Oh yeah? Well at MY company they pay everybody (including the janitor) $500,000,000/year + $1B/mo bonuses. And everyone gets four Rolls Royces when they're hired. And the company hires hot chicks to suck you off at your desk while you work.
And the companies on either side of us have packages that are 10x better!
Tell you what, guys. If you want an awesome job, move to #@^$^%$[NO CARRIER]
I'm sorry, of course you're correct. I wrote that in a hurry because I was at work, and didn't write what I meant. What I meant to write was that it locks iTunes Music Store _content_ to the iPod. (Unless you burn-rip it, there's no way to play an iTMS song on another player.) Thanks for pointing out my mistake to me.
Apple, in it's traditionally clever way, has turned the tables on the music industry. The music industry, in initial negotiations, simply stated that they wanted "DRM." Apple designed and built a form of DRM that (A) minimally inconveniences their customers, (B) complies with the letter of the agreement, and most importantly, (C) uses the DRM to lock iTunes to its player, thereby profiting from the arrangement and effectively killing any other competitors. (Even MS can't break into the market.) As Apple has the only digital music store anybody would want to use, they use their considerable muscle to bully the music industry into doing what they want.
This is NOT what the music industry wanted. When they say "DRM," they mean DRM that protects *them,* not resellers. So now they're crying for Apple to "open" their DRM. They still want DRM, just DRM that doesn't give Apple the above benefits, the goal being to effectively give their competitors a chance to flourish. If this happens, the music industry will regain the upper hand in negotiations, and start forcing Apple to do its bidding. This will, of course, result in higher prices and poorer service.
The music industry is betting the public won't understand the difference between "opening" DRM, and doing away with it. The former helps nobody but the music industry. If they succeed in convincing consumers that the industry is opposed to DRM, and mean old Apple is forcing it on them, they'll be able to turn public opinion against Apple and get their demands met. This has nothing to do with helping the consumer, and everything to do with the music industry trying to wrestle its way out of Apple's iron grip on its throat.
We'll see how this turns out.
Re:An attempt to shut down Groklaw?
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm not worried. Even if they did managed to silence PJ, what she has built is far, far more important. Groklaw will carry her torch forward with renewed vigor.
Remember, PJ may have given us 3000-some odd articles, but if her goal was to write a bunch of stuff, she would have written and sold a book. Her point was to bring together the "hackers" of the legal field with the hackers from the computing field, and in doing so create a voice for freedom loving technology users everywhere. You just can't kill that.
Ooh, it's been demoed in Vista for over a year. Spotlight's been a real, working product since the middle of 2005. Is it not enough for you that Vista is guaranteed to be the best selling operating system in the history of world to date? You actually feel the need to complain that its crappy, half finished features aren't being mentioned in the same breath as an article talking about improvements to existing, stable features in another OS entirely?
In that case, from now on I demand that every article that talks about Vista's features also talk about my currently-in-planning operating system, Creysoft PsychOSis:
A new patch from Microsoft today gave Windows Vista the ability to connect to, and remotely control Microsoft(TM) Internet Aware Appliances, now you can use your cell phone to make sure you turned off the coffee pot from the airport. In all fairness, ever since a weird dream the other night, the developer of Creysoft PsychOSis has been pondering a feature which would allow PsychOSis to connect to, and remotely control your mom.
Actually, that's only if your Mac has a PowerPC chip in it, and since Apple doesn't (to my knowledge) sell any PPC Macs anymore, this statement is untrue. Your sentiment, however, is absolutely correct. The operating system itself supports (through a virtualization layer) nearly any properly written application released since System 6; it's the hardware that makes the difference. (Rosetta itself is a compabitility layer to allow PPC apps to run, so piling Classic on top of Rosetta would be a marvel of softwrae engineering.)
Nevertheless, it is incorrect to state that you can natively run OS 9 applications on any new Mac. As Apple has wanted to phase out OS 9 for years now, I do not forsee this changing any time in the future.
They acknowledge First Life's inherent right to parody several times, even jokingly stated that they were insulted by the idea that their lawyers WOULDN'T recognize such a right. The only "license" here is a license for the derivative trademark, which they note "may require a license." Notice they didn't say "does require a license." It's more, "Hey, we think this probably falls under fair use. But just in case it doesn't, and anyone ever hassles you about it, here's a license saying you can use it anyway."
