I'm going to have to dismiss the entire analogy as false due to stretching the premises. Software, in its fundamental sense, is a specific set of instructions designed to make a machine respond precisely, purportedly to accomplish some specified machine-driven task. There is no corresponding requirement for legislation to control the behavior of human action. In fact, according to Blackstone's "Commentaries", law is supposed to define what persons may NOT do. I can see where confusing the two viewpoints might lead us into the quagmire.
That is certainly a major oversimplification. Laws that prohibit murder might fall into that category, but anything delegating authority for example is not. Anything that establishes any kind of procedure like say rules of evidence contains both dos and don'ts, not just don'ts. Things like building codes are also to a large degree both dos and don'ts. Same goes for licenses to operate, whether as a doctor or ham radio amateur often describe requirements. Pretty much everything related to taxes is about what you must declare, it certainly defaults to that and even if you're not paying taxes they want to check the eligibility of that.
Actually, in software it's actually better to compare it to bounds checking and application logic. ALTER SYSTEM us_healthcare ADD CHECK ( healthcare >= inimum_healthcare ) etc. than as the software executing something.
You can debate whether or not it would have finished with this book on schedule or not but this was planned to be the last book
Brandon Sanderson says it'll take three books to sum it up and each of those will be a 300000 word log like the previous WoT books. That means Robert Jordan would probably take at least twice as long, given his usual style. Either Jordan was planning to leave 90% of the subplots hanging, or he was trying to enter the Guinness Book of Records for thickest pocket book. More likely he realized how absurd the claim was that he'd finish it all in a book but couldn't tell his fans he'd need half a dozen which he wouldn't be around to write.
Robert Jordan pretty much up and died in the middle of finishing his last book In Memory of Light.
Robert Jordan has been in "one book more" mode for half a dozen books right up until the part where he got sick and thought he might begin in the direction of moving the series towards a close. Even then, I think he was much too caught up in his own plot and writing style to have actually finished in one book or even three. Just judging by how few of the subplots that are closed that could have been closed, I don't think he was very good at keeping track himself. It wasn't a recurring case of going off on subplots, it's subplots spreading out like a fan as the series progresses, two new appearing whenever one is closed. If he did a real job, it'd probably be like Brandon Sanderson discovering there was a million plots to close or it'd be a rushed "let me throw this out there before I die" sort of thing.
While I reserve judgment until I actually see the result, having someone else finish up the work might be the best thing that's happened to the WoT since the last half a dozen books. Someone that's actually good at bookkeeping and closing plots that really has the ability to bring the series to a consistent close. I'm guessing the final ending of book three (14!) is already well outlined as it's been hanging out there for years, but getting to that point is closing the unclosable. Not too unlike the filming of Lord of the Rings, that was also supposedly impossible to make as film. While in this case they're both authors, I'm hoping Sanderson can be to Jordan something like what Jackson was to Tolkien.
The ideas and principles that most religions are based on are sound and sane. When you look at the ideals of a few world religions (christianity, islam, judaism, buddhism, hinduism...), you'll notice that they all somehow focus on an attempt to get society to work well together. They all follow a more or less common moral standard: Don't steal. Don't kill. Don't lie. Try to live a "good" life and do "good" things. They promise rewards in the afterlife for this, which might be a bit too mystical for the secular mind of this time, but in general the intention behind it isn't so bad.
True, but most all major religions are inherently territorial because that is a religion's self-preservation. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me". "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah". Demands to gather followers by words or force. Discrimination of believers and non-believers. Support in all things even conflict and war. Religions prescribe rewards for things that are good for the religion, not society though of course it tries to make itself the pillar of society. It's dead opposite of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do", no matter how outnumered you must keep your True Faith(tm) and keep spreading the good word to the poor souls waiting to be saved.
What exactly do you think "bang on the facts" means? It's an argument for jury nullification, that's what.
