Jokes aside, what does this mean for Linux? Is it protected from SCO coming after anybody who makes a *nix based OS?
Doesn't mean anything new.
All it is saying is that (i) SCO owes Novell more than before, and (ii) summary judgements were not the right means of decision - that a jury needed to hear some of it.
There is nothing saying that Linux infringes anything, that IBM did anything improper (as this is SCO v. Novell, not SCO v. IBM), or anything else. Just that it needs to be tried by a jury instead of a judge.
Oh, and don't forget - Darl & Co are no longer in charge of SCO; the bankruptcy court is in the process of replacing them with a Trustee. So this does not mean anything with regards to what SCO will or even can do after this point. The Trustee may decide it will be a losing battle and to drop every litigation it can; though that would likely mean paying out to Novell, IBM, and others for being harassed by SCO. But it is now the Trustee that decides what to do next - appeals, litigation, etc.
I wasn't going to reply. But regardless of your lack of understanding is very present. Even in science there can be MULTIPLE theories.
For example: String Theory, vs. Loop Quantum Gravity Theory.
So please, stop this before you make more of a fool of yourself than you already have.
You are ignorant. You cannot teach biology and the history of life on this planet without 'hinting' at evolution. It *is* the story of life on this planet.
Your ignorance betrays you. It is *one* theory on it - one take. It is in no way an authoritative view, and cannot be proven at its base - especially in the historical - any more than ID or others as there are basic principles that simply cannot be tested, and its reliance on 'chance' is astronomical.
And yes - you can teach biology and the history of life on this planet without talking about evolution. That's not to say that it would not be wise to mention the various concepts put forth as to the historical thought of how things came about, but you don't have to teach it.
P.S. Thank you for stepping on the land mind. Please watch your next step.
You can teach science and not teach evolution. The two are not mutually inclusive.
Nor are they mutually exclusive - evolution is one 'model' put forth by science, a model based on certain assumptions that may or may not be true and that science cannot prove.
So again, whilst current modern school-level science is all about evolution, there is nothing preventing science from being taught without a hint of evolution ever being mentioned and students doing just as well. (Note: I did not say teach 'creationism', or 'ID', or anything else in its stead either.)
Probably b/c BSA doesn't audit software not produced by one of their members; where the RIAA wants to charge for anything by anyone - regardless of whether it came from one of their members. That alone probably makes a big difference.
i4i uses a very unique approach to the method, and from what you describe it sounds like you've only read the summary. I strongly suggest you read Rob Weir's article (available on Groklaw as well as other sources) and go back and read the patent, particularly the claims section.
There has already been a fair amount of discussion and not everything that uses XML and meta-data violates the patent. For example, ODF uses a very different method than this patent for the same kind of task - and from the various commentaries they do not violate it; namely b/c they saw the method proposed by i4i and MS as the wrong way to do it.
They went after MS exactly b/c MS did their normal predatory behavior and they have a legitimate case against MS.
FYI - this doesn't mean that I support software patents (I don't!); but this case is exactly why MS was charged with using its monopoly in an illegal way, and really shows what they do. So it's nice to see them bitten by it like this.
From what little I've read on this, it seems that Microsoft basically incorporated the plaintiff's product into Word. So essentially it would put the plaintiff out of business, and could result in irreparable damages to the plaintiff. So it is likely to withstand that test...IANAL, but from what little I know it seems reasonable.
Also, it's about time this happened, given how many times Microsoft has done this to others.
There are certainly US plans that are cheaper; though from what I am familiar with, most carriers like to charge about $30USD for just the unlimited data plan. Unlimited texting by itself could be $5 USD. Of course, both of those are on top of the standard phone service bill, which could be as low as $10/month. So there is comparable pricing, albeit without comparable services - if one didn't wanted to talk at all.
Sadly, quality is just not there. I haven't had a problem with Cingular/AT&T Wireless, even with my almost 5 year old model phone, Motorola v180 Quad-band - but I don't pay for the data plans period, and typically disable that functionality since I care about talking not data and the talking plans get expensive quick.
Try Qt Creator. It's easier, slicker, and more up-to-date; although it uses an older version of g++ by default (3.x, as opposed to 4.x) in their SDK provided version; it's out-of-the-box an easier C++ platform to build with.
What do you mean by "more up-to-date"?
Test it and you'll see - namely, the whole look'n feel of it.
