... Lord of the rings(LOTR) is a series of 5 books bound into 3 covers. GO on, look in the contents of the books, I'll wait.
When LOTR was published, publisher believed that the books did not have enough pages, and would not sell. So they bound the 5 books into 3 covers so the buyrer could get a fair deal.
No, it's one book. In the foreword to the edition I have, he refers to LotR several times as "the book", not "the series". Now, like a lot of other works, it's divided into multiple "Books", but I've never heard it suggested that the six Books were ever intended to be published seperately.
You are definitely not a lawyer. You also have not even read the most rudimentary basics of copyright law.
I note that you don't claim to be a lwayer yourself, nor give any references to confirm the assertions you make in your post.
Under currto put into service
ent law, the rights on non-visual works include the right to distribute, copy, and modify (also known as derived works). IPFilter has a copyright statement, which removes any question that the author intended his work to have copyright protection. The license under IPFilter clearly states that the user may only copy and distribute the binary and source code.
Nobody is claiming that the author needs to specify exactly what rights he or she isn't giving away. However, if one explicitly grants a broad-sounding right such as the right to "use" the source, it seems ludicrous to suggest that the author can then "clarify" it so as to eliminate the right to use it in certain ways. The fundamental question, of course, is what exactly does the right to "use" source code entail? I haven't yet seen a definitive answer.
Oh, and the word "use" is used correctly. Remember, the layman's interpretation of "use" is not the same as the legal implications. While you and I might read his license and think that we may modify the source code, he uses the word correctly. We may not, without his permission.
Okay, now we're getting somewhere. So you are aware of a legal precedent establishing what it means to "use" source code? Can you provide a reference? Exactly what rights does the right to "use" the software give you?
There's a legal dictionary at
www.lawyers.com. I looked up "use"; the definition given for "use" as a verb is:
to put into service
have enjoyment of
Looking up "service" provides nothing meaningful in this context. The definition given for "enjoyment" is:
personal benefit, use, or possession (as of rights or property)
specif
the receipt of the fruits or profits of property
That looks to me to be at least as broad as the everyday sense of "to use".
Then you missed the really funny part, where he accuses the FSF of being "Orwellian" in their use of the term, apparently without a hint of irony.
(Yes, comrade, the word "free" can ONLY mean "at no cost". That is the only meaning it has EVER had. Anybody who claims other meanings is a liar, irrational, or a traitor.)
Okay, I don't know whether M$ have trademarked "Windows" or not, or whether X-Windows pre-dates MS Windows, or whether they're just being nice and not enforcing their trademark
There's no such thing as "X-Windows". But I believe X (or "The X Windowing System", if you want to be verbose) does predate MS Windows (certainly the usable versions of it).
Referee magazine have a trademark on the term "Referee" when in the context of a sports magazine, and they are pursuing the enforcement of that trademark.
But does the law not prevent you from trademarking an English term which simply describes your type of business? If I open a shoe store, I'm reasonably certain I can't register a trademark on the word "Shoe" and prevent other shoe stores from using it in their names. How then can one claim exclusive use of the word "Referee" in titles of referees' magazines?
Re:This isn't the only time generals are the antag
on
'Thirteen Days'
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· Score: 1
Mars Attacks is the first movie off the top of my head that I can think of (I know there are others, their names just escape me). The hard right wing war-loving military guys versus the left wing peace-loving President has so often been used as a plot device.
Of course, in Mars Attacks the war-loving military guys were right, so it's not really the same thing...
Re:Spammers cheat, this will not work
on
Spambot Poisoner
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Spammers are the murderers and rapists of the techno world, they steal resources of other peoples
networks, and the traffic they generate is enough to drop small networks and mail servers.
Wouldn't that make them merely the thieves of the techno world?
I hate spam too, but let's maintain some perspective...
RMS was necessary in the grand scheme of things, without
RMS or another hard liner who stuck to his guns and just plain simply refused to give an inch we'd not
have all the wonderful choices we have today, we'd all be running Windows 95 (because there'd be no
reason for MS to improve its OS, no competition),
That's assuming that competition is the sole or even primary reason for Microsoft releasing new versions. I thought they did it to generate new sales.
Imagine the police taping an interview
with a criminal suspect, for instance, and then changing their tape to show the suspect waiving
his right to counsel and confessing to the crime. It sounds as though that's perfectly possible,
and even comparatively easy, with this technology.
My understanding was that the significance of this technology was that it could do in real time what people could already do in postproduction. That wouldn't affect the videotaped evidence scenario,
would it?
