It wouldn't render the statute meaningless. It would mean that if you circumvent for non-fair use, you end up breaking two statutes: the regular copyright laws, plus the DMCA. It's pretty normal to have a law that says that if you commit a certain crime in special circumstances, you thereby commit another crime.
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act may anyway have prohibited them from voiding warranties for jailbreaking, unless the damage to the phone was caused by the jailbreaking.
There are SOME people for whom legality is the issue. For instance, the main reason I don't get an iPod Touch to replace my aging Palm TX is precisely that (a) I don't want Apple control over what I install and how I develop software, but (b) it's morally wrong to break the law unless the law tells one to do something immoral. And, alas, the exemption doesn't apply to the iPod. But at least one obstacle to getting an iPhone is now gone for me.
It's just hit me: The prohibition on interpreted code taken literally might prevent someone making a graphing calculator app and implementing the graphing functionality by translating the equation into RPN code for a very simple stack-based virtual machine, and then interpreting that for each point. I assume that's the standard way to implement graphing, since it's a waste of CPU time to parse infix notation for every point (when I wrote a graphing calculator app for the Z80-based Sharp Wizard 7xx, that's what I did). It might also prohibit someone from implementing a Boolean text search by parsing the search expression into RPN code (that's how I implemented the Boolean search in Bible+ for PalmOS).
Now, it's true that they allow the use of interpreted code with Apple's written permission, but only "for providing minor features or functionality". In the case of a graphing calculator app, the interpreted code is used to implement the primary functionality. And in the case of a Boolean text search, depending on the app, that might well be a major feature.
Maybe this doesn't count as really interpreted code because one doesn't have Turing completeness in the interpreter--it's too simple. But with finite memory, one never really has Turing completeness. And anyway, if Turing completeness is the defining feature of an interpreter, then one could get around the restriction by setting a big arbitrary limit on the number of times a conditional can be interpreted (maybe, 2^100).
There is nothing against transparency in the full text of the speech, and in fact even the original article doesn't say there is. The speech seems balanced. On the one hand it says "Without fear we want to set out upon the digital sea embracing the unrestricted navigation with the same passion that for 2,000 years has steered the barque of the Church" and on the other hand there are "The dangers of homogenization and control, of intellectual and moral relativism" (these are opposed dangers, I suppose) and a "digital divide".
As the article notes, there does not seem to be any reason to think that CS courses have more cheaters than other courses--just that more get caught. The article cites 1-2% cheaters in CS classes. When I teach lower level philosophy classes, I have the papers get handed in through turnitin.com. Result: About 2% of my students are found cheating. How many cheat and don't get caught, I don't know. It's really frustrating, because there is a lot of work with each case, and one wonders why someone would bother to lift a few sentences from a website when they're going to be uploading their paper to a plagiarism-checking service.
Anecdotally, it seems to be a bit worse in the classes where I have poorer rapport with the students.
1. Some comments are suggesting that this only affects users who both want to play games and use Linux. But that's not correct: when functionality is reduced, that reduces resale value, and it does that for every user. Maybe the reduction is small. But it is a genuine reduction in value. How large that reduction is, I do not know, but with a large enough user base, even a small reduction will be a large overall loss to the user base. (Moreover, I would guess that there is a correlation between being the sort of person who buys used gear on ebay and being geeky, and there is a correlation between being geeky and wanting use Linux, so the effect on resale prices may not be entirely negligible.)
2. So, I think, everybody who owns an affected PS3 can reasonably demand a partial refund in compensation for a reduced feature base.
3. IANAL, but the claim that Sony can modify features as per EULA is, surely, to be understood within the bounds of common sense. For instance, surely it would not be OK for Sony to say: "We said that we can change features at our discretion, and we have changed the maximum number of controllers per PS3 to one. If you want to play N player games, buy N-1 more PS3s, and our new firmware will let you network them with one display." Likewise, it would not be acceptable for Sony to say: "We said that this was a computer, and we've disabled all console games, to keep you from wasting time that should be spent on serious computing." Major advertised features are not something the reasonable person understands the EULA as granting Sony the right to take away.
A good meta-analytic study will begin by spelling out a reasonable procedure for identifying studies. For instance, in this case, a reasonable procedure would be to identify two or three electronic databases of abstracts of peer-reviewed research in psychology and sociology, then to identify some relevant key words like "violence" and "video game", and then to come up with some further objective criteria for which studies one considers and which one doesn't. For instance, one might set a time window for the studies one considers (e.g., last 15 years) or a minimum sample size. One might also have some convenience criteria, such as only searching for things published in English. Then after one has set up these sorts of criteria, one follows them as best one can to identify the studies to include, and then one includes all the ones that match the criteria.
