AOL is not "terminating usenet access" for its members. They simply cease to provide the service themselves. Which is really no loss for AOL members, because text newsgroups can be accessed through Google and for binary newsgroups you need a premium usenet provider anyway.
Why do people assume that it is legal to share hashes of copyrighted works? A hash is a derived work and in the case of a secure hash (such as are used in P2P networks) one that could not have been constructed without using the original work.
It would seem to me that in order to illegally fix prices there would have to be a collusion of all the memory chip makers. How come only the german one is punished?
Even a tiny nuclear reactor contains more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bomb. Blowing one up with a truckload of conventional explosives may not kill a lot of people, but surely will contaminate a large area for a long time.
It would probably be lots worse than any dirty bomb that the terrorists could build by themselves.
The treaty required a reduction by 5% Given that the per capita output of CO2 in the US is more than twice that of the EU, triple that of Japan and ten times that of China, this is a measure which the US should feel morally obliged to take, even if the other countries did absolutely nothing.
Unless they are grossly abusing the system (and the Judge orders them to pay defense costs) it is going to cost you money to mount your legal defense.
Depends on what country you live in. In Germany, for example, loser pays legal costs for all. And poor people don't pay legal costs at all. And non-poor people can take out insurance to cover legal costs of any litigation they might be involved in, it does not cost very much.
Actually you are answering the wrong question. There was never any contest between C (the Unix language) and Pascal (a teaching language). The real tragedy was that the beautiful Algol succumbed to C so easily and so completely.
But you are quite right, compilers where the reason. C.A.R.Hoare (of quicksort and CSP fame) tells a good story where early in his career he led an Algol compiler team into disaster - after two years of careful programming they produced a multi-pass compiler and when they first tested it, it managed to correctly translate 1 line of Algol per second!
As recent surveys have shown, 80% of internet traffic nowadays is copyrighted stuff. If ISPs stop that, they will lose like 80% of their customers and go bankrupt.
The internet industry totally depends on filesharing. It's time to acknowledge that, not fight it.
On the other hand, the Economist at least did a poll. The letter presented here was probably written by someone in the White House, and then the White House tried to get as many economists as possible to sign it. There is no indication how many economists were asked to sign and refused.
Now, every now and then pure mathematicians will come up with an obscure field that they will decalre as being unaplicable to anything ever ( see group theory)
Group theory is not an obscure field of mathematics. It is mainstream and some of it is taught to math students in their first year. The obscure areas are where it takes you two decades to study just to get to the problem statement. There's lots of those and the potential for applications is often very small.
My take is that society does need mathematicians because hard theoretical problems do come up once in a while. Those mathematicians have to keep sharp even if they don't have anything "real" to do for the moment. In the meantime, they will push the theoretical boundaries in some obscure corner. As a bonus, something useful is produced occasionally.
As long as copyright makes money, the lobbying will go on and more and more terrible laws will be made.
Break Copyright! Destroy copyright profits!
Get rid of your iTunes habit. Don't go to movie theaters. Download as hard you can and make an FTP server for your friends. Distribute DVD-R's full of MP3s to your workmates. Explain your teenage sister how to get stuff from binary newsgroups. Install emule for your grandma.
You can cost the **AA thousands of dollars in revenues with very little risk to yourself. Let them learn the hard way.
The file with the prime numbers would be quite big - several gigabytes.
So here is a better way. Stirling's rule tells you that the chance of a random 10-digit number being prime is about 1 in 30. So, find a site with a few hundred digits of e and just check the first few dozen subsequences of length 10, using an online primality checker like http://www.2357.a-tu.net/index.php?link=Primality
This way you find the answer in five minutes using nothing but your browser. And no cheating either.
at least for me, because I only start a new session after a failure of the previous one (ok, not quite true, occasionally one has to reboot after an install).
On the other hand, a session typically runs for a few months.
and there are at least a dozen competing vendors. When they charge low, they get hit for dumping, when they charge high they get hit for fixing.
