Wait, no. I got the sarcastic subtext; I thought you were referring to some kind of meta-sarcasm. My point was that the hunting out of a species is no different to the over-predation that any predator will engage in. Where there are multiple food sources, one less successful food source can be completely depleted.
The myth is that 'primitive man' was somehow "in tune" with nature; the reality is that 'primitive man' has no inherent in-tune-ness or spiritual connection with nature, but then nor do other carnivores. Or herbivores, or plants, or whatever. Nature is competitive, and extinction is a natural process.
That doesn't absolve us of responsibility, though; we're supposed to be able to 'rise above' our animal instincts. We should be MORE in tune with nature.
... That's pretty much a longer version of what I meant. I didn't flesh it out, but I was worried that the OP was NOT being sarcastic. Just, you know, clearin' things up.
Perhaps, I might add that you could replace 'past and "primitive" societies' with 'animal populations'. My point was that it's a basic instinctual drive, we're just more successful than the other critters.
There are thousands of examples, in nature, of invading or adapting species eating out the food supply of other species, causing extinctions. This isn't an example of natives not living 'in tune' with nature, it's an example of people being 'a part of' nature.
He's not allowed to. Most pieces of prior art could invalidate multiple patents, but every time he tries to associate some art to more than one patent, he gets sued.
I hope/.'s been making their own contributions. I notice there are multiple 'tags' (or 'categories') associated with this 'article' (or 'piece of data'... eh? eh?)
I disagree with the lack of quantifiable benefit. Let's say you only spend 1 minute in 30 typing, and are able to cut 15 seconds off that minute by being a good touch typist. At the end of an 8-hour cycle, you've saved 4 minutes. That's an extra 20 minutes a week, which is like... ah screw it, we're reading slashdot, we're not THAT concerned with productivity.
My real worry is that touch typing hurt. That's more likely to be a problem with keyboard positioning and wrist alignment than typing style. I've been touch typing since I was about 15, and now I spend several hours a day typing (I enjoy recreational writing after hours). Well over a decade of heavy touch-typing has failed to produce any sort of pain. Admittedly I'm only one data point, so my opinion is really pretty useless.
I'm a software engineer, and I get to work daily with some people who never learned to touch-type. It would be a nice bonus to productivity if everyone around me could; not ground-breaking, but nice.
I think, by and large, by the time people hit the workforce, their typing habits are pretty unlikely to change without some major effort. Is even high school too late? Most kids are regularly using computers right through primary school. I think learning to type is a responsibility shared by parents and primary schools these days.
I think you misunderstand the meaning of "few". CGA is "a few" colours". VGA is a "few" shades of a "few" colours. 16 bit is rather more than this.
I suspect AoC suffers more from artwork issues.
I've read some suggestions, but I don't think they're quite hitting the mark. I don't care enough to read right through to see if someone's already said the following, but conversely, it's unlikely that anyone will read far enough through to see this anyway.
Debuggers: Bah. If it's a large enough system to be a problem, randomly interrupting execution, or debugging a component of the whole, is too hit-and-miss, and definitely using a microscope to analyze a mountain.
UML, etc.: Lack of tools, lack of original design documentation, lack of actually valuable output.
Source code analyzers: Never had a good experience here.
I maintain a large chunk of C++ code someone else ( == various teams over a long period) wrote. Here's how I started, and how I continue:
First, look at your code layout. Separate folders for separate processes / object collections / whatever is a huge help, and may give you a good visual overview.
Then, look at your output. Is it a bunch of different binaries? Are you getting intermediate object files which are included in a number of different binaries? Here are more tips on structure.
Read through some 'main' files. Files which actually commence execution: code entry points. Look at what's being loaded, what's being instantiated. Look for outside 'main' or 'event' loops to get an idea for the broad execution paths.
By now you should have a good overall view for which bits of source do what major tasks, what includes what, how the thing 'holds together' in a very general sense.
You're done.
What? You haven't looked at all sorts of detail. You don't know what 2/3 of the classes do. You haven't even worked out the IPC yet. How are you done?
Because these are established details, which currently work. There's no need to know every inch of the source. You now know where to look for changes, where to start tracking down bugs, and you're going to dig into those details of the source as necessary. Some parts you'll know well, some files you'll never need to open.
The only caveat here is you're relying on changes you make not having obscure unintended side-effects in some other part of the code. BUT, even if you were the original coder, if the design allows this, you'd probably miss it. You need to pick up things like this in testing, not by trying to know every inch of the code.
If there's no testing framework right now, start building one. Right now. I know, you're under pressure to DO STUFF, you don't have time to design a whole testing system. So sit down, hack together a quick testing harness, justify it by saying you're just writing something to help test the changes you're making, and every time you write a test for something you're modifying, also take the time to write a test for one other aspect or behavior. This way, instead of two years from now having new bugs you've introduced and a handful of out-of-date tests which don't apply any more, you caught a few of your new bugs, found a few old ones, and still have a useful test suite.
Federal Marshals with judicial approval after an ex parte hearing? Dude, do you know how much that would cost to effect? Process fees, lawyers drawing up documents, barrister fees... Plus, do you have ANY IDEA how pissed off the judge will be when the RIAA tries to waste his time with that? Anyway, even though the hearing would be ex parte, you'll have indications that it's in the works. They can't just start down that track with every law suit.
