There's a fatal flaw with your claim that failing to apply patches for six months is negligence to the point of absolving MS of all responsibility.
MS patches are notorious for introducing new bugs. Or new "features" that break existing applications. Or bundling in totally unrelated things - fix this critical bug in one application, but accept another application being patched to call home. A lot.
Do you remember the service pack saga from a few years ago? SP4 introduced a serious bug, SP5 fixed it but introduced another serious bug, then SP6 fixed that one but... a lots of sites couldn't apply any patches for a *long* period.
Or just read the war stories in the SQL Slammer thread. A lot of sites knew about the recent patch, but were unable to apply any patch because an earlier patch brok their mission critical applications.
Ironically, most of the people I know in their 30s and 40s chuckle at the young turks who don't realize that their "hot new paradigm" (or language or whatever) is the same recycled cat shit that's been around - and dismissed - for years. They'll all very much aware of the new stuff that really matters, but are also aware of the true cost of changing legacy systems and don't make changes casually.
"Support" is probably a term of art, at least in the US, that translates to spending money. Not entirely - candidates are always "supporting" various causes, but when you talk about government policy it usually means a lot more than just saying that you should probably go with the stuff that gives you access to source code over the stuff that doesn't when all other things are equal.
In other words, this is probably a big uproar over nothing. The only reason to track it is to prevent certain commercial vendors from spinning the same term-of-art to it's own benefit.
The problem with the "web" approach is that most interactions are strictly hierarchial, and the web approach does not work well in that situation.
You have a job only if the HR department says you have a job. It doesn't matter how many of your coworkers think you work there, one group has the final say.
You're a student in a university only if the registar says you are. It doesn't matter how many other students or professors you can get to think you're a student, only the registar's decision matters.
Even in your own home network, you decide what's your hardware and who's allowed to access it.
I agree that hierarchial solutions don't work well once you start crossing borders, but that accounts for only a small part of the problem for most users and systems. The problems caused when attempting to force PKI to solve this problem are a small fraction of the problems caused by forcing a "web" solution to the far more common hierarchial situations.
As others have pointed out, six sigma is an unrealistic goal on the soft targets. It's a laudable goal when you're manufacturing widgets (e.g., if you're running a soft drink production line and crank out a million cans a month, having only 3 manufacturing defects is a reasonable (if high) goal), but WTF does it mean when you're talking about a help desk that has 1000 widely varying tickets per month?
On the other hand, there are some concrete numbers that you can use a six-sigma standard on.
Uptime: over a year, your total downtime should be under 107 seconds. That's right, less than two minutes of downtime per year, for all causes! Since no system can reboot that fast, that means redundancy with fast cutovers.
Connectivity. Again, over a year your total network downtime should be under 107 seconds. That means multiple upstream providers, multiple gateways, etc.
Virus protection. Out of every million viral-laden messages (say a typical afternoon when the lastest MSTD is in full swing:-) only three should make it past your virus protection measures.
I'm sure you can come up with your own metrics. These are also far more useful measures than the "process driven" ones since it's what the IT "customers" really care about. Think about the analogy to a commercial product - when you get an empty can of soda you don't care how well the can was manufactured or how great the unseen soda would have tasted, you only care about the final product.
Your second "solution" is not a solution. If your car was stolen, you would not be pleased to have everyone tell you to get another car or learn to walk and stop whining.
If you came home and found a stranger in your house, you would not just get another apartment and call it a day.
This is identity theft. It is no different than someone going out and using your name and credit history to get a credit card in your name... and making it impossible for you to refinance your house to lock in low rates, or get a new car loan, or get an increased credit line on your cards before a long trip.
Actually, I take that back - at least identity theft is now beginning to be considered a serious crime, although it's still unnecessarily hard on the victims. (E.g., many credit bureaus won't report fraud alerts without police reports, the local police don't accept these reports since the crime occured elsewhere, and the remote police don't accept reports over the phone.) But the damage caused when an individual or a small business (when an entire domain is blacklisted) is unable to communicate with others because of the fradulent traffic sent out by spammers.
When Denver got an overlay area code (and 10-digit dialing, which I actually like) the PUC did something very smart that eliminates many of the problems others are reporting.
They made all calls within this area code local.
Most of the area code was already local. But not quite all. The border was slightly adjusted, the rate was raised by pennies, and now every call within the area code is toll-free.
I'm surprised this approach hasn't spread. It greatly simplies your life since all you need to remember are which area codes are "local" and which are not, and there's no worry about inadvertently triggering a toll charge. (Or chaos, for those of us with no prefered LD carrier because Costco phone cards are cheaper for our needs.) It may not be appropriate in all area codes, but certainly should be used in any area requiring 10-digit dialing.
