Do you claim to have composed a song? Have you ever listened to the radio? If so, then you are presumed to have copied the song from another song in violation of federal copyright law (Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs; analysis [columbia.edu]; more analysis [vwh.net]).
NO!
You are presumed to NOT have copied the song. It's possible for someone who has a song on the radio to take you to court and infer that your song is too close to theirs, but they have to prove it in court.
It's all the world of differene, so watch how you say that.
Interesting point, but you're forgetting something.
The proper place to implement leap-seconds in a system with a calendar-independant time system (like UNIX) is to do so in the "translate to real time" system, rather than adjusting the "more perfect than the Earth" time setting.
Time and computers already need to account for leap years, daylight savings time, time zones, and (to be completely accurate) no fewer than three seperate ways of denoting the year.
Adding a program to check for all of the leap seconds added in the last 30 years shouldn't be that hard; it might add extra cycles to the time-display function, but it's still the "correct" way to do it.
Of course, for _most_ applications, it'd be simpler to ignore the leap seconds and get by with frequent syncs and a system that knows that leap seconds exist. I have a hard time concieving of an instance when you'd want to know the exact down-to-the-milisecond difference of events that happened more than a year apart.
"Anyone who uses a PC's bus-clock to do timing, rather than having a system-wide clock that syncs up, at the least, every month, is an idiot."
I stand by my assertion. If you're doing something where time is important, then the system which checks time needs to sync up with itself. If you're just going to assume that all the clocks are going to work the same, then you're as much an idiot as someone who assumes that they'll never get into an accident so they don't wear their seat belt.
Now, let's introduce a leap second into this system. Since the system all syncs up ANYWAY, it only needs to be changed once per system. The only times leap seconds would cause problems would be if cross-system jumps--like international rail lines--don't deal with the issue.
I agree with you--it's not even a mildly imporant detail, and it's not a good idea to call people idiots in broad strokes. But defining an action as "idiotic" sure sounds good to me, and it grammatically equivalent to what I said.
A nice comparable statement would be "it's idiotic to run as ROOT." I.e., "anyone who runs as ROOT all the time is an idiot."
Interplanetary time would have to be established anyway--which is a different problem than localized time on Earth.
Just imagine the much broader, more mundaine implications of this... the world is networked. Every here and there, a programmer *will* make assumptions that the current second on earth is the same everywhere. Think robotic surgery from remote locations... Think railroad switches for high speed trains. A couple of seconds are much bigger than you think they are.
Anyone who uses a PC's bus-clock to do timing, rather than having a system-wide clock that syncs up, at the least, every month, is an idiot.
The system doesn't have to agree with every other system in the world--they just need to begin their transaction by syncing with each other.
It's a middiling problem, and more of an annoyance than real danger.
Well, first off, the too geeky for fashion UNIX crowd still counts from zero.
The rest of the computer world realized that humanity, and the English language, start counting at 1 when dealing with items, and only start from zero when talking about a change in state.
i.e., when counting physical locations, or locations in memory, or records in a database, the first item should be "1". When dealing with, oh, relative distances like moving a HDD, you count from zero--because the assumption is that you're going to apply said numbers to some real physical item.
The last one's the doozy. Just accept that Copyright trumps free speach--and realize that, as long as you don't hack the darn thing to make it violate copyright, the DMCA doesn't give a damn about you.
And suddenly you could be paying for the downloading of a whole bunch of music, e-books, movies that you never actually downloaded.
But you now have the legal and moral right to download them--and a reasonable expectation of having reasonable quality copies of said items.
A nice way to roll this out would be at the ISP level. Each IP assignemnt would be either "good" or "not-good", and the "good" ones could access a new Napsteresque P2P system in exchange for paying a slight ($2/month?) fee. Of course, this would have to be governmentally mandated and policed, but it would end the 'piracy wars', to use Felden's term.
A better way to do it would be to change the copyright model from "buy license with one media" to "buy lifelong crossplatform license and right to make own personal copies." Change the laws to assume that the user will be making digital purchases and making their own physical copies, rather than trying to force purely physical laws onto the internet.
