If you've got macros in assembler with macros that make structs and arrays easy, you're not writing real assembler but one of those new-fangled intermediate languages. That's a step up right there.
Anyhow, its the storage allocation that is the big thing. I just don't agree that it makes such a small difference. It isn't just the need to free up what you use - that's relatively easy. It's the constant checking of whether you've got enough or need to reallocate, and the sometimes complicated and error-prone calculations of how much you need.
I'm a very experienced C-programmer (24 years) and the storage allocation idioms reside in my fingertips, yet when dealing with a lot of variable length strings, for example, I know that it is much faster to write in a high-level language like Tcl than in C. And studies of programmers seem to show this quantitatively.
Another feature that I suspect is helpful, if not in making things go faster, in reducing the expenditure of mental energy, is the use of iterators like foreach. Being able to iterate over a list without having to worry about what the first index is and what the last index is etc. as with a C-style for makes it much easier.
It is much more difficult to master and retain the syntax of some languages than of others, so a lot of the time you aren't going to know them equally well. In any case, I think you're just wrong about language not making a difference. It is much slower to write in a low-level language than in a high-level language. Sure, you may have mastered the syntax, but you still have to spend time and mental energy keeping track of what goes where if you don't have data structures like structs and arrays, and just adding automatic storage allocation and garbage collection saves a lot of time and bugs.
I think find is the wrong word. What Microsoft probably means to say is that they aren't providing a backdoor gratis. They're continuing their standard program of selling different backdoors,to different buyers, the better hidden and more serious, the higher the price. Even Microsoft couldn't really be so incompetant, could it? And this explains why they're so slow to fix so many security flaws: every time they fix one, it breaches their contact with some government and costs them money.
Some clinics may happen to have doctors and nurses who speak the languages of their clientele, but communication between patients and medical staff is a significant problem in the United States. I had a post
about this on Language Log a while back that contains links to other information. There are large numbers of patients who do not speak English well and cannot make use of a clinic whose staff speak their language. That may be because they speak a language that is not well enough represented in the US. In many cases an ethnic group is underrepresented in the medical profession. There are lots of Chinese doctors, for example, but even proportionately very few Hmong. And in many places the distribution of people just doesn't work out so as to match X-speaking patients with X-speaking medical staff. And of course when people travel or have an emergency or need to see a specialist they aren't in a position to go to a particular clinic that serves their ethnic group.
The result is that in many cases the children of immigrants interpret for them. There are several problems with this. One is that they may not have a good knowledge of medical terminology and will misunderstand or make mistakes. A second is that they may not be good interpreters. Just speaking two languages doesn't mean you will do a good job of interpreting. A third problem is that people often do not want to talk about their medical problems in front of their friends or relatives, especially children. They may be embarassed or they may not want to burden them with their problems.
A fourth problem is that the friend or relative may have a vested interest and, consciously or unconsciously, slant the interpretation. They may downplay the patient's symptoms or exagerate them, depending on their attitude toward the patient
(e.g. "Mom is such a hypochondriac!"), and they may distort the doctor's instructions if they don't like them (e.g. because they find them burdensome or they have joined a sect that believes in faith healing or herbal medicine or whatever). A fifth problem is that, if the interpreter is a child, having the child interpret for the parent can create a problematic inversion of parent-child relations that makes the patient feel helpless. Finally, children often feel stressed by this kind of interpreting and may even decide that they are responsible for the adult's illness.
For all these reasons, providing trained medical interpreters is highly desirable. One approach in use in the US is to contract with a telephone service. That way a wide range of languages is available. A device like this won't entirely replace a good interpreter since it is limited to a certain set of questions and responses and some patients, especially elderly ones, will have difficulty communicating with a machine, but assuming that it is well done, it will be quite useful.
Passenger flights rely on instruments to make their schedules. If they didn't, they'd have to circle or divert whenever the conditions were too bad for a safe visual landing. In many areas that would mean a lot of messed up schedules.
