If a defensive battery was fired upon, it could back-calculate the trajectory and return fire automatically, even if the enemy was outside of visual range (provided it was within firing range, obviously).
I was very heavily into TA. Back when Kali and TEN were the only two real TA communities, I occasionally held #1 on the ladder. My "real" rank would be more like 3-5.
The thing you are talking about, firing back at the unit, was a hole in TA's "ai". It didn't "backtrack" and hit the spot at which the attack came from, it locked onto the unit that damaged it, and would track the unit indefinitely.
The individual units in TA had no concept of line of sight. You could target a big bertha (very long range, powerful, but slow firing artillery cannon) on the enemy commander if you flew some peepers over his base and spotted him. Then, the bertha would keep firing over and over, until the commander was dead, no matter where he went (even though you no longer had line of sight on him). This was particularly useful with the big bertha, because bertha's were not super-accurate, they would often miss by a substantial margin, so not only was the commander in danger, but anything he was near as well, so he couldn't really help constructions yards build or anything.
One of my favorite tricks was using peepers to locate the enemy commander. When I saw him, I would have a group of several defenders (the anti-air missile launchers) ready to target on the commander. Now, although the enemy commander was usually out of range of course, this collection of defenders (bound to a hotkey) would always be pointing directly at him. This way, I could triangulate his position when the nukes or big berthas were ready.
Your sperm won't be good copies after about 4 decades.
Sperm are not good copies because the DNA becomes corrupted along the way.
Sperm are produced by cells in your testes, and those cells' DNA gets messed up, each one a little bit, by radiation etc... After awhile, there is more "messed up" sperm than normal sperm, and you get things like birth defects.
However, by taking a lot of samples (say, the millions of sperm in an ejaculation) and recording all their DNA, you could combine them together to get your "true" DNA, using a simple statistics approach.
This could perhaps be used to cure cancer, as well (by making a virus which injects "correct" DNA into all your cells).
Of course, this sort of technology is pretty far down the road.
There is also some talk that DNA itself causes our aging, that DNA is basically a long chain, and on the end of the chain is a sequence which is set up such that each time it replicates, this sequence is reduced by one entry (so, there's an encoding for "replicate N times and then stop"), and we can "recharge" ourselves by adding on a bunch of entries...
This is usually what the people who say "immortality is just around the corner" are talking about.
...this is basicly the eDonkey/eMule system in a microcosmos. But pick a reasonably popular download, say 2-300 peers. Grab 1-1.5mb from each (you'll get that pretty quick before they choke your connection, someone has to start sending a few bytes)
No, this assumption is wrong... nobody has to start sending anything until both agree to exchange a piece. It's not like you start downloading piece 99 and they say "hey, can I have piece 45" and you say "no".
Maybe you're saying you agree to send them piece 99 in exchange for piece 45, and grab 50kB from them without returning anything, and then find some new sucker.
This wouldn't work either, if every node would only send whole pieces (because the 50kB you downloaded would be wasted).
Then how is the upload bandwidth for the "super-generous" seeding mode prioritized against the upload bandwidth for the same user's downloads? A problem I often run into on eDonkey is being 2315th in line.
What I would do here is have the "super-generous" nodes distribute pieces in a round-robin fashion, rather than letting a single person monopolize the node.
The viewer doesn't need to be at a specific position. The light which gets through the slits shines onto the "display" of the device.
If I shine a flashlight past my hand onto the wall, it doesn't really matter where you are (as long as you can see the wall), you'll be able to tell that I'm making a bunny shadow puppet.
No, it isn't. What is trivial with eDonkey is to get a modified client that doesn't have this restriction. Solving this problem requires reporting the amount of uploading being done to some kind of server.
No, it doesn't require that. Basically, you just have all connections be 2-way. The key issue here is that you are all looking for the same file.
If client B wants to connect to client A and download some pieces, client A can decide on whether or not to allow this based on which pieces B can provide that A is missing.
If the connection is not mutually beneficial to both parties, one side closes it.
Combine this with a "generosity" setting, where some people sharing the file give away pieces for free, (and by default, when you finish a download you turn into "super-generous" mode until the transfer utility is closed), and the system will work fine, without any sort of central monitoring.
