You are wrong. The law is set up so that everyone breaks a minor law regularly. The idea is that you can be arrested for one of these at any time, when there is no evidence against you for the crime a police officer has a hunch you may have done. Once you are arrested, the police can search you, seize your vehicle, and everything they'd be able to do in a totalitarian police state.
"I see something suspicious" -> go to location -> see people who aren't doing anything illegal The LAW says: no evidence. Do not detain them. The system says: I wasted my time for this? What else can I get them for? Maybe I can turn up something later to "justify" my actions. -> still turn up nothing -> keep pressing the "minor" charges to save face.
Ten year olds should pay through the nose for video-games, sure. Oh, and hey: is this something that can be self-regulating like the ESRB? Game retailers can charge ten year-olds double, even triple, the normal price. No need for taxes to get involved, I'd certainly be willing to do my part by charging extra for any used games I sell to ten year-olds.
well on Ubuntu 8.10, I am (as far as I can tell, randomly) either offered or not offered the option to suspend/hibernate, and whenever I'm given the option and actually try it, it does nothing other than locking up the whole system with a blank screen (fully powered on) which can't be "woken up" by any method I've tried. I suspect this is somehow related to the problem where if I leave my desk long enough for the screen saver (blank screen) to turn on while something using graphics acceleration (though compiz doesn't seem to trigger this) is running, the whole system runs EXTREMELY slowly until I've gone to console and gone back to X (though sometimes it just locks up completely).
Point is: for the Linux world, I'd guess "just go into standby!" isn't actually an option, so fast boots are what we want.
The only revision history that ever really works is one that is completely invisible when used, and that you can't help but use. And those suck because they don't actually describe what or why something happened
Which is pretty much my point. It can't possibly work unless it's completely invisible to the actual lawmakers. Even something as simple as "Save to this particular server, everything will be diffed automatically, etc" is too much overhead and would never work. That's why I'm saying the only way it would ever work "properly" is if you had someone whose full-time job it is to follow a single lawmaker around and get copies of things as they are made, attend all the meetings and make notes about what was said, and how it relates to what was written.
It's not a minor undertaking, and it's certainly not something that could work through purely-technological means.
But the flip-side is: Once this has been done "the hard way", people may be able to see benefits. Once those benefits are visible, people may be more willing to do things "properly".
If something like that were really implemented, it wouldn't be used at all, save for a staffer occasionally being told to do the equivalent of a mass commit without merging, squashing everyone who gets in the way.
People just don't work in a way which programmers would like. There are lots of "change this word here", etc, which is very vcs-friendly, but there is also a lot of "Based on the meetings, I wrote these 100 pages last week. Please review it."
It's those "bulk commits" that we need to find a system to improve.
I don't know about how git works for you, but for me, it requires a non-blank commit message. And if someone browses the log and sees a non-meaningful message, a message that doesn't explain the whole commit, or a singe commit which does "too much at once", questions get asked.
That's why we need "Git for government". Lots of small commits, references to why they happened (ie: links to C-Span video, audio or transcripts from meetings, etc)
This is something which needs to be taken on by someone on some level. It's not something which will happen immediately when someone passes a law requiring it. It'll need to be someone going up to a local lawmaker and dedicating all their time (100% of it) to tracking changes for them. Find out what's needed in terms of an interface to get real people to want to use it, make it so that non-programmers can benefit from it. Do this for one person, let anyone clone the results, and always be public about willingness to do it for anyone. Re-election time comes around, and the person you're "sponsoring" gets to say: "I'm all for government transparency. Every last paragraph I've put into a bill over the past two years has an explanation attached to it. The service I use to make this available to the public is free for any lawmaker, and similar methods are available for free to all members of the public. Why has my opponent not bothered to do the same? What is he trying to hide?"
I would love to see an organization form around this very concept. "Free version control for government", a service provided by volunteers for absolutely anyone involved in writing laws or policy.
I don't see it as something which would ever really happen, of course.
