Are often confused. If there was a shred of evidence that anything shady was going on, I'm sure the media would be all over it. The media tends to do the opposite, however. They report a few things that lead people to believe a conspiracy may exist, and then quit reporting when actual facts run out, or the original allegations turn out to be false.
For example, all of the reported allegations of intimidation or corruption in the florida 2000 elections were found to be false. But the mainstream press never reported that (or at least never reported it loudly).
We know how to make good software. There are plenty of companies that write life-critical systems that have few or no discernable flaws.
But it costs a lot of money to do that. And computer software is no different than any business. It's worth it for a business to let 5 or 10% of their customer base leave if that customer base is costing more money than it makes.
It isn't typically profitable to have a professional mechanic pick up the phone every time you call your dealership (unless it's a luxury place), and it isn't typically profitable to make relatively bugless software. Welcome to the World Of Business.
Every defense contractor cooperates with almost every other defense contractor on a few projects, so there is no point to busting on them (because you would actually be knocking yourself for cooperating with them elsewhere.)
Plus, I don't think the government would like the fact that you're demeaning their judgement capabilities when you still have billions of dollars of contracts with them (and are in the midst of trying to win billions more).
Plus, government contracting is so over-regulated that I wouldn't be surprised if you just plain _aren't_ allowed to talk badly about your competitors.
It's kind of disingenous to say "The U.S. government wants X" when one senator has expressed interest in introducing a bill that says X. If the Secretary of Commerce came out and said X, then that means "The U.S. government wants X." But congresspersons introduce legislation all the time, and to take the opinion of one of them as the creed of the entire government is a bit innacurate.
Not too sure about things marked 'D', but I know the government can't hold normal people responsible for the dissemination of classified information. Normal, as in don't have a security clearance or haven't signed an NDA. That's why reporters can print stuff that has been leaked.
There are a lot of types of injuries (in fact, most sports injuries) that happen as the result of physical trauma.
First of all, this type of program would help prevent all sports injuries that weren't the result of physical trauma (which may only be 5 or 10%).
I think the biggest thing, though, would be to keep people from keeping bad habits. Mario Lemiuex, for example, was plagued by back problems through the best years of his career. Finally, a few years ago, he went to some specialists who hooked him up to a computer that told him he had bad posture. He fixed his posture, and he's suddenly (miraculously) healthy. Well, except for the hip problems now (heavy sigh of a pens fan).
The problem with these bad habits is that I believe they aggravate the physical trauma. Some bad behaviors could outright lead to a greater chance of an injury, e.g. if you weren't always keeping your head down when making a tackle in american football. And some other bad behaviors (like mario's previously mentioned bad posture) can either transform routine contact into an injury, or aggravate an injury (if the area in question is already messed up from poor form).
I would actually like to see football players wearing little electrode suits, hooked to cameras watching the field, that would send muscle impulses to appropriate players if a potential life-threatened injury was imminent.:)
It's very hard to argue that a software bug causing unintended data collection results in an 'unreasonable' search. Especially if the data was never accessed. There's no such thing as constitutionslaughter.
The hidden life-saving benefits of robots
on
X-45 Makes Debut Flight
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They don't have to fire in self-defense. Which would have saved quite a few lives in afghanistan alone (friendly-fire).
Frankly, if we were willing to lose some ground-hugging robots with stun guns, we could probably win a war without actually killing any of the enemy, just imprisoning them for a little while;)
After all, they did catch them, and they are going to jail. While you shouldn't let law enforcement agents look at anything they want, making them fill out a form everytime they search for a criminal record would be pretty excessive. And it probably wouldn't have stopped these guys anyway.
Ultimately, you have to trust people with information, and tell them that they will go to jail if they divulge it. You can only control it so much. Since these people were caught and will be put on trial, I fail to see how it's an example of how the system doesn't work.
To take the side of microsoft, it is possible that they factor in losses to license enforcement activity.
In other words, they may get the same amount of money or more from a few schools with strict licensing control than from many schools with lax licensing control.
Anyway, any medium or larger organization that uses commercial software should probably have some sort of auditing software that helps them manage software licenses. It is part of the implied cost of running commercial software.
