That would be illegal in any jurisdiction where English Common law applies. As the rightful owner of the hardware, you would be privy to any secret embodied inside it -- and entitled to use reasonable force to obtain it.
There's one thing I can't quite get with this hunger site. If they can afford to give away a little bit of money just because I click on their website, why the hell can't they give away that money if I don't click on their website and so save them a small amount of money on outbound bandwidth, the more expensive kind? I won't be made to feel guilty for someone else's cruelty. {"You could have had an extra few grains of rice today, but AJS didn't click on our advert, so you're not."}
It's like my mother when I was younger..... Eat it up, there are starving children..... So what the chuff was she doing putting that food on my plate, knowing full well I was not going to eat it, instead of sending it out there to the starving children who would have eaten it -- except that they were a long way away and the food was {through no fault of my own} now cooked, and would be spoiled before it could be got to them?
Olympus digital cameras have a panoramic mode that only works with Olympus-branded XD and SmartMedia cards; even though the memory chips inside those cards are exactly the same as the ones in FujiFilm-branded XD cards and generic SmartMedia cards.
I don't doubt that this can be rectified by cunning use of the dd command.
The problem is that technology has moved faster than politics. Now the technology is there allowing this sort of abuse {denying you the right to use your own property as you think fit; unlawfully preventing fair competition} but the politics is not in place to prevent it. The solution won't be an easy one; and you can bet it will be the people who have been getting away with doing something wrong for a long time who will be the ones complaining the loudest.
"Copy protected" CDs can be defeated using a combination of a slow drive {24 speed or less; the slowness isn't the critical thing, but it seems that a feature was silently incorporated into more modern drives to make them artificially incompatible with some discs} and CDParanoia. I bought a CDS200-protected CD once, for the hacker challenge factor more than the music; and was disappointed to find that it ripped first time.
No person is an island. All the benefits of all human endeavour belong to all of humanity.
If I write a piece of software which can improve someone else's lot, I have a duty to the rest of the world to make that software available to them. If that means I can't sit on my arse all day making money just selling that programme, then so be it.
If you light your {unlit} candle from my {lit} one, does my room get any darker? Will my candle last any less long? I have lost nothing, you have gained something. So it goes with computer software. The effort in replicating software already written is comparable to the effort in sticking the end of a wick in a flame. Yes, somebody wrote that software in the first place; but they were going to write it anyway, whether or not anybody paid them for a copy. I lit that candle {which, by the way, was a non-trivial effort involving a flint and steel, tinder and kindling -- matches have not been invented in this figure of speech} because it was dark, not because I thought I could make money charging people for a light. How could there be anything fair or right about denying someone something which would cost me nothing to do, knowing that but for me they might fall in the dark with an unlit candle in the house?
Somewhere in a parallel universe, there was a person a bit like Bill Gates who wrote a whingeing "open letter to hobbyists" a bit like this one. At the following week's meeting of their computer club, a resolution was passed calling for the troublemaker to be hauled into the Gents' toilets and given a Bloody Good Kicking {probably a couple of head-flushes with seat-whacks too for good measure, and to prevent the casualty from losing consciousness before satisfaction was achieved}. Thenceforth, on that planet, a law was passed, and it said this: That the author of a computer programme has exactly one right in respect of that programme, and that is the right to be identified as its author, for as long as any living person remembers any true fact about the person or the programme; and that everybody has the right to distribute the source code of any computer programme ever written, with or without modifications and whether or not accompanied by an executable version, so long as they did not try to change the original author's name.
Yes, but what about if nobody could post AC until at least one logged-in user had made a post? That way, in order to get a first post, you would have to risk your precious karma.
I have been mucking around with the Hibachi web server {yes, the IOCCC version; it's not perfect, sure, but the "current" version is non-free*} and it works really well. Basically, I have a small CGI-enabled HTTP server on localhost, with access to some of the local filesystem; and a big CGI-enabled HTTP server on the remote end. Using surprisingly few cunning stunts {basically a cookie to allow the big server to look up the port number of the little server, which I decided to have as a per-user variable}, I can have the remote webserver embed content served up from localhost into a frameset or iframe. I can also use a local CGI script {on the local Hibachi server} that pulls in image data over a HTTP connection {from the remote Apache server}, mungs it and displays it in an ordinary <img/> tag. The browser could not care less what host served it up. The image can be static: all the processing is done at my end. Since the slowest part is usually getting the data from the server to the client, this is quite efficient.
It also ought to be possible to prefetch links while the user is busy reading, which would make dialup connections seem a bit faster.
It doesn't quite meet the "zero install" ideal, because it is necessary to compile Hibachi once and start it on login. I may have to write my own web server in Perl -- hence no compiling, and Perl is installed on almost every system.
* {Hibachi 2 is offered on a usage-only licence; the IOCCC-winning version is in the Public Domain. I am not quite sure how this can work, as it is my understanding that all derivative works of a work already in the Public Domain must also be in the Public Domain. But maybe the non-Free version was a derivative of a still-copyrighted predecessor of the PD version.}
Like a cell which is more or less alive. Sorry, but a cell is either alive or it is not. That first cell, whenever and wherever it was, had to get a LOT of things EXACTLY right: cell membrane, cytoplasm, nucleus/nucleoid, nucleoplasm, DNA/RNA. And all of these depend on the correct DNA/RNA.
All I am pointing out is that there are a lot of alternative answers that could have been right. We have only studied life on Earth so far. In the absence of proof to the contrary, I think it is entirely reasonable to assume that there may be other scenarios which would lead to self-sustaining interlocking series of chemical reactions..... in other words, life. Whether that means multicellular organisms capable of locomotion and intelligent thought, a primordial soup in a constant state of chemical reaction, or something inbetween, depends.
