So many people (Platonists) think these laws exist outside of human experience, and it's so obvious that they don't. WHAT they try to describe does, but there's a big difference. We can say a^2 + b^2 = c^2, but the very notion of a triangle is completely circumscribed by human experience, and the notion of abstract notation is also a human thing. To say such a relation exists a priori is where I believe rationalism runs off the rails into a kind of metaphysics of "belief" as opposed to empirical science, and where empirical science mistakes itself for reality.
Existence is a tricky thing, because it is also purely a human concept. By claiming that mathematics does not exist outside of human experience you are also implicitly claiming that the universe itself does not exist outside of human experience. Everything we know about the universe has been derived from human experience, which is ultimately no more real or unreal than our experience of mathematics, since both experiences exist only within the human mind. There is no objective viewpoint from which to consider existence or reality. Our minds must approach both the universe and mathematics in exactly the same way; perform experiments, observe the results, make up theories about what is happening, and try to disprove them. From the human perspective mathematics is as much a part of the universe as matter and energy, so it is not absurd to claim that mathematics exists outside of human experience.
Did I mention superiority? No, I said races and sexes are different. Since we're going from one ridiculous extreme to the other; are you inferring then that all races and both sexes are identical in every aspect?
And I said prove it. By "different" I assume you mean there are quantifiable measurements that distinguish individuals by race and sex. If the properties are quantifiable, then there is a numerical "best" value for certain criteria such as beauty, speed, intelligence, etc. If you actually mean that there are *not* quantifiable differences between races, what the hell is the point of your post? More importantly, how do you define race and sex? Even physiological sexual development occurs in several stages of fetal growth, making sex a multidimensional range of values dependent on the level of hormones present at different times. My entire point is that you are using words that really have little meaning in genetics. You should be talking about phenotypes linked directly to genetics or hormone levels, not abstractions like races and sexes. It's too easy to either draw incorrect conclusions or pigeonhole individuals into fitting arbitrary predetermined patterns. For instance, how do you create a new race? Once that's done, how would you test this new race to see how they differ from other ones?
No, you're the only one who knows the real truth. Oh, but did you notice where I said "culturally"? Do you suppose there's a slight difference in culture between Caucasians who've been in Canada for the past few decades and those who live in, say, France or Spain?
Well, you said races and specifically broke them into whites, blacks, etc., which generally means you're looking at some sort of genetic features and not just locale or culture. It's obvious that cultures have different ways of thinking, working, and doing things. However, cultures don't have a genetic basis that I know of.
Furthermore I was differentiating because the Politically Correct types like to lump people together based on an arbitrary constant, eg. "African American". I know people from Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados and Guyana who think that's a stupid title.
I'm a "European American", or probably more accurately a "Western European American", which I agree is about as meaningful as "African American." As far as paleontology can tell, everyone's ancestors originally came from Africa to begin with. You are differentiating on just as flimsy boundaries as the politically correct types you disparage, because just lumping all blacks into "African Americans" is just as silly as lumping all the people in Africa into one race, as you did. It's picking one phenotype (very dark skin) and assuming that implies a closely related (in a genetic sense) population group.
But please, continue your politically correct thought policing and make sure nobody out there believes that cultural or physiological differences in people makes any difference. We're aaaaaaall the same. {wink!}
Political correctness is a misguided attempt to call everyone equal. Racism/sexism is a misguided attempt to claim that differences in emotion, intelligence, athleticism, etc. between people are based significantly on who their genetic ancestors were and how many X chromosomes they have. They're equally foolish ideas. So far you've said a lot about how "races are different" but failed to provide evidence of how race is a predictor for differences, and also how to determine race in the first place.
Again, I'd love to see some examples of physiological differences by race. The only thing I can think of off-hand is sickle cell anemia, which happens to affect more people with ancestors from countries where malaria was rampant. The genes controlling that disease have nothing to do with race, however, and people of any skin tone or ancestry can have it. If you believe wikipedia, the mutation actually arose independently in distinct population groups several times. Skin pigmentation is another one, but since everyone has genes for pigmentation, I'm not sure how you'd define which levels of pigment determine race, or vice versa.
There is currently no working concurrency model for standard C++. You want to make an atomic access to an object? Hope and pray that you have bug free system libraries and a compiler that doesn't optimize away your locking wrappers and do inappropriate speculative stores. Apparently the next C++ standard will address it, but it seems rather foolish to start a transition to massively multithreaded code without an actual standard.
I only hope I live to see the day where it's acknowledged that physiologically, mentally, emotionally as well as culturally Whites (Canadian, American, European), Blacks (African, islanders), Asians, Indians, Natives, etc. are all different, as a side note women and men differ along the same lines.
So which "race" is the smartest? The kindest? The fastest? The most beautiful?
If you can't answer even one of those questions with statistical certainty, please shut up.
On second thought, do you even have a definition of race that doesn't depend on where a person's ancestors lived 200 years ago?
Always sounded to me like saying that all works of literature are, are arrangements of words. And all words are public domain. The dictionary is prior art. So books shouldn't be copyrighted.
Copyrighting or patenting mathematics would be like copyrighting or patenting the grammar of a language. It doesn't matter which words or symbols you use to perform mathematics. You can just as easily say "foo bar foo baz box" if foo = "1", bar = "+", baz = "=", and box = "2". Copyrighting or patenting mathematics is silly because it's not the words that matter, it's the rules that determine which words can go together to form valid mathematical statements. The rules of mathematics are well known and the great bulk of mathematics can be traced directly to the axioms of ZFC set theory. Stories and other creative works are not formulaic (or if they are formulaic, they're boring). There is no obvious algorithm or formula to generate Moby Dick from scratch.
