You know, just maybe, the best person to ask about the pros and cons of a weapon is not the person sharing his last name with it.
I'll bet Eugene Stoner thought the M-16 was pretty hot shit, too.
(Actually it would have been* interesting to put the two of them in a room sometime with a lot of drafting paper and tell them they couldn't come out until they designed a gun that both of them liked. I wonder what we'd have gotten? Skeletons, probably.)**
* Stoner died in 1997. ** Ironically, the Wikipedia page on Stoner has a picture of him standing next to Kalashnikov, holding each others' weapons.
I definitely hadn't heard that about the MacBook's wifi card (not that I've really been following it or anything, since I'm not really in the market for one).
Does Apple's driver actually use the 802.11a functionality? Or is it just there in the hardware, but unimplemented by Apple? (So that you'd have to use Windows drivers or something in order for it to be useful.)
Also, what's the status on Linux drivers for whatever chipset they use in there? (Are they retaining the same chipset across all models?) Has anyone had success with ndiswrappers, or are you basically hosed for a WL card when booted into Linux?
Given the choice between funding the Russian Mafia or the RIAA, I'll take the mobsters any day of the week.
Seriously: in the long run, I think a production cartel like the RIAA probably does more long-term damage to an economy/market, if allowed to take control and operate a political system, than a criminal organization ever could. I know in the short term this might seem ridiculous, but you have to consider that we are basically, as a country, allowing the recording companies and the **AAs to write our intellectual property laws. These are laws that are going to be the underpinnings of our economy for the foreseeable future.
I'll take some good old-fashioned judge-buying and kneecap-breaking and down-by-the-waterfront executions any day of the week. At least then you know who you're dealing with.
Very enlightening. Particularly the third (this one).
I noticed that the stock xpdf that is installed by Ubuntu's repositories (Universe) is the regular one from foolabs.com, which "respects" the nocopy/noprint flags; however the discussion on the Debian mailinglists seems to indicate what appears to be a consensus for including a version with a flag option ("--ignoreperms" or similar); does anyone know if any of these patches have been integrated into the mainline Debian version? I couldn't find any information just by looking at the package's site; since Ubuntu is branched from debian-unstable I'm guessing that it's not been integrated.
IMO it should; integrating a "Are you sure you want to ignore settings?" patch seems totally in line with at least my understanding of the Debian philosophy.
A computer is like a pocket knife. It's a tool, which has many uses. It's not the responsibility of the maker of the tool to look over the user's shoulders. Powerful tools can by their nature be used for good and bad, in the same way that I can use a pocket knife to carve wood or stab someone. (Albeit perhaps ineffectually; maybe that analogy would have been better with an axe or nailgun.)
Going offtopic here for a moment: Some days I wish the people at the PLF would put out a distro. Call it "Useful Linux." Combine together all the tools that are prohibited or that you have to jump through obnoxious hoops in order to use in various parts of the world -- proprietary driver licenses, encryption, DVD playback, audio codecs, DRM removal/ignorance. The hell with the licenses, the hell with local laws, put it all in there, release it as a Live CD, hosted only from Free countries / on PirateBay-type BT trackers. I think it would just blow people away to use an OS that didn't have any artificial limitations on it out of the box, just for once; an OS created as it ought to be created in the absence of political meddling. Not so much as an actual distro -- I'm not suggesting that it be maintained -- more as just a statement, a one-off curiosity.
Um, get an Apple Cinema Display and a really long extension cord?
I'm being facetious, of course, but it's unfortunate there isn't some sort of wireless video standard that has the bandwidth necessary for CPU-to-monitor connections (maybe some spread-spectrum stuff in the future would be capable of it), because I think a cordless display with a very small amount of built-in memory would sell pretty well.
Keep it on your desk in a stand as a desktop monitor, and if you wanted to read in bed or something, pick it up and take it off; it would then update wirelessly (maybe at a reduced frame-rate?) and would have a slot for SD cards so you could take it out of range of the CPU and still read things.
That might not satisfy all of your requirements but I think it would get closer to a lot of people's needs than the "eBook readers" we have right now, which are basically glorified PDAs. People don't WANT a PDA, they want a high-res LCD monitor with a battery and memory.
The very, very great majority of college/grad students buy used books because they're cheaper. Sometimes 20-50% cheaper, if you get them directly from another student.