Admittedly, I speak from experience with the Australian legal system, not the US one, but judges HATE having their time wasted. Federal Police (I think our closest counterpart to your FMs) will be nearly as pissed off as the judge. We have trouble getting even local police to look at anything civil unless the aggrieved party is claiming losses in excess of fifty to eighty thousand dollars. A few grand over file sharing? Not a chance.
Love the rest of your comment though. Great points.
You make a fair point, and I can only speak to my own motives, which are probably far from representative.
I live in Australia. AFAIK, there has never been a case made in Australia against somebody for low-level copyright infringement. They'll take down large-scale distribution rings et al, but not simple CD copying or even P2P file sharing. Thus, no real motivation to not pirate music for me.
Poor students want lots of music for their own gratification, and often aren't in a position to pay for it. I was there.
Now, I purchase CDs because: 1) I get a whole, high-quality album conveniently. No hunting P2P networks for individual tracks, or hoping lengthy downloads are reasonable quality and not fake. 2) When people come to my place, they can see my CD collection sitting there in racks. Not quite showing off, but something along the lines of 'positive visual impact'. 3) I can throw a few of them in the car and play them easily, not worrying about my MP3 player running low on batteries, my car stereo not supporting file formats,... sure, I could buy an MP3 player for my car. Have it installed. Transfer files to it... I just wanna throw a few CDs in the car and listen to music, mate. 4) I'm supporting the artists I enjoy listening to. 5+) Lots more reasons.
I'm prepared to pay for the convenience now, and like supporting artists I enjoy listening to. The CD industry needs to make legitimate purchasing attractive, not use the courts to prop up a product which isn't drawing market share. Oh, and not alienate all of their future clients, creating an atmosphere where, in ten years time, their target audience is full of people who've been burned by them.
If we started to see litigious behaviour over here in Aus, I'd just be inclined to boycott participating labels. If the artists are gonna screw their fans, then the fans should screw them right back. Oh, and to this day I will occasionally download a few tracks. Usually, because I heard a track or two on the radio, and wanted to sample a bit more of the artist. If I like the music, I might even go out and buy the CD.
One bit of FUD being spread around is the whole "They'll be able to prove it was you when they seize your computer" crap. I haven't seen it hit/. but I've certainly seen it around the place.
This isn't a criminal matter. The police aren't going to be getting search warrants and raiding your place for MP3 sharing. If the RIAA turn up at your place and try to take your laptop, call the police and have them arrested for Unauthorised Entry and Attempted Theft. The best the RIAA can do is subpoena your stuff, at which point you are required by law to provide them with copies (or possibly access to the real thing) at an actual court hearing. They can also demand copies of records you have during disclosure, if it makes it to a hearing. At the end of the day, they are going to have to be satisfied with the access YOU give them, under the terms of a court order.
While I'm not suggesting you should falsify evidence (which would be a serious crime), hard drives crash all the time. Who makes regular backups, really? Do you save and keep all the logs from your wireless router? The data doesn't need to be missing. If they subpoenaed me for a list of all the MP3s on my desktop, I would happily give it to them. I keep all my MP3s on my MP3 player, not my desktop. What about all the P2P software which has ever been installed on my laptop? I have an old laptop sitting downstairs running as a router. That's the laptop they mean, right?
Ultimately, the infringement they're chasing you about, and the potential gain to them, is not worth the cost of a serious investigation. Especially not when it's weighed against the potential loss of actually losing a case and setting a precedent. I say: Fight the good fight. I never used to buy music; it was burned CDs for me. I was a poor high school student. Now that I work as an engineer, I buy CDs all the time (not from Sony anymore, though). If the RIAA had bent me over and spanked me as a student, though, I'd have to wonder why I should go legit now that I can.
Ultimately, the RIAA is alienating today's P2Pers who would have been tomorrow's customers. They would have ended up buying their own music, CDs as gifts, gift vouchers, iPods... But once they've been grounded for a month and banned from the internet for three because their parents had to pay a settlement to the RIAA, FORGET IT.
On that note, wouldn't it be nice if America could stage a large-scale music boycott over this issue?
Replying to myself (because I've had more relevant ideas...), thus please read the parent first.
Of course, this argument means that the university can justifiably take action against athletes posting embarrassing information to Facebook.
As for the outright banning of facebook... If they can establish a reasonable contention that, by and large, when their athletes use Facebook, it DOES result in embarrassing material being placed in a public forum, then they can (and possibly should) ban it altogether. From what I've heard about facebook (though this is based on purely second-hand, at best, information) this may be a reasonable stance to take.
On the other hand, if there are numerous athletes using Facebook without any problem, and this ban is the result of a few bad eggs (in my opinion, this is unlikely, but that may be unfair of me), then it is unjustified.
I'm reminded of an article which came across/. some months ago. A lawyer was fired from his firm because he sent private emails to some colleagues about his sexual exploits. Those emails were spread around, and the whole world got to hear about the sexual (and, I might point out, completely legal) exploits of a lawyer from this firm. The lawyer had no recourse against his employer.
Why? Because every employment / tuition / membership contract I've ever seen has general provisions against bringing the employer/whatever into disrepute. You will certainly see them in sporting scholarship contracts. The behaviour the school is attempting to prevent goes beyond the behaviour of the lawyer above (communicating, privately, details of legal, but potentially disreputable, behaviour). The athletes are posting details (and PHOTOS!) of disreputable behaviour to a fairly-public forum. The behaviour sometimes crosses the line from disreputable to illegal.
