The taser-ing may be too much for the current state of the Art of Computer Programming, but issuing speeding tickets ought to be automatic, for example
Be careful what you wish for. We have an extensive speed camera network in the UK, and over a period of time they do reduce average speed, but it's received criticism for a number of reasons:
Speed cameras used as revenue generators - placed in areas which obviously don't need them but there is likely to be a strong temptation to speed.
Used as an alternative to (rather than supplement for) human enforcement - when a human police officer is faced with two drivers, one veering all over the road and the other travelling at 5mph over the limit in a relatively safe area, he'd probably stop the driver veering all over the road. Not so the camera.
Then I am really fscking scared of what will happen when this idea takes off in the UK. They already consider speed cameras to be a perfectly reasonable alternative to traffic police.
Thing is, just like anywhere in the West, it takes ages for a law to be passed in the UK. And revisiting a law because it's not working out how you like it - that takes just as long.
I'd be prepared to bet:
1. That such a copyright extension would not include clauses that the music industry must be regulated for "unacceptable" output. The music industry would instead "pledge" to do so. 2. The music industry will totally forget about the pledge just as soon as the law is passed.
Either that or it's evidence that the US tends to produce customers who are more alert to this kind of thing.
I'm not from the US myself, but IME most American customers are happy to pay for a product but if they get the slightest inkling they're being ripped off.... oooh boy.
Step 1: When you archive a document, make a PDF of it (pretty much anything with a CPU in it will display PDFs these days, I even have homebrew for my PSP that does it). For older text-only documents, ASCII text does the same job. For graphics, make sure to keep converting data to newer file formats (ie..pcx ->.png)
Will it still do so in 20 years time?
For all we know, PDF will have changed substantially and we'll find that the majority of readers have broken the code which renders really old versions.
1. Good luck getting a cassette player. They exist, but they're getting hard to find now. Won't be long before the only real source is eBay and car boot sales. 2. Good luck turning the output into something clean enough to read. Analogue tape degrades rapidly, particularly when you're trying to encode data at any sensible resolution. That's why it was only really used in small home microcomputers, and why even then it only lasted a few years.
This is why so many companies have separate sysadmins these days.
Years ago, systems were simple enough that a programmer with a bit of spare time could easily manage them. Today, however, a typical full-blown system (let's say a web application, for the sake of argument) could easily involve:
Setting up the webserver (particularly if the distribution's default isn't appropriate
Instaling anything the application requires - maybe Tomcat, maybe PHP + a bunch of modules
Setting up a database server and optimising it so the web app doesn't time out waiting for the database to come back
Backing the whole thing up.
Integrating it with existing systems - eg. user authentication, backup, email, systems monitoring.
Now granted, none of these things is particularly onerous - particularly not on a modern Linux distribution - but multiply it by "everything in the company" and quite soon no programmer wants to go near the task.
The upshot is a lot of programmers I've met today are totally lost when faced with sysadmin-type work. That's OK, that's where I make my money. I'm not totally lost with sysadmin type work but I hate bugfixing code with such a passion that I'd rather be sysadminning where I can see results much more quickly.
How the iPod became the dominant MP3 player isn't really the point.
The point is, Universal want an alternative online market, they don't like the one provided by iTunes. Unless they're prepared to drop DRM as a requirement and have whoever sells their music sell it as straight unencumbered MP3s (or something else the iPod can easily be persuaded to play), they're essentially cutting off online sales from most of the portable MP3 players out there. Why?
FWIW, I wouldn't be surprised if they are trolling for a new agreement - one which suits them better.
Huh, I thought I supplied that information to every website I visit.
Except you can choose not to visit sites that have policies you don't approve of. If you're running Vista, you can't choose whether/what information gets transmitted.
Oh noes!!! They need to know my device to supply the driver?
No they don't.
The OS could just as easily maintain a table matching device IDs to appropriate drivers, use that to decide which driver to use and just update this table periodically.
When you lose some of your privacy, many people (myself included) believe the logic you should be using isn't "How does this harm me? If I don't think it does, go ahead". The logic should be "How does this benefit me? If I don't think it does, don't go ahead".
The rationale for this is it may not harm you now. But it may do in the future - and once the information is out, you can't get it back again. It's essentially the human interaction equivalent of default-permit versus default-deny firewall rules. Default permit is more convenient in the short term, but experience suggests that default-deny is a wiser choice in the long term.
Solaris has been 64-bit for years. Yet it supports apps compiled for old 32-bit versions of solaris out of the box - indeed, you wouldn't even know you were running a 32-bit application without explicitly checking.
Oh, I quite agree. The most obvious application solution is for there to be two applications running with separate 4GB virtual address pools and some sort of IPC between them, but that's not exactly elegant.
