I've often thought that a lot of the "lawsuit reform" inspiring cases could be handled slightly differently...
Punative damages work. You can (and others have) argue that they're the only things that really work against corporations, since its hard to make McDonalds do, say, community service, or serve jail time.
However, there's no reason at all why the original plaintive should receive them (and, by extension, why their lawyers should receive 30% of them). Why not have them go to something like federal defecit reduction, or a similar program for states and lower municipalities?
The corporation is still punished. The plaintiff still receives the non-punative (ie: deserved) portion of the settlement. Nobody becomes an instant billionaire just because their parents died in a spectacularly newsworthy way.
Being fair, though, there's a huge difference between being a few pounds over ideal and the average American. And yes, I'm over here too. I would challenge most people to take a trip overseas - pretty much anywhere. Even stereotypically "fat" countries like Germany. Hang out for a couple of weeks, then head back to the 'States - you'd be amazed, really.
"Average" does not automatically equal "healthy."
Put it this way - the last time I was in Germany, I hit a mall for some new clothes (long trip). The average starting waist size for pants was 28". Over here, in some stores its 32" and in other stores (typically "cheaper" ones like Kohl's) its getting hard to find some styles starting under 34". Here, a personal size pizza is often 12" diameter (10" if its a deep pan). In Germany, the common sizes were 24 cm (small) and 28 cm (large) - both under 12". Note: this was a completely unscientific study of 5-6 department stores and a single pizzeria, but it was a very interesting observation.
Everyone who bought an iPhone at launch, apparently. Hell, I did - and didn't feel ripped off when the price dropped later, but apparently I was the only one...
Judging matters related to freedoms that you yourself enjoy is not a conflict of interest. If it were, how could judges who owned guns judge Second Amendment issues? How could a judge who smokes judge tobacco-related issues? Quite right! You should extend that, though, to include judges who have chosen not to own guns and not to smoke as well. They're just as much in conflict, if not more so!
I think that fake CP doesn't sink to the level of real CP, but I don't think it can be considered completely harmless to the victim.
'Scuse me for what may be an obvious question, but... who's the victim here? I mean, I'm certainly not an a aficionado here, but other than the knee-jerk "No! Its bad!" reactions, nobody was actually harmed, right?
Admittedly it makes it harder to prosecute genuine cases, but shouldn't it also make it less likely that there would be genuine cases? That'd be a good thing, right?
As long as we're tossing recommendations out there, how about Cherryh? She often seems to get overlooked in these kind of lists, but has a pretty solid writing style and, more to the point, wonderful characterization while maintaining the first rule of sci-fi - pick a universe with rules, and stick to them.
Actually, even though its heavier on elves (not the kind you're thinking of) than spaceships (although its had a couple of those too), the Discworld series by Pratchett is far closer to sci-fi than fantasy in the way that it treats the universe. Damn good writing, too, especially the latter half of the series.
The state isn't taxing Amazon, though. They're requiring Amazon to collect taxes owed by Amazon's customers on behalf of the state. This is how all point-of-sale-collected sales tax works: its not owed by the retailer, but by the consumer, and collected by the retailer both as a convenience (no reporting/payment burden remains) and because consumers have proven remarkably unlikely to actually report and pay the tax themselves. If it wasn't for this, the only actual way to enforce a sales tax would be to require the consumer to identify themselves to the retailer and have their purchase history reported to the state - and we really don't want to go there, do we?
Of course, you can argue the fairness of a sales tax as well (its possibly one of the most regressive forms of taxation ever introduced), but it is the law in most of the US.
Also, don't forget rounding. To the million bytes or so, 17MiB == 17MB. So it really gets stupid at that level. Besides, if we really wanted standards, then KB would refer to 1,000 bytes, since K is the SI prefix for "times a thousand."
Which will - assuming you're referring to DirecTV or Dish Network - continue to work and provide you with your local stations (assuming you're in part of the country that they cover, which is most of the population by now) in a format that you can use.
if a soldier is going to search a house, his warrant is permanent and engraved into the sole of the bot he uses to kick down the door.
Actually, I think that most armies still use actual people. Although a botnet of door-kickers might be useful, as the slashdot tags say, "whatcouldpossiblygowrong?"
