The problem is you don't know what's really needed. I needed to scan
some photos using my gf's scanner temporarily with my laptop and spent an hour
trying to get the minimal install. Finally I gave up and installed the
whole bloated CD full of garbage because only its crappy "Photostudio"
would recognize its TWAIN. What's worse is that there were a bunch
new programs added. Heck, I don't even recognize half the stuff in my
Add or Remove Programs any more.
Claiming the work as your own is plagiarism. This is widely
considered unethical, but even now it is not illegal. I would not mind
strengthening the law in this area. I think the best way to do this
would be to strengthen trademark law in specific ways. This would make
it easier for consumers to know that their dollars would go to the
artists.
You know, AntiCopyrightRadical, I was almost starting
to like you until I read this.
Have you wondered why there is no law against plagiarism?
Perhaps it's because it isn't as widespread a "problem" as it's
made out to be. There are thousands of old books in the public
domain, and I don't see wholesale plagiarism of them.
Plagiarism is easy to catch, as long as there is some way
(e.g. posting on the 'net) to establish you wrote it first.
As long as you do that, no law at all is needed.
Once a plagiarist is exposed, it's hard for him/her to build back
his/her reputation. Regardless of the law, plagiarism will continue
to be unethical, with strong motivations not to do it, as it
has always been, even before copyright law existed.
I don't think any laws should be strengthened, quite the opposite.
Oh, and you can ensure your dollars go to the artists by, say,
just paying them directly. Currently few or none of your dollars go to the artists anyway
(except in the case of megastars, who don't really need your money)
if the artist sells via an RIAA company.
I'm an artist and I hate Intellectual Property laws. Visit
http://pnk.m-db.info/ for my art stuff.
Uh - OK. But your copyright notice reads:
"Copyright Notice -
The contents of this site are the intellectual property of David
McKenzie. Personal use of this property is permitted without
restriction. Commercial use is strictly unauthorised without written
permission."
While that's well and good, aren't you depending on what you
hate in order to prohibit "commercial use"?
Interesting you should prohibit free use of your
material while expecting researchers open up
their's.
BTW I wouldn't touch your material
with a 10-foot pole because of the term
"commercial use"; as far as I'm concerned that
prohibits any use of it for all practical
purposes. Suppose an ISP puts a
Google ad on a personal page
in exchange for a free web site? Suddenly it
becomes "commercial use." Suppose I want
to use some of
it (with proper acknowledgement, of course) in
an open-source GPL'ed project that I've volunteered
my time for. Oops, the GPL allows its
software to
be used by a commercial company, no can do.
I might be able to get permission from you, but
the hassle usually isn't worth it.
So I'll pass on your offer, thanks.
While I have not read the paper you mention completely
enough yet to understand its argument, let me point out the
obvious fact that nature, by definition, "simulates itself," i.e.
is its own computer. Now, the processes involved are
extremely complex; just to simulate the processes going on
inside of a single atom can take years of computation time on
an ordinary computer, yet it happens essentially instantly
in actuality. Is the problem of simulating nature on a
submicroscopic level NP-complete? I'm not sure, but certainly it's
way beyond the realm of what present-day computers can do.
The question is, can we somehow harness this incredible built-in
computational power to solve more general problems?
No, JPEGs can't be replaced by PNGs because
PNGs (and GIFs) are lossless, whereas JPEGs are purposely lossy in order to achieve
much better typical compression than PNGs (or
GIFs). What you want to replace JPEGs with is
the open-source, patent-free
DjVu.
I would guess the issues with AOP are similar
to those with database triggers. You use them very
cautiously when there is a very clear advantage.
In my opinion, database triggers
are the GOTO for databases, based on countless hours of
nightmarish debugging of other peoples' trigger-happy
code.
Triggers are nearly indispensable for
some things, like creating audit trails. For that
task it is the best tool.
But lazy database design and lazy programming can
invoke a trigger that invokes 3 other triggers
that each invokes 2 other triggers all of which
perform what ends up as a giant transaction affecting
half of the 100 or so tables tied to a customer's record.
