Judging from the completed listings, a working G4 Mini usually sells for closer to $400. There are a few that have sold for less than $300, but they either had some problems or were sold by sellers with poor feedback.
If we assume that everyone who is charged with a crime is guilty *as charged* we have no justice system, or at best a Napoleonic system. And they are the same in that the RIAA asserts that the Sergeant was the actor in the copyright infringement occurring on his computer, while Vick's indictment asserts he was an actor in the illegal activity occurring on his property. If either the RIAA's complaint or Vick's indictment lacked these features, the cases would be thrown out at once. In our justice system we rely on the *evidence* to judge the merits of a case against *any* defendant, criminal or civil.
The "pseudo-logic" was actually logic isolating the similarity of the two cases, which is that both defendants are asserting they had no idea of what was occurring. It's actually a common tool when referencing case law to demonstrate the strength of the precedent and its relevance to the case at hand when the subject matter of the cases is unrelated, but the point of law is.
The complaint against Sgt. Paternoster is that his computer was (allegedly) used to distribute copyrighted material. The complaint against Vick is not just that his property was used to stage dogfights. Instead, Vick is being charged in very specific detail as a co-conspirator. The allegations are simply not comparable in the way that you claim they are.
1. prove Vick's motivation was as stated. Recurse back to the unknowing possession entry point above.
or
2. prove Sgt. Paternoster *didn't* buy his computer for the purpose of copyright infringement. again, recurse to the unknowing possession entry point above.
itsatrap!!
I'm not going to play your sophomoric pseudo-logic games. Read the indictment. The cases, as charged, are not at all the same.
or perhaps it's like this Michael Vick guy who lets his friend use his Virginia estate and lo and behold gets charged with dog fighting.
Vick's not accused of simply owning the property on which dogfights were staged. Rather, the case against him is that Vick bought property for the purpose of running "Bad Newz Kennels", financed a dogfighting operation, personally killed (by brutal means) a number of dogs, and was a principal conspirator in the operation. So it's really not like Sgt. Paternoster's case at all.
The cycle is a resonance involving hormones. Based on this fact alone, one can conclude that hormone-based alignment is possible.
Sure, it's possible. The question is whether the apparent phenomenon actually exists. Cecil Adams has an interesting take on it, which partly mirrors my recollection of Ann Watkins's talk:
like women who spend time together tend to align their menstrual cycles... or do you think that's another 'correlation'?
Actually, that's a statistical fallacy, as Ann Watkins has demonstrated. Two women can have their menstrual cycles out of sync by at most half a month, and once you factor in the length of menstruation and observational error (this "phenomenon" is usually observed very informally), it turns out that the statistics do not support the cycle alignment hypothesis. (These are the details I recall from a talk of Watkins's that I attended several years ago; unfortunately, I can't find the text of that talk online.)
The real beauty of EGCS history is when RedHat 6.0 shipped with a snapshot version of EGCS instead of tried and true GCC 2.98, and called it GCC 3.0. Of course, since it was just a daily snapshot and not even a release candidate, it was buggy as all hell. Couldn't even compile a kernel because some of the inline assembly and undocumented behavior changed. What a huge piece of shit, thanks RedHat.
It got so bad, FSF had to disavow all knowledge of any GCC 3.0 compiler and jump to 3.1 immediately, since invariably GCC was blamed for this debacle, instead of the true idiots: RedHat.
In particular, note that the gcc-2.96 debacle had nothing to do with egcs. GCC 2.95 was released after the gcc/egcs merger and before Red Hat released gcc-2.96.
Remember that OSS is mostly about developers scratching an itch.
Look at the major OSS projects, such as GCC and the Linux kernel. These are not just developers "scratching an itch". On these two projects alone, there are hundreds of full-time OSS developers employed by companies like Red Hat, Intel, Apple, Google, and IBM, as well as by universities and research labs around the world.
I see one of two things happening, either we'll find a magic bullet technology to significantly increase our network speeds; or some limit will finally end Moore's law. Otherwise there's simply no reason to tie together multiple processors.
You might not have a need for a cluster, but that doesn't mean that nobody else needs them. We have quite a few of clusters where I work, ranging in size from about 4,000 processors to over 100,000 processors, and these machines aren't sitting idle. Multicore desktops systems are great for a lot of things, but if you want to tackle a really big, really difficult problem, a desktop system isn't going to cut it.
Is there any reason that large projects can't require all new patches to be GPLv3, while leaving the old code GPLv2? After all, the old code has already been released, so it's not like it can be un-GPLv2'd.
According to the FSF, v2 and v3 are incompatible, so backporting a GPLv3'd patch would require relicensing the old code. GCC has a "GPLv2 or later" clause, so future releases can be licensed under GPLv3 (and since FSF owns the copyright, they can license it as they please). It's also possible to dual-license a patch so it can be backported to an old GPLv2 branch as well as a current GPLv3 branch, but in the case of GCC, it appears that RMS is opposed doing so.
