and eventually we'll migrate from Oracle to MySQL.
If you're going to migrate your database, you may as well go to the system with the most functionality for the same cost. In the database world, that's basically PostgreSQL.
Trust me on this: you do not want to have to change your database engine again. You'll learn just how much trouble it is the first time around (Oracle -> whatever), so I suggest you make sure you don't have to repeat the effort.
It simply doesn't make any sense to select a less capable database engine when the price is the same, unless there's some feature it has that you simply cannot live without and you have to have it right now. If that's not true for you then you'll be much better off going to PostgreSQL.
A lot of severe burns caused by accidents have been prevented because of that one case....Don't always think a case that sounds absurd doesn't have some other positive impact...
Lessee...McDonald's had been serving their coffee that hot for years. Which means that it was common knowledge that their coffee was very hot, right?
Naturally it never occurred to anybody that anyone who knowingly handles very hot coffee is knowingly taking a risk of getting badly burned. No, of course not. Nor did it occur to anyone that if they really cared about getting burned by hot coffee they could go somewhere else.
Because after all, nobody offered coffee that was less hot than McDonald's coffee, right? Those poor McDonald's coffee customers simply had no choice right?
Yeah, right.
Sorry, but the McDonald's coffee ruling was pure bullshit no matter how you slice it. I seriously doubt the woman who got burned could legitimately claim ignorance of the coffee's temperature (that would mean the time she got burned would have had to be her first coffee purchase from McDonald's. Not bloody likely), and I sure as hell hope she couldn't legitimately claim that she didn't know that coffee that hot could burn her that badly.
So chances are very good that the woman is either a liar or a moron. The legal system has no business protecting people from their own idiocy, especially when it's at the expense of others.
We need to do more with less, and risking crews for no reason is just plain stupid.
Quite right. We should be sending crews up for one simple reason: to figure out how to live in space.
Why? Because we'll want to be there someday. There could be any number of reasons:
Running out of resources here on earth (not likely, of course, but at some point it may be more economically feasible to acquire those resources from space, especially if all the hard work like figuring out how to keep humans there has already been figured out).
To escape the clutches of a stagnant culture and civilization. Think global stagnation can't happen? The pieces are being put into place even as we speak. It's the inevitable result of globalization. And remember: an evil police state won't fall if it doesn't have any outside competition.
To maximize humankind's long-term chances of survival. Nasty things have happened in the earth's history, and it's only a matter of time before something nasty happens on our watch. Hell, we might even be the cause.
If you think things can get interesting and weird here, you ain't seen shit. We haven't even begun to discover what interesting things are to be found out there.
Because exploring and expanding is in our nature. It's why we're here, why we've survived when countless other species have fallen by the wayside. Nature doesn't look kindly upon the meek.
We should be putting lots of people up into space, and shouldn't be screwing around with crap that doesn't teach us how to stay there.
The continued reinvestment of profit into capital is what has caused a tremendous increase in productivity and enables the extraordinary standard of living, and extended life, that we are lucky to enjoy.
Certainly. But this does nothing to negate my point.
What is profit? It's the difference between the total amount of effort (directly and indirectly) it takes for you to produce something and the amount of effort (directly and indirectly) your customer is willing to expend to acquire it.
When you exchange money with someone for a widget, all you're really doing is exchanging your effort for it. You might be willing to do so for a couple of reasons:
They have access to resources (time, equipment, materials, etc.) you don't, that are required to make the widget
They have more knowledge than you about making widgets, so they can do so much more efficiently than you
If it took them less total effort to make the widget than the amount of effort your price represents, they'd make it themselves.
When you make a lot of profit from doing something, you do so only because your customers are willing and able to sacrifice that much more of their labor to acquire your product than the amount of your efforts required to make it. But labor they expend to pay you is labor they cannot expend to pay others. That is what makes the overall exchange, when everything is accounted for, a zero-sum game at any given point in time.
What is capital? It's usually the end result of human labor, of course! A building is there only because humans built it. When you acquire it, you acquire the fruits of human labor. When you buy the raw materials to make something, you're not paying for the material itself, you're paying for the human labor required to produce it. Only things like the land itself don't represent human labor. The only reason you pay for things like land is that others want it and as a result it becomes subject to the laws of supply and demand. Fortunately, the labor you expend to pay for a piece of land is in turn used by the recipient to pay for other things.
Now, the economy changes over time as a result of fluctuations in population and the changes of productivity that result from increased knowledge. But nothing else results in the actual growth of an economy. The investment of profit you refer to is only an indirect means of directing human effort into finding ways to increase productivity.
Yeah, you're a communist. You think economies are zero-sum games.
I have no idea what one (communism) has to do with the other (whether or not the economy is a zero-sum game).
But the global economy, at any rate, is a zero-sum game, with two exceptions:
changes in the population
changes in productivity (the amount of production generated by an individual in a period of time. So making people work longer hours does not increase productivity because they're spending more time in order to accomplish more work, whereas having them tend a machine that produces ten times what they could do by hand is an increase in productivity)
After accounting for those two things, the global economy must be a zero-sum game because money is a direct representation of human production. Were this not the case, you wouldn't get inflation (an overall increase in the prices of goods) as a direct result of printing more money.
Now, the individual local economies are not zero-sum games, but that is only because they have external inputs and outputs, such as foreign trade and foreign investment.
