What if your bank decided to write zeros in a few columns? Who are you to complain that one of these was your account balance?
If they treat one player differently that another without showing beforehand that the player violated a rule, they could be sued for failing to provide the service they accepted money for providing. (And no, giving the money back doesn't magically cancel the contract.)
Paying someone money (and having them accept) forms a basic contract. They (perhaps implicitly) agree to provide a service, and that the service will be what you asked for when purchasing.
I think it's pretty obvious that if you payed me to play a game, of chess, for instance and I decided half-way through your game (with someone other customer) to remove your queen, that the game I had paid for wasn't being provided because the rules of chess don't allow for third-party intervention.
Now, if I the customer wanted to throw the game, giving my opponent high ranking, this would disrupt the rest of the service you had offered, which was a game playing and ranking service. However, the mere fact that my actions will cause you to lose money doesn't mean my actions are illegal.
If my actions are legal, I'm perfectly allowed to continue them and you must either find a way to prevent them from being disruptive, or face the fact that you can't provide the service you contracted to provide.
This is why you must be very careful in what you offer. Offer to let someone play a game, sure. With others, sure. But with everyone, perhaps not. This way if someone is disruptive you simply drop him on a mirror server, but with no other players, or perhaps with all the malcontents. Then he can play the game he contracted to play, without bothering all the other players.
"I Agree" means squat. They always ask for way for in those agreements than they can legally get away with, but they expect people to back down instead of go to court.
Second, the characters and items are not property of mythic. You bought them when you paid your money.
I understand why Mythic wants to stop item trading but that doesn't suddenly mean that their contracts are always binding and that they own everything.
If they want a game you can't buy your way through they should damn well make a game you don't benefit from buying your way through.
In fact, players of EQ and such should file a class action suit against the makers, for failing to provide a fair and open gaming experience and instead setting up a system where item farmers get rich.
What everyone is missing is that the ToS can state damn near anything, but if they are binding is another question.
NASCAR may forbid people to sell the trophy, but if the drivers own it (do they keep it forever, or have to return it each year) they can probably do whatever they like with it.
In fact, NASCAR may not legally be able to act in a prejudicial manner towards a driver (forbid him to compete) based on things they can't legally forbid the driver to do so.
Something like you suggest might work. The proportional vote picks the number of candidates, but the percentage win in various areas picks which candidates actually represent.
As the the taxed to support thing...
I wasn't saying I should take $10 from you and give it to the democrats, or the skinheads. I was saying that we should all pitch in $10 and make sure that there's a forum that anyone, who can get public support, can use.
The public access cable channels are an example. The government grants companies a monopoly on certain things (frequency with which they broadcast TV shows) and it seems reasonable that part of the deal for this spectrum would be that the station make one channel of frequency and a simple studio plus staff, available to the people.
It's an example of something I couldn't ever afford (how many million $s to buy frequency and a transmitter, and a studio, etc) and we couldn't rely on people to simply buy airtime because stations could refuse to help anyone whose policies they disagree with. However if instead of charging $100M for 10 channel of frequency, we charge $90 + (public access) for 10 channels + 1 to be used for public access, the station doesn't have to foot the bill.
The dirty little secret about the US (land of opportunity) is that fewer than 5% of all millionares (actually $10M, I think) got that way of their own merit. The rest either inherited their money, or started rich and simply increased their fortune.
Look also at groups who have been specifically disadvantaged (blacks, the American-Japanese in WW2 (put into camps), the native Indians, etc) and are, or were, poor for reasons quite unrelated to their skills and motivation.
I think it's pretty clear that while there are some poster-boy millionaries (Dave Thomas?) who are at the top because of their abilities, many people are either rich, or poor, by chance, not merit.
Sure, the poor should try to better themselves, but going from $100 to $10,000 is at least as hard as going from $1M to $100M, yet we don't look down on people who can't do the latter.
I hate the democratic welfare state, I think it's self perpetuating and punishes the workers to support the lazy. However, I can see that some welfare truly helps the economy.
If you let some crack-mom raise ten kids on welfare and she raises them all to be bums, nobody gains. However, if you let an injured man sit on welfare until he heals, at which point he goes out and gets his old job back, you've helped the economy. If he had to get a menial job he might never have healed well enough to do a decent job again, meaning he'd be stuck with crap jobs for life.
And if you fund free schools you can educate those ten children of the crack-mom and let them make something of themselves. If you say (however justified it may be) that she had em, she should support em, you'll just guarantee that they don't go anywhere.
Some taxation, even for things you dislike personally, can help tremendously.
Letting the poor (in this case, it means anyone without at least $50M) be involved in politics and have access to decent schools means that they can try to better themselves. Letting only the idle (and 95% unworthy) rich control everything only perpetuates an unbalanced system where the less rich, despite being harder and smarter workers, are penalized just because they didn't start with a ton of money.
