A Piece of the Action is #5 on both your lists? You have a love/hate relationship with it?
What about Mirror, Mirror, The Doomsday Machine, Space Seed, and Amok Time? Balance of Terror is a fine episode, but I wouldn't put it in the top 5. Too derivative, too obviously a remake of Das Boot. I really didn't like the scene with the listing space ship, but I suppose that's a fairly trivial problem, easy to clean up in a remastering. It's near the top of my list for worst violations of physics and sense.
As I understand it, patents were originally supposed to cover specific implementations, not general ideas. You had to have a working physical model. This has gradually expanded until patents do in effect cover ideas. Patents merely list every possible way it can be implemented, as broadly as possible.
Now algorithms, software, and so called business methods can be patented. Patents can be effectively renewed by tweaking the ideas and applying for a new patent. There are lots of other tricks. They all make life difficult for people who want to concentrate on innovations, not arcane legalisms.
Why did we end up going this direction? We didn't have to turn patents into the oppressive, strangling, chilling monstrosities they are today. They were supposed to help the little guy, but were too readily made into tools that large organizations could wield to help maintain their dominance. True, they have to fight off the occasional troll, but they evidently think the control they gain is worth that.
The entire approach of patent law is all wrong. It's all about control and preventing loss and "theft", and security against our fears no matter how worthless the former and ridiculous the latter, when it should be about sharing and gain. You should ask for permission first? No one does that! Permission can be flat denied, holders don't have to grant permission for some standard price. One way a business can handle this mess is to build up a defensive patent war chest. Fight fire with fire. Cross license. It's a lousy way that perpetuates lawsuits and enriches lawyers. So I think the system ought to be radically reformed, or just plain scrapped. A patent should never be a means of denial, of retarding innovation, and squelching competition. That's the very opposite of their intent. Dump the monopoly part at the least.
If these IT, CS, and Software Engineering jobs are so terrible, how do you explain all these surveys and exercises in ranking routinely putting those careers near or at the top of their lists?
Not saying they can't be horrible jobs. Seems more likely these rankings are failing to account for a number of things. Or is it that every other field really is worse?
I surmise that "pairing-based cryptography" is just some weird new name someone dreamed up for Public Key Cryptography, as that uses algorithms that work on a pair of keys. Marketing and customers are so anxious to have the next big thing that the marketing people routinely dress up old ideas in new terms, and customers eagerly latch on. Both often realize what they're doing, but they hope others, including journalists and government bureaucrats responsible for choosing and approving standards, are fooled. Shows how little they truly care about security when they go running for the obscurity and lies, and not just to try to cover up problems, but more as a marketing ploy.
Which algorithm they used, who knows? RSA? Diffie-Hellman? Clearly, they went the brute force route. And to help the brute force attack along, they deliberately went with an unusual and short number of bits, thus proving very little. They didn't break the algorithm itself. Most asymmetric algorithms need something like double the number of bits to be as secure as a typical good symmetric algorithm. 923 bits may be acceptable for a symmetric algorithm, but is shaky for RSA. These days, there is doubt that 1024 bits is enough for RSA, and users are strongly urged to go with at least 2048 bits.
The usual thing to do in a public key system is use the asymmetric algorithm only to securely transmit a key for a symmetric algorithm, then use the symmetric algorithm and key for the message itself, as that is faster. The way the article reads, they may have hacked up their own poor version of a public key system, omitting the symmetric algorithm, and using the asymmetric algorithm for the message. Possibly they aren't even doing the public part, keeping both keys of a key pair secret. There's no way to tell on any of that, not from the minimal info in the article.
Yes! Don't be downhearted. This is a fight the copyright extremists can't win.
They can pass laws that declare the value of pi is 3.0 and the world is flat, but that doesn't make it so. They can outlaw gravity all they like, but gravity won't obey. They can outlaw sex and procreation. After all, that is copying! Be a bit difficult to enforce that on bacteria. But beings capable of comprehending such a law should also understand its consequences. Anyone who doesn't, and mindlessly obeys a law like that deserves a Darwin Award.
These laws are all unconscionable. Don't feel guilty for breaking those kinds of laws! In fact, I regard it our duty to rebel against this. And good training to get us to be better citizens by questioning bad laws.
x86 is ugly. It's one of the most screwed up, inconsistent, crufty architectures ever created. Motorola's 68000 architecture was a lot cleaner. But Intel, through sheer brute force, has managed patch up many of its shortcomings and make x86 perform well in spite of itself.
They went with a load and execute architecture for the x86 instructions. Then they didn't stick to that model for the floating point instructions, going with a stack for that. And remember they split the CPU into 2 parts. If you wanted the floating point instructions, you had to get a very expensive matching x87 chip. I still remember the week when 80387 prices collapsed from $600 to $200, and still no one would buy, not with free emulators and the 486DX nearing release. Another major bit of ugliness was the segment. Rather than a true 32bit architecture, they used this segmented architecture scheme, then buggered it up even more by having different modes. In some modes, the segment and address were simply concatenated for a 32bit address space, and in others 12 bits overlapped to give only a 20bit address space. Then you had all this switching and XMS and EMS to access memory above 1M. Nasty.
x86 has been bashed for years for not having enough registers. And for making them special purpose. For instance, only one, AX, can be used for integer multiplication. Ask some compiler designers about the x86 sometime. Bet you'll get an earful.
Few platform segregation points? Maybe, but one price is lots of legacy garbage. x86 still has to support those ancient segmented modes. Then there's junk like the ASCII adjust and decimal adjust instructions: AAA, AAS, AAD, and AAM, and DAA, and DAS. Nobody uses packed decimal any more! And hardly anyone ever used it. Those instructions were a crappy way to support decimal anyway. If they were going to do it at all, should have just had AA for ASCII Add instead of "adjusting" after a regular ADD instruction. Then there's the string search instructions, REPNE CMPSW and relatives. They're hopelessly obsolete. We have much better algorithms for string search than that. They also screwed up the instructions intended for OS support on the 286. That's one reason why the lowest common denominator is i386 and not i286. 286 is also only 16bit.
You might be tempted to think x86 was good for its time. Nope. Even by the standards and principles of the 1970s, x86 stinks.
Someone mentioned CISC, as if that beat out RISC? It didn't. Under the hood, modern x86 CPUs actually translate each x86 instruction to several RISC instructions. So why not just use the actual RISC instruction set directly? One argument in favor of the x86 instruction set is that it is denser. Takes fewer bytes than the equivalent action in RISC instructions. Perhaps, but that's accidental. If that is such a valuable property, ought to create a new instruction set that is optimized for code density. Then, as if x86 wasn't CISC enough, they rolled out the MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4 additions.
That makes a powerful argument in favor of open source. Could drop all the older SSE versions if only all programs could be easily recompiled.
One number that no one seems to have argued about much is the number of downloads that could have come from one user's computer. This is the basis for the entire idea of multiplying the damages to levels we all know are ludicrous. The RIAA insists hundreds of people could have downloaded from Jammie Thomas. Although that's possible, it's highly improbable. The most likely number of downloads is 1 per file. That's one, not hundreds or thousands. The court ought to use that number to compute damages.
Why only 1? For the same reasons that Ponzi schemes do not work. The network quickly becomes saturated. Suppose people can give out copies at more or less the same rate, to anyone else. And once a copy is received, the recipient can quickly turn around and share it. (BitTorrent is even better than that, starting the sharing of parts of a copy before a recipient has received the entire file.) Each generation, the number of people who could have a copy doubles. By the time a person is giving out a copy for the 20th time, 1 million people could have a copy. By the 33rd time, everyone in the world could have it. Even if everyone in the world wants a copy, only one person, the originator, could have given out as many as 33 copies, and only the first recipient could have given out as many as 32. Just 8000 people could have given out 20 copies, and just 1 of every 2000 people could have given out 10 copies. Half the people will have given out zero copies, because by the time they got it, there was no one left who still didn't have a copy of their own. The average number of copies of 1 file that a person gives out is 1.
