And down they go again. Looks like China has decided that it is time to play a pretty damned nasty card.

As an addendum to my previous comment, starting at approximately 11 pm Beijing time, three different VPNs I am using- one free, one paid, and one corporate- have all been blocked within China. Hopefully this is temporary. IT offices will have heads on the chopping block if this is still happening in 8 more hours (or less).

As of 11:45 pm, two of my three VPNs are working again. The one that isn't is, of course, the one that people will get fired for. C'est la vie, time for bed.

I am in Beijing. I know not of this restored service of which TFA speaks. Anything Google related website-wise (and including other services, like Google Earth) have been blocked on the PC since July or so (as opposed to just slowed down to 1 Kbyte/minute previously) but Google's client on cell phones worked without a problem. What was blocked on Friday was the phone client and any other services not covered by the previous block. As of my posting this message, everything G is still only accessible for me via VPN- Freegate or paid, either works fine. Funny thing, though, if I use Freegate, I can't use any services at slashdot (I had to shut off FG so I could post this message and see how a comment I made in another thread had been moderated).

The only thing that I use frequently that is hit and miss functionally without a VPN is Google Translate, which I am guessing is because some big Chinese web sites claiming to do translation are actually just front ends to Google translate and thus stop working.

Actually, it is funny, because Orbitz was started by the airlines themselves. They didn't need to scrape cheap airfares to lower prices as much as cut out the travel agents as middlemen:

Five airlines--United Airlines Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., Continental Airlines Inc., Northwest Airlines Corp., and, later, AMR Corp. (American Airlines)--teamed to create a new online travel service. (American became an equity partner in March 2000; total start-up funding was around $100 million.) Together, the five founding partners controlled 90 percent of seats on domestic commercial flights. Existing computer reservations systems such as SABRE did not present competing fares in an unbiased way, said company officials.

What makes it even funnier to me is that American Airlines was one of the founding companies of Orbitz who was trying to lower prices from SABRE, which American Airlines started in 1960!!!

I teach both C and Data Structures. Bubble sort is for my C class where I am trying to make sure the students fully comprehend arrays (most of my students come from a non-existent programming background, and the school isn't sold on my teaching them Python as a first language just yet as apparently I am the only instructor who can use it meaningfully), how indexes work (getting them to reverse an array or a string doesn't quite seem to do it for about half of them), and my better students will have implemented bubble sort on linked lists by the end of the semester, as well. Understanding that bubble sort works isn't a problem for them, but they are only starting to think beyond what a single loop can do algorithmically. I have tried jumping to insertion sort and as a whole there is poor integration of the knowledge to take forward. Good/better/best options just can't happen for most of these students at this point, and so it has to wait for Data Structures where the first sort they learn is Insertion Sort and I don't care which language they use. I guess if someone started using Mindfuck or Ada I might start to care. They add every sort to one big program where they can calculate how much work each sort does and how much system time it takes to operate for randomly generated lists.

As for concerning themselves with cache misses as one person suggested it, until students have a better understanding of systems, that can't be readily done with a class of 40+ frequently unmotivated students (it can with ~10 motivated students, the breakpoint occurring somewhere in the middle, of course), though I start introducing the penalties of register/cache/RAM/disk in this class so that by the time I am teaching embedded systems the students who chose that path usually have a good grasp of it, with the best ones looking even at divide instructions with disdain. With the semester system being what it is, though, teaching all of that as a simultaneous, cohesive chunk of information just isn't going to happen.

It can, but the chances of it staying perfectly readable is very small. And realize that removing RAM from a machine puts it under a very different condition than intentionally accessing the RAM in a pattern which causes faster than normal leakage, so the results aren't mutually exclusive.

In this case, you an believe both, as the statements aren't contradictory, only your misunderstanding of what you read. The law the judge is referring to is Illinois Uniform Vehicle Code, not federal law (though it generally does follow Federal Highway Administration guidelines). But you are more than welcome to keep believing your misconceptions and misunderstandings. Every state has one, btw.

That is not certain.

I don't have first hand experience, but if I were to call someone to let them know that something bad happened to their kid, I'd be hesitent to leave too many details in a voice message. You generally want to downplay the injury until you know the person receiving the news can handle it.

