Re:This is not a troll, but a query...
on
Practical Common Lisp
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· Score: 2, Informative
While I'm definitely a ruby fan, the ability to easily write self-modifying code (and by that I assume you include the ability to easily write code generators and to mix and match those code generators with the rest of your code - aka common lisp macros) is really something rather unique to lisp. You don't think that this provides a compelling reason to learn lisp? I admit, that's only one reason, but it's a big one.
I've written Perl code that generates more Perl code that is then fed to eval. I've helped people write python code that generates more python code, and that is truly painful (the indentation-based grouping of Python makes this much more difficult than it needs to be). I admit I haven't done that specifically in Ruby, but I can't imagine that the experience would be very different from the same exercise in Perl.
None of these come close to the power and ease of use of Common Lisp macros.
I also question your statement "Lisp implements everything as a binary tree.". While it is true that the cons pair is the most common lisp data structure, and that all code is seen in terms of cons pairs, it's disingenuous to say that Common Lisp doesn't have arrays (vectors), hashtables, or structures with named slots. Often times people will produce a benchmark showing that "lisp is slow", when in fact they've gone and compared lists in lisp (implemented essentially as singly linked lists) to lists implemented with arrays in some other language, or compared assoc. lists with hashtables.
I didn't think that/. comments are to be written to impress you with their English abilities.
You're right, but there's a huge, huge gap between "Impressing me with your English abilities" and "Impressing me with your amazing lack of English ability". If you care so little about what you're writing to make such an egregious error in the title, why should I even bother reading it? There's spelling nits, and there are the errors found by grammar nazis, and then there's a whole other category of error so awful it makes one's teeth hurt. In that last case, the message is no longer clear because the fertilizer you've spread over your English obscures it.
If someone were giving a policy speech and began with an analogy about the Mathematical axiom of choice relating to feminist political goals, I'd stop listening right there. It's a similar situation here. Such a blatant disregard for what's leaving one's mouth (or, in the case of slashdot posts, one's computer) shows profound disrespect for the reader that I don't care to know the rest.
Indeed, with this post I jumped straight to the comments after the title, and so was surprised (although I admit, only slightly) to see all the other errors that the first response had pointed out. (I did this even though I find the idea of high schools teaching C++ interesting)
"Hey, I like this little color-selector widget that company XYZ uses in their paint program. It doesn't have the strange little artifacts here and there that ours does. I wonder how they did that? Fire up the debugger... oh, they hooked into WinObscureInternalFunctionCall32 and did fleem"
Whether or not some female students exchange sexual favors for grades, though, wasn't what we were talking about.
Of course that happens. Given the numbers of students and professors in this country, the average professor and student would have to be saints for it to not happen somewhere.
But, of course, I never claimed that didn't happen, nor did I even say it was uncommon. I said that geeks jockeying for position jumped on the blowjob joke, and that that's to be expected.
I think you meant to address your comments to someone else.
"nowadays"? You say that as though you remember a time when it was perfectly acceptable to publically suggest that a woman just go down on a prof if she wants better grades.
Look, I'm not trying to make you change all occurrences of "he" to "he/she" or some worse neologism, I'm not trying to make sure that all your example sentences have an equal balance of male and female names, and I'm not trying to make sure you hire unqualified employees so that your organization fits some desired overall demographics. I'm just saying - this is crude, and cheap, and symptomatic of a long-standing sexist tradition which exists inside computer geekdom. (and, as others have pointed out, exists elsewhere too)
To venture into an overstretched analogy, I'm not asking you to wash your hands several dozen times a day and scrub your skin till it bleeds to get the dirt off - I'm just requesting that people not piss on the carpet.
Also, "dogs" vs "whores"? Do you really believe that these are even vaguely equivalent terms?
I've watched this behavior, and it's much more prevalent (at least among all- or almost-all-male groups) when the group is a bunch of men who are constantly jockeying for position.
It didn't happen by and large in the campus sci-fi club, even at the events that were heavily male-dominated. It did happen in the computer labs late at night. Yes, there was a large amount of overlap between the two groups, but something about the different environment triggered this change in behavior. I'm saying that my personal observation has been that you get crude sexism much more when there's more showing-off and one-upmanship in general.
