This is dumb, and some would argue anti-competetive monopolistic behaviour. You have a patent on something cool. You let people use it without any royalties; it becomes popular. Really popular. Then, all of a sudden, you start charging royalties, and everyone is trapped. It would not have become that popular if royalties had been there in the first place.
This is reminiscent of two things: Microsoft (slightly different modus operandi), and drug dealers (the first one's free kiddies).
Should be that if you don't enforce your patent within a reasonable time frame, you lose the right to do so. In a perfect world. Which we are far, far, away from.
Given the presence of both LAME and anti-DRM code, perhaps the software looks for programs on your system which might be used for copyright infringement, then 'phones home' if it finds them. Sinister, but looking more likely than Sony actually using this sort of code to do anything useful.
Stop worrying about copyright, and start worrying about personal rights.
Nonetheless, even in this case, the copyright scenario is still interesting - is Sony infringing copyright by doing this even if the code is not being executed?
Well, that's entirely the point. Creation and evolution can co-exist, without the need for Intelligent Design. ID brings the notion that things needed to be tinkered with after the ball got rolling, which presumes things were not done properly at the start. Much like a computer program. If 'god' could write a computer program, one would expect she could get it right the first time (with a divine amount of analysis, design, implemention and testing). Once deployed, it just works. ID goes more along the lines of a buggy computer program that needs constant patching and re-working to keep it on track. As I see it, ID isn't about explaining the origins of life, it's about an extremely dodgy attempt to inject God into science. It's about as bad a fudge as can be made.
Well, not quite. I don't believe there is a god. But I can't find fault with certain arguments that there is one (namely that this god did the 'big bang'). That's the thing about beliefs - they don't need an underlying rational argument. And in this case, the belief in question (what caused the big bang) is of no consequence whatsoever.
Urgh - this is getting too much for my brain to translate into your puny language.
In fact, further to this, many religious folk consider ID to be _incompatible_ with Creationism, and, indeed, blasphemous. Consider that an omnipotent being, could, at creation, set all of the constants and whatnot so as to set of the evolution process, which would eventually lead to what we have now. For intelligent design to hold true, He/She must have botched the figures at the start, requiring constant meddling and fudging to get the desired outcome.
Not too many religious people like the idea of an imperfect Creator; that leads into all sorts of nasty areas.
btw - I am an atheist, though see no particular problem with some God/Giant Squid/Super-Intelligent Shade of Blue setting off the Big Bang, since it doesn't really matter anyway.
This ain't about X and qt and such (rather one small non-UI component of KDE), but qt, and gtk for that matter, can exist without X. Gtk and so forth have been ported to use DirectFB primitives rather than X ones, and the Qtopia system is a qt based palmtop environment. In some ways, that's the cool thing about layers.
As I understand it, Reiser4 barely (if at all) departs from standard POSIX filesystem semantics. While at the same time, allow meta-data capabilities (eg ACLs) of just about any sort. It does this by treating each file as a directory as well. So if you open the file as a file, you get the file. If you open the file as a directory, you get its meta-data. This does not break anything, nor require the use of any extra filesystem primitives. So I would think that in theory a port should be easy to any POSIX system.
I heard it as one guy who wants to fuck three women in succession, but only has two condoms. How can he do so without any chance of anyone catching a disease from any other person?
Hint: the solution lies in the concept of surfaces.
Problem: It is not recommended you try this at home, as experts advise against using 2 condoms on top of each other, as it _increases_ the chance of breakage.
The question is similar to the one I've been using with some of my classes of late:
An explorer walks a kilometre south, a kilometre west, then a kilometre north, and ends up where she started. Where is she? The answer is the North Pole, which is but the elementary first part of the problem.
The second part of the problem: There are more places where she could be. Describe where they are.
Absolutely suspect, yes, but deer are pests here in the land of Oz, and professional hunters are paid to kill them per scalp (or some other such body part). So no plan to pull the deer back home was necessary.
