So what do the artists get out of this? The users pay, the RIAA collects, but who gets royalties? Considering the history of the recording industry not paying royalties correctly, I very much doubt that they will pay out any royalties to ANYONE when there is no hard proof that the song was copied at all.
I'm not so sure the RIAA collects at all. In Holland we basically have the exact same system: there's a levy on blank media, for which you are granted the right to make copies off of original media, for personal use only. You are not allowed to give away the copied CD/R, nor are you allowed to make a copy off a copied CD/R.
There's a special agency that distributes the collected levies amongst record companies, according to some bizarre schedule. Which means that most of the cash stays in Holland, whereas only a pittance is sent overseas to the US where, let's face it, most of the copied popular music originated. I wouldn't be suprised if the situation in Canada is much the same.
University courses on programming do teach something about security, or good programming standards in general.
However, the student who starts working after college often finds himself in an environment without good work practices, standards and guidelines, tight deadlines, and disinterested co-workers. In that environment, his knowledge about programming practices will not be reinforced, it will be forgotten. The problem is not that he hasn't been taught properly, but if no-one is practicing or even interested in the standard of coding, is he going to bother?
Writing good software is something that's hard to teach anyway. Good programmers are made by experience, not by taking courses. However, junior programmers can learn how to produce quality code quickly... with your help.
Training up junior staff is not something that you senior techs should do just if you feel like it... it should be part of your freakin' job description!. A seniour tech who does not pass on his knowledge is a dysfunctional employee.
You may want to check that you practice what you preach. Set a good example. Encourage your peers to do likewise.
- Teach: Do you see where a junior (or even senior) team member is slipping, and not applying proper practices? Chances are others have the same problem. Organise a short (1 hour) session and explain things. How to use the source control system. Where to find project documentation (you'd be surprised how often this is neglected). Take a piece of bad code, and explain why it is bad, and how to improve it (Don't haul out the poor guy who wrote it out in front, and remove his initials from any comments).
- Train: You got 2 junior C programmers assigned to your team? The best thing for them would be to receive a short course (give by you!) in Intermediate C programming techniques. This is knowledge straight from the horse's mouth, that they can apply immediately in their everyday work. Use the project as example, and they'll be brought up to speed on the important project aspects as a bonus. Besides giving a list of further reading at the end of the course, give them the actual books that you yourself have found to be beneficial to the subject.
- Coach: Take your time with the junior team members. Write code with them instead of correcting their mistakes after they have written it. Try pair programming with them. Personally I have found the time I spent with senior programmers (when I was the junior) to be the times when I learned most.
- Awareness: Never stop to instill the importance of good coding practices into your team members. Do not ever pass a bit of bad coding; make sure it is corrected. Got a tight deadline? Do not pass bad code anyway. As the team becomes better used to coding in a proper manner, you'll see less bad code and less bugs to boot, and you might end up saving time.
I've worked both in teams writing slipshod code, and teams producing tight code to rigid procedures, with a hard-ass technical manager making sure everything was up to standards. Guess which team was more fun to work in?
Ten bucks says that this endeavor will go widely unnoticed by 90% of developers.
Sadly, you may be right.
95% of the ones that do are so intimately involved with Microsoft or Microsoft dependant technologies that this book/article/section/endeavor won't mean a damn.
What?! It is precisely because of the flaws of most modern operating systems that do not protect you from sloppy programming, that programmers need to be aware of secure programming methods. It's not just Windows either; Unix/Linux does not protect a programmer from, say, buffer overruns either. All programmers need to be aware of such flaws, and work around them.
Programming securely does not have to cost you a lot of time either. Take the SafeStr library mentioned on the website for instance... a string library that can be used as replacement for the standard C string functions, a notorious source of buffer overruns and bugs. Using this library instead of the standard functions will cost little or no extra time.
Programming securely is just like other good programming practices. Generally they do not cost extra time, they save time. It does take time to learn these practices, and that's where the responsibility of each programmer comes in. Take the time to learn good programming practices and get used to them, stay abreast of new developments, and above all train and encourage your junior team members to use these methods as well.
The team that fails to adhere to good programming practices will turn out unstable and insecure software. Where do you think the bugs in Microsoft products come from? Tight timelines? Perhaps... but a great many of the bugs I come across are generally the result of a sloppy programmer, tight deadlines or no.
