a camera linked to the databases, and regularly catch [...] motoring offences, such as driving without insurance
I'd love to know how this could possibly work (and I keep hearing that it does happen, or is going to happen, or things like that from reputable sources).
The problem is, there is such a thing as an insurance policy that allows you to drive (with 3rd party only insurance) any vehicle. Not to mention motor trade policies, which offer comprehensive insurance on any vehicles in the holder's posession (up to a specified total value).
Without such policies, many types of business would become impossible (the motor sales trade is one, but I'm sure there are many others where the ability to just pick up a vehicle and drive it is critical).
It might be possible to print the random number plates on paper using an inkjet printer and gaffer tape them to a T shirt:)
Not very nice, but cheaper.
If you have a suitable printer (not all are), you can print to non-absorbent paper in reverse and then apply the ink directly to the T-shirt. Ironing it from the back of the paper will fix it so that it doesn't come off when you take the paper away.
I haven't tried this, but it should work on any inkjet printer where the head doesn't make contact with the paper.
That means that both you and the cloner are likely to get stopped. But you are the one with the documents.
Which, according to British law you don't have to carry (and according to various recommendations you *shouldn't* carry, to prevent them from being stolen along with your car), so the cloner is asked to produce them at a local police station within 7 days, says "Yes, sir, of course I will," and drives off never to be seen again.
Then it isn't very clear. As with all moral questions, there are grey areas. In this one, the answer depends on something that you have no way of knowing: is there a way for the creator to profit from his work in the future that your actions will effect.
In the case of old games, I'd say the chance of this happening is almost zero. I don't think there's any moral problem, for example, in my collection of old Sinclair Spectrum games I have collected for use with a PC emulator. While I do own original copies of some of these, there are many in there that I never did have a copy of.
Out-of-print books is a more interesting question. Note that this may only be a temporary situation, as under standard industry contract terms, after a book has been out of print for some time period (usually about a year, I think) the publisher's exclusive right to print copies is revoked. I know of at least one author who is currently considering rereleasing one of her out-of-print novels as an e-book.
Music rarely becomes completely unavailable, as far as I can tell. As I understand it, most music publishers will sell rights to include almost any track on compilations under standard (non-discriminatory) terms. E.g., you could purchase a Limited Availability License from the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, which would effectively authorise you to make up to 500 reproductions of up to 30 minutes of music for £17.63.
Alignment in rows and columns for instance is much more effective and less strainfull. Shifted allignment is a herritage from 1895 or something (pure technical constraints back then).
I don't think that's true. For example, with my right index finger on the home key of a QWERTY board, I have U,I,N and M all about 1.2 key widths from it. If it were constrained to exact rows, two would be closer, but the other two would be further away. I don't think this is an advantage.
* "Wake" * "Power" (I use the "sleep" button regularly on my current keyboard, but only because my motherboard doesn't seem to support hibernating when I press the case power button, which was how I used the last one)
(I do use the "volume up" / "volume down" keys from time to time, although I'm more likely to grab a volume slider with the mouse and drag it, because it gives more dynamic control)
A side note: The article uses "There are only half as many keys to learn" as an advantage. Not quite.
There seems to be a common theory of user interface designers these days that "fewer buttons -> easier to use", and therefore they should double up functions on single buttons wherever possible. Sorry, my experience has always been that buttons with multiple functions are hard to learn to use.
Take, for instance, the Nokia 3210. A very popular mobile phone a few years ago. Problem? It had one big button that, depending on context, performed the following functions:
Dial Answer Disconnect Open Menu Select Menu Option
So, I'm on a call -- how do I open the menu to (e.g.) put the phone on mute? Oh, right, I press the power on/off button. Of course!
Or the HP LaserJet 6L. A great printer: economical, seems to run forever, and cheap as well. Except for the fact that it has a single control button on the front that does *every function*: print test page, page feed, reset, and probably some other stuff I don't know about too.
The article above notes how economists "Liebowitz and Margolis cited ergonomic studies that conclude that the Dvorak keyboard offers at most only a two to six percent efficiency advantage over QWERTY."
Please see this article which sets out to debunk Liebowitz & Margolis's study. Just like certain large corporations that are unpopular around these parts, L&M are guilty of picking and choosing studies that support their conclusions.
the bad news is that they are incredible hard to learn and it is very easy to forget how to use them if you don't use them for a few weeks, meaning they have basically zero chance in the mass market.
Rubbish.
I had a friend when I was in school who had a handheld computer that used the Microwriter/CyKey system refered to in the article you linked to. I was intrigued by the idea, and got her to teach me the system. It took me about 2 hours to learn it, and within 10 hours of use I was up to 50 WPM with it (a little slower than I was on a QWERTY keyboard at the time).
