It is quite probable that someone used your son's bank account to laundry money. Some guys in that line of work may make it appear that it was _you_. I would report it in writing to the bank, with a receipt, that I would keep carefully.
People cheated on elections since elections exist.
I stopped reading your post after I read your subject because if you really believe that paper ballots are less secure than computer voting, you have got something very wrong - or maybe I have, because I can't think of any way to falsify all ballots at once if you're using paper, but this is trivially simple if you're using computers.
First of all, I believe that paper ballots and electronic voting are simply equally insecure, but that you can make -- with proper procedure -- electronic voting less insecure than paper ballots. More on that on the end, so read on (and try to read on my old post, too, you'll find it interesting). Second, come on, you have not seen BSG? It's quite simple, with a sleight of hand, to exchange a ballot box for another one, falsified and stuffed with the votes we want. Presto! You exchanged all votes at once for that box.
With electronic voting, you can't even verify whether it was counted correctly (you can neither have a look at it while it is counted, nor can you make a recount without accounting for the possibility that all the numbers changed) - the only check you have are the exit polls, and they can be doctored, too, or - easier - will be denounced by the winner as incorrect even when they have a good track record. With paper ballots, however, everyone can come and watch over the counting (at least it's that way here - could be that it's illegal to do that where you are).
Recounting is: (1) as the recent USofAn history shows, unpractical, and (2) only at most as reliable as the counting. So, I think recounting is overrated. But anyway, no, we can watch the count here. But as I said, in US 2000 election, no one (or at least not enough people) cared enough to show up. You cannot see if your vote counted correctly in a paper-ballot vote, too. Why? Because vote anonymity is important to democracy (so your boss can't fire you if you vote the "wrong" way [*]). My point is: timing is everything if you want to cheat in an election. Electronic voting shortens uncertainty time, so it's harder to cheat in an electronic voting election. The part that is really important (at least IMHO) in cheating an election is tabulating the votes -- at least one 1970s BR election I can recall had a deep tabulation-cheat-suspicion (nothing was ever proven, of course) and I am pretty sure that other countries have their tabulation-cheat stories, too (fictional districts added etc). As for the machines, and the procedure, all I have to say is: read my post -- the important thing there is that the work of checking things up is thorough and distributed, so big errors do not go unnoticed. When I worked at the DA's office during an election, we checked exaustively each of the machines in our voting district. We changed the date, started the machines, summed them up, uploaded the results to the central computing, saw the results on each machine. The machine did not have any way of knowing it was not election day: some of them we punched votes all day long, so it could not know oh, I have few votes, so it must be check day instead of election day; some we tested once, some twice, some ten times and nome not at all. We kept detailed records of the testing. If most small-town DAs and electoral judges were so thorough as we were, I think it was impossible to miss any tampering. At election day, we checked and rechecked every single seal on the machines, and more than once, we threw out one machine because the seal was not signed or misaligned (we can use paper ballot boxes as a backup, but usually the backup machines -- all tested, too -- were enough)
I could write more, but I think this suffices to see that voting machines will always be less secure than paper ballots. So, I'll keep my paper ballots, thank you very much. And if I see a voting machine in my district, I'll make use of Article 20 (4).
Paper ballots are falsifiable. You can easily stuff/switch paper ballots. The security in an election process, electronic or otherwise, is in the process itself. If the machines are tested, and their state is always checked by parties' officials before the election begins, they are as safe as paper ballots that are sealed by said parties' officials -- with the advantage that you know the results quicker, with less opportunity to magic tricks. Of course it helps having more than one (or two) parties. Oh, and it also helps if you have a single data interchange standard for the whole country. I have a post from three years ago (#8944789) detailing how stuff works here in Brasil, for your entertainment:
Oh, yes, I will repeat myself over and over... by hummassa (157160) on 2004.04.22 20:06 (#8944789)
Till these topics die.
