First images from a lander millions of miles away with INACCURATE colour (NASA colour images are almost always "false-colour" because it's incredibly difficult to do accurate colour reproduction and also the press like the Mars soil to look a bit red - I'm not joking here), of a planet under (to normal humans) extremes of temperature and pressure, which has taken real scientists (you know, those blokes that put the lander up there in the first place) DAYS to decide if what they were even seeing before COULD be ice... and you take one look and say "Nah, it's not." - with precisely zero experience of low-pressure, distant planets and their atmospheres, chemical makeup and physical appearances of "common" substances under those characteristics. Weird stuff happens under "unusual" conditions like that, we know because we can simulate it on Earth.
The more likely scenario is that the scoop isn't all that powerful that it can "dig" through solid ice to make shavings. Get a toy motor-controlled Tonka crane (an good approximation of the power of the landers arms but still strong enough to do the job, i.e. shift soil) and try to scrape a bloke of ice with it under motor-control. It's REALLY not easy, you won't get shavings, you won't get anything (besides the fact that "shavings" would sublimate or not exist in such conditions anyway) - and that's "ordinary" frozen ice at "normal" pressures and temperatures (this stuff is sub-sub-zero under incredibly low pressure - it's like taking an industrial cryogenic plant and sticking it into the upper atmosphere). If the scoop can't dig through the ice, what it does is scrape the debris off the top of it. This would clear the top of the ice block of soil, thus allowing you to see it. It will take a few moments (I don't know how long because I haven't done the maths, but neither have you so it hardly matters) and a lot of energy for it to do ANYTHING but when it does it'll *probably* go from solid to gas with no liquid in between. Something you don't see in your bathtub or freezer every day.
However, there may well be a layer of "haze" or "mist" if you like directly over the ice (think dry ice here on Earth under normal Earth pressures for an *example* of the sort of thing). It also looks to me (pure speculation) that the lower soil actually has solid ice as part of it's makeup (look at the animated GIF), so it's probably combined ice/soil. The scoop has dug through to that and that's what you see sublimating, looking a little like "wet soil" for an instant (like when you spray a compressed-air-can onto soil here on Earth - you get a "wet patch" which is really the liquid/gaseous air at a low temperature, but which very quickly turns into a gas that's able to float off into the air).
Basically - you're applying FAR TOO MUCH of what you see in your kitchen to conditions that are NOWHERE NEAR those you expect to find in your average IKEA product. Even the people who put the lander up there could only guess what to expect and they were the ones spending millions of dollars trying to get up there and double-check.
It's partly the universities, mainly the schools but in the end it also comes down to the coders and their equipment at home.
1) Most people who go in for CS degrees know bugger-all about computers. It's sad but true. These people will probably NEVER program again once they leave, they will end up either typing in data all day, fixing computers or (in very rare instances) coding trivialities. I can name five top ICT teachers who programmed in COBOL and all sorts of exotic languages and who NEVER did it again for any reason. I can name twenty of the same who now specialise in English or Science or some other non-related subject.
Student's knowledge of algorithms is purely a memory aspect in order to pass the exams. This is because they are taught in school that "computers are the future" and "you should learn computers", so they fiddle on a machine and install iTunes and think they could be the next ID Software. Most teaching staff in schools have absolutely no idea what's involved in CS and just recommend those who "are good at computer stuff" to get a CS degree if nothing else beckons. Many of these people hate mathematics and drop out quite quickly. Most of the rest of the students just think it's cool to get better access to the computers and mess about on them for three years.
2) Of those that *do* end up programming, there are two types: those who probably started programming long before anybody "taught" them how to do it. Those types (we'll call them the hobbyists) probably know more languages, constructs and algorithms before they start a CS course than everybody else does *after* the course. The other type are those that find they can knock up a program "good enough". These types of people are rarely interested in coding as a hobby and will usually go on to make business apps, if anything. The hobbyists would *love* to code games all day long.
3) You don't get many of these "hobbyist" programmers at all because most of them code for years before being taught, by which time they "think they know better", or they have something missing: Access to hardware, languages, artistic teams, etc. There is no hobbyist programming platform anymore (like the ZX Spectrum, etc.) - to get started on programming for a simple device you either have to use extremely high-level "games-creators", or you're into setting up development environments on "hacked" or "chipped" hardware, or buying expensive development suites. Most of these things you end up paying money for, one way or another. There is no "pick up and program" system any more where back in the days of Codemasters, etc. it was ALL that was available. Every computer you found could be easily programmed without having to do ANYTHING to it. They came with languages BUILT-IN. The IBM PS/2 - turn it on, you're in BASIC. Programming tools just don't come with computers anymore - it's all development kits, seperate programs, etc.
4) The fun of programming was in fun languages, with crappy interfaces, horrible programming principles, and low-level techniques that required you to use your brains in order to squeeze the most out of a pittance of cpu-cycles - misuse goto and save yourself twenty cycles. You found most things out by accident or experiment and you would program a game just for the hell of it.
Nowadays, anyone can knock up a program in minutes but they don't know how/why it works, or how to make it better - it's all just libraries and "magic boxes". Take away their development environment and they wouldn't be able to write a batch file, let alone a program in C (and in fact most kids, even the computer-geeks, know bugger-all that isn't available in a GUI anymore, for instance. Tell them to write a progam and they go looking for the "Write a program" icon - DOS is a mystical thing to them that they won't bother to learn). These kids just don't care - they don't see how the games are written, they have no patience to write their own and they have no help.
Killing the command-line, BASIC and similar languag
Not being American, I probably wouldn't qualify anyway, but here's my guess:
1) The first letter in DARPA stands for "defense"
Most serious scientists want to create and explore, not destroy. Does NASA have problems hiring? THAT would be news. Actually they probably do have problems, as does anyone trying to get "real" scientists these days. I'd actually expect DARPA to be the last place to "dry up" because it won't get an enormous percentage of otherwise-eligible scientists apply.
2) Money.
Government agencies tend not to pay anywhere near market rates and if they do, they certainly don't keep up with those rates after a few years.
3)
I'm afraid this item is classified information and you may never, ever discuss it with anyone, ever.
4) Freedom.
Work for the government for a pittance to develop something that will then be claimed as a government invention, or work for a serious research place where you will get some credit and be able to discuss your ideas with others (that is, basically, what science is all about). You'll be able to research just about anything you want, in all kinds of esoteric fields, rather than being forced back to "make me something that'll kill more people", for instance. You'll (hopefully) be able to do it without a massive committee of people with their own agenda pushing you into areas you have little interest in.
Of course they do (usually, on average, in general). The problem is proportion. There's no point in telling all the non-disabled people in the world to walk at 0.5mph because that's all the wheelchair user can manage and we don't want to make them feel left out. Similarly, we don't want to have to employ 3 people in order to carry the wheelchair user everywhere at "normal" speed. There's a point where you have to recognise your own weaknesses and adjust your life to cater for them.
This is a problem - we "want" every kid to get A's when in fact the idea of factoring out levels such as A, B, C was to take account of the differences between each child - you'll never get 30 randomly-chosen kids to achieve the same grade. So you have one of two results - either every kid fails (and feels a failure, and is classed as a failure) because they didn't get the grade you wanted them to (in the UK, this is the magic "5 A-C's at GCSE", or every kid gets an A because you broaden the category to include them all (thus, the kids who put in effort see no reward at all compared to those who did nothing) - the UK does this one as well because of the above idea not working. Neither of these is a smart thing to do but schools the world over are doing both. We *used* to allocate children to sets by ability but apparently that's no longer politically correct.
This is the problem. At the moment, a VAST proportion of funds, resources, staff, etc. are directed to aid the lower-sets in mixed classes, in order to keep up with EVERYONE in the class. You can't do that - some kids are naturally more suited to certain topics, some kids are naturally quicker to learn, some kids naturally put in more effort. So you end up with a class where every pupil is either held back or made to feel stupid. Were you to extract those lower-set pupils, put them together and teach a single class at their level, you wouldn't need a teaching assistant in every single class, you wouldn't need to "bring down" the higher-achieving (by that I mean effort, not skill or intelligence) pupils, you wouldn't be alienating the lower-sets because they'd feel comfortable working at a slightly slower pace etc. and you'd spend vastly less to get the same job done.
What you're suggesting, in effect, is that we knock down all the universities and make all the students become home-helps. It doesn't work in practice. What's needed is what ACTUALLY happens in the real world - we help those less fortunate as much as we can by getting those who are more fortunate to find ways to help them - this means NOT getting in the way of the more fortunate by (proverbially) kicking them out of university to be a home-help.
My wife, when she was in school, went to a Parent's Evening with her father. Her father spent twenty minutes talking to her Maths teacher privately, then called her over.
Father: "Mr Smith says you're too stupid to take Advanced Maths" (he didn't - but that was the gist) (Mr Smith the teacher looks horrified) Daughter: "Oh, okay dad." (Daughter takes other subjects, passes with flying colours).
That's what people these days don't want to do. It's seen as "bad".
Cor, that must have been a tricky topic to research. I don't know how they come to such magnificent conclusions.
More importantly, teachers and students have been telling people this for YEARS.
Think about the effort used to get one lazy kid (kids don't have to be smart, but they should put in some effort) to pass a simple test when they're not interested in doing so. Work in a school - all you ever hear from such kids is "My dad'll get me a job" and you'll have teachers and teaching assistants basically doing the work for them multiple times over to get the right figures into the brackets that the school/government wants.
Meanwhile, all the bright kids who finished within ten minutes are bored to tears, have to wait for them to catch up, are getting no attention and so they play up. This wastes EVERYONE's time.
It's not an intelligence issue, it's an effort issue, spawned by a culture where hard work isn't rewarded and no or little work *is* rewarded - they see Daddy sit at home on benefits and affording all the latest toys and they want that for themselves. Every school I've ever worked in - the kids who win the awards/trips/treats are those that behaved/achieved for a week when they never normally would while the ones who do behave/achieve all the time are ignored and denied such incentives.
This was true twenty years ago when I was at school and is still true today. Don't bother to work and you get dozens of staff clamour round you all day long every day and try to "help" you, whether you want help or not. You get out of "normal" lessons, you get all the same breaks, treats and incentives (if not more) and you don't have to do much at all. Then, when you do bother to show that you can add two and two, you get a reward and magnificant praise, while the rest of the class are working away and being shouted at for dropping half a point on the top-level test.