If the case of the lawyer above was justifiable (and you don't sack, of all things, a LAWYER if you can't justify it) then the case of the athletes is emminently more so.
I hate to post so late, 'cause I'm significantly increasing the risk that it's been said and I've missed it...
Here are the steps: We fixed up spelling and grammar (hired editors). People started complaining about other things. Therefore, people just wanted to complain and weren't bothered by the spelling and grammar.
Here's an alternative conclusion: With the spelling and grammar fixed, one of the problems with/. that people found most annoying was solved. People were then able to turn their attention to the next-most-annoying problem.
Wash, rinse, and repeat, and you have a way to improve/. out of sight. Fix what people complain about, and then look to their new complaints for the next problem which needs to be addressed.
The GF is to a Grammar Nazi as a Ranger is to a Paladin.
While they strive for perfection in language, it is not for language's own sake, but to further the education of the human race. They realise that there must be balance in the world, and are more likely to get on with those of non-lawful alignment. While they are not so elitist as to spurn the friendship of those less eloquently phrased than themselves, they often harbour internal feelings of superiority, which may or may not be justifiable.
Like the GN, the GF will often be frustrated by those who aren't able to express themselves fluently in the GF's natural language. He will tend to avoid their company, in much the same way as a meek accountant might avoid the company of a crude, out-spoken tradesman. This should not be seen as a short-coming of this class, but rather as a natural result of human nature.
The GF will often see himself as a mentor for those around him. He will be supportive of people who strive for greater fluency, and encourage them to spend time in his presence, so as to be exposed to the art of phraseology. Like any other class, however, all GFs are frustrated by the clamouring of those who demonstrate excessively lesser ability than themselves, and will avoid even moderate amounts of social exposure to people who do not command, at a minimum, an average mastery of the GF's language.
I like their choice of the word "may". I'm glad they've accepted that they may have come to the wrong conclusion, and I'm going to suggest an alternative hypothesis, borne up strongly by my experience both in the industry and while studying for my engineering degree.
First, some background. We had a wonderful management lecturer (our uni had a policy of forcing engineers to take management courses, which I think in hindsight is an excellent idea) named Jon Whitty. He was a great speaker, but I think the most influential thing he ever did was to show us a video called "Meetings Bloody Meetings".
The proposition put forth in this video was that meetings are a good thing in the same way that communism is. Fantastic idea, generally with terrible implementations.
The most common fallacy is that meeting minutes should be distributed after the meeting, and the agenda should be handed out at the table. In reality, the minutes and agenda should be handed out at least 24 hours before the meeting, and even further if possible. The "Action List" is what should be handed out afterwards, and helps to build the minutes for the next meeting. This works really well for me, while I find the traditional approach is horrible (as we all know!). It also gives middle management an actual role to play, rather than just being the "buffer" between us and upper level management (which is a load of hogwash).
Here's a detailed example of how it works. Several days beforehand, the manager in charge of the meeting sends around a proposed agenda, and asks for submissions from other attendees. A day or so beforehand, he collates these, and sends around detailed minutes to everyone about what will be talked about. This is not just a bullet-point summary: anyone who wants to bring up something needs to send a short several-sentence summary of what they want to discuss.
The amazing thing about this? You can turn up prepared! If you turn up to a meeting to find a sheet in front of you with a point saying "Hardware purchasing", you may not even know that you will be expected to talk about it. If you get a notice 24 hours earlier, where one of the items says "Marketing wants to discuss with John Smith the recent hardware purchasing problems to ensure that supply can keep up with their sales targets", you know what records to bring with you and you can be ready to discuss the whole issue on the spot.
This also allows the manager to weed out items which would be 1-on-1s between staff members and tell them to talk about it over by the watercooler and not waste everyone else's time.
The action list is generated in the meeting. It involves somebody sitting down with a sheet of paper and making notes to the effect of "John Smith will submit a detailed budget to Purchasing by friday so that we can move towards buying more hardware" and "Steven from Purchasing will prepare a finance report once he receives the budget, and present it at the next meeting".
This action list means that everyone knows what they have to do, performance is measurable, and nothing frmo the meeting gets forgotten. Items can be checked up on (again, by this middle manager who suddenly has a job!), and there is somebody to blame when something goes wrong. Everyone feels more focused, and they come out of the meeting knowing that something just got ACCOMPLISHED.
Finally, this action list makes an excellent basis for the agenda and minutes for the next meeting. Each assigned task can be re-visited, and the next steps in the project identified and delegated. The process is all very auditable, and it makes it very easy to identify where the delays tend to be in projects so that more resources can be assigned.
In short, meetings are a wonderful tool for increasing both productivity and morale. Sadly, because 90% of middle managers think that their role is "to be a buffer between the workers and upper management", they miss out on all of those opportunities.
All of this is, of course, why engineers make such good managers
Facts are, generally, not copyrightable (although there are enough people here saying that they might be in the UK, as part of a database, that I'm inclined to think that there are exceptions). In Australia, I was involved (as an employee of a company) in litigation surrounding the copying of a database, and the courts handed down a very specific ruling. The database, and the effort that went into putting it into its current form, was copyrightable, but the information wasn't, and if our company was prepared to inspect the data in its existing form and go to some effort to get it into the form we wanted, we could exploit it without paying royalties.
