It depends on the definition whether Comcast is throttling or not. Comcast is indeed killing a connection, so there is no way to say they are "throttling" the connection. But, you can't forget there is a bittorrent client running on this computer, which notices when a connection is reset and automatically tries to reconnect. Every time Comcast kills a connection, the bittorrent client tries to establish a new one; so when Comcast eventually allows a connection to live, at that point the bittorrent client continues its transfer. They are killing a connection in order to achieve the effect of delaying a bittorrent transfer until congestion dies down. It is an open question whether killing the connection even constitutes impairing the availability of data; if Comcast only does this throttling when there is congestion, the bittorrent connection wouldn't have had enough bandwidth available to do anything anyway, so there is no additional harm done.
I don't think "fraud" is really the correct word here either. If you read the TCP standard, you will notice that it only mentions two endpoints, a source and destination; there is no provision for a third party to inject a message, so there is no way for a third party to identify themselves. Comcast is simply creating a well-formed reset packet, which necessarily mentions the two endpoints, and there is no way in the TCP standard for Comcast to indicate that these packets are from Comcast rather than one of the endpoints. Is this fraud or impersonation? How about when OpenOffice writes a file in Word format; would you say that OpenOffice is illegally impersonating Word? We won't even mention SAMBA which enables a Linux file server to "impersonate" a Windows file server.
I was trying to show there are two ways to interpret a reset message. Commonly, it is taken to mean "end MY connection"; but I think it simply means "end THAT connection". In both cases, the RESET packet is a command to a specific endpoint to end a specific connection (that may be one of many). The question here is who may legitimately send a command to end a connection; whether only the participants of the connection can send the command, or if an outside third party is allowed to send the command. At least one type of packet, the SYN packet, can be sent by an endpoint that is not part of a connection (since the connection hasn't been established yet); who says RESET isn't another TCP packet that can be sent from outside a connection?
A router or firewall is capable of crafting ("forging") a RESET message from standard, unencrypted parts of the TCP/IP header, just by passively observing the traffic in the connection. Those routers and firewalls are completely entitled to examine the headers; in fact they must, in order to perform their functions. Comcast is using standard information to craft a standard-compliant RESET packet and send it to an endpoint as part of a legal traffic management operation. Is it really illegal to simply use a protocol in a way not anticipated by the original designers? Comcast isn't the only company using this technique.
Why does everyone call these reset packets forged? If the reset packet didn't have the right source and destination information, it wouldn't work. Basically a reset packet is like all TCP packets; it has fields typically called source IP address and port, destination address and port, and a protocol code. If you want to end a connection, you send a reset packet to a destination address and specify the connection to reset using the rest of the address fields. Does the "source" information specify the sender of a reset packet, or does it specify which connection to reset? Typically, it is assumed that the source address originated the packet; but that is just an assumption, not a legal requirement.
Is it forgery when OpenOffice writes a file in.DOC format? After all, some unsuspecting person or program might be defrauded into thinking the.DOC file came from Microsoft Word.
Good luck. I had a situation with a credit card that was about 40% my fault. My card was stolen so I got a new one, but forgot to change the account number for my online payments. After 6 months of paying the wrong account and not telling me I was paying the wrong account, the credit card company suddenly forgot how to credit my account. I didn't notice the missed payment on the next month's bill, so I paid the entire amount, so I in effect paid the first bill twice. Needless to say, they cashed the second payment as well without crediting my account.
This is already a long, tedious story so I'll just say it took 6 months to get my $800 overpayment refunded. According to them, because of the "missing" payment, I owed $100 in interest. In actuality, they owed me exactly what they thought I owed them, so I should have received $100 in interest. You may be surprised to know I got nothing, not even an apology.
In the long run, exchange rates are indeed based on different inflation rates. In the short run, the exhange rate is set by a market that takes about as much notice of the economy as the stock market.
Right now, according to purchasing power parity (i.e. what it costs to buy equivalent goods in different countries), the Canadian dollar is undervalued by about 20%. So, we should expect the Canadian dollar to hit 0.85 at some point; and since inflation is higher in the U.S. right now, the Canadian dollar should go up even more.
