[RoR] is now one premier up-and-coming programming environment...
Hehe...thanks for the laugh.
Rails is basically a hobby-ist environment. It's useful for internal projects that don't have to be performant or scale up to more than a couple of concurrent users, but beyond that, it's tough to compare it favorably with Java,.NET or any of a host of other Enterprise solutions. It's not just speed, although Rails *is* considerably slower than Java, even when you navigate the nightmare that is FastCGI. It's also the supporting tools that Java has in abundance that Rails hasn't had the time develop. Things like comprehensive unit testing (and code coverage monitoring) simply aren't possible in a Rails environment.
Java and J2EE are extemely fast and scalable when you avoid the few nightmare APIs (Swing, EJB, etc). We've built a complex, data-driven site with Spring and a few other nice tools that has scaled incredibly well. By far our biggest performance concerns are database related. The Java tier comprises only about 10% of the total response time (which we've kept sub-500ms even under load, except in extreme cases). Rails just isn't capable of meeting this kind of requirement.
I don't mean to bag on Rails...I've actually done a couple of internal projects in it that needed to get done fast. And some of the core concepts behind rails (namely convention over configuration) are starting to be considered as possible feature-adds to frameworks like Spring. Ruby is a great little language and I would *love* to be able to use Ruby-like closures in Java. But it just simply isn't an enterprise development environment yet. It may get there with time (it needs a faster Ruby runtime, a native Ruby websever to rid itself of the FastCGI albatross, a good testing environment and some essential third-party stuff that Java has gotten over the years) but it simply just isn't there yet.
Eww...No. Don't do this. Stored Proc's and especially triggers can become a maintainability nightmare. Putting logic into the database that goes beyond maintaining the referential integrity of data should only be done when you know that you need to do it for performance reasons. Otherwise, do it in the core language you're using to develop your site. This can save a lot of hassle and keep your app much more portable. My usual approach is to develop all logic outside of the database and then only write stored proc's for stuff where the performance isn't good enough. I find that the number of stored proc's that I end up having to write is at least half as many as I thought I'd need when I started and usually quite a bit less than that.
BTW...I agree with you about the foreign keys...it's absolutely essential to start with a fully-normalized schema and then de-normalize only when absolutely necessary to get the performance you need (which is a really rare case).
Not saying that all artists will want to pursue this path, but I have a friends who make their livings plaing in bands that release all of their music as free mp3 downloads on their website. They even actively ask downloaders to share them with others. They make money by attracting fans who pay to go to their shows and buy t-shirts and cds (both regular and mp3) at those shows.
Remember, it wasn't until a bit over 100 years ago that technology made it possible to capture sound recordings that people began to think of them as a commodity that could be sold. Up until then, musicians made their livings actually performing their music. With that business model, filesharing becomes marketing for your real revenue source. You don't have to make money per download to actually make money. Sure, you're not going to get "Rock Star" rich, but how many RIAA artists actually make that much? Most end up not selling enough albums to pay the record companies back for the promotional costs incurred.
While I agree that this is all about power, I believe you're confusing who they're trying to exercise power over.
This is not about preventing piracy. It never has been. Every study shows that piracy doesn't cut into the amount of money they make. Those that pirate weren't likely buyers to begin with and some end up becoming buyers because they like what they downloaded and want it in a better form. What this is about is maintaining their hold on the distribution chain. The record labels are the middle men between the consumer and the artists. As technology continues to enable and simplify a direct connection between artists and consumers, the labels become less and less necessary.
By holding these technologies back, what they are really doing is preserving the situation where artists are forced to go through them to be able to reach consumers. They're preserving the situation where they can force onerous contracts on artists that give that result in the labels receiving the vast majority of the profits from music sales. They're preserving the cartel arrangement that allows charging ~$15 for a plastic disc that costs < $0.50 to create. Home studios are already well within the capabilities of many artists and CD manufacturing can be purchased at very reasonable prices. These were once functions that only record labels could offer. Now the only thing they have left is the distribution network. Filesharing and other technologies that allow artists to market directly to their fans will eventually obviate the last function that labels provide and make them completely unncessary.
That's what they're fighting. That's the power they're trying to maintain.
