If we need to move to a socialist music system (yes. the idea horrifies me) we should do it via a fair taxation system, not one that taxes only computers and internet services. We should just go all out and make everyone except for the deaf pay the music tax. Then we can just pay all the artists a fair and reasonable wage. Sure, some of the superstars will lose money but more regular joes will be able to be musicians.
More like you read on a public bulletin board how to check what your direct deposit check will be on the day before you get it.
There was no robbing going on here. Just people with valid user names and passwords logging in and looking at an unlinked page. The permissions of the system said it was OK. I don't see a crime here.
I am a mix of Cuban-American-Scottish-English-Irish-etc. I applied for minority status for Cuban-American-Scottish-English-Irish-etc's but they told me that there wasn't enough of us to form our own minority.
To all the other Cuban-American-Scottish-English-Irish-etc's out there I say "stand with me. power to the Cuban-American-Scottish-English-Irish-etc's"
The preservation of freedom of the press requires a very open view of what is considered "the press". To define it too narrowly opens the door to a tremendous loss of freedoms that the constitution is designed to protect. Why not just say that Fox News is not "the press" because they lean to the right?
All of the press stems from somebody having something to say and saying it. That is what freedom of speech and the press means. The freedom to say things openly and without fear about the government, companies, or just about anything else.
Stopping leaks, if they want them stopped, are Apple's responsibility. The publishers are not bound by any contractural obligations to Apple and Apple should not be allowed to harass them.
We call ourselves Americans. I realize this makes no sense because there are like 23 countries (or so) in the Americas. However, United Statesian sounds totally weird and besides it could also apply to citizens from the United States of Mexico (Estados Unidoes de Mejico).
Boss: "How long will it take to create feature X?" Herbjorn the Programmer (to himself): "Hmmm. 22 minutes to implement feature X plus 4 solid hours of code cleaning plus upgrading my workstation" Herbjorn: "3 days, sir. I'll get right on it."
Both consistency and good comments are good traits. I find understandable function and variable names are essential as well.
I believe that language familiarity has little to nothing to do with being a good programmer. A more familiar programmer can program faster but programming principles remain the same across all languages.
Smaller, simpler code is inherently less likely to contain bugs, runs faster, and is easier to troubleshoot.
If programmer A develops 1000 lines of code per day and programmer B develops 10 lines of code per day and both programs do the same thing I will pick programmer B every time (normal lines of code, not contest entries with runon lines and things)
On a site with mixed security levels (i.e. some anonymous and some permission-based access) the "proper" thing to do is to check security on the results the search engine is returning.
That way an anonymous user would see only results for documents that have read permissions for anonymous while a logged-in user would see results for anything they had permissions to.
Of course this idea works fine for a special purpose database-backed web site but takes a bit more work on just your average web site.
Crawling the site via localhost:80 is the most secure method for a normal site. This would index only documents available to the anonymous user already and would ignore any unlinked documents as well.
If I were Rauschenberg I would sue Cage. It is obvious to me that Cage is simply a performer of the music originally authored by Rauschenberg.
Cage may have refined the written notation some but his work matches exactly the prior work authored by Rauschenberg. Certainly any music student could sit down in from of Rauschenberg's piece and perform Cage's piece, although the tempo might be off a little.
"Hoo-ray for the sounds of fucking silence." (Nicholas Cage in Con Air)
Yesterday's article was spun towards the EFF side so this article spins more toward the "regulators" side. While they are regulators of broadcasts, the issue here is whether they are legitimate regulators of non-broadcast functions of devices. To call them regulators here gives them what I consider an undeserved legitimacy.
As far as TV piracy being a growing problem. It probably will continue to be a problem until someone important catches on that all they need to do is come up with a downloadable program package that contains some forms of advertising that people will view.
One possible downloadable tv program package would feature small corner ads or something. They need to make the ads useable but not so intrusive that people feel the need to try and hack them out of there.
More companies should move the GPL style of EULA. (As much as I like the free stuff I am referring to the versioning idea in this case.)
That way, instead of requiring a lawyer every time you install a piece of software or run Windows Update you could call your lawyer only periodically. "Hey Larry, Could you check out MS EULA 4.3 and see if any of the changes bother you?"
