Plenty of stones die and are removed from the board, plenty of stones are sacrificed during a game... Won't this screw your mythical Eval(p)?
Only through programmer error. Eval(p) by definition must 'understand' the game it is being applied to; thus, anything within the rules will not 'screw' it, by definition. The Eval(p) that is screwed by legal moves is not the true Eval(p).
Just as in chess; the computers are not surprised when pieces are removed from the board. But if in the middle of the endgame of one of Kramnik's matches, we suddenly plunked a queen for Kramnik right in the middle of the board, we'd expect Fritz to handle that poorly; he wasn't ready for the rules to be broken.
To be fair, neither was Kramnik, unless we told him we were going to do this. Both players would still have to deal with this violation, and they'd handle it about the same. In fact, the computer might have the advantage since it is much easier for the computer to discard its preconceived notions about the game at that point, what with it not having any.
I agree with you, but I also agree with the other responders to your post, that this is incredibly cumbersome and puts a lot of responsibility on the consumer to back up a key, and we all know how likely that is.
The real point to hammer home is "How is this helpful to the consumer to make them jump through all these hoops to do something that used to be as easy as burning backups to a CD-R?"
(BTW, to the story poster, if you REALLY want to nail the question down, you need this back-and-forth between people to really refine it. SiliconEntity's post is exactly what you need.)
No! Do not ask them "How is it supposed to help users?" They are so ready for that question. All you will get back is the approved marketing spiel about increased access to movies, better data security, and increased safety from viruses, just a laundry list of handwavy features with no grounding or evidence. You'll grant them a platform to spout the lines they want to spout... well, frankly, there's no way to avoid that, they are the professionals after all... and you'll probably have lost the opportunity to ask another question.
In fact, stay away from the obvious questions in general. Answers will have been prepared and you will waste your time.
If you want to make them squirm, you need to come up with some direct and highly pointed questions that will be very difficult to avoid answering directly without making it very obvious they are so avoiding it. (You can't prevent avoidance, but you can try to make it obvious that that is what they are doing.)
If I could ask a question, I'd try something like the following:
What kind of data recovery plans will exist if I buy $1000 dollars worth of digital music that is tied to my processor, only to have my processor get fried in a power surge? Will there be any way to recover my investment, or is it lost? If so, what's to prevent hackers from using that recovery mechanism? If not, how can this be a benefit to customers?
The meta-point: Perfect protection implies no recoverability. Recoverability implies imperfect protection. You can not have it both ways.
It's pointed, and it will be very difficult to avoid giving an answer, or making it obvious there isn't one. Either there is a recovery procedure, or the customer is SOL... it's pretty binary. If there is a recovery procedure, hackers might exploit it. (Or do we have to dial home to Master Microsoft first?) If there is no recovery procedure, then how can they honestly claim this is a benefit to the customer?
Me, I'd lay money on a handwaving answer... but it should be obvious, if you do it right.
Don't forget to play the classic soundtrack in your head and match the brilliant camera work that was in the original as you imagine the parent post. (I believe the Simpson's episode where Lisa gets a pony (as opposed to Bart getting the pony.... jeeze, the show HAS been on too long, hasn't it?) lampoons that scene.)
(web scripts are all the same after you've written too many)
This is a big hint from the universe that you need to abstract further. Spend some time factoring out the similarities, and you can make those drudgery scripts more quickly, with fewer bugs, and move on to more interesting problems. Plus, the challenge of factoring the functionality is itself an interesting problem.
Just trying to be helpful; I have no vested interest in you listening or otherwise;-)
Re:Another interesting statistic..
on
The Aging Gamer
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· Score: 5, Funny
The smallest fraction with integral dividend and divisor that produces.924 is 231/250. (3*7*11 / 5*5*5*2)
Empirical observation suggests that your implicit claim that there are 19 (250-231) Slashdot editors that can spell is false, unless you can produce 19 such editors. (Difficult, since the entire universe of discourse is what, six people?)
I suspect something has gone wonky with your math, and suggest you correct it posthaste. Alternatively, you can clarify what you mean by a fractional editor.