There's a point at which a child is old enough to sort himself out. When that point is reached, it's up to THEM to motivate themselves. If they want to storm out of a lesson - goodbye, don't bother coming back for the rest of the day, week, term. The trouble is that this is propogating down to younger and younger kids and you get primary-school children who do nothing all day but roam corridors, have screaming fits, throw chairs and then get rewarded when they STOP.
I blame it partly on bad parenting, partly on the schools need to provide good results across the board if they don't want to get shutdown/taken over, partly on stupid inclusion policies that don't consider the effects for anyone but the problem child and partly on "politically correct" child management (never punish, only reward, except you end up only ever rewarding those who are suddenly do what they should have been doing anyway).
I work in schools but I don't teach *precisely* because of this. If you don't want to learn, I wouldn't want you in my class distracting people who do. But, in modern times, it no longer works like that.
The key point of your comment is "(assume that the painting is old enough to be in the public domain)". That's my point here - the game's screenshots in question are OBVIOUSLY not in the public domain - they are screenshots of copyright artworks (the games) which are not in the public domain and whose use is not covered by any fair use or (presumably) licensing agreement.
For art STILL UNDER COPYRIGHT, this is the same situation. Yes, the Mona Lisa's copyright may have expired by now but most "modern" art (as in recent, not style) is still copyright the artist - Matisse artworks, for example, were heavily protected when I was last in a gallery (I don't know what the UK copyright period is offhand) - they didn't even have images of them on their own computer database just a "Sorry, still under copyright" notice.
Thus any photographs of "recent" artworks are therefore copies... which you can't do under copyright without permission. Even the museums/galleries themselves can't put images of such works on their websites (except in fair-use situations of limited resolution etc.) without permission.
Art, books, it's all the same. You can no more walk into a library and take photographs of every page of an in-copyright book than you can take photographs of in-copyright artworks (exceptions such as fair use etc. exist but have many clauses such as the percentage of the original work you use and what for etc.). And you *certainly* can't distribute those same photos and you *definitely* cannot sell them for profit (which is what has been done with this software's artwork).
"Museums and art galleries can charge you for a print because they created a new work when they photographed or scanned the original."
Yes. With the original copyright-holders permission. Or on expired-copyright (therefore public-domain) images. For instance, Beatrix Potter illustrations are too old to be covered by copyright (in some countries) and thus the originals you can do what you want with. The "new prints" of the books you can't (at least, not without Frederick Warne's permission...)
However, you can't copy and distribute the latest John Grisham without permission/licensing without getting sued.
"I have several photographs of paintings taken in the Hermitage, I took the photographs, so the copyright is mine."
Unfortunately, the copyright of the painting in the first place may well not have been yours. If the picture was old (and therefore out-of-copyright), then yes, the copyright on the photograph is yours. If not, your photograph is actually nothing more than a copyright infringement unless the use of the original image was incidental (i.e. a photo of you standing in a gallery with it behind you).
"The Hermitage don't in any sense, and never did, own the copyright on my photos."
No. And they probably don't own the copyright on the original artworks either. But the artist (or their agent) probably still do if it's a *recent* artwork.
"I didn't need their permission to take photographs of the works."
No. You need the copyright holder's permission. Who probably won't be the gallery itself. This is why they don't allow photographs in most galleries/museums that are showing ANY recent works.
"But once the works enter the public domain, you can't legally stop people making copies"
Correct. But that's not what we're talking about here. The screenshots of the games contain copyright artwork which are not in the public domain, neither are they fair use, or any of the other exceptions allowed for copyright (in the UK there are limited provisions for educational use, for example, which allow quite a lot of copyright material to be copied to a greater extent if it's to be used within a classroom environment).
The Eiffel Tower example was always rubbish anyway - I'm not sure that you can claim copyright on a public display (because fireworks display people would try to cash in, basically) and neither were a lot of people involved. But from wha
Er... even a screenshot of copyrighted material is still copyright. Copyright does not mean "bit for bit copies of the original data". It covers the whole work in all forms and interpretations. Hence why the museums and art galleries can charge you for prints of artwork - it's still under copyright, even if you're only buying a photo of a work of art.
And some places HAVE claimed copyright of landmarks - the Eiffel Tower is one. That's a bit more dubious, though. However, pressing PrintScreen and adding some skulls does not make for an original piece, in the same way as me photocopying your book and changing the main character from Harry Potter to Terry Petter doesn't.
It's either original art, created by YOU, or it's taken from somewhere else. If it's taken from somewhere else, it's a potential copyright violation if you don't have permission.
If he chooses to do it, let him. It's his downfall.
However, if he tries to make *you* (or the IT team etc.) do it, then you question it heavily and ask for a *signed, written* note from himself describing what he wants you to do before you'll do it. Just asking for that will raise enough doubt in his mind to put him off unless he's incredibly stupid. If it's illegal, it shows that HE ordered it, despite your reservations and considered it part of your job despite your protests.
If the very mention of written evidence gets you sacked, it's a matter for a tribunal, which will make it much harder for him to explain his (probably illegal in most civilised countries) behaviour. Trust me, if that's the case, you really DON'T want to be working there anyway and it would only be a matter of time before something else came up of a similar sort.
On the "explanation" side, you don't need to explain. It's very simple. Your competitor probably broke several Data Protection Act's or similar laws by accidentally including the private emails of customers in an email to all the other customers. Using such information yourself is not only breaking the same laws, but worse (because you have no right to that data at all, rather than a simple accident).
It also leaves you open to accusations of "stealing" business (like the court cases which arise when people "take" business address books filled with customers to start their own competing company). This is very bad and very easy to get found out, especially if one of those emails on that list happens to be, say, the PR officer's brother, or their PR proofreader or something - if they work out that YOUR company had access to private data belonging to their business through a legal mistake and that you used it to competitive advantage, your company could be in BIG trouble.
Then you have the fact that in most countries it's illegal to spam at all. Then you have problems such as customers bringing private actions against you for sending such spam. The company image being degraded, customers getting irate and wasting your time to cancel/complain about your spam, there are a million and one problems.
For instance, I personally use unique emails for every website, every company, every competition I enter, etc. encoded in a way that companies can't tell... it's not as simple as microsoft@mydomain.com, but I wouldn't be surprised if a great many people use such a system. And because I have made it easy to check which email is available to which companies, I *do* check emails, ESPECIALLY SPAM, for their To: address. Most auto-generated spam has a faked username prefix on the address and thus is instantly filtered. Companies, which tend to spam adddresses that they've verified are true (e.g. customers etc.), that spam my address get their prefix filtered, too. Which leaves a whitelist of "genuine" prefixes at my domain that go straight to my inbox.
When spam DOES accidentally arrive at my inbox (say, addressed to office_supplies_company@mydomain.com), either because my filter fails or because someone spams a "real" address without permission, I complain to the company involved. The usual first reponse is "it wasn't us" until the situation is properly explained in a nice recorded-delivery letter to their head office citing their own privacy policies. This is usually swiftly followed by a rapid retraction of their statements, a removal of my address from their databases and an instant blacklist for their company emails. But, then, my country has good Data Protection laws.
If just ONE of those customers has such a system, you're going to get more hassle in terms of data management, fielding calls, reading letters etc. than you can make up for in sales to people whom you've spammed, that are not interested in your/your business and would already be using you instead of that "competitor" if they were.
And then, there's the "being stupid" factor - the SECOND I saw such tricks being pulled (competing companies directly trying to
Scientists don't NEED to explain it... that's the job of the "scientists" that invented it.
If it's real, every scientist will then nod and go "Yup, they're right".
Scientists really don't give a crap about people's crackpot theories unless they *are* going to affect the known laws of science. That's where science gets interesting. Did you know, for example, that there are quantum effects that "get" energy from nowhere and then "return" it later in time. They literally "borrow" energy from the future. Much, much, much more interesting that most scientific things. However, when you do the maths, it *still* all works out and comes out to nice equations in X dimensions etc.
But a car that "runs on water" is so much crap it's unbelievable without MUCH, MUCH more information - how do you start the reaction, what inputs are there to the systems, how much energy is produced, where does that energy come from? There are a million unanswered questions and it's only a scientists job to ask them of such an "inventor", not to answer them. When the answers are forthcoming, then we can check them and see if it adds up. If they don't fit the theorems we have (for which there are no known counter-examples), then we need to investigate more. But "it just does" means they won't even look. It's a crackpot-answer, as is silence.
If you invent a perpetual motion machine, the top scientists in the world are not going to come running. Hundreds of them get invented every single day. If even science students ran round to every one, there'd be nobody left to do any real science. It's not up to science to disprove your theory, it's up to you to prove it. That's how it works, even between scientists in their own community.
A hundred scientists looking at your theory and not being able to disprove it is NOTHING in comparison to being able to provide a complete proof compatible with all known laws. It's not even close to rigourous science to say "it runs on water" and even the pseudo-science explanations are NOWHERE near rigourous answers. This is why mathematicians (who all also scientists, just as much, and in fact physics is more maths than what you would call science) hated the four-colour-theorem proof, it was done on computer and although they couldn't find any counter-examples, they also couldn't understand the proof because of the sheer size of it. However, within a few years, they were able to prove it's "correctness" and THEN they accepted it.
Signs of a crackpot:
No detailed scientific information on the critical process: Check No peer-review of the technology: Check No published papers: Check Unknown, heavily-debunked or non-existent scientists: Check No announcement of breaking scientific laws BEFORE you've built a product on the basis: Check Pseudo-science statements that are empty and meaningless: Check A magical, unexplained source of "energy" (amazing how much that word is misused in everything from Reiki healing to water-dowsing): Check Breaking KNOWN laws of physics in so many ways without explanation of how the equations match up, or where the extra energy comes from, or what the "new" equations would be: Check YouTube before New Scientist: Check
According to QI - a TV show with *real* researchers from Oxford University whose sole aim is to dispel some common myths, including everything Admiral Lord Nelson's last words ("Drink drink, fan fan, rub rub" and not "Kiss me, Hardy" even though he said the last one as well) to the number of natural satellites the Earth has - Columbus KNEW for certain that the world wasn't flat - he believed it to be pear-shaped. And as you rightly point out, there is any amount of earlier evidence that show people KNEW it wasn't flat.
