It won't work. The spammer can always have lower prices than you, because he lies about what he's selling.
For instance, everyone gets spams for "generic Viagra," but there isn't any such thing. Pfizer is the only company that manufactures the medication, and they don't make a cheap generic version. At best the spammers are buying the real thing, grinding it, and mixing it with filler, to stretch one pill into dozens or hundreds. At worst, they're just selling sugar pills. Either way it's illegal, and ineffective to boot.
Your company would either work honestly and lose out to the spammers on price, or duplicate their tactics and get shut down for fraud. (The spammers don't worried about getting closed, even if someone tracks them down, since they can open a "new" company just by changing the email address and PO Box.)
And where nobody RESTRICTS ME from using their tools if I intend to make a living off of using them.
No one is restricting your use of the tools. You can use a GPL'ed compiler to create commercial software if you like. Heck, Microsoft could use gcc to compile all of Windows, and the GPL wouldn't have a single thing to say about it.
You're only restricted if you want to alter and release* the tool itself. If you want to distribute a modified version of gcc, then the GPL kicks in.
The important effect is that you're required to release the source code for your changes. This simply ensures that everyone else has the same opportunity you did, to make changes if they want to. It's clearly a good thing-- it puts all developers on a level playing field. I fail to see anything wrong with that.
(*To be quite clear on the important point: the GPL only comes into effect when you distribute your modified software. Say you make changes to gcc and create your own compiler; you and your company can use that tool in-house as much as you want, even release applications created with it, and still keep your changes secret. As long as you don't distribute that new compiler, you never have to give up the source code.)
Of course. You'll have to pardon me for the error. I've been working a lot with English majors lately, and those people never know the right word for anything.;)
It's even clearer to use curly brackets, but the article doesn't mention that either.
IMO every loop should have brackets, and every 'if' statement too, even when not strictly necessary. They're as good as extra whitespace for visually separating chunks of code, and there's absolutely no downside to including them. I've never understood why many C programmers are so resistant to the idea of extra brackets.
The space shuttle is not in an antigravity situation. If there were no gravity, it wouldn't even orbit; it would go in a straight line, instead of circling around the planet.
You, where you sit right now, are effectively also in an orbit. As the planet rotates, you travel around its center, once per 24 hours. If you became immune to gravity, there would be nothing to keep you moving in that circle. You'd instead move at the same speed in a straight line tangent to the original circle. From the point of view of someone on the surface, you'd be "flung" off into space.
For a full explanation of the above, look up "centripetal force" in the physics reference of your choice.
An astronaut in the shuttle is not immune to gravity, he's simply in free fall. Basically, while the astronaut is pulled by gravity and falls toward Earth, the shuttle does the same. Since they're both accelerating at the same rate, the environment in the shuttle sees no relative acceleration toward the floor, and hence perceives no gravity. (An orbit is the same thing as a fall, but with lots of lateral velocity. The shuttle moves forward as well as down, so it continually "misses" the ground and keeps falling, around in a circle theoretically forever.)
He says C/C++ is unacceptable because it takes too long to learn? That's news to me. I wrote my first useful programs after a single college-level course. It was less than a full semester, so call it two months.
Were I recruiting developers, I'd want them to have spent significant time learning how to program well (regardless of language). I also want people who are willing to invest some time, both in the project and in their own skilset. If an applicant only knows some "easy to learn" language like Visual Basic, I don't think I want him working on my project.
Did you look at the picture attached to the story? It's hardly what I would call titillating. Sure the image is naked, but it's also hairless, eyeless, and apparently sexless. (The scanner seems to lack enough resolution to show nipples or female genitalia.) It's not even in color.
You could get the same effect with a B&W photo of a clothes mannequin. And if that's what floats your boat, you'd be better served working at a department store rather than the airport.
I remember hearing some airlines setting up special lanes for VIPs [...]to pass through the security checkpoints faster.
See the word I bolded? They go through faster, but they still go through.
The first-class passengers may have their own shorter lines, but they still go through security. No matter how much you pay for a ticket, you don't get on a public flight without going through the metal detectors. Once this type of scanner is in wide use, everyone will have to go through it too, wealthy or not.
(Come to think of it, the new scanners might even make VIP lines less common. If they really do let one guard scan more passengers per hour, all the lines will get shorter, which means there's less incentive to have separate "speedy" lines.)