And what most people miss is that even if you can come up with a scenario about how a DNA strand might have emerged spontaneously, you still need to explain how that DNA got encoded with information about three-dimensional protein structures which then create the cell membrane, cytoplasm, nucleus/nucleoid, nucleoplasm, etc.
Most of that information is not encoded in DNA, but encoded in the behaviour of the chemical elements themselves. It's a subtle but important distinction. For example, the number six is not somehow encoded within the numbers three and two: there is an inflexible rule explaining how you get from two and three to six. Taking an extremely simple example from chemistry, when you add an acid to an alcohol you get an ester. That much is fixed; it depends upon the properties of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The chemical reactions of DNA are already set in stone. Simplifying it a bit, if you add DNA to the correct mix of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and a few others, under the right conditions, you get more of the same DNA. It's a bit more impressive than hydrochloric acid + sodium hydroxide -> sodium chloride + water, but the ingredients have no more choice in the matter: what comes out in the end is dependent only on what went in.
..... [I]t does not explain how the data which encode three-dimensional protein structures got written to that strand.
They didn't. The data which encode three-dimensional protein structures are inherent properties of the elements which make up proteins. Lots of different strands were formed around the same time. Most of them simply did not work. A tiny few of them did work, and worked so well that they went on to bigger and better things. {Parallel: mammalian reproduction. Throw hundreds of millions of sperm at an egg, and one of them might stand a chance of fertilising it; but most of them aren't going to make it. If a man had sex every night from puberty to the day he died, and each encounter resulted in conception, he still would have had fewer children than he produced sperm in a single ejaculation, by about 10000:1.}
It would be very easy -- almost trivial -- to have {non-cellular} life-forms which could only exist in a moving pool of liquid of the correct composition at the correct temperature. Such could have come and gone many, many times throughout the history of the universe. Given their poor viability to begin with, almost any mutation would be more likely to give a survival advantage than not..... cell walls would be the "killer app", of course. Once you have a truly cellular organism, it's just that little bit less dependent on external conditions.
The probability of life arising by random chance is small, but life has arisen on at least one planet out of millions of billions in an expanding universe, and it has only taken about thirteen billion years to do so. {You don't necessarily have to turn over 52 cards before you find the ace of spad
The inverse square intensity decrease will quickly reduce the energy, unless you're dealing with a very coherent source to begin with -- but then you wouldn't need the fiber so much.
AFAIR you only get inverse square intensity decrease when a beam of light is spreading out freely. At twice the distance from the source, the beam is now covering four times the area and so the energy per square metre is 4 times smaller. But inside my mirror-walled pipe or a piece of fibre optic, the beam is not spreading out. The light which should ordinarily have ended up outside of the conduit will be bounced off the walls, and back into the conduit.
A female actor is properly called an actress.
A female hero is properly called a heroine.
A female son is properly called a daughter.
A female barman is called a barmaid.
{The fact that English has borrowed words from a variety of languages -- basically every culture ever either to have invaded the British Isles or been invaded by the British -- is quite evident from the apparent inconsistency betwen the various masculine and feminine forms}.
Shouldn't a female android properly be called a gynoid?
Surely a simple tube with a highly-reflective interior surface would work just as well as fibre optics, and more cheaply? After all, that's what happens in a fibre..... the light cannot escape through the walls of the fibre because it would end up coming out at an impossible angle {Snell's law says that sin i / sin r = the refractive index of the material, where i is the angle between light and an imaginary perpendicular on the outside and r the same thing on the inside, but the sine of an angle can never be bigger than 1}, so it just bounces off the walls instead till it gets to the other end. So why not just use an actual mirror? As a bonus, you can even use the tube as a ventilation duct.
I would have thought the obvious solution would be something like SIP over SSL {which should be easy enough to set up, if Asterisk doesn't already have such a feature}, but maybe I'm missing something obvious about SSL that would preclude it.
PGP-type encryption would be good {key servers, if you use them properly, are incredibly powerful: post your out-of-date private keys and now nothing you ever signed using any of them can be authenticated!}, but it isn't transparent.
Whatever solution is adopted, it must be network-transparent, and the user must have the right to view the source code. The Authorities no doubt would love us to be using something they can tap, on the basis of "protecting" us from terrorists and drug dealers; but if terrorists and drug dealers are known not to be using the system because they know it can be tapped, then there's no point tapping it in the first place!
Actually, most religions start from the standpoint that unobservable phenomena control and are the reason for the observable phenomena in the universe.
Well, when I spoke of some things being unexplainable, I was really referring to "God's Great Plan" or "The Will of Allah" or whatever a particular flavour of priests want to call it whenever trying to explain awkward things.
At least Science sets out to explain why certain things must be unobservable.
As for explanations, most religions are ALL ABOUT explanation. They are just about describing the unobservable forces that result in the observable. They are about revealing the underpinnings of the universe and how it works, just from an intangible superstructure point of view, if you will.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all actually pretty shallow with the explanations. The best answer you will get is "God says it's like that, so there."
If KISS were an overriding principle that has as much sway over the universe as you arbitrarily assign it then all the matter in the universe would have stayed in whatever format it was in before the big bang. Either that or the universe would be a big 'ol sphere of homogenous material.
Well..... according to the Second law of Thermodynamics, that's exactly what it's trying to turn into.
Needles to say, simplicity as a guiding principle would have resulted in a universe without the ability to generate life sustaining worlds, much less life itself.
