Deep-linking is, or must, always be legal if technically possible, on the WORLD WIDE WEB (def'n: web: a network of interlinked nodes with a high degree of linkage)
Often a rushed, under-resourced or under-skilled s/w project will congeal into a large, brittle, solid clot, which is not extendable without breaking things in mysterious prohibitive to fix ways.
Congealment comes from insufficient or ill-conceived architecture, and/or rushed or ignorant ill-fitting extensions or mods or "fixes", combined with insufficient continuous re-factoring.
This code may be worth keeping on expensive life-support if there are many existing customers depending on it, but make no mistake. Your codebase is already dead, even if its heart still beats.
So then, if you still need software with similar but slightly updated or extended functionality, you should rewrite, and in doing so, make sure you get good architecture, take sufficient time to build each part or layer, evaluate the quality of all third party libraries or frameworks used (on the "volleyball" principle that the weakest member of the team drops the ball and determines the team's i.e. the system's quality), use continuous refactoring, with technical-risk based work prioritization (biggest risks dealt with first, always), document the classes and methods sufficiently, and include unit tests and/or invariants and pre-postconditions, so that there is a lower probability that further extensions will start congealing into brittle, excess complexity.
If you can succeed at maintaining that discipline without going bankrupt, then it will have been worth it, because the value of your new software capital asset will be much greater than previously.
Of course you should have done it right the first time, (and should have had management enlightened enough to let you,) because it would have been much cheaper to do it carefully once, than the punishing expense of the original crappy development and maintenance plus the rewrite. There IS a valid argument that by the time you let your s/w congeal into a complex, brittle clot, you are already too late, and you should pull the plug, shed a tear, and walk away.
I've seen alternate routing protocols proposed wherein your traffic has to barter/haggle its way through the network at every hop, as some new troll demands a passage fee for a certain QOS.
These new methods look to me like they would create two issues: 1. Unpredictable permutations of complex, balkanized, and non-local routing strategies. Performance of the system as a whole would be unpredictable and possibly unstable.
2. It really is back to the old circuit-switching network of ma bell, on top of IP. A few nice low-latency end-to-end Concorde-like connections for those willing to fork over the dough, clogging up the routers so all the proletariat traffic suffers in a poverty of routes and bandwidth.
Deep Simplicity at the core of routing protocol is the only thing that will work at the scale of the Internet. Maybe a "voluntary-QOS-downgrade" flag on email packets etc, and a "pretty please low latency" flag on video packets, might work, but these should not have monetary contracts associated with them. They should just indirectly affect the end-consumer's bandwidth bill if anything.
It's not surprising that the climategate allegations have been shown to be false on examination.
The whole thing was a manufactured crisis, in exactly the same sinister sense that the 1 year "WMDs hand-wringing" lead-up to the Iraq War was a manufactured crisis.
It's not surprising that this sort of tactic happens, in a high-stakes political battle (there's trillions of oil dollars at stake after all, hmmm. Sound familiar?)
What is lamentable is the rampant gullibility/willful ignorance of the mainstream media, and hence of much of the general public.
Remember when you couldn't fool all the people all the time? Well, fooling people is now a highly paid, highly skilled profession, so maybe you can now at least fool the majority of the electorate for a long enough time to accomplish the goal, whether you are engaged in an illegal war for control of some oil resources, or a global warming denial disinformation campaign, for control of the right to keep burning as much oil as you feel like.
How is it even conceivable that a corporation, which exists at the whim of democratic government, can sue a democratic government that wants to build its own infrastructure. That's like GM or Caterpillar suing the municipal government for having its own works department to build and fix roads.
Utter insanity. Yes Virginia, democracy IS a sham in our current corporate oligarchy.
we'll have to figure out a way to make a second one that retains net neutrality.
Maybe this can be done both bottom up, through open-standards organizations, and ad-hoc technical committees, and top-down, with funding and support from the likes of Google and legions of other would-be information exchangers on the Internet.
