I think that's supposed to be 680x, the 8-bit generation of CPUs which ran stuff from the PET to the Apple, and the C=64. People have told me that the functionality of the chip varied greatly between the versions... but I don't really care.
I know it best as the 6808 in the Heathkits they used in my highschool digital electronics class.
I think the coco also ran the thing.
The first Macs were 68000s or something... and as another poster pointed out.. mid '80s, not late '70s.
It's been running through my mind the past week or so... 2....And Justice For All (9:44) (Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett)
Halls of justice painted green Money talking Power wolves beset your door Hear them stalking Soon you'll please their appetite They devour Hammer of justice crushes you Overpower
The ultimate in vanity Exploiting their supremacy I can't believe the things you say I can't believe I can't believe the price you pay Nothing can save you
Justice is lost Justice is raped Justice is gone Pulling your strings
Justice is done
Seeking no truth
Winning is all Find it so grim
So true So real
Apathy their stepping stone So unfeeling Hidden deep animosity So deceiving Through your eyes their light burns Hoping to find Inquisition sinking you With prying minds
The ultimate in vanity
Exploiting their supremacy I can't believe the things you say I can't believe I can't believe the price you pay Nothing can save you
Justice is lost
Justice is raped Justice is gone Pulling your strings
Justice is done
Seeking no truth
Winning is all Find it so grim
So true So real
Lady justice has been raped Truth assassin Rolls of red tape seal your lips Now you're done in Their money tips her scales again Make your deal Just what is truth? I cannot tell Cannot feel
The ultimate in vanity
Exploiting their supremacy I can't believe the things you say I can't believe I can't believe the price you pay Nothing can save us
Justice is lost
Justice is raped Justice is gone Pulling your strings
Justice is done
Seeking no truth
Winning is all Find it so grim
So true So real
Seeking no truth Winning is all Find it so grim
So true So real
Posted without permission, Copyright Metallica and the label which owns their souls and feeds their families.
75 years ago, modern commerce was new and fresh. Commercials were live, radio was interesting and formats were unique. Now we have giant uninspiring powerhouses which act as barriers to entry, who dictate what we listen to. Systems of "payola" well rooted in powerful radio stations. It all works into a simple and rather horrible equation.
Maybe if the system is flipped on its head, top bands won't make millions while bottom bands finance them with the levy they pay on recording media. Maybe albums won't be so shiny and pretty, but gritty, there might not be top-notch producers working out wicked sounds for talented mucicians. But I don't care. I want my tiny little bar-bands and little independant theatres.
That doesn't sound correct. Section 2b of the GPL reads:
b) 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.
The original question was:
What if a company uses software released under the GPL as
part of a larger software product, and does not modify the GPL'ed stuff at all?
Which to me clearly fits into this category and must be GPLed. This is why the LGPL exists, so that programs or libraries designed to be linked to (libraries, etcetera) can be linked to by commerical non-GPL software packages.
How far this goes is totally beyond me. If MS Office were to suddenly start calling ispell, I don't think it would apply. As for a hard technical definition of why it wouldn't... I don't know.
Take double-slit diffraction experiment. The slits are of comperable width to the wavelength of a photon. Fire a beam of photons through the two holes. They produce an interference pattern.
Place a sensitive detector where the target screen is. Now you can detect individual photons, and you can detect where they hit.
Now take a source of photons which though somewhat random would be just as likely to spew a photon through one slit or the other. It's not that hard to produce, nor is it terribly critical for the experiment. The key point is that rate of photons coming out can be controlled.
Slow down the source and watch the pattern. lots of interference... turn it down more... still lots of interference.
What happens when only single photons are going through? One would expect a simple non-interfering diffraction pattern right? After all, singular photons are going through the slit, how could they possibly interfere with one another?
The pattern is that of interference. Peculiar isn't it? Which hole did the photon go through?
As soon as you attempt to observe the hole which the photon goes through... you have a non-interfering diffraction pattern. It has nothing to do with the fact that photons are bouncing off eachother or that the mechanism of detection is affecting the experiment. The pattern on your detection screen is for the particles which you did not interfere with.
This has been scrutinized very carefully by many very meticulous people. If you doubt the results, pick up a book by a reputable author or publisher and read about it. There are practial applications of these results, and the same properties were found for electrons. There is more evidence that the results are not propreties specific to photons or electrons, though I have not read it personally and cannot comment on it.
...Even though I repeatedly told him to leave me alone, he never listened. To this day I feel stalked, since I still see him every day. I see him following around some people I know, and they are trying to get rid of him too. Although he may be a little stupid, he is not insane.
