And, in fact, the latest peace effort is by Israeli and Palestinian civilians to entirely skip their government bodies and negotiate with each other as a group of people harmed by conflict. These are people who affect corporate interests, government committees, nearby countries, foreign funding, and so forth. Working on FOSS together is very much in this spirit. I look forward to the day when Arafat tells Palestinians that the PLO's administrative functions depend on Israeli tech support and development, and it would be a major setback for any of them to get killed. Random violence is much more difficult when you have to be careful.
The framebuffer console kernel project has too few developers for the variety of available hardware, and the developers are (from my reading of the mailing list) not especially well organized in their interactions. So a lot of hardware seems to lag behind in API changes and get subtly broken in various ways. That might give this impression.
Also, it's relatively difficult to specify a 3D API, so that you can use hardware rendering, particularly because it means that you have to do 3D in software in the same layer for anything that doesn't support some particular operation (or some set of arguments), which means that you're going to have to do 3D in the kernel, which nobody would be happen about.
Of course, the kernel is really the right place for device drivers, and good device drivers should make the differences between devices irrelevant (aside from performance and output quality), but anything complicated with graphics cards is such a mess that it hasn't been moved to the kernel.
Actually, one thing I'd really be pleased about if the dissolution of the "core team" brought it about: people writing drivers for XFree86 could move to writing them for the kernel instead, and XFree86 could do active development on both sides of the userspace/kernel division. (This is important for things like having the 3D rendering state of your graphics cards restored correctly after suspending to disk).
You can't really blame people for not getting into the semantic markup thing; until recently, the W3C itself was using table tags on their front page to do sidebars. For that matter, they're now using CSS to do sidebars, which means that it takes two extra http requests to determine that certain parts are supposed to be floated, and there's no indication anywhere that the navigation links aren't part of the main content of the page.
Re:xforms is intriguing
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XForms Essentials
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think it's mostly just verbose. It's designed in the "xxml" style, where you skip using any useful xml features and use xml tags to represent them. (E.g., you have an item, which has a label and a value. The economical way to do this is to make the value an attribute, since it can't contain markup, and have the label be the content of the tag, since it possibly can. The way they do it is to have a tag, which contains a tag for the label, which includes the text of the label, and a tag for the value, which includes the text of the value. Verbose, hard to read, and doesn't validate the markup as tightly. But it seems to be the fashion these days.)
It also requires you to first specify what the form is supposed to contain as far as results, and then specify how the form is supposed to be arranged. This is verbose, but it is probably an advantage for JSPs and CGIs and so forth (i.e., anything that has forms in it), because it means that there is a place that specifies what form submissions will contain, all in one place. So you don't have to dig through all of the code that generates the layout of the form to find the input tags to figure out what will be in the request.
Of course, it does mean that there's more stuff that has to go in the document head to support stuff that will be included inline, which is kind of a pain.
I suspect that they want to have the compiler finish with the intermediate language. That doesn't means that another piece of software won't start with the intermediate language and generate native code, however. The point of it being an intermediate language (instead of a common machine code) is that the file contains enough information to then do further platform-specific optimizations. Java bytecode is, in fact, this way, with the issue that, when it was first released, nobody had any clue how to deal with it effectively, because stack machines have long been out of fashion as hardware designs, and bytecodes hadn't been used for anything heavy-duty. Nowadays, Java bytecodes are a perfectly good intermediate language to write a back-end for, except that they're full of Java-specific opcodes.
The thing that makes Microsoft special is that it can (reasonably) legitimately cook the books such that their results don't go through good times and bad times. In good times, they put their extra income into hiding, such that they can pull it out later to cover the bad times. The fact that they're actually having a flat quarter, therefore, means that either they decided they wanted to have a flat quarter (other companies getting too jealous and dangerous, perhaps), accounting standards have become such that they can't do this trick anymore (in the wake of Enron, it's possible), or they've been actually having bad times for long enough that they've run out of ways to cover them.
It's certainly possible that the market for MS products hasn't grown any since the mid 90s, when they saturated the market for everything they make money on, and so their trend of making more on paper each year has now caught up with them. This could be simply a result of the fact that you can't make any more money when you already have all the money.
