Recently, I went to a work-from-home arrangement. Soon after I left, I got a call from several people at work asking me if I had emptied several SQL tables that were key to our QA environment. I swore up and down that I had done no such thing, and it was dropped.
The next day someone powered up the monitor to my old desktop (still at the office) and what did he see?
First computer, got it in 1993 or so. Still had it sitting around as recent as a month ago, tried to boot it, and it failed. Finally tossed it. Not too surprised. It had trouble from day one. Most significant was the bad 8MB RAM module that couldn't be removed because it was soldered on the motherboard.
The very idea of a black hole entails that matter within its grasp is lost forever. (There is a proposed multi-billion year decay, but as far as I know this is still theoretical.) Trying to explain what is happening beyond the event horizon seems to me nothing but conjecture. It certainly fails the "empirical" requirement of scientific investigation.
We can extrapolate based on physical laws we observe outside of such entities. But to say, for a pertinent example, that the core of a black hole is a singularity vs. a new highly compact structure seems no more than conjecture. It might simplify equations to just treat the whole thing as a singularity, but this holds for any celestial body, and we know the simplification to be incorrect in everything but a black hole.
This may be a strawman, I'm sure you are talking about atomic structure, and how it behaves in high gravity situations. But here the reasoning holds true likewise. If the force that holds a neutron star from collapsing is passed, then either there is no further force to maintain the mass's structure or there is. But which is the case is, again, mere conjecture. We can't go into black holes, and we can't simulate the forces that create them.
So why do we make statements about their interior at all? Shouldn't we just stick to what we can know and investigate, such as how they form and how they interact with the universe once formed? Anything more is no more scientific than theology.
Is it when he offered a "business relation" in exchange for fixing the problem? Or was it when he threatened to disclose the flaw? Or was it merely because he wanted money in return?
Had he just disclosed the flaw, would he more or less a criminal, ethically and legally speaking? It seems that worse would have come if he had simply published the flaw right away.
Was he justified in asking for compensation for his findings? If not, this seems to obligate us to "work for free" when discovering such a security problem.
What's amusing is that you base your position on the veracity of a long-obselete psychological position. Some see it as comforting to view humans as hapless victims of their environment that do naught without its influence. I don't, for then we would have noone to blame for anything. If humans cannot help but do evil upon the enjoyment of fantasy entertainment such as GTA, then what of the people we blame for this entertainment? How are they any more responsible for its creation? For they would not have done so without the proper environmental factors, no? And who is responsible for these environmental factors but their progenitors and ultimately God Himself?
I say this in metaphor, but the point remains. You either blame each for his own actions, or you blame no one for any actions. The latter is worse than the former, and the former will have us enjoying GTA guilt free content in our knowledge that each of us is his own master, responsible and accountable for every intended action, for better or worse.
1.4 C3 is roughly equivalent to a 700Mhz PIII. Five times that is a 3.5 Ghz, which is practically available already. The original poster was unlikely talking out of his ass, but I still think his reasoning is flawed as regards the viability of the proposed Apex/VIA console.
1. Yes, this is underpowered. However, developers are able to squeeze much more out of a single system such as a console than they are out of a diverse system such as a PC. That's why current games work at all on PS2 and XBox.
2. You asked, "Why would publishers bother to get a license if anyone can write software for it?" Indeed, why would they? Maybe Apex and VIA are *gasp* planning to make money on the console itself, and not game licenses. Does Apex get money for every DVD that plays on their DVD players? No, but they still manage to make money.
3. They don't have to convince anyone that they are a "credible competitor". If there is no cost for the license (XBox), and no funky hardware (PS2), then game publishers would be stupid to NOT support it. That is, game publishers that have already decided to publish to the PC can easily re-QA a game to function on this console. It's not trivial, but even a marketshare of 100,000 would more than justify the required effort.
Again, this is assuming that the publisher has already decided to release for the PC. Pirating software for this console will certainly not be more difficult than for the PC, no matter how open it is.