Moreover, good meta-analytic methodology will involve examining the strengths and weaknesses of the studies involved, figuring out the sample sizes, and using good statistical methods to get an overall result that is better than the best of the non-meta studies, because it has the benefit of a much larger effective sample size.
Can subjectivity sneak in? Of course it can. Peer-review can help here. But of course science delivers probability and not certainty--and that's fine.
We all know that smoking causes lung cancer. But for ethical reasons, we can't do randomized studies on humans.
So, what does one do without randomized studies? Well, one can do longitudinal studies: see what progression over time there is and observe what happens when the variable studied changes over time (e.g., people quitting playing violent games, or starting to play violent games). And we can look at correlations while controlling for tons of variables.
Can one prove that one didn't miss some relevant variable to be controlled? Certainly not. But once one has done the longitudinal studies, once one has looked at correlations while controlling for all the variables one can think of, at that point the reasonable person may says: "Probably, we have causation here. It's not proved, but it's very probable." And probability is all we really have in science, and if we weren't willing to act on probabilities, we'd almost never do anything.
It is surely false that "C is a tool for writing operating systems". C is a general purpose programming language. I've mainly used it myself for two purposes: (a) scientific computation (combinatorial, floating point and graphics), and (b) programming for PDAs (Sharp and Palm). It is a perfectly fine language for scientific computation, without the overhead of C++ (which probably is not so much now as it used to be back when I was doing scientific computation). And it is a standard tool for embedded systems programming, including both OS-type stuff and applications. C might not be the best tool for GUI applications on desktop OSes, and is messy for heavy string manipulation, but for non-GUI applications on desktop OSes that don't do too much heavy string manipulation (for that, something with a well-integrated RE system is better) and for GUI applications on non-desktop OSes it is quite fine.
What C doesn't have is OO stuff. But I don't think a beginner needs it--I think what is hard for a beginning programmer is the level of abstraction, and the level of abstraction in OOP is an order of magnitude higher.
I could see designing the system to synchronize both launch times and observations with a timer tick (it wouldn't be surprising if the whole system was driven by the timer interrupt), and then you're not going to have an error due to the spacing between ticks.
I am more bit dubious about the 24 bit thing, though. Was it fixed-point or floating-point?
I don't think it was a float. What would that be? Maybe 16 bit mantissa, 1 bit sign and 7 bit exponent would seem to be the likeliest bet for a 24 bit float. If so, then after about two hours doing t += 0.1 would stop changing t, and the error would be much bigger.
So presumably it was fixed point. But if you're doing it fixed point, instead of storing x, you store nx in an int, for some appropriate scaling factor n. But if you're going to do that, surely you'll choose n in a smart way, and in this case the obvious choice, as pointed out by many posters, is n=10. This is not only the obvious choice because it gets you more precision, but it's the obvious choice because the easiest, most obvious and most standard way of coding timers is to just increment a register with each tick. It would be silly, for instance, to let n=2^8, and then increment a register with 0.1*2^8 = 0x20. It would be a very unlikely assembly language programmer who would have put an add reg,20h opcode in interrupt hander code when inc reg would have worked.
Now maybe at some point the timer value would get converted to a float for computations. But that surely wouldn't be a 24-bit float.
So maybe the article has mangled things and it was not a 24-bit register, but a 32-bit float, with 24-bit mantissa, 7 bit exponent and 1 bit sign, and the "24" in the article came from the mantissa. That's a much more realistic choice. Still, the standard way to handle timers is to just increment a timer variable. So what I could see happening is this. There is a timer system variable t at full 0.1 second precision incremented on interrupt. (That's how PCs used to work--maybe still do--except the timer resolution was 1/30 sec.) Then for their launch calculations, they do: (float32)t / 10. And now they're going to get nasty roundoff errors as the mantissa gets filled up. At the 36 hour point, t is already about 23 bits long. So when you do a float divide by 10, you'll certainly have roundoff problems. But you're still not going to be more than one tick (0.1 sec) off, because each tick still adjusts the mantissa, while the article says they were 0.36 seconds off.
