most basic sense
just means that McDonalds legally has that name,
for the purpose of entering into the binding agreements
with other humans and incorporated entities.
Hell what about insanely common names like Tony, Chang, Bob
or Steven?
What about them? You have two and ONLY two "fair" choices...
Pure random lottery, or first-come-first-serve. And the
latter only if "first come" allows anyone to try for
the name, and doesn't have any artificially high barriers
to registration (ie, huge fees that only multinational
corps could pay).
Right now what we're seeing is simple extortion
You throw that term out FAR too easily. If I own something
that you want and I don't want to give it to you, that does
not count as extortion. The situation gets a bit
murkier when both of us arguably have some "right" to the
name, but as you point out, the world has a lot
of "Tony"s... I personally know three. Which of them has
has the most "right" to the name, and would it count as
extortion if one tried to sell the name to another?
Now, does a random or FIFO allocation lead to domain squatting?
Sure. So what? It does not bother me in the least
if someone other than IBM owns ibm.eu. And applying that
to my own name - Yes, someone apparently has gone through
and registered virtually all US familial names, including
my own. Not a problem. I didn't think of it first, nor
do I really care if I have it, and if someone wants to
pay $10 a year waiting for hell to freeze over before I
offer to take it off their hands, well, their money to
waste.
Microsoft.eu, Apple.eu, Dell.eu, McDonalds.eu
Okay - So who gets Apple.eu? Paul McCartney or Steve Jobs?
I do not think that means what you think...
on
The .EU Landrush Fiasco
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The landrush process on the surface seems very fair.
We apparently have radically different ideas of
what counts as "fair".
established 'big name' registrars got exactly equal chances
of registering names as did anyone who chose to bill themselves
as a registrar
And what about Joe Jones and Sally Brown? Or more to the
point, what about Steve McDonald, Cindy Frye, or Dan Walmart?
What you call "fair", I decry as massively biased right
from the start. The very flaw you intend to point out,
rather than making the process less fair, has imparted
the only truly "fair" part of the entire dog-n'-pony.
I'll consider the process fair when humans get first
choice, and trying to trademark common single English words
carries the corporate death-penalty. Until then, let's not
bother quibbling about whether conqueror-X or conqueror-Y
managed to rape the most natives.
a relative of my raises pigs by the tens of thousands
And these pigs - Do they eat deity-provided mana, or just
synthesize their nutrients right from the air?
Yes, three acres seems VERY high to feed one person, under
the assumption that we eat grains and legumes directly. Add
a cow or a pig as an intermediate step, and your end-consumer
(ie, human) caloric yield per acre drops DRASTICALLY.
The one with 51%, decided to vote my father off the
board with his majority stake. The board then voted to
fire him.
You've just touched on the point I wanted to make, so I'll
agree with you and elaborate...
Any answer of who gets to act as CEO needs to include
the full realization that incorporating makes it no longer
"your" company. Incorporating basically means you have
sold out and now draw a salary (and a hefty portion of
the profits in the form of dividends), but the relationship
now resembles an employee and stock-owner more than
"owner".
So... Who should act as CEO? Neither of you! Hire
someone to do it, and make sure you and your friend keep
a controlling interest in the company's stock. If things
go bad, you now have an excellent scapegoat but nothing
really changes.
Nor do I believe it's an 100% positive change for the profession
I am in in as it forces publications to pick up on wire service
releases to please the advertisers; not the man in the street.
While that may bring home the bacon for one and all it certainly
stifles investigative journalism
Ah, then I owe you an apology. On that point, we agree - Entirely too
much news has turned into cookie-cutter ripoffs on what the Big Boys
decide to cover.
I had taken your earlier post as more of a stylistic complaint than
content-based. My error, sorry.
If it's at a completely different scale, manufactured
in a different way, and acts in a different way, then it's
not the same product, is it?
Good question - And we don't have the answer to that yet.
Although an entirely different realm of products, consider
CPUs... The earliest ones had features you could resolve under
relatively low power magnification. As the individual features
got smaller and smaller - Now quite literally nanoscale, literally
smaller than you can resolve with traditional optical microscopy.
As a result (or rather, of necessity), manufacturing them has gone
from simple white-light optical photolithography to amazingly
complicated assemblies of frequency-specific mirrors and filters
that can deal with wavelengths approaching X-rays. The resulting
structures created on the chip use (and in some cases, compensate
for) aspects of the behavior of electrons that look more like magic
than considering the chip just a traditional circuit composed of
really small wires and transistors.
Should we consider modern CPUs an entirely different product from those
made 30 years ago? In this case, aside from the performance, ignoring
the scale, manufacturing techniques, and how it actually "works",
I would tend to say "no". But we also have a very low risk of
exposure to the nanoscale structures on a modern CPU - For one
thing, they come well-packaged inside a nice airtight ceramic or
metal package; for another, they tend to remain firmly attached
to the chip itself.
But when it comes to products we consume, we wear, we eat off,
we might even breathe in (which seems like the problem with this
particular spray)? I welcome the addition of these incredible
products to the world, but would very much like to see
them thoroughly tested for safety first.
For the spray in question, it seems like almost a no-brainer...
They've taken sand and made it small enough to get trapped
deep in the lungs, small enough that our bronchial cillia can't
effectively remove them, and then it acts just like any other
particle that makes it that deep into the lungs - It causes
irritation, reduction in respiratory efficiency, and most
likely eventual scarring and permanant damage. This doesn't
require a new mechanism, just that in the normal macroscale
world, even in particularly risky environments, we only encounter
a minute number of such particles.
Any suggestions we try and break the mold and develop relations
with the press to obtain credible editorial are laughed at.