But would it, though? Who's to say that life isn't just a simple {although not yet fully understood by humans, that does not imply complexity. A few hundred years ago we did not fully understand the motion of charged particles, but electronics is by no means complex} natural process, by which all that kinetic energy that came from somewhere can spread itself around more thinly? Then "life sustaining worlds" would not be particularly special in and of themselves, any more than materials which conduct electricity are particularly special.
And last but not least..."There is no process that could have created a creator"
You took me rather out of context there. I said, There is no process that could have created a creator, that could not instead -- and more simply -- have created a fully-formed universe. And I stand by that.
Almost all religions postulate that the prime motivators in creation of the universe exist without having been created.
And thereby manifestly fail to achieve what you said they were setting out to do, which was to explain! If the prime motivator in creation could exist without having been created, then why could not a ready-made universe exist without having been created? Where did God come from and why could not a non-God-requiring universe have come from the same place?
As for a closing statement I will say this: The day that scientists can use the observable phenomena of the universe to describe all the mysteries of the creation of life, the creation of the universe, and the structure of matter is the day I will start listening to the Intelligent Design guys AND the scientific atheists on the subject of spirituality and faith.
There presently exist gaps in the laws of physics, so that small things obey different rules than big things. This is patently absurd, if only because there is no fixed definition as to whether something is "big" or "small" except which set of rules {as we currently know them} govern it. And scientists don't tend to like stepwise regressions, if only because it makes interpolation difficult. In fact, this has always been a problem Science has tried to solve. Newton's equations of motion, which hold very well for objects moving up t
But in this instance, our random monkeys with their random typewriters don't have to produce a particular, specific sentence; but merely something that makes enough sense in some language to be understood. {There are plenty of life-forms that would be viable; just watch a few bad sci-fi movies. There's no need for the one that emerges to look like us at all, just as long as it has the essentials to stay alive.} Also, these typewriters {or maybe the monkeys} are designed in such a way that, following any keystroke, the probability matrix is modified so that letters which would make more sense become more likely. {Chemical elements are most likely to bond in certain ways, and an incomplete chain will be looking to complete itself as soon as possible}.
Without your artificially-imposed restrictions, the probability swings back to something manageable. Life exactly like this is pretty improbable, but any kind of life at all is pretty probable.
Well, no doubt HP will try out the model of practically giving away the replicator unit -- just a small one, say, the size of a small uwave oven -- and charging a fortune for replacement matter cartridges. Lexmark will try to use technology to make it illegal to refill a matter cartridge you bought and paid for with your own money, and consequently run afoul of both American law {which specifically permits third-party replacement parts} and European law {which specifically forbids making things artificially difficult to recycle}. And we'll all be spammed to hell with offers of cheap matter cartridges to fit all popular replicator models.
Science starts from the standpoint that everything that can be observed can be explained. Religion starts from the standpoint that some things cannot be explained. The two are reconcilable only to the extent that ideas can be accepted without need of explanation -- in other words, Not Very Far At All.
The problem I have with the idea of "intelligent design" is that it breaks several important rules, not the least of which is the KISS principle. The need for an Intelligent Designer rests on the notion of Irreducible Complexity. But there is no irreducible complexity in nature. On the contrary, an Intelligent Designer would introduce irreducible complexity.
The Universe embodies the principle that simplicity is beauty. {Why does the pressure in a fluid act equally in all directions? Because it was simpler than favouring a particular direction. Why does light travel in straight lines? Because it was simpler that way. Why do men have nipples? Because it was too complicated for them not to.} If we take that logic to the extreme, it is simpler for the universe to have created itself somehow {and here I am making no assumptions about the process by which this might happen}, than for a creator to have been created as an intermediate step. My assertion is: There is no process that could have created a creator, that could not instead -- and more simply -- have created a fully-formed universe.
{The predominance of D- over L- enantiomers in nature is not evidence for Intelligent Design. It can be shown by analysis of potential reaction mechanisms that right-handed would favour right-handed and vice versa. It is probable that the primordial soup was close to racemic, but somehow more D- than L- proto-organisms survived and eventually L- forms became extinct. It ought to be possible to synthesise and culture the opposite enantiomer of an existing DNA sample, resulting in a "left handed clone". Pending the perfection of the necessary equipment, this must be left as an exercise for the reader:) It is of course possible that life on other planets could be wholly or predominantly left-handed.}
The argument against life being created by random chance ignores the obvious fact that the improbable event has already happened. In fact, given the sheer magnitude of the universe, it was close to inevitable that life would develop somewhere. Remember that the many necessary attempts were taking place in parallel, not in series {if you throw six dice at a time, the odds favour at least one of them being a six}. And not everything in the process is truly random: certain chemical elements are predisposed to bond in certain ways.
Remember also that radioactive decay events, which we know today trigger genetic mutation, would have been more common the further back in time we travel. We cannot know for certain {though we might infer from decay products} whether or not some especially radioactive isotope existed in the past but has become completely exhausted today.
{I realise that there are quite a few dangling "somehows" in this essay. It is not my intension to offer explanations for them here. These are "closing" rather than "opening" questions, which is to say that the answers will not in and of themselves raise further questions.}
Twos Complement Arithmetic is sensible. Basically it's as though {in 8 bits} you add 256 to any negative number. Since you are already effectively working modulo 256 anyway, then everything Just Works.
Ones Complement appears simpler {one fewer operation in generating a negative number}; but then there is a correction to do after a subtraction if the answer is positive.