Actually, that's not quite true - it's not free to UK viewers - while being 'free-to-air' TV, TV owners have to pay a yearly license fee of about 100 pounds I think. i.e. a BBC tax.
well, I was thinking javascript, seeing as though it's in every browser. Sure, to call it a platform is debatable, but it already seems to have well and truly surpassed what was originally intended of it.
For one thing, this is idiotic in terms of resources. Plastic requires oil. Oil is running out. Before too long, these will not be cost effective to produce, let alone a grand waste of plastic.
Unless, of course, they provide a way for the average consumer to melt their play-once dvds into fuel for their car.
Well, for a start you'd get twice as many IP addresses, though that would not be ideal as they could not communicate with each other. If only the DNS section were to split, that could still work as then you'd just have two seperate namespaces; something like
http://US:slashdot.org
and
http://EU:slashdot.org
or some such thing - this could probably be done without modifyin client software even, though search engines would have a bit of work to do. But at the end of the day, the two DNS systems would probably be near identical save a few contensious sites. The popularity of each system would determine which one survived.
But back to IP - a split may actually be good in this sense, as the new system could use IPv6. About fscking time! The new international/EU body would be responsible for dishing out IPv6 addresses, with possibly a new namespace too, while the 'old' internet would still be accessible through a gateway.
But back to DNS - This is probably going to be a moot point before too long anyway - who needs DNS when you have google? (Oh the irony!)
I read quite an interesting proposal for a DNS system based on FreeNet - completely distributed and just about uncontrollable, but based on popularity. If georgewbush.com wants to take over gwbush.com, then it just has to be more popular. Now _that's_ democracy.
in-ear-canal phones like the shure and etymonics do just as good a job in reducing outside noise as the active cancelling ones, plus have much better quality drivers to boot (and don't require batteries). My Shure e2c's are better that any headphone I've ever tried, and the volume on my jukebox seldom goes above 20%, compared to a around 70-80% with normal earbuds. And they only cost about US$70. The next up in the range are supposed heaps better still, but at a cost (one, day, she will be mine, oh yes)
Ummm... writing to NTFS under linux has been (unofficially) stable for some time now, even the older versions (=2.4). The newer (2.6) version works fine, albeit in a slightly round-about manner in some cases (there are certain file operations it cannot do straight up)
A friend of mine, about ten years ago now, did basically that - but rather than just black, took some liberty with the spraycans, and made some damn cool designs on keyboard, monitor, and case. This was ten years ago, well before case mods were in. To get around problems mentions, he used high quality spray paint, pulled the keys off the keyboard, then sanded back the keys. Now, that was well geek, back in those days. Plus you could use those nice spring loaded IBM keyboards.
These sort of teaching aids can be great for not only engaging students (something that traditional teaching methods are having difficulty with) if used in the right way, but also getting them to think more (arguably the main aim of schooling). Planning, shooting and editting a video can be a brilliant project for English or foreign language learning; the kids get motivated, and have a sense of acheivement at the end of it. As compared to another bloody set of worksheets that bores them shitless and they forget about straight away afterwards.
I was discussing this recently with a friend, and she suggested that the atmosphere was acting like a magnifying lens. This kind of makes sense (curved body of a different density), though I am unsure its effects would be sufficient to make the moon seem _that_ big.
IAAMT (I am a maths teacher); calculators are great in that they can allow students to focus on the greater, more abstract concepts rather than the boring drudgery of computation. Sure, there are times when you need mental arithmetic, but really, how often do you need to divide 2314595 by 14 in real life? And even then, you are probably going to have a mobile phone with you to help. Here in oz, we are currently introducing CAS calculators (Comptuer Algebra Systems) which solve equations, differentiate, integrate, graph, and so on. The research that has been done on these is that students who don't know what they're doing still don't know what they're doing; the students who do get there faster and easier, and can learn more.
The main issue that a lot of teachers have with such technology is that it requires a complete shift in teaching and assessment - no longer is a right/wrong answer acceptable - they have to move to more exploratory problems, which require more work on the part of the teacher.
