As the copyright holder, you're free to release the code to this one individual under whatever terms you want. Just because you released it once under one set of conditions doesn't mean that you're bound to release it to the MSU guy under the same conditions.
Right. I just don't want to release it to different people under different licenses. That would be a hassle for me, and what's my motivation to write this guy some separate, more permissive license? He's not contributing to the free information movement, so I have no motivation to do that for him.
One of the good things about copyleft licensing is that you don't have to initiate a licensing conversation every time person A wants to use some of person B's code. You just put your code out there under the license, and if people want to use it under that license, they do.
This is a real issue. For instance, I wrote a physics textbook, which is open-source, and I wrote a bunch of ruby and latex code that helps to produce the pdf from the latex sources, automatically handling some things relating to placement of figures on the page that are awkward to do with plain latex. My book, including the ruby and latex code, is under CC-BY-SA. I got an email from a guy at MSU who was writing a textbook, and had already started using my code to handle the illustrations. He wanted to check whether it was okay under the license, since he didn't intend to release his own book under a CC license. Well, my answer ended up being that I really didn't know whether it was okay or not. It wasn't clear to me whether his work counted as a derived work. On the one hand, you could say that what he was using was simply some software I wrote, so his book isn't a derived work based on my software any more than a book written in MS Word is a derived work based on Word. On the other hand, there's really no perfect separation between the software and our books. When you write a book in latex, the latex code *is* a piece of software. My code generates various boilerplate in its output, some of which is text that is visible to the reader, so it's under my copyright and license. Of course I could have just told him that it wasn't an issue, and I wouldn't sue him, but I had intentionally chosen the strong copyleft because that's what I wanted. I suspect that a lawyer would tell him his work was actually not a derived work, but I also suspect that he (and his eventual publisher) wouldn't even want to get into that issue.
Although the issue is real, it seems goofy to me to suggest GPLv3 as the fix for the problem. First off, there are huge philosophical differences between v2 and v3. Also, there is so much GPL v2 code out there that you can't necessarily just relicense under GPL v3 without causing yourself hassles with license incompatibilities. I also don't quite understand how they think they can bypass the fact that various countries have various inconsistent and ambiguous definitions of a derived work. The only thing that forces anyone to accept the GPL license attached to a work is that copyright law doesn't allow them to do certain things without a license from the author. Those things include (1) copying and redistributing the work, and (2) creating and distributing derived works from it.
I'm emotionally partial to trains, live in a railroad town, and prefer the train to driving or flying. However, there's one big problem with Amtrak for long-distance travel, which is that they have serious problems with arriving on time. They don't own the tracks, so when any other traffic is coming through, the Amtrak train has to pull over on a siding and wait. For the itinerary you found, an 18-hour trip, you should probably expect to add a random number of hours from 0 to 6 into your arrival time. This kind of thing can be especially unpleasant when your train was supposed to arrive at, say, 11 pm, and instead it arrives at 5 in the morning.
When I want entertainment, I want entertainment. Obviously, I'm not alone in feeling that Star Trek/Babylon 5/Firefly et. al. provide that.
He didn't claim it was unpopular. He didn't even claim it was objectively bad. He just explained why he personally didn't like it.
Pick any lowest-common-denominator popular culture. Britney Spears. Dogs playing poker. The Transformers movie. Whatever. The reason it sells is that a lot of people like it. But the fact that it's popular doesn't mean that it should be magically insulated from criticism.
Let's translate from science fiction to a different genre, say westerns, so Star Trek becomes Wagon Trek.
Stross is basically saying that he doesn't enjoy Wagon Trek, because he's an enthusiast for westerns, he's spent a lot of time reading good westerns, and he's developed enough taste to discriminate between shitty westerns and good ones. In particular, if a western novel has Cherokees in Spanish Colonial California, he's not going to enjoy that western, because he can't suspend his disbelief, and he can tell that the author was an idiot who didn't even have enough respect for the genre to do his research. Ditto if a Montana cowboy in 1895 is using flintlocks.
Science fiction used to be a niche market. It was part of the "long tails," before the notion of the long tails was invented. What's happened over the last 40 years is that it's become such a commoditized thing that a lot of SF (and especially a lot of the TV/movie SF) is written for people who have no actual affection for or knowledge of the genre. There's nothing wrong with letting those people enjoy their SF, just as there's nothing wrong with listening to Sonny and Cher sing "I Got You, Babe." But sometimes there are people who don't want Sonny and Cher, they want James Brown.
