Glad to see your gov't finally made you citizens, a century or two after we made ourselves citizens.;) (Englishmen were referred to as "subjects" for a very long time, certainly in 1812, possibly somewhat into this century, and I think it persisted for quite a while after England really became a representative democratic republic.) Of course, "citizen" implies that the people control the gov't, not the other way around, and that's presently debatable on both sides of the Atlantic.
As far as I can remember, Achilles was nicknamed that because he limped. Nicknames pulled out of the classics were pretty common in the Ender books.
If you really want to find something sinister in that choice, perhaps Card was implying that the Greeks made a hero out of a murderous sociopath -- which Achilles probably was by modern standards, along with most of the other main characters in Homer. Or in any Roman, Middle Ages, or Renaissance history for that matter. Standards have changed somewhat; be thankful for it. Of course, in many parts of the world, a successful murderous sociopath is still a hero, to one side, and the USA is just one short step away from that...
"Would you rather put your life into the hands of the cops or Microsoft ?" Is there a 3rd choice?
I have no idea how trustworthy the French cops are. Over here, there's been plenty to erode our trust in them -- the cowardly cops that waited outside Columbine high school for hours before going in, the LAPD Ramparts division, the FBI's brilliant idea of pumping the Branch Davidian buildiing full of flammable tear-gas which was not approved for any indoor use...
Sounds like the French gov't isn't doing a very good job of enforcing their laws.
On the other hand, over here there is hardly any law to enforce, and it's questionable whether the companies whose "privacy policy" allows any privacy are actually following that policy. The one hopeful sign is that one.com that had definitely promised to keep its customer information secret was finally blocked from putting up its customer list at the bankruptcy auction. Maybe that means you can sue other companies that don't follow their stated policy. If you can ever prove it...
Some people think that is an appropriate result, but I rather suspect a little hacking is involved. A definitely strange result though is when a pr0n search leads to the Disney web site. Apparently on many pr0n sites, if they decide you're a minor they send you to Disney...
The conclusions I reached were (1) their press releases had to be grossly overstating the breadth of their patents. Someone made an interesting point about patent abstracts -- the readable part up front -- vs claims, which actually determine what is protected by the patent. Abstracts can't be amended. Claims are mended all the time, like when the examiner points out that 19 out of 20 fail the tests of prior art and obviousness...
2. To have any validity at all to their wider claims they would not only have had to buy patent rights from the first search engines (maybe they did?), but also convince a court that you get a unique and non-obvious process simply by doing something on the internet that has long been done by hand, on single computers, and on other computer networks.
3. They probably have some valid claims on particular, narrowly construed, techniques. But considering the results I've had searching with Altavista, if they can keep others from copying their exact methods it's a good thing!
No. You just have to have a record proving when you used the idea. If it was prior and more than 1 or 2 years old, all their lawsuit will do is to put it into the court records that the idea is public domain.
But do see if your lawyer will agree to pay himself out of the proceeds of a countersuit -- for harassment, filing frivolous suits, etc. Not that I care if your lawyer gets paid, but if he can take money away from these jerks...
No. Due to Google's rating of sites by counting links, it is excellent at finding out what most everybody already knows. I'm an engineer. Usually I need just the opposite. br>
Google also has the disconcerting habit of giving first rank to a site which does not have any of the words you asked for, because other sites that did have those words pointed to it. Alta Vista will also do this, I presume for other reasons. I generally use alltheweb, which assumes that what you asked for is what you actually want!
In Northern Michigan, we pay for the lunches by checks sent about monthly, and it works fine. But the lunch staff has to know the students. It's not possible in the biggest schools -- not that the giant schools are such a good idea anyway, except maybe for high school.
But the school in the news report had only 700 students. If the staff needs a fingerprint machine to recognize the students, there's a deeper problem...
The most important reason for the 1st Amendment is that if you let the gov't control political discussion, then you know longer have a democratic republic.
Clearly this rule should require the libraries to buy only filters which have been certified by their vendors to be accurate and to NOT violate the 1st Amendment. Which means no filters -- since such a certification would expose any of the lame filters in existence to being sued into bankruptcy....
Hummmm, I know MS likes to brag about their origins in a circle of college buddies writing Altair Basic, but do they make it clear that those buddies were mis-using large amounts of free time on the college mainframe? (It was there for class-related use, not to found a business.)
For the 90% of you who weren't taught history, Trotsky was one of the original Soviet leaders. Stalin first booted him out of Russia, then sent assassins after him in Mexico. (Thinking of him as a martyr is rather mistaken -- he seems to have been even nuttier than Stalin.) Besides killing him, Soviet history texts were re-written to eliminate all mention of him. Pictures were cropped to eliminate him. A picture of the early Politburo with Trotsky near the middle was cut apart and pasted back together without Trotsky...
