There is an assumption here that clones must be unnatural. That isn't necessarily so. Cloning can be natural. That is, an unfertilized egg can spontaneously start dividing. This is common in some lower species and occurs occasionally in fowl, I think. That's why, before the days of close quality inspection, you would occasionally find a bloody chicken egg. It wasn't (necessarily) because some rooster snuck into the henhouse.
Natural cloning (parthenogenesis, or virgin birth) is rare in mammals, in which it usually induced by great stress. I don't know that there has ever been a confirmed case in humans. Jesus Christ doesn't count. Being male, he was obviously not a clone of Mary.
The point of this rambling is that a natural human clone is theoretically possible. I wonder if the Congressmen plan to outlaw both artificial and natural clones. And if so, I wonder how they propose to distinguish between the two.
RIAA, did you say that you did not intend to bring legal action? Oh, this was just an intimidation letter?
Intimidation? Perish the thought. The SDMI would never sue the professor. The SDMI is Professor Felten's friend. They just wanted to warn him about the possible consequences of foolish behavior. "Sure, you could publish that paper but, y'know, bad things can happen to people..."
To use a basketball analogy, Salon seems to think that Felten falling down will convince the referee to call his opponent for a foul. Refs fall for that, sometimes. I'm not sure a judge, who has more time to deliberate, will do so. But just in case, let me add this:
"I have cures for war, plague, pestilence, even psoriasis. Too bad the world will never have them. I must withhold them all because the details of those cures (when XORed with a certain bit string) happen to describe a decryption device which is prohibited by the DMCA."
Thats odd, as I remember it the C++ standard wasn't finalised until around 1998
Right. I should have said "Draft Standard." But I don't think the template stuff matched any specification. My most memorable g++ bug was that member initialization occurred in the order members appeared in the initializer list, not the order of declaration.
As for Microsoft, their compiler - when it worked at all - tended to produce correct code. YMMV.
In Stroustrup's other appearance at SD 2001 West he presented some numerical code (matrix manipulation, etc.) beat C on the tested compilers. One one compiler it also beat Fortran.
The trick is popularizing the idioms he used so that you don't have to be Stroustrup to understand them.
From comments made at the meeting, it appears that Visual C++ 7.0 will be significantly better. Stroustrup said that he didn't even try programming on one popular implementation (I don't think he said Visual C++, but it was implied) until the latest drop, in which he said things now work correctly. If nothing else, the for loop scope is correct.:-)
I switched from GNU C++ to Visual C++ in 1996 (change of jobs) and found that VC++ 5.0 was lot closer to the standard in the areas I cared about (library, since they used Dinkumware) than was g++. For the base language, especially templates and catching incorrect constructs, I found Microsoft and gnu both pretty dreadful.
The April 2001 C/C++ Users Journal has some results from conformance testing. There are conformant compilers, and then there are popular compilers.
Mayo Clinic already has a pretty cool machine for making 3-D x-ray movies. In fact, they have had it for about 20 years. They call it a dynamic spatial reconstructor. It used to take days of supercomputer processing to extract the movie from the raw data.
How long before this appears as a line item in the US military budget?
Under Clinton, the step from "world's policeman" to "world's ambulance service" would have been automatic. Bush may figure out a way to save the United States alone (and possibly such American allies as will help out with the expenses).
Delay could be fatal. How long will it be before some third-world maniac threatens to deploy this "alarmingly simple" techinque to our detriment? The first priority must be to deploy an "anti-directed-asteroid" defense system. Second, if we have any money left, will be to design such a system.
Fact: Encarta facts vary by translation
on
100 Years of Radio
·
· Score: 2
About a year ago (sorry, I have only a paper clipping, if that), the Wall Street Journal ran an article on "facts" in Microsoft Encarta - usually the names of inventors - which varied by translation. The French translation preferred French, the Italian edition Italians, and so on. There weren't a lot of examples, just such judgement calls: radio, the light bulb, the airplane etc.
