Half right. The CIA does have front companies, such as the one Valerie Plame "worked" for while being posted overseas ("non-diplomatic cover"). In-Q-Tel is not one of them -- check out the website, they've got their institutional affiliation literally splashed all across the front page. They perform a function similar to that performed by the NSF or DARPA -- they farm out government money to private industry/academia in hopes of getting basic research and technological advances which will eventually be useful for their respective missions. This is bog-standard for any government agency which deals with technology (although a lot of it is, not to put to fine a point on it, pork -- see the budget for NASA, for example).
They're not actually going to sell this handheld thing for $400, right? Right?
Well, they're going to sell this handheld thing for $400 but they're not going to sell this handheld thing for $400. Pesky English language and its ambiguity.
When you've just aggroed Microsoft, who is level 500 and has an Area of Effect: Death spell that it can cast on an entire industry every couple of seconds, perhaps someone clad in an all-purple Penguin Suit doesn't look so bad.
To anyone who says this comment is nerdy: consider where you are. Glass houses, stones, etc.
How I wish you were right, but Dubya just signed them up with a couple dozen more billion dollars to waste and the number one rule of American politics is that no pork ever dies.
Unfortunately for Mr. Torvalds, Article II would rear its ugly head and prevent him from taking office. You have to be born in America to be the President.
Gitmo is a military detention facility. You could be tried for a misdemeanor in federal court if you put it in their mailbox, but you would be highly unlikely to get a prison sentence (you would also be highly unlikely to be tried -- most people who are tried under the section are mail-fraud types because strategically its easier to hang refusal-to-pay-postage charges on someone than it is to prove all the elements of fraud). If Boy Scouts come up to a door that says "No soliciting" and solicit anyhow, then yes, that could well be trespassing as defined in that jursidiction (the Boy Scouts, as a charitable organization, have an exemption in other jurisdictions).
And again, its unlikely the police and prosecutors would actually arrest/prosecute for these offenses but they do exist.
"Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits any mailable matter such as
statements of accounts, circulars, sale bills, or other like matter,
on which no postage has been paid, in any letter box established,
approved, or accepted by the Postal Service for the receipt or
delivery of mail matter on any mail route with intent to avoid payment
of lawful postage thereon, shall for each such offense be fined under
this title."
18 U.S.C. 1725.
Banging on the front door, however, is legal in the abscence of a no-solicitors sign. In many jursidictions, the alternative is a criminal trespass charge. Picking a town in Illinois at random:
117.03 TRESPASS.
It is declared to be unlawful and to constitute a trespass for any solicitors to go upon any premises for the purpose of securing an audience with the occupant thereof and engage in soliciting as herein defined, in defiance of the notice exhibited at the residence in accordance with the provisions of 117.04.
Note: I am not a lawyer. This post is not legal advice.
Translation: "Nobody would buy this except a pirate, which is good because that saves the rest of us from having to buy either the actual media or this godawful-stupid looking capture device."
Why is it that Slashdot thinks they have a God-given right to watch movies for free? (I discount the possibility that the parent is discussing legal format-shifting, because its format-shifting which is in every possible way inferior to just buying the bloody DVD of the same movie, for the same amount of money.)
There is a vicious cycle in there, too. Farmers eventually become their own spigot-and-sink in the server's economy, one which the dev's have little if any control over. Consider the case of Glowing Brightwood Staff in WoW. Its a wonderful mage item, although not exactly head and shoulders above what you can get with a lot of effort. It also is very, very rare -- rare enough that if you constantly camp the AH (like the farming community can and does) you can completely monopolize the supply of it if you have enough money (if someone sells it at below your price floor, immediately buy it out and relist it at your floor). And then set the price beyond the ability of most people to pay -- at 1000g or so (n.b. to non-Wow players: thats 50-100 hours of work if you're working with singleminded efficiency as your only goal). So they only way you can realistically get it is by buying gold from a farmer, then buying the item and giving the gold back to the farmer, so he can sell the same gold again (well, OK -- 95% of the same gold, 5% gets eaten by AH fees). And for adding *no* economic value to the situation the farmer has just jacked the buyer out of, say, 700g due to pure monopoly power. (Imagine an economy where Apple could only produce like 100 iPods a week and Microsoft just bought them all and resold them for $2k apiece.)
