According to this, they are planning on reaching break-even by spring of this year:
Reaching the "break-even" point is now planned for the next release of Mandrake Linux in the spring of 2003.
Perhaps they didn't get the money they needed from the last plea they gave out, and so are speeding up the development process to get new versions out.
They just released 9.0 in November, if I recall correctly.
That being said, I think I'll finally chip in, as I like the distribution, and have only been downloading ISOs for a while now.
The key might not be put in an especially vulnerable place like the bus to calculate the hash. The hash may be computed in the hardware. But given the incredible size of the number (2048 bit), wouldn't it simply be easier to dissect the hardware and try to figure out the key that way?
The X-Box runs, after all, in a "hostile" environment. It doesn't check up against MS servers every time it runs. So all the relevant keys used for encryption, public or private, have to exist in some form or another on the X-Box itself.
I might be misunderstanding the issue. Anyone care to explain this for me?
C was probably omitted due to the difficulty of searching for just that, and not, say, C# or C++. These search engines apparently return anything matching a substring, so "C" will match "C#" or "C++" as well as just "C". You could search for "C AND NOT C++ AND NOT C#", but then this would be inaccurate as well. There may be many jobs that ask for two of these languages, or all three.
The person posting the query results also ran into this problem with "java" vs. "javascript". Many jobs may ask for both. By only searching for one or the other, you are omitting quite a portion of jobs.
Ok, if I'm understanding you correctly, then I have no argument. The subjective beliefs of management may determine whether Linux or Windows ends up being more costly. Agreed. And certain other factors will be subjective as well. Whether the command line interface is easier or harder can be a subjective opinion. And whether closed source or open source is better can also be subjective.
But what cannot be subjective is the cost for a given scenario. Once the manager has chosen to hire X people for administering the Linux boxen, and Y people for administering the Windows boxen, it is an objective fact that one will cost more, less, or the same as the other.
The line may be blurred a bit because the manager can creatively interepret the balance sheet, placing Windows cost under "general staff", and placing Linux administration under it's own category. In this case, Windows will cost nothing and Linux will cost more, because of the way costs are interpreted.
This happens all the time in IT. I may be the only one assigned to a project, but I get someone else in the company to help me out. Suddenly less work is being done for the other guy's project and more for my own. But rarely does his salary get tagged onto the cost of my own project. So my project will seem cheaper than it really is.
So perhaps the way that costs are attributed to Linux vs. Windows is subjective. But I still don't think so. I think in the above scenario and ones like it the real problem is that there is no easy way to divide up the costs among employees working on different things. There is no good methodology for attributing costs. But I think if the methodology is subjective, it should be rejected.
I still believe the original poster was using the term "subjective" in a place where "relative" should have been used. It seems like a pedantic point, but it is important. If the cost is subjective, then neither system can ever objectively be more or less expensive than the other. If the cost is relative, however, then we put the question into more exact terms and get an objective answer.
You are misinterpreting the definition. If subjective just meant "peculiar to a particular individual", then all types of things would be subjective that are not. For example, some dude drank a snake oil like medicine that made his skin turn blue. You could say that being blue was "peculiar" to this person. This does not make it subjective. "Subjective" applies to opinions, beliefs, and knowledge.
The "peculiar" person you stick in the situation of being a sysadmin may determine the outcome of a cost-efficiency equation. But this will be the case no matter what anyone believes. This is no more subjective than my wearing a fancy and unique hat is subjective.
Of course, you could say "By 'subjective' I mean no more than being 'peculiar' to a person." And if you used it enough that way, it may actually catch on, and your usage would become correct ex post facto. But your current usage is certainly not correct according to the common usage of the term, just ask any English teacher.
Many things are subjective, such as beliefs and experiences. But whether a particular type of sysadmin running a particular OS is certainly not subjective.
Now, it may be the problem is defined inexactly. And depending on how we fill in all the parameters to the problem we end up with different solutions. But this would make the solution relative, not subjective.
Remember, many of these people come from very poor countries, and are more than willing to pound out C++ code for $30k/yr, working 16 hours a day, simply because that is a small fortune to their families.
I'd have to disagree. In the three companies I have worked for, the H1-B's made more than I did. If they live in the US, then they will have to pay the same cost of living as I do. You cannot hire an H1-B in NYC for 30k, that wouldn't even pay for a studio!
But even if they wanted to and did work for so little, I think the situation would be different than you describe. Maybe the job that we do simply isn't worth as much as we would like it to be. Look at teachers. They make diddly, and there is hardly an H1-B influx of teachers to this country. When you start making less than a teacher, then you can start complaining.