For the humorless,:-)
Re:Why such confusion over something so simple?
on
The Python Cookbook
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· Score: 2
I'm not certain if this is some sort of obscure joke, but you misunderstand the future statement. It turns on language features that are being phased in on a particular release. It does not and cannot activate those features in a language version that does not support it. 1.5.2 doesn't have the __future__ directives at all.
Really, do you think these experts would have missed something that obvious?
Here's a great post filled with interesting questions. Where's the Ask Slashdot-ee's answers?
Why don't the Ask Slashdot-ees every engage in the conversation? (At least not that I've seen.) Maybe they don't know when their question has been posted?
So few Ask Slashdot questions can really be truly answered based just on the posted question, just as few (if any) pieces of software can be written without interactively interviewing the users and getting a dialog going about what they want. If you're going to Ask Slashdot, do it right!
Forgiveness if the Ask Slashdotee has since replied to this, but it still holds in general.
By and large, what Rep. Berman says is irrelevant. What matters is what is in the bill.
He can clarify until he's blue in the face, but until he changes the contents of the bill, he's talking out his hat. Everything anyone has said about the bill, every criticism, is still in full force. This does very little to negate any of it.
The exception is that some courts can consider the "intent of Congress" if they want, but depending on that to clearly define the purpose of the bill is awfully cavalier, at best.
Surround sound is an importent part of the workplace, because surround sound advertising embedded in the operating system that must be watched in order to continue to use the system is making Microsoft millions. Thanks to Palladium, there's no way around this.
You try to copy a snippet from a webpage by simply moving a mouse pointer from your desktop to your laptop, but you don't have permission to copy the snippet from the webpage, and the copy action fails due to DRM.
A worker tries to email his boss a clip of the broadcast news story about their company, but the embedded watermark blocks him from doing so.
An email is forward to the CEO's car dash. The CEO's car 'blue screens', and literally crashes, killing the CEO, because for all the Microsoft rhetoric, they are still interested in neither security, nor correctness.
Two of the six feet of the screen are dedicated to advertising.
Sarcastic? Yes. Overstated? Yes. Am I any more guilty of twisting things then Microsoft in this article? No.
It's amazing how hard Microsoft's actual actions are working to block as much of this as possible and ruin it in every way, even as they talk this stuff up.
Unlike the CBDTPA, DMCA, UCITA, and other laws, we can't lobby against Palladium. We can't (and shouldn't!) lobby to have it banned at the federal level. It's a Microsoft product. If they want to make it, they will.
All you can do is not buy it, and exercise your free speech to try to convince as many other people as possible to not buy into either.
What more is there to do? Am I missing something?
If you're looking for action to take, lobby against the CBDTPA, let your representatives know how you feel on these issues, and focus on the legal problems. Microsoft is perfectly free to offer Palladium if they want to, because as sucky as it is, it's not actually being mandated by law. (Yet. Re: CBDTPA, lest ye hurry to accuse me of paranoia.) Palladium is going to happen. (Since the first incarnation will be horrid, it may not even be worth worrying about; the market may well write it out of existance.)
Program the computers through trial and error. They may have some sort of compiler, but it would be brutish and ugly for what it does. (Compilers really need a lot of theory to make them smooth and efficient.) Imagine a linux that took twenty years longer to develop, running on significantly less elegant system, using significantly less elegant algorithms, because nobody involved has a clue about any sort of theory. Debugged over 30 years by raw trial and error, until it's solid, but atrociously bad engineering.
Yes, the transistor was a bit accidental, but without the associated theory, it could have stayed merely an uninteresting footnote.
I haven't sketched it all out, of course, it's just the kernel of an idea. Add a bit of religious-type dogmatism, and a heaping helping of a culture that prides itself only on results, and not on understanding (you've seen those people on this planet, you know; every time there's a Software Engineering post on Slashdot, twenty people thinking they are clever come out and post "Why do we need Software Engineering? It's just a crutch for those who can't code. Just write code already!". Imagine if that response was genetically determined somehow... that would REALLY slow science up.), and it would at least be worth writing about.