Is OpenOffice really there yet? During our final presentation last week in a CS class, a fellow was trying to explain to the teacher why his entire presentation featured scrunched up, barely legible text. "I created it in OpenOffice and brought it into PowerPoint," he explained, as the class laughed at at him.
The student deserved it. He should AT LEAST have ran through it once on the presentation setup, to catch any bugs like that. (We do that here at work, and we all have the exact same system.)
OoO isn't quite ready for prime time yet (see last 2 journal entries). It's getting better and better, but it's still behind Office in too many areas to perform a coup.
The Easter Bunny doesn't bring us eggs and chocolate bunnies to remind us of Jesus of Nazareth.
Of course he does. He got the job when the "Beltane Bunny" left, who wasn't fuzzy at all, and got fired among changes that she danced around naked in front of children.
Being a bunny suddenly being put in charge of the holiest celebration of the Christian year, the Easter Bunny sadly cribbed a bit much from his nudist predecessor. At first the Council of Saints and Prophets was a bit distrubed by this, but after realizing that the rebirth of Christ and the renewal of Beltane were "close enough for government work", they shurgged and figgered that God must have been preplanning this all along.
To date, the Horned God and Triune Goddess have not issued a statement as to if they did or did not convert to the new religion, though they were spotted sipping wine and swapping silly worshiper stories with Jesus and Odin.
When questioned about the recent resurgance of Wicca in the west, they simply shrugged and muttered something about "cycles of life" and "to every thing a season" while staring sopishly into each other's eyes.
Even the title of Privacy Czar for the Homeland Security department seems oxymoronic. Isn't the direction the USA is taking with Homeland Security towards giving up your privacy rights, with all these new laws passed?
The chance of privacy violations does not infer actual loss of privacy. Having a bureau at Homeland Security dedicated to preserving the privacy of innocent americans--i.e., preventing information from being ungeneralized or distributed, at the very least--is a HUGE step in the right direction.
Well, let's get started then! Anyone know of a TWiki [twiki.org] site that'll host it? I'm not exactly ready to set up my own TWiki server in my apartment.
If you want to do some speculative rule writing, I'll host them at my website, www.castlesteelstone.com
It's as improper to use European numbering here as it is to post stories in Kanji. Not that what's improper stops anyone from doing it, but it does give rise to childish comments.
It's not a "communication deficit." It's a mistake. Get over it.
Tabletop wargaming was awesome but I doubt I will ever get to play unless I go to GENCON. Thats sad...
Where are you, anyway? Tabletop's moderatly strong up upstate NY.
I suggest that you make at least two forces for any game you play--that way you can grab someone off the street and say "wanna try a wargame?" (Though I suggest going through more traditional social channels first.)
I'm thinking that if they come after us for playing their games without using their miniatures, the best thing to do would be to invent different rules and keep them under an open content license. After that, companies can compete to sell minis for the new open ruleset.
*ahem*
http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/
An Open Gaming Content minatures system would be great. Unfortunatly, no one's done one yet.
If I'm not mistaken, companies in America pay a far higer percentage of the taxes than Joe Consumer.
You're not mistaken; you're misled.
Comapnies are taxed only on their profits--that's like making the food that I buy and the rent I pay tax deductions.
Corporations also pay "it's not profit" gains. MS, for example, makes an ungodly ammount of money--but since they never declare it as a profit, they don't pay taxes on it.
You are forgetting the DMCA when you say that. If they said that out loud, Microsoft would send them a cease and desist letter claiming that they are violating the DMCA, Trade-Secret Laws, other shit that M$ can pull, etc
Only applies if they've seen the program.
Plus, even IF they saw the Palladium setup, there's a world of difference between saying "Palladium is not secure" and "Here's Palladium's weak spots."
How do you separate these two? Having a car you don't hold the key to, but instead have to call some central bureau on your cellphone to unlock wouldn't just be a philosophical problem, but a technical one.
No. How you drive your car if your cellphone dies is a technical problem--which, oddly enough, could be "solved" by sufficient network redundancy.
"Technically" the system has no problems if it works as advertised. The problems the cryptographers have are "philisophical" or "marketing", not "technical."
If the problems were technical, they'd be pointing out ways that they could easily crack Palladium or somesuch, not just saying "I don't like this."
