Thus, one could reasonably argue that stigmatizing child porn in the way our society does is, in and of itself, a national security risk. Indeed, paranoia in any form is a security risk, whether it's fear of the kiddie porn boogeyman, the fear of the terrorist boogeyman, the fear of the "Big Brother" boogeyman, or any other such thing. FDR had it right when he said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Come on, this is nonsense. Every person that breaks the law fears being exposed, if we wanted to avoid that we'd have to either not have criminals or not have laws. What if one of the guys at Pentagon is secretly a murderer, wouldn't that be blackmail material? Would you like to strike that law too? Have a mistress/child on the side your wife doesn't know about? You just expect everyone to be cool about adultery? That quote is nothing but armchair-quarterback psychology, reality is that there's plenty people and things you should fear and defend yourself from, including war. It's been roughly 65 years since the last world war, the Romans pulled off 207 years of Pax Romana before decending into war and chaos. It's way, way too early to call off WWIII and that we'll all live happily forever after.
Every other question was about the guy's sex life -- number of girlfriends, whether he ever cheated, if he looked at porn, what kind, and so on. The defence guy said he didn't care what the answers were
Where this article and your story intersect, I don't quite believe the defence guy...
The only sense in which C is "harder" is that it takes more statements - because they tend to do simple things - than a higher level language to do many things. A little writing, a little building your own library... you'll have a nice resource for lists, memory management, graphics, in whatever area(s) your interest(s) lie(s.)
Then you leave for greener pastures and the next guy has to try to figure out your DIY "standard" library, or maybe he'd rather bring his own and then spends the next few years trying to work out all the wierd incompatibilies and missing features on both sides. Or it turns out we want to merge two code bases built like that and now either there's two libraries or half the code base has to be rewritten. Every time you do stuff that pretty much every application of a certain complexity has to do like implement a list, the DIY approach is wrong. That goes for your DIY memory management and graphics libraries too.
One of my pet peevees about C and C++ (I prefer C++/Qt which fixes most of my complaints about C++) is that you can't have normal math. Overflow? Underflow? Doesn't exist. But if I multiply two big ints in C or C++ I'll get a negative number. To everyone outside the gritty little details of a CPU that's a huge and irrational WTF. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it's very important to know the exact bit layout and two's complement, but most of the time it's not. Unless it's important I'd just like my application to handle an arbritrarily large number morphing into a int8/16/32/64 or array as needed. You can of course do that with a library, but see above.
It's nice that you have the flexibility to really write to-the-metal routines when you have to, that's why I don't abandon C++ and use some other high level language. But there's a huge difference between choosing to use the complexity and having the complexity forced upon you. It's not that I can't handle it, but even a surgeon doesn't use a scalpel as bread knife. The tools you mostly want are those that make it easy on the developer, not the computer. Then you write only the performance critical sections with the computer in mind. It tends to be less than 5% of the code of any normal application.
You look at someone else performing a task, and you think "geez, what an idiot! I can do it better in ten different ways!". Then they hand the task off to you, and you slowly realize that each of your ten improvements isn't actually any better.
You're describing a very simple process that is pretty much fully understood by one man. In most of the complex systems I've looked into, there is usually plenty room for improvement because nobody really understands the process and so they fix issues in the simplest way possible, like creating a special case hack in the output function. Recently I picked apart a certain job at work and got it down from 1.5 hours to 8 seconds, all because of independently sane decisions using preexisting queries, views and reports but together they belonged on the daily WTF. I've seen people do hundreds of records one by one because they couldn't figure out how to use the batch functionality. I'm never afraid of saying I have an improvement idea, what I'm afraid of are hidden side effects. That is the doom of nearly all cleanup attempts, it's not that I break the process I'm improving it's that I break others that nobody mentioned or have documented or knew depended on what I changed. Often the people who implemented it have left the company (or were consultants to begin with), meaning all you have are whatever scraps of documentation they left behind and since then things have only been bolted on or become redundant. If you work your way through it end-to-end, I'd be very surprised if improvements didn't come by the dozen.
