The AACS-LA had to decide how to respond to the recent breaks. Someone recommended DMCA-based cease-and-desist letters to any site publishing the relevant integer. This 'someone' was probably a lawyer, and the suggestion proved to be counterproductive to the AACS-LA in a very predictable way. In the narrow context intended by the linked article, it probably is "the fault of lawyers".
The problems with the DMCA and DRM from a public policy, engineering, or free-market perspective are broader and more important, but they're not exactly news, and members of various other professions can help shoulder that blame. This move by the AACS-LA, on the other hand, has "what were they thinking" written all over it. I'm still trying to think of an angle where they get something out of it that was worth the (predictable) backlash.
Legislative leaders are looking to tweak a troublesome trademark protection program rather than defend it in court, after an unprecedented meeting with Internet power brokers who would prefer the new registry be scrapped.
Republicans did not rule out a repeal of the law. Nor did they dismiss the possibility that problems could be dealt with in an upcoming special session. But after Tuesday's meeting on Capitol Hill, lawmakers held out hope that a compromise could be reached.
The 'Internet power brokers' were "Google, eBay, Microsoft, America Online, Yahoo, 1-800 Contacts and Overstock.com", which makes the term seem unnecessarily loaded (when Overstock.com speaks, who listens, exactly?). It appears to me that legislative leaders passed a law in order to address the interests of businesses on the net by reducing what is essentially fraudulent use of trademarks (a perfectly reasonable goal, mind you), at the possible expense of purveyors of ads and search technology. When the purveyors of ads and search technology approached them and pointed out, probably in convincing detail, that the methods they chose were asinine, they listened, and might consider repealing the law, or at least revising it to make it slightly less asinine.
This isn't deeply impressive on its own, but in the context of the usual procedures of state and federal legislatures in the United States, it's actually kind of perspicacious.
I've used mozilla and firefox browsers to access etrade for years. I have a stock-option account dating back to the dot-com bubble, a stock trade account (which is different), and now a banking account. I need javascript, images, and cookies turned on for the site to work, but the mozilla family versions of these things work fine.
I agree that the above is the correct way to write business emails, with the following points:
Brevity and simplicity make points more forcefully regardless of the attention span and literacy level of the reader.
A business audience cannot be assumed to be as sympathetic or indulgent an audience as a personal friend.
Newspaper style is intentionally designed to allow useful skimming: the most important points are at the top, and less relevant details and background are provided later. This allows the reader to read more efficiently (starting with the headline, if you only read until you hit stuff you consider not worth your time, and then stop, you are unlikely to miss anything essential). A manager who was highly literate and intelligent once asked me to write reports this way because I was doing it wrong (I was leaving important bits to the end, a habit I presumably got from reading fiction, which needs to build dramatic tension).
Keeping vocabulary as simple as possible makes text a more comfortable read (with greater speed and comprehension) for everyone. I've seen recommendations about this for technical publications and journal articles. I personally find it difficult, and it usually takes me several drafts to edit out the unnecessarily long words and jargon.
But what about a calculator. A simple calculator is more than just the outside shell, and screws but also the components. Those can't be replicated in such a fashion. The screen is built with different techniquies from the hard plastic case. The circuit boards will have to be built by a second machine, and chips a third.
A calculator was designed by people with existing manufacturing techniques in mind, so it's not surprising that the design is optimized for them. Another question might be whether something that accomplishes what a calculator does could be produced with 3D printing techniques. Currently probably not, but I can forsee a convergence of expanding 3D printing capabilities and adapting product design that would create a family of new, printable products which have equivalent or analogous features to calculators or other mass produced products.
Back when mass production became dominant, there were many complaints about a loss of quality compared to hand-crafted work, but it turned out that as designers got better at exploiting the strengths of mass production techniques (which also improved and expanded), many new products were possible that could never have been produced by hand at anywhere near the same quality.
I expect 3D printing will ultimately tend to lean towards one-piece designs with variable material properties (portions that are soft, flexible, transparent, whatever) rather than an assemblage of discrete parts that are each uniform in composition. Technology will provide a growing palette of materials (including conductors, transparent materials, whatever), and we'll see what can be made of them once designers get their hands on them.
The cost of additional equipment to handle two unit systems is ultimately passed on to the people who ask for it. If enough people want it, the additional cost is amortized over a very large number of products, and is likely to be small per unit (no pun intended).
Essentially, the choice is between continuing to pay a small fee for backward compatibility, or deciding to pay a massive one-time cost to convert the country. Thus far people have chosen the small fee. One can speculate on what their motives are, but regarding this as an an example of some kind of American character flaw seems like a radical reading of the text.
Americans also speak American English, and haven't standardized on British English (for spelling, vocabulary and idiom), let alone Latin, French, or Esperanto. That's not about being crotchety, petty, or self-absorbed, either. Asking an entire country to change the unit system in which nearly all of its citizens think is huge, and it's something that has to be justified with more than 'it would be a polite gesture to your neighbors'. Or should that be 'neighbours'?
Anytime somebody tries to show me a code sample, the first thing I ask them is where they downloaded it from. Seriously, any employer that asks for a code sample has no clue what they're doing. They should put you at a whiteboard with a pen and have you write something on the fly.
