Making things easier for people with a particular handicap doesn't always make things easier for "the rest of us" or even neccessarily for "the disabled" taken as some sort of mysteriously unified group.
Curb cuts make it easier for wheelchair users, but harder for the blind to detect curbs. Wheelchair toliets are higher, making bowel movements more difficult, especially for the elderly. (These two examples taken from The Death of Common Sense by Philip Howard). Making things accessible drives up the cost.
Does this mean we in the computer industry shouldn't try to make our products accessible? Of course not. With software it is much easier than with physical devices to make something that can be all things to all people. But it is still not free. Increasing complexity makes things harder to debug--epecially when you have multiple UIs. Using accessibility layers makes it harder to reuse existing code.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
Of course, it could be a Celtic settlement in italy - after all, the Celts got as far as Rome before the roman empire got big, laying seige to it and holding the city to ransom, and only retreating when paid a cauldron full of gold - hence, by a long chain of imperfect associations, the irish leprechaun's pot of gold, and also leading to the famous quote "To the victor, the spoils.".
I reply:
Yes, but I'm pretty sure that was firmly in the iron age. According to this chronology The Celtic tribes didn't arrive in Italy till 450 BC, over 1000 years after this settlement was buried.
I think this will give us valuable insight into Bronze Age life. However, I don't think this will be the definitive answer for "what life was REALLY like in bronze age Europe." Bronze Age culture in Europe was no more uniform than it was today. I'm sure this village in what is now Italy would be very different from, say, a Celtic settlement in Bronze Age Gaul or a Basque village in what is now Spain.
I don't think Intellectual Property should be "an endless fountain of money" either. I have no problem with works passing into the public domain after a reasonable period of time. But for that time, I believe I should have control over how my work is distributed.
I certainly am not going to rely on the "enlightened" nature of any society to to compensate me.
I also don't think Stallman was 'radicalized'--to use the old Leftist term--by some manifestation of class conflict. I could be wrong, but I've never read anything by him about some moment when he realized that 'Code is born free; and everywhere it is in chains'* He seems to me to have come up with it based on his own principles. In fact, I don't quite understand why you try to impose the tired rhetoric of class ideology on this at all. After all, I am the producer, the laborer in this case. Is there now some "consuming class" which has become the pinnacle is some weird post-Marxist ideology?
I strongly disagree with Ram Sumudrala. I have no problem with people releasing freely redistributable music. But he advocates taking other peoples work and redistributing it, compensating the creator for "what it was worth to you". He quotes Stallman:
The desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.
How is that different than saying "The desire to be rewarded for one's labour does not justify depriving society of the benefit thereof"? And that would mean that I should work for nothing if people want me too.
Of course, since I'm a professional programmer, Stallman already thinks I should work for free.
Fuck that.
There could be an even worse effect if the courts decided on the Constitutionality of every law before it went into effect. Before court cases have been brought, there is no body of legal precedent on how to interpret the law, and no evidence of how plantiffs (including DAs, large corporations, and aggreived morons) are going to try to use the law. Many bad laws sounded good when they were passed. If they were pre-declared constitutional and then abused, it would be much harder to reverse the decision.
It's not like only Redhat distro users can now get a safe version of wu_ftpd--it's just that not everyone (neccessarily) has the packages ready for all there configurations.
If you have 6 boxes, better start checking versions and installing newer ones. Sure it sucks, but it's better than being surprised when your servers are "owned"
What happens if someone mugs you on your way to get a new drivers license (because you've moved to a different state) and steals your social security card and certified copy of your birth certificate?
With a sufficent chain of "what if" you can posit almost anything.
This is a problem with identification in general, it has nothing to do with computerization of records
What you're probably thinking of is "Home is the Hangman" although there were two other stories and they were published in the collection My Name is Legion
You are right that "the implicit assumption that the computer is always right" can be a problem. However, it is precisely that assumption (or at least the assumption that the computer is almost always right that makes things so much easier for most people.
I can enter a town I've never been in, present a little piece of plastic, sign my name, and receive goods and services. That's really useful. I'm willing to take the attendant risk that some can pretend to be me and do the same thing.
This isn't sexy at all from a technical perspective. It's boring and passe. Keyloggers are old, as are trojans or viruses that install software on remote computers. I could throw one together from publically available code before I leave work today.
The only thing at all newsworthy about this is that it's now being used to gather legal evidence. Tools like this have been around for years--now the government is just trying to make evidence gathered thereby admissible.
Now, what would be techinically sweet is something like a van Eck phreaking, where you latch onto the radiation produced by your CRT and reproduce the scan. Some more info available here.
