Open source is not left wing, or right wing, and it will not be made to look more attractive by asociating it with a bunch of other highly dubious causes.
I'm not sure about this. The patent debate seems to have been framed in this way for us, with the Greens taking the side of freedom and the others taking the side or the tyranny of the dinosaurs. Might it make sense to side with the Greens because of this, even outside the election booth? Too at least speak no evil of their other more dubious issues for a while? Flawed allies may be better than fewer allies.
I am personally libertarian on most issues. My exceptions are that I believe some form of limited copyright, where a more ideological liberterian might believe in no copyright. I think it can be beneficial enough to put up with the restrictions on my freedom, but probably not with the exclusivity and definitely not with such long terms. I also believe in special tax treatment for libraries, but not charities, churches, etc. And, I believe natural monopolies (city streets, last mile, military, etc.) should be only be co-operatively owned, though by as small a constituancy as is reasonable. So you can see I might see issue with the Greens in many respects, but if they are fighting for a basic freedom and no other significant voter block is, where should I stand?
Criminy, just check the OS section on DMOZ or Yahoo. It's amazing how many teenagers have written fairly sophisticated operating systems on their own. It's not easy, but it's not like sending men to the moon, either. Shit, *I* wrote one once, in 6502 assembly language, on a 8-bit microcomputer when I was sixteen. Mind you, it wasn't anything like Linux, but then I didn't have thousands of talented developers helping me out.
Yeah, I wrote an OS too in high school, before I had any programming classes under my belt (Just the Turbo Pascal Manuals and a couple issues of Dr. Dobbs my mom had seen in a trash can at work and brought home for me). I probably would have used Minix if I had known it existed, but I hadn't yet heard about the internet thing that my university might have from my Physics teacher. I spent more time figuring out where to place my bootloader on the floppy than I spent on multitasking (which started my long and eventually foolish habit of writing my own mutexes). I initially used the BIOS to interface with all the hardware, even the terminal. I could load.com's the first day. It really isn't hard to write a basic OS, everyone should do it just to demystify computers a bit.
It's whether it snowballs into a something more featured that everyone wants to use that is the key. The genius of the GPL is that it allows others to contribute to your pet project without worrying that you might steal their work. They don't need to trust you much, they just need to trust the legal system a tiny bit. This lets the snowball get going. Once it's big enough, a BSD license might even be sufficient, but the GPL really excels in getting that initial momentum.
If you violate the iTunes EULA, you might render the contract void--which means that you have to delete and destroy your copies of the songs, and Apple owes you refunds for them, and one or the other of you owes the other some renumeration for breach of contract.
These things are generally decided based on some past example, unless common sense dictates something else. Apple may be in trouble because they call the EULA terms of sale, which implies they sold you a copy of the song. When you are sold a copy you have the right to make backups and to transfer the music to another media. But they do provide you with what a judge might consider a resonable means of transfer to another media with the burn to CD functionality. Even if they didn't call it terms of sale, the very fact that they charge you per song might make a judge consider it a sale. A sale also means that Apple can't terminate your right to play the songs you have already purchased, those are your copies. The fact that Apple does do this when you simply move to a country where Apple does not sell music is also likely to make a judge rewrite the EULA to comply with the law.
I think the using hymn is very likely to be legal for a iTMS customer* under US copyright law, but we won't really know until Apple's EULA and the DMCA+ is tested in court. I think it's in Apple's favor to keep the legality of its EULA in limbo. Most people will comply with their vendor's interpretation of the law even if it is clearly illegal#, since the EULA has not been shown to be clearly illegal in court this means an even larger portion of the populace will comply with the questionable restrictions.
*If someone else purchases iTMS songs on your computer and gives them to you then you are not under the terms of the EULA at all. The person who gave you the songs may have violated the EULA, but you are free to treat the songs like a book that has been given to you. The American stolen goods doctrine does not apply because she may have violated a suspect license and but she did not steal nor copy anything. In this case only the anti-research provision of the DMCA might apply; which is one of the more illegal provisions under our constitution as currently interpreted.
+The many pronged attack on the constitutionality of the DMCA has begun, the private subpoena powers are under attack now, and if anyone is ever found guilty in an ElcomSoft/Felten type case the anti-research provision will work it's way up in the courts. Some DMCA provisions are clearly unconstitutional, and even if 'trafficing in facts' portions were upheld, the significant non-infringing uses clause would apply if Apple's 'this sale is not a sale' provisions are held to be illegal.
#For instance Major League Baseball claims copyright to the scores of their games, it is actually a federal felony for them to make this obviously bogus claim. As far as I know, this felony has never been prosecuted in the history of our great country of laws.
