you can argue that a game boy is not a necessity while in flight, but a laptop and/or PDA sure as hell is if you're a businessman.
While the adult businessman should be able to put away his toys for a couple hours, I feel really sorry for the mother who has to deal with three kids who can't use their game boys for the trip.
About 30 *times* the number of platforms for which a JVM exists.
And? There's only a handful of server enviroments out there. Whether or not your code runs on Coherent has been a moot point for almost a decade, and whether or not it runs on IRIX and HP-UX is quickly approaching that point. There's JVM's for Linux, Windows, MacOS and every Unix that still matters.
Yes, servers tend to have fairly impressive hardware resources available to them. So lets cripple that hardware by making it run an interpreted language.
That's no different from using Perl. The question is, is it worth the time to rewrite in C or some other low-level language? I think the people who run the big sites on the net have usually decided that it's not.
Likewise for freedom of religion; many Western nations still have state churches and state indoctrination into those churches in schools, and some still consider blasphemy a crime.
You seem to be describing the American South.
I follow the ACLU website, and while the American South is definetly suboptimal on this, it's also clearly illegal and not widespread; unlike Germany, where every German student has to take a class in either Catholism or Lutherinism.
We're one of the few nations in the world where you can still wave a Nazi or Communist flag.
Just don't wave the French flag.
No one's going to stop you from waving the French flag, either. Disapprove, but not stop.
unless your name happens to be God, I doubt you have the qualifications to disprove its existence.
Huh? It's not a matter of proof. It's a matter of reasonable evidence. I certainly can weight the evidence and come to a conclusion.
this is a mystery worthy of further scientific investigation.
There's an attitude that's people writing free software hate - people who think they have the right to dictate to you what you should code. It's the same with science; if you think it should be investigated, then go investigate.
To disprove bigfoot's existence requires the simultaneous examination of every square foot of millions of acres of dense forest,
It takes the same thing to disprove that Klingons live in that forest. However, the last wild Indians came out of the hills, and you expect me to believe a breeding population of creatures which eat maybe four times as much, live up there, completely hidden? They never cross a highway and get hit by cars, never rob the henhouse of farmer with a gun?
Otherwise save your absolute judgements for things you can know absolutely.
Basic epistemology - we know nothing absolutely, except for there is an I in a Now. Everything else, we weight the facts, usually come to a conclusion, and go on with our life. Perhaps the conclusion is wrong, but it rarely matters, and it's easier then trying to deal with a series of needless what-ifs.
Keep in mind that the US named themselves "the land of the free" back when slavery and apartheid were in full force, and that they have consistently lagged almost every other Westernized country in granting equal rights.
An easy thing to say. In reality:
The book of lists lists 35 countries and when they gave the vote to women. New Zealand was first in 1893. Eleven countries - including Canada, Poland, Germany, Great Britain and the US - gave women the right to vote between 1918 and 1920. But Spain waited until 1931, France 1944, Italy 1945 and Switzerland 1971.
We were one of the first nations to have freedom of speech, and all things considered we've held fairly close to it. We're one of the few nations in the world where you can still wave a Nazi or Communist flag. Likewise for freedom of religion; many Western nations still have state churches and state indoctrination into those churches in schools, and some still consider blasphemy a crime.
The right to vote didn't come to many of those western nations until after WWI. One man, one vote didn't completely come to England until 1944 (when universities stopped getting votes), the Queen (an unelected official) still has veto power (at least in theory), and in practice used it until the late 1800's.
Speaking of apartheid, Jews and Gypies never got treated very well in most of Europe, to the point of extermination 60 years ago. The black man, had he been in Europe in significant numbers, would likely have been on the same trains.
I know, it's easy to pick on America, and like many nations, we've screwed up a lot. But don't undercut our accomplishments, either.
My point is, it's virtually impossible to prove non-existence -- trivial to prove existence.
Sure, but it's a 7-foot tall primate is a lot easier to notice then a chipmunk, but so far no one has managed to call a reporter out to see and photograph the bigfeet.
If the problem were text comparison, I'd call for someone from the English department who makes critical editions, as it's the most similar to the human processes working on text, not independent words or natural forces working anything.