But people perpetuate thousand-year-old myths as easily as this.
Hence, when someone claims free-energy, perpetual motion, etc. then you need SCIENTISTS (real ones, with respect in the community and a pot-load of previous research in the area which has all been peer-reviewed) before anything is "real". The fact that there is little to no information about HOW it's done is not due to patents, etc. (which as soon as you apply for, you are able to TELL people, and they still can't just steal your idea), it's because the real scientists will point out the holes (like - you need to plug it in for it to work, it consumes a lot more energy than it produces in useful work, etc.). Any decent scientist/company that had "invented" this would be SCREAMING it from the rafters and have a slew of patents and scientific papers available, along with a hundred papers on *how* well it works and how they can make it better.
To sum it: It's balls. It's sales patter. Don't trust salesman.
Additionally, even IF people thought the world was flat, it was because of ignorance, not that they had an incomplete knowledge of science. Simple science experiments show the curvature of the Earth very quickly. There wasn't a good stock of "true" scientists until at least the 1700/1800's. The simplest knowledge of science shows you that the world is an oblate spheroid, and in the same way, the simplest knowledge of science tells you that what they claim can only be true if there are caveats - such as it needing some other material, some other energy input etc.
Probably not what you want specifically but may be useful for other people:
A while ago I gave my girlfriend a little portable "CD player" that also plays direct from SD cards and USB drives, plays MP3 CD's, radio, etc. for about £40 (probably a lot cheaper by now). Runs off batteries or mains. Was one of the best buys I've made, especially given that the £40 was in vouchers that we'd won on a competition.
It's not hard, but lots of place do it. I agree it's stupid not to.
Schools, for instance, generally run a "curriculum" and an "admin" network - one for the kids, one for the staff. Joining both is seen as an extremely bad thing. But there's usually absolutely nothing stopping people from connecting to random websites from the admin (even in the finance offices etc.).
Bring back the old days of text menus:
1. Pay in 2. Pay out 3. Print
Reduce the interface, reduce the capabilities, reduce the vulnerabilities.
If you're car display lights up and flashes, people take notice but still I've seen people ignore the warning lights and just drive (sorry, but women are actually the worst culprits).
A computer is a black box to people and a few flashing lights/slowness mean nothing to them. It could be that their P2P app has just kicked in or their printer is printing or a million other things... people can't diagnose it, therefore they don't care about it.
You will *not* educate the masses, no matter what damage you do to their computers - these people are buying new computers every year because "the old one got slow", where in reality it was running at the same speed but just bogged down with viruses.
The way to do it is not to trust them to be able to spot it, or need to. That is, make a computer that takes care of such things. This is what privilege seperation do when they are implemented properly, but even on the strictest controlled networks, you'll find something users can do that wasn't designed for or intended. However, the fix is in the design and execution, not the dumb idiot who just wants to send an email to his family.
Not surprised. Took it's time. Why isn't every virus doing this?
Seriously, this has always been possible, always been a threat. It's not surprising. It's "different" but you can't even call some parts of that "new"... other people thought of these things years ago.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next step is an "evolution"... instead of a simple worm, we get a virus that changes itself programmatically to avoid detection, uses information from previous successful hacks to propogate itself (e.g. "People click on me if I claim to be from this website... I'll send out some more of me claiming to be from that and similar websites"), or authors piggy-back increasingly more complex viruses on the back of Storm, so that eventually there is just a "swarm", instead of a "Storm".
And then the "virus swarm" will be seen as a single entity and you'll be defending your computers against it and reading adverts for "Anti-SWARM" software, etc.
I assume they mean "software/hardware vulnerability", and that the other 75% are people doing stupid things - "human vulnerabilities" or even "policy vulnerabilities". It's interesting in itself though that 75% of the attacks are due to, presumably, direct human error and nothing to do with the data being on computer.
So when you're bank next releases your details, don't accept an explanation. Most probably, someone who works there did something incredibly stupid and deliberate, rather than they got hacked or outwitted.
The capital cost to build and equip a semiconductor fabrication facility (presumably from scratch) has increased exponentially over time from approximately $6 million in 1970, to in excess of $2 billion for next generation 300mm Fabs coming on-line in the 2001- 2002 timeframe... If the current trend in fabrication facility costs continues, the cost of a Fab will exceed ***$10 billion*** by 2007, and may reach $18 billion by 2010.
And now:
The International Space Station has been far more expensive than originally anticipated. The ESA estimates the overall cost from the start of the project in the early 1990s to the prospective end in 2017 to be in the region of 100 billion (***$157 billion*** or £65.3 billion).
Even taking into account the over-budget of the ISS, the cost of building a single space station (with the help of MANY countries) is way, way, way, way over building a new semiconductor plant on earth every, say, five years or so. And that's assuming that the size, cost, and other factors inherent in the ISS are anywhere near that needed to pump out useful, complex semiconductors (they can't even make a loo work properly, so I think we're safe to say that it isn't).
It's an utterly ludicrous idea to suggest it's even viable within the next few decades, let alone at all, and certainly not given that being in space doesn't help *anyone*, it just complicates a million things. That new factory you've built? You've gotta check and change EVERY component to work in space reliably. You've gotta get tons and tons of equipment and raw materials up there and somehow have a test facility up there too.
It's pure science fiction. We'll build a moonbase that has it's own semi-conductor fab before private companies start doing "research" like this.
1) How do they know it's illegal? Are they aware of every jurisdiction?
2) Are they aware of the *actual* contents of any particular file downloaded? Some cases have been brought on the basis that the filenames were suspicious.
3) Are they aware of my private collection of CD's which, in this modern era, are quicker to download than to rip from the CD? No.
4) Are they aware of my fair use rights, and therefore my ability to exercise them by downloading songs I already have, which has been "approved" by some record labels / artists / courts in some jurisdictions?
5) Do they bother to check their facts BEFORE filing a lawsuit? Apparently not, unless it's to offer "peace treaties" where people sign away rights (including fair use) on the basis of a promise not to prosecute, even when that wouldn't stand up in a court of law.
Apparently, none of the above count when they file lawsuits. That's the problem, not them chasing after people copying copyright material.
So I disagree with their policy. I disagree with many of the lawsuits. I disagree with their tactics. I disagree with their interpretation and publicity surrounding copyright law (the word "pirate" or "theft", for example, when there is no intention to permanently deprive). I disagree with their ignorance of jurisdiction and applicable laws. I disagree with their attempts to strip *existing and well established* rights of my own, on the basis of rumour. I disagree with blanket contracts that people are frightened into signing. I disagree with their pricing policies. I disagree with their segmentation of the market (only offering certain songs online etc.).
And yet, I'm *trying* to give them bloody money. But I'm not doing anything wrong. And all the methods where I can do this either want to charge me all-over-again for the same songs I already have, or punish me by removing my ability to do so (DRM, FUD etc.). Guess why a lot of people hate them. Guess why a lot of less-lawful people just decide to rip their music anyway and don't care for their ramblings. Guess why "piracy" (Yuck!) is rife and they "aren't making money" (Rubbish!).
It's all a scam, based on little actual legal content. The big players won't be stopped by a little bit of DRM or their favourite torrent site going down. The only people to suffer are their prime customer market - people who want to pay them for a song, once, and then have their song (minus broadcast, performance rights etc.) for the course of their life.
Where's the news? This is a slashvertisement for dzone.com (twice, actually) and a dying, primitive programmer's text editor.
The linked-to article about "Enerjy" says it in no uncertain terms - there were no sales for this type of product. There was also an overbearing impetus within the company itself that free/open source software could do parts of the job just as well, and they were considering using it themselves. The whole industry of "text editors for programmers" has always been niche, and now is dead. I can't say that Open Source has much to do with it so much as "overwhelming choice".
"Years of work and cutting-edge research went into this editor, and it rivals, even surpasses, commercial editors that are selling for $100, $200, even $400 a pop."
It's an editor. I think that cutting-edge research is pushing it a bit but even $100 a pop seems expensive for what is a glorified text editor. Even if you did make $400 each time, did you really ever think that's going to continue forever?
"First of all, I should mention that UNA is a source code editor, not an IDE. It's a very sophisticated editor, well on the road to becoming an IDE, but it doesn't provide out-of-the-box support for compiling, testing, or debugging."
Point proven. It's a text editor. Designed (supposedly) for programming, that doesn't even have a facility to run a compilation script without "plugins" etc.
"The incremental search in UNA is so novel that we're patenting it. That's right, we're patenting a feature we're giving away for free. The incremental search interface allows you to navigate documents with theoretical maximum efficiency. You can jump to wherever you want in the document by typing just half a keystroke more than the minimum number of characters necessary to differentiate that position from others. You can't do better than that. People were blown away by the incremental search feature of Idea 7.0, but we've got something better than that."
I seriously doubt you will be able to patent such an old and over-used idea. Opera does this in my mail, my contacts, my newsgroups, my notes. Pidgin does it in my chat-histories. I've seen it in any number of programs, quite a lot of them "programmer's editors" or IDE's. It's hardly "novel", I wouldn't be "blown away".
The other reasons he thinks that UNA should win are scarily simple at the least. Dialog boxes that don't say stupid things. Keyboard shortcuts. External actions running in the background. Basically, what he has is the equivalent of a freeware programmer's editor from several years ago.
The screenshots depict an atrociously complicated screen with which (supposedly) people who don't know the program can write a Hello World in five minutes. Whoopee.
So his program dies a death because open-source programs do it better? That's not surprising... the program seems to be at least five-ten years behind. My versions of Visual Basic 3.0 and 4.0 had quite a lot of those features, admittedly only for their own language, but similarly thrash his editor in lots of other places (such as being able to compile without needing a plugin!). And the point is that most programmers now use either command-line tools from a particular favourite GUI or they use the IDE/GUI that came with the language (e.g. VB.net, etc.). If they are using command-line tools, then the GUI can be chopped and changed every month with little hassle as various software is released/updated/etc. And you could have a whole group of people use *whatever the hell interface they want* with the same backend tools and work together on a project.
So the fact that the type of program is dying is not surprising - it's a very volatile, niche market driven by the whims of particular programmers. The fact that his particular program is dying is even less surprising - it doesn't seem to offer anything at all. Certainly not for a pricetag, anyway.
