That depends on the extradition laws of the respective countries. However, if you only hosted the blog outside the USA I think you'd be in for some nasty surprises. If you also live there, they couldn't touch you unless they have a new extradition agreement. It needs to carry some hefty punishments for that to work, though. They don't normally extradite people over parking tickets. And it also has to be a criminal offense in their country - something I can't see happening anytime soon.
Pump and dump schemes could be an exception to this, though - I know you can get into trouble for that locally, but not sure if it's an issue if you pump and dump USA stocks. Those are not monitored or protected by our local FTC.
If you really piss off the FTC, I wouldn't accept invitations for meetings in the USA after that though. We all know what happened to Dimitri Sklarov (sp?).
Better generalize this:
GO OUT AND MEET SOME PEOPLE.
Someone said to me "if you keep doing what you always do, you will never get a new result either". So break out of your old habits.
Go to the gym. Fitness improves your health, condition, and did wonders for my self-esteem. Selfconfidence is absolutely vital to ever getting someone interested in you. If you don't have confidence in yourself, why should anyone else have?
Go to a course in art history, italian language, cooking or anything that looks like it has a high attendance of females. A female friend of mine went to a photography course for the same reason and found her new husband there. Do that in reverse.
Take dance lessons, as the poster said. In the *singles* group you find both absolute dogs and some nice girls, usually. Remember: the girls there are very likely to be looking for a nice guy.
If you do meet females, and you're not too shy to talk to them, don't smell bad, don't wear obnoxious t-shirts, can talk to them and not their breasts, and don't grope them, you probably are in the top 10% eligible guys from your group. Just treat them normally.
Don't overdo it on the political correctness side of things: I know a few people who are looking for females but are so afraid to insult someone I couldn't tell whether they were gay, hetero, or just not interested at all - that's not the image you want to have. If you have met someone a few times, and they ask why you're single, thats pretty easy. But if not, just ask them: why are they single if they're so cute. That way you show interest and make a compliment at the same time. Even if they slap you, they will remember it and start looking at you in a different way. Don't overdo this if it's not your style - fakes are easily seen through.
Practice, practice, practice. Do you really want to make all the mistakes you will make when you finally get to talk to the amazingly pretty girl in the corner? Better practice smalltalk on others first. Don't make the mistake of thinking "this is not important". Compared to the engine itself, oil is not that important, but you'll have some issues starting the engine without it being lubricated. Smalltalk is the lubricant of social interaction. The engine of a conversation won't start without smalltalk to lubricate it. And I'm not talking the computer language here. Yes, that means you have to talk to girls and find out what they're interested in. If you don't like that, a relationship is not for you.
Good luck:)
Here in The Netherlands we already have had a few of those schemes, for example for the iPhone. Apple decided to go with T-Mobile, which may work fine in a few other countries (Germany, Austria), but over here I can only get reception when I'm on the 2nd floor of my house, or in the center of the city. While having to give out your SSN is not good, at least you have a working phone afterwards. Here we have to do the same (they photocopy your passport etc. as well) and then discover you can't use it...
It was one of the reasons I did not buy an iPhone. Fortunately Belgium has outlawed exclusive contracts so I can go there and pick one up. Still, the attitude of "screw the customer, we get more money this way" does nothing for Apple's image and sealed my decision to keep my old phone for now.
It would help if someone actually had a reason for building habitats that made economic sense.
Examples would be "if we do this research on earth, it could blow up the planet". The LHC would have been great as a guise for getting to the moon - too bad the responsible scientists messed up that one. Ofcourse, it would have delayed it a bit:)
What about etremely risky genetic modification to humans? Would that be legal on the moon?
Gambling? Well we can do that at home.
Mining volatiles? Well as long as we think it's a smart idea, not much use in getting more of them. We'll have to wait until we're nearly out of them.
Helium-3 for spaceships? If say Jupiter had a gaslayer containing oxygen, hydrogen and helium-3 for our commercially viable fusion plants, well, maybe. Only when you have a warpdrive to go with it though.
