There's also the fact that their procedure actually will help for some batteries, sort of (aside from the part where you put their product on). While Li+ batteries don't have a memory effect, they often have circuitry which remembers how much you've charged the battery and how much you've discharged it, and reports this to the device. As time goes by, this estimate gets worse and worse, and is designed to err in the direction of not telling you that your battery is good when it's actually empty. So cycling a Li+ battery won't improve the performance of the battery, but it will make the device stop saying that the battery is low so soon.
He didn't test the battery in a device that reports the battery's "low charge" status, and he also cycled the battery before the test. I'd guess that the people who liked the Activator had moderately old batteries, or batteries that they'd never discharged completely (batteries tend to come half-charged, claiming to be empty, because that's best for manufacturing, storage, and not running out without warning), and their batteries had plenty of capacity below the "low charge" threshold which magically recovered.
On the charging speed front, the constant voltage portion of the charging puts charge in more slowly that the constant current portion; if the problem with your battery is that it claims to be empty when 75% charged, you'll only be recharging it for the slow portion. After cycling it, you'll be using the constant current phase, which will mean that your battery will see more charge going in during a minute of charging. So it will charge faster, although, due to the increased known capacity, it will also charge for longer before it stops.
Really, someone ought to sell a phone battery charger that will also completely discharge the battery first if the battery is reporting that it is low and you have the switch set to say you want to get the battery to read right. It beats waiting for your actual device to fail due to low power (especially when it makes varying demands on the battery; on a camera, the flash will not be possible when the battery is low but not gone, and I'd guess that cell phones will have to be in stand-by in order to drain the last of a battery without being unable to function and shutting down), plus it suggests to the user that this operation is actually helpful.
On the other hand, the cost of designing a chip, even rerouting an existing chip, is substantial. So they'd have to expect to sell quite a few SXs in order for reducing the manufacturing cost of a chip to justify the cost of making the change. At a guess, it took until the Pentium replaced the 486DX as the high-end chip, at which point there wasn't a supply of 486DXs with defective FPUs to repurpose, for the SX to be worth doing an optimized design for. Remember that the 486 is still a popular chip for embedded applications, and these frequently don't need floating point at all (or do all their non-trivial math in DSPs or FPGAs). Of course, they've been redesigned and cloned extensively by now, due to the desire to use modern processes to get cheaper, smaller, and lower power chips.
If more than 60% of your datagram size is element names, your element names are too long. Or you're using nested elements when you should be using attributes.
If you think everything is better than CVS, you most not have done any cooperative development before it became popular. The reason that CVS is popular is that it is extremely nice if you have the particular development style that it suggests, and it was the first source-control system which was nice for anyone. The switch from CVS to more recent systems is an improvement, but it's not nearly as compelling as the switch from RCS to CVS.
Doesn't seem to do anything for me (still on 1.0 though); I think I get a blocked popup message for a moment, before I get a missing plugin message. Are you sure the ad companies haven't given up on attacking firefox, and gone on to attacking flash?
Actually, Linux support for the TPM chip has already gone into Linus's repository and will be included in 2.6.12. So there will be a long period where, if you want OS support for the TPM chip, you need to use Linux.
Ah, yes. I thought that there was a bar to patentability for inventions published without notification that they are "patent pending" before the patent is granted, although I can't now find this. In any case, I understated my point since I didn't have time to look up details; my claim may be overly restrictive, but that doesn't matter for the present situation.
As for the possibility of other creators, I suspect that, while the company may be supposed to have difficulties, chances are that they would simply omit them from the application and deny their contributions.
You are right that anyone who got the code under the GPL retains the rights granted by the GPL. However, the company is claiming to have gotten the code by way of the employment contract, not the GPL.
Assuming the employment contract is valid, the company owns the copyright to all of the work done by the employee. In this case, they don't have to abide by the GPL, because they don't need a license of any sort for it. "You don't have to agree to the GPL, but nothing other than the GPL grants you the right to distribute the software" is the usual mechanism. If, however, something other than the GPL (such as owning the code yourself) grants you rights to it, the GPL doesn't matter. This is, however, not the case if the original author accepted substantial changes from somebody else, because that means that he didn't have sole copyright to give up. The other authors can put pressure on the company to abide by the GPL, because they own some of it. Also, if the author had assigned copyright to the FSF, the author couldn't give it to the company later, and the FSF could force the company to follow the GPL.