I don't think Issa fully understands. Look at #10 of his Bill of Rights:
Property - digital citizens have a right to benefit from what they create, and be secure in their intellectual property on the internet
The first part sounds okay. But the second part, no. What does "secure" mean here? Worse than that, he said "intellectual property".
He may be opposed to the details of SOPA, but not the essence. He wants some magic way to make intellectual property just work, acts as if it can be done, and seems unquestioning in moving ahead as if it's a good idea.
Then, how about #5?
digital citizens have a right to... be held accountable for what they create
That's not a right! That's some kind of obligation.
I've encountered many who really believe slaves make better workers. This includes the slaves. "I owe, I owe, it's off to work I go" is practically the national motto of the US. They don't call it slavery of course. They call it commitment, reliability and stability. They believe people must be pushed hard, and will do their best when they are in "do or die" situations, there's a gun pointing at their heads, their necks' are on the chopping blocks and the ax is ready to fall. Even better when they have volunteered. "Ability to work in high pressure environment" is a popular and sought after soft skill. They believe this so strongly that they put a higher priority on their ability to get and maintain holds over a job candidate than the abilities and skills they're seeking. Being financially responsible counts against you! They want you set up so that you're in a world of hurt if you lose your job. This is why the US does not have sane health care spending. Relieving employers of the burden of paying for and managing a health care program is seemingly one of the most business friendly things government could do. Yet business opposed it. Why? Employers like having holds over employees, and health benefits make a good one.
Ever had a boss observe that you haven't bought a new car? And this despite the fact that your current car works fine? I have, twice, and my mother once. Why is the boss so interested in your car? No one else cares. One of these bosses explained it, saying that because I wasn't making car payments, I could afford to leave my job and this was bad! At another job, the phrase "flight risk" was used to refer to employees who could afford to leave their jobs. At still another job, a fellow employee told me that he was a better employee than I because he had to have the job in order to afford his crushingly high house payments (he paid $500,000 for a small house, in California, in 2003), and his wife and new baby daughter, whereas I was living in an apartment. He made sure everyone, especially management, knew how screwed he would be if he lost his job, and that he was willing to work long hours. Often, managers are also slaves, and tend to be jealous of peons who have freedoms they don't have. Had one manager who groaned theatrically about his massive credit card debt, but it was easy to see he was really kind of bragging about it. He even held a little pissing contest one day, asking everyone how much credit card debt we had. He "won" by "virtue" of having the most. I refused to answer, and this was met with hostility, and the suspicion that I must not have any, and jealousy.
So of course H1Bs have massive advantages over the natives.
Gladwell is way off base. We remember the business giants of bygone eras for being business giants, not their charitable work. Rockefeller is known for oil more than anything else. Likewise with J. P. Morgan and banking, Carnegie and steel, Vanderbilt and railroads, etc. None of these guys have a savory reputation. They were all known for being ruthless businessmen ready to engage in any profitable behavior no matter how unethical, if they had good odds of getting away with it or getting off lightly if caught.
Today, there isn't a one among our best business leaders who doesn't have more and worse baggage than the average politician. Nor has there ever been. The very "best" business leaders ever (as crudely measured by wealth) look pathetic next to the best statesmen, scientists, journalists, explorers, military leaders, sports stars, artists, and performers. Top business leaders are almost more infamous than famous. Always seem to leave behind them a long trail of victims of dirty competition, callousness, theft, treachery, betrayal, bribery, graft, and corruption. Many even think that sort of thing might be necessary to succeed big in business, so bad is its reputation. One of the earliest business leaders recorded in history, Crassus, the wealthiest Roman ever, was of the same stripe. Greedy, unprincipled, arrogant, and crass. The very word "crass" comes from his name.
For the most part, their charitable work looks like feeble attempts to make up for the damage they did to accomplish their rise, to buy love and popularity just like they buy everything else. And it's never above suspicion, as charitable contributions have been used and abused to dodge taxes.
It's the world that needs more openness. And better utilization of the technology we do have.
Losing the passport wouldn't be such a calamity if governments were up to date. We shouldn't even use a physical item like that for purposes of verifying identity and permissions. At a border crossing, stating names and perhaps a number, or undergoing a brief biometric scan ought to be all that travelers need do. The officials at the border can then use their networked computers to check the information. It's just dopey to rely on the picture of a person carried by that person to check identity! That's as dopey as DRM. Yeah, yeah, like cash they have put security threads and watermarks and such on the passport pictures, to make forgery more difficult. And don't forget the embedded RFID chip! Currently, with passports the US now issues business sized cards for your wallet. The cards have useful phone numbers and a space upon which you are supposed to write your passport number, for just such an occurrence. Haven't progressed much!
As for personal data, no one should ever have the only copies of their work on a single laptop, except possibly for whatever was being worked on in the last few minutes or since the last time the laptop had been connected to the Internet. The laptop itself is pretty cheap these days. I hope RMS didn't lose any data. Passwords are similar. Never have unencrypted passwords or or other unencrypted sensitive data on a laptop. But if he wasn't up to scratch on that stuff, this could be the worst loss of all.
Medicines shouldn't be a big deal either. Unfortunately, they can be thanks to intellectual property law. At $5/pill for typical name brand drugs, those medicines could easily cost more to replace than everything else in the bag.
Money? Let's hope he's not in the habit of lugging around thousands of dollars in cash. Sensible travelers only carry a little cash, leaning on credit cards whenever possible. But I could see a guy like RMS scorning credit cards because they come with lots of baggage, like the tracking of your every purchase. At any rate, banks, like governments, are woefully behind on technology. Shouldn't need a piece of plastic to do a transaction.
With all that said, his Argentine hosts treated him very shabbily. If laptop bag theft is such a big problem, they should know that. It's their home, they ought to know what protections guests will need, what crimes are in vogue. Should have had someone or something watching his bag. Wasn't anyone recording his speech on video? There's no footage at all of his bag being swiped? That a thief got away with his bag doesn't speak well of them. They seem negligent at the least. Such thefts may be aided by corruption. I shouldn't wonder that petty theft of that nature is a very low priority for their police, who will undoubtedly say there's nothing they can do.
There are plugins for this problem. Check out Lazarus for Firefox.
Don't be too quick to dismiss notions of mental differences as sexism. From what I've read, both sexes are about equally good drivers. Insurers certainly considered young males more accident prone than young females. The blame was placed on young men being more aggressive, hotheaded, and reckless. Turned out the women had fewer accidents because they didn't drive as much. Then young women started driving about as much, and the accident rate equalized. But the ways women go wrong with driving do seem a little different than men. Of course, it is sexist to notice only those differences that put men in a better light, and conclude that women are worse drivers.
But back to the topic. Figures that if the leading demographic wasn't young men, it had to be young women. Why'd they bother with the "young" part? Older people couldn't be it. And what about race? Wealth? Education? Women also now lead in college degrees, maybe that correlates with adoption of tech? The list of tech areas where women lead fit the stereotypes all too well: communications and health. And GPS. Men never get lost!
Slashdot's reputation? What about women's reputation?
I have a low opinion of booth babes, and not for trying to push my buttons. It's that I can be almost sure that they don't know much about the technology and worse, don't give a crap about it. Anyone who is there ought to have a modicum of interest in the show. Even worse than that, they view the attendees with contempt and disgust, for being nerds as well as for having the typical male wandering eyes. They hate men for ogling them, but intend to trade on their looks to persuade Mr. Right to sweep them away to the life of luxury and ease they deserve, or even better, pay them lots of money so they can have the good life without him. Do they have anything other than looks, like, oh, brains? Sense? You might think some might have signed on to meet a few men, but no. Geeks can actually be good catches, but they don't think so. They don't have the intelligence to appreciate geeks, and view us negatively for in our turn being just as brainless as all other men over hot women. Try to chat with a few of them, and you'll see. A discussion about technical merits will instantly fizzle on their lack of knowledge. Persist by trying to educate them, and they will see you as a creep who is just trying to chat them up because they're hot looking, and they are probably right. They will quickly make it clear they don't care, and would rather you and your skinny nerd ass just dropped off the face of the Earth. If they have zero enthusiasm for the products they are promoting, and feel the attendees are all stereotypically smelly, socially awkward nerds, that leaves money as the only reason they are there. Total gold diggers and dumb bunnies. Just about the worse ways and representatives possible for advancing women's issues. Should we respect this?
