Oh no. You just used the words "analogy" and "stretch" in a reply to a comment about homosexuals. It suffices to say that the analogy will soon be stretched further. You have doomed us all.
Conversely, by my similarly-uninformed logic I expected air to be cooler if less heat is escaping into it. Probably because I automatically assumed the insulation to be below the stratosphere while you assumed it to be above. I'm sure someone will tell us where greenhouse gasses actually accumulate and then we won't be as uninformed.
Abstinence, combined with existing anti-retroviral therapies might actually extinguish HIV from the face of the earth in only a few decades, if used widely.
Abstinence, whether-or-not combined with existing anti-retroviral therapies, might actually extinguish humanity from the face of the earth in only a few decades, if used widely enough.
Yes, but what does the legal department get out of it?
Nothing either way, as far as I can tell. That's what makes the whole thing so bizarre. The only obvious rationale is that they're aiming to prevent another Langdell situation, but there are much simpler ways of doing that.
But you're happy for Mojang to own the word "scrolls"? Remember when Origin and Bullfrog were cool game studios?
Own the word "scrolls"? No. Own trademark to the the name of their game? Of course. Trademarks don't give anything near the level of control over a word that you suggest.
I do this to some extent, I use the name+company@gmail.com trick to sign up when their form will allow it, otherwise I make a blanket assumption that they are going to spam me (since their developers can't read an RFC) and give them my spam catcher account which I only ever check when I'm expecting a response from a web form =)
The problem with that trick is that your regular email address (name@gmail.com) is revealed. Spammers will just ignore everything after the +. You can make it more effective by taking into account the fact that gmail lets you put dots almost anywhere in your name. For example, register my.name@gmail.com and use it for communicating with your friends but never use it for signing up to websites - when you do that put the dot somewhere else (myn.ame@gmail.com, for example). Then create a filter that blocks everything except my.name@gmail.com and myn.ame@gmail.com to catch out sites that try to strip the dots. If you're willing to put in the effort you can use then more filters on myn.ame@gmail.com based on plus-addresses and senders.
Most companies would kill to get a 1/3 cut on every program sold.
Brick and mortar stores already do.
Not exactly. They get a cut only from what they sell, not from what competitors sell. I believe Nimey meant that by making themselves the sole source of Metro apps they are ensuring a cut from every program sold as competitors cannot exist.
I would like to be a convert too. The functionality of CoffeeScript is wonderful and I like the grammar but the way it handles variable scoping seems like a huge step backwards. It's counter-intuitive, unclear and unpredictable - as though the designers put an enormous amount of effort into removing an aspect of Javascript that worked well and imitating an outdated version of Python instead. If it actually is a good idea and someone could help me see the light and understand the motivation behind it I'd gladly switch over.
I haven't refreshed this page yet so I don't know if someone has already mentioned this, but it might be a better idea to click on "Edit Trust" instead of "Delete or Distrust" so that you can more-easily alter your policy for that CA later if you change your mind.
How does one remove that particular CA from one's CA bundle?
It depends on the browser. For Firefox you open the options, select "Advanced", click on the "Encryption" tag, and press the "View Certificates". Select "DigiNotar root CA" from the list (just start typing the name and the cursor should jump to it) and press "Delete or Distrust". Lots of steps, but all-in-all quite a simple process.
And exactly which OS(es) allows you to rename or move files that have write exclusive locks on them? Because, from what I can see this has, again, nothing to do with Windows.
BSD, Linux and MacOS allow you to do that, and even delete or overwrite the file while it's still locked without causing problems. Moving, deleting or renaming a file affects only a hardlink to the file and not the file itself; and overwriting a file is actually just deleting a hardlink and writing to a completely new file.
The GPLv3 prohibits the use of GPLv3'd software on devices that implement signatures as a means of execution control unless the user is given the key that is used to sign the binaries. (Not sure if supplying a means for registering a 3rd party key would suffice.)
So if you implemented a scheme where all binaries, before execution, were signature checked for your $private_vendor_key and denied if it was missing, then you'd be in violation of the GPLv3 if you didn't give the user $private_vendor_key. This was put in place to defeat the end-run that was TiVOization.