Publishers are often extremely careless about sending out scattershot DMCA notices. For example, I'm the author of a free and open-source calculus textbook. My book is available on my own web site, and also on some other sites such as lulu and scribd. I got an email today from one of the folks at scribd saying they'd received the DMCA takedown notice below. The takedown notice is so vague and sloppy that it's hard to tell what they're even claiming. Are they claiming that scribd is violating my (Ben Crowell's) copyright? If so, then what business of it is theirs? (Macmillan isn't my publisher, and I've never heard of Attributor, Inc., until today.) Or are they claiming that my book contains content that infringes Macmillan's copyrights? (It would seem not, since they list "Original Work: Calculus," as if it's the entire book whose copyright is being infringed.)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: <remediesspamproofing@attributor.com> Date: Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 6:14 PM Subject: Unauthorized Use of Macmillan Publishers Material To: copyrightspamproofing@scribd.com
*** Sent via Email - DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement ***
Dear Sir/Madam,
I certify under penalty of perjury, that I am an agent authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the intellectual property rights and that the information contained in this notice is accurate.
I have a good faith belief that the page or material listed below is not authorized by law for use by the individual(s) associated with the identified page listed below or their agents and therefore infringes the copyright owner's rights.
I HEREBY DEMAND THAT YOU ACT EXPEDITIOUSLY TO REMOVE OR DISABLE ACCESS TO THE PAGE OR MATERIAL CLAIMED TO BE INFRINGING.
This notice is sent pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the European Union's Directive on the Harmonisation of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society (2001/29/EC), and/or other laws and regulations relevant in European Union member states or other jurisdictions.
My contact information is as follows:
Organization name: Attributor Corporation As Agent for Macmillan Publishers Email: remediesspamproofing@attributor.com Phone: (650) 306 9474 Mailing address: Attributor, Inc. 1775 Woodside Road, Ste 100 Redwood City, CA 94061
*** INFRINGING PAGE OR MATERIAL *** Infringing page/material that I demand be disabled or removed in consideration of the above:
Original Work: Calculus Infringing URL: http://www.scribd.com/doc/10559480/pdf-mathematics-calculus-volume-1 Infringing URL: http://scribd.com/doc/240367/calculus-by-benjamin-crowell
My electronic signature follows: Sincerely, Attributor, Inc. /s
Take this with a grain of salt. There are a lot of issues here that are not well understood. TFA points out that we don't know whether there are black holes with masses intermediate between stellar black holes and supermassive black holes. The whole meaning of entropy is not well understood in the context of general relativity. The jury is still out on the black hole information paradox. It's still a matter of opinion whether black hole radiation is purely uncorrelated blackbody radiation, or whether it contains subtle correlations that encode the information that was "lost" when various information went into the black hole. Basically you need a theory of quantum gravity in order to be sure about the answers to these questions, and we don't have a theory of quantum gravity. Another issue is that nobody knows the structure of the vacuum around a black hole. When you try to calculate the polarization of the virtual particles in the region of high curvature around a black hole, you run into all kinds of problems. The zero-point energy of the vacuum is infinite in flat spacetime, and it's infinite in curved spacetime. Nobody is sure what that means, but they can try to subtract the one infinity from the other and find the increase in the vacuum energy that comes from curvature. Then when they try that, they seem to get answers saying that the structure of black holes can be radically different from what was previously assumed. Nobody really knows if this is right, or just an artifact of not knowing how to do the calculations correctly.
The NSLU2 is too slow - no gigabit, processor too slow, too little memory. I recently dumped my NSLU2 and went with an MSI Wind nettop - only $140 for the box and $25 for 2Gig of memory. Add $90 for a 1TB drive, and you completely blow away a NSLU2 in performance.
I guess it's a question of the application. For what I'm doing (a music server), the NSLU2's performance is perfectly fine. Your bill was $255, which is more than triple what an NSLU2 costs. What are you using yours for? Video?
I've got a newish WRT54GL running Tomato,[...]
Maybe you have bad luck?
I dunno. Maybe my area just has more power surges than yours? There's no way to tell, and that's the whole problem. It is a very common problem, though. Ask anyone who's done phone support for an ISP. The reason I've tried the unsuccessful solutions that I've tried is that slashdotters who'd done phone support for ISPs posted about how common the problem was, and suggested those solutions.
Apart from it being an N router (not sure what Linksys has in the way of N offerings, I'm still using a trusty WRT54G), this thing also has a USB port that you can hook up a USB drive to and use it like a NAS, which is kind of cool.