My problem is I can come up with a setting, no problem. I just can't set a story in it to save my life. I'm an OK writer, but not of science fiction.;-)
If I were ever to write a sci-fi story, it would be about a race of aliens who are the perfect engineers, but the universe's crappiest scientists. After several thousand years, they finally got to space, but don't understand a damn thing. Big rockets, built by trial and error. Some type of computer, but probably still using some oddly sophisticated form of vacuum tube (since they don't understand QM well enough to build a transistor; they probably completely missed the whole semiconductor bit).
Just because you can build it doesn't mean you MUST understand it. Just look at the aquaduct system build without any particular conception of gravity or potential energy; just "it works".
I forgot to add my caveat that I don't necessarily like or believe that law is the best possible law. I think it's badly broken. But when trying to avoid being sued, it's best to read the law correctly, even if you don't like it.;-)
You do at least quote the proper laws which puts you ahead of most people who seem to think all manner of crazy things about "fair use". It is not a blank check to do whatever you like, but rather a limited set of exceptions to copyright law.
IANAL either, but I study this stuff in my spare time and try to read the law fairly, rather then twisting it around. Most notably, the rulings have been that all of the four guidelines must be met satisfactorily for a use to be considered fair use; it is not enough to claim that your use is non-commercial and try to ignore 2-4. The judge must take all factors into account.
The reason the law seems vague is because it is only saying what the guidelines consider. It has been left to the judicial system to nail down exact guidelines. To get a precise idea of what those guidelines are, you'd have to consult reams of case law and try to apply them to your situation.
However, in my non-lawyerly opinion, that is unnecessary in this case, because archiving the articles is quite clearly in the wrong. You are probably OK for the first guideline, because your weblog is probably non-commercial and might even be considered educational, depending on how you use it. Two is ambiguous in this situation, so we might as well throw it out... because guidelines three and four finish it for you.
By saving a copy of the work, you are "using" the whole work, which is the worst sort of infringement possible. And I think most judges would rule that you are adversely affecting the commercial value of the work, since people will choose to read your copy rather then paying the newspaper a fee for archive retrieval. Combine those two factors together, and you are on the wrong end of the exact thing that copyright law is meant to protect, which is the value of the work. (I emphasize "law" because in theory, we are trying to maximize the value to society. The law practically accomplishes this (or not, depending on your opinion) by trying to protect the work's value to the copyright holder.)
Basically, it's not even close to fair use.
Now, let me tell you what is fair use. In a weblog, it is rare for you to really respond to the whole article. Typically, a paragraph or two adequately captures the point you wish to make. . . it may not cover it completely, but it should do. You can take a paragraph or two (assuming that the article is not merely a paragraph or two!) and copy that into your post, which I frequently do myself. To ensure my protection, plus as a service to my readers, I frequently will even cut the paragraph down until it says just what I want to respond to, frequently chopping more then half the paragraph out. The less you use, the safer you are.
Here's a recent example in my weblog; just a single paragraph that allows me to make my points without grabbing the whole article.
This is, by the way, the "canonical" fair use example, which is quoting a small (!) snippet for the purpose of editorial comment or review. Again, IANAL, but I feel quite confident that nobody can sue me because of my weblog. (And it IS an IP weblog, of sorts...)
I strongly recommend this practice, instead of trying to save the whole article. I also recommend learning how to correctly quote parts of articles by using ellipses and square brackets (as seen in that example).
It is intriguing to see such a criticism of the patterns, because to me the great personal breakthrough was seeing how the patterns enabled one to "objectify" a verb. As I see it, many of the patterns seem to do this: Iterator, command, strategy, and I don't have the book on hand but several others as well.
Each of these bundle a verb: The iterator bundles "traversing the data structure", the command bundles some piece of functionality, the strategy does the same thing but inverted relative to the command.
To me, the noun-like patterns were interesting and sometime useful (I always though "flyweight" was cool), but I've gotten a lot more milage out of the verb-like patterns.
I'll read your critiques here in a bit, but I would be curious about any response or reaction you'd have to my thoughts that many of the patterns are verb patterns. (Feel free to privately email if you don't want to do this on Slashdot.)
Get her out of school and into a home-schooling system that you can involve yourself in. It's a hard answer but if you're really concerned, it's your only choice.