In any case, Visual Studio together with Qt (and you can get full Qt integration for VS, including designers, documentation etc) will still beat Qt Creator.
I've used both the latest commercial version (1.4.3) and the latest open source version of the VS plugins by Trolltech/Nokia. The commercial version does have the full integration as you say, but it sadly breaks more often with intellisense than the open source version does; and the open source version does not have the full integration of the designers, etc - they call out to the applications instead.
Qt Creator is hands and feet above VS+Qt plug-in in this respect. However, it is currently tied to the gdb/g++ compilers; though they mention they are planning on supporting the VS debugger and MVSC compiler as well.
On one hand Visual Studio and.Net is probably the easiest thing to use to begin programming and getting something that looks cool. I personally also think it is the easiest platform/IDE for a beginning/low end programmer to quickly cobbling together some internal, database applications for a business.
Try Qt Creator. It's easier, slicker, and more up-to-date; although it uses an older version of g++ by default (3.x, as opposed to 4.x) in their SDK provided version; it's out-of-the-box an easier C++ platform to build with.
Microsoft like SEGA will survive after it's core product ends. Microsoft makes a lot of tools, these will still be used and profitable once Windows is gone (the thought of now more windows makes me giddy though)
Would be nice to see Visual Studio for Linux.
It's called Eclipse+CDT+gcc/g++ - a far superior product.
Of course, there is also Qt Creator, but that's just starting - it'll eventually be a far superior product, especially given its state out of the gate at 1.0.
What annoys me more are the signs on the backs of dump trucks that say that they're not responsible for broken windshields. Especially considering that there are multiple laws requiring that cargo be properly secured.
If they break yours, get their license plate number and the company name. Give it to your insurance company when you file your claim, then sit back and watch while the insurance company goes after them. Same for truck tires.
I hit a truck tire in the road at night once - couldn't see it until too late; but no truck around that it belonged to. After I convinced them there was nothing I could have done, they found me to be 'not at fault' - so it didn't get 'counted against me'; they would have done that right away if I had the truck's information for the truck it came from.
Certainly that'd be the case for the dump trucks too.
How would companies like these profit from funding OO development?
By not spending the money on MS Office.
Seriously. MS Office is blasted expensive - even for volume licenses. So you take a portion of what you would have spent on those licenses and invest in OO or KOffice, etc.
Sure, IBM have Symphony - but if I recall correctly they base part of it (it's ODF support) on code from OO.
Give them a way to save money and they'll do it. If they want specific features, they can fund those specific features - companies do that with the Linux kernel all the time. In the end, it's a win-win situation. That's one of the reasons Linux is really big in the data centers - and with HP, IBM, Dell, Oracle, etc.
Re:making progress
on
KDE 4.3 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Honestly I must agree with the AC/GP on this one.
I've been using Qt4.4/4.5 for a few months now - programming both for Windows and Linux; I don't have the KDE wrappers around it, but Qt4 is a god-send compared to any Windows API, for which I've been programming for nearly 5 years using MFC and Win32. (Win32 is a blessing compared to MFC, which is just horrid but partly necessary to make Windows programs faster to write at the cost of performance and programmability - e.g. CStrings are an absolute bastard from hell, but were necessary at a time.)
I'll never go back to MFC/Win32 if I can help it - though I will certainly have to from time to time for the Windows-only apps that I currently maintain for a living; even after they get replaced by Qt apps. Legacy support is a pain, but worthwhile for income.
Yes they could. But would they? If they tried, then how would they get paid? Contrary to popular believe - nobody works for free. Yes, someone may get paid for doing something other than contributing to a project, but they have to do something for a living. If a person is not getting paid to contribute to a project, then the time they get to spend on the project will be limited.
Probably. It would probably be pretty easy to setup something like the Linux Foundation for OO if there isn't something similar already. Then it's just a matter of getting the existing sponsors to contribute to pay their salaries, etc. Given the existing install-base, that probably a simple task if it was necessary to do; and I wouldn't be surprised if Sun/Oracle did that as part of letting them go if they were to do such a thing and try to shut down OO.
Oracle probably has bigger ambitions - like making OO-Base work with their one of their DB products (e.g. BDB, Oracle DB, etc.) better, perhaps in a way similar to AccessMS SQL Server; i.e. make it easier to people to migrate up the chain.
Oracle could gain a lot from having OO in their back pocket.