The Linksys NSLU2 is $80, which is a lot cheaper than $130 for the WNR3500L. I have an NSLU2, running linux, as a music server, and it works great. Considering what crap hardware most home routers are, I'd hesitate to trust one as a file server. The Marvell $99 wall-wart computer also looks kind of interesting.
What would really be handy would be an $80 NAS box that ran, say, debian, with a complete set of useful apps, was easy to set up, and was officially supported. The NSLU2 comes pretty close to this, because Linksys explicitly says it's ok with them if you install linux on it -- but they don't actually support that, and it's really kind of a hassle to set up. It's also a hassle to get the apps you want. E.g., I would really like to be able to run a more recent version of the Unison file synchronizer on my NSLU2, but when I try to compile and run it, it crashes, so I'm stuck with a precompiled binary of an older version.
It's great if "open source" is seen by a company like Netgear as a positive marketing tool. However, it's a bit of a stretch to list DD-WRT, OpenWRT. and Tomato as all being open-source. Tomato has a nonproprietary back end plus a proprietary web interface. DD-WRT has a history of GPL violations, and tries to charge people more money for a version with more functionality. If you take "open source" totally literally, then yeah, maybe these are open source, in the sense that you probably are allowed to read the source code freely. But I don't think that's what most people in the open-source world really mean by open source. OpenWRT is the only one on this list that is really totally free and nonproprietary. I run OpenWRT on my router, with a web-based front-end called Gargoyle, which is also (really) open source. Gargoyle is pretty bare bones, but it is good enough for a lot of quick, simple stuff. It would be nice if the developer could include just a tad more functionality in it, though, because I do end up having to ssh in and do certain things from the command line.
What I would really like is a cheap router that wouldn't crash and hang up all the time. For my home network, I picked up a wrt54g v.4 on ebay, because it has more memory than the current models, and is reputed to be more stable. I also bought a (cheap) UPS, because a lot of people say it's power surges that tend to cause routers to lock up. Well, I still have to reboot the router fairly frequently. It doesn't seem to be correlated with what firmware and software I run, either. I don't understand why I should have to reboot such a simple, single-purpose device more than once a year. The netgear box referred to in TFA is $130. I might consider paying that much for a router for my home network if I had some reason to believe it would need less frequent rebooting. The problem is that I have never seen reliable data that measured frequency of lockups in routers and correlated it with specific variables that I have control over. I'm perfectly willing to believe that a $1000 router designed for medium-sized businesses would not lock up. I just don't want to pay $1000.
They likely do want targeted advertisements. But the dislike of tracking wins out. Of course 90% of them signed up for a supermarket discount card and pay for everything with a credit card so they don't really care, they just think they do.
This is a competely false analogy.
The supermarket gives me a real choice. On a per-transaction basis, I can decide whether to use my supermarket membership or not. If I do, they give me several bucks off my grocery bill, and that's the price at which I've sold them that personal info. If I don't use the membership, then I've declined to sell that particular info at that price on that particular occasion.
I also get a real choice with the credit card. If I choose to use the credit card for a particular transaction, then I get an effective discount of about 1/4% (because I don't have to pay the bill until the end of the month, and the price of money is something like 5% per year, and typically it's about half a month until the end of the month), and the credit card company gets my info. If I don't use the card, then I've declined to sell that particular info at that price on that particular occasion.
The difference with ad tracking is that they're offering me $0 in return for my information. They're just hoping that I haven't figured out how to use cookie whitelisting in firefox, so that they can take my information for free.
For the paranoid among us, this is really sweet. Leave the side of your computer's case open. When your front door suddenly gets knocked in and a bunch of feds start swarming into your living room, you just reach over and rub real hard on the chip with your finger. All your bits are melted.
IMO the first linked article was not very interesting. To get to the interesting stuff, you have to go to the second linked article, then click through to the links from there. The pictures of how they fabricated the engine block are really cool. I was surprised there wasn't more info about the tires. My understanding was that tires were the main limiting factor in land speed records -- or maybe that's only for cars. Tires tend to fly apart when rotated that fast. I would assume that at these speeds they get incredible gyroscopic stability, so I guess you don't have to worry about tipping over. They have to run the course in both directions without messing with the engine, which apparently is quite a challenge. I wasn't clear on what's involved in turning around to come back. The bike has both brakes and parachutes. Does the driver actually brake and do a steered u-turn at low speed, or do they use parachutes, then pick the thing back up and turn it around by hand?
