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Comment Re:The comment may also be complex.. (Score 4, Insightful) 660

And while you're spending your time figuring out why something that isn't broken works, he is coding something that you aren't coding at all. Sure, coding until it passes isn't the ideal, but it's a whole lot better than not coding at all (you).

Coding two routines by coincidence is not more productive than coding one routine properly.

Comment Re:*First post.. (Score 1) 590

Look into it and you'll learn that "entrepreneurs" have been making a lot of money off of educating your children.

Those knaves! How dare they?!

I for one demand that they immediately cease making money off this, and instead dedicate themselves to the greater good of giving my child a top-quality education for free, and preferably while having to eat out of garbage cans!

That ought to teach those commie teachers unions that in America we don't go in for this socialist profit stuff.

Comment Re:Psystar is 100% wrong (Score 3, Insightful) 865

Yes, but Apple is making their argument in a court of Law, not a court of Nebulously Undefined Rights and Wrongs.

The current law is the current law, and Apple is legally correct. If you believe that the current law is not optimal, that's a matter to take up with the legislature. Arguing that the lawyers and courts are wrong for following the law is downright silly.

Comment Uhm, no (Score 5, Informative) 184

Did you read the ruling?

ISPs don't get to throttle at a whim. They can throttle, but if they do, they have to demonstrate to the CRTC that the throttling is as narrow as possible to solve the problem and, importantly, economic measures like tiers, or building capacity would not solve the problem. They're also not allowed to throttle any protocol so hard as to effectively block it, or throttle things like VOIP without advanced, explicit permission for the CRTC.

That's a big improvement over the status quo at the moment, which has allowed the ISPs to throttle for years with no oversight for any reason they felt like.

Comment Re:This is cool and all, but... (Score 5, Insightful) 406

Except that so far, I'm seeing table construction and table layouts. I guess that's technically code - as any SQL technically is - but a good case can be made to say that it's just the database structure. Which can, of course, be subjected to a hash check.

Except that the DDL isn't in a bunch of scripts that are building the schema, the schema exists in a bunch of strings that are concatenated together in stored procedures with some arguments to the procs munged in, and passed to Exec statements when the stored procedures are run.

That's not normal table building, that's an unabashedly self-modifying database.

Comment Re:Hyperbole much (Score 1) 406

I agree, the summary and quoted code don't shed any light on the issue, but the big, and possibly illegal, problem is that the databases are heavily self-modifying. Random example:

/* Table : CONTEST                                              */
/* Description: Election specific contest. There could be multiple
            contests per office differentiated by party, Precinct,
            and Gender.  There are also contests uhat are not for an
            office such as System Contest (e.g Straight Party) and
            Proposals. */
begin
    Exec("
    create table CONTEST
        -- identifer of contest
        CONTEST_ID           T_GLOBAL_ID          identity
        -- identifer of political subdivision
    ,    PSD_ID               T_GLOBAL_ID          null
        --     0 = all, 1=exclude, 2=include
        --    1 = Some voters can vote ONLY for this office
        --    2 =Some voters in the psd cannot vote for the office
    ,    ELIGIBILITY         !numeric(1)           null default 0
        -- if office is precinct level, identifier of contest's precinct
    ,    PRECINCT_ID          T_GLOBAL_ID          null
        -- identifier of proposal in contest
    ,    PROPOSAL_ID          T_GLOBAL_ID          null
        -- Combined from office/proposal name and modifier such as
        --  precinct name or gender
    ,    NAME                 T_STANDARD_NAME      null
        -- If contest is NOT a proposal: reference to the office at
        -- the source of this contest

etc. The Program seems to have created and destroyed tables, columns, views, etc, on the fly, an incredibly odd practice for data that is meant to be audited.
Censorship

Flickr Yanks Image of Obama As Joker 869

An anonymous reader writes "An interesting article yesterday about the unmasking of the recent creator of the controversial and iconic Obama/Joker image that has been popping up around Los Angeles with the word Socialism under it. The Los Angeles Times has identified the images' creator as Firas Alkhateeb. Even more interesting though is the fact that after getting over 20,000 hits on the image at Flickr, Flickr removed the image from Alkateeb's photostream, citing 'copyright' concerns. The image in question is clearly both an independent derivative work and unquestionably a parody of the President and Time Magazine which would be covered under fair use. It has appeared on many other sites without issue on the Internet." According to the same reader, "Flickr also recently nuked a user's entire photostream over negative comments on President Obama's official photostream."
Wireless Networking

Mixed Conclusions About Powerline Networking vs. Ham Radio 343

Barence writes "Since writing about the success he's had with powerline networking, a number of readers emailed PC Pro's Paul Ockendon to castigate him for recommending these products, such as HomePlug. They were all amateur radio enthusiasts, claiming the products affect their hobby in much the same way that urban lighting affects amateur astronomers, but rather than causing light pollution they claim powerline networking causes radio pollution in the HF band (otherwise known as shortwave). Paul's follow-up feature, 'Does powerline networking nuke radio hams?' documents his investigation into these claims, which found evidence to support both sides of an intriguing debate."

Comment Even in that case, there are important questions (Score 1) 569

Are they the kind of shop that ponies up for Resharper licenses, or do they save hundreds of dollars avoiding that only to burn thousands in developer hours using VS's poor built-in re-factoring tools? If they're using subversion, do they pay for integration tools like Visual SVN? Do they primarily do unit testing via MSTest, NUnit, TestDriven.Net? Do they purchase and use third party controls, or would they rather roll their own? MSBuild or NAnt? NHibernate or Ibatis or Entity Framework or ADO.net?

"C# Development" is not the monolithic thing you're making it out to be. There are many important tooling questions that "it's C# we uses Visual Studio lawls" doesn't even begin to address.
Software

Emacs Hits Version 23 367

djcb writes "After only 2 years since the previous version, now emacs 23 (.1) is available. It brings many new features, of which the support for anti-aliased fonts on X may be the most visible. Also, there is support for starting emacs in the background, so you can pop up new emacs windows in the blink of an eye. There are many other bigger and smaller improvements, including support for D-Bus, Xembed, and viewing PDFs inside emacs. And not to forget, M-x butterfly. You can get emacs 23 from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ or one of its mirrors; alternatively, there are binary packages available, for example from Ubuntu PPA."
Debian

Debian Decides To Adopt Time-Based Release Freezes 79

frenchbedroom writes "The ongoing Debconf 9 meeting in Cáceres, Spain has brought a significant change to Debian's project management. The Debian project will now freeze development in December of every odd year, which means we can expect a new Debian release in the spring of every even year, starting with 'Squeeze' in 2010. Until now, development freezing was decided by the Debian release team. From the announcement: 'The project chose December as a suitable freeze date since spring releases proved successful for the releases of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codenamed "Etch") and Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 ("Lenny"). Time-based freezes will allow the Debian Project to blend the predictability of time based releases with its well established policy of feature based releases. The new freeze policy will provide better predictability of releases for users of the Debian distribution, and also allow Debian developers to do better long-term planning. A two-year release cycle will give more time for disruptive changes, reducing inconveniences caused for users. Having predictable freezes should also reduce overall freeze time.' We previously discussed talks between Canonical and the Debian release team about fixed freeze dates."
Yahoo!

Microsoft and Yahoo Reach Deal 301

e9th writes "We know that Microsoft failed last February in its attempt to buy Yahoo. Now, Advertising Age reports that they've reached a deal. Instead of a buyout, the two will enter into a revenue sharing agreement, and Bing will become Yahoo's default search engine. The meat of the AdAge article can be found in Yahoo News. This deal may give Google something to worry about."

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