The point is that most people do not understand mission critical as it relates to the context of Stock Exchanges. The vast majority of exchange systems that have seriously good uptimes are built on a truly minute subset of the operating system and the system in question does nothing else.
15 years ago the top tier used Tandem which gave them zero hardware failure issues but performance was not leading edge. The emerging markets demanded a different price point and so Unix servers came to the for, windows was also a candidate and frankly good enough around the late nineties (NT and server).
I would argue that.NET is the real decision point that was the mistake. Performance and reliability are the cornerstones of an exchange systems and in order to control these, you must control your code, because the thinking was that they could use the framework to get around the need for genius programming. Seems not.
In my experience (12+ years writing exactly the kind of system in question for stock exchanges) "connectivity problems" are a very abstract way of describing the customer facing symptom regardless of the underlying cause. I haven't spoken to my London friends about this with respect to whether this is an actual networking issue but I reckon that this is a TradeElect issue or at least a major infrastructure issue since it also took out the JSE which is also handled on the TradeElect platform but uses very different comms infrastructure (ie big pipe to S. Afr. and then some fan out s to the market).
I have my own opinions on TradeElect, they are not kind. I have some personal knowledge of the decision making process of the senior IT folk that made the Microsoft call and they had reasons that they felt were strong. I disagree with their analysis but then I was a competitor of the solution chosen at the time:-)
My bank asks me the jth and kth letters of my password and never (and corresponds regularly to tell me so) asks for my complete password. Whilst this suggests they they do have the plain text stored on their system, could one devise a system that encrypted each letter of the password in some way that did not compromise the security of the stored hashes any more than the original hash?
Assuming a "strong" 8 letter password and two letters for verification it means that there is a 1 in 676 chance of a client guessing correctly in a single operator/client session. Not an unreasonable risk given the securiity that could be built into the session to avoid brute strength attacks.
I am having a bit of a think about it and I can think of a couple of techniques, but I am not sure that they are worthwhile. For example;
Just store the all the encrypted pairs (NC2) where N is password length, assuming 8 characters, only 28 combinations. Can these be stored without compromising the crackability of the whole password? I guess it would but by how much is a bit beyond my thumbnail calculating ability. Or;
Can we build a sufficiently strong transposition cypher so that we can compare specific letter positions encrypted without knowledge of the other letters?
My other bank uses SMS messages with one time codes to do verification. That seems to be very effective.
There's nothing special about us; at least, no more than any other species.
On the contrary there is something special about us. We are the only species capable of exceeding the physical limits of our bodies.
For a long time we have been able to lift heavier weights, move faster, communicate more quickly than the physical limits of our bodies, to name but a few. Soon we may even be able to reason beyond our brains capacity by the creation of special machines. That will be an extraordinary day.
I endorse the parent poster's recommendation of The Chrysalids and even further would highly recommend almost all of John Wyndhams work.
I read a book called "Grinny" by Nicholas Fisk. I remember being scared but it was an excellent story.
I also started reading Verne, Conan Doyle and some of the classic romantics (Dracula, Jekyll etc) in my first year of high school (I turned 12 that year).
While they were asleep, if you were to slip these babies onto someone that spent too much time in the late 60's they would wake up to find the most extraordinary of acid flashbacks filling their day. Cruel, but fair, well at least funny.
And then there is the other type of SF where the author doesn't focus on the technology but rather the Society that develops in the future. Specifically stories like Dune where the genius (or luck) of the author is to not worry about describing the technology and focus on the way the politics will develop in the far (in human terms) future. In this way the disbelief is much more easily suspended since the author does not have to describe too much of the detail of the science. Particularly when so much of the technology in question is "old" technology by the time period in which the story is set.
Re:The next "One major danger"...