Actually, the one thing that we don't have fixed on the desktop is bandwidth. Total processing speed in business-operations-per-second, even in a cluster.
I remember reading an article in the IEEE magazine a few years ago talking about this. It pointed out that microsoft.com was run using a Windows cluster, and a fairly well-designed efficient one at that. I forget how many machines it had in it, but it was quite a lot. They calculated that the entire site, including all of the dynamic operations, could have been deployed using something like 2-1/3 mainframes, for a ton less money... and a ton less latency.
When it comes to getting data in, inspecting it, doing something based on it, and returning a response - over and over again as fast as possible - when downtime is not an option - the mainframe is still King.
Hold up a sec... ignoring the SDK for now, you mention that the iTunes distribution model has problems.
In almost every case, the use of a central repository for software (not required, but available) is seen as a huge strength of most Linux distros, etc. iTunes is just Apple's version of apt-get in this case. If you want to distribute without going through iTunes you still can - but most people would prefer it if you went through iTunes. And in exchange for a relatively small amount of money, you get things like uptime guarantees that the existing central repositories don't actually provide (someone's got to pay for this stuff).
Besides, its totally legitimate to write your own software for the iPhone. If you want to use Apple's tools to do so, or Apple's distribution method, you have to follow a few basic rules (mostly designed so that badly-behaving software will be denied). But there's no requirement to do either one of those two things if you're a hacker/tinkerer.
Let me turn the question around. Why can't I dictate why software gets loaded on "my" device?
You can.
Absolutely, 100%, you can put whatever software you want onto "your" device.
if you develop software with their SDK (and their license terms), they'll help you to distribute it. But you can always do it yourself the hard way.
And if you put non-supported software onto the phone, they reserve the right not to give you support if your phone breaks (since figuring out if it was their fault or your fault would be time-consuming and thus expensive).
But you can do whatever you want to... I'm not sure what your complaint is.
I was once boarding a flight to New York when I was told, arbitrarily at the gate, that I would need to check my smallish bag because there was no more overhead cabin room. "B-but-!" I said. "I'm sorry sir, that's the way it is," they said, grabbing my bag and tying a tag around it. Away went my bag. "You can pick it up at your destination."
What didn't really dawn on me until much later was, how could she possibly know what my destination even WAS? With the hub-and-spoke system airlines use in the U.S., it was foolish of her to assume that my destination was New York.
Have you never gate-checked a bag before? Or seen anyone else do it? Since your bag has already gone through security, it is brought up to the jetway just outside the plane door, usually within 2-3 minutes of arrival (its often there before you can get out of the plane). You see, the flight attendant did indeed know where you were going - the whole plane was going there too. I've never in many years of flying seen a gate-checked item checked through to a final destination.
If your bag was delivered to baggage claim, that was a mistake, but it wasn't hers (the tags that they get are very clearly marked as gate-checked items). More likely it was waiting for you to pick up and you missed it, after which the airline went out of their way to deliver it to you regardless.
Oh, agreed - I'm a software developer myself - but its just another way in which the current software world is not "Engineering" in the legally accepted sense of the term.
Personally, I'd love the creation of a Software Engineering discipline that is both licensed and held accountable, legally. It wouldn't be mandatory (or even necessary) for many projects, but there are certainly some where it would be beneficial. It would also allow some organizations to advertise "Engineered Software" as a benefit, and charge more for it (note that Engineering firms, whatever the discipline, are also licensed independently from Engineers, and any firm offering or promoting Engineering services is generally (possibly always) required by the State to have posted a fairly significant bond that can be forfeited if they are found liable of a disciplinary breech).
Right, but at that point the encryption itself is adding little or no value. The rules engine throwing an exception when a confidential message is sent to the wrong person is what would stop the original problem from occurring - and would be a much better solution, even without throwing potentially complex and confusing encryption systems into the mix.
Then, when they screw up royally and get some people killed, guess who gets the blame... yeah, that's right. The engineer, who was probably doing his best to work with whatever crumbs they gave him. Seems like you hardly ever see the MBAs going to jail, or losing their certifications, when it's usually their fault.
