Rather, this problem can only be successfully resolved through the solution of what is commonly understood within the mathematical community as the "Pigeonhole Principle."
Given a number of pigeons within a sealed room that has a single hole, and which allows only one pigeon at a time to escape the room, how many unique markers are required to individually mark all of the pigeons as each escapes, one pigeon at a time?
I'm pretty sure that's not the pigeonhole principle. As I understand it, the pigeonhole principal is the following:
Given N pigeons, and M holes to stuff them in, at least the ceiling of N/M pigeons must be in one of the holes. If M is N-1, then this number is 2 (i.e. rolling 7 six-sided dice leads to at least one pair).
I find it hard to believe that the photographer wouldn't be prosecuted for this IF it was against the consent of the person being photographed.
On the other hand, if they signed an agreement saying it was ok to make all this stuff public, it's sort of like the license agreements people sign to run Microsoft Windows.
Just to add to the confusion, there is, in some states (Massachusetts, I think), a lemon law, stating that EVEN IF you are told that an automobile sucks, if it dies, then the person who sold it to you is legally liable, and may be forced to refund your money.
Actually, I kind of like the bias. If I wanted unbiased reporting, I'd read "Foreign Affairs".
Seriously, what news outlet isn't biased in some way or other? Slashdot is biased against popular corporations that do bad things and make insecure, unrobust, and unstable products. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it.
I don't really understand, isn't there some way to throttle down the bandwidth by restricting the number of users accessing your site at any time? Could someone enlighten me on why this is difficult?
1)Why should I care about the low-level workers at some gigantic corporation? You don't have any positive effect on MY neighborhood, but frequently mom-and-pop-store owners live IN the neighborhood and therefore do.
2)A straw-man. Nobody cares whether you are evil.
3)My mom owns a business. Among other reasons, she has it because it gives her the freedom to NOT JUST look out for profit. She cares about her customers. They come to her because she treats them well and sells a good product. She won't sell a shoddy product. And incidentally, she's been in business for well more than 10 years. Businesses succeed and fail for MANY reasons, not the least of which is how they contribute to the community. Amoeba Records, for example, gives free live concerts inside their San Francisco store. How often does that happen at Amazon.com?
The whole idea is anathema to civil-libertarians. Believe it or not, FUD is speech, and as such, should be considered protected under the first amendment.
Furthermore, if we hold Microsoft to such harsh rules, won't the same rules apply for all, including Slashdot posters?
Re:This raises some frightening questions
on
Battlefield Lasers
·
· Score: 1
Oops... it appears that one of the lasers only costs 25 cents per shot. My bad.
The new laser, called the Solid State Heat Capacity Laser, is about five feet long and a foot-and-a-half wide and will be small enough to be installed on an electric-powered Humvee.
"Those two couple very well together," said program director Randy Buff.
The electric laser costs about 25 cents a shot, he said.
Re:This raises some frightening questions
on
Battlefield Lasers
·
· Score: 1
What's to stop them from using these things on people? They have amazingly accurate targeting systems and they're cheap to fire (article says 25 cents (maybe dollars, I forget...) per shot.
Cheap to fire? Hardly.
From the article:
But the THEL is expensive to fire, costing $3,000 or more per shot because of the exotic chemicals used. It also requires supply lines to keep the weapon charged with chemicals.
Recently, I've stumbled upon (read: been forced to use) a nifty notation for OO stuff. For variables, the first letter gives the scope of the variable:
p_foo means variable foo is a parameter (passed in to the method)
m_foo means variable foo is a member variable.
l_foo means variable foo is a local variable, created in this method.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
....
(Of course, Microsoft would rather we not know when this has to happen, where as Red Hat has been sending me advisories ever since I installed their distro.)
1)Regarding Apache's mod_dav, "DAV on" was originally inside of some code which was apparently ripped out by the filter. Anyway, read the manual.
2)And don't forget cadaver, the command-line equivalent of ftp. You can get the source code for that at http://www.webdav.org/cadaver/cadaver-0.18.0.tar.g z
Ok, maybe HTTP/1.1 isn't quite as good as you might want, but if you add in WebDAV, it becomes an incredible replacement for FTP. And CVS. And NFS...
