Forget those uses, move to the more fun / paranoid / evil...
Investigators (pubilc and private) have access to that kind of thing already -- just costs a little more. With this sort of thing (in theory) we could see a lot of phone hacks, and people conveniently leaving their phone 'on accident' in all sorts of places.
You want the ultimate in spyware, imagine this ad:
Get a free Nokia video-enabled phone with 1-year service agreement. Only $19 a month for basic service!
Get the phone, conveniently leave it somewhere you want to spy, get a few hours worth of video. Depending on where you left it, either pick it up, or call the company and notify them that the phone was stolen while you were at the mall or other public place.
That kind of spying would be cheaper than an X-10 cam, and would work anywhere inside the phone's service area. Even at lo-res you could still get a wealth of information. Leave your phone pointing at an ATM or a POS terminal. Leave it at a bank and listen to financial information while pointing at their transaction papers. Blackmail your friends and foes by leaving the phone in a bedroom or bathroom.
There will always be work for people in the health industries.
People are always being born or dying.
As for what YOU should do, that is a much too personal question to ask on/. since it depends on factors you cannot put up here. Find something you like, and make sure you can do it well. Don't just focus on that one thing, learn about the world, but master an area.
Then comes the job search -- as everyone knows, the most effective job skill is networking (people skills, not computer skills). Talk to everyone you know, everyone you ever worked with, and tell them what you want to do. A Good idea that has been successful for me is a 'networking card' that is like a mini-resume and contact info, pass it out to everyone (attach them to resumes you give out. Ask them to pass them on if they aren't interested in you.). They'll either throw it away or find someone else to give it to in order to prevent guilt.
At that point you will have something you enjoy (not neccessarily the 'future' of the industry, but the future is what we make it).
They are equating 'pirated' disks -- those duplicated without the authors permission for any use -- with 'SOLD' disks, -- or those that specifically decrease legititmate sales.
The 'pirated' disks may be those duplicated for personal use, and based on the paper, many may have even been legal under fair use doctrine. There would be no uproar if they were copied onto tapes for friends. They are already compensated by a kickback from all recordable disk and tape sales, AND inflated prices for CD's. The two combined provide millions to the record labels. The industry first said that the kickback was enough to counter-balance piracy losses. Then they said that the inflated prices were neccesary for survival against piracy. Now what do they want, tax subsidies? They are already getting several by 'helping' so-called developing nations by using them for slave labor, er, production.
This is just an attempt to to double-dip (or is this tripple-dip?), and collect even more money for alledged losses.
... Five of us who were in AP Computer Programming played fun LAN games (Novel Netwars, registered Descent and unregistered Doom) after school, with the permission of three of the admins. We stayed until 4 or 5 PM about two days each week.
When we got a second computer lab -- with high-speed 486's -- a bunch of other people wanted to play games in that lab. Unfortunatly they were a rowdy bunch. They brought in pirated versions of all kinds of network games. They infected the lab with several viruses, and messed up several computers so the admins had to rebuild the entire network. There was an official ban on computer games because of this.
The admins -- who knew the original group of us five because we always got permission and played games with them, even let them win sometimes -- told us that we could hang around doing AP Computer Programming stuff in the 386 lab on the days we had class there. We did all kinds of fun stuff with the teacher, like build fractals and even built a ray-tracer that wrote to screen (in VESA 256 colors). 45 minutes after school ended, they would let us play games. This was with the school's permission -- but under very specific rules for 5 kids.
Now that I have a MS and am looking back at those schools, I think they were right on both counts -- the should have banned the games that they did. The games they banned were violent, stolen warez. They allowed games when: (1) both a teacher and administrator were DIRECTLY responsible for the students, (2) the students had already done their homework for one class, and even did extra work for fun, and (3) the teacher was present and ensured that all software was legal.
That was 8 years ago, but I think their policy was reasonable.
If you make sure the software is legal, make sure that network problems don't happen (viruses, hacking) and have a little supervision, it can be a great thing
Many big groups don't emply the level of security you already have.
Most bank 'security' is password protection and physical access protection. When break-ins happen they are not published; banks and credit unions are broken into quite often, and they pay to keep it out of the news.
The unfortunate truth is that for big companies, it is cheaper to pay for damage from break-ins than it is to get good security to begin with.
With the level of security you already have, look into business insurance. Tell them the precautions you have already taken and ask what would get you a better rate. (You would probably be a good risk for Insurance.) Implement those things, and have the insurer audit you in advance to make sure everything is up to snuff.
First, read the book the future of ideas by Dr. Lessig. It discusses the issue in depth.
Second, after reading the book, understand that ideas, intangebles, and resources that do not decrease in value as they are used, operate differently than tangeble objects -- therefore they whould be regulated differently.
Third, understand that people who are creative should be compensated and therefore encouraged to innovate. In contrast, creative people required the use of other innovations, and therefore cannot in good concience retain all rights to every aspect of the idea: they must benefit the common area from which they themselves derrived inspiration.