Are we really supposed to shed tears over the lose of any part of his business, let alone that he's "been forced" to release a program for free that he couldn't sell?
I've never understood copy protection at all. I certainly don't understand mediocre copy protection, i.e. "master" floppies that can be copied with Rawwrite before you use them for the first time, "type in this from the manual" types, CD-checks that could be bypassed with virtual images (even as far back as the DOS days with a suitable TSR), or anything that could be disassembled and changed within about five minutes. It makes the company think they are professional when in fact it just shows them up, and embarasses and annoys their customers.
Proper copy protections are normally highly-complex dongles etc. but they are completely over the top for most software and every time I've bothered to look, I've never had a problem finding a crack. I've installed high-end CAD programs that need such dongle but they were still a royal pain in the bum. If I'd have had more PC's to install them on, I would have found a way around it for convenience.
Even today, some modern educational software still uses stupid primitive tricks - I had to copy a master install floppy only the other day and, because most of the computers don't even HAVE a floppy anymore, automate the install process by emulating a floppy drive from the image. The program even went as far as double-checking that the floppy was writable etc. and the "copy protection" was to slightly change the wording of the license.txt on the floppy! If it was written a certain way it was "already installed somewhere", if it was written the original way it was "installable"! And you have to use the same floppy to uninstall it. Fortunately, my healthy skepticism of copy-protection methods forced me to make a raw image of the disk before it had touched any other machine.
Another one required per-PC serial numbers to be faxed/emailed to the company, which would fax/email an activation code back. For a network of PC's. With NO way to do the entire network, or to use one program on all PC's. Another (fairly famous) piece of software wouldn't let you image computers once it was activated because the program would just deactivate, even with an "educational site license". Stuff that.
I complained no end of times to the companies, who have absolutely no idea how modern network deployments work, but they refused to help except to keep sending stupid codes or floppies that did exactly the same thing. So in the end, I used my own method. It's part of being a network admin, sometimes, you have to find ways around stupid programming, whether it's hard-coded paths, stupid permissioning, or poor copy protection. Needless to say that we've stayed within the licensing terms at all times but guess which software we're not going to upgrade/buy ever again?
One of my personal pride-and-joy moments when I was younger was removing the CD-check from a copy of Desert Strike / Jungle strike. It was fantastically exciting to have the knowledge to do that, which I did by tracing assembly instructions by manually decoding the machine code, and a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List. I never distributed it (no doubt a million other people did the same much earlier) but I've kept the instructions/cracked EXE even until today. It was a simple crack, nothing more than a check to make sure a certain drive was a CD drive provided by MSCDEX or similar, but for the time, I was very chuffed at having done it without any help. I played that game a lot more when I didn't have to keep inserting the stupid CD for all of 5Mb of data, and swapping it to play the other game.
Worms Plus was particularly easy, IIRC, because you could just emulate a CD. I had a DOS utility (forgotten the name now) that let you specify a folder and it would make a "virtual CD" appear with that folder on it. It worked for an awful lot of games, and still worked under the early versions of Windows.
Even as far back as the Spectrum, just about any game was copyable if you had a decent tape player and at worst, you had to type in a short BASIC listing or use a copy utility to copy just
And what makes you think you'd be able to afford it anyway?:-)
The UK is in housing crisis right now (mainly because our banks invested in the US sub-prime housing market...) and we've been told by a few companies that if we were to even *think* about trying to get a mortgage on the same house, for the same amount, today, we'd be told where to stick it. We wouldn't be able to get interest rates of even twice what we managed to get for this mortgage even if we could get any sort of deal. There was no crisis when we bought it (in fact, the exact opposite), we've only had the house for under a year and in that time, everything's gone mad.
Ours were exceptional circumstances, however - the seller nearly went bankrupt during the process of the sale which complicated a lot of things but in the end we got the house off him (and got a bargain for dealing with that amount of risk... bankrupt people sell things cheap). But no, I wasn't at all happy about the last-minute running around and legal hassles, I was on holiday FFS. Kudos to our solicitor for managing to get anything done at all, an ordinary one would have just let everything slip past.
Vaguely related to the topic at hand are the legal rules surrounding any communication.
It's generally accepted (in UK law, at least, so my source says) that once you reply and / or initiate a conversation over a medium, that that medium is then a valid method of contacting you indefinitely over the course of that action.
So if you email a solicitor, then for that solicitor to send you an email back is perfectly legally acceptable and may even be construed as "delivered" whether or not it arrives. Because *you* selected the method of transit. If your mortgage nearly falls through at the last minute and you need to do something incredibly urgent or lose your house, a solicitor acting on your behalf can just send you an email and they've "done their job". If your servers are down, tough, if you no longer have that email, tough. At least if you read the strict letter of the law.
It may be that this is related - once a person has contacted you by fax, then sending back your confirmation by fax is construed as legally acceptable for "signing" a contract. If you don't like it, then don't communicate with them by fax at all. Ever.
On a personal note, if I weren't able to fax legally-binding forms back to a company, I wouldn't have a house, but I still don't "like" it. My purchase of the house dragged on for six months longer than it should have and the solicitor in charge on my end was a close personal friend, so they were stopping all heel-dragging and pulling out all the stops for us.
However, just as we were approaching the signing date, we had an holiday booked (Hey, we thought a six month cushion on top of a six month estimate for the deal would be long enough!). We arrived in a foreign country for a holiday, and within a day we had a phone call to say that if a particular court didn't receive a signed document on an official form within the next eight hours (time differences etc.) then we wouldn't be able to complete the purchase now, or ever (the house would be sold at auction). We had to find a kind hotel (fortunately, we found a hotel receptionist who had recently had much worse problems selling their house and they let us use the hotel fax machine for free) and recieve several forms, sign them and fax them back (and pay a month's mortgage, in cash, within 8 hours but that was easily resolved by phoning relatives near our solicitor's, although we still technically owe them that).
So it worked out well that we were able. I don't think we could have got back in time on the first plane, and there was nothing we or our solicitor could do to negate the need for us to sign the forms and pay in cash (bank transfers etc. wouldn't have cleared in time, believe it or not). However, the fact that anyone could have signed the form just shows that 99% of paperwork is useless and a waste of time, not that fax machines are somehow "evil".
Single, cloned fruit, unable to reproduce except by human intervention, with identical genetic structure in virtually all examples, cloned and distributed worldwide for decades is susceptible to the same attacking fungus that attacked the previous single, cloned fruit with identical genetic structure, but which has mutated slightly (my conjecture) in order to attack it's replacement.
And all because people don't like seeds in their fruit? (I would guess this isn't true, most probably people wouldn't really care much anyway, given that the fruit has an inedible skin too and a lot of popular fruits have seeds).
It's hardly surprising, it's only "catastrophic" because we've deliberately propogated a single, genetically-identical (and I would hazard "faulty", due to it's inability to reproduce) plant over and over and over again.
You could do it with the old-style analogue modems (only up to 28.8, though, I believe because above that needs special hardware on the ISP-end) but it won't work with DSL modems - what is on the other end (the exchange end) isn't a normal DSL modem as you know it.
As the program itself proves because it allows a scripting language to run inside it's own signed executable with admin rights.
The problem is not "just" users (users are dumb, don't trust users, sanitise your programs, their inputs, and anything a user can possibly do - this is all stuff that every programmer is taught on Day 1). The problem is not the "unsigned" executables (HAHAHA! Yeah, great, home users really care about that - they don't even UNDERSTAND the concept). The problem is really the arbitrary running of code in a full-rights environment when it's unnecessary. Installers DO NOT NEED access to anything but 1) the directory that they have requested to install into, 2) some way to call functions that will (depending on a user's settings/choices) check settings for compatibility, create icons/shortcuts, start at boot time.
It doesn't need: full access to the entire disk, the ability to set permissions on ANY other file, the ability to SEE the contents of any other file, the ability to spawn other processes, the ability to edit even the users files, to force itself into registry entries for startup, to be able to seize control of or even SEE the keyboard/mouse (window messages would be sent for anything relevant anyway) or anything else. Whether as an administrator or even a limited user.
And the user should have a damned easy way to get rid of a program if it is malicious. Through a powerful add/remove facility that is enforced BY THE OS. i.e. when you SAY uninstall Program, it forcibly kills and uninstalls the damn program, including every file it's ever installed, no matter what.
What's needed is a virtualised install environment with just the bare minimum contact with the outside world. Every programs installs into AN EMPTY FOLDER that it can't escape (i.e. chroot). If it needs access to a particular shared library, it can request that without needing to access the entire C:\Windows folder. If the OS decides that that it okay, it gets a "hard link" to the library in it's folder, or some interface through which it can call the library functions, AND NO MORE.
Hell, why just on install? Why can programs see ANY files other than ones that are: dragged-dropped, opened with or otherwise handed to the program by the user? Why can programs insert themselves in startup entries (user, computer, any of them) and OVERRIDE the user by keep reinserting themselves? Why can programs run any and every function in any and every DLL they can see whether or not they need to.
Windows really, really needs to abstract away EVERYTHING that a program could use so that it becomes a virtual program running in a controlled, minimal environment. If it wants to open a port, it has to REQUEST it first (by one of only a handful of functions it is allowed to access, or by creating a particular file in it's own chroot'd area, e.g "\SystemRequest\TCP_Port_Request_Inbound_2600"), and the Windows firewall can choose what to do - even if that is choosing to ignore all further requests because it's a virus trying to spam. If something wants to access files, the OS has to ask why? Did the user open a Word document in Word, which is associated with Word docs? Fine, let it happen. Did they drag-drop an image onto an image editor they've never used before? Okay. Did the program just abritrarily try to index the disk? Deny it. And when you have Word editing the Word file, have it edit a shadowed copy of that file, so that it can't damage the users original file, even if it "deletes" it.
Simpler is better, but you can make things too simple. It's harder to program an OS that provides such a simple environment, harder to convert legacy code to use it but MUCH, MUCH easier to see, avoid and control problems and MUCH, MUCH easier for users to manage. You don't need a million windows popping up. You don't need full access to the OS. You want the EXACT opposite. Nothing pops up unless the users want
Slashdot Mirror
Link is broke. Someone didn't check their HTML.
