No, the definition of ego is quite precise (particularly as meant in the context of the fact here) and it is simply a definition of "self" and being aware of "self" in contrast to other "selfs" in the world.
In this context the author is right, there is no place for self in good software development. In as much as the solution should be independent of the person(s) implementing it. From my perspective, I think that this can manifest it self in many ways and it does not mean that there is a lack of passion, but it does require that the discourse that determines the approach to the solution requires a full and frank exchange of views (which can be a bit shouty if necessary) between a group of people that, and this is the key point, respect each other. If the participants value each other's opinion then it means that there is no issue about "self" because the individual selves know that the right answer will come out of the group, the "uber self" of the team and as such there can, by definition, be no role for the ego.
It is the true place for consensus and probably one of the best examples of it left in the world today.
There is an aspect of this that I call (and I am not sure if I heard the phrase somewhere else first or not) the zero, one, many problem. That is all solutions to "problems" can be implemented in one of three ways; a solution that does not implement a particular thing (the zero case). The solution that implements the "single" approach to the problem (the one case) and finally the solution that implements the generic solution that will allow N results (the many case) approach.
The critical thing about this is that id not the zero or one case, the 2, 3,... case is almost always presented by the user as a requirement but to do it properly we should do the many case at first instance since if they can identify the 3 case they will eventually find a need for the 4 case and the reengineering that is required to go from 3 to 4 is better spent designing the many solution in the first place.
He sent the "SPAM" to the members of his electorate (of whom there are probably around 60,000, the % of which that are emailable is unclear to me). As an election is due, they (the politicians) will be sending unsolicited voting material to a hell of a lot of people in the coming months. Franky I would rather have the electronic version rather than the glossy dead tree version of the same piece of literature.
So whilst everyone is up in arms about this "SPAM" event, it is not quite the same as "Get y0ur M3ds here" and certainly not "untargetted" SPAM. A previous poster highlighted that political speeach is an important exemption to the SPAM legislation and I think that is very true, particularly for the smaller parties. But I agree there is a balance to be struck, it's just that I think that this episode is probably the right side of the line wherever it ends up being drawn. Besides, the exemption under whcih this mail was sent is hardly a loophole it is an explicit exemption for political and not for profit organisations.
No matter how many ultra-cool hackers I know tell me that Lisp and Scheme and ML are cool, I never have fun using them. They force my brain into such an unpleasant state of nerdliness that the only thing I can program in them is a mathematical proof or some sort of logical system.
Er, that is every single computer program you have ever written. First let me disclaim that I make my living writing in C (a little C++ and some interpreted languages). But I firmly believe that until we approach every program as the "proof of a logical system" we will be burdened by the inexorable piles of poo that is the vast majority of the software written today.
Functional programming is the way forward. I don't mean this as a personal criticism of the parent poster, just a general comment. The fact that they (most programmers) cannot see that every program they have ever written is a logical system is an indictment of how most people get into the industry. Code is just applied mathematics and most coders do not have the mathematics to apply. The sooner we fix this the better the quality of the programs we write will become.
excellent call. I had completely forgotten that. The whole BG AG thing _is_ really important. My copy of DE is in storage, but I should never have got that wrong:-)
Good fiction (and sf needs to be even better) really requires the audience to suspend its disbelief. SF needs to be better because by definition (almost) SF is asking you to suspend more. That being said, the best SF does this easily. Dune - set 10,000 years into our future solves the problems of technology most elegantly. Timescape - puts "the future" into the now and writes much of the novel in the late sixties. Greg Bear just makes up a "cosmic accounting" system that makes physics as we know it go away.
There are so many examples, the "singularity" even if it exists blinds only the mediocre SF writer, of which there are soooo many.
I wonder how this project is affected by the recently announced sale of "BBC Technology" the BBC technology arm to Siemens. It is projects like this that seem to me to make the sale an extraodinary decision. Unless they are completely unrelated? Any insiders want to AC?
Your point is well taken, but you have the wrong end of the stick. I believe that rights without duties are pointless.