I really object to the "ridiculously mismanaged" statement. Many times mysterious problems appear on a computer and there is never any information available for how to fix it.
For example, for about 4 months Word would take at least 5 minutes to start on my computer. It looked like it related to my anti-virus program, but no combination of enabling and disabling would fix the problem. Fortunately the problem fixed itself in one of the updates for whatever program was causing the program. Maybe reinstalling something would have fixed the problem sooner; but reinstalling, finding and applying all the updates, then reconfiguring the programs seemed like too much work.
For a Windows machine, mismanaging is simply installing something new or updating a program.
In my opinion, the design flaw in XP (or actually in most software) is a total lack of technical documentation. Program installation and configuration is simple and completely automated these days, which is great for most users; but if something goes wrong, there is no way to systematically figure out what went wrong. It is very frustrating that trial-and-error is about the only debugging technique possible for a normal user. Most users don't see these design flaws because they complain to Dell when something goes wrong, and Dell can actually get support from Microsoft.
Windows98 was stable in the same sense that any version of Windows is stable; after you change your code to work around the new bugs Microsoft has introduced, it will run OK again.
XP is more stable than Windows 98 for two reasons. The NT branch of Windows was a better base than the 3.1/95 branch; but more importantly Microsoft hasn't brought out a new version of Windows in a while, so programmers have had a chance to write work-arounds for most of the programs out there.
I will confidently predict that if you are running programs that were written for Windows 98, your computer will be more stable running 98 than XP.
What happens to me is at least once a day, I turn my computer off when I am no longer using it. Turning the machine back on (and Rebooting) takes a stupidly long amount of time. Maybe you don't pay for power, so you are willing to leave your computer running.
It is nice that just copying your home directory worked; I usually find that you need to set up the registry too before programs will run again. I guess you are lucky enough that all the apps you use are preinstalled on your computer; that certainly isn't the case for me.
Also, I often try to transfer peripherals (like keyboards, mice, printers and monitors) to my new computer, only to find myself in driver hell hoping to find new drivers that will work with the new version of Windows. I had to toss a printer because the manufacturer wouldn't write an XP driver for it (and wouldn't give me the information so that I could write it myself).
Now I'll admit that I don't always know when problems in Windows are fixed in later releases, but I find the worst part of setting up a new computer is reinstalling and reconfiguring all the programs so they work the same again. Maybe things work differently now.
Most people don't research and verify things on their own, they believe someone they trust. It doesn't matter if you can't evaluate open source code if someone you trust can. With proprietary code, you have to trust the company that writes the software. With open source code you can trust that a lot of people will look over the code, and if they find anything fishy, they'll eventually get the word out.
I disagree, I think the extra information might be valuable. As an analogy, suppose you could put instrumentation in cars to determine how people drive. With this information you might be able to simulate a road system, and perhaps determine which light timings maximize traffic flow. Maybe traffic is too complicated for something like this to work, and certainly building a new mall will change traffic patterns, but you have to collect the information and try it before you know for sure.
I'm not sure you really need to worry about this, I don't see how it gives any extra capabilities. If you are trading stuff, obviously you are somehow advertising its presence, otherwise no one would know to copy it from you. You don't need special spyware to determine what is available for trade, the programs that facilitate the trading can find the sharers.
Ironically, Google may be in trouble because their search engine is too good. In another search engine, if you search for "AXA" you expect to get a bunch of useless sites. When you search in Google, you expect to get useful information. Therefore if someone does a search for AXA in Google, they fully expect that their results are related to AXA. If Google searches were bad, then there would be no confusion because users would expect to get irrelevant results, and there wouldn't be much of a case.
I'm not sure it's that good an analogy. Your fingers are doing the walking when you go through the yellow pages, Google's fingers are doing the walking when showing an ad.
I think it is similar to putting a competitor's ad beside the listing for AXA's phone number in the white pages. In the white pages, you are looking specifically for AXA, and you might be confused if the ad doesn't make it clear that it is not for AXA.