I live in Brasil. We have had voting machines in the last 12-14 years (yes, twelve to fourteen -- it depends the size of the city you are in). Brazilians here: the first election here in Belo Horizonte to use the machines were the mayoral (and city council, state representation, governor, house and senate) before FHC was elected (as I count it, 2 years + 8 years + 1 1/2 = 11,5 years). I know it, because I was "mesário" (election "table" official? election "clerk"? what is a good English translation?) in the previous election, and in the two subsequent elections. IIRC, there were electronic ballot boxes in Rio and Sao Paulo in the election before that (the only two cities larger than Belo Horizonte).
Our voting machines are mainly of three different (internally) models: (a) the old ones, that use VirtuOS (*) as the OS, (b) the new ones, that use WinCE as the OS, and (c) the newest and deprecated ones that have the second printer to print your vote, show it to you inside a clear acrilic case, and mix it with others inside the machine.
Externally, all of them look roughly the same: a box similar to the old "portable computers" of the eighties, with a 5-6" diagonal LCD and a big numerical keypad in the right side of the screen, that has, besides the 0-9 keys, "confirma" (ok), "erro" (cancel), and "branco" (white).
The electoral process (from the point of view of the voter) begins... when you get your first job. If you are a mandatory voter (literate person from 18 to 65) you have to go to Electoral Court and register to vote. In the process of registering, you receive the "Título de Eleitor" (voter id), in which you have the number of you voting section. To change jobs, and specially to get a government job, you have to prove you are a registered and regularized voter (you voted in the last election, or regularized your voting situation after it).
In the election day, you scan the newspapers (or the Superior Electoral Court website), search for the address of your section, and go there. No, there is no transit vote, you can only vote at that address. If you can't get there, you'll have to "justify" your absence.
At the section, you will present your voter id to one the "mesários", and if you don't have it on you, you can still vote (you can show other valid id), but will be delayed. The mesário will search for your name in the vote-ticket sheet, and annex it to your id while you vote. You will sign a receipt in a sheet, and proceed to the voting "booth". Another "mesário" will type your voter id # in a remotely connected keypad, setting the machine in the "ready to vote" mode.
The voting "booth" is really only a desk with the voting machine over it, facing nobody else in the room, and sometimes with a cardboard "cover" around it. You will "dial" the numbers of the candidates, in order. when you dial all the digits of one candidate, a star-trek-like chime rings, his/her face will show up in the screen, and if you digited it right, you hit "ok". otherwise, you hit "cancel" and start over. Afte
my point (if it didn't come all clear like I thought it would) is that when nothing else is said angles are measured in m/m, i.e., radians; not in (pi/180 m/m == degree) or in (pi/200 m/m == grad).
TFA is not really impartial. Let's quote some:
First, let's take the trigonometric functions, SIN (Part 4, Section 3.17.7.287), COS (Part 4, Section 3.17.7.50) and TAN (Part 4, Section 3.17.7.313). Hard to mess these up right? Well, what if you fail to state whether their arguments are angle expressed as radians or degrees? Whoops. Hmmm. Someone failed the math class where they explained that an angle is a "dimensionless derived unit". Explaining, short version for the clicky-impaired: angles are the ratio between two measurements of length -- the length of an arc and the radius of said arc. It got off to a bad start. For the rest of it, it moans about bad revision and wrong formulas, with some reason, but without a lot of substance. I am pro-ODF, but this article is worthless.
that describing things without quantisizing them is _not_ science. As I posted before in this thread, science (at least as it was taught to me in college) is measuring, deriving a formula from your measurements, extrapolate your formula to something else, measuring this something else, rinse, repeat.
That's it. Science is: 1. measure phenomena, 2. figure out the formulas, 3. predict new phenomena, 4. measure new phenomena, 5. if Ok, back to stage 3; if not, back to stage 2.
(ok, ok, 6. (...), 7. Profit!!!, just to appease the masses)
notice stages 1 and 4 are measurements, stages 2 and 3 are maths.
(Reference: I am an undergraduate Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering major, or IAAEECE) I am a B.Sc. in Computer Science (graduated 15 years ago) and I studied circuits design and optimization (from the mathematical POV).
