Because the kinds of people making these decisions are usually technology-illiterate to the point where they still probably say, "Computers are the wave of the future!"
Well, you're probably right with that. But I've been noticing that lately, when the media has articles about "electronic voting", they now usually include a comment about the widespread objection to the idea by "computer experts", whatever they think that means.
The summary seems to be that there are two different objections to computerized voting equipment. One comes from the Luddites, who think that paper ballots were good enough for their grandparents, so they should be good enough for us, while ignoring all the ways that paper ballots can be subverted by insiders. The other objections come from the computer geeks, who observe that the current crop of equipment seems designed to lack any sort of audit trail or security precautions, making it exceedingly easy for an insider to subvert the results. ("You can train a chimp to change the election results.";-)
We probably can't do much about the Luddites except wait for them to die off. We can do something about the insecure, easily-subverted electronic voting systems. We just make it illegal to use any system that's not completely open to inspection by the public. It's easy to see the resistance to this suggestion as strong evidence that the lack of security and auditability is not an accident, but is intentional design,.
We'll probably have good electronic voting systems in a few decades. But it'll take the usual extended fight to overcome the political system's general desire to use an easily-subverted system. Stay tuned.
This idea that it is just a quaint piece of paper to be ignored at various times is extremely ignorant.
It's especially ignorant, since the US Constitution wasn't written on paper. It's a very quaint piece of parchment. Several pieces, actually. It's sorta hard to find a thin-skinned animal that's big enough for that much text, especially if you want to have nice-looking rectangular pages.
The same sex marriage debate on the other hand, I'll give you that one. What really bothers me is that if there is a separation of church and state, and Obama's position (to take a more liberal view) is that the government should not be "re-defining" what "marriage" is since that's best left up to the states and faith groups, then why is it a legal institution ? Why does the government define it at all ? Why do marriage licenses exist and why does the government have anything at all to do with marriage ?
Mostly because there are legal effects of marriage, easily found in such places as laws on taxes, property ownership, responsibility for children, etc. And note that in most US states (and in a lot of other countries), there is a distinction between a "civil" marriage (registered with the state) and a "religious" marriage (registered with a religious body). You can be married in either sense or both.
For example, I've lived in Massachusetts for about 25 years now, and this state legalized same-sex marriage 4 years ago. But I attended same-sex weddings years before that. These were religious marriages, but weren't civil marriages. In one, two women friends were married in a (very liberal) Jewish synagogue. At one point in the service, the rabbi commented that the state may not know about or recognize this marriage, but God is present and knows, and that's what's important.
This is nothing new in American society. One of the reasons is that, before the Revolution, most of the Colonies had an established church, and that church usually wouldn't perform marriages for non-members. Thus in most of the Colonies, Quakers (or Jews, Muslims, slaves, etc.) couldn't legally marry. They did marry, in their own church, but this was usually not recognized by the legal system. This often caused problems. Thus, in some states, a couple's property was legally owned by the man, and when he died, his property went to his relatives. They could evict his widow, claim all his money, sell his property, whatever, and she had no legal recourse.
One of the reasons that the "separation of church and state" was put in the US constitution was an attempt to end such practices and allow anyone to marry. The eventual result was that most states now just define a "civil" marriage (and a registration fee;-) without need for a religious service. Most Americans still have a religious wedding service, but it's common to point out that a couple is legally married as soon as the state's marriage registration is signed and notarized. A wedding ceremony is a social custom, but not required by law for the marriage to be valid.
There are some interesting anomalies that result from the civil/religious distinction. Thus, the Catholic church often doesn't recognize divorces, and refuses to recognize a second marriage, so Catholics may have a religious marriage to a different person than the state considers their spouse. The Mormon church outlawed plural marriages, but only in civil marriages; a Mormon man may still have several religious marriages ("marriage in heaven") with several women. A similar situation exists among American Muslims. In both cases, plural marriages are actually rare and aren't widely publicised, but they reportedly exist and would be recognized by the appropriate religious courts.
As often happens, the legal system's handling of marriage is complex and messy. Especially when married people move to a different jurisdiction than their original marriage was registered with.
Name one, just one other nation that the US has conquered.
That's easy: The Cherokee nation. The Blackfoot nation. The Dakota nation. The Hopi nation. The Navajo nation. The Hawaiian nation. The list goes on and on.
Conquering means that the US invaded, and that the subjects are now part of the US without voting rights.
Well, I suppose the subjects are part of the US, specifically they're incorporated into its soil, and the US doesn't let dead people vote (except maybe in Chicago;-). Most of the North American nations conquered by the US were simply exterminated, in some cases via biological warfare. The death rate was often over 90%. The descendants of the few survivors are now allowed to vote, since it no longer matters.
There's copious historical documentation. Of course, if you grew up attending US schools, you probably never heard about any of it. I didn't, until I started reading a bit of history on my own. But I was familiar with the slogan "The only good Indian is a dead Indian".
Trivia question: What American leader is credited with starting that saying? And what man who later became American president published the sentence " I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth"? No cheating now; don't google for them.
