The biggest news IMO is that the 17" MacBook Pro now comes with a 1920x1200 screen option. I've got that on my 15.4" Sager now, and it's wonderful. I'd rather have another 15.4", but I'd rather not step down to 1440x900.
I hope they don't develop video drivers on their desktops. It would be horrible to close one's email, web browsers, terminals, IM, IDE, and everything else every time one wanted to test a new driver.
I occasionally compile stuff on my Kubuntu desktop, but not anything that prompts a reboot. That's what test machines are for. Yes it's good to eat your own dogfood, but not when every crash leads to a 10 minute break in concentration while you reboot and start everything up again.
Closing the lid is the best solution. It's like using ISO 9660 to compromise between European and American nationalistic preferences. Plus, it keeps cats and dogs from drinking out of the toilet.
The difference in freedom between BSD and GPL:
BSD is amphetamine, giving you instant gratification. GPL is vegetables, tiresome to eat, but provides benefit into the future.
No, it's more like they're both cars with a replication bit that can be set to true or false. If the replication bit is true, then you can replicate an unlimited number of copies of the car and give or sell them to other people. With the GPL, all copies of the car must leave the replication bit set to true. With the BSD license, you can change the replication bit on copies of the car.
The explanation that works for me is this: 40 years of computer industry inertia.
The explanation that trumps yours is this: 214 years of everyone else in the world using the metric system as it was defined in 1793.
If that actually trumped my explanation, then the industry wouldn't have actually used standard prefixes for base 2 numbers. They did, from even before I was born.
I don't claim that it's correct or best; it's simply the dominant practice. Call it an idiom if it makes you feel better.
You make a compelling point that 1024^3 can be a useful quantity in computing, but you don't explain at all why "gibi" is not a good name for it and why it is preferable to overload the meaning of "giga" instead.
The explanation that works for me is this: 40 years of computer industry inertia.
Personally, though, I prefer to distinguish between power of 2 and power of 10 based numbers in the context of computer storage using the prefix "marketing". There are megabytes, and then there are marketing megabytes. Etc.
Anyway, in your example, since there is a US citizen on the line in your example, you still need a warrant.
Right, but the problem is that the NSA didn't realize they needed a warrant until the conversation was intercepted.
An additional problem is that conversations between overseas enemies and people in the US are potentially more important to intercept, from the NSA's perspective, than a typical conversation between overseas opponents, but that's a different kind of problem.
Maybe what's needed is a law that expands the definition of "declaration of war" to include non-state organizations. Some say that's what the Congress did after 9/11, though of course that declaration did not explicitly say that it's ok to tap their communications. It did imply that the government is allowed to do things that, if done indiscriminately against US citizens, would constitute violation of rights (like attacking and killing them.)
FISA (presently) allows wiretapping first, with up to 48 hours before a warrant has to be applied for. This is ass-backwards. Warrant first, then security violation.
You make a compelling argument, and I'm inclined to agree, but what should the government do in this situation: the NSA taps the phone of an overseas opponent, not needing a warrant. That overseas opponent calls somebody in the US. Now what?
I don't know if a retroactive warrant is constitutional, but it solves that problem. If it's not constitutional, what other solutions exist? (This is not a rhetorical question.)
Why single out the pro-gun lobbyists when partisans of every bent are jumping at the chance to use this terrible incident to sling mud at guns, gun laws, other laws, the United States, other countries, politicians, VT administrators, lawyers, video games, the war in Iraq, and anything else that they can think of? I agree that it's sickening. These people will stop at nothing to impose their political and social views on the rest of us.
Amazon just did what the law allows them to do. And if they are going to fulfill their obligations to their shareholders by staying as competitive as the law allows them then they should do it some more.
Obviously US patent law is up the creek, but it's not Amazon's fault. If anything Bezos should be fired if he were not to use every tool and weapon available to him.
Wouldn't Amazon's obligation to its shareholders be better served by lobbying for patent reform? Software patents are like a guillotine poised to strike Amazon (and other companies that write software), and as this case shows, even so-called defensive patents have considerable cost. At some point this cost must exceed the price of a new law.
The idea with XML was to make it (reasonably well) readable by humans.
That's certainly an advantage, but the biggest benefit is the existence of standardized XML parsing libraries. Other formats, like \nattribute:value\n, are just as human readable.
The extract shown before hardly is.
No, it's quite clear. The < > indicate a tag; the w: indicates the namespace of the tag; some tags have attributes. Closing tags have a / before the >. The semantics of tag names and attributes are defined by the "w" namespace. Different text is encoded by different tags, which seem to indicate formatting information. The tags indicate that, for example, the text "This is a " is modified by the p, r and t tags. XML is really a meta-language; the "w" namespace indicates the "language" of each tag.
