Half a page? If (x/y)^2 = 2, then x^2 = 2y^2, so x is even. Let z = x/2, now we have 2z^2 = y^2, so y is also even. Thus, any fraction that's equal to the square root of 2 cannot be expressed in lowest terms, so cannot exist. That's, what, three lines at most?
I agree with the main point, though; quite a few of the proofs I do are just boring churning through tens of possible cases. Up to 100 or so it's plausible to do it by hand, although tedious and it's easy to make mistakes; significantly beyond that, though, you're going to want to automate it.
They don't put those inside programs, only between, and I think it's to give people a break to go to the toilet or whatever. (And they can only advertise their own products in them.)
There's still going to be a damages phase, but the numbers likely to be involved are so small that the sides agreed that the judge could set the damages himself, rather than having a jury do it.
There were two phases to the court case. The jury found that Google didn't infringe any of Oracle's patents. They also found that Google had illegally copied nine lines of code from J2SE, and also copied Oracle's Java API (but the judge hasn't yet ruled on whether APIs are even copyrightable, and 9 out of the 12 jurors thought the copying would be legal in this specific case even if they're copyrightable in general). The judge also ruled that Google had used some illegally copied test files.
If the judge finds that APIs aren't copyrightable, my prediction's that Google will be found to owe Oracle $750, the statutory minimum for wilful copyright infringement. Seriously, nine lines?
That wasn't the Jury deciding whether they were copyrightable; they'd been asked about their opinion assuming it was (juries are supposed to determine facts, rather than law). That was the jury (failing to) decide whether Google were nonetheless allowed to use the API under fair use, even if it were copyrighted.
I just used a Firefox addon I happened to have handy (LeetKey, which I originally installed for reading ROT13 but has filters for many other common simple transformations like that too).
Standard functioning temperature range on even the cheapest electronic components is 0-70 degrees Celsius; more expensive components will function some distance outside that range too. You'd pretty much have to go out of your way to construct something that failed in that range, as a result. (What more likely happened was that they constructed something that heated over 70 degrees in the normal course of operation and started failing as a result, although that would be a sign of inadequate testing.)
Not to mention: in the UK votes are cast on paper and counted by hand, and yet the results for the majority of the country still typically come in early the next morning (sometimes I stay up all night to watch them). It is doable, if you have enough people willing to make it work, and we do.
Of note is that part of Google's defence is Sun's public statements that Java was free to use! So there's a bit of a symmetrical situation here. (It's lead to a bit of an interesting row, in the courtroom and also on Twitter, between Schwartz (Sun's old CEO) and various other relevant famous people.)
No way that a web-based service should allow that sort of dictionary attack to succeed. It's not too hard to deliberately spend a sufficiently long time authenticating someone (especially if there have been a bunch of password failures recently on the account / from that IP) that dictionary attacks become unfeasible; it's not like you get to attack the hash. (Look at Wikpedia, for instance, where three login failures cause you to need to fill in a CAPTCHA to log in.)
Log tables apparently used to contain deliberate errors for copyright reasons; the idea was that although you couldn't copyright the mathematical fact of what a number's logarithm is, you could copyright the errors. I have no idea if this was ever tested, or if it worked or not.
In the UK, at least, stop signs are incredibly rare. (I live in a major city, and can only think of one, which is on private land not the main road system.) On the other hand, give-way signs (either triangles next to the road, or double-dashed-lines on the ground) are incredibly common; I think those are probably the equivalent of US yield signs, although I'm not sure how direct it is.
And 4-way stops are unheard of; in the UK, if something like that were needed, they'd put a mini-roundabout there instead.
Is there any actual reason (antitrust, etc.) why Microsoft would have to give OnLive the same licensing grant as everyone else? I can imagine Microsoft simply having arranged an alternative licensing deal with them.
Well, it's probably an indication of whether the exploit is deterministic or probabilistic (probabilistic exploits will need more tries on average before they work). Also, if it's a buffer overflow, the size of the buffer it's overflowing (if it needs a lot of data to overflow, the browser will take a while to download it).
Not a good indicator of how difficult the exploit was to find, though.
We easily have the technology for breaking up lumps of rock that big; it's done all the time in a controlled way in mining, and in an uncontrolled way, I'm reasonably sure there are modern-day military weapons powerful enough. The big problem would be getting it to the asteroid (both the technical problems in getting a weapon up into space, and the political problems involved in placing a weapon in space).
