Agreed. Why is it that people just can't seem to understand that there is a *reason* why all the successful websites are no-bullshit sites ?
By that I mean, for a start:
No. Flash-intros I have to click "skip" to even see the site are not cute, nor do they "brand" you as anything but an annoyance.
It's perfectly acceptable to have text be text. You don't actually have to make all your text-links in the form of small gifs with text on them.
We don't actually *need* a "unique" navigation-system on every site. A menu across the top, or along the left border will do fine thank you.
Not everyone has the same font-size configured. If your design looks fucked in anything but the size you use (i.e. elements come out ontop of eachother) your design sucks.
Look at the Really successful sites. It's no accident that they all follow all of these rules, more or less. You can fully utilize Yahoo, Ebay, Slashdot and Etrade without being forced to deal with any of this crap.
Hate to burst your bubble, but if you'd bothered reading the article (I know -- this is/.) you'd have discovered that the laser is only usable for cutting shapes out of slices of soft cheese. They're using slices 2.5 mm thich, and say that going deeper than 10mm would be "difficult".
The rate is pathethic at that -- they cut with a speed of up to 10mm/second in soft cheese up to 10mm thick. A lethargic mouse with a knife would do better.
In Practice, you're rigth. (if only because noone is likely to be that skilled and that sneaky), but in theory, the code can be fake, and still produce the rigth executable.
It's fully possible (and indeed it's been done) to change the *compiler* so that it on seeing certain instructions, it generates different code, so I could submit to you "source-code" as well as my "proprietary compiler", the source-code would not contain any of your copyrigthed code, but any executable compiled from that source-code with that compiler, would still be derived from your work.
So, you probably think, you'll get around that by demanding also the source-code for the compiler, atleast unless it's a standard one from a third-party that you trust.
Problem is, that doesn't work. The compiler could also be changed so that it recognizes compiling itself, and then does the same trick as above, that is, insert or change instructions relative to what it "should" be doing if it was looking only at the source-code and following the spec.
So, even with "product", "source-code", "compiler" and "source-code for compiler" you cannot be sure that your code ain't in the finished product. Not even after you checked that: the compiler-sourcecode produces the "compiler", that the "compiler" produces the "product" when gives the "source-code". It's all for naugth.
No. I don't think anyone would actually have the guts (or the ability) to pull this off. It could also, atleast in theory, be detected by disassembling the compiler.
You are missing the point. You *may* be rigth that the copyrigth-holder could not get vast amounts of money for the violation, since as you say it's hard to proove monetary damage.
He could however, 100% certain, demand that the violations stop. That is, he could demand, and the court would be certain to agree, that KiSS do not sell a single more player, and recalls from the shops any that are there, until such time as they have removed the copyrigthed mplayer-code, or reached an agreement with the copyrigth-owners.
So, even if you can't (you migth be able to, but as you say, it's not certain) punish them for having ignored the GPL in the past, you most definately CAN demand that they stop doing it from this day onwards. For a company like KiSS that is also a tough pill to swallow. Re-calling thousands of players and stopping all sales of an entire product-line until the sofware is written anew would likely amount to bankruptcy for them.
(ignorant americans)
These individuals weren't in management by chance?
Different kind of people really. A nerd from Chaos-computer-camp in Berlin this summer, a liberal arts majors from Austin and a primary school teacher from Pennsylvania to mention the first three I can think of.
But yes, I confess to knowing a few particularly dense individuals myself... the type that don't know and just don't want to know.
You get those types everywhere. Still, in particular the "just don't *want* to know." type seem particularily common in some american subcultures.
The concept of American (U.S.) prosperity is somewhat overestimated. If I told somebody how much the VAT and income and property taxes would work out to for them based on what they earn and consume here, he'd think you were all insane.
Very likely not. I'm Norwegian, remember ? We've got 24% VAT, for a start. I don't think more than that is common in the US.
If I then explained what you get for what you put in, both in taxes and on the job, he'd decide he's getting screwed.
This is true. In the US it seems a religious doctrine that everything should be privatized, and that makes it magically cheaper and better. Taxes and VAt and suchlike *are* a fair bit higher in i.e. Norway than in the US. But I've seen the jaws of quite a few US-friends drop when I list what you get for those taxes. A start;
All education is free. For everyone.
For your living-costs while taking higher education, everyone gets 1/3rd as stipendium, 2/3rds as a interest-free loan. Thus, even if you are totally broke, and your parents don't have a single cent, you can, without working on the side, study to become for example a doctor.
For healthcare you pay a part yourself, limited upwards to a sum of around $100 a year for everything. ($100 sum - not $100 for each treatment or each doctor.) Everyone who stays legally in the country for over 12 months gets this health-cover. There's no such thing as "medical insurance" and questions like if you're a norwegian citizen or not are irrelevant. You stay legally, for over 12 months == you're in.
