I hardly think it counts as commercial speech in the way that term is normally used. If commercial speech referred to any form of expression which costs money to hear, most music, newspapers, books, etc. would be considered commercial speech.
The term as I've typically seen it used deals with speech about a commercial product (as in advertising), or possibly with PR in general. Commercial speech has to be based on fact to a higher degree than other kinds of speech (I'm allowed to make false statements about a person that might help their reputation, but I can't lie about my own product to make it sell better).
I agree that the court could rule in a way that doesn't follow logic. I hate to think of the consequences of banning violent video games. Will German-American groups oppose WWII games? For that matter, should we ban anything about historic wars since they might incite new violence?
I don't pirate music, but I do refuse to spend $0.99 to buy a track online. I can spend about the same at BestBuy (I generally enjoy more than the single track that some people do) for the CD itself. If it were a lossless codec without DRM, then I might buy online. I have an MP3/WMA CD player, but it won't play DRM'd files.
Until they make it worthwhile to buy online I've made a compromise. I won't pirate, but I also won't buy CD's. There's more than enough music to go around in a dorm. And last I checked it was still legal to borrow a CD to listen to (though probably not to rip it).
56 Enable automatic file encryption We've heard the promises for years. But even Apple offers this already - what's the holdup?
I haven't used a Mac in a while, so I don't know exactly what they're referring to, but I seem to have something similar under Windows XP Professional. I can mark a folder to be encrypted, which will encrypt anything that is placed in it through any application. Basically, the folder can only be accessed by users who are in the access list (so the administrator for that computer can override it, but I don't think pulling out the harddrive and using it on another computer would work, since the administrator there would have a different encryption key). It's only as secure as your login, but any sort of "automatic file encryption" would have that flaw.
Thanks. That's what I suspected but I was in a hury and didn't have time to make sure I wasn't mixing him up with someone else.
Anyway, now that I've had a chance to read about what he's done, the original poster was completely wrong. Tim Berners-Lee is indeed English (born in London) and the fact that ARPA is American is irrelevent. The reason I phrased it as "contributing" was I had assumed no one would put all the pieces together by himself. It seems I was quite wrong, as Tim Berners-Lee is credited with a number of individual projects (which led to HTTP, HTML, and the first web browser as you mentioned).
From the article it looks like Sony reduced the speed to 12x (although it seemed like it was a software change rather than different hardware; ie, it could be fixed with a firmware update). I assume the dubbing means copying from one dvd to another.
It's also worth noting that he CLR can do a bit more than straight C# is capable of. The one example that comes to mind deals with accessibility (public, protected, private). C++.net lets you declare something as "private protected", which means it can't be used outside of the current assembly, and it can only be used by derived classes within the assembly. The other five access specifiers exist in C#. In general I'd agree that VB.net and C# are basically the same language (I've only seen one thing that VB can do that C# can't). The only real reason for both to exist right now is that some people prefer programming in VB and others prefer C-like languages.
People here seem to want an impossible balance. You can create a LCD of languages to support interoperability. The interfaces between languages will have to be more limited than what can be done internally. In other words, you'd be able to use more complicated features within your program, but not expose them in your interface (this is basically what C++.net does). If you also make the demand that every feature of the language is capable of being used externally, you're basically going to require that every langauge support the exact same set of features.
One interesting feature of.Net is language interoperability. Someone can write a class in VB.NET and I can inherit from that class in C++ just the same as if the original was written in C++. Sure there were ways of doing this before, but you generally had to treat other components in a different way from stuff written and compiled in your current project's language.
A more typical usage would be to write anything that needs better performance or that needs access to non-.net libraries in C++ (since it can be compiled to machine code before distributing) and then use that component in other languages that are easier for putting a GUI together. Again, it's always been possible to do stuff like this, but.NET makes it seamless (it's just like linking to any other library).
My linux box is back in my dorm room, but I think the nvidia drivers are mostly closed source. They use an opensource wrapper just to comply with the GPL. This generally lets you fix problems that occur with some kernel updates (if a header file changes or something similar), but nothing particularly useful as far as the graphics go.
So how does a game named Mythica get confused with a company named Mythic? It's not like anyone who goes to Best Buy to buy Mythica was actually meaning to buy Mythic. "Wow, what a great deal! An entire game development studio complete with a paid staff for only $49.99!"