I'm out of ideas, but I'm pretty sure other people have a few - lets hear them.
In the mean time: save the planet, it's all we have for now.
True, if the ISPs are compromised there's a problem. An easier tactic for the RIAA would be to target one company - Opera - for facilitating filesharing, though.
Who wants to bet the musical jukebox is gone in the beta?:)
Ofcourse, Opera could get around this by merely using the browser address and the proxy to swap service names and ip-addresses. Then it would all be browser-to-browser from there. Implement a central mandatory public key repository, filled with a public key created on installation of Unite out of your own admin password. Or just implement an easy-to-use one for your friends.
Then sit back and see how much fun the RIAA has with the encrypted traffic and your home-made version of PGP with non-standard storage protocols for the key. Given that they'd have to be fishing the ISP-streams for proof before they could raid your home, that would be a pretty difficult proposition.
And I wonder how the RIAA will detect music-sharing on your private friendsbased network. Even if you have 1000+ friends, there's not much chance the RIAA is part of it. They just don't have friends.
A good GUI supported with wizards that can (if desired) access any option available to the commandline is semantically completely equivalent to the commandline function, only easier to use.
Not supplying such a GUI is just stupid, especially if the competition has them and people like them. It's one of the reasons I use Microsoft's webserver, and not Apache - i just want to dump some HTML on the web, not spend hours digging through arcane config files.
Actually, monks copying books was what arguably underpinned the development of science - the printing press just increased the speed of propagation of ideas.
You're correct on the copyright though. Copyright laws were a variation on the theme of the "patent" and were around not much later than when the first books started to appear in print. The first copyright or privilege was granted to Aldus Manutius, for this manuscript 'Aristoteles', in 1495. However, these privileges were NOT granted to the author (who expected to be paid as any other worker), but to the publisher - to protect their investment. Only in the 18th century these privileges or patents were granted to authors. Before that time, they were exclusively granted to publishers and not automatic for every work but you had to apply to the King or Queen for every book you wanted to protect.
The funny thing is that the transfer of copyright from publisher to author started when there were huge fights over the publishing rights. Around the end of the 17th century the London and Paris publishers had a total monopoly, that ended in the UK in 1694, after which the publishers outside London started to publish all the books in a massive burst. The attempt to re-monopolize the market led to the Copyright Act of 1709, granting rights to the author for 14 years after publication, with an extension possible for another 14 years if the author was still alive then. The same thing happened in France, resulting in the notion that both the publisher and author needed some protection.
Now, noone I know has any problem with paying the author or publisher for work well done. But the perpetual copyright we have now means I no longer take it seriously.
Same as in the Netherlands - completely legal here. Although the ruling party that's in bed with the local RIAA wants to change the law now. They want to abolish the 'home-copy tax' (a few cents on each blank DVD or CD) and in return install a 3-year prison sentence for downloaders. That sounds like the type of fair deal we're used to from the RIAA (or Brein, as they call the local equivalent).
This is a world wide, shared, annotated database with easy ways to join to other data and visualization tools built-in. Kudos to Google for implementing this.
Apart from the monetization possibilities (of which there are plenty), you can now crowdsource datagathering easier than ever before.
All over the world there are ornithology clubs that count birds. Imagine everyone editing the same dataset (with history) and comments added etc.
Scientists doing research on the Mexican flue. Victim counts + added information could be part of the same shared dataset.
Also, databases can be pretty difficult to add to webpages (for consumers) because you need to know a few things about SQL etc. - it looks like this could provide structured data storage to more websites than ever before.
Companies that would want to publish their data set to the world for PR reasons now have a very nice platform to do so. Companies that want to monetize their data can do that as well on the same platform. The old way is to get FTP downloads. The new way is to subscribe to specific Fusion Tables.
I know sport statistics companies that make a good living of their data - this could be a big one for them as soon as Google adds billing facilities to it. And Google would have a HUGE incentive for doing exactly that because it would grant them unlimited access to data with actual value.