Once you have gone to the expense of building an adder array {or, in the case of a drum-memory computer, a single adder is plenty good enough}, you can easily have a "carry-in". Now if you put EOR gates {with one input commoned up} on the adder inputs, so you get a selectable inverter, that takes care of the "flipping ones and zeros" part of doing a negation. If you set the carry input then you can add an extra one, which completes the twos complement operation. What's more, the carry-out will be 1 if the answer is positive, and 0 if it is negative. {Do a few and prove it to yourself}. When doing a multi-word subtraction, this just happens to be right for what to use as carry-in for the next higher order word! So you can use one logic array as both an adder and subtractor, if you're prepared to live with the {slightly counter-intuitive} fact that the carry flag is also not-borrow.
A' = A + B + Cin In "subtraction mode" we invert B, which {assuming 8 bit words} is equivalent to subtracting from 255;
A' = A + (255 - B) + Cin If Cin = 1 then
A' = A + (255 - B) + 1
A' = A - B + 256 but since we are working modulo 256,
A' = A - B If (A - B) is negative then Cout = 0. {This situation also indicates a borrow from a higher order word.}
I would have liked for there to have been a CCA instruction {for clear carry and add} and as SCS instruction {for set carry and subtract} in the 6502, but there wasn't. I'm sure the chip's designers had a good reason for the omission.
BTW, there is a "tens complement" for working in decimal {and correspondingly for all other bases}. To generate the tens complement of a decimal number, transform each digit of the subtrahend by subtracting it from nine {including enough imaginary leading zeros to match the length of the minuend} and add one. If you end up with an extra one on the beginning of the difference, ignore it. If you don't, then the difference is negative; so just take its tens complement and write a minus sign in front.
The obvious solution is to ban all advertising from the Internet.
Sooner or later though, people are going to stop clicking on advertisements. Basically it's a pyramid scheme; and only the people on the top levels of the pyramid make any money. When enough people realise what is going on, the pyramid collapses.
My new Linux distribution, when I am ready to launch it, will include an advert-blocking proxy with regular automatic updates -- so you hopefully will never even get to see an advertisement. One desktop environment {WindowMaker}, one graphical toolkit {GTK}, one browser {Konqueror}, one office suite {Abiword and Gnumeric}, one mail client {Evolution}. A sendmail/procmail/spamassassin stack and an Apache2 server so you can practice writing your own CGI scripts. And of course, the ability to click a link and download the source code for a package and its dependencies, then compile it.
A. If you don't compile your apps locally, you can't be sure they don't contain nasties. There is nothing wrong with compiling applications. It's only like preparing your own food so you know there are no artificial additives in it. What is already being worked on is a system where you will be able to click on a package, download it and its dependencies, and compile it.
B. There is nothing wrong with the command line. Sometimes it is the most efficient way of giving instructions to the computer. Mandriva has some nice utilities for configuring everything without using a text editor or command line. But you really ought at least to take an interest in what is happening behind the scenes. I can flick open an xterm, start pico and have a config file tweaked and the daemon restarted in less time than it takes for a fancy-schmancy point-and-drool frontend to load up.
C. You are not looking hard enough for the information you seek.
Conclusion: you are either an incorrigible whinger, who needs to be fed with a spoon; or a troll. I recommend that you stick your head up your arse and fart.
If you can get hold of a copy of the Windows source code, I'm sure you could compile it to run on this device. Of course it's possible that Windows also has endian issues of its own. But that's because those stupid people at Motorola decided to put the "units" last instead of first. Human beings tend to write numbers that way, because it makes for easier magnitude comparison; but when doing mathematics you have to work backwards: units, tens,hundreds..... so processor manufacturers such as Intel and MOS Technologies figured to put the units first and the 256es second. 8080 code took up more space than 6502 code so Intel soon found themselves having to put the 65536es third and the 16777216es fourth, but that's by the by. Meanwhile Motorola stuck with their arse-about-face numbers.
The original ARM1 was a pure 32-bit processor, with a 32-bit-wide word and no inbuilt concept of "byte order" as such. Its instruction set was inspired by the 6502, which powered the venerable BBC microcomputer; but with every instruction conditional. The ARM1 had no NOP instruction as such, but there was a "never" condition {the better for writing automutative code, since one need only alter the condition bits in an instruction to block its execution, but preserve the order bits. A simple loop can "comment out" a vast swathe of program; and, thanks to fully conditional execution, the same code can be used later to restore it by using a processor flag to signal "enable" or "disable"} but this rather wasteful {for the time; memory was expensive in those days} setup was eventually abandoned, and most of the "do something never" instruction codes were reused in later ARM revisions for extended instructions.
There is only one branch instruction in ARM1 assembly, BL. It makes the jump and stores the address that would have been next in a register. If you know that your subroutine is not re-entrant and you don't need that register for anything else, you don't need to worry about a stack. If you don't care about returning you can just ignore it.
Well, ozone-depleting refrigerants were banned nine years ago {Google for "Montreal Protocol" sometime}. Modern refrigerators and ACUs use non-ozone-damaging chemicals anyway, thanks to the same Greens who are now complaining about them as though they were still being used, and when they finally get a clue they will whinge about something else instead.
For me, the big thing with vehicle air conditioning is the way American car manufacturers had to design this incredibly complicated electromagnetic clutch thingy to transfer power from the engine to the compressor or not depending whether or not the coil is energised. European cars {except for those arse-shunting German monstrosities} simply drive the compressor with an electric motor and fit a bigger alternator.
I wouldn't expect Peltier effect {think solid-state heat pump} cooling to be much more efficient than a mechanical heat pump, since in both cases you have the Second Law working against you {in any energy transaction there will always be some heat on the output side}. In a mechanical heat pump you have friction in the compressor bearings and between the fluid and the pipes; in a solid-state one, you have resistive heating.