As such, I'd probably leave a message saying "hi, my name is X and I'm calling about your kid, please call me back". If your attitude is scammers and spammers oriented, you are likely to not do so.

Shachar

The summary is shit (not shiat), though, because THERE IS NO FEDERALLY MANDATED MINIMUM TIME FOR AN AMBER SIGNAL LIGHT! Why do people think there is??? There are lots and lots of recommendations, and most states follow them, but local traffic laws aren't covered by federal law, and shouldn't be unless a traffic light gets used on an interstate.

As a general rule, what was taught to the Civvies I knew (I was comp sci, the civivies were on the floor below us) when I was in college was that amber lights should have a minimum duration of 3 seconds and go up by .5 second for every 5 MPH over 30 MPH. The Institute of Traffic Engineers currently suggests it be .5 second longer for each 5 MPH over 25 MPH. But there is no federal law or federally enforced standard. There are just municipalities who can't (or won't) comprehend physics when it works out in their financial favor.

BAE is still making the RAD750. I worked with the predecessor that is in the RAD6000 computer board.

Funny, I'm moving in the opposite direction, but reach the same conclusion. Working with (most) modern IDEs just seem like masochism after you've used VIM.

The learning curve for vim is horrible. I can understand anyone who gives up before reaching reasonable productivity levels. Once you've gone through it, however, the IDEs are just no competition.

Shachar

Regulation can lead to higher prices. But that's generally only when that regulation is restricting competition in some way. Like the airlines, or the telco industry back in the days of AT&T as The Official Regulated Phone Company Monopoly.

However, its the telcos themselves today, in an environment of unprecedented freedom compared to telcos throughout most of the rest of the world, who are keeping the prices high, and that largely by limiting competition on their own. Everyone's basically trying to be Apple -- particularly in wired telecom, they're optimizing for maximum profit per customer, not trying to net the most customers. Verizon's not laying miles of new fiber anymore, trying to reach everyone. And most of these guys are making 40-50% profit margins. Meanwhile, US internet service is #10 in the world... didn't we frickin' invent the Internet?

Regulating certain aspects of the Internet can definitely improve it for every user and most connected companies. There's no need to make things better for Verizon or Comcast... they're doing just dandy. And realistically, an Internet connection is a utility -- this is obvious to everyone. If it weren't for all the money being spent to buy Congresscritters on behalf of the telcom industry, this wouldn't even be a newsworthy thing. Of course it's an utility. Maybe leaving off the Title 2 classification was a useful thing in the early days to make life easier on the ISPs. But twenty years ago, my ISP was a 5 person company run by an old buddy of mine. Now you're probably getting your service from one of the largest communications companies in the country, if not the world. Comcast owns Universal and NBC for f's sake. Verizon made over $30 billion last year.

You have to remember that the protection code has is reduced compared to the protection that other works of art has. The law and precedence (IANAL) acknowledge that there is significant amount of function (i.e. - non-copyrightable) parts to a program.

The question here, as I see it (and, again, IANAL) is whether the function's arrangement and names, which might have some expressive (i.e. - copyrightable) value to begin with, can turn to purely functional by the simple fact that implementing it is essential in order to make things work.

As far as I remember, other laws (including the hated DMCA) has language that suggests it does (allowing reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability).

Shachar

What you don't get (possibly because you are not a programmer) is that Ruby-on-Rails-with-XHTML-and-JQuery-NoSQL-Hadoop technology is simplifying programming. Simplify it any more, and you'll likely end up with worse (with both likely over the near future).

Back at the day where the programming language was hard, only people with the knack could do it. Programs still had bugs (and always shall), because programming is a complex task and we did not have the tools to simplify the complexity back then.

And then the demand for programmers sky-rocketed, and people who believed you were right started creating RADs (rapid application development environments). Pretty much all the buzzwords you dumped are in the category. The idea was to create an environment that will simplify the programming process, so that constructing a program be more like plumbing.

Guess what. It still isn't. The only difference is that now there are people doing programming that are not programmers. They are plumbers. The result is what you see. The problem is that, unlike plumbing, people still expect the end result to be anything they like. It is the lack of limitations on the end result that causes the need for understanding what you're doing, not the technology with which you develop.

Shachar

Sure it does