Yeah, they thought they were getting the fancy "designer electrons". But what they actually got was regular electrons with a fancy label. Because electrons are totally fungible; they're all the same and one's just as good as another.
Chuck did the super-obvious product placements on purpose; it was part of the humor (as well as actually being a product placement). Usually it worked, sometimes it didn't.
Meh the future is gonna be embedded ads that you simply can't escape. You'll see the characters drinking Coke while using their iPhone and driving their Ford Explorer to the Taco Bell.
I have no real problem with that. I'd rather watch a show where everyone's using the products of a particular brand, and not be interrupted for an ad, than watch a show which is constantly being interrupted for ads but has only generic products used. Unfortunately, the most likely outcome (and the status quo) is we get both.
As for this patent... it really shouldn't be patentable. But in this case I don't mind, because anything that makes it harder for those other than the patentholder to be assholes is OK by me.
You're forgetting that the decision on an arbitrator has to be agreed by both parties. If you feel you're getting the short end of the stick, simply don't agree to him and another one needs to be found.
How, as a consumer, am I to know anything about the arbitrator? I don't have a legal department to research these things. And in any case, all arbitrator are similarly situated -- they all hear a lot of cases where the plaintiff is J. Random Consumer who they'll never see again, and a few massive companies who they'll see again and again and again.
Your assumption that every arbitrator in the country will be corrupt is the reason why there is no progress and the courts are jammed.
It's not that every arbitrator in the country is corrupt. It's that the process is such that the arbitrator's interests naturally favor the corporation. If an arbitrator gets the reputation of being too consumer-friendly, the corporations (who can research these things) will stop agreeing to him and he's out of a job. If an arbitrator gets the reputation of always agreeing with the corporation, most consumers won't even know about it, and those few who do find out aren't significant enough to matter.
In any case, deciding disputes is the civil courts' JOB. If they can't do it, why the heck do we even have them?
Arbitration doesn't work like this (at least where I come from). There are 3 arbitrators, one yours, one from them and one neutral, as in, agreed by both parties. So the "neutral" should be neutral. And even if it is only one, it should still be agreed by both.
You might go to an arbitrator once or twice in your lifetime. These companies deal with them all the time. That means every arbitrator has no incentive to keep you happy and every incentive to keep the other side -- their repeat customers -- happy.
Unlike most people, I do believe that most claims should be decided like this. Decisions would be speedier, there would be no legal system to abuse because you have more money and power than the common joe...
Yes, decisions would be speedier all right.
Most people don't know what arbitration is... That's why they complain. It is actually a common clause in contracts between giant companies - and believe me, none of them want to lose money.
Giant companies can use arbitration effectively because they're already similarly situated.
Right, because the law explicitly makes arbitration legal. (See "Federal Arbitration Act"). The courts don't want to have to deal with actually providing justice (or even injustice) to pissants like us; better to fob us off on a "neutral" arbitrator hired by the other party who can deal out injustice without bothering the judges.
Most C++ apps are insanely slow compared to their C counterparts because the C++ folks rely on all this dynamic stuff. They may as well just write their crap in Javascript or Python. All the C++ code written for benchmarks is basically a gussied-up version of the C code, which just gives C++ programmers permission to lie to themselves about why they use C++.
I use C++ for the STL (despite the awful syntax) and for better encapsulation. Boost scoped_ptr is nice too. Virtual functions are a nice alternative to switch() based dispatchers, but they don't need to be (and shouldn't be) used all the time. C was and is a great language. C++ is a horrible mess with a lot of nice features buried within.
Exceptions are just plain awful. Either you have to handle them one level up from the throwing function (in which case you could have just returned an error code), or you have to pass them to higher and higher levels, each of which is less likely than the last to be able to handle it sensibly. Or you have to crash the process, which you might as well have done in the first place.
No, there is no "even worse". Someone is dead, and it isn't him. There are precious few situations in life in which surviving is a worse fate than dying: Getting deported, or spending 10 years in jail, is not on the short list.
Personally I'd rather be dead than facing 10 years in prison.
A jury of 12 people disagrees with your assessment. This wasn't some judge with an attitude problem: This was a law passed by elected representatives, in an open and accessible public forum, with ample opportunity for public discourse. It has been affirmed countless times by a majority -- and now has been affirmed unanimously by 12 randomly-selected people from that community.
Juries are not infallible. Elected representatives are not infallible. I see no reason to defer to a person's judgement merely because they got picked for a jury or for the legislature.
I'm appalled by your casual disregard for the seriousness of this person's crime: It was clearly motivated by a desire to embarass his victim
Assuming that's true, he should have been acquitted of the bias intimidation charges; embarrassment is not intimidation.
