But then, Slashdot (as a whole and/or on average, at least), is also anti-Europe, so this is indeed a difficult case. Do we say "great!" because Microsoft finally gets some heat for its unethical and arguably illegal behaviour, or do we say "EU=evil!" because they dare to fine a fine (no pun intended) US-American company?
[...] or get the code generated into view source code that you can edit from then on.
Which, of course, kinda defeats the purpose of automatically generating code in the first place.
The problem I see is that while generated code is nice in theory, and even nice in practice for a while, there will be a time where there *will* be problems with the generated code. What do you do, then? If you want to continue to rely on the automatic code generation, you'll have to look into the code generator itself to see if you can find and fix the problems (which may not always be an option), or you take the current generated code and fix the bugs in there yourself - but then, you can't profit from future improvements to thte code generator anymore, unless you either forward-port your own fixes to the generated code (assuming that the generator bugs that lead to them were not fixed in the newer version as well).
Of course, that pretty much *is* exactly the same problem that compilers suffer from as well, but there are two differences:
Compilers generally target simple back-end languages (machine code, as opposed to high-level languages), and
Compilers are actually a field in computer science that has solid theoretic underpinnings and that has been studied for (literally) decades.
Neither can be said about RoR, yet. And while I wouldn't dismiss it based on that, it *is* something that I think you should take into account when you consider using it for your specific applications.
It never hurts to put more thought into something, rather than less thought.
The best idea is to go for the eyes, actually, I think. (Yes, that sounds rather brutal, and it is - but when a shark is actually trying to eat you, you probably have other things on your mind. Just don't do it when you don't have a good reason to.)
Considering that Snopes only labels stories as "true" if it can find credible evidence that they are indeed true, the last part would probably be rather hard. Not that Snopes is never wrong, of course, but I think it'd take a bit more than an email chain letter to fool them.
I don't see the problem, really. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, feels like a duck and smells like a duck, then chances are it *is* a duck, and a judge finding just that (that it is a duck) is not unreasonable. I think it's a bit out of touch with reality to worry that this will be used in the future to find that cows are ducks, too.
And what's more... what is your alternative? Would it have been better to declare that the duck is a cow, *now, definitely*, just so that there might not be a situation where a cow is declared a duck, *in the future, maybe*?
For that matter, what findings could a judge still make, anyway? You could argue that *everything* could be used as a precedent for something we don't want in the future; but doing so will not solve the problems we are facing today. Are you suggesting we don't solve those problems just because there *might* be other problems in the future?
The FISA court has only turned the government down, what, twenty times in thirty years?
Actually, even less than that. Quoting Bruce Schneier: "In all that time, only four warrant requests were ever rejected: all in 2003." And "all that time" here actually does refer to the entire period of time where that secret kangaroo court existed.
Didn't we learn anything from the internment of Japanese citzens during WWII?
Sadly, no. The majority people I've spoken to about that particular topic - most of them just as disgusted by the current "administration" as everyone on Slashdot - have subscribed to one or more of the following opinions:
It didn't actually happen.
It did happen, but it wasn't so bad.
It did happen, and it may have been bad, but it was necessary.
It did happen, and it may have been bad, and it may not have been necessary, but I still don't care.
They say that those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it, but I'd go a bit further and say that those who do remember but don't regret history and those who do remember and don't denounce the evils that happened also are. In order to deal with these things, you first have to admit that not only did they happen, but that they were wrong, too, and that's something that many people don't seem to be able to do - they do criticise current politics, and even those of the short-term past, but everything that is more than a few decades away is sacrosanct to them.
And as long as that doesn't change in a fundamental way... no, we won't have learned anything.
Don't you think it's a bit of an overreaction to automatically call a switch from text ads to graphical ads "evil"? Especially when they haven't actually made the switch yet and nobody really knows whether they will at all or (if they decide to go through with it) what exactly those graphical ads will look like...
Really, it's like Godwin, only with the nazis. Don't cry bloody murder every time something happens that you don't 100% approve of (and that goes for the grandparent just as much as you).
But the amusing thing about this Graham's Number is that it is an upper bound on some quantity, which experts believe is equal to 6. That's right, SIX. So it's not only the largest number ever used; it's also probably the worst upper-bound ever:)
Actually, the lower bound has recently (a few years ago) been improved to 11.