Finally, I really don't think it's unreasonable for a software company to ensure that its copyright is not being violated. I doubt there's a 'nice' way to do an audit.
I do not run a webserver. I do not spend all day downloading mp3's, or anime, or what have you. I play some games online, occasionally download some programs, and read my email, and use icq. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I download about 250 megs of stuff a month.
Why do I pay the same amount as somebody who downloads 10 gigs of stuff a month? There are infrastructure costs (as with any other utility), but ultimately my money goes to pay for the hardcore anime fan's habit.
Furthermore, if I want to, say, run a webserver so friends can download movies I made, I can't. Why? Because my broadband provider is trying to lower excessive bandwidth, and doesn't allow any webservers. Which shuts me out, even if I can afford the bandwidth for my website which gets 100 hits a month (which is optimistic for my website).
People Need To Pay For The Bandwidth They Use. I dislike that my bill goes to pay for somebody else's excessive usage. You should pay for bandwidth like you pay for your cellphone. During business hours, it's a cent a meg. Off hours, it's a quarter of a cent. Whatever. I don't want to pay for your bandwidth.
invariably, somebody responds who has actually _done_ this, which is 10,000 times better than a google search. I.E. any moron can search google, but only somebody who has done it before can tell you what works and what doesn't, which is extremely important, considering the scale of the project.
I think that mainstream renditions have a great potential to suck people into the real thing. How many people got into anime because they adored the (now much-maligned) robotech cartoon from the '80s?
On one hand, I side with the purists. But they have to admit that exposure like this swells their ranks. And, in this case, it likely makes the creators boatloads of moneys, which also indirectly benefits them.
Yeah, I was about to say that... I lived in northern virginia until a few months ago. I remember seeing a yellow beetle with a large autobot symbol by McTaco Hut (McD's/Pizza Hut/Taco Bell) in reston.
didn't vivendi drop any pretense of a DMCA violation and stick to traditional copyright violations? About everything else the "vivendi rep" says is legally questionable, and seemingly unrelated to vivendi's actual positions, or at least as I understood them.
Or this just a joke/hoax that isn't very funny/convincing?
There are ways of thorougly testing software to make sure that, for all intents and purposes, it is bug free.
It isn't that doing so is impossible. It is just that it is prohibitively expensive. Microsoft could release a bug free OS with no public beta if they spent half a trillion dollars on testing each version.
There is software that is life-critical. If it had bugs, it could kill people. Like air traffic control software, or some medical software, or traffic light software, or flight-control or weapon-guidance software. This kind of software is the beneficiary of a really thorough, very costly testing process that normal software (about everything we normally use) just doesn't receive.
Basically, software does not have to be buggy. However, 99% of the time, it is not financially responsible to make sure that is the case.
My dad was a store detective for a little while. He can still spot people who are about to shoplift. If people will do it in front of a security camera in a store, they will do it in front of a security camera anywhere else. Furthermore, despite claims to the contrary, there is no a priori evidence that such a system would be computationally intractable.
If other programs rely on exploder to render web pages, it would be pretty trivial to publish an API spec documenting that, and allow other browser developers to implement the API. It is hardly 'impossible', as microsoft claims.
In fact, it's kind of a basic tenet of object-oriented programming, which microsoft execs and lawyers are evidently not familiar with.
That is correct. However, the things that the software companies 'have' is a government-granted monopoly on ownership of their work, aka "copyright".
Your argument sidesteps this fact. First, any argument about how much money companies lose in sales to piracy is purely speculative. Secondly, by illegal copying, you are violating a copyright. That copyright just so happens to have a dollar value. Whether or not the company would have made any money from you is irrelevant..
Well, I'm not sure about copy protection being all bad. I think, to some extent, that software makers (especially game console makers:) ) can protect their revenues somewhat by copy protection. (What proportion of the ~80 million PlayStation owners have the mod chip, or even know of its existence? How many of those same 80 million used napster without even thinking of the legal implications?)