One is a language which lends itself to quick and dirty web pages that have to run in a shared context (i.e. a webhost account) and the other one lends itself to enterprise deployments where you really have to have full control of the OS.
PHP won't be a serious option for large-scale projects until it can compete with not only J2EE but also frameworks like Spring/Webwork/Tiles/Sitemesh/Hibernate/iBatis. Similarly, Java won't be able to compete with PHP in the cheap-o webhost arena until it can be deployed in a shared context.
Ruby is much closer than PHP is right now. Rails, while completely full of hacks and still pretty slow, even with FastCGI, comes much closer to offering the developer what he/she needs to create a maintainable website.
The article you posted seems to actually understand the US position and shows an alternate way of accomplishing something similar. The US position is basically that we won't be reliant on an international body for such a critical piece of infrastructure. It's an important distinction that the US position is *not* that the rest of the world has to be dependant on the US for that critical piece of infrastructure.
DNS is important enough that it makes sense for each regional entity to have their own copy of the root name server, if only for reliability. That way, no regional entity would be reliant on any other entity for a working DNS system. The only thing that would have to be multinational would be the entity that determines what information is put into the root server's configuration. And that's supposed to be ICANN's job. We can (and should) debate how ICANN is run, but it makes no sense to suggest that the US turn over control of its root nameservers to a UN entity. Better that the rest of the world just create their own. If they end up sucking, ISP admins can still point their nameservers to the root servers run by the US.
Not if they have evidence that said single moms have broken the law. They could be 95-year-old great-great-grandmothers, but if they broke the law, they're a valid lawsuit target.
Legally, yes. There's no disputing that the law allows the record companies to do what they're doing. Never mind the fact that many of the laws that allow the record company to demand exorbitant settlment numbers were bought and paid for by those same record companies because they can give more in campaign contributions, they're still well within their legal rights to do what they're doing.
But morally, they're just assholes. Any law that causes hundreds of thousands of mothers to become targets of lawsuits demanding exorbitant settlements based solely on the youthful indiscretions of their children probably needs to be re-examined. Especially if those laws also make criminals out of millions of other people in this country.
The basis of the social contract is that we submit to the authority of the government and, in turn, the government uses that responsibility to do what's best for society as a whole. Their mandate is to build roads and bridges that no single person could afford to build on their own. Their mandate is to organize mass transit, fire and police stations, and stuff like it because we learned the hard way that those types of agencies don't work when implemented in a free-market fashion. And their mandate is to make laws that prevent certain behaviors that undermine the stability of the society we live in.
But when a law makes criminals out of a significant percentage of the population, it's their mandate to figure out whether that law is just. It's their job to ask who is being hurt by the offending behavior and to what extent. And it's their job to ensure that the consequences prescribed by the law are appropriate. I think the vast majority of Americans would say that the penalties for online music "piracy" are currently way too harsh.
It's easy to sit back and say that someone is in the wrong because they've broken a law. It's the very nature of the social contract that we submit ourselves to those laws and by breaking those laws, we also break our contract with society. But the agreement is two sided. To make laws that put the well-being of a select few individuals ahead of the well-being of the vast majority of the masses is just as much a violation of the social contract.
Unjust laws are meant to be challenged. Here's hoping that whatever jury hears these cases is fully cognisant of their right (and responsibility) of jury nullification when they feel that they law prescribes something the believe to be wrong.
I worked at a company that hosted mail for other companies. We had POP/IMAP/Webmail plus a bunch of other services.
Our secret to making it work? Qmail.
For an installation like this, Maildir format seems like a must to me. Plus, almost all of the free webmail clients support or require it.
Like others have said, you have to separate your storage, inbound mail, outbound mail and webmail services onto different hardware. Since we had many millions of mailboxes, we also had proxies in front of all of client-facing servers to help minimize the impact of an individual server having issues. But these are all basic network design issues. The key is a secure, configurable MTA like Qmail that stores it's mail in a friendly format that other apps can understand. De-couple everything and you should be able to scale up to AOL size, if need be.
Run it on an Windows Server, install the clients on various people's machines. The clients authenticate against your domain controller, so there's almost no configuration necessary.
It allows you to store passwords in a hierarchical fashion with a file-manager-style interface. You set permissions just like you would a normal windows shared file/folder.
