Yes, it is. But unless it's against the constitution or some other fundamental rights or is very unreasonable to Congress' intention I don't see how it is the judge's place to change it. Every time I see something about jury nullification or activist judges I'm thinking that's because the US has so royally screwed up the parliamentary system. It's one to nine judges. There's twelve jurors. They're not supposed to override hundreds of millions voting in representatives that again voting in laws, not unless it's really really serious. You don't fix a broken democracy by creating a vigilante oligarchy of judges or killing consistency and fairness by jury nullification. How about giving people a better choice than a coin flip? I can promise you that it works, once they parties to look out both to the left and the right politicians can't afford to make nearly as many unpopular decisions or ignore the public. You might even see the return of real democratic and republican parties, not the parody of themselves that most end up as after a while. Of course, the only ones that could change that are those with everything to lose, now that's what is truly without checks and balances...
But how to tell where a biological really came from if all of a sudden it just "appears" someplace and starts to spread, or who was responsible for any retaliation strikes, or even if it is a "natural mutation" or man made?
Or just go for widespread infection, if you pumped out a massive amount of germs in downtown of a major city you would overload everything and all attempts at containment, particularly once people start dying and panicing. Sure it'd be an obvious attack but really nowhere to point the finger and with >1 million that is or will be infected everything would go to hell.
fun fact about movie standards (and I know this because I used to be an art house movie theater projectionist) is that most digital transfers (to "film") are 4096x2048 already. 1080p as a standard is a huge step back in quality to what you're already seeing as "digital".
I don't have the sources now but it was a study on resolution in theaters. Basically a good master negative of a film can have 1500-2000 lines of resolution, but even the best analog cinema prints had only 800-1000 lines of resolution. So digital 1080p movies on digital screens are no worse than before. However, analog film directly scanned to digital is very impressive and probably needs a 4096x2048 (4K) camera to match. Fortunately things are progressing fast and the RED Scarlet coming this year should bring 3K to the 3000$ mark and 4K below 10000$. Compared to all the other costs, that's not much. Hell, even 9K IMAX should drop below 50000$ this year. Personally I'm most impressed with the prosonsumer cams though, it's amazing what they pack in a small HD camera and it gets better every year.
As an interesting note, the new line of Patriot SSD come very close to the 300MB/s speed, clocking in 280MB/s in reads.
Yep, the next step up seems to be PCI express cards directly, even with SATA3 on the horizon it's not moving fast enough. For example the OCZ Z-Drive. These are basicly just internally RAID'd SSDs but a preview of what's to come.
3 Gbps = uncompressed 1080p60 video, used for high-end interconnects and such. Recordings are almost always made compressed, even in professional cameras. AVCHD has a maximum of 24 Mbps = 180MB/minute, there's probably more exotic format for huge movie production cameras but even cameras in the 2000$-5000$ range use AVCHD since it takes a helluva camera to capture more detail than that. The rest is basicly to avoid generational loss so a pipeline looks like:
Camera -> (lossy) -> RAW -> (lossless editing, filtering, special effects etc.) -> Movie -> (lossy) -> final encode for consumer.
You may think it sounds a lot but video compresses very, very well along in the x, y and time axis. In fact, the better the camera the better it usually compresses because everything is clean while noisy, grainy and flickery video eats bandwidth like crazy. I guess if you're shooting staged movie shots with tons of explosions you'll hook up the camera via one of these 3 Gbps interconnects to a real storage kit and save it uncompressed directly, but then you'll need something much faster than this disk anyway.
On a related note, a lot of the videos today are basicly just "filling out the disk" of a BluRay, they don't have that amount of detail. You can tell when there's 1080p reencodes that you need a magnifying class to tell is a reencode. At BluRay sizes we should have had 2160p video instead, you'd get much more detail for 50GB - not that many can tell anyway. So you don't really need all that much space except when you're working with uncompressed intermediaries, but that's what the huge workstations with attached SANs are for.
And don't forget that's 3Gbit/s in 10 bit encoding with two parity bits, so you'll at most get 300MB/s. From cache you can get fairly close to that but reading from platters is slower, couldn't find any info on actual sequential read/write speeds.
Uh, self-signed certificates shouldn't be trusted. Not on a public website. (...) That big scary page that Firefox shows you is EXACTLY what every browser should show you. Self-signed certificates are NOT OKAY for production/public use. Encryption is more or less worthless without proof-of-identity.
