I see so many ppl here willing to give up animinity and the ensuing free speech, to stop such harassments.
Assuming you mean anonymity, I disagree that it is a requirement for free speech. Free speech is being able to say what you want (within reason) without fear of recrimination. Only if you were afraid of recrimination would you want to do so anonymously. So the need for anonymity is actually evidence that free speech does not exist.
I wouldn't describe child pornography as a 'thought crime'. It involves posession of a material which, to be produced, requires that a crime be committed which is frequently harmful to the children involved, and therefore implicitly condones the fact that that crime took place.
Would you say the same thing if you'd missed the email from the gambling site telling you that you'd won GBP 500 on the bet that you placed the night before while you were too drunk to remember it?;)
I think what's happening is they've set routers up to redirect the external requests to a different server, but that server is misconfigured so isn't serving up any actual content.
This makes more sense than the idea that they're intentionally blocking it.
Never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.
When a country (almost) voluntarily relinquishes 99% of its empire, I think calling it imperialistic is a little daft. Eximperialistic is the word you're looking for.:)
You missed the obvious fact that "extend the peace" is a euphemism for "declare war on anybody that doesn't think the same way we do".
Re:Trying to answer the question that was asked...
on
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
·
· Score: 1
Nice. I think that was rather cutting-edge at the time, though. The computer I have that was manufactured only a year before was a 286+287 running at (I think) 10MHz, had EGA, 16 bit ISA (although not for all 5 ports; some only supported 8 bit cards!), and 4Mb max memory (640Kb as standard), along with a 45Mb RLL hard disc. Came with DOS 4.01 and Windows 1.02 (I think) and new cost was roughly GBP 1500 (about $2500 I think). I bought it used in 1990 for GBP 600, including a copy of WordPerfect and a few other useful software packages. By that time I could have bought a new 286 for only a little more, but wouldn't have got the extra software, so decided to go with the second hand option.
It has been said that people allergic to cat saliva tend not to have a problem with some breeds, too. Maine Coons are sometimes quoted -- I forget the others, because that's not what I was researching at the time I found it. It certainly seems to be true for at least one cat-allergic friend I have.
A friend recently purchased a Maine Coon kitten. The breeder refused to provide registration / documentation of its pedigree until provide with evidence that it had been neutered. This is perfectly legitimate. Obviously he could have used it to breed from, but it would no longer officially be a Maine Coon if he did so.
This seems like it would invalidate the copyright-based argument for including a copyrighted text block (such as a haiku) in emails as validation of a trusted source.
Yes, it does. Perhaps even more clearly:
See Sega Enters., 977 F.2d at 1524 ("When specific instructions, even though previously copyrighted, are the only and essential means of accomplishing a given task, their later use by another will not amount to infringement.")
The case will proceed and in the end, either side may win.
Yeah, sure. But with a ruling from the supreme court that states "the district court decided that Lexmark had shown a likelihood of success [...] we view Lexmark's prospects for success [...] differently" I think they're unlikely to get very far. They'll probably drop the case.
Re:Trying to answer the question that was asked...
on
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
·
· Score: 1
follow the curve of hardware prices over the past 10 years... Starting at upwards of $7000-8000 for a home PC, which then dropped to $4k-5k a few years later, which then went to $2-3k not long after, to the magic $1k, and now to sub $500.
Excuse me? 10 years ago is approximately when I purchased my first new PC (previously I had always purchased 2nd hand). I acquired a 386 SX 40 with 16Mb of RAM and 270Mb hard disc (an entry level machine for the time -- 486DX2/66 machines had just come on the market and the disc was the smallest size available from a local supplier) for GBP 550 (about $800 US, I think). That's a long way from $7000.
In fact, I don't think entry-level PC prices have been that high in the last 20 years, much less 10.
I run NAT, firewall, SMTP & IMAP servers, SMB file and printer sharing and a test environment for web development with PHP and MySQL on a Pentium 200-MMX for a small (3 computer) office network. The file sharing has trouble keeping up with a 100Mbit network at times, but I personally blame that on cheap network hardware and low bandwidth IDE connection rather than processing power.
