I'd be willing to bet that when the copyright is up for expiration Disney will lobby for yet another extension (say 100 years) and Congress will be well paid off to approve it. It will undoubtedly be challenged, but when it hits the Supreme Court, the Supreme Idiots In Robes will say its all ok as the time renewal is still finite (which seems to have been the reason they approved the last extension).
Of course, Disney should really lobby for a 100,000 year extension on copyright as that too would still be finite and thus ok.
Libraries in most colleges and universities are also funded by a chunk of every grant. This can be a sizeable chunk depending on the institution and the granting agency ( this page shows 50%). Of course not all of this goes to the library, but the library gets some of it. Finally, some journals assess the authors a fee for publishing the paper (usually on a per page basis).
I'm still a member of the IEEE but am considering letting my membership lapse. While the IEEE does good journals they cost quite a bit. But another part of the reason is the cost of some of the other stuff - I wanted to get a copy of one of the IEEE specification documents for something (dont remember offhand what it was) and even electronic access was going to cost more than it was worth to me.
I think the "marked confidential" thing bothers me most. Sure, I understand why it is done and why it is considered a Good Thing, but I suspect that part of the reason the problem was ignored for years is that it was so marked. It the bug had not been confidential, I think it would have been fixed long ago.
Security by obscurity is almost always a bad idea for lots of reasons. This is just one more bit of evidence to that effect - that bugs kept in the shadows may be less likely to be fixed.
This is about as good a justification for the INDUCE act as anyone could come up with. Never mind that it should probably be covered by military regulations, never mind that most of the information is not all that sensitive. Never mind that INDUCE is a seriously bad idea. This will be used to make P2P of any sort look ever so much more dangerous. Orrin Hatch is probably dancing around the room now with glee.
All kinds of interesting things show up in it. Yes, there are some nice bits of classical music on it (and some other stuff) but there are lots of other good questions to ask and the spreadsheet makes it easy to ask and answer them.
I was surprised at how few Christmas titles there were (only 39 titles and 350 sets). Whitney Huston's national anthem was only valued at $3.18
(perhaps she should be as upset as anyone). (Or does the disk only contain that one piece? In which case, um, I'm not at all sure what to say - especially if I'm to steer clear of legal action.)
On the whole though, it looks to me like the RIAA decided to dump quite a bit of junk and included just enough good stuff to make it possible for the easily duped or their bought off defendors in politics and the press into defending them. Hey, after all, they did send out 520 copies of Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas".
You'll notice that the signature in the parent refers to "slashdot, promoting situational ethics...", a usage which strongly implies that the poster is a moral absolutist - and moral absolutists often disparage empathy (and the like) as being a Very Bad Thing.
Dunno about that. I write to my congresscritters from time to time (hopefully not so often I'll get tagged as a nut - so I try to pick good issues and write carefully). Of the last dozen times I've done it I've received one response - someone who "agreed with me in principle" but voted the wrong way.
I seriously doubt these representatives are representing me.
There's a beautiful book out called "100 Suns" (Michael Light) which consists of photographs of various nuclear bomb tests. Some of the photographs are just spectacular, some are mostly weird (a couple of the pictures are taken with a very fast camera very quickly after the detonation). Beautifully printed which gives the photos immediacy and power.
Opendx (http://www.opendx.org) is another open source data visualization tool that is well worth looking at. It uses a dataflow kind of programming language with a large number of primitives and while the learning curve to do advanced things is pretty steep, doing easy stuff is, well, easy.
It was originally an IBM product but is now open source. Thanks to IBM are do again.
It can be done with assertions, yup, but less cleanly. The syntax I gave would handle multiple returns from the function and ideally the syntax would provide a way to check the result value regardless of the name. Futher, though it can be rather more expensive, it could be possible to save the value of any needed arguments passed in.
Finally, combined with class invariants, what might take four statements with assertions (assert class invariant on entry, assert preconditions, assert postconditions, assert class invariant on exit) is done with one invariant for the class and the pre/post conditions.
It doesn't remove the need for assertions, but does provide cleaner syntax. For instance, in the code you gave there's no return result.
Reading the bugzilla entries for this and related bugs (an earlier post has the bugzilla url for this bug) is interesting in itself.
