I have a very hard time seeing how a binary module that contains snippets of object code directly compiled from GPLed methods in the kernel (because they were inlined) could possibly be anything but unauthorized distribution.
It could also be fair use. You know... that section of copyright law that lets you use tiny portions of a copyrighted work? I think inlined code would fit into that category. And if it doesn't, then copyright law is itself pretty fucked up.
Why should they not? They've done their time, their debt is repaid. If we trust them enough to release them from prison, surely we can let them have a vote. Hell, a felon can still run for office and be elected. It's unjust to bar someone for life from full participation in the democratic process because of a past crime.
There's nothing in the constitution that says "equal protection - unless you have a felony conviction"; the constitutionality of the process is highly suspect.
and
It also makes it hard to change a bad law - if you make everyone who gets caught doing X a felon and take away their vote, there are a lot fewer voters to vote for legalizing X (where X can be use of certain drugs, gambling, prostitution, etcetera).
You may be surprised to find that I agree. Those are good points. But they are not related to mine...
Because selective enforcement and prosecution is easy and common.
This may be true. And I mean it may: I don't really know. But if it IS, then it would seem that the selective enforcement is itself the problem, and not so much the felon voting ban. After all, compared to going to prison, not being able to vote isn't even a slap on the wrist...
the law can be - and is - structured such that two crimes that are in every reasonable way equivalent, but one is more often commited by blacks and one by white, are treated differently...
Ah, but I betcha there are more differences there than just race! I don't have any statistics to back me up on this, but I think that the official reason crack is punished more severely than powder cocaine is because it is more often associated with violent crime than cocaine is. The fact that it's more likely to be used by blacks could be incidental, and not the result of racist policies.
The racism in that case wouldn't come into play until it comes time to prosecute...
These points are interesting, but don't really deal with what I was getting at. Even if there were actually no selective enforcement or selective sentencing, you would still find that blacks would make up a disproportionate number of felons. This is because crime is related to poverty, and blacks are, on average, more poor than whites in the States. So even if this was the case, the argument could still be made that the felon voting ban is racist, and that argument would be just as idiotic. People who commit crimes are responsible for the consequences of that crime. And if one of those consequences is not being able to vote, tough! If that's the law, deal with it!
There exist good arguments for the repealing of the felon voting ban. Those that you brought up are good examples of these. Perhaps they should be heard and debated. I believe that the arguments that are NOT reasonable are those that claim that any sort of punishment for felons is thinly veiled racism. THAT viewpoint is retarded, and that is the problem I had with the grandparent poster. A crime's a crime, no matter who you are.
Good points, those. And indeed, maybe a felon voting ban doesn't make sense in some circumstances. Although:
New York, without a felon voting ban
I thought that it was a federal thing, and it meant you couldn't vote in any state.
But that's an issue for another day. My problem with the grandparent was that he seemed to connect this voting ban with hidden racism in the government there. And THAT is just stupid: for even if it is a punishment for felons (and it's a pretty light one if so, compared to having a record, not being able to get a job, etc), then how can it be blamed on anyone but the guy who committed the crime? And if it's no one's fault but his, then how can it be racism in the government?
I don't know if anyone's called for this ban to be repealed on the grounds that it's racist, but if they do, I hope they're laughed out of the courtroom. The only valid reason to repeal this would be on its own merits. If the race card is played, that would seem to imply that black people need to be protected from the consequences of themselves breaking the law. And that's just absurd.
One of the big impacts on the Florida outcome was the state law that prohibits someone who has ever been convicted of a fellony from ever voting. This is another holdover from seggragation [sic]...
Sir,
What the FUCK are you talking about? It's the fault of those in charge that black people make up the majority of felons in the States? Why SHOULD convicted felons be allowed to vote? They've already shown that they can't be trusted in free society, why should they be trusted with the vote?
Tell you what. If you wanna vote in American Federal elections, don't commit crimes! Black or white, why shouldn't that be the case?
If this seems to be unfair to black people, how is it anything but their own fault?
GTK, however, has a C++ wrapper called GTKMM (I think). Using that instead of anything else would have the advantage that GTK and QT apps would wind up using the same toolkit underneath.
