So, for example, software distributed as source code can't violate a patent until it's compiled? Maybe not, but source code is copyrighted no matter what medium or storage mechanism is used.
Microsoft may have laid up a whole heap of trouble for themselves here. Not nearly as much as the other ruling has got them out of.
I'm convinced that Microsoft, and indeed nearly all the big players in software, have such large and banal patent portfolios simply to protect themselves from these ludicrous suits. It's been a race between legitimate producers of product and the patent trolls, who for the past decade or two have been saying things precisely as absurd as "Here's a communications device that can wirelessly transmit and receive digital data. Here's a form of communication called 'e-mail'. Let's patent sending e-mail to and from a wireless device!" So they sue Blackberry and blackmail them for tens of millions of dollars, and Blackberry's over a barrel because the concept sending e-mail to and from a Blackberry is so fucking obvious that nobody bothered to write it down. I swear to Ghod it's no different than saying "Here's a car. Here's a store. Let's patent driving a car to a store!"
The real losers in this case are pharmaceutical companies, who have a highly profitable habit of saying, "Here's a drug whose patent is about to expire. Here's a way of encapsulating any drug to be slow-release for 24-hour dosing. Let's patent a slow-release version of our drug!" By getting a patent on the combination of the unpatented (their drug) and the universally obvious (slow-release tablets), they buy themselves another decade or more of high markup.
Microsoft, and indeed any techology company that sticks its head up, has been consistently and unfairly brutalized by patent trolls for too long now. I'll be happy to see this practice come to an end.
I use Outlook at work and it's fantastic for one simple reason: They screwed up the Daylight Saving Time shift so badly that for three weeks this spring I could skip meetings, show up late for meetings and keep undesirable bozos out of meetings, and if anybody asked what happened, all I had to do was mutter "Outlook" under my breath and all was forgiven.
I expect this will happen again in the fall. For all its silly, annoying, single-threaded, poorly implemented crap, if I can spend six weeks out of the year dodging meetings and actually getting work done, I'll forgive it every other flaw.
Just a reminder to ACCEPT jury duty if you get called. It is one of the best ways to directly affect how things work in the U.S. I'm a little surprised to learn here that there are jurisdictions in the U.S. where accepting jury duty is optional. In my state it is not, unless you are either totally disabled, or mentally incompetent. If you refuse to accept, a bench warrant can be issued against you.
If you are a citizen of this country, it is critical to the bargain of citizenship: If you are accused of a crime, you are entitled to a jury of your peers. In return, if you are called for jury duty, you must go.
As you said, it's one of the best ways to affect things -- at least, for those of us who can't afford a lobbyist.
A few other posters on this thread have saddened me greatly by exhibiting a smug preoccupation with how to get out of serving on a jury. I invite them to consider how this impacts the bargain: if they are accused of a crime, do they really want a jury of the dumb and complacent? Or do they want their fate in the hands of those who can think and are willing to take seriously their obligations?
Okay -- Since I'm not allowed to drink beer in class I'll just have to post this from home.
Want to give each process a weapon? Fine. But they have to earn ammunition.
Every time a process gives up its slot, it's given a round of ammunition. It has the option of "shooting" a process ahead of it in the queue, thereby expending a round of ammunition. A shot process must give up its slot in the next round. Whether it loses all its ammo when it respawns remains a research question.
There are two floating point tunable parameters, "accuracy" and "rampage." "Accuracy" is the likelihood that a given shot will actually hit the process it aims at. "Rampage" is the tendency of a process to save up rounds for a while then go on a spree.
Okay, there's a third parameter, "armor," which is the odds of a hit actually becoming an injury. This is meant to protect system processes against luser jobs, and top-level processes against spawned threads.
Of course, the scheduler itself is a boss job that can't be killed, has perfect armor and has infinite ammo.
For the purpose of top and other job monitoring tools we can replace a process's "NICE" score with a "VIOLENCE" score -- an aggregate of their armor, accuracy, rampage tendencies and current ammo supply. We can rename the renice utility to medicate. The important thing about medication is that it eventually wears off, unless you specify the -l (lobotomize) option, which turns the process into a harmless drooling vegetable. Its companion utilities are aim and armor, which tune a job's accuracy and armor class, respectively.
