I posted in this thread already but then went and read more about the case, and thought I'd share some anecdotal evidence.
As part of my job I sometimes have to sit in court rooms for specific cases, and I end up hearing a lot of other cases while I'm there. Two have stuck in my mind.
The first was the case of a lady who had been stopped by the police for using her mobile phone while driving. Her defence was that she'd been at home and a relative had called to tell her that her dad had been rushed to hospital. She jumped in the car, set off, and phoned her sister. That was when the police saw her. The prosecution didn't challenge her version of events. To me it seemed like an obvious time for a judge to use his discretion, but no, because her defence involved an admission that she did use the phone while driving, so she was found guilty and fined about £750 if I remember correctly.
Another case was a police officer accused of causing injury by dangerous driving. He'd driven through a red light while responding to an emergency call and collided with another car. I'm going to paraphrase as best I can how the judge handed down his verdict: "It is part of a police driver's job that they will sometimes have to exceed the speed limit or go through a red light when responding to an emergency call, and it is vital that due care and attention is paid to ensure that it is safe to do so. You did not exercise due care or attention when going through the red light and that lack of care caused the collision. However, you were responding to an emergency call, and therefore the court hands down an absolute discharge." Read that again if it's not immediately obvious what was wrong with the judge's logic:-)
Here's my point. When I read about the Ross Ulbricbht court, what comes across to me is that the judge is saying "blah blah yadda yadda legal stuff and now here is MY OPINION" which will vary from judge to judge. But surely justice must be consistent? You shouldn't have one judge convicting a person for making an urgent phone call, but a different judge effectively exonerating a policeman for not driving with the care required by his job. And you shouldn't have a judge handing down an entire life sentence when another judge would most likely have given a sentence of 10-20 years.
Opinions shouldn't come in to justice. If they do, it's not justice, it's one person's opinion of what justice should be.
I'm not at all supportive of what he did (you won't find a more anti-drugs person than me) but this seems particularly harsh.
If this sentence is to "set an example" then it must be overturned. The keystone of justice is fairness and setting an example with a harsh punishment is by definition unfair.
For most of my life I've worked freelance so I haven't had much experience of the corporate world. But I recently worked for a small newspaper company (approx 400 employees) for a year and it was an eye-opening experience. It amazes me how anything ever gets done in these blind, ignorant, slow-moving organisations.
I'll give you one example. The company's web filter had an issue with our own web sites, which prevented us from reading them. When I asked IT about it they knew what the problem was, but they couldn't authorise the fix and they suggested I raise the issue with my manager. But my manager was unapproachable -- asking for something to be done was the best way to make sure it didn't get done. It took over a YEAR for a small newspaper company to fix an IT issue that prevented staff from reading their own newspapers' web sites.
I dread to think what life must be like in big corporations. I don't want to ever experience it.
In very black-and-white terms I agree with Martin Bryant.
BUT... to give one example, a lot of web sites (including Slashdot) are unusable on my iPhone nowadays because of ads that either (1) automatically redirect me to a product on the App Store as soon as the ad loads, or (2) try to do that, but do it badly so Safari closes the web page and reloads it.
Maybe if advertisers didn't behave so aggressively, people wouldn't aggressively block them. I block ads on my Mac, and if it was possible (maybe it is?) then I'd block them on my iPhone too. Not because I object to adverts, or even because I want to avoid seeing them, but because they make browsing the web an obnoxious, frustrating and potentially dangerous experience. (The only virus I've ever had was from an advert force-loading a malformed PDF document.)
I always wonder when I see code like that, which is focused on optimisation, why they use divide and modulo? Aren't they slow? Why wouldn't the coder have used >> 3 instead of the divide by 8, and & 7 instead of the modulo 8? Genuinely asking because these strike me as obvious further speed boosts. Does the compiler automatically make the changes?
What a bizarre summary, with all the talk about Pearl Harbour and how the Virginia Tech shooting date has greater significance locally than naturally.
