If you modify or statically use this code that someone else wrote, and distribute it in a compiled form, then you have to distribute the changes that you made and the code that statically uses it in source form under the GPL. If you don't like those terms, then you don't have license to redistribute it in compiled form. The person who originally wrote it only gives you license to use it in this manner.
An interesting license provision - but that's not a translation of the GPL. Specifically, the idea that you can escape the "you must relicense this as GPL" clause merely by dynamic linking is simply not true if you're talking about the GPL. If you're talking about the LGPL, then yes. (though watch the "don't forbid reverse-engineering" clause) Dynamic linking still gets you covered by the GPL - see the long discussion of why CLISP is GPL in the CLISP distribution.
This makes me wonder strongly about the situation discussed in the review - dynamic linking vs. static linking wouldn't affect source disclosure requirements in any way; even if you statically link to an LGPL library, the only requirement then is that you provide the.o files to a user who wants to relink the thing.
If after reading this book, the reviewer came away with an impression of the implications of the GPL and LGPL that are radically at odds with what Richard Stallman has said after consulting with the FSF's lawyers, then I wonder about the book too.
Just because a car doesn't behave the same as a horse, it doesn't mean cars are invalid as a means of transportation.
But it does mean that calling a car an "electronic horse" may well lead people to incorrect assumptions and conclusions about the nature of cars, and might cause them to forget that cars are not birthed from other cars but are rather assembled by (machines assembled by...) humans. One can imagine a legislature outlawing two-car garages so as to cut down on the number of cars in a city - while there might be some merit to that, if the "electronic horse" phrase were deeply routed in the political discourse, it would be reasonable to assume that some who voted for the law were under the impression that the cars were breeding in there.
The previous poster was not arguing that these concepts (copyright, patent, trademarks) lack validity, but rather that the idea that these constructs are, at their heart, a government-imposed time-limited restriction is central to any discussion of the issue. Using the term "intellectual property" presupposes a different worldview and means that the holders of these time-limited monopolies begin to see the expiration of their monopoly as a taking by the government, when in fact it is merely the case that the government is releasing the restrictions on everyone else.
Word choice is important - it sets the ground rules and shapes the subsequent discussion.
I haven't really been following this story after the initial flurry, but are you saying CBS news has admitted that the documents are forgeries? Or has the White House said that they are?
And was there in fact more convincing evidence than the "I typed it on microsoft word and at a distance it looks the same" test? Because that's all I ever saw.
Has some early 1970s document-verification expert besides Dr. Philip Bouffard come forward to say "these are fake"? (Dr. Bouffard recanted after getting samples of early 1970s type from InterPol, so we'd need someone else)
Everyone seems convinced now that they were forgeries, so I'd like to know when that happened, and why.
This probably won't work for military installations, and also not for perimeter guards, but once you're past the heavily guarded perimeter and going through the weaker internal security boundaries (doors where you have to punch a combination, or internal key-carded doors), just act like you belong there and just "happen" to be coming along at the moment when someone else is just going through the door. Holding the door for someone else is a natural habbit, and one that can only be broken by large amounts of rigorous security instruction. (e.g. college campuses that just have electronic card locks and not guards are wide open to almost any person of approximately the right age)
Except that in the case covered here, there are no exact solutions that can be found. There cannot exist a general analytical root-finding formula for arbitrary-degree polynomials, because some of them have solutions that really aren't algebraic numbers.
The only thing we can have is better ways of determining numeric approximations, and that's what we've got here. It seems a Dutch student invented a better mousetrap, and the world is beating a path. However, I fail to see what all the hype (well, aside from on slashdot) is about: we could get numeric approximations before, too.
You would rather have the FCC claim exclusive rights to regulate sex, and then proceed to specify exactly where, when, and with how much power output?
Landlords cannot regulate 802.11b wireless access points because the radio spectrum is the FCC's exclusive stomping ground, and the FCC is very jealous about the exclusive nature of its regulatory power there, not because radio transmissions are somehow fundamentally less regulateable than sex.
He's just bought into the standard image of homeschooling that is presented by places like the Homeschool Legal Defense Association - that homeschooling is primarily the domain of fundamentalist Christians who wish to raise their children apart from the world. He probably also believes that you spent several hours a day behind a desk just like the ones he sat behind, only with a parent in front of the desk instead of a professional teacher.