Considering only that aspect, PDFs would need to die even faster than MS Word, because the installed base of PDF editors is not even close to that of Word. So you cannot realistically expect that the guy who receives you document can edit it and send it back with annotations.
Except there is a flaw there. PDFs are consistently used in the fields it was designed for - and most notably the publishing industry. Want to publish a book? Sure you may work with doc/docx for a while, but near the end of the cycle it goes to PDF which is what the print operator uses to generate the book itself - it's what the printer hardware understands.
Word has no such specialty fields that would keep it around. It doesn't provide for such specific details to be good for the publication industry or any other industry. It's display is very monitor/resolution dependent.
Oracle can't really kill OpenOffice. They could kill Star Office, but OpenOffice would be a lot harder to do since anyone else could quickly pick it up and continue on.
Yes, I realize that most of the devs for OpenOffice are part of Sun, but if they all got laid off, they could easily band together and pick up a fork of OpenOffice if they so desired.
Of if Oracle tried to kill OpenOffice some random group of people could fork OpenOffice and continue on too.
CAs should be fixed to not allow garbage in the domain. \0 isn't a legal character in DNS protocol
If it's not allowed in DNS protocol (which wouldn't surprise me, unless punicode-escaped), then primarily, it is the client's job to defend against it. Even if all legitimate DNS information sources are checked, the client shouldn't assume that the next DNS request will go to or be replied to from a real server.
The problem is - how would Firefox or someone other client-side check that the cert is invalid in that sense since you check then length and will get the length reported based on the null terminator. Now if the cert had something in it to tell you, then that could provide a method of checking, but I doubt it has something of that nature in there; and this would not be a simple thing to do on the client side (e.g. Firefox, IE, Opera, etc.)
Honest, this goes to show the CA's software is broken - it should catch this by trying to issue the domain against what the client software would try to verify - e.g. paypal.com\0.badguy.com -> paypal.com - which of course would immediately defeat the whole attack.
So cursive isn't really superior, it is just mandated by law in your case. The mandated security practices are even worse than say digitally signed documents.
I also don't really see why the Unicode- or ASCII-standard would change in 70 years. It's been around since the 1960s.
Did he say cursive was mandated? I didn't see that...but I could have missed it.
He did say hand-written logs were mandated - he could print it for all that matters, and it should still be satisfactory.
I gave up using cursive over a decade ago as it was just too difficult to decipher - not that I can't read cursive, I can; my own was about as good as a doctor's prescription note/signature if you know what I mean. At the beginning of a school year it would look nice and legible, by the end, it would be a series of lines. Quick? Yes. Useful? not really.
So I went to non-cursive script 100% of the time - it was about as fast, and 100% legible all the time. If I had someone requiring me to use cursive, they'd probably quickly learn (~8 months) why I shouldn't be using cursive script.
I won't disagree with others that concepts are more important than teaching any one single language - they are, and if I put a curriculum together myself I'd teach no less than 6 different languages.
However, concepts are not the apex of a degree that colleges (and professors) make them out to be either.
Students need a balanced approach between implementing software (programming) using a number of tools (languages) and the theoretical.
Sadly, computer science has largely gone theoretical, almost to the point of complete uselessness.
This is partially due to the maturity of the field - it's still highly immature, and I don't simply mean that programmers are immature - there are quite a number of very mature programmers. The field is just young compared to all other fields. For example, we need to get over the whole 'programming is art' thing and grow up - yes, there is an artistic aspect to it, just as there is to building a bridge or a car, etc; but it's not all about art, it's about building things. (If you don't agree, then you'll certainly be making a fine example of what I mean by the 'grow up'.)
We also need degrees that work through problems better, encourage innovation, and teach how to learn from our mistakes. This is the essence of an engineering degree. Talk to a mechanical or electrical engineer about their undergrad program - it's rife with pitting students against each other for the best methods, and upping your score by showing how you learned from the mistakes you made in the design, the whole 'why didn't it work as expected'. Yet, this is exactly what is lacking in nearly every computer curriculum. Students are taught to be code-monkeys ("I told you do it this way, so you better do it this way") with in-flexibility ("well that's what the professor said to do"), and severely lacks on the learning from mistakes. Sure you have to work through a debugger to find the problem - but what about when you design the program, hit the dead-line, and it's still not working? Give up? Re-write? Or dive in, learn what you did wrong, and report on it?