Of course they laugh at you for such suggestions!
I really don't see the problem here... If the topic involved
writers of fiction, writers of poetry, some form of "artistic"
endeavor, I would say that writing-to-Google could destroy it.
But the topic does NOT involve "art", it involves NEWS. Writers
(supposedly) of "fact".
If Google forces every journalist on the planet to stop thinking
themselves "cute", if it finally and fully destroys the abomination
of filler they call "human interest", if it means I can read a story
about a dead cat and not mistake it for a physics pun (or vice-versa),
I applaud the change Google has forced on journalists!
My advice - Don't fight a positive change for your
profession. Embrace it. Google has made it possible for
anyone with an interest in your story, whether you write
for the NYT or the East Nowhere Gazette, to find and read
your words. It has also, as a POSITIVE side effect, forced
you to stick to the point and not assume airs that you
create some form of art. It even makes basic fact-checking
a 30-second (rather than all day) task.
You can either use all of that to your benefit, or complain
that it forces you to do your job better. But whichever you
choose, keep in mind that Google has also lowered the bar for
entry - Any of a million bloggers could (though you can take
comfort that very few do) decide to post about
something more interesting than what Sam said Hunter did to
Crystal and how much it pissed off Joey.
What the hell are you babbling about? There's no such thing as
an "NTP pool" that can "re-route" anything.
Pot, I'd like to introduce you to Mr. Kettle.
Try pinging "pool.ntp.org". Now you now what the hell the GP
babbled about.
The NTP server in question does not (so far as I know) participate
in the open NTP pool, but that fact differs drastically from saying
"There's no such thing as an ``NTP pool`` that can ``re-route``
anything".
And if he renames his server, he just breaks it for the people who
are supposed to be using it.
"Gee, I have to PAY 80% of my bandwidth cost to let an abusive
user keep using my FREE service". Something there doesn't quite
sound right, eh?
I don't really see the problem with just changing the address, and in his
situation, I don't think I would have even bothered trying to contact
D-Link about the issue - I'd just make the change email the users
that asked permission (proper NTP-etiquette says that you should
always ask first, though server admins almost never turn anyone
down), and leave it to the users to change over). It doesn't matter if
he has 10 or 10,000 users - It only takes about 15 seconds to change
one entry in an ntp.conf.
For an example, I keep my masquerade box sync'd as a stratum-3 to a dozen
timeservers, and every now and then, one will change. If the admin emails
me, I just update my list; if not, a few months later I might notice that
one server has stopped sending me data and I pick a new one. Not the
end of the world - Not even enough of a problem that I even notice
it except by pure chance. And unless all twelve went down without
me noticing, NTP will intelligently just use the ones that do
still respond (and even if they did all die, NTP learns your machine's
hardware drift well enough over time that you'd still probably stay
accurate to within a few seconds per year).
I don't know about anyone else (see MSDE comments above) but the on-line
help with VB.NET is virtually unreadable.
Whatever asshat gave this a troll-mod has never used both development
environments. No lie -.NET's sucks hard. I don't know if I'd call
VS6's help all that wonderful, but it at least made finding
what you want relatively straightforward.
My workplace has just moved to 2005, so ask this again in a year... But
at least for now, the parent describes reality.
Of course, I have NO idea what this has to do with SQL Deskto... Sorry,
they called it "Express" this time around. And on that topic, you
only need to know one thing - How to disable the MSSQL service. No
joke - Desktop users should NOT have an SQL server running. In keeping
with standard Microsoft fare, it takes a high-end machine and makes it
run like a dog with three legs.
You should be able to send any type of signal to any
part of the brain, and eventually the brain learns what
that signal is about.
Yes and no...
For general-purpose processing, most parts of the brain can
take over for other parts, (possibly) regaining almost
full functionality over time.
With vision, however, you have the single biggest
allocation of task-dedicated meat in your entire brain.
Evolution has hard-wired the visual cortex for computational
efficiency in dealing with a staggeringly large amount of
input. For example, we do not actually see in 3d; we see
2x 2d, which our visual cortex manages to "tag" with
depth information using clues from lighting, size, and
seeing the same object from two angles. Interestingly
enough, most of the processing removes the
uninteresting parts of that information, as well as
filtering out white noise in the signal - Nerves do not
act just like little wires, and do a piss-poor job of
accurately conducting a signal... You get a result more
like the "telephone" game, though the signals average
out to basically-accurate over time.
So, for someone who could never see, although
this might let them, through conscious effort, interpret
parts of their environment as meaning "about to walk into
a wall", don't expect them to start driving. As the simplest
reason, don't think of our eyes as an X-by-Y grid of sensors,
but instead as a random jumble of X*Y sensors. They have
no real order to them - Part of our very early development
includes the visual cortex learning which "pixels" fall
adjacent to which other pixels. And on top of that,
our sensors don't even return raw light intensity data - They
carry out a form of simple edge-detection and pass that
on to the brain. So for a sense of what that would "feel"
like to suddenly have the ability to see but never have
developed that mapping, imagine trying to make sense of
Times Square in terms of reading a list of boolean values
that correspond to "edge" or "no edge".
One of the reasons I have always hoped that I get a message from God a day or
two before I die, is because I would freak out if I had to look down (or up) after
death and watch my mother in law clean out my wife and my sex toy stash.
Pah! Why feel ashamed of your porn/toy collection?
Dildoes number heavily among the oldest known human artifacts - even
the single oldest well-preserved artifact, the "Venus of Willendorf",
some scholars have argued may have served as an artificial phallus (go
ahead and look at the "hair" on it and tell me it doesn't resemble some
form of sex toy, "ridged for her pleasure"!).