School is set up from top to bottom to make sure that you hate math. It is my opinion that this is accidental, but I believe it is true. With no ability to explore the topic (must do homework, effectively must not do anything else), with the word "math" associated with rote performance of addition problem after addition problem (something that should be called "arithmetic", as it doesn't make it to "math" IMHO), with the swift formation of hatred for math created in the social environment (how many fourth-graders would admit to liking math, even if they did), the deck is stacked against us (as both parents AND students) that it's a damn miracle when anybody manages to fight past this shit and realize how wonderful math is.
Now, that said, it is certainly not for everyone and shouldn't be; I'll agree to that extent with the posts already made. But I'd say that the expression of interest before entering school is an unusual case. Whatever she liked before about math, she is being daily taught that that wasn't math, that it's really boring addition and subtraction and carrying the one that's "real" math. By extension, she will believe that she hates everything called math.
If you leave her there, you will not be able to counter this. Not to be morbid, but it may even already be too late; it's hard to force anyone, let alone a child, to fairly re-examine something they've already passed judgement on.
Unfortunately, most home-schooling stuff is just public-school stuff, except you do it at home. Whether or not you could create a truly useful math cirriculum is an open question, IMHO not answered because everybody assumes they MUST work in current definitions of "math" in elem. education, even if it damages the student to do so. There are a depressing number of unexamined assumptions in current education doctrine.
One of my dreams that will probably never happen is to take a crack at this.
(Also, it's probably worth pointing out that there is some developmental psychology worth knowing when trying to teach math. The Pieget stages of development aren't perfect, but they contain a lot of truth. Some math is not possible to teach to a child until they hit formal operational, and you'll only frustrate everyone if you try.)
Re:Agree: Time Travel, Holodeck, and Q plots suck
on
Star Trek: Pick A Plot
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· Score: 2
Sci-fi traditionally lets you extend current engineering, but requires a lot more of the author if you want to extend basic physics.
Generally, we can take "realistic" sci-fi in this context to be anything that involves below-c travel, since it's hard to otherwise upper-bound the size of a spacecraft, even if we can't build any of them now. (Example: Larry Niven's exploration of moving ringworlds, which amounts to moving the majority of the solar system. Way the hell far out in engineering terms, but not, strictly speaking, a violation of physics. Even scrith, the material that the Ringworld is made out of, is not necessarily impossible, though I sure haven't got any idea how we'd make it, let alone in quantity.)
There are several sci-fi treatments of such universes in the literature. But as the grandparent of this post observes, few, if any, of them make it into the movies. I suspect it's a combination of a lot of things; the slowing of the pace, the impossibility of explaining the limitations of the speed of light to a Star Wars "instant cross-galaxy communication, hours of travel time" audience, the inevitable sociological changes that accompany the return to multi-month communication delays... it would all just be above the average audiences head, and in a particularly ironic twist of fate, many movie goers would actually bitch about how unrealistic the movie was. (Sick world sometimes.)
Better yet, if that's REALLY the problem (no experience, no knowlege, no judgement intended), return it and get your money back. That's a just-plain shoddy product and you should not be required to take the risks involved in following that procedure in your home (both to your health and the health of the motherboard) when you don't have the proper equipment.
It may even just be a bad batch of motherboards that was shipped out improperly processed.
One thing I'd advise is to try to take a trip to your local university with a decent Comp.Sci. sequence,. Go to a student bookstore, and see what they are teaching to. In your case, I'd look in the grad student area for the network stuff and software engineering; the more mathematical stuff like graph theory may be more difficult (or not, as I don't know your background of course), but by now you probably don't care and don't need it.
The other thing is to look for The Books in your field. "Applied Cryptography" from Bruce Schneier, for instance, might be applicable from what I hear. Or if you're in OO, I'd consider "Design Patterns" indispensible (it's the other half of OO as far as I'm concerned).
And most of all, enjoy! There's some good stuff out there and I will freely admit I often wished I had a little less hand-holding. Personally, up until recently, I didn't have the discipline to do this myself. I do now but I'm so close to a degree that I might as well finish it.;-) So for me personally, schooling has been useful as a crutch while I developed the discipline. (That's not a direct reply to you, just a general observation.)
Slashdot Mirror
Plenty of stones die and are removed from the board, plenty of stones are sacrificed during a game... Won't this screw your mythical Eval(p)?
