Under the initiative, those acquitted have to petition to court to remove their sample. Seems like an undue burden after being falsely accused. I'd be more likely to support the initiative if the samples were only taken after conviction.
From the article:
Although the initiative allows people to have their DNA information pulled from the database and destroyed if they have been found innocent or released without charges, it requires a court order and a complicated stack of paperwork before it can be done.
With C++ or at least a C compiler
And then your compiler generates bad assembly and if you don't understand assembly, you can't figure what the problem is. Compilers outputing incorrect assembly has happened to me several times.
Computing is all about layers. To be really good at the layer you work at, you need to know something about the layers above you and the layers below you. For C/C++ programming, this means having an understanding of assembly and how the operating system works. I've seen many bad implementations when progammers did not understand the consquences of what they were doing.
I can see how you may have difficulties comprehending my position. As a marxist you may place the purported greater good before that of the individual. As one who believes instead that society is only protected when individuals rights are protected, I do not.
Even marxists should have a problem this kinda of excsessive tracking. Marxists should be concerened about all the evil things a corporatist facists can do with this information if they hold government power. An right wingers should be concerend about all the evil things marxists could with it if they are in power. Mao's China or USSR would have loved RFID tracking of people's movements.
To go along with these instrusive schemes, is to gamble people you don't like and think are unscrupulous will NEVER be in position of power to abuse the information to their own ends. History shows this to be a bad bet.
Let me pick the best picture out of 20 I take on my crappy 1 megapixel Kodak and I will put it up against any camera (even the really awesome expensive ones) if you only take one picture with that camera.
This is such a bogus statement. Most fine art photographers use large format view cameras where setting up one shot can take an hour and the good ones get amazing results. These photographers do not take hundreds of pictures to get a half dozen. It would take too long and be too expensive.
Speaking from experience in working a startup that was PhD heavy, PhD employees can have a lot of draw backs. Spening all those years in school, they tend to learn to be self-promoters and self-aggrandizing. Not all of them are like this. Some of the best people I've ever worked with had PhDs but so did some of the worst.
It's too early tell how it will work out for Google. It's easy to manage even problem people at the stage Google is at. Everybody there is looking forward to the big IPO and will be well behaved. A year from now the employees will be over the initial shock of being instant millionaires and some them will start to get gready and power hungry. All those PhDs who spent years in academia finely honing their self-promotion skills will set to work on promoting themselves and trying to roll over everything else that is in their way whether or not it's in Google's best interest.
The real test of your code is: can someone ELSE debug it, using whatever the heck tools they want.
I like the sentiment but the best test of any code is whether the next person would rather maintain it than write a new version him/herself. Software engineers have a bias towards rewriting stuff. If they decide it's easier to maintain the code you wrote, then you know you did a damn fine job.
The study's analysis and conclusions are bizarre. Looking at the data, none of factors considered seem to have much predictive value. US and Indian projects followed different paths but almost identical defect rates and their "productivity rates" (as if that can be measured in lines of code) are not that far off.
Japan came out way ahead in terms of defects and lines of codes yet the studies authors don't talk about much about this result at all. They really seem to want to focus on a comparison of India vs. the rest of the world.
Valenti's logic is flawed. Outlawing something because it has bad uses is not a standard that's routinely used in US public policy. If it were, private ownership of firearms would be the first thing to go. Firearms have really noxious uses, like murder. Far worse, in my opinion, than a movie studio losing some money to copyright.
Most people don't understand the statistics involved when it comes to expected norms of commercial airplane safety. There are almost 10,000,000 commerical airplane flights a year so if unlimited cell phone crashed only 1 in 10,000,000 flights, one plane every year would be lost. Even if it's 1 in a 100,000,000, that's one plane every ten years. I just don't think it's a worth plane crash with potentially hundreds of passengers dead just so people can talk for cheap on their cell phones.
And besides, airplanes are one of few respites in the modern world from constant cell phone ringing. If phones were found to be safe on planes, every flight would become a cacophony of really irrating ring tones. Forget ever being able to sleep on a plane again.
Thousands of bills of introduced into state legislatures every year which go no where. Any legislator can introduce a bill and there's no requirement that the bill have any support beyond the person introducing it.
Even if did have some support, auto dealers make a lot political contributions and have big political clout. Their lobbyists will make sure it dies. Ever wonder why you have to buy a new car through dealer rather direct from the manufacturer? Auto dealer's clout
Seeing the source is only a issue if the source contains trade secrets. Now the the code is widely available, the question is whether the information contained is still legally a trade secret. Microsoft's legal department will undoubtably insist it still is.
The best predcident I can think of is the unauthorized disclosure of RSA's RC2 & RC4 algorithims. The poster is correct that it's better not look and avoid the fight, not because it is not legal look, but rather Microsoft has the resources to bury you in legal challenges.
You'd be much worse off looking at your employeer's legal copy of the Windows source because that copy is definately protected by trade protection.
On my 12" inch Powerbook screen, the dock at 70 pixels is a disaster. There's not enough screen real estate to spare.
