Actually, (O|U)sama Bin Laden's REAL name isn't written in the roman alphabet, and I am unaware of any universal adoption of a particular transliteration scheme.
Yes, exactly right. Linus position is that that situation is an issue of hardware freedom is not an issue for a software license. You don't have to agree with him, but that is in fact his position.
That there would be such hardware does make sense. A platform that would run only vendor-signed binaries would be immune to attack by most kinds of malware, and particularly to rootkits that interfere with the kernel. Hardware that would run any binaries in userspace but only vendor-signed kernels would still be protected against such rootkits.
If you could sign your own binaries as you compiled them and then install them, then so could such a rootkit.
Linus understands the license correctly, as do you, but you don't understand Linus. He wasn't talking about what RedHat does -now-, he was saying -if- you had hardware that only ran signed kernels and -if- RedHat distributed a kernel for it -then- the GPLv3 -would- require RedHat to distribute their private key at the same time.
Nothing to do with anything being done now, since RedHat does not currently run on any such locked hardware afaik.
IIRC, it's essentially impossible for any planet to have an orbit that passes between the two stars, so the only way for a binary system to have planets is for the stars to be close enough together and the planetary orbit far enough out that the planet(s) orbit the center of mass of the pair. That nearly precludes life-as-we-know-it since you're looking at very cold orbits. Based on my memory of lectures some years ago, though, fwiw.
The reason for that is so that if I create something with the name 'DeepCeruleanIsAFaggot' they could suspend me. Basically, if it's used as harrasment or insult, they'd take stronger action. Religious names are less likely to offend that way (DeepCeruleanIsTehBuddha... err... something) though they may offend in other ways, like naming oneself 'JesusChrist' upsetting Christians. (Of course 'Jesus' is a perfectly valid name otherwise in hispanic cultures (no I don't mean latino, I mean cultures influenced by spanish language & spanish catholicism), I wonder if they enforce against that.)
My desktop linux would be a very specifically limited Linux for securely browsing the web from an unprivileged account, for use by cybercafes, etc., with a default search engine of google of course. They really don't have any business getting into the OS business as such, but the web-appliance defaulting to their pages might be another thing.
In response to about half of the top level posts, no, this court decision isn't forcing you, the existing MS software users, to change the way you do things; but it prevents any -further- distribution of the infringing technology.
From the article:
"Although existing customers can keep using older versions on current machines, any new installations of Office 2003 will require Service Pack 2, released by Microsoft in September. Office XP will need to be put into use with a special patch applied."
Universities now file their own patents, while the inventing professor(s) take an extended leave of absence to found a for-profit company that licenses the research from the university, to the better bank balances of professors and universities alike. This is why there's a grumbling about the change in direction of academic research and the decreasing amount of basic research that is being done. Grants are fewer, patent licenses are greater, research goals are shifting.
Crossing Jordan is the best example of a woman-in-science hour long show, I think; the title character being a woman and all. The main characters of Numb3rs are all men. CSI:* all have a fair mix. ER I don't watch.
'Bones' may be a more contemporary example but I'm not sure if it'll survive the season. I kinda like it, though.
Back in the day, Buffy The Vampire Slayer had cast the female character Willow as 'the computer geek'.
It looks as if you're tearing into me except that you're quoting things I never said. Had to drop my threshold to see the real shape of the tree. You're absolutely right, of course, the AC is off his nut. I do wish there were some visible indication that there's a hidden layer in the response tree. (I know, I know... then it wouldn't be -hidden-.)
Not likely. They (the newsies) will print an (almost completely unpublicized) retraction that nobody will read, but it will cover them legally as having 'corrected' their 'mistake'. It sounds as though the interviewee - who might be culpable under U.S. law - must live in Bulgaria (as he's an employee of a Bulgarian web design studio). CNN, et. al., will say they were only reporting his words in 'good faith', and a gaming chat site will not have the resources to effectively sue CNN or Yahoo. Even with deep pockets to back the case, I wouldn't give it good odds.
(Of course, I haven't read the original inaccurate articles - I don't want them to get any more hit count for it.)