It's not just having to pay the $3 up front, it's also the fact that you need to sign up, which is a bother. Already there are sites that ask you to register without payment (NY Times!!), and many of us can't even be arsed to do that.
Many of these people working on micropayments seem to think it's just another way to collect payments for what amounts to a subscription, or a pre-paid content scheme. Most of the current premium sites and micropayment schemes fail to take the occasional visitor into account. I don't want to subscribe to this guy's comics, but I might want to pay, once, to see a single one and them decide if it's worth seeing more. I'd pay a gaming site to download a demo, but the 3 or 4 files per year I download from them do not justify a subscription. I don't want a subscription to the NY times, but I'd pay to read an article every now and then. But I won't pay if it's a subscription or a large-ish up-front payment. Hell, just having to sign up for each of these things in itself would be too much of a bother.
I'm convinced that a micropayment scheme needs to cater to the occasional visitor, in order to be successful. That means:
- It needs to be a single company, or multiple ones that interconnect, like you said. Those of us who browse a wide variety of content at many different sites should not have to sign up with 25 micropayment companies.
- It needs to be easy to use. Besides the signing up, accepting the microcharge itself should be very simple. A simple system dialog should suffice, stating 'You have requested a web page for which the charge is $0,10. Press Yes to accept the charge and proceed, or No to cancel'. One click to accept the charge, no more. Certainly not a 'type your username, password, date of birth, favorite pets name and your 25 digit MicroPay ID, to access this webpage'.
- Some people will probably want a proper bill, not just a single charge each month on their CC.
This could be good for Microsoft, which in some ways is a bummer. But if Eolas was intending to carry over this suit to other browsers, than it could be good for everyone. Although in the end I was still hoping to see Microsoft crash and burn for something.
I'm not for Microsoft or Eolas, nor am I against them in this case.
What I resent is this whole sordid litigious mess, the colossal waste of effort and money to get these cases sorted, and lawyers getting richer over a silly issue.
Nah, you guys go ahead and bail out Iraq. At least it'll be money well spent. We Dutch could fund this elevator in your place, if we
- Stopped building the High Speed Train Line segment between Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Let the train ride on regular track at regular speeds. We will save 3,5 billion Euros and add only 10 minutes to the Amsterdam-Paris journey.
- Stopped building the 3,5 billion Euro freight train line from Rotterdam to, uhhh, nowhere. The usefulness of this line ends at the German border, where it connects to a branch unsuitable for freight traffic... and the Germans are not in a hurry to upgrade it. Besides, most shippers in Rotterdam have already stated that they will not use this line and use river shipping or trucks instead.
So we, as a tiny country, are pissing away 7 billion Euro (roughly the same in Dollars) building two utterly useless railroads... when we could have had a freaking space elevator!
Not to mention the fact that it'll be anchored far away from any of the regular air and sea traffic lanes. Any attempt to approach the cable (or rather, the first 10 kms of it since the rest is effectively out of reach) will be spotted well in advance.
If the unthinkable happens and someone does manage to damage or break the cable, it will either float off or come down, burning up in the atmosphere. The people contemplating this elevator have already thought out such scenarios and published them. Even the cost of replacing the cable would not be all too high, once the technology and industry to manufacture the cable is there.
Look at what Title 9 did to mens sports for example.
Well, if it's an either-or choice, I'm all for advancing space exploration. Sports... pah. Besides, there will always be other, more 'worthy', causes: if you put it like such a choice, science will never ever receive any funding until we have fed the hungry, housed the homeless, educated the ignorant, cured cancer, and fixed that annoying little rattle that my dishwasher makes.
In terms of providing inspiration for a nation, advancing science, and providing interesting spinoff technology, I think that the old-school space program has shown an excellent return on investment. This new initiative sounds like a similar thing: set to advance our progress into space, with ambitious targets (as opposed to the current regular bus service to LEO).
This guy probably saw this as a way to make some easy money. Yup, his free $12,5k is costing the company over $600k. Guess who will pay for all that in the end?