You know, after EGCS (and the associated bazaar development model) became the official GCC branch, I kinda figured they'd face the same problem as the kernel does of producing a GPLv3 branch--with thousands of contributers having provided their work under GPLv2, it would be impossible to track them all down and get their permission to relicense their work as GPLv3. Yet I see announcements for GPLv3 trumpeting the fact that the GCC project is "on board". Can someone explain to me what I'm missing here?
To contribute a non-trivial patch to gcc, you have to sign the copyright over to the FSF, so it's up to the FSF (and RMS, in particular) to decide how gcc will be licensed. However, switching to GPLv3 is still not going to be trivial for gcc. In particular, what can be backported to old releases and under which version of the GPL? There's currently a lot of discussion on the gcc list about this issue.
No it doesn't. No one in the gcc project has any obligation to take on maintenance of such code. They may choose to, but in reality Apple will still be burdened with plenty of work.
Once code is committed the the gcc tree, it's the responsibility of future contributors to not break (i.e. remain compatible with) that code. If you maintain it yourself outside of the tree, then you have to "defend" your forked version against all future modifications to ensure compatibility.
Yes, thanks, as I said above I know about LLVM - superficialy of course, but enough to know the overall plans. What "worries" me in that isn't that they can dump GCC, is that I have serious doubts that they will make their developments available to others if they are not forced to do it. It's their call though.
There's been some work done on integrating LLVM with gcc, and Chris Lattner has indicated in the past (I don't know if this has changed) that the copyright of LLVM could be given to the FSF if necessary:
I have little doubts that Apple will try to use/make another compiler as soon as they can so they can avoid having to share their changes.
Apple is very active in gcc development; just take a look in MAINTAINERS in the gcc sources. If you're right, they're putting an awful lot of work into (and contributing a lot of GPL'd code to) a project that they're about to abandon.
Also, keep in mind that Apple only has to contribute changes back if they distribute modified gcc binaries. So for gcc on x86 or PPC Darwin, they have to share their changes (since gcc is bundled with XCode), but for the iPhone (assuming it's built with gcc, with an Apple-written ARM-Darwin backend), they are not obligated to share those changes unless they choose to distribute the modified compiler binaries.
In general, Apple actually benefits by contributing their code to the gcc project. Maintaining a forked version of gcc forces Apple to deal with all bugs/regressions caused by external changes to the code, while contributing the code shifts the maintenance burden to the gcc project as whole.
You do realize this is an advertisement, right? He's spending $500 on an iPhone, plus production costs, in order to sell what's likely to be thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of dollars in blenders. Not exactly a waste.
Since the blenders are about $400 and this commercial is all over the internet now, this commercial will pay for itself many times over. I can't justify (rationalize!) a $400 blender, but I want one now. I'm going to add a Blendtek blender to the gift registry for my upcoming wedding. (So far, my fiancee has made all the registry choices, so I figure I can throw in one extravagant kitchen toy.)
Text compression is very much a form of computation, something computers are naturally very good at. There's a lot of arithmetic, a lot of searching and comparison, and so forth. I'm not aware of any compression algorithm that involves understanding what the text means (unless you count synopsis, but that's very much lossy and gets compression rates that are numerous orders of magnitude better than anything we're talking about here).
I had the same initial reaction, and I'm far from convinced that text compression is equivalent to AI, but it seems reasonable that tools like machine learning could be used to develop better compression heuristics for specific types of text. The algorithm doesn't need to understand the meaning of the text; it just needs to apply the heuristics.
I still don't see the problem. Maybe I'm too young or too socialist, but if you want something private, don't put it in an accessible area.
I refuse to have anything in the physical world that I wouldn't take responsibility for. On my computer, I keep things encrypted and out of the normal way of things so that people who might stumble onto my desk wont see it.
I really hate this geek superiority bullshit. Basically, you're blaming a victim for not being computer-savvy enough to avoid being targeted. Do you also blame rape victims for not being strong enough to fight off the attacker?
Most people don't have the technical background to secure their computer/data against a local attack (i.e., a snooping repairman). That is not a character flaw. Just because it is possible to take advantage of them does not mean that it is acceptable to take advantage of them.
From a legal point of view, it would likely come down to the reasonable expectation of privacy. Would a reasonable person not expect the tech guy he gives his computer to to look through his files? I sure would.
First of all, that's not what "reasonable expectation of privacy" means. Although I personally wouldn't risk valuable/private files to an unknown repairperson, it's certainly reasonable to expect them not to snoop around. Furthermore, they didn't just find the files, they also copied and distributed them. No court would find that reasonable.
And if it's porn that you are personally starring in or other personal information, why aren't you putting that somewhere else before letting someone on your computer?
Well, if the computer is broken (hence the need for the Geek Squad), the owner probably can't remove their personal data before sending it in for service.