The final clause is standard CYA language. If, for example, First Life started using their derivative logo to do something damaging to Second Life's reputation, Second Life's lawyers may look into it, and if, in fact, the logo is infringing, they may revoke the license. Surely you can't reasonably expect them to grant them a perpetual, non-revokable license to do anything they want with a very slightly modified logo?
The whole thing's basically a joke anyway, to let everyone know that they know about First Life, and are 100% OK with it. It's also a cheap jab at companies with less sense of humor.
It seems to me that the minds who work on DRM probably aren't all that brilliant. Most of the truly gifted people realize that there's no good way to implement it, and shy away from it. Judging from the amount of obvious holes, catastrophic bugs, and general suckiness of most DRM solutions to date, I'd guess that most of the people working on them are not brilliant programmers, but rather people we'd rather not have writing our device drivers in the first place.
First, I want to thank you for a damned fine, well thought out, measured reply. Certainly one that warrants answers to your questions.
Not at all. I imagine the increases would be reasonable, but they'd be increases nevertheless. This is really secondary to the neutrality debate, though. If you want to prioritize traffic, somebody has to pay for it. You'll ultimately pay for it, but that question is really just about who has to be the bad guy hiking their rates.
I don't think it's really secondary to the debate at all. You're exactly right - if we let them prioritize traffic, I'm going to have to eventually pay for it. And I don't want to. I understand you'll argue that this is only true if I want to take advantage of the benefits offered by the prioritized traffic, but I feel pretty confident that that won't the case.
I still don't understand why people return to this theme. My connection to my ISP is already my ISP's personal profit wagon. If my ISP were to come up to me one day and say, "We're going to limit your download speeds to all of these sites that haven't paid us money to 10kbps," I would leave them and find a new ISP. This would be a stupid business move on their part. In reality, what they're saying is, "We're not going to give 'express', low-latency, high-bandwidth service to all of these sites that haven't paid us money. But we're leaving everything else as it is today." And I think that's fine.
The reason we keep returning to that theme is because we don't share your optimistic view of ISPs' business ethics. First of all, there are a handful of people in the world who, faced with several of their favorite websites loading slowly, would assume (or even be capable of understanding) that it's their ISPs fault. Most will blame their computer, "the internet," and eventually the websites they're trying to visit. It's not like the ISPs going to email people and say, "Hey, Google's not paying us our extortion money, so we're throttling their connection." They'll just quietly throttle it down, and then send an email saying something to the effect of, "Try MSN Search Today for Free! It's acccurate, helpful, and fast!"
In any event, it's simple logic. Historically, ISPs have been required to provide treat all content equally and fairly. So when a service provider works to improve their network, the improvements are across the board. Google loads faster for you. Chickswithdicks.com loads faster for me. By allowing ISPs start 'prioritizing' traffic, we're going to end up with a situation where 90% of connections is "low profit, public internet," and 10% is "high profit, paid content," or "high profit, in-house service." Where do you think the ISP is going to concentrate most of its resources? With no real profit motive to improve the part of its business that doesn't make it very much money (and no real competition to force them into it), it's easy to see the public internet languishing ISPs pour more and more resources into building private networks of profitable in house services and dedicated connections to large content providers.
Anyway, that's my concern. Perhaps you can't see this happening, but I can't see it happening any other way.
So, your argument is that we should give ISPs carte blanche to turn the internet into their own personal profit wagon, just so you can watch HBO without glitches?
Network Neutrality simply means that the ISP is either not allowed to set up that dedicated network connection to the content provider, or if they decide to do it, they have to eat the cost (and by "eat the cost", we mean, "pass the cost onto the consumer").
And since that would jack your IPTV bill up beyond reason, nobody will buy IPTV. Hmmm... You know, having read all of the comments to this point, I'm coming to one undeniable conclusion: Maybe IPTV just isn't a good idea right now? If we had the bandwidth that's considered "normal" in most of developed Europe, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. But no, we live in a place where a 5Mb/s burst on a typical home connection is considered phenomenal.
Why don't we let the ISPs who want to roll out IPTV so much actually build the infrastructure that we paid them billions in tax dollars to build for us? Then perhaps we'll have enough bandwidth that they can roll out all their nifty services without needing to destroy the way the internet currently works.
I'm sorry, but if I have to choose between handing a bunch of obviously crooked corporations unfettered access to turn the Internet into their own, personal plaything, and letting Joe Sixpack suffer through some lag on iHBO.... so be it. I choose the internet.
