In short, the law in the UK is stricter than the law in the US, for libel cases. So when the US asks the UK to send someone over here to face trial the UK will say "If they are convicted there they would be convicted here too, so may as well let the US courts deal with it." In the reverse situation the US says "They are likely to convict for something that is perfectly legal, and in fact protected."
In the case of murder it happens differently. The US says something like "If the UK convicts him than we would too, so let the UK deal with it.", while the UK would say "The US will convict him if we would, but they would apply the death penalty which is we wouldn't, so we will protect our own."
So there is nothing unusual or unfair going on here, though if you state part of the story it can look like it.
Cause when it comes down to it people don't really want low spending. They want low taxes and all the government services they can get. Everyone has their own pet project they don't want to see cut, but they want everyone Else's project cut.
Nobody is willing to say "Start with my items, and then compromise by taking everyone Else's too." Well they might say that, but look at how they vote. Anyone who cuts spending is attacked by the opponent next election, and likely to loose. Raise taxes and you are attacked and loose. Spend without taxing and people moan, but they won't vote against you. Politicians are well trained in what we want, and they give it.
Try proposing cutting Nasa's budget on slashdot. (In a story where their budget is on topic, this comes up often)
So why isn't there a little sticker they can put next to the address: "Note, this package was accidentally dropped in shipping, please inspect it carefully. Our apologies for any damages." And the driver can live a little instruction sheet on how to file a claim (in this computer age it could be printed in the truck, and have all the tracking numbers on it already). You know they will have to do it, anyway, so you can at least make it as painless as you can.
Perfect no drop shipping is ideal, but accidents happen.
Sure, if you have a good punch. This is slashdot we are talking about though. Most of us are letting others on our machine because we will get punched outwise. Threats to punch someone who does something nasty will be met with laughs at best.
This is a cure for type I. Type I is what you get as a kid when your body never makes enough insulin. Type II is what you get when you consume so much sugar your body can't produce enough insulin.
Drink that Super Big Gulp and you will add to your chance of getting type II, which isn't covered by this treatment. (Not to mention all the other unhealthy things about soda in general)
Trolltech is an excellent example. They would not have nearly as many paying customers if it wasn't for the free version. Everyone in unixland knows KDE, and a good part of them use and like it. Enough of them are programers who have played around with the source enough to pass the qt learning curve and see how great it is. When the boss decides to start a new project they are not in position of either asking for qt, or evaluating all toolkits. The latter is hard to do, because by the time you know a toolkit isn't great you have half your application written already.
Trolltech in fact mentions kde to those who are considering their product. When you evaluate something new it is hard to know if it is any good. It is hard to get customers to act as a reference, and even when they will there is always a question if the reference is honest. KDE is there, they can point to it and say "See, they have several million lines of code built on qt". That is worth a lot.
In short, sell the GPL version as the demo, and the free software built around it as proof that your code is good. Doesn't work so well for non-libraries though.
I've been wondering, how can I make bittorrent firewall friendly. I think my setup is typical of slashdot: a nat firewall turning my IP into one of many behind the firewall. Sure I can forward the bittorrent ports, but only if I always use the one machine, a restriction that I cannot use.
What I'd like is a proxy that I can run somewhere. The proxy is bittorrent running on some machine on the network. My client isn't really bittorrent, it is a look-alike to the user that just tells the proxy to download this file. The proxy can then automatically remain a seed until space runs low. (I only download legal files so I don't care if the RIAA finds me)
Is there a better way? Has someone done this? What do you do?
I wasn't talking about multi-session disks, I was talking about DVD+-RW. When either disks is formatted you can randomly read and write to the whole thing. (DVD-RW has some restrictions on this that we can ignore) This was the claimed advantage of DVD+-RW disks, you don't waste ~13 Mb, the space occupied by the previous versions, and one more of the max 99 sessions; everytime you write data to it. With multi-session CDs you won't go very long before the disk is full (max 98 boots). With DVD+-RW you overwrite previous data, but at the cost of loosing the older versions
DVD+RW doesn't have the concept of a session at all. You cannot write a multi-session DVD+RW.
Yes I have read the relevant standards. I've wrote programs that do write CD and DVD media.
