The government is an employee of the people, not a father figure. It's damn time we start treating it that way.
1. We need salary caps that ensures politicians are earning no more than the average man they represent
2. Abolish appointed positions and establish term limits for elected positions
There is a problem with elected positions. In that even if you have completely free and fair elections the people you will get will certainly not be representative of the general public. Consider also the situation in the UK, where the "unelected" House of Lords can be the only thing standing in the way of completely daft legislation.
3. Build accountability into the constitution - this would be a multifaceted piece that must include civillian involvement, metrics to measure the effectiveness of new legislation, and the power to enact a sunset clause on legislation that is ineffective or detrimental
Maybe better to have all legislation require renewal every 5 years, possibly up it to every 10 years after 5 renewals.
4. Legislate criminal penalties for violating the constituion and enforce them
5. Provide an easy path for citizens to challenge unjust laws that does not require being arrestsed to do it (see Canada)
A better place to look might be ancient Athens. Each piece of proposed legislation being placed before a randomly selected jury of citizens. No easy way for a dedicated political class to come into existance.
The question here is do the download numbers also reflect copies downloaded with package managers such in Linux distros such as Gentoo and Ubuntu, or does it only count people that only actually go to the webpage to download? The way Windows users and Linux users tend to get software these days tends to be a little different, where windows users expect going to the website, downloading, and using an something like Install Shield to install.
Even in the Windows world one download can easily equate to many installs.
People have made it resoundingly clear that they want the government to protect them. Whether it's from alcohol, cigarettes, violent video games, firearms, drugs, sex or any number of other things which have been, or are curently threatened by, the nanny state.
Part of this is also insisting that this "protection" also be imposed on people who either feel perfectly capable of defending themselves against the "threat" or don't even consider it to be much of a "threat" in the first place.
I think that the last generation would get off their arse and protest and that is the big difference is almost as big a myth as that whatever music the young generation listens to is garbage. I think humans were lazy last century, are lazy this century and will be lazy next century.
The other factor is that most people "have lives". You have to be either rich, obsessive or both in order to be in the 24/7 lobbying game.
They are cracking down on visa's and have reduced the amount of American's allowed into the country. Sure enough they will be back to their old communist ways. This is what the people know and I think they like it that way. Democracy for people that are not used to thinking for themselves is hard.
Actually "democracy" could well include making it more difficult for foreign people to visit and foreign businesses to operate in their country. Fears of people coming from elsewhere and exploiting the locals are fairly commonplace.
I assume by the fourth you meant the multiple different systems used to transliterate Japanese into roman characters.
Hardly unique to Japanese. The same thing can happen with Semitic languages such as Arabic. IIRC Saudi road signs are notorious for some of their Arabic to English translations.
Here's a hint, the author doesn't know a single word of Russian. The author has no idea what ZAO means and hence doesn't realize including it is strange given the other company name uses.
They wouldn't actually need to understand Russian (or even Russian abbreviations) just looking at a Russian business directory should be enough to clue someone in that it means something akin to "Inc", "LLC", "Ltd", "PLC", "GmbH", etc. just that the Russian convention is to prefix rather than suffix.
ZAO means "Zakrytoye Aktsionernoye Obschestvo" (Privatly Held Corporation) in Russian, it's not a part of the name.
On the other hand "GmbH", meaning "Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung" is often left unchanged when refering to a German company. The current approach with proper nouns is to avoid making changes unless required by different alphabets. Thus you have "The SNCF TGV" rather than "French Railways/Railroads HST" or even "National French roads of iron train of big speed."
You mean, until someone designs something that does work ? What are we talking ? 3 months ? 6 months ?
Much longer than that, decades would be a more reasonable estimate.
Okay, this is a very diffucult problem, a very very difficult problem. So let's be optimistic and say 2 years.
The kind of thing needed simply does not exist outside of Sci Fi novels. It would need an actual AI which is more intelligent than the average human. Even if you create something to do the job it's likely to object to being your slave PDQ.
You can have two identical bit streams where one infringes copyright and the other doesn't. It all depends on the humans at the ends of the bit streams, and the senders' agreements (or lack thereof) with the copyright holder.
As well as there being situations where such permission isn't actually required or where the ownership of the copyright is in contention.
On the other hand, the use of TLDs for language selection like Google.fr, etc. is a hack: HTTP already supports language selection with the Accept-Language header.
Especially given that there isn't a one to one relationship between languages and countries in the first place.
Yes, but at least you get sane error messages from Linux, or at least a string to search for with google, as opposed to "Windows encountered an unknown error", or the service just failing with no error message at all.
