How can warrantless GPS tracking be legal while warrantless car searching is illegal.
Police don't need a warrant to follow a car, and in my opinion, GPS tracking is more akin to tailing a car than searching through it. I'm not thrilled by this ruling, but it doesn't seem blatantly unconstitutional.
The simple answer is no. I think people will go to pages were the video is prefaced with a short commercial before paying for Youtube. That's my humble opinion though.
I'd rather pay than sit through ads. I wouldn't pay much: maybe a few pennies for short clips, 5 or 10 cents per video max. I've already got a Google Checkout account, and I wouldn't mind micropayments if they made it easy enough.
On the other hand, if they started charging for all videos, I'd stop hosting my own videos there. I currently upload videos of my kids so their grandparents can easily watch them. (My in-laws had trouble watching mpegs I had uploaded to my own site.) If they had to pay to watch these videos, I'd go back to hosting them myself.
I seem to remember that being a scene from The Wire.
It first appeared in the David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. The anecdote had been passed down within the Baltimore Police homicide squad, and was presented as a true story in the book. Simon later adapted this and other events from his true crime books for use in The Wire.
My mother, who was programming before a fair few of us (including me) were born, once told me this: If you think you've found a bug in a compiler, or an operating system, or a programming language, or a well-known commonly used library... you're wrong.
Well, I'm a compiler writer, so I've found a bug in a compiler or two. Perhaps added some, as well, though I hope I've weeded most of those out before the public releases.
But, in general, you're right. Some advanced users can reliably find bugs in compilers, operating systems, and libraries, but in my experience, when a newbie finds a "bug" in such a system, they're almost always wrong.
What dumbass would install Acrobat reader when Mac OS X itself can read/write PDFs.
I had to install it to e-file my state taxes. The fill-in tax forms had a lot of behind-the-scenes scripting (javascript, I assume) and only worked with the Adobe browser plugin.
And now let me rant about how Slashdot gets worse by the day. Not only do I have to log back in to Slashdot repeatedly when browsing (because I'm "behind a corporate firewall")(imagine!!) but now I find myself browsing this particular topic as user "1779"! Sorry, 1779, I'll try not to muck up your view settings.
You sure it wasn't '1729'? I'm getting a lot of other logins as well, at least 25 so far.
I'm not a fan of this practice either, yet how does DNA fundamentally differ from fingerprints?
The police have Bill Gate's fingerprints on file.
Collecting DNA is much more intrusive. From DNA, you could discover some current and future medical issues, as well as details about one's ancestry (potentially revealing infidelities, for example).
Example: You have a problem with the computer. Something does not work. A file won't delete, a network share is not accessable, whatever. What would you do? You would take rational steps to narrow down the problem. You would check cables, you would check permissions, you would ping the machine, you would, in short, eliminate the possible error sources one by one.
I've had my share of tech support. What does the non-savvy person usually do?
1) Reboot. 2) Do the same thing again and again, hoping for a different result. 3) Close the program used to open the file (explorer, word processor, whatever) and reopen it. 4) Disconnect and reconnect various devices, from network cable to mouse
All that (well, maybe with the exception of the first in case of Windows machines) is in the area of "wishful thinking". Especially number 2 is very common and, from the point of an engineer who kinda knows that machines cannot create different results with identical input, stupid. It is basically wishful thinking. Maybe it works this time.
I disagree that this is just wishful thinking. From the perspective of an end-user, a multi-tasking OS should be treated as non-deterministic. Performing the same operation is NOT guaranteed to produce the same results. Let's take your example of a file that can't be deleted. Sometimes, this is because a background process is accessing the file or has it locked for some reason. Waiting a few seconds then trying again may work in this case. If it still doesn't work, then perhaps the process that locked the file is hung or crashed. Rebooting will often solve this. A more sophisticated approach would be to find out which process has locked the file and then quit or kill that process, but retrying or rebooting is often easier and possibly faster.
As for the "engineer who kinda knows that machines cannot create different results with identical input": I hope that engineer never has to work on a system with concurrent processes (e.g. any modern computer).
Check out how many degrees he actually does have some time. He has them because he's done valuable work in many fields.
To my knowledge, Dyson has only a B.A. in mathematics (excluding honorary degrees). He's a rare example (Andrew Gleason being another) of someone who made the leap from graduate student to professor without finishing a PhD.