In another well-known case (was it Windows 95?), the time zone control panel included a map which showed the border between India and Pakistan. This is a disputed border, so Microsoft was caught in a no-win situation. I think they got rid of the map.
It's interesting to see how the article cuts HP out of the Itanium loop. HP used to be acknowledged as a co-developer. Now, according to the article, "IBM, HP, Compaq, and SGI will all offer Itanium solutions alongside their own." I wonder how a supposedly technical article could so thoroughly ignore HP's contributions. And why it would...
It is (cleverly, I suppose) quoted in watts per megabyte. For a 3.3V supply, 0.000495/0.000967 watts. I'm not sure what the two numbers mean; perhaps the first is the 1GB drive and the other is the 512MB drive. If so, they both consume about 1/2 watt. There is also a 20ma "standby" (not spinning?) current, which would be 0.066 watts.
Conet is asking GBP 27.50 for some stuff they recorded off shortwave? What a deal. For them. Like the RIAA says, though, there are lot of marketing costs. Wait a minute. Slashdot is doing the marketing for free!
At least we can find out who sponsors the stations - we just wait to see who sues Conet for copyright infringement.
The US political system groups people by location, assuming that people who share geography share political interests as well. That was fine when farming was the main occupation. It is less fine when the Internet homogenizes a country so that geeks form an even distributed 49% (or so) of the population.
Some of the European systems (Italy, I think, and Israel*) do a better job of providing minority representation. Trouble is, Italy and Israel also have some hellacious parliamentary deadlocks and chaotic swings. I'm not sure if this is related to the voting system.
Lani Guinier, a Harvard professor who was barred from a government post for supposedly advocating racial quotas, has some ideas on making the process a bit fairer. That is, ensuring that a 49% minority wins *some* of the battles rather than losing them all.
*Yes, I know where Israel is. But culturally, it draws a lot from Europe.
Wonder if the two spacecraft will be able to get any stero photographs. Preferably Jupiter and a moon or two.
Or will the differences in their respective distances from Juptier be too great? For good stereo, the two cameras should be "close" together w/ respect to the subject(s), and roughly the same distance away.
Lexmark used to make a split keyboard with the "IBM touch." The two halves were on a pivot, and you could even separate them completely by up to 6 inches. They are discontinued; Lexmark is entirely out of the keyboard business.
Goldtouch (http://www.goldtouch.com) makes a keyboard which looks similar to the Lexmark, except that the halves do not separate. It claims "Full size, full travel, tactile feedback keys with soft end-stop". Sounds good, except perhaps for "soft end-stop," whatever that is. I do *not* have one of these; all I know is gathered from their web site. (My wrists are OK so far, and my old Northgate and IBM models are holding up.)
> Does anyone know what the judge will be doing > then? Or what the precedents are?
On 10/04/98 the San Jose Mercury News ran a front-page article which described exactly how our Superior Court judges *were* spending their Fridays. Search their database at www.sjmercury.com for "superior court AND judges AND golf". The full article will cost you, but the headline "JUDGE'S FRIDAY: WORK AN HOUR, OFF TO THE LINKS" pretty much sums it up.
As for precedents, never expect anything to happen on time in the legal system. If it does, that's a bonus.
31. [...] the motion picture companies insisted on a viable copy protection system
Demonstrably false, if they're referring to CSS.:-) Oh wait, maybe it's the lawyers who form the viable copy protection scheme.
32. Without the motion picture companies' copyrighted content for DVD video, there would be no viable market for computer DVD drives and DVD players [...]
I'll give them this one. DVD without motion pictures would be like the Internet without Al Gore.
