This does suck. Just yesterday, I direct a co-worker to this site to answer a math question. The google cache is still around, but not terribly useful; only the HTML itself is cached. All images, etc. come from the original site, and nearly all pages on mathworld contain a lot of images (basically whenever there's an equation whose formatting can't be handled via straight HTML, which means nearly all equations). Try bringing up the google cached version of a random mathworld page. Odd are, you won't be able to make heads or tails out of it.
There's always the Artistic GPL. Some industrious person could start an open mathworld replacement under AGPL, but I dread the idea of trying to get a large bunch of mathematically oriented people to succesfully contribute to it. Plus, it'd take at least a few years to get it back to a state comparable to mathworld.
I've been using my Airport with Linux for several months now. It works great. It is useful to have a Mac to initially configure the Airport base station, but not necessary. I borrowed a Mac laptop from work to set mine up the first time. Several weeks ago I was messing with my configuration and got everything munged up; not feeling like driving to the office to borrow the laptop again, I found a Java Airport configurator. Works perfectly from both Win32 and Linux: no Mac required.
It? What's copyrighted? You can't copyright a physical device (i.e. the cue:cat barcode scanner). I'm sure they own the copyright to their source code and the executable form of their drivers/software, but noone's illegally copying that. Some Linux hackers reverse engineered the protocol emitted by the scanner and wrote their own (completely indepented) drivers to read it and do something useful with it. What copyright is violated? What IP is violated?
J. Jovan Philyaw is the CEO of Digital Convergence (the company behind the:Cue:cat). He's also the executive producer of NetTalk Live. It looks like NetTalk Live is an interactive talk show about computers, the web, etc. that allows people to ask questions.
It might be interesting to join the next broadcast and see if we can get some comments from ole J. Jovan about his company's actions
And neither is nitrogen. Both are energy transport media (like a flywheel or a lead acid battery). Both hydrogen and nitrogen are incapable of delivering net on-the-books BTU's of energy. True fuels do delivery BTU's of energy.
Also note that there's more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of liquid hydrogen. All this "hydrogen is the energy source of the future" talk is a bunch of hooey. How are going to make the liquid hydrogen? No non-nuclear means is known to make terrestrial hydrogen that does not consume considerably much more energy than it delivers. How are you going to get liquid hydrogen to the public safely?
I could not possibly disagree more. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I'm forced to conclude that either you're trolling or you're speaking out of ignorance. Do you write code? Do you read code? I do both; a lot of both. For someone to imply that what I do is not creative...well, I find that offensive and narrow minded.
This morning, while on a plane, I was reading "After the Gold Rush" by Steve McConnell. It's subtitled "Creating a True Profession of Software Engineering" which is a pretty good summary of the subject of the book. This book address the artistic aspects of software many times. For example, on page 59 I read "Software includes many aesthetic elements, and software developers have no lack of artistic ambition." Engineering in general incorporates mathematics, science, economics, _AND_ artistry. Source code is expressive. There's good source code and there's bad source code. When I read bad source code, it often evokes emotion (i.e. anger and frustration). Just as equally, when I read good source code, it evokes emotion (excitement at a new concept or an elegant design). When some says that a piece of code is elegant, it's not a misappropriation of the word. Elegance implies beauty, and beauty implies something that's aesthetically pleasing.
The seminal classic text in programming is Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming." Notice the title; it contains the word art. The first edition of the virst volume was written over two decades ago, and Knuth chose the word Art deliberately. Knuth is arguably one of the top masters of our profession. If he calls it art, that's good enough for me.
For two observer who are stationary with respect to one another, your analysis is correct. When the observers are in motion relative to one another however, the situation is quite different. The classic example of why superluminal signaling is equivalent to reverse temporal signaling under special relativity goes something like this...
