They carry far more parts than conventional cars and those parts are expensive to maintain.
Not really. They have a small gas engine (well known in the service world) and a small electric engine (also easy to fix. My brother who is a forklift mechanic wanted to disect my Prius in his shop...) While it does have more parts, all newer cars have more parts than the earlier cars. Are you upset that we aren't using the Model T engine? Most hobby mechanics don't have the tools or experience to work with electric motors, but they don't have the tools to properly fix most of todays complex cars either. Todays cars have alomst as much electronics as they do mechanics. Additionally, most hybrid cars have a sufficient warrenty (10/100,000) that you won't need anybody other than a (certified) dealer to work on the electric parts.
you don't need AC on then standing in traffic without an engine running is fine.
These cars will have the AC running even when not driving. I can have the AC running and engine stopped when the inside temp is about 5 degrees different than the climate control is set at. The AC turns the engine on if it needs to.
A $3000 battery pack more than ruins any fuel savings
The hybrid batteries are also covered by a (10/100,000) warrenty, so you should have no problems there, either. They are not $3000 as you stated, and if you have any experinece with rechargable lead batteries, you'd know they don't have problems -- they've been in use for centuries.
Pure electric vehicles have also failed to work out well
So explain why most of the trolly-car systems, subways, forklifts, and early cars (pre oil-cartel) are electric?
Fuel cells will be on the market soon enough and they should kick butt on all other systems.
That's been the hype since the '80s. If you were in the 70's you'd tell us to hold out for our flying car, and in the 60's to hold out for our personal jet packs. I'd suggest that if you were to buy a car, you should look at what is on the market, not look at the over-hyped "future technology".
If you need to floor it in a hybrid to get out of trouble you're fucked. For those who don't live in a major city, this happens more often than you'd think.
I live in a semi-major city, and have made several road trips to both LA and San Jose and spent several weeks in each place. I love the pickup in my Prius. Granted it isn't a Porche, but it moves a lot better than other cars I have driven. Most recently I have driven both a Focus and a Taurus as rental cars. In comparison the Focus didn't pick up, didn't turn, but did have good breaks. The Taurus had about the same pickup, but didn't manuver well nor have good breaks.
All things considered, I would buy another Hybrid if I had the need to.
But you sold yours, so there must be SOME market. Considering we are also in a depression, and car manufacturers are doing everything they can think of and STILL not selling cars, what do you expect?
At any rate, why buy a car with the intent to sell it in 2 years? That short of time you should lease. When I buy a car, I expect to keep it until repairs get too expensive (6+ years) or until the insurance company decides to total it out. My family has a nice, big van that has about 650,000 miles on it, it's on a second engine and we might be putting a third in it soon.
Now, if it displayed all the wide-open wireless nets
What I'm still looking for is for Toyota to publish the specs for their on-dash display. Call me a natural-born-hacker, but I wanna do some things with it! I can easily imagine building a gui tool or installing an in-dash computer.
You're clearly not from Massachusetts. You'd get run off the road if you were only doing 70
No, he probably lives out in the West where we obey the law. You know -- where our govermnet representatives don't lie under oath, or even if they do purchase sports cars make comments like "Yes the speed limit is 65, but there is no law about how fast I can get there." Of course, Mass. picked up a good representative, who was from SLC, i understand (or at least worked there on the Olympics).
they have huge li-ion battery packs (something like 50 lbs, over $1000 replacement cost), that were subsidized by government incentives for alternative fuel vehicles.
They are LEAD (not lithium) batteries, similar to what you have in your computer UPS, or in forklifts, or in golf carts, or electric cars from a century ago. The technology in the batteries has been around for a few hundred years,according to my EE father-in-law. The batteries are large and heavy, but well hidden inside the car (between the back seat and trunk space in my Prius).
these batteries are unlikely to last more than a couple of years, and will then have to be replaced by the owner, at the unsubsidized replacement cost.
The warrantee on all electirc parts in the Prius is 10-years 100,000 miles. I opted to get an extended warrentee because I will hit the 100,000 miles at around 6 years of driving.:-( Again, accoring to my EE father-in-law, and my ISE-mechanic brother who works on forklifts, if a lead battery doesn't have problems in the first few months, it will probably live for a long, healty life of several decades.
As a Prius owner living in the Rocky Mountains, I have lots of experience there.:-)
Going up hills in the city (fairly steep grade) isn't too bad, and is comprable to other cars I have driven. When going up fairly steep grades at slow speeds (half mile, 15%, 30 mph) it actually feels easier than most other cars I have driven. Going up canyons is fun too, since at freeway speeds you don't need to do much to change the speed, and the Prius feels nice when turning sharp corners.
As always with this car, gunning it for passing works pretty good (it's not a Porche, but it does pick up speed quickly) until you hit about 75. That's an issue if you are away from the city where the normal freeway speed is 75. (If you regularly go over 75, you need to have your tires under more preassure to avoid extreme wear, etc., so I wouldn't recommend it in any car.)