The court even approved our solution: we printed the entire electronic database (tens of thousands of sheets of that old tractor-feed A3ish sized paper) and hired dozens of typists to re-type it into a new database. It was crazy, but the information in the original was purely factual (no creativity) so couldn't be copyrighted, but the electronic database layout of it was creative, and so we needed to take the raw information and add our own creative spin to it (creating our own database format and re-typing). I suspect that now, ten years on, the courts would recognise that the typists added no creativity, only the database guys and programmers, so based on that old ruling I would imagine an automated dump of the data to our new format would likely be legal.
HOWEVER... This is not the point. In fact, this is SO off-topic that the above two paragraphs, in isolation, deserve modding down as irrelevant.
This issue is about the fact that this fantasy-league crew are exploiting the identities (formed in large part from their statistics) of baseball players without the correct licence. That would be, in some ways, like me making a CG movie with somebody who looked like Mel Gibson, sounded like Mel Gibson, acted like Mel Gibson, was even called "Mel Gibson" in the credits, but had no approval from Mel Gibson himself. That would be obviously wrong (I believe that there are provisions in copyright law that amount to a person "owning the copyright to a detailed picture of who they are", to a certain degree, particularly when it comes to commercial exploitation). So the legal position is likely to be that "nobody owns the statistics, but those statistics combined with a player profile (even if it only consists of a name) is sufficient to potentially be copyrightable because it is a detailed picture of who that person is (in some respect)".
Then it is likely to get back to things like how much of that right was signed over by the players under their contracts. Copyright is separated (roughly, IANAL) into standard copyright (which would be mostly signed away, in this case) and creater's rights (which are NOT EVER transferrable), and so Major League Baseball will (probably) have to make a case that sufficient rights to the identities of the players were signed over under their contracts, and validly so (in a way not prevented by "creater's rights"), for MLB to retain sufficient rights to what would probably be claimable by the individual players had they not signed some of those rights over as part of their player contracts.
This is basically a less extreme version of my Mel Gibson example, and I think both sides have a good case. Personally, if I were in charge of MLB, I'd be saying to myself "Hey, they were paying us 9% of gross! This industry is big business, and everyone currently assumes they need to give us a cut, just for owning this licensing agreement, which we need for our core business anyway! Which idiot stirred this ant nest? FIRED!"
Of course, there's the other possibility, where they want to prevent competition by this fantasy league group and create their own, protected, fantasy league. As a matter of fact, my cynical mind is telling me that this is probably what's going on. Someone's nephew, fresh out of IT college, has mastered enough ASP to write a fantasy league program, and BAM! They're trying to kill off the competition, one injunction at a time.
If I invent a new device (a physical "thing") I may patent it. Prior art (in the form of other "things") is searched, and if what I have is truly innovative, and fulfils some other criteria, I may be awarded a patent on it.
While patent law was originally designed with this concept of "physical things", the wording (which was clearly intended to ONLY cover "physical things") has been twisted and re-interpreted to apply to other things. There was a time when this wording was circumvented to allow software patents with such phrases as "a processing device (computer) with an organisation of bits in executable memory such that the device accomplishes...". Now, even this thin veil is usually dispensed with, and software patents are more blatant. But all of that aside...
The REAL problem with software patents is that the "prior art" test is virtually impossible to make. The sheer volume of closed-source software out there makes it impossible to truly search prior art, and even if the search were to be limited to open-source plus closed-source contributions to a "prior art" database, an automated search would be virtually impossible, and the task is too large to be done by people-reading-code. The prior art requirement cannot be satisfied reliably, and this is why software protection should be done with copyright (which was originally intended for things like software), not the patent system (which wasn't).
Another large obstacle to the application of patents to software is the problem of testing "obviousness". Software fields are becoming so incredibly diverse and specialised, and invention so technical, that it would often take a highly-trained expert in the particular field of a patent application to differentiate between "trivially obvious" and "stunningly innovative", much less sort out the shades in between. The patent office cannot maintain such a diverse group of experts.
The patent system works (on "things") because it's a good system, well suited to what its (originally intended) purpose. For software, it is an abominable, unworkable solution. The world needs something else, and the majority of the software industry ticks along quite well on copyright. Public innovation is handled by open-source communities, and the leak-out of technologies from the large research giants. Yes, of course it happens... When I leave my current employer, I will take a large chunk of information learned there to my next one, and I'm already bringing it to my open source work. I don't copy code (that would violate copyright, the system meant to protect software), but nobody has the right to prevent me from using what I learn in one place elsewhere (that's how innovation and future development is ensured).
In short, the software community has no use for software patents. There are some individuals and companies who do, but SPs do not further the common good (if you read some of the foundation works of patent law, you will see that the entire point of issuing them is to promote the common good by providing incentives for researchers and inventors to publish their findings).
And no, patent litigation attorneys do not contribute so greatly to the good of the world that we should protect this system purely for the fees they can earn from the overly litigious environment which the "Software Patent" system ensures.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, no. I got the sarcastic subtext; I thought you were referring to some kind of meta-sarcasm. My point was that the hunting out of a species is no different to the over-predation that any predator will engage in. Where there are multiple food sources, one less successful food source can be completely depleted.
