Admittedly, it does not sound as if shooting the laptop (and the display, of all things) was necessary, or even helpful. Having said that, the Israeli procedure seem to be:
Our procedures are strict, but we try to apply them fairly. They HAVE saved life before. We do get it wrong occasionally, and then your property may get hurt. When it does, we apologize and reimburse you
Contrast and compare that with the US customs, which says:
Our procedures are arbitrary, and we do not commit to any specific policy. Most people go by unmolested, but if we do decide to molest you, there is nothing you can do about. Deal with it. If we took away your possessions, you will never see them again
Even on sheer "friendliness", I'm not sure which I prefer.
However, it's not that it trusts the programmer. It just doesn't care.
It amounts to the same thing.
Don't get me wrong. I use it quite frequently too, but mostly where I have no choice (kernel, embedded). When I do, I prefer the shortcuts offered by C++.
When I have to choose between C++'s overly complex syntax (but which I have already learned) and Java's distrust of the programmer, I choose C++. I do wish it had a better (simpler) syntax, though.
Java is a language who's main design criteria was "C++ is used for horrible things, so lets make them impossible". I really don't appreciate a language that does not trust the programmer (me) so much. As you can see, I'm very far from being a Java fan.
Having said that, you have to hand it one thing - it is much simpler than C++. Much much simpler.
Granted, the language being simpler often means that you have to jump through hoops to do what you want (who else misses C, which was both simple and trusted the programmer?) This does not change the core assertion - Java is much simpler than C++.
They tried that when they gave it to Rabin/Araffat/Peres.
It was premature then too, and in hindsight[1], also unjustified.
Shachar
1 - I say "hindsight" because today it is clear to pretty much everyone it was unjustified. At the time, there were enough that thought it unjustified too.
Your title would have about a 50% of working had the project been mine. If the spam filter let it through, I would probably have read the message. If it marked it as spam, I would have been highly unlikely to have read it when scanning for false positives. I would probably assume this was a Nigerian scam of some sort.
At the very least, you need to put the project's name in the title.
I'm curious, what sort of amounts have you offered? I have offered money too, but it has always been "feel-good" amounts to express gratitude afterwards, and did not require anything to be done; it was never enough to pay seriously for work.
I don't recall ever getting to the point where amounts were even discussed. Most often I was not offering to pay to include a patch I already made, but to have the bug resolved (and, in one case, I was offering money to either get a redistribution license for a freeware+source, or have the writer accept enough money to just open source it).
In all cases, I never got a reply.
I think the relicense case is of particular interest. I needed, for the course of a project, to use chntpw. At the time, it was a freeware+source non-free software. I emailed the author saying "either sell me a royalty free license, or tell me how much money it would take to make you open source the tool". I never got a reply. A few years later, the author relicensed the tool as BSD. I have no explanation for this.
Perhaps I should point out that when the maintainer is not MIA, but otherwise disinterested, this might actually work quite well. Never had a chance to pay someone else in this way, but did have the privilege to receive funds in order to solve a specific bug in one of my projects.
There were several cases in the past where I tried this. I cannot recall a single time where offering money brought back from the dead an otherwise MIA maintainer.
The theory is solid, but I have never managed to see it work in practice. Perhaps their spam filter ate my "I WANT TO PAY YOU MONEY" email.....
Fixed the spelling (punctuation, actually) mistake. Thanks.
Regarding the name, I'll quote from my old home page. I'd just give the link, but I suspect this site will not remain in the air for much longer (most of it is quite out of date), so I'm quoting here:
Once upon a time, I had a simple, very easy to understand, name. My given name had three letters, as well as my family name. It was clear to anyone hearing my name how to spell it, and to anyone seeing my name written how to pronounce it.
Without anything actually happening to me, this all changed, suddenly and ruthlessly, one day towards the end of 1991. The trigger of the change was a (now almost dead) utility called "Internet Relay Chat" - IRC. The cause of the change was most of the world's inability to speak Hebrew. All of a sudden I found that both my given and my family name were seven letters long, and no-one knew how to spell either one, let alone pronounce them.
Trying to find acceptable alternatives, I turned to the fact that most names given in Hebrew have a meaning. In my case, "Shachar" means "dawn", "Shemesh" means "sun". Since Dawn is a female name, I went with "sun".
When the domain buying craze started, I found out that sun.com was already taken. While I had the fleeting idea of suing the sneaky bastards, I decided to let the case drop.
So now you understand the reason behind my/. user name....