Additionally, the employment contract is probably not really enforceable; the author could claim that he still actually holds the copyrights, and the company is violating them.
As for the patent, it would be invalid if the program was published without a "patent-pending" notice a year before the application was filed. Not that validity of patents actually seems to matter these days, unfortunately.
The BBC isn't a media company in the usual sense. They get their funding from the British government, not advertisers or ticket sales. Lumping them and the MPAA together is a bit like expecting Linus and Bill Gates to agree on government policy. The BBC didn't lose any money due to this, because it probably didn't cause any britons to get rid of their televisions. The MPAA probably lost a bunch of money due to this, but that's what happens when the competition is better.
Of course, if someone rates you as having a 17 charisma, chances are that they already want to dance with you enough to overlook a certain amount of eccentricity. If she'd given you a 9 and danced with you because you'd passed your charisma check, that would be more impressive.
His economic arguments seem to neglect a number of factors in coming to the conclusion that large networks would always merge.
The first is that a single user may be a user of multiple networks; obviously, little value is created on account of a user of both networks when they merge, since the user could already communicate with all of the users. This effect can mean that two networks combined can simply cause the two network owners to share the value each of them had before (for example, the advent of VoIP means that people no longer need POTS lines, so the amount of money that can be extracted from consumers drops).
The second is that the communication value of a network may not be the reason for having it. For example, in the US, cell phones often have SMS, but it's a fragmented network. The networks don't merge, however, because SMS isn't widely used in comparison to voice service. The companies derive the greatest benefit from people paying a bit extra to get a SMS-capable phone, but using voice instead. Merging the SMS networks would increase their value greatly, but still wouldn't compare to the value of the existing universal network.
Between these two effects, the dot-com bust is predictable, especially when you realize that it happened among a userbase who could already call each other on the phone. Even if the value of a global network is huge, the ability of companies to extract that value in revenue is very limited.
The effect of spam can be seen as changing the nature of the network to a broadcast network, generally acknowledged to be worth O(n). The change is value from adding users is negated if they communicate with the network as a whole rather than individually with each (or some) of the members.
The argument based on Zipf's Law makes sense as a general rule, because an individual gets 1/k value from the kth most valuable user. On the other hand, this misses two points.
The links which would be most valuable may not be in the network yet. Adding user k+1 doesn't give only value 1/(k+1) to each user, because the new user is probably not less valuable than all of the existing users to each of the existing users. If the network already included everyone, Zipf's law would apply directly. But the total value to a user of n users out of a world of m users is (n log m)/m. If we assume that there is a constant number of people in the world and that the users of a network are randomly chosen from that pool, then the total value to any given user of that user's links is O(n), and the value of the network is O(n^2). We just have to remember that we hit a wall at the point where practically everyone is connected, and growing the population is only worth O(m log m).
The basic insight is that, if your friends are split across two SMS networks, there is a large value to you in them joining. If your friends picked SMS networks at random (or based on some unrelated consideration), this is likely to happen.
On the other hand, a network constructed by value (that is, if new users are chosen to be of high value to the existing users) is going to extract the value of a larger network at a smaller size and then grow at the O(n log n) rate in a merger. This is why AOL was of high value by itself (lots of friends and family) and the internet was of high value by itself (lots of people who collaborated), but the connection did not add all that much to either (with the primary exception of AOL users going off to college). Opposed to this is the fact that a user may get a different set of high-value links by having new needs; picking up a new hobby will radically improve the values of a set of previously low-valued links, and, to a certain extent, reshuffle the selection of users on the network.
So my estimation is that there are several flaws with the essentially correct O(n^2) idea: separate networks get extra total value out of duplication, at the expense of the users; all networks, even with different properties, compete with each other; it's limited and
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Each of the APUs in a Cell has SIMD instructions. Also, the PU handles dispatch, so it's not all that much like traditional SMP from the compiler's point of view.
Recent versions of Firefox, at least for installing plugins, don't pop up a dialog box. Instead, there is an unobtrusive bar at the top of the window, which essentially says, "if you're missing something on this page, here's how to get it". A very similar bar is used to let you see pop-up ads, in case you actually wanted something in a pop-up. The user default may be to answer "Yes" to any dialog boxes, but they default to not messing with anything they don't have to.