You can't do mass scale automated MITM. Someone would communicate the fingerprint using other channels or in an obfuscated form on the page. If you tried doing it selectively and turning it on and off, a known_hosts file like openssh has would warn just fine. It's not secure but it'd protect most of the information most of the time instead of being like an open book to anyone that can sniff the traffic. A letter is still pretty vulnerable to the "tearing open" attack, but it's still a step up from postcards even if it's several steps below being encoded with a one time pad.
If the nazis were experimenting on the jews and that lead to medical data/treatments is it ethical to use it? The experiments themselves were obviously unethical but that's already done, the only thing standing between doctors and taking advantage of it is a moral code. Besides, you talk as if there's only one side that has moral hangups, imagine a mother suffering a life-threatening medical condition due to her pregnancy. How far into the pregnancy can it be terminated before the Hippocratic Oath takes effect and compel them to protect the unborn? I'd very careful how you phrase that, for example having full access to all medical journals would probably advance the state of medicine, but I doubt you want everyone to have the freedom to read through your journal.
... is the fact that eventually we have to get off earth and learn how to survive in the hostile universe anyway.
With all due respect, as much as I want mankind to go into space there's nothing to suggest earth will become uninhabitable in the next few million years. Not unless we destroy it, but in that case there's not much hope we'll be capable of interstellar travel either. On that angle, who cares if that happens this century or this millennium? We could easily have spent another million years on the ape stadium, shaving off a few centuries means nothing.
The odds that any interstellar "manned" spacecraft would be anything like today's manned mission is highly unlikely. More likely what we're doing now is like testing the extreme conditions of cross-continent horse-and-buggy rides when the solution is a jet plane. I'm guessing we'll send something like space probes that'll thaw or build embryos on site with nursing robots to form new colonies, sending fully grown people is just insanely inefficient in so many ways.
You may think that's inhumane, but I think it's the only humane thing. Imagine being second generation plus on a ship in the dark void of space, only seeing pictures and videos of earth while you're trapped on a tin can because your ancenstors decided to make you a pawn in colonizing a new planet. Plus, then they'd also be real people that quite possibly, or even probably, will die at some point from ship failure. A probe on the other hand may only produce humans if all flags are green.
Actually, opinions vary considerably. Some people really consider near-indefinate commercial copyright on the work as long as it can be used non-commercially. Others are infoanachists and want it all gone. Others want them to only keep commercial rights on the original and not every kind of sampling/derivates. However, that create a big issue of defining what a "trivial" modification is and isn't. Others again think that e.g. the LotR "universe" should be protected longer to produce new works, but that the actual movie should only be five years (or 10, 20, whatever). For example a book comes out and five years later Hollywood releases a movie based on the book without paying any royalties, noone wants that. Other ideas like requiring source are pretty much dead in the water because then the source code is visiable to the world and they wouldn't do that just for Sweden. Something like YouTube is very complicated, the videos themselves are non-commercial but the site itself is for-profit.
The theory is fairly clear - no DRM and full non-commercial use. Then we want the "good" commercial use of building on that culture (no paying Ugh the caveman for wheel and fire), and not the "bad" commercial use of others ripping them off for profit. The trouble is making it work in practise and not just in fairytale land, 5 years basicly ended up as a compromises that's really not great but signals the general direction.
As much as some people wish it so, "a fair trial" or is not applicable to "ending a business relationship". You might try for "tortious interference of contract" by the MAFIAA which is part of common law and should apply in the UK, but that's about it. The circumstances where you can demand anyone continue to offer you service are slim indeed.
"(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." So, IANAL, but my understanding is that it's only illegal to crack DRM if it's protecting a copyrighted work.
Yes, as long as you use only pixie dust and don't violate:
(b) Additional Violations. (1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;
Basicly all the tools are illegal as long as at least one work (or part thereof) is still protected by copyright, i.e. forever.
They lump Freenet into the category of "Gnutella-like networks", and say that their attack against gnutella should also work against Freenet since it is Gnutella-like (p.2 and p.12).
Except it won't because freenet isn't p2p it's p2swarm.... a client can request data with the right "magic code" but all the nodes inbetween would cache it and all the pirates get it from one of the non-authenticating nodes. Note that this is really all a stupid authentication system, the sending peer could simply ask the master server "is this an authenticated client too?" and send poison data if not. This is basicly already done and better with private torrents - with the rights flags set the tracker will only allow authenticated peers and peers won't let you connect even if you know about them through DHT etc.
If you can't see how it's because you've locked yourself in a tiny box and completely ignored outside factors which remove data and introduce data without affecting increasing the amount of data a person can download. Whenever someone adds a new download to the tracker, the potential share ratio for everyone in the network increases. Whenever a new member joins, the potential share ratio for everyone on the network increases. Eventually it balances out to 100%, but the network is ever changing so it never actually gets there.