With EULAs all over the place there is no way you can keep up. Many of them are 20 pages or more and how can you read that when you just want to install the software and see if/how it works?
The case had nothing to do with that. The case was about whether students are REQUIRED to say "under God" or to be subjected it via peer pressure ("why didn't you say the pledge Johnny? aren't you patriotic?")
Another point to throw in here. Prayer in schools is perfectly legal contrary to some people's thoughts to the contrary. What isn't legal is school-sponsored prayer. Students may pray whenever they like provided they are not disrupting the class.
(IANAL) I would presume it is prosecutable under the same laws they would use against cable signal theft.
Under those laws they only need to show that you are wired up in such a way to enable "signal theft" and then it is up to you to prove that you were not "stealing" their signal.
I would contend that any law that is that unevenly enforced is completely unreasonable. I agree that a sports car is a work of art, as is the architecture of a building.
A woman's makeup job could be considered a work of art. or the design of a man's tie. Copyright run amok has serious dangerous consequences for freedom of speech.
Taking a photo of your family in front of the thing is a newsworthy event, as far as your family is concerned. Vacation photos are no different from news reporting except that the target audience is smaller. (Your friends, relatives, and anyone not smart enough to realize not to accept a dinner invitation within 2 months after your vacation.)
Now the trick is for the overlords to print up t-shirts that they retain the copyright for and then place their people in camera view of any event that they would like to censor.
What if a news event would happen next to this sculpture? Could they deny coverage? If not then who decides what is newsworthy?
I am sorry. Public sculptures, no matter how the court currently views them, should not be protected from photography. There is too much danger to freedom of speech.
I think the preferred solution would be to provide a large donation to the OpenOffice project. They could still save $4.2 million per year and the $1 million would be good for the project and buy valuable development time they could use to implement any features they needed for their environment.
I have observed an October snowstorm that caused the same effect that jmauro is describing. Many branches were torn from the trees causes blocked roadways and downed power lines. Some parts of the city were without power for a full week.
The Red Oak's leaves do go through a change. They turn brown and hang there. The altered shape does not have the same capacity to hold snow as in the summertime. Heavy snow on the leaves will probably cause the leaves to separate from the tree before it would cause the branches to break.
Also, just because jmauro is correct, does not mean that BobPaul is incorrect. Events can have multiple causes and reasons.
True but here's the thing. The privilege of being a corporation is granted by the people. If a corporation is useless (i.e. not providing a better product or service but instead gaining business by bully tactics and monopoly/market share abuse) then the people should refuse to continue to grant them the privilege of acting as a corporation.
I am sure you have a realistic view of how business really works. But there is no reason the people should have to put up with abusive entities.
Business actually has 3 purposes. 1. Provide a valuable product or service to the customer 2. Provide income for employees 3. Provide income for owners
If any of these purposes are not met the business will cease to exist. In real life, once a busines reaches a certain size it can skimp on the first and second purposes in favor of the third.
This may be in the best interest of the owners but it is not in the best interest of the customer, the employees, or the citizens that granted the company their corporate charter.
and trying to use some ludicrous pseudo-scientific explanation for an event historically documented in multiple cultures is just plain stupid. The story of the flood exists in enough places that it must be considered as an explanation. Occam would be disappointed at the lengths taken to insert complicated explanations for something so simple.
If the evidence indicates that there was a "great dying" and there is a documented explanation for that that is just being ignored I have serious issues with calling that science. What it really is is those of the secular humanist religion espousing their viewpoints.
There are plenty of creationists and anti-creationists that ignore and/or twist facts to support their pet theories. Perhaps someday people will look at the evidence with an open mind and start working to correlate historical perceptions of events with scientific theories.
On the subject of dating methods, there is no evidence to
Thank you for lumping me in with a bunch of other folks, many of whom blindly ignore scientific data in favor of their book.
I have not offered any data to support another theory concerning the origin of the universe because I do not believe that we can know the answers to that based on the sample size available to us.
You blindly accept modern science as a basis for your beliefs, others blindly accept the "book of fables" as you call it. Someone like me says "that's great. we have a working theory that we can advance scientific knowledge on but let's keep an open mind" and all those of your religion seem plenty happy to set me straight.