Algorithms IMHO are simply the words and sentences you use to make software, which is akin to a work of literature. At least it seems that way to me, anyways.
Algorithms are akin to proofs in mathematics. An algorithm is a proof that performing certain operations on the initial state will produce a desired output state, with the side effect of also showing exactly how to generate the desired output from the input state in terms of a sequence of precise fundamental operations. Algorithms must be precise, correct, and decidable; e.g. there can be no guesswork about which operations to perform and they must work. In literature, there is metaphor, simile, ambiguity, and things left to the reader's interpretation.
Fundamentally, copyrights and patents cannot prevent knowledge itself from existing, since that would not only go against the reason for having them in the first place but would also be incredibly harmful and impractical. Mathematics and algorithms are both just forms of knowledge; knowledge that following certain rules will transform one thing into another. Just as it would be silly to make it a crime to tell other people about Moby Dick or how steam engines work, it is silly to make it a crime to explain to other people how mathematics or algorithms work, and also just as silly to make it a crime for those other people to implement new things based on their knowledge of algorithms or mathematics. It would be akin to making it a crime to hear about Moby Dick and imagine the implications of hunting for a white whale with a crazy captain.
One potential weakness with metamath is that definitions are introduced without formal proof. This is acknowledged by the developers, and the definitions are generally straightforward enough that the results can be judged as correct. For instance, see df-2, which if ever used to represent the mathematical concept of 2 (e.g. by a parser seeing the digit "2" and replacing it with df-2), depends entirely upon the axiomatic definition of df-2 as (1 + 1). It is possible for someone to define df-2 as ((1 + 1) + 1), and a proof relying only on df-2 (e.g. not reducing all terms to the ZFC axioms) could actually prove a false statement given the new definition of df-2 (but it's old interpretation as the number 2). The problem arises when definitions are substituted for actual constructions of the basic axioms of the formal system without proof that the definitions themselves are sound.
Apparently the Ghilbert project does produce formal proofs of definitions and can import metamath proofs, but I have not looked at it much.
Sharing "culture" isn't stealing nor illegal, as long as the copyright owner of said culture is OK with it. Making a copy of music you've purchased - perhaps an audio tape - and giving it to a friend, is not OK with many copyright owners and in that case it is indeed illegal since it would constitute 'copyright infringement'.
It all comes down to the ephemeral nature of the copy. You can copy the music into sound waves that your friend can hear and they can copy those sound waves into their neurons (which thankfully cannot be regulated; yet), but if you try to fix a copy on some other medium it's a violation of copyright. So the real question is this: If you make a physical copy for your friend who listens to it once and then deletes it, is it an ephemeral copy or not? Rationally, that should be the same case as just playing the music over the air to your friend. Is there some moral reason that friends must have physical proximity in order to share music with each other?
I'm having a lot of trouble reading this in any way at all that can justify trial- and conviction-free seizure and disposal of a citizen's property.
So get Ron Paul on your local Republican ticket or something. When was the last time you saw the constitution without big government bootprints all over it?
Forget laptops. Forget space ships. Above all, forget nuclear weapons. If you are a citizen of an impoverished nation, focus on the basics: reading, writing, mathematics, science (includng agriculture), and free markets. If you can succeed at the basics (and everyone can succeed at the basics), then your nation will naturally prosper.
The U.S. was a very industrialist nation in the 1950's, and Japan copied that. Japan moved into electronics at the appropriate time when the market was ready for it. The only industrial markets the world is interested in now are the dirt cheapest sources of labor, not exactly something you'd advise a poor nation to develop. Japan had 50 years to become as successful as they are today, and you're talking about today's poor nations ignoring technology and trying to compete in the world market? That's insane. Poor countries need to jump into the modern information market immediately and start selling things on it. If Japan had focused on 50 year old horse-and-buggy manufacturing after WWII, they'd be poorer than the nations OLPC is trying to help now.
It is much better for any poor nation today to get into the information age and take money from rich westerners. That's essentially the only way to be successful; market your products to the richest people with the most free capital; not trying to undercut China and Mexico on cheap consumer goods. I have no doubt that without help that's the eventual fate of all poor nations; as the cheap manufacturing centers achieve a middle class the cheap manufacturing will move to the most lucrative poor country that has a surplus of people to work in factories. The OLPC project is trying to help countries avoid that fate.
When there are no more poor countries left, it will become economically expedient to research advanced automation and self assembling systems that will make everyone better off, rich or poor. The more countries that can achieve self sufficiency, the faster that will happen.
Generally (this is an oversimplification) if sync is not issued deliberately, nothing is decached until shutdown, unless RAM starts getting dangerously low (it's too smart to do disk caching in swap space).
Look up bdflush and pdflush. Dirty buffers get written back to disk relatively quickly unless you've turned it off for some reason (laptop power saving modes for instance). Just touching a file on the drive should be sufficient to force a write to the disk within a reasonable number of seconds.
That said, there's really no excuse for drives falling off the bus unless they're explicitly told to do so. I can't imagine all the extra spinups are good for the drive, either. I do have one of the freeagent drives and if I wasn't just doing large backups to it I probably would be annoyed enough to return it.