The only fundamental rights are the laws of physics. Anything else is just a pleasant fiction.
If it would significantly aid the world, why should MS's office format be opened? Government forced rail companies to standardize on track size (in cases where they hadn't already) and it's paid off incredibly, both for the people and for the once relectant companies.
I have no problem in taxing you to support politicians you abhor, because I am fully willing to support politicians I abhor. Really, we're doing it right now, our tax dollars are supporting politicians that (likely) neither of us would have picked, if we had an open choice. Part of supporting free speech is supporting the rights of people whose speech offends you. The reason I think this needs tax support is that we want people who aren't independently wealthy, or backed by wealth, to be able to compete.
Really though, I'd like to end campaign financing in the way we see it today. I'd rather "fund" politicians by giving them free spots on TV, funding debates, and the like. This way nobody is supporting anyone else's ideas, they're only supporting an open forum in which people can speak. Like everyone pitching in to buy a soapbox, without limits on who can use it.
As for who got to use it, I'd say that you'd need to hit a certain number of signatures at various stages. To start, maybe 10k signatures. That'd get state-wide air-time. Maybe 30k to get nation-wide, and 250k to get time during the finals. But without as hard of a limit. And ideally based on the population of their home state, etc.
My rough steps (with some basic notes as to the reasoning) would be to ban outright all contributions to a politician (call it treason, it's essentialy an attempt to bribe government). Limit campaign spending to some small sum, $10k or so, require receipts. (Make enough things free like TV spots as required that a lot of money isn't important). Let people contribute, but only by going to a campaign office and helping (cash donations favour the rich, time is something everyone has the same ammount of in a day.)
Taking off spending caps would simply let someone like Bill Gates outright buy a candidate and likely get the elected. It's also lead to a little favoritisms once elected. (There's really no way you can give money to a politician and not be bribing them.)
However, voting reform I do agree with. A simple system where you could vote for every party you want and the number of seats given was chosen by the their percentage of total votes. Nobody would be unwilling to vote for little parties.
If the jobs created were in Germany, versus the US, the German taxpayer could pay less (support for the open source) than before (MS licenses) and still benefit more from that tax money coming back, because it would come back into his own country.
That's a spurious argument and you know if. The Soviet Union (dunno what Russia says it is) and China say they're communist, just like the US says it's a capitalist country, but none of them are right. None of the "Red" countries have ever practiced anything close to communism. They've simply used it as a convenient way to justify not giving the lower classes anything. Other countries did the same by simply saying "you're peasants, we're the rulers, suffer."
But really, none of that matters even matters.
Any country where people are vanished frequently, or where they're executed for having a photocopier, it unlikely to be a happy one, regardless of the label for their economic system.
That should have been "RTFR" or "RTFL" and either way, I don't think it matters all that much.
I've said more in replies to the other posts, but the summary is that you could probably sue them if they used this as a ruse to get free ideas and code. Likely though they'll hire anyone who does well in the contest, making it a moot point.
Most ideas though aren't valuable because of the idea, but because of the development. Our funky ideas of what to do with a DB the size of theirs is easy, it's the merging of the idea and the reality where the work really comes in, so even if they did take the losing ideas it wouldn't help them tons, they'd just have some undeveloped ideas, much the same as what I'm sure they get emailed every day "Hey, have you guys thought of adding... "
You can't copyright ideas, but you can sue people for many different things if they use yours in a situation where you could reasonably have expected to get paid for giving them the idea.
In this case, you could expect them to use the winning idea (being the best and all) and not the rest. If they pay for one idea they use, you've got a case that they should pay for the rest.
Similarly, the writers of shows are often forbidden by their lawyers from looking at ideas from fans, anything more complex than "Make the enterprise fight more klingons" is off limits. Now, as much as I dislike lawyers, they do have a good idea of the current legal climate and likely wouldn't tell their clients to do something like that unless it served a legal purpose which must mean a few companies have been sued over it (and lost).
There isn't international copyright law, but there're international treaties to ensure that countries have similar copyright laws.
And material to be copyrighted doesn't have to be written down, it has to be "fixed in tangible media" or something similar. As in, you can't have just said it to a friend once.
Here's a quote "Under the Copyright Act of 1976, the basis of U.S. copyright law, copyright is automatic when an original work is first "fixed" in a tangible medium of expression. That means material is protected by copyright at the point when it is first printed, captured on film, drawn, or saved to hard drive or disk."
I'm merely counting on the wording being utilitarian and the quotation short enough that it's not a violation to quote it.:)
But it's not a stretch for someone to believe that it had to be printed, until ten years ago I'm sure that's what most lawyers said, not knowing there was another way to make most things tangible...
Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google
on
Google Programming Contest
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The problem is that ideas aren't worth a lot without a way to use them. I've had a lot of neat thoughts about mapping connectivity and so on, but without something like Google to run it on I'd have to spider the whole web myself on my cable.