Even with instruments, they are conservative and sometimes will not land when, for example, they have too low a ceiling. I was once on my way from San Francisco to Bergen, Norway, via London. The ceiling in London was zero so they decided not to land and went on to the next scheduled stop, which was Frankfurt. Of course I missed my flight fron London to Bergen. I had to reschedule and fly from Frankfurt to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Oslo, and then Oslo to Bergen, arriving many hours later than I was supposed to. You don't really want people having to do a lot of this.
The other problem is that its one thing to fly without instruments and other thing to use them and have them suddenly conk out, which could easily happen if some jerk decides to make a call during a landing approach, for example.
The difference is that there are good arguments that society as a whole benefits from things like public education even if particular individuals don't benefit directly. The case for public education is a lot stronger than the case for subsidizing high profit margins in a particular business model for music. It isn't a law of nature or even an obvious social good that music companies and their executives should make such large amounts of money, nor is there any good reason to keep this business model. If music as a commodity is not workable as a business model, musicians could, for example, make their money from live performances, as they did not so long ago before audio recording existed.
What about all the CD's that are not used to copy music? I have NEVER made a music CD. I use blank CDs for computer backup and storage and to store non-commercial recordings of speech, primarily ones that I have recorded myself. Why should I pay the music companies? I may be unusual in never making music CDs, but there are surely large numbers of people who use CDs for things that have nothing to do with music.
My understanding is that SCO is closely held, that is, that most of the stock is owned by insiders. That means that it would be impossible to buy SCO without the consent of the insiders.
Yes, but the facts in this case are arguably differentiable. The plaintiff claims that the thumbnails are of sufficiently high quality as to be of independent value and therefore that copying them is not fair use. As evidence it points to the fact that they sell the very same thumbnails for use on PDAs. I'm not saying that I favor their case, but it gives them a colorable argument that the existing ruling on thumbnails is not applicable.
You have to read the whole article carefully. Perfect 10 is suing on TWO grounds. One is for linking to other sites that display their images. The other is for displaying the thumbnails. The first is indeed BS. The second may not be.
AT&T did extensive testing of this sort for telephone components. I don't know when they started doing, but when I was at Bell Labs in 1982-83, there was a fenced off section of the grounds, kind of like a family garden, except instead of vegetables it contained telephone components, exposed to the elements. They apparently did this at other sites too.
The Kerry example is not good either. As with the Bush example, the entity enforcing the copyright is not Kerry or his campaign, it is the professional photographer who took the pictures. Professional photographers tend to be fussy about copyright for commercial reasons - there isn't any reason to believe that this one is attempting any sort of censorship. Indeed, one of the first comments on Slashdot was from the photographer for Howard Dean's campagin making this very point.
Here again, if these photographs were the only evidence of something of public concern, it is very likely that the courts would hold their reproduction to be fair use.
Uh, "limited circumstances" like one TV interview, not exactly most or all or even a very significant part of the material relevant to a presidential election. Furthermore, if you actually red the article about the Bush case, you'll discover two crucial points. First, there's no evidence that Bush or his people had any role in this. It was NBC. Second, and crucially, in spite of the fact that NBC refused permission, the journalist in question used the clip anyway, relying on his Fair Use rights.
So, as I said, the Fair Use doctrine may need clarification and strengthening, but even as it stands it does a good job of preventing the use of copyright restrictions for censorship.
Censorship is normally construed to mean prevention of publication of what the writer has to say, which most of the time takes the form of his or her own words. Therefore, in copyright restrictions can only lead to censorship in limited circumstances. They aren't a broad tool for censorship as you suggest.
It is true, though, that sometimes what one has to say requires the citation of someone elses words as evidence. This is supposed to be covered by the Fair use exemption. The classic case is that of a book review, but non-literary cases, like citation of individual definitions from a dictionary, the Scientology papers, and the Diebold documents, also fall under Fair Use. You'll note that although Diebold briefly made trouble with copyright claims, when the matter went to court the court told Diebold to jump in the lake.
So, the Fair Use doctrine needs to be clarified and strengthened, and where absent, added to the statutes, and DRM needs to be restricted so as not to interfere with Fair use, but it isn't fair to say that copyright poses a major and general threat to freedom of speech.