Give the user his own private key and honour it properly. That's all that is required. You don't need to disclose vendor private keys.
This may be a stupid question, but isn't that accomplished by the lawsuit? Or are you implying that they should contest it in some other fashion? Contrary to popular opinion, a lawsuit is not always a middle finger extended to the accused. It can simply be a "we need to defend this and this is how the legal system dictates our defence should proceed".
That's a fair point. I know nothing about Swedish civil law, but if they feel that their trademark should preclude Mojang's then I would imagine the appropriate thing to do would be to lodge an objection directly with the trademark office. If Bethesda's claim has merit then the application would be denied. Applying for trademark before using the mark is a prudent, diligent, and above-board way of doing things, and making Mojang withdraw their application or be forced to defend themselves in court strikes me as an denying Mojang access to due process. I'm not a lawyer and know very little about these matters, but Bethesda's course of action so far does not sit well with me. Still, I have a lot of respect for both parties and hope that they can work this out without bloodshed (unless it's in Quake, of course).
Nope, they are just helping Bethesda defend their trademark (remember, if you dont defend it, you lose it, especially since Notch is also is also in the same gaming business).
They can't lose something that they have never had. Bethesda do not have "Scrolls" as a trademark for a computer game, and do not stand to lose "The Elder Scrolls" by doing nothing here. Furthermore, all Notch has done is apply for trademark on a name that he plans to use. There's nothing wrong with that - it's just diligence - and filing a suit about that is rather arbitrary. If Bethesda's representatives have an issue with that then they should just contest the application.
The term "rare earth" is a bit of a misnomer. The materials themselves are not that rare. The issue is that they are not commonly found in a rich deposit. Rather, they are dispersed throughout an area, requiring expensive mining and refining techniques.
Ah - as in "rarified". That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.
Thank you for that. I thought the summary seemed bizarre - since when do we have laws against jailbreaking, and doesn't SAFACT normally focus on stopping sale of unauthorised duplicates? It's nice to see that things are despite Slashdot headlines things are actually working the way they should.
They might be different in theory; they are not in practice.
No, it is a purely practical matter. It's the difference between code working reliably and not.
In addition, in Objective-C, C, and C++, NULL is, in fact, (void *)0L.
NULL is a macro who's definition is implementation-defined. It is most commonly defined as 0 or 0L, but I have also seen (void *)0 and even (char *)0. I just looked at string.h from gcc 4.3.4 and it is defined as 0. You're looking at this and thinking (void *)0 is reinterpreting the number 0 as a pointer. It is not, and none of the languages that you mention allow you to convert integers into pointers. 0L, in this context, is implicitly a pointer which may or may not have a numeric value of 0 (look at DOS - it had at least different kinds of pointers with different sizes, some of which were tuples and therefore didn't evaluate to single numeric values at all).
This is not something that is likely to *ever* change, given the absolutely enormous body of code that assumes that (!pointer) is identical to (pointer == NULL); this is not something limited to x86.
It changes constantly, but it's more of an implementation thing than a platform thing. (Of course, the platform plays a big role in the implementer's decision.)
Also, char *pointer = 0; being anything other than 0 is rubbish. There are systems for which 0 can contain valid data, and therefore you must be able to assign 0 to a pointer.
Those are the very systems which tend to define null as something other than a pointer to memory at address 0. C, C++ and Objective-C do not allow you to assign integer values to pointers anyway - literal zero integers implicitly evaluate to null pointers (whatever those are) which can be anything. Let me give you an example.
int zero = 0;
int null_is_zero = (0 == *(void **)(&zero));/* nonzero if and only if null is defined as zero. Might break if size of int and void* are different. */
char *pointer = 0;/* pointer is null, which is who-knows-where */
pointer = zero;/* error. zero has a value of 0, but there is no implicit integer-to-pointer conversion. */
pointer = 1;/* error - you can't assign integers to pointers
pointer = *(char **)(&zero);/* dangerous because sizeof(char*) might be different to sizeof(int). pointer now points to memory with address 0, and may or may not be a null pointer */
It's not a tautology. It's just incredibly obvious that better-reviewed games would be downloaded more on BitTorrent.