It's also possible that their tricks have now been outlawed in such a way that someone would actually end up in jail, so now they have to report what they actually make when they actually make it. I wouldn't be too surprised if this were the case, since regulators and Congress have been really worried about companies doing exactly what Microsoft does not to maintain the appearance of slowly and steadily improving, but simply staying in business.
Or maybe Microsoft is actually at the end of their rope, and have avoided appearing this way due to their enormous assets and complex accounting, and will lose all their money next year. I wouldn't bet on that, but I wouldn't be surprised if this quarter signals that Microsoft will no longer be performing (in an earnings way) absolutely reliably in the future, which may shake the market's weird (from a technical standpoint) confidence in them.
Since the point of term papers is not, in fact, to learn to write term papers, it is likely that, as the production of term papers becomes possible while missing the point, the assignment should be changed to retain the point.
The ability to do research (of known information, at least) has already been changed by technology. Google, PubMed, and other sites make real literature research possible for high school students with just a web browser, and the kind of slogging through printed books that I learned in high school is now entirely obsolete, like long division. Doing a term paper on the Oneida Community in high school, I was limited to the books in my high school library and town library (and my parent's tableware), and I had to look in card catalogs and chase references to do it. Today, I can just type "Oneida Community" into Google, and I get primary sources, the site's own information, photos, and various essays on the subject. The old skills simply don't produce as good information as is trivially available today.
Technology replaces the gruntwork in research, and allows a given assignment to take less time finding the information and more time thinking about it. If the point is to teach students to learn new things, shouldn't it be encouraged to eliminate with technology all of the parts which are not part of learning new things, but rather part of demonstrating that you have learned them?
If you are required to come to a novel conclusion after looking at everything written on your topic, and then argue that position, it doesn't matter how little of the text you personally writing originally; if the result is a logical argument, you must have understood the topic and selected suitable raw material for it.
I think the real problem with term papers is that you are encouraged to come to the same conclusions that everybody else does, but to put it in your own words. In writing such a term paper, good research will turn up something that is exactly what you want to say. New things aren't part of the assignment at all. The task is essentially to rephrase something that's already well-written, and this task will soon be automatable.
All good compilers use at least one intermediate language. It's practically impossible to do good optimizations otherwise, even on a single platform. For example, you want to inline functions if that would improve performance, but in order to determine whether it improves performance means that you need to look at things like register allocation, which depends on things like the machine code implementation of complex expressions; however, inlining a function needs to be done with the higher level information about flow control and the structure of the function call. So you basically can't do any of the interesting optimizations without a good intermediate language.
Furthermore, getting from the high-level langauge to the intermediate language is cross-platform, which means that any optimizations done at this level are then available to all of the code generators for different platforms; this code is reused across back-ends. It also means that you can support multiple front-ends with the same back-end, and make your C++ and Java automatically compatible by virtue of sharing an intermediate language, and they also both benefit from the same architecture-specific back-end.
There's no reason that having an intermediate language means that you'll stop compiling at that level and use an interpreter for the intermediate language to run the program. In fact, gcc always compiles its intermediate language into machine code, and it can compile Java bytecode into machine code as well. Modern JVMs compile the bytecode into native machine code when the tradeoff seems to be favorable, and they can do optimizations at this point that a C compiler can't do (such as inlining the function that a function pointer usually points to).
An intermediate language essentially pushes more of the skill into the optimizing compiler, because the same optimizing compiler can be used for more tasks. Also, if the compiler is used at runtime, it can optimze based on profiling the actual workload on the actual hardware. This is especially important if, for example, IBM decides to distribute a single set of binaries which should run optimally on all of their hardware; you run the optimizer with the best possible information.
And, if this technology is sufficient to write good term papers based on online information, what is the point of learning to write term papers? Certainly any students who have access to such technology will have no use for doing it themselves after school, when the technology will be more advanced and more money will be available for it.
At that point, teachers ought to be teaching students how to get such software to produce the effect they want on the audience. For that matter, they could try teaching and encouraging students to come up with new ideas and conclusions to feed the computer.
As far as term papers which are meant to reflect not on writing skill but on research skill, they really ought to be replaced with having the students explain the material to the class. Even if the presentation is written by a computer, the student will have to find the necessary input, and have to learn the material well enough to give the presentation sensibly, which is essentially the point of literature research.