There are two important things about this approach. First, it's probabilistic instead of purely heirarchical. Second, it should give Jack Thompson the screaming heebie jeebies. In fact, I'm going to call this the JTMS scheduler -- the Jack Thompson Murder Simulator Scheduler.
I'm sure this concept can be explored further, but the bar's about to close.
A computer-gaming Marilyn Manson obsessed repressed Islamic fundamentalist, inconsistently educated mentalist engineer with an Arabic look about him, does a lot less damage when armed with a toothpick. ...but slightly more when armed with a lorry full of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel.
It's too late to install working gun control in the United States. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle. There are over a quarter of a billion private firearms in the U.S., and sending out a polite letter saying "Please hand in your guns by the close of business on Thursday" simply won't work -- it certainly won't work on the sorts who have dishonest reasons for owning them.
It was already a crime to carry a weapon onto the VaTech campus. That did not keep a baddie from bringing guns on campus -- though doubtless it deterred many honest people from doing so.
For an interesting story, look to 1991 in Killeen, Texas. A survivor of that massacre tells the story of deciding to leave her handgun locked in her car's glove box instead of taking it into the restaurant, because of laws against guns in public places. Someone who chose not to obey that law drove his truck through the window and killed 23 people, wounded 20 more, then killed himself.
Nobody decides to shoot up a school then suddenly says to himself, "Curses! It's against the law to have a firearm on that campus! All my plans, ruined! I was willing to break forty-eight laws, but that forty-ninth, man, that really did the trick." An extra law, particularly one as delusional as after-the-fact gun control, did not change the minds of the shooter in Killeen, Texas, or the one in Blacksburg, Virginia, or the ones in Littleton, Colorado, or the one in Conyers, Georgia. It won't stop the next one, either.
Still and all, we're talking about a mere thirty three people out of the nine thousand who will be murdered by guns in the United States this year. Nobody would care except they all happened at once.
Aside from rules compliance, and paying the annual listing fee, NASDAQ has three basic rules about staying listed:
Minimum share price of $1
at least 750k public shares
at least $5m market value.
If they fall out of compliance for 30 straight days (and they last traded for $1 on March 13), they get a delinquency notice and have 90 days to get it together. Their ticker symbol will probably change from "SCOX" to "SCOXE" while they're under threat of delisting. [Source]
SCO already did a 1:4 split back in 2002; I'm not sure how the exchange will feel about them doing it again, because had they not done that split, their share price would currently be less than a quarter.
Because there's no compelling reason to exempt them from traffic laws in non-emergency situations. I rather think there is, though it's a small one that I guarantee that red-light-running cops will abuse as an alibi: Suspicious activity.
What's suspicious? I really, really don't want there to be a written list somewhere, because that's the sort of think a lawyer can latch onto in a trial. Suspicious activity is something that set's off a cop's spidey sense: The chirp of a tire. A sloppy lane correction. A frightened glance from a carload of teenagers who suddenly start driving very, very carefully. Two people loitering in a parking lot, one walking fast and one acting vigilant. Anything that often is symptomatic of criminal activity but is not, in itself, a criminal act.
Even if eighty percent of the time it turns out to be nothing, I want the cop to make the U-turn, run the light, turn off all their lights in the middle of the night (did you know that police prowlers can deactivate their brake lights?), whatever little bending of traffic rules they need, in order to go investigate. And I don't want them to have to hand in their gun and badge every time it turns out to be nothing.
Cops, just like everyone else, need a certain amount of discretion in the execution of their duties. Unfortunately, anyone can turn discretion into self-indulgence and cops, just like everyone else, will sometimes look at a yellow light and think, "screw that, I'm not stopping."
The solution, I suspect, is to get rid of the cameras, or use them for something else, like grepping for the license plates of stolen vehicles. This won't happen, of course, because nine times out of ten, when a government finds it has passed a flawed law, it will correct the problem by adding more laws instead of abandoning the flawed one.
I remember doing that with Borland C's very nice IDE: I was writing a set of graphical tools for VGA, so I could display the app there and step through code on the mono. It made debugging a snap, even for non-graphical apps, because I wouldn't have to keep switching views back and forth.
I kept the monitor and card in the attic for years, and in 2001 when my headless Pentium III Linux server stopped responding, rather than dragging my 60-lbs Trinitron monitor down to the basement, I dropped the 8-bit ISA Hercules card into the single, lonely ISA slot on the motherboard, plugged in the green screen monitor, and watched in amazement as the boot messages scrolled past just as happy as can be. The card says (c) 1981 on it and I loved having this mixture of new and ancient technology functioning together in a single system. I kept it together like that for years, along with my PC-AT keyboard, just for the atavistic thrill of it all.