Not really. Censorship means preventing the originator of the information from publishing it. Protecting privacy means enabling the originator of the information to keep it private, that is, not to publish it if he or she does not wish to. The one case in which protection of privacy and censorship come together is when party A wants to publish information about party B. There is then a potential conflict between A's freedom of speech and B's right to privacy.
In US law, and generally in the law of countries that protect freedom of speech and of the press, the protection of party B is addressed by means other than censorship, that is, either by laws preventing the release of confidential information in the first place (so that, e.g., your doctor is forbidden to release your medical information to a journalist without your permission, so in principle the journalist will never be in a position to publish it) or through the ability to sue someone who libels you or violates a non-disclosure agreement or its statutory equivalent.
So, yes, in certain circumstances there is a conflict between freedom of speech and privacy and protection of privacy and censorship therefore come to have similar goals, but this is true only in certain circumstances involving personal information and may, and is in many countries, addressed by means other than censorship.
In my experience there is actually quite a lot of use of Linux as well as other Unices in universities, but the distribution is skewed. You tend to get Unix in the techier departments in which there is motivation to roll your own. Thus, I've seen a lot of Unix not only in CS and engineering departments but in Linguistics and Psychology, but my impression is that you don't get so much in science departments in which people's needs are fairly homogeneous and there is enough money for commercial software to have been produced that fills those needs nicely. Where I was last teaching, the machines the department provided for the grad students were a mixture of Wintel machines and Macs, the phonetics lab was 75% Linux, 25% Wintel, the department's main machine ran Solaris and then switched to Linux, and the main machine of an associated research institute ran FreeBSD.
On the other hand, most Humanities departments seem to be overwhelmingly MS Windows or Mac users, as are most of the general purpose computing facilities. The Humanities people tend not to want or be able to take care of their own machines and don't compute anything, so they won't change unless the IT people do or they have a strong motivation to change on their own. One factor that will be influential for people in some areas is support for multilingual and "exotic" language word-processing. A lot of East Asianists, for example, are dedicated Mac users because that's where the good East Asian word-processing was to be found. I think that the Unices will make inroads in these areas through a combination of offering what users like the East Asianists need (and OpenOffice.org Writer looks like it is doing pretty well, though the rendering for some writing systems is still problematic) and through IT people pushing the security and lower TCO of Linux and the BSDs.
Student demand for Unix might play a role, but it isn't clear to me how great that is outside of the more technical majors.
To begin with, the house was over-assessed at $400 million,
not $800 million. Suppose that the town's budget was $100 million. The article says that the real value of the house as about $121,900 on which property tax of $1500 had been paid the previous year. That gives us a tax rate of 1.23%. So the town's assessed base is about $8.13 billion. A shortfall of $8 million on a budget of $100 million could be "significant", yet the disparity in the assessed base is only 4.9%. So, yes, there could be a significant problem from the shortfall with a sufficiently modest (apparent) change in the assessed base that it wouldn't raise eyebrows if one didn't know that it was due to a single house.
Here in British Columbia the homestead exemption is mentioned right on your property tax bill. It gives you the amount to pay if you are not eligible for the exemption, the amount to pay if you are, and the criteria for the exemption. It isn't a secret known only to tax professionals and those in the know.
The people who planned the budget probably didn't know how large a contribution to the property tax base that one house made. They just get a total base value and from that compute the tax money that they have to work with. Of course, if the change in the base is much larger than expected, you'd think that somebody would look into why, but I suppose that there is a range of changes that are small enough that nobody thought to look into the reason for the change but large enough that their being in error could cause some significant budget problems.
It seems fairly plausible that the people doing the budget were not negligent. The people who set up the database, on the other hand, should have had sanity checks for things like this. I also wonder about the timing. In the jurisdictions that I am familiar with, you get an assessment notice for your property months before the tax is actually do, so if there is a problem you've got time to deal with it. For the same reason, it seems like they shouldn't be calculating tax revenue only a short time after assessment.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure this is a good thing for FLOSS. In military usage, "engage" means "fight", as in "We engaged the enemy at 09:00 and killed them all."
If you've got macros in assembler with macros that make structs and arrays easy, you're not writing real assembler but one of those new-fangled intermediate languages. That's a step up right there.
