Good god, I hope this doesn't become a long-running meme (especially the misspelling of "heard"). If it does, I will make an effort to show up in every/. thread to post a reply to these saying "Wurst. Meme. EVAR. </comic book guy>"
If I customize Firefox, the Linux kernel, or Gnome to make it easier for me to do things, it does not affect the experience of anyone who is using the official client without customizations. If I do the same thing for an MMO - and change it to give myself an unfair advantage, such as the ability to see through wall, rather than just to make it work better with my video card - then it will affect the experience of other players. And given that we have seen this kind of behavior in closed-source MMOs, you can bet it's going to happen in an open source one. But it will happen faster.
Why am I cheering about what seems to be a complete breakdown of what geeks want?
Simple - for most books, the "rightsholder" is the AUTHOR, not the publisher. (This is the opposite situation from the music industry.)
So authors will need to contact Amazon to disable this, and I'm betting that generally they won't bother. If the book publishers tell Amazon to do it, Amazon can just point out that the copyright is not in their control.
Really? I've pretty much stopped going to CNN.com because it seems like 75% of their stories are only only available in video format. (That's hyperbole, folks - I know it's really less than 50%. Probably lots less.) Now, a story that would take me half a minute to read is only available as a three minute video. It's a waste of time and bandwidth as far I'm concerned.
Except there's no such thing as permanent safety. See, the safety is only as complete as the people in charge of making things safe are trustworthy. Creating safety requires giving people power, and power corrupts. Therefore, the people in charge of safety will be corrupt. Sure, the system may work for a while, but eventually a person that is very susceptible to corruption will be put in charge, and it will break down, probably quite spectacularly and quite quicky.
Using spaces as tabs is the Right Thing to do. Say you've got your editor set to tab stops every 4 characters, and I've got mine set to every 8 characters. If your files have tabs following other text (such as to put single-line comments in C sources), things that look perfectly lined up on your screen are all over the place on mine.
So set your editors to insert X number of spaces when you hit Tab.
Or install Firefox and the Flashblock extension, which blocks ALL Flash content until explicitly allowed (which can either be once or always for a particular site). Which is better than AdBlock's version, that lets you block Flash but makes you explicitly block rather than blanket-block. (Blanket-block is better because 90% or more of Flash content encountered is ads.)
- Does it work in law to say "He's doing it too"? - Isn't it "unconstitutional" (illegal) to have a law that applies to lots and is only enforced on some?
No, to both of your questions. Try this with a cop the next time that you get pulled over speeding. Not only will you get a ticket, you'll get the cop mad and he will find probably half a dozen other things that you can additional tickets for.
They won a battle. It doesn't mean that they've won the war. Especially since the settlement was out-of-court, so the legality of their action hasn't truly been tested. (There are many reasons for settling out of court - you know you can't win; you know can win but it won't be worth the price, you might win but the cost of the judgement against you plus legal fees will be higher than what the other party is willing to take in settlement, etc.)
And as other people have pointed out in this thread, there's a good chance that deeplinking actual drives increased page views by sending people directly to content they are interested in rather than relying on them to find interesting content on their own via the site's main page.
But I'm curious why you believe flour would be more easily obtainable than other foodstuffs?
I don't. I believe that, immediately before a disaster, everyone else will be stocking up on canned goods. Which will leave the store's stock of flour, sugar, and other baking basics for me to buy, along with a whole bunch of charcoal to actually run the smoker. (I'll also be letting my 300-gallon hot tub, that I never use, drain so that I can refill it and skip the chlorine so I can use it as a stock of drinking water.)
Your boss's plan wasn't that bad, actually - nicotine addiction is horrible to try to overcome, and I bet he would have found a few people to trade with in the event of a disaster on a scale that would return the US to a barter system. But given that that hasn't happened, did he end up throwing the cigarettes away, or giving them away, or what?
"There has been a lot of research into high reliability systems, and mainframe systems can remain operational with no interruptions in service for decades on end."
As it happens, I work on a high-reliability, high-availability minicomputer in the financial industry. Even if there are no problems with backups (unlikely), there will be network problems that prevent accessing the data, unless there is a pair of high-reliability high-availability systems available at each hospital. (Pair because every machine needs to come down sometime - even if only for maintenance of its connection to the power grid - so you always have a second system to fail over to.) And the cost we'll pay to replicate all that data to every hospital in the country? It'll be huge.
"Sounds like a typical engineering challenge."
See the comment below about 11TB of radiology images for a city of 100K. Can you imagine what the requirements will be for that type of system scaled up to 300 million people?
"Take a look at the NIST security criteria for certified systems some time."