Note what the article did not say. None of the babes interviewed expressed the slightest interest in technology. As for the social aspect, they put it as "You just need to talk to people" and "You have to meet a lot of people" as if that's such an imposition and a chore. "Have to" and "need to", huh? I can certainly understand that meeting lots of people is a strain for an introvert, which is most nerds. Are these women introverts? I don't think so, not when they're pining to get back to their dance class.
We're not even supposed to talk to them beyond the most banal, polite, and brief things you might say to any stranger, and trying just marks us as about as stupid as they are. Sad. We're supposed to understand that they are only models, a profession not noted for requiring much intelligence. They are only there to look pretty, and were chosen without regard for whether they might actually know anything or care.
Nothing can stop racism, theft, rape, murder, etc. etc. etc.
We as a society agree that theft, rape, and murder cause harm and therefore are crimes. Racism is more difficult to handle, because it can be hard to detect, and hard to call, so we don't criminalize it in all cases, but we agree it is immoral, and that it harms people. As for monopolies, you have it backwards. Copyrights are monopolies, and both are bad!
Sharing should not be a crime not only because it can't be stopped. Sharing should also not be a crime because there is no harm done, and a lot of good, except maybe to a badly broken business model that needs to die anyway. Even for those who live by the broken business model of selling copies, sharing does not always harm them. It is pretty clear that like education, sharing is a net benefit to society.
I hope you realize that Canada doesn't have piracy. Sharing is legal, and artists are compensated through a number of mechanisms, including a levy on optical media. That the entertainment cartels disagree does not change this.
According to you, everyone is a pirate
It's not me saying that, it's Big Media. According to the insanely extreme copyright laws Big Media has pushed through, just about everyone is a pirate. If copyright is extended, removing works from the public domain, are you supposed to destroy any copies you have of those works if you would not be a pirate? Yes! If you play a recording that is under copyright, and your neighbor overhears, you and your neighbor are both pirates. If you look at a website and it plays a copyrighted jingle without permission from the owners, you'd think only the site owners are guilty of infringement. But you are also guilty. If you download something you thought was free, but it contains a copyrighted work, you are a pirate. Doesn't matter that you didn't know. Ignorance is no excuse!
you're... rationalizing an unethical and illegal activity with terrible false analogies and fallacies.
A growing majority of people do not agree with you about any of that. We, the people, are the supreme law. These activities are legal and ethical if we decide they are. Eventually, in a generation or 2, we will so decide. As for "terrible" analogies, I doubt you can explain why you think so in a way that will convince any fair minded person. You didn't even try.
You are the stereotypical pirate, and you are an asshole.
A person ought to know better than to resort to such name calling and unproven accusations. You do not know whether I am a pirate. And I'm not going to say one way or the other. Why should I? You wouldn't believe any denial anyway. But I will say I don't much bother with TV anymore, and it's not because I can download all the shows I want to watch, it's because there aren't any shows I really care to watch. Same with movies. Nor do I bother pirating games. There is plenty of good stuff that's freely available, even for the free OS I use. As for books and music, the public library and radio are adequate.
I did notice that you didn't actually equate piracy with theft, not in words. However, it seems to me that you agree with the spirit of that thinking. Are you a misanthrope? Do you think most of us are assholes? Because I assure you, most of us are pirates, whether we know it or not. If I pirate something, and make a donation to the artist, am I still an asshole in your book?
But it doesn't matter how wrong anyone thinks piracy is, how much moralizing is done, how many laws are passed against it, or how much DRM they try to force on people. Nothing can stop the sharing. It's easier to regulate sex or drugs than copying, and those are near impossible to control. Most governments have come to their senses, and given up trying to vilify these acts and punish people who commit them. Prohibition was repealed, and other approaches to dealing with alcoholism were tried. Think about that for a moment. There is now ample recognition that drugs are not purely a matter of choice, and not uniformly bad, and severe punishment is not the best way to handle addiction. Morphine is an accepted treatment to ease the pain of those dying from cancer. Used to be that some illnesses were thought a sign of sin or weakness. If you hadn't sinned, you would not have gotten sick. People were shunned and punished for falling ill. That what effectively amounted to a quarantine was of some benefit to everyone else only reinforced the thinking. Today we understand how counterproductive and ridiculous that thinking is, though there are still many people who feel that way about sexually transmitted diseases, and who really think that AIDS is God's way of punishing people for being homosexual or even sympathizing with them, and who might even prefer that we never find a cure though they wouldn't dare admit to such antisocial thoughts. So it will be with piracy, and much faster as piracy is quite clean compared to nasty old sex. Where reality cannot be changed, our expectations and customs must instead change.
There is no point declaring piracy "wrong". I see no reason why we should deny ourselves the benefits of our technology out of some weirdly useless and damaging moral qualms. No reason to wait, no reason to be polite about it. What will you say when society at last fully sanctions copying, and turns to other means of compensating artists, of which there are plenty? It will happen. And your sort will go down in history as part of yet another instance in a long, long list of reactionary, repressive, foolish, wasteful, and ultimately futile movements.
If only the issue was so simple! Hammer, meet nail.
We, the people, demand a share in the incredible exposure and savings our technology has brought to music. I don't see the entertainment cartels thanking us, and perhaps more to the point paying us, for the invention of the camera, microphone, speaker, electric guitar, synthesizer, radio, TV, vinyl record, mylar tape, VCR, CD, DVD, huge hard drives, fast consumer grade computers, sophisticated music composition, scoring, recording, mixing and playback software, digital mastering, pitch correction, and most of all, the Internet. No, instead, they have the nerve to whine, complain, snivel, cheat, and even fight and vandalize over the advances that have enriched us all and made possible their industry. They have demonstrated over and over that they are fools who would rather kill their business than move with the times and the technology. Remember that Hollywood itself started as essentially a pirate operation, purposely located in a place distant enough that Broadway could not easily assert their supposed rights. They don't fool us. We know all their talk of rights is really a cover for sheer greed.
We are NOT going to pay 19th century expenses for entertainment!
Copying is NOT stealing! There are many crimes that are not stealing, and many actions that should not be criminal. The world is more complicated than that. We can't draw boundaries around concepts, can't divide the universe into lots and assign ownership, can't dictate every use. No one owns the air we breathe or the water we drink, yet we obviously have an interest. Except for a few private toll roads, we all own the roads. Therefore we use more mechanisms than property rights to manage air, water, roads, and other things. The concept of property rights as applied to real estate or physical goods should not apply to data because, like air and water and roads, they are fundamentally, qualitatively different things.
I don't see any help for cases in which the client goes out of business. Certainly not this arbitration. I'd win a judgment, no problem. And then the judgment would go unpaid. That's what they always say about court. Winning judgments is easy. It's collecting that's hard. I'm only one of a long list of former employees, contractors, and creditors who are owed money. The chain of claims doesn't stop there either. The primary investor was sued and everything that could be clawed back was clawed back, including the money invested in the company.
The former owner made sure he did well out of the whole thing. He enjoys vacations at his 2nd home in Hawaii.
It's time we got away from one-size-fits-all ideas
What do you mean? We shouldn't use ASCII? Or Unicode? How about what we in the West know as the Arabic numbering system? Universality has its place. Standards are useful and important. PL/1 failed perhaps because programming is more complicated. Though computing is universal, we have not yet managed to come up with a good universal programming language. But data may be simpler.
Having said that, I think HDF5, NetCDF, JSON, YAML, and SQL (and NoSQL) all fail on the universality front. You would not want to use any of them as a basis for a file system.