As for this case, the $10k rule doesn't apply since this insane value (up to $250,000? iirc) has been placed on copyright violations. Perhaps if the FBI valued a "stolen" song on what it is actually worth we wouldn't have this problem.
What the $10K rule really means is that either the damaged party can prove they actually lost more than that as a result of the crime, or the damaged party has decided to pay the FBI (or, more precisely, the appropriate people within the FBI, and all under the table, of course) more than $10K to get the case taken care of.
And now suddenly things like the Sklyarov case make much more sense, don't they?
Why do politicians feel they have the right to destroy the trust of the citizens they represent.
Haven't you been paying attention? They feel they have that right because they don't represent the citizens; they represent the people who paid for their (re)election campaign.
And all of that is because a voter can't vote for someone they don't know about, and the people who control (either directly, as a result of owning the media, or indirectly, as a result of doing deals with those that own the media) which candidates the people know about are exactly the same people who put a bunch of money into the election funds of the candidates they favor.
In other words, it's all a big scam. But it's one that won't change, because there's no way to get there (a government that is responsive to the people) from here (a government that is responsive to the wealthy corporations) -- the people who are in control right now have made sure of that.
Re:Let 'em hire the young minds
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Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
You need both. Not because the young minds are better but because someone hasnt spent twenty years telling them a list of things are impossible.
This is where real experience counts. If a seasoned programmer says something is impossible simply because at the time he attempted to do it he was unable to, then he hasn't really learned that much.
A seasoned programmer with real experience will know why he was unable to do something, and will be able to determine at a later point in time if the conditions have changed such that what he attempted to do has finally become possible.
Put another way, some experience is more meaningful than other experience. Someone who makes the same mistake over and over can be said to be "experienced" but that experience is wasted: he hasn't learned anything. Someone who tends to make a given mistake only once and learns why it was a mistake, but who hasn't been at it that long may not be as "experienced" as the other person, but his experience is much more valuable.
All this really means is that experience without intelligence isn't terribly useful, while experience with intelligence is a formidible combination. Yes, if you have to choose between intelligence without experience and experience without intelligence, you should of course choose the former. But any hiring manager worth anything will look for people that have both intelligence and experience, and be willing to pay for it if that's what it takes.
Look, as much as I think the Bush administration is a threat to civil liberties and is terrible in all sorts of other ways, to compare them generally to Nazis is an insult to all the sacrifices billions of people made in the war that destroyed German fascism. We may not have a perfect (or even good) government, but to suggest it's a goverment that will make genocide a household word or start a war that will leave upwards of 50 million people dead is a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
In 1933, or even 1937 (4 years after the Nazis gained power, which is roughly the same amount of time that the Bush administration has been in office), few people thought that Germany would start a war that would engulf the world, and nobody thought that it would be the nation to make genocide a household word. So I wouldn't be comforted by the fact that the same is true of the U.S. at the moment, if I were you.
The U.S. has already invaded and conquered its first country under the Bush administration, and it's unclear at this point how long it will be before it does so again. But I, for one, have little reason to believe that Iraq will be the only one that undergoes a "regime change" at the hands of the Bush administration before all is said and done. I don't think we'll see World War III, but that's only because the situation is different: in WW2, Germany was a militarily powerful nation but it wasn't the most powerful by any means -- and it still came reasonably close to winning. Today, the U.S. is the most militarily powerful nation on the planet and everyone knows it. I don't think WW3 will happen because I don't think anyone is stupid enough to go up against the U.S. that way.
Even so, the slide towards fascism in the U.S. is very apparent to me, and the biggest thing I haven't figured out is how Bush will remain in power beyond his allowed two terms. I'm quite certain that he will try, I just don't yet have an idea of what he's likely to do to make it happen. But I have a strong suspicion that it will involve something like declaring a national state of emergency.
Im not sure what's better.
Europe being a set of quite sepperate countries, and the US ruling the world with its rough hand and feeling good about it self.
Or the EU creating a super country to equal that of the US and not relient on the US investment, army or technology. Unfortunately in 20-50 years it might just take someone shooting a turkey to create a nasty global war.
I think it's better to have a strong EU. Here's why:
Unlike the situation between the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R., the members of the EU and the U.S. have been allied for quite a long time now and, more importantly, share many ideological similarities. Many of the EU members are also NATO members, and those that aren't have at least not been unfriendly with the U.S. (at least until relatively recently).
So, assume a strong EU is formed. If it's strong enough, then it can act as a check against any desires the U.S. might have for global domination. If the U.S. continues its slide towards police-statehood, a strong EU may well be the only thing that can keep it from infecting the rest of the planet.
Similarly, if the EU starts showing strong tendencies towards police-statehood (even more so than what we see in the U.S.), the U.S. can act as a restraint on it. Even better, that may be enough to cause the U.S. to reverse its own course towards police statehood, if only because of a "not invented here" attitude.
The bottom line: with two similar, but not identical, systems competing with each other, I expect the world will end up being a somewhat better place than it would be without that competition. Competition between ideas is usually a good thing as long as it's not taken too seriously. The amount of similarity between the U.S. and the EU, coupled with the history shared between the U.S. and the EU member states, should be enough to keep the competition reasonably friendly -- unless the U.S. or the EU decides to go off and become a full-fledged police state.
It's always possible, of course, that both will decide to do away with the blessings of freedom in favor of the easy power of police statehood, but if anything can prevent that, it's friendly competition between the two powers.