As for intellegent switching, it does it behind the scenes. When you pull out from a stop light it may be on gas or electric, depending on how fast you are accelerating, if you are on a slope, if the engine is cold, and who-knows what else. When you are on the highway (above 42 MPH) the gas engine is always running to prevent excess drain on the battery, so factor that in to your last few questions.
frob
Re:SCO does what no other vendor has ever done...
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In fact, when they were a Linux company they had almost double the work force they have now. Makes me wonder if they fired the programmers and techies, hired lawyers, and went back to work.
Re:Glaring omission in response
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Perens completely ignored the issue of SGI contributing Sys V code into Linux. How does Perens reconcile this with his rhetoric, which basically states Linux is completely original?
It was not ignored. He said, and the whole kernel development group says, that if you show them something that they don't have the rights to, they will either prove that they have a legal right to the code or remove it.
A lot of System V code came from earlier and different projects, many of which are in the public domain or under free license.
But years of having to improve my speed in chat and online gaming gave my hands speed and accuracy
Agree there.
I already knew how to touch type, and in the early 90's got into IRC. I was attending summer programs at a local technical center. Since they were mainly interested in helping train youth and transitional adults into tech workers, they had DWS certified type tests available for free to students.
I was around 60 WPM with 1-2 errors when I started. After about 2 years of chatting and programming, a group of us went to take another of their free DWS typing tests since we were going to go look for jobs. The slowest of us was around 90 WPM with 4 errors, the fastest was around 170 with zero errors. I was in the 130 range with no errors. Online chat had everything to do with that. Because I was also programming at that speed, symbols don't really slow me down either.
The headline is misleading, saying they were "of the University of Utah". It was originally independant research being done on the Campus, not work for the University. Only after the announcement did the University adopt it in exchange for further resources.
Stanly Pons and Martin Fleischmann were both separately employeed by the University, but the research was not sponsored by the school. They were using some of the school's facilities with permission, basically because of the high cost of the equipment.
"Stan Pons did his doctoral dissertation research at Southampton University, where he developed a scientific collaboration with Professor Martin Fleischmann. In the 1980's Martin
was a frequent visitor to Utah and had been given a
courtesy visiting professorship at the
University of Utah. On March 23, 1989, a press conference was convened at the University
of Utah... to announce the discovery by Stan and Martin of
cold fusion. The euphoria and disillusionment that followed that event have been told in
many subsequent newspaper articles and books. A recent 365 page book [Charles G.
Beaudette, Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed, Oak Grove Press, South
Bristol, Maine, 2000] does a balanced job of recounting the story." (emphasis added)
Because the original press conference was conveniend at the University, and because both professors were affiliated with the U of U, and that further research was taken up by the University at the time of the press conference, many journalists jumped to the conclusion that it was the University's project.
Other than the/. error, the article iteself is rather interesting, including this answer from a professor: "The question I get more than any other is, 'Are you still doing this?', " says Prof. Jones. "The answer is yes, and what we are seeing is very difficult to explain outside of cold fusion. The repeatability of these experiments now approaches 80 percent." [Insert comparison to Microsoft here.]
It's/. Everybody's hostile against big companies, unless they're attacaking a little company that is doing bad things (*cough SCO cough*).:-)
Just stop buying CDs that their label produces. Why do you have to 'hate' them at all? They sign contracts with musicians who want to be distributed through RIAA labels. RIAA executives are dumb enough to maintain an unsustainable business model. Well it is their problem.
I don't buy their CD's. I listen to music available through iuma.org . Even so, I dislike the RIAA and MPAA for other reasons. While I agree that illigal file trading is bad, there is an awful lot of legal file trading that is getting attacked. Many independant musicians actually **LIKE** having their music distributed, and in the zip with the.mp3 or ogg file is a bit of info on the artists, or where to get more music from them. (like the low-quality recordings? For $10 you can have a CD with 15 songs, with lyrics, and jewel case. We'll even give autograph it for you.)
I don't have a problem with RIAA/MPAA protecting their assets. I do have a problem when they accuse all file traders of being criminals, shut down legal activities just because some people are breaking the law, and they demand that the government get rid of basic legal protections. (you want probable cause AND a warrant issued by a real judge?!?)
I do not use P2P for illigal files, but the day that charges were filed against Napster, I decided to not purchase anything from any RIAA group. When charges were filed against 2600 for DeCSS, I decided that when I see a movie or get a DVD, it would have a corresponding donation to the EFF.
I was going to mod too, but decided to reply to several articles in here.:-)
I agree that violence, or more specifically, conflict, is an essential in the games we make. I also agree that there is no proof of a direct cause-effect relationship between game violence and crimes. I have seen, however, a few people who get very worked up over games. I don't know what else may have been in their lives or if they were already basically this way, but when playing violent, immersive games, they did become drugged or ultra violent. It isn't the general case, but I have personally seen it happen.