But why would you buy such a product in the first place? I like movies and I love my music but absolutely ***NONE*** of it is stuff I wouldn't do without if it was too highly priced or too encumbered by DRM. I don't understand these people who need a movie or a piece of music ***SO BADLY*** that they're prepared to put up with being treated like shit by the manufacturer.
You're talking to Walmart nation here, doesn't that tell you something?
In actual response to your question, the problem is that lots of mainstream music and almost all movies use DRM now. Completely restricting one's participation in public culture is not possible in the general sense; if everyone stopped buying DRM material all the mainstream media companies would go broke by stupidly ignoring what customers actually want. They'd just blame it on piracy and put even worse DRM on discs that aren't selling.
Considering that many people watch dozens of movies a month, how are they even supposed to obtain legitimate non-DRM movies when Comcast puts secret limits on their bandwidth? There aren't any retail outlets for CC or non-DRM movies that I'm aware of. Without the contrasting sales, there's no way to indicate to the media companies that DRM-free is what you want, not just an absence of media (or that you're a "pirate").
The fact that Amazon is selling DRM free music is a good thing, because I bet they will start selling DRM free movies within a year or two. Then the *IAA's can observe customer choices using a business model they understand.
1) The laptop as a replacement for textbooks. Able to be updated and searched. Also, carrying around one XO laptop is better than managing a half dozen books, and if the computers get recycled after 8th grade then the long term costs could level out.
If grade school textbooks are anything like college textbooks, an XO is worth about two or three textbooks. That's pretty amazing when you consider that every student takes about 8 classes per year. Using open textbooks could *save* money if the schools bought laptops.
Unequivocal. The person in charge of counter-terrorism up to the very date that the Bush administration started CONFIRMED that 9/11 was already irreversibly in motion. The opportunity to stop it had already passed.
Isn't having people take their shoes off in airports supposed to stop future terrorist attacks?
If so, then what you quoted is a bold faced lie. They could have just started forcing people to take their shoes off at the airport checkpoints and taking their knives away, and 9/11 would have been prevented.
If not, then this entire anti-terrorism thing is just a front for more government control with *absolutely no benefit* to normal people.
Of course not. They will then turn to David Hume's classic argument that there is no reason whatsoever that anybody should trust the results of inductive reasoning (i.e. they will say that evolution can never really be proved).
Anyone who doesn't trust the inductive hypothesis should have serious problems with the bible or any other religious work, since none of the originals exist anymore. There's an implicit inductive argument that repeated copying/translation produces exact (or close enough) copies of an original, and will continue to do so in the future.
They were mere pawns. Do you really think that someone smart enough to plan an attack like that would be stupid enough to kill himself for a couple of virgins?
I think half the people on slashdot would kill themselves for just one virgin.
Well, forgive me for not being impressed by that. An Islamic court? Why? Did they attack an Islamic country? No. I think a jury trial would be just fine, right here near the crime scene. They certainly did not capitulate - they were defiant right up until the end.
Why should Afghanistan be impressed with U.S. courts? They execute murderers in Islamic courts the same as the U.S. does (unlike most of the first world countries). What more do you want? Torture? Public humiliation? The "crime scene" for Bin Laden is not in the U.S. It's any training camps, places where money was transferred, or other interactions with the actual people who carried out the attacks. All those things probably occurred in Afghanistan. My question to you is: Why should a sovereign nation be forced to submit to another nation's court system? Should any U.S. citizen be charged in an Islamic court for crimes committed in that foreign country despite the fact that the U.S. citizen had never even been to that country? Should Blackwater agents and military personnel be tried in Afghanistan or Iraq courts for murdering the local citizens (not just casualties of war)? Should G. W. Bush be tried in Afghanistan or Iraq for bombing those countries?
Afghanistan proved that even one country overrun by extremists is incompatible with our lifestyle. It had to go. Even a country run by horrid warlords is better for our interests than one run by militant extremists.
This one is funny enough to respond to as well: First, you consider horrid warlords (ooh, maybe like Saddam?) better than extremists, but you don't really make a distinction between them other than that. I suppose you could be alluding to the fact that the U.S. put both the Taliban's predecessors and Saddam Hussein in power (both warlords) in an attempt to control events in the middle east, and armed both of them as well, and also screwed around in Iran. You're essentially saying that creating terrorism in your children's generation is preferable to dealing directly with other nations in the present. Instead, let's just use subversive tactics to ruin other countries in defense against the Hordes of Communism (or whatever) and arm them so they'll be full of angry U.S. haters in a couple decades, and trained and armed to the teeth by the CIA.
I just compared EULA's from my $99 Fry's copy of XP to the EULA's from the ones from the MS store. They're identicle. The only difference is my MS store copies came in a box, while my Fry's copy was just a scint manual and CD encased in shrinkwrap.
So, did you keep the receipts and the holographic logos to prove to the BSA that you own the licenses?
Afghanistan? The government there was harboring the people who carried out the attacks - actively protecting them, in fact. If ever there was a legitimate reason for war, this was it! Or is there some kind of threshold for devastation that 9/11 didn't meet?
The people who carried out the attacks died in them. They were mostly Saudi Arabian (none from Afghanistan or Iraq), were partially trained in Afghanistan, but received flight instruction in the U.S. Considering the capitulation of the Taliban before the war (they were willing to turn Bin Laden over to an Islamic court) and the opposition Al Qaeda has put up since the start of the war, it's unlikely that invading Afghanistan was the right decision. I think even the Taliban would have realized that losing their country was worth less than protecting Bin Laden. As it is now, the Taliban can fight the foreign invaders AND protect Bin Laden without a conflict of interest. Way to go, strategic war planners!