The boundary of space is conventionally defined at 100 km, or about 260,000 feet. Sending a weather balloon to 107,000 feet is nice, but it's only 40% of the way to the "edge of space." Which, of course, you could have realized just by thinking about it. We define "space" as meaning "above the sensible atmosphere," and if you get there in a balloon, it couldn't be above the atmosphere.
It's an exponential decay. There is no sharp cutoff. Nothing special happens at 100 km. The scale height of the earth's atmosphere is about 7 km, so the pressure at 107,000 ft (32 km) is about 10^-2 of what it is at the surface, while the pressure at 100 km is about 10^-6 of surface pressure. It's not like somewhere in between 10^-2 atm and 10^-6 atm there's a mystical barrier that suddenly makes balloon flight impossible. It just gets harder and harder; to stay aloft with a given volume of hydrogen, a balloon at 100 km would have to have 10^-4 of the weight of a balloon that's neutrally buoyant at 32 km. It just happens to be difficult to make a balloon with sufficiently thin walls, high strength, and low surface-to-volume ratio.
If you watch the (very cool) video, the sky is black, there is no sound, and the curvature of the earth is extremely obvious. I would call that the "edge of space" -- for some definitions of "edge of space." There's not some international standards body that defines terms like "edge of space."
I'm a physics teacher at a community college, and I pretty much agree with your stat professor. All my tests are open notes. The thing is, quite a few students show up in college only knowing how to regurgitate memorized information. The professor's job is to push them into operating at a higher intellectual level, but, frankly, that's hard work for both the teacher and the students, and many students get upset about it. Some teachers prefer to go the easy way and just test memorization.
The real frontier here is that net access is getting more and more ubiquitous. Students think of their iPhone as their all-purpose Swiss army knife -- it's a calculator, it's a phone, it's a stopwatch, it's a flashlight. I should probably start walking around the room during exams and checking whether my students' calculator-ish devices have net access, although I'm not sure I'd always know from looking at them. Do I have to memorize what all the popular cell-enabled PDAs look like, and learn to distinguish them from calculators? Luckily, access to cell phone networks in my classroom seems pretty crummy, and the campus's wifi doesn't reach in there yet. That's going to change, though.
Cool project! I use python for education (in my physics class), and would love to be able to tell my students just to go to skulpt.org rather than having them download and install a full python implementation (which they can't do in school computer labs). The big missing feature from my point of view is "import math." Support for cut and paste in the demo terminal would also be a big help.
Craigslist is fine for some things, but they don't have any reputation system, and in many cases that's a serious problem. If you get ripped off buying something on craigslist, there's absolutely nothing they can do for you; all you can do is try to sweet-talk the seller into letting you return it and get your money back -- or sue him. On ebay, you can look at how many transactions the seller has made and what his feedback was like.
Uh, the OP didn't ask to replace his Windows OS with Linux. He asked for open-source replacements for applications that he could run on his existing MacOS.
GIMP is an image editor and thus in the same general area is Photoshop and Illustrator, but it isn't a replacement for them.
Uh, no, GIMP works on bitmaps, which makes it like Photoshop. Illustrator works on vector graphics, and the open-source equivalent is Inkscape. Inkscape is one of the best pieces of open-source software I've ever used, and it's multiplatform, so no, the OP doesn't have to switch to Linux to use it. I used Illustrator extensively for about 5 years, and have been using Inkscape for about 5 years after that. At this point, Inkscape does everything I want it to do. For my purposes, it's a 100% replacement for Illustrator in terms of functionality.
Damn straight. Adobe's non-support support and crappy quality control were one of the big impetuses that drove me to open source. Gawd, I remember using PageMaker ca. 1998. Paid good money for it. It constantly crashed and munged its own files. Adobe tech support tried to blame it on the OS.
Is there anything out there that's better than jamendo for free, legal downloads of music, i.e., music made by people who are intentionally making it free-as-in-something? What I don't like about jamendo: (1) It's European, and a lot of the music is French. Most French pop music is really bad. I'm really more of a jazz fan anyway, but despite the French people's fondly held belief that they're the saviors of jazz, there just aren't that many good jazz musicians in France. (2) Their tagging system is lame. Most of the tags are wildly inappropriate, e.g., "jazz" for music that's actually heavy metal, "progressive rock" for a faux-classical synthesized trumpet concerto a la Haydn. (3) Although their heart seems to be in the right place as far as free information, and apparently they run linux on their servers, their interface for uploading apparently doesn't work on any OS other than Windows. (Forum discussions: 1, 2, 3. I tried the web interface with multiple browsers. I tried both Linux and MacOS. I tried their standalone uploader program for linux, which is a summer of code project that hasn't been maintained properly. I emailed their tech support, and they weren't able to help me.)