I have porn. I have toys. I have no shame regarding them... If my
own mother found them while plant-sitting, I'd proudly say that yes,
I use them to great personal/mutual pleasure with my SO.
I just don't get how a sexually reproducing species turned into a
culture of such pathetic prudes! Humans... Like... Sex! We
spend a disproportionate amount of time seeking it, we spend virtually
all of our free time from our late-teens through late-twenties doing
it, we'll lose sleep and food over it. Wherein lies the "shame" of
having "accessories"?
Microsoft does not sell software specifically intended for
graphic designers, or for printers (the profession *or* the
hardware), or for any other specialty that would require
having the latest and greatest font set.
They sell an OS and an office productivity suite geared
toward Mom 'n Pop and boring suit-clad businessmen.
Microsoft really shouldn't bother getting into multi-million
dollar pissing contests over where the stroke on a majuscule
"Q" goes - They really only need two fonts: Arial and Lucida
Console.
Some people might prefer Times New Roman (Ugh) or Tahoma on
the proportional side, or Courier New on the NP side, but
the actual choice really doesn't matter. Give me two
fonts and call it a day.
Or to put it another way - If you care enough about the
choice of font that you would complain at only having two
options - You don't have anything to say, you just want
a flowery way to say nothing at all (ie, advertising).
5 days of camp is simply going to give them
some new skillz to use ethically or unethically.
I started off thinking I would disagree with you, but
by the end, I find I agree 100%.
I would just add one point to what you wrote...
Ethics depends heavily on situation as well as background.
In some situations "ethics" means "follow the law", in others
it means "screw the law, do the right thing", and in still
others it means picking the least unethical course
of action from a whole range of shady options.
On top of that, although some people would argue that
ethics has absolute standards, I would disagree and say
that ethics also depends on your point of view. Simple
example: should I call in sick from work (assuming I have
no more personal or vacation days) to take my mother to
her doctor's appointment?
But regardless, a five day course won't teach you
any of that. It will just hand you a small bag
of skeleton keys to try should you come across an
inconveniently locked door. And in this case, you
can already get all those keys, and more, for
free on the web.
Anyone else see it as a good thing that the kids
can't get these games without parental permission?
No, and not for the obvious "Stick it to da man" reason...
Parents have the responsibility of teaching their kids to
do the right thing not just in a safe, isolated environment,
but on their own and with temptation aplenty.
It might make it easier to look like a good parent
if Little Billy never even has the opportunity to drink,
smoke, swear, or look at porn, but it doesn't teach Billy
anything at all (or worse, teaches him to look forward to
his Day of Freedom when he can finally overindulge in the
forbidden fruit).
Personally, I see a kid buying a video-game his parents wouldn't
approve of as a WONDERFUL opportunity to teach him a hell of
a lesson - When the parents catch him with it, they can
make him take it and put it in the shredder page by page,
disc by disc, destroying 50+ dollars of his own hard-earned
money. You just don't get that same kind of lesson from a
shopkeeper telling him to take a hike.
It would be nice if women could be judged on the
merit of their ideas instead of their looks. Just a
thought, you know:-P.
Yes, it would. But I think you'll find damn few of
them, even the only "plain" ones, willing to give up
the ENORMOUS (Western/Civilized) societal edge they
currently enjoy in mixed-gender situations.
Just a thought. Odd how those light enough to walk
above the glass ceiling seem to complain the
loudest about it.
I personally think Windows' biggest flaw is its file paging.
Not sure if you mean the file cache or their virtual memory
implementation, but regardless, both of those suck
harder than a hoover on 3-phase.
I know this counts as something of a near-religious topic, but
it has always amazed me how much perkier XP gets with no
pagefile (and Win2k before it, though you needed to put the
pagefile on a ramdrive because it wouldn't just let you turn
it off). Doesn't matter if you have over a gig of RAM,
XP still wants to keep as much as possible on disk.
The biggest problem with that, however, comes from the habit of
certain poorly-written games (MS's own included) that, as their
first action, try to allocate their entire address space regardless
of never actually using more than 200MB.
And as for the file cache... I've never quite understood what
monkey-on-acid came up with the idea to keep memory full with
prefetched programs that you might someday run, yet
swap out parts of the friggin' kernel!
You're right - it's preposterous to think a
sysadmin would want to download distro ISO's quickly.
I see that argument a lot, but y'know, I can download
an ISO of any major distro via plain ol' FTP or HTTP as
fast as my cablemodem will let me. What exactly would
I gain by using P2P, other than yet another open port
on my machine just waiting for someone to find an exploit?
Though, don't take this as an anti-P2P stance... P2P
has its uses, and more efficient (for the server, not for any
particular recipient) distribution of large files comes in
pretty high on that list. But on this list,
of the top 10 sysadmin tools - It doesn't come in at
all. It duplicates funcationality (if via a slightly
different mechanism) already present on a stock Linux box.
That contract you had to sign along with other papers needed
to register to their administration (saying no means you can't
follow the study)
I'll certainly agree that they shouldn't have such a
policy, but by signing it, you pretty much gave up any
right to complain about this.
Now, if I understood your description correctly, you could
argue that your code contributed to those two other students
didn't fall under the contract to which you agreed... But in that
case, you've just moved the violation from yourself off to them,
in accepting (GPL'd) code from you that they didn't have
the right to subject to the university's license.
Somewhat messy, but the ambiguity of who takes the blame
here doesn't make the issue go away - one of you,
and not the university, didn't have the right to
use GPL'd code in your project.