Consider two observers, Randy and Becca (R and B) who are traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light with respect to one another, say 0.9c (i.e. from the point of view of R, B is traveling at 0.9c and from the point of view of B, R is traveling at 0.9c). They're not accelerating, nor under the influence of gravity (so SR applies). Initially, they're traveling towards one another (offset just a bit, so they don't collide). R and B each have a stop watch. Just as they pass one another, they start their stop watch (we'll call this event 1). From the point of view of R, he waits until his stop watch reads 10 seconds, and then he uses his trusty acme instantaneous signaling/receiving device to send a signal (we'll call this event 2) B has an identical device for receiving the signal. Well call B receiving the signal event 3. I've used an "instantaneous" signaling device here (v -> infinity) to simplfy the math, but any device that transmits faster than c would do also. What does an "instantaneous" signalling device mean? Well, simply from the point of view of R, events 2 and 3 (the sending event and the receiving event) are simultaneous. From the point of view of R, the square of the space time interval between events 1 and 3 is 19 sec^2. Special relativity tells us that the space time interval (and the square of the space time interval) is an invariant: R and B _will_ measure different times and positions for events, but they'll always get the same space time interval between any two events. So, from the POV of B, the square of the space time interval between events 1 and 3 must also be 19 sec^2. This translates to about 4.4 seconds of proper time from the POV of B (i.e. B's stop watch will read about 4.4 seconds when she receives the signal). Immediatly after B receives the signal, she turns around and sends it right back out using the same instantaneous signaling device. Call this event 4. Call R receiving the signal sent by B event 5. From the POV of B, events 4 and 5 are simultaneous. From the POV of B, the square of the space time interval between events 1 and 5 is 3.61 sec^2. Again, R must measure the same space time interval between events 1 and 5. This translates to 1.9 seconds of proper time from the POV of R, which is well before he sent the original signal at 10 seconds.
For more details about the right way to do SR, hop over to Amazon and pick up a copy of Spacetime Physics.
This reminds me of a story I once read about how careful you must be when training a NN. Some researchers tried to use NNs to recognize tanks in aerial photographs. They had a nice set of sample data set with pictures of the same terrain; the tanks were there in one set of photographs and not there in the other. They trained the NN by feeding it digitized versions of the photographs, and it returned a binary result: tanks or no tanks. When it got it right, it was reinforced, when it got it wrong it wasn't. After extensive training, the NN was performing beyond expectations. It was producing the correct answer nearly 100% of the time. So, they moved beyond their test photographs, and tried some real photographs from the field. The NN failed miserably; it got no better results than tossing a coin. The researchers eventually determined that their test data had been photographed on two different days. On one day it was cloudy, on the other it was clear. The NN had been trained to distinguish between photographs taken on cloudy days vs. photographs taken on clear days.
Hello! The answers for those questions weren't mutually exclusive; respondents could check multiple answers to those questions. Just because you're interested in, for example, device driver development, that doesn't preclude you from also being interested in application development.
The answers to questions 9 and 11 are a bit puzzling to me; In 9, GTK+ wins out over Qt by 6.7% (boooo), yet in question 11 developing for KDE wins out over developing for GNOME by about 12.7% (yeah). It makes me wonder how informed some of the respondents were if they didn't know that developing for KDE usually means developing using Qt and developing for GNOME usually means developing using GTK+. And yes, I know, this isn't necessarily the case.
It looks like the Delphi devotees came out in pretty good force; I really didn't expect there to be that many Delphi-heads interested in Linux (or vice versa). I expected C++ Builder to be the Borland tool everyone wanted.
Don't laugh. A little over a month ago, I started researching, in earnest, how feasible it would be to create a JVM for the C64 (for the fun of it). I quickly decided that the VM itself would be no problem (almost a natural fit) on a 6502. Written in 6502 assembly language, I could probably hack out a rudimentary VM in a couple of weeks. The problem was the class library. Just to print "Hello World!" would require several hundred kilobytes of classes to be loaded. I needed a stripped down, simplified class library, but I didn't feel like trying to rewrite the Java class library myself, so I put it on the back burner. Enter Spotless. I just finished looking at their stripped down java.lang.Object, java.land.String, and java.lang.StringBuffer. Perfect. Just a few K.
Actually, according to WebElements, there is one, and only one, naturally occuring thorium isot ope: Th232. So, apparently, naturally occuring thorium is not a mix of isotopes, but one isotope.
There are other "man-made" radioisotopes. A couple have fairly long half-lifes (in the thousands of years). The longest (Th230) is about 75,400 years. But that's a mere blink of the eye, in cosmological and geological terms, which explains why there's only a single naturally occuring isotope (all others have long since decayed into something else). The probability of finding a significant number of "natural" atoms in the entire earth of any isotope of thorium other than Th232 is probably very, very small (but nonzero).
