So they would include all username/password except yours?
I, for one, do not know whether I have ever registered at a gawker media site. I occasionally read some of them, and may have been tempted to comment at some point; I believe registration is mandatory before commenting so would have registered at that point in time. My guess is there's about a 20% chance this happened. If I did, I should find out so that I can change my password. I can't use the "forgotten username" interface at their site to try to find my login details because I'll have used a made-up one-off email address for the purpose, and have no idea what this would be.
Also, as an IT administrator for a small business, I feel it would be a good idea to check for other users at our site who may have registered and warn them about this breach, so I'll be running a scan for all email addresses at all domains I'm responsible for.
If a recipe calls for 3 cups of bread flour, I know my chosen flour is 155 grams per cup. So when I weigh it out on my scale I weigh out 465 grams. I could do ounces instead wouldn't matter, my scale just reads grams. Likewise it wouldn't matter if the recipe instead called for 700mL of flour.
In my experience metric recipes don't specify flour by volume, but by weight (unless for small volumes, e.g. tablespoons).
Really, working in the screwy imperial system just isn't a big deal to normal people. You don't do anything that needs inter-unit conversion which is where metric shines.
I find doing middle-advanced DIY tasks that I'm _regularly_ doing inter-unit conversions. Just yesterday, I had to work out how much water was in my central heating system. Measure the radiators in metres, estimate length of 15mm diameter pipe, quick calculations, quite easy. If I was working in feet and had to convert to gallons it would have been trickier.
How long, exactly, did it take Google to re-invent the X-terminal?
An X terminal requires a central X server to run your apps on. AIUI, on a chrome OS device, the apps are downloaded and run locally (as they are essentially javascript on web pages). It's a pretty fundamental difference.
You're describing how the "cloud" should work. Unfortunately for Google, a lot of the core apps for cOS don't have an offline mode.
It's been a while since I worked with Google Apps (because I think the file management UI is shit), but when I tried it all the apps I tried were perfectly able to work offline once I had downloaded Google Gears. I assume Chrome OS comes with Gears preinstalled...
Not all of it is high school calc. IIRC the integral of 4sin(x)/x has to be solved with Taylor series, and I only got those in the second semester of university calculus
My integration is a bit rusty, but I suspect it can be integrated by an appropriate substitution chosen to allow simplification using standard trig identities. OTOH, the Taylor series approach is probably easier.
At least here in the UK, BTW, Taylor series are part of the "further maths A level" syllabus, which is essentially equivalent to the last year of high school for students taking the most advanced maths courses possible.
This is what I get for making a factual and relevant comment.
No, it's what you get for thinking somebody's sexuality is (1) relevant to the conversation and (2) can be guessed based on what kind of portable computing device they like.
Or maybe it's for implying that/b/tards are gay. Not sure which.
Whatever, relevant is, that exim has always been a dog, almost impossible to configure, and finally with 4.0 changed the style of its configuration.
I'll admit to not having used exim pre v4, but when I switched to it some years back I found it quite easy to configure, and yet with a powerful enough configuration system that I could do what I needed to do (set up domain/user tables to come from an existing database) without any real hassle.
Dunno what people complain about, really. Perhaps they're too scared to read the manual?
I wouldn't want to use any site where these ever-amazing javascript improvements are necessary.
Are you going to stop using slashdot, then? Because, believe me, if you're going to run the most recent version on a typical handheld device processor (single core, single dispatch, usually about 5-600MHz), you're going to be feeling the sluggishness unless you're using a pretty good javascript implementation.
Well, if you checked, Rule 34 *would* apply, so it would be true. I don't think Rule 34 necessarily applies if you don't check, though, so I think it's best if neither of us looks.
On which ground ? Plagiarism is not copyright infringement. I had this interesting read from Stross on fanfiction
As much as I respect Charlie and suspect he's probably right about this, there's a big difference between your average fanfic and a direct, absolute rip-off of the original source material, which is what we're talking about here.
