Sound recording whose copyright holder is European. Copyright expires in Europe after 70 years. Copyright protection in US under Berne Convention is only valid as long as the work is under copyright protection in its country of origin, so also expires in the US after 70 years. (IANAL; this is not legal advice.)
FPUs work in synchronous with the CPU. The program has to wait the result of the FPU instruction before going on with the program.
Err -- no it doesn't. The CPU can continue executing integer instructions, and doesn't wait for the FPU until it issues another floating point instruction (or FWAIT, which doesn't compute any floating point results but synchronizes the two processors for the purpose of handling exceptions, etc.).
I think more relevant is that the FPU is reliant on the CPU providing it with a constant stream of instructions in order to not sit idle, whereas GPUs have their own instruction memory that they can read independently of the CPU, so can carry on without its attention for long periods of time.
Moore's law has to do with number of transistors on a chip, it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with processor frequency.
"Absolutely" nothing may be overstating the point somewhat: as transistor density increases, the size of the transistors decreases (duh). Smaller transistors require less charge to build up in order to switch, therefore can switch faster at the same voltage as a larger transistor. Admittedly, the maximum voltage they can handle tends to drop, but at least so far the tendency has been smaller transistors -> faster switching -> higher processor frequency.
Start digitizing books published prior to 1963 whose copyright wasn't renewed? Or start work on the books from 1923, which they will legally be able to publish in 7 years' time (I imagine it will take them at least the next 7 years to finish off everything worth keeping from prior to 1923).
I still don't see why the fact that the authors cannot be found means the Authors' Guild thinks it has the right to intervene. The Authors' Guild is not a statutory copyright licencing society (like ASCAP are), so has no standing to sue over the copyrights of anyone who has not given them explicit permission to so do. Whether the use is fair use or not is something that can only be decided in a case brought by the authors themselves, because only the authors can actually say whether or not they would authorize the use, and fair use is only relevant if the use is unauthorized.
If it works with Samsung TVs, it ought to work on XBoxes. Samsung TVs use the DLNA protocol for media streaming, which is also supported by both XBox360 and PS3.
Actually only a fairly small fraction of it. Unless you're willing to put up with badly OCR'd junk with large numbers of errors and paragraph breaks in the wrong place half the time. Or PDFs that are hard to read on your book reader because they don't reflow, so you have to either work with a smaller font than is ideal or constantly scroll around to see stuff.
They recently switched from a RFID-style windshield sticker to these license plate cameras, claiming it will be faster to open the gates (false)
It really ought to be true. I worked on a system like this nearly 10 years ago now that was capable of reliably identifying 2 vehicles per second while they passed a camera mounted approximately 50 metres from the road at speeds of up to 70mph. There's no reason the system shouldn't identify your vehicle before you've even stopped at the gate, and start opening while you're approaching, which is substantially better performance than most RFID systems (which tend to have operation ranges of a couple of metres max, thus requiring you to entirely stop before the gates begin opening).
Yes, it is. But the manufacturers have deliberately confused the issue by marketing it with adverts based on French cinema, and shot at locations in France. I can only assume the idea is to make us assume it's French (although why they'd do this I have no idea -- my experience of French beer is that it's uniformly poor).
The available academic studies on that crash suggest that while HFT was involved, the primary cause was decisions made by large hedge funds, which caused both HFT systems and human market makers to panic and get out of the market. It would have happened whether HFT was in use or not.
The stock markets are no longer about investing in companies you believe in or who have a solid track record.
I believed they ceased to be that circa 1720 with the South Sea Bubble. This was less than 40 years after the first stock market in the world was founded.
I got a better idea, add a $0.0005 sales tax on every share that is bought. National debt could be paid off by next Christmas.
Doesn't work. Here in the UK, we already have such a tax (and at a much higher level than you suggest). It just means people sell their shares to services that then let them own and trade virtual shares that give you the right to buy them back at a later point.
Why not sell directly to the buyer and cut out the middle man?