Actually, not quite. And I'm not a PE, but my wife is, so I get a fair amount of this. At least in Texas (and I believe in the other US states but do not know for sure), pretty much the one thing that you cannot do to a PE is to force him or her to seal something against his judgement. And disciplining a PE for not sealing something that they don't feel is ready is the easiest way to have a wealthy, retired PE on your hands. Does this mean that things have to be perfect before they're sealed? Of course not. But it does mean that the PE seal actually does mean something very substantial.
Any licensed Engineer who seals drawings just because some MBA ordered them to even if they don't think they're ready (or haven't taken the time to review them) is not fulfilling their professional obligation and are themselves liable for some pretty strict discipline if anyone (contractors, competitors, etc) find serious problems in them down the line - this is actually a remarkably rare case IRL.
And after that's been widely implemented, when you go to send a message to bsmith@gmail.com and accidentally send it to smith@gmail.com (also in your contact list), the software will dilligently encrypt it using smith's public key and mail it to him. That way, nobody along the route the data bits take can sniff it, and only the accidental wrong recipient will be able to get the scoop on you.
Encryption solves nothing in the case where the message was mis-addressed, unless you encrypt it in a totally different stage of your workflow, typing the address in separately, which is unlikely to be adopted, well, anywhere.
If these guys would use PGP or some other form of encryption, then even if you did send something critical like that to the wrong address, it wouldn't be so devastating. The technology to protect email has been around for nearly twenty years.
That pretty much assumes that the encryption is done out of band. Personally, most usable variants of email encryption are handled by the client itself (at least as an initiant). At some point, when you select "Jim Smith" as the intended recipient, you have to expect that it will be delivered to "Jim Smith" in a format that he can open, regardless of any interim encryption. This might involve encoding it with his public key, but that wouldn't help the fact that you meant to send it to "Jan Smythe" now would it?
Any more intrusive method just wouldn't be used in the real world, since the hugely vast majority of all emails are actually intended to be read by the person that the author listed in the "To:" field. Any kind of catch-all solution smacks of vistaNag.
Also (from the wiki article, but very relevant here):
The Missouri Board of Architects, Professional Engineers, and Land Surveyors convicted the engineers employed by Jack D. Gillum and Associates who had signed off on the final drawings of gross negligence, misconduct, and unprofessional conduct in the practice of engineering; they all lost their engineering licenses in the states of Missouri and Texas and their membership to ASCE. While Jack D. Gillum and Associates itself was cleared of criminal negligence, it was stripped of its license to be an engineering firm.
Unstated, the liklihood of those engineers in question getting licensed anywhere is pretty much zero. With software "engineers," you never have your personal livelihood on the line. That's the difference.
Much as I hate replying to my own post, I dug this up and then forgot to add the link: http://pinouts.ru/Devices/ipod_pinout.shtml. Useful if you feel like getting a little hacky; interesting even if you don't.
The big thing that the iPod dock connector adds is line-level analog audio output. If it had stayed purely in the digital realm, I'd totally agree with you. This allows more expensive electronics to use their own outboard D/As, but cheaper pieces (car adapters, etc) to use the ones built into the iPod (which aren't bad for that kind of environment).
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it turned out that Viacom did indeed have a flag.
I've often thought that a lot of the "lawsuit reform" inspiring cases could be handled slightly differently...
Punative damages work. You can (and others have) argue that they're the only things that really work against corporations, since its hard to make McDonalds do, say, community service, or serve jail time.
However, there's no reason at all why the original plaintive should receive them (and, by extension, why their lawyers should receive 30% of them). Why not have them go to something like federal defecit reduction, or a similar program for states and lower municipalities?
The corporation is still punished. The plaintiff still receives the non-punative (ie: deserved) portion of the settlement. Nobody becomes an instant billionaire just because their parents died in a spectacularly newsworthy way.
Being fair, though, there's a huge difference between being a few pounds over ideal and the average American. And yes, I'm over here too. I would challenge most people to take a trip overseas - pretty much anywhere. Even stereotypically "fat" countries like Germany. Hang out for a couple of weeks, then head back to the 'States - you'd be amazed, really.
"Average" does not automatically equal "healthy."
