I tried to sign up for a PayPal account, but the form asked me to copy letters and digits from a noisy GIF image to a text input. I know they do this to keep bots from signing up, but such a technique fails to distinguish these users from bots:
visually impaired users (does the Americans with Disabilities Act apply in this case?),
other users on text terminals (such as those whose internet access is through a shell account),
users who routinely turn off images (such as those whose internet access is through a dial-up modem), and
other users who otherwise cannot view GIF images (such as those who live in jurisdictions where Unisys owns a patent on reading LZW, but note that in the USA, patent 4,558,302 covers only writing LZW).
Garbage collection is not guaranteed to occur ever, even if the system exits normally/abnormally.
In the Java language, you can call System.gc(). The language specification guarantees that the system will run full garbage collection when your code calls this function.
Lisp has unwind-protect, and Scheme has the similar but slightly more powerful dynamic-wind, designed to allocate and free resources whenever execution enters or leaves a particular expression.
And if you don't like the details of the contract, don't sign it; you may have to choose a different career
I invest four years of my time and $100,000 in an education, and now do you say that you want me to throw it all away and work at Burger King because before I decided to go to school, nobody told me that the standard practice contracts in the field had such lopsided terms?
If I don't like the types of offers I get for postdoctoral positions in my field, and I sign a contract and take a job anyway, I can't very well complain that the postdoctoral market is "unfair" and that by not signing I will have "no career".
Yes, but if you wisely decide not to sign a contract, you have no job and no way of paying off your $200,000+ loan. Students fresh out of college may have to default on their student loans and screw up their credit for life because a job at McDonald's doesn't pay enough.
So you can't get rich on the efforts of others without giving them something back? Tough.
If you distribute a Qt application to Windows users that uses at least one GNU GPL licensed library (such as LZO, UCL, readline, and the like), you must use Qt Free Edition, and you also have to distribute the binaries and sources of Cygwin and XFree86 because Qt Free requires POSIX and X11 and cannot work with Win32. Yes, I know there's a straight Win32 version, but it requires Visual Studio 6 or later ($400), and its license does not allow developers to modify Qt and is thus incompatible with GPL'd libraries.
Shouldn't you have made it a lambda function passed to global-set-key?
The Emacs idiom for defining new features is to define the function (giving it a long name suitable for an M-x call) and then use global-set-key to add a shortcut. For example, first make M-x tetris-on-drugs, and then map Ctrl+Super+T to it. (The super key on a PC bears a Windows logo.)
LISP, just like all the languages that have copied its gc system, neglects to understand that there are many other resources I need to manage other than memory (db handles, shared memory regions, mutexes, files, etc.).
The Java language provides a solution that resembles C++'s destructors. Before the Java runtime's garbage collector disposes of objects, it calls their finalizers.
It's possible to create reasonably convincing color with only two components: red and cyan. Try it. Turn off your NVIDIA video card's blue gun, or grab an image in GIMP or Photoshop and turn off the blue channel, and see that it affects the image very little (other than giving a yellow cast which can be fixed by copying the green channel into the blue channel). This works because the human eye isn't very sensitive to blue light.
I'm considering using this fact for image compression on a Game Boy Advance homebrew game.
English works just fine with only 18 letters
on
XML for Ancients
·
· Score: 2
Not having these glyphs in the Unicode set would be like asking English-speakers to use alphabets reduced by five or six characters (M and N are similar, X, Q, C and Z could be replaced by one character as well)
No, 95 years on all works first published on or after January 31, 1923. See also Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. And it'll get even longer before 2020 as Di$ney frantically bribes Congre$$ to pass yet another corporate-welfare copyright extension.
The case will happen if you ask for the translation
Which doesn't change the fact that you can choose not to sign that contract if you don't like its terms.
Five record labels control the promotion of music, and they all have the same one-sided contract terms. Therefore, an artist can choose one of these:
Major label Foo, with a lopsided contract.
Major label Bar, with a lopsided contract.
Major label Baz, with a lopsided contract.
Major label Blah, with a lopsided contract.
Major label Yadda, with a lopsided contract.
