You ever been to moscow? You aint cruisin' anywhere there I tell you. When the roads aren't blocked with trafic they're blocked with snow. Also the police there are right bastards, stopping people at random, searching cars and asking for bribes. On the other hand perhaps it would be perfect.
Just because the standard my be implemented as GPL, that doesn't mean a proprietary implementation cannot be written by MS et al, unless the standard uses patented technology which is only licenced to GPL implementations.
IMHO, anything released initially under GPL AND protected by patent will never become a real standard. Why? Because unless Microsoft feel able to implement and integrate it most home PC users will not feel comfortable downloading it, and unless Microsoft creates an implementation it will have difficulty reaching critical mass, especially since TV-over-IP would be a extremely home user targeted technology and that is pure MS space. The microsoft response would be to release a different version (like WMA), which would then become the de-facto standard.
On the other hand, if MS create their own version you can bet you life that they'll "extend" it so as to break OSS versions.
Face it, in home user land, whatever Bill says goes.
On the plus side we do now have a new twist on the old Civilization type genre. Suicide diplomacy. You start with loads of goodwill, friends and allies, and you have to try to alienate them all in the shortest possible time.
I'm not sure about "viral". Ironically, given/.s little Borg Gates pic, I think the GPL is more borg like than anything else. Everything it comes in contact with becomes GPL.
We are GPL. You're source code will be merged with our own and added to the whole. Resistance is futile. You will be distributed
I know I will probably get flamed for this but I believe that the GPL is morally wrong. Why should my choice to release my source code free then force others to also release theirs? By choosing to release under the GPL you are making a statement which says "I am morally superior to you, and if you want to use my work you have to agree with me". You infringe their rights to control their own work. I would rather release my source code under a licence which said, "Do what you like with your source code, but you must distribute mine"
For the last few hundred years copyright has meant that you cannot distribute copies of published works without permission. Originally this was to do with censorship but was then changed to provide the author a living, and to encourage him to keep writing. It is not and has never been considered a subsidy to distribution, which is why your zero reproduction cost argument is flawed. However this only applies to published works and as currently applied source code isn't a published work when you buy Windows, only the binaries are published. You are correct, copyright is not a natural right, however it is a government sanctioned monopoly, designed to allow authors not to starve. Unpublished stuff is not protected by copyright, but also you have no right to read unpublished, un-copyrighted works. For example, I cannot demand to read your private emails or letter just because they are not copyrighted. Equally you cannot demand to see draft copies of published works or notes used to generate the complete book. For a book these could be described as source code. You could come to a private agreement with an author to see his notes or draft work so that you could write a sequel, but then he could make you sign a contract that says you cannot give them to anyone else. This is effectively a licence and they are governed by contract law, in which you basically have the power to agree to anything within reason including giving up basic rights. This also brings me to another definition of publish. That is, selling creative content without additional licence restrictions. If you agree to a licence which says you may not disclose the information to anyone, then doing so would leave you open to penalties. As a creator of a work I believe you have the right to do what you want with it, including forcing everone to give you money if someone sells a copy. After all, why should anyone else make money from the fruits of your labor, without giving you some too.
I believe that if anyone wishes to protect their source code then that is their right, as it is anyones right not to disclose private documents, and to make a living. If I choose to release my source code FOC then that is my right, but I shouldn't have the right to demand that all source code everywhere is available.
when information can be published (and marketed and sold) without significant cost, there is no point in significantly burdening the public with copyright obligations.
Actually given this statement of the ease of reproduction I would draw the opposite conclusion. Given the ease and low cost of reproduction (licenced or not) copyright restrictions should be more firmly enforced. OK the big boys may not need too much protection, but the lone programmer in his bedroom should have the right to choose to earn a living from his skills if that is what he wishes. We should respect his choice and abide by it.
The problem is that martian gravity isn't strong enough to keep a thick enough atmosphere for complex animal life. IIRC every martian spring the frozen C02 at the poles vapourises and migrates to the equatorial regions, where it heats enough that some of the gas achieves (a very low) escape velocity. Mars is constantly leaking gases, and oxygen, being lighter than C02 would escape even more easily. You may be able to generate a thick C02 atmosphere for a short time, but once the temperature started to rise you might start loosing gas faster than you could produce it.
