B) He sends them against elected Phoenix officials, like the mayor, whose email he requests for political reasons. He does NOT send FOIA requests to journalists as is incorrectly claimed by GP.
C) That said, Joe does appear to lean on journalists, but he does that with search warrants and deputies. Slashdot has covered this in the past and there is much information to be found on Wikipedia concerning the incidents of note.
Basically, he's an incompetent Sheriff who hasn't been voted out because too many people are too enamored with his "tough on crime" stance to notice that he's completely incompetent and not making the people of Arizona any safer. They'll try to defend him by claiming that the opposition is in favor of illegal immigration or some other utterly political nonsense, while ignoring the fact that his incompetence has cost Arizona taxpayers something like $100 million.
(That's a very rough estimate using the sources on Wikipedia, but it's about the right order of magnitude, especially when you count what we pay for legal liability insurance and Arizona's insanely high deductibles).
> And even if the ham stuff is damaged by EMP I bet the crustier hams could fix it.
Actually, some of us could build new rigs. Hell, I think I remember a few questions related to how to make basic radio circuits on the written exam for the General class license (I'm really dating myself here... there is no General class license any more).
> If copyright is the least free, then licenses like BSD are *MORE* free than GPL, because they grant an even WIDER license to use the software than the GPL does.
As your own analogy points out, the people who hate the GPL are mad because you won't give them a free lunch. If that were not the case, they'd make their own damn lunch instead of complaining that you're a "fascist vegetarian" because all you have are mushrooms in the fridge when they want steak.
The GPL is about sharing: you have to share back. Why are we always being called selfish by the people who want something for nothing?
> Google was able to rise to dominate search and challenge Microsoft primarily because of its numerous software patents. Without those patents, Microsoft, Altavista, Yahoo, or any other company could have used Page Rank and other algorithms covered by Google's dozens of software patents. Only part of Google's success is its good web design and marketing savvy. A huge part is the fact that it just plain does search better than almost anybody else.
Errr... the difference between idea and execution is a large one that many people seem to forget.
Yes, Microsoft *could* copy PageRank (and do we really know that they haven't? who knows what secret algorithms Bing! uses, except that the execution sucks?), but they can't copy all the Google employees, or the sense of goodwill, or the business savvy in the search arena.
I think that too many people underestimate the value of being able to reduce ideas to practice. I mean, if I gave you Google's patents and some venture capital, but on the other side, I put the Google team (who had to invent new algorithms), who do you think would make the better search engine? I know who I would bet money on...
> 35 U.S.C. 273 refers to business method patents but *does not* specifically allow them.
The summary probably should've said that the section "explicitly allows for" them, because it mentions defenses against them (which would be unnecessary if those patents didn't exist and weren't presumed to be patentable).
Any misunderstanding probably came from this:
2. Whether the Federal Circuitâ(TM)s âoemachine-or-transformationâ test for patent eligibility, which effectively forecloses meaningful patent protection to many business methods, contradicts the clear Congressional intent that patents protect âoemethod[s] of doing or conducting business.â 35 U.S.C. Â 273.
> Medical procedures can already be patented, but practitioners and 'related medical entities' (e.g., the hospital, clinic, etc where the practitioner works) has a defense against infringement.
Assuming you're talking about the defense I think you're talking about, that defense doesn't apply to biotech patents, which makes it something of a trap.
Also, the medical procedures he's probably talking about are a reference to a prior story when the "procedure" was entirely mental with no post-solution activity whatsoever. Those opposed to that patent called it a "patent on medical knowledge" (and I, personally, feel that was an apt description).
> I mean, there's only, what, twelve of them, right? That database shouldn't take long to search through every single time someone clicks "submit"...
Umm, aside from the fact that you have to supply them with a hyperlink to it (so that they can find their own page...), it really doesn't take that long to search a well-designed database.
I mean, you realize that Google searches through way more data than they ever had and that it does it in a fraction of a second, right? They COULD just search the *one* web page linked to by the user, make sure it's their own site (they don't own that many domains), then find the text, right?