The fact is that this was a clearly-made threat, whether genuine or not. Law enforcement took appropriate steps to investigate. It's not even an IT issue, just because someone used their phone (?) to post the threat on a public forum, or whatever you want to call Yik Yak.
You're not kidding about iPhones (or rather iOS) becoming less stable.
I've got an iMac, Macbook Air, iPad Mini 2 and iPhone 6 Plus, all in daily use, and it was a godsend to me when Yosemite and iOS 8 introduced handoff and full AirDrop support. Except... it only works randomly. One minute the iPhone can see everything but nothing can see it. Then it can only see the iPad but now the iMac can see the iPhone.
I regularly need to transfer screenshots from my iPhone to my Mac and I used AirDrop for about a week, but then it stopped working and hasn't worked since.
When it first stopped working, I started using Cloud Share and uploading all the screenshots to the cloud so I could then download them on the Mac... but there's always one file missing. No matter how many screenshots I transfer, if n>1 then only n-1 turn up on the Mac.
Honestly over the past couple of months I've lost confidence in Apple. There's no point adding these great features if they don't actually work. And in my experience, Apple features that don't work never get fixed. New features seem to be more about marketing than actual usability.
Internet / telecoms companies really do seem to view their customers as enemies.
15 years ago in the UK there were dozens of broadband startups and big-name companies advertising "unlimited" broadband and then throttling you if you went over a couple of gigs. I don't think a single one of them got hauled through the courts for it. The biggest one, British Telecom, had their throttling exposed by a primetime TV show, and they just breezed on, lying to customers, untouchable.
Someone like Andreas Lubitz could have just reached up and stuck something over the camera lens. That's if he even cared about being filmed, which is doubtful. From what we're hearing about his desire for notoriety, he'd have probably loved to have those last moments caught on camera and broadcast around the world.
We're probably going to see a lot of TV news shows and newspapers calling for cameras in cockpits, but it won't be anything to do with safety, it will be because the footage has commercial value to news organisations.
Anyone who has been bullied at work must be sickened by the public support for Jeremy Clarkson. Even in sacking him for the physical assault on Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon, BBC director general Tony Hall seemed almost apologetic, taking the opportunity to thank Clarkson for his work on Top Gear and wishing him the best for the future.
But if you've experienced bullying first hand then you know what a destructive force the Clarksons of the world are. Your workplace becomes a place of dread and fear. The stress becomes not just a part of your daily life, but a part of who you are as a person. It changes you.
My own experience of being bullied began when I took a job with a company that had just promoted a long-standing employee in to a management position. He had no experience of managing people, he received no training, and he openly said that he didn't want the job. He was visibly stressed almost constantly, and resented that he was still expected to work and not just manage other people's work.
Very early in the job I was shouted at in the middle of a busy office for completing a task that should have been cancelled. It was a foul-mouthed and very personal tirade of abuse, accusing me of being untrustworthy, and came totally out of the blue. Then my manager realised that he had forgotten to mark the task as cancelled, and quietly in a private room away from other staff, he apologised and promised never to speak to me like that in front of people again.
The details of bullying incidents are generally repetitive and boring, so suffice to say, this was just the beginning of what became regular abuse: Shouted at in the middle of the office for things I had allegedly done wrong, and then apologised to in private.
I put up with the abuse for way too long. I'd spoken to my union rep and kept a bullying diary as advised, but I never started a grievance procedure. Colleagues said I should, and one day I ended up talking to the company secretary about it, but I backed off, determined to resolve the issue myself. Ultimately, I told myself, this is a case of two grown men having a clash of personalities, and I should be able to resolve it. But of course I couldn't.
After about a year I had to take time off work for an unconnected health reason, which seemed to go on a lot longer than one might expect. After a week back at work, I was off again with flu, which seemed to go on forever. My doctor was puzzled and I was sent to the hospital for tests. But in conversation with my doctor one time I mentioned about how it was actually quite nice to be off work because it was an escape from the bullying, and it was as if I'd said the magic word. My doctor was certain that the stress of being bullied was the root cause of my poor health. It explained everything. It turns out that a year of sleepless nights and constant anxiety isn't very good for you.
