God, I'm so tired of reading this sort of uninformed bullshit on Slashdot from people who have little or no experience of the typical British town or city.
That's a pretty strong accusation of bullshit from someone whose own reasoning is so self-contradictory. The facts in that post seem to be dating from about 10 years ago when you might have been believed. But since then, there's been a lot of development that you might have missed.
The original article was about how we're worried that pervs could be taking photos of people without being noticed. So how could it possibly not be a valid response to mention the single young men in darkened rooms following girls around the city on CCTV screens?
Let's just sprinkle in some facts: 1. There aren't CCTV surveillance cameras every 50 metres in Britain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying through their teeth or delusional.
I can walk from one end of Nottingham centre to the other without ever being out of sight of a camera. Same in Sheffield. Probably the same in London, although I've not paid as much attention there. In smaller towns, they may not be 50m, but there is a public CCTV camera on every stretch of street in the town-centre area.
2. The majority of the cameras that are installed are privately owned, in shops, etc to deter shoplifters, etc.
OK, there are plenty more cameras that I'm not counting. Cameras in shops aren't needed to reach the "one every 50m" claim, it would be more like "one every 10m" if you included shops in city centres.
3. A great deal of the "publicly operated" cameras are in places like train stations, airports and major roads to monitor things like passenger and traffic flow, and around sensitive government buildings like police stations to improve security.
Again, I'm not really including traffic cameras in my list, although as you say, they add even more numbers to the total.
Cameras around sensitive government buildings I'd count as private, but cameras around police stations are part of the city-centre surveillance, and being close to a police station is irrelevant. (but if the cameras are for police information, can't they just look out of the window? If they wanted to find crime, rather than just record stuff. Nevermind, it's all part of the citywide network of cameras)
Most of the latter were installed at a time when organisations like the IRA were hell-bent on blowing up everything from Christmas shoppers to military barracks to politicians to financial institutions, and the images that they output are almost always recorded to nothing more advanced than video tape at poor (black and white) quality.
Cameras get replaced all the time. The sleepy little village my parents live in has just sprouted 3 new cameras, and they weren't put there in response to IRA action.
4. There is no all-seeing "Enemy Of The State"-type network of cameras that can track your every movement. (Think about it: if there was, wouldn't it be used to totally eradicate crime?)
'Scuse me? There is a camera system that can track your every movement, were you not watching when they demonstrated the systems? You seem to be confused between what's possible with the system, and what you think the policemen in charge can be bothered to look at. Specifically, any reasonable number of people can be followed everywhere they go, as we've seen demonstrated on TV. That's not the same as being able to follow everybody all the time, but for all practical purposes, is good enough. Look at london during any demonstration. Get some extra police in the control centre, and every single one of 100000 demonstrators can be continuously watched. We've seen tours of the control centres showing this happening.
5. If you want to see what footage of you someone might have, then the law says that they must provide it to you. All you have to do is ask for it in writi
"Because self-updating works so well for Windows."
It turns out that you need to test updates first, which as we Debian users know, takes time and effort.
Could Microsoft even afford the delay caused by proper testing? Apply those principles to windows software, and Windows2000 would just about be ready to go into the stable branch, and we'd all be running a solidly-patched version of Internet Explorer 3
"I would love to see some numbers on the frequency and nature of bugs in software, and I want to see these numbers broken up by language as well as by appliction domain. I suspect that a comprehensive collection of such statistics doesn't exist, since I haven't seen any empirical data enter into the various debates to which they would apply."
One theory is: the less code you have, the less likely it is to contain mistakes. So the most powerful language available (the one which solves your problem in the least amount of code) is going to have the least mistakes, because (a) you've had more time to think about each line, (b) the code is more likely to be close to the problem domain, and (c) most estimation methods find a certain number of errors per x lines of code.
"While it is widely considered relatively harmless or even benefical in small quantities, large enough doses result in a state known as drunkenness or intoxication"
It is however, slightly cheaper, and comes with the words "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License" printed in small friendly letters on the front cover.
"The problem is that information becomes dated very fast. Encyclopedias are useless for researching anything technology related, except as a historical snapshot. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, new countries were springing into existance faster than the maps could be printed."