WebDAV servers support (by default) Locking of files, Put of files, PropPatches of custom properties, PropFinds of those custom properties,Moves, Copies, and Delete. Plus Get, Put, Head, etc. that HTTP/1.1 provides.
Furthermore, there are standards defined for:
Access Control Lists (so you can decide WHO has acess to WHICH of your files with a fine level of granularity).
Versioning (AKA DeltaV) checking in/out, etc.
Searching (AKA DASL) using XML-based grammars.
Furthermore, MANY clients support saving and locking of files over WebDAV. In particular:
Microsoft Web Folders uses a WebDAV server as a file system and ships with Win 98 +
Mac OSX has WebDAV support built into the File System
Several Open Source Developers are working on a quite-functional Linux WebDAV file system that you should check out.
Adobe Photoshop 6.0 does saving over WebDAV. So does Macromedia's Dreamweaver UltraDEV. So does Microsoft Office. Many others do as well.
Mozilla's Composer WILL HAVE WebDAV support (eventually, see bug #13383)
Wish to try it out? Got apache? A level 2 DAV server (sometimes) ships with Apache. It's called ModDAV, and it seems to be quite easy to setup.
Dav on
Then, in theory anyway, you instantly have the ability to PUT files there, LOCK them, etc.
Check out Sharemation for a free (5Meg) WebDAV account that has DeltaV, ACL, DASL support. (And yes, I work for Xythos Software, we host sharemation and sell the Web File Server it's based on.)
Or go check out Tigris' Subversion a highly capable free DeltaV enabled DAV server.
Yes, or you could replace both of them with webdav.
WebDAV( IETF RFC 2518 ) is a series of extensions to HTTP that give a lot of functionality such as Access-Control (ACL), Version support, all over a simple HTTP connection (and yes, HTTPS is quite supported). Check it out at http://www.webdav.org
Look, writing software is difficult, and anything as complicated and flexible as the Linux kernel is a management headache, to say the least.
It's fine and dandy to say "don't add new features in the stable series", but then what about important features like USB? When the 2.2 kernel series went stable, USB was a pipe-dream, so at around 2.2.15 (IIRC) USB was back-ported into the 2.2 kernel. This was generally considered a GOOD THING, not too risky.
Even when not adding new features, sometimes just fixing bugs can cause new bugs to appear. A fact of software development is that sometimes things like this happen. Unforseen necessity can destabilize stable software. Try as we might, following proper coding practices and the like, writing software has continued to be hard simply by virtue of its complexity. Writing software is somewhat of a craft, not a pure engineering, and sometimes things don't go as planned (think leaky pottery).
Ultimately, though, the goal is to improve the process as much as possible, keep/sell the "good" products (such as kernel 2.4.14) and throw away the ones that developed leaks (such as 2.4.15).
Thus, Windows is doing everything that the majority of users need, and thus is doing a good job.
By the same argument, since cars worked perfectly well without seatbelts, for what most people used them for (not getting in accidents), there was no need to have seatbelts, and it was ok that you couldn't get a car with seatbelts without paying more?
And what about when you couldn't use the phone without renting a telephone from AT&T? And the phones then were all clunkers, too.
I disagree. I want seatbelts in my car and choice in buying phones AND to be able to buy a computer without an OS. Someday, history will prove me right (about the first 2 anyway).
The kids are going to win in the end. They are going to get better computers in the classroom that should ulitimately allow them to get better jobs and improve their quality of living.
No, not necessarily. Sure, they will have licenses and software to use Microsoft's latest OS, but what about the hardware to support them? That's not mentioned at all.
We're not talking about some scaled-down, super-slim OS here, Windows XP is a hog (20% slower than Win 2K running Office XP). If the deal came with hardware, I'd be FAR more impressed. As it stands, it's just another free Microsoft tax deduction.
I fail to see how this post is flamebait!!! This is a post about the crossover plugin, which is a really good product that I just used to watch the trailer!!!
"But WHY do we have to go thru this?? these people should be treated the same way VIRUS WRITERS would be..."
Ok, three things:
1)They're called MSTDs (MicroSoft Transmitted Diseases, and no, I didn't invent that).
