Note to Visa: I'm *never* going to buy a CapitalOne card *specifically* because you advertise it with popup ads. Take that!
There are plenty of reasons not to get one of those damnable cards. The straw that broke this camel's back was that as of right now -- one year later -- they still don't support Netscape 6/Mozilla for online bill-paying.
Yes, I know it's not a popular choice, and Yes, when I first downloaded Mozilla (0.8, I believe) it was also unsupported by about half of the bill-paying sites out there, and Yes, there are other bill-paying sites I use that don't officially support it today, but the difference is this: When I go to (say) Sallie Mae, I get a message that says "Your browser is unsupported," and I go ahead and use the site without problems anyway. When I go to CapitalOne's site, I get "Your browser is unsupported. You are now being logged out." Turn off Javascript, you say? "Your browser does not support Javascript. You are now being logged out."
To Hell with them; I just dropped off my last payment to them into the mail, and that's the last of my business they'll get.
In
Feist v. Rural Telephone Co., the Supreme Court held that, "As applied to a factual compilation, assuming the absence of original written expression, only the compiler's selection and arrangement may be protected; the raw facts may be copied at will." Facts such as names, telephone numbers and addresses are not themselves subject to copyright protection in the United States.
Does it occur to anyone that this was basically exactly the argument that Napster was running, in that they weren't responsible for the use of their system?... I'm just saying that you have to either accept or reject that line of argument, you can't accept if just for those you like and reject it for others.
Well, I don't think that geekoid's comment really reflects PayPal's legal arguments, though. A better analogy would be to say that Napster had the option of shutting down anyone's account without notice, on the flimsiest of reasons, and without any way to appeal the decision (seizing the MP3s on the customer's drive is optional).
In fact, this was the sort of thing the RIAA was demanding that Napster do, and Napster kept saying it was wrong/technically infeasible. They did eventually get around to blocking some account holders, but only after it was obvious that the courts weren't coming to the rescue.
Re:3500 year old technology
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 2
A perfect game of tic tac toe results in the first player winning.
I'm afraid you are mistaken. The only way for anyone to win tic-tac-toe is to put themselves in a position so that two different choices of next move result in a victory (so their opponent cannot possibly block both). In a "perfect" game (which I assume means that the players can think ahead as many moves as they wish) this is impossible. Since you assume the first player (X) can win, allow me to demonstrate how the second player (O) can always push the game to a draw (please forgive the crappy presentation; lameness filter uber alles).
Begin with everyone's favorite: X takes center (O then takes a corner).
O?? ?X? ???
X now has four choices (remember that the board has four lines of symmetry). Since three of them set X up for victory, O's move is forced in those cases (O takes another corner in the fourth).
OX? O?X O?? O?O ?X? ?X? OXX ?X? ?O? O?? ??? ??X
If we follow the "forced moves" to their conclusion we get:
OX? O?X OXO OXO ?X? XXO OXX ?X? ?O? O?? XOX ?OX
For the sake of clarity, let's call these A, B, C, and D, respectively. C ends in a draw, so we can discard it. We can also discard D, since it is simply B rotated 90 degrees clockwise.
Come to think of it, we can discard B as well, since no matter what X does next, forced moves will push the game to a draw.
We can safely assume X won't go with E, since O has a guaranteed win by taking the lower-left corner. Forced moves push G to a draw; and after O's forced move, H is the mirror image of D. F has one forced move by O, and then either of X's two remaining choices will end in a draw.
This leaves I. O simply takes the lower left corner, and the game ends in a draw.
If someone really wants me to demonstrate similar results where X starts the game by taking a corner or an edge, I can, but I think I'll stop here for now.
My situation is a little different. I work on internal development, so "customers" means other employees of the same company. Anyway, our customers give completely inflexible deadlines: Deploy what you have done, period. They control IT's budget, so we have no real say-so. We allegedly have a maintenance team, but since they have zero understanding of the system, even from an end-user's perspective, all the bug-fixing, etc., invariably falls back on us. Since the customer doesn't understand the concept of maintenance, they can't figure out why we aren't spending 100% of our time on the new project.