Basically, everyone is "trading" pieces of the download, and automatically discovering "local" peers which have uncongested links with each other.
IMO, the solution is to make private keys a real physical thing: similar in form factor to a USB key drive. It would store the private key, and have a small CPU that could encrypt/decrypt small messages using that private key. It would not be capable of transmitting the private key itself.
Yeah, this idea could work pretty well. You could even put a biometric authentication thing on there (thumbprint or whatever) if you wanted to.
I remember a story from a few years back about how IBM had made chips like this. Basically, just simple little encrypt/decrypt chips, where the private key was on the chip and inaccessible, and the chip was specifically engineered such that the private key could not be read "by any means"... (Taking the chip apart would destroy the key etc)
The specifics of this case were that someone *had* managed to extract the private key despite the countermeasures, but the idea is still sound.
In fact, with a standard key revocation database, this would work very well... If you lose your key, you report it and its revoked.
In this case, you would only have to deal with people extracting their keys on purpose, which will not usually be useful. (In how many cases do you *want* someone to be able to impersonate you? I'm not saying it wouldn't happen, but the applications are limited)
One time, I got a tech support call from a female friend. What's funny is that you would not call her stupid by any means... But, she is absolutely clueless about computers, it's amazing...
In this situation, she calls me up on the phone, and says that her AOL isn't working now, when she brings it up the "page goes right off the bottom of the screen, and I can't see what's there"...
Although it seems way too obvious, I ask her about moving the window, clicking and dragging in the title bar ("that blue band across the top"), etc... She says that's not it...
Well, it was. I drove over to her place (only a few minutes from mine, so not that bad), came in, and moved the window for her.
It really isn't as simple an issue as the rhetoric would have you believe...
It really IS simple, I think: It's the very same issue as abortion. You can ask all the same questions, "is it OK to kill a fetus to benefit 100 people" etc, just substitute "at the choice of the mother"...
Saying that it's not OK to kill a one month old fetus to save 100 people because killing is immoral, but it *IS* OK to kill the one month old fetus because "women have a right to choice" doesn't make sense.
You're killing an unborn fetus either way, and that's the major issue here. (The "playing god" issue is a smaller one).
It doesn't matter whether you're pro-choice or pro-life... The issue at heart is the same. And to have the goverment rule one way in one case, and the other way for the other case, is a disparity/hypocrisy.
This can still be messed with. When the binary is read (to do the byte-compare, or to compute a digital signature), the machine can return the "correct" binary, while it was actually running a hacked binary.
You still need a paper trail. The ballots can be counted, doublechecked, you can use 2, or 3, or N groups of people with whatever affiliation. This is where vote security lies.
I live in New Hampshire. When I voted, my local voting place was using a Diebold optical scanner vote box. Just like any other paranoid slashbot, I don't trust Diebold. But I do trust optical scan ballots, because when the numbers become contested, real people can do a recount.
Most of them do, nowadays, sure. They didn't always do that.
On a particular counter-strike server, just for shits and grins, I bound my fire button to an alias which changed my name and fired, then changed back when I let it go.
So, I had one name active for whenever I was firing (and presumably, whenever I was getting any kills), and another during other times.
The only problem was that cstrike printed a "foo has changed name to bar" message to every player connected, and that amount of spam was annoying, when you see two messages for every mouse click I input.
People more versed in physics than I am can answer this:
The lasers used for optical media keep on progressing to higher frequency light, which is better able to resolve things. Where is the likely end for optical media?
Past ultraviolet light is x-rays and gamma rays I think... Will they be used for optical media? They are known as "dangerous", but perhaps in low power situations they aren't too bad? Or, you could just have the optical drive shielded in lead:)
Microscopes haved moved past light, into "electron microscopes", which used streams of electrons to resolve things that light cannot. Will that be possible with our optical media techniques?
As part of the employee training, we were told some stories about the Despot's "crazy" return policy.
The one where I worked used to be a BJ's or Sam's or something, one of those huge food wholesalers. An old woman brought in a frozen 6 pack of blueberry muffins, that she had had in the freezer for more than 2 years, because "she didn't like them", and the refund was granted.
Another guy came in with a dead-looking plant, a shrubbery. He said that he had bought it and planted it, and now it was dead, he wanted a new one (no matter that it was late fall now, and all the leaves are off the plants, etc). The return (store credit) was granted in this case, too...