The skill of coming up with a new way to express the same ideas that have been expressed before is, ultimately, useless. At the same time, advances in communications have made it much more possible to find the raw material to come up with new conclusions. Writing unadorned prose will eventually become as insignificant a skill as long division. The available research techniques are also changing drastically. At some point, it will be necessary to ask what the point of term papers is supposed to be, and how best to test those skills.
Consider this assignment: using this database of past essays from this class, and other similar classes at this school and others as secondary sources, and using the primary sources that these essays cite, find a position or focus on a topic that interests you that is not held by any of the essays, and argue it, arguing against each of the essays which contradicts your position. Simple enough to pose (given such a database and a search engine) and to do, but you're not going to find an essay in the database or elsewhere that does the trick, because you have to contradict every local essay in some way, and any essay not in the database won't reference the necessary essays in the database.
"Linux is going to be crushed due to SCO IP issues, and Microsoft isn't? Then why do you cough up however much money SCO wants for licensing fees whenever they ask, while Linux companies are sufficiently confident to countersue SCO? Don't you know that SCO extorts and sues their licensees and nobody else? Hasn't SCO beaten you in court before?"
If everything were legitimate between SCO and Microsoft, as Microsoft has to pretend, Microsoft seems to have arbitrary licensing obligations to SCO which they admit to. Surely this is a far more dangerous situation to buy into than Linux. (Maybe Microsoft thinks that SCO really does own the errno values, and recognizes that it would be impossible to change them.)
It can pass between any number of students, so long as the students are given the source and permitted to release it under the GPL. The GPL does not require releasing the modified code to the original developers, to the general public, or to anyone other than people who get binaries. The GPL doesn't require you to release the source to people you perform services for. So it would be perfectly fine for them to have a company which checks people's code, and never release the source to their checker.
Of course, Stanford will probably release it at some point, since academic institutions tend to want to exchange information to improve research.
I'm fairly certain that press releases do not have the direct connection to exchange of money necessary to be fraudulent. If they were actually investment advice, then they would be, but they aren't. All of their SEC filings, which do have to be true, seem to have been honest.
If they actually demand money from anyone and actually accept it, that is fraud. However, that hasn't actually happened, much as they seem to suggest that it has. (Aside from getting money from Sun and MS, both of which are legitimate, as Sun and MS both actually license code that Novell owns.)
In any case, it's far more likely to be the FBI that goes after SCO when that section starts, since SCO has been meticulous about everything that the SEC cares about.
SCO has to claim something in court, and claiming something that has already been demolished is perjury (rather than just wrong). The more that gets discussed in advance, the less they can bring up in court, and the more likely it is that the case simply gets dismissed when SCO fails to actually claim that IBM did anything illegal. Of course, SCO will come up with something to say at the last minute, but the more that gets eliminated in advance, the less they will have and the quicker they'll lose.
Email exchange is private, unless you're sending to a mailing list. Then it's limited to the people who are on the mailing list, unless it's a mailing list archived online. If it's archived online and can get mail from people who are not subscribed, then it's identical to usenet except for the underlying protocols.
In fact, Pine has provided the same interface to email and usenet for ages. Google actually provides a web forum interface to usenet.
The only real difference between email and usenet is what the protocol is designed for. There is a spectrum from one-to-one communications to general broadcast, and different protocols are better for different things. And, these days, HTML over HTTP is available for the whole range. The interesting thing is putting a common interface (Outlook in MS's case) over all of these communications, regardless of the native protocols involved.
What are the chances that we'll still be using the Gregorian calendar in Y10K? Considering that we've only been using the current numbering of years for 1300 years and the Gregorian calendar for 250 years, it doesn't seem implausible that we'll change the calendar before 4-digit years run out.
In fact, it's probably best to use something like a 64 bit number of seconds since the start of 1900, which will continue to work (with a different base) when the calendar changes, and should outlive the sun. Calculating how to display these times to people is pretty easy, and can be updated if necessary without messing up any stored data.
The cow thing is actually just an urban legend. If Boston were actually laid out by cows, it would be much easier to get to the Common.