Science is fundamentally the process of evaluating a hypothesis Which is an application of logic, that is a branch of... math. There are a lot of other good answers...
Anything that is science is math. Ok, computer programming is not necessarily a lot of maths. But this article is about something that is really computer science... as opposed to making a CRUD screen in VB.net, which is akin to programming a VCR. Parsing, compiling, linear programming, sorting, searching, indexing, compressing, walking graphs, drawing graphics, designing circuits, optimizing circuits, these are activities that are computer science and that are all maths.
Edsger Dijkstra once said: "Computers are to computer science what telescopes are to astronomy".
(first, one hand -- er, foot -- to our USofAn friends) Statue of Liberty 151' 1" (46.5 m) + pedestal 154 feet (46.9 m) = 305'1" (93.4 m) Christ Redeemer 125 feet (38 m) + Corcovado 2,330 feet (710 m) = 2,455' (748 m)
Both standing on the Atlantic Ocean (the Corcovado is a mountain right on the shore (*), and that's what make it quite impressive...) I'm Brasilian, but not Carioca, so I have only been there twice, but the view is incredible.
(*) Ok, technically not. The Corcovado is right on top of the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, and the Lagoa is itself like 1km from the shore. take a look.
Funny you mentioned iTunes + iPod. I use Kubuntu since Breezy, that's my disclaimer. My wife wanted a Windows laptop, so I bought one for her for our 10th anniversary in the upcoming July 12th. I checked which software came with it, and installed: BROffice (Brasilian-localized version of OOo) 2.2, Skype and iTunes. Now, I went on to try iTunes and the only thing that it does that Amarok doesn't (for now, at least) is to sync with the AppleTV (*). But there is plenty that Amarok does that iTunes does _not_ do. Like fetching on wikipedia info about the bands, or the music's lyrics, or getting music _FROM_ the iPod (or my Firefly server) to the HD. And I got really disappointed with it. Apple afficionados kept telling me "iTunes is the best jukebox app ever", but I just could not see it. It's not even far more usable than Amarok. I bet when Amarok 2.0 comes for Windows, she will like me to install it replacing iTunes.
(*) Ok, Amarok does not go to the iTMS, only Magnatune for now but... I don't buy music from iTMS anyway because it does not sell to my Brasilian credit card / IP address...
If MS distributes something under the GPLv3, then that is licensed under the GPLv3, nothing else.
If MS distributes something under the GPLv3 or something that is a derivative work of something under the GPLv3, or something that contains part of a GPLv3'd work except if this containing could be construed as an "aggregate" as per the clause #5 of the GPLv3, then that is licensed under the GPLv3, nothing else.
If you modify the code and don't want your code under gpl v3 you remove the clause because it's not longer true for 100% of the code. Nope. You should NOT mingle with other people's copyright notices. What you do is to write in the files you modified:
/* modifications made in DATEDATE (C) My name: ** (.. a nice description of your mods here...) ** those modifications are only licensed under the GPLv3 ** (or at your option, a later version) and not under the ** GPLv2 or later as the rest of the code. Any derivative ** works of the _modified_ program must be licensed under ** the GPLv3 or later. If you desire a GPLv2 license, go ** to the upstream at http://upstream.example.com/download */
Retail Home variants of Vista also aren't licensed for virtualization. Where do you think that support comes from? In my experience, nowhere. I don't have the recollection of ONE SINGLE PERSON that tried the support number for Home variants of MS OSs that succeeded in having their questions answered.
and it's not weight, is mass... but I digress... today, we do have an actual object defining what is 1kg of mass. We want to escape that, so we are doing the most perfect possible silicon sphere with 1kg of mass, we will count the number of silicon atoms on it, and we will proclaim that 1kg = the mass of X silicon atoms.
we don't know how many silicium atoms there are in one standard kilogram. The thing they are doing is to measure exactly that, so they can proclaim after: "1 kg is X silicium atoms."
TODAY: 1kg = the mass of the "rusty lump" in Paris. We don't know how many atoms of Ir and Pt the "rusty lump" have. So, if the "rusty lump" changes mass (and it changes with time because of being rustier all the time) AND because the "rusty lump" is used to calibrate scales all over the world, the kilogram is effectively changing with time. This is BAD.
