I recognize that modern contract law has (incorrectly and unjustly, IMHO) rendered certain kinds of contractual terms void. However, even if such terms were fully enforceable they would still be nothing like the "freedom to punch someone" referred to in the Gregory Maxwell quote.
The main thing that modern contract law restricts is the ability to enter into agreements to do illegal things. No contract can require you to do anything that is against the law, no matter how much the other parties (and you) want you to. That covers Gregory Maxwell's case: there is no freedom to assault someone, as it is illegal and no contract can change that. Licenses are different though, since the law there is written so that people other than the owner of the thing being licensed (software, music, a book, etc.) have no rights to it by default; permission has to be sought. Whether or not you agree with that, that's the legal situation. And that means Maxwell's statement is BS, at least in terms of the law. (Morally is entirely different; I'm not even going to try to tackle that.)
The price of gold is set by the quantity of gold available and the demand for it, as is everything else. Since the total quantity of available gold isn't related at all to the production in any other industry, that's a really poor measure of the economic status of any one nation.
Actually it's an industrial commodity that is used in the manufacture of a number of things like integrated circuits.
A circuit breaker will not keep you from being killed btw.
Yes it will! It helps to prevent the stock traders from actually being set on fire by the electrocution, and fires spread and can kill honest people all too easily.
Keeping a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher about would help too.
just throw in, say, Lua; which is, from I've heard, very light, powerful, easy and fast. But we seem to choose not to use it much...
Lua is very lightweight. One of the consequences of that is that it does very little for you by default; you need to add in libraries to access a lot of system resources (e.g., so that you can draw on the screen or access a network or use non-Latin1 characters easily). By the time you've added in libraries to do all the extras that Lua doesn't supply out of the box that you need for your application, the whole ensemble isn't lightweight any more. That functionality has to be somewhere.
All 3 are responsible. They can sue each other later...
The important thing is to get the leak stopped. Let the courts sort out responsibility (and liability) at their own pace.
The thing to consider, though... how do you put a price on catastrophe? These companies don't really have enough money to compensate for it -- and in reality, since when could you ever compensate with MONEY something this ridiculously catastrophic to all things biological being affected.
I think you are placing too large a value on those biological things. It's just an oil leak, not the end of the world. It's not even doing anything really serious like contaminating drinking water.
They started searching luggage - and that has worked.
They also started making sure that luggage is matched to a known passenger, and checking (even if cursorily) that people aren't taking things on for others. Those are both key parts of anti-bombing measures.
In the European social democracies, you don't have that risk of moving down.
That's BS.
The Scandinavian countries have basically eliminated poverty.
What they have done is eliminated absolute poverty, as in total destitution. There are plenty of poor people about – there is relative poverty – but there is a floor to how low people can go. Of course, anyone wanting to get above the bottom needs to work. That is Good And Proper, how things should be. (What I'm not sure about is the extent to which they have got rid of tax traps; ideally, you want it so that, if people work more, they have more disposable income. That's a good thing because it means that there's always an incentive to work, and if people decide that they prefer a life outside work then they know what it is costing them. And may think it is worth it; that's only fair.)
Most of the issues addressed in the summary actually result from the fact that top US universities are insanely expensive. Harvard is about thirty thousand dollars for an undergraduate degree whereas Cambridge is about three thousand Stirling.
I've no idea what Harvard costs, but I can assure you that Cambridge costs more than that (per year). It's just that for domestic (and EU) students, the government hands out a massive subsidy; only foreign students pay the full rate. Of course, students think that paying £3000 per year gives them the right to dictate what they do, and wonder why it gets such a dusty answer from the academics; that subsidy which they are not generally aware of is the core of it.
There are multiple facets to intelligence, not all of which are measured through IQ. Moreover, most people actually reason in a Bayesian fashion, deciding how much to believe what someone's saying by evaluating the perceived trustworthiness of the speaker. If the scammer manages to get into a position where he can say things that are believed without actually being reasoned about (or say things that will be categorically not believed, allowing converse statements to be made and so belief to be established in what the scammer wants) then the core of scam is done; all that's really left is moving it into the cash-out phase.
An intelligent and suspicious mark will be very difficult to scam, especially if they are inclined to shut the scammer's statements out. Lots of people aren't good at suspicion it seems.
You do not have to join the Amish to escape proprietary software or proprietary music.
But you're not going to be using a modern car or many other household gadgets. Might as well get it over with and join the Amish. (Plus the Amish are apparently allowed to use steam-based technology.)