I can see how you have made the inference from the post. In the context of the original story my post was all about "one side" of the equation, the "vehicles" of the role of the state. However it is the definition of public life that is really important to get the balance. Public life is where one executes the rights that come from adhering to the duties of being a citizen. It all get's a little wet here, tolerance, giving effect to others rights, even down to respect for private property are all the kinds of duties I'm talking about. Kinda like a balance between the Hobbesian idea of why we join society with the late 20th century welfare state of places like Austraslia and the UK where as a society we build the infrastructure to ensure everyone has the basics of sustenance but presenting an economy that enables others to strive to accumulate capital in an attempt to free themselves from spending too much of their time achieving it (sustenance that is). Which gives more time for participating in public life; Politics, art, debate, entertainment, sport, recreation etc.
Look, it's simple. There is public life and private life. Public life is where I go to interact with others to help me form identity and have discourse on the subjects that matter for us all. Private life is where I sustain myself in order to participate in public life. The tradition of this distinction is from the dawn of democracy from Plato and Aristotle, through Hobbes all the way up to Arendt and others in the 20th Century.
Now private life is constantly being eroded and it is time to stop. I want to DESIGN my society so that when I choose to interact in public and in particular with the state then the state should be able to demand that I authenticate my entitlement to do so, however this does not require that i identify myself. This is what technology can bring. We can have both. A completely accurate entitlements system that does not require the revelation of identity to the organs of the state (except in order to establish the entitlement).
My health care records can be kept on a big central database but they should not be able to link that with my social security records. It is _I_ who provides them with that link when I authenticate my entitlement to free health care because of my social security status. Further that big database needs to know _nothing_ about my identity specifics other than they are the file 61272123. I know that the records for 61272123 are mine but the state does not need to know. Similarly the state can know that medical procedure 2453/CD/2321 for file 61272123 received an entitlement token, MPET23/5T from the Social security entitlement system and that is all it needs to know.
Technology of the kind that all the centralists love can completely enable their utopian vision of eliminating fraud for public services etc etc, but it can be done without even having to compromise my right to privacy, and it doesn't even need law it can be done technically. there are logistical issues for this vision, but they are not an order of magnitude different to the ones that exist for the current idea of "biometric id cards".
The fundamental thing is for us to decide what we want. And what I want is to be able to walk out of my house without having to carry a card that enables the state to prove _who_ I am because until I choose to enter the public sphere about which I spoke earlier, the state can just fuck righ off out of my private life.
On the flip side, it is up to me to price the value of my privacy wrt to banking, mobile phone etc and decide whether using these services (or specialised privacy enhanced version at a premium) is currently worth the cost. the examples of how this can be implemented are many and varied _already_ technology can only make them more effective.
As for preventition of terrorism, crime, even fraud, I am all for it, but not at the expense of designing a state that is built around knowing every facet of my life. I want the privacy. It should be _my_ choice as to when I leave my mark in public (so to speak) not the state's.
The solution is easy by the time the computation power grows enough that this becomes serious enough to be a problem, you just build a series of challenge response phases into the process with shared secrets between client and server. By definition this process becomes an order of magnitude harder by just andding a single layer to the CR methodology. You need only have limited CR shared secrets (say 10) and reuse them in random order from login to login.
cool. I guess what I had in my minds eye with the cam idea was more like your appraoch than "fingers". I was only half joking about the MHD heat and strong magnets were two problems that did seem to be present:-). I reckon with new materials some kind of electro actuated material (gee if that doesn't sound like muscle I don't know what does:-) might prove interesting as well.
Having said all that, I still love the idea of getting some form of impellor to work (without damage) since it is just so "take advantage of engineering to do better than evloution", which is a beautiful thing.
This is a great question. I have read a lot of responses here, and for what it's worth I have been writing complex database applications requiring high performance for ten years.
Stored procedures are critical.
First, they are critical for situations when you, as designer, know a piece of information about your database application that the query optimiser cannot really work out (if you are asking what is the query optimiser then find out!:-). The classical example of this is if you have a particular process that is going to require mulitple scans of most of the rows in a relatively large table but that only returns a limited amount of data, then what you should do is design a stored procedure that does the table scan once and collects all the data along the way. The performance imporovement will be out of sight. Particulalrly if the data is used in a client server environment.
A corollary of this point is procedures that can take variable parameters to reduce vastly the number of rows returned from standard queries. This enables efficient deployment over a network where the client can help the server reduce the number of rows sent over the network.
There are a lot of other good reasons to use stored procedures (and if you include "triggers" in the mix then number increases), all good comp sci reasons like modularity, reuse, etc etc. But the critical one for me is "design time" knowledge about the application of which the RDBMS tools (indexes etc) cannot take advantage.
