Kind of. You can generally use BSD code in a GPL application, but the reverse is not true.
In short, the GPL forces you to release derived works under the GPL, but BSD has no such restriction. Thus, if you try to use GPL code in a BSD application, you have to license it under the GPL, which kind of defeats the purpose of choosing the BSD license in the first place. The Apache project runs into this all the time.
Personally, I run Debian Testing (Sarge) on my desktop, and Debian Stable (Woody) on my firewall. One of the nice things about Stable is that in general, the only updates are security-related. That means you can set apt-get update; apt-get upgrade in a daily cron, and not worry too much about pooching your system. Doing so under the Unstable branch (and to a lesser degree, Testing) would make life...uhm...interesting.;)
At work, our admin is a big Gentoo devotee. The package system is nice in it's own way. I was fond of the FreeBSD ports system back in the day, but Gentoo's ports seem to have a lot of breakage (broken packages, missing files, bad MD5 sums, etc) compared to the Debian apt sources. I suspect this is mostly due to the monumental volunteer effort into Debian's package maintenance.
On the other hand, I find Gentoo's support for Java packages/tools is significantly better than Debian's...Probably more due to licensing issues than technical, but it would be nice to have a Debian equivalent to "java-config --set-user-vm"
Indeed. Personally, I think that at the minimum, they should have been blanking the disks locally, then shipping them on to the blankers to be blanked again. Letting machines out the front door with that kind of sensitive information on them is just begging for this kind of trouble...If there's one thing I've learned in all my years as a megalomaniac bent on world domination, it's this: Always do your own dirty work. If it's important enough that you don't want it to become public knowledge, it's important enough for you to handle it yourself.
Ultimately, the only secure way to deal with that data is to shred the drives.
Another piece of food for thought. This is the first time this has happened that anyone's heard of. Yes, it's great that they got the data before it fell into "the wrong hands"...but, if it had fallen into "the wrong hands" in the first place, we would never have heard boo about it. "The wrong hands" would have used it for their own nefarious wrong handed purposes...We'd all still be blissfully unaware, until one day we came home to find the Fed waiting for us, asking questions about our recent sizeable donations to the GLEF (George Lucas Extermination Front)
I believe that line would be from Star Wars, "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Personally, I'm fond of a line from Babylon 5..."The geometries that circumscribe your waking life draw narrower until nothing fits inside them anymore."
Actually, as of last year, it is. Bell, Telus and StarChoice successfully petitioned the CRTC to disallow "grey market" receivers because it was competing with their services. And so, in one fell swoop, all those hacked access cards and receivers suddenly became illegal.
Ugh. That reminds me of this awful commercial that just started playing up (Ontario, Canada) here on Rogers Cable...
It starts out with this 10 year old-ish boy walking out of a convenience store with a candy bar, and the shop owner runs out and accuses him of shoplifting it.
The scene then jumps to a cops dropping the kid off at his parents house.
The scene jumps again to inside the house, the kid is sitting on the couch with his father next to him. The father asks, "Did your friends put you up to it?" The kid shakes his head. "Then where did you learn to steal?" The kid looks up at his father with big deer in front of headlights eyes and says, "But Dad, you steal satellite signals!"
It then cuts to a white screen with the words "theft is theft" written on it in large black courier font with the sound of sirens and police radio in the background.
The funny thing is that the commercial makes me want to "steal satellite signals" just so I know my money wouldn't be going to fund such dreck.
So, apparently the progression is: P2P leads to Warez. Warez leads to Satellite Hacking. Satellite Hacking leads to Shoplifting, and so on and so on.
So remember, kids! Every time you download a song off the Internet, you kill a baby panda!
I've not done this myself, since I've only got a couple Debian boxen and a zippy connection to the 'Net, but I believe it's possible to set one of your boxes up as an apt source and cache the packages locally on your subnet. So, you download them once, then have them available to all your machines.
It was a post that came up a while back...I guess about six months ago now, give or take. The poster had apparently done a study on moderator behaviour (or maybe just made the whole thing up, I don't know) which exposed some interesting...uhm...features/weaknesses of the moderation system.
Anyway, while the comment was interesting to read, it WAS completely offtopic to the story it was posted to. This caused a pretty massive breakdown of the moderation system. Many moderators modded the thread up as insightful/informative/etc, while other moderators modded it back down as Offtopic.
