"Not having seen the book, I think I can still say he would do a much better job countering this misunderstanding by picking a more appropriate title."
I'll say. At first glance I thought it was about porn.
The biggest problem with this whole "it's just a theory" argument is that the word "theory" is ambiguous. It's just like "free speech" vs. "free beer".
In science "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition. A theory is a logical explanation or a testable model for a given natural phenomenon.
In common language, however, theory refers to conjecture or opinion. Thus the confusion.
String theory is the former, but it is incomplete. It has yet to be adopted by the scientific community as a proven theory because there are no accepted methods of testing it. In other words, it is a work in progress. To nitpick about calling string theory a "theory" is like nitpicking about a computer program that isn't finished being coded yet being called a "computer program". No matter which side of the fence you decide to sit on you'll be right. It's not technically a program yet because it's incomplete. But to say that it's not a program raises the question of what to call it.
"I'll admit up front: I have things to hide. Dirty little secrets that are none of your business, and that the government doesn't need to know. Things that are embarrassing, things that could be used to damage my reputation, nothing particularly dangerous, but stuff that should be between me, myself, and I, and no one else."
"Another thing: does Mozilla spinning off Thunderbird mean that it will get even a smaller share of their revenue for R&D? Tbird has not exactly been growing and improving by leaps and bound, and the Mozilla foundation seems to have little interest in it. Spinning it off into a separate organization sounds suspiciously like they're just plain cutting it loose. And if the new TBird org can't find it's own funding, the mail client's future is anything but bright."
As a Thunderbird user I consider that to be a good thing. If the Mozilla foundation isn't interested in it's development then I would rather see it fall into the hands of people who are.
And if no one is (which I think unlikely) then eventually I will just have to stop using Thunderbird and find something that is under active development.
"DoubleTwist also recognizes and imports all iTunes playlists and will read instantly which ones are protected by digital rights management technology. The software automatically plays the song files in the background (sans volume) and re-records them as MP3 files so they can be transferred to any device. Note: DoubleTwist only does this for songs you own or are authorized to play in iTunes."
So it will create DRM-free files but only for files that you are "authorized" to play. So it's not like someone sends you a DRM'ed file and it will happily remove the DRM and let you play it. Of course the whole point is that people can use this to share any kind of media with pretty much anyone.
"The first is a cultural difference, the third is out of your control,"
You're right. As an example, there was absolutely nothing that the American colonialists could do about the British monarch raising their taxes to fund a war that they had nothing to do with. They were right to just sit back and pay up. It was out of their control.
"So you are pro-riaa ? Because mostly the contra-riaa articles on slashdot are attempts to prevent them from locating thieves* and using legal recourse against them...
* if the definition of theft is taking something without permission of the legal owner, and if you don't believe in victimless crimes, it certainly is"
Copyright infringement is not theft. In order to commit theft you must deprive someone of something that they had possession of. The end result is that they no longer have possession of said item. When someone downloads a song they are not depriving the RIAA of anything they had possession of. The RIAA did not lose money as a result of their infringement (and while IANAL and my understanding may be fuzzy, I am not sure that downloading copyrighted material is actually a copyright violation anyway. As copyright is a government granted monopoly on the distribution of a creative work in order to prevent someone other than the author from distributing and profiting from his material against his will).
But the fact that copyright infringement is not theft doesn't make it "right" or "wrong". Some people feel that breaking any law, regardless of how absurd said law may be, is amoral.
And none of that addresses the issue of whether or not there is a victim with clearly identifiable damages.
Anyway, in order to answer your question I need to decide if I support copyright law. I am really unsure. There are two strong arguments on both sides of the coin. On the one hand copyright is a way of granting property rights to something that is intangible. What is a collection of words ? A song ? A collection of pictures with associated audio ? Are these "property" and how can you "own" such a thing ? Then again when you get *really* philosophical you can ask how anyone can "morally" "own" anything since we are residents of this earth, and the materials that created our tangible product were taken from the earth and someone just lay claim to them without asking any higher moral authority (whatever that may be... "God", "mother earth", "satan", "your mom".. whatever) if they can take that and call it their "property".