The BBC has done the right thing in sacking Clarkson. When I finally had to take formal action against my manager, the company was combative, and handled it on the basis that I was making it all up. I opted for the least "official" form of grievance, third-party arbitration, and my manager held his hands up to what he'd been doing and promised to change. Whether he could or not, I don't know, as I've not been well enough to return to work yet.
I've watched every episode of Top Gear since Clarkson joined the programme. I like him as a presenter. But I see him now for what he really is: A person who knows how to present himself to the people who control his career -- his bosses and the viewers -- but feels he can abuse the people below him. No doubt he will now be snapped up by another TV channel, or Netflix, and he'll continue to make great programmes that entertain millions. But we know now what he's like behind the scenes, and even a bully that knows he's a bully will still be a bully.
Same here. I'm only interested in single player games. I get maybe half an hour each day to play games, if I'm lucky, and I want to dip in to a story, soak up the atmosphere etc.
The trouble with Yik Yak is that you're hostage to other people's whims, and this app seems to attract people that prefer negativity. I tried a little experiment -- I posted one "funny" comment, one positive comment, and one negative comment. Both the funny and positive comments were quickly down-voted to -5 and removed, whereas the negative comment was up-voted and quickly became the most popular yak in my area. Most of the other top-rated yaks are people moaning about the town, the people, the night life, etc. Usually by the time you see a nice / positive yak it's already at -3 or -4 and when you refresh the list it's gone. I deleted the app.
Refactoring is the process of improving the design of existing code by changing its internal structure without affecting its external behaviour, with the main aims of improving the quality of software product. Therefore, there is a belief that refactoring improves quality factors such as understandability, flexibility, and reusability. However, there is limited empirical evidence to support such assumptions.
If my code looks scruffy then I refactor it. When I come back to it, I can read it better. That's all the empirical evidence I need.
I've spent the evening with UE and I'm running back to Unity. I don't know about the PC version but the Mac version isn't ready for primetime yet. I know it's quite new so hopefully they'll work on it some more. A lot more.
Currently, nearly everything fails. Create an empty project and add a Player Controller... fail. Plus this is personal taste but the viewport camera controls are utterly awful. Keep in mind that I use Unity and Blender every day, two apps that are known for their poor viewport controls, and I get on just fine with those. UE's controls are so bad that they even have one way of zooming the camera in 2D viewports and a different way in 3D viewports.
Oh and the W, E and R keys for move, rotate and scale, sometimes work and sometimes don't. The quad view doesn't track mouse movements so to switch from one view to another you have to either left-click (which can mess with your selection) or right-click (which brings up a menu that you have to dismiss).
I could go on... But, bottom line, I didn't like using UE at all. Unity is wonderful in its own right, but compared to UE it is beyond words. UE is an over-engineered mess that doesn't work.
All of this is on Mac remember. I'm sure the PC version will work a lot better.
It's not a bug, it's the installer's documentation that's wrong. I found the correct instructions on a forum and the install now appears to be working.
You have to click on "Library", then add engines, select the latest version and click install.
Fantastic news, in theory. I'm 3 days in to development of a new game in Unity so I tried to download UE4 to see if it was worth switching. Instead of a normal installer you have to download some Epic "community" app which will then install the engine for you. Except... it doesn't. Googling it reveals that the problem dates back at least eight months and there's still no fix.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for posting this. It does make the sentencing seem a lot more reasonable.
I posted in this thread already but then went and read more about the case, and thought I'd share some anecdotal evidence.
As part of my job I sometimes have to sit in court rooms for specific cases, and I end up hearing a lot of other cases while I'm there. Two have stuck in my mind.
