The Germans were denied their right to own weapons near the beginning of Hitler's reign.
That's just plain bullshit. Beside the fact that the common people in Germany never had a general right to bear arms (arms were a means to make a distinction in rank. State clerks for instance always had a saber, so even the station clerk at a train station was wearing a saber at his uniform), it was especially the both militias Hitler had (The SA and the Leibstandarte, later SS), which were defying any weapon restriction laws. (There were others, Leo Jogiter's troup, the Rote Ruhr Armee and several others, which were one of the reasons Germany's democracy between the two World War was failing so utterly. Sometimes having too much "well organized militias" is the dead of a democracy.)
In fact the "right to bear arms" was a political reaction to the european rank system, where each social group had to stick to a certain set of tools and arms they could own. The newly founded U.S. should never fall back into a similar discriminative system.
Normally a good security system should still work if its structure is known to the world. Cf. Bruce Schneier on "security by obscurity".
But in this case we have the strange situation that the attacker knows everything: Not only the algorithm, but all the keys. So all there is left is some kind of obfuscation. I remember an article featured here about 10 years ago, where an israelian team proved mathematically, that a software based approach to DRM can't work. I wonder if we could get them as expert witness to tell the court in a DMCA case that a DRM based enforcement of copyrights can't be called "effective" and thus is not protected by the DMCA:)
This is much better than being stored in boxes in the basement, and streaming the content off a sever, also in the basement.
I fullheartedly agree. I wouldn't be too interested in any stream coming out of a sever in the basement. Actually I would call a plumber immediately to have him plug the hole and stop the stream.
Hm. The only quirks I had with Linux and NFS (Server on Solaris) was that from time to time the statd on the Solaris machine hung, with the effect that flock() on any file mounted via NFS hung also. Restarting the statd got it right again.
As a matter of fact I HAVE a linux from seven years ago. (More correctly: It was a Linux from 1999, so eight years). It started out as a DLD (Deutsche Linux Distribution), then got a new kernel to use my ISDN card, then it got overinstalled with a RedHat 5.2, without actually reformatting the HD, then again an Upgrade Installation with RedHat 7.3 and then gradually upgraded with diverse redhat-release.*.rpms until RedHat 9.0, but with a custom kernel to cater to my diverse SCSI-drives.
There is actually no point for me to upgrade the boxes, because I can install the software packages I need, and when I need them. For some software I lost the installation medium, most prominently my CIV Call to Power from Loki Software (which I bought originally), which let me hesitate to reformat everything to start from anew.
And for "living in the past". Indeed I am somehow living in the past. I grew up in houses built around 1900. I currently live in a house from 1820. My brother's house was built 1374. (Yes. More than 600 years ago). My parent's house is from 1998, but it is built in an old vineyard, and the vineyard walls are older than 150 years. I just don't see the problem. You can just gradually upgrade houses. Install electricity. Install air condition. Install new isolation. Paint the walls. Build in new windows.
And you can gradually upgrade computers. And then they reach the level of usefullness that caters to your needs. I don't need much of the features newer computers offer (there is one exception right now: Google Earth;) ). Even video replay is fast enough for most DivX, and for DVDs I have a DVD player. I don't play 3D Real Time games, because I like round based games. Maybe I'll upgrade to 1 Gigabyte of memory, but PC133 RAM is slowly going expensive. It is still much cheaper than a new computer though. I bought one recently for my wife for US$300. It serves her needs. It even is fast enough for Google Earth. It'll probably get upgraded once or twice. And it will run until something nonreplacable breaks. That's all.
Microsoft fears IBM and Novell and CA. It doesn't "fear" Ubuntu or Gentoo or Torvalds. That's the key issue that RMS managed to miss (or probably chose to ignore for the oomph effect) in his incisive analysis of the "Halloween documents". The same as you seem to constantly manage to miss the real issue RMS has. It's called "software obstructionism" and has nothing directly to do with Microsoft, even though he considers Microsoft als one of today's key proponents of said obstructionism.