Judge me by my merits, not by my nationality. If someone from India has more experience or skill than I do, then they should get the job.
Yes, the market is tight. But people with H1-B visas are people to. Reading the article made me envision "Attack of the Clones". Everyone is struggling for jobs, not just people here. Have a heart, have a brain, judge yourself and others by your merits, not nationality.
I think the disposal of trash can also be compared to the donation of money to a charity fund. You are totally relinquishing the money, and placing it in the trust of the charity. But you still have an expectation of what that charity will do with the money. If the charity says that they will help the poor, but instead line their own pockets, then government suit can be brought. This is even though there may be no contract signed between the charity and the donator. The charity will still be held legally responsible for doing with that money what they advertise will be done with the money.
I don't see why the exact same situation doesn't hold with garbage collectors. The garbage collectors are entrusted to treat trash left by me on the street as trash, not an information gathering tool. The garbage collectors could do many things with that trash that does not violate the spirit of the contract. They could recycle the items, or incinerate them for the purposes of making energy. But using the trash as an information gathering tool would certainly violate the spirit of the implicit contract.
We can imagine other examples. One that springs to mind would be google.com selling information about specific employees searches to employers. Now, employers already have the ability to do this within the company network. But google could, based on a home email address, gather all information related to the domain name (on a cable modem, say). Then the employer could see that you are doing searches at home such as "herpes%20symptoms". Now, it is certainly ethically wrong for google to do such a thing, and I think, or would hope, that it is legally wrong as well.
If so, then it should certainly be legally wrong for garbage collectors to do the same.
The government should have as much right to go through my garbage as they have to go through my mailbox--none without a warrant.
Another example: I park my car on the curb. This does not make it legal for anyone to come and steal it. It also does not make it legal for the police to come and tow it away for evidence gathering without a warrant.
Well, I still want my car, but it might be said that I don't want my trash anymore. But there is an expectation that a service will come along and dispose of the garbage. There is no expectation that the contents of the garbage will be picked up and used against me in a court of law.
We entrust other people with our possessions all the time. We entrust valet parking not to drive off and take our cars, we entrust the bank not to deny us access to our money, and we entrust the garbage collectors to do nothing with our trash but dispose of it.
For this implicit contract to be broken in any of these circumstances, a warrant should be issued.
Just because I hand the valet the keys to my car does not give him license to rifle through my glove comparent, take my change, or steal my car.
Imagine there was a line for the valet and I just left my keys in the car with the door unlocked so the valet could pick it up in due time without me waiting. This does not give license for anyone to steal my car, though it might be easy for them to do so.
The situation is exactly analagous to garbage collectors. We place the garbage out there on the street with the implicit understanding that the garbage collectors, and no one else, is entitled to take that garbage and dispose of it. No one else has a right to that garbage.
The fact that the Supreme Court decided otherwise is quite clearly a mistake, one that should be reversed if justice is to be done.
for an accurate estimate of development time. In information theory, an extra bit must be used to distguish every distinction that can be made. That is, if you are programming a representation of a "car", and you only have two types of cars, then you will have one bit to represent the type of car. Two bits distinguishes four items, and three bits distinguishes eight items. N bits distinguish 2^N items.
But what's important is knowing, in at least a vague sense, how many "bits" you need. This will help you realize how many branches (if statement, switch statements, and so on) you will need. In the above example, if you have two types of cars to program representations for, your code will probably have something like:
if (car.type == type1) then do X else if (car.type == type2) then do Y
Branches, whether they come from if statements, switch statements, loop structures, or class polymorphism, are the basic building block of the complexity of a program. To extend on the above example, if each car can have two different types of engines, then the code will look like:
if (car.type == ctype1) then
if (car.engine.type == etype1) then do X
else if (car.engine.type == etype2) then do Y else if (car.type == ctype2) then
if (car.engine.type == etype1) then do X1
else if (car.engine.type == etype2) then do Y1 end if
Here, you can see how the complexity has doubled by adding a single extra bit of information to each object.
If you are dealing with a data structure that has sixteen fields, then you have 2^16 = 65536 cases to worry about! However, it is often the case that some of these fields are not independent, so complexity will be reduced. For example, if you have two types of vehicles, car and bicycle, and you have a field representing the engine type, then you don't truely have two bits of information, because bicycles don't have engines. In this case, the number of branches will be represented by adding instead of multiplying. This will look like:
if (vehicle.type == car) then
do W
if (vehicle.engine.type == type1) then do X
else if (vehicle.engine.type == type2) do Y else if (vehicle.type == bicycle) then
do Z end if
Here we have four things to worry about. You can use the basic rules of information theory as a guide to understanding the complexity of your project.