I think we've all known people who have been socially graceless and are very clinggy. At least two people I've known have got over it. It takes a few years of respect and reasonably normal socialization. It's as though it were a lack of self-confidence and a desparate lonliness. Their social awkwardness always struck me as nothing more than social inexperience.
A female friend of mine was chased around by one of these fellows... he wasn't as bad as some, but he lived in his own little world. 21 years old and he behaved like a 12-year-old. He would fall back on romance and chivalry all the time, sending cryptic poems via email, and kissing his lady's hand at any opportunity. She was civil to him, so were all her friends, and he eventually clued in as to how foolish he was when he did these things. It's not the romantic act, it is the complete inability to read her emotions, to sense her disinterest, embarassment and fear which is peculiar and wrong. Lonliness can distort people's preceptions and make them do very strange things.
I know, it is all speculative and pretentious armchair sociology.
A small minded office manager and owner at the company my girlfriend works for demands that all mail coming through the door may be read upon her whim. Even letters addressed to individuals marked "Private and Confidential."
Federal offense yes. 1. Proove it. 2. Keep your job, 3. Keep your references.
I'll second that. I'll also add that under Windows it has ugly fonts, is as sluggish as a big java applet (P133 w.80M), and underperforms IE by a wide margin. Sigh. I can actually watch the widgets chase my mouse... infact I have trouble not watching the widgets chase my mouse.
I was hoping they would fix the memory and speed issues before it got out of alpha. Is it out of alpha? It took sixteen seconds... real seconds for it to restore from my taskbar. My poor system was swapping memory like mad.
To top it all off the interface is ugly, and the peripheral apps (AOL IM, etc) are typically annoying.
It appears as though IE is going to be the way to go on anyhardware short of a PII w. 128M of RAM.
The only advantage this package has over v4 is standards compliance, PNGs and much faster table rendering.
The fuzzy part as I understand it, which works to promote your argument is that without explicit agreement to the terms, you cannot be bound to laws more restrictive than copyright laws.
The GPL is powerful because without the GPL, the software distributor is bound to copyright law. Meaning that he can make personal copies, but he cannot distribute the copies at all without the author's permission. In the case of Linux, all thousands of authors.
The authors have permitted the software to be redistributed under the terms of the GPL.
On the other hand, Windows requires you to adhere to regulations more stringent than copyright laws, (IIRC use on a single system, cannot resell the product used, etc). Thus you have to "agree" to the terms by breaking the seal on the product and not returning the software in 30 days.
Music has neither method, so I would assume, just as you do, that it is guided by copyright law. Copy it for personal use, keep it, sell it used (destroying all copies), and all the other fun things you can do with books, videos and the like.
If the music industry were to lock us into some kind of license agreement restricting copies for personal use, or resale, I would hope that they would provide replacement media should theirs get damaged. After all, you're buying a personal use license and not a CD anymore.
Could NetBEUI over Ethernet be a replacement for USB? Just name your mouse "mouse", your printer "printer", etc. You could plug it into a dedicated network card, a hub, or even directly into the network. I know they can make the cables reasonably thin, they do it for PCMCIA cards already.
How is USB any better than ethernet? Ethernet will even allow you to run both 10 and 100 Mbps devices on the same medium. I suppose the only thing you loose is the ability to line-power devices. With PCI you should even be able to share interrupts.
What's cheaper these days, an ethernet IC, or a USB IC?
I never understood this "3-D UI" of the future. Our language is two dimensional, our books are two dimensional, our desks are two dimensional planes upon which we work. The best we could hope for is a 3-D wrapper for our 2-D world.
Audio can be recorded in 3-D, but it certainly doesn't enhance the ability of a speaker to communicate, it just sounds prettier. People today readily discard quality audio for efficient recordings. By the same token, why would people want to work in a 3-D rendered UI?
Personally I think the next useful UI will go in the opposite direction. Less virtual, more real. Desks which automatically digitize handwriting, panels which are as easy on the eyes and as portable as paper, and of course, lots of specialized devices, like palm organizers, crosspads, networked stereo components (ala MP3 players). We're seeing the beginning of this now. Transmeta, embedded linux, and the like are a step into the future.
Quiet, unobtrusive and asthetically pleasing. If you want to dictate, dictate, if you want to type, type. Conduct online research from your sofa, or at the coffee shop down the street. Offices will become passe as the mechanisms of communication become easier and easier.
On the other hand, if you want to play games... go ahead and imerse yourself in your thick 3-D virtual reality.
This is just completely wrong. This whole issue doesn't seem to be about the GPL at all. People don't have the "right" to the source code, people who distribute code under the GPL have the legal obligation to provide the source code, at cost and upon request for up to three years.