Is the difference in utility between photographs and 3D models so great that you can justify the tremendous increase in costs? Take a fairly simple object to model -- a ceramic dinner plate which is slightly concave with a floral pattern on it. I bought one for my mother on eBay -- the prototypical eBay transaction, it cost $15 for a flea-market level item which had some value to one of the parties and, naturally, arrived shattered. Can you justify even twenty minutes of work on the part of a graphics artist to get the dinner plate to a rough approximation of its true 3D form, or do you just take the free digital photo (which can be done by a complete photo and technology amateur, in seconds) and, when I have a question about whether the plate will fit in my dinner cabinet, I can use this super-high tech teleprescence device called the telephone (or, alternately, asynchronous tele-presence: email) to ask "So, is that more or less than 14 inches in diameter?"
We won't even get into how terrible it would be to design complex models like, say, a beanie baby.
Here's the trouble with that business model: they've got to get bought out by a big guy, quick, or they're not going to make it (or, I suppose, grow massively, but its very hard to grow a game without a marketing budget and, whoops, catch-22 here). Lets say you've got a thousand paying subscribers. Great, thats $10,000 a month. Oh wait, its not -- deduct bandwidth costs, whatever they're paying for billing services (35 cents a debit plus a couple of percentage points, likely), and all the other various and sundry things you have (and don't forget taxes, because even if you forget your taxes on $120,000 of corporate income the relevant agency will not). And even if you had no costs, $10,000 a month divided by four developers is $30k a year, which is below what a freshly graduated CS student expects to make (factor the costs back in and you're closer to the actual poverty line than the engineering poverty line).
Puzzle Pirates made it: they developed IP which was interesting enough to attract about 5k paying subscribers and then got into an arrangement with Ubisoft. So there is hope. And maybe there is hope for an indie MMORPG in a niche that can support 5k -- but there just isn't at several hundred.
mail transport is unreliable by protocol definition
This "formal logic" probably does not do much to convince bosses or your mother for whom there has never been a day on the Internet when email failed to arrive instantaneously, "like it should".
What would encryping anything have accomplished, exactly? The problem isn't that someone intercepted a legitimate transfer in the middle and modified it to be evil. The problem is that one end of the legitimate transfer was compromised, and the other end of the legitimate transfer was too trusting of the input from the compromised end, and then happily passed along that input (perfectly legitimately) to other parties who were then compromised themselves.
C = (F - 32) * (5/9) (or, for a quick approximation, subtract thirty and halve, but that gets pretty inaccurate when you get into the hundreds -- useful for weather, though)
Kidnapping for money (in the US, at least) is completely dead, for a couple of reasons. First, the FBI has long considered every incident of kidnapping to be a personal vendetta against them and they play for keeps -- unless you're the pedophile who kidnaps a kid and kills them within 24 hours, they WILL catch you. And they will, likely as not, kill you in the attempt and when the guy who does gets back to the office his hand will be sore from all the high-fives. We're not nearly so effective at taking care of drug dealers, but drug dealers are -- they've got a mortality rate of about 10-25% a year in some cities, and most of them only clear minimum wage (see Freakonomics -- excellent book, by the way). Computer crimes, by contrast, are punished relatively leniently, investigated seldomly, have zero physical risk, and pay better. Whats not to like for the unscrupulous type, aside from having a higher barrier to entry than kidnapping/drug dealing?
