It was always public, like a lot of other information.
This is another example of a difference of degree becoming a difference of kind. There is a difference between saying "Public records are accessible to every citizen" and "Public records are PUBLISHED, without effort by anyone, now available to any idiot including those who wouldn't have known how to file the request in the first place". We need to keep government open and honest; we don't need to broadcast every little thing about every person.
Let's publish all car registrations. Make it easier for people to find what they need to steal for parts.
Let's publish all addresses receiving social security. Make it easier to find houses less likely to resist a robbery.
In my experience, people who say "information wants to be free" tend to be the same people who complain that surveillance cameras are more intrusive than a cop standing on the corner looking around. You can't have it both ways. I'd rather err on the side of not exposing people to more risk. (And by the way - I'm opposed to high-capacity gun ownership too - which is why I don't see any benefit to publishing a list of where to rob next to get hold of one.)
You have a typo in your post - "there" instead of "their". No coding standard is going to notice that. While people are busy looking for indentation and camel case, they are NOT looking for whether you used the correct variable. Maybe a static analysis program would question it; maybe not.
I find that clarity of meaning to humans tends to lead to clarity of meaning to the compiler as well.
It's "chilling" that the actual law goes so much further than this, and that these guidelines that appear sensible to/.ers need to be made explicit to law enforcement.
I've read/. postings asking why anyone would use a program that's a few years old, or why another poster hasn't upgraded to this morning's release of some particular library. I've also posted complaints when I updated some particular library and half of my applications broke because someone decided that "nobody needed" something that they personally didn't need.
Things are supposed to WORK. And keep working. Software does not decay. The hardware may die under it, but the software should just plain *work*.
We expect bridges to stay up; we should produce our software knowing that all of our users have the same expectations of us.
I remember getting big silver dollar coins as birthday money. When the SBA dollars were being designed, there was been some publicity about them being non-round like British 20 and 50 pence pieces to distinguish them from quarters; people were so freaked out that they were changed to be round with an *inner* non-round table area (unfortunately barely detectable). That's probably the most sensible way to go, as it could achieve the same weight and other characteristics needed to satisfy the vending machines.
Not exactly a new idea. Perhaps surprising that they rely on it with manual picking, but since a lot of their orders are timely, the "most recent" stuff is all together still on the pallet it arrived on. And as noted by others, as long as the pick list is arranged in physical order by the inventory system, there's not much lost time.
The company had been in and out of bankruptcy already, and other articles point out that the company - let alone the Hostess brand - missed the trends to "healthier" snacks. (No way to make Twinkies healthier, but they could have come out with whole-grain oatmeal cookies or something too.)
The CEO's pay matters because it shows how the board of directors think. If the company is failing, and workers are being asked for givebacks, and the CEO is NOT coming out with brilliant ideas that turn the company around - but is getting paid more in cash anyway - (as opposed to, say, stock options that will reward improvement over time), there's a clear message that the leadership of the company is cashing in short-term and not planning to have a future.
The brand names and recipes will probably be sold, and someone else will make the products or something like them. Somewhere else, in a different factory, with different workers.
Mod parent up. Same would apply to a self-storage company, or a moving-and-storage company, or any warehousing or storage business. And what about private carriers like UPS and FedEx - you're handing over physical custody of an item, but nobody would suggest that it stops being your property.
The crowd that insists that government is the problem, and we shouldn't be spending money on anything that is only understood by an educated elite, and sending things into space is a waste (as if we grind up the money and throw it up there), has kept un-funding things. Oddly enough a lot of them come from farming and natural-resource states where whether predictions can make a huge difference.
OTOH corporate interests should be enticed, by allowing them to advertise support. Get the people making cameras that survive crazy sports stunts involved in putting their stuff a little higher.:-)
OTOOH maybe all the weather broadcasters should start paying for the images and information NOAA produces, like the GPS and map websites have to pay for map information (and spend their own money on their own camera crews).
Sometimes the coding standards *do* indicate a subtle problem.