No. Your ratio can only become better by making the newcomer's ratio worse, so they have to limit their downloads and try to get upload of their own. More files being added is an opprtunity to seed but it's no good if it's rushed by everyone else that needs to improve their ratio as well. If I'm just a few hours late on a release it'll have 100 seeds and never seed back 100% because even if some are late to the party the 100Mbit symmetric people will seed them in minutes.
I am member of a nice private tracker, 0.45 minimum + bonus points + free leech files + free leech weekends + 1/2 off some classes and before on a slower line I was struggling to make it and it's not because I'm being tight fisted, it's because it's impossible to seed more. I had to snipe fresh releases and download free leech files that I then get credited upload for just to avoid being banned. The upside is that every file maxed my download every time, never any waiting for what I wanted. A fair trade, I think.
Just because one can understand memory allocations and pointers doesn't mean one wants to have to deal with them manually in all their programs. There is a reason why there are auto_ptrs in C++ and it's not because those people are "noobs", it's because people want to actually spend their time writing the program rather than having their time eaten up by writing tons of boilerplate memory management code.
Agreed. The absolutely sanest way I've found to develop is that memory follows objects. New instance? Memory allocated. Delete instance? Memory cleared. You fill up an object list = You run out of memory, but there's no "loose buffers" anywhere that you allocate somewhere but never gets cleared in the other end. If you really need to send "memory" around, send values (Qt has some really neat implicitly shared classes that means performance doesn't hurt much). I'd say almost all code can be written in a way that gives you 80% of the performance using only sane methods, and the reminder should probably have a assembler implementation with a standard fallback...
"Formal scientists" don't even consider Psychology a science, but "an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and often scientific, study of human/animal mental functions and behavior".
Since psychology doesn't comply as "real science", how can "scientists" duplicate the machine that controls most of human behaviour?
Psychologists understand the brain in the way an alchemist understands chemistry and physics - they understand that when you mix different inputs you get different outputs and have made some quasi-scientific models on how this process works, but they don't observe the actual thought process leading up to the action so they are really fumbling in the dark when their theories fail them. Kind of like how the alchemists never understood why their mixtures would never produce gold. Or what those knowledgable of plants and herbs is to medicine, "eat this and you'll feel better". It's basicly accepting a process with a "??? (Brain process)" step in it.
Right now they're doing a better job than the people doing it from a neuron level, just like a painter can be better at mixing paint than a scientist with color models. But if we want to know what's really going on then we need science to really pick that process apart. If there's a sound, what do we really pick up from it? Do we run a pattern recoginition, a memory search, what's our search algorithm? Does everything pass through the language processing center or just what we identify as talking? Do native and foreign languages share memory areas? I could go on but I'm sure you get the picture.
I'm sure that many of the psycholgical conclusions we have found will drop out of that process as results, just like an alchemist knows that if he mixes this and that what the result will be. The difference is a whole new level of understanding of why, like with modern medicine we know what the actual substance is rather than the herb it's in. Psychologists tend to get the job done because they "cheat", they have a human brain so really they just need to imagine "if I had these experiences, how would I react?" or read about similar experiences and they've usually understood the situation well enough to help. But just because we mostly behave in the same way doesn't really explain why we act that way.
If you know what you want get quotes, if not get estimates. Like "neuter a pet" has a very clear scope you should be able to get a quote on. Check a few, remove the outliers and accept that's basicly the going rate for having a professional do it. Sometimes you can go from estimates to quotes, like if you don't know what's wrong with your car you can pay one to find out and find someone else to actually fix it. Never let people replace expensive stuff without asking you first, if you go it for a 200$ repair and end up with a 600$ bill you're doing it wrong. It doesn't matter if it really is 600$ of broken, you're still doing it wrong. Take it back, have someone else look at it and if they agree then fine. It's amazing how much better it'd be if people simply made sure to have a second opinion.
And if you do hire a professional, just accept that it costs much more than a DIY project. There's in general no industry-wide or indeed global conspiracy of price fixing to give them absurd profit margins. Imagine like an employer hiring an employee - everything from hiring someone that isn't a deadbeat to marketing, billing, tools, improving skills, sick leave, periods without work and whatnot. If you can do it yourself you got no overhead, no transaction costs. And you should not also forget that you do things that are easy because you are a professional, even if the customer is asking for something any professional should be able to do in five minutes it has value. That can make the $/minute seem high but that's like measuring a boxer's $/second in the ring and not the hours spend working out in the gym.
