Any system adminstrator worthy of the name should be able to do system-level development as well -- debugging everything from applications to drivers and other kernel-level code as necessary.
You're right. That is setting the bar pretty high.
It's high, yes -- but I don't think unreasonably so. System administration involves taking potentially complex pieces -- both hardware and software -- and making them work together as a complete system. Making things work, the job of a sysadmin, is arguably harder than the task of a developer (whose job is to make things -- but not necessarily to actually cause them to function correctly when deployed to the field and integrated with local infrastructure rather than running in whatever idealized sandbox the dev group happens to target).
When wearing my sysadmin hat, I've had to disassemble and rewrite the DSDT used to initialize the PCI bus on hardware my company was provided by an overseas partner; port the MPPE kernel patch to Linux 2.4 (yes, this was a while ago); trace kernel panics back to their root cause (if not for fixage, at least to provide bug reports with sufficient supporting detail to get a quick and useful response); hunt down countless application errors by poking through strace output; play DBA; figure out why RPM didn't work correctly when ported to Solaris 8 (it was a trivially-worked-around libc bug); build a custom version of a GUI tool used to generate VPN certificate requests (yes, it's development work -- but it wasn't our dev group's job so it was squarely on IT) -- and that's just what comes to mind. System administration is interesting work in large part because it's so varied, and I really object to those who hold it in low esteem on account of having some image of what the job entails modeled off the lowest common denominator.
You know, some folks may set the bar for competancy differently than where you do.
For system administration, for instance, I tend to set it quite high: Any system adminstrator worthy of the name should be able to do system-level development as well -- debugging everything from applications to drivers and other kernel-level code as necessary. The poster may set their standards similarly, in which case semi-competance is likely to be more than enough for the kind of evaluation being made.
So -- completely discounting someone's opinions based on their own fully subjective evaluation of their own skill level is a Bad Thing. Knowing enough to know that you don't know everything, after all, is at least indicative that you know something. (Maybe not quite true -- but it means that you aren't in that area of the curve where you think you know everything but don't, which is perhaps the most dangerous part).
The casual gaming market (as represented by the sims, etc) is quite a bit smaller than the "hardcore" gaming market.
Ya know, it wasn't always that way. Remember the 80s, when every family with kids and a little spare cash had a Nintendo? When the most popular games out there were ones which weren't targeted only at "hardcore" gamers, but were accessible to just about everyone?
My impression is that Nintendo's marketing arm is trying to bring back something of those times -- and (though the Internet may now fill much of the niche that the SNES and such did back then) I wish them the best. As a busy adult with some other members of my household who are home a fair bit of time each day, enjoy retrogaming (the most frequently used console systems here lately are the old SEGA and SNES units) and are on a limited budget, I can absolutely see an untapped market here: Fun, low-entry-cost games built to target a comparatively inexpensive console. Nobody in my house is about to buy an XBox 360 or a PS3 -- we just don't have the budget -- but I can certainly see us getting a Wii.
Now, I'm not a physicist. I don't even pretend to be a physicist. However --
Most forms of radiation don't make the things they irradiate radioactive. Neutron radiation does -- but while that's emitted during *operation* of a nuclear reactor, I don't believe that it's emitted by its fuel or waste. So the water is fine, and doesn't need any kind of special storage or disposal.
You make some good points. Even if the "civilian casualties" aren't, however, that doesn't make it acceptable to destroy such blatantly non-military targets as bridges, power plants and privately owned factories when engaging in what's supposedly less than full war. The attack on a power plant, in particular, has had massive environmental impact -- spilling thousands of tons of fuel oil into the Mediterranean, which the Lebanese government is unable to send ships to clean up due to an Israeli blockade.
Me thinks you're either forgetting the rest of the situation or don't care to know.
This started with kidnapping and ransoming of Israeli soldiers.
Then, it continues with rockets raining down into Israeli territory.
Of fucking course I know that -- and I acknowledged Israel's need to do something about the rockets in my post. (As for the kidnapped soldiers -- they're two men among thousands. How many people need to die, on both sides, on their behalves? I just don't see it).