And Tog is right on about how the hiding dock is problematic due to dock reappear if the mouse pointer gets anywhere near the bottom on the screen. The dock's usable but not great on larger screens but on small ones, it's needs major improvement.
Persuation is not necessary. The EU is much more serious about stoping anti-competitive behavior than the US Justice Department is (or has been under any administration) The EU didn't cave on the GE Honeywell merger which shows it is capable of strong action over the protests of major US corportions and the US government.
The RIAA is dreaming if they think consumers are going to go out and replace all their CD players. Past successful format changes have all brought something really beneficial to the consumer. Vinyl wasn't portable, degraded with usage and wasn't user recordable. Thus, 8-track and later cassette catch on.
The only advantage that a new format can provide over CD is higher quality due to a combination of more space and better encodings. For most people, CD is good enough. Most the equipment I use to play CDs does not have high enough quality speakers to benefit from improved sound. I agree with the myriad of other posts saying that making the format the size of postage stamp isn't an advantage since this format would be hard to handle and easy to lose.
Given the lack of benefit to the consumer, it seems highly unlikely to me that consumers will embrace a new format when they have to replace all their equipment or go back to the hassle of not being able to listen in their cars or rooms that don't have the right equipment. At least before CD became ubiquitous, CDs could be easily copied to tape for listening in the car.
I do not believe it's possible to have a secure electronic ballot system and still keep the ballots secret. Financial institutions use audits to prevent their computer systems from defrauding them. An audit requires knowing the details of every transaction. With voting, this would require knowing who voted for which candidate.
Open source would be better but there are still attacks that can be done (compiler code insertion, voting officials secretly tampering with code). Paper systems have a record that can be examined later which is the best defense against fraud.
Considering the risk of fraud and error, it seems crazy to me use an electronic voting system. Optical scan ballots have most of the advantages of electronic systems and none of the problems. They are checked for over votes by the ballot box machine. Because they are counted at the machine, tallys are very fast. If there's a dispute, the paper ballots are human readable.
If a computer program is not expression, it really ought not be entitled to copyright protection. One can't copyright the mechanical design of a clock. The problem here is that software companies want to assert every possible intellectual property right to software (copyright, patent, trade secret) to make more money. Copyright was created to protect a particular creative expression. Patents were created to protect a particular machine which is why the US patent law specifically excludes algorithims. I can't think of an example of something other than software that has both copyright and patent protection.
There is no "stray mark" problem. In my county, the elections are conducted with optical scan ballots. The ballot box is actually a machine that the scans ballot and rejects it if you accidentally vote for two candidates in the same race. If you ballot is rejected, you get a fresh ballot to start over. Optical scan eliminates all the problems of punch cards and is not subject to electronic tampering since it uses a paper ballot.
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Under the initiative, those acquitted have to petition to court to remove their sample. Seems like an undue burden after being falsely accused. I'd be more likely to support the initiative if the samples were only taken after conviction.
From the article:
Although the initiative allows people to have their DNA information pulled from the database and destroyed if they have been found innocent or released without charges, it requires a court order and a complicated stack of paperwork before it can be done.
With C++ or at least a C compiler And then your compiler generates bad assembly and if you don't understand assembly, you can't figure what the problem is. Compilers outputing incorrect assembly has happened to me several times.
Computing is all about layers. To be really good at the layer you work at, you need to know something about the layers above you and the layers below you. For C/C++ programming, this means having an understanding of assembly and how the operating system works. I've seen many bad implementations when progammers did not understand the consquences of what they were doing.
Even marxists should have a problem this kinda of excsessive tracking. Marxists should be concerened about all the evil things a corporatist facists can do with this information if they hold government power. An right wingers should be concerend about all the evil things marxists could with it if they are in power. Mao's China or USSR would have loved RFID tracking of people's movements.
To go along with these instrusive schemes, is to gamble people you don't like and think are unscrupulous will NEVER be in position of power to abuse the information to their own ends. History shows this to be a bad bet.
This is such a bogus statement. Most fine art photographers use large format view cameras where setting up one shot can take an hour and the good ones get amazing results. These photographers do not take hundreds of pictures to get a half dozen. It would take too long and be too expensive.
Speaking from experience in working a startup that was PhD heavy, PhD employees can have a lot of draw backs. Spening all those years in school, they tend to learn to be self-promoters and self-aggrandizing. Not all of them are like this. Some of the best people I've ever worked with had PhDs but so did some of the worst.
It's too early tell how it will work out for Google. It's easy to manage even problem people at the stage Google is at. Everybody there is looking forward to the big IPO and will be well behaved. A year from now the employees will be over the initial shock of being instant millionaires and some them will start to get gready and power hungry. All those PhDs who spent years in academia finely honing their self-promotion skills will set to work on promoting themselves and trying to roll over everything else that is in their way whether or not it's in Google's best interest.
I like the sentiment but the best test of any code is whether the next person would rather maintain it than write a new version him/herself. Software engineers have a bias towards rewriting stuff. If they decide it's easier to maintain the code you wrote, then you know you did a damn fine job.