It shows that the developers well understood the security implications of the bug - but they were also trying to fit the browser into the MS scheme of things in which programs seem (I'm not a windows expert at that level) to be able to register protocols (shell:, vbscript:, irc:) that they get to handle. Disabling this in windows would then lead to Mozilla/Firefox behaving differently than they've come to expect.
It was further pointed out that mozilla could require a "yes" click in a dialog window, but that that would lead to other security issues.
I'd like to see design by contract built in to languages. In particular I'd like to be able to write something like :
double sqrt(double x) pre x > 0 post abs(result - x * x)/result < epsilon { ... }
If the language has classes, it would be nice to also have class invariants checked before the entry to a public function and after the result, so :
invariant instance-var > 7; public int bar(int x) pre x > 0 post result < 0 { ... }
would (essentially) translate to :
public int bar (int x) pre x > 0 && instance-var > 7 post result < 0 && instance-var > 7 { ... }
Ideally this would be something that could be turned on and off either at compile or run time on a class by class basis.
Functions as first class objects, including currying would also be very nice (like this in haskell)
times3 = 3 *
An unnamed "tuple" type (like in haskell or python) is great for handling multiple return values from functions. For example to get both the quotient and remainder from integer division :
(div,rem) = divrem(7,5);
Iterators are really nice - including the ability to define new iterators on classes (and it would be best if primitives were somehow included in classes). It should be possible to wrap iterators in functions. For example, instead of :
for (i = 0 ; i < N ; i++) for (j = 0 ; j < N ; j++) do_foo(i,j);
It would be nice to be able to define an iterator that produces all the (i,j) pairs :
Native support in the browser for SVG and SVG animation would more than replace animated GIFs as well as providing lots of interesting capabilities that could be useful in other areas.
Of course, that too would be left unused because IE doesn't support it (or worse yet IE would support some bizarre proprietary MS reworking of the basic ideas).
Lots of businesses and services don't seem to have found out about a neat bit of applied mathematics called "Operations Research". OR will help you to find out nice things about statistical patterns of use and predict (though not perfectly) future patterns of use.
In a case like this it would give the ISP a good way to measure current use and figure out how best to buy bandwidth to accomodate it. If an ISP offers unlimited bandwidth, they should be willing to back up that offer - and figure how how best to satisfy the customers and minimize cost while doing that.
Similar things apply to stores with long lines at the cashiers, to doctors/HMO's and so on - the patterns of use are measurable and usually predictable and the service provider should be able to accomodate them.
The math is interesting although not always trivial but simulations can help.
And the poster says I still managed to offer a premium service... but makes it clear that that premium service is only being offered to customers who are not seeking the premium (unlimited bandwidth) advertised.
I didn't have a good network connection at that point so installing from the network would have taken a long, long time. I also did not have another gentoo machine nearby (if I had I'd have tried copying stuff from it).
So i grabbed an old set of Red Hat CD's and installed Red Hat. And quickly started wanting gentoo back.
I once tried "emerge -pretend some-package" and it didn't show lots of dependencies, so a while later I did "emerge some-package" and discovered that somehow in the meantime libc had been upgraded and the emerge was going to install about a zillion packages. Worse yet, for some reason it failed and my machine was unusable.
I like gentoo, and I'm seriously considering converting about four machines over to gentoo, but I always remember that day and the time it took to get things fixed afterwards. And then too (which does rhyme with gentoo) I always hear a voice in the background whispering "emerge kde-base... The horror..."
While it may sound dull, I think information rich content such as the Wikipedia would be good to send along and I'd second the recommendation for the project gutenberg texts.
Similarly there are open source content sites like planetmath.org. I think there are similar sites in other discplines worth sending along.
I'd also think about toolsets that might be of use in the third world like cad software and the like.
If you have disk space (or get the CD working), collections of art and photographs would be good too. Toss in a copy of the Gimp.
Finally, music generation software would probably be very popular.
The New Yorker is the only magazine I've subscribed to (except a few professional journals) for any length of time. While I think that there was a decline a few years back in some areas, it is still one of the best (perhaps really the best) general readership magazine around.
It is good enough and covers enough topics that I suspect you could probably get a GED and good college entrance scores just by reading it carefully all through high school. (OK, maybe a week or two memorizing those nicely useless facts that exam writers favor would help out a bit.)