My understanding of the situation is that in long mode all your pointers etc are 64bit values and you don't get the extra registers without being in long mode. This means that unless you have compiled for 64bit pointers your code won't run in 32bit mode because the size of the pointers will be wrong. AFAIK the 64bit mode isn't a cpu flag which can be tested for like the SSE/SSE2 instructions, but a mode like Real/Protected mode. Perhaps your process may be able to switch mode but I doubt it. The other possibility of course is that you write byte compiled code which will run in the native x86-64 runtime.
Well, given that a circle must be made out of a finite number of atoms (or some other particle) we can say that there is no such thing as a true circle. At the limit of zooming in all you have is a polygon with a lot of sides. I don't know, but I'd guess that even space is quantised at some level so you couldn't even say with perfect accuracy that a particle orbiting in an energy field traced out a perfect circle.
actually thats 1024 bytes to a kibibyte. the prefix "kilo" means 1000. This is the standard that hard disk makers adhere to, which is partly why your OS always reports a hell of a lot less disk space than you thought you bought. Regardless, the simplest and least ambiguous way to compare bandwidths is by counting bits.
I've read this before and discarded it. Try this as a simple proof that this guy has missed the point. Take a sheet of normal paper, hold one edge just below your lips and blow. You will see the far end of the sheet rise up. This is without any pressure on the underside of the sheet. Now blow equally hard on the underside on the paper. You should see the paper rise but by a smaller amount. What the author of the article you quote missed was that the "sucking" force he explained as simply a difference in pressure between the upper and lower surface, is in fact the result of a partial vacuum on the upper surface caused by the innability of the air to expand fast enough. Clearly you have just proved this to be the case, as when you blew over the upper surface there was no additional pressure on the lower surface. OK technically there is no such thing as suction, just as is there is no such thing as centrigual force, but the upward force we call lift is greater than the change in momentum of the air beneath the wing. The author is correct that there is no such thing as suction, however he is wrong to suggest that the upward pressure comes from the motion of air under the wing. It comes from the expansive tendancy of air and the fact that air is a gas under pressure. Relieved of the weight of the atmosphere pressing down it will press outwards in all directions including back up under the wing, thus lifting the aircraft. It is worth noting that this effect is due to the compressibility of air, which is why aerofoils work differently to hydrofoils, as water is not compressible. One more thing, try explaining aerodynamic stall without assuming that the majority of lift is due to the shape of the upper surface.
Everyone get this wrong about Kanute. It is often assumed that he was a power crazy fool with a God complex. Quite the opposite. Kanute ordered the tide not to come in to prove to his people that he was just a man and the tide would pay no more attention to him than anyone else.
I agree. I think that gathering information on foreign citizens, foreign companies and foreign goverments is called espionage, and TIA will inevitably involve spying on allies.
I'm sorry, I appear to be lost. I was under the impression I was viewing slashdot, but then I saw an anti-microsoft comment modded as a Troll. My faith in the world I thought I knew has been severely shaken.
As it happens I didn't read your.sig, and if I had I might have said "for example", but the content would remain the same.
I use the word "piracy" instead of "stealing" because they are different crimes. Semantics ARE important. Without them we could never agree what it is we're arguing about.
I think the solution to ad skipping is going to be more product placement advertising, or more precisely, the adverts will get longer, and have plots. If a company wants to advertise their stuff they'll have to either i) Find a program coming up which can use their stuff or ii) Get involved in the production of a program so that the story line can be altered to use their stuff. What you'll end up with is whole programs being written by a series of advertising execs, with a writer to glue them together, and all the comittee having a veto over how their product is used. Of course, the effect of this will be to make TV shit, which no one wants to watch. The evil alternative is some kind of encrypted TV stream that cannot be recorded except on a licenced bit of kit, which can disable ad skipping and is protected by DMCA. The final alternative I can imagine is that everything becomes pay per view, or in effect, to watch anything you download the DVD at a high price. The point is, someone has to pay for decent TV, and if it's not advertisers, its gonna be you.