Then perhaps these statistics will interest you. (Not that I have much stake in the whole gas price debate.)
Those figures aren't any more reassuring, they are taking samples to support their arguement, instead of printing a graph over time. Plus, GDP isn't a very good measure here because GDP can go up even if the economy declines because it's a gross measure that counts transactions, so if your economy becomes less vertically integrated the GDP soars whether you realize any efficiencies or not. You need to measure after tax income and compare that with price (inflation adjusting either figure just obfuscates it).
The Wall Street Journal editorial section is not exactly an unbiased source. I may agree with their conclusion in this case, but I don't trust their numbers. I trust the CATO institute even less.
My guess is the real numbers are either ambiguous or show little long term change in prices. If that weren't the case, I expect the favored side of the debate would be publishing unbiased graphs. Instead, it seems both sides are cherry picking numbers.
While $2.017 is a record for gasoline, adjusted for inflation the price hit $2.99 a gallon in March 1981.
I'm a big fan of inflation adjusted prices in general. But when it comes to gasoline costs you really have to compare the median income vs price for the two periods. Or some income measure if you don't like median income. The reason is pretty simple, gas prices change the price of everything else, if one inflation adjust them one undercounts both increases and decreases in price but not linearly. Also in the short term, gas prices over the course of last year are reflected in the current prices of everything else so using the inflation adjustment introduces even more volatility into the price figure. Plus, the official inflation figure tries to exclude key sectors of the economy such as housing and, of course, energy. It is not in any way a reliable gauge of the cost of living, nor does it offset inflation with rising incomes.
I don't know what the gas/income number is, it may very well be similar, but inflation adjusting gasoline prices is a politician's tool. It's not a useful figure.
PayPal, you are free to consider me a "lost customer" at this point. I will take my business elsewhere.
Easier said than done, they like to consider you a customer for life. I loged on once and found that they wanted me to agree to a new user agreement which I found objectionable. Well when you call them up they transfer you to different agents who all say they can't close your account unless you accept the agreement. Very Kafkaesque, consider yourself lucky and wise if you never accepted the $10 sign-up bonus. Now I have to change my regular bank so that they don't have any current information and another security breach there can't haunt me.
Then through mirad stupidity and laywer speak we end up with todays chinese fire drill. All because AT&T did not think to guard their original IP by copyrighting it. Then allowed several groups to modify it without central control.
AT&T did not think to copyright UNIX for a number of reasons. One was the legality of a copyright on software was still very questionable; remember when you "leased" proprietary software for 99 years? Another, was that AT&T was not allowed to sell hardware or software because of the settlement that had split off the hardware division, creating General Electric. A company that still today is somewhere in the list of the top five largest in the world.
Besides, UNIX would never have been a success if they hadn't decided not keep centralized control. No one uses CP/M or VAX OS today by choice. Even Microsoft works hard to keep developers interested in their platform, they just keep expanding the core too quickly because they are too paranoid for their own good.
Wasn't some sort of datacasting part of the original digital TV spec, but kicked out of the US implementation?
It's still in there. But the broadcasters can't even cope with television transmission at the moment. I'm in New York, which by most definitions is not a backwater town where the broadcasters can't afford transmission equipment. But just one of them actually broadcasts proper PSIP information (UPN). CBS transmits a mostly DVB stream instead of a proper ATSC stream. The local PBS affiliate has a contract with the "Department of Homeland Security" to datacast for the government when they get their DTV channels on air. If I were in Powell's shues I would have started pulling licenses years ago.
I must have missed the news about the government rounding up Jewish people.
It was just after 9/11. The Iranian Jewish community was up in arms in LA, pretty big story. I don't know how many are in immigrant prison vs. how many were sent back to Iran.
Middle Easterners of all kinds are disappearing if you hadn't noticed, one of my mom's friends was picked up at the airport and never heard from after one call asking his wife to fax pictures of their marriage license and pictures of him with her and their kids. The ACLU has had no luck even finding out much of anything.
Please keep in mind that Amateurs have primary use of much of the 2.4GHz spectrum.
Amateurs have co-secondary use of channels 1-6, and no use of 7-11. They have primary use of a portion of the spectrum used by channel 1, so they can interfere with ISL use on that channel (and 2,3,4 actually), but probably not with unmoded 802.11b equipment (A filter that cuts out the high end, or better yet a mod that lowers the "carrier frequency*" a bit.) Now this still lets hams transmit at much higher power on channels 1-6 than part 15 users, but they still have to accept interference, respond to complaints of interference, and also can't allow commercial or encrypted traffic to be transmitted over their system. And, hams must transmit their license id periodically and prominently; this lets you find the cretin that transmits 100 Watts through their dipole.