I started at one place writing device drivers on a processor and assembler new to me. Got some demo code working and asked my boss to take a look. One glance, and the first comment was, "Oh, this is all wrong. It's in the wrong column." I had put the op codes in column 10, like on every other assembler I'd ever used, because names could be 8 characters long, and I explained this. "Oh, we never use 8 character names; we only use 6 so it's consistent with Fortran."
I used to be all for total freedom. Then I started working with groups of people where the variables associated with the same thing had names like
on_delay_time
on_dly_timr
OnDlyTime
ondelay_time
delayontimer
feature_37_count (yes, that's the on delay timer option when it was added in relay logic 20 years ago)
and let's not forget the transliterated French and Russian words from some other people.
Nothing commonly searchable, nothing commonly GREPpable, never sure which things are related and which aren't. I'm not the most organized or consistent person in the world, but words have meaning and names have power, dammit. Maybe it's easier for me to type longer names because I actually had a typing class in high school, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
Don't waste time reinventing the wheel. We don't need better wheels, we're not a racing team building a concept car. Don't write a brand new buffer algorithm when there are already five different ones in the code and a sixth in the language library. Don't implement a queue from scratch ESPECIALLY if you're going to get it wrong.
If those sound controlling to you . . . too bad. I get paid to ship reliable products.
At one prior job, it was official written policy to NEVER upgrade to the latest release of ANYTHING, on the grounds that it had no track record. So it doesn't matter how often you release.
Releasing on a fixed time schedule has never made sense to me. Target, yes, but if it's ready a week early, or needs a week longer, better to do it right than to do it at a fixed time.
Most people use the word "infant" to refer to a baby from newborn to a few months old. Under law, however, anyone under the age of majority (18 for most purposes) is technically an "infant". I was involved in a chain collision during a traffic jam years ago, and my wife was horrified when the insurance legal papers referred to an "infant" in one of the cars; the teenager in question was 16 at the time (and taller than I was). The use of "infant" rather than "minor" or "teenager" was precisely to evoke that kind of emotional response.
My point is: The "think of the children" crowd considers a 17 year 11 month old to be an "infant". Conduct yourself accordingly.
Even in a modern sword-and-sorcery like "Game of Thrones", the men-as-fighters and women-as-backstabbers (I'm sorry, politicians and behind-the-scenes agents) continues, and since the focus is on the fighters the focus is on the men.
>>> Ok, I can see lying to probation officials...I can see lack of trust..but danger to community???
Legal boilerplate. What's more important is his probation contract specifically forbade using an alias, and he did business under a pseudonym, so he's in violation of his probation. It's not "just a technicality", any more than it's a technicality if you leave your car at a parking meter longer than the time you paid for and you get a parking ticket. It's a simple matter of fact - contract says don't do that, he did it, he can get locked up. If he were a Hollywood starlet maybe he'd get out of it.:-)
The government isn't "holding in reserve"; they made a CONTRACT, that he and his lawyer agreed to, for being let out of prison in exchange for behaving himself. As I read the article, part of the contract was that he not use the Internet and that he not use an alias or pseudonym. He has violated both of those. He would have been violating them even if all he posted was a funny cat video.
As noted by others, this is *incredibly* convenient. If this video had been posted by someone with a clean record, then it would be a free speech issue. If the same person had created and posted it under his real name, it would still be a free speech issue and I'd hear debate on whether restricting internet access is realistic in this day and age. But because of the record, the government has totally clear reason to collect him without talking about the content at all. The probation contract makes it a very simple crime of fact, not of intent.
This, except I installed Subversion using a server-located file (yes, I know the red bean book says not to) and then demonstrated to my new boss how I could backtrack to any day's work. Version control sounds complicated; "backup" they understand.
