This is like a modern cartoon. American children's cartoons tend to be the worst offenders. Backgrounds are usually static while only the foreground is animated. The background might even be drawn with different penmanship or a different style altogether (e.g. a watercolor background). Sometimes the effect works, as it does in some video games, but in particular if a character has to interact with an element of the background, then things start to look very out of place.
My personal favorite example was from a cartoon showing a series of fences. They were mostly soft, pretty detailed. Except every fence had a few panels in a line that were drawn with heavier lines and flatter colors. It was easy to predict that the scene included a character breaking through those panels.
This isn't some kind of EULA situation where a provision in the contract will be thrown out: the cameras are stated to be for non-commercial use because no one paid for a commercial license. Suing would be quick and dirty, and the user would be at fault.
No. There is no provision in the contract to buy a camera stating that it is for personal use only, unless it's clearly marked on the packaging. This means the license could only bind the user if the patents are valid. If they are found to be invalid, there is no consideration and so the license cannot bind the user to anything. If the patents are valid, the user might still be found not to be subject to the license (since they would have to agree to it, and most users aren't even aware of the license's existence - they could still be found to agree without knowledge if there was significant notices attached to the camera that most people would notice stating it could only be used if you agree to the license, but to my knowledge no camera is like that), but then they would be at fault for patent infringement, which generally does not require intent.
Would be tough... Patents are a property right. We don't normally take peoples' property away if they're not using it in ways that we'd like, but maybe you could make an argument under Kelo v. City of New London that it's an eminent domain taking. Plus, it wouldn't be invalidating the patent - it would be assigning it to the government, who then releases it free into the public domain.
Some patent laws provide provisions by which a patent holder can be seen to be abusing their patent and have conditions forced upon them, but these seem to get rarely used (Here's Canada's Patent Act as an example).
The great thing about Gmail is that it is^H^Hwas a very usable email service that didn't try to tie you into a bajillion other parts of a website and other features you aren't really going to use. The more stuff they add, the more likely I am to complain loudly about the death of Unix. If they go far enough (and they're close) I'll do something about it by switching to a more Unixy mail provider, like postfix. The loss of flexibility (nice easy access from anywhere; easy to set up filtering) will be repaid in my sanity.
I seem to have heard this argument before.
The Apollo fire. The loss of the Challenger. Repairs to the Hubble.
The difference here is that they know what the current safe maximum is, so they'll operate it for a while, tear the thing down and replace them with interconnects with higher safe maximums, and start it up again. They are aware that the lower safety factor must also mean a lower-power experiement (not that putting 7 TeV of energy into a single proton is normally considered low power).
Truth is already a defense. This case establishes a new defense; it doesn't invalidate the exsisting ones:
Justification
The statement was true
Privilege
If you have some legal or moral obligation to disclose the defamatory material - for instance, you are providing a reference for someone looking for a job, or you are testifying in court.
Fair comment
You are allowed to criticize as long as it is done fairly and is based on fact.
That's not the meaning of this ruling at all. Because this is a defence, you would have the burden of proof. It's your job to show that you did try to contact them and they refused comment. Furthermore, the tests effectively establish that you must have enough information to justify the possibly-defamatory claim as much as is reasonable given the urgency of the issue. You have to prove that you did everything reasonable to determine if then rumour was true or false and then (and only then) went forward with publishing a report of an unsubstantiated allegation.
In theory, you could concoct a large amount of fake evidence to prove this to the courts, but a) it's not easy b) you'd have to convince them that the other plain was lying when he says you didn't contact him c) it's highly illegal (in Canada, the maximum prison term for perjury is fourteen years) d) the same would be possible without this new defence.
Ugh... I wish people would stop mixing up the difference between trademark and copyright. Notwithstanding that the Vatican is a sovereign state and can do whatever the heck it wants within its boundaries, what they're really declaring is that the trademark of the Pope is going to be reserved for their exclusive use. Copyright isn't even involved here.