Any of various independent labels with a contract that provides a fairer share of royalties but no chance of airplay because the major labels control the companies that tell mainstream radio stations what to play and no record sales because
consumers don't know the artist even exists, and
the major labels control the companies that tell mainstream music stores what to carry.
No label, no contract, and no career.
Is that much of a choice?
if the majority of artists make the mistake of signing contracts that they don't understand.
...then the majority of labels make the mistake of writing contracts that deceive artists.
In a sense MusicCity has just written a "browser" to contain the FastTrack "plugin". So why are they the ones that are accountable?
The essential difference between the Mozilla browser and the IE "browser" on the one hand and MusicCity's Morpheus "browser" on the other is that Mozilla and IE are primarily designed and marketed for legitimate purposes such as reading and posting to OSDN Slashdot, OSDN Freshmeat, and ex-OSDN Kuro5hin, and for viewing content with legitimate plugins such as Macromedia's SWF player, whereas MusicCity's browser cannot work with anything other than the FastTrack plugin.
Royden Yates, one of the team that discovered the tools, told the BBC: "Every indication that we have been able to gather suggests that we are looking at something between 80 and 100,000 years old.
In other words, the bone sculptures may just barely be old enough not to qualify for effectively perpetual copyright under the Sonny "Bone"-o Act?
(Yes, I knew they meant 80K to 100K years, but I couldn't resist.)
Whether the reason for high ticket prices and low profit margin is the cost of obtaining the film, the cost of the projectionist, the cost of the facility, the cost of making the movie, the cost of actors, or the cost of the ad campaigns that try to make a piece of garbage look appealing by plastering the movie's name over everything
...the cost of frivolous lawsuits that studios file against consumers who act within their constitutional right to watch DVD videos for which they have purchased a legitimate license. (The U.S. Constitution and foreign counterparts trump statutes such as DMCA and foreign counterparts.)
Try Diet Dr. Pepper. Somehow they managed to hide the weird, malty Aspartame taste better than most others.
Or you can drink DietRite cola, which doesn't even have aspartame, instead using Ace-K and sucralose. In addition, DietRite cola has no sodium and no caffeine (good for college students who have to get up for class tomorrow). Most of my friends consider it the only diet cola worth drinking.
Are the bodily fluids of the Eloi people (i.e. the people that H. G. Wells wrote about in The Time Machine and which are also depicted in Precious Moments figurines) significantly different in composition from those of a typical A.D. 2001 American?
After casually reading the Motosoto license, I could not find a significant difference between its terms and those of the GNU Lesser GPL. Anyone care to point out how this is different from LGPL?
I have yet to see a clickwrap license that says only the clicker of this license may be allowed access to the machine this software will reside on.
I have seen something to this effect a few times: "You may not permit other persons to use or otherwise access the Software except under the terms of this License." This means that if you RE the software, the DVDCCA could sue your girlfriend/wife/parent.
the DVDCCA also have to show evidence that it was lawful for Johansen to agree to that contract. If the law in Norway is that reverse engineering is lawful for interoperability, then any clauses in the click-wrap agreement are null and void
I've seen a EULA that states, in short: You may not copy, modify, etc. this software, except to install this software on one computer or strictly for backup purposes. In addition:
You may not reverse-engineer the Software in any way.
You may not export the Software to Afghanistan, Cuba, Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria.
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY ON THIS SOFTWARE, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.
THE AUTHOR SHALL NOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES INCURRED AS A RESULT OF USE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
If the law of your jurisdiction does not permit enforcing the above four terms, this agreement is NULL AND VOID, AND YOU MAY NOT USE OR OTHERWISE ACCESS THE SOFTWARE.
Attorneys cover their client's @$$es because their clients pay them to.
I see Windows XP's product authentication mechanism as a step toward eliminating shrinkwrap and click-through licensing in favor of actual contracts that users have to sign with a Digital ID.