You know, the whole money smuggling thing reminds me of when Don Johnson (of Miami Vice fame) got arrested at the Swiss border with the trunk of his car loaded with a few hundred million in "value papers". A similar case. He was released a few days later and surprisingly no paper I know ever published anything about it afterwards. They claimed it was legit.
The world of high finance must be an amazing place:)
I remember seeing a doco about the autobahns in Germany and how little maintenance they needed. The doco suggested that the US interstate system copied the Autobahn plan but skimped on the construction. IIRC the US only applied half the depth of foundation that the Germans did, resulting in a system that needed maintenance twice as often.
BS. The Autobahn is ALWAYS under maintenance and the jokers take 2 hr lunches and leave the road closed while they do. You just have to sit in your car twiddling your thumbs while they have their sausages and beer.
Yeah right. Vital interstate commerce-lanes that are critical to the economy being closed for sausages and beer... are you out of your mind? I regularly travel to Germany, and pass through its entire length by car at least once a year. I've seen lots of maintenance on it, but no more than you can expect for an infrastructure of that size.
I don't use goto often, but in cases like you descibed it is perfectly OK.
No it's not. And I'd still be screaming at someone who would write code like that.
If you have to test 8 conditions, for starters you could use boolean logic: AND and OR aren't invented to be ignored. Secondly, you could assign the testresult to different variables if you insist on short lines, and test on the value of the variables:
BOOL boundary_okay:= (x > 10) and (x < 99);
BOOL value_expected:= | x - previous_x | < defined_max_delta;...
If (boundary_okay AND value_expected AND other_tests_okay) then
{...
}
It's clear, easy to adapt, and easy to read. Not a single use of GOTO anywhere. And while I agree that only using forward goto's at least mitigates the problem (we had a rule like that on the mainframe with COBOL), it does not prevent another coder from implementing a goto jumping back in your code.
And another thing: by the time your code reaches more than a single screen, it's probably time to refactor it into simpler and smaller components anyway.
I'm sorry to enlighten you but a goto is never needed, violates ALL the tenets of good programming and frankly, when my boss or myself see a colleague or hired help put in a goto somewhere, they will get a solid thrashing.
Self-modifying code and other Weapons of Mass Code Destruction are in the same category. And while SOME arguments can be made for selfmodifying code in very limited circumstances (embedded code might be one), there is never an argument for using goto's unless the language doesn't give you subroutines.
Oh, and in my education: anyone using a GOTO got a 1 (that's an F- ) for his or her assignment anyway. Automatically.
When I studied computer science, we started with Pascal, proceeded to program MC860xx assembly (a maze-solver) and ended with having to implement the microcode (in an emulator) for a processor for various computations (addition and subtraction I believe). Especially the last one gave me a lot of insight in how a processor works. Oh, we also had a course called "Programming languages" where we did the theory behind the classes of programming (functional, imperative, parallel) and had examples for more than a dozen languages. Now that was a thorough grounding.
Combined with the compiler development, the theory on grammar, the Turing stuff and functional and parallel programming courses we had, i have not yet seen any language that was "too difficult". It may take some time to learn the libraries but almost every language I can reduce to some other one I have already seen. Ofcourse, in the last analysis they're all Turing machines anyway:P
Wells and Farrington, Improved Street Lighting and Crime Prevention. A Systematic Review, 2007.
Short summary: it helps on two counts. One by improved prevention (people who can see someone breaking and entering can report it. If it's not visible that's going to be tough) and the other way it helps is by improving the sense of security people have and a sense of community ("hey, they're improving our neighborhood, let's make sure it stays like this") so they are also more willing to call the police if shit happens.
If you read Dutch, there's also a comparison of CCTV and lighting in effectiveness: www.hetccv.nl/binaries/ccv/dossiers/bestuurlijk-handhaven/cameratoezicht/secondant_06-08_cameratoezicht.pdf
The summary: it's much cheaper to install more lights than it is to install more camera's, and CCTV without light doesn't do anything to combat crime.
1) Prioritize. Make a list of the things you need to fix and fix them in the order of priority. If someone has a new issue, slap a priority on it based on some rules and put it on the list at the spot it should be. If someone wants to change priorities, have them talk to the people who own the priority issues above them.