First images from a lander millions of miles away with INACCURATE colour (NASA colour images are almost always "false-colour" because it's incredibly difficult to do accurate colour reproduction and also the press like the Mars soil to look a bit red - I'm not joking here), of a planet under (to normal humans) extremes of temperature and pressure, which has taken real scientists (you know, those blokes that put the lander up there in the first place) DAYS to decide if what they were even seeing before COULD be ice... and you take one look and say "Nah, it's not." - with precisely zero experience of low-pressure, distant planets and their atmospheres, chemical makeup and physical appearances of "common" substances under those characteristics. Weird stuff happens under "unusual" conditions like that, we know because we can simulate it on Earth.
The more likely scenario is that the scoop isn't all that powerful that it can "dig" through solid ice to make shavings. Get a toy motor-controlled Tonka crane (an good approximation of the power of the landers arms but still strong enough to do the job, i.e. shift soil) and try to scrape a bloke of ice with it under motor-control. It's REALLY not easy, you won't get shavings, you won't get anything (besides the fact that "shavings" would sublimate or not exist in such conditions anyway) - and that's "ordinary" frozen ice at "normal" pressures and temperatures (this stuff is sub-sub-zero under incredibly low pressure - it's like taking an industrial cryogenic plant and sticking it into the upper atmosphere). If the scoop can't dig through the ice, what it does is scrape the debris off the top of it. This would clear the top of the ice block of soil, thus allowing you to see it. It will take a few moments (I don't know how long because I haven't done the maths, but neither have you so it hardly matters) and a lot of energy for it to do ANYTHING but when it does it'll *probably* go from solid to gas with no liquid in between. Something you don't see in your bathtub or freezer every day.
However, there may well be a layer of "haze" or "mist" if you like directly over the ice (think dry ice here on Earth under normal Earth pressures for an *example* of the sort of thing). It also looks to me (pure speculation) that the lower soil actually has solid ice as part of it's makeup (look at the animated GIF), so it's probably combined ice/soil. The scoop has dug through to that and that's what you see sublimating, looking a little like "wet soil" for an instant (like when you spray a compressed-air-can onto soil here on Earth - you get a "wet patch" which is really the liquid/gaseous air at a low temperature, but which very quickly turns into a gas that's able to float off into the air).
Basically - you're applying FAR TOO MUCH of what you see in your kitchen to conditions that are NOWHERE NEAR those you expect to find in your average IKEA product. Even the people who put the lander up there could only guess what to expect and they were the ones spending millions of dollars trying to get up there and double-check.
It's partly the universities, mainly the schools but in the end it also comes down to the coders and their equipment at home.
1) Most people who go in for CS degrees know bugger-all about computers. It's sad but true. These people will probably NEVER program again once they leave, they will end up either typing in data all day, fixing computers or (in very rare instances) coding trivialities. I can name five top ICT teachers who programmed in COBOL and all sorts of exotic languages and who NEVER did it again for any reason. I can name twenty of the same who now specialise in English or Science or some other non-related subject.
Student's knowledge of algorithms is purely a memory aspect in order to pass the exams. This is because they are taught in school that "computers are the future" and "you should learn computers", so they fiddle on a machine and install iTunes and think they could be the next ID Software. Most teaching staff in schools have absolutely no idea what's involved in CS and just recommend those who "are good at computer stuff" to get a CS degree if nothing else beckons. Many of these people hate mathematics and drop out quite quickly. Most of the rest of the students just think it's cool to get better access to the computers and mess about on them for three years.
2) Of those that *do* end up programming, there are two types: those who probably started programming long before anybody "taught" them how to do it. Those types (we'll call them the hobbyists) probably know more languages, constructs and algorithms before they start a CS course than everybody else does *after* the course. The other type are those that find they can knock up a program "good enough". These types of people are rarely interested in coding as a hobby and will usually go on to make business apps, if anything. The hobbyists would *love* to code games all day long.
3) You don't get many of these "hobbyist" programmers at all because most of them code for years before being taught, by which time they "think they know better", or they have something missing: Access to hardware, languages, artistic teams, etc. There is no hobbyist programming platform anymore (like the ZX Spectrum, etc.) - to get started on programming for a simple device you either have to use extremely high-level "games-creators", or you're into setting up development environments on "hacked" or "chipped" hardware, or buying expensive development suites. Most of these things you end up paying money for, one way or another. There is no "pick up and program" system any more where back in the days of Codemasters, etc. it was ALL that was available. Every computer you found could be easily programmed without having to do ANYTHING to it. They came with languages BUILT-IN. The IBM PS/2 - turn it on, you're in BASIC. Programming tools just don't come with computers anymore - it's all development kits, seperate programs, etc.
4) The fun of programming was in fun languages, with crappy interfaces, horrible programming principles, and low-level techniques that required you to use your brains in order to squeeze the most out of a pittance of cpu-cycles - misuse goto and save yourself twenty cycles. You found most things out by accident or experiment and you would program a game just for the hell of it.
Nowadays, anyone can knock up a program in minutes but they don't know how/why it works, or how to make it better - it's all just libraries and "magic boxes". Take away their development environment and they wouldn't be able to write a batch file, let alone a program in C (and in fact most kids, even the computer-geeks, know bugger-all that isn't available in a GUI anymore, for instance. Tell them to write a progam and they go looking for the "Write a program" icon - DOS is a mystical thing to them that they won't bother to learn). These kids just don't care - they don't see how the games are written, they have no patience to write their own and they have no help.
Killing the command-line, BASIC and similar languag
Not being American, I probably wouldn't qualify anyway, but here's my guess:
1) The first letter in DARPA stands for "defense"
Most serious scientists want to create and explore, not destroy. Does NASA have problems hiring? THAT would be news. Actually they probably do have problems, as does anyone trying to get "real" scientists these days. I'd actually expect DARPA to be the last place to "dry up" because it won't get an enormous percentage of otherwise-eligible scientists apply.
2) Money.
Government agencies tend not to pay anywhere near market rates and if they do, they certainly don't keep up with those rates after a few years.
3)
I'm afraid this item is classified information and you may never, ever discuss it with anyone, ever.
4) Freedom.
Work for the government for a pittance to develop something that will then be claimed as a government invention, or work for a serious research place where you will get some credit and be able to discuss your ideas with others (that is, basically, what science is all about). You'll be able to research just about anything you want, in all kinds of esoteric fields, rather than being forced back to "make me something that'll kill more people", for instance. You'll (hopefully) be able to do it without a massive committee of people with their own agenda pushing you into areas you have little interest in.
"A disabled person uses a lot more resources."
Of course they do (usually, on average, in general). The problem is proportion. There's no point in telling all the non-disabled people in the world to walk at 0.5mph because that's all the wheelchair user can manage and we don't want to make them feel left out. Similarly, we don't want to have to employ 3 people in order to carry the wheelchair user everywhere at "normal" speed. There's a point where you have to recognise your own weaknesses and adjust your life to cater for them.
This is a problem - we "want" every kid to get A's when in fact the idea of factoring out levels such as A, B, C was to take account of the differences between each child - you'll never get 30 randomly-chosen kids to achieve the same grade. So you have one of two results - either every kid fails (and feels a failure, and is classed as a failure) because they didn't get the grade you wanted them to (in the UK, this is the magic "5 A-C's at GCSE", or every kid gets an A because you broaden the category to include them all (thus, the kids who put in effort see no reward at all compared to those who did nothing) - the UK does this one as well because of the above idea not working. Neither of these is a smart thing to do but schools the world over are doing both. We *used* to allocate children to sets by ability but apparently that's no longer politically correct.
This is the problem. At the moment, a VAST proportion of funds, resources, staff, etc. are directed to aid the lower-sets in mixed classes, in order to keep up with EVERYONE in the class. You can't do that - some kids are naturally more suited to certain topics, some kids are naturally quicker to learn, some kids naturally put in more effort. So you end up with a class where every pupil is either held back or made to feel stupid. Were you to extract those lower-set pupils, put them together and teach a single class at their level, you wouldn't need a teaching assistant in every single class, you wouldn't need to "bring down" the higher-achieving (by that I mean effort, not skill or intelligence) pupils, you wouldn't be alienating the lower-sets because they'd feel comfortable working at a slightly slower pace etc. and you'd spend vastly less to get the same job done.
What you're suggesting, in effect, is that we knock down all the universities and make all the students become home-helps. It doesn't work in practice. What's needed is what ACTUALLY happens in the real world - we help those less fortunate as much as we can by getting those who are more fortunate to find ways to help them - this means NOT getting in the way of the more fortunate by (proverbially) kicking them out of university to be a home-help.
My wife, when she was in school, went to a Parent's Evening with her father. Her father spent twenty minutes talking to her Maths teacher privately, then called her over.
Father: "Mr Smith says you're too stupid to take Advanced Maths" (he didn't - but that was the gist)
(Mr Smith the teacher looks horrified)
Daughter: "Oh, okay dad."
(Daughter takes other subjects, passes with flying colours).
That's what people these days don't want to do. It's seen as "bad".
Cor, that must have been a tricky topic to research. I don't know how they come to such magnificent conclusions.
More importantly, teachers and students have been telling people this for YEARS.
Think about the effort used to get one lazy kid (kids don't have to be smart, but they should put in some effort) to pass a simple test when they're not interested in doing so. Work in a school - all you ever hear from such kids is "My dad'll get me a job" and you'll have teachers and teaching assistants basically doing the work for them multiple times over to get the right figures into the brackets that the school/government wants.
Meanwhile, all the bright kids who finished within ten minutes are bored to tears, have to wait for them to catch up, are getting no attention and so they play up. This wastes EVERYONE's time.
It's not an intelligence issue, it's an effort issue, spawned by a culture where hard work isn't rewarded and no or little work *is* rewarded - they see Daddy sit at home on benefits and affording all the latest toys and they want that for themselves. Every school I've ever worked in - the kids who win the awards/trips/treats are those that behaved/achieved for a week when they never normally would while the ones who do behave/achieve all the time are ignored and denied such incentives.
This was true twenty years ago when I was at school and is still true today. Don't bother to work and you get dozens of staff clamour round you all day long every day and try to "help" you, whether you want help or not. You get out of "normal" lessons, you get all the same breaks, treats and incentives (if not more) and you don't have to do much at all. Then, when you do bother to show that you can add two and two, you get a reward and magnificant praise, while the rest of the class are working away and being shouted at for dropping half a point on the top-level test.