You get old, you get a pension to live from. Sure, if you've never worked in your life it won't be very generous, but it'll be sufficient. (minimum is around $1000 a month, but at that rate you get extra to cover housing-costs unless you have very cheap housing.)
Norway's wealthiest 10% grossed 27% of Norway's total income in 2000. On the other hand, America's wealthiest 10% controlled 73% of America's wealth in 1997
That's apples and oranges. In Norway you're looking at income, in the US at *wealth*. Naturally the percentage of wealth is much higher than the one for income.
You're rigth that it's more for the top in the US, but the difference ain't *that* huge. The relevant number is 32% of the total income in the US went to the richest 10%, while in Norway that's only 27%. On the other end of the scale, in Norway the poorest 10% made 4.1% of the total, while in the US they made only 1.8%.
So, if you're an average poor-10% person in Norway, you need to multiply your income by 6.5 to become an average rich-10% person.In the US, you'd need to multiply your income by 17 to manage the same trick.
This is largely the result of your curious one-dollar-one-vote "democratic" system, I think. You have a system where the poor has very very small influence, thus it's no surprise that most changes in the US benefit the rich, and makes the poor even poorer. In 2001 12.7% of the population lived under the poverty-line. A number to be ashamed of for one of the richest nations on the earth.
Still, you're not really arguing that the *average* american couldn't afford the occasional vacation in Europe or Australia or Asia or wherever if he really wanted to.
disposable income and free time, but the average worker gets a vacation allotment of two weeks a year.
Pray tell, what limit exactly imposes this "fixed #" of days for exploration ? What exactly prevents Nasa from extending the mission to make up for a day or two lost ?
You can disagree all you want. Fact is the people at NASA spent thousands of man-hours studying this, odds are their judgement is better than yours.
You also seem to be unaware of how much testing this thing went trough. It's been driven for thousands of tests in terrain as much like the ones they expect on mars as possible.
Storms are extremely unlikely to do anything to the thing, *especially* aslong as it's physically connected to the lander.
Sure, odds are probably 99% that just turning and driving off one of the other two ramps would work fine. But if odds are 99.5% that i'll go well after first doing this lift-retract-settle maneuvre, then that's still definately worth a day or two delay.
They are being extremely cautious because there *are* no small problems when you're dealing with a robotic probe 170 million kilometers away from home.
Being stuck in an airbag. Getting anything entangled around the wheels. Sitting betweent rocks that are too large, all problems that would be trivial to solve -- if someone could go there and untangle the thing.
As it is, a single wrong command can make the probe immobile for life. The mission cost 820$ million.
I think you'd also be a little bit more careful about pushing buttons if you knew that pushing the wrong one *once* could waste $820 million and strand a major part of the science people have worked hard for a decade to land on Mars.
There's no real down-side to being *too* careful. 3 days more or less on the lander is unimportant. They can always extend the mission in the other end if there's still more interesting stuff to do. (planned is 90 days of exploration)
Well. Like you see, not everyone you assume are knee-jerking are really that jerky. Sure, sure, I was flippant. I think it's a serious suprise even to the educated American (I really mostly mean USAian, but that sounds silly.) how dense some people can be. I probably wouldn't have reacted the way I did if not for the fact that I have, on more than one occasion, interacted with Americans that *genuinely* believed for example that Norway is a district in Sweden, that polar-bears roaming the streets in general prevents norwegians from letting their kids play outside and that the average scandinavian has 20 reindeer, drives a snow-mobile and hunts whale in the season.
American media are generally fairly well known over here. So thank you for the informative (and largely accurate imho) overview, but Fox News, Clear Channel and CNN are not exactly unknown over here. Difference is, here they're not the main media, but more seen as tabloids which, as you say, are more about entertainment than information.
Spanish is a good point. It's strange that not basically all Americans speak spanish. I've read that in some districts in the US there's so many native spanish-speakers that the districts should properly be considered dual-language. In Finland everyone learns swedish, inspite of the fact that the swedish minority is only around 3-5%, and swedish and finnish are not even languages in the same language-branch so that takes effort. (distance is like distance between english and swahili)
Still, I guess when it comes to languages the US is not *that* multi-cultural. Maybe there's also some french along the Quebec-border ? And quite likely you've got some "ghettos" of immigrants that speak their only language. But still.
For example, my girlfriend Silvia and me, if we cooperate, can communicate effortlessly in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish (yes, those 3 are similar) English, German, French, Polish and Russian. We're not really special. None of us ever studied languages or anything like that. (I'm in comp.sci, she in economics)
It's also surprising to hear how many Americans where never in other countries than USA and at most Canada. Yes, we understand that USA is a huge country, and that you can travel 1000 miles and still be in your own country. (that's also true for Norway by the way) But to me that's still enormously strange. It's not like you can't afford it, the average American has more money than the average .
