Re:No one took your time in the first place.
on
Take Back Your Time!
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Oh I see, it's MY fault that I was born in Southern California where the housing prices are sky high. And it's MY fault that Southern California has 10% of the nations population and 15% of the nation's jobs. It must be MY fault that I chose Computer Science as my major because once again the majority of those jobs are in the top 4 most expensive housing markets (San Fransisco area, Orange County Ca. Boston Ma., and San Diego Ca.)
No. It's not your fault for any of those things. It's your fault that you didn't move away from the insanity where you currently live. There are places to use those skills of yours all over the country that have much lower costs of living, so why don't you live somewhere else? Anywhere else?
You know why: You decided that it would be best to stay in Southern California, even with all of those reasons you're now complaining about.
$250k in Kentucky will buy you a large 4 bedroom home on a ten acre spread within 20 miles of a major city. In all of those major cities (Cincinnati, Louisville, Lexington, etc.) are companies that need tech people to write in-house software, keep the computers running, and even write software products for sale. But you've never even considered that possibility for some reason...
You aren't stuck in San Diego. You've got some reason you're not revealing to us that you want to be there which is stronger than your stated reasons for why life is so rough for you. It could be a desire to remain close to family. It could be that you think the rest of the country is crowded with rednecks and you're afraid of moving away from the neighborhoods you know so well (though San Diego isn't exactly one of America's cultural mecca's).
Whatever your reason is, fine, but quit complaining. You've decided what your goals are and unless you change them, you and your wife will have to spend lots of time at the office doing things you don't like.
When it's all said and done, you sound suspiciously like my relatives in Pennsylvania. They complain that there aren't any jobs and then refuse to move where jobs are. I don't have any patience with that attitude. The fact that I just packed up and moved across the country for a great job may just have something to do with that... Yes it was tough to move away from family, but looking back at the past year, it was clearly one of the best decisions I've ever made.
Misfits are BS artists who look good on the resume and manage to slip through the interviews. Some still do, even though we give design problems, ask about process issues, and call all of the references using phone book numbers (not the numbers in the resume)
As for your characterization of A players as "misfits", I somewhat agree. Not all A players are so geeked out that they can't play at all with others, but knowing you're better than most of the people you work with does lead to some interesting idiosyncracies...
Some companies *try* to hire the top 1-2% of all programmers. Few succeed. We're trying for the top 5-10% and some misfits will always slip through. The secret is to get rid of the misfits as quickly as possible. Many don't even try for A programmers. Many are convinced (with some good numbers behind them), that A programmers are generally more trouble than they're worth and B programmers are where the money is. Many places are convinced that an A architect backed up by B programmers is the amazing combination to shoot for.
Other organizations, like government contracters, are actively searching for C players because 1) they need to stretch out the project for as long as possible and most A and B players won't put up with that game, 2) they need someone who will be willing to take such a crappy salary and 3) they like having people who occupy a slot and stay there (preferably spending their day managing the signs around the coffeepot and making sure that there are enough stirrers).
You may think I'm joking. I'm not. The startup I had been working for went under, I stayed with them out of foolish optimism until I couldn't pay the rent. Then I desperately roamed the streets looking for a job and found one working for a government contractor. I tried to stay for a year out of personal pride at holding down the job. But after nine months, I had enough money in the bank to live on for six months and I got out before finding another job. I simply could not take the insanity any more.
I've never seen more people doing less work but still looking busy than inside that "secure" environment. There were maybe three of us out of a team of twenty who actually did work on a day to day basis. Now there are two and one of them woke up the other day (it was a hilarious email). That's "okay", though, because the contractor makes their money by the number of warm bodies "working" on the project, not by actually delivering a solution. *sigh*
U.S. copyright law, 17 USC 602, bans commercial importation of copies of copyrighted works into the United States without the copyright holder's permission.
However, the SCOTUS decision mentioned in the article trumps USC. At least SCOTUS thinks so, since they were cognizant of that law when they made their decision...
liquid sodium is non-corrosive; even more non-corrosive than the hydrogen used in the Hindenberg.
The Hindenberg burned because the lacquer that covered the outer fabric of the ship was highly flammable and caused the envelope to burn very quickly, allowing oxygen to mix with the hydrogen , which then also burned. Who knows what would have happened if the envelope had been painted with a fire-retardant chemical instead of a highly flammable one?
And even more reactive.
With some compounds, that's true. With the metals used in the primary and secondary heat exchange circuits of this design? Not likely.
Water, which is what the sodium is replacing, is much more corrosive to the metal than the liquid sodium and is the cause of much of the highest risk maintenance to those designs which use it (most of the reactors in the US). Using live steam also requires entire systems to properly manage it and all of those systems operate under extremely high pressure. The liquid sodium used for primary heat exchange in this reactor uses no moving parts (as in zero) and works at ambient pressure.
Yes, if you were to get water into the liquid sodium region of the reactor, it would react, probably burning at a rate slightly hotter than the temperature of the sodium itself (~950 F) and causing absolutely no risk to the reactor core which would still be quite happily sitting at the bottom of that pool churning out the calories.
The difference between a "terrorist" and a "freedom fighter" is choice of targets, IMHO. Terrorists primarily target civilian targets. These are targets that are of no tactical or strategy value militarily. The idea is that if you kill enough civilians they will force the government to capitulate and you will get your way.