You mentioned how you didn't like the term "file sharing", and that you can't say "Stealing". Well I don't like either. Clearly "File Sharing" covers both legal and illegal activities, and as such cannot be used exclusively in the context of illegal copyrighted material distribution, which is after all what we are talking about. "Stealing" or "Theft" are both highly emotive words used by the industry to emphasise how bad it is, and neither are really appropriate because of the non-property nature of copyright. To draw an analogy, we don't say "Tax Theft", we say "Tax Evasion", but it is a similar crime; not paying fees that are due. Every crime has it own terminology for those who perpetrate it, and the correct one for those who breach copyright is "Pirate". But going back to the tax evasion analogy for a second, how many accountants get prosecuted for "Contributory Tax Evasion", whereas Napster et al got shut down for the analogous crime.
You mention that Russia has a flat tax system and lower taxes than the US and that its working. Can I ask you one question? Have you ever been to Russia? I was in Moscow in November and I can tell you it is NOT working. OK some people are rich, mafia, politicos, top businessmen. But most of them can afford fancy accountants and bribes so they don't pay any tax. The vast majority of Russians live in total abject poverty. It is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and there is no such thing as a russian middle class. You're either rich or poor. There are no "comfortably well off" people. Having been there I can say this with some authority. Give me a nice friendly social democracy anyday over an ultra capitalist one. The lesson is this, the success of a country can be measured more in the happiness of its citizens than by the wealth of its government. After all, if a government is by the people, for the people, why should it be doing anything other than seeking the best for the WHOLE of the people, rather than just the top 1%.
The explosion forces the inner coil to short against the outer metal shell, thus shortening the effective length of the coil. This increases the charge density remaining in the coil. When the entire length of coil has been shorted out all of the electrical energy which had been in the coiled part of the wire is now stored in the part of the wire which was left sticking out of one end. This remaining bit of wire acts as an aerial which transmits the EM pulse. Roughly speaking.
Rubbish. EMP's are easy to generate. Some time ago New scientist magazine published details of how to make an EMP bomb out of a metal tube, a long bit of coiled wire, a battery and some explosive. All you have to do is wrap the wire around the explosive, insert it into the metal tube makig sure the two are kept apart by insulators, attach the battery and let it go BOOM. So long as the explosive explodes progressivly from one end to the other, you should get a load of energy quickly compressed into a bit of wire left sticking out of the other end, which then radiates your EMP. Its supposedly fairly easy to built one with a range of a hundred meters or so, which is great for destroying radar, C3 sites etc. Bad at killing people, but that's not what they're for.
Actually I think the USA likes Israel because the American politicians are terrified of being branded anti-semitic by the jewish lobby, thus causing them to loose their seats in the senate or whatever. America still suffers from this national guilt complex for not stepping in against Hitler sooner to prevent the haulocaust. All Israel has to do to get whatever assistance it requires is indulge in a little emotional/political blackmail. Why do you think no US administration has been able to effectively slap down on Israel for using F16's, Apaches etc against unarmed women and children?
I've been writing vc++ for a few years now, but one feature I'd REALLY like to see would be to be able to easily set conditional breakpoints on a particular instance of an object. In fact, more object awareness across the board would be nice. I'd also like to be able to be somewhere in a windows message handler, and be able to see where the message had come from. I'd like to be able to call functions from the watch window like I could in DEC FORTRAN. I'd like to see the VC++ debugger be able to enumerate over collection objects using for_each, and examine COM properties as if they were variables. I want the VB watch and immediate windows for VC++.
Am i the only one that sees an possible selection effect error in this so called discovery? The researchers apparently were able to express General Relativity in terms of gravitation field, mass, velocity and the speed of gravity. They then used this formula to calculate the speed of gravity and unsuprisingly it came out as they expected. Why unsuprisingly? Well they are using as the basis of their proof the very thing they're trying to prove! If General Relativity is wrong in terms of the speed of gravity, then the formula that was used to calculate the speed of gravity was flawed and the result is invalid. Or to put it another way, if General Relativity is wrong, General Relativity is wrong. This statement is clearly useless and means that the experiment proves nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
You ever been to moscow? You aint cruisin' anywhere there I tell you. When the roads aren't blocked with trafic they're blocked with snow. Also the police there are right bastards, stopping people at random, searching cars and asking for bribes. On the other hand perhaps it would be perfect.