Sometimes Windows will give you a useful error message, something you can put into Google and get a useful response. Other times putting an error message into Google will return lots of hits for other people with the same problem
I'm battling with sharepoint's search service right now, the latest error message was "User does not have permission to alter database 'sharepoint_search'.
ALTER DATABASE statement failed."
Which user? I have no fricken idea.
A variation on the "Can't open file". To which my first response tends to be "Which one?"
Fixed that for you. Days are longer in summer and shorter in winter. Deal with it.
This is only the case if your lattitude is greater than 23 26 22. Thus if you can't "Deal with it" the answer is to move nearer to the Equator. Of course no amount of messing around with clocks is going to help at a lattitude of 66 33 39 or greater.
and indeed, they were correct. even now my watch correctly changes with DST/ST. shame more watches dont have such a simple feature really. as it even auto-changes when i cross time zones.
How does it manage that without GPS and a rather large database built in?
There was a patch for XP / Vista when the law changed, although it took them longer than Mandriva & CentOS to release it. If you have win2000 and earlier, you will need to edit this registry key like so:
There is still the difference that the Windows method is to mess around with the clock, which can cause some strange effects if it happens to be rebooted at the wrong time. Whereas the unix method is keep the clock in GMT/UTC. It would be nice if there was a way to get Windows to follow the unix method.
And I get a lot of "my bad" from the commercial vendor tech support people, too - if we're lucky, the problem can be worked around and will be fixed in a future version. If we're not, the problem isn't widespread enough to fix (patches and testing cost money) - but there's no implied warranty of fitness or merchantability (see your EULA!). You talk about glaring bugs not fixed for months - I'd be happy with months from some commercial vendors.
Another problem you can get is the "it's a feature not a bug" issue or where but reports get transformed into "feature requests".
One vendor of a (very) large database system had a problem formatting numbers in their SDK - it was there for years, and yes, we reported it - so long that our workaround became embedded into a cross-entity ICD and now we've been stuck re-creating it in our data for years. I would be willing to bet it was fixable in less than an hour with the source.
In these years what changes did the vendor make to the product. I have encountered software companies who appear far more interested in tinkering with user interfaces than addressing basic arithmatic or logic.
In my jurisdiction there is a limit to how much responsibility you can disclaim.
Is it known, by the the general public, what these limits actually are.
Generally, if you are selling your products for money, they have to be of a certain standard, regardless of what you wrote in your disclaimer.
The "game" software companies apply here is to claim that they are not actually selling a product. Or that the actual product is just some bits of plastic, paper and cardboard.
a commercial software vendor could get sued (or lose credibility among people purchasing it..and lose the business) if there is malicious code in place, so it is in their best interest to make sure it's not there.
How often has a software vendor being sued for any reason. Typically EULAs disclaim any liability they think they can get away with. Even when such disclaimers have no basis in fact. Whilst playing "bait and switch" over what they are actually selling to evade laws intended to protect customers from dishonest merchants.
What's to stop a commercial vendor from putting evil code in? All it takes is one disgruntled employee and some poor review processes (which certainly isn't uncommon in smaller companies).
Poor review isn't confined to small proprietary software companies. Even the biggest ones can ship pieces of software which are of utterly poor quality. Nor is the only reason for "evil code" existing in proprietary software. Whilst there are proprietary software companies who's business is producing malware I'm unaware of any OSS equivalents of the "Sony Root Kit".
Yes, I have. Thats exactly what I meant with "subtle bugs". However, you still have to get your bug through the maintainer and the testing phase without anyone noticing. Of course the protection is not 100% perfect but that also applies to CSS projects.
Except that in a CSS there's far fewer people for a "rogue programmer" to fool. Yes, I have. Thats exactly what I meant with "subtle bugs". However, you still have to get your bug through the maintainer and the testing phase without anyone noticing. Of course the protection is not 100% perfect but that also applies to CSS projects.
Obfuscated code will not make the cut as maintainers want the codebase to be readable so it can be better maintained (unless cryptic code is required for speed purposes, in which case you better explain it in detail).
It's far more likely that obfuscated code will get into a proprietary code base. Since easy readability is not a requirement and there are likely to be PHBs who think that having the code base as hard to understand as possible provides some sort of "security". (Other than job security for the only person on the planet who knows what the code actually does...)
Depends on the company of course. Yeah, at a place like Microsoft, or Google they probably use nice things like source control to keep track of who contributed what.
Which company was it who shipped a spreadsheet with a flight simulator hidden inside?
Slashdot Mirror
The government is an employee of the people, not a father figure. It's damn time we start treating it that way.