Electricity from trees is nonsense. We all know it's just a vegetable-matter battery (potato-clock, lemon-light, whatever experiment) with bigger spikes.
Not that I'm banking on anything else, but the trees is one I'm ready to dismiss out of hand.
Oh, well, perl is certainly a lumpy language. Your particular complaint on different syntax isn't uncommon, and as a result there are a lot of people who always do,
IE, using reference syntax even when you could've used the regular object. That way the syntax remains consistent whatever they're doing and they don't have to switch back and forth.
Whether that's good or not, I couldn't say. It makes syntax somewhat more consistent but at the same time rather eliminates the whole point of decorating variable names (that is, to make the distinction between types visually obvious).
(Although it still distinguishes it -as- a variable, which I like. I hate that I can't call a variable 'class' in python, because, of course, it's a keyword. In perl it's twice not a problem because class isn't a keyword, but even if it were, I could refer to '$class' without colliding with 'class'. In some hybrid of the two languages I could have 'class $class { stuff }'! But this is admittedly relatively trivial and every language has some problems with keyword conflicts. )
Using {} instead of () or adding a -> is that much more code? (Never mind that I didn't write as tersely as possible... sub { 5 + shift } would've worked if you want 'less code').
Python's problems mostly involve silent errors and unexpected value changes.
If you have a function 'foo', you can have python code like,
x = foo or,
foo and python will go on its merry way without so much as a warning, though in the x = foo case you'll probably get an exception later on when you try to use x, depending on how you use it. (Of course, this is a side-effect of having easily accessible function references; x = func is meaningful, after all.)
Worse are errors like,
self.widgt = self.widget + 1 which will silently fail to increase widget. This is a side effect of python trying to save programmers a little typing.
Then there's all the issues that copy-by-reference can create - if you change it in one place it changes everywhere. Every python learning book has (or should have) a chapter on this and the differences between L = L + M, L.extend(M), and L.append(M).
Anyway, in this area, basically, python does a lot of things implicitly. The programmer has to know what he wants keep clearly in mind the difference between a thing and a reference to a thing and what he needs, but what he writes will be 'clean' of any indication of that difference.
Perl is much more explicit, and yes, requires a handful more characters. The programmer still has to know what he wants, of course, and keep things and references distinct in his mind, and what he writes will be 'cluttered' with notation to indicate which kind of thing he's working with.
Perl of course, allows you to 'use strict;' and enforce variable declaration or not as you choose. Python does not offer that option.
Anyway, I don't think that a default of pass by reference vs. pass by value is that big a deal. Now, perl has some strong advantages in text processing, especially powerful regular expressions. On the other hand, python's objects are vastly more usable than perl's. Those are areas where you can really distinguish the languages as having dramatically different powers.
CPAN vs. Batteries Included of course is a very useful comparison, but one that could take us until the heat death of the universe to complete.
That's a really foolish argument. Of course you have to make references and dereference to do the same thing in perl, because perl is a pass by value language; python is a pass by reference language.
In perl you have to be explicit to dereference.
In python you have to be explicit to copy.
Your case happens to be one where references are needed, and in python, implicit. In cases where copying of arrays is need, python needs to be explicit; perl is implicit. So ignoring the ridiculous 'without dereferencing' restriction:
sub foo {
return { 'one' => 'ein', 'two' => 'zwei' }, sub { my $x = shift; return $x + 5; }, "string" }
"Christ isn't God (at least not from what I remember of my catechism classes)."
You weren't paying good attention then; in Catholic doctrine, Christ -is- God made flesh. (The whole three-are-one mystery of the trinity) Of course, not all Christians believe this, and indeed, a number of people have been killed over the question at various points in history.
The story of Jesus Christ also bears a remarkable resemblence to the stories of any number of other died-and-resurrected saviour gods, so it is not surprising that Christians treat him as a diety (even those sects that reject the doctrine of divine incarnation.)
This nitpick does not, of course, invalidate anything in your argument which was otherwise well made.
Well, information 'wants' to be free in the same way that nature 'abhors' a vacuum and temperatures 'try' to equalize; it's an expressive way of describing a phenomenon. Information is by nature easy to duplicate and difficult to destroy, especially in the digital era. Whether or not information 'should' be free is another question, really. It is true, though, that many people say the former meaning the latter.