Electroshock therapy is sometimes used for clinical depression. It is said that the depression is relieved because patients "forget what they were depressed about." This would suggest a very blunt instrument for erasing long term memories. By "long term", I mean memories that are older than a day. However, memories a minute old work differently than memories an hour or two old, and these work differently than permanent memories. There may be more divisions that we are aware.
But it is quite clear that a device where the amount of time to erase from memory can be adjusted by dial is simply not possible. And content selective memory erasure is likewise impossible. But remember, just because it was in a sci-fi doesn't make it totally false.
Is every Christian responsible for the bombing of abortion clinics? Is every Muslim responsible for honor killings? Is every Linux user responsible for these attacks?
I have little doubt that they were attacked. What seems strange to me though is that they were entirely giddy over the affair. They even went as far as issuing press releases about it. I haven't heard of any company that jumps to release PR about DDOS attacks so quickly. When forced to explain reports of DDOS attacks, a company may release a statement that clears the issues. But the first reports of these attacks came from SCO themselves. This is what raised suspicion, justifiably.
But people shouldn't jump to conspiracy theories so quickly. Doubt of their veracity, sure? Conviction that they are lying--not justified.
The article makes this bill out to be much worse than it is. The bill states you have to be operating the camera, and for the express purpose of making an illegal copy. This bill, then, has almost zero net impact to civil rights or law enforcement's abilities to prosecute copyright infringement.
Yes, and I could walk to work instead of driving my car. But that doesn't mean that driving should be made illegal. When you restrict people's legitimate exercise of liberties, you need a better argument than, "Just live with it." We need to keep crimes illegal and other activity legit. Recording, and more importantly, distributing a movie is illegal, but having a camera in the vicinity of a movie should not be.
On a more practical level, I would not trust most attendants with my stuff, especially a $500 camera. Going back to the hotel could easily be a 90 minute detour undertaken for no good reason.
I mean seriously, if you're carrying a recorder into a theater, you've obviously going to pirate this movie.
False! This a variant of the "argument from ignorance". Because you can't think of any reason that someone would legitimately carry a video recorder into a movie theater, there must be no such reason. Right? Wrong.
Consider the following. I know from first hand experience that many people visiting NYC carry those digital video recorders wherever they go, because they want to record the sights and sounds of the city. I also imagine that many people touring the city in such a manner would like to see a movie while out on the town without having to return to their hotel or apartment. This type of law would turn a common tourist into a common criminal.
Just another instance of law-makers not fully thinking through the laws they are creating.
I don't believe this is true. Laying out GPL products into a new order is still a derivative work, and comes under the terms of the GPL. Now, Red Hat does have copyright and trademark rights to the logo that is in the distro and thus the ISOs. But I have never seen Red Hat try to copyright the ISOs in toto, nor do I think they could.
However, I do believe the ISO copyright trick has been used in BSD licensed software--OpenBSD IIRC. BSD requires little to no constraints on derivations, so this can be done with such distros.
I completely agree with you. If someone was leeching off my connection, then the ISP would be justified in holding me at least partially responsible for the extra bandwidth. But I disagree with others who think I should be responsible for illegal acts such leechers may perform.
My mother recently left her keys in her car door. If someone came by and stole the truck, then ran over someone, would she be charged with hit and run?
YES, in some states, as another poster on this thread mentioned. If you're irresponsible like that, you can be held accountable for your actions.
Show me some case law that supports you position. Otherwise, I simply disagree.
If you throw a handgun into your neighbor's yard, and he uses it to shoot his wife, you're going to jail as an accomplice to murder.
Again, I challenge you to show some case-law that would support such a position.
Besides, the problem is that having an open WAP is in most cases negligence at worst, rather than voluntary act.