So I think something got mangled in the article. Or we had a really unlikely assembly language programmer who had floating point code executed with every tick of a timer interrupt. But even if the interrupt is only at 10hz, that's just completely contrary to the instincts of an assembly language programmer. And this would have been done back in the hey-day of assembly language programming, when one would try to optimize every clock cycle one could. (And, yes, I've worked with timer interrupt handlers, both on the Z80 and the 8086.)
TeX or LaTeX with some prewritten templates you copy from class to class should be pretty fast with practice. In addition to TeX macros, you can define keyboard macros in your text editor, so if you, say, type alt-i you get \int_{}^{} with the cursor in the first braces. You can also write a perl or even sed script that runs before TeX to remove the need for some of the backslashes--e.g., it could replace "sin" with "\sin" within equations (and in the rare case where s, i and n are variables, you can space them).
I'm a little concerned about individual variation in optimal typing methods for people with special needs or who are just less coordinated. For instance, I have rather poor control in my the last two fingers of each hand--it's probably a brain issue--and I end up typing with about six to ten fingers, at 100 wpm when I am trying to be fast, without using any system I had been taught. (I don't want or need more speed--with more speed I'd be getting ahead of my thinking too much.)
I was a clumsy and uncoordinated kid, and still am clumsy and uncoordinated in my mid 30s. They taught ten-finger touch-typing along with Logo programming in a summer program when I was in grade six, but it just wasn't natural to me and I didn't get above 30 wpm. I learned ten-fingered Dvorak touch-typing at around 18 (I think I wrote the keyboard driver myself). I think I reached about 60-80 wpm, but did not find the experience of ten-fingered typing comfortable, though I did it for somewhat elitist reasons, I think. (I remember that whenever I would sit at the particular Dvorak-equipped computer, I found it extremely hard to type in QWERTY--despite QWERTY labels on the keys--when my Dvorak driver wasn't working.) I wrote a PhD dissertation on the Dvorak system, in LaTeX.
And then I went back to QWERTY. And I've fallen into an untaught, unconscious rhythm that gets me higher speed than either the QWERTY or Dvorak touch-typing. I find it extremely natural to type most of the letter keys with about five fingers, use the thumbs for space, use the little fingers only for shifts, etc. (I don't actually know how I do it. It's too fast for me to notice the details.) This is completely unplanned, messy, no teacher would allow it, but for me is faster and less tiring than standard ten-fingered QWERTY or Dvorak. It's touch typing in the sense that I don't have to look at the keyboard (except maybe at some of the less commonly used symbol keys). Gives me 100 wpm, doesn't tire me, so what more do I want?
On the other hand, it did me no harm to be taught standard touch-typing. It ensured I knew all the key positions with tactile memory and that's crucial.
My main worry about this is that students are being required to publicly defend a view that they may take to be false. Now one cannot be surprised that at a seminary the students are required to accept and defend doctrines that are an essential part of that (I assume fundamentalist) Baptist seminary's religious tradition. But this goes beyond that, in a way that is particularly unfaithful to the Baptist ideal of conscience and individual judgment. The correctness of ID is not an essential part of the seminary's religious tradition. I assume this is a creationist and fundamentalist seminary. But the correctness of ID is not an essential part of creationism or fundamentalism.
Now ID of the Dembski variety presumably makes two claims, roughly as follows: (1) an intelligent agent is directly responsible, either through direct front-loading of complexity or through direct intervention, for the complexity observed in species; and (2) there is strong scientific evidence for the claim in (1). Something like claim (1) is presumably going to have to be accepted by any creationist (though maybe not in the full generality given). But claim (2) is something that can be rejected by those who creationists or fundamentalists or even both. Claim (2) is not a part of young earth creationism (the doctrine that God directly created the world within the last 10,000 years or so) that there is scientific evidence for young earth creationism--that is a further claim, going beyond young earth creationism. Similarly, claim (2) is not a part of old earth creationism, either.
Of course, many (most?) creationists accept (2), but that no more makes (2) a part of creationism than the fact that all microbiologists accept the existence of galaxies beyond our own makes the existence of galaxies beyond our own a part of microbiology.
Albert Einstein's little book _Relativity: The Special and the General Theory_ is a popular book aimed at people with a high school math education (a German one, though, I suppose). I really enjoyed the special relativity part of it when I was in high school, and the math you need to know doesn't get beyond algebraic shuffling with square roots. No calculus is needed.
