Threats are useless unless you mean it, and people know that you mean it. At the very least it would get the attention of a more mainstream audience.
Lives are already put at risk by this stupid law, in an indirect but very real way. It's the information equivalent of welding shut the hood of your vehicle and making it illegal to try and open it. The burden this puts on everybody will, in the long run, cost thousands, possibly millions, of lives. For instance, a medical researcher today can photocopy a useful page which may be the key to finding a drug that saves lives. Take away that convenience, and maybe he doesn't find the cure, or it takes him longer. It's hard to point and say - this guy died because of this law, but the effect is real regardless.
If people die fighting this law, it's unfortunate, but people often die fighting bad laws, and they die because of bad laws. As civilization advances a larger proportion of the economy is in the form of IP. The amount of benefit that people can gain from information is diminished by restrictions. The DMCA acts as an anchor on the advancement of civilization.
I'm not saying we should genuninely risk people's lives to fight this thing, but one has to accept some risk to do anything. Sometimes there is a greater risk from doing nothing.
1. your routine is ugly as fuck, given two objects, it would take less code to inline the function than call it.
2. having to use arrays like this because references don't exist brings up a whole bunch more problems because not only can people mistakenly swap different types of object, they can pass wrong sized arrays.
3. compile time checking is better than runtime checking, a *real-life* example would have to come from a large program so I can't be bothered, but the fact remains that this kind of programming encourages bugs.
4. your function won't work on int/float/boolean/etc because they are not derived from Object. Use a real OO language like smalltalk if you want single root done right.
> It's not clear that this approach leads to strong AI
That's a lot funnier than you think.
Supposedly we're a product of genetic algorithms (in the broadest sense). Does this approach lead to intelligence, I doubt it: "...Because there's bugger all down here on earth"
I did some commercial work with GA's for a while. They're ok, the only effective way we currently know of to solve certain classes of problem, but I now sincerely doubt that darwinism is correct. I don't think evolution from Apes to humans in 1000000 years with the kind of population that existed is feasible using a GA approach. There's something else going on that hasn't been identified yet, survival of fittest (or sexual selection) and genetic mutation/crossover just doesn't cover it.
Back when I was young and naive the company I worked for would put in patent applications for me and I was proud of it. I was principle inventor on 3 patents and a contributor on several others, and these were definitely not among the best of the ideas I have had
These were not things I would have patented myself, partly because these inventions were mostly pretty obvious to someone with the right facts at their disposal, but mostly because it was not a sensible economic bet.
Each full patent application costs several thousand dollars of patent attorney fees, several days of talking to the patent attorneys and explaining the ideas to them so they can translate it into inpenetrable legal jumble.
For someone with enough funds it makes sense to take out 100 of these if there is a good chance that one of them might eventually be worth several million dollars. However, even the useful patents are worth money if you can spare several hundred thousand dollars to defend them in a patent suit.
I have easily had 100 patents worth of software related ideas which would be patentable under the pathetic standards of USPTO. If I had enough funds, and ignored the moral issues, it would make sense for me to patent them. But it wouldn't make sense unless I had several hundred thousand dollars to spare.
XML is *not* an "enabling technology".
XML is a file format.
XML shows that you *can* use a single file format for everything. That doesn't mean it a good idea, except in a couple of particular places.
The reason it's caught on is that the average programmers is getting stupider. It's genuinely difficult for these people to write a simple parser, so they use XML for everything. Nevermind that it's harder to read/write for humans than some custom HCI format or insanely more verbose and slower to scan than some custom binary format. They preach interoperability when this is irrelevent to cover for laziness and incompetence.
If I hear one more fuckwit say, "hey lets create an XML based programming lanugage", I'll scream.