This isn't unique to Planetside; it's a staple of action games in general. Respawning has been around since the invention of deathmatch, because nobody wants to miss out on the action while everyone else is playing. (Even in Half-Life, where there's no respawning per se, everyone gets a new life at the beginning of the next round.)
Planetside has even more reason to include respawns, because it's an MMO that charges money. Early in the development of the game, one of the producers toyed with the idea of making the game 'realistic'-- a single death would kill the character permanently, and you'd have to start over. They immediately realized this was a Bad Idea, because people wouldn't ever have time to develop skills or become invested in their characters. It would've been just a Quake clone on a really big map, and no one would pay $10 a month for that when they could play Quake for free.
I live in St. Louis too. I don't know where you moved from, but the phone rates here are actually very good for a city of this size. Keep in mind that if you're only 25 minutes away, you're still well within the metropolitan area. It takes me 20 minutes to get to the city proper, and I'm smack in the middle of suburbia.
I do agree that the phone companies aren't much help with defining "local". They seem to define it by location instead of exchange, so I never know what's local until I see the bill.
[...] I think more people should recognise that he is not advocating a world without money.
True, but he is advocating a world where everyone is altruistic. A and C cannot connect unless B is generous, and allows his hardware and software to relay arbitrary packets at all times. Considering human nature, this is hardly a realistic expectation.
Perhaps B is a leech who refuses to relay. Another user, D, only turns his equipment on for ten minutes per week. Their neighbor E does relay, but he also logs every packet he sees, sifting them for passwords, credit card numbers, and potential blackmail material. F is a religious fundamentalist; when he sees packets whose destination is a porn site, he forges an error message claiming that the site is down.
And then there's G. G is a jerk who likes to laugh at other people's misfortune. He spends $50 at Radio Shack, assembles his own little noise transmitter, and points the antenna at A's house. At random intervals he cranks up the power, broadcasting enough static to prevent A from getting any connections at all.
If these were people whom you were paying for net access, you could do something about that. You could sign up with a competitor, or even sue your ISP for failure to provide service. But in the world of the Ad Hoc Internet, the relay peers wouldn't have any legal obligation to you. You would have no recourse when they start screwing with your net access.
Re:SCO is acting like they have no case
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SCO SCO SCO!
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· Score: 2, Funny
Look everyone... It's a pretender!
Or it's an actual attorney, who is keeping his username hidden because he doesn't want to be beseiged with requests for free professional advice. It's a fairly common practice IME, for lawyers and doctors both.
Ernie files the paperwork and keeps the $1-an-app.
Ernie's probably in for a heap of trouble then. If the $1 never gets to the copyright office, the copyright term ends at 50 years. Next time the company goes to enforce its copyright, it'll find that it doesn't legally have one anymore. Ernie will get fired, and probably sued, for gross malfeasance that caused the company to lose a valuable property.
The term of a copyright can theoretically go on forever, if Congress continues to extend the term. If the term is 90 years now, that's a "limited time". In 2020, if they extend the term to 110 years, that's also a "limited time." In 2040, they might extend it to 130 years, and guess what, it's still a "limited time." Repeat ad infinitum, and no copyright would ever actually reach the end of its term.
You're right that the US Constitution will not allow the term to be set at "infinity." But, every time the term is about to run out, large media companies will lobby for another extension, so they can maintain ownership of their properties. Barring a successful legal challenge or a fundamental change in US politics, there's no reason to think Congress would stop extending.
This has nothing to do with corporate copyrights or the Mickey Mouse problem. That's a completely separate issue.
The reform is aimed at non-corporate copyrights, the stuff that no one will bother to renew. Say some author wrote a scholarly book in 1924, which is now considered to be important. Because it's still under copyright, people like Project Gutenberg cannot use, reprint, or archive it without the author's permission.
After 80 years it'd be very difficult to legally acquire permission, even from the author's estate. He may have multiple generations of descendants, or no descendants at all, so it's nontrivial to figure out which party has legal authority over the work. For most purposes, getting permission to use the work is simply not feasible.
This change to the law would fix that problem. After 50 years, if the author's heirs have stopped caring (or have just died out), the $1 will go unpaid and the book will become public domain. Scholars and archivers can do with it as they will. On the other hand, if the work is important enough that someone does bother to pay the $1, we'll know that the payor is the person with legal authority. Scholars and archivers will know exactly whom to ask for permission. Either way, we no longer have the problem of unused works gathering dust under unnecessary copyright.
Are you assuming that each individual nanobot would have its own unique IP? Even in the theoretical case that would not be necessary.