RMS' issue came from 1984, when Unix Source Labs tried to renegotiate all UNIX software licenses. MIT and UCB put lots of work into UNIX and added many components to its software stock. But according to the license USL reserved the right to call those components "derivatives" and gained all distribution rights to them. Then it tried to sell MIT's own work (including RMS' own work) to MIT itself for money. And according to the licenses it had the right to do so.
So RMS envised a license that simply makes it impossible to pull a stunt like this: the GPL, which enforces the fact that software intended to be distributed for free stays free also in all its derivates, and started the GNU project whose main goal was to replace UNIX by a free alternative (That's probably why GNU stands for GNU's Not UNIX... it was designed to be a replacement for UNIX), starting by building a complete tool chain without using UNIX' original code.
It still doesn't migitate the exact problem people are complaining about.
I have a Win2000 at home, installed once in Mar 2000, and never reinstalled. If my hard disc dies, I might still be able to reinstall it without hassle. With XP I have to go through an activation process, which in turn is depending on Microsoft actually supporting XP at that point in time. With Windows Vista, the activation process got more sophisticated.
Why don't I just upgrade to WinXP? Because Win2000 runs and is proven stable (to me). Because my home box is just a P3 500 MHz with 512 MByte, which happily houses Win2000, but gets overwhelmed by XP's complexity. Because the machine just works for me (never a hardware failure until now, and all I ever changed was just an additional 80 GByte harddrive).
So I am using my pc since about seven years now without major problems. Why introduce additional problems just by a strange activation process that does nothing for me in terms of additional productivity? I'll just use Win2000 a few more years. When XP is no longer supported, and all XP installations have to be upgraded to whatever Microsoft OS is dominating then, I might still be able to use Win2000.
It's not that easy. People have lived there. Were going hunting there. Had their herds there. Had their crops growing there. It may not look very productive to our standards, but at least this land had a usage, and it can't be used for that anymore if you are pulling out the crude. So at least you have to either buy the priviledge to use the land, or you have to share the profits to offset the lost usage. If a nation tries to nationalize the local ressources it's often because the priviledges were bought before in an unclear way, by bribing the clan leaders or just going there and shooting everyone coming close, or because the previous regime were selling and the new one doesn't feel obliged to fulfill the contracts because the old one was considered illegal anyway, thus the revolution.
The main reason for the U.S. Dollar to have a value is your ability to pay your debts with it. As long as you pay a contractually determined sum of U.S.$ to your contractual partner (the debitor), your obligation is fulfilled, and the debitor has no legal recourse against you.
This is what actually gives the Dollar its inherent value. Because your employer can get rid of his debt for your work by paying you a contractually agreed upon sum of dollar, he has hired you. Because the grocery store can pay its debt to the distributor with U.S. dollar, it'll accept your U.S. dollar in exchange for its goods. The dollar will keep its value as long as enough people accept it as payment for debts.
The main difference between normal text and programs is that in texts the smallest semantic unit is the morphem (which is mostly a syllable), while in programs the smallest semantic unit is the single character (or symbol). It thus makes sense for programs to use monospaced fonts, because then every semantic unit has the same size.
But we read text by reading morphems, and the reader even can easily be confused by hyphenation through morphems (re-adi-ng is difficult to read compared to read-ing), and morphems don't map to symbols in the letter based alphabets anyway, so each morphem has its individual size to begin with. Monospaced fonts don't help spotting morphems in letter based alphabets.
It's different in Chinese or Korean though, where each morphem has its own character, and those languages use - monospaced fonts!
1. The rectangle is the halve angle of a straight line, thus you can easily separate each room into two rooms which are rectangular again. Each other angle causes the remaining angle to be of a different size. 2. Rectangular forms have parallel sides, thus they don't change the distance between walls, allowing for instance an easy sliding in of furniture. Try for instance a triangle grid and then slide in furniture! Sokoban raises it's ugly head.
Because the rectangle as itself is instable, frame work buildings always have diagonal bars to stabilize them. With mural buildings you hope the structural integrity of the wall itself keeps it from collapsing.