They might get a good idea, but if you don't win the contest they don't really have much of a legal leg to take your idea, so you're pretty safe unless you're the winner, in which case you get $10k for hacking together a script that you never could have afforded to run anyways. (It's only concept they want, not the polished results of a 2-month dev process.)
It honestly sounds like a good deal to me. I hack for a night or two on a project that I find interesting. If I lose, no big deal. If I win I get 10k USD (3 months wages for me, I get paid in Canadian $s) and I'd be famous in exactly the circles who are looking to hire a coder with good ideas...
People go on about the value of ideas all the time, but really, without proper backing ideas are a dime a dozen. I've said many time "Hey, how about a..." and seen it advertised a few years later. That doesn't mean I lost out on it, because I didn't have the cash to develop it let alone market it.
This is why patents on wide ideas are so damaging. Any idiot can have a good idea every now and then, but it takes more work (and funding unfortunately) to make them fly. If you let someone with an undeveloped idea block off a whole field it does a great disservice to the people with the ability to follow through, who likely had the idea independently.
Actually the last sentence was a joke. I'm pretty sure (ie, heard from people at IBM) that the problem with the 75GXPs was that they used platters that weren't designed for GMR drives. I'm pretty sure that one person couldn't be responsible for a fiasco of that magnitude. Or at least, one engineer couldn't; one management type easily could be.
Seriously though, he might have quit (or been layed off) over it, depending on how much of a fuss there is internally about it.
IBM tech support pretends that they've never heard from anyone that the 75GXPs are dying and they try to tell me that every drive has hundreds of discussion boards full of people saying it's crap. I was wondering if the engineering department knew there was a problem, or if they had their heads in the sand.
I think the results are "interesting" because they're detailed and show what things the cards are better at.
As for bias, well, I don't see any, at least not pro-ATI. ATI beat the GF3 in a few things and I don't recall the editors being happy or anything. Maybe ATI fanboys were, but those are just user opinions like yours or mine.
And as for my own views of ATI. Ugh. Total crap. Or rather, nice hardware, too bad it's saddled with a company that can't make a driver to save its life.
(Somewhat like Creative Labs, supposedly the Live and Audigy cards are good, but their drivers still blow up on dual-CPU systems and often on single-CPU ones.)
For the driver reason alone, I'll go with nVidia. One driver pack, works on anything from a TNT to a GeForce 4. And I've never had it screw anything up.
Console games (for the XBox) are essentially the same as PC games. If they're taking advantage of the card in a way PC games aren't it's simply because they know the hardware exactly and instead of providing detail sliders, it's tuned directly.
However, I think current PC games are using the cards we have. Tribes 2 and Giants are both slow on a GeForce 2. Wolfenstein (and supposedly MOH:AA) are very chunky with less than a GeForce 3, unless you turn the texture quality down.
Besides, console games are too handicapped by being designed for consoles. Honestly the XBox seems best because of the HD, it lets games actually save state info. But gamepads are lousy for most types of gaming except platform games, writing a game to use them cripples the interface. (As compared to a primary keyboard/mouse or keyboard/gamepad where they don't try to cram everything onto the mouse/gamepad and cut the features that they can't fit onto it.)
Actually, those contracts that say "we can change it and you're still bound by it" aren't valid.
There are some cases they can be, but it's usually the sort of thing where you get a bank statement that lists the new regulations and you "accept by continued use". When a company says that they can change the agreement without warning though, and it's your responsibility to check, they're lying.
One legal reform I'd *really* like is to make it illegal for companies to lie about the law. It's like a warranty where they say "You get squat - except where local law says otherwise" They shouldn't be able to say "You get squat" because in almost all countries there are lemon laws and the like. Similarly, companies shouldn't be able to tell you that you have no legal recourse when you do, or to tell you you must accept bizarre terms when those terms aren't enforceable.
BitKeeper seems quite honest, if they don't resort to this kind of trickery.
I used to open 5.25 floppy disks to clean them. Slice the cover on the dirty disk (orange juice had dried onto one so badly that it wouldn't spin by hand) and a clean disk (preferably blank). Remove the dirty disk and gently wash under warm water. Dry carefully (with something lint free) or let air dry. Put the disk into the clean sleeve and tape the sleeve shut.
As people who have taken HDs apart say, I didn't expect it to last. I got in, took the data, and then junked the disk. It might have worked, 5.25s were fairly forgiving and the Apple// drive was pretty robust, but I didn't risk it.
As the AC said, IBM doesn't have the best reputation with hard drives right now...
Why is the 75GXP crap? I've never seen so much negative feedback about a model of drives since the Seagate thing years ago with drive overheating (and that was preventable by using a hard drive cooler.)
