I know you're joking, but seriously, the only way to defeat the well-financed lobby groups is to bring votes. Governments can only be bought as long as that money translates into votes at election time. Shift your culture so people vote for what they believe in and not what they saw on TV and you've won. Change the rules so political parties can only accept donations from businesses that are on the same scale as what private citizens could realistically offer and you've won. But achieving either of these changes is going to take a long time and a lot of campaigning. (Odd, really, since the politicians have nothing to lose from the second, but there you go.)
Your point would carry more weight if the really serious problems had anything to do with being root. Unfortunately, for the most part, they don't.
For the vast majority of people and organisations, I suggest that the most damaging actions that malware can take are:
giving your data to others;
changing your data in subtle ways;
stealing your resources.
A virus that causes your system to crash randomly or erases your whole hard drive is annoying, but easily fixed (unless you're naive enough not to make back-ups). These are the sorts of things that not running as root prevent.
But running as root won't prevent phishing, won't prevent a cross-site scripting attack stealing your personal data, won't prevent a SQL injection attack compromising your customer database, won't prevent a virus forwarding your entire e-mail archive to your competitors, and is only partially effective in preventing a stupid user downloading a program that turns your PC into a zombie on a spam botnet.
It sounds like your experience is another example of pain from putting sensitive information on-line (in this case, on Dice) without fully appreciating the possible results. That in turn is an example of a wider problem: giving up sensitive information to anyone who doesn't have a vested interest in storing, using and destroying it properly.
An entire generation is about to learn from this mistake, but probably suffer its consequences for much of the rest of their lives. I imagine the problems will eventually get so bad that privacy/data protection starts to become a headline grabber and failing to respect them becomes culturally unacceptable. International agreements with far more teeth than today's will follow, and sooner or later, something like a class action identity theft lawsuit with huge punitive damages will put the fear of God into any organisations that don't comply properly. This may actually happen in a few years, if current trends continue. But for now, the only smart thing to do is be very careaful about what information you give to anyone.
Oh, and in case anyone hadn't guessed: my answer to employers who want sensitive information up-front is to skip them. It's not a universal practice, I won't support it, and most importantly, this means I'll never suffer the consequences of screw-ups by a random organisation I once applied to.
My current video card is already DX10-ready and I intend to use it in its fullest potential.
Good luck with that. The rest of us will be buying a better card for 1/4 the price in two years, and still have it installed well before the number of published games that really take advantage of DX10 hits double figures. And our drivers won't crash the whole PC at random intervals, either.
Seriously, buying the latest and greatest graphics card is a fool's game, and has been for probably five years or more now. Lack of game requirements and poor quality early drivers mean that you won't get the best out of such a card for several years after you get it. By that time, the rest of your system spec will be struggling to keep up, and even the budget graphics cards will support the same API standards.
Point for comparison: I last built a PC around 4 years ago. At the time, I went for high-end pretty much throughout. For the processor, RAM, and hard drive it was well worth the extra: they gave a direct advantage in things I could do with the PC at the time. However, my Radeon 9700 Pro (replaced after 6 months with a 9800 Pro because of the power supply issues) that was pretty much state-of-the-art at the time has never been used to its full potential. The games I bought it for, which would really benefit from DX9, weren't released for another year or two in reality. Today it's actually that then-high-end graphics card that is the biggest limiting factor in running more recent games (along with, ironically, simple things like not installing a DVD drive, which was a luxury item back then). I might as well have bought a cheap 'n' cheerful Radeon 9500 or then-mid-range nVidia card, and used the significant financial savings to upgrade the graphics card a couple of years later when the games could use it, spending less money overall, winding up with better kit, and suffering no practical loss of functionality in between.
In any case, in the time frame we're talking about, it's quite possible that the whole DRM house-of-cards will be crashing down around poor Microsoft's quivering OS dept. and execs will be running around trying to distance themselves from the mistakes underlying Vista. That's likely to require a significant reworking of the whole multimedia framework within the OS, which in turn is likely to do weird stuff to DX. There's still a lot of potential in DX9 that most new releases don't tap, and a lot of the PC gamer market will be on XP rather than Vista for some time to come. With this sort of environment, I would think DX10 is a pretty unappealing target for game developers right now, so I wouldn't be rushing out to upgrade things just to support it.