Most people always tried to get the closest to "mint" condition that they possibly could, too. If a book is marked up or heavily highlighted, it's secondary-market value plummets. Heck, a heavily-highlighted book isn't even worth crap on Half.com; it automatically becomes "Poor" quality, regardless of the quality of the binding, cover, etc.
I don't know anybody who went through the stack of used texts looking for one that was already marked up. Most of the time, all the good, clean ones went first, and then the people who came last got the crappy ones that were all dogeared and written-in.
I also know (and did this myself) a lot of people who wouldn't EVER write in or highlight in their textbooks because it destroyed the resale value. I had to constantly stop people from getting their pens near my expensive Physics texts, because I didn't want to mar them. Totally mint, you can recover almost all of the purchase price of an expensive book, assuming it's used the next semester. I always used to look at textbooks as a sort of rental or negative-investment. I'd buy them, use them for the semester and try to keep them in as good shape as I possibly could, and then the next semester I'd try to sell them and get back the highest possible percentage of my input. By the time I finished school, I was pretty good at it.
Nobody buys marked-up books at a premium, at least that I ever saw. If you want a cheat sheet, you just go and buy a cheat sheet, or photocopy somebody's notes who took the course last semester. That's not hard to do, and most of the time you can get someone to loan you their notes either for free or for a few bucks, plus a few dollars and half an hour of standing in front of the copier at Kinkos gets you your own little workbook. If the person you were getting the notes from was organized, you could probably get all of the returned homework assignments (problem sets) and exams, too.
Unless you're blind or care about accessibility, it's probably a lot easier -- provided the document is in any kind of printable form (and it's pretty hard for something not to be printable, since at the end of the day you can always do a screen capture) and just save it as a rasterized PDF. Yeah, it sucks for someone that uses a screenreader, Braille terminal, or other nontraditional output device, but it's just fine for 90%+ of people. If you can view it on the screen you can make a copy of it.
Sure, you won't be able to select and copy text, but it's good enough to read. And you preserve the formatting, equations, diagrams, etc.
On a side note, does anyone know of a PDF viewer program that ignores the "No Print / No Copy" restrictions? Some old versions of Apple Preview used to, but apparently the functionality has been implemented recently. It's a very silly scheme, since it depends on the viewer to correctly interpret the flags, so DMCA nonwithstanding I think it's not really a "crack" to break it. I assume that there are commandline Linux utilities that parse PDFs that either ignore it by design or could be fixed so that they do -- anybody have an example?
I also assume you could probably manually edit the file and reset the flag, although I haven't read the PDF spec in great enough detail to know how this is done.
(Note I'm not talking about encrypted PDFs here, just the silly "Un-printable" ones.)
It is unsecured in the fact that you can use it. It is also unsecured in the fact that someone could have stolen your online banking info or any other personal information you did on the internet.
What sort of bad crack are you smoking? Have you ever heard of SSL? Looked at the bottom corner of your web browser for that little "Lock/Unlock" security thingy?
The only way you'd be giving up any security by using a public WiFi access point to do online banking or shopping is if you were sending your information over the network unsecured, and in that case you pretty much deserve to see charges for massage parlors in Fiji on your next American Express bill.*
If you're not using encryption, it's insecure by default, I don't care whose network you're sending it over. The Internet is insecure by design -- deal with it.
*(This is assuming you haven't frequented any Fijian massage parlors lately.)
I'm pretty sure this is how Linksys ones are set up by default. I know that you cannot administer them remotely (from the WAN side) by default, it seems like they ought to set them up so that you can't administer them wirelessly without first changing from defaults (or at least checking a box somewhere, like the WAN option) also.
I'd check, but my WRT54GL doesn't have the default firmware on it anymore. (And obviously it's not using the default password.)
Re:That's an okay idea, but...
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Abandoned Games
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That's kind of the point of having an open-source toolchain as well as open source userland software.
Even if C were to fall into disuse, I think it's fair to assume that someone would write a C compiler in the popular language of the day, and then you could then compile that (the compiler) on your modern machine, and use it to compile your old C code. Right now I think most of the C compilers are either written in C themselves or (really old ones) in assembly, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case.
It would definitely be a non-trivial process, especially if you had to go through multiple iterations of the above process in order to get a working C compiler, but it could be done.