Now ISPs will either remove these 'under construction' pages or be more specific about them in their contracts. Watch for the next leech who sues his ISP for not providing an 'under construction' page resulting in a DNS error message. Sigh. I am beginning to appreciate my own country's legal system more and more... over here, you have to provide (shock! gasp!) actual proof of damages or you get nothing.
No one is asking then green lobby for proof that plants are unsafe: we all know that. The problem with the green lobby is that they do not want anything proven or disproven, not by them nor by anyone else. They do not want nuclear power, period. They also do not want the technology to be developed further.
Personally I think a better approach would be to see how we can improve safety procedures in nuclear plants so that accidents are less likely, and to see how we can limit the damage if an accident does happen. Researchers are making progress in both these area's... though they're not done by a long shot.
As for economics... let the market work that one out.
Suppose a nuclear plant has a problem, you contaminate 100's of square miles with radioactive emissions
Great advances have been made in reactor safety since Chernobyl, Sellafield and 3-mile Island. One promising development is the Pebble Bed Reactor. Certain folks don't seem to think it's very safe (yet), but even a worst-case catastrophic failure would contaminate a much smaller area.
It's the approach of the anti-nuclear lobby that I despise. Instead of promoting research to see if and how these reactors can be made safer, they cling to the belief that these plants cannot be made safe, ever. Perhaps in another century we'll look at this in the same way as we now think about those people who insisted that heavier-than-air flying machines were an impossibility.
have actually distributed music that they don't have the rights to.
I (and I suspect more people here than you'd think) have little sympathy for people who share music when they're not supposed to. But I would like to see this proven first, in a court of law, that those charged have actually, knowlingly shared music in violation of the law.
Their own words 'shock an awe' are aptly chosen in this case, and we should see this campain for what it is: legal strongarm tactics.
The RIAA is asking these people to promise something that is not in all cases forbidden by law. How would you feel if you'd find a letter from Microsoft on your doormat, stating
"You have illegaly copied MS products, and thus we are preparing to drag you through legal hell for the next 30 years, at the end of which we will take you you for every penny you own... unless you sign this agreement that you'll never use commy open source products again, and never use Bill Gates' name in vain.". When faced with that, does it even matter whether or not you actually copied said software?
These cases should be decided in a court of law, and with all parties on an even footing. As it is, the stronger party can bully the weaker one into agreeing to basically anything.
Oh, while I'm at it, thanks for the Al Jazeera link. Naturally they're a great source for stories on...energy-storage materials?
Apparently they are. Did you even bother to read their article, or did you just assume they only have newsworthy articles on terrorism and Saddams latest antics?
Former job: had access to 3 different database systems and the Lan. Passwords had to be changed every month, and no repeats were allowed for 6 months.
Result: ALL my systems used the same password, and it was of the form [lastname+sequential 2 digit number]
This is precisely why at one of my former clients, where security was really tight, sysadmins were forbidden from using password expiry options. The reasoning was that if people have to remember too many passwords and renew them every month, they're too often tempted to write them down, preferably on a yellow sticky tacked to the CRT.
The security officers also made sure that old accounts were deactivated promptly, and they figured that they could detect a password being compromised long before the expiry would kick in anyway.
What the poster was trying to point out is that simply throwing a bunch of laptops at schools isn't enough... Schools and teachers need to support the use of these things as well, and teach students how to use them.
As he pointed out, the schools in his area were hardly making good use of the machines. In your example, I bet that the distribution of laptops in Maine was accompanied by an education programme to teach how to use the laptops for school assignments.
I agree... schools, and the education system in general, need to figure out 2 things:
- How to teach using computers, and when teaching without them is better.
- What to teach about computers.
Both these issues are not being addressed or even recognised in schools over here (Holland). In rare instances you see an enthusiastic physics teacher giving classes on computer science, and even in those cases they have little if any teaching materials to back them up.
Buying computers for schools or giving laptops to kids is not the way to improve education.
Oh, I can sympathise with your sentiment about education. Here in Holland, per-capita spending on education is about 2/3rds of the amount spent in the rest of Europe. It scares the hell out of me to see my country dumbing down, visibly.
Several of our customers (large Multinationals) are considering moving to.NET, or they have already decided to do so. We're talking new development, and migration of old applications to.NET; not just the VB stuff but Unix software as well. I wouldn't say that.NET isn't taking off...