They aren't prying into documents, they are copying media files.
Yeah, but they aren't necessarily stealing publicly available media files. Now that digital cameras and video recorders are so common, I suspect that a lot of people have homemade media files on their computers. Going through those is absolutely an invasion of privacy.
Because its contributions will need to be simulated to be taken into account, resulting in the need for a meta-simulator.
If you enjoy pondering things like this, I strongly recommend Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. I loved that book, and although I might not be applying its concepts entirely correctly here, what I took out of the book that's relevant to this was the following:
The simulation is not system. No matter how accurate math is, it does not represent the real world, and should not be mistaken for that.
You can not objectively analyse an entire system if you're part of that system. e.g. You can not prove to yourself that you are sane.
I haven't read Hofstadter's book, so I may very well be missing the connection, but that doesn't seem to follow from Gödel's Theorem. It sounds more like a philosophical analogue of Gödel's Theorem. In any case, I'll give Gödel, Escher, Bach a try.
(I know it's a joke but...) It's impossible. To incorporate its own heat generated into its own simulation would violate Gödel's first incompleteness theorem:
"Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete."
The computer must be completely removed from the system to be accurate. It must be run from an another dimension, but you still run into the same problem when you go to take the measurements.
How does Gödel's Theorem apply here? I'm not a logician, but it doesn't seem that weather simulation can be formally characterized as an arithmetic theory. And even if it could, why would Gödel's Theorem imply that such a simulation take into account its own contributions?
Slashdot Mirror
Judging from the completed listings, a working G4 Mini usually sells for closer to $400. There are a few that have sold for less than $300, but they either had some problems or were sold by sellers with poor feedback.
The complaint against Sgt. Paternoster is that his computer was (allegedly) used to distribute copyrighted material. The complaint against Vick is not just that his property was used to stage dogfights. Instead, Vick is being charged in very specific detail as a co-conspirator. The allegations are simply not comparable in the way that you claim they are.
I'm not going to play your sophomoric pseudo-logic games. Read the indictment. The cases, as charged, are not at all the same.
Vick's not accused of simply owning the property on which dogfights were staged. Rather, the case against him is that Vick bought property for the purpose of running "Bad Newz Kennels", financed a dogfighting operation, personally killed (by brutal means) a number of dogs, and was a principal conspirator in the operation. So it's really not like Sgt. Paternoster's case at all.
Sure, it's possible. The question is whether the apparent phenomenon actually exists. Cecil Adams has an interesting take on it, which partly mirrors my recollection of Ann Watkins's talk:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/021220.html
Actually, that's a statistical fallacy, as Ann Watkins has demonstrated. Two women can have their menstrual cycles out of sync by at most half a month, and once you factor in the length of menstruation and observational error (this "phenomenon" is usually observed very informally), it turns out that the statistics do not support the cycle alignment hypothesis. (These are the details I recall from a talk of Watkins's that I attended several years ago; unfortunately, I can't find the text of that talk online.)
Your facts are a bit off:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc-2.96.html
In particular, note that the gcc-2.96 debacle had nothing to do with egcs. GCC 2.95 was released after the gcc/egcs merger and before Red Hat released gcc-2.96.
There's been some work done on integrating LLVM with gcc, and Chris Lattner has indicated in the past (I don't know if this has changed) that the copyright of LLVM could be given to the FSF if necessary:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html
No, that's not an Objective-C compiler.
Apple is very active in gcc development; just take a look in MAINTAINERS in the gcc sources. If you're right, they're putting an awful lot of work into (and contributing a lot of GPL'd code to) a project that they're about to abandon.
Also, keep in mind that Apple only has to contribute changes back if they distribute modified gcc binaries. So for gcc on x86 or PPC Darwin, they have to share their changes (since gcc is bundled with XCode), but for the iPhone (assuming it's built with gcc, with an Apple-written ARM-Darwin backend), they are not obligated to share those changes unless they choose to distribute the modified compiler binaries.
In general, Apple actually benefits by contributing their code to the gcc project. Maintaining a forked version of gcc forces Apple to deal with all bugs/regressions caused by external changes to the code, while contributing the code shifts the maintenance burden to the gcc project as whole.
I had the same initial reaction, and I'm far from convinced that text compression is equivalent to AI, but it seems reasonable that tools like machine learning could be used to develop better compression heuristics for specific types of text. The algorithm doesn't need to understand the meaning of the text; it just needs to apply the heuristics.
I really hate this geek superiority bullshit. Basically, you're blaming a victim for not being computer-savvy enough to avoid being targeted. Do you also blame rape victims for not being strong enough to fight off the attacker?
Most people don't have the technical background to secure their computer/data against a local attack (i.e., a snooping repairman). That is not a character flaw. Just because it is possible to take advantage of them does not mean that it is acceptable to take advantage of them.