Or depending on how far in the future it is, you could probably just grow some sort of clone of a C programmer (RMS?) and make him port it for you, before dissolving him back into primordial soup.
I think there are valid legal reasons for making the maximum copyright term equal to the life of the author plus (either) eighteen or twenty-one years. In Common Law, it used to be a fairly strict rule that you couldn't create a legal instrument relating to real property (so a deed, covenant, trust, etc.) with a term of more than the life of someone alive at the time of creation plus 21 years. The idea being that this way you couldn't have basically 'landed gentry,' who had perpetual and un-dissolvable property holdings. The "life plus 21 years" was picked I believe because 21 is the age of majority (well it was, until they changed it to 18), thus it's basically guarantees that the trustee's heirs will be legal adults. So it's possible to create a trust that will last through your lifetime, and see your children through to adulthood, but you can't lock stuff up for eternity.
It seems that some states have actually softened these laws, which is frankly unfortunate (and suspicious; I wonder who paid for that), but I think it's a good model for Intellectual Property in the same way that its reasoning was valid for real property.
In fact, I think it's more valid for IP than RP: I could think of some valid reasons for wanting to protect real property in a trust for multiple generations, but few valid ones for IP that don't hugely impact the public's interest. It would allow a creator of some valuable piece of IP to use it for personal gain throughout their lifetime, and also to know that their children would be supported by it at least until they became adults -- which is a valid motivation, and taking this away would I think lessen the incentive to create -- but it wouldn't lock it up for the centuries-plus terms that we have now.
Also, I think we should give a substantial consideration to harmonizing the laws between corporate-owned and privately created works; anything created "by a corporation" has to be created by an individual -- legal 'entities' do not sit down in front of Microsoft Word and type things. Anything created by IBM, for instance, had its origins in the brain of a human being or group of human beings, and the maximum copyright term ought to be the same as it would be had it been created privately by that person. (The copyright would still be owned by the corporation, the term would just be affected.) Alternately, perhaps a fixed term of 50 years could be chosen if the company preferred, to make accounting easier.
At any rate, I think we've clearly gone overboard in the present system, there is no justifiable reasons for creating IP portfolios that support generations of leech-like descendants, in the same way that aristocratic families used to live off of perpetuity bonds underwritten by the Crown. There's a reason why we don't allow the latter anymore, we shouldn't allow the former either.
U.S. Patent 123,456,789: "Method for incorporating a teenage girl in a shower in a horror movie." U.S. Patent 123,456,788: "Method for killing off annoying characters first." U.S. Patent 123,456,787: "Method for splitting up and covering more ground this way (and sending that fat kid into the basement by himself)."
It's worse than that, friend... there are perverts out there who are getting off, even before these children are conceived! In some particularly deviant cases, even many hours or days before!
Very true. I've wondered this before, but I'd really like to see some sort of study as to where the majority of music on people's iPods came from. I know on mine, the majority is from CDs that I've ripped on my computer, followed probably by "unofficial sources," then online stores, then the iTMS.
I don't know anyone who could even say with a straight face that a large percentage of music they have on their iPod came from the iTMS; it's just too expensive.
The kind of CAD they're talking about in the *NIX workstation products is like an order of magnitude or more in complexity up from what most people do with AutoCAD. In short, some of those programs (the old "workstation" standbys) make AutoCAD look like something you'd use at Home Depot to lay out your new kitchen, while they themselves could be used to design an oil rig on the North Sea. They're not even close.
The gap may have narrowed from what it once was, but there are still things (particularly in some niche fields where Cost Is Not An Object, like petrochemicals) where *NIX workstations smoke the hell out of almost anything Windows based. And this is why you still see Sun and IBM selling what to the average person seem to be outrageously priced PCs, except that they're RISC and run Linux, or sometimes AIX or Solaris. (A while back I found what I thought was the most expensive PC I'd ever seen, it was a dual-proc Opteron from IBM -- not even a RISC box! -- that was close to nine grand. I think it was the "Intellistation A Pro" you can Google it.)
This is not true from what I've read; Google.com (the US version) was functional in China about 80% of the time until Google opened its Chinese version, at which point a user in China, when typing Google.com, was automatically redirected to Google.cn.
This is similar to the behavior in other countries, where typing Google.com automatically redirects to the local-language version of the site.
