Amen. As a game developer, I do a lot of code that needs to be fast (as in 1ms can have noticeable effects in the game). Here's what I do:
Come up with a clean design, and be aware of complexity for space and CPU time - like if you are doing it every frame, don't do an O(N^2) algorithm when N is likely to be on the order of 1000.
Write the code in the cleanest way possible, and when there is a choice, prefer the cleanest way to the "fastest" way. If they are equally clean, go with the fastest. And of course, avoid anything that I know will pop up later on the profiler.
Get the code working
Profile the code to identify any hotspots.
If the hotspots are very nasty, rethink the design. Otherwise, optimize the hotspots -- first by seeing if the slow code really needs to be called as often as it is. If it takes 1us, but is called a million times in a frame, hand-optimizing the assembly code will help much less than making it get called only a thousand times per frame. Of course, if the inner-loop does something really stupid and is 10 times as slow as it should be, then I'll fix it first.
Only then, if the design is as it needs to be and can't be improved for speed, and the code needs to be called many times, and the inner-loop code doesn't do anything stupid, then I'll look into line-by-line optimizations, seeing if I can get the compiler to generate faster code (of course profiling after every change to make sure that it does indeed speed it up).
And finally, though it almost never comes to this, I'll see if I can write better assembly code than the compiler.
The main thing, though, is don't "optimize" code that doesn't yet fully work. You'll probably end up with something that is not only slow and broken, but also very difficult to debug.
Consider that "or" is used throughout the definition of who it applies to. That means if any of that is true, it applies to you. You can then reduce it to this:
Sec. 2. Definition and Policy.
(a) The term "individual subject to this order" shall mean any individual who is not a United States citizen with respect to whom I determine from time to time in writing that:
there is reason to believe that such individual, at the relevant
times,
(ii) has conspired to commit, acts in preparation of international terrorism, that threaten to cause adverse effects on the United States economy;
and
it is in the interest of the United States that such individual
be subject to this order.
Now, what is an "act of international terrorism"? If you ask the FBI, they say this:
"the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."
So, if you are not a citizen and there is reason to believe that you are conspiring to use force against property in an effort to coerce a corporation to further social objectives, and that action threatens to cause adverse effects on the U.S. economy, then Bush's order applies to you. The only other requirement is that the "activities transcend national boundaries" -- which can mean that this alleged conspiracy involves coordinating with people in other countries.
So, for example, if "there is reason to believe" that activists in the U.S. and another country intend to pour sugar in the gas tanks of trucks of some large corporation, and it is believed that this action threatens "to cause adverse effects on the United States economy", then they are alleged international terrorists and this order can be applied.
It could very well be that the activists intend to do an internationally-coordinated act of civil-disobedience by lying down in front of the trucks, but there might be "reason to believe" that some will go a bit further.
And while Bush's order also covers much more heinous crimes, the fact is that his order applies to just this sort of protest.
I'm not sure which "clearly" you are referring to. There's this one:
Clearly, if you are suspected of conspiring to commit "acts of international terrorism" that threaten to cause adverse effects on the U.S. economy, and you are not a citizen of the U.S., then this applies to you.
That's straight from Bush's executive order. So while the constitution applies to non-citizens on American soil (the executive order says that these people can be grabbed anywhere including in the U.S.), Bush makes it clear that the people that he intends to put on trial with this system are not covered by the constitution due to their alleged actions or allegiances and their status as non-citizens.
You saying that this "just plain can't" happen is like saying that Japanese Americans just plain couldn't be rounded up during WWII, that American citizens with radical views just plain couldn't be deported to Russia in 1920, that Nixon's underlings just plain couldn't plant bugs in the Watergate hotel, etc.
I think we should assume that Bush will attempt to do at least what he says he intends to do, and he says that he wants military tribunals try people for conspiring to adversely affect the U.S. economy. During WWI, it is exactly laws like this that were used to smash unions that were "seditious" because by "adversely affecting the economy" they were hurting the war effort. Bush may talk about how things are entirely new after Sept 11th, but he is borrowing many ideas from the past.
I agree that with pressure from the American people, including using the courts, Bush will not be allowed to do all that he intends to do, and some of his actions will be corrected after the fact, but that is no argument to not put pressure on him now. In fact, I've heard that due to public outcry and from the response from international human rights organizations, he has made some ammendments to the executive order making it less orwellian (I heard that he changed it to require a unanimous decision to execute someone). If everyone had said, oh, don't worry about it, it can't happen, he wouldn't have done this.
Now, if you meant the other "clearly" in my post (about WWI era laws), anyone that reads them can see that they are unconstitutional -- possessing an emblem of a banned organization is specifically listed as being a crime, in one, for example. Being unconstitutional didn't stop them from used for several years, though.
If they had the time and resources they could and should check both, but with limited options you go with the probabilities. No eldery black women have blown up anything big recently, sorry. Want to avoid that profiling? Make it so that young Arab men haven't blown up anything recently, either.
Let's make up our mind... are we against a powerful, sophisticated group that is a real threat to U.S. security, or are we up against a small, underfunded band of crazy morons who just happened to be lucky enough to kill a few thousand people.
Your profiling idea will certainly protect us against some portion of stupid whackos, but think about it... If you had a pile of money and a lot of influence and intelligence and wanted to cause damage, and you knew that they were screening for young Arab men but letting the ederly black women on the plane, wouldn't you try to find a way to use ederly black women and not young Arab men?
No it doesn't. It mentions "fair trial" but in the end, the Secretary of Defense has full power to make it as fair or unfair as he feels like.
As for this system not being used against others, there is nothing in the order that limits it. Here is who it can apply to:
(ii) has engaged in, aided or abetted, or conspired to commit, acts of international terrorism, or acts in preparation therefor,
that have caused, threaten to cause, or have as their aim to cause, injury to or adverse effects on the United States, its citizens, national security, foreign policy, or economy;
Clearly, if you are suspected of conspiring to commit "acts of international terrorism" that threaten to cause adverse effects on the U.S. economy, and you are not a citizen of the U.S., then this applies to you.
