I'm not so sure that you can really say MIT has registration online. While you can preregister for classes online, when reg day comes, you have to pick up a form which has what you prereged for, run it by your advisor to get it signed, and drop it off somewhere else.
They miight require, for "online registration", that the process be online from start to finish.
While the people who watch the daily show did better on a quiz about political knowledge, the people who watch the daily show are also more likely to have a college degree from a 4 year institution.
While John Stewart might be doing great in his job to inform, his audience might just be more receptive to understand or getting other information elsewhere. All things being equal, you would be right. But there is almost always something else to be taken into consideration.
"Being in the minority party, he is useless and cannot deliver like Connie Morella in the past or Chuck Floyd in the future."
Of course, most of the things don't mention Chuck Floyd at all, and instead is just bad propeganda using Van Hollen's voting record. Choice lines include:
"Van Hollen did not oppose Sadam paying suicide bomber families $25,000 for murdering innocent citizens in Israel"
"Van Hollen opposes identification and removal of illegal individuals"
"$270,000 for construction at the Please Touch Museum"
Bills have many parts to them, and I don't think that voting against something because not all its parts are good or voting for something despite pork that has been tacked on is really that horrible a thing. The issues is never as clear as people try to make them. That is why there are two (or more) sides to many issues! Maybe the reason "Van Hollen voted against overhaul of bankruptcy laws, H.R. 975" was because the method being proposed to overhaul them was bad or the bill included a provision to fund goat porn for senators.
A vote against a bill can come for many reasons. A vote for a bill is most likely because the person supports the main content of the bill (though, not always). Unfortunately, propoganda isn't quick to be fair and ballanced.
"...the drop has been greatly accentuated and particularly deep because of the country's high-speed Internet access and a youth culture that uses some of the most sophisticated gadgets available.' Is this really a problem or just a natural progression?"
There are two explanations for such a severe drop in music purchases: either their consumption of music is being replaced with their consumption of the other sophisticated gadgets, or (as I think was implied) the piracy* rates are extrordinarily high.
The problem is, if that level of piracy becomes common everywhere, it will stop being profitable for the record companies to make music. I realize that they are lining their pockets and fleecing the artists, but at a certain point (and 95% shutting down seems like that kind of point) it stops making sense to continue business. That would be well and good if people didn't really want the music, but they wouldn't be obtaining it like they are if they didn't.
I'm all for change, and I realize that the world will find a way to carry on even if the music industry collapses, but I don't feel that they want the industry to collapse. They just want to have their cake and eat it too.
The only way this can be considered a natural progression is in the sense tthat greed and human nature are going to make both sides sad.
*I'd say the "copyright infringement rates" but that just sounds funny.
How? There are many branches of mathematics and mathematicians who deal in practical work and will decry the relevance of this type of work.
The results of different mathematicians, some big and some small, are put together by the next generations of mathematicians to derive new results. Many people who deal with the practical are content to buil on fairly old results. They can decry all they want, but most likely even they use somee result which was initially a solution waiting for a problem. General relativity is a good example of mathematics that had no application at first. Einstein needed the tools of differential geometry (beyond just surfaces in 3 dimensions) to formulate and express the theory. I might needd to check my math history a bit, but I can't think of any major mathematics which were developed for a specific practical purpose since about Gauss. There have been serveral that have been applied, though.
What new "techniques" were invented to (suposedly) solve this problem?
I don't quite understand the details as I have only taken a single class in differential geometry and I don't think a paper has been released yet, but Perelman gave a lecture on his results at MIT and my unerstanding of it is: By doing something studying the Ricci flow in a new way, spawning some new field that I heard refered to as "Geometrization" or some such, he created a theory which solves a large class of problems. The poincare conjecture is just a special case of his theory.
In general, though, all the really hard problems in mathematics have spawned many theories and techniques as people attempted (and failed) to solve them. While Andrew Wiles proved and important conjecture in the process of proving Fermat's last theorem, 250 years of mathematicians created all sorts of wolderful results along the way. If I told you them, would you appreciate them, or even understand them?
They were the base foundations for the research and development of what we have today
And things like this will be the base foundations for the research and development of what we have tomorrow. But when things like that were being worked on, they had no practical use outside of mathematical puzzles and other bits of mathematics. I believe that Hardy once said that he loved number theory because he knew he was working on something with no applications. You don't know what results will be based upon this work and for you to use hindsight to justify the work that became important while dismissing all work that doesn't have immediately obvious applications is at the very least illogical. You don't know the future, and its pretty clear that you don't know the past. Don't pass judgement on a major achievement before it has hadd a chance to bear fruit.