You don't say "a few lines of compiler," do you? Say "a few lines of assembly language."
do practically nothing
Four lines of 6502 assembly language can detect whether a program runs on NESticle or on Nintendo hardware:
ppustatus = $2002;bit 7 of this register is vblank status
nestc_detect:
bit $2002;NES turns on bit 7 at vblank
bpl nestc_detect;wait until bit 7 is 1
bit $2002;NES turns bit 7 off after any $2002 read
bmi is_nesticle;but NESticle waits until the end of vblank
; things to do on a real NES
is_nesticle:
; things to do on a poorly emulated NES
To see how this works, visit my Everything 2 writeup about NESticle.
although I invite you to memorize the 700+ instructions in the PIII instruction set
Everyday asm programming (i.e. not writing the lowest level of kernel VM code) needs only about 50 instructions per problem domain (intmath, fpumath, mmx/sse, etc), and that's on a CISC chip. RISC instruction sets have a much smaller and much more orthogonal instruction set. For a computer architecture class at Rose-Hulman, I once designed and implemented a 16-bit RISC machine with a set of 15 instructions (8 arithmetic, 4 control, 3 data movement) based loosely on the MIPS architecture. But then I learned how ARM7TDMI's Thumb instruction set used many of the tricks I thought I invented.
I would think that you can use this citation to argue that copyrights, while supposed to be limited in scope, are now becoming de facto limitless, and thus are not 'for limited times'
No. The citation says that unlike copyrights, trade secrets are perpetual. However, this ignores that every 20 years, Disney employees contribute upwards of US$6 million to congressional re-election campaigns to get 20 more years of copyright monopoly. See also the Wikipedia article about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. In fact, according to one interpretation of the Constitution, a billion years plus two days would be considered sufficiently "limited times."
A curse on the Bono family for being so dang greedy.
Moderation question - why is no post every funny and insightful?
The comment header displays only the most recently applied moderation. Click on the comment's cid (#2510706) itself to see all different categories of moderation that moderators have applied to a comment.
It is not inconceivable that in decade or two we will be able to provide a program with a design document written in prose and have it generate the program.
We're damn close. Programs can already be written as specifications of their output in functional languages that approximate algebraic notation. In fact, a particular programmer's boss once confused a program written in the Haskell language with a design document, asking "Where's the implementation?"
"Umm..." (runs a Haskell compiler) (runs the binary it produces) (correct answer appears)
"I've heard of programming computers in English on Pick OS, but this is something else."
Slashdot Mirror
You can download it from Intel
Reminder: This compiler includes no support and cannot be used to produce products for resale or commercial use.
And thus produces binaries incompatible with the GNU General Public License, which allows no such restrictions on distributed binaries.
I tried to sign up for a PayPal account, but the form asked me to copy letters and digits from a noisy GIF image to a text input. I know they do this to keep bots from signing up, but such a technique fails to distinguish these users from bots:
Garbage collection is not guaranteed to occur ever, even if the system exits normally/abnormally.
In the Java language, you can call System.gc(). The language specification guarantees that the system will run full garbage collection when your code calls this function.
Lisp has unwind-protect, and Scheme has the similar but slightly more powerful dynamic-wind, designed to allocate and free resources whenever execution enters or leaves a particular expression.
And if you don't like the details of the contract, don't sign it; you may have to choose a different career
I invest four years of my time and $100,000 in an education, and now do you say that you want me to throw it all away and work at Burger King because before I decided to go to school, nobody told me that the standard practice contracts in the field had such lopsided terms?
If I don't like the types of offers I get for postdoctoral positions in my field, and I sign a contract and take a job anyway, I can't very well complain that the postdoctoral market is "unfair" and that by not signing I will have "no career".
Yes, but if you wisely decide not to sign a contract, you have no job and no way of paying off your $200,000+ loan. Students fresh out of college may have to default on their student loans and screw up their credit for life because a job at McDonald's doesn't pay enough.
So you can't get rich on the efforts of others without giving them something back? Tough.
If you distribute a Qt application to Windows users that uses at least one GNU GPL licensed library (such as LZO, UCL, readline, and the like), you must use Qt Free Edition, and you also have to distribute the binaries and sources of Cygwin and XFree86 because Qt Free requires POSIX and X11 and cannot work with Win32. Yes, I know there's a straight Win32 version, but it requires Visual Studio 6 or later ($400), and its license does not allow developers to modify Qt and is thus incompatible with GPL'd libraries.