Fourth, understand that the existing regime will always fight to keep their power by suppressing innovation. Innovators will offer very little fight to innovate because they do not have evidence that the innovation will be successful.
Take those together and you basically arrive at the IP law nearly 2 centuries ago. Specifically:
exact duplications of [registered] works was prohibited for a specific time (14 years, with the option to renew once).
Mechanical duplication (such as audio playback of a score) could be licenced for a small, federally manged fee, but only for the 14 to 28 year time frame.
Ideas put in concrete form (like a Coke can) could be recorded in another form (like a movie) without additional compensation, since you purchaced the right to use the object when you went to the soda machine.
Fair use included the ability to make derivative works at any time.
Fair use included the abiltiy to reverse engineer any work at any time.
Individuals, not corporations, owned the rights.
Licensing was inexpensive, and required the work to be original and creative.
Since we have to deal with the garbage that is already in place, this would mean:
Massive cutbacks on copyright duration
Instead of granting all rights to the producer, only certain rights can be granted.
Licencing deals would have to move from contracts to law.
All industries working with intangebles, including the software, entertainment, and communications industries would need reform.
Comapnies using patents and copyrights to prevent innovation would be considered extortionists, where individuals would be encouraged in their use.
The USPTO and others would need to do significantly more work to ensure works are both original and creative.
I can spend the $200 bucks on hardware at a local computer store and get better hardware than is in either platform. Xbox is a relatively slow pentium 3 with some modifications to the OS, and an nVidia card. The rest of it can be had for cheap commodity prices.
What we really need is someone to break their NDA with Micro$oft to let people play their games on the PC as well. People with dev-kits have done this with the other platforms. It was reported not too long ago on/. where someone published how to do this, but they were contacted by Microsoft WITHIN HOURS of putting it up on the web.
MS won't let this happen because their goal is not to provide entertainment software, but to extend to a new market.
I have a friend who used to work in an AOL "Subscription Cancellation Center". He said there was a strict set of rules they had to follow (all bad) and he was given a list of tactics to try to get customers to stay. General grumpyness was encouraged. Katz only listed "Why do you want to leave?", "We can reduce the price" and "We can connect to your DSL/CABLE". By being forceful he missed out on all the other goodies.
Some he did not include were "We could get rid of the ads", "We can beat the price of your new ISP", "Can you connect to your new ISP anywhere in the world?", "Have you considered all the benefits of AOL?" (things you get at ISPs, just the non-geeks don't know), "Your local ISP doesn't have thousands of tech support workers ready to help you. Your ISP's tech support isn't available 24/7", "Your new ISP won't give you all your Internet in an integrated program". "Our connect times are as fast or faster than your other ISP" (like your modem will go faster or something). "Your new ISP will charge you for each email address", "Your new ISP will force you to use different programs for everything on the Internet", and so on.
On top of that, if the customer gives an explicit reason, they select the reason from the list on the form, and their computer comes back -- with arguments against that reason, or it says that AOL will block the ads or whatever the reason was.
Finally, the customer has to state not that they want to cancel, but instruct the representative to cancel. (not a plea, but an order.) Until the customer TOLD HIM to cancel AOL considered it a wishful comment, not an instruction.
The frend left after finishing college -- AOL offers tuition-payment at the call center.
A public school district could also have about the same number of employees. They DON'T have a quarter-billion dollar budget. In several states budgets have been so tight that they have cut funding to public schools drastically - dropping many programs, not just sports, but music and clubs. They have also been laying off teachers and administrators.
If I were given the choice of 1) Keep some teachers and make the IT people do some work, or 2) Fire teachers, risk a strike that has been threatened, and only have a small scrap of paper to show for it.... I would choose the first.
While some schools may have a quarter million to spend on initial rollouts, most get computers through donations. An annual fee really hurts, especially with the budget crunch and low funding for most schools. That same money would pay for an extra 4-8 teachers.
The IT staff could do a migration to free software (about as much work as a migration to a new version of all products, which they probably do every year or two anyway) and then do the job the schools are supposed to do -- teach.
There is a great deal of GNU software that fits your list.
From the GNU website -
Ggradebook "Fully-featured GNU gradebook: an application for tracking student grades for teachers. It uses GTK+ and can optionally be compiled to use for GNOME." Unfortunately it looks like the GNU pages for it have not been updated for about a year.
GNU Educational programs aren't the worlds biggest focus, but some do exist. This will experience the 'network effect', more people use the systems, more people want better software and increase demand, better software gets built.
GNU Scientific Visualization tools. These would be useful for HS science teachers in the spcecific areas, but the network effect should kick in as more schools move over.
GNU Mathmatics software has some good selections, a few of which I have seen used in a HS math class. (Okay, I set the computer up for my wife, who teaches math, but I did see it used.)