Fanfic usually takes characters, places and concepts from one story and creates new stories based on them. Note that 'character', 'place' and 'concept' are all abstract ideas, and the notion that they are protected by copyright is dubious at best. A character in a work of written fiction is defined by a few factors: a name (which is generally held to not be subject to copyright due primarily to it being too short to be an entirely original expression), a general 'personality type' (which is typically too vague and/or derivitive of either reality or other fiction to warrant copyright protection), and a list of events that are supposed to have happened to this character in their past (the knowledge of which will influence how the character acts in future). By 'filing off the serial numbers', Charlie means (1) changing the name, and (2) changing any past events that are unique enough to firmly identify the character. By doing so, you remove any aspects of the character that could be subject to copyright protection.
OTOH, to get back to the topic at hand rather than analogies, this game includes, among other things, a maze layout which is very similar if not actually identical to an original one, and visual designs that are very similar to the originals. This is very different to the kind of abstract stuff that's involved in fanfic; we're talking concrete visual and logical designs adopted with relatively few changes.
I'm sorry, but that's not a copyright violation and it's certainly not a violation of the DMCA.
What is a copyright violation:
1. He's using Namco's original maze layout, or something very similar to it. 2. He's using artwork that looks a *lot* like the original artwork from the game; even if it was redrawn it cannot realistically be claimed not to have been copied.
You can reimplement a pac-man type game without violating the original copyright. But you have to use your own maze design, and your own artwork that is obviously distinct from the original artwork. This developer did neither.
If you have interesting software, in the age of the web, you really can start an income-producing business for hundreds of dollars.
I think thousands might be more realistic. You'll need to get the word out to people, which probably means hiring a PR firm to write a few press releases at the very minimum. Most developers are also likely to need to hire a graphic designer to touch up the visual appearance of their product, too. And a bit of money to splash on google adwords would be helpful, too. And don't forget the basics; incorporating a company is a non-trivial expense at this level. But I take your general point: people think they need millions to launch a successful business, whereas most start off much more cheaply than that. Everything I list above can be done on a budget of only about $3000. Expansion funding is easier to get than start-up funding.
Unless your product is catering to developers, your customers don't give a damn what the code that powers your product looks like (and even if your customers ARE developers, they probably still don't care)
Yes, but the customers do care about (in order of priority):
- bugs. badly written code usually has a lot more bugs per feature than well-written code, plus it takes longer to find and fix them when they're reported. - speed with which you implement the new features they want. badly written code is hard to extend, and often completely breaks when new features are added. - performance. a customer isn't going to use your product if it takes twice as long to perform a simple task as your competitors. well-written code is easier to optimize.
To be fair, I don't think high school courses usually cover numerical approximations to integration. At least here in the UK, our equivalent courses cover analytical integration of continuous functions in one variable, with just a brief covering of the principles behind integration (using the rectangular approximation, IIRC, along with the notion that as the width of the rectangles approach zero the error introduced disappears). But only the analytical approach is actually tested, so I wouldn't be surprised to find some schools skip teaching the basic principles these days. Numerical methods aren't covered at all until you get to university level, at which point they're an optional course in most (all?) subjects.
Method for dissipation of influenza symptoms through prolong dietary restriction versus current methods of hypercaloric intake treatment of cold virus carriers.
If you can find a way of making that Method and apparatus..., you could probably get a patent.
So, if it say, is on a Kindle now, it gets another eleventy years of copyright protection? What exactly is special about a magazine/book that makes the stories not public domain?
AIUI, a lot of magazines failed to register copyright on the stories they published. Book publishers generally did so as a matter of routine. Therefore, the magazines only got the basic 28 years' copyright protection.
Bear's argument is that many of the authors of the stories registered the copyright independently of the magazines, so the fact that the magazine did not do so is irrelevant. I suspect he's right, although IANAL.
If I can get in trouble for merely saying something, I don't think it's really free speech.