I tend to lean on the side against copyright law but only because I believe in a set of fundamental human rights that need to be enforced and every other kind of law is an unnecessary restriction of freedom. If someone takes a creative work and calls it his own creation, then distributes it, he is deceiving people. If someone pays $10 for a book thinking it was written by Stephen King but it was actually written by Bob Dillan he is entitled to his $10 back. But I'm not so sure that if I were to take a Stephen King book and print it on my own paper with my own ink and my own software and time and I distribute it with full credit to Stephen King as the author that I've actually done something "wrong" or that I've deprived Stephen King of anything. After all, he is still free to distribute his own copies and I have not gone into his house and robbed him of money that he already had. I'm just competing with him as a distributor and how do you "own" the words once they've come out of your head and have been distributed to the greater population ?
Sorry for the politician-like rant. In the end I don't think I even answered your question. I suppose you can reduce everything I typed to "I don't know".
In my biased Libertarian views I believe that "guns don't kill people". I think it's a major breach of freedom to outlaw any kind of device. However, I do believe in people being held accountable for their actions. If you harm someone then they should have legal recourse under any circumstance.
In other words I don't believe in victim-less crimes. Owning a gun should not be illegal. But injuring someone remains. Same applies to these devices.
Also, think for a moment. This is a device that generates a 25Khz frequency. Ban it and does all audio production equipment capable of reproducing those frequencies become illegal ?
But to label not requiring explicit memory allocation as stupid is... stupid.
You misinterpreted my use of the word "stupid". I said it's akin to C's strcpy in that it doesn't know any better. That's not a bad thing. It's not "retarded" that the language has a function like that. But the function itself is dumb in that it doesn't know any better and the programmer needs to beware.
Oh my god... php lets you fill an array with 33,554,432 elements? How dangerous and stupid! Everyone, run for your lives!
I specifically chose that example because it's something that a lot of web developers might do. 33,554,432 4-byte integers is 128MB of data. On a production web server you could potentially cause trouble with something as innocent as that.
I'm not sure if you're trolling or you really didn't understand what I was trying to say. The whole point of my post was to say that there are a lot of "web developers" who really don't know the first thing about memory management. I never said that PHP needs to be fixed, I said that those developers need a better understanding of what they're doing. PHP gets treated like a "toy language for dummies" a lot of the time but you need to know just as much about memory management to code in PHP as you do in C. A lot of "web developers" don't seem to get that. Especially those who's background is HTML/Javascript.
Not all of it makes you handle your own memory -- but you absolutely should have that experience of having to do that, so that you understand what's going on behind the scenes (why not to slurp the whole file, etc).
Agreed. Even PHP developers should know about memory management. I use PHP all the time, I love it. But it can be just as dangerous as any other language. Functions like file_get_contents() are extremely convenient but also extremely stupid. It's kind of similar to C's strcpy() (only it won't cause a buffer overflow). If your php.ini file has sane a memory_limit setting then you're not going to crash the server. But an inexperienced programmer might not know any better and increase the limit to the available memory on the server and cause it to swap with something as simple as:
Re:MySQL forgot the important part of the equation
on
Can Sun Make MySQL Pay?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is a common misconception that a lot of people seem to have. When they equate support with phoning up a tech guy to get help with their laptop not booting etc.
Companies get support contracts for various purposes. In some cases you might need to talk to a development team about adding a feature. Good luck if you're not paying for that kind of level of support. You might also need to have the product deployed across 500 servers and you need to brainstorm with the company's technicians about the best way to do that effectively. Oh and if something does break, if a bug is found etc. it is always nice for your own IT department to be able to get a support rep, developer or technician on the phone at 2:30am on a Sunday morning when your critical sites are down and costing you money by the second etc.
Re:Maybe it is not about Sun making money
on
Can Sun Make MySQL Pay?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
First of all, who is to say that there would be any anti-trust issues with Oracle purchasing MySQLAB ? It's not like the AOL/Time-Warner merger where you had two massive corporations that both had a huge stake in media markets. Oracle has a lot of competition from IBM, Microsoft etc. And MySQLAB is hardly a big company. It would be like Microsoft purchasing any other small potato. Yes the community version of MySQL is used quite a bit but do you really think the US government would give a shit about Oracle (a fairly large company but not any kind of monopoly by any standards) purchasing a relatively small potato like MySQLAB ?
