I'd guess that August is when college students returned to their internet connections, but who knows... (there doesn't seem to be such a spike in 2004)
To the anonymous reply: don't be silly. Just because (the relatively new) Digg rose to slashdot's level doesn't mean it will continue to rise forever. Just how many geeks do you think are out there?
Just wanted to say I agree. I read slashdot for the comments. Sure it's full of idiots. But often when I ask a technical question, or legal question, or just throw out an idea, I get something back that I either didn't know or hadn't thought of.
The problem with Digg discussions is the lack of threading or nesting. It requires a larger effort to follow a conversation (i.e. reading everything), and so I just don't. Slashdot's nesting makes it easy to skip large sections of comments that I don't care about. It's also easier to find comments I read yesterday and see new replies. I think the Digg (and phpBB which I loathe) style of flat comments is really only workable on small scale sites where it's possible to read everything. But that's just me.
As a young and naive wannabe programmer, I have a question about IPC: From what little I understand of fork() and shared memory, it only allows the sharing of continuous blocks of memory. Is this correct? In my programs, I typically use threads and a glib GAsyncQueue to push pointers to memory structures between threads. For me this works rather well, because I essentially keep the threads completely separate (like processes), but I can still share a complex memory structure full of pointers. How are things like this accomplished in fork()/IPC land? Thanks.
Perhaps the user installed the anti-spyware program? And thus may be assumed to accept the anti-spyware software's definition of spyware? So if it flags innocent software, so what. Can I not install an anti-everythingware program if I so desire?
Why can't science and God coexist? The laws of physics are God. God is the laws of physics. I don't see why God is always a character sitting on a throne looking down upon us. God is nature, or at least, nature is a part of God. Why then is it so bad to study this in a way that asks questions and poses falsifiable answers within this observable portion? An atheist may well look at science as a way to explain things without the God of Gaps; fine. A theist may well look at science as a way to be closer to God; fine.
P.S. I was under the impression that DNA similarities across species was at least a bit of evidence for macroevolution. Science is about deductive reasoning. The reason for X is Y. Well is it? Let's check Z... nope. How about A? nope; B? nope; C? nope; Does that mean Y is really the reason for X? No. But it does mean that it could be. And it also means that if the check for D turned out true that we'd have to rethink our "Y causes X" statement. But with Intelligent Design or Creationism, there will always be parts of nature not yet understood via natural explanations that can be attributed to a higher power. Thus no evidence exists that if found would destroy either.
Take gravity for example. I presume you don't dispute its existence. I do. I submit that what you call gravity is naught but completely random whims of particles and objects. It just so happens that the completely random whims have created the illusion of gravity through pure chance. One of these is science (e.g. Newtonian gravity), the other is not (conspiracy of randomness). If you were to drop an apple and see it float, you would be forced to question Newtonian gravity. However, nothing could possibly happen that would contradict the conspiracy of randomness. It may indeed be true; but it is not science.
Why is that so many people prefer kde over gnome, yet redhat, debian-based distros like ubuntu and now SuSE use gnome as their primary?
Perhaps "so many" isn't so many... I personally agree with two comments above. One states "KDE feels clunky to me", the replay states "KDE is more mature and solid". I prefer GNOME largely because of its (more) minimalist look. While I don't use KDE much, from what I hear it has many nice features that GNOME does not (kio stuff, kparts, scriptability), but I still prefer the GNOME look.
I guess I agree more with the philosophy "options are where the developers couldn't make a decision". It's not KDE and it's not GNOME, but yesterday I was using Microsoft Word and looking through its options... "[y/n] Insert deletes selection?" among 10,000 others. In my opinion, applications should either be inherently flexible (much like stringing together pipes on the command line is flexible), or make decisions and stop bothering me. Honestly, something as fundamental as "insert deletes selection" really needs to be an OS wide option, or no option at all... (and for the record, it should not delete the selection; I spent 20 minutes of careful mousing to select all that, damned if you're going to make me redo it because of one mistaken keypress. But I leave that option set to "yes" for consistency with every other application out there so I don't drive myself crazy). If one method is clearly superior to the other, get rid of the other. If it isn't clear which is better, change the design. GNOME may make the wrong decisions, but at least they try. MS Word just gives up and includes *everything* as an option, and I get the same feeling from KDE.
Another thing I can't stand about KDE kis kthe knaming kscheme. Kbut kthat's kjust kme. Ok, that was low. Seriously though, it's hard to find the kapplication you want from an alphabetized menu.