Try to debug that. Or try to write new functionality,
never quite knowing what the side effect of any
database transaction is going to be.
For your demo, and for initial use until
people are more comfortable, I would make these
suggestions:
(1) The standard OO.o file format is going to cause a lot of complaints
because it can't be read in Word, until everyone's phased over. Plus no one will recognize what.sxw
is in their directories.
Use.doc (which for 99% of the users' memos,
letters, etc. is
fine) at first and slowly phase in the OO.o format as its advantages
are eventually realized by more advanced users. But at the beginning the advantages will not
outway the drawbacks for novices, who will have enough other things
to struggle with.
To save as.doc by default: Tools -> Options... -> Load/Save -> General Standard file format Document type Text document Always save as Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP
(2) People will feel more comfortable with
what looks like a "Windows" application,
not something with its own fonts for menus etc., regardless of whether
it is better or worse.
To use standard Windows fonts: Tools -> Options... -> OpenOffice.org -> Accessibility -> Use system font for user interface
At my university, the official policy is that you may record lecture for
your own personal use if the prof permits it. *Most* profs have no
problem with this, but some do not permit it, and that is perfectly
within their rights.
You are paying for the lecture, and the professor is performing
it as a work for hire - that is what he/she is paid to do.
At least that should be the relationship between the
professor and the university. If not allowing recording inhibits
the learning process, that is a very serious matter. For example,
I do not have a good "auditory" memory but am more of a visual
person, so I always had to record the more difficult classes
to go over the words later. This was years ago, no questions asked.
Has the IP fetish gotten to the point where now some professors don't allow
recording lectures anymore? If I went to school now, would I
have to have a note-taker assigned to me from disability services
for all my classes then? And what if the note-taker can't take
good notes (by not having the prerequisites and being unfamiliar
with the material)? Seriously, I'd be up in arms about something preventing me from getting the
education I was paying through the nose for.
Reader beware
on
Linux Cookbook
·
· Score: 2, Informative
OK, this isn't about bookpool (thanks for the
link) but about the very first thing I read
in the
PDF excerpt on bookpool.
In
"4.3 Generating a List of Files from a Source Install for
Easy Uninstalls" she shows how to get a list of files that
were added by a program installation. But this is not
sufficient; you must also find any files (especially configs in/etc) that were modified by the program installation. If a modified config causes one of
the deleted programs to be called, e.g. during
boot-up, that can lead to big headaches when
your startup script dies as a result.
This is especially true with programs that don't
have an uninstall; since the uninstall process wasn't even
thought about, there may be other unknown (bad)
programming practices hidden in it too. That she doesn't mention this
(or is even aware of it?) gives me an uneasy
feeling.
I make donations to many organizations and projects, and I have to
decide how to best spend this money. If a project is very popular,
there are more people who are likely to donate. If the
developer/author/composer is getting rich as a result of the donations,
then I don't see the need for an additional donation from me. The money
would be better spent on a project that I think is important and useful
but which is not so popular.
With nothing more than a "donate" button I have no way of judging
whether my money will be well spent or not.
Therefore I only donate to
sites that show a running total of how much money has been donated so
far, to help me better judge whether or not I should donate money to the
project. In addition, this total should be auditable so that I can know
that it is not fictional. This means that there needs to be a list of
donors (anonymous if they wish but with some means for
self-identification) together with the date and amount donated, so that
I can verify that I have been included in this list and they are not understating the money received.
One *always* pays taxes on capitals gains from stock sales. Has nothing
to do with salary.
As someone else pointed out, you only pay 25%. But more importantly,
you pay no taxes until you actually sell; so most of the money gets
a tax-free ride, growing tax-free if the stock goes up,
until they retire or whatever billionaires do with their money.
At their wealth level, salary is completely meaningless. $1 million
is less than 0.02% of their net worth. So any salary at all is just a
token statement. Sometimes billionaires will use
their token salary to set a
symbolic standard that nobody else in the company can earn more. Bill Gates' salary
for example is insignificant
compared to his net worth, so its only purpose
is to make some statement, like "I pay my fair
share of taxes" or "I am paid fairly and not
out of proportion to everyone else" or whatever.