Don't make it a harder problem than it actually is.
> That she expects to earn a large amount of money by being immediately put into a "management" position and paid vast sums of money solely due to the fact that she is such a wonderful person and "deserves" to be a manager with a large salary.
What are you talking about? Any half-competent career services department should be able to see that anyone that lawsuit-happy who has that big of a sense of entitlement has a bright future at the RIAA (or any of the other MAFIAA franchises).
This is just a simple matter of matching up the person's personality and skill set to the right organization...
You may be right that they weren't sabotaging Lotus 123. I don't remember much about that story (though there WAS a big lawsuit over some of those things, unless I'm confused by all the many lawsuits Microsoft has been through).
That said, in spite of your talk about them "bending over backwards to maintain compatibility" it's not like they'll do that to help their competitors. Read this, for example.
Don't get me wrong. They DO preserve compatibility with their own stuff, even to ridiculous degrees (it often causes bugs, like that huge hole in image previews caused by support for a really ancient, terrible file format nobody has used for at least a decade).
But don't try to make it sound like they're altruistic about compatibility or that they're above using cutthroat tactics against their competition.
> But I haven't written a CLI app in a while, and I'm mostly used to post-VC6 Visual Studio (VC6 was pretty terrible standards-wise, they even got the for-loop scoping wrong).
A _VERY_ old install CD that has been collecting dust for ages says that I was using VC++ 5.0, Enterprise Edition (I got it by working on a project with a professor in college; I don't think I've ever used it since then). So they've certainly had a long time to improve, even though I clearly remember how horribly broken it used to be.
He might not want everyone looking at his porn collection?
Also, you'd have to scan every pair of images for dupes, which changes the complexity from N to N*log(N). Moreover, that relies on humans and some people have no idea which image is higher quality. Not everyone even understands what a compression artifact is. Such people won't give you useful answers.
In his situation, I'd probably run the dupe finder program, then examine all the duplicates personally. There can't be *that* many... right?
> Really? Everyone I know who uses Visual Studio.Net loves it, and I frequently hear comments, even on Slashdot, how its the "One thing that Microsoft got right." I certainly enjoy using it, and scratch my head when I come across the occasional (rare) comment that its "bloated and buggy."
I don't know how VS is now because I haven't used it for ages, so my complaint may be outdated, but I remember trying to make some CLI applications with it years ago and finding that parts of the standard library were screwed up horribly. You couldn't safely get keyboard input the simple way without following some 3rd party instructions that told me which parts of their standard library implementation were buggy and how to change them so that they actually worked properly.
> The goal was to facilitate theft of service, not interoperability.
Sad thing is, "theft of service" is required to make a device that interoperates with their network.
Mind you, I'm not trying to say that the law allows this, because I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Just that breaking technical protection measures is usually necessary to actually interoperate with DRM-encumbered services.
> The pre on the other hand says 'Hey, I'm an iPod!'
Read Sega v. Accolade. If you try to abuse trademark law by using a lock-out measure that requires people to use your trademark to get past it, they are allowed to use your trademark for that purpose.
This case presents several difficult questions of first impression involving our copyright and trademark laws. 1 We are asked [977 F.2d 1514] to determine, first, whether the Copyright Act permits persons who are neither copyright holders nor licensees to disassemble a copyrighted computer program in order to gain an understanding of the unprotected functional elements of the program. In light of the public policies underlying the Act, we conclude that, when the person seeking the understanding has legitimate reason for doing so and when no other means of access to the unprotected elements exists, such disassembly is as a matter of law a fair use of the copyrighted work. Second, we must decide the legal consequences under the Lanham Trademark Act of a computer manufacturerâ(TM)s use of a security system that affords access to its computers to software cartridges that include an initialization code which triggers a screen display of the computer manufacturerâ(TM)s trademark. The computer manufacturer also manufactures software cartridges; those cartridges all contain the initialization code. The question is whether the computer manufacturer may enjoin competing cartridge manufacturers from gaining access to its computers through the use of the code on the ground that such use will result in the display of a "false" trademark. Again, our holding is based on the public policies underlying the statute. We hold that when there is no other method of access to the computer that is known or readily available to rival cartridge manufacturers, the use of the initialization code by a rival does not violate the Act even though that use triggers a misleading trademark display. Accordingly, we reverse the district courtâ(TM)s grant of a [24 USPQ2d 1563] preliminary injunction in favor of plaintiff-appellee Sega Enterprises, Ltd. on its claims of copyright and trademark infringement. We decline, however, to order that an injunction pendente lite issue precluding Sega from continuing to use its security system, even though such use may result in a certain amount of false labeling. We prefer to leave the decision on that question to the district court initially.