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GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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"Freedom From" and "Freedom To" are not the same thing. In either case, the defect of the Free Software movement (of which I am an advocate) is that it is all still dependent on the existence of property rights in the output of intellect. It is this defective logic that is the root cause of all the semantic difficulties about whether GPL is free or not (v2 or v3, L or not). Logic dictates that if your are having problems with irreconcilable deductions then one must return to your premises and examine them for defects. It is not the deductions about Freedom that are the problems but the premises about Free Software that are the causes of this dilemma. Run your arguments from premises where there is no "property" and all of the dilemmas go away and RMS's Tivoizaton becomes a perfectly reasonable thing to do (but then so too is hacking it:-)
The fundamental questions about healthcare are the same as the one about other similar "services". Is it a natural monopoly? Does it represent a "public good"? In other words, is the total amount of captial invested in healthcare provision capable of efficient use when price is the factor used to allocate scarcity? Well, it depends on your definition of efficient. Libertarians amongst us should ask the fundamental question of whether it is right use the last available theatre to fix my in grown toenail for the $50,000 I am willing to pay or save the life of the chap that (through their own fault) fell through a window and can afford the $15,000 that it costs for their surgery (including profit). Sure, the example is absurd, but only in it's extreme. The decision is the same when deciding between the bypass and the hip replacement. If the resource is scarce (which healthcare services genrally are) then allocation must be made in some way. It seems to me (and I am way liberarian) that there are factors other than the market that should be taken into account.
Let's forget about the "fairness" question for now. From a pure captial perspective, every moment that a piece of the healthcare capital is idle is an inefficiency (I am not sugesting that it should all be in use 24/7). As such can a "public" approach to healthcare impove this efficiency? The OECD collects some pretty interesting figures about healthcare (http://www.ecosante.org/OCDEENG/411000.html) and there is a great spread sheet, the link for which I cannot immediately find, that shows relative % of GDP spent on health care for different countries. Even switzerland which has an excellent and insurance funded healthcare system spends 25% less of its GDP than the USA. Countries like Australia, Germany, UK and Canada spend less than 11 percent (compared to the US 15.3) [the UK spends 8.1, it may well have a super discounted rate due to the ease with which expenditure can be evaluated due to the nature of the NHS]. These are 2004 figures. Does the health of the population reflect this extra expenditure in the US (note this is also % of GDP the per capita parity $USD expenditure is even more embarassing to the US). I think the answer is not. Evidence? Anecdote mostly, gut feeling somewhat, lack of universality of healthcare - fact. In addition, if life expectency at birth is an indicator of health (and it is at least arguable that it is correlated) then the 77.7 of the USA is at the bottom of all the countries mentioned above. And yet health care expenditure is 50% more per person per annum.
On top of that, the faultless nature of many helathcare issues makes public healthcare an important measure of our society's civility.
I think that there is some strong evidence to suggest that the "utility" nature of much health care infrastructure and the classic insider/outsider nature of the spending problem makes public provision of the service a very rational way to go. Libertarian or not.
I have always wondered if "stack" based thinking is inherently human or not. It can take a while to get reverse polish notation but once grokked it seems that one can hold much more of a computation in ones head (or with minimal, non answer based) notes.
I think not but I think the research would be fascinating. Long range navigation would be the most logical "selection pressure" on a disposition to stack based thinking, but in reality I think humans tend to use waypoint based navigation which is inherently not stack based.
Either way the elegance of stack based calculation and the way in which it can work for humans does suggest soem very interesting aspects of cognition.
At worst this article is completely disingenuous. A proper economic anaylsis of DRM may well be able to make a case that it cannot open up a new business model but this article is not it. At the core of the authors thesis is the statement (unproven) "DRM is fundamentally opposed to this concept. It is not increasing value for the consumer in any way, but about limiting it.". However it is easy to argue that DRM provides the incentive for some content creators to do the creating in the first place. As long as one creator is willig to enter the market "Safe in the knowledge that DRM protects their IP" then there is a new business model and the authors whole argument is shot to pieces.
So lets think about it another (better) way; "DRM cannot be a positive contributor to net social utility". A simple argument would run; Once a content creator has been stimulated (economically or cathartically) to produce content that _particular_ content cannot have any further social capital invested in it since to do so would be formally inefficient. Every dollar returned to the original author (who has already been sufficiently rewarded for its creation otherwise they would never have done so in the first place) is a dollar that should better have been spent stimulating a different piece of contents createion.
Don't misunderstand there are a whole bunch of value added services surroundig the content that have revenue streams, shops, library services, downloads, storage, viewers, original artwork suppliers, etc etc. Even the costs associated with its distribution are capable of driving a new business model whose marginal cost is very low (if not effectively zero).