As someone with a few printed maps at home, it's pretty amazing to go to Wikipedia on the day after a government change, and see the new flag, map, and text about the government. Much better than looking at a paper map from only a few years ago and seeing "Yugoslavia" or "East Germany"
"That Britannica link goes to the "concise" oort cloud article unless you're a member, so I'm not sure that's a good comparison."
Actually I'd say it's an excellent comparaison.
"You are viewing a brief summary article. Members can login to view the full article" - (they won't tell you the price, but apparently it's $7.95 per month) EB
I pay more than that for Wikipedia, but in return, I know that everyone in the world has free access to an encyclopedia.
"In some ways though, that's really a pretty undeniable truth about the Wikipedia system -- even if it is True today, some jackass can come in and make it Not True tomorrow. Even if it's Not True for only five minutes, if someone looks at it during that time and assumes it to be correct, the wiki has failed in some sense."
The wikipedians have been planning to use "stable" and "testing" versions for as long as I can remember, so (although it's not urgent) whenever that's in, it should prevent many of the "accidentally reading a vandalism and believing it" problems.
For now, locked articles are used for pages contraversial enough to have this problem, and ideas are discussed on the talk page, which can be moved to the actual page by somebody "trusted" (a similar way to how traditional encyclopaedias operate?)
To be fair, if someone in charge of developing EB has looked at it and found only an error in someone's birth-date, then that sounds pretty good, especially for something which has about 100 times as many articles as any physical encyclopaedia I have access to, has more tech topics (how good is EB's article on WindowMaker or X?) and most important of all, I can check it from anywhere without having to pay an annual fee, remember passwords, or sign a license agreeing not to copy anything.
"Imagine a perl script to generate spoof statistics. Imagine a million./ readers running the script as a cron job."
Has anyone got a packet-dump (or even better, an analysis of the packet structure)? It's easy enough to write a script, but we don't want to just replay the same ID number again and again...
" I'm lucky enough to be able to back up most of my stuff by just plainly copying it from my drive to my USB drive. Then I put my USB drive away. I do this every few months. I guess the smartest thing I can do is invest in a fireproof waterproof lock box, and stick it in an attic."
"A union WILL NOT WORK in this instance. Why? Cause if you and all the game programmers join a union, the gaming companies will just replace each and every person."
And every product they make will instantly become 6 months delayed. ("Adding more programmers to a late project only makes it later") Did we mention that if they don't release seasonal games on time, they lose all the potential profit from those games?
"EVERY coder has, at one time or another, wanted to code video games."
Perhaps. But just try getting those programmers to work for (and take part in) a high-profile "union busting"...
A few months ago, the BBC technical department was in the news because their staff weren't getting paid enough, and had decided to voice their discontent.
The BBC, naturally enough, wrote to the perl-jobs mailing list, advertising programming positions. We just laughed at them. I wonder if they ever did get any responses to their email, once it became known that they were trying to replace people who were on the verge of striking...
"You get the code, look for flaws, write a program that exploits the flaws, and say "Hey Microsoft, give us $50,000 or we'll release this new virus that will wipe out every computer running Windows 2000 that's connected to the Internet.""
"I heard that people are now leaking the linux code all over the place"
Actually, eBay has been known to instigate fraud investigations, locked accounts, and seizure of assets against people selling copies of Linux without Microsoft's permission.
"Specifically, if wind generation were expanded to the point where it produced one-10th of today's energy, the models say cooling in the Arctic and a warming across the southern parts of North America should happen.
And what changes does this model predict if we put 24,533,000 kg of carbon dioxide per year into the atmosphere?
"Typically, "Exempt" refers to "professions" such as lawyer, doctor, and engineer. It can also apply to "management." A software coder without the word "engineer" in their title might be able to be considered non-exempt. The only way to know for sure is to contact the department of labor: http://www.dol.gov/"
That DOL website says that exemptions are very narrow, so the only way to know for sure is to phone and check...
Presumably they would not have described the exemption as narrow if it had included "Engineers", and I can't find any reference to engineers in the law itself (FLSA?), although that law is exceedingly badly-written, and almost impossible to read.
It does appear that everyone affected by the law has to get a copy and explanation of it from their employer, so it looks like EA Games (and others) have the burden of proving that their employment policies are lawful?
"Reading this article woke me up a little... maybe I should be getting those things. I wonder how many programmers are in the situation of having little to no 'crunch time' and paid overtime and comp days? Especially paid overtime -- who gets that? Anyone?"