This definition of terrorist is a new one and may have some merit. However, the actual working definition of the US government is any non-military group that uses force against US interests, military or civillian. The actual working definition of the Israeli government is equally disingenuous.
Though I agree that there could be a substantive difference between "freedom fighter" and "terrorist" (and the one you gave wasn't bad), the propaganda machines that most of the US listens to have intentionally defined those as any paramilitary action that was "for us" and any paramilitary action that was "against us".
But then again, that could just be my cynical view of US news organizations, so maybe I'm completely wrong. Your Mileage May Vary.
Right and wrong have only a passing relationship with legal and illegal. In the case of copyright law, they passed each other about forty years ago, waved once, and have never even visited since then.
You are correct that all of us are subject to the laws of our jurisdiction, but those laws are (ideally) subject to reactions of moral outrage from the populace on whose authority those laws are hopefully based. Right now, copyright laws are *way* out of whack from reality, but reality has a way of occasionally imposing itself. Even in a country with laws as fucked up as those in the US of A.
The issue isn't the RIAA/MPAA protecting copyrights, but buying enough legislators to make those copyrights permanent along with additional laws which will eventually prevent you from being able to trust your computer/TV/camera/stereo/etc. to do what you intend. And all under the banner of protecting their copyrights, quite legally stolen from the original artists.
The FSF is simply asking vendors to follow the only licenses the vendors have to leverage the valuable software products they've chosen to include in their commercial products.
The RIAA is also idiotic for suing its customer base, (which the FSF is also not doing), but then again, you knew you weren't comparing apples to apples, didn't you?
More like comparing "pure concentrated evil" to apples. IMNSHO, of course.
Why should the RIAA member companies have to adopt a new business model to combat theft? The problem isn't their business model, it's people stealing their music because they're too cheap.
Because people who are sharing songs don't see it as theft. Our culture sees the way the labels treat the artists as theft from the talent and the way the entertainment industry buys laws in Congress as theft from the public domain. Doing the moral equivalent of letting a friend tape a record just isn't theft.
Except according to the current laws. But those will catch up to reality eventually. It may take a little while though. In the meantime, you just need to have a little understanding of how right and wrong differ dramatically from legal and illegal (most intersections between ethical actions and present day laws appear to be accidental anyway).
if the company informs you of this....then you can't complain about this.
Really? Wouldn't there also need to be some kind of a "first ammendment override" clause?
No. The First Amendment to the Constitution only limits the actions of the Federal Government, not private institutions.
If I work for a newspaper and they decide not to print my article, it's not censorship, it's editorial control.
Going the other way: If you work for a company, they tell you that you are not to use company resources for personal use, that they will monitor your use of company resources to ensure compliance, and you get in trouble because they then did exactly that, you have no basis for complaint.
As an aside, I wouldn't work at such a place (and actually quit from one last year for exactly such a reason) but that is a separate issue from the legality of the employment agreement WRT monitoring.
Also, Jefferson considered Atheism to be a religion.
The definition of Atheism has changed through the years. Christianity was labelled "atheist" by Roman authorities because it denied the validity of existing religions in claiming exclusive truth. Most of the other religions of the day were tolerant of alternative gods and could peacefully coexist. Because Christianity could not accept a larger pantheon, it was therefore atheistic, using the legal definition of that time and culture.
Not refuting your point, just that words change meaning over time and what Jefferson meant when he said "atheism" may not be what you and I mean by the word today.
Our penal system doesn't evaluate price-effectiveness when considering between punishments (thank goodness, a bullet is pretty much the cheapest way of delivering "justice" yet found).
Two things about life in prison. First, having him rot in jail is a worse punishment than killing him would be (IMHO). Second, we have the chance later to say that he was innocent or we otherwise feel that he should be pardoned and he gets to be set free. That's a lot harder to do when you killed him ten years ago. Posthumous pardons don't quite have the same upside.
Before hard drives are allowed out of secured facilities, the HD platters must be fully shredded, as in completely ground to dust. Before, they just required that the multiply overwritten platters be broken into pieces smaller than.1"x.1", but then one of those data recovery houses arranged for a dramatic demonstration.
It took them slightly more than a month to put the pieces of a fully "demilled" disk back together and recover something like 30% of the original data from the disk, including multiple complete files.
So now the US military requires that every platter is pretty much ground to dust before being allowed out of a secure container. Rather impressive machine, actually.
Because people and ants are not directly or even slightly comparable, psychologically speaking. Ants are mentally wired to act collectively for common purpose. In general, people are wired for self-interest and can act contrary to leaders, but...
The observation that "a person is smart, people are dumb" is a useful simplification of the differences between individual psychology and group psychology. Quite simply, people act differently in groups than they do when they believe they are solitary. Usually, they cede some of their decision making to the group consensus. Not always, and only to a certain extent, but any number of experiments have been completed that substantiate that assertion.
As a result of this evidence, media, marketing, and politics have all evolved to take advantage of group psychology. Further, people spending any time in those professions generally opine that people are rather stupid. But when you and I look around and talk to our friends and family, we generally observe that we are among fairly smart people. That dichotomy goes directly back to the statement you objected to.