But NNSA is the part of the DOE that handles research of nuclear energy in military applications. This includes nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors for ships and submarines.
If you know what seat they are in days after they filmed it and released it, what good does it really do you? Ive never seen a theater with assigned seating before.
This might be useful for tracking down unauthorized recordings obtained during pre-release screenings.
I've heard of a company in the U.S. that is selling CD-ROMs containing OpenOffice for ~$10.
What's wrong with that? In the late '90s, I bought several Linux distributions on CD-ROM sets, since I had a slow internet connection and no CD burner. There used to be a lot of places selling CD sets for reasonable prices (a couple dollars per disc, plus shipping).
These days, almost every computer has a CD or DVD burner and broadband internet is ubiquitous, but for those who don't have those things, $10 for CDs of OpenOffice doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
the account information and email address of the iTunes account holder is hidden inside each and every DRM-free download
How is this "hidden"? If you select an audio file purchased from the iTunes Store (with or without DRM), and go to File->Get Info, you'll see the following fields in the summary:
Assembly is bad which is the point of using a higher level language. Assembly should be avoided as well which is why you microkernels are the most stable.
I don't understand your point here. What does assembly language have to do with the microkernel vs. monolithic kernel debate? One could certainly write a microkernel in assembly language.
As for assembly being something that should be avoided: it depends on the context. Higher-level languages have the advantage of easier programming and maintenance, better readability (in theory!), and portability. Assembly language allows greater control (sometimes necessary for very low-level programming), and hand-coded assembly can sometimes increase performance (though not too often these days in comparison to a good optimizing compiler).
Today's computers have tens and sometimes hundreds of services or processes running and a single program that uses direct memory access with a pointer can cause a GP fault and bring it down. I remember the days of Windows 3.1 and having to hit the reset button.
Again, I'm not following you here. Modern OSes have memory protection to prevent this from being an issue. You can certainly crash a program by using pointers incorrectly, but you can also generate a NullPointerException in Java. Furthermore, pointers are essential for system-level programming.
Csharp and Java provide access to pointers indirectly through their apis so they are managed. Goto statements make spaghetti code and makes debugging hard.
GOTO statements can lead to spaghetti code if used incorrectly. Here's an analogy: inexperienced writers are often given various rules for English composition, such as "Don't split infinitives" or "Don't end a sentence with a preposition." These are good guidelines, but they aren't absolute. Once you know why these "rules" exist, you'll find that there are times when you should ignore them. The same is true for programming with GOTOs. If you don't know why they're dangerous, then you shouldn't use them. For an experienced programmer, however, GOTOs can be very useful in some situations.
You only found one professor who uses them.
I know plenty of CS professors who use GOTOs, but Knuth is arguably the preeminent living computer scientist and he's also a vocal advocate of the GOTO statement.
Pointers also cause memory leaks in programs and other errors that can be avoided by calling by value or using an api which manages the pointers indirectly.
Since this is Slashdot, here's a car analogy: saying pointers cause memory leaks is like saying that steering wheels cause car crashes. Garbage collection is great, but it's not suited for all situations.
Yeah, I think you're right about the utilities. A few years ago, Alliant Energy was trying to change the law to allow them to shut off non-paying customers who could -- according to some criteria -- afford to pay, but I don't know if the law was ever modified.
(The only reason I know about the eviction rules is because my wife used to volunteer as a tenant advocate.)
Slashdot Mirror
If they were to spend the entire day following you, and recording your every move just for fun, there would be some constitutional issues.
Are you sure about that? As far as I know, police don't need a warrant to observe you in a public place.
How can warrantless GPS tracking be legal while warrantless car searching is illegal.
Police don't need a warrant to follow a car, and in my opinion, GPS tracking is more akin to tailing a car than searching through it. I'm not thrilled by this ruling, but it doesn't seem blatantly unconstitutional.
I think we need to work on an inductance USB port :D
What about Wireless USB?
The simple answer is no. I think people will go to pages were the video is prefaced with a short commercial before paying for Youtube. That's my humble opinion though.
I'd rather pay than sit through ads. I wouldn't pay much: maybe a few pennies for short clips, 5 or 10 cents per video max. I've already got a Google Checkout account, and I wouldn't mind micropayments if they made it easy enough.