He also raises a very good point about the broken search feature in XP SP2. Once, I tried finding a string in a directory tree of php files. The search function found nothing, so I assumed that there were no files that contained the string. I was wrong. The string was in one of the files, but the windows search feature did not bother looking inside php files.
I've run into exactly that problem, too. Even if you explicitly give it "php" as part of the filename (or *.php, or.php, for that matter) it doesn't seem to see them. Even if PHP files are a registered file type, it doesn't seem to see them. The search feature is simply broken, and absurdly so: this could easily lead to someone deleting things without backing them up, or something equally damaging. And worst of all, I'm pretty sure it used to work until the recent "improvements".
Do you mean the bit about it being more difficult to navigate to the parent directory? That's not a bug: too much malware gets installed that way.
Are you saying that removing the navigation widgets that for many people are probably the most used on the whole dialog (after "OK"/"Save"/whatever default) is a feature?
Next, you'll be telling me I need to enter a password just to change my system clock...:-)
Once you've decreed that the only peers are those who have complete faith in the dogma and know it's not their place to question it, peer-review becomes little more than a self-perpetuating system to ensure that future work toes the party line too.
<irony> Mod parent (+1, I Agree) </irony>
And this guy proposing to basically introduce heresy and excommunication in science (if you dare question the dogma, we'll de-certify you) is contrary to that whole method. It just shows that it's he who has no fucking clue what science is all about. Maybe someone should start by de-certifying him.
Indeed. He has just provided clear evidence that he doesn't understand the scientific method, or that he is willing to ignore his understanding and bow to political masters. Either way, he has no position being in a position where he's perceived as a scientific authority.
Because at screen resolutions, many fonts designed for math use make the relevant symbols quite clearly distinguishable.
And which fonts would those be? It's taken me years just to find a monospace font for code that I'm really happy with. I've never seen a really good font for rendering serious maths on-screen.
So, it requires either a special keyboard or special input method to use effectively. So what?
So that's a major inconvenience, which will inevitably impede its adoption.
The monitor is not the issue, the font is.
How can the monitor possibly not be an issue? Even with all the latest "high resolution" screens and sub-pixel anti-aliasing in font rendering, ultimately the screens on desktops today are around 100dpi, while the sorts of printers where things like TeX output look nice are more like 600dpi as a minimum. Much higher resolution screens are in the research labs, but it will be years before they're on developer desktops as a matter of routine.
OTOH, specialized fonts that make the distinctions necessary for unambiguously representing complex mathematical notation are hardly unknown, particularly among the target user base of Fortress.
Really? Can you name any typeface that is screen-optimised, designed with maths in mind, and widely available?
I'm asking because on a low-resolution computer screen, probably using anti-aliasing these days too, the typical angle brackets used for certain products look a lot like less-than and greater-than signs, all the double-bar and double-square bracket symbols look awfully like their single-barred equivalents, etc. One of my major concerns about displaying code as typeset mathematics on-screen is that ambiguity is almost inevitable with the state of (a) display technology, (b) computer typesetting, and (c) the mathematical typefaces available today. If the legibility issue isn't resolved, and decisively so, we could see the old "1 vs l vs | vs I", "o vs O vs 0", "5 vs s vs S", and so on, all over again and a zillion times worse. Brackets were just the first example that came to mind; you could just as well pick on greek letters, or binary mathematical operators, or indeed several other families of symbols that can be represented as Unicode characters internally but are hard to distinguish on-screen.
I think getting programming languages away from ASCII and into formatted Unicode is an exellent idea, even though I'm not a mathematician so I'm not really in Fortress's target market --- but even tho I'm a programmer, I definitely think mathematical notation is a lot easier and more convenient to read that C/Java style syntax.
Out of curiosity, how many different types of bracket pair do you think are defined in Unicode?
Coming from someone who hasn't written more than a couple shell and Python scripts, why does it feel like there is nothing but resistance from the "seasoned" IT crowd over new ways of trying to do things?
That would be a fair comment if this were a new issue, but it's not. I'm not sure I'd use the word "resistance", but the scepticism, at least in my case and to this particular subject, is born of experience. Manipulating equations in their natural form is cumbersome on a computer, because they are hard to type and navigate on a keyboard and hard to view on low-resolution screens.