This is not really a Rubicon. I edited for several years with a WP account. Then I decided WP had evolved into a thing that was no longer fun for me, and to reduce my temptation to get involved in any more WP stuff, I disabled my account by munging the password. Ever since then, I've been editing without logging in. There are already a lot of things you can't do without being logged in. You can't upload an image, can't mark your edits as minor, can't make a new article, can't edit certain articles. WP's official policy is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with editing anonymously, but people are often very snotty toward you if you edit anonymously. There's a strong tendency for both humans and bots to revert anonymous editors' edits, even if it's a good edit, with a good comment line pointing to discussion on the talk page.
I can't really see using a closed-source browser when there are plenty of perfectly good open-source ones available. I'd be interested in trying chromium (the open-source version of chrome), but the last time I checked, it didn't seem mature enough to want to mess with. When it shows up in the ubuntu repos, I'll certainly be interested in giving it a spin. The thing is, Firefox is very feature-rich, and I've gotten used to/dependent on a bunch of its features, including mathml, ad blocking, flash blocking, and emacs keybindings (the firemacs add-on). I can see how chrome or chromium could be fun to play with if you're interested in browsers as technology, but for everyday use, what's the attraction...?
Switzerland is the same, you have to ask permission of every person visible in the picture.
Everyone who's visible, or everyone who's recognizable? If it was everyone who was visible, it would be effectively illegal to take a photo of a large crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. I just don't want to release it to different people under different licenses. That would be a hassle for me, and what's my motivation to write this guy some separate, more permissive license? He's not contributing to the free information movement, so I have no motivation to do that for him.
One of the good things about copyleft licensing is that you don't have to initiate a licensing conversation every time person A wants to use some of person B's code. You just put your code out there under the license, and if people want to use it under that license, they do.
This is a real issue. For instance, I wrote a physics textbook, which is open-source, and I wrote a bunch of ruby and latex code that helps to produce the pdf from the latex sources, automatically handling some things relating to placement of figures on the page that are awkward to do with plain latex. My book, including the ruby and latex code, is under CC-BY-SA. I got an email from a guy at MSU who was writing a textbook, and had already started using my code to handle the illustrations. He wanted to check whether it was okay under the license, since he didn't intend to release his own book under a CC license. Well, my answer ended up being that I really didn't know whether it was okay or not. It wasn't clear to me whether his work counted as a derived work. On the one hand, you could say that what he was using was simply some software I wrote, so his book isn't a derived work based on my software any more than a book written in MS Word is a derived work based on Word. On the other hand, there's really no perfect separation between the software and our books. When you write a book in latex, the latex code *is* a piece of software. My code generates various boilerplate in its output, some of which is text that is visible to the reader, so it's under my copyright and license. Of course I could have just told him that it wasn't an issue, and I wouldn't sue him, but I had intentionally chosen the strong copyleft because that's what I wanted. I suspect that a lawyer would tell him his work was actually not a derived work, but I also suspect that he (and his eventual publisher) wouldn't even want to get into that issue.
Although the issue is real, it seems goofy to me to suggest GPLv3 as the fix for the problem. First off, there are huge philosophical differences between v2 and v3. Also, there is so much GPL v2 code out there that you can't necessarily just relicense under GPL v3 without causing yourself hassles with license incompatibilities. I also don't quite understand how they think they can bypass the fact that various countries have various inconsistent and ambiguous definitions of a derived work. The only thing that forces anyone to accept the GPL license attached to a work is that copyright law doesn't allow them to do certain things without a license from the author. Those things include (1) copying and redistributing the work, and (2) creating and distributing derived works from it.
I'm emotionally partial to trains, live in a railroad town, and prefer the train to driving or flying. However, there's one big problem with Amtrak for long-distance travel, which is that they have serious problems with arriving on time. They don't own the tracks, so when any other traffic is coming through, the Amtrak train has to pull over on a siding and wait. For the itinerary you found, an 18-hour trip, you should probably expect to add a random number of hours from 0 to 6 into your arrival time. This kind of thing can be especially unpleasant when your train was supposed to arrive at, say, 11 pm, and instead it arrives at 5 in the morning.
He didn't claim it was unpopular. He didn't even claim it was objectively bad. He just explained why he personally didn't like it.
Pick any lowest-common-denominator popular culture. Britney Spears. Dogs playing poker. The Transformers movie. Whatever. The reason it sells is that a lot of people like it. But the fact that it's popular doesn't mean that it should be magically insulated from criticism.
