Perhaps this "War on Copyright Infringment" will be as successful as the "War on Drugs".
The war on drugs is essentially a war on the poor. The war on copyright infringement is a war on the middle class, but the middle class has already been attacked by the IRS, unemployment, state/local taxes, their churches (the 10% "tax-deductible" tax), etc. Hitting them yet again seems pretty slimy, IMO.
No, you can pledge all you like. But government agents (i.e. teachers) can't lead children in a statement that asserts the existence of God. There are gray areas of the establishment clause, but this one isn't even close.
Regardless of constitutionality, I find it very sad that this whole issue over the Pledge of Allegiance has gotten more news coverage than (insert any one of a billion more important issues here).
The case officer at the SS administration told him he would have a better life if he gave up, cashed out, moved to another country and started his life over again.
Is there a way to sue Congress for writing such bad legislation and get awarded damages to buy things like cars in hard cash? Seriously, the SSN is artificial and is apparently causing real damage due to real negligence (allowing identity theft and then, saying, "[move] to another country and started his life over again"...that sucks really bad).
One problem with spyware is that it is not produced and distributed in "good faith." To some extent, so is Windows Media Player, for example, so, if spyware is deemed illegal, there is a good chance for unintended consequences. Are the odds good that the legislation will be specific enough?
Of course, some of the statements made by their CEO and other execs are so inane that we may be faced with a rare thing (at least in corporations) -- malice and incompetence.
It isn't rare at all. Just combine an incompetent engineering team with aggressive management and marketing. Bam, Dilbert in real life (or, just look to big consulting firms).
Okay, you be black for a second. Imagine you have to go to the police station to vote.
You are claiming most black people are wanted by the police? That's the only reason to mention that voting places also happen to be police stations.
For some people, the very aspect of voting for some white fool in a suit who will likely screw you anyway, makes the whole system bogus.
I guess Al Sharpton participates aggressively in primary debates for the fun of it? He is a smart guy and grills those white fools in a very public forum.
The high costs associated with running for office are only due to the costs of mingling with the people.
Yes, being personable and visible is a big part of politics. Who'd have thunk that?
I mean, really... do they need to spend $5mil travelling all over the freaking world, riding in limos and soaking up the cash with big expensive dinners and giant wardrobes?
Not many poor people have the education, social connections, international ties, and sheer ego to get elected in the first place much less face the kremlin to prevent nuclear war in a moment's notice.
Online voting would make the whole system more honest.
There are few things as insecure as the Internet (DOS attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, power outages, operating system bugs, default passwords in backbone routers, foriegn supercomputers breaking encryption). I wouldn't be at all suprised if organized crime owns key infrastructure points for a whole new generation of extortion and blackmail.
why would any one need more than 512 mb ram any way????????????????game devlps shd stick to some limit instead of asking for more, for every new release
3D modeling tools need more than 512MB of RAM for complex models, so the developers themselves need more RAM. I agree that they should target their games to more modest computers, however, but, then, they wouldn't get the "gee whiz" reviews from crappy gamer magazines.
As far as those modeling tools go, I felt pretty inadequate after loading one particular model that not only sucked up my 512MB of RAM but then proceeded to completely suck up the next 1GB of swap. Thankfully, good systems (e.g., modern UNIX and kin) take this in stride and I was able to kill the modeling tool without much trouble at all.
I do, however, have sensitive information such as usernames and passwords sent to my email.
A small measure of protection would be to immediately memorize/record off-line that sensitive information and then delete the e-mail. E-mail is always a gamble of varying odds, but deleting e-mail quickly probably reduces the liklihood of that information getting onto backup tapes somewhere.
Of course, this assumes "delete" really means delete...anyone know for sure? I can imagine for "help desk" reasons, "delete" might actually mean "wait for hysterical customer to want their deleted e-mail back." My hope is that the e-mail service would have the guts to really delete the e-mail and tell customers to be more careful next time.
"Universal" is a very ambitious word. I have seen attempts at standard "universal" 3D formats and realized that the problem space of 3D is so complex that "universal" will very likely never exist. So, who do we please? CAD/CAM? LOL: within CAD/CAM there is machining, molding, prototyping, ship building, process planning, etc. Mesh editing for still-lifes and animation? That would be easier but there are already formats for that (gee, it's just a mesh and some primitives).
The problem is simply that the standards documents become so large that no one can implement them, no one can follow all the changes in them, everyone will be behind, no one will be compatible with each other. I'm talking tens of thousands of pages of standards documents, for starters. And people thought "web based" and it's hundreds of related acronyms is bad? Just you wait!