But, a few hours later, one of the cart-return guys noted that one of the shrubs in front of the store had been dug up. This guy had just come in, dug up a plant from in front of the store, and "returned" it for some store credit.
I have not RTFA, but the concept talked about in this article is actually pretty old.
The times I have read about it, they specifically addressed this issue. They noted that the worst case scenario is that the "sweeping" of the beam stops, and a single spot on your eye is getting the full power of the laser.
Even with this concept, they said that the power levels were well below the accepted "danger levels".
Perhaps to accomplish this, they need to sweep several times for a "full" image, since the laser is low power.
Manufacturers need to cripple cheaper cars to somehow justify the extra $100k plus you can spend on higher-end models.
Basically, the free market takes care of this. It can take time, as the big boys who have a sort of implicit oligopoly / price fixing trust try to fight off the smaller guys, but it will almost always happen. (The cases where it doesn't are "natural monopolies" and government-granted monopolies (like cable companies, etc)).
Your kind of thinking ("Manufacturers need to cripple cheap cars") will work in the short term. Over the long term, those manufacturers adopting this tactic will lose when someone else realizes "hey, I can build a better car than this for 60% of the price".
Witness the US auto industry getting eaten alive by the Japanese in the 70s and 80s.
If you're standard directly on the earth's axis of rotation (at the north or south pole), then you are not moving with respect to the center of the earth (although you are rotating once per 24 hours).
If you stand on the equator, then you are moving at speed ((circumference of the earth) / 24 hours), which is roughly 1000mph, with respect to the center of the earth.
Re:Is it an open protocol?
on
Replacing TCP?
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· Score: 1
What about a piece of software (named A) that does not contain, but rather USES a piece of software (named B)? Is A a derivative of B?
Well, now you're discussing a somewhat different topic. The FSF asserts that dynamic linking constitutes a derived work. Other people (myself among them) don't agree with this view.
Re:Is it an open protocol?
on
Replacing TCP?
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· Score: 1
I agree with the rest of your post here -- obviously Microsoft will NOT use any GPL code in something like Windows. But I dispute that the kernel is a derivative of the stack. You're saying that if MS were to use a GPL'd _NETWORK_ stack, their task scheduling algorithms are derivatives?
Quoting from the GPL, section 0:
The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language.
The writers of the GPL are not saying "here is what we think of as a derivative work", it's the writers reaffirming "here is what copyright law says is a derivative work".
There's really no leeway here in your argument. By definition, a piece of software (named A) which contains a piece of software (named B) or a portion of it, is a derivative work.
Re:Is it an open protocol?
on
Replacing TCP?
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· Score: 1
Almost true. It gives you a license to distribute that code, under certain terms.
My mistake, I guess, although you're picking nits. When I said "use" here, I was talking about using their implementation in a product you create. Since their software is a library intended to be "used" (oops, I guess I meant "linked") into other software, I figured it would be obvious.
Sorry, you're way off here. Redhat sells Linux, and their customers use it for commercial purposes.
I have not read the article (although I would like to), all the links (even though coral-ized) are dead right now for me at least, so perhaps you are placing more weight on the "non-commercial" wording they used than I did. I was just pointing out that releasing something for "non-commercial" use under the GPL makes a lot of sense, since the normal business model of "commercial" software is not compatiable with the GPL.
If they say they are releasing under the GPL, then Redhat is allowed to use the software with their own GPL'ed software, such as their version of the Linux kernel.
Sorry, you've mis-construed non-commercial. Non-commercial typically means not used in commerce. Believe it or not, is is possible to sell software for non-commercial use.
I think *you've* misconstrued things. The normal meaning of "commercial software" means "software that is sold" or "software that is not open source".
By the way, you should tell Redhat and Novell that bit about the GPL not working for ``paying a price per use/copy of the binary'', that'll be a revelation to them.
Whoo boy, zing! I guess that punched a hole in me!
Seriously, everyone knows that if you buy Redhat or Novell off the shelf, you're not "paying for use/copy of the binary", or if you are, you're an idiot. You can download the same binary for free, or you can have it burned to CDs and mailed to you for a couple of dollars if your link is slow.