Let's translate from science fiction to a different genre, say westerns, so Star Trek becomes Wagon Trek. Stross is basically saying that he doesn't enjoy Wagon Trek, because he's an enthusiast for westerns, he's spent a lot of time reading good westerns, and he's developed enough taste to discriminate between shitty westerns and good ones. In particular, if a western novel has Cherokees in Spanish Colonial California, he's not going to enjoy that western, because he can't suspend his disbelief, and he can tell that the author was an idiot who didn't even have enough respect for the genre to do his research. Ditto if a Montana cowboy in 1895 is using flintlocks.
Science fiction used to be a niche market. It was part of the "long tails," before the notion of the long tails was invented. What's happened over the last 40 years is that it's become such a commoditized thing that a lot of SF (and especially a lot of the TV/movie SF) is written for people who have no actual affection for or knowledge of the genre. There's nothing wrong with letting those people enjoy their SF, just as there's nothing wrong with listening to Sonny and Cher sing "I Got You, Babe." But sometimes there are people who don't want Sonny and Cher, they want James Brown.
Publishers are often extremely careless about sending out scattershot DMCA notices. For example, I'm the author of a free and open-source calculus textbook. My book is available on my own web site, and also on some other sites such as lulu and scribd. I got an email today from one of the folks at scribd saying they'd received the DMCA takedown notice below. The takedown notice is so vague and sloppy that it's hard to tell what they're even claiming. Are they claiming that scribd is violating my (Ben Crowell's) copyright? If so, then what business of it is theirs? (Macmillan isn't my publisher, and I've never heard of Attributor, Inc., until today.) Or are they claiming that my book contains content that infringes Macmillan's copyrights? (It would seem not, since they list "Original Work: Calculus," as if it's the entire book whose copyright is being infringed.)
Take this with a grain of salt. There are a lot of issues here that are not well understood. TFA points out that we don't know whether there are black holes with masses intermediate between stellar black holes and supermassive black holes. The whole meaning of entropy is not well understood in the context of general relativity. The jury is still out on the black hole information paradox. It's still a matter of opinion whether black hole radiation is purely uncorrelated blackbody radiation, or whether it contains subtle correlations that encode the information that was "lost" when various information went into the black hole. Basically you need a theory of quantum gravity in order to be sure about the answers to these questions, and we don't have a theory of quantum gravity. Another issue is that nobody knows the structure of the vacuum around a black hole. When you try to calculate the polarization of the virtual particles in the region of high curvature around a black hole, you run into all kinds of problems. The zero-point energy of the vacuum is infinite in flat spacetime, and it's infinite in curved spacetime. Nobody is sure what that means, but they can try to subtract the one infinity from the other and find the increase in the vacuum energy that comes from curvature. Then when they try that, they seem to get answers saying that the structure of black holes can be radically different from what was previously assumed. Nobody really knows if this is right, or just an artifact of not knowing how to do the calculations correctly.
I guess it's a question of the application. For what I'm doing (a music server), the NSLU2's performance is perfectly fine. Your bill was $255, which is more than triple what an NSLU2 costs. What are you using yours for? Video?
I dunno. Maybe my area just has more power surges than yours? There's no way to tell, and that's the whole problem. It is a very common problem, though. Ask anyone who's done phone support for an ISP. The reason I've tried the unsuccessful solutions that I've tried is that slashdotters who'd done phone support for ISPs posted about how common the problem was, and suggested those solutions.
The Linksys NSLU2 is $80, which is a lot cheaper than $130 for the WNR3500L. I have an NSLU2, running linux, as a music server, and it works great. Considering what crap hardware most home routers are, I'd hesitate to trust one as a file server. The Marvell $99 wall-wart computer also looks kind of interesting.
What would really be handy would be an $80 NAS box that ran, say, debian, with a complete set of useful apps, was easy to set up, and was officially supported. The NSLU2 comes pretty close to this, because Linksys explicitly says it's ok with them if you install linux on it -- but they don't actually support that, and it's really kind of a hassle to set up. It's also a hassle to get the apps you want. E.g., I would really like to be able to run a more recent version of the Unison file synchronizer on my NSLU2, but when I try to compile and run it, it crashes, so I'm stuck with a precompiled binary of an older version.