* 802.11b is a spread spectrum technology so there isn't a carrier frequency per say, but actually a set of frequencies per channel, some of which are above the frequency allocation for primary use for hams even on channel 1.
Er, people are _already_ filing patents on patches. In fact, that's the backbone of the patent system - most patents filed are on small tweaks to existing mechanisms.
While undoubtedly true, I think this may be the very reason the patent regime is so hostile to the progress of the arts and sciences. A system closer to the founders' where the president himself reviewed that year's patents needs to be reinstituted. Of course, I do find it hard to believe that patents make any sense in an economy where government funds almost all research and much of our product development. A simple rule might eliminate a lot of the patent problem, simply disallow corporations or individuals that sell to the government or make use government funded research from holding patents or using patented technology in their products. That simple rule would curb the patent plague.
I do like the concept of paying inventors like myself for our hard work, but where industry is having the greatest positive effect the patents are an obvious encumberance at 18 years when the product cycle is 9 days (fashion) to 9 months (hardware). Where industry is limp and facile with 2-3 year product cycles there is little need for a patent monopoly to bring a product to market either. Something like what has been proposed for music where artist try to make their music as popular as possible and get a proportional share of some related tax makes more sense. Institute a 2% value added tax on business and use the proceeds to pay inventors, but without the exclusivity. The patenting process also needs to be reformed, too many trivial patents are being granted: I propose a system where each patent examiner gets to pass one patent up to a higher level for approval per year, and additional patents for a dock on their pay, but then gets a bonus if that patent is approved by the higher level examiner who is under the same rules. The top level examiner would then pass on their patent to be approved by the president and if approved move to congress to be ratified. If only one or two patents were granted a year they might be useful, especially if licensed as part of a small flat tax instead of the current liability lottery system.
It is even older than this. The basic algorithms for sub-skin scattering of photons where worked out about 20 years ago for radiotheraphy treatment planning. All you need to do for visible light is adjust some of the parameters.
I bet Jensen will readily admit that you can do all this stuff with older techniques. He just made it much much faster to render with photon mapping and the simplification he made with a virtual source. But then again skin is still not rendered so well. The problem is that there aren't really any good models for skin. It's composed of multiple layers that each have different properties, and on your face there are dozens of skin types each with different properties. Just look at your hand and notice all the different types of skin.
BTW The tell-tale artifact on that picture in the BBC story is the lips.
I think their main problem is they're a company of engineers who like to do "cool stuff." Someone needs to rein those guys in ("You want to serialize binary java classes into the SQL database? How the F**K are we supposed to MAINTAIN that?!")
I implemented that 6 years ago for the company I worked at. It reduced maintenance. When new forms were added the employees didn't even have to restart the application to begin using them. When there was a major upgrade to the application they just had to restart to begin using the new version. The upgrades didn't even stress the servers much because the classes were loaded incrementally as they were used. We did provide a jar for the most stable classes though.
FYI We did begin supporting Oracle and not just SQL Server because of an incident where a customer almost lost $2 billion because their MSCE had quit doing backups months before SQL Server decided to corrupt the database. Then Microsoft refused to support their product even when offered handsome payment; our CEO joined our cheers when Microsoft was found guilty in the anti-trust case.
What will the resume say? Besides, if they are homeless, how is the employer going to contact them?
Most of the homeless in America are not the panhandlers or the street kids, they are young singles working at low paying jobs and recently divorced/widowed/escaped women and their children. You never see them because they try hard not to look homeless. They live out of their cars if single, or in shelters if their city provides them and they have kids. They are usually homeless for a few months until they put their lives back together. They get those cheapo $20 a month cell phones so they are contactable.
The street kids are usually runaways from broken homes and the older panhandlers are usually former mental patients without caring relatives or current alcholics. The first set will find often find abandoned buildings to live in eventually and the latter could be helped with group homes and the like, but aren't.
One of my friends works on finding financing day care centers and low income housing using bank community funds. If you knew the reality of the situation I don't think you would be so crass about it. The few most visible homeless generally aren't going to be the go-getter type that will find any job easily, but most homeless do pursue the goal of a rent-paying job with great zeal if few resources.
Why was Gentoo Technologies, Inc. initially set up as a for-profit company? It doesn't make sense. Since it was not a 501(c)(3) non-profit, donations to Gentoo Technologies, Inc. were not tax deductible. (Hell, it may have been the case that the donors were legally, albeit technically, responsible to pay gift tax on any donation over the annual limit.)
I don't know the particulars with Gentoo, but I was party to the creation of a not-for-profit last year and started a corporation some years ago. That experience leads me to believe expediancy may have been the reason. Establishing a corporation is just a matter of filling out some forms and sending them off to the state capital. Establishing a not-for-profit is a labor intensive and expensive process involving lots of lawyers and consultation with the IRS. For the not-for-profit we got pro-bono legal help, but even so it hardly seems worth it in retrospect.