So the "and when" logically equates to "or when", both of which are completely pointless additions to the if, but the "and when" still somehow manages to make it sound like the speaker or writer believes that the situation is actually inevitable, something they've only just realised after saying "if"
It means that it's mostly conditional but with an eventual yet not dominating inevitability. For example if Linus burns out or when he dies of old age, the project will need a new leader. "If" would imply it might never happen. "when" implies everything is deterministic. "If and when" focuses on the near future while recognizing the eventual inevitability, though in a logically pure and formal sense it is then inevitable. However, it is quite normal in general conversation to use "if" and ignore that nothing lasts forever, so it is more formally correct than usual. The parent post very much reminds me of this.
Until medium format Digital becomes more sane and really up's the resolution... film ain't going nowhere. (...) Even low end DSLR's like the T2i now have better resolution than 35mm film.
The T2i is 18 MP, so if we say 15 MP is equal to 35mm then 4x15 MP = 60 MP should be equal to 70mm. Today you can get a full-size medium format 60MP digital back, the downside is of course that it costs $40000. Still you also get all the advantages of digital such as no film cost, no processing cost and no delay in seeing the results. Oh and the article claims much better ISO too. At a rate of almost 1 fps. Not saying this is for everyone, and digital has always been fairly expensive for the first picture, but it makes me fairly certain that in another ten years even medium format film is dead.
Well, last I checked AI development hasn't come so far that it can stand on its own and orphanages and foster homes are hardly considered the ideal way to grow up. Reality is that even though Linus does all the final commits to his tree, he most of the time pulls it on request by subsystem and driver and arch maintainers - it's not like one man reads every line of code. Changes to core code perhaps, but that's a very small part. That system of maintainers wouldn't go away if Linus was hit by a bus, most likely they'd have a little group vote and pick a new master repository. Linux would go on. I'd really hate to see him go though, he's one of those people that - despite maintaining Linux - decides to write a VCS from scratch and does it with high quality, high performance and quickly. 99 out of 100 others would have outsourced that to somebody else.
It seems to be plenty sufficient to prevent an open source BD player from arriving at least. As far as I know, every HD-DVD can be played now using the leaked AACS MKVs but only the very first and simplest BD+ movies. The rest you need a commercial tool for. Of course, BD rips made with one of the commercial tools that remove BD+ don't have this limitation. Just put them on iTunes already with the music and lose those stupid DRM dreams. The music industry had to and last I checked it didn't die.
We are, at least this media. It'll be as popular as SACD and DVD Audio, which is to say not at all. Ever notice how they could sell DVDs with about 1000 of those iTunes tracks, but they don't? This won't be used to sell more on one disc, it'll be to tell you that you need BeyondHD resolution and lossless 384KHz/48 bit audio for your bats because otherwise you'll miss the overtones. Looking at the encodes I see that even BluRay is often overkill. Outside of backwater countries like the US the connection speeds are ready too. It just doesn't seem like the TV and movie industry is ready, but well... it seems more and more people understand that it's possible anyway.
If I write a piece of code calling functions from a GPL'd work, it could in principle work with any program that implemented the exact same functions. That argument is quite weak as long as the functions are not any form of standard, in the extreme copyright would practically be none for source code. Making a program modular doesn't mean each module is a separate work, even if internally there is a set of functions that make up a theming "API". You can quite clearly write a side story to a book that is derivative without reusing any exact phrase, I'm not sure logically adding a new theme that fits perfectly with the preexisting work would be any different. I don't see it as very clean cut either way.
I think there's value in the GPL, but I don't see how a coherent argument can be made that it maximizes the user's freedom.
You may use it any way you want, the GPL does not in any shape, way or form restrict your use of the software. If you want to distribute it there are restrictions, but then you are the distributor and those who recieve it are users. Tbe GPL then naturally maximizes their freedom by demanding you give them the source code, which you wouldn't need to do with BSD code. You could of course, but as a legally guaranteed minimum only the GPL demands that they must.
The GPL is as clear as mud. Do you want an example? It says "derivative works" must be GPL as well. Well, what is a derivative work? Guess what? The GPL itself doesn't define that term. So there's huge debate as to if a block of code that uses nothing from the parent but fully documented and exposed APIs is derivative or not.
"Derivative work" is defined in US copyright law, which is how it is generally understood:
A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications, which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a "derivative work".
