Foursquare is a mobile app that has a database of interesting and sometimes not interesting landmarks. When your at a location in it's database, you can check in and you are awarded points for doing so. If you have the most check-ins at a place out of anybody over some period (two months I think), you become the Mayor of that location and you get extra points for this.
Sometimes they have promo offers for certain check ins. e.g. check in at Burger King and there might be 10% off your next meal.
Yes you can as long as you are very careful to stay non-commercial.
Not true. Debian, being a flavour of Linux, is distributed under GPLv2. GPLv2 states that, if you have a written offer to make the sources available to you for three years, you can effectively forward the offer to the people you distribute it to, provided its for non commercial purposes. It's unlikely that anybody who uses Debian has such a written offer if they just downloaded it off the Internet.
Also a link to the souce code at yhe same place as the binary is considered distributing together
This is a bit ambiguous. If you mean putting a copy of the Debian source on your download server counts, then yes. If you mean just having a URL that points at Debian's server, then no, it's not good enough.
that should apply even when the source is on a different server.
Wrong if the "different server" is Debian's. The reason why this is so should be obvious: Debian cannot be held responsible under the terms of the GPL for software that you got from somewhere else.
Of course I don't really see the point of not just hosting the source, too.
Neither do I. It's the easiest way to fulfil the terms of the GPL.
You didn't try all sorts of weird click+button combinations, nor did you try right click because both right click and ctrl-click open a context menu with "Move to Trash" in it amongst other things.
The surface area of an elephant is much higher than the surface area of a feather and yet it has a higher terminal velocity.
Absolute surface area is not important, it is the surface area to mass ratio and aerodynamics. I'm willing to bet that the surface area to mass ratio of the Cray 2 is much lower than that of the iPad because surface area increases with the square of length but mass increases with the cube of length. Also, surface area to mass ratio depends on the shape of the object. A flat tablet shape is bad for minimising the ratio.
If the iPad does manage to remain edge on, it might have a chance but I would not be sure.
By the way: are we defining the Cray 2 as just the electronics, or are we throwing the cooling plant out of the plane too?
Every phone I have ever bought has come with a new cable. Come to think of it, every USB device I have ever bought has come with a new cable. Any device that didn't would be subject to whiney reviews saying "they were too cheap to supply a cable".
Apple could quite easily dispense with all the criticism if only they were prepared to make an adapter from Lightning to USB. But they'll never do that because they have to keep everything proprietary.
By the way, there is a much bigger issue with migrating from iOS devices to Android than the connectors as I found out when I wanted to buy my first smart phone. I wanted to buy an Android phone because I had an iPad and an iPod Touch I wanted to compare the interfaces and also experiment with developing for Android, but then I realised that I would have to buy all my apps all over again, so I bought an iPhone. The software is a much bigger lock in than than any wire.
Can't speak for Openheimer but neither Feynman nor Einstein had any time for the Jewish faith. They were Jews by accident of birth, no more. People of the Jewish faith are not necessarily immune to fuckwhittery.
They had the capability to pinpoint the away team with an accuracy sufficient to teleport them back to the ship from anywhere on the planet without leaving any bits behind or inadvertently picking up bits of other bystanders or objects.
Wireless heartrate monitors? We have that, they didn't.... well, I think the medical bay had something they would use, so the doctor could monitor you if you were very sick, but how useful would it be on away missions to check heartrate to tell when someone's nervous or scared? So many more uses they didn't touch.
Doctor McCoy had a little device that looked like a car cigarette lighter that could diagnose virtually any disease non invasively.
Star Trek communicators work even when the spaceship is on the other side of the planet, or at least you never hear anybody say "we have to wait 20 minutes until we have line of sight."
Furthermore the reliability and range of the communicator can be dynamically adjusted so that the away team's mission always treads the fine line between "completely routine and tedious" and "everybody dies".
"Windows" is a pretty generic common name. But do you think Microsoft as a trademark on it? Of course they do. Will they sue you if you attempt to sell an operating system named Windows? Yes and they'll probably win.
If he has a comic book business or product called "Carnival of Souls" and a registered trademark and Harper Collins is also selling a comic book called "Carnival of Souls" it seems to me, as a not-a-lawyer, that he has a strong case.
"We should avoid entangling alliances with european powers that could draw us into bloodshed..... rest assured while one European leader runs-around mad, and the others act as if they are halfway there themselves, we shall remain at peace here in North America." - George Washington)
Who says Americans don't do irony.
My country has been drawn into two major land wars since the turn of the century and in both cases, it was by the USA.
I don't think anyone should be liable just for writing and releasing source code.
Why?
If I write some software incompetently and release it as source and people subsequently lose lots of money as a result, why should I not be liable to the same extent as if I had released the software as a binary?
So you're saying that, in order to ensure I never fall foul of being sued for defects in the software I use to supply services to my customers I need to audit every line of the open source software in my solution. Nah, I think I'll find a proprietary supplier that is prepared to give me a warranty.