And secondly, while a company could buy MySQL and kill off the proprietary offerings, that wouldn't help them much in the market place because you can't kill off the community version. Too many people depend on the community version of MySQL. It's not always safe to assume that the community will pick up and revive a "dead" project, but in the case of MySQL it pretty much is. It would be like any other fork of very popular software such as XFree86 -> Xorg and GCC -> EGCS. Not the exact same circumstances in those cases but similar and the point is that when enough people use and depend on the software and find that the controlling factor in that software is headed in a direction that's not in the best interest of the community there will almost certainly be developers who will fork and keep it going because they, like, need it and stuff.
(DRM/copy protection, criminalizing mod-chips, less regulation, certain taxes)
This is slightly off-topic but it might interest the/. crowd.
I recently bought a vintage / classic / retro 1981 arcade machine. Upon opening up the back I discovered an extremely thick manual book with instructions for doing everything you could imagine to the machine. It has full technical schematics for the PCBs and Monitor. Talks about replacing and modding components etc.
I was born in 1982 and in "my time" the back panel would have a huge warning about how just opening the panel would void the warranty etc. with a number to call if you need to pay a technician $500 / hour with a 3 hour minimum to come service it for you.
I've just gotten a huge glimpse of what "open hardware" is and why it's important. I was shocked and extremely delighted to find such an impressive manual. It's never happened to me before.
My wife and I are building a MAME cabinet and the project prompted us to reminisce about our youthful Arcade days. The one thing we both did was hang around outside the arcade and ask random pedestrians for quarters so that we could "phone our parents for a ride".
I agree with you, but never think that there aren't assholes out there who get kicks off of sticking it to random strangers. Money can greatly escalate a problem and it's scope, but sometimes people are just jerks and gladly act as such for free.
If the world was asshole-free then people would never get their cars keyed, tires slashed or houses egged unprovoked.
While I agree that auto-executing anything is very bad practice, most average users would go ahead and run the program anyway without giving any consideration to it's safety (or just assuming that it's safe because it wouldn't make sense for the manufacturer to harm their costumer's computers... never thinking about a man-in-the-middle type of scenario).
This allows emergency vehicles to by-pass traffic lights by turning them green. It uses an IR transponder on vehicles, and an IR receiver on lights. When a certain frequency (pulse) is sent out from the vehicle and picked up by the receiver, the light turns green.
Here's something a little funny about those systems.
My father-in-law is an ex-firefighter (just retired at the end of '07) who drove the truck for a couple of years before being promoted to Captain. He absolutely despises the system due to it's unreliability and shortly after it was introduced in our city he stopped even trying to use it all together.
I didn't even know that they existed until a discussion popped up at the dinner table one night and I couldn't help but wonder what kind of potential for abuse there is. Even more ironic that the emergency services themselves don't even use them (well, I can only speak for my father-in-law but from the sounds of it they're hated - at least the implementation in my city).
The above is by far the best piece of advice I've read so far in the comments.
The last company I worked at hired a TON of co-ops from the local University (mostly to save money and also because they had a lot of "easy grunt work" type of programming that was perfect for entry level). Many of these kids were over qualified for the positions and quickly moved up in the company. They were then offered full time jobs with much higher pay and full benefits upon graduating.
Not to mention, what the parent said: NOTHING beats experience. You can spend your whole life in University and, without any experience, it won't mean anything to an employer next to another guy's resume who has less education but more experience. Education shows that you've learned how to do something. Experience shows that you've actually done it.
So yeah this is almost a no-brainer. If you want to develop your skill set to increase your value in the work place then go get some experience in said work place.
Another slightly off topic but similar anecdote. I've been in the computer industry for over 10 years and I currently run my own business. But I've been getting kind of tired of sitting at a computer all day so I've been thinking about going into the culinary world and becoming a chef. I contacted the local college to ask them what the best way to get into their culinary program would be and they told me to go get a job in a kitchen right now and then after working for a while enter the program as a registered apprentice. It just goes to show that no matter what you do experience is king.
Slashdot Mirror
Allow me to introduce you to the Paragraph and the Full Stop.
That is all. Carry on.
"Not having seen the book, I think I can still say he would do a much better job countering this misunderstanding by picking a more appropriate title."
I'll say. At first glance I thought it was about porn.
String theory is incomplete.