Then the admins stepped in and screwed things up royally. First, they started using their unlimited modpoints to knock it down. Then, when it got too big to moderate by hand, they repeatedly "bitchslapped" the thread, which instantly caused all the comments to drop to -1, and blacklisted any moderators who tried to raise it back up.
It was a bad time for/.'s moderation system. Anyway, that's what I remember...I'm sure there are others who can fill in more details...Maybe link to a copy of the forbidden post...
I own a full ATI TV Wonder (not the VE), and have owned a Hauppauge in the past. In my experience, ATI's tuner is much stronger than the one on the Hauppauge WinTV card I had. It can pull in channels that the WinTV wouldn't even touch, and generally produces a much clearer signal. As long as you're running it under Linux, you should be A-OK.
Under Windows, these cards are ATI's bastard stepchild. ATI's driver/application support has been pretty slim, and not very good. Half-assed at best. I guess they'd rather you bought a shiny new All-In-Wonder instead...
I know what you mean about feeling like a schmuck every time you buy music. I feel like I need a shower every time I see one of their damned "You need music and music needs you" commercials.
I bought a new CD last week, and even though it wasn't by an RIAA-owned artist (Canadian band, The Arrogant Worms), I still felt a tinge of guilt over giving my money to "the music industry".
The funny thing is that I don't even use P2P anymore. (Not out of any high moral standard...just another version of that age old story: Boy meets girl. Boy moves in with girl and her daughter. Boy no longer has time to sit around and download music, but still manages to read/. from work.:)
Oooh! Oooh! Oooh! Integer values for x, y, z that satisfy x^27 + y^27 = z^27? Well I can think of several right off the top of my head...
x=1 y=-1 z=0
or
x=0 y=1 z=1
Or did you want a non-trivial answer for that?
[FLAME ON] Now, in the words of Dennis Miller, "I don't mean to get off on a rant", but speaking as a Math/Comp Sci. geek, I hate it when people attempt to sound intelligent by frobbing their mighty mathematical muscles. Most people wouldn't know (or care) what the integral of e^(-x^2) is, nor for that matter what you define as "fundamental mathematic expressions" are either.
That's basically like asking someone for a grenden frenesdhire of lignitious flibidnituriousness. Without the context or the intellectual framework to understand the question, it's meaningless. Do YOU have a grenden frenesdhire of lignitious flibidnituriousness? I thought not.
As for your example with Andromeda, a pair of rubber bands and a liquid lunch...well, even you state that there is a vanishingly small chance of being solvable. Vanishingly small, but non-zero. Just because we currently do not know how to do it now doesn't mean we never will.
Remember, at one point in time, many leading scientists believed it was impossible for man to fly, even AFTER Kitty Hawk. The Wright brothers were considered crackpots in their time. Next, it was the sound barrier. "Man will never break the sound barrier", they said. It's been broken. The history of scientific progress is littered with so-called experts saying "It can't be done." and the men who proved it could. [FLAME OFF]
That being said, there ARE classes of problems which are considered unsolvable. Turing's Halting Problem (Note the use of a link providing information for those interested in learning more and/or are not gifted with near-omniscient intellect) is one of them. Alan Turing proved that there is no algorithm which can solve it for any possible inputs. It's a mindbendingly elegant proof...you can see a sketch of it on the other side of the link if you're interested.
Anyway, sorry for the flame. Your post caught me as being a little too intellectually smug and self-flagellating. Had to be done.
It was until recently. About a year ago, the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC) ruled that so-called grey-market satellite recievers were no longer legal. The argument made was that it was competing with Canadian satellite providers, which is true...if only because, in my opinion, our Canadian satellite providers suck.
Also, if you want your variables to be EXTRA private in Perl, there are tricks you can use, such as closures to make it non-trivial (but not impossible) to access those variables.
Damian Conway's book, Object Oriented Perl is a really good, of occasionally scary look at the deeper mysteries of doing OOP with Perl.
You did notice none of this organic life happened to be unfit or over 25 didn't you?
Except for the council people, and many of the ship captains, that is.
Besides, the 'young' demographic of the Zionites is probably best explained by the fact that:
They only liberate young minds (See the first movie), and
There was a throwaway line by Morpheus in this one that since Neo, they've liberated more minds in 6 months than in the previous 6 years. (Or something like that) also,
In any war, it's people of fighting age who have the highest attrition rate. So, you would naturally see fewer middle aged or older Zionites than normal.