Put it this way - the last time I was in Germany, I hit a mall for some new clothes (long trip). The average starting waist size for pants was 28". Over here, in some stores its 32" and in other stores (typically "cheaper" ones like Kohl's) its getting hard to find some styles starting under 34". Here, a personal size pizza is often 12" diameter (10" if its a deep pan). In Germany, the common sizes were 24 cm (small) and 28 cm (large) - both under 12". Note: this was a completely unscientific study of 5-6 department stores and a single pizzeria, but it was a very interesting observation.
We really are a pretty fat country.
Everyone who bought an iPhone at launch, apparently. Hell, I did - and didn't feel ripped off when the price dropped later, but apparently I was the only one...
'Scuse me for what may be an obvious question, but... who's the victim here? I mean, I'm certainly not an a aficionado here, but other than the knee-jerk "No! Its bad!" reactions, nobody was actually harmed, right?
Admittedly it makes it harder to prosecute genuine cases, but shouldn't it also make it less likely that there would be genuine cases? That'd be a good thing, right?
As long as we're tossing recommendations out there, how about Cherryh? She often seems to get overlooked in these kind of lists, but has a pretty solid writing style and, more to the point, wonderful characterization while maintaining the first rule of sci-fi - pick a universe with rules, and stick to them.
Actually, even though its heavier on elves (not the kind you're thinking of) than spaceships (although its had a couple of those too), the Discworld series by Pratchett is far closer to sci-fi than fantasy in the way that it treats the universe. Damn good writing, too, especially the latter half of the series.
The state isn't taxing Amazon, though. They're requiring Amazon to collect taxes owed by Amazon's customers on behalf of the state. This is how all point-of-sale-collected sales tax works: its not owed by the retailer, but by the consumer, and collected by the retailer both as a convenience (no reporting/payment burden remains) and because consumers have proven remarkably unlikely to actually report and pay the tax themselves. If it wasn't for this, the only actual way to enforce a sales tax would be to require the consumer to identify themselves to the retailer and have their purchase history reported to the state - and we really don't want to go there, do we?
Of course, you can argue the fairness of a sales tax as well (its possibly one of the most regressive forms of taxation ever introduced), but it is the law in most of the US.
Seems pretty basic to me...
Also, don't forget rounding. To the million bytes or so, 17MiB == 17MB. So it really gets stupid at that level. Besides, if we really wanted standards, then KB would refer to 1,000 bytes, since K is the SI prefix for "times a thousand."
Which will - assuming you're referring to DirecTV or Dish Network - continue to work and provide you with your local stations (assuming you're in part of the country that they cover, which is most of the population by now) in a format that you can use.
Actually, the one thing that we don't have fixed on the desktop is bandwidth. Total processing speed in business-operations-per-second, even in a cluster.
I remember reading an article in the IEEE magazine a few years ago talking about this. It pointed out that microsoft.com was run using a Windows cluster, and a fairly well-designed efficient one at that. I forget how many machines it had in it, but it was quite a lot. They calculated that the entire site, including all of the dynamic operations, could have been deployed using something like 2-1/3 mainframes, for a ton less money... and a ton less latency.
When it comes to getting data in, inspecting it, doing something based on it, and returning a response - over and over again as fast as possible - when downtime is not an option - the mainframe is still King.
Hold up a sec... ignoring the SDK for now, you mention that the iTunes distribution model has problems.
In almost every case, the use of a central repository for software (not required, but available) is seen as a huge strength of most Linux distros, etc. iTunes is just Apple's version of apt-get in this case. If you want to distribute without going through iTunes you still can - but most people would prefer it if you went through iTunes. And in exchange for a relatively small amount of money, you get things like uptime guarantees that the existing central repositories don't actually provide (someone's got to pay for this stuff).
Besides, its totally legitimate to write your own software for the iPhone. If you want to use Apple's tools to do so, or Apple's distribution method, you have to follow a few basic rules (mostly designed so that badly-behaving software will be denied). But there's no requirement to do either one of those two things if you're a hacker/tinkerer.
Let me turn the question around. Why can't I dictate why software gets loaded on "my" device?
You can.
Absolutely, 100%, you can put whatever software you want onto "your" device.
if you develop software with their SDK (and their license terms), they'll help you to distribute it. But you can always do it yourself the hard way.