Yes, I think. 37-and-a-half hours per week, and I paid for every hour of overtime. 25 days holiday per year. And it's in gaming, although not in the mainstream part you know. It's also in the UK, although that shouldn't make much difference (someome already mentioned problems in France, which has very good labor laws)
I guess if you allow the company to ask for overtime too often, then it quickly becomes a problem you can't get out of - once long hours are expected, then I imagine it's much more difficult to say no. But if you leave at 5pm like your contract specifies, then what are they going to do? Wait 3 months to find someone who'll accept the job, and another 8 months for them to get up-to-speed on the code?
"I think the big question is, how can we get small game studios back?"
Presumably, we can decide that we'd like to buy more games from small companies, and try to remember that decision when purchasing.
Of course, good information isn't always available, and the people buying these games in such bulk are probably teenagers with no concept of what these problems are.
So is it a job for games magazines? Would they ever get review copies again if they exposed such information, or would EA crush anyone who spoke out against them?
TOP msg n After the initial +OK, the POP3 server sends the headers of the message, the blank line separating the headers from the body, and then the number of lines of the indicated message's body.
"A day out off the presses, and it's "venerable"? "
December 10, 1994: Netscape 1.0 is released
"And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days."
March 31, 1998: Netscape became open-source, and Mozilla was born
"And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble."
July 15, 2003: Mozilla Foundation was established, and Netscape development ceased at AOL
"And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror."
Slashdot Mirror
God, I'm so tired of reading this sort of uninformed bullshit on Slashdot from people who have little or no experience of the typical British town or city.
That's a pretty strong accusation of bullshit from someone whose own reasoning is so self-contradictory. The facts in that post seem to be dating from about 10 years ago when you might have been believed. But since then, there's been a lot of development that you might have missed.
The original article was about how we're worried that pervs could be taking photos of people without being noticed. So how could it possibly not be a valid response to mention the single young men in darkened rooms following girls around the city on CCTV screens?
Let's just sprinkle in some facts:
1. There aren't CCTV surveillance cameras every 50 metres in Britain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying through their teeth or delusional.
I can walk from one end of Nottingham centre to the other without ever being out of sight of a camera. Same in Sheffield. Probably the same in London, although I've not paid as much attention there. In smaller towns, they may not be 50m, but there is a public CCTV camera on every stretch of street in the town-centre area.
2. The majority of the cameras that are installed are privately owned, in shops, etc to deter shoplifters, etc.
OK, there are plenty more cameras that I'm not counting. Cameras in shops aren't needed to reach the "one every 50m" claim, it would be more like "one every 10m" if you included shops in city centres.
3. A great deal of the "publicly operated" cameras are in places like train stations, airports and major roads to monitor things like passenger and traffic flow, and around sensitive government buildings like police stations to improve security.
Again, I'm not really including traffic cameras in my list, although as you say, they add even more numbers to the total.
Cameras around sensitive government buildings I'd count as private, but cameras around police stations are part of the city-centre surveillance, and being close to a police station is irrelevant. (but if the cameras are for police information, can't they just look out of the window? If they wanted to find crime, rather than just record stuff. Nevermind, it's all part of the citywide network of cameras)
Most of the latter were installed at a time when organisations like the IRA were hell-bent on blowing up everything from Christmas shoppers to military barracks to politicians to financial institutions, and the images that they output are almost always recorded to nothing more advanced than video tape at poor (black and white) quality.
Cameras get replaced all the time. The sleepy little village my parents live in has just sprouted 3 new cameras, and they weren't put there in response to IRA action.
4. There is no all-seeing "Enemy Of The State"-type network of cameras that can track your every movement. (Think about it: if there was, wouldn't it be used to totally eradicate crime?)
'Scuse me? There is a camera system that can track your every movement, were you not watching when they demonstrated the systems? You seem to be confused between what's possible with the system, and what you think the policemen in charge can be bothered to look at. Specifically, any reasonable number of people can be followed everywhere they go, as we've seen demonstrated on TV. That's not the same as being able to follow everybody all the time, but for all practical purposes, is good enough. Look at london during any demonstration. Get some extra police in the control centre, and every single one of 100000 demonstrators can be continuously watched. We've seen tours of the control centres showing this happening.