The first was the case of a lady who had been stopped by the police for using her mobile phone while driving. Her defence was that she'd been at home and a relative had called to tell her that her dad had been rushed to hospital. She jumped in the car, set off, and phoned her sister. That was when the police saw her. The prosecution didn't challenge her version of events. To me it seemed like an obvious time for a judge to use his discretion, but no, because her defence involved an admission that she did use the phone while driving, so she was found guilty and fined about £750 if I remember correctly.
Another case was a police officer accused of causing injury by dangerous driving. He'd driven through a red light while responding to an emergency call and collided with another car. I'm going to paraphrase as best I can how the judge handed down his verdict: "It is part of a police driver's job that they will sometimes have to exceed the speed limit or go through a red light when responding to an emergency call, and it is vital that due care and attention is paid to ensure that it is safe to do so. You did not exercise due care or attention when going through the red light and that lack of care caused the collision. However, you were responding to an emergency call, and therefore the court hands down an absolute discharge." Read that again if it's not immediately obvious what was wrong with the judge's logic :-)
Here's my point. When I read about the Ross Ulbricbht court, what comes across to me is that the judge is saying "blah blah yadda yadda legal stuff and now here is MY OPINION" which will vary from judge to judge. But surely justice must be consistent? You shouldn't have one judge convicting a person for making an urgent phone call, but a different judge effectively exonerating a policeman for not driving with the care required by his job. And you shouldn't have a judge handing down an entire life sentence when another judge would most likely have given a sentence of 10-20 years.
Opinions shouldn't come in to justice. If they do, it's not justice, it's one person's opinion of what justice should be.
I'm not at all supportive of what he did (you won't find a more anti-drugs person than me) but this seems particularly harsh.
If this sentence is to "set an example" then it must be overturned. The keystone of justice is fairness and setting an example with a harsh punishment is by definition unfair.
For most of my life I've worked freelance so I haven't had much experience of the corporate world. But I recently worked for a small newspaper company (approx 400 employees) for a year and it was an eye-opening experience. It amazes me how anything ever gets done in these blind, ignorant, slow-moving organisations.
I'll give you one example. The company's web filter had an issue with our own web sites, which prevented us from reading them. When I asked IT about it they knew what the problem was, but they couldn't authorise the fix and they suggested I raise the issue with my manager. But my manager was unapproachable -- asking for something to be done was the best way to make sure it didn't get done. It took over a YEAR for a small newspaper company to fix an IT issue that prevented staff from reading their own newspapers' web sites.
I dread to think what life must be like in big corporations. I don't want to ever experience it.
Take Two brought suit to "ensure that [their] trademarks are not misused."
= Take Two intend to misuse trademark laws to control discussion and criticism of their product.
But... but... you're not allowed to fly drones over residential areas! How are the criminals getting around this law?
Oh no, wait, it's just legitimate photography businesses (like mine) which get hurt by the drone laws. Pervs and criminals will carry on regardless.
In very black-and-white terms I agree with Martin Bryant.
BUT... to give one example, a lot of web sites (including Slashdot) are unusable on my iPhone nowadays because of ads that either (1) automatically redirect me to a product on the App Store as soon as the ad loads, or (2) try to do that, but do it badly so Safari closes the web page and reloads it.
Maybe if advertisers didn't behave so aggressively, people wouldn't aggressively block them. I block ads on my Mac, and if it was possible (maybe it is?) then I'd block them on my iPhone too. Not because I object to adverts, or even because I want to avoid seeing them, but because they make browsing the web an obnoxious, frustrating and potentially dangerous experience. (The only virus I've ever had was from an advert force-loading a malformed PDF document.)
I always wonder when I see code like that, which is focused on optimisation, why they use divide and modulo? Aren't they slow? Why wouldn't the coder have used >> 3 instead of the divide by 8, and & 7 instead of the modulo 8? Genuinely asking because these strike me as obvious further speed boosts. Does the compiler automatically make the changes?