No, you are ignoring the simplest and correct answer. Bang on the law means "It wasn't illegal". Bang on the facts means "I didn't do it". If you try reading something into the last one except resignation, then maybe it could imply appealing to their emotions. Because that's what jury nullification is, you don't need it unless both the law and the evidence is against you...
Aren't you trying to invent something new just because it happens electronically? Walk into any clothes store and the sales rep will suggest clothes that he will think fit you, which might be a complete mismatch. Remember that showing ads to people that aren't interested is a complete waste of time for both the advertiser and you. They'd love a customers that says "your ads suck, why can't you advertise about stuff I care about?" and ask "yes, please, how can we know what ads you want?" with $-signs in their eyes.
Hmm.... The outcome of WWII led to the USSR, which in turn led to the Cold War
Wow, talk about having your history backwards. The USSR was formed in 1922 after the revolution of 1917, and Hitler's strong opposition to socialism and the USSR is one of the biggest reasons Europe stood by and watched him build the Nazi regime, leading to WWII. The USSR was on their way to becoming a superpower already, if they hadn't lose 10+ million soldiers and 10+ million civilians there certainly wouldn't have been less of a Cold War.
Put in a configure option like grown-ups, and like any other real developer, and be done with it!
Even in a kernel there are many things that aren't performance sensitive, but the scheduler is not one of them. From what I understood from the kernel discussion last time, this would probably have to be #ifdefs galore. It's also not just the algorithm itself, everything that collects data for the scheduler to use also costs cycles. After all this runs 1000 times a second, it has to be as lightweight as possible.
Let me put this as simple as possible: A Linux ABI would not give you Windows-class drivers. They're first tier, bread and butter drivers that would send the company into bankruptcy if they didn't work. And quite a few of them still suck regardless. Linux binary drivers would be somewhere way, way down there on the "we might hack up something some day" after they're done making the Windows driver and the same with bug reports. Oh yeah and probably just for plain x86, the rest are screwed.
Asking for source and specs is in 99% of the cases the only way drivers will get written in a timely, high-quality and cross-platform way. A typical example of a stable ABI would be ndiswrapper that implements the Network Driver Interface Specification ABI originally made for Windows, and it's a solution everyone will tell you to avoid and go with a native driver instead where possible. A better solution is to try to make better device standards, like how all USB memory sticks use one driver for the Mass Storage Class and most webcams the Video Class. If for example you could get people together to write a Printer Class that actually is sufficient for managing a printer, it'd be fantastic.
You missed the part about the Unix philosophy, which is "Do one thing, and do it well". It browses the web, apparently very very well. But storing cookies for later use isn't really browsing, now, is it? Neither are favorites or bookmarks or history and all that. If you want that stuff, you have to write scripts for it.
Until you want to implement something like a privacy button. It needs to clear the disk cache. It needs to clear the cookies. It needs to clear the autocomplete for the navigation bar. It has to delete the page history. But you don't want it to nuke your bookmark database, so you can't just make a "purge all". What's one thing for the user isn't one thing for the developer, which is why you end up building monolithical applications.
You know what else runs natively? Botnets, SPAMbots, various Virii, worms, etc. I know that if I was writing computer viruses, I definately want the IP address of someone who is running Windows/quote
Maybe they do on your networks, they never did here by using good sense, applying protection and not running every random exe from the Internet. Oh yeah, and not using IE as web browser. Seriously, I think Linux is ahead of Windows on this one but anyone visiting slashdot should be more than capable of administrating Windows without running into problems.
Even so, it still doesn't guarantee access to any enhancements that Microsoft may make to Exchange/Outlook.
Have you read Apple's licensing agreement with Microsoft or something? I'm sure they have lawyers that have checked they have terms to make sure things like that don't happen.
In order to get customers to come in the first place you usually have to advertise with prices that are rather good. If you can't upsell them to a different model I'd say usually the money is in accessories, that the customer usually doesn't know the market price of but will throw in when he's there, either because he thinks of it when he sees it or a sales representative is convincing. Going home to google if it's Linux compatible is a no-sale because then the customer might just as well go somewhere else and an online price check is just a search away. So if you want Linux in retail stores, I think you'll want everything else to have nice Tux labels too...