If the code is being distributed outside of the GPL, the distributor is doing it in blatent violation of copyright law.
As for how "linking" fits into this I have no idea. It seems that Slade could get away with this. Think of two extremes:
GPL a plug-in interface for his binary-only modular enhancement.
Write a book telling people how to modify the Quake source to obtain the enhancements.
IMHO there is zero merit to his "waive your rights" argument, but as mentioned elsewhere, the very loose linking argument seems unfortunately plausible.
It would be nice if LDP followed something similar to Slashdot or Freshmeat whereupon people could comment or ask questions if they run into trouble. The authors can't update the docs all the time. If we could communicate the trials and tribulations while working with a package, it could provide valuable feedback to the document writer and the developers.
Also if you have a chapter to contribute or propose, post it and wait for it to be integrated or ignored.
Putting up a two-year-old dead document may not be very useful, nor are you going to have experts on the topic critiquing the work. On the other hand, if somebody posts, "Hey, the feature described in section 3.2 has been changed!", or "see CERT advisory 2000-09-12.3!" it is better that it be found in a dedicated forum than through hours of probing on IRC or searching through Usenet.
I thought I posted this idea to the original suggestions...
If you can come up with a valid theory of elves and provide solid experimental evidence supporting it, then we can throw that in the dark matter pot also.
A simple experiment:
Enter Lab.
Place keys on table
work... work... work...
Keys are gone.
The elves surely must have some mass. Hmm... I wonder what the possability is that the keys were sucked out of existance by random weakly interacting antimatter collisions:-)
As for the difficulty of detection, wouldn't one of the active neutrino projects, like SNO pick up some very peculiar collisions if dense matter is going to occasionally interact and spew a photon? Off the cuff, wouldn't the intensity of photons released during collision of a neutrino differ greatly from that of an atom with the mass of Nickel, with an unspecified velocity?
Oh wait... it appears that's what they did... using seasonal fluctuations in the earth's velocity. That makes sense. I'll be quiet now.
You call it a fork in time with wee positrons flying around influencing past events, I call it a probablility function:-)
IMHO it's the same thing. Random events don't fit well into a four-dimensional universe. Time travel and branching realities is just as good a theory as colapsing proability waves.
Some people just have to stretch reality to get that extra half-dimension. OTOH, some people just have to stretch reality to get rid of that extra half-dimension and kick in some peculiar bits of antimatter.
The fact of the matter is, we don't know what happened in the box. It's all idle speculation without some mathematical genius and a particle accelerator anyways. Alas I have neither.
Show me a theory which doesn't require an extra half dimension or extra particles, and I'll be convinced... or probably just confused.:-)
You call it a fork in time with wee positrons flying around influencing past events, I call it a probablility function:-)
IMHO it's the same thing. Random events don't fit well into a four-dimensional universe. Time travel and branching realities is just as good a theory as colapsing proability waves.
Some people just have to stretch reality to get that extra half-dimension. OTOH, some people just have to stretch reality to get rid of that extra half-dimension and kick in some peculiar bits of antimatter.
The fact of the matter is, we don't know what happened in the box. It's all idle speculation without some mathematical genius and a particle accelerator anyways.
Show me a theory which doesn't require an extra half dimension or extra particles, and I'll be convinced.
Kudos for recognising your shortcommings in a public forum.
As for whailing on Q*bert as not being an elected official of Slashdot, remember that of all the questions posted to Slashdot, these were the ones which were publically moderated as the most pressing.
Jon is less an elected official of Slashdot than Q*bert, yet he chose to all but disregard the criticism of his subject matter as the babbling of a vocal minority.
I agree with Q*bert, and I see nothing but annectodal evidence in Jon's reply that his or her premise is wrong. Am I part of this vocal minority which feels that Jon's articles are lengthy, simplistic and completely lack hard references?
Where were Jon's people when they could have moderated Q*bert's post as "overrated"?
All due respect to Jon, despite plugging his job experience to defend his position, outside of Slashdot, Jon seems to be either loved or ignored. I cannot deny he has a strong following... although outside of Slashdot, I would personally lean towards ignoring him.
A cat in a box with a phial of poision, rigged up to a small hammer which upon the decay of an unstable atom drops the hammer, cracks the phial and the cat dies.
The key is that the actual decay of the atom is absolutely random. We have half-life measurements, we have a controlled system. No matter what the external influence on the system, that atom will decay and we won't know when it happens.
The box is really just a barrier blocking all possible observation.
Whether the cat is dead or alive only becomes part of our reality when we observe it. Mathematically, the cat can only be described as being both dead and alive. There is a probability that it is dead, and a probability that it is alive.