When you buy a commercial Linux distro, you are paying for support, or bound manuals, or something. If you're paying for "use/copy of the binary", you are paying for something you could get for free, and there's better ways you could donate money to the organization of your choice than this.
Re:Is it an open protocol?
on
Replacing TCP?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Boy are you idiot
Thanks... I'm not sure if you're confused or trolling, but I respond anyway:
Microsoft as long as they didn't change the stack could use it in their kernel without releasing the full kernel code.
Wrong. The reason the LGPL exists is to address this specific case. If the stack were LGPL licensed, then MS could include it, and only be required to submit any changes they made to the LGPL'ed stack itself.
As the Stack wouldn't be a derivative of the whole kernel.
How could you possibly argue that their stack was a derivative of the MS kernel? I assume you meant to say that the MS kernel was a derivative of the stack... But then you are 100% wrong here. If MS used this code, then their kernel would be a derivative work, there's basically no way to get around it.
Technically, the FSF specifically states that if two programs run in operation via a "pipe", that it doesn't consider them linked. Any form of dynamic linking, they are considered linked, so you couldn't load the stack as a dll or driver and consider yourself not a derivative work. There is perhaps a tiny bit of leeway if you're a lawyer, where you could say "the FSF thinks loading a driver makes the kernel a derivative work, but I don't, so let's argue that in court".
Now to be really nice MSFT might have to make available... an LGPL style wrapper
You are way off base. GPL apps are specifically allowed to include LGPL stuff. This is a special case exemption from the normal rules of the GPL. LGPL stuff is *not* allowed to include GPL stuff.
Re:Is it an open protocol?
on
Replacing TCP?
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· Score: 0
The GPL doesn't lend itself to ``free, non-commercial use'': it lets the licensee use and distribute freely, at any price, for any use.
No, it doesn't.
The General Public License gives you a license to use that code under certain terms.
When they say "free, non-commercial use", and they talk about the GPL, they are making sense. The Linux kernel, which is GPL, may use their implementation. Microsoft cannot use their implementation in any of its Windows OSes without releasing the OS kernel under terms which are compatible with the GPL.
"Dual licensing" software under the GPL and some other commercial license is noble, (because you are releasing open source), viable (see Qt and Aladdin Ghostscript for examples of people who have made money doing this), and does not conflict with the goals of the FSF.
The GPL does not lend itself to "commercial use", because the "standard" model of software licensing is paying a price per use/copy of the binary, and the GPL doesn't work this way.
GPL trolls (sorry, not that I'm implying you're one) always pipe up with "but you can sell GPL software as much as you want", while totally ignoring the fact that the whole concept of selling software is based on the idea of copyright-enforced scarcity, which the GPL eliminates.
"max over 0 (0 max plus) scan" is not very readable to me. But, the fact that I don't understand this statement is relatively unimportant.
It's a pretty straightforward translation that you've offer, "|/0(0|+)\" is "max over 0 (0 max plus) scan". Each character in the first translates 1:1 into terms in the second...
But, why even bother with the first notation? It's pretty ridiculous. *Anyone*, even an expert in the language, would have an easier time reading the verbose version.
Representing "Maximum substring sum" with the "verbose" form is still plenty tight enough...
Introducing this "terse line noise" form just increases the barrier to entry.
Re:Fixing fundamental design mistakes?
on
Linus Interviewed
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Some folks still think that *nix is inherently virus proof because anything a mere user runs couldn't touch the really important stuff in/bin. I think most Unix programmers understand by now that the really important stuff is under $HOME; what's under/bin is easily replaceable.
I think you are dismissing things too easily. The fact that the stuff under/bin is easily replaceable is exactly what makes unix "inherently virus proof".
The stuff stored under $HOME is mostly data, not executable (except for scripts, which are easy to doublecheck). If I find out I have been hacked or virused, I just shrug, tar up/home, reinstall my stuff, and carefully restore/home. On a computer where I am the only user (a fair comparison, if it's one person's primary workstation), that will only take maybe an hour of my attention if I'm really paranoid about checking all the scripts.
Viruses aren't a problem because they can only hit stuff in/bin if there's a security problem (which are much rarer than the windows world), and even if they do, it's easy to restore/bin. They can hit $HOME, but by its nature $HOME is not a good target.