Anyhow, its the storage allocation that is the big thing. I just don't agree that it makes such a small difference. It isn't just the need to free up what you use - that's relatively easy. It's the constant checking of whether you've got enough or need to reallocate, and the sometimes complicated and error-prone calculations of how much you need.
I'm a very experienced C-programmer (24 years) and the storage allocation idioms reside in my fingertips, yet when dealing with a lot of variable length strings, for example, I know that it is much faster to write in a high-level language like Tcl than in C. And studies of programmers seem to show this quantitatively.
Another feature that I suspect is helpful, if not in making things go faster, in reducing the expenditure of mental energy, is the use of iterators like foreach. Being able to iterate over a list without having to worry about what the first index is and what the last index is etc. as with a C-style for makes it much easier.
It is much more difficult to master and retain the syntax of some languages than of others, so a lot of the time you aren't going to know them equally well. In any case, I think you're just wrong about language not making a difference. It is much slower to write in a low-level language than in a high-level language. Sure, you may have mastered the syntax, but you still have to spend time and mental energy keeping track of what goes where if you don't have data structures like structs and arrays, and just adding automatic storage allocation and garbage collection saves a lot of time and bugs.
Since when does a press release have any credibility?
I think find is the wrong word. What Microsoft probably means to say is that they aren't providing a backdoor gratis. They're continuing their standard program of selling different backdoors,to different buyers, the better hidden and more serious, the higher the price. Even Microsoft couldn't really be so incompetant, could it? And this explains why they're so slow to fix so many security flaws: every time they fix one, it breaches their contact with some government and costs them money.
Some clinics may happen to have doctors and nurses who speak the languages of their clientele, but communication between patients and medical staff is a significant problem in the United States. I had a post about this on Language Log a while back that contains links to other information. There are large numbers of patients who do not speak English well and cannot make use of a clinic whose staff speak their language. That may be because they speak a language that is not well enough represented in the US. In many cases an ethnic group is underrepresented in the medical profession. There are lots of Chinese doctors, for example, but even proportionately very few Hmong. And in many places the distribution of people just doesn't work out so as to match X-speaking patients with X-speaking medical staff. And of course when people travel or have an emergency or need to see a specialist they aren't in a position to go to a particular clinic that serves their ethnic group.
The result is that in many cases the children of immigrants interpret for them. There are several problems with this. One is that they may not have a good knowledge of medical terminology and will misunderstand or make mistakes. A second is that they may not be good interpreters. Just speaking two languages doesn't mean you will do a good job of interpreting. A third problem is that people often do not want to talk about their medical problems in front of their friends or relatives, especially children. They may be embarassed or they may not want to burden them with their problems. A fourth problem is that the friend or relative may have a vested interest and, consciously or unconsciously, slant the interpretation. They may downplay the patient's symptoms or exagerate them, depending on their attitude toward the patient (e.g. "Mom is such a hypochondriac!"), and they may distort the doctor's instructions if they don't like them (e.g. because they find them burdensome or they have joined a sect that believes in faith healing or herbal medicine or whatever). A fifth problem is that, if the interpreter is a child, having the child interpret for the parent can create a problematic inversion of parent-child relations that makes the patient feel helpless. Finally, children often feel stressed by this kind of interpreting and may even decide that they are responsible for the adult's illness.
For all these reasons, providing trained medical interpreters is highly desirable. One approach in use in the US is to contract with a telephone service. That way a wide range of languages is available. A device like this won't entirely replace a good interpreter since it is limited to a certain set of questions and responses and some patients, especially elderly ones, will have difficulty communicating with a machine, but assuming that it is well done, it will be quite useful.
Hmm, is Microsoft's new logo a polar bear?
Passenger flights rely on instruments to make their schedules. If they didn't, they'd have to circle or divert whenever the conditions were too bad for a safe visual landing. In many areas that would mean a lot of messed up schedules.