Again, not saying I consider this "right", but... People
really need to think twice before they "just sign it".
Oh, puh-lease. Call me self-centered if you want, call
me a heartless bastard, call me direly lacking in empathy.
But to equate me with Microsoft? Feh.
You've also expressed a very common opinion that pains me: "people who
are disabled should just suck it up because I enjoy this."
When it takes no extra effort, or a truly miniscule
effort, I agree that it seems nothing short of rude to not make
one's work accessible. But when it requires either doubling the
effort or reducing the end result for everyone, then damn straight
I say "screw those who can't use this"!
I sympathize for those less fortunate than myself. I won't,
however, reduce my own quality of life out of some pathologically
misplaced sense of guilt over having the full complement of human
senses and abilities.
Although most people might not come right out and admit it that
bluntly, I suspect almost all people feel the same way.
So, why do we still have unnavigable-to-those-with-disability-X
websites? Do all web designers take a required course in "Evil 101"?
No. Because, standards compliant or not, making a site useful
to those with certain limitations doesn't always take just a small
amount of extra planning - It frequently takes a herculean effort
that may well dwarf the scope of the "normal" version of the project.
Put another way - Someone a few thread up mentioned that if you pay
someone's nephew $50 to make a website, you get what you pay for...
Well, a lot of Mom 'n Pops can only afford $50 on such a
low-payback-but-potentially-critical project. That doesn't excuse
a company like Target, but the same idea applies... If it cost
and extra $20 or half an hour, every site would work perfectly
in all browsers and for those with any conceivable disability.
Designing things with standards in mind is a better idea than not doing so.
I agree - But that has no relevance to the topic at hand.
Quick note of history... Before the modern web, a very similar
but text-only medium existed, called "gopher". From an informational
point of view, it worked just as well as the triple-dub, yet never
really caught on before the web put the final nail in its coffin.
Why?
Modally-specific mediums exist. No amount of standards compliance will
ever change that. The blind can't appreciate a rainbow, the
deaf can't appreciate soft music lacking a strong bass. Just a fact
of life for those lacking one of the normal senses (and yes, I said
"normal" - PC or not, most of us can see and hear).
If you can find a way to let blind people appreciate a rainbow,
by all means implement it and make a fortune in the process. If not,
you have no right to deprive me of that same rainbow.
I would say that two types of websites exist (apropos to this discussion)...
Those that convey written information, and (at the expense of soundling like
a marketing droid) those that convey a sensory experience. The blind can
use the former, and cannot use the latter. Simple as that. Roosters don't
lay eggs.
Why do OEMs insist on using integated Intel graphics
cards when stuff like this is available?
Because, believe it or not, most people do not use
their PCs for high-end gaming. They may occasionally
try to run some hot new resource-sucking game without a clue
about the hardware needed to get a good framerate, but for
the most part, a Flash app inside their browser counts as the
most graphically-intensive app they run.
Now, on the opposite side of that, you have people who
will blow $400 on a video card to pointlessly get from
200 to 206fps. Those people will, as their first action
on getting a new PC, rip a low-end card out and toss it
in the trash.
So who, exactly, would a low-to-mid range video card
benefit? Yes, many Slashdotters might understand why
you would want something like this, but Mom n' Pop would
rather save $50 and use the integrated video, and Little
Billy would rather put the $50 toward a $400 card.
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If that was the case, I could use secret-level government information I obtain through my job and reveal it and magically it wouldn't be protected anymore!
Yes and no - Although I would agree it no longer counts as "secret" (since your "crime" would involve the change in distribution of the information), you know that information as secret, and therein lies the basis on which to charge you with revealing them.
If you thrown a dart at a shopping list say "Apple will release the iBanana this year", even if true and completely unexpected, you haven't broken the law, because you didn't know that what you said held true, nor did you know it should have remained secret.
If you overheard the same thing in a crowded convention center, you might have known (or at least suspected) its truth, but you still wouldn't know it as a secret.
no, the guard should respond by putting a bullet in your fucking head.
Uh-huh.
If you can't do better than that, I can see why you posted as an AC.
Sad. But then, Bush won, eh?
Putting quotes around "trade secrets"
Doesn't make them not trade secrets.
Quotes or not, "trade secrets" count as just that - secrets.
As soon as the whole world knows about them, they lose that status.
And, for the real shocker - simply talking about them doesn't break the law! Violating an NDA does. B&E or cracking to obtain them does. Admittedly most ways of obtaining them probably break the law. But talking about them, writing about them, blogging about them? Nope.
Companies have things like NDAs precisely to keep "trade secrets" a "secret". If they counted as legally-protected IP, a company would hold a patent on them instead.
Most of these anti-blogger and anti-indy-news lawsuits you hear about involve Apple trying to force the author to reveal their sources, not something so petty as a mere cash settlement. Ironically, though, thanks to the sheer number of bloggers out there speculating on Apple's Next Big Thing (patent pending), the "source" of these leaks ends up Apple's own legal team - You can tell what they have in their pipeline by which random rumor-mills they choose to go after.
When the guy standing guard at the end of a pier with a glaringly obvious docked Trident sub answers questions like "so, do I see a Trident sub over there?" with "No Comment", they don't respond so uselessly just to piss off the blind - If he doesn't refuse to answer all questions, you can extract useful information just from what questions he won't answer.
No you don't. If my name is Steven does that mean I get to reserve steven.com?
I didn't claim that gave me the "right" to reserve my name - Quite the opposite, a point with which you apparently agree... No, I don't automatically get "steven.com". Neither does "SteveCorp" or "Three Steves, Inc", or even "Steve Jobs".
