Commercial speech does have some constitutional protection, but not to the same level as non-commercial speech. But even with pure political speech, there is no requirement for me to pay for your speech.
In fact, I would claim that Graham's approach to spam provides a much better protection of freedom of (especially political) speech than any other method. If until now you never received political spam, than his filtering method will probably rate the mail average, maybe even slightly positive. If you decide to delete-as-spam, the filter will "learn" to recognize political mails as something you don't want. If you decide to read the mail, it will "learn" to let future political mails get through as well.
You come up with an idea, but only work on it in your head. And it is related to your employment, who should own it?
You should own it.
Of course, if it is directly related to the project you're currently working on, then you'd better make use of your idea by implementing it for your current employer. But that's not because the idea is owned by the employer -- it's because if you don't make use of your idea, you won't be able to complete your project. And completing the project is your job.
If the company owns all ideas that you have while working for them, you can never safely start an independent business. People don't sit in their office and then, one day, decide that they have no ideas whatsoever but should quit their job, go home and try getting ideas. How it actually works is that while you're at work, you have an idea that is not directly related to your current task, or you're not satisfied with your payment or your company's management or something like that. And then you decide "I can do better than this," and start your own business.
It even used to be the case that you could not just start a new business with something related to your previous job. You could even do almost exactly the same thing. Think about people who invented a groupware solution, then decided that they could do better, and invented another groupware solution.
What if, while working for your company, you have a great idea, tell your employer about it and they believe the idea won't work? Don't tell me this doesn't happen, it happens all the time. So you decide to quit and start your own business. One or two years later, your business is a big success. Should it be possible for your previous employer to claim ownership over your business because you developed the idea for them?
I hope not. It would mean you take the risk, they take the profit -- without any investments. Capitalism, huh?
Establishing that Brown had the idea years before coming to DSC would have contradicted the signed agreement and gone a long way toward establishing Brown's credibility.
How exactly do I prove at what time I had an idea? This is bullshit. The company can always claim I had the idea while working for them, and I can always claim the contrary. Neither of us can prove their statement, so the default is that I lose any rights to my idea?
well, the only way to resolve this argument is to read the Nature article. (I haven't yet.) Have you?
No, but your argument about how to define a "clear" day...
I believe they would have compared the contrail-less data with just average September days. How would you sort out which days were "clear"? (and which days you would thow out because they weren't "clear" enough?)
...makes sense. So I guess now I'll have to read the Nature article to find out:-)
Well, yes, but I suppose that they compared their data not with that of cloudy days but with data from other, clear days during similar times of the year. I think what they're saying is not that the clear skys were caused by a lack of air traffic, but that the temperature variation was even higher than it normally can be expected on days with a clear sky. Of course, you can never prove that this wasn't just a coincident, but on the other hand the data does show an effect that you would expect anyway, so it does make sense to conclude that there is a relation between air traffic and temperature variation.
Of course, I'm not a meteorology expert, so I habe no idea how much data you would usually collect before drawing conclusions -- but that fact that this study has been published by Nature imho shows that at least it can't be totally bogus.
Anyone with even the smallest knowledge of statistics can tell you that this 'experiment' is absolutely non-scientific and the researchers admit it that global warming is likely responsible for most of the increase.
There is no increase caused by jets.
Unfortunately, the article submitter obviously didn't understand at all what the article says -- first, it doesn't say earth's average temperature increases or decreases, it says the daily variation, i.e. the difference between night and day, changes. This is something that you can very well observe with just a few days of data.
Second, the researchers claim that the jets reduce the temperature range.
First, they're not actually talking about exhaust here, they're talking about contrails, i.e. condensed water (clouds).
Second, the contrails, don't contribute to a temperature variation, they prevent it: "the clear skies boosted the temperature swing between daytime highs and nighttime lows by about 3 degrees nationwide."
