Do I have to point out that you made a conscious decision to get in your automobile and go to the store to buy that candy? You made a choice. It resulted in an extra 15 pounds. It was a bad choice.
Spoken like somebody who has no idea the sorts of things psychological imbalance can cause. The drug was prescribed to treat a certain mental condition. Are you doubting the reality of such conditions? The side effect is yet a different change in mental condition. Go take some fucking LSD and tell me about how you're "in control."
Yes. That certainly explains the total lack of all law-related articles here. Around here we do NOT discuss copyright infringement, programmer unionization, corporate liability for software flaws, or anything even remotely like that. No sir.
In fact merely THINKING about discussing the intricacies of law, when all parties are not holders of law degrees, should be grounds for immediate imprisonment. How's that?
So how legally enforceable are all those disclaimers I get in the footers of e-mails warning me that the e-mail is confidential and if I am not the intended recipient of the e-mail I am required to delete it immediately?
"If you are not the intended recipient of this puppy, you are required to drown it immediately. Have a nice day."
We're not responsible for the proper disposition of articles which we came into possession of unwillfully. I didn't ask for the email and I sure as hell am not following any "directions" contained therein. Retroactive NDA == no such legal concept.
Do you realize how slow it was?
Dialup was severely affected and if you got 1kbps you were very lucky.
Thats just for a small 20million person country back in the day when everyone didn't have net.
We've become so spoiled. Bandwidth has made us lazy. Why, 1 kbps is basically a 9600 bps modem. I used to do practical things on the Internet as those speeds. Just getting on your average web site these days would take too long for comfort. And what do we get in exchange? A lot of flashy graphics and advertisements.
A good start would be complete eradication of tax exemption and shelters for religious institutions.
If the government collected taxes from religious institutions, it would then have a stake in maintaining that flow of tax revenues. Taxation would give the government an easy way to put pressure on unfavorable religions. Better to make sure that the two remain as absolutely separated as possible.
Well, if somebody makes a bid like this for a publicly traded company, what exactly is supposed to happen? The only way to prevent it is through complete solidarity of the shareholders.
If I had owned any YHOO I would have sold late yesterday. At this point they could withdraw the bid, various people have already made craploads of money.
I wouldn't say it was justified or unjustified. This was a case of nature behaving as nature does. This guy pissed off a very large biological organism and it killed him. Did he deserve it? Let's just say he did something stupid with predictable, catastrophic results. It's no different than accidentally falling off a cliff. Nature kills. And in this case, even if you try to contain the killing nature, it can still be deadly.
Try comparing your results with what 3rd parties would have voted.
How am I supposed to get data on what various people "would have" done? Anyway, the independents are in the voting record along with everyone else. They were part of the experiment. As I said, the algorithm dropped them into the Democrat category. I did not cause this to happen by artificially restricting the number of clusters.
We could possibly glean more detailed information about the independents, if there were more of them. Sadly, there are not. Your complaint on this amounts to a "Boo hoo."
In a rare "double-whammy" decision, the DOJ has ordered Steve Ballmer and Darl MacBride to co-produce (and star in) a feature length film entitled "2 CEOs, 1 Cup"...
For some reason I imagined these two men struggling valiantly for control of an athletic cup. What is wrong with me?
I disagree with the notion that Republicans = Democrats = Sold out
There are real and serious differences between the two parties and anyone who tries to marginalize those differences is usually agitating for a 3rd party or giving in to apathy.
Indeed. Back when I was getting my feet wet in the field of data mining, I decided to download the voting records of the US Senate, at least for the last 20 or so years. This data is publicly available on the government web site. A few Perl scripts later and I had reduced the entire voting record to a single CSV file. Each "issue" (an item being voted on) was represented by a single row. Each column represented a specific Senator, and the values were either "For," "Against," or "No Vote."
I also created a perpendicular data set, where each row represented a Senator and each column represented a specific issue, with the values again being "For," "Against," and "No Vote."
I loaded these data sets into a general data mining tool and ran some trials. Among other experiments, I ran J48 to produce decision trees to predict vote values for each Senator, based on how the Senator voted on some specific "model issues," such as gun control legislation. In other words, based on how a Senator voted on certain issues I could predict how they voted on some target issue. If somebody voted against a pro-life abortion bill, how would they vote on a matter of pollution control? Etc. I also ran the perpendicular analysis: based on how other Senators voted on issue X, how would any given Senator vote on the same issue? These decision trees achieved predictive accuracies of greater than 80% in standard cross-validation testing.