The company sometimes invite people in so we can evaulate game-play. They have cameras to observe their reactions, and record what they do, and have surveys to ask what things they don't like, any problem areas in levels, and so on. They aren't game testers, just normal joes (not many janes, but they sometimes have them) who come in and play games for an hour. They are asked to fill out a survey on the way in, play whatever game we ask them to, then fill out an exit survey. I've asked about the violence in media vs. agressive behavior before, and I was invited to come watch on some of the days that they've had people in. Also, our team is occasionally given reports back, and I've talked with other teams about their players' results.
While I don't work on violent games, other teams I work with and review results with, do. When reviewing people playing violent games, we have talked a little bit at their history (Do they watch violent movies? Do they play M-rated games?) These are the violence trends I have observed:
I have observed that on violent games, many people (usually male, we don't survey many females) who don't typically view violent material (few or no R-movies, etc) and say they are not uncomfortable with the violence in the game, but they initially look and act uncomfortable while playing. By the end of the sessions, they were more comfortable with the violence in the game. Some of these people, I would guess about 1/3, seem to get completely immersed in the game. They just lose focus of everything else. More on them later, they're the first group I'm concerned about. The rest of them just seemed like normal people. They understood when there were glitches in the games, and are basically helpful to the staff.
People who do usually view violent material but don't play violent games complained that the our games are not real enough, that is, not enough gore. When playing, these people tended to seek out more violent areas of the game and spend more time on the more graphic death scenes. From what I have seen, though, these people didn't act beligerent to the staff, nor get too involved in the games. They were like most of the people above, just normal people wanting to say "Hey, I helped play-test that game!" I was a little bothered by one guy's comment about wanting more gore, but otherwise, they're pretty normal.
Those who have an extensive history in games (both M and non-M) but don't watch violent movies, tended to be the tester's nightmare: they want to systematically go through the entire game, clean out every corner, get every item, learn the maps, etc. They don't really notice the violence, but they don't seem much affected by it. They also find the most glitches.
Those who have an extensive history in M-rated games, *and* frequently watch R-rated movies tended to do one of two things: most tend to just work through the basic plot and do very little exploring. Some (a small number) tended to just seek out violence, and became agressive or a little hostile to our staff. Most of these guys (the ones who follow the plot) don't find much as far as bugs are concerned, but they do show what is interesting and what isn't. The few people who become agressive, however, are the second group I am concerned about.
Based only on what I have seen (which isn't as much as the people who run the tests), I'm not to worried
I would say that having to have a DRM server on the lan is a bad idea. It means that if your server goes down, opps, no more documents.
I can see the joy around the office cooler already:
worker 1: "I've been wondering... Since all our docs are DRM protected, what would happen if something happened to our server?"
worker 2: "Let's DOS our server, so we don't have to do any work!"
worker 1: "No, let's just go to Usenet and get all the latest network-aware viruses."
worker 2: "Are you kidding?! When I kept running all those.pif files, I thought I was going to be fired after infecting the whole network."
worker 1: "Hey, what's that network message?"
Network Server notice appears on all screens:
'From Network Admin - our DRM Server has just crashed due to yet another microsoft bug. See their KB article Q9324849276 (
Overflow error in DRM Server when 3 or more people are logged in). Estimated down time is 2 weeks, while we perform manditory testing of the new patch.'
worker 2: "Great! I'm taking my family to the beach. See you in two weeks."
It sure is going to be risky business to kill backwards compatibility to all current Office versions.
Although they probably meant forward compatability, MS has been known to kill backwards compatability in many instances.
Try MS Access for compatability. Each edition limits you to the earlier format, or prompts you to migrate to the new version of the files. Even then, Access 2000 and XP won't open files from Access 95 or Access 7 for Windows 95.
"DOS is Dead" - try running a dos app in Windows XP.
Try moving from certain versions of MS Works to later versions. The Microsoft FAQ for many of those products tell you to convert to some other format (databases go through DBase III, word processing files to RTF, spread-sheets to CSV, and so on).
On the issue of FORWARD COMPATABILITY, WordPerfect got that one right. We still have copies of WP 6 for DOS in use. We can open WordPerfect 2002 documents in it, save and modify them, then re-open them in WP2002 or any other version without any hickups.
Try opening Word 97 documents in Word 7.0, or in WordPad. In the best case it will open with errors. Try opening Word XP in Word 97 -- it will inform you that it will try to convert it, then it will give you some obscure error messages, and finally it will give up. Try the same thing with Excel formats, almost none have forward-compatability. Then try it with Access, to get the same results. Now try opening Word.NET 2003 (or whatever it will be called) with encryption in Word XP. You won't be too surprised.
A good example of this was when I left support at our local University a few years ago. Each time we would roll out a new version of Office, most especially when we moved from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, we'd get a bunch of complaints: "I can't open my files at home any more!" But then when we'd explain how to convert them to older versions, they'd come back the next day and say "It din't let me keep my drawings [that of course use the latest COM objects] when I took it home. It's the school's fault!" Just this month, one of my friends sent me a word document written at their school (with Office XP). I have word 2000, and it wouldn't open it after complaining that it was an unknown format.
So it isn't really all that risky, since they keep about the same level of compatability that they have always had. If you have a document created with product [year], don't consider opening it if you don't have that same year or later.