France and the other countries that opposed the Iraq invasion simply thought that Iraq was not an immediate threat to the U.S. or the world, and worried that invading Iraq would lead to a quagmire. As it turns out, the French (and others) were correct. So for Americans, being correct is the same as being cowardly.
I don't know what Bush knew and when, but there is plenty of evidence that the American spy agencies could have come to the same (correct) conclusion as the French. Bush should have known that his evidence was doubtful, and if he did and still played up the (nonexistent) threat, I think we know who the weasely, duplicitous, back-stabbing, conniving, mercenary, opportunistic people are.
It depends on the problem you are trying to solve. I find that when you are analyzing a drawing of an actual physical object, as opposed to doing an abstract math problem, you end up with triangles all over the place.
Your method is actually equivalent to mine. Since triangles within the unit circle have a hypotenuse with a length of 1, the coordinates are actually the lengths of the adjacent and opposite sides. Thus remembering if it is (cos, sin) or (sin, cos) is the same as remembering if it is (adjacent, opposite) or (opposite, adjacent). So if you remember the coordinate for 0 degrees is (1,0) and you know the value of sin(0), that tells you which order to use either for the ( cos, sin ) or (adjacent, opposite) case.
At any rate, I was simply trying to justify why I have been known to use a calculator to compute sin(0). It's not because I don't understand trigonometry, it's because I don't always remember whether it is (cos, sin) or (sin, cos).
I think you can understand the fundamental concepts of trigonometry without necessarily remembering whether to use sine or cosine when you know the lengths of a hypotenuse and the opposite side.
I understand trigonometry, so I know that the value of sin(0) will tell me if sine involves the adjacent or opposite side. When I use a calculator to determine sin(0), I am trying to find out if the answer is 0 or 1; thus I can use my knowledge of trigonometry and the calculator's ability to calculate sine to avoid memorizing one more piece of math trivia. Determine the value of tan(0) as well, and you know which sides are involved in all the trigonometry relations.
I completely disagree. You can understand that sine (and cosine and tangent) are all ratios of the various sides of a right-angle triangle as a function of one of the angles, without remembering which one corresponds to which ratio.
It's only pretty poor if you don't know that either sin(0) or cos(0) is 0. This is a poor test to use anyway, sin(90) gives you the same type of information, as well as telling you whether your calculator is in degree or radian mode:-) However, I will agree it is a lost cause if you confuse tan() with sin() or cos().
I'm with you, except that I find it less stressful to work for someone else than to work on my own.
If you work for a good company where you have reasonable influence over your workload, the security of a steady paycheck is great.
If you want to change or expand your job to include running a company as well, realize that you are actually changing your job. Running a company adds further tasks -- like sales at least -- that you might not enjoy.
For the first two paragraphs you had a good point; but right after you complain about belittling posts, you launch into your own little tirade.
Let's take the good points from both posts:
1. If it helps you to think things could be worse, or that someone else has faced worse and survived, then go ahead and help yourself.
2. Everyone is the best judge of how stressful a situation is, and no one can objectively judge whether you are overreacting to a particular situation. Indiana Jones didn't like snakes.
My own 2 cents: do something to change your situation; it probably won't change if you do nothing.
The problem was someone would make a copy of a book without permission and sell it. Stopping this was the reason for copyrights. Authors get paid by their publishers, who make money and pass part back to the authors. If the publisher is the only person allowed to sell copies of a book, then that monopoly allows them to charge more than cost of production of the book. This maximizes the amount of profit the publisher can make, who passes some back to the author.
Copyrights are not necessary for an author to write books and get them published. The author doesn't even have to reveal the text to a publisher until they've signed a contract; so the author has no need of copyright, they can just hide the copy. Copyrights are needed to create the monopoly that help the publisher and by extension, the author.
Now I'm not saying that copyrights are bad because they cause a monopoly, but we'd better recognize what is going on here. The stronger the monopoly, the more the publisher (and the author) make, but the worse for society as a whole. Copyrights are now awarded for about 150 years, that's quite a monopoly to have. We need some sort of copyright, but we also have to take consumers into account as well, and perhaps gain some rights rather than giving them all away. For example, if a book or CD is out of print, why shouldn't you be able to make a copy? How can the publishers say they lost any money if people copy something they can't buy?