Fair enough on one level but totally unfair on the one that matters here. If the criticism of the Linux community is they concentrate their effort on things that mortals care little for this one doesn't work since the performance of Flash Player is entirely out of their hands.
Fair enough on one level, but totally unfair in a way too. The desktop can probably wait until hell freezes over before Microsoft will port their chat client - a pretty basic need. Instead we got clients like pidgin and kopete that use those protocols as replacements. The lack of a flash replacement is valid criticism of the Linux community, gnash doesn't really come close.
Won't happen. It'd be as stupid as to say everyone that is listening to music are chumps, that they should all play instruments themselves or find something else worthwhile to do. Or those that read books instead of writing them. Being told a good story is fun - that you don't see it is your loss, not mine. Of course there's crap series, crap movies too but I don't have a problem sorting out the lemons.
Perhaps. But they still have a long way to go on $/GB. Just checking my local price guide it's 0.09 $/GB for 1.5TB HDDs and 3.75 $/GB for the cheapest SSD. But yeah, booting off SSD and having a HDD for media sure.
Not to mention that they'll need to patch the digital hole. Before the big breakthroughs on AACS/BD+ there were HDCP breakers and HDMI capture cards to make pure digital copies, even though it had to be transcoded since it was already decoded. AACS/BD+ isn't totally broken in that AnyDVD must release new versions of the decrypting tool but HDCP is, just like CSS is for DVDs. There's no fixing that without replacing every HDMI and DVI/HDCP connection out there.
Well, first you have simple prejudice and bigotry not rooted in facts. But then you have statistical truths, well that's only statistics.
The question is, how can you use these statistics? Imagine you're operating a customs check point, and you only have capacity to search X% of the travellers. Do you stop those most likely, or a completely random pick? If you do use what you statistically know, a non-smuggling person in a high-risk group will be checked much more often than a non-smuggling person in a low-risk group. Of course that feels unjust, like why are they always stopping and inconvieniencing me and not him? Of course you feel it's guilt by association, that they are treating all of them as criminals. On the other hand it's clearly the optimal solution for catching smugglers given limited resources.
In short, you need a form of willful blindness not to discriminate.
Or hold a reality show called "Voted Off The Planet!".
Haha this could be a great show... you can pick any startegy, like make you popular or so unpopular people want to get rid of you or whatever. Would be cool.
I'd hate to be on the ground there, and get the radio message "Sorry, World War 3 has broken out. By the time you get this message, there will be no survivors here. Good luck, you'll be the only surviving humans in the universe.
I read one interesting theory. If we for a moment forget copyright law, there's contract law in general. That's pretty basic law which there's pretty good consensus opinion about. So I make with you a contract that reserves the same exclusive rights as copyright law does today, and you must impose the same restrictions on everyone that you give access to it. Since the creator of the work has the first copy and never sells copies except under contract, every copy is either authorized by the creator or have, at some point, been a breach of that contract. That would probably be considered a well-known fact, just like that you can't download Metallica songs legally off P2P.
So really all that it would take to reinstate "copyright" as such is a law prohibiting you from dealing in such copies, just like they prohibit dealing in stolen goods. In fact, we probably would need such a law anyway, since without copyright as today some dishonest employee could post the source code of their company, and everyone else could use it freely since it was never stolen, only copied. This sounds far easier to legally defend, and I doubt all copyright holders will let go without trying something similar to this.
We already have plenty weapons with lots of collateral damage and they're being used, that was never in dispute. The question was how can this be a weapon "with little to no collateral damage" if in fact the reflections do collateral damage. If we didn't care about colleteral we could just throw a nuke at it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to have to dismiss the entire analogy as false due to stretching the premises. Software, in its fundamental sense, is a specific set of instructions designed to make a machine respond precisely, purportedly to accomplish some specified machine-driven task. There is no corresponding requirement for legislation to control the behavior of human action. In fact, according to Blackstone's "Commentaries", law is supposed to define what persons may NOT do. I can see where confusing the two viewpoints might lead us into the quagmire.