Usually, however, the project is already well underway before the complexity is understood to any significant detail. This is the reason managers use "guesstimates" and such, because they really don't want to, or don't have the time to, understand the real complexity of the project. This isn't really blameworthy, since much of the above task is not a manager's job.
But you should keep in mind that you will never really know the complexity. People that have done many projects of a similar nature can often estimate the complexity without too much effort, but this is because they are already familiar with the situation. If you are tackling a new problem, all bets are off. Prior experience, in this case, gives you nothing.
The lawyer's job is to obtain the best outcome for his client, whether the plaintiff or the defendant. The judge's is to ensure the trial is conducted 'fairly' according to established laws and procedures. Then it is up to the jury to determine guilt/innocence in a criminal proceeding or 'responsibility' in a civil suit.
Given that each of the lawyer, judge, and jury have different roles, doesn't it seem a miscarriage of justice to allow the lawyers to select the jury? Lawyers cannot select the judge that hears their case, why should they be allowed to select the jury?
Suggestions so far have been pretty bad. The problem, as the original poster suggested, is that lawyers want people they can manipulate. The answer is to make it more difficult to exclude people. That way the lawyers have less control over the constituency of the jury.
There are often good reasons to exclude potential jurors. But we have gotten to the point where each lawyer on the case can exclude X number of people, for no reason whatsoever. There should be very narrow and well defined criteria for which potential jurors should not serve. These criteria should be similar to those judges use to recuse themselves from cases where there is a conflict of interest.
If the lawyers can no longer control the constituency of the jury, then the jury itself has a better chance of being a jury of "peers", rather than a jury of "people the lawyers thought they could manipulate". Of course, jury selection itself is not totally random, lists of potential jurors are limited to voters/property owners/licensed drivers.
But a semi-random list is certainly much better than a list that reflects, prima facia, people who lawyers thought would be easier to convince of their case.
The article linked to says that the information commonly presented to signal the increase in crime rate after Australia's buyback is insufficient. Snopes then proceeds to give a much more meaningful set of data, which show not just 1997-1998 changes, but also changes of the preceeding and following years.
The only problem is when the government becomes, in effect, a corporation. What we have now is, in essence, a form of capitalo-anarchism, where the government is controlled by corporations. The idea behind this system of goverment is that corporations provide rule of law just as any other product. In theory, the corporation that best suits the consumers' needs will do the best.
The disanalogy is that we cannot pick and choose our favorite goverment. There is a limited degree to which we can. We can go to California, and be under the influence of Hollywood's and Silicon Valley's lobbying. Or we can go to Texas, and be under the influence of Big Oil's lobbying.
The problem is that the corporations that control our laws are totally sheilded from responsibility. We would like to expect that corporations that screw over Joe Average citizen will do worse than those that help protect the rights and priviledges of Joe Average citizen.
But this is not the case. In practice, the goal of maximizing profits has shown time and time again to be contrary to the goals of protecting the rights of average citizens. We can see this in the music cartels demanding tithes for every digit recordable media sold, Microsoft destroying competition and leaving consumers with few alternatives, scientific journals demanding that their outragious cartels for controlling scientific information be preserved and that the government's free databases be shut down, medical companies demanding less liability, software companies redefining their product to be a "license", even for home buyers. The list goes on and on.
But it would not be useful without decrypting it via a program that has been compiled into an unreadable format.
In any case, it doesn't matter. For a book to be of use, it must be readable. This is different from programs, which can be used in their unreadable state. If the book is readable, it can be copied. A program can be copied too, but not in the same way. I can't take the sorting algorithm from an executable and use it for something else, unless I have the source code. But I can take any random paragraph from a book and insert it into another work.
This is just talking about practicality, not legality. The GPL seeks to make legality the same as practicality, and to promote both at the admonishment of the doctrine of copyright.
Either GPL+Proprietary is either a good licensing practice or is a bad licensing practice. You can't say it's good for MySQL AB and bad for Trolltech.
Sure. I say it's good, for both cases. A company has the means to continue it's existence, while simultaneously benefitting the community. If the company ever decides to be a bastard and run off with the code, anyone else can take the GPL code and keep maintaining it.
..the online or downloadable version of this book?
No where. And it doesn't need to be. If the book was licensed like the GPL, then anyone who bought a copy could redistribute the text. But there is a separate libre license specifically designed to deal with documents, and so the GPL doesn't even apply.
And it makes sense that the restrictions put on books should differ from those placed on software. You cannot "compile" a book into an unreadable format and still make use of it, unless you have a correspondingly compiled software utility that descrambles the text.