[To be clear a tautology is something that is by definition true, like... "if a and b are rational numbers, then ab is rational".
That's not a tautology. That's a mathematical consequence. Tautology is a repetition of meaning. "a and b are rational" has a different meaning than "ab is rational", even though one can be shown to always imply the second. Otherwise you could say that the entirety of provable mathematics is tautologous.
No. GP has it right, and you do not. Tautology is not about meaning, it is about truth. Bertrand Russell's quote from the Wiktionary entry is particularly apt, here. The proposition "if a and b are rational numbers, then ab is rational" *is* tautological, because in the deductive modality, the conclusion is always implicit in the premise; there is no way to "deduce" a new truth via the deductive modality. One can only restate a truth that was already present in the premise, and that is what makes the deductive modality tautological. Think GIGO, replacing "garbage" with "truth". So, as you implied, the entirety of provable mathematics is definitely not tautologous. There indeed exists another modality that is not tautological. The other modality is inductive logic, which *can* produce new truths, rendering it non-tautological.
If a and b are rational numbers, then is ab rational? That depends on the closure of rational numbers, which I would argue is not part of the premise at all. You are extrapolating from assumed properties of the word "rational" which are not given in the statement.
Consider this: "if a and b are imaginary numbers, then ab is imaginary". The same syntax, but not even true. What if we define "rational numbers" to be imaginary? Then the original example isn't true either.
A variation of the original example that is tautological would be "if a and b being rational numbers is sufficient for ab to be rational, and a and b are rational numbers, then ab is rational".
nil and NULL are identical; they're just casts of 0. The reason that you can send messages to nil is that the objc_msgSend() function (the runtime bit that does the actual message lookup and call on objects) does a NULL check for you and immediately returns 0 if you're messaging nil/NULL.
Be careful about thinking of null as 0. Null pointers and zero pointers are different concepts that just happen to coincide sometimes. Although it's usually the convention on x86 that zero pointers are considered null, it's not strictly the case in general. Quite often there's a completely different convention, like 0 being a valid pointer and -1 being null. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that C uses the '0' character as a symbol for null to avoid having an extra keyword. The C code "char *pointer = 0;" doesn't necessarily give the pointer a zero value; it assigns whatever value the compiler is configured to treat as null.
it's stored in/data which is off limits to any app, unless you've rooted the phone.
If that's inaccurate start by correcting the person I responded to, not me.
The person to whom you responded is accurate, as far as I know, but "it's stored in/data which is off limits to any app, unless you've rooted the phone." still does not imply that rooting the phone causes/data to cease being off-limits to apps. You're drawing a false conclusion.
They can't - it's stored in/data which is off limits to any app, unless you've rooted the phone.
Which as many Android enthusiasts point out is terribly easy to do. While it does not affect every user it affects huge subset of users.
On the iPhone, even if you've jailbroken it there's no such weakness thanks to the Keychain. Jailbreaking allows side loading, it does not break the entire security model and expose things as basic as email passwords.
No such weakness? What weakness are you talking about? GPP did not imply that rooting the phone causes/data to cease being off-limits to apps.
Don't over sensationalise it you will just go to a site that links (possibly using the direct ip address) to another site that has no 'illegal' content but is outside the US that has an IP link to the desired site. Provided the IP is static enough no DNS is ever needed. Just add more links as the law tries to catchup.
Name-based hosting makes it a little more complicated, since (as far as I am aware - please correct me if I'm wrong) URL's don't currently have a way of specifying the domain and the IP address at the same time. You can get a link to the correct host, but because you used an IP address instead of a domain name the server will present the wrong website.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you stretch the analogy too far
Oh no. You just used the words "analogy" and "stretch" in a reply to a comment about homosexuals. It suffices to say that the analogy will soon be stretched further. You have doomed us all.