Hopefully as schools begin to use the platforms, and since RedHat has promised support for these schools, these areas of GNU software (and non-GNU, free software) will grow and improve.
Look at movies put out by the porn industry, compared to those put out by Disney or the others. Some movies have much more value than others.
Final Fantasy is very artistic, compared with Twisted Metal, Mortal Kombat, or others. The FF series has violent themes, but not graphic violence and gore. The other two have pointless, graphic gore and female models dressed to dance at a nudie-bar.
Even the Disney classics have violent themes -- conflict is a primary element of storytelling. But there is a big difference between the PG rated Dinosaur where a bunch of characters are killed by meteor, eaten, starved, etc. without dwelling on it versus the plethora of films with R ratings where the same things happen, with much more gore and gratuitous violence.
He isn't stating that all games should be prohibited, just affirming that the RASC-style ratings followed. Sort of like going to the movies and not selling tickets to an NC-17 show to a 10-year-old.
People argue that porn is art. We limit access to that.
As you said, we limit porn, music, and other art. This kind of law (like those of porn and smoking) are there to protect most of us parents who don't want our kids getting into those things. If the parents want to, they can buy the games and let the kids play. They can buy cigarettes and let the kids smoke, they can buy the porn and let it sit around the house.
The law sounds reasonable to me. Let the kid's parents look at it, if they are not the age of majority.
Re:Why do PC cases continue to be "difficult"?
on
Bubble-Plexi Case Mod
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· Score: 1
For a PC case, I go with a 'screwless' case every time. I shop around and get the current year's highest quality -- usually around $75 USD.
There is a single thumbscrew in the back that takes about 1 turn. Then the side panel drops down. Drives are in neat little holders -- just pop them into the frame, or pull them out with a thumb and index finger. So far all of my boxes have compatable drive holders, which is cool. Of course it would be easier to replace the thumbscrew with a spring-loaded little pull ring, but Apple already did that. A screw is goo to keep it from falling open while I'm moving the box.
You still gotta deal with the screws on cards, but I seldom do more than just shove the card in since I KNOW I will be pulling it out again someday, so why bother? On the very rare occasion that a card slips out far enough to lose contact, it only takes about 10 seconds to open the case, jab at all the cards, and boot the machine. If it works, just pop the top back on and twist the thumbscrew. If it doesn't work then it probably wasn't that anyway and I'll be ripping things out...
What I want to do (no, I don't, it would just be fun to see) would be a screwless case with the side panel replaced with plexi and neon lights lighting up the innards, and maybe a few mirrors in good places to help see into corners when I'm working on it. Then you get quick access and high visibility. Of course you still have the generally ugly box, but old habits die hard.
Considering I'm a white-collar programmer, I think I'd just have to learn Spanish. Buy a few PC's up here, take them down there -- it might be the country's largest supercomputer. : )
That would put the well-trained geeks in the upper class (ie - not poor, more than one telephone per household), meaning we could get great healthcare and excellent standard of living. The only problem in most S.A. countries (I have been told by people who go there regularly) is that geeks don't face headhunters as we know them, but headhunters who abduct and ransom for cash, or corporate thugs who want to stop their competition *dead*. < gulp > : (
The law should not say 'piracy is more illegal', nor should it restrict access to acceptable activities. Piracy is already illegal, and further restrictions harm consumers without protecting providers. It has to go to the base of the problem, which is entrenched in IP, Copyright, and Patent issues.
Congress wants to pass a law, so let them. Let it include these sections:
- NOMENCLATURE: CONSUMERS. Many bills and laws refer to the consumers of electronic devices and services as 'USERS', while non-elctronic device and service bills and laws refer to 'CONSUMERS'. CITIZEN or CONSUMER should be the term used, not USER.
- SUPPORT OF SOFTWARE. All software and hardware requires support. When consumers are unable to obtain support from the producer (unsupported products) the community MUST be able to reverse engineer those programs. In order for that to work, copying of software must be available without restriction once a producer discontinues support for a program. At such time that any group fails to provide support for a reasonable cost and within a reasonable time, all IP rights must be dissolved. To prevent lawsuits against people who support these projects, any software patents would also be dissolved. If a component in the software wishes to keep their patents, the group must release their source to a GPL-style license. Congress has all power of patents, so that shouldn't be hard for them, except in their pocketbooks. This provision cannot be taken away by license or other agreement.
- SUPPORT OF MEDIA. All media fail. CD-ROMs and DVDs get scratches, melt in the sun, etc. Any law preventing the duplication of media to any degree MUST support complete and free replacement of damaged media UNTIL THE MEDIA TYPE IS NO LONGER USED. (That means that 8-tracks are just now leaving the market, and the big black records are still good and must allow either duplication or free replacement.) If the tools for duplication of media are controlled with DRM, the provider must allow free and infinite replacements of media, and transitions to unlimited other media for backups (rather than a single backup copy). This provision cannot be taken away by license or any other agreement.
