As members of the science and engineering community, we understand that a Law is one of the highest designations we can give a phenomena. It implies that there exists consistent empirical evidence for the phenomena. Evolution and Relativity have far more evidence yet they are still theories.
What a load of utter rubbish. The reason some things are named 'laws' and some things are named 'theories' has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of them. Things were called 'laws' back in the 17th-19th century when a lot of people actually thought that they embodied some exact and final property of nature. None of them did.
The truth is, that most of the things called 'laws' are exactly like 'Moore's law': an ad-hoc mathematical description of an empirical observation.
Boyle's law, Hooke's law, Avogadro's law, Newton's law of gravity, Ohm's law, Arrhenius' law, and so on and so on. All of these laws were derived essentially the same way: By fitting a curve to experimental data. Boyle and Avogadro didn't know what a gas was made up of. Arrhenius did not understand statistical thermodynamics, Newton did not understand gravity.
Now the theories you refer to, are something completely different in both rigor and how well the describe things. For instance the 'theory of relativity' is based on a set of basic postulates, from which the rest follows mathematically.
Einstein did not go out and measure the relationship of mass and speed and fit a curve to it. He made a few assumptions (some of which noone had dare make before) and worked out the physical consequences, arriving at something which just-so-happens to match reality far better than Newton's fitting-the-simplest-curve approach did.
That's bullshit. Could you point out exactly which significant freedoms Americans have which most Europeans do not?
I can think of only one - the right to bear arms. Most Europeans don't consider that an important freedom. They wouldn't have banned guns if they did.
As an American living in Sweden, I'm quite aware of a number of freedoms Americans do not have in their own country.
For instance, all government documents here are public records, except those explicitly classified. (which by law are required to be either national-security or privacy related) Not so in the USA. Exactly the opposite.
I have the freedom to enter someone else's property, for instance taking a stroll in someone elses' forest, on the condition that I do not damage anything. It is not legal to prohibit someone from that. Not so in the USA, where you've got barbed-wire fences, 'gated communities' and 'No Trespassing' signs everywhere, and you risk being shot if you ignore them.
The drinking age in most of Europe is 18. In the US-of-A it's 21. But you can still serve in the army at that age!
Holland has liberal drug laws. While I don't really advocate that, it's certainly another freedom americans do not have.
So.. Exactly what freedoms are you talking about? It's a tired cliche that americans (myself included) are fed with from kindergarten and upwards.
But nobody ever told me exactly what freedoms Europe are lacking. Freedom of speech, democracy, freedom of religion.. they have all that.
So tell me.. what freedoms do Europeans admire Americans about? I've lived in Europe for over a decade now, and have never met a single European who said he admired America for its freedoms.
I am sorry did you say java and compile to native.... That is NOT a JVM.
Yeah, and I also said GIJ, which is NOT native-compilation but a JVM.
There are several other VM's out there, Kaffe, JamVM and SableVM, which all use the GNU Classpath library and thus also benefit indirectly from Red Hat's work.
What about Blackdown? It's not open source. Period. It's under Sun's license.
Look at the abomination they did to get Eclipse to run.
Yeah, sure. I've seen it. Have you? Note particularily the line: No Eclipse changes are needed.
how about IBM's JVM for linux
They have several. What about IBM JVM? It's not open source either. They do have one though which is, JikesVM. And It has GNU Classpath as its library. IBM hasn't contributed any code at all towards the runtime.
(And the class library is the major issue with Java, not the VM. VM's are small by comparison)
The only thing they want with Java is the ability for it to be compiled to "their" OS.
Which doesn't quite explain why they're contributing by writing cross-platform Java library code, does it?
I agree that RedHat does do some development, but are you seriously saying that they do anywhere near what Sun or Microsoft do?
No. Nobody said that. You were the one saying Red Hat doesn't contribute to open source software. Now you've suddenly changed this to doing as much development as Sun or Microsoft??!
I do say this: They contribute a hell of a lot more code to the community than either Sun or Microsft does, despite having far smaller resources.
Yes. Red Hat charges a lot of money for support. So does Microsoft for their Enterprise solutions. You are making the stupid mistake of comparing consumer products with enterprise products. These are completely different things. Rest assured that Windows with enterprise support isn't cheap either. Nor is AIX, or Solaris or anything else.
I suggest you stop commenting on stuff which you obviously don't know much about.