Worse than the Nazi "final solution"?
Worse than the "Rape of Nanking"?
Worse than the Turkish genocide against the Armenians?
Worse than the genocide in Ruanda?
You get the idea (and I've not even gone earlier than the 20th century)
I was just looking at this with another program and gcj was substantially slower than native java. A big chunk of this was because the java compiler managed to inline a bunch of function calls, but even with that accounted for gcj was slower by 30 percent or a bit more.
I suspect that if the right support for tabs is built into the browser (including things like opening links in new tabs) that extensions to provide the extra-added-attractions will be built and will be likely to be smaller and more focussed than the TBE package.
I use much of the TBE functionality and would like it to be available to users, but I don't know that it belongs in the base browser. If there is good support for the basic operations though, I suspect (having tried to read through the TBE code a couple of times) tab extensions are likely to be less bloated, more modular and easier to implement/fix/...
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I'd be willing to bet that when the copyright is up for expiration Disney will lobby for yet another extension (say 100 years) and Congress will be well paid off to approve it. It will undoubtedly be challenged, but when it hits the Supreme Court, the Supreme Idiots In Robes will say its all ok as the time renewal is still finite (which seems to have been the reason they approved the last extension). Of course, Disney should really lobby for a 100,000 year extension on copyright as that too would still be finite and thus ok.
Libraries in most colleges and universities are also funded by a chunk of every grant. This can be a sizeable chunk depending on the institution and the granting agency ( this page shows 50%). Of course not all of this goes to the library, but the library gets some of it. Finally, some journals assess the authors a fee for publishing the paper (usually on a per page basis).
I'm still a member of the IEEE but am considering letting my membership lapse. While the IEEE does good journals they cost quite a bit. But another part of the reason is the cost of some of the other stuff - I wanted to get a copy of one of the IEEE specification documents for something (dont remember offhand what it was) and even electronic access was going to cost more than it was worth to me.
Security by obscurity is almost always a bad idea for lots of reasons. This is just one more bit of evidence to that effect - that bugs kept in the shadows may be less likely to be fixed.
This is about as good a justification for the INDUCE act as anyone could come up with. Never mind that it should probably be covered by military regulations, never mind that most of the information is not all that sensitive. Never mind that INDUCE is a seriously bad idea. This will be used to make P2P of any sort look ever so much more dangerous. Orrin Hatch is probably dancing around the room now with glee.
All kinds of interesting things show up in it. Yes, there are some nice bits of classical music on it (and some other stuff) but there are lots of other good questions to ask and the spreadsheet makes it easy to ask and answer them.
I was surprised at how few Christmas titles there were (only 39 titles and 350 sets). Whitney Huston's national anthem was only valued at $3.18 (perhaps she should be as upset as anyone). (Or does the disk only contain that one piece? In which case, um, I'm not at all sure what to say - especially if I'm to steer clear of legal action.)
On the whole though, it looks to me like the RIAA decided to dump quite a bit of junk and included just enough good stuff to make it possible for the easily duped or their bought off defendors in politics and the press into defending them. Hey, after all, they did send out 520 copies of Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas".
You'll notice that the signature in the parent refers to "slashdot, promoting situational ethics...", a usage which strongly implies that the poster is a moral absolutist - and moral absolutists often disparage empathy (and the like) as being a Very Bad Thing.
I seriously doubt these representatives are representing me.
There's a beautiful book out called "100 Suns" (Michael Light) which consists of photographs of various nuclear bomb tests. Some of the photographs are just spectacular, some are mostly weird (a couple of the pictures are taken with a very fast camera very quickly after the detonation). Beautifully printed which gives the photos immediacy and power.
It was originally an IBM product but is now open source. Thanks to IBM are do again.
Finally, combined with class invariants, what might take four statements with assertions (assert class invariant on entry, assert preconditions, assert postconditions, assert class invariant on exit) is done with one invariant for the class and the pre/post conditions.
It doesn't remove the need for assertions, but does provide cleaner syntax. For instance, in the code you gave there's no return result.
Reading the bugzilla entries for this and related bugs (an earlier post has the bugzilla url for this bug) is interesting in itself.
