The first thing I did when somebody in our company got the "lets patent things" bug was to make sure that everybody was well aware of my anti-patent position *before* I was ever put in such a predicament. My employment agreement didn't say anything specific about patents; although it did about ownership. I have no problems whatsoever over ownership; be that copyrights, trademarks, or trade secrets. But patents to me are unethical.
So I talked to all my managers, the human resources VP, and to our own company's lawyer, explaining my position to each of them. I also wrote it out and had a copy put in my personnel record. Basically I said that I would not willingly sign any patent paperwork as me being an "inventor" due to my ethical beliefs, but that I would do anything else to defend against other patents (even publication, etc.) and would not interfere within anything where I wasn't an inventor...I also said that I was aware I could be fired for refusing to sign as an inventor.
But now everyone's well aware of my position, most respect it, and they know ahead of time whether they value me more as an employee or value a potential patent more. I figure its best for everyone to know up front what to expect, and so far nothing "bad" has happened.
Clearly Sony developed this on their own, so you can't even say they stole it.
You must be thinking copyrights, or trade secrets. Because patent law don't care one tiny bit whether anything was stolen, pirated, plundered, copied, leaked, miasspropriated, derived from, inspired by, just coincidental, or "discovered" completely independently in an entirely different galaxy by a lone martian who's never even heard of the patentee or patent office. There's no shred of moral justification for patents like there could be with copyright. That's why patents are so offensive; they're a claim over not just the appropriation of "thought", but over the entire ownership of a particular thought and the absolute dominion and authority to exclude the entire human race ever having it, even if they do so entirely on their own or even just accidentally.
And as for the people asking why she didn't do something with the patent herself, to manufacture anything. Well, odds are really really good that even if she did have all the intent and means to do so (which may be arguable), that she couldn't do so because then she herself would be violating somebody else's patent. Having a patent to "A" doesn't give you any rights to make "A" at all. All having a patent does is the give you the authority to make sure that nobody else can do "A" either. Patents only take away, they never give.
I had played a Star Trek text game back around 1984 on a dumb ASCII terminal running on a kit-built 8080 computer (a NorthStar 32 K I think). Most of the game data was stored on two 5.25 inch floppys (hard sectored).
But this game also let you not only move through space and fighting Klingons and firing topedos and such, but it also represented all of the hundreds of different rooms inside the Enterprise, a hundred or so crew members (all named with different skills), and even some inventory items such as dylithium crystals. You could move crew members around the ship's rooms and corridors. It was all text based (with ASCII graphics). I remember there was a big wall-sized poster with the schematics of the Enterprise and all the different room numbers printed on it.
Is this that game, or does anybody know what this was?
"106. Exclusive rights in copyrighted works:
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;..."
[emphasis mine]
There's nothing in copyright law that says: oh, by the way, if you only make copies for yourself
that's okay.
Just ask Microsft about that one.
Now, to be fair, there are a few exemptions that are very carefully spelled out, such as fair use, or the one-backup-copy, etc. But without those specific limited exemptions, in general copyright infringment covers personal-use copies too.
Same for patent law too. You don't have to sell anything or distribute anything to be guilty of either copyright or patent infringment. Just "doing it" in the privacy of your own home can technically be illegal, though granted, the likelyhood of you getting caught or sued and/or the type of punishment can vary.
I think it is this misunderstanding that causes most people to not get so upset by copyright/patent laws, because they think it doesn't apply to them since they're not selling anything. But that's wrong.
Um, copyright infringement does not require that you sell anything. Nor does it even require distribution; even if you keep those copies all for your own private use, making copies (printing) is potentially copyright infringement. Yes, its stupid, but its the law.
Now certainly if you sell copies, that can have an impact on how agressively the company tries to enforce its copyright, or the punishment you receive should you be found guilty due to the quantifiable financial loss and demonstration of willful infringement. But it has nothing to do with whether you are technically guilty or not.
This is why the article's title is wrong. Ford doesn't own your pictures. But then your pictures are not entirely your own either. Nobody, neither you or Ford, has rights to the pictures (unless you both agree to some sort of cross licensing lawyer-enriching scheme).