Re:I guess Double Jepordy exist in Norway
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"DVD-Jon" Faces Retrial
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· Score: 2, Informative
I believe a second trial for a different crime based on the same facts in the same jurisdiction would still be considered double jeopardy. Otherwise it's trivial to sidestep the double jeopardy law - just keep retrying the person for lesser included crimes. It's actually a bit more general than that, since double jeopardy also prevents retrial when new facts are discovered, e.g., a defendant confessing to the crime to clear his conscience. (It's not double jeopardy to try him for perjury during the first trial if he never testified that he didn't commit the crime, instead remaining silent.)
What happened in LA and elsewhere is that the defendants were charged with a crime
in two different jurisdictions. In the US, the state and federal governments are sovereign and each has a fair crack at any defendant. The federal government has not historically performed general police duties outside of military bases and the like (although this is starting to change, a troubling prospect to many people), but it has passed some limited laws to cover those cases where local authorities appear indifferent to Constitutional rights. That's why there were federal laws passed to protect civil rights workers in the 50s, and those same laws were used in the recent cases after, and only after, the defendants were acquitted in state courts.
IANAL, but this is something that anyone over the age of 12 should understand. Just because something is not "illegal" (or unlawful) doesn't mean that it's fully accepted. There is a gray area.
If you force me to sign a contract, it may not be illegal. But it will be unenforceable - contracts must be entered into freely.
If I sign a contract, then you change the pages in the middle, it may not be illegal. But it will definitely be unenforceable - you can't change contracts after the fact without the consent of all parties.
And in this particular case, you can't hold somebody to a contract if parts of it are never disclosed. It's one thing for the EULA to explicitly give them the right to do something on a "take it or leave it" basis, it's a very different thing for them to have hidden (or unduely hard to find) checkboxes to "prove" you agreed to optional terms.
This is the reason why every(?) court that has looked at EULAs has held them to be unenforceable - why the companies felt it necessary to force the issue via the UCITA.
Well, my state hasn't passed UCITA and I consider EULAs basically null and void precisely because of their widespread abusive use.
Re:Sometimes, and it can cause problems too.
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Linux Kernel Code Humor
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The saddest thing is that the managers will never understand that they're responsible for their own problems. There are a lot of valid reasons for easing somebody out of the door, but the style of comments acceptable at the company before the merger is not one of them.
N.B., I am not defending comments that are abusive to coworkers, slanderous, etc. That type of language has no place in an office.
But the tone of a comment is a valuable indication of how much effort was put into fixing it. If I see a comment like// workaround, some_library_call() isn't working like advertised
it tells me that they RTFM but found a workaround. Maybe a future version of the library (or the FM) will get it right. I probably don't need to talk to the author before touching the code myself. In contrast, a comment like// fucking windows refuses to allow us to keep both widgets visible at the same time, so we'll do this instead...
tells me that they put a lot of effort into finding a solution to the problem, but every attempt failed. If I have an idea, I should talk to the author to see if he's already tried it. (Better yet would be a pointer to some internal document detailing everything they tried.)
This isn't absolute - many people will never let their comments contain any emotional tone, and others will swear at the slightest problem. But it's a valuable tool when it's used properly.
(Speaking of bugs, why does slashcode insist on merging paragraphs?)
While this comment is humorous, it's also very deep. It shows that the coder understood what he was doing well enough to know that the behavior wasn't as expected... and anyone else touching the same code should expect problems.
It's rare, thankfully, but it is possible for code to trigger obscure compiler or even CPU bugs. These can be virtually impossible to track down, esp. if your boss is (justifiably) skeptical of your claim that the problem has to be in the compiler. In these cases the best you can do is flag the code as something that's very flaky.
(BTW, I have some personal experience with such code. I just hit one with a PNG decoder - one mode had a rare decoder error that would flip one pixel, but the mode meant that the error was propagated across multiple scan lines. A very careful review of the code showed no error, and when I tested the code on different hardware (a PC, not an embedded device) it worked perfectly on the same images. Therefore it has to be the cross-compiler or hardware, and all I could do was document the problem.)
At some point, maybe between my sophomore and junior years, my university switched from quarters to semesters. Many pairs of classes were combined into a single new class... and needless to say the university required you to retake the new semester-long class if you only had one of the prereqs.
Toss in the normal shuffling over 4 years, etc., and I think everyone in know had to hustle to complete graduation requirements. I know I ended up filling the paperwork for an associates degree for under one of the early catalogues, then using that degree as a "pre-existing AS degree" to waive all of the lower-division requirements for my BS. Toss in the fact that I could never decide between a math or physics degree and I ended up with three diplomas (one AS, two BS) in less than a year.
If the money goes to the official(s) approving the deal, it's a bribe and criminal. If it goes towards other programs or the general fund, it's a settlement and legal.
Of course reality is far more complex than that. Some officials may use the money to fund pet projects that they can't fund through regular channels. But that's a matter for the state (either the elected officials overseeing these people, or the voters themselves) to address.
Start hitting the open relays
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ISP Chief on Spam
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've contacted a number of sites running open relays that were used to joe-job one of my domains. A few were legitimately careful but got caught by Exchanges's configuration files or had non-servers hijacked (e.g., one had a Cisco router hijacked!), but most didn't know or care that their mail server was an open relay.