Furthermore, isn't Mozilla's widget set/toolkit/whatever a horrible, horrible design mistake? I don't mean how it's implemented; I mean that it was even implemented at all. Netscape hired a bunch of programmers to write a new browser, but instead they wasted years writing a new GUI: a GUI that is slow, bloated, and inconsistent with everything else on any platform. They should have just used an existing cross-platform toolkit like wxWindows.
But determining the type of a file by filename has the advantage that you can tell what's in a directory just by looking the list of file names therein. This is a good thing. If you determined filenames solely by header, then you'd have to read the header of each one individually to know what type it is, and a directory listing would tell you fairly little about what's actually in the directory.
The Mac way of using metadata is an interesting idea, but unless file type into somehow incorporated into directory listings, they are again not as useful as they could be. Thinking about it for a moment, one realizes that a possible way to do this would be to show the file type after the filename, abbreviating it so as not to waste space, and possibly separating it from the filename with a dot or some such character... leading us right back to where we started.
All in all, I'd have to say that the Windows way of determining file type by filename is actually a pretty good one in practice.
What a stupid question. Seriously. The ASAT is designed to kill satellites with its velocity alone... it's going much too fast for a net to do anything but disintegrate it. Furthermore, carrying a net would add to the weight of the homing vehicle and reduce its effective range, which isn't that great to begin with.
If any third party can ask you for the source code to something you're distributing but haven't changed, and you never distributed it to them in the first place, then...
why can't you be considered the second party that's distributing to third parties, directing them all back to the first party, Linux.org?
I mean, if it's okay for one of your customers to tell people to download the source from you, why isn't it okay for you to tell your customers to download the source from somewhere else?
You're not contradicting him. If virus followed this rule, its plural would be viri. But everyone stupidly insists on calling it virii, as though its singular was virius. And it's dumb.
Some months ago on slashdot there was an article about antispammers signing up some spammer in chicago I believe...
I don't believe that. If antispammers are signing up a spammer for junk mail, then that means that they know his address. Whenever anyone learns of a spammer's address, junk mail is the least of his problems... The constant harassment and death threats are more like it.
Suing people for sending you junk mail, under those circumstances, just wouldn't make sense.
Enterprise/Mission-critical/Life-critical systems should not be doing floating point operations period. They introduce too many errors and inaccuracies. If you think you need floats, try adjusting your units.
What a blanket statement. So it's impossible (or too difficult) to use floating point numbers correctly? You know this... how?
Are there any numerical analysts out there that have anything to say about this?
...doesn't absolve you of your obligation to obey the law...
Nor did I say it should. My point in its entirety was that the law is wrong.
...criminal behavior using one of your possessions. For example, buying a telescope does not give you the right to use it to look in my windows. Or, buying a television does not give you the right to modify it to get free cable etc etc
Those break existing laws, though, that are arguably not wrong. I'm not sure the telescope example actually breaks any laws (I think it might be a civil matter but I'm not sure) but I do get your point.
My point, however, was not that you should be able to, say, buy a brick and then use that brick by throwing it through someone's window. That breaks existing laws. There's no need to introduce a new law stating, for instance, that when you buy bricks, you can only use them as the manufacturer states, and if they state that you can't use them to build a building without paying them $1 million, then you can go to jail for violating that... That is essentially what these laws are stating. The only real difference is the type of product involved.
Look at it this way. Companies have every right to try to use technological means to force you to use their products their way. But there's no reason that these technological methods should be enforced by law, too. If people can use technology to circumvent their restrictions, and not violate any existing sane laws, there's simply no reason any new law should prevent them from doing that.
Then that law is wrong. If you buy something, you should have the right to do anything you want with it. Any law that opposes this is draconian, and a sign of a totalitarian government.
See this post for an example of why this is so bad.
If Ford won't let you put non-Ford tires on an Escort, don't buy a Ford.
If you don't want to get locked into buying one brand of ink jet refiller, don't buy that brand of ink jet printer. Or, any ink jet printer.
OR... you could buy a Ford, and then use fake Ford ID chips in the replacement tires, so that you can have your Ford and drive it too. Ford has every right to put such chips in its tires to try and prevent you from using any other brand of tires, but just the same, you have every right to do anything you can to get around it. After all, you bought the car... and you own it.
As I understand them, these laws would make attempting to bypass such restrictions illegal, and that is what is wrong with them.