Besides, "mythic" is a generic term. Anything related to myth could be described as mythic. It should be noted that the company refers to itself as Mythic Entertainment, which isn't quite so generic (their legal info doesn't mention a trademark on "Mythic", just the full company name). Mythica, on the other hand, is not a generic term.
I thought you were just kidding with this, so I took out the CD-ROM that came with the "LINUX Core Kernel Commentary" book, since it has a 0.01 version for comparison with 2.2.x. The original is definitely not copied and the one from 2.2.10 looks like an incremental change (comments added, new error numbers, but the file itself doesn't look any diffferent).
This isn't like passing an entire bomb around. What if I just gave you a chunk of steel? How were you supposed to have any clue what it was going to be used for? If legitimate and illegitimate content look the same, I don't think you'd be held responsible. Think about the US Postal Service. They have no idea what the contents of a given letter are. One letter might be plans to kill the President, and another might be a kid's letter to his grandma. There's no way to tell them apart, so the USPS just delivers them. Now imagine if both letters were encrypted and sent as 10 separate letters. Even if they were opened and read, the two would be equally meaningless.
If they were to show a trade secret, then it wouldn't be protected any more. The actual code would be, but the method would be free for anyone to use. I'm not saying SCO has such secrets in their code, but that is one reason to not show your code.
While I haven't heard about the theory the original poster was talking about, I understood it as allowing travel back to the time when the machine was turned on.
In general I agree that time travel backward through time is impossible using the same logic you used. Maybe (though I doubt it) it is possible to use a machine to travel back to when the machine was started. As such a machine does not currently exist, we couldn't use everyday experience to rule it out.
The tollbooths I've seen around NY seem to be the kind that you're supposed to drive 5mph through if you have the pass. I know in the Dallas area they just have three or four lanes each way with no booths or anything separating lanes so that you can drive through at 70 or so without any problem. It definitely makes having the pass a lot more useful.
As far as the campaigns that ship with each one: Neverwinter Nights and Shadows of Undrentide are both completely separate. In each one you should start with a new character. One of the features of Hordes of the Underdark is that you can have much higher level characters, so you take your character from either of the first two campaigns and play it from there. I'm still on the first expansion, so I don't know the story of the new campaign, but from the manual it seems like it has some characters from NWN.
If you've tried NWN out and are sure you'd enjoy playing it for a while, you'd be better off buying NWN, SoU, and HotU and installing them all before seriously starting any of the campaigns. Each one adds all kinds of new material (spells, classes, feats) that can be used in any module.
The patch to play HotU on Linux and online against people who don't have HotU will be available early next week (according to the devs). Except for this slight delay, I've been very impressed with HotU. They added numerous features that people had requested in the forums along with a few surprises. Few expansions have the depth that this one seems to.
What I like about Gentoo is that it wasn't "branded" in any way. Sure, they had to make a decision on exactly how the start-up and shutdown process would work so that everything can co-exist, but beyond that, things aren't customized for you. When you run KDE on a default install of RedHat it acts like RedHat wants it to. Same with most other distros. It's true that you can strip away the changes, but Gentoo lets you start from the defaults and add to it. When you work with Gentoo, you get nothing more than what you want. My limited experience with Debian seemed like you could do this for the most part, although I recall that it was still visbily a Debian box when you were done. I'd rather start with a generic system and do my own customization.
Theft, child porn, indecent exposure, and a traffic violation all at the same time? Surely he could have killed someone and committed some sort of business crime to complete the spectrum of criminal activity.
It would have worked just fine, except that Bioware chose to use a Windows-only codec and player (Bink) for their video files. I got the impression they made a deal that wouldn't let them distribute mpeg/ogm versions with the Linux version. The hack that exists shows that there is no technical reason for it to not work. Instead Bioware screwed up with their licensing.
As far as usability, I prefer the way NWN works under Linux. If you have the bandwidth you download the data files and the Linux client. Type in the CD key when it asks and you're done. (You could also copy the resources from a Windows install, or have someone with more bandwidth download them for you). The first expansion pack had a linux install script that would have worked nicely had the manufacturer not screwed up line endings. Instead you just had to unzip a few files (clearly explained on the website). Anyway, it was far quicker to install under Linux than on Windows. And the best part is that the Linux client doesn't require a CD to play. The only copy protection is the CD key. Plus you don't have to skip through all of the publisher and developer videos; it starts at the main menu.
You don't even need to ask on the message boards. The script for all of the videos is included with the linux client.
You can watch them with Wine or even convert them to another format. I have them as ogm files. From there, you could try the hack that hooks into the game and plays the movies ingame or just watch them on your own at the appropriate time.