For what it's worth, the laptop I'm currently using (a Toshiba Satellite) had information about the terms and conditions (that I couldn't get a refund for uninstalling Windows) on the outside of the box, visible before I bought it. I was pretty impressed by that; if they're going to let people make an informed decision rather than try to force a contract by the back door, more power to them.
The purpose of goto is to stand in for whatever control structures your language needs but doesn't have. Goto for error cleanup in C is one of those examples: it's the best way to do it in C, but if the language had better support for doing that, a goto wouldn't be necessary.
I thought it used to be a common fraud in some areas to put some substance on one of the voting buttons, so that it was possible to inspect people coming out of the voting booths to see if they'd voted the "wrong" way.
In the UK, this is handled by making all the ballot papers different colors. The voter writes their cross on each ballot, then folds the ballot in half (so that the election officials can't see the vote) and puts it in the relevant box. The election officials check, by looking at the color of the paper, that the voter's putting the paper in the right box, and corrects them if they aren't.
If a paper goes in the wrong box anyway, it can probably be moved to the right one during the count, because the papers are counted by hand. (Whoever was counting the paper would notice it was the wrong color and put it in a separate pile for incorrect ballots, which are checked by the candidates.)
It's worth noting that the Italian Wikipedia actually did shut down for a few days, in response to a proposed law in Italy that they thought would have made it basically illegal for them to operate (apparently, it would have allowed anyone to force a website to publish a retraction of anything said about them with minimal judicial oversight). Here's the Slashdot story on the issue. They hid all content on the site while they were opposing the proposal.
So not only has this happened, on Wikipedia, but at least one major website's actually gone through with a threat like that in the past. I guess it makes it more likely that they'll go through with it again, if necessary.
I remember an anecdote where one of the beta testers of Java, who was using it even before it was released to the public, got turned down for a job due to not having enough Java experience. I forget exactly who it was, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Half a page? If (x/y)^2 = 2, then x^2 = 2y^2, so x is even. Let z = x/2, now we have 2z^2 = y^2, so y is also even. Thus, any fraction that's equal to the square root of 2 cannot be expressed in lowest terms, so cannot exist. That's, what, three lines at most?
I agree with the main point, though; quite a few of the proofs I do are just boring churning through tens of possible cases. Up to 100 or so it's plausible to do it by hand, although tedious and it's easy to make mistakes; significantly beyond that, though, you're going to want to automate it.
As of third edition, AD&D was renamed to just D&D, and Basic D&D was dropped altogether.
Reading your comment made me notice that Microsoft, here, is basically embrace/extend/extinguishing Windows development.
Perhaps they're so far into the habit that they can't not do it even when it destroys their own ecosystem.
They don't put those inside programs, only between, and I think it's to give people a break to go to the toilet or whatever. (And they can only advertise their own products in them.)
There's still going to be a damages phase, but the numbers likely to be involved are so small that the sides agreed that the judge could set the damages himself, rather than having a jury do it.
There were two phases to the court case. The jury found that Google didn't infringe any of Oracle's patents. They also found that Google had illegally copied nine lines of code from J2SE, and also copied Oracle's Java API (but the judge hasn't yet ruled on whether APIs are even copyrightable, and 9 out of the 12 jurors thought the copying would be legal in this specific case even if they're copyrightable in general). The judge also ruled that Google had used some illegally copied test files. If the judge finds that APIs aren't copyrightable, my prediction's that Google will be found to owe Oracle $750, the statutory minimum for wilful copyright infringement. Seriously, nine lines?
That wasn't the Jury deciding whether they were copyrightable; they'd been asked about their opinion assuming it was (juries are supposed to determine facts, rather than law). That was the jury (failing to) decide whether Google were nonetheless allowed to use the API under fair use, even if it were copyrighted.
I just used a Firefox addon I happened to have handy (LeetKey, which I originally installed for reading ROT13 but has filters for many other common simple transformations like that too).
Standard functioning temperature range on even the cheapest electronic components is 0-70 degrees Celsius; more expensive components will function some distance outside that range too. You'd pretty much have to go out of your way to construct something that failed in that range, as a result. (What more likely happened was that they constructed something that heated over 70 degrees in the normal course of operation and started failing as a result, although that would be a sign of inadequate testing.)