It's all there in the second holding. The courts won't put up with that kind of crap.
I realize that you're trying to distinguish what they're doing from User-Agent strings, but I don't want people to go around accusing people of trademark violations unless they can cite applicable law and precedent and apply them to the facts of this particular case.
Frankly, this is why I hate all that imaginary property crap.
> While I have no major principal objections to copyright infringers being kicked off internet (if they use internet for the infringement), I would want to know more of the details before making my mind up.
Have you ever sung "Happy Birthday" in public? If so, you're a copyright infringer too.
The net would get pretty empty pretty fast if we actually kicked off all the infringers. Mind you, the MAFIAA would probably *LOVE* that...
I haven't played Daggerfall (yet) on DOSBox, but I have played other games and one of the things you may have to do is to fiddle with the CPU section of DOSBox.conf until you get it running at a reasonable speed.
It probably won't help you much, but mine looks like this:
[cpu] # core -- CPU Core used in emulation: normal,simple,dynamic,auto. # auto switches from normal to dynamic if appropriate. # cycles -- Amount of instructions DOSBox tries to emulate each millisecond. # Setting this value too high results in sound dropouts and lags. # You can also let DOSBox guess the correct value by setting it to max. # The default setting (auto) switches to max if appropriate. # cycleup -- Amount of cycles to increase/decrease with keycombo. # cycledown Setting it lower than 100 will be a percentage.
core=auto cycles=10000 cycleup=500 cycledown=20
That "cycleup"/"cycledown" bit is important, too. Because you can just experiment by adjusting the cycles up and down while playing the game until the game plays at about the right speed, then go back and put the value you found via experiment into your DOSBox.conf file.
Why do so many DOSBox tutorials tell you that you have to mount the directory every time you just want to play the game?
I set up my DOSBox.conf to have an autoexec section like this:
[autoexec] # Lines in this section will be run at startup.
mount C C:\Programs\DOSBox\C_DRIVE C:
So now I just store all my DOS games in that C_DRIVE folder and they're right there when I open DOSBox. I also make batch files so that I don't have to cd to whatever directory and remember the executable name for the main EXE. I mean, if I want to play Master of Magic, I have it set up so that I just type "mom" which runs MOM.BAT and opens it up for me.
Which reminds me, Master of Magic is another fun old game to play under DOSBox. At least, if you can still find a copy of it anywhere.
> But is a program that stores and displays recipes, math?
Yes. The recipes all correspond to binary numbers (as does any other data). The search function in it is a mathematical function that maps queries to results. The UI maps the binary numbers from sensor devices to the numbers that represent the on-screen output.
Like I said, you don't know what math is, you only think you do. Numbers are no different than any other precise form of information. You're trying to ignore a mathematical proof by relying on your incorrect understanding of what math is.
If you really want to debate something, you'd have to say that perhaps mathematics shouldn't automatically be unpatentable by statute. Frankly, mathematics being unpatentable is one of the few parts of patent law I completely agree with. I just wish they'd realize that math IS software and software is math.
There's no clear distinction between the two. For any stupid "non-mathematical" program you come up with, we can translate it back into pure math.
> It's last digit is 1 (as is it's first and only digit).