Because typically both buyers and sellers want to buy and sell immediately, rather than waiting for somebody to come along who will agree a shared price with them (which might, of course, never happen). The only real difference with a market maker is that they're effectively willing to place an ad and wait until somebody responds to it. Without them, *you* would have to wait, and the trade you requested might never happen because the price of your instrument moves against you. So, yeah, they are providing a useful service. It's a shame the ability to provide that sevice is protected by the markets and you have to pay rather large fees to be able to do it yourself, but that's what happens when a monopoly is in charge of such a large amount of money.
If they can sue based on IP, why can't they get the names and addresses of everyone involved?
FTFA:
Scammers would change their origin of attack to evade blocking and Gilmour would respond in kind.
In the last hour, the attacks have moved to Indonesia where some 28,000 unique IP addresses are attacking his sites every few minutes.
So you're suggesting he sues 28,000 indonesians? And then when the botnet operator switches to a different IP range, another few thousand people of some other nationality. And then another, and another. And you think that's going to work because...?
It's illegal to leave your car running attended because it's an attractive nuisance.
Maybe where you live it is. I can assure you it isn't where I am. Which is the problem: laws work differently in different countries. Sometimes even in different regions of the same country. The Internet is international. Even if some jurisdictions have laws that you can use against attacks like this, not all do. And that just means the attackers will end up working from those that don't.
Maybe, but I don't think that's what the person who's the subject of the story does, so if that's what he thought was meant, he misunderstood. The subject of the article appears to offer domain registration services to third parties, along with a system for managing adverts placed on the domains prior to web sites going live.
the number of Bitcoins is actually designed to inflate relative to the output of society (based on the relative amount of available processing power) unlike traditional resource backed currencies
Erm... you seem to have misread the details of how bitcoin works. First of all, the amount of processing needed to mine a block of coins is automatically scaled relative to the amount of processing that is thrown at it: when the network detects that the amount of time it takes to produce a block has dipped below a threshold value, an extra bit of required output is added, so twice as much processing is needed for subsequent blocks. Secondly, the number of coins produced in each block is decaying exponentially such that only about 2^31 (IIRC) coins will ever be produced. So bitcoin output is designed to steadily deflate over time, and is not linked to any economic activity.
No, but providing a service that allows a decentralized network to determine the validity of transactions while retaining useful properties like psuedonymity *does* constitute value. It just happens that the only way anyone has suggested of doing this is to use your GPU (or other highly parallel hardware) to perform some really tricky calculations. The only issue is that the BC network is designed on the basis that that value started as very high and has decreased over time (and will eventually reach zero), which is patently untrue.
If you can afford a television with usable inputs and/or a conversion dongle, you can afford a netbook.
Most people already have televisions with usable inputs. If you don't, they're fairly easy to come by for almost (or actually) no money. Look up your local freecycle list.
Keyboards may be free or cheap to people who already have computers, but not so much to anyone who would be interested in a $25 inferior good.
Keyboards can be purchased for less than $10, or again frequently turn up on freecycle or similar.
If you already have a screen and keyboard, you wouldn't buy this, since it is inferior in all ways to any desktop from 1995 or later.
A 1995 desktop is unlikely to have 128MB of RAM, or a processor that runs at multiple hundreds of MHz. But even accepting that you meant to type 2002, your point is still flawed: this device has several substantial benefits:
* low power consumption * silent operation (no fans, solid state storage) * TV output (not a common feature on desktop PCs until quite recently) * easily-accessible programmable I/O pins
The judge should have the power to say "Please show clear passages showing infringement by the next hearing or your case will be thrown out."
I may be remembering a different case, but I thought this is exactly what did happen in the end. The problem is that the judge is then bound to listen to them argue about whether or not the claims are clear enough, and that argument descended into the ridiculous mess we remember...
Do you think, for instance, in a plagiarism trial that a judge even during a preliminary hearing would accept the plaintiff pointing to a stack of novels and saying "There's your infringement!" No, he'd want to see specific passages between the plaintiff's work and the defendant's that showed where text had been lifted.