A few programmer friends got me copies of XP from the MS employee store for $35 each, which I have running on 2 machines.
You might want to make sure that Microsoft actually allowed your friends to transfer their license to you. I know the student editions expire once you're no longer a student, and apparently some of their corporate employee purchase programs also have expiring licenses when the employees leave the corporation.
I've never understood this. The BSA is obviously just a trade group with no authority whatsoever to conduct raids and such. If they decide they need to "raid" a business, then generally they would just have a suspicion that this business 'might' have some of their software installed and some of that software 'might' not be fully licensed. Is that really enough for local law enforcement to go along with it? A lot of the coverage I've read about BSA raids seems to imply that the business involved went along with the raid voluntarily, and I have trouble understanding why any business would do so.
Read your EULAs. Microsoft reserves the right to terminate your agreement if you ever violate the terms of the license, which includes never installing more copies than you are licensed for. Furthermore, you are required to keep the "certificate of authenticity" as proof of your license. The BSA is in essentially the same position as the *IAA, acting on the legal behalf of their member companies to sue businesses for copyright infringement. Part of a civil suit is discovery, and the BSA can demand proof of ownership for licensed installs. They could also press for criminal copyright infringement charges which would involve the local police or the FBI (since I bet you obtained or operated those illegal copies across state lines in some way...). In general, it's the same "settle or get massive copyright infringement fines and potential jail time" attack that the RIAA has been using against normal people. Businesses either agree to the BSA's audit or go directly to court and involve lawyers.
So I'd like to make an argument here, and see if I actually get any constructive responses: I really don't think that it was obvious or anticipated by any prior or *at the time that it was filed.* It was filed on September 12, 1997. How many people on here remember the state of internet commerce back in 1997? This idea was pretty innovative at that time. (Now that it's been used for 10 years, it's pretty obvious.)
Vending machines are one click shopping models. Put your money in, then click the button for the item you want. Amazon includes the "putting your money in" step when you sign up for an account; there's no reason you couldn't put $1,000 in a vending machine and come back whenever you wanted something and get a "one click" shopping experience. Patenting an existing business model just by doing it on the Internet is silly, otherwise every single type of financial transaction (or any other action really, including talking, writing, imaging, video, audio, etc.) could be patented simply because it was done over the Internet for the first time.
Second, as early as 1990 "pay-as-you-go" services like AOL and Compuserve already had content that could be purchased simply by clicking on them. They may have even had software downloads that could be purchased directly in forums, but I can't remember.
If your e-commerce site leaves out any one of those 9 clauses, you're not infringing. For example, if you're using a shopping cart ordering model, you're not infringing (look at part 9 there, you have to have a shopping cart ordering model to be within its bounds).
If Amazon wanted to be a bully, they could easily sue people. They can definitely afford lawyers. Microsoft doesn't even need to say which patents it thinks Linux infringes on in order to threaten people and win (see Suse and Linspire). Additionally, would you trust your business model to the whims of a jury who can't tell a shopping cart with a "Checkout" button apart from a "One click Purchase" button, or some random judge in Delaware or Texas of similar technical ignorance? I'm not slamming the states, just the fact that those states are used for incorporation for a reason; they're very friendly to big corporations.
Copyright is already far too long, as it lets you make more money while being dead. You are dead! You cannot be productive! No reason to pay you anymore! Because, no matter how well I did at my job, once I die I stop getting money.
Copyright shouldn't expire just because you're dead; it should just be a reasonable time limit for everyone. Authors who die soon after their work is complete (modern musicians anyone?) can supply their heirs with money for 5 or 10 years, that's fine with me.
Basing the expiration date on the date of the author's death is absurd, since artists who produce their works while young gain a much larger benefit over their entire lifetime, and 90 years later their heirs are still profiting. My tongue-in-cheek guess is that Disney hopes cryogenics works, and once they thaw Walt out they get perpetual copyrights.
If you're using RAID in a machine which requires you to power off and disassemble the machine to replace the disk-- you're wasting your money.
I disagree. I use RAID5 for storing movies, and I had to replace a drive this year. That involved turning the computer off, pulling the disk, turning it on and running in degraded mode to actually watch movies, sending the disk in for an RMA, getting the new one, turning the computer off, installing the disk, and finally building the array onto the new disk.
A pain to be sure, but if I had a single huge drive or RAID0 that failed I would be spending a few hundred hours ripping and converting all the movies again after waiting for an RMA. My RAID cost about $400 for just under 1TB of usable storage, which even today is quite a bit cheaper than any hot swappable RAID hardware I know of, and almost half as cheap as buying double the number of disks and making two copies of everything. My guess is that I'll average one drive failure during the 3 or 4 year life of the array, after which it will be time to grow it significantly and replace all the drives.
I thought this was a misquote. I checked TFA, and this is exactly what it says. This guy thinks someone who prefers secure connections is more likely to be pwned.
The point of the article is that people who click "Yes" to install random software from the Internet are much more likely to be 0wned. Just because the software claims to be secure is no reason to trust it any more than what you'd find at a shady porn site.