I don't think there are any jurisdictions where it is impossible to break the law through speech. For instance, all jursidictions I'm aware of would consider offering to pay somebody to kill another person an offence. The question then becomes merely one of where the line is drawn: in the US, for example, it is drawn at the point where specific offenses are being encouraged. In the UK, it's a little further down, in that there doesn't need to be a specific offense in mind, but merely the kind of speech that is likely to cause offenses of certain kinds (notably, terrorist attacks), or which is intended to cause other people to hate a certain group.
I happen to believe that the correct place to draw that line is likely to be somewhere between these two, but the UK position isn't far enough wrong for it to be a major problem, IMO.
Seriously, it is *so* easy to find porn by accident. Yesterday I was searching for posters for the original Buffy movie, and on the second page of results there was fake-naked-Kristy-Swanson porn.
Before they join the EU, the EU generally requires countries to enact laws that are compatible with all the existing EU regulations. That would include Regulation 974/98, which requires member states to issue Euro-denominated banknotes and coins, and give them status as legal tender.
Somehow I don't think the difference between pasting into a bashrc file or recompiling the kernel has been the deciding factor between Linux and Windows/Mac.
Actually, in some ways I think it is. I can't comment about Mac, but in Linux the system startup process is needlessly convoluted, running thousands of processes due to the fact that it's implemented with a rather large number of shell scripts. Yes, this provides flexibility, but in many ways the Windows "services" system (a single process runs through a list of processes that need to be started and/or stopped and does this) is cleaner and easier to work with. It is certainly more efficient for the most common use cases.
by the Linus wrote and released the first versions of the Linux kernel, 1200 bps modems and the 386SX were both well obsolete
While you're clearly right about the modems, it's worth noting that the 386SX40 CPU that I had in my second PC wasn't released until March '91, which is to say only 5 months before the first version of the Linux kernel was released. I presume it wasn't obselete within 5 months of release (and, I believe, about 6 months before I bought it).
I believe Linus's own PC at the time was 386-based, too.
Really? When I tried to set up git for a three-developer situation earlier this year, I came away puzzled and not entirely sure I'd understood it right. Sure, for a single developer it might be easier, but setting up push/pull aliases using egit (the integration for eclipse, the IDE we use here) involved a number of obscure dialog boxes with options that I don't understand and weren't explained in any of the tutorials I read. Whereas with subversion, all we need to do is use svnadmin to create a repository on the server, get one team member to start a new project and share it to the appropriate URL and the others then import from the same URL.
no need to configure a new network service just to get started
SVN tunnels over SSH, which is enabled by default on every Linux install I've used in the last 15 years.
much faster history browsing (even on a fast local network)
I'll grant this is true, but as getting the history of an entire project on my server here takes less than 3 seconds, and it's something I do at most once a week, I don't really see the issue.
ability to try out lines of development privately without giving up completely on version control for them
I don't really understand the point here. What's wrong with just creating a branch and using that?
ability to keep working when the server goes down
While this is true, at least where I am, one of the dev team would be responsible for fixing the server anyway, and the others would probably not be able to achieve an awful lot because the same server hosts the bug tracker, documentation wiki, task list, email server, and basically all the other tools we use for the work we do. Not to mention the virtual server we deploy to for interactive testing. And even with SVN, they'd still be able to continue working until they next needed to commit, i.e. they can finish what they're currently working on.
simpler backup of the history (just backup any repo),
As opposed to backing up the central repo, which is guaranteed to contain all of the history, rather than potentially having some of it missing if people are working on private branches?
Slashdot Mirror
So they would include all username/password except yours?
I, for one, do not know whether I have ever registered at a gawker media site. I occasionally read some of them, and may have been tempted to comment at some point; I believe registration is mandatory before commenting so would have registered at that point in time. My guess is there's about a 20% chance this happened. If I did, I should find out so that I can change my password. I can't use the "forgotten username" interface at their site to try to find my login details because I'll have used a made-up one-off email address for the purpose, and have no idea what this would be.