2)One difference here is that the USA is a capitalist country, and these people (the people who write parasitic products like Webhancer and the like) are trying to make money. They are a corporation, and therefore, given some privledges that VIRUS WRITERS don't have - namely, they can't particularly be arrested for writing software. They can only be sued. Don't like it? Then sue them. Or help to fix the system. These people are just taking advantage of a system that exists already.
3)Furthermore, the software is hardly viral. It installs itself with other software you install. You probably agreed to it in a click-through license agreement. Did you read the click-through license agreement? Most people don't. Just remember, you get what you pay for, and paying in TIME and EFFORT up front can save you in TIME and EFFORT down the road.
This comment implies that Massachusetts hasn't been spending their money appropriately wrt the tobacco settlement. In fact, Massachusetts has been one of the better states in this regard.
According to The Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids" report on the spending of the settlement, Massachusetts is spending $43.1 million dollars a year, well within the range of the CDC's recommended funding levels. Massachusetts is 4th in ranking, in fact. And Massachusetts has had a tobacco-prevention program in place since before the settlement (1993, I believe). Please, don't paint all of New England with the same brush!
Check out this chart for the source of my information.
Yeah, it's self-serving and perhaps borderline unethical. But it's not illegal (yet) and if they want to make a sight that uses IE features they can't guarantee are supported in other browers, that's their call.
Why do you say they can't guarantee these features are supported? Mozilla is OPEN SOURCE! They can damn well guarantee it if they want. Furthermore, the features ARE supported. This has nothing to do with feature-support. It's about control.
This may be offtopic, but I use Linux as my primary OS, and I have NEVER typed "sync" at the command line (I'm pretty sure, anyway). I don't even know what it does. Call me clueless if you'd like.
Additionally, occasionally if I'm doing some command-line server-type work, I have to shutdown manually, but KDE and Gnome do this (shutdown) for you now, and I don't know too many people running desktop linux who aren't using KDE or Gnome at this point.
Why do posts like this get modded up as insightful anyway? Funny, maybe, but insightful?
Slashdot Mirror
Rather, this problem can only be successfully resolved through the solution of what is commonly understood within the mathematical community as the "Pigeonhole Principle."
Given a number of pigeons within a sealed room that has a single hole, and which allows only one pigeon at a time to escape the room, how many unique markers are required to individually mark all of the pigeons as each escapes, one pigeon at a time?
I'm pretty sure that's not the pigeonhole principle. As I understand it, the pigeonhole principal is the following:
Given N pigeons, and M holes to stuff them in, at least the ceiling of N/M pigeons must be in one of the holes. If M is N-1, then this number is 2 (i.e. rolling 7 six-sided dice leads to at least one pair).
This looks like a hoax to me.
I find it hard to believe that the photographer wouldn't be prosecuted for this IF it was against the consent of the person being photographed.
On the other hand, if they signed an agreement saying it was ok to make all this stuff public, it's sort of like the license agreements people sign to run Microsoft Windows.
Just to add to the confusion, there is, in some states (Massachusetts, I think), a lemon law, stating that EVEN IF you are told that an automobile sucks, if it dies, then the person who sold it to you is legally liable, and may be forced to refund your money.
Actually, I kind of like the bias. If I wanted unbiased reporting, I'd read "Foreign Affairs".
Seriously, what news outlet isn't biased in some way or other? Slashdot is biased against popular corporations that do bad things and make insecure, unrobust, and unstable products. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it.
I don't really understand, isn't there some way to throttle down the bandwidth by restricting the number of users accessing your site at any time? Could someone enlighten me on why this is difficult?
And your argument is also crap.
1)Why should I care about the low-level workers at some gigantic corporation? You don't have any positive effect on MY neighborhood, but frequently mom-and-pop-store owners live IN the neighborhood and therefore do.
2)A straw-man. Nobody cares whether you are evil.
3)My mom owns a business. Among other reasons, she has it because it gives her the freedom to NOT JUST look out for profit. She cares about her customers. They come to her because she treats them well and sells a good product. She won't sell a shoddy product. And incidentally, she's been in business for well more than 10 years. Businesses succeed and fail for MANY reasons, not the least of which is how they contribute to the community. Amoeba Records, for example, gives free live concerts inside their San Francisco store. How often does that happen at Amazon.com?