On the other hand, if they started charging for all videos, I'd stop hosting my own videos there. I currently upload videos of my kids so their grandparents can easily watch them. (My in-laws had trouble watching mpegs I had uploaded to my own site.) If they had to pay to watch these videos, I'd go back to hosting them myself.
I seem to remember that being a scene from The Wire.
It first appeared in the David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. The anecdote had been passed down within the Baltimore Police homicide squad, and was presented as a true story in the book. Simon later adapted this and other events from his true crime books for use in The Wire.
My mother, who was programming before a fair few of us (including me) were born, once told me this: If you think you've found a bug in a compiler, or an operating system, or a programming language, or a well-known commonly used library... you're wrong.
Well, I'm a compiler writer, so I've found a bug in a compiler or two. Perhaps added some, as well, though I hope I've weeded most of those out before the public releases.
But, in general, you're right. Some advanced users can reliably find bugs in compilers, operating systems, and libraries, but in my experience, when a newbie finds a "bug" in such a system, they're almost always wrong.
What dumbass would install Acrobat reader when Mac OS X itself can read/write PDFs.
I had to install it to e-file my state taxes. The fill-in tax forms had a lot of behind-the-scenes scripting (javascript, I assume) and only worked with the Adobe browser plugin.
And I just had access to your account. (Don't worry, I tried not to mess anything up.)
Slashdot is seriously broken today,
And now let me rant about how Slashdot gets worse by the day. Not only do I have to log back in to Slashdot repeatedly when browsing (because I'm "behind a corporate firewall")(imagine!!) but now I find myself browsing this particular topic as user "1779"! Sorry, 1779, I'll try not to muck up your view settings.
You sure it wasn't '1729'? I'm getting a lot of other logins as well, at least 25 so far.
I'm not a fan of this practice either, yet how does DNA fundamentally differ from fingerprints?
The police have Bill Gate's fingerprints on file.
Collecting DNA is much more intrusive. From DNA, you could discover some current and future medical issues, as well as details about one's ancestry (potentially revealing infidelities, for example).
Victims rights should always be more important than that of criminals
What about the rights of an innocent person who was arrested and later cleared? Should their DNA remain in the system in perpetuity?
Just be aware that your choice may lead to an ever greater violation of your privacy.
Then it's not really a choice, is it?
Example: You have a problem with the computer. Something does not work. A file won't delete, a network share is not accessable, whatever. What would you do? You would take rational steps to narrow down the problem. You would check cables, you would check permissions, you would ping the machine, you would, in short, eliminate the possible error sources one by one.
I've had my share of tech support. What does the non-savvy person usually do?
1) Reboot.
2) Do the same thing again and again, hoping for a different result.
3) Close the program used to open the file (explorer, word processor, whatever) and reopen it.
4) Disconnect and reconnect various devices, from network cable to mouse
All that (well, maybe with the exception of the first in case of Windows machines) is in the area of "wishful thinking". Especially number 2 is very common and, from the point of an engineer who kinda knows that machines cannot create different results with identical input, stupid. It is basically wishful thinking. Maybe it works this time.
I disagree that this is just wishful thinking. From the perspective of an end-user, a multi-tasking OS should be treated as non-deterministic. Performing the same operation is NOT guaranteed to produce the same results. Let's take your example of a file that can't be deleted. Sometimes, this is because a background process is accessing the file or has it locked for some reason. Waiting a few seconds then trying again may work in this case. If it still doesn't work, then perhaps the process that locked the file is hung or crashed. Rebooting will often solve this. A more sophisticated approach would be to find out which process has locked the file and then quit or kill that process, but retrying or rebooting is often easier and possibly faster.
As for the "engineer who kinda knows that machines cannot create different results with identical input": I hope that engineer never has to work on a system with concurrent processes (e.g. any modern computer).
Check out how many degrees he actually does have some time. He has them because he's done valuable work in many fields.
To my knowledge, Dyson has only a B.A. in mathematics (excluding honorary degrees). He's a rare example (Andrew Gleason being another) of someone who made the leap from graduate student to professor without finishing a PhD.
Heck, they could even construct their own version of Wikipedia that touts creationism and eliminates or disputes evolution.
