Countries Support Their Primary Export Industries. Film at 11. The US isn't being any more persnickety than say... oh... France when it comes to the name "Champagne". I'm sure the Europeans who don't want to cave to MS feel the same way I do that we (the US) haven't caved to the French and allowed them to dictate how we use words. Cheers.
What's really sad is that the South Pole will get a new highway and broadband before I get broadband, and before the Springfield Interchange is finished.
If the "clean" chip really saves the environment, the real cost of the chip is lower; it's just that it's an upfront cost. If you have to spend $trillion of R&D to avoid 10 deaths over the next 20 years, would you do it? It's cold hearted, but decisions like that are made all the time. OTOH, when you get to the point of spending $billion to prevent 10,000 deaths, it's definitely worthwhile.
As for all the people on/. saying they'd pay more, that's irrelevant. What matters is what the market will collectively bear, and what you can squeeze through the political process.
What's missing here is that the "higher cost" of the environmentally friendly product is really just an "front end" cost as opposed to a "back end" cost of the environmentally un-friendly product.
For example: Chip A costs $60/per unit but deforests and poisons 0.0001 acres of land per unit. The cost of cleanup isn't realized until after a noticeable impact has occured. Chip B costs $90/per unit but damages nothing.
Which chip costs more? For the moment, let's exclude stuff like human life because $priceless is a hard figure with which to work. Instead, let's be cold hearted economists and analyze it in terms of insured lost, depreciation, etc. To a certain extend you can monetize human life (as nasty as that sounds) and IIRC the figure is something like 1.8 million $ on average.
At any rate, from a financial point of view, chip B looks like an early loan payment. Most people don't want to pay the loan right away, even when it's prudent. They'd rather "borrow against the future" sometimes at great cost.
At any rate, for many types of environmental damage we should be able to calculate which is better. If it costs $5/per unit to clean up 10 years from now, then there's an argument to be made for using chip A. OTOH, if it will cost $100/per unit to clean up 5 years from now then it's prudent to regulate the industry and require that they install the necessary polution controls.
Of course this is a dramatic oversimplification (I'm throwing out stuff like the benefit of the product itself; chips are used by environmental scientists to study and find remedies for damage!)
The point I wanted to make is that it's wrong to say the environmentally friendly chip "costs more". If it's the difference between killing the Yellow River and keeping it fishable, the friendly chip actually costs less to society overall.
There are two basic solutions: 1. regulate, and pass the cost on to the consumer (tough because the industry lobbies against it and unless the whole world regulates the consumer will just switch markets) 2. subsidize the improvements (tough, because misguided free trade agreements have given subsidies a black eye, you have to sell it to taxpayers, and you have to make sure the companies are using the money for the intended purpose).
That's not very stealthy. Still though, I agree with the general idea. Most crooks won't use this technique.
For example, there was some interesting social engineering going on near DC recently: Late at night a "women in distress" claims her car has broken down and she needs to use the phone. Chump invites her in, male partner gains access to the house immediately therafter and robs them. Why bother with blanks and files when you can just bluff your way in? And college dorms? Easy pickins when the students are drunk. Come to think of it, drunks are just such easy marks to begin with. When I was a paper boy, I wished I'd had a dollar for every time a drunk left his keys IN THE DOOR.
Why resort to clever hacks when there are so many easy marks?
For all you debating the nature vs. nurture aspect of this, consider alligators: A difference of just a few degrees in temperature of the nest determines whether they are male or female. And you're all fussing about fur color?
Killer bees did not wipe out Texas, and the Internet did not save the world, at least as fast as it was supposed to
Of course, if something wiped out life on Earth, we wouldn't be here to speculate about it. This reminds me of all the people who say it's OK to try drugs because their parents did them in the 60s, and they survived to raise the kids who are using that as an argument. Trouble with that is, all the people from the 60s who got too messed up to raise a family don't have any kids to refute the argument. If susceptibility to drug abuse were purely genetic and there were no recessive genes combining to predispose these kids to addiction, the argument would fly; but that's not the case. Grampa's latent compulsive behavior gene will zap a certain percentage of them.