I admit that I haven't looked at that. But it's not bypassing the security I'm worried about. If it's possible for the police to get a warrant for certain records, how long do you think it's going to take before some fast-talking cop flashes his badge to someone who does have proper access and ends with a copy of his wife/girlfriend/mistress's medical records?
Given that (a) the average journey for food items from production to plate is supposedly over 1000 miles in my country, (b) I live in area with few farms, and (c) Space Katrina is going to knock out transportation and probably the electical grid (I have an electric stove and oven), I have to wonder: Can the smoker I got for Christmas be used to bake bread? And what other essentials should I stock up on?
I see many problems with this. Here are the ones that seem most important:
First off, who is going to back this data up, how are they going to back it up, and how are the backups going to be tested? The public outcry that you'll have the first time a hospital administers medication that a patient is allergic to because the IT staff is still in the middle of restoring backups will (or at least should) be epic.
Secondly, quite a bit of "medical records" is high-resolution images (X-rays, ultrasounds, MRI, CAT scans, and probably a lot of stuff I haven't thought of). A typical patient may only have one or two images in their files, but we are talking hundreds (or thousands) of patients per doctor. The storage space required will be astronomical.
Third, all systems that can be abused will be; and any "safeguards" put in place to prevent abuse will only make it more difficult to uncover the abuse. I don't know what form this abuse will take, but it will happen.
I could probably come with half a dozen more if I tried, but I should be getting back to work.
...or is it looking more and more like the RIAA has realized that downloading really isn't hurting them, and they don't want the embarrassment of admitting it publicly, so they're just slowly backing off from their "Piracy is da debil!" stance and hoping that we won't notice?
how does that alter your real risk of getting into a collision?
Also, if know that your risk of getting into a collision has been altered (but not how it has been altered), do you alter how you drive? And if you did know how the risk had been altered, does that change whether you drive more or less carefully?
The answers to these questions should be obvious. But by the number of idiots who don't wear seat belts because they drive cars that have airbags, I'm guessing that to a large part of the population they aren't.
If you flee to the Democrats, they hate corporations but love government. No good. If you flee to the Republicans, they hate government but love corporations. That's no good either. If only there were a party that hated both, since both corporations And governments are untrustworthy institutions. That's a party I could stand behind.
So what you're saying is that you want a political party that is essentially libertarian but also recognizes that rule by the current Libertarian Party would result in a tragedy of the commons for vital resources (such as clean air, clean water, etc.), and therefore the existing LP is entirely unsuitable and undeserving of your support? Yeah, me too. Let me know if you find one.
I could spend considerably more time bitching about the reduction of freedom for individuals and the increasing freedom (and government support!) of corporations, but I think it would bore most people in this thread.
You're assuming that the bet you're making when entering the stock market is "The price per share of the stock in [insert company here] will go up before I have reason to sell my shares." If that's the way you want to bet, fine - but you'd be an idiot to bet that way. You should be entering the stock market with this bet: "The combined value of change in price of the stock plus the dividends paid will be more than the value of what I paid for the stock." Note that I mentioned only value, not price. Although money has been described as "the universal symbol for value received", most currencies in use at this point are fiat currencies that have no fixed value, either in non-fiat currencies or in commodities. Therefore, what costs $1 today might cost $10 a week later. (In fact, Zimbabwe's economy has been doing this kind of thing recently.)
So, depending on how the rest of the economy changes - buying a stock at $100/share and selling it a year later at $10/share might actually be a good idea - if the stock paid out $95/share in dividends and the economy is otherwise unchanged, or if that $10 will buy more than $100 would have a year earlier.
They're not doing it to "prevent losses". They're doing it to "maximise shareholder value". From the perspective of a corporation, any employee that doesn't add more value to the company's bottom line that it costs to employ them is not worth keeping around. Clearly, someone at Microsoft feels this is the case with a significant fraction of the workforce there. (Whether they are right or not is something that only time will tell.)
Last I checked, iPod Touch didn't even have Bluetooth. (Which is actually one of the things stopping from getting one - I'd like to get Bluetooth stereo headphones and not have to worry about wires while I'm listening to music.) And there are plenty of other folding and miniature Bluetooth keyboards out there - which are probably both cheaper and more accurate than the laser doohickey you linked.
<joke>You need to teach your wife about this new-fangled thing called "radio".</joke>
My wife also grew up in a household where the TV was turned on by the first person to get up in the morning and turned off by the last person to go to bed at night. Her entire family treats noise from the TV as though it were natural background noise, ignoring it and talking over it when it suits them. I suspect your wife is doing the same - leaving the TV on in order to have something other than silence in the house.
I've got to admit that I don't understand this. God knows that the actual CONTENT in that much TV isn't enough to keep anyone interested for that many hours out of the day. So why waste money by having it on? And why waste your attention by having something so damn distracting in your environment intentionally?