DRM comes into the picture and ensures that extra dollars are sent back to the author in excess of this "critical" amount. Therefore the overall utility of society is reduced since those extra dollars are not stimulating the creation of the extra content they could produce in the more efficient non-DRM world
QED.
This rough sketch is not designed to provide a bullet proof case. I hold firmly that there is such a proof; DRM cannot be a net positive contributor to social utility and as such it should be illegal. However the full defence of that posiiton is too long for the margin of this book.
Yeah, I know the feeling. We have an abstraction layer that does this goodness although even then not generically. The tradeoff in my view is true shared memory, and the pain that comes from the absence of that in Windows probably outweighs the goodness of WaitForSingleObject.
Interestingly, Linux has a call; semtimedop which works for semaphores
Despite the terms of service. It would be a very interesting test case if they should try to rip it out from under you without giving you access to your data. There is a general presumption of a duty of care. What is really interesting is that in a commercial context the law really likes there to be a payment to "establish" the relationship from which the duty arises (I am pretty sure that the "neighbour" principle is a bridge too far) so for those that are not "premium" perhaps ultimately, bad luck. However as premium users I reckon you would have a pretty strong case to make that Google owes you _at least_ your data in a meaningful format.
Now I admit that if original works that are expensive to produce (movies) were heavily pirated, then no one could afford to make them and they would generally not come into being.
So how did movies get made before the existence of all the extra revenue that these new technologies bring? I believe that movies were being made before the invention of VHS, yet alone DVD. I understand that even before TV there were movies being made. Some might say that some of the best movies of all time were made before the first cinema release was ever even shown on TV.
So perhaps you are mistaken and that unencumbered access to this content might have no impact at all on the content being made in the firt place
Correct GPL is based on copyright. But you are only half right about the "taking open code and closing it". It is true that under a non copyright regime (which I support) such taking and closing is possible. But even where there is no copyright there is the _fact_ of authorship. That is the closing can only legally be done with the correct attribution ie, "derived from project X" or based on code from "Jo Public". Take away those attributions and the closing author is committing fraud, claiming something that is their work independent of the true author. This damages the reputation (or rather fails to enhance it adequately) of the original source of the code. Which is a very simple wrong. And easy to fix. Much good flows on from this situation.
Gimme a break. The guy's site was mp3sForFree.net or some such. If this site is linking to copyrighted material (and you accept that such material is an infringement [which btw I do not]) and that is all that it does then the ruling is not as draconian as all the jerking knees here might suggest. The purpose of a common law barrister is to distingush MyHomePage.com and Google.com from the subject of this case and the power of the common law is for judges to accept that distinction and therefore make the context free "black letter law" a bit more sane. As we say in Australia "pull your head in".
Your are confusing many aspects of property and this is the source of your erroneous analysis.
First, prior to the industrial revolution, there really was no "property" in your beautifully carved table. The remedies for wrongs against property were driven by this absence. Torts such as Trespass, Trover and Conversion were the way in which I protected my goods and chattels from the criminal. All of these were driven by the idea that "land" was property and all the things on the land were only able to be protected in terms of the legal notion of property derived from the land.
It was the English legal philosophers of the IR such as Blackstone and Locke that really laid the foundation for our ideas of "private property" from which your "ethics of intrinsicness" are so derived. I am not suggesting that there was some kind of Star Chamber that decided this should be the way of things but there was this entire mercantile class that were building a whole bunch of "accrued captial" in plant and factories and business that were largely unable to be protected by these traditional concepts of property. In addition the extraordinary growth of the time lead to a very protestant idea that it was our "duty" to expoloit the resources at our disposal and it is this kind of idea that lead to concepts like "adverse possesion" (squatting) where one could gain title to property (incuding land) if one could show that one had been "using" it for a number of years (usually 12) and that the actual owner had neglected the property. However at the same time the concept of property was tied to a number of other principles for example "exclusion", the requirement that for property to be found in a thing one must be able to "exclude" others from its enjoyment. Further the idea of actual "loss" as a result of having your "property" taken from you is fundamental to these ideas.