That is certainly a major oversimplification. Laws that prohibit murder might fall into that category, but anything delegating authority for example is not. Anything that establishes any kind of procedure like say rules of evidence contains both dos and don'ts, not just don'ts. Things like building codes are also to a large degree both dos and don'ts. Same goes for licenses to operate, whether as a doctor or ham radio amateur often describe requirements. Pretty much everything related to taxes is about what you must declare, it certainly defaults to that and even if you're not paying taxes they want to check the eligibility of that.
Actually, in software it's actually better to compare it to bounds checking and application logic. ALTER SYSTEM us_healthcare ADD CHECK ( healthcare >= inimum_healthcare ) etc. than as the software executing something.
You can debate whether or not it would have finished with this book on schedule or not but this was planned to be the last book
Brandon Sanderson says it'll take three books to sum it up and each of those will be a 300000 word log like the previous WoT books. That means Robert Jordan would probably take at least twice as long, given his usual style. Either Jordan was planning to leave 90% of the subplots hanging, or he was trying to enter the Guinness Book of Records for thickest pocket book. More likely he realized how absurd the claim was that he'd finish it all in a book but couldn't tell his fans he'd need half a dozen which he wouldn't be around to write.
Robert Jordan pretty much up and died in the middle of finishing his last book In Memory of Light.
Robert Jordan has been in "one book more" mode for half a dozen books right up until the part where he got sick and thought he might begin in the direction of moving the series towards a close. Even then, I think he was much too caught up in his own plot and writing style to have actually finished in one book or even three. Just judging by how few of the subplots that are closed that could have been closed, I don't think he was very good at keeping track himself. It wasn't a recurring case of going off on subplots, it's subplots spreading out like a fan as the series progresses, two new appearing whenever one is closed. If he did a real job, it'd probably be like Brandon Sanderson discovering there was a million plots to close or it'd be a rushed "let me throw this out there before I die" sort of thing.
While I reserve judgment until I actually see the result, having someone else finish up the work might be the best thing that's happened to the WoT since the last half a dozen books. Someone that's actually good at bookkeeping and closing plots that really has the ability to bring the series to a consistent close. I'm guessing the final ending of book three (14!) is already well outlined as it's been hanging out there for years, but getting to that point is closing the unclosable. Not too unlike the filming of Lord of the Rings, that was also supposedly impossible to make as film. While in this case they're both authors, I'm hoping Sanderson can be to Jordan something like what Jackson was to Tolkien.
The ideas and principles that most religions are based on are sound and sane. When you look at the ideals of a few world religions (christianity, islam, judaism, buddhism, hinduism...), you'll notice that they all somehow focus on an attempt to get society to work well together. They all follow a more or less common moral standard: Don't steal. Don't kill. Don't lie. Try to live a "good" life and do "good" things. They promise rewards in the afterlife for this, which might be a bit too mystical for the secular mind of this time, but in general the intention behind it isn't so bad.
True, but most all major religions are inherently territorial because that is a religion's self-preservation. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me". "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah". Demands to gather followers by words or force. Discrimination of believers and non-believers. Support in all things even conflict and war. Religions prescribe rewards for things that are good for the religion, not society though of course it tries to make itself the pillar of society. It's dead opposite of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do", no matter how outnumered you must keep your True Faith(tm) and keep spreading the good word to the poor souls waiting to be saved.
A couple of quotes spring to mind:
"God, please protect me from your followers"
"Every day more and more people are giving up religion and returning to God"
I prefer this version:
"I have no problem with God. It's his fan club I can't stand"
Or just use site preferences in Opera....
What exactly do you think "bang on the facts" means? It's an argument for jury nullification, that's what.
No, you are ignoring the simplest and correct answer. Bang on the law means "It wasn't illegal". Bang on the facts means "I didn't do it". If you try reading something into the last one except resignation, then maybe it could imply appealing to their emotions. Because that's what jury nullification is, you don't need it unless both the law and the evidence is against you...