3 years ago observations on distant supernova showed that the expansion of the universe was accelerating, a discovery that was utterly unexpected and could only be explained by some previously unknown repulsive force. eg here
Surprisingly little fuss was made about this considering it meant that the most fundamental prediction physics has made about the nature of the universe is wrong. It seemed strange to me that they could be this wrong and yet still claim to know exactly what happened in the first few microseconds of the universe. Imagine walking along with someone in the wilderness, who says we are 5 hours, 3 minutes and 32 seconds from our destination. Later you find out that you're on a different continent to the one he said you were on. Yet still he insists he knows your time of arrival to the precise second. A modicum of doubt would seem appropriate.
Anyway, I wonder if this could be the missing force ?
> Every game that is possible has been played before.
Ignorance is bliss, how's it working out for you ? An average chess game is
50 moves (each) without about 20 possibilities on each move.
20^100 is a pretty big number. The proportion of games played to possible games is less than 1:number of atoms in known universe.
Being wrong by that order of magnitude is unusal even for/.
Has anyone here successfully run quake3 under linux with one ?
I have one, and nvidia's drivers work fine, X runs nice and fast, other 3d apps (OpenInventor etc) run ok, but quake3 crashes X. If I could run quake3 on this puppy, it'll probably waste enough time to stop me accomplishing anything, please help me waste my life;~/
I'm using nvidia's drivers on a 1400x1050 inspiron 8000 with GeForce2 go, SuSE 7.2 and it works great, but I had to mess with the modeline settings. email me and I'll send you my XF86Config.
Caveats: can't restart X without rebooting:(
Quake3 crashes (I'm not sure why):(
(if anyone has had success with quake3 using nvidia's latest drivers on GeForce2 go please let me know)
Actually I can run X in 3 different ways on this machine, useful in different situations..
1. native linux with nvidia drivers (fastest)
2. VMware under w2k with VMware's drivers
3. Exceed running on w2k talking to linux running under VMware (allows most interaction between w2k & X)
So, if you have a problem with nvidia's drivers I recommend options 2 or 3. VMware runs linux at about 85% native speed, it works great (you need lots of RAM though). I set up my linux partition to be accessible either under VMWare or running in native mode, so you don't waste any disk space to allow both options.
I haven't seen JPIII (or II for that matter) but the raptors in JPI definitely weren't that bright. I mean when a t-rex turns up do you (?)
a) run like crap
b) jump on it's back and give it love bites
I guess they're on an accelerated learning program.
You make a very good point. The real standards as produced by w3c are OK, but the de-facto standards created initially by netscape, and then embrace/extended by MS are horrible.
But, did you ever examine the early mozilla code (ie what they started with from netscape) ? That was a poisoned chalice if ever I saw one. It didn't support any of the trickier elements, but it still took a ton of code to do not very much badly.
BTW, how come nobody ever mentions Opera in all this. It is *by far* the best browser around, but nobody ever mentions it. If writing a decent browser is so impossible (unless one is inventing the standards yourself) how did they do it ?
Marc Andresson was an intern at NCSA. His maths wasn't good enough for him to do what he was hired for, but he did know motif pretty good, so his superior Ping Foo asked him to write a GUI for www. This proved to be a good idea. Then Jim Clarke (founder of SGI) thought it would be a good idea to commercialise the idea, and hired the more commerically minded people from NCSA (not the same as the smartest, for instance - Ping whose idea the project was, and who made some of the smarter design decisions (eg single click to follow link), never joined).
Netscape was the browser tail wagging the internet dog for a while, but they declared MS history too early. The VC money they got from being declared the next MS enabled them to hire 1000s of developers very quickly. This was profoundly stupid, because having 1000 mediocre developers is far worse than having 10 decent ones. These people wrote 100s of 1000s of lines of shitty code. This code was then released to the mozilla effort, and left it with no fucking chance. Writing a browser isn't *that* tough, but if you start with a massive shitty code base, you can lose sight of that.
At least the first version does what you expect.
I think you probably meant:
for(i = some_length_func(); i >= 0; i--)
That's a really scary error, so fundamental, it's the kind of thing that would make me want to hunt out and replace all code written by that developer.
