Since we're already talking about debiting your account, it wouldn't be a big privacy issue to have recording devices in the car to monitor when people screw stuff up and charge them for it.
But, this idea doesn't make much sense anyway. It would work well for crowded areas (like cities), because when you were done with a car it would be in a place that someone else is likely to walk up to and use it.
It wouldn't work in places which aren't population dense, so you couldn't drive them home or anything. You would have to drop them off at some sort of "depot" or something... And once you are doing that, the existing public transit infrastructure already handles the situation well enough.
How is it a violation of the "spirit" of anything for them to have used their ingenuity to improve the software in order to make money in a way that violates absolutely no provisions of the license agreed to by them and the original author?
They didn't violate the provisions of the license, correct. That's why I said they violated the spirit. This is a relatively common use of the words, "terms" and "spirit" of the law.
They violated the spirit because they are profiting off of other people's work, without submitting their own changes.
The FICS code is no more closed than it was before the modifications. People still have the same access to it.
Think of the Linux kernel, being used in different places (router firmwares and such), and then people getting upset when the manufacturer did not publish the code. It's not like the Linux code became any more closed due to their actions. But of course, they were violating the spirit (as well as the terms) of the GPL.
Good luck in your journey to become what you claim to despise.
Strawman. When did I ever suggest that I "despise" anything in my posts? I am a software developer, and I want to make money off of my software. I do not advocate usage of the GPL.
I don't consider it against the spirit of the GPL to keep your changes private. Like I said in my original post, this is actually one of the goals the FSF is trying for.
But, consider this: Say some nice app like Mozilla were written under the GPL. (Mozilla isn't GPL-only, but use your imagination). I could take the app, make some changes, and then never actually distribute the app, but host a server online where people could use the app via X11 or VNC.
In the future, software vendors are probably going to give subscription apps a try. If everyone has wireless 100Mbps net access available anywhere, that is more than enough bandwidth to run a remote desktop. Instead of buying a new version of MS Office every year, MS will instead charge a subscription (they are already doing subscription pricing), but you will never even have a binary on your local machine that is running.
If binaries are never being distributed, the GPL (which relies on copyright law) does not apply. So, you might create a nice app, but if someone can just host it on some online server, and charge people $10 / month to "use" it.
That is how the spirit of the GPL can be violated.
A real life example: The first popular internet chess service is still up and running, it's called freechess.org, or FICS (Free Internet Chess Server). FICS's codebase was originally GPL'ed.
Another service started up, I don't know which one, which used the FICS code, and charged people a monthly amount to play. The FICS people were upset that these rivals took their code, were charging people, and were not submitting their changes back.
But, this was allowed under the terms of the GPL. I hope you'll agree that it's in violation of the spirit of the GPL.
Now, the FICS code is closed, which is a real shame.
If the code in question was derived from a GPL project, it doesn't matter if he distributes it or not; it's GPL, period.
No, it's not. It's derived from a GPL work.
GPL section 2b states:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.
So, if you create a derivative work and you distribute or publish it, you must do so at no charge under the terms of the GPL.
This doesn't mean your derivative work is GPL'ed, at least "not yet", not until you publish or distribute.
This is the biggest problem that the GPLv3 is going to try to fix, if it ever gets written. The problem is that people can write "web apps" (or any remote app) like this, that don't require a binary or source to be distributed to end users... So, people can make modifications, host their own versions, and not be in violation of the terms of the GPL, although they are usually in violation of the spirit of the GPL.
On the flip side, one of the FSF's goals is to allow private modifications of works (internal to a company is the common example) without requiring those modifications to be distributed, so they can't just say "any derivative work is GPL'ed, even if you never show it to anybody else". (It's probably not possible to get away with this under copyright law anyway, although with the latest batch of garbage laws that have been passed, I'm sure someone could try).
Striking a middle ground between these two goals is difficult.
Time for some mega nerdiness: I was captain of the math team when I was in high school.
When you submitted answers for the questions, only the answer mattered. You didn't need to "show your work".
You wouldn't normally say the answers were "often" 0 or 1, since it was only a few percent of the time. But it was often enough that I would guess 0 or 1 on a problem I couldn't solve, and occasionally get a few points that way.