If I was easily offended, I'd not be reading or posting on Slashdot. Relax. Infact I marked you "Friend" after you first critisized me, I like people who are willing to offer some opposition, frequently there is a actualy working brain behind.:-)
I don't feel any venom towards the intellect of Americans (indeed I wrote in my second response that Americans are clearly no dumber than anyone else). Nor for the knowledge in general.
In spesifics though, it *is* a rather common impression that Americans, on the average, have a weaker grasp of politics and culture outside of USA than the other way around. It's quite possible, offcourse, that this impression is quite wrong, but you've not done anything to correct it.
Scandinavians in general speak english (and languages in general really, german is the most commonly taugth 3rd language) well. I don't think this is very mysterious. The main reason is probably simply that we are small countries, speaking small languages, thus everyone sees the *point* of learning languages. I know that many english-speakers also see the point, but I've also personally met atleast half a dozen who's expressed sentiments along the line of "Why should I learn , the speak english anyway."
As a scandinavian you don't have that luxury. The fact is, either you learn languages, or you loose the possibility to communicate with foreigners. (it's not very realistic to expect many foreigners to bother learning languages with less than 10 million native speakers.)
Second reason is that we get to hear and use the languages more. For example, in scandinavia all movies, except movies for small kids, are generally subtitled rather than dubbed, so you get used to hearing the original language. (It's my *impression*, correct me if wrong, that in the USA most movies, tv-series, whatever are dubbed.)
Together with music, curriculums in advanced subjects, majority of internet-pages and so on, my guess is that the average Scandinavian young person (say 15-25) spends *atleast* 2-3 hours a day listening to, reading or writing in a foreign language. (Like I'm doing this very moment for example.)
I'm sure, if the average American practiced foreign languages so much, they'd be very very good in them.
Seriously. Anyone who is annoyed at popups has had the choise of installing a decent web-browser and be done with it for ages. Firebird doesn't show any pop-ups. All that happens is that a discreete icon shows up in the statusbar. If you really like, you can click on this icon and say "allow popups from this host". Personally, I take the icon as meaning roughly "consumer-hostile site, consider taking your bussiness elsewhere."
So, to a person with a decent browser (a browser that forces you to deal with popups when you don't wish to do is not "decent".) all popups do is act as a warning-sign for sleazy bussinesses. Unless you want to, you never even see them.
I concur that completely analysing a language *only* from a large sample of example-text is very hard. And it is probably impossible to ever be 100% certain if you got the precise correct meaning.
But I also feel very confident that if you visited a normally stocked library with only say chinese books (assuming you have no experience with chinese in any shape or form) and spent a week there, you'd be able to get quite confident about quite a number of words.
Pictures are nice. It doesn't take a genius to note that under pictures of a horse it often (not always) says "XOQZWR", nor to infer, after more studying, that if under pictures of multiple horses it says "XOQZWEER", then that just *migth* have something to do with plural form. Ofcourse it helps if the patterns repeat. If cows are similarily marked "FOPS" and "FOPEES" it strengthens your hypothesis.
Knowing a few nouns give you a string to pull on. Does it frequently say XOG in texts of wildly varying types ? If so, odds are that XOG is some sort of "and" or "or" word.
Frequently used words are probably shorter (on the average) than less used words in all languages. It's no accident that it's called "I", "you", "hallo", but "incomprehencible" and "mythologie".
Even if a word starts out long, if it is frequently used, people tend to invent shortenings for it. "Automobile" is long. So, in Germany thay have shortened it to "auto". In Norway it is shortened to "bil". Personbeforderungskraftwagen is a bit of a tongue-breaker, so noone says anything but PKW. Similarily Sport-Utility-Vehicle is a mouthful, so it's a "SUV".
There's plenty of ends to start pulling on. Maybe it's just cultural bias. But to me, a crypto-student it looks as if using a unknown (or invented) natural language is an extremely weak cipher.
It's not my fault that you easily take offense. Fact is you have to be relatively dense to think that "Jon Johansen acquitted in Norwegian court", an article from a.no domain, requires/swedish/.
You migth like it or not, but a gross lack of knowledge about the world beyond nose is also frequently displayed by people from good old US of A.
Now, it *is* true the people from the USA are on the average no smarter, and no dumber than people from elsewhere. To the degree my guess seemed to indicate something else, I agree it was somewhat inflamatory. I want to apologize for that. Americans are clealy no dumber than the average person.
I still think though, that particular classes of confusion are particularily likely in Americans. Such as a confusion about the fact that Norwegians and Norwegian media in general writes and speaks Norwegian. (duh!)
We don't actually talk swedish in Norway. Let me guess, you're American ?