When I called tech support about my dead 75GXP they (after examining the drive logs the diag program makes) were suprised that it had been running almost nonstop since I bought it (I run a webserver for my friends on my computer, so I keep it up all the time). They seemed to think that the drive wasn't capable of 24/7 operation. If not, it's the first drive I've had which wasn't made for it.
Why are you a "former" drive engineer? Fired, or quit? (Hmmm, maybe the 75GXPs are your fault.)
Well, someone could take the public domain results and co-license them under the GPL, but this isn't a problem because people could still go get the original public domain version.
If your state funded grant is for "generally running a lab, while not producing results" then you should use it for that.
However, most grants are a little more specific as to what you're supposed to do with them.
IMHO if you use any public money to research/create/etc, the creation/results should be co-licensed into the public domain.
Theoretically this allows someone to take your research and change a critical word "... no reason to believe that telepathy [doesn't] exist." and have it look as if you said that, but this is covered by existing laws. I can write up a scientific sounding paper from my school experience, sign your name, and claim anything I want. What stops me isn't copyright law, it's defamation of character laws.
Likely, if the inclusion of public money made results public, private money would come with the stipulation that you do not accept public money on this project. But that's fine. If they foot the bills, they get the results. And it means there's more public money for people willing to open their results.
IMHO, using public money on something that we don't benefit from is theft. And I don't buy that there is *any* economic benefit to corporate control of this information (for the people, at any rate.) If the information was public, many companies could use it to base their work on, with it being closed only one company can. Being that public doesn't mean GPL (ie, perpetually open) there's no argument that a company couldn't make their discoveries proprietary.
Does the mapquest thing detract? Did a core developer have to take more than ten minutes to work on it?
I'm a programmer by trade and I don't think that sort of thing would slow me down by much. I tend to work very quickly on one area when I have an idea for it, but in between I work on smaller pieces. Bug fixes, minor features, etc. Taking that time and simply staring at the main problem I'm tackling wouldn't produce the finished code any faster because when I stop working it's usually because I need a fresh view on it.
I don't think people should take time from fixing the text widget and spending it adding mapquest features, but likely they wouldn't spend that time on the tetx widget anyways. In fact, I doubt that much time was spent by the core developers on that feature.
As for Mozilla being ready for an end user or not, I feel that it is. Honestly IE crashes more for me (in terms of crashes per hour used) than Mozilla. I'll often have ten Mozilla windows open and up to thirty tabs in them open (various spots in O'Reilly's Perl bookshelf, etc) and Mozilla stays up for days (literally).
Mozilla doesn't work quite right for most pluggings, but I blame a large part of that on the pluggin writers. I've heard you can get all sorts of things working in Mozilla by simply copying the.DLLs from Netscape 4.7x, but the pluggins refuse to directly install because they check for versions and don't allow an override.
Much the same as pages that don't work in Mozilla/Netscape 6. When you either fiddle with the browser ID tag (via Proximitron or Junkbuster, etc) and if needed, disable the Javascript browser checking, most of those pages load perfectly. It's just the developers not wanting to be responsible for making their pages to standards.
Mozilla has some weirdness (text entry, and horizontal lines through pictures when scrolling, are the two I see the most) but other than that, it seems able to compete with either NS4.7x or IE5.5 (the one that came with 2k).
What does it not do that your average user wants to do?
This has been hotly discussed. The problem is that it would require a complete refit of all programs to be of any real use, or it would be a performance patch on one system that made the programs incompatible with another system.
But yes, it would easily solve the program of accessing 1.1GB of data on a 1GB system. You simply tell the VM that.1GB at the start and.1GB,.55GB into the data, are to be swapped out before the rest. As you've then got.9GB marked to be kept in RAM (while possible, at least) the VM simply throws out one of those chunks to make room for the other, reducing the swapping from 1.1GB/round to.2GB/round. Furthermore intelligent precaching could get the second.1GB of swappable data ready as soon as you've gone through the first.1GB, so as to have it ready by the time you get there, and vice versa.
This could be implemented as an out-of-band request to the VM, or could be handled by writing a new malloc() that's backwards compatible.
You'd call newmalloc() in the program, specifying how much RAM, what swap pattern is likely to work, and if any of it should be considered higher priority than the rest. Ideally this would be processed by system libraries and the improved VM would read it, but on a system without those libraries the _newmalloc() function in your program is used, and it simply sums up what you've asked for and places a simple call to malloc(), giving you the ram, but without the performance options.
I'm sure a few high-end systems have this sort of thing, I can't imagine writing weather simulations to run on a Cray for instance, and having to use your own manual hacks for memory management, so I'd assume they have something... I doubt they bothered with the fallback though, most things written for a Cray wouldn't be worth running elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
What if your bank decided to write zeros in a few columns? Who are you to complain that one of these was your account balance?