*nationally
What a bizarre summary, with all the talk about Pearl Harbour and how the Virginia Tech shooting date has greater significance locally than naturally.
The fact is that this was a clearly-made threat, whether genuine or not. Law enforcement took appropriate steps to investigate. It's not even an IT issue, just because someone used their phone (?) to post the threat on a public forum, or whatever you want to call Yik Yak.
You're not kidding about iPhones (or rather iOS) becoming less stable.
I've got an iMac, Macbook Air, iPad Mini 2 and iPhone 6 Plus, all in daily use, and it was a godsend to me when Yosemite and iOS 8 introduced handoff and full AirDrop support. Except... it only works randomly. One minute the iPhone can see everything but nothing can see it. Then it can only see the iPad but now the iMac can see the iPhone.
I regularly need to transfer screenshots from my iPhone to my Mac and I used AirDrop for about a week, but then it stopped working and hasn't worked since.
When it first stopped working, I started using Cloud Share and uploading all the screenshots to the cloud so I could then download them on the Mac... but there's always one file missing. No matter how many screenshots I transfer, if n>1 then only n-1 turn up on the Mac.
Honestly over the past couple of months I've lost confidence in Apple. There's no point adding these great features if they don't actually work. And in my experience, Apple features that don't work never get fixed. New features seem to be more about marketing than actual usability.
Just seems like a decent thing to do.
Internet / telecoms companies really do seem to view their customers as enemies.
15 years ago in the UK there were dozens of broadband startups and big-name companies advertising "unlimited" broadband and then throttling you if you went over a couple of gigs. I don't think a single one of them got hauled through the courts for it. The biggest one, British Telecom, had their throttling exposed by a primetime TV show, and they just breezed on, lying to customers, untouchable.
Someone like Andreas Lubitz could have just reached up and stuck something over the camera lens. That's if he even cared about being filmed, which is doubtful. From what we're hearing about his desire for notoriety, he'd have probably loved to have those last moments caught on camera and broadcast around the world.
We're probably going to see a lot of TV news shows and newspapers calling for cameras in cockpits, but it won't be anything to do with safety, it will be because the footage has commercial value to news organisations.
Anyone who has been bullied at work must be sickened by the public support for Jeremy Clarkson. Even in sacking him for the physical assault on Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon, BBC director general Tony Hall seemed almost apologetic, taking the opportunity to thank Clarkson for his work on Top Gear and wishing him the best for the future.
But if you've experienced bullying first hand then you know what a destructive force the Clarksons of the world are. Your workplace becomes a place of dread and fear. The stress becomes not just a part of your daily life, but a part of who you are as a person. It changes you.
My own experience of being bullied began when I took a job with a company that had just promoted a long-standing employee in to a management position. He had no experience of managing people, he received no training, and he openly said that he didn't want the job. He was visibly stressed almost constantly, and resented that he was still expected to work and not just manage other people's work.
Very early in the job I was shouted at in the middle of a busy office for completing a task that should have been cancelled. It was a foul-mouthed and very personal tirade of abuse, accusing me of being untrustworthy, and came totally out of the blue. Then my manager realised that he had forgotten to mark the task as cancelled, and quietly in a private room away from other staff, he apologised and promised never to speak to me like that in front of people again.
The details of bullying incidents are generally repetitive and boring, so suffice to say, this was just the beginning of what became regular abuse: Shouted at in the middle of the office for things I had allegedly done wrong, and then apologised to in private.
I put up with the abuse for way too long. I'd spoken to my union rep and kept a bullying diary as advised, but I never started a grievance procedure. Colleagues said I should, and one day I ended up talking to the company secretary about it, but I backed off, determined to resolve the issue myself. Ultimately, I told myself, this is a case of two grown men having a clash of personalities, and I should be able to resolve it. But of course I couldn't.