If I'm not mistaken, the N-body problem was shown to have no solution in elementary functions like 100 years ago, or something like that. Possibly by someone really famous (as far as mathematicians go). He won a prize from a Danish king by doing so, as the king had made a contest to see who could solve it.
There are a number of reasons why these problems should have prize money attached to them without direct practical applications that are curreently known. First, their results are important from a purely mathematical standpoint. Second, the techniques that must be invented to solve these problems are important in their own right. Third, the mathematical problems that we can't find uses for now could very easily have applications in 100 years. Number theory is being applied to computers, group theory has practical uses now, and I'm sure that many other brahcnes of math have found applications after long periods of having little to no practical value.
What the fuck is up with the world and its instant gratification, "but what does it get me NOW" attitude these days? Oh, if only the 80s had never come....
Re:It ends when they get some tech folks in there
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If companies were barred from filing for patents, i think they would then have their employies file for patents that they are obligated to turn over to the company if it gets granted.
It would be unfair to bar employees of a barred company from filing for patents, because its entirely possible that they came up with ideas on their own time that have no relation to the company (although, that hasn't stopped companies from claiming they own all thoughts of their own employies before).
As long as patents are transferable, and perhaps as long as employees can be coerced into doing something like this, this won't work.
What is needed is some way to discourage people from filing obvious patents that can't be circumvented. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything (stiff fines, bar you from buying/selling patents, invalidate current patents) that couldn't be solved by hahving the patents file for by individuals and then either transfering the patent or forcing the specific liscensing/prosecution strategy upon the person who filed.
Of course, you might make forcing someone else to apply for your patent and then confiscating it illegal too, but I fear there would still b loopholes.
I thought we were supposed to use the duct tape to combat the terrorists. If you're going to use some on your children, make sure you have enough to spare!
Well, I'm not convinced that this is great. It seems like an abuse of a service. Taking a free email service and converting into hard drive space? Yes, is a neat hack, but wide spread use of this would be reason to change the system so that things like this aren't possible.
How could google possibly benefit from this, and why would they encourage people to use extravegent amounts of their resources while doing it in a way that completely bypasses ad revenue? They couuld make this a positive by detecting and charging money for this, but if badnwidth and storage uses are high and income is nonexistant (and they don't fuck with your data), there isn't just some magical way of turning a bad thing into a good thing.
I know, you probably want to reconcile "I like google" with "I think this is cool" but if a man were covered in leaches you wouldn't say "If you're smart, you'll turn this into a positive! See, they are taking all your bad blood! And if they don't fall off from overfeeding, you could market yourself as the amazing leech boy and join the circus!" This is not some blessing in disgeise, and to suggest that it is without even hinting how is disingenuous.
I think many people aren't quite clear on the first amendment. It says roughly that we have the right to say what we want. However, it does not say that we can force people to listen or that we have any right to be heardd.
It should be noted, before I say anything else, that corperate speech does not fall under free speech. General unsolicited email might be covered under the first amendment, but spam advertizing something business related isn't.
Additionally, sometimes what people consider free speech crosses over into things which are illegal. You can tell something, but if you follow them around and continue telling them, that could be considered harassment. You can put up a protest, but if you threaten people or indimidate others or keep people from getting to work or cause a large disturbance or many other things, you're protest has crossed the line of what is legal.
The point is that you can say whatever you want when it doesn't affect anybody else, but we don't live in a vacum and your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
The actions of spammers are destructive and cost people time and money, even if you ignore fraudulent spam. To say that it should be legal by first amendment is to ignore much of the issue.
Why should the standards group state that use of the specification will remain free from litigation?
Stating it doesn't mean that it is the case. They might have agreements from everybody involved in the making of the standard that they are granting a royalty free useage of all patents for the use of the standard (though I don't know this to be the case), but what can they do if someone decides to sue?
As far as I'm aware, if I have a patent on flattening meat with a pencil and a sheet of paper, I could go to Adobe and say that their use of JPEG related things infringes on my patent. The fact that it doesn't is (somewhat) irrelevent. What is relevent is that the JPEG group can't gaurentee that I won't file a frivilous lawsuit. What would happen if I bought a relevent patent from some other company (perhaps that was going under) and now I do have a relevent patent to leverage? What about submerine patents? What about patents which can be argued by some to be relevent and by others not to be? Even if all the companies involved in the original standard agreed to freely liscense their patents or even put them in the public domain, there are still several ways things could turn sour. And now you want the standards body to say that use of the specification will remain free from litigation after litigation has begun? Do empty, unenforcible, obviously hollow and false promises comfort you? Did you buy into SCOs argument of "Look, several linux companies won't indemnify their users, so our side must be right" argument?