If they treat one player differently that another without showing beforehand that the player violated a rule, they could be sued for failing to provide the service they accepted money for providing. (And no, giving the money back doesn't magically cancel the contract.)
Paying someone money (and having them accept) forms a basic contract. They (perhaps implicitly) agree to provide a service, and that the service will be what you asked for when purchasing.
I think it's pretty obvious that if you payed me to play a game, of chess, for instance and I decided half-way through your game (with someone other customer) to remove your queen, that the game I had paid for wasn't being provided because the rules of chess don't allow for third-party intervention.
Now, if I the customer wanted to throw the game, giving my opponent high ranking, this would disrupt the rest of the service you had offered, which was a game playing and ranking service. However, the mere fact that my actions will cause you to lose money doesn't mean my actions are illegal.
If my actions are legal, I'm perfectly allowed to continue them and you must either find a way to prevent them from being disruptive, or face the fact that you can't provide the service you contracted to provide.
This is why you must be very careful in what you offer. Offer to let someone play a game, sure. With others, sure. But with everyone, perhaps not. This way if someone is disruptive you simply drop him on a mirror server, but with no other players, or perhaps with all the malcontents. Then he can play the game he contracted to play, without bothering all the other players.
No need to bad people, just transfer them the a "Realm" with all the other item farmers. :)
Ugh, what a troll.
"I Agree" means squat. They always ask for way for in those agreements than they can legally get away with, but they expect people to back down instead of go to court.
Second, the characters and items are not property of mythic. You bought them when you paid your money.
I understand why Mythic wants to stop item trading but that doesn't suddenly mean that their contracts are always binding and that they own everything.
If they want a game you can't buy your way through they should damn well make a game you don't benefit from buying your way through.
In fact, players of EQ and such should file a class action suit against the makers, for failing to provide a fair and open gaming experience and instead setting up a system where item farmers get rich.
What everyone is missing is that the ToS can state damn near anything, but if they are binding is another question.
NASCAR may forbid people to sell the trophy, but if the drivers own it (do they keep it forever, or have to return it each year) they can probably do whatever they like with it.
In fact, NASCAR may not legally be able to act in a prejudicial manner towards a driver (forbid him to compete) based on things they can't legally forbid the driver to do so.
Something like you suggest might work. The proportional vote picks the number of candidates, but the percentage win in various areas picks which candidates actually represent.
As the the taxed to support thing...
I wasn't saying I should take $10 from you and give it to the democrats, or the skinheads. I was saying that we should all pitch in $10 and make sure that there's a forum that anyone, who can get public support, can use.
The public access cable channels are an example. The government grants companies a monopoly on certain things (frequency with which they broadcast TV shows) and it seems reasonable that part of the deal for this spectrum would be that the station make one channel of frequency and a simple studio plus staff, available to the people.
It's an example of something I couldn't ever afford (how many million $s to buy frequency and a transmitter, and a studio, etc) and we couldn't rely on people to simply buy airtime because stations could refuse to help anyone whose policies they disagree with. However if instead of charging $100M for 10 channel of frequency, we charge $90 + (public access) for 10 channels + 1 to be used for public access, the station doesn't have to foot the bill.
The dirty little secret about the US (land of opportunity) is that fewer than 5% of all millionares (actually $10M, I think) got that way of their own merit. The rest either inherited their money, or started rich and simply increased their fortune.
Look also at groups who have been specifically disadvantaged (blacks, the American-Japanese in WW2 (put into camps), the native Indians, etc) and are, or were, poor for reasons quite unrelated to their skills and motivation.
I think it's pretty clear that while there are some poster-boy millionaries (Dave Thomas?) who are at the top because of their abilities, many people are either rich, or poor, by chance, not merit.
Sure, the poor should try to better themselves, but going from $100 to $10,000 is at least as hard as going from $1M to $100M, yet we don't look down on people who can't do the latter.
I hate the democratic welfare state, I think it's self perpetuating and punishes the workers to support the lazy. However, I can see that some welfare truly helps the economy.
If you let some crack-mom raise ten kids on welfare and she raises them all to be bums, nobody gains. However, if you let an injured man sit on welfare until he heals, at which point he goes out and gets his old job back, you've helped the economy. If he had to get a menial job he might never have healed well enough to do a decent job again, meaning he'd be stuck with crap jobs for life.
And if you fund free schools you can educate those ten children of the crack-mom and let them make something of themselves. If you say (however justified it may be) that she had em, she should support em, you'll just guarantee that they don't go anywhere.
Some taxation, even for things you dislike personally, can help tremendously.
Letting the poor (in this case, it means anyone without at least $50M) be involved in politics and have access to decent schools means that they can try to better themselves. Letting only the idle (and 95% unworthy) rich control everything only perpetuates an unbalanced system where the less rich, despite being harder and smarter workers, are penalized just because they didn't start with a ton of money.
The only fundamental rights are the laws of physics. Anything else is just a pleasant fiction.