So forget about the ants. Analogies only stretch so far and the breadth of variety in nature is absolutely breathtaking. If there ever was an psychological opposite to the ant, we're probably it.
"it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven".
Go back to the Aramaic and bring your jargon filter. It really says "it is easier for a *rope* to pass through the eye of a needle than..." but the KJV translator didn't understand that in the author's dialect of Aramaic, the etymology of the chosen word for rope was what it was made from (i.e. camel hair). Like you might use the word twine (a rope made from two strings) or hawser (a heavy line for hoisting) and dearly confuse some poor translator hundreds of years hence...
As an aside, anyone who thinks the Bible is inerrant is just being silly. It is an amazing collection of works, and the myths contained within really are as wise and useful as most Christians believe, but that doesn't make them factual or even true. As a further aside, it's too bad that that's considered a troll instead of an invitation to serious conversation, but what are you going to do?
The service sucks because the areas with coverage are so spotty and the signal penetration into structures is so poor. There is no GSM coverage within a mile of my apartment. On city streets anywhere in LA, I'm lucky if the network will be good enough to hold onto a call for more than a minute (and I don't call while driving, but the fact that I can't call while riding as a passenger is particularly annoying).
The phone sucks because it's interface is unbelievably painful to use (one example of many: when trying to click to 'Smallberries, John' in the phone book by clicking '7' four times (P->Q->R->S) it stops for two seconds to tell me that there aren't any Q's), the rather bulky battery that comes with it barely lasts a day on standby, the fact that if it can't contact the network for 30 minutes it gives up permanently (and you'll never know it by looking at the external screen, you have to open the phone to see that status). The only good thing about that phone was the fact that it sounded great.
As a note: I did also try various Nokia phones, but they didn't have any better luck at finding a signal than the Motorola phone so I took them back within the 30 day limit. But I ended up being stuck with the T720, so now I get to find a fun way to treat it right.
Believe me, I despise both AT&T Wireless and the Motorola Mobile phone. But the only residue I have of that whole sordid experience is the phone, so I'll take my frustration out on that.
You just described my entire experience with AT&T after moving to SoCal. Also, I too was cursed with the hellishly awful T720 phone and now that I'm not longer a customer, I'm trying to come up with an appropriately vindictive way to demolish that shiny little instrument of frustration...
"The Matrix", "Star Wars", the Biblical Jesus story and the modern interpretation of the Jesus story all have the same ultimate basis, namely that each is another example of the hero-myth, of which there have been thousands and millions for as long as humans have had the ability to tell stories to each other.
I believe (along with others) that the hero-myth has it's origins in our biological goals of learning and helping our children and community the best we know to succeed. This shouldn't be interpreted as saying that the author of the hero-myth is concious of these reasons (though there is plenty of evidence that the Gospel accounts were specifically written to fulfill earlier prophetical and mythical heroes such as those written about by Isaiah). Instead, we look for an example to use as a teaching and learning tool and if the available real examples aren't up to the task, we'll invent one or more characters who are.
Don't be upset that the Matrix draws upon the Christian mythos for much of its material. There's a rich history there and enough of our modern Western population knows that story to make this story culturally relevant on several levels. The good and evil symbols from Christianity are all part of a larger context that can be drawn upon by this storyteller without needing explicit reference. There is a natural-feeling rightness to the individual arrayed against seemingly overwhelming odds and finding a way to succeed that we wish for in our own struggles.
Life can be overwhelming if you sit down and consider all of the things you'll need to do to make a success of it. The hero myth simplifies the story of that struggle down to one gigantic challenge and provides a nice happy ending to help us get past the paralyzing analysis of our problems and just get to working on them.
As for the Jesus myth, I read it and see a philosophy very close to the Tao presented by Jesus, a philosophy that knowing Heaven during our lifetime is part of the potential and birthright of each person.
The book was so enormously implausible that I couldn't even find it slightly entertaining. Luckily, when I was that age, I didn't have anything to do with my life so it's not like the time was relaly wasted.
They blew the fuses on the control boards of the teleport devices during fabrication (to make it look like any tampering lets the smoke out) and the other galactic races never figured out that 1) the power wasn't flowing through the obvious "blown" circuits and 2) the "blowing" of the circuits didn't happen when they opened it. At least the lack of smell might hint to the 10,000 year advanced technologist that the cold melted wire might be a ruse...
And that's one of the least egregious problems in the story. L Ron Hubbard is quite simply one of the worst authors ever published.
Auditing is very different from a code review. Code reviews are done by people, once or twice or at most three times. Auditing can be done during each build on a developer's machine or if that's too much of a PITA, at a minimum as a part of the nightly build or possibly the version control checkin script.
I'm talking about automated code review, done by a tool that checks code for various conditions that it knows how to detect.
This is not a person or group of people going over source code in an attempt to improve the quality of that code. This is a program checking to make sure that your inheritance tree is never deeper than five, that all files have a conventions-compliant preamble at the start, that the cyclomatic complexity of every method is below an acceptable measure (8), that other measures of method and class complexity are below acceptable measures, and that there are no string or numeric literals in the code except for "", 1, 0, or -1.
Among other things. And doing all of that in a few minutes at most.