The biggest problem I have with the deal is exactly what you said--Microsoft will ensure that all the money flows back into it's coffers through upgrades. It's an investment for them--not a punitive or even a compensatory measure.
Now, on the other hand, if Microsoft made a commitment for continual support, or established some sort of trust fund, then this would be a real settlement.
Yeah, but we're talking about completely different kinds of disruptions here. The APRAnet was designed to resist machine failure at critical hubs, caused, for instance by them being blown the hell up.
It was NOT designed to be secure to attack from the inside--and with the global Internet, everybody is inside now.
A quick summary for everyone who hasn't taken or has forgotten their TheoComp:
An NP problem: one that can be solved non-deterministically in polynomial time (NP=Nondeterministic polynomial). Therefore it can be solved deterministically in exponential time.
An NP-complete problem: If any NP-complete problem can be solved in polynomial time, every NP-complete problem can be solved in polynomial time.
An NP-hard problem: If any NP-hard problem can be solved in polynomial time all NP-complete problems can be solved in polynomial time, but not (necessarily) vice-versa.
Undecidable: The problem can not be solved deterministically in finite time.
NP-(hard/complete) problems are ususually solved by approximation or brute force. Or by restricting the problem--Euclidean travelling salesman can be solved in polynomial time.
Undecidable problems are usually approached by restricting the problem--Halting, for instance, can be solved if you bound the number of states.
Getting back to the original topic, that's what languages try to do. By restricting the operations you can perform, they can make garuntees like "These two variables will never reference the same area of memory"
Sure. I would argue that every nuclear power plant owner should be advised of any vunerabilities, just as every computer owner should. In fact, I'm sure this already happens.
Telling "how to make a Fake ID" is very hard to distinguish from information that does get passed out about what the current best crop of fake IDs and counterfeit currency is.
"It sounds like the DoJ is just seeking to formally recognize that some detainees may be seeking to use their lawyers as agents of future violence, not just sources of legal advice, and wish to prevent that. Risky, but not unreasonable."
I don't think it is unreasonable to tap prisoners conversations with their lawyers if there is reasonable grounds for suspicion that they are planning future crimes. However, as the article pointed out (way at the bottom), they alread CAN do this by court order. They now want to eliminate this requirement.
I am utterly opposed to this. If you have reasonable grounds, you should be able to get the court order fairly fast. If you're afraid of something happening immediately, arrest the lawyer too, for conspiracy.
Of course, whether or not the "top developers" use interactive debuggers or not has very little bearing on recommending an IDE. If the majority of programmers in the environment use interactive debuggers, than a good IDE should have good debugger support (unless you want to retrain everybody). The only consideration for the top developers should be not crippling them--they should be able to use their favorite custom tools.
Like the poster above, I have developed both ways. I certainly agree that debuggers make some programmers lazy and that single stepping through the code rather than looking for appropriate spots for inspection is stupid. However, with the same amount of consideration, I find debuggers often save me on "aggregate time" because of the time needed to recompile the project. This is especially true with embedded development, where the program has to be transferred to the target.
Sehnsucht, the album containing 'Du Hast', went gold in November of 1998 (source).
Napster wasn't founded until the summer of '99.
Of course, that doesn't prove the "would never have been as big in NA" but I seriously doubt the didn't have significant exposure before then. I had certainly heard of them long before Napster (can't say about Usenet, never tried to get mp3s from there).
Sure, giving away music is a great strategy for a new band to gain exposure. However, that's "giving away" music, not "let's get pirated."
Sure, human beings populate only a small bit of the Earth's surface (and an even smaller portion of its volume). An atom bomb takes up very little space vis a vis the area it destroys, or a virii in the hosts they kill.
You should take a look at a photo of Earth from space, at night. See all the glowing splotches? Those are human cities, pumping light into space. We know how to leave a mark.
Oh, sure, we can't "control" the weather. That doesn't mean we don't influence it. It takes a lot less skill to wreck a car than to drive it well.
"Why not just simply have a mandatory security screening..."
Because it is much harder to set up a screening process with X-rays/whatever and have everybody just go through than to ban all non-transparent bags.
Yes, it sounds like a pain in the ass, but it is a simple security measure that would make it harder to walk in with a bomb and leave it lying around. (Remember the Atlanta Olympics?)
You say "the cost...depends on teh exhibition rights which are given to its owner."
While this is a reasonable hypothesis, Australian law apparently does not agree with you. That is why Warner is trying to get the DVDs classified as software rather than film.
Re:Not just a full moon
on
All Hallow's Eve
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well, wouldn't it be kinda hard to have a full moon on the 31st without having had one earlier in the month?
