Actually, you can still do this. Its just that most people don't want to receive a lump of what might be gold (and the attendant responsibility for validating it, weighing it, etc) in exchange for cooking you some pancakes. In the age of international shipping we're currently in it also holds your country's currency hostage to the countries that own the mines and can increase your money supply for you.
Libertarians have no problem with courts, using courts, or trademarks. Quite the opposite: clear and reliable information is important for markets to function, and the purpose of courts is to impose remedies when people break contracts or lie. So there is nothing inconsistent with his ideology to bring in WIPO over this.
Other than the fact that the folk behind RonPaul.com didn't break any contract or lie. If they had, I'd agree with you. As it is they spent many, many hours of their own time building up a fan club that Ron Paul felt he deserved to get for nothing. That desire does not a contract make.
The article lacks numbers, but I have a feeling their asking price was far above and beyond the threshold of reasonable amounts. I just don't care enough to delve into it at 4:59 in the afternoon.
It was a quarter mil. Not an unreasonable amount to pay for the list of data it came with actually, from a fundraising data point of view - and that's ignoring all of the other social value. Of course, as a libertarian, he should admire their hard work and pricing power but feel free to walk away from a deal that's not beneficial to him.
...it doesn't actually look like Paul is guilty of anything but refusing to accept a settlement that was unreasonable in the first place.
"You want this one? You can have it for free - but this one over here we've added a shit-ton of value to so we want some compensation (below free-market rate IMO) for it."
Doesn't seem terribly unreasonable to me, even ignoring the fact that RP likes to tell people that he's something close to a pure libertarian.
if the recipient stores the message (through a camera screen capture for example), then it is clear s/he is going against the wishes of the sender, and that ultimately could have legal ramifications.
If that's acceptable, then just send your naked pictures with a little note saying, "Hey, please delete this instead of sharing it with your frat and checkoutmynakedgirlfried.com, mmmkay?" Either the technology as-is is adequate (in which case you don't need it), or its not (in which case you shouldn't use it).
Their marketing, however, appears to be fantastic, since the previous logic isn't being used.
Please mentally insert the symbol for pi between "not displaying" and "+ 1" in that sentence. You'd think that I'd remember that slashcode can't handle high-byte characters by now, but apparently not.
Interestingly enough in some tests (where it matters) I'll actually try to work in some randomized round-trip testing so that, for this example, we will create two numbers A and B, add them together to get C and then subtract A expecting B. Naturally they need to be in addition to expected hard-coded tests, but occasionally I've found interesting random defects in my assumptions that way.
Besides, very few specs will actually give you information like the maximum values of those numbers. When they do, there's probably another unwritten assumption that the answers display somewhere - what do you do when the length of the result overflows the screen real estate? Scroll? Wrap? And whatever your answer, how does that work with screen readers? And does it print?
There are always unwritten expectations - but there are also always situations where there may be no right answer. That's just the reality of the current state of development. One man's bug is another man's stupid user.
1+1=3 is a bug. Not displaying + 1 in its entirety is not a bug, even if the specification was written in such a way as to make it so.
I have a saying: "a bug is just something you forgot to specify". I do TDD, BDD, and ATDD, so not meeting the specs is never an issue.
Since the specs never cover all situations, but are instead interpreted by humans no two of which think alike, I would argue that meeting the specs does indeed continue to be an issue.
It may be expensive to write bug-free code, but it is always better than having software with bugs in it (which you then have to test and fix).
That's pretty naive I'm afraid. Let's go back to the all-popular house analogy. When you build a house you expect it to be correct within tolerance. Countertops level to within a certain amount of slope, et cetera. You can get a "more perfect" house/car/software-product, but there are always tolerances - and reducing tolerances begins to cost orders of magnitude more the further you go.