The $10 voucher allows you access to stuff that 5 years ago, before DLC existed, would have been included on the original game CD.
I'm sorry, but I doubt what you say there. What game published in 2005 came with the level of content that you get added in through DLC now? (That is in addition to the increased content that is made available in the main game at release in current games.) Use comparable games of course; like-with-like stops stupidity.
I hate to do a [citation needed] on you, but the echo chamber in here sometimes leads to stupid bombast. Use the facts to defeat this, please!
I didn't see anyone paying for namespace in p2p networks or on I2P/FreeNet/etc., maybe we don't need to have parent domains?
You also know jack shit about the trustability of the information on those systems. Sturgeon's Law applies. If you do something about that (e.g., through a reputation service) then you're setting something up as an authority.
It is, IMO, even more damning than that -- it's a wire feed article that originated with The Sun, England's answer to The New York Post. The closest they get to journalism is printing slightly fewer Bigfoot sightings than The Weekly World News.
They come worse than that. The Daily Star exists to cater to people who find The Sun too intellectual and lefty.
Recently Oracle, announced the procurement of the Sun God Ra, after he defeated Osiris and left Isis searching the river for his missing uh... firmware.
I know this concept might be foreign to you, but Isis is female.
Next time the guys in CSI can scan a DNA sequence in a matter of minutes (or perhaps hours, as the camera briefly observes an analog clockface), don't nitpick the usual technical constraints of a process that usually takes days or weeks or months.
Note that we're going to be at that level technically in a year or two. (Knowing what that DNA sequence means... we're a long way off that; DNA sequencing is a horribly messy affair.)
most people require tactile feedback when typing for optimum performance (one of the multitude of reasons Star Trek's LCARS input interface will never truly be embraced in reality)
I believe that there are a number of research groups working on how to make a haptic surface, so that you'll be able to feel that on-screen button move when you press it with your finger.
I hesitate to speculate what the porn industry would use it for.
the ionosphere can mess up GPS signals by about 100 nanoseconds
That's variable. You use the GPS time signal over a long period of time (days) to calculate the rate at which your clock drifts, at which point you can do a reasonably good correction for things and get your clock pretty accurate. Asking for perfect timing a second or two after switching the device on is just unfair!
The bus being available is a "service", but it's not a service I choose to use, because I like to be on my own schedule and the bus doesn't drive right by my house, it goes two blocks away, and I'm too lazy to walk the two blocks. The same issue will exist with cloud services.
Round here there are lots of private cars and public buses. They seem to coexist just fine. What's more, there are these things called "taxis" which will pick you up right from your door and take you to wherever you want to go. Not everyone uses them all the time, but they are definitely thriving.
Guess what? The analogy with cloud computing also works here. There's going to be lots of room for people providing cloud services that are specific to a relatively small group's needs. (I've seen the business models, the figures, I know the names of some companies doing this, and it freaking works as a way to deliver some things. Can't say names though; promised not to.) Just as with a taxi, the cost of using the service is higher than doing it all yourself all the time, but you avoid having to purchase, keep and maintain all that software and hardware (the car, by analogy) and that turns out to be a big saving for businesses that only use the service from time to time. There are a lot of businesses like that; heavy computing isn't what they do as an everyday thing, it's what they use from time to time.
Don't like the taxi analogy? What about a u-hire truck? Most folks don't want one of those things littering the place up, but if you need to move a bunch of stuff about then it's great, so they hire one in when needed. If they were moving lots of things every day, they'd have their own truck, but they aren't. (This tells us that grid computing won't be right for everyone, but so what? What you need to do is work out whether it is suitable for you. Just don't over-extrapolate to say that because it is – or isn't – good for you, it is perfect – or utterly unworkable – for everyone else. That would be just spouting BS.)
Once Unisys found out that GIFs used their patented LZW algorithm
It was possible to write GIFs that didn't use the LZW algorithm by exploiting the fact that all decoders worked the same way, but it was also inefficient. I remember being pleased when the LZW patent expired and we could scrap that crap.
Benchmarks are BS too. Better to check out the in-depth analyses in Microprocessor Report (that was certainly the source for this sort of thing back when I was doing this sort of hardware).