2) Make sure you have management backup. If your boss does not back you up *firmly* this whole exercise is pointless anyway, better get out and find a new job.
3) Don't touch machines you have no need to fix. Where I worked, reliability and uptime went up to 99.999% because we banned the admins from touching the critical environments unless the software engineers who had designed said environments okayed it. Patches and virus definitions were always tested on a standby machine with the exact same configuration. Virtual Servers are your friend.
I'm not sure if you ever heard of ITIL - if you haven't get a hold of the ITIL Foundation book and read it. It's a collection of best practices for service management and delivery and you really sound like you need to implement a few of those.
Slashdot Mirror
Pump and dump schemes could be an exception to this, though - I know you can get into trouble for that locally, but not sure if it's an issue if you pump and dump USA stocks. Those are not monitored or protected by our local FTC.
If you really piss off the FTC, I wouldn't accept invitations for meetings in the USA after that though. We all know what happened to Dimitri Sklarov (sp?).
This, of course, assumes that citizens of the U.S. are still a free people.
"Assumptions are the mother of all fuckups" :)
Sorry about the wall of text. Clicked submit by accident.
Better generalize this: GO OUT AND MEET SOME PEOPLE. Someone said to me "if you keep doing what you always do, you will never get a new result either". So break out of your old habits. Go to the gym. Fitness improves your health, condition, and did wonders for my self-esteem. Selfconfidence is absolutely vital to ever getting someone interested in you. If you don't have confidence in yourself, why should anyone else have? Go to a course in art history, italian language, cooking or anything that looks like it has a high attendance of females. A female friend of mine went to a photography course for the same reason and found her new husband there. Do that in reverse. Take dance lessons, as the poster said. In the *singles* group you find both absolute dogs and some nice girls, usually. Remember: the girls there are very likely to be looking for a nice guy. If you do meet females, and you're not too shy to talk to them, don't smell bad, don't wear obnoxious t-shirts, can talk to them and not their breasts, and don't grope them, you probably are in the top 10% eligible guys from your group. Just treat them normally. Don't overdo it on the political correctness side of things: I know a few people who are looking for females but are so afraid to insult someone I couldn't tell whether they were gay, hetero, or just not interested at all - that's not the image you want to have. If you have met someone a few times, and they ask why you're single, thats pretty easy. But if not, just ask them: why are they single if they're so cute. That way you show interest and make a compliment at the same time. Even if they slap you, they will remember it and start looking at you in a different way. Don't overdo this if it's not your style - fakes are easily seen through. Practice, practice, practice. Do you really want to make all the mistakes you will make when you finally get to talk to the amazingly pretty girl in the corner? Better practice smalltalk on others first. Don't make the mistake of thinking "this is not important". Compared to the engine itself, oil is not that important, but you'll have some issues starting the engine without it being lubricated. Smalltalk is the lubricant of social interaction. The engine of a conversation won't start without smalltalk to lubricate it. And I'm not talking the computer language here. Yes, that means you have to talk to girls and find out what they're interested in. If you don't like that, a relationship is not for you. Good luck :)
Here in The Netherlands we already have had a few of those schemes, for example for the iPhone. Apple decided to go with T-Mobile, which may work fine in a few other countries (Germany, Austria), but over here I can only get reception when I'm on the 2nd floor of my house, or in the center of the city. While having to give out your SSN is not good, at least you have a working phone afterwards. Here we have to do the same (they photocopy your passport etc. as well) and then discover you can't use it... It was one of the reasons I did not buy an iPhone. Fortunately Belgium has outlawed exclusive contracts so I can go there and pick one up. Still, the attitude of "screw the customer, we get more money this way" does nothing for Apple's image and sealed my decision to keep my old phone for now.
Examples would be "if we do this research on earth, it could blow up the planet". The LHC would have been great as a guise for getting to the moon - too bad the responsible scientists messed up that one. Ofcourse, it would have delayed it a bit :)
What about etremely risky genetic modification to humans? Would that be legal on the moon?