1: "atomic half-lives. Wrong." My mistake. But still they are presuming that what they see as consistency translates into accuracy. When the length of the year doesn't match up to what they think it should they don't adjust the rotation of the earth. They re-sync their clock to the earth's rotation. So which one is more accurate?
2: "I fail to see the relevance. If anything, this is a failure to properly define what's being measured." The point I am trying to make is that we live on a little planet for a short period of time. Any ideas we have about the rest of the universe are simply guesses based on a relatively small amount of information. We cannot "properly define what's being measured" because we know so little.
3: 'sun dying, earth frying' "Who asserts this?" The parent post.
Certainly all those methods are great methods but the fact that remains is that we still have not been outside our solar system. I have no problem accepting scientific assertions as the current truth but I still fail to understand the egos that pretend that this "truth" is infallible.
In the vastness of the universe, our solar system is a very small sample size to start from for determining size and our 6000 years of recorded history is a very small sample size to determine that an isotope has a half-life of 700 million years.
I also have a problem with your assertion that the sun would die and the earth would fry if half-lives were sped up. (I assume not in that order because I have a hard time imagining a dead sun frying the earth.) That is a simplistic statement with no reasonable evidence to support it.
Time must be measured relative to something. In recorded history it is measured relative to the earth's spin and trips around the sun. Currently scientists like to measure it relative to atomic half-lives. The 2 methods may or may not correlate over a long period of measurement and that isn't even recognizing the possibility of a 3rd "true" time source.
My point is not to refute the numbers and scientific evidence. They certainly work and provide a consistent basis for scientific progress. That does not mean that they are correct.
For an example of working, but incorrect measurements, measure the speed of a ball thrown while inside a moving bus. Measurements relative to the bus for useful workable and repeatable measurements, but the actual speed of a ball relative to the road beneath could involve the addition or subtraction of the bus speed.
Slashdot Mirror
No. You are not the only one who is alarmed.
If we need to move to a socialist music system (yes. the idea horrifies me) we should do it via a fair taxation system, not one that taxes only computers and internet services. We should just go all out and make everyone except for the deaf pay the music tax. Then we can just pay all the artists a fair and reasonable wage. Sure, some of the superstars will lose money but more regular joes will be able to be musicians.
More like you read on a public bulletin board how to check what your direct deposit check will be on the day before you get it.
There was no robbing going on here. Just people with valid user names and passwords logging in and looking at an unlinked page. The permissions of the system said it was OK. I don't see a crime here.
I am a mix of Cuban-American-Scottish-English-Irish-etc. I applied for minority status for Cuban-American-Scottish-English-Irish-etc's but they told me that there wasn't enough of us to form our own minority.
To all the other Cuban-American-Scottish-English-Irish-etc's out there I say "stand with me. power to the Cuban-American-Scottish-English-Irish-etc's"
The preservation of freedom of the press requires a very open view of what is considered "the press". To define it too narrowly opens the door to a tremendous loss of freedoms that the constitution is designed to protect. Why not just say that Fox News is not "the press" because they lean to the right?
All of the press stems from somebody having something to say and saying it. That is what freedom of speech and the press means. The freedom to say things openly and without fear about the government, companies, or just about anything else.
Stopping leaks, if they want them stopped, are Apple's responsibility. The publishers are not bound by any contractural obligations to Apple and Apple should not be allowed to harass them.
We call ourselves Americans. I realize this makes no sense because there are like 23 countries (or so) in the Americas. However, United Statesian sounds totally weird and besides it could also apply to citizens from the United States of Mexico (Estados Unidoes de Mejico).
So I give up. Call me a Nebraskan.
Boss: "How long will it take to create feature X?"
Herbjorn the Programmer (to himself): "Hmmm. 22 minutes to implement feature X plus 4 solid hours of code cleaning plus upgrading my workstation"
Herbjorn: "3 days, sir. I'll get right on it."
Both consistency and good comments are good traits. I find understandable function and variable names are essential as well.
I believe that language familiarity has little to nothing to do with being a good programmer. A more familiar programmer can program faster but programming principles remain the same across all languages.
Smaller, simpler code is inherently less likely to contain bugs, runs faster, and is easier to troubleshoot.