But I don't think that's the problem. What they need is a computer science historian (aka a long-bearded Unix geek), and copies of every Unix source released. Given that, it shouldn't be hard to find all the copies of that malloc function, or the fact that the Berkeley Packet Filter was also showing up in BSD releases and originally came from Berkeley. But they don't seem to be bothering to do that kind of deep research.
But it turns out it can be quite tricky to construct a graph layout that'll be easy for a human to understand.
The problem is, if you have a fairly arbitrary graph, it's not merely tricky, it's computationally hard--I belive there's exponential or factoral big O's involved. I've played around with giving graphs to VCG and Graphviz. VCG returns a sucky graph instantly, but Graphviz returns a good graph - if there's only a dozen nodes and connections. Get much above that, and it doesn't return in the minutes I've been willing to wait. If you want real-time, you can't do serious graph optimization.
it seems obvious that the next step is going to be a fully 3d-enabled desktop, with 3d icons placed in the current 2d-metaphor?
I'm sure it seemed obvious in the 1950's and 60's that the next step was going to be full 3d-movies. One problem is, humans don't see 3d; they see at best pseudo-3d, so we aren't uncomfortable working in 2d like we would be in 1d. Also, look at your book shelves and file cabinents. They aren't usually 3d organizational systems; in many ways they are 1d organizational systems folded to be fit more compactly in a 3d world.
Let's kill all these plugins, and have support for open standards within the browser. If SVG, DOM, and CSS2 were implemented fully and perfectly, we wouldn't need proprietary formats like Flash at all, and accessibility would be improved.
Have you ever heard of DjVu? It's a graphics format for scanned documents, that does amazing levels of compression - 10 Megapixel B&W scans in 30k, for example. It's not something that everyone needs, or that has been around long enough for it to be hardcoded into everyone's browser. But there's no way you can replicate it using "proper standards". So those of us who want to use it, can, without worrying about it being a "proper standard" or built-in to every browser on Earth.
So the force of this decision ends at the border of Washington State.
That, strictly speaking, is true. But having this case on hand when arguing or deciding similar cases elsewhere could help convince judges who might have had a harder time without any precedent at all.
Secondly, by taking very high quality scans we can effectivly duplicate the maps for recreation in the event of a disaster of some kind destroying the collection[...]
This is a unique collection of maps. They dont exisit in any form anywhere else in the world and are irreplacable in the event of loss.
That's part of the problem. Why keep them unique? Right now, one minor planetary/intersteller burp could easily wipe them out; if you put a copy in every major university, nothing that wouldn't practically take out humanity would destroy every copy. Where are you storing the digital copies? If they're on campus, the same castrophe that would destroy the paper copies could easily destroy your digital copies.
Ending a sentence in a preposition requires the listener/reader to reconstruct the idea.
Using a pronoun requires the listener/reader to reconstruct the idea. So?
Winston Churchill is said to have asserted that this is a rule "up with which I will not put," but the reason for the rule is clear if one ends a sentence in several prepositions:
You shouldn't use pronouns when there's more then one person the pronoun could apply to (for example: "Bill and Bob went to the store. He paid for the check.") But that doesn't mean you shouldn't use pronouns ever.
What reason did you bring the topic up for?
is a perfectly clear sentence. Compare "This is a rule I won't put with." with "This is a rule up with I will not put." The first one is clearer and more natural.
The best way to avoid getting tangled up in sentences that are hard to untangle is to avoid ending sentences with prepositions.
The best way to avoid getting tangled up in sentences that are hard to untangle is to read your sentences and rewrite them when they are too tangled.
In any case, "What reason did you bring the topic we disagree and fight over about up for?" is a bad example because it's unquestionably wrong; "disagree about" and "fight over" are prepositional phrases; "disagree and fight over about" is wrong.
Bill Gates, who would just as happily see both SCO and Linux disappear
You do realize that Microsoft is one of the few companies to pay SCO for a license for Linux? Microsoft sold Xenix (aka SCO OpenServer) over a decade ago, (which was later sold by SCO-Tarentella to Caldera (aka SCO) because it was worthless) and even if SCO's OSes were a threat, it's not like SCO is really in the operating system business anymore. Linux, OTOH, is an actual competitor with a non-negligable market share.