This is kind of like patents, where patents don't grant rights, they just take them away. So it's posible to get into an IP (sic) gridlock where nobody has any rights to something.
I went to Rose from 1986 to 1990 for CS. Back then we learned these kinds of things:
Languages: FORTRAN (as the first language), C, Pascal, Ada, Lisp/Scheme.
Assembly: DEC VAX, also had to do machine language BY HAND in hexadecimal (lower than assembly).
Hardware: computer architecture; had to design simple CPUs from the gate level up (yes, including instruction decoding, number multipication, etc.). And if you took EE courses too (which myself and many other CS students did), you even learned how the gates work from the individual transistor level up.
Theory: lots of algorithms, complexity, Knuth "stuff", automata. Even dabbled a bit in denotational semantics, lambda calculus, etc. Not to mention lots of math including descrete math and numerical computation.
Other: compilers (but at least once we could not use Lex/Yacc generators, we had to work through parser generation BY HAND. Then we actually had to produce real machine code output, do wimple optimizers, etc.)
That's what I consider learning comp sci. Exposure to so many different aspects, including very low-level hardware, that you really knew what the computer was doing.
Translated into non-liberal speak for the rest of us:
"Before we in the U.S. get to patting ourselves on the back for not being this bad,...
Before any non-liberal lurking on/. might get to discussing how bad the Germans are,
consider the story just two posts down
lets divert negative attention back on the U.S. where it belongs by cherrypicking a reference to a different story
that discusses how this is probably already being done here with no one's knowledge or consent.
which can further the liberal agenda of bashing the U.S. by inventing hypothetical FUD based on hearsay
I say "probably" because no one really knows.
It's just as likely as the Bush administration's torture being done to those illegal space aliens in Area 51 (I meant "undocumented space workers").
No laws passed, no protests staged (hard to protest something you don't even know about),
although the Bushies are covering it all up, so take my word for it
just government silently doing whatever it wants after slapping a "national security" label on it.
And we all know it's possible to prove any conspiracy theory intended to show how evil the U.S. is because the only two words we ever take out of context are "national security".
It's not right in Germany, and it's not right here.
Again, let's keep this discussion about a German event focused on the U.S. Kay?
The difference is that at least in Germany, this type of gross invasion of privacy happened on the public record and they can react and do something about it now.
Now for the real punch. The U.S. is even more evil because it hasn't passed a law requiring invasion of privacy.
Of course, we in the U.S.
Of course, we liberals stuck in the U.S. amist all those crazy Bushbots
can do something about it too,
should protest and generally blame the U.S. for anything
but most people won't get worked up over what government might be doing without it being proven true,
we don't know why most people don't believe wild theories which have no factual basis, I mean, if it shows the U.S. is evil why do they want proof?
and our government is mercilessly exploiting that fact right now
they never show mercy or restraint, all they do is all-out starve and exploit children and harm the planet!
by keeping everything secret and implying that anyone who thinks otherwise is some kind of kooky conspiracy theorist
by having the nerve to call conspiracy theorists "conspiracy theorists". I mean, that's like calling terroists "terrorists". Remember too, it's "undocumented worker", not "illegal alien".
(while they spy on them to make sure they don't get too far out of line).
I've got to go, I just spotted some black helicopters.
No, patents are quite different from most forms of legalise. They are definitely designed to be as incomprehensible as possible and as ambiguous as possible. Wheras most legalise is an attempt to be precise (much like computer programming), "patentese" is the other extreme to be as imprecise as you can possibly get by with.
For comparison go read "real" legalize, say almost any of the Public Laws passed by congress. Some of them may be long (mainly those intended to obfuscate the flow of bribery money, er, earmarks). But the laws that are actually suppposed to be the most legal in terms of setting rules for citizens, they are surprising very easy to read and understand in English. In fact the more important the law, usually the easier it is to understand. Look at some of the constitutional ammendments. Most are only a paragraph or two of very plain English prose. See, the congress which wrote those wanted to be sure they were so clear that nobody could ever not understand them or misinterpret them.