The biggest problem with this whole "it's just a theory" argument is that the word "theory" is ambiguous. It's just like "free speech" vs. "free beer".
In science "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition. A theory is a logical explanation or a testable model for a given natural phenomenon.
In common language, however, theory refers to conjecture or opinion. Thus the confusion.
String theory is the former, but it is incomplete. It has yet to be adopted by the scientific community as a proven theory because there are no accepted methods of testing it. In other words, it is a work in progress. To nitpick about calling string theory a "theory" is like nitpicking about a computer program that isn't finished being coded yet being called a "computer program". No matter which side of the fence you decide to sit on you'll be right. It's not technically a program yet because it's incomplete. But to say that it's not a program raises the question of what to call it.
Vibrating sex toys that power themselves ?
"I'll admit up front: I have things to hide. Dirty little secrets that are none of your business, and that the government doesn't need to know. Things that are embarrassing, things that could be used to damage my reputation, nothing particularly dangerous, but stuff that should be between me, myself, and I, and no one else."
Like what ?
"Another thing: does Mozilla spinning off Thunderbird mean that it will get even a smaller share of their revenue for R&D? Tbird has not exactly been growing and improving by leaps and bound, and the Mozilla foundation seems to have little interest in it. Spinning it off into a separate organization sounds suspiciously like they're just plain cutting it loose. And if the new TBird org can't find it's own funding, the mail client's future is anything but bright."
As a Thunderbird user I consider that to be a good thing. If the Mozilla foundation isn't interested in it's development then I would rather see it fall into the hands of people who are.
And if no one is (which I think unlikely) then eventually I will just have to stop using Thunderbird and find something that is under active development.
From TFA:
"DoubleTwist also recognizes and imports all iTunes playlists and will read instantly which ones are protected by digital rights management technology. The software automatically plays the song files in the background (sans volume) and re-records them as MP3 files so they can be transferred to any device. Note: DoubleTwist only does this for songs you own or are authorized to play in iTunes."
So it will create DRM-free files but only for files that you are "authorized" to play. So it's not like someone sends you a DRM'ed file and it will happily remove the DRM and let you play it. Of course the whole point is that people can use this to share any kind of media with pretty much anyone.
I mean what's the point of being a colonist if your in-laws can still phone you ?
Coke bottle or Pepsi ?
It will make all the difference in the world.
I completely disagree. Dream interpretation has many uses for people other than the one having the dream.
For example, they can be an excellent reason to make fun of your friends.
I have wet dreams about your wife. Does that count ?
Just trying to help get you out of trouble.
You're right. As an example, there was absolutely nothing that the American colonialists could do about the British monarch raising their taxes to fund a war that they had nothing to do with. They were right to just sit back and pay up. It was out of their control.
</sarcasm>
"So you are pro-riaa ? Because mostly the contra-riaa articles on slashdot are attempts to prevent them from locating thieves* and using legal recourse against them ...
... "God", "mother earth", "satan", "your mom" .. whatever) if they can take that and call it their "property".
* if the definition of theft is taking something without permission of the legal owner, and if you don't believe in victimless crimes, it certainly is"
Copyright infringement is not theft. In order to commit theft you must deprive someone of something that they had possession of. The end result is that they no longer have possession of said item. When someone downloads a song they are not depriving the RIAA of anything they had possession of. The RIAA did not lose money as a result of their infringement (and while IANAL and my understanding may be fuzzy, I am not sure that downloading copyrighted material is actually a copyright violation anyway. As copyright is a government granted monopoly on the distribution of a creative work in order to prevent someone other than the author from distributing and profiting from his material against his will).
But the fact that copyright infringement is not theft doesn't make it "right" or "wrong". Some people feel that breaking any law, regardless of how absurd said law may be, is amoral.
And none of that addresses the issue of whether or not there is a victim with clearly identifiable damages.
