I worked on the same platform in school (NachOS). It was originally in C++, then moved or branched to Java, so it is possible that the code is that ancient (although I imagine the OP was just exaggurating for rhetorical effect).
I learned more about reading, understanding, debugging, and extending real-life code in that class than any other; learning operating system fundamentals was just an added bonus. Unfortunately I took a compilers course using Haskell the next term, forever impairing my ability to enjoy working in Java.
If you live in the US, you have no general right to privacy, only constitutional protections against government violating your privacy. This is treading into philisophical territory, but I think that any law which somehow protects your privacy would be an immoral transgression upon my freedom (excluding laws against actions for which the privacy violation is a side effect of the illegal act, e.g. trespassing).
I'm a developer, but I actually agree with you about the excuses thing. It would, howveer, require everyone to cooperate on the protocol, so it's not something the community could implement unilaterally (ie it would only work if every link in the chain conformed).
Not an email expert but I think this problem is simply (if not easily) solvable by requiring a positive confirmation from each mail server, with a final confirmation when the recipient client "pulls" it, upon which the confirmation signal would follow the return chain back to the sender. This would require every conforming mail server to keep a log of all "open transactions", which would probably get very sizable for high-traffic servers and/or with delays.
I got my Treo mainly for Google everywhere. With Sprint, I pay 15 bucks a month on top of my voice plan for unlimited, unmetered access. Not cheap, but not prohibitively expensive for those who would value "Google everywhere".
What's odd about Nintendo's online stance is that they actually produced a broadband adapter, but then only a single game that actually works with it (Phantasy Star, as I recall). I'm not sure what you see as their strategy was as much intentional as it was a flameout.
Some games had LAN support. Double Dash on multiple Cubes/TVs is worth the price of admission.
Sadly, I think you're probably overestimating the intellectual curiosity of the average adult human.
That factor, coupled with the stereotypical inability of older folk to really internalize new technological advances (yes I know there are plenty who do, talking about averages here). My uncle is a leader in engineering research but still does all his information acquisition (including the geeky recreational type) the old-fashioned way. There is of course the issue that much of the 'net can't really be considered a trusted, authoritative source, but at least as a place to quickly glean and survey things I find it invaluable.
Other older folk I've talked to, as I stated, just aren't very interested in the possibilities. Although when presented with a specific, practical problem, I'll often remind them that they can likely find a solution on the internet and they seem receptive. But it doesn't seem to sink in.
[don't flame me geezers, I do recognize that some of you can adapt]
Perhaps I misread your phrasing, but my understanding has always been that copyright is not the legal recognition of natural rights, but rather a legal fiction devised to further the progress of the useful sciences and arts and thus society as a whole.
Certainly, there's nothing natural about not being able to copy a music CD...
Think about it this way: there are an absolute ton of unlikely things that could happen, so it's pretty much guaranteed that some of them will happen. But it still surprises us when they do.
The annual National Geographic Survey had thrown up the sad fact that only 23 out of 56 young Americans knew the whereabouts of the Pacific Ocean
This is just incorrectly reported, and none of the comments so far bothered to validate it. The truth is that young americans got 23 out of 56 questions right, on average. 71% could locate the Pacific. Nothing to be proud of, but I wonder how the Guardian made such a boneheaded mistake.
I don't follow. Just accelerate at 1g for 5 times as long (around a year) and everyone's comfortable. Accelerating the other direction at Alpha Centauri would be another year and you're still well under a decade for a one-way trip.
This is the best review I've read of the game so far, probably because I was thinking along the exact same lines. Once I got over the novelty of the excellent technology, the "terminator" syndrome relegated the game to the same category as every other FPS, with the addition of nice graphics and atmosphere and the "monsters jumping out of the shadows" gimmick.
All in all an impressive achievement, but not an exceptionally fun experience for gamers like myself (and I'm playing on veteren, dabbled in competetive gaming, blah blah etc.)
Aureal was doing this for gaming, had (I believe) first-order wavetracing in their Vortex 2 line of chipsets. Sounded incredible with headphones in Half-Life. Creative litigated them out of existence (Aureal actually won the lawsuit, but spent all their money on their defense).