If programmer A develops 1000 lines of code per day and programmer B develops 10 lines of code per day and both programs do the same thing I will pick programmer B every time (normal lines of code, not contest entries with runon lines and things)
The problem there is that the Vatican is a state.
If Mr Gates gave me $1 million I would refer to him as 'sir' all he wanted.
If he gave me $200, I would refer to him as 'sir' several times.
Those are my prices.
Personally I think we should knight Ed McMahon and start referring to him as Sir Prize.
On a site with mixed security levels (i.e. some anonymous and some permission-based access) the "proper" thing to do is to check security on the results the search engine is returning.
That way an anonymous user would see only results for documents that have read permissions for anonymous while a logged-in user would see results for anything they had permissions to.
Of course this idea works fine for a special purpose database-backed web site but takes a bit more work on just your average web site.
Crawling the site via localhost:80 is the most secure method for a normal site. This would index only documents available to the anonymous user already and would ignore any unlinked documents as well.
If I were Rauschenberg I would sue Cage. It is obvious to me that Cage is simply a performer of the music originally authored by Rauschenberg.
Cage may have refined the written notation some but his work matches exactly the prior work authored by Rauschenberg. Certainly any music student could sit down in from of Rauschenberg's piece and perform Cage's piece, although the tempo might be off a little.
"Hoo-ray for the sounds of fucking silence." (Nicholas Cage in Con Air)
Yesterday's article was spun towards the EFF side so this article spins more toward the "regulators" side. While they are regulators of broadcasts, the issue here is whether they are legitimate regulators of non-broadcast functions of devices. To call them regulators here gives them what I consider an undeserved legitimacy.
As far as TV piracy being a growing problem. It probably will continue to be a problem until someone important catches on that all they need to do is come up with a downloadable program package that contains some forms of advertising that people will view.
One possible downloadable tv program package would feature small corner ads or something. They need to make the ads useable but not so intrusive that people feel the need to try and hack them out of there.
More companies should move the GPL style of EULA. (As much as I like the free stuff I am referring to the versioning idea in this case.)
That way, instead of requiring a lawyer every time you install a piece of software or run Windows Update you could call your lawyer only periodically. "Hey Larry, Could you check out MS EULA 4.3 and see if any of the changes bother you?"
With EULAs all over the place there is no way you can keep up. Many of them are 20 pages or more and how can you read that when you just want to install the software and see if/how it works?
The case had nothing to do with that. The case was about whether students are REQUIRED to say "under God" or to be subjected it via peer pressure ("why didn't you say the pledge Johnny? aren't you patriotic?")
Another point to throw in here. Prayer in schools is perfectly legal contrary to some people's thoughts to the contrary. What isn't legal is school-sponsored prayer. Students may pray whenever they like provided they are not disrupting the class.
(IANAL)
I would presume it is prosecutable under the same laws they would use against cable signal theft.
Under those laws they only need to show that you are wired up in such a way to enable "signal theft" and then it is up to you to prove that you were not "stealing" their signal.
I would contend that any law that is that unevenly enforced is completely unreasonable. I agree that a sports car is a work of art, as is the architecture of a building.
A woman's makeup job could be considered a work of art. or the design of a man's tie. Copyright run amok has serious dangerous consequences for freedom of speech.
Taking a photo of your family in front of the thing is a newsworthy event, as far as your family is concerned. Vacation photos are no different from news reporting except that the target audience is smaller. (Your friends, relatives, and anyone not smart enough to realize not to accept a dinner invitation within 2 months after your vacation.)
Now the trick is for the overlords to print up t-shirts that they retain the copyright for and then place their people in camera view of any event that they would like to censor.
What if a news event would happen next to this sculpture? Could they deny coverage? If not then who decides what is newsworthy?
I am sorry. Public sculptures, no matter how the court currently views them, should not be protected from photography. There is too much danger to freedom of speech.
I think the preferred solution would be to provide a large donation to the OpenOffice project. They could still save $4.2 million per year and the $1 million would be good for the project and buy valuable development time they could use to implement any features they needed for their environment.
I have observed an October snowstorm that caused the same effect that jmauro is describing. Many branches were torn from the trees causes blocked roadways and downed power lines. Some parts of the city were without power for a full week.