Because of this and the infeasibility of the per-message solutions, I think it's time to start hitting open relays with statutory penalties. Something on the order of $100-200 first offense, $200-500 second, $500-1000 on third and subsequent offsenses, collectable through the victim's local small claims court. To minimize baseless complaints (and allow companies to ensure that they're not running an open relay) the courts could require confirmation that a site is running an open relay via an approved testing service, basically what a lot of the blacklist sites already do with test messages.
It should go without saying that any fines and court costs could be passed on to the upstream site that sent the spam. Maybe they were hacked - it really doesn't matter. Either you were authorized to send mail through that relay or you weren't. In the first case your contract specifies the damages (if any), in the latter case it's already a criminal trespass case.
Shutting down the open relays won't eliminate spammers, of course, but it should reduce the damage caused to innocent third parties and the true spammers will be universally blacklisted.
I think the theater is sleazy - putting up that sign is an admission that they know their tickets are causing confusion - but it sounds like you were offered a reasonable choice: either use the noon tickets puchased at matinee prices, or pay the difference for the midnight showing and go to it.
Now, if they said you had to pay $8+/ticket for a second set of tickets, instead of just the $3+/ticket or so difference, that would be a different matter. But you can't reasonably expect them to offer the midnight show at matinee prices - even if you're an honest victim, you know there are many people who would deliberately exploit this policy.
At the least, toss the media into freezer-weight ziplock bags. Better yet is double-bagging it - put the media in a smaller bag, and then in a larger bag with smaller bag's opening on the 'far' side.
Paper-rated "fire safes" work by putting a media that undergoes a phase change at high temperatures, releasing steam in the process. (Think of the latent heat involved in freezing and melting ice, same theory is used to keep the interior of the safe at a reasonable temperature.)
The only problem is that paper tolerates steam fairly well. Ditto the smoke that can make its way into the safe. The paper may be damaged, but it is still readable. Computer media will be destroyed. Fortunately freezer-weight plastic is more than adequate to block the steam, leaving only small openings in the seal. Even this is modest, and the second bag is mostly to allow you to avoid smearing soot onto the media as you remove it from the bag.
For a technological society, our logical base for all measures is 10, or whatever the base of our number system is. We have to deal with a incredible range of numbers (quick: how many miles could the people of Seattle drive with the oil spilled from the Exxon Valdez?) and that's much easier to do when everything is a power of 10.
But in nontechnical societies, your needs are at a much more personal level. In these cases you want numbers that are multiples of 2 or 3. That gives you 2 cups per pint, 2 pints per quart, 3 tablespoons to a teaspoon, or 4 quarts to a gallon. (There's actually an archaic meausre between quarts and gallons, so it's 2x twice over.)
That's why base 12 is so widely used in traditional systems. It can be easily deviced into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths. 60 adds fifths and is the basis for our navigation (360 is 2 x 3 x 60), clocks, and probably other stuff that slips my mind at the moment.
Finally, one important but often overlooked issue is that the Imperial set of measures was called "Imperial" for a reason - it was largely usable across Britain (or the entire UK?). In contrast, pre-metrification the French had a staggering variety of measures that made commerce beyond the village a nightmare. The French had to do something, but the system the British had was good enough to run a global empire.
Do you have a domain registered through NetSol? Have you paid your $960 advertising fee to that company yet? You know the one, it sends out an invoice once a year or so.
When I got it, I knew it was bogus (it said my ad would list me under gas stations or something like that), but it also looked like any of the other invoices my small business dealt with. Anyone not intimately familiar with my business dealings would probably have paid it without a second thought. It's only after you carefully read the entire document that you see very small print admitting that it was a solicitation, not part of an ongoing contract... although once you fall for the scam once you'll get real invoices for years.
In that case the issue isn't whether or not they can create business directories and a kilobuck for the entry. It's that their ads are literally indistiguishable from invoices without careful study or intimate knowledge of the particulars.
It the same thing with Bozo Software. The issue isn't so much the product they offer, it's the fact that their advertising is deliberately designed to be look like legitimate system messages. They stand out on Linux boxes, but on a Windows box they can fool even experienced people who don't exercise extraordinary care.
The content of the messages also tend to be deceptive. As others have pointed out, "broadcasting your IP address" is a term of art, popup ads are incapable of checking IP stack performance, etc.
My biggest fear is that, someday, some group of nuts will succeed in getting a manned mission to Mars... and the manned space programs will die because there are no dreams left but their Mars mission was symbolic, not the capping demonstration of some important new technology.
Before we start thinking about Mars, we need to get trips to LEO about as difficult as a long flight on earth. No months of training, no exhaustive tests, just pay your fare (within an order of magnitude of first-class fare between London and Sydney, say), pass your CIH questions and board a regularly scheduled flight. (Another way of looking at it - a honeymoon in orbit should provoke some jealosy, but not shock.) Getting to one of the lunar bases should be about as difficult as getting to the South Pole station today.