"Except as provided in this chapter, every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void."
Standard IANAL discalaimers apply, and you might want to read all the provisions before signing away any rights, but I believe you're basically correct.
Unfortunately, many businesses don't see it this way and still believe they have the right to file suit when their former employee had access to confidential information that could be used in his/her new position. Also unfortunate is the current situation wherein legal representation is usually prohibitively expensive. In short, California law most likely protects your rights when it comes to non-compete clauses, but if your former employer insisted on pressing the issue, it would probably be much easier and cheaper for you to give in to their demands.
"NRS 465.075 Use of device for calculating probabilities. It is unlawful for any person at a licensed gaming establishment to use, or possess with the intent to use, any device to assist:
1. In projecting the outcome of the game;
2. In keeping track of the cards played;
3. In analyzing the probability of the occurrence of an event relating to the game; or
4. In analyzing the strategy for playing or betting to be used in the game, except as permitted by the Commission."
The problem with American CEOs is the metric by which they are judged. Things like considering what's good for society, the environment or even their own employees aren't factored in.
It's all about profits and the stock price. It's all about short-term performance. It's all about maximizing shareholder value. The people who rise to become CEOs are not the kind of people who can resign themselves to fail at anything. So when they inevitably encounter a situation that demands that they choose between something that affects their own performance and something that benefits others, they consistantly choose to screw others for the company's short-term financial gain.
I'm not saying that all CEOs are really good people that are forced by the system to act in a psychopathic way. But when you look at who tries to become CEO and who the boards will approve for these positions, those that aren't ruthless get screened out. If the system were fixed, we'd start to see CEO behavior improve.
Make corporate taxes somewhat dependant on the income tax paid by their employees and you'd stop seeing so many mass layoffs. Start revoking the corporate charters of companies that willfully act in their own self interest to the extreme detriment of society as a whole and you'll start to see overall corporate behavior improve. But absent these types of mitigating concerns, the system is setup to reward psychopathic behavior. So it can't be a surprise when they behave pschopathically.
While I agree with the shades of gray theory, there is one black/white distinction that would reconcile the information wants to be free issue.
My personal belief is that people are, for the most part, reasonable. Except in extreme cases, they will tend to do what's right. Corporations are almost the opposite. They have shown themselves to act solely in their own best interests without any regard for what is right. So it is my personal belief that we need far stronger laws to protect people from corporations than corporations from people. Laws protecting personal information from being exploited by corporations are much more necessary than extending copyright to protect corporation's interests from normal people.
Unfortunately this view is pretty much the exact opposite of the one adopted by politicians.
Traditional TV is unidirectional. This makes video on demand and other uses that require information to be sent in the other direction difficult. IPTV solves this.
Plus, once everyone has converted to IPTV and TVs are made that support it, you can do interactive content like polls or other voting with your remote. You could browse live game statistics while watching sports with your remote. Have play-along game shows where you answer multiple choice questions with your remote. There's lots of possibilities if you think creatively. Just look at how often TV programs direct you to their websites. Most of this can be avoided.
On the content providers side, it gives them the ability to customize content for the viewer. They can send different commercials to different viewers based on demographic information.
Mr. Baggins also claimed that Sauron's agents threatened him with force on many occasions and even physically assaulted him while on a camping trip between Bree and Rivendale. However, his lawyers were unable to substantiate that claim as the judge rejected introducing a bladeless sword handle into evidence.
and:
When asked about possible next moves, Sauron's representatives indicated that they believed they could use the fact that their client's lifespan is significantly longer than that of a Hobbit. When asked how they would use this to their advantage, the replied, "We believe the ent, Treebeard, may have significant testimony that will be beneficial to our case."
and:
Attorneys for Sauron indicated that even if the court ruled against them, they would appeal the case directly to the Middle Earth Supreme Court. One observer speculated that while most people are aware of the 3 elvish rings, 7 dwarvish rings and 9 rings of men, there may be some truth to the rumor of the 5 judicial rings given to the 5 most senior justices on the court. The rumor, if true, would provide an explanation for each of their 2000+ year tenures.