If it would significantly aid the world, why should MS's office format be opened? Government forced rail companies to standardize on track size (in cases where they hadn't already) and it's paid off incredibly, both for the people and for the once relectant companies.
I have no problem in taxing you to support politicians you abhor, because I am fully willing to support politicians I abhor. Really, we're doing it right now, our tax dollars are supporting politicians that (likely) neither of us would have picked, if we had an open choice. Part of supporting free speech is supporting the rights of people whose speech offends you. The reason I think this needs tax support is that we want people who aren't independently wealthy, or backed by wealth, to be able to compete.
Really though, I'd like to end campaign financing in the way we see it today. I'd rather "fund" politicians by giving them free spots on TV, funding debates, and the like. This way nobody is supporting anyone else's ideas, they're only supporting an open forum in which people can speak. Like everyone pitching in to buy a soapbox, without limits on who can use it.
As for who got to use it, I'd say that you'd need to hit a certain number of signatures at various stages. To start, maybe 10k signatures. That'd get state-wide air-time. Maybe 30k to get nation-wide, and 250k to get time during the finals. But without as hard of a limit. And ideally based on the population of their home state, etc.
My rough steps (with some basic notes as to the reasoning) would be to ban outright all contributions to a politician (call it treason, it's essentialy an attempt to bribe government). Limit campaign spending to some small sum, $10k or so, require receipts. (Make enough things free like TV spots as required that a lot of money isn't important). Let people contribute, but only by going to a campaign office and helping (cash donations favour the rich, time is something everyone has the same ammount of in a day.)
Taking off spending caps would simply let someone like Bill Gates outright buy a candidate and likely get the elected. It's also lead to a little favoritisms once elected. (There's really no way you can give money to a politician and not be bribing them.)
However, voting reform I do agree with. A simple system where you could vote for every party you want and the number of seats given was chosen by the their percentage of total votes. Nobody would be unwilling to vote for little parties.
If the jobs created were in Germany, versus the US, the German taxpayer could pay less (support for the open source) than before (MS licenses) and still benefit more from that tax money coming back, because it would come back into his own country.
That's a spurious argument and you know if. The Soviet Union (dunno what Russia says it is) and China say they're communist, just like the US says it's a capitalist country, but none of them are right. None of the "Red" countries have ever practiced anything close to communism. They've simply used it as a convenient way to justify not giving the lower classes anything. Other countries did the same by simply saying "you're peasants, we're the rulers, suffer."
But really, none of that matters even matters.
Any country where people are vanished frequently, or where they're executed for having a photocopier, it unlikely to be a happy one, regardless of the label for their economic system.
That should have been "RTFR" or "RTFL" and either way, I don't think it matters all that much.
... "
I've said more in replies to the other posts, but the summary is that you could probably sue them if they used this as a ruse to get free ideas and code. Likely though they'll hire anyone who does well in the contest, making it a moot point.
Most ideas though aren't valuable because of the idea, but because of the development. Our funky ideas of what to do with a DB the size of theirs is easy, it's the merging of the idea and the reality where the work really comes in, so even if they did take the losing ideas it wouldn't help them tons, they'd just have some undeveloped ideas, much the same as what I'm sure they get emailed every day "Hey, have you guys thought of adding
You can't copyright ideas, but you can sue people for many different things if they use yours in a situation where you could reasonably have expected to get paid for giving them the idea.
In this case, you could expect them to use the winning idea (being the best and all) and not the rest. If they pay for one idea they use, you've got a case that they should pay for the rest.
Similarly, the writers of shows are often forbidden by their lawyers from looking at ideas from fans, anything more complex than "Make the enterprise fight more klingons" is off limits. Now, as much as I dislike lawyers, they do have a good idea of the current legal climate and likely wouldn't tell their clients to do something like that unless it served a legal purpose which must mean a few companies have been sued over it (and lost).
There isn't international copyright law, but there're international treaties to ensure that countries have similar copyright laws.
:)
And material to be copyrighted doesn't have to be written down, it has to be "fixed in tangible media" or something similar. As in, you can't have just said it to a friend once.
Here's a quote "Under the Copyright Act of 1976, the basis of U.S. copyright law, copyright is automatic when an original work is first "fixed" in a tangible medium of expression. That means material is protected by copyright at the point when it is first printed, captured on film, drawn, or saved to hard drive or disk."
I'm merely counting on the wording being utilitarian and the quotation short enough that it's not a violation to quote it.
But it's not a stretch for someone to believe that it had to be printed, until ten years ago I'm sure that's what most lawyers said, not knowing there was another way to make most things tangible...
The problem is that ideas aren't worth a lot without a way to use them. I've had a lot of neat thoughts about mapping connectivity and so on, but without something like Google to run it on I'd have to spider the whole web myself on my cable.