Yes - I'm pushing for a true software engineering degree that exists as part of every engineering department, not an off-shoot of the mathematics department. Teach the theory, but balance it with implementation. Doesn't have to be anything grandiose - but it does have to prove the points, teach the underlying principle, and give the students opportunity to learn from failure (what went wrong? how could you have avoided the problem?) as well as enjoy the success of competition (who can do it better?!).
Well...in a way, yes it is. It's destroying the driver's knowledge of the surrounding area that they would have otherwise gained from either (i) getting lost, or (ii) stopping to talk to the locals and get directions. It's also destroying the passenger's knowledge as they won't have the varied experiences they had before since the driver (i) didn't get lost, and (ii) didn't stop to ask for directions.
Honestly, half the fun of driving is getting lost in a new area and learning your way around. A sat-nav system takes that away.
But it also degrades the social aspects of traveling - meeting new people, or finding the hole-in-the-wall establishments that you might have not otherwise gone to but it was the only place you could find and you really enjoyed it in the end, or a whole host of other things. Instead, people are just plugging in the "I need food" and selecting what they already know they will like, or "I need gas" and going to the closest place.
So, think of it this way - if we related it to the movie 'Cars', sat-nav does basically what the highway did to the town (in a sense); and there's a whole new adventure waiting just off the road if only you'd take a look.
Though, to be fair, it will likely open up some other possibilities too - meeting more people at the places you are going, and such. So it really is a double-edged sword.
At best an IP address identifies a computer; and as other have said that single computer could be (i) a router, behind which there are other computers, (ii) a single computer with one OS, (iii) a single computer with multiple OS's (e.g. virtual machines), or more. Additionally, there is not necessarily a 1:1 ratio of computers to humans where the computer resides; thus, even if you can identify the computer you cannot necessarily identify the person behind it, even if you use a login - someone else could login as you and do stuff and you wouldn't know it.
So it's kind of somewhere between what RIAA wants and what the judge ruled here. RIAA wants it to identify a specific individual - not gonna happen - but it does identify more than the judge ruled. So privacy still needs to be held and IP addresses should still be considered private information, though not personally identifiable information.
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Jokes aside, what does this mean for Linux? Is it protected from SCO coming after anybody who makes a *nix based OS?
Doesn't mean anything new.
All it is saying is that (i) SCO owes Novell more than before, and (ii) summary judgements were not the right means of decision - that a jury needed to hear some of it.
There is nothing saying that Linux infringes anything, that IBM did anything improper (as this is SCO v. Novell, not SCO v. IBM), or anything else. Just that it needs to be tried by a jury instead of a judge.
Oh, and don't forget - Darl & Co are no longer in charge of SCO; the bankruptcy court is in the process of replacing them with a Trustee. So this does not mean anything with regards to what SCO will or even can do after this point. The Trustee may decide it will be a losing battle and to drop every litigation it can; though that would likely mean paying out to Novell, IBM, and others for being harassed by SCO. But it is now the Trustee that decides what to do next - appeals, litigation, etc.
I wasn't going to reply. But regardless of your lack of understanding is very present. Even in science there can be MULTIPLE theories. For example: String Theory, vs. Loop Quantum Gravity Theory. So please, stop this before you make more of a fool of yourself than you already have.
You are ignorant. You cannot teach biology and the history of life on this planet without 'hinting' at evolution. It *is* the story of life on this planet.
Your ignorance betrays you. It is *one* theory on it - one take. It is in no way an authoritative view, and cannot be proven at its base - especially in the historical - any more than ID or others as there are basic principles that simply cannot be tested, and its reliance on 'chance' is astronomical.
And yes - you can teach biology and the history of life on this planet without talking about evolution. That's not to say that it would not be wise to mention the various concepts put forth as to the historical thought of how things came about, but you don't have to teach it.
P.S. Thank you for stepping on the land mind. Please watch your next step.
science does not necessitate evolution.
You can teach science and not teach evolution. The two are not mutually inclusive.
Nor are they mutually exclusive - evolution is one 'model' put forth by science, a model based on certain assumptions that may or may not be true and that science cannot prove.
So again, whilst current modern school-level science is all about evolution, there is nothing preventing science from being taught without a hint of evolution ever being mentioned and students doing just as well. (Note: I did not say teach 'creationism', or 'ID', or anything else in its stead either.)