We will need a giant "route around the problem" type of solution, involving new fiber backbones, with different ownership arrangements than presently, and high-speed wireless for the last mile.
If the telcos start filtering the pipes, we need to render them irrelevant through collective will to build a better net with more geodesic rather than hub spoke topology.
In the future, Ken Cuccinelli will be posthumously charged with Crimes against Humanity and the Eco-Systems of Earth, for willfully obstructing the scientific investigation and mitigation of Global Warming.
Can SQL Server's encrypted fields have an index on them, so I can rapidly get back all of the records with "Johnson" as last name, or "Jo%" as last name?
I counted the preferences in this whole discussion to about 3/4 of the way down to this post. Here's how it pans out, give or take one or two that I misinterpreted, and not counting wafflers and OTs:
So I had a job where we were building a Java EE app and configuration problems, buggy, opaque, non-interoperable frameworks, layers etc took 50% of the team's time and builds took 1/2 an hour. Oh and the boss interrupted randomly with a complete non-sequitur urgent request at a frequency rarely less than once per hour.
Meanwhile, I cranked out a nice python webapp (hobby project) on my macbook in the back of the bus on the daily commute. I got about as much done in the hour of commuting, guarding the computer from flying down the aisle due to lead-foot bus drivers, or from being bashed by backpacks and handbags, but otherwise relatively undistracted, as in the rest of the day, easy.
Moral of the story: the back of a bus is essentially similar to having your own office, or coding in an empty apartment. If you put your mind to it, you can actually stay in flow state. No one demands the same part of your brain you're using to design and program with. Oh and JEE is far far gone.
That would seem to be the biggest problem for would be switchers. Essentially, their legalese translates into:
"You must be subjected to a complete mind-wipe before going to work at one of our potential competitors, because if you use any of the specific expertise you developed while working here, you're screwed."
While it may be that minimum wage hurts production... etc., it also helps prevent enormous wealth polarization. Too large a wealth polarization, and society will develop instability which will result in revolution, terrorism, massively increased policing costs etc. Not only that, but stable business ventures based on enforceable contracts are based largely on trust existing at many levels in society. As polarization results in a general loss of mutual goodwill and trust, the climate for business, trade, and specialization of economic process in general breaks down.
What my hypothesis says is that the simplest and most explanatory economic models will be those which posit as the interacting self-interested, compete-cooperate-decision-making, moral, intelligent agents, not only individual human persons, but rather persons and also reified law-based or meme-based human social groups, including corporations and states.
The math of cost-benefit will work out much better and ultimately simpler if it is understood that the economic / trading / conflict interactions are between all these agents, with partial inclusion/allegiance relationships existing between some, and formation of a new group-entity with identity and coherent interest and action being one of the possible strategies open to other agents.
By placing your content on the open Internet, making it available upon request using the hypertext transfer protocol, and not hiding it behind a login-only session or encryption, you have implicitly consented to that content being linked to without restriction.
Tim Berners-Lee ought to make that clear to everyone.
If you want to restrict linking to your content, you need to host it on a different distribution network, other than the WorldWide Web. whose founding, essential, sine qua non assumption and principle is open inter-linking of the content it serves.
Societies do not operate within a "greater context of individual rights". Societies are groups of humans that have produced and are collectively participating in homeostatic societal memes. Such a society becomes a self-interested, self-preserving agent (super-organism, if you will), in its own right, and as such, it interacts with and constrains the behavior of its members.
A cell in a body is constrained by its relationship with adjacent cells (by being in the body in a certain role). Its location and movement and behavior is constrained. But overall, being in such a body was better for the survival chances of the cell's ancestors, than being alone in the wild, and so it is for the body cell.
Substitute "person" for "cell", and "society" for "body", and you've pretty much got the essence of the mutually constraining, yet mutually beneficial relationship of individual people to their society.
Now, a certain libertarian political position would hold that this relationship I described is not optimal, and that the society is not a "reified" individual agent, but rather nothing more than the sum of its people.