Geeks are
starting to act like construction workers.
(Emphasis mine)
I don't know where you've been, but (no matter what ESR's jargon file says) there's always been a consistent streak of fairly crude sexism in the computer geek world. I'm sure some sociologist has written about it extensively, but it's the kind of thing I see in any large group of (mostly younger) men who are all in competition for alpha male status. (I've watched the sales guys at work, and it's there too)
Here on slashdot, there's intense competition among the first posts to get something modded up to "funny". I don't know if that's the driver - I'm not a sociologist - but it might have something to do with eliciting this behavior.
Had this student been male, would there have been a gay sex joke made? Probably, given slashdot, eventually (if nothing else, some GNAA troll would show up), but not in the first 100 posts. (Though actually, the original post's text would work just as well if the student were male...)
Eclipse sucks less than most java apps, I'll admit, but it's responsiveness is still slow as hell, and the amount of swapping that goes on when I switch to it or away from it is insane. (And silly me, I thought 512MB was a decent amount of ram)
Map data and path-finding algorithms are two different issues.
I could easily believe that google has a superior path-finding algorith tied to the same underlying map data that yahoo uses. (Or, what is more likely, that google's path-finding algorithm is superior along some routes)
In an episode of the NBC show "Medical Investigations" several weeks ago, (it might get re-run at least once before the network cancels the show) the B plot involved a girl who had bought some "all natural diet pills" online and received tapeworm eggs. (And then had a tapeworm, which had to be killed off)
They didn't specify whether it was spam, they just said that she bought it "off this website". But it could have been spam.
Okay, so basically this is the problem: when Google encounters a status 302 redirection (as opposed to the status 301 redirection) it then indexes the content as belonging to the initial URL, not the URL at the end result of the 302 redirection. Other things happen later because of google's design.
302 redirections are temporary redirections - the idea is that a 302 is supposed to be used when someone needs to be redirected to a new page, but should still use the original URL if they want to come back later. As an example, the page http://purl.oclc.org/OCLC/PURL/CONTRIBUTORS performs a 302 redirect to http://purl.oclc.org/docs/contributors.html. This means that although your web browser needs to go to some other URL for the content at the moment, they really should remember the first url as the permanent one.
Contrast this with what happens when your browser visits http://snowplow.org/martin - you get sent a 301 redirect to http://snowplow.org/martin/. (Note the extra slash) In this case, the server is saying "the url with the slash on the end is the real location, and you should not try to come back here without the final slash in the future."
Ideally, if every web browser behaved according to spec., bookmarks (remember bookmarks?) would get automatically updated to the new URL when you selected them and the redirect was a 301 redirect. However, for a 302 redirect, the bookmark would stay as is.
302 redirects can be very useful when you want to set up a hierarchy of "logical" URLs that will permanently point to the correct location. 301 redirects are useful when you're obsoleting an old URL and wish people to go and use the new URL from now on.
Okay, so how does this relate to google? Well, let's suppose that you have a great site on fruitbats. I can set up http://www.example.com/topics/fruitbats to be a 302-style redirect to your site, essentially saying "The information at http://www.example.com/topics/fruitbats is temporarily being hosted by http://www.yoursite.com/". Now, google when it spiders pages will see that, will go retrieve the text from your page and will then index it under http://www.example.com/topics/fruitbat, since after all I just gave a temporary (302) redirect.
But it gets worse, because a final part of google's indexing process is to compare pages for identical text, and throw out all but one of the URLs. Apparently this stage has nothing to go on other than the text and the recorded URLs, and so your URL stands a fifty-fifty chance of being thrown out.
Except that I've not just redirected http://www.example.com/topics/fruitbats to your site, but also http://www.example.com/topics/fruitbat, http://www.example.com/topics/fruit_bat, and http://www.example.com/topics/fruit_bats. Now your lone URL doesn't stand much of a chance of being the one kept by the "throw out duplicates" processor, does it?
