Javascript's eval can be very useful in general, and in fact, the most useful form of it is when you *are* invoking it on dynamically generated code that simply cannot be as concisely expressed in any other way. That's not to say it's impossible, but it can often be a darn sight more convoluted to not use eval in Javascript to get a particular job done than it would be to write it using statically compilable code. Some may argue that this is a flaw in the design of the language itself, but I would personally be reluctant to quickly discard the feature entirely simply because of its potential for abuse in this particular way. I would suggest that there are almost certainly other ways to achieve the desired ends, but they most probably involve much more complex intermediate goals.
Blocking eval itself isn't generally a solution anyways, since javascript within the browser could invoke 'document write' to place additional code into the page where it is executing, and then simply directly call a function that it dynamically added to the page using such a technique to achieve the exact same thing as what could be done using eval.
I suspect the longer term solution is for browsers to sandbox javascript pretty tightly.... malicious code that detects such sandboxing as an attempt to evade detection as such may not get detected by the browser as problematic, but still won't be able to accomplish anything because it will still be inside of the sandbox, and when the code tries to do something that is prohibited, it can be immediately flagged at that time rather than just trying to detect it at page load time.
Which, regardless of anything that Uber might want to claim about themselves, is only applicable if the drivers are not licensed as cab drivers within the province, and even then, their beef is with the drivers, not the company.
Scientists do not know if Kepler-452b can support life or not. What is known about the planet is that it is about 60 percent larger than Earth, placing it in a class of planets dubbed "super-Earths." While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have a better than even chance of being rocky.
So I'm not sure where you got 5 times the mass from.
In fact, if we assume composition similar to earth, a planet 1.6 times the size of earth would have 4.096 (1.6 cubed) times the mass of earth
Because gravitational pull falls with the square of the distance, we could divide 1.6 cubed times the mass of earth by the square of 1.6 gives us exactly 1.6 times earth's gravitational pull at the surface of the planet. Thus, assuming identical composition, surface gravity scales linearly with diameter. While it probably doesn't have absolutely identical composition to Earth, there is not yet any compelling reason at this time to speculate that its composition would be drastically different either. Certainly if its density were 25% heavier than that of earth, then the mass (and surface gravity) would be exactly as you described. According to the page, we do not know that information yet, however.
Yes, but because gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, by being further from the center of mass in a larger planet, the net gravitational effect where the density of the planet is otherwise the same is scales linearly with the diameter. Assuming earth-like composition, the planet is 1.6G at its surface.
Uber doesn't own the cars, and the taxi company owns the cars
That only means that Uber's workers are more likely to fall under the classification of independent contractors instead of employees, it has no bearing on whether Uber is a taxi company or not. There is nothing inherent to being a taxi company that prohibits hiring independent contractors, who typically supply their own tools and equipment to perform a job. and any such prohibition on the part of the company, while certainly entirely permissible for a company to do, is a reflection of an employer-employee status being more likely to be applicable, and not indicative of whether it is or is not a taxi company.
Except that you are still using instrumentality to assist in resolving detail.... the phrase "naked eye" as applied to being able to see something means literally that... that using just the eye alone, without anything else, it can be seen.
For chrissake, look the phrase up in a dictionary.
Well, the phrase "naked eye" when applied to being able to view something corresponds to being able to see it *without* the aid of any instrumentation. The lens that is already within the eye is as naturally part of the eye as your skin is of your body, so the fact that lens plays a part in its optics is irrelevant.
One of their more promising goals is to create a "perfect lens" which would allow an everyday person to view things as small as a virus with the naked eye.
Can someone explain to me how using a lens to see something qualifies as "with the naked eye", exactly?
Why would you assume that Allah would need to or even want revenge for such a thing? Assuming, for the moment, that Allah is actually opposed to gay marriage, and assuming that said deity even actually cared about what it was that we do, what would be the point of an omniscient and omnipotent being giving humans what is supposedly a free will if said deity was going to be petty and actually try to micromanage human behavior via swift vengeance for every infraction?
You were the one who claimed that most would-be pirates were discouraged from doing it prior to the invention of the printing press. Guess what? The high cost of making copies (and the relative lack of literate people to share them with, assuming that the author himself was even literate) discouraged authors from writing things down too.
True.... which is why most creative works that had any chance of distribution were patronized by wealthy people.
Oh, and the library of Alexandria had money to pay its workers to make copies as well, so that's why it worked. Relatively speaking though, such patronized copying facilities were rare enough that they did not practically pose any threat to the initial creator's exclususivity.