The Red Oak's leaves do go through a change. They turn brown and hang there. The altered shape does not have the same capacity to hold snow as in the summertime. Heavy snow on the leaves will probably cause the leaves to separate from the tree before it would cause the branches to break.
Also, just because jmauro is correct, does not mean that BobPaul is incorrect. Events can have multiple causes and reasons.
True but here's the thing. The privilege of being a corporation is granted by the people. If a corporation is useless (i.e. not providing a better product or service but instead gaining business by bully tactics and monopoly/market share abuse) then the people should refuse to continue to grant them the privilege of acting as a corporation.
I am sure you have a realistic view of how business really works. But there is no reason the people should have to put up with abusive entities.
Business actually has 3 purposes.
1. Provide a valuable product or service to the customer
2. Provide income for employees
3. Provide income for owners
If any of these purposes are not met the business will cease to exist. In real life, once a busines reaches a certain size it can skimp on the first and second purposes in favor of the third.
This may be in the best interest of the owners but it is not in the best interest of the customer, the employees, or the citizens that granted the company their corporate charter.
Initially I didn't find Gimp to be very intuitive but I gave it a try. Now I find Photoshop to be non-intuitive and Gimp to be quite easy.
Either Gimp leapfrogged Photoshop or my intuitions are now aligned with the Gimp way of thinking.
and trying to use some ludicrous pseudo-scientific explanation for an event historically documented in multiple cultures is just plain stupid. The story of the flood exists in enough places that it must be considered as an explanation. Occam would be disappointed at the lengths taken to insert complicated explanations for something so simple.
If the evidence indicates that there was a "great dying" and there is a documented explanation for that that is just being ignored I have serious issues with calling that science. What it really is is those of the secular humanist religion espousing their viewpoints.
There are plenty of creationists and anti-creationists that ignore and/or twist facts to support their pet theories. Perhaps someday people will look at the evidence with an open mind and start working to correlate historical perceptions of events with scientific theories.
On the subject of dating methods, there is no evidence to
Thank you for lumping me in with a bunch of other folks, many of whom blindly ignore scientific data in favor of their book.
I have not offered any data to support another theory concerning the origin of the universe because I do not believe that we can know the answers to that based on the sample size available to us.
You blindly accept modern science as a basis for your beliefs, others blindly accept the "book of fables" as you call it. Someone like me says "that's great. we have a working theory that we can advance scientific knowledge on but let's keep an open mind" and all those of your religion seem plenty happy to set me straight.
1: "atomic half-lives. Wrong."
My mistake. But still they are presuming that what they see as consistency translates into accuracy. When the length of the year doesn't match up to what they think it should they don't adjust the rotation of the earth. They re-sync their clock to the earth's rotation. So which one is more accurate?
2: "I fail to see the relevance. If anything, this is a failure to properly define what's being measured."
The point I am trying to make is that we live on a little planet for a short period of time. Any ideas we have about the rest of the universe are simply guesses based on a relatively small amount of information. We cannot "properly define what's being measured" because we know so little.
3: 'sun dying, earth frying' "Who asserts this?"
The parent post.
Certainly all those methods are great methods but the fact that remains is that we still have not been outside our solar system. I have no problem accepting scientific assertions as the current truth but I still fail to understand the egos that pretend that this "truth" is infallible.
In the vastness of the universe, our solar system is a very small sample size to start from for determining size and our 6000 years of recorded history is a very small sample size to determine that an isotope has a half-life of 700 million years.
I also have a problem with your assertion that the sun would die and the earth would fry if half-lives were sped up. (I assume not in that order because I have a hard time imagining a dead sun frying the earth.) That is a simplistic statement with no reasonable evidence to support it.
Time must be measured relative to something. In recorded history it is measured relative to the earth's spin and trips around the sun. Currently scientists like to measure it relative to atomic half-lives. The 2 methods may or may not correlate over a long period of measurement and that isn't even recognizing the possibility of a 3rd "true" time source.
My point is not to refute the numbers and scientific evidence. They certainly work and provide a consistent basis for scientific progress. That does not mean that they are correct.
For an example of working, but incorrect measurements, measure the speed of a ball thrown while inside a moving bus. Measurements relative to the bus for useful workable and repeatable measurements, but the actual speed of a ball relative to the road beneath could involve the addition or subtraction of the bus speed.