I would not want to try serving cached web data from HDF5
Neither would I. But why? Why isn't HDF5 good enough for that? Same reasons none of them are suitable for file systems. JSON, YAML, and SQL have no mechanism for handling fixed size blocks. HDF and NetCDF do have such mechanisms, but they are too limited. Can't readily overlay two different fixed size block structures on the same data. Makes it difficult to have CRCs for blocks of a size that is optimized for the storage medium and which have nothing whatever to do with the organization of the data.
I think the idea of unifying the file system, the database, and packet streams is possible and useful, that we can have universal representation and handling of data. I do not buy this contention that these are fundamentally different problems and that we should therefore accept inferior, specialized solutions to them.
But, it may not be immoral or unethical to pirate.
It certainly is completely impractical to forcibly prevent or punish piracy. Even extreme measures such as monitoring every packet on the Internet, or just shutting it down altogether could not stop piracy. There is always sneakernet. Two people could swap flash drives with a quick handshake.
GPL is very much a matter of hoisting copyright extremists in their own petard. If they've played hardball with copyright and patent law, then they have no grounds for complaint when they are caught in a GPL violation. If they weren't complete hypocrites, they'd admit they erred and do their best to make amends. Instead, we often see them trying to deny they did anything wrong, using laughably weak arguments to make their case.
You wouldn't think that strange if you knew anything about Ann Richard's opponent, Clayton Williams. He was his own worst enemy. Blew a huge, huge lead. Pretty well sealed his loss when he compared bad weather to rape, saying "if it's inevitable, just relax and enjoy it".
Folks, you're too quick to conclude that Republican voters are stupid. I know quite a few old white guys who are actually smart people, and who vote Republican. What they think does make sense, if the premises they believe are true. They are stuck in the 1950's, stuck on the American ideal of the rugged individualist, and the march of progress. They still believe in getting ahead through hard work, in pushing their children to strike out on their own, and they've seen well-meaning social aid enable dependency. They know it's a hard world, and they believe tough love is the best way to help others. Most of all, they still have a charming sort of optimism that society is largely in control of honest people who will reward others for a job well done, and that the world is a stable place that is not going to get warmer, and there is no call for panic and massive spending over what seems to them fantastical and most unlikely. Much more pressing matters are foreign enemies, which in those days were of course the Commies. In all this, there is none of the lunatic social conservative. These guys remember the times when Democrats were a collection of hippies, artists, impractical dreamers, morons, and slackers sponging off the hard work of our engineers and scientists, and hiding behind the shield of our military. 1969 really reinforced that. Woodstock looks shabby, pointless, and downright irresponsible next to the moon landing. Yes, it was a Democratic president, Kennedy, who proposed it, but the Republicans were quick to see the military potential of space. They simply do not see that today, the Republican party has completely flip flopped on science. Note also that Vietnam was pushed by the Democrats as much as or more than the Republicans. Neither party seemed capable or willing to stop that war. Ford was the president who finally ended Vietnam, not a peace loving Democrat.
There are cracks. They haven't given up on the Republican party, but they are wavering. The anti-science, anti-fact craziness is harder than ever to overlook, and is bothering them. The fraud and corruption of recent years that lead to the Great Recession also bothers them, but on that front the Democrats are indistinguishable-- all politicians and liars and crooks. It doesn't help that Obama has basically done at best nothing to curb the excesses and crimes of the financial sector. Only Madoff has been imprisoned. We are in peril of another financial meltdown. The PIIGS, particularly Greece, will undoubtedly be blamed for much of it. But there's plenty we can do in the US whatever happens with Europe. The sad fact is like with the Vietnam War in the 60's, neither party seems willing to take steps to do so. We need to bolster honesty and transparency in the markets and politics. Got to police the markets, get tough on white collar crime. Who are you supposed to vote for if you feel Wall Street fraud and campaign finance is our biggest problem? Whoever is not currently in power?
For software projects, I've heard 90% are failures! About 30% are total failures, and 30% are partial failures. The arguable ones are the 30% that meet specs, but are late and/or over budget. Are those failures? How late and how much over do they have to be to rate as a failure? If they aren't considered failures, then 60% may be about right. The 90% figure counted all those as failures.
It's an appalling rate of fail. And it seems a big reason for it is not incompetence nor that planning is that hard, but politics.
Since determining whether a patent is trivial may not itself be a trivial task, the system should avoid the problem altogether. One way is not to have a patent system. Seriously. We don't get enough in exchange for all the trouble we take upon ourselves in trying to grant and uphold a monopoly. In exchange, we're supposed to receive knowledge of how some non-trivial device is constructed and works. If that is obvious, then we get nothing for committing ourselves to enforcing the ultimate in anti-competitive favoritism, a monopoly. Another way is not to grant monopoly protection. Instead, we could commit to paying out some money based upon some measure of the usefulness of the idea.
Another possible solution is not to allow certain types of controversial patents such as software and business method patents. This patent on electronic gifts sounds like a business method patent.
I've seen this failure to connect entirely too often. Candidates get rejected for the damnedest reasons. Not having the word "configured" is classic. Trivia contests are another. Another is the widespread thinking that after only 6 months of unemployment, your skills have rotted. You're stale. Some of the nonsense reasons are actually pretexts, so they can claim they comply with EEOC requirements. I've seen job postings put up just for that. They had no intention of hiring anyone who responded. You'd think employers don't have resources or time to waste on such exercises in dishonesty.
Then when they really do need someone, employers complain they can't find anyone after they've buggered the hiring system.
Talent? Think you're any good at recognizing talent? Most companies fail dismally, even purposely, at that. Throw out talented candidates all the time, then hire some idiot, often over the protests of their own engineers that they've shoved into a closet. Most exasperating are the decisions that went against good candidates over superficial and subjective reasons that may be completely wrong, or over political reasons. The rejects didn't look like the sort of desperate people who could be easily bullied into working lots of overtime for no pay. They looked like they might be "flight risks", who don't have to put up with bad management and are capable of quickly getting another job. They want the guy who is struggling to make the killer home and car payments, so they can use the threat of foreclosure and repossession to make him work harder. H1B is just one easy marker that often and fairly reliably indicates that kind of desperation. Easier to lowball him too. That's the kind of "commitment" they're looking for in a candidate. Some rate this higher than the skills they say they want! Then they have the nerve to complain there isn't enough talent.
Experience is not equal to talent, as you ought to realize. So you're all unhappy this guy with "experience" in writing "deep packet inspection" software wasted your time because it turned out he has no talent. "What sort of data structure" is at least the right kind of question. Sounds like a hash is the way to go for a problem like that.
People with talent in software engineering will have no trouble figuring out networking. It really is not that hard. The other way around, however, is a leap that many seem unable to make. There are an awful lot of skilled network admins and DBAs who can't handle any programming except the shortest and simplest, something like a 10 line script. I've had to take over from the network admin on what seemed at first glance to be a project for him, but which really required someone with software engineering skills. He cobbled together some scripts to grind through the logs and push them into software to extract data about visitors to the company web site. His design worked great for a while, but got slower and slower as logs built up. He called on me for help when it had reached the point it was struggling to finish a day's worth of logs in 24 hours, and was slowly falling behind. He'd made a very basic design mistake, forcing it to go through all the logs every time a new day was added. This approach was of course doomed to fail. Apparently, he hadn't thought about scalability. I reworked it so it did only new logs, cutting its daily run time to 1 hour, and could have optimized further, but there was no immediate reason to do so.
From the little I've read of your requirements, I could easily do the job. But you'd never even look at me. I don't have the right kind of experience, though I have worked with network socket libraries and used Ethereal/Wireshark on occasion. You've put your requirements backwards. You say network experience is the most important, and software engineering is "minor". That also does not speak well of your understanding of the work you want done. Or it suggests you are being cheap, trying to hire 1 person for 2 jobs, or trying to hire on the less expensive skill of the 2 that you want. Or, it should be the less expensive skill. Curiously, many companies seem to value admins more highly than engineers.
Slashdot Mirror
A Piece of the Action is #5 on both your lists? You have a love/hate relationship with it?