Gambling? Well we can do that at home.
Mining volatiles? Well as long as we think it's a smart idea, not much use in getting more of them. We'll have to wait until we're nearly out of them.
Helium-3 for spaceships? If say Jupiter had a gaslayer containing oxygen, hydrogen and helium-3 for our commercially viable fusion plants, well, maybe. Only when you have a warpdrive to go with it though.
I'm out of ideas, but I'm pretty sure other people have a few - lets hear them.
In the mean time: save the planet, it's all we have for now.
True, if the ISPs are compromised there's a problem. An easier tactic for the RIAA would be to target one company - Opera - for facilitating filesharing, though.
Who wants to bet the musical jukebox is gone in the beta? :)
Ofcourse, Opera could get around this by merely using the browser address and the proxy to swap service names and ip-addresses. Then it would all be browser-to-browser from there. Implement a central mandatory public key repository, filled with a public key created on installation of Unite out of your own admin password. Or just implement an easy-to-use one for your friends. Then sit back and see how much fun the RIAA has with the encrypted traffic and your home-made version of PGP with non-standard storage protocols for the key. Given that they'd have to be fishing the ISP-streams for proof before they could raid your home, that would be a pretty difficult proposition.
And I wonder how the RIAA will detect music-sharing on your private friendsbased network. Even if you have 1000+ friends, there's not much chance the RIAA is part of it. They just don't have friends.
A good GUI supported with wizards that can (if desired) access any option available to the commandline is semantically completely equivalent to the commandline function, only easier to use. Not supplying such a GUI is just stupid, especially if the competition has them and people like them. It's one of the reasons I use Microsoft's webserver, and not Apache - i just want to dump some HTML on the web, not spend hours digging through arcane config files.
Actually, monks copying books was what arguably underpinned the development of science - the printing press just increased the speed of propagation of ideas.
You're correct on the copyright though. Copyright laws were a variation on the theme of the "patent" and were around not much later than when the first books started to appear in print. The first copyright or privilege was granted to Aldus Manutius, for this manuscript 'Aristoteles', in 1495. However, these privileges were NOT granted to the author (who expected to be paid as any other worker), but to the publisher - to protect their investment. Only in the 18th century these privileges or patents were granted to authors. Before that time, they were exclusively granted to publishers and not automatic for every work but you had to apply to the King or Queen for every book you wanted to protect.
The funny thing is that the transfer of copyright from publisher to author started when there were huge fights over the publishing rights. Around the end of the 17th century the London and Paris publishers had a total monopoly, that ended in the UK in 1694, after which the publishers outside London started to publish all the books in a massive burst. The attempt to re-monopolize the market led to the Copyright Act of 1709, granting rights to the author for 14 years after publication, with an extension possible for another 14 years if the author was still alive then. The same thing happened in France, resulting in the notion that both the publisher and author needed some protection.
Now, noone I know has any problem with paying the author or publisher for work well done. But the perpetual copyright we have now means I no longer take it seriously.
Same as in the Netherlands - completely legal here. Although the ruling party that's in bed with the local RIAA wants to change the law now. They want to abolish the 'home-copy tax' (a few cents on each blank DVD or CD) and in return install a 3-year prison sentence for downloaders. That sounds like the type of fair deal we're used to from the RIAA (or Brein, as they call the local equivalent).
This is a world wide, shared, annotated database with easy ways to join to other data and visualization tools built-in. Kudos to Google for implementing this.
Apart from the monetization possibilities (of which there are plenty), you can now crowdsource datagathering easier than ever before.
Also, databases can be pretty difficult to add to webpages (for consumers) because you need to know a few things about SQL etc. - it looks like this could provide structured data storage to more websites than ever before.
I know sport statistics companies that make a good living of their data - this could be a big one for them as soon as Google adds billing facilities to it. And Google would have a HUGE incentive for doing exactly that because it would grant them unlimited access to data with actual value.
It is a very very smart move by Google.