The problem is RW disks fail without warning, and they are only good for a 1000 writes (this is optimistic in my experience). Unless you do a verify after the write you cannot be sure that you data is saved. Worse, you have overwritten the last version too, so you can't use any hacks to get back older versions of the files you really need.
DVD-RAM in a caddy, or not removed from the drive, shouldn't have this problem. Good luck finding a DVD-RAM drive anywhere though.
or simple counters I find that using i or j or similar works quite well. After all, everybody understands a for loop with an i index -- calling it array_index_counter or some-such is (IMHO) pointless.
No, array_index_counter is worse than pointless, using i or j is recognizable to any good programmer, no though required. Using array_index_counter implies that there is something other than a loop index going on with the variable and causes all good programmers to pause for a moment to figure out what that is. (Only to be annoyed when they realize it is just a loop index)
There is one other program with descriptive loop indexes: they take up too much space. The example you gave it 19 letters, and in a typical C for statement will be repeated three times. That works out to 57 letters. Add in a few for the other required parts, and indentation, and you are longer than the typical terminal line, and all hope of easy readability is lost. (Unless you expand the window, but that assumes you do all your editing in a graphical environment, which isn't always true)
Editors and IDEs are personal choices. Make vim, emacs, and kdevelop available to everyone (Those are selected because they are the most popular free ones, have the admins install any other free ones on request). Then have each department budget for other editors that any one person may find works best for them. You might want to see if there are demo versions of commercial software you can make available to those who care to try it.
Everything else you need to make choices. There can be only one source code system so choose one. There can be only one make, so choose one. (my current project had two incompatible makes for a short time while we converted to the new system, it was a pain not worth living with any longer than you must!)
Make sure you code is cross platform. Don't use any gcc only tricks if you can avoid them, and where you must use them be careful to make them easily wrapable so you can use other compilers latter. For C++ gcc isn't very good, if speed becomes a concern you can buy a different compiler latter (perhaps just for one platform, using gcc for the other). In fact you can developers work with gcc (which is free and normally good enough), and have a good compiler for the build system.
Re:Can you install on an existing Linux box?
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Asterisk will work safely, but this will not. You need to ask your distribution for a Asterisk install.
Right. However in those situations the company will not say the employee was fired, they were laid off. Firing is used to mean that the employee was let go do to something the employee did. The company doesn't have to give a reason to lay someone off, but when pressed they are most likely to say something like: "We only had the budget for X people, and we had X+1, so someone had to be let go." The company will never say something bad about anyone let go in this case because they can be sued for it.
If the company fires someone they will say in court "He was let go because his work was not up to par. Here are records that show he was reprimanded several times for excessive web use at work. Here is his output vs the output of his peers. He was not worth it." The court will then agree that the employee wasn't worth having, and the company has a right to bad mouth his work habits to other potential employers.
Nearly all companies will try to turn the second case into a case of you resigning. In this situation they will say "Look, here are all your reprimands, and the situation hasn't changed, either resign or we fire you. If you resign we will tell anyone he asked that he left in good standing, and we are sorry to see you go. If we fire you we will tell everyone that you were a bad employee and they shouldn't hire you." Your choice, but only a fool would take the second option because it gives you a bad reference.
In all states (and nearly all countries) you have the right to fire an employee for wrong doing. There is fault involved on the employees part. When you fire someone you are telling everyone "don't hire this crook". Crook is the correct work because the employee was doing something if not illeagle, bad enough that you are willing to say in court that nobody would allow him to work for you given when he did. This is a very strong statement, and companies hate to do it because they are taking a stand on someone that can ruin them.
In Texas (and many but not all states and countries) you have the right to let someone go for no reason. However when asked about the employee your response is on the order of "Good worker, I have nothing bad to say about him, but we no longer needed him." In short you have let them go, but there is no fault involved.
You would presume that. However it is important to recall that the NSA made changes to the original DES standard that made it more resistant to differential attacks, something that the rest of the cryptography world wouldn't "invent" for 15 years or so.
I know for a fact that several government agencies (Those three letter names before homeland security) used DES encryption for a lot of stuff 10 years ago, because I worked for a company selling it. (We couldn't tell you who they were, but there are only so many places where you can tell someone what city you are going to but not what organization[1]) I also can't tell you what level of security our products were trusted to.
