The people stealing the stuff aren't necessarily the same people the homes are being built for, or at least not _all_ for the people the homes are being built for. I'd be pissed off too, but it sucks even worse for the people who need the homes and aren't stealing stuff.
> Likewise, if you blocked half the suns rays that currently reach earth from reaching earth, you don't think it would cool down the earth?
Yes. That _supports_ my point.
Of course putting extra energy can make a difference. That goes without saying, and I why I wasn't arguing with it. (As it happens, the extra energy here is pretty insignificant compared with the solar energy hitting the earth. The moon's diameter is around 1/4 of the Earth's, so it intercepts about 1/16 of the total sunlight. On average only half of the face towards Earth is sunlit, so covering that entire face of the moon with totally efficient conversion machinery will give you an extra 1/32 sunlight. But in practise only a tiny fraction of the surface will be covered with collecters, and they won't be totally efficient.)
The supposed "point" I was arguing with was that it made a difference whether the extra energy came from the moon or from fossil fuels. He claimed that in some sense the moon energy was "extra" and the same amount of fossil fuel energy wasn't. That's bollocks.
If thousands of movie-viewers choose to pay to see a movie and come out thinking "that was a waste of money", Hollywood cares (a bit), but it's not the government's problem. Same if producers spend money on a movie no-one pays to see. But if thousands of tax-payers see their tax money being spent and think "that was a waste of money", it _is_ government's problem.
What I want to know if will there by a matching tax on NERF weapons to pay for the military. And do Half-Like, Quake etc. go to the space (sci-fi) budget or military?
>...taking the material as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. > Under this definition, material which does have scientific, etc. value for adults but doesn't for minors would be fair game, right?
Right. If it's _also_ appealing or pandering to purient interest _and_ depicts sex etc. in a patently offensive manner. The lacking value bit is necessary but not sufficient.
Whether any such material exists (or even could exist) is another question, but if there is material is is obscene when considered with respect to minors and has redeeming value _for adults only_, why should that adult value affect its status with respect to minors?
As an example of the sort of thing this might be aimed at, there's a website out there somewhere with close up comparison photos of natural labias with the constructed ones of post-operative transexuals. If it's being viewed in a school library, it's probably not for its scientific value to adults (which is not to say it should or will actually be covered by this bill).
> Hey,./ subscribers, how happy are you that you wasted a page hit on Katz's book promotion?
You mean subscribers got to see this too? Maybe I won't bother after all...
Re:Harmless, my eye!
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> The amount of energy radiated from the Earth is part of the system.
Oh well in that case the answer is simple. Redefine your "effectively closed" system to include the Moon as well. Now transferring energy from the earth to the moon doesn't add anything to the system, just moves it about, so you don't have anything do worry about.
> My point is that the Earth, as an effectivley closed system
This isn't pedantry, you're just flat _wrong_. It's like saying "Microsoft Windows, as an effectively Open Source project".
> Instead, we should view our acts as external inputs
So last post fossil fuels were part of the system because they were formed on Earth, but now they are an external input?
Re:Harmless, my eye!
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> adding additional energy to what is effectively a closed system. In other words, at least burning fossil fuels is harnassing energy already collected and stored by Earth.
The Earth is _not_ a closed system. The global temperature depends on an equilibrium between input energy and radiated energy. That's why greenhouse gases can raise the temperature. And the main concern with fossil fuels and global warming is CO2 being a greenhouse gas, not the actual heat dumped into the atmosphere by exhausts, cooling towers, etc..
Burning fossil fuels releases energy stored hundreds of millions of years ago. There have been massive climate changes since then, and the fact that energy was once sunlight hitting the earth is completely irrelevent to the current balance.
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
on
GPL's Strength
·
· Score: 2
> (Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988) was amended in 1995 (IIRC)
Ok, 50C says it is legal to copy or adapt a program if necessary for lawful use by a lawful user. And "a person is a lawful user of a computer program if (whether under a licence to do any acts restricted by the copyright in the program or otherwise), he has a right to use the program."