For works first published on and after March 1, 1989, use of the copyright notice is optional. Before March 1, 1989, the use of the notice was mandatory on all published works. Omitting the notice on any work first published before that date could result in the loss of copyright protection if corrective steps are not taken within a certain amount of time. The curative steps are described in this circular under "Omission of Notice and Errors in Notice."
This applies only in Berne Convention countries. But is being phased in for all WTO countries, which include the most significant 150 countries, with the exception of a few "Pariah States".
The author must have the intent to copyright their work in order for copyright right law to be in force.
Kind of, you must have intent but since we signed the Berne convention you show that intent by not explicitly placing the work in the public domain. However, without registering your copyright, you can only collect actual damages. In most cases the damage to you in the example of a quoted e-mail is so low that a judge will throw you out of court by saying the law does not deal in trifles. Also, if you had let this person quote you whole before without warning them you did not consider this appropriate then you would likely lose your case. Unless there was some difference here, like she sold it to someone, or put it in her book.
But, I only had one problem with the Community version. My kde settings weren't automatically updated for kde 3.2..on one of the two installs I did. There was another problem I'm aware of with the 2.6.3 kernel having a botched bttv, but the particular machines I tested 10 on didn't have that problem. (One desktop, one laptop.) The laptop was particlarly nice because I didn't have to jump through hoops to get cpufreq working.
I don't plan on upgrading to 10 Official except for setting the update mirror to the correct location and maybe updating the keys if I have to.
at worst, all she had to do was reauthenticate her computer.
Mr. guy. Remember how I said she had to upgrade her hard drive? Could you conceive that that might be because it was too small? And that might result in her having more music on her iPod than her harddrive. This was a laptop so there was no way to leave the old drive installed while transfering to her new drive. She still has the old hard drive so she could still make the transfer, I told her as much, and she didn't care. She didn't buy a Mac to deal with this type of crap.
That's a big difference: DeCSS can be used by honest people simply trying to use what they paid for, whereas this iTMS cracker is only used by people who are being dishonest.
Well, my girlfriend upgraded the hard drive on her Mac and now her iTMS songs won't play. She's no tech head nor an ardent civil liberterian but she was annoyed and Apple lost a devoted customer. Now it's just a matter of me steering her to Mandrake instead of Microsoft for her next PC. I think this iTMS cracker might help Apple, she like most people wouldn't have shared the resulting mp4, if only because it might still be linked to the buyers credit card. If she or anyone else wanted to share the file it would make more sense to re-encode it, which has always been and will always be possible with digital restrictions management controls on music and videos.
The way that XMLTV "scrapes" the US TV listing data is horrifyingly inefficient. I know, as a friend is associated with the web site that they scrape. So each MythTV user generates hundreds of web page hits a day keeping updated. They're working to implement an XML (ICE) based listing delivery service that could give each user their data in a single transaction, with no worries of breaking the feed if the web site changes it's layout.
There was a first patch sent to the MythTV-dev mailing list to use the zap2it XML interface a couple days ago. Using it also means you must register with zap2it so they can collect a little bit of demographic data. This doesn't bother me as I've already registered to make the HDTV listings available and make the current scraping process more efficient. And this data doesn't include what you've watched, just tells them who is interested in the service.
If I were developing a commercial MythTV based system I would negotiate with zap2it and other such providers for the data to be hosted on my own server. Which is what this australian company has done.
the trains were able to keep running and some people and things were able to reroute themselves to get where they were going.
You sir did not need to get back home to New York from Seattle on Sept 11th.
I couldn't get an Amtrak train past Chicago. It took over a week for me to get home, once backtracking because there was a flight from San Jose to New York I was able to make.
If they are trying to keep a redundant train system they are not doing a good job.
Your check contains your name, address, phone number, bank name and routing number, your account number, your social security number (sometimes).
Woa there, my checks have never had anything but my name, routing and account number on them. Just ask for privacy checks when you open a new account. The banks really do understand that you may write checks to people you don't completely trust with all your information. I almost always use cash anyway, but why would you even want your current address on the check, now you need to print new checks when you move. Why add extra annoynances to your life when you don't have to.
I don't use loyalty cards either, carrying it around isn't worth the few dollars I might save, who knows what they do with that purchasing data, and I don't want to be influenced by or deal with the bother of coupons.
Slashdot Mirror
Open source is not left wing, or right wing, and it will not be made to look more attractive by asociating it with a bunch of other highly dubious causes.
