If they really want to help out with alternative energy usage there are a few things they can do easily:
- Design the power supplies and charge controllers of laptops to accept reasonably "wild" voltages on the input jack, publish the specs and limits, and approve direct connection to panels or 12v renewable energy systems. Alternatively they could make available an INEXPENSIVE charging brick that accepts such voltages on its input.
By 'reasonably "wild"' I mean the voltages that would appear off, say, a 12v panel (about 14.5v) or a 12V renewable-energy battery bank (about 13.5, up to 14.something during equalization). Disconnect at a minimum charge to protect batteries from undercharge would be a good idea, too. (Make it resistant to voltage spikes from switching of inductive loads and it could also be plugged directly into a cigarette lighter in a car as well.)
Down-converter bricks for 24 and 48 volt systems would be good, too. Working through one step of conversion, rather than running the system's big (and thus lossy) inverter to get power up to 120VAC for a standard brick and then bringing it back down to what the laptop wants, would be a big win.
- Improve power management (including clock-speed management, disk shutdown, and screen backlighting control) for lowered power consumption when not needed for heavy crunch or display. (For linux: Provide the hooks for the open software to do this.)
This situation presents a case study: will American courts protect the public interest, or will they sell us out to corporate interests again?
The American courts will probably follow the law as written. If it gives the FCC the power to make this decision, they'll tell Verizon to go whistle, if it doesn't they'll say the same to the FCC. In great detail.
The place to buy the law is in congress. Federal judges are pretty much immune to external pressure due to the appointment system. In high-profile stuff like this it's really hard to keep a bribe hidden and and their decisions will be scrutinized so they try to make them clear and correct in order to optimize their future career paths.
At that site all I have is 22k or so dialup. No DSL available. (Latency on satellite is unacceptable.)
A little mom-and-POP has recently installed a WiFi-based broadband service (sharing a single T1 across this and several other valleys, though they're working on adding a fiber). Their antenna is actually at the cell site in question. But it's in the $80/month range. Might go with them once we're moved out there if nothing else comes up but for vacation weekends it's not practical.
Also that just gets it for the home site. We do a lot of offroading in the surrounding several hundred square miles and we'll lose cellphone service in the subset of that which has any currently.
I can get GSM and CDMA coverage in very remote areas of North Dakota, so rural service will be expanding.
I, on the other hand, can not get either at my place in Nevada. It's just beyond Verizon's last cell. It's IN AT&T's last CDMA/AMPS cell. (Beyond this there's either AMPS or nothing, depending on the location.) But AT&T hasn't (and apparently won't) upgrade it to GSM. So when they drop CDMA and AMPS I'm hosed.
It's not like this is the boonies. There are hundreds of houses, and the intersection of two major roads, in the area served by that orphan cell.
This comitment to analog technology is just as much a problem for cell phones as for TV. This desire to keep the old stuff going is what keeps USA in the cellphone middle ages.
Actually the desire of the cellphone companies to serve only dense population centers has more to do with it.
Look at the map of coverage for AMPS (virtually the whole continental US) versus TDMA, CDMA, and/or GSM from the various carriers (essentially cities, large towns, and a subset of the interstates between them.
I got my AMPS/TDMA subscription from AT&T back in '99 or so - when building a house in Nevada. I'd have gone with Verizon, but the site is right in the coverage footprint of the LAST cell in AT&T's net and JUST BEYOND the last cell in Verizon's.
For the last several years AT&T has been trying to get me to switch to GSM. But they haven't updated that cell. And they apparently have no plans to do so. If I were to update, I'd lose service - as I no doubt will if/when they shut down all their AMPS and TDMA cells (currently threatened for next Feb).
The current generation of management has apparently forgotten that one of the points of cellphones is the ability to remain connected to the phone system when out in the boondocks - not just traveling between cities but also when going to, working in, or playing at places off the beaten track. In low usage areas a single cell can handle an enormous area. Maybe it won't ever carry enough of the traffic to directly pay for itself - but it DOES pay because its presence increases the utility of the total system.
(I guess they'll just have to learn the hard way, when somebody who DOES "get it" finally provides coverage for the customers they abandoned - whether by cellphone, wireless internet, or satellite - and a bunch of other people drop their subscriptions and migrate.)
Almost any warranty given has a clause specifically denying any other warranty, express or implied.
Usually immediately followed by a statement in parenthesis saying that some (read "virtually all") jurisdictions require that some or all of these warranties can't be disclaimed. B-)
In addition, they generally require that any disputes be resolved through arbitration and not court.
Which is also something of which courts have taken a dim view. Especially if the warranty terms can't be viewed by (even: aren't prominently displayed to) the consumer before the purchasing decision is made. (Recently such a clause was explicitly struck down for a public communication utility.)
If I didn't get satisfaction from the manufacturer and felt like taking it to formal dispute resolution I'd start with the court and let the manufacturer decide whether to argue for moving it to arbitration (thus risking me arguing against it successfully and establishing a precedent voiding such clauses.)
On the advice of my attorney I always modify such clauses in employment contracts to "either party may elect to take disputes to binding arbitration, with the costs of arbitration borne by the party so electing". Arbitration is designed for settling disputes between corporations. The costs are high and the rules generally split them evenly regardless of the "winner" (if any), treating them as separate from the settlement. So in a big-pockets/small-pockets dispute over amounts well below a million dollars the small-pockets party will likely lose by playing, even if he gets a total "win" on the issues.