>>...didn't know the thorium isotope available >>from hardware stores was the one used in slow >>breeders." > >Thorium is thorium no matter where you get it.
Chemically (i.e. only taking into account QED), thorium is thorium no matter where you get it. The same could be said for hydrogen, or carbon, or any element. From a nuclear point of view however, there can certainly be differences between atoms that are chemically (electrically) identical. We call these different flavors of atoms, isotopes. They have different atomic masses and some are unstable (i.e. radioactive). The message stated that he didn't know the thorium isotope available from hardware stores was the one used in slow breeders. This is a perfectly valid, logical, and sensible observation. Saying, "thorium is thorium no matter where you get it," is simply missing the point.
I think this is a great idea; finally, a way for RMS et al to be recognized without tying everyone's tongue, plus "GNu Inside" could (if properly applied) become a pretty powerful branding campaign. I wonder about those projects that are open source but not GPLed or LGPLed though. Should "GNu Inside" be identified with open source in general, or just with those projects that follow the GPL/LGPL?
Maybe it's time to change GNU to GNu (where the u is actually a lower case mu). GNu = GNu is Not uSoft.
A program and a computer are collectively a machine, but source code is just text. Look, I'll bet you I read more source code that I actually compile. I read source code to understand concepts, to learn new techniques, and to understand an algorithm. Source code conveys information to me. That's speech. Period. Now some will say, "Yeah, but you can also give source code to a computer and, ultimately, do something functional with it." Ok, fine. So what? Does that somehow obviate the fact that it's speech? How could it? You said that you don't think we should necessarily reduce the two to an equivalence (source code and speech). I agree with that, but people need to realize that that statement does NOT imply that Speech != Source Code, but rather Speech >= Source Code.
While many are celebrating this ruling due to the crypto export implications, I think real victory is for the deeper issue: is source code speech? While the fight's not over, I'm very encouraged that the appelate court reaffirmed that source code is expressive and is a form of speech (at least within the narrow context of this case).
The Junger case was similar. It involved a law professor who wanted to post crypto source code for his "Computers and the Law" class. A lower court (going against the ruling of the lower court in this case), sided with the government and dismissed the expressive nature of source code due to its functional aspect. They basically said source code wasn't speech. This was, IMHO, a bad bad ruling. I really find it offensive that the court would assert that a language such as C that I spend a large portion of my time reading and writing (often just for fun), isn't speech. I use computer languages to communicate ideas. That's speech. The judge (Gwinn) in the Junger case just didn't "get it." I've read this ruling, and it's obvious that at least some of the judges (or more likely, their aids) do "get it."
Let's just hope that if this goes to the Supreme Court, they're as enlightened.
While many are celebrating this ruling due to the crypto export implications, I think real victory is for the deeper issue: is source code speech? While the fights not over, I'm very encouraged that the appelate court reaffirmed that source code is expressive and is a form of speech (at least within the narrow context of this case).
The Junger case was similar. It involved a law professor who wanted to post crypto source code for his "Computers and the Law" class. A lower court (going against the ruling of the lower court in this case), sided with the government and dismissed the expressive nature of source code due to its functional aspect. They basically said source code wasn't speech. This was, IMHO, a bad bad ruling. I really find it offensive that the court would assert that a language such as C that I spend a large portion of my time reading and writing (often just for fun), isn't speech. I use computer languages to communicate ideas. That's speech. The judge (Gwinn) in the Junger case just didn't "get it." I've read this ruling, and it's obvious that at least some of the judges (or more likely, their aids) do "get it."
Let's just hope that if this goes to the Supreme Court, they're as enlightened.
The email address is encoded in the link and even if it wasn't, it's still the text of the link. Here the html from DejaNews (I've replaced all less-thans with '{' because I can't figure out how to get slashdot to escape it)...
There seem to be a lot of people out there (especially sys admins), who are saying, "This is no big deal. Everyone store logs, etc." Hello. Excuse me...you're not getting it. Lets all be clear here on exactly what's going on.