It's even online for free for readers in countries where 1920 books are public domain (U.S., say): http://www.bartleby.com/173/
I think there may be in-copyright in-print versions that are slightly more up-to-date, though.
Now that I am older, the positivist approach bothers me a lot, but the arguments are still pretty cool.
Last I checked (half a year ago or so), it was not possible to get professionally pressed discs in quantities less than about 100-200. If that's changed, I'd appreciate knowing (for family archival purposes).
They could fix it in an hour. But they have already violated Artifex's copyright by their previous distribution, and if Artifex wants financial compensation for this, they are, I assume (IANAL), within their legal rights.
Moreover, if the license is GPLv2, then clause 4 kicks in: "You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License." This may mean that Diebold has permanently lost their license to use gs. This clause, I think, is rarely enforced. Most of us who write GPLv2-licensed software would be happy to let an infringing party become compliant and continue distributing the software. Also, some folks think that if one just re-downloads a new copy of the GPLv2-licensed software from a legal distributor, one gets a fresh license. I have no idea if that's true.
The situation in countries like Poland under communism was pretty much like that: poor, heavily Christian population, believing their country to be occupied by religiously hostile Communists. Now, in some sense Communism wasn't a religion, but that shouldn't make any difference here in light of the fact that what matters is not the religiosity of the occupiers as the religious hostility.
And, no, there weren't suicide bombings as far as I know.
It looks from the comments that time doesn't count as a write-off. But I bet that if Microsoft donates a bunch of copies of Windows, or just gives them a number of licenses, to a non-profit, that counts as a charitable donation. Am I wrong?
If donating software to an organization counts as a donation, then one should be able to make a claim that by giving copyright to the FSF one is making a donation of goods, to be assessed at the market value of the code.
I suspect, though, that just releasing OSS by oneself would not count. But if one ran a non-profit that one donated code to, and which then did the releasing for one, then I think things would look better.
If I were a judge, I'd test the ability to follow simple logical arguments. I fear, though, that some humans would fail.:-(
I played a bit with Elbot, and found that it deflects just about all my questions when I try to probe it. This makes me think that a viable strategy for passing the Turing test is to mimic a non-cooperative human, one who does not seriously enter into a conversation. But this strategy has little to do with artificial intelligence, because a human who does not seriously enter into a conversation is not really exhibiting intelligence in the interaction.
Well, if it turns out that RealDVD works legally, then that would be a reason to use RealDVD, given that most if not all of the free alternatives are illegal.
IANAL, but I can kind of see how RealDVD might turn out to be legal, while the free options aren't. The free options mostly involve unauthorized DeCSS (a possible exception might be products that capture the output of licensed DVD player software), thereby violating the DMCA. RealDVD could, however, do what I understand Kaleidescope did: use a legally licensed DeCSS from the DVD-CCA folks, and then, because of a loophole in the DVD-CCA licensing, capture the decrypted video to a hard drive for playing back later. In effect, the claim could be that the computer running RealDVD becomes a complex DVD player with delayed playback--it decrypts DVDs perfectly legally using a licensed DeCSS, and then plays back the decrypted output later, using a DVD-R as an intermediary.
I would have thought the DVD-CCA people would have closed this loophole in their licensing after the Kaleidescope case, but maybe RealNetworks got a license earlier or something.
That's not the only way you can play a non-R1/U DVD. Another way is to buy a cheap IDE DVD-ROM drive, hook it up to a cheap USB-IDE adapter, and watch the movie on a computer (e.g., a laptop hooked up to a TV). No legal problems of any sort. Standard DVD software will set the DVD-ROM drive's region to whatever the region of the disc is, so you may need to get more DVD-ROM drives for more regions. But DVD-ROM drives are cheap--you can get them for about the price of a DVD.
It's a bit ridiculous to buy five DVD-ROM drives, and then one has to store them and hook them up. But at least it's perfectly legal. (It's also a reason not to throw out old DVD-ROM drives.)
The possibility of doing this was one of the reasons the Copyright Office hasn't made a DMCA exception for DVDs not available in R1 or U.
If one can get one's hands on one of the really early DVD-ROM drives where the region code was stored in software, one can also do this by having one DVD-ROM drive, but more than set of DVD player software. For a while I had two pieces of DVD player software on my Windows desktop for precisely this reason, each set to a different region.
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It wouldn't render the statute meaningless. It would mean that if you circumvent for non-fair use, you end up breaking two statutes: the regular copyright laws, plus the DMCA. It's pretty normal to have a law that says that if you commit a certain crime in special circumstances, you thereby commit another crime.