Right now, Windows 64-bit is in the same kind of situation that NT4 was in back in 1998. Official support for both software and hardware was pretty poor (generally it was "If you can get this to work, well done, but don't come running to us for support"), but everyone knew that sooner or later it, or something like it, would be the way things were done.
Don't get too excited about 64-bit. 32-bit OSs are quite able to handle >4G of RAM provided they support Intel's PAE (basically, the 4GB limit is pushed down to the application).
if it was for other reasons, there are other procedures to be followed
Really? I was under the impression that in the US at least, ISPs aren't exactly terribly well educated. The "procedure" could be "The 14-year-old on the helpdesk fires up Windows Explorer and deletes the customer's home directory".
So Novell can distribute GPLv3'd software because of the grandfather clause, but they can't distribute any of it subject to the agreement with MS without violating either the agreement or the software's license (license requires that they pass that coverage to all indirect recipients, agreement prohibits doing so).
We'll find out exactly what Novell and Microsoft think of how that part of the GPL v3 plays with their agreement when the next version of SuSE comes out and we see whether or not it's been updated with all the FSF's "GPL3 or later" versioned utilities.
Until such time, the exact text of their agreement remains under wraps (yes, I know we've been given the gist of it, but that's not what would be argued in a court case) and we can't be certain what's going to happen. For all we know, there's a line which says "if Novell are forced to choose between this agreement and distributing software, then the agreement becomes null and void".
Immobilisers have been a legal requirement for all cars in the UK for nearly 10 years now. Generally, they're the "microchip in the ignition key" type you describe.
And no, they're not impossible to work around - otherwise anytime someone lost their keys they'd have to write off their car - but they involve more work than your average teenage joyrider is prepared to put in.
This has led to a number of alternate attack vectors being used for car theft:
1. Steal the keys first then the car from the owners driveway. Easy enough if they leave the keys in a bowl by the front door. 2. Carjacking. (Oh wonderful, we've replaced the essentially non-violent crime of car theft with the rather more violent crime of carjacking) 3. Steal an older car.
You occasionally hear of more sophisticated things going on - like showing up in an official-looking tow truck and lifting the vehicle, with a view to sorting out "how to start the damn thing" at leisure - but that's pretty rare.
That can't be legal. Granted any company can dump you in a second, but if you put in the hours they legally have to compensate you for those hours.
Actually, it is if they're a limited company based in the UK. The phrase "limited company" is actually short for "limited liability company" - in other words, the liability that the directors are taking on is heavily limited.
An employee is in a similar relationship with the company as a supplier is - they supply something (in this case their labour) in exchange for money. Therefore, the money they're owed is a debt that the company has, just like any unpaid invoices are also debts.
In very basic terms, when a limited company goes into administration, one of two things happen:
1. Some or all of the business is bought out by someone else who reckons they can make a go of it. The staff (and the liability to the staff) may or may not be included in that. If they're included, they are likely to find their jobs transferred to the new company which now owns the business and their rights will be protected under TUPE.
2. Nobody comes forward to buy the business. The assets the business has are taken and carved up in order to pay their debts. If (amount of assets < amount of debts) - that's it. The creditors meet to discuss who gets what, and they've pretty much got to write off anything which they don't get back unless they've got insurance for such circumstances.
The directors of the limited company can walk away from it all with no debt in their name to trouble them.
It's supposed to encourage people to set up businesses in the knowledge that if the worst happens, they can always walk away from it and try again. If the company's debts followed them, they might be rather less keen to take the risk involved in running the business in the first place.
Anyone who's ever dealt with the kind of call centres you get with banks knows what's going to happen.
[Rings up to complain of fraud]
Bank: Hello, this is ${BANK}, how can I help you? Customer: Yes, I appear to have a transaction for £3000 leaving my account which I don't know anything about. Bank: OK, I see you use our Internet banking service. Do you have antispyware software on your computer? Customer: No, I use a.... Bank: Do you have antivirus software on your computer? Customer: No, I use a Mac.... Bank: No antispyware, no antivirus. Not our problem. Goodbye.
They've done it in vitro in a lab. Which is a good start, but that doesn't mean you can now safely screw anything that walks.
They probably haven't developed anything which they could conceivably be administered to a living organism yet - let alone tried administering it to one. Then you've got a battery of tests to make sure it's safe and effective - there's probably at least another 10 years before this could really be a treatment.
The great majority of potential treatments never make it through that development/testing process.
I enquired as to the pricing, and IIRC it was licensed in a similar manner to Exchange (you pay for the server and also for client access licenses) and at a similar cost.
Perhaps even purposefully. I can definitely see the motivation to go through so many XBox units as to get your name on the front page of Digg, Slashdot, and 1up.