On the other hand, patent lawers and the companies they front actually desire to create as much confusion and obfuscation as possible. Ever wonder why ordinary lawers can do pretty much anything, except patent law?
The sad thing is that the original intent of a patent was to actually make knowledge more available and understandable to the public as a whole. But instead patents are written in some invented cryptographic foreign language; plus the way legal penalties are set up it's in your best interest to actually NOT read patents, so the legal system is actively discouraging the disemination of knowledge, the same way a traffic ticket discourages speeding....the exact opposite of the purpose of patents.
Why is not being able to keep up with the backlog a problem? In fact if their productivity continued to slip all the way to zero (as in 0% of the applications ever made it through review), I'd say all the problems with patents would finally be fixed! And instead of hiring more examiners, I say they should reduce the number until there are no more left at all.
If you're not afraid to do a little reading and potentially coding a custom front end, you may want to look at two of the big open source engines: Lucene and Xapian.
Lucene is quite popular now, and is an Apache Java project. It's a good choice if you're a Java shop.
Xapian seems to be based on a little more solid and modern information retrieval theory and is incredibly scalable and fast. It's written in C++, with SWIG-based front ends to many languages. It might not have as polished of a front end or as fancy of a website as Lucene, but I believe it's a better choice if you have really really huge data sets or want to venture outside the Java universe.
There are also many other wholely-contained indexers too, mostly which are based on web indexing (they have spiders, query forms, etc.) all bundled together. Like ht://Dig, mnogosearch, and so forth. They are good, especially if you want more of a drop-in solution rather than a raw indexing engine, and if you're indexing web sites (and not complex entities like databases, etc).
"What does it mean?... the probability of a "suspicious person" actually being a terrorist is only 0.1%."
Yes, this is correct. And very useful to point out.
"In other words, these systems are inherently useless in identifying terrorists...."
This however may not be a correct deduction.
The problem is you are not asking the right question, an important and necessary question yes, but not the right one. What you want to know in order to make a better determination of usefulness is really an economic decision. The probabilities are just one input to that. You need to also consider the costs; the cost of each episode (e.g., true test) versus the (potential) cost of each missed terriorist. Imagine an extreme case; that each terrorist is carrying a nuclear bomb (yes this is extreme), then even the costs of those 999 false positives may well be worth the "savings" of that one true positive. At another extreme though you could say something like 80% of the terrorists just carry cameras, 19% carry a pistol, and 0.5% of the terrorists carry a "dud" bomb, and 0.5% of the terrorists carry a "small" IED. In that case then perhaps the result really is that the test doesn't make sense.
Now, we all can argue about what the cost factors really are (which is not just monetary but also loss of liberty, etc). Furthermore those cost factors, some of them not being factual, will vary widely from person to person so the conclusion about the test's usefulness will depend on who you are.
I would certainly lean toward the conclusion that the test is useless, but just the Bayes analyis is not enough to arrive at that conclusion.
The concept of using a watermarking technique is itself much better than any sort of DRM. But if the watermark is not correctly cryptographically tied into the song, then it is probably quite easy to forge watermarks. What this means is that it would be possible to still distribute thse songs (illegally) but have it appear as if somebody else did it. This is probably worse than having no watermark at all.
Of course, technically, forgeable watermarks should carry no legal weight, and should be useful for nothing more than casual marketing analysis. But we all know how things like the courts, BSA, RIAA, and so forth work. "Hey, this song found on xxxxx P2P service has your name on it! You must be guilty. Here's notice of our lawsuit, or you can settle for $100000 per song." I see a lot more innocent grandmothers getting sued in the future.
The same thing could actually be used for other file formats. Want to write a Word document outlining your plans to rob the bank; be sure to "steal" somebody else's GUID out of one of their documents and replace the one in yours. Now you've got a better shot at deniability of wrongdoing.
Another gmail trick that is more friendly to dumb sites that use broken regexes is to just insert extra periods in your mailbox name. Then you can filter based on that. If your gmail address is johndoe@gmail.com, then you can also use things like jo.hnd.oe@gmail.com, joh.n.do.e@gmail.com, etc.