Yes. Of course it got a little trickier in SCO's case, because SCO did (in the end) identify sections of code that they thought were infringing. It turned out that the allegations were invalid (in many cases the code was part of the permissively-licensed sources of early Unixes -- the Ritchie/Thompson memory allocator is the original example; in others it was code that was effectively dictated by the POSIX standard -- errno.h is the classic example here), but that generated yet more argument.
You're probably getting false positives for cancer searches: a lot of research that isn't actually targetted at curing cancer gets done with cancerous cells, simply because they're more likely to grow in a petri dish than non-cancerous cells of the same type.
Why bother when you have C,C++,Shell, perl, python, ruby, lisp,scheme, OCaml, Haskell, hell even Java
Because C# is a different language to all of these, and has a different feature set from all of these, and therefore is at least for some applications better than all of these.
C: C# is object-oriented. This has been shown to be a serious advantage for most types of software development over traditional structured programming. C++: C# is garbage-collected. This has been shown to reduce development time, complexity and number of defects in many cases over manual memory management. Shell: C# is compiled to native code for execution, therefore is substantially higher performance. perl, python, ruby: C# is a statically typed language, which has been shown to allow numerous programming errors to be caught at compile time rather than during testing, which is a clear win in many cases lisp, scheme, OCaml, Haskell: C# is a procedural language, which most programmers are better able to identify with, so is more accessible to mid- and junior- level programmers, meaning you don't have to hire ace teams in order to work with it Java: While Java is the most similar language to C# on this list, C# has numerous features that Java lacks, some of which are quite important to many programmers (closures, generics that actually work rather than just being a compile-time hack that introduce substantial limitations, anonymous functions, dynamic type inference to simplify variable definition, etc.)
The point is that a language isn't just one feature. It's a collection of features that place it in a multi-dimensional space occupied by all languages. And many problems are more easily solved in certain areas of that space than others, so the more languages you have at your disposition the better.
Slashdot Mirror
Sound recording whose copyright holder is European. Copyright expires in Europe after 70 years. Copyright protection in US under Berne Convention is only valid as long as the work is under copyright protection in its country of origin, so also expires in the US after 70 years. (IANAL; this is not legal advice.)
FPUs work in synchronous with the CPU. The program has to wait the result of the FPU instruction before going on with the program.
Err -- no it doesn't. The CPU can continue executing integer instructions, and doesn't wait for the FPU until it issues another floating point instruction (or FWAIT, which doesn't compute any floating point results but synchronizes the two processors for the purpose of handling exceptions, etc.).
I think more relevant is that the FPU is reliant on the CPU providing it with a constant stream of instructions in order to not sit idle, whereas GPUs have their own instruction memory that they can read independently of the CPU, so can carry on without its attention for long periods of time.
Moore's law has to do with number of transistors on a chip, it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with processor frequency.
"Absolutely" nothing may be overstating the point somewhat: as transistor density increases, the size of the transistors decreases (duh). Smaller transistors require less charge to build up in order to switch, therefore can switch faster at the same voltage as a larger transistor. Admittedly, the maximum voltage they can handle tends to drop, but at least so far the tendency has been smaller transistors -> faster switching -> higher processor frequency.
Unfortunately, the Authors' Guild do not publish a list of their members.
Start digitizing books published prior to 1963 whose copyright wasn't renewed? Or start work on the books from 1923, which they will legally be able to publish in 7 years' time (I imagine it will take them at least the next 7 years to finish off everything worth keeping from prior to 1923).
I still don't see why the fact that the authors cannot be found means the Authors' Guild thinks it has the right to intervene. The Authors' Guild is not a statutory copyright licencing society (like ASCAP are), so has no standing to sue over the copyrights of anyone who has not given them explicit permission to so do. Whether the use is fair use or not is something that can only be decided in a case brought by the authors themselves, because only the authors can actually say whether or not they would authorize the use, and fair use is only relevant if the use is unauthorized.
If it works with Samsung TVs, it ought to work on XBoxes. Samsung TVs use the DLNA protocol for media streaming, which is also supported by both XBox360 and PS3.
