The fact is, most Bluetooth headsets are Class 2 devices, which have a maximum power of 2.5 mW. This is orders of magnitude less than the emissions from a cell phone, which can peak at 500 mW.
Not only that, cancer risk may increase as a power law of exposure, rather than linearly. (Depending on the mechanism of damage, of course.)
From my experience with watching how the companies I work for treat patents, they aren't used offensively. They are used to:
A) Show proof of innovation to venture capitalists, stock holders and management B) Ensure they will have the right to use that process, so some other guy won't use a patent offensively against them.
And this, plus:
C) Give them something to trade when somebody with a patent on something they're doing goes after them
are how they're usually used, at first.
But when a company gets seriously behind the pack in competition and is looking at bankruptcy, its executives normally refuse to abandon the stockholders, employees, and their own paychecks and let it go quietly into that dark night. At that point they will often dig out the patent portfolio and start a bunch of actions against competitors who are beating them at their own game, on the chance that some of them are doing so using their own patented technology.
If the competitors ARE using their certified inventions, and if they can prove it (or are close enough that the competitors decide to concede the battle), they can obtain a revenue stream, a lump of cash for themselves, and/or access to some of the comptitors' own "secret sauce recipies", while penalizing the competitor and leveling the playing field. This might bring them back into the game - or at least mitigate the damage and extend their company's life.
Fact is, it is possible to prove the correctness or otherwise of a computer program, so it's mathematics.
Actually it's not possible to prove correctness - though there's other stuff you can prove.
Consider:
What constitutes "correctness" depends on the intent of the program. A perfect "cat", for example, is broken if what you wanted was "sum".
So if you have a method to formally prove correctness of a program, you have to specify to it what the intent of the program is. And you have to do that in a formal way. This, itself is a programming problem. So you have ANOTHER program which may or may not be correct, as a necessary step for proving the correctness of the first program, and this new "program" is itself not proven correct. Infinite regress.
The "correctness" proof, meanwhile, is demoted to a proof of equivalence between the two "programs", which are merely different ways to express the same intent.
Of course this can be very useful: The two (or more) forms of expression of the intent can be wildly divergent. Expressing the same intent in two or more divergent forms drastically reduces the chance that the same error is made in all of the expressions. Combined with an automatic way to prove equivalence between them (and thus root out the errors that don't occur in all of the expressions) and you end up with a drastic reduction in the number of errors in the final product and a drastic increase in the chance that there are no undiscovered errors.
Other things that can sometimes be proved about programs include impossibility and membership in a class of programs with equivalent degrees of computational difficulty.
"One possible solution offered? 'Use a wireless headset.'"
That's idiotic so use a wired headset. Duh!
RTFA. The rest of the sentence making that suggestion points out that a bluetooth headset emits only about 1/100th of the power of the cellphone. (Hardly surprising, since it only needs to radio-link for a couple feet rather than a couple miles.)
The next sentence suggests a wired handsfree device - which MAY reduce exposure. (It may not reduce it as much as switching to a wireless handsfree, because some of the phone's RF may couple to the wire and be carried up to the wired headset. Lots of devilish details trying to figure out HOW much...)
If someone is essential for a project, replace him as soon as you can.
Replace them? No. Distribute their responsibilities and knowledge? Yes. You still want the brainchild around to give input and support; it's just that you need backup in case...
Replacing them is considered better management (unless his indispensability was involuntary - imposed by administrative foulups or externalities such as an inability to hire additional experts or candidates for training).
The reasoning is: If he has worked his way into becoming indispensable now, he will work his way into becoming MORE indispensable later. The longer you keep him, the greater the hit when he finally burns out, dies, or leaves. So take the hit while it's small.
(I have spent most of my career trying to stay replaceable so I could stay upwardly mobile. And one of the downsides to my current situation is that I have for the last couple years become a rare expert in a niche that is keeping me stuck in an "indispensible" role for a critical (but boring to me) class of issues when both I and my management would like me to move on to other, potentially more valuable and innovative, work.)
This could prove interesting for various sports that use guns such as trap shooting, skeet and general target practice. Because a slower bullet could mean less accidents,...
Won't work.