That doesn't justify their actions -- the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, the carelessness with regard to civilian casualties. Would carefully targeted strikes on Hezbollah targets be appropriate? Of course! But they're going far beyond that point, and attacking targets which harm not Hezbollah but Lebanon's legitimate government -- which is weak enough as it is.
If you missed this aspect, I need to ask where you get your info -- Faux News?
I can understand trying to stop the rockets firing into their territory -- but destroying civil infrastructure (power plants, roads, etc) and persistently executing poorly-targeted attacks with substantial civilian casualties is no way to do that.
The Lebanese government is in enough trouble as it is, having a radical group (Hezbollah) executing attacks on their neighbors against the government's whim. Getting civilian support for that radical group (by demonizing the aforementioned neighbor, which Israel's civilian-infrastructure-targeted attacks and utter carelessness with regard to collateral damage have been doing pretty effectively) weakens the legitimate government, giving the radicals even more of a chance to take over Lebanon completely.
Israel is off their collective rockers, and the world is standing by and letting them get away with it. It's insane.
What makes you think that your Fortune 500 will permit that? They like it the way it is.
I don't think it's politically feasible to remove the artificial monopolies presently in place through anything short of revolution -- but that's not to say we can't discuss it from a theoretical standpoint. (Yes, "my fortune 500" are beasts -- but they are such because overexpansive government made them so. A federal government more effectively limited to a strictly defined charter could not be used as ADM's instrument to promote corn syrup at the expense of cane sugar, or GM's get-out-of-debt card, or the sales tool of so many medical software companies, or... well, you get the picture, and should understand why I object to the idea that expanding government's powers will enable government to better control the corporations rather than simply providing a better tool with which the corporations can control the people).
So, as for the other claims you've made which you're no longer trying to defend (price of healthcare as a personal-liberties concern; pharmaceuticals and genetic engineering as natural monopolies; etc) -- can I presume that you've yielded?
Do you mean you have to train it all you dears so you can write a letter?
No. All I mean is that it's likely to be weighted aganst things it hasn't seen in its training corpus (most of which would have happened before shipment, not after -- indeed, not all neural networks adjust their training during operation). Being weighted against something doesn't mean it's not possible -- just that it'll lend more weight to things that are in the corpus.
Specifically talking about life-saving medications, it's not POSSIBLE to have a free market. See AIDS medicines. Either you pay the $100-1000/month, or you die. Don't have insurance? Live in Africa? Tough. It's a free market, and you're free to die in the street.
Why are these medications so expensive? Because government regulation (such as patent laws) prevents 3rd parties from entering into competition to reproduce them. Eliminate the government's involvement and market forces come back into play. Natural monopolies exist, but pharmaceutical production is an artificial one.
Even if this weren't true, I don't see why it is a personal-liberties concern. The claim that health care is a natural right (despite enshrinement by UN declaration) is as ridiculous as the claim that food is a natural right. While artificially depriving an individual of food (by removing their freedom to contract for said resource or receive it as a voluntarily-provided gift) is an obvious abridgement of rights, I do not trample on the rights of the beggar on the street when I refuse to give him my meal -- and to lay some imperative on me to do otherwise would be an abridgement of my own freedoms.
However, when a market player is big enough to control access to the market, it isn't a market anymore. See Microsoft, Monsanto, and the drug companies.
Operating system software is a natural monopoly, like electricity distribution. Monsato and the pharmacos, on the other hand, have artificial monopolies -- they would not hold monopoly powers if the government had not granted it to them.
My understanding is that they use a neural network to determine what the most likely interpretation is. So, if its training data included "dear aunt" but nothing starting out "dear mom"...
The interests of the top of the Fortune 500 are utterly irrelevant to me.
On looking back, I think you completely missed my point.
The most profitable companies -- as exemplified by the Fortune 500 -- are those which target the sweet spot on the curve between price and units sold. Artificially raising prices so high as to sell only to a luxury market in cases where the mass-market segment is not already saturated with comparable goods reduces one's total profits, and so is not done by companies acting intelligently. It is even demonstrably stupid, because not one company taking this approach has landed itself near the top of the Fortune 500.
In short -- the idea of a company pricing a vital but cheaply-manufactured good out of reach of the general public is silly, because aiming for the luxury market when the mass market is not yet flooded is stupid: As demonstrated by the nature of those businesses on the Fortune 500 (which are, by definition, those which have done well for themselves), aiming for the mass market is The Right Thing even if acting only out of self-interest.