Interesting concept. Sell ticket vouchers to an unmade film for a small discount (say $7) and use that money to make the film. If the film ends up meeting revenue marks, people who put money in ahead of time could be sent a DVD as further thanks for helping to finance the film.
For a movie like the Hobbit, I'd put $7 worth of trust in Peter Jackson to deliver a film that was worth that investment 2-3 years down the road. He'd probably make more money as well since he'd get more than a 20% share of the profits.
Two computer programmers were having a conversation at lunch and one begins telling the other a story, "Yesterday, as I was walking home through the park, a beautiful woman rode up to me on a bicycle, got off, took off all of her clothes and told me she wanted to give me whatever I wanted!"
"Wow...that's great! What did you do?", asks his friend.
"Well, I took the bicycle. I ended up getting home quite a bit earlier than usual."
"That's smart...the clothes probably wouldn't have fit you anyways."
Ok...I'm with you for Eyes Wide Shut. The edited scenes are part of Kubrick's vision for the film and help the viewer get a more complete idea of what he was trying to do with the movie. Plus those scenes have a lot of hot naked chicks in them.
But for Team America: World Police, I don't really have a problem with the edits. It's not like a puppet sex scene is part of some grand vision on the part of the filmmakers. Plus the theatrical version of the sex scene was already pretty graphic. I really don't see how a full-on puppet sex scene would have added all that much to the film. While I'd like to have seen theaters offering an UR version for 18+ patrons, I still think I would have chosen the R version since I really have no desire to watch puppet porn.
I doubt you can get good grades on tests without either studying or doing homework, at least not for practical math and sciences - you simply don't get enough practice in solving problems.
I couldn't disagree with this statement more. In fact, I'm a counter example to this theory. Some people learn well through repetition and homework serves that purpose and is useful. I was never that way.
Math homework never helped me much and took up way too much of my time. Then came the year my school required us to get TI-81 graphing calculators for math class. I discovered the way that worked best for me to learn how to do problems was to write a program for my calculator that would solve the problems. Generalizing the problem and realizing all the border cases was far more useful than the repetition of homework for me. It also gave me a ton of confidence going into tests since I knew that any problem I got stuck on, I could do with the programs I had written. Of course, since I had learned how to do the problems in the course of writing those programs, I never had to use them on the tests.
Remember, homework is just one method of study that doesn't necessarily work best for everyone. I found one that worked better for me, and it got me into programming which is what I do professionally now. I guess I partially owe that to my math teachers' grading policies for homework.
Yeah, but corporations wait until something has been shown to be successful and useful before they start supporting developers. It's rare that a company will foot the bill for the initial development efforts. The developers still take on the risk that the project will fail.
It's important to remember that just because developers get paid to do it, it's not the same as a work-for-hire situation.
I get the purpose of ports. I'm not completely daft. The daemon still needs to listen on a specific port. But what I don't get is the knocking part. Why involve connections to other ports when you only need to make the connection to the target port?
If the initial connection, sent to the appropriate port, includes the shared secret, you don't need to even listen to connection attempts on other ports. Making extraneous connections to other ports doesn't really gain you anything other than encoding a password sequence in a series of port numbers transmitted by attempting connections to those ports. You can send that same information in the header of the initial tcp packet and you've simplified the whole situation without really losing all that much.
My big question about port knocking is why use ports in the first place? Why not send whatever shared secret you're using in the header of the initial SYN packets? It would be just as secure (basically, horribly insecure) and wouldn't involve listening on extraneous ports.
Why overload the port concept when there are plenty of better ways to send data?
This is big enough to seriously f'up the Internet - get it?
The fact that you used the word 'Internet' instead of 'Web' makes me disinclined to believe you. Google indexing affects web sites. The rest of the Internet is unaffected. Your ability to download from a torrent, place an VoIP call, play internet poker or even post sophemoric comments on Slashdot is completely separate from Google's indexing and any problems they may have.
Your argument sounds like the kind of blogger argument that disregards the possibility that blogs aren't the be all and end all of human existance.
Slashdot Mirror
[RoR] is now one premier up-and-coming programming environment...
.NET or any of a host of other Enterprise solutions. It's not just speed, although Rails *is* considerably slower than Java, even when you navigate the nightmare that is FastCGI. It's also the supporting tools that Java has in abundance that Rails hasn't had the time develop. Things like comprehensive unit testing (and code coverage monitoring) simply aren't possible in a Rails environment.
