[I]f the Tech involved seen a folder on the desktop labeled 'child porn' then he'd have every reason to check to see the contents of the folder and inform police. More than likely they installed some sort of video editing software or something and went to the last opened list for a file to test it with.
Or maybe they opened your browser and looked at the last few things that were downloaded. If you run with javascript (or other scripting tool like active-X) turned on, there are demos around the net showing how this can implicate you in all sorts of crimes. (I have a couple such demos on my own site, but I don't want it to be slashdotted, so I just suggest you google for it.;-)
What these demos typically do is use what's often called "preloading" to download things like images that are likely to be used in the site's other pages. This speeds up access to later pages, at the price of possibly downloading a few files that are never used. The fun part of the demos is to point out that files may be preloaded from anywhere on the net, and need not be used by any other pages. This means that, if you have JS turned on, my page can download all sorts of porn from various sites and just store them in your browser's cache. And anyone who knows how to check what you have recently downloaded will find them there, where they can easily be displayed via a file://... URL.
On second thought, maybe I should make a copy of my demo, using URLs for images that aren't quite as innocent as the ones that I've used, and post the URL here. Then I could look at my server's logs to see if I can identify any of the visitors, and send a tipoff to their local police that you've been downloading a lot of porn, and which browser's cache they should look in to find the images.
Science (like religion) is in some sort of ideal world, vacuum, where all is simple and described by a formula.
I think you're confusing (or conflating) science with mathematics. But don't feel bad; people do this all the time. Part of the reason is that science routinely uses mathematics as a tool, and the two fields are deeply intertwined. Scientists use math to help understand and explain what they're working on, while mathematicians routinely use scientific work as inspiration for new ideas to pursue.
But the "science" part is usually very much about the real world. It's the mathematicians who carefully avoid dealing with the real world, since that's not their job. The interesting part is how often the abstract, theoretical stuff that the mathematicians work on turn out to be very applicable to figuring out what's going on in the real world.
One of the problems with our terminology is that "computer science" is generally used for the abstract, theoretical part of software. This is misleading, because the subject really is a mathematical field, not scientific. If it were scientific, the computer scientists would be performing experiments and developing hypotheses to explain how software works. But that's not what they do; it's the "software engineers" trying to debug software that do things like that.
And this leads to the problem that "software engineering" generally involves doing things that in other fields would be called "science". In engineering, you are generally working with tools and materials whose behavior is well understood, so you can concentrate on design. With software development, this isn't generally true. An engineer designing a bridge or house or airplane can expect to work with detailed specs for all the available components. With software, the equivalent information is usually proprietary and intentionally hidden from the people building the code. Even in "open source" systems, the concept of "information hiding" is popular, and all too often this does mean that needed information is intentionally hidden from the person writing the code. So the software engineer is working with poorly-documented material, and must develop using processes that test and discover the properties of the underlying stuff.
Of course, there are some software engineers who don't do any debugging. But we know how well this works. Civil engineers might be able to develop this way, since they have access to full specs for their material. Software engineers can't, because they are kept ignorant of the details of lower-level stuff. As long as this is true, software engineering must have a large scientific component, to study and test the software as it's developed. They must constantly develop and test hypotheses about their code, in order to get it to function as desired in an environment that is mostly hidden.
Anyway, there's little chance of getting the terminology straight any time soon. There's no chance of software people getting access to detailed specs for the underlying systems. We even have laws in place that block the access to full information. So software engineering can't really be true engineering, and software developers will continue to spend large parts of their time acting as experimental scientists in order to debug their software. And they won't get much help from the computer scientists, who are spending most of their time working with the mathematics of the subject, while disparaging the real-world portion of their discipline as being "mere engineering".
Now if we could only get the computer field to adopt the same definitions that other fields of engineering, science and mat use. But that isn't going to happen any time soon.
Are newspaper purchases subject to sales tax? I never get charged for it.
It depends on where you live. Ask google about "newspaper sales-tax" and read all about it. There's a campaign right now in California to eliminate the sales tax on newspapers. It's also common for the subscription price to include any local taxes, to simplify life for everyone. Part of the explanation seems to be that newspapers have never really competed on price, so they have no strong motive to quote a price lower than what you'll pay. I've read that some US states and a few European countries explicitly exclude newspapers from the sales tax, but I don't know how many do this.
Well, we do have plenty of long-necked dinosaurs in our world today. But the biggest (ostriches, geese, etc.) aren't nearly big enough to tell us much about the truly huge ones that were around 70 or 90 million years ago. Even an ostrich's neck doesn't need much assistance in lifting blood to the head. They're also in a different suborder, unfortunately.
A theory of mine is that long necked dinosaurs had auxiliary hearts in their necks...
Possible, but we might not recognize them even in fossilized soft tissues. Such a "heart" could easily evolve from an artery that passes between (or through) muscles. Then the normal flexing of the neck, combined with one-way valves in the arteries, would function to life the blood upward. Once such a configuration exists, the usual selection process could slowly make it more effective. But the result could still look just like an artery passing through musculature, with little obvious evidence that the muscles are modified to assist in the pumping in addition to their original function.
It's too bad that a few of the big ones didn't get another 65 million years to evolve. We could have some good data on the topic by now.
A number of researchers have reported evidence that both the oxygen and CO2 levels were higher than now in the Cretaceous atmosphere. Nothing like a factor of 370, of course, more like 20% or 40% higher. And, of course, other researchers point out that this should be considered just an "interesting hypothesis" until more supporting evidence is found. The idea is generally accepted as probably true, but the numbers' precision isn't great, so further research is needed.
Two orders of magnitude is definitely stretching the idea into "crank science" territory.