Given that "terrorism" has been defined in very slippery ways in U.S. laws, to include hacking websites, property damage and other sorts of non-violent crimes, it is not a very large stretch to suggest this could be applied to unions and activists. This is especially true when you consider that the U.S. government (and most governments) have a long track record of doing exactly that. In the U.S., many states still have "criminal anarchy", "sedition", or "sabotage" laws that were specifically created to smash radical labor unions after WWI. In Washington state, the law was so bad that if you were a janitor in a building where an outlawed union was allowed to meet, you had commited a serious crime.
Yes, such laws are clearly unconstitutional, but in times of war, the constitution is often forgotten (remember the Supreme Court OKing the rounding up of law-abiding Japanese Americans during WWII?). In addition, Bush's executive order makes it clear that he does not want any judicial oversight:
(2) the individual shall not be privileged to seek any remedy or maintain any proceeding, directly or indirectly, or to have any such
remedy or proceeding sought on the individual's behalf, in (i) any court of the United States, or any State thereof, (ii) any court of any foreign nation, or (iii) any international tribunal.
Yeah, so the military tribunals are unconstitutional, but that does little for a "suspected terrorist" that gets executed or imprisoned for years before the system is overturned.
Before you think anything about Sept. 11th being something entirely new and especially evil, requiring less due process than in the past, read the Nuremburg Charter. If presumption of innocence is ok for Nazis, it's hard to see when it shouldn't apply.
Also, keep in mind that all this "anti-terrorism" talk uses Bin Laden as their reason for enacting the laws, but the laws are not confined to the acts of Sept 11th, or even confined to "violent" terrorism. There has been much effort to make sure that illegal political acts that don't involve violence fall under the category of "terrorism". Even before Sept 11th, anti-terrorism laws were used to infiltrate and disrupt non-violent activist groups and labor unions.
If a farm owner accuses non-citizen farm workers of illegal acts during a union organizing drive or strike, what is to stop these "anti-terrorism" laws and military tribunals from being used? Again, even before Sept 11th, many newspapers have referred to both violent and non-violent protestors in the U.S. as "terrorists", in many cases equating civil-disobedience (illegal acts intended to achieve a political agenda) with assassinations and mass murder.
And this is nothing new. Dissidents are often called terrorists by repressive governments. Never mind the fundamental differences between the people that destroyed the WTC and people like Martin Luther King.
On the other hand, you weep: "The U.S. was founded by such "terrorists" (if older and wiser ones)."
And those older, wiser ones got their asses kicked too. Why do you then expect that your 'revolution' should be bloodless??
Uh... I think you misread the post. The founders of the U.S. were considered terrorists by the British government, they chose to work outside the system to change it, and they won. The pro-British folks that advocated continuing to try to work within the system were the ones that "got their asses kicked". In this sense, the founders of the U.S. were much like this kid that recently got busted, though clearly Jefferson, et al were older and wiser than this kid.
Re:violently overthrow the Constitution?
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Raisethefist.com Raided
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Oh come on. The U.S. was founded by such "terrorists" (if older and wiser ones).
The president just recently created a system of military tribunals where you can be arrested, tried, convicted, and executed without even being told the crime you were charged with, without the prosecution having shown probable cause before arrest, without hearing any evidence presented against you, without the ability to cross-examine witnesses, without your choice of counsel, without the crime specifically calling for a death sentence, without a presumption of innocence, without "beyond a shadow of a doubt" or even "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of proof, without public scrutiny, and without a right of appeal.
Now please re-read the Declaration of Independence and tell me whether the guys that wrote it sound more like Bush or this punk "terrorist" kid.
The kid may have talked about overthrowing the constitution, but Bush has done it.
And if your response is that if you don't like it, you should change it by working your way up the corporate ladder until you are CEO of a large enough corporation so that you can buy yourself or a friend into office, spare me. Yeah, and if you don't like the U.S. government, why don't you go to some country the U.S. government is bombing or propping up some hellish dictator -- now that's a great idea!
Bush has made it perfectly clear -- you are either with him or against him. If you are against him, you are a terrorist and they intend to find you no matter what country you reside in. Clearly Bush is not quite that powerful, yet -- and one hopes that countries that care about human rights will be able to reign in some of his powers, but the point is that if you don't like the U.S. government you're only real options are to try to change it or keep your head down to avoid it's wrath.
And you won't change it by saving your pennies to work within the system -- with lobbyists, bribes, and the corporate media. The current system has evolved to make sure that we can't change it from within. At the same time, violence is only a successful tactic if you are already powerful -- if you are weak, it will only hasten your destruction (look at what happened to the U.S. militia movement after Oklahoma City). And advocating violence without the intention or the ability to carry it out is the height of stupidity.
The alternative is to organize where we have the most power (whether we realize it or not) -- with our coworkers or neighbors, in schools, professional associations, clubs, consumer groups, etc. And rather than organize for lofty meaningless phrases, organize for real gains that benefit us and those around us. Much of Bush's attack on Americans has taken the shape of less job security, longer hours, etc. at work. It is possible to resist these attacks, and it is much more effective if the resistance is organized and collective rather than disorganized and individual.
As passive voters and pleaders, we are powerless, but organized and actively fighting back where we have power can work -- that's how it has worked with every social improvement in the last 1000 years or so, at least.
Which is why you can't change a business by appealing to the owner/manager's sense of decency and ethics. Ultimately, you have to affect the bottom line. If a company does something illegal or otherwise anti-worker, the only way to get them to stop is to organize and fight back. When workers in an industry are organized, there is a special name for companies that treat their workers unfairly: failed.