..." and seen it advertised a few years later. That doesn't mean I lost out on it, because I didn't have the cash to develop it let alone market it.
They might get a good idea, but if you don't win the contest they don't really have much of a legal leg to take your idea, so you're pretty safe unless you're the winner, in which case you get $10k for hacking together a script that you never could have afforded to run anyways. (It's only concept they want, not the polished results of a 2-month dev process.)
It honestly sounds like a good deal to me. I hack for a night or two on a project that I find interesting. If I lose, no big deal. If I win I get 10k USD (3 months wages for me, I get paid in Canadian $s) and I'd be famous in exactly the circles who are looking to hire a coder with good ideas...
People go on about the value of ideas all the time, but really, without proper backing ideas are a dime a dozen. I've said many time "Hey, how about a
This is why patents on wide ideas are so damaging. Any idiot can have a good idea every now and then, but it takes more work (and funding unfortunately) to make them fly. If you let someone with an undeveloped idea block off a whole field it does a great disservice to the people with the ability to follow through, who likely had the idea independently.
Actually the last sentence was a joke. I'm pretty sure (ie, heard from people at IBM) that the problem with the 75GXPs was that they used platters that weren't designed for GMR drives. I'm pretty sure that one person couldn't be responsible for a fiasco of that magnitude. Or at least, one engineer couldn't; one management type easily could be.
Seriously though, he might have quit (or been layed off) over it, depending on how much of a fuss there is internally about it.
IBM tech support pretends that they've never heard from anyone that the 75GXPs are dying and they try to tell me that every drive has hundreds of discussion boards full of people saying it's crap. I was wondering if the engineering department knew there was a problem, or if they had their heads in the sand.
I just did a test install of XP on a second partition and what killed it was Norton Systemworks 2002.
It took the Via 4in1, the nVidia drivers (ASUS branded), etc. A ton of weird stuff. And it was brought down by a system utility suite... Kinda ironic.
I think the results are "interesting" because they're detailed and show what things the cards are better at.
As for bias, well, I don't see any, at least not pro-ATI. ATI beat the GF3 in a few things and I don't recall the editors being happy or anything. Maybe ATI fanboys were, but those are just user opinions like yours or mine.
And as for my own views of ATI. Ugh. Total crap. Or rather, nice hardware, too bad it's saddled with a company that can't make a driver to save its life.
(Somewhat like Creative Labs, supposedly the Live and Audigy cards are good, but their drivers still blow up on dual-CPU systems and often on single-CPU ones.)
For the driver reason alone, I'll go with nVidia. One driver pack, works on anything from a TNT to a GeForce 4. And I've never had it screw anything up.
Console games (for the XBox) are essentially the same as PC games. If they're taking advantage of the card in a way PC games aren't it's simply because they know the hardware exactly and instead of providing detail sliders, it's tuned directly.
However, I think current PC games are using the cards we have. Tribes 2 and Giants are both slow on a GeForce 2. Wolfenstein (and supposedly MOH:AA) are very chunky with less than a GeForce 3, unless you turn the texture quality down.
Besides, console games are too handicapped by being designed for consoles. Honestly the XBox seems best because of the HD, it lets games actually save state info. But gamepads are lousy for most types of gaming except platform games, writing a game to use them cripples the interface. (As compared to a primary keyboard/mouse or keyboard/gamepad where they don't try to cram everything onto the mouse/gamepad and cut the features that they can't fit onto it.)
Actually, those contracts that say "we can change it and you're still bound by it" aren't valid.
There are some cases they can be, but it's usually the sort of thing where you get a bank statement that lists the new regulations and you "accept by continued use". When a company says that they can change the agreement without warning though, and it's your responsibility to check, they're lying.
One legal reform I'd *really* like is to make it illegal for companies to lie about the law. It's like a warranty where they say "You get squat - except where local law says otherwise" They shouldn't be able to say "You get squat" because in almost all countries there are lemon laws and the like. Similarly, companies shouldn't be able to tell you that you have no legal recourse when you do, or to tell you you must accept bizarre terms when those terms aren't enforceable.
BitKeeper seems quite honest, if they don't resort to this kind of trickery.
I used to open 5.25 floppy disks to clean them. Slice the cover on the dirty disk (orange juice had dried onto one so badly that it wouldn't spin by hand) and a clean disk (preferably blank). Remove the dirty disk and gently wash under warm water. Dry carefully (with something lint free) or let air dry. Put the disk into the clean sleeve and tape the sleeve shut.
As people who have taken HDs apart say, I didn't expect it to last. I got in, took the data, and then junked the disk. It might have worked, 5.25s were fairly forgiving and the Apple// drive was pretty robust, but I didn't risk it.
As the AC said, IBM doesn't have the best reputation with hard drives right now...
Why is the 75GXP crap? I've never seen so much negative feedback about a model of drives since the Seagate thing years ago with drive overheating (and that was preventable by using a hard drive cooler.)