- PROMOTION OF BROADBAND. The CBDTPA states that it is trying to promote broadband distribution. Rather than restricting the rights of broadband consumers, a law promoting broadband should instead enhance the rights. True promotion of broadband would consist of a subsidy, fee restrictions for providers, no limit on NAT devices, and offering of services at reduced costs to the elderly and poor / college students. Because high-speed Internet access providers are currently appending the charges for regular telephone services (universal access fee, etc), they should be required to follow the same regulations.
- LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY. Current licenses tend to terminate all liability on the part of content producers. It is obvious that poorly written software is being exploited in the form of viruses, worms, and other destructive programs. I am a developer and understand that bugs happen even in good code; but some accountability must exist. Developers and corporations should not be able to sidestep all liability, indirectly harming consumers with poor products. Product support (as outlined above as a REQUIREMENT) should include timely and appropriate corrections to all software defects as support (30 days?), or immediate termination of all IP rights as discussed under SUPPORT above. Corporations can still license away all liability, but only on the provision that by law they must terminate all copyright and IP rights when so licensed, so that consumers can fix problems that arise.
A law with those provisions (and no loopholes) would protect consumers by removing some of the stigmatism of calling consumers "USERS", allow users to fix problems if the producers are unwilling or unable to, promote broadband (which is a stated goal of the CBDTPA), and allow a stronger legal ability for corporations to limit financial liability on programs.
That should hit most of the problem. BUT, it would be nearly impossible to get such a law passed thanks to the greed and fat wallets of the majority of Congress and the greed of corporations trying to get a bigger slice of the pie than they deserve.
A matrix is technically not a container, but a data type. I use the Intel Small Matrix Library matrix classes as the type, and the STL to store them.
If you want to store objects by location in n-space (like a sparse matrix), you could use a set with the coordinates as the key.
A dense storage matrix can be trivially implemented with vector classes, but you cannot to matrix operations on them.
This is a longer post and has taken a while. Someone might have already said this, so please don't mod me as 'redundant'.
If you are a good computer scientist there are no real downsides. If you are just hacking a system together and don't understand how the datatypes and algorithms work, and you don't have time or care to read the manuals, you will be in trouble using the STL.
I have used several versions of the STL on several compilers and OS's, and find that as a whole, the STL has few downsides, **IF YOU READ AND UNDERSTAND WHAT IS GOING ON** If you don't understand the basics, it becomes a nightmare to debug. On the flip side, if you understand what is going on you can get very fast code at low development cost.
Developers need to understand that certain operations invalidate iterators, and things like that. (That is the most common error that I see.) When you get an error in STL code, usually it shows up not as a single error but as a huge list of errors as it propogates through the template library -- but it is just one coding error. You might consider those as downsides, but they are typical in computer programming.
A lot of people listed 'bugs', slow learning rate, and other problems, but in my experience the STL is easy to use if you consider the two aspects the STL covers -- data types and algorithms. I have seen other programmers struggle because they cannot separate the two. They think that string types should have string algorithms in the class, or sets have the set operations, and so on. The STL is an attempt to keep the two apart. It is easy to write new data classes that use the STL by implementing the few functions needed for all the algorithms, and it is easy to write new algorithms that use any STL object because they all implement the same small set of functions.
One example -- It is easy to change the allocation method (swap portions of ram to disk) simply by writing a new allocator. A co-worker insisted that the STL wouldn't work outside of RAM, but a simple allocator class allowed everything to work on disk for huge data stores. The co-worker had spent years working on implementing a few slgorithms and data types on his own. The STL with a simple, custom allocator worked faster than his code, and took much less time to develop. Poor guy -- I really felt sorry for him.
There are some problems with specific older compilers, but most are fixed. The older Metrowerks compiler didn't allow traits, the older Microsoft compiler didn't allow several kinds of nested types (use the service packs to fix them) and their debug info is terrible in VC6, GCC used to generate very bad STL code (it still has some quirks). The glitches are mostly fixed now. New, GOOD compilers will take longer to compile (downside) but will often generate either smaller code or significantly faster code (big benifit). I have seen cases where the executable doubled in size (the code bloat that people talk about), but the runtime decreased signficantly (not usually mentioned), and the code became much more readable. Since most of us (except embedded systems people) don't need to worry about size, the tradeoffs are acceptable.
Another benefit/downside is that if you use optimizing compilers that know about the STL, you can do really incredible things. For example, if you are using a valarray (value array) type to perform operations, you can get massive speedups. I use the Intel Optimizing complier for x86 chips, and it uses MMX, SSE, and SSE2 optimizations to perform many loop, array, and STL operations. It is cool to see huge sections of code the the compiler message "foo@bar@PARAM@Z has been selected for automatic CPU dispatch", and reading the generated code shows that it uses the MMX or XMM registers, depending on the CPU type, or use the slow, loop based values on 486/Pentium chips. A bad compiler would probably just go to the worst case, the slow loop -- so get a good compiler.