Remember Ben and Jerry? At one point they proclaimed, in a
supposedly egalitarian gesture, that the highest paid employee would
earn no more than 5x the lowest paid employee, or something like that.
So they purposely set their salary relatively low to set an example. It
was actually hypocritical since they kept the tens/hundreds of millions
in profit for themselves; by keeping salaries suppressed, they kept
expenses down and increased their wealth, and they weren't so
"egalitarian" about that. But from a public relations point of view it
was a brilliant ploy, and the press portrayed them as great
egalitarians. Right. (Recently they had to let go of this rule to
attact a new CEO.)
So the only significance for the Google people is what this
accomplishes in terms of PR and what kind of statement they are
trying to make. A cynical view is that they are actually cheating
the system by not paying their fair share of FICA, etc.
and taking advantage of the huge tax loophole of not paying
capital gains tax until the stock is sold.
Assuming they've already cashed in some pocket
money, they can go years and years paying no further tax
at all on their vast wealth. Basically, the
system is set up so the ultra rich just get richer.
From the article:
"Brent, who received a $100,000 grant from the National Science
Foundation to develop Qualrus, is now looking for distributors for the product....
The product costs $399 for schools and $699 for businesses per copy."
So our tax dollars paid for the program's development, which
is now going to enrich Brent? Why isn't this program released to
public domain or GPL?
"In short: while it might seem elegant to prove the prover, then have
everything else proved by this prover, this approach has little value in
practice."
Here is a 300-line
Python program
that can verify the formal proof of any theorem (that can be
proved from ZFC set theory axioms, which is essentially all
of mathematics). So all you have to do is prove the
correctness of these 300 lines, and the job is done.
See us.metamath.org home page for more information on this program.
By definition of addition (remember, addition is not fundamental notion
in the formal arithmetics, it's defined in terms of s-operator),
To say "it's defined in terms of s-operator"
is not a definition.
If you want to define addition formally,
it actually cannot be defined in terms that
involve just the axioms
of Peano arithmetic. You also need some set theory to do that.
A formal definition of addition requires finite recursion,
which in turn is also not a primitive notion (of set theory and certainly
not of Peano arithmetic). A formal proof of
just finite recursion from the basics of set theory is quite long.
There is much more here than meets the eye, when you start talking about complete
formal proofs.
Here is a computer-verified proof that
2+2=4*.
From that page:
"The complete proof of 2 + 2 = 4 involves 2,062 subtheorems...
These have a total of 21,969 steps -- this is how many steps you would
have to examine if you wanted to verify the proof in complete detail all
the way back to the axioms."
*(Click on "2+2=4 Trivia" or add "#trivia" to URL - slashcode is
changing "#" to "%23" so I took "#trivia" off of the URL)
What I hate is when a window takes close to a minute to settle into
focus because some other processes are thrashing in the
background.
What I would like to see in Windows (and Linux - at least with Linux
there's hope since you could do it yourself in principle:) is an option
for the following behavior. Whenever you click on a window to bring it
in focus, the OS should immediately place the highest possible priority on its
underlying process, if necessary freezing everything else until the
focused process is satisfied (with a small number of exceptions of
things that might time out such as CDROM writing). If the
focused process has anything in the disk queue, it should be moved to
the front of the queue, and new disk requests from
it always placed at the front of the queue. (Has anyone ever thought of that before? If
not, this post serves as prior art so it can't be patented.) And so on
with other resource requests. After all, the purpose of YOUR
(desktop/nonserver) computer is to SERVE YOU. If this were done I bet
the perceived performance improvement would be truly astonishing.
A core list of commonly used words is a useful thing to have for a new
language. Most language courses seem to have around 2000 words that
they focus on, although these lists are usually proprietary. The only
public-domain list (in English) I could find is here
that could be a starting point
for anyone interested in assembling a list for their favorite language.
So plagiarism of Tom Sawyer is a serious problem these days? Get real.