The only thing it struggles with is compressing backups. That's an overnight job.
"In the future" isn't as commonly used as "from now on" simply because it is less specific. The "future" talked about need nod start any time. In fact, it might even be 50 years away... whereas "now" is now.
In itself, it isn't particularly important, other than the fact that it is a nice way to show a relationship between several mathematical constants that orginally arose in different fields.
What is important is the key fact in its proof, which is that for any value 't', e^it = sin(t) + i*cos(t), which is a very important equality in the simplification of comlex formulae, and is therefore used frequently in diverse practical fields including electronic engineering.
Other than the obvious, there is just so much wrong with that story. '"That's why Linux will never be mainstream", she tells me,' after failing to open an excel spreadsheet in kspread. Kspread? What the hell was she doing even attempting that. The KDE office apps might be nice when they're finished, but they're still a long way from that. And 2.5 years ago, when that article was written, I'd say they qualified as alpha software. Get some sense and install openoffice for god's sake.
And... running KDE in 800x600??? My god, no wonder things aren't working.
The memory chips in the secondary bank of the 48k ZX Spectrum were all faulty 64kbit chips of which either the top or bottom half had failed testing (so they were "cheap as chips" when he bought them - haha.) They were put into the Spectrum, wired up so it only accessed whichever 32kbit actually worked properly, and the defective half was just ignored.
This may have been true on some models, but with later models you get a simple mod kit that allowed you to switch which half you were using under software control. This worked fine for most people who tried it, so most of them by that stage must have been fine.
XviD encoded material does not play nicely with ISO standard MPEG-4 codecs; the same is true for DivX and 3ivx. These codecs are based on MPEG-4, and will play back MPEG-4, but do not create true MPEG-4 files when encoding.
If this were the case, I'd expect these codecs not to be able to play back content encoded with each other, either, but they certainly can (in fact, I find XviD plays back DivX encoded media better than DivX does in some cases -- it is a lot more resistant to corruption in the stream). Unfortunately I don't have a 'standard' MPEG-4 codec to try it with. What is the difference? Do all of these codecs implement some technique that isn't part of the standard?
Legally, doing this is a grey area (it breaks the EULA).
mplayer is, I believe, a European product. European anti-competition laws forbid tying the sale of one product to that of another in a different marketplace for any company that holds a monopoly in either (e.g. Microsoft). Therefore, this term in MS's EULA is unenfoceable in Europe.
You know, I'd forgotten that. When I did Pascal at university, we used a version that didn't have strings. You had to use char arrays, and it didn't have the concept of null termination, either, so all strings were fixed length.
God, that was an awful experience.
(I learned Pascal with BP7, which was a seriously cool piece of software. Recently tried installing it again, but it dies on startup with a runtime error. Y2K issues, I guess:( )
A key combination (like how XP claims pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in makes your computer "more secure") is a pretty stupid idea, and anything will be able to intercept it before the OS does if it tries hard enough.
Not if the OS is written correctly. Secure attention sequences (the official name for this idea) work, when implemented correctly.
I've noticed that XP seems to have introduced a setting (on by default, even!) which stops it from working, though, which is remarkably daft IMO.
I went to university at a time when my university still used Pascal as the first language. 3 years later, they switched to Java.
One of the main reasons that was used in the anti-Pascal lobby was that they wanted a single language that could be used to teach 3 concepts: structured programming, object-oriented programming, and concurrent (i.e. multithreaded) programming.
Also, a number of students complained about the dialect of Pascal that the university used, because it was utterly pointless. It lacked many facilities that they considered crucial in a language. You couldn't take pointers to variables on the stack, for instance. Files had to be statically named at compile time (the filename was the same as the name of the variable that was used to declare them!). There was no provision for breaking projects into multiple modules (actually there was; the compiler passed the source through the C preprocessor before compilation, but the lecturer specifically banned the use of this function).
There were suggestions for one of the Modula-* languages (I forget which), and when the Ada-95 spec was released, I think a few people considered that. But Java became popular at about the same time, so from that point on the eventual outcome was inevitable.
Slashdot Mirror
I see so many ppl here willing to give up animinity and the ensuing free speech, to stop such harassments.