I wouldn't say it's laughable. Consider the alternative for a momment. Which is better? Having a copyright which expires in 14-28 years, or one which expires in life + 70+ years? (Say, approx. 100 years on average)
The fact of the matter is that for a company like O'Reilly, it probably doesn't make sense from a business perspective to hold onto the copyrights for that long. As you've so brilliantly pointed out, there is little call nowadays for Perl 3 books. That, my friend, is exactly the point!
In the tech industry, the significant majority of books published have a shelf life of a few years at most. After that, they're practically worthless. Once taken out of print, the chance of them ever being republished is almost nil.
Eventually, it gets to the point where it's no longer worth it to even defend those copyrights because the money you'd spend searching for violations and defending your copyright in court costs far more than you could expect to earn over the remainder of the term. (And I would be very surprised if Tim O'Reilly didn't have a report cross his desk which showed this to him in concrete numbers)
Now, this doesn't hold for all publishers. Outside the tech sector, some books pay off in the long run. The Lord of the Rings saga is a perfect example. In those cases, from a business perspective, it's worthwhile for a publisher to hold on to his copyrights as long as possible because you never know which book in your catalogue is going to be "The Next Big Thing", and pay off big time.
For Tim O'Reilly, the chance of these books paying off for his company after 28 years is pretty close to 0. Tim O'Reilly may have strong principles, but he's a businessman first and foremost. It's a bold move that costs him and his company almost nothing.
The way I see it is that this is a brilliant move for O'Reilly. They gain practically no value from holding their copyrights to the maximum term allowed by law. By releasing their works under a shorter term, and remaining profitable, they can serve as very powerful case study for those who argue against the endless parade of copyright term extensions.
Sadly, it really is 24th Century Borg Tech vs. 22nd Century Starfleet Tech.
According to Berman & co, this plot picks up where First Contact left off. (Ie, Borg fight their way to Earth, travel back in time to thwart first Warp flight, Enterprise blows up borg sphere, and everyone lives happily ever after.)
Taken from the site linked to in the article:
"
3/11/03: Production Report: The official STAR TREK web site has posted its production report the May 7th episode of ENTERPRISE, "Regeneration." As previously reported by TrekWeb, the episode will feature the discovery of Borg sphere fragments from STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT in the arctic. When human scientists begin examining the strange cybernetic humanoids they find in the ice, the beings come to life and eventually steal a transport, borgify it, and run into Archer and the NX-01."
So, these borg found buried in the ice are the remnants of that borg sphere. (Which makes a perverse sort of sense...how else would Borg end up flash frozen on Earth?)
Have I mentioned yet how much I hate time travel plots?
Indeed. My problem with bringing the borg to Enterprise (which I rarely watch anyway) is that they are simply too powerful an enemy to be dealt with in a reasonable manner.
I mean, these are the same borg that fought their way to Earth in the 24th century, against 24th century weapons and defenses, then traveled back in time to the 22nd century. They kicked righteous Federation ass. Now they're being unleashed on 22nd century Enterprise? What the hell are the writers thinking?
This is the same Enterprise that has 'polarized hull plating', pulse cannons and a top speed of what? Warp 5? It's been established that they're not even a match for the Vulcans! And they're pairing them up against the Borg who can rip through 24th century shields in a couple of minutes, are nearly immune to phasers and photon torpedoes and can propel their ships at speeds well above warp 10 using transwarp?
If you want an idea of how badly this will go for the good guys, go watch the first ST:TNG borg episode again, and multiply the ass whooping that Picard and crew took by 100. It's like putting Pee Wee Herman in the ring against Mike Tyson on PCP. It's pretty much guaranteed to be short, brutal and very messy.
The only way they'll be able to hit the proverbial 'reset' button in an hour is by introducing some horrible plot device, because there is no plausible way for the crew to handle something like this on their own. Basically, the entire episode is going to go like this: (given an episode length of 47 minutes without commercials)
1) Enterprise is called to investigate (20 minutes) 2) The Borg kick Enterprise's ass. (20 minutes) 3) A miracle happens. (5 minutes) 4) Everyone lives happily ever after. (2 minutes)
Ugh. I think I'll just save my brain the agony, thank you very much. This is just another example of one of the three classic horrible sci-fi plots. There is no faster way to ruin a good story than by introducing time travel, clones or alternate dimensions. (and heaven help you if you manage to mire your audience in all three!) Yes, it is possible to do them right, but it's dreadfully easy to do them wrong...so very wrong.