Gack, people, for the love of little apples: your uniform doesn't say "I'm a new uniform". Your uniform says "My ID number is 3452859823402034". For the sniper to know 3452859823402034 is a US Army uniform they have to have a satellite uplink or something to the army's inventory system -- and if Osama has on-demand access to the Army's inventory tracking system we're screwed regardless of whether there are RFIDs or not.
This is the same scenario with interception on the street, from your garbage, when walking into a competing store -- without access to the underlying database all RFID gets you is an expensive way to generate poorly randomized numbers.
>>It will take days if not weeks to prove they got the wrong person !!!>>
Crimety, you're right! If only people would carry their name and photo on a little piece of plastic inside their wallet, with a copy of the same information backed up on a network law enforcement had access to, then we wouldn't have to wait a week to prove our identities! We could just show the card!
Didn't the 1980s do the Yellow Peril thing to death? Regardless, its hard to credit advice to take more science courses from someone who is spouting dime-novel scifi BS about mining the moon for essential minerals. What, pray tell, would ever justify the energy cost to move the equipment out there and the ore (or magic Moon Pixie dust, whatever) back? The rocks are the same up there as they are down here! Except down here you don't have to cart them a couple of million miles to their final destination!
You'll find that your two examples will compile to the same bytecode in any modern Java compiler. Trust me, after literally two months of trying every line-by-line optimization I could think of to squeeze every tenth of a percent out of the main loop I came to the conclusion that the guys at both Sun and IBM (jikes compiler) are just freakish code gods and that I should never, ever, ever attempt any optimization below the level of algorithm selection. How freakishly good was this compiler? I had an algorithm for solving N-Queens that could be implemented as either iterative or recursive. Obviously, in n-queens the recursive algorithm has a guaranteed maximum depth, so I would presumably gain a lot of speedup by going with iteration and avoiding the overhead with a billion function calls, right? Oh, wrong! I ran literally 10,000 trials and the difference was statistical noise, something like two hundredths of a percent in favor of the recursive algorithm (I know, WTF). Then I go digging for the answers why and a wise sage imparted on me the lesson I have just imparted on you -- Trust Your Compiler.
(Oh, by the way -- other tricks they used to tell you in the early days of Java, like trying to make the getX() inlineable or breaking the standards they taught you in CS101 and replacing foo.getBar() with foo.bar, are also pretty much useless. The Compiler Knows All.)
P.S. I eventually abandoned Java entirely for the tight-loop and rewrote that as a stand-alone C app, keeping Java for the networking and logic for the distributed application (which used, lets see, approximately 1/100000000000000000 of the amount of cycles as the actual computation loop did, that being mostly the point). C, unsuprisingly, beat Java by a factor of roughly 100 in terms of speed (a tight loop doing bit-level operations on integers, and I had the luxury of using GPLed code written by the guy who set the world record in this field as a base to start on, which meant the C, which both benefitted from hand human optimization and a much more mature compiler which was literally built to do this sort of thing, ate Java for lunch).
Yeah, I'm sure Slashdotters have all stopped downloading MP3s now that iTunes has cornered that market legally with minimal DRM and a cost which is a fraction of the old CD prices.
Redirect screen output to video capture card, redirect audio output to audio capture software... hit play, come back two hours later, upload to pirate gang in China. There, that wasn't too hard.
If it can be displayed, it can be captured, and if it can be captured you have no control over the format any more.
'Minor unexplained troubles' when pay fails to make it to the bank on time
Having experienced this once (nearly lost six weeks of salary and got a pipe thrown at my head in the bargain), if it ever happens again I will smile sweetly at them, work to my usual quitting time, then immediately call first my lawyer and second my professional contacts. "Hey Jane, whats up? How are things going at work? Oh, new project? You wouldn't happen to need any people for that, would ya? Yeah, small disagreement with management over general direction the company was taking -- I prefer one which pays for services rendered, they don't."