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act may anyway have prohibited them from voiding warranties for jailbreaking, unless the damage to the phone was caused by the jailbreaking.
There are SOME people for whom legality is the issue. For instance, the main reason I don't get an iPod Touch to replace my aging Palm TX is precisely that (a) I don't want Apple control over what I install and how I develop software, but (b) it's morally wrong to break the law unless the law tells one to do something immoral. And, alas, the exemption doesn't apply to the iPod. But at least one obstacle to getting an iPhone is now gone for me.
It's just hit me: The prohibition on interpreted code taken literally might prevent someone making a graphing calculator app and implementing the graphing functionality by translating the equation into RPN code for a very simple stack-based virtual machine, and then interpreting that for each point. I assume that's the standard way to implement graphing, since it's a waste of CPU time to parse infix notation for every point (when I wrote a graphing calculator app for the Z80-based Sharp Wizard 7xx, that's what I did). It might also prohibit someone from implementing a Boolean text search by parsing the search expression into RPN code (that's how I implemented the Boolean search in Bible+ for PalmOS).
Now, it's true that they allow the use of interpreted code with Apple's written permission, but only "for providing minor features or functionality". In the case of a graphing calculator app, the interpreted code is used to implement the primary functionality. And in the case of a Boolean text search, depending on the app, that might well be a major feature.
Maybe this doesn't count as really interpreted code because one doesn't have Turing completeness in the interpreter--it's too simple. But with finite memory, one never really has Turing completeness. And anyway, if Turing completeness is the defining feature of an interpreter, then one could get around the restriction by setting a big arbitrary limit on the number of times a conditional can be interpreted (maybe, 2^100).
There is nothing against transparency in the full text of the speech, and in fact even the original article doesn't say there is. The speech seems balanced. On the one hand it says "Without fear we want to set out upon the digital sea embracing the unrestricted navigation with the same passion that for 2,000 years has steered the barque of the Church" and on the other hand there are "The dangers of homogenization and control, of intellectual and moral relativism" (these are opposed dangers, I suppose) and a "digital divide".
As the article notes, there does not seem to be any reason to think that CS courses have more cheaters than other courses--just that more get caught. The article cites 1-2% cheaters in CS classes. When I teach lower level philosophy classes, I have the papers get handed in through turnitin.com. Result: About 2% of my students are found cheating. How many cheat and don't get caught, I don't know. It's really frustrating, because there is a lot of work with each case, and one wonders why someone would bother to lift a few sentences from a website when they're going to be uploading their paper to a plagiarism-checking service.
Anecdotally, it seems to be a bit worse in the classes where I have poorer rapport with the students.
1. Some comments are suggesting that this only affects users who both want to play games and use Linux. But that's not correct: when functionality is reduced, that reduces resale value, and it does that for every user. Maybe the reduction is small. But it is a genuine reduction in value. How large that reduction is, I do not know, but with a large enough user base, even a small reduction will be a large overall loss to the user base. (Moreover, I would guess that there is a correlation between being the sort of person who buys used gear on ebay and being geeky, and there is a correlation between being geeky and wanting use Linux, so the effect on resale prices may not be entirely negligible.)
2. So, I think, everybody who owns an affected PS3 can reasonably demand a partial refund in compensation for a reduced feature base.
3. IANAL, but the claim that Sony can modify features as per EULA is, surely, to be understood within the bounds of common sense. For instance, surely it would not be OK for Sony to say: "We said that we can change features at our discretion, and we have changed the maximum number of controllers per PS3 to one. If you want to play N player games, buy N-1 more PS3s, and our new firmware will let you network them with one display." Likewise, it would not be acceptable for Sony to say: "We said that this was a computer, and we've disabled all console games, to keep you from wasting time that should be spent on serious computing." Major advertised features are not something the reasonable person understands the EULA as granting Sony the right to take away.
A good meta-analytic study will begin by spelling out a reasonable procedure for identifying studies. For instance, in this case, a reasonable procedure would be to identify two or three electronic databases of abstracts of peer-reviewed research in psychology and sociology, then to identify some relevant key words like "violence" and "video game", and then to come up with some further objective criteria for which studies one considers and which one doesn't. For instance, one might set a time window for the studies one considers (e.g., last 15 years) or a minimum sample size. One might also have some convenience criteria, such as only searching for things published in English. Then after one has set up these sorts of criteria, one follows them as best one can to identify the studies to include, and then one includes all the ones that match the criteria.