But the thing is, a society entity doesn't really care whether you think it exists, unless you threaten its existence. At that point, it punishes you for crimes (which are technically defined as actions against the lawful order of the state, not against other individuals), or for insurrection or treason, in the most serious case. Those laws and punishments are part of the homeostatic immune system of the society entity. If you transgress at a lower level of intensity, merely by flouting the acceptable norms of behavior that the society inculcates in its people, you may simply be outcast by the society (shunned or ridiculed or shamed or unsupported by its conforming members until you decide to shit yourself out of that society.)
The free market homeostatic mechanisms exist within a larger system (the liberal democratic state), which elects governments of alternating greater regulatory predilection and lesser regulatory predilection. These back-and-forth moves by the electorate are a feedback control system whose long-term consequence is to find or wander near the average level of regulation of market activity / corporate power etc that the populace wants. Another homeostatic mechanism operating within the larger system and setting bounds on the subsystems, like the free market.
And in case you're going to say the free market should be the ultimate power in society, let me introduce you to my Russian mafia buddies who can talk it over with you. Just nice polite conversation yes?
For the "consumer" (defined in this case as the 99% of the population who are not competent programmers), an information/entertainment appliance that: 1. "just works", 2. has a single, simple way to obtain good apps or good content (e.g. movies), and has 3. Has well-designed, human-factors-centric user interface, ergonomics and design affordances
will trump a gadget/network with openness of programming architecture any time.
If the open world wants to compete in this space, it needs to somehow achieve 1.,2., and 3. above while also being open in some meaningful sense.
I put this out there as a challenge. Can the Android world, for example, improve to that level?
Remember, Freedom's just another word for this thing doesn't work!
So the basic problem is that a large corporation is like a hydra, and can just generate a new subsidiary to be lopped off by the authorities, then move on unharmed.
To deal with this problem, maybe the courts need a corporate decapitation remedy. The idea is that the court could impose a requirement that the entire senior executive and board of the corporation be replaced by unrelated people. The corporate identity and product line could continue, but the top leadership of the overall corporation would be fired for the corporate sin.
This is kind of similar to what happened to GM et al as a condition for Federal bailout money.
If you file at USPTO in September 2008, you get priority over inventions revealed by others as early as October 2007.
Wacko system. Yes. But that's the way the US patent law works. It basically means, file your patent as soon as designed, before you reveal your invention.
I'm not supporting this system. Just saying how it is currently defined.
I know your tongue is planted firmly in cheek, but I did some research on the matter, and found that the fossil fuel industry, automobile industry, and wal-mart-like fossil-fuel-based mega-scale consumer goods distribution industry have many thousands of times more money at stake (~$10 trillion annually) on the outcome of this debate than do the scientists in question.
Not to mention that the side denying anthropenic global warming is also the side whose proposition lets comfortable people, and wasteful, unsustainable industries off the hook, and lets them continue without changing anything about their behavior.
The other side's proposition suggests or implies that change, some substantial change, is needed, and that is going to require effort and some shifting of those who are currently sitting in the musical chairs.
I wonder which side is going to be more biased and vocal and strident in its bending of facts to suit its desired course of action or inaction?????
One bit represents exactly one difference, which is the smallest unit of information no matter what medium you are storing or transmitting it in. The Qubits inside a putative quantum computer are not information yet, but merely the potential for information, which if it is ever read out, will be in bits.
Some of the most promising cosmological physics, imho, involves the holographic theory, wherein the amount of entropy in a spacetime region can be defined in terms of the number of bits that could have passed across the region's boundary. Bits are fundamental to all of information theory, and quite possibly to the simplest understanding of the universe as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Also, I find it hard to believe there would be no useful information in the condition of the actual hardware after the flight.
Seems like some engineers have been sitting behind screens and simulation models so long they've forgotten the real world exists.
They have a ways to go to get to Arizona levels of excellence.
But it won't work, because Texans don't read their schoolbooks, they just keep them in big "depositories" hidden away on upper floors of buildings.
Why bother copying.