MySQL is dually licensed under GPL and a commercial license. MySQL AB can do this since they are the creators of the code.
If you wish to use the software under the restrictions of the GPL, you are free to do so. But if you wish to do something not allowed by the GPL, then, and only then must you purchase the commercial license.
This is clearly spelled out in MySQL AB's licensing section:
If your application is NOT licensed under GPL or compatible OSI license approved by MySQL AB and you intend to distribute MySQL software (be that internally or externally), you must first obtain a commercial license to the MySQL software in question.
Had they made MySQL LGPL or BSD licensed rather than GPL, then this restriction wouldn't exist.
You can do anything with MySQL that the GPL allows. But if you want to do something not allowed, you still can, but you must pay MySQL AB.
The 12-bit ID provides 4096 unique combinations of digits, lowering the risk of interference to less than 0.25%.
The only problem with this is that it represents the chance that any TWO such mice have the same 12-bit ID.
Have you ever played that game where, in a room of 25 people or more, you proclaim that at least two people have the exact same birthday? The chance of two people sharing a birthday in a room of 22 people is about 50%. The chances get much greater as the number of people increase. You wouldn't think it, because the probability that any two random people share the same birthday is 1/365. But as you increase the number of people, this goes up greatly.
For your mouse, there are 4096 possible combinations. So the probability that any two such mice will share the same ID are 1/4096. But if you have, say, 100 people, then there are 100*99 ~= 10,000 possible pairings. It's been a while since I took statistics, but I can wager that at least two of those people will share the same ID.
E. Starting three months after the entry of this Final Judgment to the Court, Microsoft shall make available for use by third parties, for the sole purpose of interoperating or communicating with a Windows Operating System Product, on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (consistent with Section III.I), any Communications Protocol that is, on or after the date this Final Judgment is submitted to the Court, (i) implemented in a Windows Operating System Product installed on a client computer, and (ii) used to interoperate, or communicate, natively (i.e., without the addition of software code to the client operating system product) with a Microsoft server operating system product.
So ISVs are only allowed to duplicate the client side protocol, and not the server side protocol? Also, more importantly, what does it mean for the agreement to be "non discriminatory"? If Microsoft says that the protocols can only be used by ISVs that do not redistribute the intellectual property to their customers, is this non discriminitory? For that would automatically disclude GPL products from implementing the protocols based on the released intellectual property. I would think it discriminatory since it automatically discludes Microsoft's biggest competitor, but later on,
2. the scope of any such license (and the intellectual property rights licensed thereunder) need be no broader than is necessary to ensure that an ISV, IHV, IAP, ICP or OEM is able to exercise the options or alternatives expressly provided under this Final Judgment (e.g., an ISV's, IHV's, IAP's, ICP's and OEM's option to promote Non-Microsoft Middleware shall not confer any rights to any Microsoft intellectual property rights infringed by that Non-Microsoft Middleware)
This seems to grant Microsoft the ability discriminate against GPL and BSD, since these licenses "infringe" upon Microsoft's intellectual property rights. That is, for Microsoft to license the protocol information to RedHat or IBM for inclusion in a BSD licensed product, the intellectual property would automatically be available to anyone for free, thus negating any possible "non discriminatory" charge Microsoft may be able to impose to licensees. Granting rights for the protocol to be implemented in a GPL style product would get even more complicated.
But this restriction in itself makes the terms of licensing automatically discriminatory. Linux is Windows biggest competitor, and would benefit greatly by full release of the protocol specifications. But since Microsoft's biggest competitor won't be able to use information to improve interoperability with Windows, who is supposed to benefit from this settlement, other than Microsoft?
Re:All Saddam's email are belong to us!
on
Saddam's Inbox Hacked
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I really don't think it's fair to compare the Iraq of today with the US of 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago. As for the more recent "atrocities" you mention:
We don't know what caused Gulf War Syndrome, or if the US government is responsible. The only evidence of a coverup is the evidence that the symptoms are so vague that no one even thought to look at it as a separate illness until sometime after the war.
Doing bad things with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons before we knew the dire consequences of using them is one thing. But it is another thing to use such weapons on civilians when you know exactly what the effects will be.
That the US government was giving Hep B vaccines to Inuit children in a covert attempt to increase incidence of AIDS among that racial group during the 1990's is just ludicrous. It may very well be that there are bad side effects to the Hep B vaccine, and it may be that the US government was negligent in exploring the effects of such vaccines, but to say that the use of the Hep B vaccine was done intentionally and solely for the purpose of giving Inuit people AIDS is just ludicrous, and I'll regard it as such until you can come up with better evidence.