... since the law is meant to be construed narrowly, not generalized, since it specifically mentions digital downloads, then any irl situations are excluded.
Yeah, but legislatures and courts do have a history of looking at "precedent". If this goes over without much fuss, it will send a message (to invoke another popular media meme) that the population and courts have accepted the principle. It can then be taken as precedent for the interpretation of other laws, as well as for the phrasing of new laws.
(And that's a slippery slope, yet another popular media meme.;-)
It occurs to me that if this happens, it has the potential to be applied to anything else that's covered by copyright. Consider the results.
If you check a book out from your local library and read it, you'll be liable for the sales tax on the retail price of the same book (at a book seller of the prosecution's choice).
If you leave a newspaper (hey, remember them?) lying around in your house and a visitor reads it, they'll be liable for the sales tax on not just that paper, but for a subscription to the newspaper.
If your local school has textbooks that they let students study from, those students (or their parents) will be liable for the sales tax on the price of the books.
If a store is playing music audible from wherever you may be (sitting at a table in a restaurant, using an elevator, walking by on the sidewalk), you are liable for the sales tax on the album that contains the music that you heard.
Since everything is by default copyrighted as soon as it's "published" (whatever that actually means), any time you read anything from any source or hear anything that was recorded, you will be required to learn the retail price for the copyrighted work, and pay the sales tax on it.
We've been in the habit of being a bit bemused by the fact that, when the authorities don't have any evidence against some supposed criminal, they customarily just charge them with tax evasion. But this is no longer just something that big-time Mafia capos and politicians have to worry about. Now we can all be tax evaders, by merely reading something somewhere and neglecting to determine its retail sales price so we can pay the sales tax.
And I can make you a criminal by merely putting copyrighted text somewhere that you read it, or by putting recorded sound somewhere that you hear it.
It can be fun to think of what might be the ultimate motive for passing laws like this. Look up the phrase "nuisance law" for further explanation.
(I have the vague impression, e.g., that [Objective-C] functions are only allowed to have one parameter. This *MUST* be wrong, but I couldn't find any documentation that would tell me that it was.)
Actually, you don't have to be wrong. There are a number of rather powerful languages that, strictly speaking, provide for only a single parameter to a function, but since that parameter can be a complex data object, it's not the limitation you might think.
For example, both LISP and perl have functions with just one parameter, but that parameter can be a list, which is a first-class data type in both languages. This means that you can pass arbitrary-length lists of values to a function, and it has the tools to run through the entire list.
This is much more powerful than the approach in languages that only allow for a fixed number of named function parameters, since in such languages, every parameter is a special case, and you can't iterate through the parameters except by explicitly listing the names of the parameters.
Language designers have invented all sorts of different function semantics, and some are a lot more powerful than what the Algol/Pascal/C class of languages provide.
No, I'm sorry, the world doesn't work that way. Things completely vanish if they SUCK. This thing probably did NOT sound "pretty", or there would still be a few around.
Well, that's often true, but there are a number of other reasons. One that keeps biting us is a peculiar logical failure in the human mind: the idea that advances or improvement require augmenting an object. This is a recognized problem with software, which we know as the usual development of "bloat" with time as new features are added and bugs are fixed. But the same thing happened in the 18th century, when the recorder died out and was hardly played except by a few academics until the Baroque revival in the mid-20th century.
The main problem with the recorder was that, unlike the closely-related transverse flute, it had a limited range (2 octaves), a very limited dynamic range (playing quietly makes it go flat, while paying louder makes it go sharp), not to mention an insanely complex fingering system. Many experiments were done, including the use of the newfangled key systems to simplify the fingering. But the limited dynamic range couldn't be fixed. So it was abandoned in favor of the transverse flute, which can easily be played quietly or loudly, and the player can make fine adjustments of the pitch to correct for the flute's tendency to go sharp when played louder. Flute makers also extended the range to 3 octaves.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Japanese were playing the shakuhachi, which is nearly identical to the European recorder, except for being made of bamboo. It had a 3-octave range, simple fingerings, and could be played quietly or loudly without going out of tune. The Europeans didn't know about it, because such a primitive "folk" instrument of an inferior culture was beneath their notice.
So why could the Japanese solve the instrument's intonation problem when the Europeans couldn't? Simple: The shakuhachi didn't have the "air guide", the short tube that the player blows into, which shapes the airstream as it hits the sharp edge that makes the noise. The shakuhachi just has a simple opening with an edge, and the player forms the airstream with their lips. As with the European flute, this takes a bit more learning at the start, since the instrument doesn't form the airstream for you. But the Japanese form, like the European flute, gives the player 3 octaves, dynamic range, and fine tuning of individual notes. I know flute players who never bother tuning; they just listen to the other instrument(s), and use their embouchure to adjust the flute's pitch appropriately. (The shakuhachi isn't tunable, so that's what they always do.)
The reason the Europeans couldn't fix the recorder's intonation was simple: Doing so required removing part of the instrument, that short little air guide at the top. They even had the example of the transverse flute, which lacks the air guide, and the instrument makers still couldn't solve the problem. The recorder had an air guide tube, it was part of the instrument, and it apparently didn't occur to anyone to just remove it and see how the instrument played.
Of course, the instrument was revived with the air guide. This presents us with the other major problem with the instrument: A total novice can easily get sound out of it. So it's used in schools as kids' first instrument, it's played by zillions of novices who insist on minimally learning what is really the most difficult woodwind instrument and then inflicting their playing on the public (unlike novice fiddlers, who usually have the sense to know that they should play in private for several years until they no longer cause listeners to cover their ears). Removing that silly air guide would have solved this problem too, since novices and kids would pick one up, blow into it a few times, get no sound at all, and decide that it's not the instrument for them.