Yes and no. If Windows fouls up, then the EULA bars you from suing Microsoft. Your remedy, if you have one at all, is limited to replacement media if the installation media turn out to be faulty. There have been instances of a Microsoft EULA forbidding you to use Microsoft software in a way that casts Microsoft in a bad light. Borland used to licence software in the condition that it was not used to develop applications which competed with existing Borland applications.
If "you can slag us off, as long as you do it in private with nobody listening otherwise we'll sue your asses to kingdom come; but you can't sue us no matter how badly we mucked up" is really enough accountability for you, then fine.
Open Source software is analogous to something delivered as a kit of parts. You get the opportunity to subject the components to any number of independent experts for scrutiny before assembling them, and can make an informed decision whether to: (1) assemble as-is, (2) make the following changes:..... or (3) leave well alone.
Very few companys [sic] have the resources to port to multiple archs' [sic]
But they don't HAVE to port to multiple architectures. They just have to make sure their source code is clean. The user ports it to a particular architecture when they type make.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be illegal in any jurisdiction where English Common law applies. As the rightful owner of the hardware, you would be privy to any secret embodied inside it -- and entitled to use reasonable force to obtain it.
There's one thing I can't quite get with this hunger site. If they can afford to give away a little bit of money just because I click on their website, why the hell can't they give away that money if I don't click on their website and so save them a small amount of money on outbound bandwidth, the more expensive kind? I won't be made to feel guilty for someone else's cruelty. {"You could have had an extra few grains of rice today, but AJS didn't click on our advert, so you're not."}
..... Eat it up, there are starving children ..... So what the chuff was she doing putting that food on my plate, knowing full well I was not going to eat it, instead of sending it out there to the starving children who would have eaten it -- except that they were a long way away and the food was {through no fault of my own} now cooked, and would be spoiled before it could be got to them?
It's like my mother when I was younger
Olympus digital cameras have a panoramic mode that only works with Olympus-branded XD and SmartMedia cards; even though the memory chips inside those cards are exactly the same as the ones in FujiFilm-branded XD cards and generic SmartMedia cards.
I don't doubt that this can be rectified by cunning use of the dd command.
The problem is that technology has moved faster than politics. Now the technology is there allowing this sort of abuse {denying you the right to use your own property as you think fit; unlawfully preventing fair competition} but the politics is not in place to prevent it. The solution won't be an easy one; and you can bet it will be the people who have been getting away with doing something wrong for a long time who will be the ones complaining the loudest.
"Copy protected" CDs can be defeated using a combination of a slow drive {24 speed or less; the slowness isn't the critical thing, but it seems that a feature was silently incorporated into more modern drives to make them artificially incompatible with some discs} and CDParanoia. I bought a CDS200-protected CD once, for the hacker challenge factor more than the music; and was disappointed to find that it ripped first time.
No person is an island. All the benefits of all human endeavour belong to all of humanity.
If I write a piece of software which can improve someone else's lot, I have a duty to the rest of the world to make that software available to them. If that means I can't sit on my arse all day making money just selling that programme, then so be it.
If you light your {unlit} candle from my {lit} one, does my room get any darker? Will my candle last any less long? I have lost nothing, you have gained something. So it goes with computer software. The effort in replicating software already written is comparable to the effort in sticking the end of a wick in a flame. Yes, somebody wrote that software in the first place; but they were going to write it anyway, whether or not anybody paid them for a copy. I lit that candle {which, by the way, was a non-trivial effort involving a flint and steel, tinder and kindling -- matches have not been invented in this figure of speech} because it was dark, not because I thought I could make money charging people for a light. How could there be anything fair or right about denying someone something which would cost me nothing to do, knowing that but for me they might fall in the dark with an unlit candle in the house?
Somewhere in a parallel universe, there was a person a bit like Bill Gates who wrote a whingeing "open letter to hobbyists" a bit like this one. At the following week's meeting of their computer club, a resolution was passed calling for the troublemaker to be hauled into the Gents' toilets and given a Bloody Good Kicking {probably a couple of head-flushes with seat-whacks too for good measure, and to prevent the casualty from losing consciousness before satisfaction was achieved}. Thenceforth, on that planet, a law was passed, and it said this: That the author of a computer programme has exactly one right in respect of that programme, and that is the right to be identified as its author, for as long as any living person remembers any true fact about the person or the programme; and that everybody has the right to distribute the source code of any computer programme ever written, with or without modifications and whether or not accompanied by an executable version, so long as they did not try to change the original author's name.
Yes, but what about if nobody could post AC until at least one logged-in user had made a post? That way, in order to get a first post, you would have to risk your precious karma.
I have been mucking around with the Hibachi web server {yes, the IOCCC version; it's not perfect, sure, but the "current" version is non-free*} and it works really well. Basically, I have a small CGI-enabled HTTP server on localhost, with access to some of the local filesystem; and a big CGI-enabled HTTP server on the remote end. Using surprisingly few cunning stunts {basically a cookie to allow the big server to look up the port number of the little server, which I decided to have as a per-user variable}, I can have the remote webserver embed content served up from localhost into a frameset or iframe. I can also use a local CGI script {on the local Hibachi server} that pulls in image data over a HTTP connection {from the remote Apache server}, mungs it and displays it in an ordinary <img /> tag. The browser could not care less what host served it up. The image can be static: all the processing is done at my end. Since the slowest part is usually getting the data from the server to the client, this is quite efficient.