Itanium chips could do extremely well on many of the STL algorithms. (I have wondered if the Intel Optimizing compiler for Itanium would do massivly parallel ops with valarray classes. Does anyone have experience there?) Other parallel chips can benifit in this way as well, IF THE COMPILER IS SMART ENOUGH TO DO IT. The downside is that you have to know how things work and why. If the compiler doesn't do the optimization, perhaps another algorithm would work better in that case.
I have to say RTFM.
BUG 1:
Your iterator became invalid once something was erased.
In the specs: "List reallocation occurs when a member function must insert or erase elements of the controlled sequence. In all such cases, only iterators or references that point at erased portions of the controlled sequence become invalid."
BUG 2:
There's not enough information, but it doesn't look like an STL issue.
As for the docs, I have seen several good sets of documentation on the STL.
Most public schools have a few lawyers. Get them involved NOW.
Tell them the problem, including asking if the BSA has the RIGHT to DEMAND that you run their programs on your computers.
If the legal geeks say that they do, get together with them and jointly request the IT department to move away from those companies.
That does two things -- first, you will show the BSA (not boy scouts) that you are willing to fight back, and second, it presents a case to the school the problems of private software in a public setting. (That's an obvious Free Software comment. karma++ )
What I'm asking is for is an example of where releasing something into Public Domain actually exposes you to liability, where releasing it under the GPL would have shielded you in some way.
I have no specific examples right now. A laywer probably could find some.
I recall hearing about, but do not recall the exact details of, situations where this is the case. Specifically, the GPL releases the authors of particular obligations, as allowed by contract law. Those obligations are still in effect under public domain restrictions, since public domain release only applies to copyright, not other IP issues like liability, trade secrets, warranty, and so on.
Actual instances of software liability is an ongoing topic./. archives, news sources, and legal news sites have much to say as to how much liability different releases of software have.
Slashdot Mirror
We need this to pass through Parliment, then get some people in the UK on the P2P networks who can afford the lawsuits and bandwidth.
So with the UK banning DoS attacks and since the US and UK have so many treaties dealing with technology, who would win?
I didn't think of that! Lets look for that security hole!
Investigators (pubilc and private) have access to that kind of thing already -- just costs a little more. With this sort of thing (in theory) we could see a lot of phone hacks, and people conveniently leaving their phone 'on accident' in all sorts of places.
You want the ultimate in spyware, imagine this ad:
Get the phone, conveniently leave it somewhere you want to spy, get a few hours worth of video. Depending on where you left it, either pick it up, or call the company and notify them that the phone was stolen while you were at the mall or other public place.That kind of spying would be cheaper than an X-10 cam, and would work anywhere inside the phone's service area. Even at lo-res you could still get a wealth of information. Leave your phone pointing at an ATM or a POS terminal. Leave it at a bank and listen to financial information while pointing at their transaction papers. Blackmail your friends and foes by leaving the phone in a bedroom or bathroom.
Just a thought...
As for what YOU should do, that is a much too personal question to ask on /. since it depends on factors you cannot put up here. Find something you like, and make sure you can do it well. Don't just focus on that one thing, learn about the world, but master an area.
Then comes the job search -- as everyone knows, the most effective job skill is networking (people skills, not computer skills). Talk to everyone you know, everyone you ever worked with, and tell them what you want to do. A Good idea that has been successful for me is a 'networking card' that is like a mini-resume and contact info, pass it out to everyone (attach them to resumes you give out. Ask them to pass them on if they aren't interested in you.). They'll either throw it away or find someone else to give it to in order to prevent guilt.
At that point you will have something you enjoy (not neccessarily the 'future' of the industry, but the future is what we make it).
The 'pirated' disks may be those duplicated for personal use, and based on the paper, many may have even been legal under fair use doctrine. There would be no uproar if they were copied onto tapes for friends. They are already compensated by a kickback from all recordable disk and tape sales, AND inflated prices for CD's. The two combined provide millions to the record labels. The industry first said that the kickback was enough to counter-balance piracy losses. Then they said that the inflated prices were neccesary for survival against piracy. Now what do they want, tax subsidies? They are already getting several by 'helping' so-called developing nations by using them for slave labor, er, production.
This is just an attempt to to double-dip (or is this tripple-dip?), and collect even more money for alledged losses.
... Five of us who were in AP Computer Programming played fun LAN games (Novel Netwars, registered Descent and unregistered Doom) after school, with the permission of three of the admins. We stayed until 4 or 5 PM about two days each week.
When we got a second computer lab -- with high-speed 486's -- a bunch of other people wanted to play games in that lab. Unfortunatly they were a rowdy bunch. They brought in pirated versions of all kinds of network games. They infected the lab with several viruses, and messed up several computers so the admins had to rebuild the entire network. There was an official ban on computer games because of this.