Actually only a fairly small fraction of it. Unless you're willing to put up with badly OCR'd junk with large numbers of errors and paragraph breaks in the wrong place half the time. Or PDFs that are hard to read on your book reader because they don't reflow, so you have to either work with a smaller font than is ideal or constantly scroll around to see stuff.
They recently switched from a RFID-style windshield sticker to these license plate cameras, claiming it will be faster to open the gates (false)
It really ought to be true. I worked on a system like this nearly 10 years ago now that was capable of reliably identifying 2 vehicles per second while they passed a camera mounted approximately 50 metres from the road at speeds of up to 70mph. There's no reason the system shouldn't identify your vehicle before you've even stopped at the gate, and start opening while you're approaching, which is substantially better performance than most RFID systems (which tend to have operation ranges of a couple of metres max, thus requiring you to entirely stop before the gates begin opening).
Yes, it is. But the manufacturers have deliberately confused the issue by marketing it with adverts based on French cinema, and shot at locations in France. I can only assume the idea is to make us assume it's French (although why they'd do this I have no idea -- my experience of French beer is that it's uniformly poor).
http://www.scribd.com/doc/61944044/Community-Design-000181607-0001
Any features not in that drawing aren't protected. It's a *very* simple drawing.
what if you figure out the algorithm? Then you could predict the market?
Only if you can get the same inputs as the algorithm has and execute it faster than the HFT trader does. Which is to say, no.
The available academic studies on that crash suggest that while HFT was involved, the primary cause was decisions made by large hedge funds, which caused both HFT systems and human market makers to panic and get out of the market. It would have happened whether HFT was in use or not.
The stock markets are no longer about investing in companies you believe in or who have a solid track record.
I believed they ceased to be that circa 1720 with the South Sea Bubble. This was less than 40 years after the first stock market in the world was founded.
I got a better idea, add a $0.0005 sales tax on every share that is bought. National debt could be paid off by next Christmas.
Doesn't work. Here in the UK, we already have such a tax (and at a much higher level than you suggest). It just means people sell their shares to services that then let them own and trade virtual shares that give you the right to buy them back at a later point.
Why not sell directly to the buyer and cut out the middle man?
Because typically both buyers and sellers want to buy and sell immediately, rather than waiting for somebody to come along who will agree a shared price with them (which might, of course, never happen). The only real difference with a market maker is that they're effectively willing to place an ad and wait until somebody responds to it. Without them, *you* would have to wait, and the trade you requested might never happen because the price of your instrument moves against you. So, yeah, they are providing a useful service. It's a shame the ability to provide that sevice is protected by the markets and you have to pay rather large fees to be able to do it yourself, but that's what happens when a monopoly is in charge of such a large amount of money.
FTFA:
So you're suggesting he sues 28,000 indonesians? And then when the botnet operator switches to a different IP range, another few thousand people of some other nationality. And then another, and another. And you think that's going to work because...?
Maybe where you live it is. I can assure you it isn't where I am. Which is the problem: laws work differently in different countries. Sometimes even in different regions of the same country. The Internet is international. Even if some jurisdictions have laws that you can use against attacks like this, not all do. And that just means the attackers will end up working from those that don't.
Maybe, but I don't think that's what the person who's the subject of the story does, so if that's what he thought was meant, he misunderstood. The subject of the article appears to offer domain registration services to third parties, along with a system for managing adverts placed on the domains prior to web sites going live.
the number of Bitcoins is actually designed to inflate relative to the output of society (based on the relative amount of available processing power) unlike traditional resource backed currencies
Erm... you seem to have misread the details of how bitcoin works. First of all, the amount of processing needed to mine a block of coins is automatically scaled relative to the amount of processing that is thrown at it: when the network detects that the amount of time it takes to produce a block has dipped below a threshold value, an extra bit of required output is added, so twice as much processing is needed for subsequent blocks. Secondly, the number of coins produced in each block is decaying exponentially such that only about 2^31 (IIRC) coins will ever be produced. So bitcoin output is designed to steadily deflate over time, and is not linked to any economic activity.