Also most people don't realize these were the same arguements given back in the 80s for writing stuff in assembly instead of C, and given that people have moved on to C++ since with the same things being said 'If it's too slow in C++ then optimize that routine in C'
Anyone who said "if it's too slow in C++ than optimize that routine in C" was not thinking straight. Anyway, C and assembler are at different levels of abstraction. C and Python, not so much. There's no great advantage to using python, except for lack of compile time.
3. all negatives, plates, positives, digitized storage medium, graphic files, magnetic medium, optical storage devices and any other thing used in the making of the illustration that contain an image of the illustration or any part thereof are destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use.
To point (3). Does that mean scanning a dollar bill, resizing in Gimp, and posting on the internet require me to uninstall the browser, erase the image from the HD, remove Gimp, destroy the scanner, and burn the original dollar bill?
No. The language is pretty simple here; you have to erase anything that contains an "image of the illustration" or "any part thereof". The tricky part would be erasing any swap or other temporary files, but there's no need to destroy the browser, Gimp, the scanner, or the original dollar bill, since none of those contain an image of the illustration (the dollar bill is not an image of the illustration, it's merely the model for it).
However, if you never printed it out, none of that applies. You then run into 18 USC 474, which provides in part
Whoever, with intent to defraud, makes, executes, acquires, scans, captures, records, receives, transmits, reproduces, sells, or has in such personâ(TM)s control, custody, or possession, an analog, digital, or electronic image of any obligation or other security of the United States; or [...] Is guilty of a class B felony.
So on paper you're OK lacking intent to defraud, but despite all that nonsense authoritarians tell you when they're passing the latest overbroad law, lack of intent means shit in court. They can "impute" intent from the act, making a total farce of any mens rea requirement, and you're going to PMITA prison.
This nerd isn't on Google+, or Facebook, and won't be until they officially abandon their "real name" policies. I find it odious that these companies intentionally lock out those who have a need, or even just a desire, for privacy.
I wonder what protections the banks will have to put in place to prevent fraud.
Check paper will likely be pre-printed with ink (not toner) which turns black when hit with the green laser. In fact, things like cashiers checks may already have it -- removing the toner might be an attack known to security people (and criminals)
And make sure you have a copy of any contracts you sign. Who knows what shenanigans someone can get up to by modifying the original.
You should always have a copy of any contract you sign. If this becomes common, I imagine it will also become common for legal documents to be printed on paper with anti-unprinting properties.
IMHO the case as such is sufficiently egregious so as to justify an extremely broad warrant without much consideration by a judge.
First of all, the Constitution doesn't allow warrants which don't particularly describe places to be searched and things to be seized, no matter how egregious the circumstances. The Supreme Court has ruled that the judges do have to exercise judgement when approving them (though this is honored more in the breach than the observance).
Second, law enforcement is very good at painting defendants in a bad light. Look up the Kevin Mitnick case; whatever Mitnick did, it is NOT true that he could have started a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone. In this case, they use "human trafficking" as a scare term; it appears he's actually a run of the mill pimp.
Since you're gonna have a switching power supply anyway... why not skip the pesky rectifier diodes and feed in raw couple hundred volts DC? Quite a few PC power supplies work just fine off raw DC on the supposed "AC input"... good luck figuring out which work and which dont without some smoke events.
You can run them on DC, but it's a waste; you still get the diode drop and half your diodes are going to get hot as hell; normally you have a full-wave rectifier where each diode operates at 50% duty cycle. With DC your rectifier becomes an unused path and two diodes which are always on (hence your smoke event). The savings come when you replace half the rectifier diodes with jumpers.
A high efficiency supply might use an active rectifier; I imagine the issue is the same, except your MOSFETs will get hot instead of your diodes.
I work for a major semi-conductor company in Silicon Valley (California USA), and we have been desperately looking for talented micro-controller firmware software developers and/or hardware engineers that are proficient with wired data-link protocols (UART, SPI, I2C, 1-wire, ISO7816-3, etc.) for nearly a year, and offering a 6 figure salary.
So find someone with a clue and maybe some experience in related areas (e.g. kernel or device driver development), and hire them. I've done microcontroller firmware and had to bit-bang both SPI and I2C, and neither one is rocket science; I learned on the job from the data sheets. Stop looking for the purple squirrel -- the candidate who has exactly the experience you need on the tools you use -- and start hiring people who have the basic skills. This is still difficult, but it's a lot less difficult than looking for the niche candidate who probably already has a job with your competition.
(I'm on the wrong coast and am currently employed doing something else, sorry)
Now, not that I'm a lawyer or anything, but it looks like a properly served warrant for access to a specific device.
Well, first of all, it's a rubber stamped warrant. Literally.
Second, Google is unlikely to have some of the information requested; the PUK of the SIM would be known by the SIM manufacturer, not the maker of the phone's operating system. Same goes for text messaging; it goes through the carrier, not Google.
Third, the records are unlikely to be physically at Google Legal Investigations Support.
