Couldn't have put it better my self. I haven't done any system programming in a while, but this book is indespensible for anyone who has a working knowledge of C and is interested in learning some good system programming.
Don't let the name fool you, no previous system programming experience required.
Bah, this is for the lame and lazy who don't have enough imagination or creativity to actually play the bloody game. I mean, the whole point of this versus sitting down at a computer and playing nethack is supposed to be making the stuff up yourself, right? This is crap and a half. I can see players wanting to get some of the supplement books to trick out their characters using some official criteria, but this isn't a book about tricking out character stats, skills, etc, it's about tricking out a world. If you need that kind of help, you probably don't need to be running your own game or making your own campaign setting to begin with.
I worked in tech support at the time, and I say that as punishment he needs to be tied to a chair witha headset affixed to his head and take calls from people affected by the worm, and try to convince them that he shouldn't be put in prison. Writing a virus or a worm may be a fun/educational excercise, but to release it into the wild is a sign of stupidity, amorality, or sociopathy. In either case he needs to have his nose rubbed in this so he doesn't do it again, and more importantly so the next kid thinks twice before releasing his creation.
Lets just take the voice functionality out of the phones and have portable camera devices that can check email and make electronic dots and dashes. You can still download "dotonze" from the online store, which will play a certain song clip for a dot, and a certain one for a dash, making all communication nigh impossible, but you'll get to listen to the same note over and over again, and will therefore be a "trend-setter."
The justices said there was enough evidence that the Web sites were seeking to profit from their customers' use of the illegally shared files for the case to go back to lower court for trial.
So doesn't this mean that the Supreme Court has simply ordered the lower court to try the case in light of their new ruling?
I'm interested to know how you can rationalize this statement: "but it's in fact the democrats who think it's okay to give authority to a municipality to bulldoze a home to build a Walmart"
with is one: "two democrats voted for this decision. Three other republicans voted for it and four other republicans voted against it".
And when could O'Connor ever be considered a Republican?
This is great news. I've heard enough bad things about paypal that I've avoided ever using it, but that still has all of the associated inconveniences. It will be nice to see an offering from Google that, at the very least, will let Paypal know they're not the only game in town.
To not shop at Amazon. I haven't bought a thing from them since one-click, and just when I'm starting to think that maybe the time has come to move on, they do something like this. I am sufficiently repulsed by this that the thought of purchasing from Amazon again makes me queasie, my ethical stance is justified, and so I shop elsewhere. Thanks for clarifying, Jeff!
I prefer pencil and paper as it allows you to more easily change appointments, but for writing on the back of your hand nothing beats good old fashioned black sharpie.
I think, this time last month, before I had seen him kill a room full of children (or at least had that act so wonderfully left absent, leaving you to imagine you saw it), I would have agreed. That does more to describe Darth Vader's evil than him blowing up a planet of nameless, faceless people. Still, God's Law (v. 2.0) is able to forgive what the law of Men would never tolerate, and in the New Testament reconning, recognizing the act as evil and abhoring it is all that really matters.
Should human society necessarily have that much grace? Luke can manage to forgive his father, but I am curious to know if Leia would be able to. What about Han? For that matter, what about Obi Wan, Yoda, or any of the other jedi whom Darth Vader betrayed?
Sort of inspires me to parody The Trial of Luculus.
It's important to remember that this system was chosen because the Foundaing Fathers knew that the new American people were largely uneducated, and were afraid of the uneducated masses being duped by a charismatic charlitan who would be emperor (like in 2000). District electors are supposed to be comprised of the most respected (which was often synonomous with wealthy and educated) members of the voting district. Even if THEY were duped, there are still the state electors, who were definitely members of the American Aristocracy, to fool. In theory the electoral college creates a thick buffer of supposedly educated people who would never allow a tyrrant to come to power in the event of the unwashed masses being seduced into electing a tyrant.