The GPLv3 actually doesn't use those words, but define it in terms of copyright law to be more international:
To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a "modified version" of the earlier work or a work "based on" the earlier work.
Yes, it is extremely muddy as the laws aren't down to the detail of compiled versus interpreted code. So it is extremely muddy, but it's not the GPLs fault. It's the law that is muddy. And last time I checked, the FSF didn't have the power to define law.
I did remember reading about a Swedish woman who got caught by that one, she cried her heart out but none of her friends answered. Need better friends? No, just moodwatch. because the message contained "nu är jag helt slut" which is something like "now I'm completely exhausted" in Swedish but the word filter had a different interpretation...
It makes no real difference if it is a MMO, a knitting club or the rugby team. You can tell what kind of person they are by their role in their team. And if you find a person who doesn't play a team sport, doesn't play group games... well smile a lot and get the interview over as quickly as possible because you got yourself a psycho.
Wow, I guess there's plenty psychos in my bunch of friends then. I did use to play a team sport for quite a few years, but eventually grew tired that every weekend for 3/4ths of the year there was one to two matches. Yeah we all played some form of team sport while 15-25, but we're 30+ now and none of us do. Likewise we had an FPS clan, we did play Guild Wars together but today it's only for the social fun of it like the Wii night we had yesterday. We used to have two WoWers, one got told by the wife to pay more attention to his kid and wife, the other is still playing but I'd consider him the most introvert and with the least initiative of the lot in real life.
I get to exercise my resource/unit management and strategy skills plenty well in single player games. We exercise, some jogging or biking and a few others at the gym together but still not as a team or anything. When we come together it's to socialize, not to be a team anything. And of course I'm biased in this but I'd say we're a fairly well-adjusted bunch, we're at least employable enough with a 0% unemployment rate at the moment. Perhaps there's some real people skills in there as well, but a lot of the guild talk I used to hear was gear and tactics. Certainly a lot of the guildies didn't learn one bit of people skills there, only a few leaders.
Being a successful raid leader means you can make over a dozen people work together who all have their own agenda and who can't be fired. Compared to that, running a multi-national is a piece of cake.
People skills are what you mostly need in middle management. Don't get me wrong it matters at the top too, but the most important thing they can do is set the company off in the right direction. I've met some very nice people that have none the less managed to lead the company very poorly. Ultimately most of their performance is based on finding the cash cows, making sure we're making profitable products and services to all the markets we can in a good way. For example, I was part of developing the promotion and salary incentives system in the company I just left, extremely important work that'd affect everyone but it wasn't very personal. Unless you count the CEOs sales pitch to make people accept the new model...
Bah I can survive logic, it's the people that don't use logic that bother me. To take an example with my mother, she often refuses to recognize to forward motion of time. More often than not, she insists I "should have known" things that are obvious in hindsight but were impossible to predict in advance and even when I point out that I'm not clairvoyant she still keeps repeating arguments that I couldn't possibly have known at the time I made the decision.
Likewise, I have a friend who sees everything in extreme black and white. It's like if a pill against headache did not work for someone under some circumstance, then it's useless and doesn't work for anybody under any circumstances. And no matter if you got medical proof, statistical proof that lots of people use it and it helps, anecdotal evidence that we've used it and it does help or whatever else, it's like "I don't believe in it". There's no point in arguing with someone who doesn't even seriously consider the arguments and the possibility that their position may be wrong. The human mind's ability to dismiss arguments we don't want to hear is astonishing.
No amount of "logical purity" is as bad as arguing with plain irrationality.
It's not that it doesn't exist, it's more that they took the brute force approach to solving it. A lot of it is distributed on CD/DVD, just put everything on the disc. Even digital downloads now rather bloat their installers than deal with it, for example because you might not be online anymore when you try to install it or you're running it from a different PC. They just assume you have the bandwidth, if not get the boxed/burned version.
This ignores the fact that life expectancy changes depending on age and the one often presented is the "at birth" number. For example, a Roman Life Expectancy table at the University of Texas shows that at birth the life expectancy was 25 but if one lived to the age of 5 one's life expectancy jumped to 48.