Nice work. I had never really thought about this issue before (ie why artificial hearts need to be pulse pumps) But I would have thougt that the inherent problems with artificial heart valves made this approach a really good idea. But I can think of a few pumping mechanisms that would be valve free (kind of). In particular the wankel rotary engine style of approach where the moving part forms the seal and the compression because of the shape of the chamber. That might prove really nice. Or something a little more flexible like opposing cams that are each contained within a thick membrane that effictively creates a movement that almost looks like peristalsis (is that the word i mean? Swallowing, right?). The problem with pro/im pellors seems obvious now. Hey why not use Magneto hydro dynamics the blood would be full of iron no?:-)
Sounds like a great place to apply lateral thought rather than just imitating nature. The "mount improbable" issues with natural selection being driven exclusively by improved collective fitness makes the pumping valvey hearty thing unlikely to be the best solution. And I am not so vain to think that the rudiments outlined above have not already been thouroughly thought of but you know what I mean.
Because eccentric is caring how high your toilet seat lifts whilst mentally unstable is caring that it lifts higher than anyone elses (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/12/chun.ht m)
we have achieved amplifiers based on transistors that are more accurate than human hearing. Once you achieve that, there is no point in having anything else.
Absolutely spot on!!! I am so sick and tired of audiophile crap. The only people who care are the ones that can hear grass growing. Technical analysis has done and will continue to prove time and time again that solid state amplification gives the most true reproduction of any sound since it's variance is _beyond the range of human hearing_! Double blind testing has done and will continue to prove time and time again that solid state amplification is indistinguishable from analog amplification even from those who claim to be able to hear the difference. I bet with a large enough sample the same people that prefer analog for some music will prefer digital for others. And the rest of us don't care.
Don't get me wrong. I firmly believe that there is a difference in the quality output available within the solid state space. Lord knows the first decent stereo I ever bought (including speakers) made me hear things on the same CDs I had had for years that I never knew were there. But one you reach the level of sophistication that solid state has reached, you are hearing what was recorded with any variance that is, and I will say it again, _beyond the range of human hearing. And anyone who says they can hear the difference must be able to hear the grass grow.
Uptime! Just like that old axe you've had in the family for generations. The only thing you've ever done is replace the handle or the head from time to time as they wore out. Bah!
For instance, UK legal system does not allow you to go to second instance court in many cases - which is, from continental point of view, serious abuse of human rights (IIRC, if you are trialed by jurry, you can't complain to their decision; they allowed this recently, but only in some extremely rare cases).
Er, well, whilst it is true that in the UK you cannot appeal on a question of fact (ie you cannot appeal the jury's decision on guilt or innocence) you can certainly appeal on a question of law. So your point is somewhat wrong.
But to make the comparison with "Continental" jurisprudence is spurious at best. It is critical to remember that in the Common law tradition it is up to the state to prove guilt and that the defendant is innocent until such proof beyond reasonable doubt is offered, and then accepted by the jury of 12 of the defendants peers. Such a presumption of innocence does not exist in the Roman/Napoleonic model from which the vast majority of the continental jurisdictions derive their criminal justice. This "golden thread" of British justice (Thank you Rumpole) and he role of the jury is at the heart of the difference.
However back to the original posters point. The constitution of the UK (and there is one, its just not written down) is founded on the idea that all things are permitted unless prescribed otherwise by law. The codified rights and duties of the continental criminal codes do not present the same ideals of freedom as this. Indeed I would suggest that the simple fact that the grandparent post actualy asked the question about "what is so wrong with having to have an ID card" says more about the fundamental differences about continental Europe and the UK than any subsequent post.
You can't stay anonymous forever on the Internet. There are too many methods available to trace a person back to the source. Subpoenaing server logs or ISP client records is a good start.
On the contrary. It is actually quite easy to generate a _completely_ untraceable email address. If one proceeds to use it from different (and carefully chosen) internet cafes and insecure wifi points you could conduct a series of correspondences without any chance of them tracing you. I shan't go into the details here but there are a number of web pages that describe the process. I believe "The Register" linked to such an article about 18 months ago.
One intriguing question that occured to me at the time was whether the cost of fixing the problem was worth the damage. I mean Y2k manifested itself in one of two ways...