And yet by doing that, you are always copying yesterday's design and never quite catching up to the competition.
There are two almost opposite but relevant responses to this.
The first is Microsoft. They've shown that it doesn't matter if you don't quite catch up to the technical leaders. If you have the biggest marketing budget and customers who mostly can't recognize quality products, you'll win the war while the innovators fight the battles with each other. You watch the innovators, make cheap knockoffs of their ideas, and swamp their marketing efforts so that most customers think you're the only company to buy from. You rake in the dough while the others do all the hard work.
The other example is explained in a number of the historical museums here in New England. In the early 1800s, the UK had the world's best cloth mills. The would-be developers here sent over some industrial spies who signed on as laborers at the mills, and sent back technical drawings of the equipment they worked on. The engineers here took those designs, that were often somewhat sketchy, and improved on them. When the big mills opened here, they were technically somewhat better than what the British (mostly Scottish) engineers had built.
Both of these approaches seem to be working for the Chinese, as they did for the Japanese, Koreans and Malaysians in previous decades.
You probably don't have an Xvideo driver. Try "-vo x11". If that doesn't work, try one of the other real-time displays listed when you do "-vo help". You'll know when you get away from displays, it starts talking about files.
That worked, for some definition of "work". That is, a window appeared with the video, and it was even synchronized with the audio. The window was sorta tiny, so I tried to enlarge it. Nothing I tried had any effect at all. Does mplayer have any menus or anything? Actually, I found some by starting MPlayer from the Applications menu at the upper left, but when I start mplayer on the command line, the same clicking on the window has no effect at all. Using CTRL, ALT, etc. still gets no response of any sort. If I put the pointer into the terminal where I ran mplayer, typing things there gets messages saying there's no binding for that character, but nothing else. This seems to imply that there's some way of binding chars to actions, but the man page doesn't explain how I might do this. So all I know to do is to run that one URL and kill it. I don't know how to find other URLs that may work. I guess if I want to see CNN, I can now, but I think I have a long way to go before I'd call mplayer useful.
When you find one that works, go to.mplayer and edit the file "config" to add the -vo line. (I.e., if you find that "-vo x11" works, put the line "-vo x11" in your.mplayer/config.
Well, that didn't work at all, it just gave gibberish messages and died. I did a bit of googling, and found examples that used the syntax "vo=x11". I tried that, and found that the MPlayer entry in the menus now produced a window. But the window doesn't play the video stream. I poked around and found the menu that now turns up when I click inside the window; the URL entry thing is there, but copying the CNN URL doesn't seem to work. I can also run mplayer from the command line without the "-vo x11", so I guess that's something.
I wonder where people learn to use this thing. It's all very baffling.
And why would URL for a video stream be called a "playlist"? That has no obvious relation to the way in which "playlist" is used in other apps.
[I]f I say that I saw a duck, and it's a coot, but for the purposes of my story it doesn't matter that it's a coot not a duck, then for all intents and purposes it's a duck.
Well, I must say that I've never read such an elegant justification for stereotyping and treating all members of a large group according to the actions of a subgroup.;-)
I took the wikipedia hint, and found the "duck test" page, which didn't give much history. This is probably because the meme predates the existence of computers. But I also found the "duck typing" page. A fun part is where it quotes some technical advice:
[D]on't check whether it IS-a duck: check whether it QUACKS-like-a duck, WALKS-like-a duck, etc, etc, depending on exactly what subset of duck-like behaviour you need to play your language-games with.
In lay language, this amounts to saying that you shouldn't conclude that "It is a duck"; you shouldn't even ask what it really is. You should only ask how it quacks, walks, etc., and base your actions on that. The reason, of course, is that if you ask whether it is a duck, in some cases the is-a test will say "No". If what you're trying to do is something that should apply to any water bird (or any quacking bird), then this isn't the answer you're really looking for.
In our house, we have a pet conure (a medium-sized mostly-green parrot) who sometimes quacks very much like a duck. In the rare cases that she walk around on the floor, her gait is fairly duck-like, probably because walking on a hard, flat surface isn't natural for her kind. But I don't think we'll be treating her like a duck. OTOH, we do get some grins when we tell people that she tries to start political discussions by hollering out "Iraq!"
I think it's more a case of "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck"...
And I've long been curious where this weird saying came from. After all, if looks/walks/quacks like a duck, it could well be a coot or gallinule (family Rallidae, order Gruiformes) rather than a duck (family Anatidae, order Anseriformes). Of course, both families have a fair variety of quacks, gaits and body shape, but in general they are sufficiently similar that most non-birders can't tell them apart by sight or sound. They're mostly good to eat, too, with a few exceptions.
I'd think that if you tried using this argument in legal circles, you'd be very likely to find that some of those lawyers are either bird watchers or bird hunters, and will ridicule you for the idea that such superficial similarities imply relatedness. I've actually heard bird hunters say that someone is so dumb "that they think a coot is a duck".