JTest can examine your code for several hundred conditions and you can add more once you understand how to write/modify a JTest template. It's pretty amazing to see all of the crap that you thought you could get away with that these tools can catch for you.
A testing organization should have audit tools that can find things like this. Literals in code is a *bad* idea and exceptions to the rule should be carefully scrutinized and explained in the code documentation.
Some literals, like "", 0, 1, and sometimes -1 are pretty much unavoidable, but for the most part, you shouldn't find numberic or string literals just lying around in source code.
Ignore the rule for test code (your audit software should be able to evaluate the "test" exception to the rule automatically, using the same method to discriminate between test code and real code that you do, whether by method name, class name, directory, whatever).
Now, you as a tester shouldn't necessarily be personally responsible for enforcing this rule, but your testing organization most definitely should be. These tools are dirt cheap for the increased confidence in quality they provide.
Some examples include JTest, TogetherSoft (now Borland), there's a bunch of free tools that are less capable than JTest and several other commercial tools that are bigger/more complete.
Yes legal bulling is illegal, but do you want to court to prove it?
Press charges and let the DA take the financial hit for you. Threatening to use the legal system when you have no intention of actually pursuing the case in a court of law is a crime called "barratry".
IANAL, so I don't know all of the details of how barratry is defined. I know that repeatedly threatening to take someone to court without actually taking them to court qualifies. I have no idea if actually filing papers that you know will get thrown out qualifies. Is there a lawyer in the house who can help us out here?
Yeah, but why bother? Risk analysis includes two factors, the impact if the risk occurs and the chance of occuring.
Given SCO's first and best shot at showing copyright infringement (the subject of this article), the risk of them succeeding against RedHat's request for a judgement is between zero and nil.
Now, it will be interesting to see if IBM's RCU and NUMA contributions are attached by Sequent's AT&T license (this is the 890k lines of code that SCO is squawking about). Personally, I estimate the chances of this happening between 2% and 5%, (largely because 1) the AT&T ownership claim is weak (remember the BSDI case?), 2) the AT&T contract is likely to be seriously weakened by the first ruling on it, 3) IBM already negotiated a much more relaxed contract, and finally 4) IBM claims that they rewrote the RCU and NUMA code for Linux and did not copy it directly from the Sequent mainframe sources).
So given that SCO has a very low probability of succeeding in their claim and that the only things affected by the claims are performance improvements for SMP systems, this risk is a non-starter. Nobody is going to mobilize developers to "fix" this until something actually needs fixing.
Customers are not liable for the sins of the vendor and people currently using Linux have no need of permission from SCO or anyone else to continue using Linux as the OS of their systems. There is no emergency, there is no need for panicked reactions.
That can be true, except that neither the comments or the code in this case were stolen. Caldera released this code under the BSD license and AT&T before them allowed multiple books to publish this exact code (including comments) without restriction. This stuff is as close to public domain as it can get while still retaining an attribution requirement.
Now, if you think all 890,000 lines of code they cited in just one instance were comments, continue to live in that dreamworld.
If you think that asserted infringement of IBM's RCU and NUMA contribution has anything to do with this snippet of Sys7 source code released by Caldera under the BSD license, you're the one clearly living in a dreamworld.
This example wouldn't stand up to 60 seconds of examination in court. The ownership of RCU and NUMA (the 890,000 lines you're referring to) will be determined in due time and it's likely that the same thing will happen to SCO as happened to AT&T, only faster.
Only the most blind advocate would suspect that somebody wrote new code in a black box and then stole comments that coincidentally happened to match correctly.
RTFA. Nobody is making that assertion. All we're asserting is that even if it wasn't public domain twenty five years ago when it was originally published, it is legal to use this particular code under the more recent BSD license from Caldera (we'll need to correct the attribution, though).
Face it. There is stolen code in Linux.
Wanna provide some evidence for that assertion? So far, SCO hasn't managed to come up with even one line of stolen code. It's likely that this is their biggest gun since they're only likely to want to show off the most compelling example in their first presentation. But the "best they've got" is code that they publically licensed years ago and has a 50/50 chance of being ruled in the public domain decades before that.
Next.
A reasonable advocate would be working on a method to right now to find coders who have NEVER seen either the SCO code, the licensed IBM code or the stolen Linux code and begin a process of writing true black-box replacements.
Actually, that's not how copyright tends to work. And I have a feeling we (the open source community) will wait for the judgement in the RedHat case. That one is coming fairly quickly compared to the IBM case and RedHat is asking for a judgement of non-infringement. When they get it (because SCO won't have anything to counter the claim), the Linux kernel is completely off the hook.
Look, it's quite possible that you're not trolling and that you 1) didn't read the article, 2) have a seriously misinformed view of how copyright laws work, and 3) don't have a very practical approach to problem solving. If so, I'd suggest that you just keep quiet next time. Remember that it is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt -- Mark Twain (para).
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Oh I see, it's MY fault that I was born in Southern California where the housing prices are sky high. And it's MY fault that Southern California has 10% of the nations population and 15% of the nation's jobs. It must be MY fault that I chose Computer Science as my major because once again the majority of those jobs are in the top 4 most expensive housing markets (San Fransisco area, Orange County Ca. Boston Ma., and San Diego Ca.)