The interests of the top of the Fortune 500 are utterly irrelevant to me. The only concern I have is that my freedom as a citizen is not impeded by their pursuit of profit.
How does choosing to sell something I own at a higher price than you wish to pay impede your freedom as a citizen? How does this vary based on whether I am an individual or a corporation?
If I have a government-granted monopoly on that thing which I wish to sell (as is the case if, for instance, I hold a patent), then my choosing to sell that thing at an absurdly high price may indeed be against the public's best interests -- but had the government not granted me that monopoly, the threat of new competitors would force me to keep my prices reasonable. Further, even while such behavior would be against the public good, I hardly see how you can justify describing it as an infringement of your freedoms. (Obviously, natural monopolies are a corner case not covered here. I believe government regulation is appropriate in such situations -- but I'm more interested in understanding your beliefs regarding the common case than exploring this outlier).
Free market does not mean that corporate actors should be able to do as they wish to corner markets and raise prices.
A strict definition of a free market means that said market should be regulated only inasmuch as necessary to prevent fraud. To be sure, this is the strict definition rather than the more commonly used one -- but it's a valid definition nonetheless, and the one on which this discussion so far has been predicated.
In a 'free market' scenario, patents will still exist in that the Monopoly will have the power to enforce its own 'patents' without the help of the government. Agreed?
If one goes beyond the strict "free market" definition to include a government conformant with libertarian ideals -- trade secrets, yes; patents, no.
In that case, the middle-ground would be some antitrust regulations, with some very light patent/IP protections (to ensure the adequate return on R&D investment)?
The historical record with regard to whether patents promote or retard innovation is inconclusive. See http://web.mit.edu/moser/www/pat501.pdf -- which finds that rather than increasing the total amount of innovation, a patent system's primary beneficial effect is encouraging a wider variety of fields to be studied. There is evidence elsewhere that in several specific fields patents tend to retard innovation -- textiles is one of these, historically; I suspect strongly (but with a lack of experimental data) that software is another.
Anyhow, I'm not personally in favor of a libertarian paradise -- but I do think patents should be available only in those situations and fields where their presence promotes, rather than harms, the public welfare; and I think that the case in favor of patent protection in general, while persuasive, is frequently overstated.
$10M/pill for antibiotics, as was proposed as a consequence of an unregulated free market, is a price out of range not only of the mass market but the luxury market as well: Almost all courses of treatment for diseases serious enough to warrant that kind of expendature require sufficiently large numbers of pills that even the super-rich would rarely be able to afford a full course of treatment.
I encourage you, further, to look at the top of the Fortune 500. Of those companies who produce consumer goods, how many of them focus only (or even primarily) on specialty- or niche-market goods? To be sure, there's some amount of money there -- but certainly not nearly as much as there is when seeking the sweet spot on the curve.
pricing themselves out of the mass market requires that there be a competition, which is a 'free market' cannot persist.
Demand is never completely inelastic: As much as folks may have an absolute need for medicines, your hypothesized $10M/pill is sufficient that most folks (even among the super-rich) cannot pay it [for an adequate duration of time as to have the intended effect] no matter how great their need. Consequently, it is indeed possible to price oneself out of a market even in the absolute lack of regulation.
Further, you completely ignore the point (and it's an important one) that it's the action of government itself, by creating the artificial monopolies we call "patents", that reduces competition and increases prices in this field.
I'm not going to argue that a completely unregulated market is a good thing, but your intended points miss their mark.
There is nothing to stop GSK from patenting antibiotics as a concept, then charging $10,000,000 per pill.
Sure there is: If they price themselves out of the mass market, they wouldn't make any money that way.
In any event, a patent is a government-enforced artificial monopoly. In a libertarian paradise (which you appear to be substituting for "free-market economy"), they wouldn't necessarily exist.
The Constitution was originally structured with the Senate being elected by the state legislators, not the people. Why? To provide some smaller group able to check the "tyranny of the majority", where a majority of people take actions which are morally unsupportable or otherwise wrong.