Sorry to ask, but why simply looking at images of children porn is usually seen as a problem?
Because those who look at them create a demand to produce them.
Ordinary pornography can be a voluntary creation. Child pornography (when it involves the participation of an actual child - in a sexual situation or in the creation of an image that might affect his later life by adverse publicity) can not be voluntary, because the child is not yet competent to make such decisions and is prone to defer to adults. So the production of child pornography using actual children is involuntary exploitation of children, abhorrent to pretty much everybody but the pedophiles themselves (and even to some of them).
In the US at least, the legal system has justified attacks on the possession of child pornography as attacks on the demand side of its production - treating possession as evidence of purchase (or of giving other benefits to the producer) and purchase/etc. as accessory after the fact to production and before the fact to future production. This lets them ban possession despite first amendment arguments.
However the laws are written to also ban possession of prose fiction, drawings, and computer "de-aged" images of adults - none of which actually involve the abuse of minors in their production (as well as material where any child participation / exploitation occurred before the legislation in question). There is considerable court activity over whether the production and/or the possession such stuff is protected by the first amendment (or the ban on ex-post-facto laws).
Pedophiles who become actual sexual predators are notoriously resistant to both voluntary and involuntary rehabilitation. This leads to a multi-way argument among several claims:
- Child pornography (even that not made by exploiting actual children) leads to the formation of the pedophile fetish and its availability thus leads to increased predation.
- Child pornography (not made by exploiting actual children) can be used for sublimation by pedophiles and its availability thus leads to decreased predation.
- The issue is moot because the first amendment protects it.
- Child pornography bans can be used to suppress political speech on the issue of when a youth becomes competent to give consent and whether/how the current laws should be revised.
(It also leads me to breathe a huge sigh of relief that my own sexual preferences don't include the underage. B-) )
What kind of soulless bastard needs a written code of ethics to know what's right and wrong?
A psychopath does.
They are about 1% of the population and apparently have a brain defect (akin to color blindness) that amounts to having no conscience.
If they don't "compensate" by voluntarily adopting a clear set of rules of conduct (or even if they do but the code is deficient) they are likely to become criminal menaces.
(It's also possible to learn behaviors that suppress conscience, with similar results. In fact this appears to be somewhat more common - at least among career criminals - than the actual mental defect. One expert in the field distinguishes the two cases by reserving the term "sociopath" for the latter - though "sociopath" is normally applied to either.)
Most of law, religion, and culture - along with the distinctions between cultures - is related to how to handle this fraction of the population. Teaching them rules of conduct (either to block misbehavior or to direct it only at outside-the-tribe groups), convincing them to adopt such rules (typically by teaching them that following he rules is good for "number one" - either in this world or an afterlife), penalizing them for misbehavior, separating them from the general population and warehousing, deporting, or killing them.
Because the suffering of others doesn't cause them mental anguish they can be some of the worst of people: Torturing, raping, and killing for their own fun. For the same reason they can be the best of people: They have to CONSCIOUSLY DECIDE to be good and work hard at it - which IMHO is far more meritorious than being good because been bad feels bad. And for the same reason they can do very well as decision makers and leaders, able to think clearly when making decisions where suffering and/or death are involved.
Compensated and partially-compensated psychopaths gravitate to positions in politics, management, sales, and crime. And those who have not fully compensated (a difficult task) occasionally cause headlines and distrust for all practitioners of those first professions when they combine one of them with that last one. B-)
So an executive who is willing to break the rules to indulge his interest in banned sexual practices by viewing banned or frowned-upon reading material on the company network is hardly surprising. What matters is whether he's compensated enough to restrict his enjoyment to reading material or if he'll also do some enjoying of it in real life (or let it affect his managerial decisions in an improper way).
In the US, the consumer would have several options, including consulting the Better Business Bureau and also with the various state Attorneys General offices.
Also the Federal Trade Commission.
The company's refusal to fix a mechanical flaw totally unrelated to the software violates the "implied warranty of serviceability and fitness". That's a BIG no-no.
... employment of software engineers and system analysts is expected to increase 'much faster than the average' through 2014 (here, and here). In contrast, employment of programmers is expected to increase 'more slowly than the average,'...
Well golly gosh whillikers.
In my 30 years in software (before I went over to the hard side of the force) I've called myself a programmer, a system analyst, a software engineer, a system architect, and a number of other buzzwords.
Guess what: There is not a standard definition for ANY of those terms. The only distinction between them is the expectations of the employers about the strengths of various parts of your skill set.
So you call yourself the one that your prospective employer hangs on the highest-in-the-design-tree position that you can convince him you're qualified to fill, based on your own skills and your resume.
They're hiring system analysts and SW engineers locally and going abroad for programmers? That just means you have to change the top line on your resume from "programmer" to "software engineer" or "system analyst".
Don't have enough experience to qualify for whatever position they're hiring for when you're just out of school? That's the same old "break-in problem". The "can't get a job because you don't have experience and can't get experience because you don't have a job" vicious circle. It's been around as long as I've been in this industry, and I cut my teeth on computers that had vacuum tubes for the DIODES in the logic.
You get your skills through:
3) classes,
2) ripping apart and studying others' code,
1) playing with the computer to make it do something fun for you, in that reverse order. (I know because that's how I did it, and I had some big names for teachers back in the day. The lessons were valuable. But self-directed code reading and bug fixing / feature enhancement was more so and self-directed problem solving was the top skill builder.)