Next day at work I'll be smiling sweetly when asking "So, hows about that paycheck?" and if I don't get it I'll serve notice immediately -- nothing personal, I just prefer eating to not eating. Companies get exactly one day, non-renewable and non-negotiable, of me being smily about this -- if it happens a second time I will be gone before the time you get to the word "trouble".
Slashdot Mirror
Half right. The CIA does have front companies, such as the one Valerie Plame "worked" for while being posted overseas ("non-diplomatic cover"). In-Q-Tel is not one of them -- check out the website, they've got their institutional affiliation literally splashed all across the front page. They perform a function similar to that performed by the NSF or DARPA -- they farm out government money to private industry/academia in hopes of getting basic research and technological advances which will eventually be useful for their respective missions. This is bog-standard for any government agency which deals with technology (although a lot of it is, not to put to fine a point on it, pork -- see the budget for NASA, for example).
Well, they're going to sell this handheld thing for $400 but they're not going to sell this handheld thing for $400. Pesky English language and its ambiguity.
To anyone who says this comment is nerdy: consider where you are. Glass houses, stones, etc.
How I wish you were right, but Dubya just signed them up with a couple dozen more billion dollars to waste and the number one rule of American politics is that no pork ever dies.
Unfortunately for Mr. Torvalds, Article II would rear its ugly head and prevent him from taking office. You have to be born in America to be the President.
And again, its unlikely the police and prosecutors would actually arrest/prosecute for these offenses but they do exist.
18 U.S.C. 1725.
Banging on the front door, however, is legal in the abscence of a no-solicitors sign. In many jursidictions, the alternative is a criminal trespass charge. Picking a town in Illinois at random:
117.03 TRESPASS. It is declared to be unlawful and to constitute a trespass for any solicitors to go upon any premises for the purpose of securing an audience with the occupant thereof and engage in soliciting as herein defined, in defiance of the notice exhibited at the residence in accordance with the provisions of 117.04.
Note: I am not a lawyer. This post is not legal advice.
Why is it that Slashdot thinks they have a God-given right to watch movies for free? (I discount the possibility that the parent is discussing legal format-shifting, because its format-shifting which is in every possible way inferior to just buying the bloody DVD of the same movie, for the same amount of money.)
There is a vicious cycle in there, too. Farmers eventually become their own spigot-and-sink in the server's economy, one which the dev's have little if any control over. Consider the case of Glowing Brightwood Staff in WoW. Its a wonderful mage item, although not exactly head and shoulders above what you can get with a lot of effort. It also is very, very rare -- rare enough that if you constantly camp the AH (like the farming community can and does) you can completely monopolize the supply of it if you have enough money (if someone sells it at below your price floor, immediately buy it out and relist it at your floor). And then set the price beyond the ability of most people to pay -- at 1000g or so (n.b. to non-Wow players: thats 50-100 hours of work if you're working with singleminded efficiency as your only goal). So they only way you can realistically get it is by buying gold from a farmer, then buying the item and giving the gold back to the farmer, so he can sell the same gold again (well, OK -- 95% of the same gold, 5% gets eaten by AH fees). And for adding *no* economic value to the situation the farmer has just jacked the buyer out of, say, 700g due to pure monopoly power. (Imagine an economy where Apple could only produce like 100 iPods a week and Microsoft just bought them all and resold them for $2k apiece.)
We won't even get into how terrible it would be to design complex models like, say, a beanie baby.
Puzzle Pirates made it: they developed IP which was interesting enough to attract about 5k paying subscribers and then got into an arrangement with Ubisoft. So there is hope. And maybe there is hope for an indie MMORPG in a niche that can support 5k -- but there just isn't at several hundred.
This "formal logic" probably does not do much to convince bosses or your mother for whom there has never been a day on the Internet when email failed to arrive instantaneously, "like it should".
What would encryping anything have accomplished, exactly? The problem isn't that someone intercepted a legitimate transfer in the middle and modified it to be evil. The problem is that one end of the legitimate transfer was compromised, and the other end of the legitimate transfer was too trusting of the input from the compromised end, and then happily passed along that input (perfectly legitimately) to other parties who were then compromised themselves.
