The industry argument I've heard is this: "Consumers" (ie, people) buy phones at a discount with multiyear contracts. This pricing scheme was developed by the industry to trick people (it's easier if you think of them as soulless "consumers") into continuing to pay the corporation despite abusive customer service, poor service, and fraud such as inaccurate coverage maps. Then the industry turns around -- pretending as if they've given a gift to the "consumers" who are living, breathing people with lives and kids and jobs and problems, sometimes involving money and cell phones -- and claim that they, the corporations, deserve to be rewarded by keeping control of the phone in violation of the common understanding of what "sell" and "own" mean.
And the Librarian of Congress somehow agrees.
Secondly, the regulated freedom from last year's Congressional Librarian decision seemed to be having an effect - why then reverse the decision?
Lastly, we should recall that corporations are _not_ free enterprise by definition - they are given special government dispensations to protect their owner(s) against liability. We (people) ultimately pay this price - a hidden tax. Corporations must be held to a particularly high level of good citizenship or their grants of liability immunity should be revoked. Else they will treat us (people) as objects that provide money to them, as a herbivore treats plants.
Maybe that's the difference between Europe & US. Europe has public transportation, US, specifically central NC, does not have reliably available PT.
This is one of the most corrupt US political areas. Commuter rail in the Raleigh area has been repeatedly sabotaged by insiders. Rail to the major airport (RDU) was squashed by airport authority, most likely to keep the parking concession. The Raleigh transportaion authority sold off the property they owned for a rail staion just before the plans that would use it were made. They claimed they needed the money. For what?
On a droid2 I use both Pageplus which resells Verizon, and also as a wifi phone using google voice + grooveIP (less complicated than sipdroid with a one time $2.49 charge.) Google voice gives good to excellent phone quality between Europe & US if you have a good wifi connection. Verizon/pageplus doesn't happen in Europe, so here it's only a wifi phone. Works OK, I make sure i have wifi where I stay. Calls to US free, calls to phones here have per minute charges, as much as 15 US cents to cell phones in Spain. For some reason, I don't feel like wifi-only would be adequate in the US, however Pageplus prepay is cheap if you don't use it a lot ($75/year).
The basic problem here is the concept of "SQL Devs".
SQL code must be co-developed with the code layer that interacts with it. Projects must not be divided at the SQL / other language layer surface. If multiple coders are needed, other ways to segment the project must be created. No-one should code only SQL.
The reason for this is that there is a close interaction between the calling code and the database data. The exact nature of this interaction depends on the problem at hand, the capabilities of the language(s) used to interact with SQL/data, and the preferences, idiosyncrasies, and skills of the coder. Security also depends on an integrated understanding while designing software.
I don't understand your abhorrence of temp tables ("... the most evil invention ever... "). They make some things possible and other things easier or clearer. Some coders prefer to use them more often than others.
If you're a manager my heart aches for the suffering of your employees.
Wouldn't the Tevatron have found the Higgs particle had it been run a few months longer? Actually didn't it, and then the LHC confirmed it with higher confidence?
Let the intelligent physicists figure out how to extend their science without so many billions of dollars. (hint: look up, there are collisions in the atmosphere at much higher energy than the LHC is capable of). Let the physicists outsmart Nature rather than funding agencies. Maybe they could concentrate better if they weren't so worried about construction, budgets, reports, etc.
I was not aware that at the moment I was poisoned. I was certainly aware later when the symptoms appeared, although I did not immediately connect them to cyanide poisoning. I had a searing headache, muscle contractions, and lethargy, not the full range of symptoms which include convulsions, cardiac arrest, and asphyxiation perceived even when breathing. Coma will occur - this is I suppose the end result of almost any fatal poisoning. It is not clear to me when unconsciousness occurs in this process. it may be dose-dependant. It would be instructive to hear from those who have been rescued from the full throes of symptoms. The only person I personally know who rescued himself from a high dose of cyanide by immediate ingestion of antidote suffered only minor symptoms.
Curiously, that person (who orally ingested a splash of concentrated cyanide in a plating plant) took an oral antidote that does not seem to be mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on cyanide poisoning. It may have been thiosulphate, I don't remember clearly off the top of my head. Keep your mouth closed in a plating plant. I was once obliged to prepare a sulphate solution for myself in a laboratory after accidently ingesting concentrated barium. Worst case of beer farts I ever had, no other symptoms. If you work with poisonous substances you should be prepared.