No. It's not your fault for any of those things. It's your fault that you didn't move away from the insanity where you currently live. There are places to use those skills of yours all over the country that have much lower costs of living, so why don't you live somewhere else? Anywhere else?
You know why: You decided that it would be best to stay in Southern California, even with all of those reasons you're now complaining about.
$250k in Kentucky will buy you a large 4 bedroom home on a ten acre spread within 20 miles of a major city. In all of those major cities (Cincinnati, Louisville, Lexington, etc.) are companies that need tech people to write in-house software, keep the computers running, and even write software products for sale. But you've never even considered that possibility for some reason...
You aren't stuck in San Diego. You've got some reason you're not revealing to us that you want to be there which is stronger than your stated reasons for why life is so rough for you. It could be a desire to remain close to family. It could be that you think the rest of the country is crowded with rednecks and you're afraid of moving away from the neighborhoods you know so well (though San Diego isn't exactly one of America's cultural mecca's).
Whatever your reason is, fine, but quit complaining. You've decided what your goals are and unless you change them, you and your wife will have to spend lots of time at the office doing things you don't like.
When it's all said and done, you sound suspiciously like my relatives in Pennsylvania. They complain that there aren't any jobs and then refuse to move where jobs are. I don't have any patience with that attitude. The fact that I just packed up and moved across the country for a great job may just have something to do with that... Yes it was tough to move away from family, but looking back at the past year, it was clearly one of the best decisions I've ever made.
Regards,
Ross
Misfits are BS artists who look good on the resume and manage to slip through the interviews. Some still do, even though we give design problems, ask about process issues, and call all of the references using phone book numbers (not the numbers in the resume)
As for your characterization of A players as "misfits", I somewhat agree. Not all A players are so geeked out that they can't play at all with others, but knowing you're better than most of the people you work with does lead to some interesting idiosyncracies...
Regards,
Ross
Some companies *try* to hire the top 1-2% of all programmers. Few succeed. We're trying for the top 5-10% and some misfits will always slip through. The secret is to get rid of the misfits as quickly as possible. Many don't even try for A programmers. Many are convinced (with some good numbers behind them), that A programmers are generally more trouble than they're worth and B programmers are where the money is. Many places are convinced that an A architect backed up by B programmers is the amazing combination to shoot for.
Other organizations, like government contracters, are actively searching for C players because 1) they need to stretch out the project for as long as possible and most A and B players won't put up with that game, 2) they need someone who will be willing to take such a crappy salary and 3) they like having people who occupy a slot and stay there (preferably spending their day managing the signs around the coffeepot and making sure that there are enough stirrers).
You may think I'm joking. I'm not. The startup I had been working for went under, I stayed with them out of foolish optimism until I couldn't pay the rent. Then I desperately roamed the streets looking for a job and found one working for a government contractor. I tried to stay for a year out of personal pride at holding down the job. But after nine months, I had enough money in the bank to live on for six months and I got out before finding another job. I simply could not take the insanity any more.
I've never seen more people doing less work but still looking busy than inside that "secure" environment. There were maybe three of us out of a team of twenty who actually did work on a day to day basis. Now there are two and one of them woke up the other day (it was a hilarious email). That's "okay", though, because the contractor makes their money by the number of warm bodies "working" on the project, not by actually delivering a solution. *sigh*
Regards,
Ross
U.S. copyright law, 17 USC 602, bans commercial importation of copies of copyrighted works into the United States without the copyright holder's permission.
However, the SCOTUS decision mentioned in the article trumps USC. At least SCOTUS thinks so, since they were cognizant of that law when they made their decision...
Regards,
Ross
liquid sodium is non-corrosive; even more non-corrosive than the hydrogen used in the Hindenberg.
The Hindenberg burned because the lacquer that covered the outer fabric of the ship was highly flammable and caused the envelope to burn very quickly, allowing oxygen to mix with the hydrogen , which then also burned. Who knows what would have happened if the envelope had been painted with a fire-retardant chemical instead of a highly flammable one?
And even more reactive.
With some compounds, that's true. With the metals used in the primary and secondary heat exchange circuits of this design? Not likely.
Water, which is what the sodium is replacing, is much more corrosive to the metal than the liquid sodium and is the cause of much of the highest risk maintenance to those designs which use it (most of the reactors in the US). Using live steam also requires entire systems to properly manage it and all of those systems operate under extremely high pressure. The liquid sodium used for primary heat exchange in this reactor uses no moving parts (as in zero) and works at ambient pressure.
Yes, if you were to get water into the liquid sodium region of the reactor, it would react, probably burning at a rate slightly hotter than the temperature of the sodium itself (~950 F) and causing absolutely no risk to the reactor core which would still be quite happily sitting at the bottom of that pool churning out the calories.
Regards,
Ross
The difference between a "terrorist" and a "freedom fighter" is choice of targets, IMHO. Terrorists primarily target civilian targets. These are targets that are of no tactical or strategy value militarily. The idea is that if you kill enough civilians they will force the government to capitulate and you will get your way.
This definition of terrorist is a new one and may have some merit. However, the actual working definition of the US government is any non-military group that uses force against US interests, military or civillian. The actual working definition of the Israeli government is equally disingenuous.
