Can anyone explain to an old hardware engineer why "it's impossible to write bug-free code", but we design bug-free hardware all the time. And don't tell me "complexity". Is an OS more complex than a car, which includes several embedded controllers and thousands of mechanical parts? But quite often, the manufacturer's get the cars right the first time -- or they get to pay for fixing every single one. It's pretty unusual to get two recall notices on the same car, and I don't think any car since the 1950's has had design defects counted in more than one digit. Most software packages ship with known defects in the 100's, or even 10,000's.
Firestone and Ford also put language like that in their warranties. It doesn't do a bit of good for them -- the law says that manufacturers do have to take a certain responsibility for their products, and this overrides any non-negotiated "contracts" that say otherwise. If the same standard was applied to Microsoft, the company would have been sued into bankruptcy long ago by all the people who suffered data and productivity losses to the BSOD.
But used car sellers don't have such responsibility. And it would seem rather nuts to try to make non-commercial coders or distributors responsible for defects in a free product. IANAL, but I don't think that's a problem.
However, what I really want to see, is not government restrictions on a company's right to write sales contracts as it pleases, but rather fraud prosecutions when fine print in the contract, warranty, or EULA contradicts specific promises in the advertisements. E.g., MS's ads about the servers running unattended. It's not that it's impossible to have an OS stable enough for that -- Novell and Unix servers have become physically lost for years, but kept right on doing their job over the network. It's just that MS's software is not that stable -- and if they publicly claim it is, you should be able to sue for all losses due to downtime, no matter what disclaimers are in the EULA.
An e-mail that ended with embedded escape sequences to program a key with a long string of commands, clear the screen, and then the something like "Mail file corrupted--press (whatever the key was) to continue."
The commands, which went back to the mail reader (or would have, if the user had followed the directions) would then 1) write the body of the message to a file, 2) exit the mail reader, 3) compile the source code it just saved, and 4) run the program.
Then the e-mail reader was not treating the e-mail as plain text. If the only escape sequences it recognizes are end of message and start of attachment, the only thing that can hurt you is the attachment -- if you are dumb enough to run an executable attachment.
Using C functions like gets() without doing overflow checking, for example, is just asking for trouble in most cases,... I don't see the difference in time between typing gets() and typing fgets() with a few more arguments when the code is first written?
In my experience, five minutes spent on overflow checks initially will save an hour in debugging. Unless you get _unlucky_ and the flaw isn't discovered in debugging. But then, I take bugs more seriously than an MS coder has to. When I release a program, I wrote it all by myself for internal company use. I'm going to get yanked out of my office to _look_ at any bugs that pop up, and have three senior managers breathing down my neck while I fix it. Microsoft programmers are insulated from that by sheer organizational size -- tech support gets the bug calls, not the programmers, and tech support probably won't be able to track down the lazy bastard responsible for the bug and make him fix it himself. Beyond that, MS shuffles most tech support off to the OEM's...
Or maybe they showed the evidence to InTouch privately and got InTouch to "settle" before the evidence was presented in court. Does anyone know what the settlement was? $0.01 is a settlement... And it doesn't hurt InTouch's chances with the next bunch of suc^h^h^halleged infringers, while a court transcript of evidence tending to invalidate the patent would.
Lawyers are a guild, not however to protect their marketshare, but to protect the consumers from unscrupulous pretenders.
Except that the guild does as little as possible to discipline crooked members...
Re:The cart goes in front of the horse?
on
David Brin on Privacy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There is actually a much, much bigger prerequisite to reaching Brin's ideal society, one which Brin never faces. And that is that a lot of everyday activities by normal people are now technically illegal. Americans have this terrible habit of trying to legislate an ideal world, and then hoping the cops don't catch them breaking those laws. Unfortunately, between the cops greater efficiency, and ever longer sentences for the poor bastards that did get caught and aren't named "Bush", our greatest growth industry has become prisons. Put out enough video cameras without changing the laws, and they'd better figure out how to make prisons self-supporting, because there won't be enough people on the outside paying taxes!
I grew up in small town American -- places where the neighbors knew who you were, and were likely to tell your parents what you were doing. There are some obvious bad points to that, but also good points. Brin's proposal amounts to using internet cameras, etc., to create a similar situation everywhere.