Our technology and science, though it may be primitive to someone in the future, will never be looked back on with the same feelings as this crap.
By actually using the concepts of the scientific method (experimentation etc), we come up with things that are true (as far as we can measure them) rather than stories we make up that sound good.
"Gravity is what requires us to eat, it pulls the food out of our bodies"... The fact that this explanation was considered shows that the concept of digestion wasn't understood. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is that this theory is easily tested, by laying down or standing on your head for a day and seeing if you get hungry.
Newton's model of physics has been shown to be "wrong", but we don't fault him for that, he drew proper conclusions from the available data.
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If a defensive battery was fired upon, it could back-calculate the trajectory and return fire automatically, even if the enemy was outside of visual range (provided it was within firing range, obviously).
I was very heavily into TA. Back when Kali and TEN were the only two real TA communities, I occasionally held #1 on the ladder. My "real" rank would be more like 3-5.
The thing you are talking about, firing back at the unit, was a hole in TA's "ai". It didn't "backtrack" and hit the spot at which the attack came from, it locked onto the unit that damaged it, and would track the unit indefinitely.
The individual units in TA had no concept of line of sight. You could target a big bertha (very long range, powerful, but slow firing artillery cannon) on the enemy commander if you flew some peepers over his base and spotted him. Then, the bertha would keep firing over and over, until the commander was dead, no matter where he went (even though you no longer had line of sight on him). This was particularly useful with the big bertha, because bertha's were not super-accurate, they would often miss by a substantial margin, so not only was the commander in danger, but anything he was near as well, so he couldn't really help constructions yards build or anything.
One of my favorite tricks was using peepers to locate the enemy commander. When I saw him, I would have a group of several defenders (the anti-air missile launchers) ready to target on the commander. Now, although the enemy commander was usually out of range of course, this collection of defenders (bound to a hotkey) would always be pointing directly at him. This way, I could triangulate his position when the nukes or big berthas were ready.
Casino rules != The Law
I'm pretty sure this would have been against the law in Vegas.
Your sperm won't be good copies after about 4 decades.
Sperm are not good copies because the DNA becomes corrupted along the way.
Sperm are produced by cells in your testes, and those cells' DNA gets messed up, each one a little bit, by radiation etc... After awhile, there is more "messed up" sperm than normal sperm, and you get things like birth defects.
However, by taking a lot of samples (say, the millions of sperm in an ejaculation) and recording all their DNA, you could combine them together to get your "true" DNA, using a simple statistics approach.
This could perhaps be used to cure cancer, as well (by making a virus which injects "correct" DNA into all your cells).
Of course, this sort of technology is pretty far down the road.
There is also some talk that DNA itself causes our aging, that DNA is basically a long chain, and on the end of the chain is a sequence which is set up such that each time it replicates, this sequence is reduced by one entry (so, there's an encoding for "replicate N times and then stop"), and we can "recharge" ourselves by adding on a bunch of entries...
This is usually what the people who say "immortality is just around the corner" are talking about.
...this is basicly the eDonkey/eMule system in a microcosmos. But pick a reasonably popular download, say 2-300 peers. Grab 1-1.5mb from each (you'll get that pretty quick before they choke your connection, someone has to start sending a few bytes)
No, this assumption is wrong... nobody has to start sending anything until both agree to exchange a piece. It's not like you start downloading piece 99 and they say "hey, can I have piece 45" and you say "no".
Maybe you're saying you agree to send them piece 99 in exchange for piece 45, and grab 50kB from them without returning anything, and then find some new sucker.
This wouldn't work either, if every node would only send whole pieces (because the 50kB you downloaded would be wasted).
Then how is the upload bandwidth for the "super-generous" seeding mode prioritized against the upload bandwidth for the same user's downloads? A problem I often run into on eDonkey is being 2315th in line.
What I would do here is have the "super-generous" nodes distribute pieces in a round-robin fashion, rather than letting a single person monopolize the node.
(the viewer needs to be at a specific position)
The viewer doesn't need to be at a specific position. The light which gets through the slits shines onto the "display" of the device.
If I shine a flashlight past my hand onto the wall, it doesn't really matter where you are (as long as you can see the wall), you'll be able to tell that I'm making a bunny shadow puppet.