Hehe...thanks for the laugh.
Rails is basically a hobby-ist environment. It's useful for internal projects that don't have to be performant or scale up to more than a couple of concurrent users, but beyond that, it's tough to compare it favorably with Java,
Java and J2EE are extemely fast and scalable when you avoid the few nightmare APIs (Swing, EJB, etc). We've built a complex, data-driven site with Spring and a few other nice tools that has scaled incredibly well. By far our biggest performance concerns are database related. The Java tier comprises only about 10% of the total response time (which we've kept sub-500ms even under load, except in extreme cases). Rails just isn't capable of meeting this kind of requirement.
I don't mean to bag on Rails...I've actually done a couple of internal projects in it that needed to get done fast. And some of the core concepts behind rails (namely convention over configuration) are starting to be considered as possible feature-adds to frameworks like Spring. Ruby is a great little language and I would *love* to be able to use Ruby-like closures in Java. But it just simply isn't an enterprise development environment yet. It may get there with time (it needs a faster Ruby runtime, a native Ruby websever to rid itself of the FastCGI albatross, a good testing environment and some essential third-party stuff that Java has gotten over the years) but it simply just isn't there yet.
Study triggers and stored procedures.
Eww...No. Don't do this. Stored Proc's and especially triggers can become a maintainability nightmare. Putting logic into the database that goes beyond maintaining the referential integrity of data should only be done when you know that you need to do it for performance reasons. Otherwise, do it in the core language you're using to develop your site. This can save a lot of hassle and keep your app much more portable. My usual approach is to develop all logic outside of the database and then only write stored proc's for stuff where the performance isn't good enough. I find that the number of stored proc's that I end up having to write is at least half as many as I thought I'd need when I started and usually quite a bit less than that.
BTW...I agree with you about the foreign keys...it's absolutely essential to start with a fully-normalized schema and then de-normalize only when absolutely necessary to get the performance you need (which is a really rare case).
Not saying that all artists will want to pursue this path, but I have a friends who make their livings plaing in bands that release all of their music as free mp3 downloads on their website. They even actively ask downloaders to share them with others. They make money by attracting fans who pay to go to their shows and buy t-shirts and cds (both regular and mp3) at those shows.
Remember, it wasn't until a bit over 100 years ago that technology made it possible to capture sound recordings that people began to think of them as a commodity that could be sold. Up until then, musicians made their livings actually performing their music. With that business model, filesharing becomes marketing for your real revenue source. You don't have to make money per download to actually make money. Sure, you're not going to get "Rock Star" rich, but how many RIAA artists actually make that much? Most end up not selling enough albums to pay the record companies back for the promotional costs incurred.
While I agree that this is all about power, I believe you're confusing who they're trying to exercise power over.
This is not about preventing piracy. It never has been. Every study shows that piracy doesn't cut into the amount of money they make. Those that pirate weren't likely buyers to begin with and some end up becoming buyers because they like what they downloaded and want it in a better form. What this is about is maintaining their hold on the distribution chain. The record labels are the middle men between the consumer and the artists. As technology continues to enable and simplify a direct connection between artists and consumers, the labels become less and less necessary.
By holding these technologies back, what they are really doing is preserving the situation where artists are forced to go through them to be able to reach consumers. They're preserving the situation where they can force onerous contracts on artists that give that result in the labels receiving the vast majority of the profits from music sales. They're preserving the cartel arrangement that allows charging ~$15 for a plastic disc that costs < $0.50 to create. Home studios are already well within the capabilities of many artists and CD manufacturing can be purchased at very reasonable prices. These were once functions that only record labels could offer. Now the only thing they have left is the distribution network. Filesharing and other technologies that allow artists to market directly to their fans will eventually obviate the last function that labels provide and make them completely unncessary.
That's what they're fighting. That's the power they're trying to maintain.
Or...
One is a language which lends itself to quick and dirty web pages that have to run in a shared context (i.e. a webhost account) and the other one lends itself to enterprise deployments where you really have to have full control of the OS.