Only through programmer error. Eval(p) by definition must 'understand' the game it is being applied to; thus, anything within the rules will not 'screw' it, by definition. The Eval(p) that is screwed by legal moves is not the true Eval(p).
Just as in chess; the computers are not surprised when pieces are removed from the board. But if in the middle of the endgame of one of Kramnik's matches, we suddenly plunked a queen for Kramnik right in the middle of the board, we'd expect Fritz to handle that poorly; he wasn't ready for the rules to be broken.
To be fair, neither was Kramnik, unless we told him we were going to do this. Both players would still have to deal with this violation, and they'd handle it about the same. In fact, the computer might have the advantage since it is much easier for the computer to discard its preconceived notions about the game at that point, what with it not having any.
Yeah, that would work great if the TiVo could predict 6 seconds into the future what the broadcast stream would contain.
The problem is the radio signal arrives in advance of the video feed. Your TiVo can do nothing to fix that.
Don't mod this up; mod the parent (and equivalent posts) back down.
I agree with you, but I also agree with the other responders to your post, that this is incredibly cumbersome and puts a lot of responsibility on the consumer to back up a key, and we all know how likely that is.
The real point to hammer home is "How is this helpful to the consumer to make them jump through all these hoops to do something that used to be as easy as burning backups to a CD-R?"
(BTW, to the story poster, if you REALLY want to nail the question down, you need this back-and-forth between people to really refine it. SiliconEntity's post is exactly what you need.)
Good point. I actually meant that as a sort of "question tree", not something to be read directly.
In fact, stay away from the obvious questions in general. Answers will have been prepared and you will waste your time.
If you want to make them squirm, you need to come up with some direct and highly pointed questions that will be very difficult to avoid answering directly without making it very obvious they are so avoiding it. (You can't prevent avoidance, but you can try to make it obvious that that is what they are doing.)
If I could ask a question, I'd try something like the following:
- What kind of data recovery plans will exist if I buy $1000 dollars worth of digital music that is tied to my processor, only to have my processor get fried in a power surge? Will there be any way to recover my investment, or is it lost? If so, what's to prevent hackers from using that recovery mechanism? If not, how can this be a benefit to customers?
The meta-point: Perfect protection implies no recoverability. Recoverability implies imperfect protection. You can not have it both ways.It's pointed, and it will be very difficult to avoid giving an answer, or making it obvious there isn't one. Either there is a recovery procedure, or the customer is SOL... it's pretty binary. If there is a recovery procedure, hackers might exploit it. (Or do we have to dial home to Master Microsoft first?) If there is no recovery procedure, then how can they honestly claim this is a benefit to the customer?
Me, I'd lay money on a handwaving answer... but it should be obvious, if you do it right.
Don't forget to play the classic soundtrack in your head and match the brilliant camera work that was in the original as you imagine the parent post. (I believe the Simpson's episode where Lisa gets a pony (as opposed to Bart getting the pony.... jeeze, the show HAS been on too long, hasn't it?) lampoons that scene.)
(web scripts are all the same after you've written too many)
;-)
This is a big hint from the universe that you need to abstract further. Spend some time factoring out the similarities, and you can make those drudgery scripts more quickly, with fewer bugs, and move on to more interesting problems. Plus, the challenge of factoring the functionality is itself an interesting problem.
Just trying to be helpful; I have no vested interest in you listening or otherwise
The smallest fraction with integral dividend and divisor that produces .924 is 231/250. (3*7*11 / 5*5*5*2)
:-)
Empirical observation suggests that your implicit claim that there are 19 (250-231) Slashdot editors that can spell is false, unless you can produce 19 such editors. (Difficult, since the entire universe of discourse is what, six people?)
I suspect something has gone wonky with your math, and suggest you correct it posthaste. Alternatively, you can clarify what you mean by a fractional editor.
For the humorless,
I'm not certain if this is some sort of obscure joke, but you misunderstand the future statement. It turns on language features that are being phased in on a particular release. It does not and cannot activate those features in a language version that does not support it. 1.5.2 doesn't have the __future__ directives at all.
Really, do you think these experts would have missed something that obvious?