It's likely to happen regardless of whether we want it to or not -- between the government using every opportunity to stampede the sheeple into allowing increased governmental powers to "protect" them, and old folks whiling away their time with video cameras (I think that was a Brin novel...). But several things are needed to make the good balance the bad:
1. Government should be at least as subject to surveillance by citizens as the other way around. That is, if a corporate official comes around a congressman's home or office the day before a vote, we should at least be able to see him going in and out. If they go out to a restaurant, we can tape them -- if they are taping us.
2. There are a few government issues which have to be worked in secret -- weapons designs (sometimes), military planning, police investigations. But these categories should be strictly defined, as limited as possible. Everything else must be open to the public, and classified items must be opened up as soon as possible. There must be severe penalties for overclassifying materials -- mandatory minimum of being barred from ever working for the government again, plus fines and possible jail time. Don't depend on gov't prosecutors to enforce this -- private citizens can file charges before a grand jury, prosecute if the grand jury indicts, and get well-paid out of the fines. (I know, that's encouraging the sharks to go feed themselves. Better on gov't officials than us...)
3. There are public areas and private areas. You DON'T surveil private areas without a warrant. If you saw what Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith were doing inside Mr. Smith's house, you'd better keep it to yourself, you damned peeping tom!
4. One big fear about a no-secrets society is that we have things we don't want the neighbors to know about -- not illegal stuff, but embarrassing. If you knew what your neighbors were hiding, you probably don't have anything to be embarrasssed about . We'll have to get used to people not being perfect. Small-towners know that -- and the only ones that are excessively concerned about what their neighbors are doing are the old ladies without a life... ("Old lady" is not defined by gender...)
5. Don't expect perfection from politicians, either. J. Edgar Hoover once had enormous power, more from fear of what might be in his secret files than from respect of his abilities as director of the FBI. Remember, once it's out in the open, it's not blackmail material any more...
5. Repeal a hell of a lot of outmoded laws. We're not only worried about the neighbors seeing something embarrassing, but also about some malicious DA digging up a 150 year old law and prosecuting.
I think a *truly* awful government (I suppose we should define what that is) cannot be elected in a country with a strong free press.
I think power by coup can only occur in countries that lack respect for the rule of law.
I don't know for sure, but I believe that when Hitler was elected in 1933, Germany had a free press. It wasn't very independent -- but neither are the major American news purveyors now.
And then there were no more elections. That is, the president (or whatever the chief executive was called) led the coup, and the Germans barely noticed. The problem was not lack of respect for the rule of law, but far too much respect for authority. Americans once understood the difference, but after a century of public education, I wouldn't count on it.
What are Bush and Ashcroft saying now? Trust them, they won't actually bend the constitution too far, but we aren't allowed to see what they are doing... (Not claiming Bush is worse than his predecessor -- and Ashcroft will have to work _very_ hard to be worse than Reno -- but since my space and time are limited, I'll just pick on the ones now in power.)
Another factor, both in Hitler's election, and in the lack of resistance after he began exceeding his constitutional powers, was intimidation by bands of hooligans working for the Nazi party. (The Brownshirts, etc.) Either the police couldn't or wouldn't catch the thugs, or the courts didn't impose sentences severe enough to discourage them. Over here, even thugs without any organization behind them don't have too much to fear from the law, and the politicians have been getting away with much more. GWB was arrested three times (vandalism, theft, and drunk driving) without ever receiving more than a slap on the wrist... And if the lawbreakers are in police uniform, there is little or no chance that they will ever be punished to fit their crimes.
The election in Florida does seem to have been stolen -- not so much in the recounts or lack thereof, but in biased winnowing of the voter registration rolls, in selective enforcement and relaxation of absentee voting regulations, and maybe even in election day intimidation by the police. I've got no reason to believe that the Democrats didn't steal other states... And the people aren't rising up to demand the mess be cleaned up, just that the votecounters get their shit together so it doesn't take weeks to find out which set of thieves was more successful...
Yes, it could happen here. The internet may be a counterbalance to the lack of independence by the official press -- but there is so much BS out there, and so little chance of verifying most of it, that people tend to just listen to the damned lies they like best.
There were VIOLENT anti-war protests, put
down and banned -- IN NY.
There was an illegal draft -- in the North.
The US Government took over the duely elected
government -- in MD.
And, Lincoln imposed a definitely unconstitutional income tax... There were also highly dubious (to say the least) government actions in the Revolutionary War, war of 1812, WWI, and WWII. (No way was the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent constitutional. It was also _stupid_.)