(1) You get a bill from your phone company for $999,999,999,999.99 for the last quarter; or
(2) If you were cooking a chicken in you microwave at midnight on the 31st of December it would cook for 1 million years.
In either case you are going to notice. I wonder the extent to which all the billing systems that were fixed could not also have been fixed by saying "pay the same amount as last time" and just wear the cost. Probably cheaper than fixing the system and the system would be fine from them on since the year would now be 00. As people so rightly point out billions of dollars were spent fiing the systems, could the same amount of damage ever have been caused?
Thanks for posting this article. I haven't bought a DVD in 2 years because of the loathing I have for the whole approach of the distributors and region encoding etc. Only today I had been wavering and considering purchasing a couple of DVD in particular and reading the article has stiffened my resolve once again.
Amen. I have vivid memories of typing rm -rf * in the wrong directory (and that was WITH pwd in my prompt). It took an entire week to duplicate the work lost.
That's why the first thing I put in my shell rc is alias rm="rm -i". Unfortunately in Linux rm -f overrides the -i, but on other unices (Solaris I believe for one) it does not and so a \rm -rf is required to make a true -rf when you actually mean it. You cannot imagine the number of times this has saved my skin, well at least a lot of pain in the mean time.
Actually not. Most copyright legislation has a specific exception for educational use. there is probably some administrative form that the professor has to use to record the material that they are using but it is very like that they will be specifically enabled to do this lawfully.
so if a server failure occurs, and the in-store machines can't connect with a central database, they apparently can't take orders or give receipts out at the actual restaurants
That is so remarkably unlikely that I think it must be wrong. I can state categorically that even with electronic POS systems, stores of 10 years ago did not require access to any server to sell product. And it is the selling of product that the evil McEmpire has down pat. They simply would let "storing data" get in the way of "sellin' product". so I doubt they would have POS registers (note the P, and the S) dependent on a wide area network to function.
The problem about which I speak is _not_ the population problem, that is an obvious issue, but the problem that every ounce of our genetic program is built for reproduction and living multiples of that programs expected lifetime without reproducing might prove to be a difficult problem with which to deal
Slashdot Mirror
No, the definition of ego is quite precise (particularly as meant in the context of the fact here) and it is simply a definition of "self" and being aware of "self" in contrast to other "selfs" in the world.
In this context the author is right, there is no place for self in good software development. In as much as the solution should be independent of the person(s) implementing it. From my perspective, I think that this can manifest it self in many ways and it does not mean that there is a lack of passion, but it does require that the discourse that determines the approach to the solution requires a full and frank exchange of views (which can be a bit shouty if necessary) between a group of people that, and this is the key point, respect each other. If the participants value each other's opinion then it means that there is no issue about "self" because the individual selves know that the right answer will come out of the group, the "uber self" of the team and as such there can, by definition, be no role for the ego.
It is the true place for consensus and probably one of the best examples of it left in the world today.
There is an aspect of this that I call (and I am not sure if I heard the phrase somewhere else first or not) the zero, one, many problem. That is all solutions to "problems" can be implemented in one of three ways; a solution that does not implement a particular thing (the zero case). The solution that implements the "single" approach to the problem (the one case) and finally the solution that implements the generic solution that will allow N results (the many case) approach.
... case is almost always presented by the user as a requirement but to do it properly we should do the many case at first instance since if they can identify the 3 case they will eventually find a need for the 4 case and the reengineering that is required to go from 3 to 4 is better spent designing the many solution in the first place.
The critical thing about this is that id not the zero or one case, the 2, 3,
He sent the "SPAM" to the members of his electorate (of whom there are probably around 60,000, the % of which that are emailable is unclear to me). As an election is due, they (the politicians) will be sending unsolicited voting material to a hell of a lot of people in the coming months. Franky I would rather have the electronic version rather than the glossy dead tree version of the same piece of literature.
So whilst everyone is up in arms about this "SPAM" event, it is not quite the same as "Get y0ur M3ds here" and certainly not "untargetted" SPAM. A previous poster highlighted that political speeach is an important exemption to the SPAM legislation and I think that is very true, particularly for the smaller parties. But I agree there is a balance to be struck, it's just that I think that this episode is probably the right side of the line wherever it ends up being drawn. Besides, the exemption under whcih this mail was sent is hardly a loophole it is an explicit exemption for political and not for profit organisations.