Your point is well made, but the UltraHLE threats occurred before the court decision that an emulator is legal. Nowadays, Nintendo's legal department is very careful to sidestep the issue of whether or not the emulator program or a data backup made from a physical medium (as opposed to another copy of the same game downloaded over the Internet) is itself legal, instead focusing on the fact that downloading ROM images of games over the Internet is illegal.
It's worth pointing out that Nintendo merely wants to find out if infringement occurred - they're almost certainly as aware as every other game company that emulation is legal. It's quite possible, however, that there was indeed some copyright infringement, such as in acquiring the game, and they want to be sure that their competitors are playing by the book.
This is reasonable, in my opinion.
The issue is one of anonymity. Someone could (comparatively) easily phreak a machine when a specific person walks into the polling booth so that they could determine that person's vote. The integrity of the results is not compromised, however; there is no threat of vote-stuffing or fraud.
It says you have the license to run it, which would, I suppose, include copying it into RAM since that's how computer programs are usually designed to be run.
Calgary uses what is, IIRC, a custom-built system where each section of street has a 4-digit number assigned. This number is posted on signs placed frequently along the road. Parking lots for which the city charges also get their numbers. There are boxes all over the place - you simply type in your license plate number and zone, and you are parked. You can also set up a prepaid account that is connected to your cell phone - you just dial the number and type in the zone and you are parked. Enforcement is done by a car with lots of cameras that drives around and determines automatically who is illegally parked; I don't know exactly how it works, probably by GPS and photo identification on the license plates. The biggest complaint is that the enforcement is far better than the old system of broken meters everywhere.
I consider any system to be successful if the primary flaw is that it works.
Erlang is probably the best language for servers and similar applications available. Not only is in inherently parallel (though they've only recently actually made the engine multithreaded, as the paralellism is in the software), but it is very easily networked as well. As a result, a well-written Erlang program can only be taken down by simultaneously killing an entire cluster of computers.
What's more, it has a little-seen feature of being able to handle code upgrades to most any component of the program without ever stopping - it keeps two versions of each module (old and new) in memory, and code can be written to automatically ensure a smooth transition into the new code when the upgrade occurs.
If I recall correctly, the Swedish telecom where Erlang was designed had one server running it with 7 continuous years uptime.
[quote]I was rather disappointed at the number of decent head-to-head or co-op games using split screen on the newer consoles. Instead, many games seem to have gone the way of one-player-per-console, playing online.[/quote]Yes. Because when I go to a friend's house and we decide we want to play video games, I'll need to have brought a console, game, television, and all related accessories. Every bit of which my friend already has. Splitscreen is a good thing.
Okay, there's many problems with the benchmarks here, including in the labeling.
The uses of each language aren't analyzed. I've never encountered a desktop application written in Perl, nor have I ever seen a C++ web framework (I'm sure both exist, but they aren't common)
Dependability isn't analyzed. The title specifically says 'dependability'. I can excuse them because well-written Erlang smokes the competition in terms of reliability (Some Erlang-based servers have been running with 100% uptime for years).
This is not a comparison of multiple programming languages. It's a comparison of a haphazard set of environments. For instance, C and C++ are not distinguished, but the various compilers are. On the other hand, C# and F# are grouped the same, even though they operate in the same VM, with the same JIT optimizer, and so on (and Mono, on the other hand, is nowhere to be found.
This is not the first time MS has done this. They have plenty of other standard functions that they have deprecated.
Yes, you read that right. Microsoft is deprecating parts of an ISO Standard all by themselves. Not that this should surprise anyone. I would have absolutely no objection to them proposing to WG14 to deprecate those functions; heck, I'd encourage it! But besides going out and deciding to 'deprecate' parts of the standards, the replacement functions actually violate those same standards.
And the warnings are irritating. You can't write a nice cross-platform library without either spewing tons of warnings or having to put in a bunch of #defines to shut the compiler up. And if you do that, your users get irritated if they depend on these warnings because you just turned them off (and of course, if you don't, they'll complain that your library is unsafe).