Anyway, in order to answer your question I need to decide if I support copyright law. I am really unsure. There are two strong arguments on both sides of the coin. On the one hand copyright is a way of granting property rights to something that is intangible. What is a collection of words ? A song ? A collection of pictures with associated audio ? Are these "property" and how can you "own" such a thing ? Then again when you get *really* philosophical you can ask how anyone can "morally" "own" anything since we are residents of this earth, and the materials that created our tangible product were taken from the earth and someone just lay claim to them without asking any higher moral authority (whatever that may be
I tend to lean on the side against copyright law but only because I believe in a set of fundamental human rights that need to be enforced and every other kind of law is an unnecessary restriction of freedom. If someone takes a creative work and calls it his own creation, then distributes it, he is deceiving people. If someone pays $10 for a book thinking it was written by Stephen King but it was actually written by Bob Dillan he is entitled to his $10 back. But I'm not so sure that if I were to take a Stephen King book and print it on my own paper with my own ink and my own software and time and I distribute it with full credit to Stephen King as the author that I've actually done something "wrong" or that I've deprived Stephen King of anything. After all, he is still free to distribute his own copies and I have not gone into his house and robbed him of money that he already had. I'm just competing with him as a distributor and how do you "own" the words once they've come out of your head and have been distributed to the greater population ?
Sorry for the politician-like rant. In the end I don't think I even answered your question. I suppose you can reduce everything I typed to "I don't know".
In my biased Libertarian views I believe that "guns don't kill people". I think it's a major breach of freedom to outlaw any kind of device. However, I do believe in people being held accountable for their actions. If you harm someone then they should have legal recourse under any circumstance.
In other words I don't believe in victim-less crimes. Owning a gun should not be illegal. But injuring someone remains. Same applies to these devices.
Also, think for a moment. This is a device that generates a 25Khz frequency. Ban it and does all audio production equipment capable of reproducing those frequencies become illegal ?
But to label not requiring explicit memory allocation as stupid is... stupid.
You misinterpreted my use of the word "stupid". I said it's akin to C's strcpy in that it doesn't know any better. That's not a bad thing. It's not "retarded" that the language has a function like that. But the function itself is dumb in that it doesn't know any better and the programmer needs to beware.
Oh my god... php lets you fill an array with 33,554,432 elements? How dangerous and stupid! Everyone, run for your lives!
I specifically chose that example because it's something that a lot of web developers might do. 33,554,432 4-byte integers is 128MB of data. On a production web server you could potentially cause trouble with something as innocent as that.
I'm not sure if you're trolling or you really didn't understand what I was trying to say. The whole point of my post was to say that there are a lot of "web developers" who really don't know the first thing about memory management. I never said that PHP needs to be fixed, I said that those developers need a better understanding of what they're doing. PHP gets treated like a "toy language for dummies" a lot of the time but you need to know just as much about memory management to code in PHP as you do in C. A lot of "web developers" don't seem to get that. Especially those who's background is HTML/Javascript.
Not all of it makes you handle your own memory -- but you absolutely should have that experience of having to do that, so that you understand what's going on behind the scenes (why not to slurp the whole file, etc).
Agreed. Even PHP developers should know about memory management. I use PHP all the time, I love it. But it can be just as dangerous as any other language. Functions like file_get_contents() are extremely convenient but also extremely stupid. It's kind of similar to C's strcpy() (only it won't cause a buffer overflow). If your php.ini file has sane a memory_limit setting then you're not going to crash the server. But an inexperienced programmer might not know any better and increase the limit to the available memory on the server and cause it to swap with something as simple as:
$foo = file_get_contents(/path/to/sufficiently/large/file);
or
$foo = array();
for($i = 0; $i 33554432; $i++) {
$foo[$i] = $i;
}
etc.
This is a common misconception that a lot of people seem to have. When they equate support with phoning up a tech guy to get help with their laptop not booting etc.
Companies get support contracts for various purposes. In some cases you might need to talk to a development team about adding a feature. Good luck if you're not paying for that kind of level of support. You might also need to have the product deployed across 500 servers and you need to brainstorm with the company's technicians about the best way to do that effectively. Oh and if something does break, if a bug is found etc. it is always nice for your own IT department to be able to get a support rep, developer or technician on the phone at 2:30am on a Sunday morning when your critical sites are down and costing you money by the second etc.
First of all, who is to say that there would be any anti-trust issues with Oracle purchasing MySQLAB ? It's not like the AOL/Time-Warner merger where you had two massive corporations that both had a huge stake in media markets. Oracle has a lot of competition from IBM, Microsoft etc. And MySQLAB is hardly a big company. It would be like Microsoft purchasing any other small potato. Yes the community version of MySQL is used quite a bit but do you really think the US government would give a shit about Oracle (a fairly large company but not any kind of monopoly by any standards) purchasing a relatively small potato like MySQLAB ?