No matter how many ultra-cool hackers I know tell me that Lisp and Scheme and ML are cool, I never have fun using them. They force my brain into such an unpleasant state of nerdliness that the only thing I can program in them is a mathematical proof or some sort of logical system.
Er, that is every single computer program you have ever written. First let me disclaim that I make my living writing in C (a little C++ and some interpreted languages). But I firmly believe that until we approach every program as the "proof of a logical system" we will be burdened by the inexorable piles of poo that is the vast majority of the software written today.
Functional programming is the way forward. I don't mean this as a personal criticism of the parent poster, just a general comment. The fact that they (most programmers) cannot see that every program they have ever written is a logical system is an indictment of how most people get into the industry. Code is just applied mathematics and most coders do not have the mathematics to apply. The sooner we fix this the better the quality of the programs we write will become.
excellent call. I had completely forgotten that. The whole BG AG thing _is_ really important. My copy of DE is in storage, but I should never have got that wrong :-)
Good fiction (and sf needs to be even better) really requires the audience to suspend its disbelief. SF needs to be better because by definition (almost) SF is asking you to suspend more. That being said, the best SF does this easily. Dune - set 10,000 years into our future solves the problems of technology most elegantly. Timescape - puts "the future" into the now and writes much of the novel in the late sixties. Greg Bear just makes up a "cosmic accounting" system that makes physics as we know it go away.
There are so many examples, the "singularity" even if it exists blinds only the mediocre SF writer, of which there are soooo many.
I wonder how this project is affected by the recently announced sale of "BBC Technology" the BBC technology arm to Siemens. It is projects like this that seem to me to make the sale an extraodinary decision. Unless they are completely unrelated? Any insiders want to AC?
Your point is well taken, but you have the wrong end of the stick. I believe that rights without duties are pointless.
I can see how you have made the inference from the post. In the context of the original story my post was all about "one side" of the equation, the "vehicles" of the role of the state. However it is the definition of public life that is really important to get the balance. Public life is where one executes the rights that come from adhering to the duties of being a citizen. It all get's a little wet here, tolerance, giving effect to others rights, even down to respect for private property are all the kinds of duties I'm talking about. Kinda like a balance between the Hobbesian idea of why we join society with the late 20th century welfare state of places like Austraslia and the UK where as a society we build the infrastructure to ensure everyone has the basics of sustenance but presenting an economy that enables others to strive to accumulate capital in an attempt to free themselves from spending too much of their time achieving it (sustenance that is). Which gives more time for participating in public life; Politics, art, debate, entertainment, sport, recreation etc.
Look, it's simple. There is public life and private life. Public life is where I go to interact with others to help me form identity and have discourse on the subjects that matter for us all. Private life is where I sustain myself in order to participate in public life. The tradition of this distinction is from the dawn of democracy from Plato and Aristotle, through Hobbes all the way up to Arendt and others in the 20th Century.
Now private life is constantly being eroded and it is time to stop. I want to DESIGN my society so that when I choose to interact in public and in particular with the state then the state should be able to demand that I authenticate my entitlement to do so, however this does not require that i identify myself. This is what technology can bring. We can have both. A completely accurate entitlements system that does not require the revelation of identity to the organs of the state (except in order to establish the entitlement).
My health care records can be kept on a big central database but they should not be able to link that with my social security records. It is _I_ who provides them with that link when I authenticate my entitlement to free health care because of my social security status. Further that big database needs to know _nothing_ about my identity specifics other than they are the file 61272123. I know that the records for 61272123 are mine but the state does not need to know. Similarly the state can know that medical procedure 2453/CD/2321 for file 61272123 received an entitlement token, MPET23/5T from the Social security entitlement system and that is all it needs to know.
Technology of the kind that all the centralists love can completely enable their utopian vision of eliminating fraud for public services etc etc, but it can be done without even having to compromise my right to privacy, and it doesn't even need law it can be done technically. there are logistical issues for this vision, but they are not an order of magnitude different to the ones that exist for the current idea of "biometric id cards".
The fundamental thing is for us to decide what we want. And what I want is to be able to walk out of my house without having to carry a card that enables the state to prove _who_ I am because until I choose to enter the public sphere about which I spoke earlier, the state can just fuck righ off out of my private life.
On the flip side, it is up to me to price the value of my privacy wrt to banking, mobile phone etc and decide whether using these services (or specialised privacy enhanced version at a premium) is currently worth the cost. the examples of how this can be implemented are many and varied _already_ technology can only make them more effective.