A standards body can't speak for the actions of people completely uninvolved with it. I don't likee empty promises, and I don't like that making them matters. This all reminds me of a joke: Two politicians are talking to eachother and on of them says "Hey, you're lying!" to which the other replied "Yes, but hear me out."
On another note, given the nature of the site, it woludln't really make sense for the statement you're looking for to be there. Not even if they had the power to make it.
It doesn't sound like they just signed their rights away, though. Record companies don't say "How would you like to not be able to work for anybody," they say "Come work for us." There is an implication that you will recieve promotion and possible collateral in exchange for being otherwise screwed.
If they were truely signed just to keep someone else from signing them, and if they wer ddenied the things that they should have been given, then the recor companies were in breach of trust, if not of contract.
The common complaint people have with labels screwing artists is that they take too big a share of the money that flows in, not that they keep the money from coming in.
While I can't say for sure that nobody has used this method before for 3D models, the article seems to suggest that this is slightly different than using differently optimize models. Instead, this seems to be a way to optimize the models so that they look good up close as well.
The concept of lossy compression of 3D models might not be new, but that doesn't mean that the method for doing it isn't.
Also, even if the problem were trivial for 2 dimensions, it wouldn't neccesarily be so in 3. The 2 body problem has a simple solution, the 3 body problem has no solution in elementary functions. Random walks are recurrent in 1 and 2 dimensions but transient in 3 or more. I can think of several other mathematical examples where the difference between 2 and 3 dimensions (or 2 and 3 objects) changes things completely.
Don't judge unless you know you understand the subtleties of this algorithm compared to others:-)
While the government might have better things to do than protect people from their own stupidity, I don't believe that the issue is as clear cut as you think.
While there are a lot of "stupid" things that people do out of sheer stupidity or carelessness (although, they might have good reason to believe they are giving a situation just consideration), there is also a good possibility for people to do "stupid" things because of deception or coercion. For example, an out of work programmer might agree to a job that requires him to sign a particularly nasty non-compete agreement. Maybe he didn't read it carefully enough. Maybe the language wasn't particularly clear, so he didn't assume it was as bad as he thought. Maybe the bank was going to forclose on his home and his wife said that if he didn't get a job, she'd leave him. So he accepts the job, and things go well for a while, but one day he finds himself out of a job again. Unfortunately, he finds that not only is he not allowed to work at a competitor to his former company for 10 years, but he's not allowed to work as a programmer at all. What then?
What do you tell someone in this situation? "I'm sorry, but you shouldn't have gotten yourself into a situation like that. Sucks to be you. Don't be stupid next time." It might be true, but that doesn't mean that things should be as they are. If I'm not mistaken, California has laws saying that non-compete agreements like that aren't enforcible. Is that really such a bad thing?
Sometimes, people make mistakes. Sometimes, people are stuck between one bad choice and another. Sometimes, even smart people are forced to do stupid things. Sometimes, people need someone to look out for them, and to preach social darwinism and say, "You are stupid for letting that happen, you deserve exactly what you get," is just as much an oversimplification as claiming that the government should always save the people from themselves.
The problem with benchmarking against games is that the performance is based on more than just the card. It could be that the RAM and CPU limit you to certain FPS, regardless of your video card.
If you're not maxing out the card's performance, then its not really benchmarking the card anymore. I would like point out the last sentence of your quote, though. What is also noteworthy is the fact that the performance of the Radeon 9800 XT drops at higher resolutions whereas that of the GeForce 6800 Ultra stays at about the same level. What that is saying is that even at 1600x1200, it isn't the card that is limiting performance. When the next generation of games, it is likely that their graphics will end up pushing the limits of the card on higher settings.
But that is why it didn't completely trounce the 9800 XT in those particular benchmarks. The benchmarks with games tell you how your card performs today. The other benchmarks tell you how it will perform tomorrow.
I don't know exactly how buying music from iTMS works, so I am going to make my comments slightly general.
When you buy something, you accept that as bought, it might have restrictions. For example, if I buy a used Honda, I accept that it cannot fly. However, I do not have to agree to the restriction "This vehicle will not fly." If I wanted to modify it to turn it into some sort of flying machine, then I am free to do so.
When you liscense something, you agree to restrictions. If I liscense a used Honda, the lisecne might prohibit me from modifying it or turning it into a flying machine.
When you buy things at retail, they are actually yours to do with. Of course, you're not allowed to do anything illegal (like creating coppies of a CD and distributing it to people, because that is a breach of copyright), but you're not agreeing to anything more. This is the right of first sale. You buy it. It is yours. Do what you want with it.