Substantial factors in how Boston is laid out include where the waterline was at various times (much of Boston is on fill, so the old roads don't go to a lot of places and often went along the shore, which isn't meaningful anymore), the need to store gunpowder (which nobody wants to build next to), all the hills, and the idea that it would probably be attacked (hence Castle Island, as well as a number of other fortifications). Considering that a war actually did start in the area, it wasn't a bad idea to plan for it, particularly since the locals used guerilla tactics. The longer the best route to where the British were going was, the more you got to shoot at them while they were just marching.
Oh, I live in Boston (actually, Somerville, one of the near semi-suburbs within the subway-accessible area), and I love it. I just think that the Big Dig has been a major annoyance, and not particularly useful. The reason that car traffic is a nightmare is that Boston was mostly laid out for defense. It's all twisty narrow streets that don't go anywhere logical. There isn't anywhere to park cars, the streets are one way in random directions, you have to merge across other traffic to get anywhere, and the signs are misleading. Car traffic is a nightmare not due to the highways, but due to the fact that there's nothing to do with your car is you get off the highway; the solution is nothing to do with the highways but rather to get people to not take their cars into the city. In order to do this, you need to provide better access to public transit for people in the suburbs, which means making the orange line nicer and having convenient parking at Sullivan Square, making the south end of the red line nicer, and making the green line reasonable fast with suitable parking; that is, get the people driving on 90 and 93 to park their cars before adding them to the mess in the city.
It's not like the Big Dig is really worthwhile for people in Boston. Those Boston residents who will be able to look out on nice parks in two years are presently looking out on rubble and construction barriers, and have spent the past decade with a huge traffic mess all around them. Perhaps their kids will actually have a net gain in quality of life.
Really, it would have been far better to replace 93 with well-maintained mass transit and good parking from Assembly Square south as far as the traffic goes. With $16 billion (or even $2.5 billion) they could have actually improved things. There are better ways to get cars around Boston (like 95), and getting more cars into Boston is just silly.
Once this is all done, the traffic reports will still say that traffic is backed up as far as Assembly Square with people trying to get to downtown Boston. The only difference will be that they won't monitor some of it from the air, and they'll have to say that it's backed up over the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge instead of the lower deck.
It's not terribly surprising that the fundies want to ban Narnia, since some of them missed the fact that he was a Christian philosopher, and the rest probably noticed the fact that one of his positions was that the fundies are essentially a satanic cult who will destroy the world in the end. So either you miss the allegory, and it's stories about magic and stuff, or you catch the allegory, and it's stories about how evil fundamentalism is. Either way, not what fundamentalists want promoted.
Actually, what you've described is actually PKI, which is what you need for e-commerce but not for anonymity. It's probably easier to make anonymous file sharing work than it is to verify that a server you've never connected to is the server you expect it to be.
Those were the defective Uruk-hai. Saruman had clearly ordered his entire force to Helm's Deep at that point. The only Uruk-hai left at Isengard are therefore the ones that wouldn't stand up to getting hit by small stones while wearing armor.
Given that he returned to save Rohan with the only remaining army of any significance, saving Theoden along with everybody else, I suspect the people of Rohan simply overlooked the death sentence. Between the army, Gandalf, and Theoden, they should be able to save him, even if he did give Aragorn a hard time when they met previously.
The RIAA isn't responsible for making encryption commonly deployed; sending credit card numbers to websites is. The pattern is essentially the same, however. The cryptographers work on stuff, the security people say you really need to use encryption, but people generally don't actually do anything about it until something of value to them is stolen, at which point encryption becomes widely used and transparent. A few years go by, and everybody forgets that what they're using is encryption.
Now people talk about how they expect encryption to get outlawed. I think Amazon's $19B market cap which depends directly on encryption and eBay's $38B which essentially requires it (not to mention all of the companies which do some of their business online) will prevent this. Then there are VPNs, telecommuting, overseas content outsourcing, and so forth. Encryption is, at this point, something the US economy depends significantly on, and it's not going to get outlawed any time soon.
Probably the biggest problem with the governmental situation in Iraq is that the people don't have much respect for a foriegn-run or foriegn-trained government, but there are few Iraqis with any governmental experience at this point. Having an IT infrastructure which is Free Software could give the people a feeling of self-determination. Sure, they can't have their own government quite yet, but at least they could have their own Linux distribution.