I'm not sure about this. The patent debate seems to have been framed in this way for us, with the Greens taking the side of freedom and the others taking the side or the tyranny of the dinosaurs. Might it make sense to side with the Greens because of this, even outside the election booth? Too at least speak no evil of their other more dubious issues for a while? Flawed allies may be better than fewer allies.
I am personally libertarian on most issues. My exceptions are that I believe some form of limited copyright, where a more ideological liberterian might believe in no copyright. I think it can be beneficial enough to put up with the restrictions on my freedom, but probably not with the exclusivity and definitely not with such long terms. I also believe in special tax treatment for libraries, but not charities, churches, etc. And, I believe natural monopolies (city streets, last mile, military, etc.) should be only be co-operatively owned, though by as small a constituancy as is reasonable. So you can see I might see issue with the Greens in many respects, but if they are fighting for a basic freedom and no other significant voter block is, where should I stand?
Criminy, just check the OS section on DMOZ or Yahoo. It's amazing how many teenagers have written fairly sophisticated operating systems on their own. It's not easy, but it's not like sending men to the moon, either. Shit, *I* wrote one once, in 6502 assembly language, on a 8-bit microcomputer when I was sixteen. Mind you, it wasn't anything like Linux, but then I didn't have thousands of talented developers helping me out.
.com's the first day. It really isn't hard to write a basic OS, everyone should do it just to demystify computers a bit.
Yeah, I wrote an OS too in high school, before I had any programming classes under my belt (Just the Turbo Pascal Manuals and a couple issues of Dr. Dobbs my mom had seen in a trash can at work and brought home for me). I probably would have used Minix if I had known it existed, but I hadn't yet heard about the internet thing that my university might have from my Physics teacher. I spent more time figuring out where to place my bootloader on the floppy than I spent on multitasking (which started my long and eventually foolish habit of writing my own mutexes). I initially used the BIOS to interface with all the hardware, even the terminal. I could load
It's whether it snowballs into a something more featured that everyone wants to use that is the key. The genius of the GPL is that it allows others to contribute to your pet project without worrying that you might steal their work. They don't need to trust you much, they just need to trust the legal system a tiny bit. This lets the snowball get going. Once it's big enough, a BSD license might even be sufficient, but the GPL really excels in getting that initial momentum.
If you violate the iTunes EULA, you might render the contract void--which means that you have to delete and destroy your copies of the songs, and Apple owes you refunds for them, and one or the other of you owes the other some renumeration for breach of contract.
These things are generally decided based on some past example, unless common sense dictates something else. Apple may be in trouble because they call the EULA terms of sale, which implies they sold you a copy of the song. When you are sold a copy you have the right to make backups and to transfer the music to another media. But they do provide you with what a judge might consider a resonable means of transfer to another media with the burn to CD functionality. Even if they didn't call it terms of sale, the very fact that they charge you per song might make a judge consider it a sale. A sale also means that Apple can't terminate your right to play the songs you have already purchased, those are your copies. The fact that Apple does do this when you simply move to a country where Apple does not sell music is also likely to make a judge rewrite the EULA to comply with the law.
I think the using hymn is very likely to be legal for a iTMS customer* under US copyright law, but we won't really know until Apple's EULA and the DMCA+ is tested in court. I think it's in Apple's favor to keep the legality of its EULA in limbo. Most people will comply with their vendor's interpretation of the law even if it is clearly illegal#, since the EULA has not been shown to be clearly illegal in court this means an even larger portion of the populace will comply with the questionable restrictions.
*If someone else purchases iTMS songs on your computer and gives them to you then you are not under the terms of the EULA at all. The person who gave you the songs may have violated the EULA, but you are free to treat the songs like a book that has been given to you. The American stolen goods doctrine does not apply because she may have violated a suspect license and but she did not steal nor copy anything. In this case only the anti-research provision of the DMCA might apply; which is one of the more illegal provisions under our constitution as currently interpreted.
+The many pronged attack on the constitutionality of the DMCA has begun, the private subpoena powers are under attack now, and if anyone is ever found guilty in an ElcomSoft/Felten type case the anti-research provision will work it's way up in the courts. Some DMCA provisions are clearly unconstitutional, and even if 'trafficing in facts' portions were upheld, the significant non-infringing uses clause would apply if Apple's 'this sale is not a sale' provisions are held to be illegal.
#For instance Major League Baseball claims copyright to the scores of their games, it is actually a federal felony for them to make this obviously bogus claim. As far as I know, this felony has never been prosecuted in the history of our great country of laws.
Then perhaps these statistics will interest you. (Not that I have much stake in the whole gas price debate.)