Re:Exploration sucked.
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 2
You're full of it. So you did CS and philosophy at uni, now you're qualified to make a bunch of blanket statements about what is and is not possible 200 hundred or so years from now, based on how you think AI works ? I did a degree in AI, and all I really learnt was the depth of our ignorance. AI doesn't work at all yet, almost everything known in AI today is useless at predicting how "real" AI will work.
Your arguments are like some caveman saying "hah, they could never make flying machines that go over 200 miles an hour - if you tried flapping a wing that fast it would break, unless it was too heavy to even get in the air in the first place".
You're "facts" are too stupid to delve into in any depth, but just as an example, doesn't it bother you that your arguments to support #1 and #4 are completely contradictorary. If an AI would have to be based on a neural net, then maybe it would be hard to make it "love" someone.
It's like the lottery, a tax on stupid people. If you're too dumb to buy a multi-region player, then you're gonna take it the ass on a regular basis anyway. Multi-region players are perfectly legal, and easy to aquire in UK. Check out www.richersounds.co.uk.
The long article is interesting, but several things bugged me a lot:
"he was a straitlaced, archconservative Catholic himself"
Bullshit - compared to who ? Tolkein was an Oxford don:
"How many Oxford dons does it take to change a lightbulb ?"
"CHANGE ?? !!"
Calling him a straightlaced conservative is disingenuous at best. My grandmother knew Tolkein, he was a regular visitor to her antiques shop in central Oxford (where I actually met him a couple of times, but can't pretend to remember the experience since I was being babysat at the time). My grandmother mentioned him as being charming, with a mischeivous air.
As for the critical disclaim from the likes of a young Germain Greer (she was a militant feminist back then, and most likely rankled by Tolkein's chivalrous attitude) or some pompous, self-satisfied Private Eye hack, it doesn't deserve repetition without ridicule.
But, the central point about Tolkein's significance to geeks is valid, and I've never heard computer games referred to as culture before, let alone as "culture's center of gravity". Hmmmm...
Your sentiments might have some justification but you make them worthless by blabbering on about Africa, when he only mentioned India.
One has to wonder which would be more insulting - the notion that Indian culture was worthless and backwards and needed to be subjucated by some western company, or the inability to distinguish between Africa and India. Why is that ? some kind of - "they're all wogs anyway, what's the difference", or what ?
> I was always led to believe that the US had more freedom than any other country in the world.
Yes, I'm sure you were. However, who by ? what country did you hear this in ? The USA doesn't need government sponsored propoganda, they have something much more powerful - profit sponsored propoganda. Any mainstream newspaper or television program that tried to criticise America would lose audience fast. It would be "un-American" of them, and besides Americans all know that the USA is the best country in the world, so they would not just piss people off, they would lose respect because people wouldn't believe it anyway.
There is a vicious circle at work here. The main reason that Americans are so incredibly patriotic is that throughout their lives almost everything they hear reinforces the notion that America is the best (richest, most free, most tolerant, etc) country on earth, so why shouldn't they be proud of that. However, since the majority believes this completely, it would be very unwise for a publication that wishes to be bought, or a show that wants to be watched, to say anything that reflects badly on America [as compared to other countries]. The media can happily complain about things like crime, drugs, morality, etc but these are internal issues, and if any comparison is offered it will generally be with the past rather than with foreign countries. It just won't get mentioned.
Foreign news is virtually never mentioned on US television unless it's in such a way as to reflect well upon America. For example, you'll get a story like - "American troops fly into East Timor to protect the natives from gangs of thugs." The earlier story: "US trained and funded death squads kill 1/3rd of population of East Timor to supress an independence movement that could damage the interests of US oil companies in nearby waters" is much less likely to make people feel good about themselves, happy with your publication, and likely to read you again. This phenomena is not unique to US by any means, it's just rather more pronounced there than other places I've stayed.