The decision trees are also very informative in that they describe the political influences between Senators. If the topmost branch of the decision tree for Senator X is Senator Y, then we can assume there is some kind of friendship, similarity, or power relationship between those two Senators, at least to some degree. These decision trees are powerful tools for political analysis.
But more to the point, one of the best tests I conducted was the application of EM-clustering to the Senators themselves, with the goal being to divide them into "camps," where each camp had similar voting preferences. I allowed the EM-algorithm to decide, on its own, how many clusters to produce, using an MDL principle. I was only somewhat surprised when the algorithm created three clusters. All the Republicans ended up in cluster 1, along with two Democrats. The rest of the Democrats, as well as all the independents, ended up in cluster 2. The third cluster contained Senators who had run for President. (My theory on why the algorithm created a "Presidential cluster" is because Presidential candidates often spend a long time away from the Senate, during their campaigns, and therefore have long stretches of "No vote" on their records. This makes them appear somewhat similar to each other from a statistical viewpoint.)
When "dumb," statistically based data mining software is capable of grasping the clear differences between Republican and Democrat, it becomes impossible to argue with a straight face that the two parties are the same. A fucking computer can tell the difference, why can't a human?
(By the way, one of the Democratic Senators the computer placed into the Republican party was Hillary Clinton.)
If you consider optimizing the crap out of something which is ultimately pointless, to be somehow comparable to what real programmers do, I suppose.
I used to write these things back when all I wrote in was assembly language. It's cool, it's fun, it's a puzzle and a challenge. Comparing it to "modern programmers" though is sort of like comparing a Sudoku expert to a professional in applied mathematics. The Sudoku expert will probably outclass the generalist at Sudoku but I wouldn't describe it as putting the mathematician to shame, nor would I trust the Sudoku expert to work out some difficult integrals for me.
If I read the first 50 or so pages of a book in electronic form and liked it, I would go buy a paperback to finish reading. Reading novels on computer screens sucks. Fairly obvious idea when you think about it, this guy just has the guts to try it and damn the publisher's opinion.
The insurance business model, which is alive and well. You might as well ask, "what kind of business model depends on people crashing their cars?" or "what kind of business model depends on houses burning down?"
If the insurance company built the cars, built the roadway, and drove the cars themselves like some kind of chauffeur service, you'd have a point. This comparison is not even remotely relevant.
MySQL also has alternative licensing so companies can build proprietary products using MySQL as the engine. I wasn't seeing much mention of that in the comments.
This is what I think is funny about supposed "open source" fanatics. Suppose somebody takes the source code, changes it somehow, releases it as a commercial product, and profits. All without releasing their changes back to the community. This is a clear-cut case of exploitation, right?
But as soon as a few thousand (or maybe not so few) dollars are thrown into the mix, suddenly it becomes legitimate? So basically, accepting bribes is okay. And don't try to say it isn't a bribe. Here's why it is.
Imagine some large, open source project Foo. I'm J. Random Developer. I want to use Foo as part of a system I'm building. But it needs new features in order to be acceptable for my intended use. So I code them up and add them. I give my changes back to the community, as I'm expected to. Everything is great and good.
Now, commercial corporation X comes in. They see this cool new feature (which I coded myself, for free) and decide they want to make use of it in a closed source application. So they pay a licensing fee and buy the rights to do this. What do I, J. Random Developer get? Now, I'm not the copyright holder on the product Foo (let's call this person FooOwner). I'm just a random developer who needed a feature. But where do these thousands of dollars in licensing fees go? To FooOwner! I decided to play by the rules and what happened? I got screwed. Now somebody else is profiting because of MY hard work. But it's not company X who makes out like a bandit, it's FooOwner. The person who supposedly has all these strong principles and ideas about Open Source.
So here's my question. There's probably a VERY long list of contributors to MySQL. When somebody pays a commercial licensing fee, how much do these people get paid? Nothing you say? Hmm. Looks like bribery to me.
What the hell sort of sane business model DEPENDS on your customers requiring support? It's like saying, "I have to keep my product consistently buggy, and provide poor user interfaces and cryptic errors, so that people continue to need help with it." It's an up-front admission that you're going to make crappy software.
