" 4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License."
OK, it is less explicit than I remembered. Your rights are terminated once you've violated the GPL. They do not automatically become restored if you belatedly come back into compliance.
I've read how the FSF has used this threat as a big stick to wave at companies not in compliance.
I'm surprised that the violating companies have got off so lightly - publish the source and keep going as you were.
If it were my GPLed code, I think I'd tell during negotiations (well, demands) prior to legal action that if they publish the source now, they can continue, but if I have to take them to court, they'll be forever forbidden from using the code. (The GPL explicitly allows this strategy.)
That depends on what the dominent cause of aging is.
One theory is that it is just too metabolically expensive to run a really good error checking system on non-germ-line cells.* As our cells divide, errors accumulate, more of them operate with reduced efficiency or not at all, and we see the result as aging. Fixing up the telomeres wouldn't help this.
An analogy: Imagine when you buy a new car, you get 10 sets of extra tires. You can use those tires on your car, but not get any more. Once the 10th set is used, the car is useless. The telomere fix would be like having an inexhaustable supply of tires - but about the time you've used the 10 sets of tires, the car is falling apart anyhow.
* The argument goes that if you spend all that energy on error checking, you have less to spend on reproduction. Sure, you potentially get to reproduce for much longer, but for most of our evolutionary history, it was seldom age that killed our ancestors.
"In the retrospect the Comcast bid for Disney and AOL buying Time Warner start making sense."
A company riding a sharemarket bubble exchanged some of its overpriced shares for a real company with real assets and real profits, and which had some synergy with the aquiring company.
What is it about that which didn't make sense at the time?
(Disclaimer - I know little about business, share markets, or the AOL/Time-Warner deal. Feel free to flame me to a crisp if I've misrepresented the situation.)
I'd guess that they wanted a publicity photo, and took appropriate precautions:
(1) Ensure the desired dish position and sun position cause the focal point to be somewhere harmless. (2) Slew to desired position with shutters closed (3) Open shutters (4) Take photo (5) close shutters.
However this is speculation on my part. As a visiting astronomer, if I'd tried this, I expect they would have been Not Impressed.
The rainbow does, however suggest a certain spontineity/opportunism in the taking of the photo.
Re:Ha! You call that a solar death ray?
on
The Solar Death Ray
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I surrender.
Under perfect conditions, you should be able to reach the surface temperature of the sun - about 5600 C. This will be reduced by atmospheric absorption, imperfect reflectivity of your mirrors, etc.
Ha! You call that a solar death ray?
on
The Solar Death Ray
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
THIS is a solar death ray: 10 metres of high-precision parabolic polished aluminium. (And there are bigger ones out there in the world too.)
I've observed there. Because it is radio astronomy, we could observe before sunset and after sunrise, but for some reason we had strict instructions to never let the sun fall on the dish. (That includes the back, but that was to do with thermal distortion of the dish, rather than frying the focus.)
I also used my HP48SX calculator (running a terminal emulator) to command the telescope to slew. Because of this, I claim the CSO as world's the largest and most expensive peripheral for a pocket calculator.
I started self-teaching myself Latin a few years ago (now abandoned.) As part of the process, I wrote a Perl program that could generate random sentences, each sentence in both English and Latin.
The state of the software is very crude, and I never got past present-active-indicative, but if anyone cares to pick it up, I can slap a GPL on it and toss it to them.
Here's some sample output. The sentences could be made a bit more sensible if more care was put into the word lists and sentence forms. (And yes, there are probably some errors in the Latin too.)
I love your greedy angers. tuas iras avaras amo.
The gate sees the life's sons to the gate. porta portae filios vitae videt.
I am a gate. porta sum.
You give ancient sailors with a Roman field. nautas antiquas agro Romano datis.
We satisfy my greedy male friend. meam amicum avaram satiamus.
I am a poet. poeta sum.
We save your Roman boy. tuam puerum Romanam servamus.
You conserve ancient monies with a greedy number. pecunias antiquas numero avaro conservatis.
You owe ancient fatherlands with a great boy. patrias antiquas puero magno debetis.
At constant speed, the momentum is irrelevant. It affects how quickly you decelerate once you cease applying power: the heavier bike will decelerate more slowly.
In our idealized model, both bikes need the same power to maintain the same speed. (In the real world, the bigger power plant will have more internal friction, the heavier bike will have more tire friction, and so will need slightly more power. The heaver/more powerful bike will also tend to have higher drag.)
Trust me on this - I have a PhD in astrophysics.