Not to mention that 3 years later, you may not be able to FIND a cartridge for your printer anymore. If they've EOL'd the printer and don't make that particular cartidge anymore, you're SOL. (HP is pretty good about re-using cartridge designs, but there are others...Epson, I'm looking at YOU!) There is a company in Toronto (sorry, I don't recall the name) whose whole purpose in life is stocking obsolete toner/ink catridges and selling them to ppl/businesses who don't want to upgrade simply because their printer is considered obsolete. Imagine what this will do to them?
On the subject of printers, I'd never buy another Epson. Picked up a Stylus C42UX for my girlfriend and I to do assignments in university. At $70 (Canadian) for the printer, it was an awesome deal for us as students. (read: poor) Unfortunately, the cartridges cost $25-30 for the black and about $40 for the colour. The black cartridge prints about 100-150 sheets of text. The kicker is that if the printer monitors the ink levels, and if it's out of any given colour (C, M, Y or K) it refuses to print. So, if I'm out of yellow ink and I want to print a black and white document, I'm SOL until I go out and pick up a new colour cartridge for almost 60% of the purchase price of the printer.
As the final nail in the coffin, just to make sure you don't go and do something sneaky like buy a new printer every time you're out of ink, they put half-filled "preview" ink cartridges in their new printers, so after 50 pages or so, you're sunk again. Every time I think about it too much I get the near uncontrollable urge to take the damned thing out back, and go Office Space on it with a baseball bat, then mail the pieces back to Epson. I doubt it would do any good, but it would make me feel better about the whole deal.:)
It's sad too, because back in the day, Epson and HP both used to be reputable printer dealers who cared about their products and their customers. (But that's another rant that I'll save that rant for a journal entry sometime...one post, one rant maximum.;)
Indeed. I know exactly what you mean about doing installs/upgrades for family and friends. I'm going home for easter and so far I'm scheduled to rebuild 3 windows PCs for my family. On the bright side, they did pay for my flight out, so I won't complain too much.:)
Of all the machines in the house, the only one that's running reliably is the Debian firewall/router I set up for them almost 2 years ago now, which I administer remotely via SSH. Usually that means apt-get update once a week or so to keep up on security updates...barring some catastrophic hardware failure, the system pretty much runs itself at this point.
Incidentally, I'm not saying it's stable because it's Linux; it's stable because nobody touches it! Users...always the weakest link.;)
Frankly, I'm about halfway though this book and at times, it's all I can do to keep from tossing it in the trash bin in disgust.
The author seems to be incapable just getting to the subject and explaining himself in a clear and consise manner. Instead, he embarks on these long, florid poetry-filled diatribes about the imagination, and a yellow tulip.
In the few places where he's actually able to keep himself on topic for more than a page, the historical description of the search for imaginary numbers is actually an interesting story in and of itself.
Why he feels the need to expound on it with inapropriate references to poetry and half-baked philosophies on the nature of imagination is beyond me. I'm not against the poetry per se, it's just that there are many occasions where I'll read a passage, hit the poetry, sit back and think, "What the hell does that have to do with the subject?" Even when there is a conceptual link, most of the time, it's very weak. (Of the I'm talking about imagination, and the word imagine is in the poem level)
Frankly, it's been a very dissapointing read. If you're looking for an interesting math book (some people would consider that an oxymoron), I'd recommend David Berlinski's "A Tour of the Calculus" or either of Simon Singh's excellent books ("Fermat's Enigma" and "The Code Book").
I was fortunate enough to be able to set up my parent's net connection before I moved across the country. I set them up with a Woody box which I could SSH into for administration, then installed VNC on each of the family machines.
Now, when I need to fix a problem, I SSH in, tunnel a VNC connection to the appropriate machine and take over.
The bonuses? A) Secure remote administration, and, B) A strong linux firewall/IDS keeps the script kiddies out. (Not to mention it's a great use for an old P75 that would otherwise be rotting in some landfill somewhere.)
I log in for a couple minutes every week or so to keep up with security patches. (Yes, I could cron it, but I prefer to take a hands-on approach to package updates)
I'm pleased to report that the machine has been running more-or-less continuously for nearly 2 years now, and I haven't had any problems with it. =)
That being said, I've been considering trying Knoppix on the machine, so I don't have to worry about the hard drive dying. (Which will happen eventually) But then I'd have to mail them CDs periodically with security updates. Might be more trouble than it's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Tricksy hobbitses...