I'm okay with Google just taking over the whole government, really. They seem to run things pretty well. Hell, scrap income taxes and make it all add-supported.
Comparing binary "data" to an executable seems extremely flawed to me, due to the huge difference in the level of complexity usually seen. As is saying "I can reverse-engineer it, therefor it doesn't need patent protection", since that argument, if valid, could be applied to anything which has ever been patented.
Try doing that usefully when the copyright has expired / would have expired, then we'll talk. By then, the hardware used to run the software used to read the modified data will be such ancient history it will be hard to even determine what it was named. Had you the source code, you have to admit it would likely be easier to derive from.
I think that if you tried to submit something as heavily-obfuscated as the binary form of something which was originally written in a high-level language to a patent examiner, they'd throw it out.
Patents, in the U.S., expire. Copyright, in the U.S., does not expire. By the time either expires, there is no benefit at all to having a binary. I challenge you to benefit from a 20-year-old binary anything. You're generally screwed unless you have the source for either it, or for what it was meant to operate on.
Yes, it is hard to say which ones are stupid. That's a reason to not grant them easily, not a reason to abolish them. The same could be said of pretty much any invention, ever. More harm is done to competitiveness through lack of implementation details (which patents require, and the current broken copyright system does not) than could ever be done by a waiting period.
Who needs "timetables"? I'd love to just pull up a map of where all the buses actually are at the moment. It's always guesswork for me as to whether I want to walk or wait at the stop- and always annoying when I decide to walk and a bus passes me when I've walked half-way...
quite possible that it's naming conventions gone wild. Something like "all methods which modify the object must be prefixed with 'do'" conflicting with "never name a method with two verbs in a row"
being able to express something in high-level branches of math-like things does not make it "math". There is nothing fundamental to the structure of the universe which defines SHA-1. The idea of "math can't be patented" is because/discoveries/ can't be patented, only inventions. (recent abuses are a separate issue).
Software is covered by patents, there is no need for it to be covered by copyright, too.
Software is often distributed in binary form: a form which cannot be derived from. The protection, for a limited time, of original works, is meant to allow them to be developed so that people in the future can create derivative works based on them.
- NO protection without source code.
- NO copyright on compiled software (makes as much sense as copyrighting a hammer)
- Patent protections on binaries, contingent on the full source being provided.
- NO obvious patents.
Software patents aren't bad, they just have a bad name because stupid ones have been granted.
I thought that replying to the first post was a sign of horrible UI decisions. Anyone else notice the number of replies to the first post skyrocketed when the new design rolled out?
I'm really sick of having to "explore" my way to every event and challenge. Burnout Paradise is a game where its "cohesiveness" really gets in the way of fun gameplay. It could benefit a lot from a little less cohesion and a little more "easy UI".
- "Retry previous race" would be nice
- "Reverse previous race" would be a more-"cohesive" way to do the same thing - get back to where you were, but have some fun doing it.
- "Jump to location" would be a less-cohesive but more what you actually want
- "Custom Race" would be the more-cohesive variant of that. Just define a point to race to, and do it.
- "Invincible mode" (or at least a way to enable Burnout: Revenge style "anything but head-on is fine" crashes) would instantly make all the "get from point a to point b before you can do a race" stuff a lot more enjoyable.
- ability to disable the slow-motion crash cam (at least for driveaways) would make the whole thing more fun
Burnout: Paradise is NOT a good example of the game's "cohesion" taking a back seat to the goal of fun.
No, of course not. Engineers should focus on engineering. Usability experts (sidenote: what a loaded term. First step, get a better name for the people who focus on usability) should focus on usability. Developers (who are often also the engineers) should coordinate with UI people and engineers to make the end result.
Slashdot Mirror
So all I need is: ...fuck
- A lawyer
- A few hundred dolars
- A few hours
You are wrong. The law is set up so that everyone breaks a minor law regularly. The idea is that you can be arrested for one of these at any time, when there is no evidence against you for the crime a police officer has a hunch you may have done. Once you are arrested, the police can search you, seize your vehicle, and everything they'd be able to do in a totalitarian police state.