Authors really just don't engage in self-censorship as a means of control.
Why not? Publishers do it all the time.... Region control on DVD's and DRM are perfect current examples of self-censorship... although not necessarily placed there by the creator personally, the publisher was still authorized by the creator to make copies of the work, so the creator would certainly be a willing participant to having such restrictions, even if they did not put them there themselves. Of course, the incentive behind publication in such cases has more to do with monetary reward than anything else, and I don't actually advocate such incentives as being worthwhile in the first place.
But outside of that, do you seriously think that all created works are published? Do you think that everyone who makes a creative work even *wants* to always publish it? Costs for creating works that one does not intend to publish is not necessarily high... and may often be something that is just a natural outpouring of that person's creativity, rather than a specific endeavor that is undertaken by the person to specifically create a particular work, so the matter of time investment in creating the work is immaterial. The simple fact that they have created the work at all is sufficient incentive for them to create it. This happens ALL the time... probably millions of times every single day, in fact.
And of course, such self-censorship is extraordinarily effective as a copy-control mechanism, because after all, how anyone copy the work if they don't know it even exists, or if they did, because they just don't have access to it? But the problem with this is that self-censorship does not offer any benefit to society... society cannot be enriched by a creative work that it does not have access to, so copyright gives such a creator the means to control their interests while still publishing (and thereby ideally helping to enrich society through an availability of diverse creative works).
Copyright, from an author's point of view, is a way to recoup their investment.
If that were true, there would be no point to explicitly putting things under something along the lines of a creative commons copyright license where the intent is to give away the work for free. What investment can one possibly recoup with that? Such copyright distribution mechanisms still differ significantly from public domain because they generally still have provisions in place on the purpose or how it is copied, such as allowing free copies for educational use or personal study only, or allowing free copies as long as the existing copyright notice and attributions are kept intact.
Copyright is, and has always been, about control... no more and no less than literally control over the "right to copy". The argument I am suggesting, however, is that allowing the creators to possess such control for a limited time even while they distribute the work is ultimately beneficial, since it gives those creators an incentive to publish (and ideally enrich society in so doing) where they may have otherwise utilized self-censorship as their preferred means of copy control, and society would not have be
Hell, some places, like Alexandria during the days of the famous library,...
You are, I assume, aware that the days of the Alexandria library copying all works that entered the city were well over a thousand years before the printing press was even developed, let alone copyright created. Also, creators who did not want their works copied could prevent Alexandria from copying them by simply not going into the city... employing self-censorship as a means of copy control, which has always existed.
Copyright (by which I mean largely the form that it exists today and not as a collusion contract created by publishers) had an intended purpose that was to maximize the enrichment to society that can be obtained by the society having access to diverse kinds of creative works, and offering the creators of those works some means of controlling their works for at least a limited time at least gave many of them an incentive to not resort to self-censorship as their main form of such control.
As a side point on the matter of controlling works for a limited duration, I am compelled to add that I do strongly believe that copyright durations are far too long today, and should be shortened drastically, by no less than a factor of 2, maybe even more, and with very minimal, if any opportunities for extension.
I'm not entirely sure if he's trying to deliberately understate it, or if it is just that he may be completely clueless as to what it feels like for the people who are put in that kind of situation.
Copyright is just an extension of the exclusivity that creators had over a work that creators enjoyed in the days before the printing press. Copying was hard enough and error prone that natural checks and balances tended to discourage most (but admittedly not all) from engaging in unauthorized copying. As I said, it didn't stop everyone but it was sufficient. As copying became easier, the only thing that was left was to either shrug and disregard it (in which case many creators would resort to self-censorship as a means of holding onto their exclusivity), or to manufacture a legal structure by which people who disregarded that exclusivity for at least a certain period of time could face punitive action for such behavior. As the law itself becomes increasingly unable to deter people who would violate a copyright, creators are again faced with the same choice of resorting to self-censorship if nothing is done, and reducing the availability of anything that has any hope of becoming a mainstream work to only whatever pop culture demands (oh, and you can bet that it will so laden with DRM and unskippable ads that it will make even what happens today look like a paradise). In the end, it will be a self-serving cycle with no real capacity for diversity or capability to enrich society, the very purpose for which copyright invented in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Javascript's eval can be very useful in general, and in fact, the most useful form of it is when you *are* invoking it on dynamically generated code that simply cannot be as concisely expressed in any other way. That's not to say it's impossible, but it can often be a darn sight more convoluted to not use eval in Javascript to get a particular job done than it would be to write it using statically compilable code. Some may argue that this is a flaw in the design of the language itself, but I would personally be reluctant to quickly discard the feature entirely simply because of its potential for abuse in this particular way. I would suggest that there are almost certainly other ways to achieve the desired ends, but they most probably involve much more complex intermediate goals.