Why do you assume that "Black can force a win" is not possible? I have not heard of anyone proving that chess with perfect play is not a loss for white.
Perhaps I was being sloppy. I was thinking that since the board is roughly symmetrical, if either could win, it would be the one with the first move.
In any case, it doesn't matter. As long as the outcome is always one of the following possibilities, any fair match of an even number of games will ultimately result in a draw:
White can force win
Black can force win
Both sides can force a draw
Even allowing for a strange state of affairs where Black can force a win, the above three possibilities absolutely limit any deterministic board game like chess, go, tic-tac-toe, etc. Either one of the sides can force a win, or both sides can force a draw. If e.g. Black can't force a draw, then either Black or White can force a win.
If White can always force a win, then every match of eight games will end 4-4. If Black can force a win, it will also be the case that every match of 8 games will end 4-4. If either side can force a draw, then every match of 8 games will end in 8 draws.
Realizing this is very simple if you just imagine that chess was as easy as tic-tac-toe. Adults don't play tic-tac-toe because they know a game played perfectly on both sides always results in a draw, and the perfect game is really easy to play.
It doesn't matter. Only one of two outcomes is possible:
White can force a win or
Black can force a draw
If White can force a win, then, in a match of 8 games, each side will have four wins. If Black can force a draw, then in a match of 8 games there will be eight draws.
But as other people have said, determining whether a draw or win can be forced is computationally infeasible. So the game will be interesting for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps they didn't get the money they needed from the last plea they gave out, and so are speeding up the development process to get new versions out.
They just released 9.0 in November, if I recall correctly.
That being said, I think I'll finally chip in, as I like the distribution, and have only been downloading ISOs for a while now.
The key might not be put in an especially vulnerable place like the bus to calculate the hash. The hash may be computed in the hardware. But given the incredible size of the number (2048 bit), wouldn't it simply be easier to dissect the hardware and try to figure out the key that way?
The X-Box runs, after all, in a "hostile" environment. It doesn't check up against MS servers every time it runs. So all the relevant keys used for encryption, public or private, have to exist in some form or another on the X-Box itself.
I might be misunderstanding the issue. Anyone care to explain this for me?
C was probably omitted due to the difficulty of searching for just that, and not, say, C# or C++. These search engines apparently return anything matching a substring, so "C" will match "C#" or "C++" as well as just "C". You could search for "C AND NOT C++ AND NOT C#", but then this would be inaccurate as well. There may be many jobs that ask for two of these languages, or all three.
The person posting the query results also ran into this problem with "java" vs. "javascript". Many jobs may ask for both. By only searching for one or the other, you are omitting quite a portion of jobs.
Ok, if I'm understanding you correctly, then I have no argument. The subjective beliefs of management may determine whether Linux or Windows ends up being more costly. Agreed. And certain other factors will be subjective as well. Whether the command line interface is easier or harder can be a subjective opinion. And whether closed source or open source is better can also be subjective.
But what cannot be subjective is the cost for a given scenario. Once the manager has chosen to hire X people for administering the Linux boxen, and Y people for administering the Windows boxen, it is an objective fact that one will cost more, less, or the same as the other.
The line may be blurred a bit because the manager can creatively interepret the balance sheet, placing Windows cost under "general staff", and placing Linux administration under it's own category. In this case, Windows will cost nothing and Linux will cost more, because of the way costs are interpreted.
This happens all the time in IT. I may be the only one assigned to a project, but I get someone else in the company to help me out. Suddenly less work is being done for the other guy's project and more for my own. But rarely does his salary get tagged onto the cost of my own project. So my project will seem cheaper than it really is.
So perhaps the way that costs are attributed to Linux vs. Windows is subjective. But I still don't think so. I think in the above scenario and ones like it the real problem is that there is no easy way to divide up the costs among employees working on different things. There is no good methodology for attributing costs. But I think if the methodology is subjective, it should be rejected.
I still believe the original poster was using the term "subjective" in a place where "relative" should have been used. It seems like a pedantic point, but it is important. If the cost is subjective, then neither system can ever objectively be more or less expensive than the other. If the cost is relative, however, then we put the question into more exact terms and get an objective answer.
You are misinterpreting the definition. If subjective just meant "peculiar to a particular individual", then all types of things would be subjective that are not. For example, some dude drank a snake oil like medicine that made his skin turn blue. You could say that being blue was "peculiar" to this person. This does not make it subjective. "Subjective" applies to opinions, beliefs, and knowledge.