Which seems circular to me - what defines whether you have a right to use the program if not under a licence, if, by default, you aren't allowed to copy it onto your machine? (And that same set of amendments omits ", otherwise than incidentally in the course of running the program" somewhere else).
Or does that just mean if you haven't stolen the program, and aren't breaking into someone else's machine to use it?
http://www.patent.gov.uk/copy/indetail/morecopy. ht m claims "running a computer program or displaying a work on a VDU will usually involve copying and thus require the consent of the copyright owner."
And how does thus fit into the recent declaration that you do need a licence to copy a game into a PlayStation, so can't legally read a region-protected game disc? http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?i d=ns999 91933
> So basically you don't need a EULA.
I'd hope so. But it doesn't seem clear-cut, which is why I said "may". Do you have any references or pointers to precedents?
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
on
GPL's Strength
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
> Microsoft's EULA lets you use software for which they are the copyright holder. Using it without would be illegal.
Looking at your user history you might just be ignorant rather than trolling with this, so:
That depends on where you are, as discussed in the thread on Playstation imports. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01 /24/131321 3&mode=thread
In any sane jurisdiction, using software you have already bought does not require additional permission from the copyright holder. Being English, I'm aware that this may not be the case in the UK.
> they say they use a compression format "similar" to MP3... > to my mind a lossy compression technique does not equal CD-quality
Depends what you mean by "similar".
http://flac.sourceforge.net/, for example, says "Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless."
Also, in principle, you could start off with more information than a CD recording (e.g. SACD), apply a lossy scheme to it, and, after the losses, still have as much audible information as the CD. You can't do that when recording from a CD, but a studio could record things that way.
Sony describe MiniDisc's compression scheme as "close to CD-quality" at 1/5 size, which is roughly comparable to what they are claiming. So if their compression method is better than ATRAC, it's not out of the question they could manage it. http://www.sony.co.jp/en/Products/mswalkman/glossa ry/
> Don't just sit around and post you gripes here and there --- contact your representatives!!!!
I'm not a US citizen (or resident). I'd like to sit around pointing and laughing at how stupid the US government is being, but since our goverment is probably stupid enough to follow your example with added cockups of its own, I'm going to sit around and gripe instead....
"She hath not seen the change of fourteen years;" "Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen."
And while Romeo and Juliet don't live to consummate their relationship, her mother says "Well, think of marriage now: younger than you,
Here in Verona, ladies of esteem,
Are made already mothers: by my count
I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid."
This study guide says she was sixteen in the story Shakespeare adapted: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:QZM 7PNsyjrwC: www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/love-in-the-arts/romeo.ht ml+Romeo+Juliet%27s+age&hl=en&client=googlet (And maybe bits of it were written before he made the change and not revised?).
> Is someone going to buy a Mustang, drive it for a day, and then take it back? Sure, it *could* happen.
Yes, but he wanted the car at one-third retail, which takes a few years depreciation. I've seen used cars with 150 miles on the clock, but they were less than one-third off the new price. (On the other hand I know someone who got a Lotus Elan (the newish one now made by Kia, not the classic), drove it for a few days, decided it was so good it was boring, and sold it for more than the new cost, since there was still a long waiting list. But that's exceptional).
The point is that the resale value of the car is part of the reason for its high initial cost, so Ford will (indirectly) see some of the money he spends on a second-hand Ford. If no-one ever wanted to buy a second hand Ford, the price of new Fords would drop.
> If the patent office can't understand something, it should deny the patent.
If the patent office can't understand a swing, things are even worse than we thought.
> If a single company submits too many patents, they should be denied.
How many is too many? Maybe hundreds or thousands of IBM's patents really are reasonable, original, useful and non-obvious. Applying for lots of patents might sometimes be a sign of abuse of the system, but denying patents after some arbitrary number is unfair to large companies doing lots of research. If it costs money to submit a patent application, and dodgy ones are rejected, companies will reduce dodgy submissions without a limit on how many they can have.