I should point out that I stopped using "sun" as a nick name, mostly because I figured the Internet had enough of its Xenophobia gone to allow non "Latin friendly" names. I also figured most people today are adept enough in the complex art of "copy and paste" to handle it.
Then again, who knows? Maybe with Sun bought by Oracle, sun.com will be free again and I'll change my mind...
Deliberations over whether to fork jawstats was a hard one. The extension was part of a project done for a client of ours. We ended up deciding that we did everything we could to contact upstream, and it was either fork or keep things to ourselves. Luckily, the client (who is the one paying the actual money:-) agreed, and this is the result.
I wouldn't know about "so many", but at least RedHat, quite officially, sell their name. If you don't pay them, you will not get a RedHat branded OS. If you want to run Oracle (or a whole bunch of other commercial proprietary applications), support is conditioned upon you running a supported platform, which usually means RedHat or Suse.
I know that what I recommend to my clients is to stick to RedHat where third party support is important, and go elsewhere (my personal favorite is Debian) if not. If you think that leaves no room for using Centos, you are right.
As for the rest of them, they are available for sale, but is anyone buying?
The reason Free (as in speech) software is usually free (as in beer) is an economics rule saying (I'm paraphrasing from memory) that in a totally free market, a product's price is the cost to produce the last copy of it. Since a copy of software costs zero to produce, and since free software almost always creates a free market (no barriers of entry for competitors), Free software is almost always free.
If we look at your case, the only reason you are able to charge more is that Apple managed to create a non-free market, despite the software being Free. After all, if it weren't for the 99$ entry price and the maintenance headache, that developer would have just compiled your sources and distribute the iPhone package himself for free. It is the very non-free market conditions that allow you to sell this software to begin with.
What are the implications? I'm afraid I'm providing more questions than answers, but at least these are different questions than you started out with:-). It's clear that legally you are 100% in the clear. You are also in the clear from the purely moral aspect. The only question is whether it is fair to exploit the lack of freedom imposed by Apple to charge people, and whether the question of whether you are making a profit (vs. merely returning some of the costs) makes any difference.
Personally, my solution would have been (and has been) to not buy an iPhone. I'm working with some of the android phones now, and find them too restrictive for my taste. I own a Neo Free runner, which is all free but not so functional. When all is said and done, you need to find some balance that works for you, and stick to it no matter what the original developer, or for that matter, the Slashdot crowd (myself included) says.
The case in Israel was an out of court settlement. It never got to a judge. It was unique in that the plaintiff refused to settle unless it was also made public, but still, no judge.
Yes. It's a good thing Israel employs a piece of paper inside an envelop.
Don't get me wrong. You can cheat with that as well, but it's much harder, and it's much harder to do that on a large scale.
Shachar
This story is important because it gives me, as a citizen of a country that has not switch to electronic voting on the one hand, and which has somewhat non-corrupt politicians (it has its own share of corrupt ones, mind you), a tool to show the well meaning ignorant politician the difference between "can" and "will". This may well prove to be the key to making sure electronic voting does not enter here (and if it does, that it would happen properly).
Shachar
I am what you would call "consistent condom user", in that I used it with every partner I've ever been with that haven't been committed to me in the three months before having sex, and then still use it until we were both tested for HIV.
And I HATE condoms. I can totally sympathize with the commenter above me saying it feels vaguely warm. I can totally sympathize with the garden hose analogy. While not strictly impossible to have good sex with a condom, it does make it hard work, and much less fun than it usually is (and what it should be). One of the many many many things I'm grateful for about my wife is that we can do away with this particular piece of polymer.
The distinction you made between people who do and do not use condoms exists, of course, but I attribute it to the distinction between people who care more or less about their health. If a study can find out how to make condoms less despiseable, and thus make the world a somewhat less disease riddled place, I say go for it.
I will not go this far, no. Certainly not for the whole project. Certain areas within the project are more likely to get this type of response, yes.
Also, according to Alexandre himself in one of the wineconf, the patches he's likely to drop without a word are not those that are entirely bad (those get rejected), but those that he cannot make his mind whether they are or are not bad.
The problem is that this gets frustrating. When I was a regular Wine hacker, this wasn't so bad. I would persist long enough and in the end something would go in (not always because I made the patch better, mind you). The epoll case was a turning point, as far as I'm concerned, because of several reasons:
The patch was a thought out one, fully debugged, and with several code review cycles to wine-devel before submittal, solving a real life performance problem + benchmarks. To have such a patch being rejected with no explanation is insulting.