I'm not too familiar with Netflix, but itsn't it "pay a monthly fee, get X
movies per month, two at a time" ? Are you forced to rent X movies each month?
I'd bet that many rent somwhat less than the limit on simple time constraints.
Either way though, any rental system is cheaper than $8. Heck, small to
mid-sized town theatres can be cheaper than $8. *sigh*/me remembers the
one-screen theatre in my town that was $1.50 when I was young (late 80's).
I love w3m. It's so nice and fast compared to, say, Firefox. It's a pleasure to use on properly (and sparsely) designed sites.
However, w3m, like all browsers I've used (maybe not lynx, I can't remember) often requires horizontal scrolling to view the entire page. I most often see this in Firefox in mailing list archives where someone isn't breaking paragraphs into multiple lines (which I believe should be perfectly acceptable... oh well). Why oh why can't Firefox be forced to break these lines? Can it and I just don't know how? Can any browser? I never want to see a horizontal scrollbar. I don't care what contortions the browser needs to go through; just never never never burden me with a horizontal scrollbar. It makes reading anything absolutely miserable. And no, a horizontal scroll wheel on the mouse would not make things better for I'd still need to shift back and forth just to read a paragraph or two.
It's all very simple. The watchers stand in a circle. The watcher of the
first watcher is watched by the watcher of the watcher of the watcher, who to
the watcher appears as merely a watcher of a watcher. Thus every watcher is
both a watcher of a watcher and a watcher of a watcher of a watcher and so on.
No watcher is not watched, and no one is not watching a watcher.
Ya know how a word starts to sound funny if you keep saying it...?
I share your feelings about Google... but as I understand, any publically
traded corporation is legally obligated to [attempt to] maximize shareholder
value. I guess I don't quite know the implications of that (many corporations
give donations to e.g. the Red Cross), but it's been bugging me lately. What
exactly can and can't a corp. do with respect to its shareholders?
Some have speculated, for example, that quantum mechanical uncertainity is at the heart of free will.
Could someone expand on this? From what I understand, the cells in our brains are much too large to be aware of or take advantage of any quantum uncertainty...
I think it's possible to explain religion using evolution... our more complex brain that has the great advantage of being able to devise horrific weaponry has some need to explain the unknown. Yet the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, and thus we are evolutionarily favorable.
What I really wonder is: do any non-human animals create art? I am unaware of any, at least to the scale that humans do, but elephants have grave yards I hear... Humans create art, historical monuments, religious shrines, and all sorts of "useless" things.
I wish the "Similar pages" actually did what I expected it to. Seems like every time I click on it, I only get identical pages, or pages from the same domain. If I search for a common term, say "apache", it'd be nice if they could group results by topic, all on the front page. The first group might be for the webserver (at the moment, the first three pages are almost exclusively about the apache webserver), the second group about the Native American tribe, the third whatever. The key point is that you'd be able to see them all on the front page, and click "Similar pages" to see more results from that subtopic. Not really sure if that's feasible, but I imagine spam filter tech could be readily adapted to sorting all the "apache" pages into a few bins.
Perhaps... of course, even ignoring what I assume you mean by "buttfuckathon", it's still much easier to make binary drivers for Windows since x86 is essentially the only architecture. The manufacturer should be happy to do whatever the customers want, which for me would be to release all specs (and possibly a reference driver for x86 Windows or maybe even Linux) so that free drivers could be made for any OS on any architecture, but apparently not enough other customers feel that way.
I've heard numerous times that it's cheaper in terms of energy to buy a used and inefficient car than to have a factory manufacture a new gree car... Thoughts?
My father mentioned that his employer offered a rebate to employees who
biked to work four days per week (I believe on the premise that biking to work
to reduced parking lot crowding, but I can't remember the details).
I know that my city offers a rebate if one purchases a water saving washing
machine (I live in a dry area). It seems cities should offer a similar rebate
to those who bike to work (less traffic impact, less wear and tear on the
roads, less pollution), or those who drive cleaner cars (less pollution).
Proving one bikes/walks/etc. to work may be too difficult... Or perhaps the
cost of roads is already built into vehicle registration.
What, they know the frequency to which you are tuned? I thought Nielsen paid people to put a special box between the cable and the TV... in other words, "took a survey".
Thanks. Your analysis is better than mine, but I'd like to add to "character of use" that google print will be a vastly useful research tool. This may not be google's use of the material, but it will be the public's use, so I'm not sure if that counts.