Bullshit. Which Linux distributor codes a majority of anything?
As for Gnome.. perhaps you should grep through the gnome codebase for @redhat.com adresses? Then perhaps you'll figure out why they had 4 candidates, (more than any other single entity) for the board of the Gnome-foundation.
Red Hat doesn't code a JVM for Linux? Obviously you haven't made any contributions yourself in this area, because you really don't have a clue.
The bulk of work in GCJ (which compiles Java to native) and it's VM GIJ has been done by Red Hat. Do you know how many people they have working on this stuff? Of course you don't. (Hint: Number of contributors to the GNU Classpath Java class library: 10)
Tell me, which other commercial distributions are contributing?
They also do a majority of work GCC. You know that little compiler-thingy?
What you're saying is that a correspondance can be found between the symbols you manipulate and a different phenomena.
But that doesn't neccesarily mean the symbols in themselves have meaning. You could argue that the 'meaning' is actually in this correspondance.
It's a rather open question. The attitude which Hilbert expressed in that quote echos a lot of what the philosopher Wittgenstein later turned into his philosophy of math:
Here one has to keep on reminding oneself of the unimportance of the 'inner process' or 'state' and ask "Why should it be important?" What does it matter to me? What is interesting is how we
use mathematical propositions.
I don't think there is any question. Open and closed source will both be around for the forseeable future.
To what extent is a different matter.
As long as there are people (and this would be the vast majority today) who care less about what license their software has than how well it does the job, then there will always be a market for closed-source software. On the condition that it is better than the available OSS solutions.
I think OSS will play this kind of role in the future, providing everybody with a basic set of software, and upping the ante for the quality of commercial software.
Commercial software on the other hand, will increasingly be for those who need and are willing to pay for the improved quality it offers. (and will per definition be forced to offer in order to exist)
Using a DDOS on spammers is kind of like sending an arsonist to burn down the house of a murderer...
Yes, but you'd have to make that mass-murderer. Which means all the difference, I'd say.
A spammer targets millions of people who have to put up with their junk in their mailboxes and on their networks.
A DDOS attack is thousands of people targeting a single individual.
Besides, if thousands of people are independently of each other voluntarily accessing these particular sites, then there's no crime in that. (AFAIK, you can't be convicted of 'conspiracy to disable an internet server through requests')
I don't generally condone vigilante justice, but this is no more criminal behaviour than what thousands of Slashdotters engage in every day. Only with a different aim.
This is also what I worry about. A hostile peer is one thing. You can just choose not to receive packets from them. But what about a hostile tracker sending your client on a wild goose chase?
Simple enough. You just choose not to recive packets from them either.
Say a bit of program logic, like say: "If you cannot connect to more than X percent of referrals from this tracker, ignore it."
Nobody said it was forbidden. If you're so smart, perhaps you should read more carefully?
It's just very unlikely. It takes a lot of energy.
If we don't know how something works, we can't say much about how it works.
Wow. You're a smart one. Did you think up that tautology yourself?
It's wrong too. We do have a pretty good picture of how nuclear physics works.
Perhaps you should remove the beam from your own eye. Why do you have no problem referring to nuclear-physical facts when they can be used to support bogus theories of cold fusion, but when the same nuclear-physical theories which provided those facts don't support your nonsense, then "we don't know" all of a sudden.
This isn't science. That's pseudoscience. You're using science in an inconsistent manner to support something which experiment does not.
Putting it into perspective. Alchemy in its various forms was practiced approximately from 300 B.C to the 19th century. Chemistry as we know it started around the late 18th century.
The science of chemistry sprung from alchemy. But alchemy is not a science. It's mysticism, magic, religion and pseudoscience. It does not utilize the scientific method.
The science of chemistry has made more discoveries and more signficant discoveries of how nature works in the last decade alone than alchemy did in the two millenia it was around.
So you're saying that we should sponsor pseudoscience, because "Hey, they might stumble onto something real", when we could be spending that money on real science, which we know will give us results.
Perhaps you're an optimist, but it's not a very positive thing you're promoting. Society only has a limited amount of resources to spend. Why not make the most of it?
There are plenty of ISO and ANSI standards which are patent-encumbered. And you usually have to pay money to get access to the standards documents.
Non-proprietary doesn't mean open. And proprietary doesn't mean non-open.