If we wanted the majority to rule unchecked, for that matter, why bother with the electoral college? Why, for that matter, bother with Congress at all -- or the bill of rights? One could simply implement a direct democracy where legislation is decided on directly by popular vote, and this would permit the majority to bully and abuse minorities as much as they see fit.
The popular vote and "the will of the people" sometimes are in favor of morally corrupt, unrealistic or otherwise faulty proposals. Having some check on public opinion was a major part of the original design of the US Constitution, and is still important today.
Checking input for escape attempts is error-prone. Passing in parameters as bind variables *isn't* error-prone (with regard to blocking SQL injection attacks); makes string quoting completely moot; and can result in a massive performance increase (particularly against Oracle) to boot.
I continue to be in disbelief that anyone doing professional database work can *not* follow this widely accepted best practice and continue to be employed.
The only way this would balance out would be for the payment to publishers per action to go up.
Well... duh.
With a fairly priced CPA ad, an advertiser is paying not a commission on the sale, but also reimbursing for the average rate of impressions which didn't result in sales. The impressions are still being paid for (bundled into the cost of the action); the primary case where this tends to be inaccurate is situations where the ratio of clicks to actions is severely out of whack (as with, say, click fraud), and those are situations where it's not fair to give the advertiser the bill for those clicks either.
I would love nothing more to swap each Win98 computer over to Linux, but you know how much of the radio programming software - Kenwood, Motorola, Icom, etc. -- will run on Linux? None.
Probably some of it can be persueded to run on Linux if you've got a high-level geek on hand to play with WINE (and find and implement API calls that aren't there yet, and fix cases where the expected behavior of already-implemented calls doesn't match what the MSDN documentation says it should be) and/or dosemu or dosbox (in the case of any pre-win32 apps). If you're lucky, the programs in question might work out-of-the-box (in which case it's a matter of system administration, rather than a programming issue).
The problem, though, is that geek-hours (for a value of "geek" that includes not just general-purpose troubleshooting but also software development in C) are expensive -- so unless you can find someone who'll do it as part of a hobby or in exchange for hardware or such, or you're lucky enough that all the software in question works with WINE without any tweaking, it probably is indeed cheaper to just upgrade to a newer Windows box.
My point, though, that it's generally not impossible to get Windows apps to run on Linux -- just difficult enough to frequently not be worthwhile.
They're all close enough that any young individual[1] who has used OpenOffice enough to be familiar with it should be more than able to pick up any other halfway-modern office suite without even trying. It's only people who are old enough to not have the innate UI sense (which anyone growing up in a 1st-world country in the last decade or so picked up} learning the exact application matters to -- and they're not going through school anymore, they're just teaching it. Further, there are night classes at community colleges and such for that sort of person.
[1] - Whether I fit into this category is starting to be up for debate. I got my geek on early in life, though.
That'll work just about as good as taking down all of the file sharers in the world. All of the popular OS software will turn into ghostwrite OS software with anonymous dropboxes in countries without absurd patent laws.
It'll work quite well. Much OSS development is done commercially -- less frequently as part of a company founded around supporting a piece of OSS, and more frequently as a part of operating a company which is building its underlying infrastructure on OSS components. If OSS is heavily encumbered with patents, then that corporate use (and corresponding support) will disappear. Sure, some OSS will still exist -- but if it's only a spare-time activity, rather than something one can spend 8 hours a day on, that provides far less time for it to flourish; this is particularly true as developers get older and have a wider array of outside responsibilities.
I've been doing work on open source software on behalf of my employers for the entire duration of my employment history. Work will become much less fun and much more work should that go away.
I can certainly say that it has turned me off to modern text adventures.
That's a shame, and I can certainly see your point (though for an occasional deviation -- when that deviation does something different enough to be novel -- I still hold it to be excusable). Just to ask, though: Have you played Varicella? It has excellent, very difficult puzzles; provides clues (if you can find them) and does not that I recall reward irrational behavior. It is hard enough to win that it's expected that one will (after figuring out individual pieces) need to play through multiple times to figure out how to get everything done in time -- but you still may enjoy it.
