Bugs allow remote access. Passwords are as much a method of providing bulkheads as they are of providing a first line of defense.
Sure, but remote access gets you an account. Certainly if there's anything at all security important on a machine, you need nultiple levels of defense for that--and certainly admin/root accounts should be well protected. But if you're not allowing any remote logins, putting a password on a generic web surfing account that lacks privileges doesn't buy you much, and the cost of doing it may easily outweigh the benefits.
For example, to make picture-mode work for photographs, you'd need a canvas about the size of an aircraft carrier flight deck to express the pixels as text, more RAM than Dodge's truck division to hold the image, and a great deal of patience to scroll it on a typical LCD.
Or go with the XEmacs fork, which supports real bitmaps (and has been maintained without RMS for years).
You Sir (or Madam), are an ignoramus (first class), and the irrelevance is all yours: Emacs, as Neal Stephenson once said; "outshines all other editors as the noonday sun does the stars" - and it still does. Of course if you don't know why it does so, you'd probably be better off using a tool designed for less smart people anyway:) More importantly, it is quite possible - likely even - that there would be no such thing as FOSS if it were not for RMS, and the world would be a much worse place for intelligent and inquisitive tech./sci./math minded people.
RMS is incredibly important to the FOSS movement, and is possibly the single most important individual in promulgating it. He did a huge amount to refine a theory of what it means for software to be free and to encourage wholesale development of large free systems. But it was already in motion before him, and certainly would've existed without him. Indeed, the OSS part of FOSS is in some ways a repudiation of a lot of his ideology; it's disheartening to me, but the original reason for the OSS moniker was to disassociate freely available software from FSF rhetoric.
Again, I do think RMS is one of the most important figures in the FOSS movement; saying that it's "quite possible - likely even - that there would be no such thing as FOSS if it were not for RMS" oversteps things rather a lot, though. The polemics would certainly differ, but the core notion of collaborative open development of freely available source (which intelligent and inquisitive people can look at, learn from, and customize) would certainly have continued to exist and grow from its pre-RMS roots.
That said, RMS is incredibly influential not only on the polemics and rhetoric but also in the development realm; a huge amount of code that is widely relied on was originally written by him, and the rhetoric and polemics got a lot of other software written and opened up in ways that tend to assure it will remain open for the future.
*I know the original BSD license is not technically free by FSF standards; in most meaningful ways, though, the culture of free, open development existed in the BSD community,mmuch as it does in the modern X.org or Apache (or other non-copyleft free software) communities.
Someone mod parent 'informative'--that's exactly what I was looking for.
I'd be very interested in hearing the results for the newer RAM types....
Read the article, it's got lots of nice graphs of RAM decay time for various RAMs from 2001-2007. (synopsis: The newer ones decay more quickly, but the "inverted compressed air can" trick still gives you a fair bit of time with them).
The paper also talks about doing error-correction on partially corrupted keys, and how to locate keys in RAM.
But never hiding bugs is silly. For example, if you provide an strace of ssh crashing, you'd want to mark that private at least.
Maybe, maybe not. You never know what the black hats already know; as a _user_ of ssh, if you disclose then I can take steps to limit damage--e.g. if I'm allowing full ssh access from outside my network (so that employees can work on the go), I may decide that the small benefit of doing so doesn't merit the risk. I'd rather turn off external ssh access for a few days until there's a fix.
When you hide the bug, you're hiding the ability for the users to take steps to protect themselves. You're forcing me to run with exposed systems for several days, and hoping that nobody "bad" knows about the bug. And you're making that judgement for your users rather than giving them the ability to make that call themselves; that's almost impossible given that the judgement might hinge heavily on whether I'm a large financial institute or a personal blog site that backs up daily. Just guessing that most users are happy with your security through obscurity is bound to be wrong in some cases, and those cases are likely to be some of the more financially significant ones.
(That's on top of the pressure to issue a real fix that full disclosure brings. Before things like BugTraq, it was common for people to sit on severe security bugs for literally _years_.)
I agree that they probably fulfilled their minimum obligation, but it would be great to see a much higher degree of co-operation between the vendors of minority browsers. By all means attack MS in this way, but play nice amongst the good guys.
Full public disclosure of security bugs is generally considered the best way to get rapid fixes, and was the entire reason that places like BugTraq were founded. Following standard protocol is not an "attack". Vendors like to assume that you're just maliciously publishing things that would be no problem for their users until you did so. That's untrue.
Many bugs are well-known by black hats before they are found by the good guys. The safest thing for users is to assume that all severe bugs are well-known by the bad guys; when you disclose publically, you give the users a chance to protect themselves even if the software is not yet fixed. I'm not sure of the details of this exploit, but they may be able to protect themselves by limiting their surfing to well-known trusted sites, using an alternate browser, or turning off javascript or whatever. In other cases, some sort of external wrapper or proxy, tighter firewall rules, limiting access to DMZs, or other external steps can help prevent big security problems even without a full vendor fix available yet. It may even be worth it to some users just to forgo using an application for a few days until it's fixed.
