You're close. It's not C, it's an unholy combination of COBOL (used for bit manipulation and other detailed machine-level stuff), FORTRAN (used for database access), and SQL (used for business logic). With plenty of assembler thrown in, and gotos galore.
(OK, there may be some C in there. Used for string manipulation, probably).
It looks to me like Dynadot may have simply rolled over on their customer to get themselves out of the line of fire:
The Court, having considered the stipulation between Plaintiffs JULIUS BAER & CO. LTD and JULIUS BAER BANK AND TRUST CO. LTD. (collectively "Julius Baer" and/or "Plaintiff's") and Defendant DYNADOT LLC ("Dynadot"),
A stipulation is an agreement between two parties in a lawsuit that a certain fact or issue is not contested. What exactly did Dynadot stipulate to? Was it just that they were indeed the registrar for wikileaks.org, or was there more?
Since the Australian National Patent Troll recently won a patent battle on OFDM (which DVB-T uses), going with DVB-T wouldn't have worked. Not to mention that the switch to 8Mhz channels vice the 6Mhz channels US analog broadcasting uses would have been much more disruptive.
(never mind that OFDM was invented in the 1960s and that CSIROs patent claims were limited to "above 10Ghz", the courts didn't care)
I can see one useful purpose of so called "Patent trolls."
Lets say you are a brilliant engineer/inventor, but a lousy businessman. You like to tinker away in your workshop, but have no ability or interest in marketing, managing employees, or filling out business tax forms. So you come up with ideas, and let somebody else handle the patent licensing so you can get back to doing what you love - inventing new stuff.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work. They're out looking for people to fleece, and you (being a lousy businessman) look ripe for the fleecing. Yes, they'll handle the patent licensing for you. But they'll also take the lion's share of any money involved. If they're especially evil, you'll actually end up paying them to take it all.
In any successful partnership between businesspeople and technical people, the businesspeople always end up on top. How much the technical people get is simply a matter of the benevolence of the businesspeople.
But IMHO a better way to accomplish the same thing is to extract the CO2 from the atmosphere and store it as octane, like I suggest here (in a post that was modded down for no reason by the people that are stalking me), and get the energy to do that from nuclear power, like this guy has already worked out the details for. That way, the gasoline you would burn, would only return to the atmosphere, what was taken from it.
If you've solved the energy problem and the CO2 capture problem, there's plenty of things you can do. Produce syngas from CO2 + H20, create methanol and diesel from the syngas, convert the methanol to gasoline, etc. I don't think there's a method for directly synthesizing pure iso-octane, but that doesn't matter much.
But first you have to solve the energy problem. And if you've come up with a way to generate nearly all the energy the world needs (aside from mobile uses) without CO2, you probably don't need to worry about the rest for a long while. Nuclear ain't going to do it, for political reasons if no other.
What if I don't want to submit my Web site to be rated? What if I don't like the idea of some other agency telling the world what is and what isn't on my site? Why should I have to be blacklisted because I refuse to be evaluated?
That's a necessary feature of any "voluntary" rating system; new unrated content must be treated as if it is as least as bad as the worst rating. Otherwise those making bad stuff would simply not submit their stuff.
I also used to think that it was the parent's, and only the parent's, job to filter out inappropriate content. But then one day, I was in the checkout aisle at the grocery store, and every single one of the women's magazines had a headline like "Have Hot Sex Tonight!!", "Make Him Wild With Desire!!!", "Naughty Nasties You Can Do To Him In The Bedroom!!!!!!!!!!". Right there, in the open, next to the freaking candy.
Yeah, there's somebody at the local grocery stores who likes to cover up the women's magazines. It took me a while to figure out their criterion for censorship... it's the word "sex".
Guess what. It's just a word. I uncover the magazines.
The point is, it is the parent's primary responsibility to filter out unwanted material, but that doesn't give you the right to go around glamorizing, or even normalizing, overtly sexual behavior in places you could reasonably expect to find a preschooler.
There's nothing remotely abnormal in the first two of the headlines you posted. And there's no reason the rest of the people of the world should be restricted in their public utterances or publications to that which you find appropriate for a pre-schooler. If you wish your child to have a filtered, desexualized version of the world, there's probably a single-sex boarding school you could send him or her to. Making the entire world, outside a few adult-only refuges, into such a place is not a reasonable demand.
Was I the only one surprised by the authors assertion that GPS is not a real-time operation? Last I checked GPS was one of the most time-critical operations in regular consumer use?
It's a matter of terminology. A control system is "hard real-time" -- if the system misses a deadline, something breaks. With consumer GPS, if you miss your deadline, you just get a late position fix. Also the deadline with consumer GPS is fairly lax; you've got a full second to calculate a new fix. Some would call this "soft real-time"; obviously the article author doesn't consider it real-time at all.