That is the image of homeschooling as it is presented in our culture - unschooling as a concept is almost completely unknown outside of the community of unschoolers. Not only that, but you must remember that to most people in our culture it seems unnatural that a child could find peers or role models outside their own age cohort - you're asking the poster to believe that you were able to find friends despite not being locked six hours each day together with hundrerds of people born in the same calendar year. This is really a very difficult concept to swallow, given that even despite several years of that forced togetherness, few of us develop more than a handful or two of friends in high school.
That forced togetherness of this kind is actively harmful toward developing healthy social skills goes against the conventional wisdom. (Though I must now pause and admit that actual evidence either way is sparse and inconclusive: there seems to be no detectable difference between homeschoolers and similarly-aged public school students in terms of social skills)
In short, you're presenting the poster of the grandparent post with evidence that reality is severely at odds with his preconceptions. Don't expect him to accept all that you say at once.
Gatto has been saying this - that the American educational system is fundamentally broken - for well over a decade. Speaking and writing about the broken state of American education is what he does, and has done since a 1991 op ed piece he did for the Wall Street Journal.
It's nice of slashdot to give him some exposure, sure, but that the American educational system is broken certainly isn't news in the sense of being new information.
Look, anyone can make a typo, and I know I'm not about to win any spelling bees, but this just offends the eyes. P-E-R-J-U-R-Y. If you wish to spell the verb form, as in "they perjure themselves when they state this", then it's P-E-R-J-U-R-E.
It's as bad as when my wife gets an invitation saying "your invited", or the sloppy crap in this stupid flash splash page. I'm not looking to find stupid spelling errors; the misspelled word just leaps out at me, repeated as it is in every title of every reply.
I know of no public library (as opposed to libraries associated with schools and universities, publicly funded or not) in the US that requires one to present a card to enter the building, or to pick a book off the shelf and read it while in the library. Presumably, if wi-fi access is offered to those inside the library, there'd be no card check if I brought in my own laptop, put it on a table, and started using the in-library wireless. (Even if I was one of those nasty out of town types)
A decent technical introduction to various machine learning techniques, including SVMs. (though it does suffer from the "I don't know how to make non-ugly PDFs from TeX" problem) From Microsoft Research, and math-heavy. The math doesn't require much specific background, but it would probably help to have had an undergraduate-level math structures or advanced linear algebra course. (or equivalent experience)
Out of curiousity, where does she teach that cheating such as that isn't an instant fail (or ejection?) That's the case on my campus (University of north carolina at charlotte)
You know, I TA'ed at a school that supposedly had an absolute, "you cheat, you get expelled" policy. (JHU) And yet, despite occasionally very blatant cheating (don't be stupid enough to copy answers from someone sitting in front of you when you saw the TA's writing down who was sitting where when the exams were given out), we never pulled that particular trigger. Why? Because it's a royal PITA to get a student expelled. (Why? Because they fight it, and they care much more about staying in school than you care about some idiot who didn't even have the sense to change variable names)
What we would do, however, is given them a 0 on the exam, and explain to them why we were doing it. This would almost certainly result in an F for the course, but no one ever fought us on it - if they had, they would have been forced to face the full stated consequences of cheating. So I guess the "no cheating" policy was extremely useful, even if we never made use of the theoretical consequences....And then there are those schools where new Assistant Professors are reprimanded for reporting student cheating based on such "sloppy" evidence as two students sitting next to each other turning in identical exam papers, complete with the occasional identical wrong answer... (*cough*Harv*cough*)
Have you even bothered to check you local channels? I'm assuming that you're in or near Orlando from the homepage you list.
PBS 15 Does a half-hour of BBC World news at 6 and again at 7. PBS 68 does the half-hour of BBC world news at 7.
We don't have cable either, but we are able to get daily both a half-hour of the BBC and a half-hour of Deutsche Welle over the air. It's not that it's completely unavailable, just that it isn't there all the time when you flip the tv on.
I'll grant that the "vast majority" bit is reaching, but are you denying the still strong voice of the "KJV only" crowd in American Christianity? When non-KJV English translations started to appear, was there no uproar?
I'll bet that there are in fact a large number of Christians who/really believe/ that Christ taught His disciples to pray beginning with the syllables [ Our fä'th[schwa]r hoo ärt in h[schwa]'v[schwa]n ]. Maybe some of them would admit that he used a different language if they thought about it. (And especially if they remembered Matthew 27)
Certainly Mel Gibson's recent movie may have eroded that strain a little, but the idea that biblical figures really did speak in 1500s English has more currency with American Christians than you might think.