However, the key is having non-intrusive copy protection, let alone non-legislated copy protection:)
Software companies lose _billions_ of dollars a year to piracy. Yet none of them support legislation. They protect their profits by actively pursuing copyright violators. And they know a great deal more about technology than the MPAA does.
Commercial speech deservces less protection than non-commercial speech.
Why?
If all your spam was from non-profits, or individuals with a bone to pick, would that make you happier? Do you support insipid chain-mails, since they come from people rather than corporations?
The lack of apparent financial motives (or any motive, for that matter) is hardly a justification for permitting spam.
I'm too lazy to look it up, but I would imagine filing a fake summons would be a fairly serious crime, because you would be impersonating an officer of the court. If someone did it to you as a prank, you could have them thrown in jail. If only we had that fallback for spam.
Prior to WWII, the U.S. had contingency plans for going to war against the -brits-. I'm sure we still do today. That doesn't mean that they aren't our closest allies. That just means we aren't caught with our pants down if something goes horribly awry.
Same thing here. We aren't going to go to war. But we gotta have plans for everything.
The real deal is why it was leaked. Probably by somebody that doesn't like bush.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, all of the reported allegations of intimidation or corruption in the florida 2000 elections were found to be false. But the mainstream press never reported that (or at least never reported it loudly).
But it costs a lot of money to do that. And computer software is no different than any business. It's worth it for a business to let 5 or 10% of their customer base leave if that customer base is costing more money than it makes.
It isn't typically profitable to have a professional mechanic pick up the phone every time you call your dealership (unless it's a luxury place), and it isn't typically profitable to make relatively bugless software. Welcome to the World Of Business.
Plus, I don't think the government would like the fact that you're demeaning their judgement capabilities when you still have billions of dollars of contracts with them (and are in the midst of trying to win billions more).
Plus, government contracting is so over-regulated that I wouldn't be surprised if you just plain _aren't_ allowed to talk badly about your competitors.
It's kind of disingenous to say "The U.S. government wants X" when one senator has expressed interest in introducing a bill that says X. If the Secretary of Commerce came out and said X, then that means "The U.S. government wants X." But congresspersons introduce legislation all the time, and to take the opinion of one of them as the creed of the entire government is a bit innacurate.
Not too sure about things marked 'D', but I know the government can't hold normal people responsible for the dissemination of classified information. Normal, as in don't have a security clearance or haven't signed an NDA. That's why reporters can print stuff that has been leaked.
First of all, this type of program would help prevent all sports injuries that weren't the result of physical trauma (which may only be 5 or 10%).
I think the biggest thing, though, would be to keep people from keeping bad habits. Mario Lemiuex, for example, was plagued by back problems through the best years of his career. Finally, a few years ago, he went to some specialists who hooked him up to a computer that told him he had bad posture. He fixed his posture, and he's suddenly (miraculously) healthy. Well, except for the hip problems now (heavy sigh of a pens fan).
The problem with these bad habits is that I believe they aggravate the physical trauma. Some bad behaviors could outright lead to a greater chance of an injury, e.g. if you weren't always keeping your head down when making a tackle in american football. And some other bad behaviors (like mario's previously mentioned bad posture) can either transform routine contact into an injury, or aggravate an injury (if the area in question is already messed up from poor form).
I would actually like to see football players wearing little electrode suits, hooked to cameras watching the field, that would send muscle impulses to appropriate players if a potential life-threatened injury was imminent. :)
It's very hard to argue that a software bug causing unintended data collection results in an 'unreasonable' search. Especially if the data was never accessed. There's no such thing as constitutionslaughter.
Frankly, if we were willing to lose some ground-hugging robots with stun guns, we could probably win a war without actually killing any of the enemy, just imprisoning them for a little while ;)
Ultimately, you have to trust people with information, and tell them that they will go to jail if they divulge it. You can only control it so much. Since these people were caught and will be put on trial, I fail to see how it's an example of how the system doesn't work.
In other words, they may get the same amount of money or more from a few schools with strict licensing control than from many schools with lax licensing control.
Anyway, any medium or larger organization that uses commercial software should probably have some sort of auditing software that helps them manage software licenses. It is part of the implied cost of running commercial software.