WHAT THE GUYS ARE DOING: they are trying to make the most perfect silicon sphere possible that weights the same as the "rusty lump". Once they get to do that, they will count the atoms of silicon on the sphere, using interferometry. Suppose the # of atoms of the shpere is M.
WHAT WILL WE GOT THEN: 1kg = M atoms of silicon. This definition will never change, and if the silicon spheres rust or break or change weight by any circunstances, we make new ones with M atoms and we have a forever-constant definition of a kilogram. This is GOOD.
Got it? They did the a similar thing with the meter -- the original was a rod roughly 1m in size, then they did some measurements and said (*) "oh, one meter is the length that the light takes 1/299,792,458 of a second to go through in vacuum." and now they can do as many calibrating rods as needed, provided they make them the length that the light takes 1/299,792,458 of a second to go thru.
(*) actually the meter had an intermediate definition of "1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum", but the new definition has the advantage of setting the light speed at exactly 299,792,458 m/s.
When I was a kid, RAM was made of flip-flops and I had to go to school with three feet of snow, and it was uphill both ways. Oh boy. Nowadays, BosstonesOwn (794949), RAM is made out of capacitors and they have to be "refreshed", that is, some circuit re-reads/re-writes the same values all over many times per second. One second without refresh, and all the data is gone for ever and ever and ever.
BEFORE: a flip flop has an input, a clock, and an output. when you put 0 in the input and pulse the clock once, the output is now 0; if you put 1 in the input and pulse the clock, the output now has 1. This is how one bit of memory is stored. Also know as SRAM, this kind of memory is fairly large in terms of integrated circuits (like 20 transistors in-die), is reasonably fast, and it's still found in L0/1/2 caches of microprocessors, in quantities in the range of Megabytes.
NOW: you have a capacitor, if you put 1 in its input (that is the same pin as its output) it retains this one for a fixed period of time (T). if no-one tries to read this bit in, like, T/2, a circuit in the memory reads this bit, and if it's 1, writes again 1 in its input. Also known as DRAM, this kind of ram is smaller per-bit (one capacitor in-die, 40-60 times smaller than a bit of SRAM), but the memory itself has to add in the end the size of the refreshing circuit, it's slower (because read cycles must be synched in time with refresh cycles), and is found in the "RAM" socket of your motherboard, in quantities in the range from hundreds of Megabytes to Gigabytes.
So, DRAM _really_ clears, i.e., if unplugged when plugged again it's all beautifully zeroed.
That's the first thing I thought when I read the blurb: I think _statically_ linking is an incredible hassle and far more difficult than dynamically linking... especially in Linux.
I'm just about ready to try releasing this but for me, I'm not sure how/where to do this. Not sure I want to give my code to sourceforge or if anyone is interested in yet another spam filter.
1. Why would you _give_ your code to sf.net?? You can _use_ sf.net as a host for your project, but you would not be giving anything to them. Ditto for savanna &c.
Especially if it runs only on postgresql databases. Transitioning to MySQL is not something I have any interest in doing and with the MySQL Zealotry being almost equal to Linux I don't think I'll find much interest. 2. Leave transitioning to MySQL as an exercise to the reader, then.
1. Can I do it with Linux today (GPL2) and tomorrow (GPL3)? A1. Yes -- unless you are making some kernel module that is a derivative work of the kernel, where your kernel module will have to be licensed under the GPLv2.
2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.) A2a. Linux (the kernel) does not come with any libraries for you to link. A2b. GNU/Linux (the whole system) comes with many libraries, some of them BSD-licensed, some GPL-licensed, some GPL-with-linking-exception-licensed, some LGPL-licensed, etc... it's a common interpretation of the GPL that if you link to a GPL-(no-linking-exception) library (like GNU readline or Qt) you are making a derivative work and thus, you have to license your work under the GPL.