Why do you want to have songs that aren't worth five cents? If I were to listen to a song that's not worth five cents, I'd rather have my three minutes back than my five cents back. I would want my money back, but not to avoid losing it, but rather to avoid giving anything to people who give me music I dislike. I certainly wouldn't want to listen to such a bad song again.
I'd personally be willing to pay more for a song I'd already downloaded and heard a dozen times than a song I hadn't heard all of yet. I don't want to support music I don't like, and I don't really even want to risk it. The content business, despite what they seem to think, actually depends entirely on the goodwill of customers. Customers can avoid paying, and it is only out of a desire to reward people they like that they pay anyway.
No law is perfectly clear, just like no documentation is perfectly clear and no specification is perfectly clear. The only law which could be perfectly clear is one which specified exactly who it would apply to and what the punishment, and those laws are unconstitutional (being bills of attainder).
I doubt that a law which actually said, "This law does not apply to individuals selling their own items on eBay" would be permitted. What about other auction sites? What if eBay changed its name? What about businesses selling items they already own? It doesn't make the law clearer; it just makes the intention of the law harder to determine.
Chances are that the law as written does not apply to individuals selling their own items on eBay, and that the reporter couldn't be bothered to look, and the author of the bill didn't know how eBay works. If it doesn't apply to normal eBay users, why should the author of the bill know anything about eBay? Does it apply to TSOP components? Just because a reporter is dumb enough to ask doesn't mean that the author of the bill should know the answer.
The fundamental idea that you can specify a law completely in the abstract is simply false. You can't do it with real laws in the real world. You can't even do it with idealized rules of games (ever look at rulings on the rules of collectable card games?). You can't do it with customer requirements for computer programs. You can't do it for anything no less complex than arithmatic. That's why it has to come down to people arguing about gray areas and making decisions about those gray areas which actually arise.
The grandparent didn't specify that more comments indicates more maturity. I think it is unambiguously true (although a bit vacuous) to say that closer to the optimal number of comments indicates more maturity.
Personally, I rarely comment my code. There are a couple of comments which substitute for statements (e.g., stating when I mean to fall through to the next case in a switch statement), and I occasionally comment some tricky statement (generally, inside a tricky conditional, I say what the intent of the test is). On the other hand, I extensively comment my declarations. Each C function gets some documentation in the header file (what are the units for the arguments; who is responsible for the memory; what happens in odd conditions; etc.), and most Java functions get javadoc (unless they are completely specified by the declaration in an interface or parent), because there's generally something that would require reading the code carefully to figure it out. Structure/class fields generally get the most documentation, because it's a real pain to figure out exactly how they behave by reading the code, since the code isn't structured that way. I've got fields where I exhaustively list all values the field can have and what they mean. If you're writing code to prepend a chunk of data to a self-resizing ring buffer, the best documentation is to explain exactly what the indices mean and give diagrams of the structure. The code documents itself, but the variable names can't tell you everything you need to know. Documenting declarations also has the advantage that you tend to kill (or update) the comment when you change the declaration, or at least orphan it in an obvious way, and declarations don't change as much anyway (because when you change them, you have to find and change everything that uses them).
There are a lot of applications for advances in game physics. Sure, modelling the real world is one application, but a general array of vector units (like the Cell processor has) would be equally good for cartoon physics modelling if that was the desired application.
One thing I can think of is that Katamari Damacy would play better if it had a better physics model, such that, for example, welcome mats would bend while screen doors wouldn't, and telephone poles wouldn't bend but the wires on them would hang off. The game would also get more interesting if, for example, umbrellas were bouncy when pushed from the sides (but not the top), such that your katamari would start to bounce when you'd picked them up and then rolled over that side. It would also be amusing if live things in your katamari could move to knock it off course.
In any case, there is always the risk of advancing things in a way that just isn't good for gameplay, but there's also the potential for advances to make new gameplay feasible; and it is generally favorable to model the real world by default, while having the game change things as necessary to make it fun.
No law is perfectly clear when passed. No matter how exact it is, it is always possible to come up with a situation that sort of matches. And it's always possible to come up with a rationale for why some law somewhere applies. That's why the courts maintain records and case law; everything really comes down to interpretation by judges, and the need for consistency is supplied by reference to earlier decision.