How long before iTunes gets shut down at college campuses just like Phynd has been multiple times. The kid across the hall from me ran a program that displayed files "in a nice sorted order" without providing the functionality to download them. Sure his was centralized and iTunes sounds like the shared playlists are broadcast (so it might be slower to browse the entire network). He lost his $12000 but Apple's allowed to do the same thing?
I assume that they can get themselves quarantined again if they continue to disrupt the network. And I'd imagine that your account would be flagged so that an administrator would know it's been taken off more than once.
According to the summary, what's interesting about it is that they didn't use their own proprietary solution. I don't see any mention of an open source solution in the summary. From the article, the significance seems to be that anyone who creates something that is NSA-approved must go through Certicom.
"They were very interested in getting the best IP out there, and we own a lot of the patents in this area," said Tony Rosati, director of marketing at Certicom, based in Mississauga, Ontario. "If you want to build an NSA-approved product, they want this in there."
As the AC said, the code bloat goes both ways. If you just have one instance of the template and you don't use all of its functions, the code will be smaller. However, if you use a template on multiple types, you end up with multiple copies of that code. It's just the same as if you had written out all of the different classes and functions by hand. Templates in C++ are basically macros with a lot of type checking. C# generics result in a single copy of the code. There are runtime penalties for doing the type checking, of course, but that's the cost of using generics. If you didn't want to be checking the type of an object as it's being added to a collection, you'd use a collection of object's.
The big difference is that in C++ the templates are compiled based on what's actually being used. A separate copy of the code is made for each type. Also, if a template class member function is not used, it isn't even compiled. From what I understand of C# generics, the code is compiled in a generic way that can be used like a template at runtime. Only one copy of the code exists. In C# you could make a library that contains a compiled "template", which is something that you can't do in C++.
Without generics you can do this in C# with the object type. Of course, you would then need to implement the type checking yourself. In C++ you might be able to pull this off with void* and the RTTI capabilities, but it probably wouldn't be as robust as C++ templates, or the C# ways of doing it (passing around void* is a good way of losing an object, especially if this is in a library to be used by different developers).
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I hardly think it counts as commercial speech in the way that term is normally used. If commercial speech referred to any form of expression which costs money to hear, most music, newspapers, books, etc. would be considered commercial speech.
The term as I've typically seen it used deals with speech about a commercial product (as in advertising), or possibly with PR in general. Commercial speech has to be based on fact to a higher degree than other kinds of speech (I'm allowed to make false statements about a person that might help their reputation, but I can't lie about my own product to make it sell better).
I agree that the court could rule in a way that doesn't follow logic. I hate to think of the consequences of banning violent video games. Will German-American groups oppose WWII games? For that matter, should we ban anything about historic wars since they might incite new violence?
I don't pirate music, but I do refuse to spend $0.99 to buy a track online. I can spend about the same at BestBuy (I generally enjoy more than the single track that some people do) for the CD itself. If it were a lossless codec without DRM, then I might buy online. I have an MP3/WMA CD player, but it won't play DRM'd files.
Until they make it worthwhile to buy online I've made a compromise. I won't pirate, but I also won't buy CD's. There's more than enough music to go around in a dorm. And last I checked it was still legal to borrow a CD to listen to (though probably not to rip it).
56 Enable automatic file encryption We've heard the promises for years. But even Apple offers this already - what's the holdup?
I haven't used a Mac in a while, so I don't know exactly what they're referring to, but I seem to have something similar under Windows XP Professional. I can mark a folder to be encrypted, which will encrypt anything that is placed in it through any application. Basically, the folder can only be accessed by users who are in the access list (so the administrator for that computer can override it, but I don't think pulling out the harddrive and using it on another computer would work, since the administrator there would have a different encryption key). It's only as secure as your login, but any sort of "automatic file encryption" would have that flaw.
Thanks. That's what I suspected but I was in a hury and didn't have time to make sure I wasn't mixing him up with someone else.
Anyway, now that I've had a chance to read about what he's done, the original poster was completely wrong. Tim Berners-Lee is indeed English (born in London) and the fact that ARPA is American is irrelevent. The reason I phrased it as "contributing" was I had assumed no one would put all the pieces together by himself. It seems I was quite wrong, as Tim Berners-Lee is credited with a number of individual projects (which led to HTTP, HTML, and the first web browser as you mentioned).