Go to DejaNews and look at a Usenet posting. Next to the Author's name, you'll see that DejaNews was nice enough to provide a link with the authors email address so that with a simple click you can email the author. Fair enough, that's helpful (and something I expect). The problem is, it's NOT a simple mailto:foo@bar.com link. It links back to DejaNews. DejaNews sees this, and says to itself, "Hey, Joe Blow just clicked on a link to email foo@bar.com." Then it redirects to something link mailto:foo@bar.com, which causes your mail client to pop up, all ready to email to foo@bar.com. At this point, DejaNews is out of the picture (you're sending email to foo@ on your PC using your mail client and your IPS' SMTP server). But DejaNews has already made a note that you at least clicked on the link to email them (you could change your mind and cancel and DejaNews wouldn't know the difference). The point here is that DejaNews doesn't have to do it this way. They could've simply put the link to the person's email directly on the page (which would've been much simpler), in which case they would have no way of knowing if you clicked it. They're specifically going out of their way to make note of the fact that you clicked on the link to email someone. Someone, somewhere, made a deliberate, conscious decision to go to the extra trouble of logging this. It's not some incidental log.
Realistically, I do think it's that big of deal. But this is not the simple sendmail log that all the I-love-to-jump-to-conclusions idiots who've only skimmed the story without actually understanding it are claiming it is.
The other two replys to this are right on the money. Realistically, I don't think it's all that big of a deal, but let's all be clear here on
exactly
what's going on.
Go to DejaNews and look at a Usenet posting. Next to the Author's name, you'll see that DejaNews was nice enough to provide a link with the authors email address so that with a simple click you can email the author. Fair enough, that's helpful (and something I expect). The problem is, it's NOT a simple mailto:foo@bar.com link. It links back to DejaNews. DejaNews sees this, and says to itself, "Hey, Joe Blow just clicked on a link to email foo@bar.com." Then it redirects to something link mailto:foo@bar.com, which causes your mail client to pop up, all ready to email to foo@bar.com. At this point, DejaNews is out of the picture (you're sending email to foo@ on your PC using your mail client and your IPS' SMTP server). But DejaNews has already made a note that you at least clicked on the link to email them (you could change your mind and cancel and DejaNews wouldn't know the difference). The point here is that DejaNews doesn't have to do it this way. They could've simply put the link to the person's email directly on the page (which would've been much simpler), in which case they would have no way of knowing if you clicked it. They're specifically going out of their way to make note of the fact that you clicked on the link to email someone. Someone, somewhere, made a deliberate, conscious decision to go to the extra trouble of logging this. It's not some incidental log.
Been down this road myself with Linux-Mandrake 5.3 just yesterday. I installed rawhide glibc 2.1 because Samba 2.0.3 wanted it. This completely broke Blackdown's JDK 1.1.7 and 1.2. Also, after installing glibc 2.1, there seemed to be a HUGE memory leak somewhere. I installed glibc 2.1 Friday. Monday morning, my workstation was crawling. I couldn't figure out from top what was eating all the memory (the X server maybe), but I was quickly forced to reboot. I don't think glibc 2.1 is ready from prime-time yet.
It may be a stretch, but I'm wondering if some sort of class action lawsuit against 3dfx might be possible in this case. There are a lot of people out there who are, from a legal POV, being damaged by 3dfx's policy. Last time I checked, there were some pretty definitive legal precedents (e.g. the legal battle between IBM and PC clone manufacturers who had to reproduce the functionality of the BIOS) that held that APIs are not proprietary and are not intellectual property. 3dfx's SDK certainly is their IP, but that's not the issue.
It's obviously possible to develop a glide wrapper without using their SDK. Their legal ground seems to be pretty shaky on this one to me. The problem is, how can high school or college students afford to fight them in court? I say either a class action lawsuit by the potential users of the wrappers, or maybe look to the EFF for help. How about emailing their Director of Legal Services.
Excellent idea. I've been digging into XML over the past few weeks, and this is a perfect application for it. Make XML the canonical form for storing the data. All other formats are translated from XML. For example, it would be a snap to write Java servlet that read the XML and returned the info in CDDB format. Ok, we need an XML DTD tailored for CD data. And of course it should be open and publicly reviewed. Randy Weems rweems@nospam.hotmail.com
Slashdot Mirror
This does suck. Just yesterday, I direct a co-worker to this site to answer a math question. The google cache is still around, but not terribly useful; only the HTML itself is cached. All images, etc. come from the original site, and nearly all pages on mathworld contain a lot of images (basically whenever there's an equation whose formatting can't be handled via straight HTML, which means nearly all equations). Try bringing up the google cached version of a random mathworld page. Odd are, you won't be able to make heads or tails out of it.