A war for national survival may well require many violations of the normal liberties. However, A WAR HAS TO BE DECLARED BY CONGRESS. Since the shrub declined to follow that procedure, it's not a war!
Since I don't recall slashdotters flaming Source Forge, I assume that the managers are pretty trustworthy and all the complaints about the privacy policy, etc., are pretty paranoid WHERE THE PRESENT MANAGEMENT IS CONCERNED. But that doesn't mean that worrying about the new policies is unfounded. I've learned that whenever I get a promise from a manager at one of my customers or vendors, I need to get it in writing so that it will bind the company after they fire him or shift him to another division... The present guys won't sell your e-mail address to spammers, close your account arbitrarily, or suddenly impose charges on the storage and block access to your own code until you pay. But if the management suddenly changes (for instance, by a merger), their lawyers have now made it possible for the new management to do all of these things, without telling you until it's done.
Yes, it's a free service, so what do you expect? Sometimes the strings that come with "free as in beer" are just too expensive. Are there any moderately priced services as good as Source Forge and good policies?
You can hardly attribute the "complete meal at a single price" idea to McDonald's. Go back a hundred years or so, and this was the practice at most food servers, only more so -- you paid a fixed amount, and they tossed some of whatever they were cooking that day onto a plate.
Better idea: Anyone who files a bogus patent application gets to pay off the challenger. You can challenge a patent by:
1) Send a certified letter to the patenter, listing the prior art or other reasons you believe all or part of the patent is invalid. They have six months to respond by either sending you a check for $10,000 and informing the patent office to withdraw the patent, or to decide to go to court and defend their patent.
2) If you win in court, the patent-filer pays court costs, expenses, legal fees, and a bonus to the legal fees comparable to what contingency-fee lawyers get.
3) If the patenter sues someone else for infringement and loses, they have to pay as in #2.
4) Add other reasons for losing a patent: Failure to inform others that the process, device, or whatever is patented before it becomes industry standard practice. Writing claims so broad as to take in much prior art even if there are unique elements to the patent. Patenting something that you did not and could not make work at the time of filing the application.
For example, the BT "hidden page" patent. They are suing now claiming hyperlinks infringe this -- 26 years after their first patent application, 22 years since they received their British patent (it expired in 2000), and 13 years after receiving their American patent. This patent is so old it refers to selecting the link with a "keypad", not a mouse. But 1976 (the date of their first patent application) is still 20 years after the first public discussion of something similar to hyperlinks. Why do they pursue a case so weak -- there's nothing to lose except lawyer's time, and probably the lawyers are on salary anyhow. If they might have to pay you a bonus plus all your expenses for demolishing their case, they might reconsider. And under #4, there would be no prima facie case -- the judge would look at the dates, toss it out, and fine them for wasting everyone else's time.
Oh yes... I've always thought that what really brought Nixon down wasn't that he was finally _proven_ to be as slimy as half the country had always figured he was, but that getting caught made him look incompetent. Incompetent as a manager if he was telling the truth and he didn't know what those ex-CIA guys on his staff were doing with bags full of $100 bills out of the campaign funds, plus wiretapping and burglar tools. _Mentally_ incompetent, or unbelievably out of touch with the public, if he was actually worried enough about the competition from Democratic Party in 1972 to send the them out to bug the headquarters. (I think the Democratic platform that year could best be summarized as "We think the Socialists are too conservative." That McGovern got over 20% is a remarkable tribute to the combined effects of political inertia and Nixon-phobia.)
And finally, trying to cover it up really put the icing on the cake. After the Democratic Convention and the Eagleton affair, Nixon could have molested children on live network TV and still beat McGovern. He certainly could have come out and taken responsibility for one little burglary and still won by a land-slide. And if he had done that, no one in Congress would have dared to mess with him.
"Liberal" means quite different things depending on country and date:
19th Century: Best expressed by J.S. Mills. Sort of what Americans now call "moderate libertarian":
- Capitalist, free-market economics.
- Mills probably never heard of labor unions, and certainly wouldn't have approved of them.
- Distrust of government balanced against recognition that some government is necessary. Mills: "That government is best which governs least."
- Representative democracy with quite limited governmental powers. (In the US, this depends largely on the Supreme Court, the legislature and executive both being notably lacking in self-restraint and respect for the Constitution... British liberalism substituted the hereditary House of Lords for the Court, and tradition for a written Constitution, and so far it seems to have worked out no worse than over here...)
- Heavy emphasis on individual rights, except where they conflict with the free market.