So what's the point in distinguishing them, then? Not many people care about who created the standard. People do care about if they can implement it for free, and freely.
Re:What's a dead virus?
on
HIV Vaccine
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· Score: 1
The answer is: "Define life."
If you mean something which can replicate on its own, then a virus doesn't count. Of course, humans can replicate without a suitable environment either.
If you mean something which can self-replicate under any condition, then a virus counts.
When they're saying a 'dead' virus, then they're it wouldn't mean anything unless it could be contrasted toa 'live' virus. So it implies the latter definition. A 'dead' virus is one which cannot replicate even in a suitable host, and a 'live' one does.
(I once countered with this kind of question to my biochem professor during an exam where he'd asked about life, "What's life? Does a virus count?" His opinion, in least in the context of the exam, was 'No'.)
You're original point seemed to me to be that you can't earn a living as a poet, and therefore must work with something completely different to make a living.
Now, it seems that your definition of a professional poet is one who spends his entire time doing nothing but composing poetry. I'd agree there are few of those. (But I'm still not sure you can say there's not a single one. Surely there's someone with a scholarship or grant or stipend of some kind out there.)
First off, I'd say it's a bit of a narrow definition, since I think you can say that someone working in related subjects on the side of their writing is indeed a professional poet.
In context here, there are few who do nothing but look at the stars all day. Astronomers usually teach, too. Yet most would agree there's a distinction between the professional astronomer who does astronomy-related activity full-time, and the amateur astronomer who has an unrelated job and looks at the stars when he comes home in the evenings.
Secondly, I maintain it's a cop-out. If poetry is your passion and what you'd really like to spend all your time doing, wouldn't it be better to try and work with something related to it? That would appear to be the decision made by these prominent poets. So why shouldn't it be a qualifier for 'professional'?
We'd all like to make a living on our favorite activity, but few can.
When not possible, I think those who do make an honest attempt at getting as close as possible to their favorite subject do deserve the title of 'professional'.
First, he only teaches part time. (A relative of mine is a friend of his)
Second, he teaches poetry, and poetry translation. I don't think you just walk in off the steet and get a faculty position at Berkeley.
The entire basis for his teaching 'profession' is that he is a distinguished poet.
Thus, he is indeed making a living off his poetry both as a poet and a teacher. (And from what I understand, a pretty good living. I'm pretty sure he could survive off his poetry alone, had he wished to do so.)
Now, they can only sue licensees hence the legal action against IBM, Autozone and DaimlerChrysler, all of whom are licensees of UNIX.
Yes, but being an SCO Linux licensee doesn't necessarily make you a licensee of UNIX.
From what I understand, the SCO Linux licenses are as vague in describing what exactly you are supposedly licensing as SCO is in describing what part of Linux is supposedly infringing.
Or is it some kind of improved system that uses any of the principles in the cryptography.com article? The stuff in that article would scare the pants off anyone who believes in fair use rights and using any tactics necessary to secure them. Thankfully, it sounds like this articles is merely pointing out the dream and there doesn't exist such a magic bullet.
Of course it does.. it's not an article! It's marketing from Cryptography Research pushing their 'solution'.
And I must say, I'm not convinced. They propose having security oftware on the discs, running on a little virtual machine in the player. Supposedly, this would help against compromised players.
I can't exactly see how that would work if the VM was compromised.
Yes, it's semantical in the sense that 'open source' means something specific, and that Sun is trying to use that term to describe something as 'open source' which is not 'open source' by anyone else's definition but Sun's.
I don't like semantical debates at all. (see my latest journal entry?)
Hacker vs. cracker is silly. Because that's a case of someone trying to replace common usage of a word with a less-common (but still valid) usage.
This is not silly. This is Sun trying to subvert the term 'open source' for their own PR purposes.
What most people are referring to when the mean 'open source' is fundamentally different from what Sun is calling 'open source'.
I'm afraid if you do the calculations there are not enough calories in the 6L of Coke to actually propel your body that far. Humans, while being truely amazing machines, are not terribly energy effcient from what I understand.
Let's see Calories in Coke seems to be about 440 calories per liter. That'd be 2640 calories in 6 liters. At a moderate pace, you spend about 560 calories per hour bicycling at 13 mph. So that's about 3770 calories.
So, about 8.5 liters of Coke. Probably not as far off as you'd think.