Slashdot Mirror
When wearing my sysadmin hat, I've had to disassemble and rewrite the DSDT used to initialize the PCI bus on hardware my company was provided by an overseas partner; port the MPPE kernel patch to Linux 2.4 (yes, this was a while ago); trace kernel panics back to their root cause (if not for fixage, at least to provide bug reports with sufficient supporting detail to get a quick and useful response); hunt down countless application errors by poking through strace output; play DBA; figure out why RPM didn't work correctly when ported to Solaris 8 (it was a trivially-worked-around libc bug); build a custom version of a GUI tool used to generate VPN certificate requests (yes, it's development work -- but it wasn't our dev group's job so it was squarely on IT) -- and that's just what comes to mind. System administration is interesting work in large part because it's so varied, and I really object to those who hold it in low esteem on account of having some image of what the job entails modeled off the lowest common denominator.
You know, some folks may set the bar for competancy differently than where you do.
For system administration, for instance, I tend to set it quite high: Any system adminstrator worthy of the name should be able to do system-level development as well -- debugging everything from applications to drivers and other kernel-level code as necessary. The poster may set their standards similarly, in which case semi-competance is likely to be more than enough for the kind of evaluation being made.
So -- completely discounting someone's opinions based on their own fully subjective evaluation of their own skill level is a Bad Thing. Knowing enough to know that you don't know everything, after all, is at least indicative that you know something. (Maybe not quite true -- but it means that you aren't in that area of the curve where you think you know everything but don't, which is perhaps the most dangerous part).
The casual gaming market (as represented by the sims, etc) is quite a bit smaller than the "hardcore" gaming market.
Ya know, it wasn't always that way. Remember the 80s, when every family with kids and a little spare cash had a Nintendo? When the most popular games out there were ones which weren't targeted only at "hardcore" gamers, but were accessible to just about everyone?
My impression is that Nintendo's marketing arm is trying to bring back something of those times -- and (though the Internet may now fill much of the niche that the SNES and such did back then) I wish them the best. As a busy adult with some other members of my household who are home a fair bit of time each day, enjoy retrogaming (the most frequently used console systems here lately are the old SEGA and SNES units) and are on a limited budget, I can absolutely see an untapped market here: Fun, low-entry-cost games built to target a comparatively inexpensive console. Nobody in my house is about to buy an XBox 360 or a PS3 -- we just don't have the budget -- but I can certainly see us getting a Wii.
Now, I'm not a physicist. I don't even pretend to be a physicist. However --
Most forms of radiation don't make the things they irradiate radioactive. Neutron radiation does -- but while that's emitted during *operation* of a nuclear reactor, I don't believe that it's emitted by its fuel or waste. So the water is fine, and doesn't need any kind of special storage or disposal.
You make some good points. Even if the "civilian casualties" aren't, however, that doesn't make it acceptable to destroy such blatantly non-military targets as bridges, power plants and privately owned factories when engaging in what's supposedly less than full war. The attack on a power plant, in particular, has had massive environmental impact -- spilling thousands of tons of fuel oil into the Mediterranean, which the Lebanese government is unable to send ships to clean up due to an Israeli blockade.
That doesn't justify their actions -- the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, the carelessness with regard to civilian casualties. Would carefully targeted strikes on Hezbollah targets be appropriate? Of course! But they're going far beyond that point, and attacking targets which harm not Hezbollah but Lebanon's legitimate government -- which is weak enough as it is.
If you missed this aspect, I need to ask where you get your info -- Faux News?
The Lebanese government is in enough trouble as it is, having a radical group (Hezbollah) executing attacks on their neighbors against the government's whim. Getting civilian support for that radical group (by demonizing the aforementioned neighbor, which Israel's civilian-infrastructure-targeted attacks and utter carelessness with regard to collateral damage have been doing pretty effectively) weakens the legitimate government, giving the radicals even more of a chance to take over Lebanon completely.
Israel is off their collective rockers, and the world is standing by and letting them get away with it. It's insane.
So, as for the other claims you've made which you're no longer trying to defend (price of healthcare as a personal-liberties concern; pharmaceuticals and genetic engineering as natural monopolies; etc) -- can I presume that you've yielded?