And FWIW, Graham's number is not the largest number ever used, either, not by far. It's the biggest *natural* number ever used, but generally, numbers only get really big when you have to talk about them in terms of consistency strength.;)
Unfortunately, what the grandparent wrote is misleading. Yes, the GIMPS project only checks Mersenne primes, so it's entirely possible (highly likely, even) that there are non-Mersenne primes in between them.
BUT it could also be that there's other Mersenne primes in there that we haven't found yet. The exponents the GIMPS project tests are not handed out in sequential order, so there are still "gaps" in there that haven't been checked and double-checked. I'm not sure what the current "watermark" is; the project has definitely checked all Mersenne numbers up to M6972593 (the 38th Mersenne prime), at least, but while finding another Mersenne prime that's smaller than another one already found before is unlikely, it can't be ruled out.
So there just might be smaller Mersenne primes, too (in addition to the smaller non-Mersenne primes that are almost certainly there).
Without knowing the details of Slovenian copyright law, I'd guess that it was dropped because he didn't actually do anything wrong. No copyrighted data went through the suprnova servers, and copyright infringement is not a criminal offense in most countries, so it's likely that contributing to it is not illegal at all, either (it typically only is for criminal activities).
In other words, it's the same reason why ThePirateBay still operates - only that the latter is hosted in Sweden, where it's probably (I assume!) less easy for the music/movie industry to get the police to investigate things when there is no evidence of an actual crime being committed.
Non-cynical answer: the difference is "patented". Robitussin's active ingredient was patented in the 1950s, so the patent has long since run out, and everyone's free to recreate it.
Cynical answer: the difference is that the USA doesn't want Indian companies to hurt the sales of US-American companies. If it's two US-American companies fighting, the USA as a whole don't lose anything, but if it's foreign companies...
And it was a crappy product, too, for that matter. I tried IE on a Sparc/Solaris box years ago, just for giggles - crash-prone and buggy (IE, that is, not Solaris ^_~).
Spare bandwidth can be used to send random garbage - some of it should be truly random so no amount of work will allow someone to conclude that they have successfully decrypted usless data but rather that they still have work to do.
That only works if you make sure that the actual, real traffic also looks like truly random data.
Ballot boxes only work when you (i.e., the population in general) actually have a chance to *choose* between different policies. If it's choosing between two evils that, for 95% of all cases, will screw you over in the same way, then you don't actually have a choice, and the ballot box is just a pseudodemocratic legitimation device for a corrupt system where laws go to the highest bidder.
Good to hear that at least one company seems to have even the tiniest bit of common sense and decency left (even though they probably just did it because of the negative reaction they were getting, too, not because of a guilty conscience).
Now I'm just waiting for an apology from Sony, too - although I have the feeling that it'll be issued at about the same time that Duke Nuken Forever comes out.
The ability to set away messages is not new - not at all. I don't know what the submitter was smoking, but maybe he didn't understand that part of the changelog that says that the code dealing with away messages (as well as other parts) has been completely rewritten.
Content is separate from presentation today (or should be), but it wasn't always so - CSS and stuff is a (relatively) new idea. Back in those days, HTML really was different - it wasn't a general mark-up language for document structure, but rather something that "just worked" in a certain way without people thinking about it that much. And documents were simpler, too: you didn't have complicated constructs designed to give a "presentation", but rather a page consisting of things like paragraphs, headlines, bulleted lists and the like, akin to what a page in a book might look like. There was no *need* to separate content from presentation then, simply because there was no real "presentation" to speak of; most tags that existed had a "natural" presentation.
I'd understand if the feds paid someone a visit after they bought - for example - large quantities of chemicals that can be used to build a bomb, or something similar, and I'd expect them to pay someone a visit who tries to buy a large number of guns and ammo for them, and similar things. That's OK.
But a *book*? And what's more, a book that contains nothing but *quotations*? It's not even the anarchist's cookbook or something - just a collection of quotes. Sure, it was Mao who wrote it, but seriously - this is no more justified than McCarthyism was. You could just as well advocate paying someone a visit for trying to obtain a copy of, say, de bello gallico (Julius Caesar was a dictator, too, and not exactly squeamish when dealing with his enemies).
Brand recognition, maybe. People might be more willing to buy a device if it's a Commodore as opposed to $RANDOM_CORPORATION_WE_NEVER_HEARD_ABOUT_BEFORE.