You're making a mountain out of a molehill. Most people (even assuming
they are unethical in the first place) don't plagiarize not because of
copyright but because it would damage their professional reputation if
found out (or in school, get them expelled). But hey, if you're so
paranoid someone's going to "steal" your words, please copyright the
hell out of them; even better, don't release them in the first place. I
notice, by the way, the public domain guy seemed perfectly willing to
acknowledge you and even asked your permission. That's what most
reasonable and honest people do. I just don't understand the big deal
here - how are you going to suffer if someday, somewhere someone
quotes your slashdot post without attribution? Copyrighted or not, it's
pretty easy to prove you originated the words with a search engine, if it
becomes an issue, and probably embarrass the person who plagiarized
them. Would really take them to court though (the only benefit of
copyright I can see)? To me people who obsess with the copyright of the
most trivial minutiae seem to have hair up their ass.
The shielding will create a capacitive coupling with the signal. As
the frequency goes up, you will lose more and more of your signal. So
10 Mbps will perform better over STP, but gigabit, especially on a long
run, probably won't perform very well if at all over STP.
You are so wrong it's not funny. Doesn't anyone take basic
electrodynamics anymore? A cable is a transmission line.
Assuming the characteristic impedance is properly matched,
as it should be for any high-speed
application (i.e. not audio), the speed of
the signal and the frequency response have nothing to do with the
capacitance per unit length. The speed is
typically around 0.7 the speed of light
regardless of the capacitance per unit length.
An ideal (theoretical) transmission line has a perfectly flat frequency response
regardless of the capacitance per unit length. High-frequency
losses are mainly due to skin effect, which
has to do mainly with the resistance and thickness
of the metal. Skin effect has nothing to do with capacitance
per unit length.
Bots don't usually succeed if you put anti-spam modification in email
addresses like the kachiiNO@SPAMgmail.com or whatever
Any spambot writer worth his salt will review the collected address
list and fine tune it to correct the most common human-readable
modifications (and there are a finite number that still remain
comprehensible to humans). Certain s/NO@SPAM/@/ will be in any
reasonable cleanup script, don't you think? Any address with "SPAM" in
it is a dead giveaway that it should be corrected, and the spambot
writer will delight in impressing his/her boss by spending a day or two
coming up with a comprehensive correction algorithm for 80-90% of the
cases.
Maybe the above works for you. It doesn't work for me. Nor
obfuscating with numeric HTML entities, etc. Can you honestly say you
never get any spam with your technique? Perhaps a Javascript email
address generation will work for a while, but eventually they'll get
clever enough for that too. An image with the email address probably works,
but it is a nuisance for the sender.
After an overenthusiastic spam filter
blocked an important real email, causing me a great deal of
inconvenience, I threw up my hands and now instruct everyone to contact
via an i-name, and ignore all email from
anyone not on my white list. So far, the i-name thing has worked
extremely well, and I've literally had zero spam.
Let's see, $3 billion is about 5% of Microsoft's bank account. Hey, we
can afford that, it's a drop in the bucket. Doesn't look good to
have all that cash sitting there doing nothing anyway. So for that
we'll get 90% of the population covered. Now, we'll make it free for a
couple of years until all the regular ISP's die of starvation... Yeah, three years should do it...
Damn those antitrust laws... There has to be a loophole,
this is just too good... hehehe... Get daddy on the
phone!
OK, I'm going to go off on a limb here with a rant that's
probably an unpopular opinion. But what do I hate about virtually
all Linux distros (and the current Mac)? It's this fad of antialiased fonts.
Am I the only one left who prefers clean bit-mapped fonts?
Sure, the screenshots shown in the article look pretty snappy from a
distance, because the fonts are large. But to get a lot of work done
you want small, even tiny fonts. That's the whole point of high screen
resolution, right?
Antialiased small fonts look awful. Compare the crisp, clean bitmaps
of NeXTSTEP or
even Windows to the small blurry fonts in GNUStep
or the
Mac. With aliasing letters bleed together , the shapes aren't quite
right, etc. It gets so tiring to read after a while.