Look at every workplace safety standard, and you'll find that the law was enacted only after workers had won the right for themselves. In fact, the law was passed to take the power out of our hands and put it in politician's hands.
If we are organized and see that we are the ones that control how safe or comfortable our working conditions are, then we will see the value in staying vigilant. If the standards are in a law instead of a collective contract, then rather than keeping organized and putting pressure on employers, we will need to work to keep the incumbent politicians in power -- staying organized on the job will be irrelevant. And after a while, the politicians will have little incentive to keep the standards on the law books -- they just need to make sure they are the "lesser evil". Next thing you know, the laws are whittled down, the standards are gone, and we're disorganized and weak.
We don't need the government to do anything for us, and, in fact, they'll never have our best interests at heart. That's why we need to do it ourselves by organizing for our own interests.
Third, the seller sets the price no more or no less than the buyer - for a transaction to take place, there must be mutual agreement.
This is true if both sides have an equal need to reach an agreement and both sides are equally informed about the value of the work. And of course there would need to be equal negotiating skill.
Obviously someone who desparately needs a job is in a worse individual bargaining position than a company that has 500 employees doing the same work and wants to hire 1 more. While negotiating, the individual can walk away if wages or conditions aren't good enough, but the consequences are great -- possible eviction, children without healthcare, etc. But if the company refuses the individual's final offer, then the company is understaffed by less than 1%. That might mildly affect the morale and profitability of the company, but it obviously wouldn't be desparate. And the fact is, the one with the most ability to walk away from a bad offer is in a powerful position.
As for knowledge, it is difficult for an individual to learn the true value of their labor. While it is possible, most people aren't aware of what they are worth. And if you undervalue yourself, you are in a worse bargaining position. Imagine buying a used car, thinking the car is worth $5000 more than the salesman knows it's really worth - you will clearly pay more than you might have with more accurate information, just as if you knew the value and the salesman undervalued it by $1000 you'd end up with a bargain. And if a lot of people looking for a similar position undervalue themselves or are desparate, then suddenly your value goes down, even if you have accurate knowledge and are not desparate.
And, of course, negotiation is a skill -- if you've only negotiated three or four times for a salary, you won't be as skilled as someone that has done it a dozen times, or someone whose job it is to be a good negotiator.
This all adds up to most people being in a situation where it is not an agreement between equals. And this lowers the value of all of our labor, since we are only as valuable as someone that might be used to replace us.
So, that leads to the question -- how can we best increase our value, so that we are on an equal footing when reaching an agreement with an employer, or even tip the scale in our favor? For one, we need to ensure that the employer is more desparate than we are -- if refusing an agreement might put us on the street, then it would be best if the employer would risk going out of business if they refuse. We need to make sure that not only do we as individuals know what we are worth, but we need to make sure that all others that do similar work know their value. And we need to make sure that others have the skills needed to stand up for themselves. And to tip things even more in our favor, we need to lessen the risk of standing up for ourselves -- if one person stands up, the employer risks little by getting rid of them, but if we stand up together for issues we have in common, we have less risk and the employer has more.
Now, when I say we need unions, I mean it is in our best interests to organize together as I described above. We certainly don't need corrupt union officials or unions that spend our money on even more corrupt politicians.
But there are a lot of other options -- you can form an independent union, and make it as democratic and decentralized as you like, or you can find an existing union to your liking (there is a broad range both within and outside the AFL-CIO).
Personally, I recommend the IWW -- a union long known for being the most democratic and least bureaucratic of unions, with a constitution that forbids any entanglement with political parties.
The best and most direct way of limiting the rights of large corporations is to choose not to participate in them and how they will or will not. The WTO makes it easier for people to make their own choices.
Yeah, right. Then why is it that the WTO is being used to force Ukranian CD manufacturers to all register with the government? The Ukrainian people don't want that law rammed down their throats, the Ukrainian government doesn't want to enact it, and even Ukrainian businesses don't want it.
Did you even read the article? You claim you want "Big Brother to butt out", and want people to be free "to make their own choices", then why the hell do you support the WTO when it is being used to force Big Brother to "butt in" and ensuring the Ukrainian people can only make the choices that the big music corporations want them to make.
To paraphrase you: if music corporations don't like CDs that aren't registered with the government, then they shouldn't use them, but they should keep their fascistic "only the RIAA can decide" laws out of it; let each person choose.
And if the WTO truly stood for free trade, the U.S. government would be punished for threatening the Ukraine with trade sanctions. After all, if I want to buy shoes made in the Ukraine, why should I be forced by the U.S. government to pay more, just because some big music companies want to force laws on the Ukrainian people -- laws that they don't want.
Next time, read the article and use your brain before posting nonsense like this.
Just in case you still don't get it. The music corporations have lobbied the U.S. government to threaten trade sanctions against Ukraine. Meanwhile, if the Ukrainian government refuses to enact a new Big Brother law written by the music corporations, they will not be allowed in the WTO. Clearly you have music corporations, the U.S. government, and the WTO on the side of Big Brother laws and trade sanctions, and the Ukrainian people on the side of free trade.
Now please explain to me why you think the music corporations, the U.S. government, and the WTO really support free trade, while presumably the Ukrainians are the bad Big Brother guys for not wanting to submit to some stupid law written by the music corporations.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick has warned that failure to address the piracy problem could jeopardize Ukraine's hope of entering the World Trade Organization this year.
The fact is that it is already illegal in the Ukraine to copy CDs without permission from the copyright holder. What the recording industry wants them to do is to ban the manufacture and sale of CDs that haven't been properly registered with the government. If the Ukrainian government fails to restrict this trade, they will receive punative trade sanctions and be kept out of the World Tade Organization.
At the same time, we are supposed to believe that the WTO is all about "Free Trade". Clearly, the WTO is for "Free Trade" in the sense that it is against people democratically limiting the rights of large corporations, but when it comes to people democratically refusing to restrict the rights of people despite threats from large corporations, the WTO again sides with the large corporations.