It's a "real" database now, so access to it is just standard SQL, and less error-prone than mucking with XML schemas. Even programatic access is easier.
$ sqlite places.sqlite
sqlite>.schema sqlite> select * from xxxx; sqlite> insert.... sqlite>.dump
or to get the output back into text format, something like
sqlite>.mode csv sqlite>.output output_save_filename.csv sqlite> select * from xxxx;
As a developer who also did not receive one of these surveys, I know that I am in fact holding off on releasing free code I've already written particularly because I am waiting for GPL3. I do not want to release under GPL2 specifically because I WANT the extra anti-patent and anti-DRM stuff that GPL3 will add.
If anything, my gripe is that the GPL3 process is taking so long; I've been sitting on some code for over a year. But getting the license right is to me more important than any particular piece of code. But I guess my vote didn't count in the survey, not that I really care.
There is no such thing as a defensive patent; that just does not make any sense at all. The whole point of a patent is offensive; it is a restriction placed upon the rest of humanity that they may not do something. It does not matter whether anybody gets sued, the mere existence of the patent has already done the most harm. Suing someone is just looting the body after you've already killed them.
And it is not just a software-only issue, patents are just as dangerous in many other fields. For a much deeper understanding of how patents are harmful, please read Against Intellectual Monopoly by by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine.
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/again stnew.htm
This is quite a long read, but it is very important.
That being said, there are plenty of features in Prototype which are more library-like than framework-like, so it is easy to use parts of it without buying into a whole framework methodology. I don't know much about the other evaluated tools.
How else would they be used? There's no such thing as a defensive-only patent. Just holding a patent is enough to cause damage to others, you don't even have to actively go around suing to be using it as a weapon. This sort of cross-licensing economy should not be making that more obvious. The only true defense against patents that the law provides is publication, and unfortunately its not balanced, sort of like leather armor in the days of gunpowder. And since patents are inherently anti-competitive devices, it should be little surprise that the patent system naturally leads to monopolistic or cartel type abuse and a suppression of innovation and thought.
Is there a listing of the included RPM packages and versions of each? This is something that I find extremely useful, especially when deciding whether I want to upgrade to or use a particular release. Red Hat has historically made this information very hard to obtain, even with their Fedora line. Why is it so hard to just post a listing?
Money is not zero-sum, just because some CEO gets a lot of money doesn't mean I get less.
So what? We're talking about the psychology/sociology of crime. It is the perceived disparity and unfairness that matters, regardless of underlying economics.
Fair enough, although I have to believe that a lot of crime (in the US) is based on things like sex, religion, and power rather than income. Regardless, it should still be pointed out that perceived unfairness and actual unfairness are not necessarily the same; and the zero-sum falicy is often then cause of this perception. So perhaps the real cause of crime is poor education instead (which a wealth-based analysis would include whereas an income one blissfully ignores to reach its conclusion).
If there were perfect equality then there would be no incentive for anybody to make any progress at all.
True, and if there is no socialism all wealth consolidates via the wealth condensation principal until we're living in a totalitarian system. No sociologist or economist in their right mind thinks extreme socialism is going to work. The question is what level of wealth disparity/condensation is ideal to maximize living conditions. I might note, Too much wealth disparity also leads to no incentive for progress....
Yes, almost nothing in economics/social science is strictly good or bad or even a simple linear function. You've always got curves and minima and maxima and all that. Same goes for taxes; neither the views that always reducing or always raising taxes is good for society is a tautology. There's a curve envolved and whether one way is good or bad depends on your current position on that curve. My complaint though, and this may be more of a comment on the editorial summary on/., is that the argument was made to imply that the amount of "badness" was directly proportional to the income disparity, and therefore to maximize "goodness" all income disparity must be eliminated.
Correlations don't prove cause-effect relations.
I distrust anyone making this argument as they usually have an agenda.. The correct quote is "correlation does not imply a specific causation."