One day when I had nothing better to do, I keyed "free stuff" into a search engine. One of the hits said swapit.com was giving away free T-shirts, so I gave them my address. Not only did they send me a T-shirt, but they also sent me a mailer for my CDs that looked like it cost at least a dollar to buy, ship, handle/process etc. I never did any business with swapit. They could have easily spent $10 to get my business--and I gave them nothing in return. I have no regrets. I still have the T-shirt, and I still wear it. It's a pretty nice piece of swag. It's black with the swapit logo on the front, and a swapit logo on the back upon which is superimposed the slogan "SWAP THE DEAD FOR LIVE". Now that's ironic, isn't it?
On closer inspection, you are fundamentally correct in pointing this out as a bug. They are dereferencing a NULL pointer assuming that your analysis of the code that comes before the assertion is correct (my knowledge of assembly is limited). A quick glance at the C99 draft and I don't see anything about defined behavior for when the file pointer is NULL (or invalid for that matter). If the behavior for passing in a NULL pointer is undefined, then I guess it's OK for the runtime behavior to be undefined; but I agree--leaving something like that in the code isn't good. They should move the assert to the beginning.
When I trace into fclose, I get... oh crap, the/. lameness filter won't let me post it all, but it's a disassembly with debug info and it's got a lot more code in it than that. There are 3 system calls appropriately enough to functions named _lock_file,_fclose_lk, and _unlock_file in that order. At any rate, the source is either not installed on my machine (or not available to begin with). Obviously MS's libc doesn't use the code in your sig, since it wouldn't do much of anything. So, what are you trying to say?
Hmmm... makes me wonder what will happen if they adopt them, and then 10 years later do a study trying to figure out why postal carriers are collectively gaining weight and experiencing associated health issues.
That, and isn't getting paid to hike one of the appeals of being a postal carrier? Whatever time the carrier saves is going to be lost because he'll have to go to a gym after work and run on a stupid treadmill just to stay in shape. It would be sad to see one of the few jobs where physical effort still matters get turned into yet another coronary creator.
In this regard, Segway sounds like yet another example of "just because we can doesn't mean we should".
Also, it's based on Kamen's wheelchair technology... it's basicly a good device for handicapped people. Anyone can tell you that such devices are fine for the handicapped, but terrible for the healthy. Would any sane person suggest putting a healthy person in a motorized wheelchair? Of course not.
Who ever said
that you can't "overcharge" for code that is
BSD licensed? Last I checked, there was no clause that determined how someone selling the code could do so.
I wasn't referring to a clause in the license. I was referring to the practical matter of not being able to charge for something that is synonymous with "free".
Then you say, "Microsoft cannot `overcharge' for BSD. They can only charge what the market will bear for the value they add."
As a practical matter, the market would look at MS BSD, compare it to FreeBSD, and the market would only be willing to pay for the stuff that MS added to BSD. In other words, I am saying that MS's brand name has no value in the market for enhanced BSD distributions.
What the fuck are you talking about ???? They can repackage FreeBSD and charge whatever the fuck they like, if that's what they want to do!
Yes. They can also re-release BOB, but the chances of either product succeeding are about equal.
If you had wanted, you could have counterpointed my argument quite nicely by saying that MS's marketing muscle was sufficient to sell branded BSD distros with no value added. You might have employed the bottled water analogy too (although I don't believe it applies because bottled water is a question of convenience and taste). Instead you went for the adhominem attack. Pity. Where can I find some people who really know how to debate?
The GPL would require Microsoft to make available any code they change under the GPL; it takes away their absolute control over the code, and takes away their ability to (over)charge for said code
Nope. This is a very common falacy put forth by GPL advocates. BSD does not grant you the right to overcharge for code, and GPL doesn't revoke it. Microsoft cannot "overcharge" for BSD. They can only charge what the market will bear for the value they add.
If Microsoft took a BSD distro and made minimal improvements, I could legally "clean room" their minimal improvements and charge the same ammount, more, or (more likely) less. I could even advertise that my improvements "do the same thing that MS BSD does at half the price".
Now, on the other hand if MSFT decided to link to GNU/Linux in a manner that required their code to be GPL'd, there is nothing to stop them from pricing MSLinux servers at $5000/copy. This is of course a rather straightforward technique used by some GPL vendors to discourage GPL software from becoming free in the "beer" sense. MSFT would have to get trickier because at $5000/copy too many customers would balk and some hackers would organize donations to "liberate" a copy. Instead, MSFT is more likely to do something like set the price at $1,000,000/copy and offer discounts to vendors who already have a certain number of MSFT licenses. So then our hypothetical group of hackers has to form a corporation and buy hundreds of thousands of MSFT licenses to get the "discount". Then you get into the whole issue of whether or not employees who have access to the code have GPL rights (as opposed to the corporation), then you can imagine herds of MSFT lawyers battling the FSF and the EFF for years until Operating Systems as a class of software are totally commoditized under BSD-like licenses anyway, rendering the whole thing moot (much like the antitrust case).