What about Mirror, Mirror, The Doomsday Machine, Space Seed, and Amok Time? Balance of Terror is a fine episode, but I wouldn't put it in the top 5. Too derivative, too obviously a remake of Das Boot. I really didn't like the scene with the listing space ship, but I suppose that's a fairly trivial problem, easy to clean up in a remastering. It's near the top of my list for worst violations of physics and sense.
As I understand it, patents were originally supposed to cover specific implementations, not general ideas. You had to have a working physical model. This has gradually expanded until patents do in effect cover ideas. Patents merely list every possible way it can be implemented, as broadly as possible.
Now algorithms, software, and so called business methods can be patented. Patents can be effectively renewed by tweaking the ideas and applying for a new patent. There are lots of other tricks. They all make life difficult for people who want to concentrate on innovations, not arcane legalisms.
Why did we end up going this direction? We didn't have to turn patents into the oppressive, strangling, chilling monstrosities they are today. They were supposed to help the little guy, but were too readily made into tools that large organizations could wield to help maintain their dominance. True, they have to fight off the occasional troll, but they evidently think the control they gain is worth that.
The entire approach of patent law is all wrong. It's all about control and preventing loss and "theft", and security against our fears no matter how worthless the former and ridiculous the latter, when it should be about sharing and gain. You should ask for permission first? No one does that! Permission can be flat denied, holders don't have to grant permission for some standard price. One way a business can handle this mess is to build up a defensive patent war chest. Fight fire with fire. Cross license. It's a lousy way that perpetuates lawsuits and enriches lawyers. So I think the system ought to be radically reformed, or just plain scrapped. A patent should never be a means of denial, of retarding innovation, and squelching competition. That's the very opposite of their intent. Dump the monopoly part at the least.
If these IT, CS, and Software Engineering jobs are so terrible, how do you explain all these surveys and exercises in ranking routinely putting those careers near or at the top of their lists?
Not saying they can't be horrible jobs. Seems more likely these rankings are failing to account for a number of things. Or is it that every other field really is worse?
I surmise that "pairing-based cryptography" is just some weird new name someone dreamed up for Public Key Cryptography, as that uses algorithms that work on a pair of keys. Marketing and customers are so anxious to have the next big thing that the marketing people routinely dress up old ideas in new terms, and customers eagerly latch on. Both often realize what they're doing, but they hope others, including journalists and government bureaucrats responsible for choosing and approving standards, are fooled. Shows how little they truly care about security when they go running for the obscurity and lies, and not just to try to cover up problems, but more as a marketing ploy.
Which algorithm they used, who knows? RSA? Diffie-Hellman? Clearly, they went the brute force route. And to help the brute force attack along, they deliberately went with an unusual and short number of bits, thus proving very little. They didn't break the algorithm itself. Most asymmetric algorithms need something like double the number of bits to be as secure as a typical good symmetric algorithm. 923 bits may be acceptable for a symmetric algorithm, but is shaky for RSA. These days, there is doubt that 1024 bits is enough for RSA, and users are strongly urged to go with at least 2048 bits.
The usual thing to do in a public key system is use the asymmetric algorithm only to securely transmit a key for a symmetric algorithm, then use the symmetric algorithm and key for the message itself, as that is faster. The way the article reads, they may have hacked up their own poor version of a public key system, omitting the symmetric algorithm, and using the asymmetric algorithm for the message. Possibly they aren't even doing the public part, keeping both keys of a key pair secret. There's no way to tell on any of that, not from the minimal info in the article.
Yes! Don't be downhearted. This is a fight the copyright extremists can't win.
They can pass laws that declare the value of pi is 3.0 and the world is flat, but that doesn't make it so. They can outlaw gravity all they like, but gravity won't obey. They can outlaw sex and procreation. After all, that is copying! Be a bit difficult to enforce that on bacteria. But beings capable of comprehending such a law should also understand its consequences. Anyone who doesn't, and mindlessly obeys a law like that deserves a Darwin Award.
These laws are all unconscionable. Don't feel guilty for breaking those kinds of laws! In fact, I regard it our duty to rebel against this. And good training to get us to be better citizens by questioning bad laws.
x86 is ugly. It's one of the most screwed up, inconsistent, crufty architectures ever created. Motorola's 68000 architecture was a lot cleaner. But Intel, through sheer brute force, has managed patch up many of its shortcomings and make x86 perform well in spite of itself.
They went with a load and execute architecture for the x86 instructions. Then they didn't stick to that model for the floating point instructions, going with a stack for that. And remember they split the CPU into 2 parts. If you wanted the floating point instructions, you had to get a very expensive matching x87 chip. I still remember the week when 80387 prices collapsed from $600 to $200, and still no one would buy, not with free emulators and the 486DX nearing release. Another major bit of ugliness was the segment. Rather than a true 32bit architecture, they used this segmented architecture scheme, then buggered it up even more by having different modes. In some modes, the segment and address were simply concatenated for a 32bit address space, and in others 12 bits overlapped to give only a 20bit address space. Then you had all this switching and XMS and EMS to access memory above 1M. Nasty.
x86 has been bashed for years for not having enough registers. And for making them special purpose. For instance, only one, AX, can be used for integer multiplication. Ask some compiler designers about the x86 sometime. Bet you'll get an earful.
Few platform segregation points? Maybe, but one price is lots of legacy garbage. x86 still has to support those ancient segmented modes. Then there's junk like the ASCII adjust and decimal adjust instructions: AAA, AAS, AAD, and AAM, and DAA, and DAS. Nobody uses packed decimal any more! And hardly anyone ever used it. Those instructions were a crappy way to support decimal anyway. If they were going to do it at all, should have just had AA for ASCII Add instead of "adjusting" after a regular ADD instruction. Then there's the string search instructions, REPNE CMPSW and relatives. They're hopelessly obsolete. We have much better algorithms for string search than that. They also screwed up the instructions intended for OS support on the 286. That's one reason why the lowest common denominator is i386 and not i286. 286 is also only 16bit.
You might be tempted to think x86 was good for its time. Nope. Even by the standards and principles of the 1970s, x86 stinks.
Someone mentioned CISC, as if that beat out RISC? It didn't. Under the hood, modern x86 CPUs actually translate each x86 instruction to several RISC instructions. So why not just use the actual RISC instruction set directly? One argument in favor of the x86 instruction set is that it is denser. Takes fewer bytes than the equivalent action in RISC instructions. Perhaps, but that's accidental. If that is such a valuable property, ought to create a new instruction set that is optimized for code density. Then, as if x86 wasn't CISC enough, they rolled out the MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4 additions.
That makes a powerful argument in favor of open source. Could drop all the older SSE versions if only all programs could be easily recompiled.
One number that no one seems to have argued about much is the number of downloads that could have come from one user's computer. This is the basis for the entire idea of multiplying the damages to levels we all know are ludicrous. The RIAA insists hundreds of people could have downloaded from Jammie Thomas. Although that's possible, it's highly improbable. The most likely number of downloads is 1 per file. That's one, not hundreds or thousands. The court ought to use that number to compute damages.
Why only 1? For the same reasons that Ponzi schemes do not work. The network quickly becomes saturated. Suppose people can give out copies at more or less the same rate, to anyone else. And once a copy is received, the recipient can quickly turn around and share it. (BitTorrent is even better than that, starting the sharing of parts of a copy before a recipient has received the entire file.) Each generation, the number of people who could have a copy doubles. By the time a person is giving out a copy for the 20th time, 1 million people could have a copy. By the 33rd time, everyone in the world could have it. Even if everyone in the world wants a copy, only one person, the originator, could have given out as many as 33 copies, and only the first recipient could have given out as many as 32. Just 8000 people could have given out 20 copies, and just 1 of every 2000 people could have given out 10 copies. Half the people will have given out zero copies, because by the time they got it, there was no one left who still didn't have a copy of their own. The average number of copies of 1 file that a person gives out is 1.