Just as I distrust people who wield the "these things are correlated therefore this one caused that one" because they usually have an agenda too. Or for that matter, pretty much any time any human talks at all they have some kind of agenda. Also I wasn't trying to quote anybody (notice the lack of quotation marks or attribution in my comment). BTW, a "proof" is an "implication" in logic; so why again is my statement wrong except that you don't trust it?
Slashdot Mirror
You are, it's called /. -- It's about the furthest thing from Fox you can find.
And if you wait a few moments until the global news oligopoly passes the story to all the other rags it owns, you can read the exact same text elsewhere too: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=world+bank+computer+intrusion
Oh, I'll one-up-you on the Troll...at least it's not the New York Times; there's a chance that this story is not made up fiction.
The first thing I did when somebody in our company got the "lets patent things" bug was to make sure that everybody was well aware of my anti-patent position *before* I was ever put in such a predicament. My employment agreement didn't say anything specific about patents; although it did about ownership. I have no problems whatsoever over ownership; be that copyrights, trademarks, or trade secrets. But patents to me are unethical.
So I talked to all my managers, the human resources VP, and to our own company's lawyer, explaining my position to each of them. I also wrote it out and had a copy put in my personnel record. Basically I said that I would not willingly sign any patent paperwork as me being an "inventor" due to my ethical beliefs, but that I would do anything else to defend against other patents (even publication, etc.) and would not interfere within anything where I wasn't an inventor...I also said that I was aware I could be fired for refusing to sign as an inventor.
But now everyone's well aware of my position, most respect it, and they know ahead of time whether they value me more as an employee or value a potential patent more. I figure its best for everyone to know up front what to expect, and so far nothing "bad" has happened.
Except that watermarks still don't work.
You must be thinking copyrights, or trade secrets. Because patent law don't care one tiny bit whether anything was stolen, pirated, plundered, copied, leaked, miasspropriated, derived from, inspired by, just coincidental, or "discovered" completely independently in an entirely different galaxy by a lone martian who's never even heard of the patentee or patent office. There's no shred of moral justification for patents like there could be with copyright. That's why patents are so offensive; they're a claim over not just the appropriation of "thought", but over the entire ownership of a particular thought and the absolute dominion and authority to exclude the entire human race ever having it, even if they do so entirely on their own or even just accidentally.
And as for the people asking why she didn't do something with the patent herself, to manufacture anything. Well, odds are really really good that even if she did have all the intent and means to do so (which may be arguable), that she couldn't do so because then she herself would be violating somebody else's patent. Having a patent to "A" doesn't give you any rights to make "A" at all. All having a patent does is the give you the authority to make sure that nobody else can do "A" either. Patents only take away, they never give.
Didn't you read the out-of-context article summary? Its not literal, its olfactic.
Is this the same game I remember?
I had played a Star Trek text game back around 1984 on a dumb ASCII terminal
running on a kit-built 8080 computer (a NorthStar 32 K I think). Most of
the game data was stored on two 5.25 inch floppys (hard sectored).
But this game also let you not only move through space and fighting
Klingons and firing topedos and such, but it also represented all of
the hundreds of different rooms inside the Enterprise, a hundred or so
crew members (all named with different skills), and even some inventory
items such as dylithium crystals. You could move crew members around
the ship's rooms and corridors. It was all text based (with ASCII
graphics). I remember there was a big wall-sized poster with the
schematics of the Enterprise and all the different room numbers printed
on it.
Is this that game, or does anybody know what this was?
There's nothing in copyright law that says: oh, by the way, if you only make copies for yourself that's okay. Just ask Microsft about that one. Now, to be fair, there are a few exemptions that are very carefully spelled out, such as fair use, or the one-backup-copy, etc. But without those specific limited exemptions, in general copyright infringment covers personal-use copies too.
Same for patent law too. You don't have to sell anything or distribute anything to be guilty of either copyright or patent infringment. Just "doing it" in the privacy of your own home can technically be illegal, though granted, the likelyhood of you getting caught or sued and/or the type of punishment can vary.