- Some public works projects are acceptable (like roads), but gov't should stay out of anything that can be done by competitive commercial concerns, or by private charities.
Late 20th & 21st century American "liberals": Moderate socialists. Sometimes not so moderate. Example: Ralph Nader
- Regulated capitalist economy with many socialist trimmings.
- Pro union
- Distrust of big business. Also tends to regulate small business to death...
- Schizoid attitude towards government -- when it comes to arresting criminals or the national defense, gov't is bad, but when it comes to welfare, business regulations, zoning, public schools, or social agencies checking up on how you raise your children, gov't magically becomes good.
-Representative democracy with some limits on governmental powers.
- Heavy emphasis on individual rights, except where they conflict with the "liberals" favorite gov't regulations.
- Almost everything should be a public work. If the regulated and heavily taxed economy can't employ everyone, the gov't should hire them. If necessary, to dig holes and fill them up again...
- Does not believe that honest citizens can or should defend themselves.
(Don't let my ridicule of 21st century liberals fool you -- conservatives are even more schizoid. But that would get too long and too far off topic...)
British or Australian late 20th - 21st century liberals: What we call "conservatives" in America
you could get a PVR with twin 160GB drives to hold every episode of the X-Files.
Of course, that means you are filling up a device costing $500 - $1,000 to avoid paying $100 - $200 for the studio-released tapes or DVD's of the series year. The only way the PVR's are going to be used to store whole series' is if the studios don't release it on tape or DVD. They can't lose money on products they didn't bother to release!!!
It's Win98SE. There's a lot of applications (I've got to have all the CAD programs any of our customers use), and each one puts something into \Windows. (Allowing this to happen is a _really_ f'd up OS design.) Every desktop icon, every start menu shortcut, and every internet bookmark (I've got lots, split out into a dozen folders, some with sub-folders) makes a separate file, and illogically these go under Windows too... So the only way to find out how many of these files are actually the OS would be to do a wipe and re-install of just the OS -- and you'd still be counting Microsoft Explorer's default set of bookmarks...
IIRC, DVD's can hold up to 7 GB, and hold only 2-3 hours of near-movie-quality (using a lot of compression). That's at least 2GB/hour. But movies are much better quality than standard TV.
TV broadcasts with a 4.5MHz bandwidth. So it should be sampled at a 10Msample/second rate, with 24 bit color, 30MByte/s, 108GB/hour. That's right -- you'd need a RAID array just to store one hour of uncompressed TV! But it can be compressed to under 1GB/hr, how much under depends on how much pixelation you consider tolerable... I doubt that most of the present PVR's have enough CPU power to do full MPEG-2 compression in real-time, especially since they have to also decompress something for display at the same time. IIRC, the last time I really looked into this, top speed in Pentiums was around 400MHz, and full real time compression was a little out of their reach -- you'd buy a card that did compression in hardware if you _really_ had to have it. A 1GHz Pentium ought to be able to do it easily in software. Can anyone confirm that?
The internet isn't killing TV because it hasn't advanced far enough. Maybe the combination of several factors will kill TV broadcasting:
- Broadband internet to every middle-class home.
- An effective, secure, and private internet micropayment mechanism.
- Shows sold directly on the internet, AT A REASONABLE PRICE.
No one is going to spend $5 for a half-hour sitcom, but 50 cents seems reasonable to see it when you want it, without commercials. With piracy and replays, that might come out to about 5 cents per view -- and I'm pretty sure that's more than the show producers get from the networks.
How do we get from here to there?
Of course, the networks are going to fight this, since they get cut out of the deal entirely. And the advertising agencies will have to come up with a whole new method of brainwashing passive audiences into buying more than needed. Tough shit. "Manure shovelers suing automobile manufacturers for loss of business..."
Now-a-days I'd expect a nice cash payment to the elected official would clear the station from having to broadcast any news of any form though. Heck it might not even take that!
No, no, no. What the elected officials really want is to make sure the broadcasters are putting them in a favorable light. E.g. "Congressman X working at local orphanage", not "Congrssman X molesting children." OK, maybe not usually that blatant (although I remember one small-town newspaper that came close), but every election season produces a flurry of "stories" of the form "X's campaign statements going over very well with the public", when a news story with even a passing acquaintance with the truth would be "X's damned lies fool many."
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm... So Microsoft built vulnerabilities into DOS too...