Keeping silent until the vendor fixes things might just hurt the user's security situation, and certainly doesn't give the user the option of evaluating the risk and determining whether it's worth ignoring it or not--it forces them to make their usage decision without good information.
Awesome, I listened to about the first 10 minutes (give or take) and didn't hear any mention of it. Yes they absolutely deserve to be recognized for their work, I've been using POV-ray since 1993 and it's tremendous. I was just surprised that the license status wasn't prominently mentioned and that they repeatedly referred to it as open-source, when it's a significant topic of discussion on the POV-Ray mailing lists.
Incidentally, the most recent FLOSS Weekly podcast (with Randal PERL Schwartz) is about POV-Ray. As usual interesting: http://www.twit.tv/floss24
That's pretty odd considering that the POV-Ray license, while quite liberal, is not open-source. The podcast erroneously lists it as such, and the podcast doesn't correct that (at least in the first few minutes). The POV-Ray license in particular prohibits much commercial distribution (in violation of OSD/DFSG term 6) and allows a revocation list of people/distributions who are not allowed to distribute at all (in violation of OSD/DFSG term 5).
I don't want to give the impression that the POV-Ray team is against open-source/free software. There is a lot of thought towards a GPL'd rewrite by the POV-Ray team, and the main reason it's not open-source is that the license predates any real definition of open-source or free software in the modern sense and there are too many contributors to relicense easily.
I just want to point out that the POV-Ray license is not currently open-source, that's a known issue that the developers are trying to address, and it's odd for a podcast dedicated to FLOSS not to mention that up front (and indeed to erroneously list it as open-source on the intro page).
Actually, _The Lord of the Rings_ was public domain in the United States for quite a while, due to some technical mistake. The copyright was RESTORED after Tolkien's death, and the courts ruled that taking works out of the public domain was perfectly legal.
No. Wolheim (from Ace Books) claimed they were public domain, but the courts ruled against him saying that the books had never been public domain and that the Ace paperback edition violated copyright. They did not apply copyright to something that had legally been in the public domain.
See Eisen, Durwood & Co. v. Christopher R. Tolkien et al., 794 F. Supp. 85, 23 U.S.P.Q.2d 1150 (S.D.N.Y. 1992), affirmed without opinion, 990 F.2d 623 (2nd Cir. 1993)
Guys, block structured languages you can trivially derive pretty-printing formatting. Which means you get the "easy to read" ability trivially.
You don't get it trivially, you get it in exchange for having block delimiters. Python avoids having redundant delimiters + indentation (the latter you _need_ for readability, hence the reason _why_ all those pretty-print programs exists).
You should NEVER read the Silly Parenthesis in LISP, that gets taken care of for you by any one of a gazillion tools... EG, on C, you can cut and paste trivially. You can't on python, you need an editor which parses the language sufficiently to understand that "This is a code block going into a different code block".
"You use a smart editor that understands parens in LISP. In Python you need a smart editor that understands whitespace."
Python2.5 and later let you write 3.0-compatible code. Just put parens around your print statements and you're probably fine to run in 2.5, 2.6, or 3.0. There are a few other changes which 2to3 and the 2.6 interpreter will warn about, but they're relatively rare. e.g. range will return an iterator instead of a list; code like:
for i in range(1000):
# do something
will remain unaffected, but code that does something like:
a=range(1000) a[37] = 2000 for i in a:
# do something
will be affected.
The conversion tool and 2.6 interpreter will warn you about those things, and they're easy to fix ( "a=list(range(1000))" ) if 2to3 doesn't do them automatically. Which I'm not sure about, because they're highly unusual--2to3 has converted all of my personal code just fine.
OTOH, 2to3 has worked perfectly with all of my python code. The changes are largely mechanical, the most notable being that in python 3 "print" is now a function so you need parens around the arguments (the gain being that you can easily change its behavior, e.g. to implement logging or whatever).
1. Python 2.6 is still due out and will be supported for years. 2. Python 3.0 includes a 2to3 script to convert existing Python code to Python 3 3. The incompatibilities are mostly mechanical, by far the largest is the change of "print" from a statement to a function (which simplifies the implementation and makes converting existing programs to log to files or whatever much easier). I've yet to find any of my code that 2to3 doesn't handle just fine.
If they sued the daughter, assuming she is underage, wouldn't the parent be held responsible?
Presumably if the daugher was underage the suit would still be ongoing for exactly that reason.
From the Plaintiff's Memorandum of Law in Support of their Motion to Dismiss with Prejudice:
"Plaintiffs also intend to file a separate lawsuit against Defendant's adult daughter, XXXXXX XXXXXX, whom Plaintiffs recently learned is the person directly responsible for the infringement." [emphasis added and name redacted by me]
quoting sales figures proves very little. Why, I could argue that a popular system with fewer triple A titles would result in those titles having high sales. In contrary, a popular system with a lot of triple A titles would cause the demand for triple A titles to go down, thus sharing the sales across all titles and effectively ruining any individual game's chances of selling a record number of units. In other words, maybe the Super Nintendo simply had so many good games that not a single monopolized the sales.