As a chemist who has worked with cyanide, I question whether he would have chosen this method to end his own life. Cyanide poisoning is extremely unpleasant and chemists who work with it generally are aware of this. Cyanide gas is very easy to produce from cyanide solutions, just a matter of adjusting or failing to adjust the pH. I have given myself low level cyanide poisoning without being aware of it until the symptoms appeared hours later, and many others have been saved by having the antidote at hand when they realized they had been exposed.
The gas could easily have been produced in his laboratory by his own accident or neglect, or by someone else.
In my opinion Turing's death by cyanide poisoning was not an intentional suicide.
Why so negative about free software? Why can't someone else step in to fill the gap left by a departing contributer? Mostly tax stuff isn't difficult, just very detailed.
What's lacking is community support; There's no fundamental flaw in the free software model.
TFA, about legal abuse of libraries because volunteers read to children. is what it is "all about" - our culture. Do living people own it or do corporations who exist only to profit own it?
Corporations and politicians who subverted our democracy for this should get what they deserve.
example: student housing is inflated because loans cover dorms but not off-campus housing. dorms are now nice apartments instead of spartan (and affordable) rooms.
>>>I have never seen a computer system which handles names properly and doubt one exists, anywhere
The open source genealogy software PhpGedView (http://www.phpgedview.net/) handles names in an extremely flexible manner. It explicitly supports 30 languages, including several asian languages, and has certainly been used with names from many more cultures (because of immigrant ancestors). Multiple names, aliases, married names, no known name - I have never seen or heard of a situation it cannot handle.
Short yellows are used in several jurisdictions to generate revenue.
Do you think the authorities running these rackets estimate the revenue per death?
It seems this is common. I've been caught (a ticket, not an accident) by one in Ohio. The cop who ticketed me said it was the most dangerous intersection in the county.
This link has it at a little under one added accident per million vehicle entries into an intersection. The ticket rate must be much higher than 1 in a million, so they get nice revenue for each citizen they kill, perhaps $5 million if 1% fatality rate in accidents and $50 tickets to 0.1% of drivers. At least the government doesn't think our lives are cheap. Injuries and repairs are other costs we pay, so this is a very expensive way to fund our government. Drive more carefully in a recession when governments get hungry.
I agree, qualifying one person = one lead developer. And ten years is too long. I know because I've developed an open source time sheet (http://ringdevelopment.com/timesheetdemo/ login guest/guest)
What really fubars projects is when the agents of the clients (that is, the employees who feel threatened) actively sabotage things. in my view, this is wholly the responsibility of the client. Failure to take care of this 200% (so that the saboteurs become or are replaced by cooperators) will result in failure, and the consultant is the innocent victim. However, 230 (or whatever) consultants means that SAIC and the consultants are milking the situation.
My guess is that New York City is doing nothing about the problem because they are the problem. Same was probably true for SAIC and FBI. In NYC's case at least, this was not a software problem to begin with. It was a management problem.
If these organizations ever get their sugar together (unlikely) they should find one or two smart people to put a system together for them - with the enthusiastic support and cooperation of everyone concerned in the client organization.
The reason these organizations fail is that they are concerned about self-perpetuation. This happens to all large organizations over time, and to the individuals within them concerned with perpetuating their roles within the organization. It's a force of human nature. Organizations lose sight of their purpose. Governments turn against the people they were formed to serve. Charities, once heart-felt, become marketing machines. Religions are inherited by control freaks. Big businesses seek rents and turn against their customers.
Be small. When the job's done find another. One developer can do it.
I mean this in the poetic sense, with dual meaning.
a) I've been using Google and Ixquick lately. Ixquick gives a fair number of porn site results to my searches, while Google rarely does. The difference? I'm not searching for porn and Google is giving better targeted results. (OTOH sometimes Ixquick comes up with a somewhat deep-web reference that Google misses, and it has other benefits as well).
b) Google has optional "SafeSearch Filtering" which I think works quite well, although I generally leave it off. It is not "infeasible" to filter porn, contrary to the OP statement. If you can provide search results for something it is trivial to suppress those same results. In other words, it's Google's core business to be able to filter porn.