The bottom line is that I think the world has a better chance of remaining at least somewhat free when there is some competition between two large powers than when there is only one large, dominating power. The latter leads to the kind of arrogance that causes the loss of rights for all but those who rule, as we in the U.S. (who don't have blinders on) have seen for ourselves.
It is EXACTLY because I have freedom of speech and can arm myself, EVEN against my own government, once it proves to have become the totalitarian state that our Founding Fathers feared, that I feel "secure".
Your feeling of security is ill-founded. The only reason the 2nd Amendment isn't opposed by everyone in government is that the arms that civilians are allowed to bear are useless against a well-armed, modern military.
Remember: it took weeks of planning and preparation for Timothy McVeigh to blow up a single building, while the same thing is done routinely by the military. And that's not even a very strong example of the disparity between military power and civilian power.
So continue to believe in your delusion that the 2nd Amendment makes a difference if you like... it can't hurt to have such a belief, I suppose, as long as you don't try to act on it later on. But if you (and others) do try to act on it, I guarantee that you will fail -- the peashooters you're allowed to arm yourself with are no match for the weaponry and armor available to the military (and guess who the military works for?).
Other countries have gotten to the bottom and we still refuse to learn from them.
No, those don't count. None of them started off as a secular democracy. The race to the bottom is now between countries that are supposed to be "free".
People need to be shown, in no uncertain terms, that being a secular democracy is no protection from police statehood. Enough people here on Slashdot and on Kuro5hin believe in that fallacy, so you can imagine how much of the general population is similarly deluded.
DARPA isn't doing a damned thing to address Congress' concerns.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if, behind the scenes, DARPA says something like "well, members of Congress will, of course, be exempt!", at which point Congress will immediately approve it.
I really wish, in this race to the bottom, some country would get there first in time to allow other countries to finally figure out that shit like this is really a very bad thing. But it looks to me like all of the countries are more or less operating in lockstep with each other, so they'll all hit bottom at about the same time.
Still think I'm full of shit when I say that the world is going to turn itself into a police state and that the end result will be a stable form of government capable of lasting thousands of years?
I don't know how many times the company I work for now has been burned because a previous programmer never checked any input to his scripts, rather just blindly inserting it into the database.
This is why you want to be using a real database -- one with constraints, foreign keys, etc. So that you don't rely on the frontend script to protect you from bogus data getting into the database.
That said, doing such checking is still good practice: it enables you to issue error messages (or dialogs, or pages, etc.) which point to the specific problem. But the proper use of a real database on the backend will, sooner or later, save you from a lot of grief.
The problem with the 9th Ammendment is that (obviously) it doesn't say what those other rights retained by the people are.
So one side can say, "just because this right isn't enumerated, doesn't mean it isn't implied." And the other side can say, "just because this activity isn't enumerated as a right, doesn't mean is is implied." And turning to the 9th Ammendment doesn't resolve that.
But the problem with the argument that "just because this activity isn't enumerated as a right doesn't mean it's implied" is that if it's a valid argument, then the 9th Amendment has no reason to exist.
This is where the history of the Bill of Rights becomes important: there was considerable debate at the time the Constitution was drafted about whether or not a Bill of Rights should be included at all, because many of the founders thought that the existence of the right to do whatever you wanted (so long as you didn't step on the rights of another to do so) was obvious. In the end, it was decided that at the very least a few of what was considered the most important rights should be enumerated in order to guard against the possibility that the government would attempt to usurp those rights along with any others. The 9th Amendment was put there to make the people who didn't want rights to be enumerated happy.
But instead of the 9th Amendment serving the purpose of ensuring freedom, it has instead been completely ignored. I doubt there are any Supreme Court decisions (in recent history, at the very least) that have the 9th Amendment as their basis.
I really wish the founders had stated in the Constitution, point blank, that the people have the right to do what they want to as long as they don't infringe upon the rights of others in doing so, and had then gone on to list the most important rights in order of priority (so that the courts would have something to fall back upon in the inevitable clash of rights they'd be forced to mediate). But, alas, the founders weren't programmers, and were perhaps even a bit naive, since they didn't seem to anticipate the use, by the Supreme Court and other courts, of the letter of the law instead of the purpose of the law to render judgements.
Re:RFC-821 Re-Write Will Make It Manageable
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Spam Meeting Wrap-up
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· Score: 1
The processing of sending email needs an overhaul that gives system administrators the ability to determine the source of incoming mail and impart a "trust" level of the message.
The fundamental assumption in the current email system is that every sending machine is trusted. That is what has to change. Most of the proposals to change this have been along the line of using certificates and other nonsense like that. But none of that is necessary (nor is the use of certificates desired: it implies a central certificate authority similar to the ones SSL certificates are issued from. Central control over the email system is a government's wet dream, which is exactly why it shouldn't be allowed to happen).
All you have to do is to verify that the machine sending the email is authorized by the owner of the email's domain (which is retrieved from the SMTP "MAIL FROM" command) to send mail on behalf of that domain. That's it. There already exists a mechanism that can be used for this purpose: DNS.
But, you say, spammers will just buy and manage their own domains? Yes, that's correct, they will. But now you have forced them to actually spend money and time managing a domain that, when you see one single spam from it, you (and everyone else) can completely block. New domains might last a day (if that) once domain blacklists are fine-tuned to deal with the problem.
Now the laws of supply and demand come into effect. There are a limited number of domain registrars competing with each other. If the demand for new domains goes up, so does the price. Increase the price and you increase the cost of spamming, and thus reduce the number of spammers out there because you've raised the cost of doing business and made it more difficult to be profitable at it.