I don't think Issa fully understands. Look at #10 of his Bill of Rights:
Property - digital citizens have a right to benefit from what they create, and be secure in their intellectual property on the internet
The first part sounds okay. But the second part, no. What does "secure" mean here? Worse than that, he said "intellectual property".
He may be opposed to the details of SOPA, but not the essence. He wants some magic way to make intellectual property just work, acts as if it can be done, and seems unquestioning in moving ahead as if it's a good idea.
Then, how about #5?
digital citizens have a right to ... be held accountable for what they create
That's not a right! That's some kind of obligation.
Belief in slavery, that's why.
I've encountered many who really believe slaves make better workers. This includes the slaves. "I owe, I owe, it's off to work I go" is practically the national motto of the US. They don't call it slavery of course. They call it commitment, reliability and stability. They believe people must be pushed hard, and will do their best when they are in "do or die" situations, there's a gun pointing at their heads, their necks' are on the chopping blocks and the ax is ready to fall. Even better when they have volunteered. "Ability to work in high pressure environment" is a popular and sought after soft skill. They believe this so strongly that they put a higher priority on their ability to get and maintain holds over a job candidate than the abilities and skills they're seeking. Being financially responsible counts against you! They want you set up so that you're in a world of hurt if you lose your job. This is why the US does not have sane health care spending. Relieving employers of the burden of paying for and managing a health care program is seemingly one of the most business friendly things government could do. Yet business opposed it. Why? Employers like having holds over employees, and health benefits make a good one.
Ever had a boss observe that you haven't bought a new car? And this despite the fact that your current car works fine? I have, twice, and my mother once. Why is the boss so interested in your car? No one else cares. One of these bosses explained it, saying that because I wasn't making car payments, I could afford to leave my job and this was bad! At another job, the phrase "flight risk" was used to refer to employees who could afford to leave their jobs. At still another job, a fellow employee told me that he was a better employee than I because he had to have the job in order to afford his crushingly high house payments (he paid $500,000 for a small house, in California, in 2003), and his wife and new baby daughter, whereas I was living in an apartment. He made sure everyone, especially management, knew how screwed he would be if he lost his job, and that he was willing to work long hours. Often, managers are also slaves, and tend to be jealous of peons who have freedoms they don't have. Had one manager who groaned theatrically about his massive credit card debt, but it was easy to see he was really kind of bragging about it. He even held a little pissing contest one day, asking everyone how much credit card debt we had. He "won" by "virtue" of having the most. I refused to answer, and this was met with hostility, and the suspicion that I must not have any, and jealousy.
So of course H1Bs have massive advantages over the natives.
Gladwell is way off base. We remember the business giants of bygone eras for being business giants, not their charitable work. Rockefeller is known for oil more than anything else. Likewise with J. P. Morgan and banking, Carnegie and steel, Vanderbilt and railroads, etc. None of these guys have a savory reputation. They were all known for being ruthless businessmen ready to engage in any profitable behavior no matter how unethical, if they had good odds of getting away with it or getting off lightly if caught.
Today, there isn't a one among our best business leaders who doesn't have more and worse baggage than the average politician. Nor has there ever been. The very "best" business leaders ever (as crudely measured by wealth) look pathetic next to the best statesmen, scientists, journalists, explorers, military leaders, sports stars, artists, and performers. Top business leaders are almost more infamous than famous. Always seem to leave behind them a long trail of victims of dirty competition, callousness, theft, treachery, betrayal, bribery, graft, and corruption. Many even think that sort of thing might be necessary to succeed big in business, so bad is its reputation. One of the earliest business leaders recorded in history, Crassus, the wealthiest Roman ever, was of the same stripe. Greedy, unprincipled, arrogant, and crass. The very word "crass" comes from his name.
For the most part, their charitable work looks like feeble attempts to make up for the damage they did to accomplish their rise, to buy love and popularity just like they buy everything else. And it's never above suspicion, as charitable contributions have been used and abused to dodge taxes.
It's the world that needs more openness. And better utilization of the technology we do have.
Losing the passport wouldn't be such a calamity if governments were up to date. We shouldn't even use a physical item like that for purposes of verifying identity and permissions. At a border crossing, stating names and perhaps a number, or undergoing a brief biometric scan ought to be all that travelers need do. The officials at the border can then use their networked computers to check the information. It's just dopey to rely on the picture of a person carried by that person to check identity! That's as dopey as DRM. Yeah, yeah, like cash they have put security threads and watermarks and such on the passport pictures, to make forgery more difficult. And don't forget the embedded RFID chip! Currently, with passports the US now issues business sized cards for your wallet. The cards have useful phone numbers and a space upon which you are supposed to write your passport number, for just such an occurrence. Haven't progressed much!
As for personal data, no one should ever have the only copies of their work on a single laptop, except possibly for whatever was being worked on in the last few minutes or since the last time the laptop had been connected to the Internet. The laptop itself is pretty cheap these days. I hope RMS didn't lose any data. Passwords are similar. Never have unencrypted passwords or or other unencrypted sensitive data on a laptop. But if he wasn't up to scratch on that stuff, this could be the worst loss of all.
Medicines shouldn't be a big deal either. Unfortunately, they can be thanks to intellectual property law. At $5/pill for typical name brand drugs, those medicines could easily cost more to replace than everything else in the bag.
Money? Let's hope he's not in the habit of lugging around thousands of dollars in cash. Sensible travelers only carry a little cash, leaning on credit cards whenever possible. But I could see a guy like RMS scorning credit cards because they come with lots of baggage, like the tracking of your every purchase. At any rate, banks, like governments, are woefully behind on technology. Shouldn't need a piece of plastic to do a transaction.
With all that said, his Argentine hosts treated him very shabbily. If laptop bag theft is such a big problem, they should know that. It's their home, they ought to know what protections guests will need, what crimes are in vogue. Should have had someone or something watching his bag. Wasn't anyone recording his speech on video? There's no footage at all of his bag being swiped? That a thief got away with his bag doesn't speak well of them. They seem negligent at the least. Such thefts may be aided by corruption. I shouldn't wonder that petty theft of that nature is a very low priority for their police, who will undoubtedly say there's nothing they can do.
There are plugins for this problem. Check out Lazarus for Firefox.
Don't be too quick to dismiss notions of mental differences as sexism. From what I've read, both sexes are about equally good drivers. Insurers certainly considered young males more accident prone than young females. The blame was placed on young men being more aggressive, hotheaded, and reckless. Turned out the women had fewer accidents because they didn't drive as much. Then young women started driving about as much, and the accident rate equalized. But the ways women go wrong with driving do seem a little different than men. Of course, it is sexist to notice only those differences that put men in a better light, and conclude that women are worse drivers.
But back to the topic. Figures that if the leading demographic wasn't young men, it had to be young women. Why'd they bother with the "young" part? Older people couldn't be it. And what about race? Wealth? Education? Women also now lead in college degrees, maybe that correlates with adoption of tech? The list of tech areas where women lead fit the stereotypes all too well: communications and health. And GPS. Men never get lost!
Slashdot's reputation? What about women's reputation?
I have a low opinion of booth babes, and not for trying to push my buttons. It's that I can be almost sure that they don't know much about the technology and worse, don't give a crap about it. Anyone who is there ought to have a modicum of interest in the show. Even worse than that, they view the attendees with contempt and disgust, for being nerds as well as for having the typical male wandering eyes. They hate men for ogling them, but intend to trade on their looks to persuade Mr. Right to sweep them away to the life of luxury and ease they deserve, or even better, pay them lots of money so they can have the good life without him. Do they have anything other than looks, like, oh, brains? Sense? You might think some might have signed on to meet a few men, but no. Geeks can actually be good catches, but they don't think so. They don't have the intelligence to appreciate geeks, and view us negatively for in our turn being just as brainless as all other men over hot women. Try to chat with a few of them, and you'll see. A discussion about technical merits will instantly fizzle on their lack of knowledge. Persist by trying to educate them, and they will see you as a creep who is just trying to chat them up because they're hot looking, and they are probably right. They will quickly make it clear they don't care, and would rather you and your skinny nerd ass just dropped off the face of the Earth. If they have zero enthusiasm for the products they are promoting, and feel the attendees are all stereotypically smelly, socially awkward nerds, that leaves money as the only reason they are there. Total gold diggers and dumb bunnies. Just about the worse ways and representatives possible for advancing women's issues. Should we respect this?
