I like to give the experts a little credit, and assume that they have ruled these things out already.
For instance---and this is entirely fictitious---suppose the galaxies appear to be ten times too small to hold together given how fast they are spinning, and so you conclude they must consist of 90% dark matter that is moons and dust and such. Then, suppose you measure the gravitational lensing, and find that the effective mass is only half what it should be if it were 90% moons and dust. Well, you'd probably have to conclude it's only 40% moons and dust, and 50% pure magic.
That's the kind of thing these scientists do. If someone with actual facts could back me up a bit, I'd appreciate it.
Regardless, it's easy to dismiss a mystery if you don't know the facts involved.
Fine. But your browser is not a derivative work, which was the original claim. And besides, it's moot, because copyright protects derivative works just like copies anyway.
AFAIK while your browser is displaying slashdot materials it is a derivative work of Slashdot. That's why I can't go to a copywrited website "print to file" and then repost the information at will.
No way. You're thinking too hard. The browser doesn't become a derivative work of the page that's displayed. That's just bizarre.
If you download a page and print it, you have made an unauthorized copy, plain and simple.
The GPL doesn't contain the word "link" or anything like it. Take a look. It's only mentioned once very briefly in an epilogue recommending how the GPL should be applied to new software.
Re:can someone explain to me
on
E ~ mc^2
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· Score: 1
That's the big thing about relativity: c is absolute. That's why the Ether theory doesn't work. No matter what frame of reference you're in, you will always measure c to have the same value.
The contortions the universe must go through to preserve this invariant are truly mind-boggling, and lead to all the strange "relativistic effects" you may have heard of, such as items gaining mass as they approach the speed of light.
I ran an Unreal Tournament clan for a while, and my experiences were great. The times when all my good teammates showed up, and we beat another good team because of superior tactics and communication, were well worthwhile. I'd definitely go through all the grief again for those moments of well-deserved victory. Actually, even some of the well-fought losses were fun.
The bad things about the game all basically boiled down to the fact that you're playing with a bunch of immature teenagers...
People get this bizarre concept of "honour" about what constitutes acceptable tactics. I say the levels and weapons are the way they are, and they should be used to their fullest. However, when I use a certain tactic (such as piston-camping or the redeemer-toss on Facing Worlds) I'd invariably be called names and accused of cheating. Rather than try to outsmart me with counter-tactics, these weenies would rather complain about how unfair I'm being. (Never mind that they could use the exact same tactics against me.) I presume these same people would accuse me of "bishop camping" if I beat them in chess. In contrast, our clan had counter-tactics at the ready, and we used them. To me, that's the fun of the game. If you fall for a trick like piston-camping more than once or twice in a game, you're an idiot, and deserve to lose.
Playing in a clan, even a clutz like me gets pretty good at the game. Afterward, when I joined a random server to play a game or two, I'd often get accused of cheating, simply because I won a few melees or captured a few flags, and sometimes I'd even get kicked off the server, even without using "cheating" tactics (see above).
The politics of the clan became a bit much for me after a while, and I turned the reins over to a friend of mine a little while before half the clan left to start their own clan. Invariably, all the problems came from the teenagers. By the end, most games were played by three old-timers (averaging 28 years old or so) and one particluarly mature and talented teenager. At that point, my personal fun level increased dramatically, since we were all there just to have fun competing, not to boost our egos in a make-believe military organization.
But all these things are relatively minor, especially compared with the woes that some EQ players apparently experience.
Re:Its been that time for a long time, and it won'
on
DNA Goes Binary
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· Score: 1
The Slashdot editors are addicted to their own power...
To paraphrase: never attribute to malice what can easily be explained by apathy.
The editors are not evil tyrants; they're basically kids who made a web site for their own reasons and have no interest in being journalists. The site thrives without the editors' expending any effort in this direction, so why should they start now?
Re:Didn't Church-Turing beat them to this?
on
DNA Goes Binary
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· Score: 1
Man, you don't even have a rudimentary understanding of this, do you?
The author is German, as you can tell from the ".de" domain, and hence probably not a native English speaker.
Lay+out is make-believe at most.
What does that mean?
Pictures are from some first anatomy book.
Does this make them incorrect somehow?
No references, just some weird hypothesis withou any proofs.
It's a web page, not a scientific paper. All he is doing is raising a hypothesis. To me, addmittedly having no medical education, it sounds believable enough at least to be studied further, which I think is all the author is recommending.
Besides he even fails to mention most Fourier transform based codecs work. They do not even fullfill the persumptions of his hypothesis, because their main size reductions are based on sliced away frequencies outside the scope of our hearing.
You can't get 20:1 reduction just by trimming the low and high frequencies. Besides, even if you are right, so long as some of the reduction comes from the kind of processing that the author describes, a danger may exist.
I, for one, would feel more comfortable if I saw this hypothesis disproven.
Well, I'll have to take your word that they all use no inline assembly code, nor any particular linkage convention, nor rely on the memory layout of structs, nor rely on the number of bits in a pointer or an int, nor any of a hundred other such things.
I think I see what's happening. We're using two different senses of the word "purpose". Clearly, the "purpose" of all plot devices, from the point of view of the writers, is to advance the plot. However, I meant the "purpose" from the point of view of the fictional Star Trek universe. For instance, the purpose of the warp drive is to propel the ship; the purpose of Geordi's visor is to allow him to see; the purpose of the shields is to repel attacks; and the sole purpose of the nexus is to cause Generations' plot to unfold as it did.
From the point of view of the fictional universe, well-written plot devices should appear to occur naturally, despite the fact that (from the point of view of the writers) they all exist only to advance the plot. This is very much not the case with the nexus, which stands out as an obvious construction of the writers. I'm sorry I wasn't clear about this in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously they mean "rest mass". That is, the mass when the particle has zero velocity.
For instance---and this is entirely fictitious---suppose the galaxies appear to be ten times too small to hold together given how fast they are spinning, and so you conclude they must consist of 90% dark matter that is moons and dust and such. Then, suppose you measure the gravitational lensing, and find that the effective mass is only half what it should be if it were 90% moons and dust. Well, you'd probably have to conclude it's only 40% moons and dust, and 50% pure magic.
That's the kind of thing these scientists do. If someone with actual facts could back me up a bit, I'd appreciate it.
Regardless, it's easy to dismiss a mystery if you don't know the facts involved.
Well, I think you may find yourself alone in your creative legal interpretation.
If you transcribe a book with a pen, the pen is not a derivative work of the book.
The browser is the tool used to copy/derive the work. It's not part of the work.
Fine. But your browser is not a derivative work, which was the original claim. And besides, it's moot, because copyright protects derivative works just like copies anyway.
If you download a page and print it, you have made an unauthorized copy, plain and simple.
The GPL doesn't contain the word "link" or anything like it. Take a look. It's only mentioned once very briefly in an epilogue recommending how the GPL should be applied to new software.
The contortions the universe must go through to preserve this invariant are truly mind-boggling, and lead to all the strange "relativistic effects" you may have heard of, such as items gaining mass as they approach the speed of light.
Thank you!
Yeah, Classpath is a waste of effort just like the GNU project duplicating UNIX was a waste of effort.
The bad things about the game all basically boiled down to the fact that you're playing with a bunch of immature teenagers...
People get this bizarre concept of "honour" about what constitutes acceptable tactics. I say the levels and weapons are the way they are, and they should be used to their fullest. However, when I use a certain tactic (such as piston-camping or the redeemer-toss on Facing Worlds) I'd invariably be called names and accused of cheating. Rather than try to outsmart me with counter-tactics, these weenies would rather complain about how unfair I'm being. (Never mind that they could use the exact same tactics against me.) I presume these same people would accuse me of "bishop camping" if I beat them in chess. In contrast, our clan had counter-tactics at the ready, and we used them. To me, that's the fun of the game. If you fall for a trick like piston-camping more than once or twice in a game, you're an idiot, and deserve to lose.
Playing in a clan, even a clutz like me gets pretty good at the game. Afterward, when I joined a random server to play a game or two, I'd often get accused of cheating, simply because I won a few melees or captured a few flags, and sometimes I'd even get kicked off the server, even without using "cheating" tactics (see above).
The politics of the clan became a bit much for me after a while, and I turned the reins over to a friend of mine a little while before half the clan left to start their own clan. Invariably, all the problems came from the teenagers. By the end, most games were played by three old-timers (averaging 28 years old or so) and one particluarly mature and talented teenager. At that point, my personal fun level increased dramatically, since we were all there just to have fun competing, not to boost our egos in a make-believe military organization.
But all these things are relatively minor, especially compared with the woes that some EQ players apparently experience.
The editors are not evil tyrants; they're basically kids who made a web site for their own reasons and have no interest in being journalists. The site thrives without the editors' expending any effort in this direction, so why should they start now?
Hint: it's not computer science. It's biology.
It's as though they thought of the top 10 science discoveries/events, and then looked around for images to represent them.
I hereby grant you a +1, Funny virtual mod point.
Nice sig. Fooled me.
Well, we can agree to disagree. I think it's an interesting idea I had never considered, and I'd like to see it refuted.
I, for one, would feel more comfortable if I saw this hypothesis disproven.
Do you mean asinine? Like replying to someone's post for the sole purpose of correcting spelling?
Um, I call "bullshit".
Well, I'll have to take your word that they all use no inline assembly code, nor any particular linkage convention, nor rely on the memory layout of structs, nor rely on the number of bits in a pointer or an int, nor any of a hundred other such things.
I agree in general about standards, but to be disappointed with the kernel hackers over this is a bit much.
From the point of view of the fictional universe, well-written plot devices should appear to occur naturally, despite the fact that (from the point of view of the writers) they all exist only to advance the plot. This is very much not the case with the nexus, which stands out as an obvious construction of the writers. I'm sorry I wasn't clear about this in the first place.
Perhaps you're not familiar with the "^H^H^H" freudian-slip notation?
I'll be seeing Nemesis tomorrow...