It shows that the developers well understood the security implications of the bug - but they were also trying to fit the browser into the MS scheme of things in which programs seem (I'm not a windows expert at that level) to be able to register protocols (shell:, vbscript:, irc:) that they get to handle. Disabling this in windows would then lead to Mozilla/Firefox behaving differently than they've come to expect.
It was further pointed out that mozilla could require a "yes" click in a dialog window, but that that would lead to other security issues.
Interesting reading.
If the language has classes, it would be nice to also have class invariants checked before the entry to a public function and after the result, so :
would (essentially) translate to :
Ideally this would be something that could be turned on and off either at compile or run time on a class by class basis.
Functions as first class objects, including currying would also be very nice (like this in haskell)
An unnamed "tuple" type (like in haskell or python) is great for handling multiple return values from functions. For example to get both the quotient and remainder from integer division :
Iterators are really nice - including the ability to define new iterators on classes (and it would be best if primitives were somehow included in classes). It should be possible to wrap iterators in functions. For example, instead of :
It would be nice to be able to define an iterator that produces all the (i,j) pairs :
Or even, given a mapping function :
Native support in the browser for SVG and SVG animation would more than replace animated GIFs as well as providing lots of interesting capabilities that could be useful in other areas.
Of course, that too would be left unused because IE doesn't support it (or worse yet IE would support some bizarre proprietary MS reworking of the basic ideas).
But...
Lots of businesses and services don't seem to have found out about a neat bit of applied mathematics called "Operations Research". OR will help you to find out nice things about statistical patterns of use and predict (though not perfectly) future patterns of use.
In a case like this it would give the ISP a good way to measure current use and figure out how best to buy bandwidth to accomodate it. If an ISP offers unlimited bandwidth, they should be willing to back up that offer - and figure how how best to satisfy the customers and minimize cost while doing that.
Similar things apply to stores with long lines at the cashiers, to doctors/HMO's and so on - the patterns of use are measurable and usually predictable and the service provider should be able to accomodate them.
The math is interesting although not always trivial but simulations can help.
And the poster says I still managed to offer a premium service... but makes it clear that that premium service is only being offered to customers who are not seeking the premium (unlimited bandwidth) advertised.
So i grabbed an old set of Red Hat CD's and installed Red Hat. And quickly started wanting gentoo back.
And -K does help a lot.
I once tried "emerge -pretend some-package" and it didn't show lots of dependencies, so a while later I did "emerge some-package" and discovered that somehow in the meantime libc had been upgraded and the emerge was going to install about a zillion packages. Worse yet, for some reason it failed and my machine was unusable.
I like gentoo, and I'm seriously considering converting about four machines over to gentoo, but I always remember that day and the time it took to get things fixed afterwards. And then too (which does rhyme with gentoo) I always hear a voice in the background whispering "emerge kde-base... The horror..."
Similarly there are open source content sites like planetmath.org. I think there are similar sites in other discplines worth sending along.
I'd also think about toolsets that might be of use in the third world like cad software and the like.
If you have disk space (or get the CD working), collections of art and photographs would be good too. Toss in a copy of the Gimp.
Finally, music generation software would probably be very popular.
It is good enough and covers enough topics that I suspect you could probably get a GED and good college entrance scores just by reading it carefully all through high school. (OK, maybe a week or two memorizing those nicely useless facts that exam writers favor would help out a bit.)
Open source is good, open source ....
Open source is good, open source
Open source is good,
Gotta install a better parser in my brain.
Worse than the Nazi "final solution"?
Worse than the "Rape of Nanking"?
Worse than the Turkish genocide against the Armenians?
Worse than the genocide in Ruanda?
You get the idea (and I've not even gone earlier than the 20th century)
Good story that (as is usual for John McPhee). The article included a couple of stories about forensic geology. Fascinating read.
I was just looking at this with another program and gcj was substantially slower than native java. A big chunk of this was because the java compiler managed to inline a bunch of function calls, but even with that accounted for gcj was slower by 30 percent or a bit more.
I use much of the TBE functionality and would like it to be available to users, but I don't know that it belongs in the base browser. If there is good support for the basic operations though, I suspect (having tried to read through the TBE code a couple of times) tab extensions are likely to be less bloated, more modular and easier to implement/fix/...