Life expectancy rates throughout history look weak because a huge proportion of children never lived to adulthood. When half your population dies by age 5 and the other half lives to 45, you get a life expectancy of around 25. I can't think of any time period where people who lived through childhood couldn't presume to live long enough to raise a family without having to get started at 14.
This is actually true for most of the adult life as well. I was looking at a population statistic comparing 1950 and 2000, and despite 50 years of medical advances most of what we've achieved is that the number of "premature" deaths are much lower, while the curve comes crashing down in much the same place where "natural causes" becomes typical. We've gotten slightly better at extending the life of the frail, but not that much in reducing the frailty of age.
For example, look a few of roman emperors that died of natural causes (not many...):
Augustus: 63 BC-14 AD = 77 Tiberius: 42 BC-37 AD = 79 Galba: 3 BC-69 AD = 72 Vespasian: 9-79 AD = 70 Antoninus Pius: 85-161 AD = 76 Gordian I: 159-238 AD = 79 Licinius: 250-325 AD = 75 (...) And a little later one, a real grand old man: Anastasius I: 430-518 AD = 88 Justin I: 450-527 AD = 77 Justinian I: 482-565 = 83
Of course this is hardly representative for people in general but living to 80 was certainly not unheard of.
Except practically they won't. Even in the US there's millions of file sharers and about 2000 copyright lawsuits a year. That means it'll on average take 1000+ years for you to be sued and you can settle for $1500-2500 which makes the yearly risk exposure about a dollar, the threat is very weak compared to many forms of low-risk injury or disease that'll cost you $1500-2500 worth of income. And the US is the most sue-happy, insane-damage, corporate-friendly country on earth. In most other countries the threat is practically nil unless you're a release group or something.
The reason they're trying so badly to rewrite IP law at the moment is that it's not working at all. And while they still hold the legilatives, they've lost the youth. Just an example from Sweden I read recently was a youth election in a Swedish city, 15% (21% of those that actually voted) voted for the Pirate Party. 10% (20% of those that actually voted) wanted the Rick Falkvinge from the Pirate Party as prime minister (source, Swedish).
Most likely, the NSA is very happy that the general public doesn't use advanced tools to escape detection. I'm sure they'd be nothing but pissed by tracking millions of people trying to figure out WTF they're up to only to discover they're sharing MP3s, not plotting terrorist attacks. As far as they are concerned, it's probably better for national security to not pursue copyright violators.
I beg to differ. Sure, court cases like Sony vs Betamax aren't good for either party but the general public sure won. Assuming this goes on all the way to the Supreme Court and becomes one of those huge landmark cases, there is a lot riding on this. For a number of reasons most people will not self-host, they rely on services like YouTube. If the court does the sensible thing and finds that it's not Google's problem that Viacom is struggling to enforce their copyright, then that'll be a standard for all sites hosting user-generated content. Personally, I couldn't think of a better champion on this one unlike Napster, Grokster and for that matter TPB though it's in Sweden, not the US. I think that when the smoke clears it'll be obvious that we won.
Doctor Who isn't sci-fi. It's a sci-fantasy show for children.
You're looking for the Sarah Jane Adventures. Doctor Who is more sci-comedy, at least some of the episodes like "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" or "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone" are far too dark for a children's show. But it has a lot more in common with 3rd Rock from the Sun which is a sitcom with aliens than it has to do with hard science fiction. The "rules" of travelling in space and time and between universes have been set and broken so many times over by now they can just make anything up. But the only ones who can't get a good laugh out of it are sci-fi snobs who calls everything else children's shows.
Um, just because the services were bundled does not mean they were free. Part of your ticket went to paying for them, whether you used them or not. Imagine McDonalds started counting every meal as a sale of burger, fries and soda with a rebate. Their revenue on fries would skyrocket, but you can't seriously say they are making billions they weren't making before. And how you draw the conclusion from the increased fries revenue that the burger hasn't gotten cheaper I don't know. If anything it's those billions are what those that don't use the services have stopped paying, now those that use them are paying for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Thus, one could reasonably argue that stigmatizing child porn in the way our society does is, in and of itself, a national security risk. Indeed, paranoia in any form is a security risk, whether it's fear of the kiddie porn boogeyman, the fear of the terrorist boogeyman, the fear of the "Big Brother" boogeyman, or any other such thing. FDR had it right when he said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Come on, this is nonsense. Every person that breaks the law fears being exposed, if we wanted to avoid that we'd have to either not have criminals or not have laws. What if one of the guys at Pentagon is secretly a murderer, wouldn't that be blackmail material? Would you like to strike that law too? Have a mistress/child on the side your wife doesn't know about? You just expect everyone to be cool about adultery? That quote is nothing but armchair-quarterback psychology, reality is that there's plenty people and things you should fear and defend yourself from, including war. It's been roughly 65 years since the last world war, the Romans pulled off 207 years of Pax Romana before decending into war and chaos. It's way, way too early to call off WWIII and that we'll all live happily forever after.