Change the speed and you change the trajectory. The bullet strikes at a different height (and is also differently affected by crosswinds).
Depending on your value of "SOME" couldn't you rent a car when you need the extra range?
No.
For starters, time is usually very precious when such a car is needed. (You lose much of a day off both ends of a vacation, for example.) Such proposals have the consistent flaw of valuing the driver's time at zero.
Then there's the extra driving and related fuel costs to pick up and drop off the specialty vehicle. (If you're 50 miles from the rental company - and in areas where you actually need, say, off-road capability that's a SHORT distance, you're talking an extra 200 miles of driving.)
Then there's the enormously higher cost per passenger mile of a rental vehicle - which has to make up the company's costs for operation, losses, damage, sitting idle waiting for a customer, etc.
Then there's the risk of the vendor not having a suitable car when you need it. (He has to have a lot of cars sitting idle a lot of the time to keep that risk low, amortizing that cost over the time it is rented - see above about costs of idle time.)
You might get away with this if a "special trip" is a once per year thing. (But then you're risking ruin of your vacation...) If it's once a quarter, or once a month, or once every two weeks, give it up.
You know, it suddenly occurs to me that Rorschach is the closest thing in Watchmen to a classic comic-book character; four colour morality, only kind of in the opposite direction.
Rorschach is a Psychopath, attempting to compensate by becoming rule-bound (and doing it poorly). Moore has the personality dead-on.
(It's interesting that the inspirations for Rorschach were apparently Steve Ditko's "Mr. A" and "The Question" - attempts at Objectivist superheros. Objectivism is a philosophy that starts from pure selfishness and derives the nonaggression principle and motivation for other behavior traits that keep its adherents within the law and make them people who, while often not likable, can be gotten along with. As such it's accessible to psychopaths. Teaching Objectivism to career criminals, motivating them to adopt its behavioral ruleset as a compensation, may be the only consistently successful rehabilitation program that has ever been studied.)
Shame, shame, shame on all of you. It is well past time to put away childish things and grow up.
Graphic novels bear the same relation to novels as stage plays/movies/TV shows bear to live storytellers.
If one form is inherently "childish" than so is the other.
Time to grow up and "put away" plays, opera, and movie theaters. Throw out that TV and those DVDs. It's all kid stuff. You're an adult now - you should be getting your live entertainment solely sitting at a campfire with somebody who can spin a good yarn.
... the entire point of that scene is to send up the comic book trope.
In particular: A major issue with comic heroes is the ends/means issue. Comic "heroes" regularly "fight crime" using methods that are forbidden for that purpose. Warrantless surveillance (such as Superman's hearing and vision), terroristic threats (such as Batman's whole schtick), etc.
Ozy's plan just scales up the moral quandary to a global, survival of humanity, scale, and rubs the heroes' noses in it.
Ozzy made his choice. But he isn't sure he made the right one. So he wants a sanity check from his peer group - and suitable punishment if they decide he did wrong: "... on the mercy of the court.". To keep them honest he puts them in the same position he was in. If they decide the other way they can punish him - and in the process undo what he did. If they decide the same way they're accessories after the fact. And if some decide each way the ones that side with him are left with murder of the others as the only way to maintain the achievement of the "good end".
And thus are they enlightened - about him, about each other, and about themselves. Big shock.
It is much more likely that the ISPs will complain and [provoke] legislation which prevents users from engaging in such P2P networking.
Oh, I'm sure they'll try that.
But by the time it gets to that point there will be a lot of users of live feed swarms. Unlike file sharing, it will be a lot harder for the networks to claim that they're all pirates stealing "content" and thus deflect the users' counter-lobbying efforts.
At that point the politicians will count the money from the ISPs and the votes from the users. I suspect the outcome will be more user-friendly than it has been for file transport.
When the ISPs all support multicast in a compatible way (or even support it at all) we can switch over to that. Unfortunately many have not chosen to do that - at least so far. (Not surprising, since many of them are broadcast media conglomerates. Multicast-for-the-masses would enable their competition on a shoestring-budget level.) Meanwhile, live torrents do the same job for the users without additional support from the ISPs.