Most specs are also dreadfully naive (they have to be). They will almost certainly contain contradictions, such as a maximum size (database should grow no more than xxGB/day based on current user growth projections) and a flexible entry system (comments should not be limited in length) - in the Real World those requirements will almost certainly work, but if someone (who is a projected user) pastes in the Linux source code into new comment blocks all day every day it'll fail pretty quickly). Is that a bug, or (like demanding.01mm tolerances in house construction) just an unreasonable expectation?
In what other industry in the world would it be acceptable that a consumer of services be expected to pay to put right defects and problems with a supplied product? If I go into a shop or store and buy an item such as a pair of trousers which doesn't have pockets and I'd asked for a pair of trousers with pockets then I wouldn't expect to pay for pockets to be sewn in.
However, if you'd asked for "a pair of trousers" and hadn't specified whether or not it had pockets because you were accustomed to them - even though not all styles of trousers have them - would that still be an issue? There's not delivering code to spec which I would argue isn't a bug, its not an accepted delivery. Then there are issues like the pockets - is that a bug?
What if you'd specified pockets that you could put your phone into (generic, but it worked) and 3 months after getting the pants you got a new phone that was larger and didn't fit. You didn't specify "current phone" so you could argue that the trousers now contained a bug because you'd specified that they should work with all generic phones, but was that a reasonable expectation to make? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't.
There's bugs where a program doesn't follow the specs (logic bugs)...
There are also missed understandings because no software spec (at least below space shuttle controller level) is written to an adequate degree to ensure a complete and proper understanding of it.
Let's take a basic login screen. You can enter your email address and a password. A developer might take a reasonable approach and limit the email address field to 255 characters - when someone comes in with a ludicrous email address and the system won't let them use that is that a bug in the spec or a bug in the code? Is it even a bug? If you say that the system should "obviously" accept "any" input, what happens when someone dumps the contents of war and peace into each field and you run out of disk space?
The amount of design flexibility in software exceeds that in physical construction by at least two orders of magnitude. There are building codes that specify things like the minimum static and dynamic loads for each floor in a building - so that that information gets #include'd in to every set of plans by default. There are no such equivalents for software, yet software specs typically end up being far shorter and more vague than building plans.
The fact that there are missed assumptions on each side should come as no surprise - in fact there are so many of them that asking either side to "document all assumptions" is equally silly. That's just part of the reality of software development that we live in today.
Actually, that's just not true - or at least not usefully true. A modern SSD should perform just fine far beyond the expected life of a laptop. Of course, anything may fail, but outside of a lab experiment even early adopters of laptop SSDs aren't finding themselves suddenly bereft of data. Exaggerating the risks just reduces credibility.
You have to admit that the final finale was brilliant, though. "You're going to bring us back for another season? Oh, I think not..."
Although it still has the possibility of Avon somehow ducking and letting the circular firing squad just shoot itself, but that's somewhat unlikely given the length of the barrage.
Nuclear Energy is dangerous, it produces a lot of hazardous wastes.
Yup. Totally agree. The thing is... so does Coal. And oil. And natural gas. Small scale solar actually has more deaths from installers falling off roofs than you'd think All power is somewhat dangerous - nuclear just happens to be the least dangerous we have.
FFS, coal mining and burning puts more radioactivity into the system than nuclear waste would if the plants just ground up their detritus and spewed it into the sky - while removing the natural landscape - but we're used to it so it doesn't count.
That their "athiest branding" sometimes gums some automated processing step and hence kicks the package out to a manual sort could also explain it. If their athiest packaging tape sometimes covers part of the address label or something. Of course you would expect the non-US shipments to have the same profile in that case and they didn't.
And along with their motivations you should also note that they've stopped using their athiest branding on US packages and delivery times have improved.
The branded tape was replaced with similarly positioned white tape - and while manual sorting might add a whole day to the process (since it takes some amount of time that could cause a package to miss the regular shipment on to the next station), it should never add more than that (and rarely make a noticeable difference). Besides, if that was the case than every package/postcard/you name it with branding on it would have this problem - and that doesn't appear to be the case.