Shouldn't you have made it a lambda function passed to global-set-key?
The Emacs idiom for defining new features is to define the function (giving it a long name suitable for an M-x call) and then use global-set-key to add a shortcut. For example, first make M-x tetris-on-drugs, and then map Ctrl+Super+T to it. (The super key on a PC bears a Windows logo.)
LISP, just like all the languages that have copied its gc system, neglects to understand that there are many other resources I need to manage other than memory (db handles, shared memory regions, mutexes, files, etc.).
The Java language provides a solution that resembles C++'s destructors. Before the Java runtime's garbage collector disposes of objects, it calls their finalizers.
It's possible to create reasonably convincing color with only two components: red and cyan. Try it. Turn off your NVIDIA video card's blue gun, or grab an image in GIMP or Photoshop and turn off the blue channel, and see that it affects the image very little (other than giving a yellow cast which can be fixed by copying the green channel into the blue channel). This works because the human eye isn't very sensitive to blue light.
I'm considering using this fact for image compression on a Game Boy Advance homebrew game.
Not having these glyphs in the Unicode set would be like asking English-speakers to use alphabets reduced by five or six characters (M and N are similar, X, Q, C and Z could be replaced by one character as well)
Spelling reform. China (outside Taiwan) has had it. It's perfectly possible to write English with only 18 letters.
and dictionaries from which three out of four words have been deleted due to redundancy or age
So? Desk dictionaries aren't nearly as comprehensive as Oxford English Dictionary or even the unabridged Webster's Third New International Dictionary.
Copyright is 70 years on books
No, 95 years on all works first published on or after January 31, 1923. See also Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. And it'll get even longer before 2020 as Di$ney frantically bribes Congre$$ to pass yet another corporate-welfare copyright extension.
The case will happen if you ask for the translation
Which doesn't change the fact that you can choose not to sign that contract if you don't like its terms.
Five record labels control the promotion of music, and they all have the same one-sided contract terms. Therefore, an artist can choose one of these:
- Major label Foo, with a lopsided contract.
- Major label Bar, with a lopsided contract.
- Major label Baz, with a lopsided contract.
- Major label Blah, with a lopsided contract.
- Major label Yadda, with a lopsided contract.
- Any of various independent labels with a contract that provides a fairer share of royalties but no chance of airplay because the major labels control the companies that tell mainstream radio stations what to play and no record sales because
- consumers don't know the artist even exists, and
- the major labels control the companies that tell mainstream music stores what to carry.
- No label, no contract, and no career.
Is that much of a choice?if the majority of artists make the mistake of signing contracts that they don't understand.
In a sense MusicCity has just written a "browser" to contain the FastTrack "plugin". So why are they the ones that are accountable?
The essential difference between the Mozilla browser and the IE "browser" on the one hand and MusicCity's Morpheus "browser" on the other is that Mozilla and IE are primarily designed and marketed for legitimate purposes such as reading and posting to OSDN Slashdot, OSDN Freshmeat, and ex-OSDN Kuro5hin, and for viewing content with legitimate plugins such as Macromedia's SWF player, whereas MusicCity's browser cannot work with anything other than the FastTrack plugin.
From the article:
In other words, the bone sculptures may just barely be old enough not to qualify for effectively perpetual copyright under the Sonny "Bone"-o Act?
(Yes, I knew they meant 80K to 100K years, but I couldn't resist.)
I think their name has a lot to do with the fact that they're based in Nashville(Music City),TN
So is MusicCity Records, which puts copy-protection on new releases such as a certain Charley Pride CD.
Suppose you copy at full PCI bus speed
You can cut a few years off that figure with AGP storage. Because most servers don't need excessive video performance, such systems can use an el-cheapo video card sitting on the PCI bus, leaving the AGP port open. Storage makers have developed high-speed storage solutions that take advantage of the insane throughput of AGP (1 GB/s and beyond).
Whether the reason for high ticket prices and low profit margin is the cost of obtaining the film, the cost of the projectionist, the cost of the facility, the cost of making the movie, the cost of actors, or the cost of the ad campaigns that try to make a piece of garbage look appealing by plastering the movie's name over everything
Try Diet Dr. Pepper. Somehow they managed to hide the weird, malty Aspartame taste better than most others.