Yes it's not "efficient". But the main cost of the inefficiency falls squarely on the pocketbooks and infrastructure of the ISPs - the very people who have chosen not to provide the more efficient form of transport. How poetic.
Perhaps, as this begins to deploy and places an additional load on the ISPs' infrastructures, they will change their minds about promoting multicast and rush to deploy/enable it.
If they hurry they might head this off. If they wait until it's widely adopted they'll probably be stuck with it. Why should the users switch to something that's more efficient for the ISPs - but incompatible with what they're using now - when what they're using now does the job for themselves just fine?
So if the reduction in latency and upstream traffic from going with multicsast isn't enough to convince the users to switch, the ISPs will be stuck begging the authors to upgrade the code to use multicast distribution where available as a friendly gesture. B-)
The entire POINT of torrent-style protocols is to, not just handle, but take advantage of, the Slashdot effect.
The more participants in the torrent, the more robust it is. It is potentially faster for the new participants as well (though this depends on the dynamics of growth and the number of simultaneous downloads per playing node).
)The average latency will increase as the torrent grows. No way to avoid that.)
So the NCTA member ISPs have agreed to censor the internet (details still unpublished).
Let's presume, for the moment, that it turns out this includes suppressing the.alt hierarchy, usenet in general, watching traffic and filing tips if a user browses a "bad" site, or otherwise doing something we'd consider improper.
Then it's time to switch to a non-NCTA ISP wherever the option is available. (Yes, even - especially - if you're NOT a pedophile.)
The government and the ISPs claim that competition is all that's needed to keep the ISPs regulated. Fine. Competition works by the customers switching to "better" providers, thus hitting those who misbehave right in the bottom line.
Obama did not vote for the bill out of support of telecom immunity. He voted for the bill out of the fact that he supported most of the other parts of the bill.
Then he should immediately submit a bill repealing the telecom immunity provisions.
He should also be on record in the intermediate votes on amendments related to telecom immunity. Is he? (And did he speak against it on the Senate floor?)
However: The proper thing to do would have been to vote against the bill (with a short speech explaining why) and do his best to make it fail as-is, then pass a new one without the provisions he (and others) allegedly oppose. Passing a bill (that the president will sign) is pretty much final for the provisions in it. Killing it is not - they can (and usually are) just brought up again, or attached to some other bill as an amendment.
To really oppose a bad hunk of legislation you have to slap it down every time it rears its head until it goes away, and refuse to knuckle under to those who would hold other stuff hostage to obtain its passage.
There's a proverb related to that: "Fast nickels are better than slow dimes."
There's also a similar law in wind power: The Betz Limit. A mill gets power by slowing the wind. But slowing the wind also reduces the amount of air going through the mill, from which you can extract power. Take ALL the power from the column of air that passes through your mill and you get no air and no power. Between not slowing the air at all and stopping it completely there is some amount of power collection where you get the most power from it. Betz computed that.
Similarly, if you want to bleed an animal and collect the blood there is some maximum amount you can take (whether expressed as a rate per month or a percentage of the blood on each pass through the heart). Take more and the animal is weakened enough that its blood production slows and can't keep up. Continuing to collect at that rate will kill it.
IMHO taxes are closer to bleeding the animal than running a windmill. B-) And the curve peak is correspondingly lower than that of the Betz limit.
At some arbitrarily high tax rate (100%? 1000%? 100,000%?), there's such a strong disincentive to earn money that revenue will also be zero.
100% - when the tax rate is expressed as the percentage of the cost to the buyer that goes to the government. At that point the seller gets nothing and the buyer just hands all his money to the government, stopping the economy cold.
Of course the economy would be dragged to a near-full-stop at tax rates far below this. But this shows there is a rate so high that the government gets nothing, just as there is one so low (zero) that the government gets nothing.
= = = =
Downside to arguments based on the Laffer Curve is that they take as a given that it's appropriate for the government to steal your resources and all arguments are about whether they're stealing too little or too much to maximize the theft. Fortunately, when the government actually IS beyond the hump of the curve (as it certainly is now), moving down toward the peak not only improves the government's income, but improves the citizens' after-tax income by an even higher margin.