Before I say that this system is completely unfounded, the parliamentary system has historically produced its share of dictators. The president of the United States still can't make law, and even though he is the civilian authority in command of the military, both the commissioned and non-commissioned officers in the armed services swear oaths to uphold the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic; by defying the constitution the president makes himself a domestic enemy and the armed services are thus no longer bound to obey him. Basically, this means that Bush couldn't legally use the military to stop protesters from burning the flag, and even if he tried, any military personel involved could not legally follow that order.
Basically the worst we have to fear is someone like Bush getting into office, but there are some things that he cannot do: anyone who thinks that Bush wouldn't have burned the constition years ago if he thought he would be able to get away with it, raise your hand. Most likely, if Bush ever did try to realize his Hitlerian ambitions, he would wind up being placed under arrest by at least one of the supreme commanders of the armed services. Pretending that the Vice President didn't oppose such actions, the line of succession draws the next president and vice president from the legislature, which have been elected by the people. In a parliamentary system, the disololution of the government would prevent such a buffer. The checks and balances that we all learned about in grade school were very much designed to maintain the new status quo. Even if Bush is as evil as some of us fear, if he ever tried to really, and I mean not in the legally ambiguous lets all file our supreme court briefs sense of the words, but if he ever really tried to overstep the bounds of his office, he would find himself in prison faster than you could say "High Treason."
The US Consitution is really a brilliant legal document; it creates a government that is not un-doable by a gullible electorate, and at the same time allows for an electorate that doesn't have to trust the government (which most people in the late 18th and early 19th centuries weren't inclined to do beyond their county government and their district representative to the House of Representatives). Basically, it creates checks and ballances for and against everything, even the American People.
but if you accept that open source software is changing and going to further change the industry, than Microsoft is going to have to shake hands with it at the very least. Microsoft doesn't exactly strike me as the kind of company to release many projects using an open source liscence, and they certainly won't do anything unless there is profit in it for them, but I can see a future where Microsoft will, at the very least, begin being more accomodating to the open source community.
Microsoft didn't get to where they are today by being closed to change. Yes, when your on top and control the operating system that most of the world uses, you're perspective tends to be a little bit different than when yuo're the new kid on the block, but it should be becoming appearant to MS that open source is not just a fad, and it should also be apearant to them that it is not something that they can easily make go away, and so they're going to have to develop a buisiness strategy that doestake it into account.
My take on this is that they're testing the waters. See the general reaction to this, and learn some lessons for the next open source release. It's going to be interesting to see how this develops.
Remember, the Cylons won because the humans basically couldn't shoot back. Hell yeah you have superior power when you've sent in a spy to obtain access to the defense mainframe and figure out how to turn off all of your enemy's defensive/offensive capabilities.
As a part time adjunct professor (I don't teach more than 2 courses any given academic year), I must say that while I like the idea of student reviews in theory, in practice I often find that negative reviews come from students who resent being assigned work, do not do said work, and try passing the buck on their failure. The numbers tend to speak for themselves; the number of C or lower grade students tend to be equal to the number of negative reviews, while positive reviews (and ones with constructive criticism) tend to be equal in number to the number of A and B grades distributed.
My personal feeling on this is that the reviews should not be anonymous. Anonymous reviews encourage this kind of libel as they remove the responsibility to provide fact based criticism from the reviewer. Since the professor does not receive the reviews until after the fact, this should not be a problem, although i can see more long term issues with tenured faculty members. My personal vote is that all reviews should be required to have the students name and ID number on them, and that information is kept on file, but is not available to the professor. This gives the student writing the review some sense of accountability; and at the same time, the university should pursue legal action against students who do write libellous comments, or at the very least remove them from the review system.
I do appreciate reviews, and some of the constructive criticism I have received has gone a long way to helping me improve my teaching, but at the same time, I don't believe that unfounded criticism by students who rarely attend class should be able to haunt my personel file for the rest of my professional life.
Why anybody thinks that they have any expectation of privacy in a public environment is beyond me. Yes, it's nice if they put up a sign indicating that your activity is being monitored by video surveilance, and in some locales it is mandates by law that they do. But if you think about it, the expectation to privacy was never meant to apply to a public setting. How else is it possible to have a free and unrestricted press?