Deep-linking is, or must, always be legal if technically possible, on the WORLD WIDE WEB (def'n: web: a network of interlinked nodes with a high degree of linkage)
Often a rushed, under-resourced or under-skilled s/w project will congeal into a large, brittle, solid clot,
which is not extendable without breaking things in mysterious prohibitive to fix ways.
Congealment comes from insufficient or ill-conceived architecture, and/or rushed or ignorant ill-fitting extensions or mods or "fixes",
combined with insufficient continuous re-factoring.
This code may be worth keeping on expensive life-support if there are many existing customers depending on it,
but make no mistake. Your codebase is already dead, even if its heart still beats.
So then, if you still need software with similar but slightly updated or extended functionality, you should rewrite,
and in doing so, make sure you get good architecture, take sufficient time to build each part or layer, evaluate the quality of
all third party libraries or frameworks used (on the "volleyball" principle that the weakest member of the team drops the ball
and determines the team's i.e. the system's quality), use continuous refactoring, with technical-risk based work prioritization
(biggest risks dealt with first, always), document the classes and methods
sufficiently, and include unit tests and/or invariants and pre-postconditions, so that there is a lower probability that
further extensions will start congealing into brittle, excess complexity.
If you can succeed at maintaining that discipline without going bankrupt, then it will have been worth it, because the value
of your new software capital asset will be much greater than previously.
Of course you should have done it right the first time, (and should have had management enlightened enough to let you,)
because it would have been much cheaper to do it carefully once, than the punishing expense of the original crappy
development and maintenance plus the rewrite. There IS a valid argument that by the time you let your s/w congeal into
a complex, brittle clot, you are already too late, and you should pull the plug, shed a tear, and walk away.
Microsoft is screwed.
I have a patent (#666666) on applying basic logic and common sense, with a smattering of visual composition intuition, to any problem at hand.
You've been punk'd
I've seen alternate routing protocols proposed wherein your traffic has to barter/haggle its way through the network at every hop, as some new troll demands a passage fee for a certain QOS.
These new methods look to me like they would create two issues:
1. Unpredictable permutations of complex, balkanized, and non-local routing strategies. Performance of the system as a whole would be unpredictable and possibly unstable.
2. It really is back to the old circuit-switching network of ma bell, on top of IP. A few nice low-latency end-to-end Concorde-like connections for those willing to fork over the dough, clogging up the routers so all the proletariat traffic suffers in a poverty of routes and bandwidth.
Deep Simplicity at the core of routing protocol is the only thing that will work at the scale of the Internet. Maybe a "voluntary-QOS-downgrade" flag on email packets etc, and a "pretty please low latency" flag on video packets, might work, but these should not have monetary contracts associated with them. They should just indirectly affect the end-consumer's bandwidth bill if anything.
It's not surprising that the climategate allegations have been shown to be false on examination.
The whole thing was a manufactured crisis, in exactly the same sinister sense that the 1 year "WMDs hand-wringing" lead-up to the Iraq War was a manufactured crisis.
It's not surprising that this sort of tactic happens, in a high-stakes political battle (there's trillions of oil dollars at stake after all, hmmm. Sound familiar?)
What is lamentable is the rampant gullibility/willful ignorance of the mainstream media, and hence of much of the general public.
Remember when you couldn't fool all the people all the time? Well, fooling people is now a highly paid, highly skilled profession, so maybe you can now at least fool the majority of the electorate for a long enough time to accomplish the goal, whether you are engaged in an illegal war for control of some oil resources, or a global warming denial disinformation campaign, for control of the right to keep burning as much oil as you feel like.
How is it even conceivable that a corporation, which exists at the whim of democratic government, can sue a democratic government that wants to build its own infrastructure. That's like GM or Caterpillar suing the municipal government for having its own works department to build and fix roads.
Utter insanity. Yes Virginia, democracy IS a sham in our current corporate oligarchy.
we'll have to figure out a way to make a second one that retains net neutrality.
Maybe this can be done both bottom up, through open-standards organizations,
and ad-hoc technical committees,
and top-down, with funding and support from the likes of Google and legions
of other would-be information exchangers on the Internet.