Probably b/c BSA doesn't audit software not produced by one of their members; where the RIAA wants to charge for anything by anyone - regardless of whether it came from one of their members. That alone probably makes a big difference.
i4i uses a very unique approach to the method, and from what you describe it sounds like you've only read the summary. I strongly suggest you read Rob Weir's article (available on Groklaw as well as other sources) and go back and read the patent, particularly the claims section.
There has already been a fair amount of discussion and not everything that uses XML and meta-data violates the patent. For example, ODF uses a very different method than this patent for the same kind of task - and from the various commentaries they do not violate it; namely b/c they saw the method proposed by i4i and MS as the wrong way to do it.
They went after MS exactly b/c MS did their normal predatory behavior and they have a legitimate case against MS.
FYI - this doesn't mean that I support software patents (I don't!); but this case is exactly why MS was charged with using its monopoly in an illegal way, and really shows what they do. So it's nice to see them bitten by it like this.
From what little I've read on this, it seems that Microsoft basically incorporated the plaintiff's product into Word. So essentially it would put the plaintiff out of business, and could result in irreparable damages to the plaintiff. So it is likely to withstand that test...IANAL, but from what little I know it seems reasonable.
Also, it's about time this happened, given how many times Microsoft has done this to others.
For starters, you need some parable units:
29 Euro is (as of 2008-08-11, 1430 EDT) about $41USD.
There are certainly US plans that are cheaper; though from what I am familiar with, most carriers like to charge about $30USD for just the unlimited data plan. Unlimited texting by itself could be $5 USD. Of course, both of those are on top of the standard phone service bill, which could be as low as $10/month. So there is comparable pricing, albeit without comparable services - if one didn't wanted to talk at all.
Sadly, quality is just not there. I haven't had a problem with Cingular/AT&T Wireless, even with my almost 5 year old model phone, Motorola v180 Quad-band - but I don't pay for the data plans period, and typically disable that functionality since I care about talking not data and the talking plans get expensive quick.
Try Qt Creator. It's easier, slicker, and more up-to-date; although it uses an older version of g++ by default (3.x, as opposed to 4.x) in their SDK provided version; it's out-of-the-box an easier C++ platform to build with.
What do you mean by "more up-to-date"?
Test it and you'll see - namely, the whole look'n feel of it.
In any case, Visual Studio together with Qt (and you can get full Qt integration for VS, including designers, documentation etc) will still beat Qt Creator.
I've used both the latest commercial version (1.4.3) and the latest open source version of the VS plugins by Trolltech/Nokia. The commercial version does have the full integration as you say, but it sadly breaks more often with intellisense than the open source version does; and the open source version does not have the full integration of the designers, etc - they call out to the applications instead.
Qt Creator is hands and feet above VS+Qt plug-in in this respect. However, it is currently tied to the gdb/g++ compilers; though they mention they are planning on supporting the VS debugger and MVSC compiler as well.
Try Qt Creator. It's easier, slicker, and more up-to-date; although it uses an older version of g++ by default (3.x, as opposed to 4.x) in their SDK provided version; it's out-of-the-box an easier C++ platform to build with.
Microsoft like SEGA will survive after it's core product ends. Microsoft makes a lot of tools, these will still be used and profitable once Windows is gone (the thought of now more windows makes me giddy though)
Would be nice to see Visual Studio for Linux.
It's called Eclipse+CDT+gcc/g++ - a far superior product.
Of course, there is also Qt Creator, but that's just starting - it'll eventually be a far superior product, especially given its state out of the gate at 1.0.
What annoys me more are the signs on the backs of dump trucks that say that they're not responsible for broken windshields. Especially considering that there are multiple laws requiring that cargo be properly secured.
If they break yours, get their license plate number and the company name. Give it to your insurance company when you file your claim, then sit back and watch while the insurance company goes after them. Same for truck tires.
I hit a truck tire in the road at night once - couldn't see it until too late; but no truck around that it belonged to. After I convinced them there was nothing I could have done, they found me to be 'not at fault' - so it didn't get 'counted against me'; they would have done that right away if I had the truck's information for the truck it came from.
Certainly that'd be the case for the dump trucks too.
By not spending the money on MS Office.
Seriously. MS Office is blasted expensive - even for volume licenses. So you take a portion of what you would have spent on those licenses and invest in OO or KOffice, etc.
