No, I don't take another person's wallet. But the nation exists for the people, and it couldn't exist without the people.
I don't think taxation is theft. Without tax money, you wouldn't have public roads. You wouldn't have schools, police, army, government, anything. That's called anarchy. Or then it might become the other extreme where the entire state is run by companies - where the entire state in essence is a company. That's called fascism. And I mean something like what it was in Mussolini's Italy, not something like corporate America.
I do really believe that the system pays you your tax money back in many ways which you don't even notice because they seem so obvious to you, public roads and schools only being single examples.
Makes me wonder whether you really are a Swede or just want to bash the country. It certainly doesn't look like one of the most oppressive countries to me (I live in the border neighbor Finland, and I believe we have here a great deal of freedom, though in some ways it might get even better - and I think our system is basically a clone of that in Sweded).
Or else is it just that you have lived all your life in a palace of some kind and have no appreciation of social care - no appreciation of the fact that there are no slums, not much of poverty, no beggars?
I'm sure you would be sued out of existence if you founded a company named "Microslot" and started producing operating systems named "Microslot Wildows".
Remember, it's not about the name being exactly the same, it's about being confusingly similar.
Trademarks are only valid within a certain business area - e.g. Intel is probably trademarked in computing, but they could have no claim against a restaurant named Intel because there's no danger of confusion. Otherwise we would have ran out of usable names long long ago...
I've actually done this to companies responding to my job applications. Politely explaining that I don't have MS Word (or Powerpoint, or whatever they come up with) isn't that bad.
Yes, I did get the job. Yes, I understand very well I might not have got any response after that. Then I could have got another job at a company with people more in their senses. Simple as that.
To me it seems that your Amendments (I'm not American) do not quite work. Really, they're adorable, at least some of them (I do like the first one). But alas, you have a lot of laws that conflict with this, copyright law not being the last example.
Copyright is just that. Even your courts view copyright as a balance struck between the First Admendment and the interests of authors. Still it seems to me that the Amendment doesn't allow for such a balance. I mean, what part of the wording "Congress shall make no law" is that hard to understand?
Might it actually be? I would doubt it were it not for this quote in the very report:
But as Napster continues to face litigation from the music industry for copyright infringement, computer users are searching for alternatives and increasingly turning to a new wave of file-sharing programs. Most of these new programs have more features than Napster because they can share any type of files, including video files. [Emphasis added]
Makes me wonder if MPAA has something to do with this. Though I very well know that porn is distributed as mpegs and such as well, I would think pictures would be the dominant media. So it seems a bit odd that they mention video files, and that's in the very first page of the report after cover and TOC.
It goes on discussing porn videos after that, however. Are these really so common in the Net after all?
if a government should be able to limit people's freedom to share information at all. I mean, sure, copyright and such did work, but it seems more and more clear they will never work in the same way again.
In a sense, I feel good about this - what people do over an encrypted channel is not government's business. However it's a bit hard to think about a model to replace copyright (except on software I think the open source model has already proven itself very viable - whether the current model or some future one, I don't know). However I'm still not sure about channels which are public by their very nature - yes, freedom of speech is good, but it surely shouldn't extend to everything, like planning to assassinate a president or a king, or publicly recruiting people to participate in such a plot?
But really, when you pick a random number (with infinite precision) from 2 ;)
Ok, perhaps better for me to not argue about something I don't understand too well myself either. I'll try to find one of those books for reference if you're interested in the higher mathematics.
And about compressing an infinite set, you're right. I should probably have said "a random number of n bits for a very large n". I'm not that much mathematician yet, though:-)
If the random numbers do not occur all over the possible input domain, then they're not random in that domain, right? Or... How about randomly setting or clearing the least significant bit of every color in a 24-bit picture. That doesn't make the picture random, does it?
Ok, it depends on how we define randomness. You're right on that.
Pi is an interesting number for not only being the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, but also another constant in software development. What follows is empirical:
t=pi*t_e, where
t = the time required to finish a project, and
t_e = the estimated time required to finish a project (which also happens to be equal to d-dt, where d is the deadline and dt is the current time).
Mathematically, given two infinite sets A and B such that A is continuous and B a discrete subset of A, the probability of a randomly picked number from set A belonging to set B is not only very small (i.e. low probability), but zero. Now A is the group of all "numbers" and B is the group of all compressible numbers. Ergo, the chance is not there.
Depending of your algorithm (repetion, fractal regression,...) you will get VERY DIFFERENT RESULTS using the same original file.