The patent is on a GRAPHICS algorithm, not sound. A stencil shadowing trick that Carmack was quite proud of independently discovering, and without which would have certainly made Doom 3 a bit slower (and uglier, code-wise, the z-fail method is the more elegant solution).
I am a bit surprised that they caved on this considering there was certainly prior art, but I definitely don't blame id. They don't have an army of lawyers.
If I ever make consumer oriented Open Source software, I intend to sell it on my webpage, and not provide it for free download. I will tell them that if they can't afford the download, they should get a copy from their friends. I will provide source with the download. If someone wants to grab my source and try to compete with me in selling it under a different name, they're welcome to try, but I'm fairly confident that I can continue to add value to this software that I originally wrote better than anybody else, and they will eventually decide to rejoin my project anyway.
I wish this were possible. I don't see how you could make money with this model, when someone could take every version of your project you release and sell it for less elsewhere. The cost of the download would quickly approach the cost of bandwidth + overhead.
I think the point he was making is that intellectual property isn't a subset of property, but rather a completely different creature. The law recognizes copyrights, patents, and trademarks. To say that any of these confer "ownership" of the intangible idea would be incorrect - they merely secure certain kinds of exclusive rights to the idea, and all for a limited time as required by the constitution.
These protections are a good thing, but large corporations are twisting the public perception of IP to make people think they "own" their ideas, and the public forgets that these three forms of IP exist only as a compromise between the need for economic incentive to produce works and the natural right to freely share information.
Your original post really deserves to be +5. If people would just make more of an effort to be objective and see the other guy's point of view our democracy would be so much greater.
I was under the impression that he was informed of the first attack before going into the school, and was informed of the second while reading, upon which he continued to read for what many would think an inappropriate amount of time. Certainly he realized it was an attack after the second plane hit (hell, you can see it on his face).
I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I think you would be violating copyright law in that case. EULAs are only for provisions above and beyond standard copyright protections.
Amen to this. I disliked math up until my third term of calc in college, when I began to realize it could be understood as a completely logical system and not just arbitrary rules and problem-solving procedures.
I imagine many people realized this earlier than myself, but elementary and secondary education didn't do the best job of presenting math as more than, say, a solving quadratic equations HOWTO.
Adrian Carmack, Sandy Peterson, and John Romero who definitely was more famous than J. Carmack for a time. I don't think McGee even worked on Doom come to think of it. . . but I do completely agree with you, it always baffled me why they put his name in the title.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked on the same platform in school (NachOS). It was originally in C++, then moved or branched to Java, so it is possible that the code is that ancient (although I imagine the OP was just exaggurating for rhetorical effect).
I learned more about reading, understanding, debugging, and extending real-life code in that class than any other; learning operating system fundamentals was just an added bonus. Unfortunately I took a compilers course using Haskell the next term, forever impairing my ability to enjoy working in Java.
If you live in the US, you have no general right to privacy, only constitutional protections against government violating your privacy. This is treading into philisophical territory, but I think that any law which somehow protects your privacy would be an immoral transgression upon my freedom (excluding laws against actions for which the privacy violation is a side effect of the illegal act, e.g. trespassing).
Seconded. In a free country, we don't compromise some people's liberties for the interests of "society as a whole".
I'm a developer, but I actually agree with you about the excuses thing. It would, howveer, require everyone to cooperate on the protocol, so it's not something the community could implement unilaterally (ie it would only work if every link in the chain conformed).
Not an email expert but I think this problem is simply (if not easily) solvable by requiring a positive confirmation from each mail server, with a final confirmation when the recipient client "pulls" it, upon which the confirmation signal would follow the return chain back to the sender. This would require every conforming mail server to keep a log of all "open transactions", which would probably get very sizable for high-traffic servers and/or with delays.
I got my Treo mainly for Google everywhere. With Sprint, I pay 15 bucks a month on top of my voice plan for unlimited, unmetered access. Not cheap, but not prohibitively expensive for those who would value "Google everywhere".