3. Can I obfuscate my code (e.g. encode it)? A3. You can do this in any case -- except (maybe, IIRC) if you are distributing your code under the GPL/LGPL.
4. Could I be forced to publish this code by some 3-d party? A4. Not really (parent poster is right on the mark)
5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems? A5. Yes you are. BUT...
and I mean this respectfully: as you will be selling your box as an embedded utility, what do you have to lose by GPL'ing (or otherwise opening) your code? If you do things right, you will have: I. a community of people that are willing to buy your box to start; II. a community will want to tinker and make your product better, fast, and you get to incorporate the changes for the next versions of your product; III. the respect of a lot of people.
Example: lots of people I know have Linksys (WRT54G[L]) wireless routers _because_ they know they can tinker with it, that there are lots of new, interesting uses to it with the alternate verstions of the software, etc. I, myself, when installing SoHo wi-fi networks _only_ recommend WRTs to my clients, as opposed to non-tinkerable D-LINKs that here in Brasil cost 30-40% less.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAICT it can stream other people's shared iTunes Libraries over a network...
It is quite probable that someone used your son's bank account to laundry money. Some guys in that line of work may make it appear that it was _you_. I would report it in writing to the bank, with a receipt, that I would keep carefully.
I stopped reading your post after I read your subject because if you really believe that paper ballots are less secure than computer voting, you have got something very wrong - or maybe I have, because I can't think of any way to falsify all ballots at once if you're using paper, but this is trivially simple if you're using computers.
First of all, I believe that paper ballots and electronic voting are simply equally insecure, but that you can make -- with proper procedure -- electronic voting less insecure than paper ballots. More on that on the end, so read on (and try to read on my old post, too, you'll find it interesting).
Second, come on, you have not seen BSG? It's quite simple, with a sleight of hand, to exchange a ballot box for another one, falsified and stuffed with the votes we want. Presto! You exchanged all votes at once for that box.
With electronic voting, you can't even verify whether it was counted correctly (you can neither have a look at it while it is counted, nor can you make a recount without accounting for the possibility that all the numbers changed) - the only check you have are the exit polls, and they can be doctored, too, or - easier - will be denounced by the winner as incorrect even when they have a good track record. With paper ballots, however, everyone can come and watch over the counting (at least it's that way here - could be that it's illegal to do that where you are).
Recounting is: (1) as the recent USofAn history shows, unpractical, and (2) only at most as reliable as the counting. So, I think recounting is overrated. But anyway, no, we can watch the count here. But as I said, in US 2000 election, no one (or at least not enough people) cared enough to show up. You cannot see if your vote counted correctly in a paper-ballot vote, too. Why? Because vote anonymity is important to democracy (so your boss can't fire you if you vote the "wrong" way [*]).
My point is: timing is everything if you want to cheat in an election. Electronic voting shortens uncertainty time, so it's harder to cheat in an electronic voting election. The part that is really important (at least IMHO) in cheating an election is tabulating the votes -- at least one 1970s BR election I can recall had a deep tabulation-cheat-suspicion (nothing was ever proven, of course) and I am pretty sure that other countries have their tabulation-cheat stories, too (fictional districts added etc).
As for the machines, and the procedure, all I have to say is: read my post -- the important thing there is that the work of checking things up is thorough and distributed, so big errors do not go unnoticed. When I worked at the DA's office during an election, we checked exaustively each of the machines in our voting district. We changed the date, started the machines, summed them up, uploaded the results to the central computing, saw the results on each machine. The machine did not have any way of knowing it was not election day: some of them we punched votes all day long, so it could not know oh, I have few votes, so it must be check day instead of election day; some we tested once, some twice, some ten times and nome not at all. We kept detailed records of the testing. If most small-town DAs and electoral judges were so thorough as we were, I think it was impossible to miss any tampering. At election day, we checked and rechecked every single seal on the machines, and more than once, we threw out one machine because the seal was not signed or misaligned (we can use paper ballot boxes as a backup, but usually the backup machines -- all tested, too -- were enough)
I could write more, but I think this suffices to see that voting machines will always be less secure than paper ballots. So, I'll keep my paper ballots, thank you very much. And if I see a voting machine in my district, I'll make use of Article 20 (4).