1. We need salary caps that ensures politicians are earning no more than the average man they represent
2. Abolish appointed positions and establish term limits for elected positions
There is a problem with elected positions. In that even if you have completely free and fair elections the people you will get will certainly not be representative of the general public. Consider also the situation in the UK, where the "unelected" House of Lords can be the only thing standing in the way of completely daft legislation.
3. Build accountability into the constitution - this would be a multifaceted piece that must include civillian involvement, metrics to measure the effectiveness of new legislation, and the power to enact a sunset clause on legislation that is ineffective or detrimental
Maybe better to have all legislation require renewal every 5 years, possibly up it to every 10 years after 5 renewals.
4. Legislate criminal penalties for violating the constituion and enforce them 5. Provide an easy path for citizens to challenge unjust laws that does not require being arrestsed to do it (see Canada)
A better place to look might be ancient Athens. Each piece of proposed legislation being placed before a randomly selected jury of citizens. No easy way for a dedicated political class to come into existance.
The question here is do the download numbers also reflect copies downloaded with package managers such in Linux distros such as Gentoo and Ubuntu, or does it only count people that only actually go to the webpage to download? The way Windows users and Linux users tend to get software these days tends to be a little different, where windows users expect going to the website, downloading, and using an something like Install Shield to install.
Even in the Windows world one download can easily equate to many installs.
People have made it resoundingly clear that they want the government to protect them. Whether it's from alcohol, cigarettes, violent video games, firearms, drugs, sex or any number of other things which have been, or are curently threatened by, the nanny state.
Part of this is also insisting that this "protection" also be imposed on people who either feel perfectly capable of defending themselves against the "threat" or don't even consider it to be much of a "threat" in the first place.
I think that the last generation would get off their arse and protest and that is the big difference is almost as big a myth as that whatever music the young generation listens to is garbage. I think humans were lazy last century, are lazy this century and will be lazy next century.
The other factor is that most people "have lives". You have to be either rich, obsessive or both in order to be in the 24/7 lobbying game.
They are cracking down on visa's and have reduced the amount of American's allowed into the country. Sure enough they will be back to their old communist ways. This is what the people know and I think they like it that way. Democracy for people that are not used to thinking for themselves is hard.
Actually "democracy" could well include making it more difficult for foreign people to visit and foreign businesses to operate in their country. Fears of people coming from elsewhere and exploiting the locals are fairly commonplace.
advertisements are commercial propaganda
Where the partiality is typically fairly obvious. Unlike propaganda which masquerades as "news" or "balanced opinion".
I assume by the fourth you meant the multiple different systems used to transliterate Japanese into roman characters.
Hardly unique to Japanese. The same thing can happen with Semitic languages such as Arabic. IIRC Saudi road signs are notorious for some of their Arabic to English translations.
Here's a hint, the author doesn't know a single word of Russian. The author has no idea what ZAO means and hence doesn't realize including it is strange given the other company name uses.
They wouldn't actually need to understand Russian (or even Russian abbreviations) just looking at a Russian business directory should be enough to clue someone in that it means something akin to "Inc", "LLC", "Ltd", "PLC", "GmbH", etc. just that the Russian convention is to prefix rather than suffix.
Please, translate correctly. It's "Begun Inc."
Or possibly "Begun Ltd"
ZAO means "Zakrytoye Aktsionernoye Obschestvo" (Privatly Held Corporation) in Russian, it's not a part of the name.
On the other hand "GmbH", meaning "Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung" is often left unchanged when refering to a German company. The current approach with proper nouns is to avoid making changes unless required by different alphabets. Thus you have "The SNCF TGV" rather than "French Railways/Railroads HST" or even "National French roads of iron train of big speed."
You mean, until someone designs something that does work ? What are we talking ? 3 months ? 6 months ?
Much longer than that, decades would be a more reasonable estimate.
Okay, this is a very diffucult problem, a very very difficult problem. So let's be optimistic and say 2 years.
The kind of thing needed simply does not exist outside of Sci Fi novels. It would need an actual AI which is more intelligent than the average human. Even if you create something to do the job it's likely to object to being your slave PDQ.
You can have two identical bit streams where one infringes copyright and the other doesn't. It all depends on the humans at the ends of the bit streams, and the senders' agreements (or lack thereof) with the copyright holder.
As well as there being situations where such permission isn't actually required or where the ownership of the copyright is in contention.
On the other hand, the use of TLDs for language selection like Google.fr, etc. is a hack: HTTP already supports language selection with the Accept-Language header.
Especially given that there isn't a one to one relationship between languages and countries in the first place.
I fully support this new .con TLD initiative for scammers and thieves.
.gov if you had .con?
Would there be much need for
Yes, but at least you get sane error messages from Linux, or at least a string to search for with google, as opposed to "Windows encountered an unknown error", or the service just failing with no error message at all.