Note what the article did not say. None of the babes interviewed expressed the slightest interest in technology. As for the social aspect, they put it as "You just need to talk to people" and "You have to meet a lot of people" as if that's such an imposition and a chore. "Have to" and "need to", huh? I can certainly understand that meeting lots of people is a strain for an introvert, which is most nerds. Are these women introverts? I don't think so, not when they're pining to get back to their dance class.
We're not even supposed to talk to them beyond the most banal, polite, and brief things you might say to any stranger, and trying just marks us as about as stupid as they are. Sad. We're supposed to understand that they are only models, a profession not noted for requiring much intelligence. They are only there to look pretty, and were chosen without regard for whether they might actually know anything or care.
Nothing can stop racism, theft, rape, murder, etc. etc. etc.
We as a society agree that theft, rape, and murder cause harm and therefore are crimes. Racism is more difficult to handle, because it can be hard to detect, and hard to call, so we don't criminalize it in all cases, but we agree it is immoral, and that it harms people. As for monopolies, you have it backwards. Copyrights are monopolies, and both are bad!
Sharing should not be a crime not only because it can't be stopped. Sharing should also not be a crime because there is no harm done, and a lot of good, except maybe to a badly broken business model that needs to die anyway. Even for those who live by the broken business model of selling copies, sharing does not always harm them. It is pretty clear that like education, sharing is a net benefit to society.
I hope you realize that Canada doesn't have piracy. Sharing is legal, and artists are compensated through a number of mechanisms, including a levy on optical media. That the entertainment cartels disagree does not change this.
According to you, everyone is a pirate
It's not me saying that, it's Big Media. According to the insanely extreme copyright laws Big Media has pushed through, just about everyone is a pirate. If copyright is extended, removing works from the public domain, are you supposed to destroy any copies you have of those works if you would not be a pirate? Yes! If you play a recording that is under copyright, and your neighbor overhears, you and your neighbor are both pirates. If you look at a website and it plays a copyrighted jingle without permission from the owners, you'd think only the site owners are guilty of infringement. But you are also guilty. If you download something you thought was free, but it contains a copyrighted work, you are a pirate. Doesn't matter that you didn't know. Ignorance is no excuse!
you're ... rationalizing an unethical and illegal activity with terrible false analogies and fallacies.
A growing majority of people do not agree with you about any of that. We, the people, are the supreme law. These activities are legal and ethical if we decide they are. Eventually, in a generation or 2, we will so decide. As for "terrible" analogies, I doubt you can explain why you think so in a way that will convince any fair minded person. You didn't even try.
You are the stereotypical pirate, and you are an asshole.
A person ought to know better than to resort to such name calling and unproven accusations. You do not know whether I am a pirate. And I'm not going to say one way or the other. Why should I? You wouldn't believe any denial anyway. But I will say I don't much bother with TV anymore, and it's not because I can download all the shows I want to watch, it's because there aren't any shows I really care to watch. Same with movies. Nor do I bother pirating games. There is plenty of good stuff that's freely available, even for the free OS I use. As for books and music, the public library and radio are adequate.
I did notice that you didn't actually equate piracy with theft, not in words. However, it seems to me that you agree with the spirit of that thinking. Are you a misanthrope? Do you think most of us are assholes? Because I assure you, most of us are pirates, whether we know it or not. If I pirate something, and make a donation to the artist, am I still an asshole in your book?
But it doesn't matter how wrong anyone thinks piracy is, how much moralizing is done, how many laws are passed against it, or how much DRM they try to force on people. Nothing can stop the sharing. It's easier to regulate sex or drugs than copying, and those are near impossible to control. Most governments have come to their senses, and given up trying to vilify these acts and punish people who commit them. Prohibition was repealed, and other approaches to dealing with alcoholism were tried. Think about that for a moment. There is now ample recognition that drugs are not purely a matter of choice, and not uniformly bad, and severe punishment is not the best way to handle addiction. Morphine is an accepted treatment to ease the pain of those dying from cancer. Used to be that some illnesses were thought a sign of sin or weakness. If you hadn't sinned, you would not have gotten sick. People were shunned and punished for falling ill. That what effectively amounted to a quarantine was of some benefit to everyone else only reinforced the thinking. Today we understand how counterproductive and ridiculous that thinking is, though there are still many people who feel that way about sexually transmitted diseases, and who really think that AIDS is God's way of punishing people for being homosexual or even sympathizing with them, and who might even prefer that we never find a cure though they wouldn't dare admit to such antisocial thoughts. So it will be with piracy, and much faster as piracy is quite clean compared to nasty old sex. Where reality cannot be changed, our expectations and customs must instead change.
There is no point declaring piracy "wrong". I see no reason why we should deny ourselves the benefits of our technology out of some weirdly useless and damaging moral qualms. No reason to wait, no reason to be polite about it. What will you say when society at last fully sanctions copying, and turns to other means of compensating artists, of which there are plenty? It will happen. And your sort will go down in history as part of yet another instance in a long, long list of reactionary, repressive, foolish, wasteful, and ultimately futile movements.
If only the issue was so simple! Hammer, meet nail.
We, the people, demand a share in the incredible exposure and savings our technology has brought to music. I don't see the entertainment cartels thanking us, and perhaps more to the point paying us, for the invention of the camera, microphone, speaker, electric guitar, synthesizer, radio, TV, vinyl record, mylar tape, VCR, CD, DVD, huge hard drives, fast consumer grade computers, sophisticated music composition, scoring, recording, mixing and playback software, digital mastering, pitch correction, and most of all, the Internet. No, instead, they have the nerve to whine, complain, snivel, cheat, and even fight and vandalize over the advances that have enriched us all and made possible their industry. They have demonstrated over and over that they are fools who would rather kill their business than move with the times and the technology. Remember that Hollywood itself started as essentially a pirate operation, purposely located in a place distant enough that Broadway could not easily assert their supposed rights. They don't fool us. We know all their talk of rights is really a cover for sheer greed.
We are NOT going to pay 19th century expenses for entertainment!
Copying is NOT stealing! There are many crimes that are not stealing, and many actions that should not be criminal. The world is more complicated than that. We can't draw boundaries around concepts, can't divide the universe into lots and assign ownership, can't dictate every use. No one owns the air we breathe or the water we drink, yet we obviously have an interest. Except for a few private toll roads, we all own the roads. Therefore we use more mechanisms than property rights to manage air, water, roads, and other things. The concept of property rights as applied to real estate or physical goods should not apply to data because, like air and water and roads, they are fundamentally, qualitatively different things.
I don't see any help for cases in which the client goes out of business. Certainly not this arbitration. I'd win a judgment, no problem. And then the judgment would go unpaid. That's what they always say about court. Winning judgments is easy. It's collecting that's hard. I'm only one of a long list of former employees, contractors, and creditors who are owed money. The chain of claims doesn't stop there either. The primary investor was sued and everything that could be clawed back was clawed back, including the money invested in the company.
The former owner made sure he did well out of the whole thing. He enjoys vacations at his 2nd home in Hawaii.
It's time we got away from one-size-fits-all ideas
What do you mean? We shouldn't use ASCII? Or Unicode? How about what we in the West know as the Arabic numbering system? Universality has its place. Standards are useful and important. PL/1 failed perhaps because programming is more complicated. Though computing is universal, we have not yet managed to come up with a good universal programming language. But data may be simpler.
Having said that, I think HDF5, NetCDF, JSON, YAML, and SQL (and NoSQL) all fail on the universality front. You would not want to use any of them as a basis for a file system.