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So many people (Platonists) think these laws exist outside of human experience, and it's so obvious that they don't. WHAT they try to describe does, but there's a big difference. We can say a^2 + b^2 = c^2, but the very notion of a triangle is completely circumscribed by human experience, and the notion of abstract notation is also a human thing. To say such a relation exists a priori is where I believe rationalism runs off the rails into a kind of metaphysics of "belief" as opposed to empirical science, and where empirical science mistakes itself for reality.
Existence is a tricky thing, because it is also purely a human concept. By claiming that mathematics does not exist outside of human experience you are also implicitly claiming that the universe itself does not exist outside of human experience. Everything we know about the universe has been derived from human experience, which is ultimately no more real or unreal than our experience of mathematics, since both experiences exist only within the human mind. There is no objective viewpoint from which to consider existence or reality. Our minds must approach both the universe and mathematics in exactly the same way; perform experiments, observe the results, make up theories about what is happening, and try to disprove them. From the human perspective mathematics is as much a part of the universe as matter and energy, so it is not absurd to claim that mathematics exists outside of human experience.
Did I mention superiority? No, I said races and sexes are different. Since we're going from one ridiculous extreme to the other; are you inferring then that all races and both sexes are identical in every aspect?
And I said prove it. By "different" I assume you mean there are quantifiable measurements that distinguish individuals by race and sex. If the properties are quantifiable, then there is a numerical "best" value for certain criteria such as beauty, speed, intelligence, etc. If you actually mean that there are *not* quantifiable differences between races, what the hell is the point of your post? More importantly, how do you define race and sex? Even physiological sexual development occurs in several stages of fetal growth, making sex a multidimensional range of values dependent on the level of hormones present at different times. My entire point is that you are using words that really have little meaning in genetics. You should be talking about phenotypes linked directly to genetics or hormone levels, not abstractions like races and sexes. It's too easy to either draw incorrect conclusions or pigeonhole individuals into fitting arbitrary predetermined patterns. For instance, how do you create a new race? Once that's done, how would you test this new race to see how they differ from other ones?
No, you're the only one who knows the real truth. Oh, but did you notice where I said "culturally"? Do you suppose there's a slight difference in culture between Caucasians who've been in Canada for the past few decades and those who live in, say, France or Spain?
Well, you said races and specifically broke them into whites, blacks, etc., which generally means you're looking at some sort of genetic features and not just locale or culture. It's obvious that cultures have different ways of thinking, working, and doing things. However, cultures don't have a genetic basis that I know of.
Furthermore I was differentiating because the Politically Correct types like to lump people together based on an arbitrary constant, eg. "African American". I know people from Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados and Guyana who think that's a stupid title.
I'm a "European American", or probably more accurately a "Western European American", which I agree is about as meaningful as "African American." As far as paleontology can tell, everyone's ancestors originally came from Africa to begin with. You are differentiating on just as flimsy boundaries as the politically correct types you disparage, because just lumping all blacks into "African Americans" is just as silly as lumping all the people in Africa into one race, as you did. It's picking one phenotype (very dark skin) and assuming that implies a closely related (in a genetic sense) population group.
But please, continue your politically correct thought policing and make sure nobody out there believes that cultural or physiological differences in people makes any difference. We're aaaaaaall the same. {wink!}
Political correctness is a misguided attempt to call everyone equal. Racism/sexism is a misguided attempt to claim that differences in emotion, intelligence, athleticism, etc. between people are based significantly on who their genetic ancestors were and how many X chromosomes they have. They're equally foolish ideas. So far you've said a lot about how "races are different" but failed to provide evidence of how race is a predictor for differences, and also how to determine race in the first place.
Again, I'd love to see some examples of physiological differences by race. The only thing I can think of off-hand is sickle cell anemia, which happens to affect more people with ancestors from countries where malaria was rampant. The genes controlling that disease have nothing to do with race, however, and people of any skin tone or ancestry can have it. If you believe wikipedia, the mutation actually arose independently in distinct population groups several times. Skin pigmentation is another one, but since everyone has genes for pigmentation, I'm not sure how you'd define which levels of pigment determine race, or vice versa.
There is currently no working concurrency model for standard C++. You want to make an atomic access to an object? Hope and pray that you have bug free system libraries and a compiler that doesn't optimize away your locking wrappers and do inappropriate speculative stores. Apparently the next C++ standard will address it, but it seems rather foolish to start a transition to massively multithreaded code without an actual standard.
I only hope I live to see the day where it's acknowledged that physiologically, mentally, emotionally as well as culturally Whites (Canadian, American, European), Blacks (African, islanders), Asians, Indians, Natives, etc. are all different, as a side note women and men differ along the same lines.
So which "race" is the smartest? The kindest? The fastest? The most beautiful?
If you can't answer even one of those questions with statistical certainty, please shut up.
On second thought, do you even have a definition of race that doesn't depend on where a person's ancestors lived 200 years ago?
Hey, if it works for our Esteemed Leaders, it should work for you, right?
Always sounded to me like saying that all works of literature are, are arrangements of words. And all words are public domain. The dictionary is prior art. So books shouldn't be copyrighted.
Copyrighting or patenting mathematics would be like copyrighting or patenting the grammar of a language. It doesn't matter which words or symbols you use to perform mathematics. You can just as easily say "foo bar foo baz box" if foo = "1", bar = "+", baz = "=", and box = "2". Copyrighting or patenting mathematics is silly because it's not the words that matter, it's the rules that determine which words can go together to form valid mathematical statements. The rules of mathematics are well known and the great bulk of mathematics can be traced directly to the axioms of ZFC set theory. Stories and other creative works are not formulaic (or if they are formulaic, they're boring). There is no obvious algorithm or formula to generate Moby Dick from scratch.