Sure, IBM have Symphony - but if I recall correctly they base part of it (it's ODF support) on code from OO.
Give them a way to save money and they'll do it. If they want specific features, they can fund those specific features - companies do that with the Linux kernel all the time. In the end, it's a win-win situation. That's one of the reasons Linux is really big in the data centers - and with HP, IBM, Dell, Oracle, etc.
Honestly I must agree with the AC/GP on this one.
I've been using Qt4.4/4.5 for a few months now - programming both for Windows and Linux; I don't have the KDE wrappers around it, but Qt4 is a god-send compared to any Windows API, for which I've been programming for nearly 5 years using MFC and Win32. (Win32 is a blessing compared to MFC, which is just horrid but partly necessary to make Windows programs faster to write at the cost of performance and programmability - e.g. CStrings are an absolute bastard from hell, but were necessary at a time.)
I'll never go back to MFC/Win32 if I can help it - though I will certainly have to from time to time for the Windows-only apps that I currently maintain for a living; even after they get replaced by Qt apps. Legacy support is a pain, but worthwhile for income.
Yes they could. But would they? If they tried, then how would they get paid? Contrary to popular believe - nobody works for free. Yes, someone may get paid for doing something other than contributing to a project, but they have to do something for a living. If a person is not getting paid to contribute to a project, then the time they get to spend on the project will be limited.
Probably. It would probably be pretty easy to setup something like the Linux Foundation for OO if there isn't something similar already. Then it's just a matter of getting the existing sponsors to contribute to pay their salaries, etc. Given the existing install-base, that probably a simple task if it was necessary to do; and I wouldn't be surprised if Sun/Oracle did that as part of letting them go if they were to do such a thing and try to shut down OO.
Oracle probably has bigger ambitions - like making OO-Base work with their one of their DB products (e.g. BDB, Oracle DB, etc.) better, perhaps in a way similar to AccessMS SQL Server; i.e. make it easier to people to migrate up the chain.
Oracle could gain a lot from having OO in their back pocket.
vi, you insensitive clod.
Are you saying that Word is not a good text processor?
If so, would you care to support that assertion?
"good" implies it's above average, and Word is only average. And the usage statistics (at least presently) would show that. ;-)
Except there is a flaw there. PDFs are consistently used in the fields it was designed for - and most notably the publishing industry. Want to publish a book? Sure you may work with doc/docx for a while, but near the end of the cycle it goes to PDF which is what the print operator uses to generate the book itself - it's what the printer hardware understands.
Word has no such specialty fields that would keep it around. It doesn't provide for such specific details to be good for the publication industry or any other industry. It's display is very monitor/resolution dependent.
Because I have OpenOffice. It is just as good.
And free.
Um yeah, until Oracle kills it next year.
Oracle can't really kill OpenOffice. They could kill Star Office, but OpenOffice would be a lot harder to do since anyone else could quickly pick it up and continue on.
Yes, I realize that most of the devs for OpenOffice are part of Sun, but if they all got laid off, they could easily band together and pick up a fork of OpenOffice if they so desired.
Of if Oracle tried to kill OpenOffice some random group of people could fork OpenOffice and continue on too.
So no, it's not that easy.
If it's not allowed in DNS protocol (which wouldn't surprise me, unless punicode-escaped), then primarily, it is the client's job to defend against it. Even if all legitimate DNS information sources are checked, the client shouldn't assume that the next DNS request will go to or be replied to from a real server.
The problem is - how would Firefox or someone other client-side check that the cert is invalid in that sense since you check then length and will get the length reported based on the null terminator. Now if the cert had something in it to tell you, then that could provide a method of checking, but I doubt it has something of that nature in there; and this would not be a simple thing to do on the client side (e.g. Firefox, IE, Opera, etc.)
Honest, this goes to show the CA's software is broken - it should catch this by trying to issue the domain against what the client software would try to verify - e.g. paypal.com\0.badguy.com -> paypal.com - which of course would immediately defeat the whole attack.
So cursive isn't really superior, it is just mandated by law in your case. The mandated security practices are even worse than say digitally signed documents.
I also don't really see why the Unicode- or ASCII-standard would change in 70 years. It's been around since the 1960s.
Did he say cursive was mandated? I didn't see that...but I could have missed it.
He did say hand-written logs were mandated - he could print it for all that matters, and it should still be satisfactory.