You don't get your job through resumes, degrees, and certifications. You get your foot in the door through contacts with people who have seen your previous work or play. THEN you and your contact use your (tuned to the job) resume, credentials, and references from other contacts to convince the middle-manager in the suit that he's lucked into a paragon who's perfect for the job.
How do you get contacts? Initially you do as much unassigned for-fun stuff as you can when you can and let others see what you did and that you enjoy doing it and are good at it. Some of these people will remember you when somebody they know is looking for somebody like you for a job of the sort you want.
Later you'll make more contacts at work: Co-workers, managers, etc. Your network of contacts will grow to get you into more doors. Your resume's experience section will grow to calm the suits (while your other contacts serve as references ditto). And your skills will grow to let you actually perform in new positions.
Your actual skills are important: to keep impressing people so you can hold your jobs, build your resume with successful project results, and grow your contact network. But it's your contacts - as you/job matchers and references - that are what get you into the jobs.
You can't look for people if you don't even know they're missing.
However there are over 150 lost planes that they KNOW are missing in Nevada alone, many of which DID file flight plans. (Add in the California part of the Sierras and the number climbs much higher.)
(One of them is the plane carrying the father of a Florida resident, who is asking the searchers whether one of these six found as a side effect of this search is the one his father was in when it went down in 1964.)
You have to understand this terrain: Much of it is deep, eroded cuts through mountains, with roads that might see a car in a week, or a month - and these are the numbered state roads. There are roads with washouts on the side of nearly vertical slopes where a car that slips off might roll down hundreds of feet and end up invisible from any point on the road or from the air above (due to trees, desert foliage, or bringing down a rockslide on top of itself.
There is no cellphone service in much of this area. Often you can't get a single AM or FM station on your car radio.
Locals normally carry bottled water, emergency rations, more than one spare tire, a high-lift jack and/or a winch, and some carry an EPIRB, when traveling these roads. (For some of them it's the trip into town.) But in some places in these valleys even an EPIRB won't hit the satellite.
The problem is there isn't really good evidence that such radiation is dangerous at all. These figures like the "0.5 cases of cancer" all assume the Linear No Threshold model - that is, that any amount of radiation is bad, and extrapolate a straight line from the last "good" data to (0,0). This has never been conclusively proven, given the extremely low cancer rates that would be expected at such low exposure limits.
IMHO (and I am not a medical professional) there is good reason to believe that, for most types of cancer, the curve at low-to-moderate doses should be essentially the Nth power of exposure. N would vary depending on the type of cancer but would typically be small and tend to be even. It could be inferred from the slope of incidence of the cancer type with age during adulthood, and cancer types subject to incidence mechanisims that would break the model would be indicated when the incidence graph is not essentially straight-line.
(Lung cancer seemed to be a good fit, with N=6, in data I saw a couple decades ago during the "radon pollution" flap. The radon risk assessments were based on extrapolating from lung cancer rates in uranium miners using the linear assumption and the ratio of radon in houses versus mines. A linear function would imply some small risk, while a 6th power function would mean the "radon in the basement threat" was a bunch of hooey.)
The reasoning:
- Most cancers (especially radiation-induced cancers) appear to be the result of the accumulation of a particular set of some integer number of mutation in single cell, which becomes the initial cell of the new cancer.
- A particular subset (N) of these are necessary to escape the growth regulation (and any anti-tumor mechanisms that would quickly and completely destroy the modified cell or its progeny.)
- Before the accumulation of all of this set of mutations in a single cell, it participates in cell growth and reproduction in the normal (very limited) fashion. After they accumulate it begins reproducing uncontrollably, expanding into a precancerous lesion (a long-lived lump with many cells available to accumulate the remaining mutations necessary for full-blown cancer). Thus the accumulation of all of the N mutations of the subset in a single cell is the critical deterinant of the rate of cancer incidence from induced mutation.
- The N mutations of the set are independent events.
- The probability of each being induced by low-level ionizing radiation is directly proportional to the amount of radiation exposure.
- Thus the probability of the complete critical subset being accumulated in a single cell (i.e. the critical event for radiation-induced cancer) rises with the Nth power of the radiation exposure.
- Cell reproduction may be limited by different genetic mechanisms for different tissue types, resulting in a different set of mutation targets and thus potentially different values of N for different types of cancer.
Of course this is a bit simplistic. For instance:
- At radiation levels in the range that can modify the production of inducable protective enzymes the assumption that the individual mutations are directly proportional to radiation fails.
- Mutations that affect the effectiveness of DNA reapir and protection mechanisms violate the assumption that the mutation rates are independent.
- It doesn't adequately model some cancer types (such as two-part cancers where two distinct mutated cell populations produce each other's growth factors.)
However these seem to be minor factors:
- Inducable enzymes would not be induced for low-level exposure and would be saturated for long-term high-level exposure. They'd bend the curve over some middle level and lower its slope above that bend, but wouldn't affect the slope at the low end. (Of course this totally breaks attempts to extrapolate from high to low exposure levels.)
- Protective/repair enzymes should be unaffected in the bulk of the potential target cells, so their loss would not be part of the critical set of N mutations.
- The bulk of cancers seem to be single mutated clones.
The frailness of age is still not solved with it, but it will make healthcare even more costly as all people getting older will demand this or other costly cures.
This is one piece of solving the frailness of age. Solve enough of them and "old age" is no longer frail.