Now if there were only a good design solution that would discourage novice guitar players from playing in public...
Switzerland states that only MS will do, but how can you truly know what's available without a public bid?
Indeed. But all too often, you can't even know it then. It's common practice in every government agency everywhere to "fix" a purchase or hire process in a simply way. You get together with the bidder/applicant that you want to win, and make up a set of "requirements" that are carefully tailored to have at least one item which you know each potential vendor/applicant will fail. You might include reasonable-sounding explanations for why each requirement item really, really needed. Then you publish your bidding process with the extensive list of "requirements", and whaddaya know, there's only one bidder that satisfies all of them.
It sounds like the people who run this agency couldn't even be bothered to go through such a simple bogus-bidding process, and just hired Microsoft without inviting anyone else. We have a simple name for that sort of process: corruption. The fix was in, Microsoft got the contract, the managers got their kickbacks, and everyone was happy. Except those spoilsports at Red Hat.
Those are all good examples of the problems with most simple definitions of "species". It's fairly common for intro biology classes (or textbooks) to go into these problems. There are many examples of what are sometimes called a "range species", in which nearby populations can interbreed, but more widely separated populations can't. There are a lot of example along shore lines, for obvious reasons.
Dogs are often used as an example of a slightly different problem: nontransitivity of the "same species relation". Domestics dogs can interbred with both jackals and the common gray wolf and produce fertile offspring, so you might be tempted to classify them all as subspecies of a single species. But if you crossbreed jackals and wolves, the offspring are usually sterile, so they're different species.
The lion/tiger case is an interesting problem. If you google for their hybrids, you'll find that whether or not the offspring are fertile depends on the sex of the parents and the sex of the offspring. The genetics is impressively complex.
Actually, these cases are handled by biologists via a simple caveat: If two populations can be interbred, but in their natural environments they don't do so, they're considered different species. The interesting part of this to biologists is studying the mechanisms that keep the populations apart.
One well-known case is that most North American ducks can interbreed, and the offspring are generally fetrile. So they're really all one species? No, because, although most hybrids are seen in the wild, they are exceedingly rare. The main separation mechanism is female selection. The males tend to approach any female duck during the spring+summer mating season, because they can't tell the females apart much better than we can (except for a few extreme cases like wood ducks). The females reject most of them, but accept the advances of males with the right color markings. Thus, a female mallard really wants to mate with a guy with a yellow beak and green neck (and the right wing bar), and a male without those colors is just too ugly to consider.
The occasional hybrids in the wild are sorta difficult to study, though, and not much is known about how they happen. The most reasonable hypothesis ("guess") is that the female's color-specifying genes are somewhat defective, so she isn't very good at picking the right guy. But it's not easy to test such things, since you can't watch all the millions of wild ducks, and in your lab, they will mate (eventually).
One fun example of problems with overly-simple definitions of "species" was from a bio prof who wrote on the board something like "Two individuals are the same species if they can mate and produce offspring." He asked the class what was wrong with this definition. I looked around, saw a lot of puzzled faces, and when nobody spoke up, I said what I thought was the obvious answer: "By that definition, you and I are different species." He and I were both male, so of course we could mate, but we couldn't produce any offspring at all. He just grinned, and went on with the lecture about other ways the term is defined, and the problems with all the definitions. I think I got a few brownie points for being able to point out the obvious problem with a definition you see all the time.
But it's yet another example of why you have to be rather careful in how you phrase your definitions.
And another "of course" is that the creationist crowd tends to pick their own definitions of "species", using definitions whose problems support their views.
Put in 4/0 (four divided by zero) and you get a divide by zero error, which breaks the page and outputs a bunch of database junk. They didn't think of this?
That's nothing, I just asked it a simple question and their server had an electronic breakdown and started billowing smoke. The question was...
"Why?"
Well, duh; that's why it's Wolfram Alpha.;-)
When Wolfram Beta comes out, we can expect that it'll be able to give correct answers to both of your questions.
if they've got a patent on it, and they stay as greedy as they've always been, nobody else will be safe trying to pull the same stunt.
Nah; I don't think so. Do you really think that all the "smart phone" vendors are now going to start delivering unlocked phones? Not a chance. If Microsoft tries taking them to court, they'll simply countersue, prove in court that MS's management knew all about their locked systems when they filed for the patent, and the court will hand MS a huge fine for knowingly submitting a bogus patent application on someone else's invention. And there is plenty of precedent for this sort of locking, from well before Microsoft existed.
The only likely use of this is against small-time developers who continue to develop Windows software without maintaining their license payments. And against small-time developers who write jail-break code for MS software. If you're small enough to be bankrupted by the court costs, you're their natural prey; otherwise they won't bother you.
Now no one else can deliberately cripple their operating system. I suppose their motive was for that Max-3-Apps thing in the starter versions of 7.
As others are no doubt pointing out, anyone who wants to challenge this in court can find lots of prior art. In the case of the limit to the number of running apps, this is quite similar to the gimmick that was in Sys/V unix two decades ago, which limited the number of simultaneous logins to 2 unless you paid them extra to change the byte that held the limit.
Back around 1990 or so, I had a bit of fun with them. Due to problems diagnosing remote login problems, I wrote a login-like program which basically had the same functionality, but it had extensive builtin logging, so you could find out why a login was failing. The program worked as a drop-in replacement for the standard login program, but it missed one feature: It didn't honor the 2-user login limit. When users "complained" (heh!) about this, I pointed out (publicly in several forums) that I'd omitted it because I didn't know where the login limit was stored. I said that if the AT&T folks would tell me where it was hidden, I could add support for the login limit.