And secondly, while a company could buy MySQL and kill off the proprietary offerings, that wouldn't help them much in the market place because you can't kill off the community version. Too many people depend on the community version of MySQL. It's not always safe to assume that the community will pick up and revive a "dead" project, but in the case of MySQL it pretty much is. It would be like any other fork of very popular software such as XFree86 -> Xorg and GCC -> EGCS. Not the exact same circumstances in those cases but similar and the point is that when enough people use and depend on the software and find that the controlling factor in that software is headed in a direction that's not in the best interest of the community there will almost certainly be developers who will fork and keep it going because they, like, need it and stuff.
(DRM/copy protection, criminalizing mod-chips, less regulation, certain taxes)
/. crowd.
This is slightly off-topic but it might interest the
I recently bought a vintage / classic / retro 1981 arcade machine. Upon opening up the back I discovered an extremely thick manual book with instructions for doing everything you could imagine to the machine. It has full technical schematics for the PCBs and Monitor. Talks about replacing and modding components etc.
I was born in 1982 and in "my time" the back panel would have a huge warning about how just opening the panel would void the warranty etc. with a number to call if you need to pay a technician $500 / hour with a 3 hour minimum to come service it for you.
I've just gotten a huge glimpse of what "open hardware" is and why it's important. I was shocked and extremely delighted to find such an impressive manual. It's never happened to me before.
Really. Anyone who can't upgrade their CPU from 32-bit to 64-bit with 30 minutes notice really isn't qualified to use a computer.
/ attempt_at_humour
My wife and I are building a MAME cabinet and the project prompted us to reminisce about our youthful Arcade days. The one thing we both did was hang around outside the arcade and ask random pedestrians for quarters so that we could "phone our parents for a ride".
I agree with you, but never think that there aren't assholes out there who get kicks off of sticking it to random strangers. Money can greatly escalate a problem and it's scope, but sometimes people are just jerks and gladly act as such for free.
If the world was asshole-free then people would never get their cars keyed, tires slashed or houses egged unprovoked.
While I agree that auto-executing anything is very bad practice, most average users would go ahead and run the program anyway without giving any consideration to it's safety (or just assuming that it's safe because it wouldn't make sense for the manufacturer to harm their costumer's computers ... never thinking about a man-in-the-middle type of scenario).
This allows emergency vehicles to by-pass traffic lights by turning them green. It uses an IR transponder on vehicles, and an IR receiver on lights. When a certain frequency (pulse) is sent out from the vehicle and picked up by the receiver, the light turns green.
Here's something a little funny about those systems.
My father-in-law is an ex-firefighter (just retired at the end of '07) who drove the truck for a couple of years before being promoted to Captain. He absolutely despises the system due to it's unreliability and shortly after it was introduced in our city he stopped even trying to use it all together.
I didn't even know that they existed until a discussion popped up at the dinner table one night and I couldn't help but wonder what kind of potential for abuse there is. Even more ironic that the emergency services themselves don't even use them (well, I can only speak for my father-in-law but from the sounds of it they're hated - at least the implementation in my city).
The above is by far the best piece of advice I've read so far in the comments.
The last company I worked at hired a TON of co-ops from the local University (mostly to save money and also because they had a lot of "easy grunt work" type of programming that was perfect for entry level). Many of these kids were over qualified for the positions and quickly moved up in the company. They were then offered full time jobs with much higher pay and full benefits upon graduating.
Not to mention, what the parent said: NOTHING beats experience. You can spend your whole life in University and, without any experience, it won't mean anything to an employer next to another guy's resume who has less education but more experience. Education shows that you've learned how to do something. Experience shows that you've actually done it.
So yeah this is almost a no-brainer. If you want to develop your skill set to increase your value in the work place then go get some experience in said work place.
Another slightly off topic but similar anecdote. I've been in the computer industry for over 10 years and I currently run my own business. But I've been getting kind of tired of sitting at a computer all day so I've been thinking about going into the culinary world and becoming a chef. I contacted the local college to ask them what the best way to get into their culinary program would be and they told me to go get a job in a kitchen right now and then after working for a while enter the program as a registered apprentice. It just goes to show that no matter what you do experience is king.