True, but given the anecdotal evidence and the relative sales of the consoles themselves, I find it unlikely.
Anyway, "triple A" titles isn't well defined as far as I can tell, but we can look at how many million-selling titles various consoles had: NES: 48 SNES: 37 PS1: 60 PS2: 88
It's certainly not definitive, but those other consoles sold more hardware, had better selling best games, and had more million-selling titles. I don't have the numbers on hand, but they also all sold more total games than the SNES.
As I said, it's not definitive but those are the best numbers I have access too; I'd be interested in any other numbers people have whatever conclusions they support.
I'd love to see a study that compared cell phone talking to having a conversation with a passenger and having your kids in the car. With luck we can get having multiple car occupants banned as a safety hazard. After that food, anything that can be read, the radio, etc... There's just no end to what we can ban!
There was one, it showed that talking with passengers wasn't anywhere near as bad as talking on a handheld. I believe that they postulated 2 reasons: 1. Passengers have some situational awareness and tend to shut up if you get into a dicier situation; 2. Phone sound quality is much worse than real voices and requires more brain power to process.
I think they did some experiments with better-quality remote voices and worse-quality to try to support (2) and from what I can call it seemed inconclusive to me (their experiments agreed with (2) but seemed far from definitive).
If you compare specs only, you simply come up with what is the best performing console (which is undoubtedly probably the most recent console) which excludes the most important factor in determining what is the best console in someone's subjective opinion: titles. What titles programmers released for a specific console seem to be what makes or breaks the console itself. Sega Genesis probably outperformed SNES but didn't have nearly the draw of its competitor's titles. Sonic was fun, and a few others too, but nothing quite compared to Chrono Trigger, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World, Mario Kart on the SNES.
Excluding bundled titles (if you include them, NES stomps all over SNES), none of the top 20 best selling console titles of all time are for SNES. PS2, PS1, and NES are the non-handheld leaders (and N64 has one).
Picking SNES out of the Nintendo offerings really confuses me because it's the one I heard the least about at the time and that I least often hear people going back to play now. Personally I remember some people playing Goldeneye and a lot of Mario Kart, but SNES was nothing like the consoles that came before or after it in terms of fun/playability. It showed in the console sales numbers (PS1 and PS2 over 100 million each, NES over 60 million, SNES 49 million).
Why will pong always be better than NES Contra for my dad? Because it was his generation's game. Why is NES Contra always better for me than Souped Up Console Gears of War? Because that was my generation's game. Why will Gears of War always beat Super Lucid Brain Implants Choco Serial Murder Hospital Mystery for my... well, you see this trend now.
Except I don't really think that's true. My generation grew up on the 2600 and the NES, but we played a heck of a lot of PS2 and we're playing the Wii and 360 now.
I _do_ find the article somewhat stupefying as the only SNES titles I remember anyone around me playing much are Mario Kart and Goldeneye; that whole era was dominated by PC games as far as I could tell. To this day I know people who still bust out their emulators or old consoles and play NES games and a lot of PS2s are still being used...
But SNES? It was a so-so platform, and I've not heard anyone talk about going back and playing those games in years. That I _do_ suspect is just that author's timeline or personal foibles speaking.
The numbers really don't support it. Not a single of the top-20 selling console games of all time was on the SNES (DS 6, PS2 4, GB 3, GBA 2, NES 2, PS1 2, N64 1), unless you count bundled titles in which case the NES nearly doubles SNES's sales and GB also beats it handily.
Neglecting handhelds, those numbers pretty much agree with my intuition; the PS2, PS1, and NES were the popular ones and seem to be the ones that people return to.
You can back them up with console sales, too. PS2: 120 million. PS1: 100 million. NES: 62 million. SNES: 49 million.
You can easily say that comparing absolute numbers is unfair since the total installed base gets bigger and bigger (so the PS2 gets an unfair boost), but that still doesn't explain why the NES was so much more popular.
Personally if I were one of the many stellar Sony classical performers I'd be jumping for joy. I know that I've been looking into a lot of new pieces in the past few months, and have posted various places looking for recommendations of performances. Several times I've gotten back answers along the lines of "A, B, and C are the consensus best performances, and both A and C are available as mp3 downloads from Amazon". Certainly particular performances _do_ matter, and for pieces that I really enjoy I might go on to buy the others. But for first time listening, if it's between 3 stellar performances I'll go with what's available easily.
If I decide I don't like the piece, the artists not readily available suffer--which seems unfair as it's not their decision and it's hardly one that a musician could be expected to anticipate at all when negotiating a contract before the mid-1990s, but there it is.
