Just when has the US refused to extradite a suspect to the UK say in the last ten years?
Very recently actually. When British journalist Terry Lloyd
was shot by US forces in Iraq, the US refused to cooperate or extradite any troops to
face trial here.
The case had to dropped entirely (just this week).
Patents must and do include "details on how to recreate such an idea". It's called the "description". While you no longer need to produce a prototype there is generally enough in the description for "someone skilled in the art2 to recreate it.
The problem is the description is written in verbose, obscure "patent speak" which is
not enough to reproduce the patent. Like this nonsense (picked, I might say,
pretty much at random from a Google search on computer patents):
The
most recent data is copied from the first memory location to a second
memory location, where the most recent data is added to the historical
data. Once the copying is done, the most recent data is deleted from the
first memory location. Once the first memory location is cleared, the
polling of the heterogeneous computers begins. The initial polling is to
determine if each one of the plurality of heterogeneous computers is
active.
[Source]
At best you can say that "most recent data is copied [etc]" is a computer
program crudely and inaccurately translated into lawyer speak. At
worse you could say that this is just obfuscation. Provide source code in
a common programming language
to make what you're trying to say clear and precise.
I have found that asking interviewees to do some (simple) coding tasks has been useful,
but it's not necessarily about whether they succeed or fail at the task.
We set
up a computer running Linux and projector in the room and asked candidates to write code.
Many of the candidates turn out to
have no idea how to use the Linux command line, or don't know what a man page is,
or how to run the compiler (and this is after extensive screening of their CVs already for a job
which specifies Linux skills). This becomes very obvious in the practical test, and
such people can be quickly rejected.
Without the practical test we'd have to rely on CVs giving reliable answers to
these things ["10 years experience with Linux" etc] and on asking the candidates
what they know and relying on honest answers back.
Seems really inefficient. but may not be. It really depends on how much data you need to copy versus how much data you can share. And how
fast copying is on your processor (probably very fast indeed).
And whether your GC strategy can be made globally more efficient because of the immutable data.
There's no single answer to this and naturally it depends on the precise application.
I should add that banning or confining mutable state is fairly important for efficient generational garbage collection.
This is often overlooked (for many programmers a good GC is "invisible"),
but if you allow mutable state, then you allow for pointers which point from
old heaps to young heaps. That complicates and slows down the garbage collection because
you have to keep a special list of those pointers. With immutable data,
no such pointers can ever exist. The OCaml compiler/runtime allows mutable
data, but has to track which structures can be mutable and handle them
specially.
Personally it's been ages since I used a mutable structure. Once you
understand how to use immutable structures, they are just so much more
convenient. Of course there's a big leap that has to happen in your
head before you understand how to use them naturally. Functional
programming has several big leaps like that though.
"Last time you checked" was some time last century in that case. Linux kernels have been able to support at least 100,000 threads for ages.
That doesn't mean that using shared memory concurrency is a good idea though. When your computer comes with 10s or 100s of cores you'll
realise that maybe SMP wasn't the best model of concurrency to choose. That's where models such as map-reduce, Erlang's shared nothing concurrency,
message passing, and MPI come into their own. Even today they are useful because you'll be able to scale your program across
multiple machines.
I don't really know much about D, but OCaml nowadays has loads of libraries, excellent features like macros, type safety everywhere, pattern matching, a super-powerful object system (not used very much, mind you), functors, and it compiles down to fast, tight machine code. If you use Debian or Fedora you can just 'apt-get' or 'yum install' the whole
system and almost all of the popular libraries.
You're probably looking for an impure functional language like OCaml. You get to use purity when you want
to (it helps in reasoning about code), but drop to impurity when you need the performance.
OCaml compiles down to native code, which about 10-20% slower than C. Faster than C in a few (narrow) cases.
Haskell is also compiled to native code, but difficulties with the execution model mean it's pretty slow for any
practical use.
Erlang is interpreted - the execution model is similar to Perl or Python - which means its slow on single cores, but
of course the whole point of Erlang is to run in highly concurrent, distributed machines. There is a project to
use OCaml for the performance-critical, single threaded parts, and Erlang for coordinating the parallelism.
Of course, this is probably missing the point. Unless you're doing
intensive numerical work, you probably don't need the performance. The
real advantage of these languages is how your code will be much smaller,
easier to understand, safer, and faster to write.
that sentence seems to suggest that you don't understand how public key cryptography works.
Well I have a degree in math and a masters in computer science, and can work
through the common forms of public key crypto from first principles, but anyway
do tell me how I this shows I don't understand how public key crypto works.
You copyright the actual tangible information. Attempting to abstract the law into mathematics is pointless. They are not compatible.