Anyway, large companies could just get individuals or spin-off companies to patent stuff and then licence them back to the companies on favourable terms.
> Entering into a contract requires, well, that you enter into a contract.
The GPL says you aren't required to agree to the license, but if you don't, you aren't allowed to copy GPL'd software.
The Microsoft agreement says you don't have to agree to it, but if you don't, you have no license to use their patents - which, they claim, any CIFS implementation necessarily will.
So, if the patents really are essential to the implementation and are valid (and even if they aren't, can you afford to fight Microsoft to prove it in court?), and you are somewhere US software patents have any validity, they _can_ impose conditions on implementations.
> I thought EOF was C-d. Maybe I'm wrong; can someone explain the difference?
Yes - the difference is you're right, and the previous poster doesn't know what he's talking about.
(Actually C-d is the character usually used interactively to signal that you want an end of file. EOF as defined in stdio.h isn't a character at all, which is why getc() and getchar() return ints (casting the result to char before comparing with EOF is a common mistake)).
Re:Titanium is also very flexible.
on
The Sexiest Metal
·
· Score: 2
> > steel can be assumed to be immune to failure from fatigue.
> Not for bicycles. Trust me - I've worn out several steel frames.
Decent quality ones? Anyway, it is possible to design a steel structure that _won't_ fatigue under a specified load (though the fatigue strength isn't generally as high as the yield strength, so a steel bike designed for absolute minimum weight could have a fatigue limited life (and so could a poorly designed or poorly welded one)), but aluminium has no lower limit - the lower the stress, the longer the life, but eventually any cyclic load will fatigue aluminium.
Articles on bicycle metallurgy: http://www.sjsu.edu/orgs/asmtms/artcl e/articl.htm
In D&D, or Tolkien? In Tolkien it was also known as truesilver. But it was found naturally (only in Moria), not made, so if it _was_ silver infused with magic it was Eru or the Valar who did the infusing. http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/m/mithril. html
> I'd not consider mitrhil a 'comic' element. IIRC, Tolkien made it for his LotR universe
I'm pretty sure D&D later borrowed it from Tolkien, and there are/were D&D based comics.
But it's fictional, and it may be an alloy. This is about real elements (or at least characters named after and supposedly based on real elements, in the case of e.g. the Metal Men).
> You'd think a hovercraft would be a better vehicle, too.
Looks like they're going over pretty lumpy stuff at times, could be tough on skirts. These things have tracks as well as the screw things. Fans would probably need deicing systems which will reduce the efficiency.
> Now imagine that someone hacks their car's firmware, crashes in a fireball,
When I saw "Physical hot rodding isn't cheap because it often involves the inadvertent testing to destruction of new ideas and components. Digital hot rodding, though--where software is used to modify how a vehicle does something--is orders of magnitude cheaper and far more accessible." I thought the author doesn't get it just as much as the hardware guys he was talking to. This isn't a simulator, its controllers for real physical hardware. You can blow an engine up by buggering about with the software just as easily as by fiddling with physical stuff.
And, as you say, in the worst case you can kill people.
> First, there is a name for software that is going to be deprecated in a foreseeable time frame. That name is "beta."
Reminds me of a old job. Specifically the "oh fuck the beta time-bomb we'd forgotten about has expired and we _still_ don't have the full release ready yet" bit of it....
(A proprietary database (not one you are likely to have heard of, it was just an ancillary product), and it would refuse to work if there were dates in its journal later than current time, so you couldn't just wind the clock back.)
Slashdot Mirror
The people stealing the stuff aren't necessarily the same people the homes are being built for, or at least not _all_ for the people the homes are being built for.
I'd be pissed off too, but it sucks even worse for the people who need the homes and aren't stealing stuff.
> Likewise, if you blocked half the suns rays that currently reach earth from reaching earth, you don't think it would cool down the earth?
Yes. That _supports_ my point.