5. If you want to see what footage of you someone might have, then the law says that they must provide it to you. All you have to do is ask for it in writi
"The popularity of camera phones has made it much easier to take illicit photos without permission."
In other news, the installation of CCTV surveillance cameras every 50 f*ing metres has made it easier to take illicit photos without permission.
"Wasn't there a huge stink about WinXP and its AutoUpdate feature"
We're not expecting any linux updates to prevent you from playing music, to change the license of any software, or to install malicious software
"Then again, I rarely watch TV anymore and then only PBS so I'm not really affected, unless they make it illegal to NOT watch TV."
I expect sooner or later, your TV will turn itself on every time there's an amber alert, a weather warning, or a specially-tagged advert...
"Because self-updating works so well for Windows."
It turns out that you need to test updates first, which as we Debian users know, takes time and effort.
Could Microsoft even afford the delay caused by proper testing? Apply those principles to windows software, and Windows2000 would just about be ready to go into the stable branch, and we'd all be running a solidly-patched version of Internet Explorer 3
"I would love to see some numbers on the frequency and nature of bugs in software, and I want to see these numbers broken up by language as well as by appliction domain. I suspect that a comprehensive collection of such statistics doesn't exist, since I haven't seen any empirical data enter into the various debates to which they would apply."
One theory is: the less code you have, the less likely it is to contain mistakes. So the most powerful language available (the one which solves your problem in the least amount of code) is going to have the least mistakes, because (a) you've had more time to think about each line, (b) the code is more likely to be close to the problem domain, and (c) most estimation methods find a certain number of errors per x lines of code.
Ironically, the Wikipedia entry on Alcohol does not have directions to good drinking establishments:
It is however, slightly cheaper, and comes with the words "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License" printed in small friendly letters on the front cover.
"The problem is that information becomes dated very fast. Encyclopedias are useless for researching anything technology related, except as a historical snapshot. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, new countries were springing into existance faster than the maps could be printed."
As someone with a few printed maps at home, it's pretty amazing to go to Wikipedia on the day after a government change, and see the new flag, map, and text about the government. Much better than looking at a paper map from only a few years ago and seeing "Yugoslavia" or "East Germany"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq
(OK, the maps are mostly from the CIA world factbook, which is also excellent and useful)
"That Britannica link goes to the "concise" oort cloud article unless you're a member, so I'm not sure that's a good comparison."
Actually I'd say it's an excellent comparaison.
"You are viewing a brief summary article. Members can login to view the full article" - (they won't tell you the price, but apparently it's $7.95 per month) EB
I pay more than that for Wikipedia, but in return, I know that everyone in the world has free access to an encyclopedia.
"In some ways though, that's really a pretty undeniable truth about the Wikipedia system -- even if it is True today, some jackass can come in and make it Not True tomorrow. Even if it's Not True for only five minutes, if someone looks at it during that time and assumes it to be correct, the wiki has failed in some sense."
The wikipedians have been planning to use "stable" and "testing" versions for as long as I can remember, so (although it's not urgent) whenever that's in, it should prevent many of the "accidentally reading a vandalism and believing it" problems.
For now, locked articles are used for pages contraversial enough to have this problem, and ideas are discussed on the talk page, which can be moved to the actual page by somebody "trusted" (a similar way to how traditional encyclopaedias operate?)
To be fair, if someone in charge of developing EB has looked at it and found only an error in someone's birth-date, then that sounds pretty good, especially for something which has about 100 times as many articles as any physical encyclopaedia I have access to, has more tech topics (how good is EB's article on WindowMaker or X?) and most important of all, I can check it from anywhere without having to pay an annual fee, remember passwords, or sign a license agreeing not to copy anything.
"Imagine a perl script to generate spoof statistics. Imagine a million ./ readers running the script as a cron job."
Has anyone got a packet-dump (or even better, an analysis of the packet structure)? It's easy enough to write a script, but we don't want to just replay the same ID number again and again...
"Usability, security and cheapness. You can have any two"
unless you run Windows
"There are people that know about what I am doing and believe in it. I just want to be an historian, a gatekeeper."
So basically just the same as archive.org, except without the distribution aspect?
" I'm lucky enough to be able to back up most of my stuff by just plainly copying it from my drive to my USB drive. Then I put my USB drive away. I do this every few months. I guess the smartest thing I can do is invest in a fireproof waterproof lock box, and stick it in an attic."