Wrong!... Since an office file opener could be used to open your own documents, or documents that others want you to open, there exists a substantial non-infringing use, so the software would not be a circumvention device.
Yes, he is partly wrong, but so are you. It may be true that the circumvention device clauses are satisfied. Unfortunately, we don't have to look far to see how companies and projects that fit that exception are still prosecuted/persecuted and even killed.
This would be a good target for a bunch of SLAPP suits against the developers -- if they chose to implement it. The potential gain for Microsoft and others ("We bankrupted 30 contributers to OpenOffice for DMCA violations. We're sending you a DMCA notice. You wanna be bankrupt next?") far outweighs their potential cost ("We paid $250,000,000 in the cases we lost, but it's just an investment for product lock-in and extra FUD against developers.") .
Just being on the right side of the law does not mean that you will survive a massive legal attack from a multi-billion dollar company. Anti-SLAPP laws are in effect in most states but the DMCA altered the USC, which is the federal law, so those state laws could be carefully avoided.
Embedded fonts (alive, but at a big cost and avoidance of court)
A student's paper with summaries of other cases (United States v. Sklyarov, Lexmark v. Static Control Components
, Felton v. Recording Industry Ass'n of America) and several interesting hypothetical physical-world comparisons to the law (locking keys out of your car == loss of ownership of car until you present the Automobile Protection Assocaition with a proper court orders allowing you to jimmy the lock).
The unfortunate fact is that just because it is legal, and even if it is right, both StarOffice (Sun) and the contributors to OpenOffice (including Sun) could both face deadly lawsuits from Microsoft if they attempt compatability.
Strategic lawsuits (gray-area, predatory lawsuits), "death by lawsuit", and even Google's lists of Allegedly Unethical Firms, Corporate Accountability, and corporate criminals show how corporations are attacking and killing projects, even when the projects or public participation are the right and legal thing.
So while you are right that such a project would be legal, you are wrong in your implied statement that it would be a safe thing to do.
That is the first time I've been accused of lying on slashdot. I guess that means that what I said strongly violates your view of reality. Could it be that you have a bell shaped head?
First, I did not say you lied. I said that If what you said were true I believe there is only one action you should take. But because your story seems unlikely (see below), I would not be surprised if it (some portion at least) were a lie.
You said that you worked as high as you could through the call center when you heard that. That means that it was probably either a shift/team supervisor or a call center manager. I have never heard of a management level corp employee (they are a low-level manager) directly admit to customers that they have deceptive trade practices, intent to defraud, and intent to illegally retailiate against lawful orders.
Assuming that were true, if you had recorded the phone call(s) you could win in both civil and criminal court, so your claim that no judge or lawyer would listen to you seems preposterous. Assuming you were able to do it once, it would be worth your while to record the calls and try it again, several times, until you get the same result.
With tape in hand, no reasonable lawyer would turn that case down, and would likely help you without any cash from you. (Just a portion of the eventual settlement). If you didn't want to go to a lawyer, your local news services would *love* a copy of the tape. Imagine the headlines -- "Phone company representative admits to corporate crimes".
So considering how unlikely it is that a call-center leadership person would admit to such things, I will stick to my first post: It is either the truth or a lie. If it true you have everything to gain and nothing to lose by calling back and recording it. If you are unwilling to do so, I will remain convinced that your story is either a complete lie or a very exaggerated version of the truth (which in my view, is a still a lie).
Many of us already support NPR or PBS, our public radio and television networks in the United States.
I support public television, it's about the only good thing on TV. The only other quality programming (in my view) is the channels on the discovery network, including discovery, animal planet, tlc, and of course BBC America.:-)
As stated earlier, I wouldn't mind sending micropayments to the BBC for access to their archives, either.
regarding SBC DSL service,
"I was told on the phone that they knew about the contradiction between the contract and the advertising. And they didn't care. They admitted that it was fraud, but it was there to let them mess with people who don't understand the law.... they told me that if I did file a complaint or sue them they would disconnect all telephone wires to my home for a minimum of 5 years."
If what you said were true, then there are a bunch of lawyers who would *love* to pick that one up. Visit a lawyer, explain the situation, ask them to make the same calls, ask the same questions, and get it on tape.
If that big of a company openly admits to fraud and illegal retaliation to their customers, the court would have no problems requiring them to meet their ads, and not retaliate.
Unless, of course, you are just lying about the whole thing.
You sell a simpler box where security is the primary factor. A lot of grandmas and older people might go for something that only does AOL, mail, web browsing and maybe printing and digital photos.
That might solve part of the problem (consumer side) but not the issue that the article was about. It does not solve the real issue.
Making a grandma-friendly, secure, e-mail and download-only box would not do what the article suggests is happening. It might keep grandma from getting infected with the latest worm, but she will still get progressively less useful bandwidth from her modem. Grandma might have a 256Kbps DSL modem. She might even be fairly lucky and after dropping the malformed packets and garbage already out there, get a 200Kbps rate right now. But next year it might be 150Kbps, then 100Kbps as a few million script-kiddies are scanning for the next generation of BackOrafice trojans. Then she'll go buy a faster connection, because her Internet connection is slower than she wants. Her new connection will give her more visible speed, but would still be dropping a majority of the packets.