Though I agree that there could be a substantive difference between "freedom fighter" and "terrorist" (and the one you gave wasn't bad), the propaganda machines that most of the US listens to have intentionally defined those as any paramilitary action that was "for us" and any paramilitary action that was "against us".
But then again, that could just be my cynical view of US news organizations, so maybe I'm completely wrong. Your Mileage May Vary.
Regards,
Ross
Right and wrong have only a passing relationship with legal and illegal. In the case of copyright law, they passed each other about forty years ago, waved once, and have never even visited since then.
You are correct that all of us are subject to the laws of our jurisdiction, but those laws are (ideally) subject to reactions of moral outrage from the populace on whose authority those laws are hopefully based. Right now, copyright laws are *way* out of whack from reality, but reality has a way of occasionally imposing itself. Even in a country with laws as fucked up as those in the US of A.
Regards,
Ross
The issue isn't the RIAA/MPAA protecting copyrights, but buying enough legislators to make those copyrights permanent along with additional laws which will eventually prevent you from being able to trust your computer/TV/camera/stereo/etc. to do what you intend. And all under the banner of protecting their copyrights, quite legally stolen from the original artists.
The FSF is simply asking vendors to follow the only licenses the vendors have to leverage the valuable software products they've chosen to include in their commercial products.
The RIAA is also idiotic for suing its customer base, (which the FSF is also not doing), but then again, you knew you weren't comparing apples to apples, didn't you?
More like comparing "pure concentrated evil" to apples. IMNSHO, of course.
Regards,
Ross
Why should the RIAA member companies have to adopt a new business model to combat theft? The problem isn't their business model, it's people stealing their music because they're too cheap.
Because people who are sharing songs don't see it as theft. Our culture sees the way the labels treat the artists as theft from the talent and the way the entertainment industry buys laws in Congress as theft from the public domain. Doing the moral equivalent of letting a friend tape a record just isn't theft.
Except according to the current laws. But those will catch up to reality eventually. It may take a little while though. In the meantime, you just need to have a little understanding of how right and wrong differ dramatically from legal and illegal (most intersections between ethical actions and present day laws appear to be accidental anyway).
Regards,
Ross
if the company informs you of this ....then you can't complain about this.
Really? Wouldn't there also need to be some kind of a "first ammendment override" clause?
No. The First Amendment to the Constitution only limits the actions of the Federal Government, not private institutions.
If I work for a newspaper and they decide not to print my article, it's not censorship, it's editorial control.
Going the other way: If you work for a company, they tell you that you are not to use company resources for personal use, that they will monitor your use of company resources to ensure compliance, and you get in trouble because they then did exactly that, you have no basis for complaint.
As an aside, I wouldn't work at such a place (and actually quit from one last year for exactly such a reason) but that is a separate issue from the legality of the employment agreement WRT monitoring.
Regards,
Ross
Also, Jefferson considered Atheism to be a religion.
The definition of Atheism has changed through the years. Christianity was labelled "atheist" by Roman authorities because it denied the validity of existing religions in claiming exclusive truth. Most of the other religions of the day were tolerant of alternative gods and could peacefully coexist. Because Christianity could not accept a larger pantheon, it was therefore atheistic, using the legal definition of that time and culture.
Not refuting your point, just that words change meaning over time and what Jefferson meant when he said "atheism" may not be what you and I mean by the word today.
Regards,
Ross
Our penal system doesn't evaluate price-effectiveness when considering between punishments (thank goodness, a bullet is pretty much the cheapest way of delivering "justice" yet found).
Two things about life in prison. First, having him rot in jail is a worse punishment than killing him would be (IMHO). Second, we have the chance later to say that he was innocent or we otherwise feel that he should be pardoned and he gets to be set free. That's a lot harder to do when you killed him ten years ago. Posthumous pardons don't quite have the same upside.
Regards,
Ross
Before hard drives are allowed out of secured facilities, the HD platters must be fully shredded, as in completely ground to dust. Before, they just required that the multiply overwritten platters be broken into pieces smaller than .1"x.1", but then one of those data recovery houses arranged for a dramatic demonstration.
It took them slightly more than a month to put the pieces of a fully "demilled" disk back together and recover something like 30% of the original data from the disk, including multiple complete files.
So now the US military requires that every platter is pretty much ground to dust before being allowed out of a secure container. Rather impressive machine, actually.
Regards,
Ross
Because people and ants are not directly or even slightly comparable, psychologically speaking. Ants are mentally wired to act collectively for common purpose. In general, people are wired for self-interest and can act contrary to leaders, but...
The observation that "a person is smart, people are dumb" is a useful simplification of the differences between individual psychology and group psychology. Quite simply, people act differently in groups than they do when they believe they are solitary. Usually, they cede some of their decision making to the group consensus. Not always, and only to a certain extent, but any number of experiments have been completed that substantiate that assertion.
As a result of this evidence, media, marketing, and politics have all evolved to take advantage of group psychology. Further, people spending any time in those professions generally opine that people are rather stupid. But when you and I look around and talk to our friends and family, we generally observe that we are among fairly smart people. That dichotomy goes directly back to the statement you objected to.
So forget about the ants. Analogies only stretch so far and the breadth of variety in nature is absolutely breathtaking. If there ever was an psychological opposite to the ant, we're probably it.
Regards,
Ross
"it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven".