We will need a giant "route around the problem" type of solution, involving
new fiber backbones, with different ownership arrangements than presently,
and high-speed wireless for the last mile.
If the telcos start filtering the pipes, we need to render them irrelevant through
collective will to build a better net with more geodesic rather than hub spoke topology.
In the future, Ken Cuccinelli will be posthumously charged with Crimes against Humanity and the Eco-Systems of Earth, for willfully obstructing the scientific investigation and mitigation of Global Warming.
Can SQL Server's encrypted fields have an index on them, so I can rapidly get back all of the records with "Johnson" as last name, or "Jo%" as last name?
I counted the preferences in this whole discussion to about 3/4 of the way down to this post.
Here's how it pans out, give or take one or two that I misinterpreted, and not counting wafflers and OTs:
Private Office: 77 (62%)
Cube Farm: 14 (11%)
Open Area: 33 (27%)
The "privacy and peace required" advocates are in the clear majority.
So I had a job where we were building a Java EE app and configuration problems, buggy, opaque, non-interoperable frameworks, layers etc took 50% of the team's time and builds took 1/2 an hour. Oh and the boss interrupted randomly with a complete non-sequitur urgent request at a frequency rarely less than once per hour.
Meanwhile, I cranked out a nice python webapp (hobby project) on my macbook in the back of the bus on the daily commute. I got about as much done in the hour of commuting, guarding the computer from flying down the aisle due to lead-foot bus drivers, or from being bashed by backpacks and handbags, but otherwise relatively undistracted, as in the rest of the day, easy.
Moral of the story: the back of a bus is essentially similar to having your own office, or coding in an empty apartment. If you put your mind to it, you can actually stay in flow state. No one demands the same part of your brain you're using to design and program with. Oh and JEE is far far gone.
That would seem to be the biggest problem for would be switchers. Essentially, their legalese translates into:
"You must be subjected to a complete mind-wipe before going to work at one of our potential competitors, because if you use any of the specific expertise you developed while working here, you're screwed."
While it may be that minimum wage hurts production... etc., it also helps prevent enormous wealth polarization. Too large a wealth polarization, and society will develop instability which will result in revolution, terrorism, massively increased policing costs etc. Not only that, but stable business ventures based on enforceable contracts are based largely on trust existing at many levels in society. As polarization results in a general loss of mutual goodwill and trust, the climate for business, trade, and specialization of economic process in general breaks down.
What my hypothesis says is that the simplest and most explanatory economic models will be those which posit as the interacting self-interested, compete-cooperate-decision-making, moral, intelligent agents, not only individual human persons, but rather persons and also reified law-based or meme-based human social groups, including corporations and states.
The math of cost-benefit will work out much better and ultimately simpler if it is understood that the economic / trading / conflict interactions are between all these agents, with partial inclusion/allegiance relationships existing between some, and formation of a new group-entity with identity and coherent interest and action being one of the possible strategies open to other agents.
By placing your content on the open Internet, making it available upon request using the hypertext transfer protocol, and not hiding it behind a login-only session or encryption, you have implicitly consented to that content being linked to without restriction.
Tim Berners-Lee ought to make that clear to everyone.
If you want to restrict linking to your content, you need to host it on a different distribution network, other than the WorldWide Web. whose founding, essential, sine qua non assumption and principle is open inter-linking of the content it serves.
Societies do not operate within a "greater context of individual rights". Societies are groups of humans that have produced and are collectively participating in homeostatic societal memes. Such a society becomes a self-interested, self-preserving agent (super-organism, if you will), in its own right, and as such, it interacts with and constrains the behavior of its members.
A cell in a body is constrained by its relationship with adjacent cells (by being in the body in a certain role). Its location and movement and behavior is constrained. But overall, being in such a body was better for the survival chances of the cell's ancestors, than being alone in the wild, and so it is for the body cell.
Substitute "person" for "cell", and "society" for "body", and you've pretty much got the essence of the mutually constraining, yet mutually beneficial relationship of individual people to their society.