So why do people say such things that can be so easily shot down (to coin a phrase) by anyone with the least knowledge of the subject? Anyone know where the "... like a duck" meme could have originated? Google doesn't seem to know, though it does turn up attributions to lots of people.
(One good way to tell Rallidae from Anatidae is that the latter have continuous webs between their toes, while the former have flaps on the sides of their toes that overlap when swimming. There are a lot of other small structural differences between the families that make it easy to tell them apart if you can catch them.)
Hmmm... I keep hearing about how great mplayer is, and I have a new ubuntu 8.04 system sitting on the desk, so I decided to try it out. It wasn't installed, of course, but a "sudo apt-get install mplayer" seemed to work fine. So I tried the above command. The result, when googled, turned out to be something that apparently has bitten thousands of people, but none of their questions seems to be answered as far as I can tell. The symptoms are the messages:
[VO_XV] Could not grab port 100. [VO_XV] Could not find free Xvideo port - maybe another process is already [VO_XV] using it. Close all video applications, and try again. If that does [VO_XV] not help, see 'mplayer -vo help' for other (non-xv) video out drivers. Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device.
The audio seems to be working fine, but there's no video. I also found the Mplayer entry in the Applications menu, and tried it. That was supremely unhelpful. I found the Open.. Play URL thing, selected it, a window popped up, I pasted in the above URL, hit the OK button... and an "ERROR!" window popped up saying "Failed, exiting." No clue at all as to what might be wrong, and the only thing I could do was hit OK, which closed the "ERROR!" window, but MPlayer didn't actually exit like it sait it would. So I looked around some more. I didn't find anything else that would accept a URL.
So. Apparently mplayer can't or won't show me the video stream, though it does play the audio and it identifies itself as CNN. Anyone have clues where I look now? Googling has, as I said, turned up lots of reports of the above error condition, but apparently nobody has posted anything explaining what to do about it. If there's a way of finding another program that has the port open, it doesn't seem to be documented anywhere, not even in "man lsof", and "mplayer -vo help" doesn't seem to mention the topic at all.
So is there somewhere I can read about diagnosing this problem and fixing it?
(It may seem dumb asking such questions here, but I've actually gotten useful pointers a few times in the past when I post questions like this on/.) (And I must say I've really grown to hate programmers whose idea of a helpful error message is "Failed, exiting." It's sad to see this user-hostile approach infecting the geeky linux universe.;-)
And the American people answered "I'd rather have a beer with the teetotal ex-alcoholic". How fucking stupid can you get?
Well now; I'd argue that this showed that many of those voters understood W's claim to have stopped drinking as just a campaign tactic. Hardly anyone I know believed it at all. And his behavior in various press conferences and such since the elections certainly reinforces the belief that he was simply lying about his (non-)drinking for PR reasons. Part of the fodder for the professional comedians in the past 8 years has been asking what George has been drinking/smoking. Understanding this could be viewed as rather good insight on the part of voters.
Of course, one might ask how many voters have actually had a beer with him. Probably about as many as got a tax cut. And probably the same people. So the voters were suckered anyway.
I'll be voting my values instead of who I decide that I can tolerate. Too bad more people didn't do that...
Or maybe the problem was that too many people did. After all, one of the major deciding issues in both 2000 and 2004 was "Who would you rather have a beer with?" You can't get much more values-oriented than that.
Last Sunday's Doonesbury was a good comment on the topic, tying in the "Joe the Plumber" campaign meme. Google for it if that link doesn't work for you.
Well, maybe, but in this case we can expect little more than a flame fest.
Not that it matters that much; we don't have to read it, or we can read at mod level 3.
I wonder if there's a more effective way to automatically limit what's shown to the more thoughtful and/or informative (and/or funny) messages. Nah; probably not.
By hacking you mean logging into a system with the password they gave you?
Hey, some government agencies (esp. the military) have counted pings to their address as "hacking" attacks. So be very careful the next time you type a ping command with an IP address. If you mistype the address, you could be attacking someone's computer.
One of the reasons computer security is so poor is that we keep reading things like this. It tells anyone with even a grain of sense that they shouldn't have anything to do with computer security. Until we wise up and start thanking kids like this, we'll continue to have crappy security in most of our systems, because the smart kids learn early to feign ignorance and disinterest in the topic.
The statement still stands that he has been punished
Yes, and hopefully this will teach him a valuable lesson: When you find things like this, you shouldn't be so stupid as to report them to the people who might be able to fix the problem. You should keep the information to yourself, until you find someone who is willing to pay you for the information. Then, instead of giving your knowledge away for free like a fool, you are acting like a true entrepreneur and looking for ways to profit from your hard-earned knowledge. Such profit-making enterprise is the sort of thing that this world honors and praises, not helping people by volunteering your time and knowledge.
So you're saying the guy above you was right? The scenario was that I've just pumped some gas at a self-service station, and I want to go in and pay. It's a cold day, so the station's door is closed, but I can see the attendant inside at the counter. When I push the door open, I have committed "breaking and entering"? And, since nobody explicitly invited me in, I've committed trespassing?