I leave my WAP open, it's faster and easier to setup. I could see being responsible for excessive bandwidth usage for failing to protect my WAP, but I fail to see how I could possibly be responsible for everything someone does through the connection. Should the person in this story who left his WAP open be charged with downloading child pornography? That would be ridiculous.
There are many analogous situations we could use. Let's say I neglect to lock my front door, someone breaks in and steals a handgun. They then kill someone with the gun. Am I guilty of murder?
Another situation. Let's say I'm packing my car, and leave stuff by the side of the car to arrange most efficiently later. If someone comes by and takes shit while I'm getting more stuff to pack, is it not stealing just because it was easy to do?
My mother recently left her keys in her car door. If someone came by and stole the truck, then ran over someone, would she be charged with hit and run?
I know I missed the original interview. But this is what my question would be. I'm of the opinion that Red Hat is not Free (as in speech) Software. Why? They will only sell the software with a subscription that directly contradicts the GPL.
Consider some scenarios:
1) I sell you GPL software, and say you must give me a constant sum for every copy you install. This clearly violates the GPL.
2) I will sell you GPL software only with a dongle. While you might be able to circumvent the dongle's protections, the EULA (on the dongle, not the software!) clearly forbids this. To install more copies of the software, then, you must buy more dongles. This, too, would be against the GPL.
3) I will sell you GPL software, but only with a support contract. The support contract requires, among other things, that you buy another support contract if the GPL software is installed on any more machines. It seems to me that this is clearly against the terms of the GPL. And yet this is exactly what Red Hat is doing.
Who's freedom are we talking about here? The consumer or the producer?
Well, exactly. Freedom is power. Giving freedom to one often takes it from another. But information is not a limited resource, until made artificially so by the government. Copyright is not a grant of rights to the producer, it is a revocation of rights for everyone else. My ability to copy something does not interfere with anyone else's. Yet, I am not allowed by law to copy another's work. I respect the law, but I realize that copyright is not a giving of freedom, it is a taking away.
The paradox of democracy is the freedom to give up the freedom one has. Many people came to the new world as indentured servants. Is it "more" free to allow indentured servitude, or to disallow it? The answer's not obvious, and depends on what one thinks "freedom" consists in. But I would say that the freedom to give freedom away is not, overall, really freedom, since giving one's freedom away is antithetical to freedom itself.
The debate can get very complicated from here, moving to what types of contracts are morally permissable or not. But it doesn't matter. Should developers have the option to open source their work? If so, then the economic point is moot. The very idea of forcing people never to give away code is so absurd that it is not even worth entertaining. Because of this, it shouldn't matter what the economic impact is.
Character frequencies are a quick test of programming ability, whatever the language. Tell the interviewee he can pick his language. I agree with your point on the first question, though. I've been doing C++ for about years and I still have to look up weird templates, static/dynamic cast semantics, and other stuff. At one point I depended on destructors being called in reverse order of constructors. Not knowing it off the top of my head, I looked it up, and lo and behold it was part of the C++ spec. I wouldn't have expected anyone to have such knowledge memorized.
The end of slavery was only bad for a small number of wealthy men. Slavery depressed wages for the working class White man.
Compared to the rest of the world, the US is "a small number of wealthy [people]." Proprietary software may not be slavery, but it is certainly antithetical to freedom
People comparing how "open source" or "free software" has failed compared proprietary software are performing a non sequitor. It's like saying Susan B. Anthony failed to live up to the standards of attractiveness compared to women in her day. Of course! That's the whole point--feminism wasn't about bettering oneself in the eyes of common feminine mores, it was about rejecting those mores. Correspondingly, free software is about rejection of the proprietary model, it isn't just another business model.
People can and do make money by centering their business on free software, but the success or failure of these companies is not the metric by which free software should be judged. Rather, it is entirely incidental.