Of course putting extra energy can make a difference. That goes without saying, and I why I wasn't arguing with it. (As it happens, the extra energy here is pretty insignificant compared with the solar energy hitting the earth. The moon's diameter is around 1/4 of the Earth's, so it intercepts about 1/16 of the total sunlight. On average only half of the face towards Earth is sunlit, so covering that entire face of the moon with totally efficient conversion machinery will give you an extra 1/32 sunlight. But in practise only a tiny fraction of the surface will be covered with collecters, and they won't be totally efficient.)
The supposed "point" I was arguing with was that it made a difference whether the extra energy came from the moon or from fossil fuels.
He claimed that in some sense the moon energy was "extra" and the same amount of fossil fuel energy wasn't. That's bollocks.
> When Hollywood drops a bomb, nobody cares.
If thousands of movie-viewers choose to pay to see a movie and come out thinking "that was a waste of money", Hollywood cares (a bit), but it's not the government's problem. Same if producers spend money on a movie no-one pays to see.
But if thousands of tax-payers see their tax money being spent and think "that was a waste of money", it _is_ government's problem.
What I want to know if will there by a matching tax on NERF weapons to pay for the military. And do Half-Like, Quake etc. go to the space (sci-fi) budget or military?
> ...taking the material as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
> Under this definition, material which does have scientific, etc. value for adults but doesn't for minors would be fair game, right?
Right. If it's _also_ appealing or pandering to purient interest _and_ depicts sex etc. in a patently offensive manner. The lacking value bit is necessary but not sufficient.
Whether any such material exists (or even could exist) is another question, but if there is material is is obscene when considered with respect to minors and has redeeming value _for adults only_, why should that adult value affect its status with respect to minors?
As an example of the sort of thing this might be aimed at, there's a website out there somewhere with close up comparison photos of natural labias with the constructed ones of post-operative transexuals. If it's being viewed in a school library, it's probably not for its scientific value to adults (which is not to say it should or will actually be covered by this bill).
> Hey, ./ subscribers, how happy are you that you wasted a page hit on Katz's book promotion?
You mean subscribers got to see this too?
Maybe I won't bother after all...
> The amount of energy radiated from the Earth is part of the system.
Oh well in that case the answer is simple.
Redefine your "effectively closed" system to include the Moon as well. Now transferring energy from the earth to the moon doesn't add anything to the system, just moves it about, so you don't have anything do worry about.
> My point is that the Earth, as an effectivley closed system
This isn't pedantry, you're just flat _wrong_. It's like saying "Microsoft Windows, as an effectively Open Source project".
> Instead, we should view our acts as external inputs
So last post fossil fuels were part of the system because they were formed on Earth, but now they are an external input?
> adding additional energy to what is effectively a closed system. In other words, at least burning fossil fuels is harnassing energy already collected and stored by Earth.
The Earth is _not_ a closed system. The global temperature depends on an equilibrium between input energy and radiated energy. That's why greenhouse gases can raise the temperature. And the main concern with fossil fuels and global warming is CO2 being a greenhouse gas, not the actual heat dumped into the atmosphere by exhausts, cooling towers, etc..
Burning fossil fuels releases energy stored hundreds of millions of years ago. There have been massive climate changes since then, and the fact that energy was once sunlight hitting the earth is completely irrelevent to the current balance.
> (Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988) was amended in 1995 (IIRC)
2 33_en_ 2.htm
. ht m claims "running a computer program or displaying a work on a VDU will usually involve copying and thus require the consent of the copyright owner."
i d=ns999 91933
This?
Statutory Instrument 1992 No. 3233
The Copyright (Computer Programs) Regulations 1992
http://www.hmso.gov.uk/si/si1992/Uksi_19923
Ok, 50C says it is legal to copy or adapt a program if necessary for lawful use by a lawful user. And "a person is a lawful user of a computer program if (whether under a licence to do any acts restricted by the copyright in the program or otherwise), he has a right to use the program."