If the code sample is in the thousands of lines (excluding object oriented coding overhead) and addresses a reasonably complex problem, and the interviewee can explain how it works and why it was designed that way (listing alternatives that would have been less efficient or more work than they were worth), then I really wouldn't care if someone else actually wrote the code, since the candidate has demonstrated the necessary analytical capabilities either way.
On the other hand, the traditional code-on-a-whiteboard test has always struck me as a bit off the mark. Either the proposed task is too simple (so you're really testing the candidate's whiteboard skills), or it's not really fair to ask of someone who is probably much better at working on a computer. Very recent graduates do handle oral exams somewhat better than people who've been out of school for a while, but that doesn't make it a reliable way to sift job candidates.
The wonderful beginners' feature of the 6502 command set was that it was so limited. When you've never programmed anything before, that kind of simplicity helps a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
The AACS-LA had to decide how to respond to the recent breaks. Someone recommended DMCA-based cease-and-desist letters to any site publishing the relevant integer. This 'someone' was probably a lawyer, and the suggestion proved to be counterproductive to the AACS-LA in a very predictable way. In the narrow context intended by the linked article, it probably is "the fault of lawyers".
The problems with the DMCA and DRM from a public policy, engineering, or free-market perspective are broader and more important, but they're not exactly news, and members of various other professions can help shoulder that blame. This move by the AACS-LA, on the other hand, has "what were they thinking" written all over it. I'm still trying to think of an angle where they get something out of it that was worth the (predictable) backlash.
The 'Internet power brokers' were "Google, eBay, Microsoft, America Online, Yahoo, 1-800 Contacts and Overstock.com", which makes the term seem unnecessarily loaded (when Overstock.com speaks, who listens, exactly?). It appears to me that legislative leaders passed a law in order to address the interests of businesses on the net by reducing what is essentially fraudulent use of trademarks (a perfectly reasonable goal, mind you), at the possible expense of purveyors of ads and search technology. When the purveyors of ads and search technology approached them and pointed out, probably in convincing detail, that the methods they chose were asinine, they listened, and might consider repealing the law, or at least revising it to make it slightly less asinine.
This isn't deeply impressive on its own, but in the context of the usual procedures of state and federal legislatures in the United States, it's actually kind of perspicacious.
I've used mozilla and firefox browsers to access etrade for years. I have a stock-option account dating back to the dot-com bubble, a stock trade account (which is different), and now a banking account. I need javascript, images, and cookies turned on for the site to work, but the mozilla family versions of these things work fine.
A calculator was designed by people with existing manufacturing techniques in mind, so it's not surprising that the design is optimized for them. Another question might be whether something that accomplishes what a calculator does could be produced with 3D printing techniques. Currently probably not, but I can forsee a convergence of expanding 3D printing capabilities and adapting product design that would create a family of new, printable products which have equivalent or analogous features to calculators or other mass produced products.
Back when mass production became dominant, there were many complaints about a loss of quality compared to hand-crafted work, but it turned out that as designers got better at exploiting the strengths of mass production techniques (which also improved and expanded), many new products were possible that could never have been produced by hand at anywhere near the same quality.
I expect 3D printing will ultimately tend to lean towards one-piece designs with variable material properties (portions that are soft, flexible, transparent, whatever) rather than an assemblage of discrete parts that are each uniform in composition. Technology will provide a growing palette of materials (including conductors, transparent materials, whatever), and we'll see what can be made of them once designers get their hands on them.
The cost of additional equipment to handle two unit systems is ultimately passed on to the people who ask for it. If enough people want it, the additional cost is amortized over a very large number of products, and is likely to be small per unit (no pun intended).
Essentially, the choice is between continuing to pay a small fee for backward compatibility, or deciding to pay a massive one-time cost to convert the country. Thus far people have chosen the small fee. One can speculate on what their motives are, but regarding this as an an example of some kind of American character flaw seems like a radical reading of the text.
Americans also speak American English, and haven't standardized on British English (for spelling, vocabulary and idiom), let alone Latin, French, or Esperanto. That's not about being crotchety, petty, or self-absorbed, either. Asking an entire country to change the unit system in which nearly all of its citizens think is huge, and it's something that has to be justified with more than 'it would be a polite gesture to your neighbors'. Or should that be 'neighbours'?
If the code sample is in the thousands of lines (excluding object oriented coding overhead) and addresses a reasonably complex problem, and the interviewee can explain how it works and why it was designed that way (listing alternatives that would have been less efficient or more work than they were worth), then I really wouldn't care if someone else actually wrote the code, since the candidate has demonstrated the necessary analytical capabilities either way.
On the other hand, the traditional code-on-a-whiteboard test has always struck me as a bit off the mark. Either the proposed task is too simple (so you're really testing the candidate's whiteboard skills), or it's not really fair to ask of someone who is probably much better at working on a computer. Very recent graduates do handle oral exams somewhat better than people who've been out of school for a while, but that doesn't make it a reliable way to sift job candidates.
The wonderful beginners' feature of the 6502 command set was that it was so limited. When you've never programmed anything before, that kind of simplicity helps a lot.