Fourth, some of the "items requested" amount to a fishing expedition -- so much for "particular" descriptions of the places to be searched or items seized.
Message here is that if you consider yourself a skilled employee, you (not your employer) are responsible for keeping your skills up to date.
You can't, though. The companies want verifiable professional experience, not skills you claim you have from working on stuff on the side. Except, of course, when they hire an outsourcing firm or bring in a visa worker... then they'll (pretend to) believe that the outsourced worker or visa worker has 5-10 years of experience in everything, even when all they really have is a crash course or less.
The shortened yellow is designed to catch those who skirt the law by continuing into the intersection even when the light is already yellow. I.E. If you don't treat the yellow as just an extension of the green, you'll never get a ticket.
In most US states, the yellow IS just an extension of the green. It's a warning that the light will soon turn red, nothing more.
People have been shaving the yellow so long, it's been forgotten that it mean "the light is about to go red, STOP"
A good driver never tailgates, doesn't speed in the city, doesn't talk on the phone or eat while driving, and knows that on the highway a two second gap is the minimum safe distance.
That's what they teach you in driving school. You get out on the road, and you find a) There aren't any other good drivers.
b) If you try to be a "good driver", the other bastards will take advantage of you. You'll constantly be slowing when people move into the 2-second gap, you'll get stuck behind the guy doing 10 under (and often his buddy alongside him) if you won't make a close pass or even tailgate, and in the city you'll be constantly missing your turn if you won't speed to get into the correct lane.
c) Back on the highway, despite people traveling at high speeds at following distances less than 2 seconds, there really aren't that many crashes. Even insane situations with packs of 65mph traffic with sub-second following distances only occasionally result in wrecks (though I wouldn't call that safe); experience would seem to indicate that 2 seconds is in fact quite conservative.
Slashdot Mirror
"We accidentally your rights"
(and anyone who believes it was an "accident" isn't paranoid enough)
Yeah, they thought they were getting the fancy "designer electrons". But what they actually got was regular electrons with a fancy label. Because electrons are totally fungible; they're all the same and one's just as good as another.
Arkanoid is breakout, not pong.
Chuck did the super-obvious product placements on purpose; it was part of the humor (as well as actually being a product placement). Usually it worked, sometimes it didn't.
<vreenak>It's a FAKE</vreenak>
I have no real problem with that. I'd rather watch a show where everyone's using the products of a particular brand, and not be interrupted for an ad, than watch a show which is constantly being interrupted for ads but has only generic products used. Unfortunately, the most likely outcome (and the status quo) is we get both.
As for this patent... it really shouldn't be patentable. But in this case I don't mind, because anything that makes it harder for those other than the patentholder to be assholes is OK by me.
How, as a consumer, am I to know anything about the arbitrator? I don't have a legal department to research these things. And in any case, all arbitrator are similarly situated -- they all hear a lot of cases where the plaintiff is J. Random Consumer who they'll never see again, and a few massive companies who they'll see again and again and again.
It's not that every arbitrator in the country is corrupt. It's that the process is such that the arbitrator's interests naturally favor the corporation. If an arbitrator gets the reputation of being too consumer-friendly, the corporations (who can research these things) will stop agreeing to him and he's out of a job. If an arbitrator gets the reputation of always agreeing with the corporation, most consumers won't even know about it, and those few who do find out aren't significant enough to matter.
In any case, deciding disputes is the civil courts' JOB. If they can't do it, why the heck do we even have them?
You might go to an arbitrator once or twice in your lifetime. These companies deal with them all the time. That means every arbitrator has no incentive to keep you happy and every incentive to keep the other side -- their repeat customers -- happy.
Yes, decisions would be speedier all right.
Giant companies can use arbitration effectively because they're already similarly situated.
Right, because the law explicitly makes arbitration legal. (See "Federal Arbitration Act"). The courts don't want to have to deal with actually providing justice (or even injustice) to pissants like us; better to fob us off on a "neutral" arbitrator hired by the other party who can deal out injustice without bothering the judges.
I use C++ for the STL (despite the awful syntax) and for better encapsulation. Boost scoped_ptr is nice too. Virtual functions are a nice alternative to switch() based dispatchers, but they don't need to be (and shouldn't be) used all the time. C was and is a great language. C++ is a horrible mess with a lot of nice features buried within.
Exceptions are just plain awful. Either you have to handle them one level up from the throwing function (in which case you could have just returned an error code), or you have to pass them to higher and higher levels, each of which is less likely than the last to be able to handle it sensibly. Or you have to crash the process, which you might as well have done in the first place.
Personally I'd rather be dead than facing 10 years in prison.
Juries are not infallible. Elected representatives are not infallible. I see no reason to defer to a person's judgement merely because they got picked for a jury or for the legislature.
Assuming that's true, he should have been acquitted of the bias intimidation charges; embarrassment is not intimidation.