After about a year I had to take time off work for an unconnected health reason, which seemed to go on a lot longer than one might expect. After a week back at work, I was off again with flu, which seemed to go on forever. My doctor was puzzled and I was sent to the hospital for tests. But in conversation with my doctor one time I mentioned about how it was actually quite nice to be off work because it was an escape from the bullying, and it was as if I'd said the magic word. My doctor was certain that the stress of being bullied was the root cause of my poor health. It explained everything. It turns out that a year of sleepless nights and constant anxiety isn't very good for you.
The BBC has done the right thing in sacking Clarkson. When I finally had to take formal action against my manager, the company was combative, and handled it on the basis that I was making it all up. I opted for the least "official" form of grievance, third-party arbitration, and my manager held his hands up to what he'd been doing and promised to change. Whether he could or not, I don't know, as I've not been well enough to return to work yet.
I've watched every episode of Top Gear since Clarkson joined the programme. I like him as a presenter. But I see him now for what he really is: A person who knows how to present himself to the people who control his career -- his bosses and the viewers -- but feels he can abuse the people below him. No doubt he will now be snapped up by another TV channel, or Netflix, and he'll continue to make great programmes that entertain millions. But we know now what he's like behind the scenes, and even a bully that knows he's a bully will still be a bully.
"New York's Attorney General says his office will take 'appropriate action' if the data is handed over."
So they must think handing over the data would be unlawful. Why not prevent it from happening in the first place?
Submit the customers to a lifetime of real world spam, and then do what, take action against a company that doesn't exist anymore?
Same here. I'm only interested in single player games. I get maybe half an hour each day to play games, if I'm lucky, and I want to dip in to a story, soak up the atmosphere etc.
people know if you do this, chances are you are going to die for it
"This" = be black, have a low IQ, no money, and be accused of something that you may or may not have done.
We'll be having a game of Ankh-Morpork in his honour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Selfie sticks, the only thing that can rival drones in their speed of being banned.
The trouble with Yik Yak is that you're hostage to other people's whims, and this app seems to attract people that prefer negativity. I tried a little experiment -- I posted one "funny" comment, one positive comment, and one negative comment. Both the funny and positive comments were quickly down-voted to -5 and removed, whereas the negative comment was up-voted and quickly became the most popular yak in my area. Most of the other top-rated yaks are people moaning about the town, the people, the night life, etc. Usually by the time you see a nice / positive yak it's already at -3 or -4 and when you refresh the list it's gone. I deleted the app.
If my code looks scruffy then I refactor it. When I come back to it, I can read it better. That's all the empirical evidence I need.
I've spent the evening with UE and I'm running back to Unity. I don't know about the PC version but the Mac version isn't ready for primetime yet. I know it's quite new so hopefully they'll work on it some more. A lot more.
Currently, nearly everything fails. Create an empty project and add a Player Controller... fail. Plus this is personal taste but the viewport camera controls are utterly awful. Keep in mind that I use Unity and Blender every day, two apps that are known for their poor viewport controls, and I get on just fine with those. UE's controls are so bad that they even have one way of zooming the camera in 2D viewports and a different way in 3D viewports.
Oh and the W, E and R keys for move, rotate and scale, sometimes work and sometimes don't. The quad view doesn't track mouse movements so to switch from one view to another you have to either left-click (which can mess with your selection) or right-click (which brings up a menu that you have to dismiss).
I could go on... But, bottom line, I didn't like using UE at all. Unity is wonderful in its own right, but compared to UE it is beyond words. UE is an over-engineered mess that doesn't work.
All of this is on Mac remember. I'm sure the PC version will work a lot better.
It's not a bug, it's the installer's documentation that's wrong. I found the correct instructions on a forum and the install now appears to be working.
You have to click on "Library", then add engines, select the latest version and click install.
Fantastic news, in theory. I'm 3 days in to development of a new game in Unity so I tried to download UE4 to see if it was worth switching. Instead of a normal installer you have to download some Epic "community" app which will then install the engine for you. Except... it doesn't. Googling it reveals that the problem dates back at least eight months and there's still no fix.