I just tested myself by writing down the combinations before following the link on wikipedia to the page with a list of them. I still remember them, 14 years later. I guess it would take me a couple of hours to get back up to speed, and probably a week or so to catch up with my QWERTY speed these days (which has improved beyond 50WPM).
The system is ideal for PDAs. You can make a keyboard that's about the same size as an average modern PDA and which would fold up over it. I have no idea why it isn't popular, probably just because it has never been promoted heavily.
Absolutely true. The moral crime occurs when you copy something that you (or the person you give it to) might otherwise have bought. This deprives the creators of income.
Note that the fact that the people refered to in the article were *selling* the XBoxes with software *at a premium* probably indicates that their customers would likely have been willing to pay for (at least some of) the games had no "pirated" version been available, so this moral crime has in fact been committed in this case.
But a flop via broadcast will almost certainly lead to a flop in the theater. Why anyone would think otherwise is beyond me.
Perhaps because the DVDs of the show were immensely popular?
Because nobody watched on TV because there was no promotion so nobody knew the show was on, because the times were regularly changed, and because the episodes were shown out of order in a way that made no sense.
(I was fortunate enough to see it in the UK, where Sci Fi Channel promoted it properly, gave it a fixed schedule, and showed all of the episodes in the right order. It makes a big difference.)
I made it to page 149 where it says "Python uses the indentation of statements under a header to group the statements in a nested block." I stopped reading and tossed the book on my bookshelf on a shelf full of unused & unloved technical manuals.
Hold on... it gets to page 149 before pointing out the most important thing to be aware of in the language's syntax? That's a terrible book. Get another one.
Seriously, though, I was put off Python for a long time for the same reason. I've used whitespace-significant languages before (COBOL, and a functional language called Miranda) and had no end of trouble with indentation issues. But when I tried Python, it just worked, flawlessly. I've never had an issue because of indentation. The language works, it's easy to write, and programs are easier to read due to the lack of excess symbols. The syntax is very clean and readable.
I'm still not sure if this is technically 3 tier, as both your business logic and UI tiers are executing in the same context.
I've worked on an app that works very similarly to that, but the associative arrays of results generated by the business logic tier are recoded into XML and passed as a result to an HTTP request from the UI tier. It's actually a trivial modification to make once you have a framework like it sounds you do, but makes a big difference in flexibility and scalability of the solution.
My mistake. Sorry, I was relying on the comment of a previous poster who said that only DirectX had direct access to the hardware these days, and was merely trying to point out that vendors could support other APIs if they wished. Didn't know that they did.:)
but he had to fill out a form because he was requesting an inter-library loan. I don't know how your school works, if the loan department can psychically detect what you want to request and save you the trouble of filling at a form or whatever, but obviously his school works the old-fashioned way.
In my library, I go to the counter and ask if they can get hold of the book for me. They look in their computer system and tell me when it will likely be available. I leave my name so that they know who to give it to. No address, no phone number, no social security number (or rather NI number, the UK equivalent).
Ask yourself: why do they need this much information to order a damned book?
If the graphics subsystem is outside the kernel, it can be replaced by another driver that does not make OpenGL play second fiddle to DirectX.
It always could be. If your vendor's driver supports it, you can talk to the hardware with whatever API you choose. But you do need driver support for it, and few vendors release drivers that support any API other than DirectX these days.
Slashdot summary: 42 articles compared, but Oh! Wiki is 2.6 times longer on average. TFA (first paragraph on the page): 50 articles compared, and articles selected with very similar lengths, and some material removed (e.g. references) if necessary to make them same lengths.
Read both articles fully. Nature sent 50 articles out to reviewers, but only got 42 back. They say they selected articles with "comparable" lengths, but there's a table on the wikipedia response page with a comparison of the sizes of the article, which is where the 2.6 figure comes from. It looks like they've done their research reasonably well to come up with that figure.
Read the discussion on wikipedia. While they were described as "comparable" in the nature article, the wikipedia articles were, on average, 2.5 times as long as the britannica equivalents.
Yes, but the nature reviewers were instructed to count omission of any important information as an error, which will go at least some way to counteract this tendency.
Slashdot Mirror
a camera linked to the databases, and regularly catch [...] motoring offences, such as driving without insurance
I'd love to know how this could possibly work (and I keep hearing that it does happen, or is going to happen, or things like that from reputable sources).
The problem is, there is such a thing as an insurance policy that allows you to drive (with 3rd party only insurance) any vehicle. Not to mention motor trade policies, which offer comprehensive insurance on any vehicles in the holder's posession (up to a specified total value).