The problem with the semantic web is that it's basically an AI problem. As of this writing, we don't currently have a way to represent arbitrary knowledge (Data, yes. Knowledge, no.) Until we find a way to make computers *understand* information, rather than simply shifting bits around according to prewritten recipes, there's not going to be any true semantic web, intelligent search, or natural language human/computer interaction.
And, frankly, that leap in technology seems a long, long, long way off.
I just want to combat some misinformation I've been seeing.
Linking, at its most basic level, is not stealing. It's not even copyright infringement. A link is merely a reference to an existing resource. Nothing more. By linking to the PDF of your book on your website, I'm no more infringing your copyright than if I told someone where to find a free copy (perhaps in the free box of a yard sale.)
A lot of individuals seem to think that anything that prevents them from making money from their work is inherently a violation of their copyright, but I'm sorry. The internet just doesn't work that way. If you want to protect your work, put it behind some kind of basic barrier (a login, a CAPCHA, something.) Then you can sue deep linkers under the DMCA for circumventing your copyright protection mechanism. A blanket ruling stating that any webmaster can object to and remove a link to any "deep" (read: non-home) page on his site is just a bad idea. Many website TOS's already (unenforceably) forbid deep linking. If this ruling spreads, any website that generates ad revenue, or relies on branding, will start adopting similar language. And since that constitutes about 85%* of the useful web, this is unquestionably bad.
Some people can't seem to understand the role deep linking plays in the useful web. Almost any informational article or resource of any length references very specific pages on other websites. This type of thinking will eventually require any web developer to do careful research on any website he wants to link to, checking their TOS policies to find out if deep linking is illegal.
Now, one slightly more rational view seems to be that one can safely deep link, and need only remove links when a content owner specifically objects. Other more disturbing views insinuate that a web developer should "just send an e-mail" before he establishes a deep link. This would turn every website article into an arduous process of research and documentation, cataloging permission for every link in every page.
Eventually, this will lead to the web being broken down into mostly web sites linking to the homepages of other websites. References in articles will become like this (Click on Articles, click in the search box and type 'Pandas'. Go to page 3, click the 3rd article from the top ('Panda Lifecycle'.) The search results may be different, so you might have to hunt around.)
If you disagree, you obviously don't understand the nature of the web. To those of you who argue that "everyone should just be reasonable", nobody is ever reasonable when it comes to money. And believe me, the web is now very much about money.
Now, I'm not talking specifically about this ruling, which may or may not embody all of the above ideas. I'm speaking more to the concept of conflating deep linking with theft, and many of the ideas and beliefs which have been espoused in this thread. The bottom line, this is a technical problem that requires a (simple and inexpensive) technical solution. Attempting to involve the courts will only harm the useful web.
Wow. I NEED to believe that's satire, because if it's not, the fact that people that stupid are allowed to vote and drive genuinely frightens me.
The saddest part is that, even if it is satire (and it seems to be), there really are people who believe crap like that. Maybe not all of it, all at once. But the ignorance is there. Shame on our educational system for allowing this level of ignorance to become prevalent enough to warrant parody.
No, it's a suggestion for how to prove his point to them. The assumption is that if they typed it into Google, and Google showed them the right answer, they would understand their mistake.
He's arguing mathematical correctness against common terminology.
They're reading $.002 as "point zero zero two cents," and he's reading it as "point zero zero two dollars." That's why they're so confused and claim there's no such thing as ".002 dollars." They may be saying it wrong, but what they're charging him is correct:
It's (more or less) clearly written on their website, and almost certainly in the contract he agreed to.
The difference between common usage and correct terminology is an unfortunate one, and until education changes it, they only way to protect yourself is to verify it character by character:
Them: "OK, that'll be point zero zero five cents per megabyte sir!" You: "Is that dollar sign zero decimal zero zero zero zero five?" Them: "No, that's dollar sign zero decimal zero zero five." You: "OK, so five tenths of a cent per megabyte?" Them: "Correct."
Verizon customer support *is* reading the price wrong, from a technical standpoint, but it's an unfortunately common mistake, and you'd probably be shocked at how many people would think *George* is the idiot here.
I agree with you that the guy was most likely being a jackass, and should have been forcefully removed by the premises. I was just pointing out, as you have, that there are far more civilized ways to go about it.