I gave up using cursive over a decade ago as it was just too difficult to decipher - not that I can't read cursive, I can; my own was about as good as a doctor's prescription note/signature if you know what I mean. At the beginning of a school year it would look nice and legible, by the end, it would be a series of lines. Quick? Yes. Useful? not really.
So I went to non-cursive script 100% of the time - it was about as fast, and 100% legible all the time. If I had someone requiring me to use cursive, they'd probably quickly learn (~8 months) why I shouldn't be using cursive script.
I won't disagree with others that concepts are more important than teaching any one single language - they are, and if I put a curriculum together myself I'd teach no less than 6 different languages.
However, concepts are not the apex of a degree that colleges (and professors) make them out to be either.
Students need a balanced approach between implementing software (programming) using a number of tools (languages) and the theoretical. Sadly, computer science has largely gone theoretical, almost to the point of complete uselessness.
This is partially due to the maturity of the field - it's still highly immature, and I don't simply mean that programmers are immature - there are quite a number of very mature programmers. The field is just young compared to all other fields. For example, we need to get over the whole 'programming is art' thing and grow up - yes, there is an artistic aspect to it, just as there is to building a bridge or a car, etc; but it's not all about art, it's about building things. (If you don't agree, then you'll certainly be making a fine example of what I mean by the 'grow up'.)
We also need degrees that work through problems better, encourage innovation, and teach how to learn from our mistakes. This is the essence of an engineering degree. Talk to a mechanical or electrical engineer about their undergrad program - it's rife with pitting students against each other for the best methods, and upping your score by showing how you learned from the mistakes you made in the design, the whole 'why didn't it work as expected'. Yet, this is exactly what is lacking in nearly every computer curriculum. Students are taught to be code-monkeys ("I told you do it this way, so you better do it this way") with in-flexibility ("well that's what the professor said to do"), and severely lacks on the learning from mistakes. Sure you have to work through a debugger to find the problem - but what about when you design the program, hit the dead-line, and it's still not working? Give up? Re-write? Or dive in, learn what you did wrong, and report on it?
Yes - I'm pushing for a true software engineering degree that exists as part of every engineering department, not an off-shoot of the mathematics department. Teach the theory, but balance it with implementation. Doesn't have to be anything grandiose - but it does have to prove the points, teach the underlying principle, and give the students opportunity to learn from failure (what went wrong? how could you have avoided the problem?) as well as enjoy the success of competition (who can do it better?!).
Well...in a way, yes it is. It's destroying the driver's knowledge of the surrounding area that they would have otherwise gained from either (i) getting lost, or (ii) stopping to talk to the locals and get directions. It's also destroying the passenger's knowledge as they won't have the varied experiences they had before since the driver (i) didn't get lost, and (ii) didn't stop to ask for directions.
Honestly, half the fun of driving is getting lost in a new area and learning your way around. A sat-nav system takes that away.
But it also degrades the social aspects of traveling - meeting new people, or finding the hole-in-the-wall establishments that you might have not otherwise gone to but it was the only place you could find and you really enjoyed it in the end, or a whole host of other things. Instead, people are just plugging in the "I need food" and selecting what they already know they will like, or "I need gas" and going to the closest place.
So, think of it this way - if we related it to the movie 'Cars', sat-nav does basically what the highway did to the town (in a sense); and there's a whole new adventure waiting just off the road if only you'd take a look.
Though, to be fair, it will likely open up some other possibilities too - meeting more people at the places you are going, and such. So it really is a double-edged sword.
But I still say - getting lost is half the fun.
And no - I don't use or own a GPS nav system.
At best an IP address identifies a computer; and as other have said that single computer could be (i) a router, behind which there are other computers, (ii) a single computer with one OS, (iii) a single computer with multiple OS's (e.g. virtual machines), or more. Additionally, there is not necessarily a 1:1 ratio of computers to humans where the computer resides; thus, even if you can identify the computer you cannot necessarily identify the person behind it, even if you use a login - someone else could login as you and do stuff and you wouldn't know it.
So it's kind of somewhere between what RIAA wants and what the judge ruled here. RIAA wants it to identify a specific individual - not gonna happen - but it does identify more than the judge ruled. So privacy still needs to be held and IP addresses should still be considered private information, though not personally identifiable information.
Wouldn't that be "::666"?