Sometimes Windows will give you a useful error message, something you can put into Google and get a useful response. Other times putting an error message into Google will return lots of hits for other people with the same problem
I'm battling with sharepoint's search service right now, the latest error message was "User does not have permission to alter database 'sharepoint_search'. ALTER DATABASE statement failed."
Which user? I have no fricken idea.
A variation on the "Can't open file". To which my first response tends to be "Which one?"
Fixed that for you. Days are longer in summer and shorter in winter. Deal with it.
This is only the case if your lattitude is greater than 23 26 22. Thus if you can't "Deal with it" the answer is to move nearer to the Equator. Of course no amount of messing around with clocks is going to help at a lattitude of 66 33 39 or greater.
and indeed, they were correct. even now my watch correctly changes with DST/ST. shame more watches dont have such a simple feature really. as it even auto-changes when i cross time zones.
How does it manage that without GPS and a rather large database built in?
There was a patch for XP / Vista when the law changed, although it took them longer than Mandriva & CentOS to release it. If you have win2000 and earlier, you will need to edit this registry key like so:
There is still the difference that the Windows method is to mess around with the clock, which can cause some strange effects if it happens to be rebooted at the wrong time. Whereas the unix method is keep the clock in GMT/UTC. It would be nice if there was a way to get Windows to follow the unix method.
Remember: The college is providing this internet FOR FREE. They wouldn't have to do that. They could just not provide any internet at all.
If they are providing internet access with their accomodation it is not free, unless they don't charge any rent.
And I get a lot of "my bad" from the commercial vendor tech support people, too - if we're lucky, the problem can be worked around and will be fixed in a future version. If we're not, the problem isn't widespread enough to fix (patches and testing cost money) - but there's no implied warranty of fitness or merchantability (see your EULA!). You talk about glaring bugs not fixed for months - I'd be happy with months from some commercial vendors.
Another problem you can get is the "it's a feature not a bug" issue or where but reports get transformed into "feature requests".
One vendor of a (very) large database system had a problem formatting numbers in their SDK - it was there for years, and yes, we reported it - so long that our workaround became embedded into a cross-entity ICD and now we've been stuck re-creating it in our data for years. I would be willing to bet it was fixable in less than an hour with the source.
In these years what changes did the vendor make to the product. I have encountered software companies who appear far more interested in tinkering with user interfaces than addressing basic arithmatic or logic.
In my jurisdiction there is a limit to how much responsibility you can disclaim.
Is it known, by the the general public, what these limits actually are.
Generally, if you are selling your products for money, they have to be of a certain standard, regardless of what you wrote in your disclaimer.
The "game" software companies apply here is to claim that they are not actually selling a product. Or that the actual product is just some bits of plastic, paper and cardboard.
a commercial software vendor could get sued (or lose credibility among people purchasing it..and lose the business) if there is malicious code in place, so it is in their best interest to make sure it's not there.
How often has a software vendor being sued for any reason.
Typically EULAs disclaim any liability they think they can get away with. Even when such disclaimers have no basis in fact. Whilst playing "bait and switch" over what they are actually selling to evade laws intended to protect customers from dishonest merchants.
What's to stop a commercial vendor from putting evil code in? All it takes is one disgruntled employee and some poor review processes (which certainly isn't uncommon in smaller companies).
Poor review isn't confined to small proprietary software companies. Even the biggest ones can ship pieces of software which are of utterly poor quality. Nor is the only reason for "evil code" existing in proprietary software. Whilst there are proprietary software companies who's business is producing malware I'm unaware of any OSS equivalents of the "Sony Root Kit".
Yes, I have. Thats exactly what I meant with "subtle bugs". However, you still have to get your bug through the maintainer and the testing phase without anyone noticing. Of course the protection is not 100% perfect but that also applies to CSS projects.
Except that in a CSS there's far fewer people for a "rogue programmer" to fool. Yes, I have. Thats exactly what I meant with "subtle bugs". However, you still have to get your bug through the maintainer and the testing phase without anyone noticing. Of course the protection is not 100% perfect but that also applies to CSS projects.
Obfuscated code will not make the cut as maintainers want the codebase to be readable so it can be better maintained (unless cryptic code is required for speed purposes, in which case you better explain it in detail).
It's far more likely that obfuscated code will get into a proprietary code base. Since easy readability is not a requirement and there are likely to be PHBs who think that having the code base as hard to understand as possible provides some sort of "security". (Other than job security for the only person on the planet who knows what the code actually does...)
Depends on the company of course. Yeah, at a place like Microsoft, or Google they probably use nice things like source control to keep track of who contributed what.
Which company was it who shipped a spreadsheet with a flight simulator hidden inside?