A lot of people are making the point that, "He was just begging for an ass kicking." Quite possibly true. However, it is not law enforcement's role to provide him one. The only, and I mean _ONLY_ time law enforcement is justified in physically attacking (as opposed to restraining) someone is when they pose a danger to themselves or those around them. Then they are to use the minimum amount of force necessary to subdue and restrain the person. Tasers are not tools of expediency.
I dunno. Maybe arrest him, bring him to the station, charge him with disorderly conduct, and tell him that if he causes trouble like that again, he's gonna spend a few days in jail? I know, it's a little bit "out there," but I really think this strategy could work.
This seems to rely on spy software watching your particular RSA application decrypt things, and thus said spy software would need to be running on the same hardware. Wouldn't it make sense to start writing RSA implementations that use the computer's GPU whenever possible? Using the GPU as a coprocessor has been discussed on Slashdot previously, and the main disadvantage was that the GPU isn't typically optimized for general purpose computing. However, since most GPU's are optimized for massive number crunching, I would think that RSA would play to its strengths. Obviously, whether or not the GPU is "good" at it, it would still come with the advantage of moving the implementation off the main CPU, and thus foiling any malware. (At least until they design malware that runs on the GPU...)
If only it worked that way. Just because we can prove something is true in quantum physics doesn't mean it can be "upscaled" to the macro-universe. In short, even if this works it's a far cry from *you* being able to go back in time.
You're using a false analogy. Buildings can and do frequently have substantial problems. Asbestos, improper wiring, faulty plumbing, foundation problems, poor space planning, etc. Furthermore, many of these problems cannot be fixed at all, but must simply be lived with, worked around, or ignored. There's no real software equivalent for a building collapsing. I guess the closest you could get would be a program crashing and FUBARing the entire system it runs on, which happens almost never with professional software, except in the case of low-level code (i.e. disk utilities and the OS.)
Just because you don't think programming has any real science behind it doesn't make you right. Writing effective, efficient algorithms is a decidedly complex task, and given the size and the scope of many of the projects we work on, it's a miracle any of it ever happens at all. Sure, engineering a building is difficult. But it is also a very old problem that has been solved over and over again in the past. We know how do design buildings now. It's certainly not simple or easy, but it's a field where new challenges are relatively rare. Contrast this to the software industry, where quite often what's being written is new, and has never been written before. Most of the solved problems have already been encapsulated into libraries, so the bulk of the code being written is completely new territory, covering problems that have never been completely solved.
Sure, some programmers (and probably all of them at one time or another) bang out some off-the-top-of-the-head code without really thinking about it. But don't paint the entire profession with the same misinformed brush.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah? Well at MY company they pay everybody (including the janitor) $500,000,000/year + $1B/mo bonuses. And everyone gets four Rolls Royces when they're hired. And the company hires hot chicks to suck you off at your desk while you work.
And the companies on either side of us have packages that are 10x better!
Tell you what, guys. If you want an awesome job, move to #@^$^%$[NO CARRIER]
I'm sorry, of course you're correct. I wrote that in a hurry because I was at work, and didn't write what I meant. What I meant to write was that it locks iTunes Music Store _content_ to the iPod. (Unless you burn-rip it, there's no way to play an iTMS song on another player.) Thanks for pointing out my mistake to me.
Apple, in it's traditionally clever way, has turned the tables on the music industry. The music industry, in initial negotiations, simply stated that they wanted "DRM." Apple designed and built a form of DRM that (A) minimally inconveniences their customers, (B) complies with the letter of the agreement, and most importantly, (C) uses the DRM to lock iTunes to its player, thereby profiting from the arrangement and effectively killing any other competitors. (Even MS can't break into the market.) As Apple has the only digital music store anybody would want to use, they use their considerable muscle to bully the music industry into doing what they want.
This is NOT what the music industry wanted. When they say "DRM," they mean DRM that protects *them,* not resellers. So now they're crying for Apple to "open" their DRM. They still want DRM, just DRM that doesn't give Apple the above benefits, the goal being to effectively give their competitors a chance to flourish. If this happens, the music industry will regain the upper hand in negotiations, and start forcing Apple to do its bidding. This will, of course, result in higher prices and poorer service.