Kind of. You can generally use BSD code in a GPL application, but the reverse is not true.
In short, the GPL forces you to release derived works under the GPL, but BSD has no such restriction. Thus, if you try to use GPL code in a BSD application, you have to license it under the GPL, which kind of defeats the purpose of choosing the BSD license in the first place. The Apache project runs into this all the time.
Amen, Brother! :)
;)
Personally, I run Debian Testing (Sarge) on my desktop, and Debian Stable (Woody) on my firewall. One of the nice things about Stable is that in general, the only updates are security-related. That means you can set apt-get update; apt-get upgrade in a daily cron, and not worry too much about pooching your system. Doing so under the Unstable branch (and to a lesser degree, Testing) would make life...uhm...interesting.
At work, our admin is a big Gentoo devotee. The package system is nice in it's own way. I was fond of the FreeBSD ports system back in the day, but Gentoo's ports seem to have a lot of breakage (broken packages, missing files, bad MD5 sums, etc) compared to the Debian apt sources. I suspect this is mostly due to the monumental volunteer effort into Debian's package maintenance.
On the other hand, I find Gentoo's support for Java packages/tools is significantly better than Debian's...Probably more due to licensing issues than technical, but it would be nice to have a Debian equivalent to "java-config --set-user-vm"
YMMV...
Indeed. Personally, I think that at the minimum, they should have been blanking the disks locally, then shipping them on to the blankers to be blanked again. Letting machines out the front door with that kind of sensitive information on them is just begging for this kind of trouble...If there's one thing I've learned in all my years as a megalomaniac bent on world domination, it's this: Always do your own dirty work. If it's important enough that you don't want it to become public knowledge, it's important enough for you to handle it yourself.
Ultimately, the only secure way to deal with that data is to shred the drives.
Another piece of food for thought. This is the first time this has happened that anyone's heard of. Yes, it's great that they got the data before it fell into "the wrong hands"...but, if it had fallen into "the wrong hands" in the first place, we would never have heard boo about it. "The wrong hands" would have used it for their own nefarious wrong handed purposes...We'd all still be blissfully unaware, until one day we came home to find the Fed waiting for us, asking questions about our recent sizeable donations to the GLEF (George Lucas Extermination Front)
I believe that line would be from Star Wars, "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
;)
Personally, I'm fond of a line from Babylon 5..."The geometries that circumscribe your waking life draw narrower until nothing fits inside them anymore."
Same idea, just more $2 words.
Actually, as of last year, it is. Bell, Telus and StarChoice successfully petitioned the CRTC to disallow "grey market" receivers because it was competing with their services. And so, in one fell swoop, all those hacked access cards and receivers suddenly became illegal.
Great, isn't it?
Ugh. That reminds me of this awful commercial that just started playing up (Ontario, Canada) here on Rogers Cable...
It starts out with this 10 year old-ish boy walking out of a convenience store with a candy bar, and the shop owner runs out and accuses him of shoplifting it.
The scene then jumps to a cops dropping the kid off at his parents house.
The scene jumps again to inside the house, the kid is sitting on the couch with his father next to him. The father asks, "Did your friends put you up to it?" The kid shakes his head. "Then where did you learn to steal?" The kid looks up at his father with big deer in front of headlights eyes and says, "But Dad, you steal satellite signals!"
It then cuts to a white screen with the words "theft is theft" written on it in large black courier font with the sound of sirens and police radio in the background.
The funny thing is that the commercial makes me want to "steal satellite signals" just so I know my money wouldn't be going to fund such dreck.
So, apparently the progression is: P2P leads to Warez. Warez leads to Satellite Hacking. Satellite Hacking leads to Shoplifting, and so on and so on.
So remember, kids! Every time you download a song off the Internet, you kill a baby panda!
I've not done this myself, since I've only got a couple Debian boxen and a zippy connection to the 'Net, but I believe it's possible to set one of your boxes up as an apt source and cache the packages locally on your subnet. So, you download them once, then have them available to all your machines.
It was a post that came up a while back...I guess about six months ago now, give or take. The poster had apparently done a study on moderator behaviour (or maybe just made the whole thing up, I don't know) which exposed some interesting...uhm...features/weaknesses of the moderation system.
/.'s moderation system. Anyway, that's what I remember...I'm sure there are others who can fill in more details...Maybe link to a copy of the forbidden post...