I think it is this misunderstanding that causes most people to not get so upset by copyright/patent laws, because they think it doesn't apply to them since they're not selling anything. But that's wrong.
Um, copyright infringement does not require that you sell anything.
Nor does it even require distribution; even if you keep those
copies all for your own private use, making copies (printing)
is potentially copyright infringement. Yes, its stupid, but its
the law.
Now certainly if you sell copies, that can have an impact on
how agressively the company tries to enforce its copyright,
or the punishment you receive should you be found guilty due
to the quantifiable financial loss and demonstration of willful
infringement. But it has nothing to do with whether you are
technically guilty or not.
This is why the article's title is wrong. Ford doesn't own your pictures.
But then your pictures are not entirely your own either. Nobody, neither
you or Ford, has rights to the pictures (unless you both agree to some
sort of cross licensing lawyer-enriching scheme).
This is kind of like patents, where patents don't grant rights, they
just take them away. So it's posible to get into an IP (sic) gridlock
where nobody has any rights to something.
I went to Rose from 1986 to 1990 for CS. Back then we learned these kinds of things:
Languages: FORTRAN (as the first language), C, Pascal, Ada, Lisp/Scheme.
Assembly: DEC VAX, also had to do machine language BY HAND in hexadecimal (lower than assembly).
Hardware: computer architecture; had to design simple CPUs from the gate level up (yes, including instruction decoding, number multipication, etc.). And if you took EE courses too (which myself and many other CS students did), you even learned how the gates work from the individual transistor level up.
Theory: lots of algorithms, complexity, Knuth "stuff", automata. Even dabbled a bit in denotational semantics, lambda calculus, etc. Not to mention lots of math including descrete math and numerical computation.
Other: compilers (but at least once we could not use Lex/Yacc generators, we had to work through parser generation BY HAND. Then we actually had to produce real machine code output, do wimple optimizers, etc.)
That's what I consider learning comp sci. Exposure to so many different aspects, including very low-level hardware, that you really knew what the computer was doing.
Translated into non-liberal speak for the rest of us:
Before any non-liberal lurking on /. might get to discussing how bad the Germans are,
lets divert negative attention back on the U.S. where it belongs by cherrypicking a reference to a different story
which can further the liberal agenda of bashing the U.S. by inventing hypothetical FUD based on hearsay
It's just as likely as the Bush administration's torture being done to those illegal space aliens in Area 51 (I meant "undocumented space workers").
although the Bushies are covering it all up, so take my word for it
And we all know it's possible to prove any conspiracy theory intended to show how evil the U.S. is because the only two words we ever take out of context are "national security".
Again, let's keep this discussion about a German event focused on the U.S. Kay?
Now for the real punch. The U.S. is even more evil because it hasn't passed a law requiring invasion of privacy.
Of course, we liberals stuck in the U.S. amist all those crazy Bushbots
should protest and generally blame the U.S. for anything
we don't know why most people don't believe wild theories which have no factual basis, I mean, if it shows the U.S. is evil why do they want proof?
they never show mercy or restraint, all they do is all-out starve and exploit children and harm the planet!
by having the nerve to call conspiracy theorists "conspiracy theorists". I mean, that's like calling terroists "terrorists". Remember too, it's "undocumented worker", not "illegal alien".
I've got to go, I just spotted some black helicopters.
No, patents are quite different from most forms of legalise. They are definitely designed to be as incomprehensible as possible and as ambiguous as possible. Wheras most legalise is an attempt to be precise (much like computer programming), "patentese" is the other extreme to be as imprecise as you can possibly get by with.
For comparison go read "real" legalize, say almost any of the Public Laws passed by congress. Some of them may be long (mainly those intended to obfuscate the flow of bribery money, er, earmarks). But the laws that are actually suppposed to be the most legal in terms of setting rules for citizens, they are surprising very easy to read and understand in English. In fact the more important the law, usually the easier it is to understand. Look at some of the constitutional ammendments. Most are only a paragraph or two of very plain English prose. See, the congress which wrote those wanted to be sure they were so clear that nobody could ever not understand them or misinterpret them.