Nor are laws from the USA relevant in the least. There is nothing similar to your "Double Jeopardy" laws in Norway, if the prosecutor appeals (as in this case) your guilt in a single case can be tried twice. Still, the court leans heavily towards following the decision in the first instance unless there's heavy new arguments, or obvious procedural errors in the lower court.
Thus this was no big surprise.
By the way, nothing new happened today. All that happened is that the time-limit for appealing to the supreme court (3 weeks I think) came and went without any appeal being logded by Okokrim, thus the verdict is final.
Seriously, I see your point. What *would* help with problems such as that one is to have collaborative filtering.
For example, a client could use it's own statistics for tokens it's seen a few times earlier, while asking the collaborative database for an opinion on this new token "v|QR@".
The trick is to ensure the integrity of the collaborative database. it'd do no good if spammers could simply subscribe and submit their spams as "non-spam". For example a rating-system that ignores (or heavily down-adjusts the significanse of) users who frequently disagree with the overwhelming majority of users migth work.
I'm not saying it's easy. Only that filtering works okay for lots of people, me included, today. And I don't see any reason why we can't manage to *atleast* maintain the status quo, even faced with new spammer "cleverness".
To a Bayesian filter such "cleverness" is even more damning than just stating plain-out what you want to say.
Probably my legitimate mail *seldom* talks about "viagra" or "refinancing", but the rarity of those words in my mail is nothing agains the unlikeliness that I'd write "v1@gr@" or "r3f|n@nc|ng".
In other words, such clever tricks migth work. Once.
We ain't getting no further. I just don't agree. There's tons of things you migth not want everyone to know about, but which are still 100% moral by any reasonable definition of moral.
I've already given one example. In general all actions which you prefer private fall in this category (unless you happen to think that any wish for privacy is immoral.)
Same is true for anything you wish could be said in public, but which you suspect the general public is too uptigth about to accept without negative consequences for yourself.
Very funny. It's true that it's possible that two mp3s exist with the same md5-hash. But it's very very VERY unlikely.
There's 128bit in a md5 hash. The hash is pretty darn close to random. (that is, there's no known way of finding collisions significantly better than just trying randomly)
So, with 2^128+1 mp3s, you'd *certainly* have atleast two with identical hash. To get 50% chanse of a collision you'd need around sqrt(2^128) which happens to be 2^64 mp3s.
For comparison, there are about 2^32 (well, between 2^32 and 2^33) people on earth. So you'd expect to see the first collision around the same time when each and every person on earth has 2^32 or 4 billion unique mp3s. (remember, they must all be unique, people copying from eachothers or ripping with identical software getting bit-exact copies won't help.)
Very VERY unlikely to have happens. The odds that there exist today two or more mp3s that are different, but with the same md5-hash is certainly no larger than 1 in a million. Probably less than 1 in a billion.
Yeah. I noticed. I guess I was a bit crass. It's just that, to me it seems your rule will lead to conformity. The rule pretty much defines "moral" as "accepted by the majority" or even as "uncontroversial". I don't agree with that.
Besides, it's just a changed (and poorer) version of Kants imperative. You should act in a way so that your actions could serve as a guidance to others. No, that's not at all the same. Because I migth act in a certain way, and wish others to follow the same rule. Which would be moral by Kant, but immoral by your rule, unless the majority already agreed with me.
Your Jesus-phrase is irrelevant to anyone non-christian (i.e. the large majority). It's also useless to christians, because all it does is ask if you yourself consider something likely to please the hypothetical Jesus. So, to a christian all the sentence says is: "It's moral if you think it is." which is pretty useless.
Or you live in a society with fanatics. Face it, even though someone migth not wish the entire world to know that he enjoys dressing up as a chamber-maid and being whipped by his mistress, it doesn't follow that doing so is immoral in any sense.
True. There exist some, extremely rare (by your own admittance) situations where rapidly accelerating is your best chance.
However, this argument is extremely weak, for a multitude of reasons, starting with:
A speed-limiter doesn't limit acceleration, it limits *speed* (duh!). There's very few situations where accelerating from say 80 mph is a reasonable way out of a tricky situation. (most of the situations where acclerating migth be the answer are low-speed situations.)
There are almost certainly many more situations in which you'll be saved by *not* having to meet the neighbours kid in 100+ mph. The existence of situations where speed-limiters are harmful is not sufficient to proove thei're bad: you must also show that those situations are more common (and/or more serious) than those situations in which speed-limiters are beneficial.
Blabla and no numbers. And no, I don't particularily feel like doing your research for you. By the way, the term "highway" that I quoted includes publicly accessible paved and unpaved roads. You're rigth that there's a lot less expressway, only about 3500km of your road-network is expressway. (okay, so that's 1998 numbers, I'm sure it's grown since then, feel free to say so if you've got newer numbers.)