How is that relevant to corporate behavior? I don't think any corporation yet has actually had the power to re-write history. So look at what they do when blocking data is in there power. AOL blocked aol-sux.com, until it became obvious that the bad publicity from this was reaching people that could never have found that web site. Internet filters put discussions of their shortcomings on the black list. A number of companies and corporate-sponsored organizations like SDMI have attempted to use the threat of copyright suits or the DCMA to muzzle critics. Post the X corporation's customer service manual pages instructing their "service" people on how to stall customers with legitimate complaints, and X corporation will claim that manual is copyrighted and/or a trade secret. These tactics have backfired as often as they have worked, so far. To take one example, if X corporation actually gets their case into court, then the NY Times can print anything the lawyers read into the record -- like the pages in question, along with the worst possible interpretation...
But various proposals now on the table will put ways of squelching certain criticism into HARDWARE.
I get calls from head-hunters about once a week and my resume hasn't been out there since 1990! (I like it here.) True, 90% of them are looking for skills way out of my field, but I have to conclude that techies of any sort are in short supply. So the head-hunters are making blind calls to any company they can find that sounds like it might have someone qualified...
High unemployment AND high inflation. The Vietnam War dragged on for five years after everyone knew it was lost. Troops shooting students. Just exactly which part of this did you like about Nixon?
Or maybe you think that forming an organization designed to steal elections from the White House staff is less serious than lying about a BJ?
WWII era teletypes used a 5 bit code, so you had to shift just to get upper case + numbers. I don't know if anyone ever actually used shift codes to represent upper/lower case, since the change from 6 to 8 bits (for most manufacturers) predated any common use of lower case in computing.
I once rescued a 1943 Army teletype from a dump and took it apart. It did encoding and decoding by means of a rotating shaft and cams, and the print mechanism was the same flying levers as in manual typewriters. Two of the 32 bits were Shift In and Shift Out -- corresponding to hitting and releasing the shift lever on the keyboard. The numbers were shifted qwertyuiop keys. This seems to imply that the codes for either numbers or letters were out of order. But these machines were used for talking to each other, not to computers, so scrambled codes were OK as long as both ends scrambled things the same.
A special amenity of TOPS-20 is its retention of multiple generations (versions) of each file
This used to be pretty common in operating systems -- when you saved a file again, it didn't overwrite the old file but just pushed in down in a sort of stack. You get a lot better security for your data that way. Especially if you make sure the new file is on a different hard drive than the old one --and the NCR operating system I used in 1972 would let you specify that in the file attributes. But note the assumption here: a disaster WILL graunch mission critical data, and probably a couple of backups too. It used to be true, I think due to hardware more than software.
I've seen octal (mis)used on 8 or 16 bit machines too often to believe that the divisible by 3 word size was a reason. Probable real reason: conversion to/from octal is less than half as many assembly language instructions as to/from hexadecimal. (I've written hex conversion in enough assembly languages to be sure about that!)
Printing Octal on an ASCII display:
Isolate 3 bits (the method is machine-dependent)
Add 32 (0x20)
Print it
For hex, you have to test whether it is >9, then either add 32 or add something else to turn 10-15 into A-F. And in EBCDIC...I don't want to even think about that.
You might not think that one IF (2 instructions) and one extra addition (1 instruction) matter that much, but when 100KHz clocks and 256 bit PROM's were state of the art...
6 bits is enough if you put letters in all uppercase. 7 bits is necessary for uppercase if you want more than two punctuation and control characters at all (26 lower case + 26 upper case + 10 digits = 62). Real ASCII is 7 bit, but computer designers didn't like 7 (it's a prime number, so a multiple of 7 bit machine would be very inflexible for any other sort of data), so they rounded up to 8.
The 4004 was designed for a calculator, hence 4 bits to store "0" through "9". It turned out to be useful to control other things as well. (Pure genius in that design.) So subsequent generations of microprocessors just doubled the size 8,16,32,64.
The only trouble with these two theories is that some people have stated that the IBM 360's were using 8 bit bytes, and they were designed almost a decade before the 4004 and more than a decade before normal printers or terminals could handle lower case. I don't know about the 60's -- I know that in 72-75 I worked on two very different non-IBM systems, an NCR 8-bitter, and a Xerox/SDS 32-bitter. So it looks like many hardware engineers were actually looking ahead a decade or so to when it would become possible to print lowercase... Stark contrast to the Y2K snafu, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Glad to see your gov't finally made you citizens, a century or two after we made ourselves citizens. ;) (Englishmen were referred to as "subjects" for a very long time, certainly in 1812, possibly somewhat into this century, and I think it persisted for quite a while after England really became a representative democratic republic.) Of course, "citizen" implies that the people control the gov't, not the other way around, and that's presently debatable on both sides of the Atlantic.