The same thing happened to Amiga, too: just remember the late "Amiga" computers (I'm putting that in quotes on purpose), which really were just standard PCs with AMD processors - but with a hefty price tag.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is always anti-Microsoft.
But then, Slashdot (as a whole and/or on average, at least), is also anti-Europe, so this is indeed a difficult case. Do we say "great!" because Microsoft finally gets some heat for its unethical and arguably illegal behaviour, or do we say "EU=evil!" because they dare to fine a fine (no pun intended) US-American company?
Which, of course, kinda defeats the purpose of automatically generating code in the first place.
The problem I see is that while generated code is nice in theory, and even nice in practice for a while, there will be a time where there *will* be problems with the generated code. What do you do, then? If you want to continue to rely on the automatic code generation, you'll have to look into the code generator itself to see if you can find and fix the problems (which may not always be an option), or you take the current generated code and fix the bugs in there yourself - but then, you can't profit from future improvements to thte code generator anymore, unless you either forward-port your own fixes to the generated code (assuming that the generator bugs that lead to them were not fixed in the newer version as well).
Of course, that pretty much *is* exactly the same problem that compilers suffer from as well, but there are two differences:
Neither can be said about RoR, yet. And while I wouldn't dismiss it based on that, it *is* something that I think you should take into account when you consider using it for your specific applications.
It never hurts to put more thought into something, rather than less thought.
The best idea is to go for the eyes, actually, I think. (Yes, that sounds rather brutal, and it is - but when a shark is actually trying to eat you, you probably have other things on your mind. Just don't do it when you don't have a good reason to.)
Considering that Snopes only labels stories as "true" if it can find credible evidence that they are indeed true, the last part would probably be rather hard. Not that Snopes is never wrong, of course, but I think it'd take a bit more than an email chain letter to fool them.
I don't see the problem, really. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, feels like a duck and smells like a duck, then chances are it *is* a duck, and a judge finding just that (that it is a duck) is not unreasonable. I think it's a bit out of touch with reality to worry that this will be used in the future to find that cows are ducks, too.
And what's more... what is your alternative? Would it have been better to declare that the duck is a cow, *now, definitely*, just so that there might not be a situation where a cow is declared a duck, *in the future, maybe*?
For that matter, what findings could a judge still make, anyway? You could argue that *everything* could be used as a precedent for something we don't want in the future; but doing so will not solve the problems we are facing today. Are you suggesting we don't solve those problems just because there *might* be other problems in the future?
That doesn't sound reasonable to me.
Actually, even less than that. Quoting Bruce Schneier: "In all that time, only four warrant requests were ever rejected: all in 2003." And "all that time" here actually does refer to the entire period of time where that secret kangaroo court existed.
Sadly, no. The majority people I've spoken to about that particular topic - most of them just as disgusted by the current "administration" as everyone on Slashdot - have subscribed to one or more of the following opinions:
They say that those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it, but I'd go a bit further and say that those who do remember but don't regret history and those who do remember and don't denounce the evils that happened also are. In order to deal with these things, you first have to admit that not only did they happen, but that they were wrong, too, and that's something that many people don't seem to be able to do - they do criticise current politics, and even those of the short-term past, but everything that is more than a few decades away is sacrosanct to them.
And as long as that doesn't change in a fundamental way... no, we won't have learned anything.
Arrrrrr, brother.
Don't you think it's a bit of an overreaction to automatically call a switch from text ads to graphical ads "evil"? Especially when they haven't actually made the switch yet and nobody really knows whether they will at all or (if they decide to go through with it) what exactly those graphical ads will look like...
Really, it's like Godwin, only with the nazis. Don't cry bloody murder every time something happens that you don't 100% approve of (and that goes for the grandparent just as much as you).
Actually, the lower bound has recently (a few years ago) been improved to 11.
And FWIW, Graham's number is not the largest number ever used, either, not by far. It's the biggest *natural* number ever used, but generally, numbers only get really big when you have to talk about them in terms of consistency strength. ;)
Well, yes. Just like music, movies, books, computer games, nice food, non-reproductive sex, voyages, and everything else that's enjoyable in life.
Since when has "useful" become a requirement for activities that people are allowed to enjoy?
Unfortunately, what the grandparent wrote is misleading. Yes, the GIMPS project only checks Mersenne primes, so it's entirely possible (highly likely, even) that there are non-Mersenne primes in between them.