We can agree on disagreeing, b
I have a post from three years ago (#8944789) detailing how stuff works here in Brasil, for your entertainment:
Oh, yes, I will repeat myself over and over...
... when you get your first job. If you are a mandatory voter (literate person from 18 to 65) you have to go to Electoral Court and register to vote. In the process of registering, you receive the "Título de Eleitor" (voter id), in which you have the number of you voting section. To change jobs, and specially to get a government job, you have to prove you are a registered and regularized voter (you voted in the last election, or regularized your voting situation after it).
by hummassa (157160) on 2004.04.22 20:06 (#8944789)
Till these topics die.
I live in Brasil. We have had voting machines in the last 12-14 years (yes, twelve to fourteen -- it depends the size of the city you are in). Brazilians here: the first election here in Belo Horizonte to use the machines were the mayoral (and city council, state representation, governor, house and senate) before FHC was elected (as I count it, 2 years + 8 years + 1 1/2 = 11,5 years). I know it, because I was "mesário" (election "table" official? election "clerk"? what is a good English translation?) in the previous election, and in the two subsequent elections. IIRC, there were electronic ballot boxes in Rio and Sao Paulo in the election before that (the only two cities larger than Belo Horizonte).
Our voting machines are mainly of three different (internally) models: (a) the old ones, that use VirtuOS (*) as the OS, (b) the new ones, that use WinCE as the OS, and (c) the newest and deprecated ones that have the second printer to print your vote, show it to you inside a clear acrilic case, and mix it with others inside the machine.
Externally, all of them look roughly the same: a box similar to the old "portable computers" of the eighties, with a 5-6" diagonal LCD and a big numerical keypad in the right side of the screen, that has, besides the 0-9 keys, "confirma" (ok), "erro" (cancel), and "branco" (white).
The electoral process (from the point of view of the voter) begins
In the election day, you scan the newspapers (or the Superior Electoral Court website), search for the address of your section, and go there. No, there is no transit vote, you can only vote at that address. If you can't get there, you'll have to "justify" your absence.
At the section, you will present your voter id to one the "mesários", and if you don't have it on you, you can still vote (you can show other valid id), but will be delayed. The mesário will search for your name in the vote-ticket sheet, and annex it to your id while you vote. You will sign a receipt in a sheet, and proceed to the voting "booth". Another "mesário" will type your voter id # in a remotely connected keypad, setting the machine in the "ready to vote" mode.
The voting "booth" is really only a desk with the voting machine over it, facing nobody else in the room, and sometimes with a cardboard "cover" around it. You will "dial" the numbers of the candidates, in order. when you dial all the digits of one candidate, a star-trek-like chime rings, his/her face will show up in the screen, and if you digited it right, you hit "ok". otherwise, you hit "cancel" and start over. Afte
my point (if it didn't come all clear like I thought it would) is that when nothing else is said angles are measured in m/m, i.e., radians; not in (pi/180 m/m == degree) or in (pi/200 m/m == grad).
Someone failed the math class where they explained that an angle is a "dimensionless derived unit" . Explaining, short version for the clicky-impaired: angles are the ratio between two measurements of length -- the length of an arc and the radius of said arc.
It got off to a bad start. For the rest of it, it moans about bad revision and wrong formulas, with some reason, but without a lot of substance.
I am pro-ODF, but this article is worthless.
that describing things without quantisizing them is _not_ science. As I posted before in this thread, science (at least as it was taught to me in college) is measuring, deriving a formula from your measurements, extrapolate your formula to something else, measuring this something else, rinse, repeat.
in mathematical form:
science = math + measurements
That's it. Science is:
1. measure phenomena,
2. figure out the formulas,
3. predict new phenomena,
4. measure new phenomena,
5. if Ok, back to stage 3; if not, back to stage 2.
(ok, ok, 6. (...), 7. Profit!!!, just to appease the masses)
notice stages 1 and 4 are measurements, stages 2 and 3 are maths.