No, it isn't. What is trivial with eDonkey is to get a modified client that doesn't have this restriction. Solving this problem requires reporting the amount of uploading being done to some kind of server.
No, it doesn't require that. Basically, you just have all connections be 2-way. The key issue here is that you are all looking for the same file.
If client B wants to connect to client A and download some pieces, client A can decide on whether or not to allow this based on which pieces B can provide that A is missing.
If the connection is not mutually beneficial to both parties, one side closes it.
Combine this with a "generosity" setting, where some people sharing the file give away pieces for free, (and by default, when you finish a download you turn into "super-generous" mode until the transfer utility is closed), and the system will work fine, without any sort of central monitoring.
Basically, everyone is "trading" pieces of the download, and automatically discovering "local" peers which have uncongested links with each other.
IMO, the solution is to make private keys a real physical thing: similar in form factor to a USB key drive. It would store the private key, and have a small CPU that could encrypt/decrypt small messages using that private key. It would not be capable of transmitting the private key itself.
Yeah, this idea could work pretty well. You could even put a biometric authentication thing on there (thumbprint or whatever) if you wanted to.
I remember a story from a few years back about how IBM had made chips like this. Basically, just simple little encrypt/decrypt chips, where the private key was on the chip and inaccessible, and the chip was specifically engineered such that the private key could not be read "by any means"... (Taking the chip apart would destroy the key etc)
The specifics of this case were that someone *had* managed to extract the private key despite the countermeasures, but the idea is still sound.
In fact, with a standard key revocation database, this would work very well... If you lose your key, you report it and its revoked.
In this case, you would only have to deal with people extracting their keys on purpose, which will not usually be useful. (In how many cases do you *want* someone to be able to impersonate you? I'm not saying it wouldn't happen, but the applications are limited)
One time, I got a tech support call from a female friend. What's funny is that you would not call her stupid by any means... But, she is absolutely clueless about computers, it's amazing...
In this situation, she calls me up on the phone, and says that her AOL isn't working now, when she brings it up the "page goes right off the bottom of the screen, and I can't see what's there"...
Although it seems way too obvious, I ask her about moving the window, clicking and dragging in the title bar ("that blue band across the top"), etc... She says that's not it...
Well, it was. I drove over to her place (only a few minutes from mine, so not that bad), came in, and moved the window for her.
It really isn't as simple an issue as the rhetoric would have you believe...
It really IS simple, I think: It's the very same issue as abortion. You can ask all the same questions, "is it OK to kill a fetus to benefit 100 people" etc, just substitute "at the choice of the mother"...
Saying that it's not OK to kill a one month old fetus to save 100 people because killing is immoral, but it *IS* OK to kill the one month old fetus because "women have a right to choice" doesn't make sense.
You're killing an unborn fetus either way, and that's the major issue here. (The "playing god" issue is a smaller one).
It doesn't matter whether you're pro-choice or pro-life... The issue at heart is the same. And to have the goverment rule one way in one case, and the other way for the other case, is a disparity/hypocrisy.
This can still be messed with. When the binary is read (to do the byte-compare, or to compute a digital signature), the machine can return the "correct" binary, while it was actually running a hacked binary.
You still need a paper trail. The ballots can be counted, doublechecked, you can use 2, or 3, or N groups of people with whatever affiliation. This is where vote security lies.
I live in New Hampshire. When I voted, my local voting place was using a Diebold optical scanner vote box. Just like any other paranoid slashbot, I don't trust Diebold. But I do trust optical scan ballots, because when the numbers become contested, real people can do a recount.
Most of them do, nowadays, sure. They didn't always do that.
On a particular counter-strike server, just for shits and grins, I bound my fire button to an alias which changed my name and fired, then changed back when I let it go.
So, I had one name active for whenever I was firing (and presumably, whenever I was getting any kills), and another during other times.
The only problem was that cstrike printed a "foo has changed name to bar" message to every player connected, and that amount of spam was annoying, when you see two messages for every mouse click I input.
People more versed in physics than I am can answer this:
:)
The lasers used for optical media keep on progressing to higher frequency light, which is better able to resolve things. Where is the likely end for optical media?