On the other hand, patent lawers and the companies they front actually desire to create as much confusion and obfuscation as possible. Ever wonder why ordinary lawers can do pretty much anything, except patent law?
The sad thing is that the original intent of a patent was to actually make knowledge more available and understandable to the public as a whole. But instead patents are written in some invented cryptographic foreign language; plus the way legal penalties are set up it's in your best interest to actually NOT read patents, so the legal system is actively discouraging the disemination of knowledge, the same way a traffic ticket discourages speeding....the exact opposite of the purpose of patents.
Why is not being able to keep up with the backlog a problem? In fact if their productivity continued to slip all the way to zero (as in 0% of the applications ever made it through review), I'd say all the problems with patents would finally be fixed! And instead of hiring more examiners, I say they should reduce the number until there are no more left at all.
I'd suggest you should consider a full-text search engine. First start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_text_search
If you're not afraid to do a little reading and potentially coding a custom front end, you may want to look at two of the big open source engines: Lucene and Xapian.
Lucene is quite popular now, and is an Apache Java project. It's a good choice if you're a Java shop.
Xapian seems to be based on a little more solid and modern information retrieval theory and is incredibly scalable and fast. It's written in C++, with SWIG-based front ends to many languages. It might not have as polished of a front end or as fancy of a website as Lucene, but I believe it's a better choice if you have really really huge data sets or want to venture outside the Java universe.
There are also many other wholely-contained indexers too, mostly which are based on web indexing (they have spiders, query forms, etc.) all bundled together. Like ht://Dig, mnogosearch, and so forth. They are good, especially if you want more of a drop-in solution rather than a raw indexing engine, and if you're indexing web sites (and not complex entities like databases, etc).
Yes, this is correct. And very useful to point out.
This however may not be a correct deduction.
The problem is you are not asking the right question, an important and necessary question yes, but not the right one. What you want to know in order to make a better determination of usefulness is really an economic decision. The probabilities are just one input to that. You need to also consider the costs; the cost of each episode (e.g., true test) versus the (potential) cost of each missed terriorist. Imagine an extreme case; that each terrorist is carrying a nuclear bomb (yes this is extreme), then even the costs of those 999 false positives may well be worth the "savings" of that one true positive. At another extreme though you could say something like 80% of the terrorists just carry cameras, 19% carry a pistol, and 0.5% of the terrorists carry a "dud" bomb, and 0.5% of the terrorists carry a "small" IED. In that case then perhaps the result really is that the test doesn't make sense.
Now, we all can argue about what the cost factors really are (which is not just monetary but also loss of liberty, etc). Furthermore those cost factors, some of them not being factual, will vary widely from person to person so the conclusion about the test's usefulness will depend on who you are.
I would certainly lean toward the conclusion that the test is useless, but just the Bayes analyis is not enough to arrive at that conclusion.
The concept of using a watermarking technique is itself much better than any sort of DRM. But if the watermark is not correctly cryptographically tied into the song, then it is probably quite easy to forge watermarks. What this means is that it would be possible to still distribute thse songs (illegally) but have it appear as if somebody else did it. This is probably worse than having no watermark at all.
Of course, technically, forgeable watermarks should carry no legal weight, and should be useful for nothing more than casual marketing analysis. But we all know how things like the courts, BSA, RIAA, and so forth work. "Hey, this song found on xxxxx P2P service has your name on it! You must be guilty. Here's notice of our lawsuit, or you can settle for $100000 per song." I see a lot more innocent grandmothers getting sued in the future.
The same thing could actually be used for other file formats. Want to write a Word document outlining your plans to rob the bank; be sure to "steal" somebody else's GUID out of one of their documents and replace the one in yours. Now you've got a better shot at deniability of wrongdoing.
Another gmail trick that is more friendly to dumb sites that
use broken regexes is to just insert extra periods in your
mailbox name. Then you can filter based on that. If your
gmail address is johndoe@gmail.com, then you can also use
things like jo.hnd.oe@gmail.com, joh.n.do.e@gmail.com, etc.