It kinda makes you think maybe they are really just for large corporations. And "free" trade isn't really "free" as in beer or "free" as in speech. It's more "free" as in "do as you're told and you won't get this nightstick rammed up your ass".
I love this idea. Rather than outlawing good practices, they're doing real education. And if you really cheat with this policy in place, it's very clear-cut.
If this program is really necessary, it suggests that very little effort is being spent evaluating students' work. Given that universities have been cutting back on teaching budgets, it's probably due to too many students in a class or inexperienced professors. If the professors took the time to actually look at the code (or in the other case, read students' papers carefully), it is pretty obvious if a student is cheating.
Also, if the professors took the time to create good homework problems, cheating wouldn't help a student even if they didn't get caught. Of course, if you're teaching two classes with 100 students each, you can't really do that.
Perhaps students should do a little math and figure that if they pay $4k per quarter and take four classes, that's $1k per student per class. And if a professor is teaching 200 students, the university is receiving $200k for the classes. The professor is probably making somewhere around $10k for the quarter, call it $20 to include benefits and taxes. Where is the other $180k going? And when budget crunches come up, perhaps budgeting should be done similar to code profiling -- look to the biggest expenses first, and make sure that the cuts don't damage the overall purpose.
Personally, if I was getting the sort of cheap-ass education where this cheater-detection software is considered a cheap alternative to proper education, I'd expect to pay much less in tuition, rather than the constant 10+% tuition increases students have been seeing for the past 20 years or so.
When I was a TA, if I saw two assignments that looked suspicious, I'd hold them up side by side and cross my eyes to get the stereogram effect. If it was a bad cheating job, there would be an almost perfect match and my eyes would be able to focus on them, with the differences jumping out at me.
Of course, with freshman assignments, they tend to be pretty damn similar even without cheating (write C code to implement bubble-sort using the pseudo-code in the book as a guide). And usually, the students that were cheating would fail the tests, so there was little need to do anything special.
Why someone would pay tens of thousands of dollars to learn nothing and end up with a job that pays well but that they'll get fired from within a few weeks...
Hell, even if all your software is legit, if you have unfree software on your systems, you might have lost your "papers" that prove you are a law-abiding citizen.
All the software at my work is legit, but you can bet some of the CDs are lost behind a filing cabinet somewhere. If they have no evidence that my company has pirated software, they have no legal right to force my company to pay me a few hundred dollars to dig through my office to find every last CD. And clearly, it is cheaper to just pay the money to the company. Sure sounds like extortion to me.
Here we have an organization that represents at least one criminal organization, shaking down businesses with a threat of illegal actions (raids without probable cause are unconstitutional, and frivilous lawsuits are also illegal) if they don't pay money. That's extortion. Sure, it's hard to make things stick against such powerful organizations, but that doesn't change the facts.
Someone needs to do a write-up on the expense of these raids. Clearly, this needs to be factored into Microsoft's "Total Cost of Ownership" bullshit, since MS-free companies have much less to lose in a raid.
What they're trying to do is conjure up in your mind all those goofy laws you've heard about -- you know, from those lists of laws that "are still on the books" even though nobody would think to enforce them now.
So when you hear about the 1913 law banning secret interviews with government officials and anti-trust witnesses, you're supposed to think of that goofy 1913 law requiring that all horseless carriages must yield right-of way to donkey carts and have someone walking 100 yards in front to announce them.
They certainly don't want you thinking about laws from 1913 that outlawed corporations handing cash to politicians in exchange for dropping anti-trust suits.
Much easier to just say something like "The document you sent came through corrupted, I've had this problem before with MS Word format files. Can you please resend the document in X format? You can tell MS Word to save in this format under the "SaveAs" option. Thanks."
It's a bit simplistic and perhaps not 100% true but everyone will understand what you're saying, will sympathise, and they might even repeat your bit of wisdom to others.
War is easy if you're the one with the guns...
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The Drone War
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· Score: 2
I wouldn't expect much of a battle of two powerful countries. What the U.S. has shown is that with high-tech weapons, it is possible to conquer a poor country with very few casualties. The main "cost" of conquering Afghanistan was monetary. So now, rather than worrying about the repercusions of Americans seeing body bags come home, the choice of whether or not to conquer a country can be done with a simpler cost-benefit analysis.
This is similar to the development of new crowd-control technology for at uppity people at home. If you pull out the machine guns and kill a bunch of protestors in America, there are serious political repercusions. On the other hand, if you can control and apprehend people without killing them, you achieve your aims without many negative consequences. Americans generally don't like government policies that get Americans killed.
Expect to see "terrorists" popping up in every little country that has something the powers-that-be want but little chance of defending themselves.
Bush sure was lucky to get his very own Reichstag fire...
This is pretty ridiculous. It's supposedly "super-secret" yet clearly Microsoft is intentionally leaking this information. Most of the features won't make it into the final product, because it's just hype. I wonder if this new "Home Station" will create revolutionary eco-cities like Ginger. And who knows, it might one day sell for $5, fit in your pocket, and double as an electric razor! Woohoo!
Now that it is clear that the mailed anthrax originated in the U.S. and is probably from a neo-Nazi or someone who has an interest in creating hysteria to build support for increased police powers, it's good to see that the FBI has turned their attention to the real terrorists!
We don't really want to catch the guys that started the anthrax scare, but those warez kidz, now, they are a top priority. I understand Osama Bin Laden himself was able to plan the Sept 11th attacks using cracked software.
It's time to crack down. Let's jam bamboo under their fingernails and put electrodes on their testicles and make them scream so that we can all feel safe again.