Okay, I clicked on the link in the parent message,
curious whether the authour had a link to an actual official site or a joke site.
It looks like it is the official site... but the best part is that Netscape gives me an error box
reading "A plugin for mime type text/plain was not found." That's got to be one of the funniest things I've ever seen surfing the web. Anybody know how to make cat work as a Netscape plugin?
And you know what the worst part is? I can't share the joke with my friends, because I don't think I could explain why I was looking at britneyspears.com...
This isn't unique to Pitfall; the Lucasarts adventure game Day of the Tentacle, the sequel to Maniac Mansion, had the original Maniac Mansion inside of it. OTOH, this wasn't particularly hidden at all. (And I'm not sure which came first.)
I vaguely remember hearing about a similar case several years ago, where the tables were turned. MSFT was suing another company for
using the word 'Bookshelf' in their software title, for infringing on MSFT's Bookshelf Encyclopedia software. Can anyone confirm this?
It seems to me that 'bookshelf' is a much more general term than 'Digital Diva'. Is MSFT being hypocritical?
Can we assume this is a rhetorical question? After all, this is the same company that tried to claim that "Internet Explorer" is a generic, non-trademarkable term. (Somebody else had the trademark first, in case you're wondering why Microsoft would want to claim that.)
Actually, if a polynomial time algorithm exists for a problem, then the problem HAS to be NP. P is a subset of NP. To recap some definitions:
P is the set of problems for which a polynomial time algorithm exists. NP is the set of problems where, if you're given a purported solution, you can check whether it actually is a solution in polynomial time. (That's kind of vague, but I think it'll do. Note that NP is more commonly defined in terms of what a nondeterministic Turing Machine can do, but I find this definition easier to understand, and they're equivalent.) If you can do the latter, you can certainly do the former, so all of P is in NP.
So a polynomial time algorithm for subset sum would show that it's in P, not that it's not in NP.
Of course, subset sum is known to be NP-complete, implying that any NP problem can be reduced to it in polynomial time. So an algorithm to solve subset sum in polynomial time could be used to construct a polytime algorithm for any NP problem; in other words, the existence of such an algorithm would mean that P=NP. This is why many researchers would be skeptical of such an algorithm. There are a LOT of NP problems for which a LOT of people have spent a LOT of time trying to find polynomial time algorithms without success; many believe that if such algorithms actually exist for all of these problems, somebody would have found one by now.
Well, intuitively, you need infinite bit strings to represent the real numbers, whereas the natural numbers correspond to finite bit strings. The same set of strings can't represent both.
As it happens, your list is only the natural numbers. Note that for the nth string, all the digits from position n on are 0 (as your comment re: the diagonal slash requires). Thus, the nth string in your list contains fewer than n 1's; in other words, every string in your list has only finite 1's. Some real numbers in [0,1) have binary expansions with infinite 1's. Ergo, your list does not include the binary expansions for all such real numbers.
Similarly, you haven't encoded all of the subsets of the natural numbers, just the FINITE subsets. Those are in fact equinumerous to the natural numbers themselves.
First, I'd like to note that you're a tad sloppy in your terminology. You don't talk about specific algorithms being P or NP, you talk about problems being in P or NP. Also, P is a subset of NP, so saying that the teacher proved the problem was still in NP isn't terribly helpful as far as deciding whether a polynomial-time algorithm exists goes.
And I'm just a graduate student myself, but I'm not bad at this stuff and if you want to e-mail me your algorithm I can look at it. I can't guarantee an answer one way or the other, though.
This and the original post said the sum of two primes. Otherwise we could just keep adding one to our heart's content.
1 is not prime. OTOH, you're right about being limited to only 2 primes... you can trivially construct any odd number greater than 1 by adding 3 and some number of 2's, and construct any even number by adding 2's.
A perfect game by both sides might result in a stalemate; I'm not sure anyone really knows. In game theory, you try to find optimal strategies for both sides. An optimal strategy satisfies the property that if one player deviates from the optimal strategy and the other sticks to it, then the latter will always do better because of the former's poor decision.
Nitpicky: the optimal strategy for player 1 and the optimal strategy for player 2 need not be the same, although admittedly it's difficult to see how they could be different in a symmetrical game like chess.
(Certainly, in the vague common usage sense of "strategy" good strategy for black differs from good strategy for white, but in the formal sense of a strategy as a function from game states to move, I'm pretty sure the optimal strategy for both sides has to be the same. The difference in practice is that they don't face the same game states in the early game.)
Optimal strategies exist for sufficiently intelligent players in both sides in any two-player zero-sum (zero sum means their loss of points is your win of points) game. This is a theorem by Von Neumann. See The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by Von Neumann and Morgenstern.
