OTOH: (Dealing with my semantic quibbles...) Well, free has a few legitimate definitions...but the only really "free" software is public domain, or possibly any software that you don't charge for is free, depending on the definition selected. That isn't what the free in FOSS means, as the BSD license is the free-est license accepted by the OSI [I think, I haven't checked that they don't accept public domain without disclaimers]. GPL certainly isn't absolutist in it's "Free as in freedom" stance, as it imposes some limitations on one who wants to re-distribute it.
The law where I live prohibits me from selling myself into slavery. Does this make me more free or less free?
How one answers that question should reveal one's opinion about whether BSD style licenses or GPL style licenses are 'more free'.
While that may be true in general, it might not be true in every specific instance. For example, if CNN is randomly right 10% of the time, and the BBC is randomly right 40% of the time, then eventually, the BBC is going to be wrong about something that CNN is right about.
In fact, fellow nerds, just give me a link to ONE impressive piece of AI software (that isn't a chess player) and I'll be bowled over. PS I'm posting this using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is one of the only examples of vaguely AI research reaching the home/office...
Did anyone actually RTFP? It's one of the most spurious pieces of "research" I've ever read.
Perhaps the article is a giant pun. Criticizing something that you are presently doing can be a source of humor. Example: "Like you know anything. You're posting on slashdot."
I had a similar experience once. It was an introductory grad-level networking course that surveyed papers written for various journals; one of the professor's stated goals was for us to learn that most CS journal articles were crap.
It was a good course; I've never written a journal article, but if I ever do, I'll be more motivated to do a good job.
I went to school in Lawrence, KS, and think the area is fantastic. KC is not a major metropolitan area. The GP mentioned the liquidity of the housing market; think about the same for the job market-- how hard is it to find another job.
In San Francisco, I have 10-20 companies that I could go to tomorrow and get a job. In KC, you would be lucky to have 2-7 companies in that kind of market if you were adequately marketable.
That doesn't sound like a very good prerequisite for "major metropolitan area" to me. If the economy tanked and suddenly work became hard to find in San Francisco, that alone would not cause San Francisco to cease being a major metropolitan area. It's more about the services and conveniences that come from having a lot of people in the same area.
You make the incorrect assumption that if drugs were legal, no more people would be taking them. SImple not true.
Also, you assume someone else putting things in there body has no chance of effecting you. Also a misconception.
I didn't see either of those two misconceptions in the previous post. Perhaps you are assuming that the previous poster has the same goals and desires w.r.t. drug use in general that you do?
I blame the drug addict, no government put a gun to there head and told them to take drugs.
Has are approach became insane? absolutly. Legalizing all drugs is also insane.
It's absolutely true that the addict is usually at fault. But that doesn't make mass legalization 'insane'. A sane person could certainly believe that the benefits from mass legalization would outweigh the harm caused by the mass chaos that would result. A sane person could also believe that even though the benefits wouldn't (in their opinion) outweigh the harm, the morally correct thing to do is to let people screw themselves up.
The real intended role of monestaries was to keep anyone remotely intelligent away from the general public where he might go starting trouble by speaking out against the Church. If you keep all the remotely bright people lured away, and force them to dedicate their life to the Church in order to learn anything, you can control them: and control of the masses was and is the purpose of Christianity since it's inception.
That requires far too much competence on the part of ancient religious leaders for me to buy it. Whether or not their religion was actually true, I'm firmly convinced that they believed it. They did what they did because they thought that's what God wanted them to do, not because they thought that would be the best way to control the masses (though individuals certainly may have been motivated to join the church leadership by the desire for power.)
In a sense, it's comforting to think of the history of religion as a series of cynical manipulations motivated by the goal of achieving personal power. Ruthless power-mongers we can understand; people who actually believe that stuff are much more unsettling to those of a different faith.
You know, this has happened every year so far that GenCon has been in Indy (3 years running now). I hear so many people whining about "why do the football jocks have to come through our con and ruin it?! I'm tired of them making fun of me in my Legolas outfit and giving my friends wedgies in the hallway! Waaaaahhhh!!!!"
Really? My observations were pretty much the opposite: it was the Colts fans who were intimidated by all those weird gamer types, who by Saturday night were well used to people wearing funny clothes and face paint.
If a DRM framework is available to implement as free software, then how can people be prevented from modifying the software to leak the cleartext of the work and then using the modified software?
In theory, hardware that only runs unmodified binaries.