Moreover, good meta-analytic methodology will involve examining the strengths and weaknesses of the studies involved, figuring out the sample sizes, and using good statistical methods to get an overall result that is better than the best of the non-meta studies, because it has the benefit of a much larger effective sample size.
Can subjectivity sneak in? Of course it can. Peer-review can help here. But of course science delivers probability and not certainty--and that's fine.
We all know that smoking causes lung cancer. But for ethical reasons, we can't do randomized studies on humans.
So, what does one do without randomized studies? Well, one can do longitudinal studies: see what progression over time there is and observe what happens when the variable studied changes over time (e.g., people quitting playing violent games, or starting to play violent games). And we can look at correlations while controlling for tons of variables.
Can one prove that one didn't miss some relevant variable to be controlled? Certainly not. But once one has done the longitudinal studies, once one has looked at correlations while controlling for all the variables one can think of, at that point the reasonable person may says: "Probably, we have causation here. It's not proved, but it's very probable." And probability is all we really have in science, and if we weren't willing to act on probabilities, we'd almost never do anything.
Actually, the product site says that the gun deactivates when the watch is removed, and the watch has a fingerprint scanner for reactivation.
It is surely false that "C is a tool for writing operating systems". C is a general purpose programming language. I've mainly used it myself for two purposes: (a) scientific computation (combinatorial, floating point and graphics), and (b) programming for PDAs (Sharp and Palm). It is a perfectly fine language for scientific computation, without the overhead of C++ (which probably is not so much now as it used to be back when I was doing scientific computation). And it is a standard tool for embedded systems programming, including both OS-type stuff and applications. C might not be the best tool for GUI applications on desktop OSes, and is messy for heavy string manipulation, but for non-GUI applications on desktop OSes that don't do too much heavy string manipulation (for that, something with a well-integrated RE system is better) and for GUI applications on non-desktop OSes it is quite fine.
What C doesn't have is OO stuff. But I don't think a beginner needs it--I think what is hard for a beginning programmer is the level of abstraction, and the level of abstraction in OOP is an order of magnitude higher.
I could see designing the system to synchronize both launch times and observations with a timer tick (it wouldn't be surprising if the whole system was driven by the timer interrupt), and then you're not going to have an error due to the spacing between ticks.
I am more bit dubious about the 24 bit thing, though. Was it fixed-point or floating-point?
I don't think it was a float. What would that be? Maybe 16 bit mantissa, 1 bit sign and 7 bit exponent would seem to be the likeliest bet for a 24 bit float. If so, then after about two hours doing t += 0.1 would stop changing t, and the error would be much bigger.
So presumably it was fixed point. But if you're doing it fixed point, instead of storing x, you store nx in an int, for some appropriate scaling factor n. But if you're going to do that, surely you'll choose n in a smart way, and in this case the obvious choice, as pointed out by many posters, is n=10. This is not only the obvious choice because it gets you more precision, but it's the obvious choice because the easiest, most obvious and most standard way of coding timers is to just increment a register with each tick. It would be silly, for instance, to let n=2^8, and then increment a register with 0.1*2^8 = 0x20. It would be a very unlikely assembly language programmer who would have put an add reg,20h opcode in interrupt hander code when inc reg would have worked.
Now maybe at some point the timer value would get converted to a float for computations. But that surely wouldn't be a 24-bit float.
So maybe the article has mangled things and it was not a 24-bit register, but a 32-bit float, with 24-bit mantissa, 7 bit exponent and 1 bit sign, and the "24" in the article came from the mantissa. That's a much more realistic choice. Still, the standard way to handle timers is to just increment a timer variable. So what I could see happening is this. There is a timer system variable t at full 0.1 second precision incremented on interrupt. (That's how PCs used to work--maybe still do--except the timer resolution was 1/30 sec.) Then for their launch calculations, they do: (float32)t / 10. And now they're going to get nasty roundoff errors as the mantissa gets filled up. At the 36 hour point, t is already about 23 bits long. So when you do a float divide by 10, you'll certainly have roundoff problems. But you're still not going to be more than one tick (0.1 sec) off, because each tick still adjusts the mantissa, while the article says they were 0.36 seconds off.