There's always the Artistic GPL. Some industrious person could start an open mathworld replacement under AGPL, but I dread the idea of trying to get a large bunch of mathematically oriented people to succesfully contribute to it. Plus, it'd take at least a few years to get it back to a state comparable to mathworld.
I've been using my Airport with Linux for several months now. It works great. It is useful to have a Mac to initially configure the Airport base station, but not necessary. I borrowed a Mac laptop from work to set mine up the first time. Several weeks ago I was messing with my configuration and got everything munged up; not feeling like driving to the office to borrow the laptop again, I found a Java Airport configurator. Works perfectly from both Win32 and Linux: no Mac required.
"...I am sure it is copyrighted in some manner."
It? What's copyrighted? You can't copyright a physical device (i.e. the cue:cat barcode scanner). I'm sure they own the copyright to their source code and the executable form of their drivers/software, but noone's illegally copying that. Some Linux hackers reverse engineered the protocol emitted by the scanner and wrote their own (completely indepented) drivers to read it and do something useful with it. What copyright is violated? What IP is violated?
J. Jovan Philyaw is the CEO of Digital Convergence (the company behind the :Cue:cat). He's also the executive producer of NetTalk Live. It looks like NetTalk Live is an interactive talk show about computers, the web, etc. that allows people to ask questions.
It might be interesting to join the next broadcast and see if we can get some comments from ole J. Jovan about his company's actions
And neither is nitrogen. Both are energy transport media (like a flywheel or a lead acid battery). Both hydrogen and nitrogen are incapable of delivering net on-the-books BTU's of energy. True fuels do delivery BTU's of energy.
Also note that there's more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of liquid hydrogen. All this "hydrogen is the energy source of the future" talk is a bunch of hooey. How are going to make the liquid hydrogen? No non-nuclear means is known to make terrestrial hydrogen that does not consume considerably much more energy than it delivers. How are you going to get liquid hydrogen to the public safely?
Check out Don Lancaster's excellent site for more debunking of hydrogen as an energy source.
I could not possibly disagree more. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I'm forced to conclude that either you're trolling or you're speaking out of ignorance. Do you write code? Do you read code? I do both; a lot of both. For someone to imply that what I do is not creative...well, I find that offensive and narrow minded.
This morning, while on a plane, I was reading "After the Gold Rush" by Steve McConnell. It's subtitled "Creating a True Profession of Software Engineering" which is a pretty good summary of the subject of the book. This book address the artistic aspects of software many times. For example, on page 59 I read "Software includes many aesthetic elements, and software developers have no lack of artistic ambition." Engineering in general incorporates mathematics, science, economics, _AND_ artistry. Source code is expressive. There's good source code and there's bad source code. When I read bad source code, it often evokes emotion (i.e. anger and frustration). Just as equally, when I read good source code, it evokes emotion (excitement at a new concept or an elegant design). When some says that a piece of code is elegant, it's not a misappropriation of the word. Elegance implies beauty, and beauty implies something that's aesthetically pleasing.
The seminal classic text in programming is Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming." Notice the title; it contains the word art. The first edition of the virst volume was written over two decades ago, and Knuth chose the word Art deliberately. Knuth is arguably one of the top masters of our profession. If he calls it art, that's good enough for me.
Randy Weems
rweems@nospam.home.com
For two observer who are stationary with respect to one another, your analysis is correct. When the observers are in motion relative to one another however, the situation is quite different. The classic example of why superluminal signaling is equivalent to reverse temporal signaling under special relativity goes something like this...