Every other question was about the guy's sex life -- number of girlfriends, whether he ever cheated, if he looked at porn, what kind, and so on. The defence guy said he didn't care what the answers were
Where this article and your story intersect, I don't quite believe the defence guy...
And DARPA set up a contest in which they got teams from the best universities in the country to compete to make child porn meeting their criteria.
Ah, the lesser known XXX-prize.
The only sense in which C is "harder" is that it takes more statements - because they tend to do simple things - than a higher level language to do many things. A little writing, a little building your own library... you'll have a nice resource for lists, memory management, graphics, in whatever area(s) your interest(s) lie(s.)
Then you leave for greener pastures and the next guy has to try to figure out your DIY "standard" library, or maybe he'd rather bring his own and then spends the next few years trying to work out all the wierd incompatibilies and missing features on both sides. Or it turns out we want to merge two code bases built like that and now either there's two libraries or half the code base has to be rewritten. Every time you do stuff that pretty much every application of a certain complexity has to do like implement a list, the DIY approach is wrong. That goes for your DIY memory management and graphics libraries too.
One of my pet peevees about C and C++ (I prefer C++/Qt which fixes most of my complaints about C++) is that you can't have normal math. Overflow? Underflow? Doesn't exist. But if I multiply two big ints in C or C++ I'll get a negative number. To everyone outside the gritty little details of a CPU that's a huge and irrational WTF. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it's very important to know the exact bit layout and two's complement, but most of the time it's not. Unless it's important I'd just like my application to handle an arbritrarily large number morphing into a int8/16/32/64 or array as needed. You can of course do that with a library, but see above.
It's nice that you have the flexibility to really write to-the-metal routines when you have to, that's why I don't abandon C++ and use some other high level language. But there's a huge difference between choosing to use the complexity and having the complexity forced upon you. It's not that I can't handle it, but even a surgeon doesn't use a scalpel as bread knife. The tools you mostly want are those that make it easy on the developer, not the computer. Then you write only the performance critical sections with the computer in mind. It tends to be less than 5% of the code of any normal application.
You look at someone else performing a task, and you think "geez, what an idiot! I can do it better in ten different ways!". Then they hand the task off to you, and you slowly realize that each of your ten improvements isn't actually any better.
You're describing a very simple process that is pretty much fully understood by one man. In most of the complex systems I've looked into, there is usually plenty room for improvement because nobody really understands the process and so they fix issues in the simplest way possible, like creating a special case hack in the output function. Recently I picked apart a certain job at work and got it down from 1.5 hours to 8 seconds, all because of independently sane decisions using preexisting queries, views and reports but together they belonged on the daily WTF. I've seen people do hundreds of records one by one because they couldn't figure out how to use the batch functionality. I'm never afraid of saying I have an improvement idea, what I'm afraid of are hidden side effects. That is the doom of nearly all cleanup attempts, it's not that I break the process I'm improving it's that I break others that nobody mentioned or have documented or knew depended on what I changed. Often the people who implemented it have left the company (or were consultants to begin with), meaning all you have are whatever scraps of documentation they left behind and since then things have only been bolted on or become redundant. If you work your way through it end-to-end, I'd be very surprised if improvements didn't come by the dozen.