The examples you gave do not involve copyrights, and that really illustrates the problems in the terms of the debate. Copyright is the right to copy! That isn't a very deep observation, but see if any of your cases involve copying. A book store doesn't copy books, it resells books it buys. A movie theatre shows the movie, it doesn't copy it. Same with a radio station. Broadcast rights are completely different than copyrights. Copyright is not the right to view or listen, it is the right to copy. The problem with the new laws is that they are redefining copyrights as the right to view, a stronger monopoly that will help publishers (and authors) and hurt society as a whole.
I don't understand why people think GPL software is free just because money doesn't change hands. When someone uses GPL software, they are getting something of value -- access to useful programs and the source code for it. Rather than paying money, GPL software is paid in-kind, by giving away the programming effort used to exploit the free programs.
Microsoft charges money for access to useful programs and sometimes gives access to the source code for huge amounts of money. After paying for this, programmers are free to charge for the programming effort by selling the software. In both cases, access is not free, there is payment either in cash or in kind.
All companies that produce software must decide whether paying Microsoft for tools and libraries and selling the resulting program is more profitable than giving the software away and getting the tools and libraries for free. If your company is in the business of selling software, obviously open source is a dumb move. However, most companies do not sell software directly; they either sell hardware that requires software to operate or they sell services, like customizing software. I claim that for the majority of companies, their software has no commercial value on its own, so the savings from using free tools makes GPL a better choice. When you consider that GPL software is actually more valuable than proprietary (since you have access to the source code), it is surprising that any non-software companies use proprietary tools rather than GPL tools.
I think copyrights were originally introduced to stop people from profiting from copyrights they don't own. When copyrights were invented, making a copy and distributing it cost a significant amount of money which pirates had to recoup (plus a small profit). These days, the situation has changed. Making a copy and distributing it is cheap enough that people are willing to absorb the cost and provide copies for free.
This change in the nature of copying is what makes updating the copyright laws a challenge. Clearly, if someone sells a copy of a CD, they are taking money the copyright owner could have made. If someone gives away a copy of a CD, we don't know if it has any value at all (i.e. whether the recipient would have bought the CD or whether they play the CD more than once).
I no longer buy significant numbers of CDs (I used to buy hundreds per year) because what the record companies are offering is not worth what they are charging. I am not pirating music (MP3 sound quality is too poor), I am simply buying other things instead and listening to the CDs I already own. I think non-profit copyright infringement does more good than harm, and the record companies are just hurting themselves harm by trying to stop it. I think fans know that their favourite bands have to make a living and are willing to support the bands to keep the music coming.
Copyright holders claim they can't compete with free. Before we believe them, they should at least try to compete by lowering their prices and offering a wider selection. There are plenty of CDs I'd like to buy; but I can't buy them if I can't find them, and I won't pay $35 for a copy of the Beatles' "white album" when I can buy the 3rd season of the Simpsons for $42. My wife and I bought 23 CDs (mostly used) at an average cost of $9 each on a recent trip to Vancouver; why don't the record companies want to earn more of my money by giving me what I want?
You put a huge restriction on designers when you say you won't to read a manual. How can something be new and also intuitive? If things have to be intuitive, we never get a chance to change the interface. Take the Windows calculator, for example. Why do you have to push buttons on the screen? Isn't it possible that there might be a better interface than replicating a physical calculator with mouse clicks?
I don't think anyone can learn to use a word processor without reading the manual (or asking someone who has); but that's the price we pay to have more capability than an intuitive picture of a pencil that you manipulate with a mouse.
I have no idea why people like to learn by trial and error; but I find spending an hour or two to RTFM always saves huge amounts of time compared to figuring it out by trial and error. Unfortunately companies use the excuse that no one reads manuals to avoid writing them, and we are all reduced to guessing how things work. Asking other users what they have discovered is a lot less useful than reading the designer's description of how to use the item.