PHP won't be a serious option for large-scale projects until it can compete with not only J2EE but also frameworks like Spring/Webwork/Tiles/Sitemesh/Hibernate/iBatis. Similarly, Java won't be able to compete with PHP in the cheap-o webhost arena until it can be deployed in a shared context.
Ruby is much closer than PHP is right now. Rails, while completely full of hacks and still pretty slow, even with FastCGI, comes much closer to offering the developer what he/she needs to create a maintainable website.
The article you posted seems to actually understand the US position and shows an alternate way of accomplishing something similar. The US position is basically that we won't be reliant on an international body for such a critical piece of infrastructure. It's an important distinction that the US position is *not* that the rest of the world has to be dependant on the US for that critical piece of infrastructure.
DNS is important enough that it makes sense for each regional entity to have their own copy of the root name server, if only for reliability. That way, no regional entity would be reliant on any other entity for a working DNS system. The only thing that would have to be multinational would be the entity that determines what information is put into the root server's configuration. And that's supposed to be ICANN's job. We can (and should) debate how ICANN is run, but it makes no sense to suggest that the US turn over control of its root nameservers to a UN entity. Better that the rest of the world just create their own. If they end up sucking, ISP admins can still point their nameservers to the root servers run by the US.
Not if they have evidence that said single moms have broken the law. They could be 95-year-old great-great-grandmothers, but if they broke the law, they're a valid lawsuit target.
Legally, yes. There's no disputing that the law allows the record companies to do what they're doing. Never mind the fact that many of the laws that allow the record company to demand exorbitant settlment numbers were bought and paid for by those same record companies because they can give more in campaign contributions, they're still well within their legal rights to do what they're doing.
But morally, they're just assholes. Any law that causes hundreds of thousands of mothers to become targets of lawsuits demanding exorbitant settlements based solely on the youthful indiscretions of their children probably needs to be re-examined. Especially if those laws also make criminals out of millions of other people in this country.
The basis of the social contract is that we submit to the authority of the government and, in turn, the government uses that responsibility to do what's best for society as a whole. Their mandate is to build roads and bridges that no single person could afford to build on their own. Their mandate is to organize mass transit, fire and police stations, and stuff like it because we learned the hard way that those types of agencies don't work when implemented in a free-market fashion. And their mandate is to make laws that prevent certain behaviors that undermine the stability of the society we live in.
But when a law makes criminals out of a significant percentage of the population, it's their mandate to figure out whether that law is just. It's their job to ask who is being hurt by the offending behavior and to what extent. And it's their job to ensure that the consequences prescribed by the law are appropriate. I think the vast majority of Americans would say that the penalties for online music "piracy" are currently way too harsh.
It's easy to sit back and say that someone is in the wrong because they've broken a law. It's the very nature of the social contract that we submit ourselves to those laws and by breaking those laws, we also break our contract with society. But the agreement is two sided. To make laws that put the well-being of a select few individuals ahead of the well-being of the vast majority of the masses is just as much a violation of the social contract.
Unjust laws are meant to be challenged. Here's hoping that whatever jury hears these cases is fully cognisant of their right (and responsibility) of jury nullification when they feel that they law prescribes something the believe to be wrong.
I worked at a company that hosted mail for other companies. We had POP/IMAP/Webmail plus a bunch of other services.
Our secret to making it work? Qmail.
For an installation like this, Maildir format seems like a must to me. Plus, almost all of the free webmail clients support or require it.
Like others have said, you have to separate your storage, inbound mail, outbound mail and webmail services onto different hardware. Since we had many millions of mailboxes, we also had proxies in front of all of client-facing servers to help minimize the impact of an individual server having issues. But these are all basic network design issues. The key is a secure, configurable MTA like Qmail that stores it's mail in a friendly format that other apps can understand. De-couple everything and you should be able to scale up to AOL size, if need be.
Network Password Manager
Run it on an Windows Server, install the clients on various people's machines. The clients authenticate against your domain controller, so there's almost no configuration necessary.
It allows you to store passwords in a hierarchical fashion with a file-manager-style interface. You set permissions just like you would a normal windows shared file/folder.
That's fair as in fair-skinned and balanced as in they take medication to correct serious chemical imbalances.