BUT it could also be that there's other Mersenne primes in there that we haven't found yet. The exponents the GIMPS project tests are not handed out in sequential order, so there are still "gaps" in there that haven't been checked and double-checked. I'm not sure what the current "watermark" is; the project has definitely checked all Mersenne numbers up to M6972593 (the 38th Mersenne prime), at least, but while finding another Mersenne prime that's smaller than another one already found before is unlikely, it can't be ruled out.
So there just might be smaller Mersenne primes, too (in addition to the smaller non-Mersenne primes that are almost certainly there).
Without knowing the details of Slovenian copyright law, I'd guess that it was dropped because he didn't actually do anything wrong. No copyrighted data went through the suprnova servers, and copyright infringement is not a criminal offense in most countries, so it's likely that contributing to it is not illegal at all, either (it typically only is for criminal activities).
In other words, it's the same reason why ThePirateBay still operates - only that the latter is hosted in Sweden, where it's probably (I assume!) less easy for the music/movie industry to get the police to investigate things when there is no evidence of an actual crime being committed.
You may not realise, but "salt cellar" (also: "saltcellar") is a perfectly appropriate term for a salt shaker.
Non-cynical answer: the difference is "patented". Robitussin's active ingredient was patented in the 1950s, so the patent has long since run out, and everyone's free to recreate it.
Cynical answer: the difference is that the USA doesn't want Indian companies to hurt the sales of US-American companies. If it's two US-American companies fighting, the USA as a whole don't lose anything, but if it's foreign companies...
I think there's some truth in both answers.
And it was a crappy product, too, for that matter. I tried IE on a Sparc/Solaris box years ago, just for giggles - crash-prone and buggy (IE, that is, not Solaris ^_~).
You may want to check Mozilla's Bugzilla and look into the "Tech Evangelism" category.
That only works if you make sure that the actual, real traffic also looks like truly random data.
Ballot boxes only work when you (i.e., the population in general) actually have a chance to *choose* between different policies. If it's choosing between two evils that, for 95% of all cases, will screw you over in the same way, then you don't actually have a choice, and the ballot box is just a pseudodemocratic legitimation device for a corrupt system where laws go to the highest bidder.
Good to hear that at least one company seems to have even the tiniest bit of common sense and decency left (even though they probably just did it because of the negative reaction they were getting, too, not because of a guilty conscience).
Now I'm just waiting for an apology from Sony, too - although I have the feeling that it'll be issued at about the same time that Duke Nuken Forever comes out.
gaim-vv is being merged back into the trunk, so at some point, 2.x should have video support as well.
The ability to set away messages is not new - not at all. I don't know what the submitter was smoking, but maybe he didn't understand that part of the changelog that says that the code dealing with away messages (as well as other parts) has been completely rewritten.
Content is separate from presentation today (or should be), but it wasn't always so - CSS and stuff is a (relatively) new idea. Back in those days, HTML really was different - it wasn't a general mark-up language for document structure, but rather something that "just worked" in a certain way without people thinking about it that much. And documents were simpler, too: you didn't have complicated constructs designed to give a "presentation", but rather a page consisting of things like paragraphs, headlines, bulleted lists and the like, akin to what a page in a book might look like. There was no *need* to separate content from presentation then, simply because there was no real "presentation" to speak of; most tags that existed had a "natural" presentation.
I'd understand if the feds paid someone a visit after they bought - for example - large quantities of chemicals that can be used to build a bomb, or something similar, and I'd expect them to pay someone a visit who tries to buy a large number of guns and ammo for them, and similar things. That's OK.
But a *book*? And what's more, a book that contains nothing but *quotations*? It's not even the anarchist's cookbook or something - just a collection of quotes. Sure, it was Mao who wrote it, but seriously - this is no more justified than McCarthyism was. You could just as well advocate paying someone a visit for trying to obtain a copy of, say, de bello gallico (Julius Caesar was a dictator, too, and not exactly squeamish when dealing with his enemies).
Brand recognition, maybe. People might be more willing to buy a device if it's a Commodore as opposed to $RANDOM_CORPORATION_WE_NEVER_HEARD_ABOUT_BEFORE.
The same thing happened to Amiga, too: just remember the late "Amiga" computers (I'm putting that in quotes on purpose), which really were just standard PCs with AMD processors - but with a hefty price tag.