Aren't you trying to invent something new just because it happens electronically? Walk into any clothes store and the sales rep will suggest clothes that he will think fit you, which might be a complete mismatch. Remember that showing ads to people that aren't interested is a complete waste of time for both the advertiser and you. They'd love a customers that says "your ads suck, why can't you advertise about stuff I care about?" and ask "yes, please, how can we know what ads you want?" with $-signs in their eyes.
Hmm.... The outcome of WWII led to the USSR, which in turn led to the Cold War
Wow, talk about having your history backwards. The USSR was formed in 1922 after the revolution of 1917, and Hitler's strong opposition to socialism and the USSR is one of the biggest reasons Europe stood by and watched him build the Nazi regime, leading to WWII. The USSR was on their way to becoming a superpower already, if they hadn't lose 10+ million soldiers and 10+ million civilians there certainly wouldn't have been less of a Cold War.
Put in a configure option like grown-ups, and like any other real developer, and be done with it!
Even in a kernel there are many things that aren't performance sensitive, but the scheduler is not one of them. From what I understood from the kernel discussion last time, this would probably have to be #ifdefs galore. It's also not just the algorithm itself, everything that collects data for the scheduler to use also costs cycles. After all this runs 1000 times a second, it has to be as lightweight as possible.
I've yet to be impressed by your comment, which contains no reason for your opinion. Care to give us some examples of your uses & hardware?
From looking at his posting history, I would say it's because Linux is GPL. He seems to have an axe or three to grind...
Let me put this as simple as possible: A Linux ABI would not give you Windows-class drivers. They're first tier, bread and butter drivers that would send the company into bankruptcy if they didn't work. And quite a few of them still suck regardless. Linux binary drivers would be somewhere way, way down there on the "we might hack up something some day" after they're done making the Windows driver and the same with bug reports. Oh yeah and probably just for plain x86, the rest are screwed.
Asking for source and specs is in 99% of the cases the only way drivers will get written in a timely, high-quality and cross-platform way. A typical example of a stable ABI would be ndiswrapper that implements the Network Driver Interface Specification ABI originally made for Windows, and it's a solution everyone will tell you to avoid and go with a native driver instead where possible. A better solution is to try to make better device standards, like how all USB memory sticks use one driver for the Mass Storage Class and most webcams the Video Class. If for example you could get people together to write a Printer Class that actually is sufficient for managing a printer, it'd be fantastic.
You missed the part about the Unix philosophy, which is "Do one thing, and do it well". It browses the web, apparently very very well. But storing cookies for later use isn't really browsing, now, is it? Neither are favorites or bookmarks or history and all that. If you want that stuff, you have to write scripts for it.
Until you want to implement something like a privacy button. It needs to clear the disk cache. It needs to clear the cookies. It needs to clear the autocomplete for the navigation bar. It has to delete the page history. But you don't want it to nuke your bookmark database, so you can't just make a "purge all". What's one thing for the user isn't one thing for the developer, which is why you end up building monolithical applications.
You know what else runs natively? Botnets, SPAMbots, various Virii, worms, etc. I know that if I was writing computer viruses, I definately want the IP address of someone who is running Windows/quote
Maybe they do on your networks, they never did here by using good sense, applying protection and not running every random exe from the Internet. Oh yeah, and not using IE as web browser. Seriously, I think Linux is ahead of Windows on this one but anyone visiting slashdot should be more than capable of administrating Windows without running into problems.
Even so, it still doesn't guarantee access to any enhancements that Microsoft may make to Exchange/Outlook.
Have you read Apple's licensing agreement with Microsoft or something? I'm sure they have lawyers that have checked they have terms to make sure things like that don't happen.