This is why movies have producers. It's to keep the artists in check. Someone should have kept the brains in check when they designed this thing. Instead of being smaller and useful, it's just a gigantic waste of money -- the Waterworld of the scientific community.
Yes, and we should dismantle Hubble and replace it with an army of hobbyist astronomers with a 100$ telescope. They won't find anything new except maybe a few near-earth asteroids, certainly no exoplanets and all the other interesting stuff happening. Same with LHC, if you wanted any particle accelerator I think we had an electron one in high school science class. We could play with it forever but I doubt we'd ever get any more results on the standard model and the higgs particle. Experimental science of this kind is all about building the most sensitive equipment you can - it's complex, expensive, obsoleted by the next generation but it's the only way to do science and not guesswork.
I think it's easier to see it if you imagine a matchmaker generation, imagine a fan down from the supposed ancestor and a fan upward from you. In 13 generations there's 2^13 = 8192 at the end of each fan - actually it will be more children and less parents, but it's a decent approximation. Now, for you not to be related all of those decendants must avoid being one of your ancenstors. Even though it's only a few thousands, there's millions of combinations. Even in a population of 100 milllion there's about 50% chance you will be related (Calculation: ((100 000 000 - 8 192) / 100 000 000)^8 192 = 0.511137763).
Distro/package maintainers tend to be the only thing keeping Linux sane with the endless dependencies on libraries that again rely on other libraries with turtles all the way down. It's might work poorly for the five applications that are basically big enough to roll their own framework but for all the Gnome/KDE apps that would be just terrible.
I don't know why firefox is bugging me but my guess it's because the developers are lazy... there's a little perl app called apt-show-versions:
See that? It is up to date, and stop bloody bugging me about it. I'm sure the same could be done with an #ifdef LINUX and a few lines in C if anyone would bother, it doesn't even take a sudo. Do you know that when I go in Opera, right-click a file in the transfer window I do get a list of my Linux applications to open it with? They got sub-percent market share and do it right, but Firefox can't be arsed to do it. Why should I think it's the maintainer's fault when the developers can't be arsed to do the things they can do? Face it, Linux is maybe 5% of the total Firefox userbase now and we're getting the same shit we are with closed source apps.
Distribution managers should thoroughly test in first person the forthcoming releases (alphas, betas, RCs...)
For what, anecdotal evidence and "works4me" tags? Don't get me wrong, it's very important to do QA but I hope the person(s) responsible pulling together thousands of packages to make a distro got better things to do than play QA peon. Things like making sure packages aren't broken, exceptions to freeze windows, what to do with release-critical bugs whether it\s downgrade, upgrade (if upstream has fixed it), delay, release anyway or just pray for a solution and basicly administer the whole thing. If it lacks QA feedback then it's more likely the release manager has failed at producing alphas or betas and recruiting testers than that he should roll up the sleeves and try doing it alone. Of course, I wouldn\t use a release the release manager himself wouldn\t use...
Who wants fair? There was plenty missing here, for example RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu LTS and Debian are probably in the same class but only Debian was in the survey. This was more like a sample with a spread, showing the spread between bleeding edge distros and stable distros. That said, my impression is that they picked a very round-about way of figuring out the age. Ubuntu has a release every six months, so the average age is close to 6mo/2 = ~13 weeks. Debian has 18 months, so 18mo/2 = ~39 weeks. Unless you're doing significant amounts of backporting that won't change and the number of releases behind will be a fairly linear equation with time. There's some better metrics to pull out here like "How bleeding edge are they when released" but I don't see him doing any of that.
Apparently its an attack on their youth because of their children were to grow up with choices, they might choose not to be boneheaded, zombie worshiping, fucktards, and THEN what would happen to the world?!?
No, but they might realize how arbitrary it is. Take a look at the world map for the biggest religions here and you see it's predominantly decided by where you're born, kinda like what sports team you cheer for. If you presented the top four religions as equal options most children would go "WTF, you want me to believe one of those crazy stories?" but give them only one and you can raise christian kids, muslim kids, buddhist kids or hindu kids. If religious indoctrination of children was outlawed they'd collapse like a house of cards and soon go the way of superstition, magic and fairytale creatures. As in "fun to watch with Harry Potter" but nothing to take seriously.
The Bill implements an EU directive which brings Ireland into line with other EU member states.
Meh, I recognize the bill. They're implementing it to the maximum extent possible, the minimum is six months which promises well for most of the other optional stuff. Many european countries are struggling with getting this bill through the national legal process.