Or you can drink DietRite cola, which doesn't even have aspartame, instead using Ace-K and sucralose. In addition, DietRite cola has no sodium and no caffeine (good for college students who have to get up for class tomorrow). Most of my friends consider it the only diet cola worth drinking.
precious bodily fluids
Are the bodily fluids of the Eloi people (i.e. the people that H. G. Wells wrote about in The Time Machine and which are also depicted in Precious Moments figurines) significantly different in composition from those of a typical A.D. 2001 American?
After casually reading the Motosoto license, I could not find a significant difference between its terms and those of the GNU Lesser GPL. Anyone care to point out how this is different from LGPL?
I have yet to see a clickwrap license that says only the clicker of this license may be allowed access to the machine this software will reside on.
I have seen something to this effect a few times: "You may not permit other persons to use or otherwise access the Software except under the terms of this License." This means that if you RE the software, the DVDCCA could sue your girlfriend/wife/parent.
the DVDCCA also have to show evidence that it was lawful for Johansen to agree to that contract. If the law in Norway is that reverse engineering is lawful for interoperability, then any clauses in the click-wrap agreement are null and void
I've seen a EULA that states, in short: You may not copy, modify, etc. this software, except to install this software on one computer or strictly for backup purposes. In addition:
- You may not reverse-engineer the Software in any way.
- You may not export the Software to Afghanistan, Cuba, Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria.
- THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY ON THIS SOFTWARE, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.
- THE AUTHOR SHALL NOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES INCURRED AS A RESULT OF USE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
If the law of your jurisdiction does not permit enforcing the above four terms, this agreement is NULL AND VOID, AND YOU MAY NOT USE OR OTHERWISE ACCESS THE SOFTWARE.Attorneys cover their client's @$$es because their clients pay them to.
I see Windows XP's product authentication mechanism as a step toward eliminating shrinkwrap and click-through licensing in favor of actual contracts that users have to sign with a Digital ID.
Um, a few lines of assembler
You don't say "a few lines of compiler," do you? Say "a few lines of assembly language."
do practically nothing
Four lines of 6502 assembly language can detect whether a program runs on NESticle or on Nintendo hardware:
To see how this works, visit my Everything 2 writeup about NESticle.although I invite you to memorize the 700+ instructions in the PIII instruction set
Everyday asm programming (i.e. not writing the lowest level of kernel VM code) needs only about 50 instructions per problem domain (intmath, fpumath, mmx/sse, etc), and that's on a CISC chip. RISC instruction sets have a much smaller and much more orthogonal instruction set. For a computer architecture class at Rose-Hulman, I once designed and implemented a 16-bit RISC machine with a set of 15 instructions (8 arithmetic, 4 control, 3 data movement) based loosely on the MIPS architecture. But then I learned how ARM7TDMI's Thumb instruction set used many of the tricks I thought I invented.
I would think that you can use this citation to argue that copyrights, while supposed to be limited in scope, are now becoming de facto limitless, and thus are not 'for limited times'
No. The citation says that unlike copyrights, trade secrets are perpetual. However, this ignores that every 20 years, Disney employees contribute upwards of US$6 million to congressional re-election campaigns to get 20 more years of copyright monopoly. See also the Wikipedia article about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. In fact, according to one interpretation of the Constitution, a billion years plus two days would be considered sufficiently "limited times."
A curse on the Bono family for being so dang greedy.
Moderation question - why is no post every funny and insightful?
The comment header displays only the most recently applied moderation. Click on the comment's cid (#2510706) itself to see all different categories of moderation that moderators have applied to a comment.
It is not inconceivable that in decade or two we will be able to provide a program with a design document written in prose and have it generate the program.
We're damn close. Programs can already be written as specifications of their output in functional languages that approximate algebraic notation. In fact, a particular programmer's boss once confused a program written in the Haskell language with a design document, asking "Where's the implementation?"
"Umm..." (runs a Haskell compiler) (runs the binary it produces) (correct answer appears)
"I've heard of programming computers in English on Pick OS, but this is something else."