I don't know about Jason but I'd need a lot more motivation than "front page of/." to persuade me to deal with a tech support call centre 12 times about the same issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Be careful what you wish for. We have an extensive speed camera network in the UK, and over a period of time they do reduce average speed, but it's received criticism for a number of reasons:
Then I am really fscking scared of what will happen when this idea takes off in the UK. They already consider speed cameras to be a perfectly reasonable alternative to traffic police.
This is the company that said "Antitrust laws shouldn't apply to us".
Thing is, just like anywhere in the West, it takes ages for a law to be passed in the UK. And revisiting a law because it's not working out how you like it - that takes just as long.
I'd be prepared to bet:
1. That such a copyright extension would not include clauses that the music industry must be regulated for "unacceptable" output. The music industry would instead "pledge" to do so.
2. The music industry will totally forget about the pledge just as soon as the law is passed.
Either that or it's evidence that the US tends to produce customers who are more alert to this kind of thing.
I'm not from the US myself, but IME most American customers are happy to pay for a product but if they get the slightest inkling they're being ripped off.... oooh boy.
Being an archievist doesn't mean you should be constantly working on your files.
You will be if you have any serious number of files and the solution to keeping the file in a sensible format is "Open in Acrobat Pro and re-save it".
Step 1: When you archive a document, make a PDF of it (pretty much anything with a CPU in it will display PDFs these days, I even have homebrew for my PSP that does it). For older text-only documents, ASCII text does the same job. For graphics, make sure to keep converting data to newer file formats (ie. .pcx -> .png)
Will it still do so in 20 years time?
For all we know, PDF will have changed substantially and we'll find that the majority of readers have broken the code which renders really old versions.
Data stored on audio tape, yes?
Well, let's see:
1. Good luck getting a cassette player. They exist, but they're getting hard to find now. Won't be long before the only real source is eBay and car boot sales.
2. Good luck turning the output into something clean enough to read. Analogue tape degrades rapidly, particularly when you're trying to encode data at any sensible resolution. That's why it was only really used in small home microcomputers, and why even then it only lasted a few years.
Years ago, systems were simple enough that a programmer with a bit of spare time could easily manage them. Today, however, a typical full-blown system (let's say a web application, for the sake of argument) could easily involve:
Now granted, none of these things is particularly onerous - particularly not on a modern Linux distribution - but multiply it by "everything in the company" and quite soon no programmer wants to go near the task.
The upshot is a lot of programmers I've met today are totally lost when faced with sysadmin-type work. That's OK, that's where I make my money. I'm not totally lost with sysadmin type work but I hate bugfixing code with such a passion that I'd rather be sysadminning where I can see results much more quickly.
How the iPod became the dominant MP3 player isn't really the point.
The point is, Universal want an alternative online market, they don't like the one provided by iTunes. Unless they're prepared to drop DRM as a requirement and have whoever sells their music sell it as straight unencumbered MP3s (or something else the iPod can easily be persuaded to play), they're essentially cutting off online sales from most of the portable MP3 players out there. Why?
FWIW, I wouldn't be surprised if they are trolling for a new agreement - one which suits them better.
Huh, I thought I supplied that information to every website I visit.
Except you can choose not to visit sites that have policies you don't approve of. If you're running Vista, you can't choose whether/what information gets transmitted.
Oh noes!!! They need to know my device to supply the driver?
No they don't.
The OS could just as easily maintain a table matching device IDs to appropriate drivers, use that to decide which driver to use and just update this table periodically.
When you lose some of your privacy, many people (myself included) believe the logic you should be using isn't "How does this harm me? If I don't think it does, go ahead". The logic should be "How does this benefit me? If I don't think it does, don't go ahead".
The rationale for this is it may not harm you now. But it may do in the future - and once the information is out, you can't get it back again. It's essentially the human interaction equivalent of default-permit versus default-deny firewall rules. Default permit is more convenient in the short term, but experience suggests that default-deny is a wiser choice in the long term.
It's also not hard to do it right.
Solaris has been 64-bit for years. Yet it supports apps compiled for old 32-bit versions of solaris out of the box - indeed, you wouldn't even know you were running a 32-bit application without explicitly checking.
Oh, I quite agree. The most obvious application solution is for there to be two applications running with separate 4GB virtual address pools and some sort of IPC between them, but that's not exactly elegant.
Right now, Windows 64-bit is in the same kind of situation that NT4 was in back in 1998. Official support for both software and hardware was pretty poor (generally it was "If you can get this to work, well done, but don't come running to us for support"), but everyone knew that sooner or later it, or something like it, would be the way things were done.
Don't get too excited about 64-bit. 32-bit OSs are quite able to handle >4G of RAM provided they support Intel's PAE (basically, the 4GB limit is pushed down to the application).