Another poster made an important point: it's not just the developers that make or break a platform like J2EE or.NET, there are the architects, CIO's, etc. Having a mature development environment with pretty colors is nice for developers, but if there is an architecture that is proven, stable, scalable and generally future proof, I will take it even if it means the developers will all be back to hand-coding X-windows widgets in vi.
I haven't yet taken sides in the J2EE vs..NET debate. If one would ask me now, I'd advise certain clients to go with.NET, and certain others to go with Java. In my view there's no clear winner; which architecture to use depends on circumstances.
Uh, you missed the point of cats completely didn't you? A cat isn't supposed to fetch you beers, their purpose is to scratch your furniture, break anything expensive they can get their paws on, chew through speaker cables and mouse cords, and generally do whatever the hell they want.
However, it does raise a good point: what do people want broadband for? So they can shop for stuff, read the news and download material without having to wait.
Over here (Holland), both subscribers and providers are starting to discover that most people do not actually need broadband. For most stuff like surfing, gaming, and downloading the occasional mp3, lower transfer rates suffice. What people do want is the convenience of a flat rate, always-on connection. For that, several providers are now offering ADSL with low transfer rates (256kb down, 64 kb up) and a low monthly data allowance, for 15-20 Euro's. (Note that the ISPs still call this 'broadband') Not a bad deal if you ask me.
Someone has to build the robots, and then once we teach robots to build other robots, then someone still has to build the robot building robots.
Not so. The robots to build the other robots with would simply form an assembly line... and you wouldn't need many of those to start cranking out millions of robots. The effort of designing, programming and hand-crafting the robots to form the assembly line for building other robots, probably won't take much in the way of labour even if you don't use any robots for those tasks.
I may buy a ticket just for fun, but playing the lottery regularly is utterly foolish.
... Please take a statistics class. Your local community college probably offers one.
I suggest you are the one to take the statistics class. Why does everyone think that 'winning the lottery' only means hitting the 10 million Euro jackpot? You could win EUR100.000, 10.000 or 1.000 which is still nice... and the odds look decidedly better for that. Perhaps these odds are close to the odds of me needing auto insurance, and the prizes are a lot closer to typical insurance payouts.
The only real difference, as another poster pointed out, is that one might need insurance. By law, or because (for example) you would not be able to afford the hospital bills if you had an accident. Lotteries on the other hand are always voluntary, you don't have to play.
Yes... for many things, the odds of needing insurance are a lot higher than those of winning even a small prize in the lottery... surprise: that's why the premiums are higher than the cost of a lottery ticket.
Do you think that insurance companies have some magical means to conjure up money to pay out large sums to claimants? Nope, that money comes from the premiums, and by necessity, the total premiums should exceed the total payouts, just like a lottery.
It is not just about probabilities, what matters is the probability, the payout, and the premium. In statistical terms: the average payout (expectation value) = the sum of (all payout values * the chance of 'winning' that particular payout). The ratio between your premium and the expectation value tells you how much money, on average, you get out of the scheme. For both lotteries and insurances this value is less than 1. Take a look at this value sometimes, you'd be surprised that it doesn't differ that much between lotteries and insurances.
It all comes down to a personal choice when weighing the odds, the premium and the payouts. Some people prefer to play lotteries with a good chance of winning a small prize, some prefer a very small chance at winning a huge amount. Guess what: I treat insurance in the same manner. I have health and car insurance because the law requires it. I have homeowner's insurance... the chances of my home burning down are slim, but if it happens, I would not be able to cover the cost of replacing everything. I could also get dental insurance and extra medical but... I don't have those. Why not? Because the chance of something happening to me that would be covered by these insurances is very slim (I have very good health). If it does happen, I can pay for it myself. It'll hurt financially, but I figure that I will claim so little from these insurances that the premiums will exceed the amounts I will pay if I remain self-insured.
Here's some insight into how insurances work: recently, Dutch health insurers refused to offer an optional extra health insurance to cover birth control. Their reasoning? If they would offer this, then only the people that actually use birth control would take out insurance on it. Since the insurers expect some profit and have to pay for administration, the premiums would exceed the payouts, and only heavy users would take the insurance... raising the premiums further still. That is how things work. The roadhog's claims are paid for by the careful driver's premiums, the costs for the person who spends more time in the doctor's office than at work, are covered by the people with a clean bill of health.