As far as I can remember, Achilles was nicknamed that because he limped. Nicknames pulled out of the classics were pretty common in the Ender books.
If you really want to find something sinister in that choice, perhaps Card was implying that the Greeks made a hero out of a murderous sociopath -- which Achilles probably was by modern standards, along with most of the other main characters in Homer. Or in any Roman, Middle Ages, or Renaissance history for that matter. Standards have changed somewhat; be thankful for it. Of course, in many parts of the world, a successful murderous sociopath is still a hero, to one side, and the USA is just one short step away from that...
"Would you rather put your life into the hands of the cops or Microsoft ?" Is there a 3rd choice?
I have no idea how trustworthy the French cops are. Over here, there's been plenty to erode our trust in them -- the cowardly cops that waited outside Columbine high school for hours before going in, the LAPD Ramparts division, the FBI's brilliant idea of pumping the Branch Davidian buildiing full of flammable tear-gas which was not approved for any indoor use...
Sounds like the French gov't isn't doing a very good job of enforcing their laws.
.com that had definitely promised to keep its customer information secret was finally blocked from putting up its customer list at the bankruptcy auction. Maybe that means you can sue other companies that don't follow their stated policy. If you can ever prove it...
On the other hand, over here there is hardly any law to enforce, and it's questionable whether the companies whose "privacy policy" allows any privacy are actually following that policy. The one hopeful sign is that one
Some people think that is an appropriate result, but I rather suspect a little hacking is involved. A definitely strange result though is when a pr0n search leads to the Disney web site. Apparently on many pr0n sites, if they decide you're a minor they send you to Disney...
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/01/17/153425 4&mode=nested
The conclusions I reached were (1) their press releases had to be grossly overstating the breadth of their patents. Someone made an interesting point about patent abstracts -- the readable part up front -- vs claims, which actually determine what is protected by the patent. Abstracts can't be amended. Claims are mended all the time, like when the examiner points out that 19 out of 20 fail the tests of prior art and obviousness...
2. To have any validity at all to their wider claims they would not only have had to buy patent rights from the first search engines (maybe they did?), but also convince a court that you get a unique and non-obvious process simply by doing something on the internet that has long been done by hand, on single computers, and on other computer networks.
3. They probably have some valid claims on particular, narrowly construed, techniques. But considering the results I've had searching with Altavista, if they can keep others from copying their exact methods it's a good thing!
You'll have to get them in some coountry where "cruel and unusual" punishment is OK. Unless you go for option 1 instead. 8-)
No. You just have to have a record proving when you used the idea. If it was prior and more than 1 or 2 years old, all their lawsuit will do is to put it into the court records that the idea is public domain.
But do see if your lawyer will agree to pay himself out of the proceeds of a countersuit -- for harassment, filing frivolous suits, etc. Not that I care if your lawyer gets paid, but if he can take money away from these jerks...
No. Due to Google's rating of sites by counting links, it is excellent at finding out what most everybody already knows. I'm an engineer. Usually I need just the opposite.
br> Google also has the disconcerting habit of giving first rank to a site which does not have any of the words you asked for, because other sites that did have those words pointed to it. Alta Vista will also do this, I presume for other reasons. I generally use alltheweb, which assumes that what you asked for is what you actually want!
I'm already boycotting the Alta Vista search engine because it s*x...
Treat lunch money bullies as what they really are -- armed robbers. You know, 20 year prison sentences...
In Northern Michigan, we pay for the lunches by checks sent about monthly, and it works fine. But the lunch staff has to know the students. It's not possible in the biggest schools -- not that the giant schools are such a good idea anyway, except maybe for high school.
But the school in the news report had only 700 students. If the staff needs a fingerprint machine to recognize the students, there's a deeper problem...
Very Funny.
The most important reason for the 1st Amendment is that if you let the gov't control political discussion, then you know longer have a democratic republic.
How about the Democratic National Committe web site? That was blocked by one popular filter for part of the campaign.
Clearly this rule should require the libraries to buy only filters which have been certified by their vendors to be accurate and to NOT violate the 1st Amendment. Which means no filters -- since such a certification would expose any of the lame filters in existence to being sued into bankruptcy....
I long ago concluded that MS programmers must use *nix, if they had to use DOS or Windows they would have done a better job!
Hummmm, I know MS likes to brag about their origins in a circle of college buddies writing Altair Basic, but do they make it clear that those buddies were mis-using large amounts of free time on the college mainframe? (It was there for class-related use, not to found a business.)