Now, a certain libertarian political position would hold that this relationship I described is not optimal, and that the society is not a "reified" individual agent, but rather nothing more than the sum of its people.
But the thing is, a society entity doesn't really care whether you think it exists, unless you threaten its existence. At that point, it punishes you for crimes (which are technically defined as actions against the lawful order of the state, not against other individuals), or for insurrection or treason, in the most serious case. Those laws and punishments are part of the homeostatic immune system of the society entity. If you transgress at a lower level of intensity, merely by flouting the acceptable norms of behavior that the society inculcates in its people, you may simply be outcast by the society (shunned or ridiculed or shamed or unsupported by its conforming members until you decide to shit yourself out of that society.)
The key words here being "anonymous coward".
The free market homeostatic mechanisms exist within a larger system (the liberal democratic state), which elects governments of alternating greater regulatory predilection and lesser regulatory predilection. These back-and-forth moves by the electorate are a feedback control system whose long-term consequence is to find or wander near the average level of regulation of market activity / corporate power etc that the populace wants. Another homeostatic mechanism operating within the larger system and setting bounds on the subsystems, like the free market.
And in case you're going to say the free market should be the ultimate power in society, let me introduce you to my Russian mafia buddies who can talk it over with you. Just nice polite conversation yes?
For the "consumer" (defined in this case as the 99% of the population who are not competent programmers),
an information/entertainment appliance that:
1. "just works",
2. has a single, simple way to obtain good apps or good content (e.g. movies), and has
3. Has well-designed, human-factors-centric user interface, ergonomics and design affordances
will trump a gadget/network with openness of programming architecture any time.
If the open world wants to compete in this space, it needs to somehow achieve 1.,2., and 3. above
while also being open in some meaningful sense.
I put this out there as a challenge. Can the Android world, for example, improve to that level?
Remember, Freedom's just another word for this thing doesn't work!
So the basic problem is that a large corporation is like a hydra, and can just generate a new subsidiary to be lopped off by the authorities, then move on unharmed.
To deal with this problem, maybe the courts need a corporate decapitation remedy. The idea is that the court could impose a requirement that the entire senior executive and board of the corporation be replaced by unrelated people. The corporate identity and product line could continue, but the top leadership of the overall corporation would be fired for the corporate sin.
This is kind of similar to what happened to GM et al as a condition for Federal bailout money.
If you file at USPTO in September 2008, you get
priority over inventions revealed by others as early
as October 2007.
Wacko system. Yes. But that's the way the US patent law
works. It basically means, file your patent as soon as designed, before you reveal your invention.
I'm not supporting this system. Just saying how it is currently
defined.
It reached back through time and disabled the LHC several times just so that it could ensure it would not be discovered until April Fools day.
I know your tongue is planted firmly in cheek, but I did some research on the matter, and found that the fossil fuel industry, automobile industry, and wal-mart-like fossil-fuel-based mega-scale consumer goods distribution industry have many thousands of times more money at stake (~$10 trillion annually) on the outcome of this debate than do the scientists in question.
Not to mention that the side denying anthropenic global warming is also the side whose proposition lets comfortable people, and wasteful, unsustainable industries off the hook, and lets them continue without changing anything about their behavior.
The other side's proposition suggests or implies that change, some substantial change, is needed, and that is going to require effort and some shifting of those who are currently sitting in the musical chairs.
I wonder which side is going to be more biased and vocal and strident in its bending of facts to suit its desired course of
action or inaction?????
of information.
One bit represents exactly one difference, which is the smallest unit of information no matter what medium you are storing or transmitting it in. The Qubits inside a putative quantum computer are not information yet, but merely the potential for information, which if it is ever read out, will be in bits.
Some of the most promising cosmological physics, imho, involves the holographic theory, wherein the amount of entropy in a spacetime region can be defined in terms of the number of bits that could have passed across the region's boundary. Bits are fundamental to all of information theory, and quite possibly to the simplest understanding of the universe as well.