The patch itself was enough to convince another, more experienced, wine hacker to try too, and his patches were ALSO rejected without giving any reason.
Looking at AJ's final implementation, it was not, in any way (design, cleaness, performance), superior to either mine or Mike's
So, in answer to your question, this attitude SOMETIMES holds the project back.
I love working on Wine, and what I'm describing here is by no means the main reason I'm no longer active, but it does take some of the fun out of it. As you know, if you're not working on a free software project for fun, why work on it?
I don't know whether to point it out, as I have no idea whether it is relevant or not, but Mike, today, is also not an active Wine hacker. He wouldn't answer my question regarding what happened, but I got the impression it was something personal (he was a CodeWeavers employee, but he also did lots of pro-bono work on Wine). Let me assure you that losing him is a far greater loss for Wine than losing me.
Just to be clear - I'm not the one calling for a fork. Also, I know Codeweavers (both the company and the people running it) and do not tend to buy into the commercial/free conflict conspiracy theory. Still, I do think that Wines leadership has an attitude problem that affects the project.
You must have a vastly different definition of "easy" than the one I know. These are from a long time ago, as I have, sadly, not been an active Wine hacker recently.
I did not manage to find much more than fragments of the epoll patches. I have a link to one of the (many) review cycles I sent out to the list here, and one of the review cycles Mike did here. Like I said, neither were accepted once submitted, despite the many review cycles.
As for the Window posistion patch, the patch is here. I have the IRC log saved. If you want, I can email it to you. The bottom line was that we disagreed on code aesthetics.
I have had quite a bit of code go into Wine. The entire BiDi support was done by me, as well as some other parts (I did a rewrite of wineboot, for example). It is very hard to claim I don't know how Wine works, or how to submit patches. I even used to appear in Wine's "who's who" page, and have an interview with me for WWN.
Not only that, but Alexandre knows me. The last time we met (wineconf in Germany, a few years ago) we had a (good humor) conversation that went something along those lines. I mentioned I don't have much time to work on Wine any more, and that maybe it doesn't matter because my patches get rejected anyways. He said that it's too bad, becuase he likes rejecting my patches. I'm saying this because I want to stress that having your patches rejected is all a part of working on FOSS, and is not what I was referring to at my grand parent post.
But the rejections I'm talking about are not explanations received on the list, where communication is short. The actual patches were flat out ignored. The explanations were received on IRC, where communication was bidirectional, and there was no misunderstanding that resulted from lack of time.
And yet, the above reasons were all that I received.
Just submit your patches and do any fix ups that they request
The problem is that Alexandre Juliard, the project's dictator, often rejects patches with reasons that contain no useful feedback except the patronizing statement "you can do better", or "it's not right".
I've had a patch I wrote for moving the wineserver code to epoll rejects because "it was not pretty". Michael Mccormak then made two more attempts at a rewrite that were rejected for precisely the same reason. In the end (several months later), Alexandre wrote his own version. At the time people explained this behavior to me as "wineserver is something he is very sensitive about".
Several years later I wrote a patch to something to do with the Window reordering being ignored (with no error message) in some cases. It is a pretty unbelievable piece of Windows mislogic, so I wrote a test case to prove this is, indeed, the behavior on Windows. The test case was rejected because it was not pretty enough. When I asked for more specific feedback, Alexandre responded with "If I can think of better ways to do it, so can you".
A project with as many contributers as Wine should have room for more than one programming styles than one. I thought it was only me for a while, but if it made it to slashdot, obviously it's not.
Yes, I had clients that made displays for aircrafts too. You can get MS windows into the cockpit, but only as Class 2 certification (which isn't much). Your program could probably display maps, but could not show the aircraft position on the map (as that is something that requires Class 3, and Windows cannot pass class 3).
In fact, those clients of mine had a machine running Class 3. It was a version of Linux so stripped down (to save on certification costs) that it didn't even have a complete TCP/IP stack.
And the funny thing is, almost no-one wrote any Class 3 applications for that platform. The development cost was so high nobody wanted to touch it. All of the actual applications were Class 2, most of them for Windows. In fact, the device only has one Class 3 application, but that one turned into a killer app (not literaly, thankfully) - it calculates the required throttle setting during takeoff to save up to 20% of fuel usage.
"In many instances, using a MFM (magnetic force microscope) to determine the prior value written to the hard drive was less successful than a simple coin toss."