You never played the lottery? Let me ask you another question.
Do you have any kind of insurance?
But surely you know that, like a lottery, insurance works because on average people pay more money into it than they receive from it. Lotteries and insurance are both gambles... except that in a lottery, you bet on good fortune. With insurance, you bet against bad fortune. In both cases, the expectancy value is less than 1, but in both cases you'll be damn glad you subscribed when your number's up.
I know I know, it's just a joke. Well, I just had to get this off my chest.
This article suggests that free speech might not be the prime issue from a MEP's point of view.
In many cases MEPs, like other politicians, need to look at all sides of the equation: free speech, consumer rights, economics, practicality, etc. All of these are valid concerns for politicians, though you are right that different politicians will weigh these concerns differently.
I have written to one of the MEPs of the party I voted for, the European Liberal Democrats (Note that Liberal means something very different in Europe than it does in the States; it's actually a right-wing party), about my concerns regarding software patents. She replied with an amendmend to the proposed directive, drafted by the commission she is in. From this directive I gather that these politicians do share our concerns to some extend. A few choice quotes from the amendment (taken from the argumentation of each revision to the Directive):
"It is clear however that the Directive, despite argmentation by the Commission, will open the way for a broader use of patents as a means to protect computer software".
"The goal of patent law is not to ensure that patent holders enjoy certain privileges; the privileges granted to patent holders are only an instrument to benefit the invention process, to benefit society as a whole".
"The requirement of an effort of invention, and a significant improvement to existing technology, are fundamental if one wants to prevent patents for trivial "inventions".
And last but not least: "3bis: Exclusion from patentability: An invention implemented in a computer is NOT to be seen as a technical contribution only because it implies the use of a computer or other device. Also excluded are inventions that use computer programs, business methods or mathematical algorithms, and that do not carry any technical implications other than processing and rendering of information in a computer system or network. This means you cannot patent some widely practiced activity X as "Activity X on a computer/the Internet".
(Translated badly from Dutch by me).
Reading these amendmends, I get the warm and fuzzy feeling that some politicians at least share our concern. What remains to be seen is how they weigh these concerns against other interests.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a special agency that distributes the collected levies amongst record companies, according to some bizarre schedule. Which means that most of the cash stays in Holland, whereas only a pittance is sent overseas to the US where, let's face it, most of the copied popular music originated. I wouldn't be suprised if the situation in Canada is much the same.
University courses on programming do teach something about security, or good programming standards in general.
However, the student who starts working after college often finds himself in an environment without good work practices, standards and guidelines, tight deadlines, and disinterested co-workers. In that environment, his knowledge about programming practices will not be reinforced, it will be forgotten. The problem is not that he hasn't been taught properly, but if no-one is practicing or even interested in the standard of coding, is he going to bother?
Writing good software is something that's hard to teach anyway. Good programmers are made by experience, not by taking courses. However, junior programmers can learn how to produce quality code quickly... with your help. Training up junior staff is not something that you senior techs should do just if you feel like it... it should be part of your freakin' job description!. A seniour tech who does not pass on his knowledge is a dysfunctional employee.
You may want to check that you practice what you preach. Set a good example. Encourage your peers to do likewise.
- Teach: Do you see where a junior (or even senior) team member is slipping, and not applying proper practices? Chances are others have the same problem. Organise a short (1 hour) session and explain things. How to use the source control system. Where to find project documentation (you'd be surprised how often this is neglected). Take a piece of bad code, and explain why it is bad, and how to improve it (Don't haul out the poor guy who wrote it out in front, and remove his initials from any comments).
- Train: You got 2 junior C programmers assigned to your team? The best thing for them would be to receive a short course (give by you!) in Intermediate C programming techniques. This is knowledge straight from the horse's mouth, that they can apply immediately in their everyday work. Use the project as example, and they'll be brought up to speed on the important project aspects as a bonus. Besides giving a list of further reading at the end of the course, give them the actual books that you yourself have found to be beneficial to the subject.
- Coach: Take your time with the junior team members. Write code with them instead of correcting their mistakes after they have written it. Try pair programming with them. Personally I have found the time I spent with senior programmers (when I was the junior) to be the times when I learned most.