Conversely, by my similarly-uninformed logic I expected air to be cooler if less heat is escaping into it. Probably because I automatically assumed the insulation to be below the stratosphere while you assumed it to be above. I'm sure someone will tell us where greenhouse gasses actually accumulate and then we won't be as uninformed.
Just so you know: I do agree with your argument, Ihmhi; I just don't get the example that you used.
Abstinence, combined with existing anti-retroviral therapies might actually extinguish HIV from the face of the earth in only a few decades, if used widely.
Abstinence, whether-or-not combined with existing anti-retroviral therapies, might actually extinguish humanity from the face of the earth in only a few decades, if used widely enough.
Yes, but what does the legal department get out of it?
Nothing either way, as far as I can tell. That's what makes the whole thing so bizarre. The only obvious rationale is that they're aiming to prevent another Langdell situation, but there are much simpler ways of doing that.
But you're happy for Mojang to own the word "scrolls"? Remember when Origin and Bullfrog were cool game studios?
Own the word "scrolls"? No. Own trademark to the the name of their game? Of course. Trademarks don't give anything near the level of control over a word that you suggest.
I do this to some extent, I use the name+company@gmail.com trick to sign up when their form will allow it, otherwise I make a blanket assumption that they are going to spam me (since their developers can't read an RFC) and give them my spam catcher account which I only ever check when I'm expecting a response from a web form =)
The problem with that trick is that your regular email address (name@gmail.com) is revealed. Spammers will just ignore everything after the +. You can make it more effective by taking into account the fact that gmail lets you put dots almost anywhere in your name. For example, register my.name@gmail.com and use it for communicating with your friends but never use it for signing up to websites - when you do that put the dot somewhere else (myn.ame@gmail.com, for example). Then create a filter that blocks everything except my.name@gmail.com and myn.ame@gmail.com to catch out sites that try to strip the dots. If you're willing to put in the effort you can use then more filters on myn.ame@gmail.com based on plus-addresses and senders.
Most companies would kill to get a 1/3 cut on every program sold.
Brick and mortar stores already do.
Not exactly. They get a cut only from what they sell, not from what competitors sell. I believe Nimey meant that by making themselves the sole source of Metro apps they are ensuring a cut from every program sold as competitors cannot exist.
I would like to be a convert too. The functionality of CoffeeScript is wonderful and I like the grammar but the way it handles variable scoping seems like a huge step backwards. It's counter-intuitive, unclear and unpredictable - as though the designers put an enormous amount of effort into removing an aspect of Javascript that worked well and imitating an outdated version of Python instead. If it actually is a good idea and someone could help me see the light and understand the motivation behind it I'd gladly switch over.
I haven't refreshed this page yet so I don't know if someone has already mentioned this, but it might be a better idea to click on "Edit Trust" instead of "Delete or Distrust" so that you can more-easily alter your policy for that CA later if you change your mind.
How does one remove that particular CA from one's CA bundle?
It depends on the browser. For Firefox you open the options, select "Advanced", click on the "Encryption" tag, and press the "View Certificates". Select "DigiNotar root CA" from the list (just start typing the name and the cursor should jump to it) and press "Delete or Distrust". Lots of steps, but all-in-all quite a simple process.
And exactly which OS(es) allows you to rename or move files that have write exclusive locks on them? Because, from what I can see this has, again, nothing to do with Windows.
BSD, Linux and MacOS allow you to do that, and even delete or overwrite the file while it's still locked without causing problems. Moving, deleting or renaming a file affects only a hardlink to the file and not the file itself; and overwriting a file is actually just deleting a hardlink and writing to a completely new file.
The GPLv3 prohibits the use of GPLv3'd software on devices that implement signatures as a means of execution control unless the user is given the key that is used to sign the binaries. (Not sure if supplying a means for registering a 3rd party key would suffice.)
So if you implemented a scheme where all binaries, before execution, were signature checked for your $private_vendor_key and denied if it was missing, then you'd be in violation of the GPLv3 if you didn't give the user $private_vendor_key. This was put in place to defeat the end-run that was TiVOization.