In a sense, of course, there's little google can do to prevent this, because even if they weighted 302-redirects lower in their "throw out duplicates" stage, I could always just go snag a copy of your website each time googlebot visits, in essence doing the redirection myself. (How? Just search the apache mod_rewrite guide for "Dynamic Mirror") However, doing it through 302 redircts means that google pays for the bandwidth to go get your page, not me. (Not that this is necessarily a signficant amount of bandwidth, since we're only talking about basic google here and not images. Depending on the revenue you get by misdirecting google queries it might be economical)
Of course, for this to really work, I'd need a list of websites sorted by category to build up my redirect db. But wait! The ODP feed provides exactly that.
I'm glad that you read the FDL license and concluded independently that there are some real problems with the license. (The FDL, and the problems with it, is a common debate topic on debian-legal) Among other things, it introduces many more undefined terms than the GPL (what counts as DRM?) and would allow someone to attach a forty-page political rant to a technical document, and no one would be able to create a derivative of the technical document without including the entirety of said rant.
Note that this precludes using pieces from a bit of documentation in comments of GPLed code, if the section copied as comments is sufficiently large so as to be beyond fair use.
However, there is another license that can be (and in fact, has been) applied to documentation, is perfectly compatible with mixing with GPLed code, and that doesn't contain those strange DRM clauses. Namely: the GPL itself. It doesn't work if you want to insist that every update of your editor manual contain your treatise against French nuclear testing, but that's not a problem for everyone.
If you have the time and the gcc compiler that's breaking things, try compiling your code with both -fstrict-aliasing and -fno-strict-aliasing. My bet is that -fno-strict-aliasing will produce code that works. (and conversely, if the "correct" compiler is version 2.95.2 or later, using -fstrict-aliasing will produce a broken executeable)
The thing is that some interesting optimization strategies were introduced in gcc during the 2.95.1 to 2.95.3 period. These strategies are perfectly valid things for a compiler to do to the code according to the C spec, but because they can be tricky to work out were not done in almost every other C compiler out there.
-fno-strict-aliasing explicitly turns these optimizations off. (by telling the compiler that your code might do some certain things which are against the C spec but still very common in practice)
-fstrict-aliasing (available in gcc 2.95.2 onwards) turns these optimizations on by asking the compiler to be clever about which pieces of memory can never be pointed to by pointers of a certain type.
I don't completely understand what in the C spec (which, I'll admit, I've never read) is being violated by code that produces bad results with -fstrict-aliasing, but the symptom (data wandering to a memory location it shouldn't be in) sounds very much like other strict-alias bugs I've heard about.
Ok, I'll grant that there might be some unseen criminal mastermind class that we never hear about because they never get caught - anything's possible, I guess. However, presumably then there'd also be people who almost didn't get caught - people who were caught only because law enforcement worked really, really hard or was lucky a few crucial times.
Where are those stories? Are they just not reported? (Or is this where we bring in the story of Al Capone, who beat every rap except tax evasion?)
i recently discovered a bug which freezes win95 boxes. here's how
it works: send a spoofed packet with the SYN flag set from a host, on an open port (such as 113 or 139), setting as source the SAME host and port (ie: 10.0.0.1:139 to 10.0.0.1:139). this will cause the win95 machine to lock up.
So it's a way to either remotely lock up or reboot a target machine. I would assume (not having, you know, tried it or anything) that this includes most windows-based webservers.
This is doubly ironic, because the C standard does not guarantee that if (!ptr) has the same result as (ptr != NULL). NULL does not have to be "zero" and on some strange CPUs, it actually is not zero.
The short version: at the level of the C code, NULL is 0 - it has to be. Now, at the assembly language level, the compiler may translate 0 used in a context where it's a pointer to some other value, but at the level of the C source code, it is 0, regardless of CPU. (if it isn't, you're not using C, just some language that mostly looks like C)
The remark that it's in complete darkness may give you a clue - I have central heating, good housing insulation, and good thick blankets, so do not always feel the need to wear heavy pajamas. In the middle of the night, I'll sometimes decide to leave the bed for some reason.
Or at least, similar actions can be explained without inventing a sixth sense.
It's basically a combination of these two things: your skin is much more sensitive than you realize, and that sense is not nearly as accurate as you think it is.