It's a "real" database now, so access to it is just standard
.schema .... .dump
.mode csv .output output_save_filename.csv
SQL, and less error-prone than mucking with XML schemas. Even
programatic access is easier.
$ sqlite places.sqlite
sqlite>
sqlite> select * from xxxx;
sqlite> insert
sqlite>
or to get the output back into text format, something like
sqlite>
sqlite>
sqlite> select * from xxxx;
As a developer who also did not receive one of these surveys, I know that I am in fact holding off on releasing free code I've already written particularly because I am waiting for GPL3. I do not want to release under GPL2 specifically because I WANT the extra anti-patent and anti-DRM stuff that GPL3 will add.
If anything, my gripe is that the GPL3 process is taking so long; I've been sitting on some code for over a year. But getting the license right is to me more important than any particular piece of code. But I guess my vote didn't count in the survey, not that I really care.
There is no such thing as a defensive patent; that just does not make any sense at all. The whole point of a patent is offensive; it is a restriction placed upon the rest of humanity that they may not do something. It does not matter whether anybody gets sued, the mere existence of the patent has already done the most harm. Suing someone is just looting the body after you've already killed them.
And it is not just a software-only issue, patents are just as dangerous in many other fields. For a much deeper understanding of how patents are harmful, please read Against Intellectual Monopoly by by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/again stnew.htm
This is quite a long read, but it is very important.
This sounds like the classic Framework versus Library debate. Some good reading:
0 5-May/000231.html
l .3.219431.12
0 6/07/frameworks_vs_l.html
The Dojo mailing list thread "dojo: framework vs library"
http://dojotoolkit.org/pipermail/dojo-interest/20
Joel Spolsky's "Why I Hate Frameworks"
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joe
Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz's "Frameworks vs. Libraries"
http://www.ddj.com/blog/architectblog/archives/20
That being said, there are plenty of features in Prototype which are more library-like than framework-like, so it is easy to use parts of it without buying into a whole framework methodology. I don't know much about the other evaluated tools.
Or according to the wisdom of Joycelyn Elders, its not just the hammers, we need safer nails.
How else would they be used? There's no such thing as a defensive-only patent. Just holding a patent is enough to cause damage to others, you don't even have to actively go around suing to be using it as a weapon. This sort of cross-licensing economy should not be making that more obvious. The only true defense against patents that the law provides is publication, and unfortunately its not balanced, sort of like leather armor in the days of gunpowder. And since patents are inherently anti-competitive devices, it should be little surprise that the patent system naturally leads to monopolistic or cartel type abuse and a suppression of innovation and thought.
Is there a listing of the included RPM packages and versions of each? This is something that I find extremely useful, especially when deciding whether I want to upgrade to or use a particular release. Red Hat has historically made this information very hard to obtain, even with their Fedora line. Why is it so hard to just post a listing?
Fair enough, although I have to believe that a lot of crime (in the US) is based on things like sex, religion, and power rather than income. Regardless, it should still be pointed out that perceived unfairness and actual unfairness are not necessarily the same; and the zero-sum falicy is often then cause of this perception. So perhaps the real cause of crime is poor education instead (which a wealth-based analysis would include whereas an income one blissfully ignores to reach its conclusion).
Yes, almost nothing in economics/social science is strictly good or bad or even a simple linear function. You've always got curves and minima and maxima and all that. Same goes for taxes; neither the views that always reducing or always raising taxes is good for society is a tautology. There's a curve envolved and whether one way is good or bad depends on your current position on that curve. My complaint though, and this may be more of a comment on the editorial summary on /., is that the argument was made to imply that the amount of "badness" was directly proportional to the income disparity, and therefore to maximize "goodness" all income disparity must be eliminated.
Just as I distrust people who wield the "these things are correlated therefore this one caused that one" because they usually have an agenda too. Or for that matter, pretty much any time any human talks at all they have some kind of agenda. Also I wasn't trying to quote anybody (notice the lack of quotation marks or attribution in my comment). BTW, a "proof" is an "implication" in logic; so why again is my statement wrong except that you don't trust it?