So to return to your table. It's now 1805 and you are enjoying the benefit of this now not so new "private property", so you build a table and if someone comes and steals it from you then you can have the state go looking for the thief. Note the difference between the punishing of the theif and the compensation for the loss of the table, even then these were two separate actions. One based on public policy (the punishment) and the other based on the loss you suffered (remedy). If your table is still in the possession of the theif you might get it back if they have sold it on you might be able tofollow the chain and get it back or you might get some equivalent amount of money to replace your table. All happy?
This property proved very effective at supporting the growth of the western economies in addition it was expanded in a number of directions, one of which was to extend the ideas of property to the output of intellect. And here was the first defect. The problem is that the intrinsic attribute about your table (other than the table itself) in which you have a right is the "creation" of the table in the first place. In other words, if someone makes a copy of your table and fails to acknowledge that it is a copy of your design then you have a remedy for fraud. Similary if you are a table maker of repute and someone else makes a table in your style and claims that it is one of yours then the remedy is one for "passing off" (funnily enough) one of those old Torts that were around since before the new fangled "private property" even existed.
The problem is that you are trying to find property in the "concept" of your table. This is a defect. For example, even the framers of the US constitution recognised that patenting mathematics was a bad idea and so there is a specific exemption gainst that. Do you think that the framers even thought of recorded music??? Computer software (which by any freakin' rational definition is purely mathematics anyway)???
You are entitled to claim authorship of all your creations, tables, books, maybe even a business process, certainly a piece of software but this reality does not infer property. There are severa
I am starting to thing that there is a fundamental flaw with this kind of analysis. In particular the "relativism" that is used to make comparisons about the widening rich poor gap. I guess it is a nagging suspicion that there are at least two "pools" of wealth within each of the two groups. One of them is the capital that cannot readily be exported to the other community, say; infrastructure, this captial requires further investment, servicing etc and is probably closely linked with some other "closed loop" multipliers that increase the overall wealth of the "haves" without really being a lost opportunity to the "have nots".
A second factor is the relative change in amenity of the two communities. It seems that there is an argument to suggest that there is a greater increase in amenity within the "have nots" than amongst we "haves". Obviously it is easier since they have so little in the first place but the fundamental point, I think, turns on whether there is any "acceleration" in growth (positive or negative) that is correlated to the overall level of development. I think there is a strong case to argue that the less developed world has a more rapid rate of growth than the "haves" (in the west at least).
I haven't really developed this idea but I think that the growth in the wealth of the rich is growing in proportion to their starting position. More people are joining the haves than are leaving them. The overall amenity of (a significant number at least) the have nots is increasing. Which means that the only real issue in my view is to ask how many people in the workd are enduring falling amenity. I suspect the answer is very small.
IT is important to note that by amenity I mean a general sense of "weatlth" and not just a question of income or assets. In many cases a falling real incoming can still mean a growing amenity.
Gimme a freakin' break. This all happened in London. If you wanted someone dead in an un-messy way there are lots of ways that do not even put a trace of blame back on the FSB mothership. Gun toting muggers, home invaders, "drug deal gone wrong", racial attack (he was russian). There are reasons why this might have been FSB, with or without direct executive approval, however it is neither the most likely nor at all likely an explanation. Much more believable is pissed of criminal elements even if it wwas corrupt FSB "tools" that executed the plan.
I can think of a few reasons why the machine might not report these results. (1) any candidate that gets 2 votes reports as zero to avoid revealing a singleton voter which might reveal the vote of a member of the electorate (2) as above but to avoid having to report vast number of candidates (the system may not make a distinctyion between the niber of voters and the number of candidates (3) In small electorates only candidtes that get above teh "deposit" threshold are reported as having any votes. A few facts from the incident in question might help to find other resons why there is nothing to see here.
Actually the question of whether or not you are a criminal is a question of "fact" according to the text of the act. That is, these clauses are designed to defeat the "solicitation" and "conspiracy" defences where an actually guilty person would say "but I didn't know what it was for" or "I just [wrote|modified|acquired] the software" and allow such a person to be found guilty on a question of whether they were _to the sufficient burden of proof_ a knowing contributor to the specific offence.
So if you don't go helping people commit these DOS offences then you are innocent.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that most people do not understand mission critical as it relates to the context of Stock Exchanges. The vast majority of exchange systems that have seriously good uptimes are built on a truly minute subset of the operating system and the system in question does nothing else.
