In general, you cannot change the licenses terms on your cell phone contract. You can, if its that important to you, review and select the provider with the least offensive terms, or, if your risk associated with non-compliance is too great, do without a cell phone.
There is an important exemption to this - one could try to change the license terms through collective bargaining, PR, or just if many people ask for it. This is where websites can be very helpful.
Also, the few I read seemed to me like more of cases where people failed to read the fine print and then got upset when the other party enforced their contract rights.
While caveat emptor is a time tested principle, it is not perfect for all situations.
In particular, here are a few issues:
Licenses are hard to analyze - they are not formulated in the language friendly to casual reading. Hence, you are unlikely to fully absorb
all the implications if the transaction is casual. And you do many casual transactions.
Example: when was the last time you read the license *before* purchasing a DVD ?
The licenses are often written to include as much as possible under assumption that it is the intersection with the law that has actual legal standing. If you are not current with the current practice you cannot understand the license without lawyers help.
It is often the case that there are a few sellers and the license terms are non-negotiable.
Example: try to change the license applied to your cell phone contract.
You are right - on pure number crunching, with little I/O the cluster peak and sustained performance for the same program should be identical.
It might be that their peak number is derived assuming code particularly favorable to the processor architecture in use - say using SSE to do the floating point math. This can easily produce the factor of 2 difference.
However, I think version number is already obsolete for Linux kernels. We should be able to manage patchsets as if they're software packages, complete with dependency and conflict information that are automatically computed.
I agree with your here, however there is a caveat - before this happens someone has to create an Open Source bitkeeper replacement.
Hopefully one of Open Source super-CVS package (arch, subversion, whatever I missed) will mature soon.
We'll need a Bill of Rights as well, post corrections below.
There shall be no law to prohibit sharing of knowledge, or the right of people to communicate
or post messages on Slashdot.
A well-educated populace being essential to the progress of Open Source, the right of people to keep and use the instruments of science shall not be infringed.
No software shall be installed forceably on personal possessions, be it brain or computing device, or required to participate in protected communication.
I think the "per square inch" phrase is there by mistake.
They were describing a particular prototype - so likely the 120 W figure refers to the output of the entire device, especially as it outputs 110 Volts (we could guess the relatively small wattage is due to losses due from DC to AC conversion).
I think this would be an appropriate article to gather up some advice on how to live in Soviet union. Things I can remember off hand:
when authorities take you in for interrogation do not agree to sign any confidentiality document. Tell them that you are a blubber mouth and that you talk in your sleep.
They can use that document to force you to spy on your friends and relatives (they will just "invite" you for interrogation and the confidentiality agreement will prevent you from notifying people they interrogated you about).
Remember: lying to authorities is usually a violation of the law. Having poor memory is not.
It helps to be scared, especially when you have a reason to. Remember: government has lots more power than you'll ever have. A little of humiliation is worth it if it saves your friends.
Be careful when proposing improvements (be it to technical or political matters) based on technical merit alone, however benign your intentions are. Your opponents will put this in a political context and claim that your improvement is "anti-proletariat" (or "pro-terrorist"). Instead, include a few paragraphs showing how this improvement was forethought in the original documents of Lenin (or documents of Department of Homeland Security - you can even use a search engine and there is plenty of material to support almost anything, at least with liberal cut'n'paste).
Post more suggestions below.
I wish I could say this is 100% for "creepiness" value only.
One of the most load sources of gravitational waves are collapses of binary neutron stars or black holes.
If a waveform of such a collapse is found it should first obey Einstein's equations and then quickly transition into the regime of quantum gravity which we know nothing about.
Such information would be extremely valuable as (at the moment) there is no way we can experiment with quantum gravity in a laboratory - the energies involved are far beyound what current accelerators can achieve.
A common viewpoint is that Unix (and Linux) security protects from escalation of privileges
(i.e. becoming root) but does not guarantee service - i.e. it is *not* designed to protect against DOS attacks, especially by users on the same system.
For example, it is trivially easy to slow Unix system to a crawl by starting several find / -name \*
processes.
The patches were likely ignored because the code exposed did not allow anything worse than slowing the system down or, in case of firmware loading, required root to begin with.