Without such policies, many types of business would become impossible (the motor sales trade is one, but I'm sure there are many others where the ability to just pick up a vehicle and drive it is critical).
It might be possible to print the random number plates on paper using an inkjet printer and gaffer tape them to a T shirt:)
Not very nice, but cheaper.
If you have a suitable printer (not all are), you can print to non-absorbent paper in reverse and then apply the ink directly to the T-shirt. Ironing it from the back of the paper will fix it so that it doesn't come off when you take the paper away.
I haven't tried this, but it should work on any inkjet printer where the head doesn't make contact with the paper.
That means that both you and the cloner are likely to get stopped. But you are the one with the documents.
Which, according to British law you don't have to carry (and according to various recommendations you *shouldn't* carry, to prevent them from being stolen along with your car), so the cloner is asked to produce them at a local police station within 7 days, says "Yes, sir, of course I will," and drives off never to be seen again.
Then it isn't very clear. As with all moral questions, there are grey areas. In this one, the answer depends on something that you have no way of knowing: is there a way for the creator to profit from his work in the future that your actions will effect.
In the case of old games, I'd say the chance of this happening is almost zero. I don't think there's any moral problem, for example, in my collection of old Sinclair Spectrum games I have collected for use with a PC emulator. While I do own original copies of some of these, there are many in there that I never did have a copy of.
Out-of-print books is a more interesting question. Note that this may only be a temporary situation, as under standard industry contract terms, after a book has been out of print for some time period (usually about a year, I think) the publisher's exclusive right to print copies is revoked. I know of at least one author who is currently considering rereleasing one of her out-of-print novels as an e-book.
Music rarely becomes completely unavailable, as far as I can tell. As I understand it, most music publishers will sell rights to include almost any track on compilations under standard (non-discriminatory) terms. E.g., you could purchase a Limited Availability License from the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, which would effectively authorise you to make up to 500 reproductions of up to 30 minutes of music for £17.63.
Alignment in rows and columns for instance is much more effective and less strainfull. Shifted allignment is a herritage from 1895 or something (pure technical constraints back then).
I don't think that's true. For example, with my right index finger on the home key of a QWERTY board, I have U,I,N and M all about 1.2 key widths from it. If it were constrained to exact rows, two would be closer, but the other two would be further away. I don't think this is an advantage.
I'm curious to hear which you don't use.
For me (and I suspect many others) this list includes:
Keys on a standard 102 key ("Windows 95") keyboard:
* "Alt Gr"
* Scroll Lock
* Pause/Break
* The rightmost "Windows" key
On 105 key keyboards:
* "Wake"
* "Power"
(I use the "sleep" button regularly on my current keyboard, but only because my motherboard doesn't seem to support hibernating when I press the case power button, which was how I used the last one)
Additional unusual keys on my keyboard:
* "Last track"
* "Stop"
* "Play/pause"
* "Next track"
* "Mute"
* "Calc"
(I do use the "volume up" / "volume down" keys from time to time, although I'm more likely to grab a volume slider with the mouse and drag it, because it gives more dynamic control)
A side note: The article uses "There are only half as many keys to learn" as an advantage. Not quite.
There seems to be a common theory of user interface designers these days that "fewer buttons -> easier to use", and therefore they should double up functions on single buttons wherever possible. Sorry, my experience has always been that buttons with multiple functions are hard to learn to use.
Take, for instance, the Nokia 3210. A very popular mobile phone a few years ago. Problem? It had one big button that, depending on context, performed the following functions:
Dial
Answer
Disconnect
Open Menu
Select Menu Option
So, I'm on a call -- how do I open the menu to (e.g.) put the phone on mute? Oh, right, I press the power on/off button. Of course!
Or the HP LaserJet 6L. A great printer: economical, seems to run forever, and cheap as well. Except for the fact that it has a single control button on the front that does *every function*: print test page, page feed, reset, and probably some other stuff I don't know about too.
The article above notes how economists "Liebowitz and Margolis cited ergonomic studies that conclude that the Dvorak keyboard offers at most only a two to six percent efficiency advantage over QWERTY."
Please see this article which sets out to debunk Liebowitz & Margolis's study. Just like certain large corporations that are unpopular around these parts, L&M are guilty of picking and choosing studies that support their conclusions.
the bad news is that they are incredible hard to learn and it is very easy to forget how to use them if you don't use them for a few weeks, meaning they have basically zero chance in the mass market.
Rubbish.
I had a friend when I was in school who had a handheld computer that used the Microwriter/CyKey system refered to in the article you linked to. I was intrigued by the idea, and got her to teach me the system. It took me about 2 hours to learn it, and within 10 hours of use I was up to 50 WPM with it (a little slower than I was on a QWERTY keyboard at the time).