I mentioned this in another site, and it was confirmed in a Google Blog posting at one point that the American, uncensored version of Google was available from within (PRC) China nearly 75-80 percent of the time, however apparently they felt this was unacceptable (in my opinion, it had to do with advertising revenues) and replaced it with the Chinese-targeted version.
Look, being solicited for sex is just part of being on the internet.
Hell, I've been solicited for sex, and I'm not a child, and haven't been in quite a while (by any US legal definition), and I haven't done anything or gone anywhere that ought to cause anyone to think I'm interested.
Being "solicited" isn't necessarily indicative of any criminal activity, since the person doing the soliciting doesn't necessarily have any idea that the person at the other end of the line is a minor; for your statistics to even have the least bit of meaning, they'd have to be restricted to people who knew (somehow) that the person at the other end of the connection was a minor, and STILL solicited them for sex of some sort. And I would argue that unless that sex was physical, no real crime was committed; any harm that you can do against another person over an internet connection which they are willfully participating in, is by its vary nature specious.
I've also always been rather suspicious of these "sting" operations, but since law enforcement and the courts have apparently accepted them as valid, I guess it's far too late to argue the point.
The point is that whatever legal and technological barriers you try to invent, the child pornographers will get around them. It's like trying to stop the flow of drugs. Short of some very orwellian schemes, it's not possible to stop. There is a big demand for it, in turn there is a large fiscal incentive to import it, and as a result, fairly intelligent people will go to work on ways to circumvent whatever barriers we create.
Have you ever looked on Freenet lately? There is definitely (what appears to be -- I've never visited, but based on descriptions on the indices) underage porn on there, and that's a network that's designed by some very intelligent people to be anonymous. Sure, it wasn't designed for porn, but the porn people aren't stupid. They take advantage of those things when it exists. If HTTP gets too dangerous, they move to Freenet; if Freenet gets too dangerous, they'll move to total trust-based Darknets. At the end of the day, even if you shut down all the open WWW underage-porn websites, in all the countries of the world (managing somehow to harmonize laws concerning the age of consent) you'd really just drive that particular subculture back to the pre-internet days, when I can only assume people traded stuff on physical media via darknets, or private BBSes.
And of course, you have the ever-present threat that, with decreased availability of prerecorded porn on the Internet, that pedophiles will decide to make their own; featuring your neighborhood kids at gunpoint as the co-stars. I've never once seen this aspect of the problem seriously considered. What if we're actually stopping would-be child molesters through the availability of Internet porn? So what happens to these people if that supply is shut off?
The whole "child porn argument" is poorly thought out. It's a knee-jerk line brought out by politicians when they don't have any other way of garnering support for an unpopular and invasive policy, which is so polarizing that it automatically casts a shadow on anyone who opposes it.
As a society, we should invent something like "Godwin's Law" for child pornography. It's something so near-universally offensive, that when you drag it out as an argument for a particular widespread action, it's almost certain that you're using it as a weak justification for an otherwise unacceptable course of action. If you have to bring child porn in as reasons for doing something, it's a good sign your policies aren't well planned. If they were, they'd probably have any number of totally valid, separate reasons for doing them, and wouldn't need the spectre of child porn to back them up.
This was the post he was responding to, it's been (rightly) beaten down to -1. I was confused at first also.
Just stop recomending OpenGL to everyone, OpelGL is dead in the game development world. DirectX is mutch better, it has everything you need. Math/Grafic/sound/input/networking, justing opengl is dumb. There is no other market other then the windows one when you are creating games.
No i say go whit MDX (Managed Direct X). Just watch tutorial number 4 where he creates a engine from sratch that have mesh,sprite support.
I don't think it's "forced," per se, but probably part of a co-branding agreement. I've heard that the whole "Intel Inside" thing gets PC manufacturers some sort of discount on their chips, and has specific requirements -- not just the stickers, but Intel's logo on the box, in promotional material, and probably in TV ads as well.
I remember this because there was some discussion a while back about whether Apple would buy into the Intel Inside campaign in order to get the discounts on chips for it's Mactel lineup. Obviously, they chose not to participate (thank god; the thought of having one of those stickers on the front of a pristine white Mac is pretty bad), and don't get whatever sweetheart deal Dell and Co. get in return for participating.
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I think he might be slightly biased.
You know, just maybe, the best person to ask about the pros and cons of a weapon is not the person sharing his last name with it.