True, there may be a psychological reason why people do make that decision. After all, people don't make random decisions. However, whatever psychological need it fills people to be vindictive, it still is irrational. The point is that given the choice between having a dollar and not having a dollar, it is irrational not to want the dollar when you get no concrete benefit the other way. While people may behave rationally given irrational utility functions, the crux of the argument doesn't change.
But it's not irrational unless you define rationality as maximizing money.
If you think that going to the movies is irrational--you're giving up money for nothing--you're welcome to that opinion, but you can't expect others to necessarily agree and it's not really worth continuing a conversation since we clearly have a difference of opinion. Likewise paying a lot of money for a really tasty dinner with beautiful ambiance and presentation, a beer that will be gone in the morning, a pair of shoes that makes you feel hot, or any of a lot of other things that have no lasting value outside the psychological.
If someone goes to Vegas and knows that blackjack is 51% against them, they may still rationally bet on it if the entertainment value they get outweighs the small cost.
If someone gets entertainment value or a feeling of self worth or whatever out of punishing someone else for offering them a small amount in exchange for getting a large amount themselves (when they had the option of offering an even or less disparate split), that doesn't necessarily mean they're irrational. Utility and money aren't the same thing, and if you feel like you're going to wander around for the rest of your life thinking "man, that guy was a dick and I let him get away with it" it might be worth giving up some money for peace of mind. Even if it wasn't the other person's choice, a lot of people might feel better turning down $10 if it meant giving a total bastard a few thousand dollars; the sense of equity is likely a very valuable human trait in terms of species survival that shouldn't just be dismissed as "irrational" because it doesn't always maximize personal wealth.
My point is that the simple presence of C on the ballot can affect the preference for A vs. B. However, upon further reading I think I was misinterpreting IIA as:
(a) In a vote for A vs. B vs. C you should have the same relative outcome for A and B as in a vote for A vs. B, assuming the only change is whether C is on the ballot or not.
But it seems to actually mean: (b) In a vote for A vs. B vs. C, the system should give the same relative results for A and B whether you discard all votes for C or count them (ie if the results without counting C are A>B, then with C it should be C>A>B, A>C>B, or A>B>C, but not, e.g., C>B>A or similar).
Which on its face seems more reasonable but I'm not sure it's obvious enough that I'd consider it a clear part of "perfect voting"; I'd guess that most people would really only care about a weaker IIA that ensured A>B>C>D + eliminating C guarantees A wins; they'd find it odd but not broken if A>D>B could result, but broken if B>A>D resulted.
But I'd also suspect that the weaker IIA implies full IIA since the result apparently holds in any 3 candidate system.
I guess I'm sold on IIA but I hardly find it as intuitive as the others.
No, there are other Econ arguments about people being irrational, such as the studies that show people are vindictive
The thing is, those also don't necessarily show that people are irrational because they make the some utility/money conflation that was my other point. It's entirely possible that the personal happiness people get out of not feeling ripped off or not letting someone "get one over on them" is worth more (utility-wise) to them than the monetary difference there. To its credit, the page you link discusses that possibility.
And most Econ 101 classes I've had start off on day one talking about utility, then say that to simplify they'll use dollars as the utility representation. That's fine, but then later on they present some example as why people are irrational without considering that it may actually be an example of why their own simplification sucks.
I'm certainly not saying that people behave rationally (indeed there are plenty of well-constructed economic experiments that show that they aren't), but it frustrates me to see illogical arguments lumped in with good ones. And it frustrates me to see simplified models applied poorly.
The marginal value of a dollar is used to justify why people are rational about not risking their life savings. But maybe you had a shitty Econ 101 professor.
(4) is the one I named IIA (so-called "independence of irrelevant alternatives"), that seems potentially unrealistic in the real world. Simply listing additional candidates on the ballot can easily have a significant psychological effect on the voter. For instance, if David Duke makes the ballot there could easily be a psychological effect about what the rest of the country is thinking, which could affect how someone chooses to rank 2 other candidates relative to each other--even if the only difference is that he's listed on one ballot and not the other (and in both cases has the same national support) a real perception effect is likely.
Likewise, even if the Republican candidate has very small support (say in a very liberal state), listing him on the ballot could easily tilt how voters choose between, say, the Green and Democratic candidates; while the Republican might not have a real shot in the race either way, that doesn't mean that the simple listing of that candidate on the ballot doesn't affect people's preferences between the other 2 candidates.
The fact that it seems unrealistic and that real-life voting systems exists that don't violate any of the other axioms (but do violate IIA) leads me to believe that perhaps IIA is not part of what people in real life would expect from a fair voting system.
Slashdot Mirror
Bugs allow remote access. Passwords are as much a method of providing bulkheads as they are of providing a first line of defense.
Sure, but remote access gets you an account. Certainly if there's anything at all security important on a machine, you need nultiple levels of defense for that--and certainly admin/root accounts should be well protected. But if you're not allowing any remote logins, putting a password on a generic web surfing account that lacks privileges doesn't buy you much, and the cost of doing it may easily outweigh the benefits.