I've seen the issue first hand. I'm with a small business, where we have a shared T1 line. Our upstream provider performs some packet filtering, but not much. After we pay for the data through our T1, we filter it. We drop malformed packets, packets from reserved and unassigned addresses, source-routed packets, and so on. We detect and block portscans and other obvious attacks at that point as well. We average a 7-10% packet loss through that filter daily. Next, we run SpamAssassin at a high filter level (15) along with attachment and virus blocking of emails, which collectively drop thousands of e-mail messages daily. Additionally our computers are running ad-filtering programs that save us a lot of bandwidth, but ads still slip through.
If we were to assume that all the ads also got through, that is about 20-25% of our bandwidth wasted in complete junk, and that percentage has been increasing for the past two years that I have been watching it. Next we have a bunch of legitimate, but unwanted, traffic. That includes file sharing and trojan ports, incoming http, mail, telnet, DNS, ftp, rpc, and other assorted ports. We get a few hundred of these each day, and the number is always growing. Some might be people in the company trying to use NetMeeting or something, even though it is against policy. Some may be legitimate errors, while the remaining others are probably probing for systems to attack.
The article says that the problem is this growing collection of junk -- currently about a quarter of our bandwidth -- which will quickly kill the Internet unless there is a change.
Unfortunately, I agree with the author of the article; unless we see some fundamental changes, it will become unusable. There are a number of good ideas already out there as to what that may be.
One idea that I like is to remove the anonymity of end-to-end, while preserving the end-to-end functionality. Every handler of every packet signs the packet, and drops packets from sources they do not trust or with invalid signatures. The sender cannot deny sending the message, each handler signs the packets and cannot deny that they handled it, each handler can state that they directly know who they received it from, and that all end-points can verify the sources. That allows any message not properly signed and not properly addressed to be dropped, and allow for law enforcement or system admins to find out who the attackers are, or exactly which machines have been compromised.
The only significant drawbacks to that system are the resources involved in all the digital signatures and the loss of anonymity. I can only see a few reasons for anonymous speech (whistle-blowers, victims of crime, etc.) but there are other anonymous outlets for them. Online, I think non-repudiation should be built in, so long as you have encryption tools available. Your
Um, no. That's not what I meant at all. You might want to read
my other post about my view.
As another person replied to you, the stricter reading and the lack of significant legal cases are the reason to fear. According to my lawyer friends, the definition of derivative works for software is not well defined. As another person pointed out to you, legal issues come into play when one developer of a 'clean room' environment has even reviewed the original software. In this particular case of operating systems, additional rules and laws come into play about what is common practice, common knowledge, and what is a solution that any competent software engineer could create.
If this make it all the way through court, the judge will probably have something to say about derivative works. If that happens, the ruling will very likely alter the way software is developed (from a legal view, anyway) -- we may become more free to rely on external sources, or become more restricted. Regardless, if the judge gets to make a ruling, the line of what is legal and what is not will become more clearly defined.
The limitation of "derivative work", in the case of the GPL, can only work so long as the code still contains *SOME* number of lines of code that were originally GPL'd by some other author.
I am not familiar with the intracacies of this, but I doubt that your interpretation is valid. I surely wouldn't depend on this conclusion without strong assurances from a lawyer.
I posted to the parent of this, after getting my own assurances from a lawyer. The short story is that the "derivative work" definition for software has never really been established. This judge gets to make that definition (if this goes all the way through the courts). If he is reasonable, he will find that there is a large amount of code needed for inter-operation and communication (like words in the dictionary, or templates of EE diagrams) and that copying those chunks is fair use. If he is less reasonable, he will find there is only a small amount of code needed for that. But that's what section 1301 & 1302 of the copyright law is about, which was mentioned by both companies legal briefs.
The smaller the judge defines those terms, the more we need to worry about using code snippits from the web and from books. That's what my lawyer friends came up with.
Slashdot Mirror
frob
I'm 6'3", 330 lbs, (which is both big and tall) and enjoy my '03 Prius (which is not a big car).
frob
All things considered, I would buy another Hybrid if I had the need to.
frob
At any rate, why buy a car with the intent to sell it in 2 years? That short of time you should lease. When I buy a car, I expect to keep it until repairs get too expensive (6+ years) or until the insurance company decides to total it out. My family has a nice, big van that has about 650,000 miles on it, it's on a second engine and we might be putting a third in it soon.
frob
I don't do the Yahoo group thing since I don't want a Yahoo account. You might enjoy it, though.
frob
Going up hills in the city (fairly steep grade) isn't too bad, and is comprable to other cars I have driven. When going up fairly steep grades at slow speeds (half mile, 15%, 30 mph) it actually feels easier than most other cars I have driven. Going up canyons is fun too, since at freeway speeds you don't need to do much to change the speed, and the Prius feels nice when turning sharp corners.