It will be interesting to see how common that hardware becomes. Will the people who don't know (or don't care about) the difference be numerous enough to give it market dominance? Will non-DRM hardware equipped computers be made illegal? If neither of those two things happens, we will have less to fear from DRM. In a best-case scenario, somebody will invent working open source DRM (solving the 'cool technical problem' aspect of the situation), which will then be made irrelevant by the spread of open content.
Yeah, but it okay to tell other people not to give out cookies to people if the giver has no objection to what they do to it, even "smearing it into the carpet"? That's just being a annoying busybody to me.
Attempting to convince someone else of one's own point of view is an essential aspect of being human. There's nothing inherently wrong with saying "I think someone in situation X should do Y."
Of course not. But it's perfectly reasonable for somebody to refuse to give you a cookie (if they're not otherwise obligated to) if you are going to do something with it that they don't approve of (like smear it into the carpet.)
He hasn't explicitly said that 9/11 and Iraq were connected but he has implied so on many occassions.
They are connected: 9/11 spurred a "gloves-off" approach to international relations. That's what they mean when they say "attacking Iraq is consistent with attacking terrorists" (see Bush's letter, quoted a few posts over.) The similarity isn't "Iraq:terrorists", it's "attack:attack".
Whether they're right or not is still debatable, but for different reasons.
It's not that I missed it, it's that I didn't care. Lunar cycles don't directly impact me at all, so I didn't take them into consideration when thinking about the 28 day month that I read about somewhere.
Does the current calendar guarantee a relationship between month and lunar cycle? If there are 12.37 lunar cycles per year, my guess is "no", in which case the 28 day month calendar doesn't leave us any worse off than the current calendar. But that's just a guess. Like I said, I don't care about the lunar cycle.
It's true that CS undergrads do need exposure to SE basics, but moving the CS program into the engineering school is overkill, because there is a need for theory-heavy CS programs.
Creating a Software Engineering program in the engineering school is a better idea; it and a CS program could complement each other nicely. SE undergrads need some basic amount of theory, which they could get from the CS program, and CS undergrads need some basic amount of SE knowledge, which the SE program could provide. The other engineering programs could provide the SE program the kind of procedural rigor that real engineers take for granted and that SE desperately needs.
Exceptional students (whether they intend to become computer scientists or software engineers) could double major in both CS and SE, just as today, exceptional students sometimes double major in CS and Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering.
An alternative would be to alter undergrad degree requirements so that a bigger part of a student's course load is in their department. At my alma mater, of the 120 credits required for graduation, 40 were breadth requirements, 40 were general electives and no more than 40 were allowed to come from a single department. Changing that last limit to 60 would let you add a complete undergrad SE curriculum to an existing CS curriculum.
If you made 13 months a year our calendar would go horribly out of sync.
Not necessarily. Make them 28 day months, and then in between Firstuary and Lastcember have a holiday (which doesn't get a day-of-the-week name) that lasts 1 or 2 days (depending on whether or not it's a leap year). Poof: the new 13-month year is exactly the same length as the current 12-month year.
The hard part is coming up with a name for the 13th month, and deciding where to put it. That would be a big political mess.
Unauthorized copies of Windows don't necessarily use Windows Update, so they don't necessarily cost Microsoft bandwidth. Sometimes they do, sure, but that's a side issue; my post was intended to address the fallacy that every unauthorized copy equals a lost sale.
Slashdot Mirror
The law where I live prohibits me from selling myself into slavery. Does this make me more free or less free?
How one answers that question should reveal one's opinion about whether BSD style licenses or GPL style licenses are 'more free'.
As it is now most musicians survive on a day job.
While that may be true in general, it might not be true in every specific instance. For example, if CNN is randomly right 10% of the time, and the BBC is randomly right 40% of the time, then eventually, the BBC is going to be wrong about something that CNN is right about.
Here you go: Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
It's really impressive how this piece of AI software can, like, understand what you say and stuff.
Perhaps the article is a giant pun. Criticizing something that you are presently doing can be a source of humor. Example: "Like you know anything. You're posting on slashdot."
It was a good course; I've never written a journal article, but if I ever do, I'll be more motivated to do a good job.
In San Francisco, I have 10-20 companies that I could go to tomorrow and get a job. In KC, you would be lucky to have 2-7 companies in that kind of market if you were adequately marketable.
That doesn't sound like a very good prerequisite for "major metropolitan area" to me. If the economy tanked and suddenly work became hard to find in San Francisco, that alone would not cause San Francisco to cease being a major metropolitan area. It's more about the services and conveniences that come from having a lot of people in the same area.
By what standard? With almost 2 million people, whatever big-city conveniences the KC metro area doesn't have are not due to its size.
It's not a problem with open source, it's a problem with complexity. The fact of the matter is that complex things are complex.
Blame is not a zero sum game. Windows is one of the problems. A child who writes worms is another.
Also, you assume someone else putting things in there body has no chance of effecting you. Also a misconception.
I didn't see either of those two misconceptions in the previous post. Perhaps you are assuming that the previous poster has the same goals and desires w.r.t. drug use in general that you do?
I blame the drug addict, no government put a gun to there head and told them to take drugs.
Has are approach became insane? absolutly. Legalizing all drugs is also insane.
It's absolutely true that the addict is usually at fault. But that doesn't make mass legalization 'insane'. A sane person could certainly believe that the benefits from mass legalization would outweigh the harm caused by the mass chaos that would result. A sane person could also believe that even though the benefits wouldn't (in their opinion) outweigh the harm, the morally correct thing to do is to let people screw themselves up.
This is good news. If WiMAX turns people into zombies, the problem will be confined to Australia.
That requires far too much competence on the part of ancient religious leaders for me to buy it. Whether or not their religion was actually true, I'm firmly convinced that they believed it. They did what they did because they thought that's what God wanted them to do, not because they thought that would be the best way to control the masses (though individuals certainly may have been motivated to join the church leadership by the desire for power.)
In a sense, it's comforting to think of the history of religion as a series of cynical manipulations motivated by the goal of achieving personal power. Ruthless power-mongers we can understand; people who actually believe that stuff are much more unsettling to those of a different faith.
Really? My observations were pretty much the opposite: it was the Colts fans who were intimidated by all those weird gamer types, who by Saturday night were well used to people wearing funny clothes and face paint.
Things moved slower in the 1700s. A 20 year delay wasn't such a big deal.
In theory, hardware that only runs unmodified binaries.
It will be interesting to see how common that hardware becomes. Will the people who don't know (or don't care about) the difference be numerous enough to give it market dominance? Will non-DRM hardware equipped computers be made illegal? If neither of those two things happens, we will have less to fear from DRM. In a best-case scenario, somebody will invent working open source DRM (solving the 'cool technical problem' aspect of the situation), which will then be made irrelevant by the spread of open content.
Attempting to convince someone else of one's own point of view is an essential aspect of being human. There's nothing inherently wrong with saying "I think someone in situation X should do Y."
A fourth possible motive is altruism.
Of course not. But it's perfectly reasonable for somebody to refuse to give you a cookie (if they're not otherwise obligated to) if you are going to do something with it that they don't approve of (like smear it into the carpet.)
They are connected: 9/11 spurred a "gloves-off" approach to international relations. That's what they mean when they say "attacking Iraq is consistent with attacking terrorists" (see Bush's letter, quoted a few posts over.) The similarity isn't "Iraq:terrorists", it's "attack:attack".
Whether they're right or not is still debatable, but for different reasons.
Does the current calendar guarantee a relationship between month and lunar cycle? If there are 12.37 lunar cycles per year, my guess is "no", in which case the 28 day month calendar doesn't leave us any worse off than the current calendar. But that's just a guess. Like I said, I don't care about the lunar cycle.
Creating a Software Engineering program in the engineering school is a better idea; it and a CS program could complement each other nicely. SE undergrads need some basic amount of theory, which they could get from the CS program, and CS undergrads need some basic amount of SE knowledge, which the SE program could provide. The other engineering programs could provide the SE program the kind of procedural rigor that real engineers take for granted and that SE desperately needs.
Exceptional students (whether they intend to become computer scientists or software engineers) could double major in both CS and SE, just as today, exceptional students sometimes double major in CS and Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering.
An alternative would be to alter undergrad degree requirements so that a bigger part of a student's course load is in their department. At my alma mater, of the 120 credits required for graduation, 40 were breadth requirements, 40 were general electives and no more than 40 were allowed to come from a single department. Changing that last limit to 60 would let you add a complete undergrad SE curriculum to an existing CS curriculum.
Not necessarily. Make them 28 day months, and then in between Firstuary and Lastcember have a holiday (which doesn't get a day-of-the-week name) that lasts 1 or 2 days (depending on whether or not it's a leap year). Poof: the new 13-month year is exactly the same length as the current 12-month year.
The hard part is coming up with a name for the 13th month, and deciding where to put it. That would be a big political mess.
I prefer "an" myself. As in: "try an minimize..." If I'm ever famous someday, you can quote me on slashdot2000 or whatever they'll be calling it then.
Unauthorized copies of Windows don't necessarily use Windows Update, so they don't necessarily cost Microsoft bandwidth. Sometimes they do, sure, but that's a side issue; my post was intended to address the fallacy that every unauthorized copy equals a lost sale.