On that note, and I wonder if anyone has made a "Night in the Lonesome October" option for Nethack.
(From the novel by Zelazny, with a new moon on halloween). If not, I might just get the latest source and start messing with it again.
Slashdot Mirror
Curb cuts make it easier for wheelchair users, but harder for the blind to detect curbs. Wheelchair toliets are higher, making bowel movements more difficult, especially for the elderly. (These two examples taken from The Death of Common Sense by Philip Howard). Making things accessible drives up the cost.
Does this mean we in the computer industry shouldn't try to make our products accessible? Of course not. With software it is much easier than with physical devices to make something that can be all things to all people. But it is still not free. Increasing complexity makes things harder to debug--epecially when you have multiple UIs. Using accessibility layers makes it harder to reuse existing code.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
Of course, it could be a Celtic settlement in italy - after all, the Celts got as far as Rome before the roman empire got big, laying seige to it and holding the city to ransom, and only retreating when paid a cauldron full of gold - hence, by a long chain of imperfect associations, the irish leprechaun's pot of gold, and also leading to the famous quote "To the victor, the spoils.".
I reply:
Yes, but I'm pretty sure that was firmly in the iron age. According to this chronology
The Celtic tribes didn't arrive in Italy till 450 BC, over 1000 years after this settlement was buried.
I think this will give us valuable insight into Bronze Age life. However, I don't think this will be the definitive answer for "what life was REALLY like in bronze age Europe." Bronze Age culture in Europe was no more uniform than it was today. I'm sure this village in what is now Italy would be very different from, say, a Celtic settlement in Bronze Age Gaul or a Basque village in what is now Spain.
I certainly am not going to rely on the "enlightened" nature of any society to to compensate me.
I also don't think Stallman was 'radicalized'--to use the old Leftist term--by some manifestation of class conflict. I could be wrong, but I've never read anything by him about some moment when he realized that 'Code is born free; and everywhere it is in chains'* He seems to me to have come up with it based on his own principles. In fact, I don't quite understand why you try to impose the tired rhetoric of class ideology on this at all. After all, I am the producer, the laborer in this case. Is there now some "consuming class" which has become the pinnacle is some weird post-Marxist ideology?
*Thank you Rousseau
How is that different than saying "The desire to be rewarded for one's labour does not justify depriving society of the benefit thereof"? And that would mean that I should work for nothing if people want me too.
Of course, since I'm a professional programmer, Stallman already thinks I should work for free. Fuck that.
There could be an even worse effect if the courts decided on the Constitutionality of every law before it went into effect. Before court cases have been brought, there is no body of legal precedent on how to interpret the law, and no evidence of how plantiffs (including DAs, large corporations, and aggreived morons) are going to try to use the law. Many bad laws sounded good when they were passed. If they were pre-declared constitutional and then abused, it would be much harder to reverse the decision.
I haven't.
It's not like only Redhat distro users can now get a safe version of wu_ftpd--it's just that not everyone (neccessarily) has the packages ready for all there configurations.
If you have 6 boxes, better start checking versions and installing newer ones. Sure it sucks, but it's better than being surprised when your servers are "owned"
What happens if someone mugs you on your way to get a new drivers license (because you've moved to a different state) and steals your social security card and certified copy of your birth certificate?
With a sufficent chain of "what if" you can posit almost anything.
This is a problem with identification in general, it has nothing to do with computerization of records
You are right that "the implicit assumption that the computer is always right" can be a problem. However, it is precisely that assumption (or at least the assumption that the computer is almost always right that makes things so much easier for most people. I can enter a town I've never been in, present a little piece of plastic, sign my name, and receive goods and services. That's really useful. I'm willing to take the attendant risk that some can pretend to be me and do the same thing.
The only thing at all newsworthy about this is that it's now being used to gather legal evidence. Tools like this have been around for years--now the government is just trying to make evidence gathered thereby admissible.
Now, what would be techinically sweet is something like a van Eck phreaking, where you latch onto the radiation produced by your CRT and reproduce the scan. Some more info available here.
The biggest problem I have with the deal is exactly what you said--Microsoft will ensure that all the money flows back into it's coffers through upgrades. It's an investment for them--not a punitive or even a compensatory measure.
Now, on the other hand, if Microsoft made a commitment for continual support, or established some sort of trust fund, then this would be a real settlement.
Yeah, but we're talking about completely different kinds of disruptions here. The APRAnet was designed to resist machine failure at critical hubs, caused, for instance by them being blown the hell up.
It was NOT designed to be secure to attack from the inside--and with the global Internet, everybody is inside now.