A coin toss is usually referenced as the worst way to try and predict a 50:50 chance event. Disregarding all of the obvious problems (i.e. - that the bits on a hard disk do not have a 50:50 distribution (unless compressed or encrypted), and that a coin is not necessarily the most random thing, I'm still left with a puzzler
If his methods have less chance of prediction than a coin toss, all he has to do is add a "not" gate at the end of his prediction algorithm, and he'll have better chance than a coin toss.
To take this to an extreme, assuming random incoming data, a coin toss has 50% chance of a hit for the next bit. If you find a method that has a 0% chance of a hit, then just flip its output and you'll get a 100% chance of a hit. Lower chances than a coin toss actually mean a good prediction ability
Slashdot Mirror
Admittedly, it does not sound as if shooting the laptop (and the display, of all things) was necessary, or even helpful. Having said that, the Israeli procedure seem to be:
Contrast and compare that with the US customs, which says:
Even on sheer "friendliness", I'm not sure which I prefer.
Shachar
It was shot by Israeli Police, not the IDF.
Shachar
However, it's not that it trusts the programmer. It just doesn't care.
It amounts to the same thing.
Don't get me wrong. I use it quite frequently too, but mostly where I have no choice (kernel, embedded). When I do, I prefer the shortcuts offered by C++.
When I have to choose between C++'s overly complex syntax (but which I have already learned) and Java's distrust of the programmer, I choose C++. I do wish it had a better (simpler) syntax, though.
shachar
Java is a language who's main design criteria was "C++ is used for horrible things, so lets make them impossible". I really don't appreciate a language that does not trust the programmer (me) so much. As you can see, I'm very far from being a Java fan.
Having said that, you have to hand it one thing - it is much simpler than C++. Much much simpler.
Granted, the language being simpler often means that you have to jump through hoops to do what you want (who else misses C, which was both simple and trusted the programmer?) This does not change the core assertion - Java is much simpler than C++.
Shachar
They tried that when they gave it to Rabin/Araffat/Peres.
It was premature then too, and in hindsight[1], also unjustified.
Shachar
1 - I say "hindsight" because today it is clear to pretty much everyone it was unjustified. At the time, there were enough that thought it unjustified too.
Your title would have about a 50% of working had the project been mine. If the spam filter let it through, I would probably have read the message. If it marked it as spam, I would have been highly unlikely to have read it when scanning for false positives. I would probably assume this was a Nigerian scam of some sort.
At the very least, you need to put the project's name in the title.
Shachar
I don't recall ever getting to the point where amounts were even discussed. Most often I was not offering to pay to include a patch I already made, but to have the bug resolved (and, in one case, I was offering money to either get a redistribution license for a freeware+source, or have the writer accept enough money to just open source it).
In all cases, I never got a reply.
I think the relicense case is of particular interest. I needed, for the course of a project, to use chntpw. At the time, it was a freeware+source non-free software. I emailed the author saying "either sell me a royalty free license, or tell me how much money it would take to make you open source the tool". I never got a reply. A few years later, the author relicensed the tool as BSD. I have no explanation for this.
Perhaps I should point out that when the maintainer is not MIA, but otherwise disinterested, this might actually work quite well. Never had a chance to pay someone else in this way, but did have the privilege to receive funds in order to solve a specific bug in one of my projects.
There were several cases in the past where I tried this. I cannot recall a single time where offering money brought back from the dead an otherwise MIA maintainer.
The theory is solid, but I have never managed to see it work in practice. Perhaps their spam filter ate my "I WANT TO PAY YOU MONEY" email.....
Fixed the spelling (punctuation, actually) mistake. Thanks.
Regarding the name, I'll quote from my old home page. I'd just give the link, but I suspect this site will not remain in the air for much longer (most of it is quite out of date), so I'm quoting here:
So now you understand the reason behind my /. user name....
I should point out that I stopped using "sun" as a nick name, mostly because I figured the Internet had enough of its Xenophobia gone to allow non "Latin friendly" names. I also figured most people today are adept enough in the complex art of "copy and paste" to handle it.
Then again, who knows? Maybe with Sun bought by Oracle, sun.com will be free again and I'll change my mind...
Shachar
We ended up forking - mawstats.
Deliberations over whether to fork jawstats was a hard one. The extension was part of a project done for a client of ours. We ended up deciding that we did everything we could to contact upstream, and it was either fork or keep things to ourselves. Luckily, the client (who is the one paying the actual money :-) agreed, and this is the result.