I don't live in the US. I live in Europe. From our point of view, you have two parties that are so similar we can't even really tell the difference.
It's easy to tell the difference.
Both parties attract and are ALMOST completely full of, psychopaths.
The Democratic party attracts the poorly compensated, I'm an "overman", anything-goes, megalomaniac kind of psychopath. (As LBJ said: "Politics is the art of the possible." For which you can read "... what you can get away with.")
The Republican party attracts psychopaths who have compensated by becoming rule-bound in an effort to be good. These can be at least as dangerous: They believe they're being good. But they tend to believe that their particular code defines what "good" is. So if you behave outside the code in any way you must be a "bad" guy, a suitable target for whatever punishments their particular code requires.
Fortunately, there are some rulesets that define "bad" very simply, leave lots of room for individual choice. And some of the best define interfering with individual choice (even when the individual choses to be not-good) as "bad" - at least as long as the other person doesn't force his/her choices on someone else.
I see a lot of claims that he did this. But all I see are claims.
- That he locked everybody else out.
- That he gave them a fake set of passwords.
- That he refuses to give them "the real one(s)".
And I don't see word one from him.
Is this what really happened?
I can imagine a number of scenarios where we'd see this external claim when, in fact, it's NOT what happened. For instance:
1) After firing the sysadmin they didn't like on the second attempt, management tries to change the passwords and fumbles it. They demand "the real passwords". He gives them what he has. It doesn't work. So:
a) They do a scapegoat operation on him to cover their own incompetence.
b) They're so incompetent that they don't even realize what happened, and honestly go after him for the crimes they believe he committed.
2) The system got pwn3d about the time they fired him. (Maybe just before, leading to the firing of the already-disliked employee. Maybe just after.)
And I could go on.
Now I have no reason to believe that he DIDN'T do it, either. (After all, it turns out Hans DID kill Nina...) But I see a government agency with a hung system doing a major smear job in the press, with lots of accusations and no details or evidence. And I see all the other posters taking as given that the accusations are true.
Let's reserve judgment until we hear what the evidence actually is, shall we? (If nothing else, they guy deserves a fair trial when it finally gets that far. It's going to be hard to find an uncontaminated jury at the rate things are going.)
If you need a recognized code of ethics to tell you that sabotaging your ex-employer's system isn't right, then no code of ethics can help you.
I beg to differ.
About one percent of the population are psychopaths/sociopaths. Think "color blindness", except it's conscience, not vision.
Psychopaths CAN compensate - if there's something in it for them and they choose to do so. But is isn't wired in. So they have to learn a set of rules to do it right. That can be very hard - especially if the rules are written by non-psychopaths, who leave things out because they assume the rule-follower will "just know" or "apply common sense", which doesn't work for someone with this mental problem.
(Compensated psychopaths are, IMHO, some of the most "good" people around - because they CHOSE to be good and WORKED at it, rather than having the bulk of it being automatic, like it is with the rest of us.)
Moral codes, ethical codes, and the like are such rule sets. Yes, psychopaths need them. And yes, if the codes are well written they can follow them and become, if not pleasant co-workers, at least valuable and reliable employees who know they shouldn't sabotage the systems when their services are no longer required.
(The one treatment known to have a high success rate rehabilitating psychopaths who have become career criminals is teaching them Objectivism. B-) )
I was under the impression that loading a program into RAM in order to execute it was fair use, or otherwise a legal copy (since the program needs to be loaded into RAM to run).
Is the argument that the loading into RAM is not playing the game, and thus not authorized, when it's a bot, not a human, that's "playing the game"?
I get the impression that this case is sufficiently at odds with other decisions that there is plenty of ground for appeal.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is, most Bluetooth headsets are Class 2 devices, which have a maximum power of 2.5 mW. This is orders of magnitude less than the emissions from a cell phone, which can peak at 500 mW.
Not only that, cancer risk may increase as a power law of exposure, rather than linearly. (Depending on the mechanism of damage, of course.)
From my experience with watching how the companies I work for treat patents, they aren't used offensively. They are used to:
A) Show proof of innovation to venture capitalists, stock holders and management
B) Ensure they will have the right to use that process, so some other guy won't use a patent offensively against them.