Probably, there's already case law defining an auctioneer as someone who accepts items from people, auctions them off, and pays the owners all but a commission. In that case, the law is already entirely clear that it doesn't apply to eBay users, but the author of the bill doesn't know eBay and the media doesn't know the law. If you set up a service where people would send you an item, you'd sell it on eBay, and you'd subtract a commission and send back the rest of the money, then you'd probably need a license; that happens not to be common, but you have to have some experience with eBay to know that (and there might be sites like eBay where that is common).
If this law isn't clear in context already, what will happen, most likely, is that it will never be applied to individuals selling their own items on eBay, because nobody thinks of such people as auctioneers, and, were such a person arrested for not having a license, they'd argue that the law doesn't apply, and win their case on this basis. People who regularly do business through eBay would sue the state for clarification, and get a ruling one way or the other for the unclear situations, most likely contributing, in general, to the definition of the terms, rather than to only this particular bill.
I think it would be an interesting school assignment to find something that Wikipedia's missing, research it, and write an entry. Of course, it might be difficult to find a topic at this point. And it would probably destroy the teacher's credibility on matters of writing if students were to notice that the style required for school papers is completely unlike anything that is used to convey information in the real world.
Actually, both of them are "Why do traffic estimates for my Ad Group differ from those given by the standalone tool?". And there was never a difference in the page body. It's only the title that changes (as in the top of the browser window, not the heading in the body). No idea why the topics changed, but it's unrelated to the point of the story.
It's weird that they're stuffing the title with keywords, because it's their engine (so they could just give their own pages a boost without messing with the cache; etc.). Also, they're putting in keywords most of which actually appear in the page.
And the title-stuffing doesn't seem to work especially well, anyway; that cache page says that "estimate" only appears in links pointing to the page, ignoring the fact that it is in the title of the cached version.
Actually, it's saying that randomized testing is as good at finding bugs as targetted testing by QA people. Targetted testing by the authors is better, because they know where the boundary conditions and tricky areas are.
Furthermore, randomized testing or static debuggers are better at finding some issues than unit tests, because people tend to write unit tests with only those inputs they've considered, while bugs often are due to the possibility of inputs that the author hasn't considered.
Having a lot of hype will get the first episode a big audience. But if people are disappointed, it'll get bad reviews, and ratings will drop. This works for movies, but it's bad for a series, because advertizers won't expect the premiere to be all that big, and will know that the rest of the shows won't be big.
Anyway, nobody else has ratings the way the US does, so it matters even less for the BBC.
Last I heard, the Council had passed this months ago, and it had been in the Commission that it was being discussed and was sometimes on the A-list for adoption. Based on my understanding of the structure of the EU as of yesterday, this doesn't make any sense; not only is passing it as an A-list item wrong; not only is it against the rules to refuse to make something a B-list item; but the body which did this isn't even the right people.
Either I'm missing something major about the distribution of power in the EU, or the Parliament should skip voting on this directive and go straight for a vote of no confidence. Or perhaps they should pass a directive criminalizing ownership of software patents; not having the power or procedures to do this doesn't seem to be stopping the other side.
They have to be defended against violations in order to avoid becoming generic and therefore invalid, but that doesn't mean you can't license them to the general public for a variety of uses that you approve of. The trademark on "Linux" is perfectly fine, despite all of the Linux variants calling themselves "Linux", because Linus licensed it for that purpose. That doesn't mean that Sun could call their next Solaris version "Linux" with impunity, if it didn't have a Linux kernel.
Mozilla is trying to establish a trustworthy brand and identity, as you say; however, having an identity excludes potential participants, who are being identified as not part of the project. And their fear that other people's versions would reflect badly on them excludes those other people from feeling welcome.
One of the key strengths of the Linux brand is that people you trust for other reasons have a stake in it. Sure, there are people out there who release terrible versions of Linux, but you don't get it from them. There are also people out there who release versions of Linux with special features for just your problem, and that's part of what Linux is about (e.g., Intrinsyc ships a Linux version with special support for the hardware on their embedded devices; the Linux Audio Development project has a version which avoids skips when recording audio; these projects couldn't call themselves Linux if Linus managed the trademark the way Mozilla manages theirs, and it would reduce the recognition of Linux as something that can solve any problem you happen to have).