... because no modern with-it techie wants to admit that they are REINVENTING THE WHEEL by going BACKWARDS to what we had in the 1970s. Of course the computers are faster and better, and the communication is faster and better, and the switchboard is hidden in the comm system instead of dialing a different connection number for each computer you want to access, and it's so much better in so many ways. But it comes back to the same thing: Instead of your data being on YOUR computer in YOUR possession and control, you're handing it off to some remote server because you trust them implicitly (or haven't even thought about it). Typical MBA thinking: decentralize everything that's centralized, centralize the rest, claim success for having wrought change, and cash your bonus check before the next generation re-applies the same rule and reverses it all.
Mark Twain, "Letters from the Earth":
He says, naievely outspokenly, and without suggestion of embarrassment:"I the Lord thy God am a jealous God."
You see, it is the only another way of saying,"I the Lord thy God am a small God, and fretful about small things."
Some truth in this. OTOH notice that your jazzy new cellphone still connects to phones around the world, including the people with analog lines, because someone makes sure there's a conversion somewhere. And everything is still powered out of the same plugs that are already built into the walls, and new LED lighting can still be screwed into the same bulb sockets that are already installed in the ceiling.
Maybe you can download new software and rebuild your kernel and be all up and running in a few hours. In the physical world, that ain't happening. The roads are paved because there aren't as many horses, but at some point the definition of "lane" got standardized, which means that cars can be about so wide and no wider, and the radius of a turn got standardized, so trucks and buses can be about so long or need steerable rear wheels, because we are NOT knocking down all the signs and posts and buildings to change all of the streets in a few hours.
My code got broken. And I found out that "deprecated" really meant "We took it out of the library, screw all the applications that used it, especially yours, and screw you too for not wanting to recompile your kernel every hour or two to keep up with us". So I went back to embedded systems and RTOSes that don't jerk people around so much.
Software patents *should* exist - for novel ideas, and for limited times. They should not apply to "look and feel" and should be more narrowly defined. If I come up with a compression algorithm that is a significant savings in time and/or resources, I should get some advantage from it, but I shouldn't be able to say that ANY improved compression is an infringement.
Slashdot Mirror
It was always public, like a lot of other information.
This is another example of a difference of degree becoming a difference of kind. There is a difference between saying "Public records are accessible to every citizen" and "Public records are PUBLISHED, without effort by anyone, now available to any idiot including those who wouldn't have known how to file the request in the first place". We need to keep government open and honest; we don't need to broadcast every little thing about every person.
Let's publish all car registrations. Make it easier for people to find what they need to steal for parts.
Let's publish all addresses receiving social security. Make it easier to find houses less likely to resist a robbery.
In my experience, people who say "information wants to be free" tend to be the same people who complain that surveillance cameras are more intrusive than a cop standing on the corner looking around. You can't have it both ways. I'd rather err on the side of not exposing people to more risk. (And by the way - I'm opposed to high-capacity gun ownership too - which is why I don't see any benefit to publishing a list of where to rob next to get hold of one.)
Coding standards are not the solution.
You have a typo in your post - "there" instead of "their". No coding standard is going to notice that. While people are busy looking for indentation and camel case, they are NOT looking for whether you used the correct variable. Maybe a static analysis program would question it; maybe not.
I find that clarity of meaning to humans tends to lead to clarity of meaning to the compiler as well.
It's "chilling" that the actual law goes so much further than this, and that these guidelines that appear sensible to /.ers need to be made explicit to law enforcement.
I've read /. postings asking why anyone would use a program that's a few years old, or why another poster hasn't upgraded to this morning's release of some particular library. I've also posted complaints when I updated some particular library and half of my applications broke because someone decided that "nobody needed" something that they personally didn't need.
Things are supposed to WORK. And keep working. Software does not decay. The hardware may die under it, but the software should just plain *work*.
We expect bridges to stay up; we should produce our software knowing that all of our users have the same expectations of us.
I remember getting big silver dollar coins as birthday money. When the SBA dollars were being designed, there was been some publicity about them being non-round like British 20 and 50 pence pieces to distinguish them from quarters; people were so freaked out that they were changed to be round with an *inner* non-round table area (unfortunately barely detectable). That's probably the most sensible way to go, as it could achieve the same weight and other characteristics needed to satisfy the vending machines.