Note that "create evil," is in the present tense, meaning that god is continually making bad stuff happen right now!
Well, yeah. God created the universe. God made it to work on its own; He would just sit back and watch.
Unfortunately, the Big Man likes us too much, and has a tendancy to bend the rules. (And he's not the only one, just the bigget and strongest rule-bender who made all the other rule-benders.)
Good happens, because people wish and seek for good. Evil happens because people wish and seek for evil.
God is good--he's just too good, and is a pushover for his favorite sentient mortal creature.
No he died so that christians could usurp a perfectly good pagan spring time festival [prohosting.com]. Eggs, bunnies, and spring flowers are fine examples of birth and rebirth. I for one love watching my garden/yard resurect itself around this time.
No, he died to end his life, which was a fine and perfect life.
His PREISTS co-opted beltane, and sahwain, and yule (feel free to corret me on the names) to make it easier for the unwashed going-to-hell masses to convert.
We've recently realized that, maybe, not everyone who isn't Christian isn't doomed to eternal suffering and damnation, so our previous furor for conversion died off. Please don't be made at us--we really, really, really did think that you were going to suffer, and we're in the theological position of apologizing to a pedestrian who we THOUGHT was about to be hit by a bus, so we knocked her down and accidentially broke her leg in our zeal to save her life.
let's see... your country 'elected' a terrorist bent on the destruction of women and children at great cost of life to American soldiers..
Hey, come on now. Not even Saddam Hussein or Hitler were "bent" on torture and destruction. They were just brutal enough to resort to such caustic methods.
Bush is willing to resort to torturing "terrorists" and starting a war to take out said "terrorists" and their friendly secular tyrant--the women and children and soldiers who die are, if not myth, collateral damage.
he can't pronounce common English words, despite that English is ostensibly his mother tongue....
Acutally, my own critizisms of Bush stem less from his inability to perfectly pronounce technical terms (and "terrahr"), and more from his word-choice and poor delivery... but we have to give him some credit, he's a texan.;)
the DMCA effectively revokes 'free speech' yet Americans in general seem not to care beyond a not-so-vocal minority..
No. The DMCA limits (a bit too harshly) some specific speach. It no more eliminates free speech than any other restrain on what you can say when to whom wihtout consequence.
Oh, and it was signed by Clinton. The DMCA is law--Chapter 12, Title 17, USC.
the PATRIOT Act effectively allows your Gestapo (or equivalent - is that the FBI?) to arrest and detain any 'citizen' without trial indefinitely..
You mean any "terrorist." The FBI has to believe (and proove to someone, even if only their superiors) that the suspect is a terrorist.
Honey, the WHOLE WORLD is my buddy. Just don't have them ask me to help them move furniture, house-sit, or loan them money.
Don't go there. You DON'T want the lawyers having to spell out who is and is not your "friend."
(Of course, that wouldn't necessarily be that bad--leave it to the lawyers (Courts), and it'd likely be something like "a relationship that a reasonable person would recognize as a friendship." The bad part would be Congress getting into the picture, which would invaribly get hotly contested debates and debacles and numbers...)
You have a single central authority that all worldwide laws pass through. No law should affect a citizen who has not had a representative say in it--that is, there should be a clear line of representation from the person to the people who work on and pass the law, preferably as short as possible.
From our current system, the natural method to a worldwide system of laws would be to have every nation join the UN--either voluntarilly or compulsory--and then have the UN General Assembly be the body that adopts laws to a worldwide status.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you claim to have composed a song? Have you ever listened to the radio? If so, then you are presumed to have copied the song from another song in violation of federal copyright law (Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs; analysis [columbia.edu]; more analysis [vwh.net]).
NO!
You are presumed to NOT have copied the song. It's possible for someone who has a song on the radio to take you to court and infer that your song is too close to theirs, but they have to prove it in court.
It's all the world of differene, so watch how you say that.
Interesting point, but you're forgetting something.
The proper place to implement leap-seconds in a system with a calendar-independant time system (like UNIX) is to do so in the "translate to real time" system, rather than adjusting the "more perfect than the Earth" time setting.