Blocking eval itself isn't generally a solution anyways, since javascript within the browser could invoke 'document write' to place additional code into the page where it is executing, and then simply directly call a function that it dynamically added to the page using such a technique to achieve the exact same thing as what could be done using eval.
I suspect the longer term solution is for browsers to sandbox javascript pretty tightly.... malicious code that detects such sandboxing as an attempt to evade detection as such may not get detected by the browser as problematic, but still won't be able to accomplish anything because it will still be inside of the sandbox, and when the code tries to do something that is prohibited, it can be immediately flagged at that time rather than just trying to detect it at page load time.
Which, regardless of anything that Uber might want to claim about themselves, is only applicable if the drivers are not licensed as cab drivers within the province, and even then, their beef is with the drivers, not the company.
So all that proves is that traffic was sent to imitate an ad view, not that the ads were actually displayed anywhere.
Which portions of the Highway Traffic Act are they alleged to actually be in violation of?
If they were no more specific in their actual allegation than the article was, Uber can win this one easily.
If the ads were unseen, how do they know they were displayed in the first place?
I'm not sure what you were reading.... From the page linked to the summary:
So I'm not sure where you got 5 times the mass from.
In fact, if we assume composition similar to earth, a planet 1.6 times the size of earth would have 4.096 (1.6 cubed) times the mass of earth
Because gravitational pull falls with the square of the distance, we could divide 1.6 cubed times the mass of earth by the square of 1.6 gives us exactly 1.6 times earth's gravitational pull at the surface of the planet. Thus, assuming identical composition, surface gravity scales linearly with diameter. While it probably doesn't have absolutely identical composition to Earth, there is not yet any compelling reason at this time to speculate that its composition would be drastically different either. Certainly if its density were 25% heavier than that of earth, then the mass (and surface gravity) would be exactly as you described. According to the page, we do not know that information yet, however.
It certainly is in two-party consent jurisdictions.
Yes, but because gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, by being further from the center of mass in a larger planet, the net gravitational effect where the density of the planet is otherwise the same is scales linearly with the diameter. Assuming earth-like composition, the planet is 1.6G at its surface.
.... when the issue of openly recording people who are in a public place is still legally questionable?
... now they know how they would react. Mission accomplished, right?
Over an open flame?
I can see wheels being in a production environment, but fire?
Hmmm.... not sure what happened to my attempt at putting html into my commment. Let's try that again (and hit preview before submit this time...)
For chrissake look the phrase up in a dictionary.
Okay, that time it worked.
That only means that Uber's workers are more likely to fall under the classification of independent contractors instead of employees, it has no bearing on whether Uber is a taxi company or not. There is nothing inherent to being a taxi company that prohibits hiring independent contractors, who typically supply their own tools and equipment to perform a job. and any such prohibition on the part of the company, while certainly entirely permissible for a company to do, is a reflection of an employer-employee status being more likely to be applicable, and not indicative of whether it is or is not a taxi company.
Except that you are still using instrumentality to assist in resolving detail.... the phrase "naked eye" as applied to being able to see something means literally that... that using just the eye alone, without anything else, it can be seen.
For chrissake, look the phrase up in a dictionary.
Well, the phrase "naked eye" when applied to being able to view something corresponds to being able to see it *without* the aid of any instrumentation. The lens that is already within the eye is as naturally part of the eye as your skin is of your body, so the fact that lens plays a part in its optics is irrelevant.
Sure... do you happen to know of one close by or something?
If we can't cough up the money to go to the moon, how in the hell does anyone think that we'll cough up the money to get to Mars?
Can someone explain to me how using a lens to see something qualifies as "with the naked eye", exactly?
I thought Slashdot was a nerd hangout...
Geeze....
Why would you assume that Allah would need to or even want revenge for such a thing? Assuming, for the moment, that Allah is actually opposed to gay marriage, and assuming that said deity even actually cared about what it was that we do, what would be the point of an omniscient and omnipotent being giving humans what is supposedly a free will if said deity was going to be petty and actually try to micromanage human behavior via swift vengeance for every infraction?