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It depends on the definition whether Comcast is throttling or not. Comcast is indeed killing a connection, so there is no way to say they are "throttling" the connection. But, you can't forget there is a bittorrent client running on this computer, which notices when a connection is reset and automatically tries to reconnect. Every time Comcast kills a connection, the bittorrent client tries to establish a new one; so when Comcast eventually allows a connection to live, at that point the bittorrent client continues its transfer. They are killing a connection in order to achieve the effect of delaying a bittorrent transfer until congestion dies down. It is an open question whether killing the connection even constitutes impairing the availability of data; if Comcast only does this throttling when there is congestion, the bittorrent connection wouldn't have had enough bandwidth available to do anything anyway, so there is no additional harm done.
I don't think "fraud" is really the correct word here either. If you read the TCP standard, you will notice that it only mentions two endpoints, a source and destination; there is no provision for a third party to inject a message, so there is no way for a third party to identify themselves. Comcast is simply creating a well-formed reset packet, which necessarily mentions the two endpoints, and there is no way in the TCP standard for Comcast to indicate that these packets are from Comcast rather than one of the endpoints. Is this fraud or impersonation? How about when OpenOffice writes a file in Word format; would you say that OpenOffice is illegally impersonating Word? We won't even mention SAMBA which enables a Linux file server to "impersonate" a Windows file server.
I was trying to show there are two ways to interpret a reset message. Commonly, it is taken to mean "end MY connection"; but I think it simply means "end THAT connection". In both cases, the RESET packet is a command to a specific endpoint to end a specific connection (that may be one of many). The question here is who may legitimately send a command to end a connection; whether only the participants of the connection can send the command, or if an outside third party is allowed to send the command. At least one type of packet, the SYN packet, can be sent by an endpoint that is not part of a connection (since the connection hasn't been established yet); who says RESET isn't another TCP packet that can be sent from outside a connection?
A router or firewall is capable of crafting ("forging") a RESET message from standard, unencrypted parts of the TCP/IP header, just by passively observing the traffic in the connection. Those routers and firewalls are completely entitled to examine the headers; in fact they must, in order to perform their functions. Comcast is using standard information to craft a standard-compliant RESET packet and send it to an endpoint as part of a legal traffic management operation. Is it really illegal to simply use a protocol in a way not anticipated by the original designers? Comcast isn't the only company using this technique.
Why does everyone call these reset packets forged? If the reset packet didn't have the right source and destination information, it wouldn't work. Basically a reset packet is like all TCP packets; it has fields typically called source IP address and port, destination address and port, and a protocol code. If you want to end a connection, you send a reset packet to a destination address and specify the connection to reset using the rest of the address fields. Does the "source" information specify the sender of a reset packet, or does it specify which connection to reset? Typically, it is assumed that the source address originated the packet; but that is just an assumption, not a legal requirement.
.DOC format? After all, some unsuspecting person or program might be defrauded into thinking the .DOC file came from Microsoft Word.
Is it forgery when OpenOffice writes a file in
I've driven a Prius in two winters now and the LCD has always worked. However, I haven't driven in temperatures less than -25 C
Good luck. I had a situation with a credit card that was about 40% my fault. My card was stolen so I got a new one, but forgot to change the account number for my online payments. After 6 months of paying the wrong account and not telling me I was paying the wrong account, the credit card company suddenly forgot how to credit my account. I didn't notice the missed payment on the next month's bill, so I paid the entire amount, so I in effect paid the first bill twice. Needless to say, they cashed the second payment as well without crediting my account.
This is already a long, tedious story so
I'll just say it took 6 months to get my $800 overpayment refunded. According to them, because of the "missing" payment, I owed $100 in interest. In actuality, they owed me exactly what they thought I owed them, so I should have received $100 in interest. You may be surprised to know I got nothing, not even an apology.
In the long run, exchange rates are indeed based on different inflation rates. In the short run, the exhange rate is set by a market that takes about as much notice of the economy as the stock market.
Right now, according to purchasing power parity (i.e. what it costs to buy equivalent goods in different countries), the Canadian dollar is undervalued by about 20%. So, we should expect the Canadian dollar to hit 0.85 at some point; and since inflation is higher in the U.S. right now, the Canadian dollar should go up even more.