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Yes, it is. But unless it's against the constitution or some other fundamental rights or is very unreasonable to Congress' intention I don't see how it is the judge's place to change it. Every time I see something about jury nullification or activist judges I'm thinking that's because the US has so royally screwed up the parliamentary system. It's one to nine judges. There's twelve jurors. They're not supposed to override hundreds of millions voting in representatives that again voting in laws, not unless it's really really serious. You don't fix a broken democracy by creating a vigilante oligarchy of judges or killing consistency and fairness by jury nullification. How about giving people a better choice than a coin flip? I can promise you that it works, once they parties to look out both to the left and the right politicians can't afford to make nearly as many unpopular decisions or ignore the public. You might even see the return of real democratic and republican parties, not the parody of themselves that most end up as after a while. Of course, the only ones that could change that are those with everything to lose, now that's what is truly without checks and balances...
But how to tell where a biological really came from if all of a sudden it just "appears" someplace and starts to spread, or who was responsible for any retaliation strikes, or even if it is a "natural mutation" or man made?
Or just go for widespread infection, if you pumped out a massive amount of germs in downtown of a major city you would overload everything and all attempts at containment, particularly once people start dying and panicing. Sure it'd be an obvious attack but really nowhere to point the finger and with >1 million that is or will be infected everything would go to hell.
fun fact about movie standards (and I know this because I used to be an art house movie theater projectionist) is that most digital transfers (to "film") are 4096x2048 already. 1080p as a standard is a huge step back in quality to what you're already seeing as "digital".
I don't have the sources now but it was a study on resolution in theaters. Basically a good master negative of a film can have 1500-2000 lines of resolution, but even the best analog cinema prints had only 800-1000 lines of resolution. So digital 1080p movies on digital screens are no worse than before. However, analog film directly scanned to digital is very impressive and probably needs a 4096x2048 (4K) camera to match. Fortunately things are progressing fast and the RED Scarlet coming this year should bring 3K to the 3000$ mark and 4K below 10000$. Compared to all the other costs, that's not much. Hell, even 9K IMAX should drop below 50000$ this year. Personally I'm most impressed with the prosonsumer cams though, it's amazing what they pack in a small HD camera and it gets better every year.
As an interesting note, the new line of Patriot SSD come very close to the 300MB/s speed, clocking in 280MB/s in reads.
Yep, the next step up seems to be PCI express cards directly, even with SATA3 on the horizon it's not moving fast enough. For example the OCZ Z-Drive. These are basicly just internally RAID'd SSDs but a preview of what's to come.
3 Gbps = uncompressed 1080p60 video, used for high-end interconnects and such. Recordings are almost always made compressed, even in professional cameras. AVCHD has a maximum of 24 Mbps = 180MB/minute, there's probably more exotic format for huge movie production cameras but even cameras in the 2000$-5000$ range use AVCHD since it takes a helluva camera to capture more detail than that. The rest is basicly to avoid generational loss so a pipeline looks like:
Camera -> (lossy) -> RAW -> (lossless editing, filtering, special effects etc.) -> Movie -> (lossy) -> final encode for consumer.
You may think it sounds a lot but video compresses very, very well along in the x, y and time axis. In fact, the better the camera the better it usually compresses because everything is clean while noisy, grainy and flickery video eats bandwidth like crazy. I guess if you're shooting staged movie shots with tons of explosions you'll hook up the camera via one of these 3 Gbps interconnects to a real storage kit and save it uncompressed directly, but then you'll need something much faster than this disk anyway.
On a related note, a lot of the videos today are basicly just "filling out the disk" of a BluRay, they don't have that amount of detail. You can tell when there's 1080p reencodes that you need a magnifying class to tell is a reencode. At BluRay sizes we should have had 2160p video instead, you'd get much more detail for 50GB - not that many can tell anyway. So you don't really need all that much space except when you're working with uncompressed intermediaries, but that's what the huge workstations with attached SANs are for.
And don't forget that's 3Gbit/s in 10 bit encoding with two parity bits, so you'll at most get 300MB/s. From cache you can get fairly close to that but reading from platters is slower, couldn't find any info on actual sequential read/write speeds.
Uh, self-signed certificates shouldn't be trusted. Not on a public website. (...) That big scary page that Firefox shows you is EXACTLY what every browser should show you. Self-signed certificates are NOT OKAY for production/public use. Encryption is more or less worthless without proof-of-identity.
You can't do mass scale automated MITM. Someone would communicate the fingerprint using other channels or in an obfuscated form on the page. If you tried doing it selectively and turning it on and off, a known_hosts file like openssh has would warn just fine. It's not secure but it'd protect most of the information most of the time instead of being like an open book to anyone that can sniff the traffic. A letter is still pretty vulnerable to the "tearing open" attack, but it's still a step up from postcards even if it's several steps below being encoded with a one time pad.