The same story happened to me. At first I bought an expensive Sony DVD player just to notice that this doesn't play anything beside music CDs and DVDs correctly encoded. Then it took longer and longer to recognize slightly scratched DVDs (I have little children, so DVDs get scratched very easily), and finally it didn't recognize any of the DVDs my children liked to watch.
So I missed my parental opportunity to reduce the media consum of my children, went to an online shop and ordered the cheapest DVD player I could get for a mere 30 EUR (at the time just US$25), and - oh wonder! - all the scratched DVDs play again, additionally the DVDs my wellmeaning sister-in-law brought from the U.S., which didn't play before, and I can also look at the burned CD with all my family pictures, play MP3 CDs...
The expensive DVD player from Sony now sits in the kitchen and occasionally plays a normal music CD, when there is nothing in the FM worth listening to.
About any rail system I have ever travelled with uses that distinction. With the possible exception of the U.S. rail (and yes, I went from St. Clara, CA to SF via rail).
And there are lots of hybrid systems. Karlsruhe, Germany for instance has an intertwined streetcar/local railway network, where local trains ride through town on streetcar rails. The relation Nuremberg-Munich is handled by a RegionalExpress train, which doesn't stop between the towns and runs on a new highspeed track, even though it is handled by the regional transport company (DB Regio).
RTFA;) They especially restrict the list to the After 1970 Era, and concentrate solely on computing. No Differential Engine, no Abacus, no beans to count.
Re:I'm sure I'm not the only one to point it out,
on
Beginning Lua Programming
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It has to do with two very basic properties of natural numbers: Cardinality and Ordinality. If your natural numbers start with 0, then the Ordinality of n (the position number in the sequence of natural numbers) is equal to the Cardinality of n (the amount of numbers, that are smaller than n).
So whenever you have to talk about both position in (ordered) sets and size of sets, starting to count with 0 has its advantages.
Burrowing gets invented and forgotten again quite often during the development of animals, and it's highly probable that a burrow dweller has non burrowing predecessors and also highly probable, that a non burrower has burrow dwellers in his genealogy chart.
Even when the kettle is calling the pot black, two wrongs don't make a right. Viacom may be a hypocritical tattletale in this case but it doesn't absolve YouTube of responsiblity. Which responsibility are you talking about? To take down works where a copyright holder claims infringment? They do that. To reinstall them if the uploader files a counter notice disputing the claims on infringment? They do that. So where is YouTube at wrong? They just comply with the DMCA.
Simply put, the user is too dumb to realize they even have a problem, let alone link it to DRM. Nobody knows what DRM even is, there is no awareness at all. 'nuff said. Do you actually think the customers call support and tell them: "I have an incompatibility between the used DRM on file ABC and player XYZ, because the used DRM Coding BlaFasel v1.04.02 is not recognized by the player firmware 2.42!" If they had a clue like this they wouldn't call support in the first place.
No. The statistics come from the resolution put into the support ticket. And those resolution was found by the support people probably after lengthy discussions with the customer to find out what actual release of which software player he was using, what make of hardware player he bought, how to update it, which DRM version of which music file finally got running on which configuration.
The FSF activists will come and demand a look at your software if and only if you start to distribute the software. I guess if I started to sell selfburned XP or Vista CDs on eBay or from a table at the street corner, there will not only the BSA come upon me.
The FSF will never look at your computers for the installed and used software at all, because the GPL allows the unlimited use of the software everytime and everywhere. It's just the process of modifying and distributing where they want a look (and if you just put the CD with the sourcecode into your distribution, they won't even call).
Linksys actually distributed a modified version of the Linux kernel together with some tools and utilities, and thus Linksys, which got the software under the GPL, had to comply with the GPL as soon as they were selling it in a modified form.
I can't talk about Saõ Paulo (never been there), but about Recife in the Northeast of Brazil.
And there is something called a middle class. They might not be that large in numbers, but they go shopping at Carrefour (the one I was talking about had a defective last "r", thus converting the shop into a Carrefou or Crazy Car) Supermarkets, they have their home with a little garden around (and a high wall with glass shards on top to ward off burglars), they work as attorney, clergyman, consultant, banker...