Someone else already pointed out that you can overcome the difficulties in typing the symbols by providing "text-only" versions that are keyboard friendly. This is, of course, what we already do in most programming languages anyway.
A related issue is navigation, in the sense of moving a cursor around the source code to edit it. What does it mean to press the up or right arrow in the middle of an equation? Is it simple to navigate around them? How do I copy part of an equation and paste it elsewhere when I'm refactoring my code? Again, we need only look at things like Equation Editor to see what a nightmare WYSIWYG interfaces to equation editing can be. Everything I think of as successful in this area -- from Wordperfect's equation editor, through typesetting tools based on TeX, to specialist maths software like Matlab -- uses an essentially line-based input format. If Fortress works on the same principle, that's fine, but again we're back to the display being nothing but a pretty-printer for the kind of code we write in other languages today.
That leaves the display issue. As anyone who's tried reading mathematical papers on-line can tell you, the sort of typesetting that works neatly for high-resolution printers on paper needs zooming in a lot for most people to read clearly on-screen. Even then, remember that Knuth designed his own set of typefaces for use with TeX, and one of his concerns was legibility when printed at small sizes, for example when used in super- or subscripts. Most people, even mathematicians, don't appreciate quite how smart he was in recognising this, but they would surely notice if papers suddenly started appearing in Times and using Times Italic for the maths instead.
Perhaps I would be less sceptical on this point if there were widely available fonts designed with similar care for rendering maths on-screen, but as yet, it seems most efforts are either based on Knuth's Computer Modern (which wasn't designed for that medium, and sometimes it shows) or some nasty, amateurish effort that isn't worth the trouble (as any sample paper that was written using Word's Equation Editor will probably demonstrate pretty quickly). I do notice that Micorosft's new font set contains Cambria Math, which I haven't looked at but may be a step in the right direction.
There will be interesting questions connected with debugging math-style code as well, but perhaps the Fortress guys have interesting answers to match. I don't know, so I offer no opinion on this one. As far as the typing and displaying issues go, though, please understand that this is neither a knee-jerk reaction nor instinctive resistance to change; rather, it is the considered opinion of someone with an extensive background in both mathematics and programming who has seen similar things before, and remains to be convinced about why things will be different this time.
Fortress uses a lot of unicode mathematical operators, which slashdot will quite pitifully fail to display.
And most keyboards will pitifully fail to type, in any straightforward and reliable way.
And most monitors will fail to display unambiguously, in any straightforward and reliable way.
Programming should be based on mathematics, not written in it -- and that's from someone who writes specialist mathematical libraries for a living. Seriously, if TeX is the least friendly programming environment I have ever encountered in serious use, and the average programming font has trouble distinguishing (, <, { and [ characters, making code look more like typeset mathematics is not the way forward.
Unless his employment contract specifies that his employer owns any work product he produces while on company time and/or resources, then he owns it, not the employer.
If that's a legal opinion in the relevant jurisdiction, cite please. What you describe certainly is not true everywhere.
...he should of asked for some kind of agreement in writing that it was his.
I think that's the most important point. I work in software, so I have to check the IP clauses in any employment contract carefully. I regard employers claiming rights to the following as fair:
code I write as part of my job (including anything obviously related, for example because it's based on my employer's trade secrets);
code I write on company time;
code I write using company resources (PC, compiler licence, whatever).
Any claims that go beyond the above, I don't sign.
Obviously the law varies from place to place, but I suspect most places have something like the above as default criteria for IP rights for any salaried worker. In this case, if the guy's a full-time cop, using police computers to write the code, using at least some work time to write the code, and writing code that relates to his job, I'm guessing he's stuffed, other than if there is any overtime provision he might claim for the extra hours he put in out of work, which there probably isn't, given on the typical draconian US employment system where any salaried employee is assumed to sell their soul and have no concept of normal working hours. (This paragraph was brought to you by the non-lawyers-who-can't-write-short-sentences-either dept.)
It would also be interesting if one guy with a few thousand dollars could develop better balistic defence in his back yard than the entire US military machine (or indeed anyone else's military machine) has achieved ever. I'm guessing that if anyone takes him up on his challenge, and fires a sniper rifle at him of the kind being used in say Iraq, he's going to win a Darwin award.:-(
As the situation currently stands, just over 1/3 of the electorate are effectively dictating to the other 2/3. How can that be democratic ? And politicians wonder why the turnout is so low.