IMO America is a good country in many respects, but general knowledge about the state of the world outside the US is not it's strong point.
No, it wasn't. Your report must have been flawed. The poles connection is true, but the enigma codes vital to decryption effort were captured by H.M.S. Petard from U559, this happened nearly two years before US entered the war.
I believe a US crew did capture an enigma later in the war. Anyway, your post gives the lie to the "it's just entertainment, nobody believes it" argument.
It just occured to me that this is bound to attract howls of "RMS doesn't have the right to decide what free means". I fully agree, and do not wish to imply otherwise, but he does decide what future versions of GPL mean, which has practical implications.
I asked RMS about this. I wrote some software that I wanted to release under two different license schemes, free for free-OS's and non-free for win32. I wanted the free-OS users to be able to link with GPL code if they felt like it, but not to be able to port to win32 (so I could have possibility of revenue from win32 addicts). I asked RMS about this. He said this was not possible right now, but might be in a future version of GPL which would allow people to release GPL software which did not provide the exemption for linking with the standard C library (GPL generally does not allow linking with non-free libraries). This would effectively allow people to write GPL software that wasn't portable to proprietary OS's since on these OS's it is always necessary to link with non-free libraries. However, AFAIK this isn't possible yet, and at the time RMS seemed undecided as to whether this would be possible in later version.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, this is weird, I have an 850 Mhz Inspiron (8000) too.
/proc/cpuinfo
I thought - hah, you rebooted with the power off, which means you're running at 700Mhz. If you reboot with power on, you should be running at 850.
Then I tried from my vmware installation of linux (I have native too, but I'm using w2k at the moment)
vmoe:/home/joss:153 cat
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 973.931
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 1612.18
whazzup with that, did vmware/linux fuckup, or is my machine really faster than it's supposed to be ?
how well does cpu Mhz correlate with the real thing on most people's boxes ?
Threats are useless unless you mean it, and people know that you mean it. At the very least it would get the attention of a more mainstream audience.
Lives are already put at risk by this stupid law, in an indirect but very real way. It's the information equivalent of welding shut the hood of your vehicle and making it illegal to try and open it. The burden this puts on everybody will, in the long run, cost thousands, possibly millions, of lives. For instance, a medical researcher today can photocopy a useful page which may be the key to finding a drug that saves lives. Take away that convenience, and maybe he doesn't find the cure, or it takes him longer. It's hard to point and say - this guy died because of this law, but the effect is real regardless.
If people die fighting this law, it's unfortunate, but people often die fighting bad laws, and they die because of bad laws. As civilization advances a larger proportion of the economy is in the form of IP. The amount of benefit that people can gain from information is diminished by restrictions. The DMCA acts as an anchor on the advancement of civilization.
I'm not saying we should genuninely risk people's lives to fight this thing, but one has to accept some risk to do anything. Sometimes there is a greater risk from doing nothing.
What book did you get this OpenGL example from ?
A book/article about DirectX perhaps..
OpenGL is pretty clean IMHO. If you want something simpler, or scene-graph based, use OpenInventor.
1. your routine is ugly as fuck, given two objects, it would take less code to inline the function than call it.
2. having to use arrays like this because references don't exist brings up a whole bunch more problems because not only can people mistakenly swap different types of object, they can pass wrong sized arrays.
3. compile time checking is better than runtime checking, a *real-life* example would have to come from a large program so I can't be bothered, but the fact remains that this kind of programming encourages bugs.
4. your function won't work on int/float/boolean/etc because they are not derived from Object. Use a real OO language like smalltalk if you want single root done right.
> It's not clear that this approach leads to strong AI
That's a lot funnier than you think.