To see this, get two friends to help test this sense. You will stand (or sit, whichever) in the middle of the room, blindfolded and wearing ear plugs, and one friend will stand behind you at a designated spot, being careful not to breath on the back of your neck. The other friend will blow a loud whistle - loud enough to hear through the earplugs - occasionally and at each whistle blow you will need to say if someone is behind you or not. Make sure that your friends choose whether to stand behind you or not before each whistle blow by using some random source, such as a coin flip or dice roll.
If this "sense" does not completely disappear when you've eliminated sight and sound, then retest while wearing a coat with a hood, or something else to completely cover your arms, back, and neck.
I have found myself that during the winter I can navigate around in complete darkness without bumping into things because I "sense" them about half an inch before I'd bump into them. It's not a sixth sense - it's that the static in the air makes the hair on my exposed legs stand up when I approach most objects. A pair of longjohns kills this "sense" completely.
All the browser people have to do is run the domain name through nameprep prior to Punycode-ing it. It's not that hard - it isn't as though there aren't dozens of implementations of Unicode normalization form KC around.
There is already a fix for this IDN problem in the unicode spec, if people would just use it:
Before resolving, all domain names should be normalized according to normalization form KC. (see http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr15/) Once that's done, anything that looks like an "a" really will be an "a", and not something that looks identical in Cyrillic.
That simple (SIMPLE!) step would avoid this problem, almost completely. There'd still be an issue with people using "paypál" instead of "paypal", but at least then the user has some vague chance of seeing the difference in the URL in the browser window.
It would also be good if responsible registrars refused to accept domain registrations for domains not normalized according to NFKC, but asking companies to refuse business simply because someone else would get hurt is probably not going to be effective.
Now that was a non-sequitor. Tell me, where in my post did I ever take an explicit or implicit position that it was ethical "to dismember an innocent human being in one stage of development and not in another stage"?
My objection was to terminology: an abortion is the interruption of a pregnancy, and no pregnancy has occurred. Yes, the destruction of zygotes produced as part of IVF should be the moral equivalent of abortion, if moral attitudes were determined by logical argument, but "moral equivalent" and "are the same thing" are two different relations.
As for there being "no such thing" as a fertilized egg, manyreputablesources disagree. I'll concede that another term for fertilized egg common in medical jargon is "zygote".
The religious right position on life is that life begins at conception (when a sperm and egg unite). Under this definition, any embryo destroyed is most certainly an abortion.
Uh, no. Under this definition, any embryo destroyed is murder. This means that abortion is murder and that the destruction of "spare" embryos from IVF is murder. It does not in any way mean that IVF is abortion.
Excuse me. Isn't an abortion the destruction of an embryo or fetus?
No, actually it isn't. Or rather, almost all abortions(*) involve the destruction of an embryo or fetus, but the destruction of fertilized eggs that have never been implanted is not the abortion of any pregnancy. No anti-abortion campaigner (that I know of) has ever called this action abortion; they may have called it "destruction of human life" and "morally equivalent to abortion", but that's different.
(*) This gets into politically-laden terminology - is it an abortion when a dilation and extraction procedure (the procedure that's often labeled "partial birth abortion") is performed on a woman carrying a fetus which has already died in utero? If so, since the fetus is dead before the procedure begins, is the D&C procedure the destruction of a fetus?
Yes, well, in California at least there seems to be some sanity to the "return this for a full refund if you don't like the terms"/"we don't accept returns of opened software" dichotomy. I'm glad to hear that. I also know that it'll spread to my state on the other coast about the same time as pigs start flying.
the website has all this crap about distribution solutions for business
Crap? This was what bittorrent was designed for - distributing ISOs. It's deliberately not encrypted, offers no anonymizing features, and the tracker is a nice, lawsuit-targetable single point of failure for any illegal file. It's about as friendly to the **AA as you can get for a new protocol without contacting them directly with a list of filenames.
The only thing bittorrent does that in any way facilitates piracy is that someone hosting warez doesn't also get hit with a huge bandwidth bill. That's all; other than that, it might as well be nothing more than a webserver.