"Dude! That machine looks like it could do 2 gigahertz, easy!"
"No no... kilohertz..."
"Whoa..."
(source, since I don't know much about Univacs. 1905 instructions per second...)
Here's a great post filled with interesting questions. Where's the Ask Slashdot-ee's answers?
Why don't the Ask Slashdot-ees every engage in the conversation? (At least not that I've seen.) Maybe they don't know when their question has been posted?
So few Ask Slashdot questions can really be truly answered based just on the posted question, just as few (if any) pieces of software can be written without interactively interviewing the users and getting a dialog going about what they want. If you're going to Ask Slashdot, do it right!
Forgiveness if the Ask Slashdotee has since replied to this, but it still holds in general.
By and large, what Rep. Berman says is irrelevant. What matters is what is in the bill.
He can clarify until he's blue in the face, but until he changes the contents of the bill, he's talking out his hat. Everything anyone has said about the bill, every criticism, is still in full force. This does very little to negate any of it.
The exception is that some courts can consider the "intent of Congress" if they want, but depending on that to clearly define the purpose of the bill is awfully cavalier, at best.
- Surround sound is an importent part of the workplace, because surround sound advertising embedded in the operating system that must be watched in order to continue to use the system is making Microsoft millions. Thanks to Palladium, there's no way around this.
- You try to copy a snippet from a webpage by simply moving a mouse pointer from your desktop to your laptop, but you don't have permission to copy the snippet from the webpage, and the copy action fails due to DRM.
- A worker tries to email his boss a clip of the broadcast news story about their company, but the embedded watermark blocks him from doing so.
- An email is forward to the CEO's car dash. The CEO's car 'blue screens', and literally crashes, killing the CEO, because for all the Microsoft rhetoric, they are still interested in neither security, nor correctness.
- Two of the six feet of the screen are dedicated to advertising.
Sarcastic? Yes. Overstated? Yes. Am I any more guilty of twisting things then Microsoft in this article? No.It's amazing how hard Microsoft's actual actions are working to block as much of this as possible and ruin it in every way, even as they talk this stuff up.
And when does evolution kick in and allow these youngsters the ability to "grow" velcro?
After being bitten by a genetically engineered radioactive super-spider, of course!
I mean, come on! Duh! Get an education!
Unlike the CBDTPA, DMCA, UCITA, and other laws, we can't lobby against Palladium. We can't (and shouldn't!) lobby to have it banned at the federal level. It's a Microsoft product. If they want to make it, they will.
All you can do is not buy it, and exercise your free speech to try to convince as many other people as possible to not buy into either.
What more is there to do? Am I missing something?
If you're looking for action to take, lobby against the CBDTPA, let your representatives know how you feel on these issues, and focus on the legal problems. Microsoft is perfectly free to offer Palladium if they want to, because as sucky as it is, it's not actually being mandated by law. (Yet. Re: CBDTPA, lest ye hurry to accuse me of paranoia.) Palladium is going to happen. (Since the first incarnation will be horrid, it may not even be worth worrying about; the market may well write it out of existance.)
Program the computers through trial and error. They may have some sort of compiler, but it would be brutish and ugly for what it does. (Compilers really need a lot of theory to make them smooth and efficient.) Imagine a linux that took twenty years longer to develop, running on significantly less elegant system, using significantly less elegant algorithms, because nobody involved has a clue about any sort of theory. Debugged over 30 years by raw trial and error, until it's solid, but atrociously bad engineering.
;-)
Yes, the transistor was a bit accidental, but without the associated theory, it could have stayed merely an uninteresting footnote.
I haven't sketched it all out, of course, it's just the kernel of an idea. Add a bit of religious-type dogmatism, and a heaping helping of a culture that prides itself only on results, and not on understanding (you've seen those people on this planet, you know; every time there's a Software Engineering post on Slashdot, twenty people thinking they are clever come out and post "Why do we need Software Engineering? It's just a crutch for those who can't code. Just write code already!". Imagine if that response was genetically determined somehow... that would REALLY slow science up.), and it would at least be worth writing about.
My problem is I can come up with a setting, no problem. I just can't set a story in it to save my life. I'm an OK writer, but not of science fiction.