It's a simple but powerful general-purpose object-oriented language. It's also a functional programming language with C-like syntax, closures, and lambdas.
The link to Douglas Crockford's site in the parent was to an article entitled "The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language".
The awful scoping mechanism
From the brief survey of Javascript on Crockford's site: """ When used inside of a function, var defines variables with function-scope. The vars are not accessible from outside of the function. There is no other granularity of scope in JavaScript. In particular, there is no block-scope. """ iow, use the var keyword. Programmers who do not know this ONE RULE (TM) are bitten by mysterious insects. Use a lint program if needed.
Functions are objects in Javascript, so this effectively allows, in either functional or object styles of programming, programmers to freely and simply define their variable scoping.
Procedural programmers used to simple block scoping (Hi COBOL fans!) may need to find a mechanism to cope with this. But I'd suggest using OO techniques if your program is complex enough that this is a problem. Javascript allows simple, non-demanding OO. If you like your OO authoritarian then Google has a Java-to-javascript translator.
intrinsic objects are too limited to be useful, so much so that now there are more than 4 different common framework projects
Python has one official library (and many 'unofficial' modules too), without which Python would be very limited. Javascript has many unofficial libraries. Welcome to the free world.
btw, I use Python, and I get Twisted Python at least to some extent. Twisted's deferred abstraction is mimicked in Dojo Javascript. I use Python on the server and Javascript + Dojo on the browser. Python has less warts and more modules. Javascript has astounding power in simplicity, as in the scoping rule.
Slashdot Mirror
it's necessary to root your phone in order to change the hosts file.
The industry argument I've heard is this: "Consumers" (ie, people) buy phones at a discount with multiyear contracts. This pricing scheme was developed by the industry to trick people (it's easier if you think of them as soulless "consumers") into continuing to pay the corporation despite abusive customer service, poor service, and fraud such as inaccurate coverage maps. Then the industry turns around -- pretending as if they've given a gift to the "consumers" who are living, breathing people with lives and kids and jobs and problems, sometimes involving money and cell phones -- and claim that they, the corporations, deserve to be rewarded by keeping control of the phone in violation of the common understanding of what "sell" and "own" mean.
And the Librarian of Congress somehow agrees.
Secondly, the regulated freedom from last year's Congressional Librarian decision seemed to be having an effect - why then reverse the decision?
Lastly, we should recall that corporations are _not_ free enterprise by definition - they are given special government dispensations to protect their owner(s) against liability. We (people) ultimately pay this price - a hidden tax. Corporations must be held to a particularly high level of good citizenship or their grants of liability immunity should be revoked. Else they will treat us (people) as objects that provide money to them, as a herbivore treats plants.
Maybe that's the difference between Europe & US. Europe has public transportation, US, specifically central NC, does not have reliably available PT.
This is one of the most corrupt US political areas. Commuter rail in the Raleigh area has been repeatedly sabotaged by insiders. Rail to the major airport (RDU) was squashed by airport authority, most likely to keep the parking concession. The Raleigh transportaion authority sold off the property they owned for a rail staion just before the plans that would use it were made. They claimed they needed the money. For what?
On a droid2 I use both Pageplus which resells Verizon, and also as a wifi phone using google voice + grooveIP (less complicated than sipdroid with a one time $2.49 charge.) Google voice gives good to excellent phone quality between Europe & US if you have a good wifi connection. Verizon/pageplus doesn't happen in Europe, so here it's only a wifi phone. Works OK, I make sure i have wifi where I stay. Calls to US free, calls to phones here have per minute charges, as much as 15 US cents to cell phones in Spain. For some reason, I don't feel like wifi-only would be adequate in the US, however Pageplus prepay is cheap if you don't use it a lot ($75/year).
This was taught at Frances Slocum elementary school (Fort Wayne, IN, USA) circa 1968.
The basic problem here is the concept of "SQL Devs".
SQL code must be co-developed with the code layer that interacts with it. Projects must not be divided at the SQL / other language layer surface. If multiple coders are needed, other ways to segment the project must be created. No-one should code only SQL.
The reason for this is that there is a close interaction between the calling code and the database data. The exact nature of this interaction depends on the problem at hand, the capabilities of the language(s) used to interact with SQL/data, and the preferences, idiosyncrasies, and skills of the coder. Security also depends on an integrated understanding while designing software.