Intel should just look to history and all the failed attempts at reforming 3D (IGES, STEP, and VRML to name a few) and revise their goals a bit lower.
Or, you could, gasp!, do some RESEARCH and find out if there is a distribution that supports that ONE piece of hardware.
Distributions are pretty much bound to OSS and ALSA, right? Understanding ALSA well enough to really configure it well is not easy (incomplete documentation, relying on Google for anecdotal "it works for me" posts, etc). Stack on all the other confusing "sound systems", like JACK, Enlightenment Sound Daemon, KDE's ARTS, whatever GNOME has, various kernel options, among a half a dozen others, and average users just don't have a chance.
I've been working with computers for over a decade and I still took days to figure out sound under linux, even when they said my sound card was supported!
I'm not sure what you regard as best practice here.
I'm not sure there is a best practice. Using multiple third-party libraries with different malloc conventions in a medium to large project with typical employee turnover, documentation, and testing just plain sucks all around. I'd say malloc is by far my least favorite aspect of C programming; in fact, I think popularizing garbage collection is one of the best contributions of Java to computing.
Though it's generally bad practice for libraries to allocate their own memory for returned data, it happens.
It happens a lot. I've seen a few expensive C-based libraries that clearly show their designers struggled with the classic caller-callee allocation dillema and lost. Debugging memory leaks in programs that use these libraries is typically hopeless and requires high effort-versus-progress computationally-expensive run-time checks to find them. I like C quite a bit, but it is disheartening to see such a simple malloc() function cause so much pain.
AT&T wireless took over and service deteriorated rapidly.
When you quit SunCom, did they give you a months-long runaround of sending you bills after your cancel date? I truly feel sorry for anyone stupid enough to sign up for automatic billing with them! SunCom are a bunch of retarded small-penised cone-headed fat-assed pimple-faced losers (in my opinion, of course).
I'm convinced that some companies just have a dysfunctional corporate culture that's immune to real reform. Their only hope is that things get so bad that all the top idiots lose their jobs -- and they're very, very lucky in choosing their new management. (That's basically what saved IBM.) But AT&T's so far gone, not even a total shakeout can save them.
This is why it is better for corporations to fail than for governments to fail. It compartmentalizes the damage and allows competition to soak up the victims, which is much much better than civil war, famine, and anarchy.
This is why November 2004 is going to be so hard a choice. Who do vote for? Oh dear oh dear, two choices and two paths to bigger government.
Let AT&T fall, they've earned it. Thankfully, I don't care and can sleep peacefully knowing that there are a dozen other companies I can do business with.
You should try out several other classes of benchmarks. Try Ogg Vorbis encoding, for example, and perhaps raytracing. You'll see that each architecture will win, but at different tasks (I've seen this myself). I estimate that the UltraSPARC FPU really is twice as strong as a Pentium III per clock, but things really jump around when SSE/VIS instructions get used. Compiler flags make measurable differences, as does using Sun's own compiler on SPARC. All this is also visible by looking at individual SPEC scores (not just the final averaged score).
But I want to yell "F*CK!" All those tens of thousands of people could be free to get truly productive jobs instead of bullsh*t paper pushing to support political favors...
Agreed, but there are too many people in the world, now, since so many bullshit jobs has allowed people to think they can afford to reproduce and raise their children to believe they can have a bullshit job, too. It's a vicious cycle.
As a result, the taxpayer is gouged incrementally until he feels a sense of entitlement to what is essentially elderly welfare, and politicians throw more money at the problem so as to not lose the votes of their dependents, thus passing the problem on to the next generation of taxpayers.
I can't deny any of these problems, but I have trouble placing the elderly as part of a healthy free market of health care. The elderly consume a very large proportion of health care costs (dying is extremely expensive), and it seems that an insurance-style business model cannot pay for their care. Whereas young and middle-aged people are perfectly served by insurance to cover their health risks, insurance premiums rise pretty much exponentially once people get into their 70s.
I am 99% libertarian in my viewpoints, but there are edge cases that need special attention (e.g, the old, the extremely poor/homeless, and the severely disabled). The true number of edge cases is much much smaller than Democrats would lead people to believe, but there are such cases, nonetheless.
A lot of us in the USA are very cynical about the government and how it operates. It's the American Way and has been for 200+ years.