The music industry is betting the public won't understand the difference between "opening" DRM, and doing away with it. The former helps nobody but the music industry. If they succeed in convincing consumers that the industry is opposed to DRM, and mean old Apple is forcing it on them, they'll be able to turn public opinion against Apple and get their demands met. This has nothing to do with helping the consumer, and everything to do with the music industry trying to wrestle its way out of Apple's iron grip on its throat.
We'll see how this turns out.
I'm not worried. Even if they did managed to silence PJ, what she has built is far, far more important. Groklaw will carry her torch forward with renewed vigor.
Remember, PJ may have given us 3000-some odd articles, but if her goal was to write a bunch of stuff, she would have written and sold a book. Her point was to bring together the "hackers" of the legal field with the hackers from the computing field, and in doing so create a voice for freedom loving technology users everywhere. You just can't kill that.
You just can't.
In that case, from now on I demand that every article that talks about Vista's features also talk about my currently-in-planning operating system, Creysoft PsychOSis:
Yep, me too. You know what I did with it? I went out and bought myself a new CD to listen to on the way to work!
But I only bought it for $12! That means, according to the RIAA's math, they're out 21 bucks! I sure showed those bastards, eh?
Actually, that's only if your Mac has a PowerPC chip in it, and since Apple doesn't (to my knowledge) sell any PPC Macs anymore, this statement is untrue. Your sentiment, however, is absolutely correct. The operating system itself supports (through a virtualization layer) nearly any properly written application released since System 6; it's the hardware that makes the difference. (Rosetta itself is a compabitility layer to allow PPC apps to run, so piling Classic on top of Rosetta would be a marvel of softwrae engineering.)
Nevertheless, it is incorrect to state that you can natively run OS 9 applications on any new Mac. As Apple has wanted to phase out OS 9 for years now, I do not forsee this changing any time in the future.
They acknowledge First Life's inherent right to parody several times, even jokingly stated that they were insulted by the idea that their lawyers WOULDN'T recognize such a right. The only "license" here is a license for the derivative trademark, which they note "may require a license." Notice they didn't say "does require a license." It's more, "Hey, we think this probably falls under fair use. But just in case it doesn't, and anyone ever hassles you about it, here's a license saying you can use it anyway."
The final clause is standard CYA language. If, for example, First Life started using their derivative logo to do something damaging to Second Life's reputation, Second Life's lawyers may look into it, and if, in fact, the logo is infringing, they may revoke the license. Surely you can't reasonably expect them to grant them a perpetual, non-revokable license to do anything they want with a very slightly modified logo?
The whole thing's basically a joke anyway, to let everyone know that they know about First Life, and are 100% OK with it. It's also a cheap jab at companies with less sense of humor.
It seems to me that the minds who work on DRM probably aren't all that brilliant. Most of the truly gifted people realize that there's no good way to implement it, and shy away from it. Judging from the amount of obvious holes, catastrophic bugs, and general suckiness of most DRM solutions to date, I'd guess that most of the people working on them are not brilliant programmers, but rather people we'd rather not have writing our device drivers in the first place.
I don't think it's really secondary to the debate at all. You're exactly right - if we let them prioritize traffic, I'm going to have to eventually pay for it. And I don't want to. I understand you'll argue that this is only true if I want to take advantage of the benefits offered by the prioritized traffic, but I feel pretty confident that that won't the case.
The reason we keep returning to that theme is because we don't share your optimistic view of ISPs' business ethics. First of all, there are a handful of people in the world who, faced with several of their favorite websites loading slowly, would assume (or even be capable of understanding) that it's their ISPs fault. Most will blame their computer, "the internet," and eventually the websites they're trying to visit. It's not like the ISPs going to email people and say, "Hey, Google's not paying us our extortion money, so we're throttling their connection." They'll just quietly throttle it down, and then send an email saying something to the effect of, "Try MSN Search Today for Free! It's acccurate, helpful, and fast!"
In any event, it's simple logic. Historically, ISPs have been required to provide treat all content equally and fairly. So when a service provider works to improve their network, the improvements are across the board. Google loads faster for you. Chickswithdicks.com loads faster for me. By allowing ISPs start 'prioritizing' traffic, we're going to end up with a situation where 90% of connections is "low profit, public internet," and 10% is "high profit, paid content," or "high profit, in-house service." Where do you think the ISP is going to concentrate most of its resources? With no real profit motive to improve the part of its business that doesn't make it very much money (and no real competition to force them into it), it's easy to see the public internet languishing ISPs pour more and more resources into building private networks of profitable in house services and dedicated connections to large content providers.