Joe McDonald, age 19 lives with his parents wants mcdonalds.eu? Uh, no.
With an "s" at the end, I would tend to agree that if we accept the idea of "rights" to a name, he wouldn't get "mcdonalds.eu". What about "mcdonald.eu"?
Joe Somebody wants imasuperl33td00d.eu? Fine, whatever.
And if Walmart, however unlikely this may seem, decides to change its name to "imasuperl33td00d-mart"?
I don't think you get my point - Arguing that companies get first dibs counts as not only arbitrary, but a sharply anti-human sentiment.
I proposed nothing more radical than putting we mere living breathing evolved inhabitants of this planet back on par with FICTIONAL entities, and it truly, truly saddens me that people would defend fiction over their own species.
Okay - So who gets Apple.eu? Paul McCartney or Steve Jobs? Let the courts figure that out. They're what they're for.
Okay, you still miss the point - BOTH companies chose a name that already exists as a common English word for a fruit, and not-coincidentally occurs near the beginning of the alphabet. The fruit existed first. People with the surname existed second. The companies came LAST. Why does the company (whichever wins in court) get preference on the domain name? And if you answer "the law says so", consider me dissapointed.
I would agree with you if - and only if - companies had to pick names that do not exist as words in any "natural" language. Xerox would satisfy that (though I personally would still say they can enter the drawing for that domain name with everyone else); Anything presumptuous enough to call itself "Apple" or "Jones" or "McDonalds" can go pound sand.
Apple.eu, Microsoft.eu and Dell.eu would all fetch a couple million easy.
If those companies value those domain names that highly, I fail to see the problem with them, if luck doesn't shine on them in the name drawing, having to pay whatever they will and whatever the "winner" wants. We call it "capitalism", not "extortion" (though I realize this involves the EU, so take that as you will).
As a private citizen, you're not even worth a memo compared to these multibillion dollar companies.
So you do understand my point - Yet you still argue in their favor? Why?
They would't piss on your grave to save your life, but you want to do them a favor by making sure no one can confuse the corporate equivalent of "Bill Jones" with "Bill Cones" or "Jill Jones"?
Hey, I don't think highly of our species either, but I won't betray the whole race in favor of fiction that, under OPTIMAL conditions would see us all work for nothing (aka "slavery") just to survive and buy (with what money?) their products.
Where have you been for the past ten years?
Learning how much Corporate America (tm) cares about their employees (Enron), consumers (RIAA), and the incidental victims (Firestone, ne Bridgestone) of their actions. Under which rock have YOU hidden that you still trust Bill Gates to act in your best interest?
As an aside, which you may or may not consider relevant - I consider domain squatters right up there with spammers and virus authors as the scum of the Earth. But to call any system that favors fictional entities over humans; that favors the "biggest" user of a name; that favors the deepest pockets, "fair"? That doesn't solve the problem, it just describes one symptom of the societal psychosis that allows the problem to exist in the first place.
I say just give major companies first dibs if the address name is the same as the LEGALLY REGISTERED company name in that/those countries
Why the bias toward companies? I "legally" have my own name in my home country. Incorporation in its most basic sense just means that McDonalds legally has that name, for the purpose of entering into the binding agreements with other humans and incorporated entities.
Hell what about insanely common names like Tony, Chang, Bob or Steven?
What about them? You have two and ONLY two "fair" choices... Pure random lottery, or first-come-first-serve. And the latter only if "first come" allows anyone to try for the name, and doesn't have any artificially high barriers to registration (ie, huge fees that only multinational corps could pay).
Right now what we're seeing is simple extortion
You throw that term out FAR too easily. If I own something that you want and I don't want to give it to you, that does not count as extortion. The situation gets a bit murkier when both of us arguably have some "right" to the name, but as you point out, the world has a lot of "Tony"s... I personally know three. Which of them has has the most "right" to the name, and would it count as extortion if one tried to sell the name to another?
Now, does a random or FIFO allocation lead to domain squatting? Sure. So what? It does not bother me in the least if someone other than IBM owns ibm.eu. And applying that to my own name - Yes, someone apparently has gone through and registered virtually all US familial names, including my own. Not a problem. I didn't think of it first, nor do I really care if I have it, and if someone wants to pay $10 a year waiting for hell to freeze over before I offer to take it off their hands, well, their money to waste.
Microsoft.eu, Apple.eu, Dell.eu, McDonalds.eu
Okay - So who gets Apple.eu? Paul McCartney or Steve Jobs?
The landrush process on the surface seems very fair.
We apparently have radically different ideas of what counts as "fair".
established 'big name' registrars got exactly equal chances of registering names as did anyone who chose to bill themselves as a registrar
And what about Joe Jones and Sally Brown? Or more to the point, what about Steve McDonald, Cindy Frye, or Dan Walmart?
What you call "fair", I decry as massively biased right from the start. The very flaw you intend to point out, rather than making the process less fair, has imparted the only truly "fair" part of the entire dog-n'-pony.
I'll consider the process fair when humans get first choice, and trying to trademark common single English words carries the corporate death-penalty. Until then, let's not bother quibbling about whether conqueror-X or conqueror-Y managed to rape the most natives.
Meat is easy, we have factory farms for that
Wow... Spoken like a true virus.
a relative of my raises pigs by the tens of thousands
And these pigs - Do they eat deity-provided mana, or just synthesize their nutrients right from the air?
Yes, three acres seems VERY high to feed one person, under the assumption that we eat grains and legumes directly. Add a cow or a pig as an intermediate step, and your end-consumer (ie, human) caloric yield per acre drops DRASTICALLY.