It may feel like you're using more gas on a lighter bike to go at the same speed, but that would be because the lighter bike has a smaller engine, so you're closer to max throttle. (This all assumes the two engines have the same efficiency. This may not be the case, and relative efficiencies could vary with power output. I don't know much about internal combustion engine efficiency, so I can't comment on this.)
Despite the nay-sayers (sibling posts to this one), this is pretty much right - although perhaps a bit misleading.
The power/force required to maintain constant speed against wind resistance is independent of the weight of the bike.
If we had two bikes, identical except for weight, then in vacuum the lighter bike has better accleration. In atmosphere, it still has better acceleration, but not by as much, so indeed it costs 'more acceleration to stay at speed'. This is, however misleading - the lighter bike still performs better, having better acceleration at any speed (but the same top speed.)
If we had two bikes with different weight and power proportional to weight (including rider), they will perform identically in vacuum, but in air the more powerful (heavier) bike will have a greater top speed.
So this isn't a problem with weight, it is a problem with power. The original statement ("needs more acceleration to stay at speed despite drag") is technically correct, but highly misleading.
While this is a responsible way to behave, I think you're playing Russian roulette. I've seen many news reports of people facing criminal or civil action for doing exactly what you describe - and, as the French case demonstrates, the courts are not always reasonable.
If you haven't already done so, have a serious talk to your lawyer about this.
Mt Ruapehu, (vulcanocam) one of our vulcanos, became active for about a year in 1995/1996 and is now pregnant with a lahar. We're probably about a year away from birth. The event is highly anticipated, with special communication links set up so that the neighbours can know as soon as possible.
(No disrespect for the victims of Tangiwai is intended by the light-hearted nature of this post.)
The point is that they assert that the new version will be "a new era in... reliablity", but provide neither evidence nor argument that this will be the case.
Do you mean to interpret the sentence as "the beta is less reliable than the final product"?
The full sentence is "This beta is not for the faint of heart, and should not be considered as reliable or be used in a production environment."
I don't think this can support your interpretation (or what I take it is your interpretation.) It means "the software is not currently reliable", or at least "the software has not been proven to be reliable."
A fine summary, but I'm going to nit-pick on the order in which the experiments were done.
What the double slit experiment did was allow us to show that light is both.
The double slit experiment showed us that light was a wave. This understanding allowed a Grand Unified Theory of Optics (not that they called it that) which explained reflection, refraction and diffraction in terms of waves.
We didn't know light was both until Einstein's 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect (for which he won his Nobel.)
For electrons, it was the other way around. First we knew they were particles, then the electron double split experiment proved that they also behaved as waves.
So they admit the did these DDOS's, cut a deal to finger Mr Big in return for immunity from prosecution.
If your company were one of the ones damaged by their admitted DDOS, can you sue them for damages?
This is a special case of a more general question: If a person has been accused of a crime, and been processed by the justice system, can the victims of the crime also sue for reparation? (Well, in one far-too-celebrated case (OJ) they did.)
I can see various arguments why it would be a good or bad thing to allow this, various possible compromises, references to weregilds etc., but I'm supposed to be working, not writing an essay, so I'll quit here.
"The e-mail infrastructure is beginning to fail," Linford warned. "You'll see huge delays in e-mail and servers collapsing. It's the beginning of the e-mail meltdown."
Actually, I'm thankful for the Apple///'s chip-unseating problem. I never had an Apple///, but I heard about the problem, and its solution, at the time. Years later when my '486 Packard Bell stopped working, I tried the 'drop' method, and it worked. It had to be reapplied every few months, however.
Finally, about 2 weeks before my PhD thesis was due, the 'drop' method didn't resurrect my computer. After about half an hour of poking at chips, attempting restarts etc, it eventually came back, but although Linux reported the same BogoMIPs, it was noticably about 1/4 the speed it had been. My theory is somehow it came back with cache disabled. (Cache was on separate chips in those days.)
I am an old-timer whose played with an Apple II - I wrote a 'life' cellular automaton in assembler to run at 8 generations per second, and I used to manually hack floppy disk blocks to do things like undeleting files. However, I don't remember what "call -151" does. (I think it would jump into some 'monitor' ROM routine.)
After some more research: It looks like you just misremembered the price. "In April 1980, Commodore president Jack Tramiel ordered the development of a computer that could sell for under $300 US." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20
Slashdot Mirror
" 4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program
except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt
otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is
void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License."
OK, it is less explicit than I remembered. Your rights are terminated once you've violated the GPL. They do not automatically become restored if you belatedly come back into compliance.
I've read how the FSF has used this threat as a big stick to wave at companies not in compliance.