Give the user his own private key and honour it properly. That's all that is required. You don't need to disclose vendor private keys.
This may be a stupid question, but isn't that accomplished by the lawsuit? Or are you implying that they should contest it in some other fashion? Contrary to popular opinion, a lawsuit is not always a middle finger extended to the accused. It can simply be a "we need to defend this and this is how the legal system dictates our defence should proceed".
That's a fair point. I know nothing about Swedish civil law, but if they feel that their trademark should preclude Mojang's then I would imagine the appropriate thing to do would be to lodge an objection directly with the trademark office. If Bethesda's claim has merit then the application would be denied. Applying for trademark before using the mark is a prudent, diligent, and above-board way of doing things, and making Mojang withdraw their application or be forced to defend themselves in court strikes me as an denying Mojang access to due process. I'm not a lawyer and know very little about these matters, but Bethesda's course of action so far does not sit well with me. Still, I have a lot of respect for both parties and hope that they can work this out without bloodshed (unless it's in Quake, of course).
Nope, they are just helping Bethesda defend their trademark (remember, if you dont defend it, you lose it, especially since Notch is also is also in the same gaming business).
They can't lose something that they have never had. Bethesda do not have "Scrolls" as a trademark for a computer game, and do not stand to lose "The Elder Scrolls" by doing nothing here. Furthermore, all Notch has done is apply for trademark on a name that he plans to use. There's nothing wrong with that - it's just diligence - and filing a suit about that is rather arbitrary. If Bethesda's representatives have an issue with that then they should just contest the application.
Pardon the spelling - I meant to say, "rarefied", the opposite of "condensed".
The term "rare earth" is a bit of a misnomer. The materials themselves are not that rare. The issue is that they are not commonly found in a rich deposit. Rather, they are dispersed throughout an area, requiring expensive mining and refining techniques.
Ah - as in "rarified". That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.
Thank you for that. I thought the summary seemed bizarre - since when do we have laws against jailbreaking, and doesn't SAFACT normally focus on stopping sale of unauthorised duplicates? It's nice to see that things are despite Slashdot headlines things are actually working the way they should.
They might be different in theory; they are not in practice.
No, it is a purely practical matter. It's the difference between code working reliably and not.
In addition, in Objective-C, C, and C++, NULL is, in fact, (void *)0L.
NULL is a macro who's definition is implementation-defined. It is most commonly defined as 0 or 0L, but I have also seen (void *)0 and even (char *)0. I just looked at string.h from gcc 4.3.4 and it is defined as 0. You're looking at this and thinking (void *)0 is reinterpreting the number 0 as a pointer. It is not, and none of the languages that you mention allow you to convert integers into pointers. 0L, in this context, is implicitly a pointer which may or may not have a numeric value of 0 (look at DOS - it had at least different kinds of pointers with different sizes, some of which were tuples and therefore didn't evaluate to single numeric values at all).
This is not something that is likely to *ever* change, given the absolutely enormous body of code that assumes that (!pointer) is identical to (pointer == NULL); this is not something limited to x86.
It changes constantly, but it's more of an implementation thing than a platform thing. (Of course, the platform plays a big role in the implementer's decision.)
Also, char *pointer = 0; being anything other than 0 is rubbish. There are systems for which 0 can contain valid data, and therefore you must be able to assign 0 to a pointer.
Those are the very systems which tend to define null as something other than a pointer to memory at address 0. C, C++ and Objective-C do not allow you to assign integer values to pointers anyway - literal zero integers implicitly evaluate to null pointers (whatever those are) which can be anything. Let me give you an example.
int zero = 0; /* nonzero if and only if null is defined as zero. Might break if size of int and void* are different. */ /* pointer is null, which is who-knows-where */ /* error. zero has a value of 0, but there is no implicit integer-to-pointer conversion. */ /* error - you can't assign integers to pointers /* dangerous because sizeof(char*) might be different to sizeof(int). pointer now points to memory with address 0, and may or may not be a null pointer */
int null_is_zero = (0 == *(void **)(&zero));
char *pointer = 0;
pointer = zero;
pointer = 1;
pointer = *(char **)(&zero);
It's not a tautology. It's just incredibly obvious that better-reviewed games would be downloaded more on BitTorrent.