Or is it the US extorting money from foreign companies because they can? Does it also happen the other way round? (And don't give MS vs. EU as an example, MS hasn't paid a penny yet and probably never will).
OK, so I have a lot of sympathy for Chamberlain. His bet didn't come off, but that does not mean it was stupid. Until 1938, Hitler had been wildly successful and it must have been hard to believe that he would take the one action that would lose him everything.
Chamberlain's decision wasn't about what "message to send". That's how Bush talks. It was about whether to declare war on Germany for annexing Czechoslovakia. A war that might have destroyed England (just think how it would have gone if the Stalin-Hitler alliance had held). Should the US have declared war on the USSR for annexing Afghanistan?
What makes you so confident North Korea's leader is crazy? He is playing a game with high stakes. The risk may be great but so is the potential payoff.
He has nukes, he has rockets, he can wipe out Tokyo and Beijing, so Bush *can't* attack him. Maybe two years ago, but now it is too late.
Embargos and diplomatic pressure won't work either. If North Korea's back is at the wall it will have no choice but to attempt nuclear blackmail. And the US don't have an answer to that.
Like it or not, appeasement is the only remaining option.
The pink elephant overlooked in this discussion is that cheating in online chess is trivial anyway - just let Fritz make the moves for you and you win every time (except, perhaps, against Kasparov and, of course, other cheaters).
So, no point in reverse engineering the client and cracking the protocol just to fake some latency in order to gain some extra seconds. Which only help in blitz games anyway. Which are a lot more fun to play offline anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
AOL is not "terminating usenet access" for its members. They simply cease to provide the service themselves. Which is really no loss for AOL members, because text newsgroups can be accessed through Google and for binary newsgroups you need a premium usenet provider anyway.
... scientists found that obesity tends to induce sleeplessness
Why do people assume that it is legal to share hashes of copyrighted works? A hash is a derived work and in the case of a secure hash (such as are used in P2P networks) one that could not have been constructed without using the original work.
It would seem to me that in order to illegally fix prices there would have to be a collusion of all the memory chip makers. How come only the german one is punished?
Even a tiny nuclear reactor contains more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bomb. Blowing one up with a truckload of conventional explosives may not kill a lot of people, but surely will contaminate a large area for a long time.
It would probably be lots worse than any dirty bomb that the terrorists could build by themselves.
So, when they want to trace a document you printed they end up at the person who sold it to you. Who probably still has your address.
You better not use it to print money then.
The treaty required a reduction by 5% Given that the per capita output of CO2 in the US is more than twice that of the EU, triple that of Japan and ten times that of China, this is a measure which the US should feel morally obliged to take, even if the other countries did absolutely nothing.
Unless they are grossly abusing the system (and the Judge orders them to pay defense costs) it is going to cost you money to mount your legal defense.
Depends on what country you live in. In Germany, for example, loser pays legal costs for all. And poor people don't pay legal costs at all. And non-poor people can take out insurance to cover legal costs of any litigation they might be involved in, it does not cost very much.
In Germany the minimum warranty period on any new product (with exceptions where it's unreasonable, such as clothing) is two years.
Yet VCRs are (almost) as cheap over here as they are in the US. What difference there is is mostly due to higher sales tax.
The equation 2+2=5 goes back to an african tribe that uses knots tied in a rope for counting.
If you combine a two knot rope with another two knot rope you get a five knot rope.
Actually you are answering the wrong question. There was never any contest between C (the Unix language) and Pascal (a teaching language). The real tragedy was that the beautiful Algol succumbed to C so easily and so completely.
But you are quite right, compilers where the reason. C.A.R.Hoare (of quicksort and CSP fame) tells a good story where early in his career he led an Algol compiler team into disaster - after two years of careful programming they produced a multi-pass compiler and when they first tested it, it managed to correctly translate 1 line of Algol per second!
We are talking about console games here. These are already using the strongest copy protection the industry can come up with.
I don't own a console and never will. But as console software is the very antithesis of software libre I find it hard to sympathize.