And this, plus:
C) Give them something to trade when somebody with a patent on something they're doing goes after them
are how they're usually used, at first.
But when a company gets seriously behind the pack in competition and is looking at bankruptcy, its executives normally refuse to abandon the stockholders, employees, and their own paychecks and let it go quietly into that dark night. At that point they will often dig out the patent portfolio and start a bunch of actions against competitors who are beating them at their own game, on the chance that some of them are doing so using their own patented technology.
If the competitors ARE using their certified inventions, and if they can prove it (or are close enough that the competitors decide to concede the battle), they can obtain a revenue stream, a lump of cash for themselves, and/or access to some of the comptitors' own "secret sauce recipies", while penalizing the competitor and leveling the playing field. This might bring them back into the game - or at least mitigate the damage and extend their company's life.
Fact is, it is possible to prove the correctness or otherwise of a computer program, so it's mathematics.
Actually it's not possible to prove correctness - though there's other stuff you can prove.
Consider:
What constitutes "correctness" depends on the intent of the program. A perfect "cat", for example, is broken if what you wanted was "sum".
So if you have a method to formally prove correctness of a program, you have to specify to it what the intent of the program is. And you have to do that in a formal way. This, itself is a programming problem. So you have ANOTHER program which may or may not be correct, as a necessary step for proving the correctness of the first program, and this new "program" is itself not proven correct. Infinite regress.
The "correctness" proof, meanwhile, is demoted to a proof of equivalence between the two "programs", which are merely different ways to express the same intent.
Of course this can be very useful: The two (or more) forms of expression of the intent can be wildly divergent. Expressing the same intent in two or more divergent forms drastically reduces the chance that the same error is made in all of the expressions. Combined with an automatic way to prove equivalence between them (and thus root out the errors that don't occur in all of the expressions) and you end up with a drastic reduction in the number of errors in the final product and a drastic increase in the chance that there are no undiscovered errors.
Other things that can sometimes be proved about programs include impossibility and membership in a class of programs with equivalent degrees of computational difficulty.
"One possible solution offered? 'Use a wireless headset.'"
That's idiotic so use a wired headset. Duh!
RTFA. The rest of the sentence making that suggestion points out that a bluetooth headset emits only about 1/100th of the power of the cellphone. (Hardly surprising, since it only needs to radio-link for a couple feet rather than a couple miles.)
The next sentence suggests a wired handsfree device - which MAY reduce exposure. (It may not reduce it as much as switching to a wireless handsfree, because some of the phone's RF may couple to the wire and be carried up to the wired headset. Lots of devilish details trying to figure out HOW much...)
If someone is essential for a project, replace him as soon as you can.
Replace them? No. Distribute their responsibilities and knowledge? Yes. You still want the brainchild around to give input and support; it's just that you need backup in case ...
Replacing them is considered better management (unless his indispensability was involuntary - imposed by administrative foulups or externalities such as an inability to hire additional experts or candidates for training).
The reasoning is: If he has worked his way into becoming indispensable now, he will work his way into becoming MORE indispensable later. The longer you keep him, the greater the hit when he finally burns out, dies, or leaves. So take the hit while it's small.
(I have spent most of my career trying to stay replaceable so I could stay upwardly mobile. And one of the downsides to my current situation is that I have for the last couple years become a rare expert in a niche that is keeping me stuck in an "indispensible" role for a critical (but boring to me) class of issues when both I and my management would like me to move on to other, potentially more valuable and innovative, work.)
This could prove interesting for various sports that use guns such as trap shooting, skeet and general target practice. Because a slower bullet could mean less accidents, ...
Won't work.
Change the speed and you change the trajectory. The bullet strikes at a different height (and is also differently affected by crosswinds).
you should be getting your live entertainment solely sitting at a campfire with somebody who can spin a good yarn.
Have you ever done that, though? 'Cause that's actually pretty awesome.
Yep.
But it's labor intensive and doesn't scale. B-(
Depending on your value of "SOME" couldn't you rent a car when you need the extra range?
No.
For starters, time is usually very precious when such a car is needed. (You lose much of a day off both ends of a vacation, for example.) Such proposals have the consistent flaw of valuing the driver's time at zero.