Nowadays I much, much prefer having two LCD screens in front of me -- one with documentation and debris, and the other with the tasks at hand.
First, once you've set up one Windows environment for yourself, you'll find it much, much faster to set up the next one, because you already have a feel for what you like.
Second, it really, really depends on whether you built the computer yourself, or bought the machine from a vendor like HP. If you built your own, you install XP, patch, d/l whatever apps you need (starting with AVG and Ad-Aware), and fiddle with the UI while stuff downloads. If you bought a Compaq, you're going to spend half your day uninstalling all the gratuitious little semi-enabled, trial-version crap they put on there, absolutely none of which is worth using. That's on top of the patch, d/l, tweak cycle.
Third, now that Vista is out, all bets are off.
My goal when setting up a computer is minimal intrusiveness. I don't need to be distracted by transparent backgrounds or menus that unfurl gloriously and make little tocking sounds as you select items. Once you learn to go through turning all the fancy options off, you'll find your environment much more usable.
By getting PJ involved in the case and getting really, *really* lucky, they might be able to effectively gag Groklaw, or at least limit what they can and cannot post. Gagging PJ doesn't gag Groklaw. At worst she would have to hand it off to someone else for a while. This may be the smart thing to do regardless, because I'm sure SCO will try to have the deposition sealed, then try to talk about every single aspect of the case with her, then attack her if she says so much as her name in public.
But I suspect there are plenty of lawyers ready to go to bat for her, and if she needs to start a legal defense fund the donations will exceed SCO's market value within a few hours.
It's sad times that we live in, and the United States government simply isn't proving [sic] a means to deal with it. What the hell does the United States government have to do with any of this? Since when is the United States government tasked with keeping high school students from cheating on papers? How, exactly, does cheating on a paper in high school become a crime interfering with interstate commerce?
Maybe they should just pass an extensive set of regulations that ultimately force teachers to check for plagiarism using tools that require about ten minutes per paper graded, not to mention time required to transcribe handwritten papers or scan in typed ones submitted on paper. Will that make your mom's job easier?
I suppose you're thinking that the children would have been suspended, or failed for the whole term? Unfortunately, they were all given a slap on the wrist, and my mom was only allowed to give them F's for that single paper. There were no write ups, no detention, no community service, nothing. Sounds like the administrators at her school are a bunch of pussies who aren't watching their teachers' backs. Offhand I'd say that part of the reason is that if the student body's average GPA drops below a certain level, they lose federal funding, which is the sort of duplicitous bullshit your mom has to put up because the superhero omnipotent United States government has decided to micromanage your mom's classroom.
As a retailer, I would simply stop stocking any product that forced me to sell at price higher than the market could bear. So what? I'm pretty sure the idea is to force you out of the market so they can sell their products directly, taking home the full retail margin instead of mere wholesale.
Step two will be to announce "tiered" pricing floors, where retailers with monthly volumes of 0 to 10 units are required to have a floor of 1.0*x, with 11 to 999,999 units have a floor of 0.99*x, and Wal*Mart has a floor of 0.75*x. Oh, they'll find a way around public outrage, like offering absolutely identical Silver, Gold and Platinum Editions of the same product, but only when they're purchased in quantity profiles matching, well, whatever the hell they want them to match.
SCOTUSblog has a writeup on today's arguments. Interesting is Justice Kennedy's question that if it's illegal for a whole bunch of retailers to band together and fix the price on a product, why is it okay for the manufacturer to do the same?
I just finished reading Theodore Rex, a history of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. I am absolutely blown away by the parallels between America now and America a century ago, and the differences between how Roosevelt and Bush are executing their duties. In this case it's to do with whether corporations consolidating their power and reducing the free market to a tight little oligarchy controlled by a single politician's prayer breakfast is a good thing or a bad thing.