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There's also the fact that their procedure actually will help for some batteries, sort of (aside from the part where you put their product on). While Li+ batteries don't have a memory effect, they often have circuitry which remembers how much you've charged the battery and how much you've discharged it, and reports this to the device. As time goes by, this estimate gets worse and worse, and is designed to err in the direction of not telling you that your battery is good when it's actually empty. So cycling a Li+ battery won't improve the performance of the battery, but it will make the device stop saying that the battery is low so soon.
He didn't test the battery in a device that reports the battery's "low charge" status, and he also cycled the battery before the test. I'd guess that the people who liked the Activator had moderately old batteries, or batteries that they'd never discharged completely (batteries tend to come half-charged, claiming to be empty, because that's best for manufacturing, storage, and not running out without warning), and their batteries had plenty of capacity below the "low charge" threshold which magically recovered.
On the charging speed front, the constant voltage portion of the charging puts charge in more slowly that the constant current portion; if the problem with your battery is that it claims to be empty when 75% charged, you'll only be recharging it for the slow portion. After cycling it, you'll be using the constant current phase, which will mean that your battery will see more charge going in during a minute of charging. So it will charge faster, although, due to the increased known capacity, it will also charge for longer before it stops.
Really, someone ought to sell a phone battery charger that will also completely discharge the battery first if the battery is reporting that it is low and you have the switch set to say you want to get the battery to read right. It beats waiting for your actual device to fail due to low power (especially when it makes varying demands on the battery; on a camera, the flash will not be possible when the battery is low but not gone, and I'd guess that cell phones will have to be in stand-by in order to drain the last of a battery without being unable to function and shutting down), plus it suggests to the user that this operation is actually helpful.
On the other hand, the cost of designing a chip, even rerouting an existing chip, is substantial. So they'd have to expect to sell quite a few SXs in order for reducing the manufacturing cost of a chip to justify the cost of making the change. At a guess, it took until the Pentium replaced the 486DX as the high-end chip, at which point there wasn't a supply of 486DXs with defective FPUs to repurpose, for the SX to be worth doing an optimized design for. Remember that the 486 is still a popular chip for embedded applications, and these frequently don't need floating point at all (or do all their non-trivial math in DSPs or FPGAs). Of course, they've been redesigned and cloned extensively by now, due to the desire to use modern processes to get cheaper, smaller, and lower power chips.
If more than 60% of your datagram size is element names, your element names are too long. Or you're using nested elements when you should be using attributes.
If you think everything is better than CVS, you most not have done any cooperative development before it became popular. The reason that CVS is popular is that it is extremely nice if you have the particular development style that it suggests, and it was the first source-control system which was nice for anyone. The switch from CVS to more recent systems is an improvement, but it's not nearly as compelling as the switch from RCS to CVS.
Doesn't seem to do anything for me (still on 1.0 though); I think I get a blocked popup message for a moment, before I get a missing plugin message. Are you sure the ad companies haven't given up on attacking firefox, and gone on to attacking flash?
Actually, Linux support for the TPM chip has already gone into Linus's repository and will be included in 2.6.12. So there will be a long period where, if you want OS support for the TPM chip, you need to use Linux.
Ah, yes. I thought that there was a bar to patentability for inventions published without notification that they are "patent pending" before the patent is granted, although I can't now find this. In any case, I understated my point since I didn't have time to look up details; my claim may be overly restrictive, but that doesn't matter for the present situation.
As for the possibility of other creators, I suspect that, while the company may be supposed to have difficulties, chances are that they would simply omit them from the application and deny their contributions.
You are right that anyone who got the code under the GPL retains the rights granted by the GPL. However, the company is claiming to have gotten the code by way of the employment contract, not the GPL.
Assuming the employment contract is valid, the company owns the copyright to all of the work done by the employee. In this case, they don't have to abide by the GPL, because they don't need a license of any sort for it. "You don't have to agree to the GPL, but nothing other than the GPL grants you the right to distribute the software" is the usual mechanism. If, however, something other than the GPL (such as owning the code yourself) grants you rights to it, the GPL doesn't matter. This is, however, not the case if the original author accepted substantial changes from somebody else, because that means that he didn't have sole copyright to give up. The other authors can put pressure on the company to abide by the GPL, because they own some of it. Also, if the author had assigned copyright to the FSF, the author couldn't give it to the company later, and the FSF could force the company to follow the GPL.