This is a clever idea, BUT:
The whole idea is anathema to civil-libertarians. Believe it or not, FUD is speech, and as such, should be considered protected under the first amendment.
Furthermore, if we hold Microsoft to such harsh rules, won't the same rules apply for all, including Slashdot posters?
Oops... it appears that one of the lasers only costs 25 cents per shot. My bad.
The new laser, called the Solid State Heat Capacity Laser, is about five feet long and a foot-and-a-half wide and will be small enough to be installed on an electric-powered Humvee.
"Those two couple very well together," said program director Randy Buff.
The electric laser costs about 25 cents a shot, he said.
Cheap to fire? Hardly.
From the article: But the THEL is expensive to fire, costing $3,000 or more per shot because of the exotic chemicals used. It also requires supply lines to keep the weapon charged with chemicals.
Recently, I've stumbled upon (read: been forced to use) a nifty notation for OO stuff. For variables, the first letter gives the scope of the variable:
p_foo means variable foo is a parameter (passed in to the method)
m_foo means variable foo is a member variable.
l_foo means variable foo is a local variable, created in this method.
Yeah, you're silly.
repeat after me:
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
Sysadmins have to patch their systems.
....
(Of course, Microsoft would rather we not know when this has to happen, where as Red Hat has been sending me advisories ever since I installed their distro.)
Or, if you're like me and use a work-laptop, use outguess to hide your porn inside your mp3 collection.
"No, VP of Technology, I don't have any porn on this laptop, just mp3s."
Oops...
g z
1)Regarding Apache's mod_dav, "DAV on" was originally inside of some code which was apparently ripped out by the filter. Anyway, read the manual.
2)And don't forget cadaver, the command-line equivalent of ftp. You can get the source code for that at http://www.webdav.org/cadaver/cadaver-0.18.0.tar.
Enjoy!
Ok, maybe HTTP/1.1 isn't quite as good as you might want, but if you add in WebDAV, it becomes an incredible replacement for FTP. And CVS. And NFS...
WebDAV servers support (by default) Locking of files, Put of files, PropPatches of custom properties, PropFinds of those custom properties,Moves, Copies, and Delete. Plus Get, Put, Head, etc. that HTTP/1.1 provides.
Furthermore, there are standards defined for:
Furthermore, MANY clients support saving and locking of files over WebDAV. In particular:
Microsoft Web Folders uses a WebDAV server as a file system and ships with Win 98 +
Mac OSX has WebDAV support built into the File System
Several Open Source Developers are working on a quite-functional Linux WebDAV file system that you should check out.
Adobe Photoshop 6.0 does saving over WebDAV. So does Macromedia's Dreamweaver UltraDEV. So does Microsoft Office. Many others do as well.
Mozilla's Composer WILL HAVE WebDAV support (eventually, see bug #13383)
Wish to try it out? Got apache? A level 2 DAV server (sometimes) ships with Apache. It's called ModDAV, and it seems to be quite easy to setup.
Then, in theory anyway, you instantly have the ability to PUT files there, LOCK them, etc.
Read more at The mod_dav page
-marick
P.S. Want more functionality?
Check out Sharemation for a free (5Meg) WebDAV account that has DeltaV, ACL, DASL support. (And yes, I work for Xythos Software, we host sharemation and sell the Web File Server it's based on.)
Or go check out Tigris' Subversion a highly capable free DeltaV enabled DAV server.
Yes, or you could replace both of them with webdav.
WebDAV( IETF RFC 2518 ) is a series of extensions to HTTP that give a lot of functionality such as Access-Control (ACL), Version support, all over a simple HTTP connection (and yes, HTTPS is quite supported). Check it out at http://www.webdav.org
Look, writing software is difficult, and anything as complicated and flexible as the Linux kernel is a management headache, to say the least.
It's fine and dandy to say "don't add new features in the stable series", but then what about important features like USB? When the 2.2 kernel series went stable, USB was a pipe-dream, so at around 2.2.15 (IIRC) USB was back-ported into the 2.2 kernel. This was generally considered a GOOD THING, not too risky.