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And, in fact, the latest peace effort is by Israeli and Palestinian civilians to entirely skip their government bodies and negotiate with each other as a group of people harmed by conflict. These are people who affect corporate interests, government committees, nearby countries, foreign funding, and so forth. Working on FOSS together is very much in this spirit. I look forward to the day when Arafat tells Palestinians that the PLO's administrative functions depend on Israeli tech support and development, and it would be a major setback for any of them to get killed. Random violence is much more difficult when you have to be careful.
The framebuffer console kernel project has too few developers for the variety of available hardware, and the developers are (from my reading of the mailing list) not especially well organized in their interactions. So a lot of hardware seems to lag behind in API changes and get subtly broken in various ways. That might give this impression.
Also, it's relatively difficult to specify a 3D API, so that you can use hardware rendering, particularly because it means that you have to do 3D in software in the same layer for anything that doesn't support some particular operation (or some set of arguments), which means that you're going to have to do 3D in the kernel, which nobody would be happen about.
Of course, the kernel is really the right place for device drivers, and good device drivers should make the differences between devices irrelevant (aside from performance and output quality), but anything complicated with graphics cards is such a mess that it hasn't been moved to the kernel.
Actually, one thing I'd really be pleased about if the dissolution of the "core team" brought it about: people writing drivers for XFree86 could move to writing them for the kernel instead, and XFree86 could do active development on both sides of the userspace/kernel division. (This is important for things like having the 3D rendering state of your graphics cards restored correctly after suspending to disk).
You can't really blame people for not getting into the semantic markup thing; until recently, the W3C itself was using table tags on their front page to do sidebars. For that matter, they're now using CSS to do sidebars, which means that it takes two extra http requests to determine that certain parts are supposed to be floated, and there's no indication anywhere that the navigation links aren't part of the main content of the page.
I think it's mostly just verbose. It's designed in the "xxml" style, where you skip using any useful xml features and use xml tags to represent them. (E.g., you have an item, which has a label and a value. The economical way to do this is to make the value an attribute, since it can't contain markup, and have the label be the content of the tag, since it possibly can. The way they do it is to have a tag, which contains a tag for the label, which includes the text of the label, and a tag for the value, which includes the text of the value. Verbose, hard to read, and doesn't validate the markup as tightly. But it seems to be the fashion these days.)
It also requires you to first specify what the form is supposed to contain as far as results, and then specify how the form is supposed to be arranged. This is verbose, but it is probably an advantage for JSPs and CGIs and so forth (i.e., anything that has forms in it), because it means that there is a place that specifies what form submissions will contain, all in one place. So you don't have to dig through all of the code that generates the layout of the form to find the input tags to figure out what will be in the request.
Of course, it does mean that there's more stuff that has to go in the document head to support stuff that will be included inline, which is kind of a pain.
I suspect that they want to have the compiler finish with the intermediate language. That doesn't means that another piece of software won't start with the intermediate language and generate native code, however. The point of it being an intermediate language (instead of a common machine code) is that the file contains enough information to then do further platform-specific optimizations. Java bytecode is, in fact, this way, with the issue that, when it was first released, nobody had any clue how to deal with it effectively, because stack machines have long been out of fashion as hardware designs, and bytecodes hadn't been used for anything heavy-duty. Nowadays, Java bytecodes are a perfectly good intermediate language to write a back-end for, except that they're full of Java-specific opcodes.
The thing that makes Microsoft special is that it can (reasonably) legitimately cook the books such that their results don't go through good times and bad times. In good times, they put their extra income into hiding, such that they can pull it out later to cover the bad times. The fact that they're actually having a flat quarter, therefore, means that either they decided they wanted to have a flat quarter (other companies getting too jealous and dangerous, perhaps), accounting standards have become such that they can't do this trick anymore (in the wake of Enron, it's possible), or they've been actually having bad times for long enough that they've run out of ways to cover them.
It's certainly possible that the market for MS products hasn't grown any since the mid 90s, when they saturated the market for everything they make money on, and so their trend of making more on paper each year has now caught up with them. This could be simply a result of the fact that you can't make any more money when you already have all the money.