Time and computers already need to account for leap years, daylight savings time, time zones, and (to be completely accurate) no fewer than three seperate ways of denoting the year.
Adding a program to check for all of the leap seconds added in the last 30 years shouldn't be that hard; it might add extra cycles to the time-display function, but it's still the "correct" way to do it.
Of course, for _most_ applications, it'd be simpler to ignore the leap seconds and get by with frequent syncs and a system that knows that leap seconds exist. I have a hard time concieving of an instance when you'd want to know the exact down-to-the-milisecond difference of events that happened more than a year apart.
From my post:
"Anyone who uses a PC's bus-clock to do timing, rather than having a system-wide clock that syncs up, at the least, every month, is an idiot."
I stand by my assertion. If you're doing something where time is important, then the system which checks time needs to sync up with itself. If you're just going to assume that all the clocks are going to work the same, then you're as much an idiot as someone who assumes that they'll never get into an accident so they don't wear their seat belt.
Now, let's introduce a leap second into this system. Since the system all syncs up ANYWAY, it only needs to be changed once per system. The only times leap seconds would cause problems would be if cross-system jumps--like international rail lines--don't deal with the issue.
I agree with you--it's not even a mildly imporant detail, and it's not a good idea to call people idiots in broad strokes. But defining an action as "idiotic" sure sounds good to me, and it grammatically equivalent to what I said.
A nice comparable statement would be "it's idiotic to run as ROOT." I.e., "anyone who runs as ROOT all the time is an idiot."
Sorry if you're offended.
They make an RFC and what not...
Interplanetary time would have to be established anyway--which is a different problem than localized time on Earth.
Just imagine the much broader, more mundaine implications of this... the world is networked. Every here and there, a programmer *will* make assumptions that the current second on earth is the same everywhere. Think robotic surgery from remote locations... Think railroad switches for high speed trains. A couple of seconds are much bigger than you think they are.
Anyone who uses a PC's bus-clock to do timing, rather than having a system-wide clock that syncs up, at the least, every month, is an idiot.
The system doesn't have to agree with every other system in the world--they just need to begin their transaction by syncing with each other.
It's a middiling problem, and more of an annoyance than real danger.
What if 20 years from now, a chinese space shuttle tries to dock with the ISS, and there is a problem because of this?
The astronauts look out the window, radio each other, and realize that 20 seconds is well within the mission's variance.
It's a piddiling little problem that requires a piddiling little answer, that's all. No real major harm will come of it.
Well, first off, the too geeky for fashion UNIX crowd still counts from zero.
The rest of the computer world realized that humanity, and the English language, start counting at 1 when dealing with items, and only start from zero when talking about a change in state.
i.e., when counting physical locations, or locations in memory, or records in a database, the first item should be "1". When dealing with, oh, relative distances like moving a HDD, you count from zero--because the assumption is that you're going to apply said numbers to some real physical item.
- Turn your X-box into a EMP bomb
- Add a nuclear power supply
- Hit someone over the head with your X-box
- Juice up the laser in the X-Box to be a weapon
- Use your X-Box to infringe on someone's Copyright
The last one's the doozy. Just accept that Copyright trumps free speach--and realize that, as long as you don't hack the darn thing to make it violate copyright, the DMCA doesn't give a damn about you.Who?
And suddenly you could be paying for the downloading of a whole bunch of music, e-books, movies that you never actually downloaded.
But you now have the legal and moral right to download them--and a reasonable expectation of having reasonable quality copies of said items.
A nice way to roll this out would be at the ISP level. Each IP assignemnt would be either "good" or "not-good", and the "good" ones could access a new Napsteresque P2P system in exchange for paying a slight ($2/month?) fee. Of course, this would have to be governmentally mandated and policed, but it would end the 'piracy wars', to use Felden's term.
A better way to do it would be to change the copyright model from "buy license with one media" to "buy lifelong crossplatform license and right to make own personal copies." Change the laws to assume that the user will be making digital purchases and making their own physical copies, rather than trying to force purely physical laws onto the internet.