Consider two observers, Randy and Becca (R and B) who are traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light with respect to one another, say 0.9c (i.e. from the point of view of R, B is traveling at 0.9c and from the point of view of B, R is traveling at 0.9c). They're not accelerating, nor under the influence of gravity (so SR applies). Initially, they're traveling towards one another (offset just a bit, so they don't collide). R and B each have a stop watch. Just as they pass one another, they start their stop watch (we'll call this event 1). From the point of view of R, he waits until his stop watch reads 10 seconds, and then he uses his trusty acme instantaneous signaling/receiving device to send a signal (we'll call this event 2) B has an identical device for receiving the signal. Well call B receiving the signal event 3. I've used an "instantaneous" signaling device here (v -> infinity) to simplfy the math, but any device that transmits faster than c would do also. What does an "instantaneous" signalling device mean? Well, simply from the point of view of R, events 2 and 3 (the sending event and the receiving event) are simultaneous. From the point of view of R, the square of the space time interval between events 1 and 3 is 19 sec^2. Special relativity tells us that the space time interval (and the square of the space time interval) is an invariant: R and B _will_ measure different times and positions for events, but they'll always get the same space time interval between any two events. So, from the POV of B, the square of the space time interval between events 1 and 3 must also be 19 sec^2. This translates to about 4.4 seconds of proper time from the POV of B (i.e. B's stop watch will read about 4.4 seconds when she receives the signal). Immediatly after B receives the signal, she turns around and sends it right back out using the same instantaneous signaling device. Call this event 4. Call R receiving the signal sent by B event 5. From the POV of B, events 4 and 5 are simultaneous. From the POV of B, the square of the space time interval between events 1 and 5 is 3.61 sec^2. Again, R must measure the same space time interval between events 1 and 5. This translates to 1.9 seconds of proper time from the POV of R, which is well before he sent the original signal at 10 seconds.
For more details about the right way to do SR, hop over to Amazon and pick up a copy of Spacetime Physics.
This reminds me of a story I once read about how careful you must be when training a NN. Some researchers tried to use NNs to recognize tanks in aerial photographs. They had a nice set of sample data set with pictures of the same terrain; the tanks were there in one set of photographs and not there in the other. They trained the NN by feeding it digitized versions of the photographs, and it returned a binary result: tanks or no tanks. When it got it right, it was reinforced, when it got it wrong it wasn't. After extensive training, the NN was performing beyond expectations. It was producing the correct answer nearly 100% of the time. So, they moved beyond their test photographs, and tried some real photographs from the field. The NN failed miserably; it got no better results than tossing a coin. The researchers eventually determined that their test data had been photographed on two different days. On one day it was cloudy, on the other it was clear. The NN had been trained to distinguish between photographs taken on cloudy days vs. photographs taken on clear days.
Hello! The answers for those questions weren't mutually exclusive; respondents could check multiple answers to those questions. Just because you're interested in, for example, device driver development, that doesn't preclude you from also being interested in application development.
The answers to questions 9 and 11 are a bit puzzling to me; In 9, GTK+ wins out over Qt by 6.7% (boooo), yet in question 11 developing for KDE wins out over developing for GNOME by about 12.7% (yeah). It makes me wonder how informed some of the respondents were if they didn't know that developing for KDE usually means developing using Qt and developing for GNOME usually means developing using GTK+. And yes, I know, this isn't necessarily the case.
It looks like the Delphi devotees came out in pretty good force; I really didn't expect there to be that many Delphi-heads interested in Linux (or vice versa). I expected C++ Builder to be the Borland tool everyone wanted.
Don't laugh. A little over a month ago, I started researching, in earnest, how feasible it would be to create a JVM for the C64 (for the fun of it). I quickly decided that the VM itself would be no problem (almost a natural fit) on a 6502. Written in 6502 assembly language, I could probably hack out a rudimentary VM in a couple of weeks. The problem was the class library. Just to print "Hello World!" would require several hundred kilobytes of classes to be loaded. I needed a stripped down, simplified class library, but I didn't feel like trying to rewrite the Java class library myself, so I put it on the back burner.
Enter Spotless. I just finished looking at their stripped down java.lang.Object, java.land.String, and java.lang.StringBuffer. Perfect. Just a few K.
Java on the C64, here we come.
Actually, according to WebElements, there is one, and only one, naturally occuring thorium isot ope: Th232. So, apparently, naturally occuring thorium is not a mix of isotopes, but one isotope.
There are other "man-made" radioisotopes. A couple have fairly long half-lifes (in the thousands of years). The longest (Th230) is about 75,400 years. But that's a mere blink of the eye, in cosmological and geological terms, which explains why there's only a single naturally occuring isotope (all others have long since decayed into something else). The probability of finding a significant number of "natural" atoms in the entire earth of any isotope of thorium other than Th232 is probably very, very small (but nonzero).