Next time, I'll just drive off without paying. That would just be petty theft, a much lesser charge in most jurisdictions.
Opening a closed but not locked door and entering a building without permission is still against the law. It is called breaking and entering.
IANAL, and I'm just guessing, but wouldn't that be tresspassing? I mean, if you're breaking and entering, I would assume that requires the breaking of something, right?
In fact, people are almost never arrested for opening an unlocked door and entering a building. In most cases, if this were attempted, the victim would simply file a harassment suit, and would usually win.
I've opened unlocked doors and entered buildings that I don't own thousands of times, and I've never been challenged. I did this at a grocery store just this morning. I've also done it at doctors' and dentists' offices, a number of banks, probably a hundred clothing stores, etc. Never once has someone accused me of trespassing. Occasionally someone has said something like "We're not open for another 10 minutes; have a seat and wait if you like." But I've never had a stronger reaction.
If a building looks at all like a "public" (i.e., commercial) building, such as a store or restaurant or..., even if it's private property, you'd better have a "No Entry" or "No Trespassing" sign on the outside of the door itself. Otherwise, you have little if any complaint if someone mistakenly thinks the open door means your open for business and enters. You can tell them that you're not open for business (yet). But if you try to get them arrested, you'll probably be the one brought up on charges.
Actually, of course, this almost never happens, either. Most people, except for a few radical private-property extremists, would think that it's reasonable to prosecute someone for the mistake of thinking that an unlocked door means that you're inviting people in to do business.
The article linked to from the summary says "Handles Java Well" in the subtitle, but then never mentions it again - only JavaScript. These are NOT THE SAME.
Yeah, but my FF settings have java disabled totally, and JS blocked by NoScript. So from my viewpoint, they are equivalent no-ops in all but a handful of web sites.
I was too busy registering to participate in one of the few things in my life I can do that can actually benefit all of humanity.
Well, you can expect to be punished in due time.;-)
Actually, this is a situation similar to the old "prisoner's dilemma" game. That's the game theory name for a class of situations in which, if everyone cooperates, everyone benefits, but if some people cooperate and others defect, the defectors win and the cooperators lose.
There is a small chance that having your info in this database will enable research that will provide medical help for you later in life. But there's a much larger chance that the info will lead to discrimination against you in insurance and jobs. So on balance you'll most likely be punished for contributing.
(But you probably won't be punished as severely as the people who contribute to the public good their discoveries of software security flaws, as in the story earlier today.;-)
No, not really. The suggestion that we pay "protection money" to the MAFIAA in exchange for freedom to use the material is just a rewording of the "mechanical license" mechanism that the music recording industry has used for decades. This doesn't qualify as "nationalization" in any sense of the word. It just says that if you want to do something that would be a copyright violation (e.g., public performance of a song you like), you don't have to go through the time-consuming and expensive work of hunting down the work's owner and negotiating a fee. You just pay your annual fee to the registration agency, and you have a license.
Ask the owner of any music performance venue how this works in your country. It seems to mostly work fairly well, from the lack of any major furor over the topic.
There has been one little problem, that "minor" artists (i.e., 90% of the song writers) rarely get paid as much as their registration fee. The agencies can easily take the attitude: It's not worth our effort to write you a check. If you object, you can take us to court, where 10 years and a few hundred thousand dollars in legal fees later you might win and we'll have to pay you.
But for the "successful" song writers, it has actually worked quite well.
They did a test that shows newer Ubuntu releases are slower than old ones. Does the reason matter?
The reasons matter if you view the slowdown as a problem that you want to fix.
About 10 years ago, a bunch of guys in the local linux/unix users group noticed that the latest linux was noticably slow on several popular motherboards that used a certain chipset. One guy managed to extract the boot ROM and they analyzed it. They discovered a little loop that went through the kernel looking for a specific short sequence of instructions, and if found, it turned off the CPU's cache.
They found this sequence in the code generated by gcc in a specific linux kernel routine. They edited it, making a few inconsequential changes (moving around commands whose order didn't matter), recompiled - and that kernel ran a lot faster.
They spread the word that this boot ROM was sabotaging the latest linux kernels, that routine was modified in the archived, and machines sped up when upgraded.
It's useful to be on the lookout for things like this. All sorts of things can cause slowdowns. One common reason is security enhancements, of course. Added features often add code to toplevels, slowing everything down. And we also have to be on the lookout for sabotage by manufacturers and OEMs who are trying to bias the results of things like benchmarks, to make one vendor's software look better than others'.
Actually, I think you only need to go up to the halfway point.
You're still working too hard. You only need go up to the square root. Your reasoning works just fine at that point.
Of course, as someone else pointed out already, this is assuming you're talking about the ordinary integers. If the data set is something like integers mod 2^N, for some N, the an integer may well have divisors that are greater than itself (for the obvious definition of "greater than").
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Because the kinds of people making these decisions are usually technology-illiterate to the point where they still probably say, "Computers are the wave of the future!"