But if you can include special purpose chips (ASICs) in any comaparison, then general purpose processors won't be the best at any single task. An ASIC can be made for any program that can be written, and it'll run that program faster than any CPU made by the same process.
For instance: want to know what is the best CPU for performing matrix multiplication? An ASIC. What's the best CPU for rendering 3D images? An ASIC (like the ones used in modern video cards - they're ASICs of a sort). What's the best CPU for playing Quake III - Arena? An ASIC with the Quake III program encoded in its logic gates... You see how comparisons like this can be silly.
The only thing general-purpose processors are best at is running many different programs.
Bob's MAC address isn't making it past the router, so they latch onto the gateway's MAC address etc etc
Now, I could be wrong, but aren't MAC addresses known only to the local gateway and aren't transmitted across the inter-net? So the router's MAC address wouldn't be known to the RIAA thugs at all? I thought only IP addresses were used for locating machines on the inter-net, and MAC addresses only on a local network (or your ISP's network) on a protocol like Ethernet.
That conviction, however, is the result of the UK being a fucked-up country and not recognizing a homeowner's right to self-defence and defence of his home. If that case had been tried in the States, he would have been found not guilty.
Re:Bah, I developed this myself....
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 1
With magnetic media, it may be possible to store data in base 3, by having the magnetic field go in one direction, the opposite direction, or having no field at all. This should work since the current in the coils would, for each piece of data, move in one direction, the other, or not at all.
Base 4, however, would be harder, since then you'd need to use intensity levels, which is a pretty bad idea because you'd get so many more errors... I doubt we'll ever see schemes like this.
there are still 5 million people who need network transparency!
Why does everyone keep mentioning this like it matters? If people make a new X server without any network transparency at all, is that going to make the old X suddenly disappear?
Of course not. If people want to use network transparency, let them use the old X.
Need I remind you that last year the capital of your "civilized nation" alone has a murder rate nearly 48 times that of my entire nation etc etc
Murder rate? Murder RATE??
You're comparing the murder rate of a hot spot for murder with the mean for an entire country? Why the fuck why? What kind of conclusion can you draw from that other than that Washington D.C. is just that, a hot spot for murder?
I mean, you might as well just compare the murder rate of D.C. with the rate for the entire United States, and you'd see the same thing: that the rate for D.C., an atypical value, is far above the mean.
Your retarded comparison says nothing about the relative rates of violence between the two countries. Why even bring it up, except as FUD?
Slashdot Mirror
Look into it... Get it? Get it? Look into the laser?
Hilarious!
You may be surprised to find that I agree. Those are good points. But they are not related to mine...
This may be true. And I mean it may: I don't really know. But if it IS, then it would seem that the selective enforcement is itself the problem, and not so much the felon voting ban. After all, compared to going to prison, not being able to vote isn't even a slap on the wrist...
Ah, but I betcha there are more differences there than just race! I don't have any statistics to back me up on this, but I think that the official reason crack is punished more severely than powder cocaine is because it is more often associated with violent crime than cocaine is. The fact that it's more likely to be used by blacks could be incidental, and not the result of racist policies.
The racism in that case wouldn't come into play until it comes time to prosecute...
As for whether or not drug possession should be a felony or not, that's a matter for another day. (By the way: an ACLU link? The same ACLU that selectively interprets the Constitution according to their own agenda? Hardly an unbiased source...)
These points are interesting, but don't really deal with what I was getting at. Even if there were actually no selective enforcement or selective sentencing, you would still find that blacks would make up a disproportionate number of felons. This is because crime is related to poverty, and blacks are, on average, more poor than whites in the States. So even if this was the case, the argument could still be made that the felon voting ban is racist, and that argument would be just as idiotic. People who commit crimes are responsible for the consequences of that crime. And if one of those consequences is not being able to vote, tough! If that's the law, deal with it!
There exist good arguments for the repealing of the felon voting ban. Those that you brought up are good examples of these. Perhaps they should be heard and debated. I believe that the arguments that are NOT reasonable are those that claim that any sort of punishment for felons is thinly veiled racism. THAT viewpoint is retarded, and that is the problem I had with the grandparent poster. A crime's a crime, no matter who you are.
And that's my point in its entirety, really.
I thought that it was a federal thing, and it meant you couldn't vote in any state.