And if you put non-supported software onto the phone, they reserve the right not to give you support if your phone breaks (since figuring out if it was their fault or your fault would be time-consuming and thus expensive).
But you can do whatever you want to... I'm not sure what your complaint is.
Have you never gate-checked a bag before? Or seen anyone else do it? Since your bag has already gone through security, it is brought up to the jetway just outside the plane door, usually within 2-3 minutes of arrival (its often there before you can get out of the plane). You see, the flight attendant did indeed know where you were going - the whole plane was going there too. I've never in many years of flying seen a gate-checked item checked through to a final destination.
If your bag was delivered to baggage claim, that was a mistake, but it wasn't hers (the tags that they get are very clearly marked as gate-checked items). More likely it was waiting for you to pick up and you missed it, after which the airline went out of their way to deliver it to you regardless.
So that way, only the paint will burn up? Better, but not quite a "Win," as they say.
Oh, agreed - I'm a software developer myself - but its just another way in which the current software world is not "Engineering" in the legally accepted sense of the term.
Personally, I'd love the creation of a Software Engineering discipline that is both licensed and held accountable, legally. It wouldn't be mandatory (or even necessary) for many projects, but there are certainly some where it would be beneficial. It would also allow some organizations to advertise "Engineered Software" as a benefit, and charge more for it (note that Engineering firms, whatever the discipline, are also licensed independently from Engineers, and any firm offering or promoting Engineering services is generally (possibly always) required by the State to have posted a fairly significant bond that can be forfeited if they are found liable of a disciplinary breech).
Right, but at that point the encryption itself is adding little or no value. The rules engine throwing an exception when a confidential message is sent to the wrong person is what would stop the original problem from occurring - and would be a much better solution, even without throwing potentially complex and confusing encryption systems into the mix.
Actually, not quite. And I'm not a PE, but my wife is, so I get a fair amount of this. At least in Texas (and I believe in the other US states but do not know for sure), pretty much the one thing that you cannot do to a PE is to force him or her to seal something against his judgement. And disciplining a PE for not sealing something that they don't feel is ready is the easiest way to have a wealthy, retired PE on your hands. Does this mean that things have to be perfect before they're sealed? Of course not. But it does mean that the PE seal actually does mean something very substantial.
Any licensed Engineer who seals drawings just because some MBA ordered them to even if they don't think they're ready (or haven't taken the time to review them) is not fulfilling their professional obligation and are themselves liable for some pretty strict discipline if anyone (contractors, competitors, etc) find serious problems in them down the line - this is actually a remarkably rare case IRL.
And after that's been widely implemented, when you go to send a message to bsmith@gmail.com and accidentally send it to smith@gmail.com (also in your contact list), the software will dilligently encrypt it using smith's public key and mail it to him. That way, nobody along the route the data bits take can sniff it, and only the accidental wrong recipient will be able to get the scoop on you.
Encryption solves nothing in the case where the message was mis-addressed, unless you encrypt it in a totally different stage of your workflow, typing the address in separately, which is unlikely to be adopted, well, anywhere.
That pretty much assumes that the encryption is done out of band. Personally, most usable variants of email encryption are handled by the client itself (at least as an initiant). At some point, when you select "Jim Smith" as the intended recipient, you have to expect that it will be delivered to "Jim Smith" in a format that he can open, regardless of any interim encryption. This might involve encoding it with his public key, but that wouldn't help the fact that you meant to send it to "Jan Smythe" now would it?
Any more intrusive method just wouldn't be used in the real world, since the hugely vast majority of all emails are actually intended to be read by the person that the author listed in the "To:" field. Any kind of catch-all solution smacks of vistaNag.
Much as I hate replying to my own post, I dug this up and then forgot to add the link: http://pinouts.ru/Devices/ipod_pinout.shtml. Useful if you feel like getting a little hacky; interesting even if you don't.
The big thing that the iPod dock connector adds is line-level analog audio output. If it had stayed purely in the digital realm, I'd totally agree with you. This allows more expensive electronics to use their own outboard D/As, but cheaper pieces (car adapters, etc) to use the ones built into the iPod (which aren't bad for that kind of environment).