Those figures aren't any more reassuring, they are taking samples to support their arguement, instead of printing a graph over time. Plus, GDP isn't a very good measure here because GDP can go up even if the economy declines because it's a gross measure that counts transactions, so if your economy becomes less vertically integrated the GDP soars whether you realize any efficiencies or not. You need to measure after tax income and compare that with price (inflation adjusting either figure just obfuscates it).
The Wall Street Journal editorial section is not exactly an unbiased source. I may agree with their conclusion in this case, but I don't trust their numbers. I trust the CATO institute even less.
My guess is the real numbers are either ambiguous or show little long term change in prices. If that weren't the case, I expect the favored side of the debate would be publishing unbiased graphs. Instead, it seems both sides are cherry picking numbers.
From your source:
While $2.017 is a record for gasoline, adjusted for inflation the price hit $2.99 a gallon in March 1981.
I'm a big fan of inflation adjusted prices in general. But when it comes to gasoline costs you really have to compare the median income vs price for the two periods. Or some income measure if you don't like median income. The reason is pretty simple, gas prices change the price of everything else, if one inflation adjust them one undercounts both increases and decreases in price but not linearly. Also in the short term, gas prices over the course of last year are reflected in the current prices of everything else so using the inflation adjustment introduces even more volatility into the price figure. Plus, the official inflation figure tries to exclude key sectors of the economy such as housing and, of course, energy. It is not in any way a reliable gauge of the cost of living, nor does it offset inflation with rising incomes.
I don't know what the gas/income number is, it may very well be similar, but inflation adjusting gasoline prices is a politician's tool. It's not a useful figure.
PayPal, you are free to consider me a "lost customer" at this point. I will take my business elsewhere.
Easier said than done, they like to consider you a customer for life. I loged on once and found that they wanted me to agree to a new user agreement which I found objectionable. Well when you call them up they transfer you to different agents who all say they can't close your account unless you accept the agreement. Very Kafkaesque, consider yourself lucky and wise if you never accepted the $10 sign-up bonus. Now I have to change my regular bank so that they don't have any current information and another security breach there can't haunt me.
Then through mirad stupidity and laywer speak we end up with todays chinese fire drill. All because AT&T did not think to guard their original IP by copyrighting it. Then allowed several groups to modify it without central control.
AT&T did not think to copyright UNIX for a number of reasons. One was the legality of a copyright on software was still very questionable; remember when you "leased" proprietary software for 99 years? Another, was that AT&T was not allowed to sell hardware or software because of the settlement that had split off the hardware division, creating General Electric. A company that still today is somewhere in the list of the top five largest in the world.
Besides, UNIX would never have been a success if they hadn't decided not keep centralized control. No one uses CP/M or VAX OS today by choice. Even Microsoft works hard to keep developers interested in their platform, they just keep expanding the core too quickly because they are too paranoid for their own good.
Wasn't some sort of datacasting part of the original digital TV spec, but kicked out of the US implementation?
It's still in there. But the broadcasters can't even cope with television transmission at the moment. I'm in New York, which by most definitions is not a backwater town where the broadcasters can't afford transmission equipment. But just one of them actually broadcasts proper PSIP information (UPN). CBS transmits a mostly DVB stream instead of a proper ATSC stream. The local PBS affiliate has a contract with the "Department of Homeland Security" to datacast for the government when they get their DTV channels on air. If I were in Powell's shues I would have started pulling licenses years ago.
I must have missed the news about the government rounding up Jewish people.
It was just after 9/11. The Iranian Jewish community was up in arms in LA, pretty big story. I don't know how many are in immigrant prison vs. how many were sent back to Iran.
Middle Easterners of all kinds are disappearing if you hadn't noticed, one of my mom's friends was picked up at the airport and never heard from after one call asking his wife to fax pictures of their marriage license and pictures of him with her and their kids. The ACLU has had no luck even finding out much of anything.
Please keep in mind that Amateurs have primary use of much of the 2.4GHz spectrum.
Amateurs have co-secondary use of channels 1-6, and no use of 7-11. They have primary use of a portion of the spectrum used by channel 1, so they can interfere with ISL use on that channel (and 2,3,4 actually), but probably not with unmoded 802.11b equipment (A filter that cuts out the high end, or better yet a mod that lowers the "carrier frequency*" a bit.) Now this still lets hams transmit at much higher power on channels 1-6 than part 15 users, but they still have to accept interference, respond to complaints of interference, and also can't allow commercial or encrypted traffic to be transmitted over their system. And, hams must transmit their license id periodically and prominently; this lets you find the cretin that transmits 100 Watts through their dipole.
* 802.11b is a spread spectrum technology so there isn't a carrier frequency per say, but actually a set of frequencies per channel, some of which are above the frequency allocation for primary use for hams even on channel 1.