Generally speaking (at a very gross approximation!) the biggest factor in speed seems to be feature size, and ARM cores run cooler than x86 cores. ARM have focussed on the low-power end of the market far more than Intel and AMD (who have been duking it out at the high-speed end) and this means that for some applications, their stuff is absolutely best. I don't know whether that's true for server-class computing; the lower power consumption will get better packing densities but whether that will compensate for the reduced computational power I just don't know.
Of course, a good benefit in the "small server" market would be being able to run normal workloads without active cooling (i.e., fans) in a normal room. That would save loads on power and aircon. (And I know for one thing that there are ARM cores that can cope with very wide temperature variations. It's impressive when you see someone torturing a CPU with a hairdryer and – straight after – some dry-ice...)
In all the cases you cite, there is clear intent to harm. The intention to harm is not so clear in the Terry Childs case.
It was clear enough that a jury convicted him, i.e., they found that it was a fact that there was malicious intent (or at least aggressive indifference to consequences). That's the core of what a conviction means. What's more, one of the jurors has taken the time to explain why Childs was convicted, which is a rare privilege for the rest of us.
The take home message has got to be "don't be a douche, even when the other guys are douches".
You don't make it so only 1 employee has the only access to everything.
And if your stupid enough to do that, you don't fire him.
That's an utterly unhelpful statement. Yes, the city should not have permitted things to get into that situation, but they did and reversing time isn't an option. Fundamentally, it was the City that owned the network; they paid for it, it was theirs. All the authority that Childs ever had was because it was delegated to him by the City. Thus when the City decided it was no longer delegating any authority to him, Childs ceased to have any right to deny access. (Yes, the City may well have been a bunch of dicks, but that should have been a matter for an employment tribunal or something like that, and not an idiotic tussle over network administration access.)
He was also totally not following best practices by not having a strategy in place to cope with his sudden accidental death, e.g., in an auto accident, or pulmonary aneurysm, or being hit by a meteorite, or any number of stupid things that could happen. No, I've got no sympathy for Childs at all. But I won't be working for the City either (even if I was living in the right part of the world and was legally able to do so).
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, the giant douche was more visually appealing than the turd sandwich?
Well, at least he wasn't a tub of lard.
I recognize that modern contract law has (incorrectly and unjustly, IMHO) rendered certain kinds of contractual terms void. However, even if such terms were fully enforceable they would still be nothing like the "freedom to punch someone" referred to in the Gregory Maxwell quote.
The main thing that modern contract law restricts is the ability to enter into agreements to do illegal things. No contract can require you to do anything that is against the law, no matter how much the other parties (and you) want you to. That covers Gregory Maxwell's case: there is no freedom to assault someone, as it is illegal and no contract can change that. Licenses are different though, since the law there is written so that people other than the owner of the thing being licensed (software, music, a book, etc.) have no rights to it by default; permission has to be sought. Whether or not you agree with that, that's the legal situation. And that means Maxwell's statement is BS, at least in terms of the law. (Morally is entirely different; I'm not even going to try to tackle that.)
The price of gold is set by the quantity of gold available and the demand for it, as is everything else. Since the total quantity of available gold isn't related at all to the production in any other industry, that's a really poor measure of the economic status of any one nation.
Actually it's an industrial commodity that is used in the manufacture of a number of things like integrated circuits.
A circuit breaker will not keep you from being killed btw.
Yes it will! It helps to prevent the stock traders from actually being set on fire by the electrocution, and fires spread and can kill honest people all too easily.
Keeping a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher about would help too.
just throw in, say, Lua; which is, from I've heard, very light, powerful, easy and fast. But we seem to choose not to use it much...
Lua is very lightweight. One of the consequences of that is that it does very little for you by default; you need to add in libraries to access a lot of system resources (e.g., so that you can draw on the screen or access a network or use non-Latin1 characters easily). By the time you've added in libraries to do all the extras that Lua doesn't supply out of the box that you need for your application, the whole ensemble isn't lightweight any more. That functionality has to be somewhere.
All 3 are responsible. They can sue each other later...
The important thing is to get the leak stopped. Let the courts sort out responsibility (and liability) at their own pace.
The thing to consider, though... how do you put a price on catastrophe? These companies don't really have enough money to compensate for it -- and in reality, since when could you ever compensate with MONEY something this ridiculously catastrophic to all things biological being affected.
I think you are placing too large a value on those biological things. It's just an oil leak, not the end of the world. It's not even doing anything really serious like contaminating drinking water.
They started searching luggage - and that has worked.