Solve enough more and it is indistinguishable from healthy youth.
Which IS the idea after all.
Meanwhile, the cost of caring for an alzheimer's patient is astronomical. If you can do a one-shot procedure (even a very expensive one) which (at a minimum) arrests the progression of the damage and lets the victim continue independent living rather than being institutionalized under continuous skilled care, the overall cost of treating the disease will plummet.
Meanwhile code obfuscation (even automatically generated obfuscation) could easily modify at least the timing, if not the order, of such calls.
(Yes I know that the article says it can't. But that refers to the usual sort, which is directed at hiding the similarity from someone reading the source. I'm talking about obfuscation directed at tools reading the routine-call signature.)
An identical library call signature for a nontrivial part of the execution could be produced by a clean-room analysis or even independent development of an equivalent component. Neither of these is a GPL violation.
This is not to say that the technique wouldn't be useful for hunting down GPL violations. But a positive is not difinitive by itself.
Meanwhile code obfuscation (even automatically generated obfuscation) could easily modify at least the timing, if not the order, of such calls.
Nevertheless this is a powerful tool: An hunk of GPL code that hasn't had its flow obfuscated systematically (even code that HAS been obfuscated but not systematically) will have large swaths of code that trips the detector. And it doesn't require reverse engineering until after the alarm goes off.
I was wondering what this "evanescent laser" bit was about. That article clarifies it.
Light confined to a waveguide by total internal reflection actually penetrates about a third of a wavelength into the space around it. (Essentially "sampling" the space to "find out" that the refractive index is too low for it to fly away. B-) ) A number of things can be done with this effect (such as measuring the refractive index of opaque substances like ketchup).
In this case what they've done is build an optic waveguide in silicion (by etching it and perhaps then oxidizing it into glass) and bonded to it an LED with the active region over the waveguide.
- The evanescent wave penetrates into the region where the diode amplifies light, which provides the gain, pumping up the light in the waveguide.
- The waveguide provides the resonant cavity for the laser, as well as all the optical plumbing.
- The waveguide (and all associated optical plumbing) can be easily and accurately constructed using integrated circuit etching techniques.
- There is no critical alignment between the diode and the waveguide. Just get it within a range of positions that put an active region on top of the waveguide for about the correct length in the correct segment.
... nor does the group of people who spend a lot of time breaking cyphers typically overlap with the group of people who have and can work with CNC equipment.
It's obvious that you haven't attended their conventions. B-)
There's nothing stopping someone from getting a standard reader and jacking up the power enough to activate and read the chips from a much greater distance.
Or using a directional antenna to get the same effect. (Or combining both for even greater range.)
This is *bad* news for the GPL. The GPL exists because of copyright law.
The problem GPL is addressing is the potential application of copyright law to CHANGES to freed software or COMBINATIONS ("compilations") with other software: Locking up the changed or included-in-an-anthology versions under a new copyright and preventing others, including the original author, from using the derivative work. If not for that threat it would be sufficient to release free software in the public domain.
If copyright is turned off it doesn't matter. If copyright stays turned on - or is turned back on by leaving the copyright-free-zone - the only way to distribute additional copies is to license the original.
Now if some non-US person in Antigua makes a change to a GPLed work whose copyright owners are all US entities and copyrights it in Antigua, things could get interesting... But somehow I doubt that any other jurisdiction (ESPECIALLY the US) would attempt to enforce the Antiguan copyright in question. B-)
The U.S. banned international online gambling because of pressure (read: bribes) from the big domestic casinos. Mainly the Indian tribes and the Vegas / Atlantic City ones. Probably the state lotteries, too.
Presuming this is correct, the penalty is designed to hit one of those groups right in the pocketbook.
The big private industry casinos of Vegas and Atlantic City were started and at one time owned and run by organized crime. Then they got too big (i.e. required too much capital) and were owned and run by "ordinary" big business (i.e. single corporations such as that owned by Howard Hughes.) Then they got too big even for that and are now owned and run by entertainment superconglomerates - the same ones that run the movie and sound recording industries that would be hit by the copyright exception.
So as far as the casino interests are concerned its rock vs. hard place.
Re the design of the 3-trailer system in the illustration. How the heck do you DISconnect the plumbing between the trailers without getting a massive exposure to the agent? Even flushing it out with bleach could easily miss some material in crevices of the connectors.
The website has nothing to do with the bank, the addresses are not the bank ones, but none the less the consumer enters their credentials. As a results of many years of brainwashing by direct marketeers they now consider all this to be "business as usual".
Also as a result of years of outsourcing, where banks, hospitals, and others would hire third-parties to handle portions of their genuine business.
For instance: My company's medical insurance company hired a third-party to administer inquiring whether certain medical treatments - such as hernia and joint operations - were the result of work-related injuries for which they could recover from the workspace-injury insurance company. The inquiry form came in an envelope with the insurance company's logo on the return address but with size, color, size of envelope, and quality of paper slightly off, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
If they really want to help out with alternative energy usage there are a few things they can do easily:
- Design the power supplies and charge controllers of laptops to accept reasonably "wild" voltages on the input jack, publish the specs and limits, and approve direct connection to panels or 12v renewable energy systems. Alternatively they could make available an INEXPENSIVE charging brick that accepts such voltages on its input.
