He doesn't have to be familiar with *specific* technology. Nobody has the slightest clue how a grey goo nanite would actually work, but that doesn't stop its discussion.
Whether you are talking frigging Gazillions or about one single Dollar, it doesn't matter, because you have already conceded that the student has to pay *something* and is therefore considered guilty as charged.
Well, DUH. They *are* guilty as charged, guilty of copyright violation, which was a crime long before our current villains came along.
The student's future would be forfeit in any case, because even if the requested penalty were sane it is still illegal to distribute copyrighted works without permission. Rail against the RIAA all you want, but please don't try to pretend the students' actions were entirely pure.
To everyone who is saying that multiple programs are good because they all have their individual specialties: Remember that programs are mutually exclusive, you can (in general) only use one to perform a particular task. If the particular features you want to use together happen to reside in different programs, tough. In the commercial world, this problem is resolved by programs defeating each other through assimilation: A program adds a feature mimicking that of its rival and thereby gains market share. Then the customer wins, because the features now work together under one program and the task is possible.
I'm not saying this problem doesn't affect commercial software as well, but claiming this is an advantage of OSS is specious. And customers have much more leverage over a commercial developer than any *individual* open source developer ("Add this feature or I won't pay you" as opposed to "Add this feature or I'll send you angry emails"). Downloading software that already works is far more desirable than patching a faulty product even to the most hardcore OSS evangelist; no one writes their own text editor or compiler, do they?
Depending on the sort of power this turns out to require, a laser-capable generator could be mounted on a vehicle itself. One truck is still better than a constant stream of trucks.
True enough for unsophisticated enemy forces
Remember that a laser beam is directional. Even if you are sensitive to its wavelength, it's much more difficult to see than a normal flash of light unless you are directly in its path (and unless it is fired through a very dirty atmosphere, in which case it would be more revealing than a projectile weapon).
That's the point exactly. How do you cram a complex concept like "use this to change the window size" or "the system is busy, wait a bit" into a 16x16 B&W image in such a way that one can easily deduce what that function is? It's hard enough already to decide to use a trash can for computer files or a wristwatch to indicate activity (remember that no one had ever designed icons before), and much harder to draw an instantly recognizable trash can with those constraints.
And what would be wrong with that? Especially for applications like finance, defense, or medicine where there is no room for the sort of errors common in consumer-level software. I wouldn't want to be the first person killed by a double free in the heart-lung machine I'm hooked up to.
Writing a web-based app is usually not engineer-level work
This question should not be answered with any specific examples. A large-scale web backend (or polished client for a nontrivial protocol, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "web-based app") can be just as complex and can require just as much engineering as a self-contained application. What makes its creators less deserving of the title "engineer" than any other programmers?
(I have yet to get a Kiki action figure at Burger King.)
Of course, if Disney *did* start selling Kiki figures at Burger King, there would be an even bigger stink over the perceived cheapening of a timeless work of art...
It's a figure of speech. A few weeks back, Disney let on (bottom of third paragraph) that they were prepared to rerelease SA if it did well at the Oscars. It did. This is that rerelease.
That is because children are NOT ordinary citizens. They are CHILDREN, which means they are not yet mature with respect to their psychology, education, common sense, and responsibility. Or do you really believe a 10-year-old and a 21-year-old are interchangeable?
Genres aren't dying, they're just becoming less well-defined. It's getting harder and harder to pigeonhole modern games into exactly one genre, because they aren't sticking to patterns (in basic design, at least). The only "genre" that has really died is text adventure, but that's only an implementation of RPG. Diablo is the same thing with graphics, and that's still going strong.
That argument seems to be founded on dualism. A materialist would rebut that by claiming that it is possible (certainly not *today*, but it's not expressly forbidden) to analyze, observe, and understand, the innermost operations of the human mind. Once this is possible, it would be not too much of a stretch to quantify and record in a precise form all aspects of a particular language.
You are basically describing a "software agent", a concept which was commonly listed as the next big thing during the dotcom age.
A person has already done the work of gathering information and declaring it relevant to a topic by posting it on a page under that topic. Where is the benefit to mixing and matching subparts of these pages? The ability to see information the author considers related will be lost.