"I see something suspicious" -> go to location -> see people who aren't doing anything illegal
The LAW says: no evidence. Do not detain them.
The system says: I wasted my time for this? What else can I get them for? Maybe I can turn up something later to "justify" my actions.
-> still turn up nothing -> keep pressing the "minor" charges to save face.
Ten year olds should pay through the nose for video-games, sure. Oh, and hey: is this something that can be self-regulating like the ESRB? Game retailers can charge ten year-olds double, even triple, the normal price. No need for taxes to get involved, I'd certainly be willing to do my part by charging extra for any used games I sell to ten year-olds.
Nobody has /ever/ successfully listened to music on real player!
oh come on! by that logic, all these changes to modernize bills every two years would be a huge waste of taxpayer money!
In Duluth, GA, they use ink. Or at least, they did for all the black people in front of me. I was never fingerprinted.
well on Ubuntu 8.10, I am (as far as I can tell, randomly) either offered or not offered the option to suspend/hibernate, and whenever I'm given the option and actually try it, it does nothing other than locking up the whole system with a blank screen (fully powered on) which can't be "woken up" by any method I've tried.
I suspect this is somehow related to the problem where if I leave my desk long enough for the screen saver (blank screen) to turn on while something using graphics acceleration (though compiz doesn't seem to trigger this) is running, the whole system runs EXTREMELY slowly until I've gone to console and gone back to X (though sometimes it just locks up completely).
Point is: for the Linux world, I'd guess "just go into standby!" isn't actually an option, so fast boots are what we want.
The only revision history that ever really works is one that is completely invisible when used, and that you can't help but use. And those suck because they don't actually describe what or why something happened
Which is pretty much my point. It can't possibly work unless it's completely invisible to the actual lawmakers. Even something as simple as "Save to this particular server, everything will be diffed automatically, etc" is too much overhead and would never work. That's why I'm saying the only way it would ever work "properly" is if you had someone whose full-time job it is to follow a single lawmaker around and get copies of things as they are made, attend all the meetings and make notes about what was said, and how it relates to what was written.
It's not a minor undertaking, and it's certainly not something that could work through purely-technological means.
But the flip-side is: Once this has been done "the hard way", people may be able to see benefits. Once those benefits are visible, people may be more willing to do things "properly".
If something like that were really implemented, it wouldn't be used at all, save for a staffer occasionally being told to do the equivalent of a mass commit without merging, squashing everyone who gets in the way.
People just don't work in a way which programmers would like. There are lots of "change this word here", etc, which is very vcs-friendly, but there is also a lot of "Based on the meetings, I wrote these 100 pages last week. Please review it."
It's those "bulk commits" that we need to find a system to improve.
I don't know about how git works for you, but for me, it requires a non-blank commit message. And if someone browses the log and sees a non-meaningful message, a message that doesn't explain the whole commit, or a singe commit which does "too much at once", questions get asked.
That's why we need "Git for government". Lots of small commits, references to why they happened (ie: links to C-Span video, audio or transcripts from meetings, etc)
This is something which needs to be taken on by someone on some level. It's not something which will happen immediately when someone passes a law requiring it. It'll need to be someone going up to a local lawmaker and dedicating all their time (100% of it) to tracking changes for them. Find out what's needed in terms of an interface to get real people to want to use it, make it so that non-programmers can benefit from it. Do this for one person, let anyone clone the results, and always be public about willingness to do it for anyone.
Re-election time comes around, and the person you're "sponsoring" gets to say: "I'm all for government transparency. Every last paragraph I've put into a bill over the past two years has an explanation attached to it. The service I use to make this available to the public is free for any lawmaker, and similar methods are available for free to all members of the public. Why has my opponent not bothered to do the same? What is he trying to hide?"
I would love to see an organization form around this very concept. "Free version control for government", a service provided by volunteers for absolutely anyone involved in writing laws or policy.
I don't see it as something which would ever really happen, of course.