True.... which is why most creative works that had any chance of distribution were patronized by wealthy people.
Oh, and the library of Alexandria had money to pay its workers to make copies as well, so that's why it worked. Relatively speaking though, such patronized copying facilities were rare enough that they did not practically pose any threat to the initial creator's exclususivity.
Why not? Publishers do it all the time.... Region control on DVD's and DRM are perfect current examples of self-censorship... although not necessarily placed there by the creator personally, the publisher was still authorized by the creator to make copies of the work, so the creator would certainly be a willing participant to having such restrictions, even if they did not put them there themselves. Of course, the incentive behind publication in such cases has more to do with monetary reward than anything else, and I don't actually advocate such incentives as being worthwhile in the first place.
But outside of that, do you seriously think that all created works are published? Do you think that everyone who makes a creative work even *wants* to always publish it? Costs for creating works that one does not intend to publish is not necessarily high... and may often be something that is just a natural outpouring of that person's creativity, rather than a specific endeavor that is undertaken by the person to specifically create a particular work, so the matter of time investment in creating the work is immaterial. The simple fact that they have created the work at all is sufficient incentive for them to create it. This happens ALL the time... probably millions of times every single day, in fact.
And of course, such self-censorship is extraordinarily effective as a copy-control mechanism, because after all, how anyone copy the work if they don't know it even exists, or if they did, because they just don't have access to it? But the problem with this is that self-censorship does not offer any benefit to society... society cannot be enriched by a creative work that it does not have access to, so copyright gives such a creator the means to control their interests while still publishing (and thereby ideally helping to enrich society through an availability of diverse creative works).
If that were true, there would be no point to explicitly putting things under something along the lines of a creative commons copyright license where the intent is to give away the work for free. What investment can one possibly recoup with that? Such copyright distribution mechanisms still differ significantly from public domain because they generally still have provisions in place on the purpose or how it is copied, such as allowing free copies for educational use or personal study only, or allowing free copies as long as the existing copyright notice and attributions are kept intact.
Copyright is, and has always been, about control... no more and no less than literally control over the "right to copy". The argument I am suggesting, however, is that allowing the creators to possess such control for a limited time even while they distribute the work is ultimately beneficial, since it gives those creators an incentive to publish (and ideally enrich society in so doing) where they may have otherwise utilized self-censorship as their preferred means of copy control, and society would not have be
You are, I assume, aware that the days of the Alexandria library copying all works that entered the city were well over a thousand years before the printing press was even developed, let alone copyright created. Also, creators who did not want their works copied could prevent Alexandria from copying them by simply not going into the city... employing self-censorship as a means of copy control, which has always existed.
Copyright (by which I mean largely the form that it exists today and not as a collusion contract created by publishers) had an intended purpose that was to maximize the enrichment to society that can be obtained by the society having access to diverse kinds of creative works, and offering the creators of those works some means of controlling their works for at least a limited time at least gave many of them an incentive to not resort to self-censorship as their main form of such control.
As a side point on the matter of controlling works for a limited duration, I am compelled to add that I do strongly believe that copyright durations are far too long today, and should be shortened drastically, by no less than a factor of 2, maybe even more, and with very minimal, if any opportunities for extension.
"Troubling"... "not supposed to happen".
I'm not entirely sure if he's trying to deliberately understate it, or if it is just that he may be completely clueless as to what it feels like for the people who are put in that kind of situation.
Copyright is just an extension of the exclusivity that creators had over a work that creators enjoyed in the days before the printing press. Copying was hard enough and error prone that natural checks and balances tended to discourage most (but admittedly not all) from engaging in unauthorized copying. As I said, it didn't stop everyone but it was sufficient. As copying became easier, the only thing that was left was to either shrug and disregard it (in which case many creators would resort to self-censorship as a means of holding onto their exclusivity), or to manufacture a legal structure by which people who disregarded that exclusivity for at least a certain period of time could face punitive action for such behavior. As the law itself becomes increasingly unable to deter people who would violate a copyright, creators are again faced with the same choice of resorting to self-censorship if nothing is done, and reducing the availability of anything that has any hope of becoming a mainstream work to only whatever pop culture demands (oh, and you can bet that it will so laden with DRM and unskippable ads that it will make even what happens today look like a paradise). In the end, it will be a self-serving cycle with no real capacity for diversity or capability to enrich society, the very purpose for which copyright invented in the first place.