Anyway, while the comment was interesting to read, it WAS completely offtopic to the story it was posted to. This caused a pretty massive breakdown of the moderation system. Many moderators modded the thread up as insightful/informative/etc, while other moderators modded it back down as Offtopic.
Then the admins stepped in and screwed things up royally. First, they started using their unlimited modpoints to knock it down. Then, when it got too big to moderate by hand, they repeatedly "bitchslapped" the thread, which instantly caused all the comments to drop to -1, and blacklisted any moderators who tried to raise it back up.
It was a bad time for
I own a full ATI TV Wonder (not the VE), and have owned a Hauppauge in the past. In my experience, ATI's tuner is much stronger than the one on the Hauppauge WinTV card I had. It can pull in channels that the WinTV wouldn't even touch, and generally produces a much clearer signal. As long as you're running it under Linux, you should be A-OK.
Under Windows, these cards are ATI's bastard stepchild. ATI's driver/application support has been pretty slim, and not very good. Half-assed at best. I guess they'd rather you bought a shiny new All-In-Wonder instead...
I know what you mean about feeling like a schmuck every time you buy music. I feel like I need a shower every time I see one of their damned "You need music and music needs you" commercials.
/. from work. :)
I bought a new CD last week, and even though it wasn't by an RIAA-owned artist (Canadian band, The Arrogant Worms), I still felt a tinge of guilt over giving my money to "the music industry".
The funny thing is that I don't even use P2P anymore. (Not out of any high moral standard...just another version of that age old story: Boy meets girl. Boy moves in with girl and her daughter. Boy no longer has time to sit around and download music, but still manages to read
Oooh! Oooh! Oooh! Integer values for x, y, z that satisfy x^27 + y^27 = z^27? Well I can think of several right off the top of my head...
x=1
y=-1
z=0
or
x=0
y=1
z=1
Or did you want a non-trivial answer for that?
[FLAME ON]
Now, in the words of Dennis Miller, "I don't mean to get off on a rant", but speaking as a Math/Comp Sci. geek, I hate it when people attempt to sound intelligent by frobbing their mighty mathematical muscles. Most people wouldn't know (or care) what the integral of e^(-x^2) is, nor for that matter what you define as "fundamental mathematic expressions" are either.
That's basically like asking someone for a grenden frenesdhire of lignitious flibidnituriousness. Without the context or the intellectual framework to understand the question, it's meaningless. Do YOU have a grenden frenesdhire of lignitious flibidnituriousness? I thought not.
As for your example with Andromeda, a pair of rubber bands and a liquid lunch...well, even you state that there is a vanishingly small chance of being solvable. Vanishingly small, but non-zero. Just because we currently do not know how to do it now doesn't mean we never will.
Remember, at one point in time, many leading scientists believed it was impossible for man to fly, even AFTER Kitty Hawk. The Wright brothers were considered crackpots in their time. Next, it was the sound barrier. "Man will never break the sound barrier", they said. It's been broken. The history of scientific progress is littered with so-called experts saying "It can't be done." and the men who proved it could.
[FLAME OFF]
That being said, there ARE classes of problems which are considered unsolvable. Turing's Halting Problem (Note the use of a link providing information for those interested in learning more and/or are not gifted with near-omniscient intellect) is one of them. Alan Turing proved that there is no algorithm which can solve it for any possible inputs. It's a mindbendingly elegant proof...you can see a sketch of it on the other side of the link if you're interested.
Anyway, sorry for the flame. Your post caught me as being a little too intellectually smug and self-flagellating. Had to be done.
It was until recently. About a year ago, the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC) ruled that so-called grey-market satellite recievers were no longer legal. The argument made was that it was competing with Canadian satellite providers, which is true...if only because, in my opinion, our Canadian satellite providers suck.
What I believe they're trying to say is that every time you use DeCSS, the Devil breaks into Baby Jesus's home and steals his lollypop!
;)
I hope you're happy! You made Baby Jesus cry!
Also, if you want your variables to be EXTRA private in Perl, there are tricks you can use, such as closures to make it non-trivial (but not impossible) to access those variables.
Damian Conway's book, Object Oriented Perl is a really good, of occasionally scary look at the deeper mysteries of doing OOP with Perl.
I'm just waiting for KDE Pi (3.1.4.....)
Except for the council people, and many of the ship captains, that is.