When you buy things online, though, I am not sure things are that simple. I would think that you can agree to additional restrictions. For example, Apple could say that you are liscensing both the files and the keys to decode them and that you are not allowed to modify the files. Running PlayFair would then be prohibited by the lisecnse under which you are using the files under.
So to answer the grandparent poster's question, why can't you do whatever you choose with the music you pay for? Because you might not have actually bought the files. If you only liscensed them, there may may be additional restrictions. There is a difference between paying for and buying, and the files might not be yours in a legal sense to do with what you please.
Of course, there might be other issues like "is a contract that you click through but do not sign actually enforceable," but I think this is enough to understand why you might not be able to do some things with the music you paid for.
So, in summary, accepting how things are is not the same as agreeing to keep them that way, and paying for something does not have to mean buying it. I hope this helps.
From Mathworld The n = 1 case of the generalized conjecture is trivial, the n = 2 case is classical (and was known to 19th century mathematicians), n = 3 (the original conjecture) remains open, n = 4 was proved by Freedman (1982) (for which he was awarded the 1986 Fields medal), n = 5 was demonstrated by Zeeman (1961), n = 6 was established by Stallings (1962), and n>=7 was shown by Smale in 1961 (although Smale subsequently extended his proof to include all n>=5).
So, to answer your question, the proof for higher dimensions doesn't hold if n10 or something (where 10 is a random number depending on the proof). Sometimes, the argument in one case relies on properties that just aren't present for smaller n. It just means you have to go hunting for a more elegent proof!
There is a difference between "The US made its decision because of the war in Iraq" and "EVERYBODY made their decisions because of the war in Iraq." Just because the US wants to bring stupid political bias into this doesn't mean that everybody does.
Actually, if you assume that quantum computing becomes main stream and people have enough qbits to factor large numbers (It was only like a year ago that IBM built a 7 qbit computer and implemented Shor's algorithm to factor 15), then you have one time pads being very possible.
One of the nice things about quantum computing is that you can send a message to someone and tell if anybody intercepted it. Therefore, you can send one time pads until one gets through without being viewed. Once you have a one time pad, you can encrypt your message and send it fairly easaily using conventional means.
Of course, I don't know what will happen with things like authentication which rely on public key schemes. I don't believe that eliptic curve encryption methods have an easy attack from quantum computing, but I don't know enough to say that they can be used for anything but encryption.
nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
IANAL, but as I understood things, the case is about contract disupite and not a criminal case. You are still correct that SCO can't just say "you're guilty, now confess your sins!" but the clauses of the bill of rights you cited do not apply since it is not a criminal case.
However, it is still SCO's job to prove its case against IBM, and all the specifics of their accusations will come out in discovery.
The simpsons is a funny show. Well placed allusions to the simpsons can also be funny. However, every other thread I read has an allusion to the same stupid quote. Sometimes, the quote is well placed. For example, in this poll . However, most of the time it is just awkward and stupid. By saying "I, for one, welcome our new FreeBSD overlords" or "I, for one, welcome our new geneticly-engineered-to-be-rich-in-beta-carotine corn overlords," both the origanol quote and well placed references to it lose value.
We should not mod these posts as funny unless they really are. Think of the consequences. Think of the children! Would it not be nice if, years from now, they could find the quote funny instead of cliched?
Alas, I fear that my cries will go unheard, so I, for one, welcome our new unfunny overlord post overlords.
I was also a heathen who recided the pledge every day in class because it was required of me. However, it did make me uncomfortable. I often asked myself as I recited the pledge, "What does god have to do with any of this?" Of course, it was never a huge issue, it was just how things were done at school.
As I grew up and started questioning more than just god, I started asking myself why they had us pledging at all. It was required of everybody (or at least, it was never presented as voluntary, and if you didn't at least salute the flag, you would be mildly repremanded), and ever since I had started questioning the bits about god, it had just been empty words that I had to say every morning. I'm sure that to the few fifth graders who were opposed to US policies, it was just empty words as well.
Looking back, reciting the pledge every day didn't cause any major harm, but it does seem both stupid and creepy. I probably would have shrugged off the "under god" parts as stupid if I had known it had been added in the 50s to somehow seperate us from the communists, and I would have appreciated being told that it was voluntary.
My personal opinion is that they should remove the "under god" phrase, stress more that it is a voluntary pledge, and be done with it. It is stupid to have everybody recite it, and everybody will cave into peer presure and say it regardless of if they want to, but I would have greatly appreciated both the choice to not be 'patriotic' and the choice to be patriotic without calling on religion. If they make those two small changes, I think all the kids out there who are like I was will appreciate it slightly, and I don't think there will be anything big left to argue about.