Even when not adding new features, sometimes just fixing bugs can cause new bugs to appear. A fact of software development is that sometimes things like this happen. Unforseen necessity can destabilize stable software. Try as we might, following proper coding practices and the like, writing software has continued to be hard simply by virtue of its complexity. Writing software is somewhat of a craft, not a pure engineering, and sometimes things don't go as planned (think leaky pottery).
Ultimately, though, the goal is to improve the process as much as possible, keep/sell the "good" products (such as kernel 2.4.14) and throw away the ones that developed leaks (such as 2.4.15).
By the same argument, since cars worked perfectly well without seatbelts, for what most people used them for (not getting in accidents), there was no need to have seatbelts, and it was ok that you couldn't get a car with seatbelts without paying more?
And what about when you couldn't use the phone without renting a telephone from AT&T? And the phones then were all clunkers, too.
I disagree. I want seatbelts in my car and choice in buying phones AND to be able to buy a computer without an OS. Someday, history will prove me right (about the first 2 anyway).
No, not necessarily. Sure, they will have licenses and software to use Microsoft's latest OS, but what about the hardware to support them? That's not mentioned at all.
We're not talking about some scaled-down, super-slim OS here, Windows XP is a hog (20% slower than Win 2K running Office XP). If the deal came with hardware, I'd be FAR more impressed. As it stands, it's just another free Microsoft tax deduction.
I fail to see how this post is flamebait!!! This is a post about the crossover plugin, which is a really good product that I just used to watch the trailer!!!
Sheesh!
"But WHY do we have to go thru this?? these people should be treated the same way VIRUS WRITERS would be..."
Ok, three things:
1)They're called MSTDs (MicroSoft Transmitted Diseases, and no, I didn't invent that).
2)One difference here is that the USA is a capitalist country, and these people (the people who write parasitic products like Webhancer and the like) are trying to make money. They are a corporation, and therefore, given some privledges that VIRUS WRITERS don't have - namely, they can't particularly be arrested for writing software. They can only be sued. Don't like it? Then sue them. Or help to fix the system. These people are just taking advantage of a system that exists already.
3)Furthermore, the software is hardly viral. It installs itself with other software you install. You probably agreed to it in a click-through license agreement. Did you read the click-through license agreement? Most people don't. Just remember, you get what you pay for, and paying in TIME and EFFORT up front can save you in TIME and EFFORT down the road.
Well,
Simply put, he didn't have enough MONEY to mount an effective campaign and get his message out and he wasn't allowed into the debates.
Furthermore, even if he had gotten into the debates, his ideas are not considered mainstream in the US.
The company I work for has started giving these pens out as "1-year anneversary gifts". Embossed with the company logo, too!
According to The Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids" report on the spending of the settlement, Massachusetts is spending $43.1 million dollars a year, well within the range of the CDC's recommended funding levels. Massachusetts is 4th in ranking, in fact. And Massachusetts has had a tobacco-prevention program in place since before the settlement (1993, I believe). Please, don't paint all of New England with the same brush!
Check out this chart for the source of my information.
Next, lets go to your home page. No doc-type definition, so it doesnt validate. Bad. Plus you are using out-of-date tags. Check it here[w3.org].
I ran the site through the validator and got the response:
"Congratulations, this document validates as HTML 4.01 Transitional!"
Yeah, it's self-serving and perhaps borderline unethical. But it's not illegal (yet) and if they want to make a sight that uses IE features they can't guarantee are supported in other browers, that's their call.
Why do you say they can't guarantee these features are supported? Mozilla is OPEN SOURCE! They can damn well guarantee it if they want. Furthermore, the features ARE supported. This has nothing to do with feature-support. It's about control.
This may be offtopic, but I use Linux as my primary OS, and I have NEVER typed "sync" at the command line (I'm pretty sure, anyway). I don't even know what it does. Call me clueless if you'd like.
Additionally, occasionally if I'm doing some command-line server-type work, I have to shutdown manually, but KDE and Gnome do this (shutdown) for you now, and I don't know too many people running desktop linux who aren't using KDE or Gnome at this point.
Why do posts like this get modded up as insightful anyway? Funny, maybe, but insightful?