So no, this isn't like Sudan coming after my wife for having the audacity to walk around Canada without a head scarf
But, what if your 15 year old son decides 'hacking is kewl', and breaks into a Sudanese computer.
Should he be extradited to Sudan and caned/branded/hand cut off/executed for his crime?
(Substitute some other country if this doesn't directly apply to Sudan. There's certainly countries with too harsh (by our standards) penalties that would try a 15 year old as an adult).
I was talking about the GIF format being lossy at >256 colors
And, by talking this way, you are using the term "lossy" in a way that nobody else uses. Hence the confusion. Hence the request to use the word "lossy" to describe the actual compression of data, rather than the quantization of the image.
If you compress a 256 color image using JPEG, what comes out isn't what you put in. That's why JPEG is called a lossy format. GIF is lossless.
I saw the movie as well. During these pieces, where they were showing fighting and such, there is one point where it shows a "scope's eye view" of a soldier's gun, with thermal imaging (at night I guess?), and he shoots a guy.
This shook me up a bit. It's almost like "Faces of Death"... I don't know who that Iraqi soldier was, and it will probably be difficult for anyone to identify him, and there he is onscreen, dying anonymously in front of millions of viewers.
I absolutely hated "The 13th Warrior". There were just too many ridiculous leaps of faith to suspend disbelief. Antonio learns English in like 2 months, for years the "monsters" live next to the "good guy" town in that bigass tree city and the good guys don't know, etc...
However, I will admit, Antonio is hot. And I'm a heterosexual male, so that's saying a lot about his hotness:)
I liked him a lot in the movie where he and Stallone were assassins, even though the movie was cheesy. Also, "Four Rooms" was pretty cheesy, but the "room" with Antonio in it is awesome.
People around here who don't know anything (ie, most), still talk about Coolio (because he was a local script kiddie) as though he were a big-time hacker.
Management types who are making hiring decisions might decide to hire this kid, if they consider hiring a "great hacker".
Most slashdotters know the difference between Morris and Coolio. Most others don't.
(A side note: I was arrested once, and the officer was making small talk on the ride back to the station. When he heard I was in computers, he was asking me about hackers, etc, particularly about what Coolio specifically did. It's not like he was the guy who arrested Coolio, but it was a small town (and, Coolio's town), and he didn't know anything about it really, either).
Re:Obligatory Futurama reference ...
on
3D Monitor
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· Score: 1
OK.
How do you use the ability to switch dominant eyes as a party trick?
Re:Obligatory Futurama reference ...
on
3D Monitor
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· Score: 1
What do you mean, "you can change your dominant eye at will"...
Are you saying you can move your eyes independently of each other?
I updated the firmware, and afterwards, Half-Life based games would not work. I could play for up to 5 minutes, then it would halt with an "invalid packet" message of some sort.
I searched around online, and found other people with similiar problems, and forums saying that Linksys was aware of the problem, it had to do with fragmentation of large packets.
The real problem was that their web/FTP did not have any copies of the previous firmware, so I couldn't revert.
I called up tech support. Several times. Usually, the people I was talking to had strong accents that made them hard to understand. On top of that, when I called and asked for the previous firmware, they were basically going to the FTP site themselves, and emailing me a file (that I could have easily downloaded, and was not the correct file).
I started off polite, the first few phone conversations. Several phone conversations (and two days after I first called), this is what my side of the conversation sounded like:
"I have VERSION 3 of the BEFSR81, do you understand? Yes, I have been to your FTP site, and looked all over it. I do not want the firmware for version 2 of the router. If you read its text file, it SPECIFICALLY SAYS IT WILL NOT WORK WITH VERSION 3."
Several hours later, what do I get, but yet another copy of version 2 firmware that won't work on my router.
I thought of this, but I don't think it would be anything nearly as bad as you are saying.
How often to you get people milling around in a supermarket, turning into a pissing contest? It happens sometimes, but not frequently.
And, the ability to set a user on "ignore" would help, too.
You mention the "internet/chat room phenomenon", but, a point against that, is again bringing up Counter-Strike (and other half-life mods): This is a community not known for its maturity, but surprisingly little "voice chat abuse" occurs, because it's easy to just simply click a person's name and you won't hear them anymore.