The one with 51%, decided to vote my father off the board with his majority stake. The board then voted to fire him.
You've just touched on the point I wanted to make, so I'll agree with you and elaborate...
Any answer of who gets to act as CEO needs to include the full realization that incorporating makes it no longer "your" company. Incorporating basically means you have sold out and now draw a salary (and a hefty portion of the profits in the form of dividends), but the relationship now resembles an employee and stock-owner more than "owner".
So... Who should act as CEO? Neither of you! Hire someone to do it, and make sure you and your friend keep a controlling interest in the company's stock. If things go bad, you now have an excellent scapegoat but nothing really changes.
Nor do I believe it's an 100% positive change for the profession I am in in as it forces publications to pick up on wire service releases to please the advertisers; not the man in the street. While that may bring home the bacon for one and all it certainly stifles investigative journalism
Ah, then I owe you an apology. On that point, we agree - Entirely too much news has turned into cookie-cutter ripoffs on what the Big Boys decide to cover.
I had taken your earlier post as more of a stylistic complaint than content-based. My error, sorry.
If it's at a completely different scale, manufactured in a different way, and acts in a different way, then it's not the same product, is it?
Good question - And we don't have the answer to that yet.
Although an entirely different realm of products, consider CPUs... The earliest ones had features you could resolve under relatively low power magnification. As the individual features got smaller and smaller - Now quite literally nanoscale, literally smaller than you can resolve with traditional optical microscopy. As a result (or rather, of necessity), manufacturing them has gone from simple white-light optical photolithography to amazingly complicated assemblies of frequency-specific mirrors and filters that can deal with wavelengths approaching X-rays. The resulting structures created on the chip use (and in some cases, compensate for) aspects of the behavior of electrons that look more like magic than considering the chip just a traditional circuit composed of really small wires and transistors.
Should we consider modern CPUs an entirely different product from those made 30 years ago? In this case, aside from the performance, ignoring the scale, manufacturing techniques, and how it actually "works", I would tend to say "no". But we also have a very low risk of exposure to the nanoscale structures on a modern CPU - For one thing, they come well-packaged inside a nice airtight ceramic or metal package; for another, they tend to remain firmly attached to the chip itself.
But when it comes to products we consume, we wear, we eat off, we might even breathe in (which seems like the problem with this particular spray)? I welcome the addition of these incredible products to the world, but would very much like to see them thoroughly tested for safety first.
For the spray in question, it seems like almost a no-brainer... They've taken sand and made it small enough to get trapped deep in the lungs, small enough that our bronchial cillia can't effectively remove them, and then it acts just like any other particle that makes it that deep into the lungs - It causes irritation, reduction in respiratory efficiency, and most likely eventual scarring and permanant damage. This doesn't require a new mechanism, just that in the normal macroscale world, even in particularly risky environments, we only encounter a minute number of such particles.
Any suggestions we try and break the mold and develop relations with the press to obtain credible editorial are laughed at.
Of course they laugh at you for such suggestions!
I really don't see the problem here... If the topic involved writers of fiction, writers of poetry, some form of "artistic" endeavor, I would say that writing-to-Google could destroy it.
But the topic does NOT involve "art", it involves NEWS. Writers (supposedly) of "fact".
If Google forces every journalist on the planet to stop thinking themselves "cute", if it finally and fully destroys the abomination of filler they call "human interest", if it means I can read a story about a dead cat and not mistake it for a physics pun (or vice-versa), I applaud the change Google has forced on journalists!
My advice - Don't fight a positive change for your profession. Embrace it. Google has made it possible for anyone with an interest in your story, whether you write for the NYT or the East Nowhere Gazette, to find and read your words. It has also, as a POSITIVE side effect, forced you to stick to the point and not assume airs that you create some form of art. It even makes basic fact-checking a 30-second (rather than all day) task.
You can either use all of that to your benefit, or complain that it forces you to do your job better. But whichever you choose, keep in mind that Google has also lowered the bar for entry - Any of a million bloggers could (though you can take comfort that very few do) decide to post about something more interesting than what Sam said Hunter did to Crystal and how much it pissed off Joey.
What the hell are you babbling about? There's no such thing as an "NTP pool" that can "re-route" anything.
Pot, I'd like to introduce you to Mr. Kettle.
Try pinging "pool.ntp.org". Now you now what the hell the GP babbled about.
The NTP server in question does not (so far as I know) participate in the open NTP pool, but that fact differs drastically from saying "There's no such thing as an ``NTP pool`` that can ``re-route`` anything".
And if he renames his server, he just breaks it for the people who are supposed to be using it.
"Gee, I have to PAY 80% of my bandwidth cost to let an abusive user keep using my FREE service". Something there doesn't quite sound right, eh?
I don't really see the problem with just changing the address, and in his situation, I don't think I would have even bothered trying to contact D-Link about the issue - I'd just make the change email the users that asked permission (proper NTP-etiquette says that you should always ask first, though server admins almost never turn anyone down), and leave it to the users to change over). It doesn't matter if he has 10 or 10,000 users - It only takes about 15 seconds to change one entry in an ntp.conf.
For an example, I keep my masquerade box sync'd as a stratum-3 to a dozen timeservers, and every now and then, one will change. If the admin emails me, I just update my list; if not, a few months later I might notice that one server has stopped sending me data and I pick a new one. Not the end of the world - Not even enough of a problem that I even notice it except by pure chance. And unless all twelve went down without me noticing, NTP will intelligently just use the ones that do still respond (and even if they did all die, NTP learns your machine's hardware drift well enough over time that you'd still probably stay accurate to within a few seconds per year).