Even with instruments, they are conservative and sometimes will not land when, for example, they have too low a ceiling. I was once on my way from San Francisco to Bergen, Norway, via London. The ceiling in London was zero so they decided not to land and went on to the next scheduled stop, which was Frankfurt. Of course I missed my flight fron London to Bergen. I had to reschedule and fly from Frankfurt to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Oslo, and then Oslo to Bergen, arriving many hours later than I was supposed to. You don't really want people having to do a lot of this.
The other problem is that its one thing to fly without instruments and other thing to use them and have them suddenly conk out, which could easily happen if some jerk decides to make a call during a landing approach, for example.
Okay, so his approach to obtaining the material was less than ideal, at least he knows how to read!
The difference is that there are good arguments that society as a whole benefits from things like public education even if particular individuals don't benefit directly. The case for public education is a lot stronger than the case for subsidizing high profit margins in a particular business model for music. It isn't a law of nature or even an obvious social good that music companies and their executives should make such large amounts of money, nor is there any good reason to keep this business model. If music as a commodity is not workable as a business model, musicians could, for example, make their money from live performances, as they did not so long ago before audio recording existed.
Unfortunately, they wouldn't be useful as recording media: gold has the virtue of not oxidizing, but it is too soft.
What about all the CD's that are not used to copy music? I have NEVER made a music CD. I use blank CDs for computer backup and storage and to store non-commercial recordings of speech, primarily ones that I have recorded myself. Why should I pay the music companies? I may be unusual in never making music CDs, but there are surely large numbers of people who use CDs for things that have nothing to do with music.
My understanding is that SCO is closely held, that is, that most of the stock is owned by insiders. That means that it would be impossible to buy SCO without the consent of the insiders.
Yes, but the facts in this case are arguably differentiable. The plaintiff claims that the thumbnails are of sufficiently high quality as to be of independent value and therefore that copying them is not fair use. As evidence it points to the fact that they sell the very same thumbnails for use on PDAs. I'm not saying that I favor their case, but it gives them a colorable argument that the existing ruling on thumbnails is not applicable.
You have to read the whole article carefully. Perfect 10 is suing on TWO grounds. One is for linking to other sites that display their images. The other is for displaying the thumbnails. The first is indeed BS. The second may not be.
AT&T did extensive testing of this sort for telephone components. I don't know when they started doing, but when I was at Bell Labs in 1982-83, there was a fenced off section of the grounds, kind of like a family garden, except instead of vegetables it contained telephone components, exposed to the elements. They apparently did this at other sites too.
Good point. I agree.
The Kerry example is not good either. As with the Bush example, the entity enforcing the copyright is not Kerry or his campaign, it is the professional photographer who took the pictures. Professional photographers tend to be fussy about copyright for commercial reasons - there isn't any reason to believe that this one is attempting any sort of censorship. Indeed, one of the first comments on Slashdot was from the photographer for Howard Dean's campagin making this very point.
Here again, if these photographs were the only evidence of something of public concern, it is very likely that the courts would hold their reproduction to be fair use.
Uh, "limited circumstances" like one TV interview, not exactly most or all or even a very significant part of the material relevant to a presidential election. Furthermore, if you actually red the article about the Bush case, you'll discover two crucial points. First, there's no evidence that Bush or his people had any role in this. It was NBC. Second, and crucially, in spite of the fact that NBC refused permission, the journalist in question used the clip anyway, relying on his Fair Use rights.
So, as I said, the Fair Use doctrine may need clarification and strengthening, but even as it stands it does a good job of preventing the use of copyright restrictions for censorship.
Censorship is normally construed to mean prevention of publication of what the writer has to say, which most of the time takes the form of his or her own words. Therefore, in copyright restrictions can only lead to censorship in limited circumstances. They aren't a broad tool for censorship as you suggest.
It is true, though, that sometimes what one has to say requires the citation of someone elses words as evidence. This is supposed to be covered by the Fair use exemption. The classic case is that of a book review, but non-literary cases, like citation of individual definitions from a dictionary, the Scientology papers, and the Diebold documents, also fall under Fair Use. You'll note that although Diebold briefly made trouble with copyright claims, when the matter went to court the court told Diebold to jump in the lake.