The problem, again, is one of user interface, I think. If the driver is distracted, searching for how to/ignore some teenage punk, then that's bad.
I have always thought that a cheap sort of CB radio available in every car would be very useful to increasing driver courtesy.
Maybe the radio receivers could tell which direction a transmission was coming from, and provide cues to people in the car (by positioning the voice across the speakers, or something).
Or maybe that wouldn't be necessary, in Counter-Strike you don't necessarily know the location of your teammates, but the voice chat helps immensely.
I think one of the problems with driving, that causes a lot of stress, is that your interaction with other people is very impersonal, and what communication can be done is through a very narrow channel (flashing your lights, waving your hand, etc)...
How many times have you pulled to a 4-way stop slightly after someone else, but they aren't moving. You feel a little frustrated, you wonder what's wrong with the other guy. Then, after 20 seconds or so, you both move at the same time, now you're saying to yourself, "What's this idiot's problem?"...
But, if you pulled up slightly after him, and he said "oh, you go right through, I need to help my wife find the pen in the glove compartment", everything is much smoother.
I guess it probably couldn't happen for technology reasons, it might be too hard to make a good user interface... But, it would solve a lot of problems imo...
Very recently, I bought a used printer on ebay. I got a real steal ($300 for an HP Color LaserJet 4550)...
But, I'd been looking off and on for a long time. Make sure you look at the cost to run, and how much expected lifetime it has left in it.
Mine has 19,000 pages printed total, and the printer is rated for 35,000 / month, so that's pretty good:)
But, of course, you don't get any warranty coverage or anything.
On mine, it might be the case that the alignment is off or something. I don't know if that's possible with laser printers. There might (I can't tell for certain, it might just be in my head) be a tiny cyan tinge to the left of colored areas that shouldn't have it.
Sequence numbers in Windows are continuous. Other operating systems randomize seq numbers
I suppose, if someone is hosting their web server on an unpatched winnt 4.0 machine (directly connected to the net no less), this might work.
I'm not an MS supporter, but get your facts straight. Complaining about MS having poor TCP sequence numbers is like complaining about Linux's poor USB support. (i.e. wake up and smell the coffee, we're in 2004 now).
Re:Open mouth, insert paranoid foot
on
Bobby Fischer Found
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You might be a mathematician, but I'm pretty sure you are not a chess player. Most legal opening moves are so bad that a chess player does not have to memorize anything: If somebody opens with something like a3 or g4, any reasonable move will give you an advantage.
First you say that "a chess player does not have to memorize anything", and then you say that you've memorized a couple dozen lines past the 8th move?
I play a lot of chess... Since I signed onto freechess.org in Sep 1997, I have played more than 22,000 games (lots of them were with very fast time controls, or variant games, but still)...
I am still a patzer. The most annoying thing (to me) in a game is just "trying to have fun", play an interesting game, and you run into people with a ton of opening knowledge.
The fun part of chess is figuring things out. Not looking up a move in a book. (It doesn't matter if you've memorized the openings or not... It's essentially the same thing)
I like Fischer Random much more than "normal" chess for this reason.
In pro chess you'll never see a truly awful opening move
There was another slashdot article a few years ago where a British GM was suggesting that he (and others) had probably played Bobby Fischer online, basically just because they got spanked so bad.
Against GMs, this "mystery figure" would do things like his first 8 moves moving every pawn up once, or 1. d3... 2. Kd2... 3. Kc3 etc..
And even after these horrible openings, this person was still dominating other GMs.
Read his post again, he answered the question you asked.
The recording of the live event removes some elements of the signal.
If the playback of the recording adds some stuff which is not in the recording, but sounds more or less like the stuff that got removed in the recording process, then your playback now sounds more like the actual event.
(I don't know if I believe this, but that's the argument he's making)
Slashdot Mirror
Far better I think, to fight for your freedom in a mediated, structured system of combat.
This would never work. Athletes (such as O.J. Simpson) would excel and never be "found guilty" of their crimes...
Since we're already talking about debiting your account, it wouldn't be a big privacy issue to have recording devices in the car to monitor when people screw stuff up and charge them for it.