The study's analysis and conclusions are bizarre. Looking at the data, none of factors considered seem to have much predictive value. US and Indian projects followed different paths but almost identical defect rates and their "productivity rates" (as if that can be measured in lines of code) are not that far off.
Japan came out way ahead in terms of defects and lines of codes yet the studies authors don't talk about much about this result at all. They really seem to want to focus on a comparison of India vs. the rest of the world.Valenti's logic is flawed. Outlawing something because it has bad uses is not a standard that's routinely used in US public policy. If it were, private ownership of firearms would be the first thing to go. Firearms have really noxious uses, like murder. Far worse, in my opinion, than a movie studio losing some money to copyright.
Most people don't understand the statistics involved when it comes to expected norms of commercial airplane safety. There are almost 10,000,000 commerical airplane flights a year so if unlimited cell phone crashed only 1 in 10,000,000 flights, one plane every year would be lost. Even if it's 1 in a 100,000,000, that's one plane every ten years. I just don't think it's a worth plane crash with potentially hundreds of passengers dead just so people can talk for cheap on their cell phones.
Look here for statistical information on airplane safety
And besides, airplanes are one of few respites in the modern world from constant cell phone ringing. If phones were found to be safe on planes, every flight would become a cacophony of really irrating ring tones. Forget ever being able to sleep on a plane again.
Take one. My expirence is that companies that come up with stupid policies like this tend to make stupid business decisions.
Thousands of bills of introduced into state legislatures every year which go no where. Any legislator can introduce a bill and there's no requirement that the bill have any support beyond the person introducing it.
Even if did have some support, auto dealers make a lot political contributions and have big political clout. Their lobbyists will make sure it dies. Ever wonder why you have to buy a new car through dealer rather direct from the manufacturer? Auto dealer's clout
Seeing the source is only a issue if the source contains trade secrets. Now the the code is widely available, the question is whether the information contained is still legally a trade secret. Microsoft's legal department will undoubtably insist it still is.
The best predcident I can think of is the unauthorized disclosure of RSA's RC2 & RC4 algorithims. The poster is correct that it's better not look and avoid the fight, not because it is not legal look, but rather Microsoft has the resources to bury you in legal challenges.
You'd be much worse off looking at your employeer's legal copy of the Windows source because that copy is definately protected by trade protection.
On my 12" inch Powerbook screen, the dock at 70 pixels is a disaster. There's not enough screen real estate to spare.
And Tog is right on about how the hiding dock is problematic due to dock reappear if the mouse pointer gets anywhere near the bottom on the screen. The dock's usable but not great on larger screens but on small ones, it's needs major improvement.
Persuation is not necessary. The EU is much more serious about stoping anti-competitive behavior than the US Justice Department is (or has been under any administration) The EU didn't cave on the GE Honeywell merger which shows it is capable of strong action over the protests of major US corportions and the US government.
The RIAA is dreaming if they think consumers are going to go out and replace all their CD players. Past successful format changes have all brought something really beneficial to the consumer. Vinyl wasn't portable, degraded with usage and wasn't user recordable. Thus, 8-track and later cassette catch on. The only advantage that a new format can provide over CD is higher quality due to a combination of more space and better encodings. For most people, CD is good enough. Most the equipment I use to play CDs does not have high enough quality speakers to benefit from improved sound. I agree with the myriad of other posts saying that making the format the size of postage stamp isn't an advantage since this format would be hard to handle and easy to lose. Given the lack of benefit to the consumer, it seems highly unlikely to me that consumers will embrace a new format when they have to replace all their equipment or go back to the hassle of not being able to listen in their cars or rooms that don't have the right equipment. At least before CD became ubiquitous, CDs could be easily copied to tape for listening in the car.
I do not believe it's possible to have a secure electronic ballot system and still keep the ballots secret. Financial institutions use audits to prevent their computer systems from defrauding them. An audit requires knowing the details of every transaction. With voting, this would require knowing who voted for which candidate.
Open source would be better but there are still attacks that can be done (compiler code insertion, voting officials secretly tampering with code). Paper systems have a record that can be examined later which is the best defense against fraud.
Considering the risk of fraud and error, it seems crazy to me use an electronic voting system. Optical scan ballots have most of the advantages of electronic systems and none of the problems. They are checked for over votes by the ballot box machine. Because they are counted at the machine, tallys are very fast. If there's a dispute, the paper ballots are human readable.
If a computer program is not expression, it really ought not be entitled to copyright protection. One can't copyright the mechanical design of a clock. The problem here is that software companies want to assert every possible intellectual property right to software (copyright, patent, trade secret) to make more money. Copyright was created to protect a particular creative expression. Patents were created to protect a particular machine which is why the US patent law specifically excludes algorithims. I can't think of an example of something other than software that has both copyright and patent protection.
There is no "stray mark" problem. In my county, the elections are conducted with optical scan ballots. The ballot box is actually a machine that the scans ballot and rejects it if you accidentally vote for two candidates in the same race. If you ballot is rejected, you get a fresh ballot to start over. Optical scan eliminates all the problems of punch cards and is not subject to electronic tampering since it uses a paper ballot.