For some reason, we never heard from them, and I was never able to add that feature. They probably figured out that I'd add it as an explicit command-line option, making it trivial for users to disable it if they liked. Also, they probably figured out that, since my program was open-source, anyone would be able to read my code to find out where the login limit was kept, and write their own little program to overwrite that byte.
In any case, I worked on a number of projects where this stupid limit was one of the listed reasons for not using Sys/V as our platform. We generally thought that delivering a system so crippled and demanding money to fix it was simply tacky, and not something that we wanted to do to our customers. Sometimes I wonder what happened to Sys/V; I haven't seen it in years, and I don't recall reading of it being retired. Of course, it lives on as POSIX, more or less, but the implementations don't use any AT&T (or SCO?) code, so we don't see such limit in the unix part of the industry any more.
(Or do we? Are some vendors still doing such tacky things to their customers? Other than Microsoft, of course.)
"The Year of the Linux Desktop" will come when the average computer user can go to the store and buy a computer with Linux on it that works just as well as the one with Windows on it.
Good summary. And this also explains why, at least here in the US, there will never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop". Microsoft has a stranglehold on retail computer sales outlets, and vigorously defends it. The result is that the "cost of entry" is an insurmountable hurdle to any startup. Unless you have startup funding measured in billions of dollars, you simply won't get your machines into any retail outlets at all. Microsoft did permit Apple to have a corner of the retail outlets, as a way of showing that they weren't a monopoly, but this worked so poorly that eventually Apple decided to spend the billions that it took to set up their own stores. But note that they weren't a startup when they did that; they'd gotten into the public perception by using Microsoft's permission for a couple of decades.
Another real problem, of course, is that to 99% of the public and media, there are only "computers". I know people who accidentally bought a Mac because it was a "computer", and they still don't understand that they didn't buy the same sort of computer that everyone else buys. If you mention Windows, they say that they have windows; they can see the windows all over their screen. They wouldn't buy a computer that doesn't have windows, of course, but all computers have windows, don't they?
So talking about something like linux is pointless. If linux doesn't have windows on its screen, they won't consider it, and if it does, what are you talking about? Is a linux a computer? You're not making sense...
Basically questions like "Linux on the Desktop" are nonsensical to almost everyone but a few of us geeks, and the cost of entry into a monopolize retail market is so great that things will stay this way forever. Microsoft did find a way to break into the old IBM monopoly over retail computer sales, but how they did it is well enough understood that they can ensure that it'll never happen again.
I poked around a couple of times, and I remember seeing a setting for network bandwidth, but I couldn't find it. I did find the "General" thingy in the "Advanced" window, and looked through all the stuff there several times, but I couldn't find anything that talks about bandwidth. I also looked in the "about:config" stuff for "bandwidth", but it doesn't even find "band". I guessed other things like "width" and "speed", and they don't match anything, either.
This is on a Macbook Pro, with firefox 3.0.10. I wonder where the network speed setting might be hidden.
Well, I tried that, and it seemed to work ok with slashdot (though it only gave me 3 or 4 summaries at a time rather than the much larger number that I have configured in my preferences.
But then I switched to the window in which I have gmail, refreshed it - and it was a disaster. Google's gmail code does something that makes it limit the portion of the screen to a small rectangle at the upper left, with a huge font size. No matter how you resize the window, the rest of the window simply isn't used, and you can only read a tiny portion of a single message at a time.
So I reverted to to the previous "Firefox/3.0.10", which fixed gmail, and unfixed slashdot so the main page now only uses about1/3 of the window's width for summaries, and the rest is mostly blank except for a bit of stuff at the top that I don't use.
Making slashdot merely an annoying waste of screen space is better than making gmail unusable.
The OP made a perfectly good metaphorical use of "infinite"; the only problem that only the metaphorical meaning makes sense, since the spam can't very well be literally infinite.
Oops; I accidentally the verb out of that sentence. Is this dangerous here on/.?;-)
I've been things on the interwebs too much, and I seem to have infected by one of the latest silly memes...
Spammers can send, literally, infinite numbers of spam messages You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
In discussions about very large numbers, "infinite" can be applied to numbers so large they might as well be infinite.
Actually, you made the same mistake as the others here. The OP could well have known what "infinite" means, but obviously doesn't know what "literally" means.
The OP made a perfectly good metaphorical use of "infinite"; the only problem that only the metaphorical meaning makes sense, since the spam can't very well be literally infinite.
Now I'll literally go away and play grammar nazi elsewhere...
NoScript is the only way I can browse Slashdot without slowing my browser to a crawl.
Yes, it helps a lot. But there are other reasons for wanting to block scripts. I have a few demos of some nasty things that can be done to you using javascript, and I've seen several demos of others online. Anyone have links to their favorite ways of exploiting users who enable JS?
-- I now demand that my user page be restored to its former layout.
I keep thinking that we need a forum to discuss slashdot, but I've never seen one. It'd be especially handy if there were a place that readers could ask dumb n00b questions about how things work here. It's gotten far too complex for my little brain, and I suspect this is true for others.
Last week, I had a pleasant surprise when most of the boilerplate on the main/. page disappeared, and all I got was the articles. No wide columns of white space, text from left edge to right edge. With the window only 1/3 the width of this 1920x1200 screen, I could read 4 or 5 summaries without scrolling. Then on Monday, it reverted. Now I have to make the window full screen to see all of the first two summaries without scrolling. At 1/3 the screen width, I see only one summary, with those wide mostly-blank columns on the left and right.
Anyway, it looks like the code has a way of generating the format that I like. But I have no idea how to tell it to send me that format. Anyone know? And, to be more general, is there some place that (if I only knew about it), I could have asked this question and got a friendly answer from someone who has already stumbled across the secret?