For example it mentions that operating systems have not been OSS for much of their lifecycle - this is not quite true.
Original Unix was developed in OSS fashion, as was numerous code for Z80-style microcomputers.
I am sure I a missing a lot:)
Also Stage 1: invention is often started in academic community in precisely OSS fashion.
GPL is simply a legal tool to protect the right to create and is an outcome of an era when one must ask for a license before humming a popular song in the shower.
Brilliant science journalism there. If the smart probe was splitting atoms it wouldn't need solar panels. Not to mention you don't need to split atoms to get ions.
Sounds ok to me. You take a neutral atom (argon most probably) and split into an ion and a few electrons.
This is not the same as splitting the nucleus.
Re:Doppler shifting radio waves?
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The key is "noticeable". Our hardware is very precise nowadays and the relative shift is approximately proportional to v/c for small v.
The relative velocity was quoted as 5.5km/sec which means v/c=0.000018. This is not such a small number.
Furthermore, even though the frequency changes little, the phase can shift a lot. The change in phase is proportional to v/c times the number of cycles in the segment you are examining - and there are a lot of cycles in 1/8192 second chunk of the microwave signal they are using to communicate.
Lastly, the length of the transmission also matters - 2 hour transmission of 1/8192 sec chunks amounts to approximately 60 million chunks. If you multiply the doppler shift above by the number of chunks you get approx 1000 - i.e. the chunk timing will shift through completely 1000 times during transmission.
(In other words you will be drifting in and out of sync with transmission rate 1000 times during descent.. A sure way to get most data scrambled)
This is not just a telescope - it is an *interferometric* *optical* telescope.
Like the larger radio-telescopes it can combine images from different mirrors into one thus significantly increasing baseline.
Why is larger baseline important ? The larger it
the smaller are the features in the sky you can tell apart.
Thus, when this technology becomes proven, it would be really great to put a pair of these really far away (like on opposite ends of solar system) - this way you will actually be able to
see extrasolar planets instead of inferring their existence from fluctuating luminosity of the star they are orbiting.
Although I know its offical/. policy that everyone should run around in circles yelling its the end of the world everytime a software patent is infringed, this particular dispute is far from over and probably faces 5+ years of appeals before any money changes hands or any technology is changed or restricted.
I don't know about you, but for me it is upsetting enough that any court upheld this patent at all. So what that appeals can go for another 5 years ? What small business can afford that ?
I am not certain whether you had any programming experience, but, in case you had, reading the code of complete program is not always the easiest way to understanding it.
Often, reading something else (like formatted output or sample input files) helps a lot more.
In other words, what you see as a good essay is a collection of sentences distilled in such a way as to produce a controlled response in the reader.
What I value is the ability to understand what the writer had on his mind. For that, I want to get at the materials used to prepare the essay or at least to be able to reconstruct the train of thought from it. I want to get to the Source for the source.
From this point of view, modifying the essay to make its point to appear more valid is actually a wrong thing to do because it aims to cloud the understanding between the writer and the reader - a perfectly fine goal indeed for a lawyer, but not something desirable for a practitioner of science.
Slashdot Mirror
The only catch is that firmware is still closed-source. It can be downloaded, but I am not certain about redistribution conditions.
There is an important exemption to this - one could try to change the license terms through collective bargaining, PR, or just if many people ask for it. This is where websites can be very helpful.
It's the quantity that matters. There are a lot more opportunities in Nigeria than Russia ;)
While caveat emptor is a time tested principle, it is not perfect for all situations.
In particular, here are a few issues:
Example: when was the last time you read the license *before* purchasing a DVD ?
Example: try to change the license applied to your cell phone contract.
How about "I have a life"?
You mean you are working on another project ? It's just a few lines of code, sillyIt might be that their peak number is derived assuming code particularly favorable to the processor architecture in use - say using SSE to do the floating point math. This can easily produce the factor of 2 difference.
But, like democracy, GPL is the least evil of the alternatives.
I agree with your here, however there is a caveat - before this happens someone has to create an Open Source bitkeeper replacement.
Hopefully one of Open Source super-CVS package (arch, subversion, whatever I missed) will mature soon.