The "peculiar" person you stick in the situation of being a sysadmin may determine the outcome of a cost-efficiency equation. But this will be the case no matter what anyone believes. This is no more subjective than my wearing a fancy and unique hat is subjective.
Of course, you could say "By 'subjective' I mean no more than being 'peculiar' to a person." And if you used it enough that way, it may actually catch on, and your usage would become correct ex post facto. But your current usage is certainly not correct according to the common usage of the term, just ask any English teacher.
Many things are subjective, such as beliefs and experiences. But whether a particular type of sysadmin running a particular OS is certainly not subjective.
Now, it may be the problem is defined inexactly. And depending on how we fill in all the parameters to the problem we end up with different solutions. But this would make the solution relative, not subjective.
I'd have to disagree. In the three companies I have worked for, the H1-B's made more than I did. If they live in the US, then they will have to pay the same cost of living as I do. You cannot hire an H1-B in NYC for 30k, that wouldn't even pay for a studio!
But even if they wanted to and did work for so little, I think the situation would be different than you describe. Maybe the job that we do simply isn't worth as much as we would like it to be. Look at teachers. They make diddly, and there is hardly an H1-B influx of teachers to this country. When you start making less than a teacher, then you can start complaining.
Judge me by my merits, not by my nationality. If someone from India has more experience or skill than I do, then they should get the job.
Yes, the market is tight. But people with H1-B visas are people to. Reading the article made me envision "Attack of the Clones". Everyone is struggling for jobs, not just people here. Have a heart, have a brain, judge yourself and others by your merits, not nationality.
I think the disposal of trash can also be compared to the donation of money to a charity fund. You are totally relinquishing the money, and placing it in the trust of the charity. But you still have an expectation of what that charity will do with the money. If the charity says that they will help the poor, but instead line their own pockets, then government suit can be brought. This is even though there may be no contract signed between the charity and the donator. The charity will still be held legally responsible for doing with that money what they advertise will be done with the money.
I don't see why the exact same situation doesn't hold with garbage collectors. The garbage collectors are entrusted to treat trash left by me on the street as trash, not an information gathering tool. The garbage collectors could do many things with that trash that does not violate the spirit of the contract. They could recycle the items, or incinerate them for the purposes of making energy. But using the trash as an information gathering tool would certainly violate the spirit of the implicit contract.
We can imagine other examples. One that springs to mind would be google.com selling information about specific employees searches to employers. Now, employers already have the ability to do this within the company network. But google could, based on a home email address, gather all information related to the domain name (on a cable modem, say). Then the employer could see that you are doing searches at home such as "herpes%20symptoms". Now, it is certainly ethically wrong for google to do such a thing, and I think, or would hope, that it is legally wrong as well.
If so, then it should certainly be legally wrong for garbage collectors to do the same.
Btw, I'm arguing against the SC, not you.
The government should have as much right to go through my garbage as they have to go through my mailbox--none without a warrant.
Another example: I park my car on the curb. This does not make it legal for anyone to come and steal it. It also does not make it legal for the police to come and tow it away for evidence gathering without a warrant.
Well, I still want my car, but it might be said that I don't want my trash anymore. But there is an expectation that a service will come along and dispose of the garbage. There is no expectation that the contents of the garbage will be picked up and used against me in a court of law.
We entrust other people with our possessions all the time. We entrust valet parking not to drive off and take our cars, we entrust the bank not to deny us access to our money, and we entrust the garbage collectors to do nothing with our trash but dispose of it.
For this implicit contract to be broken in any of these circumstances, a warrant should be issued.
Just because I hand the valet the keys to my car does not give him license to rifle through my glove comparent, take my change, or steal my car.
Imagine there was a line for the valet and I just left my keys in the car with the door unlocked so the valet could pick it up in due time without me waiting. This does not give license for anyone to steal my car, though it might be easy for them to do so.
The situation is exactly analagous to garbage collectors. We place the garbage out there on the street with the implicit understanding that the garbage collectors, and no one else, is entitled to take that garbage and dispose of it. No one else has a right to that garbage.
The fact that the Supreme Court decided otherwise is quite clearly a mistake, one that should be reversed if justice is to be done.
for an accurate estimate of development time. In information theory, an extra bit must be used to distguish every distinction that can be made. That is, if you are programming a representation of a "car", and you only have two types of cars, then you will have one bit to represent the type of car. Two bits distinguishes four items, and three bits distinguishes eight items. N bits distinguish 2^N items.