Supposedly we're a product of genetic algorithms (in the broadest sense). Does this approach lead to intelligence, I doubt it: "...Because there's bugger all down here on earth"
I did some commercial work with GA's for a while. They're ok, the only effective way we currently know of to solve certain classes of problem, but I now sincerely doubt that darwinism is correct. I don't think evolution from Apes to humans in 1000000 years with the kind of population that existed is feasible using a GA approach. There's something else going on that hasn't been identified yet, survival of fittest (or sexual selection) and genetic mutation/crossover just doesn't cover it.
I have had lots of patentable inventions.
Back when I was young and naive the company I worked for would put in patent applications for me and I was proud of it. I was principle inventor on 3 patents and a contributor on several others, and these were definitely not among the best of the ideas I have had
These were not things I would have patented myself, partly because these inventions were mostly pretty obvious to someone with the right facts at their disposal, but mostly because it was not a sensible economic bet.
Each full patent application costs several thousand dollars of patent attorney fees, several days of talking to the patent attorneys and explaining the ideas to them so they can translate it into inpenetrable legal jumble.
For someone with enough funds it makes sense to take out 100 of these if there is a good chance that one of them might eventually be worth several million dollars. However, even the useful patents are worth money if you can spare several hundred thousand dollars to defend them in a patent suit.
I have easily had 100 patents worth of software related ideas which would be patentable under the pathetic standards of USPTO. If I had enough funds, and ignored the moral issues, it would make sense for me to patent them. But it wouldn't make sense unless I had several hundred thousand dollars to spare.
XML is *not* an "enabling technology".
XML is a file format.
XML shows that you *can* use a single file format for everything. That doesn't mean it a good idea, except in a couple of particular places.
The reason it's caught on is that the average programmers is getting stupider. It's genuinely difficult for these people to write a simple parser, so they use XML for everything. Nevermind that it's harder to read/write for humans than some custom HCI format or insanely more verbose and slower to scan than some custom binary format. They preach interoperability when this is irrelevent to cover for laziness and incompetence.
If I hear one more fuckwit say, "hey lets create an XML based programming lanugage", I'll scream.
3 years ago observations on distant supernova showed that the expansion of the universe was accelerating, a discovery that was utterly unexpected and could only be explained by some previously unknown repulsive force. eg here
Surprisingly little fuss was made about this considering it meant that the most fundamental prediction physics has made about the nature of the universe is wrong. It seemed strange to me that they could be this wrong and yet still claim to know exactly what happened in the first few microseconds of the universe. Imagine walking along with someone in the wilderness, who says we are 5 hours, 3 minutes and 32 seconds from our destination. Later you find out that you're on a different continent to the one he said you were on. Yet still he insists he knows your time of arrival to the precise second. A modicum of doubt would seem appropriate.
Anyway, I wonder if this could be the missing force ?
> Every game that is possible has been played before.
/.
Ignorance is bliss, how's it working out for you ? An average chess game is
50 moves (each) without about 20 possibilities on each move.
20^100 is a pretty big number. The proportion of games played to possible games is less than 1:number of atoms in known universe.
Being wrong by that order of magnitude is unusal even for
Has anyone here successfully run quake3 under linux with one ?
;~/
I have one, and nvidia's drivers work fine, X runs nice and fast, other 3d apps (OpenInventor etc) run ok, but quake3 crashes X. If I could run quake3 on this puppy, it'll probably waste enough time to stop me accomplishing anything, please help me waste my life
I'm using nvidia's drivers on a 1400x1050 inspiron 8000 with GeForce2 go, SuSE 7.2 and it works great, but I had to mess with the modeline settings. email me and I'll send you my XF86Config.
:(
:(
Caveats: can't restart X without rebooting
Quake3 crashes (I'm not sure why)
(if anyone has had success with quake3 using nvidia's latest drivers on GeForce2 go please let me know)
Actually I can run X in 3 different ways on this machine, useful in different situations..