But even better than that, the good guys can now whitelist domains and actually get away with it. You could, for instance, whitelist yahoo.com and know that any email you receive that claims to be from yahoo.com really is from yahoo.com, because the system you got the email from was authorized by yahoo.com to send email: you verified it yourself by looking it up in DNS.
So now, lists of "known good" domains will circulate the net. Email from unknown domains can be treated with suspicion or simply blackholed, depending on what the owner of the site wants to do with it. Spammers will try to get onto the "known good" list but cannot do so because they'll be removed automatically when a few independent people receive spam from them.
We could even go so far as to build a "web of trust" around this. And none of it requires the replacement of the current email protocols.
The problem with spam has always been that nobody wants to actually do something real to stop it. The most they're willing to do is implement spam filtering and block a few IP address ranges. Nobody seems to be willing to make any changes whatsoever to the delivery semantics, because to do so would require agreeing upon a standard, which is something nobody (particularly the big players) seems to be willing to do anymore. Heavens knows we can't have cooperation between competing providers on something like this.
And so as a result, you end up with meetings between the players that conclude that "the problem can't be solved currently". Well, yeah, it can't, as long as the players aren't willing to agree upon any kind of real solution, like the one I just described.
Mind you, the US military was beat back by armed civilians in Vietnam.
It wasn't armed civilians that beat back the U.S. military, it was a well-armed and well-supplied North Vietnamese military that did it. The civilians were just a nuisance, though they were a significant one.
And despite that, the U.S. military "lost" in Vietnam only because it did not have the will to win. If it did it would have completely destroyed Hanoi. I assure you, if the U.S. government believes its very existence is threatened, it will not have that problem: it will destroy entire cities, with nukes if necessary, in order to remain in power.
The fact that they were supported by the Soviet Union somehow is relevant, a revolution might need to seek industrialized backing. OTOH, Americans build the weapons the military uses. Americans in revolution will need them too. Therefore, Americans can build them, as needed.
Industrial support for building weapons won't help you if the military either takes out or takes over the factories required to build them. The Soviet Revolution happened in 1917, before the advent of significant air power and before the development of heavy armor. It wouldn't have succeeded if the Russian military had had the ability to bomb factories from the air, or roll into an area with tanks after bombarding the area with heavy artillery and air strikes. And I haven't even mentioned busting out the nukes yet.
Granted, an armed revolution is a lot more complicated these days, but summarily dismissing it as impossible and therefore not even trying is pure cowardice. Stand and fight for what you believe in, man. It's the only fight worth fighting. Furthermore, if you've nothing worth dying for, you've nothing worth living for.
Bullshit. There's a big difference between cowardice and realism. Something's worth fighting for only if there's a chance of winning, otherwise you're better off trying to affect change from within (however difficult that may be, the chance of success will at least be greater than zero that way). But I'm telling you flat out that without military support there's NO chance of winning an armed revolution in modern America. Hasn't it occurred to you to ask why there have been no successful armed revolutions against a well-armed government (well-armed by modern standards, meaning the government has armor, artillery, lots of aircraft, etc.) by the general population anywhere in modern times? Just look at the Palestinians as an example: those guys are much better armed than the average American civilian, they're as dedicated to their cause as it gets, and yet they still haven't won despite the fact that the Israelis aren't even trying (if they were they would have leveled the entire place with their air force and sent in a full invasion force. As it is, the Israelis maintain a 10:1 kill ratio over the Palestinians, and like I said, they're not even trying).
If the U.S. government's power is truly threatened and its back is against the wall, it will have no reservations about nuking a city or two if that's what it takes to remain in power. Now just what, exactly, do you think the civilian revolutionaries are going to be able to do against that kind of power, huh?
There's a reason modern fascist regimes are able to remain in power despite the hatred the population may have towards the government: modern military power is simply too great for lightly armed civilians to deal with.
At this point I am so disillusioned with the new Star Wars films that I couldn't care less who'll feature in Episode III.
You know, the sad thing about it is that Lucas has/had such an awesome opportunity to make some really good movies, too. I mean, he has the opportunity here to show why Palpatine is doing what he's doing, to inject a bit of uncertainty into the "good versus evil" simplistic worldview.
That's one of the reasons I liked Babylon 5 so much: things weren't black and white, but different shades of gray, and the uncertainty that comes from it was used to good effect.
Lucas could have done the same thing, and might even have done it reasonably well. But nooooo...
That, as a child, he "invented" the standard Goldenrod(TM) brand of protocol droid seen all over the place 60 years in the future is ludicrous.
He didn't "invent" such a droid, and even Lucas doesn't claim he did. The droid that escorted Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan onto the Trade Federation ship was just such a droid (different only in color and voice), so such droids had been around a while.
Not me, I love my country, and I'm gonna stay here and take it back. You can run away if you want, but I'm gonna stay here and fight.
With what? The pathetic peashooters that are the most that you can legally get nowadays?
Sorry, but revolution was only possible back when the U.S. revolution happened because the firepower of the average civilian was roughly equivalent to the firepower of the average soldier. That's not the case anymore -- a reasonably well-armed soldier probably has a tens to hundreds to one advantage over the average armed civilian, and that goes up to thousands to one if you account for the support (air, artillery, armor, etc.) the average soldier gets. And that's before we consider the exotic weapons like nukes (which raises the advantage to millions to one). Remember: it took weeks of careful planning and preparation for Timothy McVeigh to take out a single government building. That's the kind of capability the military uses routinely.