But what's important is knowing, in at least a vague sense, how many "bits" you need. This will help you realize how many branches (if statement, switch statements, and so on) you will need. In the above example, if you have two types of cars to program representations for, your code will probably have something like:
if (car.type == type1) then do X
else if (car.type == type2) then do Y
Branches, whether they come from if statements, switch statements, loop structures, or class polymorphism, are the basic building block of the complexity of a program. To extend on the above example, if each car can have two different types of engines, then the code will look like:
if (car.type == ctype1) then
if (car.engine.type == etype1) then do X
else if (car.engine.type == etype2) then do Y
else if (car.type == ctype2) then
if (car.engine.type == etype1) then do X1
else if (car.engine.type == etype2) then do Y1
end if
Here, you can see how the complexity has doubled by adding a single extra bit of information to each object.
If you are dealing with a data structure that has sixteen fields, then you have 2^16 = 65536 cases to worry about! However, it is often the case that some of these fields are not independent, so complexity will be reduced. For example, if you have two types of vehicles, car and bicycle, and you have a field representing the engine type, then you don't truely have two bits of information, because bicycles don't have engines. In this case, the number of branches will be represented by adding instead of multiplying. This will look like:
if (vehicle.type == car) then
do W
if (vehicle.engine.type == type1) then do X
else if (vehicle.engine.type == type2) do Y
else if (vehicle.type == bicycle) then
do Z
end if
Here we have four things to worry about. You can use the basic rules of information theory as a guide to understanding the complexity of your project.
Usually, however, the project is already well underway before the complexity is understood to any significant detail. This is the reason managers use "guesstimates" and such, because they really don't want to, or don't have the time to, understand the real complexity of the project. This isn't really blameworthy, since much of the above task is not a manager's job.
But you should keep in mind that you will never really know the complexity. People that have done many projects of a similar nature can often estimate the complexity without too much effort, but this is because they are already familiar with the situation. If you are tackling a new problem, all bets are off. Prior experience, in this case, gives you nothing.
Given that each of the lawyer, judge, and jury have different roles, doesn't it seem a miscarriage of justice to allow the lawyers to select the jury? Lawyers cannot select the judge that hears their case, why should they be allowed to select the jury?
Suggestions so far have been pretty bad. The problem, as the original poster suggested, is that lawyers want people they can manipulate. The answer is to make it more difficult to exclude people. That way the lawyers have less control over the constituency of the jury.
There are often good reasons to exclude potential jurors. But we have gotten to the point where each lawyer on the case can exclude X number of people, for no reason whatsoever. There should be very narrow and well defined criteria for which potential jurors should not serve. These criteria should be similar to those judges use to recuse themselves from cases where there is a conflict of interest.
If the lawyers can no longer control the constituency of the jury, then the jury itself has a better chance of being a jury of "peers", rather than a jury of "people the lawyers thought they could manipulate". Of course, jury selection itself is not totally random, lists of potential jurors are limited to voters/property owners/licensed drivers.
But a semi-random list is certainly much better than a list that reflects, prima facia, people who lawyers thought would be easier to convince of their case.
The article linked to says that the information commonly presented to signal the increase in crime rate after Australia's buyback is insufficient. Snopes then proceeds to give a much more meaningful set of data, which show not just 1997-1998 changes, but also changes of the preceeding and following years.
Hardly flamebait.
The only problem is when the government becomes, in effect, a corporation. What we have now is, in essence, a form of capitalo-anarchism, where the government is controlled by corporations. The idea behind this system of goverment is that corporations provide rule of law just as any other product. In theory, the corporation that best suits the consumers' needs will do the best.
The disanalogy is that we cannot pick and choose our favorite goverment. There is a limited degree to which we can. We can go to California, and be under the influence of Hollywood's and Silicon Valley's lobbying. Or we can go to Texas, and be under the influence of Big Oil's lobbying.
The problem is that the corporations that control our laws are totally sheilded from responsibility. We would like to expect that corporations that screw over Joe Average citizen will do worse than those that help protect the rights and priviledges of Joe Average citizen.
But this is not the case. In practice, the goal of maximizing profits has shown time and time again to be contrary to the goals of protecting the rights of average citizens. We can see this in the music cartels demanding tithes for every digit recordable media sold, Microsoft destroying competition and leaving consumers with few alternatives, scientific journals demanding that their outragious cartels for controlling scientific information be preserved and that the government's free databases be shut down, medical companies demanding less liability, software companies redefining their product to be a "license", even for home buyers. The list goes on and on.
But it would not be useful without decrypting it via a program that has been compiled into an unreadable format.