You're dead right. What is interesting is that if you're "caught" with some of these
random blocks on your disk, they're just random blocks of data. You can't decode
them unless you have the key, hence there's no charge of copyright infringement.
One problem with the proposal (which, by the way, is very obvious, and is how FreeNet
and other systems work) is that their key length needs to be the same length
as the data, because it's effectively a One Time Pad. If it's any shorter than the
original data, then there will be a way to unencrypt the data without the key (proof
by a simple counting argument).
I can't imagine what an average user would require for support. Do they ask questions like "Where's the start menu" or "the dir command is broken".
No, troll, they ask questions like "the HPET timer on my 16 core Dell with 128GB of RAM loses synch by a couple of nanoseconds every day and we are assured by Dell this is a software issue. Please talk to the kernel developers to identify possible sources of lost ticks in the 2.6.18 kernel."
Operating systems are fantastically complex beasts with odd bugs and strange interactions with
hardware, and for serious high end use require advanced levels of support that Red Hat provides.
I didn't say anything about a lack of profit at Red Hat, I just stated that the day may come when corporations ask themselves why they should pay for something that is available for free.
You clearly have no idea what Red Hat's model is. We don't sell bits on a CD. We
sell support. We sell the ability to call us and (in some cases) talk to the original
kernel developer who wrote the code. I'm sorry but support is not "something that is
available for free" to any user of Linux.
Does Red Hat have any brand new product ideas that aren't part of the Linux OS that they'd like to spend a few years developing and release version 1.0 under the GPL license?
Yes, absolutely dozens of products. Off the top of my head, Red Hat MRG
(developed for years and just released, GPL, version 1.0 last week), ClusterSuite, LVM and all the Sistina stuff,
FreeIPA,
all the ET virtualization tools,
all my stuff, virtio,
JBoss (bought, already open source), RHN (recently open sourced),
Netscape Directory Server (bought and open sourced), and probably 10 more that I can't
even remember now.
In this case, though, I have no reason to doubt its validity, and I certainly didn't come away from it thinking I should let the government curtail some of my rights.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance though. The fact that Al Qaeda is using
the internet and tools such as PGP is also being used (certainly in Europe) to
justify banning "hacking" tools and pervasive monitoring of the internet. We as
technical people can see that neither of these actions will do anything to prevent
the original problem, but there are companies out there lobbying so that they can
sell the "security" infrastructure into governments, and politians are notoriously
clueless about technology.
Although Red Hat has made contributions to Linux, the OS was fundamentally done by the time Red Hat became invovled. There may be room for one company to be successful holding the corporate hand as they venture into Linux, but as corporations become more comfortable with Linux they may begin to question if Red Hat is adding any value they should be paying for.
What a load of drivel you do write. Red Hat are profitable and have expanded every quarter for
at least the past 4 years, and we're
selling RHEL licenses in spades, many to huge companies that have advanced in-house
Unix/Linux teams. The operating system was not "fundamentally done" when Red Hat came
around. Otherwise we'd just still be shipping RHL 1 to everybody. In fact we consistently top the list of
kernel contributions, that kernel scaling up and down in ways that no one could
even foresee 15 years ago when RH was founded. So stop trolling nonsense
and pay attention.
The EU Council of Ministers consists of the ministers from all national governments (different ministers depending on the subject being discussed). You know, those ministers who always approve unpopular measures when they're in the Council and then later at home blame the EU for having to implement those same measures in national law.
It's a real shame that Slashdot mods can't go over +5, because this needs to be modded up
to +500 and every person living in the EU needs to understand exactly how this undemocratic
process is working.
The worst thing about the EU Constitution (erm, I mean Lisbon Treaty)? It
enshrines this abuse. The worst thing about friend-of-Holywood Charlie McCreevy?
NO ONE can directly threaten to vote him out.
That's right -- It might not even be the government. Could be your neighbour
hopping onto your wifi, or the sysadmin at your local ISP looking to blackmail you.
Funny thing is, I get a lot more paper spam than email spam.
Well you must live in Victorian times then. I have to actually deal with the spam (ie. it isn't filtered when I see it) and
the amount is enormous, overwhelming, a giant attack on all fronts, not just email but wikis, contact forms, attacks on my BBSes and mailing lists etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Just when has the US refused to extradite a suspect to the UK say in the last ten years?
Very recently actually. When British journalist Terry Lloyd was shot by US forces in Iraq, the US refused to cooperate or extradite any troops to face trial here. The case had to dropped entirely (just this week).
Rich.
Patents must and do include "details on how to recreate such an idea". It's called the "description". While you no longer need to produce a prototype there is generally enough in the description for "someone skilled in the art2 to recreate it.