Yes I know this was a joke, but I've seen many posts saying that bicycles are great machines and forget that thier source of propulsion is probably not as effcient as a gasoline engine.
That's very much a half-truth. The human body, and all living things, really, are very efficient energy-wise. It isn't that efficient when you look at the 'big picture', e.g. we don't manage to absorb all the energy in the food we consume (which might actually be a good thing, given what people eat nowadays). Also, we're not terrifically great at turning that energy into mechanical work.
So, by analogy to an automobile, we have a leaky gas tank and a crappy transmission and tires, but the actual engine is very efficient. Because we don't do combustion. We use miniature fuel cells called mitochondriae in our cells to do the work.
But besides that.. you're forgetting that unlike combustion engines, our fuel is renewable (if anything is).
Currently, hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels or natural gas. Electrolyzing hydrogen from water is very expensive. We need very efficient solar panels for the hydrogen economy to start.
The key word there is currently.
What's current now isn't what matters when you're talking about future technology. Using hydrocarbons or electrolysis in combination with solid-state solar panels to produce hydrogen is the current situation. It's not where things are going...
Which is namely to the production of efficient catalysts which can produce hydrogen gas directly from sunlight. Google for 'artifical photosynthesis', and you'll find quite a large amount of research being done all over the world on this subject, with all kinds of different approaches. (From solid-state to organic chemistry to biochem)
Unsurprizingly.. there was a lot of criticism of video games even back in the Pac-Man days.
Although not for violence. The big scare back circa 1982, if I recall, was that kids would become so addicted to arcade games that they'd start commiting crime to get money to play them.
Well, it's 20 years later and the crime pandemic seems not to have happened.
(Although there is more 'power-pill' related crime now. Doesn't seem like the kids learned to 'Just Say No' either..)
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing wrong with "Moore's Law".
As members of the science and engineering community, we understand that a Law is one of the highest designations we can give a phenomena. It implies that there exists consistent empirical evidence for the phenomena. Evolution and Relativity have far more evidence yet they are still theories.
What a load of utter rubbish. The reason some things are named 'laws' and some things are named 'theories' has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of them. Things were called 'laws' back in the 17th-19th century when a lot of people actually thought that they embodied some exact and final property of nature. None of them did.
The truth is, that most of the things called 'laws' are exactly like 'Moore's law': an ad-hoc mathematical description of an empirical observation.
Boyle's law, Hooke's law, Avogadro's law, Newton's law of gravity, Ohm's law, Arrhenius' law, and so on and so on. All of these laws were derived essentially the same way: By fitting a curve to experimental data.
Boyle and Avogadro didn't know what a gas was made up of. Arrhenius did not understand statistical thermodynamics, Newton did not understand gravity.
Now the theories you refer to, are something completely different in both rigor and how well the describe things. For instance the 'theory of relativity' is based on a set of basic postulates, from which the rest follows mathematically.
Einstein did not go out and measure the relationship of mass and speed and fit a curve to it. He made a few assumptions (some of which noone had dare make before) and worked out the physical consequences, arriving at something which just-so-happens to match reality far better than Newton's fitting-the-simplest-curve approach did.
'Admire the freedoms Americans have'?
That's bullshit. Could you point out exactly which significant freedoms Americans have which most Europeans do not?
I can think of only one - the right to bear arms. Most Europeans don't consider that an important freedom. They wouldn't have banned guns if they did.
As an American living in Sweden, I'm quite aware of a number of freedoms Americans do not have in their own country.
For instance, all government documents here are public records, except those explicitly classified. (which by law are required to be either national-security or privacy related) Not so in the USA. Exactly the opposite.
I have the freedom to enter someone else's property, for instance taking a stroll in someone elses' forest, on the condition that I do not damage anything. It is not legal to prohibit someone from that. Not so in the USA, where you've got barbed-wire fences, 'gated communities' and 'No Trespassing' signs everywhere, and you risk being shot if you ignore them.
The drinking age in most of Europe is 18. In the US-of-A it's 21. But you can still serve in the army at that age!
Holland has liberal drug laws. While I don't really advocate that, it's certainly another freedom americans do not have.
So.. Exactly what freedoms are you talking about? It's a tired cliche that americans (myself included) are fed with from kindergarten and upwards.
But nobody ever told me exactly what freedoms Europe are lacking. Freedom of speech, democracy, freedom of religion.. they have all that.