Anyway, that's my concern. Perhaps you can't see this happening, but I can't see it happening any other way.
So, your argument is that we should give ISPs carte blanche to turn the internet into their own personal profit wagon, just so you can watch HBO without glitches?
Network Neutrality simply means that the ISP is either not allowed to set up that dedicated network connection to the content provider, or if they decide to do it, they have to eat the cost (and by "eat the cost", we mean, "pass the cost onto the consumer").
And since that would jack your IPTV bill up beyond reason, nobody will buy IPTV. Hmmm... You know, having read all of the comments to this point, I'm coming to one undeniable conclusion: Maybe IPTV just isn't a good idea right now? If we had the bandwidth that's considered "normal" in most of developed Europe, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. But no, we live in a place where a 5Mb/s burst on a typical home connection is considered phenomenal.
Why don't we let the ISPs who want to roll out IPTV so much actually build the infrastructure that we paid them billions in tax dollars to build for us? Then perhaps we'll have enough bandwidth that they can roll out all their nifty services without needing to destroy the way the internet currently works.
I'm sorry, but if I have to choose between handing a bunch of obviously crooked corporations unfettered access to turn the Internet into their own, personal plaything, and letting Joe Sixpack suffer through some lag on iHBO.... so be it. I choose the internet.
The problem with the semantic web is that it's basically an AI problem. As of this writing, we don't currently have a way to represent arbitrary knowledge (Data, yes. Knowledge, no.) Until we find a way to make computers *understand* information, rather than simply shifting bits around according to prewritten recipes, there's not going to be any true semantic web, intelligent search, or natural language human/computer interaction.
And, frankly, that leap in technology seems a long, long, long way off.
Whoooooosh....
He was parodying the massive level of ignorance this thread is displaying about Photoshop, and image processing in general.
One of the most important lessons I learned growing up is that nothing's worth having if you didn't have to work for it.
We all want to give our kids the best possible start in life, but where do we draw the line between providing for them and just spoiling them?
Don't exactly remember how he landed, though.
Painfully.
The Bush administration is not the United States of America.
I just want to combat some misinformation I've been seeing.
Linking, at its most basic level, is not stealing. It's not even copyright infringement. A link is merely a reference to an existing resource. Nothing more. By linking to the PDF of your book on your website, I'm no more infringing your copyright than if I told someone where to find a free copy (perhaps in the free box of a yard sale.)
A lot of individuals seem to think that anything that prevents them from making money from their work is inherently a violation of their copyright, but I'm sorry. The internet just doesn't work that way. If you want to protect your work, put it behind some kind of basic barrier (a login, a CAPCHA, something.) Then you can sue deep linkers under the DMCA for circumventing your copyright protection mechanism. A blanket ruling stating that any webmaster can object to and remove a link to any "deep" (read: non-home) page on his site is just a bad idea. Many website TOS's already (unenforceably) forbid deep linking. If this ruling spreads, any website that generates ad revenue, or relies on branding, will start adopting similar language. And since that constitutes about 85%* of the useful web, this is unquestionably bad.
Some people can't seem to understand the role deep linking plays in the useful web. Almost any informational article or resource of any length references very specific pages on other websites. This type of thinking will eventually require any web developer to do careful research on any website he wants to link to, checking their TOS policies to find out if deep linking is illegal.
Now, one slightly more rational view seems to be that one can safely deep link, and need only remove links when a content owner specifically objects. Other more disturbing views insinuate that a web developer should "just send an e-mail" before he establishes a deep link. This would turn every website article into an arduous process of research and documentation, cataloging permission for every link in every page.
Eventually, this will lead to the web being broken down into mostly web sites linking to the homepages of other websites. References in articles will become like this (Click on Articles, click in the search box and type 'Pandas'. Go to page 3, click the 3rd article from the top ('Panda Lifecycle'.) The search results may be different, so you might have to hunt around.)
If you disagree, you obviously don't understand the nature of the web. To those of you who argue that "everyone should just be reasonable", nobody is ever reasonable when it comes to money. And believe me, the web is now very much about money.
Now, I'm not talking specifically about this ruling, which may or may not embody all of the above ideas. I'm speaking more to the concept of conflating deep linking with theft, and many of the ideas and beliefs which have been espoused in this thread. The bottom line, this is a technical problem that requires a (simple and inexpensive) technical solution. Attempting to involve the courts will only harm the useful web.