Now for an absurdly impossible hypothetical question: let's say google hires a million monkeys, er humans, who amongst them have read every book (and google has purchased all these books; a duplicate library of congress). User submits a query, the horde returns a list of books containing that phrase. Would this be legal? It seems the crux of the situation is that google must copy the book (and digitize it) in order to search the book, and the author holds the exclusive right to copy. So, my question boils down to: if google could offer an identical service from a user's point of view without needing to copy all books (which is most likely impossible in practice but is certainly possible in theory if human memory doesn't count as a copy), then it would be legal, yes?
(I know you are looking at this more from a legal "this is how the law is at this point in time" perspecitve, and I'm looking at it from more of a "this is really cool and useful and I hope it doesn't get shut down" perspective)
I thought "fair use" was never explicitly spelled out excepting a few examples such as the home audio recording act (name may be wrong), but required the application of the four factors.
So, here's my amateur opinion:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Well, it's commercial, but they aren't selling the copyrighted work, just (presumably) advertising space.
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
*shrug*
3. amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
Copying all of it for internal use, displaying small exerpts for context. I think the context is by no means intended to be a replacement for the book, nor will it be.
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
I think this can only increase the market...? Perhaps with much trouble one could extract an entire book from google, after which the cat's out of the bag. But I think this would be an extremely valuable service.
I'm not sure if they intend to or are able to scan comics, but I can't count the times I've thought "oh, remember that Calvin and Hobbes where Calvin says 'so and so'", and wished for a text searchable database (I even already own most of the books)...
There's a difference between including the small bit (a few lines or so) to which you are replying and including the entire preceding message or messages.
I agree that having all the messages below for reference is often useful. But I think this is mostly the fault of horrendous email user agents. A proper user agent should make seeing this reference material easy. None that I've used do, and Outlook is particularly bad at it.
So, bottom posting can and is easily abused. Top posting is endlessly frustrating because it's a poor crutch around incompetent software. Until useful software exists, I go back and forth about how to reply to email. But it seems bottom posting would work best when the snipits are kept small and relevant and the assumption is made that everyone is able to easily see the entire conversation through a threaded reader or something more advanced. And regretably, top posting works well in the warped and twisted world of Outlook but I still think this would and should be better solved by a proper user agent.
Slashdot Mirror
Then what happends to John Ruggles' Locomotivie Steam-Engine for Rail and other Roads?? (US Patent 1)
I'd guess that August is when college students returned to their internet connections, but who knows... (there doesn't seem to be such a spike in 2004)
To the anonymous reply: don't be silly. Just because (the relatively new) Digg rose to slashdot's level doesn't mean it will continue to rise forever. Just how many geeks do you think are out there?
Just wanted to say I agree. I read slashdot for the comments. Sure it's full of idiots. But often when I ask a technical question, or legal question, or just throw out an idea, I get something back that I either didn't know or hadn't thought of.
The problem with Digg discussions is the lack of threading or nesting. It requires a larger effort to follow a conversation (i.e. reading everything), and so I just don't. Slashdot's nesting makes it easy to skip large sections of comments that I don't care about. It's also easier to find comments I read yesterday and see new replies. I think the Digg (and phpBB which I loathe) style of flat comments is really only workable on small scale sites where it's possible to read everything. But that's just me.
As a young and naive wannabe programmer, I have a question about IPC: From what little I understand of fork() and shared memory, it only allows the sharing of continuous blocks of memory. Is this correct? In my programs, I typically use threads and a glib GAsyncQueue to push pointers to memory structures between threads. For me this works rather well, because I essentially keep the threads completely separate (like processes), but I can still share a complex memory structure full of pointers. How are things like this accomplished in fork()/IPC land? Thanks.
I thought Linux had somewhat less than stellar thread creation performance for this very reason...?
Perhaps the user installed the anti-spyware program? And thus may be assumed to accept the anti-spyware software's definition of spyware? So if it flags innocent software, so what. Can I not install an anti-everythingware program if I so desire?
I don't get these modern jokes... I just can't stay current.
Why can't science and God coexist? The laws of physics are God. God is the laws of physics. I don't see why God is always a character sitting on a throne looking down upon us. God is nature, or at least, nature is a part of God. Why then is it so bad to study this in a way that asks questions and poses falsifiable answers within this observable portion? An atheist may well look at science as a way to explain things without the God of Gaps; fine. A theist may well look at science as a way to be closer to God; fine.
P.S. I was under the impression that DNA similarities across species was at least a bit of evidence for macroevolution. Science is about deductive reasoning. The reason for X is Y. Well is it? Let's check Z... nope. How about A? nope; B? nope; C? nope; Does that mean Y is really the reason for X? No. But it does mean that it could be. And it also means that if the check for D turned out true that we'd have to rethink our "Y causes X" statement. But with Intelligent Design or Creationism, there will always be parts of nature not yet understood via natural explanations that can be attributed to a higher power. Thus no evidence exists that if found would destroy either.