50. Information posted on Defendants' web sites establishes that they are fully aware that, in posting or 'linking' to the DeCSS program, they are wrongfully appropriating proprietary trade secrets. For example: [...] (b) Defendant Baugh acknowledges that 'I may very well be sued'. (c) Doe defendant 14 challenges: 'I have the money to go to court. Your call[;]' [...] (e) similarly, defendant Jones explains 'Listen, lawyers, and those you represent: This is none of your concern. The horse has been let out[;]' mocking the 'trained weasels you call lawyers[;]'
In other words, the following actions are admissions of guilt: - 50(b) you write that someone may sue you - 50(c) once sued, you are willing and able to defend yourself - 50(e) you point out the obvious
54. [...] the 'hack' [...] has already had a very serious adverse effect on consumers [...] in that the introduction of [DVD audio] has been delayed.
Well yes. I had planned to phase out my CD collection by January, and now that won't happen.:-) The DVD audio delay smells like a deliberate over-reaction, and one with little economic cost to either the industry or consumers. If the industry is truly worried, they should discontinue new video releases until a (what do they call it? Oh yeah, here are the words) "viable copy protection system" is in place.
>TIME is a complete fluff magazine now- it's essentially like Reader's Digest
No, TIME is not what it once was. But then, neither is Reader's Digest. It is still a race for ultimate blandness, and the rubes from Pleasantville still lead the New Yorkers by a considerable margin.
I'll add that Suse 6.2 ppp comes with "vj" header compression enabled by default; Ricochet doesn't support that. In addition to Suse's directions for ppp setup, I had to add a 'novj' line to/etc/ppp/options.
And I'll agree with the previous reply: actual speed varies. The actual tranmission rate of their "28.8" service is 50 Kbps, but with overhead etc. no one gets that. One Ricochet developer said that he lived quite close to a "poletop" (their term for a relay transceiver) and could sometimes hit 35K.
Slashdot Mirror
The submittor should have read the article more carefully.
There is an assumption here that clones must be unnatural. That isn't necessarily so. Cloning can be natural. That is, an unfertilized egg can spontaneously start dividing. This is common in some lower species and occurs occasionally in fowl, I think. That's why, before the days of close quality inspection, you would occasionally find a bloody chicken egg. It wasn't (necessarily) because some rooster snuck into the henhouse.
Natural cloning (parthenogenesis, or virgin birth) is rare in mammals, in which it usually induced by great stress. I don't know that there has ever been a confirmed case in humans. Jesus Christ doesn't count. Being male, he was obviously not a clone of Mary.
The point of this rambling is that a natural human clone is theoretically possible. I wonder if the Congressmen plan to outlaw both artificial and natural clones. And if so, I wonder how they propose to distinguish between the two.
RIAA, did you say that you did not intend to bring legal action? Oh, this was just an intimidation letter?
..."
Intimidation? Perish the thought. The SDMI would never sue the professor. The SDMI is Professor Felten's friend. They just wanted to warn him about the possible consequences of foolish behavior. "Sure, you could publish that paper but, y'know, bad things can happen to people
To use a basketball analogy, Salon seems to think that Felten falling down will convince the referee to call his opponent for a foul. Refs fall for that, sometimes. I'm not sure a judge, who has more time to deliberate, will do so. But just in case, let me add this:
"I have cures for war, plague, pestilence, even psoriasis. Too bad the world will never have them. I must withhold them all because the details of those cures (when XORed with a certain bit string) happen to describe a decryption device which is prohibited by the DMCA."
Thats odd, as I remember it the C++ standard wasn't finalised until around 1998
Right. I should have said "Draft Standard." But I don't think the template stuff matched any specification. My most memorable g++ bug was that member initialization occurred in the order members appeared in the initializer list, not the order of declaration.
As for Microsoft, their compiler - when it worked at all - tended to produce correct code. YMMV.
In Stroustrup's other appearance at SD 2001 West he presented some numerical code (matrix manipulation, etc.) beat C on the tested compilers. One one compiler it also beat Fortran.
The trick is popularizing the idioms he used so that you don't have to be Stroustrup to understand them.