The problem is the description is written in verbose, obscure "patent speak" which is not enough to reproduce the patent. Like this nonsense (picked, I might say, pretty much at random from a Google search on computer patents):
At best you can say that "most recent data is copied [etc]" is a computer program crudely and inaccurately translated into lawyer speak. At worse you could say that this is just obfuscation. Provide source code in a common programming language to make what you're trying to say clear and precise.
Rich.
If it was a document I really cared about, I wouldn't use Word either. It has horrible typography.
For stuff that I really want to look beautiful, I use Latex, and for very technical documents that need to be really precise, DocBook/XML.
Rich.
Why on earth is this report ... a PowerPoint "deck"?
Rich.
Lawsuits, court orders, bazillions of dollars in damages, ruined lifes, bizarre legal actions, etc, etc.
Sounds like the 'War' on Drugs ...
Rich.
I have found that asking interviewees to do some (simple) coding tasks has been useful, but it's not necessarily about whether they succeed or fail at the task.
We set up a computer running Linux and projector in the room and asked candidates to write code. Many of the candidates turn out to have no idea how to use the Linux command line, or don't know what a man page is, or how to run the compiler (and this is after extensive screening of their CVs already for a job which specifies Linux skills). This becomes very obvious in the practical test, and such people can be quickly rejected.
Without the practical test we'd have to rely on CVs giving reliable answers to these things ["10 years experience with Linux" etc] and on asking the candidates what they know and relying on honest answers back.
Rich.
Seems really inefficient. but may not be. It really depends on how much data you need to copy versus how much data you can share. And how fast copying is on your processor (probably very fast indeed). And whether your GC strategy can be made globally more efficient because of the immutable data. There's no single answer to this and naturally it depends on the precise application.
Rich.
I should add that banning or confining mutable state is fairly important for efficient generational garbage collection.
This is often overlooked (for many programmers a good GC is "invisible"), but if you allow mutable state, then you allow for pointers which point from old heaps to young heaps. That complicates and slows down the garbage collection because you have to keep a special list of those pointers. With immutable data, no such pointers can ever exist. The OCaml compiler/runtime allows mutable data, but has to track which structures can be mutable and handle them specially.
Personally it's been ages since I used a mutable structure. Once you understand how to use immutable structures, they are just so much more convenient. Of course there's a big leap that has to happen in your head before you understand how to use them naturally. Functional programming has several big leaps like that though.
Rich.
"Last time you checked" was some time last century in that case. Linux kernels have been able to support at least 100,000 threads for ages.
That doesn't mean that using shared memory concurrency is a good idea though. When your computer comes with 10s or 100s of cores you'll realise that maybe SMP wasn't the best model of concurrency to choose. That's where models such as map-reduce, Erlang's shared nothing concurrency, message passing, and MPI come into their own. Even today they are useful because you'll be able to scale your program across multiple machines.
Rich.
I don't really know much about D, but OCaml nowadays has loads of libraries, excellent features like macros, type safety everywhere, pattern matching, a super-powerful object system (not used very much, mind you), functors, and it compiles down to fast, tight machine code. If you use Debian or Fedora you can just 'apt-get' or 'yum install' the whole system and almost all of the popular libraries.
Rich.
You're probably looking for an impure functional language like OCaml. You get to use purity when you want to (it helps in reasoning about code), but drop to impurity when you need the performance.
Rich.
OCaml compiles down to native code, which about 10-20% slower than C. Faster than C in a few (narrow) cases.
Haskell is also compiled to native code, but difficulties with the execution model mean it's pretty slow for any practical use.
Erlang is interpreted - the execution model is similar to Perl or Python - which means its slow on single cores, but of course the whole point of Erlang is to run in highly concurrent, distributed machines. There is a project to use OCaml for the performance-critical, single threaded parts, and Erlang for coordinating the parallelism.
Of course, this is probably missing the point. Unless you're doing intensive numerical work, you probably don't need the performance. The real advantage of these languages is how your code will be much smaller, easier to understand, safer, and faster to write.
Rich.
Been done: See Wafer-scale integration.
that sentence seems to suggest that you don't understand how public key cryptography works.
Well I have a degree in math and a masters in computer science, and can work through the common forms of public key crypto from first principles, but anyway do tell me how I this shows I don't understand how public key crypto works.
Rich.
You copyright the actual tangible information. Attempting to abstract the law into mathematics is pointless. They are not compatible.
You're dead right. What is interesting is that if you're "caught" with some of these random blocks on your disk, they're just random blocks of data. You can't decode them unless you have the key, hence there's no charge of copyright infringement.
One problem with the proposal (which, by the way, is very obvious, and is how FreeNet and other systems work) is that their key length needs to be the same length as the data, because it's effectively a One Time Pad. If it's any shorter than the original data, then there will be a way to unencrypt the data without the key (proof by a simple counting argument).