>>...didn't know the thorium isotope available
>>from hardware stores was the one used in slow
>>breeders."
>
>Thorium is thorium no matter where you get it.
Chemically (i.e. only taking into account QED), thorium is thorium no matter where you get it. The same could be said for hydrogen, or carbon, or any element. From a nuclear point of view however, there can certainly be differences between atoms that are chemically (electrically) identical. We call these different flavors of atoms, isotopes. They have different atomic masses and some are unstable (i.e. radioactive). The message stated that he didn't know the thorium isotope available from hardware stores was the one used in slow breeders. This is a perfectly valid, logical, and sensible observation. Saying, "thorium is thorium no matter where you get it," is simply missing the point.
I think this is a great idea; finally, a way for RMS et al to be recognized without tying everyone's tongue, plus "GNu Inside" could (if properly applied) become a pretty powerful branding campaign. I wonder about those projects that are open source but not GPLed or LGPLed though. Should "GNu Inside" be identified with open source in general, or just with those projects that follow the GPL/LGPL?
Maybe it's time to change GNU to GNu (where the u is actually a lower case mu). GNu = GNu is Not uSoft.
rweems at home dot com
A program and a computer are collectively a machine, but source code is just text. Look, I'll bet you I read more source code that I actually compile. I read source code to understand concepts, to learn new techniques, and to understand an algorithm. Source code conveys information to me. That's speech. Period. Now some will say, "Yeah, but you can also give source code to a computer and, ultimately, do something functional with it." Ok, fine. So what? Does that somehow obviate the fact that it's speech? How could it? You said that you don't think we should necessarily reduce the two to an equivalence (source code and speech). I agree with that, but people need to realize that that statement does NOT imply that Speech != Source Code, but rather Speech >= Source Code.
While many are celebrating this ruling due to the crypto export implications, I think real victory is for the deeper issue: is source code speech? While the fight's not over, I'm very encouraged that the appelate court reaffirmed that source code is expressive and is a form of speech (at least within the narrow context of this case).
The Junger case was similar. It involved a law professor who wanted to post crypto source code for his "Computers and the Law" class. A lower court (going against the ruling of the lower court in this case), sided with the government and dismissed the expressive nature of source code due to its functional aspect. They basically said source code wasn't speech. This was, IMHO, a bad bad ruling. I really find it offensive that the court would assert that a language such as C that I spend a large portion of my time reading and writing (often just for fun), isn't speech. I use computer languages to communicate ideas. That's speech. The judge (Gwinn) in the Junger case just didn't "get it." I've read this ruling, and it's obvious that at least some of the judges (or more likely, their aids) do "get it."
Let's just hope that if this goes to the Supreme Court, they're as enlightened.
While many are celebrating this ruling due to the crypto export implications, I think real victory is for the deeper issue: is source code speech? While the fights not over, I'm very encouraged that the appelate court reaffirmed that source code is expressive and is a form of speech (at least within the narrow context of this case).
The Junger case was similar. It involved a law professor who wanted to post crypto source code for his "Computers and the Law" class. A lower court (going against the ruling of the lower court in this case), sided with the government and dismissed the expressive nature of source code due to its functional aspect. They basically said source code wasn't speech. This was, IMHO, a bad bad ruling. I really find it offensive that the court would assert that a language such as C that I spend a large portion of my time reading and writing (often just for fun), isn't speech. I use computer languages to communicate ideas. That's speech. The judge (Gwinn) in the Junger case just didn't "get it." I've read this ruling, and it's obvious that at least some of the judges (or more likely, their aids) do "get it."
Let's just hope that if this goes to the Supreme Court, they're as enlightened.
Randy Weems
rweems@nospam.hotmail.com
Bots can parse this no problem. Their redirect does not stop bots!
Randy Weems
rweems@nospam.hotmail.com
Uhh, the first sentence of that last paragraph should've been, "Realistically, I DON'T think it's that big of a deal."
There seem to be a lot of people out there (especially sys admins), who are saying, "This is no big deal. Everyone store logs, etc." Hello. Excuse me...you're not getting it. Lets all be clear here on exactly what's going on.