A paper based collection of 100,000+ maps dating back to 1886 that are slowly decaying with use. They require digitisation for long term ( 200 years +, at least as long again as they have survived already )
Why are you digitizing them for the long term? I've handled books from 1808 that were in excellent condition, having sat on a library shelf for most of that time. If you want them to survive 200 years, make a good paper copy. Better yet, make good paper copies and sell them to every university with a map collection.
Cold fusion isn't possible within 15 meters of the core of the Andromeda Galaxy.
There's a supermassive black hole there busy crushing protons and electrons into neutrons, let alone deuterium into helium. That kind of pressure guarantees that it's not cold subatomic fusion, either.
Nice theory, but there's no proof of that, either. (A whole hell of a lot of evidence, but physicists don't deal much in proof.)
it's theoretically possible for me to pass through a wall without interacting with any of its mass
It's also theoretically possible for those nickels and pennies to hover in midair. So?
cold fusion doesn't seem too far fetched.
To the untutored mind, it doesn't seem too far fetched to have a quintic equation in terms of the elementary functions. To those with a deep understanding of math, it's clearly impossible.
Quantum mechanics is not as poorly understood as you think. It may not be obvious to every English major, but it's fairly clear from what's known that cold fusion shouldn't work. Just as importantly, it has been tested and failed.
Unfortunately, some people think they can 'solve' their cold fusion annoyance by ignoring it.
I'm a great fan of Unicode; I was even indirectly helpful getting a character added to Unicode. There are competitors to Unicode, like Tron, which, as a general rule, Unicode people ignore. We could spend hours arguing over against specious claims with people who only see their culture's side of the problem; but ignoring it, and letting it go away on its own, is the better route.
A physicist could spend a life arguing about remote detectors, telekenesis, young-earth people (quite an effect on the age of the universe and the speed of light) and cold fusion. Or he could spend it doing research. Any time one of those people want to get a paper in a peer-reviewed journal, they can. Until then, ignoring it and letting it go away on its own (unless they can actually show something that's good enough to get peer-reviewed) leaves time to study something besides these apparently-dead routes.
To enable threading and C++, GCC 3.2 (3.x?) and beyond use i486 instructions. There's an option to compile it with only i386 instructions in 3.3, but that would break backward compatibility and is less efficent. So most everyone has dropped compatibility with 386s.
At least someone took the time to prove alchemy wrong. It's a travesty for a scientist to say cold fusion is wrong because of his faith. Be a scientist and use that damn method you've heard about since childhood. Since when does peer review mean you only test things that fit into your view of the universe?
I claim that if you tape two pennies and a nickle and drop them, they will hover in midair. Are you acting like a scientist and testing it?
There's a infinite range of things that could be true, but there's not an infinite amount of time to check each one. So smart people only bother checking things that they believe have a possibility to be true. Cold fusion was weighed, and came up wanting. You can spend time checking every variation to see if there is something there, or you can use it on something you feel is productive (and keeps your job) until someone comes up with some evidence that's at least somewhat convinving. You didn't test the pennies/nickle drop, because it goes against everything you know, but all I'd have to do to get it studied scientifically, if it works, is to go into a repudable scientist and show him and have him try it with his own money.
You are quite right that cold fusion has not been proven, but neither has the possibility of cold fusion been disproven. That would be a much harder job to do.
That would be an impossible thing to do. It's possible that cold fusion only works within 15 meters of the core of the Andromeda Galaxy. All we can say is the evidence doesn't indicate that cold fusion exists.
If it wasn't registered with the copyright office before the end of last year, the manuscript is public domain
Did you read the link? If it wasn't published by December 31, 2002, then it's under copyright for the life of the author (Heinlein) plus 70 years, which leaves another 60 years or so.
I find it interesting this quirk exists
The quirk was that unpublished manuscripts basically had unlimited copyright protection. Now unpublished manuscripts have the same copyright protection as anything newly published: life+70.
Slashdot Mirror
you can argue that a game boy is not a necessity while in flight, but a laptop and/or PDA sure as hell is if you're a businessman.
While the adult businessman should be able to put away his toys for a couple hours, I feel really sorry for the mother who has to deal with three kids who can't use their game boys for the trip.
About 30 *times* the number of platforms for which a JVM exists.