He's not credited for creating ARPAnet, but rather contributing to what we now see as the world wide web (he founded and leads the w3c at MIT).
From the article it looks like Sony reduced the speed to 12x (although it seemed like it was a software change rather than different hardware; ie, it could be fixed with a firmware update). I assume the dubbing means copying from one dvd to another.
It's also worth noting that he CLR can do a bit more than straight C# is capable of. The one example that comes to mind deals with accessibility (public, protected, private). C++.net lets you declare something as "private protected", which means it can't be used outside of the current assembly, and it can only be used by derived classes within the assembly. The other five access specifiers exist in C#. In general I'd agree that VB.net and C# are basically the same language (I've only seen one thing that VB can do that C# can't). The only real reason for both to exist right now is that some people prefer programming in VB and others prefer C-like languages.
People here seem to want an impossible balance. You can create a LCD of languages to support interoperability. The interfaces between languages will have to be more limited than what can be done internally. In other words, you'd be able to use more complicated features within your program, but not expose them in your interface (this is basically what C++.net does). If you also make the demand that every feature of the language is capable of being used externally, you're basically going to require that every langauge support the exact same set of features.
One interesting feature of .Net is language interoperability. Someone can write a class in VB.NET and I can inherit from that class in C++ just the same as if the original was written in C++. Sure there were ways of doing this before, but you generally had to treat other components in a different way from stuff written and compiled in your current project's language.
.NET makes it seamless (it's just like linking to any other library).
A more typical usage would be to write anything that needs better performance or that needs access to non-.net libraries in C++ (since it can be compiled to machine code before distributing) and then use that component in other languages that are easier for putting a GUI together. Again, it's always been possible to do stuff like this, but
My linux box is back in my dorm room, but I think the nvidia drivers are mostly closed source. They use an opensource wrapper just to comply with the GPL. This generally lets you fix problems that occur with some kernel updates (if a header file changes or something similar), but nothing particularly useful as far as the graphics go.
So how does a game named Mythica get confused with a company named Mythic? It's not like anyone who goes to Best Buy to buy Mythica was actually meaning to buy Mythic. "Wow, what a great deal! An entire game development studio complete with a paid staff for only $49.99!"
Besides, "mythic" is a generic term. Anything related to myth could be described as mythic. It should be noted that the company refers to itself as Mythic Entertainment, which isn't quite so generic (their legal info doesn't mention a trademark on "Mythic", just the full company name). Mythica, on the other hand, is not a generic term.
I thought you were just kidding with this, so I took out the CD-ROM that came with the "LINUX Core Kernel Commentary" book, since it has a 0.01 version for comparison with 2.2.x. The original is definitely not copied and the one from 2.2.10 looks like an incremental change (comments added, new error numbers, but the file itself doesn't look any diffferent).
This isn't like passing an entire bomb around. What if I just gave you a chunk of steel? How were you supposed to have any clue what it was going to be used for? If legitimate and illegitimate content look the same, I don't think you'd be held responsible. Think about the US Postal Service. They have no idea what the contents of a given letter are. One letter might be plans to kill the President, and another might be a kid's letter to his grandma. There's no way to tell them apart, so the USPS just delivers them. Now imagine if both letters were encrypted and sent as 10 separate letters. Even if they were opened and read, the two would be equally meaningless.
If they were to show a trade secret, then it wouldn't be protected any more. The actual code would be, but the method would be free for anyone to use. I'm not saying SCO has such secrets in their code, but that is one reason to not show your code.
While I haven't heard about the theory the original poster was talking about, I understood it as allowing travel back to the time when the machine was turned on.
In general I agree that time travel backward through time is impossible using the same logic you used. Maybe (though I doubt it) it is possible to use a machine to travel back to when the machine was started. As such a machine does not currently exist, we couldn't use everyday experience to rule it out.
The tollbooths I've seen around NY seem to be the kind that you're supposed to drive 5mph through if you have the pass. I know in the Dallas area they just have three or four lanes each way with no booths or anything separating lanes so that you can drive through at 70 or so without any problem. It definitely makes having the pass a lot more useful.
As far as the campaigns that ship with each one: Neverwinter Nights and Shadows of Undrentide are both completely separate. In each one you should start with a new character. One of the features of Hordes of the Underdark is that you can have much higher level characters, so you take your character from either of the first two campaigns and play it from there. I'm still on the first expansion, so I don't know the story of the new campaign, but from the manual it seems like it has some characters from NWN.