(Yes, I sent a question to AskSlashdot. It disappeared without a trace.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
[I]f the Tech involved seen a folder on the desktop labeled 'child porn' then he'd have every reason to check to see the contents of the folder and inform police. More than likely they installed some sort of video editing software or something and went to the last opened list for a file to test it with.
Or maybe they opened your browser and looked at the last few things that were downloaded. If you run with javascript (or other scripting tool like active-X) turned on, there are demos around the net showing how this can implicate you in all sorts of crimes. (I have a couple such demos on my own site, but I don't want it to be slashdotted, so I just suggest you google for it. ;-)
What these demos typically do is use what's often called "preloading" to download things like images that are likely to be used in the site's other pages. This speeds up access to later pages, at the price of possibly downloading a few files that are never used. The fun part of the demos is to point out that files may be preloaded from anywhere on the net, and need not be used by any other pages. This means that, if you have JS turned on, my page can download all sorts of porn from various sites and just store them in your browser's cache. And anyone who knows how to check what you have recently downloaded will find them there, where they can easily be displayed via a file://... URL.
On second thought, maybe I should make a copy of my demo, using URLs for images that aren't quite as innocent as the ones that I've used, and post the URL here. Then I could look at my server's logs to see if I can identify any of the visitors, and send a tipoff to their local police that you've been downloading a lot of porn, and which browser's cache they should look in to find the images.
Maybe later ...
What's top posting?
Heh. My favorite explanation is this old one:
I see that others have already posted much wordier replies along the same line.
Science (like religion) is in some sort of ideal world, vacuum, where all is simple and described by a formula.
I think you're confusing (or conflating) science with mathematics. But don't feel bad; people do this all the time. Part of the reason is that science routinely uses mathematics as a tool, and the two fields are deeply intertwined. Scientists use math to help understand and explain what they're working on, while mathematicians routinely use scientific work as inspiration for new ideas to pursue.
But the "science" part is usually very much about the real world. It's the mathematicians who carefully avoid dealing with the real world, since that's not their job. The interesting part is how often the abstract, theoretical stuff that the mathematicians work on turn out to be very applicable to figuring out what's going on in the real world.
One of the problems with our terminology is that "computer science" is generally used for the abstract, theoretical part of software. This is misleading, because the subject really is a mathematical field, not scientific. If it were scientific, the computer scientists would be performing experiments and developing hypotheses to explain how software works. But that's not what they do; it's the "software engineers" trying to debug software that do things like that.
And this leads to the problem that "software engineering" generally involves doing things that in other fields would be called "science". In engineering, you are generally working with tools and materials whose behavior is well understood, so you can concentrate on design. With software development, this isn't generally true. An engineer designing a bridge or house or airplane can expect to work with detailed specs for all the available components. With software, the equivalent information is usually proprietary and intentionally hidden from the people building the code. Even in "open source" systems, the concept of "information hiding" is popular, and all too often this does mean that needed information is intentionally hidden from the person writing the code. So the software engineer is working with poorly-documented material, and must develop using processes that test and discover the properties of the underlying stuff.
Of course, there are some software engineers who don't do any debugging. But we know how well this works. Civil engineers might be able to develop this way, since they have access to full specs for their material. Software engineers can't, because they are kept ignorant of the details of lower-level stuff. As long as this is true, software engineering must have a large scientific component, to study and test the software as it's developed. They must constantly develop and test hypotheses about their code, in order to get it to function as desired in an environment that is mostly hidden.
Anyway, there's little chance of getting the terminology straight any time soon. There's no chance of software people getting access to detailed specs for the underlying systems. We even have laws in place that block the access to full information. So software engineering can't really be true engineering, and software developers will continue to spend large parts of their time acting as experimental scientists in order to debug their software. And they won't get much help from the computer scientists, who are spending most of their time working with the mathematics of the subject, while disparaging the real-world portion of their discipline as being "mere engineering".
Now if we could only get the computer field to adopt the same definitions that other fields of engineering, science and mat use. But that isn't going to happen any time soon.
Would be nice to see some responses from states filled with sane people.
So where do find such a state? And do you know of any that actually let sane people into the government?
Are newspaper purchases subject to sales tax? I never get charged for it.
It depends on where you live. Ask google about "newspaper sales-tax" and read all about it. There's a campaign right now in California to eliminate the sales tax on newspapers. It's also common for the subscription price to include any local taxes, to simplify life for everyone. Part of the explanation seems to be that newspapers have never really competed on price, so they have no strong motive to quote a price lower than what you'll pay. I've read that some US states and a few European countries explicitly exclude newspapers from the sales tax, but I don't know how many do this.
Well, we do have plenty of long-necked dinosaurs in our world today. But the biggest (ostriches, geese, etc.) aren't nearly big enough to tell us much about the truly huge ones that were around 70 or 90 million years ago. Even an ostrich's neck doesn't need much assistance in lifting blood to the head. They're also in a different suborder, unfortunately.
A theory of mine is that long necked dinosaurs had auxiliary hearts in their necks ...
Possible, but we might not recognize them even in fossilized soft tissues. Such a "heart" could easily evolve from an artery that passes between (or through) muscles. Then the normal flexing of the neck, combined with one-way valves in the arteries, would function to life the blood upward. Once such a configuration exists, the usual selection process could slowly make it more effective. But the result could still look just like an artery passing through musculature, with little obvious evidence that the muscles are modified to assist in the pumping in addition to their original function.
It's too bad that a few of the big ones didn't get another 65 million years to evolve. We could have some good data on the topic by now.