That last paragraph is moot anyway (yes, a moot on top of a moot) because MSFT will never staticly link to GPL'd code anyway. If they wanted to co-opt *NIX, they would do like Apple--start from the top down, writing a GUI and apps, and gradually replacing all the components except probably the kernel and a few GNU utilities (grep, etc.).
Hmmm... actually, this whole article is moot because as others have surely pointed out, MSFT getting involved with Linux is about as likely as Osama Bin Laden marching in a Veteran's Day parade with our local VFW.
(Submitting without preview because/. is a little shaky today)
Culture Shock
on
SAUNAAB
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In Sweden they sit around in artificial steamy heat indoors then plunge into the Winter cold. In Washington DC we walk around in steamy Summer heat and then plunge into artificial cold.
Actually, there is no reason for most Americans (in the South anyway) to have a complex about not being as tech savvy as Swedes because we already have the artificial cold built into the car, and we can drive them.
If the AC isn't cold enough to give small children headaches and fog up your glasses, it's not cold enough, d#$@% it.
Actually, I'm poking good-natured fun at both cultures here. Frankly, the Summer ice-box mentality here in the US is something that I've come to dislike. Not only does it waste a lot of energy, but I've heard some theories that kidney disease has increased because we don't sweat as much as we used to--all the stuff that used to get sweated out gets taken care of by the kidneys and puts more stress on them. I haven't seen any studies to back that up though.
The hot to cold transition that Swedes practice is something I don't think I could tolerate. I've tried turning the shower nozzle to cold, and I could just feel myself starting to go into shock. I guess if I had been doing it from the time I was a little boy that wouldn't happen.
Do most Swedes dunk in ice-cold water after a sauna, or are there some people who can't tolerate it? I think if I went there, I could handle the nudity part, but then I'd have to pass on the cold water which might actually be more embarrassing if everybody else is doing it.
You have the ability under current law to gift certain things to your heirs
Spoken like somebody who has never dealt with estate planning and/or Medicaid issues. There are all kinds of ways to screw yourself by giving your children things at the wrong time. Yep. You need a lawyer to figure out what you can give and when you can give it. It's not illegal to give things, but you'll take a tax hit if you do it the wrong way, which is one step towards losing the right.
At any rate, the formulation of IP as a right vs. the formulation of IP as a privelege is a legal red herring, made much of by people on/. who are trying to persuade us to abolish IP. The only real difference made based on this argument is in how the law is formulated, not what laws would be formulated. Under a system of IP reckoned as property rights, it could be taxed away from people much as real estate. There are even personal property taxes on the books in many states which could (theoreticly) result in you losing your car if you didn't pay the tax on it, though I have never heard of anyone "foreclosing" on a car due to tax liens. Likewise, under a system of IP reckoned as privelege, the privelege can be revoked. See? No difference.
...gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I like it.
Really now, the Japanese are using square inches because Americans know what a square inch is, and they do a lot of business with the USA. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Also, they just happened to reach a "milestone" of 1.5 when measured in square inches. 1 square inch = 6.4516 square centimeters, so this is only about 0.235 per square centimeter. Maybe they should have a press release at 0.3/cm^2. But if it's less than 1, it's just not very good.
To resolve this issue, I propose the introduction of a new unit based on the meter and corrected by a factor based on Moore's law or whatever it is that governs storage density. The correction factor should be adjusted to allow for press releases oh... say... every 3 months so that stock traders will have something to speculate about. I propose that the new units be called "Horcs" in honor of no particular person, place or thing.
Who said they have to give up their IP when they show us the code? Stephen King's novels are there in plain sight, and if a grammar mistake slips through we can tell him about it, and he still holds the copyright. Same goes with source. I think it should go without saying that if you tell an author there's a bug in his program he still holds the copyright--the anology to a grammar error in a novel is almost perfect there. True functional extensions to the code are another matter, but since Windows already let's you install shells, drivers, and other code that uses the OS like it's a library, I don't see staticly linked derivative works as being any different. Although, to avoid causing confusion I could understand MS requiring that such extensions be dynamicly linked. From the end-user perspective it makes no difference.