I was staying with a 70 year old woman (a distant relative of my wife), who was still working as attorney. She had her computer (about one year outdated compared with the U.S. or Europe) for her files, she was using it everyday, and I doubt that all the software was fully licensed from Microsoft.
Of course there is a market for computers and discount software licenses in Brazil. And Brazil has nearly 190 mio inhabitants, so if only 10% of them fall anywhere in the "middle class" range, it's still a market of 19 mio people for a portugese version of Microsoft Products.
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Sorry. I got a name wrong. I meant "Leo Schlageter" and the "Freikorps".
That's just plain bullshit. Beside the fact that the common people in Germany never had a general right to bear arms (arms were a means to make a distinction in rank. State clerks for instance always had a saber, so even the station clerk at a train station was wearing a saber at his uniform), it was especially the both militias Hitler had (The SA and the Leibstandarte, later SS), which were defying any weapon restriction laws. (There were others, Leo Jogiter's troup, the Rote Ruhr Armee and several others, which were one of the reasons Germany's democracy between the two World War was failing so utterly. Sometimes having too much "well organized militias" is the dead of a democracy.)
In fact the "right to bear arms" was a political reaction to the european rank system, where each social group had to stick to a certain set of tools and arms they could own. The newly founded U.S. should never fall back into a similar discriminative system.
Normally a good security system should still work if its structure is known to the world. Cf. Bruce Schneier on "security by obscurity".
:)
But in this case we have the strange situation that the attacker knows everything: Not only the algorithm, but all the keys. So all there is left is some kind of obfuscation. I remember an article featured here about 10 years ago, where an israelian team proved mathematically, that a software based approach to DRM can't work. I wonder if we could get them as expert witness to tell the court in a DMCA case that a DRM based enforcement of copyrights can't be called "effective" and thus is not protected by the DMCA
I fullheartedly agree. I wouldn't be too interested in any stream coming out of a sever in the basement. Actually I would call a plumber immediately to have him plug the hole and stop the stream.
Hm. The only quirks I had with Linux and NFS (Server on Solaris) was that from time to time the statd on the Solaris machine hung, with the effect that flock() on any file mounted via NFS hung also. Restarting the statd got it right again.
As a matter of fact I HAVE a linux from seven years ago. (More correctly: It was a Linux from 1999, so eight years). It started out as a DLD (Deutsche Linux Distribution), then got a new kernel to use my ISDN card, then it got overinstalled with a RedHat 5.2, without actually reformatting the HD, then again an Upgrade Installation with RedHat 7.3 and then gradually upgraded with diverse redhat-release.*.rpms until RedHat 9.0, but with a custom kernel to cater to my diverse SCSI-drives.
;) ). Even video replay is fast enough for most DivX, and for DVDs I have a DVD player. I don't play 3D Real Time games, because I like round based games. Maybe I'll upgrade to 1 Gigabyte of memory, but PC133 RAM is slowly going expensive. It is still much cheaper than a new computer though. I bought one recently for my wife for US$300. It serves her needs. It even is fast enough for Google Earth. It'll probably get upgraded once or twice. And it will run until something nonreplacable breaks. That's all.
There is actually no point for me to upgrade the boxes, because I can install the software packages I need, and when I need them. For some software I lost the installation medium, most prominently my CIV Call to Power from Loki Software (which I bought originally), which let me hesitate to reformat everything to start from anew.
And for "living in the past". Indeed I am somehow living in the past. I grew up in houses built around 1900. I currently live in a house from 1820. My brother's house was built 1374. (Yes. More than 600 years ago). My parent's house is from 1998, but it is built in an old vineyard, and the vineyard walls are older than 150 years. I just don't see the problem. You can just gradually upgrade houses. Install electricity. Install air condition. Install new isolation. Paint the walls. Build in new windows.