Hmm. Check emusic.com for some of the stuff you're looking for. Depending on exactly what genre and when exactly you grew up... well, a lot of the emusic.com catalog is older stuff from labels that aren't big to-day.
Stuff that is exclusively in the hands of the riaa labels is not there, of course.
16 shares at 610,000 each transposed to 610,000 shares at 16 yen each in the original. Today's story is 1/610,000 ; still, very suspicious, but we'll see.
Don't be stupid. Out of compliance means you have more installations than you can -show- that you have licenses for. It doesn't mean that you actually have pirated software, but that you didn't keep all the right certificates of authenticity in a secure place. If your process wasn't tightly controlled, you can easily be out of compliance when somebody cleans out a closet full of 'old junk that nobody needs' (aka, all those still shrink-wrapped windows manuals).
Furthermore, being out of compliance is not a criminal matter, it's a civil one, so even if they were in actual violation and not merely in a state of poor record-keeping, they still wouldn't be 'criminals'.
Ah, right. If that's the way the law actually works, then it's a brain-dead law that should never have been passed. It's also a really simple case that should've been clearly explained in the original articles.
(Although... your explanation still doesn't make sense directly, though I understand it anyhow, but, 'You don't pay taxes on capital invested'... well, of course not, -nobody- pays taxes when they invest capital in -any- country. What you mean is, 'investments into German movie productions are -tax deductible- and only the -net earnings- from that investment are taxed.')
Anyway, it's a simple notion, it just took me so long to understand because... it's such an incredibly simple, stunningly obvious loophole that it makes for an astoundingly -dumb- law. I don't have a high opinion of lawmakers intelligence or honesty anyway, but... either these legislators were either hopelessly moronic or blatantly corrupt.
That only works if you don't have to pay taxes on the 83.3 million that you 'sell' the film for, though. So, basically, what you're saying is that my second speculation - they one I called a -really dumb way to write a tax law- - is actually true. They invest their money in a tax-deductible way and then get tax-free income in return. Or is it just a year-to-year carry thing? Invest 94 million -this- year, get 83.3 million back -next- year, repeat every year to eternally postpone taxes? That's almost starting to make sense, if it's the case.
See, the way a tax write-off works is, if I throw $1,000,000 into a tax-deductible expense, then I don't pay taxes on that $1,000,000. So, I'm out my $1,000,000 but being in the 40% tax bracket, I save $400,000. But that's still $600,000 that I've lost with no compensation other than seeing my name in the credits of a really bad movie.
Maybe there's another thing involved besides straightforward tax deductions, but the situation wasn't explained very well.
Possibly what he's meant is that if you invest $1 million you don't pay taxes on that $1 million (because it's deducted) and you only pay taxes on returns from that $1 million that are in -excess- of $1 million. (If by 'returns' he means return-on-investment, ie, net profits, and not box office returns, ie, gross profits, that could be what he's trying to say). So, if I make a movie that exactly breaks even then I'd get all my money back -and- not pay taxes on it. In which case it's not true that you make money by tanking at the box office, but by breaking even. It would also be a really, really dumb way to write a tax law, but such dumb laws -have- been written before when trying to 'stimulate investment'... or by corrupt legistlators. I just wouldn't expect to see anything that dumb in a first world nation in this century.
Anybody out there know anything about german finance laws?
According to TFA, the OSM name came from a 'branding company'. Now, personally, if I'd hired 'experts' to come and design my 'corporate image' and ended up with this fiasco, I'd be looking to get my money back. I suspect a lot of people would be looking for not just a refund but 'compensation' for the 'damage' done to them (not that in the end they're really damaged, I think... lots of free publicity... but you know how these things work.) I'd sure like to know who the 'branding' company' was so that I can be sure to never, ever hire them or see them hired by any employer of mine...
Slashdot Mirror
Because we'll all be so depressed we'll need the high that we get from smoking up some baked banana peels.
.
.
.
What do you mean that doesn't work?!