Third, to all those who say this is laughable statistical analysis, it is not. They studied the weather, not long-term climate changes. And in fact it is well known that on days with a clear sky, it gets hotter during the day and colder during the night. I'm sure everyone of you already noticed that. The clouds prevent the sun from heating up the earth during the day, and during the night, they prevent the heat from radiating into space. The only thing that had not been researched so far was the effect of the (small) amount of clouds that are artificially created by jets every day. Surprisingly, it turns out that these clouds have the same effect that other clouds have.
Relating this to global warming is just speculation. Contrails are basically just clouds, and I don't think reducing variation in temperature between day and night will contribute to or reduce global warming. That just doesn't make sense, it's like saying rainy days contribute to global warming because there are so many clouds. Now I'm pretty sure that jets do contribute to global warming, but that's due to burning fuel, not due to creating contrails -- they could just as well burn the fuel on the ground, causing no contrails at all, and it would contribute to pollution of the air.
Companies that have lower costs, lower prices, and satisfy consumers more will get that entertainment dollar.
Ahh, but you're assuming the economies of a free market. When DRM technology is required by law, it will be illegal to operate a company with lower costs, lower prices and satisfied customers.
I can say from my own experience that the user experience of running a "verify" command is actually surprisingly good.
You probably know about the new installer technology for Windows (Microsoft Installer). One of the applications installed using msi is Microsoft Office 2000.
I'm using Office 2000 (no flames please) and once had a problem with Excel, it would crash whenever I tried to use a certain feature (don't remember which one). Well, all MS Office apps have a menu item "Detect and Repair" (or something similar, I have the German version, where it is called "Erkennen und Reparieren") in the help menu. So I tried that. It asked me to insert the Office CD, which I did, then it copied some files and then asked me to quit and restart Excel. Amazingly, it did solve the problem!
Of course I would have preferred to know what exactly was wrong and what files were replaced/reinstalled, but still, I must admit that I found the repair feature quite impressive. I guess that for users who don't even want to know the details of what's going on, the feature works perfectly.
as the user would much rather have been warned beforehand.
I'm not even certain about this. One thing about human interface design is that warning dialogs don't work. Windows does have such a warning message, whenever you remove.exe or (I think).dll files, it warns you that this might cause applications to stop working (which is rather silly -- deleting any file might cause them to break, this isn't limited to DLLs and executables). I always simply click "Yes" when that dialog appears, and I guess most users do that.
It would be very hard, if not impossible, to design that dialog in a way that makes sure that it is always read and understood by all users (including those users who do not know what dependencies are).
And since unless you actually prevent users from deleting required files (which wouldn't be accepted by the majority of users, nor would it be a good idea technically), there will always be at least one case where files got deleted accidentally, so you need the "verify" feature anyway. So why not make it the easy-to-use default for solving installation problems?
The rest of the world finds the fetish the US makes over its flag somewhat peculiar. The scenes of schoolchildren making loyalty oaths to the flag every day remind Europeans such as myself more of the types of society that Stalin and Hitler tried to impose than the values of liberal democracy.
I am European as well, and, just like you, I was somewhat surprised to see the students pledge alliance to the flag every day when I visited the US (during a student exchange program).
What I didn't understand and that time is that for us Europeans the word "patriot" has a different meaning than it has in the US -- in the US, a patriot is fighting for what his country stands for (i.e. liberty and justice for all), not fighting for his government no matter what the government is doing.
I found this quote from Thomas Jefferson very interesting:
"The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
In this quote, the tyrants are obviously those who seek to destroy the "tree of liberty." What you have to realize is that Jefferson was not talking about you fighting against patriots and tyrants, but patriots fighting against tyrants. Obviously, the patriots must be the good guys then, i.e. those who are defending their liberties.
Of course, the Jefferson quote is from 1787, and looking at the Bush administration's propanganda, I suppose the meaning might have changed since then.
The problem is, they're losing money on the backbone. According to several articles I've read, they're far from using its full capacity. That's why they ran out of money, after all. KPNQwest probably already did look for new investors, and obviously didn't find any. (Yes, it probably is cheaper to buy the network in a few weeks instead of investing now, but on the other hand in a few weeks the customers will already be operating via other providers, so the KPNQwest network will be even less profitable by then.)