Take gravity for example. I presume you don't dispute its existence. I do. I submit that what you call gravity is naught but completely random whims of particles and objects. It just so happens that the completely random whims have created the illusion of gravity through pure chance. One of these is science (e.g. Newtonian gravity), the other is not (conspiracy of randomness). If you were to drop an apple and see it float, you would be forced to question Newtonian gravity. However, nothing could possibly happen that would contradict the conspiracy of randomness. It may indeed be true; but it is not science.
Why is that so many people prefer kde over gnome, yet redhat, debian-based distros like ubuntu and now SuSE use gnome as their primary?
Perhaps "so many" isn't so many... I personally agree with two comments above. One states "KDE feels clunky to me", the replay states "KDE is more mature and solid". I prefer GNOME largely because of its (more) minimalist look. While I don't use KDE much, from what I hear it has many nice features that GNOME does not (kio stuff, kparts, scriptability), but I still prefer the GNOME look.
I guess I agree more with the philosophy "options are where the developers couldn't make a decision". It's not KDE and it's not GNOME, but yesterday I was using Microsoft Word and looking through its options... "[y/n] Insert deletes selection?" among 10,000 others. In my opinion, applications should either be inherently flexible (much like stringing together pipes on the command line is flexible), or make decisions and stop bothering me. Honestly, something as fundamental as "insert deletes selection" really needs to be an OS wide option, or no option at all... (and for the record, it should not delete the selection; I spent 20 minutes of careful mousing to select all that, damned if you're going to make me redo it because of one mistaken keypress. But I leave that option set to "yes" for consistency with every other application out there so I don't drive myself crazy). If one method is clearly superior to the other, get rid of the other. If it isn't clear which is better, change the design. GNOME may make the wrong decisions, but at least they try. MS Word just gives up and includes *everything* as an option, and I get the same feeling from KDE.
Another thing I can't stand about KDE kis kthe knaming kscheme. Kbut kthat's kjust kme. Ok, that was low. Seriously though, it's hard to find the kapplication you want from an alphabetized menu.
I'm not too familiar with Netflix, but itsn't it "pay a monthly fee, get X movies per month, two at a time" ? Are you forced to rent X movies each month? I'd bet that many rent somwhat less than the limit on simple time constraints. Either way though, any rental system is cheaper than $8. Heck, small to mid-sized town theatres can be cheaper than $8. *sigh* /me remembers the
one-screen theatre in my town that was $1.50 when I was young (late 80's).
Who said anything about mp3? Ogg Vorbis 4 Life!!!
I love w3m. It's so nice and fast compared to, say, Firefox. It's a pleasure to use on properly (and sparsely) designed sites.
However, w3m, like all browsers I've used (maybe not lynx, I can't remember) often requires horizontal scrolling to view the entire page. I most often see this in Firefox in mailing list archives where someone isn't breaking paragraphs into multiple lines (which I believe should be perfectly acceptable... oh well). Why oh why can't Firefox be forced to break these lines? Can it and I just don't know how? Can any browser? I never want to see a horizontal scrollbar. I don't care what contortions the browser needs to go through; just never never never burden me with a horizontal scrollbar. It makes reading anything absolutely miserable. And no, a horizontal scroll wheel on the mouse would not make things better for I'd still need to shift back and forth just to read a paragraph or two.
It's all very simple. The watchers stand in a circle. The watcher of the first watcher is watched by the watcher of the watcher of the watcher, who to the watcher appears as merely a watcher of a watcher. Thus every watcher is both a watcher of a watcher and a watcher of a watcher of a watcher and so on. No watcher is not watched, and no one is not watching a watcher.
Ya know how a word starts to sound funny if you keep saying it...?
I share your feelings about Google... but as I understand, any publically traded corporation is legally obligated to [attempt to] maximize shareholder value. I guess I don't quite know the implications of that (many corporations give donations to e.g. the Red Cross), but it's been bugging me lately. What exactly can and can't a corp. do with respect to its shareholders?
Ha! My aerodynamic hd enclosure is still accelerating while yours is stuck at terminal velocity.
Some have speculated, for example, that quantum mechanical uncertainity is at the heart of free will.
Could someone expand on this? From what I understand, the cells in our brains are much too large to be aware of or take advantage of any quantum uncertainty...