I'll bet Eugene Stoner thought the M-16 was pretty hot shit, too.
(Actually it would have been* interesting to put the two of them in a room sometime with a lot of drafting paper and tell them they couldn't come out until they designed a gun that both of them liked. I wonder what we'd have gotten? Skeletons, probably.)**
* Stoner died in 1997.
** Ironically, the Wikipedia page on Stoner has a picture of him standing next to Kalashnikov, holding each others' weapons.
I definitely hadn't heard that about the MacBook's wifi card (not that I've really been following it or anything, since I'm not really in the market for one).
Does Apple's driver actually use the 802.11a functionality? Or is it just there in the hardware, but unimplemented by Apple? (So that you'd have to use Windows drivers or something in order for it to be useful.)
Also, what's the status on Linux drivers for whatever chipset they use in there? (Are they retaining the same chipset across all models?) Has anyone had success with ndiswrappers, or are you basically hosed for a WL card when booted into Linux?
Given the choice between funding the Russian Mafia or the RIAA, I'll take the mobsters any day of the week.
Seriously: in the long run, I think a production cartel like the RIAA probably does more long-term damage to an economy/market, if allowed to take control and operate a political system, than a criminal organization ever could. I know in the short term this might seem ridiculous, but you have to consider that we are basically, as a country, allowing the recording companies and the **AAs to write our intellectual property laws. These are laws that are going to be the underpinnings of our economy for the foreseeable future.
I'll take some good old-fashioned judge-buying and kneecap-breaking and down-by-the-waterfront executions any day of the week. At least then you know who you're dealing with.
Very enlightening. Particularly the third (this one).
I noticed that the stock xpdf that is installed by Ubuntu's repositories (Universe) is the regular one from foolabs.com, which "respects" the nocopy/noprint flags; however the discussion on the Debian mailinglists seems to indicate what appears to be a consensus for including a version with a flag option ("--ignoreperms" or similar); does anyone know if any of these patches have been integrated into the mainline Debian version? I couldn't find any information just by looking at the package's site; since Ubuntu is branched from debian-unstable I'm guessing that it's not been integrated.
IMO it should; integrating a "Are you sure you want to ignore settings?" patch seems totally in line with at least my understanding of the Debian philosophy.
A computer is like a pocket knife. It's a tool, which has many uses. It's not the responsibility of the maker of the tool to look over the user's shoulders. Powerful tools can by their nature be used for good and bad, in the same way that I can use a pocket knife to carve wood or stab someone. (Albeit perhaps ineffectually; maybe that analogy would have been better with an axe or nailgun.)
Going offtopic here for a moment: Some days I wish the people at the PLF would put out a distro. Call it "Useful Linux." Combine together all the tools that are prohibited or that you have to jump through obnoxious hoops in order to use in various parts of the world -- proprietary driver licenses, encryption, DVD playback, audio codecs, DRM removal/ignorance. The hell with the licenses, the hell with local laws, put it all in there, release it as a Live CD, hosted only from Free countries / on PirateBay-type BT trackers. I think it would just blow people away to use an OS that didn't have any artificial limitations on it out of the box, just for once; an OS created as it ought to be created in the absence of political meddling. Not so much as an actual distro -- I'm not suggesting that it be maintained -- more as just a statement, a one-off curiosity.
Um, get an Apple Cinema Display and a really long extension cord?
I'm being facetious, of course, but it's unfortunate there isn't some sort of wireless video standard that has the bandwidth necessary for CPU-to-monitor connections (maybe some spread-spectrum stuff in the future would be capable of it), because I think a cordless display with a very small amount of built-in memory would sell pretty well.
Keep it on your desk in a stand as a desktop monitor, and if you wanted to read in bed or something, pick it up and take it off; it would then update wirelessly (maybe at a reduced frame-rate?) and would have a slot for SD cards so you could take it out of range of the CPU and still read things.
That might not satisfy all of your requirements but I think it would get closer to a lot of people's needs than the "eBook readers" we have right now, which are basically glorified PDAs. People don't WANT a PDA, they want a high-res LCD monitor with a battery and memory.
What?
Maybe a few people do that, but not most people.
The very, very great majority of college/grad students buy used books because they're cheaper. Sometimes 20-50% cheaper, if you get them directly from another student.