Parts of the network may be valueable to companies that already have an infrastructure in Europe and are looking to expand certain parts of it, but I very much doubt that any company will buy the whole backbone.
Where did you get that quote from about them not planning to switch it off? Here's a quote from the press release:
The Company is working with its customers to facilitate the implementation of contingency plans, should the current situation result in instablility or a total shut-down of the KPNQwest EuroRings network.
Since this is from their own press release, of course they don't just write "we'll stop operating," but that's pretty much what the above quote says they're expecting to happen.
If you look for some more neutral information than their own press release, you might be interested in this heise online article (yes, it's an English article).
Nope. At no point does your source code touch their source code, if you link at runtime instead of compile time.
While this means you're not required to redistribute the game under the GPL, you're also not licensed to redistribute the FreeCraft engine with your game -- unless you redistribute the game under the GPL.
From section 2 of the GPL:
"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program."
I.e. you may redistribute your game under any license you want, but it must not include the FreeCraft engine unless the license you want is the GPL.
I have read an article written by a lawyer who claimed that for libraries it would be better to use the LGPL because it is questionable whether the above section would hold up in court while the LGPL's terms for the redistribution of works using the library were more clear. This was in reference to German copyright law, though. Also note that IANAL, this is not legal advice, and you ignore that section of the GPL at your own risk. Even better, don't ignore it, because even if it were legal, it is probably not what the authors want you to do.
Yes you should. By the way, I (disclaimer: I am European) don't think Alan not publishing information that might get him into legal trouble in the US was offensive. It probably was more about publicity than about actual legal issues, but offensive? Not really.
But Europeans often do have that attitude of pointing at the US and wanting to show them how they're not that free any more. Take a look at thefreeworld.net. Now that's offensive.
There is an online petition, privatkopie.net, that you might want to consider signing. Of course, since online petitions aren't the most effective tool, you'll also want to think about sending a personal letter to your representative.
Why don't they just legislate.kids or.notpron, and simply permit no conent unsuitable for children on sites with that domain.
It would fool people into believing that part of the internet were completely safe for kids, when really it is just another domain. I also guess that such a domain would attract sites with tons of online advertisements and lots of questionable businesses that try to place 1-900-dialers and spyware on the kids' computers.
A.adult domain also has the advantage of making sure that if you decide to block it, you can be quite certain not to accidentally block anything that your kids should have been able to see.
But PC's haven't changed much as well. Yes, there is more disk space, faste CPU's etc. but how they work and what we do with it hasn't changed much. That means there isn't much need for a better interface.
No, that's wrong. Networks and especially the internet have fundamentally changed the way we use our computer. It's not really a new technology, but it allows new ways of interacting. And many users don't understand the consequences of this, which is why spyware and email worms work so amazingly well despite the fact that if you understand how your computer works, it is really easy to not be affected.
I believe that this is an interface problem, computers do no longer communicate the consequences of an action the user is about to take in an appropriate way. (Actually they never had appropriate interfaces, but that wasn't a problem because until recently people didn't communicate with untrusted computers over untrusted networks all the time.)
One particular one I saw was "Harmony," which was a replacement for QT.
Well, it's listed as
"Reason:: Project is obsolete:: There are better alternatives"
There's nothing wrong with listing it as unmaintained, though. No one says that all of these projects should live one, but if you start excluding projects from the database because someone thinks they shouldn't live on, wouldn't that limit the usefulness of the database?
Note that finding new maintainers isn't the only possible use of the database, it could e.g. also be used when you're planning to start a new project to find out what mistakes similar projects made that caused them to fail. Of course, that requires appropriate documentation, but at the very least you can look at the projects to get some ideas for your own one. And maybe, though less likely, you can even find a codebase from which you can move on.
nan stands for NotANumber. According to IEEE floating point arithmetics, 1/0 is infinite, and 0/0 is undefined.