You really screwed up when you wrote the letter to their lawyers. It made the problem much, much worse for you, your friend, and her client. The little "(IANAL)" basically translates as "I am unqualified to tell you that 'You really screwed up when you wrote the letter to their lawyers.'" You don't know what the letter said. If the letter said, "This was an accident, not the client's intention, nor mine, wires got crossed somewhere, terribly sorry, and I took the offending material down and am taking steps to make sure this never happens again," then he and his client are a lot better off than if the letter said "I stole those images on purpose and the client didn't seem to care. It's obvious that we're in the wrong, have violated numerous laws, and owe your client at least $25,000. Please tell me your legal fees so I can cover those, too. Attached is a full accounting of my company's assets and revenue streams."
I can tell you're not an attorney because of all the things you didn't notice in the article. The client, not the Asker, is the one who received the shakedown notice. The client is the one with legal trouble and they are the ones in need of an attorney. The Asker may need one too, later, if the client (or anyone else) sends him an invoice, but the Asker hasn't received any threatening letters.
Based on what I've seen in the past -- as an interested outsider, not as an attorney -- an accused offender swiftly and voluntarily taking steps to remove infringing material is looked on very favorably by the courts. The $25,000 "invoice" is a shakedown by an outside contractor who probably has a semi-automated process that spiders for images then pastes a name in address into a boilerplate demand letter. Maybe in the UK that's a standard opening gambit. The client needs to get his advice from a professional who is qualified to act in the UK, not you or me, although I suspect I'm being more rational and realistic than you. A run-of-the-mill lawyer would probably be happy to advise the client, and even send a letter or two on his behalf, for less than $1000. Of course, if things progress, well, so do fees. One of the first things the client's lawyer will do is look at the letter that Asker send on client's behalf. If he sees it as harmless or positive he will probably send a letter to the shakedown artists (and the copyright holder) saying that the offending material was taken down, that the "invoice" is inappropriate, and the matter is now closed. The attorney will also advise the client on the actual limits of their liability.
Your gloating suggestion that Asker has "bent over, dropped your pants and decided to forgo any lube" is a fine example of why people should be asking lawyers, not Slashdotters, what to do when they need legal advice.
[M]any of those 140,000 also have other moral responsibilities, such as providing for their children. How about their moral responsibility to provide their children a future where there isn't a secret police, with zero accountability, conducting secret investigations of their masters' political enemies?
There's an axiom that any law that can be abused will be abused. The current administration demonstrates this with jaw-dropping alacrity. Look at the U.S. Attorney firings. Look at the 30,000 investigations the FBI has admitted to conducting illegally. All done under the umbrella of laws designed to fight terrorism. Look at how they've repealed the Posse Comitatus Act, and wait until the goddamned Army is deployed in your neighborhood, because wouldn't you know it? some guy down the street from you smoked pot once, and the war on drugs is a national emergency. Or maybe it wasn't pot. Maybe he's using peer-to-peer to tell the world about other government abuses.
That ain't the country I want my children growing up in, and it's here. Now.
By and large, SANs don't need defragging: They do all sorts of striping and mirroring internally that there's almost no guarantee that what your servers think are adjacent blocks are anywhere near each other on the SAN itself.
Where I would take a look is at your RDBMS. If you're getting 80% disk utilization at the SAN you may be doing far more sequential/full-table scans than you need to be. Turn explain plan on and start looking for opportunities to add indexes.
Finally, check virtual memory on the connected servers. If they're mapping VM to a SAN volume, you've got all sorts of pointless trouble. Always swap to local disk, because most Unixes and Windows both do pre-emptive paging and the 80% disk loading you see at login time may be from memory images of the new applications being mapped out to the SAN.
I'll be curious to see how this works out for you.
This is all nuance, but:
Linksys, which got the software under the GPL, had to comply with the GPL as soon as they were selling it in a modified form. s/selling/distributing/
And is't not even gasoline. From a cited article:
These boots use biofuels like biodiesel, vegetable oil, SVO, waste vegetable oil (WVO) to really put some pep in your step. Ignoring the revolting internal rhyme, it appears these boots are designed to run on multiple low-grade fuels. Petrol would simply allow the wearer to move a little faster, or at least drive his shin bone right through his knee if he hits the ground wrong.
'As commercial metal products have matured, it no longer makes sense for organizations to develop iron from scratch. Cutlery, structural I-beams, sheet metal bending systems are the order of the day: stable, well-proven and easily available.' Is that quote laughable?
Well, yeah. All my years working in tall buildings, and I never once panicked that the builders didn't know how to smelt, or that maybe they took one metallurgy course in engineering school but have forgotten everything about it except "don't drink incandescent liquids."