Then we can talk about manned missions to Mars. It will still be difficult, but most of the technology will be mature and it can be reused to support mining expeditions to the asteroid belt. Within a generation there should be manned stations in the asteroid belt and/or near Mars.
In contrast, we're barely able to operate a single space station today, and there's no realistic expectation of an operational lunar base for a generation.
That actually sounds like a fairly standard "how to lie with statistics" approach. It's true, but not TRUE, if you know what I mean....
As for the title, think about it. When you own a car, or better yet lease a car since it simplifies these numbers, you have regular costs such as payments, registration, insurance, fuel and maintenance. You also have an irregular expense if you're involved in an accident.
The latter might be rare - I think it's something like 5 years between accidents on average across all drivers - but the cost of an accident can easily dwarf all other costs. So these isolated events skew the numbers when you mix the regular and irregular expenses.
(The same thing is behind the statistic that for the average person the vast bulk of your health insurance money is spent during the last week of their life. Of course it is - most years you aren't fighting for your life!)
This is why "downtime" expenses are so high for Unix systems - they're so rare and often caused by hardware failure. Windows, while getting more reliable, still has more downtime so you have more 'bumper benders' as opposed to the catastrophic mechanical failures.
Leaving aside the rest of the novel, Friday has the best opening line, paragraph and chapter of any book I have ever read.
I can't remember the exact words off the top of my head, but the opening line was something like "I killed him as the door dilated closed behind him." You immediately knew that this novel would have action, violence, and a futuristic setting. I can only compare this to "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" that gives you humor, horror and violence in just four words.
The opening paragraph reinforced all of this. We learned that the speaker was an agent of some kind - not just a brutal murder, that the setting was the "Kenya Beanstalk" so it's definitely set in the future, and that there's a heavy police presence in the form of floating cameras.
The opening chapter had our hero running across a world very different from our own ("Alaska Free State?" "Illinois Imperium?" and a world with space travel, beanstalks, underground tubes... and horsedrawn transportation on the surface?!), and the betrayal of our heroine as she returns to her home base.
The writing was incredibly tight, it got you hooked and at least slightly familiarized with the universe without giving away much of the ultimate story.... No matter what you think of the rest of the novel, the opening chapter is stunning.
Friday wasn't conceived and bred as a sex slave, she was conceived and bred as the best possible human short of the "supermen" (from the original short story) that went off to Olympus. Circumstances forced her into the lowest social order that did include women (and men) bred as sex toys, but she rebelled. In many ways, the entire story is about her "father's" attempt to undo the damage caused by those early experiences. Had he not gone to jail unexpectedly, she would have had the best education available, etc.
In many ways, I see this thread as a plea to the reader to not let our own opportunities go unanswered. We all (or almost all) had our own shitty childhoods, but we have free access to libraries and the web, low-cost access to physical conditioning facilties, etc. How much of it do we use, how much do we just wallow in self-pity at our pityful educations, poor choices on TV and television, etc.?
> Third, IF you receive a certified letter from someone that you can verify is really a lawyer.
Think back to your law school days. In the US, anyone can act as their own lawyer - our courts have repeated rejected the "gatekeeper" role for lawyers that other countries have adopted.
Only a fool would pursue a non-trivial matter without a competent lawyer helping them, if not actually representing them (which is all that membership in the bar really gives you - the right to represent others before any court in that bar), but they still have that right.
Meanwhile, I agree 100% that any "legal" notice that isn't signed with a real name is meaningless. Nobody has the right to make demands by fiat - even if you're willing to concede that somebody is entitled to make a claim (which is far from certain in this case), you have the right if not the obligation to ensure that this person is competent to make this claim.
There's now a range of penalties (at least at the USMA), with separation reserved for the most serious offenses.
Meanwhile I think there's at least a chance that the RIAA will be the one to get a black eye out of this. How many of these "pirated" tracks are sitting in the student's room at home, left behind to save space and prevent damage? This isn't your average college dorm room, and I would be inclined to reward a creative cadet who found a way to enjoy his music collection despite restrictions on what he can keep in his room than punish him.
Never forget that an RIAA spokeswoman testified before a Congressional commitee that they believe consumers do not have the right to make copies of CDs they own for use in their car or at the office. I'm sure that they consider copies made while a student is in college equally "illegal." That doesn't mean that such copies are actually illegal - everyone outside of the RIAA seems to consider such copies very reasonable and legal.
William F Buckley is an honest conservative. I often disagree with conservative positions, but I often do and almost always can understand and respect their arguments even where we disagree.
In contrast, the Republican party has been seized by so-called conservatives who are pretty much as abhorent to true conservatives as to liberals, progressives, and everyone else with enough sense to come in out of the rain. I haven't been able to find any underlying philosophy other than an adolescent mixture of anti-intellectualism and deference to authority. (The Big Guy above, the wannabe in the White House or governor's mansion.) They may call themselves conservatives, but I've yet to find any true conservative who doesn't grit his teeth at the crap at their antics.