Anyway, the bottom line is that if I could read the source for Windows their business model wouldn't change: legitimate users would still have access, and illegal activities would still occur.
OK, Here's one for all you MIT "hacker" types out there: Obtain
flags with the outline of "The Mouse" on them. Visit various government
buildings. Hoist down American Flag, hoist up Mouse. Fold American
flag respectfully and hold for return to owners (groups disrespecting
the flag will be disqualified). Do this on January 15, 2004 so the
symbolism will be understood. Points for buildings to be awarded as follows:
Local unemployment, welfare, other federal social service office: 1
School (any grade level): 2
DMV: 4
Any building in the District of Columbia, add 10 points except for special
buildings as noted below:
Patent and Trademark office: 100
SCOTUS: 500
Capitol: 1000
White House: 10000 (maybe Jenna will help)
Pentagon: 50 (Pre 9/11, it was surprisingly easy to prank the Pentagon,
see Navy vs. Army football)
Other points TBD by contest organizers. Winners receive adulation,
pro-bono legal counsel, and possible place in history.
When I was a kid, one day my father took me by the office on Saturday because he had to do something. I don't know how much data was in the hard drive, but it was the size of a refrigerator. You had to wait a few minutes after turning it on so the disk could "spin up" and you were supposed to watch it after you turned it off to make sure it "spun down" properly. Either there was a lot of angular momentim in there, or the motor was really weak. All the computer equipment was Wang. They used to joke about "playing with the Wang". Ahhh... the days before sexual harassment suits.
Assuming Lessig really wants to leave Stanford, this is a Win-Win for him. If he "loses" the bet he sticks to his word and can spin himself as a "man of integrity". If he wins the bet he can quit for some other reason. So, the real question in my mind is "What does Lessig want to do after he leaves Stanford?".
Slashdot Mirror
Countries Support Their Primary Export Industries. Film at 11. The US isn't being any more persnickety than say... oh... France when it comes to the name "Champagne". I'm sure the Europeans who don't want to cave to MS feel the same way I do that we (the US) haven't caved to the French and allowed them to dictate how we use words. Cheers.
How long before someone whips up a perl script and starts crapflooding the Senate?
Since when do you need a Perl script for that?
What's really sad is that the South Pole will get a new highway and broadband before I get broadband, and before the Springfield Interchange is finished.
If the "clean" chip really saves the environment, the real cost of the chip is lower; it's just that it's an upfront cost. If you have to spend $trillion of R&D to avoid 10 deaths over the next 20 years, would you do it? It's cold hearted, but decisions like that are made all the time. OTOH, when you get to the point of spending $billion to prevent 10,000 deaths, it's definitely worthwhile.
As for all the people on /. saying they'd pay more, that's irrelevant. What matters is what the market will collectively bear, and what you can squeeze through the political process.
What's missing here is that the "higher cost" of the environmentally friendly product is really just an "front end" cost as opposed to a "back end" cost of the environmentally un-friendly product.
For example: Chip A costs $60/per unit but deforests and poisons 0.0001 acres of land per unit. The cost of cleanup isn't realized until after a noticeable impact has occured. Chip B costs $90/per unit but damages nothing.
Which chip costs more? For the moment, let's exclude stuff like human life because $priceless is a hard figure with which to work. Instead, let's be cold hearted economists and analyze it in terms of insured lost, depreciation, etc. To a certain extend you can monetize human life (as nasty as that sounds) and IIRC the figure is something like 1.8 million $ on average.
At any rate, from a financial point of view, chip B looks like an early loan payment. Most people don't want to pay the loan right away, even when it's prudent. They'd rather "borrow against the future" sometimes at great cost.
At any rate, for many types of environmental damage we should be able to calculate which is better. If it costs $5/per unit to clean up 10 years from now, then there's an argument to be made for using chip A. OTOH, if it will cost $100/per unit to clean up 5 years from now then it's prudent to regulate the industry and require that they install the necessary polution controls.
Of course this is a dramatic oversimplification (I'm throwing out stuff like the benefit of the product itself; chips are used by environmental scientists to study and find remedies for damage!)
The point I wanted to make is that it's wrong to say the environmentally friendly chip "costs more". If it's the difference between killing the Yellow River and keeping it fishable, the friendly chip actually costs less to society overall.