If I were ever to write a sci-fi story, it would be about a race of aliens who are the perfect engineers, but the universe's crappiest scientists. After several thousand years, they finally got to space, but don't understand a damn thing. Big rockets, built by trial and error. Some type of computer, but probably still using some oddly sophisticated form of vacuum tube (since they don't understand QM well enough to build a transistor; they probably completely missed the whole semiconductor bit).
Just because you can build it doesn't mean you MUST understand it. Just look at the aquaduct system build without any particular conception of gravity or potential energy; just "it works".
Guess I'm out of luck once they remove the link
;-)
Under the law, yes.
I forgot to add my caveat that I don't necessarily like or believe that law is the best possible law. I think it's badly broken. But when trying to avoid being sued, it's best to read the law correctly, even if you don't like it.
You do at least quote the proper laws which puts you ahead of most people who seem to think all manner of crazy things about "fair use". It is not a blank check to do whatever you like, but rather a limited set of exceptions to copyright law.
IANAL either, but I study this stuff in my spare time and try to read the law fairly, rather then twisting it around. Most notably, the rulings have been that all of the four guidelines must be met satisfactorily for a use to be considered fair use; it is not enough to claim that your use is non-commercial and try to ignore 2-4. The judge must take all factors into account.
The reason the law seems vague is because it is only saying what the guidelines consider. It has been left to the judicial system to nail down exact guidelines. To get a precise idea of what those guidelines are, you'd have to consult reams of case law and try to apply them to your situation.
However, in my non-lawyerly opinion, that is unnecessary in this case, because archiving the articles is quite clearly in the wrong. You are probably OK for the first guideline, because your weblog is probably non-commercial and might even be considered educational, depending on how you use it. Two is ambiguous in this situation, so we might as well throw it out... because guidelines three and four finish it for you.
By saving a copy of the work, you are "using" the whole work, which is the worst sort of infringement possible. And I think most judges would rule that you are adversely affecting the commercial value of the work, since people will choose to read your copy rather then paying the newspaper a fee for archive retrieval. Combine those two factors together, and you are on the wrong end of the exact thing that copyright law is meant to protect, which is the value of the work. (I emphasize "law" because in theory, we are trying to maximize the value to society. The law practically accomplishes this (or not, depending on your opinion) by trying to protect the work's value to the copyright holder.)
Basically, it's not even close to fair use.
Now, let me tell you what is fair use. In a weblog, it is rare for you to really respond to the whole article. Typically, a paragraph or two adequately captures the point you wish to make. . . it may not cover it completely, but it should do. You can take a paragraph or two (assuming that the article is not merely a paragraph or two!) and copy that into your post, which I frequently do myself. To ensure my protection, plus as a service to my readers, I frequently will even cut the paragraph down until it says just what I want to respond to, frequently chopping more then half the paragraph out. The less you use, the safer you are.
Here's a recent example in my weblog; just a single paragraph that allows me to make my points without grabbing the whole article.
This is, by the way, the "canonical" fair use example, which is quoting a small (!) snippet for the purpose of editorial comment or review. Again, IANAL, but I feel quite confident that nobody can sue me because of my weblog. (And it IS an IP weblog, of sorts...)
I strongly recommend this practice, instead of trying to save the whole article. I also recommend learning how to correctly quote parts of articles by using ellipses and square brackets (as seen in that example).
It is intriguing to see such a criticism of the patterns, because to me the great personal breakthrough was seeing how the patterns enabled one to "objectify" a verb. As I see it, many of the patterns seem to do this: Iterator, command, strategy, and I don't have the book on hand but several others as well.
Each of these bundle a verb: The iterator bundles "traversing the data structure", the command bundles some piece of functionality, the strategy does the same thing but inverted relative to the command.
To me, the noun-like patterns were interesting and sometime useful (I always though "flyweight" was cool), but I've gotten a lot more milage out of the verb-like patterns.
I'll read your critiques here in a bit, but I would be curious about any response or reaction you'd have to my thoughts that many of the patterns are verb patterns. (Feel free to privately email if you don't want to do this on Slashdot.)
Get her out of school and into a home-schooling system that you can involve yourself in. It's a hard answer but if you're really concerned, it's your only choice.