So the "and when" logically equates to "or when", both of which are completely pointless additions to the if, but the "and when" still somehow manages to make it sound like the speaker or writer believes that the situation is actually inevitable, something they've only just realised after saying "if"
It means that it's mostly conditional but with an eventual yet not dominating inevitability. For example if Linus burns out or when he dies of old age, the project will need a new leader. "If" would imply it might never happen. "when" implies everything is deterministic. "If and when" focuses on the near future while recognizing the eventual inevitability, though in a logically pure and formal sense it is then inevitable. However, it is quite normal in general conversation to use "if" and ignore that nothing lasts forever, so it is more formally correct than usual. The parent post very much reminds me of this.
Until medium format Digital becomes more sane and really up's the resolution... film ain't going nowhere. (...) Even low end DSLR's like the T2i now have better resolution than 35mm film.
The T2i is 18 MP, so if we say 15 MP is equal to 35mm then 4x15 MP = 60 MP should be equal to 70mm. Today you can get a full-size medium format 60MP digital back, the downside is of course that it costs $40000. Still you also get all the advantages of digital such as no film cost, no processing cost and no delay in seeing the results. Oh and the article claims much better ISO too. At a rate of almost 1 fps. Not saying this is for everyone, and digital has always been fairly expensive for the first picture, but it makes me fairly certain that in another ten years even medium format film is dead.
Linux is his baby and he's a jealous parent.
Well, last I checked AI development hasn't come so far that it can stand on its own and orphanages and foster homes are hardly considered the ideal way to grow up. Reality is that even though Linus does all the final commits to his tree, he most of the time pulls it on request by subsystem and driver and arch maintainers - it's not like one man reads every line of code. Changes to core code perhaps, but that's a very small part. That system of maintainers wouldn't go away if Linus was hit by a bus, most likely they'd have a little group vote and pick a new master repository. Linux would go on. I'd really hate to see him go though, he's one of those people that - despite maintaining Linux - decides to write a VCS from scratch and does it with high quality, high performance and quickly. 99 out of 100 others would have outsourced that to somebody else.
and lacked snake-oil solutions like BD+
It seems to be plenty sufficient to prevent an open source BD player from arriving at least. As far as I know, every HD-DVD can be played now using the leaked AACS MKVs but only the very first and simplest BD+ movies. The rest you need a commercial tool for. Of course, BD rips made with one of the commercial tools that remove BD+ don't have this limitation. Just put them on iTunes already with the music and lose those stupid DRM dreams. The music industry had to and last I checked it didn't die.
We are, at least this media. It'll be as popular as SACD and DVD Audio, which is to say not at all. Ever notice how they could sell DVDs with about 1000 of those iTunes tracks, but they don't? This won't be used to sell more on one disc, it'll be to tell you that you need BeyondHD resolution and lossless 384KHz/48 bit audio for your bats because otherwise you'll miss the overtones. Looking at the encodes I see that even BluRay is often overkill. Outside of backwater countries like the US the connection speeds are ready too. It just doesn't seem like the TV and movie industry is ready, but well... it seems more and more people understand that it's possible anyway.
If I write a piece of code calling functions from a GPL'd work, it could in principle work with any program that implemented the exact same functions. That argument is quite weak as long as the functions are not any form of standard, in the extreme copyright would practically be none for source code. Making a program modular doesn't mean each module is a separate work, even if internally there is a set of functions that make up a theming "API". You can quite clearly write a side story to a book that is derivative without reusing any exact phrase, I'm not sure logically adding a new theme that fits perfectly with the preexisting work would be any different. I don't see it as very clean cut either way.
I think there's value in the GPL, but I don't see how a coherent argument can be made that it maximizes the user's freedom.
You may use it any way you want, the GPL does not in any shape, way or form restrict your use of the software. If you want to distribute it there are restrictions, but then you are the distributor and those who recieve it are users. Tbe GPL then naturally maximizes their freedom by demanding you give them the source code, which you wouldn't need to do with BSD code. You could of course, but as a legally guaranteed minimum only the GPL demands that they must.
The GPL is as clear as mud. Do you want an example? It says "derivative works" must be GPL as well. Well, what is a derivative work? Guess what? The GPL itself doesn't define that term. So there's huge debate as to if a block of code that uses nothing from the parent but fully documented and exposed APIs is derivative or not.
"Derivative work" is defined in US copyright law, which is how it is generally understood:
A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications, which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a "derivative work".