An ironic choice of closing comments, perhaps: since you're obviously aware of the turnout issue, it is strange that you assume the same proportion of non-voters would support New Labour as the proportion of voters who do. In my experience (which, as always, I should acknowledge may not be representative) there are two kinds of people who don't vote at the moment: those who can't be bothered (whom we can reasonably assume have no preference among the candidates), and those who would vote for "none of the above" if the option were available (whom we can reasonably assume did not vote because they did not want to support any of the available candidates; c.f. spoiled ballots, etc.). I don't think you can justify a claim that Blair's lot have the backing of over 1/3 of the electorate unless, at the very least, there is such a "none of the above" option available on the ballot paper, and people still didn't vote. All you can say today is that New Labour had the backing of just over 1/5 of the electorate at the past election, because that's how many votes they got. And then you have to start looking at the West Lothian question...;-)
Again, this is just a personal anecdote, but I can't actually find a party I want to vote for right now. Of course, I don't expect any party to agree 100% with my personal views, but things are not black-and-white: I could happily vote for a party whose basic principles matched my own and whose manifesto commitments I either agreed with or at least did not strongly oppose. At present, I cannot say that of any of the main political parties in my country; I disagree with at least one major policy of every mainstream party. And my views aren't exactly extreme in any given direction: I have a liberal bias in social terms and a capitalist bias in economic ones, I suppose, but I'm a pretty centre-ground, principled-but-pragmatic type in the grand scheme of things. Surely I'm not the only voter in this position, but no-one running for election seems to cater to people like me.:-(
(Yes, I know I could theoretically run as an independent candidate for MP, or start my own political party. But until we have a political system where independents are not unheard of, and can be elected on grounds other than being a prominent person in a major local issue, and whose votes won't typically be rendered irrelevant by a political party with an outright majority in Parliament anyway, what would be the point?)
I did email my MP about my concerns over the Creationist issue. He was somewhat scathing and made remarks to the effect of "Scientists think they know what happened thousands of years ago? Give me a break, the truth is no-one knows".
If that is truly a fair reflection of what a serving MP said in an official communication, then I think you should name the MP publicly.
The sad thing is that, going by past records, it will probably take a disaster striking the politicians personally for them to realise what a bad idea it is for government to maintain any more data or allow any more access to that data than is absolutely necessary. When MPs and senior civil servants start suffering the problems of identity theft, or losing their jobs/careers/liberty over erroneous (or outright maliciously fabricated) information in the database, maybe they'll get it. Sadly, by then it will be too late, for them and for the rest of us as well.
Yes, they've done this repeatedly, most obviously with things like detention without trial, where the 90 days originally requested were scaled back to "only" several times the historical limit and the limit used in pretty much every other first world nation.
It's really odd how this works. It's as if everyone is so used to the government (with its unjustified absolute majority in Parliament) forcing through any legislation they want, no matter how unpopular, that the people making the decisions now consider the default to be the bad alternative proposed by the government and not status quo, and judge any revised proposals in that light. I'm not sure whether this is a more damning indictment of the calibre of people who make decisions in our country, or of the electoral system that gives an absolute majority to a group that gained the support of only just over 1/5 of the electorate.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, it's turtles all the way down...
I know you're joking, but seriously, the only way to defeat the well-financed lobby groups is to bring votes. Governments can only be bought as long as that money translates into votes at election time. Shift your culture so people vote for what they believe in and not what they saw on TV and you've won. Change the rules so political parties can only accept donations from businesses that are on the same scale as what private citizens could realistically offer and you've won. But achieving either of these changes is going to take a long time and a lot of campaigning. (Odd, really, since the politicians have nothing to lose from the second, but there you go.)
Your point would carry more weight if the really serious problems had anything to do with being root. Unfortunately, for the most part, they don't.
For the vast majority of people and organisations, I suggest that the most damaging actions that malware can take are:
A virus that causes your system to crash randomly or erases your whole hard drive is annoying, but easily fixed (unless you're naive enough not to make back-ups). These are the sorts of things that not running as root prevent.
But running as root won't prevent phishing, won't prevent a cross-site scripting attack stealing your personal data, won't prevent a SQL injection attack compromising your customer database, won't prevent a virus forwarding your entire e-mail archive to your competitors, and is only partially effective in preventing a stupid user downloading a program that turns your PC into a zombie on a spam botnet.