Which seems circular to me - what defines whether you have a right to use the program if not under a licence, if, by default, you aren't allowed to copy it onto your machine? (And that same set of amendments omits ", otherwise than incidentally in the course of running the program" somewhere else).
Or does that just mean if you haven't stolen the program, and aren't breaking into someone else's machine to use it?
http://www.patent.gov.uk/copy/indetail/morecopy
And how does thus fit into the recent declaration that you do need a licence to copy a game into a PlayStation, so can't legally read a region-protected game disc?
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?
> So basically you don't need a EULA.
I'd hope so. But it doesn't seem clear-cut, which is why I said "may". Do you have any references or pointers to precedents?
> Microsoft's EULA lets you use software for which they are the copyright holder. Using it without would be illegal.
1 /24/131321 3&mode=thread
Looking at your user history you might just be ignorant rather than trolling with this, so:
That depends on where you are, as discussed in the thread on Playstation imports.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/0
In any sane jurisdiction, using software you have already bought does not require additional permission from the copyright holder.
Being English, I'm aware that this may not be the case in the UK.
> they say they use a compression format "similar" to MP3...
a ry/
> to my mind a lossy compression technique does not equal CD-quality
Depends what you mean by "similar".
http://flac.sourceforge.net/, for example, says "Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless."
Also, in principle, you could start off with more information than a CD recording (e.g. SACD), apply a lossy scheme to it, and, after the losses, still have as much audible information as the CD. You can't do that when recording from a CD, but a studio could record things that way.
Sony describe MiniDisc's compression scheme as "close to CD-quality" at 1/5 size, which is roughly comparable to what they are claiming. So if their compression method is better than ATRAC, it's not out of the question they could manage it. http://www.sony.co.jp/en/Products/mswalkman/gloss
> Don't just sit around and post you gripes here and there --- contact your representatives!!!!
I'm not a US citizen (or resident). I'd like to sit around pointing and laughing at how stupid the US government is being, but since our goverment is probably stupid enough to follow your example with added cockups of its own, I'm going to sit around and gripe instead....
> The play has Juliet as a 12 year old
M 7PNsyjrwC: www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/love-in-the-arts/romeo.ht ml+Romeo+Juliet%27s+age&hl=en&client=googletd maybe bits of it were written before he made the change and not revised?).
Thirteen, nearly fourteen.
"She hath not seen the change of fourteen years;"
"Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen."
And while Romeo and Juliet don't live to consummate their relationship, her mother says
"Well, think of marriage now: younger than you,
Here in Verona, ladies of esteem,
Are made already mothers: by my count
I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid."
This study guide says she was sixteen in the story Shakespeare adapted:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:QZ
(An
> Is someone going to buy a Mustang, drive it for a day, and then take it back? Sure, it *could* happen.
Yes, but he wanted the car at one-third retail, which takes a few years depreciation. I've seen used cars with 150 miles on the clock, but they were less than one-third off the new price.
(On the other hand I know someone who got a Lotus Elan (the newish one now made by Kia, not the classic), drove it for a few days, decided it was so good it was boring, and sold it for more than the new cost, since there was still a long waiting list. But that's exceptional).
The point is that the resale value of the car is part of the reason for its high initial cost, so Ford will (indirectly) see some of the money he spends on a second-hand Ford.
If no-one ever wanted to buy a second hand Ford, the price of new Fords would drop.
> If the patent office can't understand something, it should deny the patent.
If the patent office can't understand a swing, things are even worse than we thought.
> If a single company submits too many patents, they should be denied.
How many is too many? Maybe hundreds or thousands of IBM's patents really are reasonable, original, useful and non-obvious. Applying for lots of patents might sometimes be a sign of abuse of the system, but denying patents after some arbitrary number is unfair to large companies doing lots of research. If it costs money to submit a patent application, and dodgy ones are rejected, companies will reduce dodgy submissions without a limit on how many they can have.
Anyway, large companies could just get individuals or spin-off companies to patent stuff and then licence them back to the companies on favourable terms.