As for preventition of terrorism, crime, even fraud, I am all for it, but not at the expense of designing a state that is built around knowing every facet of my life. I want the privacy. It should be _my_ choice as to when I leave my mark in public (so to speak) not the state's.
Sorry for the rant.
The solution is easy by the time the computation power grows enough that this becomes serious enough to be a problem, you just build a series of challenge response phases into the process with shared secrets between client and server. By definition this process becomes an order of magnitude harder by just andding a single layer to the CR methodology. You need only have limited CR shared secrets (say 10) and reuse them in random order from login to login.
cool. I guess what I had in my minds eye with the cam idea was more like your appraoch than "fingers". I was only half joking about the MHD heat and strong magnets were two problems that did seem to be present:-). I reckon with new materials some kind of electro actuated material (gee if that doesn't sound like muscle I don't know what does :-) might prove interesting as well.
Having said all that, I still love the idea of getting some form of impellor to work (without damage) since it is just so "take advantage of engineering to do better than evloution", which is a beautiful thing.
Cheers.
This is a great question. I have read a lot of responses here, and for what it's worth I have been writing complex database applications requiring high performance for ten years.
:-). The classical example of this is if you have a particular process that is going to require mulitple scans of most of the rows in a relatively large table but that only returns a limited amount of data, then what you should do is design a stored procedure that does the table scan once and collects all the data along the way. The performance imporovement will be out of sight. Particulalrly if the data is used in a client server environment.
Stored procedures are critical.
First, they are critical for situations when you, as designer, know a piece of information about your database application that the query optimiser cannot really work out (if you are asking what is the query optimiser then find out!
A corollary of this point is procedures that can take variable parameters to reduce vastly the number of rows returned from standard queries. This enables efficient deployment over a network where the client can help the server reduce the number of rows sent over the network.
There are a lot of other good reasons to use stored procedures (and if you include "triggers" in the mix then number increases), all good comp sci reasons like modularity, reuse, etc etc. But the critical one for me is "design time" knowledge about the application of which the RDBMS tools (indexes etc) cannot take advantage.
Nice work. I had never really thought about this issue before (ie why artificial hearts need to be pulse pumps) But I would have thougt that the inherent problems with artificial heart valves made this approach a really good idea. But I can think of a few pumping mechanisms that would be valve free (kind of). In particular the wankel rotary engine style of approach where the moving part forms the seal and the compression because of the shape of the chamber. That might prove really nice. Or something a little more flexible like opposing cams that are each contained within a thick membrane that effictively creates a movement that almost looks like peristalsis (is that the word i mean? Swallowing, right?). The problem with pro/im pellors seems obvious now. Hey why not use Magneto hydro dynamics the blood would be full of iron no? :-)
Sounds like a great place to apply lateral thought rather than just imitating nature. The "mount improbable" issues with natural selection being driven exclusively by improved collective fitness makes the pumping valvey hearty thing unlikely to be the best solution. And I am not so vain to think that the rudiments outlined above have not already been thouroughly thought of but you know what I mean.
Because eccentric is caring how high your toilet seat lifts whilst mentally unstable is caring that it lifts higher than anyone elses (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/12/chun.ht m)
we have achieved amplifiers based on transistors that are more accurate than human hearing. Once you achieve that, there is no point in having anything else.
Absolutely spot on!!! I am so sick and tired of audiophile crap. The only people who care are the ones that can hear grass growing. Technical analysis has done and will continue to prove time and time again that solid state amplification gives the most true reproduction of any sound since it's variance is _beyond the range of human hearing_! Double blind testing has done and will continue to prove time and time again that solid state amplification is indistinguishable from analog amplification even from those who claim to be able to hear the difference. I bet with a large enough sample the same people that prefer analog for some music will prefer digital for others. And the rest of us don't care.
Don't get me wrong. I firmly believe that there is a difference in the quality output available within the solid state space. Lord knows the first decent stereo I ever bought (including speakers) made me hear things on the same CDs I had had for years that I never knew were there. But one you reach the level of sophistication that solid state has reached, you are hearing what was recorded with any variance that is, and I will say it again, _beyond the range of human hearing. And anyone who says they can hear the difference must be able to hear the grass grow.