A quick summary for everyone who hasn't taken or has forgotten their TheoComp: An NP problem: one that can be solved non-deterministically in polynomial time (NP=Nondeterministic polynomial). Therefore it can be solved deterministically in exponential time. An NP-complete problem: If any NP-complete problem can be solved in polynomial time, every NP-complete problem can be solved in polynomial time. An NP-hard problem: If any NP-hard problem can be solved in polynomial time all NP-complete problems can be solved in polynomial time, but not (necessarily) vice-versa. Undecidable: The problem can not be solved deterministically in finite time. NP-(hard/complete) problems are ususually solved by approximation or brute force. Or by restricting the problem--Euclidean travelling salesman can be solved in polynomial time. Undecidable problems are usually approached by restricting the problem--Halting, for instance, can be solved if you bound the number of states. Getting back to the original topic, that's what languages try to do. By restricting the operations you can perform, they can make garuntees like "These two variables will never reference the same area of memory"
Sure. I would argue that every nuclear power plant owner should be advised of any vunerabilities, just as every computer owner should. In fact, I'm sure this already happens.
Telling "how to make a Fake ID" is very hard to distinguish from information that does get passed out about what the current best crop of fake IDs and counterfeit currency is.
"It sounds like the DoJ is just seeking to formally recognize that some detainees may be seeking to use their lawyers as agents of future violence, not just sources of legal advice, and wish to prevent that. Risky, but not unreasonable."
I don't think it is unreasonable to tap prisoners conversations with their lawyers if there is reasonable grounds for suspicion that they are planning future crimes. However, as the article pointed out (way at the bottom), they alread CAN do this by court order. They now want to eliminate this requirement.
I am utterly opposed to this. If you have reasonable grounds, you should be able to get the court order fairly fast. If you're afraid of something happening immediately, arrest the lawyer too, for conspiracy.
Of course, whether or not the "top developers" use interactive debuggers or not has very little bearing on recommending an IDE. If the majority of programmers in the environment use interactive debuggers, than a good IDE should have good debugger support (unless you want to retrain everybody). The only consideration for the top developers should be not crippling them--they should be able to use their favorite custom tools.
Like the poster above, I have developed both ways. I certainly agree that debuggers make some programmers lazy and that single stepping through the code rather than looking for appropriate spots for inspection is stupid. However, with the same amount of consideration, I find debuggers often save me on "aggregate time" because of the time needed to recompile the project. This is especially true with embedded development, where the program has to be transferred to the target.
Of course, that doesn't prove the "would never have been as big in NA" but I seriously doubt the didn't have significant exposure before then. I had certainly heard of them long before Napster (can't say about Usenet, never tried to get mp3s from there).
Sure, giving away music is a great strategy for a new band to gain exposure. However, that's "giving away" music, not "let's get pirated."
I think it probably also makes it Federal mail fraud in the United States, which has more stringent penalties and an in-place enforcement service.
Ahh, false humility.
Sure, human beings populate only a small bit of the Earth's surface (and an even smaller portion of its volume). An atom bomb takes up very little space vis a vis the area it destroys, or a virii in the hosts they kill.
You should take a look at a photo of Earth from space, at night. See all the glowing splotches? Those are human cities, pumping light into space. We know how to leave a mark.
Oh, sure, we can't "control" the weather. That doesn't mean we don't influence it. It takes a lot less skill to wreck a car than to drive it well.
"Why not just simply have a mandatory security screening..."
Because it is much harder to set up a screening process with X-rays/whatever and have everybody just go through than to ban all non-transparent bags.
Yes, it sounds like a pain in the ass, but it is a simple security measure that would make it harder to walk in with a bomb and leave it lying around. (Remember the Atlanta Olympics?)
I don't really see how "profit" enters into it.
You say "the cost...depends on teh exhibition rights which are given to its owner."
While this is a reasonable hypothesis, Australian law apparently does not agree with you. That is why Warner is trying to get the DVDs classified as software rather than film.
Well, wouldn't it be kinda hard to have a full moon on the 31st without having had one earlier in the month?
On that note, and I wonder if anyone has made a "Night in the Lonesome October" option for Nethack. (From the novel by Zelazny, with a new moon on halloween). If not, I might just get the latest source and start messing with it again.
And for all of you holding your breath, it can access MSN.com
I didn't find anything on the web either, although of course project names get changed a whole bunch.
But the article was supposedly written by a
"Harvey M. Dunkirk" who says he's an assistant to one of the lab's directors.
However, no such person appears in the LCS directory--and "Support Staff" is listed for some of the people there.
Mighty fishy--I welcome a clarifying comment from anyone with more first-hand knowledge.