It's great if "open source" is seen by a company like Netgear as a positive marketing tool. However, it's a bit of a stretch to list DD-WRT, OpenWRT. and Tomato as all being open-source. Tomato has a nonproprietary back end plus a proprietary web interface. DD-WRT has a history of GPL violations, and tries to charge people more money for a version with more functionality. If you take "open source" totally literally, then yeah, maybe these are open source, in the sense that you probably are allowed to read the source code freely. But I don't think that's what most people in the open-source world really mean by open source. OpenWRT is the only one on this list that is really totally free and nonproprietary. I run OpenWRT on my router, with a web-based front-end called Gargoyle, which is also (really) open source. Gargoyle is pretty bare bones, but it is good enough for a lot of quick, simple stuff. It would be nice if the developer could include just a tad more functionality in it, though, because I do end up having to ssh in and do certain things from the command line.
What I would really like is a cheap router that wouldn't crash and hang up all the time. For my home network, I picked up a wrt54g v.4 on ebay, because it has more memory than the current models, and is reputed to be more stable. I also bought a (cheap) UPS, because a lot of people say it's power surges that tend to cause routers to lock up. Well, I still have to reboot the router fairly frequently. It doesn't seem to be correlated with what firmware and software I run, either. I don't understand why I should have to reboot such a simple, single-purpose device more than once a year. The netgear box referred to in TFA is $130. I might consider paying that much for a router for my home network if I had some reason to believe it would need less frequent rebooting. The problem is that I have never seen reliable data that measured frequency of lockups in routers and correlated it with specific variables that I have control over. I'm perfectly willing to believe that a $1000 router designed for medium-sized businesses would not lock up. I just don't want to pay $1000.
If we'd applied the same criteria to these groups that we apply to other mammals, there actually wouldn't be two genuses here, there'd be one.
This is a competely false analogy.
The supermarket gives me a real choice. On a per-transaction basis, I can decide whether to use my supermarket membership or not. If I do, they give me several bucks off my grocery bill, and that's the price at which I've sold them that personal info. If I don't use the membership, then I've declined to sell that particular info at that price on that particular occasion.
I also get a real choice with the credit card. If I choose to use the credit card for a particular transaction, then I get an effective discount of about 1/4% (because I don't have to pay the bill until the end of the month, and the price of money is something like 5% per year, and typically it's about half a month until the end of the month), and the credit card company gets my info. If I don't use the card, then I've declined to sell that particular info at that price on that particular occasion.
The difference with ad tracking is that they're offering me $0 in return for my information. They're just hoping that I haven't figured out how to use cookie whitelisting in firefox, so that they can take my information for free.
For the paranoid among us, this is really sweet. Leave the side of your computer's case open. When your front door suddenly gets knocked in and a bunch of feds start swarming into your living room, you just reach over and rub real hard on the chip with your finger. All your bits are melted.
IMO the first linked article was not very interesting. To get to the interesting stuff, you have to go to the second linked article, then click through to the links from there. The pictures of how they fabricated the engine block are really cool. I was surprised there wasn't more info about the tires. My understanding was that tires were the main limiting factor in land speed records -- or maybe that's only for cars. Tires tend to fly apart when rotated that fast. I would assume that at these speeds they get incredible gyroscopic stability, so I guess you don't have to worry about tipping over. They have to run the course in both directions without messing with the engine, which apparently is quite a challenge. I wasn't clear on what's involved in turning around to come back. The bike has both brakes and parachutes. Does the driver actually brake and do a steered u-turn at low speed, or do they use parachutes, then pick the thing back up and turn it around by hand?
It's an exponential decay. There is no sharp cutoff. Nothing special happens at 100 km. The scale height of the earth's atmosphere is about 7 km, so the pressure at 107,000 ft (32 km) is about 10^-2 of what it is at the surface, while the pressure at 100 km is about 10^-6 of surface pressure. It's not like somewhere in between 10^-2 atm and 10^-6 atm there's a mystical barrier that suddenly makes balloon flight impossible. It just gets harder and harder; to stay aloft with a given volume of hydrogen, a balloon at 100 km would have to have 10^-4 of the weight of a balloon that's neutrally buoyant at 32 km. It just happens to be difficult to make a balloon with sufficiently thin walls, high strength, and low surface-to-volume ratio.
If you watch the (very cool) video, the sky is black, there is no sound, and the curvature of the earth is extremely obvious. I would call that the "edge of space" -- for some definitions of "edge of space." There's not some international standards body that defines terms like "edge of space."
I'm a physics teacher at a community college, and I pretty much agree with your stat professor. All my tests are open notes. The thing is, quite a few students show up in college only knowing how to regurgitate memorized information. The professor's job is to push them into operating at a higher intellectual level, but, frankly, that's hard work for both the teacher and the students, and many students get upset about it. Some teachers prefer to go the easy way and just test memorization.