Well, I'm not familiar with the reasoning behind IEEE floating point arithmetics, but x/0 yields infinity in many programming languages. My guess is that it was defined this way because it makes more sense for most pratical applications, since otherwise a number x/y (with a small, variable y) might suddenly become undefined when y becomes so small that the computer's precision doesn't suffice and the computer thinks that y=0. In this case, x/y shouldn't be undefined, it should be "very large, beyond the computer's precision." This is better expressed by saying x/y=inf instead of x/y=nan.
Concerning mathematics, read slamb's reply to an AC who replied to my post, he explains why x/0 has to be undefined: depending on what sequence you use, it could be either positive or negative infinity.
Actually 4/0 is infinity, but 0*infinity is undefined
No, x/0 is undefined. However, you can do things like
lim y->0 of x/y = infinity (for x > 0)
because, when y approaches zero, x/y will obviously become larger. But that is not the same as
x/0 = infinity (this is wrong!)
0*infinity is undefined, however, continuing the example above, I could write:
lim y->0 of 0 * x/y = lim y->0 of 0/y = 0
i.e. in that example, "0*infinity" would be zero.
The problem with infinity is that you can't use it like a number, because it isn't one. Infinity literally means that there is an infinite number of things, e.g. the set of integers is infinite, meaning you can never list all integers because there is always a successor. You'll never "arrive at infinity" when listing integers. This means you can calculate with infinity only with equations that involve sequences and their limits. (Like the above-mentioned lim y->0 which means that y is a sequence of numbers approaching zero, and not y = 0. A suitable sequence might e.g. be y[n] = 1/n with n = 1, 2,.... Obviously, this sequence is approaching zero, but will never be equal to zero.)
Cloning is just another technology. What's hard to swallow for religious people is that it shouldn't be possible to do according to their beliefs and being proven wrong might have consequences for the validity of other things they belief (like having a soul, reincarnation, heaven, getting access to 70 virgins if you blow yourself up in a shopping centre,..).
Well, I am not religious and still believe that cloning is a bad idea.
Why? Well, not because it is "evil," but because I fear that it endangers basic democratic principles like human dignity. Think GATTACA, without the happy end. There are also biological consequences of cloning, like the reduction of biodiveristy.
My concern is mostly that everyone is excited about the possiblities of genetic technologies (as am I), but there is no real public discussion about the long-term social and biological consequences of the use of technologies, except the religious concerns that you've mentioned. In other words, one of my major fears is the fact that so many religious arguments are used in the public debates concerning genetic technology, and that valid scientific concerns are silenced alongside with the religious critics.
Technology by itself is not bad. However certain applications of it can certainly be evil.
Exactly. Yet whenever someone criticizes cloning, they are silenced as some religious freak who dimisses technology and wants to halt progress. I am not opposed to the technology that allows cloning, I am opposed to its application for cloning. I am certain that the same technology allows many legitimate medical uses, like the growing of human organs for implantation you've mentioned, and should be used for those.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, I would claim that Graham's approach to spam provides a much better protection of freedom of (especially political) speech than any other method. If until now you never received political spam, than his filtering method will probably rate the mail average, maybe even slightly positive. If you decide to delete-as-spam, the filter will "learn" to recognize political mails as something you don't want. If you decide to read the mail, it will "learn" to let future political mails get through as well.
You should own it.
Of course, if it is directly related to the project you're currently working on, then you'd better make use of your idea by implementing it for your current employer. But that's not because the idea is owned by the employer -- it's because if you don't make use of your idea, you won't be able to complete your project. And completing the project is your job.
If the company owns all ideas that you have while working for them, you can never safely start an independent business. People don't sit in their office and then, one day, decide that they have no ideas whatsoever but should quit their job, go home and try getting ideas. How it actually works is that while you're at work, you have an idea that is not directly related to your current task, or you're not satisfied with your payment or your company's management or something like that. And then you decide "I can do better than this," and start your own business.