Just because the standard my be implemented as GPL, that doesn't mean a proprietary implementation cannot be written by MS et al, unless the standard uses patented technology which is only licenced to GPL implementations.
IMHO, anything released initially under GPL AND protected by patent will never become a real standard. Why? Because unless Microsoft feel able to implement and integrate it most home PC users will not feel comfortable downloading it, and unless Microsoft creates an implementation it will have difficulty reaching critical mass, especially since TV-over-IP would be a extremely home user targeted technology and that is pure MS space. The microsoft response would be to release a different version (like WMA), which would then become the de-facto standard.
On the other hand, if MS create their own version you can bet you life that they'll "extend" it so as to break OSS versions.
Face it, in home user land, whatever Bill says goes.
On the plus side we do now have a new twist on the old Civilization type genre. Suicide diplomacy. You start with loads of goodwill, friends and allies, and you have to try to alienate them all in the shortest possible time.
I'm not sure about "viral". Ironically, given /.s little Borg Gates pic, I think the GPL is more borg like than anything else. Everything it comes in contact with becomes GPL.
We are GPL. You're source code will be merged with our own and added to the whole. Resistance is futile. You will be distributed
For the last few hundred years copyright has meant that you cannot distribute copies of published works without permission. Originally this was to do with censorship but was then changed to provide the author a living, and to encourage him to keep writing. It is not and has never been considered a subsidy to distribution, which is why your zero reproduction cost argument is flawed. However this only applies to published works and as currently applied source code isn't a published work when you buy Windows, only the binaries are published. You are correct, copyright is not a natural right, however it is a government sanctioned monopoly, designed to allow authors not to starve. Unpublished stuff is not protected by copyright, but also you have no right to read unpublished, un-copyrighted works. For example, I cannot demand to read your private emails or letter just because they are not copyrighted. Equally you cannot demand to see draft copies of published works or notes used to generate the complete book. For a book these could be described as source code. You could come to a private agreement with an author to see his notes or draft work so that you could write a sequel, but then he could make you sign a contract that says you cannot give them to anyone else. This is effectively a licence and they are governed by contract law, in which you basically have the power to agree to anything within reason including giving up basic rights. This also brings me to another definition of publish. That is, selling creative content without additional licence restrictions. If you agree to a licence which says you may not disclose the information to anyone, then doing so would leave you open to penalties. As a creator of a work I believe you have the right to do what you want with it, including forcing everone to give you money if someone sells a copy. After all, why should anyone else make money from the fruits of your labor, without giving you some too.
I believe that if anyone wishes to protect their source code then that is their right, as it is anyones right not to disclose private documents, and to make a living. If I choose to release my source code FOC then that is my right, but I shouldn't have the right to demand that all source code everywhere is available.
Actually given this statement of the ease of reproduction I would draw the opposite conclusion. Given the ease and low cost of reproduction (licenced or not) copyright restrictions should be more firmly enforced. OK the big boys may not need too much protection, but the lone programmer in his bedroom should have the right to choose to earn a living from his skills if that is what he wishes. We should respect his choice and abide by it.
The problem is that martian gravity isn't strong enough to keep a thick enough atmosphere for complex animal life. IIRC every martian spring the frozen C02 at the poles vapourises and migrates to the equatorial regions, where it heats enough that some of the gas achieves (a very low) escape velocity. Mars is constantly leaking gases, and oxygen, being lighter than C02 would escape even more easily. You may be able to generate a thick C02 atmosphere for a short time, but once the temperature started to rise you might start loosing gas faster than you could produce it.