They're also even-handed (the have two of them), objective (their's is very well defined) and on the level (that had their taxes drastically reduced).
I believe you're talking about California Business and Professions Code 16600 which says:
"Except as provided in this chapter, every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void."
Standard IANAL discalaimers apply, and you might want to read all the provisions before signing away any rights, but I believe you're basically correct.
Unfortunately, many businesses don't see it this way and still believe they have the right to file suit when their former employee had access to confidential information that could be used in his/her new position. Also unfortunate is the current situation wherein legal representation is usually prohibitively expensive. In short, California law most likely protects your rights when it comes to non-compete clauses, but if your former employer insisted on pressing the issue, it would probably be much easier and cheaper for you to give in to their demands.
Actually, in Nevada, it is very illegal.
From the NGC's website:
"NRS 465.075 Use of device for calculating probabilities. It is unlawful for any person at a licensed gaming establishment to use, or possess with the intent to use, any device to assist:
1. In projecting the outcome of the game;
2. In keeping track of the cards played;
3. In analyzing the probability of the occurrence of an event relating to the game; or
4. In analyzing the strategy for playing or betting to be used in the game, except as permitted by the Commission."
The problem with American CEOs is the metric by which they are judged. Things like considering what's good for society, the environment or even their own employees aren't factored in.
It's all about profits and the stock price. It's all about short-term performance. It's all about maximizing shareholder value. The people who rise to become CEOs are not the kind of people who can resign themselves to fail at anything. So when they inevitably encounter a situation that demands that they choose between something that affects their own performance and something that benefits others, they consistantly choose to screw others for the company's short-term financial gain.
I'm not saying that all CEOs are really good people that are forced by the system to act in a psychopathic way. But when you look at who tries to become CEO and who the boards will approve for these positions, those that aren't ruthless get screened out. If the system were fixed, we'd start to see CEO behavior improve.
Make corporate taxes somewhat dependant on the income tax paid by their employees and you'd stop seeing so many mass layoffs. Start revoking the corporate charters of companies that willfully act in their own self interest to the extreme detriment of society as a whole and you'll start to see overall corporate behavior improve. But absent these types of mitigating concerns, the system is setup to reward psychopathic behavior. So it can't be a surprise when they behave pschopathically.
While I agree with the shades of gray theory, there is one black/white distinction that would reconcile the information wants to be free issue.
My personal belief is that people are, for the most part, reasonable. Except in extreme cases, they will tend to do what's right. Corporations are almost the opposite. They have shown themselves to act solely in their own best interests without any regard for what is right. So it is my personal belief that we need far stronger laws to protect people from corporations than corporations from people. Laws protecting personal information from being exploited by corporations are much more necessary than extending copyright to protect corporation's interests from normal people.
Unfortunately this view is pretty much the exact opposite of the one adopted by politicians.
One thought:
Traditional TV is unidirectional. This makes video on demand and other uses that require information to be sent in the other direction difficult. IPTV solves this.
Plus, once everyone has converted to IPTV and TVs are made that support it, you can do interactive content like polls or other voting with your remote. You could browse live game statistics while watching sports with your remote. Have play-along game shows where you answer multiple choice questions with your remote. There's lots of possibilities if you think creatively. Just look at how often TV programs direct you to their websites. Most of this can be avoided.
On the content providers side, it gives them the ability to customize content for the viewer. They can send different commercials to different viewers based on demographic information.
I'd add:
Mr. Baggins also claimed that Sauron's agents threatened him with force on many occasions and even physically assaulted him while on a camping trip between Bree and Rivendale. However, his lawyers were unable to substantiate that claim as the judge rejected introducing a bladeless sword handle into evidence.
and:
When asked about possible next moves, Sauron's representatives indicated that they believed they could use the fact that their client's lifespan is significantly longer than that of a Hobbit. When asked how they would use this to their advantage, the replied, "We believe the ent, Treebeard, may have significant testimony that will be beneficial to our case."
and:
Attorneys for Sauron indicated that even if the court ruled against them, they would appeal the case directly to the Middle Earth Supreme Court. One observer speculated that while most people are aware of the 3 elvish rings, 7 dwarvish rings and 9 rings of men, there may be some truth to the rumor of the 5 judicial rings given to the 5 most senior justices on the court. The rumor, if true, would provide an explanation for each of their 2000+ year tenures.