As you stated, you code four times faster, and with a decent framework and unit tests, you can get working code out the door four times faster (presumably). To my clients at least, that's worth way more than saving some clock cycles. No one really cares about that stuff unless you're working within some serious hardware limitations.
Or until your quick and inefficient solution is suddenly dealing with absolutely massive quantities of data. That's one of the big problems with optimizing for development time; the increase in machine speed and storage has been more than matched, in some fields, with an increase in data which needs to be processed.
I've got a CS degree and am doing embedded programming now. Most of the EEs here do hardware design, not software.
Some of the major challenges of embedded work are
1) You've got to do pretty much everything. The OS does little for you, and even the stuff it does for you, you've got to know how it does it inside and out. For some stuff, there's no OS at all.
2) There's not much space. Small flash, little RAM, and no disk.
3) There's not much speed or time. The processor is running at tens of megahertz if you're lucky. And you've likely got some real-time constraints; take too long and your device fails in some way.
4) Debugging can be a major challenge, depending on your tool set. The device doesn't have a nice graphical interface with GDB in a window. If you're lucky it's got a dedicated debug interface.
5) Sometimes it really IS a hardware problem:-)
However, if you can program an Apple II (or other 8-bit) in assembler or write an efficienct Linux device driver, you're probably up to it.
In addition, while I'd love to continue advancing my CS skills it has become obvious to me that the only way to make real money in our society is to get a degree of a fake science like economics/business in the form of an MBA. That way you can bullshit like a pro, cheat shareholders out of millions of dollars (maybe even billions!) and provide absolutely no value to anybody but yourself.
It's a seductive idea (at least if your conscience is sufficiently flexible), but remember that only a few top MBAs get to do that sort of thing. Most MBAs end up in middle management somewhere, caught between impossible directives and short budgets from above and sullen workers below, fighting for scraps of territory with others of their ilk, and getting laid off when the guys at the top want a new Porsche.
Except we don't have a method of generating pure hydrogen efficiently, we don't have a way of removing CO2 from the air efficiently, we don't have a way of reducing CO2 to C + O2 efficiently (though it's fortunately not necessary, producing CO is sufficient for hydrocarbon synthesis), and we don't have a workable methanol fuel cell.
Best argument I heard against that has to do with Johnny Cash: Imagine a hemorrhoid commercial with the Ring of Fire song playing in the background a week after he died.
Current law allows them to do just that provided they make a new recording and pay the mechanical royalty.
Further: Imagine a Mercedes commercial playing the original Janis Joplin version of "Mercedes Benz".
Oh, wait, that's been done too. So much for that argument for copyright.
What I'm curious about, is how does an RIAA lawsuit affect a student's ability to pursue their education ?
Of course. In addition to the costs involved, RIAA actions may result in university disciplinary actions, such as restrictions on computer use, which impede a student's ability to pursue their education.
Is the cartel destroying someone's future career over a few hundred overplayed pop songs ?
Sure, why not? They have no conscience and the threat of destroying a career seems like a great tool to make people get in line.
What does that say about the future of the nation ?
Not much. One ruined student doesn't really make a difference.
It is very rare for copyright infringement to rise to criminal levels. The music download/upload situation is not one of those rare cases.
Unfortunately, it is. Check out the "No Electronic Theft" act, which nearly erased the distinction between criminal and civil copyright infringement by making the receipt of the copyrighted works themselves "private financial gain".
Sounds like you've had some bad experiences with the cops. Every single time I've dealt with the cops I've just done what I was told and never had any problems.
Obedience is a useful skill; you'll need it in the coming years.
Sure someone might be in the files as a gang "associate" if they spend a lot of time hanging out with the homies, but that's their bad. They can find better friends to associate with.
Right. So much for free association. Associate with who the government thinks you should be associating with is good enough.
Most of their ideas are cute but not especially helpful to anyone. I'd throw all those ideas out for a real laundry machine. I want to toss my dirty clothes in at night, and the next morning have them waiting for me, cleaned, dried, ironed, sorted, and folded.
You can get something similar. It's called a "servant". Unfortunately thanks to that darn Abe Lincoln, they're only available on a subscription basis nowadays.
Because not every piece of intellectual property is created by "Faceless Megacorp, Inc." and of many independent artists would like to make a living doing something they enjoy without having to resort to living off "tips" and the charity and goodwill of others. Music is not the only creative endeavor and authors and film makers can't just do concerts and live off merchandising.
Authors publish through "Faceless Publisher, Inc". Film makers produce their films through funding from "Faceless Film Production Company, Inc" or sometimes "Independent Film Production Limited (a wholly owned subsidiary of Faceless Film, Inc)", and distribute through the distribution arm of Faceless Film.