The advantage of a large number of nanobots would be their mass behavior. You give an instruction to the swarm as a whole, and the individual bots automagically figure out what sub-tasks to perform. Blah blah convergent behavior blah blah distributed processing blah.
There never is (and never should be) any reason to uniquely address "the nine squillionth nanobot from the left," because that bot is just a component. There's no reason for the component to communicate with the outside world. It would be like assigning separate IPs to each DIMM in a PC, or to each spark plug in your car engine; it's theoretically possible, but totally pointless.
Re:C++ will let you do anything!
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Hijacking .NET
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Hey, that actually makes sense! If I manage to have children with myself-- perhaps via some form of cloning technology-- I'll be increasing the number of brilliant, suave, attractive humans on the planet. That's sure to be good for the gene pool.
Thanks for the idea, I'll apply for a government grant immediately. (Too bad you posted anonymously; I'd have offered to add your name to the patent.)
Re:C++ will let you do anything!
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Hijacking .NET
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· Score: 1
He's not rewriting the class, he's just rewriting the header file. So his "hacked" application can access all the private members, even on objects created by "unhacked" portions of code.
Perhaps you should know what you're talking about before you start insulting people.
If it's a projection onto a spinning screen, you'll only be able to see it from one side. Stand on the side opposite the projector, and the screen will be between you and the image; the display will look blank.
That's why the movies only show the display from a 90-degree angle, instead of travelling all the way around it.
The cable for a space elevator won't just be one long molecule, though. No one expects to grow thousand-mile nanotubes in the forseeable future; even making one millimeters in length is a nontrivial problem.
Current thinking is that the cable will consist of tightly-packed nanotubes held together by some kind of epoxy. One of the major issues is figuring out what that epoxy will be. It needs to hold nanotubes tight enough that they don't slip longitudinally, without adding too much weight or negating carbon's other advantages.
(I'd grab quotes from the recent/. stories on space elevators, if the search function worked...)
Slashdot Mirror
It won't work. The spammer can always have lower prices than you, because he lies about what he's selling.
For instance, everyone gets spams for "generic Viagra," but there isn't any such thing. Pfizer is the only company that manufactures the medication, and they don't make a cheap generic version. At best the spammers are buying the real thing, grinding it, and mixing it with filler, to stretch one pill into dozens or hundreds. At worst, they're just selling sugar pills. Either way it's illegal, and ineffective to boot.
Your company would either work honestly and lose out to the spammers on price, or duplicate their tactics and get shut down for fraud. (The spammers don't worried about getting closed, even if someone tracks them down, since they can open a "new" company just by changing the email address and PO Box.)
And where nobody RESTRICTS ME from using their tools if I intend to make a living off of using them.
No one is restricting your use of the tools. You can use a GPL'ed compiler to create commercial software if you like. Heck, Microsoft could use gcc to compile all of Windows, and the GPL wouldn't have a single thing to say about it.
You're only restricted if you want to alter and release* the tool itself. If you want to distribute a modified version of gcc, then the GPL kicks in.
The important effect is that you're required to release the source code for your changes. This simply ensures that everyone else has the same opportunity you did, to make changes if they want to. It's clearly a good thing-- it puts all developers on a level playing field. I fail to see anything wrong with that.
(*To be quite clear on the important point: the GPL only comes into effect when you distribute your modified software. Say you make changes to gcc and create your own compiler; you and your company can use that tool in-house as much as you want, even release applications created with it, and still keep your changes secret. As long as you don't distribute that new compiler, you never have to give up the source code.)
If it doesnt have a milspec number on it, it is junk/crap/utter garbage....
ROFLMAO!
What an odd little world you live in. You really should take those pills like the nice doctor says, they'll make the voices stop.
Of course. You'll have to pardon me for the error. I've been working a lot with English majors lately, and those people never know the right word for anything. ;)
It's even clearer to use curly brackets, but the article doesn't mention that either.
IMO every loop should have brackets, and every 'if' statement too, even when not strictly necessary. They're as good as extra whitespace for visually separating chunks of code, and there's absolutely no downside to including them. I've never understood why many C programmers are so resistant to the idea of extra brackets.
The space shuttle is not in an antigravity situation. If there were no gravity, it wouldn't even orbit; it would go in a straight line, instead of circling around the planet.
You, where you sit right now, are effectively also in an orbit. As the planet rotates, you travel around its center, once per 24 hours. If you became immune to gravity, there would be nothing to keep you moving in that circle. You'd instead move at the same speed in a straight line tangent to the original circle. From the point of view of someone on the surface, you'd be "flung" off into space.
For a full explanation of the above, look up "centripetal force" in the physics reference of your choice.
An astronaut in the shuttle is not immune to gravity, he's simply in free fall. Basically, while the astronaut is pulled by gravity and falls toward Earth, the shuttle does the same. Since they're both accelerating at the same rate, the environment in the shuttle sees no relative acceleration toward the floor, and hence perceives no gravity. (An orbit is the same thing as a fall, but with lots of lateral velocity. The shuttle moves forward as well as down, so it continually "misses" the ground and keeps falling, around in a circle theoretically forever.)
He says C/C++ is unacceptable because it takes too long to learn? That's news to me. I wrote my first useful programs after a single college-level course. It was less than a full semester, so call it two months.
Were I recruiting developers, I'd want them to have spent significant time learning how to program well (regardless of language). I also want people who are willing to invest some time, both in the project and in their own skilset. If an applicant only knows some "easy to learn" language like Visual Basic, I don't think I want him working on my project.
It can see through the laptop as well. The plastic explosive, being an organic material, will reflect strongly and be visible on the screen.
Did you look at the picture attached to the story? It's hardly what I would call titillating. Sure the image is naked, but it's also hairless, eyeless, and apparently sexless. (The scanner seems to lack enough resolution to show nipples or female genitalia.) It's not even in color.
You could get the same effect with a B&W photo of a clothes mannequin. And if that's what floats your boat, you'd be better served working at a department store rather than the airport.
I remember hearing some airlines setting up special lanes for VIPs [...]to pass through the security checkpoints faster.
See the word I bolded? They go through faster, but they still go through.
The first-class passengers may have their own shorter lines, but they still go through security. No matter how much you pay for a ticket, you don't get on a public flight without going through the metal detectors. Once this type of scanner is in wide use, everyone will have to go through it too, wealthy or not.
(Come to think of it, the new scanners might even make VIP lines less common. If they really do let one guard scan more passengers per hour, all the lines will get shorter, which means there's less incentive to have separate "speedy" lines.)
Oops.
Of course you're right, I did mean Counter-Strike.
This isn't unique to Planetside; it's a staple of action games in general. Respawning has been around since the invention of deathmatch, because nobody wants to miss out on the action while everyone else is playing. (Even in Half-Life, where there's no respawning per se, everyone gets a new life at the beginning of the next round.)
Planetside has even more reason to include respawns, because it's an MMO that charges money. Early in the development of the game, one of the producers toyed with the idea of making the game 'realistic'-- a single death would kill the character permanently, and you'd have to start over. They immediately realized this was a Bad Idea, because people wouldn't ever have time to develop skills or become invested in their characters. It would've been just a Quake clone on a really big map, and no one would pay $10 a month for that when they could play Quake for free.
I live in St. Louis too. I don't know where you moved from, but the phone rates here are actually very good for a city of this size. Keep in mind that if you're only 25 minutes away, you're still well within the metropolitan area. It takes me 20 minutes to get to the city proper, and I'm smack in the middle of suburbia.
I do agree that the phone companies aren't much help with defining "local". They seem to define it by location instead of exchange, so I never know what's local until I see the bill.
The article was already /.-ed so I didn't bother.
Wow, too bad people didn't post the Google cache anywhere. It would be really useful if somebody showed us the cached page. Why oh why didn't any posts point out the Google cache for us?
Cutting a TCP connection is really simple - just send a RST packet to one or both ends and enjoy.
Didja read the article?
The article explains why this doesn't work.
It might be a good idea to read the article.
[...] I think more people should recognise that he is not advocating a world without money.
True, but he is advocating a world where everyone is altruistic. A and C cannot connect unless B is generous, and allows his hardware and software to relay arbitrary packets at all times. Considering human nature, this is hardly a realistic expectation.
Perhaps B is a leech who refuses to relay. Another user, D, only turns his equipment on for ten minutes per week. Their neighbor E does relay, but he also logs every packet he sees, sifting them for passwords, credit card numbers, and potential blackmail material. F is a religious fundamentalist; when he sees packets whose destination is a porn site, he forges an error message claiming that the site is down.
And then there's G. G is a jerk who likes to laugh at other people's misfortune. He spends $50 at Radio Shack, assembles his own little noise transmitter, and points the antenna at A's house. At random intervals he cranks up the power, broadcasting enough static to prevent A from getting any connections at all.
If these were people whom you were paying for net access, you could do something about that. You could sign up with a competitor, or even sue your ISP for failure to provide service. But in the world of the Ad Hoc Internet, the relay peers wouldn't have any legal obligation to you. You would have no recourse when they start screwing with your net access.
Look everyone... It's a pretender!
Or it's an actual attorney, who is keeping his username hidden because he doesn't want to be beseiged with requests for free professional advice. It's a fairly common practice IME, for lawyers and doctors both.
Ernie files the paperwork and keeps the $1-an-app.
Ernie's probably in for a heap of trouble then. If the $1 never gets to the copyright office, the copyright term ends at 50 years. Next time the company goes to enforce its copyright, it'll find that it doesn't legally have one anymore. Ernie will get fired, and probably sued, for gross malfeasance that caused the company to lose a valuable property.
The term of a copyright can theoretically go on forever, if Congress continues to extend the term. If the term is 90 years now, that's a "limited time". In 2020, if they extend the term to 110 years, that's also a "limited time." In 2040, they might extend it to 130 years, and guess what, it's still a "limited time." Repeat ad infinitum, and no copyright would ever actually reach the end of its term.
You're right that the US Constitution will not allow the term to be set at "infinity." But, every time the term is about to run out, large media companies will lobby for another extension, so they can maintain ownership of their properties. Barring a successful legal challenge or a fundamental change in US politics, there's no reason to think Congress would stop extending.
This has nothing to do with corporate copyrights or the Mickey Mouse problem. That's a completely separate issue.
The reform is aimed at non-corporate copyrights, the stuff that no one will bother to renew. Say some author wrote a scholarly book in 1924, which is now considered to be important. Because it's still under copyright, people like Project Gutenberg cannot use, reprint, or archive it without the author's permission.
After 80 years it'd be very difficult to legally acquire permission, even from the author's estate. He may have multiple generations of descendants, or no descendants at all, so it's nontrivial to figure out which party has legal authority over the work. For most purposes, getting permission to use the work is simply not feasible.
This change to the law would fix that problem. After 50 years, if the author's heirs have stopped caring (or have just died out), the $1 will go unpaid and the book will become public domain. Scholars and archivers can do with it as they will. On the other hand, if the work is important enough that someone does bother to pay the $1, we'll know that the payor is the person with legal authority. Scholars and archivers will know exactly whom to ask for permission. Either way, we no longer have the problem of unused works gathering dust under unnecessary copyright.
(Pleanty of room there for a _lot_ of nanobots)
Are you assuming that each individual nanobot would have its own unique IP? Even in the theoretical case that would not be necessary.
The advantage of a large number of nanobots would be their mass behavior. You give an instruction to the swarm as a whole, and the individual bots automagically figure out what sub-tasks to perform. Blah blah convergent behavior blah blah distributed processing blah.
There never is (and never should be) any reason to uniquely address "the nine squillionth nanobot from the left," because that bot is just a component. There's no reason for the component to communicate with the outside world. It would be like assigning separate IPs to each DIMM in a PC, or to each spark plug in your car engine; it's theoretically possible, but totally pointless.
Hey, that actually makes sense! If I manage to have children with myself-- perhaps via some form of cloning technology-- I'll be increasing the number of brilliant, suave, attractive humans on the planet. That's sure to be good for the gene pool.
Thanks for the idea, I'll apply for a government grant immediately. (Too bad you posted anonymously; I'd have offered to add your name to the patent.)
He's not rewriting the class, he's just rewriting the header file. So his "hacked" application can access all the private members, even on objects created by "unhacked" portions of code.
Perhaps you should know what you're talking about before you start insulting people.
If it's a projection onto a spinning screen, you'll only be able to see it from one side. Stand on the side opposite the projector, and the screen will be between you and the image; the display will look blank.
That's why the movies only show the display from a 90-degree angle, instead of travelling all the way around it.
The cable for a space elevator won't just be one long molecule, though. No one expects to grow thousand-mile nanotubes in the forseeable future; even making one millimeters in length is a nontrivial problem.
/. stories on space elevators, if the search function worked...)
Current thinking is that the cable will consist of tightly-packed nanotubes held together by some kind of epoxy. One of the major issues is figuring out what that epoxy will be. It needs to hold nanotubes tight enough that they don't slip longitudinally, without adding too much weight or negating carbon's other advantages.
(I'd grab quotes from the recent