My understanding of the situation is that in long mode all your pointers etc are 64bit values and you don't get the extra registers without being in long mode. This means that unless you have compiled for 64bit pointers your code won't run in 32bit mode because the size of the pointers will be wrong. AFAIK the 64bit mode isn't a cpu flag which can be tested for like the SSE/SSE2 instructions, but a mode like Real/Protected mode. Perhaps your process may be able to switch mode but I doubt it. The other possibility of course is that you write byte compiled code which will run in the native x86-64 runtime.
Well, given that a circle must be made out of a finite number of atoms (or some other particle) we can say that there is no such thing as a true circle. At the limit of zooming in all you have is a polygon with a lot of sides. I don't know, but I'd guess that even space is quantised at some level so you couldn't even say with perfect accuracy that a particle orbiting in an energy field traced out a perfect circle.
actually thats 1024 bytes to a kibibyte. the prefix "kilo" means 1000. This is the standard that hard disk makers adhere to, which is partly why your OS always reports a hell of a lot less disk space than you thought you bought. Regardless, the simplest and least ambiguous way to compare bandwidths is by counting bits.
I've read this before and discarded it. Try this as a simple proof that this guy has missed the point. Take a sheet of normal paper, hold one edge just below your lips and blow. You will see the far end of the sheet rise up. This is without any pressure on the underside of the sheet. Now blow equally hard on the underside on the paper. You should see the paper rise but by a smaller amount. What the author of the article you quote missed was that the "sucking" force he explained as simply a difference in pressure between the upper and lower surface, is in fact the result of a partial vacuum on the upper surface caused by the innability of the air to expand fast enough. Clearly you have just proved this to be the case, as when you blew over the upper surface there was no additional pressure on the lower surface. OK technically there is no such thing as suction, just as is there is no such thing as centrigual force, but the upward force we call lift is greater than the change in momentum of the air beneath the wing. The author is correct that there is no such thing as suction, however he is wrong to suggest that the upward pressure comes from the motion of air under the wing. It comes from the expansive tendancy of air and the fact that air is a gas under pressure. Relieved of the weight of the atmosphere pressing down it will press outwards in all directions including back up under the wing, thus lifting the aircraft. It is worth noting that this effect is due to the compressibility of air, which is why aerofoils work differently to hydrofoils, as water is not compressible. One more thing, try explaining aerodynamic stall without assuming that the majority of lift is due to the shape of the upper surface.
Its all a question of priorities. You need /. you dont need backdoors and easter eggs
It brings a whole new meaning to "packet collision".
major karma bonus to u for the rfc 1149 mention.
Everyone get this wrong about Kanute. It is often assumed that he was a power crazy fool with a God complex. Quite the opposite. Kanute ordered the tide not to come in to prove to his people that he was just a man and the tide would pay no more attention to him than anyone else.
I agree. I think that gathering information on foreign citizens, foreign companies and foreign goverments is called espionage, and TIA will inevitably involve spying on allies.
I'm sorry, I appear to be lost. I was under the impression I was viewing slashdot, but then I saw an anti-microsoft comment modded as a Troll. My faith in the world I thought I knew has been severely shaken.
As it happens I didn't read your .sig, and if I had I might have said "for example", but the content would remain the same.
I use the word "piracy" instead of "stealing" because they are different crimes. Semantics ARE important. Without them we could never agree what it is we're arguing about.
I think the solution to ad skipping is going to be more product placement advertising, or more precisely, the adverts will get longer, and have plots. If a company wants to advertise their stuff they'll have to either i) Find a program coming up which can use their stuff or ii) Get involved in the production of a program so that the story line can be altered to use their stuff. What you'll end up with is whole programs being written by a series of advertising execs, with a writer to glue them together, and all the comittee having a veto over how their product is used. Of course, the effect of this will be to make TV shit, which no one wants to watch. The evil alternative is some kind of encrypted TV stream that cannot be recorded except on a licenced bit of kit, which can disable ad skipping and is protected by DMCA. The final alternative I can imagine is that everything becomes pay per view, or in effect, to watch anything you download the DVD at a high price. The point is, someone has to pay for decent TV, and if it's not advertisers, its gonna be you.