Er, people are _already_ filing patents on patches. In fact, that's the backbone of the patent system - most patents filed are on small tweaks to existing mechanisms.
While undoubtedly true, I think this may be the very reason the patent regime is so hostile to the progress of the arts and sciences. A system closer to the founders' where the president himself reviewed that year's patents needs to be reinstituted. Of course, I do find it hard to believe that patents make any sense in an economy where government funds almost all research and much of our product development. A simple rule might eliminate a lot of the patent problem, simply disallow corporations or individuals that sell to the government or make use government funded research from holding patents or using patented technology in their products. That simple rule would curb the patent plague.
I do like the concept of paying inventors like myself for our hard work, but where industry is having the greatest positive effect the patents are an obvious encumberance at 18 years when the product cycle is 9 days (fashion) to 9 months (hardware). Where industry is limp and facile with 2-3 year product cycles there is little need for a patent monopoly to bring a product to market either. Something like what has been proposed for music where artist try to make their music as popular as possible and get a proportional share of some related tax makes more sense. Institute a 2% value added tax on business and use the proceeds to pay inventors, but without the exclusivity. The patenting process also needs to be reformed, too many trivial patents are being granted: I propose a system where each patent examiner gets to pass one patent up to a higher level for approval per year, and additional patents for a dock on their pay, but then gets a bonus if that patent is approved by the higher level examiner who is under the same rules. The top level examiner would then pass on their patent to be approved by the president and if approved move to congress to be ratified. If only one or two patents were granted a year they might be useful, especially if licensed as part of a small flat tax instead of the current liability lottery system.
It is even older than this. The basic algorithms for sub-skin scattering of photons where worked out about 20 years ago for radiotheraphy treatment planning. All you need to do for visible light is adjust some of the parameters.
I bet Jensen will readily admit that you can do all this stuff with older techniques. He just made it much much faster to render with photon mapping and the simplification he made with a virtual source. But then again skin is still not rendered so well. The problem is that there aren't really any good models for skin. It's composed of multiple layers that each have different properties, and on your face there are dozens of skin types each with different properties. Just look at your hand and notice all the different types of skin.
BTW The tell-tale artifact on that picture in the BBC story is the lips.
For me what takes the longest isn't the bootloader, it's the starting and stopping of services. This is still cool though.
True for me too, but if I were developing the kernel I would probably just reboot to single user mode.
I think their main problem is they're a company of engineers who like to do "cool stuff." Someone needs to rein those guys in ("You want to serialize binary java classes into the SQL database? How the F**K are we supposed to MAINTAIN that?!")
I implemented that 6 years ago for the company I worked at. It reduced maintenance. When new forms were added the employees didn't even have to restart the application to begin using them. When there was a major upgrade to the application they just had to restart to begin using the new version. The upgrades didn't even stress the servers much because the classes were loaded incrementally as they were used. We did provide a jar for the most stable classes though.
FYI We did begin supporting Oracle and not just SQL Server because of an incident where a customer almost lost $2 billion because their MSCE had quit doing backups months before SQL Server decided to corrupt the database. Then Microsoft refused to support their product even when offered handsome payment; our CEO joined our cheers when Microsoft was found guilty in the anti-trust case.
What will the resume say? Besides, if they are homeless, how is the employer going to contact them?
Most of the homeless in America are not the panhandlers or the street kids, they are young singles working at low paying jobs and recently divorced/widowed/escaped women and their children. You never see them because they try hard not to look homeless. They live out of their cars if single, or in shelters if their city provides them and they have kids. They are usually homeless for a few months until they put their lives back together. They get those cheapo $20 a month cell phones so they are contactable.
The street kids are usually runaways from broken homes and the older panhandlers are usually former mental patients without caring relatives or current alcholics. The first set will find often find abandoned buildings to live in eventually and the latter could be helped with group homes and the like, but aren't.
One of my friends works on finding financing day care centers and low income housing using bank community funds. If you knew the reality of the situation I don't think you would be so crass about it. The few most visible homeless generally aren't going to be the go-getter type that will find any job easily, but most homeless do pursue the goal of a rent-paying job with great zeal if few resources.
Why was Gentoo Technologies, Inc. initially set up as a for-profit company? It doesn't make sense. Since it was not a 501(c)(3) non-profit, donations to Gentoo Technologies, Inc. were not tax deductible. (Hell, it may have been the case that the donors were legally, albeit technically, responsible to pay gift tax on any donation over the annual limit.)
I don't know the particulars with Gentoo, but I was party to the creation of a not-for-profit last year and started a corporation some years ago. That experience leads me to believe expediancy may have been the reason. Establishing a corporation is just a matter of filling out some forms and sending them off to the state capital. Establishing a not-for-profit is a labor intensive and expensive process involving lots of lawyers and consultation with the IRS. For the not-for-profit we got pro-bono legal help, but even so it hardly seems worth it in retrospect.