As for legal uses, besides the stuff on http://www.legaltorrents.com/, and linux ISOs (bittorrent is really/the/ way to download a new knoppix ISO), consider this scenario:
You're an academic institution with three separate computer labs. Each of these labs has a few dozen machines, all interconnected by a fast 1 Gig lan, though the connections between the labs is much slower. You've got a central server, not in any of the labs, that needs to distribute several large files (virtual PC disk images) to all of the machines in all the labs nightly. (the disk images change that often)
The solution? An internal bittorrent network. Easy to set up centrally and automate on all the machines, and it takes advantage of the large intra-lab bandwidth. The previous solution - rsyncing from the central machine - would take 5-6 hours and spike the central server's CPU almost the whole time. (the way the disk images change is apparently not rsync-friendly) This solution takes less than an hour with no serious CPU load on the central server; after all, the tracker is only watching a few hundred clients at once.
(Disclaimer: I didn't do this, I just was talking to the guy who did)
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm definitely a ruby fan, the ability to easily write self-modifying code (and by that I assume you include the ability to easily write code generators and to mix and match those code generators with the rest of your code - aka common lisp macros) is really something rather unique to lisp. You don't think that this provides a compelling reason to learn lisp? I admit, that's only one reason, but it's a big one.
I've written Perl code that generates more Perl code that is then fed to eval. I've helped people write python code that generates more python code, and that is truly painful (the indentation-based grouping of Python makes this much more difficult than it needs to be). I admit I haven't done that specifically in Ruby, but I can't imagine that the experience would be very different from the same exercise in Perl.
None of these come close to the power and ease of use of Common Lisp macros.
I also question your statement "Lisp implements everything as a binary tree.". While it is true that the cons pair is the most common lisp data structure, and that all code is seen in terms of cons pairs, it's disingenuous to say that Common Lisp doesn't have arrays (vectors), hashtables, or structures with named slots. Often times people will produce a benchmark showing that "lisp is slow", when in fact they've gone and compared lists in lisp (implemented essentially as singly linked lists) to lists implemented with arrays in some other language, or compared assoc. lists with hashtables.
If someone were giving a policy speech and began with an analogy about the Mathematical axiom of choice relating to feminist political goals, I'd stop listening right there. It's a similar situation here. Such a blatant disregard for what's leaving one's mouth (or, in the case of slashdot posts, one's computer) shows profound disrespect for the reader that I don't care to know the rest.
Indeed, with this post I jumped straight to the comments after the title, and so was surprised (although I admit, only slightly) to see all the other errors that the first response had pointed out. (I did this even though I find the idea of high schools teaching C++ interesting)
"Hey, I like this little color-selector widget that company XYZ uses in their paint program. It doesn't have the strange little artifacts here and there that ours does. I wonder how they did that? Fire up the debugger... oh, they hooked into WinObscureInternalFunctionCall32 and did fleem"
Whether or not some female students exchange sexual favors for grades, though, wasn't what we were talking about.
Of course that happens. Given the numbers of students and professors in this country, the average professor and student would have to be saints for it to not happen somewhere.
But, of course, I never claimed that didn't happen, nor did I even say it was uncommon. I said that geeks jockeying for position jumped on the blowjob joke, and that that's to be expected.
I think you meant to address your comments to someone else.
"nowadays"? You say that as though you remember a time when it was perfectly acceptable to publically suggest that a woman just go down on a prof if she wants better grades.
Look, I'm not trying to make you change all occurrences of "he" to "he/she" or some worse neologism, I'm not trying to make sure that all your example sentences have an equal balance of male and female names, and I'm not trying to make sure you hire unqualified employees so that your organization fits some desired overall demographics. I'm just saying - this is crude, and cheap, and symptomatic of a long-standing sexist tradition which exists inside computer geekdom. (and, as others have pointed out, exists elsewhere too)
To venture into an overstretched analogy, I'm not asking you to wash your hands several dozen times a day and scrub your skin till it bleeds to get the dirt off - I'm just requesting that people not piss on the carpet.
Also, "dogs" vs "whores"? Do you really believe that these are even vaguely equivalent terms?