15 years ago the top tier used Tandem which gave them zero hardware failure issues but performance was not leading edge. The emerging markets demanded a different price point and so Unix servers came to the for, windows was also a candidate and frankly good enough around the late nineties (NT and server).
I would argue that .NET is the real decision point that was the mistake. Performance and reliability are the cornerstones of an exchange systems and in order to control these, you must control your code, because the thinking was that they could use the framework to get around the need for genius programming. Seems not.
In my experience (12+ years writing exactly the kind of system in question for stock exchanges) "connectivity problems" are a very abstract way of describing the customer facing symptom regardless of the underlying cause. I haven't spoken to my London friends about this with respect to whether this is an actual networking issue but I reckon that this is a TradeElect issue or at least a major infrastructure issue since it also took out the JSE which is also handled on the TradeElect platform but uses very different comms infrastructure (ie big pipe to S. Afr. and then some fan out s to the market).
I have my own opinions on TradeElect, they are not kind. I have some personal knowledge of the decision making process of the senior IT folk that made the Microsoft call and they had reasons that they felt were strong. I disagree with their analysis but then I was a competitor of the solution chosen at the time :-)
My bank asks me the jth and kth letters of my password and never (and corresponds regularly to tell me so) asks for my complete password. Whilst this suggests they they do have the plain text stored on their system, could one devise a system that encrypted each letter of the password in some way that did not compromise the security of the stored hashes any more than the original hash?
Assuming a "strong" 8 letter password and two letters for verification it means that there is a 1 in 676 chance of a client guessing correctly in a single operator/client session. Not an unreasonable risk given the securiity that could be built into the session to avoid brute strength attacks.
I am having a bit of a think about it and I can think of a couple of techniques, but I am not sure that they are worthwhile. For example;
Just store the all the encrypted pairs (NC2) where N is password length, assuming 8 characters, only 28 combinations. Can these be stored without compromising the crackability of the whole password? I guess it would but by how much is a bit beyond my thumbnail calculating ability. Or;
Can we build a sufficiently strong transposition cypher so that we can compare specific letter positions encrypted without knowledge of the other letters?
My other bank uses SMS messages with one time codes to do verification. That seems to be very effective.
There's nothing special about us; at least, no more than any other species.
On the contrary there is something special about us. We are the only species capable of exceeding the physical limits of our bodies.
For a long time we have been able to lift heavier weights, move faster, communicate more quickly than the physical limits of our bodies, to name but a few. Soon we may even be able to reason beyond our brains capacity by the creation of special machines. That will be an extraordinary day.
I endorse the parent poster's recommendation of The Chrysalids and even further would highly recommend almost all of John Wyndhams work.
I read a book called "Grinny" by Nicholas Fisk. I remember being scared but it was an excellent story.
I also started reading Verne, Conan Doyle and some of the classic romantics (Dracula, Jekyll etc) in my first year of high school (I turned 12 that year).
Yeah, those scanning electron beams suck so much, the laser has got to suck too. Right??
While they were asleep, if you were to slip these babies onto someone that spent too much time in the late 60's they would wake up to find the most extraordinary of acid flashbacks filling their day. Cruel, but fair, well at least funny.
And then there is the other type of SF where the author doesn't focus on the technology but rather the Society that develops in the future. Specifically stories like Dune where the genius (or luck) of the author is to not worry about describing the technology and focus on the way the politics will develop in the far (in human terms) future. In this way the disbelief is much more easily suspended since the author does not have to describe too much of the detail of the science. Particularly when so much of the technology in question is "old" technology by the time period in which the story is set.