Well, they did similar (although smaller) tests in other countries and saw no difference, so it was unlikely German customs. And US customs generally has far less opportunity for someone to tweak results like the USPS does, especially in their last-mile service.
The goal there is to have things put away during takeoff and landing. The problem is if you let them use things during taxi it is not reasonable to expect them to follow the rules and put them away before takeoff.
If this were true, then presumably I wouldn't have been asked to turn off my e-ink Kindle while sitting next to the guy juggling a hardback book, a pizza (!), and a large cup of hot coffee in his lap. I totally get the argument against tray tables, since you can't just drop them to the floor in an emergency, but banning small electronics based on evacuation fears is groundless.
For that matter, you're even allowed to carry your laptop in your lap during takeoff and landing as long as its turned off. So... if the rule is about evacuation, its focussing on entirely the wrong areas.
Personally, I think this one has an excellent chance of sticking around for the same reason that Voice is sticking around. It's a great feature for Android.
Yup. In the same way that having a service that made it easy for people to get self-selected articles from authors they know and trust delivered directly to their phones to, uh, "Read" when they had a spare minute would be a great feature too...
The real issue with the google distrust is their current opaqueness.
In the large population centers of the north east, even gasoline cars can be difficult to start on the colder winter days. Diesel cars would be hopeless at -20F without special attention or a heated garage, where a gasoline engines generally work at lower temperatures than Diesel. Things are a bit colder here than in Europe.
Have you actually looked at a decent map of Europe? Its far from all being Mediterranean, you know, and happens to host many high mountain ranges and get buried under metres of snow just like Canada does.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you can still do this. Its just that most people don't want to receive a lump of what might be gold (and the attendant responsibility for validating it, weighing it, etc) in exchange for cooking you some pancakes. In the age of international shipping we're currently in it also holds your country's currency hostage to the countries that own the mines and can increase your money supply for you.
Libertarians have no problem with courts, using courts, or trademarks. Quite the opposite: clear and reliable information is important for markets to function, and the purpose of courts is to impose remedies when people break contracts or lie. So there is nothing inconsistent with his ideology to bring in WIPO over this.
Other than the fact that the folk behind RonPaul.com didn't break any contract or lie. If they had, I'd agree with you. As it is they spent many, many hours of their own time building up a fan club that Ron Paul felt he deserved to get for nothing. That desire does not a contract make.
The article lacks numbers, but I have a feeling their asking price was far above and beyond the threshold of reasonable amounts. I just don't care enough to delve into it at 4:59 in the afternoon.
It was a quarter mil. Not an unreasonable amount to pay for the list of data it came with actually, from a fundraising data point of view - and that's ignoring all of the other social value. Of course, as a libertarian, he should admire their hard work and pricing power but feel free to walk away from a deal that's not beneficial to him.
Nah, let's just bring the WIPO into it.
As one of those libertarian types, clearly he felt that anything being offered for free was a trap....
and anything that was being offered for money was too expensive, even though he really wanted it, so he should get it for frees.
...it doesn't actually look like Paul is guilty of anything but refusing to accept a settlement that was unreasonable in the first place.
"You want this one? You can have it for free - but this one over here we've added a shit-ton of value to so we want some compensation (below free-market rate IMO) for it."
Doesn't seem terribly unreasonable to me, even ignoring the fact that RP likes to tell people that he's something close to a pure libertarian.
Guess that depends on where they live.
Pity. Token ring gets even more interesting when there's a second computer to talk to :)
if the recipient stores the message (through a camera screen capture for example), then it is clear s/he is going against the wishes of the sender, and that ultimately could have legal ramifications.
If that's acceptable, then just send your naked pictures with a little note saying, "Hey, please delete this instead of sharing it with your frat and checkoutmynakedgirlfried.com, mmmkay?" Either the technology as-is is adequate (in which case you don't need it), or its not (in which case you shouldn't use it).
Their marketing, however, appears to be fantastic, since the previous logic isn't being used.