An interesting corrolary (sp?) is that no money is allotted for maintenance, so all maintenance gets charged to the current project, which is already thread-bare as it is. In theory, if this keeps up long enough, we'll someday have a project whose budget is all spent on maintenance.
Hardly. English, with a vocabulary of approximately six hundred thousand words, is the largest spoken language, beating the next largest by an order of magnitude. The problem is that people don't take the time (or even have the time, for that matter) to learn most words, so people pick a subset of words they're comfortable with, and overload them all to Hell (the canonical example being "set", with 153 definitions, IIRC).
...you can recognize a Microsoft program from 50 miles away, and damn if they don't all work the same.
Let's see... I could be an offtopic troll and say, "yeah, they do work the same way: not at all!", but I believe I shall pass.
Actually, the funny thing is, just earlier today, I was complaining to a co-worker that MS programs don't all work the same way. I'll concede that nearly all products within the same "generation" tend to work the same, but there are a Hell of a lot of gratuitous changes made between successive versions of the same product, especially to the widget set.
Hey, thanks for saving me the trouble of figuring it out again! I was a little confused at first, because I misread your definition of N as (b-a)/(D+1); guess I need to check up on that "reading comprehension" thing I hear so much about.
Of course, you could be in my current situation, where there are no standards to speak of. Nothing brightens my morning more than to bring up some code and see no fewer than four different bracing styles.
Good. Now, class, your next assignment is to generalize this formula to accept arbitrary start/stop points, with an unknown, constant difference between elements (e.g., summate all odd numbers from 25 to 79).
I'm sure, 100 years from now some turtlenecked twit will preach to others:"Oh... you have a holo-cave... we don't have that at our place..we have wholseome television."
I thought people were already saying that about the Internet (chat room addiction, etc.).
It's not possible to go too far in repealing the DMCA. Having the law completely eliminated is a Good Thing.... Unlike protecting copyrights, eliminating the DMCA is clear-cut...
Actually, no. There are a couple of good parts to the DMCA.
For example, there used to be a legal gray-area where people had to worry about caching-proxies. Were they violating copyright laws? Nobody was sure, and the DMCA explicitly states that the answer is "no". I consider this to be a Good Thing [tm].
What people generally mean when they bitch that "the DMCA is evil" is that "Section 1201 of the DMCA is evil". This is the part of the law that deals with circumvention, and makes copyright violation a criminal violation, rather than a civil one.
One of the disadvantages to this method is that you often get popups saying "unable to connect to ad.adservingsite.com". I tried running Apache for a while to get rid of the messages, but decided that was silly.
Apache is overkill for this problem. I decided to go with AntiWeb. It's nice and lightweight, and I finally don't have those silly error popups. It's still silly to do, but so is putting advertisers' domains in your hosts file.
I had thought of that, but I'm not really sure that's true. I just went to mail.yahoo.com, and the "Secure" link contains a GET parameter that says "&.u=e1n4p58ulnqv1". I refresh the page, and now it says "&.u=20dfmpsulnr1g". I'm concerned that reusing the same value over and over is a security risk.
...I don't care about my Yahoo mail for evesdroppers.
That's certainly your prerogative, but I contend that it's still poor development policy.
Yahoo mail sucks
So does every other free e-mail service.
I've had pretty good experience with gmx.net. Then again, I don't have to use the Web interface, so maybe that's the difference (if you want that option with Yahoo, it's no longer free).
Yahoo gives you a choice of signing in through their standard or secure server.
True, but they don't make secure login the default, and once you've signed in, it immediately drops you back into a non-secure connection to read your e-mail. Yahoo mail sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
Note to Visa: I'm *never* going to buy a CapitalOne card *specifically* because you advertise it with popup ads. Take that!
There are plenty of reasons not to get one of those damnable cards. The straw that broke this camel's back was that as of right now -- one year later -- they still don't support Netscape 6/Mozilla for online bill-paying.
Yes, I know it's not a popular choice, and Yes, when I first downloaded Mozilla (0.8, I believe) it was also unsupported by about half of the bill-paying sites out there, and Yes, there are other bill-paying sites I use that don't officially support it today, but the difference is this: When I go to (say) Sallie Mae, I get a message that says "Your browser is unsupported," and I go ahead and use the site without problems anyway. When I go to CapitalOne's site, I get "Your browser is unsupported. You are now being logged out." Turn off Javascript, you say? "Your browser does not support Javascript. You are now being logged out."
