(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.--Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
In other words, regardless of what commercial software companies might like you to believe, using a program does not require a copyright license.
How so? There isn't anything in the Constitution saying "Congress is here to pass laws, but NOT laws that will piss off gold-standard people". I'm genuinely curious about this, where in the Constitution does it bar this?
No, that's the wrong question. The right question is, "Where in the Constitution is Congress given the power to pass such laws?" The Constitution defines precisely what the powers of Congress are. Everything else is reserved to the states and the people. Go read the Tenth Amendment again.
The Bill of Rights, and later amendments that restrict Congressional power, do tend to confuse people, because they take power away from Congress rather than granting it. Remember that those restrictions apply in addition to the restriction that Congress stay within its Constitutionally delegated powers. That's made explicit by the Ninth Amendment, so maybe you should go read that one again too.
There is no clause saying that congress MUST pass constitutional laws,
Um... besides Article Six?
the Executive branch's veto power exists to make sure Congress stays within constitutional bounds, and if that fails SCoTUS. As a secondary feature, the voters have the power to raise a huff and remove these people.
Yes, we have checks and balances partly to help enforce the Constitution. That doesn't make, say, the passing of the Sedition Act any less illegal. The fact that the other branches of government are watching over their shoulders does not excuse Congress from their responsibility to obey the supreme law of the land.
Something not often mentioned in these discussions is that the FSF recommends that you put in the "or any future version" clause. The Creative Commons licenses, in contrast, require it -- since version 2.0, they have included this upgradeability in the text of the license. (See section 4b: version 2.0, 2.5, 3.0.)
So any work licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0 or 2.5 is automatically also licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0. And 3.0 goes even further, in that a work may be relicensed under any other license that Creative Commons deems to be compatible (although there aren't any of these yet.)
MPlayer works fine for me. It doesn't seem to understand the.ram file, so I had to do "mplayer `cat dirkgently.ram`" instead. You can save the stream to disk using e.g. "mplayer -dumpstram `cat dirkgently.ram` -dumpfile dg1.rm".
Flyspell (along with Emacs's other spell-checking functions) doesn't work right with camel case. Here's a modified flyspell-get-word and flyspell-region which will handle camel case if ps-flyspell-check-subwords is set (copy this into your.emacs if you like.)
(require 'flyspell) (require 'cc-subword)
(defvar ps-flyspell-check-subwords nil
"*Non-nil if Flyspell should check subwords separately.
If this variable is set to non-nil, an identifier such MyLongFunctionName will be treated as four separate words (My, Long, Function, Name) for the purposes of Flyspell.")
(defun flyspell-get-word (following &optional extra-otherchars)
"Return the word for spell-checking according to Ispell syntax. If optional argument FOLLOWING is non-nil or if `flyspell-following-word' is non-nil when called interactively, then the following word \(rather than preceding\) is checked when the cursor is not over a word. Optional second argument contains otherchars that can be included in word many times.
Ya I know, online petition is not the best way. Write to your representatives if you can.
Precisely. Emailing your Representative is better than nothing, but not by much. With all the email these folks get, it's going to take more than a bunch of Slashdotters sending in EFF form letters to make a difference. Much better is a real letter; at least that way they know you care enough to spend the time composing it yourself.
Phone calls are also good, and a lot faster, since mail to the Capitol is severely delayed for security reasons. If even looking up your Rep's phone number sounds like too much work, just call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.
Merge sort and heap sort are both O(n log n) for arbitrary input -- they'll always take about the same amount of time no matter what the input data looks like. And O(n log n) is the best you can possibly do on average.
Quicksort, in contrast, is highly suboptimal -- O(n^2) -- in the case where the data are already in order. It only approaches O(n log n) behavior when the data are completely randomized. In general, of course, it depends on what data you're looking at, but quicksort performance will be somewhere in between these two cases.
People USE quicksort because it's optimal for many situations that people typically work with. That's not because of its asymptotic behavior, but because of its small constant factor.
Remember, our computers are not Turing machines. We never actually work with the average case. And n is a lot smaller than infinity.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. USC title 17, section 117(a):
In other words, regardless of what commercial software companies might like you to believe, using a program does not require a copyright license.
No, that's the wrong question. The right question is, "Where in the Constitution is Congress given the power to pass such laws?" The Constitution defines precisely what the powers of Congress are. Everything else is reserved to the states and the people. Go read the Tenth Amendment again.
The Bill of Rights, and later amendments that restrict Congressional power, do tend to confuse people, because they take power away from Congress rather than granting it. Remember that those restrictions apply in addition to the restriction that Congress stay within its Constitutionally delegated powers. That's made explicit by the Ninth Amendment, so maybe you should go read that one again too.
Um... besides Article Six?
Yes, we have checks and balances partly to help enforce the Constitution. That doesn't make, say, the passing of the Sedition Act any less illegal. The fact that the other branches of government are watching over their shoulders does not excuse Congress from their responsibility to obey the supreme law of the land.
Something not often mentioned in these discussions is that the FSF recommends that you put in the "or any future version" clause. The Creative Commons licenses, in contrast, require it -- since version 2.0, they have included this upgradeability in the text of the license. (See section 4b: version 2.0, 2.5, 3.0.)
So any work licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0 or 2.5 is automatically also licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0. And 3.0 goes even further, in that a work may be relicensed under any other license that Creative Commons deems to be compatible (although there aren't any of these yet.)
Wait a minute. Installing special drivers for mice and keyboards? Did it suddenly get to be 1995 again while I wasn't looking?
MPlayer works fine for me. It doesn't seem to understand the .ram file, so I had to do "mplayer `cat dirkgently.ram`" instead. You can save the stream to disk using e.g. "mplayer -dumpstram `cat dirkgently.ram` -dumpfile dg1.rm".
Precisely. Emailing your Representative is better than nothing, but not by much. With all the email these folks get, it's going to take more than a bunch of Slashdotters sending in EFF form letters to make a difference. Much better is a real letter; at least that way they know you care enough to spend the time composing it yourself.
Phone calls are also good, and a lot faster, since mail to the Capitol is severely delayed for security reasons. If even looking up your Rep's phone number sounds like too much work, just call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.
That would be the green part.
It all depends on what you mean by "optimal."
Merge sort and heap sort are both O(n log n) for arbitrary input -- they'll always take about the same amount of time no matter what the input data looks like. And O(n log n) is the best you can possibly do on average.
Quicksort, in contrast, is highly suboptimal -- O(n^2) -- in the case where the data are already in order. It only approaches O(n log n) behavior when the data are completely randomized. In general, of course, it depends on what data you're looking at, but quicksort performance will be somewhere in between these two cases.
People USE quicksort because it's optimal for many situations that people typically work with. That's not because of its asymptotic behavior, but because of its small constant factor.
Remember, our computers are not Turing machines. We never actually work with the average case. And n is a lot smaller than infinity.