I don't know about anyone else (see MSDE comments above) but the on-line help with VB.NET is virtually unreadable.
.NET's sucks hard. I don't know if I'd call
VS6's help all that wonderful, but it at least made finding
what you want relatively straightforward.
Whatever asshat gave this a troll-mod has never used both development environments. No lie -
My workplace has just moved to 2005, so ask this again in a year... But at least for now, the parent describes reality.
Of course, I have NO idea what this has to do with SQL Deskto... Sorry, they called it "Express" this time around. And on that topic, you only need to know one thing - How to disable the MSSQL service. No joke - Desktop users should NOT have an SQL server running. In keeping with standard Microsoft fare, it takes a high-end machine and makes it run like a dog with three legs.
You should be able to send any type of signal to any part of the brain, and eventually the brain learns what that signal is about.
Yes and no...
For general-purpose processing, most parts of the brain can take over for other parts, (possibly) regaining almost full functionality over time.
With vision, however, you have the single biggest allocation of task-dedicated meat in your entire brain. Evolution has hard-wired the visual cortex for computational efficiency in dealing with a staggeringly large amount of input. For example, we do not actually see in 3d; we see 2x 2d, which our visual cortex manages to "tag" with depth information using clues from lighting, size, and seeing the same object from two angles. Interestingly enough, most of the processing removes the uninteresting parts of that information, as well as filtering out white noise in the signal - Nerves do not act just like little wires, and do a piss-poor job of accurately conducting a signal... You get a result more like the "telephone" game, though the signals average out to basically-accurate over time.
So, for someone who could never see, although this might let them, through conscious effort, interpret parts of their environment as meaning "about to walk into a wall", don't expect them to start driving. As the simplest reason, don't think of our eyes as an X-by-Y grid of sensors, but instead as a random jumble of X*Y sensors. They have no real order to them - Part of our very early development includes the visual cortex learning which "pixels" fall adjacent to which other pixels. And on top of that, our sensors don't even return raw light intensity data - They carry out a form of simple edge-detection and pass that on to the brain. So for a sense of what that would "feel" like to suddenly have the ability to see but never have developed that mapping, imagine trying to make sense of Times Square in terms of reading a list of boolean values that correspond to "edge" or "no edge".
One of the reasons I have always hoped that I get a message from God a day or two before I die, is because I would freak out if I had to look down (or up) after death and watch my mother in law clean out my wife and my sex toy stash.
Pah! Why feel ashamed of your porn/toy collection?
Dildoes number heavily among the oldest known human artifacts - even the single oldest well-preserved artifact, the "Venus of Willendorf", some scholars have argued may have served as an artificial phallus (go ahead and look at the "hair" on it and tell me it doesn't resemble some form of sex toy, "ridged for her pleasure"!).
I have porn. I have toys. I have no shame regarding them... If my own mother found them while plant-sitting, I'd proudly say that yes, I use them to great personal/mutual pleasure with my SO.
I just don't get how a sexually reproducing species turned into a culture of such pathetic prudes! Humans... Like... Sex! We spend a disproportionate amount of time seeking it, we spend virtually all of our free time from our late-teens through late-twenties doing it, we'll lose sleep and food over it. Wherein lies the "shame" of having "accessories"?
Microsoft does not sell software specifically intended for graphic designers, or for printers (the profession *or* the hardware), or for any other specialty that would require having the latest and greatest font set.
They sell an OS and an office productivity suite geared toward Mom 'n Pop and boring suit-clad businessmen.
Microsoft really shouldn't bother getting into multi-million dollar pissing contests over where the stroke on a majuscule "Q" goes - They really only need two fonts: Arial and Lucida Console.
Some people might prefer Times New Roman (Ugh) or Tahoma on the proportional side, or Courier New on the NP side, but the actual choice really doesn't matter. Give me two fonts and call it a day.
Or to put it another way - If you care enough about the choice of font that you would complain at only having two options - You don't have anything to say, you just want a flowery way to say nothing at all (ie, advertising).
5 days of camp is simply going to give them some new skillz to use ethically or unethically.
I started off thinking I would disagree with you, but by the end, I find I agree 100%.
I would just add one point to what you wrote...
Ethics depends heavily on situation as well as background. In some situations "ethics" means "follow the law", in others it means "screw the law, do the right thing", and in still others it means picking the least unethical course of action from a whole range of shady options.
On top of that, although some people would argue that ethics has absolute standards, I would disagree and say that ethics also depends on your point of view. Simple example: should I call in sick from work (assuming I have no more personal or vacation days) to take my mother to her doctor's appointment?
But regardless, a five day course won't teach you any of that. It will just hand you a small bag of skeleton keys to try should you come across an inconveniently locked door. And in this case, you can already get all those keys, and more, for free on the web.
Anyone else see it as a good thing that the kids can't get these games without parental permission?
No, and not for the obvious "Stick it to da man" reason...
Parents have the responsibility of teaching their kids to do the right thing not just in a safe, isolated environment, but on their own and with temptation aplenty.
It might make it easier to look like a good parent if Little Billy never even has the opportunity to drink, smoke, swear, or look at porn, but it doesn't teach Billy anything at all (or worse, teaches him to look forward to his Day of Freedom when he can finally overindulge in the forbidden fruit).
Personally, I see a kid buying a video-game his parents wouldn't approve of as a WONDERFUL opportunity to teach him a hell of a lesson - When the parents catch him with it, they can make him take it and put it in the shredder page by page, disc by disc, destroying 50+ dollars of his own hard-earned money. You just don't get that same kind of lesson from a shopkeeper telling him to take a hike.