Please mentally insert the symbol for pi between "not displaying" and "+ 1" in that sentence. You'd think that I'd remember that slashcode can't handle high-byte characters by now, but apparently not.
Looks like a bug to me...
Interestingly enough in some tests (where it matters) I'll actually try to work in some randomized round-trip testing so that, for this example, we will create two numbers A and B, add them together to get C and then subtract A expecting B. Naturally they need to be in addition to expected hard-coded tests, but occasionally I've found interesting random defects in my assumptions that way.
Besides, very few specs will actually give you information like the maximum values of those numbers. When they do, there's probably another unwritten assumption that the answers display somewhere - what do you do when the length of the result overflows the screen real estate? Scroll? Wrap? And whatever your answer, how does that work with screen readers? And does it print?
There are always unwritten expectations - but there are also always situations where there may be no right answer. That's just the reality of the current state of development. One man's bug is another man's stupid user.
1+1=3 is a bug. Not displaying + 1 in its entirety is not a bug, even if the specification was written in such a way as to make it so.
I have a saying: "a bug is just something you forgot to specify". I do TDD, BDD, and ATDD, so not meeting the specs is never an issue.
Since the specs never cover all situations, but are instead interpreted by humans no two of which think alike, I would argue that meeting the specs does indeed continue to be an issue.
It may be expensive to write bug-free code, but it is always better than having software with bugs in it (which you then have to test and fix).
That's pretty naive I'm afraid. Let's go back to the all-popular house analogy. When you build a house you expect it to be correct within tolerance. Countertops level to within a certain amount of slope, et cetera. You can get a "more perfect" house/car/software-product, but there are always tolerances - and reducing tolerances begins to cost orders of magnitude more the further you go.
Most specs are also dreadfully naive (they have to be). They will almost certainly contain contradictions, such as a maximum size (database should grow no more than xxGB/day based on current user growth projections) and a flexible entry system (comments should not be limited in length) - in the Real World those requirements will almost certainly work, but if someone (who is a projected user) pastes in the Linux source code into new comment blocks all day every day it'll fail pretty quickly). Is that a bug, or (like demanding .01mm tolerances in house construction) just an unreasonable expectation?
This is what is "wrong" with IT in general.
In what other industry in the world would it be acceptable that a consumer of services be expected to pay to put right defects and problems with a supplied product? If I go into a shop or store and buy an item such as a pair of trousers which doesn't have pockets and I'd asked for a pair of trousers with pockets then I wouldn't expect to pay for pockets to be sewn in.
However, if you'd asked for "a pair of trousers" and hadn't specified whether or not it had pockets because you were accustomed to them - even though not all styles of trousers have them - would that still be an issue? There's not delivering code to spec which I would argue isn't a bug, its not an accepted delivery. Then there are issues like the pockets - is that a bug?
What if you'd specified pockets that you could put your phone into (generic, but it worked) and 3 months after getting the pants you got a new phone that was larger and didn't fit. You didn't specify "current phone" so you could argue that the trousers now contained a bug because you'd specified that they should work with all generic phones, but was that a reasonable expectation to make? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't.
There are also missed understandings because no software spec (at least below space shuttle controller level) is written to an adequate degree to ensure a complete and proper understanding of it.
Let's take a basic login screen. You can enter your email address and a password. A developer might take a reasonable approach and limit the email address field to 255 characters - when someone comes in with a ludicrous email address and the system won't let them use that is that a bug in the spec or a bug in the code? Is it even a bug? If you say that the system should "obviously" accept "any" input, what happens when someone dumps the contents of war and peace into each field and you run out of disk space?
The amount of design flexibility in software exceeds that in physical construction by at least two orders of magnitude. There are building codes that specify things like the minimum static and dynamic loads for each floor in a building - so that that information gets #include'd in to every set of plans by default. There are no such equivalents for software, yet software specs typically end up being far shorter and more vague than building plans.
The fact that there are missed assumptions on each side should come as no surprise - in fact there are so many of them that asking either side to "document all assumptions" is equally silly. That's just part of the reality of software development that we live in today.