And you can gradually upgrade computers. And then they reach the level of usefullness that caters to your needs. I don't need much of the features newer computers offer (there is one exception right now: Google Earth
RMS' issue came from 1984, when Unix Source Labs tried to renegotiate all UNIX software licenses. MIT and UCB put lots of work into UNIX and added many components to its software stock. But according to the license USL reserved the right to call those components "derivatives" and gained all distribution rights to them. Then it tried to sell MIT's own work (including RMS' own work) to MIT itself for money. And according to the licenses it had the right to do so.
So RMS envised a license that simply makes it impossible to pull a stunt like this: the GPL, which enforces the fact that software intended to be distributed for free stays free also in all its derivates, and started the GNU project whose main goal was to replace UNIX by a free alternative (That's probably why GNU stands for GNU's Not UNIX... it was designed to be a replacement for UNIX), starting by building a complete tool chain without using UNIX' original code.
Name the price for "English". And now argue that knowing the English language is not valuable.
It still doesn't migitate the exact problem people are complaining about.
I have a Win2000 at home, installed once in Mar 2000, and never reinstalled. If my hard disc dies, I might still be able to reinstall it without hassle. With XP I have to go through an activation process, which in turn is depending on Microsoft actually supporting XP at that point in time. With Windows Vista, the activation process got more sophisticated.
Why don't I just upgrade to WinXP? Because Win2000 runs and is proven stable (to me). Because my home box is just a P3 500 MHz with 512 MByte, which happily houses Win2000, but gets overwhelmed by XP's complexity. Because the machine just works for me (never a hardware failure until now, and all I ever changed was just an additional 80 GByte harddrive).
So I am using my pc since about seven years now without major problems. Why introduce additional problems just by a strange activation process that does nothing for me in terms of additional productivity? I'll just use Win2000 a few more years. When XP is no longer supported, and all XP installations have to be upgraded to whatever Microsoft OS is dominating then, I might still be able to use Win2000.
Sorry. I am German, and we write "Morphem".
It's not that easy. People have lived there. Were going hunting there. Had their herds there. Had their crops growing there. It may not look very productive to our standards, but at least this land had a usage, and it can't be used for that anymore if you are pulling out the crude. So at least you have to either buy the priviledge to use the land, or you have to share the profits to offset the lost usage.
If a nation tries to nationalize the local ressources it's often because the priviledges were bought before in an unclear way, by bribing the clan leaders or just going there and shooting everyone coming close, or because the previous regime were selling and the new one doesn't feel obliged to fulfill the contracts because the old one was considered illegal anyway, thus the revolution.
The main reason for the U.S. Dollar to have a value is your ability to pay your debts with it. As long as you pay a contractually determined sum of U.S.$ to your contractual partner (the debitor), your obligation is fulfilled, and the debitor has no legal recourse against you.
This is what actually gives the Dollar its inherent value. Because your employer can get rid of his debt for your work by paying you a contractually agreed upon sum of dollar, he has hired you. Because the grocery store can pay its debt to the distributor with U.S. dollar, it'll accept your U.S. dollar in exchange for its goods. The dollar will keep its value as long as enough people accept it as payment for debts.
The main difference between normal text and programs is that in texts the smallest semantic unit is the morphem (which is mostly a syllable), while in programs the smallest semantic unit is the single character (or symbol). It thus makes sense for programs to use monospaced fonts, because then every semantic unit has the same size.
But we read text by reading morphems, and the reader even can easily be confused by hyphenation through morphems (re-adi-ng is difficult to read compared to read-ing), and morphems don't map to symbols in the letter based alphabets anyway, so each morphem has its individual size to begin with. Monospaced fonts don't help spotting morphems in letter based alphabets.
It's different in Chinese or Korean though, where each morphem has its own character, and those languages use - monospaced fonts!
Actually no :)
Rectangular forms have two advantages:
1. The rectangle is the halve angle of a straight line, thus you can easily separate each room into two rooms which are rectangular again. Each other angle causes the remaining angle to be of a different size.
2. Rectangular forms have parallel sides, thus they don't change the distance between walls, allowing for instance an easy sliding in of furniture. Try for instance a triangle grid and then slide in furniture! Sokoban raises it's ugly head.