It would be nice if women could be judged on the merit of their ideas instead of their looks. Just a thought, you know :-P.
Yes, it would. But I think you'll find damn few of them, even the only "plain" ones, willing to give up the ENORMOUS (Western/Civilized) societal edge they currently enjoy in mixed-gender situations.
Just a thought. Odd how those light enough to walk above the glass ceiling seem to complain the loudest about it.
I personally think Windows' biggest flaw is its file paging.
Not sure if you mean the file cache or their virtual memory implementation, but regardless, both of those suck harder than a hoover on 3-phase.
I know this counts as something of a near-religious topic, but it has always amazed me how much perkier XP gets with no pagefile (and Win2k before it, though you needed to put the pagefile on a ramdrive because it wouldn't just let you turn it off). Doesn't matter if you have over a gig of RAM, XP still wants to keep as much as possible on disk.
The biggest problem with that, however, comes from the habit of certain poorly-written games (MS's own included) that, as their first action, try to allocate their entire address space regardless of never actually using more than 200MB.
And as for the file cache... I've never quite understood what monkey-on-acid came up with the idea to keep memory full with prefetched programs that you might someday run, yet swap out parts of the friggin' kernel!
You're right - it's preposterous to think a sysadmin would want to download distro ISO's quickly.
I see that argument a lot, but y'know, I can download an ISO of any major distro via plain ol' FTP or HTTP as fast as my cablemodem will let me. What exactly would I gain by using P2P, other than yet another open port on my machine just waiting for someone to find an exploit?
Though, don't take this as an anti-P2P stance... P2P has its uses, and more efficient (for the server, not for any particular recipient) distribution of large files comes in pretty high on that list. But on this list, of the top 10 sysadmin tools - It doesn't come in at all. It duplicates funcationality (if via a slightly different mechanism) already present on a stock Linux box.
That contract you had to sign along with other papers needed to register to their administration (saying no means you can't follow the study)
I'll certainly agree that they shouldn't have such a policy, but by signing it, you pretty much gave up any right to complain about this.
Now, if I understood your description correctly, you could argue that your code contributed to those two other students didn't fall under the contract to which you agreed... But in that case, you've just moved the violation from yourself off to them, in accepting (GPL'd) code from you that they didn't have the right to subject to the university's license.
Somewhat messy, but the ambiguity of who takes the blame here doesn't make the issue go away - one of you, and not the university, didn't have the right to use GPL'd code in your project.
Again, not saying I consider this "right", but... People really need to think twice before they "just sign it".
Congratulations - you're Microsoft.
Oh, puh-lease. Call me self-centered if you want, call me a heartless bastard, call me direly lacking in empathy. But to equate me with Microsoft? Feh.
You've also expressed a very common opinion that pains me: "people who are disabled should just suck it up because I enjoy this."
When it takes no extra effort, or a truly miniscule effort, I agree that it seems nothing short of rude to not make one's work accessible. But when it requires either doubling the effort or reducing the end result for everyone, then damn straight I say "screw those who can't use this"!
I sympathize for those less fortunate than myself. I won't, however, reduce my own quality of life out of some pathologically misplaced sense of guilt over having the full complement of human senses and abilities.
Although most people might not come right out and admit it that bluntly, I suspect almost all people feel the same way. So, why do we still have unnavigable-to-those-with-disability-X websites? Do all web designers take a required course in "Evil 101"? No. Because, standards compliant or not, making a site useful to those with certain limitations doesn't always take just a small amount of extra planning - It frequently takes a herculean effort that may well dwarf the scope of the "normal" version of the project.
Put another way - Someone a few thread up mentioned that if you pay someone's nephew $50 to make a website, you get what you pay for... Well, a lot of Mom 'n Pops can only afford $50 on such a low-payback-but-potentially-critical project. That doesn't excuse a company like Target, but the same idea applies... If it cost and extra $20 or half an hour, every site would work perfectly in all browsers and for those with any conceivable disability.
Designing things with standards in mind is a better idea than not doing so.
I agree - But that has no relevance to the topic at hand.
Quick note of history... Before the modern web, a very similar but text-only medium existed, called "gopher". From an informational point of view, it worked just as well as the triple-dub, yet never really caught on before the web put the final nail in its coffin.
Why?
Modally-specific mediums exist. No amount of standards compliance will ever change that. The blind can't appreciate a rainbow, the deaf can't appreciate soft music lacking a strong bass. Just a fact of life for those lacking one of the normal senses (and yes, I said "normal" - PC or not, most of us can see and hear).
If you can find a way to let blind people appreciate a rainbow, by all means implement it and make a fortune in the process. If not, you have no right to deprive me of that same rainbow.
I would say that two types of websites exist (apropos to this discussion)... Those that convey written information, and (at the expense of soundling like a marketing droid) those that convey a sensory experience. The blind can use the former, and cannot use the latter. Simple as that. Roosters don't lay eggs.
Why do OEMs insist on using integated Intel graphics cards when stuff like this is available?
Because, believe it or not, most people do not use their PCs for high-end gaming. They may occasionally try to run some hot new resource-sucking game without a clue about the hardware needed to get a good framerate, but for the most part, a Flash app inside their browser counts as the most graphically-intensive app they run.
Now, on the opposite side of that, you have people who will blow $400 on a video card to pointlessly get from 200 to 206fps. Those people will, as their first action on getting a new PC, rip a low-end card out and toss it in the trash.
So who, exactly, would a low-to-mid range video card benefit? Yes, many Slashdotters might understand why you would want something like this, but Mom n' Pop would rather save $50 and use the integrated video, and Little Billy would rather put the $50 toward a $400 card.