If the nazis were experimenting on the jews and that lead to medical data/treatments is it ethical to use it? The experiments themselves were obviously unethical but that's already done, the only thing standing between doctors and taking advantage of it is a moral code. Besides, you talk as if there's only one side that has moral hangups, imagine a mother suffering a life-threatening medical condition due to her pregnancy. How far into the pregnancy can it be terminated before the Hippocratic Oath takes effect and compel them to protect the unborn? I'd very careful how you phrase that, for example having full access to all medical journals would probably advance the state of medicine, but I doubt you want everyone to have the freedom to read through your journal.
... is the fact that eventually we have to get off earth and learn how to survive in the hostile universe anyway.
With all due respect, as much as I want mankind to go into space there's nothing to suggest earth will become uninhabitable in the next few million years. Not unless we destroy it, but in that case there's not much hope we'll be capable of interstellar travel either. On that angle, who cares if that happens this century or this millennium? We could easily have spent another million years on the ape stadium, shaving off a few centuries means nothing.
The odds that any interstellar "manned" spacecraft would be anything like today's manned mission is highly unlikely. More likely what we're doing now is like testing the extreme conditions of cross-continent horse-and-buggy rides when the solution is a jet plane. I'm guessing we'll send something like space probes that'll thaw or build embryos on site with nursing robots to form new colonies, sending fully grown people is just insanely inefficient in so many ways.
You may think that's inhumane, but I think it's the only humane thing. Imagine being second generation plus on a ship in the dark void of space, only seeing pictures and videos of earth while you're trapped on a tin can because your ancenstors decided to make you a pawn in colonizing a new planet. Plus, then they'd also be real people that quite possibly, or even probably, will die at some point from ship failure. A probe on the other hand may only produce humans if all flags are green.
Actually, opinions vary considerably. Some people really consider near-indefinate commercial copyright on the work as long as it can be used non-commercially. Others are infoanachists and want it all gone. Others want them to only keep commercial rights on the original and not every kind of sampling/derivates. However, that create a big issue of defining what a "trivial" modification is and isn't. Others again think that e.g. the LotR "universe" should be protected longer to produce new works, but that the actual movie should only be five years (or 10, 20, whatever). For example a book comes out and five years later Hollywood releases a movie based on the book without paying any royalties, noone wants that. Other ideas like requiring source are pretty much dead in the water because then the source code is visiable to the world and they wouldn't do that just for Sweden. Something like YouTube is very complicated, the videos themselves are non-commercial but the site itself is for-profit.
The theory is fairly clear - no DRM and full non-commercial use. Then we want the "good" commercial use of building on that culture (no paying Ugh the caveman for wheel and fire), and not the "bad" commercial use of others ripping them off for profit. The trouble is making it work in practise and not just in fairytale land, 5 years basicly ended up as a compromises that's really not great but signals the general direction.
As much as some people wish it so, "a fair trial" or is not applicable to "ending a business relationship". You might try for "tortious interference of contract" by the MAFIAA which is part of common law and should apply in the UK, but that's about it. The circumstances where you can demand anyone continue to offer you service are slim indeed.
"(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
So, IANAL, but my understanding is that it's only illegal to crack DRM if it's protecting a copyrighted work.
Yes, as long as you use only pixie dust and don't violate:
(b) Additional Violations.
(1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;
Basicly all the tools are illegal as long as at least one work (or part thereof) is still protected by copyright, i.e. forever.
They lump Freenet into the category of "Gnutella-like networks", and say that their attack against gnutella should also work against Freenet since it is Gnutella-like (p.2 and p.12).
Except it won't because freenet isn't p2p it's p2swarm.... a client can request data with the right "magic code" but all the nodes inbetween would cache it and all the pirates get it from one of the non-authenticating nodes. Note that this is really all a stupid authentication system, the sending peer could simply ask the master server "is this an authenticated client too?" and send poison data if not. This is basicly already done and better with private torrents - with the rights flags set the tracker will only allow authenticated peers and peers won't let you connect even if you know about them through DHT etc.
If you can't see how it's because you've locked yourself in a tiny box and completely ignored outside factors which remove data and introduce data without affecting increasing the amount of data a person can download. Whenever someone adds a new download to the tracker, the potential share ratio for everyone in the network increases. Whenever a new member joins, the potential share ratio for everyone on the network increases. Eventually it balances out to 100%, but the network is ever changing so it never actually gets there.