When I called tech support about my dead 75GXP they (after examining the drive logs the diag program makes) were suprised that it had been running almost nonstop since I bought it (I run a webserver for my friends on my computer, so I keep it up all the time). They seemed to think that the drive wasn't capable of 24/7 operation. If not, it's the first drive I've had which wasn't made for it.
Why are you a "former" drive engineer? Fired, or quit? (Hmmm, maybe the 75GXPs are your fault.)
Well, someone could take the public domain results and co-license them under the GPL, but this isn't a problem because people could still go get the original public domain version.
Works for me.
... no reason to believe that telepathy [doesn't] exist." and have it look as if you said that, but this is covered by existing laws. I can write up a scientific sounding paper from my school experience, sign your name, and claim anything I want. What stops me isn't copyright law, it's defamation of character laws.
If your state funded grant is for "generally running a lab, while not producing results" then you should use it for that.
However, most grants are a little more specific as to what you're supposed to do with them.
IMHO if you use any public money to research/create/etc, the creation/results should be co-licensed into the public domain.
Theoretically this allows someone to take your research and change a critical word "
Likely, if the inclusion of public money made results public, private money would come with the stipulation that you do not accept public money on this project. But that's fine. If they foot the bills, they get the results. And it means there's more public money for people willing to open their results.
IMHO, using public money on something that we don't benefit from is theft. And I don't buy that there is *any* economic benefit to corporate control of this information (for the people, at any rate.) If the information was public, many companies could use it to base their work on, with it being closed only one company can. Being that public doesn't mean GPL (ie, perpetually open) there's no argument that a company couldn't make their discoveries proprietary.
Does the mapquest thing detract? Did a core developer have to take more than ten minutes to work on it?
.DLLs from Netscape 4.7x, but the pluggins refuse to directly install because they check for versions and don't allow an override.
I'm a programmer by trade and I don't think that sort of thing would slow me down by much. I tend to work very quickly on one area when I have an idea for it, but in between I work on smaller pieces. Bug fixes, minor features, etc. Taking that time and simply staring at the main problem I'm tackling wouldn't produce the finished code any faster because when I stop working it's usually because I need a fresh view on it.
I don't think people should take time from fixing the text widget and spending it adding mapquest features, but likely they wouldn't spend that time on the tetx widget anyways. In fact, I doubt that much time was spent by the core developers on that feature.
As for Mozilla being ready for an end user or not, I feel that it is. Honestly IE crashes more for me (in terms of crashes per hour used) than Mozilla. I'll often have ten Mozilla windows open and up to thirty tabs in them open (various spots in O'Reilly's Perl bookshelf, etc) and Mozilla stays up for days (literally).
Mozilla doesn't work quite right for most pluggings, but I blame a large part of that on the pluggin writers. I've heard you can get all sorts of things working in Mozilla by simply copying the
Much the same as pages that don't work in Mozilla/Netscape 6. When you either fiddle with the browser ID tag (via Proximitron or Junkbuster, etc) and if needed, disable the Javascript browser checking, most of those pages load perfectly. It's just the developers not wanting to be responsible for making their pages to standards.
Mozilla has some weirdness (text entry, and horizontal lines through pictures when scrolling, are the two I see the most) but other than that, it seems able to compete with either NS4.7x or IE5.5 (the one that came with 2k).
What does it not do that your average user wants to do?
This has been hotly discussed. The problem is that it would require a complete refit of all programs to be of any real use, or it would be a performance patch on one system that made the programs incompatible with another system.
.1GB at the start and .1GB, .55GB into the data, are to be swapped out before the rest. As you've then got .9GB marked to be kept in RAM (while possible, at least) the VM simply throws out one of those chunks to make room for the other, reducing the swapping from 1.1GB/round to .2GB/round. Furthermore intelligent precaching could get the second .1GB of swappable data ready as soon as you've gone through the first .1GB, so as to have it ready by the time you get there, and vice versa.
But yes, it would easily solve the program of accessing 1.1GB of data on a 1GB system. You simply tell the VM that
This could be implemented as an out-of-band request to the VM, or could be handled by writing a new malloc() that's backwards compatible.
You'd call newmalloc() in the program, specifying how much RAM, what swap pattern is likely to work, and if any of it should be considered higher priority than the rest. Ideally this would be processed by system libraries and the improved VM would read it, but on a system without those libraries the _newmalloc() function in your program is used, and it simply sums up what you've asked for and places a simple call to malloc(), giving you the ram, but without the performance options.
I'm sure a few high-end systems have this sort of thing, I can't imagine writing weather simulations to run on a Cray for instance, and having to use your own manual hacks for memory management, so I'd assume they have something... I doubt they bothered with the fallback though, most things written for a Cray wouldn't be worth running elsewhere.