A number of researchers have reported evidence that both the oxygen and CO2 levels were higher than now in the Cretaceous atmosphere. Nothing like a factor of 370, of course, more like 20% or 40% higher. And, of course, other researchers point out that this should be considered just an "interesting hypothesis" until more supporting evidence is found. The idea is generally accepted as probably true, but the numbers' precision isn't great, so further research is needed.
Two orders of magnitude is definitely stretching the idea into "crank science" territory.
... since the law is meant to be construed narrowly, not generalized, since it specifically mentions digital downloads, then any irl situations are excluded.
Yeah, but legislatures and courts do have a history of looking at "precedent". If this goes over without much fuss, it will send a message (to invoke another popular media meme) that the population and courts have accepted the principle. It can then be taken as precedent for the interpretation of other laws, as well as for the phrasing of new laws.
(And that's a slippery slope, yet another popular media meme. ;-)
It occurs to me that if this happens, it has the potential to be applied to anything else that's covered by copyright. Consider the results.
If you check a book out from your local library and read it, you'll be liable for the sales tax on the retail price of the same book (at a book seller of the prosecution's choice).
If you leave a newspaper (hey, remember them?) lying around in your house and a visitor reads it, they'll be liable for the sales tax on not just that paper, but for a subscription to the newspaper.
If your local school has textbooks that they let students study from, those students (or their parents) will be liable for the sales tax on the price of the books.
If a store is playing music audible from wherever you may be (sitting at a table in a restaurant, using an elevator, walking by on the sidewalk), you are liable for the sales tax on the album that contains the music that you heard.
Since everything is by default copyrighted as soon as it's "published" (whatever that actually means), any time you read anything from any source or hear anything that was recorded, you will be required to learn the retail price for the copyrighted work, and pay the sales tax on it.
We've been in the habit of being a bit bemused by the fact that, when the authorities don't have any evidence against some supposed criminal, they customarily just charge them with tax evasion. But this is no longer just something that big-time Mafia capos and politicians have to worry about. Now we can all be tax evaders, by merely reading something somewhere and neglecting to determine its retail sales price so we can pay the sales tax.
And I can make you a criminal by merely putting copyrighted text somewhere that you read it, or by putting recorded sound somewhere that you hear it.
It can be fun to think of what might be the ultimate motive for passing laws like this. Look up the phrase "nuisance law" for further explanation.
(I have the vague impression, e.g., that [Objective-C] functions are only allowed to have one parameter. This *MUST* be wrong, but I couldn't find any documentation that would tell me that it was.)
Actually, you don't have to be wrong. There are a number of rather powerful languages that, strictly speaking, provide for only a single parameter to a function, but since that parameter can be a complex data object, it's not the limitation you might think.
For example, both LISP and perl have functions with just one parameter, but that parameter can be a list, which is a first-class data type in both languages. This means that you can pass arbitrary-length lists of values to a function, and it has the tools to run through the entire list.
This is much more powerful than the approach in languages that only allow for a fixed number of named function parameters, since in such languages, every parameter is a special case, and you can't iterate through the parameters except by explicitly listing the names of the parameters.
Language designers have invented all sorts of different function semantics, and some are a lot more powerful than what the Algol/Pascal/C class of languages provide.
No, I'm sorry, the world doesn't work that way. Things completely vanish if they SUCK. This thing probably did NOT sound "pretty", or there would still be a few around.
Well, that's often true, but there are a number of other reasons. One that keeps biting us is a peculiar logical failure in the human mind: the idea that advances or improvement require augmenting an object. This is a recognized problem with software, which we know as the usual development of "bloat" with time as new features are added and bugs are fixed. But the same thing happened in the 18th century, when the recorder died out and was hardly played except by a few academics until the Baroque revival in the mid-20th century.
The main problem with the recorder was that, unlike the closely-related transverse flute, it had a limited range (2 octaves), a very limited dynamic range (playing quietly makes it go flat, while paying louder makes it go sharp), not to mention an insanely complex fingering system. Many experiments were done, including the use of the newfangled key systems to simplify the fingering. But the limited dynamic range couldn't be fixed. So it was abandoned in favor of the transverse flute, which can easily be played quietly or loudly, and the player can make fine adjustments of the pitch to correct for the flute's tendency to go sharp when played louder. Flute makers also extended the range to 3 octaves.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Japanese were playing the shakuhachi, which is nearly identical to the European recorder, except for being made of bamboo. It had a 3-octave range, simple fingerings, and could be played quietly or loudly without going out of tune. The Europeans didn't know about it, because such a primitive "folk" instrument of an inferior culture was beneath their notice.
So why could the Japanese solve the instrument's intonation problem when the Europeans couldn't? Simple: The shakuhachi didn't have the "air guide", the short tube that the player blows into, which shapes the airstream as it hits the sharp edge that makes the noise. The shakuhachi just has a simple opening with an edge, and the player forms the airstream with their lips. As with the European flute, this takes a bit more learning at the start, since the instrument doesn't form the airstream for you. But the Japanese form, like the European flute, gives the player 3 octaves, dynamic range, and fine tuning of individual notes. I know flute players who never bother tuning; they just listen to the other instrument(s), and use their embouchure to adjust the flute's pitch appropriately. (The shakuhachi isn't tunable, so that's what they always do.)
The reason the Europeans couldn't fix the recorder's intonation was simple: Doing so required removing part of the instrument, that short little air guide at the top. They even had the example of the transverse flute, which lacks the air guide, and the instrument makers still couldn't solve the problem. The recorder had an air guide tube, it was part of the instrument, and it apparently didn't occur to anyone to just remove it and see how the instrument played.