To an extent, this happens already. This is the main reason why companies like Red Hat can charge people a lot of money for software that can be obtained for free on the Internet.
This idea that FOSS is "the higher standard" because of the possibility of review is pie in the sky, by the way. In principle it is possible to review FOSS, in practice, it is often impossible due to the complexity of the software. And at least one very serious bug has been caused by downstream people reviewing software and applying an incorrect patch.
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says that in any consistent formalisation of number theory there exist true statements that cannot be proved within that formalisation. It does not say that in any consistent formalisation of number theory all true statements cannot be proved within that formalisation.
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says that in any consistent formalisation of number theorem there exist true statements that cannot be proved within that formalisation. It does not say that in any consistent formalisation of number theorem all true statements cannot be proved within that formalisation.
There certainly are formalisations of number theory in which many statements can be proved. For instance, In GEB, EGB Douglas Hofstadter proved that addition is commutative within his TNT formal system.
The analogous statement to Gödel's Incompleteness in the context of this discussion would be "there exist programs which cannot be proved to be secure". That's a long way from "program X cannot be proved to be secure" where X is, say, my new banking application. It's even further from the statement "program X is secure".
Actually, what he proved is that there is no general algorithm for deciding whether an arbitrary program terminates or not. But that does not mean that it is impossible to decide that any particular program never terminates. For instance, if I show you a program with no loops in it, you can decide that it terminates. If I show you a program like while (true) printf("Hello \n"); you can decide it doesn't terminate.
Anyway, that's not what the parent post said, it said:
If it was possible to prevent all security holes, this wouldn't be a bad idea. However, it is provably impossible to do so
In the context of this discussion, this is saying that it is provably impossible for me to eliminate all of the security holes in my new online banking application. I will grant that it might be a difficult task, if my application is even moderately complex, but provably impossible? I don't think so.
Slashdot Mirror
Aaargh, the apostrophes, they burn.
Foursquare is a mobile app that has a database of interesting and sometimes not interesting landmarks. When your at a location in it's database, you can check in and you are awarded points for doing so. If you have the most check-ins at a place out of anybody over some period (two months I think), you become the Mayor of that location and you get extra points for this.
Sometimes they have promo offers for certain check ins. e.g. check in at Burger King and there might be 10% off your next meal.
I can do better than that. With no data at all other than it's a Foursquare user, I can predict a user's home town to within 13 Mm.
Thirteen megametres is roughly the diameter of the Earth and no two points on its surface can be further apart than that.
Yes you can as long as you are very careful to stay non-commercial.
Not true. Debian, being a flavour of Linux, is distributed under GPLv2. GPLv2 states that, if you have a written offer to make the sources available to you for three years, you can effectively forward the offer to the people you distribute it to, provided its for non commercial purposes. It's unlikely that anybody who uses Debian has such a written offer if they just downloaded it off the Internet.
Also a link to the souce code at yhe same place as the binary is considered distributing together
This is a bit ambiguous. If you mean putting a copy of the Debian source on your download server counts, then yes. If you mean just having a URL that points at Debian's server, then no, it's not good enough.
that should apply even when the source is on a different server.
Wrong if the "different server" is Debian's. The reason why this is so should be obvious: Debian cannot be held responsible under the terms of the GPL for software that you got from somewhere else.
Of course I don't really see the point of not just hosting the source, too.
Neither do I. It's the easiest way to fulfil the terms of the GPL.
You didn't try all sorts of weird click+button combinations, nor did you try right click because both right click and ctrl-click open a context menu with "Move to Trash" in it amongst other things.
The surface area of an elephant is much higher than the surface area of a feather and yet it has a higher terminal velocity.
Absolute surface area is not important, it is the surface area to mass ratio and aerodynamics. I'm willing to bet that the surface area to mass ratio of the Cray 2 is much lower than that of the iPad because surface area increases with the square of length but mass increases with the cube of length. Also, surface area to mass ratio depends on the shape of the object. A flat tablet shape is bad for minimising the ratio.
If the iPad does manage to remain edge on, it might have a chance but I would not be sure.
By the way: are we defining the Cray 2 as just the electronics, or are we throwing the cooling plant out of the plane too?
Do you honestly think the Slashdot readership is a sample representative of the population?
Every phone I have ever bought has come with a new cable. Come to think of it, every USB device I have ever bought has come with a new cable. Any device that didn't would be subject to whiney reviews saying "they were too cheap to supply a cable".
Apple could quite easily dispense with all the criticism if only they were prepared to make an adapter from Lightning to USB. But they'll never do that because they have to keep everything proprietary.
By the way, there is a much bigger issue with migrating from iOS devices to Android than the connectors as I found out when I wanted to buy my first smart phone. I wanted to buy an Android phone because I had an iPad and an iPod Touch I wanted to compare the interfaces and also experiment with developing for Android, but then I realised that I would have to buy all my apps all over again, so I bought an iPhone. The software is a much bigger lock in than than any wire.