For example, to make picture-mode work for photographs, you'd need a canvas about the size of an aircraft carrier flight deck to express the pixels as text, more RAM than Dodge's truck division to hold the image, and a great deal of patience to scroll it on a typical LCD.
Or go with the XEmacs fork, which supports real bitmaps (and has been maintained without RMS for years).
You Sir (or Madam), are an ignoramus (first class), and the irrelevance is all yours: Emacs, as Neal Stephenson once said; "outshines all other editors as the noonday sun does the stars" - and it still does. Of course if you don't know why it does so, you'd probably be better off using a tool designed for less smart people anyway :) More importantly, it is quite possible - likely even - that there would be no such thing as FOSS if it were not for RMS, and the world would be a much worse place for intelligent and inquisitive tech./sci./math minded people.
Right, because SHARE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) and DECUS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECUS never existed. Nor did BSD* and pcc. Nor did the MIT AI lab, SAIL, or any of the other communities that RMS has said influenced him heavily.
RMS is incredibly important to the FOSS movement, and is possibly the single most important individual in promulgating it. He did a huge amount to refine a theory of what it means for software to be free and to encourage wholesale development of large free systems. But it was already in motion before him, and certainly would've existed without him. Indeed, the OSS part of FOSS is in some ways a repudiation of a lot of his ideology; it's disheartening to me, but the original reason for the OSS moniker was to disassociate freely available software from FSF rhetoric.
Again, I do think RMS is one of the most important figures in the FOSS movement; saying that it's "quite possible - likely even - that there would be no such thing as FOSS if it were not for RMS" oversteps things rather a lot, though. The polemics would certainly differ, but the core notion of collaborative open development of freely available source (which intelligent and inquisitive people can look at, learn from, and customize) would certainly have continued to exist and grow from its pre-RMS roots.
That said, RMS is incredibly influential not only on the polemics and rhetoric but also in the development realm; a huge amount of code that is widely relied on was originally written by him, and the rhetoric and polemics got a lot of other software written and opened up in ways that tend to assure it will remain open for the future.
*I know the original BSD license is not technically free by FSF standards; in most meaningful ways, though, the culture of free, open development existed in the BSD community,mmuch as it does in the modern X.org or Apache (or other non-copyleft free software) communities.
(and oh yeah, vim >>> emacs)
Every login account on an internet-connected computer needs a secure password.
Only if it allows remote logins or lacks physical security.
Someone mod parent 'informative'--that's exactly what I was looking for.
I'd be very interested in hearing the results for the newer RAM types....
Read the article, it's got lots of nice graphs of RAM decay time for various RAMs from 2001-2007. (synopsis: The newer ones decay more quickly, but the "inverted compressed air can" trick still gives you a fair bit of time with them).
The paper also talks about doing error-correction on partially corrupted keys, and how to locate keys in RAM.
But never hiding bugs is silly. For example, if you provide an strace of ssh crashing, you'd want to mark that private at least.
Maybe, maybe not. You never know what the black hats already know; as a _user_ of ssh, if you disclose then I can take steps to limit damage--e.g. if I'm allowing full ssh access from outside my network (so that employees can work on the go), I may decide that the small benefit of doing so doesn't merit the risk. I'd rather turn off external ssh access for a few days until there's a fix.
When you hide the bug, you're hiding the ability for the users to take steps to protect themselves. You're forcing me to run with exposed systems for several days, and hoping that nobody "bad" knows about the bug. And you're making that judgement for your users rather than giving them the ability to make that call themselves; that's almost impossible given that the judgement might hinge heavily on whether I'm a large financial institute or a personal blog site that backs up daily. Just guessing that most users are happy with your security through obscurity is bound to be wrong in some cases, and those cases are likely to be some of the more financially significant ones.
(That's on top of the pressure to issue a real fix that full disclosure brings. Before things like BugTraq, it was common for people to sit on severe security bugs for literally _years_.)
I agree that they probably fulfilled their minimum obligation, but it would be great to see a much higher degree of co-operation between the vendors of minority browsers. By all means attack MS in this way, but play nice amongst the good guys.
Full public disclosure of security bugs is generally considered the best way to get rapid fixes, and was the entire reason that places like BugTraq were founded. Following standard protocol is not an "attack". Vendors like to assume that you're just maliciously publishing things that would be no problem for their users until you did so. That's untrue.
Many bugs are well-known by black hats before they are found by the good guys. The safest thing for users is to assume that all severe bugs are well-known by the bad guys; when you disclose publically, you give the users a chance to protect themselves even if the software is not yet fixed. I'm not sure of the details of this exploit, but they may be able to protect themselves by limiting their surfing to well-known trusted sites, using an alternate browser, or turning off javascript or whatever. In other cases, some sort of external wrapper or proxy, tighter firewall rules, limiting access to DMZs, or other external steps can help prevent big security problems even without a full vendor fix available yet. It may even be worth it to some users just to forgo using an application for a few days until it's fixed.