If you've tried NWN out and are sure you'd enjoy playing it for a while, you'd be better off buying NWN, SoU, and HotU and installing them all before seriously starting any of the campaigns. Each one adds all kinds of new material (spells, classes, feats) that can be used in any module.
The patch to play HotU on Linux and online against people who don't have HotU will be available early next week (according to the devs). Except for this slight delay, I've been very impressed with HotU. They added numerous features that people had requested in the forums along with a few surprises. Few expansions have the depth that this one seems to.
What I like about Gentoo is that it wasn't "branded" in any way. Sure, they had to make a decision on exactly how the start-up and shutdown process would work so that everything can co-exist, but beyond that, things aren't customized for you. When you run KDE on a default install of RedHat it acts like RedHat wants it to. Same with most other distros. It's true that you can strip away the changes, but Gentoo lets you start from the defaults and add to it. When you work with Gentoo, you get nothing more than what you want. My limited experience with Debian seemed like you could do this for the most part, although I recall that it was still visbily a Debian box when you were done. I'd rather start with a generic system and do my own customization.
Theft, child porn, indecent exposure, and a traffic violation all at the same time? Surely he could have killed someone and committed some sort of business crime to complete the spectrum of criminal activity.
It would have worked just fine, except that Bioware chose to use a Windows-only codec and player (Bink) for their video files. I got the impression they made a deal that wouldn't let them distribute mpeg/ogm versions with the Linux version. The hack that exists shows that there is no technical reason for it to not work. Instead Bioware screwed up with their licensing.
As far as usability, I prefer the way NWN works under Linux. If you have the bandwidth you download the data files and the Linux client. Type in the CD key when it asks and you're done. (You could also copy the resources from a Windows install, or have someone with more bandwidth download them for you). The first expansion pack had a linux install script that would have worked nicely had the manufacturer not screwed up line endings. Instead you just had to unzip a few files (clearly explained on the website). Anyway, it was far quicker to install under Linux than on Windows. And the best part is that the Linux client doesn't require a CD to play. The only copy protection is the CD key. Plus you don't have to skip through all of the publisher and developer videos; it starts at the main menu.
You don't even need to ask on the message boards. The script for all of the videos is included with the linux client.
You can watch them with Wine or even convert them to another format. I have them as ogm files. From there, you could try the hack that hooks into the game and plays the movies ingame or just watch them on your own at the appropriate time.
How long before iTunes gets shut down at college campuses just like Phynd has been multiple times. The kid across the hall from me ran a program that displayed files "in a nice sorted order" without providing the functionality to download them. Sure his was centralized and iTunes sounds like the shared playlists are broadcast (so it might be slower to browse the entire network). He lost his $12000 but Apple's allowed to do the same thing?
I assume that they can get themselves quarantined again if they continue to disrupt the network. And I'd imagine that your account would be flagged so that an administrator would know it's been taken off more than once.
According to the summary, what's interesting about it is that they didn't use their own proprietary solution. I don't see any mention of an open source solution in the summary. From the article, the significance seems to be that anyone who creates something that is NSA-approved must go through Certicom.
"They were very interested in getting the best IP out there, and we own a lot of the patents in this area," said Tony Rosati, director of marketing at Certicom, based in Mississauga, Ontario. "If you want to build an NSA-approved product, they want this in there."
As the AC said, the code bloat goes both ways. If you just have one instance of the template and you don't use all of its functions, the code will be smaller. However, if you use a template on multiple types, you end up with multiple copies of that code. It's just the same as if you had written out all of the different classes and functions by hand. Templates in C++ are basically macros with a lot of type checking. C# generics result in a single copy of the code. There are runtime penalties for doing the type checking, of course, but that's the cost of using generics. If you didn't want to be checking the type of an object as it's being added to a collection, you'd use a collection of object's.
The big difference is that in C++ the templates are compiled based on what's actually being used. A separate copy of the code is made for each type. Also, if a template class member function is not used, it isn't even compiled. From what I understand of C# generics, the code is compiled in a generic way that can be used like a template at runtime. Only one copy of the code exists. In C# you could make a library that contains a compiled "template", which is something that you can't do in C++.
Without generics you can do this in C# with the object type. Of course, you would then need to implement the type checking yourself. In C++ you might be able to pull this off with void* and the RTTI capabilities, but it probably wouldn't be as robust as C++ templates, or the C# ways of doing it (passing around void* is a good way of losing an object, especially if this is in a library to be used by different developers).