1. native linux with nvidia drivers (fastest)
2. VMware under w2k with VMware's drivers
3. Exceed running on w2k talking to linux running under VMware (allows most interaction between w2k & X)
So, if you have a problem with nvidia's drivers I recommend options 2 or 3. VMware runs linux at about 85% native speed, it works great (you need lots of RAM though). I set up my linux partition to be accessible either under VMWare or running in native mode, so you don't waste any disk space to allow both options.
I haven't seen JPIII (or II for that matter) but the raptors in JPI definitely weren't that bright. I mean when a t-rex turns up do you (?)
a) run like crap
b) jump on it's back and give it love bites
I guess they're on an accelerated learning program.
You make a very good point. The real standards as produced by w3c are OK, but the de-facto standards created initially by netscape, and then embrace/extended by MS are horrible.
But, did you ever examine the early mozilla code (ie what they started with from netscape) ? That was a poisoned chalice if ever I saw one. It didn't support any of the trickier elements, but it still took a ton of code to do not very much badly.
BTW, how come nobody ever mentions Opera in all this. It is *by far* the best browser around, but nobody ever mentions it. If writing a decent browser is so impossible (unless one is inventing the standards yourself) how did they do it ?
nearly...
Marc Andresson was an intern at NCSA. His maths wasn't good enough for him to do what he was hired for, but he did know motif pretty good, so his superior Ping Foo asked him to write a GUI for www. This proved to be a good idea. Then Jim Clarke (founder of SGI) thought it would be a good idea to commercialise the idea, and hired the more commerically minded people from NCSA (not the same as the smartest, for instance - Ping whose idea the project was, and who made some of the smarter design decisions (eg single click to follow link), never joined).
Netscape was the browser tail wagging the internet dog for a while, but they declared MS history too early. The VC money they got from being declared the next MS enabled them to hire 1000s of developers very quickly. This was profoundly stupid, because having 1000 mediocre developers is far worse than having 10 decent ones. These people wrote 100s of 1000s of lines of shitty code. This code was then released to the mozilla effort, and left it with no fucking chance. Writing a browser isn't *that* tough, but if you start with a massive shitty code base, you can lose sight of that.
I don't know where you got that price, maxed out like that it's pretty expensive.
:)
Although, you can save a lot by getting the 512MB ram from www.crucial.com rather than from dell.
In the UK, crucial will sell 512MB of compatable ram for £150, while dell charges £600 !
I'm expecting mine on Friday
the upcount version evaluates the length function N times, the downcount evaluates once.
Although, I must admit I normally use
for (i=0;ia.size();i++)
when I know that a.size() uses cached value
At least the first version does what you expect.
I think you probably meant:
for(i = some_length_func(); i >= 0; i--)
That's a really scary error, so fundamental, it's the kind of thing that would make me want to hunt out and replace all code written by that developer.
You're full of it. So you did CS and philosophy at uni, now you're qualified to make a bunch of blanket statements about what is and is not possible 200 hundred or so years from now, based on how you think AI works ? I did a degree in AI, and all I really learnt was the depth of our ignorance. AI doesn't work at all yet, almost everything known in AI today is useless at predicting how "real" AI will work.
Your arguments are like some caveman saying "hah, they could never make flying machines that go over 200 miles an hour - if you tried flapping a wing that fast it would break, unless it was too heavy to even get in the air in the first place".
You're "facts" are too stupid to delve into in any depth, but just as an example, doesn't it bother you that your arguments to support #1 and #4 are completely contradictorary. If an AI would have to be based on a neural net, then maybe it would be hard to make it "love" someone.
It's like the lottery, a tax on stupid people. If you're too dumb to buy a multi-region player, then you're gonna take it the ass on a regular basis anyway. Multi-region players are perfectly legal, and easy to aquire in UK. Check out www.richersounds.co.uk.
The long article is interesting, but several things bugged me a lot:
"he was a straitlaced, archconservative Catholic himself"
Bullshit - compared to who ? Tolkein was an Oxford don:
"How many Oxford dons does it take to change a lightbulb ?"