Rich.
I can't imagine what an average user would require for support. Do they ask questions like "Where's the start menu" or "the dir command is broken".
No, troll, they ask questions like "the HPET timer on my 16 core Dell with 128GB of RAM loses synch by a couple of nanoseconds every day and we are assured by Dell this is a software issue. Please talk to the kernel developers to identify possible sources of lost ticks in the 2.6.18 kernel."
Operating systems are fantastically complex beasts with odd bugs and strange interactions with hardware, and for serious high end use require advanced levels of support that Red Hat provides.
Rich.
I didn't say anything about a lack of profit at Red Hat, I just stated that the day may come when corporations ask themselves why they should pay for something that is available for free.
You clearly have no idea what Red Hat's model is. We don't sell bits on a CD. We sell support. We sell the ability to call us and (in some cases) talk to the original kernel developer who wrote the code. I'm sorry but support is not "something that is available for free" to any user of Linux.
Does Red Hat have any brand new product ideas that aren't part of the Linux OS that they'd like to spend a few years developing and release version 1.0 under the GPL license?
Yes, absolutely dozens of products. Off the top of my head, Red Hat MRG (developed for years and just released, GPL, version 1.0 last week), ClusterSuite, LVM and all the Sistina stuff, FreeIPA, all the ET virtualization tools, all my stuff, virtio, JBoss (bought, already open source), RHN (recently open sourced), Netscape Directory Server (bought and open sourced), and probably 10 more that I can't even remember now.
Rich.
[Not in reply to your comment, but since you seem to be one of the authors ...]
The $64K question for me is what is / will the license be? Will it be properly open source? All parts or some parts?
Rich.
In this case, though, I have no reason to doubt its validity, and I certainly didn't come away from it thinking I should let the government curtail some of my rights.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance though. The fact that Al Qaeda is using the internet and tools such as PGP is also being used (certainly in Europe) to justify banning "hacking" tools and pervasive monitoring of the internet. We as technical people can see that neither of these actions will do anything to prevent the original problem, but there are companies out there lobbying so that they can sell the "security" infrastructure into governments, and politians are notoriously clueless about technology.
Rich.
This is a sick fucked up system.. where our companies that directly benefit from wars also run our media..
So that explains what CmdrTaco is getting up to when he should be proof-reading Slashdot stories. Running a global defense corporation :-)
Rich.
Although Red Hat has made contributions to Linux, the OS was fundamentally done by the time Red Hat became invovled. There may be room for one company to be successful holding the corporate hand as they venture into Linux, but as corporations become more comfortable with Linux they may begin to question if Red Hat is adding any value they should be paying for.
What a load of drivel you do write. Red Hat are profitable and have expanded every quarter for at least the past 4 years, and we're selling RHEL licenses in spades, many to huge companies that have advanced in-house Unix/Linux teams. The operating system was not "fundamentally done" when Red Hat came around. Otherwise we'd just still be shipping RHL 1 to everybody. In fact we consistently top the list of kernel contributions, that kernel scaling up and down in ways that no one could even foresee 15 years ago when RH was founded. So stop trolling nonsense and pay attention.
Rich.
The EU Council of Ministers consists of the ministers from all national governments (different ministers depending on the subject being discussed). You know, those ministers who always approve unpopular measures when they're in the Council and then later at home blame the EU for having to implement those same measures in national law.
It's a real shame that Slashdot mods can't go over +5, because this needs to be modded up to +500 and every person living in the EU needs to understand exactly how this undemocratic process is working.
The worst thing about the EU Constitution (erm, I mean Lisbon Treaty)? It enshrines this abuse. The worst thing about friend-of-Holywood Charlie McCreevy? NO ONE can directly threaten to vote him out.
Rich.
you shouldn't be trusting other "not to look".
That's right -- It might not even be the government. Could be your neighbour hopping onto your wifi, or the sysadmin at your local ISP looking to blackmail you.
Rich.
Funny thing is, I get a lot more paper spam than email spam.
Well you must live in Victorian times then. I have to actually deal with the spam (ie. it isn't filtered when I see it) and the amount is enormous, overwhelming, a giant attack on all fronts, not just email but wikis, contact forms, attacks on my BBSes and mailing lists etc.
Rich.
I don't think a foreign country would risk putting a former president in front of a war crime tribunal, even if its as unpopular a president as Bush.
In many parts of the EU any citizen can ask the police to arrest him if he was no longer president and dared to step foot here. You might want to read about General Pinochet's arrest warrant (issued by a Spanish judge and only very narrowly avoided), and this WP page on universal jurisdiction.
Rich.