Intuatively, you can not have a 50% dead cat, nor a 50% decayed atom. Mathematically that is exactly what you have. The probability wave collapses (ie, the uncertainty vanishes) upon observation.
The thought experiment really just emphasizes the philosophical implications which the existance truely random systems have on our universe. IMHO it is a radical thought to apply it as absolute truth, but whether it is or is not the absolute truth doesn't really matter when it is the only mathematical description of the situation which is currently possible.
Reality is perception... et yadda, et yadda, et yadda (ie blah).
Katz writing for slashdot is different: it's someone writing long-winded, half-considered (if that much) editorials on subjects he doesn't really understand--and has no interest in understanding. And he's doing it for a relatively respectable website.
I second that.
'New', 'Groundbreaking' developments in psychology
on
Excerpt From "Geeks"
·
· Score: 1
There was a segment on "The Nature of Things" last night which had me thinking about Jon's obsession with the Helmouth articles.
In a nutshell, the theory is that the "nature" component of the nature vs nurture debate has more to do with peer groups than it does with parents.
The segment was called "Do parents matter?"
The thought is certianly not original, but the papers and the solid evidence is original. I should probably give the book a read.
They had an interview with an terribly rejected plump school kid, he was in absolute tears because day in day out for what perceptibly is his entire life, he has lived in a world where none of his peers would even give him the time of day.
A quick blurb from a psychologist followed and said, to paraprhase, "Take anybody and place them in a situation where they are among 24 peers, all of which dislike them, for years and there will certainly be long lasting, profound, adverse effects on that individual's personality."
It was a fantastic segment, and it reiterated and vastly expanded upon much of what Jon has been going on about for the past year or so... including discussions of not only the "geeks", "outcasts" or "loners", but including brief analysis of those who are popular, those who are leaders and soforth.
First it was the graphics apps... Then they bought the Wordprocessor, Spreadsheet, etc.
Most of these companies which Corel is buying are ones which Microsoft has passed on. Borland was the major IDE competitor before Visual 'x' surpassed them. Wordperfect was the #1 Wordprocessor before Lotus was killed and Word bundled Excel.
To spare the usual Anti-Microsoft rant, Corel has not been leveraging an OS to manipulate their competition.
Corel/Inprise is now doing something interesting and exciting on a cool platform. I hope the quality of their software reflects the talent they should be attracting.
Boosting WINE, and working on a common printing environment are noble spinoffs.
Another skeptic here, but have you ever noticed the super-highly moderated comments, usually in interviews which despite being "Intriguing" or "Insightful" haven't a single reply?
Have you noticed that if you check out the person's other posts, they're all similarly highly rated, with few followups?
Sometimes I wonder if professional reporters for news outlets aren't stuffing the moderation scores with multiple accounts.
(This is not off-topic as it has to do with the functionality of the code mentioned in the article!)
I was thinking about other systems of moderation to implement. Something like introducing "entropy", randomly allocated positive moderation points. Each story would get points at a rate determined per hour and per volume of posts. That way people (first post kiddies) have no way of obtaining moderation by boosting their Karma, or bleeding moderation points by posting intentionally stupid anonymous comments. All they could possibly do to abuse the system is to open zillions of accounts, hope for one of them to randomly get some points, and boost stupid comments.
Hand-picked super-moderators could probably control, and hence discourage this problem. Blasted commments could go into a "censored" page or something. Just to check for abuse.
The other key is to make moderation convenient... ie, not require a page reload to submit, and to be able to post to the same story you moderate. Just tick off boxes as you read, and tie moderation to any action on the page. Even perhaps a javascript "onDocumentExit" event.
Yeah, I know, write it myself. I just might.
There must be a simple way to allow anonymous comments, public moderation and curb abuse all at the same time.
It's the closest I've heard the media admit to being afraid of "hackers." Of course they're not really afraid, they're simply preying upon public fears. It makes news.
Oh, and the article shows how this Slashdot thread is slightly blown out of proportion.
It is not currently economically viable to pirate CDs with DeCSS. It might be economically viable to create a plant to duplicate them (digital copies), but DeCSS is not needed to do that.
Nor is DeCSS needed to feed the output of a DVD player into a signal strengthener, into a MPEG card and create CDV or VHS copies of movies.
That too might be economically viable, but doesn't require DeCSS.
Funny, the only thing DeCSS is good for is playing DVDs under Linux. Odd about that isn't it?