Additionally, the employment contract is probably not really enforceable; the author could claim that he still actually holds the copyrights, and the company is violating them.
As for the patent, it would be invalid if the program was published without a "patent-pending" notice a year before the application was filed. Not that validity of patents actually seems to matter these days, unfortunately.
The BBC isn't a media company in the usual sense. They get their funding from the British government, not advertisers or ticket sales. Lumping them and the MPAA together is a bit like expecting Linus and Bill Gates to agree on government policy. The BBC didn't lose any money due to this, because it probably didn't cause any britons to get rid of their televisions. The MPAA probably lost a bunch of money due to this, but that's what happens when the competition is better.
Of course, if someone rates you as having a 17 charisma, chances are that they already want to dance with you enough to overlook a certain amount of eccentricity. If she'd given you a 9 and danced with you because you'd passed your charisma check, that would be more impressive.
His economic arguments seem to neglect a number of factors in coming to the conclusion that large networks would always merge.
The first is that a single user may be a user of multiple networks; obviously, little value is created on account of a user of both networks when they merge, since the user could already communicate with all of the users. This effect can mean that two networks combined can simply cause the two network owners to share the value each of them had before (for example, the advent of VoIP means that people no longer need POTS lines, so the amount of money that can be extracted from consumers drops).
The second is that the communication value of a network may not be the reason for having it. For example, in the US, cell phones often have SMS, but it's a fragmented network. The networks don't merge, however, because SMS isn't widely used in comparison to voice service. The companies derive the greatest benefit from people paying a bit extra to get a SMS-capable phone, but using voice instead. Merging the SMS networks would increase their value greatly, but still wouldn't compare to the value of the existing universal network.
Between these two effects, the dot-com bust is predictable, especially when you realize that it happened among a userbase who could already call each other on the phone. Even if the value of a global network is huge, the ability of companies to extract that value in revenue is very limited.
The effect of spam can be seen as changing the nature of the network to a broadcast network, generally acknowledged to be worth O(n). The change is value from adding users is negated if they communicate with the network as a whole rather than individually with each (or some) of the members.
The argument based on Zipf's Law makes sense as a general rule, because an individual gets 1/k value from the kth most valuable user. On the other hand, this misses two points.
The links which would be most valuable may not be in the network yet. Adding user k+1 doesn't give only value 1/(k+1) to each user, because the new user is probably not less valuable than all of the existing users to each of the existing users. If the network already included everyone, Zipf's law would apply directly. But the total value to a user of n users out of a world of m users is (n log m)/m. If we assume that there is a constant number of people in the world and that the users of a network are randomly chosen from that pool, then the total value to any given user of that user's links is O(n), and the value of the network is O(n^2). We just have to remember that we hit a wall at the point where practically everyone is connected, and growing the population is only worth O(m log m).
The basic insight is that, if your friends are split across two SMS networks, there is a large value to you in them joining. If your friends picked SMS networks at random (or based on some unrelated consideration), this is likely to happen.
On the other hand, a network constructed by value (that is, if new users are chosen to be of high value to the existing users) is going to extract the value of a larger network at a smaller size and then grow at the O(n log n) rate in a merger. This is why AOL was of high value by itself (lots of friends and family) and the internet was of high value by itself (lots of people who collaborated), but the connection did not add all that much to either (with the primary exception of AOL users going off to college). Opposed to this is the fact that a user may get a different set of high-value links by having new needs; picking up a new hobby will radically improve the values of a set of previously low-valued links, and, to a certain extent, reshuffle the selection of users on the network.
So my estimation is that there are several flaws with the essentially correct O(n^2) idea: separate networks get extra total value out of duplication, at the expense of the users; all networks, even with different properties, compete with each other; it's limited and
Each of the APUs in a Cell has SIMD instructions. Also, the PU handles dispatch, so it's not all that much like traditional SMP from the compiler's point of view.
Recent versions of Firefox, at least for installing plugins, don't pop up a dialog box. Instead, there is an unobtrusive bar at the top of the window, which essentially says, "if you're missing something on this page, here's how to get it". A very similar bar is used to let you see pop-up ads, in case you actually wanted something in a pop-up. The user default may be to answer "Yes" to any dialog boxes, but they default to not messing with anything they don't have to.