Is OpenOffice really there yet? During our final presentation last week in a CS class, a fellow was trying to explain to the teacher why his entire presentation featured scrunched up, barely legible text. "I created it in OpenOffice and brought it into PowerPoint," he explained, as the class laughed at at him.
The student deserved it. He should AT LEAST have ran through it once on the presentation setup, to catch any bugs like that. (We do that here at work, and we all have the exact same system.)
OoO isn't quite ready for prime time yet (see last 2 journal entries). It's getting better and better, but it's still behind Office in too many areas to perform a coup.
The Easter Bunny doesn't bring us eggs and chocolate bunnies to remind us of Jesus of Nazareth.
Of course he does. He got the job when the "Beltane Bunny" left, who wasn't fuzzy at all, and got fired among changes that she danced around naked in front of children.
Being a bunny suddenly being put in charge of the holiest celebration of the Christian year, the Easter Bunny sadly cribbed a bit much from his nudist predecessor. At first the Council of Saints and Prophets was a bit distrubed by this, but after realizing that the rebirth of Christ and the renewal of Beltane were "close enough for government work", they shurgged and figgered that God must have been preplanning this all along.
To date, the Horned God and Triune Goddess have not issued a statement as to if they did or did not convert to the new religion, though they were spotted sipping wine and swapping silly worshiper stories with Jesus and Odin.
When questioned about the recent resurgance of Wicca in the west, they simply shrugged and muttered something about "cycles of life" and "to every thing a season" while staring sopishly into each other's eyes.
Even the title of Privacy Czar for the Homeland Security department seems oxymoronic. Isn't the direction the USA is taking with Homeland Security towards giving up your privacy rights, with all these new laws passed?
The chance of privacy violations does not infer actual loss of privacy. Having a bureau at Homeland Security dedicated to preserving the privacy of innocent americans--i.e., preventing information from being ungeneralized or distributed, at the very least--is a HUGE step in the right direction.
Well, let's get started then! Anyone know of a TWiki [twiki.org] site that'll host it? I'm not exactly ready to set up my own TWiki server in my apartment.
If you want to do some speculative rule writing, I'll host them at my website, www.castlesteelstone.com
I'll even check ya for OGL compliance.
/. is an American site.
It's as improper to use European numbering here as it is to post stories in Kanji. Not that what's improper stops anyone from doing it, but it does give rise to childish comments.
It's not a "communication deficit." It's a mistake. Get over it.
Tabletop wargaming was awesome but I doubt I will ever get to play unless I go to GENCON. Thats sad...
Where are you, anyway? Tabletop's moderatly strong up upstate NY.
I suggest that you make at least two forces for any game you play--that way you can grab someone off the street and say "wanna try a wargame?" (Though I suggest going through more traditional social channels first.)
I'm thinking that if they come after us for playing their games without using their miniatures, the best thing to do would be to invent different rules and keep them under an open content license. After that, companies can compete to sell minis for the new open ruleset.
*ahem*
http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/
An Open Gaming Content minatures system would be great. Unfortunatly, no one's done one yet.
If I'm not mistaken, companies in America pay a far higer percentage of the taxes than Joe Consumer.
You're not mistaken; you're misled.
Comapnies are taxed only on their profits--that's like making the food that I buy and the rent I pay tax deductions.
Corporations also pay "it's not profit" gains. MS, for example, makes an ungodly ammount of money--but since they never declare it as a profit, they don't pay taxes on it.
You are forgetting the DMCA when you say that. If they said that out loud, Microsoft would send them a cease and desist letter claiming that they are violating the DMCA, Trade-Secret Laws, other shit that M$ can pull, etc
Only applies if they've seen the program.
Plus, even IF they saw the Palladium setup, there's a world of difference between saying "Palladium is not secure" and "Here's Palladium's weak spots."
How do you separate these two? Having a car you don't hold the key to, but instead have to call some central bureau on your cellphone to unlock wouldn't just be a philosophical problem, but a technical one.
No. How you drive your car if your cellphone dies is a technical problem--which, oddly enough, could be "solved" by sufficient network redundancy.
"Technically" the system has no problems if it works as advertised. The problems the cryptographers have are "philisophical" or "marketing", not "technical."
If the problems were technical, they'd be pointing out ways that they could easily crack Palladium or somesuch, not just saying "I don't like this."