"Freedom From" and "Freedom To" are not the same thing. In either case, the defect of the Free Software movement (of which I am an advocate) is that it is all still dependent on the existence of property rights in the output of intellect. It is this defective logic that is the root cause of all the semantic difficulties about whether GPL is free or not (v2 or v3, L or not). Logic dictates that if your are having problems with irreconcilable deductions then one must return to your premises and examine them for defects. It is not the deductions about Freedom that are the problems but the premises about Free Software that are the causes of this dilemma. Run your arguments from premises where there is no "property" and all of the dilemmas go away and RMS's Tivoizaton becomes a perfectly reasonable thing to do (but then so too is hacking it :-)
The fundamental questions about healthcare are the same as the one about other similar "services". Is it a natural monopoly? Does it represent a "public good"? In other words, is the total amount of captial invested in healthcare provision capable of efficient use when price is the factor used to allocate scarcity? Well, it depends on your definition of efficient. Libertarians amongst us should ask the fundamental question of whether it is right use the last available theatre to fix my in grown toenail for the $50,000 I am willing to pay or save the life of the chap that (through their own fault) fell through a window and can afford the $15,000 that it costs for their surgery (including profit). Sure, the example is absurd, but only in it's extreme. The decision is the same when deciding between the bypass and the hip replacement. If the resource is scarce (which healthcare services genrally are) then allocation must be made in some way. It seems to me (and I am way liberarian) that there are factors other than the market that should be taken into account.
Let's forget about the "fairness" question for now. From a pure captial perspective, every moment that a piece of the healthcare capital is idle is an inefficiency (I am not sugesting that it should all be in use 24/7). As such can a "public" approach to healthcare impove this efficiency? The OECD collects some pretty interesting figures about healthcare (http://www.ecosante.org/OCDEENG/411000.html) and there is a great spread sheet, the link for which I cannot immediately find, that shows relative % of GDP spent on health care for different countries. Even switzerland which has an excellent and insurance funded healthcare system spends 25% less of its GDP than the USA. Countries like Australia, Germany, UK and Canada spend less than 11 percent (compared to the US 15.3) [the UK spends 8.1, it may well have a super discounted rate due to the ease with which expenditure can be evaluated due to the nature of the NHS]. These are 2004 figures. Does the health of the population reflect this extra expenditure in the US (note this is also % of GDP the per capita parity $USD expenditure is even more embarassing to the US). I think the answer is not. Evidence? Anecdote mostly, gut feeling somewhat, lack of universality of healthcare - fact. In addition, if life expectency at birth is an indicator of health (and it is at least arguable that it is correlated) then the 77.7 of the USA is at the bottom of all the countries mentioned above. And yet health care expenditure is 50% more per person per annum.
On top of that, the faultless nature of many helathcare issues makes public healthcare an important measure of our society's civility.
I think that there is some strong evidence to suggest that the "utility" nature of much health care infrastructure and the classic insider/outsider nature of the spending problem makes public provision of the service a very rational way to go. Libertarian or not.
I have always wondered if "stack" based thinking is inherently human or not. It can take a while to get reverse polish notation but once grokked it seems that one can hold much more of a computation in ones head (or with minimal, non answer based) notes.
I think not but I think the research would be fascinating. Long range navigation would be the most logical "selection pressure" on a disposition to stack based thinking, but in reality I think humans tend to use waypoint based navigation which is inherently not stack based.
Either way the elegance of stack based calculation and the way in which it can work for humans does suggest soem very interesting aspects of cognition.
Not quite. http://www.hsbc.com/hsbc/about_hsbc/group-history
The history shows that the bank is anything but the basically the Chinese National Bank. It is currently listed in London IIRC
At worst this article is completely disingenuous. A proper economic anaylsis of DRM may well be able to make a case that it cannot open up a new business model but this article is not it. At the core of the authors thesis is the statement (unproven) "DRM is fundamentally opposed to this concept. It is not increasing value for the consumer in any way, but about limiting it.". However it is easy to argue that DRM provides the incentive for some content creators to do the creating in the first place. As long as one creator is willig to enter the market "Safe in the knowledge that DRM protects their IP" then there is a new business model and the authors whole argument is shot to pieces.
So lets think about it another (better) way; "DRM cannot be a positive contributor to net social utility". A simple argument would run;
Once a content creator has been stimulated (economically or cathartically) to produce content that _particular_ content cannot have any further social capital invested in it since to do so would be formally inefficient. Every dollar returned to the original author (who has already been sufficiently rewarded for its creation otherwise they would never have done so in the first place) is a dollar that should better have been spent stimulating a different piece of contents createion.
Don't misunderstand there are a whole bunch of value added services surroundig the content that have revenue streams, shops, library services, downloads, storage, viewers, original artwork suppliers, etc etc. Even the costs associated with its distribution are capable of driving a new business model whose marginal cost is very low (if not effectively zero).