Yet the whole world is made of stuff that was, at one point, smelted.
What we're seeing is a new level of abstraction, with a much steeper amplification curve than ever before: The work of a very few extremely expert people becomes the building blocks for the work of a relative few very expert people becomes the building blocks for the work of a slightly few relatively expert people becomes the building blocks for the work of relatively many ordinarily skilled people becomes the building blocks for everything everybody else uses. There enough layers between the person the guy designing the circuit traces for a chip's sign-extended add instruction and the guy writing an Excel macro that one chip designer can support the work of hundreds of millions of others. Compare this with the mid-1960s when the guys writing the accounting package could walk into the machine room and physically rewire the machine to make sign-extended adds work faster with odd numbers.
Computer science is not becoming dead. But it is becoming more focussed and more niche-oriented. There are so many things one can do with a computer without a CS degree that the lack of one is not a universal barrier, if it ever was. My last analogy for the day is the automobile factory. There's an assembly line in there full of people making cars, who have never even heard of smelting, have no comprehension of what makes gasoline burn one way and diesel fuel another, and would be utterly hopeless designing the ideal valve geometry, a whole industry full of people without the slightest clue about extractive metallurgy, yet here we are with hundreds of millions of rock-solid, reliable cars on the road.
We ran simulations the weekend before, but forgot to set it back on one of the build servers, which went and touched about half our version control tree, and when the rest of the build machines saw they were a week behind schedule, the whole farm lit up like a Christmas tree, swamping a key NFS server and bringing our internal (gigabit!) network to its knees.
Funny, funny stuff. I would have much preferred a couple of weeks showing up an hour late for meetings I don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm convinced that Microsoft, and indeed nearly all the big players in software, have such large and banal patent portfolios simply to protect themselves from these ludicrous suits. It's been a race between legitimate producers of product and the patent trolls, who for the past decade or two have been saying things precisely as absurd as "Here's a communications device that can wirelessly transmit and receive digital data. Here's a form of communication called 'e-mail'. Let's patent sending e-mail to and from a wireless device!" So they sue Blackberry and blackmail them for tens of millions of dollars, and Blackberry's over a barrel because the concept sending e-mail to and from a Blackberry is so fucking obvious that nobody bothered to write it down. I swear to Ghod it's no different than saying "Here's a car. Here's a store. Let's patent driving a car to a store!"
The real losers in this case are pharmaceutical companies, who have a highly profitable habit of saying, "Here's a drug whose patent is about to expire. Here's a way of encapsulating any drug to be slow-release for 24-hour dosing. Let's patent a slow-release version of our drug!" By getting a patent on the combination of the unpatented (their drug) and the universally obvious (slow-release tablets), they buy themselves another decade or more of high markup.
Microsoft, and indeed any techology company that sticks its head up, has been consistently and unfairly brutalized by patent trolls for too long now. I'll be happy to see this practice come to an end.
I expect this will happen again in the fall. For all its silly, annoying, single-threaded, poorly implemented crap, if I can spend six weeks out of the year dodging meetings and actually getting work done, I'll forgive it every other flaw.
If you are a citizen of this country, it is critical to the bargain of citizenship: If you are accused of a crime, you are entitled to a jury of your peers. In return, if you are called for jury duty, you must go.
As you said, it's one of the best ways to affect things -- at least, for those of us who can't afford a lobbyist.
A few other posters on this thread have saddened me greatly by exhibiting a smug preoccupation with how to get out of serving on a jury. I invite them to consider how this impacts the bargain: if they are accused of a crime, do they really want a jury of the dumb and complacent? Or do they want their fate in the hands of those who can think and are willing to take seriously their obligations?
Want to give each process a weapon? Fine. But they have to earn ammunition.
Every time a process gives up its slot, it's given a round of ammunition. It has the option of "shooting" a process ahead of it in the queue, thereby expending a round of ammunition. A shot process must give up its slot in the next round. Whether it loses all its ammo when it respawns remains a research question.
There are two floating point tunable parameters, "accuracy" and "rampage." "Accuracy" is the likelihood that a given shot will actually hit the process it aims at. "Rampage" is the tendency of a process to save up rounds for a while then go on a spree.
Okay, there's a third parameter, "armor," which is the odds of a hit actually becoming an injury. This is meant to protect system processes against luser jobs, and top-level processes against spawned threads.