School is set up from top to bottom to make sure that you hate math. It is my opinion that this is accidental, but I believe it is true. With no ability to explore the topic (must do homework, effectively must not do anything else), with the word "math" associated with rote performance of addition problem after addition problem (something that should be called "arithmetic", as it doesn't make it to "math" IMHO), with the swift formation of hatred for math created in the social environment (how many fourth-graders would admit to liking math, even if they did), the deck is stacked against us (as both parents AND students) that it's a damn miracle when anybody manages to fight past this shit and realize how wonderful math is.
Now, that said, it is certainly not for everyone and shouldn't be; I'll agree to that extent with the posts already made. But I'd say that the expression of interest before entering school is an unusual case. Whatever she liked before about math, she is being daily taught that that wasn't math, that it's really boring addition and subtraction and carrying the one that's "real" math. By extension, she will believe that she hates everything called math.
If you leave her there, you will not be able to counter this. Not to be morbid, but it may even already be too late; it's hard to force anyone, let alone a child, to fairly re-examine something they've already passed judgement on.
Unfortunately, most home-schooling stuff is just public-school stuff, except you do it at home. Whether or not you could create a truly useful math cirriculum is an open question, IMHO not answered because everybody assumes they MUST work in current definitions of "math" in elem. education, even if it damages the student to do so. There are a depressing number of unexamined assumptions in current education doctrine.
One of my dreams that will probably never happen is to take a crack at this.
(Also, it's probably worth pointing out that there is some developmental psychology worth knowing when trying to teach math. The Pieget stages of development aren't perfect, but they contain a lot of truth. Some math is not possible to teach to a child until they hit formal operational, and you'll only frustrate everyone if you try.)
Sci-fi traditionally lets you extend current engineering, but requires a lot more of the author if you want to extend basic physics.
Generally, we can take "realistic" sci-fi in this context to be anything that involves below-c travel, since it's hard to otherwise upper-bound the size of a spacecraft, even if we can't build any of them now. (Example: Larry Niven's exploration of moving ringworlds, which amounts to moving the majority of the solar system. Way the hell far out in engineering terms, but not, strictly speaking, a violation of physics. Even scrith, the material that the Ringworld is made out of, is not necessarily impossible, though I sure haven't got any idea how we'd make it, let alone in quantity.)
There are several sci-fi treatments of such universes in the literature. But as the grandparent of this post observes, few, if any, of them make it into the movies. I suspect it's a combination of a lot of things; the slowing of the pace, the impossibility of explaining the limitations of the speed of light to a Star Wars "instant cross-galaxy communication, hours of travel time" audience, the inevitable sociological changes that accompany the return to multi-month communication delays... it would all just be above the average audiences head, and in a particularly ironic twist of fate, many movie goers would actually bitch about how unrealistic the movie was. (Sick world sometimes.)
... is whether we see a post from "Wakko Warner" ever again...
Better yet, if that's REALLY the problem (no experience, no knowlege, no judgement intended), return it and get your money back. That's a just-plain shoddy product and you should not be required to take the risks involved in following that procedure in your home (both to your health and the health of the motherboard) when you don't have the proper equipment.
It may even just be a bad batch of motherboards that was shipped out improperly processed.
One thing I'd advise is to try to take a trip to your local university with a decent Comp.Sci. sequence,. Go to a student bookstore, and see what they are teaching to. In your case, I'd look in the grad student area for the network stuff and software engineering; the more mathematical stuff like graph theory may be more difficult (or not, as I don't know your background of course), but by now you probably don't care and don't need it.
;-) So for me personally, schooling has been useful as a crutch while I developed the discipline. (That's not a direct reply to you, just a general observation.)
The other thing is to look for The Books in your field. "Applied Cryptography" from Bruce Schneier, for instance, might be applicable from what I hear. Or if you're in OO, I'd consider "Design Patterns" indispensible (it's the other half of OO as far as I'm concerned).
And most of all, enjoy! There's some good stuff out there and I will freely admit I often wished I had a little less hand-holding. Personally, up until recently, I didn't have the discipline to do this myself. I do now but I'm so close to a degree that I might as well finish it.