No, any revolution that happens is going to have to have a great deal of support from the military controlled by the very people who are being revolted against. In short, today ain't the 1700's and an armed revolution against a modern, reasonably well-armed government like the U.S. simply isn't possible.
Revolution by the population against the fascist German government would have been difficult enough. But against the U.S. government? No, you're WAY better off leaving, no matter how much you might like to stay and fight. Because you're basically guaranteed to lose if you stay.
VC contracts tend to go the exact opposite direction, up to and including the "if you get sued, we get our money back first!" type of term.
A contract can say anything you want it to say -- that doesn't mean it's binding upon third parties (the RIAA, in this case) that didn't sign it.
The real question is whether or not the VCs played any part in managing Napster, either through providing direction/guidance or by providing executive staff. Many startup companies have seen both (it was the VCs that said "grow now, worry about being profitable later", and thus contributed to the demise of many startup companies and in essence caused the dotcom crash). So no matter what a contract may say, a VC could easily be liable if it did anything more than provide money for the business.
I'm actually not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it is because of the limited liability angle that there are so many evil things foisted upon us by the corporate world -- corporations take actions in order to make money for their investors, and investors don't give a crap what the corporations do as long as they make money. That's something that clearly has to change, and making the investors liable for the actions of the corporation is one way to do it. But the downside is that investors will be much more hesitant to invest if they are suddenly liable for the actions of a corporation. That might not be an altogether bad thing, though: it'll force investors to take an active role in the actions of a corporation, and will further force them to examine the actions of any company they're considering investing in.
This whole thing could, in the end, actually do the world a lot of good. But there are certainly risks involved, as there are with any significant change in How Things Are Done.
The determination of what is novel, unobvious, and what advances the arts and sciences is legal, and not subject to what those "skilled in the art" think.
Bzzt!!
Title 35, Section 103(a) of the U.S. code explicitly says:
A patent may not be obtained though the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made.
What those "skilled in the art" think is centrally important because it is they to whom the subject matter as amended by the patent is obvious or not.
If the opinion of those "skilled in the art" does not matter when even the law itself essentially says it does then the patent process is so fundamentally broken that it cannot be fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to migrate your database, you may as well go to the system with the most functionality for the same cost. In the database world, that's basically PostgreSQL.
Trust me on this: you do not want to have to change your database engine again. You'll learn just how much trouble it is the first time around (Oracle -> whatever), so I suggest you make sure you don't have to repeat the effort.
It simply doesn't make any sense to select a less capable database engine when the price is the same, unless there's some feature it has that you simply cannot live without and you have to have it right now. If that's not true for you then you'll be much better off going to PostgreSQL.
Lessee...McDonald's had been serving their coffee that hot for years. Which means that it was common knowledge that their coffee was very hot, right?
Naturally it never occurred to anybody that anyone who knowingly handles very hot coffee is knowingly taking a risk of getting badly burned. No, of course not. Nor did it occur to anyone that if they really cared about getting burned by hot coffee they could go somewhere else.
Because after all, nobody offered coffee that was less hot than McDonald's coffee, right? Those poor McDonald's coffee customers simply had no choice right?
Yeah, right.
Sorry, but the McDonald's coffee ruling was pure bullshit no matter how you slice it. I seriously doubt the woman who got burned could legitimately claim ignorance of the coffee's temperature (that would mean the time she got burned would have had to be her first coffee purchase from McDonald's. Not bloody likely), and I sure as hell hope she couldn't legitimately claim that she didn't know that coffee that hot could burn her that badly.
So chances are very good that the woman is either a liar or a moron. The legal system has no business protecting people from their own idiocy, especially when it's at the expense of others.
Quite right. We should be sending crews up for one simple reason: to figure out how to live in space.
Why? Because we'll want to be there someday. There could be any number of reasons:
We should be putting lots of people up into space, and shouldn't be screwing around with crap that doesn't teach us how to stay there.
Certainly. But this does nothing to negate my point.
What is profit? It's the difference between the total amount of effort (directly and indirectly) it takes for you to produce something and the amount of effort (directly and indirectly) your customer is willing to expend to acquire it.
When you exchange money with someone for a widget, all you're really doing is exchanging your effort for it. You might be willing to do so for a couple of reasons:
If it took them less total effort to make the widget than the amount of effort your price represents, they'd make it themselves.
When you make a lot of profit from doing something, you do so only because your customers are willing and able to sacrifice that much more of their labor to acquire your product than the amount of your efforts required to make it. But labor they expend to pay you is labor they cannot expend to pay others. That is what makes the overall exchange, when everything is accounted for, a zero-sum game at any given point in time.
What is capital? It's usually the end result of human labor, of course! A building is there only because humans built it. When you acquire it, you acquire the fruits of human labor. When you buy the raw materials to make something, you're not paying for the material itself, you're paying for the human labor required to produce it. Only things like the land itself don't represent human labor. The only reason you pay for things like land is that others want it and as a result it becomes subject to the laws of supply and demand. Fortunately, the labor you expend to pay for a piece of land is in turn used by the recipient to pay for other things.
Now, the economy changes over time as a result of fluctuations in population and the changes of productivity that result from increased knowledge. But nothing else results in the actual growth of an economy. The investment of profit you refer to is only an indirect means of directing human effort into finding ways to increase productivity.