Keeping silent until the vendor fixes things might just hurt the user's security situation, and certainly doesn't give the user the option of evaluating the risk and determining whether it's worth ignoring it or not--it forces them to make their usage decision without good information.
Awesome, I listened to about the first 10 minutes (give or take) and didn't hear any mention of it. Yes they absolutely deserve to be recognized for their work, I've been using POV-ray since 1993 and it's tremendous. I was just surprised that the license status wasn't prominently mentioned and that they repeatedly referred to it as open-source, when it's a significant topic of discussion on the POV-Ray mailing lists.
That's pretty odd considering that the POV-Ray license, while quite liberal, is not open-source. The podcast erroneously lists it as such, and the podcast doesn't correct that (at least in the first few minutes). The POV-Ray license in particular prohibits much commercial distribution (in violation of OSD/DFSG term 6) and allows a revocation list of people/distributions who are not allowed to distribute at all (in violation of OSD/DFSG term 5).
I don't want to give the impression that the POV-Ray team is against open-source/free software. There is a lot of thought towards a GPL'd rewrite by the POV-Ray team, and the main reason it's not open-source is that the license predates any real definition of open-source or free software in the modern sense and there are too many contributors to relicense easily.
I just want to point out that the POV-Ray license is not currently open-source, that's a known issue that the developers are trying to address, and it's odd for a podcast dedicated to FLOSS not to mention that up front (and indeed to erroneously list it as open-source on the intro page).
Actually, _The Lord of the Rings_ was public domain in the United States for quite a while, due to some technical mistake. The copyright was RESTORED after Tolkien's death, and the courts ruled that taking works out of the public domain was perfectly legal.
No. Wolheim (from Ace Books) claimed they were public domain, but the courts ruled against him saying that the books had never been public domain and that the Ace paperback edition violated copyright. They did not apply copyright to something that had legally been in the public domain.
See Eisen, Durwood & Co. v. Christopher R. Tolkien et al., 794 F. Supp. 85, 23 U.S.P.Q.2d 1150 (S.D.N.Y. 1992), affirmed without opinion, 990 F.2d 623 (2nd Cir. 1993)
Guys, block structured languages you can trivially derive pretty-printing formatting. Which means you get the "easy to read" ability trivially.
You don't get it trivially, you get it in exchange for having block delimiters. Python avoids having redundant delimiters + indentation (the latter you _need_ for readability, hence the reason _why_ all those pretty-print programs exists).
You should NEVER read the Silly Parenthesis in LISP, that gets taken care of for you by any one of a gazillion tools...
EG, on C, you can cut and paste trivially. You can't on python, you need an editor which parses the language sufficiently to understand that "This is a code block going into a different code block".
"You use a smart editor that understands parens in LISP. In Python you need a smart editor that understands whitespace."
Python2.5 and later let you write 3.0-compatible code. Just put parens around your print statements and you're probably fine to run in 2.5, 2.6, or 3.0. There are a few other changes which 2to3 and the 2.6 interpreter will warn about, but they're relatively rare. e.g. range will return an iterator instead of a list; code like:
for i in range(1000):
# do something
will remain unaffected, but code that does something like:
a=range(1000)
a[37] = 2000
for i in a:
# do something
will be affected.
The conversion tool and 2.6 interpreter will warn you about those things, and they're easy to fix ( "a=list(range(1000))" ) if 2to3 doesn't do them automatically. Which I'm not sure about, because they're highly unusual--2to3 has converted all of my personal code just fine.
OTOH, 2to3 has worked perfectly with all of my python code. The changes are largely mechanical, the most notable being that in python 3 "print" is now a function so you need parens around the arguments (the gain being that you can easily change its behavior, e.g. to implement logging or whatever).
1. Python 2.6 is still due out and will be supported for years.
2. Python 3.0 includes a 2to3 script to convert existing Python code to Python 3
3. The incompatibilities are mostly mechanical, by far the largest is the change of "print" from a statement to a function (which simplifies the implementation and makes converting existing programs to log to files or whatever much easier). I've yet to find any of my code that 2to3 doesn't handle just fine.
From Argument (A)(6) "Plaintiffs are simultaneously moving for summary judgement against Defendant's Counterclaim."
And that filing:
Plaintiffs' Memorandum of Law in support of motion for summary judgment dismissing counterclaim* http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=lava_amurao_080128PltffsMotSumJudgCounterclaimMemo
So it's probably more accurate to say that the defendant's counterclaims _may_ remain, depending on the judge's ruling on the simultaneous motions.
If they sued the daughter, assuming she is underage, wouldn't the parent be held responsible?
Presumably if the daugher was underage the suit would still be ongoing for exactly that reason.