I would not want to try serving cached web data from HDF5
Neither would I. But why? Why isn't HDF5 good enough for that? Same reasons none of them are suitable for file systems. JSON, YAML, and SQL have no mechanism for handling fixed size blocks. HDF and NetCDF do have such mechanisms, but they are too limited. Can't readily overlay two different fixed size block structures on the same data. Makes it difficult to have CRCs for blocks of a size that is optimized for the storage medium and which have nothing whatever to do with the organization of the data.
I think the idea of unifying the file system, the database, and packet streams is possible and useful, that we can have universal representation and handling of data. I do not buy this contention that these are fundamentally different problems and that we should therefore accept inferior, specialized solutions to them.
I'd put it a little differently:
It is illegal to pirate.
But, it may not be immoral or unethical to pirate.
It certainly is completely impractical to forcibly prevent or punish piracy. Even extreme measures such as monitoring every packet on the Internet, or just shutting it down altogether could not stop piracy. There is always sneakernet. Two people could swap flash drives with a quick handshake.
GPL is very much a matter of hoisting copyright extremists in their own petard. If they've played hardball with copyright and patent law, then they have no grounds for complaint when they are caught in a GPL violation. If they weren't complete hypocrites, they'd admit they erred and do their best to make amends. Instead, we often see them trying to deny they did anything wrong, using laughably weak arguments to make their case.
You wouldn't think that strange if you knew anything about Ann Richard's opponent, Clayton Williams. He was his own worst enemy. Blew a huge, huge lead. Pretty well sealed his loss when he compared bad weather to rape, saying "if it's inevitable, just relax and enjoy it".
Folks, you're too quick to conclude that Republican voters are stupid. I know quite a few old white guys who are actually smart people, and who vote Republican. What they think does make sense, if the premises they believe are true. They are stuck in the 1950's, stuck on the American ideal of the rugged individualist, and the march of progress. They still believe in getting ahead through hard work, in pushing their children to strike out on their own, and they've seen well-meaning social aid enable dependency. They know it's a hard world, and they believe tough love is the best way to help others. Most of all, they still have a charming sort of optimism that society is largely in control of honest people who will reward others for a job well done, and that the world is a stable place that is not going to get warmer, and there is no call for panic and massive spending over what seems to them fantastical and most unlikely. Much more pressing matters are foreign enemies, which in those days were of course the Commies. In all this, there is none of the lunatic social conservative. These guys remember the times when Democrats were a collection of hippies, artists, impractical dreamers, morons, and slackers sponging off the hard work of our engineers and scientists, and hiding behind the shield of our military. 1969 really reinforced that. Woodstock looks shabby, pointless, and downright irresponsible next to the moon landing. Yes, it was a Democratic president, Kennedy, who proposed it, but the Republicans were quick to see the military potential of space. They simply do not see that today, the Republican party has completely flip flopped on science. Note also that Vietnam was pushed by the Democrats as much as or more than the Republicans. Neither party seemed capable or willing to stop that war. Ford was the president who finally ended Vietnam, not a peace loving Democrat.
There are cracks. They haven't given up on the Republican party, but they are wavering. The anti-science, anti-fact craziness is harder than ever to overlook, and is bothering them. The fraud and corruption of recent years that lead to the Great Recession also bothers them, but on that front the Democrats are indistinguishable-- all politicians and liars and crooks. It doesn't help that Obama has basically done at best nothing to curb the excesses and crimes of the financial sector. Only Madoff has been imprisoned. We are in peril of another financial meltdown. The PIIGS, particularly Greece, will undoubtedly be blamed for much of it. But there's plenty we can do in the US whatever happens with Europe. The sad fact is like with the Vietnam War in the 60's, neither party seems willing to take steps to do so. We need to bolster honesty and transparency in the markets and politics. Got to police the markets, get tough on white collar crime. Who are you supposed to vote for if you feel Wall Street fraud and campaign finance is our biggest problem? Whoever is not currently in power?
For software projects, I've heard 90% are failures! About 30% are total failures, and 30% are partial failures. The arguable ones are the 30% that meet specs, but are late and/or over budget. Are those failures? How late and how much over do they have to be to rate as a failure? If they aren't considered failures, then 60% may be about right. The 90% figure counted all those as failures.
It's an appalling rate of fail. And it seems a big reason for it is not incompetence nor that planning is that hard, but politics.
Since determining whether a patent is trivial may not itself be a trivial task, the system should avoid the problem altogether. One way is not to have a patent system. Seriously. We don't get enough in exchange for all the trouble we take upon ourselves in trying to grant and uphold a monopoly. In exchange, we're supposed to receive knowledge of how some non-trivial device is constructed and works. If that is obvious, then we get nothing for committing ourselves to enforcing the ultimate in anti-competitive favoritism, a monopoly. Another way is not to grant monopoly protection. Instead, we could commit to paying out some money based upon some measure of the usefulness of the idea.
Another possible solution is not to allow certain types of controversial patents such as software and business method patents. This patent on electronic gifts sounds like a business method patent.
I've seen this failure to connect entirely too often. Candidates get rejected for the damnedest reasons. Not having the word "configured" is classic. Trivia contests are another. Another is the widespread thinking that after only 6 months of unemployment, your skills have rotted. You're stale. Some of the nonsense reasons are actually pretexts, so they can claim they comply with EEOC requirements. I've seen job postings put up just for that. They had no intention of hiring anyone who responded. You'd think employers don't have resources or time to waste on such exercises in dishonesty.
Then when they really do need someone, employers complain they can't find anyone after they've buggered the hiring system.
Talent? Think you're any good at recognizing talent? Most companies fail dismally, even purposely, at that. Throw out talented candidates all the time, then hire some idiot, often over the protests of their own engineers that they've shoved into a closet. Most exasperating are the decisions that went against good candidates over superficial and subjective reasons that may be completely wrong, or over political reasons. The rejects didn't look like the sort of desperate people who could be easily bullied into working lots of overtime for no pay. They looked like they might be "flight risks", who don't have to put up with bad management and are capable of quickly getting another job. They want the guy who is struggling to make the killer home and car payments, so they can use the threat of foreclosure and repossession to make him work harder. H1B is just one easy marker that often and fairly reliably indicates that kind of desperation. Easier to lowball him too. That's the kind of "commitment" they're looking for in a candidate. Some rate this higher than the skills they say they want! Then they have the nerve to complain there isn't enough talent.
Experience is not equal to talent, as you ought to realize. So you're all unhappy this guy with "experience" in writing "deep packet inspection" software wasted your time because it turned out he has no talent. "What sort of data structure" is at least the right kind of question. Sounds like a hash is the way to go for a problem like that.
People with talent in software engineering will have no trouble figuring out networking. It really is not that hard. The other way around, however, is a leap that many seem unable to make. There are an awful lot of skilled network admins and DBAs who can't handle any programming except the shortest and simplest, something like a 10 line script. I've had to take over from the network admin on what seemed at first glance to be a project for him, but which really required someone with software engineering skills. He cobbled together some scripts to grind through the logs and push them into software to extract data about visitors to the company web site. His design worked great for a while, but got slower and slower as logs built up. He called on me for help when it had reached the point it was struggling to finish a day's worth of logs in 24 hours, and was slowly falling behind. He'd made a very basic design mistake, forcing it to go through all the logs every time a new day was added. This approach was of course doomed to fail. Apparently, he hadn't thought about scalability. I reworked it so it did only new logs, cutting its daily run time to 1 hour, and could have optimized further, but there was no immediate reason to do so.
From the little I've read of your requirements, I could easily do the job. But you'd never even look at me. I don't have the right kind of experience, though I have worked with network socket libraries and used Ethereal/Wireshark on occasion. You've put your requirements backwards. You say network experience is the most important, and software engineering is "minor". That also does not speak well of your understanding of the work you want done. Or it suggests you are being cheap, trying to hire 1 person for 2 jobs, or trying to hire on the less expensive skill of the 2 that you want. Or, it should be the less expensive skill. Curiously, many companies seem to value admins more highly than engineers.