Suppose the cable guy came out to install your cable, and said "This cable is free. Installation is free. The programming is free. We only charge for support. So if something breaks, you can call me out here and I'll fix it for some $NOMINAL charge."
It kind of makes you think, "Gee, this shit must break all the time if they can actually make money charging only for support," doesn't it?
In addition, anybody can provide support. Chances are, your support blows. Someone else can step in and provide better support. They can easily do this because the source is available. NOW what are you going to make your money on?
I can say from experience that having a programming and shell-using wife is a great thing, but we don't exactly sit around for hours shooting the breeze about technology. After working an entire day writing code neither of us really want to discuss it in our free time, and although we both have serious web addictions, we never cross paths with each other online. Our relationship is purely here in the real world.
It's great, but it's not the universe defining nucleus of our marriage or anything like that.
But the main issue from a safety standpoint is wiring faults. Neutral and hot could be swapped (a common mistake by DIYers). You also have the possibility of neutral being disconnected (or having a loose connection) at the source - in this situation the voltage on the neutral wire will be pulled up by the loads on the line towards the "hot" wire. The load would not be getting any current so it would appear that the circuit is dead, but both the neutral and the hot would actually be hot!
Okay, so to make sure I understand this -- neutral is called neutral because it's tied to ground? So if some idiot were to stand on the ground and grab the neutral wire, no ill would befall him, because it's already grounded?
The next stupid question is, why do you need a neutral wire at all? Why not just "hot" and "ground?"
Salmon also die in the process of spawning themselves. They basically use up every ounce of fat and energy while swimming upstream to spawning waters and producing eggs. But I've never heard of anybody referring to this process as "self destruction."
Neutral is neutral and ground is ground. The fact that they are connected to each other at the service entrance does NOT mean that neutral can be used as a ground reference.
Can somebody versed in AC explain why this is so? If the neutral and ground are tied together don't they have to be at the same potential by definition?
Slashdot Mirror
Do I have to point out that you made a conscious decision to get in your automobile and go to the store to buy that candy? You made a choice. It resulted in an extra 15 pounds. It was a bad choice.
Spoken like somebody who has no idea the sorts of things psychological imbalance can cause. The drug was prescribed to treat a certain mental condition. Are you doubting the reality of such conditions? The side effect is yet a different change in mental condition. Go take some fucking LSD and tell me about how you're "in control."
Slashdot is not a lawyer.
Yes. That certainly explains the total lack of all law-related articles here. Around here we do NOT discuss copyright infringement, programmer unionization, corporate liability for software flaws, or anything even remotely like that. No sir.
In fact merely THINKING about discussing the intricacies of law, when all parties are not holders of law degrees, should be grounds for immediate imprisonment. How's that?
So how legally enforceable are all those disclaimers I get in the footers of e-mails warning me that the e-mail is confidential and if I am not the intended recipient of the e-mail I am required to delete it immediately?
"If you are not the intended recipient of this puppy, you are required to drown it immediately. Have a nice day."
We're not responsible for the proper disposition of articles which we came into possession of unwillfully. I didn't ask for the email and I sure as hell am not following any "directions" contained therein. Retroactive NDA == no such legal concept.
Do you realize how slow it was? Dialup was severely affected and if you got 1kbps you were very lucky. Thats just for a small 20million person country back in the day when everyone didn't have net.
We've become so spoiled. Bandwidth has made us lazy. Why, 1 kbps is basically a 9600 bps modem. I used to do practical things on the Internet as those speeds. Just getting on your average web site these days would take too long for comfort. And what do we get in exchange? A lot of flashy graphics and advertisements.
Oh well.
A good start would be complete eradication of tax exemption and shelters for religious institutions.
If the government collected taxes from religious institutions, it would then have a stake in maintaining that flow of tax revenues. Taxation would give the government an easy way to put pressure on unfavorable religions. Better to make sure that the two remain as absolutely separated as possible.
Well, if somebody makes a bid like this for a publicly traded company, what exactly is supposed to happen? The only way to prevent it is through complete solidarity of the shareholders.
This is what you get when you go public.
If I had owned any YHOO I would have sold late yesterday. At this point they could withdraw the bid, various people have already made craploads of money.
In other news, MSFT is down about 6.5% and YHOO is up about 48%. Holy shit.