Algorithms IMHO are simply the words and sentences you use to make software, which is akin to a work of literature. At least it seems that way to me, anyways.
Algorithms are akin to proofs in mathematics. An algorithm is a proof that performing certain operations on the initial state will produce a desired output state, with the side effect of also showing exactly how to generate the desired output from the input state in terms of a sequence of precise fundamental operations. Algorithms must be precise, correct, and decidable; e.g. there can be no guesswork about which operations to perform and they must work. In literature, there is metaphor, simile, ambiguity, and things left to the reader's interpretation.
Fundamentally, copyrights and patents cannot prevent knowledge itself from existing, since that would not only go against the reason for having them in the first place but would also be incredibly harmful and impractical. Mathematics and algorithms are both just forms of knowledge; knowledge that following certain rules will transform one thing into another. Just as it would be silly to make it a crime to tell other people about Moby Dick or how steam engines work, it is silly to make it a crime to explain to other people how mathematics or algorithms work, and also just as silly to make it a crime for those other people to implement new things based on their knowledge of algorithms or mathematics. It would be akin to making it a crime to hear about Moby Dick and imagine the implications of hunting for a white whale with a crazy captain.
One potential weakness with metamath is that definitions are introduced without formal proof. This is acknowledged by the developers, and the definitions are generally straightforward enough that the results can be judged as correct. For instance, see df-2, which if ever used to represent the mathematical concept of 2 (e.g. by a parser seeing the digit "2" and replacing it with df-2), depends entirely upon the axiomatic definition of df-2 as (1 + 1). It is possible for someone to define df-2 as ((1 + 1) + 1), and a proof relying only on df-2 (e.g. not reducing all terms to the ZFC axioms) could actually prove a false statement given the new definition of df-2 (but it's old interpretation as the number 2). The problem arises when definitions are substituted for actual constructions of the basic axioms of the formal system without proof that the definitions themselves are sound.
Apparently the Ghilbert project does produce formal proofs of definitions and can import metamath proofs, but I have not looked at it much.
See mmset appendix 4 for references.
Sharing "culture" isn't stealing nor illegal, as long as the copyright owner of said culture is OK with it. Making a copy of music you've purchased - perhaps an audio tape - and giving it to a friend, is not OK with many copyright owners and in that case it is indeed illegal since it would constitute 'copyright infringement'.
It all comes down to the ephemeral nature of the copy. You can copy the music into sound waves that your friend can hear and they can copy those sound waves into their neurons (which thankfully cannot be regulated; yet), but if you try to fix a copy on some other medium it's a violation of copyright. So the real question is this: If you make a physical copy for your friend who listens to it once and then deletes it, is it an ephemeral copy or not? Rationally, that should be the same case as just playing the music over the air to your friend. Is there some moral reason that friends must have physical proximity in order to share music with each other?
I'm having a lot of trouble reading this in any way at all that can justify trial- and conviction-free seizure and disposal of a citizen's property.
So get Ron Paul on your local Republican ticket or something. When was the last time you saw the constitution without big government bootprints all over it?
Forget laptops. Forget space ships. Above all, forget nuclear weapons. If you are a citizen of an impoverished nation, focus on the basics: reading, writing, mathematics, science (includng agriculture), and free markets. If you can succeed at the basics (and everyone can succeed at the basics), then your nation will naturally prosper.
The U.S. was a very industrialist nation in the 1950's, and Japan copied that. Japan moved into electronics at the appropriate time when the market was ready for it. The only industrial markets the world is interested in now are the dirt cheapest sources of labor, not exactly something you'd advise a poor nation to develop. Japan had 50 years to become as successful as they are today, and you're talking about today's poor nations ignoring technology and trying to compete in the world market? That's insane. Poor countries need to jump into the modern information market immediately and start selling things on it. If Japan had focused on 50 year old horse-and-buggy manufacturing after WWII, they'd be poorer than the nations OLPC is trying to help now.
It is much better for any poor nation today to get into the information age and take money from rich westerners. That's essentially the only way to be successful; market your products to the richest people with the most free capital; not trying to undercut China and Mexico on cheap consumer goods. I have no doubt that without help that's the eventual fate of all poor nations; as the cheap manufacturing centers achieve a middle class the cheap manufacturing will move to the most lucrative poor country that has a surplus of people to work in factories. The OLPC project is trying to help countries avoid that fate.
When there are no more poor countries left, it will become economically expedient to research advanced automation and self assembling systems that will make everyone better off, rich or poor. The more countries that can achieve self sufficiency, the faster that will happen.
Generally (this is an oversimplification) if sync is not issued deliberately, nothing is decached until shutdown, unless RAM starts getting dangerously low (it's too smart to do disk caching in swap space).
Look up bdflush and pdflush. Dirty buffers get written back to disk relatively quickly unless you've turned it off for some reason (laptop power saving modes for instance). Just touching a file on the drive should be sufficient to force a write to the disk within a reasonable number of seconds.
That said, there's really no excuse for drives falling off the bus unless they're explicitly told to do so. I can't imagine all the extra spinups are good for the drive, either. I do have one of the freeagent drives and if I wasn't just doing large backups to it I probably would be annoyed enough to return it.