The myth is that 'primitive man' was somehow "in tune" with nature; the reality is that 'primitive man' has no inherent in-tune-ness or spiritual connection with nature, but then nor do other carnivores. Or herbivores, or plants, or whatever. Nature is competitive, and extinction is a natural process.
That doesn't absolve us of responsibility, though; we're supposed to be able to 'rise above' our animal instincts. We should be MORE in tune with nature.
... That's pretty much a longer version of what I meant. I didn't flesh it out, but I was worried that the OP was NOT being sarcastic. Just, you know, clearin' things up. Perhaps, I might add that you could replace 'past and "primitive" societies' with 'animal populations'. My point was that it's a basic instinctual drive, we're just more successful than the other critters.
There are thousands of examples, in nature, of invading or adapting species eating out the food supply of other species, causing extinctions. This isn't an example of natives not living 'in tune' with nature, it's an example of people being 'a part of' nature.
Well, it was DIRECTLY the dingo, but then the eagle got the dingo. It's called the food chain, and we're not always at the top!
He's not allowed to. Most pieces of prior art could invalidate multiple patents, but every time he tries to associate some art to more than one patent, he gets sued.
I hope /.'s been making their own contributions. I notice there are multiple 'tags' (or 'categories') associated with this 'article' (or 'piece of data'... eh? eh?)
I disagree with the lack of quantifiable benefit. Let's say you only spend 1 minute in 30 typing, and are able to cut 15 seconds off that minute by being a good touch typist. At the end of an 8-hour cycle, you've saved 4 minutes. That's an extra 20 minutes a week, which is like... ah screw it, we're reading slashdot, we're not THAT concerned with productivity.
My real worry is that touch typing hurt. That's more likely to be a problem with keyboard positioning and wrist alignment than typing style. I've been touch typing since I was about 15, and now I spend several hours a day typing (I enjoy recreational writing after hours). Well over a decade of heavy touch-typing has failed to produce any sort of pain. Admittedly I'm only one data point, so my opinion is really pretty useless.
I'm a software engineer, and I get to work daily with some people who never learned to touch-type. It would be a nice bonus to productivity if everyone around me could; not ground-breaking, but nice. I think, by and large, by the time people hit the workforce, their typing habits are pretty unlikely to change without some major effort. Is even high school too late? Most kids are regularly using computers right through primary school. I think learning to type is a responsibility shared by parents and primary schools these days.
I think you misunderstand the meaning of "few". CGA is "a few" colours". VGA is a "few" shades of a "few" colours. 16 bit is rather more than this. I suspect AoC suffers more from artwork issues.
I've read some suggestions, but I don't think they're quite hitting the mark. I don't care enough to read right through to see if someone's already said the following, but conversely, it's unlikely that anyone will read far enough through to see this anyway.
Debuggers: Bah. If it's a large enough system to be a problem, randomly interrupting execution, or debugging a component of the whole, is too hit-and-miss, and definitely using a microscope to analyze a mountain.
UML, etc.: Lack of tools, lack of original design documentation, lack of actually valuable output.
Source code analyzers: Never had a good experience here.
I maintain a large chunk of C++ code someone else ( == various teams over a long period) wrote. Here's how I started, and how I continue:
First, look at your code layout. Separate folders for separate processes / object collections / whatever is a huge help, and may give you a good visual overview.
Then, look at your output. Is it a bunch of different binaries? Are you getting intermediate object files which are included in a number of different binaries? Here are more tips on structure.
Read through some 'main' files. Files which actually commence execution: code entry points. Look at what's being loaded, what's being instantiated. Look for outside 'main' or 'event' loops to get an idea for the broad execution paths.
By now you should have a good overall view for which bits of source do what major tasks, what includes what, how the thing 'holds together' in a very general sense.
You're done.
What? You haven't looked at all sorts of detail. You don't know what 2/3 of the classes do. You haven't even worked out the IPC yet. How are you done?
Because these are established details, which currently work. There's no need to know every inch of the source. You now know where to look for changes, where to start tracking down bugs, and you're going to dig into those details of the source as necessary. Some parts you'll know well, some files you'll never need to open.
The only caveat here is you're relying on changes you make not having obscure unintended side-effects in some other part of the code. BUT, even if you were the original coder, if the design allows this, you'd probably miss it. You need to pick up things like this in testing, not by trying to know every inch of the code.
If there's no testing framework right now, start building one. Right now. I know, you're under pressure to DO STUFF, you don't have time to design a whole testing system. So sit down, hack together a quick testing harness, justify it by saying you're just writing something to help test the changes you're making, and every time you write a test for something you're modifying, also take the time to write a test for one other aspect or behavior. This way, instead of two years from now having new bugs you've introduced and a handful of out-of-date tests which don't apply any more, you caught a few of your new bugs, found a few old ones, and still have a useful test suite.
Oh well, hope someone reads this and benefits.
Police Officers and search warrants are for criminal matters. See other comments around this one.
Federal Marshals with judicial approval after an ex parte hearing? Dude, do you know how much that would cost to effect? Process fees, lawyers drawing up documents, barrister fees... Plus, do you have ANY IDEA how pissed off the judge will be when the RIAA tries to waste his time with that? Anyway, even though the hearing would be ex parte, you'll have indications that it's in the works. They can't just start down that track with every law suit.