Of course, the scheduler itself is a boss job that can't be killed, has perfect armor and has infinite ammo.
For the purpose of top and other job monitoring tools we can replace a process's "NICE" score with a "VIOLENCE" score -- an aggregate of their armor, accuracy, rampage tendencies and current ammo supply. We can rename the renice utility to medicate. The important thing about medication is that it eventually wears off, unless you specify the -l (lobotomize) option, which turns the process into a harmless drooling vegetable. Its companion utilities are aim and armor, which tune a job's accuracy and armor class, respectively.
There are two important things about this approach. First, it's probabilistic instead of purely heirarchical. Second, it should give Jack Thompson the screaming heebie jeebies. In fact, I'm going to call this the JTMS scheduler -- the Jack Thompson Murder Simulator Scheduler.
I'm sure this concept can be explored further, but the bar's about to close.
He's been giving (well, helping give) Florida a bad name since at least 1990.
It's too late to install working gun control in the United States. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle. There are over a quarter of a billion private firearms in the U.S., and sending out a polite letter saying "Please hand in your guns by the close of business on Thursday" simply won't work -- it certainly won't work on the sorts who have dishonest reasons for owning them.
It was already a crime to carry a weapon onto the VaTech campus. That did not keep a baddie from bringing guns on campus -- though doubtless it deterred many honest people from doing so.
For an interesting story, look to 1991 in Killeen, Texas. A survivor of that massacre tells the story of deciding to leave her handgun locked in her car's glove box instead of taking it into the restaurant, because of laws against guns in public places. Someone who chose not to obey that law drove his truck through the window and killed 23 people, wounded 20 more, then killed himself.
Nobody decides to shoot up a school then suddenly says to himself, "Curses! It's against the law to have a firearm on that campus! All my plans, ruined! I was willing to break forty-eight laws, but that forty-ninth, man, that really did the trick." An extra law, particularly one as delusional as after-the-fact gun control, did not change the minds of the shooter in Killeen, Texas, or the one in Blacksburg, Virginia, or the ones in Littleton, Colorado, or the one in Conyers, Georgia. It won't stop the next one, either.
Still and all, we're talking about a mere thirty three people out of the nine thousand who will be murdered by guns in the United States this year. Nobody would care except they all happened at once.
Looks like the probationary period has gone to 180 days. My bad.
Aside from rules compliance, and paying the annual listing fee, NASDAQ has three basic rules about staying listed:
- Minimum share price of $1
- at least 750k public shares
- at least $5m market value.
If they fall out of compliance for 30 straight days (and they last traded for $1 on March 13), they get a delinquency notice and have 90 days to get it together. Their ticker symbol will probably change from "SCOX" to "SCOXE" while they're under threat of delisting. [Source]SCO already did a 1:4 split back in 2002; I'm not sure how the exchange will feel about them doing it again, because had they not done that split, their share price would currently be less than a quarter.
What's suspicious? I really, really don't want there to be a written list somewhere, because that's the sort of think a lawyer can latch onto in a trial. Suspicious activity is something that set's off a cop's spidey sense: The chirp of a tire. A sloppy lane correction. A frightened glance from a carload of teenagers who suddenly start driving very, very carefully. Two people loitering in a parking lot, one walking fast and one acting vigilant. Anything that often is symptomatic of criminal activity but is not, in itself, a criminal act.
Even if eighty percent of the time it turns out to be nothing, I want the cop to make the U-turn, run the light, turn off all their lights in the middle of the night (did you know that police prowlers can deactivate their brake lights?), whatever little bending of traffic rules they need, in order to go investigate. And I don't want them to have to hand in their gun and badge every time it turns out to be nothing.
Cops, just like everyone else, need a certain amount of discretion in the execution of their duties. Unfortunately, anyone can turn discretion into self-indulgence and cops, just like everyone else, will sometimes look at a yellow light and think, "screw that, I'm not stopping."
The solution, I suspect, is to get rid of the cameras, or use them for something else, like grepping for the license plates of stolen vehicles. This won't happen, of course, because nine times out of ten, when a government finds it has passed a flawed law, it will correct the problem by adding more laws instead of abandoning the flawed one.