Anyone who said "if it's too slow in C++ than optimize that routine in C" was not thinking straight. Anyway, C and assembler are at different levels of abstraction. C and Python, not so much. There's no great advantage to using python, except for lack of compile time.
No. The language is pretty simple here; you have to erase anything that contains an "image of the illustration" or "any part thereof". The tricky part would be erasing any swap or other temporary files, but there's no need to destroy the browser, Gimp, the scanner, or the original dollar bill, since none of those contain an image of the illustration (the dollar bill is not an image of the illustration, it's merely the model for it).
However, if you never printed it out, none of that applies. You then run into 18 USC 474, which provides in part
So on paper you're OK lacking intent to defraud, but despite all that nonsense authoritarians tell you when they're passing the latest overbroad law, lack of intent means shit in court. They can "impute" intent from the act, making a total farce of any mens rea requirement, and you're going to PMITA prison.
In the early '90s, the BSA was threatening people with prison rape.
...but I didn't expect it to be just cash money, and I certainly didn't expect it to be so low.
Ah.
Google's current name policy.
As well as the policy itself, also read the long post by Yonatan Zunger on that page, concerning "name-shaped".
Unofficial summary: Google no longer requires real names; it merely requires that the name represent a real person.
(I do work for Google, but I do not speak for them on this or any other issue. Yonatan does, however.)
Check paper will likely be pre-printed with ink (not toner) which turns black when hit with the green laser. In fact, things like cashiers checks may already have it -- removing the toner might be an attack known to security people (and criminals)
You should always have a copy of any contract you sign. If this becomes common, I imagine it will also become common for legal documents to be printed on paper with anti-unprinting properties.
First of all, the Constitution doesn't allow warrants which don't particularly describe places to be searched and things to be seized, no matter how egregious the circumstances. The Supreme Court has ruled that the judges do have to exercise judgement when approving them (though this is honored more in the breach than the observance).
Second, law enforcement is very good at painting defendants in a bad light. Look up the Kevin Mitnick case; whatever Mitnick did, it is NOT true that he could have started a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone. In this case, they use "human trafficking" as a scare term; it appears he's actually a run of the mill pimp.
That's actually not true; the Uniform Commercial Code provides for specific performance in some circumstances.
You can run them on DC, but it's a waste; you still get the diode drop and half your diodes are going to get hot as hell; normally you have a full-wave rectifier where each diode operates at 50% duty cycle. With DC your rectifier becomes an unused path and two diodes which are always on (hence your smoke event). The savings come when you replace half the rectifier diodes with jumpers.
A high efficiency supply might use an active rectifier; I imagine the issue is the same, except your MOSFETs will get hot instead of your diodes.
So find someone with a clue and maybe some experience in related areas (e.g. kernel or device driver development), and hire them. I've done microcontroller firmware and had to bit-bang both SPI and I2C, and neither one is rocket science; I learned on the job from the data sheets. Stop looking for the purple squirrel -- the candidate who has exactly the experience you need on the tools you use -- and start hiring people who have the basic skills. This is still difficult, but it's a lot less difficult than looking for the niche candidate who probably already has a job with your competition.
(I'm on the wrong coast and am currently employed doing something else, sorry)
Well, first of all, it's a rubber stamped warrant. Literally.
Second, Google is unlikely to have some of the information requested; the PUK of the SIM would be known by the SIM manufacturer, not the maker of the phone's operating system. Same goes for text messaging; it goes through the carrier, not Google.
Third, the records are unlikely to be physically at Google Legal Investigations Support.
Fourth, some of the "items requested" amount to a fishing expedition -- so much for "particular" descriptions of the places to be searched or items seized.
You can't, though. The companies want verifiable professional experience, not skills you claim you have from working on stuff on the side. Except, of course, when they hire an outsourcing firm or bring in a visa worker... then they'll (pretend to) believe that the outsourced worker or visa worker has 5-10 years of experience in everything, even when all they really have is a crash course or less.
In most US states, the yellow IS just an extension of the green. It's a warning that the light will soon turn red, nothing more.
Because it doesn't mean that.
That's what they teach you in driving school. You get out on the road, and you find
a) There aren't any other good drivers.
b) If you try to be a "good driver", the other bastards will take advantage of you. You'll constantly be slowing when people move into the 2-second gap, you'll get stuck behind the guy doing 10 under (and often his buddy alongside him) if you won't make a close pass or even tailgate, and in the city you'll be constantly missing your turn if you won't speed to get into the correct lane.
c) Back on the highway, despite people traveling at high speeds at following distances less than 2 seconds, there really aren't that many crashes. Even insane situations with packs of 65mph traffic with sub-second following distances only occasionally result in wrecks (though I wouldn't call that safe); experience would seem to indicate that 2 seconds is in fact quite conservative.