I really object to the "ridiculously mismanaged" statement. Many times mysterious problems appear on a computer and there is never any information available for how to fix it.
For example, for about 4 months Word would take at least 5 minutes to start on my computer. It looked like it related to my anti-virus program, but no combination of enabling and disabling would fix the problem. Fortunately the problem fixed itself in one of the updates for whatever program was causing the program. Maybe reinstalling something would have fixed the problem sooner; but reinstalling, finding and applying all the updates, then reconfiguring the programs seemed like too much work.
For a Windows machine, mismanaging is simply installing something new or updating a program.
In my opinion, the design flaw in XP (or actually in most software) is a total lack of technical documentation. Program installation and configuration is simple and completely automated these days, which is great for most users; but if something goes wrong, there is no way to systematically figure out what went wrong. It is very frustrating that trial-and-error is about the only debugging technique possible for a normal user. Most users don't see these design flaws because they complain to Dell when something goes wrong, and Dell can actually get support from Microsoft.
Windows98 was stable in the same sense that any version of Windows is stable; after you change your code to work around the new bugs Microsoft has introduced, it will run OK again.
XP is more stable than Windows 98 for two reasons. The NT branch of Windows was a better base than the 3.1/95 branch; but more importantly Microsoft hasn't brought out a new version of Windows in a while, so programmers have had a chance to write work-arounds for most of the programs out there.
I will confidently predict that if you are running programs that were written for Windows 98, your computer will be more stable running 98 than XP.
Well, don't just claim that someone can make convincing couter-arguments, give us some examples.
What happens to me is at least once a day, I turn my computer off when I am no longer using it. Turning the machine back on (and Rebooting) takes a stupidly long amount of time. Maybe you don't pay for power, so you are willing to leave your computer running.
It is nice that just copying your home directory worked; I usually find that you need to set up the registry too before programs will run again. I guess you are lucky enough that all the apps you use are preinstalled on your computer; that certainly isn't the case for me.
Also, I often try to transfer peripherals (like keyboards, mice, printers and monitors) to my new computer, only to find myself in driver hell hoping to find new drivers that will work with the new version of Windows. I had to toss a printer because the manufacturer wouldn't write an XP driver for it (and wouldn't give me the information so that I could write it myself).
Now I'll admit that I don't always know when problems in Windows are fixed in later releases, but I find the worst part of setting up a new computer is reinstalling and reconfiguring all the programs so they work the same again. Maybe things work differently now.
Most people don't research and verify things on their own, they believe someone they trust. It doesn't matter if you can't evaluate open source code if someone you trust can. With proprietary code, you have to trust the company that writes the software. With open source code you can trust that a lot of people will look over the code, and if they find anything fishy, they'll eventually get the word out.
I disagree, I think the extra information might be valuable. As an analogy, suppose you could put instrumentation in cars to determine how people drive. With this information you might be able to simulate a road system, and perhaps determine which light timings maximize traffic flow. Maybe traffic is too complicated for something like this to work, and certainly building a new mall will change traffic patterns, but you have to collect the information and try it before you know for sure.
I'm not sure you really need to worry about this, I don't see how it gives any extra capabilities. If you are trading stuff, obviously you are somehow advertising its presence, otherwise no one would know to copy it from you. You don't need special spyware to determine what is available for trade, the programs that facilitate the trading can find the sharers.
Ironically, Google may be in trouble because their search engine is too good. In another search engine, if you search for "AXA" you expect to get a bunch of useless sites. When you search in Google, you expect to get useful information. Therefore if someone does a search for AXA in Google, they fully expect that their results are related to AXA. If Google searches were bad, then there would be no confusion because users would expect to get irrelevant results, and there wouldn't be much of a case.
I'm not sure it's that good an analogy. Your fingers are doing the walking when you go through the yellow pages, Google's fingers are doing the walking when showing an ad.
I think it is similar to putting a competitor's ad beside the listing for AXA's phone number in the white pages. In the white pages, you are looking specifically for AXA, and you might be confused if the ad doesn't make it clear that it is not for AXA.