The reason the first programmers on the ENIAC were women was that most of the men had gone off to fight WWII. The interesting thing, though, is that all the government propaganda aimed at women in the 40's influenced how mothers raised their daughters -- even if women weren't treated equally, women on a large scale came to believe that they *should* be treated equally. So even though the powers that be put women "back in their place", their daughters grew up with some ideas. That's at least part of what led to the women's lib movement in the late 60's and 70's.
Unfortunately, it kind of hit a dead-end with many unresolved issues. Now, a great many more women work full-time jobs, but so do men. In fact, the average work-week has grown steady up from 40 hours to 45 or 50. Meanwhile it has grown more and more difficult to financially support a family on one income, but the housework still needs doing and kids need taking care of.
It's true that women tend to make less for the same work as men, but even if that gets equalized, that doesn't solve the bigger problems. Being forced to work 50+ hours a week is hardly "liberation," and certainly not what the feminist movement was hoping to achieve.
Ultimately, both men and women need to work together to liberate ourselves (at least those of us in the bottom 99% economically).
That's a pretty bogus poll. Do practices being used in the terror investigation go too far? It assumes that the respondant knows what practices are being used, and it also suggests that improper practices are at least in the right direction, even if they've gone "too far".
Now, if you asked people if it is ok for CIA agents to attach electrodes to an elderly suspect's testicles in order to extract information, and then to dump the suspect in a street without apologies or medical care if it turned out to be an innocent bystander, my guess is most Americans would say that such actions are criminal and not to be tolerated. Is it "going too far"? Only in the sense that Charles Manson "went too far".
Of course, the real question is will Larry Ellison still be alive for Nuremburg II, and, if so, what will be his excuse? And should he hang for his crimes?
IBM set up the Nazi database system and apparently got off claiming they didn't know the Nazis would do bad things with it. Given that the various political leaders and even the CIA have gone on record approving of torture and assassinations to root out "terrorists", and given the broad use of the term "terrorist", can Larry Ellison successfully claim ignorance? Is ignorance a valid defense?
While XBOX encryption can not be an impregnable technical barrier, it is a serious legal barrier. The DMCA prevents hackers from legally passing around the tools to decrypt Xbox binaries. And copyright law prevents you from passing around the binaries themselves. So its going to be impossible to legally use the Xbox binaries do deduce things like register locations on custom chips. For the non-custom chips with published specs, just find the base address and you know the rest.
IANAL, but I don't think the DMCA forbids creating, posessing, and using a tool. I'm pretty sure it just covers distributing the tool (though it's still up in the air if courts will consider source code "a device" under the DMCA). And copyright law allows fair use -- just as you can use quotes from a movie or song, it should be legal to disassemble short parts of the binaries and distribute those as part of an article about how the XBox works.
I think the trouble would come from trade secret laws, since I'm sure MS would claim every tiny bit of code is a trade secret, and the law forbids distributing a trade secret without permission from the owner. I don't think reverse engineering and sharing the info is actually illegal, since I don't that information is legally a trade secret, but that's never stopped multi-billionaires from suing people into the ground.
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- Come up with a clean design, and be aware of complexity for space and CPU time - like if you are doing it every frame, don't do an O(N^2) algorithm when N is likely to be on the order of 1000.
- Write the code in the cleanest way possible, and when there is a choice, prefer the cleanest way to the "fastest" way. If they are equally clean, go with the fastest. And of course, avoid anything that I know will pop up later on the profiler.
- Get the code working
- Profile the code to identify any hotspots.
- If the hotspots are very nasty, rethink the design. Otherwise, optimize the hotspots -- first by seeing if the slow code really needs to be called as often as it is. If it takes 1us, but is called a million times in a frame, hand-optimizing the assembly code will help much less than making it get called only a thousand times per frame. Of course, if the inner-loop does something really stupid and is 10 times as slow as it should be, then I'll fix it first.
- Only then, if the design is as it needs to be and can't be improved for speed, and the code needs to be called many times, and the inner-loop code doesn't do anything stupid, then I'll look into line-by-line optimizations, seeing if I can get the compiler to generate faster code (of course profiling after every change to make sure that it does indeed speed it up).
- And finally, though it almost never comes to this, I'll see if I can write better assembly code than the compiler.
The main thing, though, is don't "optimize" code that doesn't yet fully work. You'll probably end up with something that is not only slow and broken, but also very difficult to debug.So, for example, if "there is reason to believe" that activists in the U.S. and another country intend to pour sugar in the gas tanks of trucks of some large corporation, and it is believed that this action threatens "to cause adverse effects on the United States economy", then they are alleged international terrorists and this order can be applied.
It could very well be that the activists intend to do an internationally-coordinated act of civil-disobedience by lying down in front of the trucks, but there might be "reason to believe" that some will go a bit further.
And while Bush's order also covers much more heinous crimes, the fact is that his order applies to just this sort of protest.
You saying that this "just plain can't" happen is like saying that Japanese Americans just plain couldn't be rounded up during WWII, that American citizens with radical views just plain couldn't be deported to Russia in 1920, that Nixon's underlings just plain couldn't plant bugs in the Watergate hotel, etc.
I think we should assume that Bush will attempt to do at least what he says he intends to do, and he says that he wants military tribunals try people for conspiring to adversely affect the U.S. economy. During WWI, it is exactly laws like this that were used to smash unions that were "seditious" because by "adversely affecting the economy" they were hurting the war effort. Bush may talk about how things are entirely new after Sept 11th, but he is borrowing many ideas from the past.
I agree that with pressure from the American people, including using the courts, Bush will not be allowed to do all that he intends to do, and some of his actions will be corrected after the fact, but that is no argument to not put pressure on him now. In fact, I've heard that due to public outcry and from the response from international human rights organizations, he has made some ammendments to the executive order making it less orwellian (I heard that he changed it to require a unanimous decision to execute someone). If everyone had said, oh, don't worry about it, it can't happen, he wouldn't have done this.