Of course, the instrument was revived with the air guide. This presents us with the other major problem with the instrument: A total novice can easily get sound out of it. So it's used in schools as kids' first instrument, it's played by zillions of novices who insist on minimally learning what is really the most difficult woodwind instrument and then inflicting their playing on the public (unlike novice fiddlers, who usually have the sense to know that they should play in private for several years until they no longer cause listeners to cover their ears). Removing that silly air guide would have solved this problem too, since novices and kids would pick one up, blow into it a few times, get no sound at all, and decide that it's not the instrument for them.
Now if there were only a good design solution that would discourage novice guitar players from playing in public ...
(Maybe removing the strings would work. ;-)
Switzerland states that only MS will do, but how can you truly know what's available without a public bid?
Indeed. But all too often, you can't even know it then. It's common practice in every government agency everywhere to "fix" a purchase or hire process in a simply way. You get together with the bidder/applicant that you want to win, and make up a set of "requirements" that are carefully tailored to have at least one item which you know each potential vendor/applicant will fail. You might include reasonable-sounding explanations for why each requirement item really, really needed. Then you publish your bidding process with the extensive list of "requirements", and whaddaya know, there's only one bidder that satisfies all of them.
It sounds like the people who run this agency couldn't even be bothered to go through such a simple bogus-bidding process, and just hired Microsoft without inviting anyone else. We have a simple name for that sort of process: corruption. The fix was in, Microsoft got the contract, the managers got their kickbacks, and everyone was happy. Except those spoilsports at Red Hat.
Those are all good examples of the problems with most simple definitions of "species". It's fairly common for intro biology classes (or textbooks) to go into these problems. There are many examples of what are sometimes called a "range species", in which nearby populations can interbreed, but more widely separated populations can't. There are a lot of example along shore lines, for obvious reasons.
Dogs are often used as an example of a slightly different problem: nontransitivity of the "same species relation". Domestics dogs can interbred with both jackals and the common gray wolf and produce fertile offspring, so you might be tempted to classify them all as subspecies of a single species. But if you crossbreed jackals and wolves, the offspring are usually sterile, so they're different species.
The lion/tiger case is an interesting problem. If you google for their hybrids, you'll find that whether or not the offspring are fertile depends on the sex of the parents and the sex of the offspring. The genetics is impressively complex.
Actually, these cases are handled by biologists via a simple caveat: If two populations can be interbred, but in their natural environments they don't do so, they're considered different species. The interesting part of this to biologists is studying the mechanisms that keep the populations apart.
One well-known case is that most North American ducks can interbreed, and the offspring are generally fetrile. So they're really all one species? No, because, although most hybrids are seen in the wild, they are exceedingly rare. The main separation mechanism is female selection. The males tend to approach any female duck during the spring+summer mating season, because they can't tell the females apart much better than we can (except for a few extreme cases like wood ducks). The females reject most of them, but accept the advances of males with the right color markings. Thus, a female mallard really wants to mate with a guy with a yellow beak and green neck (and the right wing bar), and a male without those colors is just too ugly to consider.
The occasional hybrids in the wild are sorta difficult to study, though, and not much is known about how they happen. The most reasonable hypothesis ("guess") is that the female's color-specifying genes are somewhat defective, so she isn't very good at picking the right guy. But it's not easy to test such things, since you can't watch all the millions of wild ducks, and in your lab, they will mate (eventually).
One fun example of problems with overly-simple definitions of "species" was from a bio prof who wrote on the board something like "Two individuals are the same species if they can mate and produce offspring." He asked the class what was wrong with this definition. I looked around, saw a lot of puzzled faces, and when nobody spoke up, I said what I thought was the obvious answer: "By that definition, you and I are different species." He and I were both male, so of course we could mate, but we couldn't produce any offspring at all. He just grinned, and went on with the lecture about other ways the term is defined, and the problems with all the definitions. I think I got a few brownie points for being able to point out the obvious problem with a definition you see all the time.
But it's yet another example of why you have to be rather careful in how you phrase your definitions.
And another "of course" is that the creationist crowd tends to pick their own definitions of "species", using definitions whose problems support their views.
Well, duh; that's why it's Wolfram Alpha. ;-)
When Wolfram Beta comes out, we can expect that it'll be able to give correct answers to both of your questions.
You may not like the answers, though.
if they've got a patent on it, and they stay as greedy as they've always been, nobody else will be safe trying to pull the same stunt.
Nah; I don't think so. Do you really think that all the "smart phone" vendors are now going to start delivering unlocked phones? Not a chance. If Microsoft tries taking them to court, they'll simply countersue, prove in court that MS's management knew all about their locked systems when they filed for the patent, and the court will hand MS a huge fine for knowingly submitting a bogus patent application on someone else's invention. And there is plenty of precedent for this sort of locking, from well before Microsoft existed.
The only likely use of this is against small-time developers who continue to develop Windows software without maintaining their license payments. And against small-time developers who write jail-break code for MS software. If you're small enough to be bankrupted by the court costs, you're their natural prey; otherwise they won't bother you.
Now no one else can deliberately cripple their operating system. I suppose their motive was for that Max-3-Apps thing in the starter versions of 7.
As others are no doubt pointing out, anyone who wants to challenge this in court can find lots of prior art. In the case of the limit to the number of running apps, this is quite similar to the gimmick that was in Sys/V unix two decades ago, which limited the number of simultaneous logins to 2 unless you paid them extra to change the byte that held the limit.
Back around 1990 or so, I had a bit of fun with them. Due to problems diagnosing remote login problems, I wrote a login-like program which basically had the same functionality, but it had extensive builtin logging, so you could find out why a login was failing. The program worked as a drop-in replacement for the standard login program, but it missed one feature: It didn't honor the 2-user login limit. When users "complained" (heh!) about this, I pointed out (publicly in several forums) that I'd omitted it because I didn't know where the login limit was stored. I said that if the AT&T folks would tell me where it was hidden, I could add support for the login limit.
