"Heck, Slashdot censors. Otherwise, every article here might be M$ bashing or Linux raves. Or, endless dupes " - censorship and editorial judgement are two very different things. It's not a subtle or difficult-to-understand difference, either.
"Open source" is not software where the source code is freely available. It software where you can obtain the source code provided you agree to a license. That license specifies that you must make any changes to that source code available to anybody else who agrees to the same license. - This is not true. An open source licenses is one that lets you freely copy, distribute, and merge the code into your own projects. There are a number of open source licenses that do not attach themselves to derivative works, such as the Berkeley and MIT licenses (which are even freer than the GPL, in the sense that they have fewer strings attached)
I just finished emailing other people on the Wikimedia communications committee about this. As I see it, everything in the new law applies to Wikipedia except two words - "commercially operated". Wikipedia is run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, so presumably this law does not apply.
If I remember correctly, Microsoft's trademark case over the term 'Windows' fell apart on one rather innocious bit of law - apparently while it's entirely possible for something to go from trademarkably specific to common use (like 'kleenex' or 'band-aid'), it's legally impossible for the reverse to occur. Thus, Microsoft's 'Windows' trademark is effectively legally unenforcable. I very much suspect the same applies in this case.
Yah, because the audience is *really* likely to laugh a Valerie Plame joke with Karl Rove (who could very well be indicted by the end of the month) sitting right there.
No, they didn't laugh at what Colbert said because a lot of it cuts pretty close to home for those sitting in attendance. Case and point - when Colbert thanked the press for all the hard work they did during Bush's first term ignoring all his lies and misdeeds.
I watched the video and this comment cracked me up: "I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personel changes. SO, the White house has personel changes. And then you write "oh, they're just re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic." First of all, that's a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. if anything, they are re-arranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg"
The link you provided pretty much agrees with me: The Bill of Rights 1689 is largely not a statement of certain positive rights that citizens and/or residents of a free and democratic society have (or ought to have). Instead it sets out (or in the view of its writers, restates) certain constitutional requirements where the actions of the Crown require the consent of the governed as represented in Parliament. In this respect, it differs from other "bills of rights," including the United States Bill of Rights, though many elements of the first eight amendments to the U.S. Constitution echo its contents. This is in part due to the un-codified constitutional traditions of the UK
England has no constitution and no bill of rights (except, arguably, the 800-year-old Magna Carta). The United States does, despite efforts by the current administration to marginalize them.
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which established the FISA court) clearly and explicitely says that the US Government may not do survielance of American citizens without a warrant. I do not see how the government can assert privilege over the NSA's clearly illegal actions. (Nixon tried and failed - badly)
If you believe that TV, movies, music, video games, 'etc are free speech (and, outside of Jack Thompson, I'm pretty sure most people do), then taxing them is unconstitutional. Remember - the power to tax is the power to destroy. As soon as they are legally allowed to levy a $1 tax on video games, they can just as easily make it $1 million.
Almost every media outlet has someone whose job it is to write inflammatory rhetoric (at the local level, usually jeers directed at the local local sports teams) in order to sell papers. For example, it's what journalist-cum-troller Andrew Orlwoski does at the register. Dvorak is doing more of the same here.
Re:Thats what abandonware is!
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 1
The examples are for patents only, but laches estoppel can apply to pretty much any issue (especially time-sensetive ones like, for example, elections)
Re:Thats what abandonware is!
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 1
"Just because the company hasn't done anything with their game doesn't mean they aren't entitled to enforce their copyright."
While generally true, this is not absolute. Laches can (and will) apply in some circumstances.
"Can this be considered discriminatory to those of a lower education level in their attempt to obtain a job, as well?"
"Equal opportunity employer" means they do not discriminate on the basis of legally protected traits (such as those protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - race, color, religion, sex, or national origin). Education (or lack there) is *NOT* a protected characteristic. They are perfectly free to say that people who have below a certain level of education need not apply. (And the reverse is also true - I remember hearing about a police department in New Hamshipre that would not take applicants with above a 105 IQ, citing the high rate of burnout due to boredom)
Apparently the person who submitted this story thinks "delete" and "censor" are synonomous - they are not. Things get deleted from Wikipedia all the time; that doesn't mean it was censored.
Someone I knew once worked at GE, building phased array radar for the navy. She told me a couple of very funny stories. A guy was inspecting a prototype for a new array model in a closed room, and accidentally fired it off. As you might expect, the radio waves bounced off the wall 5 feet away, came straight back, and blew out the system. Needless to say, there were some very pissed engineers.
Then, they would go out to the boonies in New Jersey to test it. The Navy testing grounds is this large, flat, empty area in central Jersey. The thing was, birds (pelicans or gulls, I think) would swoop down right above the radar while it was being tested at full power. Needless to say, they made a rather disturbing sizzling sound as they dropped.
Here's the sentence in the research paper I mentioned: "Increasing component frequency (thus power consumption increasing as power is a cubic function of frequency for CMOS chips) can shorten execution time for some applications like the above example, but it is not necessarily true for some other applications." (I would tell you what the name of the paper but I cannot - these things are supposed to be kept confidential until the paper is published, and especially if it is rejected). As for why this is true, I'm not sure - it's outside my area of expertise.
It's not just direct - power consumption is proportional to the *cube* of the frequency (according to the research paper I just peer-reviewed). But, there are all kinds of ways to vastly reduce that, using voltage scaling, frequency scaling, and power-down-during idling technqiues.
If memory serves, the big problem with these chips was the possiblity of 'state explosion' - as the chip got bigger, the number of possible states increased expontentially. Has this been resolved?
I read the summary and cringed. (1) Don't call them clockless -- they're called a-synchronous, because (unlike a synchronus processor, one with a clock), all the parts of the processor aren't constantly starting and stopping at the same time. A typical synchronus processor can only run at a maximum frequency inversely proportional to the longest length in the critical path - so if it takes up to 5 nanoseconds for information to propagate from one part of the chip to the other, the clock cannot tick any faster than once every 5 nanoseconds. (2) One very serious problem in modern processors is clock skew - if you have one central clock, the parts closest to the clock get the 'tick' signal faster than the parts farhther away, so the processor doesn't run perfectly synchronously.
"I don't think it's possible to create a captcha that is usable by vision-impaired users, except maybe a sound recording" - someone else in this thread has already describedjust such a thing. Any visually impaired reader could use the voice->sound function to pass that captcha, or one of those electronic braile monitoring things.
Slashdot Mirror
"Heck, Slashdot censors. Otherwise, every article here might be M$ bashing or Linux raves. Or, endless dupes " - censorship and editorial judgement are two very different things. It's not a subtle or difficult-to-understand difference, either.
"Open source" is not software where the source code is freely available. It software where you can obtain the source code provided you agree to a license. That license specifies that you must make any changes to that source code available to anybody else who agrees to the same license. - This is not true. An open source licenses is one that lets you freely copy, distribute, and merge the code into your own projects. There are a number of open source licenses that do not attach themselves to derivative works, such as the Berkeley and MIT licenses (which are even freer than the GPL, in the sense that they have fewer strings attached)
I just finished emailing other people on the Wikimedia communications committee about this. As I see it, everything in the new law applies to Wikipedia except two words - "commercially operated". Wikipedia is run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, so presumably this law does not apply.
If I remember correctly, Microsoft's trademark case over the term 'Windows' fell apart on one rather innocious bit of law - apparently while it's entirely possible for something to go from trademarkably specific to common use (like 'kleenex' or 'band-aid'), it's legally impossible for the reverse to occur. Thus, Microsoft's 'Windows' trademark is effectively legally unenforcable. I very much suspect the same applies in this case.
Wikipedia *always* needs more coders - the 3-5 that we have just are not enough. Here's the relavant page
Yah, because the audience is *really* likely to laugh a Valerie Plame joke with Karl Rove (who could very well be indicted by the end of the month) sitting right there.
No, they didn't laugh at what Colbert said because a lot of it cuts pretty close to home for those sitting in attendance. Case and point - when Colbert thanked the press for all the hard work they did during Bush's first term ignoring all his lies and misdeeds.
I watched the video and this comment cracked me up: "I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personel changes. SO, the White house has personel changes. And then you write "oh, they're just re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic." First of all, that's a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. if anything, they are re-arranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg"
The link you provided pretty much agrees with me: The Bill of Rights 1689 is largely not a statement of certain positive rights that citizens and/or residents of a free and democratic society have (or ought to have). Instead it sets out (or in the view of its writers, restates) certain constitutional requirements where the actions of the Crown require the consent of the governed as represented in Parliament. In this respect, it differs from other "bills of rights," including the United States Bill of Rights, though many elements of the first eight amendments to the U.S. Constitution echo its contents. This is in part due to the un-codified constitutional traditions of the UK
England has no constitution and no bill of rights (except, arguably, the 800-year-old Magna Carta). The United States does, despite efforts by the current administration to marginalize them.
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which established the FISA court) clearly and explicitely says that the US Government may not do survielance of American citizens without a warrant. I do not see how the government can assert privilege over the NSA's clearly illegal actions. (Nixon tried and failed - badly)
If you believe that TV, movies, music, video games, 'etc are free speech (and, outside of Jack Thompson, I'm pretty sure most people do), then taxing them is unconstitutional. Remember - the power to tax is the power to destroy. As soon as they are legally allowed to levy a $1 tax on video games, they can just as easily make it $1 million.
I didn't mean he should wait 20+ years to do the prequels. But seriously - Galactica hasn't even hit season 3 yet.
...does anyone else think it might be a tad too early to start doing the prequels?
Almost every media outlet has someone whose job it is to write inflammatory rhetoric (at the local level, usually jeers directed at the local local sports teams) in order to sell papers. For example, it's what journalist-cum-troller Andrew Orlwoski does at the register. Dvorak is doing more of the same here.
The examples are for patents only, but laches estoppel can apply to pretty much any issue (especially time-sensetive ones like, for example, elections)
"Just because the company hasn't done anything with their game doesn't mean they aren't entitled to enforce their copyright."
While generally true, this is not absolute. Laches can (and will) apply in some circumstances.
"I also know that one of the companies that produces ambulances employs many, many Amish people to do the wiring"
"Who knows more about electricity than the Amish?" -- Homer Simpson
"Can this be considered discriminatory to those of a lower education level in their attempt to obtain a job, as well?"
"Equal opportunity employer" means they do not discriminate on the basis of legally protected traits (such as those protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - race, color, religion, sex, or national origin). Education (or lack there) is *NOT* a protected characteristic. They are perfectly free to say that people who have below a certain level of education need not apply. (And the reverse is also true - I remember hearing about a police department in New Hamshipre that would not take applicants with above a 105 IQ, citing the high rate of burnout due to boredom)
What can I say but "wow"?
Apparently the person who submitted this story thinks "delete" and "censor" are synonomous - they are not. Things get deleted from Wikipedia all the time; that doesn't mean it was censored.
Someone I knew once worked at GE, building phased array radar for the navy. She told me a couple of very funny stories. A guy was inspecting a prototype for a new array model in a closed room, and accidentally fired it off. As you might expect, the radio waves bounced off the wall 5 feet away, came straight back, and blew out the system. Needless to say, there were some very pissed engineers.
Then, they would go out to the boonies in New Jersey to test it. The Navy testing grounds is this large, flat, empty area in central Jersey. The thing was, birds (pelicans or gulls, I think) would swoop down right above the radar while it was being tested at full power. Needless to say, they made a rather disturbing sizzling sound as they dropped.
Here's the sentence in the research paper I mentioned: "Increasing component frequency (thus power consumption increasing as power is a cubic function of frequency for CMOS chips) can shorten execution time for some applications like the above example, but it is not necessarily true for some other applications." (I would tell you what the name of the paper but I cannot - these things are supposed to be kept confidential until the paper is published, and especially if it is rejected). As for why this is true, I'm not sure - it's outside my area of expertise.
It's not just direct - power consumption is proportional to the *cube* of the frequency (according to the research paper I just peer-reviewed). But, there are all kinds of ways to vastly reduce that, using voltage scaling, frequency scaling, and power-down-during idling technqiues.
If memory serves, the big problem with these chips was the possiblity of 'state explosion' - as the chip got bigger, the number of possible states increased expontentially. Has this been resolved?
I read the summary and cringed. (1) Don't call them clockless -- they're called a-synchronous, because (unlike a synchronus processor, one with a clock), all the parts of the processor aren't constantly starting and stopping at the same time. A typical synchronus processor can only run at a maximum frequency inversely proportional to the longest length in the critical path - so if it takes up to 5 nanoseconds for information to propagate from one part of the chip to the other, the clock cannot tick any faster than once every 5 nanoseconds. (2) One very serious problem in modern processors is clock skew - if you have one central clock, the parts closest to the clock get the 'tick' signal faster than the parts farhther away, so the processor doesn't run perfectly synchronously.
"I don't think it's possible to create a captcha that is usable by vision-impaired users, except maybe a sound recording" - someone else in this thread has already describedjust such a thing. Any visually impaired reader could use the voice->sound function to pass that captcha, or one of those electronic braile monitoring things.