Most likely any sales agreement will also include a settlement with Novell. The new owners will pony up enough money to make everybody happy, rather than run the risk of open ended litigation and damages.
"So personally I believe that no evidence was presented that actual distribution did take place....you and I and the rest of the world know that it probably did...but since when is 'probably' sufficient in the eyes of the law."
Since "more likely than not" became the standard of proof in civil cases in the United States.
I've been around Slashdot for quite awhile. Based on what I've read, I would have found her liable. Remember, the standard of proof is "more likely than not" in a civil trial. And yes, most likely this woman distributed the tracks they say she did, in violation of copyright laws.
My intimate knowledge of how software "REALLY works" wouldn't really have much to do with this decision. Sure - maybe her IP address or MAC address were spoofed. It's possible, but unlikely, given all of the evidence supplied.
I am as antagonistic towards the RIAA as they come. Based on what I've read about the case, I would have found her liable. Don't care how much I hate the RIAA, the law is the law. Your job as a juror is to uphold that law, not enact your own personal little geek-vendettas.
Yes, I am sure those terms are entirely and completely enforceable in every jurisdiction. Besides, you don't get taken to court for EULA violations, you lose your license to use the product.
Flex builder 3 (currently in beta) will offer most of the missing code intelligence features such as refactoring, and formatting, and will dramatically improve code hinting.
Please check a dictionary before you post such twaddle.
From m-w.com "to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered b : to bring in by way of return ", or "to come to be duly worthy of or entitled or suited to b : to make worthy of or obtain for "
There is no sense of inheritance or entitlement in the word. It appears to be originally descended from a German verb that meant "to reap". Reaping, at least at the time the word was in use in Old High German, certainly involved a lot of work.
"I think he means to say that the gains in efficiency will increase relative to rasterization as the detail of the scene increases."
I am assuming that's what he meant as well. If that's the case, and we define "n" as some metric of scene complexity, then I'd like to see some support of the claim that rasterization is O(n) and raytracing is O(log(n)).
No, that's the answer to the question what is "O(log n)". I am perfectly familiar with "big O" notation. I am not however aware of what the original post meant by "n". Is it vertices, scene complexity, rays, textures, or some other metric of rendering scene complexity?
"Raytracing is O(log n) versus O(n) for rasterization, which means that even though raytracing is currently slower (the constants involved in raytracing are higher), after the break even point is passed much less of the available computational power will be needed to render the scene and can instead be used for physics and AI."
Oil, gas and nuclear fuels have stored potential energy. Sure, they have to be mined and refined, but the number of people required to accomplish this for a particular unit of energy has fallen exponentially.
"The cost of transportation isn't the cost of the fuel, it's the cost of the labor to extract the raw materials, the cost of the labor to transform them to fuel, the cost of the labor necessary to build the plant that accomplishes that, and the cost of the labor to make use of it (to drive the vehicles, to manage them, etc.)."
No, the cost of labor to extract the materials is the cost of labor to extract the materials. The cost of transportation, on any large scale, is mainly dictated by the cost of fuel. Shipping jets are flown by a few people consuming thousands of gallons of jet fuel an hour. I don't think their salaries come close in comparison.
"Every single transaction thread ultimately terminates in human labor."
Except when it terminates in stored chemical or nuclear energy, or with captured solar energy.
"Well, "temporary" here likely means "not within our lifetime", thanks to the very sizable Chinese population, even assuming your analysis is correct. But I see little reason to believe your analysis is correct."
"The problem is: that won't happen until the US dollar falls so much that one man-hour of US labor costs less than one man-hour of Chinese labor. The cost of that one man-hour of Chinese labor is largely the result of the fact that said labor is largely (though not always, of course) slave labor. Slave labor is the cheapest labor possible because a slave's standard of living is, by force, barely subsistence level -- in other words just enough to enable said laborer to work and no more."
You assume that labor is the only cost involved in making a product. Most processes are highly automated these days, so once you account for the sunk cost of the plant, material, energy and transportation costs dominate.
What happens to material, energy and transportation costs when the dollar devalues? Well, if you are purchasing from foreign countries, in US dollars, you have to pay more. But if you buy materials mined and processed in the US, energy derived from US coal or nuclear, and only have to transport your goods within the US, your costs don't rise. Even with higher labor costs you can still be competitive with foreign producers.