Course the NSA also shortened the key to 56 bits. So this isn't a clear case of them helping against their interests.
[1]Not the IRS, we sold the IRS some stuff too, but AFAIK no encryption. Several engineers "regretted" not putting a backdoor in after they learned the IRS was sending tax data with our equipment.
but wouldn't it be possible to record the sound on a tape recorder, then take it home and demodulate it, then work on breaking the encryption?!
Sure, but I'll save you the trouble: it is standard 3DES encryption. Though expect them to start moving to AES soon. There is also some standard public key cryptography and replay prevention. (so you can't play the same bit sequence back and get it to spit out money) Standard algorithms in cryptography.
If you manage to break them you won't have a hard time getting millions from one of several countries for the secret - more than the machine holds, and you don't take a chance that the cops recognize you from the video tapes.
"Only Americans can innovate" is probably a dangerous stereotype. I have not seen any clear evidence of that.
You have not seen evidence because it is not true. However if you look close you will find evidence that some countries do much worse at encouraging innovation and the thought processes that lead up to it.
Remember, all generalizations are false. There are smart people in nearly every country that do creative innovation. There are plenty of uncreative people everywhere. Taken as a whole the US tends to be more innovative.
In the case of Japan, they are known to do a pretty good job, but their process is not the same as the US, so their results are different.
Yes ask what you can do. However remember that just because you can doesn't mean you should! I know small business owners with a dedicated room for the business, dedicated computers. They don't write it off though, because when they sell they pay capital gains on that space, while the rest of the house is tax-free. (They are builders, they build their house for cost every 2 years)
So ask what you can do, but also ask what the downside of doing it is. It might not be worth it. It might be worth paying your own way for something the office will provide. (I don't know of any reason, but this of course varies from country to country)
While we are at it, lets switch the whole world to English. I'm tired of getting picked on as an American for only speaking one language while the rest of the world speaks at least two. Since we get in trouble for working with several different measurement systems, it is only fair that we pick on your for insisting on sticking with your old language when you could switch to English.
The fact that English is not a good language (though I don't know what would be a good one) fits right in. Metric is a bad standard. It is standard, and that is worth something, but the Imperial measurements generally are better for real world use. For starters, base 12 is much better than base 10 when you need to deal with thirds, which is common in the real world.
Even if the entire world switch to English, with metric units, it wouldn't help as much as you think. There is a lot of good literature in other languages that you really need to learn the original to enjoy. There are a lot of recipes with imperial measurements. (More than just cooking) There is a lot of software that works now that uses the imperial measurements, and converting it all is not trivial.
Just set up a rule so that your kid cannot open any email that isn't signed with pgp/gpg, with a key in your web of trust. I'm tempted to impose that rule on myself and force my friends to install gpg. (Sadly I'm lazy - I haven't gotten around to making myself a key yet)
So long as it is honest. You are required by law to report your occupation. You are required by law to report all the income you have. The law does not allow as evidence anything you are forced to reveal (This is known as the fifth amendment). Thus if you put "tax evader" on the forms, and this is your primary occupation they cannot get you on this. They might investigate you, but if you are good at hiding your tracks they can do nothing about it.
This comes up most often for drug dealers. If you report a lot of self employment income and list your job is drug dealer, they cannot get you on the easier charge to prove: tax evasion. Remember, Al Capone was got on Tax evasion, he managed to hide all evidence of his drug (alcohol) operations, but the court was able to find he had far more income than he was reporting. If he had reported that income they couldn't have got him.
Also note, raising and lowering your house temperature actually uses more energy than keeping it at a constant temperature.
Myth. Unless you are the rare type that puts his thermostat on the low setting all the time compared to raising and lowering it to fit what you like. If you are like most people and you would leave it on the high setting all the time you use less power by turning it down.
Simple thermodynamics. The greater the heat difference, the faster the heat transfer. Your house only needs to be heated to make up for the loss from heat transfer.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct, but not for the reason you think.
In short, the law in the UK is stricter than the law in the US, for libel cases. So when the US asks the UK to send someone over here to face trial the UK will say "If they are convicted there they would be convicted here too, so may as well let the US courts deal with it." In the reverse situation the US says "They are likely to convict for something that is perfectly legal, and in fact protected."
In the case of murder it happens differently. The US says something like "If the UK convicts him than we would too, so let the UK deal with it.", while the UK would say "The US will convict him if we would, but they would apply the death penalty which is we wouldn't, so we will protect our own."
So there is nothing unusual or unfair going on here, though if you state part of the story it can look like it.
Cause when it comes down to it people don't really want low spending. They want low taxes and all the government services they can get. Everyone has their own pet project they don't want to see cut, but they want everyone Else's project cut.
Nobody is willing to say "Start with my items, and then compromise by taking everyone Else's too." Well they might say that, but look at how they vote. Anyone who cuts spending is attacked by the opponent next election, and likely to loose. Raise taxes and you are attacked and loose. Spend without taxing and people moan, but they won't vote against you. Politicians are well trained in what we want, and they give it.
Try proposing cutting Nasa's budget on slashdot. (In a story where their budget is on topic, this comes up often)
So why isn't there a little sticker they can put next to the address: "Note, this package was accidentally dropped in shipping, please inspect it carefully. Our apologies for any damages." And the driver can live a little instruction sheet on how to file a claim (in this computer age it could be printed in the truck, and have all the tracking numbers on it already). You know they will have to do it, anyway, so you can at least make it as painless as you can.
Perfect no drop shipping is ideal, but accidents happen.
Sure, if you have a good punch. This is slashdot we are talking about though. Most of us are letting others on our machine because we will get punched outwise. Threats to punch someone who does something nasty will be met with laughs at best.
This is a cure for type I. Type I is what you get as a kid when your body never makes enough insulin. Type II is what you get when you consume so much sugar your body can't produce enough insulin.
Drink that Super Big Gulp and you will add to your chance of getting type II, which isn't covered by this treatment. (Not to mention all the other unhealthy things about soda in general)
Trolltech is an excellent example. They would not have nearly as many paying customers if it wasn't for the free version. Everyone in unixland knows KDE, and a good part of them use and like it. Enough of them are programers who have played around with the source enough to pass the qt learning curve and see how great it is. When the boss decides to start a new project they are not in position of either asking for qt, or evaluating all toolkits. The latter is hard to do, because by the time you know a toolkit isn't great you have half your application written already.
Trolltech in fact mentions kde to those who are considering their product. When you evaluate something new it is hard to know if it is any good. It is hard to get customers to act as a reference, and even when they will there is always a question if the reference is honest. KDE is there, they can point to it and say "See, they have several million lines of code built on qt". That is worth a lot.
In short, sell the GPL version as the demo, and the free software built around it as proof that your code is good. Doesn't work so well for non-libraries though.
You can always get your data back just fine from /dev/random. You just have to figure out where it starts there, which can sometimes be difficult.
I've been wondering, how can I make bittorrent firewall friendly. I think my setup is typical of slashdot: a nat firewall turning my IP into one of many behind the firewall. Sure I can forward the bittorrent ports, but only if I always use the one machine, a restriction that I cannot use.
What I'd like is a proxy that I can run somewhere. The proxy is bittorrent running on some machine on the network. My client isn't really bittorrent, it is a look-alike to the user that just tells the proxy to download this file. The proxy can then automatically remain a seed until space runs low. (I only download legal files so I don't care if the RIAA finds me)
Is there a better way? Has someone done this? What do you do?
I wasn't talking about multi-session disks, I was talking about DVD+-RW. When either disks is formatted you can randomly read and write to the whole thing. (DVD-RW has some restrictions on this that we can ignore) This was the claimed advantage of DVD+-RW disks, you don't waste ~13 Mb, the space occupied by the previous versions, and one more of the max 99 sessions; everytime you write data to it. With multi-session CDs you won't go very long before the disk is full (max 98 boots). With DVD+-RW you overwrite previous data, but at the cost of loosing the older versions
DVD+RW doesn't have the concept of a session at all. You cannot write a multi-session DVD+RW.
Yes I have read the relevant standards. I've wrote programs that do write CD and DVD media.
The problem is RW disks fail without warning, and they are only good for a 1000 writes (this is optimistic in my experience). Unless you do a verify after the write you cannot be sure that you data is saved. Worse, you have overwritten the last version too, so you can't use any hacks to get back older versions of the files you really need.
DVD-RAM in a caddy, or not removed from the drive, shouldn't have this problem. Good luck finding a DVD-RAM drive anywhere though.
or simple counters I find that using i or j or similar works quite well. After all, everybody understands a for loop with an i index -- calling it array_index_counter or some-such is (IMHO) pointless.
No, array_index_counter is worse than pointless, using i or j is recognizable to any good programmer, no though required. Using array_index_counter implies that there is something other than a loop index going on with the variable and causes all good programmers to pause for a moment to figure out what that is. (Only to be annoyed when they realize it is just a loop index)
There is one other program with descriptive loop indexes: they take up too much space. The example you gave it 19 letters, and in a typical C for statement will be repeated three times. That works out to 57 letters. Add in a few for the other required parts, and indentation, and you are longer than the typical terminal line, and all hope of easy readability is lost. (Unless you expand the window, but that assumes you do all your editing in a graphical environment, which isn't always true)
Editors and IDEs are personal choices. Make vim, emacs, and kdevelop available to everyone (Those are selected because they are the most popular free ones, have the admins install any other free ones on request). Then have each department budget for other editors that any one person may find works best for them. You might want to see if there are demo versions of commercial software you can make available to those who care to try it.
Everything else you need to make choices. There can be only one source code system so choose one. There can be only one make, so choose one. (my current project had two incompatible makes for a short time while we converted to the new system, it was a pain not worth living with any longer than you must!)
Make sure you code is cross platform. Don't use any gcc only tricks if you can avoid them, and where you must use them be careful to make them easily wrapable so you can use other compilers latter. For C++ gcc isn't very good, if speed becomes a concern you can buy a different compiler latter (perhaps just for one platform, using gcc for the other). In fact you can developers work with gcc (which is free and normally good enough), and have a good compiler for the build system.
Asterisk will work safely, but this will not. You need to ask your distribution for a Asterisk install.
Right. However in those situations the company will not say the employee was fired, they were laid off. Firing is used to mean that the employee was let go do to something the employee did. The company doesn't have to give a reason to lay someone off, but when pressed they are most likely to say something like: "We only had the budget for X people, and we had X+1, so someone had to be let go." The company will never say something bad about anyone let go in this case because they can be sued for it.
If the company fires someone they will say in court "He was let go because his work was not up to par. Here are records that show he was reprimanded several times for excessive web use at work. Here is his output vs the output of his peers. He was not worth it." The court will then agree that the employee wasn't worth having, and the company has a right to bad mouth his work habits to other potential employers.
Nearly all companies will try to turn the second case into a case of you resigning. In this situation they will say "Look, here are all your reprimands, and the situation hasn't changed, either resign or we fire you. If you resign we will tell anyone he asked that he left in good standing, and we are sorry to see you go. If we fire you we will tell everyone that you were a bad employee and they shouldn't hire you." Your choice, but only a fool would take the second option because it gives you a bad reference.
Lets separate terminology.
In all states (and nearly all countries) you have the right to fire an employee for wrong doing. There is fault involved on the employees part. When you fire someone you are telling everyone "don't hire this crook". Crook is the correct work because the employee was doing something if not illeagle, bad enough that you are willing to say in court that nobody would allow him to work for you given when he did. This is a very strong statement, and companies hate to do it because they are taking a stand on someone that can ruin them.
In Texas (and many but not all states and countries) you have the right to let someone go for no reason. However when asked about the employee your response is on the order of "Good worker, I have nothing bad to say about him, but we no longer needed him." In short you have let them go, but there is no fault involved.
You would presume that. However it is important to recall that the NSA made changes to the original DES standard that made it more resistant to differential attacks, something that the rest of the cryptography world wouldn't "invent" for 15 years or so.
I know for a fact that several government agencies (Those three letter names before homeland security) used DES encryption for a lot of stuff 10 years ago, because I worked for a company selling it. (We couldn't tell you who they were, but there are only so many places where you can tell someone what city you are going to but not what organization[1]) I also can't tell you what level of security our products were trusted to.
Course the NSA also shortened the key to 56 bits. So this isn't a clear case of them helping against their interests.
[1]Not the IRS, we sold the IRS some stuff too, but AFAIK no encryption. Several engineers "regretted" not putting a backdoor in after they learned the IRS was sending tax data with our equipment.
but wouldn't it be possible to record the sound on a tape recorder, then take it home and demodulate it, then work on breaking the encryption?!
Sure, but I'll save you the trouble: it is standard 3DES encryption. Though expect them to start moving to AES soon. There is also some standard public key cryptography and replay prevention. (so you can't play the same bit sequence back and get it to spit out money) Standard algorithms in cryptography.
If you manage to break them you won't have a hard time getting millions from one of several countries for the secret - more than the machine holds, and you don't take a chance that the cops recognize you from the video tapes.
"Only Americans can innovate" is probably a dangerous stereotype. I have not seen any clear evidence of that.
You have not seen evidence because it is not true. However if you look close you will find evidence that some countries do much worse at encouraging innovation and the thought processes that lead up to it.
Remember, all generalizations are false. There are smart people in nearly every country that do creative innovation. There are plenty of uncreative people everywhere. Taken as a whole the US tends to be more innovative.
In the case of Japan, they are known to do a pretty good job, but their process is not the same as the US, so their results are different.
Well yeah the US voted for Bush. Did you pay no attention to his opponent? The type of guy only a European could love.
Yes ask what you can do. However remember that just because you can doesn't mean you should! I know small business owners with a dedicated room for the business, dedicated computers. They don't write it off though, because when they sell they pay capital gains on that space, while the rest of the house is tax-free. (They are builders, they build their house for cost every 2 years)
So ask what you can do, but also ask what the downside of doing it is. It might not be worth it. It might be worth paying your own way for something the office will provide. (I don't know of any reason, but this of course varies from country to country)
While we are at it, lets switch the whole world to English. I'm tired of getting picked on as an American for only speaking one language while the rest of the world speaks at least two. Since we get in trouble for working with several different measurement systems, it is only fair that we pick on your for insisting on sticking with your old language when you could switch to English.
The fact that English is not a good language (though I don't know what would be a good one) fits right in. Metric is a bad standard. It is standard, and that is worth something, but the Imperial measurements generally are better for real world use. For starters, base 12 is much better than base 10 when you need to deal with thirds, which is common in the real world.
Even if the entire world switch to English, with metric units, it wouldn't help as much as you think. There is a lot of good literature in other languages that you really need to learn the original to enjoy. There are a lot of recipes with imperial measurements. (More than just cooking) There is a lot of software that works now that uses the imperial measurements, and converting it all is not trivial.
Yeah, the downside is that the police will be looking at you. So you have to be even more careful to keep everything hidden.
Just set up a rule so that your kid cannot open any email that isn't signed with pgp/gpg, with a key in your web of trust. I'm tempted to impose that rule on myself and force my friends to install gpg. (Sadly I'm lazy - I haven't gotten around to making myself a key yet)
So long as it is honest. You are required by law to report your occupation. You are required by law to report all the income you have. The law does not allow as evidence anything you are forced to reveal (This is known as the fifth amendment). Thus if you put "tax evader" on the forms, and this is your primary occupation they cannot get you on this. They might investigate you, but if you are good at hiding your tracks they can do nothing about it.
This comes up most often for drug dealers. If you report a lot of self employment income and list your job is drug dealer, they cannot get you on the easier charge to prove: tax evasion. Remember, Al Capone was got on Tax evasion, he managed to hide all evidence of his drug (alcohol) operations, but the court was able to find he had far more income than he was reporting. If he had reported that income they couldn't have got him.
Also note, raising and lowering your house temperature actually uses more energy than keeping it at a constant temperature.
Myth. Unless you are the rare type that puts his thermostat on the low setting all the time compared to raising and lowering it to fit what you like. If you are like most people and you would leave it on the high setting all the time you use less power by turning it down.
Simple thermodynamics. The greater the heat difference, the faster the heat transfer. Your house only needs to be heated to make up for the loss from heat transfer.