What would be most easy to read for a computerprogram would probably some "binary gibberish" as this could be more or less a dump of the RAM portion that deals with the document (not unlike the old.doc). No processing necessary at all at file read.
It's not the processing that makes it easy or hard for a program to read, it's the encoding. If there were a standard way to describe binary tags, then that would be almost as good as the standard way to describe text tags used by XML.
A programmer looking at the XML encoded stuff knows what the tags are; they're the parts surrounded by %gt; %lt; etc. that I described above. He doesn't have to, though, because he can use his standard XML library. A programmer looking at a binary encoding doesn't have any such indicators, so it's harder to make a computer program that parses a binary format. He has to know what the format is ahead of time and make his own read() calls or whatever.
If nothing else, you could explain to me why hardly any file format before the 90's was based on formats similar to XML...
The computers of that time were so slow that the overhead imposed by text-based protocols was significant. Even today, for some applications it is significant and for some it is not. Some XML parsers make a function call, or allocate memory, for each tag.
Once that lesson has been taught, any clever student will be able to conclude on his own that it's impossible to "steal another person's IP".
It is possible, but it's a lot harder than e.g. copyright infringement. Stealing somebody's copyright or patentable work or trademark involves convincing everyone that said "IP" actually belongs to the thief. This is hard to do, but not impossible, especially when one party is a poor student and the other is a rich university.
I'm curious about how this works in other fields. When a music major writes a song as part of the work done in pursuit of a Master's thesis, does that song belong to the university?
That's because you don't understand the context. XML isn't for making documents easy for *people* to read and understand, it's for making documents easy for *programs* to read and understand.
It's far easier to make a computer program read and understand the XML excerpt you quoted than it is to make a computer program read and understand a document that, when encoded, looks like binary gibberish.
That said, even though I'm no XML expert, the XML you displayed looked pretty easy to understand to me.
Agreed. I regularly use scp to transfer files with nontrivial size between my home office and my employer's network; if my ISP throttled this traffic, then I wouldn't have any reason to pay for their highest upload speed. Fortunately I live in an area with multiple high speed internet providers.
Just how did these baby polar bears, kola bears, blind cave fish and blind mole rats make the oceanic journey and arrive in the Middle East.
Magic.
Oh, you don't believe in magic? Then you don't need any more reason to disbelieve that a magical being caused a worldwide flood, but you'll need harder questions than those to convince people who do believe in magic that it doesn't really exist.
It's gotten to the point that I don't even want to watch TV most days. I find that when I do, it is upsetting. The commercial networks are all busy chasing each other down the gory path.
I know what you mean. Even commercials for shows I don't watch sometimes bother me. I don't want to watch or hear somebody screaming in agony. It's to the point where we have to carefully choose which channel we leave the TV on when we turn it off, so that the next time we turn it on we're not surprised by something scary.
More legislation isn't the answer, but I don't know what the solution is. I haven't been able to bring myself to simply opt out of TV.
You claim it doesn't exist, because of lack of evidence. In the absence of evidence, science is agnostic; it knows that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.
Are you asserting that the supernatural is undetectable? If so, prove it. Note that lack of detection is not proof of undetectability, or proof of lack of existence, or proof of lack of influence in day to day life.
If it is detectable, it is natural. Your argument is that the supernatural is somehow a different and magical realm where science cannot address it. The only way for that to be the case is if it is undetectable.
The supernatural is defined as everything that is not bound by the laws of nature -- magic is a good word to use. If magic existed, why couldn't it be detectable?
Faith is nothing more than the axioms of a person's belief system.
No faith is acceptance of beliefs without regard to evidence.
No, faith is belief without proof. People change their "faith" every day when it disagrees with the evidence they observe. Faith describes our belief in things that have insufficient evidence, which is probably the vast majority of the things we believe (very little in our day to day lives has been scientifically proven, or proven to the extent that it would hold up in a court of law.)
Here's something that I believe through faith: the scientific method is a valid way to determine how things work.
Nonsense. You believe that on the grounds of evidence.
My belief is consistent with my observations, but correlation with observations is not proof. Logically, we know that just because something happens 100 times in a row doesn't mean that it will happen the 101st time, but in practice humans tend to believe it anyway.
That doesn't preclude it, in theory, if it exists, from affecting our universe; the concept of "supernatural" is not bound by natural laws.
In what theory?
That's what "super"natural means: "Unexplainable by natural law or phenomena."