In order to get customers to come in the first place you usually have to advertise with prices that are rather good. If you can't upsell them to a different model I'd say usually the money is in accessories, that the customer usually doesn't know the market price of but will throw in when he's there, either because he thinks of it when he sees it or a sales representative is convincing. Going home to google if it's Linux compatible is a no-sale because then the customer might just as well go somewhere else and an online price check is just a search away. So if you want Linux in retail stores, I think you'll want everything else to have nice Tux labels too...
Fair enough on one level but totally unfair on the one that matters here. If the criticism of the Linux community is they concentrate their effort on things that mortals care little for this one doesn't work since the performance of Flash Player is entirely out of their hands.
Fair enough on one level, but totally unfair in a way too. The desktop can probably wait until hell freezes over before Microsoft will port their chat client - a pretty basic need. Instead we got clients like pidgin and kopete that use those protocols as replacements. The lack of a flash replacement is valid criticism of the Linux community, gnash doesn't really come close.
Won't happen. It'd be as stupid as to say everyone that is listening to music are chumps, that they should all play instruments themselves or find something else worthwhile to do. Or those that read books instead of writing them. Being told a good story is fun - that you don't see it is your loss, not mine. Of course there's crap series, crap movies too but I don't have a problem sorting out the lemons.
Perhaps. But they still have a long way to go on $/GB. Just checking my local price guide it's 0.09 $/GB for 1.5TB HDDs and 3.75 $/GB for the cheapest SSD. But yeah, booting off SSD and having a HDD for media sure.
Not to mention that they'll need to patch the digital hole. Before the big breakthroughs on AACS/BD+ there were HDCP breakers and HDMI capture cards to make pure digital copies, even though it had to be transcoded since it was already decoded. AACS/BD+ isn't totally broken in that AnyDVD must release new versions of the decrypting tool but HDCP is, just like CSS is for DVDs. There's no fixing that without replacing every HDMI and DVI/HDCP connection out there.
Well, first you have simple prejudice and bigotry not rooted in facts. But then you have statistical truths, well that's only statistics.
The question is, how can you use these statistics? Imagine you're operating a customs check point, and you only have capacity to search X% of the travellers. Do you stop those most likely, or a completely random pick? If you do use what you statistically know, a non-smuggling person in a high-risk group will be checked much more often than a non-smuggling person in a low-risk group. Of course that feels unjust, like why are they always stopping and inconvieniencing me and not him? Of course you feel it's guilt by association, that they are treating all of them as criminals. On the other hand it's clearly the optimal solution for catching smugglers given limited resources.
In short, you need a form of willful blindness not to discriminate.
Or hold a reality show called "Voted Off The Planet!".
Haha this could be a great show... you can pick any startegy, like make you popular or so unpopular people want to get rid of you or whatever. Would be cool.
I'd hate to be on the ground there, and get the radio message "Sorry, World War 3 has broken out. By the time you get this message, there will be no survivors here. Good luck, you'll be the only surviving humans in the universe.
So... you'd rather be dead?
I read one interesting theory. If we for a moment forget copyright law, there's contract law in general. That's pretty basic law which there's pretty good consensus opinion about. So I make with you a contract that reserves the same exclusive rights as copyright law does today, and you must impose the same restrictions on everyone that you give access to it. Since the creator of the work has the first copy and never sells copies except under contract, every copy is either authorized by the creator or have, at some point, been a breach of that contract. That would probably be considered a well-known fact, just like that you can't download Metallica songs legally off P2P.
So really all that it would take to reinstate "copyright" as such is a law prohibiting you from dealing in such copies, just like they prohibit dealing in stolen goods. In fact, we probably would need such a law anyway, since without copyright as today some dishonest employee could post the source code of their company, and everyone else could use it freely since it was never stolen, only copied. This sounds far easier to legally defend, and I doubt all copyright holders will let go without trying something similar to this.
The purpose of this tool is war. So, yes.
We already have plenty weapons with lots of collateral damage and they're being used, that was never in dispute. The question was how can this be a weapon "with little to no collateral damage" if in fact the reflections do collateral damage. If we didn't care about colleteral we could just throw a nuke at it.