Slashdot Mirror
Good god, I hope this doesn't become a long-running meme (especially the misspelling of "heard"). If it does, I will make an effort to show up in every /. thread to post a reply to these saying "Wurst. Meme. EVAR. </comic book guy>"
If I customize Firefox, the Linux kernel, or Gnome to make it easier for me to do things, it does not affect the experience of anyone who is using the official client without customizations. If I do the same thing for an MMO - and change it to give myself an unfair advantage, such as the ability to see through wall, rather than just to make it work better with my video card - then it will affect the experience of other players. And given that we have seen this kind of behavior in closed-source MMOs, you can bet it's going to happen in an open source one. But it will happen faster.
Why am I cheering about what seems to be a complete breakdown of what geeks want?
Simple - for most books, the "rightsholder" is the AUTHOR, not the publisher. (This is the opposite situation from the music industry.)
So authors will need to contact Amazon to disable this, and I'm betting that generally they won't bother. If the book publishers tell Amazon to do it, Amazon can just point out that the copyright is not in their control.
Really? I've pretty much stopped going to CNN.com because it seems like 75% of their stories are only only available in video format. (That's hyperbole, folks - I know it's really less than 50%. Probably lots less.) Now, a story that would take me half a minute to read is only available as a three minute video. It's a waste of time and bandwidth as far I'm concerned.
Except there's no such thing as permanent safety. See, the safety is only as complete as the people in charge of making things safe are trustworthy. Creating safety requires giving people power, and power corrupts. Therefore, the people in charge of safety will be corrupt. Sure, the system may work for a while, but eventually a person that is very susceptible to corruption will be put in charge, and it will break down, probably quite spectacularly and quite quicky.
Using spaces as tabs is the Right Thing to do. Say you've got your editor set to tab stops every 4 characters, and I've got mine set to every 8 characters. If your files have tabs following other text (such as to put single-line comments in C sources), things that look perfectly lined up on your screen are all over the place on mine.
So set your editors to insert X number of spaces when you hit Tab.
Or install Firefox and the Flashblock extension, which blocks ALL Flash content until explicitly allowed (which can either be once or always for a particular site). Which is better than AdBlock's version, that lets you block Flash but makes you explicitly block rather than blanket-block. (Blanket-block is better because 90% or more of Flash content encountered is ads.)
No, to both of your questions. Try this with a cop the next time that you get pulled over speeding. Not only will you get a ticket, you'll get the cop mad and he will find probably half a dozen other things that you can additional tickets for.
They won a battle. It doesn't mean that they've won the war. Especially since the settlement was out-of-court, so the legality of their action hasn't truly been tested. (There are many reasons for settling out of court - you know you can't win; you know can win but it won't be worth the price, you might win but the cost of the judgement against you plus legal fees will be higher than what the other party is willing to take in settlement, etc.)
And as other people have pointed out in this thread, there's a good chance that deeplinking actual drives increased page views by sending people directly to content they are interested in rather than relying on them to find interesting content on their own via the site's main page.
What? I provided you with a link so you could find out more. It wasn't like you were going to RTFA that the summary linked to!
So was I. It's a "Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device", it's made by General Dynamics, and you can read more about it here.
Revs
Hey, unlike the Sox, at least they actually play football, even if not the American variety.
I don't. I believe that, immediately before a disaster, everyone else will be stocking up on canned goods. Which will leave the store's stock of flour, sugar, and other baking basics for me to buy, along with a whole bunch of charcoal to actually run the smoker. (I'll also be letting my 300-gallon hot tub, that I never use, drain so that I can refill it and skip the chlorine so I can use it as a stock of drinking water.)
Your boss's plan wasn't that bad, actually - nicotine addiction is horrible to try to overcome, and I bet he would have found a few people to trade with in the event of a disaster on a scale that would return the US to a barter system. But given that that hasn't happened, did he end up throwing the cigarettes away, or giving them away, or what?
"There has been a lot of research into high reliability systems, and mainframe systems can remain operational with no interruptions in service for decades on end."
As it happens, I work on a high-reliability, high-availability minicomputer in the financial industry. Even if there are no problems with backups (unlikely), there will be network problems that prevent accessing the data, unless there is a pair of high-reliability high-availability systems available at each hospital. (Pair because every machine needs to come down sometime - even if only for maintenance of its connection to the power grid - so you always have a second system to fail over to.) And the cost we'll pay to replicate all that data to every hospital in the country? It'll be huge.
"Sounds like a typical engineering challenge."
See the comment below about 11TB of radiology images for a city of 100K. Can you imagine what the requirements will be for that type of system scaled up to 300 million people?
"Take a look at the NIST security criteria for certified systems some time."