The UK *does* have a lot of road, afterall, still comparing to Norway, you've got a smaller area, and, inspite of this you have got 4 times as much highway. There *are* tons of roads in the UK. It's only that there's also tons of people. 4 times the roads. 15 times the people.
Doesn't change anything. Really. Look, be sensible about this, it's a detail and there's no need to get all defensive on me.
Fact is, there are a lot of countries with a lot lower population-density than the UK. It is logical that when there's a lot of area, and few people, then there will also be a lot of road compared to few people.
I don't have numbers for "road" in the UK, nor in for example Norway, Sweden, Iceland or Finland, but I find it quite unlikely that the UK has such a *vastly* higher road-to-highway ratio than all of those others.
You migth have ben led to believe otherwise, but the UK is a *small* country (less than 225000 km^2), with a LOT of people (over 60 million). This is not a recipe for "world record" in road/capita. For comparison, Norway has 307000 km^2, that is *more* land-area than the UK, with a population of 4.5 million, 13 times lower density *will* lead to more roads/capita. (AND more highways/capita)
Look, if you've got actual numbers that say otherwise, please post them. If you're just rambling and annoyed that you're wrong, even about such a miniscule detail, get over it.
I think UK motorists conveniently like to forget that we have more miles of road per capita than anywhere else.
Bull. The UK has about 60 million people, and around 370000 km of highways, making an average of 161 people pr km of highway.
Many many MANY smaller countries beat this by a wide margin. For example, Norway has 4.5 million people and 91000 km of highway for an average of only 49 people pr km of highway.
The GPL defines what is considered derivative and what is not.
Sorry, but you're wrong. It's a common misunderstanding, but that does not make it any less wrong, or any less serious.
Copyrigth-law defines what is considered a derivative work, and what is not. There is nothing the GPL can do, or attempts to do, to change the definition of derivative work from the one in copyrigth-law.
What the README for Linux (Not the GPL !) *does* do is to state, that the developers do not consider any userspace program merely running under Linux as a derived work. Very likely a judge would agree with this based on copyrigth-law alone, so the statement is fairly moot.
What the statement *does* do is to prevent some misleaded kernel-developer from even claiming something else. The doctrine of "estoppel" prevents a person or entity from claiming two different conflicting things at one time if a third party is hurt by the claim. Thus, the claim in the README that userspace is unrestricted prevents any copyrigth-owner from claiming the oposite in court.
Slashdot Mirror
By that I mean, for a start:
- No. Flash-intros I have to click "skip" to even see the site are not cute, nor do they "brand" you as anything but an annoyance.
- It's perfectly acceptable to have text be text. You don't actually have to make all your text-links in the form of small gifs with text on them.
- We don't actually *need* a "unique" navigation-system on every site. A menu across the top, or along the left border will do fine thank you.
- Not everyone has the same font-size configured. If your design looks fucked in anything but the size you use (i.e. elements come out ontop of eachother) your design sucks.
Look at the Really successful sites. It's no accident that they all follow all of these rules, more or less. You can fully utilize Yahoo, Ebay, Slashdot and Etrade without being forced to deal with any of this crap.The rate is pathethic at that -- they cut with a speed of up to 10mm/second in soft cheese up to 10mm thick. A lethargic mouse with a knife would do better.
It's fully possible (and indeed it's been done) to change the *compiler* so that it on seeing certain instructions, it generates different code, so I could submit to you "source-code" as well as my "proprietary compiler", the source-code would not contain any of your copyrigthed code, but any executable compiled from that source-code with that compiler, would still be derived from your work.
So, you probably think, you'll get around that by demanding also the source-code for the compiler, atleast unless it's a standard one from a third-party that you trust.
Problem is, that doesn't work. The compiler could also be changed so that it recognizes compiling itself, and then does the same trick as above, that is, insert or change instructions relative to what it "should" be doing if it was looking only at the source-code and following the spec.
So, even with "product", "source-code", "compiler" and "source-code for compiler" you cannot be sure that your code ain't in the finished product. Not even after you checked that: the compiler-sourcecode produces the "compiler", that the "compiler" produces the "product" when gives the "source-code". It's all for naugth.
No. I don't think anyone would actually have the guts (or the ability) to pull this off. It could also, atleast in theory, be detected by disassembling the compiler.
He could however, 100% certain, demand that the violations stop. That is, he could demand, and the court would be certain to agree, that KiSS do not sell a single more player, and recalls from the shops any that are there, until such time as they have removed the copyrigthed mplayer-code, or reached an agreement with the copyrigth-owners.
So, even if you can't (you migth be able to, but as you say, it's not certain) punish them for having ignored the GPL in the past, you most definately CAN demand that they stop doing it from this day onwards. For a company like KiSS that is also a tough pill to swallow. Re-calling thousands of players and stopping all sales of an entire product-line until the sofware is written anew would likely amount to bankruptcy for them.