They already did:
http://www.conservapedia.com/
But NNSA is the part of the DOE that handles research of nuclear energy in military applications. This includes nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors for ships and submarines.
True, but it's still DOE, not DOD.
Its funded by the DOD, not DOE. Its primarily for research and stockpile stewardship.
NIF (and the rest of LLNL) is certainly part of the DOE:
http://nnsa.energy.gov/
If you know what seat they are in days after they filmed it and released it, what good does it really do you? Ive never seen a theater with assigned seating before.
This might be useful for tracking down unauthorized recordings obtained during pre-release screenings.
While this sounds cool from a technical perspective, it would be easy to circumvent by plugging a remote microphone into the camera.
Also, wouldn't the accuracy of this depend on the theater's dimensions and acoustics as well as the layout/calibration of the speaker system?
Now, handing out fake tickets to those obviously illegally parked could net a useful income for a while.
Someone did that for a while in Madison, WI:
http://www.madison.com/tct/news/stories/302436
His trial begins on the 19th.
Now Colin Humphreys's team at the University of Cambridge has discovered a simple solution to the shrinkage problem.
Excellent news! Wait, what's this story about?
I've heard of a company in the U.S. that is selling CD-ROMs containing OpenOffice for ~$10.
What's wrong with that? In the late '90s, I bought several Linux distributions on CD-ROM sets, since I had a slow internet connection and no CD burner. There used to be a lot of places selling CD sets for reasonable prices (a couple dollars per disc, plus shipping).
These days, almost every computer has a CD or DVD burner and broadband internet is ubiquitous, but for those who don't have those things, $10 for CDs of OpenOffice doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
the account information and email address of the iTunes account holder is hidden inside each and every DRM-free download
How is this "hidden"? If you select an audio file purchased from the iTunes Store (with or without DRM), and go to File->Get Info, you'll see the following fields in the summary:
Purchased by:
Account Name:
Purchase Date:
Apple's not trying to hide anything here.
Assembly is bad which is the point of using a higher level language. Assembly should be avoided as well which is why you microkernels are the most stable.
I don't understand your point here. What does assembly language have to do with the microkernel vs. monolithic kernel debate? One could certainly write a microkernel in assembly language.
As for assembly being something that should be avoided: it depends on the context. Higher-level languages have the advantage of easier programming and maintenance, better readability (in theory!), and portability. Assembly language allows greater control (sometimes necessary for very low-level programming), and hand-coded assembly can sometimes increase performance (though not too often these days in comparison to a good optimizing compiler).
Today's computers have tens and sometimes hundreds of services or processes running and a single program that uses direct memory access with a pointer can cause a GP fault and bring it down. I remember the days of Windows 3.1 and having to hit the reset button.
Again, I'm not following you here. Modern OSes have memory protection to prevent this from being an issue. You can certainly crash a program by using pointers incorrectly, but you can also generate a NullPointerException in Java. Furthermore, pointers are essential for system-level programming.
Csharp and Java provide access to pointers indirectly through their apis so they are managed. Goto statements make spaghetti code and makes debugging hard.
GOTO statements can lead to spaghetti code if used incorrectly. Here's an analogy: inexperienced writers are often given various rules for English composition, such as "Don't split infinitives" or "Don't end a sentence with a preposition." These are good guidelines, but they aren't absolute. Once you know why these "rules" exist, you'll find that there are times when you should ignore them. The same is true for programming with GOTOs. If you don't know why they're dangerous, then you shouldn't use them. For an experienced programmer, however, GOTOs can be very useful in some situations.
You only found one professor who uses them.
I know plenty of CS professors who use GOTOs, but Knuth is arguably the preeminent living computer scientist and he's also a vocal advocate of the GOTO statement.
Pointers also cause memory leaks in programs and other errors that can be avoided by calling by value or using an api which manages the pointers indirectly.
Since this is Slashdot, here's a car analogy: saying pointers cause memory leaks is like saying that steering wheels cause car crashes. Garbage collection is great, but it's not suited for all situations.
Yeah, I think you're right about the utilities. A few years ago, Alliant Energy was trying to change the law to allow them to shut off non-paying customers who could -- according to some criteria -- afford to pay, but I don't know if the law was ever modified.
(The only reason I know about the eviction rules is because my wife used to volunteer as a tenant advocate.)