And? There's only a handful of server enviroments out there. Whether or not your code runs on Coherent has been a moot point for almost a decade, and whether or not it runs on IRIX and HP-UX is quickly approaching that point. There's JVM's for Linux, Windows, MacOS and every Unix that still matters.
Yes, servers tend to have fairly impressive hardware resources available to them. So lets cripple that hardware by making it run an interpreted language.
That's no different from using Perl. The question is, is it worth the time to rewrite in C or some other low-level language? I think the people who run the big sites on the net have usually decided that it's not.
Other than a very few countries (Germany springs to mind with it's ban on Nazi items)
And France, and between those two, that's a big part of the western nations.
I live in the UK [...] if I waved by swastika with an intent to incite racial hatred (which it could probably be intrepreted as)
So, in other words, you probably can't wave a Nazi flag, especially if you mean something by it.
Likewise for freedom of religion; many Western nations still have state churches and state indoctrination into those churches in schools, and some still consider blasphemy a crime.
You seem to be describing the American South.
I follow the ACLU website, and while the American South is definetly suboptimal on this, it's also clearly illegal and not widespread; unlike Germany, where every German student has to take a class in either Catholism or Lutherinism.
We're one of the few nations in the world where you can still wave a Nazi or Communist flag.
Just don't wave the French flag.
No one's going to stop you from waving the French flag, either. Disapprove, but not stop.
unless your name happens to be God, I doubt you have the qualifications to disprove its existence.
Huh? It's not a matter of proof. It's a matter of reasonable evidence. I certainly can weight the evidence and come to a conclusion.
this is a mystery worthy of further scientific investigation.
There's an attitude that's people writing free software hate - people who think they have the right to dictate to you what you should code. It's the same with science; if you think it should be investigated, then go investigate.
To disprove bigfoot's existence requires the simultaneous examination of every square foot of millions of acres of dense forest,
It takes the same thing to disprove that Klingons live in that forest. However, the last wild Indians came out of the hills, and you expect me to believe a breeding population of creatures which eat maybe four times as much, live up there, completely hidden? They never cross a highway and get hit by cars, never rob the henhouse of farmer with a gun?
Otherwise save your absolute judgements for things you can know absolutely.
Basic epistemology - we know nothing absolutely, except for there is an I in a Now. Everything else, we weight the facts, usually come to a conclusion, and go on with our life. Perhaps the conclusion is wrong, but it rarely matters, and it's easier then trying to deal with a series of needless what-ifs.
Keep in mind that the US named themselves "the land of the free" back when slavery and apartheid were in full force, and that they have consistently lagged almost every other Westernized country in granting equal rights.
An easy thing to say. In reality:
The book of lists lists 35 countries and when they gave the vote to women. New Zealand was first in 1893. Eleven countries - including Canada, Poland, Germany, Great Britain and the US - gave women the right to vote between 1918 and 1920. But Spain waited until 1931, France 1944, Italy 1945 and Switzerland 1971.
We were one of the first nations to have freedom of speech, and all things considered we've held fairly close to it. We're one of the few nations in the world where you can still wave a Nazi or Communist flag. Likewise for freedom of religion; many Western nations still have state churches and state indoctrination into those churches in schools, and some still consider blasphemy a crime.
The right to vote didn't come to many of those
western nations until after WWI. One man, one vote didn't completely come to England until 1944 (when universities stopped getting votes), the Queen (an unelected official) still has veto power (at least in theory), and in practice used it until the late 1800's.
Speaking of apartheid, Jews and Gypies never got treated very well in most of Europe, to the point of extermination 60 years ago. The black man, had he been in Europe in significant numbers, would likely have been on the same trains.
I know, it's easy to pick on America, and like many nations, we've screwed up a lot. But don't undercut our accomplishments, either.
My point is, it's virtually impossible to prove non-existence -- trivial to prove existence.
Sure, but it's a 7-foot tall primate is a lot easier to notice then a chipmunk, but so far no one has managed to call a reporter out to see and photograph the bigfeet.
Why not use systematic biologist or linguists?
If the problem were text comparison, I'd call for someone from the English department who makes critical editions, as it's the most similar to the human processes working on text, not independent words or natural forces working anything.