Assuming you mean anonymity, I disagree that it is a requirement for free speech. Free speech is being able to say what you want (within reason) without fear of recrimination. Only if you were afraid of recrimination would you want to do so anonymously. So the need for anonymity is actually evidence that free speech does not exist.
I wouldn't describe child pornography as a 'thought crime'. It involves posession of a material which, to be produced, requires that a crime be committed which is frequently harmful to the children involved, and therefore implicitly condones the fact that that crime took place.
Would you say the same thing if you'd missed the email from the gambling site telling you that you'd won GBP 500 on the bet that you placed the night before while you were too drunk to remember it? ;)
It was a real pain when the only machine in the office with drivers for the adsl modem stopped booting.
Had to download a knopppix image over a 56K dialup.
Not funny.
I think what's happening is they've set routers up to redirect the external requests to a different server, but that server is misconfigured so isn't serving up any actual content.
This makes more sense than the idea that they're intentionally blocking it.
Never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.
When a country (almost) voluntarily relinquishes 99% of its empire, I think calling it imperialistic is a little daft. Eximperialistic is the word you're looking for. :)
You missed the obvious fact that "extend the peace" is a euphemism for "declare war on anybody that doesn't think the same way we do".
Nice. I think that was rather cutting-edge at the time, though. The computer I have that was manufactured only a year before was a 286+287 running at (I think) 10MHz, had EGA, 16 bit ISA (although not for all 5 ports; some only supported 8 bit cards!), and 4Mb max memory (640Kb as standard), along with a 45Mb RLL hard disc. Came with DOS 4.01 and Windows 1.02 (I think) and new cost was roughly GBP 1500 (about $2500 I think). I bought it used in 1990 for GBP 600, including a copy of WordPerfect and a few other useful software packages. By that time I could have bought a new 286 for only a little more, but wouldn't have got the extra software, so decided to go with the second hand option.
It has been said that people allergic to cat saliva tend not to have a problem with some breeds, too. Maine Coons are sometimes quoted -- I forget the others, because that's not what I was researching at the time I found it. It certainly seems to be true for at least one cat-allergic friend I have.
A friend recently purchased a Maine Coon kitten. The breeder refused to provide registration / documentation of its pedigree until provide with evidence that it had been neutered. This is perfectly legitimate. Obviously he could have used it to breed from, but it would no longer officially be a Maine Coon if he did so.
This seems like it would invalidate the copyright-based argument for including a copyrighted text block (such as a haiku) in emails as validation of a trusted source.
Yes, it does. Perhaps even more clearly:
See Sega Enters., 977 F.2d at 1524 ("When specific instructions, even though previously
copyrighted, are the only and essential means of accomplishing a given task, their later use by another will not amount to infringement.")
The case will proceed and in the end, either side may win.
Yeah, sure. But with a ruling from the supreme court that states "the district court decided that Lexmark had shown a likelihood of
success [...] we view Lexmark's prospects
for success [...] differently" I think they're unlikely to get very far. They'll probably drop the case.
follow the curve of hardware prices over the past 10 years... Starting at upwards of $7000-8000 for a home PC, which then dropped to $4k-5k a few years later, which then went to $2-3k not long after, to the magic $1k, and now to sub $500.
Excuse me? 10 years ago is approximately when I purchased my first new PC (previously I had always purchased 2nd hand). I acquired a 386 SX 40 with 16Mb of RAM and 270Mb hard disc (an entry level machine for the time -- 486DX2/66 machines had just come on the market and the disc was the smallest size available from a local supplier) for GBP 550 (about $800 US, I think). That's a long way from $7000.
In fact, I don't think entry-level PC prices have been that high in the last 20 years, much less 10.
I run NAT, firewall, SMTP & IMAP servers, SMB file and printer sharing and a test environment for web development with PHP and MySQL on a Pentium 200-MMX for a small (3 computer) office network. The file sharing has trouble keeping up with a 100Mbit network at times, but I personally blame that on cheap network hardware and low bandwidth IDE connection rather than processing power.
The only thing it struggles with is compressing backups. That's an overnight job.