I certainly don't call that "Breaking copy protection" or "Cracking". The only aspect of what was done which might be called "Cracking" is the act of breaking the encryption. One might also call that "cryptography", or "code breaking". But that wasn't even necessary because Xing fouled up.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's supposed to be 680x, the 8-bit generation of CPUs which ran stuff from the PET to the Apple, and the C=64. People have told me that the functionality of the chip varied greatly between the versions... but I don't really care.
I know it best as the 6808 in the Heathkits they used in my highschool digital electronics class.
I think the coco also ran the thing.
The first Macs were 68000s or something... and as another poster pointed out.. mid '80s, not late '70s.
It's been running through my mind the past week or so...
...And Justice For All (9:44)
2.
(Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett)
Halls of justice painted green
Money talking
Power wolves beset your door
Hear them stalking
Soon you'll please their appetite
They devour
Hammer of justice crushes you
Overpower
The ultimate in vanity
Exploiting their supremacy
I can't believe the things you say
I can't believe
I can't believe the price you pay
Nothing can save you
- Justice is lost
Justice is doneJustice is raped
Justice is gone Pulling your strings
Winning is all
Find it so grim
So true
So real
Apathy their stepping stone
So unfeeling
Hidden deep animosity
So deceiving
Through your eyes their light burns
Hoping to find
Inquisition sinking you
With prying minds
Exploiting their supremacy
I can't believe the things you say
I can't believe
I can't believe the price you pay
Nothing can save you
- Justice is lost
Justice is doneJustice is raped
Justice is gone Pulling your strings
Winning is all
Find it so grim
So true
So real
Lady justice has been raped
Truth assassin
Rolls of red tape seal your lips
Now you're done in
Their money tips her scales again
Make your deal
Just what is truth? I cannot tell
Cannot feel
Exploiting their supremacy
I can't believe the things you say
I can't believe
I can't believe the price you pay
Nothing can save us
- Justice is lost
Justice is doneJustice is raped
Justice is gone Pulling your strings
Winning is all
Find it so grim
So true
So real
Seeking no truth
Winning is all
Find it so grim
So true
So real
Posted without permission, Copyright Metallica and the label which owns their souls and feeds their families.
75 years ago, modern commerce was new and fresh. Commercials were live, radio was interesting and formats were unique. Now we have giant uninspiring powerhouses which act as barriers to entry, who dictate what we listen to. Systems of "payola" well rooted in powerful radio stations. It all works into a simple and rather horrible equation.
Maybe if the system is flipped on its head, top bands won't make millions while bottom bands finance them with the levy they pay on recording media. Maybe albums won't be so shiny and pretty, but gritty, there might not be top-notch producers working out wicked sounds for talented mucicians. But I don't care. I want my tiny little bar-bands and little independant theatres.
To hell with mega-media.
That doesn't sound correct. Section 2b of the GPL reads:
The original question was:
Which to me clearly fits into this category and must be GPLed. This is why the LGPL exists, so that programs or libraries designed to be linked to (libraries, etcetera) can be linked to by commerical non-GPL software packages.
How far this goes is totally beyond me. If MS Office were to suddenly start calling ispell, I don't think it would apply. As for a hard technical definition of why it wouldn't... I don't know.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html
It's more than that.
Take double-slit diffraction experiment. The slits are of comperable width to the wavelength of a photon. Fire a beam of photons through the two holes. They produce an interference pattern.
Place a sensitive detector where the target screen is. Now you can detect individual photons, and you can detect where they hit.
Now take a source of photons which though somewhat random would be just as likely to spew a photon through one slit or the other. It's not that hard to produce, nor is it terribly critical for the experiment. The key point is that rate of photons coming out can be controlled.
Slow down the source and watch the pattern. lots of interference... turn it down more... still lots of interference.
What happens when only single photons are going through? One would expect a simple non-interfering diffraction pattern right? After all, singular photons are going through the slit, how could they possibly interfere with one another?
The pattern is that of interference. Peculiar isn't it? Which hole did the photon go through?
As soon as you attempt to observe the hole which the photon goes through... you have a non-interfering diffraction pattern. It has nothing to do with the fact that photons are bouncing off eachother or that the mechanism of detection is affecting the experiment. The pattern on your detection screen is for the particles which you did not interfere with.
This has been scrutinized very carefully by many very meticulous people. If you doubt the results, pick up a book by a reputable author or publisher and read about it. There are practial applications of these results, and the same properties were found for electrons. There is more evidence that the results are not propreties specific to photons or electrons, though I have not read it personally and cannot comment on it.
I think we've all known people who have been socially graceless and are very clinggy. At least two people I've known have got over it. It takes a few years of respect and reasonably normal socialization. It's as though it were a lack of self-confidence and a desparate lonliness. Their social awkwardness always struck me as nothing more than social inexperience.