DRM comes into the picture and ensures that extra dollars are sent back to the author in excess of this "critical" amount. Therefore the overall utility of society is reduced since those extra dollars are not stimulating the creation of the extra content they could produce in the more efficient non-DRM world
QED.
This rough sketch is not designed to provide a bullet proof case. I hold firmly that there is such a proof; DRM cannot be a net positive contributor to social utility and as such it should be illegal. However the full defence of that posiiton is too long for the margin of this book.
Yeah, I know the feeling. We have an abstraction layer that does this goodness although even then not generically. The tradeoff in my view is true shared memory, and the pain that comes from the absence of that in Windows probably outweighs the goodness of WaitForSingleObject.
Interestingly, Linux has a call; semtimedop which works for semaphores
Despite the terms of service. It would be a very interesting test case if they should try to rip it out from under you without giving you access to your data. There is a general presumption of a duty of care. What is really interesting is that in a commercial context the law really likes there to be a payment to "establish" the relationship from which the duty arises (I am pretty sure that the "neighbour" principle is a bridge too far) so for those that are not "premium" perhaps ultimately, bad luck. However as premium users I reckon you would have a pretty strong case to make that Google owes you _at least_ your data in a meaningful format.
Now I admit that if original works that are expensive to produce (movies) were heavily pirated, then no one could afford to make them and they would generally not come into being.
So how did movies get made before the existence of all the extra revenue that these new technologies bring? I believe that movies were being made before the invention of VHS, yet alone DVD. I understand that even before TV there were movies being made. Some might say that some of the best movies of all time were made before the first cinema release was ever even shown on TV.
So perhaps you are mistaken and that unencumbered access to this content might have no impact at all on the content being made in the firt place
Screw that I want to see a World of WordStar
Correct GPL is based on copyright. But you are only half right about the "taking open code and closing it". It is true that under a non copyright regime (which I support) such taking and closing is possible. But even where there is no copyright there is the _fact_ of authorship. That is the closing can only legally be done with the correct attribution ie, "derived from project X" or based on code from "Jo Public". Take away those attributions and the closing author is committing fraud, claiming something that is their work independent of the true author. This damages the reputation (or rather fails to enhance it adequately) of the original source of the code. Which is a very simple wrong. And easy to fix. Much good flows on from this situation.
Gimme a break. The guy's site was mp3sForFree.net or some such. If this site is linking to copyrighted material (and you accept that such material is an infringement [which btw I do not]) and that is all that it does then the ruling is not as draconian as all the jerking knees here might suggest. The purpose of a common law barrister is to distingush MyHomePage.com and Google.com from the subject of this case and the power of the common law is for judges to accept that distinction and therefore make the context free "black letter law" a bit more sane. As we say in Australia "pull your head in".
But maybe the 1854 reference is actually an abbreviation of "true Ruthiness" referring to a certain "mother of all things" ness ???
Your are confusing many aspects of property and this is the source of your erroneous analysis.
First, prior to the industrial revolution, there really was no "property" in your beautifully carved table. The remedies for wrongs against property were driven by this absence. Torts such as Trespass, Trover and Conversion were the way in which I protected my goods and chattels from the criminal. All of these were driven by the idea that "land" was property and all the things on the land were only able to be protected in terms of the legal notion of property derived from the land.
It was the English legal philosophers of the IR such as Blackstone and Locke that really laid the foundation for our ideas of "private property" from which your "ethics of intrinsicness" are so derived. I am not suggesting that there was some kind of Star Chamber that decided this should be the way of things but there was this entire mercantile class that were building a whole bunch of "accrued captial" in plant and factories and business that were largely unable to be protected by these traditional concepts of property. In addition the extraordinary growth of the time lead to a very protestant idea that it was our "duty" to expoloit the resources at our disposal and it is this kind of idea that lead to concepts like "adverse possesion" (squatting) where one could gain title to property (incuding land) if one could show that one had been "using" it for a number of years (usually 12) and that the actual owner had neglected the property. However at the same time the concept of property was tied to a number of other principles for example "exclusion", the requirement that for property to be found in a thing one must be able to "exclude" others from its enjoyment. Further the idea of actual "loss" as a result of having your "property" taken from you is fundamental to these ideas.