If you have no choice, then you have no choice.
Shachar
I wouldn't know about "so many", but at least RedHat, quite officially, sell their name. If you don't pay them, you will not get a RedHat branded OS. If you want to run Oracle (or a whole bunch of other commercial proprietary applications), support is conditioned upon you running a supported platform, which usually means RedHat or Suse.
I know that what I recommend to my clients is to stick to RedHat where third party support is important, and go elsewhere (my personal favorite is Debian) if not. If you think that leaves no room for using Centos, you are right.
As for the rest of them, they are available for sale, but is anyone buying?
Shachar
The reason Free (as in speech) software is usually free (as in beer) is an economics rule saying (I'm paraphrasing from memory) that in a totally free market, a product's price is the cost to produce the last copy of it. Since a copy of software costs zero to produce, and since free software almost always creates a free market (no barriers of entry for competitors), Free software is almost always free.
If we look at your case, the only reason you are able to charge more is that Apple managed to create a non-free market, despite the software being Free. After all, if it weren't for the 99$ entry price and the maintenance headache, that developer would have just compiled your sources and distribute the iPhone package himself for free. It is the very non-free market conditions that allow you to sell this software to begin with.
What are the implications? I'm afraid I'm providing more questions than answers, but at least these are different questions than you started out with :-). It's clear that legally you are 100% in the clear. You are also in the clear from the purely moral aspect. The only question is whether it is fair to exploit the lack of freedom imposed by Apple to charge people, and whether the question of whether you are making a profit (vs. merely returning some of the costs) makes any difference.
Personally, my solution would have been (and has been) to not buy an iPhone. I'm working with some of the android phones now, and find them too restrictive for my taste. I own a Neo Free runner, which is all free but not so functional. When all is said and done, you need to find some balance that works for you, and stick to it no matter what the original developer, or for that matter, the Slashdot crowd (myself included) says.
Shachar
The case in Israel was an out of court settlement. It never got to a judge. It was unique in that the plaintiff refused to settle unless it was also made public, but still, no judge.
Shachar
Yes. It's a good thing Israel employs a piece of paper inside an envelop. Don't get me wrong. You can cheat with that as well, but it's much harder, and it's much harder to do that on a large scale. Shachar
This story is important because it gives me, as a citizen of a country that has not switch to electronic voting on the one hand, and which has somewhat non-corrupt politicians (it has its own share of corrupt ones, mind you), a tool to show the well meaning ignorant politician the difference between "can" and "will". This may well prove to be the key to making sure electronic voting does not enter here (and if it does, that it would happen properly). Shachar
I have yet to see an installer builder where you cannot override this.
Demanding that a user agrees to the GPL in order to use the program can be read to violate section 5 of the GPL v2 (not sure about v3).
Shachar
I am what you would call "consistent condom user", in that I used it with every partner I've ever been with that haven't been committed to me in the three months before having sex, and then still use it until we were both tested for HIV.
And I HATE condoms. I can totally sympathize with the commenter above me saying it feels vaguely warm. I can totally sympathize with the garden hose analogy. While not strictly impossible to have good sex with a condom, it does make it hard work, and much less fun than it usually is (and what it should be). One of the many many many things I'm grateful for about my wife is that we can do away with this particular piece of polymer.
The distinction you made between people who do and do not use condoms exists, of course, but I attribute it to the distinction between people who care more or less about their health. If a study can find out how to make condoms less despiseable, and thus make the world a somewhat less disease riddled place, I say go for it.
Shachar
I will not go this far, no. Certainly not for the whole project. Certain areas within the project are more likely to get this type of response, yes.
Also, according to Alexandre himself in one of the wineconf, the patches he's likely to drop without a word are not those that are entirely bad (those get rejected), but those that he cannot make his mind whether they are or are not bad.
The problem is that this gets frustrating. When I was a regular Wine hacker, this wasn't so bad. I would persist long enough and in the end something would go in (not always because I made the patch better, mind you). The epoll case was a turning point, as far as I'm concerned, because of several reasons:
So, in answer to your question, this attitude SOMETIMES holds the project back.
I love working on Wine, and what I'm describing here is by no means the main reason I'm no longer active, but it does take some of the fun out of it. As you know, if you're not working on a free software project for fun, why work on it?