A female friend of mine was chased around by one of these fellows... he wasn't as bad as some, but he lived in his own little world. 21 years old and he behaved like a 12-year-old. He would fall back on romance and chivalry all the time, sending cryptic poems via email, and kissing his lady's hand at any opportunity. She was civil to him, so were all her friends, and he eventually clued in as to how foolish he was when he did these things. It's not the romantic act, it is the complete inability to read her emotions, to sense her disinterest, embarassment and fear which is peculiar and wrong. Lonliness can distort people's preceptions and make them do very strange things.
I know, it is all speculative and pretentious armchair sociology.
A small minded office manager and owner at the company my girlfriend works for demands that all mail coming through the door may be read upon her whim. Even letters addressed to individuals marked "Private and Confidential."
Federal offense yes. 1. Proove it. 2. Keep your job, 3. Keep your references.
I'll second that. I'll also add that under Windows it has ugly fonts, is as sluggish as a big java applet (P133 w.80M), and underperforms IE by a wide margin. Sigh. I can actually watch the widgets chase my mouse... infact I have trouble not watching the widgets chase my mouse.
I was hoping they would fix the memory and speed issues before it got out of alpha. Is it out of alpha? It took sixteen seconds... real seconds for it to restore from my taskbar. My poor system was swapping memory like mad.
To top it all off the interface is ugly, and the peripheral apps (AOL IM, etc) are typically annoying.
It appears as though IE is going to be the way to go on anyhardware short of a PII w. 128M of RAM.
The only advantage this package has over v4 is standards compliance, PNGs and much faster table rendering.
This is probably untrue if MS paid any attention to the OS/2 saga.
Why write for the X-box when you can target the Playstation and corner both markets?
The fuzzy part as I understand it, which works to promote your argument is that without explicit agreement to the terms, you cannot be bound to laws more restrictive than copyright laws.
The GPL is powerful because without the GPL, the software distributor is bound to copyright law. Meaning that he can make personal copies, but he cannot distribute the copies at all without the author's permission. In the case of Linux, all thousands of authors.
The authors have permitted the software to be redistributed under the terms of the GPL.
On the other hand, Windows requires you to adhere to regulations more stringent than copyright laws, (IIRC use on a single system, cannot resell the product used, etc). Thus you have to "agree" to the terms by breaking the seal on the product and not returning the software in 30 days.
Music has neither method, so I would assume, just as you do, that it is guided by copyright law. Copy it for personal use, keep it, sell it used (destroying all copies), and all the other fun things you can do with books, videos and the like.
If the music industry were to lock us into some kind of license agreement restricting copies for personal use, or resale, I would hope that they would provide replacement media should theirs get damaged. After all, you're buying a personal use license and not a CD anymore.
Anything less is hypocrasy.
Could NetBEUI over Ethernet be a replacement for USB? Just name your mouse "mouse", your printer "printer", etc. You could plug it into a dedicated network card, a hub, or even directly into the network. I know they can make the cables reasonably thin, they do it for PCMCIA cards already.
How is USB any better than ethernet? Ethernet will even allow you to run both 10 and 100 Mbps devices on the same medium. I suppose the only thing you loose is the ability to line-power devices. With PCI you should even be able to share interrupts.
What's cheaper these days, an ethernet IC, or a USB IC?
I never understood this "3-D UI" of the future. Our language is two dimensional, our books are two dimensional, our desks are two dimensional planes upon which we work. The best we could hope for is a 3-D wrapper for our 2-D world.
Audio can be recorded in 3-D, but it certainly doesn't enhance the ability of a speaker to communicate, it just sounds prettier. People today readily discard quality audio for efficient recordings. By the same token, why would people want to work in a 3-D rendered UI?
Personally I think the next useful UI will go in the opposite direction. Less virtual, more real. Desks which automatically digitize handwriting, panels which are as easy on the eyes and as portable as paper, and of course, lots of specialized devices, like palm organizers, crosspads, networked stereo components (ala MP3 players). We're seeing the beginning of this now. Transmeta, embedded linux, and the like are a step into the future.
Quiet, unobtrusive and asthetically pleasing. If you want to dictate, dictate, if you want to type, type. Conduct online research from your sofa, or at the coffee shop down the street. Offices will become passe as the mechanisms of communication become easier and easier.
On the other hand, if you want to play games... go ahead and imerse yourself in your thick 3-D virtual reality.
This is just completely wrong. This whole issue doesn't seem to be about the GPL at all. People don't have the "right" to the source code, people who distribute code under the GPL have the legal obligation to provide the source code, at cost and upon request for up to three years.