For some reason, we never heard from them, and I was never able to add that feature. They probably figured out that I'd add it as an explicit command-line option, making it trivial for users to disable it if they liked. Also, they probably figured out that, since my program was open-source, anyone would be able to read my code to find out where the login limit was kept, and write their own little program to overwrite that byte.
In any case, I worked on a number of projects where this stupid limit was one of the listed reasons for not using Sys/V as our platform. We generally thought that delivering a system so crippled and demanding money to fix it was simply tacky, and not something that we wanted to do to our customers. Sometimes I wonder what happened to Sys/V; I haven't seen it in years, and I don't recall reading of it being retired. Of course, it lives on as POSIX, more or less, but the implementations don't use any AT&T (or SCO?) code, so we don't see such limit in the unix part of the industry any more.
(Or do we? Are some vendors still doing such tacky things to their customers? Other than Microsoft, of course.)
"The Year of the Linux Desktop" will come when the average computer user can go to the store and buy a computer with Linux on it that works just as well as the one with Windows on it.
Good summary. And this also explains why, at least here in the US, there will never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop". Microsoft has a stranglehold on retail computer sales outlets, and vigorously defends it. The result is that the "cost of entry" is an insurmountable hurdle to any startup. Unless you have startup funding measured in billions of dollars, you simply won't get your machines into any retail outlets at all. Microsoft did permit Apple to have a corner of the retail outlets, as a way of showing that they weren't a monopoly, but this worked so poorly that eventually Apple decided to spend the billions that it took to set up their own stores. But note that they weren't a startup when they did that; they'd gotten into the public perception by using Microsoft's permission for a couple of decades.
Another real problem, of course, is that to 99% of the public and media, there are only "computers". I know people who accidentally bought a Mac because it was a "computer", and they still don't understand that they didn't buy the same sort of computer that everyone else buys. If you mention Windows, they say that they have windows; they can see the windows all over their screen. They wouldn't buy a computer that doesn't have windows, of course, but all computers have windows, don't they?
So talking about something like linux is pointless. If linux doesn't have windows on its screen, they won't consider it, and if it does, what are you talking about? Is a linux a computer? You're not making sense ...
Basically questions like "Linux on the Desktop" are nonsensical to almost everyone but a few of us geeks, and the cost of entry into a monopolize retail market is so great that things will stay this way forever. Microsoft did find a way to break into the old IBM monopoly over retail computer sales, but how they did it is well enough understood that they can ensure that it'll never happen again.
I poked around a couple of times, and I remember seeing a setting for network bandwidth, but I couldn't find it. I did find the "General" thingy in the "Advanced" window, and looked through all the stuff there several times, but I couldn't find anything that talks about bandwidth. I also looked in the "about:config" stuff for "bandwidth", but it doesn't even find "band". I guessed other things like "width" and "speed", and they don't match anything, either.
This is on a Macbook Pro, with firefox 3.0.10. I wonder where the network speed setting might be hidden.
Well, I tried that, and it seemed to work ok with slashdot (though it only gave me 3 or 4 summaries at a time rather than the much larger number that I have configured in my preferences.
But then I switched to the window in which I have gmail, refreshed it - and it was a disaster. Google's gmail code does something that makes it limit the portion of the screen to a small rectangle at the upper left, with a huge font size. No matter how you resize the window, the rest of the window simply isn't used, and you can only read a tiny portion of a single message at a time.
So I reverted to to the previous "Firefox/3.0.10", which fixed gmail, and unfixed slashdot so the main page now only uses about1/3 of the window's width for summaries, and the rest is mostly blank except for a bit of stuff at the top that I don't use.
Making slashdot merely an annoying waste of screen space is better than making gmail unusable.
Hey, you're right! That's very clever.
The only problem now would be: What percentage of the /. readership would/wouldn't understand this use of a colon?
The OP made a perfectly good metaphorical use of "infinite"; the only problem that only the metaphorical meaning makes sense, since the spam can't very well be literally infinite.
Oops; I accidentally the verb out of that sentence. Is this dangerous here on /.? ;-)
I've been things on the interwebs too much, and I seem to have infected by one of the latest silly memes ...
Well, I for one had never heard of Seen on Slash until now, so maybe that's part of the explanation. I'll look it over.
NoScript is the only way I can browse Slashdot without slowing my browser to a crawl.
Yes, it helps a lot. But there are other reasons for wanting to block scripts. I have a few demos of some nasty things that can be done to you using javascript, and I've seen several demos of others online. Anyone have links to their favorite ways of exploiting users who enable JS?
--
I now demand that my user page be restored to its former layout.
I keep thinking that we need a forum to discuss slashdot, but I've never seen one. It'd be especially handy if there were a place that readers could ask dumb n00b questions about how things work here. It's gotten far too complex for my little brain, and I suspect this is true for others.
Last week, I had a pleasant surprise when most of the boilerplate on the main /. page disappeared, and all I got was the articles. No wide columns of white space, text from left edge to right edge. With the window only 1/3 the width of this 1920x1200 screen, I could read 4 or 5 summaries without scrolling. Then on Monday, it reverted. Now I have to make the window full screen to see all of the first two summaries without scrolling. At 1/3 the screen width, I see only one summary, with those wide mostly-blank columns on the left and right.
Anyway, it looks like the code has a way of generating the format that I like. But I have no idea how to tell it to send me that format. Anyone know? And, to be more general, is there some place that (if I only knew about it), I could have asked this question and got a friendly answer from someone who has already stumbled across the secret?
(Yes, I sent a question to AskSlashdot. It disappeared without a trace. ;-)