The admins -- who knew the original group of us five because we always got permission and played games with them, even let them win sometimes -- told us that we could hang around doing AP Computer Programming stuff in the 386 lab on the days we had class there. We did all kinds of fun stuff with the teacher, like build fractals and even built a ray-tracer that wrote to screen (in VESA 256 colors). 45 minutes after school ended, they would let us play games. This was with the school's permission -- but under very specific rules for 5 kids.
Now that I have a MS and am looking back at those schools, I think they were right on both counts -- the should have banned the games that they did. The games they banned were violent, stolen warez. They allowed games when: (1) both a teacher and administrator were DIRECTLY responsible for the students, (2) the students had already done their homework for one class, and even did extra work for fun, and (3) the teacher was present and ensured that all software was legal.
That was 8 years ago, but I think their policy was reasonable.
If you make sure the software is legal, make sure that network problems don't happen (viruses, hacking) and have a little supervision, it can be a great thing
Many big groups don't emply the level of security you already have. Most bank 'security' is password protection and physical access protection. When break-ins happen they are not published; banks and credit unions are broken into quite often, and they pay to keep it out of the news. The unfortunate truth is that for big companies, it is cheaper to pay for damage from break-ins than it is to get good security to begin with. With the level of security you already have, look into business insurance. Tell them the precautions you have already taken and ask what would get you a better rate. (You would probably be a good risk for Insurance.) Implement those things, and have the insurer audit you in advance to make sure everything is up to snuff.
Second, after reading the book, understand that ideas, intangebles, and resources that do not decrease in value as they are used, operate differently than tangeble objects -- therefore they whould be regulated differently.
Third, understand that people who are creative should be compensated and therefore encouraged to innovate. In contrast, creative people required the use of other innovations, and therefore cannot in good concience retain all rights to every aspect of the idea: they must benefit the common area from which they themselves derrived inspiration.
Fourth, understand that the existing regime will always fight to keep their power by suppressing innovation. Innovators will offer very little fight to innovate because they do not have evidence that the innovation will be successful.
Take those together and you basically arrive at the IP law nearly 2 centuries ago. Specifically:
Since we have to deal with the garbage that is already in place, this would mean:
I can spend the $200 bucks on hardware at a local computer store and get better hardware than is in either platform. Xbox is a relatively slow pentium 3 with some modifications to the OS, and an nVidia card. The rest of it can be had for cheap commodity prices.
What we really need is someone to break their NDA with Micro$oft to let people play their games on the PC as well. People with dev-kits have done this with the other platforms. It was reported not too long ago on /. where someone published how to do this, but they were contacted by Microsoft WITHIN HOURS of putting it up on the web.
MS won't let this happen because their goal is not to provide entertainment software, but to extend to a new market.
Some he did not include were "We could get rid of the ads", "We can beat the price of your new ISP", "Can you connect to your new ISP anywhere in the world?", "Have you considered all the benefits of AOL?" (things you get at ISPs, just the non-geeks don't know), "Your local ISP doesn't have thousands of tech support workers ready to help you. Your ISP's tech support isn't available 24/7", "Your new ISP won't give you all your Internet in an integrated program". "Our connect times are as fast or faster than your other ISP" (like your modem will go faster or something). "Your new ISP will charge you for each email address", "Your new ISP will force you to use different programs for everything on the Internet", and so on.
On top of that, if the customer gives an explicit reason, they select the reason from the list on the form, and their computer comes back -- with arguments against that reason, or it says that AOL will block the ads or whatever the reason was.
Finally, the customer has to state not that they want to cancel, but instruct the representative to cancel. (not a plea, but an order.) Until the customer TOLD HIM to cancel AOL considered it a wishful comment, not an instruction.
The frend left after finishing college -- AOL offers tuition-payment at the call center.
If I were given the choice of 1) Keep some teachers and make the IT people do some work, or 2) Fire teachers, risk a strike that has been threatened, and only have a small scrap of paper to show for it. ... I would choose the first.
The IT staff could do a migration to free software (about as much work as a migration to a new version of all products, which they probably do every year or two anyway) and then do the job the schools are supposed to do -- teach.
Hopefully as schools begin to use the platforms, and since RedHat has promised support for these schools, these areas of GNU software (and non-GNU, free software) will grow and improve.
Look at movies put out by the porn industry, compared to those put out by Disney or the others. Some movies have much more value than others.
Final Fantasy is very artistic, compared with Twisted Metal, Mortal Kombat, or others. The FF series has violent themes, but not graphic violence and gore. The other two have pointless, graphic gore and female models dressed to dance at a nudie-bar.
Even the Disney classics have violent themes -- conflict is a primary element of storytelling. But there is a big difference between the PG rated Dinosaur where a bunch of characters are killed by meteor, eaten, starved, etc. without dwelling on it versus the plethora of films with R ratings where the same things happen, with much more gore and gratuitous violence.
He isn't stating that all games should be prohibited, just affirming that the RASC-style ratings followed. Sort of like going to the movies and not selling tickets to an NC-17 show to a 10-year-old.