We look at a company like Diebold, whose management have made public statements showing political allegiance, we see that they base their systems off of MS Windows and MS Access, we see their memos about how incompetent their software development is, and we really have to work hard to not shit ourselves over just how corruptable such a system would be.
I really don't know how the e-voting system in Brazil was developed, but it seems from your post that it must have progressed much more reasonably and fairly than it is progressing in the USA.
Perhaps Brazil should send some consultants to the USA to speak to Congress and the states?
You could fire 99% of the IRS employees and get the operating budget to that of a Taco Bell.
Unfortunately, the IRS is here to stay, for political reasons. Getting rid of the IRS as we know it would:
1) Make thousands of IRS employees unemployed (who would, of course, bitch about it). 2) Make tens of thousands of H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, etc. employees unemployed (who would, of course, bitch about it). 3) Put out of work many thousands of independent tax accountants (who would, of course, bitch about it). 4) Make it hard or impossible for so many well-to-do people and businesses to pay no tax at all (who would, of course, bitch about it). 5) It would put poor people out of their Earned Income Credit (who would, of course, bitch about it). 6) Bitch, bitch, bitch, moan, moan, moan, ad nauseum, until no politician would ever dream of altering the IRS.
Basically, the IRS is the biggest political tool ever created in human history. Getting rid of it is not only impossible, it's less possible than impossible.
Yes, but $200,000,000 could easily go towards infrastructure, for example, making life more livable for hundreds of thousands of people.
Even better, I would bet the sinking ships of social security and medicare could make good use of all that diffused and useless pork money (I bet it's in the tens of billions of dollars).
$200,000,000 is enough for 50 or more people (including me, of course:) to retire right now and never have to work another day ever in their lives. This isn't chump change, and the people "in power" who abuse it should be seriously ashamed.
Reading the posts above just warms my heart. The trolls, the flamers, the me-toos, the RTFAs, and even the bad jokes all are united in one voice. No other topic has joined slashdotters together in such harmony. We should all be very grateful to Real for such a tremendous gift.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps this "War on Copyright Infringment" will be as successful as the "War on Drugs".
The war on drugs is essentially a war on the poor. The war on copyright infringement is a war on the middle class, but the middle class has already been attacked by the IRS, unemployment, state/local taxes, their churches (the 10% "tax-deductible" tax), etc. Hitting them yet again seems pretty slimy, IMO.
'If you don't pay for it, you've stolen it.'
Wow. Where do I turn myself in for two decades of Christmas and birthdays?
Hey MPAA/RIAA, why don't you go fuck yourselves! I think you might like it!
No, you can pledge all you like. But government agents (i.e. teachers) can't lead children in a statement that asserts the existence of God. There are gray areas of the establishment clause, but this one isn't even close.
Regardless of constitutionality, I find it very sad that this whole issue over the Pledge of Allegiance has gotten more news coverage than (insert any one of a billion more important issues here).
The case officer at the SS administration told him he would have a better life if he gave up, cashed out, moved to another country and started his life over again.
Is there a way to sue Congress for writing such bad legislation and get awarded damages to buy things like cars in hard cash? Seriously, the SSN is artificial and is apparently causing real damage due to real negligence (allowing identity theft and then, saying, "[move] to another country and started his life over again"...that sucks really bad).
I relax by strangling cute little duckies at the pond in front of children. By their cheerful screams, I know they love it, and their mothers do too!
One problem with spyware is that it is not produced and distributed in "good faith." To some extent, so is Windows Media Player, for example, so, if spyware is deemed illegal, there is a good chance for unintended consequences. Are the odds good that the legislation will be specific enough?
Of course, some of the statements made by their CEO and other execs are so inane that we may be faced with a rare thing (at least in corporations) -- malice and incompetence.
It isn't rare at all. Just combine an incompetent engineering team with aggressive management and marketing. Bam, Dilbert in real life (or, just look to big consulting firms).
Okay, you be black for a second. Imagine you have to go to the police station to vote.
You are claiming most black people are wanted by the police? That's the only reason to mention that voting places also happen to be police stations.
For some people, the very aspect of voting for some white fool in a suit who will likely screw you anyway, makes the whole system bogus.
I guess Al Sharpton participates aggressively in primary debates for the fun of it? He is a smart guy and grills those white fools in a very public forum.
The high costs associated with running for office are only due to the costs of mingling with the people.
Yes, being personable and visible is a big part of politics. Who'd have thunk that?
I mean, really... do they need to spend $5mil travelling all over the freaking world, riding in limos and soaking up the cash with big expensive dinners and giant wardrobes?