Why do you want to have songs that aren't worth five cents? If I were to listen to a song that's not worth five cents, I'd rather have my three minutes back than my five cents back. I would want my money back, but not to avoid losing it, but rather to avoid giving anything to people who give me music I dislike. I certainly wouldn't want to listen to such a bad song again.
I'd personally be willing to pay more for a song I'd already downloaded and heard a dozen times than a song I hadn't heard all of yet. I don't want to support music I don't like, and I don't really even want to risk it. The content business, despite what they seem to think, actually depends entirely on the goodwill of customers. Customers can avoid paying, and it is only out of a desire to reward people they like that they pay anyway.
No law is perfectly clear, just like no documentation is perfectly clear and no specification is perfectly clear. The only law which could be perfectly clear is one which specified exactly who it would apply to and what the punishment, and those laws are unconstitutional (being bills of attainder).
I doubt that a law which actually said, "This law does not apply to individuals selling their own items on eBay" would be permitted. What about other auction sites? What if eBay changed its name? What about businesses selling items they already own? It doesn't make the law clearer; it just makes the intention of the law harder to determine.
Chances are that the law as written does not apply to individuals selling their own items on eBay, and that the reporter couldn't be bothered to look, and the author of the bill didn't know how eBay works. If it doesn't apply to normal eBay users, why should the author of the bill know anything about eBay? Does it apply to TSOP components? Just because a reporter is dumb enough to ask doesn't mean that the author of the bill should know the answer.
The fundamental idea that you can specify a law completely in the abstract is simply false. You can't do it with real laws in the real world. You can't even do it with idealized rules of games (ever look at rulings on the rules of collectable card games?). You can't do it with customer requirements for computer programs. You can't do it for anything no less complex than arithmatic. That's why it has to come down to people arguing about gray areas and making decisions about those gray areas which actually arise.
The grandparent didn't specify that more comments indicates more maturity. I think it is unambiguously true (although a bit vacuous) to say that closer to the optimal number of comments indicates more maturity.
Personally, I rarely comment my code. There are a couple of comments which substitute for statements (e.g., stating when I mean to fall through to the next case in a switch statement), and I occasionally comment some tricky statement (generally, inside a tricky conditional, I say what the intent of the test is). On the other hand, I extensively comment my declarations. Each C function gets some documentation in the header file (what are the units for the arguments; who is responsible for the memory; what happens in odd conditions; etc.), and most Java functions get javadoc (unless they are completely specified by the declaration in an interface or parent), because there's generally something that would require reading the code carefully to figure it out. Structure/class fields generally get the most documentation, because it's a real pain to figure out exactly how they behave by reading the code, since the code isn't structured that way. I've got fields where I exhaustively list all values the field can have and what they mean. If you're writing code to prepend a chunk of data to a self-resizing ring buffer, the best documentation is to explain exactly what the indices mean and give diagrams of the structure. The code documents itself, but the variable names can't tell you everything you need to know. Documenting declarations also has the advantage that you tend to kill (or update) the comment when you change the declaration, or at least orphan it in an obvious way, and declarations don't change as much anyway (because when you change them, you have to find and change everything that uses them).
There are a lot of applications for advances in game physics. Sure, modelling the real world is one application, but a general array of vector units (like the Cell processor has) would be equally good for cartoon physics modelling if that was the desired application.
One thing I can think of is that Katamari Damacy would play better if it had a better physics model, such that, for example, welcome mats would bend while screen doors wouldn't, and telephone poles wouldn't bend but the wires on them would hang off. The game would also get more interesting if, for example, umbrellas were bouncy when pushed from the sides (but not the top), such that your katamari would start to bounce when you'd picked them up and then rolled over that side. It would also be amusing if live things in your katamari could move to knock it off course.
In any case, there is always the risk of advancing things in a way that just isn't good for gameplay, but there's also the potential for advances to make new gameplay feasible; and it is generally favorable to model the real world by default, while having the game change things as necessary to make it fun.
No law is perfectly clear when passed. No matter how exact it is, it is always possible to come up with a situation that sort of matches. And it's always possible to come up with a rationale for why some law somewhere applies. That's why the courts maintain records and case law; everything really comes down to interpretation by judges, and the need for consistency is supplied by reference to earlier decision.