So I think something got mangled in the article. Or we had a really unlikely assembly language programmer who had floating point code executed with every tick of a timer interrupt. But even if the interrupt is only at 10hz, that's just completely contrary to the instincts of an assembly language programmer. And this would have been done back in the hey-day of assembly language programming, when one would try to optimize every clock cycle one could. (And, yes, I've worked with timer interrupt handlers, both on the Z80 and the 8086.)
TeX or LaTeX with some prewritten templates you copy from class to class should be pretty fast with practice. In addition to TeX macros, you can define keyboard macros in your text editor, so if you, say, type alt-i you get \int_{}^{} with the cursor in the first braces. You can also write a perl or even sed script that runs before TeX to remove the need for some of the backslashes--e.g., it could replace "sin" with "\sin" within equations (and in the rare case where s, i and n are variables, you can space them).
I'm a little concerned about individual variation in optimal typing methods for people with special needs or who are just less coordinated. For instance, I have rather poor control in my the last two fingers of each hand--it's probably a brain issue--and I end up typing with about six to ten fingers, at 100 wpm when I am trying to be fast, without using any system I had been taught. (I don't want or need more speed--with more speed I'd be getting ahead of my thinking too much.)
I was a clumsy and uncoordinated kid, and still am clumsy and uncoordinated in my mid 30s. They taught ten-finger touch-typing along with Logo programming in a summer program when I was in grade six, but it just wasn't natural to me and I didn't get above 30 wpm. I learned ten-fingered Dvorak touch-typing at around 18 (I think I wrote the keyboard driver myself). I think I reached about 60-80 wpm, but did not find the experience of ten-fingered typing comfortable, though I did it for somewhat elitist reasons, I think. (I remember that whenever I would sit at the particular Dvorak-equipped computer, I found it extremely hard to type in QWERTY--despite QWERTY labels on the keys--when my Dvorak driver wasn't working.) I wrote a PhD dissertation on the Dvorak system, in LaTeX.
And then I went back to QWERTY. And I've fallen into an untaught, unconscious rhythm that gets me higher speed than either the QWERTY or Dvorak touch-typing. I find it extremely natural to type most of the letter keys with about five fingers, use the thumbs for space, use the little fingers only for shifts, etc. (I don't actually know how I do it. It's too fast for me to notice the details.) This is completely unplanned, messy, no teacher would allow it, but for me is faster and less tiring than standard ten-fingered QWERTY or Dvorak. It's touch typing in the sense that I don't have to look at the keyboard (except maybe at some of the less commonly used symbol keys). Gives me 100 wpm, doesn't tire me, so what more do I want?
On the other hand, it did me no harm to be taught standard touch-typing. It ensured I knew all the key positions with tactile memory and that's crucial.
My main worry about this is that students are being required to publicly defend a view that they may take to be false. Now one cannot be surprised that at a seminary the students are required to accept and defend doctrines that are an essential part of that (I assume fundamentalist) Baptist seminary's religious tradition. But this goes beyond that, in a way that is particularly unfaithful to the Baptist ideal of conscience and individual judgment. The correctness of ID is not an essential part of the seminary's religious tradition. I assume this is a creationist and fundamentalist seminary. But the correctness of ID is not an essential part of creationism or fundamentalism.
Now ID of the Dembski variety presumably makes two claims, roughly as follows: (1) an intelligent agent is directly responsible, either through direct front-loading of complexity or through direct intervention, for the complexity observed in species; and (2) there is strong scientific evidence for the claim in (1). Something like claim (1) is presumably going to have to be accepted by any creationist (though maybe not in the full generality given). But claim (2) is something that can be rejected by those who creationists or fundamentalists or even both. Claim (2) is not a part of young earth creationism (the doctrine that God directly created the world within the last 10,000 years or so) that there is scientific evidence for young earth creationism--that is a further claim, going beyond young earth creationism. Similarly, claim (2) is not a part of old earth creationism, either.
Of course, many (most?) creationists accept (2), but that no more makes (2) a part of creationism than the fact that all microbiologists accept the existence of galaxies beyond our own makes the existence of galaxies beyond our own a part of microbiology.
Albert Einstein's little book _Relativity: The Special and the General Theory_ is a popular book aimed at people with a high school math education (a German one, though, I suppose). I really enjoyed the special relativity part of it when I was in high school, and the math you need to know doesn't get beyond algebraic shuffling with square roots. No calculus is needed.