Admittedly, I speak from experience with the Australian legal system, not the US one, but judges HATE having their time wasted. Federal Police (I think our closest counterpart to your FMs) will be nearly as pissed off as the judge. We have trouble getting even local police to look at anything civil unless the aggrieved party is claiming losses in excess of fifty to eighty thousand dollars. A few grand over file sharing? Not a chance.
Love the rest of your comment though. Great points.
You make a fair point, and I can only speak to my own motives, which are probably far from representative.
... sure, I could buy an MP3 player for my car. Have it installed. Transfer files to it... I just wanna throw a few CDs in the car and listen to music, mate.
I live in Australia. AFAIK, there has never been a case made in Australia against somebody for low-level copyright infringement. They'll take down large-scale distribution rings et al, but not simple CD copying or even P2P file sharing. Thus, no real motivation to not pirate music for me.
Poor students want lots of music for their own gratification, and often aren't in a position to pay for it. I was there.
Now, I purchase CDs because:
1) I get a whole, high-quality album conveniently. No hunting P2P networks for individual tracks, or hoping lengthy downloads are reasonable quality and not fake.
2) When people come to my place, they can see my CD collection sitting there in racks. Not quite showing off, but something along the lines of 'positive visual impact'.
3) I can throw a few of them in the car and play them easily, not worrying about my MP3 player running low on batteries, my car stereo not supporting file formats,
4) I'm supporting the artists I enjoy listening to.
5+) Lots more reasons.
I'm prepared to pay for the convenience now, and like supporting artists I enjoy listening to. The CD industry needs to make legitimate purchasing attractive, not use the courts to prop up a product which isn't drawing market share. Oh, and not alienate all of their future clients, creating an atmosphere where, in ten years time, their target audience is full of people who've been burned by them.
If we started to see litigious behaviour over here in Aus, I'd just be inclined to boycott participating labels. If the artists are gonna screw their fans, then the fans should screw them right back. Oh, and to this day I will occasionally download a few tracks. Usually, because I heard a track or two on the radio, and wanted to sample a bit more of the artist. If I like the music, I might even go out and buy the CD.
One bit of FUD being spread around is the whole "They'll be able to prove it was you when they seize your computer" crap. I haven't seen it hit /. but I've certainly seen it around the place.
This isn't a criminal matter. The police aren't going to be getting search warrants and raiding your place for MP3 sharing. If the RIAA turn up at your place and try to take your laptop, call the police and have them arrested for Unauthorised Entry and Attempted Theft. The best the RIAA can do is subpoena your stuff, at which point you are required by law to provide them with copies (or possibly access to the real thing) at an actual court hearing. They can also demand copies of records you have during disclosure, if it makes it to a hearing. At the end of the day, they are going to have to be satisfied with the access YOU give them, under the terms of a court order.
While I'm not suggesting you should falsify evidence (which would be a serious crime), hard drives crash all the time. Who makes regular backups, really? Do you save and keep all the logs from your wireless router? The data doesn't need to be missing. If they subpoenaed me for a list of all the MP3s on my desktop, I would happily give it to them. I keep all my MP3s on my MP3 player, not my desktop. What about all the P2P software which has ever been installed on my laptop? I have an old laptop sitting downstairs running as a router. That's the laptop they mean, right?
Ultimately, the infringement they're chasing you about, and the potential gain to them, is not worth the cost of a serious investigation. Especially not when it's weighed against the potential loss of actually losing a case and setting a precedent. I say: Fight the good fight. I never used to buy music; it was burned CDs for me. I was a poor high school student. Now that I work as an engineer, I buy CDs all the time (not from Sony anymore, though). If the RIAA had bent me over and spanked me as a student, though, I'd have to wonder why I should go legit now that I can.
Ultimately, the RIAA is alienating today's P2Pers who would have been tomorrow's customers. They would have ended up buying their own music, CDs as gifts, gift vouchers, iPods... But once they've been grounded for a month and banned from the internet for three because their parents had to pay a settlement to the RIAA, FORGET IT.
On that note, wouldn't it be nice if America could stage a large-scale music boycott over this issue?
Replying to myself (because I've had more relevant ideas...), thus please read the parent first.
Of course, this argument means that the university can justifiably take action against athletes posting embarrassing information to Facebook.
As for the outright banning of facebook... If they can establish a reasonable contention that, by and large, when their athletes use Facebook, it DOES result in embarrassing material being placed in a public forum, then they can (and possibly should) ban it altogether. From what I've heard about facebook (though this is based on purely second-hand, at best, information) this may be a reasonable stance to take.
On the other hand, if there are numerous athletes using Facebook without any problem, and this ban is the result of a few bad eggs (in my opinion, this is unlikely, but that may be unfair of me), then it is unjustified.
I'm reminded of an article which came across /. some months ago. A lawyer was fired from his firm because he sent private emails to some colleagues about his sexual exploits. Those emails were spread around, and the whole world got to hear about the sexual (and, I might point out, completely legal) exploits of a lawyer from this firm. The lawyer had no recourse against his employer.