Different kind of people really. A nerd from Chaos-computer-camp in Berlin this summer, a liberal arts majors from Austin and a primary school teacher from Pennsylvania to mention the first three I can think of.
But yes, I confess to knowing a few particularly dense individuals myself... the type that don't know and just don't want to know.
You get those types everywhere. Still, in particular the "just don't *want* to know." type seem particularily common in some american subcultures.
The concept of American (U.S.) prosperity is somewhat overestimated. If I told somebody how much the VAT and income and property taxes would work out to for them based on what they earn and consume here, he'd think you were all insane.
Very likely not. I'm Norwegian, remember ? We've got 24% VAT, for a start. I don't think more than that is common in the US.
If I then explained what you get for what you put in, both in taxes and on the job, he'd decide he's getting screwed.
This is true. In the US it seems a religious doctrine that everything should be privatized, and that makes it magically cheaper and better. Taxes and VAt and suchlike *are* a fair bit higher in i.e. Norway than in the US. But I've seen the jaws of quite a few US-friends drop when I list what you get for those taxes. A start;
Norway's wealthiest 10% grossed 27% of Norway's total income in 2000. On the other hand, America's wealthiest 10% controlled 73% of America's wealth in 1997
That's apples and oranges. In Norway you're looking at income, in the US at *wealth*. Naturally the percentage of wealth is much higher than the one for income.
You're rigth that it's more for the top in the US, but the difference ain't *that* huge. The relevant number is 32% of the total income in the US went to the richest 10%, while in Norway that's only 27%. On the other end of the scale, in Norway the poorest 10% made 4.1% of the total, while in the US they made only 1.8%.
So, if you're an average poor-10% person in Norway, you need to multiply your income by 6.5 to become an average rich-10% person.In the US, you'd need to multiply your income by 17 to manage the same trick.
This is largely the result of your curious one-dollar-one-vote "democratic" system, I think. You have a system where the poor has very very small influence, thus it's no surprise that most changes in the US benefit the rich, and makes the poor even poorer. In 2001 12.7% of the population lived under the poverty-line. A number to be ashamed of for one of the richest nations on the earth.
Still, you're not really arguing that the *average* american couldn't afford the occasional vacation in Europe or Australia or Asia or wherever if he really wanted to.
disposable income and free time, but the average worker gets a vacation allotment of two weeks a year.
What is it they say ? Ev
You can disagree all you want. Fact is the people at NASA spent thousands of man-hours studying this, odds are their judgement is better than yours.
You also seem to be unaware of how much testing this thing went trough. It's been driven for thousands of tests in terrain as much like the ones they expect on mars as possible.
Storms are extremely unlikely to do anything to the thing, *especially* aslong as it's physically connected to the lander.
Sure, odds are probably 99% that just turning and driving off one of the other two ramps would work fine. But if odds are 99.5% that i'll go well after first doing this lift-retract-settle maneuvre, then that's still definately worth a day or two delay.
Being stuck in an airbag. Getting anything entangled around the wheels. Sitting betweent rocks that are too large, all problems that would be trivial to solve -- if someone could go there and untangle the thing.
As it is, a single wrong command can make the probe immobile for life. The mission cost 820$ million.
I think you'd also be a little bit more careful about pushing buttons if you knew that pushing the wrong one *once* could waste $820 million and strand a major part of the science people have worked hard for a decade to land on Mars.
There's no real down-side to being *too* careful. 3 days more or less on the lander is unimportant. They can always extend the mission in the other end if there's still more interesting stuff to do. (planned is 90 days of exploration)
American media are generally fairly well known over here. So thank you for the informative (and largely accurate imho) overview, but Fox News, Clear Channel and CNN are not exactly unknown over here. Difference is, here they're not the main media, but more seen as tabloids which, as you say, are more about entertainment than information.
Spanish is a good point. It's strange that not basically all Americans speak spanish. I've read that in some districts in the US there's so many native spanish-speakers that the districts should properly be considered dual-language. In Finland everyone learns swedish, inspite of the fact that the swedish minority is only around 3-5%, and swedish and finnish are not even languages in the same language-branch so that takes effort. (distance is like distance between english and swahili)
Still, I guess when it comes to languages the US is not *that* multi-cultural. Maybe there's also some french along the Quebec-border ? And quite likely you've got some "ghettos" of immigrants that speak their only language. But still.