Modern plants have become so highly automated that labor costs are a minor portion of production costs. This is why many Asian car manufacturers build their cars here, despite higher labor costs, other costs simply outweigh the benefits of lower labor costs.
"Not everyone can be middle class when the factories require cheap grunt work. "
Sure they can, when the owners of the factory share some of the profits. Witness Germany. Blue collar workers are well respected and have a high standard of living.
"Returning to an industrial society is not a viable goal for the U.S."
I am afraid we must re-industrialize. World wide labor costs will eventually equalize (dollar devaluation is a step in that direction), and it will become simply too expensive to import everything. If we had a lack indigenous raw materials you might have an argument, but we've got most of what we need to make most things, right here, in the US.
Let me guess, you're a Republican, right? So to you, higher prices for imports is a Good Thing, because of the trade imbalance. But if you're a blue collar family struggling to live on an income that's stagnant at best, higher prices are just higher prices.
Sure, until enterprising individuals build plants in the US to make the goods we were previously importing, but at a lower price. And those plants start hiring US workers.
Yes, I agree, that would be a catastrophe - let's just continue buying all our stuff from other countries and let our workers keep losing their jobs. Outsource everything - eventually the world will just pay us American's to sit around and watch ads for their products.
Well, what you are describing is a stupid person, not a programmer:) I was trained in Pascal, and learned basic data structures. I also taught myself rudimentary C at some point.
My point was that though this education has served me well, I can't say that I've ever had much use for these concepts in most of my programming and design tasks. I've coded in very high level proprietary, business oriented programming languages, Java, or various other scripting languages. Rarely have I had the need to understand what a pointer is, or how to build a "data structure" in a C like language. I've never had to write my own linked list.
I have had to have a thorough understanding of Java's implementation of the object oriented programming model, and the library classes available in the JDK. Thus my "translation guide". To do what I do, you need to understand object references and how garbage collection works. You need to understand what an object is, and how encapsulation works. A healthy does of common OO design patterns can't hurt. All of this can be had at the "Java schools" you so despise.
Now perhaps in your line of work you need low level device driver programmers to code for very limited devices where standard libraries can't be used, and memory has to be managed manually. Well, yes, then you will need to retrain your average Java programmer, though, if the person is sufficiently smart, it shouldn't take much time at all.
"Just curious - what is your problem domain? Business, medical, financial, etc?"
In my entire career I've never had to use a pointer (at least not directly) - 11+ years and counting. I've done very well, am well respected, and have never wanted for work.
Here is a handy translation guide: Pointer -> Object Reference Data Structure -> Object
After they hire all the people required to sift and parse this data, there will be no Indian programmers left for outsourcing. Bravo, keep up the good work - bureaucracy know no bounds.
"Hundreds of millions of years ago the atmosphere had a lot more carbon in it than it does now. The world was also a lot hotter than it is now, largely because of it."
The data clearly indicates that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are strongly correlated with global temperature. Many plausible explanations have been put forth as to why temperature increases would cause increases in CO2. There are also plausible explanations as to how CO2 would cause the temperature increase on its own. I don't know that either side has proven its case. The fact that temperature increases actually precede CO2 increases makes me think that things are a bit more complicated than Mr. Gore would have us believe.
"Of course the science of climate change (despite the popular misnomer "global warming") neither requires, nor suggests that Earth's atmosphere will change evenly or the entire world will even warm. In fact, it's suggested (convincingly so, to anyone even remotely knowledgeable about the topic) that some parts of the world would cool and even experience a new ice age."
Yes yes, speculation about the disruption of the thermohaline circulation causing an new ice age in Europe. Pardon me, I should call it "Global catastrophe" instead. I also seem to recall a severe hurricane season being predicted in 2006.
"Steal your mom's car keys, go out to her garage, close all the doors and turn on the car to experience first-hand the effects of releasing excessive amounts of carbon into a closed system that is incapable of processing it in a timely fashion."
I fail to see what Carbon Monoxide poisoning has to do with CO2 and the greenhouse effect.
"I will most certainly impugn both your intelligence and your intellectual honesty. You clearly possess neither in any significant quantity. If you do in fact not believe in "god" that only proves that being an atheist does not preclude one from being a delusional idiot, it's just a good start."
I see you have to resort to name calling - a stunning gambit for the moral high ground. Surely other readers will be convinced that you have proven your point. "I am right, he is stupid! Nya!" Really, even the proponents of Intelligent Design can do better than that.