So tell me.. what freedoms do Europeans admire Americans about? I've lived in Europe for over a decade now, and have never met a single European who said he admired America for its freedoms.
I am sorry did you say java and compile to native.... That is NOT a JVM.
Yeah, and I also said GIJ, which is NOT native-compilation but a JVM.
There are several other VM's out there, Kaffe, JamVM and SableVM, which all use the GNU Classpath library and thus also benefit indirectly from Red Hat's work.
What about Blackdown? It's not open source. Period. It's under Sun's license.
Look at the abomination they did to get Eclipse to run.
Yeah, sure. I've seen it. Have you?
Note particularily the line: No Eclipse changes are needed.
how about IBM's JVM for linux
They have several. What about IBM JVM? It's not open source either. They do have one though which is, JikesVM. And It has GNU Classpath as its library. IBM hasn't contributed any code at all towards the runtime.
(And the class library is the major issue with Java, not the VM. VM's are small by comparison)
Redhat all but hates Java.
Yeah, which is why they hosted an open-source Java summit as recently as two weeks ago.
The only thing they want with Java is the ability for it to be compiled to "their" OS.
Which doesn't quite explain why they're contributing by writing cross-platform Java library code, does it?
I agree that RedHat does do some development, but are you seriously saying that they do anywhere near what Sun or Microsoft do?
No. Nobody said that. You were the one saying Red Hat doesn't contribute to open source software. Now you've suddenly changed this to doing as much development as Sun or Microsoft??!
I do say this: They contribute a hell of a lot more code to the community than either Sun or Microsft does, despite having far smaller resources.
Yes. Red Hat charges a lot of money for support. So does Microsoft for their Enterprise solutions. You are making the stupid mistake of comparing consumer products with enterprise products. These are completely different things. Rest assured that Windows with enterprise support isn't cheap either. Nor is AIX, or Solaris or anything else.
I suggest you stop commenting on stuff which you obviously don't know much about.
Bullshit. Which Linux distributor codes a majority of anything?
As for Gnome.. perhaps you should grep through the gnome codebase for @redhat.com adresses?
Then perhaps you'll figure out why they had 4 candidates, (more than any other single entity) for the board of the Gnome-foundation.
Red Hat doesn't code a JVM for Linux?
Obviously you haven't made any contributions yourself in this area, because you really don't have a clue.
The bulk of work in GCJ (which compiles Java to native) and it's VM GIJ has been done by Red Hat.
Do you know how many people they have working on this stuff? Of course you don't. (Hint: Number of contributors to the GNU Classpath Java class library: 10)
Tell me, which other commercial distributions are contributing?
They also do a majority of work GCC. You know that little compiler-thingy?
But that doesn't neccesarily mean the symbols in themselves have meaning. You could argue that the 'meaning' is actually in this correspondance.
It's a rather open question. The attitude which Hilbert expressed in that quote echos a lot of what the philosopher Wittgenstein later turned into his philosophy of math:
I don't think there is any question. Open and closed source will both be around for the forseeable future.
To what extent is a different matter.
As long as there are people (and this would be the vast majority today) who care less about what license their software has than how well it does the job, then there will always be a market for closed-source software. On the condition that it is better than the available OSS solutions.
I think OSS will play this kind of role in the future, providing everybody with a basic set of software, and upping the ante for the quality of commercial software.
Commercial software on the other hand, will increasingly be for those who need and are willing to pay for the improved quality it offers.
(and will per definition be forced to offer in order to exist)
If it is OK to DDoS spamers, who else is it ok to knock off of the net?
"News for nerds, stuff that matters"?
Using a DDOS on spammers is kind of like sending an arsonist to burn down the house of a murderer...
Yes, but you'd have to make that mass-murderer. Which means all the difference, I'd say.
A spammer targets millions of people who have to put up with their junk in their mailboxes and on their networks.
A DDOS attack is thousands of people targeting a single individual.
Besides, if thousands of people are independently of each other voluntarily accessing these particular sites, then there's no crime in that. (AFAIK, you can't be convicted of 'conspiracy to disable an internet server through requests')
I don't generally condone vigilante justice, but this is no more criminal behaviour than what thousands of Slashdotters engage in every day. Only with a different aim.
This is also what I worry about. A hostile peer is one thing. You can just choose not to receive packets from them. But what about a hostile tracker sending your client on a wild goose chase?