But why would you buy such a product in the first place? I like movies and I love my music but absolutely ***NONE*** of it is stuff I wouldn't do without if it was too highly priced or too encumbered by DRM. I don't understand these people who need a movie or a piece of music ***SO BADLY*** that they're prepared to put up with being treated like shit by the manufacturer.
You're talking to Walmart nation here, doesn't that tell you something?
In actual response to your question, the problem is that lots of mainstream music and almost all movies use DRM now. Completely restricting one's participation in public culture is not possible in the general sense; if everyone stopped buying DRM material all the mainstream media companies would go broke by stupidly ignoring what customers actually want. They'd just blame it on piracy and put even worse DRM on discs that aren't selling.
Considering that many people watch dozens of movies a month, how are they even supposed to obtain legitimate non-DRM movies when Comcast puts secret limits on their bandwidth? There aren't any retail outlets for CC or non-DRM movies that I'm aware of. Without the contrasting sales, there's no way to indicate to the media companies that DRM-free is what you want, not just an absence of media (or that you're a "pirate").
The fact that Amazon is selling DRM free music is a good thing, because I bet they will start selling DRM free movies within a year or two. Then the *IAA's can observe customer choices using a business model they understand.
A tiny vocal minority does not matter, in this case.
Sure it matters, if they're on TV.
1) The laptop as a replacement for textbooks. Able to be updated and searched. Also, carrying around one XO laptop is better than managing a half dozen books, and if the computers get recycled after 8th grade then the long term costs could level out.
If grade school textbooks are anything like college textbooks, an XO is worth about two or three textbooks. That's pretty amazing when you consider that every student takes about 8 classes per year. Using open textbooks could *save* money if the schools bought laptops.
Unequivocal. The person in charge of counter-terrorism up to the very date that the Bush administration started CONFIRMED that 9/11 was already irreversibly in motion. The opportunity to stop it had already passed.
Isn't having people take their shoes off in airports supposed to stop future terrorist attacks?
If so, then what you quoted is a bold faced lie. They could have just started forcing people to take their shoes off at the airport checkpoints and taking their knives away, and 9/11 would have been prevented.
If not, then this entire anti-terrorism thing is just a front for more government control with *absolutely no benefit* to normal people.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Of course not. They will then turn to David Hume's classic argument that there is no reason whatsoever that anybody should trust the results of inductive reasoning (i.e. they will say that evolution can never really be proved).
Anyone who doesn't trust the inductive hypothesis should have serious problems with the bible or any other religious work, since none of the originals exist anymore. There's an implicit inductive argument that repeated copying/translation produces exact (or close enough) copies of an original, and will continue to do so in the future.
They were mere pawns. Do you really think that someone smart enough to plan an attack like that would be stupid enough to kill himself for a couple of virgins?
I think half the people on slashdot would kill themselves for just one virgin.
Well, forgive me for not being impressed by that. An Islamic court? Why? Did they attack an Islamic country? No. I think a jury trial would be just fine, right here near the crime scene. They certainly did not capitulate - they were defiant right up until the end.
Why should Afghanistan be impressed with U.S. courts? They execute murderers in Islamic courts the same as the U.S. does (unlike most of the first world countries). What more do you want? Torture? Public humiliation? The "crime scene" for Bin Laden is not in the U.S. It's any training camps, places where money was transferred, or other interactions with the actual people who carried out the attacks. All those things probably occurred in Afghanistan. My question to you is: Why should a sovereign nation be forced to submit to another nation's court system? Should any U.S. citizen be charged in an Islamic court for crimes committed in that foreign country despite the fact that the U.S. citizen had never even been to that country? Should Blackwater agents and military personnel be tried in Afghanistan or Iraq courts for murdering the local citizens (not just casualties of war)? Should G. W. Bush be tried in Afghanistan or Iraq for bombing those countries?
Afghanistan proved that even one country overrun by extremists is incompatible with our lifestyle. It had to go. Even a country run by horrid warlords is better for our interests than one run by militant extremists.
This one is funny enough to respond to as well: First, you consider horrid warlords (ooh, maybe like Saddam?) better than extremists, but you don't really make a distinction between them other than that. I suppose you could be alluding to the fact that the U.S. put both the Taliban's predecessors and Saddam Hussein in power (both warlords) in an attempt to control events in the middle east, and armed both of them as well, and also screwed around in Iran. You're essentially saying that creating terrorism in your children's generation is preferable to dealing directly with other nations in the present. Instead, let's just use subversive tactics to ruin other countries in defense against the Hordes of Communism (or whatever) and arm them so they'll be full of angry U.S. haters in a couple decades, and trained and armed to the teeth by the CIA.
I just compared EULA's from my $99 Fry's copy of XP to the EULA's from the ones from the MS store. They're identicle. The only difference is my MS store copies came in a box, while my Fry's copy was just a scint manual and CD encased in shrinkwrap.
So, did you keep the receipts and the holographic logos to prove to the BSA that you own the licenses?
Afghanistan? The government there was harboring the people who carried out the attacks - actively protecting them, in fact. If ever there was a legitimate reason for war, this was it! Or is there some kind of threshold for devastation that 9/11 didn't meet?
