" Here are a few of the more obvious arguments against the law (with my counter-arguments) and some clarifying thoughts: ...
8. People will often claim to be acting for another person's benefit to the exclusion of any benefit to themselves. Any such claims are in contradiction to the law and must therefore be false. The aim of such a device is usually to produce an even greater benefit to the person employing it."
Your counter-arguments to this point seem to me to be rather pointless.
The first assumes that the law is correct - essentially, you are stating that any such claim, being used as a counter-example to your law, must be a false claim, since your law is true. That is, you are assuming the correctness of the law in order to argue its correctness, which is, of course, a circular argument, and should therefore be dismissed.
The second point you make here is also has a fundamental flaw, in the word "usually". If "the aim of such a device is usually to..." then there must be some cases where the aim is not to produce a greater benefit to the claimant.
However, the fact that both points you make to counter such claims are flawed does not (istm) matter very much, since surely such a claim is claim to an act of altruism, and so it is simply a case of finding the (perhaps non-obvious) benefit to the preson making the claim.
Most benchmark tests I've seen show icc producing faster code than gcc, which isn't surprising given that Intel's people presumably know preciesly what optimisations work best on their chips. Since icc produces faster code than gcc, compiling from course with icc will produce a faster system than compiling from source with gcc. Of course, there are fairly obvious downsides, too - using icc limits you in what platforms you can use, and (for those who care about such things) it's most definitely non-Free.
Yes, a post made as AC would be less likely to be modded down than a post you make while logged in, but that is because AC posts start at 0, while your logged-in posts start at 2 (with bonus.) A post at 0 is less likely to be modded down than one at 2, simply because it is already lower. Even with it having been modded up, the AC post is (currently) only at 1, and so is less visible than if you had posted it logged in and it had no moderation done to it.
Well, he does say "If you're feeling particularly masochistic you could pay a ton of money for SCO's rinky-dink UnixWare or OpenServer products" which suggests to me that he doesn't rate UnixWafre highly.
Except it's not the American media - VNU are a British publishing company, and the artice is by Peter Williams of the British National Space Centre.
"In true British low-budget fashion" is surely a comment that could only have been written by a Brit, anyway?
No its not exponential (doubling every 18 months is 2x not x^2)
It is y(x) = 2y(x-1) (where x is time, in units of 18 months to make the numbers nice.)
So y(x) = 4y(x-2) = 8y(x-3) = (2^n)y(x-n)
If we let n = x then we get that y(x) = (2^x)y(0) i.e. exponential growth (y(0) is a constant initial value.)
While your statement that doubling every 18 months is 2x, not x^2, is correct, exponential growth is 2x; x^2 is quadratic growth.
The timeshifting provisions are not as significant as you suggest, since they only apply to broadcasts. A backup copy of a CD cannot come under the timeshifting rule since it is not a copy of a broadcast.
As for the criminal offences, the maximum jail term that it allows is two years, which is a lot less that for burglary or rape.
And why, exactly, do you think that any spammer will pay the slightest bit of notice to this patent, gicven that they break so many laws already? After all, they are currently breaking all the anti-spam laws that currently exist, they are forgers (for using faked "from" addresses,) they comit libel whenever the perform a joe-job attack on anyone, they criminally attempt to take anti-spam blocklists out of action with DDOS attacks, and then there's all the porn spam, viagra spam, pryamid scheme spam, Nigerian 419 scams, spams that are attempts to steal passwords for online banks, paypal, etc. There seems no reason why adding another one to that list will make any difference to spammers, unfortunatly.
From the manual for Norton Internet Security 2004 (the product in question,) page 161:
"There are two ways to restrict Web site access:
Block Web sites by category
Specify which categories of sites users can and cannot access. You can also add or remove specific sites to or from the list of blocked sites in a category. Use this option to restrict users from visiting specific types of Web sites, but to allow everything else.
Create a list of websites that can be visited.
Specify the Web sites that all users can visit. Use this option to strictly control users' Internet activities, regardless of users' account types.
Canon seem to do quite well on this. My printer is a BJ-10SX, about 10 years old. It has worked perfectly well on every OS I've ever use it with, from Win3.0 to WinXP to Linux. They still make the ink cartridges for it, which is about all the support from them it needs.
All right, apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Reddeno, may I introduce you to my good friend, Sarcasm? I don't believe you've met before. Sarcasm, this is Reddeno, who might not understand you at first, I do hope you have time to explain what it is you do.
Re:Mebbe learn to write a bayesian filter?
on
Another Whack at Spam
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with Bayesian filters is that, if they are used enough, they will drive spammers to make their spam look less spammy, and then getting those extra 9s of efficiency without getting a bad false-positive rate gets harder.
Honestly, I don't know how old the universe is--I just know that it's at least 6,000 years old, and probably a fair bit older.