Now, if you meant the other "clearly" in my post (about WWI era laws), anyone that reads them can see that they are unconstitutional -- possessing an emblem of a banned organization is specifically listed as being a crime, in one, for example. Being unconstitutional didn't stop them from used for several years, though.
Let's make up our mind... are we against a powerful, sophisticated group that is a real threat to U.S. security, or are we up against a small, underfunded band of crazy morons who just happened to be lucky enough to kill a few thousand people.
Your profiling idea will certainly protect us against some portion of stupid whackos, but think about it... If you had a pile of money and a lot of influence and intelligence and wanted to cause damage, and you knew that they were screening for young Arab men but letting the ederly black women on the plane, wouldn't you try to find a way to use ederly black women and not young Arab men?
As for this system not being used against others, there is nothing in the order that limits it. Here is who it can apply to:
Clearly, if you are suspected of conspiring to commit "acts of international terrorism" that threaten to cause adverse effects on the U.S. economy, and you are not a citizen of the U.S., then this applies to you.Given that "terrorism" has been defined in very slippery ways in U.S. laws, to include hacking websites, property damage and other sorts of non-violent crimes, it is not a very large stretch to suggest this could be applied to unions and activists. This is especially true when you consider that the U.S. government (and most governments) have a long track record of doing exactly that. In the U.S., many states still have "criminal anarchy", "sedition", or "sabotage" laws that were specifically created to smash radical labor unions after WWI. In Washington state, the law was so bad that if you were a janitor in a building where an outlawed union was allowed to meet, you had commited a serious crime.
Yes, such laws are clearly unconstitutional, but in times of war, the constitution is often forgotten (remember the Supreme Court OKing the rounding up of law-abiding Japanese Americans during WWII?). In addition, Bush's executive order makes it clear that he does not want any judicial oversight:
Yeah, so the military tribunals are unconstitutional, but that does little for a "suspected terrorist" that gets executed or imprisoned for years before the system is overturned.The Geneva Convention
The Nuremburg Charter.
Before you think anything about Sept. 11th being something entirely new and especially evil, requiring less due process than in the past, read the Nuremburg Charter. If presumption of innocence is ok for Nazis, it's hard to see when it shouldn't apply.
Also, keep in mind that all this "anti-terrorism" talk uses Bin Laden as their reason for enacting the laws, but the laws are not confined to the acts of Sept 11th, or even confined to "violent" terrorism. There has been much effort to make sure that illegal political acts that don't involve violence fall under the category of "terrorism". Even before Sept 11th, anti-terrorism laws were used to infiltrate and disrupt non-violent activist groups and labor unions.
If a farm owner accuses non-citizen farm workers of illegal acts during a union organizing drive or strike, what is to stop these "anti-terrorism" laws and military tribunals from being used? Again, even before Sept 11th, many newspapers have referred to both violent and non-violent protestors in the U.S. as "terrorists", in many cases equating civil-disobedience (illegal acts intended to achieve a political agenda) with assassinations and mass murder.
And this is nothing new. Dissidents are often called terrorists by repressive governments. Never mind the fundamental differences between the people that destroyed the WTC and people like Martin Luther King.
The president just recently created a system of military tribunals where you can be arrested, tried, convicted, and executed without even being told the crime you were charged with, without the prosecution having shown probable cause before arrest, without hearing any evidence presented against you, without the ability to cross-examine witnesses, without your choice of counsel, without the crime specifically calling for a death sentence, without a presumption of innocence, without "beyond a shadow of a doubt" or even "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of proof, without public scrutiny, and without a right of appeal.
This system makes a military court-martial look like a hippy love-in.
Now please re-read the Declaration of Independence and tell me whether the guys that wrote it sound more like Bush or this punk "terrorist" kid.
The kid may have talked about overthrowing the constitution, but Bush has done it.
And if your response is that if you don't like it, you should change it by working your way up the corporate ladder until you are CEO of a large enough corporation so that you can buy yourself or a friend into office, spare me. Yeah, and if you don't like the U.S. government, why don't you go to some country the U.S. government is bombing or propping up some hellish dictator -- now that's a great idea!
Bush has made it perfectly clear -- you are either with him or against him. If you are against him, you are a terrorist and they intend to find you no matter what country you reside in. Clearly Bush is not quite that powerful, yet -- and one hopes that countries that care about human rights will be able to reign in some of his powers, but the point is that if you don't like the U.S. government you're only real options are to try to change it or keep your head down to avoid it's wrath.
And you won't change it by saving your pennies to work within the system -- with lobbyists, bribes, and the corporate media. The current system has evolved to make sure that we can't change it from within. At the same time, violence is only a successful tactic if you are already powerful -- if you are weak, it will only hasten your destruction (look at what happened to the U.S. militia movement after Oklahoma City). And advocating violence without the intention or the ability to carry it out is the height of stupidity.
The alternative is to organize where we have the most power (whether we realize it or not) -- with our coworkers or neighbors, in schools, professional associations, clubs, consumer groups, etc. And rather than organize for lofty meaningless phrases, organize for real gains that benefit us and those around us. Much of Bush's attack on Americans has taken the shape of less job security, longer hours, etc. at work. It is possible to resist these attacks, and it is much more effective if the resistance is organized and collective rather than disorganized and individual.
As passive voters and pleaders, we are powerless, but organized and actively fighting back where we have power can work -- that's how it has worked with every social improvement in the last 1000 years or so, at least.
Which is why you can't change a business by appealing to the owner/manager's sense of decency and ethics. Ultimately, you have to affect the bottom line. If a company does something illegal or otherwise anti-worker, the only way to get them to stop is to organize and fight back. When workers in an industry are organized, there is a special name for companies that treat their workers unfairly: failed.
That's why we should organize.
Right on.