I kept the monitor and card in the attic for years, and in 2001 when my headless Pentium III Linux server stopped responding, rather than dragging my 60-lbs Trinitron monitor down to the basement, I dropped the 8-bit ISA Hercules card into the single, lonely ISA slot on the motherboard, plugged in the green screen monitor, and watched in amazement as the boot messages scrolled past just as happy as can be. The card says (c) 1981 on it and I loved having this mixture of new and ancient technology functioning together in a single system. I kept it together like that for years, along with my PC-AT keyboard, just for the atavistic thrill of it all.
Nowadays I much, much prefer having two LCD screens in front of me -- one with documentation and debris, and the other with the tasks at hand.
First, once you've set up one Windows environment for yourself, you'll find it much, much faster to set up the next one, because you already have a feel for what you like.
Second, it really, really depends on whether you built the computer yourself, or bought the machine from a vendor like HP. If you built your own, you install XP, patch, d/l whatever apps you need (starting with AVG and Ad-Aware), and fiddle with the UI while stuff downloads. If you bought a Compaq, you're going to spend half your day uninstalling all the gratuitious little semi-enabled, trial-version crap they put on there, absolutely none of which is worth using. That's on top of the patch, d/l, tweak cycle.
Third, now that Vista is out, all bets are off.
My goal when setting up a computer is minimal intrusiveness. I don't need to be distracted by transparent backgrounds or menus that unfurl gloriously and make little tocking sounds as you select items. Once you learn to go through turning all the fancy options off, you'll find your environment much more usable.
But I suspect there are plenty of lawyers ready to go to bat for her, and if she needs to start a legal defense fund the donations will exceed SCO's market value within a few hours.
Maybe they should just pass an extensive set of regulations that ultimately force teachers to check for plagiarism using tools that require about ten minutes per paper graded, not to mention time required to transcribe handwritten papers or scan in typed ones submitted on paper. Will that make your mom's job easier?
I suppose you're thinking that the children would have been suspended, or failed for the whole term? Unfortunately, they were all given a slap on the wrist, and my mom was only allowed to give them F's for that single paper. There were no write ups, no detention, no community service, nothing. Sounds like the administrators at her school are a bunch of pussies who aren't watching their teachers' backs. Offhand I'd say that part of the reason is that if the student body's average GPA drops below a certain level, they lose federal funding, which is the sort of duplicitous bullshit your mom has to put up because the superhero omnipotent United States government has decided to micromanage your mom's classroom.You cannot even be party to a contract until you achieve majority.
Maybe not, but your parents or guardians can. If you think they got you a raw deal, wait until you're eighteen and sue them.Step two will be to announce "tiered" pricing floors, where retailers with monthly volumes of 0 to 10 units are required to have a floor of 1.0*x, with 11 to 999,999 units have a floor of 0.99*x, and Wal*Mart has a floor of 0.75*x. Oh, they'll find a way around public outrage, like offering absolutely identical Silver, Gold and Platinum Editions of the same product, but only when they're purchased in quantity profiles matching, well, whatever the hell they want them to match.
SCOTUSblog has a writeup on today's arguments. Interesting is Justice Kennedy's question that if it's illegal for a whole bunch of retailers to band together and fix the price on a product, why is it okay for the manufacturer to do the same?
I just finished reading Theodore Rex, a history of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. I am absolutely blown away by the parallels between America now and America a century ago, and the differences between how Roosevelt and Bush are executing their duties. In this case it's to do with whether corporations consolidating their power and reducing the free market to a tight little oligarchy controlled by a single politician's prayer breakfast is a good thing or a bad thing.
You really screwed up when you wrote the letter to their lawyers. It made the problem much, much worse for you, your friend, and her client.
The little "(IANAL)" basically translates as "I am unqualified to tell you that 'You really screwed up when you wrote the letter to their lawyers.'" You don't know what the letter said. If the letter said, "This was an accident, not the client's intention, nor mine, wires got crossed somewhere, terribly sorry, and I took the offending material down and am taking steps to make sure this never happens again," then he and his client are a lot better off than if the letter said "I stole those images on purpose and the client didn't seem to care. It's obvious that we're in the wrong, have violated numerous laws, and owe your client at least $25,000. Please tell me your legal fees so I can cover those, too. Attached is a full accounting of my company's assets and revenue streams."