It even used to be the case that you could not just start a new business with something related to your previous job. You could even do almost exactly the same thing. Think about people who invented a groupware solution, then decided that they could do better, and invented another groupware solution.
What if, while working for your company, you have a great idea, tell your employer about it and they believe the idea won't work? Don't tell me this doesn't happen, it happens all the time. So you decide to quit and start your own business. One or two years later, your business is a big success. Should it be possible for your previous employer to claim ownership over your business because you developed the idea for them?
I hope not. It would mean you take the risk, they take the profit -- without any investments. Capitalism, huh?
How exactly do I prove at what time I had an idea? This is bullshit. The company can always claim I had the idea while working for them, and I can always claim the contrary. Neither of us can prove their statement, so the default is that I lose any rights to my idea?
Only one I know about is Graphviz. There is a description of the algorithm somewhere on the site.
No, but your argument about how to define a "clear" day...
...makes sense. So I guess now I'll have to read the Nature article to find out :-)
Well, yes, but I suppose that they compared their data not with that of cloudy days but with data from other, clear days during similar times of the year. I think what they're saying is not that the clear skys were caused by a lack of air traffic, but that the temperature variation was even higher than it normally can be expected on days with a clear sky. Of course, you can never prove that this wasn't just a coincident, but on the other hand the data does show an effect that you would expect anyway, so it does make sense to conclude that there is a relation between air traffic and temperature variation.
Of course, I'm not a meteorology expert, so I habe no idea how much data you would usually collect before drawing conclusions -- but that fact that this study has been published by Nature imho shows that at least it can't be totally bogus.
There is no increase caused by jets.
Unfortunately, the article submitter obviously didn't understand at all what the article says -- first, it doesn't say earth's average temperature increases or decreases, it says the daily variation, i.e. the difference between night and day, changes. This is something that you can very well observe with just a few days of data.
Second, the researchers claim that the jets reduce the temperature range.
First, they're not actually talking about exhaust here, they're talking about contrails, i.e. condensed water (clouds).
Second, the contrails, don't contribute to a temperature variation, they prevent it: "the clear skies boosted the temperature swing between daytime highs and nighttime lows by about 3 degrees nationwide."
Third, to all those who say this is laughable statistical analysis, it is not. They studied the weather, not long-term climate changes. And in fact it is well known that on days with a clear sky, it gets hotter during the day and colder during the night. I'm sure everyone of you already noticed that. The clouds prevent the sun from heating up the earth during the day, and during the night, they prevent the heat from radiating into space. The only thing that had not been researched so far was the effect of the (small) amount of clouds that are artificially created by jets every day. Surprisingly, it turns out that these clouds have the same effect that other clouds have.
Relating this to global warming is just speculation. Contrails are basically just clouds, and I don't think reducing variation in temperature between day and night will contribute to or reduce global warming. That just doesn't make sense, it's like saying rainy days contribute to global warming because there are so many clouds. Now I'm pretty sure that jets do contribute to global warming, but that's due to burning fuel, not due to creating contrails -- they could just as well burn the fuel on the ground, causing no contrails at all, and it would contribute to pollution of the air.
Ahh, but you're assuming the economies of a free market. When DRM technology is required by law, it will be illegal to operate a company with lower costs, lower prices and satisfied customers.
Yes. But that doesn't make them a democratic institution that should be in charge of changing the laws.
I can say from my own experience that the user experience of running a "verify" command is actually surprisingly good.
You probably know about the new installer technology for Windows (Microsoft Installer). One of the applications installed using msi is Microsoft Office 2000.
I'm using Office 2000 (no flames please) and once had a problem with Excel, it would crash whenever I tried to use a certain feature (don't remember which one). Well, all MS Office apps have a menu item "Detect and Repair" (or something similar, I have the German version, where it is called "Erkennen und Reparieren") in the help menu. So I tried that. It asked me to insert the Office CD, which I did, then it copied some files and then asked me to quit and restart Excel. Amazingly, it did solve the problem!