And if you turn off antialiasing
they're barely
legible
(and sometimes even touch each other - I hate it when
letters touch each other!) because no one takes the time to produce
correct bitmaps for specific
font sizes.
(OK, to be honest I haven't seen the Mac with antialiasing
turned off.) I don't even care about a zillion different sizes,
just give me a couple of fixed sizes, small and smaller, that look
right.
As
much as I hate Windows, one thing it has going for it is that the fonts
are very clean and legible with antialiasing turned off.
I tried the latest Ubuntu for a while, playing
with all the font settings available (even
LCD subpixel) and in end couldn't stand it
because of the fonts. Such a beautiful OS
gone to waste because it's unreadable with
antialiasing turned off, and I can't stand it
turned on. Isn't
readability like half the point of a computer in the first place? Or do all people care about
anymore is just getting a pretty "printed page"
effect from a blurry distance?
The irony is that font bitmaps are not even copyrightable!
Heck, just steal them from NEXTStep! Or even Windows! (The bitmaps, that is.)
Why doesn't anyone do this?
What gets me is that this particular utility is trivial, doing a few API
calls normally done by a text editor. Sure, packaging it nicely takes
more work that I'd be willing to put in for one-time personal use if I
were to roll my own, but just what is the big "trade secret" that makes
this guy's code so precious he can't release the source so that people
can trust his code? The "Windows mentality" is right; most people are
just too stupid to understand why this is an issue. By releasing
binary-only he's just helping to perpetuate this mentality, and in my
mind this is worse than not releasing anything at all. Sorry, it's not
worth it to take the risk, vs. the small extra nuisance of paste/re-copy
from a text editor.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is you don't know what's really needed. I needed to scan some photos using my gf's scanner temporarily with my laptop and spent an hour trying to get the minimal install. Finally I gave up and installed the whole bloated CD full of garbage because only its crappy "Photostudio" would recognize its TWAIN. What's worse is that there were a bunch new programs added. Heck, I don't even recognize half the stuff in my Add or Remove Programs any more.
You know, AntiCopyrightRadical, I was almost starting to like you until I read this.
Have you wondered why there is no law against plagiarism? Perhaps it's because it isn't as widespread a "problem" as it's made out to be. There are thousands of old books in the public domain, and I don't see wholesale plagiarism of them.
Plagiarism is easy to catch, as long as there is some way (e.g. posting on the 'net) to establish you wrote it first. As long as you do that, no law at all is needed. Once a plagiarist is exposed, it's hard for him/her to build back his/her reputation. Regardless of the law, plagiarism will continue to be unethical, with strong motivations not to do it, as it has always been, even before copyright law existed.
I don't think any laws should be strengthened, quite the opposite. Oh, and you can ensure your dollars go to the artists by, say, just paying them directly. Currently few or none of your dollars go to the artists anyway (except in the case of megastars, who don't really need your money) if the artist sells via an RIAA company.
Uh - OK. But your copyright notice reads: "Copyright Notice - The contents of this site are the intellectual property of David McKenzie. Personal use of this property is permitted without restriction. Commercial use is strictly unauthorised without written permission."
While that's well and good, aren't you depending on what you hate in order to prohibit "commercial use"?
Interesting you should prohibit free use of your material while expecting researchers open up their's.
BTW I wouldn't touch your material with a 10-foot pole because of the term "commercial use"; as far as I'm concerned that prohibits any use of it for all practical purposes. Suppose an ISP puts a Google ad on a personal page in exchange for a free web site? Suddenly it becomes "commercial use." Suppose I want to use some of it (with proper acknowledgement, of course) in an open-source GPL'ed project that I've volunteered my time for. Oops, the GPL allows its software to be used by a commercial company, no can do. I might be able to get permission from you, but the hassle usually isn't worth it. So I'll pass on your offer, thanks.