No. Your ratio can only become better by making the newcomer's ratio worse, so they have to limit their downloads and try to get upload of their own. More files being added is an opprtunity to seed but it's no good if it's rushed by everyone else that needs to improve their ratio as well. If I'm just a few hours late on a release it'll have 100 seeds and never seed back 100% because even if some are late to the party the 100Mbit symmetric people will seed them in minutes.
I am member of a nice private tracker, 0.45 minimum + bonus points + free leech files + free leech weekends + 1/2 off some classes and before on a slower line I was struggling to make it and it's not because I'm being tight fisted, it's because it's impossible to seed more. I had to snipe fresh releases and download free leech files that I then get credited upload for just to avoid being banned. The upside is that every file maxed my download every time, never any waiting for what I wanted. A fair trade, I think.
Just because one can understand memory allocations and pointers doesn't mean one wants to have to deal with them manually in all their programs. There is a reason why there are auto_ptrs in C++ and it's not because those people are "noobs", it's because people want to actually spend their time writing the program rather than having their time eaten up by writing tons of boilerplate memory management code.
Agreed. The absolutely sanest way I've found to develop is that memory follows objects. New instance? Memory allocated. Delete instance? Memory cleared. You fill up an object list = You run out of memory, but there's no "loose buffers" anywhere that you allocate somewhere but never gets cleared in the other end. If you really need to send "memory" around, send values (Qt has some really neat implicitly shared classes that means performance doesn't hurt much). I'd say almost all code can be written in a way that gives you 80% of the performance using only sane methods, and the reminder should probably have a assembler implementation with a standard fallback...
"Formal scientists" don't even consider Psychology a science, but "an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and often scientific, study of human/animal mental functions and behavior".
Since psychology doesn't comply as "real science", how can "scientists" duplicate the machine that controls most of human behaviour?
Psychologists understand the brain in the way an alchemist understands chemistry and physics - they understand that when you mix different inputs you get different outputs and have made some quasi-scientific models on how this process works, but they don't observe the actual thought process leading up to the action so they are really fumbling in the dark when their theories fail them. Kind of like how the alchemists never understood why their mixtures would never produce gold. Or what those knowledgable of plants and herbs is to medicine, "eat this and you'll feel better". It's basicly accepting a process with a "??? (Brain process)" step in it.
Right now they're doing a better job than the people doing it from a neuron level, just like a painter can be better at mixing paint than a scientist with color models. But if we want to know what's really going on then we need science to really pick that process apart. If there's a sound, what do we really pick up from it? Do we run a pattern recoginition, a memory search, what's our search algorithm? Does everything pass through the language processing center or just what we identify as talking? Do native and foreign languages share memory areas? I could go on but I'm sure you get the picture.
I'm sure that many of the psycholgical conclusions we have found will drop out of that process as results, just like an alchemist knows that if he mixes this and that what the result will be. The difference is a whole new level of understanding of why, like with modern medicine we know what the actual substance is rather than the herb it's in. Psychologists tend to get the job done because they "cheat", they have a human brain so really they just need to imagine "if I had these experiences, how would I react?" or read about similar experiences and they've usually understood the situation well enough to help. But just because we mostly behave in the same way doesn't really explain why we act that way.
If you know what you want get quotes, if not get estimates. Like "neuter a pet" has a very clear scope you should be able to get a quote on. Check a few, remove the outliers and accept that's basicly the going rate for having a professional do it. Sometimes you can go from estimates to quotes, like if you don't know what's wrong with your car you can pay one to find out and find someone else to actually fix it. Never let people replace expensive stuff without asking you first, if you go it for a 200$ repair and end up with a 600$ bill you're doing it wrong. It doesn't matter if it really is 600$ of broken, you're still doing it wrong. Take it back, have someone else look at it and if they agree then fine. It's amazing how much better it'd be if people simply made sure to have a second opinion.
And if you do hire a professional, just accept that it costs much more than a DIY project. There's in general no industry-wide or indeed global conspiracy of price fixing to give them absurd profit margins. Imagine like an employer hiring an employee - everything from hiring someone that isn't a deadbeat to marketing, billing, tools, improving skills, sick leave, periods without work and whatnot. If you can do it yourself you got no overhead, no transaction costs. And you should not also forget that you do things that are easy because you are a professional, even if the customer is asking for something any professional should be able to do in five minutes it has value. That can make the $/minute seem high but that's like measuring a boxer's $/second in the ring and not the hours spend working out in the gym.
This is why movies have producers. It's to keep the artists in check. Someone should have kept the brains in check when they designed this thing. Instead of being smaller and useful, it's just a gigantic waste of money -- the Waterworld of the scientific community.