C = (F - 32) * (5/9) (or, for a quick approximation, subtract thirty and halve, but that gets pretty inaccurate when you get into the hundreds -- useful for weather, though)
... and the server is a smoking husk before the first comment is posted.
Kidnapping for money (in the US, at least) is completely dead, for a couple of reasons. First, the FBI has long considered every incident of kidnapping to be a personal vendetta against them and they play for keeps -- unless you're the pedophile who kidnaps a kid and kills them within 24 hours, they WILL catch you. And they will, likely as not, kill you in the attempt and when the guy who does gets back to the office his hand will be sore from all the high-fives. We're not nearly so effective at taking care of drug dealers, but drug dealers are -- they've got a mortality rate of about 10-25% a year in some cities, and most of them only clear minimum wage (see Freakonomics -- excellent book, by the way). Computer crimes, by contrast, are punished relatively leniently, investigated seldomly, have zero physical risk, and pay better. Whats not to like for the unscrupulous type, aside from having a higher barrier to entry than kidnapping/drug dealing?
This is the same scenario with interception on the street, from your garbage, when walking into a competing store -- without access to the underlying database all RFID gets you is an expensive way to generate poorly randomized numbers.
Does that portable tag shredder erase fingerprints, too, or is that a job for your tin-foil washcloth?
Crimety, you're right! If only people would carry their name and photo on a little piece of plastic inside their wallet, with a copy of the same information backed up on a network law enforcement had access to, then we wouldn't have to wait a week to prove our identities! We could just show the card!
Didn't the 1980s do the Yellow Peril thing to death? Regardless, its hard to credit advice to take more science courses from someone who is spouting dime-novel scifi BS about mining the moon for essential minerals. What, pray tell, would ever justify the energy cost to move the equipment out there and the ore (or magic Moon Pixie dust, whatever) back? The rocks are the same up there as they are down here! Except down here you don't have to cart them a couple of million miles to their final destination!
(Oh, by the way -- other tricks they used to tell you in the early days of Java, like trying to make the getX() inlineable or breaking the standards they taught you in CS101 and replacing foo.getBar() with foo.bar, are also pretty much useless. The Compiler Knows All.)
P.S. I eventually abandoned Java entirely for the tight-loop and rewrote that as a stand-alone C app, keeping Java for the networking and logic for the distributed application (which used, lets see, approximately 1/100000000000000000 of the amount of cycles as the actual computation loop did, that being mostly the point). C, unsuprisingly, beat Java by a factor of roughly 100 in terms of speed (a tight loop doing bit-level operations on integers, and I had the luxury of using GPLed code written by the guy who set the world record in this field as a base to start on, which meant the C, which both benefitted from hand human optimization and a much more mature compiler which was literally built to do this sort of thing, ate Java for lunch).
Right guys? No pirates here?
If it can be displayed, it can be captured, and if it can be captured you have no control over the format any more.
"Sorry, creationrap, yo. You don't like it, you can return yourself to the manufacturer and get a complete refund. That would be Me." -- God
Having experienced this once (nearly lost six weeks of salary and got a pipe thrown at my head in the bargain), if it ever happens again I will smile sweetly at them, work to my usual quitting time, then immediately call first my lawyer and second my professional contacts. "Hey Jane, whats up? How are things going at work? Oh, new project? You wouldn't happen to need any people for that, would ya? Yeah, small disagreement with management over general direction the company was taking -- I prefer one which pays for services rendered, they don't."
Next day at work I'll be smiling sweetly when asking "So, hows about that paycheck?" and if I don't get it I'll serve notice immediately -- nothing personal, I just prefer eating to not eating. Companies get exactly one day, non-renewable and non-negotiable, of me being smily about this -- if it happens a second time I will be gone before the time you get to the word "trouble".