You know, I remember when "tax and spend" was a bad thing. Then I saw the predictable consequences of years of "borrow and spend" politics. It doesn't work for individuals (it's the fastest way to bankruptcy other than "acts of God"), and it doesn't work for nations.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a fatal flaw with your claim that failing to apply patches for six months is negligence to the point of absolving MS of all responsibility.
MS patches are notorious for introducing new bugs. Or new "features" that break existing applications. Or bundling in totally unrelated things - fix this critical bug in one application, but accept another application being patched to call home. A lot.
Do you remember the service pack saga from a few years ago? SP4 introduced a serious bug, SP5 fixed it but introduced another serious bug, then SP6 fixed that one but... a lots of sites couldn't apply any patches for a *long* period.
Or just read the war stories in the SQL Slammer thread. A lot of sites knew about the recent patch, but were unable to apply any patch because an earlier patch brok their mission critical applications.
Ironically, most of the people I know in their 30s and 40s chuckle at the young turks who don't realize that their "hot new paradigm" (or language or whatever) is the same recycled cat shit that's been around - and dismissed - for years. They'll all very much aware of the new stuff that really matters, but are also aware of the true cost of changing legacy systems and don't make changes casually.
"Support" is probably a term of art, at least in the US, that translates to spending money. Not entirely - candidates are always "supporting" various causes, but when you talk about government policy it usually means a lot more than just saying that you should probably go with the stuff that gives you access to source code over the stuff that doesn't when all other things are equal.
In other words, this is probably a big uproar over nothing. The only reason to track it is to prevent certain commercial vendors from spinning the same term-of-art to it's own benefit.
The problem with the "web" approach is that most interactions are strictly hierarchial, and the web approach does not work well in that situation.
You have a job only if the HR department says you have a job. It doesn't matter how many of your coworkers think you work there, one group has the final say.
You're a student in a university only if the registar says you are. It doesn't matter how many other students or professors you can get to think you're a student, only the registar's decision matters.
Even in your own home network, you decide what's your hardware and who's allowed to access it.
I agree that hierarchial solutions don't work well once you start crossing borders, but that accounts for only a small part of the problem for most users and systems. The problems caused when attempting to force PKI to solve this problem are a small fraction of the problems caused by forcing a "web" solution to the far more common hierarchial situations.
As others have pointed out, six sigma is an unrealistic goal on the soft targets. It's a laudable goal when you're manufacturing widgets (e.g., if you're running a soft drink production line and crank out a million cans a month, having only 3 manufacturing defects is a reasonable (if high) goal), but WTF does it mean when you're talking about a help desk that has 1000 widely varying tickets per month?
:-) only three should make it past your virus protection measures.
On the other hand, there are some concrete numbers that you can use a six-sigma standard on.
Uptime: over a year, your total downtime should be under 107 seconds. That's right, less than two minutes of downtime per year, for all causes! Since no system can reboot that fast, that means redundancy with fast cutovers.
Connectivity. Again, over a year your total network downtime should be under 107 seconds. That means multiple upstream providers, multiple gateways, etc.
Virus protection. Out of every million viral-laden messages (say a typical afternoon when the lastest MSTD is in full swing
I'm sure you can come up with your own metrics. These are also far more useful measures than the "process driven" ones since it's what the IT "customers" really care about. Think about the analogy to a commercial product - when you get an empty can of soda you don't care how well the can was manufactured or how great the unseen soda would have tasted, you only care about the final product.
If you came home and found a stranger in your house, you would not just get another apartment and call it a day.
This is identity theft. It is no different than someone going out and using your name and credit history to get a credit card in your name... and making it impossible for you to refinance your house to lock in low rates, or get a new car loan, or get an increased credit line on your cards before a long trip.
Actually, I take that back - at least identity theft is now beginning to be considered a serious crime, although it's still unnecessarily hard on the victims. (E.g., many credit bureaus won't report fraud alerts without police reports, the local police don't accept these reports since the crime occured elsewhere, and the remote police don't accept reports over the phone.) But the damage caused when an individual or a small business (when an entire domain is blacklisted) is unable to communicate with others because of the fradulent traffic sent out by spammers.
When Denver got an overlay area code (and 10-digit dialing, which I actually like) the PUC did something very smart that eliminates many of the problems others are reporting.
They made all calls within this area code local.
Most of the area code was already local. But not quite all. The border was slightly adjusted, the rate was raised by pennies, and now every call within the area code is toll-free.
I'm surprised this approach hasn't spread. It greatly simplies your life since all you need to remember are which area codes are "local" and which are not, and there's no worry about inadvertently triggering a toll charge. (Or chaos, for those of us with no prefered LD carrier because Costco phone cards are cheaper for our needs.) It may not be appropriate in all area codes, but certainly should be used in any area requiring 10-digit dialing.