Of course I would have preferred to know what exactly was wrong and what files were replaced/reinstalled, but still, I must admit that I found the repair feature quite impressive. I guess that for users who don't even want to know the details of what's going on, the feature works perfectly.
I'm not even certain about this. One thing about human interface design is that warning dialogs don't work. Windows does have such a warning message, whenever you remove .exe or (I think) .dll files, it warns you that this might cause applications to stop working (which is rather silly -- deleting any file might cause them to break, this isn't limited to DLLs and executables). I always simply click "Yes" when that dialog appears, and I guess most users do that.
It would be very hard, if not impossible, to design that dialog in a way that makes sure that it is always read and understood by all users (including those users who do not know what dependencies are).
And since unless you actually prevent users from deleting required files (which wouldn't be accepted by the majority of users, nor would it be a good idea technically), there will always be at least one case where files got deleted accidentally, so you need the "verify" feature anyway. So why not make it the easy-to-use default for solving installation problems?
Yes, but if the developer who ports Linux to the Xbox lives in the US, that won't really help him.
I am European as well, and, just like you, I was somewhat surprised to see the students pledge alliance to the flag every day when I visited the US (during a student exchange program).
What I didn't understand and that time is that for us Europeans the word "patriot" has a different meaning than it has in the US -- in the US, a patriot is fighting for what his country stands for (i.e. liberty and justice for all), not fighting for his government no matter what the government is doing.
I found this quote from Thomas Jefferson very interesting:
In this quote, the tyrants are obviously those who seek to destroy the "tree of liberty." What you have to realize is that Jefferson was not talking about you fighting against patriots and tyrants, but patriots fighting against tyrants. Obviously, the patriots must be the good guys then, i.e. those who are defending their liberties.
Of course, the Jefferson quote is from 1787, and looking at the Bush administration's propanganda, I suppose the meaning might have changed since then.
The problem is, they're losing money on the backbone. According to several articles I've read, they're far from using its full capacity. That's why they ran out of money, after all. KPNQwest probably already did look for new investors, and obviously didn't find any. (Yes, it probably is cheaper to buy the network in a few weeks instead of investing now, but on the other hand in a few weeks the customers will already be operating via other providers, so the KPNQwest network will be even less profitable by then.)
Parts of the network may be valueable to companies that already have an infrastructure in Europe and are looking to expand certain parts of it, but I very much doubt that any company will buy the whole backbone.
Where did you get that quote from about them not planning to switch it off? Here's a quote from the press release:
Since this is from their own press release, of course they don't just write "we'll stop operating," but that's pretty much what the above quote says they're expecting to happen.
If you look for some more neutral information than their own press release, you might be interested in this heise online article (yes, it's an English article).
While this means you're not required to redistribute the game under the GPL, you're also not licensed to redistribute the FreeCraft engine with your game -- unless you redistribute the game under the GPL.
From section 2 of the GPL:
"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program."
I.e. you may redistribute your game under any license you want, but it must not include the FreeCraft engine unless the license you want is the GPL.
I have read an article written by a lawyer who claimed that for libraries it would be better to use the LGPL because it is questionable whether the above section would hold up in court while the LGPL's terms for the redistribution of works using the library were more clear. This was in reference to German copyright law, though. Also note that IANAL, this is not legal advice, and you ignore that section of the GPL at your own risk. Even better, don't ignore it, because even if it were legal, it is probably not what the authors want you to do.
Yes you should. By the way, I (disclaimer: I am European) don't think Alan not publishing information that might get him into legal trouble in the US was offensive. It probably was more about publicity than about actual legal issues, but offensive? Not really.
But Europeans often do have that attitude of pointing at the US and wanting to show them how they're not that free any more. Take a look at thefreeworld.net. Now that's offensive.
Make sure we get to know that we aren't better.
There is an online petition, privatkopie.net, that you might want to consider signing. Of course, since online petitions aren't the most effective tool, you'll also want to think about sending a personal letter to your representative.