Very true, but only for the *other* way of writing the number. The whole point of that exercise is to illustrate that numbers can be represented in different ways, one of which does not and cannot have a "last" digit.
> I often see the opinion that "mathematical software" should not be patentable, but "non-mathematical software" should be. I appreciate the theoretical arguments on this subject, but the practical ones seem to point the other way.
What does "mathematical" mean to you, exactly? Seems like you think it means that the software has to use a lot of math you've never heard of to do something complex. Now, I can at least respect the argument that very innovative new processes might merit legal protection, though I think it's a terrible idea because it's unnecessary and it carries a high cost for society. Mathematicians can also make life difficult for you. If I create an equivalence relation between something patented and something not patented, what does the patent control? Have I destroyed the utility of the patent, or does the patent swallow up my "invention" too?
But back to the original point, the division between "mathematical" and "non-mathematical" software is the result of fuzzy-headed thinking by people who don't know what math is. Software is equivalent to math and that link describes how you turn programs into math (and vice versa). There's no such thing as non-mathematical software because there's no such thing as non-mathematical math.
Now I know there are some people, especially that guy at IP Watchdog who was in the news quite a while ago, who think that because they can do a few fancy integrals, partial derivatives, and linear algebra, they know all there is to know about math. But they totally ignore the stuff that's relevant here and probably don't even know what type systems or proof calculi are. Suffice it to say that anyone who thinks they know all there is to know about math is wrong.
I wasn't logged in before, GP anon was me. Anyhow, the period was the end of the sentence, not some attempt to make it into a float/string/boolean/whatever and I certainly didn't use the Python operators. It's supposed to be the same token (1) on both sides. But that's why we use formal languages that are picky about syntax and which can be checked automatically to avoid people finding weird ambiguities to question.
(Wiki links added because most people are too lazy to Google the terms they don't understand. Especially if they don't realize that they don't actually understand them.)
So even if you find some crazy language where they define != to be an equality operator or something equally unusual, software is still equivalent to math. Metamath wouldn't be possible otherwise. And as you can see, they're doing just fine.
> They should call it Paulism instead of Christianity.
I don't think Paul would like that, if you read what I've excerpted from the First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, Chapter 1:
11 For it has been declared to me concerning you, my bretheren, by those of Chloe's household, that there are contentions among you. 12 Now I say this, that each of you says, "I am of Paul," or "I am of Apollos," or "I am of Cephas," or "I am of Christ." 13 Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptised in the name of Paul? 14 I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15 Lest anyone should say that I had baptized in my own name. 16 Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas. Besides, I do not know whether I baptized any other.
Speaking of which, this wasn't actually written by me. I'm actually an impostor with the same name publishing a pseudepigraph. Obviously, I've never used the word sesquicentennial on Slashdot before, let alone vestigial or varmint, so the word frequency and vocabulary is all wrong, as astute scholars may eventually realize some thousands of years from now. Hopefully, this post will prove to be pivotal when they debate whether Slashdot should have been called Cowboy Neildot given that CmdrTaco was actually a minor figure in the whole rise of the Cult of Slashdot in Ancient America.
Slashdot Mirror
A) They're FOIA requests (not FAIO).
B) He sends them against elected Phoenix officials, like the mayor, whose email he requests for political reasons. He does NOT send FOIA requests to journalists as is incorrectly claimed by GP.
C) That said, Joe does appear to lean on journalists, but he does that with search warrants and deputies. Slashdot has covered this in the past and there is much information to be found on Wikipedia concerning the incidents of note.
Basically, he's an incompetent Sheriff who hasn't been voted out because too many people are too enamored with his "tough on crime" stance to notice that he's completely incompetent and not making the people of Arizona any safer. They'll try to defend him by claiming that the opposition is in favor of illegal immigration or some other utterly political nonsense, while ignoring the fact that his incompetence has cost Arizona taxpayers something like $100 million.