I've watched this behavior, and it's much more prevalent (at least among all- or almost-all-male groups) when the group is a bunch of men who are constantly jockeying for position.
It didn't happen by and large in the campus sci-fi club, even at the events that were heavily male-dominated. It did happen in the computer labs late at night. Yes, there was a large amount of overlap between the two groups, but something about the different environment triggered this change in behavior. I'm saying that my personal observation has been that you get crude sexism much more when there's more showing-off and one-upmanship in general.
I don't know where you've been, but (no matter what ESR's jargon file says) there's always been a consistent streak of fairly crude sexism in the computer geek world. I'm sure some sociologist has written about it extensively, but it's the kind of thing I see in any large group of (mostly younger) men who are all in competition for alpha male status. (I've watched the sales guys at work, and it's there too)
Here on slashdot, there's intense competition among the first posts to get something modded up to "funny". I don't know if that's the driver - I'm not a sociologist - but it might have something to do with eliciting this behavior.
Had this student been male, would there have been a gay sex joke made? Probably, given slashdot, eventually (if nothing else, some GNAA troll would show up), but not in the first 100 posts. (Though actually, the original post's text would work just as well if the student were male...)
Eclipse sucks less than most java apps, I'll admit, but it's responsiveness is still slow as hell, and the amount of swapping that goes on when I switch to it or away from it is insane. (And silly me, I thought 512MB was a decent amount of ram)
It's enough to drive me back to JDE.
Map data and path-finding algorithms are two different issues.
I could easily believe that google has a superior path-finding algorith tied to the same underlying map data that yahoo uses. (Or, what is more likely, that google's path-finding algorithm is superior along some routes)
In an episode of the NBC show "Medical Investigations" several weeks ago, (it might get re-run at least once before the network cancels the show) the B plot involved a girl who had bought some "all natural diet pills" online and received tapeworm eggs. (And then had a tapeworm, which had to be killed off)
They didn't specify whether it was spam, they just said that she bought it "off this website". But it could have been spam.
Okay, so basically this is the problem: when Google encounters a status 302 redirection (as opposed to the status 301 redirection) it then indexes the content as belonging to the initial URL, not the URL at the end result of the 302 redirection. Other things happen later because of google's design.
302 redirections are temporary redirections - the idea is that a 302 is supposed to be used when someone needs to be redirected to a new page, but should still use the original URL if they want to come back later. As an example, the page http://purl.oclc.org/OCLC/PURL/CONTRIBUTORS performs a 302 redirect to http://purl.oclc.org/docs/contributors.html. This means that although your web browser needs to go to some other URL for the content at the moment, they really should remember the first url as the permanent one.
Contrast this with what happens when your browser visits http://snowplow.org/martin - you get sent a 301 redirect to http://snowplow.org/martin/. (Note the extra slash) In this case, the server is saying "the url with the slash on the end is the real location, and you should not try to come back here without the final slash in the future."
Ideally, if every web browser behaved according to spec., bookmarks (remember bookmarks?) would get automatically updated to the new URL when you selected them and the redirect was a 301 redirect. However, for a 302 redirect, the bookmark would stay as is.
302 redirects can be very useful when you want to set up a hierarchy of "logical" URLs that will permanently point to the correct location. 301 redirects are useful when you're obsoleting an old URL and wish people to go and use the new URL from now on.
Okay, so how does this relate to google? Well, let's suppose that you have a great site on fruitbats. I can set up http://www.example.com/topics/fruitbats to be a 302-style redirect to your site, essentially saying "The information at http://www.example.com/topics/fruitbats is temporarily being hosted by http://www.yoursite.com/". Now, google when it spiders pages will see that, will go retrieve the text from your page and will then index it under http://www.example.com/topics/fruitbat, since after all I just gave a temporary (302) redirect.
But it gets worse, because a final part of google's indexing process is to compare pages for identical text, and throw out all but one of the URLs. Apparently this stage has nothing to go on other than the text and the recorded URLs, and so your URL stands a fifty-fifty chance of being thrown out.