I have no idea what one (communism) has to do with the other (whether or not the economy is a zero-sum game).
But the global economy, at any rate, is a zero-sum game, with two exceptions:
After accounting for those two things, the global economy must be a zero-sum game because money is a direct representation of human production. Were this not the case, you wouldn't get inflation (an overall increase in the prices of goods) as a direct result of printing more money.
Now, the individual local economies are not zero-sum games, but that is only because they have external inputs and outputs, such as foreign trade and foreign investment.
No, but they may as well be. They're a cartel. The companies (particularly the large ones) that are RIAA members all act in unison, in lockstep.
Such a thing is explicitly illegal, but they have enough money that they can make the entire U.S. government forget about that inconvenient fact.
What the $10K rule really means is that either the damaged party can prove they actually lost more than that as a result of the crime, or the damaged party has decided to pay the FBI (or, more precisely, the appropriate people within the FBI, and all under the table, of course) more than $10K to get the case taken care of.
And now suddenly things like the Sklyarov case make much more sense, don't they?
Haven't you been paying attention? They feel they have that right because they don't represent the citizens; they represent the people who paid for their (re)election campaign.
And all of that is because a voter can't vote for someone they don't know about, and the people who control (either directly, as a result of owning the media, or indirectly, as a result of doing deals with those that own the media) which candidates the people know about are exactly the same people who put a bunch of money into the election funds of the candidates they favor.
In other words, it's all a big scam. But it's one that won't change, because there's no way to get there (a government that is responsive to the people) from here (a government that is responsive to the wealthy corporations) -- the people who are in control right now have made sure of that.
This is where real experience counts. If a seasoned programmer says something is impossible simply because at the time he attempted to do it he was unable to, then he hasn't really learned that much.
A seasoned programmer with real experience will know why he was unable to do something, and will be able to determine at a later point in time if the conditions have changed such that what he attempted to do has finally become possible.
Put another way, some experience is more meaningful than other experience. Someone who makes the same mistake over and over can be said to be "experienced" but that experience is wasted: he hasn't learned anything. Someone who tends to make a given mistake only once and learns why it was a mistake, but who hasn't been at it that long may not be as "experienced" as the other person, but his experience is much more valuable.
All this really means is that experience without intelligence isn't terribly useful, while experience with intelligence is a formidible combination. Yes, if you have to choose between intelligence without experience and experience without intelligence, you should of course choose the former. But any hiring manager worth anything will look for people that have both intelligence and experience, and be willing to pay for it if that's what it takes.
In 1933, or even 1937 (4 years after the Nazis gained power, which is roughly the same amount of time that the Bush administration has been in office), few people thought that Germany would start a war that would engulf the world, and nobody thought that it would be the nation to make genocide a household word. So I wouldn't be comforted by the fact that the same is true of the U.S. at the moment, if I were you.
The U.S. has already invaded and conquered its first country under the Bush administration, and it's unclear at this point how long it will be before it does so again. But I, for one, have little reason to believe that Iraq will be the only one that undergoes a "regime change" at the hands of the Bush administration before all is said and done. I don't think we'll see World War III, but that's only because the situation is different: in WW2, Germany was a militarily powerful nation but it wasn't the most powerful by any means -- and it still came reasonably close to winning. Today, the U.S. is the most militarily powerful nation on the planet and everyone knows it. I don't think WW3 will happen because I don't think anyone is stupid enough to go up against the U.S. that way.
Even so, the slide towards fascism in the U.S. is very apparent to me, and the biggest thing I haven't figured out is how Bush will remain in power beyond his allowed two terms. I'm quite certain that he will try, I just don't yet have an idea of what he's likely to do to make it happen. But I have a strong suspicion that it will involve something like declaring a national state of emergency.
I think it's better to have a strong EU. Here's why:
Unlike the situation between the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R., the members of the EU and the U.S. have been allied for quite a long time now and, more importantly, share many ideological similarities. Many of the EU members are also NATO members, and those that aren't have at least not been unfriendly with the U.S. (at least until relatively recently).
So, assume a strong EU is formed. If it's strong enough, then it can act as a check against any desires the U.S. might have for global domination. If the U.S. continues its slide towards police-statehood, a strong EU may well be the only thing that can keep it from infecting the rest of the planet.
Similarly, if the EU starts showing strong tendencies towards police-statehood (even more so than what we see in the U.S.), the U.S. can act as a restraint on it. Even better, that may be enough to cause the U.S. to reverse its own course towards police statehood, if only because of a "not invented here" attitude.
The bottom line: with two similar, but not identical, systems competing with each other, I expect the world will end up being a somewhat better place than it would be without that competition. Competition between ideas is usually a good thing as long as it's not taken too seriously. The amount of similarity between the U.S. and the EU, coupled with the history shared between the U.S. and the EU member states, should be enough to keep the competition reasonably friendly -- unless the U.S. or the EU decides to go off and become a full-fledged police state.
It's always possible, of course, that both will decide to do away with the blessings of freedom in favor of the easy power of police statehood, but if anything can prevent that, it's friendly competition between the two powers.
The bottom line is that I think the world has a better chance of remaining at least somewhat free when there is some competition between two large powers than when there is only one large, dominating power. The latter leads to the kind of arrogance that causes the loss of rights for all but those who rule, as we in the U.S. (who don't have blinders on) have seen for ourselves.
Remember: it took weeks of planning and preparation for Timothy McVeigh to blow up a single building, while the same thing is done routinely by the military. And that's not even a very strong example of the disparity between military power and civilian power.