While I have not read the paper you mention completely enough yet to understand its argument, let me point out the obvious fact that nature, by definition, "simulates itself," i.e. is its own computer. Now, the processes involved are extremely complex; just to simulate the processes going on inside of a single atom can take years of computation time on an ordinary computer, yet it happens essentially instantly in actuality. Is the problem of simulating nature on a submicroscopic level NP-complete? I'm not sure, but certainly it's way beyond the realm of what present-day computers can do. The question is, can we somehow harness this incredible built-in computational power to solve more general problems?
No, JPEGs can't be replaced by PNGs because PNGs (and GIFs) are lossless, whereas JPEGs are purposely lossy in order to achieve much better typical compression than PNGs (or GIFs). What you want to replace JPEGs with is the open-source, patent-free DjVu.
I would guess the issues with AOP are similar to those with database triggers. You use them very cautiously when there is a very clear advantage.
In my opinion, database triggers are the GOTO for databases, based on countless hours of nightmarish debugging of other peoples' trigger-happy code.
Triggers are nearly indispensable for some things, like creating audit trails. For that task it is the best tool.
But lazy database design and lazy programming can invoke a trigger that invokes 3 other triggers that each invokes 2 other triggers all of which perform what ends up as a giant transaction affecting half of the 100 or so tables tied to a customer's record. Try to debug that. Or try to write new functionality, never quite knowing what the side effect of any database transaction is going to be.
(1) The standard OO.o file format is going to cause a lot of complaints because it can't be read in Word, until everyone's phased over. Plus no one will recognize what .sxw
is in their directories.
Use .doc (which for 99% of the users' memos,
letters, etc. is
fine) at first and slowly phase in the OO.o format as its advantages
are eventually realized by more advanced users. But at the beginning the advantages will not
outway the drawbacks for novices, who will have enough other things
to struggle with.
(2) People will feel more comfortable with what looks like a "Windows" application, not something with its own fonts for menus etc., regardless of whether it is better or worse.
You are paying for the lecture, and the professor is performing it as a work for hire - that is what he/she is paid to do. At least that should be the relationship between the professor and the university. If not allowing recording inhibits the learning process, that is a very serious matter. For example, I do not have a good "auditory" memory but am more of a visual person, so I always had to record the more difficult classes to go over the words later. This was years ago, no questions asked. Has the IP fetish gotten to the point where now some professors don't allow recording lectures anymore? If I went to school now, would I have to have a note-taker assigned to me from disability services for all my classes then? And what if the note-taker can't take good notes (by not having the prerequisites and being unfamiliar with the material)? Seriously, I'd be up in arms about something preventing me from getting the education I was paying through the nose for.
OK, this isn't about bookpool (thanks for the link) but about the very first thing I read in the PDF excerpt on bookpool. In "4.3 Generating a List of Files from a Source Install for Easy Uninstalls" she shows how to get a list of files that were added by a program installation. But this is not sufficient; you must also find any files (especially configs in /etc) that were modified by the program installation. If a modified config causes one of
the deleted programs to be called, e.g. during
boot-up, that can lead to big headaches when
your startup script dies as a result.
This is especially true with programs that don't
have an uninstall; since the uninstall process wasn't even
thought about, there may be other unknown (bad)
programming practices hidden in it too. That she doesn't mention this
(or is even aware of it?) gives me an uneasy
feeling.
With nothing more than a "donate" button I have no way of judging whether my money will be well spent or not.
Therefore I only donate to sites that show a running total of how much money has been donated so far, to help me better judge whether or not I should donate money to the project. In addition, this total should be auditable so that I can know that it is not fictional. This means that there needs to be a list of donors (anonymous if they wish but with some means for self-identification) together with the date and amount donated, so that I can verify that I have been included in this list and they are not understating the money received.
For a good example of what I mean, see everything2 donation box
As someone else pointed out, you only pay 25%. But more importantly, you pay no taxes until you actually sell; so most of the money gets a tax-free ride, growing tax-free if the stock goes up, until they retire or whatever billionaires do with their money.
At their wealth level, salary is completely meaningless. $1 million is less than 0.02% of their net worth. So any salary at all is just a token statement. Sometimes billionaires will use their token salary to set a symbolic standard that nobody else in the company can earn more. Bill Gates' salary for example is insignificant compared to his net worth, so its only purpose is to make some statement, like "I pay my fair share of taxes" or "I am paid fairly and not out of proportion to everyone else" or whatever.