How many politicians would not "consent" to having their pictures taken at certain times, or having their words recorded in any media if they could claim a right to privacy. Don't even get started on the sort of crap that your average corporate officer would pull. Think about the terrifying implications of a world where Bush and Ashcroft got to have the final say over exactly what sound bites could be played. On the somewhat less extremist end, it's bad enough that companies are trying to claim that their company memos are intellectual property, but if there was a legal precedent for a right to privacy in public, I have a feeling that most of us wuoldn't have heard of Diebold. Hell, we might not even have heard of the collapse of Enron, or the tragi-comical machinations of SCO. They would, after all, have an expectation of privacy in a public settings, and even liberally interpretted, "privacy" could be defined as communication only between directly involved parties. If you aren't comfortable with having your browsing activity recorded, than you should be doing your browsng at home, where you do have an expectation of privacy.
In all, less gaming value for your hard-earned dollar.
Don't spend your hard-earned dollars for crappy games. All and all, game companies will only charge what they can get away with charging. If I have to pay a subscription fee for Diablo II, I probably never would have bought it, and I certainly wouldn't have bought the expansion, and I have a feeling a lot of people would have cancelled their subscriptions after their 1.10 patch came out.
Likewise, if I had to subscribe to every game for a video console, there is absolutely no incentive for me to pay any money for that console. Maybe I'm in the minority in thinking this way, but I doubt it.
Whatever you do, make sure that you can produce the code, and make it accessable. I don't doubt your honesty, but you should be able to point out to them in exactly what files the offending code resides. For all you know, the company might not even have knowledge that it's there, and given the recent crap with SCO, they are likely to be very distrustful unless you can specify exactly what the code is.
Aside from that, if it does come to court, you should make sure your lawyer is competent to demonstrate that just because a few lines are different doesn't mean that it wasn't copied and then "tweaked" for purposes of legality. A decent lawyer should be able to demonstrate to the judge the different ways of accomplishing the same complex task, overall coding style, etc. And failing a decent lawyer, you may find yourself needing to explain it to said indecent lawyer.
I would, above all else, urge you not to waste time. Send them a friendly email, and make it clear that you expect a response within a reasonable amount of time, and failing that response, or if you should get a dismissive response, your next communication with them should be through a lawyer, on your lawyers letter head, through good old fashioned US Mail.
Pre-emptively, you might gather any and all access logs available to you. Then see if you can find out what IP range the company owns. If you can demonstrate that one of their employees accessed it, that will give you a more direct link. You could always try subpoening the home IPs of the "authors" of this code, but that will be hella hard and take a lot of time.
I was just sitting there checking my email when all of a sudden a stream of smoke started coming from the ac adapter. I tried a new adapter, but it wouldn't draw power from that. Thankfully, it still booted under battery power, and it had enough for me to back up most of my data. After a lengthy battle with compaq, (despite the fact that a similar model adapter had been recalled due to the possibility of over-heating) I was informed that under no circumstances would they even look at the thing.
So in the end, I lost out on $1500+, but I guess I should count my blessings... if the laptop had been running on my desk overnight or something to that effect, my whole apartment would probably have burned down, and I may well have been consumed by the flames.
The lesson I learned is never to buy compaq, as they obviously don't care very much about product quality, potential life threatening hazards, etc. So now my problem is this; I have an adapter from a natioanl electronics chain with a breaker in it, and I have a lap top that would boot under battery power, now I need a power module for the motherboard and instructions for installing it. If anyone out there has any advice on where I could obtain these, I would be much obliged.
Slashdot Mirror
About throwing out the baby with the bathwater?
Couldn't have put it better my self. I haven't done any system programming in a while, but this book is indespensible for anyone who has a working knowledge of C and is interested in learning some good system programming.
Don't let the name fool you, no previous system programming experience required.