For the 90% of you who weren't taught history, Trotsky was one of the original Soviet leaders. Stalin first booted him out of Russia, then sent assassins after him in Mexico. (Thinking of him as a martyr is rather mistaken -- he seems to have been even nuttier than Stalin.) Besides killing him, Soviet history texts were re-written to eliminate all mention of him. Pictures were cropped to eliminate him. A picture of the early Politburo with Trotsky near the middle was cut apart and pasted back together without Trotsky...
How is that relevant to corporate behavior? I don't think any corporation yet has actually had the power to re-write history. So look at what they do when blocking data is in there power. AOL blocked aol-sux.com, until it became obvious that the bad publicity from this was reaching people that could never have found that web site. Internet filters put discussions of their shortcomings on the black list. A number of companies and corporate-sponsored organizations like SDMI have attempted to use the threat of copyright suits or the DCMA to muzzle critics. Post the X corporation's customer service manual pages instructing their "service" people on how to stall customers with legitimate complaints, and X corporation will claim that manual is copyrighted and/or a trade secret. These tactics have backfired as often as they have worked, so far. To take one example, if X corporation actually gets their case into court, then the NY Times can print anything the lawyers read into the record -- like the pages in question, along with the worst possible interpretation...
But various proposals now on the table will put ways of squelching certain criticism into HARDWARE.
I get calls from head-hunters about once a week and my resume hasn't been out there since 1990! (I like it here.) True, 90% of them are looking for skills way out of my field, but I have to conclude that techies of any sort are in short supply. So the head-hunters are making blind calls to any company they can find that sounds like it might have someone qualified...
is that the owners DON'T run them.
High unemployment AND high inflation. The Vietnam War dragged on for five years after everyone knew it was lost. Troops shooting students. Just exactly which part of this did you like about Nixon?
Or maybe you think that forming an organization designed to steal elections from the White House staff is less serious than lying about a BJ?
WWII era teletypes used a 5 bit code, so you had to shift just to get upper case + numbers. I don't know if anyone ever actually used shift codes to represent upper/lower case, since the change from 6 to 8 bits (for most manufacturers) predated any common use of lower case in computing.
I once rescued a 1943 Army teletype from a dump and took it apart. It did encoding and decoding by means of a rotating shaft and cams, and the print mechanism was the same flying levers as in manual typewriters. Two of the 32 bits were Shift In and Shift Out -- corresponding to hitting and releasing the shift lever on the keyboard. The numbers were shifted qwertyuiop keys. This seems to imply that the codes for either numbers or letters were out of order. But these machines were used for talking to each other, not to computers, so scrambled codes were OK as long as both ends scrambled things the same.
A special amenity of TOPS-20 is its retention of multiple generations (versions) of each file
This used to be pretty common in operating systems -- when you saved a file again, it didn't overwrite the old file but just pushed in down in a sort of stack. You get a lot better security for your data that way. Especially if you make sure the new file is on a different hard drive than the old one --and the NCR operating system I used in 1972 would let you specify that in the file attributes. But note the assumption here: a disaster WILL graunch mission critical data, and probably a couple of backups too. It used to be true, I think due to hardware more than software.
I've seen octal (mis)used on 8 or 16 bit machines too often to believe that the divisible by 3 word size was a reason. Probable real reason: conversion to/from octal is less than half as many assembly language instructions as to/from hexadecimal. (I've written hex conversion in enough assembly languages to be sure about that!)
Printing Octal on an ASCII display:
Isolate 3 bits (the method is machine-dependent)
Add 32 (0x20)
Print it
For hex, you have to test whether it is >9, then either add 32 or add something else to turn 10-15 into A-F. And in EBCDIC...I don't want to even think about that.
You might not think that one IF (2 instructions) and one extra addition (1 instruction) matter that much, but when 100KHz clocks and 256 bit PROM's were state of the art...
6 bits is enough if you put letters in all uppercase. 7 bits is necessary for uppercase if you want more than two punctuation and control characters at all (26 lower case + 26 upper case + 10 digits = 62). Real ASCII is 7 bit, but computer designers didn't like 7 (it's a prime number, so a multiple of 7 bit machine would be very inflexible for any other sort of data), so they rounded up to 8.
The 4004 was designed for a calculator, hence 4 bits to store "0" through "9". It turned out to be useful to control other things as well. (Pure genius in that design.) So subsequent generations of microprocessors just doubled the size 8,16,32,64.
The only trouble with these two theories is that some people have stated that the IBM 360's were using 8 bit bytes, and they were designed almost a decade before the 4004 and more than a decade before normal printers or terminals could handle lower case. I don't know about the 60's -- I know that in 72-75 I worked on two very different non-IBM systems, an NCR 8-bitter, and a Xerox/SDS 32-bitter. So it looks like many hardware engineers were actually looking ahead a decade or so to when it would become possible to print lowercase... Stark contrast to the Y2K snafu, eh?