To Hell with them; I just dropped off my last payment to them into the mail, and that's the last of my business they'll get.
</rant>Companies have been able to copyright collections of facts like phone numbers so why not?
Probably because you're wrong.
(emphasis added)
Does it occur to anyone that this was basically exactly the argument that Napster was running, in that they weren't responsible for the use of their system? ... I'm just saying that you have to either accept or reject that line of argument, you can't accept if just for those you like and reject it for others.
Well, I don't think that geekoid's comment really reflects PayPal's legal arguments, though. A better analogy would be to say that Napster had the option of shutting down anyone's account without notice, on the flimsiest of reasons, and without any way to appeal the decision (seizing the MP3s on the customer's drive is optional).
In fact, this was the sort of thing the RIAA was demanding that Napster do, and Napster kept saying it was wrong/technically infeasible. They did eventually get around to blocking some account holders, but only after it was obvious that the courts weren't coming to the rescue.
Now if only more [people] were at least this humble...
I didn't see it as humility, but more as a polite way of saying, "Don't bother kissing my ass; it won't work."
It's 8x8, actually.
A perfect game of tic tac toe results in the first player winning.
I'm afraid you are mistaken. The only way for anyone to win tic-tac-toe is to put themselves in a position so that two different choices of next move result in a victory (so their opponent cannot possibly block both). In a "perfect" game (which I assume means that the players can think ahead as many moves as they wish) this is impossible. Since you assume the first player (X) can win, allow me to demonstrate how the second player (O) can always push the game to a draw (please forgive the crappy presentation; lameness filter uber alles).
Begin with everyone's favorite: X takes center (O then takes a corner).
O???X?
???
X now has four choices (remember that the board has four lines of symmetry). Since three of them set X up for victory, O's move is forced in those cases (O takes another corner in the fourth).
OX? O?X O?? O?O?X? ?X? OXX ?X?
?O? O?? ??? ??X
If we follow the "forced moves" to their conclusion we get:
OX? O?X OXO OXO?X? XXO OXX ?X?
?O? O?? XOX ?OX
For the sake of clarity, let's call these A, B, C, and D, respectively. C ends in a draw, so we can discard it. We can also discard D, since it is simply B rotated 90 degrees clockwise.
Come to think of it, we can discard B as well, since no matter what X does next, forced moves will push the game to a draw.
So, we turn to A, and see X has five choices.
OXX OX? OX? OX? OX??X? XX? ?XX ?X? ?X?
?O? ?O? ?O? XO? ?OX
Call these E, F, G, H, and I.
We can safely assume X won't go with E, since O has a guaranteed win by taking the lower-left corner. Forced moves push G to a draw; and after O's forced move, H is the mirror image of D. F has one forced move by O, and then either of X's two remaining choices will end in a draw.
This leaves I. O simply takes the lower left corner, and the game ends in a draw.
If someone really wants me to demonstrate similar results where X starts the game by taking a corner or an edge, I can, but I think I'll stop here for now.
My situation is a little different. I work on internal development, so "customers" means other employees of the same company. Anyway, our customers give completely inflexible deadlines: Deploy what you have done, period. They control IT's budget, so we have no real say-so. We allegedly have a maintenance team, but since they have zero understanding of the system, even from an end-user's perspective, all the bug-fixing, etc., invariably falls back on us. Since the customer doesn't understand the concept of maintenance, they can't figure out why we aren't spending 100% of our time on the new project.
An interesting corrolary (sp?) is that no money is allotted for maintenance, so all maintenance gets charged to the current project, which is already thread-bare as it is. In theory, if this keeps up long enough, we'll someday have a project whose budget is all spent on maintenance.
Given the complexity of the topic of discussion, I think nit-picking is appropriate.
We know where Winston Smith works now.
I'm sorry, but you're mistaken. No one by that name has ever worked here.
It's a great esay...
It's an even better essay.