It's also possible that their tricks have now been outlawed in such a way that someone would actually end up in jail, so now they have to report what they actually make when they actually make it. I wouldn't be too surprised if this were the case, since regulators and Congress have been really worried about companies doing exactly what Microsoft does not to maintain the appearance of slowly and steadily improving, but simply staying in business.
Or maybe Microsoft is actually at the end of their rope, and have avoided appearing this way due to their enormous assets and complex accounting, and will lose all their money next year. I wouldn't bet on that, but I wouldn't be surprised if this quarter signals that Microsoft will no longer be performing (in an earnings way) absolutely reliably in the future, which may shake the market's weird (from a technical standpoint) confidence in them.
Since the point of term papers is not, in fact, to learn to write term papers, it is likely that, as the production of term papers becomes possible while missing the point, the assignment should be changed to retain the point.
The ability to do research (of known information, at least) has already been changed by technology. Google, PubMed, and other sites make real literature research possible for high school students with just a web browser, and the kind of slogging through printed books that I learned in high school is now entirely obsolete, like long division. Doing a term paper on the Oneida Community in high school, I was limited to the books in my high school library and town library (and my parent's tableware), and I had to look in card catalogs and chase references to do it. Today, I can just type "Oneida Community" into Google, and I get primary sources, the site's own information, photos, and various essays on the subject. The old skills simply don't produce as good information as is trivially available today.
Technology replaces the gruntwork in research, and allows a given assignment to take less time finding the information and more time thinking about it. If the point is to teach students to learn new things, shouldn't it be encouraged to eliminate with technology all of the parts which are not part of learning new things, but rather part of demonstrating that you have learned them?
If you are required to come to a novel conclusion after looking at everything written on your topic, and then argue that position, it doesn't matter how little of the text you personally writing originally; if the result is a logical argument, you must have understood the topic and selected suitable raw material for it.
I think the real problem with term papers is that you are encouraged to come to the same conclusions that everybody else does, but to put it in your own words. In writing such a term paper, good research will turn up something that is exactly what you want to say. New things aren't part of the assignment at all. The task is essentially to rephrase something that's already well-written, and this task will soon be automatable.
All good compilers use at least one intermediate language. It's practically impossible to do good optimizations otherwise, even on a single platform. For example, you want to inline functions if that would improve performance, but in order to determine whether it improves performance means that you need to look at things like register allocation, which depends on things like the machine code implementation of complex expressions; however, inlining a function needs to be done with the higher level information about flow control and the structure of the function call. So you basically can't do any of the interesting optimizations without a good intermediate language.
Furthermore, getting from the high-level langauge to the intermediate language is cross-platform, which means that any optimizations done at this level are then available to all of the code generators for different platforms; this code is reused across back-ends. It also means that you can support multiple front-ends with the same back-end, and make your C++ and Java automatically compatible by virtue of sharing an intermediate language, and they also both benefit from the same architecture-specific back-end.
There's no reason that having an intermediate language means that you'll stop compiling at that level and use an interpreter for the intermediate language to run the program. In fact, gcc always compiles its intermediate language into machine code, and it can compile Java bytecode into machine code as well. Modern JVMs compile the bytecode into native machine code when the tradeoff seems to be favorable, and they can do optimizations at this point that a C compiler can't do (such as inlining the function that a function pointer usually points to).
An intermediate language essentially pushes more of the skill into the optimizing compiler, because the same optimizing compiler can be used for more tasks. Also, if the compiler is used at runtime, it can optimze based on profiling the actual workload on the actual hardware. This is especially important if, for example, IBM decides to distribute a single set of binaries which should run optimally on all of their hardware; you run the optimizer with the best possible information.
And, if this technology is sufficient to write good term papers based on online information, what is the point of learning to write term papers? Certainly any students who have access to such technology will have no use for doing it themselves after school, when the technology will be more advanced and more money will be available for it.
At that point, teachers ought to be teaching students how to get such software to produce the effect they want on the audience. For that matter, they could try teaching and encouraging students to come up with new ideas and conclusions to feed the computer.
As far as term papers which are meant to reflect not on writing skill but on research skill, they really ought to be replaced with having the students explain the material to the class. Even if the presentation is written by a computer, the student will have to find the necessary input, and have to learn the material well enough to give the presentation sensibly, which is essentially the point of literature research.