Well, you're probably right with that. But I've been noticing that lately, when the media has articles about "electronic voting", they now usually include a comment about the widespread objection to the idea by "computer experts", whatever they think that means.
The summary seems to be that there are two different objections to computerized voting equipment. One comes from the Luddites, who think that paper ballots were good enough for their grandparents, so they should be good enough for us, while ignoring all the ways that paper ballots can be subverted by insiders. The other objections come from the computer geeks, who observe that the current crop of equipment seems designed to lack any sort of audit trail or security precautions, making it exceedingly easy for an insider to subvert the results. ("You can train a chimp to change the election results.";-)
We probably can't do much about the Luddites except wait for them to die off. We can do something about the insecure, easily-subverted electronic voting systems. We just make it illegal to use any system that's not completely open to inspection by the public. It's easy to see the resistance to this suggestion as strong evidence that the lack of security and auditability is not an accident, but is intentional design,.
We'll probably have good electronic voting systems in a few decades. But it'll take the usual extended fight to overcome the political system's general desire to use an easily-subverted system. Stay tuned.
This idea that it is just a quaint piece of paper to be ignored at various times is extremely ignorant.
It's especially ignorant, since the US Constitution wasn't written on paper. It's a very quaint piece of parchment. Several pieces, actually. It's sorta hard to find a thin-skinned animal that's big enough for that much text, especially if you want to have nice-looking rectangular pages.
(Yeah, I know; picky, picky, picky. ;-)
The same sex marriage debate on the other hand, I'll give you that one. What really bothers me is that if there is a separation of church and state, and Obama's position (to take a more liberal view) is that the government should not be "re-defining" what "marriage" is since that's best left up to the states and faith groups, then why is it a legal institution ? Why does the government define it at all ? Why do marriage licenses exist and why does the government have anything at all to do with marriage ?
Mostly because there are legal effects of marriage, easily found in such places as laws on taxes, property ownership, responsibility for children, etc. And note that in most US states (and in a lot of other countries), there is a distinction between a "civil" marriage (registered with the state) and a "religious" marriage (registered with a religious body). You can be married in either sense or both.
For example, I've lived in Massachusetts for about 25 years now, and this state legalized same-sex marriage 4 years ago. But I attended same-sex weddings years before that. These were religious marriages, but weren't civil marriages. In one, two women friends were married in a (very liberal) Jewish synagogue. At one point in the service, the rabbi commented that the state may not know about or recognize this marriage, but God is present and knows, and that's what's important.
This is nothing new in American society. One of the reasons is that, before the Revolution, most of the Colonies had an established church, and that church usually wouldn't perform marriages for non-members. Thus in most of the Colonies, Quakers (or Jews, Muslims, slaves, etc.) couldn't legally marry. They did marry, in their own church, but this was usually not recognized by the legal system. This often caused problems. Thus, in some states, a couple's property was legally owned by the man, and when he died, his property went to his relatives. They could evict his widow, claim all his money, sell his property, whatever, and she had no legal recourse.
One of the reasons that the "separation of church and state" was put in the US constitution was an attempt to end such practices and allow anyone to marry. The eventual result was that most states now just define a "civil" marriage (and a registration fee ;-) without need for a religious service. Most Americans still have a religious wedding service, but it's common to point out that a couple is legally married as soon as the state's marriage registration is signed and notarized. A wedding ceremony is a social custom, but not required by law for the marriage to be valid.
There are some interesting anomalies that result from the civil/religious distinction. Thus, the Catholic church often doesn't recognize divorces, and refuses to recognize a second marriage, so Catholics may have a religious marriage to a different person than the state considers their spouse. The Mormon church outlawed plural marriages, but only in civil marriages; a Mormon man may still have several religious marriages ("marriage in heaven") with several women. A similar situation exists among American Muslims. In both cases, plural marriages are actually rare and aren't widely publicised, but they reportedly exist and would be recognized by the appropriate religious courts.
As often happens, the legal system's handling of marriage is complex and messy. Especially when married people move to a different jurisdiction than their original marriage was registered with.
Name one, just one other nation that the US has conquered.
That's easy: The Cherokee nation. The Blackfoot nation. The Dakota nation. The Hopi nation. The Navajo nation. The Hawaiian nation. The list goes on and on.
Conquering means that the US invaded, and that the subjects are now part of the US without voting rights.
Well, I suppose the subjects are part of the US, specifically they're incorporated into its soil, and the US doesn't let dead people vote (except maybe in Chicago ;-). Most of the North American nations conquered by the US were simply exterminated, in some cases via biological warfare. The death rate was often over 90%. The descendants of the few survivors are now allowed to vote, since it no longer matters.
There's copious historical documentation. Of course, if you grew up attending US schools, you probably never heard about any of it. I didn't, until I started reading a bit of history on my own. But I was familiar with the slogan "The only good Indian is a dead Indian".
Trivia question: What American leader is credited with starting that saying? And what man who later became American president published the sentence " I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth"? No cheating now; don't google for them.