But, this idea doesn't make much sense anyway. It would work well for crowded areas (like cities), because when you were done with a car it would be in a place that someone else is likely to walk up to and use it.
It wouldn't work in places which aren't population dense, so you couldn't drive them home or anything. You would have to drop them off at some sort of "depot" or something... And once you are doing that, the existing public transit infrastructure already handles the situation well enough.
How is it a violation of the "spirit" of anything for them to have used their ingenuity to improve the software in order to make money in a way that violates absolutely no provisions of the license agreed to by them and the original author?
They didn't violate the provisions of the license, correct. That's why I said they violated the spirit. This is a relatively common use of the words, "terms" and "spirit" of the law.
They violated the spirit because they are profiting off of other people's work, without submitting their own changes.
The FICS code is no more closed than it was before the modifications. People still have the same access to it.
Think of the Linux kernel, being used in different places (router firmwares and such), and then people getting upset when the manufacturer did not publish the code. It's not like the Linux code became any more closed due to their actions. But of course, they were violating the spirit (as well as the terms) of the GPL.
Good luck in your journey to become what you claim to despise.
Strawman. When did I ever suggest that I "despise" anything in my posts? I am a software developer, and I want to make money off of my software. I do not advocate usage of the GPL.
If you'd actually read my post and it's ancestors, you'd know that I wasn't talking about the article.
Perhaps I was unclear:
I don't consider it against the spirit of the GPL to keep your changes private. Like I said in my original post, this is actually one of the goals the FSF is trying for.
But, consider this: Say some nice app like Mozilla were written under the GPL. (Mozilla isn't GPL-only, but use your imagination). I could take the app, make some changes, and then never actually distribute the app, but host a server online where people could use the app via X11 or VNC.
In the future, software vendors are probably going to give subscription apps a try. If everyone has wireless 100Mbps net access available anywhere, that is more than enough bandwidth to run a remote desktop. Instead of buying a new version of MS Office every year, MS will instead charge a subscription (they are already doing subscription pricing), but you will never even have a binary on your local machine that is running.
If binaries are never being distributed, the GPL (which relies on copyright law) does not apply. So, you might create a nice app, but if someone can just host it on some online server, and charge people $10 / month to "use" it.
That is how the spirit of the GPL can be violated.
A real life example:
The first popular internet chess service is still up and running, it's called freechess.org, or FICS (Free Internet Chess Server). FICS's codebase was originally GPL'ed.
Another service started up, I don't know which one, which used the FICS code, and charged people a monthly amount to play. The FICS people were upset that these rivals took their code, were charging people, and were not submitting their changes back.
But, this was allowed under the terms of the GPL. I hope you'll agree that it's in violation of the spirit of the GPL.
Now, the FICS code is closed, which is a real shame.
If the code in question was derived from a GPL project, it doesn't matter if he distributes it or not; it's GPL, period.
No, it's not. It's derived from a GPL work.
GPL section 2b states:
So, if you create a derivative work and you distribute or publish it, you must do so at no charge under the terms of the GPL.
This doesn't mean your derivative work is GPL'ed, at least "not yet", not until you publish or distribute.
This is the biggest problem that the GPLv3 is going to try to fix, if it ever gets written. The problem is that people can write "web apps" (or any remote app) like this, that don't require a binary or source to be distributed to end users... So, people can make modifications, host their own versions, and not be in violation of the terms of the GPL, although they are usually in violation of the spirit of the GPL.
On the flip side, one of the FSF's goals is to allow private modifications of works (internal to a company is the common example) without requiring those modifications to be distributed, so they can't just say "any derivative work is GPL'ed, even if you never show it to anybody else". (It's probably not possible to get away with this under copyright law anyway, although with the latest batch of garbage laws that have been passed, I'm sure someone could try).
Striking a middle ground between these two goals is difficult.
Sounds like you were working on 1942 :)
I loved that game...
Time for some mega nerdiness: I was captain of the math team when I was in high school.
When you submitted answers for the questions, only the answer mattered. You didn't need to "show your work".
You wouldn't normally say the answers were "often" 0 or 1, since it was only a few percent of the time. But it was often enough that I would guess 0 or 1 on a problem I couldn't solve, and occasionally get a few points that way.