[To be clear a tautology is something that is by definition true, like ... "if a and b are rational numbers, then ab is rational".
That's not a tautology. That's a mathematical consequence. Tautology is a repetition of meaning. "a and b are rational" has a different meaning than "ab is rational", even though one can be shown to always imply the second. Otherwise you could say that the entirety of provable mathematics is tautologous.
No. GP has it right, and you do not. Tautology is not about meaning, it is about truth. Bertrand Russell's quote from the Wiktionary entry is particularly apt, here. The proposition "if a and b are rational numbers, then ab is rational" *is* tautological, because in the deductive modality, the conclusion is always implicit in the premise; there is no way to "deduce" a new truth via the deductive modality. One can only restate a truth that was already present in the premise, and that is what makes the deductive modality tautological. Think GIGO, replacing "garbage" with "truth". So, as you implied, the entirety of provable mathematics is definitely not tautologous. There indeed exists another modality that is not tautological. The other modality is inductive logic, which *can* produce new truths, rendering it non-tautological.
If a and b are rational numbers, then is ab rational? That depends on the closure of rational numbers, which I would argue is not part of the premise at all. You are extrapolating from assumed properties of the word "rational" which are not given in the statement.
Consider this: "if a and b are imaginary numbers, then ab is imaginary". The same syntax, but not even true. What if we define "rational numbers" to be imaginary? Then the original example isn't true either.
A variation of the original example that is tautological would be "if a and b being rational numbers is sufficient for ab to be rational, and a and b are rational numbers, then ab is rational".
nil and NULL are identical; they're just casts of 0. The reason that you can send messages to nil is that the objc_msgSend() function (the runtime bit that does the actual message lookup and call on objects) does a NULL check for you and immediately returns 0 if you're messaging nil/NULL.
Be careful about thinking of null as 0. Null pointers and zero pointers are different concepts that just happen to coincide sometimes. Although it's usually the convention on x86 that zero pointers are considered null, it's not strictly the case in general. Quite often there's a completely different convention, like 0 being a valid pointer and -1 being null. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that C uses the '0' character as a symbol for null to avoid having an extra keyword. The C code "char *pointer = 0;" doesn't necessarily give the pointer a zero value; it assigns whatever value the compiler is configured to treat as null.
From the GPP:
it's stored in /data which is off limits to any app, unless you've rooted the phone.
If that's inaccurate start by correcting the person I responded to, not me.
The person to whom you responded is accurate, as far as I know, but "it's stored in /data which is off limits to any app, unless you've rooted the phone." still does not imply that rooting the phone causes /data to cease being off-limits to apps. You're drawing a false conclusion.
They can't - it's stored in /data which is off limits to any app, unless you've rooted the phone.
Which as many Android enthusiasts point out is terribly easy to do. While it does not affect every user it affects huge subset of users.
On the iPhone, even if you've jailbroken it there's no such weakness thanks to the Keychain. Jailbreaking allows side loading, it does not break the entire security model and expose things as basic as email passwords.
No such weakness? What weakness are you talking about? GPP did not imply that rooting the phone causes /data to cease being off-limits to apps.
Some regulations may be necessary, but all regulations make it harder to compete in that particular industry.
False. Counterexample: rules against anticompetitive practices make it easier to compete - that's the reason such regulations exist, after all.
Don't over sensationalise it you will just go to a site that links (possibly using the direct ip address) to another site that has no 'illegal' content but is outside the US that has an IP link to the desired site. Provided the IP is static enough no DNS is ever needed. Just add more links as the law tries to catchup.
Name-based hosting makes it a little more complicated, since (as far as I am aware - please correct me if I'm wrong) URL's don't currently have a way of specifying the domain and the IP address at the same time. You can get a link to the correct host, but because you used an IP address instead of a domain name the server will present the wrong website.