Having looked into this a little bit, it appears that the cheapest decent PVR box constructable with retail components and MythTV is still going to run you around $250 plus labor to assemble and install. Compare this to $270 for an 80-hour Tivo, with a $100 mail-in rebate.
Now, with Tivo there is still the subscription price, but the best bet economically would be to go with Tivo. (or other commercial PVR) Of course, if you have many of the expensive components for a PVR already lying around and assemble PC's all the time (and enjoy doing so), then I guess MythTV could be for you.
Also, if you're willing to hack and fiddle with things to achieve some particular purpose not available with an off-the-shelf Tivo (I don't know - integration with your internet-enabled toaster or something), then the choice is clear. (but if so, then you knew that)
But for everyone else? Tivo. Were I in the market for a PVR, I'd just get a Tivo, and I say that as someone who just a week ago had three computers disassembled all over the office, messing with dd and hexedit to turn a toasted machine (physical read error on the sector with the root directory) back into one which not only boots again, but appears to be in perfect working order. With other people, it might be the time or computer hardware/software fiddling involved; with me, the hardware prices just don't favor building it myself.
And then there's the radical option of simply not watching TV at all...
Many of your complaints would go away if you typed, as is often recommended by those who teach typing, without ever looking at the keyboard. (Well, maybe the automatic "hit space after each word" reflex would be tough, but the "typing the rest of the word" problem would go away) I know; I can't do it either.
Without looking at the keyboard, I get only about 20 wpm. With only occasional glances, I'm at about 30. Staring at it, as I usually do, I get up to around 60 wpm. I'm not sure if there is useful virtue in being able to hit the keys accurately without looking at them, especially when I use multiple very differently-sized keyboards each day.
This all sounds like a great idea... except for the fact that I really, really, need health insurance for my family. The other employee benefits (stock purchase plan, life/disability insurance, etc.), even though they're nice to have, I could do without. Health insurance, though, is a kicker.
How do you get around this? Do you pay the exorbitant prices for self-insured health insurance, or do you go with the health plan I had in-between college and grad. school? (live very carefully, and pray that you never get sick)
The cost of medical care will keep me tied to the corporate teat for the foreseeable future.
Huh - I had always thought that the "essential step" exemption didn't come into place until after mass market distribution of software with EULAs which hung their legality on the legally tenuous-but-arguable "you're making a copy in RAM in order to use it" theory.
But apparently copyright law (in the US) has never provided legal support to mass-market EULAs. Huh.
(Hence the push for states to enact UTICA, though why something like that wasn't pushed in the mid-1980s is beyond me)
And as far as I can tell, you're right in your reading (though I am also not a lawyer), and it would cover programs which need to be installed to hard disk before being used.
Depends on the jurisdiction. Current legal opinion seems to be that under English law running a program involves copying it to RAM. Fortunately the GPL allows copying which doesn't involve distribution essentially without restriction.
In the US, since 1987 the copy created in ram as a necessary part of running the program is not copyright infringement, even if you don't agree to the license. Of course, this was in the days before it was common to install to harddisk, and so that practice (installing to a hard disk) probably would be considered copying for which one would need a license. The whole copy-made-in-ram issue is one for computers that load the program into ram directly from removeable media, which applies to very few products today. (with the noteable exception of console games - you'll notice that those very rarely have any kind of EULA)
This mess of course makes the GPL's freedom with copying that is not distribution especially nice.
Okay, so I can see why for existing projects you might not want to spend the time to switch, unless that switch could be automated somehow.
(Though with a few scripts to call imagemagick utilities and pngcrush, followed by a global search-and-replace on your HTML/PHP/JSP/whatever source files, automating the switch might be really, really easy)
For new projects, though, there's no reason to use gifs except for the few cases where you want animations. All of the line art, icons, stupid images-in-table-with-rollover-effects menus, etc. can be done just as well by pngs.
Also, how about this for a business case for the old projects: bandwidth expenses. I just took a snapshot of the slashdot front page, which contains a large number of.gifs. Now, converting them all to.png files and running pngcrush on the result reduced the total image size by about 4% (down by 3.947%). Admittedly, that reduction works out to only about 1% of the total, but I would imagine that 1% of slashdot's bandwidth expenses are still worth an hour or two of script writing and testing.