"In the future" isn't as commonly used as "from now on" simply because it is less specific. The "future" talked about need nod start any time. In fact, it might even be 50 years away... whereas "now" is now.
In itself, it isn't particularly important, other than the fact that it is a nice way to show a relationship between several mathematical constants that orginally arose in different fields.
What is important is the key fact in its proof, which is that for any value 't', e^it = sin(t) + i*cos(t), which is a very important equality in the simplification of comlex formulae, and is therefore used frequently in diverse practical fields including electronic engineering.
Other than the obvious, there is just so much wrong with that story. '"That's why Linux will never be mainstream", she tells me,' after failing to open an excel spreadsheet in kspread. Kspread? What the hell was she doing even attempting that. The KDE office apps might be nice when they're finished, but they're still a long way from that. And 2.5 years ago, when that article was written, I'd say they qualified as alpha software. Get some sense and install openoffice for god's sake.
And... running KDE in 800x600??? My god, no wonder things aren't working.
The memory chips in the secondary bank of the 48k ZX Spectrum were all faulty 64kbit chips of which either the top or bottom half had failed testing (so they were "cheap as chips" when he bought them - haha.) They were put into the Spectrum, wired up so it only accessed whichever 32kbit actually worked properly, and the defective half was just ignored.
This may have been true on some models, but with later models you get a simple mod kit that allowed you to switch which half you were using under software control. This worked fine for most people who tried it, so most of them by that stage must have been fine.
It doesn't support interlaced video. I believe both of the DVD standards in question require interlaced video support.
XviD encoded material does not play nicely with ISO standard MPEG-4 codecs; the same is true for DivX and 3ivx. These codecs are based on MPEG-4, and will play back MPEG-4, but do not create true MPEG-4 files when encoding.
If this were the case, I'd expect these codecs not to be able to play back content encoded with each other, either, but they certainly can (in fact, I find XviD plays back DivX encoded media better than DivX does in some cases -- it is a lot more resistant to corruption in the stream). Unfortunately I don't have a 'standard' MPEG-4 codec to try it with. What is the difference? Do all of these codecs implement some technique that isn't part of the standard?
Legally, doing this is a grey area (it breaks the EULA).
mplayer is, I believe, a European product. European anti-competition laws forbid tying the sale of one product to that of another in a different marketplace for any company that holds a monopoly in either (e.g. Microsoft). Therefore, this term in MS's EULA is unenfoceable in Europe.
You know, I'd forgotten that. When I did Pascal at university, we used a version that didn't have strings. You had to use char arrays, and it didn't have the concept of null termination, either, so all strings were fixed length.
:( )
God, that was an awful experience.
(I learned Pascal with BP7, which was a seriously cool piece of software. Recently tried installing it again, but it dies on startup with a runtime error. Y2K issues, I guess
A key combination (like how XP claims pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in makes your computer "more secure") is a pretty stupid idea, and anything will be able to intercept it before the OS does if it tries hard enough.
Not if the OS is written correctly. Secure attention sequences (the official name for this idea) work, when implemented correctly.
I've noticed that XP seems to have introduced a setting (on by default, even!) which stops it from working, though, which is remarkably daft IMO.
(* BANGS HEAD AGAINST DESK *)
No!
(this line to counter lameness filter)
I went to university at a time when my university still used Pascal as the first language. 3 years later, they switched to Java.
One of the main reasons that was used in the anti-Pascal lobby was that they wanted a single language that could be used to teach 3 concepts: structured programming, object-oriented programming, and concurrent (i.e. multithreaded) programming.
Also, a number of students complained about the dialect of Pascal that the university used, because it was utterly pointless. It lacked many facilities that they considered crucial in a language. You couldn't take pointers to variables on the stack, for instance. Files had to be statically named at compile time (the filename was the same as the name of the variable that was used to declare them!). There was no provision for breaking projects into multiple modules (actually there was; the compiler passed the source through the C preprocessor before compilation, but the lecturer specifically banned the use of this function).
There were suggestions for one of the Modula-* languages (I forget which), and when the Ada-95 spec was released, I think a few people considered that. But Java became popular at about the same time, so from that point on the eventual outcome was inevitable.