Your GPU's do not constitute value
No, but providing a service that allows a decentralized network to determine the validity of transactions while retaining useful properties like psuedonymity *does* constitute value. It just happens that the only way anyone has suggested of doing this is to use your GPU (or other highly parallel hardware) to perform some really tricky calculations. The only issue is that the BC network is designed on the basis that that value started as very high and has decreased over time (and will eventually reach zero), which is patently untrue.
If you can afford a television with usable inputs and/or a conversion dongle, you can afford a netbook.
Most people already have televisions with usable inputs. If you don't, they're fairly easy to come by for almost (or actually) no money. Look up your local freecycle list.
Keyboards may be free or cheap to people who already have computers, but not so much to anyone who would be interested in a $25 inferior good.
Keyboards can be purchased for less than $10, or again frequently turn up on freecycle or similar.
If you already have a screen and keyboard, you wouldn't buy this, since it is inferior in all ways to any desktop from 1995 or later.
A 1995 desktop is unlikely to have 128MB of RAM, or a processor that runs at multiple hundreds of MHz. But even accepting that you meant to type 2002, your point is still flawed: this device has several substantial benefits:
* low power consumption
* silent operation (no fans, solid state storage)
* TV output (not a common feature on desktop PCs until quite recently)
* easily-accessible programmable I/O pins
The judge should have the power to say "Please show clear passages showing infringement by the next hearing or your case will be thrown out."
I may be remembering a different case, but I thought this is exactly what did happen in the end. The problem is that the judge is then bound to listen to them argue about whether or not the claims are clear enough, and that argument descended into the ridiculous mess we remember...
Do you think, for instance, in a plagiarism trial that a judge even during a preliminary hearing would accept the plaintiff pointing to a stack of novels and saying "There's your infringement!" No, he'd want to see specific passages between the plaintiff's work and the defendant's that showed where text had been lifted.
Yes. Of course it got a little trickier in SCO's case, because SCO did (in the end) identify sections of code that they thought were infringing. It turned out that the allegations were invalid (in many cases the code was part of the permissively-licensed sources of early Unixes -- the Ritchie/Thompson memory allocator is the original example; in others it was code that was effectively dictated by the POSIX standard -- errno.h is the classic example here), but that generated yet more argument.
Does Spamhaus know whether the IP addresses it blacklists belong to businesses or individuals?
You're probably getting false positives for cancer searches: a lot of research that isn't actually targetted at curing cancer gets done with cancerous cells, simply because they're more likely to grow in a petri dish than non-cancerous cells of the same type.
Why bother when you have C,C++,Shell, perl, python, ruby, lisp,scheme, OCaml, Haskell, hell even Java
Because C# is a different language to all of these, and has a different feature set from all of these, and therefore is at least for some applications better than all of these.
C: C# is object-oriented. This has been shown to be a serious advantage for most types of software development over traditional structured programming.
C++: C# is garbage-collected. This has been shown to reduce development time, complexity and number of defects in many cases over manual memory management.
Shell: C# is compiled to native code for execution, therefore is substantially higher performance.
perl, python, ruby: C# is a statically typed language, which has been shown to allow numerous programming errors to be caught at compile time rather than during testing, which is a clear win in many cases
lisp, scheme, OCaml, Haskell: C# is a procedural language, which most programmers are better able to identify with, so is more accessible to mid- and junior- level programmers, meaning you don't have to hire ace teams in order to work with it
Java: While Java is the most similar language to C# on this list, C# has numerous features that Java lacks, some of which are quite important to many programmers (closures, generics that actually work rather than just being a compile-time hack that introduce substantial limitations, anonymous functions, dynamic type inference to simplify variable definition, etc.)
The point is that a language isn't just one feature. It's a collection of features that place it in a multi-dimensional space occupied by all languages. And many problems are more easily solved in certain areas of that space than others, so the more languages you have at your disposition the better.