The skill of coming up with a new way to express the same ideas that have been expressed before is, ultimately, useless. At the same time, advances in communications have made it much more possible to find the raw material to come up with new conclusions. Writing unadorned prose will eventually become as insignificant a skill as long division. The available research techniques are also changing drastically. At some point, it will be necessary to ask what the point of term papers is supposed to be, and how best to test those skills.
Consider this assignment: using this database of past essays from this class, and other similar classes at this school and others as secondary sources, and using the primary sources that these essays cite, find a position or focus on a topic that interests you that is not held by any of the essays, and argue it, arguing against each of the essays which contradicts your position. Simple enough to pose (given such a database and a search engine) and to do, but you're not going to find an essay in the database or elsewhere that does the trick, because you have to contradict every local essay in some way, and any essay not in the database won't reference the necessary essays in the database.
I think he intends to do computer work and actually live in the middle of nowhere. You can stay there much longer if you're getting paid...
"Linux is going to be crushed due to SCO IP issues, and Microsoft isn't? Then why do you cough up however much money SCO wants for licensing fees whenever they ask, while Linux companies are sufficiently confident to countersue SCO? Don't you know that SCO extorts and sues their licensees and nobody else? Hasn't SCO beaten you in court before?"
If everything were legitimate between SCO and Microsoft, as Microsoft has to pretend, Microsoft seems to have arbitrary licensing obligations to SCO which they admit to. Surely this is a far more dangerous situation to buy into than Linux. (Maybe Microsoft thinks that SCO really does own the errno values, and recognizes that it would be impossible to change them.)
It can pass between any number of students, so long as the students are given the source and permitted to release it under the GPL. The GPL does not require releasing the modified code to the original developers, to the general public, or to anyone other than people who get binaries. The GPL doesn't require you to release the source to people you perform services for. So it would be perfectly fine for them to have a company which checks people's code, and never release the source to their checker.
Of course, Stanford will probably release it at some point, since academic institutions tend to want to exchange information to improve research.
I'm fairly certain that press releases do not have the direct connection to exchange of money necessary to be fraudulent. If they were actually investment advice, then they would be, but they aren't. All of their SEC filings, which do have to be true, seem to have been honest.
If they actually demand money from anyone and actually accept it, that is fraud. However, that hasn't actually happened, much as they seem to suggest that it has. (Aside from getting money from Sun and MS, both of which are legitimate, as Sun and MS both actually license code that Novell owns.)
In any case, it's far more likely to be the FBI that goes after SCO when that section starts, since SCO has been meticulous about everything that the SEC cares about.
SCO has to claim something in court, and claiming something that has already been demolished is perjury (rather than just wrong). The more that gets discussed in advance, the less they can bring up in court, and the more likely it is that the case simply gets dismissed when SCO fails to actually claim that IBM did anything illegal. Of course, SCO will come up with something to say at the last minute, but the more that gets eliminated in advance, the less they will have and the quicker they'll lose.
Email exchange is private, unless you're sending to a mailing list. Then it's limited to the people who are on the mailing list, unless it's a mailing list archived online. If it's archived online and can get mail from people who are not subscribed, then it's identical to usenet except for the underlying protocols.
In fact, Pine has provided the same interface to email and usenet for ages. Google actually provides a web forum interface to usenet.
The only real difference between email and usenet is what the protocol is designed for. There is a spectrum from one-to-one communications to general broadcast, and different protocols are better for different things. And, these days, HTML over HTTP is available for the whole range. The interesting thing is putting a common interface (Outlook in MS's case) over all of these communications, regardless of the native protocols involved.
What are the chances that we'll still be using the Gregorian calendar in Y10K? Considering that we've only been using the current numbering of years for 1300 years and the Gregorian calendar for 250 years, it doesn't seem implausible that we'll change the calendar before 4-digit years run out.
In fact, it's probably best to use something like a 64 bit number of seconds since the start of 1900, which will continue to work (with a different base) when the calendar changes, and should outlive the sun. Calculating how to display these times to people is pretty easy, and can be updated if necessary without messing up any stored data.
The cow thing is actually just an urban legend. If Boston were actually laid out by cows, it would be much easier to get to the Common.