Not many poor people have the education, social connections, international ties, and sheer ego to get elected in the first place much less face the kremlin to prevent nuclear war in a moment's notice.
Online voting would make the whole system more honest.
There are few things as insecure as the Internet (DOS attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, power outages, operating system bugs, default passwords in backbone routers, foriegn supercomputers breaking encryption). I wouldn't be at all suprised if organized crime owns key infrastructure points for a whole new generation of extortion and blackmail.
why would any one need more than 512 mb ram any way????????????????game devlps shd stick to some limit instead of asking for more, for every new release
3D modeling tools need more than 512MB of RAM for complex models, so the developers themselves need more RAM. I agree that they should target their games to more modest computers, however, but, then, they wouldn't get the "gee whiz" reviews from crappy gamer magazines.
As far as those modeling tools go, I felt pretty inadequate after loading one particular model that not only sucked up my 512MB of RAM but then proceeded to completely suck up the next 1GB of swap. Thankfully, good systems (e.g., modern UNIX and kin) take this in stride and I was able to kill the modeling tool without much trouble at all.
I do, however, have sensitive information such as usernames and passwords sent to my email.
A small measure of protection would be to immediately memorize/record off-line that sensitive information and then delete the e-mail. E-mail is always a gamble of varying odds, but deleting e-mail quickly probably reduces the liklihood of that information getting onto backup tapes somewhere.
Of course, this assumes "delete" really means delete...anyone know for sure? I can imagine for "help desk" reasons, "delete" might actually mean "wait for hysterical customer to want their deleted e-mail back." My hope is that the e-mail service would have the guts to really delete the e-mail and tell customers to be more careful next time.
"Universal" is a very ambitious word. I have seen attempts at standard "universal" 3D formats and realized that the problem space of 3D is so complex that "universal" will very likely never exist. So, who do we please? CAD/CAM? LOL: within CAD/CAM there is machining, molding, prototyping, ship building, process planning, etc. Mesh editing for still-lifes and animation? That would be easier but there are already formats for that (gee, it's just a mesh and some primitives).
The problem is simply that the standards documents become so large that no one can implement them, no one can follow all the changes in them, everyone will be behind, no one will be compatible with each other. I'm talking tens of thousands of pages of standards documents, for starters. And people thought "web based" and it's hundreds of related acronyms is bad? Just you wait!
Intel should just look to history and all the failed attempts at reforming 3D (IGES, STEP, and VRML to name a few) and revise their goals a bit lower.
who selflessy put ourselves in danger every day to eliminate the wasted space you "safies" use to create those awful traffic jams
Tailgating kills people. How's that for a wrench in your humor machine?
Or, you could, gasp!, do some RESEARCH and find out if there is a distribution that supports that ONE piece of hardware.
Distributions are pretty much bound to OSS and ALSA, right? Understanding ALSA well enough to really configure it well is not easy (incomplete documentation, relying on Google for anecdotal "it works for me" posts, etc). Stack on all the other confusing "sound systems", like JACK, Enlightenment Sound Daemon, KDE's ARTS, whatever GNOME has, various kernel options, among a half a dozen others, and average users just don't have a chance.
I've been working with computers for over a decade and I still took days to figure out sound under linux, even when they said my sound card was supported!
I'm not sure what you regard as best practice here.
I'm not sure there is a best practice. Using multiple third-party libraries with different malloc conventions in a medium to large project with typical employee turnover, documentation, and testing just plain sucks all around. I'd say malloc is by far my least favorite aspect of C programming; in fact, I think popularizing garbage collection is one of the best contributions of Java to computing.
Though it's generally bad practice for libraries to allocate their own memory for returned data, it happens.
It happens a lot. I've seen a few expensive C-based libraries that clearly show their designers struggled with the classic caller-callee allocation dillema and lost. Debugging memory leaks in programs that use these libraries is typically hopeless and requires high effort-versus-progress computationally-expensive run-time checks to find them. I like C quite a bit, but it is disheartening to see such a simple malloc() function cause so much pain.
AT&T wireless took over and service deteriorated rapidly.
When you quit SunCom, did they give you a months-long runaround of sending you bills after your cancel date? I truly feel sorry for anyone stupid enough to sign up for automatic billing with them! SunCom are a bunch of retarded small-penised cone-headed fat-assed pimple-faced losers (in my opinion, of course).