Bah, this is for the lame and lazy who don't have enough imagination or creativity to actually play the bloody game. I mean, the whole point of this versus sitting down at a computer and playing nethack is supposed to be making the stuff up yourself, right? This is crap and a half. I can see players wanting to get some of the supplement books to trick out their characters using some official criteria, but this isn't a book about tricking out character stats, skills, etc, it's about tricking out a world. If you need that kind of help, you probably don't need to be running your own game or making your own campaign setting to begin with.
I worked in tech support at the time, and I say that as punishment he needs to be tied to a chair witha headset affixed to his head and take calls from people affected by the worm, and try to convince them that he shouldn't be put in prison. Writing a virus or a worm may be a fun/educational excercise, but to release it into the wild is a sign of stupidity, amorality, or sociopathy. In either case he needs to have his nose rubbed in this so he doesn't do it again, and more importantly so the next kid thinks twice before releasing his creation.
This research indicates that 50% of windows installs are compromised before they've finished booting. No way.
Lets just take the voice functionality out of the phones and have portable camera devices that can check email and make electronic dots and dashes. You can still download "dotonze" from the online store, which will play a certain song clip for a dot, and a certain one for a dash, making all communication nigh impossible, but you'll get to listen to the same note over and over again, and will therefore be a "trend-setter."
So doesn't this mean that the Supreme Court has simply ordered the lower court to try the case in light of their new ruling?
Republican ticket vote. She's one of the swing voters on the court is all I'm implying.
I'm interested to know how you can rationalize this statement: "but it's in fact the democrats who think it's okay to give authority to a municipality to bulldoze a home to build a Walmart"
with is one: "two democrats voted for this decision. Three other republicans voted for it and four other republicans voted against it".
And when could O'Connor ever be considered a Republican?
This is great news. I've heard enough bad things about paypal that I've avoided ever using it, but that still has all of the associated inconveniences. It will be nice to see an offering from Google that, at the very least, will let Paypal know they're not the only game in town.
"I felt a great distrubance in the force; a great number of voices cried out, and were suddenly silenced..."
So maybe I don't have the quotation perfect, but I have yet to meet a fan that thinks the tv show is a good idea.
To not shop at Amazon. I haven't bought a thing from them since one-click, and just when I'm starting to think that maybe the time has come to move on, they do something like this. I am sufficiently repulsed by this that the thought of purchasing from Amazon again makes me queasie, my ethical stance is justified, and so I shop elsewhere. Thanks for clarifying, Jeff!
I prefer pencil and paper as it allows you to more easily change appointments, but for writing on the back of your hand nothing beats good old fashioned black sharpie.
I think, this time last month, before I had seen him kill a room full of children (or at least had that act so wonderfully left absent, leaving you to imagine you saw it), I would have agreed. That does more to describe Darth Vader's evil than him blowing up a planet of nameless, faceless people. Still, God's Law (v. 2.0) is able to forgive what the law of Men would never tolerate, and in the New Testament reconning, recognizing the act as evil and abhoring it is all that really matters.
Should human society necessarily have that much grace? Luke can manage to forgive his father, but I am curious to know if Leia would be able to. What about Han? For that matter, what about Obi Wan, Yoda, or any of the other jedi whom Darth Vader betrayed?
Sort of inspires me to parody The Trial of Luculus.
Couldn't having a lock on your door be admitted as evidence of wrong doing by logical extension?
...and call them brilliant. Any guesses as to whom will be invited to help co-author the next version of the DMCA or USAPATRIOT act?
It's important to remember that this system was chosen because the Foundaing Fathers knew that the new American people were largely uneducated, and were afraid of the uneducated masses being duped by a charismatic charlitan who would be emperor (like in 2000). District electors are supposed to be comprised of the most respected (which was often synonomous with wealthy and educated) members of the voting district. Even if THEY were duped, there are still the state electors, who were definitely members of the American Aristocracy, to fool. In theory the electoral college creates a thick buffer of supposedly educated people who would never allow a tyrrant to come to power in the event of the unwashed masses being seduced into electing a tyrant.