As you said, we limit porn, music, and other art. This kind of law (like those of porn and smoking) are there to protect most of us parents who don't want our kids getting into those things. If the parents want to, they can buy the games and let the kids play. They can buy cigarettes and let the kids smoke, they can buy the porn and let it sit around the house.
The law sounds reasonable to me. Let the kid's parents look at it, if they are not the age of majority.
There is a single thumbscrew in the back that takes about 1 turn. Then the side panel drops down. Drives are in neat little holders -- just pop them into the frame, or pull them out with a thumb and index finger. So far all of my boxes have compatable drive holders, which is cool. Of course it would be easier to replace the thumbscrew with a spring-loaded little pull ring, but Apple already did that. A screw is goo to keep it from falling open while I'm moving the box.
You still gotta deal with the screws on cards, but I seldom do more than just shove the card in since I KNOW I will be pulling it out again someday, so why bother? On the very rare occasion that a card slips out far enough to lose contact, it only takes about 10 seconds to open the case, jab at all the cards, and boot the machine. If it works, just pop the top back on and twist the thumbscrew. If it doesn't work then it probably wasn't that anyway and I'll be ripping things out...
What I want to do (no, I don't, it would just be fun to see) would be a screwless case with the side panel replaced with plexi and neon lights lighting up the innards, and maybe a few mirrors in good places to help see into corners when I'm working on it. Then you get quick access and high visibility. Of course you still have the generally ugly box, but old habits die hard.
That would put the well-trained geeks in the upper class (ie - not poor, more than one telephone per household), meaning we could get great healthcare and excellent standard of living. The only problem in most S.A. countries (I have been told by people who go there regularly) is that geeks don't face headhunters as we know them, but headhunters who abduct and ransom for cash, or corporate thugs who want to stop their competition *dead*. < gulp > : (
I know he isn't a U.S. Citizen, but I would vote for him.
Congress wants to pass a law, so let them. Let it include these sections:
- NOMENCLATURE: CONSUMERS. Many bills and laws refer to the consumers of electronic devices and services as 'USERS', while non-elctronic device and service bills and laws refer to 'CONSUMERS'. CITIZEN or CONSUMER should be the term used, not USER.
- SUPPORT OF SOFTWARE. All software and hardware requires support. When consumers are unable to obtain support from the producer (unsupported products) the community MUST be able to reverse engineer those programs. In order for that to work, copying of software must be available without restriction once a producer discontinues support for a program. At such time that any group fails to provide support for a reasonable cost and within a reasonable time, all IP rights must be dissolved. To prevent lawsuits against people who support these projects, any software patents would also be dissolved. If a component in the software wishes to keep their patents, the group must release their source to a GPL-style license. Congress has all power of patents, so that shouldn't be hard for them, except in their pocketbooks. This provision cannot be taken away by license or other agreement.
- SUPPORT OF MEDIA. All media fail. CD-ROMs and DVDs get scratches, melt in the sun, etc. Any law preventing the duplication of media to any degree MUST support complete and free replacement of damaged media UNTIL THE MEDIA TYPE IS NO LONGER USED. (That means that 8-tracks are just now leaving the market, and the big black records are still good and must allow either duplication or free replacement.) If the tools for duplication of media are controlled with DRM, the provider must allow free and infinite replacements of media, and transitions to unlimited other media for backups (rather than a single backup copy). This provision cannot be taken away by license or any other agreement.
- PROMOTION OF BROADBAND. The CBDTPA states that it is trying to promote broadband distribution. Rather than restricting the rights of broadband consumers, a law promoting broadband should instead enhance the rights. True promotion of broadband would consist of a subsidy, fee restrictions for providers, no limit on NAT devices, and offering of services at reduced costs to the elderly and poor / college students. Because high-speed Internet access providers are currently appending the charges for regular telephone services (universal access fee, etc), they should be required to follow the same regulations.
- LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY. Current licenses tend to terminate all liability on the part of content producers. It is obvious that poorly written software is being exploited in the form of viruses, worms, and other destructive programs. I am a developer and understand that bugs happen even in good code; but some accountability must exist. Developers and corporations should not be able to sidestep all liability, indirectly harming consumers with poor products. Product support (as outlined above as a REQUIREMENT) should include timely and appropriate corrections to all software defects as support (30 days?), or immediate termination of all IP rights as discussed under SUPPORT above. Corporations can still license away all liability, but only on the provision that by law they must terminate all copyright and IP rights when so licensed, so that consumers can fix problems that arise.
A law with those provisions (and no loopholes) would protect consumers by removing some of the stigmatism of calling consumers "USERS", allow users to fix problems if the producers are unwilling or unable to, promote broadband (which is a stated goal of the CBDTPA), and allow a stronger legal ability for corporations to limit financial liability on programs.