Go to DejaNews and look at a Usenet posting. Next to the Author's name, you'll see that DejaNews was nice enough to provide a link with the authors email address so that with a simple click you can email the author. Fair enough, that's helpful (and something I expect). The problem is, it's NOT a simple mailto:foo@bar.com link. It links back to DejaNews. DejaNews sees this, and says to itself, "Hey, Joe Blow just clicked on a link to email foo@bar.com." Then it redirects to something link mailto:foo@bar.com, which causes your mail client to pop up, all ready to email to foo@bar.com. At this point, DejaNews is out of the picture (you're sending email to foo@ on your PC using your mail client and your IPS' SMTP server). But DejaNews has already made a note that you at least clicked on the link to email them (you could change your mind and cancel and DejaNews wouldn't know the difference). The point here is that DejaNews doesn't have to do it this way. They could've simply put the link to the person's email directly on the page (which would've been much simpler), in which case they would have no way of knowing if you clicked it. They're specifically going out of their way to make note of the fact that you clicked on the link to email someone. Someone, somewhere, made a deliberate, conscious decision to go to the extra trouble of logging this. It's not some incidental log.
Realistically, I do think it's that big of deal. But this is not the simple sendmail log that all the I-love-to-jump-to-conclusions idiots who've only skimmed the story without actually understanding it are claiming it is.
Randy Weems
reems@nospam.hotmail.com
- exactly
what's going on.Go to DejaNews and look at a Usenet posting. Next to the Author's name, you'll see that DejaNews was nice enough to provide a link with the authors email address so that with a simple click you can email the author. Fair enough, that's helpful (and something I expect). The problem is, it's NOT a simple mailto:foo@bar.com link. It links back to DejaNews. DejaNews sees this, and says to itself, "Hey, Joe Blow just clicked on a link to email foo@bar.com." Then it redirects to something link mailto:foo@bar.com, which causes your mail client to pop up, all ready to email to foo@bar.com. At this point, DejaNews is out of the picture (you're sending email to foo@ on your PC using your mail client and your IPS' SMTP server). But DejaNews has already made a note that you at least clicked on the link to email them (you could change your mind and cancel and DejaNews wouldn't know the difference). The point here is that DejaNews doesn't have to do it this way. They could've simply put the link to the person's email directly on the page (which would've been much simpler), in which case they would have no way of knowing if you clicked it. They're specifically going out of their way to make note of the fact that you clicked on the link to email someone. Someone, somewhere, made a deliberate, conscious decision to go to the extra trouble of logging this. It's not some incidental log.
Randy Weems
rweems@home.com
Been down this road myself with Linux-Mandrake 5.3 just yesterday. I installed rawhide glibc 2.1 because Samba 2.0.3 wanted it. This completely broke Blackdown's JDK 1.1.7 and 1.2. Also, after installing glibc 2.1, there seemed to be a HUGE memory leak somewhere. I installed glibc 2.1 Friday. Monday morning, my workstation was crawling. I couldn't figure out from top what was eating all the memory (the X server maybe), but I was quickly forced to reboot. I don't think glibc 2.1 is ready from prime-time yet.
Randy Weems
It may be a stretch, but I'm wondering if some sort of class action lawsuit against 3dfx might be possible in this case. There are a lot of people out there who are, from a legal POV, being damaged by 3dfx's policy. Last time I checked, there were some pretty definitive legal precedents (e.g. the legal battle between IBM and PC clone manufacturers who had to reproduce the functionality of the BIOS) that held that APIs are not proprietary and are not intellectual property. 3dfx's SDK certainly is their IP, but that's not the issue.
It's obviously possible to develop a glide wrapper without using their SDK. Their legal ground seems to be pretty shaky on this one to me. The problem is, how can high school or college students afford to fight them in court? I say either a class action lawsuit by the potential users of the wrappers, or maybe look to the EFF for help. How about emailing their Director of Legal Services.
Randy Weems
Excellent idea. I've been digging into XML over the past few weeks, and this is a perfect application for it. Make XML the canonical form for storing the data. All other formats are translated from XML. For example, it would be a snap to write Java servlet that read the XML and returned the info in CDDB format. Ok, we need an XML DTD tailored for CD data. And of course it should be open and publicly reviewed. Randy Weems rweems@nospam.hotmail.com