There's a point at which a child is old enough to sort himself out. When that point is reached, it's up to THEM to motivate themselves. If they want to storm out of a lesson - goodbye, don't bother coming back for the rest of the day, week, term. The trouble is that this is propogating down to younger and younger kids and you get primary-school children who do nothing all day but roam corridors, have screaming fits, throw chairs and then get rewarded when they STOP.
I blame it partly on bad parenting, partly on the schools need to provide good results across the board if they don't want to get shutdown/taken over, partly on stupid inclusion policies that don't consider the effects for anyone but the problem child and partly on "politically correct" child management (never punish, only reward, except you end up only ever rewarding those who are suddenly do what they should have been doing anyway).
I work in schools but I don't teach *precisely* because of this. If you don't want to learn, I wouldn't want you in my class distracting people who do. But, in modern times, it no longer works like that.
The key point of your comment is "(assume that the painting is old enough to be in the public domain)". That's my point here - the game's screenshots in question are OBVIOUSLY not in the public domain - they are screenshots of copyright artworks (the games) which are not in the public domain and whose use is not covered by any fair use or (presumably) licensing agreement.
For art STILL UNDER COPYRIGHT, this is the same situation. Yes, the Mona Lisa's copyright may have expired by now but most "modern" art (as in recent, not style) is still copyright the artist - Matisse artworks, for example, were heavily protected when I was last in a gallery (I don't know what the UK copyright period is offhand) - they didn't even have images of them on their own computer database just a "Sorry, still under copyright" notice.
Thus any photographs of "recent" artworks are therefore copies... which you can't do under copyright without permission. Even the museums/galleries themselves can't put images of such works on their websites (except in fair-use situations of limited resolution etc.) without permission.
Art, books, it's all the same. You can no more walk into a library and take photographs of every page of an in-copyright book than you can take photographs of in-copyright artworks (exceptions such as fair use etc. exist but have many clauses such as the percentage of the original work you use and what for etc.). And you *certainly* can't distribute those same photos and you *definitely* cannot sell them for profit (which is what has been done with this software's artwork).
"Museums and art galleries can charge you for a print because they created a new work when they photographed or scanned the original."
Yes. With the original copyright-holders permission. Or on expired-copyright (therefore public-domain) images. For instance, Beatrix Potter illustrations are too old to be covered by copyright (in some countries) and thus the originals you can do what you want with. The "new prints" of the books you can't (at least, not without Frederick Warne's permission...)
However, you can't copy and distribute the latest John Grisham without permission/licensing without getting sued.
"I have several photographs of paintings taken in the Hermitage, I took the photographs, so the copyright is mine."
Unfortunately, the copyright of the painting in the first place may well not have been yours. If the picture was old (and therefore out-of-copyright), then yes, the copyright on the photograph is yours. If not, your photograph is actually nothing more than a copyright infringement unless the use of the original image was incidental (i.e. a photo of you standing in a gallery with it behind you).
"The Hermitage don't in any sense, and never did, own the copyright on my photos."
No. And they probably don't own the copyright on the original artworks either. But the artist (or their agent) probably still do if it's a *recent* artwork.
"I didn't need their permission to take photographs of the works."
No. You need the copyright holder's permission. Who probably won't be the gallery itself. This is why they don't allow photographs in most galleries/museums that are showing ANY recent works.
"But once the works enter the public domain, you can't legally stop people making copies"
Correct. But that's not what we're talking about here. The screenshots of the games contain copyright artwork which are not in the public domain, neither are they fair use, or any of the other exceptions allowed for copyright (in the UK there are limited provisions for educational use, for example, which allow quite a lot of copyright material to be copied to a greater extent if it's to be used within a classroom environment).
The Eiffel Tower example was always rubbish anyway - I'm not sure that you can claim copyright on a public display (because fireworks display people would try to cash in, basically) and neither were a lot of people involved. But from wha
Er... even a screenshot of copyrighted material is still copyright. Copyright does not mean "bit for bit copies of the original data". It covers the whole work in all forms and interpretations. Hence why the museums and art galleries can charge you for prints of artwork - it's still under copyright, even if you're only buying a photo of a work of art.
And some places HAVE claimed copyright of landmarks - the Eiffel Tower is one. That's a bit more dubious, though. However, pressing PrintScreen and adding some skulls does not make for an original piece, in the same way as me photocopying your book and changing the main character from Harry Potter to Terry Petter doesn't.
It's either original art, created by YOU, or it's taken from somewhere else. If it's taken from somewhere else, it's a potential copyright violation if you don't have permission.
If he chooses to do it, let him. It's his downfall.
However, if he tries to make *you* (or the IT team etc.) do it, then you question it heavily and ask for a *signed, written* note from himself describing what he wants you to do before you'll do it. Just asking for that will raise enough doubt in his mind to put him off unless he's incredibly stupid. If it's illegal, it shows that HE ordered it, despite your reservations and considered it part of your job despite your protests.
If the very mention of written evidence gets you sacked, it's a matter for a tribunal, which will make it much harder for him to explain his (probably illegal in most civilised countries) behaviour. Trust me, if that's the case, you really DON'T want to be working there anyway and it would only be a matter of time before something else came up of a similar sort.
On the "explanation" side, you don't need to explain. It's very simple. Your competitor probably broke several Data Protection Act's or similar laws by accidentally including the private emails of customers in an email to all the other customers. Using such information yourself is not only breaking the same laws, but worse (because you have no right to that data at all, rather than a simple accident).
It also leaves you open to accusations of "stealing" business (like the court cases which arise when people "take" business address books filled with customers to start their own competing company). This is very bad and very easy to get found out, especially if one of those emails on that list happens to be, say, the PR officer's brother, or their PR proofreader or something - if they work out that YOUR company had access to private data belonging to their business through a legal mistake and that you used it to competitive advantage, your company could be in BIG trouble.
Then you have the fact that in most countries it's illegal to spam at all. Then you have problems such as customers bringing private actions against you for sending such spam. The company image being degraded, customers getting irate and wasting your time to cancel/complain about your spam, there are a million and one problems.
For instance, I personally use unique emails for every website, every company, every competition I enter, etc. encoded in a way that companies can't tell... it's not as simple as microsoft@mydomain.com, but I wouldn't be surprised if a great many people use such a system. And because I have made it easy to check which email is available to which companies, I *do* check emails, ESPECIALLY SPAM, for their To: address. Most auto-generated spam has a faked username prefix on the address and thus is instantly filtered. Companies, which tend to spam adddresses that they've verified are true (e.g. customers etc.), that spam my address get their prefix filtered, too. Which leaves a whitelist of "genuine" prefixes at my domain that go straight to my inbox.
When spam DOES accidentally arrive at my inbox (say, addressed to office_supplies_company@mydomain.com), either because my filter fails or because someone spams a "real" address without permission, I complain to the company involved. The usual first reponse is "it wasn't us" until the situation is properly explained in a nice recorded-delivery letter to their head office citing their own privacy policies. This is usually swiftly followed by a rapid retraction of their statements, a removal of my address from their databases and an instant blacklist for their company emails. But, then, my country has good Data Protection laws.
If just ONE of those customers has such a system, you're going to get more hassle in terms of data management, fielding calls, reading letters etc. than you can make up for in sales to people whom you've spammed, that are not interested in your/your business and would already be using you instead of that "competitor" if they were.
And then, there's the "being stupid" factor - the SECOND I saw such tricks being pulled (competing companies directly trying to
Scientists don't NEED to explain it... that's the job of the "scientists" that invented it.
If it's real, every scientist will then nod and go "Yup, they're right".
Scientists really don't give a crap about people's crackpot theories unless they *are* going to affect the known laws of science. That's where science gets interesting. Did you know, for example, that there are quantum effects that "get" energy from nowhere and then "return" it later in time. They literally "borrow" energy from the future. Much, much, much more interesting that most scientific things. However, when you do the maths, it *still* all works out and comes out to nice equations in X dimensions etc.
But a car that "runs on water" is so much crap it's unbelievable without MUCH, MUCH more information - how do you start the reaction, what inputs are there to the systems, how much energy is produced, where does that energy come from? There are a million unanswered questions and it's only a scientists job to ask them of such an "inventor", not to answer them. When the answers are forthcoming, then we can check them and see if it adds up. If they don't fit the theorems we have (for which there are no known counter-examples), then we need to investigate more. But "it just does" means they won't even look. It's a crackpot-answer, as is silence.
If you invent a perpetual motion machine, the top scientists in the world are not going to come running. Hundreds of them get invented every single day. If even science students ran round to every one, there'd be nobody left to do any real science. It's not up to science to disprove your theory, it's up to you to prove it. That's how it works, even between scientists in their own community.
A hundred scientists looking at your theory and not being able to disprove it is NOTHING in comparison to being able to provide a complete proof compatible with all known laws. It's not even close to rigourous science to say "it runs on water" and even the pseudo-science explanations are NOWHERE near rigourous answers. This is why mathematicians (who all also scientists, just as much, and in fact physics is more maths than what you would call science) hated the four-colour-theorem proof, it was done on computer and although they couldn't find any counter-examples, they also couldn't understand the proof because of the sheer size of it. However, within a few years, they were able to prove it's "correctness" and THEN they accepted it.
Signs of a crackpot:
No detailed scientific information on the critical process: Check
No peer-review of the technology: Check
No published papers: Check
Unknown, heavily-debunked or non-existent scientists: Check
No announcement of breaking scientific laws BEFORE you've built a product on the basis: Check
Pseudo-science statements that are empty and meaningless: Check
A magical, unexplained source of "energy" (amazing how much that word is misused in everything from Reiki healing to water-dowsing): Check
Breaking KNOWN laws of physics in so many ways without explanation of how the equations match up, or where the extra energy comes from, or what the "new" equations would be: Check
YouTube before New Scientist: Check
According to QI - a TV show with *real* researchers from Oxford University whose sole aim is to dispel some common myths, including everything Admiral Lord Nelson's last words ("Drink drink, fan fan, rub rub" and not "Kiss me, Hardy" even though he said the last one as well) to the number of natural satellites the Earth has - Columbus KNEW for certain that the world wasn't flat - he believed it to be pear-shaped. And as you rightly point out, there is any amount of earlier evidence that show people KNEW it wasn't flat.