I also don't want to be removed from the search process because there is no way to completely communicate your preferences to the computer. How often do you use the "I'm feeling lucky" button?
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He doesn't have to be familiar with *specific* technology. Nobody has the slightest clue how a grey goo nanite would actually work, but that doesn't stop its discussion.
Don't worry, we'll just get Superman to fly around the planet, reverse time, and go after the other cruise missile.
The student's future would be forfeit in any case, because even if the requested penalty were sane it is still illegal to distribute copyrighted works without permission. Rail against the RIAA all you want, but please don't try to pretend the students' actions were entirely pure.
To everyone who is saying that multiple programs are good because they all have their individual specialties: Remember that programs are mutually exclusive, you can (in general) only use one to perform a particular task. If the particular features you want to use together happen to reside in different programs, tough. In the commercial world, this problem is resolved by programs defeating each other through assimilation: A program adds a feature mimicking that of its rival and thereby gains market share. Then the customer wins, because the features now work together under one program and the task is possible.
I'm not saying this problem doesn't affect commercial software as well, but claiming this is an advantage of OSS is specious. And customers have much more leverage over a commercial developer than any *individual* open source developer ("Add this feature or I won't pay you" as opposed to "Add this feature or I'll send you angry emails"). Downloading software that already works is far more desirable than patching a faulty product even to the most hardcore OSS evangelist; no one writes their own text editor or compiler, do they?
Everyone who's already boycotting new movie releases because of TEH EVIL MPAA.
That's the point exactly. How do you cram a complex concept like "use this to change the window size" or "the system is busy, wait a bit" into a 16x16 B&W image in such a way that one can easily deduce what that function is? It's hard enough already to decide to use a trash can for computer files or a wristwatch to indicate activity (remember that no one had ever designed icons before), and much harder to draw an instantly recognizable trash can with those constraints.
And what would be wrong with that? Especially for applications like finance, defense, or medicine where there is no room for the sort of errors common in consumer-level software. I wouldn't want to be the first person killed by a double free in the heart-lung machine I'm hooked up to.
That's no excuse for helping idiots ruin the game for honest players. Write an autonomous bot or go play RoboWar or something.
OS X does not use the 68K emulator outside of Classic, so there'd better not be any 68K code in a native Carbon app like Photoshop...
(I have yet to get a Kiki action figure at Burger King.) Of course, if Disney *did* start selling Kiki figures at Burger King, there would be an even bigger stink over the perceived cheapening of a timeless work of art...
It's a figure of speech. A few weeks back, Disney let on (bottom of third paragraph) that they were prepared to rerelease SA if it did well at the Oscars. It did. This is that rerelease.
That is because children are NOT ordinary citizens. They are CHILDREN, which means they are not yet mature with respect to their psychology, education, common sense, and responsibility. Or do you really believe a 10-year-old and a 21-year-old are interchangeable?
They don't even need to slap up the driver. 99% of USB devices work with a Mac out of the box, OS X has built-in generic drivers.
Hopefully this will consist of more than "Consider operating system X. Note how insecure this feature is compared to the Windows equivalent."
Genres aren't dying, they're just becoming less well-defined. It's getting harder and harder to pigeonhole modern games into exactly one genre, because they aren't sticking to patterns (in basic design, at least). The only "genre" that has really died is text adventure, but that's only an implementation of RPG. Diablo is the same thing with graphics, and that's still going strong.
If I encode child pornography as a prime number, is it still illegal/obscene?
That argument seems to be founded on dualism. A materialist would rebut that by claiming that it is possible (certainly not *today*, but it's not expressly forbidden) to analyze, observe, and understand, the innermost operations of the human mind. Once this is possible, it would be not too much of a stretch to quantify and record in a precise form all aspects of a particular language.
You are basically describing a "software agent", a concept which was commonly listed as the next big thing during the dotcom age.
A person has already done the work of gathering information and declaring it relevant to a topic by posting it on a page under that topic. Where is the benefit to mixing and matching subparts of these pages? The ability to see information the author considers related will be lost.
I also don't want to be removed from the search process because there is no way to completely communicate your preferences to the computer. How often do you use the "I'm feeling lucky" button?