"CHANGE ?? !!"
Calling him a straightlaced conservative is disingenuous at best. My grandmother knew Tolkein, he was a regular visitor to her antiques shop in central Oxford (where I actually met him a couple of times, but can't pretend to remember the experience since I was being babysat at the time). My grandmother mentioned him as being charming, with a mischeivous air.
As for the critical disclaim from the likes of a young Germain Greer (she was a militant feminist back then, and most likely rankled by Tolkein's chivalrous attitude) or some pompous, self-satisfied Private Eye hack, it doesn't deserve repetition without ridicule.
But, the central point about Tolkein's significance to geeks is valid, and I've never heard computer games referred to as culture before, let alone as "culture's center of gravity". Hmmmm...
Your sentiments might have some justification but you make them worthless by blabbering on about Africa, when he only mentioned India.
One has to wonder which would be more insulting - the notion that Indian culture was worthless and backwards and needed to be subjucated by some western company, or the inability to distinguish between Africa and India. Why is that ? some kind of - "they're all wogs anyway, what's the difference", or what ?
> I was always led to believe that the US had more freedom than any other country in the world.
Yes, I'm sure you were. However, who by ? what country did you hear this in ? The USA doesn't need government sponsored propoganda, they have something much more powerful - profit sponsored propoganda. Any mainstream newspaper or television program that tried to criticise America would lose audience fast. It would be "un-American" of them, and besides Americans all know that the USA is the best country in the world, so they would not just piss people off, they would lose respect because people wouldn't believe it anyway.
There is a vicious circle at work here. The main reason that Americans are so incredibly patriotic is that throughout their lives almost everything they hear reinforces the notion that America is the best (richest, most free, most tolerant, etc) country on earth, so why shouldn't they be proud of that. However, since the majority believes this completely, it would be very unwise for a publication that wishes to be bought, or a show that wants to be watched, to say anything that reflects badly on America [as compared to other countries]. The media can happily complain about things like crime, drugs, morality, etc but these are internal issues, and if any comparison is offered it will generally be with the past rather than with foreign countries. It just won't get mentioned.
Foreign news is virtually never mentioned on US television unless it's in such a way as to reflect well upon America. For example, you'll get a story like - "American troops fly into East Timor to protect the natives from gangs of thugs." The earlier story: "US trained and funded death squads kill 1/3rd of population of East Timor to supress an independence movement that could damage the interests of US oil companies in nearby waters" is much less likely to make people feel good about themselves, happy with your publication, and likely to read you again. This phenomena is not unique to US by any means, it's just rather more pronounced there than other places I've stayed.
IMO America is a good country in many respects, but general knowledge about the state of the world outside the US is not it's strong point.
No, it wasn't. Your report must have been flawed. The poles connection is true, but the enigma codes vital to decryption effort were captured by H.M.S. Petard from U559, this happened nearly two years before US entered the war.
I believe a US crew did capture an enigma later in the war. Anyway, your post gives the lie to the "it's just entertainment, nobody believes it" argument.
It just occured to me that this is bound to attract howls of "RMS doesn't have the right to decide what free means". I fully agree, and do not wish to imply otherwise, but he does decide what future versions of GPL mean, which has practical implications.
I asked RMS about this. I wrote some software that I wanted to release under two different license schemes, free for free-OS's and non-free for win32. I wanted the free-OS users to be able to link with GPL code if they felt like it, but not to be able to port to win32 (so I could have possibility of revenue from win32 addicts). I asked RMS about this. He said this was not possible right now, but might be in a future version of GPL which would allow people to release GPL software which did not provide the exemption for linking with the standard C library (GPL generally does not allow linking with non-free libraries). This would effectively allow people to write GPL software that wasn't portable to proprietary OS's since on these OS's it is always necessary to link with non-free libraries. However, AFAIK this isn't possible yet, and at the time RMS seemed undecided as to whether this would be possible in later version.