Because space telescopes can see radiation distorted or blocked entirely by the atmosphere, and repairing the Hubble is still cheaper than making a new space telescope. Sure, the TMT will have better resolving power, but that won't make it any more able to detect what isn't there.
Slashdot Mirror
Need your computer hacked? There's an app for that.
This is like a modern cartoon. American children's cartoons tend to be the worst offenders. Backgrounds are usually static while only the foreground is animated. The background might even be drawn with different penmanship or a different style altogether (e.g. a watercolor background). Sometimes the effect works, as it does in some video games, but in particular if a character has to interact with an element of the background, then things start to look very out of place.
My personal favorite example was from a cartoon showing a series of fences. They were mostly soft, pretty detailed. Except every fence had a few panels in a line that were drawn with heavier lines and flatter colors. It was easy to predict that the scene included a character breaking through those panels.
Canada's first and, so far, only female Prime Minister also took office by becoming party leader and with no general election in between.
This isn't some kind of EULA situation where a provision in the contract will be thrown out: the cameras are stated to be for non-commercial use because no one paid for a commercial license. Suing would be quick and dirty, and the user would be at fault.
No. There is no provision in the contract to buy a camera stating that it is for personal use only, unless it's clearly marked on the packaging. This means the license could only bind the user if the patents are valid. If they are found to be invalid, there is no consideration and so the license cannot bind the user to anything. If the patents are valid, the user might still be found not to be subject to the license (since they would have to agree to it, and most users aren't even aware of the license's existence - they could still be found to agree without knowledge if there was significant notices attached to the camera that most people would notice stating it could only be used if you agree to the license, but to my knowledge no camera is like that), but then they would be at fault for patent infringement, which generally does not require intent.
Would be tough... Patents are a property right. We don't normally take peoples' property away if they're not using it in ways that we'd like, but maybe you could make an argument under Kelo v. City of New London that it's an eminent domain taking. Plus, it wouldn't be invalidating the patent - it would be assigning it to the government, who then releases it free into the public domain.
Some patent laws provide provisions by which a patent holder can be seen to be abusing their patent and have conditions forced upon them, but these seem to get rarely used (Here's Canada's Patent Act as an example).
The great thing about Gmail is that it is^H^Hwas a very usable email service that didn't try to tie you into a bajillion other parts of a website and other features you aren't really going to use. The more stuff they add, the more likely I am to complain loudly about the death of Unix. If they go far enough (and they're close) I'll do something about it by switching to a more Unixy mail provider, like postfix. The loss of flexibility (nice easy access from anywhere; easy to set up filtering) will be repaid in my sanity.
I seem to have heard this argument before. The Apollo fire. The loss of the Challenger. Repairs to the Hubble.
The difference here is that they know what the current safe maximum is, so they'll operate it for a while, tear the thing down and replace them with interconnects with higher safe maximums, and start it up again. They are aware that the lower safety factor must also mean a lower-power experiement (not that putting 7 TeV of energy into a single proton is normally considered low power).
It's called an aurochs. Research fail.
Truth is already a defense. This case establishes a new defense; it doesn't invalidate the exsisting ones: Justification The statement was true Privilege If you have some legal or moral obligation to disclose the defamatory material - for instance, you are providing a reference for someone looking for a job, or you are testifying in court. Fair comment You are allowed to criticize as long as it is done fairly and is based on fact.
That's not the meaning of this ruling at all. Because this is a defence, you would have the burden of proof. It's your job to show that you did try to contact them and they refused comment. Furthermore, the tests effectively establish that you must have enough information to justify the possibly-defamatory claim as much as is reasonable given the urgency of the issue. You have to prove that you did everything reasonable to determine if then rumour was true or false and then (and only then) went forward with publishing a report of an unsubstantiated allegation.
In theory, you could concoct a large amount of fake evidence to prove this to the courts, but a) it's not easy b) you'd have to convince them that the other plain was lying when he says you didn't contact him c) it's highly illegal (in Canada, the maximum prison term for perjury is fourteen years) d) the same would be possible without this new defence.