Remember Ben and Jerry? At one point they proclaimed, in a supposedly egalitarian gesture, that the highest paid employee would earn no more than 5x the lowest paid employee, or something like that. So they purposely set their salary relatively low to set an example. It was actually hypocritical since they kept the tens/hundreds of millions in profit for themselves; by keeping salaries suppressed, they kept expenses down and increased their wealth, and they weren't so "egalitarian" about that. But from a public relations point of view it was a brilliant ploy, and the press portrayed them as great egalitarians. Right. (Recently they had to let go of this rule to attact a new CEO.)
So the only significance for the Google people is what this accomplishes in terms of PR and what kind of statement they are trying to make. A cynical view is that they are actually cheating the system by not paying their fair share of FICA, etc. and taking advantage of the huge tax loophole of not paying capital gains tax until the stock is sold. Assuming they've already cashed in some pocket money, they can go years and years paying no further tax at all on their vast wealth. Basically, the system is set up so the ultra rich just get richer.
"Everything starts with the children," she said. "They're the ones who say `recycle' and `don't smoke.' The Internet is their world."
Ah, yes, the children, and all the terrible things that might happen to them if this isn't passed.
So our tax dollars paid for the program's development, which is now going to enrich Brent? Why isn't this program released to public domain or GPL?
Here is a 300-line Python program that can verify the formal proof of any theorem (that can be proved from ZFC set theory axioms, which is essentially all of mathematics). So all you have to do is prove the correctness of these 300 lines, and the job is done. See us.metamath.org home page for more information on this program.
To say "it's defined in terms of s-operator" is not a definition. If you want to define addition formally, it actually cannot be defined in terms that involve just the axioms of Peano arithmetic. You also need some set theory to do that. A formal definition of addition requires finite recursion, which in turn is also not a primitive notion (of set theory and certainly not of Peano arithmetic). A formal proof of just finite recursion from the basics of set theory is quite long.
There is much more here than meets the eye, when you start talking about complete formal proofs.
*(Click on "2+2=4 Trivia" or add "#trivia" to URL - slashcode is changing "#" to "%23" so I took "#trivia" off of the URL)
What I hate is when a window takes close to a minute to settle into focus because some other processes are thrashing in the background. What I would like to see in Windows (and Linux - at least with Linux there's hope since you could do it yourself in principle:) is an option for the following behavior. Whenever you click on a window to bring it in focus, the OS should immediately place the highest possible priority on its underlying process, if necessary freezing everything else until the focused process is satisfied (with a small number of exceptions of things that might time out such as CDROM writing). If the focused process has anything in the disk queue, it should be moved to the front of the queue, and new disk requests from it always placed at the front of the queue. (Has anyone ever thought of that before? If not, this post serves as prior art so it can't be patented.) And so on with other resource requests. After all, the purpose of YOUR (desktop/nonserver) computer is to SERVE YOU. If this were done I bet the perceived performance improvement would be truly astonishing.
A core list of commonly used words is a useful thing to have for a new language. Most language courses seem to have around 2000 words that they focus on, although these lists are usually proprietary. The only public-domain list (in English) I could find is here that could be a starting point for anyone interested in assembling a list for their favorite language.
So plagiarism of Tom Sawyer is a serious problem these days? Get real. You're making a mountain out of a molehill. Most people (even assuming they are unethical in the first place) don't plagiarize not because of copyright but because it would damage their professional reputation if found out (or in school, get them expelled). But hey, if you're so paranoid someone's going to "steal" your words, please copyright the hell out of them; even better, don't release them in the first place. I notice, by the way, the public domain guy seemed perfectly willing to acknowledge you and even asked your permission. That's what most reasonable and honest people do. I just don't understand the big deal here - how are you going to suffer if someday, somewhere someone quotes your slashdot post without attribution? Copyrighted or not, it's pretty easy to prove you originated the words with a search engine, if it becomes an issue, and probably embarrass the person who plagiarized them. Would really take them to court though (the only benefit of copyright I can see)? To me people who obsess with the copyright of the most trivial minutiae seem to have hair up their ass.