Granted, the exact savings would depend on your site, and how often it's used. For sites like slashdot, with many frequent repeat visitors, most images would be cached so actual bandwidth savings are even less. However, for sites that are visited only occasionally (such as, say, bestbuy.com or the website of your refridgerator's manufacturer) but by a large number of distinct people, the savings could be much larger.
Another type of site that would clearly benefit from.png use is online cartoons - highly compressible images which, while static, are still added to the site daily and therefore not likely to be already cached by most visitors. I imagine ucomics.com could definitely realize some bandwidth savings by switching to.png images.
The poster never claimed that Indiana legislated the value of pi - they claimed that a bill to do so passed the state house but died in the state senate. This is in fact what the reference you point to says.
As a slashdot reader, I find this fucking hilarious. Somebody angrily refutes a post with a reference that agrees with exactly what the post said.
See, I'm as ready to suspect the average slashdot post of anti-immigrant blustering as anybody else, but it's pretty obvious, if you can read any of the grandparent post at all, that the point about the employees being non-citizens was meant to emphasize how this company was able to exploit its workers.
Slashdot Mirror
Decoded version:
I don't know what my anti-spyware program is telling me, and get freaked out by a pop-under ad. setting a cookie.
This makes me wonder strongly about the situation discussed in the review - dynamic linking vs. static linking wouldn't affect source disclosure requirements in any way; even if you statically link to an LGPL library, the only requirement then is that you provide the
If after reading this book, the reviewer came away with an impression of the implications of the GPL and LGPL that are radically at odds with what Richard Stallman has said after consulting with the FSF's lawyers, then I wonder about the book too.
But it does mean that calling a car an "electronic horse" may well lead people to incorrect assumptions and conclusions about the nature of cars, and might cause them to forget that cars are not birthed from other cars but are rather assembled by (machines assembled by
The previous poster was not arguing that these concepts (copyright, patent, trademarks) lack validity, but rather that the idea that these constructs are, at their heart, a government-imposed time-limited restriction is central to any discussion of the issue. Using the term "intellectual property" presupposes a different worldview and means that the holders of these time-limited monopolies begin to see the expiration of their monopoly as a taking by the government, when in fact it is merely the case that the government is releasing the restrictions on everyone else.
Word choice is important - it sets the ground rules and shapes the subsequent discussion.
I haven't really been following this story after the initial flurry, but are you saying CBS news has admitted that the documents are forgeries? Or has the White House said that they are?
And was there in fact more convincing evidence than the "I typed it on microsoft word and at a distance it looks the same" test? Because that's all I ever saw.
Has some early 1970s document-verification expert besides Dr. Philip Bouffard come forward to say "these are fake"? (Dr. Bouffard recanted after getting samples of early 1970s type from InterPol, so we'd need someone else)
Everyone seems convinced now that they were forgeries, so I'd like to know when that happened, and why.
This probably won't work for military installations, and also not for perimeter guards, but once you're past the heavily guarded perimeter and going through the weaker internal security boundaries (doors where you have to punch a combination, or internal key-carded doors), just act like you belong there and just "happen" to be coming along at the moment when someone else is just going through the door. Holding the door for someone else is a natural habbit, and one that can only be broken by large amounts of rigorous security instruction. (e.g. college campuses that just have electronic card locks and not guards are wide open to almost any person of approximately the right age)
Except that in the case covered here, there are no exact solutions that can be found. There cannot exist a general analytical root-finding formula for arbitrary-degree polynomials, because some of them have solutions that really aren't algebraic numbers.
The only thing we can have is better ways of determining numeric approximations, and that's what we've got here. It seems a Dutch student invented a better mousetrap, and the world is beating a path. However, I fail to see what all the hype (well, aside from on slashdot) is about: we could get numeric approximations before, too.
You would rather have the FCC claim exclusive rights to regulate sex, and then proceed to specify exactly where, when, and with how much power output?
Landlords cannot regulate 802.11b wireless access points because the radio spectrum is the FCC's exclusive stomping ground, and the FCC is very jealous about the exclusive nature of its regulatory power there, not because radio transmissions are somehow fundamentally less regulateable than sex.
He's just bought into the standard image of homeschooling that is presented by places like the Homeschool Legal Defense Association - that homeschooling is primarily the domain of fundamentalist Christians who wish to raise their children apart from the world. He probably also believes that you spent several hours a day behind a desk just like the ones he sat behind, only with a parent in front of the desk instead of a professional teacher.