(Reference: I am an undergraduate Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering major, or IAAEECE) I am a B.Sc. in Computer Science (graduated 15 years ago) and I studied circuits design and optimization (from the mathematical POV).
Anything that is science is math.
Ok, computer programming is not necessarily a lot of maths.
But this article is about something that is really computer science... as opposed to making a CRUD screen in VB.net, which is akin to programming a VCR.
Parsing, compiling, linear programming, sorting, searching, indexing, compressing, walking graphs, drawing graphics, designing circuits, optimizing circuits, these are activities that are computer science and that are all maths.
Edsger Dijkstra once said: "Computers are to computer science what telescopes are to astronomy".
(first, one hand -- er, foot -- to our USofAn friends)
Statue of Liberty 151' 1" (46.5 m) + pedestal 154 feet (46.9 m) = 305'1" (93.4 m)
Christ Redeemer 125 feet (38 m) + Corcovado 2,330 feet (710 m) = 2,455' (748 m)
Both standing on the Atlantic Ocean (the Corcovado is a mountain right on the shore (*), and that's what make it quite impressive...) I'm Brasilian, but not Carioca, so I have only been there twice, but the view is incredible.
(*) Ok, technically not. The Corcovado is right on top of the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, and the Lagoa is itself like 1km from the shore. take a look.
Funny you mentioned iTunes + iPod. I use Kubuntu since Breezy, that's my disclaimer. My wife wanted a Windows laptop, so I bought one for her for our 10th anniversary in the upcoming July 12th. I checked which software came with it, and installed: BROffice (Brasilian-localized version of OOo) 2.2, Skype and iTunes.
Now, I went on to try iTunes and the only thing that it does that Amarok doesn't (for now, at least) is to sync with the AppleTV (*). But there is plenty that Amarok does that iTunes does _not_ do. Like fetching on wikipedia info about the bands, or the music's lyrics, or getting music _FROM_ the iPod (or my Firefly server) to the HD. And I got really disappointed with it. Apple afficionados kept telling me "iTunes is the best jukebox app ever", but I just could not see it. It's not even far more usable than Amarok. I bet when Amarok 2.0 comes for Windows, she will like me to install it replacing iTunes.
(*) Ok, Amarok does not go to the iTMS, only Magnatune for now but... I don't buy music from iTMS anyway because it does not sell to my Brasilian credit card / IP address...
If MS distributes something under the GPLv3, then that is licensed under the GPLv3, nothing else.
If MS distributes something under the GPLv3 or something that is a derivative work of something under the GPLv3, or something that contains part of a GPLv3'd work except if this containing could be construed as an "aggregate" as per the clause #5 of the GPLv3, then that is licensed under the GPLv3, nothing else.
and it's not weight, is mass... but I digress... today, we do have an actual object defining what is 1kg of mass. We want to escape that, so we are doing the most perfect possible silicon sphere with 1kg of mass, we will count the number of silicon atoms on it, and we will proclaim that 1kg = the mass of X silicon atoms.
we don't know how many silicium atoms there are in one standard kilogram. The thing they are doing is to measure exactly that, so they can proclaim after: "1 kg is X silicium atoms."
You are being very dense here.
TODAY: 1kg = the mass of the "rusty lump" in Paris. We don't know how many atoms of Ir and Pt the "rusty lump" have. So, if the "rusty lump" changes mass (and it changes with time because of being rustier all the time) AND because the "rusty lump" is used to calibrate scales all over the world, the kilogram is effectively changing with time. This is BAD.
WHAT THE GUYS ARE DOING: they are trying to make the most perfect silicon sphere possible that weights the same as the "rusty lump". Once they get to do that, they will count the atoms of silicon on the sphere, using interferometry. Suppose the # of atoms of the shpere is M.
WHAT WILL WE GOT THEN: 1kg = M atoms of silicon. This definition will never change, and if the silicon spheres rust or break or change weight by any circunstances, we make new ones with M atoms and we have a forever-constant definition of a kilogram. This is GOOD.
