If you look at official FBI statistics for Kennesaw you find
that crime did not decrease following their law requiring gun ownership. The only statistics that show this appear to have been made up.
Lott did not set out to show that gun control reduced crime. If you look at his previous work you'll see that it pretty strongly libertarian.
If you want to find out what is wrong with Lott's claims, please read my critique of his work. (Also available from the first page of your google search).
I don't know why you think Haskell is not suitable for intro programming. It's easy to understand and you can start writing interesting stuff straight away.
My nine year old had no trouble learning to program in Haskell and really enjoyed it.
The court doc says that he represented himself! The guy took on a huge international corp, & won... what a guy.
Yeah but his defence was maximally lame: "He acknowledged that he supplied and installed a considerable volume of chips for PlayStation consoles before March 2001, but claimed that any chipping of consoles thereafter was done by his flatmate, whom he reluctantly identified as "Ted".
The monks 'A's desire to kill himself in case he has red eyes is so strong that when C & B don't kill themselves, he eventually assumes there must be someone else with red eyes. Therefore he kills himself.
Oh wait that doesn't make sense, if it did they would kill themselves before the tourist came along, because he told them something everyone already knew.
They knew there were monks with red eyes, they knew nobody was killing themselves and they knew already that there was at least one of the them with red eyes. So the tourist simply told them what they already knew.
But the reaction of the other monks then tells
them more.
Suppose there are just two monks, both red-eyed. They don't kill themselves because
they don't know their eye colour. The tourist
makes his unfortunate remark. Now if monk A
had green eyes then monk B would know that he
himself must have red eyes so he would kill himself that night.
So, when monk B doesn't kill himself, monk A
learns that he himself has red eyes and kills
himself on the second night. (And so does
monk B, who has also learned that he has red
eyes.)
This Discovery special was about about another paper that came out right after the first (because of the first) from many many more thousands of scientists and other *ologists that said that both were a crock of shit, media and political propoganda.
There's certainly a lot of political propaganda
about global warming floating around, both from
greenies who exagerrate the problem and from
right-wingers who even deny the existence of the greenhouse effect. As far as I can tell, it is very real, but we can't yet be sure of just how
much warming we're going to get.
So you could make a DVD that runs full fledged applications.
Well, no. The DVD virtual machine only has 32 bytes of RAM so about all you can do is simple games like "Dragons Lair".
Of course, general purpose computers have limited amounts of RAM as well, so in a theoretical sense the they are no more powerful, but you can do a lot more with 128 Mbytes than with 32 bytes.
There's no programming that the player uploads and executes.
You are mistaken. The DVD FAQ has details on the DVD command language. The language is Turing complete -- in theory, any thing you could express with a C program you could express in the DVD program language. In practice it is much more limited, because the only writable storage it can use is 16 2-byte registers.
Buttons on DVD menus can actually be set up to execute arbitrary sequences of code. However, in most DVD Videos the buttons are just links to other menus or parts of the movie, so I guess that is why you felt that there wasn't any executable code on the disc.
I've looked at the code that is uploaded and executed and no-one would dispute that it is executable code - it has assignments and conditional branches.
Why does software differ from books, video, etc in the applicability of the doctrine of first sale?
Because the copyright law gives the copyright holder the right to control rentals in the particular cases of computer programs and audio recordings. The relevant bits of the law are included in schedule A of the judgement
The subject of this judgement was not whether a dvd is a movie or software, it is about Time Warner using its larger size to extort extra money from the movie rental stores.
You are wrong. This was a copyright case.
You can find a good summary of the judgement here.
how did you determine (and what are) the "commands" the section B lists ?.. did you disassemble the code ?
I used the ifo_dump utility that is included with the ogle player to find the instructions in the IFO (info) files. The only instructions in the VOB (video object) files are on menu buttons, so I just had to count the number of buttons on all the menus for those.
The DVD FAQ has details about the nature of the commands on DVDs. The commands that were on the Warner DVDs that I looked at did not do anything very exciting - it was stuff like setting the audio language to match the setting on the player.
Please read what the judgement says before posting. DVD videos certainly contain computer programs that create the interactive menus. However, that doesn't mean that the whole disc is a computer program, any more than then software inside a car makes a car a computer program.
I was involved in this case as an expert witness, so, if anyone has questions I'd be happy to answer them.
In a recent Australian court case, as well as
arguing that DVD Videos were computer programs, Warner argued that playing DVDs involved making
unauthorized copies of the computer programs on them. As well as ruling that DVDs were not
computer programs, the judge ruled that playing a DVD did not make an unauthorized copy
of a computer program. The judgement is
here
The authors of The Fable of the Keys are economists and are not experts in user interface design.
The design of everyday things by Don Norman contains more accurate information. In brief, Dvorak is better than QWERTY, but only by about 10%, so it's not worthwhile to switch.
Slashdot Mirror
More details are here.
If you want to find out what is wrong with Lott's claims, please read my critique of his work. (Also available from the first page of your google search).
My nine year old had no trouble learning to program in Haskell and really enjoyed it.
And this guy's name was Eddy....
Suppose there are just two monks, both red-eyed. They don't kill themselves because they don't know their eye colour. The tourist makes his unfortunate remark. Now if monk A had green eyes then monk B would know that he himself must have red eyes so he would kill himself that night.
So, when monk B doesn't kill himself, monk A learns that he himself has red eyes and kills himself on the second night. (And so does monk B, who has also learned that he has red eyes.)
I recommend New Scientist's summary
Of course, general purpose computers have limited amounts of RAM as well, so in a theoretical sense the they are no more powerful, but you can do a lot more with 128 Mbytes than with 32 bytes.
Buttons on DVD menus can actually be set up to execute arbitrary sequences of code. However, in most DVD Videos the buttons are just links to other menus or parts of the movie, so I guess that is why you felt that there wasn't any executable code on the disc.
I've looked at the code that is uploaded and executed and no-one would dispute that it is executable code - it has assignments and conditional branches.
The DVD FAQ has details about the nature of the commands on DVDs. The commands that were on the Warner DVDs that I looked at did not do anything very exciting - it was stuff like setting the audio language to match the setting on the player.
I was involved in this case as an expert witness, so, if anyone has questions I'd be happy to answer them.
In a recent Australian court case, as well as arguing that DVD Videos were computer programs, Warner argued that playing DVDs involved making unauthorized copies of the computer programs on them. As well as ruling that DVDs were not computer programs, the judge ruled that playing a DVD did not make an unauthorized copy of a computer program. The judgement is here
The authors of The Fable of the Keys are economists and are not experts in user interface design.
The design of everyday things by Don Norman contains more accurate information. In brief, Dvorak is better than QWERTY, but only by about 10%, so it's not worthwhile to switch.