Then there's the extra driving and related fuel costs to pick up and drop off the specialty vehicle. (If you're 50 miles from the rental company - and in areas where you actually need, say, off-road capability that's a SHORT distance, you're talking an extra 200 miles of driving.)
Then there's the enormously higher cost per passenger mile of a rental vehicle - which has to make up the company's costs for operation, losses, damage, sitting idle waiting for a customer, etc.
Then there's the risk of the vendor not having a suitable car when you need it. (He has to have a lot of cars sitting idle a lot of the time to keep that risk low, amortizing that cost over the time it is rented - see above about costs of idle time.)
You might get away with this if a "special trip" is a once per year thing. (But then you're risking ruin of your vacation...) If it's once a quarter, or once a month, or once every two weeks, give it up.
Didn't someone patent the business model of being a patent troll?
People have talked about doing so on Slashdot.
Unfortunately, the patent trolls have prior art.
And, as this case shows, patenting being a patent troll "on the internet" or "using a web browser" isn't going to work, either.
You know, it suddenly occurs to me that Rorschach is the closest thing in Watchmen to a classic comic-book character; four colour morality, only kind of in the opposite direction.
Rorschach is a Psychopath, attempting to compensate by becoming rule-bound (and doing it poorly). Moore has the personality dead-on.
(It's interesting that the inspirations for Rorschach were apparently Steve Ditko's "Mr. A" and "The Question" - attempts at Objectivist superheros. Objectivism is a philosophy that starts from pure selfishness and derives the nonaggression principle and motivation for other behavior traits that keep its adherents within the law and make them people who, while often not likable, can be gotten along with. As such it's accessible to psychopaths. Teaching Objectivism to career criminals, motivating them to adopt its behavioral ruleset as a compensation, may be the only consistently successful rehabilitation program that has ever been studied.)
Shame, shame, shame on all of you. It is well past time to put away childish things and grow up.
Graphic novels bear the same relation to novels as stage plays/movies/TV shows bear to live storytellers.
If one form is inherently "childish" than so is the other.
Time to grow up and "put away" plays, opera, and movie theaters. Throw out that TV and those DVDs. It's all kid stuff. You're an adult now - you should be getting your live entertainment solely sitting at a campfire with somebody who can spin a good yarn.
... the entire point of that scene is to send up the comic book trope.
In particular: A major issue with comic heroes is the ends/means issue. Comic "heroes" regularly "fight crime" using methods that are forbidden for that purpose. Warrantless surveillance (such as Superman's hearing and vision), terroristic threats (such as Batman's whole schtick), etc.
Ozy's plan just scales up the moral quandary to a global, survival of humanity, scale, and rubs the heroes' noses in it.
Ozzy made his choice. But he isn't sure he made the right one. So he wants a sanity check from his peer group - and suitable punishment if they decide he did wrong: "... on the mercy of the court.". To keep them honest he puts them in the same position he was in. If they decide the other way they can punish him - and in the process undo what he did. If they decide the same way they're accessories after the fact. And if some decide each way the ones that side with him are left with murder of the others as the only way to maintain the achievement of the "good end".
And thus are they enlightened - about him, about each other, and about themselves. Big shock.
Wasn't this the guy who promised to "deliver the votes" to a politician? Can't remember who it was...
If I've got this right:
The "deliver the votes" guy was the head of Diebold - the owning company.
This guy was the head of the Diebold Election Systems (since renamed) - the owned company.
It is much more likely that the ISPs will complain and [provoke] legislation which prevents users from engaging in such P2P networking.
Oh, I'm sure they'll try that.
But by the time it gets to that point there will be a lot of users of live feed swarms. Unlike file sharing, it will be a lot harder for the networks to claim that they're all pirates stealing "content" and thus deflect the users' counter-lobbying efforts.
At that point the politicians will count the money from the ISPs and the votes from the users. I suspect the outcome will be more user-friendly than it has been for file transport.
If you want broadcast, broadcast.