I don't know whether to point it out, as I have no idea whether it is relevant or not, but Mike, today, is also not an active Wine hacker. He wouldn't answer my question regarding what happened, but I got the impression it was something personal (he was a CodeWeavers employee, but he also did lots of pro-bono work on Wine). Let me assure you that losing him is a far greater loss for Wine than losing me.
Just to be clear - I'm not the one calling for a fork. Also, I know Codeweavers (both the company and the people running it) and do not tend to buy into the commercial/free conflict conspiracy theory. Still, I do think that Wines leadership has an attitude problem that affects the project.
Shachar
You must have a vastly different definition of "easy" than the one I know. These are from a long time ago, as I have, sadly, not been an active Wine hacker recently.
I did not manage to find much more than fragments of the epoll patches. I have a link to one of the (many) review cycles I sent out to the list here, and one of the review cycles Mike did here. Like I said, neither were accepted once submitted, despite the many review cycles.
As for the Window posistion patch, the patch is here. I have the IRC log saved. If you want, I can email it to you. The bottom line was that we disagreed on code aesthetics.
Shachar
I have had quite a bit of code go into Wine. The entire BiDi support was done by me, as well as some other parts (I did a rewrite of wineboot, for example). It is very hard to claim I don't know how Wine works, or how to submit patches. I even used to appear in Wine's "who's who" page, and have an interview with me for WWN.
Not only that, but Alexandre knows me. The last time we met (wineconf in Germany, a few years ago) we had a (good humor) conversation that went something along those lines. I mentioned I don't have much time to work on Wine any more, and that maybe it doesn't matter because my patches get rejected anyways. He said that it's too bad, becuase he likes rejecting my patches. I'm saying this because I want to stress that having your patches rejected is all a part of working on FOSS, and is not what I was referring to at my grand parent post.
But the rejections I'm talking about are not explanations received on the list, where communication is short. The actual patches were flat out ignored. The explanations were received on IRC, where communication was bidirectional, and there was no misunderstanding that resulted from lack of time.
And yet, the above reasons were all that I received.
Shachar
The problem is that Alexandre Juliard, the project's dictator, often rejects patches with reasons that contain no useful feedback except the patronizing statement "you can do better", or "it's not right".
I've had a patch I wrote for moving the wineserver code to epoll rejects because "it was not pretty". Michael Mccormak then made two more attempts at a rewrite that were rejected for precisely the same reason. In the end (several months later), Alexandre wrote his own version. At the time people explained this behavior to me as "wineserver is something he is very sensitive about".
Several years later I wrote a patch to something to do with the Window reordering being ignored (with no error message) in some cases. It is a pretty unbelievable piece of Windows mislogic, so I wrote a test case to prove this is, indeed, the behavior on Windows. The test case was rejected because it was not pretty enough. When I asked for more specific feedback, Alexandre responded with "If I can think of better ways to do it, so can you".
A project with as many contributers as Wine should have room for more than one programming styles than one. I thought it was only me for a while, but if it made it to slashdot, obviously it's not.
Shachar
Yes, I had clients that made displays for aircrafts too. You can get MS windows into the cockpit, but only as Class 2 certification (which isn't much). Your program could probably display maps, but could not show the aircraft position on the map (as that is something that requires Class 3, and Windows cannot pass class 3).
In fact, those clients of mine had a machine running Class 3. It was a version of Linux so stripped down (to save on certification costs) that it didn't even have a complete TCP/IP stack.
And the funny thing is, almost no-one wrote any Class 3 applications for that platform. The development cost was so high nobody wanted to touch it. All of the actual applications were Class 2, most of them for Windows. In fact, the device only has one Class 3 application, but that one turned into a killer app (not literaly, thankfully) - it calculates the required throttle setting during takeoff to save up to 20% of fuel usage.
Shachar
Possibly this is just an exercise in reverse psychology:
Shachar
From the article:
A coin toss is usually referenced as the worst way to try and predict a 50:50 chance event. Disregarding all of the obvious problems (i.e. - that the bits on a hard disk do not have a 50:50 distribution (unless compressed or encrypted), and that a coin is not necessarily the most random thing, I'm still left with a puzzler
If his methods have less chance of prediction than a coin toss, all he has to do is add a "not" gate at the end of his prediction algorithm, and he'll have better chance than a coin toss.
To take this to an extreme, assuming random incoming data, a coin toss has 50% chance of a hit for the next bit. If you find a method that has a 0% chance of a hit, then just flip its output and you'll get a 100% chance of a hit. Lower chances than a coin toss actually mean a good prediction ability
Shachar