By 'reasonably "wild"' I mean the voltages that would appear off, say, a 12v panel (about 14.5v) or a 12V renewable-energy battery bank (about 13.5, up to 14.something during equalization). Disconnect at a minimum charge to protect batteries from undercharge would be a good idea, too. (Make it resistant to voltage spikes from switching of inductive loads and it could also be plugged directly into a cigarette lighter in a car as well.)
Down-converter bricks for 24 and 48 volt systems would be good, too. Working through one step of conversion, rather than running the system's big (and thus lossy) inverter to get power up to 120VAC for a standard brick and then bringing it back down to what the laptop wants, would be a big win.
- Improve power management (including clock-speed management, disk shutdown, and screen backlighting control) for lowered power consumption when not needed for heavy crunch or display. (For linux: Provide the hooks for the open software to do this.)
Hope she wins and gets a couple of million from the RIAA (as well as setting a precedent)
I hope she wins and the RIAA members effectively lose the copyrights to every song involved in these suits.
That's the point of the "copyright misuse" claim: Part of the penalty for misuse of a copyright is the loss of the ability to enforce it at all.
This situation presents a case study: will American courts protect the public interest, or will they sell us out to corporate interests again?
The American courts will probably follow the law as written. If it gives the FCC the power to make this decision, they'll tell Verizon to go whistle, if it doesn't they'll say the same to the FCC. In great detail.
The place to buy the law is in congress. Federal judges are pretty much immune to external pressure due to the appointment system. In high-profile stuff like this it's really hard to keep a bribe hidden and and their decisions will be scrutinized so they try to make them clear and correct in order to optimize their future career paths.
Do you have broadband at home?
At that site all I have is 22k or so dialup. No DSL available. (Latency on satellite is unacceptable.)
A little mom-and-POP has recently installed a WiFi-based broadband service (sharing a single T1 across this and several other valleys, though they're working on adding a fiber). Their antenna is actually at the cell site in question. But it's in the $80/month range. Might go with them once we're moved out there if nothing else comes up but for vacation weekends it's not practical.
Also that just gets it for the home site. We do a lot of offroading in the surrounding several hundred square miles and we'll lose cellphone service in the subset of that which has any currently.
I can get GSM and CDMA coverage in very remote areas of North Dakota, so rural service will be expanding.
I, on the other hand, can not get either at my place in Nevada. It's just beyond Verizon's last cell. It's IN AT&T's last CDMA/AMPS cell. (Beyond this there's either AMPS or nothing, depending on the location.) But AT&T hasn't (and apparently won't) upgrade it to GSM. So when they drop CDMA and AMPS I'm hosed.
It's not like this is the boonies. There are hundreds of houses, and the intersection of two major roads, in the area served by that orphan cell.
This comitment to analog technology is just as much a problem for cell phones as for TV. This desire to keep the old stuff going is what keeps USA in the cellphone middle ages.
Actually the desire of the cellphone companies to serve only dense population centers has more to do with it.
Look at the map of coverage for AMPS (virtually the whole continental US) versus TDMA, CDMA, and/or GSM from the various carriers (essentially cities, large towns, and a subset of the interstates between them.
I got my AMPS/TDMA subscription from AT&T back in '99 or so - when building a house in Nevada. I'd have gone with Verizon, but the site is right in the coverage footprint of the LAST cell in AT&T's net and JUST BEYOND the last cell in Verizon's.
For the last several years AT&T has been trying to get me to switch to GSM. But they haven't updated that cell. And they apparently have no plans to do so. If I were to update, I'd lose service - as I no doubt will if/when they shut down all their AMPS and TDMA cells (currently threatened for next Feb).
The current generation of management has apparently forgotten that one of the points of cellphones is the ability to remain connected to the phone system when out in the boondocks - not just traveling between cities but also when going to, working in, or playing at places off the beaten track. In low usage areas a single cell can handle an enormous area. Maybe it won't ever carry enough of the traffic to directly pay for itself - but it DOES pay because its presence increases the utility of the total system.
(I guess they'll just have to learn the hard way, when somebody who DOES "get it" finally provides coverage for the customers they abandoned - whether by cellphone, wireless internet, or satellite - and a bunch of other people drop their subscriptions and migrate.)
Have you ever read a warranty or EULA?
Why, yes. I have.
Almost any warranty given has a clause specifically denying any other warranty, express or implied.
Usually immediately followed by a statement in parenthesis saying that some (read "virtually all") jurisdictions require that some or all of these warranties can't be disclaimed. B-)
In addition, they generally require that any disputes be resolved through arbitration and not court.
Which is also something of which courts have taken a dim view. Especially if the warranty terms can't be viewed by (even: aren't prominently displayed to) the consumer before the purchasing decision is made. (Recently such a clause was explicitly struck down for a public communication utility.)
If I didn't get satisfaction from the manufacturer and felt like taking it to formal dispute resolution I'd start with the court and let the manufacturer decide whether to argue for moving it to arbitration (thus risking me arguing against it successfully and establishing a precedent voiding such clauses.)
On the advice of my attorney I always modify such clauses in employment contracts to "either party may elect to take disputes to binding arbitration, with the costs of arbitration borne by the party so electing". Arbitration is designed for settling disputes between corporations. The costs are high and the rules generally split them evenly regardless of the "winner" (if any), treating them as separate from the settlement. So in a big-pockets/small-pockets dispute over amounts well below a million dollars the small-pockets party will likely lose by playing, even if he gets a total "win" on the issues.
Sorry to ask, but why simply looking at images of children porn is usually seen as a problem?