That is the image of homeschooling as it is presented in our culture - unschooling as a concept is almost completely unknown outside of the community of unschoolers. Not only that, but you must remember that to most people in our culture it seems unnatural that a child could find peers or role models outside their own age cohort - you're asking the poster to believe that you were able to find friends despite not being locked six hours each day together with hundrerds of people born in the same calendar year. This is really a very difficult concept to swallow, given that even despite several years of that forced togetherness, few of us develop more than a handful or two of friends in high school.
That forced togetherness of this kind is actively harmful toward developing healthy social skills goes against the conventional wisdom. (Though I must now pause and admit that actual evidence either way is sparse and inconclusive: there seems to be no detectable difference between homeschoolers and similarly-aged public school students in terms of social skills)
In short, you're presenting the poster of the grandparent post with evidence that reality is severely at odds with his preconceptions. Don't expect him to accept all that you say at once.
Gatto has been saying this - that the American educational system is fundamentally broken - for well over a decade. Speaking and writing about the broken state of American education is what he does, and has done since a 1991 op ed piece he did for the Wall Street Journal.
It's nice of slashdot to give him some exposure, sure, but that the American educational system is broken certainly isn't news in the sense of being new information.
Look, anyone can make a typo, and I know I'm not about to win any spelling bees, but this just offends the eyes. P-E-R-J-U-R-Y. If you wish to spell the verb form, as in "they perjure themselves when they state this", then it's P-E-R-J-U-R-E.
It's as bad as when my wife gets an invitation saying "your invited", or the sloppy crap in this stupid flash splash page. I'm not looking to find stupid spelling errors; the misspelled word just leaps out at me, repeated as it is in every title of every reply.
You mean like this Cascading Style Sheets tool?
I know of no public library (as opposed to libraries associated with schools and universities, publicly funded or not) in the US that requires one to present a card to enter the building, or to pick a book off the shelf and read it while in the library. Presumably, if wi-fi access is offered to those inside the library, there'd be no card check if I brought in my own laptop, put it on a table, and started using the in-library wireless. (Even if I was one of those nasty out of town types)
A decent technical introduction to various machine learning techniques, including SVMs. (though it does suffer from the "I don't know how to make non-ugly PDFs from TeX" problem) From Microsoft Research, and math-heavy. The math doesn't require much specific background, but it would probably help to have had an undergraduate-level math structures or advanced linear algebra course. (or equivalent experience)
What we would do, however, is given them a 0 on the exam, and explain to them why we were doing it. This would almost certainly result in an F for the course, but no one ever fought us on it - if they had, they would have been forced to face the full stated consequences of cheating. So I guess the "no cheating" policy was extremely useful, even if we never made use of the theoretical consequences.
Have you even bothered to check you local channels? I'm assuming that you're in or near Orlando from the homepage you list.
PBS 15 Does a half-hour of BBC World news at 6 and again at 7. PBS 68 does the half-hour of BBC world news at 7.
We don't have cable either, but we are able to get daily both a half-hour of the BBC and a half-hour of Deutsche Welle over the air. It's not that it's completely unavailable, just that it isn't there all the time when you flip the tv on.
I'll grant that the "vast majority" bit is reaching, but are you denying the still strong voice of the "KJV only" crowd in American Christianity? When non-KJV English translations started to appear, was there no uproar?
/really believe/ that Christ taught His disciples to pray beginning with the syllables [ Our fä'th[schwa]r hoo ärt in h[schwa]'v[schwa]n ]. Maybe some of them would admit that he used a different language if they thought about it. (And especially if they remembered Matthew 27)
I'll bet that there are in fact a large number of Christians who
Certainly Mel Gibson's recent movie may have eroded that strain a little, but the idea that biblical figures really did speak in 1500s English has more currency with American Christians than you might think.
Having looked into this a little bit, it appears that the cheapest decent PVR box constructable with retail components and MythTV is still going to run you around $250 plus labor to assemble and install. Compare this to $270 for an 80-hour Tivo, with a $100 mail-in rebate.
Now, with Tivo there is still the subscription price, but the best bet economically would be to go with Tivo. (or other commercial PVR) Of course, if you have many of the expensive components for a PVR already lying around and assemble PC's all the time (and enjoy doing so), then I guess MythTV could be for you.