I don't understand your abhorrence of temp tables (" ... the most evil invention ever ... "). They make some things possible and other things easier or clearer. Some coders prefer to use them more often than others.
If you're a manager my heart aches for the suffering of your employees.
Wouldn't the Tevatron have found the Higgs particle had it been run a few months longer? Actually didn't it, and then the LHC confirmed it with higher confidence?
Let the intelligent physicists figure out how to extend their science without so many billions of dollars. (hint: look up, there are collisions in the atmosphere at much higher energy than the LHC is capable of). Let the physicists outsmart Nature rather than funding agencies. Maybe they could concentrate better if they weren't so worried about construction, budgets, reports, etc.
by Jimmy Carter
The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language
http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html
I was not aware that at the moment I was poisoned. I was certainly aware later when the symptoms appeared, although I did not immediately connect them to cyanide poisoning. I had a searing headache, muscle contractions, and lethargy, not the full range of symptoms which include convulsions, cardiac arrest, and asphyxiation perceived even when breathing. Coma will occur - this is I suppose the end result of almost any fatal poisoning. It is not clear to me when unconsciousness occurs in this process. it may be dose-dependant. It would be instructive to hear from those who have been rescued from the full throes of symptoms. The only person I personally know who rescued himself from a high dose of cyanide by immediate ingestion of antidote suffered only minor symptoms.
Curiously, that person (who orally ingested a splash of concentrated cyanide in a plating plant) took an oral antidote that does not seem to be mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on cyanide poisoning. It may have been thiosulphate, I don't remember clearly off the top of my head. Keep your mouth closed in a plating plant. I was once obliged to prepare a sulphate solution for myself in a laboratory after accidently ingesting concentrated barium. Worst case of beer farts I ever had, no other symptoms. If you work with poisonous substances you should be prepared.
So you're suggesting that one of the greatest polymaths since Eratosthenes had the the mentality of a 5 year old girl, in part because he was gay?
As a chemist who has worked with cyanide, I question whether he would have chosen this method to end his own life. Cyanide poisoning is extremely unpleasant and chemists who work with it generally are aware of this. Cyanide gas is very easy to produce from cyanide solutions, just a matter of adjusting or failing to adjust the pH. I have given myself low level cyanide poisoning without being aware of it until the symptoms appeared hours later, and many others have been saved by having the antidote at hand when they realized they had been exposed.
The gas could easily have been produced in his laboratory by his own accident or neglect, or by someone else.
In my opinion Turing's death by cyanide poisoning was not an intentional suicide.
http://www.physics.harvard.edu/about/Phys253.html
Even if you don't understand them.
Why so negative about free software? Why can't someone else step in to fill the gap left by a departing contributer? Mostly tax stuff isn't difficult, just very detailed.
What's lacking is community support; There's no fundamental flaw in the free software model.
Here's a project I started & abandoned several years ago:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/autotax/
This is an extension of the IRS fillable pdf forms, adding calculations.
This was envisioned as "computer-assisted" as opposed to fully automated, which might address a lot of the "my situation is unique" objections.
I abandoned the project because people were eager to use it but not contribute.
>This is ALL about the interests of the lawyers
TFA, about legal abuse of libraries because volunteers read to children. is what it is "all about" - our culture. Do living people own it or do corporations who exist only to profit own it?
Corporations and politicians who subverted our democracy for this should get what they deserve.
regulation of student loans is in poor shape.
example: student housing is inflated because loans cover dorms but not off-campus housing. dorms are now nice apartments instead of spartan (and affordable) rooms.
regulations should give correct incentives.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EE0530175276C4A0
I hear they're teaching python now in this course. What guile!
Why is EFF concerned about how a closed-everything company treats its associates? How is this EFF's concern?
>>>I have never seen a computer system which handles names properly and doubt one exists, anywhere
The open source genealogy software PhpGedView (http://www.phpgedview.net/) handles names in an extremely flexible manner. It explicitly supports 30 languages, including several asian languages, and has certainly been used with names from many more cultures (because of immigrant ancestors). Multiple names, aliases, married names, no known name - I have never seen or heard of a situation it cannot handle.
Short yellows are used in several jurisdictions to generate revenue.