When the ISPs all support multicast in a compatible way (or even support it at all) we can switch over to that. Unfortunately many have not chosen to do that - at least so far. (Not surprising, since many of them are broadcast media conglomerates. Multicast-for-the-masses would enable their competition on a shoestring-budget level.) Meanwhile, live torrents do the same job for the users without additional support from the ISPs.
Yes it's not "efficient". But the main cost of the inefficiency falls squarely on the pocketbooks and infrastructure of the ISPs - the very people who have chosen not to provide the more efficient form of transport. How poetic.
Perhaps, as this begins to deploy and places an additional load on the ISPs' infrastructures, they will change their minds about promoting multicast and rush to deploy/enable it.
If they hurry they might head this off. If they wait until it's widely adopted they'll probably be stuck with it. Why should the users switch to something that's more efficient for the ISPs - but incompatible with what they're using now - when what they're using now does the job for themselves just fine?
So if the reduction in latency and upstream traffic from going with multicsast isn't enough to convince the users to switch, the ISPs will be stuck begging the authors to upgrade the code to use multicast distribution where available as a friendly gesture. B-)
The entire POINT of torrent-style protocols is to, not just handle, but take advantage of, the Slashdot effect.
The more participants in the torrent, the more robust it is. It is potentially faster for the new participants as well (though this depends on the dynamics of growth and the number of simultaneous downloads per playing node).
)The average latency will increase as the torrent grows. No way to avoid that.)
So the NCTA member ISPs have agreed to censor the internet (details still unpublished).
Let's presume, for the moment, that it turns out this includes suppressing the .alt hierarchy, usenet in general, watching traffic and filing tips if a user browses a "bad" site, or otherwise doing something we'd consider improper.
Then it's time to switch to a non-NCTA ISP wherever the option is available. (Yes, even - especially - if you're NOT a pedophile.)
The government and the ISPs claim that competition is all that's needed to keep the ISPs regulated. Fine. Competition works by the customers switching to "better" providers, thus hitting those who misbehave right in the bottom line.
Let's try it.
Obama did not vote for the bill out of support of telecom immunity. He voted for the bill out of the fact that he supported most of the other parts of the bill.
Then he should immediately submit a bill repealing the telecom immunity provisions.
He should also be on record in the intermediate votes on amendments related to telecom immunity. Is he? (And did he speak against it on the Senate floor?)
However: The proper thing to do would have been to vote against the bill (with a short speech explaining why) and do his best to make it fail as-is, then pass a new one without the provisions he (and others) allegedly oppose. Passing a bill (that the president will sign) is pretty much final for the provisions in it. Killing it is not - they can (and usually are) just brought up again, or attached to some other bill as an amendment.
To really oppose a bad hunk of legislation you have to slap it down every time it rears its head until it goes away, and refuse to knuckle under to those who would hold other stuff hostage to obtain its passage.
There's a proverb related to that: "Fast nickels are better than slow dimes."
There's also a similar law in wind power: The Betz Limit. A mill gets power by slowing the wind. But slowing the wind also reduces the amount of air going through the mill, from which you can extract power. Take ALL the power from the column of air that passes through your mill and you get no air and no power. Between not slowing the air at all and stopping it completely there is some amount of power collection where you get the most power from it. Betz computed that.
Similarly, if you want to bleed an animal and collect the blood there is some maximum amount you can take (whether expressed as a rate per month or a percentage of the blood on each pass through the heart). Take more and the animal is weakened enough that its blood production slows and can't keep up. Continuing to collect at that rate will kill it.
IMHO taxes are closer to bleeding the animal than running a windmill. B-) And the curve peak is correspondingly lower than that of the Betz limit.
At some arbitrarily high tax rate (100%? 1000%? 100,000%?), there's such a strong disincentive to earn money that revenue will also be zero.
100% - when the tax rate is expressed as the percentage of the cost to the buyer that goes to the government. At that point the seller gets nothing and the buyer just hands all his money to the government, stopping the economy cold.
Of course the economy would be dragged to a near-full-stop at tax rates far below this. But this shows there is a rate so high that the government gets nothing, just as there is one so low (zero) that the government gets nothing.