Go back to the Aramaic and bring your jargon filter. It really says "it is easier for a *rope* to pass through the eye of a needle than..." but the KJV translator didn't understand that in the author's dialect of Aramaic, the etymology of the chosen word for rope was what it was made from (i.e. camel hair). Like you might use the word twine (a rope made from two strings) or hawser (a heavy line for hoisting) and dearly confuse some poor translator hundreds of years hence...
As an aside, anyone who thinks the Bible is inerrant is just being silly. It is an amazing collection of works, and the myths contained within really are as wise and useful as most Christians believe, but that doesn't make them factual or even true. As a further aside, it's too bad that that's considered a troll instead of an invitation to serious conversation, but what are you going to do?
Regards,
Ross
Both the service and the phone suck.
The service sucks because the areas with coverage are so spotty and the signal penetration into structures is so poor. There is no GSM coverage within a mile of my apartment. On city streets anywhere in LA, I'm lucky if the network will be good enough to hold onto a call for more than a minute (and I don't call while driving, but the fact that I can't call while riding as a passenger is particularly annoying).
The phone sucks because it's interface is unbelievably painful to use (one example of many: when trying to click to 'Smallberries, John' in the phone book by clicking '7' four times (P->Q->R->S) it stops for two seconds to tell me that there aren't any Q's), the rather bulky battery that comes with it barely lasts a day on standby, the fact that if it can't contact the network for 30 minutes it gives up permanently (and you'll never know it by looking at the external screen, you have to open the phone to see that status). The only good thing about that phone was the fact that it sounded great.
As a note: I did also try various Nokia phones, but they didn't have any better luck at finding a signal than the Motorola phone so I took them back within the 30 day limit. But I ended up being stuck with the T720, so now I get to find a fun way to treat it right.
Believe me, I despise both AT&T Wireless and the Motorola Mobile phone. But the only residue I have of that whole sordid experience is the phone, so I'll take my frustration out on that.
Regards,
Ross
You just described my entire experience with AT&T after moving to SoCal. Also, I too was cursed with the hellishly awful T720 phone and now that I'm not longer a customer, I'm trying to come up with an appropriately vindictive way to demolish that shiny little instrument of frustration...
Any good ideas?
Regards,
Ross
"The Matrix", "Star Wars", the Biblical Jesus story and the modern interpretation of the Jesus story all have the same ultimate basis, namely that each is another example of the hero-myth, of which there have been thousands and millions for as long as humans have had the ability to tell stories to each other.
:)
I believe (along with others) that the hero-myth has it's origins in our biological goals of learning and helping our children and community the best we know to succeed. This shouldn't be interpreted as saying that the author of the hero-myth is concious of these reasons (though there is plenty of evidence that the Gospel accounts were specifically written to fulfill earlier prophetical and mythical heroes such as those written about by Isaiah). Instead, we look for an example to use as a teaching and learning tool and if the available real examples aren't up to the task, we'll invent one or more characters who are.
Don't be upset that the Matrix draws upon the Christian mythos for much of its material. There's a rich history there and enough of our modern Western population knows that story to make this story culturally relevant on several levels. The good and evil symbols from Christianity are all part of a larger context that can be drawn upon by this storyteller without needing explicit reference. There is a natural-feeling rightness to the individual arrayed against seemingly overwhelming odds and finding a way to succeed that we wish for in our own struggles.
Life can be overwhelming if you sit down and consider all of the things you'll need to do to make a success of it. The hero myth simplifies the story of that struggle down to one gigantic challenge and provides a nice happy ending to help us get past the paralyzing analysis of our problems and just get to working on them.
As for the Jesus myth, I read it and see a philosophy very close to the Tao presented by Jesus, a philosophy that knowing Heaven during our lifetime is part of the potential and birthright of each person.
But then again, I could be wrong
Regards,
Ross
The book was so enormously implausible that I couldn't even find it slightly entertaining. Luckily, when I was that age, I didn't have anything to do with my life so it's not like the time was relaly wasted.
They blew the fuses on the control boards of the teleport devices during fabrication (to make it look like any tampering lets the smoke out) and the other galactic races never figured out that 1) the power wasn't flowing through the obvious "blown" circuits and 2) the "blowing" of the circuits didn't happen when they opened it. At least the lack of smell might hint to the 10,000 year advanced technologist that the cold melted wire might be a ruse...
And that's one of the least egregious problems in the story. L Ron Hubbard is quite simply one of the worst authors ever published.
Regards,
Ross
Auditing is very different from a code review. Code reviews are done by people, once or twice or at most three times. Auditing can be done during each build on a developer's machine or if that's too much of a PITA, at a minimum as a part of the nightly build or possibly the version control checkin script.
I'm talking about automated code review, done by a tool that checks code for various conditions that it knows how to detect.
This is not a person or group of people going over source code in an attempt to improve the quality of that code. This is a program checking to make sure that your inheritance tree is never deeper than five, that all files have a conventions-compliant preamble at the start, that the cyclomatic complexity of every method is below an acceptable measure (8), that other measures of method and class complexity are below acceptable measures, and that there are no string or numeric literals in the code except for "", 1, 0, or -1.
Among other things. And doing all of that in a few minutes at most.