France and the other countries that opposed the Iraq invasion simply thought that Iraq was not an immediate threat to the U.S. or the world, and worried that invading Iraq would lead to a quagmire. As it turns out, the French (and others) were correct. So for Americans, being correct is the same as being cowardly.
I don't know what Bush knew and when, but there is plenty of evidence that the American spy agencies could have come to the same (correct) conclusion as the French. Bush should have known that his evidence was doubtful, and if he did and still played up the (nonexistent) threat, I think we know who the weasely, duplicitous, back-stabbing, conniving, mercenary, opportunistic people are.
It depends on the problem you are trying to solve. I find that when you are analyzing a drawing of an actual physical object, as opposed to doing an abstract math problem, you end up with triangles all over the place.
Your method is actually equivalent to mine. Since triangles within the unit circle have a hypotenuse with a length of 1, the coordinates are actually the lengths of the adjacent and opposite sides. Thus remembering if it is (cos, sin) or (sin, cos) is the same as remembering if it is (adjacent, opposite) or (opposite, adjacent). So if you remember the coordinate for 0 degrees is (1,0) and you know the value of sin(0), that tells you which order to use either for the ( cos, sin ) or (adjacent, opposite) case.
At any rate, I was simply trying to justify why I have been known to use a calculator to compute sin(0). It's not because I don't understand trigonometry, it's because I don't always remember whether it is (cos, sin) or (sin, cos).
I think you can understand the fundamental concepts of trigonometry without necessarily remembering whether to use sine or cosine when you know the lengths of a hypotenuse and the opposite side.
I understand trigonometry, so I know that the value of sin(0) will tell me if sine involves the adjacent or opposite side. When I use a calculator to determine sin(0), I am trying to find out if the answer is 0 or 1; thus I can use my knowledge of trigonometry and the calculator's ability to calculate sine to avoid memorizing one more piece of math trivia. Determine the value of tan(0) as well, and you know which sides are involved in all the trigonometry relations.
I completely disagree. You can understand that sine (and cosine and tangent) are all ratios of the various sides of a right-angle triangle as a function of one of the angles, without remembering which one corresponds to which ratio.
:-) However, I will agree it is a lost cause if you confuse tan() with sin() or cos().
It's only pretty poor if you don't know that either sin(0) or cos(0) is 0. This is a poor test to use anyway, sin(90) gives you the same type of information, as well as telling you whether your calculator is in degree or radian mode
I'm with you, except that I find it less stressful to work for someone else than to work on my own.
If you work for a good company where you have reasonable influence over your workload, the security of a steady paycheck is great.
If you want to change or expand your job to include running a company as well, realize that you are actually changing your job. Running a company adds further tasks -- like sales at least -- that you might not enjoy.
For the first two paragraphs you had a good point; but right after you complain about belittling posts, you launch into your own little tirade.
Let's take the good points from both posts:
1. If it helps you to think things could be worse, or that someone else has faced worse and survived, then go ahead and help yourself.
2. Everyone is the best judge of how stressful a situation is, and no one can objectively judge whether you are overreacting to a particular situation. Indiana Jones didn't like snakes.
My own 2 cents: do something to change your situation; it probably won't change if you do nothing.
The problem was someone would make a copy of a book without permission and sell it. Stopping this was the reason for copyrights. Authors get paid by their publishers, who make money and pass part back to the authors. If the publisher is the only person allowed to sell copies of a book, then that monopoly allows them to charge more than cost of production of the book. This maximizes the amount of profit the publisher can make, who passes some back to the author.
Copyrights are not necessary for an author to write books and get them published. The author doesn't even have to reveal the text to a publisher until they've signed a contract; so the author has no need of copyright, they can just hide the copy. Copyrights are needed to create the monopoly that help the publisher and by extension, the author.
Now I'm not saying that copyrights are bad because they cause a monopoly, but we'd better recognize what is going on here. The stronger the monopoly, the more the publisher (and the author) make, but the worse for society as a whole. Copyrights are now awarded for about 150 years, that's quite a monopoly to have. We need some sort of copyright, but we also have to take consumers into account as well, and perhaps gain some rights rather than giving them all away. For example, if a book or CD is out of print, why shouldn't you be able to make a copy? How can the publishers say they lost any money if people copy something they can't buy?