Why? Because every employment / tuition / membership contract I've ever seen has general provisions against bringing the employer/whatever into disrepute. You will certainly see them in sporting scholarship contracts. The behaviour the school is attempting to prevent goes beyond the behaviour of the lawyer above (communicating, privately, details of legal, but potentially disreputable, behaviour). The athletes are posting details (and PHOTOS!) of disreputable behaviour to a fairly-public forum. The behaviour sometimes crosses the line from disreputable to illegal.
If the case of the lawyer above was justifiable (and you don't sack, of all things, a LAWYER if you can't justify it) then the case of the athletes is emminently more so.
I hate to post so late, 'cause I'm significantly increasing the risk that it's been said and I've missed it...
/. that people found most annoying was solved. People were then able to turn their attention to the next-most-annoying problem.
/. out of sight. Fix what people complain about, and then look to their new complaints for the next problem which needs to be addressed.
Here are the steps:
We fixed up spelling and grammar (hired editors).
People started complaining about other things.
Therefore, people just wanted to complain and weren't bothered by the spelling and grammar.
Here's an alternative conclusion:
With the spelling and grammar fixed, one of the problems with
Wash, rinse, and repeat, and you have a way to improve
Then there's the Grammar Fundamentalist.
The GF is to a Grammar Nazi as a Ranger is to a Paladin.
While they strive for perfection in language, it is not for language's own sake, but to further the education of the human race. They realise that there must be balance in the world, and are more likely to get on with those of non-lawful alignment. While they are not so elitist as to spurn the friendship of those less eloquently phrased than themselves, they often harbour internal feelings of superiority, which may or may not be justifiable.
Like the GN, the GF will often be frustrated by those who aren't able to express themselves fluently in the GF's natural language. He will tend to avoid their company, in much the same way as a meek accountant might avoid the company of a crude, out-spoken tradesman. This should not be seen as a short-coming of this class, but rather as a natural result of human nature.
The GF will often see himself as a mentor for those around him. He will be supportive of people who strive for greater fluency, and encourage them to spend time in his presence, so as to be exposed to the art of phraseology. Like any other class, however, all GFs are frustrated by the clamouring of those who demonstrate excessively lesser ability than themselves, and will avoid even moderate amounts of social exposure to people who do not command, at a minimum, an average mastery of the GF's language.
I like their choice of the word "may". I'm glad they've accepted that they may have come to the wrong conclusion, and I'm going to suggest an alternative hypothesis, borne up strongly by my experience both in the industry and while studying for my engineering degree.
First, some background. We had a wonderful management lecturer (our uni had a policy of forcing engineers to take management courses, which I think in hindsight is an excellent idea) named Jon Whitty. He was a great speaker, but I think the most influential thing he ever did was to show us a video called "Meetings Bloody Meetings".
The proposition put forth in this video was that meetings are a good thing in the same way that communism is. Fantastic idea, generally with terrible implementations.
The most common fallacy is that meeting minutes should be distributed after the meeting, and the agenda should be handed out at the table. In reality, the minutes and agenda should be handed out at least 24 hours before the meeting, and even further if possible. The "Action List" is what should be handed out afterwards, and helps to build the minutes for the next meeting. This works really well for me, while I find the traditional approach is horrible (as we all know!). It also gives middle management an actual role to play, rather than just being the "buffer" between us and upper level management (which is a load of hogwash).
Here's a detailed example of how it works.
Several days beforehand, the manager in charge of the meeting sends around a proposed agenda, and asks for submissions from other attendees. A day or so beforehand, he collates these, and sends around detailed minutes to everyone about what will be talked about. This is not just a bullet-point summary: anyone who wants to bring up something needs to send a short several-sentence summary of what they want to discuss.
The amazing thing about this? You can turn up prepared! If you turn up to a meeting to find a sheet in front of you with a point saying "Hardware purchasing", you may not even know that you will be expected to talk about it. If you get a notice 24 hours earlier, where one of the items says "Marketing wants to discuss with John Smith the recent hardware purchasing problems to ensure that supply can keep up with their sales targets", you know what records to bring with you and you can be ready to discuss the whole issue on the spot.
This also allows the manager to weed out items which would be 1-on-1s between staff members and tell them to talk about it over by the watercooler and not waste everyone else's time.
The action list is generated in the meeting. It involves somebody sitting down with a sheet of paper and making notes to the effect of "John Smith will submit a detailed budget to Purchasing by friday so that we can move towards buying more hardware" and "Steven from Purchasing will prepare a finance report once he receives the budget, and present it at the next meeting".
This action list means that everyone knows what they have to do, performance is measurable, and nothing frmo the meeting gets forgotten. Items can be checked up on (again, by this middle manager who suddenly has a job!), and there is somebody to blame when something goes wrong. Everyone feels more focused, and they come out of the meeting knowing that something just got ACCOMPLISHED.
Finally, this action list makes an excellent basis for the agenda and minutes for the next meeting. Each assigned task can be re-visited, and the next steps in the project identified and delegated. The process is all very auditable, and it makes it very easy to identify where the delays tend to be in projects so that more resources can be assigned.
In short, meetings are a wonderful tool for increasing both productivity and morale. Sadly, because 90% of middle managers think that their role is "to be a buffer between the workers and upper management", they miss out on all of those opportunities.