There are two basic solutions: 1. regulate, and pass the cost on to the consumer (tough because the industry lobbies against it and unless the whole world regulates the consumer will just switch markets) 2. subsidize the improvements (tough, because misguided free trade agreements have given subsidies a black eye, you have to sell it to taxpayers, and you have to make sure the companies are using the money for the intended purpose).
That's not very stealthy. Still though, I agree with the general idea. Most crooks won't use this technique.
For example, there was some interesting social engineering going on near DC recently: Late at night a "women in distress" claims her car has broken down and she needs to use the phone. Chump invites her in, male partner gains access to the house immediately therafter and robs them. Why bother with blanks and files when you can just bluff your way in? And college dorms? Easy pickins when the students are drunk. Come to think of it, drunks are just such easy marks to begin with. When I was a paper boy, I wished I'd had a dollar for every time a drunk left his keys IN THE DOOR.
Why resort to clever hacks when there are so many easy marks?
For all you debating the nature vs. nurture aspect of this, consider alligators: A difference of just a few degrees in temperature of the nest determines whether they are male or female. And you're all fussing about fur color?
Killer bees did not wipe out Texas, and the Internet did not save the world, at least as fast as it was supposed to
Of course, if something wiped out life on Earth, we wouldn't be here to speculate about it. This reminds me of all the people who say it's OK to try drugs because their parents did them in the 60s, and they survived to raise the kids who are using that as an argument. Trouble with that is, all the people from the 60s who got too messed up to raise a family don't have any kids to refute the argument. If susceptibility to drug abuse were purely genetic and there were no recessive genes combining to predispose these kids to addiction, the argument would fly; but that's not the case. Grampa's latent compulsive behavior gene will zap a certain percentage of them.
In other words, evil things bury their failures.
One day when I had nothing better to do, I keyed "free stuff" into a search engine. One of the hits said swapit.com was giving away free T-shirts, so I gave them my address. Not only did they send me a T-shirt, but they also sent me a mailer for my CDs that looked like it cost at least a dollar to buy, ship, handle/process etc. I never did any business with swapit. They could have easily spent $10 to get my business--and I gave them nothing in return. I have no regrets. I still have the T-shirt, and I still wear it. It's a pretty nice piece of swag. It's black with the swapit logo on the front, and a swapit logo on the back upon which is superimposed the slogan "SWAP THE DEAD FOR LIVE". Now that's ironic, isn't it?
On closer inspection, you are fundamentally correct in pointing this out as a bug. They are dereferencing a NULL pointer assuming that your analysis of the code that comes before the assertion is correct (my knowledge of assembly is limited). A quick glance at the C99 draft and I don't see anything about defined behavior for when the file pointer is NULL (or invalid for that matter). If the behavior for passing in a NULL pointer is undefined, then I guess it's OK for the runtime behavior to be undefined; but I agree--leaving something like that in the code isn't good. They should move the assert to the beginning.
When I trace into fclose, I get... oh crap, the /. lameness filter won't let me post it all, but it's a disassembly with debug info and it's got a lot more code in it than that. There are 3 system calls appropriately enough to functions named _lock_file,_fclose_lk, and _unlock_file in that order. At any rate, the source is either not installed on my machine (or not available to begin with). Obviously MS's libc doesn't use the code in your sig, since it wouldn't do much of anything. So, what are you trying to say?
Hmmm... makes me wonder what will happen if they adopt them, and then 10 years later do a study trying to figure out why postal carriers are collectively gaining weight and experiencing associated health issues.
That, and isn't getting paid to hike one of the appeals of being a postal carrier? Whatever time the carrier saves is going to be lost because he'll have to go to a gym after work and run on a stupid treadmill just to stay in shape. It would be sad to see one of the few jobs where physical effort still matters get turned into yet another coronary creator.
In this regard, Segway sounds like yet another example of "just because we can doesn't mean we should".
Also, it's based on Kamen's wheelchair technology... it's basicly a good device for handicapped people. Anyone can tell you that such devices are fine for the handicapped, but terrible for the healthy. Would any sane person suggest putting a healthy person in a motorized wheelchair? Of course not.
What kind of drugs are you on?
I'll assume that's a rhetorical question.
Who ever said that you can't "overcharge" for code that is BSD licensed? Last I checked, there was no clause that determined how someone selling the code could do so.