For example, my girlfriend Silvia and me, if we cooperate, can communicate effortlessly in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish (yes, those 3 are similar) English, German, French, Polish and Russian. We're not really special. None of us ever studied languages or anything like that. (I'm in comp.sci, she in economics)
It's also surprising to hear how many Americans where never in other countries than USA and at most Canada. Yes, we understand that USA is a huge country, and that you can travel 1000 miles and still be in your own country. (that's also true for Norway by the way) But to me that's still enormously strange. It's not like you can't afford it, the average American has more money than the average . If I was easily offended, I'd not be reading or posting on Slashdot. Relax. Infact I marked you "Friend" after you first critisized me, I like people who are willing to offer some opposition, frequently there is a actualy working brain behind. :-)
I don't feel any venom towards the intellect of Americans (indeed I wrote in my second response that Americans are clearly no dumber than anyone else). Nor for the knowledge in general.
In spesifics though, it *is* a rather common impression that Americans, on the average, have a weaker grasp of politics and culture outside of USA than the other way around. It's quite possible, offcourse, that this impression is quite wrong, but you've not done anything to correct it.
Scandinavians in general speak english (and languages in general really, german is the most commonly taugth 3rd language) well. I don't think this is very mysterious. The main reason is probably simply that we are small countries, speaking small languages, thus everyone sees the *point* of learning languages. I know that many english-speakers also see the point, but I've also personally met atleast half a dozen who's expressed sentiments along the line of "Why should I learn , the speak english anyway."
As a scandinavian you don't have that luxury. The fact is, either you learn languages, or you loose the possibility to communicate with foreigners. (it's not very realistic to expect many foreigners to bother learning languages with less than 10 million native speakers.)
Second reason is that we get to hear and use the languages more. For example, in scandinavia all movies, except movies for small kids, are generally subtitled rather than dubbed, so you get used to hearing the original language. (It's my *impression*, correct me if wrong, that in the USA most movies, tv-series, whatever are dubbed.)
Together with music, curriculums in advanced subjects, majority of internet-pages and so on, my guess is that the average Scandinavian young person (say 15-25) spends *atleast* 2-3 hours a day listening to, reading or writing in a foreign language. (Like I'm doing this very moment for example.)
I'm sure, if the average American practiced foreign languages so much, they'd be very very good in them.
However, the context of this story was to avoid annoying comercial popups. And for that, it works fine.
So, to a person with a decent browser (a browser that forces you to deal with popups when you don't wish to do is not "decent".) all popups do is act as a warning-sign for sleazy bussinesses. Unless you want to, you never even see them.
I concur that completely analysing a language *only* from a large sample of example-text is very hard. And it is probably impossible to ever be 100% certain if you got the precise correct meaning.
But I also feel very confident that if you visited a normally stocked library with only say chinese books (assuming you have no experience with chinese in any shape or form) and spent a week there, you'd be able to get quite confident about quite a number of words.
Pictures are nice. It doesn't take a genius to note that under pictures of a horse it often (not always) says "XOQZWR", nor to infer, after more studying, that if under pictures of multiple horses it says "XOQZWEER", then that just *migth* have something to do with plural form. Ofcourse it helps if the patterns repeat. If cows are similarily marked "FOPS" and "FOPEES" it strengthens your hypothesis.
Knowing a few nouns give you a string to pull on. Does it frequently say XOG in texts of wildly varying types ? If so, odds are that XOG is some sort of "and" or "or" word.
Frequently used words are probably shorter (on the average) than less used words in all languages. It's no accident that it's called "I", "you", "hallo", but "incomprehencible" and "mythologie".
Even if a word starts out long, if it is frequently used, people tend to invent shortenings for it. "Automobile" is long. So, in Germany thay have shortened it to "auto". In Norway it is shortened to "bil". Personbeforderungskraftwagen is a bit of a tongue-breaker, so noone says anything but PKW. Similarily Sport-Utility-Vehicle is a mouthful, so it's a "SUV".
There's plenty of ends to start pulling on. Maybe it's just cultural bias. But to me, a crypto-student it looks as if using a unknown (or invented) natural language is an extremely weak cipher.
You migth like it or not, but a gross lack of knowledge about the world beyond nose is also frequently displayed by people from good old US of A.
Now, it *is* true the people from the USA are on the average no smarter, and no dumber than people from elsewhere. To the degree my guess seemed to indicate something else, I agree it was somewhat inflamatory. I want to apologize for that. Americans are clealy no dumber than the average person.
I still think though, that particular classes of confusion are particularily likely in Americans. Such as a confusion about the fact that Norwegians and Norwegian media in general writes and speaks Norwegian. (duh!)
Nor are laws from the USA relevant in the least. There is nothing similar to your "Double Jeopardy" laws in Norway, if the prosecutor appeals (as in this case) your guilt in a single case can be tried twice. Still, the court leans heavily towards following the decision in the first instance unless there's heavy new arguments, or obvious procedural errors in the lower court.
Thus this was no big surprise.
By the way, nothing new happened today. All that happened is that the time-limit for appealing to the supreme court (3 weeks I think) came and went without any appeal being logded by Okokrim, thus the verdict is final.
Seriously, I see your point. What *would* help with problems such as that one is to have collaborative filtering.