Even if this weren't true, I don't see why it is a personal-liberties concern. The claim that health care is a natural right (despite enshrinement by UN declaration) is as ridiculous as the claim that food is a natural right. While artificially depriving an individual of food (by removing their freedom to contract for said resource or receive it as a voluntarily-provided gift) is an obvious abridgement of rights, I do not trample on the rights of the beggar on the street when I refuse to give him my meal -- and to lay some imperative on me to do otherwise would be an abridgement of my own freedoms.
Operating system software is a natural monopoly, like electricity distribution. Monsato and the pharmacos, on the other hand, have artificial monopolies -- they would not hold monopoly powers if the government had not granted it to them.
My understanding is that they use a neural network to determine what the most likely interpretation is. So, if its training data included "dear aunt" but nothing starting out "dear mom"...
The most profitable companies -- as exemplified by the Fortune 500 -- are those which target the sweet spot on the curve between price and units sold. Artificially raising prices so high as to sell only to a luxury market in cases where the mass-market segment is not already saturated with comparable goods reduces one's total profits, and so is not done by companies acting intelligently. It is even demonstrably stupid, because not one company taking this approach has landed itself near the top of the Fortune 500.
In short -- the idea of a company pricing a vital but cheaply-manufactured good out of reach of the general public is silly, because aiming for the luxury market when the mass market is not yet flooded is stupid: As demonstrated by the nature of those businesses on the Fortune 500 (which are, by definition, those which have done well for themselves), aiming for the mass market is The Right Thing even if acting only out of self-interest.
If I have a government-granted monopoly on that thing which I wish to sell (as is the case if, for instance, I hold a patent), then my choosing to sell that thing at an absurdly high price may indeed be against the public's best interests -- but had the government not granted me that monopoly, the threat of new competitors would force me to keep my prices reasonable. Further, even while such behavior would be against the public good, I hardly see how you can justify describing it as an infringement of your freedoms. (Obviously, natural monopolies are a corner case not covered here. I believe government regulation is appropriate in such situations -- but I'm more interested in understanding your beliefs regarding the common case than exploring this outlier).
A strict definition of a free market means that said market should be regulated only inasmuch as necessary to prevent fraud. To be sure, this is the strict definition rather than the more commonly used one -- but it's a valid definition nonetheless, and the one on which this discussion so far has been predicated.
The historical record with regard to whether patents promote or retard innovation is inconclusive. See http://web.mit.edu/moser/www/pat501.pdf -- which finds that rather than increasing the total amount of innovation, a patent system's primary beneficial effect is encouraging a wider variety of fields to be studied. There is evidence elsewhere that in several specific fields patents tend to retard innovation -- textiles is one of these, historically; I suspect strongly (but with a lack of experimental data) that software is another.
Anyhow, I'm not personally in favor of a libertarian paradise -- but I do think patents should be available only in those situations and fields where their presence promotes, rather than harms, the public welfare; and I think that the case in favor of patent protection in general, while persuasive, is frequently overstated.
$10M/pill for antibiotics, as was proposed as a consequence of an unregulated free market, is a price out of range not only of the mass market but the luxury market as well: Almost all courses of treatment for diseases serious enough to warrant that kind of expendature require sufficiently large numbers of pills that even the super-rich would rarely be able to afford a full course of treatment.
I encourage you, further, to look at the top of the Fortune 500. Of those companies who produce consumer goods, how many of them focus only (or even primarily) on specialty- or niche-market goods? To be sure, there's some amount of money there -- but certainly not nearly as much as there is when seeking the sweet spot on the curve.
Demand is never completely inelastic: As much as folks may have an absolute need for medicines, your hypothesized $10M/pill is sufficient that most folks (even among the super-rich) cannot pay it [for an adequate duration of time as to have the intended effect] no matter how great their need. Consequently, it is indeed possible to price oneself out of a market even in the absolute lack of regulation.
Further, you completely ignore the point (and it's an important one) that it's the action of government itself, by creating the artificial monopolies we call "patents", that reduces competition and increases prices in this field.
I'm not going to argue that a completely unregulated market is a good thing, but your intended points miss their mark.
Sure there is: If they price themselves out of the mass market, they wouldn't make any money that way.
In any event, a patent is a government-enforced artificial monopoly. In a libertarian paradise (which you appear to be substituting for "free-market economy"), they wouldn't necessarily exist.