(That's a very rough estimate using the sources on Wikipedia, but it's about the right order of magnitude, especially when you count what we pay for legal liability insurance and Arizona's insanely high deductibles).
I thought they renamed them, too? But yes, I am out of it.
I was a Tech+, but only because I couldn't manage the Morse code for General.
> And even if the ham stuff is damaged by EMP I bet the crustier hams could fix it.
Actually, some of us could build new rigs. Hell, I think I remember a few questions related to how to make basic radio circuits on the written exam for the General class license (I'm really dating myself here... there is no General class license any more).
> If copyright is the least free, then licenses like BSD are *MORE* free than GPL, because they grant an even WIDER license to use the software than the GPL does.
As your own analogy points out, the people who hate the GPL are mad because you won't give them a free lunch. If that were not the case, they'd make their own damn lunch instead of complaining that you're a "fascist vegetarian" because all you have are mushrooms in the fridge when they want steak.
The GPL is about sharing: you have to share back. Why are we always being called selfish by the people who want something for nothing?
> Google was able to rise to dominate search and challenge Microsoft primarily because of its numerous software patents. Without those patents, Microsoft, Altavista, Yahoo, or any other company could have used Page Rank and other algorithms covered by Google's dozens of software patents. Only part of Google's success is its good web design and marketing savvy. A huge part is the fact that it just plain does search better than almost anybody else.
Errr... the difference between idea and execution is a large one that many people seem to forget.
Yes, Microsoft *could* copy PageRank (and do we really know that they haven't? who knows what secret algorithms Bing! uses, except that the execution sucks?), but they can't copy all the Google employees, or the sense of goodwill, or the business savvy in the search arena.
I think that too many people underestimate the value of being able to reduce ideas to practice. I mean, if I gave you Google's patents and some venture capital, but on the other side, I put the Google team (who had to invent new algorithms), who do you think would make the better search engine? I know who I would bet money on...
> 35 U.S.C. 273 refers to business method patents but *does not* specifically allow them.
The summary probably should've said that the section "explicitly allows for" them, because it mentions defenses against them (which would be unnecessary if those patents didn't exist and weren't presumed to be patentable).
Any misunderstanding probably came from this:
> Medical procedures can already be patented, but practitioners and 'related medical entities' (e.g., the hospital, clinic, etc where the practitioner works) has a defense against infringement.
Assuming you're talking about the defense I think you're talking about, that defense doesn't apply to biotech patents, which makes it something of a trap.
Also, the medical procedures he's probably talking about are a reference to a prior story when the "procedure" was entirely mental with no post-solution activity whatsoever. Those opposed to that patent called it a "patent on medical knowledge" (and I, personally, feel that was an apt description).
> I mean, there's only, what, twelve of them, right? That database shouldn't take long to search through every single time someone clicks "submit"...
Umm, aside from the fact that you have to supply them with a hyperlink to it (so that they can find their own page...), it really doesn't take that long to search a well-designed database.
I mean, you realize that Google searches through way more data than they ever had and that it does it in a fraction of a second, right? They COULD just search the *one* web page linked to by the user, make sure it's their own site (they don't own that many domains), then find the text, right?
Don't make it a harder problem than it actually is.
> That she expects to earn a large amount of money by being immediately put into a "management" position and paid vast sums of money solely due to the fact that she is such a wonderful person and "deserves" to be a manager with a large salary.
What are you talking about? Any half-competent career services department should be able to see that anyone that lawsuit-happy who has that big of a sense of entitlement has a bright future at the RIAA (or any of the other MAFIAA franchises).
This is just a simple matter of matching up the person's personality and skill set to the right organization...
You may be right that they weren't sabotaging Lotus 123. I don't remember much about that story (though there WAS a big lawsuit over some of those things, unless I'm confused by all the many lawsuits Microsoft has been through).
That said, in spite of your talk about them "bending over backwards to maintain compatibility" it's not like they'll do that to help their competitors. Read this, for example.