The GPLv3 actually doesn't use those words, but define it in terms of copyright law to be more international:
To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a "modified version" of the earlier work or a work "based on" the earlier work.
Yes, it is extremely muddy as the laws aren't down to the detail of compiled versus interpreted code. So it is extremely muddy, but it's not the GPLs fault. It's the law that is muddy. And last time I checked, the FSF didn't have the power to define law.
I did remember reading about a Swedish woman who got caught by that one, she cried her heart out but none of her friends answered. Need better friends? No, just moodwatch. because the message contained "nu är jag helt slut" which is something like "now I'm completely exhausted" in Swedish but the word filter had a different interpretation...
It makes no real difference if it is a MMO, a knitting club or the rugby team. You can tell what kind of person they are by their role in their team. And if you find a person who doesn't play a team sport, doesn't play group games... well smile a lot and get the interview over as quickly as possible because you got yourself a psycho.
Wow, I guess there's plenty psychos in my bunch of friends then. I did use to play a team sport for quite a few years, but eventually grew tired that every weekend for 3/4ths of the year there was one to two matches. Yeah we all played some form of team sport while 15-25, but we're 30+ now and none of us do. Likewise we had an FPS clan, we did play Guild Wars together but today it's only for the social fun of it like the Wii night we had yesterday. We used to have two WoWers, one got told by the wife to pay more attention to his kid and wife, the other is still playing but I'd consider him the most introvert and with the least initiative of the lot in real life.
I get to exercise my resource/unit management and strategy skills plenty well in single player games. We exercise, some jogging or biking and a few others at the gym together but still not as a team or anything. When we come together it's to socialize, not to be a team anything. And of course I'm biased in this but I'd say we're a fairly well-adjusted bunch, we're at least employable enough with a 0% unemployment rate at the moment. Perhaps there's some real people skills in there as well, but a lot of the guild talk I used to hear was gear and tactics. Certainly a lot of the guildies didn't learn one bit of people skills there, only a few leaders.
Being a successful raid leader means you can make over a dozen people work together who all have their own agenda and who can't be fired. Compared to that, running a multi-national is a piece of cake.
People skills are what you mostly need in middle management. Don't get me wrong it matters at the top too, but the most important thing they can do is set the company off in the right direction. I've met some very nice people that have none the less managed to lead the company very poorly. Ultimately most of their performance is based on finding the cash cows, making sure we're making profitable products and services to all the markets we can in a good way. For example, I was part of developing the promotion and salary incentives system in the company I just left, extremely important work that'd affect everyone but it wasn't very personal. Unless you count the CEOs sales pitch to make people accept the new model...
Bah I can survive logic, it's the people that don't use logic that bother me. To take an example with my mother, she often refuses to recognize to forward motion of time. More often than not, she insists I "should have known" things that are obvious in hindsight but were impossible to predict in advance and even when I point out that I'm not clairvoyant she still keeps repeating arguments that I couldn't possibly have known at the time I made the decision.
Likewise, I have a friend who sees everything in extreme black and white. It's like if a pill against headache did not work for someone under some circumstance, then it's useless and doesn't work for anybody under any circumstances. And no matter if you got medical proof, statistical proof that lots of people use it and it helps, anecdotal evidence that we've used it and it does help or whatever else, it's like "I don't believe in it". There's no point in arguing with someone who doesn't even seriously consider the arguments and the possibility that their position may be wrong. The human mind's ability to dismiss arguments we don't want to hear is astonishing.
No amount of "logical purity" is as bad as arguing with plain irrationality.
It's not that it doesn't exist, it's more that they took the brute force approach to solving it. A lot of it is distributed on CD/DVD, just put everything on the disc. Even digital downloads now rather bloat their installers than deal with it, for example because you might not be online anymore when you try to install it or you're running it from a different PC. They just assume you have the bandwidth, if not get the boxed/burned version.
This ignores the fact that life expectancy changes depending on age and the one often presented is the "at birth" number. For example, a Roman Life Expectancy table at the University of Texas shows that at birth the life expectancy was 25 but if one lived to the age of 5 one's life expectancy jumped to 48.