As always with this car, gunning it for passing works pretty good (it's not a Porche, but it does pick up speed quickly) until you hit about 75. That's an issue if you are away from the city where the normal freeway speed is 75. (If you regularly go over 75, you need to have your tires under more preassure to avoid extreme wear, etc., so I wouldn't recommend it in any car.)
As for intellegent switching, it does it behind the scenes. When you pull out from a stop light it may be on gas or electric, depending on how fast you are accelerating, if you are on a slope, if the engine is cold, and who-knows what else. When you are on the highway (above 42 MPH) the gas engine is always running to prevent excess drain on the battery, so factor that in to your last few questions.
frob
In fact, when they were a Linux company they had almost double the work force they have now. Makes me wonder if they fired the programmers and techies, hired lawyers, and went back to work.
A lot of System V code came from earlier and different projects, many of which are in the public domain or under free license.
frob
I already knew how to touch type, and in the early 90's got into IRC. I was attending summer programs at a local technical center. Since they were mainly interested in helping train youth and transitional adults into tech workers, they had DWS certified type tests available for free to students.
I was around 60 WPM with 1-2 errors when I started. After about 2 years of chatting and programming, a group of us went to take another of their free DWS typing tests since we were going to go look for jobs. The slowest of us was around 90 WPM with 4 errors, the fastest was around 170 with zero errors. I was in the 130 range with no errors. Online chat had everything to do with that. Because I was also programming at that speed, symbols don't really slow me down either.
frob
Stanly Pons and Martin Fleischmann were both separately employeed by the University, but the research was not sponsored by the school. They were using some of the school's facilities with permission, basically because of the high cost of the equipment.
See http://www.chem.utah.edu/depthistory/ChemDept_Hist ory.pdf for some of this:
Because the original press conference was conveniend at the University, and because both professors were affiliated with the U of U, and that further research was taken up by the University at the time of the press conference, many journalists jumped to the conclusion that it was the University's project.Other than the /. error, the article iteself is rather interesting, including this answer from a professor: "The question I get more than any other is, 'Are you still doing this?', " says Prof. Jones. "The answer is yes, and what we are seeing is very difficult to explain outside of cold fusion. The repeatability of these experiments now approaches 80 percent." [Insert comparison to Microsoft here.]
frob
I don't have a problem with RIAA/MPAA protecting their assets. I do have a problem when they accuse all file traders of being criminals, shut down legal activities just because some people are breaking the law, and they demand that the government get rid of basic legal protections. (you want probable cause AND a warrant issued by a real judge?!?)
I do not use P2P for illigal files, but the day that charges were filed against Napster, I decided to not purchase anything from any RIAA group. When charges were filed against 2600 for DeCSS, I decided that when I see a movie or get a DVD, it would have a corresponding donation to the EFF.
frob
I agree that violence, or more specifically, conflict, is an essential in the games we make. I also agree that there is no proof of a direct cause-effect relationship between game violence and crimes. I have seen, however, a few people who get very worked up over games. I don't know what else may have been in their lives or if they were already basically this way, but when playing violent, immersive games, they did become drugged or ultra violent. It isn't the general case, but I have personally seen it happen.
The company sometimes invite people in so we can evaulate game-play. They have cameras to observe their reactions, and record what they do, and have surveys to ask what things they don't like, any problem areas in levels, and so on. They aren't game testers, just normal joes (not many janes, but they sometimes have them) who come in and play games for an hour. They are asked to fill out a survey on the way in, play whatever game we ask them to, then fill out an exit survey. I've asked about the violence in media vs. agressive behavior before, and I was invited to come watch on some of the days that they've had people in. Also, our team is occasionally given reports back, and I've talked with other teams about their players' results.
While I don't work on violent games, other teams I work with and review results with, do. When reviewing people playing violent games, we have talked a little bit at their history (Do they watch violent movies? Do they play M-rated games?) These are the violence trends I have observed:
I have observed that on violent games, many people (usually male, we don't survey many females) who don't typically view violent material (few or no R-movies, etc) and say they are not uncomfortable with the violence in the game, but they initially look and act uncomfortable while playing. By the end of the sessions, they were more comfortable with the violence in the game. Some of these people, I would guess about 1/3, seem to get completely immersed in the game. They just lose focus of everything else. More on them later, they're the first group I'm concerned about. The rest of them just seemed like normal people. They understood when there were glitches in the games, and are basically helpful to the staff.
People who do usually view violent material but don't play violent games complained that the our games are not real enough, that is, not enough gore. When playing, these people tended to seek out more violent areas of the game and spend more time on the more graphic death scenes. From what I have seen, though, these people didn't act beligerent to the staff, nor get too involved in the games. They were like most of the people above, just normal people wanting to say "Hey, I helped play-test that game!" I was a little bothered by one guy's comment about wanting more gore, but otherwise, they're pretty normal.