Simple enough. You just choose not to recive packets from them either.
Say a bit of program logic, like say: "If you cannot connect to more than X percent of referrals from this tracker, ignore it."
So, what is there to forbid and H-H reaction?
Nobody said it was forbidden. If you're so smart, perhaps you should read more carefully?
It's just very unlikely. It takes a lot of energy.
If we don't know how something works, we can't say much about how it works.
Wow. You're a smart one. Did you think up that tautology yourself?
It's wrong too. We do have a pretty good picture of how nuclear physics works.
Perhaps you should remove the beam from your own eye. Why do you have no problem referring to nuclear-physical facts when they can be used to support bogus theories of cold fusion, but when the same nuclear-physical theories which provided those facts don't support your nonsense, then "we don't know" all of a sudden.
This isn't science. That's pseudoscience. You're using science in an inconsistent manner to support something which experiment does not.
Putting it into perspective. Alchemy in its various forms was practiced approximately from 300 B.C to the 19th century. Chemistry as we know it started around the late 18th century.
The science of chemistry sprung from alchemy. But alchemy is not a science. It's mysticism, magic, religion and pseudoscience. It does not utilize the scientific method.
The science of chemistry has made more discoveries and more signficant discoveries of how nature works in the last decade alone than alchemy did in the two millenia it was around.
So you're saying that we should sponsor pseudoscience, because "Hey, they might stumble onto something real", when we could be spending that money on real science, which we know will give us results.
Perhaps you're an optimist, but it's not a very positive thing you're promoting. Society only has a limited amount of resources to spend. Why not make the most of it?
What the heck does proprietary matter?
There are plenty of ISO and ANSI standards which are patent-encumbered. And you usually have to pay money to get access to the standards documents.
Non-proprietary doesn't mean open.
And proprietary doesn't mean non-open.
So what's the point in distinguishing them, then? Not many people care about who created the standard. People do care about if they can implement it for free, and freely.
The answer is: "Define life."
If you mean something which can replicate on its own, then a virus doesn't count. Of course, humans can replicate without a suitable environment either.
If you mean something which can self-replicate under any condition, then a virus counts.
When they're saying a 'dead' virus, then they're it wouldn't mean anything unless it could be contrasted toa 'live' virus. So it implies the latter definition.
A 'dead' virus is one which cannot replicate even in a suitable host, and a 'live' one does.
(I once countered with this kind of question to my biochem professor during an exam where he'd asked about life, "What's life? Does a virus count?" His opinion, in least in the context of the exam, was 'No'.)
You're original point seemed to me to be that you can't earn a living as a poet, and therefore must work with something completely different to make a living.
Now, it seems that your definition of a professional poet is one who spends his entire time doing nothing but composing poetry. I'd agree there are few of those.
(But I'm still not sure you can say there's not a single one. Surely there's someone with a scholarship or grant or stipend of some kind out there.)
First off, I'd say it's a bit of a narrow definition, since I think you can say that someone working in related subjects on the side of their writing is indeed a professional poet.
In context here, there are few who do nothing but look at the stars all day. Astronomers usually teach, too. Yet most would agree there's a distinction between the professional astronomer who does astronomy-related activity full-time, and the amateur astronomer who has an unrelated job and looks at the stars when he comes home in the evenings.
Secondly, I maintain it's a cop-out. If poetry is your passion and what you'd really like to spend all your time doing, wouldn't it be better to try and work with something related to it? That would appear to be the decision made by these prominent poets. So why shouldn't it be a qualifier for 'professional'?
We'd all like to make a living on our favorite activity, but few can.
When not possible, I think those who do make an honest attempt at getting as close as possible to their favorite subject do deserve the title of 'professional'.
That's a cop-out!
First, he only teaches part time.
(A relative of mine is a friend of his)
Second, he teaches poetry, and poetry translation. I don't think you just walk in off the steet and get a faculty position at Berkeley.
The entire basis for his teaching 'profession' is that he is a distinguished poet.
Thus, he is indeed making a living off his poetry both as a poet and a teacher.
(And from what I understand, a pretty good living. I'm pretty sure he could survive off his poetry alone, had he wished to do so.)
Robert Hass.
Now, they can only sue licensees hence the legal action against IBM, Autozone and DaimlerChrysler, all of whom are licensees of UNIX.