Except that I've not just redirected http://www.example.com/topics/fruitbats to your site, but also http://www.example.com/topics/fruitbat, http://www.example.com/topics/fruit_bat, and http://www.example.com/topics/fruit_bats. Now your lone URL doesn't stand much of a chance of being the one kept by the "throw out duplicates" processor, does it?
In a sense, of course, there's little google can do to prevent this, because even if they weighted 302-redirects lower in their "throw out duplicates" stage, I could always just go snag a copy of your website each time googlebot visits, in essence doing the redirection myself. (How? Just search the apache mod_rewrite guide for "Dynamic Mirror") However, doing it through 302 redircts means that google pays for the bandwidth to go get your page, not me. (Not that this is necessarily a signficant amount of bandwidth, since we're only talking about basic google here and not images. Depending on the revenue you get by misdirecting google queries it might be economical)
Of course, for this to really work, I'd need a list of websites sorted by category to build up my redirect db. But wait! The ODP feed provides exactly that.
I am a little bit wary of doi
I'm glad that you read the FDL license and concluded independently that there are some real problems with the license. (The FDL, and the problems with it, is a common debate topic on debian-legal) Among other things, it introduces many more undefined terms than the GPL (what counts as DRM?) and would allow someone to attach a forty-page political rant to a technical document, and no one would be able to create a derivative of the technical document without including the entirety of said rant.
Note that this precludes using pieces from a bit of documentation in comments of GPLed code, if the section copied as comments is sufficiently large so as to be beyond fair use.
However, there is another license that can be (and in fact, has been) applied to documentation, is perfectly compatible with mixing with GPLed code, and that doesn't contain those strange DRM clauses. Namely: the GPL itself. It doesn't work if you want to insist that every update of your editor manual contain your treatise against French nuclear testing, but that's not a problem for everyone.
If you have the time and the gcc compiler that's breaking things, try compiling your code with both -fstrict-aliasing and -fno-strict-aliasing. My bet is that -fno-strict-aliasing will produce code that works. (and conversely, if the "correct" compiler is version 2.95.2 or later, using -fstrict-aliasing will produce a broken executeable)
The thing is that some interesting optimization strategies were introduced in gcc during the 2.95.1 to 2.95.3 period. These strategies are perfectly valid things for a compiler to do to the code according to the C spec, but because they can be tricky to work out were not done in almost every other C compiler out there.
-fno-strict-aliasing explicitly turns these optimizations off. (by telling the compiler that your code might do some certain things which are against the C spec but still very common in practice)
-fstrict-aliasing (available in gcc 2.95.2 onwards) turns these optimizations on by asking the compiler to be clever about which pieces of memory can never be pointed to by pointers of a certain type.
I don't completely understand what in the C spec (which, I'll admit, I've never read) is being violated by code that produces bad results with -fstrict-aliasing, but the symptom (data wandering to a memory location it shouldn't be in) sounds very much like other strict-alias bugs I've heard about.
Ok, I'll grant that there might be some unseen criminal mastermind class that we never hear about because they never get caught - anything's possible, I guess. However, presumably then there'd also be people who almost didn't get caught - people who were caught only because law enforcement worked really, really hard or was lucky a few crucial times.
Where are those stories? Are they just not reported? (Or is this where we bring in the story of Al Capone, who beat every rap except tax evasion?)
So it's a way to either remotely lock up or reboot a target machine. I would assume (not having, you know, tried it or anything) that this includes most windows-based webservers.
I'll just give you the citation and let you work it out from there: http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/s5.html, especially questions 5.3, 5.5, and 5.10.
The short version: at the level of the C code, NULL is 0 - it has to be. Now, at the assembly language level, the compiler may translate 0 used in a context where it's a pointer to some other value, but at the level of the C source code, it is 0, regardless of CPU. (if it isn't, you're not using C, just some language that mostly looks like C)
The remark that it's in complete darkness may give you a clue - I have central heating, good housing insulation, and good thick blankets, so do not always feel the need to wear heavy pajamas. In the middle of the night, I'll sometimes decide to leave the bed for some reason.
Or at least, similar actions can be explained without inventing a sixth sense.
It's basically a combination of these two things: your skin is much more sensitive than you realize, and that sense is not nearly as accurate as you think it is.