Past ultraviolet light is x-rays and gamma rays I think... Will they be used for optical media? They are known as "dangerous", but perhaps in low power situations they aren't too bad? Or, you could just have the optical drive shielded in lead
Microscopes haved moved past light, into "electron microscopes", which used streams of electrons to resolve things that light cannot. Will that be possible with our optical media techniques?
I worked at a local Home Depot for awhile.
As part of the employee training, we were told some stories about the Despot's "crazy" return policy.
The one where I worked used to be a BJ's or Sam's or something, one of those huge food wholesalers.
An old woman brought in a frozen 6 pack of blueberry muffins, that she had had in the freezer for more than 2 years, because "she didn't like them", and the refund was granted.
Another guy came in with a dead-looking plant, a shrubbery. He said that he had bought it and planted it, and now it was dead, he wanted a new one (no matter that it was late fall now, and all the leaves are off the plants, etc). The return (store credit) was granted in this case, too...
But, a few hours later, one of the cart-return guys noted that one of the shrubs in front of the store had been dug up. This guy had just come in, dug up a plant from in front of the store, and "returned" it for some store credit.
I have not RTFA, but the concept talked about in this article is actually pretty old.
The times I have read about it, they specifically addressed this issue. They noted that the worst case scenario is that the "sweeping" of the beam stops, and a single spot on your eye is getting the full power of the laser.
Even with this concept, they said that the power levels were well below the accepted "danger levels".
Perhaps to accomplish this, they need to sweep several times for a "full" image, since the laser is low power.
Manufacturers need to cripple cheaper cars to somehow justify the extra $100k plus you can spend on higher-end models.
Basically, the free market takes care of this. It can take time, as the big boys who have a sort of implicit oligopoly / price fixing trust try to fight off the smaller guys, but it will almost always happen. (The cases where it doesn't are "natural monopolies" and government-granted monopolies (like cable companies, etc)).
Your kind of thinking ("Manufacturers need to cripple cheap cars") will work in the short term. Over the long term, those manufacturers adopting this tactic will lose when someone else realizes "hey, I can build a better car than this for 60% of the price".
Witness the US auto industry getting eaten alive by the Japanese in the 70s and 80s.
If you're standard directly on the earth's axis of rotation (at the north or south pole), then you are not moving with respect to the center of the earth (although you are rotating once per 24 hours).
If you stand on the equator, then you are moving at speed ((circumference of the earth) / 24 hours), which is roughly 1000mph, with respect to the center of the earth.
What about a piece of software (named A) that does not contain, but rather USES a piece of software (named B)? Is A a derivative of B?
Well, now you're discussing a somewhat different topic. The FSF asserts that dynamic linking constitutes a derived work. Other people (myself among them) don't agree with this view.
google: dynamic linking derivative work
Quoting from the GPL, section 0:
The writers of the GPL are not saying "here is what we think of as a derivative work", it's the writers reaffirming "here is what copyright law says is a derivative work".
There's really no leeway here in your argument. By definition, a piece of software (named A) which contains a piece of software (named B) or a portion of it, is a derivative work.
Almost true. It gives you a license to distribute that code, under certain terms.
My mistake, I guess, although you're picking nits. When I said "use" here, I was talking about using their implementation in a product you create. Since their software is a library intended to be "used" (oops, I guess I meant "linked") into other software, I figured it would be obvious.
Sorry, you're way off here. Redhat sells Linux, and their customers use it for commercial purposes.
I have not read the article (although I would like to), all the links (even though coral-ized) are dead right now for me at least, so perhaps you are placing more weight on the "non-commercial" wording they used than I did. I was just pointing out that releasing something for "non-commercial" use under the GPL makes a lot of sense, since the normal business model of "commercial" software is not compatiable with the GPL.
If they say they are releasing under the GPL, then Redhat is allowed to use the software with their own GPL'ed software, such as their version of the Linux kernel.
Sorry, you've mis-construed non-commercial. Non-commercial typically means not used in commerce. Believe it or not, is is possible to sell software for non-commercial use.
I think *you've* misconstrued things. The normal meaning of "commercial software" means "software that is sold" or "software that is not open source".
google - site:opensource.org commercial
google - define:commercial software
By the way, you should tell Redhat and Novell that bit about the GPL not working for ``paying a price per use/copy of the binary'', that'll be a revelation to them.
Whoo boy, zing! I guess that punched a hole in me!