_No_ compression algorithm ever will compress purely random numbers.
Or to be more precise, no compression algorithm ever will compress more than 50% of all possible inputs of the size n or less for any given n. Proof left as an exercise (it's really simple).
here's a simple test... try to compress the "random" string of numbers; if you can compress a string of random numbers, it isn't
Sure, this is a good way of being sure some number is not random. But it doesn't work the other way round. You can't compress already compressed files or encrypted files (well, from good encryption and compression programs), yet they're not random.
Explain to me why I can get this out of a "perfect" random number generator:
Because the probability of a random number being equal to some predetermined value when the set of possible random numbers is not discrete is exactly zero. Perhaps that's why.
1 a : lacking a definite plan, purpose, or pattern b : made, done, or chosen at random <read random passages from the book>
2 a : relating to, having, or being elements or events with definite probability of occurrence <random processes> b : being or relating to a set or to an element of a set each of whose elements has equal probability of occurrence <a random sample>; also : characterized by procedures designed to obtain such sets or elements <random sampling>
---
So, pi probably has no plan or pattern, but arguably does have a definite purpose. It wasn't probably made, done or chosen at random, though it's hard to know.
I don't know if we can talk about probabilities together with pi, more than "if we pick a 5 from the decimal representation, which is the probability of the next digit being 8".
... because it's still not free-as-in-speech. Is this really good for open source or free software? Hell, no!
Don't you realize what's wrong with this? You're stuck with a proprietary environment for writing free code. There's no guarantee this platform will see any development (think about Borland going bust or any other reason), nor that the next version will be free, and in a few years you might well find yourselves stuck with an obsoleted programming environment and lots of open source code of no use because nobody would want to pay Borland for this kind of deception.
One of the real strengths of open source is that it can't cease to exist because a company decides so or goes bust. But this move from Borland, I think, is rather outrageous because it clearly aims to exploit the goodwill of open source community for greater profits. Steer clear of this, I say!
It's similar proprietary crap as Windows CE. Aren't the licenses actually nearly identical? Both allow distribution of both the program itself and derivative works, but forbid selling.
It's a shame that there's a Linux distribution which falls to methods as sinister as Microsoft, which seems to be the ultimate one among GPL haters.
Perhaps these "no reg required" links could be placed in the stories themselves? It can't be too hard to replace "www" with "archive", and it's hard to imagine how this would be illegal either.
At least I know Debian isn't going to include Java until there's a decent open source JRE available, and we're just not right there yet.
And, you know, the more people think Java is necessary, the happier I become that Debian maintainers do not bend and pollute their magnificent distribution with non-free packages.
How about boycotting any OEM that _does_ include Java?:-)
See #300 for my reasoning about why no-one is infringing in your example, and why binary compatibility has nothing to do with this. I believe that in this case even FSF would agree this isn't infringing as long as the result is not distributed, however I can't speak for them.
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I don't think taxation is theft. Without tax money, you wouldn't have public roads. You wouldn't have schools, police, army, government, anything. That's called anarchy. Or then it might become the other extreme where the entire state is run by companies - where the entire state in essence is a company. That's called fascism. And I mean something like what it was in Mussolini's Italy, not something like corporate America.
I do really believe that the system pays you your tax money back in many ways which you don't even notice because they seem so obvious to you, public roads and schools only being single examples.
Or else is it just that you have lived all your life in a palace of some kind and have no appreciation of social care - no appreciation of the fact that there are no slums, not much of poverty, no beggars?
I'm sure you would be sued out of existence if you founded a company named "Microslot" and started producing operating systems named "Microslot Wildows".
Remember, it's not about the name being exactly the same, it's about being confusingly similar.
Trademarks are only valid within a certain business area - e.g. Intel is probably trademarked in computing, but they could have no claim against a restaurant named Intel because there's no danger of confusion. Otherwise we would have ran out of usable names long long ago...
Yes, I did get the job. Yes, I understand very well I might not have got any response after that. Then I could have got another job at a company with people more in their senses. Simple as that.
I really doubt many of us would like to see Visual Basic for Linux/X11. And isn't C# just Microsoft's new name for the same technology?
Copyright is just that. Even your courts view copyright as a balance struck between the First Admendment and the interests of authors. Still it seems to me that the Amendment doesn't allow for such a balance. I mean, what part of the wording "Congress shall make no law" is that hard to understand?