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I'm not so sure that you can really say MIT has registration online. While you can preregister for classes online, when reg day comes, you have to pick up a form which has what you prereged for, run it by your advisor to get it signed, and drop it off somewhere else.
They miight require, for "online registration", that the process be online from start to finish.
While the people who watch the daily show did better on a quiz about political knowledge, the people who watch the daily show are also more likely to have a college degree from a 4 year institution.
While John Stewart might be doing great in his job to inform, his audience might just be more receptive to understand or getting other information elsewhere. All things being equal, you would be right. But there is almost always something else to be taken into consideration.
Hypes himself? Such as:
"Being in the minority party, he is useless and cannot deliver like Connie Morella in the past or Chuck Floyd in the future."
Of course, most of the things don't mention Chuck Floyd at all, and instead is just bad propeganda using Van Hollen's voting record. Choice lines include:
"Van Hollen did not oppose Sadam paying suicide bomber families $25,000 for murdering innocent citizens in Israel"
"Van Hollen opposes identification and removal of illegal individuals"
"$270,000 for construction at the Please Touch Museum"
Bills have many parts to them, and I don't think that voting against something because not all its parts are good or voting for something despite pork that has been tacked on is really that horrible a thing. The issues is never as clear as people try to make them. That is why there are two (or more) sides to many issues! Maybe the reason "Van Hollen voted against overhaul of bankruptcy laws, H.R. 975" was because the method being proposed to overhaul them was bad or the bill included a provision to fund goat porn for senators.
A vote against a bill can come for many reasons. A vote for a bill is most likely because the person supports the main content of the bill (though, not always). Unfortunately, propoganda isn't quick to be fair and ballanced.
There are two explanations for such a severe drop in music purchases: either their consumption of music is being replaced with their consumption of the other sophisticated gadgets, or (as I think was implied) the piracy* rates are extrordinarily high.
The problem is, if that level of piracy becomes common everywhere, it will stop being profitable for the record companies to make music. I realize that they are lining their pockets and fleecing the artists, but at a certain point (and 95% shutting down seems like that kind of point) it stops making sense to continue business. That would be well and good if people didn't really want the music, but they wouldn't be obtaining it like they are if they didn't.
I'm all for change, and I realize that the world will find a way to carry on even if the music industry collapses, but I don't feel that they want the industry to collapse. They just want to have their cake and eat it too.
The only way this can be considered a natural progression is in the sense tthat greed and human nature are going to make both sides sad.
*I'd say the "copyright infringement rates" but that just sounds funny.
How? There are many branches of mathematics and mathematicians who deal in practical work and will decry the relevance of this type of work.
The results of different mathematicians, some big and some small, are put together by the next generations of mathematicians to derive new results. Many people who deal with the practical are content to buil on fairly old results. They can decry all they want, but most likely even they use somee result which was initially a solution waiting for a problem. General relativity is a good example of mathematics that had no application at first. Einstein needed the tools of differential geometry (beyond just surfaces in 3 dimensions) to formulate and express the theory. I might needd to check my math history a bit, but I can't think of any major mathematics which were developed for a specific practical purpose since about Gauss. There have been serveral that have been applied, though.
What new "techniques" were invented to (suposedly) solve this problem?
I don't quite understand the details as I have only taken a single class in differential geometry and I don't think a paper has been released yet, but Perelman gave a lecture on his results at MIT and my unerstanding of it is: By doing something studying the Ricci flow in a new way, spawning some new field that I heard refered to as "Geometrization" or some such, he created a theory which solves a large class of problems. The poincare conjecture is just a special case of his theory.
In general, though, all the really hard problems in mathematics have spawned many theories and techniques as people attempted (and failed) to solve them. While Andrew Wiles proved and important conjecture in the process of proving Fermat's last theorem, 250 years of mathematicians created all sorts of wolderful results along the way. If I told you them, would you appreciate them, or even understand them?
They were the base foundations for the research and development of what we have today
And things like this will be the base foundations for the research and development of what we have tomorrow. But when things like that were being worked on, they had no practical use outside of mathematical puzzles and other bits of mathematics. I believe that Hardy once said that he loved number theory because he knew he was working on something with no applications. You don't know what results will be based upon this work and for you to use hindsight to justify the work that became important while dismissing all work that doesn't have immediately obvious applications is at the very least illogical. You don't know the future, and its pretty clear that you don't know the past. Don't pass judgement on a major achievement before it has hadd a chance to bear fruit.
If I'm not mistaken, the N-body problem was shown to have no solution in elementary functions like 100 years ago, or something like that. Possibly by someone really famous (as far as mathematicians go). He won a prize from a Danish king by doing so, as the king had made a contest to see who could solve it.