The real question is, "Have we formed an alternative to proprietary software?" And I think the answer is Yes, we have. Now, I'll be the first to admit that most free games lack the sophistication of their proprietary brethren, but this is not very important for two reasons. First, these are games. It's not like forcing me to use proprietary products to submit a resume or file my tax return. Secondly, and this is related to the first point, most games lack "network" effects. You pick up the game, play it, and buy a better one a few months down the road. There is no vendor lock-in. Each game is a new creature.
Slashdot Mirror
The next day someone powered up the monitor to my old desktop (still at the office) and what did he see?
SQL Query Analyzer maximized with:(I still don't remember doing it.)
First computer, got it in 1993 or so. Still had it sitting around as recent as a month ago, tried to boot it, and it failed. Finally tossed it. Not too surprised. It had trouble from day one. Most significant was the bad 8MB RAM module that couldn't be removed because it was soldered on the motherboard.
The very idea of a black hole entails that matter within its grasp is lost forever. (There is a proposed multi-billion year decay, but as far as I know this is still theoretical.) Trying to explain what is happening beyond the event horizon seems to me nothing but conjecture. It certainly fails the "empirical" requirement of scientific investigation.
We can extrapolate based on physical laws we observe outside of such entities. But to say, for a pertinent example, that the core of a black hole is a singularity vs. a new highly compact structure seems no more than conjecture. It might simplify equations to just treat the whole thing as a singularity, but this holds for any celestial body, and we know the simplification to be incorrect in everything but a black hole.
This may be a strawman, I'm sure you are talking about atomic structure, and how it behaves in high gravity situations. But here the reasoning holds true likewise. If the force that holds a neutron star from collapsing is passed, then either there is no further force to maintain the mass's structure or there is. But which is the case is, again, mere conjecture. We can't go into black holes, and we can't simulate the forces that create them.
So why do we make statements about their interior at all? Shouldn't we just stick to what we can know and investigate, such as how they form and how they interact with the universe once formed? Anything more is no more scientific than theology.
Is it when he offered a "business relation" in exchange for fixing the problem? Or was it when he threatened to disclose the flaw? Or was it merely because he wanted money in return?
Had he just disclosed the flaw, would he more or less a criminal, ethically and legally speaking? It seems that worse would have come if he had simply published the flaw right away.
Was he justified in asking for compensation for his findings? If not, this seems to obligate us to "work for free" when discovering such a security problem.
What do others here think?
What's amusing is that you base your position on the veracity of a long-obselete psychological position. Some see it as comforting to view humans as hapless victims of their environment that do naught without its influence. I don't, for then we would have noone to blame for anything. If humans cannot help but do evil upon the enjoyment of fantasy entertainment such as GTA, then what of the people we blame for this entertainment? How are they any more responsible for its creation? For they would not have done so without the proper environmental factors, no? And who is responsible for these environmental factors but their progenitors and ultimately God Himself?
I say this in metaphor, but the point remains. You either blame each for his own actions, or you blame no one for any actions. The latter is worse than the former, and the former will have us enjoying GTA guilt free content in our knowledge that each of us is his own master, responsible and accountable for every intended action, for better or worse.
1.4 C3 is roughly equivalent to a 700Mhz PIII. Five times that is a 3.5 Ghz, which is practically available already. The original poster was unlikely talking out of his ass, but I still think his reasoning is flawed as regards the viability of the proposed Apex/VIA console.
1. Yes, this is underpowered. However, developers are able to squeeze much more out of a single system such as a console than they are out of a diverse system such as a PC. That's why current games work at all on PS2 and XBox.
2. You asked, "Why would publishers bother to get a license if anyone can write software for it?" Indeed, why would they? Maybe Apex and VIA are *gasp* planning to make money on the console itself, and not game licenses. Does Apex get money for every DVD that plays on their DVD players? No, but they still manage to make money.
3. They don't have to convince anyone that they are a "credible competitor". If there is no cost for the license (XBox), and no funky hardware (PS2), then game publishers would be stupid to NOT support it. That is, game publishers that have already decided to publish to the PC can easily re-QA a game to function on this console. It's not trivial, but even a marketshare of 100,000 would more than justify the required effort.