Not exactly a new idea. Perhaps surprising that they rely on it with manual picking, but since a lot of their orders are timely, the "most recent" stuff is all together still on the pallet it arrived on. And as noted by others, as long as the pick list is arranged in physical order by the inventory system, there's not much lost time.
The company had been in and out of bankruptcy already, and other articles point out that the company - let alone the Hostess brand - missed the trends to "healthier" snacks. (No way to make Twinkies healthier, but they could have come out with whole-grain oatmeal cookies or something too.)
The CEO's pay matters because it shows how the board of directors think. If the company is failing, and workers are being asked for givebacks, and the CEO is NOT coming out with brilliant ideas that turn the company around - but is getting paid more in cash anyway - (as opposed to, say, stock options that will reward improvement over time), there's a clear message that the leadership of the company is cashing in short-term and not planning to have a future.
The brand names and recipes will probably be sold, and someone else will make the products or something like them. Somewhere else, in a different factory, with different workers.
A teacher told me years ago that who your mayor is will have a bigger impact on your life than who your president is.
Your mayor can't instigate a military draft and ship you off to be shot at for stupid reasons.
Took notes with a refillable Rapidograph all through college. Second the motion on buying the special ink - it's cheaper than replacing the tips.
Mod parent up. Same would apply to a self-storage company, or a moving-and-storage company, or any warehousing or storage business. And what about private carriers like UPS and FedEx - you're handing over physical custody of an item, but nobody would suggest that it stops being your property.
The crowd that insists that government is the problem, and we shouldn't be spending money on anything that is only understood by an educated elite, and sending things into space is a waste (as if we grind up the money and throw it up there), has kept un-funding things. Oddly enough a lot of them come from farming and natural-resource states where whether predictions can make a huge difference.
:-)
OTOH corporate interests should be enticed, by allowing them to advertise support. Get the people making cameras that survive crazy sports stunts involved in putting their stuff a little higher.
OTOOH maybe all the weather broadcasters should start paying for the images and information NOAA produces, like the GPS and map websites have to pay for map information (and spend their own money on their own camera crews).
Sometimes the coding standards *do* indicate a subtle problem.
I started at one place writing device drivers on a processor and assembler new to me. Got some demo code working and asked my boss to take a look. One glance, and the first comment was, "Oh, this is all wrong. It's in the wrong column." I had put the op codes in column 10, like on every other assembler I'd ever used, because names could be 8 characters long, and I explained this. "Oh, we never use 8 character names; we only use 6 so it's consistent with Fortran."
I found another job 6 weeks later.
I used to be all for total freedom. Then I started working with groups of people where the variables associated with the same thing had names like
on_delay_time
on_dly_timr
OnDlyTime
ondelay_time
delayontimer
feature_37_count (yes, that's the on delay timer option when it was added in relay logic 20 years ago)
and let's not forget the transliterated French and Russian words from some other people.
Nothing commonly searchable, nothing commonly GREPpable, never sure which things are related and which aren't. I'm not the most organized or consistent person in the world, but words have meaning and names have power, dammit. Maybe it's easier for me to type longer names because I actually had a typing class in high school, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
Don't waste time reinventing the wheel. We don't need better wheels, we're not a racing team building a concept car. Don't write a brand new buffer algorithm when there are already five different ones in the code and a sixth in the language library. Don't implement a queue from scratch ESPECIALLY if you're going to get it wrong.
If those sound controlling to you . . . too bad. I get paid to ship reliable products.
At one prior job, it was official written policy to NEVER upgrade to the latest release of ANYTHING, on the grounds that it had no track record. So it doesn't matter how often you release.
Releasing on a fixed time schedule has never made sense to me. Target, yes, but if it's ready a week early, or needs a week longer, better to do it right than to do it at a fixed time.
Most people use the word "infant" to refer to a baby from newborn to a few months old. Under law, however, anyone under the age of majority (18 for most purposes) is technically an "infant". I was involved in a chain collision during a traffic jam years ago, and my wife was horrified when the insurance legal papers referred to an "infant" in one of the cars; the teenager in question was 16 at the time (and taller than I was). The use of "infant" rather than "minor" or "teenager" was precisely to evoke that kind of emotional response.