While I haven't read that book, I'm pretty sure the game has to be both deterministic and have complete knowledge of the game state available to both players. There is no optimal (in the sense we're using here) strategy for Paper-Rock-Scissors, nor for Poker, despite both games' being zero-sum.
Along these lines, in asking more game-theoretic questions about chess, it would be interesting to know if the leading player has a strategy available to always win and if the other player can always force a stalemate. Hell, I can't even think of an ironclad argument that the player who doesn't start can't always force a win.
Indeed not; consider a variation on Fox & Goose (you can find the rules here) with the diagonal line removed. In that game, whoever goes first is guaranteed to lose an optimally-played game. The reason people expect that chess is either a victory for white or a stalemate is that, empirically, white wins more often than black (though I don't think the difference is terribly large).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad you feel that way. Care to tell me your mailing address?
No, it's one book. In the foreword to the edition I have, he refers to LotR several times as "the book", not "the series". Now, like a lot of other works, it's divided into multiple "Books", but I've never heard it suggested that the six Books were ever intended to be published seperately.
I note that you don't claim to be a lwayer yourself, nor give any references to confirm the assertions you make in your post.
Under currto put into service ent law, the rights on non-visual works include the right to distribute, copy, and modify (also known as derived works). IPFilter has a copyright statement, which removes any question that the author intended his work to have copyright protection. The license under IPFilter clearly states that the user may only copy and distribute the binary and source code.
Nobody is claiming that the author needs to specify exactly what rights he or she isn't giving away. However, if one explicitly grants a broad-sounding right such as the right to "use" the source, it seems ludicrous to suggest that the author can then "clarify" it so as to eliminate the right to use it in certain ways. The fundamental question, of course, is what exactly does the right to "use" source code entail? I haven't yet seen a definitive answer.
Oh, and the word "use" is used correctly. Remember, the layman's interpretation of "use" is not the same as the legal implications. While you and I might read his license and think that we may modify the source code, he uses the word correctly. We may not, without his permission.
Okay, now we're getting somewhere. So you are aware of a legal precedent establishing what it means to "use" source code? Can you provide a reference? Exactly what rights does the right to "use" the software give you?
There's a legal dictionary at www.lawyers.com. I looked up "use"; the definition given for "use" as a verb is:
Looking up "service" provides nothing meaningful in this context. The definition given for "enjoyment" is:
That looks to me to be at least as broad as the everyday sense of "to use".
Don't you mean to say "The statement 'Many, many people in forums like this, and on Usenet, make that mistake.' is true"??
Then you missed the really funny part, where he accuses the FSF of being "Orwellian" in their use of the term, apparently without a hint of irony.
(Yes, comrade, the word "free" can ONLY mean "at no cost". That is the only meaning it has EVER had. Anybody who claims other meanings is a liar, irrational, or a traitor.)
Isn't that pretty much the definition of technology-as-villain?
There's no divide at all. "Central America" isn't the name of a continent; it's the southernmost region of North America.
Deliberate pun?
What? They're claiming a full 12 nanometres? Those greedy bastards.
There's no such thing as "X-Windows". But I believe X (or "The X Windowing System", if you want to be verbose) does predate MS Windows (certainly the usable versions of it).
Referee magazine have a trademark on the term "Referee" when in the context of a sports magazine, and they are pursuing the enforcement of that trademark.
But does the law not prevent you from trademarking an English term which simply describes your type of business? If I open a shoe store, I'm reasonably certain I can't register a trademark on the word "Shoe" and prevent other shoe stores from using it in their names. How then can one claim exclusive use of the word "Referee" in titles of referees' magazines?
Of course, in Mars Attacks the war-loving military guys were right, so it's not really the same thing...
Wouldn't that make them merely the thieves of the techno world?
I hate spam too, but let's maintain some perspective...
That's assuming that competition is the sole or even primary reason for Microsoft releasing new versions. I thought they did it to generate new sales.
My understanding was that the significance of this technology was that it could do in real time what people could already do in postproduction. That wouldn't affect the videotaped evidence scenario, would it?
It looks like it is the official site... but the best part is that Netscape gives me an error box reading "A plugin for mime type text/plain was not found." That's got to be one of the funniest things I've ever seen surfing the web. Anybody know how to make cat work as a Netscape plugin?
And you know what the worst part is? I can't share the joke with my friends, because I don't think I could explain why I was looking at britneyspears.com...