[I was born in the US, FWIW.]
And yet by doing that, you are always copying yesterday's design and never quite catching up to the competition.
There are two almost opposite but relevant responses to this.
The first is Microsoft. They've shown that it doesn't matter if you don't quite catch up to the technical leaders. If you have the biggest marketing budget and customers who mostly can't recognize quality products, you'll win the war while the innovators fight the battles with each other. You watch the innovators, make cheap knockoffs of their ideas, and swamp their marketing efforts so that most customers think you're the only company to buy from. You rake in the dough while the others do all the hard work.
The other example is explained in a number of the historical museums here in New England. In the early 1800s, the UK had the world's best cloth mills. The would-be developers here sent over some industrial spies who signed on as laborers at the mills, and sent back technical drawings of the equipment they worked on. The engineers here took those designs, that were often somewhat sketchy, and improved on them. When the big mills opened here, they were technically somewhat better than what the British (mostly Scottish) engineers had built.
Both of these approaches seem to be working for the Chinese, as they did for the Japanese, Koreans and Malaysians in previous decades.
You probably don't have an Xvideo driver. Try "-vo x11". If that doesn't work, try one of the other real-time displays listed when you do "-vo help". You'll know when you get away from displays, it starts talking about files.
That worked, for some definition of "work". That is, a window appeared with the video, and it was even synchronized with the audio. The window was sorta tiny, so I tried to enlarge it. Nothing I tried had any effect at all. Does mplayer have any menus or anything? Actually, I found some by starting MPlayer from the Applications menu at the upper left, but when I start mplayer on the command line, the same clicking on the window has no effect at all. Using CTRL, ALT, etc. still gets no response of any sort. If I put the pointer into the terminal where I ran mplayer, typing things there gets messages saying there's no binding for that character, but nothing else. This seems to imply that there's some way of binding chars to actions, but the man page doesn't explain how I might do this. So all I know to do is to run that one URL and kill it. I don't know how to find other URLs that may work. I guess if I want to see CNN, I can now, but I think I have a long way to go before I'd call mplayer useful.
When you find one that works, go to .mplayer and edit the file "config" to add the -vo line. (I.e., if you find that "-vo x11" works, put the line "-vo x11" in your .mplayer/config.
Well, that didn't work at all, it just gave gibberish messages and died. I did a bit of googling, and found examples that used the syntax "vo=x11". I tried that, and found that the MPlayer entry in the menus now produced a window. But the window doesn't play the video stream. I poked around and found the menu that now turns up when I click inside the window; the URL entry thing is there, but copying the CNN URL doesn't seem to work. I can also run mplayer from the command line without the "-vo x11", so I guess that's something.
I wonder where people learn to use this thing. It's all very baffling.
And why would URL for a video stream be called a "playlist"? That has no obvious relation to the way in which "playlist" is used in other apps.
Wooooosh!
<Ducks ...>
One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is "There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."
Of course, it can be difficult to prosecute criminals who are in charge of writing the laws and determining the pay of judges.
[I]f I say that I saw a duck, and it's a coot, but for the purposes of my story it doesn't matter that it's a coot not a duck, then for all intents and purposes it's a duck.
Well, I must say that I've never read such an elegant justification for stereotyping and treating all members of a large group according to the actions of a subgroup. ;-)
I took the wikipedia hint, and found the "duck test" page, which didn't give much history. This is probably because the meme predates the existence of computers. But I also found the "duck typing" page. A fun part is where it quotes some technical advice:
In lay language, this amounts to saying that you shouldn't conclude that "It is a duck"; you shouldn't even ask what it really is. You should only ask how it quacks, walks, etc., and base your actions on that. The reason, of course, is that if you ask whether it is a duck, in some cases the is-a test will say "No". If what you're trying to do is something that should apply to any water bird (or any quacking bird), then this isn't the answer you're really looking for.
In our house, we have a pet conure (a medium-sized mostly-green parrot) who sometimes quacks very much like a duck. In the rare cases that she walk around on the floor, her gait is fairly duck-like, probably because walking on a hard, flat surface isn't natural for her kind. But I don't think we'll be treating her like a duck. OTOH, we do get some grins when we tell people that she tries to start political discussions by hollering out "Iraq!"
I think it's more a case of "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck" ...
And I've long been curious where this weird saying came from. After all, if looks/walks/quacks like a duck, it could well be a coot or gallinule (family Rallidae, order Gruiformes) rather than a duck (family Anatidae, order Anseriformes). Of course, both families have a fair variety of quacks, gaits and body shape, but in general they are sufficiently similar that most non-birders can't tell them apart by sight or sound. They're mostly good to eat, too, with a few exceptions.
I'd think that if you tried using this argument in legal circles, you'd be very likely to find that some of those lawyers are either bird watchers or bird hunters, and will ridicule you for the idea that such superficial similarities imply relatedness. I've actually heard bird hunters say that someone is so dumb "that they think a coot is a duck".