What happened in LA and elsewhere is that the defendants were charged with a crime in two different jurisdictions. In the US, the state and federal governments are sovereign and each has a fair crack at any defendant. The federal government has not historically performed general police duties outside of military bases and the like (although this is starting to change, a troubling prospect to many people), but it has passed some limited laws to cover those cases where local authorities appear indifferent to Constitutional rights. That's why there were federal laws passed to protect civil rights workers in the 50s, and those same laws were used in the recent cases after, and only after, the defendants were acquitted in state courts.
IANAL, but this is something that anyone over the age of 12 should understand. Just because something is not "illegal" (or unlawful) doesn't mean that it's fully accepted. There is a gray area.
If you force me to sign a contract, it may not be illegal. But it will be unenforceable - contracts must be entered into freely.
If I sign a contract, then you change the pages in the middle, it may not be illegal. But it will definitely be unenforceable - you can't change contracts after the fact without the consent of all parties.
And in this particular case, you can't hold somebody to a contract if parts of it are never disclosed. It's one thing for the EULA to explicitly give them the right to do something on a "take it or leave it" basis, it's a very different thing for them to have hidden (or unduely hard to find) checkboxes to "prove" you agreed to optional terms.
This is the reason why every(?) court that has looked at EULAs has held them to be unenforceable - why the companies felt it necessary to force the issue via the UCITA.
Well, my state hasn't passed UCITA and I consider EULAs basically null and void precisely because of their widespread abusive use.
The saddest thing is that the managers will never understand that they're responsible for their own problems. There are a lot of valid reasons for easing somebody out of the door, but the style of comments acceptable at the company before the merger is not one of them.
// workaround, some_library_call() isn't working like advertised
// fucking windows refuses to allow us to keep both widgets visible at the same time, so we'll do this instead...
N.B., I am not defending comments that are abusive to coworkers, slanderous, etc. That type of language has no place in an office.
But the tone of a comment is a valuable indication of how much effort was put into fixing it. If I see a comment like
it tells me that they RTFM but found a workaround. Maybe a future version of the library (or the FM) will get it right. I probably don't need to talk to the author before touching the code myself. In contrast, a comment like
tells me that they put a lot of effort into finding a solution to the problem, but every attempt failed. If I have an idea, I should talk to the author to see if he's already tried it. (Better yet would be a pointer to some internal document detailing everything they tried.)
This isn't absolute - many people will never let their comments contain any emotional tone, and others will swear at the slightest problem. But it's a valuable tool when it's used properly.
(Speaking of bugs, why does slashcode insist on merging paragraphs?)
While this comment is humorous, it's also very deep. It shows that the coder understood what he was doing well enough to know that the behavior wasn't as expected... and anyone else touching the same code should expect problems.
It's rare, thankfully, but it is possible for code to trigger obscure compiler or even CPU bugs. These can be virtually impossible to track down, esp. if your boss is (justifiably) skeptical of your claim that the problem has to be in the compiler. In these cases the best you can do is flag the code as something that's very flaky.
(BTW, I have some personal experience with such code. I just hit one with a PNG decoder - one mode had a rare decoder error that would flip one pixel, but the mode meant that the error was propagated across multiple scan lines. A very careful review of the code showed no error, and when I tested the code on different hardware (a PC, not an embedded device) it worked perfectly on the same images. Therefore it has to be the cross-compiler or hardware, and all I could do was document the problem.)
At some point, maybe between my sophomore and junior years, my university switched from quarters to semesters. Many pairs of classes were combined into a single new class... and needless to say the university required you to retake the new semester-long class if you only had one of the prereqs.
Toss in the normal shuffling over 4 years, etc., and I think everyone in know had to hustle to complete graduation requirements. I know I ended up filling the paperwork for an associates degree for under one of the early catalogues, then using that degree as a "pre-existing AS degree" to waive all of the lower-division requirements for my BS. Toss in the fact that I could never decide between a math or physics degree and I ended up with three diplomas (one AS, two BS) in less than a year.
If the money goes to the official(s) approving the deal, it's a bribe and criminal. If it goes towards other programs or the general fund, it's a settlement and legal.
Of course reality is far more complex than that. Some officials may use the money to fund pet projects that they can't fund through regular channels. But that's a matter for the state (either the elected officials overseeing these people, or the voters themselves) to address.
I've contacted a number of sites running open relays that were used to joe-job one of my domains. A few were legitimately careful but got caught by Exchanges's configuration files or had non-servers hijacked (e.g., one had a Cisco router hijacked!), but most didn't know or care that their mail server was an open relay.
Because of this and the infeasibility of the per-message solutions, I think it's time to start hitting open relays with statutory penalties. Something on the order of $100-200 first offense, $200-500 second, $500-1000 on third and subsequent offsenses, collectable through the victim's local small claims court. To minimize baseless complaints (and allow companies to ensure that they're not running an open relay) the courts could require confirmation that a site is running an open relay via an approved testing service, basically what a lot of the blacklist sites already do with test messages.