If you're not at least distributing through Faceless Megacorp, Inc, then you're lost in the noise anyway. Copyright violation is the least of your worries, unless it's Faceless Megacorp doing the copying -- and in that case, you're screwed anyway because your lawyer probably can't beat up their lawyers.
Like I've implied elsewhere... If you're some white kid living in the safe suburbs, yes... something like a gang injunction looks like an attack on your first amendment rights. If you're living in the hood with a bunch of home boys who have nothing better to do than hang out in front of liquor stores and on the corners harassing everyone who passes by, a gang injunction is a good idea.
The right to free association (and all the rest of the Constitution) applies even when it's inconvenient.
I mean, seriously... where do you get off on posting your crap? Have you ever been in a neighborhood where you simply can't walk down the street without getting hassled? Who would you rather be hassled by? A bunch of home boys with guns and knives, or a bunch of cops who are trying to keep the other guys with guns and knives out of the neighborhood?
Let's see... I've had cops stop me, demand I get out of my car, beat me up, pepper spray me and haul me off to jail, then charge ME for attacking THEM (the charges were all dropped, at a rather high cost to me). On the other hand, the worst the "home boys" have done is throw things at me. I think I'll take the hassle from the home boys.
Do you know how many legal hoops the DA and the police department have to jump through to prove that a particular group of individuals is a street gang that needs to have an injunction passed against them?
Doesn't matter how many hoops it takes. It should be a matter of a brick wall, not hoops. You want to deprive someone of their rights, there's already a process, called a "criminal trial", and it's a lot more difficult than an injunction, even an injunction with a lot of hoops.
Quit thinking of this as Faceless Megacorp v. The People and you might begin to grasp the immediacy of legitimate copyright reform for all parties involved.
Why would I quit thinking of it that way? The Faceless Megacorps have gone out of their way to prove it IS that way.
Unfettered distribution of copyrighted works will eventually force production companies to look towards "Reality TV" as a revenue stream and take fewer chances on riskier shows (think "Firefly" or "Babylon 5").
No unfettered distribution, both shows STILL canceled.
Watch the show on the companies site and SUPPORT the reasonable distribution model provided instead of trying to take away other people's rights.
I watch the show over the air, though I use a MythTV box to record them. They even tried to make that illegal, with their stinking broadcast flag.
On the other hand if you're a felon, you are mandated by the court to tell the police officers that at any time that you are on probation. If you are a gang member, you have to follow the rules of gang injunctions.
Gang injunctions? Oh, right, an attack on the first amendment right of free association.
I hate to support profiling, but if you're over twenty-five years old and have nothing better to do than collect a welfare check and ride around the neighborhood at 2:00 in the afternoon while most people your age are working and contributing to society, you probably deserve to be stopped and questioned about what you're up to.
In a free country, it's none of the cops' damn BUSINESS what I'm up to, until they can show that it's criminal. Riding a bike around a neighborhood isn't even close to criminal.
I thought visitors from countries with the Visa Waiver program didn't have to do the photographing thing. Are you from an EU country not in the program? Or is it different because you were coming on a work visa?
The UK is the leader (in the race to Big Brother) among the 1st world, with the US snapping at its heels and the rest of Europe apparently not far behind. North Korea is in a class of its own, and China seems to be comfortable with the level of authoritarianism it has now.
Slashdot Mirror
You're close. It's not C, it's an unholy combination of COBOL (used for bit manipulation and other detailed machine-level stuff), FORTRAN (used for database access), and SQL (used for business logic). With plenty of assembler thrown in, and gotos galore.
(OK, there may be some C in there. Used for string manipulation, probably).
A stipulation is an agreement between two parties in a lawsuit that a certain fact or issue is not contested. What exactly did Dynadot stipulate to? Was it just that they were indeed the registrar for wikileaks.org, or was there more?
Since the Australian National Patent Troll recently won a patent battle on OFDM (which DVB-T uses), going with DVB-T wouldn't have worked. Not to mention that the switch to 8Mhz channels vice the 6Mhz channels US analog broadcasting uses would have been much more disruptive.
(never mind that OFDM was invented in the 1960s and that CSIROs patent claims were limited to "above 10Ghz", the courts didn't care)
Unfortunately, it doesn't work. They're out looking for people to fleece, and you (being a lousy businessman) look ripe for the fleecing. Yes, they'll handle the patent licensing for you. But they'll also take the lion's share of any money involved. If they're especially evil, you'll actually end up paying them to take it all.
In any successful partnership between businesspeople and technical people, the businesspeople always end up on top. How much the technical people get is simply a matter of the benevolence of the businesspeople.