Also, if you're willing to hack and fiddle with things to achieve some particular purpose not available with an off-the-shelf Tivo (I don't know - integration with your internet-enabled toaster or something), then the choice is clear. (but if so, then you knew that)
But for everyone else? Tivo. Were I in the market for a PVR, I'd just get a Tivo, and I say that as someone who just a week ago had three computers disassembled all over the office, messing with dd and hexedit to turn a toasted machine (physical read error on the sector with the root directory) back into one which not only boots again, but appears to be in perfect working order. With other people, it might be the time or computer hardware/software fiddling involved; with me, the hardware prices just don't favor building it myself.
And then there's the radical option of simply not watching TV at all...
Many of your complaints would go away if you typed, as is often recommended by those who teach typing, without ever looking at the keyboard. (Well, maybe the automatic "hit space after each word" reflex would be tough, but the "typing the rest of the word" problem would go away) I know; I can't do it either.
Without looking at the keyboard, I get only about 20 wpm. With only occasional glances, I'm at about 30. Staring at it, as I usually do, I get up to around 60 wpm. I'm not sure if there is useful virtue in being able to hit the keys accurately without looking at them, especially when I use multiple very differently-sized keyboards each day.
This all sounds like a great idea... except for the fact that I really, really, need health insurance for my family. The other employee benefits (stock purchase plan, life/disability insurance, etc.), even though they're nice to have, I could do without. Health insurance, though, is a kicker.
How do you get around this? Do you pay the exorbitant prices for self-insured health insurance, or do you go with the health plan I had in-between college and grad. school? (live very carefully, and pray that you never get sick)
The cost of medical care will keep me tied to the corporate teat for the foreseeable future.
And then there were all those white supremacists rounded up in Texas late last year. With, you know, bombs and poison and other terrorist stuff. But not brown skin or Korans, so I guess it wasn't worth national media attention.
(And as for white people bombing America, you left out the bombing of the Atlanta Olympic Games)
Huh - I had always thought that the "essential step" exemption didn't come into place until after mass market distribution of software with EULAs which hung their legality on the legally tenuous-but-arguable "you're making a copy in RAM in order to use it" theory.
But apparently copyright law (in the US) has never provided legal support to mass-market EULAs. Huh.
(Hence the push for states to enact UTICA, though why something like that wasn't pushed in the mid-1980s is beyond me)
And as far as I can tell, you're right in your reading (though I am also not a lawyer), and it would cover programs which need to be installed to hard disk before being used.
This mess of course makes the GPL's freedom with copying that is not distribution especially nice.
Okay, so I can see why for existing projects you might not want to spend the time to switch, unless that switch could be automated somehow.
.gifs. Now, converting them all to .png files and running pngcrush on the result reduced the total image size by about 4% (down by 3.947%). Admittedly, that reduction works out to only about 1% of the total, but I would imagine that 1% of slashdot's bandwidth expenses are still worth an hour or two of script writing and testing.
.png use is online cartoons - highly compressible images which, while static, are still added to the site daily and therefore not likely to be already cached by most visitors. I imagine ucomics.com could definitely realize some bandwidth savings by switching to .png images.
(Though with a few scripts to call imagemagick utilities and pngcrush, followed by a global search-and-replace on your HTML/PHP/JSP/whatever source files, automating the switch might be really, really easy)
For new projects, though, there's no reason to use gifs except for the few cases where you want animations. All of the line art, icons, stupid images-in-table-with-rollover-effects menus, etc. can be done just as well by pngs.
Also, how about this for a business case for the old projects: bandwidth expenses. I just took a snapshot of the slashdot front page, which contains a large number of
Granted, the exact savings would depend on your site, and how often it's used. For sites like slashdot, with many frequent repeat visitors, most images would be cached so actual bandwidth savings are even less. However, for sites that are visited only occasionally (such as, say, bestbuy.com or the website of your refridgerator's manufacturer) but by a large number of distinct people, the savings could be much larger.
Another type of site that would clearly benefit from
Actually, that reference matched what I thought was true which - not too surprisingly - matched exactly what the poster said. (I think my original source was something like http://db.uwaterloo.ca/~alopez-o/math-faq/mathtext /node18.html)
The poster never claimed that Indiana legislated the value of pi - they claimed that a bill to do so passed the state house but died in the state senate. This is in fact what the reference you point to says.
As a slashdot reader, I find this fucking hilarious. Somebody angrily refutes a post with a reference that agrees with exactly what the post said.
See, I'm as ready to suspect the average slashdot post of anti-immigrant blustering as anybody else, but it's pretty obvious, if you can read any of the grandparent post at all, that the point about the employees being non-citizens was meant to emphasize how this company was able to exploit its workers.