I'm convinced that some companies just have a dysfunctional corporate culture that's immune to real reform. Their only hope is that things get so bad that all the top idiots lose their jobs -- and they're very, very lucky in choosing their new management. (That's basically what saved IBM.) But AT&T's so far gone, not even a total shakeout can save them.
This is why it is better for corporations to fail than for governments to fail. It compartmentalizes the damage and allows competition to soak up the victims, which is much much better than civil war, famine, and anarchy.
This is why November 2004 is going to be so hard a choice. Who do vote for? Oh dear oh dear, two choices and two paths to bigger government.
Let AT&T fall, they've earned it. Thankfully, I don't care and can sleep peacefully knowing that there are a dozen other companies I can do business with.
You should try out several other classes of benchmarks. Try Ogg Vorbis encoding, for example, and perhaps raytracing. You'll see that each architecture will win, but at different tasks (I've seen this myself). I estimate that the UltraSPARC FPU really is twice as strong as a Pentium III per clock, but things really jump around when SSE/VIS instructions get used. Compiler flags make measurable differences, as does using Sun's own compiler on SPARC. All this is also visible by looking at individual SPEC scores (not just the final averaged score).
But I want to yell "F*CK!" All those tens of thousands of people could be free to get truly productive jobs instead of bullsh*t paper pushing to support political favors...
Agreed, but there are too many people in the world, now, since so many bullshit jobs has allowed people to think they can afford to reproduce and raise their children to believe they can have a bullshit job, too. It's a vicious cycle.
As a result, the taxpayer is gouged incrementally until he feels a sense of entitlement to what is essentially elderly welfare, and politicians throw more money at the problem so as to not lose the votes of their dependents, thus passing the problem on to the next generation of taxpayers.
I can't deny any of these problems, but I have trouble placing the elderly as part of a healthy free market of health care. The elderly consume a very large proportion of health care costs (dying is extremely expensive), and it seems that an insurance-style business model cannot pay for their care. Whereas young and middle-aged people are perfectly served by insurance to cover their health risks, insurance premiums rise pretty much exponentially once people get into their 70s.
I am 99% libertarian in my viewpoints, but there are edge cases that need special attention (e.g, the old, the extremely poor/homeless, and the severely disabled). The true number of edge cases is much much smaller than Democrats would lead people to believe, but there are such cases, nonetheless.
Why the big fuss about e-voting in the USA?
A lot of us in the USA are very cynical about the government and how it operates. It's the American Way and has been for 200+ years.
We look at a company like Diebold, whose management have made public statements showing political allegiance, we see that they base their systems off of MS Windows and MS Access, we see their memos about how incompetent their software development is, and we really have to work hard to not shit ourselves over just how corruptable such a system would be.
I really don't know how the e-voting system in Brazil was developed, but it seems from your post that it must have progressed much more reasonably and fairly than it is progressing in the USA.
Perhaps Brazil should send some consultants to the USA to speak to Congress and the states?
You could fire 99% of the IRS employees and get the operating budget to that of a Taco Bell.
Unfortunately, the IRS is here to stay, for political reasons. Getting rid of the IRS as we know it would:
1) Make thousands of IRS employees unemployed (who would, of course, bitch about it).
2) Make tens of thousands of H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, etc. employees unemployed (who would, of course, bitch about it).
3) Put out of work many thousands of independent tax accountants (who would, of course, bitch about it).
4) Make it hard or impossible for so many well-to-do people and businesses to pay no tax at all (who would, of course, bitch about it).
5) It would put poor people out of their Earned Income Credit (who would, of course, bitch about it).
6) Bitch, bitch, bitch, moan, moan, moan, ad nauseum, until no politician would ever dream of altering the IRS.
Basically, the IRS is the biggest political tool ever created in human history. Getting rid of it is not only impossible, it's less possible than impossible.
Yes, but $200,000,000 could easily go towards infrastructure, for example, making life more livable for hundreds of thousands of people.
Even better, I would bet the sinking ships of social security and medicare could make good use of all that diffused and useless pork money (I bet it's in the tens of billions of dollars).
$200,000,000 is enough for 50 or more people (including me, of course:) to retire right now and never have to work another day ever in their lives. This isn't chump change, and the people "in power" who abuse it should be seriously ashamed.
Reading the posts above just warms my heart. The trolls, the flamers, the me-toos, the RTFAs, and even the bad jokes all are united in one voice. No other topic has joined slashdotters together in such harmony. We should all be very grateful to Real for such a tremendous gift.
Damn