So, the Fair Use doctrine needs to be clarified and strengthened, and where absent, added to the statutes, and DRM needs to be restricted so as not to interfere with Fair use, but it isn't fair to say that copyright poses a major and general threat to freedom of speech.
Not really. Censorship means preventing the originator of the information from publishing it. Protecting privacy means enabling the originator of the information to keep it private, that is, not to publish it if he or she does not wish to. The one case in which protection of privacy and censorship come together is when party A wants to publish information about party B. There is then a potential conflict between A's freedom of speech and B's right to privacy.
In US law, and generally in the law of countries that protect freedom of speech and of the press, the protection of party B is addressed by means other than censorship, that is, either by laws preventing the release of confidential information in the first place (so that, e.g., your doctor is forbidden to release your medical information to a journalist without your permission, so in principle the journalist will never be in a position to publish it) or through the ability to sue someone who libels you or violates a non-disclosure agreement or its statutory equivalent.
So, yes, in certain circumstances there is a conflict between freedom of speech and privacy and protection of privacy and censorship therefore come to have similar goals, but this is true only in certain circumstances involving personal information and may, and is in many countries, addressed by means other than censorship.
In my experience there is actually quite a lot of use of Linux as well as other Unices in universities, but the distribution is skewed. You tend to get Unix in the techier departments in which there is motivation to roll your own. Thus, I've seen a lot of Unix not only in CS and engineering departments but in Linguistics and Psychology, but my impression is that you don't get so much in science departments in which people's needs are fairly homogeneous and there is enough money for commercial software to have been produced that fills those needs nicely. Where I was last teaching, the machines the department provided for the grad students were a mixture of Wintel machines and Macs, the phonetics lab was 75% Linux, 25% Wintel, the department's main machine ran Solaris and then switched to Linux, and the main machine of an associated research institute ran FreeBSD.
On the other hand, most Humanities departments seem to be overwhelmingly MS Windows or Mac users, as are most of the general purpose computing facilities. The Humanities people tend not to want or be able to take care of their own machines and don't compute anything, so they won't change unless the IT people do or they have a strong motivation to change on their own. One factor that will be influential for people in some areas is support for multilingual and "exotic" language word-processing. A lot of East Asianists, for example, are dedicated Mac users because that's where the good East Asian word-processing was to be found. I think that the Unices will make inroads in these areas through a combination of offering what users like the East Asianists need (and OpenOffice.org Writer looks like it is doing pretty well, though the rendering for some writing systems is still problematic) and through IT people pushing the security and lower TCO of Linux and the BSDs. Student demand for Unix might play a role, but it isn't clear to me how great that is outside of the more technical majors.
To begin with, the house was over-assessed at $400 million, not $800 million. Suppose that the town's budget was $100 million. The article says that the real value of the house as about $121,900 on which property tax of $1500 had been paid the previous year. That gives us a tax rate of 1.23%. So the town's assessed base is about $8.13 billion. A shortfall of $8 million on a budget of $100 million could be "significant", yet the disparity in the assessed base is only 4.9%. So, yes, there could be a significant problem from the shortfall with a sufficiently modest (apparent) change in the assessed base that it wouldn't raise eyebrows if one didn't know that it was due to a single house.
Here in British Columbia the homestead exemption is mentioned right on your property tax bill. It gives you the amount to pay if you are not eligible for the exemption, the amount to pay if you are, and the criteria for the exemption. It isn't a secret known only to tax professionals and those in the know.
The people who planned the budget probably didn't know how large a contribution to the property tax base that one house made. They just get a total base value and from that compute the tax money that they have to work with. Of course, if the change in the base is much larger than expected, you'd think that somebody would look into why, but I suppose that there is a range of changes that are small enough that nobody thought to look into the reason for the change but large enough that their being in error could cause some significant budget problems.
It seems fairly plausible that the people doing the budget were not negligent. The people who set up the database, on the other hand, should have had sanity checks for things like this. I also wonder about the timing. In the jurisdictions that I am familiar with, you get an assessment notice for your property months before the tax is actually do, so if there is a problem you've got time to deal with it. For the same reason, it seems like they shouldn't be calculating tax revenue only a short time after assessment.