Besides, the 'young' demographic of the Zionites is probably best explained by the fact that:
- They only liberate young minds (See the first movie), and
- There was a throwaway line by Morpheus in this one that since Neo, they've liberated more minds in 6 months than in the previous 6 years. (Or something like that) also,
- In any war, it's people of fighting age who have the highest attrition rate. So, you would naturally see fewer middle aged or older Zionites than normal.
That, at least, made sense to me.I wouldn't say it's laughable. Consider the alternative for a momment. Which is better? Having a copyright which expires in 14-28 years, or one which expires in life + 70+ years? (Say, approx. 100 years on average)
The fact of the matter is that for a company like O'Reilly, it probably doesn't make sense from a business perspective to hold onto the copyrights for that long. As you've so brilliantly pointed out, there is little call nowadays for Perl 3 books. That, my friend, is exactly the point!
In the tech industry, the significant majority of books published have a shelf life of a few years at most. After that, they're practically worthless. Once taken out of print, the chance of them ever being republished is almost nil.
Eventually, it gets to the point where it's no longer worth it to even defend those copyrights because the money you'd spend searching for violations and defending your copyright in court costs far more than you could expect to earn over the remainder of the term. (And I would be very surprised if Tim O'Reilly didn't have a report cross his desk which showed this to him in concrete numbers)
Now, this doesn't hold for all publishers. Outside the tech sector, some books pay off in the long run. The Lord of the Rings saga is a perfect example. In those cases, from a business perspective, it's worthwhile for a publisher to hold on to his copyrights as long as possible because you never know which book in your catalogue is going to be "The Next Big Thing", and pay off big time.
For Tim O'Reilly, the chance of these books paying off for his company after 28 years is pretty close to 0. Tim O'Reilly may have strong principles, but he's a businessman first and foremost. It's a bold move that costs him and his company almost nothing.
The way I see it is that this is a brilliant move for O'Reilly. They gain practically no value from holding their copyrights to the maximum term allowed by law. By releasing their works under a shorter term, and remaining profitable, they can serve as very powerful case study for those who argue against the endless parade of copyright term extensions.
According to Berman & co, this plot picks up where First Contact left off. (Ie, Borg fight their way to Earth, travel back in time to thwart first Warp flight, Enterprise blows up borg sphere, and everyone lives happily ever after.)
Taken from the site linked to in the article:
So, these borg found buried in the ice are the remnants of that borg sphere. (Which makes a perverse sort of sense...how else would Borg end up flash frozen on Earth?)
Have I mentioned yet how much I hate time travel plots?
Indeed. My problem with bringing the borg to Enterprise (which I rarely watch anyway) is that they are simply too powerful an enemy to be dealt with in a reasonable manner.
I mean, these are the same borg that fought their way to Earth in the 24th century, against 24th century weapons and defenses, then traveled back in time to the 22nd century. They kicked righteous Federation ass. Now they're being unleashed on 22nd century Enterprise? What the hell are the writers thinking?
This is the same Enterprise that has 'polarized hull plating', pulse cannons and a top speed of what? Warp 5? It's been established that they're not even a match for the Vulcans! And they're pairing them up against the Borg who can rip through 24th century shields in a couple of minutes, are nearly immune to phasers and photon torpedoes and can propel their ships at speeds well above warp 10 using transwarp?
If you want an idea of how badly this will go for the good guys, go watch the first ST:TNG borg episode again, and multiply the ass whooping that Picard and crew took by 100. It's like putting Pee Wee Herman in the ring against Mike Tyson on PCP. It's pretty much guaranteed to be short, brutal and very messy.
The only way they'll be able to hit the proverbial 'reset' button in an hour is by introducing some horrible plot device, because there is no plausible way for the crew to handle something like this on their own. Basically, the entire episode is going to go like this: (given an episode length of 47 minutes without commercials)
1) Enterprise is called to investigate (20 minutes)
2) The Borg kick Enterprise's ass. (20 minutes)
3) A miracle happens. (5 minutes)
4) Everyone lives happily ever after. (2 minutes)
Ugh. I think I'll just save my brain the agony, thank you very much. This is just another example of one of the three classic horrible sci-fi plots. There is no faster way to ruin a good story than by introducing time travel, clones or alternate dimensions. (and heaven help you if you manage to mire your audience in all three!) Yes, it is possible to do them right, but it's dreadfully easy to do them wrong...so very wrong.