Can anyone explain to an old hardware engineer why "it's impossible to write bug-free code", but we design bug-free hardware all the time. And don't tell me "complexity". Is an OS more complex than a car, which includes several embedded controllers and thousands of mechanical parts? But quite often, the manufacturer's get the cars right the first time -- or they get to pay for fixing every single one. It's pretty unusual to get two recall notices on the same car, and I don't think any car since the 1950's has had design defects counted in more than one digit. Most software packages ship with known defects in the 100's, or even 10,000's.
Firestone and Ford also put language like that in their warranties. It doesn't do a bit of good for them -- the law says that manufacturers do have to take a certain responsibility for their products, and this overrides any non-negotiated "contracts" that say otherwise. If the same standard was applied to Microsoft, the company would have been sued into bankruptcy long ago by all the people who suffered data and productivity losses to the BSOD.
But used car sellers don't have such responsibility. And it would seem rather nuts to try to make non-commercial coders or distributors responsible for defects in a free product. IANAL, but I don't think that's a problem.
However, what I really want to see, is not government restrictions on a company's right to write sales contracts as it pleases, but rather fraud prosecutions when fine print in the contract, warranty, or EULA contradicts specific promises in the advertisements. E.g., MS's ads about the servers running unattended. It's not that it's impossible to have an OS stable enough for that -- Novell and Unix servers have become physically lost for years, but kept right on doing their job over the network. It's just that MS's software is not that stable -- and if they publicly claim it is, you should be able to sue for all losses due to downtime, no matter what disclaimers are in the EULA.
An e-mail that ended with embedded escape sequences to program a key with a long string of commands, clear the screen, and then the something like "Mail file corrupted--press (whatever the key was) to continue."
The commands, which went back to the mail reader (or would have, if the user had followed the directions) would then 1) write the body of the message to a file, 2) exit the mail reader, 3) compile the source code it just saved, and 4) run the program.
Then the e-mail reader was not treating the e-mail as plain text. If the only escape sequences it recognizes are end of message and start of attachment, the only thing that can hurt you is the attachment -- if you are dumb enough to run an executable attachment.
Using C functions like gets() without doing overflow checking, for example, is just asking for trouble in most cases, ... I don't see the difference in time between typing gets() and typing fgets() with a few more arguments when the code is first written?
In my experience, five minutes spent on overflow checks initially will save an hour in debugging. Unless you get _unlucky_ and the flaw isn't discovered in debugging. But then, I take bugs more seriously than an MS coder has to. When I release a program, I wrote it all by myself for internal company use. I'm going to get yanked out of my office to _look_ at any bugs that pop up, and have three senior managers breathing down my neck while I fix it. Microsoft programmers are insulated from that by sheer organizational size -- tech support gets the bug calls, not the programmers, and tech support probably won't be able to track down the lazy bastard responsible for the bug and make him fix it himself. Beyond that, MS shuffles most tech support off to the OEM's...
Or maybe they showed the evidence to InTouch privately and got InTouch to "settle" before the evidence was presented in court. Does anyone know what the settlement was? $0.01 is a settlement... And it doesn't hurt InTouch's chances with the next bunch of suc^h^h^halleged infringers, while a court transcript of evidence tending to invalidate the patent would.
Lawyers are a guild, not however to protect their marketshare, but to protect the consumers from unscrupulous pretenders.
Except that the guild does as little as possible to discipline crooked members...
There is actually a much, much bigger prerequisite to reaching Brin's ideal society, one which Brin never faces. And that is that a lot of everyday activities by normal people are now technically illegal. Americans have this terrible habit of trying to legislate an ideal world, and then hoping the cops don't catch them breaking those laws. Unfortunately, between the cops greater efficiency, and ever longer sentences for the poor bastards that did get caught and aren't named "Bush", our greatest growth industry has become prisons. Put out enough video cameras without changing the laws, and they'd better figure out how to make prisons self-supporting, because there won't be enough people on the outside paying taxes!
I grew up in small town American -- places where the neighbors knew who you were, and were likely to tell your parents what you were doing. There are some obvious bad points to that, but also good points. Brin's proposal amounts to using internet cameras, etc., to create a similar situation everywhere.
It's likely to happen regardless of whether we want it to or not -- between the government using every opportunity to stampede the sheeple into allowing increased governmental powers to "protect" them, and old folks whiling away their time with video cameras (I think that was a Brin novel...). But several things are needed to make the good balance the bad:
1. Government should be at least as subject to surveillance by citizens as the other way around. That is, if a corporate official comes around a congressman's home or office the day before a vote, we should at least be able to see him going in and out. If they go out to a restaurant, we can tape them -- if they are taping us.