Don't get me wrong. They DO preserve compatibility with their own stuff, even to ridiculous degrees (it often causes bugs, like that huge hole in image previews caused by support for a really ancient, terrible file format nobody has used for at least a decade).
But don't try to make it sound like they're altruistic about compatibility or that they're above using cutthroat tactics against their competition.
> But I haven't written a CLI app in a while, and I'm mostly used to post-VC6 Visual Studio (VC6 was pretty terrible standards-wise, they even got the for-loop scoping wrong).
A _VERY_ old install CD that has been collecting dust for ages says that I was using VC++ 5.0, Enterprise Edition (I got it by working on a project with a professor in college; I don't think I've ever used it since then). So they've certainly had a long time to improve, even though I clearly remember how horribly broken it used to be.
> How about Amazon's Mechanical Turk service?
He might not want everyone looking at his porn collection?
Also, you'd have to scan every pair of images for dupes, which changes the complexity from N to N*log(N). Moreover, that relies on humans and some people have no idea which image is higher quality. Not everyone even understands what a compression artifact is. Such people won't give you useful answers.
In his situation, I'd probably run the dupe finder program, then examine all the duplicates personally. There can't be *that* many... right?
> Really? Everyone I know who uses Visual Studio .Net loves it, and I frequently hear comments, even on Slashdot, how its the "One thing that Microsoft got right." I certainly enjoy using it, and scratch my head when I come across the occasional (rare) comment that its "bloated and buggy."
I don't know how VS is now because I haven't used it for ages, so my complaint may be outdated, but I remember trying to make some CLI applications with it years ago and finding that parts of the standard library were screwed up horribly. You couldn't safely get keyboard input the simple way without following some 3rd party instructions that told me which parts of their standard library implementation were buggy and how to change them so that they actually worked properly.
> The goal was to facilitate theft of service, not interoperability.
Sad thing is, "theft of service" is required to make a device that interoperates with their network.
Mind you, I'm not trying to say that the law allows this, because I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Just that breaking technical protection measures is usually necessary to actually interoperate with DRM-encumbered services.
I'm pretty sure they'd have the same hardware. You know, given that Visa & Mastercard are two different brands owned by the same company...
(That's why they always bash Discover in the ads.)
> The pre on the other hand says 'Hey, I'm an iPod!'
Read Sega v. Accolade. If you try to abuse trademark law by using a lock-out measure that requires people to use your trademark to get past it, they are allowed to use your trademark for that purpose.
It's all there in the second holding. The courts won't put up with that kind of crap.
I realize that you're trying to distinguish what they're doing from User-Agent strings, but I don't want people to go around accusing people of trademark violations unless they can cite applicable law and precedent and apply them to the facts of this particular case.
Frankly, this is why I hate all that imaginary property crap.
> While I have no major principal objections to copyright infringers being kicked off internet (if they use internet for the infringement), I would want to know more of the details before making my mind up.
Have you ever sung "Happy Birthday" in public? If so, you're a copyright infringer too.
The net would get pretty empty pretty fast if we actually kicked off all the infringers. Mind you, the MAFIAA would probably *LOVE* that...
I haven't played Daggerfall (yet) on DOSBox, but I have played other games and one of the things you may have to do is to fiddle with the CPU section of DOSBox.conf until you get it running at a reasonable speed.
It probably won't help you much, but mine looks like this:
That "cycleup"/"cycledown" bit is important, too. Because you can just experiment by adjusting the cycles up and down while playing the game until the game plays at about the right speed, then go back and put the value you found via experiment into your DOSBox.conf file.
Why do so many DOSBox tutorials tell you that you have to mount the directory every time you just want to play the game?
I set up my DOSBox.conf to have an autoexec section like this:
So now I just store all my DOS games in that C_DRIVE folder and they're right there when I open DOSBox. I also make batch files so that I don't have to cd to whatever directory and remember the executable name for the main EXE. I mean, if I want to play Master of Magic, I have it set up so that I just type "mom" which runs MOM.BAT and opens it up for me.