It also ought to be possible to prefetch links while the user is busy reading, which would make dialup connections seem a bit faster.
It doesn't quite meet the "zero install" ideal, because it is necessary to compile Hibachi once and start it on login. I may have to write my own web server in Perl -- hence no compiling, and Perl is installed on almost every system.
* {Hibachi 2 is offered on a usage-only licence; the IOCCC-winning version is in the Public Domain. I am not quite sure how this can work, as it is my understanding that all derivative works of a work already in the Public Domain must also be in the Public Domain. But maybe the non-Free version was a derivative of a still-copyrighted predecessor of the PD version.}
All I am pointing out is that there are a lot of alternative answers that could have been right. We have only studied life on Earth so far. In the absence of proof to the contrary, I think it is entirely reasonable to assume that there may be other scenarios which would lead to self-sustaining interlocking series of chemical reactions ..... in other words, life. Whether that means multicellular organisms capable of locomotion and intelligent thought, a primordial soup in a constant state of chemical reaction, or something inbetween, depends.
Most of that information is not encoded in DNA, but encoded in the behaviour of the chemical elements themselves. It's a subtle but important distinction. For example, the number six is not somehow encoded within the numbers three and two: there is an inflexible rule explaining how you get from two and three to six. Taking an extremely simple example from chemistry, when you add an acid to an alcohol you get an ester. That much is fixed; it depends upon the properties of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The chemical reactions of DNA are already set in stone. Simplifying it a bit, if you add DNA to the correct mix of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and a few others, under the right conditions, you get more of the same DNA. It's a bit more impressive than hydrochloric acid + sodium hydroxide -> sodium chloride + water, but the ingredients have no more choice in the matter: what comes out in the end is dependent only on what went in.
They didn't. The data which encode three-dimensional protein structures are inherent properties of the elements which make up proteins. Lots of different strands were formed around the same time. Most of them simply did not work. A tiny few of them did work, and worked so well that they went on to bigger and better things. {Parallel: mammalian reproduction. Throw hundreds of millions of sperm at an egg, and one of them might stand a chance of fertilising it; but most of them aren't going to make it. If a man had sex every night from puberty to the day he died, and each encounter resulted in conception, he still would have had fewer children than he produced sperm in a single ejaculation, by about 10000:1.}
..... cell walls would be the "killer app", of course. Once you have a truly cellular organism, it's just that little bit less dependent on external conditions.
It would be very easy -- almost trivial -- to have {non-cellular} life-forms which could only exist in a moving pool of liquid of the correct composition at the correct temperature. Such could have come and gone many, many times throughout the history of the universe. Given their poor viability to begin with, almost any mutation would be more likely to give a survival advantage than not
The probability of life arising by random chance is small, but life has arisen on at least one planet out of millions of billions in an expanding universe, and it has only taken about thirteen billion years to do so. {You don't necessarily have to turn over 52 cards before you find the ace of spad
Or have I missed something?
A female hero is properly called a heroine.
A female son is properly called a daughter.
A female barman is called a barmaid. Shouldn't a female android properly be called a gynoid?
Surely a simple tube with a highly-reflective interior surface would work just as well as fibre optics, and more cheaply? After all, that's what happens in a fibre ..... the light cannot escape through the walls of the fibre because it would end up coming out at an impossible angle {Snell's law says that sin i / sin r = the refractive index of the material, where i is the angle between light and an imaginary perpendicular on the outside and r the same thing on the inside, but the sine of an angle can never be bigger than 1}, so it just bounces off the walls instead till it gets to the other end. So why not just use an actual mirror? As a bonus, you can even use the tube as a ventilation duct.
I would have thought the obvious solution would be something like SIP over SSL {which should be easy enough to set up, if Asterisk doesn't already have such a feature}, but maybe I'm missing something obvious about SSL that would preclude it.
PGP-type encryption would be good {key servers, if you use them properly, are incredibly powerful: post your out-of-date private keys and now nothing you ever signed using any of them can be authenticated!}, but it isn't transparent.
Whatever solution is adopted, it must be network-transparent, and the user must have the right to view the source code. The Authorities no doubt would love us to be using something they can tap, on the basis of "protecting" us from terrorists and drug dealers; but if terrorists and drug dealers are known not to be using the system because they know it can be tapped, then there's no point tapping it in the first place!
Well, when I spoke of some things being unexplainable, I was really referring to "God's Great Plan" or "The Will of Allah" or whatever a particular flavour of priests want to call it whenever trying to explain awkward things.
At least Science sets out to explain why certain things must be unobservable.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all actually pretty shallow with the explanations. The best answer you will get is "God says it's like that, so there."
Well ..... according to the Second law of Thermodynamics, that's exactly what it's trying to turn into.
But would it, though? Who's to say that life isn't just a simple {although not yet fully understood by humans, that does not imply complexity. A few hundred years ago we did not fully understand the motion of charged particles, but electronics is by no means complex} natural process, by which all that kinetic energy that came from somewhere can spread itself around more thinly? Then "life sustaining worlds" would not be particularly special in and of themselves, any more than materials which conduct electricity are particularly special.
You took me rather out of context there. I said, There is no process that could have created a creator, that could not instead -- and more simply -- have created a fully-formed universe. And I stand by that.
And thereby manifestly fail to achieve what you said they were setting out to do, which was to explain! If the prime motivator in creation could exist without having been created, then why could not a ready-made universe exist without having been created? Where did God come from and why could not a non-God-requiring universe have come from the same place?