But people perpetuate thousand-year-old myths as easily as this.
Hence, when someone claims free-energy, perpetual motion, etc. then you need SCIENTISTS (real ones, with respect in the community and a pot-load of previous research in the area which has all been peer-reviewed) before anything is "real". The fact that there is little to no information about HOW it's done is not due to patents, etc. (which as soon as you apply for, you are able to TELL people, and they still can't just steal your idea), it's because the real scientists will point out the holes (like - you need to plug it in for it to work, it consumes a lot more energy than it produces in useful work, etc.). Any decent scientist/company that had "invented" this would be SCREAMING it from the rafters and have a slew of patents and scientific papers available, along with a hundred papers on *how* well it works and how they can make it better.
To sum it: It's balls. It's sales patter. Don't trust salesman.
Additionally, even IF people thought the world was flat, it was because of ignorance, not that they had an incomplete knowledge of science. Simple science experiments show the curvature of the Earth very quickly. There wasn't a good stock of "true" scientists until at least the 1700/1800's. The simplest knowledge of science shows you that the world is an oblate spheroid, and in the same way, the simplest knowledge of science tells you that what they claim can only be true if there are caveats - such as it needing some other material, some other energy input etc.
Probably not what you want specifically but may be useful for other people:
A while ago I gave my girlfriend a little portable "CD player" that also plays direct from SD cards and USB drives, plays MP3 CD's, radio, etc. for about £40 (probably a lot cheaper by now). Runs off batteries or mains.
Was one of the best buys I've made, especially given that the £40 was in vouchers that we'd won on a competition.
It's not hard, but lots of place do it. I agree it's stupid not to.
Schools, for instance, generally run a "curriculum" and an "admin" network - one for the kids, one for the staff. Joining both is seen as an extremely bad thing. But there's usually absolutely nothing stopping people from connecting to random websites from the admin (even in the finance offices etc.).
Bring back the old days of text menus:
1. Pay in
2. Pay out
3. Print
Reduce the interface, reduce the capabilities, reduce the vulnerabilities.
Because people don't care.
If you're car display lights up and flashes, people take notice but still I've seen people ignore the warning lights and just drive (sorry, but women are actually the worst culprits).
A computer is a black box to people and a few flashing lights/slowness mean nothing to them. It could be that their P2P app has just kicked in or their printer is printing or a million other things... people can't diagnose it, therefore they don't care about it.
You will *not* educate the masses, no matter what damage you do to their computers - these people are buying new computers every year because "the old one got slow", where in reality it was running at the same speed but just bogged down with viruses.
The way to do it is not to trust them to be able to spot it, or need to. That is, make a computer that takes care of such things. This is what privilege seperation do when they are implemented properly, but even on the strictest controlled networks, you'll find something users can do that wasn't designed for or intended. However, the fix is in the design and execution, not the dumb idiot who just wants to send an email to his family.
Not surprised.
Took it's time.
Why isn't every virus doing this?
Seriously, this has always been possible, always been a threat. It's not surprising. It's "different" but you can't even call some parts of that "new"... other people thought of these things years ago.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next step is an "evolution"... instead of a simple worm, we get a virus that changes itself programmatically to avoid detection, uses information from previous successful hacks to propogate itself (e.g. "People click on me if I claim to be from this website... I'll send out some more of me claiming to be from that and similar websites"), or authors piggy-back increasingly more complex viruses on the back of Storm, so that eventually there is just a "swarm", instead of a "Storm".
And then the "virus swarm" will be seen as a single entity and you'll be defending your computers against it and reading adverts for "Anti-SWARM" software, etc.
Yeah, it's really not clearly worded, is it?
I assume they mean "software/hardware vulnerability", and that the other 75% are people doing stupid things - "human vulnerabilities" or even "policy vulnerabilities". It's interesting in itself though that 75% of the attacks are due to, presumably, direct human error and nothing to do with the data being on computer.
So when you're bank next releases your details, don't accept an explanation. Most probably, someone who works there did something incredibly stupid and deliberate, rather than they got hacked or outwitted.
You pillock.
Do the arithmetic. From the article you quoted:
The capital cost to build and equip a semiconductor fabrication facility (presumably from scratch) has increased exponentially over time from approximately $6 million in 1970, to in excess of $2 billion for next generation 300mm Fabs coming on-line in the 2001- 2002 timeframe... If the current trend in fabrication facility costs continues, the cost of a Fab will exceed ***$10 billion*** by 2007, and may reach $18 billion by 2010.
And now:
The International Space Station has been far more expensive than originally anticipated. The ESA estimates the overall cost from the start of the project in the early 1990s to the prospective end in 2017 to be in the region of 100 billion (***$157 billion*** or £65.3 billion).
Even taking into account the over-budget of the ISS, the cost of building a single space station (with the help of MANY countries) is way, way, way, way over building a new semiconductor plant on earth every, say, five years or so. And that's assuming that the size, cost, and other factors inherent in the ISS are anywhere near that needed to pump out useful, complex semiconductors (they can't even make a loo work properly, so I think we're safe to say that it isn't).
It's an utterly ludicrous idea to suggest it's even viable within the next few decades, let alone at all, and certainly not given that being in space doesn't help *anyone*, it just complicates a million things. That new factory you've built? You've gotta check and change EVERY component to work in space reliably. You've gotta get tons and tons of equipment and raw materials up there and somehow have a test facility up there too.
It's pure science fiction. We'll build a moonbase that has it's own semi-conductor fab before private companies start doing "research" like this.
1) How do they know it's illegal? Are they aware of every jurisdiction?
2) Are they aware of the *actual* contents of any particular file downloaded? Some cases have been brought on the basis that the filenames were suspicious.
3) Are they aware of my private collection of CD's which, in this modern era, are quicker to download than to rip from the CD? No.
4) Are they aware of my fair use rights, and therefore my ability to exercise them by downloading songs I already have, which has been "approved" by some record labels / artists / courts in some jurisdictions?
5) Do they bother to check their facts BEFORE filing a lawsuit? Apparently not, unless it's to offer "peace treaties" where people sign away rights (including fair use) on the basis of a promise not to prosecute, even when that wouldn't stand up in a court of law.
Apparently, none of the above count when they file lawsuits. That's the problem, not them chasing after people copying copyright material.
So I disagree with their policy. I disagree with many of the lawsuits. I disagree with their tactics. I disagree with their interpretation and publicity surrounding copyright law (the word "pirate" or "theft", for example, when there is no intention to permanently deprive). I disagree with their ignorance of jurisdiction and applicable laws. I disagree with their attempts to strip *existing and well established* rights of my own, on the basis of rumour. I disagree with blanket contracts that people are frightened into signing. I disagree with their pricing policies. I disagree with their segmentation of the market (only offering certain songs online etc.).
And yet, I'm *trying* to give them bloody money. But I'm not doing anything wrong. And all the methods where I can do this either want to charge me all-over-again for the same songs I already have, or punish me by removing my ability to do so (DRM, FUD etc.). Guess why a lot of people hate them. Guess why a lot of less-lawful people just decide to rip their music anyway and don't care for their ramblings. Guess why "piracy" (Yuck!) is rife and they "aren't making money" (Rubbish!).
It's all a scam, based on little actual legal content. The big players won't be stopped by a little bit of DRM or their favourite torrent site going down. The only people to suffer are their prime customer market - people who want to pay them for a song, once, and then have their song (minus broadcast, performance rights etc.) for the course of their life.
Where's the news? This is a slashvertisement for dzone.com (twice, actually) and a dying, primitive programmer's text editor.
The linked-to article about "Enerjy" says it in no uncertain terms - there were no sales for this type of product. There was also an overbearing impetus within the company itself that free/open source software could do parts of the job just as well, and they were considering using it themselves. The whole industry of "text editors for programmers" has always been niche, and now is dead. I can't say that Open Source has much to do with it so much as "overwhelming choice".
"Years of work and cutting-edge research went into this editor, and it rivals, even surpasses, commercial editors that are selling for $100, $200, even $400 a pop."
It's an editor. I think that cutting-edge research is pushing it a bit but even $100 a pop seems expensive for what is a glorified text editor. Even if you did make $400 each time, did you really ever think that's going to continue forever?
"First of all, I should mention that UNA is a source code editor, not an IDE. It's a very sophisticated editor, well on the road to becoming an IDE, but it doesn't provide out-of-the-box support for compiling, testing, or debugging."
Point proven. It's a text editor. Designed (supposedly) for programming, that doesn't even have a facility to run a compilation script without "plugins" etc.
"The incremental search in UNA is so novel that we're patenting it. That's right, we're patenting a feature we're giving away for free. The incremental search interface allows you to navigate documents with theoretical maximum efficiency. You can jump to wherever you want in the document by typing just half a keystroke more than the minimum number of characters necessary to differentiate that position from others. You can't do better than that. People were blown away by the incremental search feature of Idea 7.0, but we've got something better than that."
I seriously doubt you will be able to patent such an old and over-used idea. Opera does this in my mail, my contacts, my newsgroups, my notes. Pidgin does it in my chat-histories. I've seen it in any number of programs, quite a lot of them "programmer's editors" or IDE's. It's hardly "novel", I wouldn't be "blown away".
The other reasons he thinks that UNA should win are scarily simple at the least. Dialog boxes that don't say stupid things. Keyboard shortcuts. External actions running in the background. Basically, what he has is the equivalent of a freeware programmer's editor from several years ago.
The screenshots depict an atrociously complicated screen with which (supposedly) people who don't know the program can write a Hello World in five minutes. Whoopee.
So his program dies a death because open-source programs do it better? That's not surprising... the program seems to be at least five-ten years behind. My versions of Visual Basic 3.0 and 4.0 had quite a lot of those features, admittedly only for their own language, but similarly thrash his editor in lots of other places (such as being able to compile without needing a plugin!). And the point is that most programmers now use either command-line tools from a particular favourite GUI or they use the IDE/GUI that came with the language (e.g. VB.net, etc.). If they are using command-line tools, then the GUI can be chopped and changed every month with little hassle as various software is released/updated/etc. And you could have a whole group of people use *whatever the hell interface they want* with the same backend tools and work together on a project.
So the fact that the type of program is dying is not surprising - it's a very volatile, niche market driven by the whims of particular programmers. The fact that his particular program is dying is even less surprising - it doesn't seem to offer anything at all. Certainly not for a pricetag, anyway.