They also started making sure that luggage is matched to a known passenger, and checking (even if cursorily) that people aren't taking things on for others. Those are both key parts of anti-bombing measures.
In the European social democracies, you don't have that risk of moving down.
That's BS.
The Scandinavian countries have basically eliminated poverty.
What they have done is eliminated absolute poverty, as in total destitution. There are plenty of poor people about – there is relative poverty – but there is a floor to how low people can go. Of course, anyone wanting to get above the bottom needs to work. That is Good And Proper, how things should be. (What I'm not sure about is the extent to which they have got rid of tax traps; ideally, you want it so that, if people work more, they have more disposable income. That's a good thing because it means that there's always an incentive to work, and if people decide that they prefer a life outside work then they know what it is costing them. And may think it is worth it; that's only fair.)
Perhaps they are the ones that have America's debt rated AAA.
Well, if you mean the Alcoholics Association of America, then yeah, that makes sense.
Most of the issues addressed in the summary actually result from the fact that top US universities are insanely expensive. Harvard is about thirty thousand dollars for an undergraduate degree whereas Cambridge is about three thousand Stirling.
I've no idea what Harvard costs, but I can assure you that Cambridge costs more than that (per year). It's just that for domestic (and EU) students, the government hands out a massive subsidy; only foreign students pay the full rate. Of course, students think that paying £3000 per year gives them the right to dictate what they do, and wonder why it gets such a dusty answer from the academics; that subsidy which they are not generally aware of is the core of it.
Intelligence is different from (street) Smarts.
There are multiple facets to intelligence, not all of which are measured through IQ. Moreover, most people actually reason in a Bayesian fashion, deciding how much to believe what someone's saying by evaluating the perceived trustworthiness of the speaker. If the scammer manages to get into a position where he can say things that are believed without actually being reasoned about (or say things that will be categorically not believed, allowing converse statements to be made and so belief to be established in what the scammer wants) then the core of scam is done; all that's really left is moving it into the cash-out phase.
An intelligent and suspicious mark will be very difficult to scam, especially if they are inclined to shut the scammer's statements out. Lots of people aren't good at suspicion it seems.
You do not have to join the Amish to escape proprietary software or proprietary music.
But you're not going to be using a modern car or many other household gadgets. Might as well get it over with and join the Amish. (Plus the Amish are apparently allowed to use steam-based technology.)
The $10 voucher allows you access to stuff that 5 years ago, before DLC existed, would have been included on the original game CD.
I'm sorry, but I doubt what you say there. What game published in 2005 came with the level of content that you get added in through DLC now? (That is in addition to the increased content that is made available in the main game at release in current games.) Use comparable games of course; like-with-like stops stupidity.
I hate to do a [citation needed] on you, but the echo chamber in here sometimes leads to stupid bombast. Use the facts to defeat this, please!
I didn't see anyone paying for namespace in p2p networks or on I2P/FreeNet/etc., maybe we don't need to have parent domains?
You also know jack shit about the trustability of the information on those systems. Sturgeon's Law applies. If you do something about that (e.g., through a reputation service) then you're setting something up as an authority.
It is, IMO, even more damning than that -- it's a wire feed article that originated with The Sun, England's answer to The New York Post. The closest they get to journalism is printing slightly fewer Bigfoot sightings than The Weekly World News.
They come worse than that. The Daily Star exists to cater to people who find The Sun too intellectual and lefty.
Recently Oracle, announced the procurement of the Sun God Ra, after he defeated Osiris and left Isis searching the river for his missing uh... firmware.
I know this concept might be foreign to you, but Isis is female.
Next time the guys in CSI can scan a DNA sequence in a matter of minutes (or perhaps hours, as the camera briefly observes an analog clockface), don't nitpick the usual technical constraints of a process that usually takes days or weeks or months.
Note that we're going to be at that level technically in a year or two. (Knowing what that DNA sequence means... we're a long way off that; DNA sequencing is a horribly messy affair.)
most people require tactile feedback when typing for optimum performance (one of the multitude of reasons Star Trek's LCARS input interface will never truly be embraced in reality)
I believe that there are a number of research groups working on how to make a haptic surface, so that you'll be able to feel that on-screen button move when you press it with your finger.
I hesitate to speculate what the porn industry would use it for.
the ionosphere can mess up GPS signals by about 100 nanoseconds
That's variable. You use the GPS time signal over a long period of time (days) to calculate the rate at which your clock drifts, at which point you can do a reasonably good correction for things and get your clock pretty accurate. Asking for perfect timing a second or two after switching the device on is just unfair!