= = = =
Downside to arguments based on the Laffer Curve is that they take as a given that it's appropriate for the government to steal your resources and all arguments are about whether they're stealing too little or too much to maximize the theft. Fortunately, when the government actually IS beyond the hump of the curve (as it certainly is now), moving down toward the peak not only improves the government's income, but improves the citizens' after-tax income by an even higher margin.
I don't live in the US. I live in Europe. From our point of view, you have two parties that are so similar we can't even really tell the difference.
It's easy to tell the difference.
Both parties attract and are ALMOST completely full of, psychopaths.
The Democratic party attracts the poorly compensated, I'm an "overman", anything-goes, megalomaniac kind of psychopath. (As LBJ said: "Politics is the art of the possible." For which you can read "... what you can get away with.")
The Republican party attracts psychopaths who have compensated by becoming rule-bound in an effort to be good. These can be at least as dangerous: They believe they're being good. But they tend to believe that their particular code defines what "good" is. So if you behave outside the code in any way you must be a "bad" guy, a suitable target for whatever punishments their particular code requires.
Fortunately, there are some rulesets that define "bad" very simply, leave lots of room for individual choice. And some of the best define interfering with individual choice (even when the individual choses to be not-good) as "bad" - at least as long as the other person doesn't force his/her choices on someone else.
Good/Bad (they'll assign one of those to Republican or Democrat, and the other to the left over party)
Maybe I'm just one of those simplistic morons... but what if one of the parties actually is evil?
While you're considering that, consider this:
What if BOTH of those parties actually are evil?
I see a lot of claims that he did this. But all I see are claims.
- That he locked everybody else out.
- That he gave them a fake set of passwords.
- That he refuses to give them "the real one(s)".
And I don't see word one from him.
Is this what really happened?
I can imagine a number of scenarios where we'd see this external claim when, in fact, it's NOT what happened. For instance:
1) After firing the sysadmin they didn't like on the second attempt, management tries to change the passwords and fumbles it. They demand "the real passwords". He gives them what he has. It doesn't work. So:
a) They do a scapegoat operation on him to cover their own incompetence.
b) They're so incompetent that they don't even realize what happened, and honestly go after him for the crimes they believe he committed.
2) The system got pwn3d about the time they fired him. (Maybe just before, leading to the firing of the already-disliked employee. Maybe just after.)
And I could go on.
Now I have no reason to believe that he DIDN'T do it, either. (After all, it turns out Hans DID kill Nina...) But I see a government agency with a hung system doing a major smear job in the press, with lots of accusations and no details or evidence. And I see all the other posters taking as given that the accusations are true.
Let's reserve judgment until we hear what the evidence actually is, shall we? (If nothing else, they guy deserves a fair trial when it finally gets that far. It's going to be hard to find an uncontaminated jury at the rate things are going.)
If you need a recognized code of ethics to tell you that sabotaging your ex-employer's system isn't right, then no code of ethics can help you.
I beg to differ.
About one percent of the population are psychopaths/sociopaths. Think "color blindness", except it's conscience, not vision.
Psychopaths CAN compensate - if there's something in it for them and they choose to do so. But is isn't wired in. So they have to learn a set of rules to do it right. That can be very hard - especially if the rules are written by non-psychopaths, who leave things out because they assume the rule-follower will "just know" or "apply common sense", which doesn't work for someone with this mental problem.
(Compensated psychopaths are, IMHO, some of the most "good" people around - because they CHOSE to be good and WORKED at it, rather than having the bulk of it being automatic, like it is with the rest of us.)
Moral codes, ethical codes, and the like are such rule sets. Yes, psychopaths need them. And yes, if the codes are well written they can follow them and become, if not pleasant co-workers, at least valuable and reliable employees who know they shouldn't sabotage the systems when their services are no longer required.
(The one treatment known to have a high success rate rehabilitating psychopaths who have become career criminals is teaching them Objectivism. B-) )
I was under the impression that loading a program into RAM in order to execute it was fair use, or otherwise a legal copy (since the program needs to be loaded into RAM to run).
Is the argument that the loading into RAM is not playing the game, and thus not authorized, when it's a bot, not a human, that's "playing the game"?
I get the impression that this case is sufficiently at odds with other decisions that there is plenty of ground for appeal.