Because those who look at them create a demand to produce them.
Ordinary pornography can be a voluntary creation. Child pornography (when it involves the participation of an actual child - in a sexual situation or in the creation of an image that might affect his later life by adverse publicity) can not be voluntary, because the child is not yet competent to make such decisions and is prone to defer to adults. So the production of child pornography using actual children is involuntary exploitation of children, abhorrent to pretty much everybody but the pedophiles themselves (and even to some of them).
In the US at least, the legal system has justified attacks on the possession of child pornography as attacks on the demand side of its production - treating possession as evidence of purchase (or of giving other benefits to the producer) and purchase/etc. as accessory after the fact to production and before the fact to future production. This lets them ban possession despite first amendment arguments.
However the laws are written to also ban possession of prose fiction, drawings, and computer "de-aged" images of adults - none of which actually involve the abuse of minors in their production (as well as material where any child participation / exploitation occurred before the legislation in question). There is considerable court activity over whether the production and/or the possession such stuff is protected by the first amendment (or the ban on ex-post-facto laws).
Pedophiles who become actual sexual predators are notoriously resistant to both voluntary and involuntary rehabilitation. This leads to a multi-way argument among several claims:
- Child pornography (even that not made by exploiting actual children) leads to the formation of the pedophile fetish and its availability thus leads to increased predation.
- Child pornography (not made by exploiting actual children) can be used for sublimation by pedophiles and its availability thus leads to decreased predation.
- The issue is moot because the first amendment protects it.
- Child pornography bans can be used to suppress political speech on the issue of when a youth becomes competent to give consent and whether/how the current laws should be revised.
(It also leads me to breathe a huge sigh of relief that my own sexual preferences don't include the underage. B-) )
What kind of soulless bastard needs a written code of ethics to know what's right and wrong?
A psychopath does.
They are about 1% of the population and apparently have a brain defect (akin to color blindness) that amounts to having no conscience.
If they don't "compensate" by voluntarily adopting a clear set of rules of conduct (or even if they do but the code is deficient) they are likely to become criminal menaces.
(It's also possible to learn behaviors that suppress conscience, with similar results. In fact this appears to be somewhat more common - at least among career criminals - than the actual mental defect. One expert in the field distinguishes the two cases by reserving the term "sociopath" for the latter - though "sociopath" is normally applied to either.)
Most of law, religion, and culture - along with the distinctions between cultures - is related to how to handle this fraction of the population. Teaching them rules of conduct (either to block misbehavior or to direct it only at outside-the-tribe groups), convincing them to adopt such rules (typically by teaching them that following he rules is good for "number one" - either in this world or an afterlife), penalizing them for misbehavior, separating them from the general population and warehousing, deporting, or killing them.
Because the suffering of others doesn't cause them mental anguish they can be some of the worst of people: Torturing, raping, and killing for their own fun. For the same reason they can be the best of people: They have to CONSCIOUSLY DECIDE to be good and work hard at it - which IMHO is far more meritorious than being good because been bad feels bad. And for the same reason they can do very well as decision makers and leaders, able to think clearly when making decisions where suffering and/or death are involved.
Compensated and partially-compensated psychopaths gravitate to positions in politics, management, sales, and crime. And those who have not fully compensated (a difficult task) occasionally cause headlines and distrust for all practitioners of those first professions when they combine one of them with that last one. B-)
So an executive who is willing to break the rules to indulge his interest in banned sexual practices by viewing banned or frowned-upon reading material on the company network is hardly surprising. What matters is whether he's compensated enough to restrict his enjoyment to reading material or if he'll also do some enjoying of it in real life (or let it affect his managerial decisions in an improper way).
In the US, the consumer would have several options, including consulting the Better Business Bureau and also with the various state Attorneys General offices.
Also the Federal Trade Commission.
The company's refusal to fix a mechanical flaw totally unrelated to the software violates the "implied warranty of serviceability and fitness". That's a BIG no-no.
... employment of software engineers and system analysts is expected to increase 'much faster than the average' through 2014 (here, and here). In contrast, employment of programmers is expected to increase 'more slowly than the average,' ...
Well golly gosh whillikers.
In my 30 years in software (before I went over to the hard side of the force) I've called myself a programmer, a system analyst, a software engineer, a system architect, and a number of other buzzwords.
Guess what: There is not a standard definition for ANY of those terms. The only distinction between them is the expectations of the employers about the strengths of various parts of your skill set.
So you call yourself the one that your prospective employer hangs on the highest-in-the-design-tree position that you can convince him you're qualified to fill, based on your own skills and your resume.
They're hiring system analysts and SW engineers locally and going abroad for programmers? That just means you have to change the top line on your resume from "programmer" to "software engineer" or "system analyst".
Don't have enough experience to qualify for whatever position they're hiring for when you're just out of school? That's the same old "break-in problem". The "can't get a job because you don't have experience and can't get experience because you don't have a job" vicious circle. It's been around as long as I've been in this industry, and I cut my teeth on computers that had vacuum tubes for the DIODES in the logic.
You get your skills through:
3) classes,
2) ripping apart and studying others' code,
1) playing with the computer to make it do something fun for you,
in that reverse order. (I know because that's how I did it, and I had some big names for teachers back in the day. The lessons were valuable. But self-directed code reading and bug fixing / feature enhancement was more so and self-directed problem solving was the top skill builder.)