I think it can be integrated in flying cars, to have invisible 3D-printed flying cars.
I believe that this is already the case. Leastwise, I've never seen one... have you?
Kids today... what ever happened to dip switches with your chips?
Actually, that's just not true - or at least not usefully true. A modern SSD should perform just fine far beyond the expected life of a laptop. Of course, anything may fail, but outside of a lab experiment even early adopters of laptop SSDs aren't finding themselves suddenly bereft of data. Exaggerating the risks just reduces credibility.
You have to admit that the final finale was brilliant, though. "You're going to bring us back for another season? Oh, I think not..."
Although it still has the possibility of Avon somehow ducking and letting the circular firing squad just shoot itself, but that's somewhat unlikely given the length of the barrage.
Nuclear Energy is dangerous, it produces a lot of hazardous wastes.
Yup. Totally agree. The thing is... so does Coal. And oil. And natural gas. Small scale solar actually has more deaths from installers falling off roofs than you'd think All power is somewhat dangerous - nuclear just happens to be the least dangerous we have.
FFS, coal mining and burning puts more radioactivity into the system than nuclear waste would if the plants just ground up their detritus and spewed it into the sky - while removing the natural landscape - but we're used to it so it doesn't count.
That their "athiest branding" sometimes gums some automated processing step and hence kicks the package out to a manual sort could also explain it. If their athiest packaging tape sometimes covers part of the address label or something. Of course you would expect the non-US shipments to have the same profile in that case and they didn't.
And along with their motivations you should also note that they've stopped using their athiest branding on US packages and delivery times have improved.
The branded tape was replaced with similarly positioned white tape - and while manual sorting might add a whole day to the process (since it takes some amount of time that could cause a package to miss the regular shipment on to the next station), it should never add more than that (and rarely make a noticeable difference). Besides, if that was the case than every package/postcard/you name it with branding on it would have this problem - and that doesn't appear to be the case.
Well, they did similar (although smaller) tests in other countries and saw no difference, so it was unlikely German customs. And US customs generally has far less opportunity for someone to tweak results like the USPS does, especially in their last-mile service.
The goal there is to have things put away during takeoff and landing. The problem is if you let them use things during taxi it is not reasonable to expect them to follow the rules and put them away before takeoff.
If this were true, then presumably I wouldn't have been asked to turn off my e-ink Kindle while sitting next to the guy juggling a hardback book, a pizza (!), and a large cup of hot coffee in his lap. I totally get the argument against tray tables, since you can't just drop them to the floor in an emergency, but banning small electronics based on evacuation fears is groundless.
For that matter, you're even allowed to carry your laptop in your lap during takeoff and landing as long as its turned off. So... if the rule is about evacuation, its focussing on entirely the wrong areas.
Personally, I think this one has an excellent chance of sticking around for the same reason that Voice is sticking around. It's a great feature for Android.
Yup. In the same way that having a service that made it easy for people to get self-selected articles from authors they know and trust delivered directly to their phones to, uh, "Read" when they had a spare minute would be a great feature too...
The real issue with the google distrust is their current opaqueness.
Thanks for the heads up on this issue. The letter that was posted next to the review on DigitalRev was not sent in response to the review.
That explains why their DCMA request clearly pointed to the URL of their online store:
Accordingly, we hereby demand that Softlayer.com immediately remove or disable access to the Infringing Material at:
http://www.digitalrev.com/article/gopro-hero-3-vs-sony/Njk3MDQ3MDg_A
Yup. Nothing to do with the review here...
In the large population centers of the north east, even gasoline cars can be difficult to start on the colder winter days. Diesel cars would be hopeless at -20F without special attention or a heated garage, where a gasoline engines generally work at lower temperatures than Diesel. Things are a bit colder here than in Europe.
Have you actually looked at a decent map of Europe? Its far from all being Mediterranean, you know, and happens to host many high mountain ranges and get buried under metres of snow just like Canada does.