That's just sour grapes 'cause you weren't a bad enough dude to save President Ronnie.:)
This isn't unique to Pitfall; the Lucasarts adventure game Day of the Tentacle, the sequel to Maniac Mansion, had the original Maniac Mansion inside of it. OTOH, this wasn't particularly hidden at all. (And I'm not sure which came first.)
It seems to me that 'bookshelf' is a much more general term than 'Digital Diva'. Is MSFT being hypocritical?
Can we assume this is a rhetorical question? After all, this is the same company that tried to claim that "Internet Explorer" is a generic, non-trademarkable term. (Somebody else had the trademark first, in case you're wondering why Microsoft would want to claim that.)
Actually, if a polynomial time algorithm exists for a problem, then the problem HAS to be NP. P is a subset of NP. To recap some definitions:
P is the set of problems for which a polynomial time algorithm exists. NP is the set of problems where, if you're given a purported solution, you can check whether it actually is a solution in polynomial time. (That's kind of vague, but I think it'll do. Note that NP is more commonly defined in terms of what a nondeterministic Turing Machine can do, but I find this definition easier to understand, and they're equivalent.) If you can do the latter, you can certainly do the former, so all of P is in NP.
So a polynomial time algorithm for subset sum would show that it's in P, not that it's not in NP.
Of course, subset sum is known to be NP-complete, implying that any NP problem can be reduced to it in polynomial time. So an algorithm to solve subset sum in polynomial time could be used to construct a polytime algorithm for any NP problem; in other words, the existence of such an algorithm would mean that P=NP. This is why many researchers would be skeptical of such an algorithm. There are a LOT of NP problems for which a LOT of people have spent a LOT of time trying to find polynomial time algorithms without success; many believe that if such algorithms actually exist for all of these problems, somebody would have found one by now.
Well, intuitively, you need infinite bit strings to represent the real numbers, whereas the natural numbers correspond to finite bit strings. The same set of strings can't represent both.
As it happens, your list is only the natural numbers. Note that for the nth string, all the digits from position n on are 0 (as your comment re: the diagonal slash requires). Thus, the nth string in your list contains fewer than n 1's; in other words, every string in your list has only finite 1's. Some real numbers in [0,1) have binary expansions with infinite 1's. Ergo, your list does not include the binary expansions for all such real numbers.
Similarly, you haven't encoded all of the subsets of the natural numbers, just the FINITE subsets. Those are in fact equinumerous to the natural numbers themselves.
Forgot that my e-mail isn't displayed on my messages... it's tbarrie@cs.utoronto.ca
First, I'd like to note that you're a tad sloppy in your terminology. You don't talk about specific algorithms being P or NP, you talk about problems being in P or NP. Also, P is a subset of NP, so saying that the teacher proved the problem was still in NP isn't terribly helpful as far as deciding whether a polynomial-time algorithm exists goes.
And I'm just a graduate student myself, but I'm not bad at this stuff and if you want to e-mail me your algorithm I can look at it. I can't guarantee an answer one way or the other, though.
1 is not prime. OTOH, you're right about being limited to only 2 primes... you can trivially construct any odd number greater than 1 by adding 3 and some number of 2's, and construct any even number by adding 2's.
Nitpicky: the optimal strategy for player 1 and the optimal strategy for player 2 need not be the same, although admittedly it's difficult to see how they could be different in a symmetrical game like chess.
(Certainly, in the vague common usage sense of "strategy" good strategy for black differs from good strategy for white, but in the formal sense of a strategy as a function from game states to move, I'm pretty sure the optimal strategy for both sides has to be the same. The difference in practice is that they don't face the same game states in the early game.)
Optimal strategies exist for sufficiently intelligent players in both sides in any two-player zero-sum (zero sum means their loss of points is your win of points) game. This is a theorem by Von Neumann. See The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by Von Neumann and Morgenstern.
While I haven't read that book, I'm pretty sure the game has to be both deterministic and have complete knowledge of the game state available to both players. There is no optimal (in the sense we're using here) strategy for Paper-Rock-Scissors, nor for Poker, despite both games' being zero-sum.
Along these lines, in asking more game-theoretic questions about chess, it would be interesting to know if the leading player has a strategy available to always win and if the other player can always force a stalemate. Hell, I can't even think of an ironclad argument that the player who doesn't start can't always force a win.
Indeed not; consider a variation on Fox & Goose (you can find the rules here) with the diagonal line removed. In that game, whoever goes first is guaranteed to lose an optimally-played game. The reason people expect that chess is either a victory for white or a stalemate is that, empirically, white wins more often than black (though I don't think the difference is terribly large).