Interesting concept. Sell ticket vouchers to an unmade film for a small discount (say $7) and use that money to make the film. If the film ends up meeting revenue marks, people who put money in ahead of time could be sent a DVD as further thanks for helping to finance the film.
For a movie like the Hobbit, I'd put $7 worth of trust in Peter Jackson to deliver a film that was worth that investment 2-3 years down the road. He'd probably make more money as well since he'd get more than a 20% share of the profits.
His trolls are right where Bilbo left them, he can come and pick them up anytime he wants.
In the same vein...
Two computer programmers were having a conversation at lunch and one begins telling the other a story, "Yesterday, as I was walking home through the park, a beautiful woman rode up to me on a bicycle, got off, took off all of her clothes and told me she wanted to give me whatever I wanted!"
"Wow...that's great! What did you do?", asks his friend.
"Well, I took the bicycle. I ended up getting home quite a bit earlier than usual."
"That's smart...the clothes probably wouldn't have fit you anyways."
Ok...I'm with you for Eyes Wide Shut. The edited scenes are part of Kubrick's vision for the film and help the viewer get a more complete idea of what he was trying to do with the movie. Plus those scenes have a lot of hot naked chicks in them.
But for Team America: World Police, I don't really have a problem with the edits. It's not like a puppet sex scene is part of some grand vision on the part of the filmmakers. Plus the theatrical version of the sex scene was already pretty graphic. I really don't see how a full-on puppet sex scene would have added all that much to the film. While I'd like to have seen theaters offering an UR version for 18+ patrons, I still think I would have chosen the R version since I really have no desire to watch puppet porn.
I doubt you can get good grades on tests without either studying or doing homework, at least not for practical math and sciences - you simply don't get enough practice in solving problems.
I couldn't disagree with this statement more. In fact, I'm a counter example to this theory. Some people learn well through repetition and homework serves that purpose and is useful. I was never that way.
Math homework never helped me much and took up way too much of my time. Then came the year my school required us to get TI-81 graphing calculators for math class. I discovered the way that worked best for me to learn how to do problems was to write a program for my calculator that would solve the problems. Generalizing the problem and realizing all the border cases was far more useful than the repetition of homework for me. It also gave me a ton of confidence going into tests since I knew that any problem I got stuck on, I could do with the programs I had written. Of course, since I had learned how to do the problems in the course of writing those programs, I never had to use them on the tests.
Remember, homework is just one method of study that doesn't necessarily work best for everyone. I found one that worked better for me, and it got me into programming which is what I do professionally now. I guess I partially owe that to my math teachers' grading policies for homework.
Yeah, but corporations wait until something has been shown to be successful and useful before they start supporting developers. It's rare that a company will foot the bill for the initial development efforts. The developers still take on the risk that the project will fail.
It's important to remember that just because developers get paid to do it, it's not the same as a work-for-hire situation.
I get the purpose of ports. I'm not completely daft. The daemon still needs to listen on a specific port. But what I don't get is the knocking part. Why involve connections to other ports when you only need to make the connection to the target port?
If the initial connection, sent to the appropriate port, includes the shared secret, you don't need to even listen to connection attempts on other ports. Making extraneous connections to other ports doesn't really gain you anything other than encoding a password sequence in a series of port numbers transmitted by attempting connections to those ports. You can send that same information in the header of the initial tcp packet and you've simplified the whole situation without really losing all that much.
My big question about port knocking is why use ports in the first place? Why not send whatever shared secret you're using in the header of the initial SYN packets? It would be just as secure (basically, horribly insecure) and wouldn't involve listening on extraneous ports.
Why overload the port concept when there are plenty of better ways to send data?
This is big enough to seriously f'up the Internet - get it?
The fact that you used the word 'Internet' instead of 'Web' makes me disinclined to believe you. Google indexing affects web sites. The rest of the Internet is unaffected. Your ability to download from a torrent, place an VoIP call, play internet poker or even post sophemoric comments on Slashdot is completely separate from Google's indexing and any problems they may have.
Your argument sounds like the kind of blogger argument that disregards the possibility that blogs aren't the be all and end all of human existance.