2. What happens if we're actually talking about Nazis?
Then you've already invoked Godwin's Law, and the chances are that your thread isn't going to last all that much longer as a sane discussion. Them's the breaks.
This, however, assumes that it is possible to have a sane discussion on/. in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
This is dumb, and some would argue anti-competetive monopolistic behaviour. You have a patent on something cool. You let people use it without any royalties; it becomes popular. Really popular. Then, all of a sudden, you start charging royalties, and everyone is trapped. It would not have become that popular if royalties had been there in the first place.
This is reminiscent of two things: Microsoft (slightly different modus operandi), and drug dealers (the first one's free kiddies).
Should be that if you don't enforce your patent within a reasonable time frame, you lose the right to do so. In a perfect world. Which we are far, far, away from.
Given the presence of both LAME and anti-DRM code, perhaps the software looks for programs on your system which might be used for copyright infringement, then 'phones home' if it finds them. Sinister, but looking more likely than Sony actually using this sort of code to do anything useful.
Stop worrying about copyright, and start worrying about personal rights.
Nonetheless, even in this case, the copyright scenario is still interesting - is Sony infringing copyright by doing this even if the code is not being executed?
Well, that's entirely the point. Creation and evolution can co-exist, without the need for Intelligent Design. ID brings the notion that things needed to be tinkered with after the ball got rolling, which presumes things were not done properly at the start. Much like a computer program. If 'god' could write a computer program, one would expect she could get it right the first time (with a divine amount of analysis, design, implemention and testing). Once deployed, it just works. ID goes more along the lines of a buggy computer program that needs constant patching and re-working to keep it on track. As I see it, ID isn't about explaining the origins of life, it's about an extremely dodgy attempt to inject God into science. It's about as bad a fudge as can be made.
Well, not quite. I don't believe there is a god. But I can't find fault with certain arguments that there is one (namely that this god did the 'big bang'). That's the thing about beliefs - they don't need an underlying rational argument. And in this case, the belief in question (what caused the big bang) is of no consequence whatsoever.
Urgh - this is getting too much for my brain to translate into your puny language.
In fact, further to this, many religious folk consider ID to be _incompatible_ with Creationism, and, indeed, blasphemous. Consider that an omnipotent being, could, at creation, set all of the constants and whatnot so as to set of the evolution process, which would eventually lead to what we have now. For intelligent design to hold true, He/She must have botched the figures at the start, requiring constant meddling and fudging to get the desired outcome.
Not too many religious people like the idea of an imperfect Creator; that leads into all sorts of nasty areas.
btw - I am an atheist, though see no particular problem with some God/Giant Squid/Super-Intelligent Shade of Blue setting off the Big Bang, since it doesn't really matter anyway.
This ain't about X and qt and such (rather one small non-UI component of KDE), but qt, and gtk for that matter, can exist without X. Gtk and so forth have been ported to use DirectFB primitives rather than X ones, and the Qtopia system is a qt based palmtop environment. In some ways, that's the cool thing about layers.
As I understand it, Reiser4 barely (if at all) departs from standard POSIX filesystem semantics. While at the same time, allow meta-data capabilities (eg ACLs) of just about any sort. It does this by treating each file as a directory as well. So if you open the file as a file, you get the file. If you open the file as a directory, you get its meta-data. This does not break anything, nor require the use of any extra filesystem primitives. So I would think that in theory a port should be easy to any POSIX system.
I heard it as one guy who wants to fuck three women in succession, but only has two condoms. How can he do so without any chance of anyone catching a disease from any other person?
Hint: the solution lies in the concept of surfaces.
Problem: It is not recommended you try this at home, as experts advise against using 2 condoms on top of each other, as it _increases_ the chance of breakage.
I say it is a first degree angle
1) 3 miles
2) One of the equinoxes?
3) White.
The question is similar to the one I've been using with some of my classes of late:
An explorer walks a kilometre south, a kilometre west, then a kilometre north, and ends up where she started. Where is she? The answer is the North Pole, which is but the elementary first part of the problem.