* Source: My Ass
Wow. I NEED to believe that's satire, because if it's not, the fact that people that stupid are allowed to vote and drive genuinely frightens me.
The saddest part is that, even if it is satire (and it seems to be), there really are people who believe crap like that. Maybe not all of it, all at once. But the ignorance is there. Shame on our educational system for allowing this level of ignorance to become prevalent enough to warrant parody.
No, it's a suggestion for how to prove his point to them. The assumption is that if they typed it into Google, and Google showed them the right answer, they would understand their mistake.
He's arguing mathematical correctness against common terminology.
o ns/global/globalaccesspriceandcoverage.jsp?section =smallMediumBusiness
They're reading $.002 as "point zero zero two cents," and he's reading it as "point zero zero two dollars." That's why they're so confused and claim there's no such thing as ".002 dollars." They may be saying it wrong, but what they're charging him is correct:
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/businessSoluti
It's (more or less) clearly written on their website, and almost certainly in the contract he agreed to.
The difference between common usage and correct terminology is an unfortunate one, and until education changes it, they only way to protect yourself is to verify it character by character:
Them: "OK, that'll be point zero zero five cents per megabyte sir!"
You: "Is that dollar sign zero decimal zero zero zero zero five?"
Them: "No, that's dollar sign zero decimal zero zero five."
You: "OK, so five tenths of a cent per megabyte?"
Them: "Correct."
Verizon customer support *is* reading the price wrong, from a technical standpoint, but it's an unfortunately common mistake, and you'd probably be shocked at how many people would think *George* is the idiot here.
I agree with you that the guy was most likely being a jackass, and should have been forcefully removed by the premises. I was just pointing out, as you have, that there are far more civilized ways to go about it.
A lot of people are making the point that, "He was just begging for an ass kicking." Quite possibly true. However, it is not law enforcement's role to provide him one. The only, and I mean _ONLY_ time law enforcement is justified in physically attacking (as opposed to restraining) someone is when they pose a danger to themselves or those around them. Then they are to use the minimum amount of force necessary to subdue and restrain the person. Tasers are not tools of expediency.
I dunno. Maybe arrest him, bring him to the station, charge him with disorderly conduct, and tell him that if he causes trouble like that again, he's gonna spend a few days in jail? I know, it's a little bit "out there," but I really think this strategy could work.
This seems to rely on spy software watching your particular RSA application decrypt things, and thus said spy software would need to be running on the same hardware. Wouldn't it make sense to start writing RSA implementations that use the computer's GPU whenever possible? Using the GPU as a coprocessor has been discussed on Slashdot previously, and the main disadvantage was that the GPU isn't typically optimized for general purpose computing. However, since most GPU's are optimized for massive number crunching, I would think that RSA would play to its strengths. Obviously, whether or not the GPU is "good" at it, it would still come with the advantage of moving the implementation off the main CPU, and thus foiling any malware. (At least until they design malware that runs on the GPU...)
If only it worked that way. Just because we can prove something is true in quantum physics doesn't mean it can be "upscaled" to the macro-universe. In short, even if this works it's a far cry from *you* being able to go back in time.
You're using a false analogy. Buildings can and do frequently have substantial problems. Asbestos, improper wiring, faulty plumbing, foundation problems, poor space planning, etc. Furthermore, many of these problems cannot be fixed at all, but must simply be lived with, worked around, or ignored. There's no real software equivalent for a building collapsing. I guess the closest you could get would be a program crashing and FUBARing the entire system it runs on, which happens almost never with professional software, except in the case of low-level code (i.e. disk utilities and the OS.)
Just because you don't think programming has any real science behind it doesn't make you right. Writing effective, efficient algorithms is a decidedly complex task, and given the size and the scope of many of the projects we work on, it's a miracle any of it ever happens at all. Sure, engineering a building is difficult. But it is also a very old problem that has been solved over and over again in the past. We know how do design buildings now. It's certainly not simple or easy, but it's a field where new challenges are relatively rare. Contrast this to the software industry, where quite often what's being written is new, and has never been written before. Most of the solved problems have already been encapsulated into libraries, so the bulk of the code being written is completely new territory, covering problems that have never been completely solved.
Sure, some programmers (and probably all of them at one time or another) bang out some off-the-top-of-the-head code without really thinking about it. But don't paint the entire profession with the same misinformed brush.