Also, as an IT administrator for a small business, I feel it would be a good idea to check for other users at our site who may have registered and warn them about this breach, so I'll be running a scan for all email addresses at all domains I'm responsible for.
If a recipe calls for 3 cups of bread flour, I know my chosen flour is 155 grams per cup. So when I weigh it out on my scale I weigh out 465 grams. I could do ounces instead wouldn't matter, my scale just reads grams. Likewise it wouldn't matter if the recipe instead called for 700mL of flour.
In my experience metric recipes don't specify flour by volume, but by weight (unless for small volumes, e.g. tablespoons).
Really, working in the screwy imperial system just isn't a big deal to normal people. You don't do anything that needs inter-unit conversion which is where metric shines.
I find doing middle-advanced DIY tasks that I'm _regularly_ doing inter-unit conversions. Just yesterday, I had to work out how much water was in my central heating system. Measure the radiators in metres, estimate length of 15mm diameter pipe, quick calculations, quite easy. If I was working in feet and had to convert to gallons it would have been trickier.
How long, exactly, did it take Google to re-invent the X-terminal?
An X terminal requires a central X server to run your apps on. AIUI, on a chrome OS device, the apps are downloaded and run locally (as they are essentially javascript on web pages). It's a pretty fundamental difference.
You're describing how the "cloud" should work. Unfortunately for Google, a lot of the core apps for cOS don't have an offline mode.
It's been a while since I worked with Google Apps (because I think the file management UI is shit), but when I tried it all the apps I tried were perfectly able to work offline once I had downloaded Google Gears. I assume Chrome OS comes with Gears preinstalled...
Not all of it is high school calc. IIRC the integral of 4sin(x)/x has to be solved with Taylor series, and I only got those in the second semester of university calculus
My integration is a bit rusty, but I suspect it can be integrated by an appropriate substitution chosen to allow simplification using standard trig identities. OTOH, the Taylor series approach is probably easier.
At least here in the UK, BTW, Taylor series are part of the "further maths A level" syllabus, which is essentially equivalent to the last year of high school for students taking the most advanced maths courses possible.
This is what I get for making a factual and relevant comment.
No, it's what you get for thinking somebody's sexuality is (1) relevant to the conversation and (2) can be guessed based on what kind of portable computing device they like.
Or maybe it's for implying that /b/tards are gay. Not sure which.
Whatever, relevant is, that exim has always been a dog, almost impossible to configure, and finally with 4.0 changed the style of its configuration.
I'll admit to not having used exim pre v4, but when I switched to it some years back I found it quite easy to configure, and yet with a powerful enough configuration system that I could do what I needed to do (set up domain/user tables to come from an existing database) without any real hassle.
Dunno what people complain about, really. Perhaps they're too scared to read the manual?
All utter bullshit from the T-Mobile rep and a very good reason to NEVER use T-Mobile.
So which phone company doesn't have any incompetent staff and therefore never makes an incorrect statement to a customer?
I wouldn't want to use any site where these ever-amazing javascript improvements are necessary.
Are you going to stop using slashdot, then? Because, believe me, if you're going to run the most recent version on a typical handheld device processor (single core, single dispatch, usually about 5-600MHz), you're going to be feeling the sluggishness unless you're using a pretty good javascript implementation.
Or... "The browsers wars continues"
"... after this commercial break"?
(That's about the only way I can make sense of that sentence.)
Well, if you checked, Rule 34 *would* apply, so it would be true. I don't think Rule 34 necessarily applies if you don't check, though, so I think it's best if neither of us looks.
On which ground ? Plagiarism is not copyright infringement. I had this interesting read from Stross on fanfiction
As much as I respect Charlie and suspect he's probably right about this, there's a big difference between your average fanfic and a direct, absolute rip-off of the original source material, which is what we're talking about here.