I wasn't referring to a clause in the license. I was referring to the practical matter of not being able to charge for something that is synonymous with "free".
Then you say, "Microsoft cannot `overcharge' for BSD. They can only charge what the market will bear for the value they add."
As a practical matter, the market would look at MS BSD, compare it to FreeBSD, and the market would only be willing to pay for the stuff that MS added to BSD. In other words, I am saying that MS's brand name has no value in the market for enhanced BSD distributions.
What the fuck are you talking about ???? They can repackage FreeBSD and charge whatever the fuck they like, if that's what they want to do!
Yes. They can also re-release BOB, but the chances of either product succeeding are about equal.
If you had wanted, you could have counterpointed my argument quite nicely by saying that MS's marketing muscle was sufficient to sell branded BSD distros with no value added. You might have employed the bottled water analogy too (although I don't believe it applies because bottled water is a question of convenience and taste). Instead you went for the adhominem attack. Pity. Where can I find some people who really know how to debate?
The GPL would require Microsoft to make available any code they change under the GPL; it takes away their absolute control over the code, and takes away their ability to (over)charge for said code
Nope. This is a very common falacy put forth by GPL advocates. BSD does not grant you the right to overcharge for code, and GPL doesn't revoke it. Microsoft cannot "overcharge" for BSD. They can only charge what the market will bear for the value they add.
If Microsoft took a BSD distro and made minimal improvements, I could legally "clean room" their minimal improvements and charge the same ammount, more, or (more likely) less. I could even advertise that my improvements "do the same thing that MS BSD does at half the price".
Now, on the other hand if MSFT decided to link to GNU/Linux in a manner that required their code to be GPL'd, there is nothing to stop them from pricing MSLinux servers at $5000/copy. This is of course a rather straightforward technique used by some GPL vendors to discourage GPL software from becoming free in the "beer" sense. MSFT would have to get trickier because at $5000/copy too many customers would balk and some hackers would organize donations to "liberate" a copy. Instead, MSFT is more likely to do something like set the price at $1,000,000/copy and offer discounts to vendors who already have a certain number of MSFT licenses. So then our hypothetical group of hackers has to form a corporation and buy hundreds of thousands of MSFT licenses to get the "discount". Then you get into the whole issue of whether or not employees who have access to the code have GPL rights (as opposed to the corporation), then you can imagine herds of MSFT lawyers battling the FSF and the EFF for years until Operating Systems as a class of software are totally commoditized under BSD-like licenses anyway, rendering the whole thing moot (much like the antitrust case).
That last paragraph is moot anyway (yes, a moot on top of a moot) because MSFT will never staticly link to GPL'd code anyway. If they wanted to co-opt *NIX, they would do like Apple--start from the top down, writing a GUI and apps, and gradually replacing all the components except probably the kernel and a few GNU utilities (grep, etc.).
Hmmm... actually, this whole article is moot because as others have surely pointed out, MSFT getting involved with Linux is about as likely as Osama Bin Laden marching in a Veteran's Day parade with our local VFW.
(Submitting without preview because /. is a little shaky today)
In Sweden they sit around in artificial steamy heat indoors then plunge into the Winter cold. In Washington DC we walk around in steamy Summer heat and then plunge into artificial cold.
Actually, there is no reason for most Americans (in the South anyway) to have a complex about not being as tech savvy as Swedes because we already have the artificial cold built into the car, and we can drive them.
If the AC isn't cold enough to give small children headaches and fog up your glasses, it's not cold enough, d#$@% it.
Actually, I'm poking good-natured fun at both cultures here. Frankly, the Summer ice-box mentality here in the US is something that I've come to dislike. Not only does it waste a lot of energy, but I've heard some theories that kidney disease has increased because we don't sweat as much as we used to--all the stuff that used to get sweated out gets taken care of by the kidneys and puts more stress on them. I haven't seen any studies to back that up though.
The hot to cold transition that Swedes practice is something I don't think I could tolerate. I've tried turning the shower nozzle to cold, and I could just feel myself starting to go into shock. I guess if I had been doing it from the time I was a little boy that wouldn't happen.
Do most Swedes dunk in ice-cold water after a sauna, or are there some people who can't tolerate it? I think if I went there, I could handle the nudity part, but then I'd have to pass on the cold water which might actually be more embarrassing if everybody else is doing it.