Yes, but being an SCO Linux licensee doesn't necessarily make you a licensee of UNIX.
From what I understand, the SCO Linux licenses are as vague in describing what exactly you are supposedly licensing as SCO is in describing what part of Linux is supposedly infringing.
So just because you own a DVD player that was hacked, you won't be able to play future DVDs? That's a load of crap.
Yes, it's a load of crap. First because it's not an article.. It's a marketing piece which is about to contrast this situation to Their Solution(TM).
Or is it some kind of improved system that uses any of the principles in the cryptography.com article? The stuff in that article would scare the pants off anyone who believes in fair use rights and using any tactics necessary to secure them. Thankfully, it sounds like this articles is merely pointing out the dream and there doesn't exist such a magic bullet.
Of course it does.. it's not an article! It's marketing from Cryptography Research pushing their 'solution'.
And I must say, I'm not convinced. They propose having security oftware on the discs, running on a little virtual machine in the player. Supposedly, this would help against compromised players.
I can't exactly see how that would work if the VM was compromised.
People with valid arguments have no difficulty using the correct term! Without semantics language is meaningless.
And using what you consider to be the 'incorrect' term does not invalidate the argument.
Everyone knows perfectly well what is meant when someone refers to copyright infringement as 'stealing'.
Yes, it's semantical in the sense that 'open source' means something specific, and that Sun is trying to use that term to describe something as 'open source' which is not 'open source' by anyone else's definition but Sun's.
I don't like semantical debates at all. (see my latest journal entry?)
Hacker vs. cracker is silly. Because that's a case of someone trying to replace common usage of a word with a less-common (but still valid) usage.
This is not silly. This is Sun trying to subvert the term 'open source' for their own PR purposes.
What most people are referring to when the mean 'open source' is fundamentally different from what Sun is calling 'open source'.
I'm afraid if you do the calculations there are not enough calories in the 6L of Coke to actually propel your body that far. Humans, while being truely amazing machines, are not terribly energy effcient from what I understand.
Let's see Calories in Coke seems to be about 440 calories per liter. That'd be 2640 calories in 6 liters.
At a moderate pace, you spend about
560 calories per hour bicycling at 13 mph. So that's about 3770 calories.
So, about 8.5 liters of Coke. Probably not as far off as you'd think.
Yes I know this was a joke, but I've seen many posts saying that bicycles are great machines and forget that thier source of propulsion is probably not as effcient as a gasoline engine.
That's very much a half-truth. The human body, and all living things, really, are very efficient energy-wise.
It isn't that efficient when you look at the 'big picture', e.g. we don't manage to absorb all the energy in the food we consume (which might actually be a good thing, given what people eat nowadays). Also, we're not terrifically great at turning that energy into mechanical work.
So, by analogy to an automobile, we have a leaky gas tank and a crappy transmission and tires, but the actual engine is very efficient. Because we don't do combustion. We use miniature fuel cells called mitochondriae in our cells to do the work.
But besides that.. you're forgetting that unlike combustion engines, our fuel is renewable (if anything is).
Currently, hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels or natural gas. Electrolyzing hydrogen from water is very expensive. We need very efficient solar panels for the hydrogen economy to start.
The key word there is currently.
What's current now isn't what matters when you're talking about future technology. Using hydrocarbons or electrolysis in combination with solid-state solar panels to produce hydrogen is the current situation. It's not where things are going...
Which is namely to the production of efficient catalysts which can produce hydrogen gas directly from sunlight. Google for 'artifical photosynthesis', and you'll find quite a large amount of research being done all over the world on this subject, with all kinds of different approaches.
(From solid-state to organic chemistry to biochem)
it isn't always - it's only true for numbers which are not even and not multiples of 5...
What?
4 is even. 4 mod 10 = 4
4^13 = 67108864, 67108864 mod 10 = 4
5 is a multiple of 5.
5^13 = 1220703125, 1220703125 mod 10 = 5
5 mod 10 = 5
Unsurprizingly.. there was a lot of criticism of video games even back in the Pac-Man days.
Although not for violence. The big scare back circa 1982, if I recall, was that kids would become so addicted to arcade games that they'd start commiting crime to get money to play them.
Well, it's 20 years later and the crime pandemic seems not to have happened.
(Although there is more 'power-pill' related crime now. Doesn't seem like the kids learned to 'Just Say No' either..)