Actually, (O|U)sama Bin Laden's REAL name isn't written in the roman alphabet, and I am unaware of any universal adoption of a particular transliteration scheme.
Yes, exactly right. Linus position is that that situation is an issue of hardware freedom is not an issue for a software license. You don't have to agree with him, but that is in fact his position.
That there would be such hardware does make sense. A platform that would run only vendor-signed binaries would be immune to attack by most kinds of malware, and particularly to rootkits that interfere with the kernel. Hardware that would run any binaries in userspace but only vendor-signed kernels would still be protected against such rootkits.
If you could sign your own binaries as you compiled them and then install them, then so could such a rootkit.
Linus understands the license correctly, as do you, but you don't understand Linus. He wasn't talking about what RedHat does -now-, he was saying -if- you had hardware that only ran signed kernels and -if- RedHat distributed a kernel for it -then- the GPLv3 -would- require RedHat to distribute their private key at the same time.
Nothing to do with anything being done now, since RedHat does not currently run on any such locked hardware afaik.
IIRC, it's essentially impossible for any planet to have an orbit that passes between the two stars, so the only way for a binary system to have planets is for the stars to be close enough together and the planetary orbit far enough out that the planet(s) orbit the center of mass of the pair. That nearly precludes life-as-we-know-it since you're looking at very cold orbits. Based on my memory of lectures some years ago, though, fwiw.
The reason for that is so that if I create something with the name 'DeepCeruleanIsAFaggot' they could suspend me. Basically, if it's used as harrasment or insult, they'd take stronger action. Religious names are less likely to offend that way (DeepCeruleanIsTehBuddha ... err... something) though they may offend in other ways, like naming oneself 'JesusChrist' upsetting Christians. (Of course 'Jesus' is a perfectly valid name otherwise in hispanic cultures (no I don't mean latino, I mean cultures influenced by spanish language & spanish catholicism), I wonder if they enforce against that.)
My desktop linux would be a very specifically limited Linux for securely browsing the web from an unprivileged account, for use by cybercafes, etc., with a default search engine of google of course. They really don't have any business getting into the OS business as such, but the web-appliance defaulting to their pages might be another thing.
In response to about half of the top level posts, no, this court decision isn't forcing you, the existing MS software users, to change the way you do things; but it prevents any -further- distribution of the infringing technology.
From the article:
"Although existing customers can keep using older versions on current machines, any new installations of Office 2003 will require Service Pack 2, released by Microsoft in September. Office XP will need to be put into use with a special patch applied."
Universities now file their own patents, while the inventing professor(s) take an extended leave of absence to found a for-profit company that licenses the research from the university, to the better bank balances of professors and universities alike. This is why there's a grumbling about the change in direction of academic research and the decreasing amount of basic research that is being done. Grants are fewer, patent licenses are greater, research goals are shifting.
Crossing Jordan is the best example of a woman-in-science hour long show, I think; the title character being a woman and all. The main characters of Numb3rs are all men. CSI:* all have a fair mix. ER I don't watch.
'Bones' may be a more contemporary example but I'm not sure if it'll survive the season. I kinda like it, though.
Back in the day, Buffy The Vampire Slayer had cast the female character Willow as 'the computer geek'.
It looks as if you're tearing into me except that you're quoting things I never said. Had to drop my threshold to see the real shape of the tree. You're absolutely right, of course, the AC is off his nut. I do wish there were some visible indication that there's a hidden layer in the response tree. (I know, I know... then it wouldn't be -hidden-.)
Not likely. They (the newsies) will print an (almost completely unpublicized) retraction that nobody will read, but it will cover them legally as having 'corrected' their 'mistake'. It sounds as though the interviewee - who might be culpable under U.S. law - must live in Bulgaria (as he's an employee of a Bulgarian web design studio). CNN, et. al., will say they were only reporting his words in 'good faith', and a gaming chat site will not have the resources to effectively sue CNN or Yahoo. Even with deep pockets to back the case, I wouldn't give it good odds.
(Of course, I haven't read the original inaccurate articles - I don't want them to get any more hit count for it.)
Electricity from trees is nonsense. We all know it's just a vegetable-matter battery
(potato-clock, lemon-light, whatever experiment) with bigger spikes.