The Constitution was originally structured with the Senate being elected by the state legislators, not the people. Why? To provide some smaller group able to check the "tyranny of the majority", where a majority of people take actions which are morally unsupportable or otherwise wrong.
If we wanted the majority to rule unchecked, for that matter, why bother with the electoral college? Why, for that matter, bother with Congress at all -- or the bill of rights? One could simply implement a direct democracy where legislation is decided on directly by popular vote, and this would permit the majority to bully and abuse minorities as much as they see fit.
The popular vote and "the will of the people" sometimes are in favor of morally corrupt, unrealistic or otherwise faulty proposals. Having some check on public opinion was a major part of the original design of the US Constitution, and is still important today.
Like MagikSlinger said, I wasn't talking about out-of-bounds inputs. The topic of discussion, after all, is SQL injection attacks.
Checking input for escape attempts is error-prone. Passing in parameters as bind variables *isn't* error-prone (with regard to blocking SQL injection attacks); makes string quoting completely moot; and can result in a massive performance increase (particularly against Oracle) to boot.
I continue to be in disbelief that anyone doing professional database work can *not* follow this widely accepted best practice and continue to be employed.
With a fairly priced CPA ad, an advertiser is paying not a commission on the sale, but also reimbursing for the average rate of impressions which didn't result in sales. The impressions are still being paid for (bundled into the cost of the action); the primary case where this tends to be inaccurate is situations where the ratio of clicks to actions is severely out of whack (as with, say, click fraud), and those are situations where it's not fair to give the advertiser the bill for those clicks either.
I would love nothing more to swap each Win98 computer over to Linux, but you know how much of the radio programming software - Kenwood, Motorola, Icom, etc. -- will run on Linux? None.
Probably some of it can be persueded to run on Linux if you've got a high-level geek on hand to play with WINE (and find and implement API calls that aren't there yet, and fix cases where the expected behavior of already-implemented calls doesn't match what the MSDN documentation says it should be) and/or dosemu or dosbox (in the case of any pre-win32 apps). If you're lucky, the programs in question might work out-of-the-box (in which case it's a matter of system administration, rather than a programming issue).
The problem, though, is that geek-hours (for a value of "geek" that includes not just general-purpose troubleshooting but also software development in C) are expensive -- so unless you can find someone who'll do it as part of a hobby or in exchange for hardware or such, or you're lucky enough that all the software in question works with WINE without any tweaking, it probably is indeed cheaper to just upgrade to a newer Windows box.
My point, though, that it's generally not impossible to get Windows apps to run on Linux -- just difficult enough to frequently not be worthwhile.
They're all close enough that any young individual[1] who has used OpenOffice enough to be familiar with it should be more than able to pick up any other halfway-modern office suite without even trying. It's only people who are old enough to not have the innate UI sense (which anyone growing up in a 1st-world country in the last decade or so picked up} learning the exact application matters to -- and they're not going through school anymore, they're just teaching it. Further, there are night classes at community colleges and such for that sort of person.
[1] - Whether I fit into this category is starting to be up for debate. I got my geek on early in life, though.
It'll work quite well. Much OSS development is done commercially -- less frequently as part of a company founded around supporting a piece of OSS, and more frequently as a part of operating a company which is building its underlying infrastructure on OSS components. If OSS is heavily encumbered with patents, then that corporate use (and corresponding support) will disappear. Sure, some OSS will still exist -- but if it's only a spare-time activity, rather than something one can spend 8 hours a day on, that provides far less time for it to flourish; this is particularly true as developers get older and have a wider array of outside responsibilities.
I've been doing work on open source software on behalf of my employers for the entire duration of my employment history. Work will become much less fun and much more work should that go away.
I can certainly say that it has turned me off to modern text adventures.
That's a shame, and I can certainly see your point (though for an occasional deviation -- when that deviation does something different enough to be novel -- I still hold it to be excusable). Just to ask, though: Have you played Varicella? It has excellent, very difficult puzzles; provides clues (if you can find them) and does not that I recall reward irrational behavior. It is hard enough to win that it's expected that one will (after figuring out individual pieces) need to play through multiple times to figure out how to get everything done in time -- but you still may enjoy it.