Seriously, everyone knows that if you buy Redhat or Novell off the shelf, you're not "paying for use/copy of the binary", or if you are, you're an idiot. You can download the same binary for free, or you can have it burned to CDs and mailed to you for a couple of dollars if your link is slow.
When you buy a commercial Linux distro, you are paying for support, or bound manuals, or something. If you're paying for "use/copy of the binary", you are paying for something you could get for free, and there's better ways you could donate money to the organization of your choice than this.
Boy are you idiot
... an LGPL style wrapper
Thanks... I'm not sure if you're confused or trolling, but I respond anyway:
Microsoft as long as they didn't change the stack could use it in their kernel without releasing the full kernel code.
Wrong. The reason the LGPL exists is to address this specific case. If the stack were LGPL licensed, then MS could include it, and only be required to submit any changes they made to the LGPL'ed stack itself.
As the Stack wouldn't be a derivative of the whole kernel.
How could you possibly argue that their stack was a derivative of the MS kernel? I assume you meant to say that the MS kernel was a derivative of the stack... But then you are 100% wrong here. If MS used this code, then their kernel would be a derivative work, there's basically no way to get around it.
Technically, the FSF specifically states that if two programs run in operation via a "pipe", that it doesn't consider them linked. Any form of dynamic linking, they are considered linked, so you couldn't load the stack as a dll or driver and consider yourself not a derivative work. There is perhaps a tiny bit of leeway if you're a lawyer, where you could say "the FSF thinks loading a driver makes the kernel a derivative work, but I don't, so let's argue that in court".
Now to be really nice MSFT might have to make available
You are way off base. GPL apps are specifically allowed to include LGPL stuff. This is a special case exemption from the normal rules of the GPL. LGPL stuff is *not* allowed to include GPL stuff.
The GPL doesn't lend itself to ``free, non-commercial use'': it lets the licensee use and distribute freely, at any price, for any use.
No, it doesn't.
The General Public License gives you a license to use that code under certain terms.
When they say "free, non-commercial use", and they talk about the GPL, they are making sense. The Linux kernel, which is GPL, may use their implementation. Microsoft cannot use their implementation in any of its Windows OSes without releasing the OS kernel under terms which are compatible with the GPL.
"Dual licensing" software under the GPL and some other commercial license is noble, (because you are releasing open source), viable (see Qt and Aladdin Ghostscript for examples of people who have made money doing this), and does not conflict with the goals of the FSF.
The GPL does not lend itself to "commercial use", because the "standard" model of software licensing is paying a price per use/copy of the binary, and the GPL doesn't work this way.
GPL trolls (sorry, not that I'm implying you're one) always pipe up with "but you can sell GPL software as much as you want", while totally ignoring the fact that the whole concept of selling software is based on the idea of copyright-enforced scarcity, which the GPL eliminates.
"max over 0 (0 max plus) scan" is not very readable to me. But, the fact that I don't understand this statement is relatively unimportant.
It's a pretty straightforward translation that you've offer, "|/0(0|+)\" is "max over 0 (0 max plus) scan". Each character in the first translates 1:1 into terms in the second...
But, why even bother with the first notation? It's pretty ridiculous. *Anyone*, even an expert in the language, would have an easier time reading the verbose version.
Representing "Maximum substring sum" with the "verbose" form is still plenty tight enough...
Introducing this "terse line noise" form just increases the barrier to entry.
I think you are dismissing things too easily. The fact that the stuff under
The stuff stored under $HOME is mostly data, not executable (except for scripts, which are easy to doublecheck). If I find out I have been hacked or virused, I just shrug, tar up
Viruses aren't a problem because they can only hit stuff in
Our technology and science, though it may be primitive to someone in the future, will never be looked back on with the same feelings as this crap.
By actually using the concepts of the scientific method (experimentation etc), we come up with things that are true (as far as we can measure them) rather than stories we make up that sound good.
"Gravity is what requires us to eat, it pulls the food out of our bodies"... The fact that this explanation was considered shows that the concept of digestion wasn't understood. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is that this theory is easily tested, by laying down or standing on your head for a day and seeing if you get hungry.
Newton's model of physics has been shown to be "wrong", but we don't fault him for that, he drew proper conclusions from the available data.