I can tell you're not an attorney because of all the things you didn't notice in the article. The client, not the Asker, is the one who received the shakedown notice. The client is the one with legal trouble and they are the ones in need of an attorney. The Asker may need one too, later, if the client (or anyone else) sends him an invoice, but the Asker hasn't received any threatening letters.
Based on what I've seen in the past -- as an interested outsider, not as an attorney -- an accused offender swiftly and voluntarily taking steps to remove infringing material is looked on very favorably by the courts. The $25,000 "invoice" is a shakedown by an outside contractor who probably has a semi-automated process that spiders for images then pastes a name in address into a boilerplate demand letter. Maybe in the UK that's a standard opening gambit. The client needs to get his advice from a professional who is qualified to act in the UK, not you or me, although I suspect I'm being more rational and realistic than you. A run-of-the-mill lawyer would probably be happy to advise the client, and even send a letter or two on his behalf, for less than $1000. Of course, if things progress, well, so do fees. One of the first things the client's lawyer will do is look at the letter that Asker send on client's behalf. If he sees it as harmless or positive he will probably send a letter to the shakedown artists (and the copyright holder) saying that the offending material was taken down, that the "invoice" is inappropriate, and the matter is now closed. The attorney will also advise the client on the actual limits of their liability.
Your gloating suggestion that Asker has "bent over, dropped your pants and decided to forgo any lube" is a fine example of why people should be asking lawyers, not Slashdotters, what to do when they need legal advice.
There's an axiom that any law that can be abused will be abused. The current administration demonstrates this with jaw-dropping alacrity. Look at the U.S. Attorney firings. Look at the 30,000 investigations the FBI has admitted to conducting illegally. All done under the umbrella of laws designed to fight terrorism. Look at how they've repealed the Posse Comitatus Act, and wait until the goddamned Army is deployed in your neighborhood, because wouldn't you know it? some guy down the street from you smoked pot once, and the war on drugs is a national emergency. Or maybe it wasn't pot. Maybe he's using peer-to-peer to tell the world about other government abuses.
That ain't the country I want my children growing up in, and it's here. Now.
That quote about First Amendment rights being "chipped away", is from Reed's opinion in ACLU v. Reno, 31 F. Supp. 2d 473, issued in 1999.
Where I would take a look is at your RDBMS. If you're getting 80% disk utilization at the SAN you may be doing far more sequential/full-table scans than you need to be. Turn explain plan on and start looking for opportunities to add indexes.
Finally, check virtual memory on the connected servers. If they're mapping VM to a SAN volume, you've got all sorts of pointless trouble. Always swap to local disk, because most Unixes and Windows both do pre-emptive paging and the 80% disk loading you see at login time may be from memory images of the new applications being mapped out to the SAN.
I'll be curious to see how this works out for you.
If you copyright your DNA you will have the greatest euphemism for masturbation so far: "exercising my intellectual property rights."
Well, yeah. All my years working in tall buildings, and I never once panicked that the builders didn't know how to smelt, or that maybe they took one metallurgy course in engineering school but have forgotten everything about it except "don't drink incandescent liquids."
Yet the whole world is made of stuff that was, at one point, smelted.
What we're seeing is a new level of abstraction, with a much steeper amplification curve than ever before: The work of a very few extremely expert people becomes the building blocks for the work of a relative few very expert people becomes the building blocks for the work of a slightly few relatively expert people becomes the building blocks for the work of relatively many ordinarily skilled people becomes the building blocks for everything everybody else uses. There enough layers between the person the guy designing the circuit traces for a chip's sign-extended add instruction and the guy writing an Excel macro that one chip designer can support the work of hundreds of millions of others. Compare this with the mid-1960s when the guys writing the accounting package could walk into the machine room and physically rewire the machine to make sign-extended adds work faster with odd numbers.
Computer science is not becoming dead. But it is becoming more focussed and more niche-oriented. There are so many things one can do with a computer without a CS degree that the lack of one is not a universal barrier, if it ever was. My last analogy for the day is the automobile factory. There's an assembly line in there full of people making cars, who have never even heard of smelting, have no comprehension of what makes gasoline burn one way and diesel fuel another, and would be utterly hopeless designing the ideal valve geometry, a whole industry full of people without the slightest clue about extractive metallurgy, yet here we are with hundreds of millions of rock-solid, reliable cars on the road.
Funny, funny stuff. I would have much preferred a couple of weeks showing up an hour late for meetings I don't like.