See:
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.html
For works first published on and after March 1, 1989, use of the copyright notice is optional. Before March 1, 1989, the use of the notice was mandatory on all published works. Omitting the notice on any work first published before that date could result in the loss of copyright protection if corrective steps are not taken within a certain amount of time. The curative steps are described in this circular under "Omission of Notice and Errors in Notice."
This applies only in Berne Convention countries. But is being phased in for all WTO countries, which include the most significant 150 countries, with the exception of a few "Pariah States".
The author must have the intent to copyright their work in order for copyright right law to be in force.
Kind of, you must have intent but since we signed the Berne convention you show that intent by not explicitly placing the work in the public domain. However, without registering your copyright, you can only collect actual damages. In most cases the damage to you in the example of a quoted e-mail is so low that a judge will throw you out of court by saying the law does not deal in trifles. Also, if you had let this person quote you whole before without warning them you did not consider this appropriate then you would likely lose your case. Unless there was some difference here, like she sold it to someone, or put it in her book.
No one has tried Mandrake 10.0 Official yet.
But, I only had one problem with the Community version. My kde settings weren't automatically updated for kde 3.2..on one of the two installs I did. There was another problem I'm aware of with the 2.6.3 kernel having a botched bttv, but the particular machines I tested 10 on didn't have that problem. (One desktop, one laptop.) The laptop was particlarly nice because I didn't have to jump through hoops to get cpufreq working.
I don't plan on upgrading to 10 Official except for setting the update mirror to the correct location and maybe updating the keys if I have to.
at worst, all she had to do was reauthenticate her computer.
Mr. guy. Remember how I said she had to upgrade her hard drive? Could you conceive that that might be because it was too small? And that might result in her having more music on her iPod than her harddrive. This was a laptop so there was no way to leave the old drive installed while transfering to her new drive. She still has the old hard drive so she could still make the transfer, I told her as much, and she didn't care. She didn't buy a Mac to deal with this type of crap.
Cool!
I just bought the first music I have in ages from Audio Lunchbox.
I looked at Magnatune before but didn't find anything I liked, I'll try again though, they are not evil.
That's a big difference: DeCSS can be used by honest people simply trying to use what they paid for, whereas this iTMS cracker is only used by people who are being dishonest.
Well, my girlfriend upgraded the hard drive on her Mac and now her iTMS songs won't play. She's no tech head nor an ardent civil liberterian but she was annoyed and Apple lost a devoted customer. Now it's just a matter of me steering her to Mandrake instead of Microsoft for her next PC. I think this iTMS cracker might help Apple, she like most people wouldn't have shared the resulting mp4, if only because it might still be linked to the buyers credit card. If she or anyone else wanted to share the file it would make more sense to re-encode it, which has always been and will always be possible with digital restrictions management controls on music and videos.
The way that XMLTV "scrapes" the US TV listing data is horrifyingly inefficient. I know, as a friend is associated with the web site that they scrape. So each MythTV user generates hundreds of web page hits a day keeping updated. They're working to implement an XML (ICE) based listing delivery service that could give each user their data in a single transaction, with no worries of breaking the feed if the web site changes it's layout.
There was a first patch sent to the MythTV-dev mailing list to use the zap2it XML interface a couple days ago. Using it also means you must register with zap2it so they can collect a little bit of demographic data. This doesn't bother me as I've already registered to make the HDTV listings available and make the current scraping process more efficient. And this data doesn't include what you've watched, just tells them who is interested in the service.
If I were developing a commercial MythTV based system I would negotiate with zap2it and other such providers for the data to be hosted on my own server. Which is what this australian company has done.
the trains were able to keep running and some people and things were able to reroute themselves to get where they were going.
You sir did not need to get back home to New York from Seattle on Sept 11th.
I couldn't get an Amtrak train past Chicago. It took over a week for me to get home, once backtracking because there was a flight from San Jose to New York I was able to make.
If they are trying to keep a redundant train system they are not doing a good job.
Your check contains your name, address, phone number, bank name and routing number, your account number, your social security number (sometimes).
Woa there, my checks have never had anything but my name, routing and account number on them. Just ask for privacy checks when you open a new account. The banks really do understand that you may write checks to people you don't completely trust with all your information. I almost always use cash anyway, but why would you even want your current address on the check, now you need to print new checks when you move. Why add extra annoynances to your life when you don't have to.
I don't use loyalty cards either, carrying it around isn't worth the few dollars I might save, who knows what they do with that purchasing data, and I don't want to be influenced by or deal with the bother of coupons.