What's so bad about USB dongles anyway? Seems to me they would be an improvement over CDs/DVDs that must be in the drive.
As recent surveys have shown, 80% of internet traffic nowadays is copyrighted stuff. If ISPs stop that, they will lose like 80% of their customers and go bankrupt.
The internet industry totally depends on filesharing. It's time to acknowledge that, not fight it.
On the other hand, the Economist at least did a poll. The letter presented here was probably written by someone in the White House, and then the White House tried to get as many economists as possible to sign it. There is no indication how many economists were asked to sign and refused.
Except that P cannot sue BigCo. Selling a product which uses an unlicensed patent is illegal, but buying is not.
Group theory is not an obscure field of mathematics. It is mainstream and some of it is taught to math students in their first year. The obscure areas are where it takes you two decades to study just to get to the problem statement. There's lots of those and the potential for applications is often very small.
My take is that society does need mathematicians because hard theoretical problems do come up once in a while. Those mathematicians have to keep sharp even if they don't have anything "real" to do for the moment. In the meantime, they will push the theoretical boundaries in some obscure corner. As a bonus, something useful is produced occasionally.
I agree. There is no knowing what those hypos will do when you let them run the country.
As long as copyright makes money, the lobbying will go on and more and more terrible laws will be made.
Break Copyright! Destroy copyright profits!
Get rid of your iTunes habit. Don't go to movie theaters. Download as hard you can and make an FTP server for your friends. Distribute DVD-R's full of MP3s to your workmates. Explain your teenage sister how to get stuff from binary newsgroups. Install emule for your grandma.
You can cost the **AA thousands of dollars in revenues with very little risk to yourself. Let them learn the hard way.
The file with the prime numbers would be quite big - several gigabytes.
So here is a better way. Stirling's rule tells you that the chance of a random 10-digit number being prime is about 1 in 30. So, find a site with a few hundred digits of e and just check the first few dozen subsequences of length 10, using an online primality checker like http://www.2357.a-tu.net/index.php?link=Primality
This way you find the answer in five minutes using nothing but your browser. And no cheating either.
at least for me, because I only start a new session after a failure of the previous one (ok, not quite true, occasionally one has to reboot after an install).
On the other hand, a session typically runs for a few months.
and there are at least a dozen competing vendors. When they charge low, they get hit for dumping, when they charge high they get hit for fixing.
Or is it the US extorting money from foreign companies because they can? Does it also happen the other way round? (And don't give MS vs. EU as an example, MS hasn't paid a penny yet and probably never will).
OK, so I have a lot of sympathy for Chamberlain. His bet didn't come off, but that does not mean it was stupid. Until 1938, Hitler had been wildly successful and it must have been hard to believe that he would take the one action that would lose him everything.
Chamberlain's decision wasn't about what "message to send". That's how Bush talks. It was about whether to declare war on Germany for annexing Czechoslovakia. A war that might have destroyed England (just think how it would have gone if the Stalin-Hitler alliance had held). Should the US have declared war on the USSR for annexing Afghanistan?
What makes you so confident North Korea's leader is crazy? He is playing a game with high stakes. The risk may be great but so is the potential payoff.
He has nukes, he has rockets, he can wipe out Tokyo and Beijing, so Bush *can't* attack him. Maybe two years ago, but now it is too late.
Embargos and diplomatic pressure won't work either. If North Korea's back is at the wall it will have no choice but to attempt nuclear blackmail. And the US don't have an answer to that.
Like it or not, appeasement is the only remaining option.
That depends on the game. In Diablo II, for example, generated or resurrected monsters do not give experience.
The pink elephant overlooked in this discussion is that cheating in online chess is trivial anyway - just let Fritz make the moves for you and you win every time (except, perhaps, against Kasparov and, of course, other cheaters).
So, no point in reverse engineering the client and cracking the protocol just to fake some latency in order to gain some extra seconds. Which only help in blitz games anyway. Which are a lot more fun to play offline anyway.