Fanfic usually takes characters, places and concepts from one story and creates new stories based on them. Note that 'character', 'place' and 'concept' are all abstract ideas, and the notion that they are protected by copyright is dubious at best. A character in a work of written fiction is defined by a few factors: a name (which is generally held to not be subject to copyright due primarily to it being too short to be an entirely original expression), a general 'personality type' (which is typically too vague and/or derivitive of either reality or other fiction to warrant copyright protection), and a list of events that are supposed to have happened to this character in their past (the knowledge of which will influence how the character acts in future). By 'filing off the serial numbers', Charlie means (1) changing the name, and (2) changing any past events that are unique enough to firmly identify the character. By doing so, you remove any aspects of the character that could be subject to copyright protection.
OTOH, to get back to the topic at hand rather than analogies, this game includes, among other things, a maze layout which is very similar if not actually identical to an original one, and visual designs that are very similar to the originals. This is very different to the kind of abstract stuff that's involved in fanfic; we're talking concrete visual and logical designs adopted with relatively few changes.
I'm sorry, but that's not a copyright violation and it's certainly not a violation of the DMCA.
What is a copyright violation:
1. He's using Namco's original maze layout, or something very similar to it.
2. He's using artwork that looks a *lot* like the original artwork from the game; even if it was redrawn it cannot realistically be claimed not to have been copied.
You can reimplement a pac-man type game without violating the original copyright. But you have to use your own maze design, and your own artwork that is obviously distinct from the original artwork. This developer did neither.
If you have interesting software, in the age of the web, you really can start an income-producing business for hundreds of dollars.
I think thousands might be more realistic. You'll need to get the word out to people, which probably means hiring a PR firm to write a few press releases at the very minimum. Most developers are also likely to need to hire a graphic designer to touch up the visual appearance of their product, too. And a bit of money to splash on google adwords would be helpful, too. And don't forget the basics; incorporating a company is a non-trivial expense at this level. But I take your general point: people think they need millions to launch a successful business, whereas most start off much more cheaply than that. Everything I list above can be done on a budget of only about $3000. Expansion funding is easier to get than start-up funding.
Unless your product is catering to developers, your customers don't give a damn what the code that powers your product looks like (and even if your customers ARE developers, they probably still don't care)
Yes, but the customers do care about (in order of priority):
- bugs. badly written code usually has a lot more bugs per feature than well-written code, plus it takes longer to find and fix them when they're reported.
- speed with which you implement the new features they want. badly written code is hard to extend, and often completely breaks when new features are added.
- performance. a customer isn't going to use your product if it takes twice as long to perform a simple task as your competitors. well-written code is easier to optimize.
To be fair, I don't think high school courses usually cover numerical approximations to integration. At least here in the UK, our equivalent courses cover analytical integration of continuous functions in one variable, with just a brief covering of the principles behind integration (using the rectangular approximation, IIRC, along with the notion that as the width of the rectangles approach zero the error introduced disappears). But only the analytical approach is actually tested, so I wouldn't be surprised to find some schools skip teaching the basic principles these days. Numerical methods aren't covered at all until you get to university level, at which point they're an optional course in most (all?) subjects.
Method for dissipation of influenza symptoms through prolong dietary restriction versus current methods of hypercaloric intake treatment of cold virus carriers.
If you can find a way of making that Method and apparatus..., you could probably get a patent.
So, if it say, is on a Kindle now, it gets another eleventy years of copyright protection? What exactly is special about a magazine/book that makes the stories not public domain?
AIUI, a lot of magazines failed to register copyright on the stories they published. Book publishers generally did so as a matter of routine. Therefore, the magazines only got the basic 28 years' copyright protection.
Bear's argument is that many of the authors of the stories registered the copyright independently of the magazines, so the fact that the magazine did not do so is irrelevant. I suspect he's right, although IANAL.
If I can get in trouble for merely saying something, I don't think it's really free speech.