> Entering into a contract requires, well, that you enter into a contract.
The GPL says you aren't required to agree to the license, but if you don't, you aren't allowed to copy GPL'd software.
The Microsoft agreement says you don't have to agree to it, but if you don't, you have no license to use their patents - which, they claim, any CIFS implementation necessarily will.
So, if the patents really are essential to the implementation and are valid (and even if they aren't, can you afford to fight Microsoft to prove it in court?), and you are somewhere US software patents have any validity, they _can_ impose conditions on implementations.
> I thought EOF was C-d. Maybe I'm wrong; can someone explain the difference?
Yes - the difference is you're right, and the previous poster doesn't know what he's talking about.
(Actually C-d is the character usually used interactively to signal that you want an end of file. EOF as defined in stdio.h isn't a character at all, which is why getc() and getchar() return ints (casting the result to char before comparing with EOF is a common mistake)).
> > steel can be assumed to be immune to failure from fatigue.
l e/articl.htm
> Not for bicycles. Trust me - I've worn out several steel frames.
Decent quality ones? Anyway, it is possible to design a steel structure that _won't_ fatigue under a specified load (though the fatigue strength isn't generally as high as the yield strength, so a steel bike designed for absolute minimum weight could have a fatigue limited life (and so could a poorly designed or poorly welded one)), but aluminium has no lower limit - the lower the stress, the longer the life, but eventually any cyclic load will fatigue aluminium.
Articles on bicycle metallurgy:
http://www.sjsu.edu/orgs/asmtms/artc
> mithril is simply silver infused with magic.
. html
Maybe that's a special case of alloying...
In D&D, or Tolkien?
In Tolkien it was also known as truesilver. But it was found naturally (only in Moria), not made, so if it _was_ silver infused with magic it was Eru or the Valar who did the infusing.
http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/m/mithril
> I'd not consider mitrhil a 'comic' element. IIRC, Tolkien made it for his LotR universe
I'm pretty sure D&D later borrowed it from Tolkien, and there are/were D&D based comics.
But it's fictional, and it may be an alloy. This is about real elements (or at least characters named after and supposedly based on real elements, in the case of e.g. the Metal Men).
"arguably, the most significant personal transportation device of the 20th century"
Yeah right. That would be the same 20th century as the Model T Ford and the Wright brothers' first flight?
> First: you can bring illicit drugs into the country and nobody is gonna stop you (how do you stop a submarine without blowing it up?)
You get the Navy to drop a warning depth charge. It if doesn't surface, you forget about the "without blowing it up" bit for the next charge.
> My office email environment is Exchange, and very much makes use of the scheduling system in addition to email, so I'm stuck with it.
Sucks to be you, I guess. Wait for Microsoft to get round to offering what you want, same as everyone else stuck with them does.
> You'd think a hovercraft would be a better vehicle, too.
Looks like they're going over pretty lumpy stuff at times, could be tough on skirts. These things have tracks as well as the screw things.
Fans would probably need deicing systems which will reduce the efficiency.
> Now imagine that someone hacks their car's firmware, crashes in a fireball,
When I saw "Physical hot rodding isn't cheap because it often involves the inadvertent testing to destruction of new ideas and components. Digital hot rodding, though--where software is used to modify how a vehicle does something--is orders of magnitude cheaper and far more accessible." I thought the author doesn't get it just as much as the hardware guys he was talking to. This isn't a simulator, its controllers for real physical hardware. You can blow an engine up by buggering about with the software just as easily as by fiddling with physical stuff.
And, as you say, in the worst case you can kill people.
> First, there is a name for software that is going to be deprecated in a foreseeable time frame. That name is "beta."
Reminds me of a old job. Specifically the "oh fuck the beta time-bomb we'd forgotten about has expired and we _still_ don't have the full release ready yet" bit of it....
(A proprietary database (not one you are likely to have heard of, it was just an ancillary product), and it would refuse to work if there were dates in its journal later than current time, so you couldn't just wind the clock back.)