If we are organized and see that we are the ones that control how safe or comfortable our working conditions are, then we will see the value in staying vigilant. If the standards are in a law instead of a collective contract, then rather than keeping organized and putting pressure on employers, we will need to work to keep the incumbent politicians in power -- staying organized on the job will be irrelevant. And after a while, the politicians will have little incentive to keep the standards on the law books -- they just need to make sure they are the "lesser evil". Next thing you know, the laws are whittled down, the standards are gone, and we're disorganized and weak.
We don't need the government to do anything for us, and, in fact, they'll never have our best interests at heart. That's why we need to do it ourselves by organizing for our own interests.
This is true if both sides have an equal need to reach an agreement and both sides are equally informed about the value of the work. And of course there would need to be equal negotiating skill.
Obviously someone who desparately needs a job is in a worse individual bargaining position than a company that has 500 employees doing the same work and wants to hire 1 more. While negotiating, the individual can walk away if wages or conditions aren't good enough, but the consequences are great -- possible eviction, children without healthcare, etc. But if the company refuses the individual's final offer, then the company is understaffed by less than 1%. That might mildly affect the morale and profitability of the company, but it obviously wouldn't be desparate. And the fact is, the one with the most ability to walk away from a bad offer is in a powerful position.
As for knowledge, it is difficult for an individual to learn the true value of their labor. While it is possible, most people aren't aware of what they are worth. And if you undervalue yourself, you are in a worse bargaining position. Imagine buying a used car, thinking the car is worth $5000 more than the salesman knows it's really worth - you will clearly pay more than you might have with more accurate information, just as if you knew the value and the salesman undervalued it by $1000 you'd end up with a bargain. And if a lot of people looking for a similar position undervalue themselves or are desparate, then suddenly your value goes down, even if you have accurate knowledge and are not desparate.
And, of course, negotiation is a skill -- if you've only negotiated three or four times for a salary, you won't be as skilled as someone that has done it a dozen times, or someone whose job it is to be a good negotiator.
This all adds up to most people being in a situation where it is not an agreement between equals. And this lowers the value of all of our labor, since we are only as valuable as someone that might be used to replace us.
So, that leads to the question -- how can we best increase our value, so that we are on an equal footing when reaching an agreement with an employer, or even tip the scale in our favor? For one, we need to ensure that the employer is more desparate than we are -- if refusing an agreement might put us on the street, then it would be best if the employer would risk going out of business if they refuse. We need to make sure that not only do we as individuals know what we are worth, but we need to make sure that all others that do similar work know their value. And we need to make sure that others have the skills needed to stand up for themselves. And to tip things even more in our favor, we need to lessen the risk of standing up for ourselves -- if one person stands up, the employer risks little by getting rid of them, but if we stand up together for issues we have in common, we have less risk and the employer has more.
Now, when I say we need unions, I mean it is in our best interests to organize together as I described above. We certainly don't need corrupt union officials or unions that spend our money on even more corrupt politicians.
But there are a lot of other options -- you can form an independent union, and make it as democratic and decentralized as you like, or you can find an existing union to your liking (there is a broad range both within and outside the AFL-CIO).
Personally, I recommend the IWW -- a union long known for being the most democratic and least bureaucratic of unions, with a constitution that forbids any entanglement with political parties.
Did you even read the article? You claim you want "Big Brother to butt out", and want people to be free "to make their own choices", then why the hell do you support the WTO when it is being used to force Big Brother to "butt in" and ensuring the Ukrainian people can only make the choices that the big music corporations want them to make.
To paraphrase you: if music corporations don't like CDs that aren't registered with the government, then they shouldn't use them, but they should keep their fascistic "only the RIAA can decide" laws out of it; let each person choose.
And if the WTO truly stood for free trade, the U.S. government would be punished for threatening the Ukraine with trade sanctions. After all, if I want to buy shoes made in the Ukraine, why should I be forced by the U.S. government to pay more, just because some big music companies want to force laws on the Ukrainian people -- laws that they don't want.
Next time, read the article and use your brain before posting nonsense like this.
Just in case you still don't get it. The music corporations have lobbied the U.S. government to threaten trade sanctions against Ukraine. Meanwhile, if the Ukrainian government refuses to enact a new Big Brother law written by the music corporations, they will not be allowed in the WTO. Clearly you have music corporations, the U.S. government, and the WTO on the side of Big Brother laws and trade sanctions, and the Ukrainian people on the side of free trade.
Now please explain to me why you think the music corporations, the U.S. government, and the WTO really support free trade, while presumably the Ukrainians are the bad Big Brother guys for not wanting to submit to some stupid law written by the music corporations.
At the same time, we are supposed to believe that the WTO is all about "Free Trade". Clearly, the WTO is for "Free Trade" in the sense that it is against people democratically limiting the rights of large corporations, but when it comes to people democratically refusing to restrict the rights of people despite threats from large corporations, the WTO again sides with the large corporations.
It kinda makes you think maybe they are really just for large corporations. And "free" trade isn't really "free" as in beer or "free" as in speech. It's more "free" as in "do as you're told and you won't get this nightstick rammed up your ass".
I love this idea. Rather than outlawing good practices, they're doing real education. And if you really cheat with this policy in place, it's very clear-cut.
If this program is really necessary, it suggests that very little effort is being spent evaluating students' work. Given that universities have been cutting back on teaching budgets, it's probably due to too many students in a class or inexperienced professors. If the professors took the time to actually look at the code (or in the other case, read students' papers carefully), it is pretty obvious if a student is cheating.
Also, if the professors took the time to create good homework problems, cheating wouldn't help a student even if they didn't get caught. Of course, if you're teaching two classes with 100 students each, you can't really do that.
Perhaps students should do a little math and figure that if they pay $4k per quarter and take four classes, that's $1k per student per class. And if a professor is teaching 200 students, the university is receiving $200k for the classes. The professor is probably making somewhere around $10k for the quarter, call it $20 to include benefits and taxes. Where is the other $180k going? And when budget crunches come up, perhaps budgeting should be done similar to code profiling -- look to the biggest expenses first, and make sure that the cuts don't damage the overall purpose.