2. There are a few government issues which have to be worked in secret -- weapons designs (sometimes), military planning, police investigations. But these categories should be strictly defined, as limited as possible. Everything else must be open to the public, and classified items must be opened up as soon as possible. There must be severe penalties for overclassifying materials -- mandatory minimum of being barred from ever working for the government again, plus fines and possible jail time. Don't depend on gov't prosecutors to enforce this -- private citizens can file charges before a grand jury, prosecute if the grand jury indicts, and get well-paid out of the fines. (I know, that's encouraging the sharks to go feed themselves. Better on gov't officials than us...)
3. There are public areas and private areas. You DON'T surveil private areas without a warrant. If you saw what Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith were doing inside Mr. Smith's house, you'd better keep it to yourself, you damned peeping tom!
4. One big fear about a no-secrets society is that we have things we don't want the neighbors to know about -- not illegal stuff, but embarrassing. If you knew what your neighbors were hiding, you probably don't have anything to be embarrasssed about . We'll have to get used to people not being perfect. Small-towners know that -- and the only ones that are excessively concerned about what their neighbors are doing are the old ladies without a life... ("Old lady" is not defined by gender...)
5. Don't expect perfection from politicians, either. J. Edgar Hoover once had enormous power, more from fear of what might be in his secret files than from respect of his abilities as director of the FBI. Remember, once it's out in the open, it's not blackmail material any more...
5. Repeal a hell of a lot of outmoded laws. We're not only worried about the neighbors seeing something embarrassing, but also about some malicious DA digging up a 150 year old law and prosecuting.
I don't know for sure, but I believe that when Hitler was elected in 1933, Germany had a free press. It wasn't very independent -- but neither are the major American news purveyors now.
And then there were no more elections. That is, the president (or whatever the chief executive was called) led the coup, and the Germans barely noticed. The problem was not lack of respect for the rule of law, but far too much respect for authority. Americans once understood the difference, but after a century of public education, I wouldn't count on it.
What are Bush and Ashcroft saying now? Trust them, they won't actually bend the constitution too far, but we aren't allowed to see what they are doing... (Not claiming Bush is worse than his predecessor -- and Ashcroft will have to work _very_ hard to be worse than Reno -- but since my space and time are limited, I'll just pick on the ones now in power.)
Another factor, both in Hitler's election, and in the lack of resistance after he began exceeding his constitutional powers, was intimidation by bands of hooligans working for the Nazi party. (The Brownshirts, etc.) Either the police couldn't or wouldn't catch the thugs, or the courts didn't impose sentences severe enough to discourage them. Over here, even thugs without any organization behind them don't have too much to fear from the law, and the politicians have been getting away with much more. GWB was arrested three times (vandalism, theft, and drunk driving) without ever receiving more than a slap on the wrist... And if the lawbreakers are in police uniform, there is little or no chance that they will ever be punished to fit their crimes.
The election in Florida does seem to have been stolen -- not so much in the recounts or lack thereof, but in biased winnowing of the voter registration rolls, in selective enforcement and relaxation of absentee voting regulations, and maybe even in election day intimidation by the police. I've got no reason to believe that the Democrats didn't steal other states... And the people aren't rising up to demand the mess be cleaned up, just that the votecounters get their shit together so it doesn't take weeks to find out which set of thieves was more successful...
Yes, it could happen here. The internet may be a counterbalance to the lack of independence by the official press -- but there is so much BS out there, and so little chance of verifying most of it, that people tend to just listen to the damned lies they like best.
And, Lincoln imposed a definitely unconstitutional income tax... There were also highly dubious (to say the least) government actions in the Revolutionary War, war of 1812, WWI, and WWII. (No way was the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent constitutional. It was also _stupid_.)
A war for national survival may well require many violations of the normal liberties. However, A WAR HAS TO BE DECLARED BY CONGRESS. Since the shrub declined to follow that procedure, it's not a war!
Since I don't recall slashdotters flaming Source Forge, I assume that the managers are pretty trustworthy and all the complaints about the privacy policy, etc., are pretty paranoid WHERE THE PRESENT MANAGEMENT IS CONCERNED. But that doesn't mean that worrying about the new policies is unfounded. I've learned that whenever I get a promise from a manager at one of my customers or vendors, I need to get it in writing so that it will bind the company after they fire him or shift him to another division... The present guys won't sell your e-mail address to spammers, close your account arbitrarily, or suddenly impose charges on the storage and block access to your own code until you pay. But if the management suddenly changes (for instance, by a merger), their lawyers have now made it possible for the new management to do all of these things, without telling you until it's done.