The bus being available is a "service", but it's not a service I choose to use, because I like to be on my own schedule and the bus doesn't drive right by my house, it goes two blocks away, and I'm too lazy to walk the two blocks. The same issue will exist with cloud services.
Round here there are lots of private cars and public buses. They seem to coexist just fine. What's more, there are these things called "taxis" which will pick you up right from your door and take you to wherever you want to go. Not everyone uses them all the time, but they are definitely thriving.
Guess what? The analogy with cloud computing also works here. There's going to be lots of room for people providing cloud services that are specific to a relatively small group's needs. (I've seen the business models, the figures, I know the names of some companies doing this, and it freaking works as a way to deliver some things. Can't say names though; promised not to.) Just as with a taxi, the cost of using the service is higher than doing it all yourself all the time, but you avoid having to purchase, keep and maintain all that software and hardware (the car, by analogy) and that turns out to be a big saving for businesses that only use the service from time to time. There are a lot of businesses like that; heavy computing isn't what they do as an everyday thing, it's what they use from time to time.
Don't like the taxi analogy? What about a u-hire truck? Most folks don't want one of those things littering the place up, but if you need to move a bunch of stuff about then it's great, so they hire one in when needed. If they were moving lots of things every day, they'd have their own truck, but they aren't. (This tells us that grid computing won't be right for everyone, but so what? What you need to do is work out whether it is suitable for you. Just don't over-extrapolate to say that because it is – or isn't – good for you, it is perfect – or utterly unworkable – for everyone else. That would be just spouting BS.)
Once Unisys found out that GIFs used their patented LZW algorithm
It was possible to write GIFs that didn't use the LZW algorithm by exploiting the fact that all decoders worked the same way, but it was also inefficient. I remember being pleased when the LZW patent expired and we could scrap that crap.
Nah, you can do far better than that. "The character 'a' repeated Graham's number of times" is just a start...
But the Kolmogorov Complexity of that is rather smaller. It's that which is limited by Twitter, not the eventual expanded size of the message.
IOW, benchmarks or you're full of shit.
Benchmarks are BS too. Better to check out the in-depth analyses in Microprocessor Report (that was certainly the source for this sort of thing back when I was doing this sort of hardware).
Generally speaking (at a very gross approximation!) the biggest factor in speed seems to be feature size, and ARM cores run cooler than x86 cores. ARM have focussed on the low-power end of the market far more than Intel and AMD (who have been duking it out at the high-speed end) and this means that for some applications, their stuff is absolutely best. I don't know whether that's true for server-class computing; the lower power consumption will get better packing densities but whether that will compensate for the reduced computational power I just don't know.
Of course, a good benefit in the "small server" market would be being able to run normal workloads without active cooling (i.e., fans) in a normal room. That would save loads on power and aircon. (And I know for one thing that there are ARM cores that can cope with very wide temperature variations. It's impressive when you see someone torturing a CPU with a hairdryer and – straight after – some dry-ice...)
In all the cases you cite, there is clear intent to harm. The intention to harm is not so clear in the Terry Childs case.
It was clear enough that a jury convicted him, i.e., they found that it was a fact that there was malicious intent (or at least aggressive indifference to consequences). That's the core of what a conviction means. What's more, one of the jurors has taken the time to explain why Childs was convicted, which is a rare privilege for the rest of us.
The take home message has got to be "don't be a douche, even when the other guys are douches".
You don't make it so only 1 employee has the only access to everything.
And if your stupid enough to do that, you don't fire him.
That's an utterly unhelpful statement. Yes, the city should not have permitted things to get into that situation, but they did and reversing time isn't an option. Fundamentally, it was the City that owned the network; they paid for it, it was theirs. All the authority that Childs ever had was because it was delegated to him by the City. Thus when the City decided it was no longer delegating any authority to him, Childs ceased to have any right to deny access. (Yes, the City may well have been a bunch of dicks, but that should have been a matter for an employment tribunal or something like that, and not an idiotic tussle over network administration access.)
He was also totally not following best practices by not having a strategy in place to cope with his sudden accidental death, e.g., in an auto accident, or pulmonary aneurysm, or being hit by a meteorite, or any number of stupid things that could happen. No, I've got no sympathy for Childs at all. But I won't be working for the City either (even if I was living in the right part of the world and was legally able to do so).