All of this is, of course, why engineers make such good managers
Facts are, generally, not copyrightable (although there are enough people here saying that they might be in the UK, as part of a database, that I'm inclined to think that there are exceptions). In Australia, I was involved (as an employee of a company) in litigation surrounding the copying of a database, and the courts handed down a very specific ruling. The database, and the effort that went into putting it into its current form, was copyrightable, but the information wasn't, and if our company was prepared to inspect the data in its existing form and go to some effort to get it into the form we wanted, we could exploit it without paying royalties.
The court even approved our solution: we printed the entire electronic database (tens of thousands of sheets of that old tractor-feed A3ish sized paper) and hired dozens of typists to re-type it into a new database. It was crazy, but the information in the original was purely factual (no creativity) so couldn't be copyrighted, but the electronic database layout of it was creative, and so we needed to take the raw information and add our own creative spin to it (creating our own database format and re-typing). I suspect that now, ten years on, the courts would recognise that the typists added no creativity, only the database guys and programmers, so based on that old ruling I would imagine an automated dump of the data to our new format would likely be legal.
HOWEVER... This is not the point. In fact, this is SO off-topic that the above two paragraphs, in isolation, deserve modding down as irrelevant.
This issue is about the fact that this fantasy-league crew are exploiting the identities (formed in large part from their statistics) of baseball players without the correct licence. That would be, in some ways, like me making a CG movie with somebody who looked like Mel Gibson, sounded like Mel Gibson, acted like Mel Gibson, was even called "Mel Gibson" in the credits, but had no approval from Mel Gibson himself. That would be obviously wrong (I believe that there are provisions in copyright law that amount to a person "owning the copyright to a detailed picture of who they are", to a certain degree, particularly when it comes to commercial exploitation). So the legal position is likely to be that "nobody owns the statistics, but those statistics combined with a player profile (even if it only consists of a name) is sufficient to potentially be copyrightable because it is a detailed picture of who that person is (in some respect)".
Then it is likely to get back to things like how much of that right was signed over by the players under their contracts. Copyright is separated (roughly, IANAL) into standard copyright (which would be mostly signed away, in this case) and creater's rights (which are NOT EVER transferrable), and so Major League Baseball will (probably) have to make a case that sufficient rights to the identities of the players were signed over under their contracts, and validly so (in a way not prevented by "creater's rights"), for MLB to retain sufficient rights to what would probably be claimable by the individual players had they not signed some of those rights over as part of their player contracts.
This is basically a less extreme version of my Mel Gibson example, and I think both sides have a good case. Personally, if I were in charge of MLB, I'd be saying to myself "Hey, they were paying us 9% of gross! This industry is big business, and everyone currently assumes they need to give us a cut, just for owning this licensing agreement, which we need for our core business anyway! Which idiot stirred this ant nest? FIRED!"
Of course, there's the other possibility, where they want to prevent competition by this fantasy league group and create their own, protected, fantasy league. As a matter of fact, my cynical mind is telling me that this is probably what's going on. Someone's nephew, fresh out of IT college, has mastered enough ASP to write a fantasy league program, and BAM! They're trying to kill off the competition, one injunction at a time.
If I invent a new device (a physical "thing") I may patent it. Prior art (in the form of other "things") is searched, and if what I have is truly innovative, and fulfils some other criteria, I may be awarded a patent on it.
While patent law was originally designed with this concept of "physical things", the wording (which was clearly intended to ONLY cover "physical things") has been twisted and re-interpreted to apply to other things. There was a time when this wording was circumvented to allow software patents with such phrases as "a processing device (computer) with an organisation of bits in executable memory such that the device accomplishes...". Now, even this thin veil is usually dispensed with, and software patents are more blatant. But all of that aside...
The REAL problem with software patents is that the "prior art" test is virtually impossible to make. The sheer volume of closed-source software out there makes it impossible to truly search prior art, and even if the search were to be limited to open-source plus closed-source contributions to a "prior art" database, an automated search would be virtually impossible, and the task is too large to be done by people-reading-code. The prior art requirement cannot be satisfied reliably, and this is why software protection should be done with copyright (which was originally intended for things like software), not the patent system (which wasn't).
Another large obstacle to the application of patents to software is the problem of testing "obviousness". Software fields are becoming so incredibly diverse and specialised, and invention so technical, that it would often take a highly-trained expert in the particular field of a patent application to differentiate between "trivially obvious" and "stunningly innovative", much less sort out the shades in between. The patent office cannot maintain such a diverse group of experts.
The patent system works (on "things") because it's a good system, well suited to what its (originally intended) purpose. For software, it is an abominable, unworkable solution. The world needs something else, and the majority of the software industry ticks along quite well on copyright. Public innovation is handled by open-source communities, and the leak-out of technologies from the large research giants. Yes, of course it happens... When I leave my current employer, I will take a large chunk of information learned there to my next one, and I'm already bringing it to my open source work. I don't copy code (that would violate copyright, the system meant to protect software), but nobody has the right to prevent me from using what I learn in one place elsewhere (that's how innovation and future development is ensured).
In short, the software community has no use for software patents. There are some individuals and companies who do, but SPs do not further the common good (if you read some of the foundation works of patent law, you will see that the entire point of issuing them is to promote the common good by providing incentives for researchers and inventors to publish their findings).
And no, patent litigation attorneys do not contribute so greatly to the good of the world that we should protect this system purely for the fees they can earn from the overly litigious environment which the "Software Patent" system ensures.