My point is: The "think of the children" crowd considers a 17 year 11 month old to be an "infant". Conduct yourself accordingly.
Even in a modern sword-and-sorcery like "Game of Thrones", the men-as-fighters and women-as-backstabbers (I'm sorry, politicians and behind-the-scenes agents) continues, and since the focus is on the fighters the focus is on the men.
>>> Ok, I can see lying to probation officials...I can see lack of trust..but danger to community???
Legal boilerplate. What's more important is his probation contract specifically forbade using an alias, and he did business under a pseudonym, so he's in violation of his probation. It's not "just a technicality", any more than it's a technicality if you leave your car at a parking meter longer than the time you paid for and you get a parking ticket. It's a simple matter of fact - contract says don't do that, he did it, he can get locked up. If he were a Hollywood starlet maybe he'd get out of it. :-)
The government isn't "holding in reserve"; they made a CONTRACT, that he and his lawyer agreed to, for being let out of prison in exchange for behaving himself. As I read the article, part of the contract was that he not use the Internet and that he not use an alias or pseudonym. He has violated both of those. He would have been violating them even if all he posted was a funny cat video.
As noted by others, this is *incredibly* convenient. If this video had been posted by someone with a clean record, then it would be a free speech issue. If the same person had created and posted it under his real name, it would still be a free speech issue and I'd hear debate on whether restricting internet access is realistic in this day and age. But because of the record, the government has totally clear reason to collect him without talking about the content at all. The probation contract makes it a very simple crime of fact, not of intent.
Mod parent up.
This, except I installed Subversion using a server-located file (yes, I know the red bean book says not to) and then demonstrated to my new boss how I could backtrack to any day's work. Version control sounds complicated; "backup" they understand.
... because no modern with-it techie wants to admit that they are REINVENTING THE WHEEL by going BACKWARDS to what we had in the 1970s. Of course the computers are faster and better, and the communication is faster and better, and the switchboard is hidden in the comm system instead of dialing a different connection number for each computer you want to access, and it's so much better in so many ways. But it comes back to the same thing: Instead of your data being on YOUR computer in YOUR possession and control, you're handing it off to some remote server because you trust them implicitly (or haven't even thought about it). Typical MBA thinking: decentralize everything that's centralized, centralize the rest, claim success for having wrought change, and cash your bonus check before the next generation re-applies the same rule and reverses it all.
Mark Twain, "Letters from the Earth": He says, naievely outspokenly, and without suggestion of embarrassment:"I the Lord thy God am a jealous God." You see, it is the only another way of saying,"I the Lord thy God am a small God, and fretful about small things."
Some truth in this. OTOH notice that your jazzy new cellphone still connects to phones around the world, including the people with analog lines, because someone makes sure there's a conversion somewhere. And everything is still powered out of the same plugs that are already built into the walls, and new LED lighting can still be screwed into the same bulb sockets that are already installed in the ceiling.
Maybe you can download new software and rebuild your kernel and be all up and running in a few hours. In the physical world, that ain't happening. The roads are paved because there aren't as many horses, but at some point the definition of "lane" got standardized, which means that cars can be about so wide and no wider, and the radius of a turn got standardized, so trucks and buses can be about so long or need steerable rear wheels, because we are NOT knocking down all the signs and posts and buildings to change all of the streets in a few hours.
My code got broken. And I found out that "deprecated" really meant "We took it out of the library, screw all the applications that used it, especially yours, and screw you too for not wanting to recompile your kernel every hour or two to keep up with us". So I went back to embedded systems and RTOSes that don't jerk people around so much.
Software patents *should* exist - for novel ideas, and for limited times. They should not apply to "look and feel" and should be more narrowly defined. If I come up with a compression algorithm that is a significant savings in time and/or resources, I should get some advantage from it, but I shouldn't be able to say that ANY improved compression is an infringement.