Most people always tried to get the closest to "mint" condition that they possibly could, too. If a book is marked up or heavily highlighted, it's secondary-market value plummets. Heck, a heavily-highlighted book isn't even worth crap on Half.com; it automatically becomes "Poor" quality, regardless of the quality of the binding, cover, etc.
I don't know anybody who went through the stack of used texts looking for one that was already marked up. Most of the time, all the good, clean ones went first, and then the people who came last got the crappy ones that were all dogeared and written-in.
I also know (and did this myself) a lot of people who wouldn't EVER write in or highlight in their textbooks because it destroyed the resale value. I had to constantly stop people from getting their pens near my expensive Physics texts, because I didn't want to mar them. Totally mint, you can recover almost all of the purchase price of an expensive book, assuming it's used the next semester. I always used to look at textbooks as a sort of rental or negative-investment. I'd buy them, use them for the semester and try to keep them in as good shape as I possibly could, and then the next semester I'd try to sell them and get back the highest possible percentage of my input. By the time I finished school, I was pretty good at it.
Nobody buys marked-up books at a premium, at least that I ever saw. If you want a cheat sheet, you just go and buy a cheat sheet, or photocopy somebody's notes who took the course last semester. That's not hard to do, and most of the time you can get someone to loan you their notes either for free or for a few bucks, plus a few dollars and half an hour of standing in front of the copier at Kinkos gets you your own little workbook. If the person you were getting the notes from was organized, you could probably get all of the returned homework assignments (problem sets) and exams, too.
Please help entering the code [xccr.com]: 2,2,7,6,6,4
By the way, what's the deal with xccr.com?
What does entering that code do, exactly? I must be missing something.
Why even bother running it through OCR?
Unless you're blind or care about accessibility, it's probably a lot easier -- provided the document is in any kind of printable form (and it's pretty hard for something not to be printable, since at the end of the day you can always do a screen capture) and just save it as a rasterized PDF. Yeah, it sucks for someone that uses a screenreader, Braille terminal, or other nontraditional output device, but it's just fine for 90%+ of people. If you can view it on the screen you can make a copy of it.
Sure, you won't be able to select and copy text, but it's good enough to read. And you preserve the formatting, equations, diagrams, etc.
On a side note, does anyone know of a PDF viewer program that ignores the "No Print / No Copy" restrictions? Some old versions of Apple Preview used to, but apparently the functionality has been implemented recently. It's a very silly scheme, since it depends on the viewer to correctly interpret the flags, so DMCA nonwithstanding I think it's not really a "crack" to break it. I assume that there are commandline Linux utilities that parse PDFs that either ignore it by design or could be fixed so that they do -- anybody have an example?
I also assume you could probably manually edit the file and reset the flag, although I haven't read the PDF spec in great enough detail to know how this is done.
(Note I'm not talking about encrypted PDFs here, just the silly "Un-printable" ones.)
It is unsecured in the fact that you can use it. It is also unsecured in the fact that someone could have stolen your online banking info or any other personal information you did on the internet.
What sort of bad crack are you smoking? Have you ever heard of SSL? Looked at the bottom corner of your web browser for that little "Lock/Unlock" security thingy?
The only way you'd be giving up any security by using a public WiFi access point to do online banking or shopping is if you were sending your information over the network unsecured, and in that case you pretty much deserve to see charges for massage parlors in Fiji on your next American Express bill.*
If you're not using encryption, it's insecure by default, I don't care whose network you're sending it over. The Internet is insecure by design -- deal with it.
*(This is assuming you haven't frequented any Fijian massage parlors lately.)
I'm pretty sure this is how Linksys ones are set up by default. I know that you cannot administer them remotely (from the WAN side) by default, it seems like they ought to set them up so that you can't administer them wirelessly without first changing from defaults (or at least checking a box somewhere, like the WAN option) also.
I'd check, but my WRT54GL doesn't have the default firmware on it anymore. (And obviously it's not using the default password.)
That's kind of the point of having an open-source toolchain as well as open source userland software.
Even if C were to fall into disuse, I think it's fair to assume that someone would write a C compiler in the popular language of the day, and then you could then compile that (the compiler) on your modern machine, and use it to compile your old C code. Right now I think most of the C compilers are either written in C themselves or (really old ones) in assembly, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case.
It would definitely be a non-trivial process, especially if you had to go through multiple iterations of the above process in order to get a working C compiler, but it could be done.