I'm surprised that the violating companies have got off so lightly - publish the source and keep going as you were.
If it were my GPLed code, I think I'd tell during negotiations (well, demands) prior to legal action that if they publish the source now, they can continue, but if I have to take them to court, they'll be forever forbidden from using the code. (The GPL explicitly allows this strategy.)
That depends on what the dominent cause of aging is.
One theory is that it is just too metabolically expensive to run a really good error checking system on non-germ-line cells.* As our cells divide, errors accumulate, more of them operate with reduced efficiency or not at all, and we see the result as aging. Fixing up the telomeres wouldn't help this.
An analogy: Imagine when you buy a new car, you get 10 sets of extra tires. You can use those tires on your car, but not get any more. Once the 10th set is used, the car is useless. The telomere fix would be like having an inexhaustable supply of tires - but about the time you've used the 10 sets of tires, the car is falling apart anyhow.
* The argument goes that if you spend all that energy on error checking, you have less to spend on reproduction. Sure, you potentially get to reproduce for much longer, but for most of our evolutionary history, it was seldom age that killed our ancestors.
"In the retrospect the Comcast bid for Disney and AOL buying Time Warner start making sense."
A company riding a sharemarket bubble exchanged some of its overpriced shares for a real company with real assets and real profits, and which had some synergy with the aquiring company.
What is it about that which didn't make sense at the time?
(Disclaimer - I know little about business, share markets, or the AOL/Time-Warner deal. Feel free to flame me to a crisp if I've misrepresented the situation.)
This would violate the GPL: you don't have the source to whatever GUI extras CherryOS have added.
I'd guess that they wanted a publicity photo, and took appropriate precautions:
(1) Ensure the desired dish position and sun position cause the focal point to be somewhere harmless.
(2) Slew to desired position with shutters closed
(3) Open shutters
(4) Take photo
(5) close shutters.
However this is speculation on my part. As a visiting astronomer, if I'd tried this, I expect they would have been Not Impressed.
The rainbow does, however suggest a certain spontineity/opportunism in the taking of the photo.
Thanks - you just made my day. :-).
I surrender.
Under perfect conditions, you should be able to reach the surface temperature of the sun - about 5600 C. This will be reduced by atmospheric absorption, imperfect reflectivity of your mirrors, etc.
THIS is a solar death ray: 10 metres of high-precision parabolic polished aluminium. (And there are bigger ones out there in the world too.)
I've observed there. Because it is radio astronomy, we could observe before sunset and after sunrise, but for some reason we had strict instructions to never let the sun fall on the dish. (That includes the back, but that was to do with thermal distortion of the dish, rather than frying the focus.)
I also used my HP48SX calculator (running a terminal emulator) to command the telescope to slew. Because of this, I claim the CSO as world's the largest and most expensive peripheral for a pocket calculator.
I started self-teaching myself Latin a few years ago (now abandoned.) As part of the process, I wrote a Perl program that could generate random sentences, each sentence in both English and Latin.
The state of the software is very crude, and I never got past present-active-indicative, but if anyone cares to pick it up, I can slap a GPL on it and toss it to them.
Here's some sample output. The sentences could be made a bit more sensible if more care was put into the word lists and sentence forms. (And yes, there are probably some errors in the Latin too.)
I love your greedy angers.
tuas iras avaras amo.
The gate sees the life's sons to the gate.
porta portae filios vitae videt.
I am a gate.
porta sum.
You give ancient sailors with a Roman field.
nautas antiquas agro Romano datis.
We satisfy my greedy male friend.
meam amicum avaram satiamus.
I am a poet.
poeta sum.
We save your Roman boy.
tuam puerum Romanam servamus.
You conserve ancient monies with a greedy number.
pecunias antiquas numero avaro conservatis.
You owe ancient fatherlands with a great boy.
patrias antiquas puero magno debetis.
I've been collecting Latin /. sigs (including the above) in my journal, along with my feeble attempts at translation.
At constant speed, the momentum is irrelevant. It affects how quickly you decelerate once you cease applying power: the heavier bike will decelerate more slowly.
In our idealized model, both bikes need the same power to maintain the same speed. (In the real world, the bigger power plant will have more internal friction, the heavier bike will have more tire friction, and so will need slightly more power. The heaver/more powerful bike will also tend to have higher drag.)
Trust me on this - I have a PhD in astrophysics.
It may feel like you're using more gas on a lighter bike to go at the same speed, but that would be because the lighter bike has a smaller engine, so you're closer to max throttle. (This all assumes the two engines have the same efficiency. This may not be the case, and relative efficiencies could vary with power output. I don't know much about internal combustion engine efficiency, so I can't comment on this.)