It sounds like your experience is another example of pain from putting sensitive information on-line (in this case, on Dice) without fully appreciating the possible results. That in turn is an example of a wider problem: giving up sensitive information to anyone who doesn't have a vested interest in storing, using and destroying it properly.
An entire generation is about to learn from this mistake, but probably suffer its consequences for much of the rest of their lives. I imagine the problems will eventually get so bad that privacy/data protection starts to become a headline grabber and failing to respect them becomes culturally unacceptable. International agreements with far more teeth than today's will follow, and sooner or later, something like a class action identity theft lawsuit with huge punitive damages will put the fear of God into any organisations that don't comply properly. This may actually happen in a few years, if current trends continue. But for now, the only smart thing to do is be very careaful about what information you give to anyone.
Oh, and in case anyone hadn't guessed: my answer to employers who want sensitive information up-front is to skip them. It's not a universal practice, I won't support it, and most importantly, this means I'll never suffer the consequences of screw-ups by a random organisation I once applied to.
Good luck with that. The rest of us will be buying a better card for 1/4 the price in two years, and still have it installed well before the number of published games that really take advantage of DX10 hits double figures. And our drivers won't crash the whole PC at random intervals, either.
Seriously, buying the latest and greatest graphics card is a fool's game, and has been for probably five years or more now. Lack of game requirements and poor quality early drivers mean that you won't get the best out of such a card for several years after you get it. By that time, the rest of your system spec will be struggling to keep up, and even the budget graphics cards will support the same API standards.
Point for comparison: I last built a PC around 4 years ago. At the time, I went for high-end pretty much throughout. For the processor, RAM, and hard drive it was well worth the extra: they gave a direct advantage in things I could do with the PC at the time. However, my Radeon 9700 Pro (replaced after 6 months with a 9800 Pro because of the power supply issues) that was pretty much state-of-the-art at the time has never been used to its full potential. The games I bought it for, which would really benefit from DX9, weren't released for another year or two in reality. Today it's actually that then-high-end graphics card that is the biggest limiting factor in running more recent games (along with, ironically, simple things like not installing a DVD drive, which was a luxury item back then). I might as well have bought a cheap 'n' cheerful Radeon 9500 or then-mid-range nVidia card, and used the significant financial savings to upgrade the graphics card a couple of years later when the games could use it, spending less money overall, winding up with better kit, and suffering no practical loss of functionality in between.
In any case, in the time frame we're talking about, it's quite possible that the whole DRM house-of-cards will be crashing down around poor Microsoft's quivering OS dept. and execs will be running around trying to distance themselves from the mistakes underlying Vista. That's likely to require a significant reworking of the whole multimedia framework within the OS, which in turn is likely to do weird stuff to DX. There's still a lot of potential in DX9 that most new releases don't tap, and a lot of the PC gamer market will be on XP rather than Vista for some time to come. With this sort of environment, I would think DX10 is a pretty unappealing target for game developers right now, so I wouldn't be rushing out to upgrade things just to support it.
I've run into exactly that problem, too. Even if you explicitly give it "php" as part of the filename (or *.php, or .php, for that matter) it doesn't seem to see them. Even if PHP files are a registered file type, it doesn't seem to see them. The search feature is simply broken, and absurdly so: this could easily lead to someone deleting things without backing them up, or something equally damaging. And worst of all, I'm pretty sure it used to work until the recent "improvements".
Are you saying that removing the navigation widgets that for many people are probably the most used on the whole dialog (after "OK"/"Save"/whatever default) is a feature?
Next, you'll be telling me I need to enter a password just to change my system clock... :-)
It wasn't Buffy, it was Wolverine, you insensitive clod!
<irony> Mod parent (+1, I Agree) </irony>
Indeed. He has just provided clear evidence that he doesn't understand the scientific method, or that he is willing to ignore his understanding and bow to political masters. Either way, he has no position being in a position where he's perceived as a scientific authority.
And which fonts would those be? It's taken me years just to find a monospace font for code that I'm really happy with. I've never seen a really good font for rendering serious maths on-screen.
So that's a major inconvenience, which will inevitably impede its adoption.