Personally, if I was getting the sort of cheap-ass education where this cheater-detection software is considered a cheap alternative to proper education, I'd expect to pay much less in tuition, rather than the constant 10+% tuition increases students have been seeing for the past 20 years or so.
When I was a TA, if I saw two assignments that looked suspicious, I'd hold them up side by side and cross my eyes to get the stereogram effect. If it was a bad cheating job, there would be an almost perfect match and my eyes would be able to focus on them, with the differences jumping out at me.
Of course, with freshman assignments, they tend to be pretty damn similar even without cheating (write C code to implement bubble-sort using the pseudo-code in the book as a guide). And usually, the students that were cheating would fail the tests, so there was little need to do anything special.
Why someone would pay tens of thousands of dollars to learn nothing and end up with a job that pays well but that they'll get fired from within a few weeks...
All the software at my work is legit, but you can bet some of the CDs are lost behind a filing cabinet somewhere. If they have no evidence that my company has pirated software, they have no legal right to force my company to pay me a few hundred dollars to dig through my office to find every last CD. And clearly, it is cheaper to just pay the money to the company. Sure sounds like extortion to me.
Here we have an organization that represents at least one criminal organization, shaking down businesses with a threat of illegal actions (raids without probable cause are unconstitutional, and frivilous lawsuits are also illegal) if they don't pay money. That's extortion. Sure, it's hard to make things stick against such powerful organizations, but that doesn't change the facts.
Someone needs to do a write-up on the expense of these raids. Clearly, this needs to be factored into Microsoft's "Total Cost of Ownership" bullshit, since MS-free companies have much less to lose in a raid.
What they're trying to do is conjure up in your mind all those goofy laws you've heard about -- you know, from those lists of laws that "are still on the books" even though nobody would think to enforce them now.
So when you hear about the 1913 law banning secret interviews with government officials and anti-trust witnesses, you're supposed to think of that goofy 1913 law requiring that all horseless carriages must yield right-of way to donkey carts and have someone walking 100 yards in front to announce them.
They certainly don't want you thinking about laws from 1913 that outlawed corporations handing cash to politicians in exchange for dropping anti-trust suits.
Much easier to just say something like "The document you sent came through corrupted, I've had this problem before with MS Word format files. Can you please resend the document in X format? You can tell MS Word to save in this format under the "SaveAs" option. Thanks."
It's a bit simplistic and perhaps not 100% true but everyone will understand what you're saying, will sympathise, and they might even repeat your bit of wisdom to others.
This is similar to the development of new crowd-control technology for at uppity people at home. If you pull out the machine guns and kill a bunch of protestors in America, there are serious political repercusions. On the other hand, if you can control and apprehend people without killing them, you achieve your aims without many negative consequences. Americans generally don't like government policies that get Americans killed.
Expect to see "terrorists" popping up in every little country that has something the powers-that-be want but little chance of defending themselves.
Bush sure was lucky to get his very own Reichstag fire...
This is pretty ridiculous. It's supposedly "super-secret" yet clearly Microsoft is intentionally leaking this information. Most of the features won't make it into the final product, because it's just hype. I wonder if this new "Home Station" will create revolutionary eco-cities like Ginger. And who knows, it might one day sell for $5, fit in your pocket, and double as an electric razor! Woohoo!
We don't really want to catch the guys that started the anthrax scare, but those warez kidz, now, they are a top priority. I understand Osama Bin Laden himself was able to plan the Sept 11th attacks using cracked software.
It's time to crack down. Let's jam bamboo under their fingernails and put electrodes on their testicles and make them scream so that we can all feel safe again.
Unfortunately, it kind of hit a dead-end with many unresolved issues. Now, a great many more women work full-time jobs, but so do men. In fact, the average work-week has grown steady up from 40 hours to 45 or 50. Meanwhile it has grown more and more difficult to financially support a family on one income, but the housework still needs doing and kids need taking care of.
It's true that women tend to make less for the same work as men, but even if that gets equalized, that doesn't solve the bigger problems. Being forced to work 50+ hours a week is hardly "liberation," and certainly not what the feminist movement was hoping to achieve.
Ultimately, both men and women need to work together to liberate ourselves (at least those of us in the bottom 99% economically).
Now, if you asked people if it is ok for CIA agents to attach electrodes to an elderly suspect's testicles in order to extract information, and then to dump the suspect in a street without apologies or medical care if it turned out to be an innocent bystander, my guess is most Americans would say that such actions are criminal and not to be tolerated. Is it "going too far"? Only in the sense that Charles Manson "went too far".
Of course, the real question is will Larry Ellison still be alive for Nuremburg II, and, if so, what will be his excuse? And should he hang for his crimes?
IBM set up the Nazi database system and apparently got off claiming they didn't know the Nazis would do bad things with it. Given that the various political leaders and even the CIA have gone on record approving of torture and assassinations to root out "terrorists", and given the broad use of the term "terrorist", can Larry Ellison successfully claim ignorance? Is ignorance a valid defense?
IANAL, but I don't think the DMCA forbids creating, posessing, and using a tool. I'm pretty sure it just covers distributing the tool (though it's still up in the air if courts will consider source code "a device" under the DMCA). And copyright law allows fair use -- just as you can use quotes from a movie or song, it should be legal to disassemble short parts of the binaries and distribute those as part of an article about how the XBox works.
I think the trouble would come from trade secret laws, since I'm sure MS would claim every tiny bit of code is a trade secret, and the law forbids distributing a trade secret without permission from the owner. I don't think reverse engineering and sharing the info is actually illegal, since I don't that information is legally a trade secret, but that's never stopped multi-billionaires from suing people into the ground.