You are so wrong it's not funny. Doesn't anyone take basic electrodynamics anymore? A cable is a transmission line. Assuming the characteristic impedance is properly matched, as it should be for any high-speed application (i.e. not audio), the speed of the signal and the frequency response have nothing to do with the capacitance per unit length. The speed is typically around 0.7 the speed of light regardless of the capacitance per unit length. An ideal (theoretical) transmission line has a perfectly flat frequency response regardless of the capacitance per unit length. High-frequency losses are mainly due to skin effect, which has to do mainly with the resistance and thickness of the metal. Skin effect has nothing to do with capacitance per unit length.
Panna Felson
Any spambot writer worth his salt will review the collected address list and fine tune it to correct the most common human-readable modifications (and there are a finite number that still remain comprehensible to humans). Certain s/NO@SPAM/@/ will be in any reasonable cleanup script, don't you think? Any address with "SPAM" in it is a dead giveaway that it should be corrected, and the spambot writer will delight in impressing his/her boss by spending a day or two coming up with a comprehensive correction algorithm for 80-90% of the cases.
Maybe the above works for you. It doesn't work for me. Nor obfuscating with numeric HTML entities, etc. Can you honestly say you never get any spam with your technique? Perhaps a Javascript email address generation will work for a while, but eventually they'll get clever enough for that too. An image with the email address probably works, but it is a nuisance for the sender.
After an overenthusiastic spam filter blocked an important real email, causing me a great deal of inconvenience, I threw up my hands and now instruct everyone to contact via an i-name, and ignore all email from anyone not on my white list. So far, the i-name thing has worked extremely well, and I've literally had zero spam.
Damn those antitrust laws... There has to be a loophole, this is just too good... hehehe... Get daddy on the phone!
Am I the only one left who prefers clean bit-mapped fonts?
Sure, the screenshots shown in the article look pretty snappy from a distance, because the fonts are large. But to get a lot of work done you want small, even tiny fonts. That's the whole point of high screen resolution, right?
Antialiased small fonts look awful. Compare the crisp, clean bitmaps of NeXTSTEP or even Windows to the small blurry fonts in GNUStep or the Mac. With aliasing letters bleed together , the shapes aren't quite right, etc. It gets so tiring to read after a while.
And if you turn off antialiasing they're barely legible (and sometimes even touch each other - I hate it when letters touch each other!) because no one takes the time to produce correct bitmaps for specific font sizes. (OK, to be honest I haven't seen the Mac with antialiasing turned off.) I don't even care about a zillion different sizes, just give me a couple of fixed sizes, small and smaller, that look right.
As much as I hate Windows, one thing it has going for it is that the fonts are very clean and legible with antialiasing turned off. I tried the latest Ubuntu for a while, playing with all the font settings available (even LCD subpixel) and in end couldn't stand it because of the fonts. Such a beautiful OS gone to waste because it's unreadable with antialiasing turned off, and I can't stand it turned on. Isn't readability like half the point of a computer in the first place? Or do all people care about anymore is just getting a pretty "printed page" effect from a blurry distance?
The irony is that font bitmaps are not even copyrightable! Heck, just steal them from NEXTStep! Or even Windows! (The bitmaps, that is.) Why doesn't anyone do this?
(End rant.)
What gets me is that this particular utility is trivial, doing a few API calls normally done by a text editor. Sure, packaging it nicely takes more work that I'd be willing to put in for one-time personal use if I were to roll my own, but just what is the big "trade secret" that makes this guy's code so precious he can't release the source so that people can trust his code? The "Windows mentality" is right; most people are just too stupid to understand why this is an issue. By releasing binary-only he's just helping to perpetuate this mentality, and in my mind this is worse than not releasing anything at all. Sorry, it's not worth it to take the risk, vs. the small extra nuisance of paste/re-copy from a text editor.