Not to mention: in the UK votes are cast on paper and counted by hand, and yet the results for the majority of the country still typically come in early the next morning (sometimes I stay up all night to watch them). It is doable, if you have enough people willing to make it work, and we do.
Of note is that part of Google's defence is Sun's public statements that Java was free to use! So there's a bit of a symmetrical situation here. (It's lead to a bit of an interesting row, in the courtroom and also on Twitter, between Schwartz (Sun's old CEO) and various other relevant famous people.)
What extra packages would you recommend?
No way that a web-based service should allow that sort of dictionary attack to succeed. It's not too hard to deliberately spend a sufficiently long time authenticating someone (especially if there have been a bunch of password failures recently on the account / from that IP) that dictionary attacks become unfeasible; it's not like you get to attack the hash. (Look at Wikpedia, for instance, where three login failures cause you to need to fill in a CAPTCHA to log in.)
Log tables apparently used to contain deliberate errors for copyright reasons; the idea was that although you couldn't copyright the mathematical fact of what a number's logarithm is, you could copyright the errors. I have no idea if this was ever tested, or if it worked or not.
In the UK, at least, stop signs are incredibly rare. (I live in a major city, and can only think of one, which is on private land not the main road system.) On the other hand, give-way signs (either triangles next to the road, or double-dashed-lines on the ground) are incredibly common; I think those are probably the equivalent of US yield signs, although I'm not sure how direct it is.
And 4-way stops are unheard of; in the UK, if something like that were needed, they'd put a mini-roundabout there instead.
Is there any actual reason (antitrust, etc.) why Microsoft would have to give OnLive the same licensing grant as everyone else? I can imagine Microsoft simply having arranged an alternative licensing deal with them.
Well, it's probably an indication of whether the exploit is deterministic or probabilistic (probabilistic exploits will need more tries on average before they work). Also, if it's a buffer overflow, the size of the buffer it's overflowing (if it needs a lot of data to overflow, the browser will take a while to download it).
Not a good indicator of how difficult the exploit was to find, though.
We easily have the technology for breaking up lumps of rock that big; it's done all the time in a controlled way in mining, and in an uncontrolled way, I'm reasonably sure there are modern-day military weapons powerful enough. The big problem would be getting it to the asteroid (both the technical problems in getting a weapon up into space, and the political problems involved in placing a weapon in space).
The same joke was also made on the Firehose submission. So I guess it was kind-of obvious...
For what it's worth, the laptop I'm currently using (a Toshiba Satellite) had information about the terms and conditions (that I couldn't get a refund for uninstalling Windows) on the outside of the box, visible before I bought it. I was pretty impressed by that; if they're going to let people make an informed decision rather than try to force a contract by the back door, more power to them.
The purpose of goto is to stand in for whatever control structures your language needs but doesn't have. Goto for error cleanup in C is one of those examples: it's the best way to do it in C, but if the language had better support for doing that, a goto wouldn't be necessary.
I thought it used to be a common fraud in some areas to put some substance on one of the voting buttons, so that it was possible to inspect people coming out of the voting booths to see if they'd voted the "wrong" way.
In the UK, this is handled by making all the ballot papers different colors. The voter writes their cross on each ballot, then folds the ballot in half (so that the election officials can't see the vote) and puts it in the relevant box. The election officials check, by looking at the color of the paper, that the voter's putting the paper in the right box, and corrects them if they aren't. If a paper goes in the wrong box anyway, it can probably be moved to the right one during the count, because the papers are counted by hand. (Whoever was counting the paper would notice it was the wrong color and put it in a separate pile for incorrect ballots, which are checked by the candidates.)
It's worth noting that the Italian Wikipedia actually did shut down for a few days, in response to a proposed law in Italy that they thought would have made it basically illegal for them to operate (apparently, it would have allowed anyone to force a website to publish a retraction of anything said about them with minimal judicial oversight). Here's the Slashdot story on the issue. They hid all content on the site while they were opposing the proposal. So not only has this happened, on Wikipedia, but at least one major website's actually gone through with a threat like that in the past. I guess it makes it more likely that they'll go through with it again, if necessary.
I remember an anecdote where one of the beta testers of Java, who was using it even before it was released to the public, got turned down for a job due to not having enough Java experience. I forget exactly who it was, though.