There presently exist gaps in the laws of physics, so that small things obey different rules than big things. This is patently absurd, if only because there is no fixed definition as to whether something is "big" or "small" except which set of rules {as we currently know them} govern it. And scientists don't tend to like stepwise regressions, if only because it makes interpolation difficult. In fact, this has always been a problem Science has tried to solve. Newton's equations of motion, which hold very well for objects moving up t
But in this instance, our random monkeys with their random typewriters don't have to produce a particular, specific sentence; but merely something that makes enough sense in some language to be understood. {There are plenty of life-forms that would be viable; just watch a few bad sci-fi movies. There's no need for the one that emerges to look like us at all, just as long as it has the essentials to stay alive.} Also, these typewriters {or maybe the monkeys} are designed in such a way that, following any keystroke, the probability matrix is modified so that letters which would make more sense become more likely. {Chemical elements are most likely to bond in certain ways, and an incomplete chain will be looking to complete itself as soon as possible}.
Without your artificially-imposed restrictions, the probability swings back to something manageable. Life exactly like this is pretty improbable, but any kind of life at all is pretty probable.
Well, no doubt HP will try out the model of practically giving away the replicator unit -- just a small one, say, the size of a small uwave oven -- and charging a fortune for replacement matter cartridges. Lexmark will try to use technology to make it illegal to refill a matter cartridge you bought and paid for with your own money, and consequently run afoul of both American law {which specifically permits third-party replacement parts} and European law {which specifically forbids making things artificially difficult to recycle}. And we'll all be spammed to hell with offers of cheap matter cartridges to fit all popular replicator models.
Tobacco is natural. So is Belladonna. Just being natural does not mean something is good for you.
Science starts from the standpoint that everything that can be observed can be explained. Religion starts from the standpoint that some things cannot be explained. The two are reconcilable only to the extent that ideas can be accepted without need of explanation -- in other words, Not Very Far At All.
:) It is of course possible that life on other planets could be wholly or predominantly left-handed.}
The problem I have with the idea of "intelligent design" is that it breaks several important rules, not the least of which is the KISS principle. The need for an Intelligent Designer rests on the notion of Irreducible Complexity. But there is no irreducible complexity in nature. On the contrary, an Intelligent Designer would introduce irreducible complexity.
The Universe embodies the principle that simplicity is beauty. {Why does the pressure in a fluid act equally in all directions? Because it was simpler than favouring a particular direction. Why does light travel in straight lines? Because it was simpler that way. Why do men have nipples? Because it was too complicated for them not to.} If we take that logic to the extreme, it is simpler for the universe to have created itself somehow {and here I am making no assumptions about the process by which this might happen}, than for a creator to have been created as an intermediate step. My assertion is: There is no process that could have created a creator, that could not instead -- and more simply -- have created a fully-formed universe.
{The predominance of D- over L- enantiomers in nature is not evidence for Intelligent Design. It can be shown by analysis of potential reaction mechanisms that right-handed would favour right-handed and vice versa. It is probable that the primordial soup was close to racemic, but somehow more D- than L- proto-organisms survived and eventually L- forms became extinct. It ought to be possible to synthesise and culture the opposite enantiomer of an existing DNA sample, resulting in a "left handed clone". Pending the perfection of the necessary equipment, this must be left as an exercise for the reader
The argument against life being created by random chance ignores the obvious fact that the improbable event has already happened. In fact, given the sheer magnitude of the universe, it was close to inevitable that life would develop somewhere. Remember that the many necessary attempts were taking place in parallel, not in series {if you throw six dice at a time, the odds favour at least one of them being a six}. And not everything in the process is truly random: certain chemical elements are predisposed to bond in certain ways.
Remember also that radioactive decay events, which we know today trigger genetic mutation, would have been more common the further back in time we travel. We cannot know for certain {though we might infer from decay products} whether or not some especially radioactive isotope existed in the past but has become completely exhausted today.
{I realise that there are quite a few dangling "somehows" in this essay. It is not my intension to offer explanations for them here. These are "closing" rather than "opening" questions, which is to say that the answers will not in and of themselves raise further questions.}
Hey, mathematical jokes! Great!
Q. What do you get when you cross an elephant with a grape?
A. |elephant| . |grape| . cos (theta)
Q. What do you get when you cross a mountaineer with a grape?
A. You can't -- a mountaineer is a scalar!
Twos Complement Arithmetic is sensible. Basically it's as though {in 8 bits} you add 256 to any negative number. Since you are already effectively working modulo 256 anyway, then everything Just Works.
Ones Complement appears simpler {one fewer operation in generating a negative number}; but then there is a correction to do after a subtraction if the answer is positive.
Once you have gone to the expense of building an adder array {or, in the case of a drum-memory computer, a single adder is plenty good enough}, you can easily have a "carry-in". Now if you put EOR gates {with one input commoned up} on the adder inputs, so you get a selectable inverter, that takes care of the "flipping ones and zeros" part of doing a negation. If you set the carry input then you can add an extra one, which completes the twos complement operation. What's more, the carry-out will be 1 if the answer is positive, and 0 if it is negative. {Do a few and prove it to yourself}. When doing a multi-word subtraction, this just happens to be right for what to use as carry-in for the next higher order word! So you can use one logic array as both an adder and subtractor, if you're prepared to live with the {slightly counter-intuitive} fact that the carry flag is also not-borrow.
A' = A + B + Cin
In "subtraction mode" we invert B, which {assuming 8 bit words} is equivalent to subtracting from 255;
A' = A + (255 - B) + Cin
If Cin = 1 then
A' = A + (255 - B) + 1
A' = A - B + 256
but since we are working modulo 256,
A' = A - B
If (A - B) is negative then Cout = 0. {This situation also indicates a borrow from a higher order word.}
I would have liked for there to have been a CCA instruction {for clear carry and add} and as SCS instruction {for set carry and subtract} in the 6502, but there wasn't. I'm sure the chip's designers had a good reason for the omission.