From comments made at the meeting, it appears that Visual C++ 7.0 will be significantly better. Stroustrup said that he didn't even try programming on one popular implementation (I don't think he said Visual C++, but it was implied) until the latest drop, in which he said things now work correctly. If nothing else, the for loop scope is correct. :-)
I switched from GNU C++ to Visual C++ in 1996 (change of jobs) and found that VC++ 5.0 was lot closer to the standard in the areas I cared about (library, since they used Dinkumware) than was g++. For the base language, especially templates and catching incorrect constructs, I found Microsoft and gnu both pretty dreadful.
The April 2001 C/C++ Users Journal has some results from conformance testing. There are conformant compilers, and then there are popular compilers.
Mayo Clinic already has a pretty cool machine for making 3-D x-ray movies. In fact, they have had it for about 20 years. They call it a dynamic spatial reconstructor. It used to take days of supercomputer processing to extract the movie from the raw data.
How long before this appears as a line item in the US military budget?
Under Clinton, the step from "world's policeman" to "world's ambulance service" would have been automatic. Bush may figure out a way to save the United States alone (and possibly such American allies as will help out with the expenses).
Delay could be fatal. How long will it be before some third-world maniac threatens to deploy this "alarmingly simple" techinque to our detriment? The first priority must be to deploy an "anti-directed-asteroid" defense system. Second, if we have any money left, will be to design such a system.
About a year ago (sorry, I have only a paper clipping, if that), the Wall Street Journal ran an article on "facts" in Microsoft Encarta - usually the names of inventors - which varied by translation. The French translation preferred French, the Italian edition Italians, and so on. There weren't a lot of examples, just such judgement calls: radio, the light bulb, the airplane etc.
In another well-known case (was it Windows 95?), the time zone control panel included a map which showed the border between India and Pakistan. This is a disputed border, so Microsoft was caught in a no-win situation. I think they got rid of the map.
It's interesting to see how the article cuts HP out of the Itanium loop. HP used to be acknowledged as a co-developer. Now, according to the article, "IBM, HP, Compaq, and SGI will all offer Itanium solutions alongside their own." I wonder how a supposedly technical article could so thoroughly ignore HP's contributions. And why it would ...
I tried it out last Tuesday. I ordered (I thought) Al Gore's "Macarena", but somehow got a Pat Buchanan single of "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" instead.
There *is* power information on IBM's website:
c ro/datasheet.htm
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/mi
It is (cleverly, I suppose) quoted in watts per megabyte. For a 3.3V supply, 0.000495/0.000967 watts. I'm not sure what the two numbers mean; perhaps the first is the 1GB drive and the other is the 512MB drive. If so, they both consume about 1/2 watt. There is also a 20ma "standby" (not spinning?) current, which would be 0.066 watts.
Conet is asking GBP 27.50 for some stuff they recorded off shortwave? What a deal. For them. Like the RIAA says, though, there are lot of marketing costs. Wait a minute. Slashdot is doing the marketing for free!
At least we can find out who sponsors the stations - we just wait to see who sues Conet for copyright infringement.
The US political system groups people by location, assuming that people who share geography share political interests as well. That was fine when farming was the main occupation. It is less fine when the Internet homogenizes a country so that geeks form an even distributed 49% (or so) of the population.
Some of the European systems (Italy, I think, and Israel*) do a better job of providing minority representation. Trouble is, Italy and Israel also have some hellacious parliamentary deadlocks and chaotic swings. I'm not sure if this is related to the voting system.
Lani Guinier, a Harvard professor who was barred from a government post for supposedly advocating racial quotas, has some ideas on making the process a bit fairer. That is, ensuring that a 49% minority wins *some* of the battles rather than losing them all.
*Yes, I know where Israel is. But culturally, it draws a lot from Europe.
Wonder if the two spacecraft will be able to get any stero photographs. Preferably Jupiter and a moon or two.
Or will the differences in their respective distances from Juptier be too great? For good stereo, the two cameras should be "close" together w/ respect to the subject(s), and roughly the same distance away.
If they were, they would be giving away automobiles, not computers.