I could change that Wikipedia article to make it agree... though, I am at a loss where it disagrees at all.
It says "The scientific method seeks to explain the complexities of nature in a replicable way." Also: "Natural sciences, which study natural phenomena, including biological life." (emphasis mine) The point is that science is about nature, not about things outside of nature, if any such things exist.
It's one thing to claim the supernatural exists and is magically exempt from science. It's another absurd step to say that theologians have magical powers to figure out things about the supernatural. It's yet another thing to say that the unsolved problems in science are supernatural, and that the supernatural exists in such a way that it can exist without existing.
I don't claim that the supernatural exists, I claim that science can't tell whether or not the supernatural exists. If I'm wrong, please explain why (continuing to assert that the supernatural doesn't exist isn't explanation).
Theologians have personal testimony, which isn't scientific evidence, but is still evidence; they, and philosophers, also have logic and reason. Testimony, logic/reason, and domain-specific vocabulary are the tools of theologians and philosophers that I referred to a few posts back.
I don't claim that the unsolved problems in science are supernatural, but I do claim that the unsolved problems in science disprove your claim that science
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest news IMO is that the 17" MacBook Pro now comes with a 1920x1200 screen option. I've got that on my 15.4" Sager now, and it's wonderful. I'd rather have another 15.4", but I'd rather not step down to 1440x900.
I hope they don't develop video drivers on their desktops. It would be horrible to close one's email, web browsers, terminals, IM, IDE, and everything else every time one wanted to test a new driver.
I occasionally compile stuff on my Kubuntu desktop, but not anything that prompts a reboot. That's what test machines are for. Yes it's good to eat your own dogfood, but not when every crash leads to a 10 minute break in concentration while you reboot and start everything up again.
Er, make that ISO 8601. (Hangs head in shame.)
Closing the lid is the best solution. It's like using ISO 9660 to compromise between European and American nationalistic preferences. Plus, it keeps cats and dogs from drinking out of the toilet.
No, it's more like they're both cars with a replication bit that can be set to true or false. If the replication bit is true, then you can replicate an unlimited number of copies of the car and give or sell them to other people. With the GPL, all copies of the car must leave the replication bit set to true. With the BSD license, you can change the replication bit on copies of the car.
FYI, according to the Washington Post, the US is reducing its carbon emissions -- at least when the weather cooperates.
What I would like to know is this: what evidence is there that reducing our carbon emissions now will affect global warming?
Feingold was the only Senator to vote against it, but not the only member of Congress; some Representatives also voted against it.
If that actually trumped my explanation, then the industry wouldn't have actually used standard prefixes for base 2 numbers. They did, from even before I was born.
I don't claim that it's correct or best; it's simply the dominant practice. Call it an idiom if it makes you feel better.
The explanation that works for me is this: 40 years of computer industry inertia.
Personally, though, I prefer to distinguish between power of 2 and power of 10 based numbers in the context of computer storage using the prefix "marketing". There are megabytes, and then there are marketing megabytes. Etc.
Right, but the problem is that the NSA didn't realize they needed a warrant until the conversation was intercepted.
An additional problem is that conversations between overseas enemies and people in the US are potentially more important to intercept, from the NSA's perspective, than a typical conversation between overseas opponents, but that's a different kind of problem.
Maybe what's needed is a law that expands the definition of "declaration of war" to include non-state organizations. Some say that's what the Congress did after 9/11, though of course that declaration did not explicitly say that it's ok to tap their communications. It did imply that the government is allowed to do things that, if done indiscriminately against US citizens, would constitute violation of rights (like attacking and killing them.)
You make a compelling argument, and I'm inclined to agree, but what should the government do in this situation: the NSA taps the phone of an overseas opponent, not needing a warrant. That overseas opponent calls somebody in the US. Now what?
I don't know if a retroactive warrant is constitutional, but it solves that problem. If it's not constitutional, what other solutions exist? (This is not a rhetorical question.)
Situations like this make me wish I remembered those 4th grade lessons in sentence diagramming.
Why single out the pro-gun lobbyists when partisans of every bent are jumping at the chance to use this terrible incident to sling mud at guns, gun laws, other laws, the United States, other countries, politicians, VT administrators, lawyers, video games, the war in Iraq, and anything else that they can think of? I agree that it's sickening. These people will stop at nothing to impose their political and social views on the rest of us.
Wouldn't Amazon's obligation to its shareholders be better served by lobbying for patent reform? Software patents are like a guillotine poised to strike Amazon (and other companies that write software), and as this case shows, even so-called defensive patents have considerable cost. At some point this cost must exceed the price of a new law.