You might find that USB keys are hardier than that, so you could just leave them to survive without needing a safe...
"A union WILL NOT WORK in this instance. Why? Cause if you and all the game programmers join a union, the gaming companies will just replace each and every person."
And every product they make will instantly become 6 months delayed. ("Adding more programmers to a late project only makes it later") Did we mention that if they don't release seasonal games on time, they lose all the potential profit from those games?
"EVERY coder has, at one time or another, wanted to code video games."
Perhaps. But just try getting those programmers to work for (and take part in) a high-profile "union busting"...
A few months ago, the BBC technical department was in the news because their staff weren't getting paid enough, and had decided to voice their discontent.
The BBC, naturally enough, wrote to the perl-jobs mailing list, advertising programming positions. We just laughed at them. I wonder if they ever did get any responses to their email, once it became known that they were trying to replace people who were on the verge of striking...
"What's funnier? He tried to use Paypal to sell it, or he sold it for only $20?? Apparently, he doesn't place a high value on MS's source code..."
Especially when Linux source-code is worth $612 million...
"You get the code, look for flaws, write a program that exploits the flaws, and say "Hey Microsoft, give us $50,000 or we'll release this new virus that will wipe out every computer running Windows 2000 that's connected to the Internet.""
Microsoft: "Oh no, not again!"
"I heard that people are now leaking the linux code all over the place"
Actually, eBay has been known to instigate fraud investigations, locked accounts, and seizure of assets against people selling copies of Linux without Microsoft's permission.
"Specifically, if wind generation were expanded to the point where it produced one-10th of today's energy, the models say cooling in the Arctic and a warming across the southern parts of North America should happen.
And what changes does this model predict if we put 24,533,000 kg of carbon dioxide per year into the atmosphere?
"Typically, "Exempt" refers to "professions" such as lawyer, doctor, and engineer. It can also apply to "management." A software coder without the word "engineer" in their title might be able to be considered non-exempt. The only way to know for sure is to contact the department of labor: http://www.dol.gov/"
That DOL website says that exemptions are very narrow, so the only way to know for sure is to phone and check...
Presumably they would not have described the exemption as narrow if it had included "Engineers", and I can't find any reference to engineers in the law itself (FLSA?), although that law is exceedingly badly-written, and almost impossible to read.
It does appear that everyone affected by the law has to get a copy and explanation of it from their employer, so it looks like EA Games (and others) have the burden of proving that their employment policies are lawful?
"If my company here tried that, they would have a big fat lawsuit slapped on 'em before they could twist their nipples"
Your company does that? Eww!
"Reading this article woke me up a little... maybe I should be getting those things. I wonder how many programmers are in the situation of having little to no 'crunch time' and paid overtime and comp days? Especially paid overtime -- who gets that? Anyone?"
Yes, I think. 37-and-a-half hours per week, and I paid for every hour of overtime. 25 days holiday per year. And it's in gaming, although not in the mainstream part you know. It's also in the UK, although that shouldn't make much difference (someome already mentioned problems in France, which has very good labor laws)
I guess if you allow the company to ask for overtime too often, then it quickly becomes a problem you can't get out of - once long hours are expected, then I imagine it's much more difficult to say no. But if you leave at 5pm like your contract specifies, then what are they going to do? Wait 3 months to find someone who'll accept the job, and another 8 months for them to get up-to-speed on the code?
"I think the big question is, how can we get small game studios back?"
Presumably, we can decide that we'd like to buy more games from small companies, and try to remember that decision when purchasing.
Of course, good information isn't always available, and the people buying these games in such bulk are probably teenagers with no concept of what these problems are.
So is it a job for games magazines? Would they ever get review copies again if they exposed such information, or would EA crush anyone who spoke out against them?
"IMAP is much better, in that it only downloads the headers of the messages until you read the body."
From RFC 1939, the POP specification:
TOP msg n
After the initial +OK, the POP3 server sends the headers of the message, the blank line separating the headers from the body, and then the number of lines of the indicated message's body.
"A day out off the presses, and it's "venerable"? "
December 10, 1994: Netscape 1.0 is released
"And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days."
March 31, 1998: Netscape became open-source, and Mozilla was born
"And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble."
July 15, 2003: Mozilla Foundation was established, and Netscape development ceased at AOL
"And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror."