I'm not so sure that kids/teens should really bother learning the low level sorts of stuff. Now, I don't think that it isn't important to know. Certainly, if you are ever working in any sort of embedded system you will need to know this kind of stuff. Even if you aren't its helpful to know, but if your a kid playing around in your spare time its really not important to know. My suggestion would be to find something you find fun and do it until it gets boring or you find you need something with more power. I started in HyperCard. It was easy to do some simple stuff and while it certainly wasn't the most powerful environment it was cool to do stuff in, and if you don't know the first Myst game was a HyperCard project. If you like doing stuff with the Web then start with HTML then maybe Javascript or Pearl. Personally, I think the Flash environment would be a great place to start, though its kind of expensive for a kid to play around with. That said you can easily make some cool things in it, there's lots of books/websites which can help you, and once you've completed your first masterpiece you can easily post it on the web to get real feedback. Which can be incredibly useful. You could then see the whole project life cycle. Later after you get out of high-school you can go on and get into a Computer Science program and they will cover all the various things you should know, the low level stuff, the OS stuff, 3d graphics or whatever else. I'd suggest a Computer Science (or Engineering) program over a technical college since a college tends to only teach you the language of the day rather then the theory behind everything. The important thing if your start out is have fun. If you like doing the lower level stuff, go for it. Though I think most kids would rather be able to see instant results, which to me would mean something like HTML or Flash would be better, but to each their own.
I think that one is easy to solve. Give each person 1 000 000 shares each valued at $1. This is easy and cheap to establish. I trade you one share for $1. Then you trade me one share for $1. Therefore we both have $1 000 000 worth of stock. I'm not 100% that this actually works but I do believe it does. My original concern though still holds I think, each person would have to pay personal income tax on their $1 000 000 of income, in most countries that would be a pretty huge amount.
Re:A school project
on
Faking a Company
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm no legal or finical expert however, wouldn't your 10 000 friend be legally required to pay taxes on their $1 000 000 of stock? I was doing a quick look at the fortune 500 FAQ, market cap is equal to the number of shares times their value as of such and such a date. Therefore, the shares have to actually be worth $1 000 000 or you company will have a market cap of $0. If they are therefore worth $1 000 000, then your friends have each been paid $1 000 000 and would be required to remit taxes on it. Since the stock is really worthless, in that they can't sell it to anyone, they would have to use other sources of income, aka their real jobs, to pay for the tax on that $1 000 000. Good luck finding your 10 000 friends willing to do that. I don't think the taxation office takes "it was a joke" as an excuse for not paying.
I wonder if they can make a virus that creates a battery could they make one that somehow alters a computer? Could we then see the world's first animal to computer transmission. I hope no one with the kind of technical abilities to do such a thing is actually reading this.
And then we can discover that by using human soul's we can make these "smart" bolts much more effective. Simultaneously, we can develop a space railway, and hire a very attractive robot to dupe little children into getting robot bodies for free, but really just put them into bolts. If anyone else knows this reference, hats off to you!
I'd expect that some of the iron was converted to energy, the articles explanation of magnetic vortices and friction does though seem to border on magic to me. I doubt this breaks conservation laws. The article doesn't say where the energy came from, but that seem the most likely causes to me. Though I'm not a physicist.
Depending on how everything works out this could become an interesting form of energy generation, iron is fairly plentiful, though not nearly as plentiful as say hydrogen.
I remember back in grade school we had a lab of Mac Pluses/Classics and prior to the installation of the AppleTalk network we had an outbreak of nCAM. This was one of those oh so wonderful pass by floppy worms. Since there was no network each student had a floppy disk that they stored their files on. The computers were outfitted with hard drives so the Mac OS 6.0 and Applications were installed on each machine. nCAM is fairly malign for a worm in that it does little other then spread itself to applications and diskettes, however the one thing it does is infrequently play a sound file that says "Don't Panic". Now on a single users machine this would be mildly annoying considering the sound would only play maybe once an hour or so. However, in a lab of 20 or 30 computers one would be going off nearly every minute. Since it was difficult to detect at first the worm quickly spread and was quickly all over the place, in the student disks and in effectively every computer. They ended up disinfecting all of the student disks and lab computers, I should imagine it was a project given to the grade 9 computer class. I believe they ended up having to go through this process on more then one occasion.
For a week I used the Dvorak keyboard layout. I'm not sure if I saw any speed improvement but then I only was using it for a week. By that time I had most of the keys down and could type english fairly well. However, I work as a programmer and one problem with the Dvorak layout is that it puts all the commonly used control characters ((, ), [, ], {, },;, etc) into more difficult to reach spots since they aren't really commonly used in English. Thus I ended up giving up on it. But it was interesting. I wonder if the Colemak layout would work better in this regard. Though I would doubt it since it probably also assumes your typing English, and not some strange language developed with the QWERTY keyboard layout in mind.
Again I'm not a lawyer but I remember the Monsanto vs unlucky farmer case. I was under the impression the court found that the farmer's theory of cross pollination wasn't sound and that was why the case was decided in Monsanto's favor. If the court did accept the farmer's theory then maybe they would have decided the other way.
I disagree though, I believe that deciding what is fair in law is a key part of the role of the judicial system. Maybe this is not really the jurisdiction of the lowest level of judges but that is what the supreme court is there for. In an idealized version of democracy the people elect the politicians. The politicians make the laws and everybody is happy. However, democracy can run into a problem (along with lots of other problems) in that it allows the majority to rule over the minority. Thus if such a law is created, one say that suppresses the minorities, the courts are there to allow the minority to explain why a law is a problem and then the courts either tell the politicians to rework the law, or they simply change it themselves (I'm not sure on this last point, I think the courts in different countries have different powers). Thus the courts are there to control the laws and make sure that they are fair. Though they are also there for a number of other reasons. Judges are not computers, they do not simply read the letter of the law and apply it, they interpret the law as they see is best.
Though again I'm no legal expert so if someone whom is wishes to correct me I will accept your statements as being more accurate then my own.
A company or individual can sue for slander. I'm no legal expert however maybe RetroCoder could consider CounterSpy as slandering them when they mark SpyMon as spyware. This however would have nothing to do with the EULA in particular. You hear about this kind of court case usually in regards to the media, if I review your software and give it an unfair and bad review I just might end up on the receiving end of such a lawsuit. I would think though that given the nature of SpyMon that this would be exceedingly difficult to prove, since you can't sue over slander if the comments are true (aka its fine to call a pice of crap a piece of crap, but you can't call something that most people would consider good a piece of crap.)
If RetroCoder indeed is going to attempt to sue for violating the EULA and they go all the way through court and lose I'm curious if this will have any implications on future EULA related cases. Others have been saying that EULA's are hard to prove in court but every time an EULA cannot successfully be defended it means that it will be all the more difficult to show in future. If enough attempts are made and failed maybe companies will stop trying to claim all these crazy protections in EULA's and decided to simply save the costs of hiring lawyers to write them.
I would tend to agree with some others that there should be legal mechanisms in place to properly protect software. Neither copyright nor patent properly fit this bill and no one seems to be interested in trying to come up with the appropriate thing.
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I'm not so sure that kids/teens should really bother learning the low level sorts of stuff. Now, I don't think that it isn't important to know. Certainly, if you are ever working in any sort of embedded system you will need to know this kind of stuff. Even if you aren't its helpful to know, but if your a kid playing around in your spare time its really not important to know. My suggestion would be to find something you find fun and do it until it gets boring or you find you need something with more power. I started in HyperCard. It was easy to do some simple stuff and while it certainly wasn't the most powerful environment it was cool to do stuff in, and if you don't know the first Myst game was a HyperCard project. If you like doing stuff with the Web then start with HTML then maybe Javascript or Pearl.
Personally, I think the Flash environment would be a great place to start, though its kind of expensive for a kid to play around with. That said you can easily make some cool things in it, there's lots of books/websites which can help you, and once you've completed your first masterpiece you can easily post it on the web to get real feedback. Which can be incredibly useful. You could then see the whole project life cycle.
Later after you get out of high-school you can go on and get into a Computer Science program and they will cover all the various things you should know, the low level stuff, the OS stuff, 3d graphics or whatever else. I'd suggest a Computer Science (or Engineering) program over a technical college since a college tends to only teach you the language of the day rather then the theory behind everything.
The important thing if your start out is have fun. If you like doing the lower level stuff, go for it. Though I think most kids would rather be able to see instant results, which to me would mean something like HTML or Flash would be better, but to each their own.
I think that one is easy to solve. Give each person 1 000 000 shares each valued at $1. This is easy and cheap to establish. I trade you one share for $1. Then you trade me one share for $1. Therefore we both have $1 000 000 worth of stock. I'm not 100% that this actually works but I do believe it does. My original concern though still holds I think, each person would have to pay personal income tax on their $1 000 000 of income, in most countries that would be a pretty huge amount.
I'm no legal or finical expert however, wouldn't your 10 000 friend be legally required to pay taxes on their $1 000 000 of stock? I was doing a quick look at the fortune 500 FAQ, market cap is equal to the number of shares times their value as of such and such a date. Therefore, the shares have to actually be worth $1 000 000 or you company will have a market cap of $0. If they are therefore worth $1 000 000, then your friends have each been paid $1 000 000 and would be required to remit taxes on it. Since the stock is really worthless, in that they can't sell it to anyone, they would have to use other sources of income, aka their real jobs, to pay for the tax on that $1 000 000. Good luck finding your 10 000 friends willing to do that. I don't think the taxation office takes "it was a joke" as an excuse for not paying.
I wonder if they can make a virus that creates a battery could they make one that somehow alters a computer? Could we then see the world's first animal to computer transmission. I hope no one with the kind of technical abilities to do such a thing is actually reading this.
And then we can discover that by using human soul's we can make these "smart" bolts much more effective. Simultaneously, we can develop a space railway, and hire a very attractive robot to dupe little children into getting robot bodies for free, but really just put them into bolts. If anyone else knows this reference, hats off to you!
I'd expect that some of the iron was converted to energy, the articles explanation of magnetic vortices and friction does though seem to border on magic to me. I doubt this breaks conservation laws. The article doesn't say where the energy came from, but that seem the most likely causes to me. Though I'm not a physicist.
Depending on how everything works out this could become an interesting form of energy generation, iron is fairly plentiful, though not nearly as plentiful as say hydrogen.
I remember back in grade school we had a lab of Mac Pluses/Classics and prior to the installation of the AppleTalk network we had an outbreak of nCAM. This was one of those oh so wonderful pass by floppy worms. Since there was no network each student had a floppy disk that they stored their files on. The computers were outfitted with hard drives so the Mac OS 6.0 and Applications were installed on each machine. nCAM is fairly malign for a worm in that it does little other then spread itself to applications and diskettes, however the one thing it does is infrequently play a sound file that says "Don't Panic". Now on a single users machine this would be mildly annoying considering the sound would only play maybe once an hour or so. However, in a lab of 20 or 30 computers one would be going off nearly every minute. Since it was difficult to detect at first the worm quickly spread and was quickly all over the place, in the student disks and in effectively every computer. They ended up disinfecting all of the student disks and lab computers, I should imagine it was a project given to the grade 9 computer class. I believe they ended up having to go through this process on more then one occasion.
For a week I used the Dvorak keyboard layout. I'm not sure if I saw any speed improvement but then I only was using it for a week. By that time I had most of the keys down and could type english fairly well. However, I work as a programmer and one problem with the Dvorak layout is that it puts all the commonly used control characters ((, ), [, ], {, }, ;, etc) into more difficult to reach spots since they aren't really commonly used in English. Thus I ended up giving up on it. But it was interesting. I wonder if the Colemak layout would work better in this regard. Though I would doubt it since it probably also assumes your typing English, and not some strange language developed with the QWERTY keyboard layout in mind.
Again I'm not a lawyer but I remember the Monsanto vs unlucky farmer case. I was under the impression the court found that the farmer's theory of cross pollination wasn't sound and that was why the case was decided in Monsanto's favor. If the court did accept the farmer's theory then maybe they would have decided the other way.
I disagree though, I believe that deciding what is fair in law is a key part of the role of the judicial system. Maybe this is not really the jurisdiction of the lowest level of judges but that is what the supreme court is there for. In an idealized version of democracy the people elect the politicians. The politicians make the laws and everybody is happy. However, democracy can run into a problem (along with lots of other problems) in that it allows the majority to rule over the minority. Thus if such a law is created, one say that suppresses the minorities, the courts are there to allow the minority to explain why a law is a problem and then the courts either tell the politicians to rework the law, or they simply change it themselves (I'm not sure on this last point, I think the courts in different countries have different powers). Thus the courts are there to control the laws and make sure that they are fair. Though they are also there for a number of other reasons. Judges are not computers, they do not simply read the letter of the law and apply it, they interpret the law as they see is best.
Though again I'm no legal expert so if someone whom is wishes to correct me I will accept your statements as being more accurate then my own.
A company or individual can sue for slander. I'm no legal expert however maybe RetroCoder could consider CounterSpy as slandering them when they mark SpyMon as spyware. This however would have nothing to do with the EULA in particular. You hear about this kind of court case usually in regards to the media, if I review your software and give it an unfair and bad review I just might end up on the receiving end of such a lawsuit. I would think though that given the nature of SpyMon that this would be exceedingly difficult to prove, since you can't sue over slander if the comments are true (aka its fine to call a pice of crap a piece of crap, but you can't call something that most people would consider good a piece of crap.)
If RetroCoder indeed is going to attempt to sue for violating the EULA and they go all the way through court and lose I'm curious if this will have any implications on future EULA related cases. Others have been saying that EULA's are hard to prove in court but every time an EULA cannot successfully be defended it means that it will be all the more difficult to show in future. If enough attempts are made and failed maybe companies will stop trying to claim all these crazy protections in EULA's and decided to simply save the costs of hiring lawyers to write them.
I would tend to agree with some others that there should be legal mechanisms in place to properly protect software. Neither copyright nor patent properly fit this bill and no one seems to be interested in trying to come up with the appropriate thing.