The examples you gave do not involve copyrights, and that really illustrates the problems in the terms of the debate. Copyright is the right to copy! That isn't a very deep observation, but see if any of your cases involve copying. A book store doesn't copy books, it resells books it buys. A movie theatre shows the movie, it doesn't copy it. Same with a radio station. Broadcast rights are completely different than copyrights. Copyright is not the right to view or listen, it is the right to copy. The problem with the new laws is that they are redefining copyrights as the right to view, a stronger monopoly that will help publishers (and authors) and hurt society as a whole.
I don't understand why people think GPL software is free just because money doesn't change hands. When someone uses GPL software, they are getting something of value -- access to useful programs and the source code for it. Rather than paying money, GPL software is paid in-kind, by giving away the programming effort used to exploit the free programs.
Microsoft charges money for access to useful programs and sometimes gives access to the source code for huge amounts of money. After paying for this, programmers are free to charge for the programming effort by selling the software. In both cases, access is not free, there is payment either in cash or in kind.
All companies that produce software must decide whether paying Microsoft for tools and libraries and selling the resulting program is more profitable than giving the software away and getting the tools and libraries for free. If your company is in the business of selling software, obviously open source is a dumb move. However, most companies do not sell software directly; they either sell hardware that requires software to operate or they sell services, like customizing software. I claim that for the majority of companies, their software has no commercial value on its own, so the savings from using free tools makes GPL a better choice. When you consider that GPL software is actually more valuable than proprietary (since you have access to the source code), it is surprising that any non-software companies use proprietary tools rather than GPL tools.
I think copyrights were originally introduced to stop people from profiting from copyrights they don't own. When copyrights were invented, making a copy and distributing it cost a significant amount of money which pirates had to recoup (plus a small profit). These days, the situation has changed. Making a copy and distributing it is cheap enough that people are willing to absorb the cost and provide copies for free.
This change in the nature of copying is what makes updating the copyright laws a challenge. Clearly, if someone sells a copy of a CD, they are taking money the copyright owner could have made. If someone gives away a copy of a CD, we don't know if it has any value at all (i.e. whether the recipient would have bought the CD or whether they play the CD more than once).
I no longer buy significant numbers of CDs (I used to buy hundreds per year) because what the record companies are offering is not worth what they are charging. I am not pirating music (MP3 sound quality is too poor), I am simply buying other things instead and listening to the CDs I already own. I think non-profit copyright infringement does more good than harm, and the record companies are just hurting themselves harm by trying to stop it. I think fans know that their favourite bands have to make a living and are willing to support the bands to keep the music coming.
Copyright holders claim they can't compete with free. Before we believe them, they should at least try to compete by lowering their prices and offering a wider selection. There are plenty of CDs I'd like to buy; but I can't buy them if I can't find them, and I won't pay $35 for a copy of the Beatles' "white album" when I can buy the 3rd season of the Simpsons for $42. My wife and I bought 23 CDs (mostly used) at an average cost of $9 each on a recent trip to Vancouver; why don't the record companies want to earn more of my money by giving me what I want?
You put a huge restriction on designers when you say you won't to read a manual. How can something be new and also intuitive? If things have to be intuitive, we never get a chance to change the interface. Take the Windows calculator, for example. Why do you have to push buttons on the screen? Isn't it possible that there might be a better interface than replicating a physical calculator with mouse clicks?
I don't think anyone can learn to use a word processor without reading the manual (or asking someone who has); but that's the price we pay to have more capability than an intuitive picture of a pencil that you manipulate with a mouse.
I have no idea why people like to learn by trial and error; but I find spending an hour or two to RTFM always saves huge amounts of time compared to figuring it out by trial and error. Unfortunately companies use the excuse that no one reads manuals to avoid writing them, and we are all reduced to guessing how things work. Asking other users what they have discovered is a lot less useful than reading the designer's description of how to use the item.