Those who have an extensive history in games (both M and non-M) but don't watch violent movies, tended to be the tester's nightmare: they want to systematically go through the entire game, clean out every corner, get every item, learn the maps, etc. They don't really notice the violence, but they don't seem much affected by it. They also find the most glitches.
Those who have an extensive history in M-rated games, *and* frequently watch R-rated movies tended to do one of two things: most tend to just work through the basic plot and do very little exploring. Some (a small number) tended to just seek out violence, and became agressive or a little hostile to our staff. Most of these guys (the ones who follow the plot) don't find much as far as bugs are concerned, but they do show what is interesting and what isn't. The few people who become agressive, however, are the second group I am concerned about.
Based only on what I have seen (which isn't as much as the people who run the tests), I'm not to worried
worker 1: "I've been wondering... Since all our docs are DRM protected, what would happen if something happened to our server?" .pif files, I thought I was going to be fired after infecting the whole network."
worker 2: "Let's DOS our server, so we don't have to do any work!"
worker 1: "No, let's just go to Usenet and get all the latest network-aware viruses."
worker 2: "Are you kidding?! When I kept running all those
worker 1: "Hey, what's that network message?"
Network Server notice appears on all screens:
worker 2: "Great! I'm taking my family to the beach. See you in two weeks."
- Try MS Access for compatability. Each edition limits you to the earlier format, or prompts you to migrate to the new version of the files. Even then, Access 2000 and XP won't open files from Access 95 or Access 7 for Windows 95.
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"DOS is Dead" - try running a dos app in Windows XP.
- Try moving from certain versions of MS Works to later versions. The Microsoft FAQ for many of those products tell you to convert to some other format (databases go through DBase III, word processing files to RTF, spread-sheets to CSV, and so on).
On the issue of FORWARD COMPATABILITY, WordPerfect got that one right. We still have copies of WP 6 for DOS in use. We can open WordPerfect 2002 documents in it, save and modify them, then re-open them in WP2002 or any other version without any hickups.Try opening Word 97 documents in Word 7.0, or in WordPad. In the best case it will open with errors. Try opening Word XP in Word 97 -- it will inform you that it will try to convert it, then it will give you some obscure error messages, and finally it will give up. Try the same thing with Excel formats, almost none have forward-compatability. Then try it with Access, to get the same results. Now try opening Word.NET 2003 (or whatever it will be called) with encryption in Word XP. You won't be too surprised.
A good example of this was when I left support at our local University a few years ago. Each time we would roll out a new version of Office, most especially when we moved from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, we'd get a bunch of complaints: "I can't open my files at home any more!" But then when we'd explain how to convert them to older versions, they'd come back the next day and say "It din't let me keep my drawings [that of course use the latest COM objects] when I took it home. It's the school's fault!" Just this month, one of my friends sent me a word document written at their school (with Office XP). I have word 2000, and it wouldn't open it after complaining that it was an unknown format.
So it isn't really all that risky, since they keep about the same level of compatability that they have always had. If you have a document created with product [year], don't consider opening it if you don't have that same year or later.
frob
Yes, he is partly wrong, but so are you. It may be true that the circumvention device clauses are satisfied. Unfortunately, we don't have to look far to see how companies and projects that fit that exception are still prosecuted/persecuted and even killed.
This would be a good target for a bunch of SLAPP suits against the developers -- if they chose to implement it. The potential gain for Microsoft and others ("We bankrupted 30 contributers to OpenOffice for DMCA violations. We're sending you a DMCA notice. You wanna be bankrupt next?") far outweighs their potential cost ("We paid $250,000,000 in the cases we lost, but it's just an investment for product lock-in and extra FUD against developers.") .
Just being on the right side of the law does not mean that you will survive a massive legal attack from a multi-billion dollar company. Anti-SLAPP laws are in effect in most states but the DMCA altered the USC, which is the federal law, so those state laws could be carefully avoided.
Examples:
The unfortunate fact is that just because it is legal, and even if it is right, both StarOffice (Sun) and the contributors to OpenOffice (including Sun) could both face deadly lawsuits from Microsoft if they attempt compatability.
Strategic lawsuits (gray-area, predatory lawsuits), "death by lawsuit", and even Google's lists of Allegedly Unethical Firms, Corporate Accountability, and corporate criminals show how corporations are attacking and killing projects, even when the projects or public participation are the right and legal thing.
So while you are right that such a project would be legal, you are wrong in your implied statement that it would be a safe thing to do.
frob
You said that you worked as high as you could through the call center when you heard that. That means that it was probably either a shift/team supervisor or a call center manager. I have never heard of a management level corp employee (they are a low-level manager) directly admit to customers that they have deceptive trade practices, intent to defraud, and intent to illegally retailiate against lawful orders.
Assuming that were true, if you had recorded the phone call(s) you could win in both civil and criminal court, so your claim that no judge or lawyer would listen to you seems preposterous. Assuming you were able to do it once, it would be worth your while to record the calls and try it again, several times, until you get the same result.
With tape in hand, no reasonable lawyer would turn that case down, and would likely help you without any cash from you. (Just a portion of the eventual settlement). If you didn't want to go to a lawyer, your local news services would *love* a copy of the tape. Imagine the headlines -- "Phone company representative admits to corporate crimes".