So continue to believe in your delusion that the 2nd Amendment makes a difference if you like ... it can't hurt to have such a belief, I suppose, as long as you don't try to act on it later on. But if you (and others) do try to act on it, I guarantee that you will fail -- the peashooters you're allowed to arm yourself with are no match for the weaponry and armor available to the military (and guess who the military works for?).
No, those don't count. None of them started off as a secular democracy. The race to the bottom is now between countries that are supposed to be "free".
People need to be shown, in no uncertain terms, that being a secular democracy is no protection from police statehood. Enough people here on Slashdot and on Kuro5hin believe in that fallacy, so you can imagine how much of the general population is similarly deluded.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if, behind the scenes, DARPA says something like "well, members of Congress will, of course, be exempt!", at which point Congress will immediately approve it.
I really wish, in this race to the bottom, some country would get there first in time to allow other countries to finally figure out that shit like this is really a very bad thing. But it looks to me like all of the countries are more or less operating in lockstep with each other, so they'll all hit bottom at about the same time.
Still think I'm full of shit when I say that the world is going to turn itself into a police state and that the end result will be a stable form of government capable of lasting thousands of years?
This is why you want to be using a real database -- one with constraints, foreign keys, etc. So that you don't rely on the frontend script to protect you from bogus data getting into the database.
That said, doing such checking is still good practice: it enables you to issue error messages (or dialogs, or pages, etc.) which point to the specific problem. But the proper use of a real database on the backend will, sooner or later, save you from a lot of grief.
But the problem with the argument that "just because this activity isn't enumerated as a right doesn't mean it's implied" is that if it's a valid argument, then the 9th Amendment has no reason to exist.
This is where the history of the Bill of Rights becomes important: there was considerable debate at the time the Constitution was drafted about whether or not a Bill of Rights should be included at all, because many of the founders thought that the existence of the right to do whatever you wanted (so long as you didn't step on the rights of another to do so) was obvious. In the end, it was decided that at the very least a few of what was considered the most important rights should be enumerated in order to guard against the possibility that the government would attempt to usurp those rights along with any others. The 9th Amendment was put there to make the people who didn't want rights to be enumerated happy.
But instead of the 9th Amendment serving the purpose of ensuring freedom, it has instead been completely ignored. I doubt there are any Supreme Court decisions (in recent history, at the very least) that have the 9th Amendment as their basis.
I really wish the founders had stated in the Constitution, point blank, that the people have the right to do what they want to as long as they don't infringe upon the rights of others in doing so, and had then gone on to list the most important rights in order of priority (so that the courts would have something to fall back upon in the inevitable clash of rights they'd be forced to mediate). But, alas, the founders weren't programmers, and were perhaps even a bit naive, since they didn't seem to anticipate the use, by the Supreme Court and other courts, of the letter of the law instead of the purpose of the law to render judgements.
The fundamental assumption in the current email system is that every sending machine is trusted. That is what has to change. Most of the proposals to change this have been along the line of using certificates and other nonsense like that. But none of that is necessary (nor is the use of certificates desired: it implies a central certificate authority similar to the ones SSL certificates are issued from. Central control over the email system is a government's wet dream, which is exactly why it shouldn't be allowed to happen).
All you have to do is to verify that the machine sending the email is authorized by the owner of the email's domain (which is retrieved from the SMTP "MAIL FROM" command) to send mail on behalf of that domain. That's it. There already exists a mechanism that can be used for this purpose: DNS.
But, you say, spammers will just buy and manage their own domains? Yes, that's correct, they will. But now you have forced them to actually spend money and time managing a domain that, when you see one single spam from it, you (and everyone else) can completely block. New domains might last a day (if that) once domain blacklists are fine-tuned to deal with the problem.
Now the laws of supply and demand come into effect. There are a limited number of domain registrars competing with each other. If the demand for new domains goes up, so does the price. Increase the price and you increase the cost of spamming, and thus reduce the number of spammers out there because you've raised the cost of doing business and made it more difficult to be profitable at it.
But even better than that, the good guys can now whitelist domains and actually get away with it. You could, for instance, whitelist yahoo.com and know that any email you receive that claims to be from yahoo.com really is from yahoo.com, because the system you got the email from was authorized by yahoo.com to send email: you verified it yourself by looking it up in DNS.
So now, lists of "known good" domains will circulate the net. Email from unknown domains can be treated with suspicion or simply blackholed, depending on what the owner of the site wants to do with it. Spammers will try to get onto the "known good" list but cannot do so because they'll be removed automatically when a few independent people receive spam from them.
We could even go so far as to build a "web of trust" around this. And none of it requires the replacement of the current email protocols.
The problem with spam has always been that nobody wants to actually do something real to stop it. The most they're willing to do is implement spam filtering and block a few IP address ranges. Nobody seems to be willing to make any changes whatsoever to the delivery semantics, because to do so would require agreeing upon a standard, which is something nobody (particularly the big players) seems to be willing to do anymore. Heavens knows we can't have cooperation between competing providers on something like this.
And so as a result, you end up with meetings between the players that conclude that "the problem can't be solved currently". Well, yeah, it can't, as long as the players aren't willing to agree upon any kind of real solution, like the one I just described.
It wasn't armed civilians that beat back the U.S. military, it was a well-armed and well-supplied North Vietnamese military that did it. The civilians were just a nuisance, though they were a significant one.