Do you think the authorities running these rackets estimate the revenue per death?
It seems this is common. I've been caught (a ticket, not an accident) by one in Ohio. The cop who ticketed me said it was the most dangerous intersection in the county.
He knew.
A couple of these exploits are mentioned here:
http://www.freedomworks.org/news/denver-colorado-caught-exploiting-short-yellow-lig
This link has it at a little under one added accident per million vehicle entries into an intersection. The ticket rate must be much higher than 1 in a million, so they get nice revenue for each citizen they kill, perhaps $5 million if 1% fatality rate in accidents and $50 tickets to 0.1% of drivers. At least the government doesn't think our lives are cheap. Injuries and repairs are other costs we pay, so this is a very expensive way to fund our government. Drive more carefully in a recession when governments get hungry.
I agree, qualifying one person = one lead developer. And ten years is too long. I know because I've developed an open source time sheet (http://ringdevelopment.com/timesheetdemo/ login guest/guest)
What really fubars projects is when the agents of the clients (that is, the employees who feel threatened) actively sabotage things. in my view, this is wholly the responsibility of the client. Failure to take care of this 200% (so that the saboteurs become or are replaced by cooperators) will result in failure, and the consultant is the innocent victim. However, 230 (or whatever) consultants means that SAIC and the consultants are milking the situation.
My guess is that New York City is doing nothing about the problem because they are the problem. Same was probably true for SAIC and FBI. In NYC's case at least, this was not a software problem to begin with. It was a management problem.
If these organizations ever get their sugar together (unlikely) they should find one or two smart people to put a system together for them - with the enthusiastic support and cooperation of everyone concerned in the client organization.
The reason these organizations fail is that they are concerned about self-perpetuation. This happens to all large organizations over time, and to the individuals within them concerned with perpetuating their roles within the organization. It's a force of human nature. Organizations lose sight of their purpose. Governments turn against the people they were formed to serve. Charities, once heart-felt, become marketing machines. Religions are inherited by control freaks. Big businesses seek rents and turn against their customers.
Be small. When the job's done find another. One developer can do it.
I mean this in the poetic sense, with dual meaning.
a) I've been using Google and Ixquick lately. Ixquick gives a fair number of porn site results to my searches, while Google rarely does. The difference? I'm not searching for porn and Google is giving better targeted results. (OTOH sometimes Ixquick comes up with a somewhat deep-web reference that Google misses, and it has other benefits as well).
b) Google has optional "SafeSearch Filtering" which I think works quite well, although I generally leave it off. It is not "infeasible" to filter porn, contrary to the OP statement. If you can provide search results for something it is trivial to suppress those same results. In other words, it's Google's core business to be able to filter porn.
Why not teach Javascript itself?
It's a simple but powerful general-purpose object-oriented language. It's also a functional programming language with C-like syntax, closures, and lambdas.
A browser is the interpreter.
**** Please read http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html before modding this down. ****
The link to Douglas Crockford's site in the parent was to an article entitled "The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language".
The awful scoping mechanism
From the brief survey of Javascript on Crockford's site:
"""
When used inside of a function, var defines variables with function-scope. The vars are not accessible from outside of the function. There is no other granularity of scope in JavaScript. In particular, there is no block-scope.
"""
iow, use the var keyword. Programmers who do not know this ONE RULE (TM) are bitten by mysterious insects. Use a lint program if needed.
Functions are objects in Javascript, so this effectively allows, in either functional or object styles of programming, programmers to freely and simply define their variable scoping.
Procedural programmers used to simple block scoping (Hi COBOL fans!) may need to find a mechanism to cope with this. But I'd suggest using OO techniques if your program is complex enough that this is a problem. Javascript allows simple, non-demanding OO. If you like your OO authoritarian then Google has a Java-to-javascript translator.
intrinsic objects are too limited to be useful, so much so that now there are more than 4 different common framework projects
Python has one official library (and many 'unofficial' modules too), without which Python would be very limited. Javascript has many unofficial libraries. Welcome to the free world.
btw, I use Python, and I get Twisted Python at least to some extent. Twisted's deferred abstraction is mimicked in Dojo Javascript. I use Python on the server and Javascript + Dojo on the browser. Python has less warts and more modules. Javascript has astounding power in simplicity, as in the scoping rule.