There are a number of reasons why these problems should have prize money attached to them without direct practical applications that are curreently known. First, their results are important from a purely mathematical standpoint. Second, the techniques that must be invented to solve these problems are important in their own right. Third, the mathematical problems that we can't find uses for now could very easily have applications in 100 years. Number theory is being applied to computers, group theory has practical uses now, and I'm sure that many other brahcnes of math have found applications after long periods of having little to no practical value.
What the fuck is up with the world and its instant gratification, "but what does it get me NOW" attitude these days? Oh, if only the 80s had never come....
If companies were barred from filing for patents, i think they would then have their employies file for patents that they are obligated to turn over to the company if it gets granted.
It would be unfair to bar employees of a barred company from filing for patents, because its entirely possible that they came up with ideas on their own time that have no relation to the company (although, that hasn't stopped companies from claiming they own all thoughts of their own employies before).
As long as patents are transferable, and perhaps as long as employees can be coerced into doing something like this, this won't work.
What is needed is some way to discourage people from filing obvious patents that can't be circumvented. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything (stiff fines, bar you from buying/selling patents, invalidate current patents) that couldn't be solved by hahving the patents file for by individuals and then either transfering the patent or forcing the specific liscensing/prosecution strategy upon the person who filed.
Of course, you might make forcing someone else to apply for your patent and then confiscating it illegal too, but I fear there would still b loopholes.
I thought we were supposed to use the duct tape to combat the terrorists. If you're going to use some on your children, make sure you have enough to spare!
Well, I'm not convinced that this is great. It seems like an abuse of a service. Taking a free email service and converting into hard drive space? Yes, is a neat hack, but wide spread use of this would be reason to change the system so that things like this aren't possible.
How could google possibly benefit from this, and why would they encourage people to use extravegent amounts of their resources while doing it in a way that completely bypasses ad revenue? They couuld make this a positive by detecting and charging money for this, but if badnwidth and storage uses are high and income is nonexistant (and they don't fuck with your data), there isn't just some magical way of turning a bad thing into a good thing.
I know, you probably want to reconcile "I like google" with "I think this is cool" but if a man were covered in leaches you wouldn't say "If you're smart, you'll turn this into a positive! See, they are taking all your bad blood! And if they don't fall off from overfeeding, you could market yourself as the amazing leech boy and join the circus!" This is not some blessing in disgeise, and to suggest that it is without even hinting how is disingenuous.
I think many people aren't quite clear on the first amendment. It says roughly that we have the right to say what we want. However, it does not say that we can force people to listen or that we have any right to be heardd.
It should be noted, before I say anything else, that corperate speech does not fall under free speech. General unsolicited email might be covered under the first amendment, but spam advertizing something business related isn't.
Additionally, sometimes what people consider free speech crosses over into things which are illegal. You can tell something, but if you follow them around and continue telling them, that could be considered harassment. You can put up a protest, but if you threaten people or indimidate others or keep people from getting to work or cause a large disturbance or many other things, you're protest has crossed the line of what is legal.
The point is that you can say whatever you want when it doesn't affect anybody else, but we don't live in a vacum and your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
The actions of spammers are destructive and cost people time and money, even if you ignore fraudulent spam. To say that it should be legal by first amendment is to ignore much of the issue.
Why should the standards group state that use of the specification will remain free from litigation?
Stating it doesn't mean that it is the case. They might have agreements from everybody involved in the making of the standard that they are granting a royalty free useage of all patents for the use of the standard (though I don't know this to be the case), but what can they do if someone decides to sue?
As far as I'm aware, if I have a patent on flattening meat with a pencil and a sheet of paper, I could go to Adobe and say that their use of JPEG related things infringes on my patent. The fact that it doesn't is (somewhat) irrelevent. What is relevent is that the JPEG group can't gaurentee that I won't file a frivilous lawsuit. What would happen if I bought a relevent patent from some other company (perhaps that was going under) and now I do have a relevent patent to leverage? What about submerine patents? What about patents which can be argued by some to be relevent and by others not to be? Even if all the companies involved in the original standard agreed to freely liscense their patents or even put them in the public domain, there are still several ways things could turn sour. And now you want the standards body to say that use of the specification will remain free from litigation after litigation has begun? Do empty, unenforcible, obviously hollow and false promises comfort you? Did you buy into SCOs argument of "Look, several linux companies won't indemnify their users, so our side must be right" argument?
A standards body can't speak for the actions of people completely uninvolved with it. I don't likee empty promises, and I don't like that making them matters. This all reminds me of a joke: Two politicians are talking to eachother and on of them says "Hey, you're lying!" to which the other replied "Yes, but hear me out."
On another note, given the nature of the site, it woludln't really make sense for the statement you're looking for to be there. Not even if they had the power to make it.