Life expectancy rates throughout history look weak because a huge proportion of children never lived to adulthood. When half your population dies by age 5 and the other half lives to 45, you get a life expectancy of around 25. I can't think of any time period where people who lived through childhood couldn't presume to live long enough to raise a family without having to get started at 14.
This is actually true for most of the adult life as well. I was looking at a population statistic comparing 1950 and 2000, and despite 50 years of medical advances most of what we've achieved is that the number of "premature" deaths are much lower, while the curve comes crashing down in much the same place where "natural causes" becomes typical. We've gotten slightly better at extending the life of the frail, but not that much in reducing the frailty of age.
For example, look a few of roman emperors that died of natural causes (not many...):
Augustus: 63 BC-14 AD = 77
Tiberius: 42 BC-37 AD = 79
Galba: 3 BC-69 AD = 72
Vespasian: 9-79 AD = 70
Antoninus Pius: 85-161 AD = 76
Gordian I: 159-238 AD = 79
Licinius: 250-325 AD = 75
(...)
And a little later one, a real grand old man:
Anastasius I: 430-518 AD = 88
Justin I: 450-527 AD = 77
Justinian I: 482-565 = 83
Of course this is hardly representative for people in general but living to 80 was certainly not unheard of.
Except practically they won't. Even in the US there's millions of file sharers and about 2000 copyright lawsuits a year. That means it'll on average take 1000+ years for you to be sued and you can settle for $1500-2500 which makes the yearly risk exposure about a dollar, the threat is very weak compared to many forms of low-risk injury or disease that'll cost you $1500-2500 worth of income. And the US is the most sue-happy, insane-damage, corporate-friendly country on earth. In most other countries the threat is practically nil unless you're a release group or something.
The reason they're trying so badly to rewrite IP law at the moment is that it's not working at all. And while they still hold the legilatives, they've lost the youth. Just an example from Sweden I read recently was a youth election in a Swedish city, 15% (21% of those that actually voted) voted for the Pirate Party. 10% (20% of those that actually voted) wanted the Rick Falkvinge from the Pirate Party as prime minister (source, Swedish).
Most likely, the NSA is very happy that the general public doesn't use advanced tools to escape detection. I'm sure they'd be nothing but pissed by tracking millions of people trying to figure out WTF they're up to only to discover they're sharing MP3s, not plotting terrorist attacks. As far as they are concerned, it's probably better for national security to not pursue copyright violators.
Since most software still isn't multithreaded, a crappy application will only max out one core, allowing you to still get work done.
Not to mention letting you kill said shitty application/process without waiting five minutes.
I beg to differ. Sure, court cases like Sony vs Betamax aren't good for either party but the general public sure won. Assuming this goes on all the way to the Supreme Court and becomes one of those huge landmark cases, there is a lot riding on this. For a number of reasons most people will not self-host, they rely on services like YouTube. If the court does the sensible thing and finds that it's not Google's problem that Viacom is struggling to enforce their copyright, then that'll be a standard for all sites hosting user-generated content. Personally, I couldn't think of a better champion on this one unlike Napster, Grokster and for that matter TPB though it's in Sweden, not the US. I think that when the smoke clears it'll be obvious that we won.
Doctor Who isn't sci-fi. It's a sci-fantasy show for children.
You're looking for the Sarah Jane Adventures. Doctor Who is more sci-comedy, at least some of the episodes like "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" or "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone" are far too dark for a children's show. But it has a lot more in common with 3rd Rock from the Sun which is a sitcom with aliens than it has to do with hard science fiction. The "rules" of travelling in space and time and between universes have been set and broken so many times over by now they can just make anything up. But the only ones who can't get a good laugh out of it are sci-fi snobs who calls everything else children's shows.
Well, this match is over. God wins!
"God is dead."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882
"Nietzsche is dead."
- God, 1900
God always wins.
Um, just because the services were bundled does not mean they were free. Part of your ticket went to paying for them, whether you used them or not. Imagine McDonalds started counting every meal as a sale of burger, fries and soda with a rebate. Their revenue on fries would skyrocket, but you can't seriously say they are making billions they weren't making before. And how you draw the conclusion from the increased fries revenue that the burger hasn't gotten cheaper I don't know. If anything it's those billions are what those that don't use the services have stopped paying, now those that use them are paying for them.