I wouldn't say it was justified or unjustified. This was a case of nature behaving as nature does. This guy pissed off a very large biological organism and it killed him. Did he deserve it? Let's just say he did something stupid with predictable, catastrophic results. It's no different than accidentally falling off a cliff. Nature kills. And in this case, even if you try to contain the killing nature, it can still be deadly.
Darwin Award.
Try comparing your results with what 3rd parties would have voted.
How am I supposed to get data on what various people "would have" done? Anyway, the independents are in the voting record along with everyone else. They were part of the experiment. As I said, the algorithm dropped them into the Democrat category. I did not cause this to happen by artificially restricting the number of clusters.
We could possibly glean more detailed information about the independents, if there were more of them. Sadly, there are not. Your complaint on this amounts to a "Boo hoo."
In a rare "double-whammy" decision, the DOJ has ordered Steve Ballmer and Darl MacBride to co-produce (and star in) a feature length film entitled "2 CEOs, 1 Cup"...
For some reason I imagined these two men struggling valiantly for control of an athletic cup. What is wrong with me?
I disagree with the notion that Republicans = Democrats = Sold out There are real and serious differences between the two parties and anyone who tries to marginalize those differences is usually agitating for a 3rd party or giving in to apathy.
Indeed. Back when I was getting my feet wet in the field of data mining, I decided to download the voting records of the US Senate, at least for the last 20 or so years. This data is publicly available on the government web site. A few Perl scripts later and I had reduced the entire voting record to a single CSV file. Each "issue" (an item being voted on) was represented by a single row. Each column represented a specific Senator, and the values were either "For," "Against," or "No Vote."
I also created a perpendicular data set, where each row represented a Senator and each column represented a specific issue, with the values again being "For," "Against," and "No Vote."
I loaded these data sets into a general data mining tool and ran some trials. Among other experiments, I ran J48 to produce decision trees to predict vote values for each Senator, based on how the Senator voted on some specific "model issues," such as gun control legislation. In other words, based on how a Senator voted on certain issues I could predict how they voted on some target issue. If somebody voted against a pro-life abortion bill, how would they vote on a matter of pollution control? Etc. I also ran the perpendicular analysis: based on how other Senators voted on issue X, how would any given Senator vote on the same issue? These decision trees achieved predictive accuracies of greater than 80% in standard cross-validation testing.
The decision trees are also very informative in that they describe the political influences between Senators. If the topmost branch of the decision tree for Senator X is Senator Y, then we can assume there is some kind of friendship, similarity, or power relationship between those two Senators, at least to some degree. These decision trees are powerful tools for political analysis.
But more to the point, one of the best tests I conducted was the application of EM-clustering to the Senators themselves, with the goal being to divide them into "camps," where each camp had similar voting preferences. I allowed the EM-algorithm to decide, on its own, how many clusters to produce, using an MDL principle. I was only somewhat surprised when the algorithm created three clusters. All the Republicans ended up in cluster 1, along with two Democrats. The rest of the Democrats, as well as all the independents, ended up in cluster 2. The third cluster contained Senators who had run for President. (My theory on why the algorithm created a "Presidential cluster" is because Presidential candidates often spend a long time away from the Senate, during their campaigns, and therefore have long stretches of "No vote" on their records. This makes them appear somewhat similar to each other from a statistical viewpoint.)
When "dumb," statistically based data mining software is capable of grasping the clear differences between Republican and Democrat, it becomes impossible to argue with a straight face that the two parties are the same. A fucking computer can tell the difference, why can't a human?
(By the way, one of the Democratic Senators the computer placed into the Republican party was Hillary Clinton.)
If you consider optimizing the crap out of something which is ultimately pointless, to be somehow comparable to what real programmers do, I suppose.
I used to write these things back when all I wrote in was assembly language. It's cool, it's fun, it's a puzzle and a challenge. Comparing it to "modern programmers" though is sort of like comparing a Sudoku expert to a professional in applied mathematics. The Sudoku expert will probably outclass the generalist at Sudoku but I wouldn't describe it as putting the mathematician to shame, nor would I trust the Sudoku expert to work out some difficult integrals for me.
You people put on clothes to party? Around here we start by removing them.
If I read the first 50 or so pages of a book in electronic form and liked it, I would go buy a paperback to finish reading. Reading novels on computer screens sucks. Fairly obvious idea when you think about it, this guy just has the guts to try it and damn the publisher's opinion.
The insurance business model, which is alive and well. You might as well ask, "what kind of business model depends on people crashing their cars?" or "what kind of business model depends on houses burning down?"