Not that I'm banking on anything else, but the trees is one I'm ready to dismiss out of hand.
Oh, well, perl is certainly a lumpy language.
Your particular complaint on different syntax isn't uncommon, and as a result there are a lot of people who always do,
my $d = { 'one' => 'ichi', 'two' => 'ni' };
print $d->{'two'};
IE, using reference syntax even when you could've used the regular object. That way the syntax remains consistent whatever they're doing and they don't have to switch back and forth.
Whether that's good or not, I couldn't say. It makes syntax somewhat more consistent but at the same time rather eliminates the whole point of decorating variable names (that is, to make the distinction between types visually obvious).
(Although it still distinguishes it -as- a variable, which I like. I hate that I can't call a variable 'class' in python, because, of course, it's a keyword. In perl it's twice not a problem because class isn't a keyword, but even if it were, I could refer to '$class' without colliding with 'class'. In some hybrid of the two languages I could have 'class $class { stuff }'! But this is admittedly relatively trivial and every language has some problems with keyword conflicts. )
Using {} instead of () or adding a -> is that much more code?
(Never mind that I didn't write as tersely as possible... sub { 5 + shift } would've worked if you want 'less code').
Python's problems mostly involve silent errors and unexpected value changes.
If you have a function 'foo', you can have python code like,
x = foo
or,
foo
and python will go on its merry way without so much as a warning, though in the x = foo case you'll probably get an exception later on when you try to use x, depending on how you use it. (Of course, this is a side-effect of having easily accessible function references; x = func is meaningful, after all.)
Worse are errors like,
self.widgt = self.widget + 1
which will silently fail to increase widget. This is a side effect of python trying to save programmers a little typing.
Then there's all the issues that copy-by-reference can create - if you change it in one place it changes everywhere. Every python learning book has (or should have) a chapter on this and the differences between L = L + M, L.extend(M), and L.append(M).
Anyway, in this area, basically, python does a lot of things implicitly. The programmer has to know what he wants keep clearly in mind the difference between a thing and a reference to a thing and what he needs, but what he writes will be 'clean' of any indication of that difference.
Perl is much more explicit, and yes, requires a handful more characters. The programmer still has to know what he wants, of course, and keep things and references distinct in his mind, and what he writes will be 'cluttered' with notation to indicate which kind of thing he's working with.
Perl of course, allows you to 'use strict;' and enforce variable declaration or not as you choose. Python does not offer that option.
Anyway, I don't think that a default of pass by reference vs. pass by value is that big a deal. Now, perl has some strong advantages in text processing, especially powerful regular expressions. On the other hand, python's objects are vastly more usable than perl's. Those are areas where you can really distinguish the languages as having dramatically different powers.
CPAN vs. Batteries Included of course is a very useful comparison, but one that could take us until the heat death of the universe to complete.
That's a really foolish argument. Of course you have to make references and dereference to do the same thing in perl, because perl is a pass by value language; python is a pass by reference language.
In perl you have to be explicit to dereference.
In python you have to be explicit to copy.
Your case happens to be one where references are needed, and in python, implicit. In cases where copying of arrays is need, python needs to be explicit; perl is implicit. So ignoring the ridiculous 'without dereferencing' restriction:
sub foo {
return { 'one' => 'ein', 'two' => 'zwei' }, sub { my $x = shift; return $x + 5; }, "string"
}
my ($a, $b, $c) = foo();
print $a->{'one'};
print $b->(5);
print $c;
"Christ isn't God (at least not from what I remember of my catechism classes)."
You weren't paying good attention then; in Catholic doctrine, Christ -is- God made flesh. (The whole three-are-one mystery of the trinity) Of course, not all Christians believe this, and indeed, a number of people have been killed over the question at various points in history.
The story of Jesus Christ also bears a remarkable resemblence to the stories of any number of other died-and-resurrected saviour gods, so it is not surprising that Christians treat him as a diety (even those sects that reject the doctrine of divine incarnation.)
This nitpick does not, of course, invalidate anything in your argument which was otherwise well made.