So to return to your table. It's now 1805 and you are enjoying the benefit of this now not so new "private property", so you build a table and if someone comes and steals it from you then you can have the state go looking for the thief. Note the difference between the punishing of the theif and the compensation for the loss of the table, even then these were two separate actions. One based on public policy (the punishment) and the other based on the loss you suffered (remedy). If your table is still in the possession of the theif you might get it back if they have sold it on you might be able tofollow the chain and get it back or you might get some equivalent amount of money to replace your table. All happy?
This property proved very effective at supporting the growth of the western economies in addition it was expanded in a number of directions, one of which was to extend the ideas of property to the output of intellect. And here was the first defect. The problem is that the intrinsic attribute about your table (other than the table itself) in which you have a right is the "creation" of the table in the first place. In other words, if someone makes a copy of your table and fails to acknowledge that it is a copy of your design then you have a remedy for fraud. Similary if you are a table maker of repute and someone else makes a table in your style and claims that it is one of yours then the remedy is one for "passing off" (funnily enough) one of those old Torts that were around since before the new fangled "private property" even existed.
The problem is that you are trying to find property in the "concept" of your table. This is a defect. For example, even the framers of the US constitution recognised that patenting mathematics was a bad idea and so there is a specific exemption gainst that. Do you think that the framers even thought of recorded music??? Computer software (which by any freakin' rational definition is purely mathematics anyway)???
You are entitled to claim authorship of all your creations, tables, books, maybe even a business process, certainly a piece of software but this reality does not infer property. There are severa
I am starting to thing that there is a fundamental flaw with this kind of analysis. In particular the "relativism" that is used to make comparisons about the widening rich poor gap. I guess it is a nagging suspicion that there are at least two "pools" of wealth within each of the two groups. One of them is the capital that cannot readily be exported to the other community, say; infrastructure, this captial requires further investment, servicing etc and is probably closely linked with some other "closed loop" multipliers that increase the overall wealth of the "haves" without really being a lost opportunity to the "have nots".
A second factor is the relative change in amenity of the two communities. It seems that there is an argument to suggest that there is a greater increase in amenity within the "have nots" than amongst we "haves". Obviously it is easier since they have so little in the first place but the fundamental point, I think, turns on whether there is any "acceleration" in growth (positive or negative) that is correlated to the overall level of development. I think there is a strong case to argue that the less developed world has a more rapid rate of growth than the "haves" (in the west at least).
I haven't really developed this idea but I think that the growth in the wealth of the rich is growing in proportion to their starting position. More people are joining the haves than are leaving them. The overall amenity of (a significant number at least) the have nots is increasing. Which means that the only real issue in my view is to ask how many people in the workd are enduring falling amenity. I suspect the answer is very small.
IT is important to note that by amenity I mean a general sense of "weatlth" and not just a question of income or assets. In many cases a falling real incoming can still mean a growing amenity.
Gimme a freakin' break. This all happened in London. If you wanted someone dead in an un-messy way there are lots of ways that do not even put a trace of blame back on the FSB mothership. Gun toting muggers, home invaders, "drug deal gone wrong", racial attack (he was russian). There are reasons why this might have been FSB, with or without direct executive approval, however it is neither the most likely nor at all likely an explanation. Much more believable is pissed of criminal elements even if it wwas corrupt FSB "tools" that executed the plan.
I can think of a few reasons why the machine might not report these results.
(1) any candidate that gets 2 votes reports as zero to avoid revealing a singleton voter which might reveal the vote of a member of the electorate
(2) as above but to avoid having to report vast number of candidates (the system may not make a distinctyion between the niber of voters and the number of candidates
(3) In small electorates only candidtes that get above teh "deposit" threshold are reported as having any votes.
A few facts from the incident in question might help to find other resons why there is nothing to see here.
Actually the question of whether or not you are a criminal is a question of "fact" according to the text of the act. That is, these clauses are designed to defeat the "solicitation" and "conspiracy" defences where an actually guilty person would say "but I didn't know what it was for" or "I just [wrote|modified|acquired] the software" and allow such a person to be found guilty on a question of whether they were _to the sufficient burden of proof_ a knowing contributor to the specific offence.
:-)
So if you don't go helping people commit these DOS offences then you are innocent.
Relax your head