Again, this is assuming that the publisher has already decided to release for the PC. Pirating software for this console will certainly not be more difficult than for the PC, no matter how open it is.
What is an "inaccessible memory"? Such a term lacks empirical existence, and so is unscientific.
Electroshock therapy is sometimes used for clinical depression. It is said that the depression is relieved because patients "forget what they were depressed about." This would suggest a very blunt instrument for erasing long term memories. By "long term", I mean memories that are older than a day. However, memories a minute old work differently than memories an hour or two old, and these work differently than permanent memories. There may be more divisions that we are aware.
But it is quite clear that a device where the amount of time to erase from memory can be adjusted by dial is simply not possible. And content selective memory erasure is likewise impossible. But remember, just because it was in a sci-fi doesn't make it totally false.
Is every Christian responsible for the bombing of abortion clinics? Is every Muslim responsible for honor killings? Is every Linux user responsible for these attacks?
I have little doubt that they were attacked. What seems strange to me though is that they were entirely giddy over the affair. They even went as far as issuing press releases about it. I haven't heard of any company that jumps to release PR about DDOS attacks so quickly. When forced to explain reports of DDOS attacks, a company may release a statement that clears the issues. But the first reports of these attacks came from SCO themselves. This is what raised suspicion, justifiably.
But people shouldn't jump to conspiracy theories so quickly. Doubt of their veracity, sure? Conviction that they are lying--not justified.
The article makes this bill out to be much worse than it is. The bill states you have to be operating the camera, and for the express purpose of making an illegal copy. This bill, then, has almost zero net impact to civil rights or law enforcement's abilities to prosecute copyright infringement.
Yes, and I could walk to work instead of driving my car. But that doesn't mean that driving should be made illegal. When you restrict people's legitimate exercise of liberties, you need a better argument than, "Just live with it." We need to keep crimes illegal and other activity legit. Recording, and more importantly, distributing a movie is illegal, but having a camera in the vicinity of a movie should not be.
On a more practical level, I would not trust most attendants with my stuff, especially a $500 camera. Going back to the hotel could easily be a 90 minute detour undertaken for no good reason.
Consider the following. I know from first hand experience that many people visiting NYC carry those digital video recorders wherever they go, because they want to record the sights and sounds of the city. I also imagine that many people touring the city in such a manner would like to see a movie while out on the town without having to return to their hotel or apartment. This type of law would turn a common tourist into a common criminal.
Just another instance of law-makers not fully thinking through the laws they are creating.
I don't believe this is true. Laying out GPL products into a new order is still a derivative work, and comes under the terms of the GPL. Now, Red Hat does have copyright and trademark rights to the logo that is in the distro and thus the ISOs. But I have never seen Red Hat try to copyright the ISOs in toto, nor do I think they could.
However, I do believe the ISO copyright trick has been used in BSD licensed software--OpenBSD IIRC. BSD requires little to no constraints on derivations, so this can be done with such distros.
I completely agree with you. If someone was leeching off my connection, then the ISP would be justified in holding me at least partially responsible for the extra bandwidth. But I disagree with others who think I should be responsible for illegal acts such leechers may perform.
Again, I challenge you to show some case-law that would support such a position.
Besides, the problem is that having an open WAP is in most cases negligence at worst, rather than voluntary act.
I leave my WAP open, it's faster and easier to setup. I could see being responsible for excessive bandwidth usage for failing to protect my WAP, but I fail to see how I could possibly be responsible for everything someone does through the connection. Should the person in this story who left his WAP open be charged with downloading child pornography? That would be ridiculous.
There are many analogous situations we could use. Let's say I neglect to lock my front door, someone breaks in and steals a handgun. They then kill someone with the gun. Am I guilty of murder?