So no, this isn't like Sudan coming after my wife for having the audacity to walk around Canada without a head scarf
But, what if your 15 year old son decides 'hacking is kewl', and breaks into a Sudanese computer.
Should he be extradited to Sudan and caned/branded/hand cut off/executed for his crime?
(Substitute some other country if this doesn't directly apply to Sudan. There's certainly countries with too harsh (by our standards) penalties that would try a 15 year old as an adult).
After reading these comments, yesterday I watched "Grave of the Fireflies".
The whole time, I was thinking to myself, "OK, lots of character development, now where's the trauma?".
It was, ultimately, a very boring movie.
I was talking about the GIF format being lossy at >256 colors
And, by talking this way, you are using the term "lossy" in a way that nobody else uses. Hence the confusion. Hence the request to use the word "lossy" to describe the actual compression of data, rather than the quantization of the image.
If you compress a 256 color image using JPEG, what comes out isn't what you put in. That's why JPEG is called a lossy format. GIF is lossless.
I have recently seen Farenheit 9/11.
I saw the movie as well. During these pieces, where they were showing fighting and such, there is one point where it shows a "scope's eye view" of a soldier's gun, with thermal imaging (at night I guess?), and he shoots a guy.
This shook me up a bit. It's almost like "Faces of Death"... I don't know who that Iraqi soldier was, and it will probably be difficult for anyone to identify him, and there he is onscreen, dying anonymously in front of millions of viewers.
I absolutely hated "The 13th Warrior". There were just too many ridiculous leaps of faith to suspend disbelief. Antonio learns English in like 2 months, for years the "monsters" live next to the "good guy" town in that bigass tree city and the good guys don't know, etc...
:)
However, I will admit, Antonio is hot. And I'm a heterosexual male, so that's saying a lot about his hotness
I liked him a lot in the movie where he and Stallone were assassins, even though the movie was cheesy. Also, "Four Rooms" was pretty cheesy, but the "room" with Antonio in it is awesome.
There are really bad movies, I've seen some of them on MST3K, etc...
But, you can look at almost all film student projects, etc, and say, god that's horrible.
A different measure, is, "what's the worst movie you've ever paid to see".
"The 13th Warrior", and "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars" are the worst movies I have ever paid money to watch.
I don't really agree with that.
People around here who don't know anything (ie, most), still talk about Coolio (because he was a local script kiddie) as though he were a big-time hacker.
Management types who are making hiring decisions might decide to hire this kid, if they consider hiring a "great hacker".
Most slashdotters know the difference between Morris and Coolio. Most others don't.
(A side note: I was arrested once, and the officer was making small talk on the ride back to the station. When he heard I was in computers, he was asking me about hackers, etc, particularly about what Coolio specifically did. It's not like he was the guy who arrested Coolio, but it was a small town (and, Coolio's town), and he didn't know anything about it really, either).
OK.
How do you use the ability to switch dominant eyes as a party trick?
What do you mean, "you can change your dominant eye at will"...
Are you saying you can move your eyes independently of each other?
I always wanted to be able to do that...
I have a linksys BEFSR81v3 router.
I updated the firmware, and afterwards, Half-Life based games would not work. I could play for up to 5 minutes, then it would halt with an "invalid packet" message of some sort.
I searched around online, and found other people with similiar problems, and forums saying that Linksys was aware of the problem, it had to do with fragmentation of large packets.
The real problem was that their web/FTP did not have any copies of the previous firmware, so I couldn't revert.
I called up tech support. Several times. Usually, the people I was talking to had strong accents that made them hard to understand. On top of that, when I called and asked for the previous firmware, they were basically going to the FTP site themselves, and emailing me a file (that I could have easily downloaded, and was not the correct file).
I started off polite, the first few phone conversations. Several phone conversations (and two days after I first called), this is what my side of the conversation sounded like:
"I have VERSION 3 of the BEFSR81, do you understand? Yes, I have been to your FTP site, and looked all over it. I do not want the firmware for version 2 of the router. If you read its text file, it SPECIFICALLY SAYS IT WILL NOT WORK WITH VERSION 3."
Several hours later, what do I get, but yet another copy of version 2 firmware that won't work on my router.
I thought of this, but I don't think it would be anything nearly as bad as you are saying.