"Surely it must bother you that you essentially are using the same basic line of attack used by those opposing evolutionary biology."
I could care less. I have pointed out to you, as an observation of fact, that two people can look at the same data and arrive at different conclusions. It is perfectly possible that those two people believe they have fairly weighed all of the evidence and come to an unbiased and fair conclusion. This is a possibility that you should allow for when encountering those who disagree with you.
You have continued to impugn my motivation and intellectual honesty. And yes, claiming that I am evaluating one claim with one set of standards, and another claim with an entirely different set of standards *is* tantamount to challenging my intellectual honesty. You appear to suffer from the delusion that those who disagree with you are misdirected and deluded. I wish I possessed such confidence in my conclusions, but I am a bit more humble.
To address your claims on my faulty methodology. I am equally skeptical of all scientific claims - probably more skeptical than most. I see evolution as nothing more than a collection of hypothesis that best explain the fossil and more recent genetic evidence. The observations are incomplete, and some of the hypothesis involve guesswork, but I see no more plausible competing explanations. I am not convinced that evolution is "true", or a "fact", but that it is merely the most successful model of observed reality in this particular realm of observation.
The global warming hypothesis makes many fewer verifiable claims. I would say that the claim "Rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have caused an increase in global average temperature" is not supported by the evidence. I am not even sure that "global average" temperature is a meaningful concept. Even if it is, and the measurements of it are proper and correct, and the various adjustments and weighting used to arrive at a single "temperature" for planet earth are correct, there is no scientifically valid proof that CO2 is causing the rise. There are many other plausible explanations for the temperature rise. There are many plausible arguments against the validity of the measurement of a global average temperature. These alternative explanations are MUCH more plausible than "God made dinosaur fossils to fool us". They are much more plausible than the argument "Things that are too complicated could not possibly have arisen through natural processes".
Slashdot Mirror
Most likely any sales agreement will also include a settlement with Novell. The new owners will pony up enough money to make everybody happy, rather than run the risk of open ended litigation and damages.
"So personally I believe that no evidence was presented that actual distribution did take place....you and I and the rest of the world know that it probably did...but since when is 'probably' sufficient in the eyes of the law."
Since "more likely than not" became the standard of proof in civil cases in the United States.
I've been around Slashdot for quite awhile. Based on what I've read, I would have found her liable. Remember, the standard of proof is "more likely than not" in a civil trial. And yes, most likely this woman distributed the tracks they say she did, in violation of copyright laws.
My intimate knowledge of how software "REALLY works" wouldn't really have much to do with this decision. Sure - maybe her IP address or MAC address were spoofed. It's possible, but unlikely, given all of the evidence supplied.
I am as antagonistic towards the RIAA as they come. Based on what I've read about the case, I would have found her liable. Don't care how much I hate the RIAA, the law is the law. Your job as a juror is to uphold that law, not enact your own personal little geek-vendettas.
No, it is not the jury's job to interpret the law. It is the jury's job to weigh the evidence within the bounds of the law.
Don't like the law? Please, feel free to vote in different legislators.
Yes, I am sure those terms are entirely and completely enforceable in every jurisdiction. Besides, you don't get taken to court for EULA violations, you lose your license to use the product.
Flex builder 3 (currently in beta) will offer most of the missing code intelligence features such as refactoring, and formatting, and will dramatically improve code hinting.
I guess you don't understand the meaning of the word "major".
No, your conviction that English speakers have some sense of entitlement remains the same, as does you imperfect understanding of the verb "to earn".
"In English you "earn" (inherit) it."
Please check a dictionary before you post such twaddle.
From m-w.com "to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered b : to bring in by way of return ", or "to come to be duly worthy of or entitled or suited to b : to make worthy of or obtain for "
There is no sense of inheritance or entitlement in the word. It appears to be originally descended from a German verb that meant "to reap". Reaping, at least at the time the word was in use in Old High German, certainly involved a lot of work.
"I think he means to say that the gains in efficiency will increase relative to rasterization as the detail of the scene increases."
I am assuming that's what he meant as well. If that's the case, and we define "n" as some metric of scene complexity, then I'd like to see some support of the claim that rasterization is O(n) and raytracing is O(log(n)).
Everything you've said is utterly meaningless without defining what exactly n is.