It doesn't sound like they just signed their rights away, though. Record companies don't say "How would you like to not be able to work for anybody," they say "Come work for us." There is an implication that you will recieve promotion and possible collateral in exchange for being otherwise screwed.
If they were truely signed just to keep someone else from signing them, and if they wer ddenied the things that they should have been given, then the recor companies were in breach of trust, if not of contract.
The common complaint people have with labels screwing artists is that they take too big a share of the money that flows in, not that they keep the money from coming in.
While I can't say for sure that nobody has used this method before for 3D models, the article seems to suggest that this is slightly different than using differently optimize models. Instead, this seems to be a way to optimize the models so that they look good up close as well.
:-)
The concept of lossy compression of 3D models might not be new, but that doesn't mean that the method for doing it isn't.
Also, even if the problem were trivial for 2 dimensions, it wouldn't neccesarily be so in 3. The 2 body problem has a simple solution, the 3 body problem has no solution in elementary functions. Random walks are recurrent in 1 and 2 dimensions but transient in 3 or more. I can think of several other mathematical examples where the difference between 2 and 3 dimensions (or 2 and 3 objects) changes things completely.
Don't judge unless you know you understand the subtleties of this algorithm compared to others
While the government might have better things to do than protect people from their own stupidity, I don't believe that the issue is as clear cut as you think.
While there are a lot of "stupid" things that people do out of sheer stupidity or carelessness (although, they might have good reason to believe they are giving a situation just consideration), there is also a good possibility for people to do "stupid" things because of deception or coercion. For example, an out of work programmer might agree to a job that requires him to sign a particularly nasty non-compete agreement. Maybe he didn't read it carefully enough. Maybe the language wasn't particularly clear, so he didn't assume it was as bad as he thought. Maybe the bank was going to forclose on his home and his wife said that if he didn't get a job, she'd leave him. So he accepts the job, and things go well for a while, but one day he finds himself out of a job again. Unfortunately, he finds that not only is he not allowed to work at a competitor to his former company for 10 years, but he's not allowed to work as a programmer at all. What then?
What do you tell someone in this situation? "I'm sorry, but you shouldn't have gotten yourself into a situation like that. Sucks to be you. Don't be stupid next time." It might be true, but that doesn't mean that things should be as they are. If I'm not mistaken, California has laws saying that non-compete agreements like that aren't enforcible. Is that really such a bad thing?
Sometimes, people make mistakes. Sometimes, people are stuck between one bad choice and another. Sometimes, even smart people are forced to do stupid things. Sometimes, people need someone to look out for them, and to preach social darwinism and say, "You are stupid for letting that happen, you deserve exactly what you get," is just as much an oversimplification as claiming that the government should always save the people from themselves.
The problem with benchmarking against games is that the performance is based on more than just the card. It could be that the RAM and CPU limit you to certain FPS, regardless of your video card.
If you're not maxing out the card's performance, then its not really benchmarking the card anymore. I would like point out the last sentence of your quote, though. What is also noteworthy is the fact that the performance of the Radeon 9800 XT drops at higher resolutions whereas that of the GeForce 6800 Ultra stays at about the same level. What that is saying is that even at 1600x1200, it isn't the card that is limiting performance. When the next generation of games, it is likely that their graphics will end up pushing the limits of the card on higher settings.
But that is why it didn't completely trounce the 9800 XT in those particular benchmarks. The benchmarks with games tell you how your card performs today. The other benchmarks tell you how it will perform tomorrow.
I don't know exactly how buying music from iTMS works, so I am going to make my comments slightly general.
When you buy something, you accept that as bought, it might have restrictions. For example, if I buy a used Honda, I accept that it cannot fly. However, I do not have to agree to the restriction "This vehicle will not fly." If I wanted to modify it to turn it into some sort of flying machine, then I am free to do so.
When you liscense something, you agree to restrictions. If I liscense a used Honda, the lisecne might prohibit me from modifying it or turning it into a flying machine.
When you buy things at retail, they are actually yours to do with. Of course, you're not allowed to do anything illegal (like creating coppies of a CD and distributing it to people, because that is a breach of copyright), but you're not agreeing to anything more. This is the right of first sale. You buy it. It is yours. Do what you want with it.
When you buy things online, though, I am not sure things are that simple. I would think that you can agree to additional restrictions. For example, Apple could say that you are liscensing both the files and the keys to decode them and that you are not allowed to modify the files. Running PlayFair would then be prohibited by the lisecnse under which you are using the files under.
So to answer the grandparent poster's question, why can't you do whatever you choose with the music you pay for? Because you might not have actually bought the files. If you only liscensed them, there may may be additional restrictions. There is a difference between paying for and buying, and the files might not be yours in a legal sense to do with what you please.