You have the ability under current law to gift certain things to your heirs
Spoken like somebody who has never dealt with estate planning and/or Medicaid issues. There are all kinds of ways to screw yourself by giving your children things at the wrong time. Yep. You need a lawyer to figure out what you can give and when you can give it. It's not illegal to give things, but you'll take a tax hit if you do it the wrong way, which is one step towards losing the right.
At any rate, the formulation of IP as a right vs. the formulation of IP as a privelege is a legal red herring, made much of by people on /. who are trying to persuade us to abolish IP. The only real difference made based on this argument is in how the law is formulated, not what laws would be formulated. Under a system of IP reckoned as property rights, it could be taxed away from people much as real estate. There are even personal property taxes on the books in many states which could (theoreticly) result in you losing your car if you didn't pay the tax on it, though I have never heard of anyone "foreclosing" on a car due to tax liens. Likewise, under a system of IP reckoned as privelege, the privelege can be revoked. See? No difference.
...gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I like it.
Really now, the Japanese are using square inches because Americans know what a square inch is, and they do a lot of business with the USA. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Also, they just happened to reach a "milestone" of 1.5 when measured in square inches. 1 square inch = 6.4516 square centimeters, so this is only about 0.235 per square centimeter. Maybe they should have a press release at 0.3/cm^2. But if it's less than 1, it's just not very good.
To resolve this issue, I propose the introduction of a new unit based on the meter and corrected by a factor based on Moore's law or whatever it is that governs storage density. The correction factor should be adjusted to allow for press releases oh... say... every 3 months so that stock traders will have something to speculate about. I propose that the new units be called "Horcs" in honor of no particular person, place or thing.
Who said they have to give up their IP when they show us the code? Stephen King's novels are there in plain sight, and if a grammar mistake slips through we can tell him about it, and he still holds the copyright. Same goes with source. I think it should go without saying that if you tell an author there's a bug in his program he still holds the copyright--the anology to a grammar error in a novel is almost perfect there. True functional extensions to the code are another matter, but since Windows already let's you install shells, drivers, and other code that uses the OS like it's a library, I don't see staticly linked derivative works as being any different. Although, to avoid causing confusion I could understand MS requiring that such extensions be dynamicly linked. From the end-user perspective it makes no difference.
Anyway, the bottom line is that if I could read the source for Windows their business model wouldn't change: legitimate users would still have access, and illegal activities would still occur.
OK, Here's one for all you MIT "hacker" types out there: Obtain flags with the outline of "The Mouse" on them. Visit various government buildings. Hoist down American Flag, hoist up Mouse. Fold American flag respectfully and hold for return to owners (groups disrespecting the flag will be disqualified). Do this on January 15, 2004 so the symbolism will be understood. Points for buildings to be awarded as follows:
Local unemployment, welfare, other federal social service office: 1
School (any grade level): 2
DMV: 4
Any building in the District of Columbia, add 10 points except for special buildings as noted below:
Patent and Trademark office: 100
SCOTUS: 500
Capitol: 1000
White House: 10000 (maybe Jenna will help)
Pentagon: 50 (Pre 9/11, it was surprisingly easy to prank the Pentagon, see Navy vs. Army football)
Other points TBD by contest organizers. Winners receive adulation, pro-bono legal counsel, and possible place in history.
just honestly wondering how the parent pronounced '.mil' that it gets prefixed with 'an'.
"Army" :)
No, what MSFT is trying to do is avoid paying twice for the software. It's just that when the shoe is on the other foot, the GPL advocates don't care.
If you try to get Brass Monkey from the Bar-Monkey, will the stack overflow?
When I was a kid, one day my father took me by the office on Saturday because he had to do something. I don't know how much data was in the hard drive, but it was the size of a refrigerator. You had to wait a few minutes after turning it on so the disk could "spin up" and you were supposed to watch it after you turned it off to make sure it "spun down" properly. Either there was a lot of angular momentim in there, or the motor was really weak. All the computer equipment was Wang. They used to joke about "playing with the Wang". Ahhh... the days before sexual harassment suits.
Cults have to hack a satellite to get this much media exposure.
Assuming Lessig really wants to leave Stanford, this is a Win-Win for him. If he "loses" the bet he sticks to his word and can spin himself as a "man of integrity". If he wins the bet he can quit for some other reason. So, the real question in my mind is "What does Lessig want to do after he leaves Stanford?".