How can the monitor possibly not be an issue? Even with all the latest "high resolution" screens and sub-pixel anti-aliasing in font rendering, ultimately the screens on desktops today are around 100dpi, while the sorts of printers where things like TeX output look nice are more like 600dpi as a minimum. Much higher resolution screens are in the research labs, but it will be years before they're on developer desktops as a matter of routine.
Really? Can you name any typeface that is screen-optimised, designed with maths in mind, and widely available?
I'm asking because on a low-resolution computer screen, probably using anti-aliasing these days too, the typical angle brackets used for certain products look a lot like less-than and greater-than signs, all the double-bar and double-square bracket symbols look awfully like their single-barred equivalents, etc. One of my major concerns about displaying code as typeset mathematics on-screen is that ambiguity is almost inevitable with the state of (a) display technology, (b) computer typesetting, and (c) the mathematical typefaces available today. If the legibility issue isn't resolved, and decisively so, we could see the old "1 vs l vs | vs I", "o vs O vs 0", "5 vs s vs S", and so on, all over again and a zillion times worse. Brackets were just the first example that came to mind; you could just as well pick on greek letters, or binary mathematical operators, or indeed several other families of symbols that can be represented as Unicode characters internally but are hard to distinguish on-screen.
Out of curiosity, how many different types of bracket pair do you think are defined in Unicode?
You mean it makes things like C++ and Perl look simple? WE'RE ALL DOOOOOMED!
...You can type your program in Fortress instead? ;-)
That would be a fair comment if this were a new issue, but it's not. I'm not sure I'd use the word "resistance", but the scepticism, at least in my case and to this particular subject, is born of experience. Manipulating equations in their natural form is cumbersome on a computer, because they are hard to type and navigate on a keyboard and hard to view on low-resolution screens.
Someone else already pointed out that you can overcome the difficulties in typing the symbols by providing "text-only" versions that are keyboard friendly. This is, of course, what we already do in most programming languages anyway.
A related issue is navigation, in the sense of moving a cursor around the source code to edit it. What does it mean to press the up or right arrow in the middle of an equation? Is it simple to navigate around them? How do I copy part of an equation and paste it elsewhere when I'm refactoring my code? Again, we need only look at things like Equation Editor to see what a nightmare WYSIWYG interfaces to equation editing can be. Everything I think of as successful in this area -- from Wordperfect's equation editor, through typesetting tools based on TeX, to specialist maths software like Matlab -- uses an essentially line-based input format. If Fortress works on the same principle, that's fine, but again we're back to the display being nothing but a pretty-printer for the kind of code we write in other languages today.
That leaves the display issue. As anyone who's tried reading mathematical papers on-line can tell you, the sort of typesetting that works neatly for high-resolution printers on paper needs zooming in a lot for most people to read clearly on-screen. Even then, remember that Knuth designed his own set of typefaces for use with TeX, and one of his concerns was legibility when printed at small sizes, for example when used in super- or subscripts. Most people, even mathematicians, don't appreciate quite how smart he was in recognising this, but they would surely notice if papers suddenly started appearing in Times and using Times Italic for the maths instead.
Perhaps I would be less sceptical on this point if there were widely available fonts designed with similar care for rendering maths on-screen, but as yet, it seems most efforts are either based on Knuth's Computer Modern (which wasn't designed for that medium, and sometimes it shows) or some nasty, amateurish effort that isn't worth the trouble (as any sample paper that was written using Word's Equation Editor will probably demonstrate pretty quickly). I do notice that Micorosft's new font set contains Cambria Math, which I haven't looked at but may be a step in the right direction.
There will be interesting questions connected with debugging math-style code as well, but perhaps the Fortress guys have interesting answers to match. I don't know, so I offer no opinion on this one. As far as the typing and displaying issues go, though, please understand that this is neither a knee-jerk reaction nor instinctive resistance to change; rather, it is the considered opinion of someone with an extensive background in both mathematics and programming who has seen similar things before, and remains to be convinced about why things will be different this time.
And most keyboards will pitifully fail to type, in any straightforward and reliable way.
And most monitors will fail to display unambiguously, in any straightforward and reliable way.
Programming should be based on mathematics, not written in it -- and that's from someone who writes specialist mathematical libraries for a living. Seriously, if TeX is the least friendly programming environment I have ever encountered in serious use, and the average programming font has trouble distinguishing (, <, { and [ characters, making code look more like typeset mathematics is not the way forward.