And despite that, the U.S. military "lost" in Vietnam only because it did not have the will to win. If it did it would have completely destroyed Hanoi. I assure you, if the U.S. government believes its very existence is threatened, it will not have that problem: it will destroy entire cities, with nukes if necessary, in order to remain in power.
Industrial support for building weapons won't help you if the military either takes out or takes over the factories required to build them. The Soviet Revolution happened in 1917, before the advent of significant air power and before the development of heavy armor. It wouldn't have succeeded if the Russian military had had the ability to bomb factories from the air, or roll into an area with tanks after bombarding the area with heavy artillery and air strikes. And I haven't even mentioned busting out the nukes yet.
Bullshit. There's a big difference between cowardice and realism. Something's worth fighting for only if there's a chance of winning, otherwise you're better off trying to affect change from within (however difficult that may be, the chance of success will at least be greater than zero that way). But I'm telling you flat out that without military support there's NO chance of winning an armed revolution in modern America. Hasn't it occurred to you to ask why there have been no successful armed revolutions against a well-armed government (well-armed by modern standards, meaning the government has armor, artillery, lots of aircraft, etc.) by the general population anywhere in modern times? Just look at the Palestinians as an example: those guys are much better armed than the average American civilian, they're as dedicated to their cause as it gets, and yet they still haven't won despite the fact that the Israelis aren't even trying (if they were they would have leveled the entire place with their air force and sent in a full invasion force. As it is, the Israelis maintain a 10:1 kill ratio over the Palestinians, and like I said, they're not even trying).
If the U.S. government's power is truly threatened and its back is against the wall, it will have no reservations about nuking a city or two if that's what it takes to remain in power. Now just what, exactly, do you think the civilian revolutionaries are going to be able to do against that kind of power, huh?
There's a reason modern fascist regimes are able to remain in power despite the hatred the population may have towards the government: modern military power is simply too great for lightly armed civilians to deal with.
You know, the sad thing about it is that Lucas has/had such an awesome opportunity to make some really good movies, too. I mean, he has the opportunity here to show why Palpatine is doing what he's doing, to inject a bit of uncertainty into the "good versus evil" simplistic worldview.
That's one of the reasons I liked Babylon 5 so much: things weren't black and white, but different shades of gray, and the uncertainty that comes from it was used to good effect.
Lucas could have done the same thing, and might even have done it reasonably well. But nooooo...
He didn't "invent" such a droid, and even Lucas doesn't claim he did. The droid that escorted Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan onto the Trade Federation ship was just such a droid (different only in color and voice), so such droids had been around a while.
Lucas may be lame, but he's not quite that lame.
With what? The pathetic peashooters that are the most that you can legally get nowadays?
Sorry, but revolution was only possible back when the U.S. revolution happened because the firepower of the average civilian was roughly equivalent to the firepower of the average soldier. That's not the case anymore -- a reasonably well-armed soldier probably has a tens to hundreds to one advantage over the average armed civilian, and that goes up to thousands to one if you account for the support (air, artillery, armor, etc.) the average soldier gets. And that's before we consider the exotic weapons like nukes (which raises the advantage to millions to one). Remember: it took weeks of careful planning and preparation for Timothy McVeigh to take out a single government building. That's the kind of capability the military uses routinely.
No, any revolution that happens is going to have to have a great deal of support from the military controlled by the very people who are being revolted against. In short, today ain't the 1700's and an armed revolution against a modern, reasonably well-armed government like the U.S. simply isn't possible.
Revolution by the population against the fascist German government would have been difficult enough. But against the U.S. government? No, you're WAY better off leaving, no matter how much you might like to stay and fight. Because you're basically guaranteed to lose if you stay.
A contract can say anything you want it to say -- that doesn't mean it's binding upon third parties (the RIAA, in this case) that didn't sign it.
The real question is whether or not the VCs played any part in managing Napster, either through providing direction/guidance or by providing executive staff. Many startup companies have seen both (it was the VCs that said "grow now, worry about being profitable later", and thus contributed to the demise of many startup companies and in essence caused the dotcom crash). So no matter what a contract may say, a VC could easily be liable if it did anything more than provide money for the business.
I'm actually not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it is because of the limited liability angle that there are so many evil things foisted upon us by the corporate world -- corporations take actions in order to make money for their investors, and investors don't give a crap what the corporations do as long as they make money. That's something that clearly has to change, and making the investors liable for the actions of the corporation is one way to do it. But the downside is that investors will be much more hesitant to invest if they are suddenly liable for the actions of a corporation. That might not be an altogether bad thing, though: it'll force investors to take an active role in the actions of a corporation, and will further force them to examine the actions of any company they're considering investing in.
This whole thing could, in the end, actually do the world a lot of good. But there are certainly risks involved, as there are with any significant change in How Things Are Done.
I have one such suggestion: fix it so that you can't claim a loss of any kind unless you also made the same loss claim to the IRS.
That'll force these morons to sue only when incurring real losses, not on the basis of this fantasyland crap.
Bzzt!!
Title 35, Section 103(a) of the U.S. code explicitly says:
What those "skilled in the art" think is centrally important because it is they to whom the subject matter as amended by the patent is obvious or not.
If the opinion of those "skilled in the art" does not matter when even the law itself essentially says it does then the patent process is so fundamentally broken that it cannot be fixed.
The people running the site need to read their own site (to get rid of dupes) and need to run it on a real database.
Sigh...