But that's an issue for another day. My problem with the grandparent was that he seemed to connect this voting ban with hidden racism in the government there. And THAT is just stupid: for even if it is a punishment for felons (and it's a pretty light one if so, compared to having a record, not being able to get a job, etc), then how can it be blamed on anyone but the guy who committed the crime? And if it's no one's fault but his, then how can it be racism in the government?
I don't know if anyone's called for this ban to be repealed on the grounds that it's racist, but if they do, I hope they're laughed out of the courtroom. The only valid reason to repeal this would be on its own merits. If the race card is played, that would seem to imply that black people need to be protected from the consequences of themselves breaking the law. And that's just absurd.
One of the big impacts on the Florida outcome was the state law that prohibits someone who has ever been convicted of a fellony from ever voting. This is another holdover from seggragation [sic]...
Sir,
What the FUCK are you talking about? It's the fault of those in charge that black people make up the majority of felons in the States? Why SHOULD convicted felons be allowed to vote? They've already shown that they can't be trusted in free society, why should they be trusted with the vote?
Tell you what. If you wanna vote in American Federal elections, don't commit crimes! Black or white, why shouldn't that be the case?
If this seems to be unfair to black people, how is it anything but their own fault?
GTK, however, has a C++ wrapper called GTKMM (I think). Using that instead of anything else would have the advantage that GTK and QT apps would wind up using the same toolkit underneath.
Furthermore, isn't Mozilla's widget set/toolkit/whatever a horrible, horrible design mistake? I don't mean how it's implemented; I mean that it was even implemented at all. Netscape hired a bunch of programmers to write a new browser, but instead they wasted years writing a new GUI: a GUI that is slow, bloated, and inconsistent with everything else on any platform. They should have just used an existing cross-platform toolkit like wxWindows.
So I'd suggest GTKMM instead.
But determining the type of a file by filename has the advantage that you can tell what's in a directory just by looking the list of file names therein. This is a good thing. If you determined filenames solely by header, then you'd have to read the header of each one individually to know what type it is, and a directory listing would tell you fairly little about what's actually in the directory.
The Mac way of using metadata is an interesting idea, but unless file type into somehow incorporated into directory listings, they are again not as useful as they could be. Thinking about it for a moment, one realizes that a possible way to do this would be to show the file type after the filename, abbreviating it so as not to waste space, and possibly separating it from the filename with a dot or some such character... leading us right back to where we started.
All in all, I'd have to say that the Windows way of determining file type by filename is actually a pretty good one in practice.
What a stupid question. Seriously. The ASAT is designed to kill satellites with its velocity alone... it's going much too fast for a net to do anything but disintegrate it. Furthermore, carrying a net would add to the weight of the homing vehicle and reduce its effective range, which isn't that great to begin with.
So no. That's not possible. Not even remotely.
Wait a minute...
If any third party can ask you for the source code to something you're distributing but haven't changed, and you never distributed it to them in the first place, then...
why can't you be considered the second party that's distributing to third parties, directing them all back to the first party, Linux.org?
I mean, if it's okay for one of your customers to tell people to download the source from you, why isn't it okay for you to tell your customers to download the source from somewhere else?
You're not contradicting him. If virus followed this rule, its plural would be viri. But everyone stupidly insists on calling it virii, as though its singular was virius. And it's dumb.
Funny. At work, I called them "gender benders" too, but I thought I was ripping off a Futurama joke...
Some months ago on slashdot there was an article about antispammers signing up some spammer in chicago I believe...
I don't believe that. If antispammers are signing up a spammer for junk mail, then that means that they know his address. Whenever anyone learns of a spammer's address, junk mail is the least of his problems... The constant harassment and death threats are more like it.
Suing people for sending you junk mail, under those circumstances, just wouldn't make sense.
Enterprise/Mission-critical/Life-critical systems should not be doing floating point operations period. They introduce too many errors and inaccuracies. If you think you need floats, try adjusting your units.
What a blanket statement. So it's impossible (or too difficult) to use floating point numbers correctly? You know this... how?
Are there any numerical analysts out there that have anything to say about this?
...doesn't absolve you of your obligation to obey the law...
...criminal behavior using one of your possessions. For example, buying a telescope does not give you the right to use it to look in my windows. Or, buying a television does not give you the right to modify it to get free cable etc etc
Nor did I say it should. My point in its entirety was that the law is wrong.