Finally, I really don't think it's unreasonable for a software company to ensure that its copyright is not being violated. I doubt there's a 'nice' way to do an audit.
Why do I pay the same amount as somebody who downloads 10 gigs of stuff a month? There are infrastructure costs (as with any other utility), but ultimately my money goes to pay for the hardcore anime fan's habit.
Furthermore, if I want to, say, run a webserver so friends can download movies I made, I can't. Why? Because my broadband provider is trying to lower excessive bandwidth, and doesn't allow any webservers. Which shuts me out, even if I can afford the bandwidth for my website which gets 100 hits a month (which is optimistic for my website).
People Need To Pay For The Bandwidth They Use. I dislike that my bill goes to pay for somebody else's excessive usage. You should pay for bandwidth like you pay for your cellphone. During business hours, it's a cent a meg. Off hours, it's a quarter of a cent. Whatever. I don't want to pay for your bandwidth.
invariably, somebody responds who has actually _done_ this, which is 10,000 times better than a google search. I.E. any moron can search google, but only somebody who has done it before can tell you what works and what doesn't, which is extremely important, considering the scale of the project.
On one hand, I side with the purists. But they have to admit that exposure like this swells their ranks. And, in this case, it likely makes the creators boatloads of moneys, which also indirectly benefits them.
Yeah, I was about to say that ... I lived in northern virginia until a few months ago. I remember seeing a yellow beetle with a large autobot symbol by McTaco Hut (McD's/Pizza Hut/Taco Bell) in reston.
Or this just a joke/hoax that isn't very funny/convincing?
It isn't that doing so is impossible. It is just that it is prohibitively expensive. Microsoft could release a bug free OS with no public beta if they spent half a trillion dollars on testing each version.
There is software that is life-critical. If it had bugs, it could kill people. Like air traffic control software, or some medical software, or traffic light software, or flight-control or weapon-guidance software. This kind of software is the beneficiary of a really thorough, very costly testing process that normal software (about everything we normally use) just doesn't receive.
Basically, software does not have to be buggy. However, 99% of the time, it is not financially responsible to make sure that is the case.
My dad was a store detective for a little while. He can still spot people who are about to shoplift. If people will do it in front of a security camera in a store, they will do it in front of a security camera anywhere else. Furthermore, despite claims to the contrary, there is no a priori evidence that such a system would be computationally intractable.
I knew I had heard it somewhere, but couldn't remember where. It was driving me crazy. thanks :)
"Irving J. Spiderman" (pronounced "SPIdermin")
In fact, it's kind of a basic tenet of object-oriented programming, which microsoft execs and lawyers are evidently not familiar with.
That is correct. However, the things that the software companies 'have' is a government-granted monopoly on ownership of their work, aka "copyright".
Your argument sidesteps this fact. First, any argument about how much money companies lose in sales to piracy is purely speculative. Secondly, by illegal copying, you are violating a copyright. That copyright just so happens to have a dollar value. Whether or not the company would have made any money from you is irrelevant..
However, the key is having non-intrusive copy protection, let alone non-legislated copy protection :)
Software companies lose _billions_ of dollars a year to piracy. Yet none of them support legislation. They protect their profits by actively pursuing copyright violators. And they know a great deal more about technology than the MPAA does.
Why?
If all your spam was from non-profits, or individuals with a bone to pick, would that make you happier? Do you support insipid chain-mails, since they come from people rather than corporations?
The lack of apparent financial motives (or any motive, for that matter) is hardly a justification for permitting spam.
I'm too lazy to look it up, but I would imagine filing a fake summons would be a fairly serious crime, because you would be impersonating an officer of the court. If someone did it to you as a prank, you could have them thrown in jail. If only we had that fallback for spam.
Prior to WWII, the U.S. had contingency plans for going to war against the -brits-. I'm sure we still do today. That doesn't mean that they aren't our closest allies. That just means we aren't caught with our pants down if something goes horribly awry.
Same thing here. We aren't going to go to war. But we gotta have plans for everything.
The real deal is why it was leaked. Probably by somebody that doesn't like bush.