Well, information 'wants' to be free in the same way that nature 'abhors' a vacuum and temperatures 'try' to equalize; it's an expressive way of describing a phenomenon. Information is by nature easy to duplicate and difficult to destroy, especially in the digital era. Whether or not information 'should' be free is another question, really. It is true, though, that many people say the former meaning the latter.
Hmm. Check emusic.com for some of the stuff you're looking for. Depending on exactly what genre and when exactly you grew up... well, a lot of the emusic.com catalog is older stuff from labels that aren't big to-day.
Stuff that is exclusively in the hands of the riaa labels is not there, of course.
16 shares at 610,000 each transposed to 610,000 shares at 16 yen each in the original.
Today's story is 1/610,000 ; still, very suspicious, but we'll see.
Don't be stupid. Out of compliance means you have more installations than you can -show- that you have licenses for. It doesn't mean that you actually have pirated software, but that you didn't keep all the right certificates of authenticity in a secure place. If your process wasn't tightly controlled, you can easily be out of compliance when somebody cleans out a closet full of 'old junk that nobody needs' (aka, all those still shrink-wrapped windows manuals).
Furthermore, being out of compliance is not a criminal matter, it's a civil one, so even if they were in actual violation and not merely in a state of poor record-keeping, they still wouldn't be 'criminals'.
(Yeah, yeah, IHBT, I dunno when I'll learn...)
Ah, right. If that's the way the law actually works, then it's a brain-dead law that should never have been passed.
... well, of course not, -nobody- pays taxes when they invest capital in -any- country. What you mean is, 'investments into German movie productions are -tax deductible- and only the -net earnings- from that investment are taxed.')
... it's such an incredibly simple, stunningly obvious loophole that it makes for an astoundingly -dumb- law. I don't have a high opinion of lawmakers intelligence or honesty anyway, but... either these legislators were either hopelessly moronic or blatantly corrupt.
It's also a really simple case that should've been clearly explained in the original articles.
(Although... your explanation still doesn't make sense directly, though I understand it anyhow, but, 'You don't pay taxes on capital invested'
Anyway, it's a simple notion, it just took me so long to understand because
That only works if you don't have to pay taxes on the 83.3 million that you 'sell' the film for, though. So, basically, what you're saying is that my second speculation - they one I called a -really dumb way to write a tax law- - is actually true. They invest their money in a tax-deductible way and then get tax-free income in return. Or is it just a year-to-year carry thing? Invest 94 million -this- year, get 83.3 million back -next- year, repeat every year to eternally postpone taxes? That's almost starting to make sense, if it's the case.
See, the way a tax write-off works is, if I throw $1,000,000 into a tax-deductible expense, then I don't pay taxes on that $1,000,000. So, I'm out my $1,000,000 but being in the 40% tax bracket, I save $400,000. But that's still $600,000 that I've lost with no compensation other than seeing my name in the credits of a really bad movie.
Maybe there's another thing involved besides straightforward tax deductions, but the situation wasn't explained very well.
Possibly what he's meant is that if you invest $1 million you don't pay taxes on that $1 million (because it's deducted) and you only pay taxes on returns from that $1 million that are in -excess- of $1 million. (If by 'returns' he means return-on-investment, ie, net profits, and not box office returns, ie, gross profits, that could be what he's trying to say). So, if I make a movie that exactly breaks even then I'd get all my money back -and- not pay taxes on it. In which case it's not true that you make money by tanking at the box office, but by breaking even. It would also be a really, really dumb way to write a tax law, but such dumb laws -have- been written before when trying to 'stimulate investment'... or by corrupt legistlators. I just wouldn't expect to see anything that dumb in a first world nation in this century.
Anybody out there know anything about german finance laws?
According to TFA, the OSM name came from a 'branding company'. Now, personally, if I'd hired 'experts' to come and design my 'corporate image' and ended up with this fiasco, I'd be looking to get my money back. I suspect a lot of people would be looking for not just a refund but 'compensation' for the 'damage' done to them (not that in the end they're really damaged, I think... lots of free publicity... but you know how these things work.) I'd sure like to know who the 'branding' company' was so that I can be sure to never, ever hire them or see them hired by any employer of mine...