Another situation. Let's say I'm packing my car, and leave stuff by the side of the car to arrange most efficiently later. If someone comes by and takes shit while I'm getting more stuff to pack, is it not stealing just because it was easy to do?
My mother recently left her keys in her car door. If someone came by and stole the truck, then ran over someone, would she be charged with hit and run?
I know I missed the original interview. But this is what my question would be. I'm of the opinion that Red Hat is not Free (as in speech) Software. Why? They will only sell the software with a subscription that directly contradicts the GPL.
Consider some scenarios:
1) I sell you GPL software, and say you must give me a constant sum for every copy you install. This clearly violates the GPL.
2) I will sell you GPL software only with a dongle. While you might be able to circumvent the dongle's protections, the EULA (on the dongle, not the software!) clearly forbids this. To install more copies of the software, then, you must buy more dongles. This, too, would be against the GPL.
3) I will sell you GPL software, but only with a support contract. The support contract requires, among other things, that you buy another support contract if the GPL software is installed on any more machines. It seems to me that this is clearly against the terms of the GPL. And yet this is exactly what Red Hat is doing.
Thoughts?
Well, exactly. Freedom is power. Giving freedom to one often takes it from another. But information is not a limited resource, until made artificially so by the government. Copyright is not a grant of rights to the producer, it is a revocation of rights for everyone else. My ability to copy something does not interfere with anyone else's. Yet, I am not allowed by law to copy another's work. I respect the law, but I realize that copyright is not a giving of freedom, it is a taking away.
The paradox of democracy is the freedom to give up the freedom one has. Many people came to the new world as indentured servants. Is it "more" free to allow indentured servitude, or to disallow it? The answer's not obvious, and depends on what one thinks "freedom" consists in. But I would say that the freedom to give freedom away is not, overall, really freedom, since giving one's freedom away is antithetical to freedom itself.
The debate can get very complicated from here, moving to what types of contracts are morally permissable or not. But it doesn't matter. Should developers have the option to open source their work? If so, then the economic point is moot. The very idea of forcing people never to give away code is so absurd that it is not even worth entertaining. Because of this, it shouldn't matter what the economic impact is.
Character frequencies are a quick test of programming ability, whatever the language. Tell the interviewee he can pick his language. I agree with your point on the first question, though. I've been doing C++ for about years and I still have to look up weird templates, static/dynamic cast semantics, and other stuff. At one point I depended on destructors being called in reverse order of constructors. Not knowing it off the top of my head, I looked it up, and lo and behold it was part of the C++ spec. I wouldn't have expected anyone to have such knowledge memorized.
The end of slavery was only bad for a small number of wealthy men. Slavery depressed wages for the working class White man.
Compared to the rest of the world, the US is "a small number of wealthy [people]." Proprietary software may not be slavery, but it is certainly antithetical to freedom
How many people lost their jobs because of the emancipation of slaves? Probably many.
People comparing how "open source" or "free software" has failed compared proprietary software are performing a non sequitor. It's like saying Susan B. Anthony failed to live up to the standards of attractiveness compared to women in her day. Of course! That's the whole point--feminism wasn't about bettering oneself in the eyes of common feminine mores, it was about rejecting those mores. Correspondingly, free software is about rejection of the proprietary model, it isn't just another business model.
People can and do make money by centering their business on free software, but the success or failure of these companies is not the metric by which free software should be judged. Rather, it is entirely incidental.
The real question is, "Have we formed an alternative to proprietary software?" And I think the answer is Yes, we have. Now, I'll be the first to admit that most free games lack the sophistication of their proprietary brethren, but this is not very important for two reasons. First, these are games. It's not like forcing me to use proprietary products to submit a resume or file my tax return. Secondly, and this is related to the first point, most games lack "network" effects. You pick up the game, play it, and buy a better one a few months down the road. There is no vendor lock-in. Each game is a new creature.
There's a time to hold the handlebars, and there's a time to let go. We're talking about teenagers here, not toddlers.