No, that's the answer to the question what is "O(log n)". I am perfectly familiar with "big O" notation. I am not however aware of what the original post meant by "n". Is it vertices, scene complexity, rays, textures, or some other metric of rendering scene complexity?
"Raytracing is O(log n) versus O(n) for rasterization, which means that even though raytracing is currently slower (the constants involved in raytracing are higher), after the break even point is passed much less of the available computational power will be needed to render the scene and can instead be used for physics and AI."
Not disagreeing with you here, but what's "n"?
Oil, gas and nuclear fuels have stored potential energy. Sure, they have to be mined and refined, but the number of people required to accomplish this for a particular unit of energy has fallen exponentially.
"The cost of transportation isn't the cost of the fuel, it's the cost of the labor to extract the raw materials, the cost of the labor to transform them to fuel, the cost of the labor necessary to build the plant that accomplishes that, and the cost of the labor to make use of it (to drive the vehicles, to manage them, etc.)."
No, the cost of labor to extract the materials is the cost of labor to extract the materials. The cost of transportation, on any large scale, is mainly dictated by the cost of fuel. Shipping jets are flown by a few people consuming thousands of gallons of jet fuel an hour. I don't think their salaries come close in comparison.
"Every single transaction thread ultimately terminates in human labor."
Except when it terminates in stored chemical or nuclear energy, or with captured solar energy.
"Well, "temporary" here likely means "not within our lifetime", thanks to the very sizable Chinese population, even assuming your analysis is correct. But I see little reason to believe your analysis is correct."
It took about 30 years in Japan.
"The problem is: that won't happen until the US dollar falls so much that one man-hour of US labor costs less than one man-hour of Chinese labor. The cost of that one man-hour of Chinese labor is largely the result of the fact that said labor is largely (though not always, of course) slave labor. Slave labor is the cheapest labor possible because a slave's standard of living is, by force, barely subsistence level -- in other words just enough to enable said laborer to work and no more."
You assume that labor is the only cost involved in making a product. Most processes are highly automated these days, so once you account for the sunk cost of the plant, material, energy and transportation costs dominate.
What happens to material, energy and transportation costs when the dollar devalues? Well, if you are purchasing from foreign countries, in US dollars, you have to pay more. But if you buy materials mined and processed in the US, energy derived from US coal or nuclear, and only have to transport your goods within the US, your costs don't rise. Even with higher labor costs you can still be competitive with foreign producers.
Modern plants have become so highly automated that labor costs are a minor portion of production costs. This is why many Asian car manufacturers build their cars here, despite higher labor costs, other costs simply outweigh the benefits of lower labor costs.
"Not everyone can be middle class when the factories require cheap grunt work. "
Sure they can, when the owners of the factory share some of the profits. Witness Germany. Blue collar workers are well respected and have a high standard of living.
"Returning to an industrial society is not a viable goal for the U.S."
I am afraid we must re-industrialize. World wide labor costs will eventually equalize (dollar devaluation is a step in that direction), and it will become simply too expensive to import everything. If we had a lack indigenous raw materials you might have an argument, but we've got most of what we need to make most things, right here, in the US.
Let me guess, you're a Republican, right? So to you, higher prices for imports is a Good Thing, because of the trade imbalance. But if you're a blue collar family struggling to live on an income that's stagnant at best, higher prices are just higher prices.
Sure, until enterprising individuals build plants in the US to make the goods we were previously importing, but at a lower price. And those plants start hiring US workers.
Yes, I agree, that would be a catastrophe - let's just continue buying all our stuff from other countries and let our workers keep losing their jobs. Outsource everything - eventually the world will just pay us American's to sit around and watch ads for their products.
Even in Southern MI, Canadian change consitutes about 25% of the change in circulation. I expect to it all disappear if the dollar sinks any lower.
Well, what you are describing is a stupid person, not a programmer :) I was trained in Pascal, and learned basic data structures. I also taught myself rudimentary C at some point.
:)
My point was that though this education has served me well, I can't say that I've ever had much use for these concepts in most of my programming and design tasks. I've coded in very high level proprietary, business oriented programming languages, Java, or various other scripting languages. Rarely have I had the need to understand what a pointer is, or how to build a "data structure" in a C like language. I've never had to write my own linked list.
I have had to have a thorough understanding of Java's implementation of the object oriented programming model, and the library classes available in the JDK. Thus my "translation guide". To do what I do, you need to understand object references and how garbage collection works. You need to understand what an object is, and how encapsulation works. A healthy does of common OO design patterns can't hurt. All of this can be had at the "Java schools" you so despise.