If the code is being distributed outside of the GPL, the distributor is doing it in blatent violation of copyright law.
As for how "linking" fits into this I have no idea. It seems that Slade could get away with this. Think of two extremes:
IMHO there is zero merit to his "waive your rights" argument, but as mentioned elsewhere, the very loose linking argument seems unfortunately plausible.
It would be nice if LDP followed something similar to Slashdot or Freshmeat whereupon people could comment or ask questions if they run into trouble. The authors can't update the docs all the time. If we could communicate the trials and tribulations while working with a package, it could provide valuable feedback to the document writer and the developers.
Also if you have a chapter to contribute or propose, post it and wait for it to be integrated or ignored.
Putting up a two-year-old dead document may not be very useful, nor are you going to have experts on the topic critiquing the work. On the other hand, if somebody posts, "Hey, the feature described in section 3.2 has been changed!", or "see CERT advisory 2000-09-12.3!" it is better that it be found in a dedicated forum than through hours of probing on IRC or searching through Usenet.
I thought I posted this idea to the original suggestions...
A simple experiment:
The elves surely must have some mass. Hmm... I wonder what the possability is that the keys were sucked out of existance by random weakly interacting antimatter collisions :-)
As for the difficulty of detection, wouldn't one of the active neutrino projects, like SNO pick up some very peculiar collisions if dense matter is going to occasionally interact and spew a photon? Off the cuff, wouldn't the intensity of photons released during collision of a neutrino differ greatly from that of an atom with the mass of Nickel, with an unspecified velocity?
Oh wait... it appears that's what they did... using seasonal fluctuations in the earth's velocity. That makes sense. I'll be quiet now.
Some day I'll have to get back into Physics.
I suppose this means that whomever controls the standard, controls who can and who cannot enter the graphics or display industry?
Nowhere does it say what they are trying to prevent people from copying.
You call it a fork in time with wee positrons flying around influencing past events, I call it a probablility function :-)
IMHO it's the same thing. Random events don't fit well into a four-dimensional universe. Time travel and branching realities is just as good a theory as colapsing proability waves.
Some people just have to stretch reality to get that extra half-dimension. OTOH, some people just have to stretch reality to get rid of that extra half-dimension and kick in some peculiar bits of antimatter.
The fact of the matter is, we don't know what happened in the box. It's all idle speculation without some mathematical genius and a particle accelerator anyways. Alas I have neither.
Show me a theory which doesn't require an extra half dimension or extra particles, and I'll be convinced... or probably just confused. :-)
You call it a fork in time with wee positrons flying around influencing past events, I call it a probablility function :-)
IMHO it's the same thing. Random events don't fit well into a four-dimensional universe. Time travel and branching realities is just as good a theory as colapsing proability waves.
Some people just have to stretch reality to get that extra half-dimension. OTOH, some people just have to stretch reality to get rid of that extra half-dimension and kick in some peculiar bits of antimatter.
The fact of the matter is, we don't know what happened in the box. It's all idle speculation without some mathematical genius and a particle accelerator anyways.
Show me a theory which doesn't require an extra half dimension or extra particles, and I'll be convinced.
Kudos for recognising your shortcommings in a public forum.
As for whailing on Q*bert as not being an elected official of Slashdot, remember that of all the questions posted to Slashdot, these were the ones which were publically moderated as the most pressing.
Jon is less an elected official of Slashdot than Q*bert, yet he chose to all but disregard the criticism of his subject matter as the babbling of a vocal minority.
I agree with Q*bert, and I see nothing but annectodal evidence in Jon's reply that his or her premise is wrong. Am I part of this vocal minority which feels that Jon's articles are lengthy, simplistic and completely lack hard references?
Where were Jon's people when they could have moderated Q*bert's post as "overrated"?
All due respect to Jon, despite plugging his job experience to defend his position, outside of Slashdot, Jon seems to be either loved or ignored. I cannot deny he has a strong following... although outside of Slashdot, I would personally lean towards ignoring him.
A cat in a box with a phial of poision, rigged up to a small hammer which upon the decay of an unstable atom drops the hammer, cracks the phial and the cat dies.
The key is that the actual decay of the atom is absolutely random. We have half-life measurements, we have a controlled system. No matter what the external influence on the system, that atom will decay and we won't know when it happens.
The box is really just a barrier blocking all possible observation.
Whether the cat is dead or alive only becomes part of our reality when we observe it. Mathematically, the cat can only be described as being both dead and alive. There is a probability that it is dead, and a probability that it is alive.
Intuatively, you can not have a 50% dead cat, nor a 50% decayed atom. Mathematically that is exactly what you have. The probability wave collapses (ie, the uncertainty vanishes) upon observation.