So why do people say such things that can be so easily shot down (to coin a phrase) by anyone with the least knowledge of the subject? Anyone know where the "... like a duck" meme could have originated? Google doesn't seem to know, though it does turn up attributions to lots of people.
(One good way to tell Rallidae from Anatidae is that the latter have continuous webs between their toes, while the former have flaps on the sides of their toes that overlap when swimming. There are a lot of other small structural differences between the families that make it easy to tell them apart if you can catch them.)
mplayer -playlist http://www.cnn.com/video/live/cnnlive_1.asx
I'm running it on linux, and watching CNN right now.
Hmmm ... I keep hearing about how great mplayer is, and I have a new ubuntu 8.04 system sitting on the desk, so I decided to try it out. It wasn't installed, of course, but a "sudo apt-get install mplayer" seemed to work fine. So I tried the above command. The result, when googled, turned out to be something that apparently has bitten thousands of people, but none of their questions seems to be answered as far as I can tell. The symptoms are the messages:
[VO_XV] Could not grab port 100.
[VO_XV] Could not find free Xvideo port - maybe another process is already
[VO_XV] using it. Close all video applications, and try again. If that does
[VO_XV] not help, see 'mplayer -vo help' for other (non-xv) video out drivers.
Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device.
The audio seems to be working fine, but there's no video. I also found the Mplayer entry in the Applications menu, and tried it. That was supremely unhelpful. I found the Open .. Play URL thing, selected it, a window popped up, I pasted in the above URL, hit the OK button ... and an "ERROR!" window popped up saying "Failed, exiting." No clue at all as to what might be wrong, and the only thing I could do was hit OK, which closed the "ERROR!" window, but MPlayer didn't actually exit like it sait it would. So I looked around some more. I didn't find anything else that would accept a URL.
So. Apparently mplayer can't or won't show me the video stream, though it does play the audio and it identifies itself as CNN. Anyone have clues where I look now? Googling has, as I said, turned up lots of reports of the above error condition, but apparently nobody has posted anything explaining what to do about it. If there's a way of finding another program that has the port open, it doesn't seem to be documented anywhere, not even in "man lsof", and "mplayer -vo help" doesn't seem to mention the topic at all.
So is there somewhere I can read about diagnosing this problem and fixing it?
(It may seem dumb asking such questions here, but I've actually gotten useful pointers a few times in the past when I post questions like this on /.) ;-)
(And I must say I've really grown to hate programmers whose idea of a helpful error message is "Failed, exiting." It's sad to see this user-hostile approach infecting the geeky linux universe.
And the American people answered "I'd rather have a beer with the teetotal ex-alcoholic". How fucking stupid can you get?
Well now; I'd argue that this showed that many of those voters understood W's claim to have stopped drinking as just a campaign tactic. Hardly anyone I know believed it at all. And his behavior in various press conferences and such since the elections certainly reinforces the belief that he was simply lying about his (non-)drinking for PR reasons. Part of the fodder for the professional comedians in the past 8 years has been asking what George has been drinking/smoking. Understanding this could be viewed as rather good insight on the part of voters.
Of course, one might ask how many voters have actually had a beer with him. Probably about as many as got a tax cut. And probably the same people. So the voters were suckered anyway.
I'll be voting my values instead of who I decide that I can tolerate. Too bad more people didn't do that ...
Or maybe the problem was that too many people did. After all, one of the major deciding issues in both 2000 and 2004 was "Who would you rather have a beer with?" You can't get much more values-oriented than that.
Last Sunday's Doonesbury was a good comment on the topic, tying in the "Joe the Plumber" campaign meme. Google for it if that link doesn't work for you.
Well, maybe, but in this case we can expect little more than a flame fest.
Not that it matters that much; we don't have to read it, or we can read at mod level 3.
I wonder if there's a more effective way to automatically limit what's shown to the more thoughtful and/or informative (and/or funny) messages. Nah; probably not.
Thank you for your thank-you note.
By hacking you mean logging into a system with the password they gave you?
Hey, some government agencies (esp. the military) have counted pings to their address as "hacking" attacks. So be very careful the next time you type a ping command with an IP address. If you mistype the address, you could be attacking someone's computer.
One of the reasons computer security is so poor is that we keep reading things like this. It tells anyone with even a grain of sense that they shouldn't have anything to do with computer security. Until we wise up and start thanking kids like this, we'll continue to have crappy security in most of our systems, because the smart kids learn early to feign ignorance and disinterest in the topic.
The statement still stands that he has been punished
Yes, and hopefully this will teach him a valuable lesson: When you find things like this, you shouldn't be so stupid as to report them to the people who might be able to fix the problem. You should keep the information to yourself, until you find someone who is willing to pay you for the information. Then, instead of giving your knowledge away for free like a fool, you are acting like a true entrepreneur and looking for ways to profit from your hard-earned knowledge. Such profit-making enterprise is the sort of thing that this world honors and praises, not helping people by volunteering your time and knowledge.
Maybe next time he'll know better.