Those break existing laws, though, that are arguably not wrong. I'm not sure the telescope example actually breaks any laws (I think it might be a civil matter but I'm not sure) but I do get your point.
My point, however, was not that you should be able to, say, buy a brick and then use that brick by throwing it through someone's window. That breaks existing laws. There's no need to introduce a new law stating, for instance, that when you buy bricks, you can only use them as the manufacturer states, and if they state that you can't use them to build a building without paying them $1 million, then you can go to jail for violating that... That is essentially what these laws are stating. The only real difference is the type of product involved.
Look at it this way. Companies have every right to try to use technological means to force you to use their products their way. But there's no reason that these technological methods should be enforced by law, too. If people can use technology to circumvent their restrictions, and not violate any existing sane laws, there's simply no reason any new law should prevent them from doing that.
Then that law is wrong. If you buy something, you should have the right to do anything you want with it. Any law that opposes this is draconian, and a sign of a totalitarian government.
See this post for an example of why this is so bad.
If Ford won't let you put non-Ford tires on an Escort, don't buy a Ford.
If you don't want to get locked into buying one brand of ink jet refiller, don't buy that brand of ink jet printer. Or, any ink jet printer.
OR... you could buy a Ford, and then use fake Ford ID chips in the replacement tires, so that you can have your Ford and drive it too. Ford has every right to put such chips in its tires to try and prevent you from using any other brand of tires, but just the same, you have every right to do anything you can to get around it. After all, you bought the car... and you own it.
As I understand them, these laws would make attempting to bypass such restrictions illegal, and that is what is wrong with them.
That is true.
But if you can include special purpose chips (ASICs) in any comaparison, then general purpose processors won't be the best at any single task. An ASIC can be made for any program that can be written, and it'll run that program faster than any CPU made by the same process.
For instance: want to know what is the best CPU for performing matrix multiplication? An ASIC. What's the best CPU for rendering 3D images? An ASIC (like the ones used in modern video cards - they're ASICs of a sort). What's the best CPU for playing Quake III - Arena? An ASIC with the Quake III program encoded in its logic gates... You see how comparisons like this can be silly.
The only thing general-purpose processors are best at is running many different programs.
Quoth the Satanic Puppy:
Bob's MAC address isn't making it past the router, so they latch onto the gateway's MAC address etc etc
Now, I could be wrong, but aren't MAC addresses known only to the local gateway and aren't transmitted across the inter-net? So the router's MAC address wouldn't be known to the RIAA thugs at all? I thought only IP addresses were used for locating machines on the inter-net, and MAC addresses only on a local network (or your ISP's network) on a protocol like Ethernet.
What's that about Mecha Streisand?
That the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in weeks! Moderators, where are you?
Couldn't it just as easily be said that the existence of math is one of the strongest arguments for the existence of god?
And would that statement be any less meaningful than the one you just made?
That conviction, however, is the result of the UK being a fucked-up country and not recognizing a homeowner's right to self-defence and defence of his home. If that case had been tried in the States, he would have been found not guilty.
With magnetic media, it may be possible to store data in base 3, by having the magnetic field go in one direction, the opposite direction, or having no field at all. This should work since the current in the coils would, for each piece of data, move in one direction, the other, or not at all.
Base 4, however, would be harder, since then you'd need to use intensity levels, which is a pretty bad idea because you'd get so many more errors... I doubt we'll ever see schemes like this.
there are still 5 million people who need network transparency!
Why does everyone keep mentioning this like it matters? If people make a new X server without any network transparency at all, is that going to make the old X suddenly disappear?
Of course not. If people want to use network transparency, let them use the old X.
Need I remind you that last year the capital of your "civilized nation" alone has a murder rate nearly 48 times that of my entire nation etc etc
Murder rate? Murder RATE??
You're comparing the murder rate of a hot spot for murder with the mean for an entire country? Why the fuck why? What kind of conclusion can you draw from that other than that Washington D.C. is just that, a hot spot for murder?
I mean, you might as well just compare the murder rate of D.C. with the rate for the entire United States, and you'd see the same thing: that the rate for D.C., an atypical value, is far above the mean.
Your retarded comparison says nothing about the relative rates of violence between the two countries. Why even bring it up, except as FUD?