Because the rectangle as itself is instable, frame work buildings always have diagonal bars to stabilize them. With mural buildings you hope the structural integrity of the wall itself keeps it from collapsing.
The same story happened to me. At first I bought an expensive Sony DVD player just to notice that this doesn't play anything beside music CDs and DVDs correctly encoded. Then it took longer and longer to recognize slightly scratched DVDs (I have little children, so DVDs get scratched very easily), and finally it didn't recognize any of the DVDs my children liked to watch.
So I missed my parental opportunity to reduce the media consum of my children, went to an online shop and ordered the cheapest DVD player I could get for a mere 30 EUR (at the time just US$25), and - oh wonder! - all the scratched DVDs play again, additionally the DVDs my wellmeaning sister-in-law brought from the U.S., which didn't play before, and I can also look at the burned CD with all my family pictures, play MP3 CDs...
The expensive DVD player from Sony now sits in the kitchen and occasionally plays a normal music CD, when there is nothing in the FM worth listening to.
About any rail system I have ever travelled with uses that distinction. With the possible exception of the U.S. rail (and yes, I went from St. Clara, CA to SF via rail).
And there are lots of hybrid systems. Karlsruhe, Germany for instance has an intertwined streetcar/local railway network, where local trains ride through town on streetcar rails. The relation Nuremberg-Munich is handled by a RegionalExpress train, which doesn't stop between the towns and runs on a new highspeed track, even though it is handled by the regional transport company (DB Regio).
RTFA ;) They especially restrict the list to the After 1970 Era, and concentrate solely on computing. No Differential Engine, no Abacus, no beans to count.
It has to do with two very basic properties of natural numbers: Cardinality and Ordinality.
If your natural numbers start with 0, then the Ordinality of n (the position number in the sequence of natural numbers) is equal to the Cardinality of n (the amount of numbers, that are smaller than n).
So whenever you have to talk about both position in (ordered) sets and size of sets, starting to count with 0 has its advantages.
Here we go:
Ponies at Sinfest
Executive summary:
Burrowing gets invented and forgotten again quite often during the development of animals, and it's highly probable that a burrow dweller has non burrowing predecessors and also highly probable, that a non burrower has burrow dwellers in his genealogy chart.
No. The statistics come from the resolution put into the support ticket. And those resolution was found by the support people probably after lengthy discussions with the customer to find out what actual release of which software player he was using, what make of hardware player he bought, how to update it, which DRM version of which music file finally got running on which configuration.
Selling is a subset of distributing ;)
The FSF activists will come and demand a look at your software if and only if you start to distribute the software. I guess if I started to sell selfburned XP or Vista CDs on eBay or from a table at the street corner, there will not only the BSA come upon me.
The FSF will never look at your computers for the installed and used software at all, because the GPL allows the unlimited use of the software everytime and everywhere. It's just the process of modifying and distributing where they want a look (and if you just put the CD with the sourcecode into your distribution, they won't even call).
Linksys actually distributed a modified version of the Linux kernel together with some tools and utilities, and thus Linksys, which got the software under the GPL, had to comply with the GPL as soon as they were selling it in a modified form.
I can't talk about Saõ Paulo (never been there), but about Recife in the Northeast of Brazil.
And there is something called a middle class. They might not be that large in numbers, but they go shopping at Carrefour (the one I was talking about had a defective last "r", thus converting the shop into a Carrefou or Crazy Car) Supermarkets, they have their home with a little garden around (and a high wall with glass shards on top to ward off burglars), they work as attorney, clergyman, consultant, banker...
I was staying with a 70 year old woman (a distant relative of my wife), who was still working as attorney. She had her computer (about one year outdated compared with the U.S. or Europe) for her files, she was using it everyday, and I doubt that all the software was fully licensed from Microsoft.
Of course there is a market for computers and discount software licenses in Brazil. And Brazil has nearly 190 mio inhabitants, so if only 10% of them fall anywhere in the "middle class" range, it's still a market of 19 mio people for a portugese version of Microsoft Products.