Are we really supposed to shed tears over the lose of any part of his business, let alone that he's "been forced" to release a program for free that he couldn't sell?
I've never understood copy protection at all. I certainly don't understand mediocre copy protection, i.e. "master" floppies that can be copied with Rawwrite before you use them for the first time, "type in this from the manual" types, CD-checks that could be bypassed with virtual images (even as far back as the DOS days with a suitable TSR), or anything that could be disassembled and changed within about five minutes. It makes the company think they are professional when in fact it just shows them up, and embarasses and annoys their customers.
Proper copy protections are normally highly-complex dongles etc. but they are completely over the top for most software and every time I've bothered to look, I've never had a problem finding a crack. I've installed high-end CAD programs that need such dongle but they were still a royal pain in the bum. If I'd have had more PC's to install them on, I would have found a way around it for convenience.
Even today, some modern educational software still uses stupid primitive tricks - I had to copy a master install floppy only the other day and, because most of the computers don't even HAVE a floppy anymore, automate the install process by emulating a floppy drive from the image. The program even went as far as double-checking that the floppy was writable etc. and the "copy protection" was to slightly change the wording of the license.txt on the floppy! If it was written a certain way it was "already installed somewhere", if it was written the original way it was "installable"! And you have to use the same floppy to uninstall it. Fortunately, my healthy skepticism of copy-protection methods forced me to make a raw image of the disk before it had touched any other machine.
Another one required per-PC serial numbers to be faxed/emailed to the company, which would fax/email an activation code back. For a network of PC's. With NO way to do the entire network, or to use one program on all PC's. Another (fairly famous) piece of software wouldn't let you image computers once it was activated because the program would just deactivate, even with an "educational site license". Stuff that.
I complained no end of times to the companies, who have absolutely no idea how modern network deployments work, but they refused to help except to keep sending stupid codes or floppies that did exactly the same thing. So in the end, I used my own method. It's part of being a network admin, sometimes, you have to find ways around stupid programming, whether it's hard-coded paths, stupid permissioning, or poor copy protection. Needless to say that we've stayed within the licensing terms at all times but guess which software we're not going to upgrade/buy ever again?
One of my personal pride-and-joy moments when I was younger was removing the CD-check from a copy of Desert Strike / Jungle strike. It was fantastically exciting to have the knowledge to do that, which I did by tracing assembly instructions by manually decoding the machine code, and a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List. I never distributed it (no doubt a million other people did the same much earlier) but I've kept the instructions/cracked EXE even until today. It was a simple crack, nothing more than a check to make sure a certain drive was a CD drive provided by MSCDEX or similar, but for the time, I was very chuffed at having done it without any help. I played that game a lot more when I didn't have to keep inserting the stupid CD for all of 5Mb of data, and swapping it to play the other game.
Worms Plus was particularly easy, IIRC, because you could just emulate a CD. I had a DOS utility (forgotten the name now) that let you specify a folder and it would make a "virtual CD" appear with that folder on it. It worked for an awful lot of games, and still worked under the early versions of Windows.
Even as far back as the Spectrum, just about any game was copyable if you had a decent tape player and at worst, you had to type in a short BASIC listing or use a copy utility to copy just
And what makes you think you'd be able to afford it anyway? :-)
The UK is in housing crisis right now (mainly because our banks invested in the US sub-prime housing market...) and we've been told by a few companies that if we were to even *think* about trying to get a mortgage on the same house, for the same amount, today, we'd be told where to stick it. We wouldn't be able to get interest rates of even twice what we managed to get for this mortgage even if we could get any sort of deal. There was no crisis when we bought it (in fact, the exact opposite), we've only had the house for under a year and in that time, everything's gone mad.
Ours were exceptional circumstances, however - the seller nearly went bankrupt during the process of the sale which complicated a lot of things but in the end we got the house off him (and got a bargain for dealing with that amount of risk... bankrupt people sell things cheap). But no, I wasn't at all happy about the last-minute running around and legal hassles, I was on holiday FFS. Kudos to our solicitor for managing to get anything done at all, an ordinary one would have just let everything slip past.
Vaguely related to the topic at hand are the legal rules surrounding any communication.
It's generally accepted (in UK law, at least, so my source says) that once you reply and / or initiate a conversation over a medium, that that medium is then a valid method of contacting you indefinitely over the course of that action.
So if you email a solicitor, then for that solicitor to send you an email back is perfectly legally acceptable and may even be construed as "delivered" whether or not it arrives. Because *you* selected the method of transit. If your mortgage nearly falls through at the last minute and you need to do something incredibly urgent or lose your house, a solicitor acting on your behalf can just send you an email and they've "done their job". If your servers are down, tough, if you no longer have that email, tough. At least if you read the strict letter of the law.
It may be that this is related - once a person has contacted you by fax, then sending back your confirmation by fax is construed as legally acceptable for "signing" a contract. If you don't like it, then don't communicate with them by fax at all. Ever.
On a personal note, if I weren't able to fax legally-binding forms back to a company, I wouldn't have a house, but I still don't "like" it. My purchase of the house dragged on for six months longer than it should have and the solicitor in charge on my end was a close personal friend, so they were stopping all heel-dragging and pulling out all the stops for us.
However, just as we were approaching the signing date, we had an holiday booked (Hey, we thought a six month cushion on top of a six month estimate for the deal would be long enough!). We arrived in a foreign country for a holiday, and within a day we had a phone call to say that if a particular court didn't receive a signed document on an official form within the next eight hours (time differences etc.) then we wouldn't be able to complete the purchase now, or ever (the house would be sold at auction). We had to find a kind hotel (fortunately, we found a hotel receptionist who had recently had much worse problems selling their house and they let us use the hotel fax machine for free) and recieve several forms, sign them and fax them back (and pay a month's mortgage, in cash, within 8 hours but that was easily resolved by phoning relatives near our solicitor's, although we still technically owe them that).
So it worked out well that we were able. I don't think we could have got back in time on the first plane, and there was nothing we or our solicitor could do to negate the need for us to sign the forms and pay in cash (bank transfers etc. wouldn't have cleared in time, believe it or not). However, the fact that anyone could have signed the form just shows that 99% of paperwork is useless and a waste of time, not that fax machines are somehow "evil".
Single, cloned fruit, unable to reproduce except by human intervention, with identical genetic structure in virtually all examples, cloned and distributed worldwide for decades is susceptible to the same attacking fungus that attacked the previous single, cloned fruit with identical genetic structure, but which has mutated slightly (my conjecture) in order to attack it's replacement.
And all because people don't like seeds in their fruit? (I would guess this isn't true, most probably people wouldn't really care much anyway, given that the fruit has an inedible skin too and a lot of popular fruits have seeds).
It's hardly surprising, it's only "catastrophic" because we've deliberately propogated a single, genetically-identical (and I would hazard "faulty", due to it's inability to reproduce) plant over and over and over again.
Er. No. That won't work at all.
You could do it with the old-style analogue modems (only up to 28.8, though, I believe because above that needs special hardware on the ISP-end) but it won't work with DSL modems - what is on the other end (the exchange end) isn't a normal DSL modem as you know it.
Quoting from the page you linked:
"Even signed code can be malicious!"
As the program itself proves because it allows a scripting language to run inside it's own signed executable with admin rights.
The problem is not "just" users (users are dumb, don't trust users, sanitise your programs, their inputs, and anything a user can possibly do - this is all stuff that every programmer is taught on Day 1). The problem is not the "unsigned" executables (HAHAHA! Yeah, great, home users really care about that - they don't even UNDERSTAND the concept). The problem is really the arbitrary running of code in a full-rights environment when it's unnecessary. Installers DO NOT NEED access to anything but 1) the directory that they have requested to install into, 2) some way to call functions that will (depending on a user's settings/choices) check settings for compatibility, create icons/shortcuts, start at boot time.
It doesn't need: full access to the entire disk, the ability to set permissions on ANY other file, the ability to SEE the contents of any other file, the ability to spawn other processes, the ability to edit even the users files, to force itself into registry entries for startup, to be able to seize control of or even SEE the keyboard/mouse (window messages would be sent for anything relevant anyway) or anything else. Whether as an administrator or even a limited user.
And the user should have a damned easy way to get rid of a program if it is malicious. Through a powerful add/remove facility that is enforced BY THE OS. i.e. when you SAY uninstall Program, it forcibly kills and uninstalls the damn program, including every file it's ever installed, no matter what.
What's needed is a virtualised install environment with just the bare minimum contact with the outside world. Every programs installs into AN EMPTY FOLDER that it can't escape (i.e. chroot). If it needs access to a particular shared library, it can request that without needing to access the entire C:\Windows folder. If the OS decides that that it okay, it gets a "hard link" to the library in it's folder, or some interface through which it can call the library functions, AND NO MORE.
Hell, why just on install? Why can programs see ANY files other than ones that are: dragged-dropped, opened with or otherwise handed to the program by the user? Why can programs insert themselves in startup entries (user, computer, any of them) and OVERRIDE the user by keep reinserting themselves? Why can programs run any and every function in any and every DLL they can see whether or not they need to.
Windows really, really needs to abstract away EVERYTHING that a program could use so that it becomes a virtual program running in a controlled, minimal environment. If it wants to open a port, it has to REQUEST it first (by one of only a handful of functions it is allowed to access, or by creating a particular file in it's own chroot'd area, e.g "\SystemRequest\TCP_Port_Request_Inbound_2600"), and the Windows firewall can choose what to do - even if that is choosing to ignore all further requests because it's a virus trying to spam. If something wants to access files, the OS has to ask why? Did the user open a Word document in Word, which is associated with Word docs? Fine, let it happen. Did they drag-drop an image onto an image editor they've never used before? Okay. Did the program just abritrarily try to index the disk? Deny it. And when you have Word editing the Word file, have it edit a shadowed copy of that file, so that it can't damage the users original file, even if it "deletes" it.
Simpler is better, but you can make things too simple. It's harder to program an OS that provides such a simple environment, harder to convert legacy code to use it but MUCH, MUCH easier to see, avoid and control problems and MUCH, MUCH easier for users to manage. You don't need a million windows popping up. You don't need full access to the OS. You want the EXACT opposite. Nothing pops up unless the users want