It would fool people into believing that part of the internet were completely safe for kids, when really it is just another domain. I also guess that such a domain would attract sites with tons of online advertisements and lots of questionable businesses that try to place 1-900-dialers and spyware on the kids' computers.
A .adult domain also has the advantage of making sure that if you decide to block it, you can be quite certain not to accidentally block anything that your kids should have been able to see.
No, that's wrong. Networks and especially the internet have fundamentally changed the way we use our computer. It's not really a new technology, but it allows new ways of interacting. And many users don't understand the consequences of this, which is why spyware and email worms work so amazingly well despite the fact that if you understand how your computer works, it is really easy to not be affected.
I believe that this is an interface problem, computers do no longer communicate the consequences of an action the user is about to take in an appropriate way. (Actually they never had appropriate interfaces, but that wasn't a problem because until recently people didn't communicate with untrusted computers over untrusted networks all the time.)
Well, it's listed as "Reason :: Project is obsolete :: There are better alternatives"
There's nothing wrong with listing it as unmaintained, though. No one says that all of these projects should live one, but if you start excluding projects from the database because someone thinks they shouldn't live on, wouldn't that limit the usefulness of the database?
Note that finding new maintainers isn't the only possible use of the database, it could e.g. also be used when you're planning to start a new project to find out what mistakes similar projects made that caused them to fail. Of course, that requires appropriate documentation, but at the very least you can look at the projects to get some ideas for your own one. And maybe, though less likely, you can even find a codebase from which you can move on.
Well, I'm not familiar with the reasoning behind IEEE floating point arithmetics, but x/0 yields infinity in many programming languages. My guess is that it was defined this way because it makes more sense for most pratical applications, since otherwise a number x/y (with a small, variable y) might suddenly become undefined when y becomes so small that the computer's precision doesn't suffice and the computer thinks that y=0. In this case, x/y shouldn't be undefined, it should be "very large, beyond the computer's precision." This is better expressed by saying x/y=inf instead of x/y=nan.
Concerning mathematics, read slamb's reply to an AC who replied to my post, he explains why x/0 has to be undefined: depending on what sequence you use, it could be either positive or negative infinity.
No, x/0 is undefined. However, you can do things like
because, when y approaches zero, x/y will obviously become larger. But that is not the same as0*infinity is undefined, however, continuing the example above, I could write:
i.e. in that example, "0*infinity" would be zero.
The problem with infinity is that you can't use it like a number, because it isn't one. Infinity literally means that there is an infinite number of things, e.g. the set of integers is infinite, meaning you can never list all integers because there is always a successor. You'll never "arrive at infinity" when listing integers. This means you can calculate with infinity only with equations that involve sequences and their limits. (Like the above-mentioned lim y->0 which means that y is a sequence of numbers approaching zero, and not y = 0. A suitable sequence might e.g. be y[n] = 1/n with n = 1, 2, .... Obviously, this sequence is approaching zero, but will never be equal to zero.)
To cite someone who built his own jet engine (iirc that was a Slashdot story some time ago as well): "If you have to ask, you will never understand."
I guess it's like building your own operating system or other such crazy ideas.
Well, I am not religious and still believe that cloning is a bad idea.
Why? Well, not because it is "evil," but because I fear that it endangers basic democratic principles like human dignity. Think GATTACA, without the happy end. There are also biological consequences of cloning, like the reduction of biodiveristy.
My concern is mostly that everyone is excited about the possiblities of genetic technologies (as am I), but there is no real public discussion about the long-term social and biological consequences of the use of technologies, except the religious concerns that you've mentioned. In other words, one of my major fears is the fact that so many religious arguments are used in the public debates concerning genetic technology, and that valid scientific concerns are silenced alongside with the religious critics.
Exactly. Yet whenever someone criticizes cloning, they are silenced as some religious freak who dimisses technology and wants to halt progress. I am not opposed to the technology that allows cloning, I am opposed to its application for cloning. I am certain that the same technology allows many legitimate medical uses, like the growing of human organs for implantation you've mentioned, and should be used for those.