Hardly. English, with a vocabulary of approximately six hundred thousand words, is the largest spoken language, beating the next largest by an order of magnitude. The problem is that people don't take the time (or even have the time, for that matter) to learn most words, so people pick a subset of words they're comfortable with, and overload them all to Hell (the canonical example being "set", with 153 definitions, IIRC).
Let's see... I could be an offtopic troll and say, "yeah, they do work the same way: not at all!", but I believe I shall pass.
Actually, the funny thing is, just earlier today, I was complaining to a co-worker that MS programs don't all work the same way. I'll concede that nearly all products within the same "generation" tend to work the same, but there are a Hell of a lot of gratuitous changes made between successive versions of the same product, especially to the widget set.
</rant>I never tought that such a thing would be possible, but the court decision is actually a good read.
Indeed. But one thing I don't understand is the very first footnote:
What relevence do the requirements have to anything?
Hey, thanks for saving me the trouble of figuring it out again! I was a little confused at first, because I misread your definition of N as (b-a)/(D+1); guess I need to check up on that "reading comprehension" thing I hear so much about.
I agree about the goofy coding standards, but they still could've written it better than that.
char sp = '\0';
if (numP > 1)
sp = 's';
printf("This location contains %d pallet%c", numP, sp);
Of course, you could be in my current situation, where there are no standards to speak of. Nothing brightens my morning more than to bring up some code and see no fewer than four different bracing styles.
you should never end a sentence with a preposition.
"Ending sentences with prepositions is something up with which we must not put."
--Winston Churchill (I think)
(the old Gaussian summation formula)
n * (n + 1) / 2
Good. Now, class, your next assignment is to generalize this formula to accept arbitrary start/stop points, with an unknown, constant difference between elements (e.g., summate all odd numbers from 25 to 79).
Don't you code haiku?
10 PRINT "Mr. Sketch is cool!"
20 GOTO 10
I'm sure, 100 years from now some turtlenecked twit will preach to others:"Oh... you have a holo-cave... we don't have that at our place..we have wholseome television."
I thought people were already saying that about the Internet (chat room addiction, etc.).
It's not possible to go too far in repealing the DMCA. Having the law completely eliminated is a Good Thing. ... Unlike protecting copyrights, eliminating the DMCA is clear-cut...
Actually, no. There are a couple of good parts to the DMCA.
For example, there used to be a legal gray-area where people had to worry about caching-proxies. Were they violating copyright laws? Nobody was sure, and the DMCA explicitly states that the answer is "no". I consider this to be a Good Thing [tm].
What people generally mean when they bitch that "the DMCA is evil" is that "Section 1201 of the DMCA is evil". This is the part of the law that deals with circumvention, and makes copyright violation a criminal violation, rather than a civil one.
And this is not a recurrent theme on /. ?
Ha ha! Blessed inspriation! All UF needs is the ability to moderate the comics as "-1, Lame" or whatever, and then they'd be set.
One of the disadvantages to this method is that you often get popups saying "unable to connect to ad.adservingsite.com". I tried running Apache for a while to get rid of the messages, but decided that was silly.
Apache is overkill for this problem. I decided to go with AntiWeb. It's nice and lightweight, and I finally don't have those silly error popups. It's still silly to do, but so is putting advertisers' domains in your hosts file.
Bookmark fixes [insecure by default]
I had thought of that, but I'm not really sure that's true. I just went to mail.yahoo.com, and the "Secure" link contains a GET parameter that says "&.u=e1n4p58ulnqv1". I refresh the page, and now it says "&.u=20dfmpsulnr1g". I'm concerned that reusing the same value over and over is a security risk.
That's certainly your prerogative, but I contend that it's still poor development policy.
So does every other free e-mail service.
I've had pretty good experience with gmx.net. Then again, I don't have to use the Web interface, so maybe that's the difference (if you want that option with Yahoo, it's no longer free).
Compare to a bank. You pay fees to be able to pay via check.
Not me. I haven't paid any fees to my bank in nearly five years.
Yahoo gives you a choice of signing in through their standard or secure server.
True, but they don't make secure login the default, and once you've signed in, it immediately drops you back into a non-secure connection to read your e-mail. Yahoo mail sucks.