Despite the nay-sayers (sibling posts to this one), this is pretty much right - although perhaps a bit misleading.
The power/force required to maintain constant speed against wind resistance is independent of the weight of the bike.
If we had two bikes, identical except for weight, then in vacuum the lighter bike has better accleration. In atmosphere, it still has better acceleration, but not by as much, so indeed it costs 'more acceleration to stay at speed'. This is, however misleading - the lighter bike still performs better, having better acceleration at any speed (but the same top speed.)
If we had two bikes with different weight and power proportional to weight (including rider), they will perform identically in vacuum, but in air the more powerful (heavier) bike will have a greater top speed.
So this isn't a problem with weight, it is a problem with power. The original statement ("needs more acceleration to stay at speed despite drag") is technically correct, but highly misleading.
While this is a responsible way to behave, I think you're playing Russian roulette. I've seen many news reports of people facing criminal or civil action for doing exactly what you describe - and, as the French case demonstrates, the courts are not always reasonable.
If you haven't already done so, have a serious talk to your lawyer about this.
Mt Ruapehu, (vulcanocam) one of our vulcanos, became active for about a year in 1995/1996 and is now pregnant with a lahar. We're probably about a year away from birth. The event is highly anticipated, with special communication links set up so that the neighbours can know as soon as possible.
(No disrespect for the victims of Tangiwai is intended by the light-hearted nature of this post.)
Thanks - this is really what I was getting at in a round-about way. My bovine excrement detector was triggered by the reliability claim.
I hope OO 2.0 will be as good as they claim, but this article looks like cheerleading, not reporting.
The point is that they assert that the new version will be "a new era in ... reliablity", but provide neither evidence nor argument that this will be the case.
Do you mean to interpret the sentence as "the beta is less reliable than the final product"?
The full sentence is "This beta is not for the faint of heart, and should not be considered as reliable or be used in a production environment."
I don't think this can support your interpretation (or what I take it is your interpretation.) It means "the software is not currently reliable", or at least "the software has not been proven to be reliable."
"... OpenOffice.org 2.0 will usher in a new era of functionality, reliability ..."
..."
"This beta is not for the faint of heart, and should not be considered as reliable
So on the basis of trying out some unreliable software, we conclude that the final version will be reliable?
While it may turn out to be true, the logic is lacking here.
A fine summary, but I'm going to nit-pick on the order in which the experiments were done.
What the double slit experiment did was allow us to show that light is both.
The double slit experiment showed us that light was a wave. This understanding allowed a Grand Unified Theory of Optics (not that they called it that) which explained reflection, refraction and diffraction in terms of waves.
We didn't know light was both until Einstein's 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect (for which he won his Nobel.)
For electrons, it was the other way around. First we knew they were particles, then the electron double split experiment proved that they also behaved as waves.
So they admit the did these DDOS's, cut a deal to finger Mr Big in return for immunity from prosecution.
If your company were one of the ones damaged by their admitted DDOS, can you sue them for damages?
This is a special case of a more general question: If a person has been accused of a crime, and been processed by the justice system, can the victims of the crime also sue for reparation? (Well, in one far-too-celebrated case (OJ) they did.)
I can see various arguments why it would be a good or bad thing to allow this, various possible compromises, references to weregilds etc., but I'm supposed to be working, not writing an essay, so I'll quit here.
"The e-mail infrastructure is beginning to fail," Linford warned. "You'll see huge delays in e-mail and servers collapsing. It's the beginning of the e-mail meltdown."
Actually, I'm thankful for the Apple ///'s chip-unseating problem. I never had an Apple ///, but I heard about the problem, and its solution, at the time. Years later when my '486 Packard Bell stopped working, I tried the 'drop' method, and it worked. It had to be reapplied every few months, however.
Finally, about 2 weeks before my PhD thesis was due, the 'drop' method didn't resurrect my computer. After about half an hour of poking at chips, attempting restarts etc, it eventually came back, but although Linux reported the same BogoMIPs, it was noticably about 1/4 the speed it had been. My theory is somehow it came back with cache disabled. (Cache was on separate chips in those days.)
I am an old-timer whose played with an Apple II - I wrote a 'life' cellular automaton in assembler to run at 8 generations per second, and I used to manually hack floppy disk blocks to do things like undeleting files. However, I don't remember what "call -151" does. (I think it would jump into some 'monitor' ROM routine.)
After some more research: It looks like you just misremembered the price. "In April 1980, Commodore president Jack Tramiel ordered the development of a computer that could sell for under $300 US." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20