Of course, there might be other issues like "is a contract that you click through but do not sign actually enforceable," but I think this is enough to understand why you might not be able to do some things with the music you paid for.
So, in summary, accepting how things are is not the same as agreeing to keep them that way, and paying for something does not have to mean buying it. I hope this helps.
From Mathworld
The n = 1 case of the generalized conjecture is trivial, the n = 2 case is classical (and was known to 19th century mathematicians), n = 3 (the original conjecture) remains open, n = 4 was proved by Freedman (1982) (for which he was awarded the 1986 Fields medal), n = 5 was demonstrated by Zeeman (1961), n = 6 was established by Stallings (1962), and n>=7 was shown by Smale in 1961 (although Smale subsequently extended his proof to include all n>=5).
So, to answer your question, the proof for higher dimensions doesn't hold if n10 or something (where 10 is a random number depending on the proof). Sometimes, the argument in one case relies on properties that just aren't present for smaller n. It just means you have to go hunting for a more elegent proof!
There is a difference between "The US made its decision because of the war in Iraq" and "EVERYBODY made their decisions because of the war in Iraq." Just because the US wants to bring stupid political bias into this doesn't mean that everybody does.
Actually, if you assume that quantum computing becomes main stream and people have enough qbits to factor large numbers (It was only like a year ago that IBM built a 7 qbit computer and implemented Shor's algorithm to factor 15), then you have one time pads being very possible.
One of the nice things about quantum computing is that you can send a message to someone and tell if anybody intercepted it. Therefore, you can send one time pads until one gets through without being viewed. Once you have a one time pad, you can encrypt your message and send it fairly easaily using conventional means.
Of course, I don't know what will happen with things like authentication which rely on public key schemes. I don't believe that eliptic curve encryption methods have an easy attack from quantum computing, but I don't know enough to say that they can be used for anything but encryption.
Are they trying to place a positive ecological spin on oil spils/slicks?
They don't need to put a positive spin on that! If you watched fox news, you'd know that "Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple..."
Or, at least, I thought it was fox news...
nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
IANAL, but as I understood things, the case is about contract disupite and not a criminal case. You are still correct that SCO can't just say "you're guilty, now confess your sins!" but the clauses of the bill of rights you cited do not apply since it is not a criminal case.
However, it is still SCO's job to prove its case against IBM, and all the specifics of their accusations will come out in discovery.
Never mind. It looks as if it got modded down from +3 to 0 while I was replying.
I realize this is offtopic, but bear with me.
The simpsons is a funny show. Well placed allusions to the simpsons can also be funny. However, every other thread I read has an allusion to the same stupid quote. Sometimes, the quote is well placed. For example, in this poll . However, most of the time it is just awkward and stupid. By saying "I, for one, welcome our new FreeBSD overlords" or "I, for one, welcome our new geneticly-engineered-to-be-rich-in-beta-carotine corn overlords," both the origanol quote and well placed references to it lose value.
We should not mod these posts as funny unless they really are. Think of the consequences. Think of the children! Would it not be nice if, years from now, they could find the quote funny instead of cliched?
Alas, I fear that my cries will go unheard, so I, for one, welcome our new unfunny overlord post overlords.
I was also a heathen who recided the pledge every day in class because it was required of me. However, it did make me uncomfortable. I often asked myself as I recited the pledge, "What does god have to do with any of this?" Of course, it was never a huge issue, it was just how things were done at school.
As I grew up and started questioning more than just god, I started asking myself why they had us pledging at all. It was required of everybody (or at least, it was never presented as voluntary, and if you didn't at least salute the flag, you would be mildly repremanded), and ever since I had started questioning the bits about god, it had just been empty words that I had to say every morning. I'm sure that to the few fifth graders who were opposed to US policies, it was just empty words as well.
Looking back, reciting the pledge every day didn't cause any major harm, but it does seem both stupid and creepy. I probably would have shrugged off the "under god" parts as stupid if I had known it had been added in the 50s to somehow seperate us from the communists, and I would have appreciated being told that it was voluntary.
My personal opinion is that they should remove the "under god" phrase, stress more that it is a voluntary pledge, and be done with it. It is stupid to have everybody recite it, and everybody will cave into peer presure and say it regardless of if they want to, but I would have greatly appreciated both the choice to not be 'patriotic' and the choice to be patriotic without calling on religion. If they make those two small changes, I think all the kids out there who are like I was will appreciate it slightly, and I don't think there will be anything big left to argue about.
When I hear the word extreme in an advertising campaign, I think of this. God bless Maddox.