It should go without saying that any fines and court costs could be passed on to the upstream site that sent the spam. Maybe they were hacked - it really doesn't matter. Either you were authorized to send mail through that relay or you weren't. In the first case your contract specifies the damages (if any), in the latter case it's already a criminal trespass case.
Shutting down the open relays won't eliminate spammers, of course, but it should reduce the damage caused to innocent third parties and the true spammers will be universally blacklisted.
I think the theater is sleazy - putting up that sign is an admission that they know their tickets are causing confusion - but it sounds like you were offered a reasonable choice: either use the noon tickets puchased at matinee prices, or pay the difference for the midnight showing and go to it.
Now, if they said you had to pay $8+/ticket for a second set of tickets, instead of just the $3+/ticket or so difference, that would be a different matter. But you can't reasonably expect them to offer the midnight show at matinee prices - even if you're an honest victim, you know there are many people who would deliberately exploit this policy.
At the least, toss the media into freezer-weight ziplock bags. Better yet is double-bagging it - put the media in a smaller bag, and then in a larger bag with smaller bag's opening on the 'far' side.
Paper-rated "fire safes" work by putting a media that undergoes a phase change at high temperatures, releasing steam in the process. (Think of the latent heat involved in freezing and melting ice, same theory is used to keep the interior of the safe at a reasonable temperature.)
The only problem is that paper tolerates steam fairly well. Ditto the smoke that can make its way into the safe. The paper may be damaged, but it is still readable. Computer media will be destroyed. Fortunately freezer-weight plastic is more than adequate to block the steam, leaving only small openings in the seal. Even this is modest, and the second bag is mostly to allow you to avoid smearing soot onto the media as you remove it from the bag.
For a technological society, our logical base for all measures is 10, or whatever the base of our number system is. We have to deal with a incredible range of numbers (quick: how many miles could the people of Seattle drive with the oil spilled from the Exxon Valdez?) and that's much easier to do when everything is a power of 10.
But in nontechnical societies, your needs are at a much more personal level. In these cases you want numbers that are multiples of 2 or 3. That gives you 2 cups per pint, 2 pints per quart, 3 tablespoons to a teaspoon, or 4 quarts to a gallon. (There's actually an archaic meausre between quarts and gallons, so it's 2x twice over.)
That's why base 12 is so widely used in traditional systems. It can be easily deviced into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths. 60 adds fifths and is the basis for our navigation (360 is 2 x 3 x 60), clocks, and probably other stuff that slips my mind at the moment.
Finally, one important but often overlooked issue is that the Imperial set of measures was called "Imperial" for a reason - it was largely usable across Britain (or the entire UK?). In contrast, pre-metrification the French had a staggering variety of measures that made commerce beyond the village a nightmare. The French had to do something, but the system the British had was good enough to run a global empire.
Do you have a domain registered through NetSol? Have you paid your $960 advertising fee to that company yet? You know the one, it sends out an invoice once a year or so.
When I got it, I knew it was bogus (it said my ad would list me under gas stations or something like that), but it also looked like any of the other invoices my small business dealt with. Anyone not intimately familiar with my business dealings would probably have paid it without a second thought. It's only after you carefully read the entire document that you see very small print admitting that it was a solicitation, not part of an ongoing contract... although once you fall for the scam once you'll get real invoices for years.
In that case the issue isn't whether or not they can create business directories and a kilobuck for the entry. It's that their ads are literally indistiguishable from invoices without careful study or intimate knowledge of the particulars.
It the same thing with Bozo Software. The issue isn't so much the product they offer, it's the fact that their advertising is deliberately designed to be look like legitimate system messages. They stand out on Linux boxes, but on a Windows box they can fool even experienced people who don't exercise extraordinary care.
The content of the messages also tend to be deceptive. As others have pointed out, "broadcasting your IP address" is a term of art, popup ads are incapable of checking IP stack performance, etc.
My biggest fear is that, someday, some group of nuts will succeed in getting a manned mission to Mars... and the manned space programs will die because there are no dreams left but their Mars mission was symbolic, not the capping demonstration of some important new technology.
Before we start thinking about Mars, we need to get trips to LEO about as difficult as a long flight on earth. No months of training, no exhaustive tests, just pay your fare (within an order of magnitude of first-class fare between London and Sydney, say), pass your CIH questions and board a regularly scheduled flight. (Another way of looking at it - a honeymoon in orbit should provoke some jealosy, but not shock.) Getting to one of the lunar bases should be about as difficult as getting to the South Pole station today.
Then we can talk about manned missions to Mars. It will still be difficult, but most of the technology will be mature and it can be reused to support mining expeditions to the asteroid belt. Within a generation there should be manned stations in the asteroid belt and/or near Mars.
In contrast, we're barely able to operate a single space station today, and there's no realistic expectation of an operational lunar base for a generation.