I admit that I haven't looked at that. But it's not bypassing the security I'm worried about. If it's possible for the police to get a warrant for certain records, how long do you think it's going to take before some fast-talking cop flashes his badge to someone who does have proper access and ends with a copy of his wife/girlfriend/mistress's medical records?
Given that (a) the average journey for food items from production to plate is supposedly over 1000 miles in my country, (b) I live in area with few farms, and (c) Space Katrina is going to knock out transportation and probably the electical grid (I have an electric stove and oven), I have to wonder: Can the smoker I got for Christmas be used to bake bread? And what other essentials should I stock up on?
I see many problems with this. Here are the ones that seem most important:
First off, who is going to back this data up, how are they going to back it up, and how are the backups going to be tested? The public outcry that you'll have the first time a hospital administers medication that a patient is allergic to because the IT staff is still in the middle of restoring backups will (or at least should) be epic.
Secondly, quite a bit of "medical records" is high-resolution images (X-rays, ultrasounds, MRI, CAT scans, and probably a lot of stuff I haven't thought of). A typical patient may only have one or two images in their files, but we are talking hundreds (or thousands) of patients per doctor. The storage space required will be astronomical.
Third, all systems that can be abused will be; and any "safeguards" put in place to prevent abuse will only make it more difficult to uncover the abuse. I don't know what form this abuse will take, but it will happen.
I could probably come with half a dozen more if I tried, but I should be getting back to work.
...or is it looking more and more like the RIAA has realized that downloading really isn't hurting them, and they don't want the embarrassment of admitting it publicly, so they're just slowly backing off from their "Piracy is da debil!" stance and hoping that we won't notice?
It had to get to 4chan from somewhere. Mostly I'm wondering what part of the world has that large a concentration of badgers.
Anyone know where this picture is originally from?
Also, if know that your risk of getting into a collision has been altered (but not how it has been altered), do you alter how you drive? And if you did know how the risk had been altered, does that change whether you drive more or less carefully?
The answers to these questions should be obvious. But by the number of idiots who don't wear seat belts because they drive cars that have airbags, I'm guessing that to a large part of the population they aren't.
So what you're saying is that you want a political party that is essentially libertarian but also recognizes that rule by the current Libertarian Party would result in a tragedy of the commons for vital resources (such as clean air, clean water, etc.), and therefore the existing LP is entirely unsuitable and undeserving of your support? Yeah, me too. Let me know if you find one.
I could spend considerably more time bitching about the reduction of freedom for individuals and the increasing freedom (and government support!) of corporations, but I think it would bore most people in this thread.
You're assuming that the bet you're making when entering the stock market is "The price per share of the stock in [insert company here] will go up before I have reason to sell my shares." If that's the way you want to bet, fine - but you'd be an idiot to bet that way. You should be entering the stock market with this bet: "The combined value of change in price of the stock plus the dividends paid will be more than the value of what I paid for the stock." Note that I mentioned only value, not price. Although money has been described as "the universal symbol for value received", most currencies in use at this point are fiat currencies that have no fixed value, either in non-fiat currencies or in commodities. Therefore, what costs $1 today might cost $10 a week later. (In fact, Zimbabwe's economy has been doing this kind of thing recently.)
So, depending on how the rest of the economy changes - buying a stock at $100/share and selling it a year later at $10/share might actually be a good idea - if the stock paid out $95/share in dividends and the economy is otherwise unchanged, or if that $10 will buy more than $100 would have a year earlier.
They're not doing it to "prevent losses". They're doing it to "maximise shareholder value". From the perspective of a corporation, any employee that doesn't add more value to the company's bottom line that it costs to employ them is not worth keeping around. Clearly, someone at Microsoft feels this is the case with a significant fraction of the workforce there. (Whether they are right or not is something that only time will tell.)
Last I checked, iPod Touch didn't even have Bluetooth. (Which is actually one of the things stopping from getting one - I'd like to get Bluetooth stereo headphones and not have to worry about wires while I'm listening to music.) And there are plenty of other folding and miniature Bluetooth keyboards out there - which are probably both cheaper and more accurate than the laser doohickey you linked.
<joke>You need to teach your wife about this new-fangled thing called "radio".</joke>
My wife also grew up in a household where the TV was turned on by the first person to get up in the morning and turned off by the last person to go to bed at night. Her entire family treats noise from the TV as though it were natural background noise, ignoring it and talking over it when it suits them. I suspect your wife is doing the same - leaving the TV on in order to have something other than silence in the house.
I've got to admit that I don't understand this. God knows that the actual CONTENT in that much TV isn't enough to keep anyone interested for that many hours out of the day. So why waste money by having it on? And why waste your attention by having something so damn distracting in your environment intentionally?