The second part of the problem: There are more places where she could be. Describe where they are.
Absolutely suspect, yes, but deer are pests here in the land of Oz, and professional hunters are paid to kill them per scalp (or some other such body part). So no plan to pull the deer back home was necessary.
Actually, that's not quite true - it's not free to UK viewers - while being 'free-to-air' TV, TV owners have to pay a yearly license fee of about 100 pounds I think. i.e. a BBC tax.
well, I was thinking javascript, seeing as though it's in every browser. Sure, to call it a platform is debatable, but it already seems to have well and truly surpassed what was originally intended of it.
Unless, of course, they provide a way for the average consumer to melt their play-once dvds into fuel for their car.
But back to IP - a split may actually be good in this sense, as the new system could use IPv6. About fscking time! The new international/EU body would be responsible for dishing out IPv6 addresses, with possibly a new namespace too, while the 'old' internet would still be accessible through a gateway.
But back to DNS - This is probably going to be a moot point before too long anyway - who needs DNS when you have google? (Oh the irony!)
I read quite an interesting proposal for a DNS system based on FreeNet - completely distributed and just about uncontrollable, but based on popularity. If georgewbush.com wants to take over gwbush.com, then it just has to be more popular. Now _that's_ democracy.
it is only active government intervention that has limited people's access to free information.
erm - lawsuits by private companies wishing to silence critics/opponents? The free-for-all market-knows-best approach is just as dodgy as the others.
I paid for a Colossal Squid, and I'm gonna get a colossal squid.
in-ear-canal phones like the shure and etymonics do just as good a job in reducing outside noise as the active cancelling ones, plus have much better quality drivers to boot (and don't require batteries). My Shure e2c's are better that any headphone I've ever tried, and the volume on my jukebox seldom goes above 20%, compared to a around 70-80% with normal earbuds. And they only cost about US$70. The next up in the range are supposed heaps better still, but at a cost (one, day, she will be mine, oh yes)
Ummm... writing to NTFS under linux has been (unofficially) stable for some time now, even the older versions (=2.4). The newer (2.6) version works fine, albeit in a slightly round-about manner in some cases (there are certain file operations it cannot do straight up)
A friend of mine, about ten years ago now, did basically that - but rather than just black, took some liberty with the spraycans, and made some damn cool designs on keyboard, monitor, and case. This was ten years ago, well before case mods were in. To get around problems mentions, he used high quality spray paint, pulled the keys off the keyboard, then sanded back the keys. Now, that was well geek, back in those days. Plus you could use those nice spring loaded IBM keyboards.
The atmosphere. The earth's rotation is gradually slowing down due to drag from the atmosphere (related to tides IIRC)
These sort of teaching aids can be great for not only engaging students (something that traditional teaching methods are having difficulty with) if used in the right way, but also getting them to think more (arguably the main aim of schooling). Planning, shooting and editting a video can be a brilliant project for English or foreign language learning; the kids get motivated, and have a sense of acheivement at the end of it. As compared to another bloody set of worksheets that bores them shitless and they forget about straight away afterwards.
I was discussing this recently with a friend, and she suggested that the atmosphere was acting like a magnifying lens. This kind of makes sense (curved body of a different density), though I am unsure its effects would be sufficient to make the moon seem _that_ big.
IAAMT (I am a maths teacher); calculators are great in that they can allow students to focus on the greater, more abstract concepts rather than the boring drudgery of computation. Sure, there are times when you need mental arithmetic, but really, how often do you need to divide 2314595 by 14 in real life? And even then, you are probably going to have a mobile phone with you to help. Here in oz, we are currently introducing CAS calculators (Comptuer Algebra Systems) which solve equations, differentiate, integrate, graph, and so on. The research that has been done on these is that students who don't know what they're doing still don't know what they're doing; the students who do get there faster and easier, and can learn more.
The main issue that a lot of teachers have with such technology is that it requires a complete shift in teaching and assessment - no longer is a right/wrong answer acceptable - they have to move to more exploratory problems, which require more work on the part of the teacher.