Or depending on how far in the future it is, you could probably just grow some sort of clone of a C programmer (RMS?) and make him port it for you, before dissolving him back into primordial soup.
That's "Hoary" Hedgehog ... although he'd probably be happier if he was Hooray Hedgehog. But no, he's just Hoary.
I think there are valid legal reasons for making the maximum copyright term equal to the life of the author plus (either) eighteen or twenty-one years. In Common Law, it used to be a fairly strict rule that you couldn't create a legal instrument relating to real property (so a deed, covenant, trust, etc.) with a term of more than the life of someone alive at the time of creation plus 21 years. The idea being that this way you couldn't have basically 'landed gentry,' who had perpetual and un-dissolvable property holdings. The "life plus 21 years" was picked I believe because 21 is the age of majority (well it was, until they changed it to 18), thus it's basically guarantees that the trustee's heirs will be legal adults. So it's possible to create a trust that will last through your lifetime, and see your children through to adulthood, but you can't lock stuff up for eternity.
It seems that some states have actually softened these laws, which is frankly unfortunate (and suspicious; I wonder who paid for that), but I think it's a good model for Intellectual Property in the same way that its reasoning was valid for real property.
In fact, I think it's more valid for IP than RP: I could think of some valid reasons for wanting to protect real property in a trust for multiple generations, but few valid ones for IP that don't hugely impact the public's interest. It would allow a creator of some valuable piece of IP to use it for personal gain throughout their lifetime, and also to know that their children would be supported by it at least until they became adults -- which is a valid motivation, and taking this away would I think lessen the incentive to create -- but it wouldn't lock it up for the centuries-plus terms that we have now.
Also, I think we should give a substantial consideration to harmonizing the laws between corporate-owned and privately created works; anything created "by a corporation" has to be created by an individual -- legal 'entities' do not sit down in front of Microsoft Word and type things. Anything created by IBM, for instance, had its origins in the brain of a human being or group of human beings, and the maximum copyright term ought to be the same as it would be had it been created privately by that person. (The copyright would still be owned by the corporation, the term would just be affected.) Alternately, perhaps a fixed term of 50 years could be chosen if the company preferred, to make accounting easier.
At any rate, I think we've clearly gone overboard in the present system, there is no justifiable reasons for creating IP portfolios that support generations of leech-like descendants, in the same way that aristocratic families used to live off of perpetuity bonds underwritten by the Crown. There's a reason why we don't allow the latter anymore, we shouldn't allow the former either.
U.S. Patent 123,456,789: "Method for incorporating a teenage girl in a shower in a horror movie."
U.S. Patent 123,456,788: "Method for killing off annoying characters first."
U.S. Patent 123,456,787: "Method for splitting up and covering more ground this way (and sending that fat kid into the basement by himself)."
I can feel the money rolling in already.
It's worse than that, friend ... there are perverts out there who are getting off, even before these children are conceived! In some particularly deviant cases, even many hours or days before!
It's sick, I tell you; just sick.
Very true. I've wondered this before, but I'd really like to see some sort of study as to where the majority of music on people's iPods came from. I know on mine, the majority is from CDs that I've ripped on my computer, followed probably by "unofficial sources," then online stores, then the iTMS.
I don't know anyone who could even say with a straight face that a large percentage of music they have on their iPod came from the iTMS; it's just too expensive.
The kind of CAD they're talking about in the *NIX workstation products is like an order of magnitude or more in complexity up from what most people do with AutoCAD. In short, some of those programs (the old "workstation" standbys) make AutoCAD look like something you'd use at Home Depot to lay out your new kitchen, while they themselves could be used to design an oil rig on the North Sea. They're not even close.
The gap may have narrowed from what it once was, but there are still things (particularly in some niche fields where Cost Is Not An Object, like petrochemicals) where *NIX workstations smoke the hell out of almost anything Windows based. And this is why you still see Sun and IBM selling what to the average person seem to be outrageously priced PCs, except that they're RISC and run Linux, or sometimes AIX or Solaris. (A while back I found what I thought was the most expensive PC I'd ever seen, it was a dual-proc Opteron from IBM -- not even a RISC box! -- that was close to nine grand. I think it was the "Intellistation A Pro" you can Google it.)
This is not true from what I've read; Google.com (the US version) was functional in China about 80% of the time until Google opened its Chinese version, at which point a user in China, when typing Google.com, was automatically redirected to Google.cn.