Yes, it's a free service, so what do you expect? Sometimes the strings that come with "free as in beer" are just too expensive. Are there any moderately priced services as good as Source Forge and good policies?
I gather that the TCP/IP stack is BSD-derived. And guess what? That part of Windows works. ;-)
Sounds good. Just hack that and send them someone else's home address. Hmmm, the possibilities for improving the world...
My boss's boss
His boss
About half the board of directors
Al Gore
Dick Armey
Ashcroft
Reno
...
You can hardly attribute the "complete meal at a single price" idea to McDonald's. Go back a hundred years or so, and this was the practice at most food servers, only more so -- you paid a fixed amount, and they tossed some of whatever they were cooking that day onto a plate.
Better idea: Anyone who files a bogus patent application gets to pay off the challenger. You can challenge a patent by:
1) Send a certified letter to the patenter, listing the prior art or other reasons you believe all or part of the patent is invalid. They have six months to respond by either sending you a check for $10,000 and informing the patent office to withdraw the patent, or to decide to go to court and defend their patent.
2) If you win in court, the patent-filer pays court costs, expenses, legal fees, and a bonus to the legal fees comparable to what contingency-fee lawyers get.
3) If the patenter sues someone else for infringement and loses, they have to pay as in #2.
4) Add other reasons for losing a patent: Failure to inform others that the process, device, or whatever is patented before it becomes industry standard practice. Writing claims so broad as to take in much prior art even if there are unique elements to the patent. Patenting something that you did not and could not make work at the time of filing the application.
For example, the BT "hidden page" patent. They are suing now claiming hyperlinks infringe this -- 26 years after their first patent application, 22 years since they received their British patent (it expired in 2000), and 13 years after receiving their American patent. This patent is so old it refers to selecting the link with a "keypad", not a mouse. But 1976 (the date of their first patent application) is still 20 years after the first public discussion of something similar to hyperlinks. Why do they pursue a case so weak -- there's nothing to lose except lawyer's time, and probably the lawyers are on salary anyhow. If they might have to pay you a bonus plus all your expenses for demolishing their case, they might reconsider. And under #4, there would be no prima facie case -- the judge would look at the dates, toss it out, and fine them for wasting everyone else's time.
Oh yes... I've always thought that what really brought Nixon down wasn't that he was finally _proven_ to be as slimy as half the country had always figured he was, but that getting caught made him look incompetent. Incompetent as a manager if he was telling the truth and he didn't know what those ex-CIA guys on his staff were doing with bags full of $100 bills out of the campaign funds, plus wiretapping and burglar tools. _Mentally_ incompetent, or unbelievably out of touch with the public, if he was actually worried enough about the competition from Democratic Party in 1972 to send the them out to bug the headquarters. (I think the Democratic platform that year could best be summarized as "We think the Socialists are too conservative." That McGovern got over 20% is a remarkable tribute to the combined effects of political inertia and Nixon-phobia.)
And finally, trying to cover it up really put the icing on the cake. After the Democratic Convention and the Eagleton affair, Nixon could have molested children on live network TV and still beat McGovern. He certainly could have come out and taken responsibility for one little burglary and still won by a land-slide. And if he had done that, no one in Congress would have dared to mess with him.
"Liberal" means quite different things depending on country and date:
19th Century: Best expressed by J.S. Mills. Sort of what Americans now call "moderate libertarian":
- Capitalist, free-market economics.
- Mills probably never heard of labor unions, and certainly wouldn't have approved of them.
- Distrust of government balanced against recognition that some government is necessary. Mills: "That government is best which governs least."
- Representative democracy with quite limited governmental powers. (In the US, this depends largely on the Supreme Court, the legislature and executive both being notably lacking in self-restraint and respect for the Constitution... British liberalism substituted the hereditary House of Lords for the Court, and tradition for a written Constitution, and so far it seems to have worked out no worse than over here...)
- Heavy emphasis on individual rights, except where they conflict with the free market.
- Some public works projects are acceptable (like roads), but gov't should stay out of anything that can be done by competitive commercial concerns, or by private charities.