You don't get your job through resumes, degrees, and certifications. You get your foot in the door through contacts with people who have seen your previous work or play. THEN you and your contact use your (tuned to the job) resume, credentials, and references from other contacts to convince the middle-manager in the suit that he's lucked into a paragon who's perfect for the job.
How do you get contacts? Initially you do as much unassigned for-fun stuff as you can when you can and let others see what you did and that you enjoy doing it and are good at it. Some of these people will remember you when somebody they know is looking for somebody like you for a job of the sort you want.
Later you'll make more contacts at work: Co-workers, managers, etc. Your network of contacts will grow to get you into more doors. Your resume's experience section will grow to calm the suits (while your other contacts serve as references ditto). And your skills will grow to let you actually perform in new positions.
Your actual skills are important: to keep impressing people so you can hold your jobs, build your resume with successful project results, and grow your contact network. But it's your contacts - as you/job matchers and references - that are what get you into the jobs.
You can't look for people if you don't even know they're missing.
However there are over 150 lost planes that they KNOW are missing in Nevada alone, many of which DID file flight plans. (Add in the California part of the Sierras and the number climbs much higher.)
(One of them is the plane carrying the father of a Florida resident, who is asking the searchers whether one of these six found as a side effect of this search is the one his father was in when it went down in 1964.)
You have to understand this terrain: Much of it is deep, eroded cuts through mountains, with roads that might see a car in a week, or a month - and these are the numbered state roads. There are roads with washouts on the side of nearly vertical slopes where a car that slips off might roll down hundreds of feet and end up invisible from any point on the road or from the air above (due to trees, desert foliage, or bringing down a rockslide on top of itself.
There is no cellphone service in much of this area. Often you can't get a single AM or FM station on your car radio.
Locals normally carry bottled water, emergency rations, more than one spare tire, a high-lift jack and/or a winch, and some carry an EPIRB, when traveling these roads. (For some of them it's the trip into town.) But in some places in these valleys even an EPIRB won't hit the satellite.
The problem is there isn't really good evidence that such radiation is dangerous at all. These figures like the "0.5 cases of cancer" all assume the Linear No Threshold model - that is, that any amount of radiation is bad, and extrapolate a straight line from the last "good" data to (0,0). This has never been conclusively proven, given the extremely low cancer rates that would be expected at such low exposure limits.
IMHO (and I am not a medical professional) there is good reason to believe that, for most types of cancer, the curve at low-to-moderate doses should be essentially the Nth power of exposure. N would vary depending on the type of cancer but would typically be small and tend to be even. It could be inferred from the slope of incidence of the cancer type with age during adulthood, and cancer types subject to incidence mechanisims that would break the model would be indicated when the incidence graph is not essentially straight-line.
(Lung cancer seemed to be a good fit, with N=6, in data I saw a couple decades ago during the "radon pollution" flap. The radon risk assessments were based on extrapolating from lung cancer rates in uranium miners using the linear assumption and the ratio of radon in houses versus mines. A linear function would imply some small risk, while a 6th power function would mean the "radon in the basement threat" was a bunch of hooey.)
The reasoning:
- Most cancers (especially radiation-induced cancers) appear to be the result of the accumulation of a particular set of some integer number of mutation in single cell, which becomes the initial cell of the new cancer.
- A particular subset (N) of these are necessary to escape the growth regulation (and any anti-tumor mechanisms that would quickly and completely destroy the modified cell or its progeny.)
- Before the accumulation of all of this set of mutations in a single cell, it participates in cell growth and reproduction in the normal (very limited) fashion. After they accumulate it begins reproducing uncontrollably, expanding into a precancerous lesion (a long-lived lump with many cells available to accumulate the remaining mutations necessary for full-blown cancer). Thus the accumulation of all of the N mutations of the subset in a single cell is the critical deterinant of the rate of cancer incidence from induced mutation.
- The N mutations of the set are independent events.
- The probability of each being induced by low-level ionizing radiation is directly proportional to the amount of radiation exposure.
- Thus the probability of the complete critical subset being accumulated in a single cell (i.e. the critical event for radiation-induced cancer) rises with the Nth power of the radiation exposure.
- Cell reproduction may be limited by different genetic mechanisms for different tissue types, resulting in a different set of mutation targets and thus potentially different values of N for different types of cancer.
Of course this is a bit simplistic. For instance:
- At radiation levels in the range that can modify the production of inducable protective enzymes the assumption that the individual mutations are directly proportional to radiation fails.
- Mutations that affect the effectiveness of DNA reapir and protection mechanisms violate the assumption that the mutation rates are independent.
- It doesn't adequately model some cancer types (such as two-part cancers where two distinct mutated cell populations produce each other's growth factors.)
However these seem to be minor factors:
- Inducable enzymes would not be induced for low-level exposure and would be saturated for long-term high-level exposure. They'd bend the curve over some middle level and lower its slope above that bend, but wouldn't affect the slope at the low end. (Of course this totally breaks attempts to extrapolate from high to low exposure levels.)
- Protective/repair enzymes should be unaffected in the bulk of the potential target cells, so their loss would not be part of the critical set of N mutations.
- The bulk of cancers seem to be single mutated clones.
The frailness of age is still not solved with it, but it will make healthcare even more costly as all people getting older will demand this or other costly cures.
This is one piece of solving the frailness of age. Solve enough of them and "old age" is no longer frail.
Solve enough more and it is indistinguishable from healthy youth.