If you've solved the energy problem and the CO2 capture problem, there's plenty of things you can do. Produce syngas from CO2 + H20, create methanol and diesel from the syngas, convert the methanol to gasoline, etc. I don't think there's a method for directly synthesizing pure iso-octane, but that doesn't matter much.
But first you have to solve the energy problem. And if you've come up with a way to generate nearly all the energy the world needs (aside from mobile uses) without CO2, you probably don't need to worry about the rest for a long while. Nuclear ain't going to do it, for political reasons if no other.
That's a necessary feature of any "voluntary" rating system; new unrated content must be treated as if it is as least as bad as the worst rating. Otherwise those making bad stuff would simply not submit their stuff.
Yeah, there's somebody at the local grocery stores who likes to cover up the women's magazines. It took me a while to figure out their criterion for censorship... it's the word "sex".
Guess what. It's just a word. I uncover the magazines.
There's nothing remotely abnormal in the first two of the headlines you posted. And there's no reason the rest of the people of the world should be restricted in their public utterances or publications to that which you find appropriate for a pre-schooler. If you wish your child to have a filtered, desexualized version of the world, there's probably a single-sex boarding school you could send him or her to. Making the entire world, outside a few adult-only refuges, into such a place is not a reasonable demand.
It's a matter of terminology. A control system is "hard real-time" -- if the system misses a deadline, something breaks. With consumer GPS, if you miss your deadline, you just get a late position fix. Also the deadline with consumer GPS is fairly lax; you've got a full second to calculate a new fix. Some would call this "soft real-time"; obviously the article author doesn't consider it real-time at all.
Or until your quick and inefficient solution is suddenly dealing with absolutely massive quantities of data. That's one of the big problems with optimizing for development time; the increase in machine speed and storage has been more than matched, in some fields, with an increase in data which needs to be processed.
I've got a CS degree and am doing embedded programming now. Most of the EEs here do hardware design, not software.
:-)
Some of the major challenges of embedded work are
1) You've got to do pretty much everything. The OS does little for you, and even the stuff it does for you, you've got to know how it does it inside and out. For some stuff, there's no OS at all.
2) There's not much space. Small flash, little RAM, and no disk.
3) There's not much speed or time. The processor is running at tens of megahertz if you're lucky. And you've likely got some real-time constraints; take too long and your device fails in some way.
4) Debugging can be a major challenge, depending on your tool set. The device doesn't have a nice graphical interface with GDB in a window. If you're lucky it's got a dedicated debug interface.
5) Sometimes it really IS a hardware problem
However, if you can program an Apple II (or other 8-bit) in assembler or write an efficienct Linux device driver, you're probably up to it.
It's a seductive idea (at least if your conscience is sufficiently flexible), but remember that only a few top MBAs get to do that sort of thing. Most MBAs end up in middle management somewhere, caught between impossible directives and short budgets from above and sullen workers below, fighting for scraps of territory with others of their ilk, and getting laid off when the guys at the top want a new Porsche.
Except we don't have a method of generating pure hydrogen efficiently, we don't have a way of removing CO2 from the air efficiently, we don't have a way of reducing CO2 to C + O2 efficiently (though it's fortunately not necessary, producing CO is sufficient for hydrocarbon synthesis), and we don't have a workable methanol fuel cell.
But aside from that, no problem at all.
Current law allows them to do just that provided they make a new recording and pay the mechanical royalty.
Further:
Imagine a Mercedes commercial playing the original Janis Joplin version of "Mercedes Benz".
Oh, wait, that's been done too. So much for that argument for copyright.
Authors publish through "Faceless Publisher, Inc". Film makers produce their films through funding from "Faceless Film Production Company, Inc" or sometimes "Independent Film Production Limited (a wholly owned subsidiary of Faceless Film, Inc)", and distribute through the distribution arm of Faceless Film.
If you're not at least distributing through Faceless Megacorp, Inc, then you're lost in the noise anyway. Copyright violation is the least of your worries, unless it's Faceless Megacorp doing the copying -- and in that case, you're screwed anyway because your lawyer probably can't beat up their lawyers.
You guys keep violating US copyright law, I'll keep violating the Canadian language laws. No French on MY website, that's for sure.
Gang injunctions? Oh, right, an attack on the first amendment right of free association.
In a free country, it's none of the cops' damn BUSINESS what I'm up to, until they can show that it's criminal. Riding a bike around a neighborhood isn't even close to criminal.
I thought visitors from countries with the Visa Waiver program didn't have to do the photographing thing. Are you from an EU country not in the program? Or is it different because you were coming on a work visa?
The UK is the leader (in the race to Big Brother) among the 1st world, with the US snapping at its heels and the rest of Europe apparently not far behind. North Korea is in a class of its own, and China seems to be comfortable with the level of authoritarianism it has now.