From the Plaintiff's Memorandum of Law in Support of their Motion to Dismiss with Prejudice:
"Plaintiffs also intend to file a separate lawsuit against Defendant's adult daughter, XXXXXX XXXXXX, whom Plaintiffs recently learned is the person directly responsible for the infringement." [emphasis added and name redacted by me]
quoting sales figures proves very little. Why, I could argue that a popular system with fewer triple A titles would result in those titles having high sales. In contrary, a popular system with a lot of triple A titles would cause the demand for triple A titles to go down, thus sharing the sales across all titles and effectively ruining any individual game's chances of selling a record number of units. In other words, maybe the Super Nintendo simply had so many good games that not a single monopolized the sales.
True, but given the anecdotal evidence and the relative sales of the consoles themselves, I find it unlikely.
Anyway, "triple A" titles isn't well defined as far as I can tell, but we can look at how many million-selling titles various consoles had:
NES: 48
SNES: 37
PS1: 60
PS2: 88
It's certainly not definitive, but those other consoles sold more hardware, had better selling best games, and had more million-selling titles. I don't have the numbers on hand, but they also all sold more total games than the SNES.
As I said, it's not definitive but those are the best numbers I have access too; I'd be interested in any other numbers people have whatever conclusions they support.
I'd love to see a study that compared cell phone talking to having a conversation with a passenger and having your kids in the car. With luck we can get having multiple car occupants banned as a safety hazard. After that food, anything that can be read, the radio, etc... There's just no end to what we can ban!
There was one, it showed that talking with passengers wasn't anywhere near as bad as talking on a handheld. I believe that they postulated 2 reasons:
1. Passengers have some situational awareness and tend to shut up if you get into a dicier situation;
2. Phone sound quality is much worse than real voices and requires more brain power to process.
I think they did some experiments with better-quality remote voices and worse-quality to try to support (2) and from what I can call it seemed inconclusive to me (their experiments agreed with (2) but seemed far from definitive).
I'll try to dig up a link.
If you compare specs only, you simply come up with what is the best performing console (which is undoubtedly probably the most recent console) which excludes the most important factor in determining what is the best console in someone's subjective opinion: titles. What titles programmers released for a specific console seem to be what makes or breaks the console itself. Sega Genesis probably outperformed SNES but didn't have nearly the draw of its competitor's titles. Sonic was fun, and a few others too, but nothing quite compared to Chrono Trigger, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World, Mario Kart on the SNES.
Excluding bundled titles (if you include them, NES stomps all over SNES), none of the top 20 best selling console titles of all time are for SNES. PS2, PS1, and NES are the non-handheld leaders (and N64 has one).
Picking SNES out of the Nintendo offerings really confuses me because it's the one I heard the least about at the time and that I least often hear people going back to play now. Personally I remember some people playing Goldeneye and a lot of Mario Kart, but SNES was nothing like the consoles that came before or after it in terms of fun/playability. It showed in the console sales numbers (PS1 and PS2 over 100 million each, NES over 60 million, SNES 49 million).
Why will pong always be better than NES Contra for my dad? Because it was his generation's game. Why is NES Contra always better for me than Souped Up Console Gears of War? Because that was my generation's game. Why will Gears of War always beat Super Lucid Brain Implants Choco Serial Murder Hospital Mystery for my ... well, you see this trend now.
Except I don't really think that's true. My generation grew up on the 2600 and the NES, but we played a heck of a lot of PS2 and we're playing the Wii and 360 now.
I _do_ find the article somewhat stupefying as the only SNES titles I remember anyone around me playing much are Mario Kart and Goldeneye; that whole era was dominated by PC games as far as I could tell. To this day I know people who still bust out their emulators or old consoles and play NES games and a lot of PS2s are still being used...
But SNES? It was a so-so platform, and I've not heard anyone talk about going back and playing those games in years. That I _do_ suspect is just that author's timeline or personal foibles speaking.
The numbers really don't support it. Not a single of the top-20 selling console games of all time was on the SNES
(DS 6, PS2 4, GB 3, GBA 2, NES 2, PS1 2, N64 1), unless you count bundled titles in which case the NES nearly doubles SNES's sales and GB also beats it handily.
Neglecting handhelds, those numbers pretty much agree with my intuition; the PS2, PS1, and NES were the popular ones and seem to be the ones that people return to.
You can back them up with console sales, too. PS2: 120 million. PS1: 100 million. NES: 62 million. SNES: 49 million.
You can easily say that comparing absolute numbers is unfair since the total installed base gets bigger and bigger (so the PS2 gets an unfair boost), but that still doesn't explain why the NES was so much more popular.
Personally if I were one of the many stellar Sony classical performers I'd be jumping for joy. I know that I've been looking into a lot of new pieces in the past few months, and have posted various places looking for recommendations of performances. Several times I've gotten back answers along the lines of "A, B, and C are the consensus best performances, and both A and C are available as mp3 downloads from Amazon". Certainly particular performances _do_ matter, and for pieces that I really enjoy I might go on to buy the others. But for first time listening, if it's between 3 stellar performances I'll go with what's available easily.