BTW, there is a "tens complement" for working in decimal {and correspondingly for all other bases}. To generate the tens complement of a decimal number, transform each digit of the subtrahend by subtracting it from nine {including enough imaginary leading zeros to match the length of the minuend} and add one. If you end up with an extra one on the beginning of the difference, ignore it. If you don't, then the difference is negative; so just take its tens complement and write a minus sign in front.
The obvious solution is to ban all advertising from the Internet.
Sooner or later though, people are going to stop clicking on advertisements. Basically it's a pyramid scheme; and only the people on the top levels of the pyramid make any money. When enough people realise what is going on, the pyramid collapses.
My new Linux distribution, when I am ready to launch it, will include an advert-blocking proxy with regular automatic updates -- so you hopefully will never even get to see an advertisement. One desktop environment {WindowMaker}, one graphical toolkit {GTK}, one browser {Konqueror}, one office suite {Abiword and Gnumeric}, one mail client {Evolution}. A sendmail/procmail/spamassassin stack and an Apache2 server so you can practice writing your own CGI scripts. And of course, the ability to click a link and download the source code for a package and its dependencies, then compile it.
A. If you don't compile your apps locally, you can't be sure they don't contain nasties. There is nothing wrong with compiling applications. It's only like preparing your own food so you know there are no artificial additives in it. What is already being worked on is a system where you will be able to click on a package, download it and its dependencies, and compile it.
B. There is nothing wrong with the command line. Sometimes it is the most efficient way of giving instructions to the computer. Mandriva has some nice utilities for configuring everything without using a text editor or command line. But you really ought at least to take an interest in what is happening behind the scenes. I can flick open an xterm, start pico and have a config file tweaked and the daemon restarted in less time than it takes for a fancy-schmancy point-and-drool frontend to load up.
C. You are not looking hard enough for the information you seek.
Conclusion: you are either an incorrigible whinger, who needs to be fed with a spoon; or a troll. I recommend that you stick your head up your arse and fart.
If you can get hold of a copy of the Windows source code, I'm sure you could compile it to run on this device. Of course it's possible that Windows also has endian issues of its own. But that's because those stupid people at Motorola decided to put the "units" last instead of first. Human beings tend to write numbers that way, because it makes for easier magnitude comparison; but when doing mathematics you have to work backwards: units, tens,hundreds ..... so processor manufacturers such as Intel and MOS Technologies figured to put the units first and the 256es second. 8080 code took up more space than 6502 code so Intel soon found themselves having to put the 65536es third and the 16777216es fourth, but that's by the by. Meanwhile Motorola stuck with their arse-about-face numbers.
The original ARM1 was a pure 32-bit processor, with a 32-bit-wide word and no inbuilt concept of "byte order" as such. Its instruction set was inspired by the 6502, which powered the venerable BBC microcomputer; but with every instruction conditional. The ARM1 had no NOP instruction as such, but there was a "never" condition {the better for writing automutative code, since one need only alter the condition bits in an instruction to block its execution, but preserve the order bits. A simple loop can "comment out" a vast swathe of program; and, thanks to fully conditional execution, the same code can be used later to restore it by using a processor flag to signal "enable" or "disable"} but this rather wasteful {for the time; memory was expensive in those days} setup was eventually abandoned, and most of the "do something never" instruction codes were reused in later ARM revisions for extended instructions.
There is only one branch instruction in ARM1 assembly, BL. It makes the jump and stores the address that would have been next in a register. If you know that your subroutine is not re-entrant and you don't need that register for anything else, you don't need to worry about a stack. If you don't care about returning you can just ignore it.
Well, ozone-depleting refrigerants were banned nine years ago {Google for "Montreal Protocol" sometime}. Modern refrigerators and ACUs use non-ozone-damaging chemicals anyway, thanks to the same Greens who are now complaining about them as though they were still being used, and when they finally get a clue they will whinge about something else instead.
For me, the big thing with vehicle air conditioning is the way American car manufacturers had to design this incredibly complicated electromagnetic clutch thingy to transfer power from the engine to the compressor or not depending whether or not the coil is energised. European cars {except for those arse-shunting German monstrosities} simply drive the compressor with an electric motor and fit a bigger alternator.
I wouldn't expect Peltier effect {think solid-state heat pump} cooling to be much more efficient than a mechanical heat pump, since in both cases you have the Second Law working against you {in any energy transaction there will always be some heat on the output side}. In a mechanical heat pump you have friction in the compressor bearings and between the fluid and the pipes; in a solid-state one, you have resistive heating.
Yes and no. If Windows fouls up, then the EULA bars you from suing Microsoft. Your remedy, if you have one at all, is limited to replacement media if the installation media turn out to be faulty. There have been instances of a Microsoft EULA forbidding you to use Microsoft software in a way that casts Microsoft in a bad light. Borland used to licence software in the condition that it was not used to develop applications which competed with existing Borland applications.
..... or (3) leave well alone.
If "you can slag us off, as long as you do it in private with nobody listening otherwise we'll sue your asses to kingdom come; but you can't sue us no matter how badly we mucked up" is really enough accountability for you, then fine.
Open Source software is analogous to something delivered as a kit of parts. You get the opportunity to subject the components to any number of independent experts for scrutiny before assembling them, and can make an informed decision whether to: (1) assemble as-is, (2) make the following changes: