I don't understand why an individual needs to express themselves with other people's work. That's not all that inventive in my book. I think this is kind of like calling wearing an Abercrombie sweater as some form of original expression.
Albert Einstein once said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants".
Nearly all creativity employs existing material as building blocks. Traditionally, these building blocks have tended to be in the public domain, which has given new inventors huge creative freedom. If Einstein, as the poor patent clerk that he was in the early 20th century, had to buy a patent license from Lorentz and Associates for the use of the Lorentz Transformation, and pay for copyright clearance from Issac Linear Models for the use of calculus theorems etc, then we'd never have got the Theory of Relativity, and all the many amazingly good things (and some amazingly bad things) which have come from it.
What I'm saying is that the large intellectual property stake-holders, the (MP|RI)AA, BSA etc are working to privatise the very raw materials with which people think and express themselves. Ask any software developer working for a company which has been hit with a lawsuit for infringment of a trivial submarine patent for a simple commonplace programming technique.
I hold that until/unless there is major reform in the very concept of intellectual property as a legal entity, then society as a whole in its present globally-wired state will enjoy more creative flow without it.
...refuse to close the barn door, and make those fraudulent claims that the horse has already bolted!
Anyone in their right mind can see the horse clearly inside its stall within the barn, lazily chomping out of its nose-bag. If you can't see it, your vision must be impaired - get to your nearest RIAA office and book in for the next available seminar.
I'm sure there must have been a lot of ferry operators put out when the Channel Tunnel opened up to connect road traffic between the UK and France. But in that case, the ferry operators didn't have any significant pull with government, so the tunnel went ahead.
To borrow Russel Crowe's line from Master and Commander, we have to choose the 'lesser of two weevils':
Widspread infringement of intellectual property
Increasing concentration of intellectual property amongst an elite oligopoly which is working to mutate the intellectual property regulations into a force which increasingly represses expression, invention and communication and squashes competition
What, unlike the rest of the internet (and Fox News)???
Most people with at least some connection to the outside world are aware of institutional biases. They know some media companies like Fox lean toward conservative outlooks, and other media companies like Oprah in many ways lean toward liberal outlooks.
The problem with Wikipedia is that it holds itself to be not only factually accurate, but neutral as well. But I have seen at least one area where they have sourced only from media coverage, which in this case I know from personal experience to be inaccurate, but they treat the media coverage as gospel and revert out any information to the contrary.
My hopes are that Larry Sanger's next attempt will prove more successful.
One concept I've thought of is something like a 'polypedia', which allows n diverse articles on each subject, plus a 'rating' system so that each person can evaluate each article and, where s/he is able, compare each article's popularity with its accuracy based on his/her personal experience.
A better alternative to outright blocking would be to pass all Wikipedia hits through a proxy which, when articles are retrieved, modifies the returned HTML code to insert under the article heading the following words in large boldface: "This article may contain severe bias and/or inaccuracies".
I have seen a few pages on Wikipedia that contain downright inaccuracy. I've edited them myself, only to see my changes promptly reverted out by a few misinformed zealots who keep the pages on their watchlists.
The prevailing philosophy at Wikipedia is that a falsehood with higher-profile references is better than truth with lower-profile references.
If I were not an expert in the subjects concerned, I would have no way of knowing that the articles were inaccurate, and would tend to believe them.
All this said, my opinion is that outright censorship is reprehensible, but accuracy warnings are absolutely essential. Also - there are a great number of pages on Wikipedia, such as pages on science subjects which by their nature do not arouse into debate or controversy, which are extremely accurate, well-written and well-researched.
...when you're spring-cleaning their rooms, and you find the RPGs under their beds, the Uzis and Glocks in the closet underneath their sweaters, and the C4 explosive and detonators in the back of their socks and underwear drawers.
But, since you as parents are giving them a healthy regular slice of quality time, nurturing their emotional development, encouraging their self-esteem, and especially creating a happy, balanced, loving life for your and your significant other, and healing your issues as they arise, you'll never have to deal with such a worrying scenario, will you. You can set your kids loose on GTA and worse without a worry in the world.
OTOH, if you're sticking to a job you hate, voting in fucktard politicians, missing your kids' school/sport events, sitting on unresolved issues with your SO, putting money above love and [c]overtly taking it all out on your kids, then you'd better not let them near anything that has a CPU in it.
Back in the early days of cars, most folks thought the red flag act was entirely justified.
Sorry, but we've hit a new age of abundance. With the overwhelming percentage of internet users using LimeWire, BitTorrent etc, attempts to sustain a manufactured scarcity in the face of this abundance will similarly fade away into obsolescence.
The copyright enforcement versus piracy arms race will make for interesting history courses in future decades. I can see the courses now - "The Rise And Fall Of Intellectual Property".
I'm looking forward to blowing my grandkids' minds when I tell them about the era when information wasn't free.
should 4.0+0.0j and 4.0 be equal? Python does not think so. should 4L and 4.0 be equal? python does not always think so
WTF?!? Which particular python version are you talking about? Python2.4 and later:
>>> x0 = int(4) >>> x1 = long(4) >>> x2 = float(4) >>> x3 = complex(4, 0) >>> x0 == x1 and x0 == x2 and x0 == x3 and x1 == x2 and x1 == x3 and x2 == x3 True >>>
Or, are you talking about inequalities (<, <=, > >=) which are required for list sorting? In this case, it's not a python issue but a mathematical issue. You shouldn't be trying to use inequality operators on complex numers. Inequalities with scalars such as floats, ints, longs etc are a mapping (S1,S2)=>(Bool), where S1 and S2 each can be one of float, long, int, bool, string, but such mapping is not defined if S1 and/or S2 is the field 'complex'.
Your question is interesting though - a matter of whether a sort of a list of containing complex numbers should work if all the complex numbers have a zero imaginary part. I wouldn't think so. But if you're desperate, you could try something like:
x0 = int(4) x1 = long(4) x2 = float(4) x3 = complex(4, 0) list1 = [x0, x1, x2, x3] list2 = [x3, x1, x2, x0] def compare(x, y):
if isinstance(x, complex) and x.imag == 0:
x = x.real
if isinstance(y, complex) and y.imag == 0:
y = y.real
return cmp(x, y) list1.sort(compare) list2.sort(compare)
As for the 'problem' of list sort results depending on order of the original list, this only happens where there is computational equality between members of the original list, so what's the problem really?
If a student's submitted work lights up in huge slabs of red and yellow at turnitin, you can show that the probability of this happening without cheating is so low as to be negligible - similar to how juries buy into the "99.999999941% probability" results of DNA tests.
Also, if this student's exam results are lower than students whose work is cleared by turnitin, then such student has some things to explain to the academic review board.
There's an possible way in which Turnitin might avoid the copyright issue.
They could issue a standalone program, for the use of tutors, which will break the submitted work up into phrase chunks, and store each submitted essay as a sequence of hashed phrases.
Storing it as a sequence of hashed words might still run foul of copyright, since a dictionary attack would be able to uplift most/all of the plaintext. But if the hashing granularity is phrases, then turnitin could argue that it is computationally infeasible to reconstruct the submitted cleartext, and thus what they're storing is effectively a 'fingerprint' of the work and not the work itself.
If they wanted to get really smart, they could break up each phrase into words, and by using a thesaurus, reduce each word to an index into a table of synonym sets. This could defeat circumvention attempts whereby plagiarists replace words with synonyms to avoid detection.
...in the eyes of our customers, especially government customers"
Kinda reminds me of George Orwell's Animal Farm, where the revolutionary sheep are initially chanting "four legs good, two legs bad", but after the corruption has set in, and the head animals are enjoying human comforts, the chant changes to "four legs good, two legs better".
If enough British people care enough about an issue, they can strike en masse and paralyse the country. If the Government doesn't back down, they can stay out on strike. If the government still doesn't back down, and the people stay out on strike, then HRM QE2 can dissolve Parliament and call fresh elections.
Problem is that the British people seem to lack provokability. Fear of making waves. Addiction to the status quo. Conformity seems to be hardwired into the British psyche.
Also, there's a fallacy of composition - if 20 thousand people go on strike, they'll soon start having a problem with the police. But if 20 million people go on strike, and stay on strike, then the police (and government whom they represent) will soon have a major problem with *them*. But you won't get twenty million people out on strike, because each one of these twenty million people thinks that he/she is the only one who really gives a damn.
...would not have a button to launch the beer, but a hose.
Inside the hose would be a flow sensor and an alcohol sensor. Couch potato would request a drink by blowing into the hose for a few seconds.
Once the breath flow is detected, the controller would measure the breath alcohol. If the person's breath alcohol reading is within the legal driving limit, the machine would flash a green light, and toss the person a beer. Otherwise, it would flash a red light, then toss them a non-alcoholic drink.
This does kick my butt - I need to convert all my MP3s to OGG, and have both formats of every song on disk. Until, of course, some ogg-compatible home stereos and personal players come on the market.
Would I be right to worry that when I upgrade to the next Ubuntu release, or update within the release I'm running, that I might find several programs and libraries quietly dropping their MP3 support, leaving me with gigs of unplayable files?
Are linux distros about to get hit with a torrent of C&D letters?
OGG won't be able to take over completely from MP3 until most/all home stereos are able to play ogg CDs in the same way they can now play MP3 CDs, and until most/all personal music players can work with ogg files.
Confine yourself (at least 80%) to work that you actually love. If you commit to doing stuff you don't enjoy, you'll be very prone to burnout.
Be independent, find and exploit market niches; your independence can give you an operational agility long lost by larger outfits. If you keep your overheads down, you'll have good margins on all kinds of enjoyable 'nickel and dime' jobs, and be very competitive against larger operators.
Slashdot Mirror
Nearly all creativity employs existing material as building blocks. Traditionally, these building blocks have tended to be in the public domain, which has given new inventors huge creative freedom. If Einstein, as the poor patent clerk that he was in the early 20th century, had to buy a patent license from Lorentz and Associates for the use of the Lorentz Transformation, and pay for copyright clearance from Issac Linear Models for the use of calculus theorems etc, then we'd never have got the Theory of Relativity, and all the many amazingly good things (and some amazingly bad things) which have come from it.
What I'm saying is that the large intellectual property stake-holders, the (MP|RI)AA, BSA etc are working to privatise the very raw materials with which people think and express themselves. Ask any software developer working for a company which has been hit with a lawsuit for infringment of a trivial submarine patent for a simple commonplace programming technique.
I hold that until/unless there is major reform in the very concept of intellectual property as a legal entity, then society as a whole in its present globally-wired state will enjoy more creative flow without it.
Anyone in their right mind can see the horse clearly inside its stall within the barn, lazily chomping out of its nose-bag. If you can't see it, your vision must be impaired - get to your nearest RIAA office and book in for the next available seminar.
I'm sure there must have been a lot of ferry operators put out when the Channel Tunnel opened up to connect road traffic between the UK and France. But in that case, the ferry operators didn't have any significant pull with government, so the tunnel went ahead.
To borrow Russel Crowe's line from Master and Commander, we have to choose the 'lesser of two weevils':
..."Advertise no evil"
Hope so. But then again, I hope for world peace as well.
Most people with at least some connection to the outside world are aware of institutional biases. They know some media companies like Fox lean toward conservative outlooks, and other media companies like Oprah in many ways lean toward liberal outlooks.
The problem with Wikipedia is that it holds itself to be not only factually accurate, but neutral as well. But I have seen at least one area where they have sourced only from media coverage, which in this case I know from personal experience to be inaccurate, but they treat the media coverage as gospel and revert out any information to the contrary.
My hopes are that Larry Sanger's next attempt will prove more successful.
One concept I've thought of is something like a 'polypedia', which allows n diverse articles on each subject, plus a 'rating' system so that each person can evaluate each article and, where s/he is able, compare each article's popularity with its accuracy based on his/her personal experience.
A better alternative to outright blocking would be to pass all Wikipedia hits through a proxy which, when articles are retrieved, modifies the returned HTML code to insert under the article heading the following words in large boldface: "This article may contain severe bias and/or inaccuracies".
I have seen a few pages on Wikipedia that contain downright inaccuracy. I've edited them myself, only to see my changes promptly reverted out by a few misinformed zealots who keep the pages on their watchlists.
The prevailing philosophy at Wikipedia is that a falsehood with higher-profile references is better than truth with lower-profile references.
If I were not an expert in the subjects concerned, I would have no way of knowing that the articles were inaccurate, and would tend to believe them.
All this said, my opinion is that outright censorship is reprehensible, but accuracy warnings are absolutely essential.
Also - there are a great number of pages on Wikipedia, such as pages on science subjects which by their nature do not arouse into debate or controversy, which are extremely accurate, well-written and well-researched.
...when you're spring-cleaning their rooms, and you find the RPGs under their beds, the Uzis and Glocks in the closet underneath their sweaters, and the C4 explosive and detonators in the back of their socks and underwear drawers.
But, since you as parents are giving them a healthy regular slice of quality time, nurturing their emotional development, encouraging their self-esteem, and especially creating a happy, balanced, loving life for your and your significant other, and healing your issues as they arise, you'll never have to deal with such a worrying scenario, will you. You can set your kids loose on GTA and worse without a worry in the world.
OTOH, if you're sticking to a job you hate, voting in fucktard politicians, missing your kids' school/sport events, sitting on unresolved issues with your SO, putting money above love and [c]overtly taking it all out on your kids, then you'd better not let them near anything that has a CPU in it.
...have a pipe and pump between the bottom of the driver's seat and the fuel injector, and eat liberal quantities of chilli beans.
Back in the early days of cars, most folks thought the red flag act was entirely justified.
Sorry, but we've hit a new age of abundance. With the overwhelming percentage of internet users using LimeWire, BitTorrent etc, attempts to sustain a manufactured scarcity in the face of this abundance will similarly fade away into obsolescence.
The copyright enforcement versus piracy arms race will make for interesting history courses in future decades. I can see the courses now - "The Rise And Fall Of Intellectual Property".
I'm looking forward to blowing my grandkids' minds when I tell them about the era when information wasn't free.
When I first saw 'VBootkit', I first read it as 'VB Rootkit'. Wonder why?
I've had it with these motherfucking "Snakes on a Plane" jokes on this motherfucking thread!
"I've had enough of this motherfucking python code on this motherfucking server!"
WTF?!? Which particular python version are you talking about?
Python2.4 and later:
>>> x0 = int(4)
>>> x1 = long(4)
>>> x2 = float(4)
>>> x3 = complex(4, 0)
>>> x0 == x1 and x0 == x2 and x0 == x3 and x1 == x2 and x1 == x3 and x2 == x3
True
>>>
Or, are you talking about inequalities (<, <=, > >=) which are required for list sorting?
In this case, it's not a python issue but a mathematical issue. You shouldn't be trying to use inequality operators on complex numers. Inequalities with scalars such as floats, ints, longs etc are a mapping (S1,S2)=>(Bool), where S1 and S2 each can be one of float, long, int, bool, string, but such mapping is not defined if S1 and/or S2 is the field 'complex'.
Your question is interesting though - a matter of whether a sort of a list of containing complex numbers should work if all the complex numbers have a zero imaginary part. I wouldn't think so. But if you're desperate, you could try something like:
x0 = int(4)
x1 = long(4)
x2 = float(4)
x3 = complex(4, 0)
list1 = [x0, x1, x2, x3]
list2 = [x3, x1, x2, x0]
def compare(x, y):
if isinstance(x, complex) and x.imag == 0:
x = x.real
if isinstance(y, complex) and y.imag == 0:
y = y.real
return cmp(x, y)
list1.sort(compare)
list2.sort(compare)
As for the 'problem' of list sort results depending on order of the original list, this only happens where there is computational equality between members of the original list, so what's the problem really?
You don't necessarily need hard evidence.
If a student's submitted work lights up in huge slabs of red and yellow at turnitin, you can show that the probability of this happening without cheating is so low as to be negligible - similar to how juries buy into the "99.999999941% probability" results of DNA tests.
Also, if this student's exam results are lower than students whose work is cleared by turnitin, then such student has some things to explain to the academic review board.
There's an possible way in which Turnitin might avoid the copyright issue.
They could issue a standalone program, for the use of tutors, which will break the submitted work up into phrase chunks, and store each submitted essay as a sequence of hashed phrases.
Storing it as a sequence of hashed words might still run foul of copyright, since a dictionary attack would be able to uplift most/all of the plaintext. But if the hashing granularity is phrases, then turnitin could argue that it is computationally infeasible to reconstruct the submitted cleartext, and thus what they're storing is effectively a 'fingerprint' of the work and not the work itself.
If they wanted to get really smart, they could break up each phrase into words, and by using a thesaurus, reduce each word to an index into a table of synonym sets. This could defeat circumvention attempts whereby plagiarists replace words with synonyms to avoid detection.
Am I the only slashdotter who gets laid on a regular basis? Feels like it sometimes.
But - 100 million years without sex. That's gotta suck... or NOT!
Kinda reminds me of George Orwell's Animal Farm, where the revolutionary sheep are initially chanting "four legs good, two legs bad", but after the corruption has set in, and the head animals are enjoying human comforts, the chant changes to "four legs good, two legs better".
...General strike!
If enough British people care enough about an issue, they can strike en masse and paralyse the country. If the Government doesn't back down, they can stay out on strike. If the government still doesn't back down, and the people stay out on strike, then HRM QE2 can dissolve Parliament and call fresh elections.
Problem is that the British people seem to lack provokability. Fear of making waves. Addiction to the status quo. Conformity seems to be hardwired into the British psyche.
Also, there's a fallacy of composition - if 20 thousand people go on strike, they'll soon start having a problem with the police. But if 20 million people go on strike, and stay on strike, then the police (and government whom they represent) will soon have a major problem with *them*. But you won't get twenty million people out on strike, because each one of these twenty million people thinks that he/she is the only one who really gives a damn.
...would not have a button to launch the beer, but a hose.
Inside the hose would be a flow sensor and an alcohol sensor. Couch potato would request a drink by blowing into the hose for a few seconds.
Once the breath flow is detected, the controller would measure the breath alcohol. If the person's breath alcohol reading is within the legal driving limit, the machine would flash a green light, and toss the person a beer. Otherwise, it would flash a red light, then toss them a non-alcoholic drink.
This does kick my butt - I need to convert all my MP3s to OGG, and have both formats of every song on disk. Until, of course, some ogg-compatible home stereos and personal players come on the market.
Would I be right to worry that when I upgrade to the next Ubuntu release, or update within the release I'm running, that I might find several programs and libraries quietly dropping their MP3 support, leaving me with gigs of unplayable files?
Are linux distros about to get hit with a torrent of C&D letters?
OGG won't be able to take over completely from MP3 until most/all home stereos are able to play ogg CDs in the same way they can now play MP3 CDs, and until most/all personal music players can work with ogg files.
oh, yes!