How do you know it's at least 6000 years old? How do you know that $deity didn't just snap its fingers 10 seconds ago and create the universe fully formed, including creating everyone of Earth, with full memories and a belief that they have been around for a long time?
He readily amdits that it's not possible to create a full replacement for X, QT and GTK in the ammount of time he had,as he writes in the report:
"Clearly a full replacement of an entire graphical user interface system is far beyond the scope of a fourth year undergraduate individual project. The aim is instead to create a suitable foundation upon which a replacement can easily be built."
Re:Wonder if they used this?
on
SCO's Plan Examined
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Just to add to that, perhaps "deriving" (and so on) wasn't the right word to use, since "an arrow indicates an inheritance like a compatibility, it is not only a matter of source code." Which makes any claims based on the map even more flakey.
Re:Wonder if they used this?
on
SCO's Plan Examined
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've just looked through the two maps, and the only difference I can see is that SCO have Minix deriving from Sinix (which is shown as a derivitive of V7, 4.1BSD and Xenix 3.0) while the original map shows Minix as coming only from V7 & 4.1BSD. (Both Sinix and Minix are shown coming from the line from V7 to V8 after an input from BSD.)
Although this difference initally appears to be a simple mis-reading of the arrows, it could be significant, since Xenix was bought by SCO.
There aren't any modifications as such, but the highlighting that SCO have done is inaccurate. (Note, I haven't checked the entire SCOed version for differences, only the paths they have highlighted.)
The mag-stripe machines certainly do store that info, at least for a short while, because the machines don't let you use the same card through the same set of barriers for a little while. AFAICT, there's nothing fundamentally different with the new cards, privacy wise, except for the storage medium.
A simple way to prevent dodgy hand-counting: allow anyone, and everyone, to watch the count. With representatives of all the political parties observing the counting, the chances of a counter getting away with anything are, imho, very slim.
There was discussion of that very idea in news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting about a month ago, and, while it could be a good idea, there are a number of practial problems that were mentioned, but it could work.
I'd say it's more using a shotgun to remove a verucca, since they're doing a great job of shooting themselves in their collective foot and making people hate them all the more.
That's excelent. If you don't bother removing broken addresses from your spam (sorry, did I say spam? I'm sure I meant legimate opt-in mailing lists) databases, they'll gradually bit-rot, until you end up sending most of your crap to verisign's/dev/null, rather than it all going to the rest of us for us to filter out of our email.
Slashdot Mirror
" Here are a few of the more obvious arguments against the law (with my counter-arguments) and some clarifying thoughts:
...
8. People will often claim to be acting for another person's benefit to the exclusion of any benefit to themselves. Any such claims are in contradiction to the law and must therefore be false. The aim of such a device is usually to produce an even greater benefit to the person employing it."
Your counter-arguments to this point seem to me to be rather pointless.
The first assumes that the law is correct - essentially, you are stating that any such claim, being used as a counter-example to your law, must be a false claim, since your law is true. That is, you are assuming the correctness of the law in order to argue its correctness, which is, of course, a circular argument, and should therefore be dismissed.
The second point you make here is also has a fundamental flaw, in the word "usually". If "the aim of such a device is usually to..." then there must be some cases where the aim is not to produce a greater benefit to the claimant.
However, the fact that both points you make to counter such claims are flawed does not (istm) matter very much, since surely such a claim is claim to an act of altruism, and so it is simply a case of finding the (perhaps non-obvious) benefit to the preson making the claim.
Most benchmark tests I've seen show icc producing faster code than gcc, which isn't surprising given that Intel's people presumably know preciesly what optimisations work best on their chips. Since icc produces faster code than gcc, compiling from course with icc will produce a faster system than compiling from source with gcc. Of course, there are fairly obvious downsides, too - using icc limits you in what platforms you can use, and (for those who care about such things) it's most definitely non-Free.
Or maybe they could use gollum, and then it would be a tolkein ring.
Yes, a post made as AC would be less likely to be modded down than a post you make while logged in, but that is because AC posts start at 0, while your logged-in posts start at 2 (with bonus.) A post at 0 is less likely to be modded down than one at 2, simply because it is already lower. Even with it having been modded up, the AC post is (currently) only at 1, and so is less visible than if you had posted it logged in and it had no moderation done to it.
Well, he does say "If you're feeling particularly masochistic you could pay a ton of money for SCO's rinky-dink UnixWare or OpenServer products" which suggests to me that he doesn't rate UnixWafre highly.
Except it's not the American media - VNU are a British publishing company, and the artice is by Peter Williams of the British National Space Centre.
"In true British low-budget fashion" is surely a comment that could only have been written by a Brit, anyway?
No its not exponential (doubling every 18 months is 2x not x^2)
It is y(x) = 2y(x-1) (where x is time, in units of 18 months to make the numbers nice.)