Probably, there's already case law defining an auctioneer as someone who accepts items from people, auctions them off, and pays the owners all but a commission. In that case, the law is already entirely clear that it doesn't apply to eBay users, but the author of the bill doesn't know eBay and the media doesn't know the law. If you set up a service where people would send you an item, you'd sell it on eBay, and you'd subtract a commission and send back the rest of the money, then you'd probably need a license; that happens not to be common, but you have to have some experience with eBay to know that (and there might be sites like eBay where that is common).
If this law isn't clear in context already, what will happen, most likely, is that it will never be applied to individuals selling their own items on eBay, because nobody thinks of such people as auctioneers, and, were such a person arrested for not having a license, they'd argue that the law doesn't apply, and win their case on this basis. People who regularly do business through eBay would sue the state for clarification, and get a ruling one way or the other for the unclear situations, most likely contributing, in general, to the definition of the terms, rather than to only this particular bill.
I think it would be an interesting school assignment to find something that Wikipedia's missing, research it, and write an entry. Of course, it might be difficult to find a topic at this point. And it would probably destroy the teacher's credibility on matters of writing if students were to notice that the style required for school papers is completely unlike anything that is used to convey information in the real world.
Actually, both of them are "Why do traffic estimates for my Ad Group differ from those given by the standalone tool?". And there was never a difference in the page body. It's only the title that changes (as in the top of the browser window, not the heading in the body). No idea why the topics changed, but it's unrelated to the point of the story.
It's weird that they're stuffing the title with keywords, because it's their engine (so they could just give their own pages a boost without messing with the cache; etc.). Also, they're putting in keywords most of which actually appear in the page.
And the title-stuffing doesn't seem to work especially well, anyway; that cache page says that "estimate" only appears in links pointing to the page, ignoring the fact that it is in the title of the cached version.
Actually, it's saying that randomized testing is as good at finding bugs as targetted testing by QA people. Targetted testing by the authors is better, because they know where the boundary conditions and tricky areas are.
Furthermore, randomized testing or static debuggers are better at finding some issues than unit tests, because people tend to write unit tests with only those inputs they've considered, while bugs often are due to the possibility of inputs that the author hasn't considered.
But NT wasn't an NSA recommendation. The NSA doesn't care about the security of fools who buy consumer operation systems.
Having a lot of hype will get the first episode a big audience. But if people are disappointed, it'll get bad reviews, and ratings will drop. This works for movies, but it's bad for a series, because advertizers won't expect the premiere to be all that big, and will know that the rest of the shows won't be big.
Anyway, nobody else has ratings the way the US does, so it matters even less for the BBC.
Last I heard, the Council had passed this months ago, and it had been in the Commission that it was being discussed and was sometimes on the A-list for adoption. Based on my understanding of the structure of the EU as of yesterday, this doesn't make any sense; not only is passing it as an A-list item wrong; not only is it against the rules to refuse to make something a B-list item; but the body which did this isn't even the right people.
Either I'm missing something major about the distribution of power in the EU, or the Parliament should skip voting on this directive and go straight for a vote of no confidence. Or perhaps they should pass a directive criminalizing ownership of software patents; not having the power or procedures to do this doesn't seem to be stopping the other side.
They have to be defended against violations in order to avoid becoming generic and therefore invalid, but that doesn't mean you can't license them to the general public for a variety of uses that you approve of. The trademark on "Linux" is perfectly fine, despite all of the Linux variants calling themselves "Linux", because Linus licensed it for that purpose. That doesn't mean that Sun could call their next Solaris version "Linux" with impunity, if it didn't have a Linux kernel.
Mozilla is trying to establish a trustworthy brand and identity, as you say; however, having an identity excludes potential participants, who are being identified as not part of the project. And their fear that other people's versions would reflect badly on them excludes those other people from feeling welcome.
One of the key strengths of the Linux brand is that people you trust for other reasons have a stake in it. Sure, there are people out there who release terrible versions of Linux, but you don't get it from them. There are also people out there who release versions of Linux with special features for just your problem, and that's part of what Linux is about (e.g., Intrinsyc ships a Linux version with special support for the hardware on their embedded devices; the Linux Audio Development project has a version which avoids skips when recording audio; these projects couldn't call themselves Linux if Linus managed the trademark the way Mozilla manages theirs, and it would reduce the recognition of Linux as something that can solve any problem you happen to have).