Substantial factors in how Boston is laid out include where the waterline was at various times (much of Boston is on fill, so the old roads don't go to a lot of places and often went along the shore, which isn't meaningful anymore), the need to store gunpowder (which nobody wants to build next to), all the hills, and the idea that it would probably be attacked (hence Castle Island, as well as a number of other fortifications). Considering that a war actually did start in the area, it wasn't a bad idea to plan for it, particularly since the locals used guerilla tactics. The longer the best route to where the British were going was, the more you got to shoot at them while they were just marching.
Oh, I live in Boston (actually, Somerville, one of the near semi-suburbs within the subway-accessible area), and I love it. I just think that the Big Dig has been a major annoyance, and not particularly useful. The reason that car traffic is a nightmare is that Boston was mostly laid out for defense. It's all twisty narrow streets that don't go anywhere logical. There isn't anywhere to park cars, the streets are one way in random directions, you have to merge across other traffic to get anywhere, and the signs are misleading. Car traffic is a nightmare not due to the highways, but due to the fact that there's nothing to do with your car is you get off the highway; the solution is nothing to do with the highways but rather to get people to not take their cars into the city. In order to do this, you need to provide better access to public transit for people in the suburbs, which means making the orange line nicer and having convenient parking at Sullivan Square, making the south end of the red line nicer, and making the green line reasonable fast with suitable parking; that is, get the people driving on 90 and 93 to park their cars before adding them to the mess in the city.
It's not like the Big Dig is really worthwhile for people in Boston. Those Boston residents who will be able to look out on nice parks in two years are presently looking out on rubble and construction barriers, and have spent the past decade with a huge traffic mess all around them. Perhaps their kids will actually have a net gain in quality of life.
Really, it would have been far better to replace 93 with well-maintained mass transit and good parking from Assembly Square south as far as the traffic goes. With $16 billion (or even $2.5 billion) they could have actually improved things. There are better ways to get cars around Boston (like 95), and getting more cars into Boston is just silly.
Once this is all done, the traffic reports will still say that traffic is backed up as far as Assembly Square with people trying to get to downtown Boston. The only difference will be that they won't monitor some of it from the air, and they'll have to say that it's backed up over the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge instead of the lower deck.
It's not terribly surprising that the fundies want to ban Narnia, since some of them missed the fact that he was a Christian philosopher, and the rest probably noticed the fact that one of his positions was that the fundies are essentially a satanic cult who will destroy the world in the end. So either you miss the allegory, and it's stories about magic and stuff, or you catch the allegory, and it's stories about how evil fundamentalism is. Either way, not what fundamentalists want promoted.
Actually, what you've described is actually PKI, which is what you need for e-commerce but not for anonymity. It's probably easier to make anonymous file sharing work than it is to verify that a server you've never connected to is the server you expect it to be.
Those were the defective Uruk-hai. Saruman had clearly ordered his entire force to Helm's Deep at that point. The only Uruk-hai left at Isengard are therefore the ones that wouldn't stand up to getting hit by small stones while wearing armor.
Given that he returned to save Rohan with the only remaining army of any significance, saving Theoden along with everybody else, I suspect the people of Rohan simply overlooked the death sentence. Between the army, Gandalf, and Theoden, they should be able to save him, even if he did give Aragorn a hard time when they met previously.
The RIAA isn't responsible for making encryption commonly deployed; sending credit card numbers to websites is. The pattern is essentially the same, however. The cryptographers work on stuff, the security people say you really need to use encryption, but people generally don't actually do anything about it until something of value to them is stolen, at which point encryption becomes widely used and transparent. A few years go by, and everybody forgets that what they're using is encryption.
Now people talk about how they expect encryption to get outlawed. I think Amazon's $19B market cap which depends directly on encryption and eBay's $38B which essentially requires it (not to mention all of the companies which do some of their business online) will prevent this. Then there are VPNs, telecommuting, overseas content outsourcing, and so forth. Encryption is, at this point, something the US economy depends significantly on, and it's not going to get outlawed any time soon.
Probably the biggest problem with the governmental situation in Iraq is that the people don't have much respect for a foriegn-run or foriegn-trained government, but there are few Iraqis with any governmental experience at this point. Having an IT infrastructure which is Free Software could give the people a feeling of self-determination. Sure, they can't have their own government quite yet, but at least they could have their own Linux distribution.