You mentioned how you didn't like the term "file sharing", and that you can't say "Stealing". Well I don't like either. Clearly "File Sharing" covers both legal and illegal activities, and as such cannot be used exclusively in the context of illegal copyrighted material distribution, which is after all what we are talking about. "Stealing" or "Theft" are both highly emotive words used by the industry to emphasise how bad it is, and neither are really appropriate because of the non-property nature of copyright. To draw an analogy, we don't say "Tax Theft", we say "Tax Evasion", but it is a similar crime; not paying fees that are due. Every crime has it own terminology for those who perpetrate it, and the correct one for those who breach copyright is "Pirate". But going back to the tax evasion analogy for a second, how many accountants get prosecuted for "Contributory Tax Evasion", whereas Napster et al got shut down for the analogous crime.
You mention that Russia has a flat tax system and lower taxes than the US and that its working. Can I ask you one question? Have you ever been to Russia? I was in Moscow in November and I can tell you it is NOT working. OK some people are rich, mafia, politicos, top businessmen. But most of them can afford fancy accountants and bribes so they don't pay any tax. The vast majority of Russians live in total abject poverty. It is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and there is no such thing as a russian middle class. You're either rich or poor. There are no "comfortably well off" people. Having been there I can say this with some authority. Give me a nice friendly social democracy anyday over an ultra capitalist one. The lesson is this, the success of a country can be measured more in the happiness of its citizens than by the wealth of its government. After all, if a government is by the people, for the people, why should it be doing anything other than seeking the best for the WHOLE of the people, rather than just the top 1%.
The explosion forces the inner coil to short against the outer metal shell, thus shortening the effective length of the coil. This increases the charge density remaining in the coil. When the entire length of coil has been shorted out all of the electrical energy which had been in the coiled part of the wire is now stored in the part of the wire which was left sticking out of one end. This remaining bit of wire acts as an aerial which transmits the EM pulse. Roughly speaking.
Rubbish. EMP's are easy to generate. Some time ago New scientist magazine published details of how to make an EMP bomb out of a metal tube, a long bit of coiled wire, a battery and some explosive. All you have to do is wrap the wire around the explosive, insert it into the metal tube makig sure the two are kept apart by insulators, attach the battery and let it go BOOM. So long as the explosive explodes progressivly from one end to the other, you should get a load of energy quickly compressed into a bit of wire left sticking out of the other end, which then radiates your EMP. Its supposedly fairly easy to built one with a range of a hundred meters or so, which is great for destroying radar, C3 sites etc. Bad at killing people, but that's not what they're for.
Actually I think the USA likes Israel because the American politicians are terrified of being branded anti-semitic by the jewish lobby, thus causing them to loose their seats in the senate or whatever. America still suffers from this national guilt complex for not stepping in against Hitler sooner to prevent the haulocaust. All Israel has to do to get whatever assistance it requires is indulge in a little emotional/political blackmail. Why do you think no US administration has been able to effectively slap down on Israel for using F16's, Apaches etc against unarmed women and children?
Except that they're not flying, unidentified, or objects. They're optical artifacts.
I've been writing vc++ for a few years now, but one feature I'd REALLY like to see would be to be able to easily set conditional breakpoints on a particular instance of an object. In fact, more object awareness across the board would be nice. I'd also like to be able to be somewhere in a windows message handler, and be able to see where the message had come from. I'd like to be able to call functions from the watch window like I could in DEC FORTRAN. I'd like to see the VC++ debugger be able to enumerate over collection objects using for_each, and examine COM properties as if they were variables. I want the VB watch and immediate windows for VC++.
Am i the only one that sees an possible selection effect error in this so called discovery? The researchers apparently were able to express General Relativity in terms of gravitation field, mass, velocity and the speed of gravity. They then used this formula to calculate the speed of gravity and unsuprisingly it came out as they expected. Why unsuprisingly? Well they are using as the basis of their proof the very thing they're trying to prove! If General Relativity is wrong in terms of the speed of gravity, then the formula that was used to calculate the speed of gravity was flawed and the result is invalid. Or to put it another way, if General Relativity is wrong, General Relativity is wrong. This statement is clearly useless and means that the experiment proves nothing.