Uptime! Just like that old axe you've had in the family for generations. The only thing you've ever done is replace the handle or the head from time to time as they wore out. Bah!
For instance, UK legal system does not allow you to go to second instance court in many cases - which is, from continental point of view, serious abuse of human rights (IIRC, if you are trialed by jurry, you can't complain to their decision; they allowed this recently, but only in some extremely rare cases).
Er, well, whilst it is true that in the UK you cannot appeal on a question of fact (ie you cannot appeal the jury's decision on guilt or innocence) you can certainly appeal on a question of law. So your point is somewhat wrong.
But to make the comparison with "Continental" jurisprudence is spurious at best. It is critical to remember that in the Common law tradition it is up to the state to prove guilt and that the defendant is innocent until such proof beyond reasonable doubt is offered, and then accepted by the jury of 12 of the defendants peers. Such a presumption of innocence does not exist in the Roman/Napoleonic model from which the vast majority of the continental jurisdictions derive their criminal justice. This "golden thread" of British justice (Thank you Rumpole) and he role of the jury is at the heart of the difference.
However back to the original posters point. The constitution of the UK (and there is one, its just not written down) is founded on the idea that all things are permitted unless prescribed otherwise by law. The codified rights and duties of the continental criminal codes do not present the same ideals of freedom as this. Indeed I would suggest that the simple fact that the grandparent post actualy asked the question about "what is so wrong with having to have an ID card" says more about the fundamental differences about continental Europe and the UK than any subsequent post.
You can't stay anonymous forever on the Internet. There are too many methods available to trace a person back to the source. Subpoenaing server logs or ISP client records is a good start.
On the contrary. It is actually quite easy to generate a _completely_ untraceable email address. If one proceeds to use it from different (and carefully chosen) internet cafes and insecure wifi points you could conduct a series of correspondences without any chance of them tracing you. I shan't go into the details here but there are a number of web pages that describe the process. I believe "The Register" linked to such an article about 18 months ago.
One intriguing question that occured to me at the time was whether the cost of fixing the problem was worth the damage. I mean Y2k manifested itself in one of two ways...
(1) You get a bill from your phone company for $999,999,999,999.99 for the last quarter; or
(2) If you were cooking a chicken in you microwave at midnight on the 31st of December it would cook for 1 million years.
In either case you are going to notice. I wonder the extent to which all the billing systems that were fixed could not also have been fixed by saying "pay the same amount as last time" and just wear the cost. Probably cheaper than fixing the system and the system would be fine from them on since the year would now be 00. As people so rightly point out billions of dollars were spent fiing the systems, could the same amount of damage ever have been caused?
Just a thought.
I don't want to /. it so do a google on "letter folding" and follow the top link (I think). For a cool letter folding page. Kinda like applied origami.
Thanks for posting this article. I haven't bought a DVD in 2 years because of the loathing I have for the whole approach of the distributors and region encoding etc. Only today I had been wavering and considering purchasing a couple of DVD in particular and reading the article has stiffened my resolve once again.
It is just sooooooooo broken
Amen. I have vivid memories of typing rm -rf * in the wrong directory (and that was WITH pwd in my prompt). It took an entire week to duplicate the work lost.
That's why the first thing I put in my shell rc is alias rm="rm -i". Unfortunately in Linux rm -f overrides the -i, but on other unices (Solaris I believe for one) it does not and so a \rm -rf is required to make a true -rf when you actually mean it. You cannot imagine the number of times this has saved my skin, well at least a lot of pain in the mean time.
Actually not. Most copyright legislation has a specific exception for educational use. there is probably some administrative form that the professor has to use to record the material that they are using but it is very like that they will be specifically enabled to do this lawfully.
so if a server failure occurs, and the in-store machines can't connect with a central database, they apparently can't take orders or give receipts out at the actual restaurants
That is so remarkably unlikely that I think it must be wrong. I can state categorically that even with electronic POS systems, stores of 10 years ago did not require access to any server to sell product. And it is the selling of product that the evil McEmpire has down pat. They simply would let "storing data" get in the way of "sellin' product". so I doubt they would have POS registers (note the P, and the S) dependent on a wide area network to function.
The problem about which I speak is _not_ the population problem, that is an obvious issue, but the problem that every ounce of our genetic program is built for reproduction and living multiples of that programs expected lifetime without reproducing might prove to be a difficult problem with which to deal