Not to mention that 3 years later, you may not be able to FIND a cartridge for your printer anymore. If they've EOL'd the printer and don't make that particular cartidge anymore, you're SOL. (HP is pretty good about re-using cartridge designs, but there are others...Epson, I'm looking at YOU!) There is a company in Toronto (sorry, I don't recall the name) whose whole purpose in life is stocking obsolete toner/ink catridges and selling them to ppl/businesses who don't want to upgrade simply because their printer is considered obsolete. Imagine what this will do to them?
:)
;)
On the subject of printers, I'd never buy another Epson. Picked up a Stylus C42UX for my girlfriend and I to do assignments in university. At $70 (Canadian) for the printer, it was an awesome deal for us as students. (read: poor) Unfortunately, the cartridges cost $25-30 for the black and about $40 for the colour. The black cartridge prints about 100-150 sheets of text. The kicker is that if the printer monitors the ink levels, and if it's out of any given colour (C, M, Y or K) it refuses to print. So, if I'm out of yellow ink and I want to print a black and white document, I'm SOL until I go out and pick up a new colour cartridge for almost 60% of the purchase price of the printer.
As the final nail in the coffin, just to make sure you don't go and do something sneaky like buy a new printer every time you're out of ink, they put half-filled "preview" ink cartridges in their new printers, so after 50 pages or so, you're sunk again. Every time I think about it too much I get the near uncontrollable urge to take the damned thing out back, and go Office Space on it with a baseball bat, then mail the pieces back to Epson. I doubt it would do any good, but it would make me feel better about the whole deal.
It's sad too, because back in the day, Epson and HP both used to be reputable printer dealers who cared about their products and their customers. (But that's another rant that I'll save that rant for a journal entry sometime...one post, one rant maximum.
[sings]
Valjean at last
we see each other plain
Monsieur le maire
you'll wear a different chain.
[/sings]
Indeed. I know exactly what you mean about doing installs/upgrades for family and friends. I'm going home for easter and so far I'm scheduled to rebuild 3 windows PCs for my family. On the bright side, they did pay for my flight out, so I won't complain too much. :)
;)
Of all the machines in the house, the only one that's running reliably is the Debian firewall/router I set up for them almost 2 years ago now, which I administer remotely via SSH. Usually that means apt-get update once a week or so to keep up on security updates...barring some catastrophic hardware failure, the system pretty much runs itself at this point.
Incidentally, I'm not saying it's stable because it's Linux; it's stable because nobody touches it! Users...always the weakest link.
Frankly, I'm about halfway though this book and at times, it's all I can do to keep from tossing it in the trash bin in disgust.
The author seems to be incapable just getting to the subject and explaining himself in a clear and consise manner. Instead, he embarks on these long, florid poetry-filled diatribes about the imagination, and a yellow tulip.
In the few places where he's actually able to keep himself on topic for more than a page, the historical description of the search for imaginary numbers is actually an interesting story in and of itself.
Why he feels the need to expound on it with inapropriate references to poetry and half-baked philosophies on the nature of imagination is beyond me. I'm not against the poetry per se, it's just that there are many occasions where I'll read a passage, hit the poetry, sit back and think, "What the hell does that have to do with the subject?" Even when there is a conceptual link, most of the time, it's very weak. (Of the I'm talking about imagination, and the word imagine is in the poem level)
Frankly, it's been a very dissapointing read. If you're looking for an interesting math book (some people would consider that an oxymoron), I'd recommend David Berlinski's "A Tour of the Calculus" or either of Simon Singh's excellent books ("Fermat's Enigma" and "The Code Book").
I was fortunate enough to be able to set up my parent's net connection before I moved across the country. I set them up with a Woody box which I could SSH into for administration, then installed VNC on each of the family machines.
Now, when I need to fix a problem, I SSH in, tunnel a VNC connection to the appropriate machine and take over.
The bonuses? A) Secure remote administration, and, B) A strong linux firewall/IDS keeps the script kiddies out. (Not to mention it's a great use for an old P75 that would otherwise be rotting in some landfill somewhere.)
I log in for a couple minutes every week or so to keep up with security patches. (Yes, I could cron it, but I prefer to take a hands-on approach to package updates)
I'm pleased to report that the machine has been running more-or-less continuously for nearly 2 years now, and I haven't had any problems with it. =)
That being said, I've been considering trying Knoppix on the machine, so I don't have to worry about the hard drive dying. (Which will happen eventually) But then I'd have to mail them CDs periodically with security updates. Might be more trouble than it's worth.