Which reminds me, Master of Magic is another fun old game to play under DOSBox. At least, if you can still find a copy of it anywhere.
> But is a program that stores and displays recipes, math?
Yes. The recipes all correspond to binary numbers (as does any other data). The search function in it is a mathematical function that maps queries to results. The UI maps the binary numbers from sensor devices to the numbers that represent the on-screen output.
Like I said, you don't know what math is, you only think you do. Numbers are no different than any other precise form of information. You're trying to ignore a mathematical proof by relying on your incorrect understanding of what math is.
If you really want to debate something, you'd have to say that perhaps mathematics shouldn't automatically be unpatentable by statute. Frankly, mathematics being unpatentable is one of the few parts of patent law I completely agree with. I just wish they'd realize that math IS software and software is math.
There's no clear distinction between the two. For any stupid "non-mathematical" program you come up with, we can translate it back into pure math.
> It's last digit is 1 (as is it's first and only digit).
Very true, but only for the *other* way of writing the number. The whole point of that exercise is to illustrate that numbers can be represented in different ways, one of which does not and cannot have a "last" digit.
> Not all algorithms are math; most algorithms use some math.
That statement is false. There's an isomorphism between computer programs and mathematical proofs. Algorithms are math.
> I often see the opinion that "mathematical software" should not be patentable, but "non-mathematical software" should be. I appreciate the theoretical arguments on this subject, but the practical ones seem to point the other way.
What does "mathematical" mean to you, exactly? Seems like you think it means that the software has to use a lot of math you've never heard of to do something complex. Now, I can at least respect the argument that very innovative new processes might merit legal protection, though I think it's a terrible idea because it's unnecessary and it carries a high cost for society. Mathematicians can also make life difficult for you. If I create an equivalence relation between something patented and something not patented, what does the patent control? Have I destroyed the utility of the patent, or does the patent swallow up my "invention" too?
But back to the original point, the division between "mathematical" and "non-mathematical" software is the result of fuzzy-headed thinking by people who don't know what math is. Software is equivalent to math and that link describes how you turn programs into math (and vice versa). There's no such thing as non-mathematical software because there's no such thing as non-mathematical math.
Now I know there are some people, especially that guy at IP Watchdog who was in the news quite a while ago, who think that because they can do a few fancy integrals, partial derivatives, and linear algebra, they know all there is to know about math. But they totally ignore the stuff that's relevant here and probably don't even know what type systems or proof calculi are. Suffice it to say that anyone who thinks they know all there is to know about math is wrong.
I wasn't logged in before, GP anon was me. Anyhow, the period was the end of the sentence, not some attempt to make it into a float/string/boolean/whatever and I certainly didn't use the Python operators. It's supposed to be the same token (1) on both sides. But that's why we use formal languages that are picky about syntax and which can be checked automatically to avoid people finding weird ambiguities to question.
The theorem I was mentioning above is called Curry-Howard-Lambek correspondence (it took me a while to find all the links):
(Wiki links added because most people are too lazy to Google the terms they don't understand. Especially if they don't realize that they don't actually understand them.)
So even if you find some crazy language where they define != to be an equality operator or something equally unusual, software is still equivalent to math. Metamath wouldn't be possible otherwise. And as you can see, they're doing just fine.
> They should call it Paulism instead of Christianity.
I don't think Paul would like that, if you read what I've excerpted from the First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, Chapter 1:
In case you're wondering, as best we know, Paul was beheaded with a sword.
Speaking of which, this wasn't actually written by me. I'm actually an impostor with the same name publishing a pseudepigraph. Obviously, I've never used the word sesquicentennial on Slashdot before, let alone vestigial or varmint, so the word frequency and vocabulary is all wrong, as astute scholars may eventually realize some thousands of years from now. Hopefully, this post will prove to be pivotal when they debate whether Slashdot should have been called Cowboy Neildot given that CmdrTaco was actually a minor figure in the whole rise of the Cult of Slashdot in Ancient America.