- Awareness: Never stop to instill the importance of good coding practices into your team members. Do not ever pass a bit of bad coding; make sure it is corrected. Got a tight deadline? Do not pass bad code anyway. As the team becomes better used to coding in a proper manner, you'll see less bad code and less bugs to boot, and you might end up saving time.
I've worked both in teams writing slipshod code, and teams producing tight code to rigid procedures, with a hard-ass technical manager making sure everything was up to standards. Guess which team was more fun to work in?
Programming securely does not have to cost you a lot of time either. Take the SafeStr library mentioned on the website for instance... a string library that can be used as replacement for the standard C string functions, a notorious source of buffer overruns and bugs. Using this library instead of the standard functions will cost little or no extra time.
Programming securely is just like other good programming practices. Generally they do not cost extra time, they save time. It does take time to learn these practices, and that's where the responsibility of each programmer comes in. Take the time to learn good programming practices and get used to them, stay abreast of new developments, and above all train and encourage your junior team members to use these methods as well.
The team that fails to adhere to good programming practices will turn out unstable and insecure software. Where do you think the bugs in Microsoft products come from? Tight timelines? Perhaps... but a great many of the bugs I come across are generally the result of a sloppy programmer, tight deadlines or no.
It's not just having to pay the $3 up front, it's also the fact that you need to sign up, which is a bother. Already there are sites that ask you to register without payment (NY Times!!), and many of us can't even be arsed to do that.
Many of these people working on micropayments seem to think it's just another way to collect payments for what amounts to a subscription, or a pre-paid content scheme. Most of the current premium sites and micropayment schemes fail to take the occasional visitor into account. I don't want to subscribe to this guy's comics, but I might want to pay, once, to see a single one and them decide if it's worth seeing more. I'd pay a gaming site to download a demo, but the 3 or 4 files per year I download from them do not justify a subscription. I don't want a subscription to the NY times, but I'd pay to read an article every now and then. But I won't pay if it's a subscription or a large-ish up-front payment. Hell, just having to sign up for each of these things in itself would be too much of a bother.
I'm convinced that a micropayment scheme needs to cater to the occasional visitor, in order to be successful. That means:
- It needs to be a single company, or multiple ones that interconnect, like you said. Those of us who browse a wide variety of content at many different sites should not have to sign up with 25 micropayment companies.
- It needs to be easy to use. Besides the signing up, accepting the microcharge itself should be very simple. A simple system dialog should suffice, stating 'You have requested a web page for which the charge is $0,10. Press Yes to accept the charge and proceed, or No to cancel'. One click to accept the charge, no more. Certainly not a 'type your username, password, date of birth, favorite pets name and your 25 digit MicroPay ID, to access this webpage'.
- Some people will probably want a proper bill, not just a single charge each month on their CC.
I'm not for Microsoft or Eolas, nor am I against them in this case.
What I resent is this whole sordid litigious mess, the colossal waste of effort and money to get these cases sorted, and lawyers getting richer over a silly issue.
Nah, you guys go ahead and bail out Iraq. At least it'll be money well spent. We Dutch could fund this elevator in your place, if we
- Stopped building the High Speed Train Line segment between Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Let the train ride on regular track at regular speeds. We will save 3,5 billion Euros and add only 10 minutes to the Amsterdam-Paris journey.
- Stopped building the 3,5 billion Euro freight train line from Rotterdam to, uhhh, nowhere. The usefulness of this line ends at the German border, where it connects to a branch unsuitable for freight traffic... and the Germans are not in a hurry to upgrade it. Besides, most shippers in Rotterdam have already stated that they will not use this line and use river shipping or trucks instead.
So we, as a tiny country, are pissing away 7 billion Euro (roughly the same in Dollars) building two utterly useless railroads... when we could have had a freaking space elevator!
Not to mention the fact that it'll be anchored far away from any of the regular air and sea traffic lanes. Any attempt to approach the cable (or rather, the first 10 kms of it since the rest is effectively out of reach) will be spotted well in advance.