For example, a client could use it's own statistics for tokens it's seen a few times earlier, while asking the collaborative database for an opinion on this new token "v|QR@".
The trick is to ensure the integrity of the collaborative database. it'd do no good if spammers could simply subscribe and submit their spams as "non-spam". For example a rating-system that ignores (or heavily down-adjusts the significanse of) users who frequently disagree with the overwhelming majority of users migth work.
I'm not saying it's easy. Only that filtering works okay for lots of people, me included, today. And I don't see any reason why we can't manage to *atleast* maintain the status quo, even faced with new spammer "cleverness".
To a Bayesian filter such "cleverness" is even more damning than just stating plain-out what you want to say.
Probably my legitimate mail *seldom* talks about "viagra" or "refinancing", but the rarity of those words in my mail is nothing agains the unlikeliness that I'd write "v1@gr@" or "r3f|n@nc|ng".
In other words, such clever tricks migth work. Once.
I've already given one example. In general all actions which you prefer private fall in this category (unless you happen to think that any wish for privacy is immoral.)
Same is true for anything you wish could be said in public, but which you suspect the general public is too uptigth about to accept without negative consequences for yourself.
There's 128bit in a md5 hash. The hash is pretty darn close to random. (that is, there's no known way of finding collisions significantly better than just trying randomly)
So, with 2^128+1 mp3s, you'd *certainly* have atleast two with identical hash. To get 50% chanse of a collision you'd need around sqrt(2^128) which happens to be 2^64 mp3s.
For comparison, there are about 2^32 (well, between 2^32 and 2^33) people on earth. So you'd expect to see the first collision around the same time when each and every person on earth has 2^32 or 4 billion unique mp3s. (remember, they must all be unique, people copying from eachothers or ripping with identical software getting bit-exact copies won't help.)
Very VERY unlikely to have happens. The odds that there exist today two or more mp3s that are different, but with the same md5-hash is certainly no larger than 1 in a million. Probably less than 1 in a billion.
Besides, it's just a changed (and poorer) version of Kants imperative. You should act in a way so that your actions could serve as a guidance to others. No, that's not at all the same. Because I migth act in a certain way, and wish others to follow the same rule. Which would be moral by Kant, but immoral by your rule, unless the majority already agreed with me.
Your Jesus-phrase is irrelevant to anyone non-christian (i.e. the large majority). It's also useless to christians, because all it does is ask if you yourself consider something likely to please the hypothetical Jesus. So, to a christian all the sentence says is: "It's moral if you think it is." which is pretty useless.
immoral is not the same as unaccepted.
However, this argument is extremely weak, for a multitude of reasons, starting with:
The UK *does* have a lot of road, afterall, still comparing to Norway, you've got a smaller area, and, inspite of this you have got 4 times as much highway. There *are* tons of roads in the UK. It's only that there's also tons of people. 4 times the roads. 15 times the people.
Fact is, there are a lot of countries with a lot lower population-density than the UK. It is logical that when there's a lot of area, and few people, then there will also be a lot of road compared to few people.
I don't have numbers for "road" in the UK, nor in for example Norway, Sweden, Iceland or Finland, but I find it quite unlikely that the UK has such a *vastly* higher road-to-highway ratio than all of those others.
You migth have ben led to believe otherwise, but the UK is a *small* country (less than 225000 km^2), with a LOT of people (over 60 million). This is not a recipe for "world record" in road/capita. For comparison, Norway has 307000 km^2, that is *more* land-area than the UK, with a population of 4.5 million, 13 times lower density *will* lead to more roads/capita. (AND more highways/capita)
Look, if you've got actual numbers that say otherwise, please post them. If you're just rambling and annoyed that you're wrong, even about such a miniscule detail, get over it.
Bull. The UK has about 60 million people, and around 370000 km of highways, making an average of 161 people pr km of highway.
Many many MANY smaller countries beat this by a wide margin. For example, Norway has 4.5 million people and 91000 km of highway for an average of only 49 people pr km of highway.
Sorry, but you're wrong. It's a common misunderstanding, but that does not make it any less wrong, or any less serious.
Copyrigth-law defines what is considered a derivative work, and what is not. There is nothing the GPL can do, or attempts to do, to change the definition of derivative work from the one in copyrigth-law.
What the README for Linux (Not the GPL !) *does* do is to state, that the developers do not consider any userspace program merely running under Linux as a derived work. Very likely a judge would agree with this based on copyrigth-law alone, so the statement is fairly moot.
What the statement *does* do is to prevent some misleaded kernel-developer from even claiming something else. The doctrine of "estoppel" prevents a person or entity from claiming two different conflicting things at one time if a third party is hurt by the claim. Thus, the claim in the README that userspace is unrestricted prevents any copyrigth-owner from claiming the oposite in court.