I think it's possible to explain religion using evolution... our more complex brain that has the great advantage of being able to devise horrific weaponry has some need to explain the unknown. Yet the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, and thus we are evolutionarily favorable.
What I really wonder is: do any non-human animals create art? I am unaware of any, at least to the scale that humans do, but elephants have grave yards I hear... Humans create art, historical monuments, religious shrines, and all sorts of "useless" things.
I wish the "Similar pages" actually did what I expected it to. Seems like every time I click on it, I only get identical pages, or pages from the same domain. If I search for a common term, say "apache", it'd be nice if they could group results by topic, all on the front page. The first group might be for the webserver (at the moment, the first three pages are almost exclusively about the apache webserver), the second group about the Native American tribe, the third whatever. The key point is that you'd be able to see them all on the front page, and click "Similar pages" to see more results from that subtopic. Not really sure if that's feasible, but I imagine spam filter tech could be readily adapted to sorting all the "apache" pages into a few bins.
Perhaps... of course, even ignoring what I assume you mean by "buttfuckathon", it's still much easier to make binary drivers for Windows since x86 is essentially the only architecture. The manufacturer should be happy to do whatever the customers want, which for me would be to release all specs (and possibly a reference driver for x86 Windows or maybe even Linux) so that free drivers could be made for any OS on any architecture, but apparently not enough other customers feel that way.
I've heard numerous times that it's cheaper in terms of energy to buy a used and inefficient car than to have a factory manufacture a new gree car... Thoughts?
My father mentioned that his employer offered a rebate to employees who biked to work four days per week (I believe on the premise that biking to work to reduced parking lot crowding, but I can't remember the details).
I know that my city offers a rebate if one purchases a water saving washing machine (I live in a dry area). It seems cities should offer a similar rebate to those who bike to work (less traffic impact, less wear and tear on the roads, less pollution), or those who drive cleaner cars (less pollution). Proving one bikes/walks/etc. to work may be too difficult... Or perhaps the cost of roads is already built into vehicle registration.
What, they know the frequency to which you are tuned? I thought Nielsen paid people to put a special box between the cable and the TV... in other words, "took a survey".
Thanks. Your analysis is better than mine, but I'd like to add to "character of use" that google print will be a vastly useful research tool. This may not be google's use of the material, but it will be the public's use, so I'm not sure if that counts.
Now for an absurdly impossible hypothetical question: let's say google hires a million monkeys, er humans, who amongst them have read every book (and google has purchased all these books; a duplicate library of congress). User submits a query, the horde returns a list of books containing that phrase. Would this be legal? It seems the crux of the situation is that google must copy the book (and digitize it) in order to search the book, and the author holds the exclusive right to copy. So, my question boils down to: if google could offer an identical service from a user's point of view without needing to copy all books (which is most likely impossible in practice but is certainly possible in theory if human memory doesn't count as a copy), then it would be legal, yes?
(I know you are looking at this more from a legal "this is how the law is at this point in time" perspecitve, and I'm looking at it from more of a "this is really cool and useful and I hope it doesn't get shut down" perspective)
I thought "fair use" was never explicitly spelled out excepting a few examples such as the home audio recording act (name may be wrong), but required the application of the four factors.
So, here's my amateur opinion:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Well, it's commercial, but they aren't selling the copyrighted work, just (presumably) advertising space.
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
*shrug*
3. amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
Copying all of it for internal use, displaying small exerpts for context. I think the context is by no means intended to be a replacement for the book, nor will it be.
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
I think this can only increase the market...? Perhaps with much trouble one could extract an entire book from google, after which the cat's out of the bag. But I think this would be an extremely valuable service.
I'm not sure if they intend to or are able to scan comics, but I can't count the times I've thought "oh, remember that Calvin and Hobbes where Calvin says 'so and so'", and wished for a text searchable database (I even already own most of the books)...
There's a difference between including the small bit (a few lines or so) to which you are replying and including the entire preceding message or messages.
I agree that having all the messages below for reference is often useful. But I think this is mostly the fault of horrendous email user agents. A proper user agent should make seeing this reference material easy. None that I've used do, and Outlook is particularly bad at it.
So, bottom posting can and is easily abused. Top posting is endlessly frustrating because it's a poor crutch around incompetent software. Until useful software exists, I go back and forth about how to reply to email. But it seems bottom posting would work best when the snipits are kept small and relevant and the assumption is made that everyone is able to easily see the entire conversation through a threaded reader or something more advanced. And regretably, top posting works well in the warped and twisted world of Outlook but I still think this would and should be better solved by a proper user agent.