You know, the whole money smuggling thing reminds me of when Don Johnson (of Miami Vice fame) got arrested at the Swiss border with the trunk of his car loaded with a few hundred million in "value papers". A similar case. He was released a few days later and surprisingly no paper I know ever published anything about it afterwards. They claimed it was legit. The world of high finance must be an amazing place :)
I remember seeing a doco about the autobahns in Germany and how little maintenance they needed. The doco suggested that the US interstate system copied the Autobahn plan but skimped on the construction. IIRC the US only applied half the depth of foundation that the Germans did, resulting in a system that needed maintenance twice as often.
BS. The Autobahn is ALWAYS under maintenance and the jokers take 2 hr lunches and leave the road closed while they do. You just have to sit in your car twiddling your thumbs while they have their sausages and beer.
Yeah right. Vital interstate commerce-lanes that are critical to the economy being closed for sausages and beer... are you out of your mind? I regularly travel to Germany, and pass through its entire length by car at least once a year. I've seen lots of maintenance on it, but no more than you can expect for an infrastructure of that size.
The parent I replied to was discussing Computer Science majors...
True, it's just pseudocode and bad one at that. But that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
I don't use goto often, but in cases like you descibed it is perfectly OK.
No it's not. And I'd still be screaming at someone who would write code like that.
If you have to test 8 conditions, for starters you could use boolean logic: AND and OR aren't invented to be ignored. Secondly, you could assign the testresult to different variables if you insist on short lines, and test on the value of the variables:
BOOL boundary_okay := (x > 10) and (x < 99); := | x - previous_x | < defined_max_delta; ...
BOOL value_expected
If (boundary_okay AND value_expected AND other_tests_okay) then { ...
}
It's clear, easy to adapt, and easy to read. Not a single use of GOTO anywhere. And while I agree that only using forward goto's at least mitigates the problem (we had a rule like that on the mainframe with COBOL), it does not prevent another coder from implementing a goto jumping back in your code.
And another thing: by the time your code reaches more than a single screen, it's probably time to refactor it into simpler and smaller components anyway.
I'm sorry to enlighten you but a goto is never needed, violates ALL the tenets of good programming and frankly, when my boss or myself see a colleague or hired help put in a goto somewhere, they will get a solid thrashing. Self-modifying code and other Weapons of Mass Code Destruction are in the same category. And while SOME arguments can be made for selfmodifying code in very limited circumstances (embedded code might be one), there is never an argument for using goto's unless the language doesn't give you subroutines. Oh, and in my education: anyone using a GOTO got a 1 (that's an F- ) for his or her assignment anyway. Automatically.
When I studied computer science, we started with Pascal, proceeded to program MC860xx assembly (a maze-solver) and ended with having to implement the microcode (in an emulator) for a processor for various computations (addition and subtraction I believe). Especially the last one gave me a lot of insight in how a processor works. Oh, we also had a course called "Programming languages" where we did the theory behind the classes of programming (functional, imperative, parallel) and had examples for more than a dozen languages. Now that was a thorough grounding. Combined with the compiler development, the theory on grammar, the Turing stuff and functional and parallel programming courses we had, i have not yet seen any language that was "too difficult". It may take some time to learn the libraries but almost every language I can reduce to some other one I have already seen. Ofcourse, in the last analysis they're all Turing machines anyway :P
Short summary: it helps on two counts. One by improved prevention (people who can see someone breaking and entering can report it. If it's not visible that's going to be tough) and the other way it helps is by improving the sense of security people have and a sense of community ("hey, they're improving our neighborhood, let's make sure it stays like this") so they are also more willing to call the police if shit happens.
If you read Dutch, there's also a comparison of CCTV and lighting in effectiveness: www.hetccv.nl/binaries/ccv/dossiers/bestuurlijk-handhaven/cameratoezicht/secondant_06-08_cameratoezicht.pdf
The summary: it's much cheaper to install more lights than it is to install more camera's, and CCTV without light doesn't do anything to combat crime.
I'm not sure if you ever heard of ITIL - if you haven't get a hold of the ITIL Foundation book and read it. It's a collection of best practices for service management and delivery and you really sound like you need to implement a few of those.