Before I say that this system is completely unfounded, the parliamentary system has historically produced its share of dictators. The president of the United States still can't make law, and even though he is the civilian authority in command of the military, both the commissioned and non-commissioned officers in the armed services swear oaths to uphold the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic; by defying the constitution the president makes himself a domestic enemy and the armed services are thus no longer bound to obey him. Basically, this means that Bush couldn't legally use the military to stop protesters from burning the flag, and even if he tried, any military personel involved could not legally follow that order.
Basically the worst we have to fear is someone like Bush getting into office, but there are some things that he cannot do: anyone who thinks that Bush wouldn't have burned the constition years ago if he thought he would be able to get away with it, raise your hand. Most likely, if Bush ever did try to realize his Hitlerian ambitions, he would wind up being placed under arrest by at least one of the supreme commanders of the armed services. Pretending that the Vice President didn't oppose such actions, the line of succession draws the next president and vice president from the legislature, which have been elected by the people. In a parliamentary system, the disololution of the government would prevent such a buffer. The checks and balances that we all learned about in grade school were very much designed to maintain the new status quo. Even if Bush is as evil as some of us fear, if he ever tried to really, and I mean not in the legally ambiguous lets all file our supreme court briefs sense of the words, but if he ever really tried to overstep the bounds of his office, he would find himself in prison faster than you could say "High Treason."
The US Consitution is really a brilliant legal document; it creates a government that is not un-doable by a gullible electorate, and at the same time allows for an electorate that doesn't have to trust the government (which most people in the late 18th and early 19th centuries weren't inclined to do beyond their county government and their district representative to the House of Representatives). Basically, it creates checks and ballances for and against everything, even the American People.
but if you accept that open source software is changing and going to further change the industry, than Microsoft is going to have to shake hands with it at the very least. Microsoft doesn't exactly strike me as the kind of company to release many projects using an open source liscence, and they certainly won't do anything unless there is profit in it for them, but I can see a future where Microsoft will, at the very least, begin being more accomodating to the open source community.
Microsoft didn't get to where they are today by being closed to change. Yes, when your on top and control the operating system that most of the world uses, you're perspective tends to be a little bit different than when yuo're the new kid on the block, but it should be becoming appearant to MS that open source is not just a fad, and it should also be apearant to them that it is not something that they can easily make go away, and so they're going to have to develop a buisiness strategy that doestake it into account.
My take on this is that they're testing the waters. See the general reaction to this, and learn some lessons for the next open source release. It's going to be interesting to see how this develops.
Janus was also the god of beginnings and endings. Convenient.
Remember, the Cylons won because the humans basically couldn't shoot back. Hell yeah you have superior power when you've sent in a spy to obtain access to the defense mainframe and figure out how to turn off all of your enemy's defensive/offensive capabilities.
As a part time adjunct professor (I don't teach more than 2 courses any given academic year), I must say that while I like the idea of student reviews in theory, in practice I often find that negative reviews come from students who resent being assigned work, do not do said work, and try passing the buck on their failure. The numbers tend to speak for themselves; the number of C or lower grade students tend to be equal to the number of negative reviews, while positive reviews (and ones with constructive criticism) tend to be equal in number to the number of A and B grades distributed.
My personal feeling on this is that the reviews should not be anonymous. Anonymous reviews encourage this kind of libel as they remove the responsibility to provide fact based criticism from the reviewer. Since the professor does not receive the reviews until after the fact, this should not be a problem, although i can see more long term issues with tenured faculty members. My personal vote is that all reviews should be required to have the students name and ID number on them, and that information is kept on file, but is not available to the professor. This gives the student writing the review some sense of accountability; and at the same time, the university should pursue legal action against students who do write libellous comments, or at the very least remove them from the review system.
I do appreciate reviews, and some of the constructive criticism I have received has gone a long way to helping me improve my teaching, but at the same time, I don't believe that unfounded criticism by students who rarely attend class should be able to haunt my personel file for the rest of my professional life.