I just tested myself by writing down the combinations before following the link on wikipedia to the page with a list of them. I still remember them, 14 years later. I guess it would take me a couple of hours to get back up to speed, and probably a week or so to catch up with my QWERTY speed these days (which has improved beyond 50WPM).
The system is ideal for PDAs. You can make a keyboard that's about the same size as an average modern PDA and which would fold up over it. I have no idea why it isn't popular, probably just because it has never been promoted heavily.
Absolutely true. The moral crime occurs when you copy something that you (or the person you give it to) might otherwise have bought. This deprives the creators of income.
Note that the fact that the people refered to in the article were *selling* the XBoxes with software *at a premium* probably indicates that their customers would likely have been willing to pay for (at least some of) the games had no "pirated" version been available, so this moral crime has in fact been committed in this case.
No, SciFi has always been owned by NBC/Universal. Fox has always been owned by News Corporation. Nothing has changed.
But a flop via broadcast will almost certainly lead to a flop in the theater. Why anyone would think otherwise is beyond me.
Perhaps because the DVDs of the show were immensely popular?
Because nobody watched on TV because there was no promotion so nobody knew the show was on, because the times were regularly changed, and because the episodes were shown out of order in a way that made no sense.
(I was fortunate enough to see it in the UK, where Sci Fi Channel promoted it properly, gave it a fixed schedule, and showed all of the episodes in the right order. It makes a big difference.)
I made it to page 149 where it says "Python uses the indentation of statements under a header to group the statements in a nested block." I stopped reading and tossed the book on my bookshelf on a shelf full of unused & unloved technical manuals.
Hold on... it gets to page 149 before pointing out the most important thing to be aware of in the language's syntax? That's a terrible book. Get another one.
Seriously, though, I was put off Python for a long time for the same reason. I've used whitespace-significant languages before (COBOL, and a functional language called Miranda) and had no end of trouble with indentation issues. But when I tried Python, it just worked, flawlessly. I've never had an issue because of indentation. The language works, it's easy to write, and programs are easier to read due to the lack of excess symbols. The syntax is very clean and readable.
Who's using Perl 6 for a serious project?
Nobody. There isn't a fully working implementation yet.
Did RMS really just call George W Bush a fascist?
I'm not, like, imagining that, am I?
I'm still not sure if this is technically 3 tier, as both your business logic and UI tiers are executing in the same context.
I've worked on an app that works very similarly to that, but the associative arrays of results generated by the business logic tier are recoded into XML and passed as a result to an HTTP request from the UI tier. It's actually a trivial modification to make once you have a framework like it sounds you do, but makes a big difference in flexibility and scalability of the solution.
So what you're saying is... Don't use MySQL.
I'm not sure what you're talking about.
I think the nerdiness comes from the idea of using computer graphics to reduce the size of the bulge. That's pretty damn nerdy if you ask me. :)
Not sure where you're quoting from, but Larry Niven does the same idea much better here.
My mistake. Sorry, I was relying on the comment of a previous poster who said that only DirectX had direct access to the hardware these days, and was merely trying to point out that vendors could support other APIs if they wished. Didn't know that they did. :)
but he had to fill out a form because he was requesting an inter-library loan. I don't know how your school works, if the loan department can psychically detect what you want to request and save you the trouble of filling at a form or whatever, but obviously his school works the old-fashioned way.
In my library, I go to the counter and ask if they can get hold of the book for me. They look in their computer system and tell me when it will likely be available. I leave my name so that they know who to give it to. No address, no phone number, no social security number (or rather NI number, the UK equivalent).
Ask yourself: why do they need this much information to order a damned book?
If the graphics subsystem is outside the kernel, it can be replaced by another driver that does not make OpenGL play second fiddle to DirectX.
It always could be. If your vendor's driver supports it, you can talk to the hardware with whatever API you choose. But you do need driver support for it, and few vendors release drivers that support any API other than DirectX these days.
Slashdot summary: 42 articles compared, but Oh! Wiki is 2.6 times longer on average.
TFA (first paragraph on the page): 50 articles compared, and articles selected with very similar lengths, and some material removed (e.g. references) if necessary to make them same lengths.
Read both articles fully. Nature sent 50 articles out to reviewers, but only got 42 back. They say they selected articles with "comparable" lengths, but there's a table on the wikipedia response page with a comparison of the sizes of the article, which is where the 2.6 figure comes from. It looks like they've done their research reasonably well to come up with that figure.
Read the discussion on wikipedia. While they were described as "comparable" in the nature article, the wikipedia articles were, on average, 2.5 times as long as the britannica equivalents.
Yes, but the nature reviewers were instructed to count omission of any important information as an error, which will go at least some way to counteract this tendency.