If I decide I don't like the piece, the artists not readily available suffer--which seems unfair as it's not their decision and it's hardly one that a musician could be expected to anticipate at all when negotiating a contract before the mid-1990s, but there it is.
True, there may be a psychological reason why people do make that decision. After all, people don't make random decisions. However, whatever psychological need it fills people to be vindictive, it still is irrational. The point is that given the choice between having a dollar and not having a dollar, it is irrational not to want the dollar when you get no concrete benefit the other way. While people may behave rationally given irrational utility functions, the crux of the argument doesn't change.
But it's not irrational unless you define rationality as maximizing money.
If you think that going to the movies is irrational--you're giving up money for nothing--you're welcome to that opinion, but you can't expect others to necessarily agree and it's not really worth continuing a conversation since we clearly have a difference of opinion. Likewise paying a lot of money for a really tasty dinner with beautiful ambiance and presentation, a beer that will be gone in the morning, a pair of shoes that makes you feel hot, or any of a lot of other things that have no lasting value outside the psychological.
If someone goes to Vegas and knows that blackjack is 51% against them, they may still rationally bet on it if the entertainment value they get outweighs the small cost.
If someone gets entertainment value or a feeling of self worth or whatever out of punishing someone else for offering them a small amount in exchange for getting a large amount themselves (when they had the option of offering an even or less disparate split), that doesn't necessarily mean they're irrational. Utility and money aren't the same thing, and if you feel like you're going to wander around for the rest of your life thinking "man, that guy was a dick and I let him get away with it" it might be worth giving up some money for peace of mind. Even if it wasn't the other person's choice, a lot of people might feel better turning down $10 if it meant giving a total bastard a few thousand dollars; the sense of equity is likely a very valuable human trait in terms of species survival that shouldn't just be dismissed as "irrational" because it doesn't always maximize personal wealth.
My point is that the simple presence of C on the ballot can affect the preference for A vs. B. However, upon further reading I think I was misinterpreting IIA as:
(a) In a vote for A vs. B vs. C you should have the same relative outcome for A and B as in a vote for A vs. B, assuming the only change is whether C is on the ballot or not.
But it seems to actually mean:
(b) In a vote for A vs. B vs. C, the system should give the same relative results for A and B whether you discard all votes for C or count them (ie if the results without counting C are A>B, then with C it should be C>A>B, A>C>B, or A>B>C, but not, e.g., C>B>A or similar).
Which on its face seems more reasonable but I'm not sure it's obvious enough that I'd consider it a clear part of "perfect voting"; I'd guess that most people would really only care about a weaker IIA that ensured A>B>C>D + eliminating C guarantees A wins; they'd find it odd but not broken if A>D>B could result, but broken if B>A>D resulted.
But I'd also suspect that the weaker IIA implies full IIA since the result apparently holds in any 3 candidate system.
I guess I'm sold on IIA but I hardly find it as intuitive as the others.
No, there are other Econ arguments about people being irrational, such as the studies that show people are vindictive
The thing is, those also don't necessarily show that people are irrational because they make the some utility/money conflation that was my other point. It's entirely possible that the personal happiness people get out of not feeling ripped off or not letting someone "get one over on them" is worth more (utility-wise) to them than the monetary difference there. To its credit, the page you link discusses that possibility.
And most Econ 101 classes I've had start off on day one talking about utility, then say that to simplify they'll use dollars as the utility representation. That's fine, but then later on they present some example as why people are irrational without considering that it may actually be an example of why their own simplification sucks.
I'm certainly not saying that people behave rationally (indeed there are plenty of well-constructed economic experiments that show that they aren't), but it frustrates me to see illogical arguments lumped in with good ones. And it frustrates me to see simplified models applied poorly.
The marginal value of a dollar is used to justify why people are rational about not risking their life savings. But maybe you had a shitty Econ 101 professor.
That's entirely possible.
(4) is the one I named IIA (so-called "independence of irrelevant alternatives"), that seems potentially unrealistic in the real world. Simply listing additional candidates on the ballot can easily have a significant psychological effect on the voter. For instance, if David Duke makes the ballot there could easily be a psychological effect about what the rest of the country is thinking, which could affect how someone chooses to rank 2 other candidates relative to each other--even if the only difference is that he's listed on one ballot and not the other (and in both cases has the same national support) a real perception effect is likely.
Likewise, even if the Republican candidate has very small support (say in a very liberal state), listing him on the ballot could easily tilt how voters choose between, say, the Green and Democratic candidates; while the Republican might not have a real shot in the race either way, that doesn't mean that the simple listing of that candidate on the ballot doesn't affect people's preferences between the other 2 candidates.
The fact that it seems unrealistic and that real-life voting systems exists that don't violate any of the other axioms (but do violate IIA) leads me to believe that perhaps IIA is not part of what people in real life would expect from a fair voting system.