But I don't think that's the problem. What they need is a computer science historian (aka a long-bearded Unix geek), and copies of every Unix source released. Given that, it shouldn't be hard to find all the copies of that malloc function, or the fact that the Berkeley Packet Filter was also showing up in BSD releases and originally came from Berkeley. But they don't seem to be bothering to do that kind of deep research.
But it turns out it can be quite tricky to construct a graph layout that'll be easy for a human to understand.
The problem is, if you have a fairly arbitrary graph, it's not merely tricky, it's computationally hard--I belive there's exponential or factoral big O's involved. I've played around with giving graphs to VCG and Graphviz. VCG returns a sucky graph instantly, but Graphviz returns a good graph - if there's only a dozen nodes and connections. Get much above that, and it doesn't return in the minutes I've been willing to wait. If you want real-time, you can't do serious graph optimization.
it seems obvious that the next step is going to be a fully 3d-enabled desktop, with 3d icons placed in the current 2d-metaphor?
I'm sure it seemed obvious in the 1950's and 60's that the next step was going to be full 3d-movies. One problem is, humans don't see 3d; they see at best pseudo-3d, so we aren't uncomfortable working in 2d like we would be in 1d. Also, look at your book shelves and file cabinents. They aren't usually 3d organizational systems; in many ways they are 1d organizational systems folded to be fit more compactly in a 3d world.
Let's kill all these plugins, and have support for open standards within the browser. If SVG, DOM, and CSS2 were implemented fully and perfectly, we wouldn't need proprietary formats like Flash at all, and accessibility would be improved.
Have you ever heard of DjVu? It's a graphics format for scanned documents, that does amazing levels of compression - 10 Megapixel B&W scans in 30k, for example. It's not something that everyone needs, or that has been around long enough for it to be hardcoded into everyone's browser. But there's no way you can replicate it using "proper standards". So those of us who want to use it, can, without worrying about it being a "proper standard" or built-in to every browser on Earth.
So the force of this decision ends at the border of Washington State.
That, strictly speaking, is true. But having this case on hand when arguing or deciding similar cases elsewhere could help convince judges who might have had a harder time without any precedent at all.
Secondly, by taking very high quality scans we can effectivly duplicate the maps for recreation in the event of a disaster of some kind destroying the collection[...]
This is a unique collection of maps. They dont exisit in any form anywhere else in the world and are irreplacable in the event of loss.
That's part of the problem. Why keep them unique? Right now, one minor planetary/intersteller burp could easily wipe them out; if you put a copy in every major university, nothing that wouldn't practically take out humanity would destroy every copy. Where are you storing the digital copies? If they're on campus, the same castrophe that would destroy the paper copies could easily destroy your digital copies.
Ending a sentence in a preposition requires
the listener/reader to reconstruct the idea.
Using a pronoun requires the listener/reader to reconstruct the idea. So?
Winston Churchill is said to have asserted that this is a rule "up with which I will not put," but the reason for the rule is clear if one ends a sentence in several prepositions:
You shouldn't use pronouns when there's more then one person the pronoun could apply to (for example: "Bill and Bob went to the store. He paid for the check.") But that doesn't mean you shouldn't use pronouns ever.
What reason did you bring the topic up for?
is a perfectly clear sentence. Compare "This is a rule I won't put with." with "This is a rule up with I will not put." The first one is clearer and more natural.
The best way to avoid getting tangled up in sentences that are hard to untangle is to avoid ending sentences with prepositions.
The best way to avoid getting tangled up in sentences that are hard to untangle is to read your sentences and rewrite them when they are too tangled.
In any case, "What reason did you bring the topic we disagree and fight over about up for?" is a bad example because it's unquestionably wrong; "disagree about" and "fight over" are prepositional phrases; "disagree and fight over about" is wrong.
Bill Gates, who would just as happily see both SCO and Linux disappear
You do realize that Microsoft is one of the few companies to pay SCO for a license for Linux? Microsoft sold Xenix (aka SCO OpenServer) over a decade ago, (which was later sold by SCO-Tarentella to Caldera (aka SCO) because it was worthless) and even if SCO's OSes were a threat, it's not like SCO is really in the operating system business anymore. Linux, OTOH, is an actual competitor with a non-negligable market share.