Now perhaps in your line of work you need low level device driver programmers to code for very limited devices where standard libraries can't be used, and memory has to be managed manually. Well, yes, then you will need to retrain your average Java programmer, though, if the person is sufficiently smart, it shouldn't take much time at all.
"Just curious - what is your problem domain? Business, medical, financial, etc?"
Yes.
In my entire career I've never had to use a pointer (at least not directly) - 11+ years and counting. I've done very well, am well respected, and have never wanted for work.
Here is a handy translation guide:
Pointer -> Object Reference
Data Structure -> Object
After they hire all the people required to sift and parse this data, there will be no Indian programmers left for outsourcing. Bravo, keep up the good work - bureaucracy know no bounds.
"Hundreds of millions of years ago the atmosphere had a lot more carbon in it than it does now. The world was also a lot hotter than it is now, largely because of it."
The data clearly indicates that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are strongly correlated with global temperature. Many plausible explanations have been put forth as to why temperature increases would cause increases in CO2. There are also plausible explanations as to how CO2 would cause the temperature increase on its own. I don't know that either side has proven its case. The fact that temperature increases actually precede CO2 increases makes me think that things are a bit more complicated than Mr. Gore would have us believe.
"Of course the science of climate change (despite the popular misnomer "global warming") neither requires, nor suggests that Earth's atmosphere will change evenly or the entire world will even warm. In fact, it's suggested (convincingly so, to anyone even remotely knowledgeable about the topic) that some parts of the world would cool and even experience a new ice age."
Yes yes, speculation about the disruption of the thermohaline circulation causing an new ice age in Europe. Pardon me, I should call it "Global catastrophe" instead. I also seem to recall a severe hurricane season being predicted in 2006.
"Steal your mom's car keys, go out to her garage, close all the doors and turn on the car to experience first-hand the effects of releasing excessive amounts of carbon into a closed system that is incapable of processing it in a timely fashion."
I fail to see what Carbon Monoxide poisoning has to do with CO2 and the greenhouse effect.
"I will most certainly impugn both your intelligence and your intellectual honesty. You clearly possess neither in any significant quantity. If you do in fact not believe in "god" that only proves that being an atheist does not preclude one from being a delusional idiot, it's just a good start."
I see you have to resort to name calling - a stunning gambit for the moral high ground. Surely other readers will be convinced that you have proven your point. "I am right, he is stupid! Nya!" Really, even the proponents of Intelligent Design can do better than that.
"Surely it must bother you that you essentially are using the same basic line of attack used by those opposing evolutionary biology."
I could care less. I have pointed out to you, as an observation of fact, that two people can look at the same data and arrive at different conclusions. It is perfectly possible that those two people believe they have fairly weighed all of the evidence and come to an unbiased and fair conclusion. This is a possibility that you should allow for when encountering those who disagree with you.
You have continued to impugn my motivation and intellectual honesty. And yes, claiming that I am evaluating one claim with one set of standards, and another claim with an entirely different set of standards *is* tantamount to challenging my intellectual honesty. You appear to suffer from the delusion that those who disagree with you are misdirected and deluded. I wish I possessed such confidence in my conclusions, but I am a bit more humble.
To address your claims on my faulty methodology. I am equally skeptical of all scientific claims - probably more skeptical than most. I see evolution as nothing more than a collection of hypothesis that best explain the fossil and more recent genetic evidence. The observations are incomplete, and some of the hypothesis involve guesswork, but I see no more plausible competing explanations. I am not convinced that evolution is "true", or a "fact", but that it is merely the most successful model of observed reality in this particular realm of observation.
The global warming hypothesis makes many fewer verifiable claims. I would say that the claim "Rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have caused an increase in global average temperature" is not supported by the evidence. I am not even sure that "global average" temperature is a meaningful concept. Even if it is, and the measurements of it are proper and correct, and the various adjustments and weighting used to arrive at a single "temperature" for planet earth are correct, there is no scientifically valid proof that CO2 is causing the rise. There are many other plausible explanations for the temperature rise. There are many plausible arguments against the validity of the measurement of a global average temperature. These alternative explanations are MUCH more plausible than "God made dinosaur fossils to fool us". They are much more plausible than the argument "Things that are too complicated could not possibly have arisen through natural processes".