It's even online for free for readers in countries where 1920 books are public domain (U.S., say): http://www.bartleby.com/173/
I think there may be in-copyright in-print versions that are slightly more up-to-date, though.
Now that I am older, the positivist approach bothers me a lot, but the arguments are still pretty cool.
Last I checked (half a year ago or so), it was not possible to get professionally pressed discs in quantities less than about 100-200. If that's changed, I'd appreciate knowing (for family archival purposes).
How about reducing the font size by 10.5%?
But on the other hand some of us cheer up, because we can do amateur astronomy earlier in the evening. :-)
They could fix it in an hour. But they have already violated Artifex's copyright by their previous distribution, and if Artifex wants financial compensation for this, they are, I assume (IANAL), within their legal rights.
Moreover, if the license is GPLv2, then clause 4 kicks in: "You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License." This may mean that Diebold has permanently lost their license to use gs. This clause, I think, is rarely enforced. Most of us who write GPLv2-licensed software would be happy to let an infringing party become compliant and continue distributing the software. Also, some folks think that if one just re-downloads a new copy of the GPLv2-licensed software from a legal distributor, one gets a fresh license. I have no idea if that's true.
The situation in countries like Poland under communism was pretty much like that: poor, heavily Christian population, believing their country to be occupied by religiously hostile Communists. Now, in some sense Communism wasn't a religion, but that shouldn't make any difference here in light of the fact that what matters is not the religiosity of the occupiers as the religious hostility.
And, no, there weren't suicide bombings as far as I know.
It looks from the comments that time doesn't count as a write-off. But I bet that if Microsoft donates a bunch of copies of Windows, or just gives them a number of licenses, to a non-profit, that counts as a charitable donation. Am I wrong?
If donating software to an organization counts as a donation, then one should be able to make a claim that by giving copyright to the FSF one is making a donation of goods, to be assessed at the market value of the code.
I suspect, though, that just releasing OSS by oneself would not count. But if one ran a non-profit that one donated code to, and which then did the releasing for one, then I think things would look better.
But this is pure speculation. Does anyone know?
If I were a judge, I'd test the ability to follow simple logical arguments. I fear, though, that some humans would fail. :-(
I played a bit with Elbot, and found that it deflects just about all my questions when I try to probe it. This makes me think that a viable strategy for passing the Turing test is to mimic a non-cooperative human, one who does not seriously enter into a conversation. But this strategy has little to do with artificial intelligence, because a human who does not seriously enter into a conversation is not really exhibiting intelligence in the interaction.
Well, if it turns out that RealDVD works legally, then that would be a reason to use RealDVD, given that most if not all of the free alternatives are illegal.
IANAL, but I can kind of see how RealDVD might turn out to be legal, while the free options aren't. The free options mostly involve unauthorized DeCSS (a possible exception might be products that capture the output of licensed DVD player software), thereby violating the DMCA. RealDVD could, however, do what I understand Kaleidescope did: use a legally licensed DeCSS from the DVD-CCA folks, and then, because of a loophole in the DVD-CCA licensing, capture the decrypted video to a hard drive for playing back later. In effect, the claim could be that the computer running RealDVD becomes a complex DVD player with delayed playback--it decrypts DVDs perfectly legally using a licensed DeCSS, and then plays back the decrypted output later, using a DVD-R as an intermediary.
I would have thought the DVD-CCA people would have closed this loophole in their licensing after the Kaleidescope case, but maybe RealNetworks got a license earlier or something.
That's not the only way you can play a non-R1/U DVD. Another way is to buy a cheap IDE DVD-ROM drive, hook it up to a cheap USB-IDE adapter, and watch the movie on a computer (e.g., a laptop hooked up to a TV). No legal problems of any sort. Standard DVD software will set the DVD-ROM drive's region to whatever the region of the disc is, so you may need to get more DVD-ROM drives for more regions. But DVD-ROM drives are cheap--you can get them for about the price of a DVD.
It's a bit ridiculous to buy five DVD-ROM drives, and then one has to store them and hook them up. But at least it's perfectly legal. (It's also a reason not to throw out old DVD-ROM drives.)
The possibility of doing this was one of the reasons the Copyright Office hasn't made a DMCA exception for DVDs not available in R1 or U.
If one can get one's hands on one of the really early DVD-ROM drives where the region code was stored in software, one can also do this by having one DVD-ROM drive, but more than set of DVD player software. For a while I had two pieces of DVD player software on my Windows desktop for precisely this reason, each set to a different region.