Note that "create evil," is in the present tense, meaning that god is continually making bad stuff happen right now!
Well, yeah. God created the universe. God made it to work on its own; He would just sit back and watch.
Unfortunately, the Big Man likes us too much, and has a tendancy to bend the rules. (And he's not the only one, just the bigget and strongest rule-bender who made all the other rule-benders.)
Good happens, because people wish and seek for good. Evil happens because people wish and seek for evil.
God is good--he's just too good, and is a pushover for his favorite sentient mortal creature.
No he died so that christians could usurp a perfectly good pagan spring time festival [prohosting.com]. Eggs, bunnies, and spring flowers are fine examples of birth and rebirth. I for one love watching my garden/yard resurect itself around this time.
:)
No, he died to end his life, which was a fine and perfect life.
His PREISTS co-opted beltane, and sahwain, and yule (feel free to corret me on the names) to make it easier for the unwashed going-to-hell masses to convert.
We've recently realized that, maybe, not everyone who isn't Christian isn't doomed to eternal suffering and damnation, so our previous furor for conversion died off. Please don't be made at us--we really, really, really did think that you were going to suffer, and we're in the theological position of apologizing to a pedestrian who we THOUGHT was about to be hit by a bus, so we knocked her down and accidentially broke her leg in our zeal to save her life.
Hope you enjoy the garden, to boot.
Quit renaming all the browsers! Every time I recommend them to a friend or coworker, the name changes and they get confused. :(
You don't recommend them very much, do you?
Netscape was "re-named" to Mozilla--which, in a way, is just publicizing the name it always had.
"Gecko" has always been the Mozilla render engine.
"Phoenix" stared out as "Phoenix" as "micro-Mozilla", and we've known for, oh, six months or so that it had to be re-named.
Minotaur is almost brand'spankin' new--and every mention I've seen of it had "to be re-named to thunderbird" stamped on it.
let's see... your country 'elected' a terrorist bent on the destruction of women and children at great cost of life to American soldiers..
;)
Hey, come on now. Not even Saddam Hussein or Hitler were "bent" on torture and destruction. They were just brutal enough to resort to such caustic methods.
Bush is willing to resort to torturing "terrorists" and starting a war to take out said "terrorists" and their friendly secular tyrant--the women and children and soldiers who die are, if not myth, collateral damage.
he can't pronounce common English words, despite that English is ostensibly his mother tongue....
Acutally, my own critizisms of Bush stem less from his inability to perfectly pronounce technical terms (and "terrahr"), and more from his word-choice and poor delivery... but we have to give him some credit, he's a texan.
the DMCA effectively revokes 'free speech' yet Americans in general seem not to care beyond a not-so-vocal minority..
No. The DMCA limits (a bit too harshly) some specific speach. It no more eliminates free speech than any other restrain on what you can say when to whom wihtout consequence.
Oh, and it was signed by Clinton. The DMCA is law--Chapter 12, Title 17, USC.
the PATRIOT Act effectively allows your Gestapo (or equivalent - is that the FBI?) to arrest and detain any 'citizen' without trial indefinitely..
You mean any "terrorist." The FBI has to believe (and proove to someone, even if only their superiors) that the suspect is a terrorist.
Honey, the WHOLE WORLD is my buddy. Just don't have them ask me to help them move furniture, house-sit, or loan them money.
Don't go there. You DON'T want the lawyers having to spell out who is and is not your "friend."
(Of course, that wouldn't necessarily be that bad--leave it to the lawyers (Courts), and it'd likely be something like "a relationship that a reasonable person would recognize as a friendship." The bad part would be Congress getting into the picture, which would invaribly get hotly contested debates and debacles and numbers...)
Ok, how do you get (b) without (a)?
You have a single central authority that all worldwide laws pass through. No law should affect a citizen who has not had a representative say in it--that is, there should be a clear line of representation from the person to the people who work on and pass the law, preferably as short as possible.
From our current system, the natural method to a worldwide system of laws would be to have every nation join the UN--either voluntarilly or compulsory--and then have the UN General Assembly be the body that adopts laws to a worldwide status.