Why anybody thinks that they have any expectation of privacy in a public environment is beyond me. Yes, it's nice if they put up a sign indicating that your activity is being monitored by video surveilance, and in some locales it is mandates by law that they do. But if you think about it, the expectation to privacy was never meant to apply to a public setting. How else is it possible to have a free and unrestricted press?
How many politicians would not "consent" to having their pictures taken at certain times, or having their words recorded in any media if they could claim a right to privacy. Don't even get started on the sort of crap that your average corporate officer would pull. Think about the terrifying implications of a world where Bush and Ashcroft got to have the final say over exactly what sound bites could be played. On the somewhat less extremist end, it's bad enough that companies are trying to claim that their company memos are intellectual property, but if there was a legal precedent for a right to privacy in public, I have a feeling that most of us wuoldn't have heard of Diebold. Hell, we might not even have heard of the collapse of Enron, or the tragi-comical machinations of SCO. They would, after all, have an expectation of privacy in a public settings, and even liberally interpretted, "privacy" could be defined as communication only between directly involved parties. If you aren't comfortable with having your browsing activity recorded, than you should be doing your browsng at home, where you do have an expectation of privacy.
Let the modding-down commence!
In all, less gaming value for your hard-earned dollar.
Don't spend your hard-earned dollars for crappy games. All and all, game companies will only charge what they can get away with charging. If I have to pay a subscription fee for Diablo II, I probably never would have bought it, and I certainly wouldn't have bought the expansion, and I have a feeling a lot of people would have cancelled their subscriptions after their 1.10 patch came out.
Likewise, if I had to subscribe to every game for a video console, there is absolutely no incentive for me to pay any money for that console. Maybe I'm in the minority in thinking this way, but I doubt it.
Whatever you do, make sure that you can produce the code, and make it accessable. I don't doubt your honesty, but you should be able to point out to them in exactly what files the offending code resides. For all you know, the company might not even have knowledge that it's there, and given the recent crap with SCO, they are likely to be very distrustful unless you can specify exactly what the code is.
Aside from that, if it does come to court, you should make sure your lawyer is competent to demonstrate that just because a few lines are different doesn't mean that it wasn't copied and then "tweaked" for purposes of legality. A decent lawyer should be able to demonstrate to the judge the different ways of accomplishing the same complex task, overall coding style, etc. And failing a decent lawyer, you may find yourself needing to explain it to said indecent lawyer.
I would, above all else, urge you not to waste time. Send them a friendly email, and make it clear that you expect a response within a reasonable amount of time, and failing that response, or if you should get a dismissive response, your next communication with them should be through a lawyer, on your lawyers letter head, through good old fashioned US Mail.
Pre-emptively, you might gather any and all access logs available to you. Then see if you can find out what IP range the company owns. If you can demonstrate that one of their employees accessed it, that will give you a more direct link. You could always try subpoening the home IPs of the "authors" of this code, but that will be hella hard and take a lot of time.
Best of luck to you!
I was just sitting there checking my email when all of a sudden a stream of smoke started coming from the ac adapter. I tried a new adapter, but it wouldn't draw power from that. Thankfully, it still booted under battery power, and it had enough for me to back up most of my data. After a lengthy battle with compaq, (despite the fact that a similar model adapter had been recalled due to the possibility of over-heating) I was informed that under no circumstances would they even look at the thing.
So in the end, I lost out on $1500+, but I guess I should count my blessings... if the laptop had been running on my desk overnight or something to that effect, my whole apartment would probably have burned down, and I may well have been consumed by the flames.
The lesson I learned is never to buy compaq, as they obviously don't care very much about product quality, potential life threatening hazards, etc. So now my problem is this; I have an adapter from a natioanl electronics chain with a breaker in it, and I have a lap top that would boot under battery power, now I need a power module for the motherboard and instructions for installing it. If anyone out there has any advice on where I could obtain these, I would be much obliged.