So y(x) = 4y(x-2) = 8y(x-3) = (2^n)y(x-n)
If we let n = x then we get that y(x) = (2^x)y(0) i.e. exponential growth (y(0) is a constant initial value.)
While your statement that doubling every 18 months is 2x, not x^2, is correct, exponential growth is 2x; x^2 is quadratic growth.
The timeshifting provisions are not as significant as you suggest, since they only apply to broadcasts. A backup copy of a CD cannot come under the timeshifting rule since it is not a copy of a broadcast. As for the criminal offences, the maximum jail term that it allows is two years, which is a lot less that for burglary or rape.
And why, exactly, do you think that any spammer will pay the slightest bit of notice to this patent, gicven that they break so many laws already?
After all, they are currently breaking all the anti-spam laws that currently exist, they are forgers (for using faked "from" addresses,) they comit libel whenever the perform a joe-job attack on anyone, they criminally attempt to take anti-spam blocklists out of action with DDOS attacks, and then there's all the porn spam, viagra spam, pryamid scheme spam, Nigerian 419 scams, spams that are attempts to steal passwords for online banks, paypal, etc.
There seems no reason why adding another one to that list will make any difference to spammers, unfortunatly.
According to the report on their website, it was "offensive, shocking and in bad taste."
"There are two ways to restrict Web site access:
- Block Web sites by category
- Create a list of websites that can be visited.
"Specify which categories of sites users can and cannot access. You can also add or remove specific sites to or from the list of blocked sites in a category. Use this option to restrict users from visiting specific types of Web sites, but to allow everything else.
Specify the Web sites that all users can visit. Use this option to strictly control users' Internet activities, regardless of users' account types.
What was that about it not being configurable?
Canon seem to do quite well on this. My printer is a BJ-10SX, about 10 years old. It has worked perfectly well on every OS I've ever use it with, from Win3.0 to WinXP to Linux. They still make the ink cartridges for it, which is about all the support from them it needs.
All right, apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Reddeno, may I introduce you to my good friend, Sarcasm? I don't believe you've met before. Sarcasm, this is Reddeno, who might not understand you at first, I do hope you have time to explain what it is you do.
The problem with Bayesian filters is that, if they are used enough, they will drive spammers to make their spam look less spammy, and then getting those extra 9s of efficiency without getting a bad false-positive rate gets harder.
Honestly, I don't know how old the universe is--I just know that it's at least 6,000 years old, and probably a fair bit older.
How do you know it's at least 6000 years old? How do you know that $deity didn't just snap its fingers 10 seconds ago and create the universe fully formed, including creating everyone of Earth, with full memories and a belief that they have been around for a long time?
He readily amdits that it's not possible to create a full replacement for X, QT and GTK in the ammount of time he had,as he writes in the report:
"Clearly a full replacement of an entire graphical user interface system is far beyond the scope of a fourth year undergraduate individual project. The aim is instead to create a suitable foundation upon which a replacement can easily be built."
Just to add to that, perhaps "deriving" (and so on) wasn't the right word to use, since "an arrow indicates an inheritance like a compatibility, it is not only a matter of source code." Which makes any claims based on the map even more flakey.
I've just looked through the two maps, and the only difference I can see is that SCO have Minix deriving from Sinix (which is shown as a derivitive of V7, 4.1BSD and Xenix 3.0) while the original map shows Minix as coming only from V7 & 4.1BSD. (Both Sinix and Minix are shown coming from the line from V7 to V8 after an input from BSD.)
Although this difference initally appears to be a simple mis-reading of the arrows, it could be significant, since Xenix was bought by SCO.
There aren't any modifications as such, but the highlighting that SCO have done is inaccurate. (Note, I haven't checked the entire SCOed version for differences, only the paths they have highlighted.)
The mag-stripe machines certainly do store that info, at least for a short while, because the machines don't let you use the same card through the same set of barriers for a little while. AFAICT, there's nothing fundamentally different with the new cards, privacy wise, except for the storage medium.
Unfortunatly, if Card Scrambler Man zapped your card, it would no longer work in the automatic ticket barriers.
A simple way to prevent dodgy hand-counting: allow anyone, and everyone, to watch the count. With representatives of all the political parties observing the counting, the chances of a counter getting away with anything are, imho, very slim.
There was discussion of that very idea in news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting about a month ago, and, while it could be a good idea, there are a number of practial problems that were mentioned, but it could work.
I'd say it's more using a shotgun to remove a verucca, since they're doing a great job of shooting themselves in their collective foot and making people hate them all the more.
That's excelent. If you don't bother removing broken addresses from your spam (sorry, did I say spam? I'm sure I meant legimate opt-in mailing lists) databases, they'll gradually bit-rot, until you end up sending most of your crap to verisign's /dev/null, rather than it all going to the rest of us for us to filter out of our email.