The people who carried out the attacks died in them. They were mostly Saudi Arabian (none from Afghanistan or Iraq), were partially trained in Afghanistan, but received flight instruction in the U.S. Considering the capitulation of the Taliban before the war (they were willing to turn Bin Laden over to an Islamic court) and the opposition Al Qaeda has put up since the start of the war, it's unlikely that invading Afghanistan was the right decision. I think even the Taliban would have realized that losing their country was worth less than protecting Bin Laden. As it is now, the Taliban can fight the foreign invaders AND protect Bin Laden without a conflict of interest. Way to go, strategic war planners!
A few programmer friends got me copies of XP from the MS employee store for $35 each, which I have running on 2 machines.
You might want to make sure that Microsoft actually allowed your friends to transfer their license to you. I know the student editions expire once you're no longer a student, and apparently some of their corporate employee purchase programs also have expiring licenses when the employees leave the corporation.
I've never understood this. The BSA is obviously just a trade group with no authority whatsoever to conduct raids and such. If they decide they need to "raid" a business, then generally they would just have a suspicion that this business 'might' have some of their software installed and some of that software 'might' not be fully licensed. Is that really enough for local law enforcement to go along with it? A lot of the coverage I've read about BSA raids seems to imply that the business involved went along with the raid voluntarily, and I have trouble understanding why any business would do so.
Read your EULAs. Microsoft reserves the right to terminate your agreement if you ever violate the terms of the license, which includes never installing more copies than you are licensed for. Furthermore, you are required to keep the "certificate of authenticity" as proof of your license. The BSA is in essentially the same position as the *IAA, acting on the legal behalf of their member companies to sue businesses for copyright infringement. Part of a civil suit is discovery, and the BSA can demand proof of ownership for licensed installs. They could also press for criminal copyright infringement charges which would involve the local police or the FBI (since I bet you obtained or operated those illegal copies across state lines in some way...). In general, it's the same "settle or get massive copyright infringement fines and potential jail time" attack that the RIAA has been using against normal people. Businesses either agree to the BSA's audit or go directly to court and involve lawyers.
So I'd like to make an argument here, and see if I actually get any constructive responses: I really don't think that it was obvious or anticipated by any prior or *at the time that it was filed.* It was filed on September 12, 1997. How many people on here remember the state of internet commerce back in 1997? This idea was pretty innovative at that time. (Now that it's been used for 10 years, it's pretty obvious.)
Vending machines are one click shopping models. Put your money in, then click the button for the item you want. Amazon includes the "putting your money in" step when you sign up for an account; there's no reason you couldn't put $1,000 in a vending machine and come back whenever you wanted something and get a "one click" shopping experience. Patenting an existing business model just by doing it on the Internet is silly, otherwise every single type of financial transaction (or any other action really, including talking, writing, imaging, video, audio, etc.) could be patented simply because it was done over the Internet for the first time.
Second, as early as 1990 "pay-as-you-go" services like AOL and Compuserve already had content that could be purchased simply by clicking on them. They may have even had software downloads that could be purchased directly in forums, but I can't remember.
If your e-commerce site leaves out any one of those 9 clauses, you're not infringing. For example, if you're using a shopping cart ordering model, you're not infringing (look at part 9 there, you have to have a shopping cart ordering model to be within its bounds).
If Amazon wanted to be a bully, they could easily sue people. They can definitely afford lawyers. Microsoft doesn't even need to say which patents it thinks Linux infringes on in order to threaten people and win (see Suse and Linspire). Additionally, would you trust your business model to the whims of a jury who can't tell a shopping cart with a "Checkout" button apart from a "One click Purchase" button, or some random judge in Delaware or Texas of similar technical ignorance? I'm not slamming the states, just the fact that those states are used for incorporation for a reason; they're very friendly to big corporations.
Copyright is already far too long, as it lets you make more money while being dead. You are dead! You cannot be productive! No reason to pay you anymore! Because, no matter how well I did at my job, once I die I stop getting money.
Copyright shouldn't expire just because you're dead; it should just be a reasonable time limit for everyone. Authors who die soon after their work is complete (modern musicians anyone?) can supply their heirs with money for 5 or 10 years, that's fine with me.
Basing the expiration date on the date of the author's death is absurd, since artists who produce their works while young gain a much larger benefit over their entire lifetime, and 90 years later their heirs are still profiting. My tongue-in-cheek guess is that Disney hopes cryogenics works, and once they thaw Walt out they get perpetual copyrights.
If you're using RAID in a machine which requires you to power off and disassemble the machine to replace the disk-- you're wasting your money.
I disagree. I use RAID5 for storing movies, and I had to replace a drive this year. That involved turning the computer off, pulling the disk, turning it on and running in degraded mode to actually watch movies, sending the disk in for an RMA, getting the new one, turning the computer off, installing the disk, and finally building the array onto the new disk.
A pain to be sure, but if I had a single huge drive or RAID0 that failed I would be spending a few hundred hours ripping and converting all the movies again after waiting for an RMA. My RAID cost about $400 for just under 1TB of usable storage, which even today is quite a bit cheaper than any hot swappable RAID hardware I know of, and almost half as cheap as buying double the number of disks and making two copies of everything. My guess is that I'll average one drive failure during the 3 or 4 year life of the array, after which it will be time to grow it significantly and replace all the drives.
I thought this was a misquote. I checked TFA, and this is exactly what it says. This guy thinks someone who prefers secure connections is more likely to be pwned.
The point of the article is that people who click "Yes" to install random software from the Internet are much more likely to be 0wned. Just because the software claims to be secure is no reason to trust it any more than what you'd find at a shady porn site.