That's certainly an advantage, but the biggest benefit is the existence of standardized XML parsing libraries. Other formats, like \nattribute:value\n, are just as human readable.
No, it's quite clear. The < > indicate a tag; the w: indicates the namespace of the tag; some tags have attributes. Closing tags have a / before the >. The semantics of tag names and attributes are defined by the "w" namespace. Different text is encoded by different tags, which seem to indicate formatting information. The tags indicate that, for example, the text "This is a " is modified by the p, r and t tags. XML is really a meta-language; the "w" namespace indicates the "language" of each tag.
It's not the processing that makes it easy or hard for a program to read, it's the encoding. If there were a standard way to describe binary tags, then that would be almost as good as the standard way to describe text tags used by XML.
A programmer looking at the XML encoded stuff knows what the tags are; they're the parts surrounded by %gt; %lt; etc. that I described above. He doesn't have to, though, because he can use his standard XML library. A programmer looking at a binary encoding doesn't have any such indicators, so it's harder to make a computer program that parses a binary format. He has to know what the format is ahead of time and make his own read() calls or whatever.
The computers of that time were so slow that the overhead imposed by text-based protocols was significant. Even today, for some applications it is significant and for some it is not. Some XML parsers make a function call, or allocate memory, for each tag.
It is possible, but it's a lot harder than e.g. copyright infringement. Stealing somebody's copyright or patentable work or trademark involves convincing everyone that said "IP" actually belongs to the thief. This is hard to do, but not impossible, especially when one party is a poor student and the other is a rich university.
I'm curious about how this works in other fields. When a music major writes a song as part of the work done in pursuit of a Master's thesis, does that song belong to the university?
That's because you don't understand the context. XML isn't for making documents easy for *people* to read and understand, it's for making documents easy for *programs* to read and understand.
It's far easier to make a computer program read and understand the XML excerpt you quoted than it is to make a computer program read and understand a document that, when encoded, looks like binary gibberish.
That said, even though I'm no XML expert, the XML you displayed looked pretty easy to understand to me.
Yes, primarily ignorance about which of the millions of results from a google search for "pidgin" refer to this particular program.
That's not a showstopper, but it prevents it from being perfect.
Agreed. I regularly use scp to transfer files with nontrivial size between my home office and my employer's network; if my ISP throttled this traffic, then I wouldn't have any reason to pay for their highest upload speed. Fortunately I live in an area with multiple high speed internet providers.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
For users who don't have working fingers or hands, they're right.
Magic.
Oh, you don't believe in magic? Then you don't need any more reason to disbelieve that a magical being caused a worldwide flood, but you'll need harder questions than those to convince people who do believe in magic that it doesn't really exist.
I know what you mean. Even commercials for shows I don't watch sometimes bother me. I don't want to watch or hear somebody screaming in agony. It's to the point where we have to carefully choose which channel we leave the TV on when we turn it off, so that the next time we turn it on we're not surprised by something scary.
More legislation isn't the answer, but I don't know what the solution is. I haven't been able to bring myself to simply opt out of TV.
I'm preparing by increasing my long-term energy storage. Via chocolate.
You claim it doesn't exist, because of lack of evidence. In the absence of evidence, science is agnostic; it knows that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.
The supernatural is defined as everything that is not bound by the laws of nature -- magic is a good word to use. If magic existed, why couldn't it be detectable?
No, faith is belief without proof. People change their "faith" every day when it disagrees with the evidence they observe. Faith describes our belief in things that have insufficient evidence, which is probably the vast majority of the things we believe (very little in our day to day lives has been scientifically proven, or proven to the extent that it would hold up in a court of law.)
My belief is consistent with my observations, but correlation with observations is not proof. Logically, we know that just because something happens 100 times in a row doesn't mean that it will happen the 101st time, but in practice humans tend to believe it anyway.
That's what "super"natural means: "Unexplainable by natural law or phenomena."
It says "The scientific method seeks to explain the complexities of nature in a replicable way." Also: "Natural sciences, which study natural phenomena, including biological life." (emphasis mine) The point is that science is about nature, not about things outside of nature, if any such things exist.
I don't claim that the supernatural exists, I claim that science can't tell whether or not the supernatural exists. If I'm wrong, please explain why (continuing to assert that the supernatural doesn't exist isn't explanation).
Theologians have personal testimony, which isn't scientific evidence, but is still evidence; they, and philosophers, also have logic and reason. Testimony, logic/reason, and domain-specific vocabulary are the tools of theologians and philosophers that I referred to a few posts back.
I don't claim that the unsolved problems in science are supernatural, but I do claim that the unsolved problems in science disprove your claim that science