/ignore some teenage punk, then that's bad.
How often to you get people milling around in a supermarket, turning into a pissing contest? It happens sometimes, but not frequently.
And, the ability to set a user on "ignore" would help, too.
You mention the "internet/chat room phenomenon", but, a point against that, is again bringing up Counter-Strike (and other half-life mods): This is a community not known for its maturity, but surprisingly little "voice chat abuse" occurs, because it's easy to just simply click a person's name and you won't hear them anymore.
The problem, again, is one of user interface, I think. If the driver is distracted, searching for how to
I have always thought that a cheap sort of CB radio available in every car would be very useful to increasing driver courtesy.
Maybe the radio receivers could tell which direction a transmission was coming from, and provide cues to people in the car (by positioning the voice across the speakers, or something).
Or maybe that wouldn't be necessary, in Counter-Strike you don't necessarily know the location of your teammates, but the voice chat helps immensely.
I think one of the problems with driving, that causes a lot of stress, is that your interaction with other people is very impersonal, and what communication can be done is through a very narrow channel (flashing your lights, waving your hand, etc)...
How many times have you pulled to a 4-way stop slightly after someone else, but they aren't moving. You feel a little frustrated, you wonder what's wrong with the other guy. Then, after 20 seconds or so, you both move at the same time, now you're saying to yourself, "What's this idiot's problem?"...
But, if you pulled up slightly after him, and he said "oh, you go right through, I need to help my wife find the pen in the glove compartment", everything is much smoother.
I guess it probably couldn't happen for technology reasons, it might be too hard to make a good user interface... But, it would solve a lot of problems imo...
Very recently, I bought a used printer on ebay. I got a real steal ($300 for an HP Color LaserJet 4550)...
:)
But, I'd been looking off and on for a long time. Make sure you look at the cost to run, and how much expected lifetime it has left in it.
Mine has 19,000 pages printed total, and the printer is rated for 35,000 / month, so that's pretty good
But, of course, you don't get any warranty coverage or anything.
On mine, it might be the case that the alignment is off or something. I don't know if that's possible with laser printers. There might (I can't tell for certain, it might just be in my head) be a tiny cyan tinge to the left of colored areas that shouldn't have it.
Sequence numbers in Windows are continuous. Other operating systems randomize seq numbers
I suppose, if someone is hosting their web server on an unpatched winnt 4.0 machine (directly connected to the net no less), this might work.
I'm not an MS supporter, but get your facts straight. Complaining about MS having poor TCP sequence numbers is like complaining about Linux's poor USB support. (i.e. wake up and smell the coffee, we're in 2004 now).
You might be a mathematician, but I'm pretty sure you are not a chess player. Most legal opening moves are so bad that a chess player does not have to memorize anything: If somebody opens with something like a3 or g4, any reasonable move will give you an advantage.
... 2. Kd2 ... 3. Kc3 etc..
First you say that "a chess player does not have to memorize anything", and then you say that you've memorized a couple dozen lines past the 8th move?
I play a lot of chess... Since I signed onto freechess.org in Sep 1997, I have played more than 22,000 games (lots of them were with very fast time controls, or variant games, but still)...
I am still a patzer. The most annoying thing (to me) in a game is just "trying to have fun", play an interesting game, and you run into people with a ton of opening knowledge.
The fun part of chess is figuring things out. Not looking up a move in a book. (It doesn't matter if you've memorized the openings or not... It's essentially the same thing)
I like Fischer Random much more than "normal" chess for this reason.
In pro chess you'll never see a truly awful opening move
There was another slashdot article a few years ago where a British GM was suggesting that he (and others) had probably played Bobby Fischer online, basically just because they got spanked so bad.
Against GMs, this "mystery figure" would do things like his first 8 moves moving every pawn up once, or 1. d3
And even after these horrible openings, this person was still dominating other GMs.
Read his post again, he answered the question you asked.
The recording of the live event removes some elements of the signal.
If the playback of the recording adds some stuff which is not in the recording, but sounds more or less like the stuff that got removed in the recording process, then your playback now sounds more like the actual event.
(I don't know if I believe this, but that's the argument he's making)
I wouldn't mind having my snailmail box slashdotted with $4000 checks :)