Ugh... I wish people would stop mixing up the difference between trademark and copyright. Notwithstanding that the Vatican is a sovereign state and can do whatever the heck it wants within its boundaries, what they're really declaring is that the trademark of the Pope is going to be reserved for their exclusive use. Copyright isn't even involved here.
Your point is well made, but the UltraHLE threats occurred before the court decision that an emulator is legal. Nowadays, Nintendo's legal department is very careful to sidestep the issue of whether or not the emulator program or a data backup made from a physical medium (as opposed to another copy of the same game downloaded over the Internet) is itself legal, instead focusing on the fact that downloading ROM images of games over the Internet is illegal.
How much would you pay for the computer Linus used?
I rest my case.
It's worth pointing out that Nintendo merely wants to find out if infringement occurred - they're almost certainly as aware as every other game company that emulation is legal. It's quite possible, however, that there was indeed some copyright infringement, such as in acquiring the game, and they want to be sure that their competitors are playing by the book.
This is reasonable, in my opinion.
The issue is one of anonymity. Someone could (comparatively) easily phreak a machine when a specific person walks into the polling booth so that they could determine that person's vote. The integrity of the results is not compromised, however; there is no threat of vote-stuffing or fraud.
A system language with run-time reflection is one of the worst ideas I've heard this year.
And I've heard a pitch for a language where the compiler can be changed by a running program... retroactively.
It says you have the license to run it, which would, I suppose, include copying it into RAM since that's how computer programs are usually designed to be run.
Calgary uses what is, IIRC, a custom-built system where each section of street has a 4-digit number assigned. This number is posted on signs placed frequently along the road. Parking lots for which the city charges also get their numbers. There are boxes all over the place - you simply type in your license plate number and zone, and you are parked. You can also set up a prepaid account that is connected to your cell phone - you just dial the number and type in the zone and you are parked. Enforcement is done by a car with lots of cameras that drives around and determines automatically who is illegally parked; I don't know exactly how it works, probably by GPS and photo identification on the license plates. The biggest complaint is that the enforcement is far better than the old system of broken meters everywhere.
I consider any system to be successful if the primary flaw is that it works.
Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which will see this and any similar laws shot to hell.
Erlang is probably the best language for servers and similar applications available. Not only is in inherently parallel (though they've only recently actually made the engine multithreaded, as the paralellism is in the software), but it is very easily networked as well. As a result, a well-written Erlang program can only be taken down by simultaneously killing an entire cluster of computers.
What's more, it has a little-seen feature of being able to handle code upgrades to most any component of the program without ever stopping - it keeps two versions of each module (old and new) in memory, and code can be written to automatically ensure a smooth transition into the new code when the upgrade occurs.
If I recall correctly, the Swedish telecom where Erlang was designed had one server running it with 7 continuous years uptime.
[quote]I was rather disappointed at the number of decent head-to-head or co-op games using split screen on the newer consoles. Instead, many games seem to have gone the way of one-player-per-console, playing online.[/quote]Yes. Because when I go to a friend's house and we decide we want to play video games, I'll need to have brought a console, game, television, and all related accessories. Every bit of which my friend already has. Splitscreen is a good thing.
I'm sure there are others, but I have work to do.
This is not the first time MS has done this. They have plenty of other standard functions that they have deprecated.
Yes, you read that right. Microsoft is deprecating parts of an ISO Standard all by themselves. Not that this should surprise anyone. I would have absolutely no objection to them proposing to WG14 to deprecate those functions; heck, I'd encourage it! But besides going out and deciding to 'deprecate' parts of the standards, the replacement functions actually violate those same standards.
And the warnings are irritating. You can't write a nice cross-platform library without either spewing tons of warnings or having to put in a bunch of #defines to shut the compiler up. And if you do that, your users get irritated if they depend on these warnings because you just turned them off (and of course, if you don't, they'll complain that your library is unsafe).
Screw Microsoft.
Because space telescopes can see radiation distorted or blocked entirely by the atmosphere, and repairing the Hubble is still cheaper than making a new space telescope. Sure, the TMT will have better resolving power, but that won't make it any more able to detect what isn't there.