So you're saying the guy above you was right? The scenario was that I've just pumped some gas at a self-service station, and I want to go in and pay. It's a cold day, so the station's door is closed, but I can see the attendant inside at the counter. When I push the door open, I have committed "breaking and entering"? And, since nobody explicitly invited me in, I've committed trespassing?
Next time, I'll just drive off without paying. That would just be petty theft, a much lesser charge in most jurisdictions.
Is the law really that absurd?
In fact, people are almost never arrested for opening an unlocked door and entering a building. In most cases, if this were attempted, the victim would simply file a harassment suit, and would usually win.
I've opened unlocked doors and entered buildings that I don't own thousands of times, and I've never been challenged. I did this at a grocery store just this morning. I've also done it at doctors' and dentists' offices, a number of banks, probably a hundred clothing stores, etc. Never once has someone accused me of trespassing. Occasionally someone has said something like "We're not open for another 10 minutes; have a seat and wait if you like." But I've never had a stronger reaction.
If a building looks at all like a "public" (i.e., commercial) building, such as a store or restaurant or ..., even if it's private property, you'd better have a "No Entry" or "No Trespassing" sign on the outside of the door itself. Otherwise, you have little if any complaint if someone mistakenly thinks the open door means your open for business and enters. You can tell them that you're not open for business (yet). But if you try to get them arrested, you'll probably be the one brought up on charges.
Actually, of course, this almost never happens, either. Most people, except for a few radical private-property extremists, would think that it's reasonable to prosecute someone for the mistake of thinking that an unlocked door means that you're inviting people in to do business.
The article linked to from the summary says "Handles Java Well" in the subtitle, but then never mentions it again - only JavaScript.
These are NOT THE SAME.
Yeah, but my FF settings have java disabled totally, and JS blocked by NoScript. So from my viewpoint, they are equivalent no-ops in all but a handful of web sites.
I was too busy registering to participate in one of the few things in my life I can do that can actually benefit all of humanity.
Well, you can expect to be punished in due time. ;-)
Actually, this is a situation similar to the old "prisoner's dilemma" game. That's the game theory name for a class of situations in which, if everyone cooperates, everyone benefits, but if some people cooperate and others defect, the defectors win and the cooperators lose.
There is a small chance that having your info in this database will enable research that will provide medical help for you later in life. But there's a much larger chance that the info will lead to discrimination against you in insurance and jobs. So on balance you'll most likely be punished for contributing.
(But you probably won't be punished as severely as the people who contribute to the public good their discoveries of software security flaws, as in the story earlier today. ;-)
Nationalize the media? Wow.
Really?
No, not really. The suggestion that we pay "protection money" to the MAFIAA in exchange for freedom to use the material is just a rewording of the "mechanical license" mechanism that the music recording industry has used for decades. This doesn't qualify as "nationalization" in any sense of the word. It just says that if you want to do something that would be a copyright violation (e.g., public performance of a song you like), you don't have to go through the time-consuming and expensive work of hunting down the work's owner and negotiating a fee. You just pay your annual fee to the registration agency, and you have a license.
Ask the owner of any music performance venue how this works in your country. It seems to mostly work fairly well, from the lack of any major furor over the topic.
There has been one little problem, that "minor" artists (i.e., 90% of the song writers) rarely get paid as much as their registration fee. The agencies can easily take the attitude: It's not worth our effort to write you a check. If you object, you can take us to court, where 10 years and a few hundred thousand dollars in legal fees later you might win and we'll have to pay you.
But for the "successful" song writers, it has actually worked quite well.
They did a test that shows newer Ubuntu releases are slower than old ones. Does the reason matter?
The reasons matter if you view the slowdown as a problem that you want to fix.
About 10 years ago, a bunch of guys in the local linux/unix users group noticed that the latest linux was noticably slow on several popular motherboards that used a certain chipset. One guy managed to extract the boot ROM and they analyzed it. They discovered a little loop that went through the kernel looking for a specific short sequence of instructions, and if found, it turned off the CPU's cache.
They found this sequence in the code generated by gcc in a specific linux kernel routine. They edited it, making a few inconsequential changes (moving around commands whose order didn't matter), recompiled - and that kernel ran a lot faster.
They spread the word that this boot ROM was sabotaging the latest linux kernels, that routine was modified in the archived, and machines sped up when upgraded.
It's useful to be on the lookout for things like this. All sorts of things can cause slowdowns. One common reason is security enhancements, of course. Added features often add code to toplevels, slowing everything down. And we also have to be on the lookout for sabotage by manufacturers and OEMs who are trying to bias the results of things like benchmarks, to make one vendor's software look better than others'.
Actually, I think you only need to go up to the halfway point.
You're still working too hard. You only need go up to the square root. Your reasoning works just fine at that point.
Of course, as someone else pointed out already, this is assuming you're talking about the ordinary integers. If the data set is something like integers mod 2^N, for some N, the an integer may well have divisors that are greater than itself (for the obvious definition of "greater than").
Huh? What?
It isn't???