Late 20th & 21st century American "liberals": Moderate socialists. Sometimes not so moderate. Example: Ralph Nader
- Regulated capitalist economy with many socialist trimmings.
- Pro union
- Distrust of big business. Also tends to regulate small business to death...
- Schizoid attitude towards government -- when it comes to arresting criminals or the national defense, gov't is bad, but when it comes to welfare, business regulations, zoning, public schools, or social agencies checking up on how you raise your children, gov't magically becomes good.
-Representative democracy with some limits on governmental powers.
- Heavy emphasis on individual rights, except where they conflict with the "liberals" favorite gov't regulations.
- Almost everything should be a public work. If the regulated and heavily taxed economy can't employ everyone, the gov't should hire them. If necessary, to dig holes and fill them up again...
- Does not believe that honest citizens can or should defend themselves.
(Don't let my ridicule of 21st century liberals fool you -- conservatives are even more schizoid. But that would get too long and too far off topic...)
British or Australian late 20th - 21st century liberals: What we call "conservatives" in America
Thanks for the real numbers.
you could get a PVR with twin 160GB drives to hold every episode of the X-Files.
Of course, that means you are filling up a device costing $500 - $1,000 to avoid paying $100 - $200 for the studio-released tapes or DVD's of the series year. The only way the PVR's are going to be used to store whole series' is if the studios don't release it on tape or DVD. They can't lose money on products they didn't bother to release!!!
It's Win98SE. There's a lot of applications (I've got to have all the CAD programs any of our customers use), and each one puts something into \Windows. (Allowing this to happen is a _really_ f'd up OS design.) Every desktop icon, every start menu shortcut, and every internet bookmark (I've got lots, split out into a dozen folders, some with sub-folders) makes a separate file, and illogically these go under Windows too... So the only way to find out how many of these files are actually the OS would be to do a wipe and re-install of just the OS -- and you'd still be counting Microsoft Explorer's default set of bookmarks...
What an f'd up OS design.
Any idea what compression ratio or MB/hour they get?
IIRC, DVD's can hold up to 7 GB, and hold only 2-3 hours of near-movie-quality (using a lot of compression). That's at least 2GB/hour. But movies are much better quality than standard TV.
TV broadcasts with a 4.5MHz bandwidth. So it should be sampled at a 10Msample/second rate, with 24 bit color, 30MByte/s, 108GB/hour. That's right -- you'd need a RAID array just to store one hour of uncompressed TV! But it can be compressed to under 1GB/hr, how much under depends on how much pixelation you consider tolerable... I doubt that most of the present PVR's have enough CPU power to do full MPEG-2 compression in real-time, especially since they have to also decompress something for display at the same time. IIRC, the last time I really looked into this, top speed in Pentiums was around 400MHz, and full real time compression was a little out of their reach -- you'd buy a card that did compression in hardware if you _really_ had to have it. A 1GHz Pentium ought to be able to do it easily in software. Can anyone confirm that?
The internet isn't killing TV because it hasn't advanced far enough. Maybe the combination of several factors will kill TV broadcasting:
- Broadband internet to every middle-class home.
- An effective, secure, and private internet micropayment mechanism.
- Shows sold directly on the internet, AT A REASONABLE PRICE.
No one is going to spend $5 for a half-hour sitcom, but 50 cents seems reasonable to see it when you want it, without commercials. With piracy and replays, that might come out to about 5 cents per view -- and I'm pretty sure that's more than the show producers get from the networks.
How do we get from here to there?
Of course, the networks are going to fight this, since they get cut out of the deal entirely. And the advertising agencies will have to come up with a whole new method of brainwashing passive audiences into buying more than needed. Tough shit. "Manure shovelers suing automobile manufacturers for loss of business..."
Theoretically, you could download schedules from TV Guide's web site and have the script set up to crunch that into a PVR database.
Not that I know anything about this -- except that TV Guide is unaware of the existence of my town or the local cable company...
Now-a-days I'd expect a nice cash payment to the elected official would clear the station from having to broadcast any news of any form though. Heck it might not even take that!
No, no, no. What the elected officials really want is to make sure the broadcasters are putting them in a favorable light. E.g. "Congressman X working at local orphanage", not "Congrssman X molesting children." OK, maybe not usually that blatant (although I remember one small-town newspaper that came close), but every election season produces a flurry of "stories" of the form "X's campaign statements going over very well with the public", when a news story with even a passing acquaintance with the truth would be "X's damned lies fool many."