This is similar to the behavior in other countries, where typing Google.com automatically redirects to the local-language version of the site.
I mentioned this in another site, and it was confirmed in a Google Blog posting at one point that the American, uncensored version of Google was available from within (PRC) China nearly 75-80 percent of the time, however apparently they felt this was unacceptable (in my opinion, it had to do with advertising revenues) and replaced it with the Chinese-targeted version.
Look, being solicited for sex is just part of being on the internet.
Hell, I've been solicited for sex, and I'm not a child, and haven't been in quite a while (by any US legal definition), and I haven't done anything or gone anywhere that ought to cause anyone to think I'm interested.
Being "solicited" isn't necessarily indicative of any criminal activity, since the person doing the soliciting doesn't necessarily have any idea that the person at the other end of the line is a minor; for your statistics to even have the least bit of meaning, they'd have to be restricted to people who knew (somehow) that the person at the other end of the connection was a minor, and STILL solicited them for sex of some sort. And I would argue that unless that sex was physical, no real crime was committed; any harm that you can do against another person over an internet connection which they are willfully participating in, is by its vary nature specious.
I've also always been rather suspicious of these "sting" operations, but since law enforcement and the courts have apparently accepted them as valid, I guess it's far too late to argue the point.
The point is that whatever legal and technological barriers you try to invent, the child pornographers will get around them. It's like trying to stop the flow of drugs. Short of some very orwellian schemes, it's not possible to stop. There is a big demand for it, in turn there is a large fiscal incentive to import it, and as a result, fairly intelligent people will go to work on ways to circumvent whatever barriers we create.
Have you ever looked on Freenet lately? There is definitely (what appears to be -- I've never visited, but based on descriptions on the indices) underage porn on there, and that's a network that's designed by some very intelligent people to be anonymous. Sure, it wasn't designed for porn, but the porn people aren't stupid. They take advantage of those things when it exists. If HTTP gets too dangerous, they move to Freenet; if Freenet gets too dangerous, they'll move to total trust-based Darknets. At the end of the day, even if you shut down all the open WWW underage-porn websites, in all the countries of the world (managing somehow to harmonize laws concerning the age of consent) you'd really just drive that particular subculture back to the pre-internet days, when I can only assume people traded stuff on physical media via darknets, or private BBSes.
And of course, you have the ever-present threat that, with decreased availability of prerecorded porn on the Internet, that pedophiles will decide to make their own; featuring your neighborhood kids at gunpoint as the co-stars. I've never once seen this aspect of the problem seriously considered. What if we're actually stopping would-be child molesters through the availability of Internet porn? So what happens to these people if that supply is shut off?
The whole "child porn argument" is poorly thought out. It's a knee-jerk line brought out by politicians when they don't have any other way of garnering support for an unpopular and invasive policy, which is so polarizing that it automatically casts a shadow on anyone who opposes it.
As a society, we should invent something like "Godwin's Law" for child pornography. It's something so near-universally offensive, that when you drag it out as an argument for a particular widespread action, it's almost certain that you're using it as a weak justification for an otherwise unacceptable course of action. If you have to bring child porn in as reasons for doing something, it's a good sign your policies aren't well planned. If they were, they'd probably have any number of totally valid, separate reasons for doing them, and wouldn't need the spectre of child porn to back them up.
Bah. Computers are for wimps -- what, you aren't manufacturing your own transistors? What sort of a girly-man are you?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you don't use csh then, do you?
I think the parent post to yours was right on, as a response to this drivel (which comes across to me as nothing but MS-centric shilling).
I'm pretty sure that sort of thing can be outsourced these days.
I just wish I was the sort of consultant that got to kill people.
I don't think it's "forced," per se, but probably part of a co-branding agreement. I've heard that the whole "Intel Inside" thing gets PC manufacturers some sort of discount on their chips, and has specific requirements -- not just the stickers, but Intel's logo on the box, in promotional material, and probably in TV ads as well.
I remember this because there was some discussion a while back about whether Apple would buy into the Intel Inside campaign in order to get the discounts on chips for it's Mactel lineup. Obviously, they chose not to participate (thank god; the thought of having one of those stickers on the front of a pristine white Mac is pretty bad), and don't get whatever sweetheart deal Dell and Co. get in return for participating.