JTest can examine your code for several hundred conditions and you can add more once you understand how to write/modify a JTest template. It's pretty amazing to see all of the crap that you thought you could get away with that these tools can catch for you.
Regards,
Ross
A testing organization should have audit tools that can find things like this. Literals in code is a *bad* idea and exceptions to the rule should be carefully scrutinized and explained in the code documentation.
Some literals, like "", 0, 1, and sometimes -1 are pretty much unavoidable, but for the most part, you shouldn't find numberic or string literals just lying around in source code.
Ignore the rule for test code (your audit software should be able to evaluate the "test" exception to the rule automatically, using the same method to discriminate between test code and real code that you do, whether by method name, class name, directory, whatever).
Now, you as a tester shouldn't necessarily be personally responsible for enforcing this rule, but your testing organization most definitely should be. These tools are dirt cheap for the increased confidence in quality they provide.
Some examples include JTest, TogetherSoft (now Borland), there's a bunch of free tools that are less capable than JTest and several other commercial tools that are bigger/more complete.
Regards,
Ross
Then you missed the part where she slammed Democrats too.
Buddy, the party you appear to be so excited about is exactly one half of the problem. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are anyone's friends.
At least this candidate has the native intelligence to recognize that fact.
I'll vote for her.
Regards,
Ross
Yes legal bulling is illegal, but do you want to court to prove it?
Press charges and let the DA take the financial hit for you. Threatening to use the legal system when you have no intention of actually pursuing the case in a court of law is a crime called "barratry".
IANAL, so I don't know all of the details of how barratry is defined. I know that repeatedly threatening to take someone to court without actually taking them to court qualifies. I have no idea if actually filing papers that you know will get thrown out qualifies. Is there a lawyer in the house who can help us out here?
Regards,
Ross
Yeah, but why bother? Risk analysis includes two factors, the impact if the risk occurs and the chance of occuring.
Given SCO's first and best shot at showing copyright infringement (the subject of this article), the risk of them succeeding against RedHat's request for a judgement is between zero and nil.
Now, it will be interesting to see if IBM's RCU and NUMA contributions are attached by Sequent's AT&T license (this is the 890k lines of code that SCO is squawking about). Personally, I estimate the chances of this happening between 2% and 5%, (largely because 1) the AT&T ownership claim is weak (remember the BSDI case?), 2) the AT&T contract is likely to be seriously weakened by the first ruling on it, 3) IBM already negotiated a much more relaxed contract, and finally 4) IBM claims that they rewrote the RCU and NUMA code for Linux and did not copy it directly from the Sequent mainframe sources).
So given that SCO has a very low probability of succeeding in their claim and that the only things affected by the claims are performance improvements for SMP systems, this risk is a non-starter. Nobody is going to mobilize developers to "fix" this until something actually needs fixing.
Customers are not liable for the sins of the vendor and people currently using Linux have no need of permission from SCO or anyone else to continue using Linux as the OS of their systems. There is no emergency, there is no need for panicked reactions.
Regards,
Ross
Of course stealing comments is IP infringement.
That can be true, except that neither the comments or the code in this case were stolen. Caldera released this code under the BSD license and AT&T before them allowed multiple books to publish this exact code (including comments) without restriction. This stuff is as close to public domain as it can get while still retaining an attribution requirement.
Now, if you think all 890,000 lines of code they cited in just one instance were comments, continue to live in that dreamworld.
If you think that asserted infringement of IBM's RCU and NUMA contribution has anything to do with this snippet of Sys7 source code released by Caldera under the BSD license, you're the one clearly living in a dreamworld.
This example wouldn't stand up to 60 seconds of examination in court. The ownership of RCU and NUMA (the 890,000 lines you're referring to) will be determined in due time and it's likely that the same thing will happen to SCO as happened to AT&T, only faster.
Only the most blind advocate would suspect that somebody wrote new code in a black box and then stole comments that coincidentally happened to match correctly.
RTFA. Nobody is making that assertion. All we're asserting is that even if it wasn't public domain twenty five years ago when it was originally published, it is legal to use this particular code under the more recent BSD license from Caldera (we'll need to correct the attribution, though).
Face it. There is stolen code in Linux.
Wanna provide some evidence for that assertion? So far, SCO hasn't managed to come up with even one line of stolen code. It's likely that this is their biggest gun since they're only likely to want to show off the most compelling example in their first presentation. But the "best they've got" is code that they publically licensed years ago and has a 50/50 chance of being ruled in the public domain decades before that.
Next.
A reasonable advocate would be working on a method to right now to find coders who have NEVER seen either the SCO code, the licensed IBM code or the stolen Linux code and begin a process of writing true black-box replacements.
Actually, that's not how copyright tends to work. And I have a feeling we (the open source community) will wait for the judgement in the RedHat case. That one is coming fairly quickly compared to the IBM case and RedHat is asking for a judgement of non-infringement. When they get it (because SCO won't have anything to counter the claim), the Linux kernel is completely off the hook.
Look, it's quite possible that you're not trolling and that you 1) didn't read the article, 2) have a seriously misinformed view of how copyright laws work, and 3) don't have a very practical approach to problem solving. If so, I'd suggest that you just keep quiet next time. Remember that it is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt -- Mark Twain (para).
Regards,
Ross