If that's a legal opinion in the relevant jurisdiction, cite please. What you describe certainly is not true everywhere.
I think that's the most important point. I work in software, so I have to check the IP clauses in any employment contract carefully. I regard employers claiming rights to the following as fair:
Any claims that go beyond the above, I don't sign.
Obviously the law varies from place to place, but I suspect most places have something like the above as default criteria for IP rights for any salaried worker. In this case, if the guy's a full-time cop, using police computers to write the code, using at least some work time to write the code, and writing code that relates to his job, I'm guessing he's stuffed, other than if there is any overtime provision he might claim for the extra hours he put in out of work, which there probably isn't, given on the typical draconian US employment system where any salaried employee is assumed to sell their soul and have no concept of normal working hours. (This paragraph was brought to you by the non-lawyers-who-can't-write-short-sentences-either dept.)
It would also be interesting if one guy with a few thousand dollars could develop better balistic defence in his back yard than the entire US military machine (or indeed anyone else's military machine) has achieved ever. I'm guessing that if anyone takes him up on his challenge, and fires a sniper rifle at him of the kind being used in say Iraq, he's going to win a Darwin award. :-(
An ironic choice of closing comments, perhaps: since you're obviously aware of the turnout issue, it is strange that you assume the same proportion of non-voters would support New Labour as the proportion of voters who do. In my experience (which, as always, I should acknowledge may not be representative) there are two kinds of people who don't vote at the moment: those who can't be bothered (whom we can reasonably assume have no preference among the candidates), and those who would vote for "none of the above" if the option were available (whom we can reasonably assume did not vote because they did not want to support any of the available candidates; c.f. spoiled ballots, etc.). I don't think you can justify a claim that Blair's lot have the backing of over 1/3 of the electorate unless, at the very least, there is such a "none of the above" option available on the ballot paper, and people still didn't vote. All you can say today is that New Labour had the backing of just over 1/5 of the electorate at the past election, because that's how many votes they got. And then you have to start looking at the West Lothian question... ;-)
Again, this is just a personal anecdote, but I can't actually find a party I want to vote for right now. Of course, I don't expect any party to agree 100% with my personal views, but things are not black-and-white: I could happily vote for a party whose basic principles matched my own and whose manifesto commitments I either agreed with or at least did not strongly oppose. At present, I cannot say that of any of the main political parties in my country; I disagree with at least one major policy of every mainstream party. And my views aren't exactly extreme in any given direction: I have a liberal bias in social terms and a capitalist bias in economic ones, I suppose, but I'm a pretty centre-ground, principled-but-pragmatic type in the grand scheme of things. Surely I'm not the only voter in this position, but no-one running for election seems to cater to people like me. :-(
(Yes, I know I could theoretically run as an independent candidate for MP, or start my own political party. But until we have a political system where independents are not unheard of, and can be elected on grounds other than being a prominent person in a major local issue, and whose votes won't typically be rendered irrelevant by a political party with an outright majority in Parliament anyway, what would be the point?)
If that is truly a fair reflection of what a serving MP said in an official communication, then I think you should name the MP publicly.
The sad thing is that, going by past records, it will probably take a disaster striking the politicians personally for them to realise what a bad idea it is for government to maintain any more data or allow any more access to that data than is absolutely necessary. When MPs and senior civil servants start suffering the problems of identity theft, or losing their jobs/careers/liberty over erroneous (or outright maliciously fabricated) information in the database, maybe they'll get it. Sadly, by then it will be too late, for them and for the rest of us as well.
Yes, they've done this repeatedly, most obviously with things like detention without trial, where the 90 days originally requested were scaled back to "only" several times the historical limit and the limit used in pretty much every other first world nation.
It's really odd how this works. It's as if everyone is so used to the government (with its unjustified absolute majority in Parliament) forcing through any legislation they want, no matter how unpopular, that the people making the decisions now consider the default to be the bad alternative proposed by the government and not status quo, and judge any revised proposals in that light. I'm not sure whether this is a more damning indictment of the calibre of people who make decisions in our country, or of the electoral system that gives an absolute majority to a group that gained the support of only just over 1/5 of the electorate.
OK, I give up. I'm a "glass half full" person. Which one am I supposed to choose? :-/