So considering how unlikely it is that a call-center leadership person would admit to such things, I will stick to my first post: It is either the truth or a lie. If it true you have everything to gain and nothing to lose by calling back and recording it. If you are unwilling to do so, I will remain convinced that your story is either a complete lie or a very exaggerated version of the truth (which in my view, is a still a lie).
frob
As stated earlier, I wouldn't mind sending micropayments to the BBC for access to their archives, either.
frob
Please note that Apple does not permit the return of or offer refunds for the following products:
- Product that is custom configured to your specifications
- Opened memory
- Opened software
- Electronic software downloads
" How about "BY USING THE SITE, YOU AGREE TO THESE TERMS OF USE" "no shirt, no shoes, no service" um, yes? "Please take a moment to carefully review the Pricing & Terms below" That one is between you and your religion. Talk to you your parents about it, but generally that's part of the marraige agreements. I thought it was The Planet Algoroth, and yes, there is a corresponding licence agreement.So yes, the lawyers have struck everywhere.
If that big of a company openly admits to fraud and illegal retaliation to their customers, the court would have no problems requiring them to meet their ads, and not retaliate.
Unless, of course, you are just lying about the whole thing.
frob
That might solve part of the problem (consumer side) but not the issue that the article was about. It does not solve the real issue.
Making a grandma-friendly, secure, e-mail and download-only box would not do what the article suggests is happening. It might keep grandma from getting infected with the latest worm, but she will still get progressively less useful bandwidth from her modem. Grandma might have a 256Kbps DSL modem. She might even be fairly lucky and after dropping the malformed packets and garbage already out there, get a 200Kbps rate right now. But next year it might be 150Kbps, then 100Kbps as a few million script-kiddies are scanning for the next generation of BackOrafice trojans. Then she'll go buy a faster connection, because her Internet connection is slower than she wants. Her new connection will give her more visible speed, but would still be dropping a majority of the packets.
I've seen the issue first hand. I'm with a small business, where we have a shared T1 line. Our upstream provider performs some packet filtering, but not much. After we pay for the data through our T1, we filter it. We drop malformed packets, packets from reserved and unassigned addresses, source-routed packets, and so on. We detect and block portscans and other obvious attacks at that point as well. We average a 7-10% packet loss through that filter daily. Next, we run SpamAssassin at a high filter level (15) along with attachment and virus blocking of emails, which collectively drop thousands of e-mail messages daily. Additionally our computers are running ad-filtering programs that save us a lot of bandwidth, but ads still slip through.
If we were to assume that all the ads also got through, that is about 20-25% of our bandwidth wasted in complete junk, and that percentage has been increasing for the past two years that I have been watching it. Next we have a bunch of legitimate, but unwanted, traffic. That includes file sharing and trojan ports, incoming http, mail, telnet, DNS, ftp, rpc, and other assorted ports. We get a few hundred of these each day, and the number is always growing. Some might be people in the company trying to use NetMeeting or something, even though it is against policy. Some may be legitimate errors, while the remaining others are probably probing for systems to attack.
The article says that the problem is this growing collection of junk -- currently about a quarter of our bandwidth -- which will quickly kill the Internet unless there is a change.
Unfortunately, I agree with the author of the article; unless we see some fundamental changes, it will become unusable. There are a number of good ideas already out there as to what that may be.
One idea that I like is to remove the anonymity of end-to-end, while preserving the end-to-end functionality. Every handler of every packet signs the packet, and drops packets from sources they do not trust or with invalid signatures. The sender cannot deny sending the message, each handler signs the packets and cannot deny that they handled it, each handler can state that they directly know who they received it from, and that all end-points can verify the sources. That allows any message not properly signed and not properly addressed to be dropped, and allow for law enforcement or system admins to find out who the attackers are, or exactly which machines have been compromised.
The only significant drawbacks to that system are the resources involved in all the digital signatures and the loss of anonymity. I can only see a few reasons for anonymous speech (whistle-blowers, victims of crime, etc.) but there are other anonymous outlets for them. Online, I think non-repudiation should be built in, so long as you have encryption tools available. Your
As another person replied to you, the stricter reading and the lack of significant legal cases are the reason to fear. According to my lawyer friends, the definition of derivative works for software is not well defined. As another person pointed out to you, legal issues come into play when one developer of a 'clean room' environment has even reviewed the original software. In this particular case of operating systems, additional rules and laws come into play about what is common practice, common knowledge, and what is a solution that any competent software engineer could create.
If this make it all the way through court, the judge will probably have something to say about derivative works. If that happens, the ruling will very likely alter the way software is developed (from a legal view, anyway) -- we may become more free to rely on external sources, or become more restricted. Regardless, if the judge gets to make a ruling, the line of what is legal and what is not will become more clearly defined.
frob
The smaller the judge defines those terms, the more we need to worry about using code snippits from the web and from books. That's what my lawyer friends came up with.
frob