The problem :
A paper based collection of 100,000+ maps dating back to 1886 that are slowly decaying with use. They require digitisation for long term ( 200 years +, at least as long again as they have survived already )
Why are you digitizing them for the long term? I've handled books from 1808 that were in excellent condition, having sat on a library shelf for most of that time. If you want them to survive 200 years, make a good paper copy. Better yet, make good paper copies and sell them to every university with a map collection.
Cold fusion isn't possible within 15 meters of the core of the Andromeda Galaxy.
There's a supermassive black hole there busy crushing protons and electrons into neutrons, let alone deuterium into helium. That kind of pressure guarantees that it's not cold subatomic fusion, either.
Nice theory, but there's no proof of that, either. (A whole hell of a lot of evidence, but physicists don't deal much in proof.)
it's theoretically possible for me to pass through a wall without interacting with any of its mass
It's also theoretically possible for those nickels and pennies to hover in midair. So?
cold fusion doesn't seem too far fetched.
To the untutored mind, it doesn't seem too far fetched to have a quintic equation in terms of the elementary functions. To those with a deep understanding of math, it's clearly impossible.
Quantum mechanics is not as poorly understood as you think. It may not be obvious to every English major, but it's fairly clear from what's known that cold fusion shouldn't work. Just as importantly, it has been tested and failed.
Unfortunately, some people think they can 'solve' their cold fusion annoyance by ignoring it.
I'm a great fan of Unicode; I was even indirectly helpful getting a character added to Unicode. There are competitors to Unicode, like Tron, which, as a general rule, Unicode people ignore. We could spend hours arguing over against specious claims with people who only see their culture's side of the problem; but ignoring it, and letting it go away on its own, is the better route.
A physicist could spend a life arguing about remote detectors, telekenesis, young-earth people (quite an effect on the age of the universe and the speed of light) and cold fusion. Or he could spend it doing research. Any time one of those people want to get a paper in a peer-reviewed journal, they can. Until then, ignoring it and letting it go away on its own (unless they can actually show something that's good enough to get peer-reviewed) leaves time to study something besides these apparently-dead routes.
Modern distros on old hardware still work
To enable threading and C++, GCC 3.2 (3.x?) and beyond use i486 instructions. There's an option to compile it with only i386 instructions in 3.3, but that would break backward compatibility and is less efficent. So most everyone has dropped compatibility with 386s.
At least someone took the time to prove alchemy wrong. It's a travesty for a scientist to say cold fusion is wrong because of his faith. Be a scientist and use that damn method you've heard about since childhood. Since when does peer review mean you only test things that fit into your view of the universe?
I claim that if you tape two pennies and a nickle and drop them, they will hover in midair. Are you acting like a scientist and testing it?
There's a infinite range of things that could be true, but there's not an infinite amount of time to check each one. So smart people only bother checking things that they believe have a possibility to be true. Cold fusion was weighed, and came up wanting. You can spend time checking every variation to see if there is something there, or you can use it on something you feel is productive (and keeps your job) until someone comes up with some evidence that's at least somewhat convinving. You didn't test the pennies/nickle drop, because it goes against everything you know, but all I'd have to do to get it studied scientifically, if it works, is to go into a repudable scientist and show him and have him try it with his own money.
You are quite right that cold fusion has not been proven, but neither has the possibility of cold fusion been disproven. That would be a much harder job to do.
That would be an impossible thing to do. It's possible that cold fusion only works within 15 meters of the core of the Andromeda Galaxy. All we can say is the evidence doesn't indicate that cold fusion exists.
It's their service so they can do whatever they want.
I can take a gun and shoot a random passerby. The question here was should, not can.
when/where does the concept of fair use enter the legal system?
The first amendment? It's a lot like the right to privacy - something that isn't explicit in the constitution, but judges read in there anyway.
Fair use was never part of the constitution.
The court system disagrees; fair use has always been part of the legal system in the US despite not being part of the law until 1978.
If it wasn't registered with the copyright office before the end of last year, the manuscript is public domain
Did you read the link? If it wasn't published by December 31, 2002, then it's under copyright for the life of the author (Heinlein) plus 70 years, which leaves another 60 years or so.
I find it interesting this quirk exists
The quirk was that unpublished manuscripts basically had unlimited copyright protection. Now unpublished manuscripts have the same copyright protection as anything newly published: life+70.