If the insurance company built the cars, built the roadway, and drove the cars themselves like some kind of chauffeur service, you'd have a point. This comparison is not even remotely relevant.
MySQL also has alternative licensing so companies can build proprietary products using MySQL as the engine. I wasn't seeing much mention of that in the comments.
This is what I think is funny about supposed "open source" fanatics. Suppose somebody takes the source code, changes it somehow, releases it as a commercial product, and profits. All without releasing their changes back to the community. This is a clear-cut case of exploitation, right?
But as soon as a few thousand (or maybe not so few) dollars are thrown into the mix, suddenly it becomes legitimate? So basically, accepting bribes is okay. And don't try to say it isn't a bribe. Here's why it is.
Imagine some large, open source project Foo. I'm J. Random Developer. I want to use Foo as part of a system I'm building. But it needs new features in order to be acceptable for my intended use. So I code them up and add them. I give my changes back to the community, as I'm expected to. Everything is great and good.
Now, commercial corporation X comes in. They see this cool new feature (which I coded myself, for free) and decide they want to make use of it in a closed source application. So they pay a licensing fee and buy the rights to do this. What do I, J. Random Developer get? Now, I'm not the copyright holder on the product Foo (let's call this person FooOwner). I'm just a random developer who needed a feature. But where do these thousands of dollars in licensing fees go? To FooOwner! I decided to play by the rules and what happened? I got screwed. Now somebody else is profiting because of MY hard work. But it's not company X who makes out like a bandit, it's FooOwner. The person who supposedly has all these strong principles and ideas about Open Source.
So here's my question. There's probably a VERY long list of contributors to MySQL. When somebody pays a commercial licensing fee, how much do these people get paid? Nothing you say? Hmm. Looks like bribery to me.
What the hell sort of sane business model DEPENDS on your customers requiring support? It's like saying, "I have to keep my product consistently buggy, and provide poor user interfaces and cryptic errors, so that people continue to need help with it." It's an up-front admission that you're going to make crappy software.
Suppose the cable guy came out to install your cable, and said "This cable is free. Installation is free. The programming is free. We only charge for support. So if something breaks, you can call me out here and I'll fix it for some $NOMINAL charge."
It kind of makes you think, "Gee, this shit must break all the time if they can actually make money charging only for support," doesn't it?
In addition, anybody can provide support. Chances are, your support blows. Someone else can step in and provide better support. They can easily do this because the source is available. NOW what are you going to make your money on?
I can say from experience that having a programming and shell-using wife is a great thing, but we don't exactly sit around for hours shooting the breeze about technology. After working an entire day writing code neither of us really want to discuss it in our free time, and although we both have serious web addictions, we never cross paths with each other online. Our relationship is purely here in the real world.
It's great, but it's not the universe defining nucleus of our marriage or anything like that.
Why the hell don't people get put in prison when this happens? Ridiculous.
But the main issue from a safety standpoint is wiring faults. Neutral and hot could be swapped (a common mistake by DIYers). You also have the possibility of neutral being disconnected (or having a loose connection) at the source - in this situation the voltage on the neutral wire will be pulled up by the loads on the line towards the "hot" wire. The load would not be getting any current so it would appear that the circuit is dead, but both the neutral and the hot would actually be hot!
Okay, so to make sure I understand this -- neutral is called neutral because it's tied to ground? So if some idiot were to stand on the ground and grab the neutral wire, no ill would befall him, because it's already grounded?
The next stupid question is, why do you need a neutral wire at all? Why not just "hot" and "ground?"
Salmon also die in the process of spawning themselves. They basically use up every ounce of fat and energy while swimming upstream to spawning waters and producing eggs. But I've never heard of anybody referring to this process as "self destruction."
Neutral is neutral and ground is ground. The fact that they are connected to each other at the service entrance does NOT mean that neutral can be used as a ground reference.
Can somebody versed in AC explain why this is so? If the neutral and ground are tied together don't they have to be at the same potential by definition?
What's bad about electricity?
Speaking as somebody who lives in an area impacted by significant hydropower development, I can answer... "Quite a bit."Considering all the computers to transfer it are already on, I can't imagine it being much more at all.
"Considering that the child porn has already been manufactured, there's not much harm in looking at it."
"Considering that the cows would have been slaughtered anyway, there's no harm in eating beef."
Etc...