The thought experiment really just emphasizes the philosophical implications which the existance truely random systems have on our universe. IMHO it is a radical thought to apply it as absolute truth, but whether it is or is not the absolute truth doesn't really matter when it is the only mathematical description of the situation which is currently possible.
Reality is perception... et yadda, et yadda, et yadda (ie blah).
Katz writing for slashdot is different: it's someone writing long-winded, half-considered (if that much) editorials on subjects he doesn't really understand--and has no interest in understanding. And he's doing it for a relatively respectable website.
I second that.
There was a segment on "The Nature of Things" last night which had me thinking about Jon's obsession with the Helmouth articles.
In a nutshell, the theory is that the "nature" component of the nature vs nurture debate has more to do with peer groups than it does with parents.
The segment was called "Do parents matter?"
The thought is certianly not original, but the papers and the solid evidence is original. I should probably give the book a read.
They had an interview with an terribly rejected plump school kid, he was in absolute tears because day in day out for what perceptibly is his entire life, he has lived in a world where none of his peers would even give him the time of day.
A quick blurb from a psychologist followed and said, to paraprhase, "Take anybody and place them in a situation where they are among 24 peers, all of which dislike them, for years and there will certainly be long lasting, profound, adverse effects on that individual's personality."
http://w ww.tv.cbc.ca/cgi-bin/programs/extra.cgi?SC=NT&file =NT20000207.html
It was a fantastic segment, and it reiterated and vastly expanded upon much of what Jon has been going on about for the past year or so... including discussions of not only the "geeks", "outcasts" or "loners", but including brief analysis of those who are popular, those who are leaders and soforth.
First it was the graphics apps... Then they bought the Wordprocessor, Spreadsheet, etc.
Most of these companies which Corel is buying are ones which Microsoft has passed on. Borland was the major IDE competitor before Visual 'x' surpassed them. Wordperfect was the #1 Wordprocessor before Lotus was killed and Word bundled Excel.
To spare the usual Anti-Microsoft rant, Corel has not been leveraging an OS to manipulate their competition.
Corel/Inprise is now doing something interesting and exciting on a cool platform. I hope the quality of their software reflects the talent they should be attracting.
Boosting WINE, and working on a common printing environment are noble spinoffs.
Another skeptic here, but have you ever noticed the super-highly moderated comments, usually in interviews which despite being "Intriguing" or "Insightful" haven't a single reply?
Have you noticed that if you check out the person's other posts, they're all similarly highly rated, with few followups?
Sometimes I wonder if professional reporters for news outlets aren't stuffing the moderation scores with multiple accounts.
(This is not off-topic as it has to do with the functionality of the code mentioned in the article!)
I was thinking about other systems of moderation to implement. Something like introducing "entropy", randomly allocated positive moderation points. Each story would get points at a rate determined per hour and per volume of posts. That way people (first post kiddies) have no way of obtaining moderation by boosting their Karma, or bleeding moderation points by posting intentionally stupid anonymous comments. All they could possibly do to abuse the system is to open zillions of accounts, hope for one of them to randomly get some points, and boost stupid comments.
Hand-picked super-moderators could probably control, and hence discourage this problem. Blasted commments could go into a "censored" page or something. Just to check for abuse.
The other key is to make moderation convenient... ie, not require a page reload to submit, and to be able to post to the same story you moderate. Just tick off boxes as you read, and tie moderation to any action on the page. Even perhaps a javascript "onDocumentExit" event.
Yeah, I know, write it myself. I just might.
There must be a simple way to allow anonymous comments, public moderation and curb abuse all at the same time.
Good article, somebody moderate it up.
It's the closest I've heard the media admit to being afraid of "hackers." Of course they're not really afraid, they're simply preying upon public fears. It makes news.
Oh, and the article shows how this Slashdot thread is slightly blown out of proportion.
If you call writing a player cracking.
It is not currently economically viable to pirate CDs with DeCSS. It might be economically viable to create a plant to duplicate them (digital copies), but DeCSS is not needed to do that.
Nor is DeCSS needed to feed the output of a DVD player into a signal strengthener, into a MPEG card and create CDV or VHS copies of movies.
That too might be economically viable, but doesn't require DeCSS.
Funny, the only thing DeCSS is good for is playing DVDs under Linux. Odd about that isn't it?
I certainly don't call that "Breaking copy protection" or "Cracking". The only aspect of what was done which might be called "Cracking" is the act of breaking the encryption. One might also call that "cryptography", or "code breaking". But that wasn't even necessary because Xing fouled up.