Got it? They did the a similar thing with the meter -- the original was a rod roughly 1m in size, then they did some measurements and said (*) "oh, one meter is the length that the light takes 1/299,792,458 of a second to go through in vacuum." and now they can do as many calibrating rods as needed, provided they make them the length that the light takes 1/299,792,458 of a second to go thru.
(*) actually the meter had an intermediate definition of "1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum", but the new definition has the advantage of setting the light speed at exactly 299,792,458 m/s.
When I was a kid, RAM was made of flip-flops and I had to go to school with three feet of snow, and it was uphill both ways. Oh boy.
Nowadays, BosstonesOwn (794949), RAM is made out of capacitors and they have to be "refreshed", that is, some circuit re-reads/re-writes the same values all over many times per second. One second without refresh, and all the data is gone for ever and ever and ever.
BEFORE: a flip flop has an input, a clock, and an output. when you put 0 in the input and pulse the clock once, the output is now 0; if you put 1 in the input and pulse the clock, the output now has 1. This is how one bit of memory is stored. Also know as SRAM, this kind of memory is fairly large in terms of integrated circuits (like 20 transistors in-die), is reasonably fast, and it's still found in L0/1/2 caches of microprocessors, in quantities in the range of Megabytes.
NOW: you have a capacitor, if you put 1 in its input (that is the same pin as its output) it retains this one for a fixed period of time (T). if no-one tries to read this bit in, like, T/2, a circuit in the memory reads this bit, and if it's 1, writes again 1 in its input. Also known as DRAM, this kind of ram is smaller per-bit (one capacitor in-die, 40-60 times smaller than a bit of SRAM), but the memory itself has to add in the end the size of the refreshing circuit, it's slower (because read cycles must be synched in time with refresh cycles), and is found in the "RAM" socket of your motherboard, in quantities in the range from hundreds of Megabytes to Gigabytes.
So, DRAM _really_ clears, i.e., if unplugged when plugged again it's all beautifully zeroed.
Ok??
That's the first thing I thought when I read the blurb: I think _statically_ linking is an incredible hassle and far more difficult than dynamically linking... especially in Linux.
I'm just about ready to try releasing this but for me, I'm not sure how/where to do this. Not sure I want to give my code to sourceforge or if anyone is interested in yet another spam filter.
1. Why would you _give_ your code to sf.net?? You can _use_ sf.net as a host for your project, but you would not be giving anything to them. Ditto for savanna &c. Especially if it runs only on postgresql databases. Transitioning to MySQL is not something I have any interest in doing and with the MySQL Zealotry being almost equal to Linux I don't think I'll find much interest. 2. Leave transitioning to MySQL as an exercise to the reader, then.A2b. GNU/Linux (the whole system) comes with many libraries, some of them BSD-licensed, some GPL-licensed, some GPL-with-linking-exception-licensed, some LGPL-licensed, etc... it's a common interpretation of the GPL that if you link to a GPL-(no-linking-exception) library (like GNU readline or Qt) you are making a derivative work and thus, you have to license your work under the GPL. 3. Can I obfuscate my code (e.g. encode it)? A3. You can do this in any case -- except (maybe, IIRC) if you are distributing your code under the GPL/LGPL. 4. Could I be forced to publish this code by some 3-d party? A4. Not really (parent poster is right on the mark) 5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems? A5. Yes you are. BUT...
and I mean this respectfully: as you will be selling your box as an embedded utility, what do you have to lose by GPL'ing (or otherwise opening) your code? If you do things right, you will have:
I. a community of people that are willing to buy your box to start;
II. a community will want to tinker and make your product better, fast, and you get to incorporate the changes for the next versions of your product;
III. the respect of a lot of people.
Example: lots of people I know have Linksys (WRT54G[L]) wireless routers _because_ they know they can tinker with it, that there are lots of new, interesting uses to it with the alternate verstions of the software, etc. I, myself, when installing SoHo wi-fi networks _only_ recommend WRTs to my clients, as opposed to non-tinkerable D-LINKs that here in Brasil cost 30-40% less.