+1 if I had mod points today, truly insightful
Sadly, I think you're probably overestimating the intellectual curiosity of the average adult human.
That factor, coupled with the stereotypical inability of older folk to really internalize new technological advances (yes I know there are plenty who do, talking about averages here). My uncle is a leader in engineering research but still does all his information acquisition (including the geeky recreational type) the old-fashioned way. There is of course the issue that much of the 'net can't really be considered a trusted, authoritative source, but at least as a place to quickly glean and survey things I find it invaluable.
Other older folk I've talked to, as I stated, just aren't very interested in the possibilities. Although when presented with a specific, practical problem, I'll often remind them that they can likely find a solution on the internet and they seem receptive. But it doesn't seem to sink in.
[don't flame me geezers, I do recognize that some of you can adapt]
Everybody else: "What's a motherboard?"
Perhaps I misread your phrasing, but my understanding has always been that copyright is not the legal recognition of natural rights, but rather a legal fiction devised to further the progress of the useful sciences and arts and thus society as a whole.
Certainly, there's nothing natural about not being able to copy a music CD...
Think about it this way: there are an absolute ton of unlikely things that could happen, so it's pretty much guaranteed that some of them will happen. But it still surprises us when they do.
I don't follow. Just accelerate at 1g for 5 times as long (around a year) and everyone's comfortable. Accelerating the other direction at Alpha Centauri would be another year and you're still well under a decade for a one-way trip.
This is the best review I've read of the game so far, probably because I was thinking along the exact same lines. Once I got over the novelty of the excellent technology, the "terminator" syndrome relegated the game to the same category as every other FPS, with the addition of nice graphics and atmosphere and the "monsters jumping out of the shadows" gimmick.
All in all an impressive achievement, but not an exceptionally fun experience for gamers like myself (and I'm playing on veteren, dabbled in competetive gaming, blah blah etc.)
Aureal was doing this for gaming, had (I believe) first-order wavetracing in their Vortex 2 line of chipsets. Sounded incredible with headphones in Half-Life. Creative litigated them out of existence (Aureal actually won the lawsuit, but spent all their money on their defense).
The patent is on a GRAPHICS algorithm, not sound. A stencil shadowing trick that Carmack was quite proud of independently discovering, and without which would have certainly made Doom 3 a bit slower (and uglier, code-wise, the z-fail method is the more elegant solution).
I am a bit surprised that they caved on this considering there was certainly prior art, but I definitely don't blame id. They don't have an army of lawyers.
seppuku
I think the point he was making is that intellectual property isn't a subset of property, but rather a completely different creature. The law recognizes copyrights, patents, and trademarks. To say that any of these confer "ownership" of the intangible idea would be incorrect - they merely secure certain kinds of exclusive rights to the idea, and all for a limited time as required by the constitution.
These protections are a good thing, but large corporations are twisting the public perception of IP to make people think they "own" their ideas, and the public forgets that these three forms of IP exist only as a compromise between the need for economic incentive to produce works and the natural right to freely share information.
Your original post really deserves to be +5. If people would just make more of an effort to be objective and see the other guy's point of view our democracy would be so much greater.
I was under the impression that he was informed of the first attack before going into the school, and was informed of the second while reading, upon which he continued to read for what many would think an inappropriate amount of time. Certainly he realized it was an attack after the second plane hit (hell, you can see it on his face).
I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I think you would be violating copyright law in that case. EULAs are only for provisions above and beyond standard copyright protections.
Jeez, didn't it used to be a station wagon of CDs?
Amen to this. I disliked math up until my third term of calc in college, when I began to realize it could be understood as a completely logical system and not just arbitrary rules and problem-solving procedures.
I imagine many people realized this earlier than myself, but elementary and secondary education didn't do the best job of presenting math as more than, say, a solving quadratic equations HOWTO.
Adrian Carmack, Sandy Peterson, and John Romero who definitely was more famous than J. Carmack for a time. I don't think McGee even worked on Doom come to think of it. . . but I do completely agree with you, it always baffled me why they put his name in the title.