To see this, get two friends to help test this sense. You will stand (or sit, whichever) in the middle of the room, blindfolded and wearing ear plugs, and one friend will stand behind you at a designated spot, being careful not to breath on the back of your neck. The other friend will blow a loud whistle - loud enough to hear through the earplugs - occasionally and at each whistle blow you will need to say if someone is behind you or not. Make sure that your friends choose whether to stand behind you or not before each whistle blow by using some random source, such as a coin flip or dice roll.
If this "sense" does not completely disappear when you've eliminated sight and sound, then retest while wearing a coat with a hood, or something else to completely cover your arms, back, and neck.
I have found myself that during the winter I can navigate around in complete darkness without bumping into things because I "sense" them about half an inch before I'd bump into them. It's not a sixth sense - it's that the static in the air makes the hair on my exposed legs stand up when I approach most objects. A pair of longjohns kills this "sense" completely.
All the browser people have to do is run the domain name through nameprep prior to Punycode-ing it. It's not that hard - it isn't as though there aren't dozens of implementations of Unicode normalization form KC around.
There is already a fix for this IDN problem in the unicode spec, if people would just use it:
Before resolving, all domain names should be normalized according to normalization form KC. (see http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr15/) Once that's done, anything that looks like an "a" really will be an "a", and not something that looks identical in Cyrillic.
That simple (SIMPLE!) step would avoid this problem, almost completely. There'd still be an issue with people using "paypál" instead of "paypal", but at least then the user has some vague chance of seeing the difference in the URL in the browser window.
It would also be good if responsible registrars refused to accept domain registrations for domains not normalized according to NFKC, but asking companies to refuse business simply because someone else would get hurt is probably not going to be effective.
Now that was a non-sequitor. Tell me, where in my post did I ever take an explicit or implicit position that it was ethical "to dismember an innocent human being in one stage of development and not in another stage"?
My objection was to terminology: an abortion is the interruption of a pregnancy, and no pregnancy has occurred. Yes, the destruction of zygotes produced as part of IVF should be the moral equivalent of abortion, if moral attitudes were determined by logical argument, but "moral equivalent" and "are the same thing" are two different relations.
As for there being "no such thing" as a fertilized egg, many reputable sources disagree. I'll concede that another term for fertilized egg common in medical jargon is "zygote".
Uh, no. Under this definition, any embryo destroyed is murder. This means that abortion is murder and that the destruction of "spare" embryos from IVF is murder. It does not in any way mean that IVF is abortion.
No, actually it isn't. Or rather, almost all abortions(*) involve the destruction of an embryo or fetus, but the destruction of fertilized eggs that have never been implanted is not the abortion of any pregnancy. No anti-abortion campaigner (that I know of) has ever called this action abortion; they may have called it "destruction of human life" and "morally equivalent to abortion", but that's different.
(*) This gets into politically-laden terminology - is it an abortion when a dilation and extraction procedure (the procedure that's often labeled "partial birth abortion") is performed on a woman carrying a fetus which has already died in utero? If so, since the fetus is dead before the procedure begins, is the D&C procedure the destruction of a fetus?
Yes, well, in California at least there seems to be some sanity to the "return this for a full refund if you don't like the terms"/"we don't accept returns of opened software" dichotomy. I'm glad to hear that. I also know that it'll spread to my state on the other coast about the same time as pigs start flying.
The only thing bittorrent does that in any way facilitates piracy is that someone hosting warez doesn't also get hit with a huge bandwidth bill. That's all; other than that, it might as well be nothing more than a webserver.
As for legal uses, besides the stuff on http://www.legaltorrents.com/, and linux ISOs (bittorrent is really
The solution? An internal bittorrent network. Easy to set up centrally and automate on all the machines, and it takes advantage of the large intra-lab bandwidth. The previous solution - rsyncing from the central machine - would take 5-6 hours and spike the central server's CPU almost the whole time. (the way the disk images change is apparently not rsync-friendly) This solution takes less than an hour with no serious CPU load on the central server; after all, the tracker is only watching a few hundred clients at once.
(Disclaimer: I didn't do this, I just was talking to the guy who did)