That actually sounds like a fairly standard "how to lie with statistics" approach. It's true, but not TRUE, if you know what I mean....
As for the title, think about it. When you own a car, or better yet lease a car since it simplifies these numbers, you have regular costs such as payments, registration, insurance, fuel and maintenance. You also have an irregular expense if you're involved in an accident.
The latter might be rare - I think it's something like 5 years between accidents on average across all drivers - but the cost of an accident can easily dwarf all other costs. So these isolated events skew the numbers when you mix the regular and irregular expenses.
(The same thing is behind the statistic that for the average person the vast bulk of your health insurance money is spent during the last week of their life. Of course it is - most years you aren't fighting for your life!)
This is why "downtime" expenses are so high for Unix systems - they're so rare and often caused by hardware failure. Windows, while getting more reliable, still has more downtime so you have more 'bumper benders' as opposed to the catastrophic mechanical failures.
Leaving aside the rest of the novel, Friday has the best opening line, paragraph and chapter of any book I have ever read.
I can't remember the exact words off the top of my head, but the opening line was something like "I killed him as the door dilated closed behind him." You immediately knew that this novel would have action, violence, and a futuristic setting. I can only compare this to "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" that gives you humor, horror and violence in just four words.
The opening paragraph reinforced all of this. We learned that the speaker was an agent of some kind - not just a brutal murder, that the setting was the "Kenya Beanstalk" so it's definitely set in the future, and that there's a heavy police presence in the form of floating cameras.
The opening chapter had our hero running across a world very different from our own ("Alaska Free State?" "Illinois Imperium?" and a world with space travel, beanstalks, underground tubes... and horsedrawn transportation on the surface?!), and the betrayal of our heroine as she returns to her home base.
The writing was incredibly tight, it got you hooked and at least slightly familiarized with the universe without giving away much of the ultimate story.... No matter what you think of the rest of the novel, the opening chapter is stunning.
Friday wasn't conceived and bred as a sex slave, she was conceived and bred as the best possible human short of the "supermen" (from the original short story) that went off to Olympus. Circumstances forced her into the lowest social order that did include women (and men) bred as sex toys, but she rebelled. In many ways, the entire story is about her "father's" attempt to undo the damage caused by those early experiences. Had he not gone to jail unexpectedly, she would have had the best education available, etc.
In many ways, I see this thread as a plea to the reader to not let our own opportunities go unanswered. We all (or almost all) had our own shitty childhoods, but we have free access to libraries and the web, low-cost access to physical conditioning facilties, etc. How much of it do we use, how much do we just wallow in self-pity at our pityful educations, poor choices on TV and television, etc.?
> Third, IF you receive a certified letter from someone that you can verify is really a lawyer.
Think back to your law school days. In the US, anyone can act as their own lawyer - our courts have repeated rejected the "gatekeeper" role for lawyers that other countries have adopted.
Only a fool would pursue a non-trivial matter without a competent lawyer helping them, if not actually representing them (which is all that membership in the bar really gives you - the right to represent others before any court in that bar), but they still have that right.
Meanwhile, I agree 100% that any "legal" notice that isn't signed with a real name is meaningless. Nobody has the right to make demands by fiat - even if you're willing to concede that somebody is entitled to make a claim (which is far from certain in this case), you have the right if not the obligation to ensure that this person is competent to make this claim.
There's now a range of penalties (at least at the USMA), with separation reserved for the most serious offenses.
Meanwhile I think there's at least a chance that the RIAA will be the one to get a black eye out of this. How many of these "pirated" tracks are sitting in the student's room at home, left behind to save space and prevent damage? This isn't your average college dorm room, and I would be inclined to reward a creative cadet who found a way to enjoy his music collection despite restrictions on what he can keep in his room than punish him.
Never forget that an RIAA spokeswoman testified before a Congressional commitee that they believe consumers do not have the right to make copies of CDs they own for use in their car or at the office. I'm sure that they consider copies made while a student is in college equally "illegal." That doesn't mean that such copies are actually illegal - everyone outside of the RIAA seems to consider such copies very reasonable and legal.
William F Buckley is an honest conservative. I often disagree with conservative positions, but I often do and almost always can understand and respect their arguments even where we disagree.
In contrast, the Republican party has been seized by so-called conservatives who are pretty much as abhorent to true conservatives as to liberals, progressives, and everyone else with enough sense to come in out of the rain. I haven't been able to find any underlying philosophy other than an adolescent mixture of anti-intellectualism and deference to authority. (The Big Guy above, the wannabe in the White House or governor's mansion.) They may call themselves conservatives, but I've yet to find any true conservative who doesn't grit his teeth at the crap at their antics.
You know, I remember when "tax and spend" was a bad thing. Then I saw the predictable consequences of years of "borrow and spend" politics. It doesn't work for individuals (it's the fastest way to bankruptcy other than "acts of God"), and it doesn't work for nations.