Yes, and we should dismantle Hubble and replace it with an army of hobbyist astronomers with a 100$ telescope. They won't find anything new except maybe a few near-earth asteroids, certainly no exoplanets and all the other interesting stuff happening. Same with LHC, if you wanted any particle accelerator I think we had an electron one in high school science class. We could play with it forever but I doubt we'd ever get any more results on the standard model and the higgs particle. Experimental science of this kind is all about building the most sensitive equipment you can - it's complex, expensive, obsoleted by the next generation but it's the only way to do science and not guesswork.
I think it's easier to see it if you imagine a matchmaker generation, imagine a fan down from the supposed ancestor and a fan upward from you. In 13 generations there's 2^13 = 8192 at the end of each fan - actually it will be more children and less parents, but it's a decent approximation. Now, for you not to be related all of those decendants must avoid being one of your ancenstors. Even though it's only a few thousands, there's millions of combinations. Even in a population of 100 milllion there's about 50% chance you will be related (Calculation: ((100 000 000 - 8 192) / 100 000 000)^8 192 = 0.511137763).
Distro/package maintainers tend to be the only thing keeping Linux sane with the endless dependencies on libraries that again rely on other libraries with turtles all the way down. It's might work poorly for the five applications that are basically big enough to roll their own framework but for all the Gnome/KDE apps that would be just terrible.
I don't know why firefox is bugging me but my guess it's because the developers are lazy... there's a little perl app called apt-show-versions:
kjella@kjella-desktop:~$ apt-show-versions firefox
firefox/jaunty-security uptodate 3.0.11+build2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1
See that? It is up to date, and stop bloody bugging me about it. I'm sure the same could be done with an #ifdef LINUX and a few lines in C if anyone would bother, it doesn't even take a sudo. Do you know that when I go in Opera, right-click a file in the transfer window I do get a list of my Linux applications to open it with? They got sub-percent market share and do it right, but Firefox can't be arsed to do it. Why should I think it's the maintainer's fault when the developers can't be arsed to do the things they can do? Face it, Linux is maybe 5% of the total Firefox userbase now and we're getting the same shit we are with closed source apps.
Sure, but name a desktop environment that would work that well on the OLPC's pathetic specs.
Pretty much anything not KDE or Gnome? Any of the light DEs could have done it...
Distribution managers should thoroughly test in first person the forthcoming releases (alphas, betas, RCs ...)
For what, anecdotal evidence and "works4me" tags? Don't get me wrong, it's very important to do QA but I hope the person(s) responsible pulling together thousands of packages to make a distro got better things to do than play QA peon. Things like making sure packages aren't broken, exceptions to freeze windows, what to do with release-critical bugs whether it\s downgrade, upgrade (if upstream has fixed it), delay, release anyway or just pray for a solution and basicly administer the whole thing. If it lacks QA feedback then it's more likely the release manager has failed at producing alphas or betas and recruiting testers than that he should roll up the sleeves and try doing it alone. Of course, I wouldn\t use a release the release manager himself wouldn\t use...
Who wants fair? There was plenty missing here, for example RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu LTS and Debian are probably in the same class but only Debian was in the survey. This was more like a sample with a spread, showing the spread between bleeding edge distros and stable distros. That said, my impression is that they picked a very round-about way of figuring out the age. Ubuntu has a release every six months, so the average age is close to 6mo/2 = ~13 weeks. Debian has 18 months, so 18mo/2 = ~39 weeks. Unless you're doing significant amounts of backporting that won't change and the number of releases behind will be a fairly linear equation with time. There's some better metrics to pull out here like "How bleeding edge are they when released" but I don't see him doing any of that.
Apparently its an attack on their youth because of their children were to grow up with choices, they might choose not to be boneheaded, zombie worshiping, fucktards, and THEN what would happen to the world?!?
No, but they might realize how arbitrary it is. Take a look at the world map for the biggest religions here and you see it's predominantly decided by where you're born, kinda like what sports team you cheer for. If you presented the top four religions as equal options most children would go "WTF, you want me to believe one of those crazy stories?" but give them only one and you can raise christian kids, muslim kids, buddhist kids or hindu kids. If religious indoctrination of children was outlawed they'd collapse like a house of cards and soon go the way of superstition, magic and fairytale creatures. As in "fun to watch with Harry Potter" but nothing to take seriously.
The Bill implements an EU directive which brings Ireland into line with other EU member states.
Meh, I recognize the bill. They're implementing it to the maximum extent possible, the minimum is six months which promises well for most of the other optional stuff. Many european countries are struggling with getting this bill through the national legal process.