Which IS the idea after all.
Meanwhile, the cost of caring for an alzheimer's patient is astronomical. If you can do a one-shot procedure (even a very expensive one) which (at a minimum) arrests the progression of the damage and lets the victim continue independent living rather than being institutionalized under continuous skilled care, the overall cost of treating the disease will plummet.
Meanwhile code obfuscation (even automatically generated obfuscation) could easily modify at least the timing, if not the order, of such calls.
(Yes I know that the article says it can't. But that refers to the usual sort, which is directed at hiding the similarity from someone reading the source. I'm talking about obfuscation directed at tools reading the routine-call signature.)
An identical library call signature for a nontrivial part of the execution could be produced by a clean-room analysis or even independent development of an equivalent component. Neither of these is a GPL violation.
This is not to say that the technique wouldn't be useful for hunting down GPL violations. But a positive is not difinitive by itself.
Meanwhile code obfuscation (even automatically generated obfuscation) could easily modify at least the timing, if not the order, of such calls.
Nevertheless this is a powerful tool: An hunk of GPL code that hasn't had its flow obfuscated systematically (even code that HAS been obfuscated but not systematically) will have large swaths of code that trips the detector. And it doesn't require reverse engineering until after the alarm goes off.
Good job, guys.
I was wondering what this "evanescent laser" bit was about. That article clarifies it.
Light confined to a waveguide by total internal reflection actually penetrates about a third of a wavelength into the space around it. (Essentially "sampling" the space to "find out" that the refractive index is too low for it to fly away. B-) ) A number of things can be done with this effect (such as measuring the refractive index of opaque substances like ketchup).
In this case what they've done is build an optic waveguide in silicion (by etching it and perhaps then oxidizing it into glass) and bonded to it an LED with the active region over the waveguide.
- The evanescent wave penetrates into the region where the diode amplifies light, which provides the gain, pumping up the light in the waveguide.
- The waveguide provides the resonant cavity for the laser, as well as all the optical plumbing.
- The waveguide (and all associated optical plumbing) can be easily and accurately constructed using integrated circuit etching techniques.
- There is no critical alignment between the diode and the waveguide. Just get it within a range of positions that put an active region on top of the waveguide for about the correct length in the correct segment.
There are many instances of car keys being duplicated by thieves in league with garages, valet parkings and so forth.
In fact, this is exactly what the encrypted-chip-in-key was intended to prevent.
Copying the funny metal shape is easy with hardware-store tools. But duplicating the chip was intended to be essentially impossible.
... nor does the group of people who spend a lot of time breaking cyphers typically overlap with the group of people who have and can work with CNC equipment.
It's obvious that you haven't attended their conventions. B-)
There's nothing stopping someone from getting a standard reader and jacking up the power enough to activate and read the chips from a much greater distance.
Or using a directional antenna to get the same effect. (Or combining both for even greater range.)
This is *bad* news for the GPL. The GPL exists because of copyright law.
The problem GPL is addressing is the potential application of copyright law to CHANGES to freed software or COMBINATIONS ("compilations") with other software: Locking up the changed or included-in-an-anthology versions under a new copyright and preventing others, including the original author, from using the derivative work. If not for that threat it would be sufficient to release free software in the public domain.
If copyright is turned off it doesn't matter. If copyright stays turned on - or is turned back on by leaving the copyright-free-zone - the only way to distribute additional copies is to license the original.
Now if some non-US person in Antigua makes a change to a GPLed work whose copyright owners are all US entities and copyrights it in Antigua, things could get interesting... But somehow I doubt that any other jurisdiction (ESPECIALLY the US) would attempt to enforce the Antiguan copyright in question. B-)
... why should HW and MS be punished by international legal reaction to US treaty violation?
And a possible answer is "Hollywood IS Vegas". The major casinos are part of the same entertainment conglomerates as the major studios.
Doesn't help Microsoft, of course.
The U.S. banned international online gambling because of pressure (read: bribes) from the big domestic casinos. Mainly the Indian tribes and the Vegas / Atlantic City ones. Probably the state lotteries, too.
Presuming this is correct, the penalty is designed to hit one of those groups right in the pocketbook.
The big private industry casinos of Vegas and Atlantic City were started and at one time owned and run by organized crime. Then they got too big (i.e. required too much capital) and were owned and run by "ordinary" big business (i.e. single corporations such as that owned by Howard Hughes.) Then they got too big even for that and are now owned and run by entertainment superconglomerates - the same ones that run the movie and sound recording industries that would be hit by the copyright exception.
So as far as the casino interests are concerned its rock vs. hard place.
Re the design of the 3-trailer system in the illustration. How the heck do you DISconnect the plumbing between the trailers without getting a massive exposure to the agent? Even flushing it out with bleach could easily miss some material in crevices of the connectors.
The website has nothing to do with the bank, the addresses are not the bank ones, but none the less the consumer enters their credentials. As a results of many years of brainwashing by direct marketeers they now consider all this to be "business as usual".
Also as a result of years of outsourcing, where banks, hospitals, and others would hire third-parties to handle portions of their genuine business.
For instance: My company's medical insurance company hired a third-party to administer inquiring whether certain medical treatments - such as hernia and joint operations - were the result of work-related injuries for which they could recover from the workspace-injury insurance company. The inquiry form came in an envelope with the insurance company's logo on the return address but with size, color, size of envelope, and quality of paper slightly off, etc.