If the unthinkable happens and someone does manage to damage or break the cable, it will either float off or come down, burning up in the atmosphere. The people contemplating this elevator have already thought out such scenarios and published them. Even the cost of replacing the cable would not be all too high, once the technology and industry to manufacture the cable is there.
In terms of providing inspiration for a nation, advancing science, and providing interesting spinoff technology, I think that the old-school space program has shown an excellent return on investment. This new initiative sounds like a similar thing: set to advance our progress into space, with ambitious targets (as opposed to the current regular bus service to LEO).
Now ISPs will either remove these 'under construction' pages or be more specific about them in their contracts. Watch for the next leech who sues his ISP for not providing an 'under construction' page resulting in a DNS error message. Sigh. I am beginning to appreciate my own country's legal system more and more... over here, you have to provide (shock! gasp!) actual proof of damages or you get nothing.
No one is asking then green lobby for proof that plants are unsafe: we all know that. The problem with the green lobby is that they do not want anything proven or disproven, not by them nor by anyone else. They do not want nuclear power, period. They also do not want the technology to be developed further.
Personally I think a better approach would be to see how we can improve safety procedures in nuclear plants so that accidents are less likely, and to see how we can limit the damage if an accident does happen. Researchers are making progress in both these area's... though they're not done by a long shot.
As for economics... let the market work that one out.
It's the approach of the anti-nuclear lobby that I despise. Instead of promoting research to see if and how these reactors can be made safer, they cling to the belief that these plants cannot be made safe, ever. Perhaps in another century we'll look at this in the same way as we now think about those people who insisted that heavier-than-air flying machines were an impossibility.
The RIAA probably put them on Double Secret Probation first!
Their own words 'shock an awe' are aptly chosen in this case, and we should see this campain for what it is: legal strongarm tactics.
The RIAA is asking these people to promise something that is not in all cases forbidden by law. How would you feel if you'd find a letter from Microsoft on your doormat, stating
"You have illegaly copied MS products, and thus we are preparing to drag you through legal hell for the next 30 years, at the end of which we will take you you for every penny you own... unless you sign this agreement that you'll never use commy open source products again, and never use Bill Gates' name in vain.". When faced with that, does it even matter whether or not you actually copied said software?
These cases should be decided in a court of law, and with all parties on an even footing. As it is, the stronger party can bully the weaker one into agreeing to basically anything.
$699?! I though the going rate was tree fiddy? ($3,50)
The security officers also made sure that old accounts were deactivated promptly, and they figured that they could detect a password being compromised long before the expiry would kick in anyway.
What the poster was trying to point out is that simply throwing a bunch of laptops at schools isn't enough... Schools and teachers need to support the use of these things as well, and teach students how to use them.
As he pointed out, the schools in his area were hardly making good use of the machines. In your example, I bet that the distribution of laptops in Maine was accompanied by an education programme to teach how to use the laptops for school assignments.
I agree... schools, and the education system in general, need to figure out 2 things:
- How to teach using computers, and when teaching without them is better.
- What to teach about computers.
Both these issues are not being addressed or even recognised in schools over here (Holland). In rare instances you see an enthusiastic physics teacher giving classes on computer science, and even in those cases they have little if any teaching materials to back them up.
Buying computers for schools or giving laptops to kids is not the way to improve education.
Oh, I can sympathise with your sentiment about education. Here in Holland, per-capita spending on education is about 2/3rds of the amount spent in the rest of Europe. It scares the hell out of me to see my country dumbing down, visibly.
Several of our customers (large Multinationals) are considering moving to .NET, or they have already decided to do so. We're talking new development, and migration of old applications to .NET; not just the VB stuff but Unix software as well. I wouldn't say that .NET isn't taking off...
.NET, there are the architects, CIO's, etc. Having a mature development environment with pretty colors is nice for developers, but if there is an architecture that is proven, stable, scalable and generally future proof, I will take it even if it means the developers will all be back to hand-coding X-windows widgets in vi.
.NET debate. If one would ask me now, I'd advise certain clients to go with .NET, and certain others to go with Java. In my view there's no clear winner; which architecture to use depends on circumstances.
Another poster made an important point: it's not just the developers that make or break a platform like J2EE or
I haven't yet taken sides in the J2EE vs.