Lexmark used to make a split keyboard with the "IBM touch." The two halves were on a pivot, and you could even separate them completely by up to 6 inches. They are discontinued; Lexmark is entirely out of the keyboard business.
Goldtouch (http://www.goldtouch.com) makes a keyboard which looks similar to the Lexmark, except that the halves do not separate. It claims "Full size, full travel, tactile feedback keys with soft end-stop". Sounds good, except perhaps for "soft end-stop," whatever that is. I do *not* have one of these; all I know is gathered from their web site. (My wrists are OK so far, and my old Northgate and IBM models are holding up.)
I am a Java programmer now, and my memory of the better days is slipping away, but I think this works:
template < class T >
struct Foo {
typedef bool (* func) ( const T & );
};
And then the name of your typedef is, of course, Foo< T >::func.
> Does anyone know what the judge will be doing
> then? Or what the precedents are?
On 10/04/98 the San Jose Mercury News ran a front-page article which described exactly how our Superior Court judges *were* spending their Fridays. Search their database at www.sjmercury.com for "superior court AND judges AND golf". The full article will cost you, but the headline "JUDGE'S FRIDAY: WORK AN HOUR, OFF TO THE LINKS" pretty much sums it up.
As for precedents, never expect anything to happen on time in the legal system. If it does, that's a bonus.
31. [...] the motion picture companies insisted on a viable copy protection system
:-) Oh wait, maybe it's the lawyers who form the viable copy protection scheme.
:-) The DVD audio delay smells like a deliberate over-reaction, and one with little economic cost to either the industry or consumers. If the industry is truly worried, they should discontinue new video releases until a (what do they call it? Oh yeah, here are the words) "viable copy protection system" is in place.
Demonstrably false, if they're referring to CSS.
32. Without the motion picture companies' copyrighted content for DVD video, there would be no viable market for computer DVD drives and
DVD players [...]
I'll give them this one. DVD without motion pictures would be like the Internet without Al Gore.
50. Information posted on Defendants' web sites establishes that they are fully aware that, in posting or 'linking' to the DeCSS program, they
are wrongfully appropriating proprietary trade secrets. For example:
[...]
(b) Defendant Baugh acknowledges that 'I may very well be sued'.
(c) Doe defendant 14 challenges: 'I have the money to go to court. Your call[;]'
[...]
(e) similarly, defendant Jones explains 'Listen, lawyers, and those you represent: This is none of your concern. The horse has been let out[;]' mocking the 'trained weasels you call lawyers[;]'
In other words, the following actions are admissions of guilt:
- 50(b) you write that someone may sue you
- 50(c) once sued, you are willing and able to defend yourself
- 50(e) you point out the obvious
54. [...] the 'hack' [...] has already had a very serious adverse effect on consumers [...] in that the introduction of [DVD audio] has been delayed.
Well yes. I had planned to phase out my CD collection by January, and now that won't happen.
>TIME is a complete fluff magazine now- it's essentially like Reader's Digest
No, TIME is not what it once was. But then, neither is Reader's Digest. It is still a race for ultimate blandness, and the rubes from Pleasantville still lead the New Yorkers by a considerable margin.
Consider conditional expressions. In Algol, they read
:= if b then c else d
:-)
a
A dozen years or so later, C said it more clearly as
a = b ? c : d;
Then Perl helped remind you which items were variables.
$a = $b ? $c : $d;
And now Python (courtesy of Programming Python, p. 135).
a = ((b and [c]) or [d])[0]
That's how I *always* wrote it in pseudocode. Didn't you?
I'll add that Suse 6.2 ppp comes with "vj" header compression enabled by default; Ricochet doesn't support that. In addition to Suse's directions for ppp setup, I had to add a 'novj' line to /etc/ppp/options.
And I'll agree with the previous reply: actual speed varies. The actual tranmission rate of their "28.8" service is 50 Kbps, but with overhead etc. no one gets that. One Ricochet developer said that he lived quite close to a "poletop" (their term for a relay transceiver) and could sometimes hit 35K.