I'm okay with Google just taking over the whole government, really. They seem to run things pretty well. Hell, scrap income taxes and make it all add-supported.
This is Illinois. The same state that has been keeping the penny in circulation all these years. Obviously, they like to be stupid with local heroes.
Comparing binary "data" to an executable seems extremely flawed to me, due to the huge difference in the level of complexity usually seen. As is saying "I can reverse-engineer it, therefor it doesn't need patent protection", since that argument, if valid, could be applied to anything which has ever been patented.
Try doing that usefully when the copyright has expired / would have expired, then we'll talk. By then, the hardware used to run the software used to read the modified data will be such ancient history it will be hard to even determine what it was named. Had you the source code, you have to admit it would likely be easier to derive from.
I think that if you tried to submit something as heavily-obfuscated as the binary form of something which was originally written in a high-level language to a patent examiner, they'd throw it out.
Patents, in the U.S., expire. Copyright, in the U.S., does not expire. By the time either expires, there is no benefit at all to having a binary. I challenge you to benefit from a 20-year-old binary anything. You're generally screwed unless you have the source for either it, or for what it was meant to operate on.
Yes, it is hard to say which ones are stupid. That's a reason to not grant them easily, not a reason to abolish them. The same could be said of pretty much any invention, ever. More harm is done to competitiveness through lack of implementation details (which patents require, and the current broken copyright system does not) than could ever be done by a waiting period.
And you call yourself Raenex?!
Who needs "timetables"? I'd love to just pull up a map of where all the buses actually are at the moment. It's always guesswork for me as to whether I want to walk or wait at the stop- and always annoying when I decide to walk and a bus passes me when I've walked half-way...
quite possible that it's naming conventions gone wild. Something like "all methods which modify the object must be prefixed with 'do'" conflicting with "never name a method with two verbs in a row"
being able to express something in high-level branches of math-like things does not make it "math". There is nothing fundamental to the structure of the universe which defines SHA-1. The idea of "math can't be patented" is because /discoveries/ can't be patented, only inventions. (recent abuses are a separate issue).
Software is covered by patents, there is no need for it to be covered by copyright, too.
Software is often distributed in binary form: a form which cannot be derived from. The protection, for a limited time, of original works, is meant to allow them to be developed so that people in the future can create derivative works based on them.
- NO protection without source code.
- NO copyright on compiled software (makes as much sense as copyrighting a hammer)
- Patent protections on binaries, contingent on the full source being provided.
- NO obvious patents.
Software patents aren't bad, they just have a bad name because stupid ones have been granted.
It's not because of attention seeking, it's because the "real reply button" is either:
- not a button
or
- buried somewhere at the bottom of the page.
I thought that replying to the first post was a sign of horrible UI decisions. Anyone else notice the number of replies to the first post skyrocketed when the new design rolled out?
I'm really sick of having to "explore" my way to every event and challenge. Burnout Paradise is a game where its "cohesiveness" really gets in the way of fun gameplay. It could benefit a lot from a little less cohesion and a little more "easy UI".
- "Retry previous race" would be nice
- "Reverse previous race" would be a more-"cohesive" way to do the same thing - get back to where you were, but have some fun doing it.
- "Jump to location" would be a less-cohesive but more what you actually want
- "Custom Race" would be the more-cohesive variant of that. Just define a point to race to, and do it.
- "Invincible mode" (or at least a way to enable Burnout: Revenge style "anything but head-on is fine" crashes) would instantly make all the "get from point a to point b before you can do a race" stuff a lot more enjoyable.
- ability to disable the slow-motion crash cam (at least for driveaways) would make the whole thing more fun
Burnout: Paradise is NOT a good example of the game's "cohesion" taking a back seat to the goal of fun.
you really think a wall-sized flexible touch-screen display is going to be less expensive than a projector, ever?
No, of course not. Engineers should focus on engineering. Usability experts (sidenote: what a loaded term. First step, get a better name for the people who focus on usability) should focus on usability. Developers (who are often also the engineers) should coordinate with UI people and engineers to make the end result.