Uh, you missed the point of cats completely didn't you? A cat isn't supposed to fetch you beers, their purpose is to scratch your furniture, break anything expensive they can get their paws on, chew through speaker cables and mouse cords, and generally do whatever the hell they want.
That's why I got two of the little monsters.
The only real difference, as another poster pointed out, is that one might need insurance. By law, or because (for example) you would not be able to afford the hospital bills if you had an accident. Lotteries on the other hand are always voluntary, you don't have to play.
Yes... for many things, the odds of needing insurance are a lot higher than those of winning even a small prize in the lottery... surprise: that's why the premiums are higher than the cost of a lottery ticket.
Do you think that insurance companies have some magical means to conjure up money to pay out large sums to claimants? Nope, that money comes from the premiums, and by necessity, the total premiums should exceed the total payouts, just like a lottery.
It is not just about probabilities, what matters is the probability, the payout, and the premium. In statistical terms: the average payout (expectation value) = the sum of (all payout values * the chance of 'winning' that particular payout). The ratio between your premium and the expectation value tells you how much money, on average, you get out of the scheme. For both lotteries and insurances this value is less than 1. Take a look at this value sometimes, you'd be surprised that it doesn't differ that much between lotteries and insurances.
It all comes down to a personal choice when weighing the odds, the premium and the payouts. Some people prefer to play lotteries with a good chance of winning a small prize, some prefer a very small chance at winning a huge amount. Guess what: I treat insurance in the same manner. I have health and car insurance because the law requires it. I have homeowner's insurance... the chances of my home burning down are slim, but if it happens, I would not be able to cover the cost of replacing everything. I could also get dental insurance and extra medical but... I don't have those. Why not? Because the chance of something happening to me that would be covered by these insurances is very slim (I have very good health). If it does happen, I can pay for it myself. It'll hurt financially, but I figure that I will claim so little from these insurances that the premiums will exceed the amounts I will pay if I remain self-insured.
Here's some insight into how insurances work: recently, Dutch health insurers refused to offer an optional extra health insurance to cover birth control. Their reasoning? If they would offer this, then only the people that actually use birth control would take out insurance on it. Since the insurers expect some profit and have to pay for administration, the premiums would exceed the payouts, and only heavy users would take the insurance... raising the premiums further still. That is how things work. The roadhog's claims are paid for by the careful driver's premiums, the costs for the person who spends more time in the doctor's office than at work, are covered by the people with a clean bill of health.
My apologies for getting way offtopic here.
You never played the lottery? Let me ask you another question.
Do you have any kind of insurance?
But surely you know that, like a lottery, insurance works because on average people pay more money into it than they receive from it. Lotteries and insurance are both gambles... except that in a lottery, you bet on good fortune. With insurance, you bet against bad fortune. In both cases, the expectancy value is less than 1, but in both cases you'll be damn glad you subscribed when your number's up.
I know I know, it's just a joke. Well, I just had to get this off my chest.
I have written to one of the MEPs of the party I voted for, the European Liberal Democrats (Note that Liberal means something very different in Europe than it does in the States; it's actually a right-wing party), about my concerns regarding software patents. She replied with an amendmend to the proposed directive, drafted by the commission she is in. From this directive I gather that these politicians do share our concerns to some extend. A few choice quotes from the amendment (taken from the argumentation of each revision to the Directive):
"It is clear however that the Directive, despite argmentation by the Commission, will open the way for a broader use of patents as a means to protect computer software".
"The goal of patent law is not to ensure that patent holders enjoy certain privileges; the privileges granted to patent holders are only an instrument to benefit the invention process, to benefit society as a whole".
"The requirement of an effort of invention, and a significant improvement to existing technology, are fundamental if one wants to prevent patents for trivial "inventions".
And last but not least: "3bis: Exclusion from patentability: An invention implemented in a computer is NOT to be seen as a technical contribution only because it implies the use of a computer or other device. Also excluded are inventions that use computer programs, business methods or mathematical algorithms, and that do not carry any technical implications other than processing and rendering of information in a computer system or network. This means you cannot patent some widely practiced activity X as "Activity X on a computer/the Internet".
(Translated badly from Dutch by me).
Reading these amendmends, I get the warm and fuzzy feeling that some politicians at least share our concern. What remains to be seen is how they weigh these concerns against other interests.