I don't think there are any jurisdictions where it is impossible to break the law through speech. For instance, all jursidictions I'm aware of would consider offering to pay somebody to kill another person an offence. The question then becomes merely one of where the line is drawn: in the US, for example, it is drawn at the point where specific offenses are being encouraged. In the UK, it's a little further down, in that there doesn't need to be a specific offense in mind, but merely the kind of speech that is likely to cause offenses of certain kinds (notably, terrorist attacks), or which is intended to cause other people to hate a certain group.
I happen to believe that the correct place to draw that line is likely to be somewhere between these two, but the UK position isn't far enough wrong for it to be a major problem, IMO.
In the UK it is fine to say [...] "enemies of Islam should die"
Err... no it isn't. You can find several prominent examples of people who have been prosecuted for essentially this exact thing (this was the first) .
but racist and provocative to suggest that the Qur'an might encourage terrorism
So how come Christopher Hitchens, who has published a popular book with exactly that thesis (among others) has never been arrested because of it?
People do spout crap about freedom of speech in the UK, when the position really isn't that bad.
Seriously, it is *so* easy to find porn by accident. Yesterday I was searching for posters for the original Buffy movie, and on the second page of results there was fake-naked-Kristy-Swanson porn.
Before they join the EU, the EU generally requires countries to enact laws that are compatible with all the existing EU regulations. That would include Regulation 974/98, which requires member states to issue Euro-denominated banknotes and coins, and give them status as legal tender.
Somehow I don't think the difference between pasting into a bashrc file or recompiling the kernel has been the deciding factor between Linux and Windows/Mac.
Actually, in some ways I think it is. I can't comment about Mac, but in Linux the system startup process is needlessly convoluted, running thousands of processes due to the fact that it's implemented with a rather large number of shell scripts. Yes, this provides flexibility, but in many ways the Windows "services" system (a single process runs through a list of processes that need to be started and/or stopped and does this) is cleaner and easier to work with. It is certainly more efficient for the most common use cases.
by the Linus wrote and released the first versions of the Linux kernel, 1200 bps modems and the 386SX were both well obsolete
While you're clearly right about the modems, it's worth noting that the 386SX40 CPU that I had in my second PC wasn't released until March '91, which is to say only 5 months before the first version of the Linux kernel was released. I presume it wasn't obselete within 5 months of release (and, I believe, about 6 months before I bought it).
I believe Linus's own PC at the time was 386-based, too.
Simpler setup
Really? When I tried to set up git for a three-developer situation earlier this year, I came away puzzled and not entirely sure I'd understood it right. Sure, for a single developer it might be easier, but setting up push/pull aliases using egit (the integration for eclipse, the IDE we use here) involved a number of obscure dialog boxes with options that I don't understand and weren't explained in any of the tutorials I read. Whereas with subversion, all we need to do is use svnadmin to create a repository on the server, get one team member to start a new project and share it to the appropriate URL and the others then import from the same URL.
no need to configure a new network service just to get started
SVN tunnels over SSH, which is enabled by default on every Linux install I've used in the last 15 years.
much faster history browsing (even on a fast local network)
I'll grant this is true, but as getting the history of an entire project on my server here takes less than 3 seconds, and it's something I do at most once a week, I don't really see the issue.
ability to try out lines of development privately without giving up completely on version control for them
I don't really understand the point here. What's wrong with just creating a branch and using that?
ability to keep working when the server goes down
While this is true, at least where I am, one of the dev team would be responsible for fixing the server anyway, and the others would probably not be able to achieve an awful lot because the same server hosts the bug tracker, documentation wiki, task list, email server, and basically all the other tools we use for the work we do. Not to mention the virtual server we deploy to for interactive testing. And even with SVN, they'd still be able to continue working until they next needed to commit, i.e. they can finish what they're currently working on.
simpler backup of the history (just backup any repo),
As opposed to backing up the central repo, which is guaranteed to contain all of the history, rather than potentially having some of it missing if people are working on private branches?