They were describing a particular prototype - so likely the 120 W figure refers to the output of the entire device, especially as it outputs 110 Volts (we could guess the relatively small wattage is due to losses due from DC to AC conversion).
Ok, now sign out and post your real opinion as "Anonymous Coward" below.
Yes we can. However it would be called "rooftop"
then - the article lists the size of 120 watt panel as 14 feet by 10 feet.
You'll get a really large screen though.
Post more suggestions below.
I wish I could say this is 100% for "creepiness" value only.
One of the most load sources of gravitational waves are collapses of binary neutron stars or black holes.
If a waveform of such a collapse is found it should first obey Einstein's equations and then quickly transition into the regime of quantum gravity which we know nothing about.
Such information would be extremely valuable as (at the moment) there is no way we can experiment with quantum gravity in a laboratory - the energies involved are far beyound what current accelerators can achieve.
For example, it is trivially easy to slow Unix system to a crawl by starting several find / -name \* processes.
The patches were likely ignored because the code exposed did not allow anything worse than slowing the system down or, in case of firmware loading, required root to begin with.
For example it mentions that operating systems have not been OSS for much of their lifecycle - this is not quite true.
Original Unix was developed in OSS fashion, as was numerous code for Z80-style microcomputers. I am sure I a missing a lot :)
Also Stage 1: invention is often started in academic community in precisely OSS fashion.
GPL is simply a legal tool to protect the right to create and is an outcome of an era when one must ask for a license before humming a popular song in the shower.
Don't tell me you never had fun making something go boom !
There is nothing wrong with blowing up, it is not getting along that is the problem - and possibly the only problem.
His beard is the secret ingredient :)
Sounds ok to me. You take a neutral atom (argon most probably) and split into an ion and a few electrons.
This is not the same as splitting the nucleus.
The relative velocity was quoted as 5.5km/sec which means v/c=0.000018. This is not such a small number.
Furthermore, even though the frequency changes little, the phase can shift a lot. The change in phase is proportional to v/c times the number of cycles in the segment you are examining - and there are a lot of cycles in 1/8192 second chunk of the microwave signal they are using to communicate.
Lastly, the length of the transmission also matters - 2 hour transmission of 1/8192 sec chunks amounts to approximately 60 million chunks. If you multiply the doppler shift above by the number of chunks you get approx 1000 - i.e. the chunk timing will shift through completely 1000 times during transmission. (In other words you will be drifting in and out of sync with transmission rate 1000 times during descent.. A sure way to get most data scrambled)
Like the larger radio-telescopes it can combine images from different mirrors into one thus significantly increasing baseline.
Why is larger baseline important ? The larger it the smaller are the features in the sky you can tell apart.
Thus, when this technology becomes proven, it would be really great to put a pair of these really far away (like on opposite ends of solar system) - this way you will actually be able to see extrasolar planets instead of inferring their existence from fluctuating luminosity of the star they are orbiting.
I don't know about you, but for me it is upsetting enough that any court upheld this patent at all. So what that appeals can go for another 5 years ? What small business can afford that ?
- Linux Versus NT
-
Linux versus FreeBSD
- Linux versus TwinView Nvidia GForce4 MX 4000 (ok, it's a bizarre one, but we are being thorough
:)
-
Linux versus MacOS X Server
- Linux Versus On Time RTOS-32 for Real-Time Embedded Systems
And, most importantly: Linux Versus Linux. (No you can't actually read it..)Ok, this was the first page.. I got bored copy'n'pasting afterward.
I am not certain whether you had any programming experience, but, in case you had, reading the code of complete program is not always the easiest way to understanding it.
Often, reading something else (like formatted output or sample input files) helps a lot more.
In other words, what you see as a good essay is a collection of sentences distilled in such a way as to produce a controlled response in the reader.
What I value is the ability to understand what the writer had on his mind. For that, I want to get at the materials used to prepare the essay or at least to be able to reconstruct the train of thought from it. I want to get to the Source for the source.
From this point of view, modifying the essay to make its point to appear more valid is actually a wrong thing to do because it aims to cloud the understanding between the writer and the reader - a perfectly fine goal indeed for a lawyer, but not something desirable for a practitioner of science.