That should hit most of the problem. BUT, it would be nearly impossible to get such a law passed thanks to the greed and fat wallets of the majority of Congress and the greed of corporations trying to get a bigger slice of the pie than they deserve.
If you want to store objects by location in n-space (like a sparse matrix), you could use a set with the coordinates as the key. A dense storage matrix can be trivially implemented with vector classes, but you cannot to matrix operations on them.
If you are a good computer scientist there are no real downsides. If you are just hacking a system together and don't understand how the datatypes and algorithms work, and you don't have time or care to read the manuals, you will be in trouble using the STL.
I have used several versions of the STL on several compilers and OS's, and find that as a whole, the STL has few downsides, **IF YOU READ AND UNDERSTAND WHAT IS GOING ON** If you don't understand the basics, it becomes a nightmare to debug. On the flip side, if you understand what is going on you can get very fast code at low development cost.
Developers need to understand that certain operations invalidate iterators, and things like that. (That is the most common error that I see.) When you get an error in STL code, usually it shows up not as a single error but as a huge list of errors as it propogates through the template library -- but it is just one coding error. You might consider those as downsides, but they are typical in computer programming.
A lot of people listed 'bugs', slow learning rate, and other problems, but in my experience the STL is easy to use if you consider the two aspects the STL covers -- data types and algorithms. I have seen other programmers struggle because they cannot separate the two. They think that string types should have string algorithms in the class, or sets have the set operations, and so on. The STL is an attempt to keep the two apart. It is easy to write new data classes that use the STL by implementing the few functions needed for all the algorithms, and it is easy to write new algorithms that use any STL object because they all implement the same small set of functions.
One example -- It is easy to change the allocation method (swap portions of ram to disk) simply by writing a new allocator. A co-worker insisted that the STL wouldn't work outside of RAM, but a simple allocator class allowed everything to work on disk for huge data stores. The co-worker had spent years working on implementing a few slgorithms and data types on his own. The STL with a simple, custom allocator worked faster than his code, and took much less time to develop. Poor guy -- I really felt sorry for him.
There are some problems with specific older compilers, but most are fixed. The older Metrowerks compiler didn't allow traits, the older Microsoft compiler didn't allow several kinds of nested types (use the service packs to fix them) and their debug info is terrible in VC6, GCC used to generate very bad STL code (it still has some quirks). The glitches are mostly fixed now. New, GOOD compilers will take longer to compile (downside) but will often generate either smaller code or significantly faster code (big benifit). I have seen cases where the executable doubled in size (the code bloat that people talk about), but the runtime decreased signficantly (not usually mentioned), and the code became much more readable. Since most of us (except embedded systems people) don't need to worry about size, the tradeoffs are acceptable.
Another benefit/downside is that if you use optimizing compilers that know about the STL, you can do really incredible things. For example, if you are using a valarray (value array) type to perform operations, you can get massive speedups. I use the Intel Optimizing complier for x86 chips, and it uses MMX, SSE, and SSE2 optimizations to perform many loop, array, and STL operations. It is cool to see huge sections of code the the compiler message "foo@bar@PARAM@Z has been selected for automatic CPU dispatch", and reading the generated code shows that it uses the MMX or XMM registers, depending on the CPU type, or use the slow, loop based values on 486/Pentium chips. A bad compiler would probably just go to the worst case, the slow loop -- so get a good compiler.
Itanium chips could do extremely well on many of the STL algorithms. (I have wondered if the Intel Optimizing compiler for Itanium would do massivly parallel ops with valarray classes. Does anyone have experience there?) Other parallel chips can benifit in this way as well, IF THE COMPILER IS SMART ENOUGH TO DO IT. The downside is that you have to know how things work and why. If the compiler doesn't do the optimization, perhaps another algorithm would work better in that case.
I have to say RTFM. BUG 1: Your iterator became invalid once something was erased. In the specs: "List reallocation occurs when a member function must insert or erase elements of the controlled sequence. In all such cases, only iterators or references that point at erased portions of the controlled sequence become invalid." BUG 2: There's not enough information, but it doesn't look like an STL issue. As for the docs, I have seen several good sets of documentation on the STL.
Tell them the problem, including asking if the BSA has the RIGHT to DEMAND that you run their programs on your computers.
If the legal geeks say that they do, get together with them and jointly request the IT department to move away from those companies.
That does two things -- first, you will show the BSA (not boy scouts) that you are willing to fight back, and second, it presents a case to the school the problems of private software in a public setting. (That's an obvious Free Software comment. karma++ )
I have no specific examples right now. A laywer probably could find some.
I recall hearing about, but do not recall the exact details of, situations where this is the case. Specifically, the GPL releases the authors of particular obligations, as allowed by contract law. Those obligations are still in effect under public domain restrictions, since public domain release only applies to copyright, not other IP issues like liability, trade secrets, warranty, and so on.
Actual instances of software liability is an ongoing topic. /. archives, news sources, and legal news sites have much to say as to how much liability different releases of software have.