But as Napster continues to face litigation from the music industry for copyright infringement, computer users are searching for alternatives and increasingly turning to a new wave of file-sharing programs. Most of these new programs have more features than Napster because they can share any type of files, including video files. [Emphasis added]
Makes me wonder if MPAA has something to do with this. Though I very well know that porn is distributed as mpegs and such as well, I would think pictures would be the dominant media. So it seems a bit odd that they mention video files, and that's in the very first page of the report after cover and TOC.
It goes on discussing porn videos after that, however. Are these really so common in the Net after all?
In a sense, I feel good about this - what people do over an encrypted channel is not government's business. However it's a bit hard to think about a model to replace copyright (except on software I think the open source model has already proven itself very viable - whether the current model or some future one, I don't know). However I'm still not sure about channels which are public by their very nature - yes, freedom of speech is good, but it surely shouldn't extend to everything, like planning to assassinate a president or a king, or publicly recruiting people to participate in such a plot?
you really are an idiot
Thank you, sir, for pointing that out.
Ok, perhaps better for me to not argue about something I don't understand too well myself either. I'll try to find one of those books for reference if you're interested in the higher mathematics.
And about compressing an infinite set, you're right. I should probably have said "a random number of n bits for a very large n". I'm not that much mathematician yet, though :-)
Ok, it depends on how we define randomness. You're right on that.
How about - pi?
t=pi*t_e, where
t = the time required to finish a project, and
t_e = the estimated time required to finish a project (which also happens to be equal to d-dt, where d is the deadline and dt is the current time).
Mathematically, given two infinite sets A and B such that A is continuous and B a discrete subset of A, the probability of a randomly picked number from set A belonging to set B is not only very small (i.e. low probability), but zero. Now A is the group of all "numbers" and B is the group of all compressible numbers. Ergo, the chance is not there.
_No_ compression algorithm ever will compress purely random numbers.
Or to be more precise, no compression algorithm ever will compress more than 50% of all possible inputs of the size n or less for any given n. Proof left as an exercise (it's really simple).
Sure, this is a good way of being sure some number is not random. But it doesn't work the other way round. You can't compress already compressed files or encrypted files (well, from good encryption and compression programs), yet they're not random.
Because the probability of a random number being equal to some predetermined value when the set of possible random numbers is not discrete is exactly zero. Perhaps that's why.
Function: adjective
Date: 1565
1 a : lacking a definite plan, purpose, or pattern b : made, done, or chosen at random <read random passages from the book>
2 a : relating to, having, or being elements or events with definite probability of occurrence <random processes> b : being or relating to a set or to an element of a set each of whose elements has equal probability of occurrence <a random sample>; also : characterized by procedures designed to obtain such sets or elements <random sampling>
---
So, pi probably has no plan or pattern, but arguably does have a definite purpose. It wasn't probably made, done or chosen at random, though it's hard to know.
I don't know if we can talk about probabilities together with pi, more than "if we pick a 5 from the decimal representation, which is the probability of the next digit being 8".
Don't you realize what's wrong with this? You're stuck with a proprietary environment for writing free code. There's no guarantee this platform will see any development (think about Borland going bust or any other reason), nor that the next version will be free, and in a few years you might well find yourselves stuck with an obsoleted programming environment and lots of open source code of no use because nobody would want to pay Borland for this kind of deception.
One of the real strengths of open source is that it can't cease to exist because a company decides so or goes bust. But this move from Borland, I think, is rather outrageous because it clearly aims to exploit the goodwill of open source community for greater profits. Steer clear of this, I say!
It's similar proprietary crap as Windows CE. Aren't the licenses actually nearly identical? Both allow distribution of both the program itself and derivative works, but forbid selling.
It's a shame that there's a Linux distribution which falls to methods as sinister as Microsoft, which seems to be the ultimate one among GPL haters.
Perhaps these "no reg required" links could be placed in the stories themselves? It can't be too hard to replace "www" with "archive", and it's hard to imagine how this would be illegal either.
Try one of:
- gzip -cd patch.gz |patch -p0
- bzip2 -cd patch.bz2 |patch -p0
- patch -p0 <patch
And, you know, the more people think Java is necessary, the happier I become that Debian maintainers do not bend and pollute their magnificent distribution with non-free packages.
How about boycotting any OEM that _does_ include Java? :-)
See #300 for my reasoning about why no-one is infringing in your example, and why binary compatibility has nothing to do with this. I believe that in this case even FSF would agree this isn't infringing as long as the result is not distributed, however I can't speak for them.