Can't speak for Openheimer but neither Feynman nor Einstein had any time for the Jewish faith. They were Jews by accident of birth, no more. People of the Jewish faith are not necessarily immune to fuckwhittery.
Or GPS? They had no idea where people were.
They had the capability to pinpoint the away team with an accuracy sufficient to teleport them back to the ship from anywhere on the planet without leaving any bits behind or inadvertently picking up bits of other bystanders or objects.
Wireless heartrate monitors? We have that, they didn't.... well, I think the medical bay had something they would use, so the doctor could monitor you if you were very sick, but how useful would it be on away missions to check heartrate to tell when someone's nervous or scared? So many more uses they didn't touch.
Doctor McCoy had a little device that looked like a car cigarette lighter that could diagnose virtually any disease non invasively.
Star Trek communicators work even when the spaceship is on the other side of the planet, or at least you never hear anybody say "we have to wait 20 minutes until we have line of sight."
Furthermore the reliability and range of the communicator can be dynamically adjusted so that the away team's mission always treads the fine line between "completely routine and tedious" and "everybody dies".
"Windows" is a pretty generic common name. But do you think Microsoft as a trademark on it? Of course they do. Will they sue you if you attempt to sell an operating system named Windows? Yes and they'll probably win.
If he has a comic book business or product called "Carnival of Souls" and a registered trademark and Harper Collins is also selling a comic book called "Carnival of Souls" it seems to me, as a not-a-lawyer, that he has a strong case.
the comment is, at best, a statement of what the original programmer intended to write.
Which is an important piece of information to have when you are trying to figure out what the bug is.
Good code doesn't need comments that explain what the code does, yes; that should be clear from the code itself.
Yes, but any code only documents exactly what it does. It does not document what the person who wrote it thinks it does.
I think he means change control, not revision control.
Germany has NEGATIVE interest rates on short-term bonds
How does that work? Why would anybody buy a bond at all if you then had to pay for the privilege of owning them?
"We should avoid entangling alliances with european powers that could draw us into bloodshed..... rest assured while one European leader runs-around mad, and the others act as if they are halfway there themselves, we shall remain at peace here in North America." - George Washington)
Who says Americans don't do irony.
My country has been drawn into two major land wars since the turn of the century and in both cases, it was by the USA.
Why does that make incompetent software developers any less responsible for the bugs in their code?
I don't think anyone should be liable just for writing and releasing source code.
Why?
If I write some software incompetently and release it as source and people subsequently lose lots of money as a result, why should I not be liable to the same extent as if I had released the software as a binary?
So you're saying that, in order to ensure I never fall foul of being sued for defects in the software I use to supply services to my customers I need to audit every line of the open source software in my solution. Nah, I think I'll find a proprietary supplier that is prepared to give me a warranty.
To an extent, this happens already. This is the main reason why companies like Red Hat can charge people a lot of money for software that can be obtained for free on the Internet.
This idea that FOSS is "the higher standard" because of the possibility of review is pie in the sky, by the way. In principle it is possible to review FOSS, in practice, it is often impossible due to the complexity of the software. And at least one very serious bug has been caused by downstream people reviewing software and applying an incorrect patch.
Sorry, the first paragraph should be
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says that in any consistent formalisation of number theory there exist true statements that cannot be proved within that formalisation. It does not say that in any consistent formalisation of number theory all true statements cannot be proved within that formalisation.
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says that in any consistent formalisation of number theorem there exist true statements that cannot be proved within that formalisation. It does not say that in any consistent formalisation of number theorem all true statements cannot be proved within that formalisation.
There certainly are formalisations of number theory in which many statements can be proved. For instance, In GEB, EGB Douglas Hofstadter proved that addition is commutative within his TNT formal system.
The analogous statement to Gödel's Incompleteness in the context of this discussion would be "there exist programs which cannot be proved to be secure". That's a long way from "program X cannot be proved to be secure" where X is, say, my new banking application. It's even further from the statement "program X is secure".
Actually, what he proved is that there is no general algorithm for deciding whether an arbitrary program terminates or not. But that does not mean that it is impossible to decide that any particular program never terminates. For instance, if I show you a program with no loops in it, you can decide that it terminates. If I show you a program like while (true) printf("Hello \n"); you can decide it doesn't terminate.
Anyway, that's not what the parent post said, it said:
If it was possible to prevent all security holes, this wouldn't be a bad idea. However, it is provably impossible to do so
In the context of this discussion, this is saying that it is provably impossible for me to eliminate all of the security holes in my new online banking application. I will grant that it might be a difficult task, if my application is even moderately complex, but provably impossible? I don't think so.
Provably?
I'd like to see that proof.
Because it's the law.