In any case, it doesn't matter. For a book to be of use, it must be readable. This is different from programs, which can be used in their unreadable state. If the book is readable, it can be copied. A program can be copied too, but not in the same way. I can't take the sorting algorithm from an executable and use it for something else, unless I have the source code. But I can take any random paragraph from a book and insert it into another work.
This is just talking about practicality, not legality. The GPL seeks to make legality the same as practicality, and to promote both at the admonishment of the doctrine of copyright.
Sure. I say it's good, for both cases. A company has the means to continue it's existence, while simultaneously benefitting the community. If the company ever decides to be a bastard and run off with the code, anyone else can take the GPL code and keep maintaining it.
The parent post answers a question that has been asked many times in this thread. There should be at least one answer for all the questions asked.
No where. And it doesn't need to be. If the book was licensed like the GPL, then anyone who bought a copy could redistribute the text. But there is a separate libre license specifically designed to deal with documents, and so the GPL doesn't even apply.
And it makes sense that the restrictions put on books should differ from those placed on software. You cannot "compile" a book into an unreadable format and still make use of it, unless you have a correspondingly compiled software utility that descrambles the text.
MySQL is dually licensed under GPL and a commercial license. MySQL AB can do this since they are the creators of the code.
If you wish to use the software under the restrictions of the GPL, you are free to do so. But if you wish to do something not allowed by the GPL, then, and only then must you purchase the commercial license.
This is clearly spelled out in MySQL AB's licensing section:
Had they made MySQL LGPL or BSD licensed rather than GPL, then this restriction wouldn't exist.
You can do anything with MySQL that the GPL allows. But if you want to do something not allowed, you still can, but you must pay MySQL AB.
I don't see how you can find any fault with this.
The only problem with this is that it represents the chance that any TWO such mice have the same 12-bit ID.
Have you ever played that game where, in a room of 25 people or more, you proclaim that at least two people have the exact same birthday? The chance of two people sharing a birthday in a room of 22 people is about 50%. The chances get much greater as the number of people increase. You wouldn't think it, because the probability that any two random people share the same birthday is 1/365. But as you increase the number of people, this goes up greatly.
For your mouse, there are 4096 possible combinations. So the probability that any two such mice will share the same ID are 1/4096. But if you have, say, 100 people, then there are 100*99 ~= 10,000 possible pairings. It's been a while since I took statistics, but I can wager that at least two of those people will share the same ID.
So ISVs are only allowed to duplicate the client side protocol, and not the server side protocol? Also, more importantly, what does it mean for the agreement to be "non discriminatory"? If Microsoft says that the protocols can only be used by ISVs that do not redistribute the intellectual property to their customers, is this non discriminitory? For that would automatically disclude GPL products from implementing the protocols based on the released intellectual property. I would think it discriminatory since it automatically discludes Microsoft's biggest competitor, but later on,
This seems to grant Microsoft the ability discriminate against GPL and BSD, since these licenses "infringe" upon Microsoft's intellectual property rights. That is, for Microsoft to license the protocol information to RedHat or IBM for inclusion in a BSD licensed product, the intellectual property would automatically be available to anyone for free, thus negating any possible "non discriminatory" charge Microsoft may be able to impose to licensees. Granting rights for the protocol to be implemented in a GPL style product would get even more complicated.
But this restriction in itself makes the terms of licensing automatically discriminatory. Linux is Windows biggest competitor, and would benefit greatly by full release of the protocol specifications. But since Microsoft's biggest competitor won't be able to use information to improve interoperability with Windows, who is supposed to benefit from this settlement, other than Microsoft?
Perhaps I was being sloppy. I was thinking that since the board is roughly symmetrical, if either could win, it would be the one with the first move.
In any case, it doesn't matter. As long as the outcome is always one of the following possibilities, any fair match of an even number of games will ultimately result in a draw:
Even allowing for a strange state of affairs where Black can force a win, the above three possibilities absolutely limit any deterministic board game like chess, go, tic-tac-toe, etc. Either one of the sides can force a win, or both sides can force a draw. If e.g. Black can't force a draw, then either Black or White can force a win.
If White can always force a win, then every match of eight games will end 4-4. If Black can force a win, it will also be the case that every match of 8 games will end 4-4. If either side can force a draw, then every match of 8 games will end in 8 draws.
Realizing this is very simple if you just imagine that chess was as easy as tic-tac-toe. Adults don't play tic-tac-toe because they know a game played perfectly on both sides always results in a draw, and the perfect game is really easy to play.
If White can force a win, then, in a match of 8 games, each side will have four wins. If Black can force a draw, then in a match of 8 games there will be eight draws.
But as other people have said, determining whether a draw or win can be forced is computationally infeasible. So the game will be interesting for a while.