The real frontier here is that net access is getting more and more ubiquitous. Students think of their iPhone as their all-purpose Swiss army knife -- it's a calculator, it's a phone, it's a stopwatch, it's a flashlight. I should probably start walking around the room during exams and checking whether my students' calculator-ish devices have net access, although I'm not sure I'd always know from looking at them. Do I have to memorize what all the popular cell-enabled PDAs look like, and learn to distinguish them from calculators? Luckily, access to cell phone networks in my classroom seems pretty crummy, and the campus's wifi doesn't reach in there yet. That's going to change, though.
Cool project! I use python for education (in my physics class), and would love to be able to tell my students just to go to skulpt.org rather than having them download and install a full python implementation (which they can't do in school computer labs). The big missing feature from my point of view is "import math." Support for cut and paste in the demo terminal would also be a big help.
Craigslist is fine for some things, but they don't have any reputation system, and in many cases that's a serious problem. If you get ripped off buying something on craigslist, there's absolutely nothing they can do for you; all you can do is try to sweet-talk the seller into letting you return it and get your money back -- or sue him. On ebay, you can look at how many transactions the seller has made and what his feedback was like.
Uh, the OP didn't ask to replace his Windows OS with Linux. He asked for open-source replacements for applications that he could run on his existing MacOS.
Uh, no, GIMP works on bitmaps, which makes it like Photoshop. Illustrator works on vector graphics, and the open-source equivalent is Inkscape. Inkscape is one of the best pieces of open-source software I've ever used, and it's multiplatform, so no, the OP doesn't have to switch to Linux to use it. I used Illustrator extensively for about 5 years, and have been using Inkscape for about 5 years after that. At this point, Inkscape does everything I want it to do. For my purposes, it's a 100% replacement for Illustrator in terms of functionality.
Damn straight. Adobe's non-support support and crappy quality control were one of the big impetuses that drove me to open source. Gawd, I remember using PageMaker ca. 1998. Paid good money for it. It constantly crashed and munged its own files. Adobe tech support tried to blame it on the OS.
Is there anything out there that's better than jamendo for free, legal downloads of music, i.e., music made by people who are intentionally making it free-as-in-something? What I don't like about jamendo: (1) It's European, and a lot of the music is French. Most French pop music is really bad. I'm really more of a jazz fan anyway, but despite the French people's fondly held belief that they're the saviors of jazz, there just aren't that many good jazz musicians in France. (2) Their tagging system is lame. Most of the tags are wildly inappropriate, e.g., "jazz" for music that's actually heavy metal, "progressive rock" for a faux-classical synthesized trumpet concerto a la Haydn. (3) Although their heart seems to be in the right place as far as free information, and apparently they run linux on their servers, their interface for uploading apparently doesn't work on any OS other than Windows. (Forum discussions: 1, 2, 3. I tried the web interface with multiple browsers. I tried both Linux and MacOS. I tried their standalone uploader program for linux, which is a summer of code project that hasn't been maintained properly. I emailed their tech support, and they weren't able to help me.)
This is not really a Rubicon. I edited for several years with a WP account. Then I decided WP had evolved into a thing that was no longer fun for me, and to reduce my temptation to get involved in any more WP stuff, I disabled my account by munging the password. Ever since then, I've been editing without logging in. There are already a lot of things you can't do without being logged in. You can't upload an image, can't mark your edits as minor, can't make a new article, can't edit certain articles. WP's official policy is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with editing anonymously, but people are often very snotty toward you if you edit anonymously. There's a strong tendency for both humans and bots to revert anonymous editors' edits, even if it's a good edit, with a good comment line pointing to discussion on the talk page.
Cool! Thanks for the correction.
I can't really see using a closed-source browser when there are plenty of perfectly good open-source ones available. I'd be interested in trying chromium (the open-source version of chrome), but the last time I checked, it didn't seem mature enough to want to mess with. When it shows up in the ubuntu repos, I'll certainly be interested in giving it a spin. The thing is, Firefox is very feature-rich, and I've gotten used to/dependent on a bunch of its features, including mathml, ad blocking, flash blocking, and emacs keybindings (the firemacs add-on). I can see how chrome or chromium could be fun to play with if you're interested in browsers as technology, but for everyday use, what's the attraction...?
Everyone who's visible, or everyone who's recognizable? If it was everyone who was visible, it would be effectively illegal to take a photo of a large crowd.