Actually, I'm a Mac user and I've never had a problem with getting Apple accessories to work on it.
if it was for other reasons, there are other procedures to be followed
Really? I was under the impression that in the US at least, ISPs aren't exactly terribly well educated. The "procedure" could be "The 14-year-old on the helpdesk fires up Windows Explorer and deletes the customer's home directory".
So Novell can distribute GPLv3'd software because of the grandfather clause, but they can't distribute any of it subject to the agreement with MS without violating either the agreement or the software's license (license requires that they pass that coverage to all indirect recipients, agreement prohibits doing so).
We'll find out exactly what Novell and Microsoft think of how that part of the GPL v3 plays with their agreement when the next version of SuSE comes out and we see whether or not it's been updated with all the FSF's "GPL3 or later" versioned utilities.
Until such time, the exact text of their agreement remains under wraps (yes, I know we've been given the gist of it, but that's not what would be argued in a court case) and we can't be certain what's going to happen. For all we know, there's a line which says "if Novell are forced to choose between this agreement and distributing software, then the agreement becomes null and void".
Non-US tourists may not know this, and most people won't have the backup of being able to say "I'm a journalist, here's my ID".
Immobilisers have been a legal requirement for all cars in the UK for nearly 10 years now. Generally, they're the "microchip in the ignition key" type you describe.
And no, they're not impossible to work around - otherwise anytime someone lost their keys they'd have to write off their car - but they involve more work than your average teenage joyrider is prepared to put in.
This has led to a number of alternate attack vectors being used for car theft:
1. Steal the keys first then the car from the owners driveway. Easy enough if they leave the keys in a bowl by the front door.
2. Carjacking. (Oh wonderful, we've replaced the essentially non-violent crime of car theft with the rather more violent crime of carjacking)
3. Steal an older car.
You occasionally hear of more sophisticated things going on - like showing up in an official-looking tow truck and lifting the vehicle, with a view to sorting out "how to start the damn thing" at leisure - but that's pretty rare.
That can't be legal. Granted any company can dump you in a second, but if you put in the hours they legally have to compensate you for those hours.
Actually, it is if they're a limited company based in the UK. The phrase "limited company" is actually short for "limited liability company" - in other words, the liability that the directors are taking on is heavily limited.
An employee is in a similar relationship with the company as a supplier is - they supply something (in this case their labour) in exchange for money. Therefore, the money they're owed is a debt that the company has, just like any unpaid invoices are also debts.
In very basic terms, when a limited company goes into administration, one of two things happen:
1. Some or all of the business is bought out by someone else who reckons they can make a go of it. The staff (and the liability to the staff) may or may not be included in that. If they're included, they are likely to find their jobs transferred to the new company which now owns the business and their rights will be protected under TUPE.
2. Nobody comes forward to buy the business. The assets the business has are taken and carved up in order to pay their debts. If (amount of assets < amount of debts) - that's it. The creditors meet to discuss who gets what, and they've pretty much got to write off anything which they don't get back unless they've got insurance for such circumstances.
The directors of the limited company can walk away from it all with no debt in their name to trouble them.
It's supposed to encourage people to set up businesses in the knowledge that if the worst happens, they can always walk away from it and try again. If the company's debts followed them, they might be rather less keen to take the risk involved in running the business in the first place.
Anyone who's ever dealt with the kind of call centres you get with banks knows what's going to happen.
[Rings up to complain of fraud]
Bank: Hello, this is ${BANK}, how can I help you?
Customer: Yes, I appear to have a transaction for £3000 leaving my account which I don't know anything about.
Bank: OK, I see you use our Internet banking service. Do you have antispyware software on your computer?
Customer: No, I use a....
Bank: Do you have antivirus software on your computer?
Customer: No, I use a Mac....
Bank: No antispyware, no antivirus. Not our problem. Goodbye.
They've done it in vitro in a lab. Which is a good start, but that doesn't mean you can now safely screw anything that walks.
They probably haven't developed anything which they could conceivably be administered to a living organism yet - let alone tried administering it to one. Then you've got a battery of tests to make sure it's safe and effective - there's probably at least another 10 years before this could really be a treatment.
The great majority of potential treatments never make it through that development/testing process.
I think that's it.
I enquired as to the pricing, and IIRC it was licensed in a similar manner to Exchange (you pay for the server and also for client access licenses) and at a similar cost.
Well I wouldn't call that an Open Source replacement for Exchange.
And you'd be quite right not to. It isn't. It is, however, the best you're going to get right now.
Perhaps even purposefully. I can definitely see the motivation to go through so many XBox units as to get your name on the front page of Digg, Slashdot, and 1up.
/." to persuade me to deal with a tech support call centre 12 times about the same issue.
I don't know about Jason but I'd need a lot more motivation than "front page of